2008 November 20 « Direct Marketing Observations

Archive for November 20th, 2008

Social Media and Sundry Quotes

This first quote actually was found due to a tweet from Chris Brogan and can be attributed to Rachel Rubin who was guest posting on Kyle James’s blog, did you follow that?

One of my biggest professional challenges is to find a credible, valuable way to assess the effectiveness of our electronic media. Using Web Analytics and calculated ROI for certain projects are great starts, but I think there’s more to it.

Joseph Jaffe goes off on the Big 3

Bottom line, they did not join the conversation. I can’t put it any differently. They never listened to their customers; they never listened to the market; they never listened to the industry.

Kyle Flaherty tells you what we’ve been saying for a while on Twitter and elsewhere, in this guest post on Jennifer Leggio’s ZDNet Blog:

Do NOT ask “How will the economy affect social media?”
DO ask “How can I prove and then improve how social media affects my business?”

Chris Brogan

it’s water…

Read this wonderful article by John Kotter in The Harvard Business Review

Real urgency is a belief that, yes, there are big hazards and big opportunities out there (not just the former). More importantly, true urgency is a set of emotions, a gut-level feeling that we need to get up every single day with total determination to do something to deal with those hazards and opportunities and make some progress, no matter how modest, and do so today.

Toby Bloomberg asks a very simple question:

In this overwhelming world what One – 1 – I thing would you just do?

We focus a lot on personal brands and Frank Martin writes a lively piece titled Personal Brands(again) in which he says:

You HAVE to focus on adding value first, not your shine

Fred Wilson “rocks it” on this blog post which asks, “Do you do any real work”?. Check out this blurb then go read it!

And that’s one of the main reasons I keep writing, commenting, discussing, and participating in blogs, tumblr, twitter, disqus, and the social media world at large. Its about the “realest” work I do

OK folks, read them,share them and retweet them…

Social Media Pitch-Raise your hand if you understood anything I just said.

Published November 20, 2008 Social Media marketing , Social Networks , Web 2.0 Leave a Comment
Tags: Marketing, seo, social media, Social Media marketing, Social Networks

This is starting to become a recurring theme of late. I pitch a social media project and spend the majority of the time explaining my vision and my passion for what the possibilities might be, and I get the blank stare:

Except this time, they nodded their head as I was speaking. So the whole time I’m thinking.. “I’m building momentum”, but something tells me I better ask the following question just to make sure.

You guys know what social media is right?

Before they could answer, I though to say, “Better yet I said, Raise your hand if you understood anything I just said.” Now this is a group of fairly young, hip execs. 1 CEO, 1 CMO, 2 VP’s and 3 sales and marketing people. I got nothing. So I had to scramble. I said the 50,000 foot view of social media is that of a MySpace or Facebook. They all nodded. I tried going deeper but it was futile. I might have used the term SEO but now that i think back, there is no way they knew what that meant. I did get this question though:

Can you get us ranked #1 for __________ in the whole country?

Uhhhh.. no I cannot, unless I worked for Google, I think I mumbled that. At the end of the day I walked away with a project but it’s not going to involve any social media components. I guess that’s the upside. Here’s the moral.

I need to to do a couple of things going forward. Here’s what they are:

I’m going to determine if social media even makes sense for the company I’m talking to.
If it does, I’m going to work backwards with any company or individual I deal with or talk to, and show them examples of companies that do what they do and how they use social media successfully.
I’m going to simplify my examples of social media and explain some tools that might make sense
I’m going to show the sizzle of social media
I’m going to show even more value and demonstrate the power of social media in regards to extending the conversation with their customers.

Now before you say I should have done this homework beforehand, perhaps I could have, but the homework I did do, was on what their business model was. And the potential it posessed for social media adoption. My assumption was, “Every company has the potential” Maybe, maybe not. But as I head down this road even more, I’ll be able to determine if that is indeed possible.

You see, you have to understand, I’ve rolled out quite a few social media projects for my former company and it’s clients and their products, but now that I’m pitching the projects as well for my new company, all of a sudden it’s a whole different ballgame. One in which i was not completely prepared for.