I attended a marketing conference put on by my daughters university. While I only attended one day, I was fortunate enough to hear the 4 finalists to present their Unilever case study. Sponsor Unilever, presented a scenario of one of their consumer products with poor market-share. The students were challenged with coming up with a plan to change that.


First, I was blown away by the polish and professionalism of the presentations. I was disappointed by the lack of social media as part of their plans. The majority of the room had probably not been near a TV that day, but I would bet every student checked in on Facebook. Yet social media was barely on the radar of the first few presentations. Happily, the final presentation, and the students who ultimately won the case competition, factored social media big into their plan.


The conference closed with Christopher Luxon, president of Unilever Canada giving a presentation. I think his words were as relevant to veteran marketers as they were to a university aged audience. Key messages that stuck with me were "Seek conversations with your consumers", and "Small actions big differences". Both very actionable via social media tools today.

Even with that positive endorsement of social media, I talked to a few students and company representatives and there is still lots of caution. I don't blame them. Giving your message to the masses to be forward on through their social networks is ripe for abuse and prone to error. AdAge has a great article called "Marketers Rushing to Haiti's Aid Hit Twit-Storm of Misinformation" that talks about well intentioned people forwarding the wrong message forward, or event chastising companies who the public thought could do more. There's lots of "goodness" in the article though so have a read.

So what's the solution for a marketer? Wait until social media grows up? I think the answer is to treat social media like it is grown-up. Knee jerk, poorly planned social media campaigns can fail just as a misprinted coupon, or a misplaced media-buy could fail. Sadly the ease at which we can launch a campaign in social media lets us run off half-cocked.

Factor social media into every campaign. Plan it. Plan how you deploy it, don't just shotgun it to as many locations as possible. Measure it. Deploy the content in such a way that you can track the success. Something as simple as a "Tweet" with a measurable URL might mean the difference between knowing IF social media had impact or wondering later. It might also ensure the original message does not get lost.

Get the data and keep the data. Marketing is a business of metrics and predictability. Next campaign, know what worked, what did not. Feel free to experiment, but don't make the same mistake twice.





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I know this comes a little late but I've been doing lots on identity
lately so I am just trying this out. We all read and hear about
technology that can take an image of a face and identify who it is. Not
so long ago that would have been the stuff of the "Conspiracy Theory"
types.

I just installed the latest version of Google's Picasa 3.6. I happen to
use it for my family's pictures and today it installed an update. I
read about "what" new features were added and realized "name-tagging"
was added recently. Basically it scans all your photos and starts to
group them by similarity. You start by identifying "who" each photo is,
then Picasa takes off and starts to recommend photos as likely of that
person. I have to say its impressive. I have spent hours tagging
photos manually so I could have pictures of my family grouped together.
Sadly I take photos faster than I caption and tag them.

The web ran into a similar problem years ago. As a result "text" search
engines like Google and Alta Vista became part of how we find
information. With more and more content being delivered in the form of
video and photos we face the threat of the good content being buried
under useless content.

http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=93773

Does this have the danger of being used for evil and not good? Of course
it does. My theory is that once us consumers get it, it has already been
in the hands their hands for a while. I'm just glad we finally get to
play with it too.

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People use the phrase "Tipping Point" a lot but I think it really applies here.  Like a chlds teeter-totter, you can walk up one side of it and no change, then you pass the tippingpoint and all the change happens at once.  The teeter-totter flips.

One of my favorite blogger/journalists reports on Pepsi changing their Superbowl advertising strategy this year.  Instead of a Superbowl ad, they will be spending $20mm on a soclai media campaign.

Read marks Article here.

Has Pepsi Tipped the Social Media Scales?

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For those who don't follow me on Twitter, I spoke at the New England Mail Order Association last week.  While the focus of NEMOA is direct mail and catalogs, it was a great experience for me as a participant.  Being knee deep in ROI and social media, it was nice to be with a group that does not discount a product without having a pretty good idea what the reaction, and sales uplift will be.  These people know their numbers and their customers.

To be frank, It never occurred to me that catalogers invented the notion of exploiting the "long tail".  That is finding a niche market independent of where they live and targeting them.  In their case they exploited it by  using the postal service.  Of course, NEMOA members are e-commerce experts too, but they know the value of interuptive marketing. 

My presentation was really an overview of Facebook, Twitter and the power of "friends" networks.  Then I got into building branded communities around the most common social media use case. 

I'm not sure the value of these slides without the narrative and bad humor I injected, but you can view them here. NEMOA presentation.





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I don't blog or tweet as much as I should. Generally I do when I am passionate about a topic. Last year when I blogged about ROI, it felt like the whole Social Media industry was saying it was too hard to put a dollar value on social media. I spoke about it at the Web 2.0 conf in NY as well. "No tangible ROI" is generally a kiss of death when trying to get a project funded at the exec level. I blogged about it then because it was a big issue with clients, and because I thought social media vendors needed to address it. I'm the CTO here at Awareness, so I got to focus our thinking about this in our next round of product features. I'll talk about the fruits of that later in this post. Of course we are always talking to clients and internally about how ROI is tied to what your "use case is for social media. If you are publishing blogs by your exec team, that has very different purpose and return-on-investment than a community that might be offering "peer support". Shortly after that we launched BPC's or "Best Practice Communities" to deploy our platform in ways to specific to each use case. Target the use case, and you can target a specific ROI benefit. You can read more on that in my Post "Stop whining about ROI and start digging for numbers "

Having BPC's in place meant we could enhance our reporting with dashboards dedicated to each use case. After all, if I want to look at a dashboard for a support community, I want to know how many questions have been asked/answered. If I am looking at a dashboard for an executive blog, I want to know how many comments have been left, how many page views that site gets, and how many leads have been generated from that activity. We added "Net Promoter Score " to all dashboards to make sure customer satisfaction and "referral" are kept as a measurement. You can read about our release of "Dashboards " here.

I'm thrilled to give you the inside scoop on our latest enhancement of our dashboards. Our dev team has been referring to this as "Dollars for Dashboards". The premise is simple and goes back to the blog post I wrote last year. Software can capture a metric, but it becomes a good ROI measurement when you add a cost/value multiplier (that you endorse and have agreement on). The platform will tell us how many questions were answered in a Support Community, you tell us what a support call is worth to you, and presto we can present a dashboard that shows ROI over a period of time. And next exec review you can make a statement like "We saved $24,514.25 in support calls with our community last quarter".

---

The dashboards take your input on the value of the various metrics we capture. Then we use those dollar values in the report. So now, for example, you can view our peer support community and see how many questions were answered last week, and what was the dollar value of that activity. Each dashboard allows you to edit your values by answering simple questions.

Here is a sample of some of the values we let you put in.

• What is the value of an answered question?
  
• What is the value of a new registered member?
  
• As a lead
  
• As better demographic info on an existing customer
  
• what is the value of a comment?
• what is the value of a shared innovation?
• What is the value of a page view?
  

We aren't stopping there. Architecturally we've added the ability to put a numerical value on a post. This will allow community admin's to put arbitrary values on a piece of content. There are a lot of use cases here, but in an innovation community one idea may have a huge value. Now there is a place to track and document that. The team has a ton of ideas for next iteration of this feature, but it feels like it's a pretty big step for the industry to address ROI at the platform level.

Looking forward to the near future, I can't see slowing down in this area. I can see adding values to each profile question, and voting. If I am serious about lead generation, then certain profile responses would make them higher and lower value. The same applies if I am serious about improving customer service. The more I know about my customer the better I can serve them, and sell to them. ROI is not a tough nut to crack, but you definitely need to factor it in to the planning process of a community from the beginning.
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The last couple of months have been a little nerve wracking for me. Google stopped indexing us.  

Google sent us a notice saying...

"While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages
were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be
found here..."

Its a long story about why they stopped indexing us, and its a little techie.  The net-net was some content with links to buy Viagra (why is that always that product?) were inserted into some user generated content.  Of course we remedied that immediately, removed the  offending profiles and clicked on the Google webmaster page to re-index our site.

And we waited.... 

We would have loved to follow up with Google, but you can't contact them.  You simply submit
and wait.  You might get an automated response.. but nothing you can reply-to. So everyday we resubmitted our site.  Finally 2 months later we are back on the index.  The funny thing is that although the offending content is gone from our site, Google themselves have kept it cached. (cached means they are showing an old copy).  So our site does not show it.. but Google does.  That's ironic.  I guess the act of taking us out of the index was less about quality and more about a rap on the knuckles for Awareness

This was a minor inconvenience for us but some companies draw most of their leads from search engine marketing.  Had we been one of them, this episode in the Google penalty box could have been devastating.  While researching how to fix the issue I found that there are a ton of companies in the same boat.  Although Google's mantra is "Do no evil", when they pass judgment, there is no way to connect with another human being to remedy it.

During the episode, our Google Adsense ads continued to show.  So Google had no problem showing a link to our content as a paying advertiser, just not in the unpaid search results?  Should Google's mantra be "Do no evil unless you pay us"?

Search is now a small part of peoples online marketing toolbox.  More and more brands (and I mean notable brands) are creating Facebook Fan pages, YourTube channels, LinkedIn groups, and Twitter accounts to represent their products and companies.  Serious effort goes into building these as destinations where customers can go for information and to meet other customers.  At the drop of a hat, LinkedIn could change its rules and remove your group, or limit your interaction. Twitter could remove your account as too commercial.   While these sites are free, the time and effort invested in them can be significant.

So what is a company to do? Of course as marketers we want to get in front of the millions of eyeballs on these sites.  If you are an established brand its important to diversify.  Is Twitter a fad? It doesn't matter if you have not put all your eggs in that basket.  A few smart tools and you can participate in several places at once.  This very blog post will automatically be published as a link in Twitter, which will update my FriendFeed, and my Facebook account.  With a little more effort I could syndicate it even more broadly. The key is to "own" the customer interactions.  Its nice to get comments in YouTube, but if possible bring that customer back to your site for the discussion. Create a Facebook fan page, but in it promote your own community.  In your own community you have access to the profile info that your customers share, and the content.
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Today Twitter broke again.. too much traffic.

3 Hollywood celebrities die and the consciousness of the internet can't handle the traffic. (by the way, I am saddened by their deaths, I don't mean to trivialize that)

I know I dedicate too much time to Twitter in this blog. There are so many aspects of it to comment on. From the spammers who are trying to exploit it, to the people building their "personal brand" by creating thousands of followers, to the companies making real efforts to add transparency to their customer communications.

At the end of the day, nobody likes the Twitter application itself.  It's the public stream of consciousness we want to read and write to. People tweet form their cell phones, third party apps or by clicking a "share this" link in an article. So if it's all just the data, why aren't the bigger players stepping up?

The transition would be easy.. register your Twitter account.. some giant database run by a giant internet power suck all your information out, and we all move on.  RIP Twitter. 

Amazon, with your "elastic cloud services" you provide, you must be set up with a LOT of hardware and availability? How about setting up a web service for people to post status updates into one giant database, and track their friends? See my past post on some enhancements you might want to think about.

Google? How about you? I'm happy with the speed my search results come back. I've never seen a "FAIL WHALE" pop up during that request. It would set you up great for rolling out Google Wave.

All we want is some borg-like company to manage the info for us. Then all the twitter application developers would happily point to that stream to save their information. We'd also happily cross post to Twitter before it died completely. So let's all agree, Twitter was a great idea that was poorly implemented. Now get out of the way and someone build it right.
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As many of you have read, I've had some great conversations with my friends at Cisco Webex.  We use Webex to present to hundreds of people.  Over the last year I have met folks from their eLearning, and eMarketing groups and since then I have begun to think deeper about how we can use both synchronous and asynchronous communication to foster a community. 

Let me explain.  "Synchronous" simply means you are communicating back and forth and for the most part you are reponding to what was just spoken.  "Asynchronous" refers to how online communities work.You can go back in time and comment on something someone said 5 days ago.  You read the conversation in any order you want.    When chatting about this with my friend Dana Bowler at Webex we spoke for quite a while on how the synchronous events could draw the community together and re-engage them in the community after the event.  The result of that chat is a Webinar we will both Co-host. 

Click here to register.  Details are below.  Looking forward to the discussion!

Webinar: The Facilitated Discussion
with Dana Bowler and David Carter - June 18, 2009 2:00 PM EST

What better way to add relevance to your online community and build relationships with its members than through real-time discussions?

Join Dana Bowler, Global Collaboration Consultant at Cisco Webex, and David Carter Founder and CTO of Awareness Inc. on June 18 at 2PM ET as they discuss the marriage of Synchronous and Asynchronous communication within online communities.

In this session, Dana will share best practices around facilitating a topic based discussion. You will learn how to engage the audience in conversation and the best ways to weave the experience back into your community. David will take us through "Points of Enthusiasm" and how to leverage the excitement of your audience to build participation and conversation within your community. In addition, he will discuss the value of archived content as a way to drive ongoing participation with your community.

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Call me crazy and maybe I have been focusing too much on Facebook Connect.  Frankly very few people ask, but I did get a question about OpenSocial today. I Googled "LinkedIn Open Social" and the first hit was October 31, 2007.  Hmmm, not the beehive of activity I was hoping for.  Most of the hits were the press announcements from .. ah.. October 31, 2007.

I finally found a link on the OpenSocial.org  .  It wasn't easy but I found a page on LinkedIn for API access.  I filled out the API request, and here was my response.





So, how does one portray themselves as a compelling LinkedIn partner without being able to develop an integration?  There is no doubt that LinkedIn is a force in social media, but it took a long time to get here and in that time other social media home runs have waltzed in and claimed a big piece.  These might not be competitors.. or are they?

What about an enterprise that wants to write something for staff to use to access their LinkedIn data?

Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube all have community aspects to their offering and all are exponentially easier to work with as a developer. Only Facebook even comes close to being a place for me to connect with collegues on (but thats still a big "Yikes") .  So wake up LinkedIn, time to embrace third party developers.


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With Twitter being the hottest online space at the moment, marketers are trying to crack the code on getting to twitter users.  Lets face it, Twitter is broke, and in the exact same state email was at in the early days.  Why not  try to exploit it.  We tolerate a flow of junk because its new and cool.  We can easily point to a relevant tweet to justify our obsession.  Spammers see an opportunity too and are mirroring genuine behavior. I see a number of tactics in use.  Don't be offended if you personally use these tactics for your own personal tweeting. Spammers want to look like you.  However, ask yourself if you use these tactics because you are trying to get the most out of the conversation, or are you personally trying to attract followers?  You may be a spammer. 

Follow lots of people.

Sure, you aren't really reading their content, but if you follow them, they might follow you back.  Its easy to find your targets. http://search.twitter.com will return a list.  What makes your brand look better than a gazillion followers?  Some spammers even un-follow if people don't reciprocate the follow (the nerve).  They don't want their follow/following ratio to get out of hand.. they might look like spammers.

Get lots of followers. 

If you are a spammer you need eyeballs reading your stuff and following your links. Do people read everyone they follow? The followed profiles certainly get more attention than the general twitter stream of content , but even the mavens I follow in social media put so much content that is not relevant   to me that I barely notice their good stuff.  If you watch there are gems, but these same people are also offering political  opinion, sports shout-outs, responses to other tweets.  The noise in twitter is numbing.  If they follow you though.. you can send them direct messages. 

Send Direct Messages

Your first chance to send a direct message is the auto-follow message.  "Thanks for following me, I look forward to reading your tweets.. click here to buy my book", or insert your favorite spammy message.

Hi-jack popular Hash Tags

Argh... (you caught me.. I was "grugging" there for a sec)  I hate this one. For good reason, people tag their conversations which allows you to search a "topic", not just a person.  You will see things like #awarenessinc used by our company in our tweets so people can group information about our company or during our webinars.  Actually combine the two  (hash tags and webinars) and you have a Twebinar.  Say it "twebinar, its fun.  Here's what spammers do.  Spammers create an account, watch for trending topics in Twitter, then join the conversation. People will say "hey, who is this guy?",  and read the profile, or even follow blindly like Lemmings running off a cliff .  Sadly it's what you should do if you really want to be part of a conversation, spammers know that.  I click a lot of profiles and see if people are actually writing about the content I want to read on a regular basis, then I follow. 

Post often. 

If people are getting a flooded with tweets, make sure you are in the stream of content.. often.  Its tough, because you have to think of stuff to tweet about. Those doing it manually have learned to just speak random thoughts out loud.  "Wow this hamburger is good", tweeted the social media expert.  Try it in real life.  Walk down the street just blurting out things that pop into your head.  Pretty soon you will realize your side of the street is relatively free of people and the general public are walking on the other side.  For some reason its perfectly acceptable on Twitter.   Yes, I have started to do it on Twitter.  I can argue for or against it, BUT spammers know that.  See the next point.

And lastly my new favorite...

ReTweet posts.

If new content is hard to write, retweet others.  If the this bubble we live in wasn't already the ultimate echo chamber before.. it is now.  The Retweet (see the "RT and @address in front of the tweeted message) has become an Twitter endorsement of your content. I am always flattered when someone thinks my content is so worthwhile they retweet it.  Especially if the content is retweeted by someone in the business.  I do it.  It beats the heck out of a "poke" or "nudge" or whatever you do to get somone's attention.  If I retweet you, assume I am saying "well done".  This morning, my post was retweeted by a Candy manufacturer.  Ummmm, not sure how that could be anything but an "auto-retweet" based on that fact that I used the word "candy" in the content. The content was clearly in the category of me posting random stuff.  No thought leadership there.  I commented that I was eating candy for breakfast, thanks to a package a client sent.   I could be wrong, maybe that company was endorsing that behaviour and thought of me as some dietary thought leader, but watch for it as a tactic.

If the fact that I have called out these tactics as spam tactics offends you.. don't be. I use them, and I like to feel when I do its genuine. Plus, the ultimate test of a spammer... If you are offended.. you are not a spammer ;)



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