Today’s wakeup call was provided by Brian Solis with his new blog post “The 5 Pillars of New Media Strategy.” Brian argues convincingly that we all should stop looking for a magic formula or success recipe to guide us in our social media travails by simply arguing that it all depends on who we are serving or building a meaningful relationship with. While I myself occasionally fall prey to the temptation to offer list type “secrets” such as in “3 Keys To Social Success,” I do agree that too much of the focus is placed on the social media delivery side. As a consequence, the tendency is to be less concerned about how our social media efforts will be received by customers. [Read more…]
Stick Shift Social Media
It is increasingly rare these days to encounter a car with a manual transmission and many young drivers barely know what it is, let alone are able to drive them. Some of the advantages of driving with a stick shift, such as the increased attentiveness and the sense of being one with the car, and are forgotten or ignored as the convenience factor of automatic transmissions wins more and more people over. There are those who still resist, though, those who swear by the superiority of manual stick shifting.
One twist to this dilemma was introduced last week when I met a parent here in Orange County who said that their kid’s first car will get a manual transmission. Why? Well, then they would at least know that their kid would be so overwhelmed by getting the gear into the right gear, which means that they wouldn’t be sending text messages! [Read more…]
Trust is Queen
“Content is King” is an oft-uttered “secret” to success in social media and while I don’t think content will become unimportant any time soon, it is also becoming increasingly clear that just offering content, even good quality content, will not be enough any longer if it ever was.
“Context is King” is an alternative statement which has grown in popularity. The focus on context reflects the need for not just the right content to be provided but that it also needs to be made available to the right people, on the right platform, in the right conversation, at the right time, with the right tone, in the right quantity, etc. Sounds like logistics, right? [Read more…]
Your Personal Branding Objectives
When setting out to build or refine your own personal reputation and personal brand, your online presence can simply no longer be ignored. “Nobody is going to look or find that information on me online.” No? Are you kidding me? If you today would be about to hire somebody yourself, wouldn’t you Google that individual’s name at least once? And then dig deeper if something catches your attention? I bet you would.
Still, your online first impression, however important that may be, is only the first gate you need to pass to go places. What is critical next is to have an entrepreneurial mindset about yourself and your whole career. In the book, The Start-up of You, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha argues for a radical move away from the notion that you will be a lifer at a major corporation being promoted every few years. Instead, we are entering a more foreign and uncertain territory in which we have to adapt and reinvent ourselves and our personal brands continuously to stay with the times and to take advantage of the best opportunities for our skills. [Read more…]
Content on Demand
Tonight, we discussed the Harvard case study on Demand Media (of eHow.com fame) in my Social Media Marketing MBA class. It is a fascinating story about how content can be systematically produced on a vast scale and result in almost guaranteed demand from viewers and consequently also in profits for the advertisers.
The controversy regarding so-called “content farms” revolves around the opportunistic creation of content to meet current demands but doing so in a way that compromises content quality some claim. For example, Jeff Jarvis called Demand Media on this as he stated that they “create crap just good enough to fool the algorithm.” Google’s search algorithm, that is. Clearly, Jeff Jarvis has a point in that somewhere, a line in the sand has to be drawn, and it is also clear that Demand Media is not striving toward writing dissertations on the topics they address.
The idea to develop and publish content that is likely to be searched has now been gaining traction for a number of years with bestselling books such as “Inbound Marketing” by the cofounders of HubSpot. What strikes me with this case, though, is the level of sophistication that seems to lie behind the proprietary algorithm used by companies such as Demand Media as they try to expedite the statistical analysis of search trends, paid ads, and statistics from social networks to get the order for the right content out there as soon as possible. See how Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt defends his model:
Then, of course, someone has to produce the said content and the identification and recruitment of a vast stable of relevant content creators clearly represent another necessary strength needed in this space. It becomes clear that for one’s own postings to be noticed for popular keywords, one has to be both fast and clever in terms of how posts are tagged and outlined 🙂
How Oreo Cookie ate from the Super Bowl
If any business still wonders whether they should be on Twitter, they should take note of the likely future Harvard Business School case study “How Oreo Cookie ate from the Super Bowl.” The key learning points:
Pay for the Ticket of Admission
You have to pay to play goes the saying and in this case, the ticket price is significant, $3,8 million for a 30 second commercial. Even if companies not placing Super Bowl ads also could get into the social media conversation during the game, it is more likely that you will be top of mind and followed by the socialverse if you have at least one entry in the ad mix. Oreo’s entry was quite an engaging at that at least according to me and my 9-year-old daughter watching it. You judge for yourself:
http://youtu.be/6kMWLYYcAYw
Prepare the Decision Makers
It has now been quite established that companies need to prepare the IT infrastructure for spikes in traffic during the Super Bowl. Also, if you sell online, you may need customer service and order representatives on standby to ensure that everything runs smoothly. In this case, the preparedness was manifested in how the agency 360i set up a mission control room where they monitored the game. Key was also to include Oreo executives of sufficient seniority so that the team could get necessary approvals on the spot.
Expect the Unexpected
Finally, the mission of the team seems to have been to be on the lookout for noteworthy things during the broadcast and then quickly come up with engaging content related to it. Why is this effective? Well, as David Meerman Scott calls it in “Newsjacking,” you act fast to get included as part of a bigger story or the second paragraphs of newspapers covering the bigger story. Also, this blog post is just one of many others writing about this right now. So, what did this Oreo team come up with? Well, when the power went out during the game, Oreo went to work and after 15 minutes, the posted the following tweet.
Power out? No problem. twitter.com/Oreo/status/29…
— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013
Chapman Social Media Aid
Next week, students in my social media marketing classes will pick companies and organizations to work with in their semester-long team projects. Some of them already have ideas of who they would like to help but most teams still need to find access to a company or an organization. I am receiving many emails from businesses asking for student help but my inbox is getting messy.
Therefore, I developed a brief survey that I ask you to fill out if you wish to be considered. Your willingness to facilitate a student project is much appreciated and please note that non-profit organizations are also encouraged to participate as we wish to reach out more to the broader community.
For best chances to be considered, please complete the survey ASAP, ideally before Monday classes begin at 1 pm, 2.30 pm, and 7 pm (February 4) but most likely there will still be teams in need of a company also on Wednesday February 6 (classes at 1 pm).
Disclaimer: There are no guarantees that your project will be chosen by any student team but please consider throwing your name in the hat if you are willing to open up and allow for students to gain some valuable real-world experience. Please note that these project teams are not to be mistaken for paid consultants. In the past, some businesses have been very grateful for the valuable help they have gotten and some organizations have indeed achieved higher levels of social media presence, organization, and understanding. In other cases, businesses had expected more from the students. That is just the name of the game and neither I personally nor Chapman University is responsible for the actions or recommendations by the students.
Voice of the B2B Customers’ Customers
In the early 1990’s, companies started to listen more systematically to the “voice of the customer” (VOC)* after the quality movement made it clear that companies had room for improvement in this regard. Companies could more precisely identify how to provide the most value by dissecting the customers’ voice so that they could hierarchically structure and prioritize their needs. Many companies learned from this exercise and customers benefited.
However, VOC also missed the boat in one major way. The voice of the customer approach assumes that the customer is talking to you. But what if the customer is either unwilling or unable to articulate anything? This is the “silence of the customer” which could be equally if not more important than what customers actually say such as when “96% of customers who are unhappy don’t complain.”
Thinking about it, in a B2B context this could also mean that social media listening efforts could be misdirected if listening is limited only to direct customers. Instead of trying to listen to direct customers when they may not have anything to say, companies could be better off holding their ears close to the ground where the customers of the customers interact instead. Why? Well, imagine if we could hear customers’ customers concerns. Wouldn’t that put us in a better position to also predict what our customers’ needs are, articulated or not?
* Abbie Griffin & John R. Hauser (1993), “The Voice of the Customer,” Marketing Science, Vol. 12, No. 1, Winter 1993.
Good Domain Parenting
When speaking about social media, I often draw laughter when I say that I find it incredible that there are still parents out there who name their babies without first checking if the matching domain name is available. What they don’t know is that I am only half-joking when I make that statement. Perhaps “incredible” is an exaggeration but I do maintain that you could do your child a great favor if you think ahead in this regard. I registered our two kids’ domains when they were about 5-6 years old and was lucky myself to find them still being available. Yes, it is possible that .com as a top level domain will be more or less irrelevant when the time comes for them to “brand” themselves online as technology changes. Still, the expense of about $10 a year pales in comparison to all other investments parents make in their kids future and the rewards could be significant.
Case in point. In today’s class when I said the above, one of my students came up and said that that was exactly what his dad did when he was born! His name “Zachary Campbell” is a common one as well but thanks to his dad’s foresightedness, he now outranks others with the same name, even some semicelebrities. Check out his site, hire him!
B2B Social Media in Silicon Valley
Took the Southwest shuttle from Orange County to San Jose in Silicon Valley today and met with some marketing executives at a major B2B company. It was educational for me to hear first-hand accounts from marketers about their struggles selling social media initiatives to non-marketing executives. Without strong companywide support, the social media efforts undertaken, however well-intentioned, may not even get a fair shot at being successful as they tend to be understaffed and underfunded. Even the projects that do get some traction on social media can suffer from not get the recognition they deserve due to a general lack of appreciation of the power of social media. Continuing to provide some good examples could perhaps convince them over time. However, it would clearly be ideal should they have the very senior management’s blessing. A great way of demonstrating such support would be if the CEO would jump on board and started tweeting or blogging, wouldn’t it?