Too often companies forget the second part of this scenario:
Firms are in business (1) to make profits by offering products and services
(2) to satisfy the unmet needs of their customers.
Too often they are so immersed in organization-centric thinking, that they don’t even realize their products or services may no longer be in sync with the marketplace, i.e., no one really likes their offerings/brand/support anymore.
This is where Social Media fits into Modern Business:
We are all customers. Everyone is a customer of someone else.
“Social media is important for business because the discussions between so many people bring information to us. We want people to talk and we want them to listen to us.” — [all quotes from Axel Schultze]
In the second meeting of the Social Media Academy Leadership class, Axel discussed how various social media “tools” [ i.e., sites/ platforms] enable businesses to grow their networks.
“If you have products or services, you can have conversations with people who use them. People may not be looking at your advertising, but if you ask someone what they think of your product, you will probably get an answer.”
WHERE DO YOU HAVE THESE DISCUSSIONS
or
Which sites do you use?
The common wisdom is that you go where your customers are. These days, the most popular hangouts are Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Business people need profiles on each of these sites, and businesses can have them as well.
“The demarcation between personal selves and business selves doesn’t really make sense any more. We need to take down these walls.”
The key to online presence building is to be deliberate, thoughtful, and very careful about everything you post online – no matter what the site or platform.
Four Social Media Objectives:
1) Extend reach with tools 2) Intensify the depth of your relationships 3) Broaden your knowledge 4) Revitalize your influennce
“When you do a survey, you get certain types of people who choose to respond. When you make telephone calls, if you have 20 effective conversations in one day, that is a good day. But with social media, you could easily have 200 interactions in a day.”
LEARN FROM YOUR MARKET: Get your hands around the Concepts. The tools may change, but you will be able to navigate the waves of innovation and continue to build on your experience to get the most from each new communication opportunity.
To find out, you can read student Synang Chhan’s Tips on Going Viral, but you may also want to know the scientific, i.e. observed and verifiable reasons behind the huge audiences for some Internet content — besides the fact that they are just plain funny.
Social media scientist, Dan Zarrella, conducted a webinar highlighting his research results into peoples’ behavior on the Internet. Here is what we learned to help us with our marketing strategies:
1. MYTH: Ideas spread because they are good. In reality, plenty of good ideas go nowhere, while some bad ones spread like wild fire.
2. MEME: The term is used to describe ideas that spread from person to person. Our world is made of memes — contagious units of our culture. MEMETICS is the study of cultural transfer.
3. EVOLUTION: Who or what survives? Those who compete best. What is evolution? Variation + competition = Evolution.
4. ITERATION: Try lots of campaigns and stick with what works.
5. IDEAS: These must adapt to pressures of society and be easily remembered. Ideas will be successful based on two factors: Longevity and Fecundity [# of offspring]. When you construct a campaign, you need to decide whether you are going for Long Term or for Quick Spread.
6. SOCIAL EXCHANGE: Every human action is an exchange of value.
“The more valuable an activity shared between members, the more frequently members will interact.”
7. SOCIAL PROOF: We learn by copying others. We value things that others value: because we think they know what they are doing.
8. INFORMATION VOIDS: Don’t let “voids” develop around your brand — that’s where rumors develop. Just think about Tiger Woods.
9. VIRAL: Self-replicating. Give people a reason to replicate. For example, the only way by saving a victim is by spreading a message.
10. REMIXING IDEAS: Your brand should be a box of crayons, not a rubber stamp, so that people can input suggestions — for something totally new that could go viral. Make New structure for Old content, e.g., modern Romeo & Juliet film. Make New content from and Old Structure, e.g. using an old ad design for a different product.
11. FUNNEL OF MARKETING: Exposure at top, then Awareness, and at the base is Motivation. Here is one of Dan’s articles: science of social media marketing
12. SEEDING: To gain exposure, you must reach a lot of people. Big Seeds = giving information to influential people. If you “seed” to influencers, your growth is exponential. Basic PR/Marketing strategy: Find and target Influencers.
13. COMBINED RELEVANCE: Why do people share? One reason is because friends find things [e.g. links] that are appropriate in more ways than one. For example, if your friend’s hobby is photography and she likes yoga, then you would definitely want to send photos of yoga poses you found online.
Why do YOU do do what you do online? For example, why do you retweet? The answer is scientific and the next post will show you how.
photo taken at Sausalito Art Festival 2009 – Judge’s first place pick at show
Author Tamar Weinberg is a community manager for Mashable, clearly the best source for Social Media news on the Net —
She knows her stuff AND you will, too, if you get a copy of this book, read it, and follow up by trying our just a small portion of the platforms and strategies described in careful detail . . . just one example:
There are more than ten pages just on social bookmarking sites Delicious and StumbleUpon.
Tamar’s Top Seven Reasons to be on the Web:
Establish your expertise.
Bring more traffic to your website.
Raise search engine rankings.
Increase sales.
Manage your reputation.
Enhance brand awareness.
Build relationships.
Here areNine Strategies for Social Media Marketing Success:
1) Establish goals for your social media marketing campaigns.
2) Create a strategy for executing your social marketing efforts.
3) Communicate effectively with the communities you intend to target.
4) Take charge of the conversation, even if it’s not on your website.
5) Gain exposure from participating among many social channels.
6) Utilize social media to handle a reputation management crisis.
7) Utilize blogs and bloggers to send messages to larger groups of individuals.
8] Leverage existing sites to market your products.
9) Craft content that is currently “hot” within many social media circles.
Some quotes to “get your hands around”:
“You can’t manage something you can’t measure.”
“On the Social Web, conversations happen WITH or WITHOUT you.”
“A Community Manager’s key function is humanizing an organization.”
“Strategy requires teamwork and idea generation.”
“Communities flourish because people are helping people.”
“If you consistently Listen, AND Give Back to your social media community, you will be miles ahead of the competition.”
12 different Online Reputations you should monitor:
Your name
Your company name
Your brand names
Your company executives
Your company’s media spokespeople
Your slogan or marketing message
The competition
Your industry
Your weaknesses
Your business partners
Your clients
Your intellectual property
Personally, I’ve made a list of [a] more than a dozen sites I’m going to check out in more depth, [b] a half dozen communities I’m going to join, and [c] 10 specific tips I’ve already started to adopt.
PS I really didn’t count, but I’m willing to bet there are MORE THAN 1,734 facts you’ll learn about social media from Tamar’s invaluable text.
For those of you who’ve already read it, let us know how it helped you.
Feeling left out because everyone’s buzzing about Twitter Lists . . . and you’re not?
Reminds me of how one of my good friends has had two dinner parties at her home in the last few weeks, and I wasn’t invited to either. But she did ask me for this weekend, so maybe there’s hope for all of us.
Fresh from a 30-minute webinar on Twitter Lists by Hubspot, I have decided to weigh in with my own . . .
List on Twitter Lists:
1. First off, Twitter Lists is a brand new social media/Twitter feature, so by the time we learn all there is to know, many aspects will change. And that’s OK. Really. Getting your feet wet in the evolving new technology makes it so much easier to capitalize on the opportunities you will find along the way — this is ESPECIALLY TRUE for businesses who’ve feared jumping onto the social media bandwagon.
a. COROLLARY: That means that the rest of this “List” may — or may not — be useful tomorrow/next week/next month . . .
2. Twitter is like a fire hydrant, according to the webinar, so Twitter Lists are like hoses, according to me.
b. COROLLARY: You can focus your Twitter streams and increase your Reach.
3. Webinar’s HOW-TO: (a) Follow the Lists of people you respect; (b) Create some of your own by going to your Follower list; and (c) Promote your lists via widget, FB, FF, and Twitter itself.
c. COROLLARY: Check out more lists on Listorious and add yours to this directory
4. Instead of number of Twitter Followers to measure your popularity, the new gauge will be how many Lists you are on.
d. COROLLARY: Using either of these analytics is “interesting” — to use the term many English teachers write when we can’t think of something positive to say about a student’s paper/thesis.
5. You can not [now] SPAM the people on a Twitter List
e. COROLLARY: A critical component to Success with Social Media Marketing [SMM} is to personalize relationships and service. Automatic anything is so un-SMM.
6. Teachers can make Twitter Lists for individual courses for in-class or homework discussions
f. I won’t have to use TweetChat which was giving us some trouble when students replied directly to other students, e.g., these discussions sometimes did not appear in the stream.
Posts re: Twitter Lists from the blogosphere:
7. Four clever uses for lists: includes creating mini-communities where every listee follows the list and uses hashtags for discussions.
“For those cast adrift in a sea of content, good news: A “curation” economy is beginning to take shape, tweet by tweet, list by list.”
10. Robert Scoble:
“Twitter Lists are for people crazy about tech news. Techmeme is for lazy people who want all their news in 10 minutes? Heheh. Very fun!” in response to a comment on his post “Techmeme vs Twitter Lists“
— BTW, Scoble is the ONLY “listee” on Steve Rubel’s “List/faves”
Time to “get off the couch” and start LISTING — or at least reading about them. It really is “All about the Buzz”
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LinkedIn is so much more than a “resume repository” advised Dean Guadagni and Susan Hanshaw in a presentation to Marin Professionals.
The two social media marketing strategists outlined a host of ways that online networking on this Web platform can play a significant role in your professional life.
One tip sent me home to update my profile . . .
But, first, three facts for you:
1 – LinkedIn provides a pathway for users to connect with the right people beyond their own network connections.
2 – A large network increases your ability to rank high in searches.
3 – 75% of employers are checking out LinkedIn profiles on prospective employees.
Below is my LinkedIn profile page:
I’ll show you what I changed — and how:
The “change” was on the bottom of the profile page — the SUMMARY portion:
My summary had only been a few key words until Dean & Susan told me what to do:
FIRST PARAGRAPH: Communicate quickly and clearly the type of opportunities you are seeking.
SECOND PARAGRAPH: Highlight 3 or 4 key career accomplishments that demonstrate your qualifications. [Don’t use bullet points. Make it a friendly narrative.]
THIRD PARAGRAPH: Answer the question: How are you UNIQUE? How are you DIFFERENT?
Finally, there is the SPECIALTIES section which is hugely important. Here you put the KEY WORDS that employers are looking for when they search the LinkedIn site.
When you draft your own LinkedIn Summary, think about this quote from Susan:
“Consider your career as a tapestry of different threads of activities and jobs that you have had.”
SFSU student Justin Fong puts his Social Media lessons to good use
More than 100 marketing students in the College of Business at San Francisco State experienced All Things Social Media from classroom activities, influential guest speakers, and their own individual research.
Justin Fong was one of a half dozen students who had a double-dose, taking both my PR and my Advertising courses. After the semester ended, he began working for Scoreloop and here is a report on his internship activities:
Hey Shari,
How’s the summer going for you? My internship is really tough. Long hours and pretty much a non-stop day, but it’s a lot of fun. There is a lot going on at once.
The first thing I do in the morning is troll through the news for stories about our company and our competitors. I look through Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and other social media sites to see if anything’s new. If something does comes up, I e-mail it to my team and we try to de-position our competitors.
I also take care of all of our social media profiles. I made our Facebook fan page, our Linkedin company profile, monitor our Twitter account, etc. There are so many different things I do.
One thing that I helped the company with was the idea of creating a wikipedia page, which we discussed in a phone conference.
We had a big press release yesterday. It was a hit and got picked up by a lot of big companies, Google, Yahoo, CNBC, MarketWatch, and so many more. We do both traditional PR and PR 2.0. I’ll update you when more things happen for the company. We’re getting ready for Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference so we’re really busy this week. Have a good rest of summer!
Best Regards, Justin Fong
Hey guys, if any more of you are “out there” doing social media activities, please send me your reports and maybe we’ll have a host of guest hosts.
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Sharing and commenting is the “name of the game” in the Social Media World, so I’m re-distributing a great post I read Monday morning by Erik Qualman and including my own comments on each maxim.
Like the structure of a blog — where you read the most recent entry first — I’m starting with number 15:
15. The overall achievement of individuals and companies will be largely dependent on their social media success.
Genuine success usually comes to those who work, and work diligently. towards a worthwhile goal. Marketing on New Media, whether it is your personal brand — or a company brand — will not lead to overnight success. Even our new celebrities Susan Boyle and Adam Lambert paid “offline” dues taking lessons and performing in front of audiences before their meteoric rise to fame.
The Social Media are NOT a fad, folks. The sooner those who want to offer goods, services, and themselves to others, the sooner they need to discover the right platform(s) [i.e., Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Ning, LinkedIn, etc.] to reach the right people and then get “out there” and Do It.
Online search has revolutionized the way we hire — and get hired
14. The information exchanged in social media in relation to job searching and recruiting has rendered it unrecognizable from the information exchanged 10 years ago. Appropriate matches between employer and employee have increased as a result of an increased information flow.
My students at San Francisco State are learning this lesson on a daily basis. Those who’ve recently graduated know that so many new jobs require social media knowledge, experience, and skills. Plus prospective employers are checking LinkedIn pages for connections and endorsements and, even, personal blogs. Savvy employers are Googling prospects rather than spending much time with resumes.
And savvy job seekers, whether fresh out of college or fresh out of a job, are discovering a myriad of ways to research employers in even more depth than a company website. One great “trick” is going on LinkedIn, clicking the “Company” link on the top menu board, selecting a company of interest [e.g., Microsoft] and checking out tons of information opportunities you couldn’t find anywhere else, like “former employees” who might be able to offer great strategies for landing a job or avoiding pitfalls.
Engage in conversations that are already going on
13. If you’re a large brand, you can rest assured that there are conversations, pages, and applications constantly being developed around your brand and by the community at large. The social community is “doing” social media even if your company chooses not to.
THIS IS HUGE, especially for HUGE companies. We know that none of us can “control the message” online. I’m reminded of a student who was blasted on Yelp because a bank customer blamed her personally for his frustrations. She came to me crying because every time anyone Googled her, this nasty Yelp comment was the first thing they saw. We’ve learned that there’s no technology to erase bad comments; there’s even something called the Streisand Effect where companies have learned what happens when you try to.
What do you do instead? THIS IS EASY. You put your own good stuff online, and the nastiness is buried on page 54 of Google [or now the new soon-to-be popular search “Bing”]. As they say, the “cream rises to the top.”
12. Making multiple mistakes within social media is far better than doing nothing at all.
Picasso said, “I am always doing that which I do not know how to do in order to learn to do it.” An art instructor of mine once told the class that we all had 1,000 bad paintings in us, so we’d better get started to get those out of the way. An English professor once said that if we read everything written by Thomas Hardy, we would think he was just a hack, but it is his masterpieces that continue to be read, studied, and remembered.
11. Marketers’ jobs have changed from creating and pushing to one that requires listening, engaging, and reacting to potential and current customer needs.
For years we’ve heard that “The Customer is Always Right” but we haven’t really listened to them, and THAT is what is so powerful about online opportunities. When your customers have questions and concerns, you can shape your products and services to respond to real needs and wants RATHER THAN simply producing things and trying to manipulate people to want and acquire them.
“Content is key” is MORE than the message
10. Companies that produce great products and services rather than companies that simply rely on great messaging will be winners in a Socialnomic™ world. The social graph is the world’s largest and most powerful referral program.
Why have testimonials always been so sought after by marketers? Because people like to hear how wonderfully products and services have worked for others — and also when those products and services have NOT worked. The better mousetrap works well , people will use it, and so will their friends and neighbors.
Focusing on core strengths leads to leadership
9. Being “well-rounded” as a company or individual is less beneficial. It’s more productive to play to your core strength. This differentiates you from the competition.
Rarely is a jack-of-all-trades in the League of Superstars. We like doing what we do well: when we focus our efforts on our strengths, we build a trustworthy reputation and retain loyal followers.
8. The transparency and speed of information exchanged within social media mitigates casual schizophrenic behavior. Having a “work” personality and having a “party” personality will soon become extinct. People and companies will need to have one essence and be true to that essence.
Back “in the day” when I studied journalism, we were taught objectivity, i.e., keeping ourselves out of our stories. But just as the news”papers” themselves are disappearing, so is the way we’ve communicated with audiences. Neither preaching nor more subtle manipulation works anymore. What does is honesty, authenticity, sincerity, and friends helping friends.
Figure out which platforms work best for your community
7. The most successful social media and mobile applications are those that allow users to brag, compete, or look cool by passing it on.
Today’s social media landscape is burgeoning with a vast variety of platforms to share opinions, insights, and graphic contributions — the most useful will become the most popular, and the most popular will become the most powerful. Experimenting with many of them will help you figure out which are most likely to build your community of engaged customers, clients, and friends.
6. With the increasing popularity of e-books, there will be new digital media placement opportunities for brands. This is very similar to product placement in movies, only this is for books, and the placements are clickable and measurable.
A great feature of new technology is the opportunity to modernize the tried-and-true: longer stories and lessons are being published online in the form of e-books, which offer readers an additional layer of credibility but with the ultimate in ease-of-use. When businesses find appropriate ways to sponsor these applications, the ROI will be evident.
Fun and games is more than fun and games
5. Successful social media marketers will function more like entertainment companies, publishers, or party planners rather than as traditional advertisers.
Tradition in marketing has meant treating customers in an “impersonal” way that just won’t work anymore. As entertainment options increase — and our ability to discover and access them online grows — our expectations are necessitating new traditions. We audience members are putting ourselves “out there” with our likes and dislikes broadcast on Facebook, Twitter, etc. All of this will make it easier for “producers” to create appealing, targeted, winning communication strategies. As one commenter to Erik’s post put it, “Every company will be a media company.”
4. The old adage that you can only have two of these — cheap, quick, or quality — doesn’t hold true within social media. It’s possible to have all three.
We don’t have to pay to play, so the online world is accessible to all with an available computer. Information is readily obtainable and often in “real time.” Thus quality is never compromised because of cost or speed.
3. Social media’s ability to quickly disseminate information among friends and peers helps eliminate different people performing the same tasks (multiple individual redundancies), whether it’s researching the best vacation spot or smart phone. This results in a more efficient society.
No one likes wasting time, so online searching avoids the delay and frustration of waiting for postal delivery, a return phone call, or even getting past the button-pressing in a phone tree. Businesses can send personalized messages to a community — thus eliminating the waste of mass marketing and the expense of one-on-one promotion.
Quality goods and services lead to great word of mouth
2. Consumers are looking to peers for recommendations on products, services, health issues, and more via social media. Only companies that produce products and services of great value will be part of these conversations; mediocrity will quickly be eliminated.
Society as a whole will be improved as we help one another create and discover the highest quality products and services.
1. Successful marketers will be more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy; listen first, sell second.
Everything in this revolutionary world of Social Media Marketing begins with improving (a) the way we listen to one another and (b) the means to do it.
Let’s re-visit #15 and more fully comprehend that business growth and success in the future will be tied to mastery of opportunities offered in our Brave New World of Social Media
The 100-year-old press release, the Hard Sell, is dead.
After celebrities Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher joined the Twitter Universe, its population grew 1.2 million – including a 12% growth in One Day!
Twitter is the perfect medium for broadcasting today, especially when building brands.
Speaking of branding, the Internet is an outstanding way to create and develop a personal brand. Resumes are passé. The paradigm is shifting in job search.
Google Alerts allow you to get an email notification every time your name [or any key word of your choosing] is mentioned on the Internet.
Information is going to be like the air around us.
We will be making chips from man-made diamonds so computers will get lighter and lighter.
Advertising, as we have known it, i.e., Madison Avenue strategies developed for the “New” medium of TV in the Fifties, just doesn’t work anymore.
Too often companies forget the second part of this scenario:
Feeling left out because everyone’s buzzing about Twitter Lists . . . and you’re not?
