Corporate Social Media: After the Buzz
I was a guest on This Week in Social Media hosted by PJA Advertising + Marketing. The show was rebroadcasted last week. I had a chance to listen again and thought there were some interesting nuggets. Mike O’Toole and I talked about the practical aspects of running social for a public company. I really like the way we came up with a top five list of “rules” for helping an organization be more social. 1. Find people who are willing to speak in the first person and aren’t afraid to have a personal point of view. You need people who are passionate about a given topic and have the domain expertise to add value to the conversation. 2. Be ruthless. Help your team find time for social marketing activities. What will they stop doing to make time to join the emerging conversations? Find the bottom 10% of activities and stop doing them – life is a zero sum game and something has to give. 3. Think small and simple. Social media can be overwhelming so people need to get started in simple ways and scale from there. 4. Use agile project management. Social media is still quite speculative and you will need to test things before making bigger investments. Agile provides an adaptive approach that helps accelerate learning. 5. Need to create an open, principle-based policy to provide guidance to the team. It is impossible to create rules for every possible scenario so you need to give people baseline behavioral guidance. There is much more to the conversation if you have the time to listen. Are there any other things we should add to the list? One last ask: I could also use your support for my panel on Agile for Social Media at the SXSW conference. Vote early and vote often my friends. And as always, thanks for your...
Seven simple steps to more effective social media listening
I’m sure that most of us have heard the social media truism that first step to being more social is listening. An entire industry has sprung up around listening platforms. Before you sign up for 12 months of service from the platform of the day, here is my list of low cost/no cost ways to be a better online listener. Identify your top influencers and/or sources of information – If you are like most people, you know your top 5 to 10 off the top of your head. What are the sites you visit everyday? What sites do you feel guilty about not visiting more frequently? What does your boss read daily? You get the idea. My suggestion is find 30-40 sources. I know that sounds like alot but we’ll talk more later about how to deal with the deluge of content. Setup a Google Reader account – I know there are many ways to read RSS feeds but I like the Reader’s ability to share feeds and connect with people on Google. I also regularly use my feed reader as a convenient time waster on my new HTC Incredible. Just scrape the RSS feeds from your source and add to the reader. Create Google Alerts – In my world, there are granular things that I want to watch daily. I know it is vain but I watch my own name and “personal brand”. Some other obvious things include your company, brand, or competitors. You can decide on a comprehensive vs. blog search depending on traffic – one approach is starting with comprehensive and then refine if necessary. I also suggest setting it up for immediate notification by RSS rather than email. If it has more than 10 alerts per day then you are either too popular (yeah, right) or need to refine your search. You can track these through your Google Reader like any other feed. Setup a Twitter search – I think this is the hidden gem of Twitter’s offerings. Just go to search.twitter.com and create searches on your keywords (use the same keywords from your Google Alerts if you want). The best part is you can create RSS feeds for these search and then dump them into your Reader. More advanced tweeters can add a search column in Tweetdeck. Create lists on Twitter – I “follow” over 1,000 people on Twitter. In reality, I probably care about 150 of them (sorry). The best way to keep your signal-to-noise ratio high is to build a list important friends. For example, I have on two lists on my personal Twitter account – Fresh Followers for new followers I’d...
Presentation from MassTLC breakfast – March 18, 2010
My slides from the MassTLC breakfast on where we discussed trends and changes in marketing expenditures for 2010. Mtlc Sales & Marketing Panel, March 18, 2010View more presentations from Frank...
Seven things a blog post is not…
A direct response marketing program – This means we need to avoid the urge to include conversation stopping things like hyperbole, canned benefits statements and a call to action. Few things shut down a blog conversations faster than “act before Friday…” or some other type of offer. A press release – PR teams have a very specific role as the “official voice” of the organization for the media and other third parties. This typically means speaking of your organization in the third person. In contrast, effective blogging works in the first and second person as you would in a conversation. This also invites comments, both positive and negative. An email substitute – Just because your house email list is losing its pop doesn’t mean you can blindly move your promotions to your blog. Blogs with no obvious value to your audience are spam. You need to get beyond the facts and tell me something new, fresh or surprising. A case study – Blogs are great for telling stories but again think in the first and second person rather than the third person. You have to interview your customer for the case study so why not take the time to capture the narrative as a Q&A or podcast? Buzz – You are not stupid. You can see through it when there is no substance. It is no secret that the best blogs are full of fresh content and interesting ideas. Why bother blogging at all if you have nothing new, original or real to share? Advertising – If you are a consistent blogger with a thoughtful SEO plan, you can crank up your pagerank and generate significant inbound traffic that can replace expensive paid media. Again it starts with compelling content that your readers want to read, share and link to. Viral marketing – Sure a blog post can “go viral” and get shared broadly but you first need to create something your audience cares about and is worth sharing. – Mr. Tangyslice thanks you for joining us today and wonders which of these things you see most frequently and if he missed anything? Related articles: Top 8 Mistakes Of Blogger Newbs (davidrisley.com) The Power of Being Personal on Your Blog (problogger.net) 8 things I wish I knew before starting to blog...
A 21 day plan for creating your own Internet radio or TV show
Image via Wikipedia Wake up everybody. The age of plentiful bandwidth is here. This means a streaming radio show can sound like the host is sitting right next to you. Last summer I blogged about my learning from producing a couple of online radio shows. I created this post as a follow roadmap to help you create your own show. My guess is that this is a new venture so I am a big advocate of testing new media programs in no-cost or low cost ways to prove the concept before “going big”. So how can we get from idea to fresh online radio show in an agile way? Here is my road map I used twice last summer and am currently employing as I produce a new show here at Novell. Strategy: Write a short creative brief – This should be no more than 3 pages. Remember that the show is the product not the document. Sell the idea to the most important stakeholders – You need buy-in but don’t try to sell everyone. The first show (ie “the pilot”) will be your best tool for convincing people to do more. Find an executive sponsor – This person can advise the team and protect the idea from the corporate T-cell types that challenge anything new or different. Your sponsor could also be a possibly be one of your first guests. Operational details Decide on a format – Will it be a panel? Will it be a one-on-one interview? Or a combination? Pick dates for your first three shows – Without a first show date, all you have is an idea. This creates a sense of urgency and catalyzes the team. Decide on frequency – My bias is towards weekly. Unless you have enough content, more than once a week is tough. On the other hand, less than once a week doesn’t give you the chance to develop a rhythm. Identify potential guests for your first three shows – The first shows won’t be perfect so you don’t need to call in all your markers to get superstar guests. Save that for when you have worked out the kinks. Get all your technology straightened out. You don’t need much equipment these days to do radio but you do need someone who can plug it in and make sure it works seamlessly. TV/video has even more moving parts so plan accordingly. Figure out the streaming/hosting – Where will the show reside? There are a number of Internet radio stations to consider. You can also buy some bandwidth from a CDN and stay independent. Content Find a strong host – I...
My social media reading list
I’ve been accumulating news stories and blog posts for a B2B social media training course. As much as I like Digg, I felt like Delicious was a better way to organizing the articles. Here is the link I particularly like Peter Kim ‘s wiki with social media use cases. ** Name drop alert *** Peter, maybe we could grab another giant crab boil at SXSW this year with Mr. Cutler… I still need to add a bunch of Groundswell related stuff and don’t like any of the conventional articles about measurement as they were mostly written by people who have never marketed anything besides themselves. Did I miss any obvious ones. Any ones I should delete? Thanks and slice you...
