Tag Archives: Social Media marketing

Your 4th of July Seth Godin, Jackie Huba, eating a meatball sundae marketing video

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I love Jackie Huba’s blog, Church of the customer it’s always relevant and so…customer-centric. With that being said, you might enjoy the light fare that I’m throwing your way. have a good 4th of July.

Social media and customer service; a no brainer

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I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time. I’ve read iterations from other notable bloggers and marketers but my questions are these. Where does social media make the best sense in say, a B2B setting? Or. for that matter, a B2C setting? Could it be customer service?  It’s funny to think that in 2008 that a novel concept could be communicating with the customer! Reaching out to the customer. Talking with the customer, listening to the customer  before, during and after the purchase.

Now don’t get me wrong there are plenty of companies out there that do a good job in maintaining a relationship with the customer but… But the problem is, the model that they are operating from is cut from the “old school” of marketing and customer service. It consists of 2-3 major direct mail campaigns per year, a decent if not underperforming customer service call center in which most customer issues are resolved amicably, and a website that takes orders and ships them on time etc. etc. You get the point. I’m sure you can think of at least a half a dozen companies like that. You see them everyday. You interact with them EVERY day. They do just enough to satisfy your expectation of customer service.

However, when a company reaches out to you or goes above and beyond your expectations, you raise an eyebrow. You’re surprised. Why? Because your expectations are so low that you expect NOTHING! and when you do get a friendly note, someone that speaks with you instead of at you, or the least bit of CSR love, you a) are surprised and b) become a customer for life and c) you tell your friends.

Lets do  a quick test. Think of 5 companies that suck. And perhaps they suck because you have heard that they do, which in an of itself is not good. Why? Because maybe they don’t, though chances are they do, but the viral reputation dictates that they must suck because so many have said so. Ok so quick, think of 5.

Most of the ones that come to mind for me are airlines. How about you? If you talk to Joseph Jaffe, he’ll go off on Delta But I would guess that most of you, if you fly with an frequency, will volunteer an airline. Ironically, I’m thinking that because our expectations are so lowered when we fly now, that when we do have a good experience, we think of that as a WIN.

But here’s what happened. If you’re fed bread and water for so long, you expect it. When they add an apple, you consider it a treat. But the reality is that you SHOULD be getting a balanced meal, but your expectations have been lowered so much, an APPLE is considered a score by the customer. How pathetic is that?  What’s worse is that customer service representatives throw us bones and we snap them up and thank them up and down and then we tell everyone about the great customer service we just received. Again, I say to you, how pathetic is that? I mean look at Seth Godin, he’s amazed at this small act of customer service.

Becky Carroll, who has a blog called Customers Rock wrote a post called Social Media Empowering Customer Service: Guest Blogger Brian Solis in which Brian Solis and Becky blog about social media empowering customerservice. That’s my point, it makes perfect sense for social media to be an extension of what customer service does FOR the customer. As new media marketers and observers, it’s up to us to explain to large companies and even small ones, that, here is a way to find out more about your customers instead of the usual demographic info.

Social media does empower customer service, if it’s used for that. But how many get that? How many examples can you, me and everyone else out there, think of? I think what’s more of a viable statment is: “Social media will eventually empower customer service and social media should empower customer service”. 

Twebinar Mashup was a success

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Just got done with the twebinar hosted by Chris Brogan. It was an interesting way to push information out regarding social media. For those in the know, it gave them insight as to how some of the movers and shapers of social media, marketing and media think in regards to how social media is changing the game. It also was presented in a way that if someone who had “heard” what social media was, but was not entirely sure what IT was, could, perhaps in laymans terms utilize or understand it.

The mashup was interesting in that we had video, we had twitter, we had live webcam, we had twitter aggregators and we had live participants and we had half participants who were following the tweets and not perhaps the video. Even more interesting were the ways that participants were communicating. The primary means being Twitter, but in the Twebinar format, they were talking with individuals that were in the video, they were talking with the moderator, Chris Brogan and they were talking with each other.

Now picture that happening in any other type of moderator, speaker, panel, discussion presentation where everyone was, for the most part, talking at once. In this format it worked. It was staccato like in its essence, but it worked.

With a couple of tweaks here and there. I can definitely see this becoming some type of workable app for future conferences. Perhaps embedding the Twitter app in the screen of the presentation so that everyone could tweet and everyone could read everyone elses tweets without having to possibly toggle betwen Summize and the actual presentation? Either way it worked. Good job to David Alston of Radian6 as well. The good news? This is a 3 part series. What are you waiting for?

The funnel theory with social networks

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 Check out my man here. He’s heard a lot about social networks and he wants to check them out. He’s not sure why he should, he just knows that everyone is talking about them, they use them to meet people and they use to talk to friends and relatives and it is THE Thing to do! But where should he start. What social network is right for him? Should he do some research? If he does he’s going to find differing opinions from all over the place.  He’ll hear about the notion that Linkedin is not Facebook for grownups 

Or maybe he saw this video that parodies Facebook? And now he’s all WTF is Facebook about? 

 

 The bottom line is  that when you decide to Join the online social community, this is what happens:

You are a lone individual that is joining a community of individuals. At that point, it is now up to you to join the conversation. But joining the conversation does not mean that you are, in theory “part” of the conversation. You could move your way up the social media spiral but that would mean that you are doing a majority, or want to do a majority of the below stages of the spiral:

 But you don’t need to. You just want to know what it all means and where you fit in. You just want to know, what exactly is a social network? Let’s segue to our friends from Common Craft shall we?

Ok so now you have an idea but what should you do now? Maybe, just maybe you could jump into a social network, but do you even know which one? Here is a quick primer of two of the more popular social networking sites. Honestly though, if I’m explaining this, you have to be living in a freakin cave. But I digress..

If you’re going to use Facebook  then you need to know that it has more than 60 million active users, an average of 250,000 new registrations per day since Jan. 2007 and over 55,000 regional, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks. More than half of Facebook users are outside of college and the fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older. Is that too large for you?

If your cup of tea might be MySpace maybe you should know that it has more than 110 million monthly active users around the globe, however, 85% of MySpace users are of voting age (18 or older) One in four Americans is on MySpace. MySpace is translated in more than 20 international territories: U.S., UK, Japan, Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Canada, Netherlands, New Zealand, MySpace en Espanol, Latin America, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland.

But thats just 2 of the big ones that I’m sure you have heard about. Here is a nice breakdown of the top social sites provided by compete

In the end, you should check out each one and see if it fits the criteria you want in your selection of a social network. It will be up to you to decide which one fits you the best. Because in reality, this is how the social networking funnel should look:

 Ultimately, and you will see, if not already, that the best way to thrive in a social networking setting is to be amongst people that are of like mind and spirit. Thats why if you are in your mid 30’s and love reading books and are more concerned about what is in your 401k, maybe MySpace ain’t the ticket.  Eventually we will all have our own sense of where we should be within a social network, it’s merely up to you to find your way and craft, meld and shape your online indentity in the social network that makes sense to YOU.

LinkedIn has got it’s act together

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Yep, LinkedIn does have its act together…Except for today, since they have been down for over 2 hours. But having said that, I’m sure the 23 million plus members will let them slide. Especially since it has now been valued at over $1billion! Watch this video and listen carefully. You may understand the thinking that goes into investing in some of the hottest social media companies out there today.

With 23 million members in 150 countries, more than half overseas, LinkedIn has said it could generate as much as $100 million in revenue this year from premium subscriptions, blue-chip advertisers, job listings and corporate services. It’s all part of a massive shift, dubbed Enterprise 2.0, as corporate America increasingly turns to the Web for software and services.

LinkedIn boasts that it averages a new user every two seconds. Research firm Nielsen Online reports that LinkedIn is pulling in 146% more unique visitors year over year.

In May, it was the fourth-most-popular social network, with 7.7 million U.S. visitors. Its audience stats are the kind that impress advertisers as well: The average user is 41 years old and makes about $110,000 a year.

 

Twebinar: Where twitter meets webinar

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Next week, Thursday, the 26th, some of social media’s best and brightest come together to wax poetic about all things social in the form of a twebinar, which is essentially a webinar and Twitter mash-up. The conversations take place in real-time before, during and after the webinar, on Twitter.

To enter the Twebinar

 

  1. Make sure you have a twitter account, don’t worry it’s simple. Next, Sign-up for a webinar on a topic that interests you.
  2. On the day of the webinar, watch the presentation from your computer and receive information visually and verbally from the presenter(s).
  3. During the webinar, a parallel conversation takes place as participants comment, ask questions, and/or discuss the webinar series on Twitter. Follow the webinar participants on Twitter and join the conversation.
  4. Gather ideas and/or resources from a community of people with interests that are similar to yours.
  5. The result? Ta Da…. A twebinar!
  6. Learn some things about yourself, others, your industry, and perhaps how it all comes full circle in social media.

How social networks might make money, virtual goods.

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Will selling goods be the answer for social networks?

Brian Oneill says that If you take a look at social networks in Asia, they are all monetizing their sites primarily through social goods. For instance, 51.com, which recently raised a $50 million round, earns 70 percent of their revenue through virtual goods.

I’ve written in the past about monetizing social nets and the challenges that the smaller players will face. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that if your revenue models are tied into advertisers, you may be looking at a light at the end of the tunnel attached to a train. So we talked about this over a year ago, and it’s been written about a lot back then, and still. So what has changed? Nothing.

Social Nets have to sell something other than subscriptions and ad space.  So what is it? Virtual Goods,

Susan Wu, a principal at Charles River Ventures says that people spend real money on virtual objects for  four major reasons:

Virtual objects aren’t really objects – they’re services

Virtual objects create real value for people

The cost of buying objects can be cheaper than “earning” them and lastly, and the most important,

You can make money off of virtual objects.

I would suggest all  those who are “thinking” of  jumping into the social media tech start up game to read the full article by Susan, though it came out roughly a year ago to the day, it is now more relevant than ever before. 

 

17 social media influencers and thought shapers

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 Butch Cassidy: “I couldn’t do that. Could you do that? Why can they do it? Who are those guys?”

I promised that I would follow up the top 30 social media experts post I did with a few more people who’s work I admire, who’s thinking is forward, and who’s ideas of what culture and technology should be, are wide open.  You have no idea how many bookmarks and sites I have saved that I try to read and digest and actually think about. No wonder my eyes are always bleeding on the way home from work? Easy..I’m kidding..

It’s these types of people that will provide the basis of how we will view our interactions in a technological environment as we go forward. If you are unfamiliar with some of these people, that’s ok. Pretty soon you won’t be. Of these 17, feel free to offer up your peers for review. We currently have a listing of 51 social media experts, luminaries and standouts! I’d love to add more and I know they’re out there. Beware though, if you email or tweet that you’re an expert, then you’re not.

Todd Defren

Neil Patel

Lee Odden

Richard Binhammer

John Cass

Maggie Fox

David Alston

Chris Heuer

Sam Lawrence

Mike Manuel

Steve Lubetkin

Dave Parmet

Pete Blackshaw

Kris Smith

Kami Watson Huyse

Joseph Thornley

Clay Shirkey

Stowe Boyd

I would suggest setting aside some time to really go through the list, as there is quite a bit to digest here, but it’s all good and so so very relevant today!

What did we do before the conversations started?

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You know, I have never had some many great meaningful discussions on so many relevant topics in all the years I have been in tech. I attribute alot of this to the buzzword of the latter part of this decade and that is the conversation. The emergence of the conversation between people wanting to work together, the collaboration of people working towards a collective goal. The customer finding his voice and the company finally listening with humility.

Mental Note: Be sure to write a piece about listening with humility. Who does that?

 Which led me to think. What the hell did we do before? What did people do with all of this great input, insight, knowledge and wisdom before, but with no real vehicles to share it. Did they write books about conversations? Not really,  Although, I know of one book where the conversations are rich and plentiful and thats the age of conversation edited by Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan.

Tell me this isn’t a great time to be talking and sharing? I know these are hard times in some respects, but from a technology, innovation, and entrepreneuial standpoint, there has never been a more optimal time make a difference and actually do a lot with what we have right now! Here’s someone that all of you should follow. Ironically his blog is called How to change the world, once you get there if you have not heard of him, it won’t take you long to appreciate what he does with his time.

Another person that really enagages in some great discussions about, well conversations is Chris Brogan, your day should consist of stopping by Chris’s blog to see what he is thinking. In fact he has a post that I’m sure we all could relate to called, Be Sexier in Person. Not that Chris is blogging about sexy he is in person, just read the post.

 

 

 

 

 

You know who else I like, who else engages in light but interesting and thought provoking conversations? Mack Collier. he lays it out there in a way thats easy to digest. In actuality there are A LOT of conversations going on out there that I would like to take part in, but my god, would I ever get anything done?

 

I think whats important to keep in mind is that we all love to talk, or we wouldn’t be blogging but you tell me what do you want to get out of your next conversation? Are you into what you can contribute or what you can take away from it? What is your favorite blog and why?

Suffice it to say, I’m glad we’re in the age of the conversation and excited about where we are headed, wherever that may be.

Last thing. While I was writing this I had Pandora on in the backround and heard the most riveting acoustic version of “One”. The song originally sung by U2 was being sang by Warren Haynes at Bonnaroo, Check it out and tell me what you think.