Steve Garfield invites us up to the stage to make media during his presentation on the simplicity of video creation.

Uncovering Social Media Data You Can Count On

With stakeholders throughout the enterprise taking a role in the ownership of conversations in social spaces, each wants to know the impact of a relationship on demand creation, customer retention and support efficiency. This panel addresses how to make the numbers meaningful for sales, marketing, customer service and product teams.

Click here to vote for Uncovering Social Media Data You Can Count On

Extending B2B Acquisition Strategies Using Micromedia

Let’s discuss the importance of proper brand personification in micromedia spaces. We will talk integration of micromedia as a channel in a communications plan and alignment of messaging with strategic objectives. We will cover clear statement of objectives, managing multiple objectives, integration with CRM and community initiatives and attribution of a sale to micromedia. The overlay will be the balancing act of how much sales vs. thought leadership vs. customer service vs. your laundry list of others.

Click here to vote for Extending B2B Acquisition Strategies Using Micromedia

DataRock

What would this post be without a little DataRock?

Trent was a vocal advocate for spam controls in twitter. Twitter users know that twitter is not going to implement a big new feature like that in the near future. He announced back in June that he was leaving. He came back in July to announce his last shows and to talk to Dave Navarro. No “wave wave wave wave goodbye”. The @trent_reznor account is just gone. The @nineinchnails still persists though as he said it would.

Good to see he has not gone soft.

I attended Radian 6 and Chris Brogan’s the Rockstars of Social CRM event last night. The panel had some of the heavy hitters of Social Media and CRM. Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian 6, Frank Eliason who you know better as @comcastcares, Paul Greenberg, Author of CRM at the Speed of Light, President of The 56 Group, LLC, Brent Leary, Co-author of Barack 2.0 and Co-founder of CRM Essentials and Michael Thomas, National President, CRM Association. The key themes really resonated with me and I agreed with them.

• Social CRM gets back to basics
• a return to Helpful 1.0 not Sales 2.0
• Good relationships = good sales
• You must earn your right to sell.

The Land Grab

Then something weird happened. The panel made a comment about Social Media ownership. They poked fun at PR and Marketing trying to get their clutches on Social Media and suggested that the only real home for Social Media is with Sales, specifically Customer Service. Suddenly, all of the IT people in the room fainted because they were left out of the land grab! Marketers wept openly. PR folk made some calls.

With all due respect to the panel, folks have been drinking a ton of beer to keep this pissing contest going. The fact is that there are applications for Social Media across the enterprise. Look. Social (essentially) means communication. Media is a medium of conveyance. So Social Media is a fancy name for a communication tool. The organization needs to communicate in order to succeed. Your team or functional area does not need to be the Superfriends of Social Media, locking down the technology at the Halls of Social Media Justice. It is one thing to be a trail blazer and another to construct a fortress around the perimeter of a trail to ensure that no one else can even see the trail.

A Leaky Basement

Let’s look at audience. If customer service is the only social media touchpoint, it means that the people who are interacting with your brand have likely already bought your product and are having a problem. Customer service is trained to troubleshoot issues with the mind to retain. What about prospects? Do you normally bring people into your home through a leaky basement? That is what you are doing if your social media systems invite people to your product through an open book of its problems. These problems should form knowledge bases for product development and marketing teams who can craft workarounds and answers to questions while putting fixes on the roadmap.

Is Customer Service Taking Over?

Of course Marketing and PR can benefit from information delivered via customer service, but there are full brand experiences that can expand communities, get more eyes on the product and ultimately net more customers. Should their creation be owned by customer service? Does customer service want to worry about security issues and scalability? Should they be releasing the latest information on future product offerings, upgrades? No. They should be consuming them. The IT group is taken aback because they have been using social media technologies forever. Their original twitter was called IRC with the biggest difference that people had to opt into a group to talk to one another. They share technical information on blogs and in forums. Customer service is going to have a really hard time taking it from them, especially when they have the power to shut the whole thing down.

Working Together

Brand personification either requires participants from many functional areas to come together to form the brand’s voice, or a central point that represents the corporate voice and then routes people to the appropriate personas to handle their inquiries. I would recommend that most companies begin with a single point of entry until such time that it becomes unwieldy and the message becomes diluted or the conversations become too much for the team to handle. While the organization finds its voice, a segmentation strategy can be assembled and rolled out when needed. Let me know if you would like me to elaborate on this strategy.

What are your thoughts? You can login with your facebook, twitter or disqus account and join the conversation.

Recently, I found myself a little bit envious of the 20-something set. Not because of their youth, or their ability to be just starting out with their lives, but because for the majority of their lives they have been connected to all of their friends via the Internet. Thinking back on my days at school, camp and college and all the people that I lost touch with before the Internet makes me a bit sad for the connection that I missed.  Browsing some Generation Y’s Facebook and MySpace pages, I realize that they have not lost touch with people, they have them all in their networks and can re-connect at any time.

However, as I joined into this new world of people networking, I realized that when someone does not care for you in this spectrum, there are many ways for them to show it. Prior to these friendship sites, losing touch could become a passive act; not returning e-mails or phone calls.  A person could fall out of contact with a friend or acquaintance and never know if it was lack of time, disinterest, or true dislike that caused the connection to be broken.  The Internet friendship sites take the guesswork out of losing touch; if someone wants you to know who they are and what they are doing, you are their friend, otherwise, you are not.

Let us take Facebook for example.  Recently I heard of a 30-something couple that broke up after a few years of dating.  He still wanted to be friends, she didn’t.  So, how does she make this clear?  She de-friends her ex on Facebook.  Not only is he sad about the demise of their relationship, but she makes it quite evident that he is no longer her friend, her acquaintance or a person that can know what is going on in her life.  This is the most extreme new way to say “I hate you”; taking someone who is your friend and actively erasing them.

Now, let us review a few lesser ways to indicate hatred online.  Ignoring a friend request shows someone that the friend in question has no interest in them and does not want others to associate them as friends.  Blocking a pal on Twitter means that the prior friend does not care what the person is saying and does not want them to access their comments either.  Perhaps the instant-messaging block is the most personal; a person takes a direct connection to them online and completely closes it – what better way to say “I hate you?”

So, what is worse, wondering what happened to that friend you used to do shots with in college or knowing that they are online but want nothing to do with you?  You decide.

• I wanted more money.
• I felt under appreciated.
• I did not get along with my boss.
• I found a better opportunity.

Or you might find out that the person felt like they had their soul sucked out by Dementor kisses. Glassdoor.com is the place to air their filthy laundry about employment experiences anonymously. Registered users can review their previous position and talk about the benefits and gotchas of the employment experience. Registered users can also see the salaries for various positions within the companies.

There is a catch. In order to register, a person needs to contribute a review of one of their positions. I see this as a barrier to the success of the site. With smaller companies, it will be easy to tell who posted the review as they will be one of the only people with that particular position. If the industry is somewhat small and incestuous, like advertising for instance, this could harm a person’s reputation and get them blackballed within their industry. My suggested solution is for Glassdoor.com to give people the option of having their held review until they get enough similar at which time they would release. This could protect people from being sleuthed particularly if they are still in the position. Glassdoor could post that they have 3 positions for Logan’s Xtreme Consulting and and need 2 more to publish.

I also think that the CEO approval could be unfair. Polls should be a slice of a particular time period. Of course Yahoo’s CEO is currently embattled due to his handling of potential mergers with Microsoft, but it would be interesting if this was based on opinions over time. It would be nice if a user could see approval over different time periods such as this week, this month and all time popularity.

I spoke to Gregory Ng and we both classified this site as dangerous. If a company ends up with secrets exposed, dirty laundry aired or personal attacks on the site, there will be repercussions and they could ask Glassdoor to remove reviews or prosecute them. If that happens, then the purity of the site is destroyed and the site becomes a parody of itself. The site addesses this by disguising itself as a resource for employers so that they know where they stack up. I do not see companies taking the position that a handful of poor reviews is an impetus for wholesale organizational changes. I would like to hear the corporate PR perspective on the site. As of now, it is probably not any large corporation’s radar screen.

Was Mama Cass an inspiration for twitter? My 5 year old was singing this song the other day and I immediately thought of twitter. I find myself putting things on twitter just to see if someone else will identify with my references. Other times because I tweet just because I need to get something out of my head and move on. It’s not exactly singing, but the whole tweeting for tweeting’s sake is a lot like making your own kind of music.

What does it need?

It is really useful now, but I have a few ideas for how I would take Twitturly to the next level.

• Larger “windows” or a user controlled timeline ala Google Analytics.
• URL trend lines
• Aggregation of URLs by individuals or groups of individuals.
• Drill up: Aggregation of URLs by site, drill down to specific URLs

Windows of Time

This allows users to specify a larger window of time than 24 hours. It allows them to track what has been popular for a given time period. I would like to see tabs that say 24hours (the default), 1 week, 1 month and 1 year. If the system can handle it, ideally we would be able to choose a time frame between A and date B and be given the list.

URL trendline

Building on the Windows of Time idea, a user would be able to see a graph of the popularity of a URL within that time window. It would also be cool if they could add more than one URL to the graph, ala trendrr. One could argue that you can do this via compete.com, but that is only for URL home pages. This would allow us to compare specific URL and their popularity on Twitter.

Aggregation by Popular People

What are the most talkative people in twitter talking about? I would like to see the URLs from

• The 10 top most popular by followers.
• The top 10 people who follow the most people.
• The top 10 people with the most tweets.
• The top top people who receive the most @s.
• The most popular URLs by everyone that I am following.

URL Drill Up

This would be a drill-up to the home page. It would scrape everything off of the URL after the first slash. This tells us how popular places Youtube, Google, Digital Before Digital and Yahoo are in aggregate and then we can drill down and see what the most popular articles/stories/features are.

What would you add to Twitturly?

Matt recently told me that he was starting a blog war with his good friend, Bill Townsend of Interminds LLC over a presentation that Bill gave to Matt’s executive MBA class. I have never met Bill, but after reading his presentation entitled the Black and White of Internet Marketing, I can see that he CLEARLY knows his stuff and that he is actively monitoring the pulse of the digital space. So this is not a knock on Bill, but an attempt to change his thinking on one point: advertising on social media.

In slide 72, Bill gives us a screen shot from Facebook (see blow) with the title: “What Do I Advertise Here?”

To Which I answer “whatever her friends like”, I would assume things like perhaps Axe Body spray, Seven For All Mankind Jeans and Verizon Wireless with unlimited texting:

I think Bill’s argument is more effective if he says: “Why Should I Advertise Here?” and then go back to his heat map slide. I think that the question is whether or not display advertising on the Internet works at all, not whether we should try the established techniques on Social Media advertising effectiveness.

On slide 59, Bill suggests that the way to get someone to click on a banner is to feign interactivity. How about actually creating interactive advertising for social networks? Instead of banner ads, make those ads short films or interactive widgets. These will fit more with the spirit of the medium. Facebook is about interacting. It’s about learning and communicating with friends and sharing experiences virtually. Advertising needs to blend into that space in order to be effective. The more that we can blur the lines between content and advertising, the more effective we will be, particularly as the Facebook generation is one that is more than happy to make an online purchase.

Given the amount of information that all of the little widgets and applications on Facebook collect and the connection to friends and friend’s friends, we should be able to mine all the little applications on facebook and come up with very targeted advertising.

In summary we mine the information on a person’s profile and the profiles of their friends and then incorporate:

• Video
• Widgets
• Games
• Surveys

What would you add to this?

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