Member-to-Member

Social Media 101 - For Marketers (and other people who speak English)

I, like everyone who does "social media' professionally, get asked to explain it a lot. I've got bunches of emails and slide decks taking a crack at the answer to What is Social Media, but I haven't been happy with any of them because they tend to focus on the little stuff, and it's the big stuff I find so interesting. Also, in getting my clients (and prospects) to the point where I can begin to actually advise them on how to incorporate social media into their global communications strategy, I have to help them understand the essence of what it is, not the details.

So, for a new client, I sat down and just wrote it out. I've been told by non-marketers and non-techies that it works pretty well to give them the big picture and put a lot of things they know about (e.g., Facebook, Twitter etc.) into a larger perspective. I share it here in the hopes others will find it useful. Feedback below welcome since I'll probably continue to evolve it for use in new fora.

Social Media 101 for Marketers

View more presentations from Dana Theus. (tags: 2.0 marketing)

Word of Mouth (Meme)

What fun! I got tagged to do a post on Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing - focusing on membership marketing for associations - by the Social Fish mavens, Maddie Grant and Lindy Dryer. They said it was supposed to be fun and not take a lot of work, so I admit I'm recycling a bit here and including non association examples, but it'll fit the bill and it gives me a soapbox to address the frequent association angst around the question Should we be on Facebook and LinkedIn?

On to the meme!

Word of mouth marketing is what happens when someone other than you talks about your organization, product or offering. There's a whole Word of Mouth Marketing Association that has some good definitional stuff. When I started in marketing (before you were born), WOM was a happy accident, something that happened because of some cool promo at a trade show worked better than expected or because a goofy or touching employee story that happened to hit the big press thanks to serendipity or an industrious PR person.

Now that social media is here, WOM is enjoying a revival for several reasons: 1) it's easy to design WOM campaigns that social tools can enable and 2) the speed of dialog with customers is so much faster (some would say more natural, being two-way and all) that marketers can adjust WOM campaigns on the fly to better hit the customer's sweet spot and 3) through the magic of technology, WOM is more trackable than ever before and thus can earn its way into an actual marketing plan. WOM has its dark side of course (*cough* Motrin and a bunch more), but for the most part it's a good thing.

Personal Identity Management Takes a Major Step Forward

Facebook joins the OpenID movement!

Thanks to @jowyang for spreading the word announced yesterday that Facebook has thrown it's weight in with OpenID, joining Google, IBM, Microsoft, PayPal, VeriSign and Yahoo! on OpenID's board. I think this is great news, because getting the big players together is the first step in a long haul to helping make the social web more useful, trustworthy and important to the broader population.

My opinion might differ from others' a bit in terms of the importance of this first step - critical mass - in that I think a centralized login ID is only a prerequisite to the true impact of this movement, which is ultimately (multiple) personal identity management. What's the difference? Centralized login is a quantitative improvement - reducing the number of logins you have to manage across multiple platforms (and thus potentially improving security over them). It certainly is beneficial and will reduce barriers to joining multiple networks, but it's not the holy grail. The holy grail is being able to centrally own and manage your personal identities. In other words, having one identity which you use on Facebook and LiveJournal, and managing it through the same tools as you do your separate professional identity on LinkedIn and Business Exchange. OpenID does this really well, or might once they get the buy-in and support to build out what is now very basic functionality in this regard.

New Media, Same Message?

If I see one more "how to market in tough times" blog post, LinkedIn discussion, FaceBook event announcement or Twitter tinyurl I'm going to unsubscribe from the lot of them! Ok. I won't unsubscribe, but sheesh. Social networks are starting to feel like Direct Mail spam. Why? Because my email newsletters have the same blasted chicken-little-sky-is-falling titles! Where's the community? Where's the user-generated content? I know why we marketers do this; we see a new channel and we just can't resist putting it through it's paces and since social networks provide potential access to attractive target audiences we'll keep doing it. And we should certainly do so because although social media is much more than a communications channel, it is a critical new tool in the multichannel marketing mix.

How Will Business Socialize: Exploring the Social vs. Collaboration Conundrum

A CMO friend and I were having lunch and she asked me about Twitter*and whether I thought it was a decent solution for helping her sales teams communicate real time at conferences where they're trying to track down prospects and partners and such. I had to tell her "no" because Twitter is so open and she didn't want all her competitors seeing who their top prospects were on her sales teams' tweets. I knew it was just a matter of time before someone figured out how to capitalize on this opportunity, and sure enough I later tripped over Yammer, which appears to have jumped on this market opportunity to create private TwitYam networks. I've shot it off to my friend and hope her sales teams will soon be yammering away. Yammer makes me hopeful that we are now entering the phase of social tech where businesses will weigh in with some cash and legitimize and invest in our budding industry. That being said, I think it may be a rough transition because social tech is just really complicated.

Being old now, I've seen this cycle so many times in the communications space. I'm generalizing a bit here but new communications tech waves, from telephone/telex (ok, I'm not THAT old, but I started my career in telcom), email (I AM that old), SMS/txt, IM and now Tweets and LinkedIns - they all get frothy attention in the public network space where innovation thrives and viral usage can explode to prove the validity of the medium. But then they run smack into the business model problem.

Sex Proves Once Again We're Only Human - Even in Cyberspace

I'd tripped over this stat a few weeks ago, that Facebook has surpassed "sex" and "google" in Google searches, but it took a ClickZ article by Dave Evans for me to focus on why this was more than just titillating information for the geek in me that likes it when new technology succeeds.

Secrets to Social Networking Success: 7 Lessons from the Association Sector

As I wrote in my last post about providing real world value, I think the Association sector offers unique insight to how social technologies - social networking in particular - will be successful as it matures. As a result of attending ASAE's annual conference last month, I picked up a number of tips for helping social networking be successful. Many of these takeaways came from a great presentation by Jessica Medaille and Jennifer Ragan-Fore of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) on their Second Life initiative, which I referenced in my last post. I also garnered insight from presentations made by the American Society of Cataract & Refractive Surgery (ASCRS), the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), Risk and Insurance Management Society (RIMS) and several others.

From these examples, and from a variety of other sessions and conversations at the conference, here are my key takeaways on '7 secrets' to making a social networking initiative work among a group of already-connected-to-some-extent professionals.

The Value of 'Real World' Value - Social Network Lessons from the Association Sector

Good news! Successful social networking among trade and professional associations demonstrate that fundamental principals of business are thriving and that despite my periodic doubts, people still value value. Even better, if you're me, after studying several specific initiatives and talking to lots of people I have uncovered what I think is the pithy success formula for social networking success: enable something virtually which cannot be fully achieved in the real world, and ensure that it has 'real world value' to your participant base. We talk a lot about social networking lacking ROI, but where it delivers real world value, there is strong potential for ROI.

I follow the association sector's adoption and use of social media because I think the association sector is the perfect petri dish for B2B social media adoption since association members already value their strong and multilayered business communities in the real world, many of which are ripe for migration or expansion online. To explore this further, I attended the ASAE & The Center's annual conference in San Diego last month in order to get the pulse of how social media is working in this sector. I paid special attention to how these new strategies were integrated into their marketing efforts. My takeaway is that the sector's involvement is still largely experimental but that social media and networking is growing among associations overall and that there are several very noteworthy implementations that have a lot to teach us.

(Un)usability: The Social Web's Dirty Little Secret

I promised myself I wouldn't rant, but I will admit to being frustrated. I finally have to admit that "this social networking stuff" is not so easy to use.

While I try to justify and design social networks for myself and clients, I find myself explaining almost daily the advantages of blogging and SNing to my friends and associates. And as I explain it to them I'm forced to confront the fact that lost between nonstandard functionality and the sheer newness of concepts like 'tweets' and 'trackbacks' lies the still unrealized promise of the social web. I'm not the only one, even Charlene and Josh have noticed it.

Why do I call these ancient (in web years) concepts new? Because in my general social media evangelism, client work and social network building I am committed to finding ways to bring the rest of the population into productive uses of this technology, uses that facilitate their day jobs instead of eating up their sleep time. In my very unscientific analysis, this means the 83% of the "mostly mature" population with whom the social web has yet to entrench itself. And to these people, who I think of as the "Unsocialized Web," tweets, trackbacks, friends lists, tags, RSS readers and ganks really are new.

In calling out the Unsocialized Web population I'm referring to the 35+ year olds who currently run the majority of our society. Though unscientific, my identification of this market segment is based on both personal experience in my real world business and social circles cross referenced with a liberal interpretation of Groundswell Technographics Profile data. According to Groundswell, only 17% of the 35-44 year old U.S. population are considered Creators. In the social web context - especially if applied to their productive work life - I would argue that becoming a Creator indicates an individual's true adoption of the social web (I accept that this argument is open for debate and am happy to elaborate if people are interested). Even fewer individuals in the 45+ age bracket fall into the Creator adoption category. At best, then, this age bracket of my 35+ year old peers* has just begun to move out of the 15% Innovator and Early Adopter population, which is the percentage of people who need to have adopted a new technology in order for that technology to start to ramp up to general adoption levels (i.e., Early Majority).

In other words, when us old folks buy into it, the social web goes mainstream.

Associations: Leadership and Missed Opportunities in Social Media

"Why would I want to read blogs and learn about what some high schooler had for breakfast?"

I've heard this too many times from professional colleagues who seem to take Andrew Keen's view in The Cult of the Amateur, that all that blathering from anyone who wants to speak isn't necessarily a good thing. And as those of us who watch social media know, organizations far and wide have responded to the scary no-one's-in-control reality first surfaced by the Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) with trepidation and concern. [Cluetrain Wakeup Message to Organizations: No organization or individual is in control of their marketing conversation anymore now that customers, employees and whackos can blather very loudly in cyberspace and can influence anyone who likes what they have to say, regardless of its veracity or tact.]

Despite their hesitation, however, anecdotal evidence in my corner of the world points to the fact that organizations are beginning to experiment with models for how to move beyond the "control paranoia" to leverage the power of social media for their stakeholders. Nowhere does the potential for social media seem as great as in the marketplace for trade and professional associations, yet association executives are generally as conservative, if not more so, than other business execs when it comes to their comfort zone on sharing the megaphone. And it's for this reason that I give ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership, credit for helping take a leadership position with their members to help them figure it out. This month's ASAE monthly magazine includes a special Social Media supplement which has some excellent articles, including a cover story article by Keen himself.

[In the rest of the article (1722 words) I discuss Keen's article and look at what Associations are doing (and not doing) in social media adoption.]