Tag: Marketing

Social Media & The Responsibility of Thought Leadership

Posted by Rich Harris – March 7, 2010

It’s so easy to get buried in information nowadays if you aren’t methodical about channeling, funneling, and organizing your incoming tweets, feeds, and messages. Even when you get organized, you have only made it to zero. How can you and your clients or company get above zero? How do you propel your company in a way that makes them visible above the others without looking like just another news regurgitating spammer junkie? For the sake of spewing at least one social media and business cliché in this post: How do you rise above the noise?

Some of the most well known thought leaders currently in the social media spotlight [@BrianSolis, @SethGodin, @ChrisBrogan, @Britopian, @Mediaphyter, @AaronStrout and many many many many more] did not get where they are by doing only what has been known to work. They’ve always focused on pushing us outside of the traditional approach, existing marketing patterns, and evolving the marketing status quo, focusing on the understanding of human behavior, it’s place in business. If there’s a calculated risk opportunity presenting itself that maybe others haven’t seen yet, they’ll try it and discuss it publicly. These folks know that business won’t get better and advance closer to that streamlined revenue utopia we all strive for unless they go ‘this way’ while everyone else is going ‘that way’.

Succeed and Expand

While being a copycat can be traditionally considered the purest form of flattery, I think it’s important for social marketers to realize that in the online marketing world, imitation is only imitation and offers no real value to what we are all trying to do if that’s all you do. News comes and goes fast and the competition for something fresh is fierce.

So You Have A Mountain…

…of data at your finger tips that you’ve accumulated. After lots of trial and error, say you’ve learned how to target and cultivate a niche market. What now? How can you aggressively capitalize on that market and get even more niche, dissecting it into more detail so that you can execute even more effective campaigns and conversations? You will need to get creative in the way that scientists had to when they worked towards dwindling physical matter down to molecules and eventually atoms. In some cases where there’s a mountain, there is a mountain range. After going to the top of one and slamming your flag into the dirt, set up a functional camp of explorers to delve deeper on said mountain, and then you should start heading down hill and start your next climb on the adjacent peaks to see what lies ahead (figuratively speaking of course). :-)

Be The Modern Day Lewis & Clark of Marketing

Social media for me has really been more of an expedition than it has been a job. I think it’s really easy to get mired down in the day to day, pulling the same old story of coming into work, checking out industry specific news and influencers, retweeting some cool stuff, having some convos with relevant and meaningful people on Twitter and Facebook, and then heading home to throw down a Guinness and do it for another hour or so before bed. While it’s important to recognize, acknowledge and maintain all the things you’ve discovered over the last quarter and even the last week, the successes should only make you hungrier for more ideas, new territories and new markets. Never stop.

The Personal Brand: The Balance of Give and Take

Lastly, social media is un-ending monster-sized manufacturer of the personal brand. It has given those of us that know how to promote ourselves, our talents, our hobbies, our lives and everything we do, as a brand. While I’d be an idiot that should be slapped if I produced “Rich Harris the T-shirt”, I’ve always had some inkling of narcissism in my hat. I acknowledge it. I roll with it. I embrace it. However, I am also very aware that not only does the world not revolve around me and everything I have going on, more importantly there is an amazing amount of value in what thousands of other people are doing around me. Their marketing and business ideas, their ambitions, are all extremely important to the big picture and the greater good of successful business and networking.

It’s a great thing for me to simply acknowledge that there are others around me, but as someone who is trying to shine in his own little bubble, it’s more important that I extend myself and elevate those folks around me who also have great (and hopefully even better) ideas than me as well as great ideals. Not to cater to my hippie side too much here, but it’s important that you pay very close to attention to the balance between 1. Giving back to social media, business and marketing and 2. Building your own legion of followers. In my opinion, your value is absolutely and ONLY equal to the amount of value you place on others and how much you lift them and their social capital up. In this life, you get what you give and I believe that couldn’t be more true in marketing and business. The social information age is the perfect time and place to do it.

Part of your priority menu as a social marketer should always be finding people that are smarter and better at what you do than you are……and sharing their thoughts and leadership with others.

Other sources…

Digital Marketing Today: Leverage Social Media to turn your Thought Leaders into Sales people

Redmond Channel Partner Online: Become A Thought Leader

Thought Leadership Times [blog]

[Image Credit: Paige's Arting & Scribbling Blog]

Onward.

Emotions. Patterns. Business. Morality?

Posted by Rich Harris – November 14, 2009

xPsychology4aEmotions Are Still Math

I started thinking about this when I was typing my previous blog post about Google having the Holy Grail. As a marketer, I’m always trying to figure out human behavioral patterns and how I can maximize my company’s profit from the understanding of this.

I had an interesting thread going on Facebook the other day. I was eating sushi at a restaurant and was watching the people around me, talking to each other, responding to conversations with various facial expressions, hand gestures, and vocal tones that varied in intensity. All of these ways of expressing themselves were based on emotion that was being outputted as a physiological response to conversational input they had just received from whoever was sitting across the table and having lunch with them.

I had posted a Facebook status stating that “Emotions are still math.” It was interesting to see people’s responses to this. The vibe I got is that it almost was considered offensive that I had said that. My only point was to acknowledge the fusion between the two concepts, not to minimize the importance of one over the other. Maybe my choice of words made it come off that way, “flattening” the value of emotion. [...stealing your descriptor Andy :-) ]. This definitely was not my intention.

If you know me, I’m far more emotional and dramatic than your average person, half the time it’s to my detriment.

Patterns

While I’m not necessarily referring to my friends on Facebook that participated in that conversation in my next statement here, for certain people I think it strokes a chord with them, like my statement was disregarding humanity on some blunt robotic level, not validating peoples emotions, converting the organic human aesthetic, all the things that mean so much to people, into 1’s and 0’s, basically saying that our entire population is just an abbacus made out of living tissue. My point with it was just that you can plug in formulas to patterns of human behavior. Patterns, whether abstract or linear, are still patterns, no matter how random we think the activity contained within those patterns actually is. I’m not the first person to say this and certainly not the last. Everyone learns this in Psych 1A their first year of college.

Is Business/Marketing Inherently Evil?

What I’m about to say here excludes non-profit organizations.

Successful marketers know that you need to recognize and understand behavioral data to make sound marketing decisions. This requires that on some level you convert what you see in human beings into a formulaic pattern so that you can run some numbers and calculate a risk. The goal of all that is to make more money. Period.

In reference to my “Emotions are still math” statement that kicked off the colorful convo on Facebook: If you are a marketing genius at a company that wants to grow, employ other human beings, beat your competition, understanding how to convert human emotion into dollars, does that make you evil? Smart? Shrewd? Heartless? All of the above?….or just someone trying to pay their bills?

I’m don’t know the answer…that’s why I’m asking.

[image courtesy of duke.edu]

Social Media: Living In Cultural Lethargy

Posted by Rich Harris – October 31, 2009

Forgive the Easy Rider Fonda era tone/vibe to this post. I typed the initial bulk of this post at 3AM on my BlackBerry, Halloween morning.

It seems funny to me that Social Media is considered this new thing to everyone. It actually seems kinda sad. A natural behavior that sites like Twitter and Facebook just happen to catalyze, has a *special new name, if not only for the reason that apparently we repressed a natural aspect of who we really are. Since we are not repressing it anymore, something that was always there inside us is now considered some new way of thinking, the brilliant new marketing method and approach that everyone is hyping and talking about. Why do we find it so surprising and fresh human beings actually want to engage other human beings directly in business? Are we using the fact that there was no Twitter or Facebook or MySpace before as an excuse to not directly engage customers? Are we somehow ready to come out of our little anti-social hovels and holes and cubicles that we essentially put ourselves in as a standard for the last bunch of decades?

It’s funny to me that we have ads and TV commercials whose attempt to yield a return were created with a “personal touch” by our usually overpaid agencies of record to be successful…yet they were all one way communications, directly engaging no one. It’s like a mother trying to nurture her new baby and raising her child through a glass window. The child never gets to actually be touched but the mother is there talking him/her through life without ever truly bonding or connecting with it. This is how marketing has always been so we never questioned the morbidity of it as a standard. We needed the internet, a bunch of computers (in essence a robot network), to teach us that what we needed all along was inside us already but that we were too caught up in corporate insecurity to realize the natural importance of engaging other humans directly as a standard in business.

Social Media to me, I’m starting to discover, does not currently exist as this great new idea. It is just filling a gap in business of sociological depravity that we have created for ourselves emotionally in our culture. Think about the family-owned bakery in a small village in Greece somewhere, 10 generations deep. All they know is consistent sales, happy loyal customers, and real relationships with those customers. Take a look at all the cultures that don’t have big business but still consistently make money because of a human touch that they just executed on naturally. Social marketers could learn a thing or two from these people. Yet, here in big business, while billions of dollars have been made, billions have also been lost because we struggled to have that winning marketing campaign in Q1 of nineteen eighty whatever when the culture-created consumer zombies stared at the TV, watched our commercials that didn’t quite stimulate them enough to get that false sense of “I need this to truly be alive inside” that we were hoping.

Are we finally ready to stop being in denial that being social is necessary for the survival of business? Did we just need the information age and networked computers and the chat rooms AOL introduced us to in the 90’s as an excuse break down walls so that we could learn this new fascinating discovery about being alive called “talking directly with other people?”

Don’t get me wrong, I love social marketing but Social Media and it’s current success as “the new thing” is kind of a big slap in the face reminder that we’ve kind of lost ourselves, as a standard. Maybe it won’t just help our companies. Maybe it will have cultural healing properties and help us exploit human qualities that currently STILL work to bond indigenous tribes in remote parts of the world with their families and communities.

Social Media is about the basics.

Pseudo hippie rant done.

Onward.

Social Media: Some Low Hanging Fruit For Newbies

Posted by Rich Harris – October 26, 2009

323436829_f6afb5c48eMany large corporations are still new to social media and are trying to figure out how it works, their short term plan, their long term plan, etc. After setting up your Twitter account and a Facebook Fan page for your company, now what? A company CAN do a few things almost immediately to expand their presence in social media with little effort/cost. This list assumes you already have a Twitter account, Facebook/MySpace or other sites that are built and established.

1. Spread Your Tweets Like Butter: Make sure all tweets are either manually posted or automatically posted to your other social sites. There are tons of widgets out there and just about everything posted on Facebook, MySpace, Tumblr, etc. has a URL that can be crawled by search engines. That’s money in the bank.

2. Let Your Social Media Hitch A Ride: Talk to any and every internal team in your company that manages outbound communications. At the very least text links to your primary social media accounts/profiles should be on there. You’d be surprised how many of your customers and partners didn’t know you were in the social media space, especially if it’s new for your company. With tens of thousands of emails going out per blast to customers that trust you and have opted in, every email without a link to you on Twitter, is a lost opportunity.

3. Welcome Aboard, Follow Us: Most established companies have an HR dept of some sort and those departments have a process for onboarding new employees. Your company’s social media info should be included in the welcome packet (whether virtual or paper). Most people are using the popular sites for personal reasons so they most likely don’t need to be recruited to use Facebook or Twitter. As long as employees aren’t a disgruntled loose canon, you almost get an extension of your marketing efforts when they can see stuff and contribute to it, even if it’s just ‘liking’ something on Facebook.

4. Let Search Do The Work: This one sounds obvious but even some of the biggest companies do not do this, at all. Some of the mainstay companies that have some of the strongest online consumer brands in the world, like Apple, usually don’t have to link to their social profiles as people will seek them out. However, if you are not Apple, it’s helpful to have text links to social media profiles somewhere as part of the standard footer or navigation on any of your web properties. I’m not saying plaster huge Twitter icons and logos everywhere, but just a text link can do you some good. Also make sure you have some kind of landing page or provision on your site’s contact page with all of your social media links. If you get decent traffic on your site from search engine referrals, there’s some easy intrinsic opportunity to show up in more search results that you are not currently in without those links.

5. C’mon, Everyone Is Doing It: Social media may not be for everyone. I still have friends who even barely have an email account. However, if you have a company that is marketing itself online and you have employees that are online, send out company-wide emails reminding them to join your company on Facebook, Twitter, or whichever sites you have made to be your social marketing avenues. If they are not on Facebook or Twitter yet, they may actually want to check it out and sign up. Your employees are part of your army, make sure they feel like it.

Primer Over Sushi: The Impact Media Group

Posted by Rich Harris – October 23, 2009

Picture 4The Company

Today I had the pleasure of meeting with David Sieburg, Production Manager, at the Impact Media Group, based out of Santa Cruz, CA. I’ve been down to their offices before so I was already familiar with some of the amazing stuff they do. What sets these guys apart from many small video/production houses is that they don’t see themselves as a video production company. They don’t meet with a client, find out the client’s name, get the client’s logo, and slap it on some generic backdrop in HD and call it a day. The priority of their approach is not just your story, but more importantly, how to visually and creatively tell your company’s story in a way that is powerful enough to be done without words if given the option. Their goal is to visualize your company’s message in a way that is unlike any of your most aggressive competitors. Some of their work is surreal.

We’ve all seen amazing ideas on TV created by multimillion dollar Hollywood studios and pricey over-hyped agencies in San Francisco. The beauty and uniqueness of Impact is that they can accomplish the same quality, professionalism, creativity, and delivery of any high-end agency that I’ve seen but with a fraction of the crew and overhead.

The Next Steps

They are about to embark on their initial planning stages of their social media push and I’m excited to see what they do. We talked quite extensively about some of this stuff and the challenges of social media for a small B2B company that is the genius behind video creative used by big names we all know like Apple, Starbucks, HP, NBC, Discovery Channel, and Adobe…just to name a few. I look forward to seeing this small company, capable of creating bigger than life video, effectively populate the social media landscape within their respective industry against their competitors. They got the talent and big brand client base to do it quickly. It’s hard to believe a company this small has done things so big.

Thanks for the sushi David!

Social Media: Join The Convo or Instigate & Observe?

Posted by Rich Harris – October 22, 2009

talking-headsAn Interesting Question

I recently was sent a really interesting article posted at Adweek.com titled “When Silence Can Be Golden” written by Benjamin Palmer, co-founder and CEO of The Barbarian Group. It was an interesting commentary and perspective on how brands should consider utilizing social media. We’ve all heard everyone say stuff like “get your brand to ‘join the conversation‘ or ‘build a real direct relationship with your customers‘”.

That’s all fine and dandy and of course as a social media guy, I can’t disagree with that statement. However, the article I mentioned above discusses the potential absurdity behind having a static or inanimate brand engage customers directly or attempting to build a relationship with them. A couple lines from the article that I really liked and hadn’t thought about before were:

“Maybe some brands shouldn’t be conversational. Maybe most shouldn’t.

Social media was not made for brands. Lots of other stuff on the Internet was, but not Facebook and not Twitter.”

I mostly agree with the above, with some exceptions. I agree that some brands maybe shouldn’t be conversational but I also think we need to remember that business IS people. People make products and then people pay for those products. ‘Tis life. Later on in the article he talks about how a company should probably evaluate their approach with social media. Your evaluation does not mean that you should wonder if your company should even get into social media at all (of course it should). The real question is: Does it make sense for you to promote your brand having the conversation with your customers OR does it make more sense for your brand to promote the environments where your customers have conversations with each other about your brand and it’s products/services?

What Are Your Options?

So based on what I’ve said above, you basically have a couple concrete options that could be considered a best fit for your company. You ALSO have a massive grey area that may need to be explored, demanding that you get creatively amorphous and nimble with your approach.

Join The Conversation:

This is the old adage, the trendy social media goto defacto standard tagline that any marketer uses to bring his/her newly discovered career path to the customers. It still has value and substance and has a proven track record for success when done right. Industry types where I think this would be most appropriate are ones whose business is serving human beings and their experiences, where tangible goods are just a facet of the overall experience. These would be anything like hotels (as mentioned in the article by Palmer), restaurants, airlines, general product support services like Geek Squad, etc. People pay for a good experience from other humans that represent or are employed by these industries so direct engagement with them via social media would most likely feel more natural.

Instigate, Observe, Tweak, Observe, Repeat.

Next up is the other concrete option that Palmer spoke of which is: create an environment, or mechanism, or medium, for your customers and target audience to hang out and discuss your brand with each other while you watch and learn and strategize your next moves. In many cases, you can learn how to humanize your non-human products. You can learn much more by listening to your customers as a fly on the wall of your company’s Facebook Fan Page, the stream of tweets containing your brand name (or your competitor’s for that matter), and so on. The industries or companies where this applies are pretty much any company where a tangible product represents their brand. A hard drive, a pack of gum, a bottle of water that supposedly has vitamins in it. :-)

Meet Me In The Middle

The third option is that your real triumph may require you to do a combination of both. You may have a static tangible product that you will sell the most of if you create environments for your customers to talk with each other about their experiences while also conversing with them directly in the same environment so they feel like the brand is their for them, backing it’s product(s). It all depends. Every company and audience is different and complex in it’s own way. It’s all doable but the intuition of your social media/marketing team is crucial to find that balance yielding the best return so that your compay’s foray into social media is worth the hype behind the lengthy social media pitch you just gave to your execs.

Onward.

[ Talking Heads image courtesy of, and borrowed from, 8ninths ]

Social Media: The Next Heroin Soaked Band-Aid

Posted by Rich Harris – October 16, 2009

bandaidsGood Stuff

Recently on Twitter a tweet from @AdamCohen to @RobertCollins said: “More evidence social media is just a part of the overall marketing toolbox. Love it.”. This was in response to something Robert had tweeted: “Research found a 19-percentage-point lift in searches on brand among users who also saw them on social media http://bit.ly/YxoMb“. Both of these guys are refreshing to follow for their insight into the big picture. Check ‘em out.

The Tried And True Is Still King

After following the convo between and Adam and Robert above, I was finally able to put something together that has been bothering me for so long about Social Media: Social Media is not a replacement for an organized, well run company or quality products/services (Hence, the somewhat wonky title of this blog post).

It doesn’t matter how many times you tweet a promo, post a link to your Facebook wall, send out an email blast, fax a flyer, chisel an advertisement into stone with jurassic era hand tools…Successful stable companies that stick around and grow are only able to do so because of their functional healthy internal organs, not because they have a great tan.

Some Things To Think About, No More Band-Aids

Having worked for quite a few startups and large companies, I understand the pressure felt when money is tight, triumphs and successes are less than recent failures, etc. If your company is struggling, social media (or any marketing medium for that matter) won’t “fix” it on the mere fact that it’s currently popular among other companies and marketers. ANY marketing budget is wasted if your company isn’t solid on the inside, speaking with “one voice”, with all organizations in alignment with each other from the top down. If you have that cohesiveness and solidarity within your company, then and only then is it time to market it.

I’m the millionth person to say this in the history of marketing and business but seeing the activity going on with social media, it’s existence is becoming more present as a buzz word and a shallow sales pitch than it is as a practical and useful tool for companies. I felt that I had to put out a reminder for my own sanity so I don’t start getting annoyed with my own line of work. :-)

Onward.

Social Media: Meaning & Purpose Are In Our DNA.

Posted by Rich Harris – October 14, 2009

Photo Credit: User "Scoobay" on FlickrControlled Capitalism is Changing

The problem with one-way communication and some of the old way of doing marketing is that for years, in an effort to solidify and meet our revenue forecasts, we have trained human beings to be the type of consumer that doesn’t think for themselves. They’ve been rolling with the consumer herd so that large corporations with nebulous names can spoon feed them what they need to like, and pay for, next week, next month, next year.

In this awesome age of information that we are swimming in, people are now learning from a young age to think for themselves when it comes to consumables and how they have the power to choose the next trend and influence others, even people they don’t know (customer reviews for example). This power has also made them hungrier and less patient when it comes to the ROI attached to something they read, eat, drink, smell, etc….people expect a return now when you engage them and frankly, I don’t blame them.

Think about how much time and money is wasted marketing something in a way that creates no return or meaning for the customer. Think about the thousands of banner ads that were designed by pricey agencies that were ignored and never clicked, the print ads were never read or that never drove one direct sale or word of mouth reference. It’s mind blowing to think about all the money spent on that with nothing to show for it.

Legos Are Deep, Man

A nice write up entitled, “Finding Purpose in Labor (and Labor Economics)” was posted by Daniel R. Hawes where he posts some thoughts and opinions regarding a study that was done and documented called “Man’s search for meaning: The case of Legos”

Here’s a quote from Daniel’s write up about the experiment talking about it’s premise:

“Meaning, or purpose, in the task was manipulated by what the MIT and University of Chicago experimenters did with Lego toys after a participant had put them together. For one group of participants – the group with the meaningful task – the constructed Lego toys were piled up on a table for the participant to see, and new Lego pieces were provided to build further toys. For the meaning-deprived group, each constructed toy was immediately disassembled (for the participant to see), and the parts given back to be reused for subsequent building efforts.
Maybe not surprisingly to you, but possibly surprising for economic theorists, the average amount of toys each person was willing to build significantly differed between the two groups.”

……and here is a quote from the researchers doing the study:

“Despite the fact that the physical task requirements and the wage schedule were identical in the two conditions, the subjects in the Meaningful condition built significantly more [Lego toys] than those in the Sisyphus condition. In the Meaningful condition, subjects built an average of 10.6 [Lego toys]  and received an average of $14.40, while those in the Sisyphus condition built an average of 7.2 [Lego toys] and earned an average of $11.52.”

After reading I was reminded of one of the most simple rules to good marketing, and more importantly in this day and age, surefire tactics for upping the statistical odds of you getting a return for your social media campaign initiatives: Meaning & Purpose.

As a Social Media Marketer, It’s Already In Your Bag of Tricks

Something as simple as Legos remind us of one of the low-hanging fruits of social media. The study above reminds us of something very simple and fundamental.To me, the above data states something that should be obvious to any social marketer.

When you run a campaign, is there a meaning or purpose for the user when they arrive at your campaign landing page, click on your shortened URL, follow you on Twitter, etc.? Do they feel that when you engage them does your promotional delivery wreak more of the ‘take’ than the more important scent of ‘give’?

If you build your social media efforts on a foundation of meaning for your audience, the revenue and brand awareness will come naturally. Even something as simple as Legos prove it.

Onward.

[lego photo credit: Scoobay on Flickr]

Stats from The Solis

Posted by Rich Harris – October 13, 2009

Brian’s recent blog post: “The Great Social Divide: Twitter, Facebook Traffic Surges, Myspace Fades“, was chock full of some really great social media nuggets. The behemoth that is Facebook, the rise of Twitter, the process of the fall of MySpace. I highly recommend checking this post out. It’s always nice for us social media guys when someone else goes out there and pulls and the information we really care about into one location instead of the 8 different ones we have to go. The best quote by far from the post at the bottom that is in sync with the rest of the better known social media/marketers was this:

“This is why, in social media, digital anthropology, sociology, ethnography, and psychology prevail…”

Amen to that.

Funny Video for Social Media “Gurus”

Posted by Rich Harris – October 5, 2009

Corporate Facebook Strategy: Multiple Fan Pages.

Posted by Rich Harris – August 26, 2009

Growth, It Happens.

As the Social Media guy (manager, dude, whatever) at Seagate, I have seen social media go from something that was an incremental piece of the communications landscape to a “must have” for many functions within the company. While that’s all good and validates the understanding of the power of social media  it does pose a bit of problem: how does a large corporation strategically support all these functions without muddying the waters and turn people away from the communities it’s trying to build? The answer I’m finding is that through some trial and error, companies may need to constantly rethink their approach to social media particularly as new functions within the organization look for real estate in the social media world.

I began this journey by building a Facebook Fan Page in the summer of 2008. As I’ve watched over the last several months, the unavoidable requirement for Facebook to support companies and their passionate desire to market f themselves on social networks has become a tidal wave of opportunity for third-party developers, marketers, small to medium businesses, and huge global companies. In most companies the social media foundation has been laid, the frame built, drywall, sheetrock, plumbing, electrical, flooring, paint…you name it….it’s now done here. Now it is time to sit back and figure out the next steps that make sense for your company. In social media, specific strategies need to be applied to EACH social media tool that is used by a company. On top of that, global companieshave multiple market segments and personas that have to be tended to, all of which are sprinkled throughout the various platforms/social sites. In this case, it’s more important than ever to move beyond the main house you’ve built, containing the furniture and feng shui that is the current social media entity and to start building a community with different neighborhoods in certain parts of ‘town’. I know I’m speaking a lot in metaphors. I do that a lot and apologize if you are confused about this blog post. I just liken building a marketing effort, – short term and long term, with building a house from scratch, adding surrounding neighborhoods, and beyond.  Anyhow, this is the point where I believe you need to start modifying your strategy, one social site/network at a time, with the big and little picture in mind.

First Up: Facebook

Seagate on FacebookSo in the beginning, the Gods of Facebook created groups. We started one for Seagate. Shortly after, they created Fan Pages. The benefit to fan pages was the zing and marketing-esque options, they way they updated people’s feeds, etc. The Seagate Fan Page was born. Very quickly this page has grown in content, userbase (fanbase ?), and most importantly – the amount of interaction with peeps from all over the world.

Many companies are at this point in their FB plan. One big corporate FB Fan Page with a variety of company information. What happens then when other functions and departments want to promote their particular product of service that is very specific and unique? No, is probably not the right answer. But what is the right answer?  . With every company in the world looking to reduce their budgets to save money and become more efficient, many departments see Facebook fan pages as an opportunity to market their specific product or service.  It’s all good, but what are the paths that can be taken to ensure alignment and messaging without damaging your company’s rep? Initially, I thought let’s duplicate content and have a “the more, the better” approach. Then I thought about how duplicated content on multiple web properties for a company was something that had always rubbed me the wrong way. I’ve never liked the shotgun approach to marketing because I always felt like it was lazy and underestimated (publicly and bluntly) our customers. At the same time, as the Social Media point person, you want to support their efforts. There-in lays the rub.

I’ve been watching companies/entities like Dell, Zappo’s, and the USAA closely, and how they’ve been extremely proactive with social media, allowing themselves to get their hands dirty in fairly uncharted territory when it comes to marketing their brands on social sites (outside of normal banner adverts). Dell has multiple pages that are fairly niched out but I still don’t feel like there’s much of a coordinated effort there…lots of pages with tons of content all the time. I’d prefer an approach that attempts to more cohesively connect Facebook pages strategically. And that’s exactly the approach I’m taking. Is it the right or only answer? Maybe. Maybe not. As I said, companies have to constantly go through a bit of trial and error and make corrections along the way.

Before building something like this you have to ask a few questions to legitimize the usefulness and need that a business unit or department would have for creating a Facebook fan page under your company’s umbrella. Questions like, “Is there a business benefit to marketing your department outside of the company?” or “Are resources available that can tend to the administration, maintenance and content of your page?” should be asked. Just make sure everyone is wanting to do this for your company for the right reasons and the same corporate message.

A couple general rules I like to adhere to for these fan pages is stuff I’ve mentioned above:

1. Avoid grossly duplicative content from any other company fan page unless it’s relevant to the purpose/subject matter of the fan page in question. Keep the content focused and precise and relevant. When someone joins a fan page that has a certain title and description, they are there to get that content and not be upsold everything else that the company has under the sun. You lose people that way, quickly.

2. Overarching content ideas should always be funneled through the person or team that is the official holder of the social media keys to the kingdom for a large company. Social media is fast and furious and people notice problems and discrepancies with everything that companies post. The internet as we know is forever, so if silos start happening within your company, ESPECIALLY on a social network, Twitter, etc. you risk a PR nightmare and potential legal issues…plus your company looks confused and clueless internally. No bueno.

I’m interested in hearing from anyone who has or manages a multi-tiered Facebook Fan Page enviornment (or equivalent on another social site). Please chime in here also if you have feedback, other ideas, disagree etc….please post your thoughts. I’m open to new ideas here as well.

Thanks for reading and happy Facebooking!

iJango Facebook Ploy: C’mon now, we aren’t stupid.

Posted by Rich Harris – August 19, 2009

Ijango_banner_598_x_259So the other day I got a message from someone that I had accepted a friend request on Facebook for iJango. At first I thought, “eh, they are trying to get me to join so just ignore it” but then someone else in the list of people they had sent the message to (there was a group of about 20 of us) replied and tag teamed with the original sender also doing a sales pitch for iJango….like were all a bunch of morons ready to devour a polished turd on a silver platter. Here’s snippets for ya…I’ll leave the names of the people out of this as I tend to give everyone at least one “get out of social media jail FREE card”.

=========================

First person/message:

“……What If you could multi-level Google, IJango just did!!!

THIS IS BIGGER THAN THE GROWTH OF FACEBOOK, MYSPACE, TWITTER ETC.!!!!

Ok, so i’m going to make this quick for you! If you are a network marketer, are interested in network marrketing, or never thought of it really but want an opportunity to make some serious money, then just keep reading……..”

Shortly after that post…another person chimed in with a response…

Second person/message:

“….Hi xxxxxx,

Thanks for the friendship. How is Ijango going for you? I have heard rumors that it is not going as well as people originally thought it was going to. I have two close friends who are leaders in it that are actually jumping ship. I hope that you are not experiencing the same results……”

First person’s response to that:

“…..Actually its going very well. Ijango is really taking off. we just got word that it is generating more prospects in this pre-launch phase than google did when it was first getting started. My heart is really in this. So thank you. With absolutely no product to sell, no change required in the way people use the internet, and its offering the site for free to everyone globally….this is definetely a gold mine….“

=========================

This is the kind of thing that will make Social Media fail. The point to social media is to assume and embrace the fact that consumers and potential customers are intelligent and NOT rock-headed lemmings, hungry to eat the next line of bullshit that you feed them. The method in which these iJango peeps used above was flat out insulting to any consumer that has an IQ of 45 or above.

To folks repping iJango: Be smarter about how you push your offering and do it through real relationships and not used car salesmen tactics from the 1950’s.

/Onward

Social Media Experts? You Have Lots To Learn Grasshopper.

Posted by Rich Harris – March 11, 2009

Now that title may at first glance appear somewhat pretentious but even being someone who manages social media for a large company like myself, I have a hard time proclaiming guru or expert status.

Here’s the thing. You can’t be an expert at something that first of all has really only started culminating the last couple years, and second, changes almost every week. You can call yourself a social media ninja, bad ass, maestro, whatever the hell you wanna call it….but there’s a 96.87% chance you are no guru or expert.

First, to say something positive (I’ve been trying to start off all my recent blog posts on a positive note), I love social media and I love how excited everyone is about it. It’s reshaping company/brand PR/Marketing efforts in a way that is healthy, creative, and cost effective…most of the time. I’d say my only complaint about it is that it’s made internet life quite a bit “noisier”…which I expected to happen.

Now then…..my point in this post is that to those claiming to be social media experts or even someone that claims to be in the know with social media and it’s big picture….this is probably not true. Just because you have a twitter account and you know how to use it, doesn’t make you a social media marketer. There’s an art to understanding that social media is all about people, about meaningful conversation that is genuine, relevant, intelligent (sometimes), and more importantly: REAL.

No one likes repeated spammy comments on Twitter, their MySpace comments section, or their Facebook walls, etc.

Also, you need to understand that because you have accounts on all the various sites, it does not make you an expert. If you want to eventually be an expert or guru at social media, the most important aspect of it that you need to understand, more important than the tools themselves that are at your fingertips is PEOPLE. To be really good, you need to ‘get’ people….different types of people, their interests, personalities, various thought processes, locales, etc. You might say to yourself..”ok that’s basic segment marketing analysis,” but we, as social marketers, have to understand that this landscape is different. The consumers of social media don’t like to be spoon fed empty one way communications about products, services and other crap. They are smarter than the old consumer, they have a lower attention span, and they put up with less bullshit than ever before. They have the power to immediately weed out and block all crap, unlike email spam which is and will always barely be under control.

The other side of this on the tools/technology side is that you need a cohesion that takes the sum of all the parts of what you do for a company or client. There should be a high level premise and plan on how all the accounts/tools all tie together to push out one message and a wave of consistent content. If you don’t have that, your efforts are null and void. Might as well head home and start gardening.

To be a social media expert or guru, you need to understand all the tools, how they all work together and you need to have a passion for human beings and their behavior, good, bad and ugly. If you understand that stuff, have a vision,  and are fascinated with human beings, you will be a social media jedi one day. I hope I get to be one too. :-)

Seth Godin: The New Marketingseth

Posted by Rich Harris – March 17, 2008

I recently went to an Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City Utah. For you web analyst people out there, you know what Omniture can do, SiteCatalyst is awesome, and it’s potential is even more awesome. While I enjoyed the learning tracks at the summit, the Omniture strategic partnership upsells sprinkled throughout, I have to say I most enjoyed listening to Seth Godin speak.

He gave away free copies of his book Meatball Sundae. I’m not easily impressed and I’ve considered myself ahead of the curve when it came to the new way of marketing to people on the web and beyond via web 2.0, blogs, social tech, etc. What Seth did for me was not only augment conclusions I came to on my own a year or so ago, but he pulled all my scattered marketing thoughts together and put them in a relevant context, packaging it all up together in one tight little bundle that made sense.

I’ve just finished part one of his Meatball Sundae book and am getting into part two where he talks about the 14 new marketing trends. I think one of the biggest things I got out of this was realizing not only how clueless most companies are nowadays, but more importantly the new way of looking at your company.

Most companies that have been around for awhile, are trying to use the new marketing methods and mold them to their old school status quo way of doing business. Seth’s approach in this book is to make your company a more fast moving, dynamic company but altering your way of doing business BASED on what new marketing methods are out there as well as making sure that you are ready to change and morph when new ideas come out.

It’s an excellent (and I believe a required) read for any marketers, online or offline. The concepts are the same for both. The information age has started to render the ‘big and slow’ companies obsolete in the way they do consumer business and marketing.

SETH’S BLOG

SETH’S BOOKS