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Rich HarrisI'm a father of 3 amazing boys, marketing guy, tech geek, blogger, artist, photographer, and musician. Thanks for reading and share your thoughts & comments if you have some. Peace.

Social Media: The Agriculture & Farming Industry

Posted by Rich Harris – June 2, 2010

Jeff Fowle (@JeffFowle on Twitter) and I met at a Twitter conference in Seattle back in early March of this year. He’s a mellow dude and one of the nicest guys I’ve met in a long time. He’s a farmer, Agvocate, family man and a social media guy. After chatting with him in Seattle, I was interested in knowing more about how an industry as organic as his could proliferate an era as digital as the current one. Jeff has been instrumental in doing just that.

I think his bio says it all: “Jeff Fowle is a third generation family farmer and rancher from Etna, California. He and his wife Erin and son Kyle raise registered Angus cattle, Percheron draft horses, warmbloods, alfalfa and alfalfa-grass hay and grain as a rotation. They also start and train horses for riding, jumping, and driving. Their family run ranch has incorporated many environmentally beneficial and water efficient technologies and management strategies.”

NOTE: Jeff was also the Twitterer of the week on last week’s episode of The Quick’n'Dirty Podcast. You can listen to the episode or read the recap.

Here’s the quick interview we did over email.

So who are you and what do you do?

I’m a 4th generation rancher & farmer, raising the 5th. We raise Angus and Hereford cattle, Percheron Draft horses, Warmbloods, Thoroughbreds, Quarterhorses, alfalfa hay, wheat & pasture.

Jeff, you and I met at 140tc in Seattle and your good friend Ray Prock (@RayLinDairy on Twitter) was explaining to me some of the complexities of farming. I had no idea. Do you get the sense that most consumers don’t know much about where their food comes from and how it got onto their dinner table?

Over 90% of Americans are at least 2 generations removed from the farm or ranch. This generational gap presents a situation where the average person no longer understands what is involved in order to get that food to their table, let alone a clear idea of where it came from.

What is the most common misconception about the farming industry and those that work in it?

I think the most common misconception is that “farmers don’t care.” Main stream media carries a few negative stories and assumption by the public is that “all of ag” is like that. Reality is that farmers & ranchers are great stewards of the land and livestock. It is in our best interest to keep the land healthy & productive for future generations and diverse wildlife. Also, livestock that is low stress & happy is healthier and produces more consistently.

How are you using social media to help the farming industry? Educational? Marketing?

I’m using SM for several purposes.

  1. To reach out to people who have questions about where their food comes from & how it is produced.
  2. Address mis-information being spread by those opposing agriculture.
  3. Learn what the perceptions are by the public.
  4. Learn from fellow producers across the country.
  5. Market my own products.

Has it been a challenge trying get the farming community to learn, use, and embrace tools like Twitter and Facebook?

The biggest challenge is overcoming the technology issues. Many farmers & ranchers are still on dial-up which makes most SM applications a challenge.  For those who do have access, its a matter of building confidence & helping them realize that there are folks who are interested in their story and learning how, what and why they do what they do.

What is Agvocacy and what is it about?

Agvocacy is simply the act of promoting agriculture. I believe that we need all types of production in order to meet the future needs of the people. Conventional, organic, natural, farmers markets all will play an important role in continuing to provide safe, wholesome and healthy food for future generations.

What kinds of changes have you seen in the farming industry’s communication culture since you started your social media push?

The biggest learning curve has been in relating to people. Due to mis-information and incorrect assumptions, many people have formed opinions about what we do. We must first listen to their concerns and understand why they believe what they do. Once we understand their perspective we can then discuss their questions rationally and eliminate or at least reduce the likelihood of a confrontation occurring. It is paramount to remain professional and civil in all conversations. Farmers and ranchers have become very cautious and almost numb to attacks, so this is a sign of progress, being able to engage with the public, share the story and have mutual respect.

Any events or announcements you’d like to mention?

The AgChat Foundation will be having some announcements of upcoming events in the next couple of weeks. They will be announced on Twitter, Facebook & also on our website agchat.org.



Leech Marketing: Stop The Algorithmic Madness

Posted by Rich Harris – May 31, 2010

Like most social media peeps, I sit around all day and watch Twitter as a part of my job. I watch several keyword/phrase streams like everyone else, to keep my thumb on the pulse of the business, various industries, market segments and influencers. Lately I’ve been surprised (and a little dissappointed) to see what some of the fairly notable and medium to large companies have been doing, some of which are publicly traded. I’ve covered this and similar observations in a recent rant “Twitter Auto-DM’s: Perpetuating Our Inner Lemming?” which more of a Twitter-specific bitchfest but still lends itself to a bigger issue I’m seeing that is not platform, industry, or era-specific. I don’t think this issue will ever really go away because there will always be a layer of misguided marketers and businesses doing things that are just lame, hoping to capitalize on customers that haven’t been trained to think for themselves as consumers (yet).

In this world there are three types of people:

  1. Givers
  2. Takers
  3. Those that know the importance of balancing being both.

In business it’s no different.

What is Leech Marketing?

In the social media/web world, to me leech marketing is basically the effort behind leveraging search algorithms to make quick money from uninformed customers with no concern for the real long-tail value of one’s business or industry. The unfortunate effect of this behavior is that it brings down the social capital value of those businesses that are doing social the right way for the right reasons. So to explain what the hell I’m really talking about here, these are a few (of many) leech methods, sucking the value out of social media by muddying the waters of our intended target audiences.

Irrelevant Hashtagging

This definitely can make trying to do business on Twitter (the right way) more time consuming as you watch keyword/phrase streams, trying to follow current market segment-specific conversations as well as unearthing new potential markets. People are hashtagging business-related tweets by top ten Twitter trending topics rather than relevancy to one’s target audience in an effort expose a ‘conversation’ to new randoms, more shotgunning.

Unfortunately (and statistically) your ROI will not only suck, but you are actually hurting other businesses that aren’t even in your space. This will NOT give you a competitive edge and additionally makes you (personal brand) or your company look desperate and clueless. You want to be the company that looks like you are smarter and wiser than everyone else, that you’ve risen above it all, focusing on what’s really important. Here’s what I’m talking about.

Examples:

Say you want to sell your Canon point-and-shoot camera on Craigslist……

  • Good: “Selling my point-and-shoot camera. DM me if interested. LINKTOCRAIGSLISTPOST #photography #pointandshoot #photographer #forsale”
  • Bad: “Selling my point-and-shoot camera. DM me if interested. LINKTOCRAIGSLISTPOST #socialmedia #justinbieber #oilspill”

Irrelevant Categorizing/Tagging of Blog Posts is Clutter

Similar to tweet construction, categorizing/tagging blog posts is an art. It’s probably safe to say that since search engines give preference to blogs, I believe that category/tag spam and it’s content irrelevance is responsible for probably a surprising percentage of lost business, wasted bandwidth, wasted time, and overall confusion for customers.

I understand that one way to help proliferate or unearth new customers and markets is to tag posts with keywords/phrases with ‘somewhat relevant’ tags. I think that’s all smart and good, but tagging anything “Justin Bieber” alongside anything other than what’s relevant is what I’m against.

Let’s take the same concept, selling a used Canon point-and-shoot camera on Craigslist, except this time, you write a blog post about it with info about the camera and then linking to your Craigslist entry.

Examples:

  • Good Tagging: “For sale, camera, canon, point and shoot, photography, photographer, used camera, craigslist, beginner camera”
  • Bad Tagging: “canon, camera, photography, oil spill, bp gas, justin bieber, lost, social media”

Above I’m not saying it’s “bad” because it won’t work, however I am saying that you are creating more clutter for the rest of us and hurting online business flow by doing it. This method of tagging reduces the value of search and other social media tools for the business and personal web experience.

Search rankings don’t mean squat without a real conversion that supports the business objective(s).

“Mannequin” Blog Posts, Keyword-Based Post Aggregators – Automated or Manual

A “mannequin” blog post basically consists of the first paragraph or so of an original post, plus the link to the source so you can link back to it. I’m not opposed to this at all as long as the mannequin’d post is relevant to your business/brand and if it only makes up a fairly miniscule portion of your content. Those that have set up websites that in a scripted fashion crawl every blog post with a certain brand name, product type, specific industry keywords/phrases, then in a scripted fashion duplicate the post, creating a blog post and publishing it, is not only wrong for search/business clutter reasons, it’s also one of the many ways the companies sell their soul if that website or process is a documented part of their business plan. It’s weak and not a good foundation for your brand….my opinion of course.

Blind Following, Friending, Liking, Retweeting

Doing any of the above without researching the person/website first to make sure it’s relevant and has intrinsic value to your business and it’s objectives is just dumb. Plain and simple.

Common Sense

On the web, especially nowadays, people and content are data points, data points whose connection and strength lies solely in their relevance. The less relevant, the less valuable. The less valuable, the bigger the reason you shouldn’t do it, but you already know that. :-) Here’s a few other good articles on this stuff. Some old, some new.

How not to use Twitter: HabitatUK as a case study
Why Hashtag Hijacking Is Bad for Everyone
Onward.

If Hunter S. Thompson Wrote for The Tech Industry

Posted by Rich Harris – May 13, 2010

Sooooo…..I work for Seagate. They make hard drives. I’m subscribed to any and all Google alerts where Seagate’s products/services are mentioned to keep my thumb on the pulse of what people are saying about the company so that I can do my job. The latest Google alert I had received had a link titled ‘hard drive seagate‘. It linked to this URL: http://hooydgzznq.co.cc/2010/05/13/hard-drive-seagate/

If you look at the page that I just gave you the link to, it’s pretty harmless/innocuous. When you visit it nothing bad will happen to your computer, (or at least it didn’t to my Mac) but you’ll notice that you can’t *see* the copy I’ve pasted in below but what you can see is ads. I couldn’t figure out from the link I saw how the hell the link ranked so high in the alert until I viewed the source and to my lack of surprise, the copy below had been hidden in the HTML code to trick search engines and suck you in to click on their PPC ad to make you think you were going somewhere. This is a very common thing for hackers to do to cash in on PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads….but alas, that is not why I’m writing about this.

The reason I’m posting this is that I have to give whatever acid trip’d existential mofo hacker a strong and well-deserved “Hunter S. Thompson of Technology Blogger of The Year” Award. While he/she/it put this little ditty together in an attempt to lure in search engine users looking for products in the high tech industry, I say he did it because he’s trying to connect the dots in the universe for us all to understand better…..well not really…but I got a good laugh out of it….so here it is. Enjoy this literary journey.

“Sony was also naive, but its business name was the most odd, dell inspiron 4000 audio driver. Josef mengele, the due angel of death of auschwitz, who has given versions for more than 30 classes. The 1540 place of layolle s voice is own, but no vote or rainbow boys attend. Commercial barebone computers and laptops, the state s bedroom this battery was sound s of santana. Denna proceeds in temperature with richard, commercial to his sandstone on receiving her dam despite the system she came him. Yellow security in nashville gives 83 floor in the lyrics and 60 simpletech in the appliances, which is sold primal for the southeastern united states. The writing got viable duck for a game of needs. Peoplefictionalplaceswaffle is a company milk referred by tom dell which made under power and later unix, vtech kinder laptop 3 jaar. Thoroughly through a mountain of a series of a class i address a traditional area at disk who architecturally does me a percent of the way which i usually update. An oriented design was that performance speakers would be stupid, since small parts would be coming not. Happy has been rectified of jobs verbose and available name. Sager notebook support drivers, traditional components of the supply have not disguised but skillz is laid to undergo a much link in which he faces the shareholders. Davidson county happily quite. Microsoft did to stop number carnival with windows, installing on configuring paragraph to genoese city political changes while apple was pointing a briefly disrupted, but main, public. In the different today to the laptop is st, laptop driver m6 video. i ranked together of the channels to the reputation in talk and he of mix challenged instead into his substance, laptop driver m6 video. Bivotar and juranda are on a landscape to hunt the three palantirs of zork and to learn the odd fleet krill. Another plant is that the keyboard was a culper ring film devoted as agent 355, now this memory is generally extended to major motherboard, seagate hard drive 300gb. Divorce time and functional imaging cameras. You think a magic flanked with uninstaller very form, leapster ac adapter. This mother is according to be transferred to deliver approve standard.”

Consider yourself enlightened. :-P

Twitter Auto-DM’s: Perpetuating Our Inner Lemming?

Posted by Rich Harris – May 10, 2010

[Rant Alert]

This post is a rant. Normally almost any auto-DM I see makes me angsty due to their “hey look at me me me!” nature. I’m also ashamed of their blatant attempt to shape our brains into “realizing” that as customers, we are none other than weak-willed bafoons lacking the ability to think for ourselves, incapable of doing research before committing to an action or purchase.

The Hollow Influencer

I started following some people that seemed prolific an insightful on their blog or website, had decent inbound link traffic and showed up in search fairly high in the list in a relevant way. I got a flurry of DM’s when I followed a certain group of these tweeps based on the fact that they had Social Media in their Twitter bio. I was following them just to get an updated lay of the land when it comes to the latest influencers/trending business topics on Twitter.

These auto-DM’s poured in and I was laughing at some of them but also kind of appalled by others from a business perspective. I’ll list the tweets below but will hide the author names to protect the misguided folks that meant well, even if they did miss the mark by a longshot. It’s not surprising, yet still ludicrous and sad, that this layer of the business world, the empty useless stagnant one, still existed and functioned in the background like an old kitchen appliance, louder than ever.

Harvesting The Lemming Long-Tail

The DM’s…..these are all real Auto-DM’s from people that, based on some very minimal research, appeared to possibly be legit influential marketers.

“I REALLY appreciate the follow and I’m always interested in real estate resources if you know any.”

…..okay cool cause I want you to rope me into voluntarily telling you about my real estate resources of choice, so that you can feel justified replying back and saying, “good idea, however I have a better solution, check this link out….

“I do value your follow. Hope you find my tweets helpful. Look forward to yours. A gift:”

(They provided a link here to a promo video for some dude’s “Build an Online Business” DVD.) The guy seems nice enough but calling your own DVD with you talking and it costing me over a hundo to own your DVD series, a ‘gift’ to a human being, to me is like getting ‘the gift’ of a barely working ’84 Buick from a used car salesman. “Thanks buddy, can’t wait until this heap breaks down a block down the road after allowing myself to be sold on the car when it was actually missing it’s engine and steering wheel.”

“Want To Learn How Twitter Could Pay Your Bills Every Month? Look…”

(They provided a link to a network marketing training video.) Twitter can’t pay my bills every month, only I can. Your poorly produced DVD isn’t helping.

“Thanks so much for following me! If you need any help feel free to let me know!”

Help with what??? Anything? Rad! Come wash my car, pay my bills and hook me up with dry cleaning!

“Want to see how I built a twitter list of 40,000 on autopilot?”

This one by far is the best example of everything that is jacked up about social media. Do you raise your kids on autopilot? Do you maintain your closest friendships on autopilot? Does your marriage run on autopilot? Do you keep your biggest customer relationships and accounts running on autopilot? Great job buddy. Thanks for reminding us how there are still a bunch of ‘takers’ trying to exploit peeps for revenue instead of putting some value in the fact that they’ve chosen to invest in your company, you, and your potential success. NEWSFLASH: You OWE them for that.

I just can’t stand this stuff and I don’t bitch that often…so here’s my rant and whining for the quarter. My point here is you can’t squeeze an organically built business relationship out of some cheese-0-matic of a DM so don’t try and sell people that way. It just looks cheap and self-absorbed.

There are of course selfless/harmless versions of these but I just believe that if you want the smartest customers as your loyal customers, don’t treat them like they’re idiots with your messaging.

Onward.

Your Social Media Stereo EQ

Posted by Rich Harris – April 29, 2010

The Conversation

I have to credit a tweet from Adam Cohen (@AdamCohen on Twitter, His blog: http://adamhcohen.com/) as the genesis for this post. He was attending the Social Business Summit 2010 in Austin I believe (assumed based on his hashtag). While attending a keynote/panel of some sort he had said the following:

@adamcohen “Social applies in product dev, marketing, sales, customer svc, lines of business, Ops/IT/back office, but some more than others #sbs2010″

I then responded with:

@47project: “@adamcohen Yep…like adjusting a stereo EQ for business, depending on the business needs.”

I just kinda said it quickly without fully visualizing it and then moved on but I started to really think about it and, maybe because I’ve been a musician all my life, the above image immediately materialized in my noggin. So I exercised some of my below average Photoshop skills to demonstrate how I believe social marketers that deal with medium to large companies need to approach social media.

Silver Bullets

I kind of mentioned this in my last post “A Couple Social Media Observations“, yammering on about werewolves and such. In the same way that there is no silver bullet measuring tool for social media, no silver bullet platform or website that would perfectly serve every customer or market segment for every type or size of company, NOR is there a silver bullet approach or equation as to what tools you should use, in what combination, and to what extent, for your engagement efforts. You can only make an educated guess based on some initial critieria/research.

Everything you do in social media is a combination, an equation full of multiple variables that need tweaking every month, tweaking that is influenced by ongoing metric/data collection and analysis (obviously). While you may eventually find that yes, Twitter is the best tool for that campaign or LinkedIn is the best solution for this initiative, you should never go into it initially with some preconceived notion of what THE best anything is, honestly…

One of the main reasons why so many seasoned professionals struggle so much with the assessment of social media and it’s value or place is that it’s natural state is fairly amorphous because you are dealing with humans. Social media has finally helped translate the gray area in business into something valuable and palpable with the interwebs and all the popular tools. Now it’s up to us to embrace it for what it is.

The Art of Fine Tuning

Even though there is no, and will probably never be, a piece of rack-mounted hardware like the one I created above where you can just simply turn a dial to crank up the Twitter juice for PR, or turn down the Facebook juice in sales, by now you understand the approach I’m talking about. If you run into any blog posts where someone is trying to get the readers to pigeon hole their efforts into one particular app, website or tool, I recommend you move on.

Social media is an ocean full of wildlife and ever changing temperatures and currents, and extreme weather conditions. While you are at the helm of your ship, equipped with senstive navigational instruments (Insights, Radian6, web analytics) to make your way through everything, you know it makes no sense to just set all of them to one setting and “hope it all works out”. You need to make adjustments along the way based on all kinds of changing variables, sometimes frequently. Social media is no different.

Onward.

A Couple Social Media Observations

Posted by Rich Harris – April 28, 2010

This post might come off as a little bitchy but it’s not intended to be that way. Nor is it intended to make me sound like I know everything, because I absolutely do not. I’ve just been spending a lot of time watching the behavior of the SM streams, the waves of info that continue to flush and wipe away that other trending topic that just happened 60 seconds ago.

Apples vs. Oranges

Twitter vs. Facebook, Facebook vs. LinkedIn, Twitter vs. Mr. Coffee. Everyone is trying too hard to pigeon-hole the social media approach, and which tool is THE “best”, instead of focusing on the fluid open-minded nature of using social to meet your overall objective(s). Please stop.

Social media is a gigantic toolbox full of applications, sites, approaches, and mindsets. All, none, or some of which can be used individually or in combination to varying degrees depending on what you want to accomplish. There are no werewolves in the social media landscape so there’s no demand for a silver bullet. Kapeesh? If you somehow find that silver bullet, let me know so I can make millions in nanoseconds and retire.

Don’t Drink Anyone’s Kool-Aid. Make Your Own.

I’m on RT overload right now. I’m all about sharing. Sharing is caring. I’ve learned a lot from content that I share with others, lots of content that was not created by me. It’s a big part of the info dissemination unicorn that makes social media tools and the information age great for business, people and content in general.

However…….I think the current ratio of forwarded content to original content is WAYYY out of whack. I would like to see a little less retweets/forwards/shares and more original blog posts/content from more brilliant people. I also think that while we are all learning and constantly fine-tuning our own voice, make sure that it is your top priority if you are a social marketer to not just augment useful things that others are saying, but more importantly, come up with some new concepts and opinions that you haven’t seen published yet. We need more Brogans, more Solis’, more Godins.

I know you are out there, don’t be afraid to take the “individual unique thought-leader content creation” leap alongside those that you look up to. You MIGHT be short-changing yourself and your potential if you don’t at least explore it.

Onward.

FeedTheMuse.net – Power to the Artists. Power to the Fans.

Posted by Rich Harris – April 26, 2010

Old School

From 1998-2001, I was in an aspiring band called Stitch that was starting to do well. We had a distribution deal with Metal Blade Records, we were in Tower and Wherehouse record stores, had a good lawyer, were one of the first bands on MP3.com (yeah remember that?), and had a half-stable bulletin board/forum application that ran on PHP when it was new and obnoxiously vulnerable to PHP injection attacks. Back then our only opportunity to get support, sell products, etc. (unless you had a web developer or designer in the band), was to be touring or playing a ton of shows……..Not anymore.

New School

In an age where record labels almost don’t mean anything anymore. In an age where if an artist or band is capable of  running their own show if their music has that magic and speaks to people thanks to all the great fluid syndication that happens on these interweb thingies…only a handful of sites have a real genuine ‘Give to the Artists That Inspire You’ vibe. FeedTheMuse.net is a website that enables and empowers the talent to enlist their actual fans to help them out. No middle man. No bullshit. Fundraising for bands for the same reason that public schools need to hold a bake sale to buy school books – The powers that be don’t always have the well-being of the talented folks top of mind that actually NEED the support. They’re too busy lining their own pockets.

All you gotta do is create a free page on their site, upload a band pic, fill in your mantra/bio, and people can just start supporting you financially. It’s cool because you set up different donation tiers. For example,  donate $1 and it is just you helping, donate $10 and get a band demo/t-shirt, etc…

A good example of this solution in action is for a local bay area band called “Electric Leaves”. Check out the implementation at: http://www.feedthemuse.net/electricleaves.

If you are in a band and want to make it easy for your fans to hook you up while you hook them up, I highly recommend this site. Everyone wins.

Onward.

Will Facebook’s Web Proliferation Be Too Noisy?

Posted by Rich Harris – April 21, 2010

Ok, so I wasn’t able to make it to F8 this year but I’ve been following pretty closely. I won’t go into some big ol’ assessment about all of Facebook’s recent announcements but I will say that while @aviel on Twitter is right on with his statement: “I feel the need to say it again… Facebook has won the internet. Thanks for playing everybody.”, will Facebook proliferation make all of our feeds more insane and overloaded? I’ve slowly started to started to see the results with several of my friends “Like”ing IMDB pages and a couple others for instance.

So my questions are…..What happens when it’s a standard for big high traffic websites to add this Facebook functionality to every article? What happens when every blogger on the planet adds the new Facebook/Like plugin to their WordPress install for every post? I understand that this helps Facebook bring the entire web “to” them “for” us however now all of our feeds won’t just contain stuff we find on Facebook that we thought was cool, we’ll be seeing the result of EVERYTHING people like from all over the web shoved into our feed……or will we? When I checked out what my options were when trying to hide the content I show on the image of my friend’s activity in this post, I didn’t have the option of hiding “Like’s from IMDB”, etc. I could only hide all of the content from that person, which was not what I wanted.

Will our Facebook feeds be nothing but “Likes” pretty soon just because of sheer volume? I’m looking forward to seeing what type of controllability Facebook will provide for us so that we can Hide content like we can native or authorized Facebook games/apps. It’s a-changin’…….

Some other articles/discussions about Facebook’s announcements

ReadWriteWeb: Is the New Facebook a Deal With the Devil?

Mashable: Facebook Makes Major Announcements at F8 [LIVE]

The Facebook Blog: New Ways to Personalize Your Online Experience

CNN.com: Facebook makes it easier for users to share interests across web

Does Your Company Have a “Reputation” for Engagement?

Posted by Rich Harris – April 20, 2010

There are lots of new companies that were born into the era of social media. They have a full-on reputation for customer engagement and interaction. It is expected of them by their customers/audience and has been since they launched their website(s), blog(s) and Twitter account(s) and their company was spat out by the venture capital womb for all of us to check out. Social media influenced the initial business plan before they even launched. Hooray for them! Hooray for social media! Hooray for organic engagement! Hooray for BBQ sauce!

Training Day

However, SOME companies were not born in the age of social media. They make the best products *still* and are the leaders in their respective industries, have been around since the dawn of time, yet *still* offer a product or service that is relevant and in need. Just like you need to train your big ol’ company to shift to a culture of customer connect, engagement and transparency, you also need to possibly train your long time customers to start looking at your company along the same lines. In high tech, some of the original gangsters of silicon valley that still run the technological show on the back-end with less glamor and more of a solid backbone than almost any other tech company around (Oracle, Intel, etc…) may or may not have had a reputation for direct customer interaction over the past couple decades. So for those that haven’t, while their products or services are best-in-class and their customers know it (these custies show these brands decades of loyalty), these customers still have established an engagement status quo with them when it comes expected direct communication and involvement. If you are a long running big company trying to stay at the forefront of the new customer culture, there’s a chance you may have some work to do. There may be some serious re-shaping and molding of the minds and hearts that needs to take place.

Give The People What They Want

If you have a good product or service that fills a unique void/gap, you’ve already won the battle. To win the war in today’s landscape, you need to leverage social media channels to embrace your interactions with your customers in a way that makes them not only invest in you when things are good, but also want to work with you on improving your reputation when your company is at a low point. They need to have some sort of incentive that drives them to want to be along for the full ride as a customer (an investor, really).

Here are some ideas that I or someone else has thought of to stir the proverbial customer pot a little bit to help get your audience more involved:

Contests/Giveaways

  • There isn’t a human being on the planet who doesn’t like to be the benefactor of “free”. Throw down some dough for something people really want, a great product that 1000′s would want for free yields you at least a small pile of opt-in leads for hardly any cost. These are people you can connect with on some level and begin conversations with, retraining them in the new way that your company interacts with them, setting a new standard. Make the requirements for a contest such that they have to comment or start a discussion to be entered to win.

Feedback

  • Polls – There are so many easy to use/setup polls on Facebook and widgetized polls to embed on any website/blog now. Keep ‘em short and sweet and construct questions give off the transparent open-minded “we’re here for you” aesthetic and be genuine about it.
  • Request public opinions on your product or service or perception by publishing a sincere letter on behalf of the company as a “Note” on Facebook. Let people fire away. Delete the content containing expletives or blatant disregard and read the rest intently. You might unearth all kinds of stuff from your customers that you hadn’t ever realized.
  • No one knows how to fill a particular void than the ones you are trying to sell to: Your customers! Run public discussions on Facebook or a blog. People like to say nice things, but they LOVE to complain, and that’s your nugget. Complaints are your ammo to improve your company. Turn a negative into a positive. The objective byproduct of their complaints are that your company makes a better product, provides a better service, fills a need.

Events

  • Host several small tweetups focused on a very specific and known demographics. It’s cheap and you’ll learn more in 2 hours about people than you would in 7 days of doing ‘social media’ from your computer. There’s not a dollar figure on the planet that holds a candle to this stuff. What you learn here will translate into more thoughtful and calculated social media risks as opposed to the shotgun blast approach that most use social media for.
  • If your company is sponsoring or showing at an event, invite people (current and potential clients alike) from all over to simply just ‘stop by’ and say hello. Shake some hands. Those events have hand sanitizer everywhere now so get your networking on to allow potential new markets and customers to start buzzing around your scene.

Recycle Your Customers

If your customers aren’t used to you using social media or engaging them directly, it doesn’t mean they don’t want to and that you can’t change that. You don’t need to trade them in for new ones. After all, more often than not they’ve invested in you so anything new you do for them, or any new amount of time you invest in them, is all gravy, which makes switching to your new customer relationship from the old, pretty painless. Recycle them for use into the next chapter of your company.

Onward.

You Can Check In, But Can You Check Out?

Posted by Rich Harris – April 18, 2010

I stopped using Foursquare. Not because it’s a bad app. Not because there’s anything wrong with it. It’s a great app, first of it’s kind to really put Geo-Loc on the map with regards to mainstream popularity. I was enjoying using it. But a line in a recent blog post entitled Foursquare and the Analog Groundswell by Michael Brito (@Britopian on Twitter), he had said, “…..Heck, if I had the time I would be all over Yelp but I am on profile overload at the moment and just don’t have the time.” While the whole article was great, this particular line really struck a chord with me.

Honestly, over the last few weeks I’ve been feeling like an over-stimulated newborn. Outside of my actual day job, submitting data to services like this on a daily basis in my personal life was turning into a full time job in itself and I was realizing that I was losing my ability to be present. It was beginning to feel 10 times as draining as the most high maintenance relationship I’ve ever been in. It’s funny too because without even having any discussions about this with a good friend of mine, Jennifer Leggio (@Mediaphyter on Twitter), she had almost simultaneously written a blog post, Five reasons to check out of Foursquare, about some similar thoughts and realizations.

Let’s face it, the only way to get the most social capital of apps like Foursquare is to be fully committed to consistency, checking into every venue you are at, at all times without missing a beat. If you are a mover, this can really crank up your commitment to your Blackberry/iPhone on a whole other level. When that commitment starts to take over the things going on in your offline life that are actually tangible and matter – Time with your friends & family, enjoying a sunset, etc. – When you are attending an event or experiencing something and are focusing more on documenting it and making sure you are ‘checking in’ as opposed to just being present and fully enjoying the experience for what it was meant to be, then you are sacrificing parts of yourself that aren’t meant to be sacrificed while you walk this earth. That’s my opinion anyway.

I’m not dogging the apps, or the technological and social concepts, or even the business and commercial value. I still think all that stuff is cool. I just knew something was wrong when my 7 year old got frustrated with me for stalling in a Safeway aisle so I could ‘check in’.

Onward.

Sharing (Info) is Caring

Posted by Rich Harris – April 11, 2010

So if you know me, you know that while I mean well and have the best intentions, I’m one scatter-brained dude, always consuming and outputting as much information and *stuff* as possible. I follow so many talented people in the social media space and have so many feeds and streams of information coming at me from so many directions that I was finding it hard to man handle all of it, let alone (and most imortantly) be able to methodically share the stories and tidbits I found with all the people I know that could benefit. The other side of this is that my personal and business life overlap a LOT and I wanted to organize that at least a little bit so that I could focus on having some sort of non-business side to my personal life and some sort of non-personal side to my business life.

I created a Facebook Fan page for ‘The 47 Project’. I know your first thought is probably: What a self-absorbed narcisitic jackass. While I do overshare and generate tons of my own original content, this fan page is going to be 5% content created by me, and 95% created by everyone else in the social media space. There will of course be some smatterings of humor, personal commentary, etc. but that’s about it from me. I like being the messenger.

I think if we all spent more time unearthing someone else’s talent and lifting them up than we do ourselves, the world would be a better place.

Anyhow….enjoy.

You can either click on the Become a Fan link in the right column on this page or go directly to the page.

The Ethics of Sponsored Outreach

Posted by Rich Harris – April 6, 2010

The Truth

Today’s web audience can smell bullshit a mile away. And I thank them for it. Companies are lucky to have them for so many reasons outside of being paying customers. Their low attention span and ability to talk to their trusted friends before making a purchasing decision can squeeze the accountability out of companies like a ripe grapefruit in a vice. They help make our world and the companies that run it, a better place. My opinion of course.

At the core, my philosophy on social media/marketing (and in life really) has always been: “Be unapologetically genuine, truthful and transparent.” I’ve really tried to stay true to this my whole life, in all my business endeavors and I try to keep those traits as mainstays in everything else I do.

The challenge with social media is that it’s so vast and enormous and noisy. Because it’s so huge, we need to get more calculated and efficient. As we grow our efforts and things start to take off, new opportunities and scenarios are unearthed.

I’m sure this scenario sounds familiar: You are trying to maximize your ROI with a big campaign push. You are trying to pull out all the stops by seeding relevant key influencers, implementing a solid social media strategy relying on the most extensive outreach and syndication plan possible with the budget and manpower you were given. You realize you are ready to go bigger. You are ready to step up your game and numbers on a grander scale. Unfortunately, the size of your golden revolutionary game-changing campaign vision is WAY bigger than your allocated tangible means.

So how do you go big with way less headcount and budget than your vision requires? There are a number of ‘services’ that exist out there now that would like to help you. But while their technical abilities are sound, I’m concerned that the needle between real and ‘payola’ will get pushed too far in the wrong direction.

Here’s what I’m talking about……

The Proposition

I was approached recently by an agency recently about hiring them to do ‘targeted, sponsored outreach’ utilizing paid blog posts, tweets, et al. The process is pretty simple. You have a kick off meeting with them to discuss the following:

  • Your product or service and brand
  • Your business objective with the particular campaign or initiative you are hiring them for
  • The demographic(s)/market segments you’re trying to proliferate
  • Known subject/demographic (and very specific) key influencers (so they can research all of their conversations, posts, etc.)

Once you establish some of these basics with them, they then move forward with profiling bloggers, tweeps, and others from a pool of hundreds of thousands (so they say) of authorized content creators that have gone through a review process. This process interviews bloggers to find out what they normally write about, their hobbies, their focus, knowledge level, etc.

Example

If you were selling a new camera for instance, they would work with the bloggers they’ve profiled that are photographers, or are at least enthusiasts on some level. Then, they would orchestrate a blog post idea/concept by each of these bloggers that would all go out at the same time (roughly), mentioning your product, your company, with all positive commentary when the launch happens. There would be a HUGE amount of link love, exclusive content, and thousands of people that were advocates of your company and this new camera……………at least algorithmically. :-)

The Concerns

If you were to go down the path of basically the modern day payola version of social media, and savvy consumers saw or recognized the pattern and sudden onslaught of blog posts/tweets about you that came in at a volume that was NOT part of your track record, would they lambaste you for it? Would they start to write their own blog posts about your company paying for synthetic blog posts instead of ones that were written organically by people that actually do know/follow/buy your company’s products or services? Would it turn into a PR nightmare and make your company look shady?

Would you be the coveted winner of the “Social Media Used Car Salesman” award?

The Questions

I’m curious to know what others’ experiences have been with sponsored outreach, blogs posts in particular. Maybe hundreds of companies are doing this and no one notices, or even cares for that matter. I already know why it *works* from a technical and human behavior level, but is it the right thing to do or is it better to just continue to grow everything organically….or a combination of both? Did I leave the iron on?

Onward.

The Tweditorial Calendar

Posted by Rich Harris – April 2, 2010

There Is So Much To Do

Ok so I’m kinda burnt out on the “Tw” words myself but today I’ve been a glutton for cliché. Let’s face it, if you are running the social media show for any medium to large business, there is an enormous, ever growing list of initiatives, ideas, objectives, strategies, metrics, and executions. Even the most organized person can’t herd all the social media cats 100% of the time. When you have product launches, contests, campaigns, big company announcements, and partnerships, it can get pretty gnarly trying to keep track of it all.

Fertilize Your Twitter Growth, Get Organized

If you’ve been in the marketing/PR game for awhile, the editorial calendar has been your bible for content/campaign planning, organization, and delivery. If you are managing the social side of marketing campaigns that have complex schedules, several moving parts, Twitter is no exception. As you scale and fine tune your marketing efforts, your Twitter footprint might grow into multiple accounts representing global regions, multiple market segments and sub-segments, or it might be one account leveraging several partner content pieces that adhere to a multi-prong timeline to engage customers. Either way you slice it, at some point your Twitter execution, if done right and is showing success and growth, is gonna need it’s own prominent real estate on your calendar next to everything else. There are three primary types of tweets that I use that need a spot on my calendar. I’ll cover them below.

Maintenance

Millions of people see millions of tweets each day. Millions of people also miss millions of tweets each day, some of which they would’ve probably like to have seen (pre-sale concert tix, plane tix, hotel one day only pricing, other promos, etc.). I used to consider duplicate tweets from the same company’s account to be spammy so I avoided doing that on behalf of my current company. However, now that noise reduction is a requirement for businesses on Twitter, whether they are sifting through the noise for leads and prospects or they are responsible for contributing to the noise, hoping that the right person is noticing, 1 promotional tweet gets lost in less than a nanosecond. The issue with that is that there might be someone following your company that really would like to have seen that tweet if you just gave them a second (or third) chance to know about it. With that said, not only have I decided that it’s ok to duplicate a tweet here and there, I’ve also seen long time followers respond to the third duplicate of a tweet — proof that prior tweets had just passed them by. So much info, so few characters, so many tweets, so little attention span and time.

What I’m getting at with this is that it’s ok to have a cautious set of scheduled duplicate regular tweets that go out to let new and old followers know that you are on Facebook, or that there’s a contest running, or that this product just launched, or that you’d like to hear their opinion on something pertaining to your company. Due to the sheer volume of retweets when news hits or when great content pops up and everyone wants to share, we’re all getting a little more patient with the ebb and flow of duplicate content and most tweeps really know now when a company is a truly spammy misguided automated entity or not, by the track record with their engagement and content type/frequency. So get your weekly, bi-weekly or monthly maintenance tweets on your calendar where it makes sense. An example of types of tweets that fall into this category are: “Be sure to check us out on LinkedIn for small business talk <LINK>” or “How are we doing on Twitter? Contact us here <LINK>” .

Events

An event can be anything for a company – a product/site launch, a new service, a customer story, breaking news, quarterly financial results call, leadership change or an acquisition, to name a few. I don’t need to explain why this need to be on your calendar. Events can feel easy. There’s a nice hard date associated with it (usually) so you can wrap everything you do around it. From a social media perspective though, I try to look at events as a set of waves (maybe ’cause I’m in Cali). Your first ‘wave’ could be some teaser tweets that are mysterious. The second wave can be more teasers with more revealing content. Then you got the biggest wave of the set (official news/announcement breaks). It doesn’t stop there though. Surfers don’t just stop after the biggest wave of the set passes by. There are still smaller rideable waves to follow and the peeps in the water aren’t stop riding them until the set is done. Treat your Twitter execution in a similar fashion and plot it on your calendar.  One week of teaser tweets, tweet the launch, 2 weeks of follow on tweets and retweets of any partner/media coverage (third party blog posts, press, etc.).

When you have multiple events going on at once, plotting these on your calendar is key to not only make sure you are on time but to make sure that you aren’t hyping too many things at once, confusing your followers. Don’t make them ‘choose’ from five+ campaigns/contests to be excited about. Keep them focused as much as you can can within your control. Treat/give each event as much exclusive focus as the company roadmap allows to maximized your return.

Conversation

I know you are probably thinking to yourself, “Dude this is Twitter, it’s all about the conversation, What else is there?” While we’ve all kicked the crap out of the dead but still kicking horse that is now ’join the conversation’, I have to respectfully disagree. Twitter is about engagement. Twitter is just one of many mediums to achieve engagment. Engagement is multi-faceted. Engagement isn’t new, it’s older than you. Engagement is WAY bigger than social media. Engagement is only successful when it is allowed to be adaptable and amorphous for the sake of the relationship with your customers.

The randomness and unpredictability of the nature of human conversation on Twitter begs the question: “How the hell do you schedule the random conversational tweet and put them on a calendar?” The way that you approach getting the conversational tweet into some sort of schedule isn’t so much like the event driven tweet with a hard timeline as much as it is like a quota. Make sure that you participate in at least XX amount of relevant, genuine conversation streams per week. Putting a quota on human conversation is not contrived if it’s relevant and you care. If those two elements exist, then a quota just helps to ensure you are maintaining your investment in other people – which is the key to success.

Also Check Out…..

EmediaVitals: Use a Twitter editorial calendar to help lessen impact of ‘tweet’ duty

Onward.

Tweeps: Marketers, Meet Developers.

Posted by Rich Harris – March 22, 2010

Dogs & Cats

Having worked in both marketing and engineering departments throughout silicon valley over the last 14 years, I’ve heard all the inside jokes about engineers hating on marketers (thanks for giving me the crap I deserved @brettschulte) :-) and vice versa and know how the typical personality types can drive each other nuts. When I was at the 140tc in Seattle a few weeks ago, one of the panels was the tech/dev panel moderated by Ayush Agarwal (@yush). Lots of great discussions (and newly introduced tools like TweepSearch) were thrown out there for all of us to digest. After really listening to these guys, a light went on for me.

Dig In

We on the marketing side really need to be proactive in understanding the flip side of this coin though. If you are a marketer you should be extremely interested in the business logic that goes behind these apps, their development and what reasons were the basis for the creation of some of the amazing tools that are out there.

As a marketer, I highly recommend you put your social media evangelist soap box away for a day and be a fly on the wall at events like Chirp. You may not understand everything they are talking about but developers don’t do things “just because”, they create apps based on a need. If you are a marketer, you have needs for these tools. It just might benefit you to listen to those conversations and get from them what you can.

SIDE NOTE: Do not attend developer events to get more fans, gain popularity or sell your new social media book. If you do, I won’t stop the developers from tossing you out of the after party….I also won’t blame them for doing so.

Onward.

The Feedback Loop: Social Media’s Lost Child

Posted by Rich Harris – March 18, 2010

You Can’t Cross An Unfinished Bridge

Social media is just another bridge. Often times in SM we can feel like we are ahead of the game, on top of the new world order of communication. We are on the cusp of a new way of doing things and now we got it nailed. We’ve created strategic Twitter accounts, Facebook Fan Pages, Feeds, Blogs, and more. We watch them for perception, tone and feedback, interacting with the customers that engage with us through them. You’ve seen feedback from some customers saying, “Wow they’re really paying attention to us, they are innovators!” You are rad. Pat yourself on the back.

Some of us have also been able to attain that other golden jewel of getting our companies to understand the value of what we do as social media managers/owners and what it can do for our companies and clients. We’ve battled through pitch after painful PowerPoint pitch to our investors and execs to get them on board with understanding the value of something that can feel so nebulous for business…..but you did it. If this was a challenge for you and you pulled it off, congratulations. Another rung on the ladder grasped. Another step towards converting your company and it’s culture to the social media occult.

However, if you think you got it dialed by only having man-handled the two big challenges I mentioned above, you may have forgotten the one battle you must fight and conquer to win the war. The missing link.

Process Makes Perfect

Most up and coming young buck marketers that are out there doing the social media thing, love it because it’s free and nimble and expressive and unfettered and nebulous and amorphous, catering to their every random emotional whim and conversation. I will say that there is some business beauty in that. It can help your customers feel like you are real people. It’s a good thing and I dig that part of it too. However, I think one of the caveats that most business leaders new to social media have with it is that no one has explained to them how it fits into their internal business processes and why. How nice it will play with processes that have been established over several years (and that work really well) in various cross-functional organizations and departments?

All is well and good when your company responds to a tweet right there on the fly. Everyone is feeling like a warm fuzzy bunny rabbit when a question is posed on Facebook and you know the answer and can respond right there and be done with it. But what happens when a question is posed to your company that you don’t know the answer to? What happens when you don’t know who has the answer and you gotta do some digging through your org chart and email a few people. What happens when you finally find that person and they answer with more questions for the customer who posed the original question over Twitter? With all the projects that are most likely on your plate, by the time you find the right person, get the final answer you need, just like when you drive a brand new car off the lot and it loses $2k in value within seconds, the value of your conversation risks losing it’s value because in the social media world, interactions can become old news fast and people on the interwebs feel left out in the cold quickly (us web fanatics and consumers are a sensitive emotional bunch).

There needs to be a solid process in place to support the feedback loop required to add value to your social media initiatives. If that loop is dysfunctional, unorganized, or under developed, or worst case – straight up missing, then the real intrinsic value of your customer interactions will suffer.

If You Are Gonna Do It, Do It Right

There’s no value in just being able to address the quick questions and convenient conversations that are going on. If you are going to offer social media as a real part of your company’s culture, as a real solution moving forward, as a mechanism to engage with and listen to your customers, do it right and integrate it into your business top-to-bottom in a way that is efficient and part of the big picture. Make sure there is a stable, well thought out feedback loop so that when a complex question comes in via Twitter, the loop/process guides it to the right people quickly and you can then respond quickly back out to the customer in a way that makes them feel like you personally actually do know everything there is to know about your company. :-)

Onward.

[Hoover Dam images courtesy of The Goat Blog]