Business

Social events need not be a huge affair, but they can be extremely effective. They should definitely be a part of any social media strategy that your organization is considering. From a marketers perspective they can be a good way to persuade the C level that the trip to Vegas will be more than just a non-stop party.

Having created your Facebook page, your Twitter account(s) and your LinkedIn page how do you take that work out to the real world with a consistent message? How do you leverage all that online work when you meet people in real life?

For some reason this is still one of the biggest puzzles for a lot of organizations. They understand face to face marketing & sales, they go to tradeshows, conferences and other events, but for some reason when they get there they completely forget to utilize their Social Media efforts.  Here are some suggestions to make that connection easier.

Four simple things to do

Let’s imagine you are sending a team of four people to a tradeshow in Vegas with a booth. If all your efforts are focused on the tradeshow floor you are missing a big opportunity. Why not create a tweetup at a bar, perhaps in the hotel that the tradeshow is being held in.

• Use Twitter to find out who is going to the tradeshow. It’s as simple as sending out a tweet asking just that.
• Create a hashtag for your event that reflects your company name and/or the main event.
• Put up signs at the event – just simple ones printed in the business center of the hotel reminding people to Tweet the event, use your hashtag, checkin on Foursquare and send a shout.
• Have a couple of door prizes for people who tweet your event, maybe even have a few quiz questions about your company or the event and reward the first person to tweet the answer.

These simple steps can turn an ordinary conference trip into something a lot more creative, that has tangible results that can be built into the trip autopsy.

What does your organization do to move Social from online to the real world?

As children we hear the word No a lot. Why? Because we are being shown boundaries. By discovering these boundaries we get to understand where the limits of our world are. It helps us set expectations.

However, it seems that as people mature into adulthood they seem to forget that is what the word is for. They seem to find the word unacceptable. Most surprisingly they seem to find it unacceptable in the business setting. I have been in consulting in one form or another for nearly two decades. In that time I have discovered that the hardest lesson for consultants, account managers & business owners to learn to say to clients & customers is No. Usually it only comes after the consultant has been pushed and pushed. Instead of setting boundaries early the No comes almost as a surprise to the client.

Helium Hands

People who have trouble saying No to requests have a tendency to overburden themselves, then guilt themselves because they might let someone down. Had they used No earlier they wouldn’t be in that position. No isn’t a bad thing, No helps others find boundaries, helps them define what your limits are and helps them learn to respect them. In business it can be especially useful. Telling a client, or a prospective client No can save a lot of issues later in the relationship.

I have seen people that I respect & like be guilted by others who have taken advantage of the fact that they know the other person is always willing to help. However, that willingness to help is usually expressed by them  saying yes. This constant saying yes, which I lovingly refer to as “helium hand” because the hand rises like a balloon whenever volunteers are asked for, is not good for either person. If you really want to help say No sometimes, not to be offensive, but to empower the requester. They will find someone else to ask, or they will find a way to get whatever it is done, on their own. That might mean they choose another provider, maybe you lose them as a client – if you do then you probably were going to anyway.

True, there will always be those who refuse to believe No applies to them or that they are somehow more deserving than others who have been told No. But it’s possible to reduce the numbers of them by practicing the use of the word more often.

Do you use No when you should or do you suffer from helium hand?

I was having an interesting conversation a few days ago discussing the various merits of Social Media for business. The conversation started to focus on the various ways of “relationship” building, customer “engagement”, pipeline “nuturing”.  These are of course the stock in trade phrases rolled out by Social Media “guru’s” and those who follow them blindly.

Social Networking & Social Media

Firstly I want to clear up a common misunderstanding between Social Media & Social Networking. They are very different, though often conducted using the same tools, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. Social Networking is the nice, kumbaya, lets all hold hands, hug and generally be nice to each other activity, also known as Socialist Media.

Social Media on the other hand is the activity of promoting a brand, service or product to the masses with the intent that some or all of the recipients of the message will buy, use or encourage others to do so.

With that clarification, lets clear the decks for the real meat of this post. Social Media is not about making friends, it’s not about customer engagement, it’s not about creating warm fuzzies with your prospects or existing customer anymore than any other  form of messaging is. If a brand has 1.2m fans on Facebook do they have the bandwidth to create a deep and meaningful relationship with each of those fans, no of course not. So lets stop kidding each other.

Uncle Phil

At the Enterprise level, and even at the Small & Medium business level, Social Media activity can best be described with a family analogy. The picture at the beginning of this post is our imaginary Uncle Phil, he comes to all the family gatherings, he’s an ok guy, takes an interest in our lives, even remembers our kids names and what grade they are in at school. But you know, somewhere between the Turkey & the Pumpkin pie, he is going to lean over, press his slightly sweaty palm onto your arm and say “How is your insurance coverage looking these days?”. Yep, he wants to sell us something. All that chatting, all that “getting to know you”, was just a front.

“Transparency” is a word so thrown around in Social Media that it has become, like so much other jargon, almost meaningless. If brands are to achieve real transparency in their Social Media activity then they need to put out their shingle up front. Some do, some are very good at it. Only a completely naive person would imagine for instance that Ford loaned Fiesta’s to reviewers so that they could experience having reliable transport for a few months. The Fiesta Movement was created with the sole intent that people get excited about the product and go and buy it.

Selling Isn’t Shameful

There is nothing wrong or shameful about selling your product, there is nothing wrong or shameful about using Social Media to sell your product. What is wrong is trying to hide it. The Social Media audience is evolving quickly, their level of sophistication is rising exponentially. They no longer truly believe that Brands want Fans so that they can invite them over for dinner, or find out about how little Johnny is doing in school (if in fact anyone ever believed that).

Some Social Media guru’s/agencies are still touting the “engagement/conversation” model. The “Touchy Feely” campaign creators. The problem with that model is, where is the ROI? Yes, exactly there isn’t any. I prefer the “Ouchy Bleedy” campaign. Yes it’s going to hurt the kumbaya crowd, but its more honest. Hello my name is Simon & I want your wallet. (the image is from a t-shirt I was inspired to design from LOLCatz – I’ll be wearing it at future conferences).

What about you? Do you want Hugs from customers or dollars?

Living in Austin – the self proclaimed “Live Music Capital of the World”, it is not too surprising that there have been attempts to also dub it the “Social Media Capital of the World” or at least the US. I was part of some banter on Twitter a few days ago on just this topic, the challenger being Boston,Mass.

Most of the conversation centered around who lived in those particular cities and what they represented in terms of Social Media leadership. To be honest, given the talent in both I tended to say that they jointly held the title.

However, it got me thinking. Often when you are part of a sub-culture it is all too easy to become blinded to the fact that not everyone shares your interests. So I decided to do a little research using Google Insights for Search to see where, in the US, people were actually searching for Social Media. The results were surprising.

Search Terms

I used the year 2009 for the search period and used the following search terms as the basis for showing interest in Social Media marketing:

• Social Media
• Social Media Marketing
• Social Marketing
• Facebook Marketing
• Facebook for Business

I arrived at these terms after testing several others to see which produced the highest results.

What the results show is, that far from being the Social Media capital, Austin, or more specifically Texas didn’t make the top five (actually it didn’t make the top ten), Massachusetts comes in at number two, so its fairly safe to assume that a reasonable number of the searches came from the Boston area.  Illinois is no real surprise, being home to Chicago, and a lot of companies being based there.

Minnesota, Oh ya

What really surprised me was the appearance of Minnesota, whilst obviously home to the Twin Cities, with a population of 5.2m (US Census 2008 figures), it is considerably smaller in population than Texas (24.3m), home to Austin. In fact Texas’ population is almost double that of Illinois and more than 40 times bigger than that of the District of Columbia, both of which register with higher numbers. I would have expected that simply given the higher population numbers there would have been more searches.

The fact that Texas doesn’t make the list could simply mean that they don’t use Google to find their Social Media services, or know that they are so well served with agencies, conferences & other resources that searching for them is unnecessary. It could be that they are using search terms that are completely outside the realms of those I used (though I think this unlikely).

For whatever reason, in terms of where those people live who are looking for information on Social Media, for now at least, in the discussion between Austin & Boston, Boston is the clear leader.

Where do you think Social Media is most wanted?

The last installment of the Foursquare series takes a look at B2B and how Geo-Location services like Foursquare, Gowalla & even Twitter can be used by them.

Successful use of Social Media by the B2B space is a bit of a holy grail amongst marketers. Some have even gone so far as to dismiss the technology as it currently stands because they see no real method of seeing returns on their investment.  If services like Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn are a hard sell, how much harder is it to sell a service like Foursquare which seems to reside firmly in the B2C space and be little more than a game?

I was talking this idea through the other day with a friend who read my first post in this series and she extrapolated a very interesting concept for me. I was proposing the use of the technology by B2B service organizations, such as HVAC, copy machine repair etc. Her extrapolation of my idea was to incorporate the heat maps that I showed in the first post into a CRM/Lead Generation environment.  I can definitely see this being used, especially by small B2B outfits.

Imagine being a service based organization that has some type of field force, whether they are making deliveries, making maintenance calls etc. By using heat maps you can see the frequency of visits in a particular area, and by field force member. The heat map would show you where your calls were and where they were not. This would immediately give you valuable information for targeting either customer service issues (too many maintenance calls) or sales opportunities (no deliveries). While I am sure that there is enterprise level shipping, tracking or delivery scheduling software out there, I am equally sure it is beyond the budget of a small B2B businesses trying to compete with bigger organizations. I posted the link to wheredoyougo yesterday, here is another service, checkoutcheckins (produced by Danny Pier) doing a very similar thing with heat maps – still in Alpha.

Location, Location, Location

Of course the key here is still a physical presence. What of companies that do not have a physical product, for example a Marketing Communications Agency?  How do they leverage geo-location services to advance their marketing, especially in the B2B space?  The quick answer is they don’t, not directly. After all the key to geo-location social networking is exactly that, location. However, in much the same way as companies are now starting to feature select staff member twitter streams on their websites, I could definitely see some companies showing select staff member check-ins on their websites. Why? If for no other reason than to show that the company has more than a passing knowledge of how to leverage the technology. More than this, it can provide subliminal messaging showing your potential customers who you are already working with. Of course, it has to be managed correctly, and there is the question of just how much transparency you want with your organization.

Other concepts that have been proposed all revolve around having a location, even if its a temporary one such as at a trade show or conference. This is still a good idea, though temporary locations really do go against the spirit of geo-location social networking, insofar as the idea is that you can repeat the experience of others. If your “friends” are checking in at a conference that you aren’t at, then you have no way of repeating their experience.

Changing The Game

B2B Marketing through geo-location social networking is a much harder proposition. If I were the marketing manager for a company such as Avery Dennison, how would I use Foursquare or services like it to market my message to potential customers? Having access to an individuals’ check-ins doesn’t help me much.

Because I lack the other information about that person, are they authorized to make purchases on behalf of the company etc.? Just because I see that they have checked-in at Office Max doesn’t mean they are buying labels for their company or at all. So no point in pushing them discount coupons. So what do I get from a geo-location service that helps me get my message through all the noise that potential & existing customers are already experiencing? I reverse the concept. Instead of trying to use the service to simply promote my products, why not use my products to promote the service. For example, market to restaurants, bars, coffee shops etc. that are using Foursquare, labels that they can give away to “Mayors”?

Overall, I think that there is a long way to go for geo-location services. We will need to see a greater convergence of both current software technologies and new adaptations of hardware technologies. I certainly see a role for RFID technology in geo-location social networking, having a product check-in for you as you buy it will certainly expand the B2c potential of these services. Quite where B2B will go with Social Media in general, and geo-location in particular, remains to be seen. But there are some very smart people out there figuring it out and you can be sure that, given the right incentive, we will see some innovative campaigns using these tools.

Share your predictions for these services with everyone in the comments below.

Read Part One of this series.

Read Part Two of this series.

Following on from yesterday’s post about Foursquare for users, today I’m going to look at Foursquare for business, in particular the Business to Consumer market (we’ll look at Business to Business tomorrow). During this series I’m making several predictions, mine are based on research, they are generated by getting involved in the development community and talking to people who are actually building these applications. When I see smart people like Mike Langford of Tweetworks diving into the Foursquare API it’s a clear indication that some good apps are just around the corner.

One reason businesses get involved in any new technology is the rate of adoption by the broader community, e.g. their potential customers.  The chart below shows the increasing rate of check-ins in 2009, an increase of approx 900% over the year.

(thanks to John Wiseman for the graph)

In considering the B2C market, I’m going to segment it into large brands & local businesses. While the core of this series of posts focuses on Foursquare, it really covers all geo-location services and their potential uses.

There are two major elements for businesses to consider when getting involved with any Social Media service. Firstly, what can they achieve by using or encouraging use of the application? The other is what can they derive from the application if anything?

Large Brands

Large brands are usually associated with large budgets. What this means is that they can, if they so choose, spend more to acquire a customer than smaller businesses. However, the mindset of doing that is changing. Social Media has made it possible to lower that cost. Geo-Location when used as a part of the Social Media movement can be leveraged quite cheaply.  There are some very obvious quick wins, which large brands can and do use when using Social Media. Promotions, discounts and activity based rewards are all a part of their arsenal.  All of these can have a geo-location element. Gowalla, another of the popular location sharing services uses these to promote its own service. They hide rewards at locations and provide clues to their existing users. This type of “Treasure Hunt” is a common use of marketing in geo-location and is inspired by geo-caching as a game.

The advantage of this type of marketing is that the brand does not need to have their own physical location, they are leveraging other locations, usually notable ones – The Golden Gate Bridge, Grand Central Station, Sydney Opera House etc. This means that brands like Coca-Cola or Hanes can compete with brands like Disney, Marriott etc that have well known physical locations.

The real win for brands is not however in the simple B2C competition, but in leveraging the fact that geo-location services like Foursquare and Gowalla are social. The real win is in the B2C2C space. This might be a reward not only for you but for getting your friends to take action as well. E.g. if you check-in at X location you will receive Y reward, however, if you get 10 of your “friends” to check-in at that location you will get YY reward.

An Open API Leads to Greater Adoption

The fact that, certainly for Foursquare, it is possible to extract this type of data via their API means that brands can promote rewards far more easily through networks.  Foursquare in particular, having opened its API, is making it possible to construct applications that have far reaching potential. Because Foursquare allows its users to auto-post their check-ins to Facebook & Twitter, any application that utilizes the Foursquare API also gets this benefit. In effect they piggyback on the permissions already granted by a Foursquare user.  So a brand could set up a location based competition application and have users take part and promote their activity to their entire network, without the brand ever having to gain direct access to that network. This is a very powerful application of, and extension to, tools like Foursquare that we will see more of in the coming months.

Local Business

The most commonly considered method for local businesses to use location based services is loyalty programs. This is a quick, easy and free/low cost method of using these services. Simply ensuring that your business location(s) are entered in the tool correctly and waiting for people to check-in is great way to achieve a small amount of free promotion. By actually telling people that they will be rewarded for checking in it is possible to increase this dramatically.

In fact, Foursquare actively encourages this on their website by providing a form for businesses to fill out when they offer specials at their location(s). While this is great, it isn’t the only way local businesses can utilize these tools.  Just offering a discount or a freebie will only work so often and for so long. Again, as for large brands, the real killer is not in just communicating with your customers but having them communicate with others and spreading the word. Services such as Yelp have gone a long way in doing this, but they lack the instant nature of geo-location services like Foursquare.

Unlike large brands, local businesses do not usually have the funds to invest in the creation of applications to leverage the networks of users, so they have to do it in a more analog fashion. Referal business is at the core of most successful small businesses, by encouraging referral activity via the use of social tools, small businesses are able to leverage the large networks that users build without cost. For example if I owned a dog washing service I might offer a free dog wash to the “Mayor” of my location, however, if a user brought in 3 other “friends” I might want to offer something more. Using the physical location to show these offers, combined with online announcements, encourages people to take part in these activities.

In the B2C space we are likely to see a lot more integration of applications. As more applications open their API to each other it will be easier for businesses to have their advocates share their message to a broader networks. So what would a future business to consumer app look like in the near future?

You have a local business that sells a major brand product, you want the local customers, the brand wants the loyalty of your customers. As a supplier they provide you with an incentive for your customers, some kind of promo, but instead of a coupon that has to be redeemed, it is validated via geo-location social networking. Having installed the brand’s application, when the customer makes a “reward” purchase, that reward is promoted to all of their network as well. “Matt just earned X, you can too”.

What features do you think Foursquare should have to get businesses to use it?

What’s that you say? I can’t hear you over all the noise! Listening was promoted heavily in 2009 as THE activity that companies should be undertaking in Social Media. I agree listening is very important and it has become increasingly easier to do with tools from Visible Technologies, Radian6, ScoutLabs, even google. The trouble is with all this listening going on, companies are not taking action. Listening by its very nature is passive, no business survives long by being passive.

What Are You Listening To?

Social Media monitoring is, or should be, an integral part of any organizations Social Media plan. However, what often gets left out of that plan is what the organization is listening for. Social Media “guru’s” will tell organizations, conversations are being had about your product/service/organization whether you like it or not, you need to hear them and join in. Great advice, but what conversations are being had, what do you want to do about them? How will you join in?

For major brands, the noise can be deafening when they first open themselves to “listening”. Even for smaller organizations the volume can be overwhelming and unexpected. Sometimes organizations will come to the “listening” stage with trepidation because they expect to hear bad things, they are braced for all of the “awkward” C-Level meetings that they are going to have, only to find that most of the conversations are positive, now they sit back and pat themselves on the back.

All I Hear Is Crickets!

Even more awkward is the situation where very little is being said. Is it because the organization isn’t worth talking about? Is it because no one cares enough to mention them? How do you fill the silence, should you even try? Without an action plan in place, all the listening in the world will get you no where. Before you listen, plan on what you are going to pay attention to, what you are listening for and what you are going to do when you hear those things. Simply trying to listen to everything will result in the same organizational paralysis that occurs when organizations try to measure everything.

What Should Your Organization Do When It Hears Things?

image by Mat Strange

It is now accepted wisdom that the number of followers, or friends or connections in your social media life doesn’t matter. After all we are told its not a matter of having 100,000 followers, its more important to have 1000 that actually engage. But who tells us this is so? Well its the thought leaders in the field of Social Media of course. How do we know they are thought leaders, well, its obvious, just look at how many people follow them!

Reach Not Influence

A somewhat circular argument really. Rather like those who tell you that money doesn’t matter, only the rich can afford to make such sweeping generalizations. Being a thought leader isn’t always about being first to have an original idea, or even being the first to apply that idea, sometimes and with the advent of self-publishing, its about being first to reach the largest audience with the idea.

Broadcasting is Alive And Well

While I would be the first to agree that there are many ways to “game” Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other Social Media sites to grab large numbers of followers, and I would also agree that these numbers alone do not indicate a level of someones influence, I would argue that those with a large audience to hear them are more likely to grab attention with their ideas.

If you have great ideas but only share them with one or two friends then the idea is likely to die, if you have a great idea and share it with thousands then the idea is likely to thrive. If this were not the case then the concept of broadcast media would not have survived.

Thought Leader or Thought Broadcaster?

When I look at many of today’s acknowledged Socal Media thought leaders, many of them are less idea generators and more idea broadcasters, distilling ideas from other sources, sometimes taking them wholesale and then broadcasting to large audiences who for the most part accept these ideas as being original. I’m not accusing anyone of plagiarism here, I’m not saying that they don’t have original ideas of their own, far from it. However, it has been my experience that some of the ideas that are becoming Social Media lore are in fact distillations, reworkings of other ideas and concepts that become more accepted because of the new source than because of the idea.

This is why the numbers matter. If I, with only 4,000 followers, want to spread an idea then I will have to work considerably harder than if I had 40,000 or 400,000 followers. Its a simple matter of scale. So does this mean that to become a thought leader you should start by growing a huge following and the rest will simply happen? No of course not, you still have to have the original ideas, concepts, ability to distill other ideas and make them work, in short, talent. However, getting the word out about your idea is going to be a lot easier if you have a crowd to echo your thoughts.

Avatar premiered this weekend. A multi-million dollar blockbuster and much vaunted as a game changer in the movie going experience.  James Cameron has spent a considerable amount of time and money building the technology he needed to bring to life the story in his head.

I went with high hopes of the movie and saw it in its 3D version (my full review here). What I came away with was a sense that the movie was more about the technology than it was about the story.

What Can Social Marketers Learn?

What Social Marketers can learn from this experience is that, no matter how slick your presentation, no matter what technology you deploy, if your content doesn’t meet the need or expectation of your audience the gloss will wear off fast.

Tools & Tricks Are Only Part of The Solution

Investing heavily in a great looking Facebook page, or an amazing set of Social Media monitoring tools will serve no purpose if you have no content or content strategy to back it up.

Commiting to Social Media and to providing your readers/viewers/listeners with quality content is much more likely to generate a lasting impact than having only a flashy interface.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth making those investments too, but be prepared for that fact that the real investment comes in the form of content, not tools.

Content Is Still King

Content has always been King, no matter the medium. Whether in print, on the Radio or Television or more recently Online, the method of delivering the message is never as important as the message itself. A slickly put together Social marketing campaign will have a much shorter shelf life than content that draws in the audience, makes them feel involved and ultimately encourages them to talk about it.

Publicity is something all businesses need.  For many small businesses this starts and ends with a listing in the local Yellow pages. They have neither the expertise nor time for anything more elaborate.

Blogging Partners – A new Publicity Channel

Occasionally they will find the money to do some small scale advertising, perhaps in a community newsletter or even the local newspaper. All of these methods are credible, viable methods of spreading the word. However, another channel that seems to be, as yet, fairly untapped is partnering with local bloggers to have the word spread.

Bloggers, like all other content producers are hungry for one thing – more content. Preferably new content. By feeding this need small businesses can in fact create a relationship that helps both parties. So how does a small business find a blogger and get their attention?

Reach Out To The Community

Firstly, do what small businesses are usually very good at, interact with the local community. Perhaps blogging is something you know nothing about, beyond reading one or two, if that. So your first step is to read more, do google searches for blogs in your area of business, then narrow it to your geographical area. We will look at why geography is important in a moment. Find out which events bloggers are attending in your area, Twitter is an excellent source of this information, a good percentage of people attending Tweetups are bloggers – they might not be writing about your line of business but they probably know someone who is.

Finding a local blogger is important for two main reasons, firstly it enables you to develop a real relationship with them, secondly it gives them the opportunity to get to know your business. If you are a coffee shop they can come and work from your shop, if you are a car mechanic they can get their car serviced, anything that gives them an insight into what and how you do what it is you do.

Why Would They Care?

So why would they write about you? Read what they write, find an angle in their writing that applies to your business. I write mostly about Marketing, Social Media & Blogging, so the best angle to approach me is how your business is using those things differently. Come with a story at least outlined so that some of the work is already done for them.

From a bloggers perspective, why would you be interested in writing about local businesses? Well unless you are already have an unlimited supply of content, you want & need fresh content that appeals to your readers. Local businesses are a great source of that content. They want the publicity, you want the content, the question you should be asking is “why am I not approaching local businesses?”.

Which bloggers do you know who could write about your business?