17 things that a social media consultant, agency or customer can’t do for you.

Posted on August 12, 2009 by marc meyer

This started as a post that was born out of frustration. After about 4 rewrites, I have softened it enough that it now speaks as a document that the client, the consultant and the agency can speak to when they begin talking to each other. I have not even covered strategy, objectives, scope or expectations, but at least we have a starting point.

This is not meant to be snarky, ok maybe a little, but it is meant to be somewhat of a cautionary post as well. Part of it being that I have made most of the mistakes myself. I’ve learned from them and yet, I still make them, because what I am still learning is that no two clients are alike. The dynamics are not called the dynamics for nothing! Feel free to add to them as well.

A social media consultant or agency can’t teach you to “do a blog”.-Just because they want you to do it, doesn’t mean you can. It’s not right for every business but let’s say it is. You just might not have been built for it. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just that the assumption can’t be made that everyone is capable of writing a compelling blog with compelling content.
A social media consultant or agency can’t teach you to do “social media”. You don’t do social media. If you’re an SMB or department head and you hear that, look at your phone and say you have to take this call..
A social media consultant or agency can’t teach you how to write for SEO, the User, AND for Social. It’s not easy, it’s time intensive, and not for the faint of heart and probably not in their DNA. Though it is a great quality to possess. If they are asking or expecting you to, be afraid, be very afraid.
A social media consultant or agency can’t teach you to understand the relationship between search and social. Why? It’s an art as much as it is science and to be honest, why should they? It’s not what they do! Should you take the time to at least understand the dynamics? Yes.
A social media consultant or agency can’t, won’t, or might not teach you to understand when it’s appropriate to not to do something with social media. Why? It’s not in their best interests. What you might not hear is that some aspects of social media are just not right for every business. Let’s not jam round pegs into square holes just for the sake of getting the business. As a decision maker always ask why. It’s you’re right. Which leads to #6.
A social media consultant or agency won’t teach you to understand the why. Why? Because they don’t really care about theory, they might not get it, nor do they want to spend time educating you. You need to take the time yourself to understand the why. Preferably before they come calling. Make them squirm. Dazzle them with your knowledge.
A social media consultant or agency can’t teach you to know when not to pimp your stuff. Why? Because if you think it’s the right thing to do and you’re a traditional marketer, chances are, you’re going to do it anyway. Like the analogy of the actor who thinks he always has to be “on” when he’s in public. You don’t always have to pimp your stuff.
A social media consultant or agency can’t teach you to be yourself. They can tell you, they just can’t teach you. You will figure out that being authentic goes a lot further than #7.
A social media consultant or agency can’t teach you how to have real conversations. You know the difference, really…you do! You have them at the dinner table every night. That’s real.
A social media consultant or agency can’t teach you how to have real online conversations that result in business. Slightly different from #7 but no less impactful or important. The gist being that you can’t force the action.
A social media consultant or agency can’t teach you how to not be disingenuous. You’ll find out real quick how this one works. It’s generally when you learn what the word flame means in the online world and the only voice you hear is youw own.
A social media consultant or agency can’t teach you how to not be overt and blatant with your marketing message. Why? You’ll think that it’s the right thing to do to, until you see otherwise. See #10
A social media consultant or agency can’t teach you to have your “ah-ha” moment, you’ll know when it happens. You will have it. Though they may have the skills to set up a moment for you, they’re more fun when you have them on your own time.
Agencies can’t teach patience and perseverance- they don’t care. That’s not their business model. Though that is a cornerstone element of social media.
A social media consultant or agency can’t teach you to want it- if you don’t want it, then you won’t want it…this speaks to #17
A social media consultant or agency can’t teach you to write FBML why? Because chances are they don’t know what it is. They will just outsource it
A social media consultant or agency can’t teach you how to “be social”…You just have to try.

Hopefully you can’t take these nuggets for what they are-lessons learned.

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10 social sites I bookmarked last week and why.

Posted on August 10, 2009 by marc meyer

Yes there are lots of websites and blogs to read; and for that reason a lot of times I bookmark them and hope to get back to them later. There’s a method to my bookmarking and it usually revolves around learning. I’m an infofreak and my thoughts are that I need to share more of this these bookmarks. So here goe…

Disclaimer* None of these companies paid me to do this and these are not in any kind of order.

1) Objectivemarketer seemed like an interesting site, though the description was ambigiuous but certainly worth trying out.

2) Evernote– Ive been meaning to check this out I just haven’t pulled the trigger on it. Anything that simplifies, I’m all for.

3) Lazyfeed– this seems pretty cool and is exactly what you might think. It’s a real time feed of topics that Lazfeed finds, sortable, searchable, findable, realtime monitoring. I believe its in beta, follow them On Twitter for a reg. code.

4) The Spinks Blog Not that David needs any help but he has an interesting read here and glad I finally went over to see what he had to say.

5) Eventful Find share and promote events- This could be a useful site. The jury is still out though.

6) Hubpages Still checking this one out too-Publish online with easy to use, non-techie tools

7) The ultimate list of basic SEO resources– This is pretty self explanatory no?

8) What the fuck is social media one year later- this slide deck is a follow up by Marta Kagan from her immensely popular first deck on the same subject. Great to read and share, lots of useful stats.

9) The Ultimate list of Twitter tools Ignore the annoying popup and check this list. You never know what you might not know.

10) Why social media marketing fails This is really good, listen to the audio podcast featuring Peter Kim , Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li.

I love The filter aspect of Twitter and believe it or not, a lot of these originated from tweets. I just amassed them into an uber tweet for you 🙂

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WOM

Posted on August 8, 2009 by marc meyer

I highly suggest this site as a resource http://www.womma.org/casestudy/

Posted via email from marcmeyer’s posterous

Don’t be a Social Media Dick…

Posted on August 6, 2009 by marc meyer

Wanna know something great about social media? If you’re a dick (in the slang sense), eventually people will know it. Why? Because of the transparent nature of the platforms and its associated tools. You see, if you hang yourself out there far enough, your personality starts to show. Take Twitter for example. If you Tweet long enough, patterns start to form. Just like in grade school, high school and college and at your work. You start to see the personalities of the people that you “hang with” every day.

I used to say and still do, that you can determine the true personality of someone by how they carry themselves in sports. Be it on the basketball court, the golf course, a pick up game, anything. If you act like a jerk, then it will show. If you bust your ass, people notice. if you’re a team first type of person, people notice. If you’re a dick, people notice. Well guess what? The same holds true in social media.

Here’s the thing though. In this uber networked world we now live in. You really don’t want the tag of being “the dick”, or even “that bitch”, for that matter. No one wants to work with those types of people, no one wants to hang with those types of people and no one certainly wants to hire or refer that kind of person.

For those that might be the aformentioned, It’s not about trying not to please everyone either; and it’s not about being hard or cool or contrarian. Or trying to have this badass persona. You don’t have to. it’s boring and childish. It’s about being real. and being a realist. Look, we’re all scratching and clawing for the same things here, but if I felt the need to write this, well then you can pretty much figure out that something must be awry.

There’s a term that we should all strive for and one that I think is the ultimate compliment that can be given to someone. If someone says that you are “good people”, consider it the equivalent of being knighted. For someone to say that you are “good people” means that you treat people fairly, you’re generally nice to everyone, and everyone is on equal footing with you and vice versa. It doesn’t get any better than that. It doesn’t mean that you can’t have your moments, we all have them. But for the most part, you’re a solid citizen. In this case, the offline world can and should mirror the online world.

In social media, you can tell pretty quickly and pretty easily who the good people are. Even more so, you can eventually tell who the dicks are. Don’t be one.

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When the social media relationship ends…

Posted on August 4, 2009 by marc meyer

In my previous post about nurturing relationships, I was skewered a bit for not really pinning down the how’s and why’s as much as I was alluding to going out and just doing it. Ok, I get that. perhaps another post is in order in which I suggest specific tools on how to nurture a relationship via social networking. But in the meantime, I wanted to tell you a quick and true story about what happens when the relationship goes bad in social networks.

It goes like this

About 4 years ago I had created an online community to support the sales and marketing efforts of a CPG. Why did I create it? Initially I thought it just made sense to put up a KB with some bells and whistles, but it quickly became evident that something larger was needed just because of the amount of emails and feedback we were getting. I’d like to claim it was some great epiphany but no, it just made sense. So the community was born. 5000 members strong.

Mistakes are made

I decided to manage it. You’ll be pleased to know that I was not transparent and I hid behind a cleverly stupid name. Mistake #1.

Mistake #2, though we had created a rules and regulations, TOS, policies page, I did not adhere to enforcing them. I would capitulate time and time again in my efforts to make everyone happy. Lesson #1/Mistake #2, You cannot possibly make everyone happy as a community manager.

As I kept my distance from the community and only appeared on an as needed basis, my stature took on the persona of something that resembled the all powerful and mighty Oz. I would come in periodically, settle a dispute swiftly, siding with the person who I didn’t want to piss off and away I would go. Further alienating people as I went. Mistake #3 Not abiding by the TOS, having little or no affinity to the members of the community, and essentially being completely out of touch with the nuances of the community.

To alleviate this headache, I appointed 3 moderators to buffer the criticism. The problem was I gave them too much power and they instituted their own brand of vigilante justice. Mistake #4 I was now playing favorites and siding with the moderators who may not have had the best interests of the community at hand, since they were not being paid and were merely the “appointed” brand champions of the community.

Mistake #5 Instead of reasoning and understanding and trying to empathize with the passionate members of the community, I would throw down the swift hand of justice. I would warn members and then subsequently kick them out. Some got second and third chances, others did not.

When the social network relationship goes really bad.

Instance #1 The person I kicked out, did a blog post on how he would like to kick my ass and kill me. Now this person did have some issues but instead of me trying to reason with this person, who was by the way, a brand champion- I kicked them out. This person was a very very popular member of the group and once gone, weakened the core group of passionate users and brand champions. Mistake #6 I didn’t realize how important this person was until they were gone.

Instance #2 Another brand champion was just a bit too busy on the site. Always emailing me, IM’ing me with suggestions, how to’s, criticism, you name it. I took it all in stride but he was always seeing how far he could push things in regards to what he would do for the sake of the group and to his page within the site. I found myself always having to check his page, his comments, his posts, and his avatar to see if he was behaving. I was also periodically geting complaints about him from other members, as well as the mods. Which then meant that I had to talk to him and tell him to chill. It was getting old.

I had warned him on numerous occasions and he would comply and behave for a bit, but not for long. The last straw was him dropping some code on some of his pages which locked down the site for quite some time. That was it. He had to go. So I kicked him out.

From bad to worse

Did he go quietly? No.In short order he did the following: He found every social site that I was a part of and did everything in his power to make my life miserable. He either trashed me, the site, or the product. When he wasn’t doing that, he was creating multiple and I mean multiple personas, and coming back into the community, and proceeding to again, trash me, the product, the company and anything else he could think of to disrupt the site. It was a community nightmare to the nth degree.

So what did I do? I tried to follow behind him and clean the mess up, but that proved virtually impossible. So I did the only thing I could do. I reached out to him and brought back into the community, back into the fold. Why? Because it was easier to “manage him” within the community rather than outside of it. It was a very unpopular decision. Mistake #7 The best move turned out to be the worst moved followed by an even worse move.

By now, most people had had enough and to be honest, at this point, things were starting to die down. The brand champions were moving on, the passion was waning, and there was nothing really happening at the corporate level-that was keeping people involved and engaged in the community.

Lessons learned

So yes, in a sense, the moderators and the administrators certainly didn’t help things. Nor did we learn from our mistakes or adapt from them. But on a larger level, the community life-cycle, the people that made the community thrive, and the site as a whole, were diminishing, either by my actions or just the natural progression of things. Could it have been prevented? Hard to say. The easy answer is yes, but how long would that have prolonged the shelf life? Relationships begin and end and begin again, all the time. In some cases it just wasn’t meant to be and in others it is. In this one, there are valuable lessons everywhere, you just have to know how to look, and not necessarily where.

My point is this. All of our social relationships right now are thriving in one way or another but for how long? The natural progression of things dictates that most of them will flame out. At that point what is left? What do we have for the effort? Your takeaway? Understand the value of purpose before the relationship begins in earnest knowing that there is the distinct possibility that the relationship will end.

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How to nurture conversations in social media

Posted on August 3, 2009 by marc meyer

In social media, social networking and in this web 2.0 world, there is one thing that is and must remain consistent. That is the art of conversation. In order for it to “work”. Conversations have to ensue, they have to abound, and they have to be maintained. Beyond “just” having a conversation, there has to be a beginning, a middle and an end. Or a purpose, right? What social media has really done has created the means to have conversations in ways that 10 years ago we could only imagine. But beyond the means, you now know so much more about the person you are now having a conversation with. And if you don’t know that much about that person, you now have the ability to find out, rather quickly too.

There’s the old school version of communicating

And there’s the new school.

But neither works if you don’t adopt the mode of give and take or… serve, receive, and volley..

Sorta like…

In social media, you can serve and hit against the backboard all you want, but you will never get anything out of that except becoming adept at repetition. In other words, you can create social network profiles on all of the hot social networks, and you can write really great blog posts, but if you don’t take the time to go out and share you, your personality and your content with people that have similar interests and tastes, it will die on the vine. Learn how to share your content. Social Poster is a great place to start, but beyond that you need to decide where you and your interests fit in.

Here’s the best example I can think of.

When you first go into Facebook it’s just one big funnel. But eventually most of you find your way, your groups, your peeps, or your tribes. But once you do, joining doesn’t guarantee anything.

Here’s another example.

Penn Station in New York to the outsider can seem incredibly confusing. But really, it’s pretty efficient. What it does is that it funnels and routes people from the suburbs into the city and back again. Like Facebook, each person from their distinct city, town, and neighborhood at the beginning and end of the day can find their way out of town and back home and vice-versa again at Penn station. With a little research, some directions, some effort, and some help, someone can walk off the street and get to the neighborhood, town, suburb or city that they need to get to in the surrounding New York/New Jersey area.