How to Get Started With Social Media

Posted on January 22, 2009 by Paul

The Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council held an informative seminar at Communispace this morning entitled “Getting Started with Social Media — Lessons from the Front Lines.” I took notes of the comments by the four speakers and pulled out a few highlights to share:

Perry Allison (left), Vice President of Social Marketing Innovation at Eons.com talked about the value of gathering detailed feedback from a small number of people. Referring to a project that Eons conducted with Quaker Oats, she said she was initially concerned that only 80 members of the baby clothes site offered comments. “I thought Quaker wouldn’t be excited about 80 members, because this is a company that advertises on baby items on television to millions. But the brand manager was ecstatic because of the feedback and insight they were getting.” The main thing they advertise is this brand of baby clothes.

It’s the engagement that gets clients energized, she said. “Advertising currently drives more revenue, but what gets brands most excited is engagement marketing.”

Allison offered a list of common mistakes that companies make in creating online communities: “Overloading people with information, not having a clear concept of the goals, not defining a clear value proposition, using marketing speak, and viewing the destination as a thing rather than a process.” That last point is particularly important. Markers have been taught to treat campaigns as projects with defined beginnings and ends. But customer communities, if well managed, can last for years. The value is in the process, not the deliverable.

A couple of the panelists commented on the dilemma facing mainstream media organizations today as their power is eroded by the influence of new sources.

Pam Johnston (left), Vice President of Member Experience at Gather.com, brought an interesting background to the discussion. She spent more than 15 years in television news before joining Gather, which means she understands the mainstream media mindset. The most disruptive force in social media is its ability to define new trusted sources, she said. “People are looking for a trusted source and it may not be the Boston Globe. It may be your neighbor.

“I can tell you from experience that traditional media don’t want to be a hub,” she said. “They have a top-down mentality: ‘If you want it, you have to come to my site to get it.'”

Dan Kennedy, Assistant Professor at the Northeastern School Of Journalism and author of the Media Nation blog, was even more blunt about the challenges facing mainstream media. “The question of how news organizations are going to monetize anything they’re doing is the question facing the industry right now. The Boston Globe may have the largest audience its’ ever had and it’s losing $1 million a week,” he said.

Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, offered a five-step approach to getting started with social media:

1. Start a blog. It’s a living breathing thing.

2. Create interesting content. If you do that, people will link to you.

3. Publish everywhere: Use Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and any other channel you have available.

4. Optimize for search engines. If you’ve got a good pithy title (Top 10 Tips, anyone?), then publicize it. Make it easy for people to post your content right to Twitter, Digg, Facebook and other destinations.

5. Measure it. Look at your traffic, page views, unique visitors, time spent on site. That’s how you know whether your hard work is paying off.

Sound easy? Creating remarkable content isn’t instinctive for everyone. That’s why Gather’s Johnston was dismayed when Burger King backed down last week on its audacious “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign on Facebook. The program got lots of attention for originality, even if its premise – members “unfriended” others in exchange for free hamburgers – was controversial. Burger King yanked the campaign last week over complaints that it was encouraging antisocial behavior.

“It was probably the most successful campaign Facebook has ever done,” she said. “I thought it was funny and memorable. It got people talking and those are important qualities for a memorable campaign.”

On the always popular issue of return on investment, Halligan had this to say: “Most of our customers create a LinkedIn group or Facebook page and see, on average, a 13% month-over-month growth in leads. I’d advise jumping into this. You don’t need venture backing to start a Twitter account. If you’ve got time and energy and something to say, then do it.”

Finally, Halligan got my vote for best quote with this one: “”Marketers are lions looking for elephants in the jungle. But the elephants have all left the jungle and they’re at watering holes out on the savannah. Those watering holes are called Google and Facebook and Twitter and Gather and Eons.”

So get your tail out of the jungle.

How To Trash Your Search Performance In One Easy Step

Posted on January 20, 2009 by Paul

As you can tell from the list to the right called My Other Sites, I have a fairly busy online life. I maintain a half dozen websites myself and contribute to a few others. Until recently, I housed each of these sites in its own account at GoDaddy.com. This was expensive, but it’s the cost of doing business.

A few months ago, a GoDaddy support representative thought he was being helpful by convincing me to consolidate all those accounts under one master account and reorganize my sites subdirectories. Then I would simply forward each domain to the appropriate subdirectory. The cost savings were compelling.

I made those changes, although not without difficulty. At one point, I trashed an entire database and had to rebuild it from Google cache pages. But I eventually consolidated five sites into one account.

Look Back in Horror

Last week I decided to take a look at the search engine performance of all my domains using HubSpot‘s excellent Website Grader tool. I was stunned to find that the consolidated sites had plummeted in search effectiveness. While my two main blogs – this one and newspaperdeathwatch.com — both scored better than 98% on Website Grader, the consolidated sites ranged from 65% down to a pathetic 7%.

I couldn’t find any explanation for this, so I consulted the smartest search expert I know: Mike Moran, author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. He confirmed my suspicions.

“Redirecting domains to subdomains saves money but, as you saw, it can sometimes hurt search rankings a great deal,” he wrote. “My suspicion is that search engines downgrade these sites because anyone working this hard to save money is more likely to have a low-quality site, and might even be a spammer.”

This logic baffled me until I thought it through a bit. Google constantly fights a war against spammers and link farmers who tried to game the search algorithm. One tactic they use is to buy up thousands of domains and point them to sites that are nothing but collections of keywords and links. It’s safe to assume that some of these scavengers try to save money by consolidating their sites in a single directory. Google’s strategy actually makes sense. Unfortunately, it can also penalize people whose motivations are sincere.

I’m now going through the tedious process of restoring all of my websites to their original accounts. Please excuse the occasional 404 error. And learn from my example: don’t try this at home!

Colleges Race Ahead in Social Media Adoption

Posted on January 20, 2009 by Paul

New research shows that educational institutions are leveraging social media far more effectively than businesses in finding and recruiting their key constituents: students.

Perhaps in recognition of the fact that high school students are already thoroughly invested in social networks and online video, college recruiters are using these techniques to identify candidates. The tools are particularly popular at small institutions, which probably appreciate the cost efficiencies that online promotion provides. For example, the research found that nearly 8 in 10 private colleges use blogs for recruitment.

“Social Media and College Admissions: The First Longitudinal Study” was conducted by Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., a Senior Fellow and Research Chair of the Society for New Communications Research and Chancellor Professor of Marketing at the University of Massachusetts and Eric Mattson, CEO of Financial Insite Inc., a Seattle-based research firm. It compares adoption of social media between 2007 and 2008 by admissions offices of four-year accredited institutions in the US. The findings are based on 536 interviews with college admissions officers.

Among the top-level results:

Adoption by admissions offices grew from 61% in 2007 to 85% in 2008.
Forty-one percent of college admissions departments have blogs, compared to 13% of the Fortune 500 and 39% of the Inc. 500.
Nearly two-thirds of college admissions officers now say they are “very familiar with” social networks and 17% use social networks to research prospective students. These tools are often used to protect the school from potential embarrassment.
Video is now being widely used to deliver virtual tours of campuses, virtual visits to the dorms, and sample lectures from the faculty.
Seventy-eight percent of private schools have blogs, versus 28% of public schools; 50% of schools with undergraduate populations of less than 2,000 have blogs.
Four out of ten of institutions not currently using social media plan to start a blog.
Nearly 90% of admissions departments feel that social media is “somewhat to very important” to their future strategy.

You can download the executive summary here.

Democratized Insight

Posted on January 18, 2009 by Paul

From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

One of the few segments of the IT industry that has stubbornly resisted the efficiencies of Moore’s Law is research. The services provided by big analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester Research are a $3 billion industry that still conducts business pretty much the same way it did 20 years ago. High-priced analysts using the phone and the speaking circuit to tap into what’s on the minds of their IT management customers. Clients pay five- and six-figure annual fees to tap into their insight. A few prominent opinion-leaders affect the path of billions of dollars in IT investment.

Now David Vellante is disrupting that model. His Wikibon.org is the kind of Web 2.0 project that just might cause the big players to re-evaluate their value propositions. That could be very good for customers.

Vellante knows the research business. For years he ran the largest division of International Data Corp., a market intelligence firm whose opinions can make or break companies. Vellante left IDC a few years ago to start Barometrix, an advisory firm focused on IT investment optimization. That team started Wikibon as an experiment nearly two years ago.

Wikibon uses Web 2.0 technology to turn the IT research model on its head. Its collaborative wiki engine makes it easy for a vast community of practitioners to share expertise and experience. It turns out that when you roll up all that information, you have a resource that helps people make the kinds of decisions that used to involve expensive analysts. And it’s all free.

Research Goes Open Source

Call it open source advice. The first Wikibon community is centered on data storage, and more than 3,000 people have joined. A core group of 30 to 40 independent consultants and experts use the site to share their advice with the broader community. Before Wikibon, they had no way to reach that audience of storage specialists. Now they give away advice in hopes of winning consulting business. Members get the benefit of their years of experience for free.

The bottoms-up model is incredibly cost-efficient. Wikibon has just three employees. Quality control is outsourced to the members, who have contributed some 20,000 articles and edits to the archive. This democratized approach “hasn’t been as much of a limitation as I expected,” Vellante told me.

And the value of the information is evidenced by the time members spend on the site. “It’s Facebook-like,” Vellante says. “We’re getting 20 to 30 page views per visitor.”

Wikibon has now grown to the point that the team is beginning to carve the library into subsections; one new area focuses on data protection and another on storage networks. The small company hopes to monetize its business through value-added programs, such as a new service that helps vendors qualify for energy rebate programs.

Wikibon epitomizes the innovative power of Web 2.0. In the traditional model, insight was communicated from the top down because that was the only affordable way to do it. With thousands of experts now able to assemble an advisory resource of their own, the opportunity exists to flip that model. “It feels disruptive,” Vellante says.

Communities like Wikibon won’t put Gartner out of business, but they provide an affordable alternative that will pressure the market leaders to innovate. That’s the kind of disruption that we can all feel good about.

Social Media FAQ Wrap-Up

Posted on January 15, 2009 by Paul

I’ve recently been answering questions asked by attendees at my recent “10 Secrets of Social Media Marketing” seminars. Here’s the conclusion to the series. For free webcasts on this topic, check out the recent event sponsored by Listrak and another sponsored by Awareness just this week.

Q: What are the best ways to link social media marketing directly to increased sales? Our clients are looking for absolute metrics.

A: Make sure the links on any social media channels you use lead back to unique URLs. This can be done through a simple server redirect, which in techie terms is called a 301 redirect. The person who administers your website should know how to do this. Unique URLs enable you to track which links are referring visitors to a landing page or order form. It’s then a simple task to find which of those visits result in orders.

You should also keep a close eye on referring URLs and visitor paths. A referring URL is a Web page that sends a visitor to your site. Look for the domains give you a lot of traffic because you’ll want to cultivate the owners of those sites. Visitor paths show you the track a visitor takes on your site. This can yield insights about which pages do the best job of guiding a visitor to a desired page, such as an order form. You’ll want to focus your marketing efforts on sending more traffic to those pages.

Referring URLs and visitor paths are standard metrics provided by tools like Google Analytics.
Q: How do you deal with legal issues when blogging and still make sure that reading your blog do not take what you are saying as legal advice?

A: Disclaim like crazy. Each page of your site should include a disclaimer and it’s a good idea to also disclaim individual content items such as blog entries or videos. However, I don’t want to be seen as giving legal advice myself :-). In some regulated industries , even disclaimers may be insufficient. It’s a good idea to check with an intellectual property attorney to understand the issues specific to your business.

Q: When you’re ready to spin off new blogs from established ones, should the timeframe be shortened from the original schedule, or should you count on the same schedule/time requirements?

A: Effective campaigns should achieve enough traction within a year to enable the owner to consider spinning off targeted sites or communities. You should expect to develop traction much more quickly in spun-off properties because the audience is already familiar with your content and your value. Very often you will be dividing an audience into two parts, much as a cell divides, but the combined growth of those two parts should be greater than it would have been had you not divided them. In addition, some of your members or participants will continue to be active in both communities, providing an additional boost.

Q: Are there certain phrases or keywords that rise up on the blog list?
A: Keyword popularity is entirely dependent on the topic. I suggest your goal should not be to dominate the most popular keywords in your market but rather to own the keywords that customers use to find you.

Think outside the box. A bicycle shop’s best prospects may not be people looking for “bicycles” but rather people searching for “green transportation.” One free tool you can use to assess keyword popularity is Google AdWords Keyword Tool. A less useful, but still interesting tool is Google Trends. The Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion tool is another one to look at. It actually recommends keywords you should use.

Innovation in Anonymity

Posted on January 13, 2009 by Paul

From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

I recently had two MRI scans on my back. Magnetic resonance imaging is a wonderful technology that enables doctors to see inside the body with depth and precision that conventional x-rays can’t match.

But MRIs are also mysterious and even frightening procedures for patients. A person is drawn inside a small cylinder and subjected to a series of loud noises for as much as 45 minutes. The attending radiologist told me that about 80% of patients experience some kind of claustrophobic stress, forcing technicians to frequently paused the procedure to calm them down.

I should have known about all this because my MRI provider’s website features a wonderful interactive experience that describes the benefits of MRI in a collage of high-resolution images and video tutorials. It also has a multimedia tour of the MRI experience that even includes samples of the odd sounds patients hear. This information would have been immensely useful to me if I’d known it existed, but I didn’t learn of the feature until weeks after the procedures, when I stumbled upon it in the context of a different discussion.

In fact, at no time during my interactions with people at the MRI center did anyone inform me that this resource existed. It wasn’t listed on the company’s letterhead or the preparatory documents sent to patients. A software project that had no doubt cost the company thousands of dollars was barely even referenced on the provider’s homepage.

Failure to Promote

This situation is all too common in businesses. Technology innovators dream up clever new ways to serve their customers and then don’t tell anyone about it. Customer service reps and automated voice response systems routinely refer visitors to generic homepages with meaningless statements like, “more information is available on our website.” But who has the time to go and find it?

Somewhere inside these companies a disconnect has occurred between the technologists and the people who interact with customers. Businesses assume it’s okay to hire service reps who haven’t a shred of technical expertise because those skills aren’t required to interact with the public. IT people are taught to do their jobs and then go home. Cooperating with others to promote the tools they build isn’t part of the job description.

But it should be. Today’s customers are too busy to spend time searching for resources they don’t know exist. The people who commission customer-facing projects may move on to other jobs or companies, leaving their creations without a sponsor.

IT people need to step up to the plate and promote the fruits of their labors because no one else is going to do it. Here are some steps my MRI provider could have taken:

If you are a as if it is a Promote the resource in printed documents – Health-care providers produce lots of paper, yet none of the informational documents I received even mentioned the website experience.

Post signs — A poster in the lobby or window could have alerted me to the existence of this great application.

Train customer service personnel — In my multiple phone calls with the clerical staff, no one recommended that I even visit the website.

Set up a lobby demo — PCs are cheap; why not make it easy for customers in the waiting room to learn what the company has offer?

This adds up to an opportunity missed for some innovative IT person whose creativity and hard work won’t receive the recognition it deserves. Don’t let your good work go to waste because you forgot to tell anyone about it.

FAQ the Third

Posted on January 8, 2009 by Paul

I’ve recently conducted a couple of online seminars about social media topics. The Q&A sessions at these events are almost always too short to get to the issues that are on people’s minds. So over the next few issues of this newsletter, I’ll run down a few of the best questions I didn’t get to. For a good, free webcast on this topic, check out the recent event sponsored by Listrak.

To subscribe to my weekly newsletter, just fill out the short form to the right.

Q: How do you reach international audiences? Are the tools you showed just for US consumers?

A: The Internet doesn’t know geographic boundaries, so with few exceptions your message can reach across the globe. The one area that is geographically sensitive is social networks, which seem to gain more active followings in some countries than in others. Google’s Orkut, for example, has been a nonstarter in the U.S. but has a huge following in Brazil. Cyworld is popular in Korea, while Hi5 has a big Latin American membership. In Japan, Mixi is the largest social network. The Swedes love Lunarstorm, and the Poles take to Grono. I’m not sure why that’s the case, but if you’re trying to reach people on social networks, you need to go where they’re already congregating.

Q: Can you give some examples of return on investment?

A: That depends on how you define “return.” Often, businesses look at return in terms of visits to a designated landing page, such as a download or order form. In that case, look at referring URLs. You can also track actual orders back to the URLs or e-mail links that referred people to that page. That’s a relatively easy way to translate links into sales. Use unique URLs and/or tracking codes to document where your customers are coming from. This podcast interview with Avinash Kaushik on Paul Dunay’s Buzz Marketing for Technology podcast series has some sound advice.

In other cases, however, companies may look for an increase in favorable press coverage or blogger comments as an indicator of ROI. In that case, tracking an increase in press or blog citations compared to a base point can yield a pretty good idea of the effectiveness of a campaign. Note that these are not web analytics and that the collar value of these results can be difficult to quantify.

Q: What (if any) silver bullet can you use, to encourage your client to create a blog for their company, when they are deathly afraid of negative feedback?

A: A substantial body of evidence is emerging to support the effectiveness of social media marketing. For example, here’s a list of links to archives of successful social media campaigns. A study of the Inc. 500 by the University of Massachusetts found that three quarters of the respondents now consider social media to be essential to their marketing efforts. Sites like eMarketer and Marketing Sherpa also have extensive case history and statistical evidence about the value of blogs and other tools. Recent McKinsey research reveals that companies that have bought into Web 2.0 marketing are planning to expand their commitment this year.

In my view, negative feedback is an overrated problem. Every company has some unhappy customers, and most people understand that that’s part of the landscape. In most cases, critics can be converted to satisfied customers or even fans with a little hand-holding and special attention. There is overwhelming evidence that simply responding to disgruntled customers with a message that shows you’re listening can put to bed the vast majority of complaints. If a company does have a customer satisfaction problem, however, it is wise to step lightly into new media. Be prepared for negativity and be ready to respond to each and every comment. You’ll quickly find that criticism will diminish as you demonstrate responsiveness.

Q: Does social media marketing apply more to medium and larger businesses than to small businesses?

A: In my experience, small businesses are more active, creative and effective at leveraging social media marketing than big companies. There are many reasons for this, including the compelling cost advantages, the speed and responsiveness of small organizations, their willingness to engage directly with individual customers and the accessibility of senior managers. The University of Massachusetts research I mentioned above found that small businesses are adopting these tools much faster than large ones. In my own presentations and seminars, I consistently find that small companies are more enthusiastic and responsive to the potential of social media than the big guys. In fact, large companies tend to excel at finding reasons to AVOID talking to their customers!

Fun With Feeds

Posted on January 6, 2009 by Paul

If you subscribe to this blog in a feed reader, apologies. My feeds appear to have abruptly stopped around the middle of December and on January 1 the number of subscribers plummeted from 600 to zero. I have no idea why this is happening, although I suspect it has something to do with Feedburner’s transition to Google. I’m trying to troubleshoot via the Feedburner forums and will get things back online as soon as possible.

Coaxing Web 2.0 Into the Enterprise

Posted on January 5, 2009 by Paul

From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

McKinsey has a new report on enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, and the findings should give pause to IT organizations planning to roll these tools out to their internal customers.

Overall, these technologies — which include wikis, blogs and social networks — are making steady progress into the organizations represented by the nearly 2,000 respondents to the survey. What’s striking is the disparity between those companies that have made a commitment and those that are still skeptical. The companies that have drunk the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid report that it’s changing the very nature of their businesses and that they plan to expand their commitment this year.

Among early adopters, tools are being used to develop new products collaboratively, reinvent internal communications and transform the process of communicating with customers. Only 8% of the executives who describe themselves as satisfied Web 2.0 users say the tools haven’t changed their organizations, compared to 46% of the self-described dissatisfied users.

However, the survey has a disquieting finding for IT organizations. Those companies that showed the least satisfaction with Web 2.0 tended to be the ones in which IT drove the initiative. Companies that report the overall highest satisfaction with the tools and technologies are those in which IT plays NO role in selection and deployment. Conversely, those with the highest dissatisfaction levels are also the most likely to let IT lead the charge (see chart).

Why does this sad state of affairs exist? I suspect it has much to do with internal culture and the ways in which the technology’s value proposition is defined for the ultimate users.

Taken at face value, the data suggests that IT is best left out of the Web 2.0 equation, but in my experience, technology groups play a vital role. One of the beauties of these new technologies is that they’re so simple and adaptable. Social networks, for example, can be used for anything from technical support to corporate knowledge management while wikis can perform at the project level or across an entire company. I’ve worked with several companies to implement Web 2.0 technologies, and the successful ones always go about it the same way. A small number of enthusiastic users are given tools and the means to use them and then their creativity is allowed to filter through the organization. IT plants the seed and then gives its customers the means to make the garden grow.

This process is invariably supported by managers who trust their people to do the right thing and who support experimentation and risk. Conversely, I’ve never seen Web 2.0 succeed in companies that mandated it from the top or pushed it through the IT group. Web 2.0 technology only works when people want to use it. Technology that enhances collaboration must necessarily be driven from the bottom up.

I cringe when I hear questions like this: “We want to start a corporate blog. What should we do with it?” If the technology doesn’t match a perceived need, no one is going to use it.

The best way to manage Web 2.0 adoption is to find those business side sponsors who have the curiosity to experiment and give them the means for discovery. The McKinsey report demonstrates that they quickly figure out their own uses for the tools, and their enthusiasm becomes contagious. It’s fulfilling enough to plant the seed and nurture the flower as it takes root and grows.

paulgillin.com

Social Media and the Open Enterprise

How To Trash Your Search Performance In One Easy Step

Democratized Insight

Innovation in Anonymity

Failure to Promote

Fun With Feeds

Coaxing Web 2.0 Into the Enterprise