Monthly Archives: April 2011

The Distraction Economy

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I admit I have some sort of Social Media ADD but it’s not my fault. I blame it on the emergence of multi-platform, multi-channel and multi-device access to me, to you and to them. There are too many places to find content, curate content, share content and consume content. There are too many places to have conversations, to read conversations and to lurk without having conversations.  I can’t scale and neither can you.

This has nothing to do with Dunbar’s number.  Dunbar was talking about relationships, I’m talking about the pull for your attention. It’s funny, but the reality is that it isn’t as much about me or you as  you might think it is. The desire to have you “In  Network”  is as much about YOU as it is about your personal data.  It might not even be predicated on your actual participation as much as you might think. But nevertheless, at the end of the day-Your presence, your bio, your participation, your video, your pic, your blog post, your quote, your tweet, your status update, your opinion, your recommendation, and or your location is what’s needed. Today. Right Now.

This isn’t the attention economy, this is the “Distraction Economy”.  You know I’m right, you just don’t have time to respond, but you’ll probably share this and maybe tweet it.

What Twitter could learn from Facebook Deals

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I know that the comparisons between Facebook and Twitter are not justified. Facebook is really about developing deeper relationships with friends and family whereas Twitter is more about sharing and consuming information with people in a quick and easy fashion. There are other similarities but the fact is they are different. Their UI’s are pretty different.

But in 2012 you cannot mention social media without a reference to 1) Facebook and 2) Twitter. But if we’re to compare the adaptive growth of the two over the last few years, Twitter came out of the blocks fast and Facebook has been consistently building major momentum as of late.

Here’s the rub though…

Twitter has appeared to have stalled with it’s growth, it’s user adoption and new features, while Facebook continues to enhance it’s feature set at a rapid rate.

The latest case in point: Facebook Deals Facebook Deals has been designed to let the site’s 600 million plus users easily share their shopping experiences with one another. The deals may show up on a users’ news feed, or in ads on the dashboard on the left. Users can buy the deal with a credit card, or share it or like it.

The new service is Facebook’s latest  attempt to tap into the multibillion-dollar market for daily deals online and additionally adds the element of commerce  as well as further keeping their users “in network” on Facebook. 

This latest addition to Facebook further amplifies Facebook’s  proactive moves in regards to what it sees in the social media space. When Facebook sees what users “like and do” in social networks, they quickly incorporate those features into it’s own network. Remember when Facebook changed it’s wall into a virtual Twitter feed of your Friend’s activities?  Why did Facebook create Places? To adress and fold in what Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt and others had accomplished. And now Facebook has created Deals…

What has Twitter done? Dialed down the API from third party developers, changed their UI and have added features that Facebook has. I realize that Twitter and Facebook are different but Twitter had had just as much of an opportunity to change the lanscape of social platforms and communications as Facebook has.

HeyTwitter, don’t you know the first tenet of social media is to listen and monitor your customers and competition and then turn that into actionable outcomes?

Is social media territorial? Should it be?

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I was walking the dog the other night and watched as he “marked” his territory and naturally I thought about the  natural Tug-o-War that occurs with social. The desire for different departments wanting to own the “rights” to social media. Why do you think that is? Look at how strongly some people feel about the subject!

Danny Wong, the co-founder and Lead Evangelist for Blank Label says that PR should own social media because that department knows “what the appropriate messages are for the company’s followers.”

According to Chris Koch’s B2B Marketing Blog He just comes right out and states, It’s official: Marketing owns social media management, in which I agree with his next question, Now what?

Chris Kieff strongly believes, as usual, that it’s the bailiwick of the HR department and that HR should own social media; and if you don’t think there’s an opinion on that, look at the responses he got to his post

Lastly, Steve Radick thinks we all own social media. Wait cancel that, he thinks no one owns social media.

Now I’m confused.

But let’s think about this for a second. A dog marks his territory every day. The same territory every day. Why does he do that? Because another dog came along and marked the exact same territory as his own as well. This happens every day without fail. So the dog marking dance happens every day without fail. Sniff, then mark. Over and over and over again.

It’s simple really, it’s  not about ownership, it’s about establishing that you as an organization, are consistently there every day,  and making sure others know that you were there…every day, and that you are going to be there…every day. That’s all consumers want.

What Can P90X Teach Us About Social Digital Principles?

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In case you may be living under a rock and do not know what P90X is, it’s currently the media darling of the fitness world. It’s a fitness program encapsulated on DVD in which it stresses 3 simple core principles into it’s workout regime. The core principles are grounded in intensity, variety and consistency.

So I thought, can we make a correlation between P90X and social? Or marketing either online or offline?

The answer is absolutely. Let’s take a quick look.

First, I did a search on Intensity and pulled these colloquial terms:

All of them make sense, but when I think of intensity in digital/social media marketing, I think of focus.

Next up is Variety, which would seemingly fly in the face of focus, but not necessarily. To me, variety means keeping things fresh, not only from a marketing standpoint but also from the standpoint of giving you and your employees and your customers, a reason to come to work, do the work and buy the work. Variety is a two way street.

Lastly we have one of the four pillars of life in my opinion. Consistency. Do you want to succeed? Do you want to win? Do you want to overcome? It’s all about reps. Being consistent with your routine, with your messaging, with your offers, with your conversations, with your content, with your employees and most importantly with your customers. In sports, we marvel at how good it appears that some athletes are-we don’t realize how hard they practiced and worked in order to be consistent.

What principles guide you?

When Should Brands Establish Credibility in Social?

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The answer to the title of this post is now, but how are they supposed to do that? What does social credibility look like on the brand side? Is it a Facebook and Twitter presence? A Blog? An internal social media strategy? A go to market strategy? Hiring a social media director? What should credibility look like for a brand in the not so new social space? Is it  accruing  a massive numbers of followers and fans? At what point is a brand legit in social media?

There is an old adage that goes like this-To get a job you need experience, with the response being… “but how can I get the experience without the job”? So how or when is a brand supposed to go about establishing credibility in social media? What does that look like? What is the line of demarcation for when a brand is accepted as being social. We need to ease up on the castigation of brands that move too slow in social media. Let’s let it marinate first. I know some will say if not now then when but…

At some point you were new to…

Should Companies Play it Safe in Social Media?

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What does that mean exactly, to play it safe? Is that creating a Facebook page just to satisfy the critics and the bashers? Is it creating a Twitter profile “in case” someone maybe be talking about you so that you can claim that you and your company are proactively listening to the conversation?  Or is it a blog that has 3-4 posts over the span of 6 months?  Maybe, possibly, and perhaps?

One of the easiest ways to opt out of the social media revolution is to do just enough to satisfy the hacks that may be looking at your social efforts who then may be writing, speaking or commenting about your stuff and trying to poke holes at it. To be honest, if I was a company who didn’t have money, resources, or time (weak excuse) to dip a toe into the waters of social, I might do the same thing. Of course doing the barest of minimums also sets you up for the hacks who love to point out the companies who…do the barest of minimums. Or…doing the barest of minimums sets you up for nothing.

So what’s happening here?  Call it paralysis by analysis. Fear of talking, orRO-myopia. But the fact of the matter is that some organizations are so fixated on social but so unsure of what to do, or so obsessed with a wait and see mode, that they end up doing nothing or prefer to just sit back and do very little. Ironically they then claim that they are social, or that they’re doing nothing, because they’re waiting for things to sort themselves out.

Does either strategy ( I use the term lightly) work? Not really. Does it buy you time compared to your comptetitors? Maybe. You see, the easiset way that you could  measure your efforts in social would be to first measure how you’re doing compared to the competition. When I coach basketball and baseball- I want to know who is the best and why. Amazing players aside, preparation can go a long way. Once my teams are suitably prepared, we measure where we are by competing. Then I know exactly where to focus my practices and future game plans.

You’re in business to make money and you’re in business to compete against others that do what you do and sell what you sell. Do you scout them? How do you compare to them? What are you doing to improve what you do, as it compares to what they do? What makes you better than them? What are they doing with social media that you are not?

Playing it safe in sports means playing for ties or not caring whether you win or lose. If that was what mattered, then we wouldn’t have to keep score or root for any teams. In business we keep score by making money and surviving.  Social used the right way, could determine both.

Consumer Empowerment or Why Brands Can’t Afford to Falter

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Danny Brown is right.  2 days ago he wrote a post about brands that drive  customers away. Essentially saying/asking, why give your customers, the loyal one’s, a reason to leave. I loved his examples and his post is a quick must read. But let me take his thought a step further.  Recently WebTrends released a whitepaper in which they analyzed the website traffic of Fortune 100 websites based on ‘unique visits’. The study revealed that 68% of the top 100 companies were experiencing a negative growth in unique visits over the past year.

Now we might easily attribute that to the rise of social and particularly to Facebook possibly, but what the research revealed was that Facebook was gaining tremendous popularity as a destination to connect with brands online, and is increasingly chosen over the websites of certain companies. Partly because when customers went to the websites-those sites were still stuck in 1990’s “brochure-ware” mode.

Do you want to give a customer or potential customer, an easy out and an easy path to the competitior? Beyond Danny’s examples of bad customer service experiences, make their initial destination location and landing page user experience a bad one and that should do the trick.

Though there are websites sustaining traffic in spite of Facebook, I’ve said all along that when Facebook catches up with an e-commerce solution that makes the brand experience simple and efficient,  the corporate website is done. This is not an if, it’s a when, and it’s already happening.  When we add mobile and mobile social to the mix, the old adage of you never get a second chance at a first impression will have never loomed more large.

It is time for brands and retailers to understand that it’s not neccessarily about surviving online with a website that has a multitude of itabs that point you to all it’s web properties, it’s more about understanding why people seek out your web property in the first place. What does your user want and expect from your brand online? If you’re a commerce site, or you sell product online, then why complicate the landing page with a corporate look and feel and experience? I don’t care about who your board of directors are! But I do want to possibly buy your product. Make it simple. Want to get ahead of the curve? Then you need to understand, TODAY how mobile and social play into the user experience, you MUST  measure and improve the  performance of all your social, mobile and web entities-KNOW WHAT YOUR USERS WANT AND EXPECT.

Survival for brands and retailers will now be predicated on a customer expectation that is high, seamless, one click in theory, and will eventually be one site in nature. Ok so if we take into account Danny’s post that brands are doing everything they can sometimes to drive their loyal customers away and visits to corporate sites are down-what is happening?

Consumer empowerment is what is happening. Choice is happening.  And brands not recognizing the new age of the educated and enlightened consumer, and moving slowly to adapt, is what’s happening. Stop getting caught up in the minutiae of why you’re moving so slow. Let’s go.

You know what Twitter needs to Fix?

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I know, it’s a loaded question but it’s simple really. It’s the one area that needs attention and really hasn’t received much of it. See if you can figure out. I apologize for using my page as the example.

The Bio section. If we’ve been saying that numbers don’t matter and that it’s all about quality and not quantity, then that notion pretty much renders alot of what you see on the bio section as useless. Right?.  Here’s a really quick suggestion. Since we have the ability to publish content across multiple social platforms at once, perhaps we should see what networks one is a part of. Twitter needs to empower it’s users and allow them to take advantage of a new bio design that leverages more of who they are and not their “personal numbers”. The current bio section was cool when Twitter first launched 5 years ago. Right now it only serves to answer the most rudimentary of questions-that most frown on anyways.

What do you think?

The Problem with the Social Web

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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.