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Archive for May, 2009

Social Media Is Becoming A Commodity

09.05.29

Anyone can do media relations. Anyone can pitch a journalist. Some people can even do it well. However, no-one in their right mind is going to hire your firm because you pitched a straight media relations campaign to them because everyone is pitching it.

Social media is fast becoming a commodity, just like media relations. A few firms used to differentiate themselves by being the ones who paid attention to social media. Now, anyone who can talk a good game and who knows slightly more than the client is able to pitch it and sound like an expert.

Basic business theory says that while first movers gain a temporary advantage, if they don’t create barriers to entry to others then that advantage can quickly be lost.

As social media increasingly becomes a commodity, companies need to do more than just be there. Those who have enjoyed an advantage from being early to market need to work hard to separate themselves once again.

Just ‘doing’ social media is no longer enough to win you business. Having done it for a little longer than everyone else does little to differentiate you, either. You might crow that you were doing it before other people, but potential clients probably don’t care.

What do clients care about?

Ideas - creative, strategic ideas that solve a problem and accomplish objectives
Integrated solutions – approaches that bring together disciplines into a strategic approach
Understanding – a clear knowledge and grasp of the issues that matter to them
Rounded team – a well-formed team that covers all the bases
Chemistry – a team that gels with the client-side team personally as well as professionally
Thought leadership – demonstrated leadership in the areas that matter
Success – documented case studies – the one area in which, for now, being a first mover gives the advantage.

So what if you have 25,000 Twitter followers? It takes a few weeks for unscrupulous types to game the system and gain that many if that’s what they’re after. Similarly, who cares if you’ve had a blog for six or seven years? It’s what you’ve done with it that matters.

If you’ve been around in social media for a few years, think: what have you done to separate yourself now that everyone else is just like you?

Posted in: consulting, social media

Tags: business, social media, trends

14Comments

There’s Nothing Magical About Social Media Principles

09.05.28

We often hear how social media is “different” – how it changes everything about your communications. How you have to throw the old rules out the window when launching into social media tools. I respectfully disagree.

Too many “social media experts” treat these kinds of principles as though they separate social media from other forms of communication, probably because they’ve never practiced those other forms and only have preconceptions to go on.

There’s nothing magical about the principles people discuss for social media – there are just nuances in their application.

Here are a few principles that get banded about as “social media” principles, but which apply across different forms of communication and across different channels:

There is no silver bullet solution
Target your audiences
Messaging matters
Customer service affects your image
Tailor your approach
You rise and fall on relationships
Measurement is key

There is no silver bullet solution

Whether you’re launching a traditional media relations campaign, a store-based promotion or a series of advertisements, there’s no single solution to your problem. Social media is no different.

There’s no stand-alone “kit” to solve every problem – just as with every other communications discipline, you need to create it based on the situation.

Target your audiences

Every so often I see people opinionating about how targeting is an obsolete concept in digital communications. I really want to talk to those peoples’ clients.

When you’re formulating a communications plan, tactics come close to last in the development process. You think through the context, through your objectives, through your audiences and through your strategic approach before reaching your tactics. Why? Because your tactics should vary depending on those factors.

Is the audience for your raw iron ore on Twitter? Maybe (I haven’t done the research), but I doubt it. Regardless of whether you’re looking online or offline in your communications, you need to figure out how best to reach the people who are important to your business. If you think targeting doesn’t matter, you go ahead with that Twitter outreach on iron ore. Just don’t send me your resume when you’re fired.

Fail to target your audiences, and your communications will fall short regardless of whether they’re social media tactics or not.

Messaging matters

Messaging still matters. The words you use affect how people perceive you. However, communicators need to realize that in traditional media, in advertising, in social media and in other communications, repeating the same messages over and over again (politicians do this especially badly) doesn’t work. People, both journalists and potential customers alike, tune it out.

Customer service affects your image

Experiences matter more than the words in print. You can blather away all you like to that reporter from the Globe and Mail; if you’re leaving your customers on hold for an hour, they won’t care what they read in the paper. Your words will ring hollow.

The same applies to social media tools. Do a Twitter Search of your company name. What are people saying about you? Do a search on Facebook too, and one on Google Blogsearch, and on BackType, Technorati, IceRocket, EveryZing and so on. Are people complaining about your appalling service levels? Same effect as above.

Unique to social media? No. Important everywhere? Yes.

Tailor your approaches

When you pick up the phone and call an editor at the Toronto Star, that conversation is informed by all of the prior conversations you’ve had with him. You know that he’s interested in certain kinds of stories, that Wednesday is a bad day to call him and that he’s a visual learner who likes to see things for himself. So, tailor your approach to him. When you call his counterpart at the Toronto Sun, you know she approaches things a different way so adjust accordingly.

Blogger relations isn’t some mysterious black hole. The principles remain the same as good media relations. Know your audience; tailor your approach to them; give them content that helps them.

You rise and fall on relationships

It takes a long time to develop relationships, and you can burn them in an instant if you abuse them.

Online or off, the people who succeed are the people who build relationships with other people. It doesn’t matter if you’re calling a client, a colleague, a journalist or a blogger – those conversations are built on your past interactions.

The same goes for your customers, too – do they have transactions with you, or is it an ongoing engagement?

Anyone who suggests that this is unique to social media is in need of a clue as to how to succeed in the real world.

Measurement is key

If you tell me that measurement doesn’t matter in traditional media relations, I’ll laugh you out of the room. Now, as much as ever, companies are being forced to justify their budgets in all areas. Whether you’re producing ads, pitching journalists or building an online community, if you can’t measure your outcomes then good luck renewing your budget.

Closing thoughts

There are plenty of other examples I could give. Shel Holtz and Todd Defren - two guys with way more experience than me – both wrote interesting posts on the subject of “campaigns” yesterday. Again, as they’ll agree, while short-term initiatives work it’s always been more effective to build coverage over time than to go through constant, expensive one-day wonders.

These aren’t social media principles – they’re communications principles.

What do you think?

Posted in: pr, public relations, social media, strategy

Tags: communications, social media, strategy

12Comments

Is This Your Agency/Client Relationship?

09.05.27

On a lighter-than-usual note: Agency folks, does this video seem familiar?

Fortunately, we’re blessed with clients who aren’t like this.

Hat tip to Todd Defren.

Posted in: miscellaneous

Tags: agency, client

8Comments

Want Me To Write About Your Stuff? Don’t Lie In Your Pitch

09.05.27

I receive several pitches each day. In general, even if I don’t write about what they’re pitching, I welcome the approach.

A few days ago, however, I received this email:

subject: I’d like to know your opinion Hello, My name is […]. I’m a […] student at […]. I writing you because I’d like to know your opinion about a YouTube Viral ad I saw recently posted on AdRants for a nonprofit called […]. Recently I’m seeing more nonprofits use social media to spread their message. This ad in particular struck me because it seemed like it was directed at a specific type of YouTube viewer, FailBlog fans. FYI FailBlog is a YouTube channel that posts juvenile videos about people falling and such. What I found refreshing is the fact that a serious nonprofit like [...] is using a juvenile ad to communicate a serious message. Here’s the video link: [Deleted – I'm not giving him the traffic] Hope you enjoy it and post about it. Look forward to hearing your comments. Thank You

Reading this, my spidey senses started tingling:

The person sending the email opened saying they wanted my opinion and closed asking me to post about it (is this what you had in mind?)
Some of the language sounded a lot like an informal version of what I see in a lot of pitches – “Recently we’re seeing more companies use X to do Y.“

After about 30 seconds of pondering this, I glanced at the email address of the sender, only to see that the email came from the domain of one of the world’s largest advertising agencies. What’s more, the person who sent the email appeared to be the person who had posted the video on YouTube. Instead of potentially getting me to write about their creative video, the agency has succeeded in getting me to block all emails from their domain in future. What’s wrong with this approach?

Main faults

The email, coming from an ad agency’s domain, claimed to be from a student. Even if the person really was a summer student at this agency, their actions reflect on the company.
The sender claimed to have seen the video on AdRants (it was indeed posted there) when in reality they posted it to YouTube themselves.

Does Your Organization Have Multiple Personalities?

09.05.21

Whether you like it or not, your customer service is now part of your company’s public relations. In reality it has always been that way but now, with the variety of online tools that let individuals have a louder voice, many more people can hear about your customer service successes and failures.

Customer service is one of the many ways you can put social media tools to use – identifying customer issues early and resolving them to create happy, satisfied customers. Whether it’s through focused tools like Get Satisfaction or through a coordinated listening and engagement program, there are plenty of ways to go about it. On a daily basis we’re blown away by the power of tools like Radian6 for coordinating this kind of effort.

Respond to customers online and they can be blown away that you’re listening. Frankly, most people don’t yet expect it. We’ve seen from our own clients that the response you can get from effective online service is powerful.

What happens, though, when your offline customer service function doesn’t live up to the expectation for service standards you’ve set online?

You end up with an organization with multiple personalities.

Online, your company is friendly, responsive, and goes beyond the minimum to set a gold-level standard. Offline, your call centre staff are assessed on turnaround time on calls, and are focused on getting you off the line as quickly as possible.

The person who gets prompt, friendly, personal service online one day and then the next day gets put on hold to a call centre in India for 90 minutes will have an even more negative perception of that phone experience due to that contrast. What’s more, they’re likely to continue to rely on your online service in future, by-passing the other options.

Is that the kind of consistency you aim for with your brand? I hope not.

What about the customers who experience this disconnect? As Todd Defren notes, the response is likely to be something along the lines of:

“Treat me like a STAR one day, and give me a nightmarish experience the next day, just because I’ve reached out via a different channel? F* you! I’m gonna tweet about this — you are a fraud!!”

If you’re starting to tune-in and listen to conversations about your company online, pay close attention to what people are saying. Are they consistently complaining about your offline customer service? If they are, while you stand to benefit from outreach through social media tools, you need to take a long, hard look at the rest of your customer service operation.

Posted in: monitoring, pr, public relations

Tags: branding, customer service, listening, monitoring, pr, public relations

8Comments

Rethinking “Influencers”

09.05.20

Who are the influencers in your market? Are they the top-of-mind attention grabbers, are they the lower-profile up-and-comers, or are they the long tail, the people with relatively few readers but who make up a good chunk of pages 2+ in Google’s search results and who, in time, could develop a sizeable following?

I ask because I’ve had a couple of conversations recently that have made me reconsider who I look at as “influencers” in client markets recently.

What’s an “influencer?”

I’ve always defined “influencers” quite narrowly. I’ve thought of them as the people who, when they speak on their key topic, make others sit up and take notice. I tend to define that group narrowly based on criteria like engagement, traffic, on-topic posts and so on.

I’ve started to wonder if I’m defining that group too narrowly. What about the people who have built up communities around their brand – people who are engaged in whatever that person writes about (for example Brogan who, despite his modesty, gets a lot of outreach because his voice online is LOUD)? What about the people who don’t have a large readership or engaged community yet, but who are starting out and may develop that in future? Do you consider them influencers in your market or not?

Finite resources

One concern with defining a list of influencers too widely is that your resources are finite. You can define a core group of 20 or 200 influencers, but as the group grows, so the attention you can devote to each one diminishes.

If you define your group too narrowly you risk getting lost in the ever increasing noise out there. If, however, you define it too broadly then you become incapable of building the relationships you need with those people. Where’s the line?

If you think strategically, the answer to those questions depends on your objectives. Your goals for your communications, and the measurements you use to define success, will affect how you define your audiences and, through that, your “influencers.” If your objectives change, so may your approach to defining that group.

Despite those in social media who may say otherwise, when you get back to basics it’s a numbers game – your client needs to generate a profit. You need to meet your targets, whatever they are. How you reach those numbers can differ – though relationships with a few key influencers or a network of quieter voices. Still, the numbers never go away.

What do you think? Have you tended to lean one way or the other on this spectrum? How have you approached this in the past?

Image credit: Oranje

Posted in: blogger relations, social media

Tags: blogger relations, influencer, outreach, social media

7Comments

Where Are The Experts?

09.05.19

The people on the leading edge of social media have, in general, avoided referring to themselves as experts. It’s partly due to modesty, and partly because everyone who calls themselves an “expert” gets widely mocked as a douchebag in the social media egosystem.

I got a trackback today from a post by Marc Meyer, noting that “if I do a search for a social media expert, I may not be able to find one.” His post looks at the top ten Google results for “social media expert” and notes that only one is someone calling themselves an expert. The rest (including my own post on experts) are somewhat sceptical of people describing themselves as such.

Marc makes a fair point – there is a dearth of useful results when you look for people to help with your social media experts. That makes the selection process for companies all the more important, and was part of the reasoning behind my aforementioned post – you need to know the right questions to ask or you end up signing a contract for snake oil.

With that said, a few months ago I started to wonder when it’s going to be ok to start calling yourself an “expert.” People in other fields do, and social media has been around in an evolving form for ten years or so now. When will it be acceptable?

Part of the problem is that those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about social media and other thoughts of digital PR don’t want to position ourselves in the same pot as the plethora of jonny-come-lately self-entitled “experts” who have come crawling out of the woodwork recently.

Too many “experts” have built their egos on the back of their own “personal brands” but there’s a big difference between marketing yourself and marketing a corporation with stakeholders and competitors. Meanwhile, those of us who are looking to differentiate ourselves have taken to leading by offering advice instead of ego, and letting others judge if we know what we’re talking about.

To answer Marc’s point, here are some of the people I consider to be experts in the field of social media communications. I read their posts, in many cases I’ve met them in person and they’re doing the things that many other people only talk about.

These people aren’t necessarily the most prolific bloggers, but when they write, I read. When they speak, I listen… and their thoughts help me form my opinions, whether I agree with them or not:

Who do you regard as an expert?

Image credit: Marc Randazza

Posted in: social media

Tags: experts, social media

8Comments

BackType Connect – Good… Too Good?

09.05.15

Over the last couple of years, it’s become harder and harder to track conversations about your site online. Tools like Google Blogsearch and Google Alerts are great for tracking links from other blogs, but as micro-blogging tools like Twitter, Jaiku, FriendFeed, Tumblr and their like emerged people started to post links in ways that are a little harder to track.

URL-shortening services, in particular, increased the difficulty of finding people linking to your content. What’s more, while you might see those alerts, other members of your community didn’t so potentially useful additions to your conversation were lost.

As people started to notice this trend, services began to spring-up to find and aggregate these conversations on your site. For several months I used Chat Catcher, developed by Shannon Whitley. Unfortunately, as Twitter’s popularity sky-rocketed earlier this year, Chat Catcher became harderto maintain and Whitley announced recently that it would cease functioning shortly (update: last night Whitley announced that Chat Catcher would NOT be shutting down after all, due to the supportive messages he received). At that point I began looking around for an alternative solution.

Enter BackType Connect

I’ve been a fan of BackType since it launched a little while back. BackType initially served as a comment search tool, letting you search the comments on blogs (often where the highly valuable debate occurred) in a way that other search engines didn’t. I clearly wasn’t the only one, as the good folks at Radian6 incorporated BackType’s search into their product not too long ago.

BackType recently launched BackType Connect, a service that lets you view the conversations around a particular post including comments on other blogs, tweets, FriendFeed, Digg and Reddit comments and more. At around the same time, they released a WordPress plugin that does the same thing on your own site.

It works… too well?

BackType Connect does an excellent job of finding and aggregating conversations around your posts. In fact, if you enable all of its functions, it almost works too well. When I first enabled the plugin, I left all of the features enabled and found myself faced with a deluge of new comments from other blogs, retweets from Twitter and more.

While it may be useful to know about comments on other blogs which link to your posts, I found the usefulness of including them on my site to be limited (and worried that the commenters might be irritated to see their thoughts posted on my site instead of the original post) so I quickly turned-off that feature.

Also, since installing BackType Connect, I’ve noticed a big drop-off in comments on my site. I’m not entirely sure of the reason, but suspect that it may be because Twitter comments via the plugin can quite easily overwhelm the comments section of the post, especially if a lot of people tweet about what you write. BackType Connect will only post other conversations as comments on your posts, not as trackbacks (although you can group them all at the end of your comments rather than chronolocially integrated) – that option would be a nice addition in the future.

Chris Golda and Mike Montano from BackType both suggested that I disable the Twitter functionality, so we’ll see what happens from here (the plugin still identifies tweets and provides a link to them; it just no longer posts them on my site).

I’m not sure about this one, but I suspect that if you uninstall BackType Connect you may lose the comments that have been posted via it. When I disabled the Twitter function, all of those comments disappeared from my site immediately. Something to think about if you ever consider deleting the plugin.

Bottom line: BackType Connect is a great plugin for seeing what other people are saying about your posts away from your own site. Be careful when deciding whether to enable all of its features though – while you may see everything other people are saying about you, you may drive away the conversation on your own site.

Regardless of the small number of issues, this is still a useful plugin. It’s easy to install, easy to set-up and easy to use once you have it there. Worth a try if you run a WordPress site.

Have you tried BackType Connect or similar plugins? Do you find them useful? Which service have you found to be the best?

Posted in: social media, tools

Tags: BackType Connect, plugins, Twitter, WordPress

2Comments

Five Tools For Drinking From The Firehose

09.05.14

Over the last few weeks I’ve presented to a number of groups around ’101′ social media topics – how to get started, practical pointers, and ethical issues in social media.

People often express shock at the sheer volume of tools and information out there in social media. It can be overwhelming, for sure.

So how can you avoid drowning in information? What are some of the best ways to filter through the noise and find the signal?

Google Reader

RSS will save your sanity when you start to get involved in social media. Instead of having to check 10, 20 or 100 sites for changes all the time, RSS feeds let you pull all of the updates into one place.

I always look to Google Reader when recommending a particular RSS reader – it’s web-based so it’s cross-platform, it’s available remotely and it’s easy to use. Other options include Feed Demon and Bloglines.

PostRank

If your RSS reader is getting clogged with too many feeds, PostRank may be your saviour.

My “A-list” of blogs alone covers about 50 sites. It’s a rare day when I can get to all of them. PostRank (formerly known as AideRSS) helps to filter your feeds by the level of “engagement” on posts. If you’re busy, just ask for the best posts out of your subscriptions, and read a few. If you have more time on your hands, read a few more. If you use Google Reader, the process is made even easier through PostRank’s Firefox extension, which lets you apply that filtering directly in your reader.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck just keeps getting better and has become the automatic choice for many people due to its powerful sorting functionality. If you follow any significant number of people, the volume of conversation flowing through Twitter can be overwhelming. Tweetdeck helps you to manage this through grouping your followers and setting-up searches for the terms that are important to you.

MicroPlaza

MicroPlaza aggregates all of the links posted on Twitter by people you follow, and a list of all the people who posted those same links. You can subscribe to that list via RSS and pull it into your RSS reader, further reducing the effort required to consume all this information. If, like me, you use Twitter to populate your reading list, that can be a powerful tool.

Still, if you follow a lot of people you could drown under that list of links. Fortunately, MicroPlaza lets you create groups of people you trust, aggregate their links and subscribe to just those links. Voila – your own personal newsfeed.

Delicious

Want to avoid having to trawl through the noise to get to the interesting posts? Why not make use of other peoples’ recommendations?

Delicious lets you subscribe via RSS to the bookmarks of other people. Create a network of people who you trust and you can subscribe to that, too. Alternatively, search for key terms that are important to you and subscribe to those results. You instantly have a continuing feed of sites that other people have found sufficiently valuable to save.

These are five of the key tools I use to keep things manageable. What do you use?

Posted in: social media, tools

Tags: RSS, social media, tools

8Comments

Social Media Policies For Your Company: External Policies

09.05.11

In my last post we explored the policies that companies should consider internally, within their organization, when getting started in social media.

This time we’ll take a look at the social media policies that organizations might consider posting publicly, for everyone to see. There are two:

Comment moderation policy
Interaction policy

Comment moderation policy

Comment moderation policies are closely related to one of the “norms” of social media, and one of the aspects which organizations that can find hardest to stomach: People expect that when they leave a comment, it will appear on the site.

If someone posts a comment and it doesn’t appear on the site, they may react badly. These reactions can range from repeated attempts to post comments, letters to your boss, to independent posts on other sites that are out of your control, through to sparking the organization of activist activities on an ongoing basis.

Frankly though, if you have an official blog you may want to review comments before posting them. You’re probably quite sensitive about the site content anyway, and you know that the Google has a very long memory.

So how do you protect your organization from a consumer backlash, while protecting the conversation on your site from being derailed?

You publish a comment moderation policy, to which you can point if you have to reject someone’s comment. It’s out there, up-front, and nothing is hidden so people should have no complaints if they violate it. Think of it as an insurance policy, just in case something goes wrong.

Consider covering the following:

Language and manners: Will you reject comments which include offensive or inappropriate language?
Personal attacks: Will you rule out personal attacks? Ideally you might allow people to question or argue the content – after all, this medium is about conversation. Aggressive attacks, though, are another thing.
On-topic comments: What will you do with comments that veer away from the topic of the post or other peoples’ comments?
Comment spam: Will you allow comments that appear to be spam?
Number of links: Do you want to limit the number of links that you will allow? Will you use no-follow links?
Blocking: Will you take action against repeat offenders?
Contact: Will you provide a way for commenters to contact someone if their comment is not approved, or if they have other questions?

Online interaction policy

Let’s say you recognize the importance of listening and, as your online efforts mature, you’re starting to engage with the people talking online about your industry. The trouble is, you know that once you start to engage with people online they’ll expect it and you know that you’re not going to want to respond to everyone. You should try to avoid the “dark side” of social media.

How do you draw the line?

As with your comment moderation, you state up-front which conversations you will engage in, and which you won’t. Again, having this posted publicly on your site gives you the ability to point to it if someone asks why you haven’t responded to their posting.

An interaction policy also helps by adding some credibility to your approach, as you can publicly set clear standards for your interactions. This has the additional benefit of reinforcing your standards with your employees.

You may want to consider the following facets of an engagement policy:

Conversations:

Spam and off-topic comments: Will you respond to spam or off-topic comments? Likely not.
Defamation: You may want to avoid responding to defamatory remarks.
Misinformation: Ideally, you should aim to correct misinformation as soon as possible. Remember, if people don’t see a correction they may assume an incorrect statement to be true.
Dissent: What’s your approach to commenters who simply disagree with you? Will you debate with them? Will you avoid the conversation? Where do you draw the line between dissent and trolling?

Standards:

Timeliness: Assuming your processes allow for it (which they ideally should), consider stating that you will reply to online comments as soon as possible.
Honesty and accuracy: Consider stating that you will take all possible steps to ensure that what you post is complete and accurate.
Error correction: Make it clear that if you post something that you discover is inaccurate, you will endeavour to correct it immediately.
Confidentiality: Publicly state that you will not discuss confidential information.
Disclosure: Note that when employees engage in public conversations about the organization, they will disclose their affiliation.

Your interaction policy will also benefit from an internal component – a clearly-defined process for how to go about those interactions. The US Air Force has a well thought-out decision tree that lays out the considerations for whether to respond to posts. You may want to tweak it for your organization, but it provides an excellent starting point.

Beyond this, though, clearly lay-out who is responsible for what in your process, and the timelines involved. As Alex de Bold said to me last week, social media moves in dog years. You won’t have time to figure this out on the fly. Will you triage posts? What approvals are needed at each level?

Thinking this through in advance will not only make your life easier, it may also save you if things do go wrong at some point and people ask why things were handled a certain way.

Conclusion

This is the final part of a three-part series on social media policies. To get the full story, check out the rest of the social media policy series. Once again, a big hat tip goes to Michael O’Connor Clarke for his ideas on this topic over the last few months.

Do you have these kinds of policies? What would you change in the approaches above?

Posted in: 101, best practices, social media

Tags: 101, alipolicies, policies, practical 101

2Comments