A Thorough Look at Social Media Marketing

February 7, 2011

social media strategies

Book Review
Social media strategies for professionals and their firms:
The guide to establishing credibility and accelerating relationships.
By Michelle Golden
Wiley, 2011.  348 pp.

In Social Media Strategies for Professionals and Their Firms Michelle Golden helps the reader think through today’s social media tools: which best suits your purpose and style, and what it takes to succeed with each medium, whether in corporate use or individual use.

Golden is a certified professional facilitator who blogs at Golden Practices Inc.  Accounting Today has named her one of the most powerful women in accounting.

In this very well written book she argues that marketers must persuade their firms to abandon most traditional (and ineffective) forms of marketing, including formal corporate ‘messaging.’ She promotes relationship marketing, using LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and blogs instead.

She takes on the ‘bottom line’ crowd and those managers who demand, “What’s the ROI of social media?” She responds, that’s a lot like asking, “What is the ROI of your phone?” In either case, she says, that depends entirely on what it’s used for.

Anticipating the entirely predictable (and reasonable) concerns of IT staff and of  corporate “brand” hawks, she says that disallowing employees’ use of social media is cutting off the firm’s nose to spite its face. Rather than worrying about the way people spend their time, she says, it’s better to hold people accountable for the end result: Ether they are performing or they aren’t.

When firms and their marketers say they feel rushed to implement a “Facebook strategy” or “LinkedIn strategy,” she advises taking a slower, thoughtful approach. She cautions against considering the mere adoption of any social media channel as the goal. Success requires first specifying what you ultimately seek to accomplish.

Some firms mistakenly implemented social media tools as vehicles for one-way content delivery. This practice severely under-uses these tools, she says, and using social media for “broadcasting” suggests the firm and its people are uninterested in relationships, inaccessible, unaware of social media behaviors, or all three.

Golden provides many corporate success stories. More than 20 case studies offer detailed strategies. These include Freed Maxick Battaglia: A CPA firm’s 10-week campaign to attract new business; Mark Bailey & Co., Ltd.: An ongoing campaign for audits of small, public companies; McKonly & Asbury: An approach to earning the trust of, and business from, local family-owned businesses; and Tracy Coenen’s Fraud Files blog, which established her niche in a fraud and forensic practice.

Like Dan Schwabel, Chris Brogan, and Erik Deckers and Kyle Lacy, Golden discusses what to do, and what to avoid, when branding oneself individually. Presenting oneself online in a corporate-like, sanitized, inauthentic way is doomed to fail.  Authenticity is a core value, and the online community generally rewards usefulness and altruism. Trust, transparency, and giving freely to the community are core to social capital.

In the book’s second half Golden details how to set up and use social media tools. She discusses the importance of using LinkedIn, in part because it’s highly searchable and well ranked in Google. She advises using Twitter not so much to talk about yourself, but to share information that can help others and to go out of your way to name others outside of your organization.

She explains how to use social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg.com, Alltop.com,  Friendfeed, and Stumbleupon to collect and tag content relevant to your industry. Search for content already tagged in useful ways, then filter and share that information through bookmarks of your own.

I found Social Media Strategies to be thorough, well organized, and satisfying.  I believe it has helped me create a more effective online presence.

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Posted by paul baker

You Are a Brand

February 7, 2011

branding yourself deckers lacy

Book Review
Branding yourself: how to use social media to invent or reinvent yourself.
Erik Deckers and Kyle Lacy
QUE BizTech/ Pearson, 2011. 283 p.

You may or may not be comfortable thinking of yourself as a ‘brand’ a la Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, or Facebook.

But considering your career as a brand will generate ideas that may help you reach your goals.

In Branding Yourself Erik Deckers and Kyle Lacy explain why you should promote yourself, how to build your online network, and how to succeed in ‘real world’ networking (public speaking, getting published, using your network to land a dream job).

Erik Deckers owns a social media agency and has been blogging since 1997. Kyle Lacy runs a digital marketing firm and blogs at KyleLacy.com, where he is ranked in the AdAge 150.

They emphasize the importance of establishing oneself as trustworthy and credible, carefully distinguishing this kind of branding from false advertising. Here they raise and develop themes developed by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith in Trust Agents and by Dan Schwabel in Me 2.0: Build a powerful brand to achieve career success.

If you ask 10 people to define personal branding you’ll get 10 different answers. Deckers and Lacy offer this: A brand is one’s emotional response to an image or to the name of a particular company, product, or person. Given that, branding yourself means creating the desired emotional response in people when they hear your name, see you online, or meet you in person.

OK, but how? They say that a personal branding campaign involves preparation and planning. One should sit down and craft a positioning statement (what I can offer uniquely) and a transaction statement (what success will look like). The statement will include defining one’s competition and specifying one’s end goal.

Kyle Lacy uses his positioning and transaction statements to keep himself focused. His location, age, being a published author, and running a business distinguish him different from some of the competition.

In a nice touch, Deckers and Lacy created three fictional personas to illustrate the points in each chapter: ‘Allen’ is an influencer with many contacts in the marketing and advertising world; ‘Beth’ changes jobs within the same industry to climb the career ladder; ‘Carla’ wants to change jobs and move into a different industry; and the IT specialist ‘Darrin’ leaves his job every 2 or 3 years to pursue a bigger paycheck. Throughout the book, each persona applies the main points to his or her own circumstances.

The authors discuss building one’s network via blogging, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. For example, forwarding articles and links helps build relationships with customers and colleagues. Facebook’s professional pages help business owners promote and develop their brands, establish community-based relationships, purchase advertising, and track analytics.

The authors wisely realized that this can all get kind of heavy at times. To lighten the tone, they include a selection of humorous Twitter tweets they sent back and forth while writing the chapters. It’s like looking over their shoulders as they worked through this project.

In the Yin and Yang of brand building, it’s important to balance self-promotion with modesty. The authors emphasize remembering to talk about other people more than about yourself. As you promote other people’s ideas and victories you become seen as helpful and resourceful.

Although I generally like the book’s design and layout, I would register one complaint about the information-rich figures, illustrations, and graphs. They are tiny and difficult to read. Often less than half a page, each deserves a full page.

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How and Why Social Media Changes Companies

February 4, 2011

Social Media Management Handbook

Book Review
The Social Media Management Handbook:
Everything you need to know to get social media working in your business.
Nick Smith and Robert Wollan with Catherine Zhou.
Wiley, 2011. 328 p.

There are many books about business uses of social media. This one offers more than most: Beyond showing how companies can use social media, it also explains why.

In 18 chapters, the book places the rise of social media in several contexts: generational, technological, and economic. Chapters address how adopting social media affects a company’s marketing and sales, customer service and support, platforms and IT infrastructure, employee responsibilities, recruiting practices, and the duties of the chief information officer and chief marketing officer.

The three primary authors work with Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company. Robert Wollan directs Accenture’s customer relationship management service, Nick Smith directs marketing transformation, and Catherine Zhou directs customer analytics.

The 21 contributing authors explain why social media policies must cross departmental boundaries and isolated practices. They discuss how marketers and business analysts need to adopt new measurement methods to account for the streams of brand-related information consumers constantly post to the web. Marketing and PR managers who face a relentless demand for “Return on Investment” will appreciate the book’s observation that the return on investment in social media does not necessarily mean sales: The metrics a company creates to gauge its effectiveness and return should be shaped  accordingly. A company can define its ROI in social media from many angles, including an consumer attitudinal perspective, a behavioral perspective, and an organizational standpoint, as well as from a transactional or conversion standpoint.

The book recommends that companies adopt an emerging online communication discipline called Social Community Marketing. From this perspective, brand-building efforts evolve from a mass-marketing model (which aims to acquire as many customers as possible) to a more targeted, tailored approach that initiates and maintains genuine conversations with customers.

Because so many consumers use smart phones and social media apps, companies need to ramp up their communication efforts in the mobile field. Customers tell their friends about good and bad experiences at the very moment they’re having them.

Accenture’s resource-rich social media portal provides access to updated content and project templates.

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A passionate user evangelizes for LinkedIn

February 4, 2011

linked in success wayne breitbarth

Book Review
The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success.
Kick-start your business, brand, and job search.
Wayne Breitbarth.
Greenleaf Book Press, 2011.  175 p.

A couple of years ago three books about using LinkedIn were published at about the same time. Then, about 30 million professionals use used the networking service; now the figure is more than 90 million.

In the book LinkedIn for Recruiting nearly 50 professional recruiters contributed comments, short case studies, and testimonials about using LinkedIn to locate job candidates. Even if you’re not a recruiter, this book is interesting as it provides insight into how recruiters think.  42 Rules for 24-hour Success on LinkedIn is a good starter book for general readers as well as recruiters. In 7 sections, the authors discuss what LinkedIn offers, how to create a strong profile, how to build your network, how to manage recommendations, how to raise awareness of yourself by posting and answering questions, how to search the LinkedIn database, and how to create or join an affinity group. Jason Alba’s I’m on LinkedIn, Now What? aims at the individual user. He discusses LinkedIn contacts as a source of knowledge about business and political issues, career management, job leads, and consulting opportunities. He recommends using LinkedIn for “your personal branding strategy,” a theme that informs the book.

Now I can I can recommend Wayne Breitbarth’s new book, Power Formula for LinkedIn Success. It has the advantage of being more up to date, obviously, but beyond that, Brietbarth is a passionate Super User. He has taught more than 120 classes on using LinkedIn and he’s now out on a book promo tour. He uses the tool to its max, uploading videos and documents and how to’s and polls. And he shares his secrets here.

His central message is that your power as a LinkedIn user comes from your unique set of experiences and your unique set of relationships.

Generally speaking, the more LinkedIn connections you have, the more you’ll benefit. But Breitbarth emphasizes, as do others, that you should limit your network to people you really know and trust. If you have 500 connections and don’t really know most of them, are you really in a position to make many honest referrals? How many of those 500 can you really ask for help? And consider that when you add a connection on LinkedIn, you are essentially handing over your Outlook database to that person. You hope he or she will treat it professionally.

Among his many recommendations for LinkedIn users are to check the keywords in your profile and add to, or focus, the keywords, to make you more searchable. He recommends listing every job you have ever held and to detail what you accomplished, what experience you gained, and any awards received. List all your volunteer positions. Get more recommendations from colleagues present and past, and realize that even the words in recommendations are keyword searchable.

Use more applications. Post books to the reading list, point to your SlideShare presentations, post documents to Box.net and list your upcoming Events, whether presenting or attending.

Did you know that LinkedIn allows you to save your searches? And if you wish, LinkedIn will notify you whenever a new person who meets your search criteria has been found in your network.  Breitbarth also recommends joining LinkedIn Groups, and lots of them—up to 50. Your membership will increase your visibility and will help you find others with similar interests.

Breitbarth conducts a semiannual poll about how people use LinkedIn, and here he shares the results in Top 10 list.

With more people using mobile apps, I would have enjoyed reading a discussion of using the LinkedIn app. But that will appear in the next edition, I’ll bet.

Wayne Breitbarth’s website: www.powerformula.net

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Communicating research more effectively

January 21, 2011

Students and faculty who plan to attend the AERA Annual Meeting this year may be interested in a communications professional development course.

A half-day workshop, Communicating research through effective presentations, social media, and writing, will focus on these sometimes neglected skills.

Instructors will be Ron Dietel, assistant director for research use and communications at UCLA’s National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST);  Barbara McKenna, Communications Director for the School Redesign Network at Stanford University and for the Leadership for Equity and Accountability in Districts and Schools (LEADS); and Paul Baker, senior communicator at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER).

The syllabus is here

The course blog is here

The course Ning is here

Registration information is here

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In company, loneliness

January 19, 2011

alone together

Book Review
Alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other.
Sherry Turkle.
Basic Books, 2011. 360 p.

“Unless that’s the president, get off your phone!” headlines today’s newspaper column written by UW-Madison student Kathleen Brosnan.

“I pretty much secretly despise people who are clicking away at their phone when I’m having a conversation with them.”

Her column in today’s Daily Cardinal illustrates Sherry Turkle’s concern in Alone Together.

Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. She’s the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and a licensed clinical psychologist. She is the author of The Second Self and Life on the Screen.

In Alone Together Turkle shows how today’s always-on social network, with its promise to give us more control over human relationships, actually isolates us.

She also illustrates our vulnerability to sociable robots, which promise relationships where we will be in control, even if that means not being in relationships at all.

Through dozens of case studies, Alone Together shows how we keep expecting more from technology and less from each other. While we defend all this connectivity as a way to be close, we also use it to distance each other.

Alone Together also raises philosophical and ethical questions about using intelligent robots as playthings for children and caretakers for the elderly. This may seem a far stretch, but consider:

In the late 1990s children began playing with objects that presented themselves as having feelings and needs. Tamagotchis and Furbies sold in the tens of millions. They would tell you if they were hungry or unhappy. Children interacted with them as they would a pet or a human.  They identified with the doll before them, all the while knowing that it is “only a machine.”

The elderly, meanwhile, find comfort and “companionship” in Paro, a small, seal-like sociable robot developed at MIT’s AgeLab. In 2002 the Guinness Records pronounced it “the most therapeutic robot in the world,” in part because it was part of Japan’s initiative to use robots to support senior citizens. In 2009, Denmark placed an order for one thousand Paros for elder-care facilities, even though the price tag as $6,000 per unit.

For Turkle, Paro and other companion robots raise the question, “Don’t we have people for these jobs?” Have we come to think of the elderly as nonpersons who do not require the care of persons”? Perhaps those who suffer from dementia need the most human attention, not the least. And if we assign machine companionship to Alzheimer’s patients, who is next on the list?

Turkle challenges us to take a very critical look at our intelligent companions, whether dolls or smart phones, and to consider the consequences of using them as substitutes for genuine human communication.

I close with one of Turkle’s many powerful anecdotes: Hannah, a high school junior, says that for years she has tried to get her mother’s attention when her mother comes to fetch her after school or after dance lessons. Hannah says, “The car will start; she’ll be driving still looking down, looking at her messages, but still no hello.”  Parents say they are ashamed of such behavior but quickly get around to explaining, if not justifying it, They say they are more stressed than ever as they try to keep up with email messages.

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Communicating education research

December 28, 2010

Over the years I’ve fielded calls from Frank Schultz, an education reporter for the Janesville (Wis.) Gazette. “Paul, I’m working on a story about (_____). What does education research say about it?”  Frank is good at providing feedback on articles I publish in a quarterly newsletter too. He recently reacted to a story about assessment practices in Wisconsin schools, and ended with this observation:

“. . . In any case, the article makes some sense to me because I have heard similar talk from some edu-doctors around here. Maybe someone should research how to communicate education concepts with the public.”

Frank makes a very good point. There is a lot of room for improvement.  Researchers often seem to live on a different planet from classroom teachers, not to mention the man in the street.

Speaking as a communicator, I can report on a few efforts to bridge the gap, both continuing and sporadic.

Members of the American Educational Research Assn. have two interest groups to address communication issues:  Communication of Research and Research Use.

AERA’s Communication and Outreach Committee presents panels at each year’s annual meeting on communicating education research to the public. I have helped organize this panel for the past 2 or 3 years. We gather newspaper reporters, bloggers, and researchers to speak about communication from their perspective.

In my own work I take cues from my friends in science, including the Natl. Assn. of Science Writers and the AAAS and the NSF.  Last year I attended their joint conference on science research communication and can recommend it.

The Education Writers Association, which serves reporters, editors, and higher ed communicators, holds workshops throughout the year and an annual conference. I’ve benefited from getting to know reporters and other higher ed people and look forward to the next conference in April.

In our own state, WCER hosts leaders of Wisconsin’s Cooperative Educational Service Agencies (CESAs) annually for a one-day conference. Researchers share their recent work with CESA staff and productive conversation ensues; sometimes new partnerships form.

So what I describe is a mix of research and practice. Frank’s original point remains, though:  The field of education communication is ripe for more research on what’s effective.

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A customer service story

December 21, 2010

I created this 3-minute movie today to help me think through issues of customer service.

I hope you enjoy it.

postal story

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Fundamentals of your online presence

December 20, 2010

six pixels of separation

Book Review
Six pixels of separation:  Everyone is connected: Connect your business to everyone.
By Mitch Joel.
Business Plus/Hachette Book Group, 2010. 288 p.

If you communicate on behalf of an organization, it’s understandable that you might assume that just about everybody is online now. But that’s evidently not the case. Mitch Joel aims Six Pixels squarely at those still considering establishing an online business presence.

By day, Joel runs TwistImage, a digital marketing agency that develops websites, customer relationship management initiatives, micro-sites, and online promotions for its clients. Joel sees his job as “helping people navigate the complex world of new marketing.”

This book lays out the decisions one should make before jumping into social media for business. Its title deliberately recalls the phrase “six degrees of separation” and takes it a step further. In today’s digital world, Joel says, “there are no degrees of separation between you and your customers. You are connected.”

“The big idea in a world of Six Pixels, Joel says, “ is to embrace community as the new currency.”

Six Pixels walks the reader through the online conversational channels where your business might become an important source of insight, information, and community in its niche. These channels include blogs, microblogs, podcasts, online social networks, sharing sites, user-generated content, wikis, and widgets.

Joel explains the importance of using search engine marketing, news readers, news alerts and watchlists, and Google Blog Search and Google Trends.

He points to Arianna Huffington as someone who has used online publishing not only to connect and get her voice out to the masses, but also to build a substantive media channel that generates significant revenues and competes successfully against major mainstream news organizations. Huffington has created her own personal brand. In fact, Joel says, the best way to build your personal brand is to give away your expertise. He cites as examples Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, and Chris Brogan.

The book’s most up-to-date chapter addresses mobile technology and its growing potential as a marketplace. “Mobile is going to be much more disruptive to your business than the Internet,” Joel says. “If it was causing you a level of grief that people might go online and read a negative review about you, or see a search result that led to your competitor, imaging having consumers stand in your physical space and check online for prices and how close your nearest competitor is at the same time.”

Joel emphasizes the importance of innovation, of seeing market needs and jumping in with your new idea. “All new business models look weird and act weird,” he says, “because they are weird.” He points to several examples of innovation that changed rules of the game:

  • While the big mobile carriers were worried about voice and churning consumers to other carriers they were blindsided by the companies offering data: RIM with the BlackBerry and Apple with the iPhone.
  • While the music industry was charging high prices for plastic CDs and ignoring consumer interest in the single-song format, iTunes came out with songs for $0.99 by download and changed everything.
  • The online publisher Lulu has sold thousands of books, but it doesn’t publish one book for 10 million people; it sells 10 million books to 10 million people.

Joel asks his readers to consider the following: Given that we’re all intrinsically connected, the bigger question is, How are you going to spread your story, connect, and add value to your life and the people whose lives you touch? How are you going to explore your network to grow your net worth? How are you going to add tremendous value to a brand, product, or service that can always be made cheaper and faster by someone else? How are you going to connect and stay connected?

Six Pixels is among the latest in a number of books about creating an online presence to grow your career and your business. Many of the ideas here can be found among titles including Chris Brogan’s Trust Agents (2009), Shel Israel’s Twitterville (2009), Paul Gillin’s Secrets of Social Media Marketing (2009), Dan Schwabel’s Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (2009), Jim Tobin’s Social Media Is A Cocktail Party (2008), Amy Shuen’s Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide (2008), Charlene Li’s Groundswell (2008), Martin Thomas’s Crowdsurfing (2008), John Cass’s Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging (2007), Shel Holtz’s Blogging for Business (2006), and Gerald Baron’s Now Is Too Late (2006).  If you’ve read a few of the titles above, you won’t find a lot of news in Six Pixels. But if you are new to social media for business, then I can certainly recommend this book.

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Stewarding technology for communities

December 20, 2010

digital habitats

Book Review
Digital habitats: Stewarding technology for communities.
Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, John D. Smith.
CPsquare, 2009. 227 p.

We humans face profound environmental, economic, cultural, and political challenges. These new challenges require new kinds of communities to learn together. Our communities have to match the problems we are addressing in size and in complexity.

One way to address a specific challenge is to form a community of practice. A community of practice represents an intention to steward a domain of knowledge and to sustain learning about it. A high level of identification with the issue connects the members and their orientation to practice.

Lots of learning potential is generated by the interplay between technology and community. Technology for community use has become an important area of practice, and it needs to be developed and nurtured to yield its full potential. People who take on the task of making this happen are called technology stewards.

Technology stewards usually are members of an online community addressing a domain of knowledge. But technology stewardship is not merely about technology, technical support, or even user support. Technology stewards search for better ways to serve their communities. A digital habitat is part of the life of a community, so choosing technology, installing it, and supporting its use requires understanding and improvisation.

Ideally, the ultimate effect of careful stewarding is an increase in community and in learning capacity.

Co-author Etienne Wenger is author of several books on communities of practice, including Situated Learning. Nancy White, Full Circle Associates, supports collaboration in the nonprofit, NGO, and business sectors. John D. Smith is the community steward for CPsquare.

The 11 chapters of Digital Habitats describe the idea and the role of technology stewards. The first section defines the notion of technology stewardship intellectually, historically, and practically. Section 2 offers three models for thinking about technology in communities. These models are meant to help tech stewards “read” situations and propose sources of action. Part 3 focuses on the evolving practice of stewarding technology. Part 4 addresses the future of technology stewardship: the interplay between community and technology, and how tech stewards can best develop their practice.

Good tech stewards provide the level of technical expertise needed by their particular community. For example, when a community has grown so  large that many people don’t know each other, the tech steward may set up a membership directory in response.

The authors clearly distinguish between technology stewardship and traditional IT support. They emphasize the importance of working within the community, and how an insider perspective creates the fit between community aspirations and technology.

A steward’s choice of technology should reflect the style of the community: formal versus informal, presentation versus discussion, whole group versus breakouts.  The effective tech steward doesn’t just manage the configuration, but makes it a productive habitat. He or she maintains the community’s vision while maintaining some flexibility with uncertainties and changes.

Determining what communities will tolerate or demand—including their needs, interest, and motivations—makes stewarding interesting work. This kind of work cannot be reduced to one formula.

The book’s final two chapters consider trends in the search for new digital habitats at the intersection of community and technology.

This is an inspiring book and I recommend it. For my purposes, though, the book would have been stronger with a few detailed profiles or case studies of stewards and how they worked within their communities.

The authors have created two online spaces that do offer rich supplemental resources. One is a group blog at http://technologyforcommunities.com .  The other is a tools wiki http://technologyforcommunities.com/tools .

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