An extensive piece on the future of business social media was published yesterday on the Buzz Bin. While a little too futuristic for the average marketing exec just trying to figure out social media, there was a very relevant section, which was a carry over from previous conversations about business social media and personality:
Like Shel, I also disagree with Forrester’s Josh Bernoff that companies can act as an entity in socialized worlds. Because of the very nature of social media, it will be much harder for companies to diffuse their messages as an entity… Instead, personality must be infused into social environments. Identifiable people that work inside companies must represent the entity.
This strong stance finds it basis not in purists as Josh would state it, but because the social environment itself is inherently relational and community based. Without identifiable people to associate with, companies become inherently monolothic, relying on the brand identity to communicate. By its very nature, this is antisocial relying on something to build trust that even political pollsters know just doesn’t work - that’s corporate identities.
At bare minimum, corporations need to use an avatar or a personality to associate with the social media effort. For example, Nokia’s Mosh uses Russell the empty shirt and Goodwill of Greater Washington uses the Fashionista. In short @richardatDELL works a lot better than @DellCorp.
Here are some examples of personalities and why they work and don’t work…
The Bad
Ah yes, the suit. Mr. Safe and Corporate. Who trusts this guy (geez, these are my book photos)?
Point being, this shot was intended for book promotion to a community of business managers just trying to figure out what social media is. I mean, if its the Rayhteon blog targeted towards defense buyers, maybe, but otherwise, where’s the soul? It in its own right this photo is not ideal for social environments because its too stiff and formal.
Let’s be frank, would you rush to go talk to this guy in his office on your coffee break?
The Ugly
Oh yeah! The prototypical crazy blogger! This meets the general executive perception of a blogger, a member of an unruly horde. People are afraid of this guy. While it may get fans in some social media circles, this type of avatar is not likely to appease executives trying to bridge the gap between formal corporate communications.
The Good
Finally, a happy medium. Turkish coffee in Aswan Egypt is quite good.
This is the persona of a real person, an identifiable person, the fellow next door, that you would talk to on a coffee break. Real enough to socialize with, yet refined enough to engage in a conversation.
There is no one-size fits all approach to corporate personalities in social worlds. What’s most important is that conversational marketing include it. With personality comes a sense of authenticity, rather than an ivory tower that people think may screw them over for a profit.
Rohit Bhargava has an excellent book coming out on this topic, “*Personality not included.” Parties interested in this topic should pre-order it today.
This past Tuesday, the 2008 SXSW Interactive Festival adjourned. Unfortunately, my employer felt SXSWi too expensive and unworthy for me to attend 7-11 March. Why spend money to attend a conference about social networking tools when I use many of these tools and virtually interact daily with several of the conference attendees already? Luckily, on my own time and dime, I was able to obtain a day pass and attend Monday, 10 March, events.
Upon my return I was asked by another conference attendee if I would have paid $500 to attend SXSW for the networking benefit excluding speakers/panels . My immediate answer was “Of course!” The enchantment of a day meeting social media mavens and awe of being a kid in a candy store has worn off a bit and I have reconsidered my answer to the question. I am still digesting Monday’s conversations, the SXSWi Twemes, live blogging, and podcasts posted during the conference week.
The panels, speakers and evening events are conversation starters. Kami Huyse, SXSWi Future of Corporate Blogs panel speaker, reflects why conferences are more than just free cocktails and bs, “I always learn a great deal from the attendees when I present at these conferences. There are a lot of challenging questions and interactions that help to shape and energize my thinking. I am sure that teaching is one of the best ways to refine old ideas and develop new ones. In fact, I wonder if presenters don’t learn more than attendees from these things.”
There will always be the bobble heads in the room lacking original thought and agreeing with everything and everyone. At SXSWi, I encountered more stimulating conversation than followers. Without the panels and speakers I would not have been introduced to new ideas and thoughts from those outside my circle.
“Hello. Social Media Marketplace, how can I help you?”
“Yes, I’d like a bushel of blogs, four cartons of community, and does that come with the comments?”
If Social Media could be purchased in that fashion, you would not want it.
This issue comes to mind, because of a nice lunch conversation I had with a friend. He’s a successful attorney - and by successful, I mean the sort who has personally won the appeal (and freedom) of three innocent men who were on death row. He doesn’t have a household name, but is very well-known in certain circles, and is asked to lecture on capital punishment around the U.S.
My friend has three-and-a-half manuscripts sitting around, unpublished. He’s had discussions with literary agents and book editors that haven’t gone much of anywhere. In past days, you had good material, and the agents came to you to help promote it. But now the tables have turned, and you have to have some type of promotable platform before the agent will take up your cause. “Platform?” My friend was told he needed some type of online presence, like a blog, that had at least 1,000 visitors a day.
Metric Myopia
1,000 visitors a day. Now, that’s a completely arbitrary number, and it is completely disconnected from reality. I could register his name as a website, and load it with spam-links and search-engine keywords and build up that kind of traffic. (I could also do it in a real stealthy way, so it wouldn’t look like a spam-blog.) But that’s not the measurement that matters. In fact, we really aren’t yet sure what measurement ought to matter.
Web measurement has changed radically in the last few years. People used to talk about “hits”, but that hit on the server might be a request for an image. Put 10 pictures on a web page, and earn 11 hits. So then we started looking at “page views,” which gets skewed by bad site design. A well-structured site makes it easy for you to find what you want, where a bad one can boost traffic by making you click around. (Or, just add a “splash page”, and watch the page-view count go up.)
Then we migrated to “unique visitors.” We can record all of the other stats, but keep them bundled together by visitor. This requires dropping a little “cookie”, or a bit of code in the browser that will help us identify this unique visitor if they come back later. Uniques aren’t perfect, because they don’t track people who use different computers, and many people are blocking the use of cookies for security reasons. But at least we’re narrowing the information to some useful numbers.
Ghosts in the Machine
Let’s get back to my friend’s dilemma. He’s been told he needs a blog with 1,000 hits per day. What if he had one person who visited, printed out his page, and then made 1,000 copies he distributed to everyone in his office? That would have the same influence, but my friend doesn’t get credit for it. This isn’t a new issue - print publications have tried for decades to determine how much pass-around certain magazines get before hitting the trash heap. How do we account for those “ghosts,” those users who are influenced by the content without leaving a trace on the website?
That’s what happens with RSS subscriptions. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) takes the information out of the browser, and frees it up to travel through a number of different paths. It can come directly to a special reader. Outlook and other e-mail programs can subscribe to RSS feeds as well. You can subscribe to the updates directly through e-mail. Those who subscribe get the newly updated information pushed straight to them, in a format of their own choosing, for consumption at the time and place of their convenience.
If you’re trying to connect with other people, catching them at the time and place of their choosing puts you in a wonderful position. You are never interrupting, and odds are, you will likely not be interrupted.
Measuring the Measures
Now, riddle me this: would you rather have 100 people visit your website, or have 20 subscribe? If you want a quick snapshot that sounds good, 100 visitors looks more impressive. But over time, those 20 subscribers will have way more impressions, and are more likely to be influenced by what you have to share. Those 20 subscribers are more likely to share what you have to say with others of like mind, and even convert a few to subscriber status as well.
If your interest is in selling a general product, or getting the attention of as many eyeballs as possible, page views and hits may be the best measure of your success. If you’re trying to promote something like a book - something that requires a little more financial and emotional investment from the buyer - you’re more likely to track your influence by the number of subscribers. Those are the people who’ve already indicated they don’t want to miss what you have to say… and they will be the people who might just pay for a few of those words.
Conversion Issues
I wish there was an easy way to convert between the currency, and say that a site with X number of visitors will have Y number of subscribers. It doesn’t work like that. I write regularly over at Occam’s RazR. On a typical day, I have 40-50 people who actually visit the website. Occasionally, I break 100. Sometimes I don’t break double-figures. But that’s been the pattern for more than a year now. What has changed is my subscriber count. According to Feedburner, I had just 45 subscribers last July. Eight months later, I am in the low 200’s with a steady pattern of growth (225 as of today.)
My audience (communicators of various stripes) might be considered a little more tech-savvy than most, and more inclined to subscribe. Given a choice between subscription audiences, a less tech-friendly group would lean more on familiar options like e-mail subscriptions. (Out of my 225, only 15 or so are e-mail. Very much an anomaly.) Your mileage may vary. And it will.
A Free Market
And that is precisely why you should be wary of those who want to sell you Social Media like it is a commodity. There is no baseline for exchange rates. There is no common currency. You have to decide what sort of measurement matters to you, and cultivate in that direction. The market is totally free - free for you to define, free for you to dissect, free for you to develop. Just beware those who have already put a price tag on what they offer you, particularly if you haven’t yet decided your goal.
To start the week I will be speaking and liveblogging on WordPress.com for my client the Human Capital Institute in Phoenix (see picture of summit host The Westin Kierland Resort & Spa). The 2008 Human Capital Summit covers the movement from traditional HR administration towards fostering talent management as the new lever for market success. Liveblogging has its unique role at such an event.
First and foremost, liveblogging can create an air of excitement at an event, not only for attendees, but also for extended members of the HCI community. Other benefits liveblogging offers:
Google juice for the event
Recorded history of the event
Helps an organizations and companies see social media at work
Better retention of information for the liveblogger (I personally hope to gain a lot as an exec who runs his own companies. HCI revolves around reinventing the organization around talent and to communicate the value driven by cutting-edge talent practices to investors and other stakeholders.).
1) Pre-identify who and what you want to cover. For example, after the keynote and first session, I will crash the video interviews of many speakers and give readers an inside scoop on their thoughts. Also do a little research on speakers in advance.
2) Have camera, will travel. Make sure you have comfortable gear for your camera so its readily accessible and can be used easily. My neck strap was bought for just these situations. Also be sure to have all of the necessary cables and pretest your equipment. Visuals are critical to great blogging, and you must be able to quickly add photos to each story.
3) Write, read and send: Don’t overthink the writing. You are a scribe in the ancient Egyptian sense, analysis is great, but in reality people just want to know the prescient points. Read through the script after writing, and send. Don’t over-edit. You come back that night and clean it up. If you are truly liveblogging, your job is to get the posts up almost as quickly as events happen.
4) Be flexible: Livebloggers get called into all sorts of weird situations. “Cover this, write that, don’t take my photo.” Just roll with it, and have fun.
5) Headlines matter. Like any blog post, be creative and try to get folks interested. Liveblogging can be an entry point for larger engagement with the subject matter and/or organization.
6) Don’t kill yourself. After three or four posts, you’ll be tired. Take that break. No one needs to be Brett Favre.
7) Limit your tools. Don’t overdo it. You can’t vlog, podcast, blog and tweet an event. Or at least you can’t do all of it well. Choose your most comfortable tools and execute well. For me, writing, photos, and maybe a couple of podcast chats.
Whether your social media efforts include blogging, podcasting or video, valuable content is king. Other than the logistics of executing these tools, I find the most asked question and highest concern is “Who/what feeds this beast?”
You don’t have to look very far for the answer. Your community of readers, viewers and participants are the keepers of enough content to last you decades.
Survey Feedback: Be honest. You have reams of data. Begin addressing common concerns and comments. Do not dwell on the negative. I am not fond of open ended survey questions because of the analytical nightmare, but this data is great brainstorming fodder for story content. Does your company conduct customer/associate/manager satisfaction surveys (CSI/ASI/MSI)? Look for trends. Drive content at the same time as you address issues and show your community you ARE listening and acting upon suggestions.
Customer Comments: Whether you have a formal customer comment program or you monitor informal conversations, trend this data and address key topics.
Editorial: Peruse trade and entertainment magazine articles.
What does RSS mean anyway? An embarrassing question for some, but one that a lot of newcomers may want to ask.
Mike Sansone, author of Converstations, has been quietly building a glossary of terms for those who need a quick answer. While only 25% of the way through the alphabet, Mike’s glossary is a good resource for those who are just getting comfortable with new media forms.
Heck, it’s good for those of us who have been around for a while, too. I now know what AJAX is (An acronym — Asynchronous Java Script and XML — representing a way to create real-time Web applications).
There are literally thousands of blog posts out there telling you how to take your first steps in Social Media. Those first hurdles are so important to clear. But have you ever looked at the setup on the track after the high hurdles are run? It’s not the first hurdles that trip up the athletes — it is the last ones. When you’re tired, when you’re in a groove, and when you think you know everything at high speed, that’s when your trailing foot comes low and trips you up.
If you are exploring the use of Social Media in your company and have any thought of bringing executives or a CEO on board, be as prepared for the end of the race as for the starter’s pistol. What could be worse than trying to reign in a superior who doesn’t realize he’s getting strategically sloppy?
Set Expectations
There’s a reason why coaches tend to have played the games they now teach. They know what it’s like to make decisions in the heat of the moment. They understand the pressures, the distractions, and the demands. There’s also a reason you don’t see many player-coaches anymore. The speed of the game makes it almost impossible to see the entire arena as X’s and O’s. You lose your strategic edge, and the perspective of the whole picture.
If you’re the Social Media coach or evangelist for your organization, set the expectations that there are dangers that come with familiarity. Your CEO who is hesitant to touch the interface at first may not be as thoughtful when the mechanics of blogging become second-nature. The power of instant publishing can be intoxicating, and “drunk bloggers” can lead to unhappy accidents.
Build a Firewall
The very first firewall is technical. Those who are unsure about the mechanics are looking at each entry several times before it “goes live.” Before you set up your system, stress the importance of an editorial function. Yes, the CEO will have the final say, but it’s foolish to give him every say. Make sure there is a Jiminy Cricket built into the plan, someone who can ask the crucial question: “Are you sure this is how you want it to sound?”
Examples
I’ve been part of an online journalism community for nearly ten years. A few months ago, I was promoted to become one of a small number of moderators. A couple of us are still active “members” of the discussions, and we are very careful not to participate in ways that could be construed as abusive. If I take issue with someone’s argument, they shouldn’t feel as though I might abuse my Mod Powers. I’m very cognizant of my capacity to lose my temper.
My solution? Before posting, I change both the color and the font of everything I wrote. It takes just a few swipes and clicks, but it forces me to look at everything one more time. It is my self-enforced firewall to ensure I don’t click too fast and bare thoughts that shouldn’t be shared.
This topic actually stems from a discussion I had with Geoff Livingston. Geoff has had one hell of a year; writing and publishing a book, spearheading the content for two top-rated marketing blogs, scoring Social Media victories for his clients, and running a lot of traditional communications counsel through his firm. He’s been through quite a bit, but that’s not an excuse for losing his cool.
Geoff’s let his temper get the best of him, reading too much into things that were not intended. He said some things and acted out, and will be the first to tell you that’s not representative of what he wants to be. He’s now taking a few days off to re-fresh and re-center, and will back to the grind next week. He knows I’m writing this — we talked about it — and there’s value in sharing it. If it can happen to Geoff, it can happen to me, and it can happen to you or your CEO who blogs.
Build the firewalls now, because the most dangerous hurdles are closer to the end.
(Ike Pigott can be regularly found at Occam’s RazR.)
It’s time for the completely shameless monthly exercise in subjective measures of greatness…the Most Influential Blogger post. Winners get complimentary Blogs of Fire T-Shirts.
This list changes quite a bit from month-to-month, and ranking by cumulative score allows for a better picture of my most influential bloggers.Year-to-date rankings for the blogger of the year are accumulated from month to month. As this is the first ranking of the year, we are beginning with a clean slate.
3) Neville Hobson - I like Neville quite a bit and have been following him for some time. His posts can informative, educational, and are often backed by great stats. A great staple for anyone’s reader.
4) Chris Brogan - Note repeat from last month: Chris is still on, always thinking about his community. It’s hard not to get something from Chris Brogan’s blog. Like Neville, Chris is a must read staple for anyone’s blog.
“Hello. Social Media Marketplace, how can I help you?”
That’s what happens with RSS subscriptions. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) takes the information out of the browser, and frees it up to travel through a number of different paths. It can come directly to a special reader. Outlook and other e-mail programs can subscribe to RSS feeds as well. You can subscribe to the updates directly through e-mail. Those who subscribe get the newly updated information pushed straight to them, in a format of their own choosing, for consumption at the time and place of their convenience.
If your interest is in selling a general product, or getting the attention of as many eyeballs as possible, page views and hits may be the best measure of your success. If you’re trying to promote something like a book - something that requires a little more financial and emotional investment from the buyer - you’re more likely to track your influence by the number of subscribers. Those are the people who’ve already indicated they don’t want to miss what you have to say… and they will be the people who might just pay for a few of those words.
There are literally thousands of blog posts out there telling you how to take your first steps in Social Media. Those first hurdles are so important to clear. But have you ever looked at the setup on the track after the high hurdles are run? It’s not the first hurdles that trip up the athletes — it is the last ones. When you’re tired, when you’re in a groove, and when you think you know everything at high speed, that’s when your trailing foot comes low and trips you up.
