Archive for Social Media Marketing

What Salon’s & Social Media Have In Common

// August 31st, 2009 // Comments // Social Media Marketing

The other day I was getting my hair cut at Alan Benjamin’s Salon (I’d provide a link but Alan does not have a website, yet =).  Alan and I got into a conversation about his business and where he derives most of his customers.

I asked him how business was and what he does to get new clients. Interestingly, he said, “Fortunately, I don’t anymore they come to me by referral”.  If you know Alan, he’s a flamboyant, talented stylist and also very funny.  Women at his salon love him and he loves them.

He told me that he’s just not going to waste money advertising anymore.  He’s been involved in local business networking/mixer clubs, he’s paid for yellow page ads, and online listings and the list goes on.  Yet, his most effective form of promotion has been his customer network, i.e. word-of-mouth.

Then, I told Alan a little bit about what I was doing and it’s similarities to the Salon Effect.  He raised his eyebrows and commented, “that sounds interesting - so what you do is act like a radar dector and show people where potential customers are and what they think about you”.  I said, yep.

I really liked the radar dector as an analogy to social media intelligence and I also like the commonality between social media and a salon.  What happens in social media is exactly what happens at and around a salon.  People go to the salon and talk about what’s happening in the local community.  People make recommendations about local businesses, movies to watch, who did what and so forth.  And, if you listen while you’re there you on pick up things.  If you engage in conversation you learn even more.

Today, people are going to online communities, blogs, microblogs, forums, etc., like they have gone to salons, pubs, local resturants, etc., and are influencing others in mass.  Social media is not a fad.  In fact, it’s a serious change in how businesses will need to adapt to in order to be successful.  Are you ready for the change?  Maybe this video will make you think about getting prepared.

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How Important Is Internet Intelligence For Your Business?

// August 27th, 2009 // Comments // Social Media Marketing

So What?Did you know that….

Only one in five companies (22%) have an internal strategy that ties data collection and analysis to business objectives.

– Econsultancy//Online Measurement & Strategy Report

There are 251,290,489 internet users in the USA, who account for 15% of the total internet users in the world.

– Nielsen//NetRatings via Internet World Stats, April 2009

221m internet users in the U.S spent an average of 19 hours and 42 minutes online during March 2008. [Source: Nielsen Online, April 2008]

– An average of 52 seconds was spent on each web page visited.

– The number of web pages viewed per person was 2,437.

Socially driven sites are growing at alarming rates :

Worldwide unique visitors (June, 2009).  Source: comScore

  1. Google Sites: 844 million
  2. Microsoft Sites: 691 million
  3. Yahoo! Sites: 581 million
  4. Facebook: 340 million
  5. Wikimedia Foundation sites: 303 million
  6. AOL: 280 million
  7. eBay: 233 million
  8. CBS Interactive: 186 million
  9. Amazon: 183 million
  10. Ask Network: 174 million

“Time spent on social network sites is also expanding: Across the globe in 2008 activity in ‘Member Communities’ accounted for one in every 15 online minutes - now it accounts for one in every 11. In Brazil the average is one of every four minutes and in UK it’s one in every six minutes.” — source Nielsen Wire.

People are interacting and influencing each other as they always have.  The difference with people talking about a restaurant they just went to or a movie they saw last night in everyday conversation offline is that they influence a small subset of people.  When this same conversation happens in an open forum online, the same conversation has a vast reach and the capability to influence many, many people.  Moreover, if the person is highly influential and states something profound about your product or service it could have amazing or damaging consequences.

In the emerging world of internet intelligence or sentiment analysis, businesses like never before will have the opportunity to garner significant amounts of data about customers and competitors.  This is great for people in general because it will force the hands of companies to Raise The Bar and perform, pardon the pun AT&T.

As a business owner, think of using internet intelligence as you would a radar detector scaning the data on a massive beach and then digging for treasure.  But, more importantly, you’ll have a much better idea of what you are digging for with the data in front of you.

Let’s say you are an author with a great book and you have a niche but large audience.  Using the power of internet intelligence you have the capability to reach out and target the audience you are trying to reach quite efficiently.

So, the question is:  what do you think about the opportunities for your business now using internet intelligence?

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How Do You Measure Social Media?

// August 24th, 2009 // Comments // Social Media Marketing

Meausing Social Media

Meausing Social Media

I’ve been thinking about social media measurement lately and so have many others but there does not appear to be a standard metric system at least that I’ve found.  There are many ideas on what the metrics should be that are being discussed.  Although, I think many folks are overanalyzing this.

It’s simple really.  It’s called the 4 R’s of business:

  • Reputation (Customer Satisfaction + Sentiment = Reputation)
  • Reach ( Numbers of People + Engagement + Frequency = Reach )
  • Revenue ( $ Intensity + $ Volume = Revenue )
  • & Return On Operations ( Revenue - Cost + Time = Return On Ops )

In the business world there aren’t too many more metrics that really mean much to owners and CEO’s/CFO’s of companies.  If you can’t move the needle in one or more of these metrics with Social Media then something is wrong.

As a form of marketing, social media or whatever you call it — “emerging media” — there needs to be measurement as a business department just as sales, finance, IT, R&D and other organizational groups are measured.  If you don’t “Inspect What You Expect” then how do you judge the success of your efforts or know what your efforts are producing?

More importantly, social media as a business process needs to be realized with structured and systemized process.  Doing so will play a critical part in many businesses success as the medium and understanding evolves.  It’s just that not very many people are or have been able to explain to business owners and executives the real value proposition of social media.  Speaking of value proposition, well, that’s a whole other conversation.

For now, I would like to hear what you think about these metrics.  Do you agree, disagree?  Let’s have a collaborative discussion.

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What is Efficient, Elastic and Effective?

// August 20th, 2009 // Comments // Social Media Marketing

Social Media is Efficient, Elastic & Effective for finding new customers!  Why do I believe this?  And, why is this important to you?

Well for one thing, social media recently helped a little company called FriendFeed get acquired for $50 million by Facebook.  How so?  Well, for those who do know him, Robert Scoble is an influential technology evangelist.  IMHO, Scoble was a major promoter of the service helping to raise its popularity and valuation as a company because of his social influence on the internet. Of course, that is not to say that the FriendFeed team did not do a fantastic job building a valuable company, they did and that’s why Facebook bought them.  But, Scoble helped them gain traction by bringing over lots of users, who brought over their friends and so forth.

In the famous Cluetrain Manifesto Doc Searls & David Weinbergersaid stated that, “Markets are nothing more than conversations”. If you understand this and that transactions are primarily influenced by reputation and recommendations from people’s influence, then you can appreciate the power and potential of socialized marketing.

Since marketing is all about influencing people, social media is naturally designed to encourage conversation where people are, by their permission and by their interests. The key is finding out where the people are and engaging in relevant and meaningful conversation that can influence a business transaction if you have something to sell. Ok, how?

This is where Efficiency comes in!

The internet as a marketing medium is highly efficient. The problem is most of us don’t know how to harness its data efficiency and intelligence power.  Search marketing has proven the power that internet marketing has and it will continue to be a powerful marketing tactic. However, search marketing takes more technical prowess, time and energy to produce results, although things are being made easier. Whereas various forms of social mediums have the power to produce impactful results quicker because of the human influence element involved. By leveraging internet intelligence tools one can quickly discover where relevant conversations are happening on the internet and begin to participate and influence such conversation.

Elastic & Expansive

Social media has an elastic benefit in that when one group of people are influenced chances are high that this group of people will go off and influence others with similar interests.  This is how most products and services are sold.  This elasticity of influence has a ripple effect like dropping a pebble in a pond.  The practice of calling things “viral” comes from medical attribution of a virus. Like a virus you can spread influence through the web sharing via people quickly.  How do you hear about the funny videos on YouTube?  Right, your friends tell you about it and share it.  Then the ripple in the pond gets exponetially larger.

Effective

Beyond its elastic and data efficiency benefits, social media is effective in terms of cost and reach. Compared to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to achieve 97% failure rates and 3% success rates as is common with most traditional marketing mediums, look to social media strategies to produce much higher success rates with more effective targeting in terms of cost and specific marketing reach. With proper audience identification and engagement tactics you will be able to fish where the fish are. Then, focus on making your new customers your most effective marketers.

What do you think?  I’d love to hear from you.

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July’s gone bye => time to fly again!

// July 19th, 2009 // Comments // Social Media Marketing

Destin Florida Beach

Destin Florida Beach

Well, it’s been some time since I posted and for good reason.  July has been a crazy month for Julie & I.  We put our house on the market in early June and it sold in 2 weeks.  We were extremely surprised how fast it sold and were prepared for a 3-6 month sales process.  I was preparing to do an online marketing campaign and produced a video, which I planned to syndicate through TubeMogul hitting about 10 other popular video sites.

The video did come in handy before we even promoted it - 1 view produced 1 buyer.  It was an incredible video but I  did not know it was that good…just joking.   I really think what helped us sell the house was taking care of it for years and more importantly for selling was the staging of the home.  We had a professional stagger come and help us prepare the house and all the extra work we put in was well worth it.

Then, we had to move and we weren’t necessarily ready to move that quick but, everything is in storage and we will start looking for a new place when we get back from Destin beach.  Yep, we’re on a little family vacation in Florida and we’ll be here a week.  When I get back I plan to jump back into the blog and fly again now that we have all the moving, packing and house selling stuff behind us.

If you are following me on Facebook, Twitter or FriendFeed (see feed to the left if you’re on my site) I am sharing our experience there if you have an interest.  I also brought along my Wired Magazine and I’ll be reading Tribes We Lead by Seth Godin in between building sand castles, Heinkien’s, Pirate Excursions and Nike+ runs.

I’ll check in again soon but enjoy this until then.

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Can Social Media Really Make A Difference For Businesses?

// June 22nd, 2009 // Comments // Social Media Marketing, Thought Leadership

Right now many companies large and small are exploring the idea of social media.  Many are unsure about how to social-mediadevelop a strategy.  They don’t know where to start or who to trust.  Moreover, what empirical evidence can a business turn to help it determine the value of building a social media strategy?  Well, these are questions and concerns that I plan to address here.

Last week I raised the question, “How do you systemize social media”?  In terms of process and daily practice, I was hoping to spark a  conversation to understand and uncover other practitioners methods and systems of use.  Little did I know it would create a deeper conversation on a more strategic level.

If you click on the link above you’ll see embeded in the post a conversation stream that took place.  What I learned from a few social media colleagues is that in order for social media to make a difference in businesses, social media at a high level must first be understood.  With out understanding the value proposition of social media at a leadership level, a business or businesses will be hard pressed to allow a socialized media culture to be adopted inside the organization.

Say what?  Social media can only make a difference in a business if the company from top to bottom understands and believes in the value of such a dynamic culture shift.  THIS IS A VERY BIG DEAL!

“SOCIAL MEDIA REQUIRES A CULTURE & MIND SET SHIFT”

That is a very BOLD statement but, for social media to really make a difference for an organization it is an ABSOLUTE REQUIREMENT.  Why is this the case?

It is required because most business were not built on the fact that everyone, no matter what you’re title or position, has the power and opportunitiy to make significant things happen because of the power of the internet.  Everyone in the organization, has the power to produce content and build a following.  People’s voices are the new currency that drives the influence to exchange.

If you’re a company of 10, then you most likely have 10 able promoters and content creators on your team.  Now consider this, “It is estimated that the average person knows about 250 people. And each of those people knows, in turn, another 250 or so people. This means that for each new person you meet, you gain access to a potential pool of 62,500 people separated from you by just two degrees!” – Buzzy Gordon.

Don’t you think the ability to potentially influence approximately 625,000 people is pretty powerful for a small business?  I do.

Now, of course, influencing that many people to actually make a purchase is far fethched but influencing just a small percentage of that group of warm connections by practicing social media makes for a pretty compelling business case.  Would’nt you agree?

To accomplish this though requires leadership to adopt a culture of transparency and expression for the good of its customers and employees.  Giving up control and truly leading is what is required here.  And, leading with an educated understanding is a big step to social media making an impact on a business.  In a future post I’ll show you an example of how social media activities are just starting benefit me.

CONSIDER THIS VIDEO AS A 1ST STEP TO UNDERSTANDING

(Note:  A collaborative team I am working with are in the early stages of developing a resource to help companies understand and use social media.  This video is part of recommended material to be reviewed).

Now that you have a better understanding of how social media might benefit your business, in a future post I’ll show you an example of how social media activities are just starting to benefit me.  Do you have any questions that I might be able to help answer?

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People Do Business, Tools Don’t: How Do You Systemize Social Media?

// June 18th, 2009 // Comments // #TwitterTalks, Social Media Marketing

My social Network on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter...
Image by luc legay via Flickr

I’ve been thinking about some of the things we’ve been discussing on building43 — A community for people fanatical about the Internet — and things that have been bubbling up for a while in other spheres of conversation.

We, as a western business culture, seem to be really caught up and infatuated with the amount of tools we use, not excluding me.  I’m a gadget junkie and tool freak!  I have so many accounts for different web applications and services it’s crazy.  There is so much out there to experiment with and test.  Part of me thinks there is a level of unproductivity because of this behavior another part me thinks there is a lot to learn through experimentation with these tools and technologies.  What do you think?

Well, I read a great post on ProBlogger this week by Nick Thacker called 5 Ways To ‘Systemize’ your Blogging.  It really rang home with me as it is part of the practice I advise clients to take in developing their content strategy.  I admit I need to practice better what I preach with my new blog here.  Why is the this relevant to People Do Business, Tools Don’t?

People are the lifeblood of any business.  People do the work.  People work with customers - people.  People manage people.  People make the plans and people take action or don’t.

Tools on the otherhand — computuers, phones, web applications — are levers to facilitate and increase productivity of people.  Productivity can be measured a number of ways based on what your job is right?

So, what I’ve been thinking about is - how are social media and internet tools making us more productive and getting business done.  How are we selecting the tools we decided to use for business?  How could you and I take the advice Nick gave and apply it to Social Media Marketing?

This is a question that I think should be discussed in collaboration with others as it is a problem that I think many businesses are struggling with today.  How do you systemize the practice of social media?

Please share your thoughts as I would love to put together a collaborative document or “Best Practices” Starter-kit for Social Media or something to help businesses get over the change threshold.  I am going to start working on how to ‘Systemize’ my own Social Media practices and will report back later.

Last, thank you Nick for a great post - you really got me thinking and acting.

>>>> UPDATE:  I’m bringing the conversation that we had today on this topic today on Friend Feed <<<<

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