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Seven Social Media Insights on CES

12.01.18

By now you’ve probably had more than your fill of analysis from the many, many products and announcements revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Now that I’ve had a few days to decompress, I thought I’d do something slightly different and provide a few insights from a social perspective.

CES is not a social media conference (duh)

CES is, first and foremost, an electronics show. It attracts a very different audience compared to conferences like SXSW or BlogWorld. While those social-focused conferences are fertile ground when it comes to social media programs, CES is full of salespeople and executives who, generally speaking, are less socially-savvy than conferences in the social media bubble.

I spoke to a rep at one booth who was giving away high-value prizes to followers who showed up at the booth and showed them promotion-related tweets on their phone; they said it took an hour for the first person to approach them the last time they ran their promotion.

That doesn’t mean there’s no place for social media, though – far from it.

Raise awareness ahead of the event

If your company is attending CES, take the opportunity to create awareness of where you’ll be and what you have to offer ahead of time, both through public channels (e.g. your blog, Twitter, Facebook etc) but also by mining your databases for people and companies that you want to connect with at the event and seeting-up meetings with them ahead of time.

Create and amplify content for non-attendees

CES is full of cutting-edge new technology. If your company is there showcasing their products or announcements, take advantage of that to create content for non-attendees:

  • Go behind the scenes on your booth
  • Go in-depth on your products
  • Get reactions from show attendees on camera
  • Get interviews with partners

CES can be a content goldmine if you approach it correctly.

Remember that other people are creating content, too

You’re not the only one thinking about content generation at CES. The world’s tech media, from traditional to hybrid to social, gather in Vegas for this event. There’s content being generated constantly. That means you need to be on your game – you need to treat everyone you speak to as though they’re a journalist (because they could be), and you need to watch your words because you never know who could be walking by.

Listen and learn

With the amount of content generation – and subsequent online discussion – that goes on, social media monitoring can be a goldmine of insights (and issues management). Makes sure you pay close attention to the conversation surrounding your brand and its competitors – not from a superficial “ooh there’s a pretty chart” perspective but from one of driving and optimizing your content calendar throughout and beyond the event, and from one of bringing product-focused insights back to the business.

Plan your visit using social media

With over 3,100 exhibitors and over 153,000 attendees in 2012, planning your schedule at CES can be overwhelming. Take some of the stress out of it by leveraging social media tools to help plan your visit:

  • Use tools like TripIt and Plancast to see which of your contacts/leads/key vendors will be in town for the event
  • Use LinkedIn to identify key people from the companies you want to connect with, and reach out to them ahead of the show
  • Use Foursquare to see where your connections are during the event (although, as mentioned, this can be less effective than at events like SXSW where Foursquare becomes central to staying on top of what’s going on

Create meetups to connect with influencers

While you may find that throwing a fan event at CES is tougher than at other events, the top tier of tech influencers is in town. Tailor your approach to throwing events to this audience – give them a reason to come along (exclusive access to company insiders, or exclusive information, for example) and differentiate your event from the masses. Remember, most people will be triple-booked most nights so you need to stand out (and not just by throwing the biggest party).

Social media can (and clearly does) have a very important place at events like CES, but it’s very different from social media-focused events like SXSW – you need to think differently, and you need to execute differently.

What do you think?

Posted in: event planning, social media

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My 2012 Reading Challenge: 36 Books

12.01.09

For the last two years I’ve set myself a challenge – one I adopted from Julien Smith - to read at least 26 books per year. That’s one every two weeks.

In 2010 I managed 26 books; last year I managed 32.

Stand-out books for me last year included:

This year, I’m shooting for 36.

I’m looking forward to getting stuck into a bunch of books that have been on my “to read” list for a while – books like Humanize, Predictably Irrational, Here Comes Everybody, Empowered, Social Media ROI and the The Hunger Games Trilogy.

What books have you enjoyed recently, and what are you looking forward to reading?

(Image: kwerfeldein on Flickr)

Posted in: books

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Six important shifts for social media in 2012

11.12.31

It’s hard to believe we’re about to tick over to another calendar year. So, as usual, I got to thinking about the shifts I think companies need to make in their social media activities in the next year.

These aren’t necessarily trends that are already happening (although I’d like to say they are), but they’re certainly where my head is at and hopefully where others are, too.

Here are six shifts I hope to see in social media use by business in 2012.

Better objective-setting

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a slow maturation in the way companies develop their objectives for social media. My hope is that this will continue in 2012. That means fewer companies treating fan or follower growth or video views as goals, fewer made-up numbers and more focusing on business outcomes – sales, cost savings, customer/employee retention etc.

More effective measurement

As companies get better at setting objectives for social media, they’re going to need to get better at measuring against those new objectives. That means shifting focus away from  anecdotal evidence and simple outputs, and looking at indicators of the behaviour you’re looking to drive. It also means taking a closer look at the reporting of that measurement. See my recent post on five ways to improve your social media measurement for more on this.

This will be accompanied by increased realism over social media results. I’m currently reading a book that points to a multi-national company having 27,000 Twitter followers as an indication of social media success. Let’s face it, that’s unlikely to move the needle for lots of companies. As companies focus-in on reporting business objectives, we’ll see a continued shift away from high-fives over anecdotes and minor wins and a more hard-nosed focus on what really matters.

Improved Integration

Key to measuring more effectively, but with far, far broader effects, integration (and the breaking down of silos) will become even more key in 2012. The smart organizations have already figured out that social media works best when supported, and supporting, other forms of communications; look for more companies to mandate a silo-busting approach over the next year.

Strategic content planning

As organizations increasingly adopt the role of media companies in their online communications, watch for content strategy to receive greater focus in 2012. That means shifting from a “we have to fill these content slots” approach to one that carefully considers the objectives of each piece of proactive content and why it deserves its place in the content calendar. Sometimes it might be to drive community engagement; other times it might be to drive business conversion, and so on.

Increased search focus

An increased (and improved) search focus sits alongside more strategic planning of content. It means broadening the scope of how you target content, from point-in-time to point-in-lifecycle – thinking about what people are looking for at their stage in whatever process you’re targeting, and helping them through that and on to the next stage. That could be a stage of the purchase cycle, it could be a stage of the support process, or any number of others that you choose to focus on (thinking back to objectives).

Focusing on the less-shiny object

This is a big bucket of all sorts of increases, but my hope is that as companies move away from shiny-object snydrome in 2012 they start to take a more sophisticated approach to the less-shiny objects – policies, processes, listening, crisis plans etc – or, more formally put, to social business.

Social business

For me, this is an exciting time. I’m jazzed to see more mature use of social media help it to evolve into a more powerful tool for organizations – “life after likes“, as David Armano puts it. This is the cool stuff – the stuff that will move the needle and add real value for companies.

That makes the non-shiny objects the shiny ones for me.

 

Posted in: measurement, social media, strategy

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Search Engines Are A Conduit, Not A Source

11.12.21

Let’s get this out of the way: Search engines are a key part of communications nowadays. Take a look at your website analytics and it’ll be clear – there’s no avoiding it. Search engines usually drive a significant proportion – if not the majority – of traffic to companies’ websites.

However, I’m tired of seeing “studies” showing that “search engines” are a source of information for consumers.

Search engines are a conduit – a step along the path – not a source.

Think about it – when you look for information on something, you go to Google (or Bing, or Ask.com, or whoever…) and type in your query. The vast majority of the time, you don’t sit and look at the results page – you click through to a result. You do that because the results pages have the information, not the search engine.

Yes, there are exceptions – Google News, for example – and sometimes you’ll find the information you need in the title or description shown in the search results, but the majority of the time you pass straight through the search engine and on to your destination. Search engines understand this – Google optimizes its page to get you off its site as quickly as possible.

Why does this matter, and am I just being pedantic?

Because the nodding and agreement that comes from headlines about search engines as an information source interferes with the push to answer more important questions:

  • Do consumers in my market niche, rather than generic consumers,  use search engines to research their products?
  • Once my consumers have searched (or not), where do they go?
    • Do they go to product review sites to check out other peoples’ reviews?
    • Do they go to corporate sites to read-up on specs and options?
    • Do they go to news sites to see what’s going on with the company or the product?
    • Do they go to blogs to check out discussions there?

This is the sort of information that’s useful. This is the sort of information that lets my team figure out where to prioritize its efforts in order to drive search engine optimization (driving consumer reviews; publishing product-focused content; driving earned media coverage, etc).

Also, there’s a big difference between customers of different industries - preferences along these lines are what we should be digging into (note: this is another report that cites “search results” as an influential channel). We need to be thinking more closely about that.

I get it. Search is important. Companies need to pay attention to search (and invest more in optimizing both organic results and the paid media around those results). Etc etc. And yes, some companies aren’t paying attention.

For the rest of us, though – those of us trying to do the best we can, and who really want to optimize based on useful insights – let’s move beyond the “search results are an important information source” nonsense and get down to the business of finding useful insights that can fuel our communication strategy.

Fair?

Posted in: communications, search

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Should you let social media conversations direct your business?

11.11.22

Here’s a question for you: Should you let conversations in social media direct your business?

If you’ve worked in the social media space, that seems like a pretty straightforward “yes”, right? I mean, we’re always talking about how listening and responding is critical.

What if we ask the question a couple of other ways:

Should you always let conversations in social media direct your business?

Should you let individual conversations in social media direct your business?

The answer isn’t quite as simple now, is it? All of a sudden, we’re facing potential (hypothetical) situations where, every time someone doesn’t like something, you change things around to make them happy, or where a single outspoken voice gets priority over a potential majority who could want something else.

All of this goes to say that while listening is central to social business, you need to frame the decisions you make based on that listening appropriately.

Let’s take two examples:

Customer Support

I’m of the general mindset that you should try to help every customer who needs support (you don’t tell your call centre not to answer calls from certain customers, do you?). But what about when a customer asks for something that, if applied to everyone who asked, just wouldn’t be feasible? Do you change your company’s approach based on one person’s request?

If you’re a B2B company with only a few major customers, then perhaps you do.

If you’re a B2C company with hundreds, thousands or millions of customers, though, then probably not – you’d end up bankrupting your company.

Product and Service Insights

Let’s say you’ve got your listening program set up. Do you listen to each individual opinion that is out there on the web?

Of course not. You’d end up constantly in reactive mode, responding to customer “insights” with no overarching strategy and no ability to plan for the future.

Approach Insights Strategically

I think the time where large companies will begin to take a more strategic approach to leveraging social media for insights is fast approaching. Note: I’m not talking about losing the human touch when it comes to interacting with people, and I’m not talking about removing flexibility from front-line social media staff, but more in how companies approach distilling social media conversations into useable takeaways.

Take Insights in Aggregate

When my team tells me that “there’s a lot of conversation online” about topic X, my first response nowadays is “how much”? If the answer is just a few mentions, then my response is to keep monitoring, see if things escalate and begin to prepare in case they do. If the answer is “hundreds” or “thousands” of conversations, then we know we need to react immediately.

The same applies to mining for insights. Taking individual pieces of feedback can be useful for illustrative purposes, but unless you’re just looking for ideas to inspire (or to pass the hours and hours of free time you clearly have), you need to step up a level and identify the key trends.

Test Your Assumptions

Tom Webster gave a great presentation at BlogWorld recently where he talked about the need to “do your own work.” In this context, it means not just assuming that something you’ve gleaned from other people is correct – you need to test it for your business.

Tom also made the great point that social media are themselves a biased source of data, so to be sure of your insights, you need to test them outside social media.

What does this mean? It means that you need to move from shift from reacting to customer feedback to testing to ensure that the reaction to those reactions would benefit your business. Of course, once you implement changes subsequently, you should be monitoring for the reaction to those changes, developing more insights, testing… and so on.

My hope is that the time of the “let’s all sit around a campfire and pretend that businesses need to respond to every single piece of feedback” people is coming to an end, and that the time for strategic insights is upon us. Some social media practitioners are ready for this; others aren’t.

Ask yourself: where do you sit?

Posted in: monitoring, social media

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Five ways to improve your social media measurement

11.11.21

We’re past the point  where a “get me one of those” approach to the latest social shiny object is a viable approach. As business use of social media continues to slowly mature, measurement is becoming more and more important to justify the investment in social activities.

Last week I spoke on a roundtable on Practical Social Media Goal Setting, Measurement and ROI, along with Janet Fouts, Steve Farnsworth and Brian Rice. One of the most interesting questions asked related to the mistakes that organizations make around measuring social media. Rather than focus on those mistakes, here are five ways to avoid them – five ways to improve your social media measurement and reporting.

1. Focus on outcomes over outputs

The number of Tweets you post, or replies you generate, may be interesting, but what value do they drive? Instead, focus on the outcomes of those activities – how many leads did you generate? How much money did you save? How many event registrations did you drive?

It can sometimes be hard to accomplish this – especially from the agency side – as you often need to work with many business functions to determine this (sales, IT, marketing etc). The more you can push in this direction, though, the better off you’ll be.

2. Set measurable objectives

Measurement factors into SMART goals in several ways.

Firstly, considering insights from previous activities (previous reporting periods or previous campaigns) to set appropriate expectations for the time-period set.

Secondly, ensuring that the objectives that are set are measurable so you can measure the ultimate success or failure of your program at the end.

3. Determine the purpose of your report

I’ve seen way too many reports that lay out the objectives of a program, then report on measurements that have nothing to do with those objectives.

If you’re looking to get ten thousand sign-ups to a new service, why would you report on the number of retweets of your content? Or the sentiment of coverage? Those numbers have value when you’re looking for ways to optimize your activities, but when it comes to measuring against your objectives, the connection there is weak at best.

Before you begin working on a measurement report, determine what the purpose of that report is. Is it to optimize content? Provide insights to fuel products, services, messaging, etc? Or to determine the success of a program? Determine the purpose of your measurement and tailor your approach to it.

The audience of your report is often tied closely to its purpose. Who are you writing for? The answer to that question – whether it’s community managers or senior executives – should determine the kind of insights you provide.

Check out Jeremiah Owyang’s great post on the social media ROI  pyramid for a great way of thinking about this.

4. Focus on driving action

Number soup doesn’t help anyone. To make your reporting valuable, make sure you seek to drive insights and action with what you report. To quote Rob Clark, look not just at the “what”, but the “so what” and the “now what”.

5. Measure before, during and after

The measurement process doesn’t start at the end of a project; it starts at the beginning, with setting your objectives, and continues throughout the work. Measurement, done right, fuels your objectives, sets a baseline against which you can measure, enables course adjustments during the activities and measures against your objectives at the end.

Doing these things won’t make measuring your activities any easier, but it will make your measurement and reporting more effective, and will help you to improve your social media activities over the long run. That may not be shiny and glamorous, but it’s effective and valuable.

(Image credit: Jeremiah Owyang)

Posted in: measurement, social media

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What Gets You Up In The Morning?

11.11.14

Every so often it’s helpful to reflect on why your job matters to you – why you put in all the effort, passion and commitment you do.

For me, one of those moments came last week when I read this post by my colleague Rob Clark (which I’m re-publishing here with his permission).

I’ve worked a number of jobs throughout my life. Every single one of them I’ve put everything I’ve got into it. That’s just how I’m wired. I can’t be at a place and not give it my loyalty, my dedication and the full extent of what I have to offer.

Most of these jobs have adequately compensated me though a few have undervalued my contributions and balked at fair payment. Some of the jobs were extremely rewarding – most often through the people I’ve worked with. Some of them were educational – though more often than not a hard lesson learned.

But I have to say that my job at Edelman is the first where I consistently feel that I’m getting more back than I put in. And lord knows I put in a lot.

What’s more – I know that this isn’t simply a momentary happenstance or aligning of events. The company is putting the effort into making this a culture. Making this the regular modus operandi. I greatly appreciate that effort because it tells me this is not just a fluke or temporary alignment of good people. This is the way things will be. Smart people, doing creative and challenging work, together as a team.

I couldn’t agree more, and couldn’t be prouder to have people like Rob with me on that team.

What about you?

Posted in: career, miscellaneous

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Book Review: The Social Customer

11.10.31

The Social Customer is one of the best books I’ve read on practical uses and implementations of social media marketing. Given that I’ve read a fair number of them over the last few years, that’s saying something.


The author, Adam Metz, takes the reader through a straightforward, easy-to-read summary of the concept and potential for social CRM, but that’s really only part of this book. While it covers social CRM at length, this is a solid 201-level tome on many aspects of social media, which means this is a useful read for anyone wanting to go beyond the intro level and commit to the social marketing arena.

Structure

The Social Customer is divided into three sections:

  1. Section One takes the reader through an overview of the topic of social CRM.
  2. Section Two walks through 23 use cases of social CRM (based on Altimeter’s 18 social CRM use cases, with a few extras thrown in), dividing them into six groups:
    1. Social Marketing
    2. Social Sales
    3. Social Support
    4. Social Innovation and Product Development
    5. Collaboration
    6. Seamless Customer Experience
  3. Section Three looks at the implementation of social CRM within the organization.

Strengths

While unashamedly enthusiastic about the potential and desirability of social CRM implementations, Metz is honest throughout about his thoughts on the market-readiness of the various use cases that are put forward. You never get the feeling that he’s just preaching for the sake of it, but that there’s a considered opinion behind the assessments.
The book is extremely easy to read. A consistent energy and enthusiasm flow through it, and the personal anecdotes lend a human feel to the book throughout.
Lastly, he book draws frequently from other popular texts including the aforementioned Altimeter paper, Paul Greenberg’s CRM principles and the book Blue Ocean Strategy. In doing so, it creates a really solid overview of the topic that ultimately leaves you wanting more.

Weaknesses

The book isn’t without its issues, however.
The vendor-focused nature of much of the book means that it will be out-of-date before long – especially as it provides a point-in-time assessment of the market readiness of tools and use-case implementations.
The book offers a fairly immature definition of a socially-enabled business which, while fitting the topic of the book, ignores many of the other potential considerations in play.
The middle section of the book – the 23 use case – does drag and becomes repetitive as it progresses. This part of the book, while valuable, is a bit of a slog – you’re best either taking a break before diving into it, or just picking and choosing the chapters based on your own business objectives.
Still, these weaknesses don’t ultimately spoil what, as I mentioned earlier, is one of the best social-focused books I’ve read in a long time – if not the best.
Who should read this: People with a good knowledge of social media who are looking to begin to go more in-depth; people who want to explore the potential of social CRM at a basic level.
People who should avoid this: Anyone looking for an introduction to social media (this will be too advanced); people looking for an in-depth “how-to” on social CRM.
What you’ll learn:
  • Introduction to the concept of social CRM and the social customer
  • High-level introduction to 23 use cases for social CRM and their market readiness
  • Introduction to operational factors, including analytics, work flows, legal and ethical considerations

Posted in: books

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You’re Not a Strategist – You’re a Punk

11.10.20

I’m constantly astonished at how many people looking to get into agencies describe themselves as a “strategist” and think that by doing so, they can now avoid all of the work they don’t want to do. Whether it’s planning and budgeting, client project execution or measuring the outcomes, some people seem to think that by calling yourself something different, you can avoid learning about critical elements of a communications function.

Here’s the thing, though: it’s by doing that that you learn how good programs and strategies work.

I know I’m going to piss a lot of people off here, but in my opinion you can’t be an effective strategist until you’ve got some experience to rest behind it.

Mashable recently published a post that nicely explains my frustration. It’s entitled “What Does It Take To Be a Social Strategist?” Key points:

  1. About a third of companies look for at least six years of experience when looking for a social strategist
  2. 92% of social strategists are manager-level or higher
  3. Key success factors:
    1. Rallying stakeholders across the organization
    2. Leading multi-faceted, cross-departmental efforts
    3. Having a long-term, customer-centric vision
    4. Being multi-disciplinary and wearing “many hats”

Sounds pretty intense, right? So then why do I encounter so many inexperienced people giving themselves that title?

Here’s where I’m coming from: When I started working in communications, after doing a few internships during school I spent four years, analyzing quality assessments of communications plans in the public sector.

Sounds mind-bogglingly boring, right? On the contrary, I think that experience set me up fabulously to succeed later. I looked at poor plans and learned to spot the holes and what doesn’t work. I looked at good plans and learned how they effectively fit together. I did the same for tactical materials, too.

Later I moved jobs, began executing things myself, and learned from my mistakes. I organized a media event that I thought was near-perfect but that had ZERO media show up (sob!). I had drafts returned to me by editors with so much red ink on them, you could barely read the original draft.

On the flip side, I also wrote a release that got verbatim pick-up on the front page of tier-one media (I still have a copy of that paper!), and led programs that delivered great results for clients. In short: I learned.

You can’t just flip a switch and consider yourself a strategist without gaining experience in these other areas. You need to get in the trenches, get your head down and learn.

What’s more – sorry to say it – but there’s a lot more to strategy than just idea creation.

You might be great at putting the pieces together, and have a really great mind for integrating different elements to solve problems, but until you’ve gained enough experience to know (the majority of the time, at least – communications isn’t a science) what is likely to work and what isn’t, be quiet and continue to learn.

If you think you just flip a switch and become a master strategist overnight without gaining the experience needed first, you’re not a strategist. You’re just a punk.

(photo credit: Flickr)

Posted in: strategy

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Content Is King At BlogWorld

11.10.20

I’ll be speaking at BlogWorld LA in a couple of weeks, along with my good friend Jeremy Wright, on the topic of blogger relations – how to identify people, how to approach them and how to avoid the mistakes of others.

I had a chance recently to chat with DJ Waldow, who recorded this video about our session and about why I keep coming back to BlogWorld.

If you’re interested in attending BlogWorld LA, you can use the code BWEVIP20 to get 20% off the registration price.

Posted in: blogger relations, BlogWorld, events

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