Here are 5 key takeaways that I would like to share:
My Social Media Strategy: Tweet others as you would like to be tweeted. Just to be clear, this was not heard from Craig Newmark at Craigslist since he quoted the golden rule more accurately as one of his final fireside chat remarks. But I misheard it and love it. This is, in essence my own social media strategy.
Peg your press communication to something relevant in the world. This idea is from Sue Kwon at CBS5. She is outstanding at creating a compelling story. Go out and read news headlines and know how your story relates to or solves key problems. Be sure to use relevant statistics in your communication. And when you are telling your story on video – be camera ready, have signage/logos, and look good…
Have your customers vying to tell your story. Your story is likely even more compelling coming right from the horses mouth (well, if horses are your customer). Nowadays “customers” can be fans, friends, followers and all the world’s folks that know and love your stuff. Capture the stories that your horses are happy to tell.
Know and love your metrics. Tim Ferriss suggested Anne Holland’s WhichTestWon.com — and as a lover of A/B testing, I love this concept. Go get your own. Know which tests are important to you and how the results will make your onsite endeavors more effective.
Make policy, not decisions. This is another Tim Ferris inspired tidbit. So many of the leaders I know aren’t comfortable delegating decisions or spend tons of time making decisions. Find the decisions that you are re-decisioning and create and communicate the policy around them. Then check your metrics to watch your reduction of time spent in decision-making.
The event website is here. Thanks to the organizers and speakers for the great wealth of knowledge you shared with us!
17 years ago I made a dirty investment, well, I made an investment in dirt. I bought a piece of land that was pretty much filled with horse poop, and that was a good thing. Since then, that piece of land shown above has continued to be filled with green compost, local horse and llama manure, neighborly turkey manure (though that won’t be repeated), experiemental biofuel, and a ton of vegetables and fruit that have fed families and restaurants in our community.
Today is blog action day — a day where climate change gets a deserved front and center stage in the blogosphere, which I hope is good news for the biosphere. What does climate change have to do with dirt? Everything. Healthy organically grown dirt in my front yard means sustainable healthy food, healthy people and a healthier planet. No petroleum needed to grow the food or transport it across the world, no pesticides needed to obliterate the pests.
Take the dirt, add local sunshine and water, share seeds with the hood, grow diverse open pollinated heirlooms and my front yard becomes a small and meaningful part of the blog action day solution.
Oh, and did I mention just how good our front yard dirt grown produce tastes? (yeah Jean you are going to be doing the testimonial for those chile rellenos!)
In addition to all the great things you will be doing to support the global climate, please spend a bit of time getting dirty.
The topic of today’s Silicon Valley Brand Forum was “Bloggers and Tweeters are Devouring my Brand”, though I wonder if the title could alternatively been “How do I get Bloggers and Tweeters devoted to a brand?”…. more on that later.
But first a big thanks to Kevin Heany for putting this and the many years of Brand Forums together! You have a rocknroll great memory Kevin.
Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter Group, author of the hot Web Strategy blog was the keynote speaker for the forum. He spoke so briefly, but he could have captivated my interest all day! He presented 3 simple yet smart ideas: 1) your website is irrelevant, 2) real time is not fast enough and 3) customers don’t care what department you are in. If you assume for a moment that all three of these are true for your company, what tactics would you use to empower your brand? Would you say something like: seek relevance and link it on your site, prepare a listening strategy and centralize customer touchpoints into a single (positive) experience? Right on.
The host for the forum was Electronic Arts (EA). What a fun place to work! Gotta love the Starbucks in their lobby and the fun games you can play while enjoying your beverage. Check out the photo from Jeremiah Owyang’s photostream:
But to find the venue the day before, I did my usual type-into-Google-maps thing and to my surprise, the company rating results that popped up next to the map for EA were certainly not as wonderful as their lobby. EA was rated with 1 lowly star and the comments about the company I saw certainly weren’t stunning.
If anyone needed help from getting their brand devoured by bloggers and tweeters, I figured EA was on the list. So I was extra curious to see their presentation. And I was extra impressed. Jaap Tuinman, EA’s online marketing and community development manager really gets this stuff. And EA is a good business case for learning from failures, #EAFAIL to be exact. That is the hash tag where users comment on EA’s failures. EA really does pay attention to user comments as almost 4 million of you already know from watching the Tiger Woods walk on water video.
I got quite a kick out of Cisco’s Jeanette Gibson who told the “Cisco Fatty” story. It’s a story about a woman got exposed when she tweeted her disinterest in a Cisco job that came with a “fat” paycheck. The issue quickly got out of hand for Cisco, and the woman, especially when someone created a YouTube video, which went viral. The issue than reached crisis level when the Oprah show called to get Cisco on air (Cisco rejected the Oprah offer though I wouldn’t have…) There are tons of examples of people broadcasting things that they shouldn’t or that they regret, but this one has some excellent lessons learned. Sure, don’t broadcast things you regret, but a more important morale: the more that a company like Cisco proactively develops a strategy and pays attention to online conversations, the better they can prepare, react and adapt in times of crisis.
So what were some of the essential takeaways from the Brand Forum? Well some may believe that squeaky wheels in the web 2.0 world can devour a brand. Some may believe that brand managers should be responsible for controlling a brand. Believe it or not. In this open and connected online world, it’s more evident than ever that brand is made of the perceptions and experiences in the minds of the CONSUMERS. The role of branding particularly in this online world is to provide a clear platform, content and an experience for bloggers, tweeters, employees and consumers to engage in and enthusiastically advocate. Goodbye Devour, Hello Devotion!
Can you unplug from social media? Take the challenge, here’s what I found out.
Many people tell me that they don’t want to plug in to social media. Some feel it’s a waste of time, not important, information overload, etc. So I decided to unplug, for a month and see what I would find missing in my life. I checked out of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter for several weeks, and then left all e-communication behind for a week in the wilderness.
I figured that the things that I missed would help me understand the benefits of the various technologies I had been using. It also happened that the last week of my experiment, I was in the Ansel Adams Wilderness in the Eastern Sierra. Mono and Inyo Counties seriously lack broadband, similar to the Central Sierra counties I work with to help adopt high speed internet and associated technologies. Many of the residents in the area couldn’t have acceptable access to social networking, even if they did understand its benefits. So my experiment would help understand what many of these residents are missing, and advocate on their behalf.
Here are my top observations: Access to critical information – We heard from a passing hiker that a bear had recently attacked a tent (while people were sleeping in it) at Thousand Island Lakes. Given that we were planning to camp there the next day or so, I kinda wanted more information on this subject. In the connected world, I could have typed in a few search keywords, downloaded conditions from various websites, emailed a friend to find out more, etc. But I was limited to just asking hikers that happened to pass us if they knew more. Most didn’t.
There was also wildfire activity in the area. I knew this because a passing hiker happened to have been evacuated from the fire area. The forest service was posting information about this online, but I had no access to it in my unconnected state.
My conclusion is that the traditional face to face information channel works, especially since most hikers were willing to stop for a while and exchange information. But the online channels would be much faster and more reliable sources of critical information.
General knowledge of what’s going on in the world. I missed news highlights. But I didn’t miss the latest in the Michael Jackson autopsy, or Sarah Palin’s retirement.
At one point, my watch broke and I wanted to know the time. I figured that I could use the sun as an approximation so of course I wanted to search various sites and forums on telling time using the sun. I also was curious about the names of some of the wildflowers and some of the star constellations. All of this information would have been readily available online for me. Sure, I may be able to get by without a lot of the general knowledge, but I sorely missed the immediate quench of my curiosity.
Updates from my friends and colleagues. Except for those who I was hiking with, I had no news. OK, I certainly didn’t miss knowing every event my friends attended or who was dating or breaking up. I was curious about a friend who had applied for a new dream job and another who had a big decision to take. But most of the update information I peruse in social networks is nice to have, not critical.
Professional opportunities. My social networks are a huge source of professional information and opportunity. Yeah, those of you that are reading this know who you are and you rock!! I missed knowing that a colleague won a big grant (information that was posted online with reader comments). I didn’t have access to shared documents on a group share account, I couldn’t download instructions for completing an upcoming project. Clearly for me, access to these connected technologies is essential for my professional success, no way around it.
So there you have it. I survived bears and fires, but literally lost track of time and probably fell behind professionally. So how about you? What would you lose if you unplugged for a while, and would you miss it? Take the unplugged challenge and let me know!
Would you consider yourself an activist? How about a digital activist? I probably wouldn’t. But wait, are those who are active building communities in social media all considered digital activists? Maybe I’ve been an activist all along just waiting for a cause to find me (which it did). So at least for the next week, I’m a digital activist and project champion for IJCentral.org. What a talented group of people passionate about an important cause! I’m honored to be working with them and can’t wait to meet up with this team next week at the N2Y4 conference!
So let’s get started… first, the cause: International justice. Check out this movie trailer for “The Reckoning”, by Skylight pictures. AMAZING!
Next, collaboration… what can you do to help out? For now, check out the site IJCentral.org. Stay tuned for a list of action items and new enhancements to the site.
Over the next week I hope to share with you a LOT more on the IJCentral story as well as the power of social media for global engagement!
And to help answer some of the questions above, check out the following interesting blog post from Gaurav Misha on the 4 Cs of Social Media!
Go ahead and raise your hand! Yep just raise it. Repeat regularly. Repeat when asked to volunteer. Cause you never know where it could lead you. And that’s a good thing.
I raised my hand digitally when I saw this announcement http://tinyurl.com/o95dsy. A good thing. Because I am now the project champion for ITCentral which you’ll hear more about from me in a bit. I am honored to help champion ITCentral at Net Squared’s Mobile Challenge conference next week. WOW, this is going to be an astounding exchange of ideas, particularly for using innovations in mobile technology for social change. The conference brings together all types of people playing at the intersection of technology and progressive change. What an impressive group of attendees! Just imagine the possibilities that they will create for global community engagement. That’s a really good thing!
And you can participate from the safety of your home (or mobile telephone), just click here for more conference info or click on the widget below to follow along.
For now, check out all of the innovative projects out there, especially the 15 featured projects selected into the competition by community vote – I promise you’ll be impressed. Which of the projects will you raise your hand for?
I recently asked a group of about 35 students in class if I should recommend every one of them in LinkedIn. Their answers were as beautifully diverse as the students themselves. But the answer wasn’t yes. In general they felt that if I endorsed every student it would dilute the value of my recommendations. So should I endorse just the students who ask? Or just the students who got the best grades? Or just the ones looking for jobs? Ah, these are some of the tricky questions that we need to answer for ourselves when sending and receiving recommendations in social networks.
Contributing to recommendations is a great way to learn about social review processes, so I would like to encourage them as much as possible. So I came up with a process for the students which may help.
1) Recommendations are two-way. Before giving a recommendation I ask that the student gives a recommendation to somebody else first. It reinforces the learning and the beauty of contribution.
2) Recommendations should be focused on the person’s value add. It’s less interesting to read a recommendation that says a person is generally a great contributor or team player, and more interesting when a recommendation focuses on things that stand out. So I generally ask the students to reflect on what they feel are their key value-adds for their academic or professional interests.
If a student makes it through these challenges, then it’s highly likely that they have learned the value of the process and merit a recommendation.
Do you endorse everyone who asks?
Opinions are good, right? Or should this read, opinions are good as long as you don’t share negative ones with anyone else publicly? Social network platforms are changing the way I look at opinions.
I learned my first social review lessons at a party when I was 16 years old. That was, well let’s say a few years ago, but I’m still reminded of it. I had developed a little thesis that you can share negative yet honest opinions in a positive, helpful spirit, and true friends will appreciate your viewpoint. I was wrong. So much for scientific research, my first null hypothesis was clearly rejected, followed by several days eating my lunch alone. (Note: at least all was not lost since I just recently re-connected via Facebook to the old troop including the host of that famous “Sweet 16” party). I quickly defaulted to “if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say it”.
Now that online platforms exist for all types of publicly identified ratings, rankings, comments and reviews, there’s a lot more art in the process – with aesthetic expressions and creative levels of participation, emotion and trust in the communication palette.
I’m a fan of social rating, ranking, user reviews, consumer reviews, etc. I consume and contribute. I am generally more motivated to share and contribute when my opinions are extreme – either I love something or there are problems with it. And I’m one of those naïve individuals who actually believe that real people’s comments are mostly real.
Which brings me to my vacuum cleaner. My current one was designed poorly (notice in the picture that the wand and handle aren’t attached… you can bet that I commented on that problem!) I want one that sucks. I don’t care too much about the type of vacuum cleaner; I care more about getting my floor clean. And weird but true, I care even more about not purchasing a bad product (ah, those who have visited my floor may already know this). I don’t want to waste shipping, packing, material resources, or money on a poor product. So I’ll spend at least 4 times the cost of the vacuum in the online social platform world, searching for a good product, reading reviews and in some cases even discussing the product with a stranger (yes a stranger, which would be different from a close person I know and trust). I can use online tools to do all of this quickly and easily.
Listen up here fellow marketers, I like this system and if for some reason I feel that you are abusing it trying to spam, amplify, or falsely promote stuff, I’m not going to… eat lunch with you.
Are the results I get from social reviews better than those I would get by listening to TV commercials, reading mail-order catalogs and asking the salesperson at the local store?
Resounding YES.
And the process is getting better and better. More people are participating, platforms are getting more sophisticated, and consumers are getting better at public reviewing. The balance between words painted by product experts and the tapestry of words from users is shifting in the right direction.
So here are some ideas I’d like to add to the social review artists palette:
1) thank those who give useful feedback since they are risking friend loss
2) be genuine when reviewing, big points for factual
3) be sensitive to the people and things behind the review (yes my dear Sweet 16 friends I did learn something)
4) be graceful when others express negative comments, especially those that are truly given in a spirit of improvement
Comments? What’s your style for expressing opinions publicly?
I’ve returned today back to (virtual) reality after an astounding MarketingNow Conference April 15/16 2009 in Wellington New Zealand (and a bit of a holiday with family at the Great Barrier Reef) Since it’s been several days since I’ve been online (yep, thankfully no internet access at the Great Barrier Reef) I’ve had a chance to reflect on some of the key points that have stayed with me since the event.
This wasn’t a social media conference about social media. It was about business success using new rules of marketing, no rules of marketing, superpowers, niche influencers, techniques for discoverability and by following dreams. Here are some of the details of my reflections:
1) Listen to the real, genuine and nice in your customers and befriend it. Right, sounds so basic, so simple that it can’t possibly be a takeaway, but how often do we openly listen to the voice of our customers, clients, critics, family, etc., and then promote it?
David Meerman Scott and Chris Brogan are two of the greats in the field and great mentors for me in real, genuine and nice. They exude it. Their presentations on the first day of the event were mostly about real, genuine and nice people who created magic by stimulating real, genuine and nice conversations. Surprising enough, innovation, humor, expertise, excitement, outrageous and good causes all hang out in the real, genuine and nice. No scripting, coercion, pushing, censuring or filtering of information, just real, genuine and nice.
2) Provide a platform for the conversation. Where do you encourage people to comment, participate, interact? Where do you tell your story or engage a debate? My session on the second day of the conference was about indulging the superpowers (ideas, stories, brand, reputation) and divulging the superheroes (communities). We had 4 adventures in a 90 minute workshop: 1) determine the keywords used to describe a superpower, 2) get involved in the conversation, 3) spread the superpower virally, 4) promote the superheroes.
To develop the conversation I used a technique inspired by Allen Gunn (Gunner) from Aspiration to provide a platform for debate. Basically I presented a statement which was controversial and had people agree or disagree with this statement by voting physically – they lined up in the front of the room if they strongly agreed or in the back of the room if they strongly disagreed.
This picture of the conversation is from Simon Young’s summary of the Marketing Now event at http://ijump.co.nz/category/blog/. Note that Simon also live tweeted 2 full days of the event, wow! Definitely invite Simon to your next event as he has a fantastic ability to create the being there feeling through social media. During the event I used a technique to empower the conversation virally. The “virus” I used was actually a clear very dilute borax solution (a type of washing powder). Out of the 100 participants only about 4 people actually had a virus to propagate. The rest had just plain water. We exchanged a “virus” by engaging in conversations, connecting and then mixing our cups together. The virus then spread through this cup sharing process. At the end of the adventure, we used pH strips to see how far the virus propagated. Kirsten Smith and Nancy Jennings inspired me to create this technique which was adapted from a school exercise where children learn about contagious diseases. The platform really helped all the participants discuss, engage, debate, network and have a bit of fun, all while enhancing their unique superpower!
3) Identify and measure influencers. Some may argue that social network influencers are hard to measure or identify but Stephen Johnson has convinced me otherwise. Stephen is the true definition of creative genius and he’s got a lot of stuff figured out. Among tons of inspiring business cases, Stephen presented Orion, an innovative platform which allows insight into how social networks evolve and influence grows (as in almost real time!). It’s a platform that could be used in so many wonderful ways, including building involvement in causes (including eco causes) and managing crises. Stephen understands and articulates groundswell better than anyone else I’ve met and is soooooo interesting to talk to regarding just about anything to do with innovation in social media.
4) Become more visible and discoverable at home. Your home may be a website, blog, twitter page, profile, etc. Become visible wherever you choose to call home. Jim Stewart from StewArtMedia (not to be confused with James Stewart our dear Marketing Now videographer) is an expert in doing just that! In workshops he facilitates he shows attendees how to build and optimize a page and watch how it jumps in ranking. At the event he gave all kinds of tips and techniques for developing presence organically. Since I used to be the account director for Adobe search, I particularly appreciated his comments on Adobe and dominance of the “click here” phrase. Jim’s presentation was simple and insightful and I highly recommend checking out his site and his webcasts!!
5) Follow your own emerging dreams! OK, I saved the best for last. Siobhan Bulfin is my superhero in this area! The Marketing Now conference she created brought together some outstanding people and inspired Kiwi businesses in exciting new ways! Siobhan started with a few searches in Google and YouTube. She selected topics which were interesting and inspiring to her and found people, communities and ideas. She attended some workshops to get to know some of the experts in the field and boost her own expertise and then went out and developed a strong voice in the New Zealand business community. She has now taken her dream to the next level and has developed a New Zealand Social Media network on Ning! And it’s not going to stop there! Stay tuned for more events and exciting innovations from this wonder woman!
Yep, all in all a fantastically successful event and I look forward to the next one… reserve a place in your agenda for Auckland in October…
Thanks again to those who crowdsourced the Social Media Alive workshop at Marketing Now New Zealand.
Here is a superlist of the sites and blogs of the participants. Check them out and sponsor their businesses and causes. They care about customer relationship and engagement!
It’s T-1 for the Marketing Now conference in Wellington and I’m already fascinated with the social media brainpower that Siobhan Bulfin has put together!
OK, sure, get a bunch of e-geeks together and there will be talk of Twitter worms, follow spam, techniques to differentiate robots from humans, and the many ways of dealing with too many followers and not enough finger speed.
The extraordinarily cool benefits of this kind of brainpower concentration are already emerging and the conference hasn’t even begun.
In just a few hours, we already had new business models in SEO/ social media insurance policies, cause marketing, loyalty programs and education.
But almost as cool…. this particular community of brainpower is well connected: using “full portfolio” communication (full portfolio meaning talking to each other verbally while simultaneously or subsequently tweeting to each other) you no longer needs to guess what the person next to you is thinking — and if you miss any of the conversation, you can catch it live a few minutes later.
Stay tuned, I am getting a really good feeling about this conference, but in case ESP becomes the next victim of a worm or profile erasure, watch the hashtag #mktgnow.
The Social Media Live! workshop is going to be a blast… no secrets to divulge yet but stay tuned! I look forward to seeing you in Wellington!
This blog is your educational playground. Feel free to browse around and discover what’s wrong with this blog. Because yes, there is a LOT wrong with this blog — as well as some things that are right –and after the workshop you’ll have a good sense of the difference! Leave a comment!
Batman is a superhero known for his analytical detective skills and using tools on his famous batman utility belt to handle all sorts of challenges from the villains. Ah, as if all you have to do is add “bat” in front of a tool and it becomes unique, special, just the right tool for the job.
Today with a bat-iPhone utility belt armored with a bat-map, a bat-calendar, bat-Twitter, bat-Skype and bat-internet we can handle all sorts of challenges from the communication cost and time villains. And even more interesting, with today’s bat-tools we no longer need to shine a bat-signal into Gotham City for our communication, we’ve got bat-e-Bay!
Bat e-Bay can be used to auction something unique to a very large audience of which a small population would be highly interested — something like a 1966 official Batman Utility Belt.
Permission for photo graciously provided by e-Bay seller where the item is auctioned http://tinyurl.com/ctru7w
The batman utility belt is an excellent long tail example: no longer is it a detective challenge for the likes of a superhero like Batman to find the right pool of potentially interested purchasers. Social media casts a huge net and the villains of cost and time are easy to fight. Yep, bat-times have clearly changed and the distribution bat-channels have also changed tremendously. Though if you are looking for souvenirs of the same bat-time at the same bat-channel, stay tuned cause bat-social media’s got your back.
Online social communities are powerful marketing allies! I’m currently surveying people registered for the Marketing Now! event in New Zealand to find out about the social communities they are interested in developing. Most of the responders so far reported that they are interested in developing a loyal community or community of influencers. Who IS this community of influencers and how do you find them? Well it may be that some of your best influencers are the ones close by in the gene pool — your family! Ah, do I hear you mumbling that mixing business and personal Facebook friends or Twitter followers is like blending oil and vinegar for you?
Well I have been recently enlightened by spending time this week with my family of influencers: my parents (in the 80’s age range just to give you an idea) participate in forums with their friends, use search engines for most of their info gathering, and check ratings and comments for most of the restaurants they try or videos they rent. They’ll probably read this blog post and send a link to their friends. My sister practically lives on her iPod – buys and comments on apps, contributes content to music communities (the group Cake in particular), downloads books and videos and follows on Twitter. My brother is a photographer and uses Flickr to post and get comments on his art. And the next generation of my family takes it to the next level! Faren has helped create an open source health research community and Lucille is building one up as a wellness examiner! And that’s just the start of it… My family is and has the potential of being a powerful community of influencers as I am for them. They are the first ones to think about for potential comments, diggs, bookmarks and community influence… and they may be the easiest to engage.
So next time you are on an airplane and the announcement reminds you to look around because the nearest emergency exit may be behind you, remind yourself to also look around because your nearest community of influencers may be right behind you, or sitting next to you, and they may know about sites with good floor lighting to help light your way.
Oh, and for the curious minds, I’m the one smack in the middle of the photo above. iPod girl (left) and photo boy (right) practiced influence skills at an early age.
Permission for photo graciously provided by e-Bay seller where the item is auctioned http://tinyurl.com/ctru7w 
