Businesses are spreading their social media wings in a big way, creating lots of new opportunity but also questions about how to manage their suddenly overflowing baskets of online goodies.
Recent research I’ve been conducting into business adoption of multiple social media platforms is turning up some striking results. The 53 respondents to a survey I posted in December report that their organizations are using an average of eight social media platforms today, compared to less than one in 2006. They also report nearly unanimous satisfaction with these platforms in the area of value for the dollar and performance against expectations.
These results are only preliminary and are based upon a small sample base. We’ll continue to seek responses to the survey and sponsors for the project as we move toward a goal of 150 total responses. People who take the survey get an early look at the numbers with a preliminary report to be released at South by Southwest in Austin next month.
While I can’t share any numbers at this point (you’ll have to take the survey to get those), here are some general observations.
Marketers are having really, really good experiences with social media so far;
The metrics they use are all over the map, though some consensus is beginning to emerge on what matters;
Few organizations are taking a disciplined approach to measuring ROI at this point. That may come later, but they’re busy with governance issues right now;
Marketers say Twitter is the killer app;
The next big challenge is to get procedures and organizations in place to integrate social media into other communication programs.
In-depth interviews with 10 organizations, including some very big brands like Coca-Cola and Ford, indicate that a federated approach to social media adoption is emerging. In other words, large businesses are developing centers of excellence at the corporate level to share tools and best practices but are leading implementation to individual business units. On Facebook, however, some companies are looking at the example set by Honda, which has taken a disciplined approach by building separate fan pages for each of its brands around a consistent set of guidelines and aggregating those communities on a corporate fan page.
The report on the first stage of the research will be available in about three weeks and I’ll let you know where to get it.
I’m delivering a seminar for International Data Group this week on how to use Twitter for business. I’ve never done an in-depth seminar on this subject before, so I’ve spent some 20 hours preparing the all-new slide presentation you see below. This is intended to be a comprehensive guide to getting started with and building Twitter as a driver of business and conversation in a business environment. Topics include:
Creating a Twitter presence;
Building a follower base;
How to gain visibility;
Business uses of Twitter;
The future of Twitter in the enterprise.
This presentation features plenty of examples and best practices from successful businesses that I’ve gathered in my research and writings over the last year or so. It’s distributed on a Creative Commons Attribution license, so download and enjoy!
Posterous is a new service that radiates a person’s social media activity out to a network of community sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr and Delicious. Posterous is one of a host of new services that automate the once-tedious manual process of cross-posting information to multiple websites and social networks. Other pure-play entrants in this category include Ping.fm, Dlvr.it and the Wordpress plugin Supr, but the basic capability to cross-post information across multiple social media is rapidly becoming a part of nearly every Web application. Google Buzz, which was announced just this week, has some of the same functionality.
These are the first ripples in a wave of new technology that will make the Internet effectively site-less. By that I mean that the metaphor of the Web as we’ve known it for the last 15 years is breaking down. The Internet is increasingly not about sites but about content and people. As technology makes it possible for our online scribblings to appear wherever we may choose, the task of assessing influence will become considerably more complex.
The big change in the landscape is that information no longer needs to have a homepage in order to reach an audience. Facebook kicked off this trend when it created a service that was so popular that some brands found it was more desirable to use Facebook as a homepage than their branded websites. Honda is a notable example of this. The auto maker has started listing a Facebook fan page as the destination URL in its TV ads. The tactic is a bit of a gimmick, but it’s also indicative of a shift in marketer perceptions. As Coca-Cola’s Digital Communications Director Adam Brown told me recently, “Our philosophy is to fish where the fish are.”
Only it’s becoming more difficult to figure out where the fish are. As social networks integrate their content, the contributions of individuals will become detached from discrete websites. On Twitter, for example, conversations exist in a stateless form that finds a home on Twitter.com, TweetDeck, Seesmic, blog widgets or any other listening device that catches them. How do we assess influence in this environment?
In the early days of social media (and by that I mean 2006!), online influencers used their blogs as a home base and relied upon word-of-mouth, inbound links and search engines to deliver an audience. Today, the blog is almost irrelevant. With Posterous, a blog entry can be created as an e-mail message and posted automatically to a couple of dozen social outposts, formatted for the unique capabilities of each destination. Some of these services publish fan and follower counts but others don’t. Determining an influencer’s “share of market” is a matter of picking through search results and the metrics provided by various channels to measure a person’s total footprint.
In time, services will emerge that make sense of this chaos, but for now this is a classic case of technology outpacing people’s ability to understand it. For marketers, the key point is that the website as we have known it is diminishing in importance, influencers are magnifying their voices and the rules of engagement are being reset. The good news is that everyone can use these tools, so if you’re currently limiting your publishing activities to a blog or Twitter, consider expanding your scope. The bad news is that the influencer you thought you had identified and corralled is now blasting messages to a whole lot of different audiences. Only time will tell what the impact of that new reality will be.
Shel Israel’s Twittervilleis currently sitting at number 62,000 on Amazon, which is disappointing because a lot of people should be reading this book. I suspect that Twitterville’s performance has been impacted by the flood of how-to-tweet books that have hit the market this year, but this book isn’t microblogging for dummies. Rather, Twitterville is a celebration of a new platform that has unleashed the creative energies of a community in ways that few of us could have ever conceived.
Israel says he interviewed more than 100 people for this book and it shows. Its scope spans everything from politics to nonprofits to law enforcement to giant corporations. Each Twitter member finds value in different ways.
Israel was co-author of the groundbreaking 2006 book Naked Conversations, which was the first book to dramatize the game-changing nature of social media. Twitterville is no less important in framing the context for a revolution. Israel starts with the story of James Buck, a freelance journalist who was arrested by Egyptian police in 2008 and whose plight (and subsequent release) was communicated around the world by a single tweet: “arrested.”
Buck’s case was emblematic of the multiplicative power of Twitter. He had only a few followers at the time of his arrest, but a sequence of re-tweeted messages by some prominent Twitter members quickly spread word to the State Department, which intervened within 24 hours.
This idea that an individual can attain great influence by virtue of telling a remarkable story is central to understanding the power of Twitter and of social media in general. It also dramatizes the triumph of the individual over the impersonal corporate entity. “An individual brand now impacts the corporate brand,” Israel writes. Twitter “is a community of millions of personal brands. They are shaping the present and future of individuals and the companies they represent.”
That doesn’t mean businesses can’t develop a brand on Twitter, and Israel provides many examples of companies that have. His point, however, is that you can’t think of the Twittersphere in terms of mass. Brands are built in Twitter by imparting wisdom, helping others and contributing to the collective knowledge. Corporations that experience the most success are those that let their people come out from behind the brand wall and act human.
The value of contributing to the collective good permeates Twitterville. Israel calls this “lethal generosity.” It’s the idea that people who “are the most generous to their communities almost invariably acquire the greatest influence.” This concept is central to another recent book I recommend: Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. Coming at a time when the world is still reeling from a financial crisis precipitated by greed, it’s refreshing to see celebrations of generosity. In one section on fundraising, Israel recounts several stories of charitable success that would have been unimaginable before a medium like Twitter existed.
Twitterville isn’t all celebration. In Chapter 15, Israel analyzes the seamy underworld of spammers, bots and phishermen and relates a couple of hair-raising stories of people whose reputations have been trashed by identity thieves. As Larry Ellison once said, “Every ecosystem has scavengers.” Twitter is no exception, and by acknowledging Twitter’s dark side, Israel makes the argument for the medium’s value all the more compelling.
The book provides useful advice on how to keep out of trouble as well as how to optimize the Twitter experience, but it isn’t a book about how to amass 100,000 followers. It’s about how relationships work in a world constrained by limitations of space and time, yet liberated by the ingenuity and spirit of its citizens. If you still don’t “get” Twitter, then read Twitterville. You’ll quickly understand.
I met a woman this week at the Supergenius conference who’s quietly making her mark on the giant crafting business. If I was writing a book, I might even call Jenny Barnett Rohrs a New Influencer.
Jenny is a professional music therapist who put that career aside for a few years to care of her kids. But the artistic instinct didn’t die amid the PBJ sandwiches and homework. The Lakewood, Ohio mom continued her passion of crafting and nearly two years ago launched a blog under the clever name of Craft Test Dummies.
Jenny was urged on by husband Jeff, who works at ExactTarget, an e-mail marketing term. Jeff knows a thing or two about digital promotion, and he urged Jenny to sweat the basics in organizing her site, writing good headlines and tagging all content. Jenny further promoted her own brand by volunteering to write for CraftCritique.com, a popular reviews site. Her Facebook fan page is a cornucopia of advice and offers. There’s a Ning community. And she’s on Twitter because, well, who isn’t?
The result: Craft Test Dummies is now the number nine result on Google for the keyword “crafting,” beating out even very large retail enterprises. Imagine that. In a population of hundreds of millions of crafting enthusiasts worldwide, this blogger has reached search nirvana in less than two years all by herself. Now Jenny gets hundreds of daily visitors, invitations to speak and samples from crafting supply makers around the country who hope to get one of her coveted reviews. She gets paid to demonstrate at trade shows and craft fairs and recently signed a contract to consult for an online retailer.
Jenny Rohrs is successful because she took care of the basics:
The blog is polished and well-organized. Categories are selected with care. Entries are thoroughly tagged;
The site is optimized for search. One trick: nearly every page title contains the word “craft” or “crafting;”
Jenny’s a good member of the community. She links to crafters she respects and they return the favor;
She uses every platform to her advantage, and the cross-links create more search awareness;
Most importantly, Jenny writes good stuff. Her entries are conversational, friendly and easy to read. They’re also full of ideas and advice. Not only does this appeal to crafting enthusiasts, but Google is tuned to love that kind of content.
With so many millions of blogs out there, you might fear that it’s too late to get into the game. But look at the results that this recent entrant has achieved. The secret is to deliver good content in an accessible format and to spread the word through as many channels as possible. The total cost of all the social media platforms Jenny Rohrs uses is $0. Her time may be invaluable, but the tools are cheap.
The stack of unread books on the nightstand has been getting pretty tall lately, so I took advantage of some recent travel and vacation time to shorten it a bit. Over the next couple of days, I’ll post of reviews of some titles I recommend. Starting with…
Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust – Chris Brogan and Julien Smith don’t need my help to sell books; they’ve already made the New York Times bestseller list and their success is well deserved. The market has been flooded with social media books this year, but Trust Agents is different because it’s more about the social than the media.
Oh, there are plenty of tech tips and tricks, which are organized conveniently into sidebars, bullet lists and “top 10” formats. What really makes this book work, though, is its unflagging devotion to a kind of social media Golden Rule: treat others the way you’d want them to treat you and the rewards will come back in time
The authors make a persuasive case that the value one derives from social media comes from using the tools to build trust, and that means giving till it hurts. It’s about answering questions, making connections, giving advice and donating time without any clear expectation of reward. Believe us, the rewards will come, the authors say.
You certainly can’t argue with their success. Brogan is an A-list blogger and Smith is a popular speaker and pioneer in online community development. If Trust Agents does nothing else, it provides a blueprint for achieving the kind of success the authors have demonstrated through the practice of listening actively, responding generously and constantly asking the audience for feedback. Take the tools out of the equation and the same tactics work offline. People who succeed are those who have the relationships and reputations to get things done for others.
The greatest shortcoming of Trust Agents – if you can call it that– is the lack of hard ROI data. The authors don’t try to calculate the return on their own time investments, perhaps because neither has ever needed to. ROI, however, has been the bugaboo of this fledgling media and the greatest excuse for executives so far choosing to do nothing. If you want numbers, read Groundswell by Li and Bernoff or Measuring Public Relationships by Paine. Both do an excellent job of assigning numbers to actions.
If you learn nothing more from this book than a few of the tricks to better leverage your own online presence, it’s well worth the price.
The Connectors: How the World’s Most Successful Businesspeople Build Relationships and Win Clients for Life – I sometimes share with audiences the story of Automatic Appliance, a local retailer and service company that has forever wrested my business from the big-box discount companies by tirelessly working to satisfy me at every opportunity. The last time I called seeking to fix a balky clothes dryer, the owner spent 15 minutes on the phone trying to help me resolve the problem myself instead of charging me $300 for a house visit. Such selfless generosity has won Automatic Appliance a customer for life.
This anecdote would fit perfectly in The Connectors, a book that echoes, in many ways, the give-to-get spirit of Trust Agents. To be honest, I almost quit reading this book by marketing entrepreneur Maribeth Kuzmeski after 50 pages because it appeared to be just another in a long line of bafflingly successful books that tell how you can succeed by believing in yourself. But there’s more to The Connectors than pop-psych pabulum. I’m glad I stuck with it.
The Connectors isn’t about connections as much as about going the extra mile to make yourself or your business exceptional. The connections the author refers to are those that create indelible impressions in the minds of those one seeks to influence. Over time, these become the basis for sustainable business relationships.
Like Trust Agents, The Connectors skirts the ROI issue and chooses to build its case through anecdotes and inspirational stories. The book includes a number of useful and downloadable self-assessment worksheets. While some of its examples have been done to death (it’s time to retire Fedex’s Fred Smith legend, inspiring as it is), Kuzmeski’s many examples of success working with individual clients are compelling. Her counsel boils down to:
Build your social skills in a way that works for you;
Focus on what you do well and use your strengths to establish a unique niche for your enterprise;
Find small ways to delight customers; and
Doggedly pursue business opportunities with generosity and goodwill until the client turns your way.
Like Trust Agents, The Connectors takes it on faith – and the author’s considerable success – that paying it forward pays back in the long run. The most compelling section for me focused on creating a personal impression with prospects that makes it impossible for them not to want to give you their business. This may involve considerable investment of time and energy, an issue the author doesn’t resolve completely, but you can’t argue with the results. In an age in which globalization makes long-term competitive advantage nearly impossible to achieve, trusted relationships may be all we have left.
From yesterday’s BtoB magazine NetMarketing Breakfast in New York, here are some facts and figures from Adam Christensen, Social Media Communications Manager at IBM, about Big Blue’s use of social media tools:
For a company with 400,000 employees, those numbers are pretty impressive. They’re all the more remarkable when you consider that, 20 years ago, IBM had one of the most buttoned down command-and-control cultures of any company on the planet.
Adam works on strategy and standards for IBM’s global social media activities. Follow him on Twitter.
I was delighted to participate in a panel with Jason Falls, C.C. Chapman, Chris Brogan, Brian Solis and Mike Lewis at the Inbound Marketing Summit last week. Here’s the full 37-minute panel. It got pretty heated at a couple of points. This group is passionate about discarding old assumptions.
The most frequent criticism of Twitter that I hear is that the service is a waste of time. It’s all about people telling the world what they had for breakfast or how long they’ve been waiting for a bus. Don’t we have better things to do?
I decided to try a short experiment. I clipped a 100-tweet block from my Twitter stream at random and examined the contents to see just how much useful content there was, if any.
A little background first: I follow about 1,150 people and I prune my list with some care. If someone’s tweets are completely irrelevant to my interests, I unfollow that person. I only follow people who interest me or who send me a personal request asking me to follow them. That weeds out the spammers and bots.
Here are my results
42% of the tweets were what I’d call random. These were mostly along the lines of what people had for breakfast or ongoing conversations I hadn’t followed.
12% contained news of general interest (BTW, Twitter has been one of the best places to monitor the ongoing news of the Samoan tsunami this week).
33% were referral links to information that the writer found interesting.
7% were notable quotes.
6% were either self-promotional messages or requests for advice.
Two statistics interested me in particular. One was that 45% of the tweets contained a link. This indicates that Twitter is used at least as much to point friends to interesting information as it is to comment on everyday activities. After all, you can’t link to what you had for breakfast. The other is that at least 20 of the tweets interested me enough that I wanted to learn more.
This wasn’t the kind of reading I would find on a typical news website. Here’s a sampling:
“Subjects of news coverage now try to write the stories themselves using pro journalists. http://is.gd/3OEDM
It isn’t CNN.com, but then I don’t use Twitter for the same reason I use CNN. The bottom line is that the 4 1/2 minutes it took me to read 100 tweets yielded at least 20 items of interest. There are other places on the Web where I could consume more information in less time, but it’s a different kind of information. It’s not less valuable, just different.
Newspaper and magazine editors often complain that the rise of customized news services has shortchanged readers by removing the element of discovery that a printed publication delivers. However, the Twitter stream and Facebook news feed deliver just as much surprise and delight as any professional media entity, if not more. The only difference: the recommendations come from people I know instead of professional editors.
It turns out that avid Web users are just as interested in discovery as print readers. It’s just that they’ve found a faster, less intrusive, more personal and more ecologically friendly way to go about it. Is it any wonder mainstream media is dying?
The Desert Springs JW Marriott Resort & Spa, in Palm Desert, Calif. has a clever Twitter-based promotion starting tomorrow. They call it “Tweet to Retreat,” and it requires followers on Twitter to answer a daily question about the resort to be entered in a drawing for a luxury three-day getaway package.
You don’t have to be a hotel guest to enter. All answers can be found on the resort website. Questions range “from the ingredients in the Angel Kiss cocktail at Oasis Bar & Grille (hint, hint), to the number of rooms at the hotel,” the press release says. Not sure what the (hint, hint) is all about. The release on the website also mysteriously leaves out the detail that you can find answers to the questions elsewhere on the site. That information was only contained in the release sent by e-mail.
Anyway, the hotel has only 280 followers as of this morning, so your chances should be pretty good if you make it a point to check out the daily questions. The prize: “A three-night stay at the resort, including: dinner at Ristorante Tuscany and Mikado Japanese Steakhouse, daily breakfast at LakeView, four 60-minute spa treatments, a VIP table at Costas nightclub, and a choice of tennis or golf lessons for two.” I’m there!
Businesses are spreading their social media wings in a big way, creating lots of new opportunity but also questions about how to manage their suddenly overflowing baskets of online goodies.![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
From yesterday’s BtoB magazine 
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