Why Leaders Must Engage with Social Media

Tomorrow I'm giving a presentation on social media at the Women & Power Conference Reunion at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. While I'm convinced that not all C-level executives need to be Twitter junkies, I am absolutely convinced that they need to be acquainted with social media.

There are two basic reasons:

1. There may be external events that are picked up on social media and require attention.
2. There may be internal activities that are good and need to be encouraged or potentially damaging and need to be restrained or monitored.

How does the relevant C-level executive know what to do (or not do) if she does not understand social media?

W&P Reunion.pptx

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This presentation was a lot of fun to develop. I hope you have equal fun reading it.

Even more, what are your thoughts on this important, but undercovered, subject?

Add to Your Circle of Friends!

My friends at Overdrive Interactive have a new white paper that details ways of making connections in social media. They have 100 suggestions; I’ve picked out what I consider the Top Ten Ways to Make Friends—all free; all things even the smallest business can do. Here’s the list with some commentary and some combinations:


1.BE VAIN. Facebook now allows vanity URL’s. If you don’t have one yet, set one. It’s a lot easier to promote your page if you have a short, relevant URL that people can remember.
2.FACEBOOK TAB IT. Add an “Invite Friends” tab on your Facebook page that allows your friends to invite their own friends to become a friend of your Facebook page. Add the tab, then draw attention to it through status updates and tweets.
3.TXT 2 B FRIENDZ: Create a campaign that encourages people to join your Facebook page or Twitter profile by text messaging. If possible, respond back to messages with a coupon code or information about your company. Text “like overdriveinteractive” to 32665 to check it out. Give people an incentive to become your friend, then continue to reward them for loyalty.
4.USE CROSS-PROMOTIONS. Promote your Facebook profile on Twitter and promote your Twitter profile on your Facebook page. Tweet about your Facebook page and use status updates to talk about your Twitter page. Cross promote all your social networks, in fact! When you post something on YouTube or SlideShare, post a notice on your Facebook page and Tweet it. Be sure your company blog has chiclets or other call-outs to all your social channels!
5.SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Optimize your Facebook and Twitter pages for SEO. Make a list of high value key words to use opportunistically in your content. Yes the engines are indexing sourced content. Yes, Facebook and Twitter get indexed. It’s hard to overestimate the contribution of high value key words in all your social channels! Study your referrals data, use keyword tools, and see what words are drawing traffic to the sites of your competitors on Compete.com.
6.REACH OUT TO BLOGGERS. The blogosphere is great place to promote your Facebook and Twitter communities. Find key bloggers that talk about your brand, company, or product category and then reach out to them to become your friend. Tell them the value of your content and tell them to send things to you to tweet and post.
7.WRAP IT. If you sell packaged goods, make sure your packaging promotes your social channels. If people like you enough to buy your product, give them the chance to connect with you in the places where they want to connect. Shopping bags provide great display space. And be sure your main channels—blog, Facebook and Twitter, probably—are on your business card and your email template!
8.MORE THAN JUST DISCOUNTS. If you send [mail] out coupons, include your Facebook and Twitter addresses on them. For more encouragement, include a statement about how social connections will receive more exclusive discounts on the social channels. Do the same in your email newsletters.
9.FOR FRIENDS ONLY. Have friends-only content on your Facebook page. If users want to access the content, they need to become your friend. Give them incentives by including coupons, discounts or sweepstakes entries. List your job openings there; why should anyone apply for a job who isn’t your friend?
10.Above All: SILENCE IS NOT GOLDEN. In social media, you never want to be quiet. Keep sharing information that your friends want to hear: tips, resources, contests, discounts, information, etc. The more you share content they care about, the more they will share your content and brand with their friends.

Among many other useful tips, the white paper points out that you should never waste friends. Don’t just close down a campaign-specific Facebook page. “Reskin” it. That one is likely to require professional programming assistance, but it’s worth it to recycle friends instead of having to reacquire them!

Notice that this is all about integrating your channels to get the maximum value out of your social media efforts. How are you doing on that score? There’s a new app, a Social Page Evaluator from Vitrue, discussed on Smart Blog and in more detail on Vitrue’s company blog that will put a value on your Facebook and Twitter pages.

So find out how well you’re doing in social media at the moment, think about where you need to go, and read the entire Overdrive white paper to get more valuable suggestions!

Does Your Conference Need a Twitter Backchannel?

The headline in AdWeek yesterday said “Big Biz Embracing Twitter.” Seems reasonable to assume that people who work for big businesses, and small also, are Tweeting on behalf of themselves, their products and their companies—right? That makes Twitter a way of reaching B2B customers and prospects about subjects that are directly relevant to them and to their work.

That’s especially important in a world where trade show and conference attendance has become expensive and hard to justify in many companies. People who do attend want to get the most from it—both from the presentations themselves and from the networking that goes on before and after hours.













Enter the Twitter backchannel. I wrote some time ago about creating a Twitter archive, essentially for notes taken at a conference. Multiply that by all the conference attendees and you have a Twitter backchannel. According to a study by European academics, that’s a good thing not a distraction. Positive aspects include encouraging participation, community building and better sharing of information. Read the study for yourself; it’s interesting.

There are several stakeholders here; the audience certainly, the conference organizers, and the speakers. The latter are going to have to learn to present in a different environment!

First conference organizers:

• In order to use social media to promote your conference, you have to start early. It’s important to stimulate and organize conversation. Helpful activities at this point include posting questions and starting discussions on the corporate or conference LinkedIn and Facebook pages. This helps conference planners understand the expectations of attendees and better meet their needs.
• A hashtag is essential. It is the key organizing tool for the Tweeting. Tweeting also needs to begin early. It should be the product of an identifiable individual, perhaps the conference organizer.
• Be sure your conference venue has the necessary infrastructure to support live Tweeting from the event. Maybe that should be the first step!
• Encourage attendees to Tweet during the conference, including presentations. That will drive unprepared presenters nuts; more about that in a minute.
• Follow all the rules of the social media world, being personable, open and transparent, and correcting any mistakes honestly and quickly. This is an imperfect world of human beings after all.
(1, 2, 3)

Conference presenters must be prepared for the live Tweet environment:

• Obviously you start with a well-crafted presentation that fits your audience. All the rules of good presentation—and much more—apply.
• Be prepared for both negative and positive Tweets. That’s life in the social media world.
• Understand whether there will be a live Twitterstream and how much control you have. Can you turn it off while you’re talking and just turn it back on for Q&A, for example?
• A moderator to keep up with the Twitterstream for you may be a good idea. Some speakers take a “Twitter break” and check the stream themselves.
• Respond to Tweets during the Q&A and learn from them after the event.

A disaster that’s quickly become a classic happened at last fall’s Web 2.0 Expo. Here’s a brief description of what happened and the speaker’s response. There’s a lot more, but you get the point. In order to avoid your own personal debacle, read a good set of tips or a detailed post by Olivia Mitchell; she covers preparation and management issues beautifully.

Let’s come full circle to the audience again. First, I can just hear conference organizers worrying that a Twitter backchannel will cut down on conference attendance. Nonsense. If a person has time and can afford it, he or she will attend the conference in person. But if the customer can’t attend, second-hand is better than nothing—much better if it’s well done. You are sharing the time and effort of the conference—and the expertise of your speakers—far beyond the physical auditorium. That has to be good for your brand—maybe even for your sales!

So engage your audience early and often. Make them active participants, not passive bystanders. Here are two great examples:

The South by Southwest Music & Media Conference is in high gear well in advance of its March 12 kickoff.

Since their beginning about a year ago, Twestivals have taken place around the globe. Twestival Global 2010 is building buzz and will soon announce the nonprofit beneficiary of this year’s event.

Social Networks -- Ubiquitous?

The scariest thing about this report is its conclusion: If your target audience isn’t already on social networks, it probably will be soon! However, according to a study by Anderson Analytics, different audiences will be concentrated on different networks. The soon-to-be-released study was shared with the ReadWriteWeb blog over the weekend; that’s where I found it.

The RWW blog has a good overview of the demographics of users of the 4 major platforms. There’s a substantial amount of overlap in usage. Just visually, it appears that Facebook has the most unique users, followed by MySpace, although the absolute number appears smaller for MySpace. Neither Twitter nor LinkedIn have many unique users. They both have a big overlap with users of Facebook. LinkedIn has almost no “unique overlap” with MySpace.

That squares with a lot of what we already know about users of the 4 platforms. It also provides interesting confirmation of the most interesting report of the day. I found this report from Morgan Stanley on an @mattrhodes Tweet. What makes it intriguing is that it was written by a 15-year old on “work experience.” MS liked it so much they published it, and if your work has anything to do with young people, you ought to read it.

Two quotes:

No teenager that I know of regularly reads a newspaper, as most do not have the time and cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the newssummarised on the internet or on TV. Ouch! Maybe double ouch!!

Facebook is popular as one can interact withfriends on a wide scale. On the other hand, teenagers do not use twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then justleave it as they release that they are not going to update it(mostly because texting twitter uses up credit, and they wouldrather text friends with that credit). In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets’ are pointless. He says it’s about the profile—fascinating!!

The Anderson Analytics study breaks social media users into 4 segments. According to Ad Age:

Anderson's research breaks down general social-media users into four categories: business users, fun seekers, social-media mavens and late followers. Of those, social-media mavens are the key group, not only because of their high incomes and decision-making power at companies but also because their large social-media footprints can make them brand allies and evangelists, Mr. Anderson said. Fun seekers are also an important group because they are the up-and-coming mavens as they transition from students to employees.

The report also segments non users:

Contrary to what some might think, people who spurn social media aren't tech haters. In fact, they spend as much time as social-media fans surfing the web. But they say they don't use social media for three basic reasons: They don't have the time, they don't think it's secure or they think it's stupid. While the first two groups -- which Anderson labels "time-starved" and "concerned" -- may be swayed to join eventually, don't hold out much hope for the last group: 94% said they will never use social media.

Their commentary about the concerned non users is especially interesting:

The concerned non-users are an older demographic (one-third are retired) who don't use social networks because they're worried about their privacy. However, they do recognize value in social media and may join as they become more comfortable with it.

The study also found that almost 50% of the “time-starved” consumers expected to use a social network within a year.

Hence the conclusion: social networks are soon going to be ubiquitous among all except the oldest Internet users—and they may give in also!

There’s more to come from this interesting study. You can follow Tom Anderson’s blog and the Anderson Analytics website—and do a lot of thinking about where/how to best engage with your target audience!

LinkedIn Polls--Uses and Abuses

People have been sending me polls lately. When I see them on news sites, I often don’t answer them. When someone goes to the trouble of emailing it to me, I often do. That said, I can’t remember who sent me a LinkedIn poll about the virtues of advertising during a recession but I answered it, checked to my answer against others (a minority position, I’m sorry to say), then started thinking.
I remembered answering one or two when CNBC partnered with LinkedIn last fall to do what I thought was going to be a daily business poll. CNBC is still doing them, but not regularly. I have the TV set to CNBC several hours most weekdays, and I haven’t heard about them in quite awhile. I don’t see anything on their home page. Do they publicize the polls in daily news alerts? At all? I don’t know.

The Poll app seems to be first cousin to the LinkedIn Answers app (I think you have to be signed in to see both). Either one can be put on your LinkedIn profile page. The Answers page is personalized to interests of the user, presumably issues listed on the user profile. Note that a question about online promotion/advertising by John Batelle is the Featured question on my page when I checked it (clearly they know it’s me; the profile picture is a nice touch to point out that you are identified, non anonymous).
Note that if you want to set up a polling option you can send it to your own network free. If you want to use LinkedIn’s targeting options, you have to upgrade to Premium membership. I didn’t try it because a question to the lovely people in my network “just to see if the app worked” seemed quite spammy to me.

Is this more than just fun and games, social media style? Maybe.

If you have a serious question that matches the expertise of people in your network, it’s worth asking. I would be more inclined to use the Answers app than the Poll for a serious question, so respondents could explain their reasoning.

Can the polls simply be used as an engagement device—clearly the intention of people who have emailed them to me recently? Maybe, but I don’t think you ought to push that unless you have a consistent stream of REALLY INTERESTING questions, and that’s hard. The email I received from a news site asked me to answer the daily poll and to suggest questions. Engaging, but also a suggestion that they don’t have a bright idea for every day! I also ran across a blogger who was annoyed by getting the same poll two days in a row, although my guess is that it was an opt-in. Good point anyway. The rule should be “engage, not annoy.” Where do you draw the line for your own target audience?

I guess I come down on the side of this being a better technique for a specific answer to a professional question than as an ongoing engagement device, whatever your target audience. I have no issue with polls on your page, website, whatever—anywhere they are not intrusive. When you email them to people, they become intrusive, and caution is urged!

Who Owns the Social Network?

I’m still scratching my head over an article I found in a recent newsletter from Foviance, a British customer-experience firm. It describes a recent British court decision that awarded partial contents of an employee’s social network to his employer.

The employeer, Hays Specialist Recruitment, is an executive recruiting firm. The former employee, MarkIons, had set up his own recruiting firm before leaving Hays and used the LinkedIn network he built while in the employment of Hays to solicit business for his new firm. According to the British Computer Weekly (note two interesting links at the bottom of this article):

A court judgment ordered Ions to disclose his LinkedIn business contacts and all e-mails sent to or received by his LinkedIn account from the Hays computer network, but stopped short of requiring him to disclose his entire database of clients, as requested by Hays.

Interesting, as is another article referenced by Foviance in the Times Online in which employees were urged to keep business and social network contacts separate. One, that’s hard to do; and, two, if your business and personal life is as entwined as mine is, you wouldn’t want to anyway.

The Foviance newsletter pointed out that the articles it referenced did not comment on implications beyond this case. The fact that the firms involved are recruiters is probably important, even though contacts are the life blood of other industries also. I wonder if it mattered to the court that the employee had started his business while still employed by Hayes.

This seems counter to what is going on in the US. Not only are there networks springing up all over the place, especially the B2B verticals, there are efforts to move data seamlessly between them. I’ve written about FriendFeed and OpenSocial. There is, in fact, a trade organization devoted to the subject.

So I bring up the issue without knowing whether it is--or will become--a problem. If it does, I don’t know what the best solution would be. But social networks are here to stay, and the business vs. the personal use of them may create issues that need to be considered.

Social Networks and Travel Planning

With another summer weekend approaching, it seems a good time to think about travel. It’s pretty much accepted that the booking of travel has seen a huge shift to the web. When I ask my students they look at me like “is there any other way?” Penetration is not complete, however, as this recent chart from eMarketer (newsletter, June 3, 2008) shows. The Internet is a huge factor, whether or not travel is booked online. Describing results from a study of American families conducted by AOL the newsletter says that, “Almost three-quarters said they used the Internet for vacation planning. Of these Web-savvy consumers, 72% browsed search engines, 58% went to online booking sites, 26% visited consumer testimonial sites and 19% browsed travel information sites.” The web is clearly an important source for these family vacationers, and they are consulting user-generated content as well as travel industry content.

The social aspects of this reminded me of a site a friend brought to my attention when she was planning a business trip several weeks ago. Dopplr is a Finnish site; I was especially interested in the fact that the invitation was delivered by LinkedIn. When I investigated the site, I found that the site allows travelers to share itineries with contacts from Gmail and Facebook, and perhaps others—as well as from LinkedIn. Or you can invite people and create your own network on Dopplr (names in the graphic are not real names).
So this is clearly cool. Most of us have dined alone or attended a concert by ourselves in a strange city, so this is attractive. Whether it’s worth the effort is another question. My guess is that it is not unless you are extremely social or—more likely—a frequent traveler. It’s also nice to see who is going to be in your own city also in case you want to do some networking.

But something else occurred to me. A few companies have pages on LinkedIn; not long ago I wrote about Basho and their LinkedIn Group. It seemed like a cool idea to network B2B customers, but I couldn’t see that there was a lot going on. LinkedIn makes it possible to ask a question to find if contacts are going to be, say, at an upcoming conference. It clearly works but doesn’t seem terribly efficient. Among other things, it seems to depend on people checking their LinkedIn messages. I wonder how many others don’t do that very often.

I’m not sure exactly how to do it, but if a B2B firm or trade organization could use the Dopplr technology to allow people to network at conferences, that seems to be a useful addition to conference services. That would seem to be an idea whose time has come, and Dopplr appears to have the technology to do it!

Basho Builds B2B Community

In response to my post last week on BobKent.net, one of my students sent me a link to the Basho Technologies site—thanks, Noah! This sales training firm is actively working to create a community of “sales leaders” in a way that few other B2B firms are. Besides, I love the Sumo imagery!

They have a number of interactive channels, all of which are under the umbrella of the Basho Community. Their blog, newsletter and library are not unusual for a B2B firm. Podcasting is catching on—slowly—which is too bad because it seems such a natural in B2B markets. Theirs are well organized; for one thing when you go to the podcast page, you can easily make the choice to listen to the MP3 file on your computer or to download it to an iPod or other MP3 device. Making that clear is good for the non-iPod person or the novice user.
The most interesting channel is their LinkedIn group. When I looked, it had 2,927 members. I didn’t join, so I don’t know exactly how they network there, but it’s an impressive accomplishment in terms of size. The other thing that surprised me, considering the popularity of LinkedIn among professionals and the degree to which it is being used for job search and recruiting, is how few Corporate Groups there are. When you look at the corporate groups, most of them are corporate alumni groups. That’s a great way of staying in touch and meeting colleagues, but the paucity of real corporate groups suggests that a lot of B2B firms are missing a good (free!) bet.

They seem to be following the guidelines Jim Leach set down in a thoughtful iMediaConnection article a few days ago. Particularly note that he stresses the need for new metrics to measure the effectiveness of community building in both B2C and B2B markets.

I’m happy to see a firm that is building community around its brand in a strategic way. That seems such a natural in B2B where people have genuine involvement with the products and services they use and like to interact with colleagues who share their interests and often their problems. It is a channel marketers can use to get out their messages. More important, it is a channel in which they can listen to the issues that are important to their customers!
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