Are Top Managers the (Top) Laggards of Social Media?

A white paper published by the Dutch education and strategy consulting firm MarketingMonday reveals that CEOs and CFOs of the biggest Dutch companies (50 corporations from the AEX and AMX  and American companies (first 100 in the Fortune500 list) are to their great majority no users of Social Media. The study was focused on the active use of Facebook, Hyves (the most popular Dutch social networking site), LinkedIn and Twitter in Holland and of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in the US.

The most important findings: biggest corporations top managers' participation in Social Media

Dutch CEOs / CFOs                                                    US CEOs
LinkedIn                         26%                                      LinkedIn                 8%
Facebook                         6%                                      Facebook               7%
Twitter                              1%                                      Twitter                    2%
Hyves                               1%

It is interesting that the penetration of social media is higher among Dutch top managers than their American counterparts. The study also looked to the use of social media by the CEOs of the 100 fastest growing US businesses according to the CNNMoney.com. Surprisingly the percentages are exactly the same as the US 100 biggest corporations!

US CEOs of 100 fastest growing corporations
LinkedIn 8%

Facebook 7%

Twitter 2%


The MarketingMonday report attributes the low adoption rates of social media to eight reasons: Age, Income and Education level, Knowledge, Time, Regulations, Fear, Cultur and Lack of Transparency. They also strongly recommend to CEOs to use social media indeed, mentioning several advantages for them and their company.

I think that age and lack of time are the main reasons for the low adoption of social media by top managers. On the other hand I have serious doubt that a CEO Facebook page will add much to the image of a big corporation. The names of CEOs are largely unknown to the public and few consumers will become friends of them. Those who would possibly be interested to become their friends are other CEOs and top managers who for all intents and purposes are also no users of social media.

Twitter Spam: new headache for the social nedia user?

I don't know about you but my Junk email file has been substantially smaller the last months. Busting some mafia email spam networks seems to be the reason for this but I suspect that the email spam aficionados realize that email spam finds itself in the decline stage of its life cycle. A new form of spam seems to be emerging though. Counting on the increasing popularity of the social media the spammers try now to use these as spam platforms. Twitter spam seems to be the new emerging headache for Twitter users; this takes sometimes very subtle and sophisticated forms. Do we now need a Twitter spam filter? An interesting post in WIRED

Social Media Marketing Isn't a Popularity Contest

For social media marketers it must be about monetizing their social media activities. Part of the inspiration for this approach comes from Wilson Kerr who made a stellar presentation last week on the subject of monetizing mobile media—more about that later. David Carter’s presentation the week before, based on the Social Funnel ebook from Awareness, laid the groundwork. In my blog post I quoted Jeremiah Owyang as saying not to show engagement metrics to C-level executives; they are interested in business results, not a popularity contest.

I watch social media marketers in all markets struggle with this issue. So I decided to pick out one case study each from B2B, B2C and NP. I’ve intentionally chosen small, not terribly well known companies. It may sound easy for Dell to make sales with its Twitter program and Taco Bell to sell chalupas and burritos with coupons distributed on its Facebook page, although it’s less easy than it sounds. But my point is that small companies, even individuals, can do important things in social media if they keep their eyes on the prize—monetizing their activities.

The biggest monetization opportunity in B2B is far and away the generation of qualified leads. Breaking Point is a cyber security firm who says its products “harden the resiliency of vulnerable converged networks and train cyber warriors” to prevent and deter cyber attacks. Are your eyes glazing over already? It’s incredibly important but at first glance it may not seem to be a candidate for social media marketing. Using a corporate blog, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts and a revamped PR strategy, they joined in the online conversation, staking out a position as a respected industry source. After 6 months, 75% of their leads were coming from the inbound traffic generated by these social media activities. Their blog is well organized—a video, a list of topics, the appropriate social media chicklets, and posts that only an IT security professional could love. That is their target audience, after all! Read the details and 5 other excellent B2B case studies in the HubSpot/Marketing Sherpa presentation.

Depending on your age and gender, you may be equally unmoved by the funky shoes that Canadian B2C entrepreneur John Fluevog sells online and from a growing number of retail stores in Canada and the US. According to Australian marketer Ginger, whose blog is credited with this captivating image, Fluevog reported that sales increased 40% in 2009, the year of their entry into social media marketing. If you search the corporate name, John Fluevog Boots & Shoes Ltd., you’ll find an array of social media activities including reviews and a lot of local marketing using Google’s Places. If you look at their Facebook wall, you see a few administrator posts but mostly customers showing off their shoes and loving them. On their Twitter page they cross promote offers seen on the Facebook page and actively respond to customer questions and issues. This nicely integrated social media program (see the links on their wall page) takes time, but not a lot of money. It’s within reach of any small business.

The social media space can be productive for non-profit (NP) marketers also. Dave Morin’s birthday wish is a great story of what a single individual can accomplish. His wish on October 14, 2010 was to raise $10,000 for the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital by the end of the year. He actually raised the $10k within 24 hours! The fundraising continues, with almost $14K to date and mention of a new initiative focusing on children’s health worldwide. In the interest of full disclosure, Dave Morin is hardly a novice. He was a Facebook executive and headed their Causes fund-raising function, which now operates separately. One can assume that he had a large network of Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections with whom to share his message. If you look at the list of contributors, though, most of the $14K has come from small donors. As you can see on the Causes page the largest donor is $1K and I only saw two of those. Reaching many small, often new, donors is the power of online fundraising. I look forward to the day when I see a case history of a NP who used traditional methods to grow social media small donors to traditional large donors and bequests. That should happen over time for NP organizations who harness the power of social media marketing.

There it is—a three market perspective on monetizing social media marketing. Questions, comments and links to other case studies welcome!


Article first published in condensed form as Social Media Marketing Isn't a Popularity Contest on Technorati.

BeKnown to Promote Your Career

Last night I had the pleasure—and fun—of being part of the Networking in the Social Age event hosted by Monster’s new BeKnown Network. It was moderated by Matt Cooney, Social Media Manager at Monster and, I’m happy to note, my former student. Joining me on the panel was a group of young, talented, social media pros: Ryan Paugh, Chief of Staff of the Young Entrepreneur Council, Brent Turner, CTO and VP Product Development at MIT’s Technology Review and Kristen Haley, Social Media Producer for Beantown Social. All of them are experienced in several aspects of the social media world and deeply engaged in it. The panel discussion was live-streamed on the BeKnown Network and I expect it to be archived there soon.


The discussion provided a lot of interesting insights. The most compelling one for me was the sense that, while the large social networks have their place, smaller and more intimate communities may be the wave of the future. Whether it’s a closed Facebook page, or a professional group on LinkedIn—open or closed—or whether it’s a community on any platform of people who are passionate about a subject, these smaller communities have a lot to offer both personally and professionally. @profstrahler Tweeted during the live stream and he pointed out some of the other high points. Thanks, Doug!


It was a good event, the first of many by this new network, I hope. I’ve always worked to help my students prepare for their job searches and career development; having a resource like BeKnown should be a real asset. Take a look at their mission statement on the sidebar of the event notice. Expanding the notion of job search to one of career management that helps people improve their lives is a great vision. The tight integration of the network with Facebook is going to provide a lot of opportunity. The BeKnown landing page has a great video introduction; it is an interesting perspective on merging your personal and professional communications and still controlling messages so they are directed to only the people you want to receive them. Of course they have a mobile app so you can do this on the go, and do it in many languages. Fascinating concept!

I look forward to watching this develop and seeing ways it can benefit today’s students and young professionals. Good going!

The tragedy of the (Social Media) gurus

In this blog I raised a number of times the red flag about the well-known phenomenon of "experts" or "gurus" etc. who mushroom when management hypes erupt. The Social Media hype could not be an exception so with a lot of interest I read the post in the blog of Stephan ten Kate titled (in Dutch*) " The public ends the deception of Social media experts". 
One thing some Social Media experts seem to ignore is that today there are no secrets, the public has the means and the will to scrutinize everything; treating the customer with respect is now the rule. In the good old days we would say that one unhappy customer might talk about the bad experiences to 10-12 others. Today an unhappy customer can reach thousands or even millions with his/her bad experience. The Social Media have made today the Word Of Mouth potential advantage but also a substantial risk factor for those making unsubstantiated and bases product (or service) claims. The post of Stephan shows clearly what the power of the Social Media is; he talks also about this in his reflection.
*For non-Dutch speakers a Google translation could help at least for the text!

Do You Believe Zuckerberg's Law of Social Sharing?

It’s being equated to Moore’s Law of early Internet days; the now-validated prediction that computing power will double every two years as costs fall by half. I don’t know whether it meets that standard, but here’s what Zuckerberg originally said in 2008:

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he said. “That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.”

My attention was drawn to this by a recent infographic on a Bloomberg Business Week site—more about that in a minute. The infographic is too large to reproduce easily, but it has some interesting factoids. Of course, the growth numbers are based on the Z. prediction; it’s not clear whether they used actual Facebook numbers to validate them. Whether the sharing figures are accurate (and who could tell with precision anyway??) the phenomenon is real. I found some other interesting things while looking around.

Aol & Nielsen content sharing study

View more presentations from Mitya Voskresensky

The consumer behavior behind sharing is important. There is a recent study by Nielsen for AOL that is worth paging through. Among other things, it finds that email is still the most-used sharing tool although social networks, especially Facebook, are gaining fast. Most Internet users share but they share different content on different networks. That’s interesting and important to the marketer who wants to have her content shared.

The difficulty of doing that was brought home to me by this chart. It is the multichannel options for the ShareThis multichannel bar. I use the simple icon on this site and it’s reliable and it produces interesting analytics. They’ve also added a real-time widget that other bloggers or website owners might enjoy. There are a lot of options here: how does the marketer select the best ones? Start with any analytics you can get. You might want to test different options of a multichannel sharing bar, although you don’t want to confuse your visitors. Finally, you might resort to marketing research among key users or the most avid sharers on your site. You have to understand the behavior of your own target audience.

Marketers also struggle every day with issues of keeping up with their discipline, given the torrent of content. I ran into two interesting services. The infographic I referred to was created by Summify, a personal service that creates a daily summary of news from the user’s social networks and sends it by email, to the desktop, or by mobile. The infographic was posted on a BBW beta site called Business Exchange. It describes itself as a social sharing site, with items “filtered by like-minded professionals.” Those professionals can view, comment, and suggest new topics. I don’t see a distribution tool, but if there’s not one, it will probably come.

These services represent two different and interesting approaches to taming the torrent of social sharing. They fall short, however, of actual content curation, adding expert judgement to the equation, as practiced by Huffington Post and others.

It’s a big world, full of content. The job of marketers is to make their content entertaining, relevant, and worthy of social sharing. A big job indeed!

Social Media Welcomes a New Country

I intended to shut down the blog for the summer with a summary of some of the recent changes on Facebook. This is more important and it’s an interesting commentary on the power of the media for good.

If you missed the reporting in October when George Clooney and John Prendergrast of the Enough Project were lobbying in Washington, D.C., you need to watch this video. If you saw the reporting then, it is worth watching again to see that what they, and others, were trying to do apparently worked. Clooney’s comments about the prevention of suffering without spending money on an avoidable crisis are powerful.

Watch the video here.

The visible outcome is the establishment of the new country, South Sudan, this Saturday, July 9. There is a welcome ceremony planned on social media. You can like the Facebook page, or Tweet using the hashtag #Welcome193 (South Sudan will be the 193rd nation to join the United Nations). Or you are welcome to post a link or part or all of this blog post on your own blog. But do something, and as you do, think about the power of social media.

The blog will start up again sometime in September, roughly coinciding with the beginning of the Social Media Marketing course at Harvard Extension for the fall semester.

Have a wonderful summer!

3 Pressing Questions Facing the Future of Social Media

Soren Gordhamer is the organizer of the Wisdom 2.0 Conference, which brings together staff from Google, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga along with Zen teachers and others to explore living with awareness and wisdom in our modern age. He is SorenG on Twitter.

The conversation about social media in our society is shifting significantly. We’re no longer asking questions like, “Will people use social media?” or “Are sites like Facebook and Twitter simply trends that will soon lose steam?” After billions of tweets and 600 million people on Facebook, it’s settled: People want to share online. And with Facebook moving toward a $100 billion valuation, there is money to be made.

The emerging conversation is not if we will be connected but is instead, “How can we effectively and productively connect?” Now that we can get constant updates on just about every aspect of our friends’ lives, how do we receive that which is relevant?

New paradigms are beginning to emerge as user habits shift toward greater relevancy. The companies that successfully address these changes will have a huge advantage over those that don’t.

1. The Distraction Question

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How do we live continually connected without being continually distracted?

A recent survey from social email software provider harmon.ie found that individual employees are burning an average of $10,375 in productivity each year. Why? “Because we don’t disconnect from an online chat quickly enough, or we get sidetracked by a bulging email inbox, or we fall into a Facebook hole of photos, updates and messages.”

In a recent blog post titled “The Twitter Trap,” Bill Keller, the executive editor (for not much longer) of The New York Times, writes about the challenges of staying focused. “The most obvious drawback of social media is that they are aggressive distractions.” He continued, “Every time my TweetDeck shoots a new tweet to my desktop, I experience a little dopamine spritz that takes me away from … from … wait, what was I saying?”

While the range of content we could access was once exciting, people are realizing they need to know as much about how to turn off their stream than how to turn it on. The question is no longer, “How can I know what my friends are doing or thinking at any given time?” We have solved that for the most part. Social media that finds the right balance of when and how to update us, and which gives us control over such notifications, will win in the long run.

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2. The Filter Question

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How do we filter the stream to get what is most essential?

In the early days of Twitter, your feed would show the @replies of everyone you followed. For some, it created an excess of irrelevant information. Twitter changed this functionality (to the initial chagrin of many users) to only include tweets directed at users that were mutually followed. It effectively streamlined Twitter feeds and removed information clutter. Most users have since come around to accept that this was the right move for Twitter amid its exponential growth.

Twitter’s focus on relevance is echoed in the activities of other web giants like Google and Facebook. They are attempting to do the filtering for us, such that we only see what they think most interests us.

Some people, like MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser, see a danger in this. In a recent TED talk, he describes the “filter bubble” as “your own personal unique universe of information that you live in online.” More and more, we see only what companies think we want to see. For example, we might receive different Google search results than our neighbor, since the rankings are now based more and more on what Google knows about us. And even if we have the same Facebook friends as our neighbor, we will be shown very different updates, as Facebook defaults to showing us only things related to what we click on and share the most.

Three elements are important here. First, the means of filtering needs to be transparent. We need to know what the filtering is based on. Second, we need choice in that filtering to help make it relevant to us. And third, there needs to be a non-filtering (or non-personalized) option. For example, if we can see a personalized Google search, we also need the choice for a non-personalized one.

The companies that can do this will succeed in gathering user trust and engagement. The question is not if filtering is needed but rather how that filtering happens and the level of choice and transparency in the process.

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3. The Capacity Question

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How much social media can I actually consume?

Along these same lines is the third issue of capacity. As more an more media are integrated into social networks every day, we’re growing accustomed to knowing just about everything our friends are doing, thinking, watching and listening to. On one level, this is awesome. On another, it makes balancing other people’s life updates and living your own life that much more challenging.

Mark Zuckerberg argued last week that people tend to want more than they think. Recalling the implementation of Facebook’s News Feed feature, he said, “People thought that, you know, it was just too much. They wanted to share stuff on the site, but they didn’t want it to be so much in people’s face. You know now it’s just part of the site that I think most people in a way would be like, ‘What’s going on? How can there be Facebook without this?’”

At some point, though, we reach a capacity. There is only so much time in a day. Dave Morin’s company,Path, which gives users a maximum of 50 friends, is one step toward a shifting paradigm. Other efforts that build limits into the system will likely emerge to support people in search of this balance.

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Get Ready – It’s Only Going To Increase

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If you think you have a challenge now managing your tweets, emails, Facebook posts and texts, hold on to your hat. This is just the beginning. According to a recent blog post from Cisco Systems, “In 2010, there were 12.5 billion devices connected to the Internet. Looking to the future, Cisco IBSG predicts there will be 25 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2015, and 50 billion by 2020.”

Both the types of information we can share will dramatically increase, and the number of people from whom we can receive this content will also grow. Essentially, we will have many more people creating significantly more content.

Providing people more ways to share online is no longer the challenge. That was the old paradigm. A new paradigm of relevancy is emerging, which goes beyond the question of whether “to follow or not follow” or “to friend or not friend.” Companies need to see that their job is not to provide us data, or even keep us updated — it is to serve our needs.

And people have a need to not only receive a constant flow of information but also to get quality information in ways that add benefit to their lives. The social networks and web companies that remember this will stand the best chance of success in the future.

The myth of the Generation Einstein

Conventional wisdom suggests that Generation Y, also known as Millenials and widely known in Holland as Generation Einstein following the book of Boschma and Groen, are among other things Media Smart: “Since they were babies, they have been confronted with the media – they understand advertising and have become the ultimate experts. They only need to see the advertisement to know what the marketing strategy of the company is” (http://www.generationeinstein.com/).
I do not know where such ideas are founded on but my impression is that they are based more on fiction than on facts. For sure the millenials have grown in a media-dominated society but they media smartness is limited since they are heavily exposed to one medium only, namely the Internet: they watch much less TV, read almost nothing on paper (except maybe their school text books) including newspapers and they listen much less to the radio than their parents. This one-sided exposure can never make them experts in advertising as the above quote claims. In fact on this point I would rather argue the contrary: Their almost blind faith to everything published online as the absolute truth makes it sometimes impossible to make a distinction between reality and commercial messages. I do not have any hard evidence to support this argument, maybe some research on this would be useful. However there is some evidence already that the Millenials despite their reputation as Media Smart do in fact very superficial and limited use of even the Internet and more specifically of the Social Media: A recent study of my M&G colleagues van Velzen, Bondarouk and Klerks indicates that most of the Generation Y online users are passive information consumers. A recent study we conducted among VWO 5 and 6 children confirms this findings, pointing also to the fact that the vast majority of this segment is using the Social Media for entertainment rather than anything else. The percentage of these children who are actively creating and contribute content online is negligible.
My conclusion is that often the reality can be different than the perception. Again I would argue for more research in this area and a consistent follow-up of the trends here in a longitudinal study. As about the term Generation Einstein we should use Einstein’s name more carefully!

A Real World Social Media Spin-Off

This post is from the Tweetstream of @mattrhodes from the UK agency Fresh Networks. He and his colleagues come up with things I would not be aware of otherwise, and I'm grateful!

I'm also an Anglophile and a huge fan of the National Trust and all they do, so their take off on Farmville definitely caught my attention.

What a clever concept! The idea of letting people become sort of virtual farmers and have control over this farm is fascinating. What a good way to get people involved in the production of their food and the protection of the land on which it's grown. This is also a different take on Community Sponsored Agriculture and a really engaging one. Plus who can resist a cow who looks this sweet?

All in all, it's something I'm going to enjoy following and hope some of my friends will get some good ideas.

Is Social Media Marketing interesting for B2B?

This is a standard question I get every time I talk about Social Media Marketing to audiences including people from the B2B domain. For many social media is strongly associated with B2C marketing while industrial marketers seem to be quite enthusiastic about it. A recent post in BtoB Magazine gives some nice examples of B2B applications of Social Media; for those interested in some stats I suggest to look to the E-Marketer  and this post of Brian Solis. An older report of Marketing Sherpa also indicates that B2B marketers are enthousiastic about social media as part of their marketing strategy. (see table below)

Conclusion is that there is enough talk and evidence about B2B and social media marketing and it seems that industrial marketers are equally (if not more) excited about it than their B2C counterparts. Let's wait for the first scientific evidence on this, I will keep you up-to-date here.

Is This the Ultimate Local Marketing?

This email crossed my desk on Wednesday. I looked at it as possible spam, then I realized that the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce legitimately had my email address, so I read it. I had never heard of Try It Local, but it didn’t take me long to find it on the web.

It’s an interesting concept. This program is specifically designed for Chambers of Commerce who want to bring business to their towns. Local marketing programs are ideal for the small businesses that make up the core of chamber memberships around the country, so that seemed reasonable.

The deal of the week floated into my inbox today. It’s for a well-regarded local restaurant, although I must admit that I found the size of the deal underwhelming. Many of the features are similar to Groupon (Boston page), Gowalla and other location-based services. The main difference is that there does not seem to be a minimum number of purchasers to establish the deal. I’ve gone back to the offer several times while writing this and people are buying it in numbers that seem reasonable for this resort area in the off season.

So this platform may not be as social as some of the others, but that also seems to suit the small business environment. There are, however, social elements. The ad for what I think is a chamber of commerce publication shows “likes.” It has icons that link to the restaurant’s web page and Facebook page. It has no easy-to-use Share icons, which I think is an oversight.

But all in all, it seems well done. It appears to me to be the ultimate local marketing (for now at least) because of the program sponsorl. Chambers of commerce know the small businesses in their area and should have the trust needed to get small businesses to participate. That may not be too much of an issue. At one promotion per week, I wonder if there will be a queue lining up to participate in what seems to be a business-friendly promotion , run by a local entity not an unknown firm somewhere. That seems likely!

And that may be the main downside. Are consumers becoming so accustomed to these deals that they won’t buy anything unless there is a promotion attached to it? It happened with cars. It could happen with local businesses also. And is that in any way different from the sales and promotions they currently offer? I’m not sure. What I am pretty sure of is that this email-based program costs them less than advertising in their local newspaper. The one that loses here is the newspaper.

Try It Local points out that the program offers benefits to the chambers also, so it appears to be a win-win for them and the local businesses. For the moment, it is the most truly local deal program that I know of. Do you know of others that have a similar model?