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When Does Social Media Really Work?

The beauty of social media isn’t in the online connections. It’s not about the numbers, never has been. OK, maybe it is to marketers, but that’s because they operate from a different perspective. No the beauty of social media is in it’s potential. It’s potential to connect people from divergent backgrounds or in the same city or that have the same common interests. It can really connect people in infinite ways. That may seem somewhat preachy or full of green meadows, unicorns and rainbows but it’s true.

Recently in the Wall Street Journal, there was an article titled , Why Successful Branding Still Happens Offline. The article was good but it was really similar to a thousand other articles that I have read over the years about how brands need to do this or that in social in order to be successful. As I neared the end of the piece, I read the following:

The great social wave is an opportunity that no business can afford to ignore or look at myopically. It’s happening all around us – and to the continuing surprise of many, it’s mostly happening face-to-face

I’ve said the first part of that sentence, again, a thousand times about ignoring social at your own peril, blah, blah,blah. But the back half of the sentence struck a nerve. It’s mostly happening face to face. Basically where social takes off and takes on magical tones is when we get to associate a name with a physical face and voice and not an avatar. Going to a conference and meeting that person that you have had tens of twenty or hundreds of conversations with on Twitter or Facebook or blog comments. That’s the money shot.

Whether you do business with someone online or whatever it is you or your company might do with social, it’s always going to be or should be based on some type of interaction and then some type of result. Taking social offline should be the goal of every online social media encounter worth its weight.

Relationships In A Socially Connected World

Published February 15, 2012 Social Networks Leave a Comment
Tags: clay shirky, jamie sandford, ny times, Social Networks, tweetchats

In the New York Times recently there was an article titled, My Dinner With Clay Shirky, and What I Learned About Friendship which I highly recommend. The piece was essentially about an authors dinner experience with noted writer, speaker, and internet ethnographer Clay Shirky. If you don’t know who Clay Shirky is, go to Amazon and read some excerpts from his two books Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organization and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

The gist of the NY Times piece was that if we’re not careful we could spend so much time interacting with people on the Web that we could become a little socially deficient. Ironically, this week we held a social media tweetchat hosted by Jamie Sandford on how one cultivates relationships in a social world. The parallels were neat and not lost on me. On the one hand we had Shirky wanting us to take it offline and on the other, we had a group of people in a tweetchat talking about how to make online connections stronger with the eventuality that we do take them offline.

Complete and utter online social immersion can make us feel like we are so busy with our connections that don’t have time for the offline world. Just as quickly however, if we don’t take the time to balance the two or at least make the attempt to deepen our online relationships we can easily feel the false euphoric high of quantity give us the semblance of relationships. Yet the reality is the payoff rests in face to face interactions. We spend so much time cultivating our numbers on various social platforms that we begin to think we have “a lot” of “friends”.

Our manufactured social world allows to think we’re popular until we step out from behind the machine. The point? Even in a connected world, we have to make the effort to cultivate a virtual relationship into something greater than the sum total of the networks that we are part of.

The secret sauce of social is selfishness-and that’s not a bad thing

Published September 12, 2011 SEO/SEM , social media , social media influence , Social Networks 1 Comment
Tags: origins of social media, social business, Social Networks

Excuse me while I say the following: If it wasn’t for social media, you wouldn’t be anywhere near where you are right now in your career. To put it more succinctly, social media has made a lot of you. Yes I know that’s like saying if it wasn’t for the internet Bill Gates wouldn’t be anything but another coder, but let me back up. You see, for a lot of us, and notice I said us, social media added that missing layer. That missing dimension, that lens into our personal, private and public lives.

Social is the accelerant.

In a way, using social is very much like wining and dining to get what we need. For some, utilizing social media to “court” others and market ourselves, is the same as drug reps taking doctors on ski trips to “earn” their business. Or going out on a date where we both talk about ourselves. It’s an interview. It’s the handshake and the introduction. Social is the empty seat next to you on an airplane that soon will be occupied by someone you can talk to for 3 hours. Or not. The potential is there should you choose to engage. The seat is the tool or the platform for discussion..

People have been using each other for centuries. In social media, the same holds true. People are using each other because they’re seeing that our social selves can be so easily intertwined into our ability to create, and curate; and yet it’s also dependent on consumption, its dependent on sharing, dependent on broadcasting the message, the message that is you and me. Some of you may or may not know this but we are feeding off of each other. We’re sitting across from each other on that plane and we both have the same opportunity to talk to each other and take it to another level.

Without those elements, you are nothing but a product of what we were prior to the boom of the internet- a product of the 80′s and early 90′s. You are static. Social has added flash to your being. It’s added substance to who you are or… who you want to be, should you so choose.

It starts with Linkedin

Think about this. Linkedin is and became one of the initial gateways into people’s lives; and for a lot of people, who were never into that “social thing”, and who are still not that social, Linkedin is their gateway into social media. In fact, if we go by the 90-9-1 model, Linkedin might be as social as some people will ever get! But at the end of the day, is Linkedin a social network? Perhaps. It has elements of social. But what Linkedin really is, is it’s our vetting tool. It’s our way to learn more about others, and have others learn more about us. But really it may have evolved with Linkedin, but it started with blogging.

Bloggers were considered outlaws

Social has a quid pro quo nature to it. In fact, today’s social elements were born out of the early days of blogging which were veiled in a sensibility of “us versus them” camaraderie. Essentially it boiled down to a “if you show me yours I’ll show you mine” mentality of reading, commenting, and sharing each others blogs. It was almost the manual defacto way that you grew your readership. But it also allowed us to show each other and others our many layers in ways in which we never were able to before.

Blogs allowed us and allow us to say whatever we wanted when we wanted, and we used each other, and then we used someone else, and they used us too-and we let them, if it grew our readers. It’s how blogging works. Funny but in the non-blogging world, we indirectly and directly use each other every day by associating ourselves with new people and entities that we think can help us get where we want to go. It’s not sacrilege to say this but people use each other all the time; but it might be sacrilege to say this though…Using each other is the nature of social media.

We call it social media but it could easily be called useful media.

Social has added that dimension of vetting the who, search added the dimension of vetting the what. Yet we still have to work, we still have to pay our bills, and eat, drive, sleep and do that daily mundane life stuff; because the human element still weaves its way through all of that offline stuff. The new difference is, social media is adding that dynamic layer of personal utility. It’s adding the layer of creating who we are, so that someone might see who we are. Social is selfish. It helps us. It connects us. And that’s not a bad thing, it’s more just the reality of where we are going.

On Dependence of 3rd Party Platforms and Leaving the Grid

Published August 25, 2011 Social Networks Leave a Comment
Tags: amazon, Apple, google, networks, social

We use Gmail to send email. We use Facebook to connect with our past. We use Twitter to let people know what we’re doing right now. Without technology, how would we connect with people? The phone, the written word via snail mail, and or lo and behold… face to face?

What happens if Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Youtube, Pandora, Verison, Spotify, Evernote, Amazon, Google and Microsoft were to go away? What happens? Life goes on. Case in point, you’re talking to someone on your cell phone and the call is dropped, what do you do? You look at the phone, you may call them back, you may not, you shrug your shoulders and life goes on.

Have you ever thought about how dependent you are on the digital things that make your life go? I know I do. In fact, we often joke about what would happen if some of us were off the grid for any substantial amount of time.Would we shrivel up like a raisin? Get a case of the DT’s? For some it’s possible, they can hop right off of the grid and shut it down no problem. Digital for those that can’t disconnect, resembles some type of ambient ubiquity which they cannot separate themselves from for any extended period of time-like 2 days.

But what if someone just disconnects

This morning I was looking for someone who I had gotten to know fairly well who essentially created a whole new life for himself around social media. They created a slipstream niche around how to use social media for SMB’s. They wrote a book, they V-logged, they tweeted over 15,000 times, they created an active Facebook page, and then all of a sudden. No more. The sites are shut down, the social profiles are dormant and the person has just disappeared from the social ecosystem.

Did he die? Did he just decide that social media is so superficial that there has to be something better out there? Did he get a new job that necessitates that he not participate at all in social? I may never know because the only way I ever communicated with him were through 3rd party platforms and social networks. He doesn’t use those anymore. Maybe he wants to reconnect with his family? I don’t know. In a sense, he has gone from one extreme to the other, and that’s OK. Why? I’m starting to think about the overall value of social as it pertains to our truly personal, social selves and maybe just maybe this person decided that it wasn’t worth it.

It makes you wonder though. What will social look like in 5 years. Is social in and of itself creating its own oxymoron? Where social doesn’t really mean social at all? Maybe there is something to Facebook Fatigue. All I know is that when someone ceases “to be” in social media either a life has ended or…maybe just maybe…life goes on.

The Age of Digital Enamorment

Published June 8, 2011 Digital , Social Networks Leave a Comment
Tags: digital, mobile social, mobile social media

I wasn’t the best history student but I do know that we’ve had these periods in our history where there were just huge shifts and advancements in the way things were done. We had The Stone Age, The Bronze age, etc. etc., Each bigger and better than their predecessor; and then there was The Age of Enlightenment which was pretty cool since it was a movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe who were all about trying to reform society and advance knowledge. Kind of an ongoing and consistent theme even up to now don’t you think?

But you know what though? You know what has been consistent throughout all of these “Ages”? They all ended. Everyone moved on, everyone advanced.

Let’s fast forward to the year 2000. That’s when the Dot-Com Age came to an end. And now lets fast forward 11 years later to the “Age of Digital Enamorment”. Or is it the social media bubble? Depends on who you talk to, right? Simply put, we are in a period of time (which will end) that has us so completely fixated on all things digital, all things communications related, all things portable, and all things computer powered, and cloud driven etc.,etc.,, that seeing a 6 year old with a tablet raises nary an eyebrow.

Most will openly admit that they they’re not sure what they would do without a computer, a laptop, a tablet, a cell phone, Facebook or Twitter-They would be helpless and sadly I might be one of them, though it is my job, so maybe that is a slight pass. For others it has, this age of “Digital Enamorment”, weaved it’s way into the fabric of our daily lives, our private lives, out passions, our relationships, our problems, our past and our future so pervasively, that we really don’t know how we could live without them. I saw this term used in a post I had read recently that pretty much sums it up nicely, it’s called Pervasive Connectivity.

Perhaps a better way of looking at is that we live in the age of “Always On“.

And yet, we want more. We want it smaller and we demand it faster. In fact manufacturers and platform providers can’t work any faster in trying to roll out V2, V3, V4 and so on and so forth of their products and services. We will reach a maturation point that is preceded by a saturation point.

Still the question remains though-What will move us from the Age of Digital Enamorment?

We can point to a few things looming on the horizon, but the fact of the matter is, we are in a world that is still moving at light speed towards all digital, all web based, all mobile in nature, all social, and going global in desire and reach. The next movement won’t be us getting away from digital, no there’s going to be a point where we reach a level of intimacy with digital. I already see it happening. It’s that maturation after saturation.

Look no further than calling it the age of “Digital Intimacy”.

We’ll move here because we will have become so accustomed to our devices and our digital lives that we will desire a level of intimacy with these products and platforms that pushes us towards more of a return to the age of the conversation, the age of the relationship and an age of reclaiming our privacy.

Face to Face relationships will be the new black.

Is Being Too Social Ruining Social Media?

Published June 2, 2011 Social Networks 1 Comment
Tags: dunbars number, msnbc, Social Networks

I was reading an article on MSNBC recently about Groupon and the tag line to the piece was the following:

“When everything’s social, nothing is.”

Which gave me pause to think. What happens when you have so many options to do something or buy something or say something or share something in social? Is there a tipping point looming here where eventually everyone tires of being so social?

I actually think so.

It’s not going to happen yet, but as I was made aware in a comment on a post I wrote about social media bubbles-”there is a bubble, it’s just different”. So with that assumptive comment in hand, which in hindsight I now agree with. I think it is safe to say that eventually we as a social world will tire of being so social with each other. There’s just too many choices and it’s not decreasing anytime soon.

There will come a time where we just won’t want to share, chat, upload, download, friend, follow, or like from a social standpoint, a mobile standpoint, and a mobile social standpoint. It’s inevitable. If we produce too much of something (i.e. social networks) then demand goes down right? We’re going to burn ourselves out. Let’s look at this another way.

Being social on the web is not a utility, but a lot of us use the social web from a utilitarian standpoint. They are two distinct things. But when they start to bleed into each other, that requires more time, and for most of us, time is still a commodity.

When social first came on the scene, the amount of networks were few and far between. Eventually more and more copycat type of networks emerged as the boom spread far and wide. The Big boys i.e. the Facebooks, the Youtubes, The Twitters and even the Myspace’s of the world enjoyed the rush. But as we head toward 800 million users on Facebook and we see stuff like this graph from Ken Burbary, we realize that we truly are in an age of “digital enamorment”.

Eventually there will be a correction where we pare down our networks and we start to refine who our connections are with, and what they stand for. Right now we’re too enamored with social to see that. As things progress we’ll soon realize that there is indeed a bit of truth to Dunbar’s number about limits to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships with. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. The number sits at 150 and ironically Dunbar did not figure online social networks into the mix.

Your goal? Develop and refine the networks you’re in and remember Facebook isn’t your network, it’s your platform. Who you are connected to within Facebook is your network.

The Voice of the Social Employee Inside the Firewall

Published May 10, 2011 Social Networks , voice of the customer 2 Comments
Tags: intranets, Social Networks, VOC, voice of the customer

In doing some recent research and “listening” to the voice of the customer lately on behalf of clients, it dawned on me that we really don’t talk much about the “voice of the employee”. Sure we talk about employee empowerment and internal ideation at some cool sexy companies that are doing “that”, but for most, the employee doesn’t get the type of play that it deserves. Up to now, we really haven’t given it an official name. For now on, I’m going to call it Voice of the “social” Employee.

For some organizations they will stress how important the employee is and then do nothing about it-call it lip service, while others actually put their money where their mouth is. However, if companies were all about their employees, why would 84%% of all employees in the workforce be looking for a job right in 2011? Yes, part of that is attributed to an economy on the rebound but the other part of that equation has to be linked to factors such as genuine dissatisfaction.

For some of the dissatisfied, it just might not be a good fit and that happens, but what of the 84% who feel that the organization just doesn’t care about them? How do you change that as a C level executive? Does any amount of internal collaborative software or initiatives bolster the morale of a disenfranchised employee? Can an internal socially powered ideation platform or network empower and propel an employee into massive production and an upbeat morale?

Does social media offer the panacea to an employee who feels that he is not being paid what he is worth? Does social give a voice to the employee who isn’t happy? Does social soften the feelings of the employee who thinks that the company doesn’t care about them? Depends on whether they choose to voice that attitude in front of or behind the firewall. Right? In general, dissatisfaction voiced in front of the firewall results in a quick exit strategy-which is where most of today’s “social employees” reside.

Social media can do a lot of things especially in the worlds of awareness, HR, sales, marketing, PR and communication but it may not help when it comes to the employee who feels that they are not getting anywhere. Consider the following three very general examples:

Sure, it’s great for sourcing new ideas but what happens when Betty in accounting can’t stand Fred in the cubicle next to her and Fred stalks her in all of her social networks both internally and externally? Does Betty complain openly on Facebook?
How does social enable Juan in shipping who busts his ass and yet no one notices because he’s so quiet and chooses not to use that hot new internal platform? How can a company leverage that through an internal social platform?
Roger in sales has devised a great way to save the company money but it involves using social media and might eliminate some positions-should he do it?

The voice of the employee is 10 times different than the voice of the customer. It’s layered in nuance, context and politics. You can’t serve the voice of the customer until you address the voice of the employee first.

We want our employees to be more social internally and to create bonds and ties and networks-but employees need to see the value to them and not necessarily to the company. There is the intrinsic value of participation for participation sake and of course there is the mandate of participation-but aren’t those basically disingenuous? What type of quality of participation can we actually expect?

One could say that the best way to motivate would be to incentivize. And in a way Zynga struck a nerve when it realized that social network growth and app saturation could be wrapped around and tied to gaming-people like to be challenged, they like to be entertained and they like to be rewarded. Taken a step further if you were to look at Gowalla and Foursquare, and why they are/were successful-it’s based on the notion of a reward system-earning badges for “checking in”.

But I digress with this parting question. How can we empower, reward and engage our employees to higher levels using some of the basic success tenets of social media? We’re asking the backbone of our organizations to utilize social networks and tools to engage the customer and give the customer a voice but in the same breath we may be taking it away from our employees. We may be unknowingly muting and muzzling our employees for the sake of the customer and creating an opportunity for them to take “it” outside of the firewall.

The Problem with the Social Web

Published April 4, 2011 social media , Social Networks 3 Comments
Tags: Facebook, social business, the social web, Twitter

Competition is a good thing. Burger King is across the street from McDonalds. Chipotle sits a few hundred yards from Moe’s, Sprint and AT&T offer virtually the same thing. At the end of the day it’s about choice and personal preference that decide whether we go for the hamburger or the hamburger, the buritto or the buritto, or the phone or the phone. Sure we might get a recommendation or suggestion from someone, or we might be motivated by some type of incentive-but ultimately, you make the choice to choose…

Two years ago my friend Jason Breed and I created Hashtag Socialmedia- a tweetchat that revolved around talking about the business of social media. We patterned the chat around the rise of tweetchats that had distinct hashtags associated with them-our model came from Sarah Evans and her #journchat, which at the time was virtually the only tweetchat out there.

Her idea became our idea. But with additional bells and whistles and a different topic. The same but different. What drove both were the variety and types of people that participated. Was it a form of “Me-too”-ism? Maybe. But we weren’t competing for the same eyeballs and ears, so it didn’t matter. We took the basic concept of a tweetchat and made it our own.

In the larger picture of the social web though-there is Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube and blogs. Those are your so called starting points in social and then everything else sorta falls into lockstep behind them. I’m generalizing blogs, but if you insist, I could go with WordPress, Typepad and Blogger.

The point is this. Right now we are stuck in the Me too phase of social. I see things being created that are offshoots of the basic premise of connecting, sharing and communicating-but nothing that is transformational. Nothing that is altering the way people do business.

If anything, I still see the adoption of social media taking longer than I expected.

Consider the following statements:

“We have a blog, come read it and find out cool stuff about our company”

“Come join our community and learn more about us”

“We have a Twitter account, follow us we may say something insightful”

“Come see our Facebook page and fan/like us”

“View our Youtube videos and share them”

“Download out mobile app and receive valuable benefits”

“Register for our email newsletter and print coupons”

See what I mean? We’re all drinking from the same well. Doing what we’ve been told works. We’re all in the same bathtub and the toys in the tub are the same one’s that were there last week, last month and last year. Any new additions to the tub will be the same “type” of bath toys that are currently available, but nothing really new that may spur me to take two baths in the same week!. I know, what a ridiculous analogy-but my point being that I’m afraid that we’re stuck right now and it might be awhile before we become “unstuck”.

Recently I read where, First it was AOL, then it was Microsoft, then it was Google and now it’s Facebook. I’d say that was pretty safe. But look how different each was from the previous NBT.

It’s safe to easily sit here and say that Facebook is “it” right now, but also with the aspect of Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube being variants of a solid basic notion that Facebook understood early on which is this:

All of those above mentioned platforms all have a solid foundation of “ease of sharing, creating, connecting and communicating” at their core. There is no mystery about that. Sure, we’re exploring different ways that those can be exploited-but nothing really different. It’s “Here’s what you do, here’s how they work, the rest is up to you”- Now go do it.

The mystery is in what’s next. We obsess on it. But I will say this- We don’t need another Facebook. We don’t need another Facebook competitor either. We just need a better experience-but right now I don’t know what it looks like or where it’s going to come from.

Neither do you.

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