Tag: Social Media

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.

Facebook’s Juxtaposition of Reality, Our Responsibility

Posted by Rich Harris – February 15, 2010

The Information Consumption Routine

Every morning I boot up my MacBook Pro, I start some coffee, throw together a quick breakfast, load up Gmail, Facebook, etc. and start observing,  joining, or creating conversations. You never have any idea what you are going to be talking about every day on Facebook, it just happens. The access to these conversations every day is starting a huge cultural shift in personal communication and all of it’s different levels of value and meaning. While there is no replacement for the real deal, we’re learning very quickly how to “read” the correct emotional tone of Facebook statuses, Tweets, IM chat sessions, based on who we are talking to, when we are talking to them, who their other friends are on Facebook, and what your history is with them.

We’ve also started joining groups and fanning pages en masse, not even for the sake of the participating in the group or page itself, but just to have an opportunity to announce publicly in an information stream….to let the world know….(diminuendo to a dramatic pause)….that you’ve just become a fan of “Standing On Your Head While Stacking Golf Balls On Tuesdays After 3pm PST” and you don’t care who knows it!

The Needle

There are a couple things going on now that I think we really need to pay attention to. There are benefits and inherent flaws in the mobilization power contained within an environment like Facebook. The feelings of immediate connectedness can almost distract us from the thought of what it really means to be connected and reciprocal with others around us.

Benefit

Facebook on one hand has made it possible for us to amass quickly with like minded individuals for a passionate purpose. It puts those that have always wanted to make a statement or do something big with their opinion but never had the right medium for it. They were too shy, too localized, or too overwhelmed at where to even begin. All understandable of course. This has opened doors for them and given them a voice that puts them on the map. This is a very positive thing.

Caution

There is another side to this coin however, a price or cost that is being paid. Unintentionally I think we are training ourselves, to some extent, to feel morally validated by joining a group on Facebook called “Cure Cancer” and that’s all. It’s as if somehow we’re giving back by joining the group publicly and opting in to messages/news from the group or fan page. Now I do believe strongly that the dissemination and forwarding of information by supporters is awesome and will never be a bad thing. It’s a tangible contribution and good reason to join a group. Fans of a cause on Facebook can get the word out quick and promote. But we can ALL do that on Facebook, with just the click of a mouse, and then we update our status with how much we love bacon and then play Farmville (FB games are not my gig).

I don’t have the stats but I just wonder what the ratio is of people on Facebook that ‘joined’ a great cause to the amount of people that have actually either volunteered 1 hour of their time or $1 to any charity anywhere within the last month. I very much include myself in the group of people that wasn’t really giving, and did so without really realizing it. I was joining, and still do, online communities with a premise that I support. I share their posts on my wall, I retweet stuff to spread the word. I just started to question myself on how much have I actually tangibly given back or made any real contribution to any of these philanthropic institutions or initiatives. When I looked back at my level of giving back vs. what I took for myself, it wasn’t looking promising. I was out of whack and am still in the process of scoping out a way for me to contribute that allows me to also keep the quality of the other things I’m doing in my career and family life extremely high. Both can easily be done. You just gotta get creative.

Balance

I realized I really need to step it up in the area of real, actual contribution. Even a dollar a month helps, or donating an hour of your time at a teen center, a homeless shelter, an understaffed public school, or an old folks home giving some people your conversation time to brighten up the tail end of their existence as they get ready to move on. Look through one of the big charity fan pages or groups you’ve joined on Facebook and see if there’s something in your local area you can check out and contribute to every couple of weeks for an hour or so.

Reciprocation, Social Responsibility

Not to get all preachy here but the online world is permanently infusing itself with our psyches, our communication, sense of belonging and community, all at the click of a button. We need to be careful to not get complacent with a subconsciously perceived substitution for physical interaction and presence, for actually going somewhere to help a perfect stranger that could really use someone to talk to for an hour, a family that could use a $20 bag of groceries this month, a dollar to Haiti, or donating some old books you’ll never read again to a school or two.

You know me, I love social networking and yammering on about nothing more than most of you probably ever will but I am reminded constantly by my kids how important it is focus on the tangible.

Onward.

Social Media: To Rockstar or Not to Rockstar

Posted by Rich Harris – February 5, 2010

Ya Done Good Son.

You started out years ago as a newbie online marketer. Over the last decade or so, you’ve pulled off some amazing things with viral marketing campaigns, banner ad placements, eCommerce, and  some huge partner promotions/campaigns leveraging everything under the sun effectively without spending hardly a dime and the revenue is rolling in. Your shrewd sense of where things are going next in the online marketing world has set you apart from your co-workers and your equivalents at other companies.

Your marketing cunning has been noted by journalists abroad and you’ve even done a few high-profile keynotes and panels. You’ve written for a couple well-known print publications with huge distribution as a guest columnist. You feel the momentum of your career getting more intense and gaining the kind of thrust you had always hoped it would finally get. Finally it is happening.

Then one year, the Social Media ship lands and an outpouring of tools and websites floods the online world. You quickly understand these new concepts, embrace them, become a master at manipulating them to sculpt yours and your company’s future and now you are right smack in the middle of the new era and excited about it.

After a couple more years of plugging away, you are a Social Media expert. A new opportunity arises. You get hired to do a job at a big company. You were hired under the assumption that you would be a bad ass at it because being a bad ass at it is what will make your employer happy by making them money. They will make money as a result of your genius strategy for garnering more social capital than their competitors could ever imagine. People are following you and the company that hired you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and are engaged.

As doors start opening for you within the social media community, your frame of reference and circle of professional cohorts expands exponentially.

The Corporate Debacle

What should your company do with you when you actually become the bad ass they always wanted you to be? When directors and VP’s, who are also smart career opportunists like you, know that your success brings opportunity not just for their company, but for you personally as well? Should they be threatened by that? Should they embrace it? Should they be happy or annoyed with you that your blog has taken off, your Twitter following is through the roof quadrupling the company’s, and you are getting talked about in social media almost as much as your company is?

Due to the nature of social media if you are active, excellent at what you do, and involved in the communities, you meet LOTS of people, constantly and instantly. All the boundaries have lifted, the shackles of long distances geographically have been removed. We can find ‘like’ people right NOW. These people are from all over the world, many of them are smart as hell and respected in their industry and career space. There are so many benefits for your company as you mix it up on behalf of <COMPANY NAME>, getting involved, and being an evangelist for your company. Before you know it, the same amount of people are asking you about you as they are about your company.

A recent article from Sage Circle entitled, “Forrester tells analysts no more personal blogs with interesting implications for analyst relations” discusses how Forrester management had requested that all of their analysts shut down all of their own personal blogs. Forrester CEO George Colony was all down for non-competes that favored the employer because  “… non-competes ultimately help new and established companies alike to retain the talent they’ve invested in, further nurtured and who have become star employees due to their rewarding tenure and success. …”.

Where do you draw the line though? How can you justify keeping your SM expert at bay BECAUSE they did such an amazing job and are naturals at what they do? You can’t tell a Social Media expert to not be social. You can’t tell an opportunist to not seize the best opportunities. Anyone with even a hair of ambition knows this.

My recommendation on how companies should handle this is to recognize their Social Media expert’s success. Stay close to them and help them facilitate their career growth. Like any role anywhere, if a company supports the growth of an outstanding employee, statistics have shown they will be loyal and stick with their company longer as well and will continue to be in good standing after an eventual split if it happens. Invest in the relationship with your SM rockstar and it will pay your company back in the short and long term, regardless if they end up working for you or not.

Just remember that a star can’t make you shine if you keep it in a box.

Social Media Brushfires: Know When to Hold ‘em…

Posted by Rich Harris – February 3, 2010

…Know when to walk away….

OK…please excuse the tasteless implementation of the Kenny Rogers reference but I think it’s very fitting for this particular post. We should all know the importance and priority of managing bad PR, whether you are a huge publicly traded company, or an up and coming startup, trying to make a good first impression in your respective market. With this comes the responsibility of knowing how to manage and pick your battles through all the noise.

If you are on Twitter/Facebook representing your company, you have a few different responsibilities:

  1. Syndicate meaningful, relevant and useful content (whether it’s your own or an outside party’s)
  2. Monitor tone.
  3. Respond to valid inquiries.
  4. Research new potential prospects/markets.
  5. Damage control.

Damage Control

For this post I’ll be focusing on #5 from the above list. One of the most important PR aspects of your job is watching out for bad media coverage, misconstrued news, inaccurate information/statements, manipulation of content for malicious purposes, and the inevitable “brushfire” that can take off like a flaming bullet-train constructed entirely of retweets, moving faster than the speed of Twitter’s API read/write count per second. (Holy run-on sentence Batman.)

As most seasoned PR professionals (which I am not) know, you need to have a damage control strategy and process in place for when the proverbial thorn comes out of nowhere and sticks your company in the ribs until you can find the right tools to extract it. Social media is obviously no exception and needs to be part of that overall process/strategy.

One question I’m asked often is, “How do I know when to respond to a problem tweet, post or person, and to what extent if at all?” While there’s no silver bullet answer because almost every situation is different in it’s subtleties, there are a few things you should think about.

Rules of Engagement

As a father of 3 active boys, I’ve learned to pick my battles almost hourly and am reminded constantly to keep this thought in my arsenal when doing my job online. In SM it’s imperative that you do the same. Not every complaint is worth yours or your company’s time. Some of them are worthless, some are worth noting and others require engagement on some level. Be efficient in your choice of customer entanglement. :-) Here are a few types of posters that I’ve seen and how I responded:

  1. The Strobe – In a flash, this person will usually say something once and with much emotion and superfluous punctuation, yet no detail, and then be done with it. Example: “<yourcompanyname> SUCKS!!!!!!”. No action to be taken here. Because they’ve provided no newsworthy detail in this post and most will see them as whiners anyhow. Chances are they are not an influencer. Nothing to see here folks, keep moving.
  2. The Heckler – This is an upgraded version of The Strobe. They will post multiple times hoping that their emotional, yet information-less, rant sort of ‘takes off’ and has it’s own snowball effect. Again with this one though, most of their posts are emotional and not often substantiated with any background. You *should* keep an eye on them however because they do have the time and energy to put into it and will probably keep an eye on your company for mistakes.
  3. The Investigator – This person is as thorough in documenting their issues as they are in their delivery of information to the web for all to see. If there is an issue, they will most likely have the story and the facts to back up their claim. Watch very closely for posts by these types and take them seriously. It is highly recommended that you reach out to these people immediately, opening up some dialog to validate their claims. Many times their content and/or story are capable of unearthing weaknesses in your company and/or it’s products and services.

Be Cool, Go With Your Gut

At the end of the day, you know your company better than anyone else (or at least you should) out there when it comes to public perception and reputation because you observe it all day. Simply continue paying close attention to all the streams of information that are relevant and act accordingly. Just make sure to triple check yourself before reacting to anything, and work very closely with your PR team and management to ensure that you are all on the same page when picking your battles, because there will be many of them for you to choose from, sometimes daily.

Onward.

Social Media: Perception, Trust, Influence, Control

Posted by Rich Harris – January 28, 2010

Human Perception – Intangible Yet In Control of Humanity

Since humans began walking the earth, how they perceive the world around them dictates the direction of humanity. In my opinion, it is very clearly Pavlovian in nature. When we are born, we have a default set of electrical impulses and chemical/hormonal responses that make up who we are. Once the process of pregnancy is done, we are then thrust into the world and from that very moment that we are born, inhaling that first breath of air outside of the womb, our senses are stimulated, taking input, processing it, categorizing it, labeling it, assigning physiological responses to it, and so forth. Life experiences and environmental influences, if even on a small level at first, start shaping our perceptions immediately and thus the process of environmental influence on our brains begins. This environmental influence is the foundation on which the building blocks of our perception of the world are stacked over time for the rest of our lives. Environmental influence and these building blocks are what you as a social marketer need to understand and have spinning in the back of your head when you are digging deep in search of that golden soft spot with your current and potential audiences.

The Connection

Now, while I know that I geeked out a little bit in the first section of this blog post giving you all my worst impression of Bill Nigh the Anthropological Science Guy, my focus here is to help really break down social marketing in more cerebral scientific terms. After all, ultimately there truly is an equation for all this stuff. Can social media be broken down to a chemical/molecular level? Of course it can, just like everything else….I’m sure either way however, there’s a chance I sound crazy, and more importantly, I hope you feel compelled to question me on it. :-)

I’ll now connect my science rant with the title of this blog post: Whether you want to call it ‘building positive brand awareness with conversation’ or ‘social media’, personally I think perception control through influence is really what this comes down to. We need to learn how to harness everyone’s perception by understanding how to influence it on a deeper level. We all want to tweet, syndicate, and converse. We all want everyone on the planet to follow our company and become it’s fan. The biggest problem however that execs have expressed concern about with social media is that it makes them feel like their company’s message is out of control out there in the interwebs. Understandable.

SM is a tad bizarre in that you need to be able to focus on celebrating and embracing it’s freedom and socialness while simultaneously keeping your company’s reputation and perception on the up and up which is done through SOME sort of control. I know most will wince at the thought of putting the words ‘social media’ and ‘control’ in the same sentence but I’m all about using a combo of understanding how the process of human perception and response can be exploited to get people to not just feel good about your company, but to feel even better about influencing someone else’s perception of your company; a much more valuable measurement.

Creating Perception

So all those building blocks of perception I mentioned in the borderline mad scientist intro paragraph I whipped up at the top should be heavily regarded because they are moldable, morphable, and can be sculpted and shaped through all types of influence. Social media being no exception of course. The path to these building blocks is a good first impression created by their observations of your company on the various social platforms. Knowing your audience and where to find them in the sea of Twitter/Facebook noise is key. Once you have that nailed, make sure your content/tweets/positive customer engagements are happening publicly there for them to see. Those are good catalysts for these new potential customers to give you ‘access’ to molding their perception of you….letting their consumer guard down, establishing at least some initial trust, etc.

Managing Perception

After you’ve gained that initial level of trust through your positive and targeted first impressions, maintaining that moving forward is key. As I sit here all day every day and watch my 24″ screen dedicated to nothing but streams of Twitter search word columns using TweetDeck, while my other monitor watches a few other tools, I am reminded daily about the importance of maintenance. While you can’t control what people are gonna say, you CAN keep tabs in realtime about the overall perception of your company or brand (we all know that already). Watching this stuff on behalf of (and sometimes in defense of after some bad PR) can feel like an overwhelming digital version of Whack-A-Mole, ensuring that you catch every bad piece of press to counter and every good piece of press to augment. I can’t reiterate enough the importance of making the maintenance part of your social media role an extremely high priority. If you do not, you leave the mercy of your company’s public influence to the wolves.

Onward.

Twitter Lists & Business: Perception Analysis

Posted by Rich Harris – January 15, 2010

The List Goes On…

Twitter list-making has almost turned into a sort of technological modern day scrap booking. People can now organize and categorize their interests and influencers and easily share them with others. Twitter lists have also created nice clean SEO-friendly URL’s to keep all the search engines happy and thriving. When it comes to your business on Twitter however,  there’s much more going on here…

Customers (Humans) Are Control Freaks

Businesses should pay a little attention to the plain list numbers (quantity) but really should be paying to attention to more than just how many lists they are on. The number of lists is an ok high-level metric and is always good for business/SEO. However, the quantity of lists is, in my opinion, irrelevant when it comes to the real benefit. It is irrelevant in the same way the number of followers became irrelevant on Twitter after it exploded early last year. When your company is added to a list on Twitter and eventually (and hopefully) 100′s and 1000′s of lists, you immediately get insight into what people and partners are thinking about your company, how they are categorizing you in their minds, and are essentially giving away their perception of where your company stands inside their heads. Humans need to assign categories to everything based on how they feel about it emotionally and Twitter lists are no exception. Because of this, businesses should be paying close attention to these lists as they continue to grow.

As you expand your Twitter footprint, continue the ongoing perception analysis as the social media expert for your company and clients, I highly recommend including Twitter list analysis into your overall marketing/social media dashboard.

Onward.

Social Media: B2B, It’s About Interaction Analysis Silly!

Posted by Rich Harris – November 30, 2009

Dude, Social Media for B2B, Everyone’s Talking About It, Bro.

b2b-technology-marketing-agency-wordle-3One of the hottest topics in social media as it pertains to corporate, is how to incorporate social media into a company’s currently existing B2B strategy and initiatives. I’ve witnessed several discussions about this topic. The bottom line is that the solution is NOT in the tools available (Twitter, Facebook). The solution is not hiring some agency to set up an account on every social site.

Social media strategies and proposed solutions should only be created based on analysis. There are companies and agencies that have come to this conclusion on their own (a good thing), however the main issue still exists. Most of these entities are analyzing the wrong things to generate their strategy. Of course it’s important to know your audience/segment/demo…whatever you wanna call it. It’s important to understand what your top 3 competitors are or aren’t doing. That’s all standard blah blah blah…

The fruits of social media for any business, any type of business, in any industry, come from the enhancement of interactions. Enhancing the key interactions are the core of all social media successes in my opinion. Those key interactions are the ones that catalyze the rest of your efforts across the board.

Where Should You Start?

With B2B, it’s a little different. Don’t waste your time focusing on the hype of the currently popular tools like you would in the consumer world. B2B is a different beast because B2B customers, relationships and conversations are NOT typically the type that you share with the general public. When you are thinking about how to deal with your distys and the sales channel, remember that Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the zillions of other tier 2/tier 3 sites were not created, nor have they thrived, because they had the nature of B2B in mind. It’s hard not to wince when I hear companies say stuff like, “I know we NEED social media in our B2B strategy, it’s the latest thing and we don’t wanna miss the boat.” What people should really be saying is, “I know we need to enhance our relationships and interactions with our customers on the B2B side. If social media has a place here, let’s use it.”

A Scenario

237303-main_FullAs the top social media person in your company, you are approached by some inside sales people that manage the big accounts. They heard about social media, have heard of Twitter, Facebook, and so on. They want to incorporate social media into their B2B program/marketing roadmap but aren’t sure how to go about it.

Here are some simple steps to get started that I’ve been using:

  1. Discovery Time. Set up a meeting with your new stakeholders so that you can discuss the entire process for the way they communicate and interact with their customers. Find out all points in the process with a customer that they have a direct interaction, human to human. Find out if there’s a site/application that they interact with where feedback or communications with those customers happens, like Salesforce.com, etc. EVERY touch point of interaction needs to be noted whether it’s a person OR a process that interacts with them. An accurate picture of this will help you get closer to identifying the gaps that need to be filled. Also it’s important to ask them if they know what their customers currently need and have, and what they need but don’t have. Your stakeholders should be able to answer those questions quickly. If they can’t, then they have approached you too early in the game.
  2. Get More Feedback. Your stakeholders will know a lot about their customers. If social media is new to their fold however, I don’t think it hurts to give them some homework. Have them pick out 5-10 of their most difficult and opinionated customers. They should let those customers know that they are exploring introducing some social media concepts into the relationship and process and would like some feedback on ways they could improve on communicating/interacting. Based on those results, it’s time to begin the construction of your plan.
  3. Choose Your Drug. You now have a list of interactions to take a look at, know who their audience is, and what their needs are. The next steps are to assess with the stakeholder what kinds of interactions seem to really work and which ones seem to fall on deaf ears (which we will throw out of the equation immediately for this new social media plan). Zoom in on the good stuff and research if there’s currently a social tool, site, or product offering that could help augment those things that currently work. Keep in mind that there may not be. Most social media sites were initially designed with nimble, chaotic, public conversation/interaction in mind so I can tell you right now that trying to bend and sculpt the public consumer factor of something like Facebook and Twitter, is not the right approach and will fail (unless of course Facebook/Twitter decide they want to change their whole model and reason for existence to serving enterprise level B2B marketing initiatives – probably not gonna happen). If you found something out there that works, then congrats and move forward with an execution for testing it out. If you cannot find a solution in a pretty little package with a bow on it somewhere then you may have to explore spending some budget on custom apps/sites that will serve your specific purpose. If you go that route, your risk better be pretty calculated as that path can get costly.
  4. Testing 1, 2, 3. Is This Thing On? Testing your new idea in a live environment is crucial and exciting. Remember that since this may be uncharted territory for your company’s B2B effort, you may run into surprising results. In some of my experiences, I’ve set up expectations and not only were they not met, I witnessed something completely new about my customers that I wasn’t aware of, just based on how they interacted. Take that stuff seriously folks. Those are the nuggets of social media decision-making right there.
  5. Execute. Analyze. Tweak. Repeat. If you are an experienced marketer, you know this routine well. If you don’t know this routine well, you shouldn’t be in marketing or any other line of work that requires analysis and ROI. :-)

Go On With Yo’ Bad Self.

I hope some of this stuff helps you. These are some things that I’m doing right now and they seem to be working well as a fundamentally basic approach. I know that the variables in play for every company are so vast and at times amorphous. As I learn more and more through my experiences, running through these exercises with my current company and other clients, I’ll post the meat of what went down, regardless if what I tried succeeded or failed.

Onward.

Facebook: Are You A Stalker or Researcher?

Posted by Rich Harris – November 18, 2009

Stalking-TwitterSoooo…..Are You?

The general public is full of crazies. This validates our assumption that the online world is full of crazier crazies because now people can be more anonymous, and anonymity is the main survival tool of any genuine weirdo, allowing him or her to carry on. Of course, there’s the serious issue of stalkers on Facebook and MySpace, which is not to be taken lightly. There’s also the harmless stuff, the running joke of, “Hey, I’m glad we got to meet face to face finally, I’ve been stalking you on Facebook (tee hee). Let’s go hang out,” and all turns out friendly and good and you gain some new friends.

I was thinking about this the other day about how many people I’ve connected with online as acquaintances after meeting them through friends, or at business-related mixers or events. You know the routine…you go to a trade show while on a business trip, or a party somewhere, or even just a local watering hole and strike up a conversation with a perfect stranger. After you meet someone that doesn’t seem like Jeffrey Dahmer’s illegitimate love child, you ask if they’re on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. You get back to your hotel room or home base and get online, find them, and add them. They accept your request and you are now “connected” or “friends.”

Presumptuousness Is The Bastard Child Of Fear.

So it’s no mystery that the human majority takes a look at someone they don’t know and absorbs what microscopic sliver of information about that person they can get their senses on (hair color, their interaction in a restaurant they just witnessed, the wedding ring on their finger). Then their next step is to make massive detailed assumptions about how/who/what that person really is about, their background, their personality, their life history, and so on. It’s human nature. We’re all (to various degrees) innately uncomfortable with not knowing everything there is to know about the people we see around us. Where there are informational gaps, our hearts and minds do their damnedest to fill all those gaps as fast as we possibly can with whatever so that we can comfortably continue to deny some of our own insecurities and the reason we are drumming up all this bullshit.

I understand that there are situations where your common sense forces you to observe a situation so that you can genuinely protect yourself. For example, going into a dark alley in the wrong neighborhood where you’ve just seen a drug deal or “transaction” go down, lends itself to some safe assumptions, the main one being: “I’m probably sacrificing my personal physical safety by taking that particular path to the grocery store.” I think those assumptions are warranted and backed by sanity.

However, for the rest of the non-criminally active portion of the population, think about how exhausting it is that we do that, walking around pigeon-holing everyone. Think about how much energy we spend latching our own neuroses onto something so silly and intangible. I think that tools like Facebook and MySpace and the social sites in general may be providing a positive spin on how we meet new people and form our positive and negative opinions about them moving forward.

Deconstruct. Reconstruct.

Over recent months I’ve had the opportunity to actually go hang out with people face to face that I had initially met on Facebook. Before we even got together I made the effort to comb through their photo albums, check out their status history, take a gander at content they had posted, and read about them on the info section of their profile. Since I’ve started to make a general practice of doing that with random people I’m connected with on Facebook, a couple of interesting things have happened for me.

  • First and foremost, it was a reminder that I don’t even know a fraction of what I thought I knew about people that I’m connected with online. This immediately set off the process of deconstructing my assumptions, pre-conceived opinions/notions, and heaps of information that I had assembled about these people. In an effort to protect oneself, these assumptions (more often than not) never give people the benefit of the doubt….especially if you are a skeptical, cynical bastard like me.
  • The next step is that I began to build up or construct a new picture of this person in my head based on the content that they provided about themselves online. Unless they’re all pathological liars, I felt like I had more valid info now and was able to fill in the gaps with data that was probably much closer to the truth about who they were than all the crap I had concocted in my head prior without any of their content.

The End Result.

So as I was starting to go through this exercise of researching someone before actually hanging out with them, I realized a message was being heavily reiterated to me. My experience when meeting this person for the first time, with me focusing on a more informed opinion about this person, made the get together way more interesting and smooth. I knew what topics would be better to avoid, which ones might spark really good conversation, etc. It’s funny too because people are almost surprised (and probably uncomfortable) that I went and crawled all their info beforehand. The sad thing is that the concept of me wanting to research them first so that I was better prepared socially to interact with them means that being unprepared and uncomfortable is a social standard for many. This to some extent means that it’s probably more comfortable to them if you just make the status quo assumptions because then I’d be going in blind, squirming to find our common ground right there on the fly, which always sucks.

I’m not the first to come to these conclusions by any means but my recent experiences with Facebook in particular have illuminated a lot when it comes to human interaction patterns and reminded me that, as a whole, when it comes to socializing, people have some serious work to do, myself included.

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.

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.

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

Social Media: Educate Your Internal Customers, Don’t Forget About Them

Posted by Rich Harris – September 16, 2009

421922_p3d-cinema-audience-posters-7633482They Might Be Old School, But They’re Still Here For A Reason

There are several key older companies that still reign supreme in 100′s of different industries. A lot of these older and larger companies are still mainstays in their respective industries and some of them will probably never go away because of how essential they are.

Quite a few of these companies are also interested and curious about social media, what it is, how can they leverage it, and what path in social media makes the most sense for them and their business. If you are in charge of social media at one of these companies either as an internal employee/contributor or as a consultant, you need to drive home the most important concept for these types of clients: Education.

Take Ownership, Empower Your Constituents

If you are at the helm of social media in your company or for your client, don’t just start creating accounts on social sites, doing all the ‘cool stuff’ people expect you to do, and then wonder why no one is including you in marketing meetings or wonder why no one seems to be as excited as you. You may find that most don’t have the understanding, hence the same passion for it, that you do because they just don’t know anything yet.

Don’t get frustrated that your company isn’t into it.  Maybe they need to learn first.

Social media came into play so freakin’ fast and is still like a non-stop bullet train of change that many have ever taken the time to explain it to them and get them educated and up to speed. If you approach it in a way that is all about you being the social media rockstar and make it all about you and your silly job title, then you are doing social media, and more importantly, the company in question, a HUGE disservice. Good marketing is about your ability to put your internal and external customers first and your high level excitement about the prospect of elevating others.

I’ve seen lots of blog posts about educating execs and directors on social media to get them on board. This is all great (and required) discussion. It’s obviously a big part of pitching SM to companies. However, remember that just because you sold all the management on SM, that is only the beginning. You’ve barely walked in the door of their house. Management buying into your pitch and cutting you a check is only a very early step in getting started.

As a social media professional it is your job to educate companies on the following topics (at the bare minimum):

  • The pros AND cons of social media. You know the pros already but they need to be made aware of all the cons like how noisy Twitter is, the decent amount of time it takes to invest in real relationships and maintain them effectively, the risk of corporate transparency and how it holds you accountable on a new level, small mistakes can lead to huge social media brush fires on Twitter.
  • Cost/ROI comparisons against traditional marketing methodologies.
  • The value of “quality of quantity” as opposed to just quantity when it comes to your leads/followers/fans.
  • Pick one site like Twitter, Facebook, etc. and let people ask you 8,000 questions about them. When explaining the facets of any of the sites like Twitter, etc. try and draw similarities where you can to actions your audience has taken in the past with traditional marketing so they can associate the their historical knowledge and efforts with the new lingo and tools. You may even want to ask for the details about a campaign they’ve run and then you illustrate for them the ‘social media version’.

Some Tips On Getting Started

  • Set up brown bag lunches/meetings with sales, marketing, PR and poll everyone on their knowledge of social media. Make sure to note all ‘weak spots’ or ‘opportunities’ (what I’d rather call them) and start framing your education material around the results.
  • Sit down with business units that interact with customers directly and indirectly on behalf of the company and find out what they’ve been doing traditionally, what has failed, what has succeeded, and figure out how to translate some of those successful initiatives into the social media equation. They’ll learn the value of social media incredibly fast if they can identify what they already know with all the new ways of execution.
  • Make it your mission to evangelize internally (without sounding like some trendy zealot) how the only difference between SM and traditional marketing is the nimble nature of it because of the internet/tools. Everyone needs to accept and buy in to the fact that giving power to the people and their opinions now demands more respect and transparency and that your company has no choice but to be a part of it.

At the end of the day remember that you are only as successful as the people that genuinely back you and understand what you are doing. Social media is and always will be about everyone other than you.

Onward….