Participation within a social network is a good thing.
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Social Media Thought For The Day #1
Published November 27, 2009 social media 1 CommentTags: marc meyer, social media, Social Networks
IKEA changes the game on Facebook
Published November 25, 2009 Facebook 1 CommentTags: Facebook, IKEA, social media
Watch this video.
Simple yet brilliant in its execution. Gotcha thinking?
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11 Must Save Social Media Links For The Week
Published November 24, 2009 social media 1 CommentTags: jason falls, jay baer, jd lasica, ken Burbary, marc meyer, social media
I have thousands of bookmarks and chances are you do too. From a social media purists standpoint, it’s good karma to share links and websites that are worth a second look. Here are 11 of them in no particular order.
One of the smart guys out there is Jay Baer, last week he wrote a post titled the 11 Must Do’s For the Serious Blogger. As I have been wont to say on various occassions, not all of you should or can blog. Jay’s post is for those that can, and are serious about it.
Do you know what a KPI is? If you are an online marketer of any kind and don’t know, then quit reading and go work out, eat some yogurt, or go to Starbucks. For those that do know the importance of KPI’s, here’s a great little checklist of sorts titled, 35 social medis KPI’s to measure engagement.
If you use Tweetdeck or Seesmic for Twitter, you know the importance of grouping the people or topics you follow. Well Twitter responded by creating Lists. So how do you make heads or tails of that? Try out Listorious, which will bring some order to your chaos.
If you use Twitter for content and I do, it’s my filter for content. But I don’t like when I DON’T know about something and I should. There is no good way to avoid this, it will happen. Enter Twitter Tim.es, which generates a personalized ‘newspaper’ for you based on what the people that you follow are talking about.
Speaking of things happening now, check out this cool little app, Surchur, real time search and real time discovery.
I’ve said this before but my friend Ken Burbary has assembled one helluva wiki of social media monitoring solutions. It is the best, most complete list that I have seen out there on the topic.
Want to see what kind of influence you have based on your Twitter presence? Well, Edelman has put together a pretty cool little tool called Tweetlevel. Don’t read too much into it though, It’s just another tool that measures your presence in the ether.
Last month JD Lasica put together a nice deck of the top 10 pharma efforts in social media that dovetailed nicely into the FDA hearings on social media 2 weeks ago. If you care about Pharma’s involvement in social media, then this is a must read, if you don’t, then keep moving…
And 2 for the road…
BatchBook is the social CRM built for small businesses and entrepreneurs, I thought this had a lot of promise because it addressed a niche that doesn’t get the same CRM love that the enterprise gets.
I read this post and already knew the answer, Is Facebook getting uncool for 18-24’s?
I hope this helps make things easier, enlightens you or simplifies your work flow. Either way, feel free to share these with others who might benefit.
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#SocialMedia Tweetchat #35-Stop Campaigning & Start Conversing – The New Marketing Paradigm
Published November 23, 2009 social media Leave a CommentTags: #socialmedia, hashtag socialmedia, jason breed, marc meyer, tom martin
Build a relationship, garner trust and a customer will never leave. Sounds pretty easy!? In fact we have been talking about it since the dawn of time (social media time anyway) with the Cluetrain Manifesto that started in 1999 and identified that the Internet has forced marketing to be more about conversations than messages. Since then we have Valeria Maltoni the Conversation Agent (a past moderator here), a great book called Naked Conversations written by Shel Israel (an upcoming moderator) and Robert Scoble and countless other examples. So why is it that companies still market via campaigns and agencies still win business with this approach?
A classic example of movement for the sake of motion? Possibly. Consider all the money and effort that goes into concept, strategy, creative, execution of marketing campaigns. Brands spend all that time creating a pitch to consumers, introducing themselves time and time again, selling stuff to unwilling customers then when it’s done, they see how much product was sold, cut off the pitch to those customers and prospects then rinse and repeat the whole daunting process all over. So where is the conversation part of this we have been talking about now for at least 10 years? Not the cordial, “wave to each other at a cocktail party” conversation but the relationship conversation that lasts for months, years or longer? The conversation where you find out what each other needs and wants (notice I said both), you know, a real relationship not a manufactured one.
So what does that look like and how do marketers break out of the campaign mentality? Think about the impact of this scenario: A company with multiple brands has a consolidated marketing department focused on customer relationships. They are in charge of courting the consumer and understanding how they live, work and play. From that relationship, the company understands what products (Brands) can help that customer and how they add value to that consumer’s life. Then the Brands become stewards for helping those customers buy the things they need (considering people like to buy things yet do not like to be sold). The company pours their monies into acquiring a customer once then facilitating their purchases across the various products. This is very different than what happens today as each Brand pays to acquire the same customers over and over across all brands independently. This may be some utopian dream to many but the speed of communicating and the ubiquity of access to communicate is forever changing the old norms and customers have left that station. Companies need to figure out how to adapt and soon.
We are very happy to have Tom Martin moderating this topic on tuesday. Tom spends a lot of time in this space covering all aspects of branding, marketing and social media and brings a creative approach to his work. He will help us work through this topic and facilitate a great learning opportunity for all of us. The topic and questions will be:
Stop Campaigning and Start Conversing – The New Marketing Paradigm
1) What is the difference between a marketing campaign and a customer conversation?
2) How do agencies have to change in order to create conversations instead of campaigns?
3) What are some examples of brands or agencies that have succeeded in making the jump from campaign to conversation?
The chat will take place Tuesday 11/24 at noon EST. We will use the #sm35 for the event
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danah boyd deserves better
Published November 19, 2009 Web 2.0 expo NYC Leave a CommentTags: danah boyd, web 2.0 expo
Web 2.0 expo is in full swing right now in New York, and so are the idiots that can make social media and Twitter a train wreck. I’ve been dialed in pretty much this whole week and I wasn’t really going to blog about it until I read this from danah boyd on her blog.
Unfortunately, my presentation at Web2.0 Expo sucked. The physical setup was hard and there was a live stream behind me. I knew something was wrong because folks started laughing in the audience. Unable to see anything (the audience, the stream), I found myself closing down. And so I collapsed and read the whole thing, feeling mega low on energy and barely delivering my points. Le sigh. I feel like I failed the audience so, if you were in the audience, I’m sorry. But hopefully you’ll get more out of reading the presentation than I got out of giving it.
Are you kidding me? danah thinks it’s her fault? What happened was there was a live “unfiltered” Twitter feed streaming behind her as she was talking, with bullshit snark flowing down the screen. Just a solid flow of criticism. Was she at her best? Maybe not, she was nervous, you could tell, but the people in the audience were watching the stream and not paying attention to her. Huge fail. Not sure who I’m more angry at, the folks controlling the screen over on the right side or the Twitter hacks. If you’re not going to cut danah some slack, then I sure as hell can’t let the folks at Web 2.0 expo off the hook.
I will say it again as I’ve said it before, this person is doing more in the areas of social network research herself, than armies could do. She’s smart. She get’s it and she deserves better than what she got.
Are You F*cking Kidding Me? (Facebook Song) LIVE
This is a NSFW type of video, but still very very funny.
The Duration of a Conversation
Published November 17, 2009 blogging , social media 2 CommentsTags: blogging, charlene li, chris brogan, groundswell, social media
Chris Brogan recently blogged about the addiction of giving one’s opinion. As I read it a few questions and thoughts entered my mind on why we comment.
- Do we comment for the sake of commenting?
- Are we going through the motions of commenting because we know it has an underlying effect on our social media status?
- We really want to engage in a dialogue.
- We want to meet this person.
- We want this person to notice us.
- We want business
- We want something from this person
- We want others to notice us.
- None of the above. I like reading blogs
I think that the nature of why people blog has changed over the last 2 years. When Groundswell came out, the reasons we blogged were because it was clearly a way to express and connect with others. The conversations were pure and lasted longer than the current, I post, you comment-we’re done model.
Twitter has in effect reduced blogging to more of a long form vehicle for self expression only, whereas in the past it was a catchall for all thoughts both verbose and sound-bite’ish. But it has also exposed blogging to the masses as a way to promote one’s self and not necessarily one’s intellect.
Conversations through the comments section of a blog have been rendered to nothing more than a self promotional back pat and a scrawled autograph by the author.
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The Ubiquity of Social Media
Published November 17, 2009 social media Leave a CommentTags: marc meyer, social media, social media manifesto, Social Media marketing
Through the course of 11,000 plus tweets, 2 years of using Twitter, as well as creating, hosting, and participating in some very high level Twitter chats around the business of social media, I have oftentimes been struck with moments of absolute, 140 character clarity when it comes to all things social media.
Luckily I have been able to document those moments with the help of Twitter archives and compile them into a manifesto of sorts that hopefully helps the reader think more about the “why it sucks”, the “how” and the “wtf for”, of this maddening space.
The clarity, the thoughts and opinions are mine. You may not agree with them and that’s OK. They are meant to be talked about and discussed as much as they are to be challenged and disagreed with. They are talking points.
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Social Media Rock Star Syndrome
Published November 16, 2009 social media Leave a CommentTags: hashtag social media, rohit bhargava, social media, Tweetchat
Twankers, Rock Stars & Gurus – Authenticity In A World of Exploding Egos
The term “Authenticity” get played out a lot. I mean – ALOT! It gets used to discuss personal branding issues like what kind of avatar should you use and how to disclose if you get paid to communicate a product or experience. Authenticity is used to discuss ethics in business including can you outsource moderation of your community or what if corp communications manages the CEO’s blog? Most of the discussion comes down to the distaste for people trying to be posers online. The fact is whether online or off, people are going to stretch the truth (or outright lie). It happens.
This week, we wanted to change up the conversation a bit and look at it from a personal perspective. Authenticity is a way of being and not something that can be attained by following some corporate policies. While there many people who start out being truly authentic it’s interesting what happens when some get a few wins under their belts. Somewhere they begin believing everything they hear and their ego gets in the way of what was once rational thinking. Kind of a “forgetting your roots” scenario.
Then we have the people who stay true to their character despite success or sometimes fame. Our moderator this week certainly fits the latter description. Rohit Bhargava is a SVP at Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence (which he was a founding member) and is the author of the award winning book Personality not Included. Despite his success, he remains truly authentic at every level. How does he do it? We”ll find out this Tuesday at noon EST.
Something a bit different this week as we will start out with everyone sharing their thoughts on who, today, exemplifies authenticity whether famous or not. Then as everyone joins we will start with Q1 that asks an interesting question. For businesses looking to get established in social media, do you need to task someone who has already built up their own personal brand or can you be successful in building a corporate brand even though your personal brand is not established? The next question should be a hot one. Let’s say you have social media success in the consumer packaged goods industry, are you qualified to lead a team from the healthcare industry? In other words, is social media the same across industries or do you have to specialize. Then Rohit will tackle a question that centers around the idea that some contend extensive personal branding can detract from a company’s branding efforts. This week’s topic and questions:
Topic: Twankers, Rock Stars & Gurus – Authenticity In A World of Exploding Ego
Pre Q1: Who do you feel lives up to being authentic in the digital world?
Q1: Do you have to ROCK your personal brand in SocMed before you try to ROCK your company’s?
Q2: Does Social Media expertise transcend industries?
Q3: Does personal branding compete with or add-to your Company’s market influence?
With Rohit, we are in for a fun chat that is sure the raise the bar for all of us. Plan on joining us Tuesday at noon EST by following the #sm34.l
Gov 2.0,The FDA, and Social Media
Published November 13, 2009 Gov 2.0 , social media 2 CommentsTags: FDA, fda panels on social media, Gov 2.0, social media
Listening to The FDA hearings on promotion of FDA regulated medical products using the internet and social media tools, was both fascinating, frustrating, and groundbreaking.
First and foremost it’s a glimpse into the process in Washington of the FDA trying to learn more and to get up to speed on topics such as:
- What Pharma is doing online
- The significance of social media and Pharma
- Medical professionals usage of online tools and social media
- Medical information dissemination by patients online
- The role of social media for patient information
All of this done through snackable content consisting of no more than 10-15-20 minute presentations to an FDA panel.
More importantly however, what struck me was the ability to listen and watch the FDA hearings online, comment and share what we heard and saw via the Twitter hashtag #FDASM and then read the follow up blog posts from some of the participants. One suggestion: The FDA panel would be smart to go back and read the #FDASM back channel, because the conversation there, was both enlightening and incredibly observant.
As well, Google Docs spreadsheet had been created so that users can see speaker name, company, presentation, and email and talk to those who are viewing the document at the same time that you are!
Transparency is reaching Washington. Gov 2.0 is in action for the people. This doesn’t mean that this will speed up the process of the FDA doing anything within the next 3-6-9 months based on what they have learned, but now people have been able to glimpse something tangible, and actually participate in more ways than ever before. Hopefully Washington is starting to get it.
I applaud the FDA for realizing that they need to understand the power of online medical information, the power and impact of search, and the power of social media, and the effect that it can and does have on consumers and..the way that Pharma can manipulate it. This is a big step and yet at the same time a small step. Either way, they are both steps in the right direction.
