Three Plateaus in Social Media

Posted on June 21, 2011 by marc meyer

For those of you who are new to the social space, this post does not entirely apply to you, though it perhaps eventually will. So you can keep reading to see what will might happen to you.

Plateau #1

You’ve created half assed personas in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Linkedin
You’ve added and perhaps bought followers, fans, likes, subscribers and contacts
You’ve created a blog and have added a few posts
You have pushed out some weak, self serving content on all of them
You had no strategy
You quit because, you see nothing gained and you claim that social media does not work

Plateau #2

You have done everything in Plateau #1 and…
You have added/bought thousands of people to your networks
You push out content on all of your networks but it’s over the top and self serving
You monitor all of your networks…sort of
You have engaged with people somewhat
Your activities have tailed off because it takes too much work and you’re not seeing the results and you’re not convinced that social media works. Pretty soon, it dies a slow death.

Plateau #3

You have identified and created personas in the right networks that fit your needs
You understand that it’s a marathon and not a sprint
You manage and grow all of your networks thoughtfully and effectively
You measure all of your efforts effectively
You create and meet all of your existing KPI’s
You adapt and you create new KPI’s
You create, adjust, and redefine your strategy accordingly
You thrive

As you can see, the 3 plateaus are fairly well defined and quite different. Most of you have done all or parts of each. Those that can get to the third plateau can certainly speak to the other two. Those that have quit after one or two, certainly know why they did. What’s your smell test?

Does Social Media Own You?

Posted on May 13, 2011 by marc meyer

Recently I was asked by a school administrator whether Facebook should be used as the platform for communication with another school in another part of the world. Great Idea but I can think of a better one and here’s why.

This morning I was reading an article by David Rogers about whether it was time to shut down your website and go social instead. He measures the benefits of having a social presence versus just a static web presence. Yet one of the points that he made and its one that I have maintained for a while now is this:

Social might be the cool new alternative to a static web presence but what If Facebook, Twitter and Youtube go away tomorrow? I know it seems farfetched, but the point is, what would you do? To Rogers point he states the following as a benefit to the old school web site. And it’s simple really. Own the data.

Social media platforms are owned by the companies that run them, and, as such, they are the only ones holding all the data on your customers and your interactions with them. On your own website, you own all the data.”

The point I made to the administrator was this. Facebook is cool but why not create a proprietary channel in which you own and control the data? Create a profile that is more indigenous of the classroom, the subject matter and the student instead of relying on a profile that reveals whether a student is in a relationship or not.

We need to take our lips off of the baby bottle that is the big 3 of Social Media(Facebook, YouTube and Twitter) and own the data and own the channel. We need to quit treating Facebook like a crack pipe that no one seems to be able to put down. Own the data and control the channel and the better you can control the platform.

The Silos are still there-How can you change that?

Posted on May 6, 2011 by marc meyer

Do silos ever come down? Over the past five plus years it’s been said an inordinate amount of times that-

“In order for social media to be effective internally within an organization, the silos have to come down“.

But do silos ever actually come down? Drive down any back road in any rural American town and tell me how many old silos you see. They’re still there. And they’re still being used in some cases. They’re built to last and withstand the elements.

You could spend the majority of your time within your company trying to get buy in and roll out a social media initiative and get nowhere because of “the silos”.

How do you break down silos? In a literal sense, you could take a wrecking ball to it. You could blow it up or you could start at the foundation and topple it. You could even start from within and dismantle it. Geez… The analogies are endless aren’t they? They all make perfect sense too from a descriptive, figurative sense of what you could do. But who really does that?

Most farmers or people who do not use silos anymore just leave them be and go in another direction. Silos either have outlived their use because the farmer has sold the farm or they build a bigger one, a stronger one. But they don’t come down.

The fact of the matter is that the larger the organization, the larger the silos are and the amount or number of silos. I see it everyday in organizations with employees that number in the tens of thousands.

Don’t focus on something that you can’t bring down. You can either go around them or last time I checked-there is an opening somewhere. What goes in must come out right? It’s up to you to devise a way to work with the immovable object.

Should Companies Play it Safe in Social Media?

Posted on April 11, 2011 by marc meyer

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.

The Problem with the Social Web

Posted on April 4, 2011 by marc meyer

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.