Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Does your business engage in social media? Then you must have a social CRM strategy: How can you integrate social collaboration functionality with your existing systems? How do you staff your SCRM efforts? How do you transition from listening to engaging in conversations, and which ones should you engage in? How do you get the results of those conversations into your CRM system? Start with understanding the following.

1- Google Is Your Friend
One of the great CRM questions is, "how do I find out where my customers are talking about me?" The big social media standard bearers -- Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn -- are obvious first thoughts, but often customers congregate on smaller sites that are more narrowly focused on their vertical markets or their unique interests.

Discovering these rich niches of often-intense conversation could prove far more lucrative than relentlessly panning in the waters of Facebook or Twitter for a nugget of discussion about your business. So how do you find these smaller, specialized channels? Do you need to throw significant cash at it? Is there a tool you can buy that will magically reveal these social media mother lodes?

You can surely blow a lot of dough on technology to find them, but before you do, make your task easy: plug in the name of your company, the names of your competitors, or keywords that pertain to your business into Google Search. It'll return results for those terms and, with a little digging, it should reveal many of the significant smaller social media channels where people are talking about you.

2- Make Sure To Show Up At Your Own Party
These days, online marketing pieces and company websites have lots of little Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media icons strewn about their landscapes inviting customers to click on them to friend, connect or subscribe to them. It's remarkably easy for designers to add them to their pages, and it's also remarkably easy for marketing managers and other executives to tell designers to add them to their pages.

Unfortunately, it's not quite so easy to recognize that when you plaster an icon on company content, you're making a commitment to be part of the conversation -- not just when the content is published, but for as long as that standing invitation is open to the public. If you're going to tell people to follow you on Twitter or Facebook, then you'd better be there for them.

Don't start inviting people to your Facebook or LinkedIn page or to follow you on Twitter unless you plan on having a real, ongoing presence there. And, for heaven's sake, don't invite them to a customer community of your creation if you don't have a genuine commitment to maintaining and participating in that community.

Engaging haphazardly is worse than not engaging in the first place, because it asks the customer to do something and then fails to honor that action. Customers get the same level of non-communication, even though they have actively done something extra to get it.

3- Once You Go Social There Ain’t No Coming Back
One of the terrifying things about social media is that it takes control of the company message away from designated spokespeople and distributes it around the company. Especially when people love their jobs, their blogs, tweets and status updates may be chock-full of information that the company may not want in the public sphere yet.

This isn't happening because employees all over the world have decided to maliciously divulge important material or to sabotage marketing efforts, said Greg Gunn, vice president of business development at HootSuite. It's happening because most companies don't bother to educate their employees about how they should talk about the business on social media.

So tell them. Unless you include them in the company's understanding of how social media should be used in discussing the business, don't be surprised if they say things you don't want them to say.

For example, for competitive reasons, it's not OK for the engineers at a software company to blog about new, revolutionary features before they are announced. Do they know that? And do they know the date when the project they're working on will be announced? If they do, then you could effectively multiply your marketing efforts, with your traditional marketing being supplemented by the blogs and tweets of your developers.

Here's a non-technology example: Marketing creates a new, official name for an incentive program, but the sales department fails to get the word, and the socially active people in sales continue to use the old name, creating confusion among the customers and, ultimately, the impression that internal chaos reigns inside your business. Did sales get the memo -- not just about the name change, but about how the program needed to be referred to in all circumstances, including on social media?

Companies need to realize that everyone in the business is potentially a source of company information in the social era. You must help them deliver a controlled and coherent message about your business, and that entails keeping everyone inside the company informed about marketing and messaging plans. It also means making them aware of the importance of bringing things they learn through their conversations back to the business when appropriate.

So make sure you have a sound strategy in place before jumping into social media. Make sure all your employees are aware of the dos and don’ts you have put in place. Most importantly, make sure your internal communications are clear and followed. If you have any questions let us know.

Paying for Followers is as Icky as Paying for Sex

Peter Shankman

There are certain things you don’t do in this world: Abuse an animal. Make any attempt to get any TSA official to smile. And also, you never pay a consultant or company to acquire new Twitter followers for you. They’re not real, and they won’t help you in the long run says Social Media Entrepreneur Peter Shankman.

By itself, the number of Twitter followers you have is the new penis envy. If that sounds familiar, it should – I’ve said it before. But with new “consultants” popping up all over the place guaranteeing you “2,000 new followers in 30 days” in exchange for your credit card number, I believe it’s time to revisit the subject.

1) Quality will always trump quantity. I’ll take 500 interested, engaged, active, and contributing-to-the-conversation Twitter followers over 50,000 from whom I never hear back any day. In fact, (and I mentioned this before, too,) when I have some occasional free time, I’ll DM some followers I’ve never heard from before, asking them if I can change anything to make their experience of following me more beneficial. If I don’t hear back, or if they continue not to respond to anything I tweet, I no longer count them as a “real” follower in my mind. In some cases, I’ve suggested that some followers unfollow me, and based on what they’re tweeting about, follow other, more relevant Twitter users, instead. It’s never about the amount. It’s about the engagement of those you
have.

1a) – Remember –By default, high engagement from the followers you do have almost guarantees new followers daily, since they’ll be people who have seen your current followers engaging you – thus, they become interested in what you have to say. This is the best kind of follower, an organic follower. Getting organic
followers should always be your goal, because they’re born from you tweeting interesting and exciting content. I can guarantee you that paying for followers will not generate one single organic follower. Expecting it to is like
expecting a prostitute to want to come home the next morning to meet your family. There’s no reason for them to, since it was always a business transaction, and nothing more.

2) Here’s the number one, time tested, best way to get new, organic followers: Respect the followers you currently have! My favorite line of all time, and I say it often: Having an audience who actually wants to listen to what you have to say is a privilege, not a right, just like wearing Spandex. You have the privilege of having an audience who wants to engage with you, and you must respect that. That means listening to what they have to say more than you ask them to listen to you. It means holding contests and giving away free (quality) product or discounts to the audience you currently have, and not insulting and ignoring them by holding weekly “our next follower/fan gets a free thingamabob!” contests. You’ve worked hard to have the right to talk to the audience you have. Why would you, as soon as you get them, ignore them, looking for the next one? It’s like those people we’ve all met at networking events: As you’re introducing yourself to them, you can’t catch their eyes, because they’re
already scanning the room for the next possible introduction who they think might be better than you. Insulting as hell, isn’t it? Well, by constantly focusing on trying to get that next new follower/fan and not giving props to the ones you have, you’ve become that guy to your audience. Don’t become that guy.

3) So the logical question then becomes “well, if you’re telling us to only focus on the followers/fans we have, how do we attract new ones?” And it’s a valid question, with an even more valid answer. Your job is no longer to do your own PR. For years, it was. For years, you were the one charged with shouting from the rooftops how totally awesome your company was, and getting people to listen and believe you. Those days are over. That’s no longer your job. If you’re still doing that, you’re wasting your time.

Your new job is simply thus: Create such amazing experiences for your current customers and audience, with stellar customer service, amazing response to them, and spectacular content tailor-made for the audience you already have, and your current audience will take over your job AND DO YOUR PR FOR YOU!

Think about it – Your audience, if treated beyond well (think awesomely,) will go out and share how happy they are with their audience, and well, simply put, chances are, that’ll convert some of their audience over to you, and you’ve got an organic follower, who’s so much more likely to turn into a paying customer for you.

It’s no longer about you having to shout about your awesomeness. It’s about allowing an audience who for the first time has the tools to do it themselves, to go out and do it. And you’re not asking them to – you’re not begging – you’re not asking them to “vote for your page,” or any of that crap we see so often. You’re simply offering such an amazing service, product, and in the end, full experience, that they do it on their own, because they want to share their story.

Think about the last time your flight was late. Remember when you finally landed? You and everyone else on the plane pulled out your mobile phones and bitched. Didn’t matter who you called, you just needed to bitch about the craptastic service you got, and how you were never flying that airline again. But then, think about the last time you had an awesome experience. You did the same thing, without even realizing it. You shared it. You talked about it. And you did it without being prompted. You wanted to talk about it. You wanted your friends,
those people who put their trust in you, to have that same amazing experience. You wanted to build organic followers for the company or brand that made you feel like a superstar.

That’s what we need to be striving to do. Not trying to get to a “number” or fans of followers. Not pulling out the tape measure. We need to focus on being amazing, in all aspects of our business. When we figure that out, it won’t be a numbers game anymore. It’ll be about your business growing. And in the end, a business that grows,
and generates revenue, and is profitable… Well, I’ll take that over a thousand new followers every single time, and so should you.

The 7 Social Media Marketing Essentials for Brands and Companies

Social media is changing in front of our eyes. It can be easy to become distracted by all the new technologies and some people don’t know where to start or how to make a difference with their social media marketing.

With that in mind, Niall of Simply Zesty agency, created a list of seven key areas that we think all businesses and brands should be spending their time on. Yes the headings are broad and there are a hundred things you could be trying within each section but if you improved your company’s performance across these 7 areas you would start to see real tangible results. It can be easy to get caught up in all the hype and move from one platform to another trying to follow the trends but have a little focus, hone in on these clear goals and you will be in a far better place…

Internal Communications
The tools are available to help improve how you talk to each other within your company. Companies that communicate well internally will more often than not have far better results. Try out Yammer, Convofy, SocialCast, Campfire, Facebook groups or instant messaging tools like Skype or Google chat to get the best out of your company. The smart companies are adding a social layer to their entire business and putting as big a focus on internal communications as external comms. Make sure that your company has excellent social media guidelines to allow staff to talk about where they work and the benefits of working there. The days of control where upper management decided what was projected in to public domain about your company are long gone and every single one of your staff now have a voice thanks to social media.

Branded Content
It’s not enough trying to create engaging updates or throw up the odd picture on social media channels. If you are really serious about engaging with a community you’ll need to start thinking about branded content and how to seed it within the communities that you have access to. This could be anything from videos and websites to blogs or podcasts and the most important thing about branded content is creating something that the consumer has genuine interest in. We all know how to filter ads out these days and the savvy consumer is looking for new ways to engage with brands. Content should be at the very center of everything you do and spending time and money developing branded content is a route most brands and businesses should be going down. Now you won’t have their budgets for creating content but it’s an important part of social media now and one your company should be trying to engage with.

Stunning Customer Service
There is no reason why you should’t be talking to your customers in this day and age. The tools are there from Twitter and Facebook to Linkedin or forums and the smart brands are talking to their customers and solving problems to build positive word of mouth. The businesses doing this well are actually being proactive via social media channels and finding the problems and putting out the fires before they go any further. The upside of creating advocates through stunning social media customer service is that they all have the power to tell 100s of friends about their positive experiences. Being proactive and engaging with your customers on 3rd party channels rather than waiting for them to come to you is the key.

Ignore Facebook At Your Peril
Websites come and go. Look at Myspace and Bebo as classic examples. Many think Facebook will have a similar fall from grace one day and that we will move on to the next big thing but to think like that would be foolish. You need to think of Facebook not as a website but as a platform which will become as important as the internet or Google itself. Facebook is starting to force its way on to websites, it’s being built in to the core of mobile phones and soon you’ll be buying stuff through there and it will influence search results. Facebook is not going away any time soon and while you should always have a broad approach and not have all your eggs in one basket, spend a decent percentage of your time and money marketing via Facebook. It’s only going to get bigger and more important.

Transparency
It’s getting harder and harder to spin a story about your company that is not accurate or glosses over the truth. Brands and businesses have to be more transparent than they ever have in the past. Consumers and the man in the street have as much say in a brand as people working within the company. It’s a seismic shift away from the days when control was key and the message could be tailored to suit the goals of the company. There have been countless social media disasters and many of them arise from companies trying to bend the truth or cover something up. Social media is bringing a whole new level of transparency to business and for the consumer that can only be a good thing.

Adapting To Technology And Being Nimble
Trends change in social media circles quicker than you could imagine. While it is important not to jump from trend to trend without achieving anything it’s also important to be nimble and have your marketing strategy evolve over time. In the past placing an advert in a newspaper was always pretty much the same process but marketing on Facebook can change from week to week as the platform evolves. Twitter doesn’t even have an effective ad platform yet but chances are you could be using it next year. You need to look at new platforms like the tablet computer which, although less than 2 years old, is creating a seismic shift in our online habits. These new technologies and platforms seem to come out of nowhere and they can change entire industries within a year so be nimble and evolve your strategy because consumers might not always be in the same place.

Mobile Mobile Mobile
If you don’t have some sort of mobile strategy for your business or brand then you better start moving fast. Consumers are moving away from newspapers and magazines and embracing smart phones and tablets. Have a look around at other people on the next bus or train you are on and you’ll see people peering in to their mobiles. People are finding deals on the go and they are researching products on their mobiles. We’re only at the very start of this journey and as tools like location aware advertising and local deals take hold over the next year it’s clear that you would be a fool if you hadn’t at least started to put some thought in to the area of mobile.

Focusing on the Social, Minus the Media

Jenna Wortham writes about her own experience with social media in the following article from The New York Times:
The scene unfolding at the Thai restaurant in Brooklyn was like that of any other casual dinner party. A small group of people sat around a wooden table, passing large dishes of spicy red curry and fried rice, drinking cold beers and swapping war stories about apartment hunting in New York. But the twist was this: Before about 8 that evening, none of us had met before.

My newfound friends came courtesy of a Chicago start-up business called Grubwithus, an online service with the seemingly modest aim of bringing strangers together to have a meal. The concept is simple enough: People browse through a list of dinners in their cities and buy tickets, usually for around $25. Before the event, they can share a few online tidbits about themselves with their dining partners, a precautionary measure against awkward lulls in conversation and a way to ease fears about meeting up with a bunch of unknowns. For example, Eunice, one of my dining mates, wrote in her profile that she was a young nurse who loved to shop and travel.

But the service has deeper ambitions. It is using contemporary techniques to foster a kind of social networking that predates the dawn of services like Facebook and Twitter: old-fashioned conversation among casual acquaintances, without keyboards and screens.

Academics who study how we socialize online say that even in an era of almost nonstop communication across a bevy of platforms, in which so many millions of us are just a few clicks away from one another on the Web, people still crave the intimacy of face-to-face meetings.

People worry that “online contact and networking might replace offline interactions, but offline is still so precious that we’re creating ways to bring offline even more front and center,” said S. Shyam Sundar, a director of the Media Effects Research Lab at Pennsylvania State University. “Physical proximity plays a big role in terms of building relationships.”

Mr. Sundar noted the contradiction of a new generation of services that rely on the ubiquity of social networking to prompt contact that the Web calls IRL, or “in real life,” sometimes known as the real world. People are using social technology to feed their need to meet up and close the gap between all the social networking that they do from a distance.

Grubwithus, which began organizing group dinners last August, says that more than 10,000 people have registered with the site. It’s hoping to turn the concept of social meals into a full-fledged business. Grubwithus helps the restaurant coordinate the menu for the group for the night and then charges a service fee to the restaurant; the amount varies by meal.

It has already sold a handful of prominent venture capitalists on the concept of social dining: the company raised $1.6 million in financing earlier this year from Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital, among others.

Of course, there is no shortage of ways to connect with the people you already know or have recently met. LinkedIn, Facebook, Hashable and Foursquare, for starters, have gained momentum and traction for exactly that. The challenge here is to come up with a way of gently expanding that network, something that clubs, ice cream socials and schools have done for generations.

Before the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, it may have been easier to strike up a conversation with a fellow commuter or to exchange pleasantries with another solo diner or drinker. And while that certainly has not vanished, the presence of soft glowing screens may get in the way of casual connections.

Other entrepreneurs have noticed this distinctly modern quandary and are coming up with applications to deal with it. Sonar, for example, is a new mobile application that combs a user’s connections on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare and alerts them if they have any friends in the vicinity.

One of Sonar’s founders, Brett Martin, says the company wants to leverage the dozens, or even hundreds, of connections that many people have already made online and see if they can use those to form new, meaningful friendships.

For example, when you turn on the application and check into a movie theater in your location, it pings you — letting you know that a guy named Joe and you share several Facebook friends, and that Joe is lingering nearby. You are given the option of messaging Joe to see if he wants to organize a quick meeting.

Of course, there is also something to be said for not becoming overly dependent on technology. Do we really need the Web to make new friends? My first instinct is to say no — that the most interesting people I’ve met have been through serendipitous and random encounters while traipsing around a new city.

But after our Grubwithus meal wound to a close — four hearty courses and two hours of entertaining chatter later — we trooped into the thick night air, lingering on the sidewalk, shaking hands and saying our goodbyes. Promises were made to keep in contact and plan a reunion meal. I couldn’t help but ask: would we really all keep in touch after this?

Nicolae, a young, bright-eyed entrepreneur, paused on his descent into the subway, smiled and said: “Of course! We’re all on the Internet.”

3 Social Media Lessons To Be Learned From The Google vs. Facebook PR Fiasco

In case you haven’t been following the story, PR agency giant Burson-Marsteller admitted last week, amidst great gnashing of teeth and ludicrous scandal, that they were hired by Facebook to circulate anti-Google privacy stories. Facebook paid Burson to try and plant anti-Google stories in major media outlets, but the ham-handed employees at the center of the campaign refused to disclose their client--Facebook--to reporters, a clear violation of industry ethical standards. This is a pretty big black eye for the PR industry. It’s also a very teachable Social Media moment.

Google wants to play in the social network space, Facebook doesn’t want them to, and some PR agency thought it was a smart business decision to take money to get in the mud with the two of them. Burson thought this was a good idea? This agency, one of the most powerful PR agencies around, had just won the SABRE North American Agency of the Year award days before the story broke. Did they really think they were going to get by with this type of shenanigans? And these questions lead to the teachable moments:

Lesson #1 – Know Your Influencers in Social Media

Burson-Marsteller made several slip-ups but one that is worth noting is that they deleted a Facebook post from Jessica Murray. She is the Global Community Manager and social media goddess for the international professional group SocialMediaClub.org. Jessica knows her stuff, she comments on professional conduct in the social media industry, and she is connected to tens of thousands of professional level social media business people through her extended network. Jessica noticed the deletion and was not amused. She used her influence to spread the word about the mess. "That was wrong," a Burson representative told Wired. "We`ll be reaching out to Jessica, and we`ll let her put her post back," the representative said, adding that the company`s Facebook page has received "a lot of profanity."

Not all Twitter and Facebook freaks are alike. The agency kind of screwed with the wrong one with their behavior (and Jessica was likely not the only one the agency treated this way!), so know your influencers. You might not be able to shush out every little homegrown blogger that happens to go viral, but it’s wise to hedge your bets when the big guns show up to visit.

Lesson #2 – There is No Such Thing as a Secret Anymore
In the old day pre Web and social media communication was slow, towns were poorly connected (if connected ever at all), plenty of people couldn’t read or “do numbers” and much of the inner workings of business were kept on a need to know basis. It’s not those times anymore so wake up! There are very few industries that actually need secrecy, so it’s time to ditch a business model that requires it.

The only way Burson could have possibly thought their stunt would work is if no one found out. Have they heard of the Internet? HELLO! You think when it’s easy to google just about anything and anybody who’s nobody gets paid for dirt, just to feed the 24/7 global information beast, that news about a Google-Facebook tangle wouldn’t surface? Do you think those secrets will stay secret when you snub people like Jessica? The audacity is staggering. Relying on secrets is not reliable at all in the new Social Media World Order. Get rid of it where you can. Be social, be open, be actually transparent, and be real.

Lesson #3 – Grow a Pair and Learn to Say No
There’s always going to be mismatched agencies and clients. If you are a PR professional and someone asks you to do something, like black hat SEO or tricky trick accounting, don’t take the client. And if your marketing and advertising agency advices you to throw enough numbers at the wall and see what sticks, any publicity is good publicity, and hey, let’s spy on your competition, better think twice about working with them.

Legal guidelines and a sound social media policy is required to handle these situations. Taking the gig in the first place was a bad idea and then how Burson’s social media department handled the situation made things worse. Without either the courage or a policy, employees will wander as they will in the Social landscape and make decisions that aren’t in alignment with your mission. Don’t let them. Whether you’re in PR or Social, you should learn to say NO.

PR isn’t News – Get It!
PR people want what we do to seem like objective news, but it’s not. It might be news, but it’s not reporting and it often steps into advertising and spin. It’s especially not objective news when there is an agenda laying underneath the PR release that is nefarious or at best opaque. Every honest PR person knows this. Every Social Media professional knows this.
If the conduct of the PR industry gets sideways with the ethos of Social, someone will get hurt. Don’t let it be you. Learn from this fiasco and do better.

Picture courtesy of Creative Commons attibution license by qwrrty

Five great ways to take social media offline

Nothing is more social than hundreds of people, alone at home, signing into Twitter for a midnight snack of connection, right? Unfortunately, while many companies have given the green light to ‘do' social media, setting up Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts, this pursuit of social media greatness appears to be creating a sort of temporary amnesia when it comes to the more traditional aspects of relationship building. What about the power of touch or shared oxygen?

The truly thrilling frontier is a place where online and offline connections exist in tandem, not in isolation, says Anne Buehner, Associate Social Media Strategist at Red Door Interactive. Smart marketers will begin to put forth campaign ideas and social media tenets that not only dissolve the divide between on- and offline communities, but extend and synthesize stakeholders to connect with brands and one-another at multiple (digital and physical) touch points.

Here are five ways that companies can start moving in this direction:

1. Promote and recognize your social media community in-store. From store windows and t-shirts to receipts and napkins, companies are taking advantage of every opportunity to remind their customers that they're on social media networks. For example, Red Door client Charlotte Russe recently launched an in-store campaign that included signage and window displays featuring Facebook comments, tweets, and photos from social media fans. A mobile and QR Code sign up made it easy for customers to become a part of the social community while still in the store.

2. Create a live experience and provide a way for participants to promote it for you. The Jeep Rocks & Road Tour organized various off-road course events across the country that put people behind the wheel of its new model SUV. After going through a variety of terrain - including a nearly vertical slope - participants were given the opportunity to record a video recounting their experience and could automatically post it on their own social networks. To rev up the momentum of this campaign, Jeep also posted a few of these videos on its YouTube channel.

3. Facilitate Meetups to bring your community together for events in real life. Social technology blogs such as Mashable and TechCrunch have both created MeetUp groups in an effort to bring members of the community together. For its fifth anniversary, TechCrunch encouraged its community of "crunchies" to gather face-to-face and utilized meetup.com as a channel for folks to connect and plan events in their respective cities. In addition, Mashable encourages its readers to meet monthly in more than 1,150 cities around the world.

Similarly, tweet-ups bring a Twitter community together for a live event or mixer. Not only does this provide an opportunity to meet face-to-face with followers, but it can increase awareness of a brand and Twitter account. Attendees are also encouraged to tweet live from the events, thus updating their networks about the brand and activities.

4. Engage your online community with an offline scavenger hunt. Rather than offering prizes through online contests, brands can now mobilize followers through hybrid contents that involve offline activities. Last year, Red Door client ESET leveraged the early adopter crowd at SXSW and promoted its anti-virus software through a scavenger hunt that included a photo booth and interactive media wall. In addition, skateboarder Tony Hawk has hosted the "Tony Hawk Treasure Hunt" for two consecutive years and provides his followers with opportunities to win prizes that are hidden in more than 60 cities around the world by posting clues on his Twitter account. This tactic alone helped increase Tony's Twitter followers significantly.

Retailers can also execute similar tactics to spur foot traffic in-store and direct customers to Twitter - or any online community - for exclusive contest information.

5. Encourage check-ins. While the onslaught of location-based "check-in" services may seem overwhelming, there are many benefits to offering incentives for check-ins. Facebook Deals, for example, allows brands to drive those who like their business in-store and customers to Facebook for the deal, thus marrying the on- and offline communities. When consumers check-in to a location from most geo-location applications, it automatically posts to their Facebook and Twitter feeds (if they set up their accounts for social sharing). Thus, check-ins can increase a brand's exposure exponentially.

Vons and Pepsi both put a twist on basic check-ins when they teamed up with Foursquare. The Vons/Pepsi/Foursquare partnership made it easy for consumers to integrate their Vons Club card with Foursquare and receive special savings from Pepsi. Applications like Foursquare provide ample opportunities for business to offer incentives and syncing loyalty programs with social check-ins is a win-win for consumers and businesses.

Consumers are constantly seeking ways to translate their social media interactions into something more tangible. With new and evolving technologies, now is the time for companies to get creative and examine opportunities to extend the conversation, transparently and authentically, into the daily lives of their social communities. By engaging the social media family across multiple channels, platforms and locations, a brand can build and expand a loyal community of enthusiasts.

Protecting Your Privacy on Social Media Networks

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have exploded in popularity. People love sharing their personal news and views about what’s going on in their lives.

But stop and think for a moment. This information—some of which is very personal—is going up on the Internet. Outside of your trusted circle of friends and relatives, who else is viewing what you post? Spam bots, vindictive acquaintances, and even criminals may take an interest, too.

With these caveats in mind, we’re here to present some helpful hints to keep your social networking a safer, more rewarding experience:

Read the social media site’s fine print - In the 21st century, information is the new currency. You wouldn’t just hand out your banking account information, so why would you give away your privacy rights on social networking sites? Pay particular attention to what you are agreeing to share when you sign up or log into your account.

Many sites push you to agree to terms that are best for them—not you. Take a moment to wade through any legalese. Some of it may exceed your personal comfort limit. Make sure your permission choices are right for you.

Keep your full name and address to yourself - According to a 2009 report by Legal & General, a UK financial services group, over one-third of social media site users have posted when they’re going to be away from their home*. If this sounds like an open invitation for criminals, you’re right. Avoid posting such private details.

This same advice also applies to posting your children or grandchildren’s full names. In a 2010 article, Consumer Reports reveals that 26% of social media users post sensitive information about their children, including photos and names. Avoid being one of them. Everyone in your trusted circle should know the children’s names anyway, so the information is redundant.

And speaking of photos…

Think twice about posting revealing photos - Even if you don’t explicitly reveal a child’s name, you may be revealing too much in what appears to be a harmless photo.

Consider this scenario: You want to post a digital photo of your 15-year-old granddaughter in her new cheerleader uniform. In the photo, she’s standing in front of her school’s homecoming game. What’s wrong with this, you ask? If the photo contains the school’s name, either on uniforms or in the background, a stranger wouldn’t have too much trouble tracking down her location and identity. Consider blurring or cropping such revealing details, if you know how. If not, maybe that isn’t the best photo to share.

And what about that picture of your new expensive flat screen TV, or your family room full of gifts around the holidays? Advertising their whereabouts may needlessly paint a target on your house for criminals. When in doubt, just share your photos privately with a trusted few.

Finally, recognize that maintaining your privacy online isn’t easy - There are people out there who want—and will do just about anything—to get your private information. We know this statement may send a cold shiver down your back, but the only way to keep information completely private is to lock it away—whether it’s stored securely or just kept in your head.

Many employers now scan social media sites. If you’re posting views they wouldn’t appreciate—like talking about how much you hate your boss—then you might want to step away from the keyboard. Once information is out there, it’s like water: It finds a way to run its course toward freedom. Don’t let what you share today come back to haunt you tomorrow.

Social media sites can be a great way to stay connected to old friends and help you make new ones. Just keep your privacy shades drawn to the appropriate level.

The Truth About the Social Media Hype

Don’t trust anyone who says they’ll reveal the “secrets of social media.” There are no secrets of social media. As someone who’s seen the bubble of the early web and new media business burst, I’m feeling a sense of déjà vu, says Aliza Sherman, strategic social media consultant with Conversify.

There are people who make a good living off hype and the naiveté of others. They see a short window of time when people are still in learning mode or “behind the curve,” and they swoop in with shiny promises bathed in snake oil, take as much money as they can get, then run.
The rest of us are left here in their greedy and destructive wake to pick up the pieces and, worse, to deal with the disillusionment of people who’ve been burned by a con artist claiming to know the “secrets” of social media that will make everyone rich.

We’ve been here before. Some new technological developments (the web, for instance) have had a major impact on how we communicated and did business. Unfortunately, everyone treated these technical advances as the silver bullet, the cure-all magic potion, the most important thing we must all now embrace lest we get left behind and suffer in a life of failure.

The 5 C’s of the Web and Social Media
1. Communications. The Internet and the Web were technologies that were transforming the way we communicated.
2. Connection. Being online connected us to people and to information more quickly and easily than ever before.
3. Community. The Internet and Web was bringing together like-minded people for mutual support and friendship.
4. Convenience. Using the Internet could close distances, reduce time, and help us do things more efficiently and effectively.
5. Creativity. The Web was helping to “level the playing field,” putting tools of creation in the hands of the individual.
Today, with the advent of social media — a vast and growing set of tools with greater interactive (“social”) functionality — we still have the same 5 C’s:
1. Communications: Check. Although now we’re calling this “Conversations.”
2. Connection: Check. Our connections to people are augmented through social networking functions. Our connections to information are augmented through feeds and sharing functions. We’re so connected now, our minds are boggled.
3. Community: Check. Social networking functions enhance the ways we can start and grow communities.
4. Convenience: Check. Never before have we had so much information and so many tools at our fingertips.
5. Creativity: Check. From the ease of setting up a blog to building a presence on a social network, anyone with access to the Internet and a computer can create and publish virtually anything online.

• Social media won’t save the world. The social web — along with increased access to broadband and wireless/mobile networks — is bringing more people together. But the tools that make up “social media” are not world-savers. People can save the world; social media tools can help people to make positive change.
• Social media won’t save the economy. Just as the Web and new media companies got investors excited and Wall Street aflutter, so does anything new and promising. Investors, like entrepreneurs, take risks and that is a good thing. LinkedIn going public isn’t going to change our society or our economy. It will make a few people rich on paper and may start a VC frenzy for a while, then everything will shake out.
• Social media won’t save your life. Now I can point to many examples of people who will say the Internet saved their life or Twitter saved their life. But the truth is that other people saved their lives and all the Internet — or Twitter, or Facebook, or the blogosphere – did was make it easier to reach out and to be reached.

The social web is made up of people connecting with one another or to information that is important to them. We don’t all need social networks and blogs and Twitter to succeed at anything.
We can augment our efforts with social media tools and tactics, but if our intentions are bad, greedy, evil and destructive, we will continue to hurt others and ourselves despite the promise of new technologies. As long as we continue to buy into the hype of new technologies and look to communications tools and platforms to save us, we’re doomed. We need to conduct business well, provide quality products or services, care about our customers and give back to our communities.

Why Social Media Practices Are Like Football

You’re not likely at the point yet where you have social media wired into everything. Right now, you may just be trying to figure out where to get started and deciding who is responsible for managing it and accounting for the results that grow from it. That’s perfectly okay, and it’s where a lot of organizations begin, say Jay Baer and Amber Naslund, social media strategists.
As social media adoption expands in an organization, however, you need a model that’s scalable and provides some autonomy within other functions and units but that maintains some central coordination for the purposes of consistency and clear communication. For that, let’s look to the football field for inspiration.
The Coaching Staff
The coaches are an organized, recognized group that acts as the hub for all things social media within a company. It can be small, with just a few people, or larger, with broad representation from a number of areas. If there’s already a dedicated social media team in your company, they often form the core of this group and are deeply active participants and advisors.
Coaches are responsible for making things happen in their own areas of the business, such as customer service, marketing, or product management. Each department might have one or two coaches who are represented as part of the larger group. Coaches take knowledge and consensus from the group regarding overall social media strategy and apply this information to the day-to-day functions of their team. They also bring back challenges, information, and successes to share with the other members of the coaching staff so that everyone can learn from one another.
They might work on:
Leadership: Championing social media strategies to management and throughout the organization to encourage participation
Intent: Laying out the underlying tenets and purposes for social media participation as an organization
Guidance: Developing social media participation guidelines – not just rules and regulations – that everyone can adopt and get behind
Best Practices: Be the center for subject matter expertise around the world of social media
Coordination: Keeping of the messy bits of internal communication and coordination around social media implementation
The Players
The players are the social media in action throughout the organization. Although the coaching staff is the center for overall social media approach, each coach works with his players to develop goals, strategy, and success metrics for their area of the business. The players are made up of the front line listening and response teams that actively mine social media for information and they are the ones who act on what they find.
Information gatherers form your centralized listening centers, monitoring the social web and mining it for relevant information, and they make sure that information gets to the people that need it. They might interact on behalf of the company as well, but their chief responsibility is to locate information for others to act. These players are early warning systems, researchers, and the information filters of corporate social media.
Frontline responders will be the faces of your company. They are the ones who work in a public light to either react to the needs and demands of your online community or provide a public-facing persona and presence for your brand. They conduct the proactive engagement and participation online to connect with customers, prospects, and the community as a whole. Social media and community management professionals are frontline responders, as are your communication teams and your customer service teams.
The Booth
Everyone in your company is affected by the speed and scale of social media, even if some corners are affected in a nonpublic way. These are the members of the booth—social media stakeholders whose participation may not be daily but is no less important.
Your writers and creative types might be part of the booth and build communication strategy. Human resources can focus social media efforts externally for employee recruitment or internally for talent retention. Research and development and product management capture insights from customers or the competition. Legal and compliance can focus on managing risk while adapting to an environment with less control. Analysts can derive actionable insights from data and feed those back to teams, and even IT can evolve their operations to support more fluid internal communication networks.
What ties all of these people together is the unifying work of the coaching staff. Departments take the strategic cues from the coaches and apply them downstream to their teams. They build independent, autonomous strategies that integrate with the larger whole, providing a networked but nimble approach to social coordination that can work for any company of any size.
The increasing speed of business calls for a distribution of decision making and authority throughout an organization to make us quicker, more nimble, and more responsive to the demands of immediacy. We need teams that communicate faster, with more fluidity and less friction. And to do that, we simply have to shatter the bottlenecks of process and control that have historically created a sense of security and consistency.
It’s time to organize our people and communications in a way that allows the elephant to dance much lighter on its feet.

Don’t be Left Behind: Engage your Business in Social Media

Social Media is a powerful tool to enhance a business’ online strategy. Having an extended online relationship with your customers through social media will increase their involvement with your brand offline. Managers and owners that understand the importance of a strong online presence definitely develop a healthier communication with customers. This communication doesn’t stop there, it creates many more opportunities. It’s time to take control of the outcomes and tap into social media by enabling social tools on your business’ website and interacting with your users. If you are unsure, consider this:

·         “Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later” – Business Week

·         “Social Media Will Change Your Business” – Business Week

·         “Facebook, has 200,000,000 – number of active users” – The Future Buzz

·         “Facebook, 100 – number of friends the average user has” – The Future Buzz

·         “10,432,575,000 – number of Tweets to date” - gigatweet

·         “Twitter tweets: 600 per second” – Search Engine Land

·         “133,000,000 – number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002″ – The Future Buzz

·         “346,000,000 – number of people globally who read blogs” ComScore

Everyone that works in the daily operations of any business is busy wearing many hats trying to thrive. There is always very limited time to accomplish the many tasks of the daily operation and you may think you don’t have the time to engage in social media.

There are innumerable reasons why social media is imperative for businesses. Here are five factors that are relevant for the inclusion of social media and the importance of social media adoption in a website development strategy.

1. Extended business relationship

If someone asks a question to a clerk in a store, the clerk most likely will give a prompt and adequate answer -as close as possible to a solution to that person’s needs. In social media it is similar. In most cases this interaction may involve people that are interested in a specific company, brand, product or service. They inquire about offers, or have questions or comments about goods and services. Social media let managers and owners jump into the conversation, and build relationships with new or existing customers.

2. Extended way of communication

Your communication can create, clarify, refer, lead. Due to the two way nature of social media, it creates a better understanding of what people are saying about your business. You can get a sense of what customers think and feel about your company. Should you encounter negative feedback, you have the ability to respond and the opportunity to turn that person into a happy customer.

3. Extended way of referrals

Whether or not you are active in the online presence of your business, social media is creating referrals. Sources like Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, and specialty blogs are becoming the easiest way people share their opinions with friends and strangers. Plus, these services offer solutions for business to engage in communication, helping you manage comments and opinions about your business.

4. Extended brand awareness

Social media offer you more control over your brand. People have a perception of your business, and this can depend strongly on what you say. A company can give insight about their business helping others understand why they should choose them over someone else. Likewise, when you introduce a new product, social media allow users to post experiences, how-to, and reviews making those people your brand evangelicals.

5. Extended way of sharing an opinion

Don’t let your brand be moved by the flow, interact, participate, share, discover…! There are many social sites where people are sharing their opinions about your business. There is always room for everyone in the social media field. Participate and engage with those interested in your industry.

In a recent conversation with Sadao Nelson, a wine consultant for Restaurants in San Francisco and Manager of COCO500 Restaurant, he mentioned that social media has not taken a big deal of his time. Responding to Yelp, Twitter, and Facebook comments takes only a few dedicated daily minutes and the job’s done! Sadao also happens to be the former manager of The Corner Restaurant. In the early days he created an online profile on social media sites for The Corner and it has turned excellent results on Google and Yahoo.

We hope you see the advantages social media can bring to your business and start using them. If you need help, contact us at info (at) jd-anderson (dot) com and be sure to read the next post, Social Media: Getting Started

The 10 Best Social Media Campaigns

Since social media has become an integral part of our lives, marketers have used their creative talents to develop social media campaigns with various degrees of success which can be measured in a variety of ways, says blogger Jeff Bullas.

One very successful social media marketing campaign that was run in 2009 was the competition for the “Best Job in the World” which was based on the simple concept of posting a one-minute video application on Tourism Queensland’s Web site explaining why you should be chosen as caretaker of Hamilton Island on the Great Barrier Reef and you might get to blog and cam your way through a six-month gig that paid about $100K U.S.

The results included 400,000 new visitors to the website in the first 30 hours and 1 million hits the second day the competition was launched.

Success for social media marketing campaigns can mean many things and can include

• More brand awareness
• Increased sales
• The number of Youtube views

or whatever measurement that is deemed important for the brand in achieving its goals

Forbes recently engaged three experts to rank the world’s best-ever social media campaigns.
The judges were

• David Berkowitz of the New York City agency 360i
• Brandon Evans of the social marketing agency Mr Youth in New York City
• Michael Lebowitz of Big Spaceship, a digital ad shop in Brooklyn

They were asked to take into account the success of the campaigns as well as the quality of the execution and creativity of each one.

Here are the top 10 social media campaigns

1. The Blair Witch Project

This was a low budget horror movie that used a viral social media campaign that used web sites and message boards to incite anticipation and interest months before the its release in 1999. The anticipation was created by spreading rumors about the fate of the movie’s main characters with fake newspaper clippings and police photos of their missing car being spread on what was then the 1999 version of what we now call social media.

The result for a movie that cost $22,000 to make, at last count it has grossed over $240 million, making it the worlds most profitable movie ever.

2. Blendtec: Will It Blend

This well known series of online videos first burst on the scene in 2006 (not long after YouTube was launched). It shows the Blendtec ‘Total Blender destroying anything from a baseball to an iPhone.

Result: Home sales of blenders has increased by more than 700%

3. Old Spice: “Smell Like a Man, Man”

Isaiah Mustafa was already popular in TV commercial but when a campaign was created that allowed him to respond to questions via online videos(180 in fact) and Twitter the buzz that it generated spread around the world. The results are still being counted.

4. Burger King: “Subservient Chicken”

This social media campaign centers around a person dressed in a chicken suit on a website that responds to commands like “make a sandwich” or “moonwalk”. It was created for Burger King by the advertising agency Crispin, Porter + Bogusky for the chain’s TenderCrisp Sandwich.

Result: Website received 15 million hits in 5 days

5. Pepsi Refresh

This was aimed at people’s charitable gene which gave people the chance to get funding for their charity. Its goal was to create a new identity while maintaining its youthful image.

6. VW: Fun Theory

This was a social experiment using humor to drive engagement and influence customer behavior. It involved Volkswagen transforming a Swedish subway staircase into a giant functioning piano. The result, 66% more people choosing the steps rather than the escalator. This won t the 2010 Cyber Grand Prix Lion at the Cannes International Advertising Festival.

7. Office Max: “Elf Yourself”

The office supply retailer encouraged people during the 2006 holiday campaign to upload pictures of themselves. Technology was then applied to the images which would transform them into dancing elves. The creative genius behind this campaign was the San Francisco based agency Toy and San. The result 122 million elves, more brand awareness and increased sales.







8. Evian: “Roller Babies”

This YouTube blockbuster showing babies break dancing and busting moves ended up being (according to the Guinness Book of Records) the most watched online ad in viewing history with over 60 million views and 54,000 comments.

9. Ikea: “Facebook Showroom”

This Facebook marketing campaign involved the store manager of the Malmo Ikea store posting pictures of the new showrooms where people who tagged the items first, won that product. The result was a viral word of mouth campaign that quickly spread to people’s Facebook friends and created huge product awareness.

10. Hotmail

This was maybe the first integration of social media and email which involved Hotmail running ads in 1996 at the bottom of every email which said “get your free email at hotmail”. Apparently the judges were a bit divided on this with one rating it as the best and the other the worst and also whether it constituted a social media campaign.

What are some of the core elements that were in these campaigns that made them such a success? For Jeff it includes these elements: Humor, Competition, and Curiosity.