I’ve been thinking pretty hard lately about the choices we make. What drives the conversations that we have with the people that we come in contact with everyday on the various social media platforms? What are the forces behind the decisions that we make for ourselves and on behalf of our clients? Those thoughts are broken down into a simple graphic.
This weeks selection of social sites cover the gamut from social media monitoring to a few juicy blog posts on community, strategy and real time search, to a couple of new social networks. Have any I should add? Lemme know!
1) Check out Zoho, It appears that Zoho offers everything from a business solutions standpoint to a new set of tires. (Just kidding on the tires)
2) 46 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools Free is good
3) Free is really good. 7 Essential multimedia tools and their free alternatives
4) From the SEOMoz Blog –How To Monitor & Track Google’s Real-time Search-Pay attention to this, it’s going to loom large.
5) Daily Mugshot is fun. Change the wrapper on your personal brand every day!
6) What is thankfulfor? It’s your personal gratitude journal. It’s also a collective gratitude journal, for all of us. Very cool and simple.
7) A strategic plan has a better chance of being successful when it’s easy to understand, easy to find, and easy to share. With that being said check out this post by Ben McConnell
8. Shiv Singh talks about Ken Burbary’s Social Analytics Lifecycle. I agree with Shiv on this, I like where it’s going and it is certainly a work in progress, but I would add consumer and influencer insights as an input as well too.
9) Check Daniel Eden’s Vinyl Art work out. This could definitely be a present for someone you know.
10) Share your experiences through Gowalla. I haven’t played with this to any degree yet, but I do like the UI.
If you did not notice Tiger Woods has been in the news a lot lately. How much? Lets take a look at some visual representations utilizing some of the exact tools that you would use to monitor your brand. Then I’m going to ask you a very simple question at the end of this post.
First we’re going to use the Trend search from Blog Pulse to create a graph that plots “buzz” about Tiger Woods in the blogosphere. We’re going to look at a 6 month window.
How about some search analytics from Compete? Notice an uptick?
Icerocket also tracks blog mentions and real time search trends, look at it’s graph and check out the numbers below the graph.
One of the most impressive and visually appealing of the tools that I used was from Trendrr which allowed us to track qualitative, quantitative, real-time, sentiment, and competitive trends. For the purpose of this post, we looked at Google results, tweets from Twitter and blog posts on Google..
Driving the point home, we now look at Google Trends.
So your team Tiger or your the brand manager for your company and you see these kinds of results. What are you going to do to repair this? What is your first step? How would a large organization manage its reputation after taking a hit like this? What does Tiger do now? What will repair a reputation damaged to this degree? What does Nike do?
How do we move the needle back to conversations? Beth Harte and I were talking about how there seems to be a dearth of conversations on Twitter these days. A year ago we were complaining about the growing cacophony of echo in the Twitter sphere. Now it appears that everyone doesn’t have time to talk, so they just shoot a title and a link out with or without attributes.
My advice would be to take the time to talk with the people that took the time to talk with you. take the time to say something instead of just pushing another link out. Value just doesn’t lie in the quality of the information that you share, but also in the quality of what you have to say.
However the irony is not lost on me on the way that I choose to promote this post. I will go to Twitter and tweet the title and the link. How do you “fix” that?
As I was reading through The Big Money Facebook 50: Companies making social media work.article yesterday, I saw that Coca-Cola was the number one brand on the list. I wanted to see why so I decided to check it out. When I got to their page I was greeted with this.
Which prompted me to ask or question on Twitter the following:
The answers came fast and furious. Surprisingly or not, they were mixed and I can see why. As social media marketers and brand execs struggle with the best way to have conversations wrapped around their brand, they always run the risk of reverting back to a push style method of marketing. And that’s the rub.
What if consumers prefer that method? Or just don’t care? They just want whatever the brand is willing to give them for free, and they don’t care. So with that being said, giving up all of my contact information, profile information and my friends information for what might be behind the welcome screen doesn’t matter. Apparently not. Or the promise of what might be behind the curtain is compelling enough for me. Given Coke’s status as the number one brand on Facebook according to this list, I think we know the answer.
So what’s my point? Yes the conversations are important but sometimes customers don’t want to talk with brands, they just want what the brands are willing to give them provided the customer is willing to give up its privacy. Do you really think that Coca-Cola is that sexy of a brand to be worshiped all the way into the #1 spot on Facebook? No. It’s the allure of what might be.
I’m struck by what Geoff Livingston titled his book from 2007. “Now is Gone”. It almost seems prescient. Content is content just for a day and almost seems irrelevant if it is from last week. Social sites are only as good as the purpose they serve right now. Fame is fleeting, personal brands last only as long as your last Google update and social networks continue to evolve.
What does this mean? When a social site no longer serves the needs of the people that participate, those people move on. Though there might not be a thing wrong with it. The site has become obsolete.
I often times find it interesting that some social media consultants suggest that one way a company of any size can insert themselves into the social stream quickly is to start a blog. Well, yes that’s true but…
Starting a blog, having a blog, nurturing that blog and actually making money at it are all very distinct things.
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What happens when you marginalize your social media relationships? You discount the impact that it will have on you and your personal brand. You dismiss its outcome. Your needs become the priority, though it has been categorized as a relationship. The loose definition of marginalize is to relegate or confine to a lower or outer limit or edge, as of social standing. In other words, you push it to the edge. Whether it’s a social media relationship, engagement or a commitment.You push it away, because its importance is not readily evident to you.
A loose definition of relationship is, a particular type of connection existing between people related to or having dealings with each other. Dealings with each other.
Here’s the kicker…
The problem with marginalizing relationships or business connections in the age of social media, is that it can come back to bite you in the ass. Some might claim that marginalizing things for them is merely their way of assigning priorities to things. But because of the broad association of people within the social media bubble and for that matter, outside the bubble, connections are magnified. Six degrees of separation is really about two or three. Every connection counts. The context of what is said, what is written, and what is implied, matters. Always. Everywhere.
Morgan Brown recently wrote about a connection that he had with Chris Brogan and how he came away so impressed with the way Chris conducted himself and handled a very brief meeting of sorts. Why am I struck by this? Because it speaks volumes about relationships on the edge. It magnifies the importance of connections that were made prior to the physical meeting. They might not have seemed evident before, and the meaning not readily apparent months ago, yet they now have come full circle for Morgan and Chris. No burned bridges, bad experiences, bad tastes, nothing.
What am I trying to say? In social media, sometimes I wonder how often we get or give second chances at first impressions. Yet, I do know that any social media relationship or any engagement should never be marginalized or discounted because YOU don’t think it’s important enough.
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I’ve come across in recent days a number of people and their blogs who have struck a chord with me in a good way. I have found them in oh so many ways, but the bottom line is that I have found them. Which gave me cause to think.
I look at what makes us do what we do in online communities, in social networks and as much as I would like to thank the developers for creating a platform in which we can connect, I also realize that.
“No man is an island.”
-from John Donne
It’s the power and the passion of the people that make it work. It’s people being people. I also realize that because of the power of networks and the strength of the people that are within them, quotes like the one below, mean nothing.
You know where you are?
You’re in the jungle baby.
You’re gonna die!-Guns n Roses,”Welcome to the jungle”
However, I do think it’s important to understand that though these networks can be robust and filled with people, if you don’t engage or try and in engage in thoughtful and meaningful discussions and conversations, you have nothing. Thus, you might as well be speaking to no one.
“In space no one can hear you scream.”
-Tagline from 1979 movie Alien
Without people and without connections, they, the networks, will die on the vine. And as much as we depend on the platform for our connections, its more important to nurture the connection rather than the platform. Because what if the platform goes away tomorrow? What will you do, or what will you have to show for it?
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
-George Berkeley, Irish philosopher
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