socialutions

Brands are hiring people to lead their “social initiatives“. Armed with some perceived power afforded by the new position these individuals charge forward with initiatives to help the brands become more social and responsive to customers.

They engage in Twitter, get their brands positioned with a blog, gain presence in “communities” and try to position the brand as “open and willing to change” based on customer feedback and desires. These new “social contacts” for brands may be like a deer staring into the headlights of an oncoming car.

Change Doesn’t Come From Pretending to be Social

The quality of social interaction is driven by the organizations entire “system” of interactions lead by management. The current craze by brands wanting to ride the “social wave” is akin to corporations trying to ride the “quality movement” of the 80’s and 90’s. Those that used quality as a differential started by changing the thinking that managed the “system” and it permeated from the top down. Those that faked it hired a Quality Guru and made quality their responsibility. The later failed.

In a panel on “Business Innovations that are Changing the World,” Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt said: “Let’s not forget that the fundamental goal of any corporation is to change the world and not just to satisfy the interests of particular stakeholders. Companies that open themselves up to promoting and fully leveraging the social dimension of human beings in order to create smarter and more effective solutions for social problems will be the winners of this new social economy.

“One of the things to say,very clearly,is that social networks as a phenomenon are very real.If you are of a certain age,you sort of dismiss this as college kids or teenagers. But it is very real.”

Why Pretending is Easy to Detect

A brand may understand all the social tools but knowing “how” to use them to fix their own house is another issue. My garage is full of tools but I cannot build a house. Those that know me would laugh if I tried to pretend I knew how to build a house.

Customers know brands based on past experiences. Hiring people to manage a social initiative is not the Socialution. Most organizational cultures have not built “social environments” required for inside changes.

Unless leadership of an organization starts from the inside out then any social initiative is likely to be labeled as fake, insincere and not a real Socialution. Pretending to be something your not is in fact anti social and people can see, hear and smell it a mile away.

If you keep pretending the situation will only get worse and the outcomes of anti social behavior is that people will no longer consider you a friend. With less and less friends to support you who will pay your future bills? If your actions are consistently anti social but you consider yourself BIG enough to bully a market, beware. The market is collectively BIGGER than you ever thought you could be and markets can shift at the click of a mouse. What happens to the Deer that doesn’t move?

What say you?

There are 48,500,000 listing on Google when you type in “Social Media Services“. There are 36,100,000 listing when you type in “Social Media Business Services.

A review of the listing only five pages deep reveals “advertising, ad placement and design services” are the dominant services. It appears as though the majority of the service providers think “social media” is about ad placement, click through, ad analytics and fundamentally the offerings are applying old tricks to new media. One thing is clear, there is a huge market of suppliers offering to help companies enter the world of social media. The problem is some may start you off on the wrong road.

As previously written in post titled “Do Old Mindsets Repeat Themselves” and “Do You Like Being Shot At?” the marketers message to a uniformed and yet eager market is leading the sheep to the wolves den to be slaughtered. The old school of thought concerning marketing and use of media was driven by impressions, click throughs and a host of other “tricks of the trade“. Well here is some news for those looking for help. Stay away from the tricks and enter doing the right things for the right purpose.

What Are The Right Things?

The wrong thing is to think of social media as an extension of old advertising methods. The right thing is to think of it as an opportunity to renew or begin old relations and form new ones.

Of the listing on our Google search we found a site whose white paper promotes three critical elements for entering into “social media” and using the tools correctly. The site is RSSApplied and their white paper promotes three service elements which include:

1. Knowledge
2. Strategies
3. Execution

The services offering appear to be designed around use of virtual tools to deliver the knowledge required, qualified resources to help with the strategies and a community to assist with execution. There is a host of other companies, both large and small, also offering numerous services for businesses but only a few seem to approach the market wholistically.

The pricing for those offering other than “advertising ad design and placement” range from monthly subscription models, monthly campaign management to a full course consulting engagement with all the bells and whistles. The cost ranges were $250 a month for basic services all the way up to six figure engagement for everything from setting up and running a community blog to defining and implementing strategically designed initiatives.

How Does A Business Choose?

For those just entering or those wanting to fix current defunct strategies the options, technology, language and “rules of the road” can be very confusing. The choices are fairly straight forward:

1. Learn on your own
2. Hiring an internal resource to manage your transformation
3. Hiring outside “experts” to help you do the right things and do them right
4. Join a community of experts who can guide you along the way
5. Apply the old rules to the new game and loose

Whatever your choice one thing is certain. Everyone has a roadmap but few really know how to get there.

What say you?

When the web was first born the defacto model was to become the destination site where people could get any and all information. Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Excite and numerous others fueled the frenzy and race for traffic. Traffic begets advertisers and the game was eyeballs and clickthroughs. The capital markets bought the hype only to learn hard lessons later on.

Do Old Mindsets Repeat Themselves?

Some of us tend to repeat ourselves when we get old. The same can be true of old business models followed by old school strategies pursued by old school thinking about markets.

Today the craze of the old market is centric to all the activity, and subsequent traffic, generated from all this “social stuff“. The stories about MySpace, Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube and the host of others have the old markets chasing consumers again. Chasing us with ads or the promise of advertising revenue and they are throwing a ton of money at the chase. The big sites are dancing with the old markets just waiting for them to open their pocketbooks and give the “networks” more money for access and exposure to all their traffic.

The Wall Street Journal reports: Cable operators are increasingly seeking to become destinations for online video, as consumers spend more time watching television shows, movies and other clips that they download from Apple Inc.’s iTunes, Google Inc.’s YouTube and other Internet sources. ThePlatform provides a service that functions as a management system for converting TV shows into the latest online-video formats, inserting promotions from online-advertising networks and transmitting the content to distribution networks that speed up the delivery of Web video to consumers. The company earns money like a utility, charging clients an undisclosed fee for the amount of video they store online and a usage fee every time a user clicks on the clients’ videos.

Comcast is also making a play to become a technology-service provider for other companies that want to put video online, signing up clients that include cable operators, Verizon Wireless and Hulu, a popular Web site for TV episodes that is jointly owned by General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal and News Corp., parent company of Dow Jones & Co. - Read the whole story…

Will Consumers Follow Old Models and Mindsets?

In case the old mindsets haven’t noticed the consumers are getting smarter, more demanding and vocal. Repeating old strategies to a newly engaged, enlightened and connected consumer may in fact backfire on you and you won’t get what you want, the consumer’s eyeballs and pocketbooks.

Consumers, people, are now following other people and they know the game of traffic, impressions, eyeballs and old corporate strategies aimed at capturing them. People revolt over being “captured, herded or taken for granted”. When people revolt in masses it represents a market, your market or at least you thought it was. The people are the market and they have a new strategy that doesn’t equate well with the old strategies.

There is an old saying “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it”. The movement may just not match what you think. Get it?

What say you?

Everybody seems to like attention. Getting attention comes from many different activities, some good and some bad. Sales, Marketing and PR for businesses is all about getting and keeping your markets attention. After all if you don’t have the attention of your market it means someone else does.

Traffic to your web site, social network, blog etc. reflects to some degree your ability to get peoples attention. Once you have people’s attention then the challenge becomes one of keeping the attention so the people will come back, again, again and again. In the world of social technologies everyone is vying for everyone else’s attention. The competitive factor for business is the how, why, what, where and when of getting and keeping their markets attention, the people.

How difficult is it to Get and Keep Attention?

In the world of “human connections” the dynamics of getting and keeping peoples attention are centric to knowing and understanding human nature and the fabrics of healthy relations. Everyone wants our attention. The proliferation of information overloads our brains ability to pay attention to the valuable and important matters, whether personal or professional. The social web has accelerated this overload with everyone everywhere wanting to connect with anyone anywhere. Connecting via a social network and becoming “virtual friends” or connecting with our stories and message whether it be our blog, twitter or the host of other “social media” proliferating throughout hundreds of communities vying again for more of our attention. Then we go home for dinner with our family and wonder why we can’t get each others attention. Getting and keeping ones attention can be but shouldn’t be this difficult.

Attention Comes at the Point of Need

As we watch the activities of online communities the successful ones have “created an art and science” of filling the needs of its members. The art is centric to facilitating conversations and the sharing of relative information that helps community members fill a need “when” and “where” it becomes the thread of conversations. The science is centric to “how” technological tools are used to organize the conversations so they fill known and unknown needs of the community. Knowing “why” people would be attracted to your community and “what” would keep their attention in your community is about possessing the knowledge and skills relative to the art and science behind the “when, where and how” of human attention.

How Good is Your Business or You at Fulfilling Peoples Needs?

The irony of watching major brands jump into all this “social stuff” is they seem to focus on the value an online community can provide to themselves, not the community which is nothing more than a swarm of people with needs. Most corporate-sponsored online communities are virtual ghost towns according to Ed Moran, a Deloitte consultant who just completed a study of more than 100 businesses with online communities.

Not surprisingly, these sites failed to gain traction with customers. Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members – despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects. “A disturbingly high number of these sites fail, says Ed Moran”

In other words they failed because they didn’t know how to fulfill the needs by paying attention to and understanding “why” people would be attracted to their community and “what” would keep the attention. Just maybe they should have first gained the knowledge and skills relative to the art and science behind the “when, where and how” of human attention. Oh yeah, one last thing, gaining the knowledge and skills first would have not only saved them $1 million but enabled them to gain the markets attention and avoid the embarrassment of building a ghost town.

If this article gets your attention and you need anything just ask. What say you?

If you think the wave of social technology adoption has been high just wait a little longer. Business leaders, academia and old Media are now coming around to the recognition that all this “social stuff” is becoming a requirement for business leaders or they may not survive.

Major media publications are writing about the impact of blogs, social networks, social media and all the related buzz words around all this “social stuff”. Academia is now launching entire research divisions to study all this “social stuff” and its implications. Everyone seems hungry to learn.

What Are They Learning?

UMASS Dartmouth University conducted numerous studies centric to the social web and particularly blogs. Two studies of interest titled: Behind the Scenes in the Blogosphere: Advice from Established Bloggers and another study titled: The Hype Is Real shares perspectives and practices that point to the wave of user generated content and engagement that continues to create disruptive changes across all markets.

The author’s state: “Blogs will make or break your business. They have the power to disseminate information and host global conversations on any topic. Every publication from Business Week, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal to online white papers from Marqui (www.marqui.com/blog) warns businesses that blogging is not an optional endeavor. Those that don’t will not survive. “

“With over 40 million conversations going on 24 hours a day, the question becomes how does a business enter and thrive in the blogosphere? The answer to this question is that smart businesses will seek guidance from the experts.”

What Are Smart Businesses?

Previously we discussed “Why Do Business Blogs Fail?” And “Why Do Business Blogs Fail: Part 2?” In both these post and the results of the studies mentioned above there is a single smart theme which consistently tells the story and provides the pathway to all this “social stuff”.

The single theme isn’t really anything new just forgotten. The theme is that relationships create and influence your economy. Relationships with people whether they are labeled employees, customers, suppliers or entire markets. The common thread is relationships with people. People are tired of the marketing hype, the corporate speak, slogans and exhortations trying to motivate them to do something, anything and everything. People are tired of being treated as objects, wallets or targets for your offerings. Chasing people the old way is going to kill your business and marketing the old way is just pouring your money down the drain.

Business runs on economic gains. The gains come from having good relations first. Markets are conversations. Transactions within a market come from having conversations with those that relate to you. How can you relate to people if you don’t understand what it takes to create and keep a relationship? The social web thrives because it is about people having conversations with people about anything, everything and about your business. The conversations fill the needs and enable people to get what they want.

Get it? What say you?

More and more companies are adding new media marketing strategies to change the way they interact with customers online. Extending your marketing message through blogs, Facebook, Youtube, Digg and more, can help build your brand, network with customers, and give an effective boost to organic search engine optimization. With so many social media sites, and so many ways to leverage blogging, I’m going to share some thoughts on how these new forms of media can be implemented within your marketing strategy to build your brand.

Brand Blogging

Blogging provides you an opportunity to give a personality to your corporate brand. The corporate blog is connected directly to your main domain, which connects your blogging efforts directly to the main brand. It’s a quick way to float out marketing concepts, and generate instant feedback. This is makes blogging a good brand tool - giving you more flexibility than your normal website.

Your blog’s best asset is being tied to your main domain, which makes it “official” - but this is also the thing that limits blogging more than social media.

Social Media Branding

Social media has less boundaries than your corporate blog because it’s not directly tied to your domain. It’s an extension of your brand and online marketing strategy, and it’s generally less formal in nature. This gives you the flexibility to move beyond corporate messaging. For example, you probably need to think twice before referencing someone else’s content - even on your blog - but on Facebook, Twitter or Digg it’s commonplace. This is one of social media’s best aspects as a branding tool - branding by association. The brand by association concept really works on social media, allowing you the freedom to leverage other content but also because of your network. Being able to network directly with prospects, and directly network your brand with people (and other companies) can help position your brand in ways that your website cannot. It’s extremely organic, and unlike your position on Google - it’s completely controlled by you.

There are hundreds of ways that social media and blogging can be used as branding tools. Look for part two where I provide more thoughts on the subject.

What are your thoughts?

The term media has many different definitions. Published media is any media made available to the public. Mass media refers to all means of mass communication. Broadcast media refers to communications delivered over mass electronic communication networks.

News media refers to mass media focused on communicating news. Media meshing refers to the act of combining multiple independent pieces of communication media to enrich an information consumer’s experience. New media refers to media that can only be created or used with the aid of modern computer processing power.

The history of “media” has been designed, developed and pushed from a few at the top to the masses at the bottom. This model has been used to influence public opinion about anything, everything and everywhere. The old model was an important factor in driving historical economies.

As a result of social computing the model has been turned upside down and now the masses are the media and history is being made before our eyes. This shift is creating new economics and models that further invert the old definitions of brand economics.

Deborah Schultz writes :What I love about this discussion is that it puts the topic in logical economic terms. At the core of why brands do not control the message is the fact that they no longer control the medium - as the world flattens and the cost of communication disintegrates it is indeed the customer who can increasingly compare notes and attitudes and create the value.

As Umair points out:

In fact, when interaction is cheap, the very economic rationale for orthodox brands actually begins to implode: information about expected costs and benefits doesn’t have to be compressed into logos, slogans, ad-spots or column-inches – instead, consumers can debate and discuss expected costs and benefits in incredibly rich detail.

“I love to quote Scott Cook on this one:”

“A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is - it is what consumers tell each other it is.”

I would even argue that was to a certain degree - always the case - it is just that today we are all connected - you can’t snow me anymore. This is SO much bigger than mere branding - it lies at the core of your business model.

How Will Business Models Be Impacted?

The past business models were designed around mass production of anything and everything whether a product, service or information. Businesses grew by selling more to the masses and used the media to increase their reach to buyers. Web 1.0 increased the reach and velocity of the message.

Today the consumer now has the reach and controls the message. Everyday we’re seeing examples of how conversations about companies, products, services and information is being threaded by the masses who freely voice their opinions and experiences, one to one to millions. The means of marketing has been inverted as has the media. Now marketing through media is a bottom up wave rather than a top down model for business.

The bottom up model cuts across every business process, every financial model and changes the face of traditional strategic thinking and organizational design. The buyers of your product or service are now the voice of your business and have been empowered to speak up via the tools of the social web. Businesses can no longer afford to ignore the impact of this shift but few are prepared to invert their own organizational pyramids, the mindsets of power, control and the subsequent relations with people, internally and externally.

The Relationship Economy is fueling these changes and the changes could come at the click of a mouse, one to one to millions. Are you prepared or in denial?

What say you?

Social Media applies to strategy, learning, understanding and executing, not just marketing.

It appears as though marketers and advertisers are consuming the conversations with methods and madness about social marketing Businesses are responding and buying the marketing hype while ignoring the fundaments of the landscape of human behavior intersecting with social technologies.

An article titled “ A Different Perspective On Social Media Marketing by Joe Marchese states “Doing “social media marketing” right is a different story entirely. The landscape and the consumers have changed, but known and comfortable ways of doing advertising have not (yet). Advertisers are coming from a world of meticulously crafted brand messages being blasted out at people through one-way media like TV, print, or radio — to a world where consumers can tune it all out at the press of a button.”

“But “scale” is not necessarily as important as it once was. Advertisers coming from a world where “reach and frequency” was a success metric need to realize that in this new world “scale is out and impact is in.” In other words, buying billions of impressions online — where click-throughs amount to no more than a “rounding error” and the number of people who recall seeing the ad, let alone remembering the message in the ad, can hardly be measured on a logarithmic scale — is not impactful.”

The article highlights three implications for marketers and advertiser which emphasizes the following proclamations:

1. Be useful.
2. Make a social media commitment.
3. Read and react in real time

Is It More Than Marketing?

Social Media applies to four critical business elements required to succeed in any market. Appling the use of social media and related technologies to the achievement of business results presents a new management paradigm that requires a new mindset. . The four critical components include:

1. Defining sustainable strategies and related organization initiatives aimed at building sustainable relations
2. Learning “how to effectively and efficiently” use and apply social technologies to achieve the strategic objectives
3. Understanding what you need to do to get what you want
4. Executing “social transformation”, both internally and externally, to achieve what you need to do to get what you want

Social Media Applies to Results

The result of applying the four critical components is quantitative, measurable success that drives your business forward in the Era of Social Computing. You will be surprised at what kind of results you can produce. Surprised pleasantly if you successfully apply the previous components. Surprised by negative results if you don’t.

What say you?

Given that “social business practices” are a new dynamic with little history there is little to point to as best practices. However, beyond the “technical tools and know how” there is a baseline of truisms for relational and communications issues fundamental to successful business practices…relations.

Now that “people” have been empowered by all this “social stuff” and the internet is accelerating the old truisms into the spot light. The old truths are now being spun as new truths with everyone addressing them from different perspectives and applied inferences to business practices. .

Social Media Applied to Business

Lee Gomes writes: Employee Blogging: What’s the Purpose? People who blog tend to be very opinionated. But in a corporation, that doesn’t fit very well, since corporations need to control their message. So a lot of companies don’t participate in blogging. Or if they do, it’s in a very top-down way. For most businesses, if a project don’t have a specific objective, it’s very hard to allocate resources for it.

People are tired of dealing with institutions; they want to deal with people. My philosophy is that corporations are made up of people. How, then, do you free them up? If you have 100 people in customer service, why don’t you have 100 people blogging? The people in your company who are smart and passionate, who like the customer and who like their job, who think they are doing important work and who want to talk about it — free those people up.

Moving Business Closer to People?

Chris Baggott writes: Successful business blogs have two characteristics. First, rather than top down from the “C” level, they open up by having widespread employee participation. Prospects and Customers are not the ones to write frequently about your business….but you hire smart, passionate people who like their jobs, like the customer, are proud of your products….let them blog about it.

Secondly, ROI need to be measured based on search & conversion. Blogging is a content and engagement strategy. Widespread employee blogging generates lots of great topic specific, keyword, frequently updated and authentic content. The more content you generate like this, the more traffic you generate. Most successful Corporate Blogging programs in our system drive three times or more traffic than their traditional sites.

When the searcher lands on a page with a post that specifically matches their search intent…written by a real human being and addressing a similar situation…they convert. They take the next step in the relationship.

Is It Convergence of Old with New?

The common attribute of any successful business is “how well” the business propositions relate to people, employees, customers and entire markets. It is the propositions, the entire business systems that create conversations. Relationships beget conversations, good and bad.

Conversations represent entire markets. Transaction occurs when the relationships are sound, the conversations are beneficial and the exchange of value fulfills a human need or desire.The process is natural to the human psyche. T

he internet has accelerated the process. If your business relations are good they can get better. Bad and they will get worse.

What say you?