Self discovery in social media-10 questions to ask yourself.

Posted on January 13, 2009 by marc meyer

Hey you, yea you. before you go and read or write another post that is about another post that is about another post, that chances are, was about another post, lets ask ourselves some questions. Better yet, before you go and tell someone what you “do”, and before you fold the term “social media” in to that, at least ask and answer these questions.

Are you willing to admit that social media is no longer the darling new kid on the block? It’s not new, you are.
Are you tired of being the “me too” person/ or are you tired of that person? or do you even know that you are? How could you be different? What makes you, you?-Bring THAT to the table please.
What does a social media junkie mean exactly? That you spend an incessant amount of time online? We need something better than someone who likens themselves to a junkie.
Why do you follow the people that you follow on Twitter? To learn, to emulate, to share, to echo, to stalk, to sell to? Is there a rhyme or reason/ or are you just glad to be playing in the sandbox? Contribute.
What are you hoping to get out of social media? To learn, to emulate, to share, to echo, to stalk? Is it a business reason, family, personal? How are you using the tools that define social media to define you?
What original thought if any, are you bringing to the table? What is your opinion? I know what theirs is, so I don’t need to hear it from you.
If you truly believe social media is about Facebook and Twitter, then be sure to fix your bio that says that you are a social media expert, enthusiast, consultant or other..
What do you think social media is? Right now…today. In your own words.
What are you telling people? If they asked you, what would you say?
If you could change one thing about it, what would it be?

Ask these questions, if not for yourself, then at least for the others out there that are struggling with trying to keep the client focused on what is possible and what is real and what is “doable” with social media. SMB’s hear the buzz but they also need to hear the skinny.

Social Media could be the savior for SMB’s

Posted on January 6, 2009 by marc meyer

6 days into 2009 and I’m sure we all have our goals set or we’re busy finalizing what we are going to do. I make these lists and I write down thoughts at a furious pace and still, in the back of my mind, I’m constantly wondering what everyone is collectively thinking right now. By everyone, I’m really referring to small and medium sized business owners. The economy sucks and business is wayy down..

They have to be wondering where the business is going to come from or how they are going to get business utilizing their existing forms of advertising, sales, and marketing. The problem is, how effective do those continue to be? Were they ever? Do they know they are not working? Do they utilize metrics or do they fly by the seat of their pants to measure their effectiveness? Do they understand that there is more for less out there right now? Or is it less for less? Their heads have to be swimming. I know mine is.

Initially I would have said No, SMB’s are not aware of their advertising, sales and marketing effectiveness, but in that sense I was referring to “as it pertains to social media”, as in how effective could all these initiatves be if they were using social media, and that is completely true. SMB’s do not know much about how social media might be able to turn the tide.The power. The effectiveness. The impact.

But they do know plenty about what is and what isn’t working in regards to their sales and marketing initiatives. I love what Christian Maurer says about this:

In today’s business climate, sales organizations think that they have to increase their activities to counteract the increased reluctance of customers to buy. These increased activities will however not necessarily be rewarded by higher revenue.One might end up trying to get more juice from an already squeezed out lemon

So enter Social Media. The darling of the last few years. We go from product centric to customer centric. But how do you articulate that social media could be just what the doctor ordered? Well I could wax eloquent on that question for awhile but I’d like to refer you to Kyle Lacy’s 4 part series on social media marketing for the small business as a primer. It’s a wonderful piece and more so, it exposed me to a great blog for small business called The Marketing Spot. I highly recommend you add it to your list in 2009.

Ok so back to you Mr. and Mrs. SMB how do you go about learning whether Social Media is the cure for what is ailing your business? And how do you do it quickly because you don’t have time to ramp something like this up. WHAT DO YOU DO FIRST?

-You could try and learn about “It” on your own but you need to know what “it” is. This might help.

-But then after you figure out what it is, you then need to know who you can trust or what to look for in a social media consultant, because you don’t have time to be doing this, right?

-Once you figured out what to look for, then you need to decide “who to look for”

-So now that you have “that” person or agency selected, now you have to have a strategy and they have to share that with you, so that you know exactly what they are trying to do for you and your business.

–A blueprint of how that person works is a good thing to have, it lets you know exactly how they work and it is a key component that we talk about all the time and that’s transparency in social media. Amber Naslund does a great job of discussing her “blueprint” in this post.

-Now that we have the strategy and the blueprint, it’s time to implement. Don’t worry though, your accomplished social media strategist knows just what to do.

OK, so you know what it is, you know what to look for, you know who they are, you know what they’ll do and you know how they’ll do it. But the last thing we have to do is we still have to measure what they’ve done.

-We talk all the time about how to measure social media but here’s a simple framework for measuring it’s effectiveness.

With that in mind, I end with this; As long as you know upfront what you are trying to accomplish and you adhere somewhat to these steps above, you may just have figured out how to incorporate social media into your SMB marketing plan! But don’t stop there and don’t rely solely on your social media expert/strategist. Take the time to learn as much as you can as you go, so that you can understand the sea change that is happening within the worlds of PR, marketing, advertising and communication.

–

Social Media – The Melting Pot

Posted on December 27, 2008 by marc meyer

My friend Jason Breed who is the senior director of business development at Neighborhood America, which probably has one of the best developed social networking platforms in the industry, sent me a great post about the melting pot that is social media. Jason has a wonderful perspective and insight into what “large” companies perceive and what they want and ultimately what they need. Herein are is thoughts.

It’s very intriguing to me in my travels to listen to people discuss the term “social media”. People of all types and experience levels in the corporate space relate it, mostly as a negative connotation, to existing social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, etc or they relate it, still with negative connotation, to consumer marketing flops dating back to the GM “tell me what you think about Suburbans” snafu to more recently the Motrin Moms incident.

Other areas where social media gets used a lot is with web 2.0 initiatives. First, anyone still referring to versions of the internet have their own issues, next, the majority of the population still does not understand exactly what a blog, forum or certainly a wiki is or does. Why should they? They are a series of features and tools not solutions. When is the last time you woke up and said to your loved one, “can’t wait to forum today!”? While the tool sets have some social elements to them, there are many corporate blogs still run by the marketing department that are far from social. In fact, many still use them to self publish push messaging while fully moderating comments and publishing selected content. Something about lipstick and pigs come to mind here.

So what is social media, well it does include much of what is mentioned above however it also includes a whole world of opportunities that takes a bit more creativity to understand the possibilities.

To me, social media is simply a term of interaction. It has become a container term for a lot of things however it all comes down to enabling interactions. The ability to develop a cycle of communications between two or more parties either through online or mobile. Understanding this as a framework, you can apply this interaction to employee communications, consumer transactions, partners, CRM, BPM, shareholders, etc or any mix therein. In fact any department from construction to office management to sales, development, customer support, logistics management, public relations, human resources, and any other department you can think of can use the construct of developing better interactions (ie. Social media) to begin to solve traditional business issues.

When you get beyond simple marketing and word-of-mouth campaigns, it becomes much easier to understand how applying social elements to traditional processes can save time, costs or even increase revenues. Consider the traditional sales cycle that is manually touched 4-5 times before it gets into a sales funnel or CRM package. Using social elements, even a small sales team could manage a lot more information from customers with better purchasing metrics if you had a creative way to allow customers to automatically feed the CRM system on the front end through a professional (social) interaction.

For those who understand the construct that the social environment has allowed us to create though improved interactions beyond the obvious consumer marketing tactics, 2009 will truly be a very constructive and profitable year for businesses of all shapes and sizes

Being human is what will change the playing field in 2009

Posted on December 26, 2008 by marc meyer

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what might be the defining “thing” that could change the tide for companies that are ready to embark on their own social media journey. Well, this morning as I was reading greg verdino’s blog, he has a section in there that points to the topics he speaks about, and one of the topics is called “are you ready?” he essentially is saying the following and I quote:

You can — but only if you’re ready to move beyond the old ways you’ve always done things, ready to rethink the fundamentals of how business happens, ready to embrace change and ready to take action.”

Great topic to talk about, but as I was thinking about it more, I’d like to add 3 more words to it, and it’s this.

“Are you ready to be human“?

Are you ready to leave your unending, take no prisoners drive, your ego, and your self serving ideals at the door and act like a human who can speak normally and speak one on one with your customers, with your employees and with your prospects? Sometimes we feel like we have to do this dance and we have to “act” like something that is completely alien to us. So let me ask you, when you want to make friends with someone, do you act the same way you do when trying to get a new client or new deal or contract? No..You act like a human, you act like yourself. Remember transparency? We talk about it for a reason.

Be Human. it works.

Good or Bad..7 things about me.

Posted on December 11, 2008 by marc meyer

I have been tagged by my friend Beth Harte to share seven things about me that you might not know (or want to know). I would say this though, as much as we all are about transparency, choosing 7 things can be tough without challenging The Communications Decency Act. But here goes.

1. In college I majored in Political Science and I hate politics. I just don’t have the passion for it like others, but there was nothing else that interested me or perhaps I didn’t try hard enough to find the right fit. Though I did minor in French…Why?

2. Because I was born and raised in New Orleans, and spoke french throughout my childhood; as it was taught in school and I had lots of cajun friends. My Family moved completely away a year before Katrina, but it still took a heavy toll on me personally. I lived nearby the fairgrounds which is home of the Jazz Fest which I would highly suggest attending if not for the food, then for the music of course. i could hear the music from my front porch.

The house in N.O. 5 minutes from the Jazzfest

3. Speaking of music, I have a tremendous passion for it. Perhaps because of my heritage and the fact that though I couldnt get into the bars on Bourbon St. until I was 16, I still would catch a bus and go down and listen to the music emenating from the bars for hours on end. With that being said, I have about 600 cassettes, 800 CD’s and roughly 2,000 songs on my ipod. It was this love for music that prompted me to…

4. Sell concert t-shirts for almost 5 years. After I graduated from college, I realized that my degree was pretty worthless, so I decided to go to Graduate school for a masters in sport management. While in school I met a guy that sold concert shirts, not just any kind, they were bootlegs. That’s right, the guys outside the arenas and stadiums, hustling. It was the perfect college job. I just didn’t know it would suck me in for 5 years. There is a book forthcoming of what I saw and experienced. BTW, I have gone to over 500 shows from Hawaii to NYC. But once I got done with my degree, was pretty much fried from all the travelling and realized that the business of sports paid nothing if you wern’t a “playa”, the internet had arrived. Thank god.

5. So I decided to create 2 websites, one devoted to concert t-shirts and the other devoted to music reviews. I learned as much as I could and built them from scratch. One tanked and one thrived. The review site thrived and I started receiving demos and samples and tons of music from the major labels and the indies. I just couldn’t keep up. Though I loved doing it. A shell of it’s former self is still up, but it is so neglected and I still don’t have time to manage it which is a pity. The original business plan was so before its time too…oh well. But that initial experience led to more tech related jobs, so I thank music for getting me started.

6. In between tech jobs I also was the Dir. of Mktg for a now defunct alt. music radio station in Pittsburgh, PA. The gig lasted less than a year. Why? As stations are wont to do, they changed formats from alt. rock to smoooth jazz. Oh and they did it while I was on my honeymoon in Greece. I came back and my stuff was in a box with 2 weeks severance and the smooth sounds of Kenny G wafting through the hallways. Sweet. Oh did I mention I moved to Pittsburgh right after college? Guess not. Try melding a New Orleans/Pittsburghese life into some sort of twisted “Yat-Yinzer” accent. But I love Pittsburgh, which many might not know, but hey that’s what the point of this is right?

Lastly, 7) I have 2 kids who rock, a wife who I married because when I asked her what her favorite music was, she answered that it was the blues, when I pressed her to elaborate, she said, “Stevie Ray”. At that point, she had me. When we met, I had insanely long hair and I owned a motorcycle. I also have roughly 11 strategically placed tattoos as well, but you would never know. One of the tats is an image from an Alexander Calder painting I own that I bought with my college student loan money that was supposed to go towards a class…By the way my 8 year old son just asked me how to play the blues…:)

Now that that’s out of the way I’m going to tag the following people:

Here are the rules:

Link your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged

15 questions the small business owner will ask about social media

Posted on December 10, 2008 by marc meyer

I was reading Peter Kim’s wiki of social media marketing examples which I highly recommend, and thought that I’d follow that up with the following short post about the types of questions and comments you might be getting from business owners about social media. This differs somewhat from say Chris Brogan’s post about selling it internally to your boss-but the questions and comments might be very similar.

Are you having conversations like this? I’ve had these type of questions thrown at me over the course of the last few weeks and months. If you are not getting these type of questions, then maybe you should get out there more. But the flip side is this: You better be prepared to answer them.

How much is it gonna cost?
But first tell me what exactly it is?
Is it like Facebook or Myspace? Because that’s all I really know.
Twitter? I’ve heard about it, but I’m not really sure what that is.
A blog? I don’t see what I blog is going to do for my business, besides, I don’t have time nor the desire to write one.
So you’re going to “show me” how social media is going to drive business? Ok…(proceeds to wait)
Who else is using it?
Are there any companies like mine that are using it?
So can you guarantee this?
Who’s going to do this? You? or us?
How long is this going to take?
I still don’t understand but I’ll take your word for it.
Can you get our website ranked higher in Google?
Will I make money?
Will I save money?

Interestingly enough, even the ones that do “get it” will still ask a lot of these questions. You see, the issue is that social media and all it’s moving parts really involves putting a value on the engagement and then equating it to dollars earned or dollars saved. That’s what the business owner wants to see. We need to start putting what social media is and does into more equitable simplified terms that the public and small to medium sized business owners can understand, that they can wrap their arms around. And if you are truly challenged, and you are “that person” that works for the small to medium sized business, then maybe you might want to check out this post by Mark Story, it may help. I know I get it, and maybe you do too, but can you articulate it?