Get The Preliminaries Out Of The Way

I’m obviously a huge advocate of social technologies. But nothing can ever replace the value of a one on one, in the flesh business or personal meeting. That chance to shake hands or the power of a hug when reconnecting with a long missed friend. Not even good video conferencing can do that. In business, sometimes you just have to look them in the eye.

But what business social technologies do very well is get the preliminaries out of the way. The questions I ask as a CEO when a sales person comes calling are “Who are you? What’s your experience? What makes you who you are?” I’m sure you too ask similar questions in such situations.

The value of tools such as LinkedIn, Plaxo or FastPitch in business are that they provide “evidence” of your business and those who have used your company’s services and your personal reputation. Be honest here; if you’re looking at the LinkedIn profiles of two sales reps you’ve met and one has absolutely no recommendations from former co-workers, clients or supervisors and the other one does…well?

This is our personal “social capital” or perhaps “personality capital” that we build as we progress through our careers. Already recruiters and executive searchers are using LinkedIn and similar tools extensively to research and identify key candidates. We have reached the point where it looks odd if you aren’t engaged in some social media channel to some degree.

So it’s unlikely you’ll “close the deal” via LinkedIn or a blog, but you stand a better chance of speeding up the process a whole lot and getting closer to the deal win. And speeding up a sales process or business development initiative is worth money.

What about you? What do you think?

(Author: G. Crouch)

The Evangelical Right & Aid Relief in Fragile Nations

Over the past few months we’ve undertaken, on our own, a project to map the use of social media by the evangelical right. Part of our research has been how Christian/evangelical non-profit aid groups are engaging in aid delivery in fragile nations and post-crisis states (e.g. Haiti post-earthquake.)

Social Media & Business Use in Atlantic Canada Update

Citizen or “netizen” use of social media technologies in Atlantic Canada is fairly high at around 78% of the online population. So what about business use? We monitor such activity on an ongoing basis in Atlantic Canada, UK and Northeastern US. So here’s a quick update on usage in Atlantic Canada this year.

Trend: While we’ve seen a 32% increase in businesses using social media in Atlantic Canada this year over 2009, what we’ve really noticed is “individual use”, that is, professionals, use social media more than a “business entity.” We define a business entity as a company that has a presence in a social media channel.

Professional Usage: Professionals use of social media tools is up 48% over 2009. The most popular business social media tool in Atlantic Canada is LinkedIn followed by Plaxo. eCademy and FastPitch are distant third and fourth respectively. We also note that “knowledge workers” or “white collar” professions are more active than “blue collar” or “skilled trades”. Knowledge workers dominate this space for business use. The top professions using business social networking tools are; 1) marketing, 2) public relations, 3) insurance/finance, 4) real-estate and 5) technology.

Business Usage: Businesses are increasing their usage of social media tools, mostly for marketing messages. The most popular channels for businesses in Atlantic Canada are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and blogging. The most popular blogging platform is WordPress followed by blogger.

We do note that although blogging is up 21% over 2009, businesses will average 1 blog post per month only. In 67% of the instances where we looked at a business blog, the blog design did not match their website design or corporate branding. This can lead to prospective mistrust amongst potential customers and purchase dissonance.

Conclusion: We forecast growth in use of social media by businesses this year and are seeing slightly higher use than we expected. We do note that businesses tend to have one person who engages the most with social technologies. We saw that 43% of businesses that use social media have sales professionals as their front while 40% were marketing and the remaining 17% were public relations/communications professionals.

Methodology: We monitor 1,500 business domains across Atlantic Canada (similar and scaled to population in UK and NE USA) with our crawler then running search intervals every month. Data is then compiled through our Artificial Intelligence Engine and reviewed by two analysts. We combine automated and physical research and analysis. We began benchmarking in 2008 and now have two years of statistical data on usage in these regions.

When a New Logo for Gap Hit The Social Web

Gap launched a new logo, rather quietly, the other day. Marketing blog Brand New did a quick, unflattering review pushed out by leading digital media strategist Jeremiah Owyang via Twitter. As I looked at the new logo I suddenly thought “let’s run a sentiment analysis” on this for fun. So we did, over the past 24 hours.

We looked at Twitter, Plurk and Identi.ca plus Facebook and over 150 blogs, including comments. Below is the pie chart for like, dislike and don’t care. You can see the results for yourself. Although I was surprised of the 18,504 comments and references we sampled that even 25% liked it…still…

Calculation of the sentiment is done through our Artificial Intelligence Engine and I suspect would fit in with a number of other social media monitoring tools…percentages will vary as we all have our own “secret sauce” algorithms. One wonders if perhaps, given little fanfare over the launch, Gap was looking to see if got any attention. If so, good marketing move on Gap’s part.