When to Adopt Social Media Tools into Marketing

There’s three ways to look at adopting new digital media and social media channels for your marketing and communications efforts.

A) Bleeding Edge: Get in before the service becomes super hot to build presence and traction (i.e. getting into Twitter in 2007.) The upside can be getting to shape the tone and manner and building a strong brand presence. The downside is knowing it will be a winner and that it won’t shut down for lack of service. If you picked Plurk as microblog platform, well, sorry about that.

B) Leading Edge: This is when, it would seem, mainstream media first starts to report on a service. A good example would be blogging. You can better pick which service is likely to be around in a few years (even through acquisitions or mergers) and you can still play a role in shaping the channel and building  a strong presence.

C) Laggard: Shareholders of pharmacy chain Walgreen’s kept pushing senior management to build an online presence fast and start an eCommerce site. Management resisted and waiting until 2000, watching and learning from others who failed. Smart move on Walgreen’s part. Sometimes this can be a safe bet, but you’ll expend more human resource time and money in social media channels the later you enter.

In large part, when you choose to use a social media  service depends mostly on senior management’s comfort with that level of engagement, expenditure and how it can relate to ROI for the business. Other factors include time, brand values, market size etc. As always with social media, do some listening first. A service may not always live up to the hype or may not even be right for your organization.

Some companies have a culture of being “bleeding edge” and want to be at the visionary stage of product adoption (i.e. Moores Law of technology adoption)

The Ecosystem of Twitter

Every time Apple launches a new device, iPad included, a whole business ecosystem emerges and kicks into gear. Cases, stands, speakers, headsets and more. The Sony Walkman never achieved this.

On the Web, it seems Twitter is the Cyburbian version of Apple products. It’s spun off an incredible amount of associated services (here’s an excellent list);

- Twitter ranking tools
- Twitter clients (Browser-based, OS-based and Air-based)
- Statistical / Analytical services
- Follower services
- Aggregators
- Image & Video Sharing
- Games

But what about the money?  Well, not so much. You can buy some products, send money or use an eBay linked service, but these are volume-based services, with, I suspect, not much volume. Perhaps someday. Twitter has worked out a system, it would seem, for revenue. We’re just not sure what that is yet.

But an entire ecosystem has evolved around the service. While there are over 80 other microblogging services, none have created such a powerful ecosystem. Kind of like comparing Microsoft’s Zune to the iPod.

So while the theoretical side of this would say it’s very successful. On the practical side however, there’s little to no money being generated. No revenue makes a company a Non-Profit Organization. So why? Personally I’m not sure. Perhaps you have ideas?

(Author: G. Crouch)

Social Media Is A Freekin’ Mess

After three years of analyzing Web and Social Media behaviour and engagement for clients and reading many other reports like those of PEW Internet, Forrester etc., I’d like to formally state that Social Media is a total and utter mess.

It’s just a messy place. In terms of information, both useful and not. Because it’s very hard to define what is or isn’t useful.

Just look at blogging platforms alone; there’s over 300 blogging platforms out there (i.e. Blogger, WordPress, TypePad) and then there’s the search engines for blogs…Google’s blog search, IceRocket and Technorati among the leaders. Recently when we looked at the results our system brought back from Google and compared them to IceRocket, we found Google had an average of 62.4% more spam and unrelated content than IceRocket and don’t get me started on Technorati.

Think Twitter is the only Microblog? It’s not. There’s over 170 different microblogging services being used. Think Facebook is the only Social Networking service? Yup, you guessed it. There’s over 40 of those and their fragmenting everyday.

Then there’s aggregator services that enable you to share all your information or suck it up into one place. Google’s Buzz is a kind of aggregator combined with participation.

All of this to say; Social Media is a massive tangle of data.

It’s not information until you can make sense of it. There are a number of “reputation management” tools out there that enable some form of aggregation of the data into information, but so far none have proven overly useful.

There’s nothing wrong with this messy place called Social Media. It’s part of the progress. It’s wonderful because ideas are being shared, new approaches being developed towards a better world and well, that’s good.

It’s just  a messy, unmanaged mess right now. And it likely will be for a while yet. This creates a nightmare for marketers, PR pro’s, businesses, government and the average citizen.

To me, Social Media will evolve to more simple systems. Such complexity is not sustainable.

What do you think?

(Author: G. Crouch, CEO)

One Easy Step to Fail Social Media Engagement

You’ve jumped into Twitter as a company and it’s tying back to your blog or microsite so you can track visits and ideally, conversions to whatever your converting them. Great. So like any good marketer you’ve looked at the related cost of spending all that time “tweeting” and getting followers. Then you discover an automated solution to get followers and push out your message. You just failed Social Media engagement 101.

All these services are designed to enable a marketer to become a broadcaster. The point of Social Media is building relationships through dialogue. Broadcasters are one to many. The ability to forge a relationship is lost because you’re not really asking, questioning or engaging. You’re telling. This is what TV, newspapers, magazines and online ads are for.

While an automated “follower” service for Twitter might seem enticing, you’re actually putting your brand into a deficit and at the very least not building brand engagement. Just awareness. Followers will quickly unfollow you. Automated DM’s (Direct Messages) back to people can have the same effect.

Building followers in Twitter or fan’s on Facebook and connections on LinkedIn or any Social Media application lose effectiveness when you attempt to use them as a broadcast medium. In some cases, some individuals such as Seth Godin or Guy Kawasaki do become broadcasters; but from time to time they do engage and respond. A large part of the reason Dell has been successful with Twitter is that they engage and connect with people one on one.

If your brand is good and your message is good, if you engage, then you will pick up followers. That is a much more real measure of success.

This post came as a result of a great lunch conversation with my fellow Social Media practitioner Carman Pirie over at Colour. We covered a lot of interesting ground, this being one of the highlights.

(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Partner)

When Your Social Media Star Falls

She got your brand out all over Twitter, to the tune of many thousands of followers. He built a huge presence on Facebook and NetLog for you. Nary a negative word was said about your organization. It was all great, until they resigned. She got a plum offer from a PR agency and he got hired by your competitor. Now what? And just who were all these people engaged with? Your brand or the person behind it? Both really.

So. Now what? One was an intern the other was a junior. Yes, they were building positive vibes for the brand, but conversion to sales wasn’t really there yet, or you’d only just started to define success metrics for engaging in Social Media. We’ve seen this with a few clients. It creates a difficult situation. A few quick do’s and don’ts based on our experience:

Don’t:

- Leave The Kingdom Doors Open: Make sure you change all the passwords to the accounts. Just to be on the safe side.

- Drop it Cold Turkey: If you assume all those followers were a bunch of teens and 20-somethings who don’t care, you’ll be in for a little Social Media crisis. If you want to wind down your engagement in Social Media, then plan it carefully.

Do’s:

- Have a Transition Plan: Have the person’s supervisor develop a plan to transition to a new person if possible, or plan disengagement. Carefully, with solid, honest messaging.

- Be Open: Let the person who’s leaving talk about in a positive manner. If it’s possible, have them introduce the new person.

A little forethought when a situation like this can save a whole lot of grief down the road. It’s also good practice for the senior manager in the organization to “listen in” on what’s being said on a regular basis. To make sure the message is clear and on target.

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Partner @webconomist on Twitter)