Post by Andrew Lisa

I‘ve talked with people who are juggling as many as 25 business profiles for Twitter alone — and these are legitimate accounts. If the nature of their business demands that they’re also wrapped up in multiple profiles on other social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, there are simply not enough hours in the day to keep up.

Here are the five social media management tools that I hear positive reviews about most frequently (and isn’t word of mouth the best barometer?):

SproutSocial: Collaboration & keyboard monitoring

1SproutSocial has a clean, sleek interface and powerful features that come standard with every plan. It has an easy, single-stream inbox feed and tasking tools that make it nearly impossible to miss a customer’s question or comment. You can also post – and schedule postings – for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn simultaneously. Keyword monitoring lets you keep tabs on what people are saying about you and its collaboration feature allows you to split up tasks between team members.

Postling: Manage multiple accounts — and your blog

2With one single inbox at Postling, you can manage not just Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, but also YouTube and even your blog. Even more, Postling lets you monitor reviews on sites like Yelp, CitySearch and TripAdvisor. Publish everything in one place and choose to respond either from your social media account or via email. Postling also has one of the best mobile apps in the industry.

Spredfast: Famed for its analytics program

3Spredfast is big-time social marketing for big-time operations. Its renowned analytics program is provided in readable graphs and charts, perfect for presenting to clients or customers regarding their own outreach programs. It’s not for the little guys, however – fees range from $12,000 to $1 million a year, on top of whatever you pay for high-speed business Internet.

Expion: Analytics + content marketing

4Expion steps it up by providing not just social marketing, but analytics and content marketing as well. It has a customizable interface that allow users to manage and govern personalized accounts. There is a whole world of social media management tools, and it can be big and confusing. The proliferation of social media, of course, resulted in the parallel rise of countless supporting applications. The first thing you should do is narrow down potential sites by clearly identifying clearly what size business each site is geared toward. From there, you can get into price and functionality.

Social Engage: Buff up your online profile

5Aimed at small businesses, Social Engage (formerly CoTweet) does everything you’d expect from a social marketing app, but it has a feature that makes it unique. Its +Engage feature frequently changes the design of your profile to follow the latest Internet trends.

The post Choosing the right social media management system appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Ditch the assumptions & consider the client’s needs

Target audience: Marketing professionals, business owners, harried executives.

When I decided to hire a virtual assistant, I had no idea how much I’d learn from the process.

Here’s the story:

I’ve recently relaunched my business and have very specific areas I want to grow it in. There were a couple of things I realized when I made the decision to dust off my entrepreneurial shoes:

• I needed to have a system with which to track, develop and maintain new business relationships – hence my exhausting search for a small business CRM (customer relationship management) system that would work the way I needed it to.

• I needed help with certain elements of my business, particularly on the administrative and marketing side of things. Do you have any idea how long it takes to do much of the nitty-gritty an entrepreneur has to deal with, as well as how long those tasks can take, particularly the marketing tasks?

Now, marketing is what I do. So when it comes to my business, it had better be good else baby won’t get a new pair of shoes!

Enter oDesk

I looked around, checked out various sites for locating virtual assistants, and then decided to place a job posting on oDesk. I’d heard good things about it from a few different friends and fellow women entrepreneurs (Donna Vincent Roa and Tinu Abayomi-Paul, to name just a couple), and it seemed to have a pretty solid system.

So I posted a job opening. I made it as detailed as I could. I specified certain skills, how much I was willing to pay, etc., and what I was looking for. Before I could even count to 10, the applicants started rolling in.

Over a period of a couple of weeks, there were 27 applicants. Most of them ignored at least some of the specifics of my posting. Many had frighteningly high opinions of their language skills, and some applied even though they would be incapable of using certain platforms I needed them to.

When I narrowed down the list to six or seven candidates, I asked them to follow a specific process to set up a Skype interview with me. It was easy enough: I gave them my Timebridge link and asked them to send me a couple of options for a chat.

Guess how many did exactly as I asked?

One.

Just one.

And the others? That’s where the lessons begin.

Know your software

1Well, there was the one candidate who couldn’t figure out how to use Timebridge, and kept asking me for help.

If your potential client wants you to use a particular piece of software, or platform, you better figure out how to use it … without asking the client for help.

Assess your limitations

2Then there were the candidates who were in China. Very eager, but unable to use Twitter. Or Google, which would make working on the social media marketing side of things difficult. No. It would make it impossible!

If your physical or geographical (or any other -cal) circumstances preclude you from working with platforms the client needs you to … why should they hire you?

Know the job specs

3Then there were the candidates who completely ignored specific do’s and don’ts – e.g., I did not want anyone working for an agency to apply, but they did anyway. And I may have considered them if they fit the other criteria, but they didn’t.

So they were doubly irritating.

It’s one thing to be ambitious in your reach, but the job specs are the job specs. And either you match, or you don’t. If you don’t, you’re far better off focusing on finding what is a good match for you.

Be open minded

4The person I ended up hiring was a bit of a surprise.

I thought I might find someone in the Far East, because of my small budget, but I actually found someone right here in the United States. I’m also paying more than I originally wanted to.

Ultimately, after talking to her, I believed she’d be worth it — someone I could work with over the long haul.

The right person for the job might be someone completely different from the preconception you had in mind. The same goes for PR agencies, business partners and strategic partners. Keep an open mind.

Cold calling can still work

5Something else I hadn’t anticipated happened. I got a few emails – not applications via oDesk, but direct emails – from virtual assistants who must have seen the job posting, checked me and my company out, and decided to write in personally.

Every single one of these was personable, and while I didn’t hire them, I am in touch with at least a couple who I may end up working with on different types of projects – maybe even client work – as I grow the business.

You never know where your next client might come from. “Cold calling” can still work, but only if it’s done right.

I’ve been working with my virtual assistant for close to a month now. While it’s early days yet, she is smart, eager to learn, takes direction well, and is teaching me a thing or two herself (anyone tried Join.me for screen sharing, now that Skype doesn’t let you do that without a premium account? It’s awesome!). She is conscientious about work, time (both when it comes to time sheets as well as learning some elements of the job on her own time) and someone I lean on just a little bit more every day.

And she better not get a big head as she reads this, Karelyn. Heh!

What about you? Have you gleaned business insights from places you wouldn’t expect? And do you have tips on working well with virtual assistants? Leave us a comment below!

Republished from Waxing Unlyrical.

The post 5 business lessons learned from hiring a virtual assistant appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Mobile, social, geolocation, big data, marketing — Socialmedia.biz’s strategists eye the future

The social media landscape has undergone enormous changes since the current Socialmedia.biz team of strategists partnered up in 2009. With the end of the year fast approaching, we thought this would be a good time to offer our forecasts into what the next year may hold in store for social media, mobile, social businesses and more. Here are nine fearless predictions — including a look at the current state, predicted future state and our recommendations.

When in doubt, think mobile — and especially tablets

Current state

1While mobile usage has been rising for years and a majority of Americans’ cell phones became smartphones during 2012, tablet usage is now eclipsing the smartphone numbers by threefold in the case of the Apple iPad to iPhone adoption (source: 2012 KPCB Internet Trends). Now, 55 percent of adults access the Internet from their mobile phone, double the rate of what they did only three years ago (source: Pew Internet & American Life Project). Along with bandwidth improvements, visitors increasingly access your organization’s page from a mobile device, with 13 percent of global traffic coming from mobile (source: 2012 KPCB Internet Trends).

Future state

The computing environment – along with our lifestyles – is moving away from the desktop and even the laptop, with users relying more heavily on their smartphones and tablet devices to do business, stay connected and share. Increasingly, even the road warrior is ditching a laptop for a tablet, Bluetooth keyboard and a set of apps to get through the work day or while attending a conference. User expectations are exceedingly high in terms of navigating a site for informational purposes, to complete a task, to make a purchase or a donation. They expect a browsing experience akin to the simple, intuitive navigation found in buying a book on Amazon or the crisp visual experience of inhaling your Facebook stream via the Flipboard app.

Recommendations

Design your site expecting the mobile user in mind. At the top of the page, place a hyperlink to a mobile version of your site. Having an app available for your site is a nice-to-have, but a truly easy-to-navigate mobile site will work for multiple uses and keep your development costs down as you weigh business needs for an app. Make your site swipeable on tablets by using Onswipe, a free service that lets your brand publish content with more of an app-like appearance. (JD interviewed the founder here a year ago.) Another company doing innovative publishing around mobile is ScrollMotion, an inventive New York startup that animates sales, marketing and training applications on the tablet, turning them into more interactive and dynamic content assets. The user experience is enhanced and complex subjects gain more visual elements. No matter what your site is telling or selling, the end user wants to consume and interact with your content in a way that behaves more like entertainment, from a look-and-feel perspective. (To learn more about mobile-related topics, visit Socialmedia.biz’s mobile section.)

A wave of recommendations startups before the big consolidation

Current state

2I just got an iPhone 5 this week, after remaining content with my iPhone 4 for two years and skipping the iPhone 4S and the siren call of Siri (is it too late to join the party, Zooey Deschanel?). But despite the Big Brotherish visage of Apple looming over the landscape, 2012 saw the rise a number of new arrivals on the Recommendations bandwagon, so much so that it’s now officially its own sector. These are the spawn of Yelp, which itself is the spawn of review sites like Zagat.

Future state

With dozens of guns aimed its way, it may be tough for Yelp to shake its rep as the go-to place for untrustworthy reviews from strangers and hucksters. So make way for a new generation of social recommendation sites. I just wrote about the launch of social recommendations engine Snoox (“Recommendations from friends, not strangers”) and only this week heard about another one, BagsUp (“Find the best places to eat … shop … play … stay”). What, no recommendation engine yet on the best place to shack up and have an affair? Maybe that niche will be filled by Trover (a cool little bicurious — Apple/Android — mobile app), Raved, Villij, LiveStar or Stamped (just bought by Yahoo!). One thing’s for certain: There’s no room in the marketplace for another dozen photo-sharing apps.

Meantime, the current champ of geolocation, Foursquare, is working hard to reinvent itself as … ta da! A social recommendations engine! Check-ins and mayorships are so 2010 and will become quaint, even unhip, a year from now. But geoloco is for real and will be huge in the years ahead, so look for Facebook or Apple (dark horses: Microsoft or Yahoo!) to snap up Foursquare by Q4 2013. The only question is whether Dennis Crowley becomes a billionaire or mega-millionaire.

Recommendations

Facebook desperately wants to own the social recommendations space. But so does Apple with its kinda-sexy intelligent agent, Siri. Google, too, wants in, and will increasingly enhance its mapping capabilities not only right up to your business’s front door — but inside the place, too. After all, photo sharing apps are the new Google Street View. And now Yahoo’s new CEO, Marissa Mayer, smartly bets on mobile and local as the future hope of the dysfunctional behemoth.

While most of us aren’t about to log into Facebook to rave about our latest purchase from Bed Bath & Beyond, we may take a snap of our cool new crockpot with our iPhone 5 or Android, upload it to Instagram and share it on Foursquare and Twitter. Recommendation technology is seeping into our lives through social sharing activities that are becoming part of the invisible fabric of our lives.

Quick! That fabric’s now on sale, for 40 percent off, at Pottery Barn!

Shut up, privacy nuts! Some of us see a benefit in oversharing

Current state

3I have always embraced applications that follow me around. From old man Google Latitude to upstart Highlight, I am always trying to overshare. Checking in on social networks has become commonplace. Facebook, Google+ and many others (thanks, in many cases, to a generous FourSquare API) allow us to log in to our respective social network profiles and identify where we’re at and who we’re with, and then share that with both our friends as well as with the public, should we wish. A couple of startups that have yet to catch on are taking the next step, allowing us to just allow our apps to check us in and share our whereabouts with our friends — or the public — automatically, while the services begin collecting our social data and begin sharing it with advertisers, business partners, etc.

Moreover, once all of this silliness about privacy is finally put to rest and folks learn to trade some of their privacy for convenience and value, there are so many other things that your devices can offer. I recently bought a Nexus 7 tablet with Google Now. Now offers users like me access to what I might need to know right now: what’s around me; how long it’ll take to get to my next appointment and how, based on traffic; what fun stuff is going on around me, and where I might want to get a drink or eat, as well as anything else Google can sort out about me. I have become obsessed with carrying it on me all the time so that Google can spend all of its time stalking me so it can become more and more useful — to me. The same thing is happening to Apple owners as they embrace Siri and other location- and context-aware platforms with calendar, search engine and inbox integration.

The RunKeeper app: automated updates.

Future state

Until now, social stalking software companies have been so afraid of being accused of privacy invasion that they’ve intentionally limited the amount of share one is able to provide with their friends. This will soon end. The value of being able to actively passively share where you are, what you’re doing, even when you’re not going out, is too high to prevent the boldest of us to participate gladly. Even Google Latitude, which allows its users to “automatically check in here,” restricts that share to only fellow chums on Latitude with whom I already have a connection. As more and more applications integrate Google Maps, Foursquare and the like into their social networks (such as GetGlue, Facebook, Google+ and Instagram), giving them the ability to actively and intentionally check-in into the store, restaurant, gym, cafe, and home — but only explicitly and with exceptional intent. We all know that running your GPS on your phone burns the battery, but batteries are getting better and external battery packs are becoming more common, so that barrier will soon fall. One of my happiest personal states is when I’m running or walking and have my RunKeeper tracking my trip and sharing my entire route and performance with not only my friends in the RunKeeper community but also with everyone I am connected to on Facebook and Twitter, including the public.

We Americans are like frogs: We’re easy to boil if you drop us into a nice bath and then bring the water to a roiling boil rather than throwing us directly in to blanch. So Google, Foursquare, Facebook and the like are wooing us over time with tempting morsels, addictive functionality and set-up-and-forget convenience. 2013 will be the year when Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google and Bing will have convinced you to cross-integrate your calendar, email, search history and privacy setting in such a way that there will be a small, easy step — infinitesimal, in fact — toward location- and context-awareness, with opportunities to share everything: what you’re doing, where you are, how long you’ve been there, and whether you’re a regular (the mayor). It’ll happen implicitly, frictionlessly and whether I think about it or not.

Recommendations

While the tide of passive participation and frictionless sharing on social media is a tidal wave and is bound to come to pass, the self-proclaimed privacy police could very well spook Google, Facebook and the rest into hibernation, especially since Foursquare is having business and revenue challenges. Erring on the side of discretion and safety has kept the vast usefulness of location- and context-awareness in a box.

I’ll be honest, I think the real reason why these companies are unwilling to allow us to throw open our doors and windows is because there’s so much information — contextual, location-based, historical, as well as gleaned from search, email, browsing history, and online shopping and orders — that they’re truthfully afraid to reveal how much they know about us.

But without doubt, this will all come to fruition. And once we get over our jitters, we’ll discover how awesome a personal Web valet they can be. The obstacles are not technological but cultural. The coming year will mark a watershed, and privacy will no longer stand in the way.

Making sense of Big Data for analysis, metrics & sales leads

Current state

4According to IBM, every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. But the Big Data challenge isn’t only about the overwhelming volume of data available, it’s about how to make sense of that much data. To date, traditional data analysis tools have been inadequate and infrastructures not robust enough to meet the Big Data challenge.

Though the tools do exist – IBM Big Data Platform, Cloudera and Hadoop for instance – to take on the task, cost and lack of expertise has made it prohibitive for many companies to jump on board the Big Data bandwagon.

Future state

Aside from a lot of hype about investing in Big Data and the data scientist talent shortage, there was relatively little discussion about advances in Big Data technologies in 2012. What we did see in 2012, however, was the rise of the cloud. Advances in cloud computing technology is what will bring Big Data analysis capabilities closer to the mainstream in 2013. IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) cloud services like Amazon Web Services Big Data and Google BigQuery will help close the gap for smaller enterprises.

Cloud technologies offer cheaper and more robust storage options for emerging Big Data platforms, so we are likely to see more of these platforms emerge, and existing platforms bloom.

Recommendations

Though enterprise is still the “big” winner as far as advances in big data technologies and predictive analysis, small- to medium-size businesses can still benefit. There are tools available now that help companies tap into Big Data for real-time analysis, application tracking, business metrics and long-tail sales leads.

Here are a few to keep your eye on:

• Infochimps

• Appfirst

• Bloomreach

And for those who don’t mind tackling a learning curve, there are a number of big data open-source technologies that can also be applied to IaaS technologies like Google’s BigQuery.

Time to reimagine mobile ads as supporting users’ goals

Current state

5Websites and social networks have been seriously gnashing their teeth in 2010-2012 as the “third screen” (mobile) has overtaken the second (computer) in prominence, effectively crowding out the key revenue source: display ads. The sun is setting on interruptive advertising.

Future state

In 2013, mobile advertising revenue will continue to fall, although its collapse is temporarily dampened by the popularity of tablets which, despite having mobile functionality, are usually used to consume data. This makes interruptive advertisements somewhat more tolerable. However, the breakthrough will come to advertisers that realize interruptive ads “do things to people,” so they shift to “doing things with people.” This works by reimagining “ads” as software that supports users (of the device or site) who are engaged in what’s most important to them. Where interruptive ads take away from users, “software ads” support them.

Recommendations

At a minimum, begin implementing the Facebook option on some of your display ads. Even better, get serious by applying agile software development to ad design. Identify users you want to engage and map their workstreams; ask yourself what knowledge or tools you have that could support users in unique ways and design “ads” to deliver the support. Note that this will work only when your firm truly puts users first. This approach will align you with users and distinguish you in 2013 and beyond.

Twitter will reach its zenith, and then begin to recede

Current state

6Social networks continue to be born every few weeks — seemingly every day. That’s fine, but not all of them deserve to survive.

Future state

A new yet-to-be-seen major social network will rise as we’ll watch another one begin to fall. Just as we saw the dramatic rise of Pinterest this year, another major social network will rise from the ashes to become the new social media darling. (MySpace? Probably not.) But in its wake a major social network will begin to fall. I predict it will actually be Twitter. Twitter is becoming less and less valuable.

Don’t take my word for it. Take a look at your blog or website analytics. Isolate the traffic that comes just from Twitter. Notice the bounce rate is much higher than your average and the time on site is much lower than your average. Twitter is becoming more and more useless as a traffic driver as most of the traffic it sends is uninterested garbage. And the noise from Twitter is drowning out the signal. Today the only way to truly consume Twitter is by following hashtags and other searches. But for tent pole events such as the Super Bowl, that’s impossible as there’s far too much content from just a single hashtag.

Recommendations

Twitter’s noise is deafening and it will soon consume itself. So don’t put all of your brand’s eggs in the Twitter basket. Diversify. You should be doing that anyway — especially in a space that sees social platforms rise and fall and come and go so readily.

More businesses will become roll-your-own Community Companies

Betabrand lets customers design and choose which products they make.

Current state

7Mass-produced products are way 20th century, and B2C product firms won’t maintain profitability unless they enable customers’ serious input into what they offer.

Future state

In 2013, the Community Company social business model will break through big-time. The Community Company puts stakeholders in charge of one or more of the firm’s key business processes. Ready examples are Threadless and Betabrand, which let customers design and choose which products they make. Threadless is the most “pure” in that its customers drive the product process, where BetaBrand is a hybrid whose “Think Tank” invites customer input.

Recommendations

Good practices here are creating various roles for stakeholders that are meaningful to them and harmonious with your core competencies. Use a hierarchy of social actions and workstreams to engage stakeholders who have various passion levels. Support each role with (online) tools, functionality and rewards. Design your innovation process to enable increasing stakeholder involvement over time. In the Social Channel, product significance falls in favor of stakeholder experiences when using products. Increase your competitive advantage by aggressively moving to give stakeholders key roles in how your firm works.

Firms will go cross-platform to raise the bar in social business

Current state

8With few exceptions, most firms’ social media processes are primarily organized around platforms, which add some value to stakeholders but leave money on the table. Marketers are driven by metrics, and platforms’ social actions are measurable, even though most are still not tied to real business impact.

Future state

In 2013, firms that want to make impact will jettison their platform-centric mindset, and focus on workstreams. Warby Parker shows how it will be done. They use Twitter to source and respond to the most popular customer service issues, and they digitize responses on YouTube, then provide links to the YouTube videos on Twitter. Note that the videos enable them to be personal, funny and helpful while harnessing massive scale.

Recommendations

To outperform using this technique, you’ll need a taxonomy of “problems” and naming for videos and links that will scale once you have hundreds of videos. You’ll also need some design standardization for videos, so they reflect the brand and become more useful to stakeholders. By no means does this mean they should be formulaic. Note that stakeholders don’t care for platforms; they have problems or goals, and they seek the most expeditious solutions. Firms need to align with them by knitting platforms into seamless business processes to support stakeholders.

In mapping out success, become the solution

Current state

9The Internet is full of advice on how to get more Twitter followers, Facebook fans and blog readers. Each of these “how to” articles are designed to teach you how to become more successful in social media.

Future state

The reality is that the only way to truly succeed in social media is not just be the guy who follows others’ advice, but to be the first in plotting out a roadmap to success. To pull that off, you’ll need to experiment … a lot. We’ll see more glimmers of that innovate-or-calcify approach in 2013. Some companies, such as TiVo, have established a reasonably safe haven for social media experimentation. Their philosophy is to try and try again. If you’re going to fail, fail quickly and cheaply. It’s the mantra of Silicon Valley, where TiVo (perhaps not coincidentally) is based.

Recommendation

The companies that will continue to succeed with social media marketing are the ones that don’t look for proof points on what to do, but rather become the proof points that others point to as markers of success.

What would you add?

Obviously we just scratched the surface of what may lie ahead in the new year. What’s your big, brash prediction for what we’ll see in 2013? Please add your thoughts in the comments below — we promise to respond!

The post 9 social media predictions & business recommendations for 2013 appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Manage your online presence to cultivate a positive reputation

Target audience: Businesses, brands, marketing professionals, SEO specialists, agencies, general public.

What you say about yourself online and what others say about you online will affect your business’s bottom line. According to a study conducted by the Harvard Business Review, an overall one-star increase or decrease on a review site can result in a 5 to 9 percent increase or decrease in sales. Similarly, a study by Edmunds.com discovered that auto dealerships with a 3.5 star rating or below get 30 percent fewer leads, said Brent Franson, vice president of sales at Reputation.com.

Two weeks ago I moderated a panel discussion for the Jewish Community Federation Business Leadership Council on building and protecting your online brand. Joining me and Franson on the panel were Shanee Ben-Zur, social media strategist and manager for NVIDIA, and Daniel Bernstein, product partnerships lead for Social/Google+ at Google.

Here’s a video summary of our evening discussion:

Why your online brand matters

We’re discovered via our online brand. The content that we and others create about us from our online identity. Videos about us, photos we’re tagged in, our tweets, Facebook profile, and blog posts all form a collective representation of ourselves. Most entry points for this content are through Google, said Bernstein.

Your online reputation is found through search results, agreed Franson. The first two results from a Google search get 52 percent of all clicks. That first page of results get 72 percent of all clicks, and the second page gets the next 27 percent. After the second page of search results, there are barely any clicks.

Google may be where you’re often discovered, but it’s no longer the dominating force of your site traffic. We’re undergoing a major disruption of the distribution and consumption of media which has resulted in a shift of site traffic from solely search to now including social services such as Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This disruption is most noticeable via mobile, noted Bernstein, who said Facebook has been reporting a 25 percent increase quarter over quarter in mobile traffic.

One-time management vs. ongoing management

Ever feel you’re never going to have enough time to dedicate to building and maintaining your online brand? You’re not alone.

Defining your online brand is not up to you. “The Web is going to say something about you whether you like it or not,” said Franson. “There’s no option of me not to say anything.”

There are two ways you can manage your online profile: Through one-time (or infrequent) management and ongoing management through social media.

Your best one-time management effort is to have a business website and social account. If you truly have no time to set up a business site, at bare minimum it’s easy to set up a LinkedIn page and forget about it, for at least a year, said Bernstein.

As for ongoing management, you have to contribute. “If you’re not contributing anything to the community, it’s not going to do anything for you,” said Franson. “If you want to have an active presence, you should be talking about things actively. … A Twitter account that you’re never updating is never going to do anything for you.”

Taking that first step on Twitter is not easy. “When you start on Twitter, you’re in a room talking to yourself. You want people to show up to your party. To get there you go to their room and their party,” said Ben-Zur who advises following key people in your areas of interest. Listorious is a great service to search for those people and Twitter lists others have created on that subject.

Bernstein argued that you don’t necessarily have to participate on Twitter. “The top misconception of Twitter is you have to tweet. You don’t. You can get tons of value from Twitter by just watching,” he said. Just follow the media outlets you normally follow and you’ll start observing a new phenomenon as your news arrives in bite-size formats.

Where do you draw the line with negative criticism?

About five years ago I had a situation where I accidentally said something stupid on an Internet show, and I got an insane volume of criticism. In an effort to quell the anger, I went into a chat room trying to explain what I was trying to say. My response only added fuel to the fire. It continued an angry discussion that I discovered died out when I just kept my mouth shut.

Staying quiet is rarely the best thing to do, but it’s sometimes the appropriate action. I asked the panel how they handle negative criticism.

Because of some involvement with Israel, NVIDIA received a mountain of criticism on their blog, much of it anti-Semitic. They were able to manage the situation in part because they had a public comment policy. This allowed them to delete, without repercussion, any post that had profanity in it. Posts with civil, yet negative comments, stayed up. To quell the continuing tide of non-profane criticism, they put up a short post to establish their position on the issue, said Ben-Zur.

When deciding whether to take action on a review, look at the criticism first and ask yourself, “How sober is the person who posted the review?” said Franson. “If someone is legitimately upset, you can apologize publicly or respond privately.”

Beware of using your corporate and legal muscle to take someone down. The Internet has communications and distribution powers that are completely beyond your control. The most notorious case of this is when Barbara Streisand sent her team of lawyers after someone who posted a picture of her home online. The person who posted the completely legit and legal photo did not buckle to the pressure. Instead, he exacerbated Streisand’s concern by spreading it to his friends. The photo went everywhere, and the poor response resulted in a Wikipedia article called “The Streisand Effect.” In retrospect, it would have better if she did nothing. Keep this example in mind the next time you get into a debate on a review site, said Franson. Sometimes it’s a good idea, and sometimes responses only go back and forth and it just makes the situation a lot worse.

“People are forgiving of companies making mistakes,” said Ben-Zur. “They’re not forgiving of being ignored.”

People really appreciate and accept it when companies apologize, Ben-Zur noted.

Reviews can make or break your business

As evidenced by the statistics at the beginning of this article, small businesses need to focus on online reviews, said Franson. Seventy-two percent of the public trust online reviews as much as they trust word of mouth.

The overwhelming majority, 80 percent, of reputation damage to small businesses is a mismatch of what people are saying online and what’s actually happening offline, Franson said. The scale tips to one side when a few unhappy people were the only ones that went out of their way to post a review online. To right the scale, you have to go out of your way to solicit reviews.

Jason Calacanis’ newly pivoted content business, Mahalo, is built on maintaining programming that only has 4- and 5-star reviews. When you see a “gun” histogram, it’s an insta-buy. The reverse image is an insta-pass, said Calacanis.

New online branding opportunities

All the panelists agreed that Google is the most popular entry point for people to discover your brand. To incentivize participation in its social network, Google+, Google is letting the Google+ identity carry through to its main Google search property. If your business is on Google+ with pictures and reviews, that information will appear on the right hand side at the top of the page whenever anyone does a search on your business. It’s a phenomenal branding and real estate play, Bernstein said.

Another huge branding opportunity is with photos, which have caused an amazing media disruption and are incredible attractors. Astonishingly, 10 percent of all photos ever taken were taken in 2011. More and more people live their lives through photos, Bernstein said.

Another astonishing statistic that Bernstein noted is that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. It’s bigger than Bing and Yahoo. While it’s not a major player with regard to reputation, videos can grab more Google real estate by being embedded in search results.

For more on how to create and protect your online brand, read Ben-Zur’s article, How to Create and Protect Your Online Brand.

Stock photo of conversation image and Dislike button courtesy of Big Stock Photo.

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Will Facebook stick to its core competency or be waylaid?

This is third of a three-part series on Facebook as an investment. Also see:
• Facebook’s biggest barrier to enormous wealth? Trust
• Facebook will remain king, but social pure plays will fade

Many brands are boosting their investments in social business platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest with every passing quarter, but CMOs are too often focused on next quarter’s numbers. They fail to insulate themselves against platforms’ business risks. Facebook’s IPO will likely cause the company to change its behavior in surprising ways, and without warning, by changing its policies and features. Here, I’ll address how brand executives can insulate themselves from Facebook’s — or any platform’s — fortunes by moving to make their relationships and networks portable.

Seeing beyond the platform

Pure play firms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have defined language, behavior, features and the very concepts of digital “social networks,” but they are quite expendable when brands manage their investments appropriately. However, brand leaders need to follow the digital ecosystem closely and be ready to adjust quickly.

Here are some principles for avoiding surprises. Specific action steps follow.

Assume pure plays’ gradual obsolescence

Watch the ecosystem’s major players, and the interactions among them, but the trend will be specialist sites maximizing value from “social networking” and fading dominance of pure plays. The latter will continue to exist, but they will not maximize value because they are designed for “socializing” (which people can’t resist), not doing things. Moreover, I use “ecosystem” intentionally because it indicates a pervasive, real-time network that increasingly interoperates. Because it’s digital, it’s more dynamic than any human market we’ve ever experienced. Here are brief comments on some of the players:

Facebook is so entrenched globally that it may remain the dominant general social network for many years. However, there is a big caveat. Facebook’s management team looks like it’s losing focus due to the IPO and too much time with Wall Street bankers. It’s “using the money it raised” for M&A, purportedly considering entering the hardware market (buying RIM). If Facebook’s management team and core competencies included M&A (like, say, Cisco), I would be confident. But they don’t. If Facebook buys RIM, I would seriously question Facebook’s medium-term relevance and long-term survival. Making phones will not help Facebook sell more mobile advertising. Not even Apple’s best-in-class iPhones will likely display much advertising due to user backlash. The device wouldn’t help Facebook enough to warrant the distraction — not even close.

An interesting Facebook aside is that the thing about the company that “investors” fear the most — Zuckerberg’s control of the company — is probably its biggest asset and hope. Wall street bankers know little about sociality online. Facebook’s core competency is leading digital development of environments in which people can interact socially. Facebook will have to remain grounded in its core competency, and I fear it will be waylaid. Neither Google nor Facebook+RIM have Apple‘s core competency in hardware design, and Facebook’s software design is quite limited. The “Facebook Shares Plumb New Depths” post fails to mention that Google’s main motivation in buying Motorola Mobile was its patents. Google is probably smart enough to not entertain trying to be a market leader in the handset business.

Wall Street bankers love doing deals (M&A), which historically destroy economic value (researchers estimate the range for failure is between 50% and 80%). Strangely, Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobile, if Google dreams of designing and manufacturing its own market-leading handset, is a major coup for Apple, whose software/hardware experience is probably second to none. If Facebook acquires RIM, that will help Apple, too, because Facebook’s innovation and focus will suffer.

LinkedIn has a far stronger team, and its value proposition to users is closer to money; also it’s a “general” purpose pure play, it’s focused on “work” and selling members’ data and access to enterprise functions (recruiting/HR). It will earn handsome returns, but much more quietly than Facebook.

Twitter may or may not endure as it still hasn’t found a strong business model. It is transformational, but I don’t see its long-term viability.

Manage within the ecosystem’s context — not pure plays’

In the Knowledge Economy, markets are far more dynamic and fast-moving than ever, and the ecosystem is its infrastructure. In part two, I predicted the fading relevance of the general social network pure plays, whose platforms vie to cater to general audiences. They will persist as “general connection areas” that will function like infrastructure for general communications, but few people will pursue activities there that they deem “important.” This will limit pure plays’ ROI compared to specialized collaboration spaces that will interoperate with each other and share data according to users’ preferences.

You will best manage your investments in platforms by assuming they will fade because it is better to remain more attentive to the social ecosystem’s dynamics than less. In 2012, most users don’t have a strong perceived value from social networks, except they are hooked on them. But few people understand how to create the value. Therefore, they have adopted a binary approach: LinkedIn for business, Facebook for personal. Twitter is seriously used by few people and struggles to find a value proposition or business model. It is the most vulnerable by far. But the likelihood that any of the “big three” will be displaced by “another” one is low.

Google+ offers an example that proves the point. It is arguably very similar to Facebook and Twitter, but, despite Google’s immense resources, it has not replaced either one (it isn’t supposed to, but that’s another post). Users’ change costs are too high.

Platforms matter less than people

Think of your social business initiatives as building relationships, trust and business. Relationships endure disruptions, so form rich, multichannel connections and interactions with your primary stakeholders. To develop a consistent business-meaningful return on social business, you need to be very focused on outcomes that are meaningful to you and your stakeholders. You need to consisently deliver uncommon value to stakeholders, which means you need to know them very well. When you do this, they will follow you anywhere.

When disruptions occur, and you maintain an ecosystem viewpoint, you’ll rarely be surprised, and you’ll already have contingency plans in place. You’ll invite your highest priority stakeholders to new venues. An easy way to think about it: Look at platforms as trade shows, restaurants or other venues in which you develop relationships. Constantly evaluate your results, and assume that nothing will last forever. Prepare to move; remain informed, analyze all platforms and refuse to depend on any platform.

Action steps: Insulate your brand against surprises

To achieve consistent results in social business initiatives, you need to become focused, efficient and consistent in developing relationships online. This means making priorities and other choices.

• Conduct a robust ecosystem audit, which should include specific descriptions of stakeholders, stakeholder rank (to you), stakeholder workstreams (what they are doing online that’s relevant to you) and rankings of the most relevant venues for engaging them.
• Approach the ecosystem as the multipolar world it really is. Note the types of activities or conversations to stakeholders prefer in various venues Use this insight to guide your interaction strategy in each. Remember, just because stakeholders may be members of a platform, that doesn’t mean they like interacting there about the topics with which you want to engage them.
• By interacting with stakeholders in more than one venue, you will: insulate yourself against losing the relationship if a venue fails and strengthen the relationship.
• In your thinking and approach, unbundle platforms’ functions, and approach them as learning opportunities. Explicitly develop competencies in, for example, inviting people, which apply slightly differently in various platforms, but good practices hold true across platforms.
• Develop institutional knowledge about platforms’ social features and behaviors and results by developing a Social Business Competency Team. I can’t say it strongly enough: Human OS is sociality, and social networks digitize big parts of it. Digital social features on the Web will explode. So, organizations need to develop competencies with social features, whether they reside in general pure plays or in specialist sites.
• Create beta projects in which you invite small groups of pre-selected stakeholders to try out your presences on new platforms.
• Don’t heed the 20th century siren song, “Content engages.” Meaningful interaction engages, although content can be a great spark.

What is your practice for assessing and selecting platforms?

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Reid Hoffman on pervasive data and how it will impact business in the future

In addition to being the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman is a Silicon Valley insider with rich insight into technology trends, markets and building companies.

I attended his presentation at SxSW, where his main message was that the future was bearing down on us, and he prophesied that it would “arrive sooner and be stranger than we think.”

• He painted the context for his theme, “Web 3.0 as data,” with this timeline:
  • Web 1.0 was a low bandwidth environment in which individuals searched for files online (and on demand). The concept of “cyberspace” was separate from the “real” world. It was an anonymous world in which many people participated as animes.
  • Web 2.0 was a shift in which people increasingly participated with their real identities (MySpace notwithstanding), and the online world became increasingly integrated with the offline world. Social networks mapped social graphs (again, with real people), and most people blogged as themselves. Online became firmly embedded in offline life, as a way to help manage and navigate by using reviews and other buying tools. Wikileaks and the current revolutions in the Middle East are part of this larger trend.
  • Web 3.0 is mostly to do with the massive amounts of active and passive data we are generating. An example of passive data is phone calls from mobile devices. Bandwidth is increasing, which enables video, audio and graphic sharing and data. Hoffman advocates thinking hard about it and acting to protect data. Think about what kind of future we want to create.
• Web 3.0’s data introduces significant risks to privacy because every transaction, passive and active, is linked to our real identities. Mobile device transactions are constantly tracked, and this is relevant because they are tied to real identities.
• Hoffman’s biggest fear is how governments could use information to control people. Governments are organizations that are closest to what he called “pure power” (because they integrate information, legal authority and military/police power). They can mine email, text and all other digital data to learn anyone’s social graph.
• Unlike corporations, government is not incented to care for citizens; he implied it is less accountable.
• He introduced an interesting wrinkle to this: data is data, and the Web is global, so citizens can be outed and exposed by governments that are not bound by their laws. For example, if (U.S.) Americans pass legislation that controls how their government can use data, nothing prevents another government from using the data. This also suggests to me that the threat is far greater that hacker groups will use the data because they are outside the law.
• Ask yourself what kind of Web 3.0 world we should make. Our decisions may determine whether we find ourselves in a “Genuine New World” or a “Brave New World.”
• Hoffman offered two guiding principles to mitigate risk: 1) as a company executive, make sure you never “ambush your users” by exposing them and thus betraying their trust in you (for not safeguarding their data). 2) Realize that all data is not equal, things like credit card numbers need different protection than age or gender or physical address.
• The data we are producing falls into three types: explicit data is information that we understand is about us and we want to protect; implicit data is less known, we are unaware of it, examples are mobile calls, payments; analytics is data about data that tries to analyze and create meaning. Sources of all three types are exploding.
• Networks are data graphs.
• He would like a data dashboard of the information “the government” has on him. Analogous to credit reports, so you could correct errors.

How data will become more significant in Web 3.0

Next, Hoffman gave some examples of what he meant by Web 3.0 and its data.

• LinkedIn Skills is new; the site introduced a new section of the LinkedIn Profile, skills that are keywords and hotlinked. It encourages users to use the keywords to describe their capabilities. This enables LinkedIn to show skills graphs that are tied to various entities. For example, “blogging” and “reverse mergers” are associated with companies and geographies, which enables people with that skill to see how relevant it may be to a prospective employer; likewise, if they want a job with that employer, they can see how they can increase their chances by developing new skills. Moreover, people can see how skills are related to each other. They are mashing skills up with Wikipedia, too, to provide additional insights.
• Waze is an Israeli company that (through opt-in) tracks drivers’ velocity and location so that users can see real-time traffic flow. Here is another example of the importance of safeguarding data. People who are speeding self-incriminate if Waze doesn’t safeguard their identities. (I wonder how they prevent police from using the anonymous data to zap people in various locations.)
• There are numerous examples of sharing financial information to gain insight from the crowd; sites like Wasabi invite users to upload bank statements, so they can discover opportunities to buy and manage their finances better.
• Redfin is the Charles Schwab of real estate; its users share anonymized information about home prices, values, payments, etc., so they get a better idea for how to buy and sell in real time.
• He suggested that top-down topologies are inferior to bottom up. With LinkedIn Skills, they analyzed existing profiles to create the “skills” (i.e. keywords).

10 rules of entrepreneurship in Web 3.0

He introduced by sharing ten rules of entrepreneurship because entrepreneurs would have a big part of developing Web 3.0.

1. Disruptive change should be a big part of the concept behind your business; a hallmark is that, if you succeed, you will spawn a “platform” from which numerous new businesses will be born.
2. Aim big because it takes the same effort to launch something small (incremental) as something really big. You also have more room.
3. Build a network around your company, and tap it for everything, thereby amplifying your company. Ask your network for advice and help, treat it as your board of advisors and distributed intelligence.
4. Plan for good and bad luck by anticipating things that disasters and fortuitous things that could happen. Be ready to capitalize on good things. He is an alum of PayPal, where they were not excited by “all these eBayers” using PayPal at first. Then they thought, “Wait a minute, maybe these are our customers.” Be paranoid, try to consider challenges and bad luck that could present, and consider how you could mitigate damage.
5. Practice “flexible persistence” by actively considering when you need to be in persistent mode and “go through walls” and when you need to realize that maybe you need to tweak your concept. The above eBay example also probably works for this.
6. Launch early, don’t let perfectionist tendencies delay you. You should be embarrassed by your first release. No matter how smart your team is, you won’t get it right in isolation of customers and users. You will lose valuable time getting it too perfect; you want to be early to start fast iteration cycles by interacting with users.
7. Be ambitious but don’t drink your own Kool-Aid because you’ll lose your way. Be paranoid, ask your network what’s wrong with your company to draw out faults.
8. Realize that product is important, but distribution is even more key because a great product that no one knows about will fail. Build a solid distribution concept into the DNA of the product.
9. Pay attention to culture from the beginning because the people you hire will hire all the rest of the company. Hire people who are adaptible rather than experienced.
10. Break the rules sometimes, nothing is holy here.

Analysis and conclusions

• This post and subject may seem like meaningless tech babble, but I also encourage you to think about it, and deeply. Wired has been covering this for a long time, pervasive information and data has been a major theme there, even predicting the death of the scientific method.

• You have undoubtedly heard of Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law, which describe the falling cost of computing and the increasing value of networks respectively. Once you appreciate that every time every person and every machine hits a button of a digital interface, that represents a transaction that can be recorded and analyzed. Behavior can be deduced. Falling computing costs make it increasingly feasible to analyze these transactions and understand trends.
• Hoffman didn’t go down this road, but Chris Anderson’s and Wired’s big thesis is that we can eliminate a huge part of uncertainty by using statistics. To call this “disruptive” probably trivializes it, it is so immense in signficance.
• Hoffman’s clear message is exceptionally valuable: “Don’t let this happen to you. Take an active part in creating that future.” Influence it the way you think it can serve best, and try to mitigate threats. Assess how you can exert the most influence.
• Think about your business or the most important things in your life. Reflect on the sources of uncertainty. Research the types of digital transactions that are occurring and anticipate how data could change the rules. It won’t be even, but you will be ahead of the curve by thinking about this, constantly. Invest some cycles in learning and sharing with complementary thinkers.
• Hoffman’s Ten Rules are solid; I would wrap them in the larger context of seeing your company (or yourself) as a surfer. You are interacting with some kind of market (a body of water) that is far stronger than you. However, if you watch it and respect it, you can use its power to create amazing things. My favorite is probably #5. It’s an interaction. #3 is critical, too, building your network with purpose is probably the most important thing you can do. It’s a well known law in the Valley among people who are serially successful.

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Inside the huge banner opportunity created by Facebook

Facebook’s development schedule epitomizes the “white water, fast iteration” approach to serving company and customer. Although its mishaps are legendary, it succeeds in consistently fielding a mind-numbing array of features, so it is difficult to keep up and very easy to miss the significance of things.

To wit, very few people people have noticed that Facebook has quietly revolutionized banner ads through a feature that is maligned by users but gold for marketers. This feature has created two opportunities for e-commerce marketers: a new means of inexpensive market research and an easy way to improve relationships with their viewers.

Read on to do this to your competitors before they do it to you.

‘You have removed this ad’: A spark in a dry forest

I hope you have used the “remove this ad” feature that Facebook introduced, I believe, in Q4 2009 or Q1 2010. When you mouse over most Facebook ads, you will see an “x” in the far right (1 — see above). When you click the “x” to remove the ad, you get the dialog box beneath, which gives you the radio buttons (2) and the all-important “other.” When you hit “Okay,” you get the gold box. Seems innocuous, right? Wrong. It has begun to change the expectations of your prospects, who will increasingly expect to give feedback on all ads.

Removing ads: Customer viewpoint

I have been using “remove this ad” since it was released, and I have noticed several things about it:

• There’s very little talk about it online. Any dialog is dominated by users who hate “remove this ad” because they hate ads in general and they would like “removing” the ad to be permanent (i.e. bar chart brains would never reappear). Note that the gold box doesn’t promise banishing the ad. Users don’t care, though.
• I’ll hypothesize that only a small portion of Facebook users bother to give feedback, but I’ll wager that most of those who do want to do it everywhere.
• Yes, when you remove the ad, it isn’t banished from your land forever, but clicking the “x” and adding a peppery comment can be satisfying anyway.

Removing ads: A marketer’s viewpoint

Now, think about yourself as a buyer of millions of dollars of banner ads per year, which all CMOs do. What if, for appropriate (geeky) segments you would introduce this functionality in some of your banner ads (not necessarily on Facebook)? This would help you:

• Conduct low-cost market research by collecting responses; on Facebook itself this is particularly interesting because Facebook knows user demographics. However, off-Facebook, wouldn’t you like to know if readers of certain sites find your ads offensive or …? (you design the responses)

• Improve your relationship with prospects when you give them the option to respond; you suggest that you are interested in their viewpoints.
• You can take this into account when selecting your ad mix. You read it here, in 2011: The majority of “display” ads will be selected by customers within 10 years at the outside; certain demographics much earlier.
• I recommend pilots this year to get ahead of the market. Of course, many of your ads are syndicated, etc., but you can select specific situations to experiment and learn.

• This is another example of how disruption happens: Remember that inane idea by the inflated company in Cupertino? A “touch screen” phone? “That’ll never work!” Now everything has to be touch. Get ahead.

Under the hood: Social actions

Facebook’s DNA is encouraging social actions, which are digital transactions within a social context, because social actions give insights into the social graph. I’ll wager that Facebook regards “remove this ad” as a private social action, between users and Facebook and their clients. They have a business to run, and they are going to optimize impressions to make money. Over time, they will be able to show users more relevant ads, which is why I’ve committed to giving them feedback when I have time. I’m educating their algorithms.

Conclusions

• The very suggestion that users can “remove” ads is brilliant: Not only can you make that ad disappear, you can give the reason. Most banner ads will have that feature in the medium term, depending on user/reader demographics.
• If marketers truly care about the people with whom they are trying to communicate and influence, they will appreciate that feedback and use it to focus their efforts better. What if you could increase clickthrough 2x, 3x by using in-workstream customer feedback? Some firms will.
• You can outdo Facebook by giving readers more ways to indicate approval of ads. Facebook has several reasons for removing an ad but only one way to indicate approval (“like”). But that will change. You can lead.
• Bottom line: if your brand uses online ads, begin experimenting with this feature in 2011. Work with your viewers, not against them.

What do you think of Facebook’s “remove this ad” feature? Do you like it or use it? Tell us in the comments!

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Conversation trumps content: It’s the human spark of knowledge and caring that carries true value

As adoption of social technologies spreads into even the most risk-averse industries and companies, executives have questions about where social media could take them and where the different kinds of social media consultants can guide them.

Depending on how one defines social media, it is a multimillion-dollar consulting and services industry. Most of the players have a marketing approach in which they help their clients to create content and interact with people in major platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, MySpace, blogs and specialized social networks. Most firms focus on consumer-facing (“B2C”) scenarios because the market for business-to-business use of social technologies significantly lags consumer uses.

The three main types of social media services providers are:

• Pure play social media consultancies have been created specifically to address this market.
• Legacy advertising and marketing firms have mobilized social media practices. Most of these are focused on content creation, their traditional domain.
• Technology vendors are two types: pure play tech startups and legacy enterprise vendors that are bolting on social features to their suites.

Please keep in mind, the links are broadly representative; there is significant crossover between several of the types.

The evolving social business approach

Based on past client work and intense observation, I’ve observed that, increasingly, the conversation is the content. Frankly, most people are utterly fed up with consuming slick marketing “content.” They thirst for honest, real, human interaction that is authentic, spontaneous and caring. Therefore, marketing and ad firms’ approach of creating content to engage is quite outdated. Yes, content can spark conversation, but it is rapidly transitioning to a supporting role. Similarly, technology firms’ proposition, which is often, “Use this technology to engage people,” is equally outdated because, although inane technology can prevent a community from forming, it’s the human spark of knowledge and caring that carries the value.The best technology can only be intuitive and invisible — it won’t create a community.

It isn’t easy to create a situation in which the firm can have a persistent, engaging series of interactions with people. It requires significant homework, focus and resources. Very loosely speaking, here is a basic description of how to succeed:

• Vision typically addresses, based on our business, who are the stakeholders we care about (i.e. customers, regulators, employees, investors…), and how are they adopting? How are our competitors and business partners adopting? Create a vision and sense of immediacy for our business.
• Strategy. Who are we? Does our culture naturally lend itself to spontaneous, transparent communication, or do we have constraints (i.e. healthcare, law). After getting our arms around stakeholder adoption and who we are, we can create a strategy.
• Test. Because social business is so new, even the best strategy will have numerous unknowns, so we use pilots to test the unknowns in small, short-cycle projects. We often start engaging with pre-existing platforms like Facebook when stakeholders are already there.
• Services. The above steps are classic “consulting.” But pilots morph into execution services in which we scale the effort in step with business results. The last phases are integrating the now-proven social business processes with legacy processes, which includes displacing them when appropriate.

Digital social networking: Our era’s dialtone

Most organizations will do best to develop in-house capabilities with social technologies and behaviors. I firmly believe that digital social networking, because it enables more social interaction and humans are overwhelmingly social, is the 21st century dialtone. In other words, all stakeholders will shortly expect organizations to relate to them using digital social tools.

This means that organizations that don’t will struggle to remain relevant. Employees will have to get very proficient as soon as possible. So, this is not something you want to outsource to a service provider long term. Therefore, look to extensive mentoring where clients develop native capability. Yes, it makes sense to outsource in some situations.

Most firms don’t understand this, so they have their agencies post Facebook, Twitter and blog content, which is usually an utter failure, but they don’t realize it right away. People can smell manufactured content a mile away, but they won’t say anything, and they won’t come back. They won’t share. This can be OK when competitors are just as clueless — but those that get it first will win attention and loyalty.

The other thing is, Web 2.0 is very different from Web 1.0 because it’s social; its skills are more nuanced and take time to learn. Firms that think they can wait to adopt and throw a bunch of money at it when a couple of their key competitors (finally) pull off major successes will have a rude awakening. There is a significant learning curve for employees and management that money can’t address; only time and experience lead to results.

Keep in mind that expectations are rising rapidly among increasing pockets of stakeholders and constituencies. Think about Comcast, which completely reset the bar with their Twitter customer service approach. It took AT&T years to get it together, and they lost immense credibility in the meantime.

Final thoughts

• Social business (media, networking) is not “another channel” that you should outsource long term.
• The attraction for most people, social’s differentiation, is authentic, truthful interaction, not “content.”
• Interaction cannot be manufactured, but it can scale when your firm serves as host and the community is doing most of the interacting.
• The best parties are given by hosts who know how to invite the right people, make appropriate introductions, provide ancillary amenities and let their guests do the talking.
• Hosting is not easy to do offline, where the skills have been known and practiced for millennia; succeeding with it online requires a significant learning curve.
• The competition for stakeholder attention online will increase exponentially.
• People will reward the firms that participate in a relevant, timely and authentic way with their attention and their business.

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Only 15% of word of mouth marketing campaigns show results, but WOM drives sales — when companies honor and nurture it

Word of mouth marketing is seen by many marketers as the economic engine of social business (or social media) because people recommend products and services to each other: All marketers have to do is give them the right information to share and make it easy for them to recommend things, right? Wrong. Or, in popular parlance, “It’s complicated.”

Here, I’ll identify some of the flawed concepts that underlie word of mouth marketing (WOMM) so that you can avoid being part of its 85 percent casualty rate. I’ll show in general how you can tweak the idea and succeed with social business initiatives more often.

Word of mouth marketing is flawed

At Alterian’s 2010 user conference, Don Peppers shared this arresting statistic in his keynote: Only 15% of WOMM initiatives show positive ROI. Shocking — at least until you start thinking about it. Loosely speaking, WOM (sans “marketing”) happens when a trusted and relatively unbiased “friend” shares her experience with a product/service with someone close to her. “Someone like me” who isn’t tainted by sales commissions or quarterly revenue targets. Marketing, on the other hand, is generally about creating need or driving sales. Do you see the problem?

In this context, WOM and marketing are mutually exclusive: The latter’s purpose is to serve the company by moving product; the former serves the person first. It’s a conflict of interest, and it will rarely work. Ever.

93% of word of mouth is offline

In a second data point, Keller Fay Group’s latest TalkTrack study revealed that the overwhelming majority of WOM (as defined by them) takes place offline and face to face (via e-consultancy and @stefanw), not online through social business. This is not surprising when you stop to think about what traditional WOM is, largely a conversation between family or close friends. Tight ties. However, neither of these references dives into WOM or WOMM deeply enough to understand why and how they can work or not.

WOM among loose ties

Digital communications significantly reduce the cost of many kinds of interaction, so WOM among loose ties will continue to grow. However, marketers should recognize that loose ties and tight ties have important differences because the motivations and level of trust are different. Loose ties are not just inferior tight ties; people form loose ties for many reasons, but the online many-to-many environment enables people to manage their reputations and influence by leveraging the network effect. Tight tie relationships are limited in number, multidimensional and high investment.

How marketers can succeed with word of mouth

Having led marketing for several firms, I can appreciate why marketers would love the concept of word of mouth marketing. Given that they are in conflict, it’s important to focus on WOM while avoiding WOMM. I’ll wager that the majority of the 85 percent of failures result from not understanding and honoring their differences. The good news is, WOM drives sales — when companies honor and nurture it. Here’s how:

• First — and this is a leap of faith — accept that WOM serves the customer, not you. Trust that if you don’t interfere, positive results will often result. There is no halfway here; intent and honesty are WOM’s key differentiators. Don Peppers shared Staples’ “Speak Easy” fiasco as a warning (“sponsored” tweets and bloggers are other traps). All companies say that they put the customer first, but many aren’t being honest with themselves or their customers.
• Second, the company must put itself first to be congruent with itself as a business. It shouldn’t try to do WOM. But the company, acting in its self-interest, can support WOM. Marketers must safeguard these boundaries if they want to succeed because they form the foundation of trust among the three principal actors: company, friend and customer.
• Third, accept that your products and services are not a great fit for most people. In a pervasive transparent network, the market will figure out what works and what doesn’t. Don’t try to “make markets” by convincing people to buy unless you have a valid value proposition for them. Focus on serving people for whom you have a superior value proposition. This is the key to thriving in a transparent environment.
• Fourth, trust customers’ friends to engage with WOM — for their own motivations. Remember, they are there to serve their friend, not to move your product. WOM is their role, not yours. Campaigns like Staples’ fail because marketers don’t understand their role and unknowingly turn WOM into shilling. Sorry.
• Remember Miracle on 34th Street? It was breakthrough to send customers to other stores when they had a better value proposition for the customer. It increased WOM because it surprised people and exceeded expectations. But it was Kris Kringle (a “friend”) who started it based on his personal integrity. Later Macy’s turned it into a tactic, but Kris never did.
• Accepting WOM transparency is difficult because it requires significant culture change. Firms that don’t accept this new reality will fight and lose. The market will expose them in the end.
• On the other hand, those that take this road will be more successful because they will be aligned with customers and their friends. Moreover, focusing on valid value propositions and customers will tend to lead the company to innovate more successfully.

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Creating a plan from scratch? These 7 tips will get you going

‘We need a social media strategy.” I hear this all the time. And companies have meetings upon meetings to discuss this. I’ve been a part of many of those meetings and it can be tiring to go through endless internal discussions as to what your social media strategy should be. You know what doesn’t work for a social media strategy? Not being social.

People just want to start.

Social media works when you become public about your discussion. So my recommendation is to fast track your social media strategy with the following recommendation.

While everybody’s situation is different, I find myself recommending the following basic model for most of my clients. Some of these recommendations are echoed in an article I recently wrote for Mashable titled, How to Jump-Start Your Career by Becoming an Online Influencer.

There are plenty of variations, but if you don’t know where to start, this model will work well for you.

Set up your own media outlet

Step 1You need an outlet to publish your thoughts. You need a place where you can invite influencers and customers to be interviewed. You can’t become an online influencer if you don’t create content.

Repeating my mantra, “Content is the currency of social media and search.”

If you want to be traded and visible in social media and search, then you must create content – ideally good content.

There are many ways to do this, but if you want to save yourself a ton of headaches, complications, and cost simply set up a WordPress blog with a theme that’s optimized for social media and search, such as the Thesis theme. This blog uses WordPress and Thesis.

Create social identities

Step 2For most users and brands, you’ll want to have accounts and identities with the major sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Try to stay consistent and use the same username for all identities so as not to confuse yourself or your audience. KnowEm is a great service that will check across endless social services as to which names are and aren’t available.

Create a proactive editorial plan

Step 3Create thought pieces, how-to’s, explanations, videos, podcasts, or anything else that demonstrates your thought leadership in your space. This is where you form viewpoints that you hope to become leading opinions.

A simple way to produce a proactive editorial calendar is to simply ask your sales staff and sales partners, “Why are we losing sales?” You’ll get answers such as “We’re not even a consideration,” “They don’t know how we’re different than competitor X,” and “They didn’t think we had a solution for problem Z.”

Take all the answers, rank them 1-10 in terms of importance, and start creating content (e.g., articles, screencasts, how-to’s, case studies, video interviews) that answer those issues. Next time your sales staff are out in the field and they get hammered with one of these top ten questions, they’ll have your content as support and they’ll be able to close the sale.

For more advice on connecting content creation with your sales cycle, read “Be the Voice – Build Your Business by Becoming Your Industry’s Thought Leader.”

If you feel completely overwhelmed and you don’t even think you can start, read “Blogging advice for people who ‘have no time to blog.'”

Create a reactive editorial plan

Step 4Set up search queries for relevant industry terms, and follow your industry’s top people. For management of all this microblogging and blogging behavior, there are tons of options, but you might want to start with TweetDeck or HootSuite.

When you see stories trending, respond with a short blog post quickly, and then a comment on the source material with a link back to your blog post. If it’s a growing story, keep updating your blog post with time stamps. Make sure to message out to all the venues that care about this content (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and industry specific message boards).

Build relationships with your industry’s key influencers

Step 5Every industry has people that the rest of us look up to, read what they say, and respect their opinion. If you want them to start paying attention to you, pay attention to them first (Read: “Three simple tricks to getting influencers to pay attention to you”). Far too often influencer relationships are limited to pitching your product. Don’t do that. Instead, offer value to the influencer and the industry as a whole. I know you’ve heard it a million times before, but be genuine about your desire to form a relationship. They will soon see you as a resource, not a flack pitching your client’s product, and they’ll be eager to hear more from you.

Build relationships with really big brands

Step 6If you’re a small brand, and nobody knows your name, you have to start associating yourself with brand names that people do know. That means you have to align yourself with big brands. You do that by writing stories about them. How are big brands associated with your business? Are they doing things similar, different, could they benefit from you? Do you have any big brands as customers? Do you have any friends that work at big brands? Ask if you can interview them. Publish that story on your media outlet/blog.

Offer content to well-trafficked media outlets

Step 7When you start creating content, no one is going to know you exist. You may be a huge brand, but you may not be known as a voice in your industry. You can rectify your editorial anonymity by producing content for free on other well known industry sites. Simply approach the sites and ask if you can contribute. Just ask for a link back to your site.

Warning: This takes work, ongoing work, and lots of it. You need to make your social media strategy a part of of your ultimate marketing, branding, content, and customer service process. None of this will happen overnight. But you need to start somewhere. So get started.

Stock photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

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