In our final installment we learn about a few of the essential keys to creating a successful corporate blogging program. Here is the last part of my chat with Silicon Valley communications legend Lou Hoffman. – Steve Farnsworth(@Steveology)
Can you talk about what you mean by storytelling and why it’s important to corporate blogging?
(LH) Given a choice between dull or compelling, people gravitate toward compelling. This is why more people watch American Idol than CSPAN.That’s the idea of applying storytelling techniques to blogging. It pushes the content toward the compelling quadrant.
No one expects a scientist coming out of R&D to write like David Pogue from the New York Times. Geez, I wish I could bring such cleverness and levity to my own blog.
But that same scientist can absolutely improve his or her blog content by using techniques found in classic storytelling.
For example—
Just trusting your ear and writing with conversational tone improves a blog.
There’s a reason that anywhere from 10 to 30 percent of the content in Economist articles are anecdotes. They entertain and show a certain realness.
Recognize that drama comes from contrast, showing the difference between “what was” and “what is.” The greater the difference, the greater the drama.
All of these concepts and others help people who don’t write for a living tell their stories in a more entertaining fashion.
Conventional wisdom holds that you shouldn’t be different for the sake of being different.
I disagree.
There are millions of blogs out there.
It’s tough to break through the noise.
If you’ve got a way to be different, give it a shot. Your Google analytics numbers will tell you whether it worked or not.
(SF) If a corporate blogger wants to start using storytelling in their writing, how can they start?
(LH) Read corporate blogs as well as mainstream blogs.
Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop does as good a job as anyone at capturing the top blogs by subject matter.
On the mainstream side, I think someone like Henry Blodget at the BusinessInsider combines strong opinions with the ability to turn a phrase as reflected in his recent post on the Hurd fiasco at HP.
A good example of a CEO who isn’t afraid to deviate from the status quo is Dave Kellogg at MarkLogic (not a client). His post “Dear CIO, Stop Writing Big Checks For Commodity Software” is a classic.
I’d also suggest corporate bloggers flag posts that they find effective, taking a moment to reverse engineer the content. What made it good?
In fact, this concept can be applied to everything you read including books and magazine articles.
Same goes for content that bores you.
If you can understand the “why” behind the good and bad, it starts to cultivate your own writing and voice. Train yourself to read with Post-it notes at your side.
In the book The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, he espouses the “10,000 hour rule,” that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert in anything.
I’m not saying every corporate blogger needs to point to this 10K threshold to be successful.
But there’s no getting around the act of writing and striving to tell compelling stories will improve the corporate blogger over time.
A simple social media policy is best — it can even fend off lawyers. And a set of simple, easy to remember and enforce rules also happens to be the best way to run your business, raise your children, and be a decent person.
So here it is:
Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t steal, don’t reveal.
If you add in the Golden Rule we learned as children, and treat others the way you want to be treated, many of the social media policy disputes that are making headlines these days would simply fade away.
THE EASY PATH
Prefer the easy path? Just follow these four basic steps.
- Follow somebody at random – literally anyone will do
- Wait 24-48 hours to see if they follow you back
- If they don’t, unfollow them
- Repeat
This is known as churning. And while it’s supposed to be a breach of Twitter’s TOS, they rarely do anything about it. It’s a simple and highly-effective way to build a lot of followers in a short period of time. In three months you can easily pick up ten thousand people. And if you’re really into it, a lot more.
There’s just one (relatively minor) drawback to finding followers using this system: almost none of these profiles (1-2 per cent maximum) will pay you any attention whatsoever. This is because most of the people who automatically follow you back are employing the exact same system as you. With very, very few exceptions, the actual value of a network built this way is at or close to zero. Want proof? Just check out the bit.ly data of anyone who built a Twitter network using these practices.
Take a look around Twitter and you’ll see lots of folks, many of whom come bearing titles such as guru, maven and internet marketer – and so many of them are enthusiasts, too, which is always nice to see – who have built huge followings using this very system. They’re easy to spot, as they’re nearly always following a few hundred more people than the tens (and sometimes hundreds) of thousands of people who are following them. Although a few are sneaky, and later mass-unfollow almost everyone to make it look like they recruited their audience simply by being awesome. They didn’t. And they’re not.
THE HARD PATH
Unfortunately, the hard path is literally that: hard. It takes time, it takes effort, and it requires all of this to work.
- Learn the Twitter basics (and continue to educate yourself)
- Write perfect tweets
- Be yourself
- Put in the hours
- Be useful, helpful or interesting
- Be nice (until it’s time to not be nice)
- Have a proper avatar
- Pay attention
- Don’t be a jerk
Here’s how the 1% have done it (color coded).
#1 Create a No Retribution Social Media Policy
Most leaders forget that employees become cynical over time. Policies come and go. Some die; some are ignored. The 1% start with a social media policy that their employees comment on publicly. This gives ownership of the policy to everyone in the organization.
A no retribution clause enforced by the executives of the organization is a must. No exceptions. If the employee follows the policy, then he or she cannot be punished. In fact, most of the 1% hold up the employees’ actions publicly as if to say, “See, we’re serious about recognizing your rights”.
P.S. Some policies read: “Don’t be stupid,” and leave it at that.
#2 Make your Subject Matter Experts Heroes
Every company has at least a few of them. They are the people that you look at and say Wow, how do they do it? The 1% promote their subject matter experts (SME) internally and externally. They make their SMEs into industry celebrities, which attracts fans (customers), which attracts revenue.
Sites like Triberr make promoting SMEs easy because they create an active and cooperative ecosystem system that helps promote and foster relationships and content.
#3 Build Your Community
Today, companies are erecting the scaffolding for employee and customer communities to better understand and connect with them. These social support networks provide the organization with far less expensive resources (the crowd of employees, customers and partners) to execute on the objectives of the organization.
#4 Enlist Partners and Suppliers in Your Organization’s Supply Chain
Chris Brogan calls it a home base, or you can think of it as a hub.
Your own content-rich site, on a domain you own, managed with good content management software, is where you’ll put about 80% of your content marketing time and energy.
A site like this becomes a valuable business asset. Over time, it develops a reputation — both with human readers and with search engines.
It’s where you develop the ideas that will become your unique selling proposition.
It’s where you’ll foster the customer conversations that spark new product ideas.
It’s where you’ll optimize your content for both search engines and potential customers.
There is a commodity that is at the core of our work in the communications field, and the related fields of marketing and advertising. Without this commodity, we could never hope to wield influence. Unlike oil, it is a resource that will always exist, yet it is finite; there is only so much of it to go around. This commodity is attention.
In an information/knowledge economy, attention is at the heart of just about everything. If people pay attention, you have a shot at getting your message across. If they don’t, if they choose to focus their attention elsewhere, you might as well be firing your messages into deep space. What’s more, given the nature of the Net, you can identify what people are paying attention to and use that information.
It’s interesting to reflect on the term “pay attention.” “Pay” suggests some kind of barter arrangement. When I pay money for something, I expect to get something in return, whether it’s a pack of chewing gum, a new laptop, a novel, whatever. When I pay heed, I also expect something in return, such as information of value. As more and more organizations jockey to attract the attention of key audiences, what are they giving in return? Are they even thinking in terms of an exchange? And what of those organizations that use services like Technorati and PubSub to identify where people are focusing their attention in order to use it to better hone their own messages? Are they employing any ethical guidelines to their application of the information they obtain?
These questions are new to the information age, but a non-profit organization has been launched to advocate on behalf of the people who own the commodity organizations crave. AttentionTrust maintains that individuals own themselves, their data, and their attention. Further, this ownership assumes certain rights:
- Property—You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have control.
- Mobility—You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to. You have the ability to transfer your attention.
- Economy—You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has worth.
- Transparency—You can see exactly how your attention is being used. You can decide who you trust.
AssociationTrust defines attention, in part, as
…the substance of focus. It registers your interests by indicating choice for certain things and choice against other things. Any time you pay attention to something (and any time you ignore something), data is created. That data has value, but only if it’s gathered, measured, and analyzed. Right now, you generally lack the ability to capture that data for yourself, so you can’t benefit from it. But what if you could? And what if you could share your data with other people, who were also capturing their own data, or if you could exchange your data for something of value with companies and other institutions that were interested in learning more about the things that interested you? You’d be in control–you would decide who has access to what data, as well as what you’d accept in exchange for access to your data.
The site also includes links to some research and writing on the subject of attention.
The mission of AttentionTrust isn’t clear, and its activities aren’t defined, but the association is inviting memberships for those who are willing to abide by the four principles. In any case, this is no fly-by-night group. The volunteer board includes the likes of ZDNet columnist and attention advocate Steve Gillmor (president), Nick Bradbury, designer of the FeedDemon RSS newsreader, Seth Goldstein, Clay Shirky, and Mary Hodder, among others. Since there’s no dollar figure attached to membership (other than a suggested $25 donation), I’m signing up if for no other reason than to see what comes next.
This depiction of the digital marketing landscape was shown at a Buddy Media event marking the launch of the social marketing software agency’s new suite of measurement tools.
You can click to enlarge it, but that won’t make it look any simpler.
Bonus points for reader Ryan, who realized Pinterest isn’t on there.
In my “Writing for the Wired World” workshops, I begin by pointing out a fundamental difference between business websites and everything else on the web. When you build a family site (birthday party pictures and the like) or a fan site (if you love your Mini Cooper, for instance) or a performance art site (fun with Flash, for example), your visitors are happy to click here and there to see what you’re offering. When people come to a business site, however, they know exactly what they want. With laser-like intensity, they will zero in (or, at least, try to) on the answer to their question, the solution to their problem. Visitors to business sites have agendas. They’re not interested in following any links that won’t get them to what brought them.
Similar distinctions apply to business podcasting -– particularly B2B podcasting, where your customer is another business instead of an individual customer or consumer. There’s no point in pretending to be “Dawn and Drew” when your audience has come for useful business content. (Besides, if they want to listen to “Dawn and Drew,” they can. )
That said, it’s also worth noting that your listeners spend most of their time listening to podcasts other than yours. There are podcasting practices you should learn and adhere to that, so far, many business podcasts are ignoring. Most busines podcasts, for example, don’t have associated blogs. More on that later.
Not that there are a lot of B2B podcasts out there yet. I count maybe half a dozen (from Oracle, Jupiter, Eric Schwartzman, and BMC Software, for example). But podcasting is exploding and businesses are going to figure out sooner rather than later that a podcast could be a useful B2B communication channel.
With that in mind, I started jotting down some guidelines for B2B podcasting. As luck would have it, I wound up with 10:
Be relevant
If you’re considering a B2B podcast, you’ve probably already given some consideration to a theme and an audience. One of the no-brainer podcasts no business has A podcast for this audience helps elevate your content above the dozens or even hundreds of other companies sending content through traditional channels. It’s not enough to just focus on this audience; you have to add some value. You don’t need to disclose material information for this podcast to be relevant, but you should offer insights into why your organization is a worthy investment. You might, for instance, pick a focus of your R&D efforts and give it a bit more attention that usual, talk about customer satisfaction metrics, or conduct an interview with one of your thought leaders.
Under some circumstances, you might be tempted to use your podcast to address issues that have reared their ugly heads. It’s easy to view the podcast as a broad business communication tool. It’s not. Podcasting is all about narrowcasting, particularly when you’re dealing with a business audience. Resist the temptation to digress or risk losing an audience that listens because of the highly focused content you deliver. Consider IBM’s podcast, which delves into the future of some aspect of life (homes, cars, shopping) through the eyes of two company thought leaders on the subject. How many people would unsubscribe if IBM used an episode to explain its labor issues? That’s not why people subscribed.
Avoid fluff
I’ve heard some comments recently suggesting that business podcasts should be more entertaining. One pundit went so far as to suggest that business podcasts should play songs. Don’t you believe it. Someone who listens to the IBM podcast wants to know what the future holds and they want to hear it from experts working on real-world applications. Listeners to my podcast may argue, “You play music.” Yes, Neville and I play a podsafe tune at the end of every show. But we’re not a B2B podcast; there is no business behind our show. (We’re just two guys doing a podcast.) We also save the music for the end of the show, so those who don’t want to hear music can stop listening when the music starts. (Incidentally, we play music to support the independent artists whose efforts are one of the biggest drivers of podcasting and because it’s our show and we want to.)
Be infotaining
While you don’t want to turn your B2B podcast into a top 40 music show, you do want to employ enough entertainment elements to make it interesting to listen to. Solid content is not compelling if it is delivered by a lone monotonous voice. Use musical intros and outros, introduce new features, and generally take advantage of the medium. Adopt a format for your show. “For Immediate Release” is a co-hosted discussion with audio commentary from other sources. You could do an interview show, a panel discussion, or commentary by company thought leaders. Listeners get to like a format. They also like it if you shake it up from time to time.
Build and engage community
There’s a podcasting myth that suggests one of podcasting’s great limitations is its one-way, top-down nature. Hogwash. Podcasts routinely build communities of listeners the members of which interact with the podcaster. Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code offers a great example. Curry expressed an interest in biodiesel and asked for input. Listeners sent what they knew by email and audio comment. Other listeners commented on what the first round of listeners said. Curry responded and asked more questions. The biodiesel discussion has been going on for weeks on DSC. Neville and I have worked hard to make “For Immediate Release” listener-driven, with as much as half of each show based on themes raised by our listeners.
There are no competitors…okay, there are some competitors
If you spend your time bashing your competitors, your listeners will unsubscribe in droves. They’re coming for insights, not an us-vs.-them commercial. As my mother (and yours, too, probably) used to say, if you can’t say something nice about somebody, don’t say anything. In fact, if a competitor introduces a podcast or says something worthwhile in a blog, point to it. Neville and I don’t see the growing number of PR-focused podcasts as competition. We even link to them in what we call our “podroll,” a list of other communication-themed podcasts on our show blog. Just because your audience is made up of customers doesn’t mean you shouldn’t recognize the interconnectedness of the medium and your listeners’ hunger for useful and interesting content.
Not that I think Boston Consulting Group would ever welcome a new podcast by McKinsey & Company into the podosphere. Short of that, though, it pays dividends to be part of a bigger podcasting community.
Don’t advertise or sell
Nobody wants to subscribe to and download a commercial. You can brand your product, service, or company by being the provider of useful information. You should avoid turning your podcast into an advertisement at all costs, regardless of what your throwback marketing VP wants.
Be authentic
Businesses often are inclined to overproduce their media, striving to be as good as – or better than – mainstream public media. I remember talking to the manager of one company’s video production operation who said his baseline was a local newscast; his work could never, no matter what, be worse than a typical local newscast. While podcast listeners do want to be entertained, their primary interest is in content, not polish. A podcast hosted by voice talent reading a script will be dismissed, while listening to a real engineer or designer or brand manager -– replete with all his “ums” and “uhs” -– will be compelling, as long as he’s talking about something the listener cares about. (Besides, you can edit out the worst mistakes.)
Be mindful of your listeners’ time
Depending on whom you talk to, podcasts shouldn’t exceed 20 or 40 minutes. Neville and I routinely run 70 to 80 minutes. But again, while “The Hobson and Holtz Report” is about business, it’s not from a business. With a business podcast, you’re asking your customer (or prospective customer) to give her attention to your organization’s content. It’s an exchange. Don’t ask for too much of it. Make sure you fill the time you do have with something useful enough to make the exchange worthwhile.
Integrate your podcast into the blogosphere
Outside the pseudo podcasts from the mainstream media (repackaged pre-broadcast radio content), you’ll be hard-pressed to find a podcast that doesn’t have an associated blog. So far, most of the business podcasts haven’t emulated this practice with the exception of GM, where the Fastlane podcast is just part of the Fastlane blog. Your podcast blog page contains show notes, another tactic common among indie podcasters but missing from businesses. Listeners appreciate the hell out of good show notes. Most important, but inviting comments on each show, you more effectively build that community of listeners naysayers insist you can’t build with a podcast.
As I said at the beginning, I’m sure I’ve overlooked some important guidelines. What have I missed?
A dominantly male platform, almost 70 percent, Google+ is slowly but surely attracting a more diverse user base. Big brands are taking notice and many have fully integrated the platform into their social media strategies for 2012. Is Google+ a part of your 2012 social media strategy? It should be!
Let’s examine a few of the brands to look in 2012 for social media insight.
H&M
Over half a million users have this brand circled on Google+. If you circle H&M you’ll see their fashion picks of the day, get access to style guides like their 2012 Denim Guide and engage with other fans of the brand by discussing questions like “What’s the first sign of spring? Caps, sneakers, sunglasses?”. Engagement isn’t quite what you’d expect if you had this many fans on Facebook – under 100 shares and around 100 +1s is common for their daily status updates.
Social networking sites give us the opportunity to share something interesting and meaningful, but staying active on these sites is difficult. Look back on your recent tweets, Facebook status updates, blog posts. Do you find this material interesting and relevant? If you don’t, chances are others won’t either. If you find yourself posting just for the sake of posting, you may be experiencing this fatigue. Engaging in content and interacting with other users, rather than shooting out content blindly, is the key to combating social media fatigue. Social engagement is more than just content—it’s about getting involved in a conversation.
Find ways to integrate all of your social media platforms into one tool to make things easier. Using Hootsuite, or another social media consolidation platform, is one way to do this. It’s also important to keep track of where your time is being spent. Set up a routine and make appointments with your social networking sites. Set aside two hours (or however long) in the morning for blogging, scheduling tweets and updating LinkedIn/Facebook/Google+, etc. Later, pick a part of the day where you can cut loose and catch up on things. Pop into each network for five to 10 minutes to survey activity and reply to what you need to. Getting into the habit of tracking your time on social media sites takes persistence before you see results.
As someone who specializes in the online marketing arena, I meet and chat with people everyday who are interested in using social media to market their business. Not a big surprise right? But what you might be surprised to learn, is many of these medium-to-large firms have a major problem: they don’t know how to start.
While social media marketing advice can be found on every corner of the internet, most of it doesn’t address this problem or offer ways to enhance or “reinvigorate” an existing campaign.
So in this article I want to push aside the “Go Get ‘Em Tiger”s and technical mumbo jumbo and provide you with a fool proof step-by-step 101 list to get your social media marketing campaign underway in no time flat!
Let’s dive right in:
Step 1: Write Down Your Objectives
The first thing you’ll want to do is really identify what you are trying to achieve through using social media to market your company. Keep in mind that more leads is not your only goal. Think about possible objectives such as; engaging your current customers/clients, offering better customer service, building brand recognition, getting more local exposure….these are the types of objectives that you should be looking at.
Step 2: Know Who Your Target Market Is
A social media marketing campaign that is laser focused has the ability to reap better results than a broad shoot campaign. You don’t want to waste time here wading through unqualified leads….you want the real deal. Make a list of 5-10 target markets that you want to hit and keep it handy throughout your campaign. Having this list will help you keep your “eye on the prize”.
Step 3: Look at What Your Competition is Doing on Social Media
Many of us do a competitive analysis when we put together our marketing plan….so why don’t we do one when we are developing our social media marketing strategy? Usually the easiest way to begin this exercise is to go to their website and follow their social media links from there. If you can’t find the links there, login to sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and search for their company name. When you find them, see what they are doing and if it is successful. Are they getting lots of comments? Do they use lots of graphics and design elements? Are they posting often? Taking a look at these items can even give you good solid ideas of what you need to do…and what you don’t need to.
Step 4: What Are You Going to Say?
This is one of the trickiest things to come by as many organizations don’t have a wealth of available info to share. If your company does – the battle is nearly over! If not, it has just begun. Make sure that you are able to come up with content that is timely, engaging, entertaining, thought provoking and educational…or one of those 5. Also, think out of the box! If I was a healthcare organization, I would go to the website for the medical association that is within my niche and share some of their updates and tips, as they would be relevant and interesting to my audience. Sharing is caring….not stealing! But content is king folks.
Here are the social-era rules that allow both people and institutions to thrive:
1. Connections create value.
The social era will reward those organizations that realize they don’t create value all by themselves. If the industrial era was about building things, the social era is about connecting things, people, and ideas. Networks of connected people with shared interests and goals create ways that can produce returns for any company that serves their needs.
2. Power in community.
Power used to come largely through and from big institutions. Today power can and does come from connected individuals in community. Power can come from the way you work with others, such as one party offering a platform to the multitude of creators. When community invests in an idea, it also co-owns its success. Instead of trying to achieve scale by all by yourself, we have a new way to have scale: scale can be in, with, and through community.
3. Collaboration > control.
Organizations that “let go at the top”–forsaking proprietary claims and avoiding hierarchy–are agile, flexible, and poised to leap from opportunity to opportunity, sacrificing short-term payoffs for long-term prosperity. No longer can management espouse the notion that good ideas can come from everywhere, while actually pursuing a practice in which direction is owned by a few. Instead of centralized decisions, there is distributed input, decision making, and distributed ownership.
4. Celebrate onlyness.
The foundational element starts with celebrating each human and, more specifically, something I’ve termed onlyness. Onlyness is that thing that only one particular person can bring to a situation. It includes the skills, passions, and purpose of each human. Each of us is standing in a spot that no one else occupies. That unique point of view is born of our accumulated experience, perspective, and vision. Without this tenet of celebrating onlyness, we allow ourselves to be simply cogs in a machine–dispensable and undervalued.
5. Allow all talent.
“Doing work” no longer requires a badge and a title within a centralized organization. Anyone–without preapproval or vetting or criteria–will create and contribute. And this fundamental shift changes how any organization creates value, and how many individuals gather together. This talent inclusion–across ages, genders, cultures, sexual orientation–is essential for solving new problems as well as for finding new solutions to old problems. Be the one to enable that connected individual in your enterprise, through systems and leadership, and you win.
6. Consumers become co-creators.
More and more companies embrace consumers as “co-creation” partners in their innovation efforts, instead of as buyers at the end of a value chain. Consumers, traditionally considered as value exchangers or extractors, are now seen as a source of value creation and competitive advantage. This collaboration shares power between the participants as we start to recognize value creation as an act of exchange, not simply a one-way transaction. As an exchange, all parties need to do it sustainably as each must have equilibrium to stay viable.
Here are 10 key actions to transform employees into ambassadors:
- Ditch social media guidelines for social media training – The internet changes everyday and with it, the norms, behaviors and destinations an ambassador must pay attention to. Static guidelines leave ambassadors with instructions that expire and little direction. The journey from employee to ambassador includes more than a set of rules, it includes the acquisition of skills. Those skills can only come from experience and training.
- Use game mechanics to incentivize participation – Building an organic audience is a long-term commitment. Not every ambassador will be energized by the prospect of daily production, reading, sharing and networking. To maintain momentum, break-down responsibilities into discrete and categorized actions. Weight each action by expected effort and reward accordingly. Make it all add up. Give ambassadors a set of quests that allow them to qualify for a particular specialty — set up a profile, make your first connection, unlock your newbie status. Design digital tools that monitor activities and allow constant feedback.
- Limit your audience to interest groups – The ‘mass web’ is an extremely competitive environment where the latest gossip, extraordinary news events and cat videos fight for attention. The size of the potential audience is huge, but the chance of being drowned out is even larger. Avoid irrelevance by engaging with interest groups. Focus on becoming a valued member of the community, not just a sponsor of it.
- Don’t get caught up in audience size – 100 good friends online can often trump 100,000 acquaintances, especially if those 100 friends are well connected. With a smaller network, the content that you produce and things you have to say become more focused. That focus improves the likelihood of engagement and strong referral. Good friends don’t just ‘pass things along’, they advocate for their circle of friends.
- Choose your speciality – There are many ways to become prominent online. Brands become obsessed with leading conversations and taking the authoritative role. But, not every brand has the qualities to lead audiences like a Seth Godin or Steven Colbert. There are other specialities. For example, Jason Kottke has won the attention of a large audience by exploring the fringe of internet and sharing links that would otherwise remain hidden. It’s not about what he says but, about what he finds.
Many organizations find it difficult to keep up with their corporate blog by regularly adding fresh and relevant content. Even though most managers find this process painful, there are a few techniques you can use to scale content generation for a corporate blog.
1. Record your blog on your smartphone during your work commute.
I find that my work commute stimulates idea generation much like taking a shower or watering a garden. Use your smartphone to do a safe hands-free voice recording and release your thoughts for later processing. Think about the latest changes in your industry, company news or the most interesting points during the meetings you attended that day. Sit down later and take notes from your recorded message, and write your post using your own prompts. Allow your mundane commute to free your mind, and you’ll be surprised at what you create!
2. Ask other industry influencers to post on your blog.
There are many blog and forum owners in every industry who are trying to promote their websites and gain new exposure. Reach out to these individuals and offer the opportunity to post regularly on your corporate blog. This will allow them to promote themselves while adding fresh, valuable and relevant content to your website. Be sure to allow them to link back to their own website in their posts on your site. This will keep them coming back to add more content, and will even add value to your company’s SEO strategy since the outbound link is relevant to your industry!
Matrix: Breakdown of the Corporate Social Strategist Team
Note that in smaller teams, individuals may cover multiple roles, and in most cases these are cross-functional teams, as community managers may often come from product marketing, customer support, or corporate communications.
Role Primary Duty What No One Tells You Social Strategist Leader and program manager,The program leader for social business, the strategist is responsible for overall vision and accountability towards investments. We’ve done a detailed study on the career path of the social strategist including demographics, psychographics, business goals and challenges. Don’t hire an evangelist if they don’t have program manager chops. This individual must run a business program, and able to measure against real business results like: leads, sentiment, csat, customer support, and reduced costs. Community Managers Primarily outbound and customer-facing, this role is a trusted member of the community, serving as a liaison between the community and the brand. These are often the most under-appreciated professionals in the team as they deal with customer woes time off hours and some even suffer personally as they deal with customer angst. Hire community managers that are balance brand enthusiasm with passion for customers –these are not PR pros that are on party message, but instead are trusted members of the community. Read the four tenants of the community manager to learn more. Celebrate these roles on Community Manager Appreciation Day. Business Unit Liason These internal facing members have a primary duty of reaching out to business units to get them to collaborate, get on board and often join a center of excellence. They may also represent a particular business unit, department, product line, or region. These are key conduits to maintaining relationships with many business teams, and are key for achieving enterprise coordination in scale. As an interface inside of larger corporations, this role serves as an internal conduit to 1.5 coordinate efforts with other business units, in order to provide them with resources, as well as ensure consistency. Yet don’t let them talk to business units unarmed, they should have a checklist of requirements and slot in education manager to obtain consistency.
Over the weekend, I finished switching my Web site over to a new content management system. I had been using Mamboserver, but wasn’t as thrilled with it as I thought I’d be, so I switched to phpWebSite, which is a vast improvement. Interestingly, on the heels of the switchover came some input that suggested, perhaps, that static Web pages are a thing of the past in light of the conversational nature of blogs. Are static Web sites (and, for that matter, magazine ads) dinosaurs that should be consigned to the dustbin of communication history?
I’ve given this extensive consideration, weighed the implications, and reached a conclusion:
What a crock.
If we’ve learned anything over the last several years, it’s that all new media and communication channels are additive. I would defy you to name one-ONE-new medium that has outright replaced an older one. These predictions have always accompanied the introduction of a new channel. Radio was supposed to replace print. Television was supposed to replace radio. Now blogs are supposed to replace Web sites.
The truth is, new media channels assume the roles for which they are better suited than the older channels. And the older channels adapt to do what they’re best at. Consider television. Before TV, radio consisted of programming that included dramas and comedies, soap operas, game shows and variety shows (from “The Green Hornet,” “Inner Sanctum,” and “The Shadow” to “Texaco Star Theater,” “Beat the Band,” and “Quiz Kids”). When TV came along, these kinds of shows quickly became TV staples because they were better as visual presentations. Did radio die just because “Days of Our Lives” was no longer part of the programming mix? Nope. Radio adapted into a channel for programming that was better as audio.
Today, newspapers are struggling in the face of challenges from blogs, online classifieds (e.g., Craig’s List and eBay), and online news channels, but I don’t for a minute believe newspapers as a medium will vanish. There’s too much evidence suggesting that people scan Web content but read paper.
Some newspapers that don’t adapt will certainly perish. But smart publishers will figure out how to evolve their publications into something that is just better on paper than it could be online. New newspapers with fresh approaches that leverage print’s inherent strengths will appear. These will thrive.
E-mail is another example. Think back to when e-mail was first introduced at your workplace. Did IT simultaneously remove your fax machines? E-mail became a new alternative, not a required replacement.
So what’s the benefit of a static Web site or a magazine ad?
Let’s start with the Web, and let’s look at the Microsoft Office campaign that Steve Rubel wrote about. I agree completely with Steve’s assertion that Microsoft has wasted an “opportunity to use what I call ‘conversational marketing’ – e.g. blogs, podcsating and RSS.” But that doesn’t mean there should’t be an associated Web site. Once somebody has engaged in a conversation, there should be a place to go where they can quickly navigate to information they need. Remember, good Web sites are built on principles of information architecture, easy retrieval of information. Further, information found on the static site may well be what leads someone to want to engage in a conversation.
(By the way, the special Microsoft site, with its slow-loading Flash and streaming video files, sucks. It looks like it could have come from one of those extinct Web design companies of the mid-1990’s. And no, I’m not suggesting that Steve ever said there should be no Web site at all; Steve gets the idea of integrating all appropriate media to achieve a business
outcome.)
Another example: government sites. With the ocean of information available, do I want to engage in a conversation just to find, for example, how to get a camping permit in Yosemite? Well-constructed Web pages are far more
useful: Click, click, there’s my answer. I don’t have to wait for somebody to respond to my post. And let’s not forget commerce sites from Amazon.com to the online stores at places like Circuit City or Home Depot. Adding customer service blogs to these is a great idea. Replacing them with blogs is, well, dumb.
And what about magazine ads? People still read magazines; print still rocks.
And if you can create the awareness that drives readers to an online conversation, increased share of market follows.
Finally, it’s still worth noting that, according to the oft-cited Pew report on blogging, only 27% of the online adult population in the US reads blogs at all. That’s an impressive number, but it’s still a fraction of a company’s total potential audience.
You’ll find no bigger advocate for the social customer, the business/audience conversation, and the value of new communication channels than me. To achieve genuine and meaningful business results, however, it’s important to temper enthusiasm with practicality. Blogs, RSS, podcasts, and wikis are exciting and important and transformational, but they are a part of a larger communication landscape. Communications that integrate them will be far more successful than those that rely solely on them.
To bring this full circle, that’s why I have a Web site, a blog, a wiki, and a monthly e-mail newsletter. I can engage people in my blog. But someone who wants to know what my intranet audit service entails can find that in two clicks on my Web site. (I still get a lot of business that way.) People who don’t read blogs remain aware of me through the newsletter, which is also posted to a separate blog so I can distribute it as an RSS feed. I have an RSS feed of the news items on my Web site’s home page. I have no plans to give up my site and go blog-only any time soon. Each serves its purpose. And all is right with the world.
There is a definite art form to writing blog posts that can give you both the short-term gain of being shareable on Social Media sites, and the long-term gain of ranking well with search engines. Mainly, because you’re trying to reach two different audiences at the same time. Content that’s shared on Social Media sites typically has a lifespan of a few minutes at best as it is quickly replaced on the person’s timeline/stream with additional items. But with search engines, content is cataloged and then retrieved later when a relevant search is made.
So let’s think about the differences in those audiences, and how we reach each:
1 – Social Media sites – Blog post title needs to be catchy and attention-grabbing. An interesting photo that grabs attention also helps for content shared on Facebook and Plus. But the idea is, how can you grab the person’s attention for even a few seconds so you can convince them to click your link?
2 – Search Engine – Here, we need to write content that’s consistent with the search query. You can already see a potential conflict with writing for Social Media sites in that we need that catchy, attention-grabbing title and blog post, but both also have to be CONSISTENT with the content of the blog post. IOW, if we have a cute and sparkly title, but the blog post is crap/inconsistent with blog post title, it not only won’t be Liked, RTed and +1ed, it won’t rank well in search results either.
So we need to write a blog post that has both a catchy title that immediately grabs your attention PLUS one that will include content consistent with the blog post title that will also rank well in search engines. Whew, glad we didn’t make it tough on ourselves
To thrive in social, mobile and new media in general, we need much more than content producers, we need a new breed of designers that grasp the elements of online sharing and have mastered the A.R.T. of social media to trigger desirable (and social) actions, reactions and transactions. A new genre of social producers are taking aim at developing content strategies that are not only consumable, they’re shareable, actionable and act as catalysts or sparks for relevant conversations. These social producers are in fact masters of their domains and understand the culture and the laws of information commerce within each.
The difference between Social Producers and traditional content creators is that they begin with the social outcomes they wish to see and reverse engineer content strategies to enliven them. They understand the relationship between cause and effect and they bake-in conversation starters related to an integrated and business-focused strategy and design specific shareable elements as KPIs to measure progress and results.
Social producers think about the overall experience and the effect where a social object is at the center of the dialog and interaction they envision…within each network. The overall story and outcome defines the nature of the social object. And the desired outcomes combined with the social effect they aim to trigger is then evaluated network by network.
Social producers also borrow a page from the book of transmedia producers. They look at the landscape of social media to evaluate relevant and productive channels and networks available for social storytelling. Whether you love or hate the term transmedia, the point is that an object is only as relevant as its medium and the people who connect with its message and purpose. Multiple objects can tell one story or various facets of the story and they can do so within specific media. For example, a social producer will ask, “this social object may be culturally relevant and compelling for Twitter and Facebook, but will this work equally in Pinterest or in the blogosphere?” Often, social producers will then repackage the social object to tell the same story but in the context of discrete networks to align with how people discover, share and interact within each unique culture.
Beyond shareability, the social producers also think about resonance. Conversations on social networks move quickly. What was trending an hour ago gives way to the next social object that captures everyone’s attention until that too is replaced by the next shiny object and so on. Resonance is a technique that allows a social object to enjoy a greater lifespan and continue to swim upstream while other content strategies wash away in real-time. As an example, I can’t help but think of Back to the Future III. Marty McFly is desperately pushing for the steam train to hit 88 mph to jump back into Delorean and head back to the future. But, regular wood only helped the train reach a speed that wasn’t even close. To help, Doc engineered a special form of Presto Logs to throw into the fire at different intervals to help the fire burn hotter and as such, push the train to go faster stage by stage. And that’s the idea of resonance. Social producers design elements into social object so that they can continually rise or align with conversations as they shift over time.
If social media is about creating and sharing experiences through conversations and content, start first with the experiences and conversations you wish to rouse. As you think about your content strategy for social networks, do so from the perspective of a social producer. While the social effect is certainly a goal, the social effect is also the result of social design. In the end, people are going to talk, so give them something to talk about!
7. Spend time with time wasters.
The classic business plan imposes efficiency on an inefficient market. Where there is waste, there is opportunity. Dispatch the engineers, route around the problem, and boom—opportunity seized.
That’s a great way to make money, but it’s not necessarily a way to find the future. A better signal, perhaps, is to look at where people—individuals—are being consciously, deliberately, enthusiastically inefficient. In other words, where are they spending their precious time doing something that they don’t have to do? Where are they fiddling with tools, coining new lingo, swapping new techniques? That’s where culture is created. The classic example, of course, is the Homebrew Computer Club—the group of Silicon Valley hobbyists who traded circuits and advice in the 1970s, long before the actual utility of personal computers was evident. Out of this hacker collective grew the first portable PC and, most famously, Apple itself.
This same phenomenon—people playing—has spurred various industries, from videogames (thank you, game modders) to the social web (thank you, oversharers). Today, inspired dissipation is everywhere. The maker movement is merging bits with atoms, combining new tools (3-D printing) with old ones (soldering irons). The DIY bio crowd is using off-the-shelf techniques and bargain-basement lab equipment, along with a dose of PhD know-how, to put biology into garage lab experiments. And the Quantified Self movement is no longer just Bay Area self-tracking geeks. It has exploded into a worldwide phenomenon, as millions of people turn their daily lives into measurable experiments.
The phenomenon of hackathons, meanwhile, converts free time into a development platform. Hackathons harness the natural enthusiasm of code junkies, aim it at a target, and create a partylike competition atmosphere to make innovation fun. (And increasingly hackathons are drawing folks other than coders.) No doubt there will be more such eruptions of excitement, as the tools become easier, cheaper, and more available.
These rules don’t create the future, and they don’t guarantee success for those who use them. But they do give us a glimpse around the corner, a way to recognize that in this idea or that person, there might be something big.
These days we get a new “it” thing every few months. Right now a newish service called Pinterest qualifies as next year’s Google+ or Twitter.
Essentially, Pinterest is a social bookmarking site that focuses on images. So, it’s a bit of a mashup of sorts between Delicious and Flickr.
When you “pin” something you share an image and link to the original content you found online. You can surf the web and pin just about anything you find. You can also create related collections of things called “Pinboards” – a bit like tagging. Visitors to the site, and of course, followers of your pinning activity, can discover new things grouped into a variety of categories.
Brides to be have embraced the site, graphic designers, hand made artists, fashion designers and really anyone with goods and services that show well visually have found new sources of traffic via the site. (Word is Pinterest has become the #1 source of traffic to Etsy.)
There’s something very compelling about the visual aspect of the presentation that has turned Pinterest surfing into somewhat of an addiction for brides, designers, foodies, students, fashionistas and those in search of the latest trends.
Personally, I think Pinterest has taken off due in large part to the fact that we’ve all become so overwhelmed with information that anything that is easy to scan with little to no mental engagement is what gets our attention. Stunning images certainly fit that requirement.
