Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’
Creating A #SocialMedia Community? Don’t Follow This Example.
This is a guest post from Brian G. Rice of Rice Team Consulting, he shared his story of an experience he recently had with a Social Media Community. Today we are going back to small town rules, especially within Social Media Networks, you can’t lie, trick or hide anymore, integrity is at risk if you start playing games with people, or don’t provide good service. Someone, like Brian, will start talking about you and your integrity, your businesses reputation begins to tarnish when this happens.
Here is Brians Story.
Last week a message appeared in my LinkedIn inbox from PwC. I was being invited to the PwC Private Business Exchange on LinkedIn. After checking to make sure that the PwC in question was indeed the company formerly known as PricewaterhouseCoopers, I quickly accepted their invitation.
I use social media to market my consulting services. Here is this great big, well respected company giving me the opportunity to present my content to a whole group of business people within the context of borrowed credibility of PwC? You betcha I said yes.
To my mind, the fact that this was a LinkedIn group made it even better.
I have been using LinkedIn for over seven years. LinkedIn was the social media site for business before there really were social media sites. The culture of LinkedIn has always been one of a high signal to noise ratio. From its early days as a resume sharing site, it has been a place where you connect with people who you have actually done some sort of business with.
In terms of business credibility, LinkedIn is the best social media site out there.
So I accepted the invitation, and quickly posted an introduction to myself. Nothing fancy, and nothing long. I suggested that people take a look at my LinkedIn profile, and then I asked a question: What motivates you to hire a consultant? Nothing spammy. No hard sales technique. Just a simple question. I hit send on my post, and I was informed that it would appear shortly after the moderator approved it.
Then I waited. And waited. And waited. And then I was removed from the group.
Before I was able to get to angry about this, I received another note from someone at PwC. Apparently, they had such a large response to their offer that they decided to create a second group for companies with less than 50 employees because they “recognize that entrepreneurs face unique challenges as they grow their business.”
The message, for those not equipped with built-in Marketing-to-English dictionaries, was basically “We don’t want you bothering our big important potential clients.”
I’m not actually writing this post to pick on PwC. I am offering here a cautionary tale: marketing social media is about building relationships. The clear-headed business person in me can see what happened here, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t make me angry. PwC is now in deficit relationship-wise with me, and they are going to have to work to gain back my trust.
First impressions in any relationship are important. PwC is an established, respected company, and they had invited me to join a private business forum! This made a very good first impression. It didn’t matter that I knew I had just been bulk invited to this list. The invite did make me feel important and special.
I’d still feel that way if they had simply done a little research into my company (everything they needed to know is on my LinkedIn profile) and invited me to their “Entrepreneurs Exchange” in the first place. Instead, as I emailed to the forum administrator, I feel like I have been shuffled off to the small kids table. The fact that I have never received a response to that email has only worked to underline this feeling.
If you are going to use social media to market your company, you need to understand that relationships are built on communication.
A short email back to me, sincere and honest in its approach, could have turned my entire attitude around. Even an email disagreeing with me would have been better than nothing. By ignoring me, they have made me feel even less respected than before.
The future of business and marketing is based on relationships. More and more, people are going to buy products and services from people they trust and have a relationship with. Companies like PwC are realising that this shift is occurring, and they are trying to take advantage of it.
But just like real life, the downside of using relationships to market your product or service is that when you make a mistake, you need to work much harder to fix the problem. A single negative “debit” on the relationship balance sheet can wipe out multiple positive “credits”.
As I am finishing this article, I have been waiting over twenty-four hours to have a post approved to the new PwC forum I was invited to. Rationally, I’m sure that the moderator has just been busy. But emotionally? I just can’t help feeling more ignored.
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Do you have any thoughts or comments you wish to leave Brian? Is he over reacting, is he right, what do you think? Feel free to comment here on Owengreaves.com
The Future Of Business – Findability
I’m not going to beat around the bush here, I spend almost 90% of my time on Twitter, it’s where my research comes from, my business, and most of my relationships. Twitter is the service I use to expand, learn and teach what I do, FaceBook, has it’s place but I rarely spend much time there, why? I use TweetDeck , I feed multiple social networks this way, including FaceBook. Rumour has it TweetDeck is about to be purchased or already has been, by Twitter, that’s good news in my books. Twitter will be able to add so much to the experience of using their real-time service.
The secret sauce if you will, the secret tool is not that secret when trying to maximize Twitter, it’s the search in Twitter that brings the most value in terms of data. If you spend enough time listening in the Twitter search, you start to see trends, interests and needs, businesses don’t pay enough attention there in my humble opinion.
The #FutureOfBusiness hashtag is where I like to hang out, to see what others are saying and thinking about on this topic, we are headed to a day of the open & free business model. But what does that mean really. Does it mean everything is free and open, of course not, it is however, a strategy, a successful business model. So how do all these social networks fit into the equation?
Think about where you do business today, what is the business model you execute today, does it leverage social networks? And if it is, how did you determine which social network to invest your time and money in? I’m almost certain very little research went into that determination, you probably just sensed you should be on FaceBook because most of your friends and business associates said you should be there. When a business owner asks me if they should be on FaceBook or any other social network, I like to ask them why they think they should be there. Almost everytime it has nothing to do with a business case or sound data to backup that question, it is always an emotional reason, like the fear of loss. That’s not new, it’s as old as time that emotion, but it has as much power as worrying, and probably the same results worrying brings you.
So where do you spend your time and money in terms of social networks, and why? The Future Of Business is not social networks, it is however, social & mobile. Social Media is not new, the conversations you and I were having offline our entire life, has merely gone digital, they are now happening on the Internet. The difference, the world can now listen in and share your feelings, spread your conversation everywhere. Everything will create a stream everywhere.
With 3 billion people yet to hit the Internet, being found should be your primary concern, it’s going to get noisier than it is today, findability will determine the life of your business online. The best way to be found, create more content than you consume, then leverage every social network you can to help that cause.
So where do you do business, which social network do you use the most, what is the hardest part about being found for you, how do you get found? I would love to hear your thoughts on findability, not SEO.
A Social Media Opportunity Missed
A few weeks ago I attended a session on Social Media, I was flabbergasted, no wait, I was shocked by the lack of knowledge in the business community, that most don’t understand how social networks will impact their business. A local bank put the event on, the event was just to drum up business of course, but they dropped the ball. They should have tried to connect with me during, if not immediately after the event, through a social network of some kind, after all the speakers were talking about social media and how to use it. I left the event empty handed, nothing in hand, no one approached me, I approached the speakers but they were eager to leave right after they finished. First real contact came two weeks later, I got an email. Now to be fair, I was invited by someone associated with the organization, I didn’t hear about the event at all, I heard nothing, he even sat with me (a good move), we have since met a few times to get to know each other better. The email’s primary purpose was to provide me with contact information, here’s a snippet:
<snipped to protect the quilty>
“Your XYZ small business advisor will work with you to identify realistic growth targets — and recommend the right financial products and solutions to help you get there. If you have any questions about managing your business, please call any time. I have attached a list of our Senior Account Manager, Business & Personal advisors with contact details.”
They thought they were helping business owners by having someone speak on social media, all it did was freak people out, why, because there was a huge gap as to why they should be paying attention to social networks. The speakers were awesome with how to use social media networks, some steps to take, some tactics and strategy, but they didn’t educate the crowd as to why they needed to do what they were selling. The WHY is more important than tactics and strategy, it’s not enough to say everyone is doing it, show your audience why, show them it’s working, give good examples. Take the time to show what’s going on around them, show them the future of business, and then try to help you create ideas to help adopt that future. Social networks are just one small part of an open economy. Explain in simple terms what the business of the future looks like, tell how its social and mobile, how a business need to become a platform, how we are seeing the tribalization of business, and what does all this mean to their business. Show the audience what is happening, then give them hope. And just what is happening, a paradigm shift.
I preach the future of business, an open economy, adopting the open & free business model, it means you think differently, it means you realize something has to change, and the need to change it quickly. We are moving into a world where 60% of all commerce is online, another 3 billion people are coming to the Internet in the 3 years, are you ready? Do you know what to do?
The bank collected names and contact information from everyone as they came in, so they had the details to communicate immediately. Posting a warm welcome on FaceBook with a picture of the crowd, a few shout outs on Twitter thanking people for coming, would have gone a long way to making the bank more human. Now in their defence, most of this community do not use Twitter, they all said they used FaceBook in a poll taken by the speakers.
I would have recommended they leverage FaceBook then, wherever the people are, that’s where your business should be! They could have held a contest on FaceBook and Twitter building up to the event, made the announcement on the social networks as to who won during the event. As you can see they could have made it a huge opportunity to connect with people and be more human, which in turn builds more trust. But that’s not what happened, they did what they always do, make the customer work too hard to make communication happen, and the communication that did happen was to make the customer work even more. The bank should have reached out and made it easy for those who attended to get information and have the option to let them sit down with them to talk about product and services. What they did, they sent a mailer telling the audience to contact them, backwards in the new day of business. You make it an opt-in and opt-out, you go to the people, not make the people come to you. If they come to you, it’s most likely going to be by digital means, they aren’t leaving their home to sit in your office. The bank should have invested more in social media, they should have set an example, it was a social media event for crying out loud. Enough said on that, as you can see they could have had a better plan in my humble opinion.
How could this Bank make it easier for the audience, what would you have done?
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Olivier Blanchard’s New Book – Social Media ROI
It finally arrived, Olivier Blanchard’s book called Social Media ROI, Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization. I am truly humbled and honored, I was not expecting to find my name in the book, thank you with all the appreciation I can muster.
I have never met Olivier, but I have had an online relationship with him for over 3 years, and I can tell you he knows what he is talking about. He is firm in his stand and he has always taken the time to try and explain why he takes the stand he does, a man on a mission, a man with Integrity, which you will read in his book.
Now, for some reason the world has missed a simple observation, Social Media (conversations)is not new, its just gone digital. What has been overlooked, is how to accurately translate these conversations into revenue, how these conversations become conversions, how they actually bring about a result worth measuring. No Olivier is not the only one to see that conversations can have a Return On Investment (ROI), he is however, the only one to date that can articulate it with clarity and passion. And now with this book, he is working with you side-by-side.
What caught my eye upon cracking the cover, is how Olivier walks you from beginning to end, from what a Social Media Program IS, what you need to think about, to what it should look like,and what you should get from such a program. It’s the first Social Media University TextBook in my humble opinion.
Right from the beginning you’ll read how to create a social company, all the way to analysis and reporting of your social media program.
This book is easy to read and yet it is serious heavy lifting at times, but if you take the time and follow Olivier’s thinking, the confusion simply goes away. If you do the work, you will have a solid foundation of how to not only leverage Social Media networks, you’ll know how to participate in them, how to plug Social Media into your business, how to listen, how to monitor. and as he says, ” Listening Before Talking”. You learn more from this book than sitting at your computer trying to figure it out. Olivier is your Social Media ROI Mentor, all for the price of a book.
One of my favorite chapters is, The Eleven Key Best Practices for Social Media Program Management.
I highly recommend reading this book many times, not just once, it is packed with so much, one reading would merely set you up to fail. You have in your hands a text book if you study it, you will increase your odds of success in all social networks. A MUST have on your book shelf. This book will protect you from those who consider themselves Social Media GURU’s, the so called Social Media Expert.
This book will play a huge role in my work, how I see the future of business, how this fits an open and free business model, and how an ROI can be achieved. I look forward to implementing many of the steps in this book, and you will too, it’s the best investment you’ll make for the future of your business.
Make sure you connect with Olivier on his blog and follow him on Twitter: @thebrandbuilder
If you had the opportunity to talk at TED, what would your speech be about and why?
In a group called TED Ideas Worth Spreading, a discussion on LinkedIn with Andrew Oduro Ayim, he asked an interesting question, If you had the opportunity to talk at TED, what would your speech be about and why?
I responded as short as I could:
I would share my passion as often as I can, for as long as I can, and I’m sharing that passion at The World Futurist Society Conference in July 2011 on The Future of Business – The Open & Free Business Model. It’s not what we do, it’s not a skill-set, it’s about how we think, it’s how business really is in our world. A world where Access trumps Ownership, a world where generations yet to come will and do not value ownership of home, ownership of car, they value life-style not a work-style.
Business owners still don’t even know what Social Media can do for them in my area, we are in for a world of hurt, the paradigm shift from closed to open is too painful.
What would you talk about?