Tag Archives: Facebook

Social is the future

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I love this quote from Facebook’s Bret Taylor on the future of the social web. I think he’s right.  The products that will win in the future will be able to help us extract value out of our relationships in a variety of ways to improve our experiences online and off.  And, it’s early days.

Bret Taylor of Facebook

One thing that Mark and I have talked a lot about is how the services that will be the most successful in the future will be ones that are built with social functionality in mind from day one. That’s what we’ve seen with the gaming industry. My favorite game growing up was Sim City. If you were to build that socially, you’d make all these changes — neighbors would make a difference, you’d build cities that are competitive to your friends’ cities. Social experiences in products can create an immense amount of value. Products like the Wii took something that was previously solitary and made it fun by involving family.

Photo and quote via Q & A: Facebook’s Bret Taylor on privacy, the transition from FriendFeed | VentureBeat.

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Content is King: Your Social Media Content Strategy

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content_strategyToday I had the privilege of speaking at UCLA‘s Anderson School of Management at the BizSoMe (biz sum) conference about creating an effective social media content strategy.  Content is more than just information, content objects are critical hubs of conversation – they are social objects that get consumed, shared and manipulated by the viewing audience.  By deliberately planning a social media content strategy companies can increase engagement and achieve their business goals by leveraging social networks and their inherent content sharing features.

In this talk I focused on content strategy from a high-level view and then looked at it specifically for Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Flickr.  Unfortunately I ran out of time and had to skip past much of the Twitter and Flickr portions of the talk.

A couple of notes:

A couple of people asked for recommendations about custom Facebook Pages. Here are a few options:

Any other questions? Drop me an email or connect with me on Twitter.  And feel free to add me on LinkedIn.

Content is King – Your Social Media Content Strategy

Social Media Content Strategy: Content is King

View more presentations from Morgan Brown.
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Responsibility

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If you’re reading this it’s a good bet that you are probably responsible for marketing your company in one form or another.  And if so, instead of another list of things to do in 2010, or another pile of resolutions to stick to for the first 6 weeks, I simply ask that you take responsibility to work on your craft in 2010.  I promise to do the same.

What does work on your craft mean?

It means refusing to be comfortable.  Resisting the urge to feel satisfied.  Remaining curious. Reading, thinking, pondering, improving, pushing, testing, trying, failing and succeeding.

The world is full of too many people who think they’ve done and seen it all.  I talk with digital marketers every day who still say Twitter and Facebook are fads.  Who still think digital marketing comes down to email, search and a Web site.  And that is the mark of someone letting their responsibility slide.

We owe it to ourselves, our colleagues, our profession, our families to continue to learn and push and get better.  Sitting still is the quickest route to irrelevancy in today’s world.

So I implore you (and me) to take responsibility for our craft as marketers. To refuse to know it all, to refuse to be satisfied and to open our eyes to what’s happening right in front of us and start asking questions – about it all.

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The Art of Access

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Access. It’s what everyone wants.  Access to the best events, access to the famous people.  If the adage “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is true (and, it is) then access is what gets you to the “who” that can make a difference.  But, more often than not, meeting the “who” that matter is a pipe dream – and any interaction is often little more than a passing handshake in the hall of a conference or a feeble “great panel” comment as you stand in a sea of others all clamoring to meet the person you really want to know.

Gaining access is an art. An art that they don’t teach you in business school, but one that changes everything, from the events you attend to the people that you meet to the jobs that you get.  It is the secret to getting to wherever it is you’re going.

Here are the key principles in gaining access:

Pre-Gaming

If you’re not pre-gaming conferences and events you’re killing your chances at gaining access.  You or your company have spent hundreds or thousands of dollars to get you to an event (say, South By Southwest); you can’t simply walk-in without doing any prep work and expect to successfully connect with the people you want to meet.  These people have schedules at these events that are booked weeks in advance and your chances of just “running into” these people are zero. Do your homework.

  • Identify who will be at the event ahead of time
  • Make a “hit list” of people you want to meet
  • Mine Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to learn about the events outside of the conference (often unofficial) that will provide better settings to have a meaningful interaction
  • For your hit list: read their blog posts, twitter stream and articles so that you can talk intelligently to these people about topics that are important to them

Create a Platform

The people you want to meet are the same people that everyone else wants to meet.  Typically, you and everyone are not the people they want to meet, they want to meet with their friends and business associates.  Bottom line: they are busy.  In order to break through the noise and get a meaningful interaction with them you need to bring value.  And this is not about what your company does for its customers.  It’s about how you can help promote and advance the interests of the individual you want to meet.

You can do this by creating a platform that can help distribute their message and further their own goals.  For example at SXSW we created a platform called 100 interviews.  We went around and asked the top 100 social media and technology people if they would be willing to be interviewed on video as a part of this “experiment” at SXSW.  It took 4 days and we met and had meaningful interactions with people that you can only dream of.

Why did it work?

  • We created a platform – 100 interviews – that gave us a coherent and easily understandable value proposition for the participants.  Get your message out, be involved with 99 other luminaries, be part of the project.
  • We created value for them – a distribution network across all online video sites tied to a big, recognizable event (SXSW)
  • We played off of SXSW’s theme – by calling the project an experiment we played to the collaborative nature of SXSW.  People want to be a part of a cutting-edge way of doing things and participating in something novel.
  • We used social proof

Using Social Proof

Social proof is essential to gaining access.  It is the proof that gives the people you want access to confidence that you’re worth their time.  It is also the engine that drives the momentum of your access.  The concept is simple.  You get one notable person to say yes to get the next, and so on, until you’ve lined up meetings or interviews with everyone else you want to meet.  And it’s just like bowling pins – get one key individual and you can leverage that agreement to connect with the next person.

How to use social proof:

  • Make yourself look bigger than you are – If we had randomly asked people to interview them, they would want to know who we were and for what purpose.  Instead we created a powerful hook “100 interviews” that instantly created an easy-to-understand premise.
  • Create a presence – We instantly launched a web site, Twitter account and YouTube channels. By having these concrete elements people could validate what we were doing.
  • Use commitments to gain other commitments – We publicly announced when we secured big commitments. By Twittering and posting those commitments on our site we were able to validate our project and get more people involved.

Create Buzz

Promote. Promote. Promote.  We promoted 100 interviews like crazy in the days leading up to the event.  We asked our friends to Tweet about it on Twitter, we posted our commitment updates on our blog and tweeted them out.  By generating buzz we created additional credibility to what we were doing.  After a few days the people we contacted said “oh, you’re the 100 interviews guys!” Having the buzz gave us credibility and helped us gain even more commitments.

How to create buzz:

  • Create a brand – 100 interviews had a nice ring to it. We supported it with a logo, web site, Twitter handle and YouTube channel.
  • Cash in your Whuffie – Whuffie is social currency, the goodwill you accumulate with people you’ve helped in the past. It’s time to cash some in and ask people you know to help spread the word. Reach out on Twitter, email, Facebook, whatever, to ask them to help get the word out.
  • Leverage online tools – Create Facebook fan pages, event pages, a WordPress blog, a Twitter account, and more. Give people every possible way to interact and promote what you’re doing.

Make it Count

Look, even with a great platform and buzz you still have just one interaction with a person you want to meet.  Sure – it’s a more meaningful interaction than just shaking hands after a panel, but it is just one.  And one does not make a relationship.  The best way to move from interaction to relationship is to follow up afterwards. And follow up quickly and personally.

Write a personal thank you note to every person you met and interviewed.  Make it handwritten, and get it out the door in a week.  This will make you stand out from the rest of the folks who simply drop emails or Twitter direct messages.  Then, follow the person on Twitter, interact when appropriate and keep in-touch with them periodically.  Then when you see them at the next event you’ll have another reason to say hi and chat for a few minutes.

Guess what?  You now have access.  Welcome to your new world.

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The difference between ad:tech and Blogworld

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I’m at ad:tech this week.  I just spent the last 10+ hours in a booth talking to people about online advertising.  All the big online agencies are here, WPP, Digitas, TribalDDB, etc. etc.  The big online players are here too, Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, etc. etc.  And I’m here.  A couple of weeks off of my trip to BlogWorld and New Media Expo.  And to be honest, I might as well be on another planet.  If BlogWorld represents the latest in social media and where the internet is going, ad:tech represents Web 1.0 and its desire to cling on to its cash cow with white knuckles.

The event is so amazingly different that I wanted to share with you some of the drastic differences that I noticed while grinding out a day at the booth.

Foursquare: When I checked in on Foursquare at BlogWorld there were nearly 50 people checked in, and it remained that way over the course of 2+ days.  Fatburger had a special offer running on the service for free burger samples.  When I checked in at ad:tech there were a whopping 7 people checked in and none of the exhibitors were running any type of Foursquare promotion.  Since ad:tech is at least 4 or 5 times the size of BlogWorld I’d call that a vote of no confidence for the hottest location-based social network.

Twitter: I was very conscious of the stream at #bwe09 and have been monitoring #adtechny and #adtech in the stream to see if I could glean anything off of what is happening here at ad:tech.  The streams are completely different.  BlogWorld was a river of quotes, nuggets of information from panels, information and feedback from sessions and crowd feedback as they interacted with panels.  People using it to connect and meet up.  ad:tech?  None of that. Just promotional tweets from companies trying to drive traffic to their booths.  (Disclosure, we did it too.) Sessions weren’t tweeted, no one was quoted in the tweets. No one challenged speakers and ideas via the Twitter feed.  Nothing.  It was simply a bullhorn for brands looking for foot traffic.

The Schedule: Social media is not the core of the agenda.  It’s a tangential.  It’s a channel to push advertising through.  It’s all about how to monetize eyeballs. Nothing about conversation, nothing about connecting as people – all about how to spend ad dollars there effectively as a brand.  Even Facebook is here with the tag line “reach people before they start searching” [for the competition on Google].  Social isn’t about a new way of connecting with a community here – it’s another arm on the wheel of digital strategy where people are trying to find a way to throw dollars at it while justifying it to their clients.

The Money: The one thing that is here that wasn’t necessarily at Blogworld is the money.  The money is definitely here.  The ad buyers, the strategists, the big agencies that represent the Fortune 10 brands with multi-million dollar online budgets are here.  You don’t see them at Blogworld.  We started to see some more big brands at Blogworld with Ford and Bud Light; but those two sponsors are just two of a constellation of hundreds here.

What this means?

The people that control the money have yet to make the leap.  They’re still 1.0.  I’d argue that most of the industry is still 1.0.  It’s all ad networks, pay-per-something-or-other business models all about driving traffic, reach and views.  Things like loyalty, engagement and reaching a passionate community are all secondary to the traditional metrics, and social is just another channel to throw ad dollars at to maximize impressions and reach of traditional media campaigns.

It’s eye-opening to me, as someone who embraces the new media and social marketing community to the fullest to see how far behind the money and the people really are.  The people talking here aren’t talking about human connections and building lasting relationships between companies and people, they’re talking about how to extend banner networks to socnets.

It’s a different mind set.  It’s an old mind set.  It’s a scary mind set when you consider how many millions of dollars are managed by these people.

My Challenge to ad:tech

It’s time to start listening.  It’s time to bring in some of the social media people who are on the bleeding edge and really learn.  Stop thinking of social media as just another avenue for your media buyer/traffic department to spend ad dollars at and start thinking about what it means for your clients, what it means to how your brand interacts with real people online.

There are real people out there, who given the chance and a good reason will do the work of your ad dollars.  Tell your clients to spend their money differently, to think about their customers differently, and to figure out ways to delight their customers rather than simply finding the next sucker.

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4C’s of Personal Branding

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I’m still working on my keynote on Building a Personal Brand for November 7th.  I think I’ve come up with a framework for the talk that I’m happy with, now I just need to round it out and execute on the actual presentation.  One of the things I came up with in my brainstorming for the talk was what I’m calling the “Foundation of the Personal Brand” which is based on the 4c’s (not dissimilar to the diamond industry.)

I’d like to share those 4c’s with you here and see if you agree with them as the cornerstones to building a successful personal brand.

The 4c’s to a successful personal brand

Character - Character and integrity are at the base of everything.  Plenty has been written about authenticity, transparency and ethics when it comes to creating asuccessful brand on the Web.  I believe it speaks for itself and goes without saying that to win in the long run you have to be true to yourself and true to others.  You also have to have the mindset of helping others with what you’re doing.  If you’re not out to help others you’ll be talking to yourself.  Without character, without integrity and the desire to help others you’ll never be successful in the long term – with a personal brand or any other effort.

Commitment – Building a personal brand using social media tools is not a sprint.  Using social media to create a personal brand is the longest path to overnight success there is.  Building a personal brand is a marathon.  It requires a persistent consistency.  Without that commitment to success you’ll stop before you even get started.  You won’t make the connections  and you won’t create the body of work to demonstrate your expertise.  Without a true commitment to it you’ve lost before you’ve begun.

Create – Goes hand-in-hand with commitment.  The most well-recognized and successful social media luminaries create tons of valuable content.  You have to give to get.  Pay in with amazing content, insight and opinion and you will be rewarded.  Spend all your time on Facebook and Twitter and you won’t create the foundation of thinking that will give you the respect that you’ll need to propel yourself forward in your career/life.  Sure, you can build a viral following on Twitter by being witty; but that’s like catching lightning in a bottle.  Lay a solid foundation of your expertise by creating valuable content.

Connect – None of this is worth very much without connections to other people.  If you’re not building relationships with people in your industry you’re not going to find the success and recognition that you need to cement your personal brand.  While some of this is self-promotional, it is primarily being earnest in trying to connect with people in your industry that you can help and learn from.  This is where getting offline is critical. Sure, meeting people on Twitter or in the comments of your blog is a great way to break the ice; but the relationships really get built at conferences, mixers, meetups, tweetups and other real world gatherings.  You need to find the ones you need to be at and get to them one way or another.  If there aren’t any in your area, start them.  There is no way to succeed without connecting.

So what do you think? What are your building blocks for a successful personal brand?  Brad had a great comment in my last post about being yourself which is dead on.  What am I missing? Do you like these or not? How would you change/add/subtract to/from them?

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If you’re not using Facebook search you don’t know what you’re missing

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Tonight while I was going through some of the different social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook I decided to do a search on the name of the company I work for “TurnHere.” Now I do this regularly and automatically on Twitter and the Web. I use Google Alerts to monitor for TurnHere mentions on the Web (they’re pumped into my Google Reader), I have a column of Tweetdeck assigned just to listen for TurnHere in the Twitterverse and we have a paid subscription to Scout Labs for monitoring the brand.

But I hadn’t drilled down on Facebook search yet with the brand name and none of the above tools give you insight into that community. Talk about opportunity. The new and improved Facebook search is a gold mine for opportunities to connect with people who are talking about your brand or topic of interest. Previously, Facebook would only search people, names, events, pages and groups. But now that they have added status updates in the search it’s a whole new world.

Take a look at what I saw in the results for TurnHere (note that these are just my friends, you can also click on “Posts by Everyone” below the “Posts by Friends for a broader view, note you’ll typically only be able to interact or engage with your friends depending on people’s privacy settings):

Facebook search

Don is looking forward to his TurnHere shoot next week. That’s a great piece of information and an opportunity for me to engage with him around that. Is he feeling ready? Excited? Nervous? Can I answer any last minute questions for him? Or can I just give him a word of encouragement and let him know that we’re excited to see the finished video? All sorts of opportunities are there to create a meaningful connection with Don around his video shoot experience.

Or further down the page:

Facebook search 2

With Debbie I have the chance to help spread the word about her new video and also check in to see how everyone felt about the shoot and the finished product. The same for Cindy.

Lastly, notice the note from Paulo (who works with me at TurnHere) and the retweet posted to his Facebook profile about the kind words some gave about a recent speaking opportunity I had. This is a great find for me personally and allows me to reach out to that person and thank them and see if there is anything I can do to help them out as well. I am also able to add that kudo to my speaking page which will hopefully give people more confidence in extending speaking invitations to me and helping me grow that part of my career.

So now I know to make sure that Facebook search is a regular part of my brand and personal monitoring to catch more opportunities to interact with people talking about TurnHere.

For reference here are the tools that I use to monitor personal and brand mentions:

More than just brand mentions:

Obviously search goes just beyond monitoring brand mentions.  It can be used to find people talking about the things your company does or areas of interest to you personally.  It could be about events or needs or anything really.  Search across these networks is a powerful way to identify opportunities to make new connections and grow your influence, whether for your brand or yourself.

Check it out and let me know what your tips are for using search to build and strengthen your network!

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Which Way is Up?

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Lately I’ve been asked to speak more and more on social media and online marketing. I love it because as a geek I’m thrilled that people are starting to pay attention to the powerful opportunities that are available to people who understand and make the Web an important part of their customer relationships.  Unfortunately most people start with questions like “Do I need to be on Twitter?” or “How do I put video on my Facebook Page?”  And so I counter with my favorite question, “What does success look like?”

Usually I get a stammering answer about community, new customers or something about being “with it.”  It’s astonishing to me that so many people can invest time, effort and money into an initiative without knowing what outcome they’re looking for.

Define “Which Way is Up”

So, let’s not let that be you.  If you’re going to start using social media for your business first answer the question “What does success look like?”  Write down what you’re trying to achieve.  This doesn’t have to be rocket science; but it should be goals that you can track to.  This will be your “up” and once you define your “up” you’ll be able to see how you’re doing and what you can be doing to optimize your climb to success.

One thing to caution against is thinking purely in terms of closed sales and transactions.  Those are important; but we have to look at the reality of the social space in terms of generating short-term revenue.  Of course, social media can provide closed sales; but the medium is not transactional in nature, and it’s relational foundation makes it unwelcoming to quick transactions.  By definition it favors meaningful and trusting relationships that are fostered over time and pay dividends over the long run.

Bottom line, if you’re looking for a quick sale let’s look at Google Ad Words.  If you’re looking to build something of lasting value, let’s keep going.

If you’re not looking for immediate transactions (although we’ll take them if they come through) what are you looking to do?  In my opinion what you want to do is build assets.  Assets like an opt-in email newsletter, a Facebook Page with fans of your business, a Twitter following comprised of the people who are important to your business’s success.  All of these allow you to create an ongoing dialog and relationship with your customers, suppliers and potential customers.

Back to “up,” consider both qualitative measures as well as quantitative measures.  Here are a few things to think about:

  • Number of conversations you have with followers, fans, email list subscribers
  • Growth of all three assets over time
  • Number of mentions of your product or service over time
  • Number of referrals of your product or service over time
  • Number of comments, tweets, retweets, Facebook posts over time
  • Number of times your email newsletter is opened, forwarded
  • Number of times blog posts are shared
  • Number of reviews on Yelp (positive, negative, neutral)
  • Number of sales, repeat sales, referred sales
  • Average purchase size of members vs. non-members

To make sure you focus not just on the short term think of your success in terms of not just what’s in it for you; but answer the question “What’s in it for the people engaging with me online?”  By keeping that question at the front of your thinking while defining your goals you’ll find that you create success for both you and the people important to your business.  Avoiding one-sided benefit thinking ensures that you’re thinking of your customers and suppliers, etc. as partners in your success and not just as leads, cost centers and transactions.

Remember, you create your own definition of success; these are a just a few items to get you started.

How are you doing?

Once you’ve created your definition of success you need to properly track against those goals to see how you’re trending.  You can do this through a variety of tools such as the Facebook Page insights, Google Analytics, and social media monitoring tools like Scout Labs, Radian6 (for bigger firms), Twitalyzer and other tools.

The goal should be to keep the KPIs (key performance indicators) lightweight enough so that you can easily manage tracking them, while being robust enough to give you a clear indication of your success or shortcomings.

Then once you measure you need to watch for trends or turning points that may provide insight into the success (or lack thereof) of your efforts.  For example you may be trending below your goal Fan number on Facebook, or you may be seeing a jump in the number of reviews you’re receiving on Yelp.  Either way, for each number look at what the data is telling you.  Are you trending up? Trending down? Not making any progress or shooting through the roof?

Course Correcting

The greatest part about measuring is that it gives you the ability to see where you have opportunity for improvement.  It’s not just a gut reaction about whether something is working or not; but rather real insight that can help you refine and continuously improve or correct to get to your desired end state.  For example, if you’re tracking the number or tweets your blog articles get you may find some that resound more than others.  By having that data handy you can review your most-shared posts for clues on how you can continue to get that level of engagement across more of your content.

Of course this goes for traditional measures like Web traffic too.  If you track the number of conversions of people to your site to a desired goal (say placing an order, filling out a contact form, downloading a menu, etc.) then you can test different tweaks to your Web site copy, images, layout, etc. to see if you can optimize for that goal.  For example I recently tested the effectiveness of two lines of new Web copy on a form I had developed. By adding those two lines of copy and simplifying a couple of other elements on the page I saw a 3x increase in number of conversions I was getting.  A huge success.

The more data you have the more you can course correct on the fly.  It gives you the ability to reach your goals and turn lagging efforts into winners.  Without the data you can’t tell which way is up.

Constantly Test

The beauty of the Web is you can continuously test and benchmark.  Once you set a new high water mark you can use that as the number to beat.  If you have a certain number of Facebook fan signups you’re looking for over a given month you can track week over week signups.  If you run a giveaway or promotion in one week and get 100, and the previous week you got 50, you can learn from that giveaway and see what you can do to get 150 for the following week. Probably not the most elegant example; but I hope you get the point.  By continually refining and using bench marks you can continually optimize your social media efforts to reach your defined success.

And it’s not just good for you

While we’ve focused on your efforts in this post it’s important to look at the flip side of this article as well.  If people are signing up to your Facebook page or tweeting your articles you’re doing something right.  You’re providing them information, content an experience, or some benefit that is attracting more people to you.  Bravo.  If you’re headed in the wrong direction it gives you an opportunity to ask why aren’t people engaged with what I’m doing here?  Am I not listening to what they want? Am I blatantly, overly self-promoting?  Am I a bore?

You can make sure that you keep your focus on the people important to your business by defining your goals and successes as mutual successes.  This way you’ll be sure that your efforts are not solely driven based on what you want but rather on what is beneficial to both you and the people your business relies on to succeed.

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If you’re a small business about to make the social media leap…

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Here are a handful of things that I’d do right away.

Give yourself some time to do it well.  Everything is fairly easy, except for the blog.  Writing blog content takes time, is not easy at first, and of course has some of the best potential of any of the items above.

Once you’ve done that you should make it a regular habit to do the following:

  • Watch Google Alerts that mention your business and also check your Yelp! page.  If someone is talking about you, feel free to respond in an honest, open, friendly manner.  Build relationships.
  • Tell your friends and family about your new social media presence.  Ask them to follow and Fan you.
  • Find people that are interesting to you on Twitter through directories like WeFollow and by conducting searches about your local area or areas of interest using search.twitter.com. Follow them.
  • Start talking to them. Not pitching, not selling, but talking.
  • Feel free to provide special offers to your Facebook, Twitter or Yelp fans. Check out Luna Park’s Twitter feed for an idea on that.

There’s lots more to do; but remember, you can start small. You can make mistakes as long as they are with good intentions and you work to correct them quickly and earnestly.  Get out there and try a few things. See what works for you. Stick with it.

I’ll have more on this in future posts – stay tuned!

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Amazing Internet Facts

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Some of these videos are blah.  Some are really good.  I enjoyed this one a lot.  Some of my favorite stats:

  • More video was uploaded to YouTube in the last 2 months than if ABC, CBS & NBC had been airing NEW content 24/7/365 since 1948. (Which was when ABC started broadcasting.)
  • 10 million. The number of unique visitors that ABC, CBS & NBC get collectively each month. These businesses have been around about 200 years collectively.
  • 250 million. The number of unique visitors that MySpace, Facebook & YouTube get collectively each month. None of these businesses existed 6 years ago.

Enjoy:

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