In his remarks, Tac explained that social media has evolved to the point where brands now have more of an opportunity than ever before to not waste their marketing dollars. Brands can understand exactly what customers are saying about their products and services by listening in on--and responding back to--online discussions.
So as 2010 arrives, what changes do brands need to make to meet the needs of their prospects and customers? Tac recommends the following:
1) Brands must improve their internal structure and processes so that online engagement can happen quickly. "Taking three days to craft a response to a tweet" won't cut it; real-time engagement is needed.
2) "Authenticity" trumps "quality" when creating and distributing content using social media.
3) "Driving people to your website will become a nostalgic [concept] very soon." Instead, brands should operate under hub-and-spoke model, creating and sharing content across the social media landscape.
Video: Capitalize on all that content
Here is an excerpt from Tac's talk, where he explains how social media helps brands validate their marketing efforts.
That will be the thrust of my questions in a live audio interview with ZDNet's Jennifer Leggio later today (1:00pm Eastern/10:00am Pacific). The interview can be heard live via my ipadio.com page.
Update: I've just finished the conversation with Jennifer; you can listen to the archived interview by scrolling down to the bottom of this post.
'Wakeup call' for brands
Leggio (aka @mediaphyter) blogged earlier this week that Google's real-time search results will serve as a "wakeup call" for brands, particularly in the area of online reputation management. Now, tweets or Facebook updates about a brand--whether flattering or damning--have the potential to scroll on to a search-results page for a company within minutes of their initial posting.
Back in early September, Chris Brogan pledged to write a guest post for the first 10 people to buy 10 copies of Six Pixels of Separation, the new business book written by our mutual friend, Mitch Joel. I thought it was a brilliant--and generous--offer by Chris, so I took him up on it. Here's Chris's post:
* * * * *
By Chris Brogan
Your brand isn't going to fare well in the coming months without a few considerations and adjustments. In some ways, if you think of the old way of marketing and business communication as theater, then this new phase, with social media, is "theater in the round."
By that, business went from "control your message" into "represent the brand." In this new way, brands and companies have gone from being a thing to being a thing that we want to have a human face. If you work for a brand and aren't yet sure how to do that, here are five starter steps.
1) Listen. I can't stress this enough. Use a tool like Radian6 or ScoutLabs or Spiral16 or any of the professional listening tools and start collecting unstructured data about what your customers/clients/prospects/vendors/competitors are talking about. Listen. It's the basis of understanding. But don't stop at collecting the data. Find where it needs to go within the company, and find where you need to go outside the company to find new relationships.
2) Connect. Take your listening information and find the people you need to reach. Connect. Build online social media and social networking profiles and connect. And when I say connect, take what you've learned from your listening and get involved in THEIR stories. Don't talk about you. But then, that's next.
3) Relate. Want to blow away your competitors? Talk about your customers instead of wanting them to talk about you. Talk about what they're into. Talk about how they can succeed. Give them new tools, even if they're not YOUR tools. Equip them.
4) Share. Offer as much as you can give away for free for free. Do it. Your product and service is just as important to sell, but the more you build a relationship with me (the customer) and the more you equip me to do more things, the more you deliver value to what I'm trying to accomplish (that complements your product or service). It's a great opportunity to give me what I want.
5) Apologize. When you're wrong, admit it. This is another human move to blow away your competitors. We don't apologize when we're wrong. I'm still waiting for some apologies.
This new human approach for brands to do business does yield revenue. Dell made over a million dollars more in their first year of offering bargains via Twitter. The Roger Smith Hotel in Manhattan is showing higher revenues after building a social media outreach program. Customer perception of Comcast customer service has improved greatly since the onset of its social media communications channels.
Where's your hesitation? Get into this theater, practice this new experience, and let's build a relationship-minded method to branding and sales for these coming months.
Chris Brogan is co-author of Trust Agents, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsettling book. He blogs at [ChrisBrogan.com].
It was the summer of 2006, and I had happened upon Chris's Amateur Traveler podcast episode on Tanzania. Like Chris, I enjoy traveling. And like Chris, I had also been to Tanzania (OK, it was only at the border in my case, but I still count it!). And as a guy whose wife hails form neighboring Kenya, Chris's use of Swahili phrases and his exploration of the Masai culture in that show caught and held my attention. His podcast providing compelling and well-produced audio content while also giving me a real sense of traveling inside the country. There was no doubt this fellow podcast junkie was onto something.
Now, more than three years later, Chris has zoomed past 200 weekly episodes of Amateur Traveler (I've podfaded at least twice in the meantime), while also adding a weekly bible podcast and roundtable travel roundup program to his hosting and production repetoire. It's an ambitious and consuming undertaking that I know Chris is passionate about--and that he'd been squeezing in on nights and weekends. But in about a month, that will all change.
Tuesday afternoon, during a LiveWorld staff meeting, we learned that Chris plans to take his podcasting efforts to the next level. He'll be leaving his full-time LiveWorld position next month to concentrate almost exclusively on his podcasting and related travel projects. He'll be busy-- I just love this--expanding his "media empire."
So while losing Chris the co-worker won't be fun, chronicling his new journeys online certainly will be.
I went through an interesting mental exercise yesterday morning in answering six questions from co-worker Mark Williams about our preparations for the webinar.
What I hope came through was this: There's a heckuva lot that goes into producing a webinar (far more than just showing up and talking for an hour), but that the learning experience is one that will help us plenty as we plan future events.
If you're seeing this post prior to 2:00pm Eastern on Tuesday, November 10th, there's still time to join us for the live recording our free "Social Everywhere 2010" webinar. Just click the image below.
I got a glimpse into Kodak's social media efforts during last week's 140 Conference in Los Angeles, and came away impressed.
Kodak was the primary sponsor of the event, so its presence was impossible to miss. Heck, even name of the conference venue itself -- the Kodak Theatre -- ensured we'd have the brand top of mind.
A couple of key takeaways for me:
* Kodak recognizes that social media engagement by brand helps to create customer evangelists. Case in point: Kodak's contest this past summer to rename its "lame"-sounding Zi8 pocket camera (disclosure: I was so impressed with the camera while testing it at the conference sponsor table for five minutes that I ordered one over the weekend).
CMO Jeffrey Hayzlett (pictured above) explained how the marketing group turned to their -- and his (@JeffreyHayzlett) -- Twitter followers and to the readers of their Thousand Words blog, for suggestions. The response was overwhelming. Kodak received thousands of recommendations and will announce the winning entry and camera renaming during a formal launch in January.
* Kodak's content-and-engagement approach to Social Everywhere is both centralized and distributed.
Here, on Kodak's "home turf," staffers can share their industry insights and "tell [their] story," as chief blogger Jenny Cisney (above) put it to me after the 140 Conference.
"No longer can you wait for customers to come to your website and come to you," Cisney said. "So that's why we're going to where our customers are. If they're on Facebook, well, we'll have a Facebook page. If they're on Twitter, we're going to have Twitter accounts. That's how we determine where we're going to participate."
Whether on a brand's "home turf" (corporate website, destination community) or across external social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, conversations about companies big and small are happening everywhere online.
In such an environment, just where should brands, marketers, and community spend their time, focus, and business dollars?
That's the question we'll be exploring in our upcoming webinar, "Social Everywhere 2010 - How Do Brands Cope?" The webinar be held on Tuesday, November 10, at 2:00pm Eastern, and you can register by clicking the link below.
We're thrilled to have Altimeter Group partner Jeremiah Owyang headlining our webinar. And in this video that I recorded at last week's BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas, Jeremiah talks about the evolving social web and the new challenges for marketers:
Your comments: Where's the social web headed?
Jeremiah will be joined in the webinar by Jennifer Gordon, director of global advertising at Campbell Soup (LiveWorld client) and LiveWorld CEO Peter Friedman, and we're looking to gather up questions for all three starting today (I'll be moderation the discussion).
Here are a few questions to think about; we'd love your feedback in the comments section below, or on Twitter using the #Social2010 hashtag.
Does a centralized web presence for brands still matter?
What key questions should marketers be asking when considering which external social networks to participate in?
Should brands be concerned about the recent release of Google Sidewiki? How can they effectively monitor and join those related conversations
I wanted to share my slides from a "Best Practices in Online Engagement" presentation I delivered last Thursday, October 8, at the Integrated Marketing Summit in Kansas City. I was part of a three-person panel on social media best practices with Virginia Miracle of Ogilvy PR and IBM's Rebecca Butler.
As with many of my presentations, the slides are mostly images that are meant to complement the stories that I'm telling; they aren't always meaningful when viewed in isolation, outside the event. To help, I'm including some of my speaking notes as they correspond to the individual slides. I've also turned most of the slide images above into links.
Slide 2 I knew I had a friendly audience in Kansas City when my remark about the Red Sox cap draw a thunderous applause from several attendees. Sports fandom can be good for business, because it offers an immediate human point in comon. A few hours after my presentation, in fact, I was watching the Red Sox-Angels playoff game with a fellow former New Englander.
Slide 3 So what shouldn't be rocket science about engaging with customers in social media but yet is often forgotten: being genuinely helpful, being around before the sale, not force-feeding marketing messages down someone's throat in an online community or online social network. It's an argument Chris Brogan makes all the time.
Slide 4 Mitch Joel is one of the very best content marketers I know. When he blogs and podcasts, he rarely--if ever--talks about his own company's services and projects. Instead, he serves as a voice and resource for his industry of digital marketing. He becomes the thoughtful, insightful marketer that we want to do business with. This approach has helped Mitch's agency, Twist Image, to grow and thrive in recent years.
Slides 5-6 We don't really talk to brands. We talk to the people who work for those brands. When I want to talk to Ford, I hunt down Scott Monty.
Slide 7 More brands should consider employing or talking to someone like Jeremy Pepper to help them find and express their social voice. A big reason why corporate blogs lie at the bottom of the trust ladder is their blandess and lack of any real opinion. Jeremy Pepper? He certainly ain't bland, and he isn't shy about writing what he really thinks.
Slide 8 Chase Jarvis is a professional photographer who understands the importance of giving back to his community online. This screenshot comes from a "story behind the story" video answering blog reader and Facebook fan questions about how Chases uses a tripod. It was recorded on the set of Chase's recent photo shoot in New Zealand.
Slide 9 How does a brand like Starbucks show that it's really listening to its customers and fans? By reporting back on the progress of suggestions submitted through the My Starbucks Ideas site. The Mini Starbucks Card was one of the first community-generated ideas carried through to production, and this announcement from Chuck Davidson has become one of the community's most highly-trafficked and interacted-on posts.
Slide 10 eBay (disclosure: a LiveWorld client) runs a program called Voices for some 150 power members in its online communities. These members are included in communications--and their feedback is sought and incorporated--for potential new eBay products and changes to the community. The result? A "small army" of brand advocates, according to our conversations with eBay.
Slide 11 Businesses and brands need to set "house rules"--for their digital properties. These could take the form of a comment policy on a blog or easy-to-find community standards in a destination community and outline what is acceptable/unacceptable behavior/commentary/etc.
Slide 12 What's one option in a community or social channel where long-time members have "poisoned" the well and are unwelcoming and downright unhelpful to newcomers? Firing those members. It's a risky tactic but sometimes a necessary one to ensure the community's long-term survival.
Slide 13 This is Bill Johnston's graphical representation of the "presence framework" that Chris Brogan laid out earlier this year. It indicates the importance of creating a digital "home base" (corporate website, corporate blog, etc.) while also connecting with customers and community members in other distributed social channels ("outposts" and "passports" across the social web) across the social media landscape.
Slides 14-15 The presence framework in action: examples of Chase Jarvis's outposts--his Twitter account (@ChaseJarvis) and Facebook Page.
Slides 16-17 Possible to give back to your community on the most "boring subject imaginable" and generate substantial revenue in the process? Christopher S. Penn from the Financial Aid Podcast has demonstrated that it is!
The week-old Google Sidewiki has a potentially far-reaching impact for brands.
Of note:
1. A Sidewiki comment can be left to any web page of any brand site. All that's needed to use Sidewiki is a relatively simple download of the free product (for Firefox and Internet Explorer now, with Google Chrome still to come) and keeping the Google Toolbar open in the web browser. From there, all websites become instantly social, with a comment window appearing alongside each page enabling commenting and voting.
2. Brands don't have much say over the content that appears in a Sidewiki. Apart from an initial post that a publisher/content creator can leave in a Sidewiki, all comments are ultimately displayed according to a Google algorithm. Users--and site owners--can rate comments as not "useful" and flag spam comments/hate speech for abuse, but at least so far, doing so will not necessarily make those comments disappear. There are also no moderation controls or options for brands and publishers in Sitewiki.
3. Brand monitoring is as important as ever. Sidewiki is the latest product giving consumers the power to talk about brands in a public space online. Brand managers, agencies, and community managers should be diligent in reviewing Sidewiki commentary to key pages on their websites to gauge customer, fan, and detractor sentiment, and then engage when and where appropriate. Robust monitoring tools haven't yet been developed, but since an API is available, expect that to change soon.
Where should community management sit inside an organization?
That's one of several questions I posed to Marshall Kirkpatrick (@MarshallK), VP of content development and lead blogger at ReadWriteWeb, in this recent audio interview at his downtown Portland, Oregon office.
* Marshall talks about the implications of Facebook's decision to open up search on status messages, notes, and shared links.
* Marshall considers whether brand monitoring on Facebook will become a new line of professional services.
* Bryan asks Marshall if companies and brands should outsource their community management.
* Marshall explains why "just about every department in an organization needs to have a relationship with the community manager."
* Marshall shares a surprising conclusion--at least for him--from ReadWriteWeb's premium report: Community managers are making very good use of Twitter.
Are customer-service successes on Twitter worth celebrating?
A debate of sorts broke out over that question during yesterday morning's Social Media Breakfast in Ottawa during a presentation (slides embedded at the end of this post) by Tara Hunt | @MissRogue, when she suggested that "@ComcastCares is a victim of our own nepotism.
Tara argued that Comcast's efforts on Twitter and other social media channels are overhyped by an adoring crowd of social-media enthusiasts, even if customer-service problems and culture at the company remain largely unsolved and unchanged.
Tara and Frank have since exchanged tweets with each other, and I expect a direct conversation between the two--and perhaps a face-to-face debate!--to follow.
But until then, the question remains: If good customer service through social media doesn't trigger corresponding improvements throughout an organization, just how should we be talking about it?
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