Why Do Psychic Fairs Advertise? And Your Customers Don’t Have ESP

I have always been somewhat bemused when I hear radio ads or see billboards for Psychic Fairs. My assumption is that at minimum, those who are exhibiting their "skills" don't need to be solicited to participate as they should "see" any upcoming events pertinent to their genre and those who are interested may also have an "inside" track on this type of event. In the B2B customer relationship world, on the other hand, communication and engagement with our prospects has always been a critical activity and the world of marketing is obviously predicated on finding the secret sauce that will entice participants to join our events, review our materials, and participate in discussions with us.

In my continued exploration and curiosity around the SMN explosion, however, I am seeing a clear demarcation between those companies who are taking a shotgun approach to communication, advertisement and marketing in a misguided attempt to not miss the "boat" and those companies who are assuming that their clients are active participants in communities and social media sites and they can engage strictly as observers or rely on virtual word-of-mouth that is the foundation of these mechanisms to drive customers and prospects to their more formal websites and material. As I have stressed in previous posts, I think these positions on either end of the conversational spectrum are both indicative of our failure to establish a strategy for SMN participation prior to implementing our interaction and our confusion and still trepidation about how we should play in this sandbox. In short, our customers still do not have ESP and it is an inherent responsibility to let them know that we are "out there." I might go so far as to suggest that it is hugely presumptuous and egotistical to adopt a "field of dreams" approach to our social media and networking implementation. Just as we have used traditional email campaigns, newsletters and other methods for updating clients and prospects about new features, websites, conferences, etc., we need to adopt a similar approach to evangelizing about our entry into the world of on-line communities and profiles. I think a customized social media assessment or audit is appropriate on a company by company basis, but here are a few starter steps that I might suggest once you have decided to enter the Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, social soup:

1. Add links to your new corporate profiles, Twitter addresses, community invitations to your website.
   
2. Include announcements of your presence and a statement of your objective in newsletters, email campaigns, blogs, etc.
   
3. Invite current clients to participate by launching a "membership drive".
   
4. Interview reference clients from any beta tests you have done with new support infrastructures or forums that have utilized social networking and publish the interviews.
   
5. Survey your clients about their participation in social networks and include their corporate Linkedin profile addresses, Twitter accounts, blog addresses, etc. in your CRM or SFA database.
   
6. Use some of the embedded communication functionality in the social network applications to evangelize and spread the word.
   
7. Ask your employees (particularly your sales, marketing and support personnel) to comb their contacts, connections, and friends for presence in social networks.
   
8. Rinse and repeat often as the growth statistics are exponential and profiles and accounts in the SMN world change far more often than email addresses.
   

I hope these "top of brain" initial thoughts are helpful; at minimum interesting.

Don’t Forget the Oatmeal: True Story and Metaphor for Losing Sight of the Key Ingredient When We Implement SMN Tools

Last week I decided to make a batch of oatmeal cookies, an undertaking that I have completed successfully (following the good old standard Quaker lid recipe) hundreds of times. This batch, however, was an attempt to duplicate the particular crispness of a batch that my mother had prepared that had been received with accolades and raves. I gathered the ingredients, whirled them together with the trusty mixer and threw them in the oven with little concern and mostly by rote.

The first cookie sheet came out with a solid brick of baked mess end. I was puzzled and began hypothesizing that perhaps my oven temperature was a little off. I made some adjustments and threw in the second batch: same result, yet this time I began to hypothetically analyze the quality of the brown sugar and flour. Ever hopeful and certain that since I had done this successfully many, many times in the past, I threw yet a third sheet in the oven only to achieve the same disastrous results.

It was hours later that I realized that in my haste to try and duplicate my Mother's results and my inattention to the specifics of the recipe due to my assumption that I had done this so many times I had it down pat, that I had forgotten the key ingredient: the oatmeal; the fundamental POINT, glue, key, objective, focus, etc., etc., of the entire cookie.

As I have been speaking with various clients and colleagues over the past couple of weeks about metrics, tool selection, and plans for their implementation of SMN in their B2B customer relationship and reference programs, often a similar recipe mishap has emerged. Our eagerness to apply the elements of social media to our marketing and sales strategies can sometimes result in us losing sight of our primary and overarching objectives: maintaining and enhancing our current and prospective customer messaging and relationships. We can become too focused on the "shiny" factor: "X company used Box-in to add audio clips to their corporate profile. We should do that!", that we end up considering or deploying applications and tools that are not relevant or appropriate for our messaging. Worse, we may find certain new features so exciting that we implement them without any consideration of our fundamental goals and themes. I shared a story in a previous post about a company's extreme reaction to a negative Tweet. They had established a Twitter profile just because they had heard they "had to" and had given zero consideration to the reasons they may or may want a presence in this medium. The company had established no link between the profile and any existing customer relationship infrastructure; paid no heed to their marketing strategic plan; and other than creating a profile, had not even taken a stab at what SMN tool-kit objectives might be. When they found a negative Tweet about their product, their immediate inclination was to ask Twitter to shut the offender down and to specifically and directly answer his comments in a very aggressive and defensive fashion. They "forgot" that their customer relationship strategy included language about open and positive dialogue about issues and solutions, that their marketing mission was to attract and education potential new clients and audiences, and that the point of their Web 2.0 presence was the engage customers in meaningful dialogue and educational opportunities. In other words, when an unexpected result occurred, they were not positioned to respond cohesively or coherently because they hadn't followed or even really established their own "recipe".

If our customer relationship and reference objective is "oatmeal", then we should be diligent about including that ingredient in our entry to the SMN world. No matter how many times we have launched a new forum, community, blog or collateral infrastructure in the past, we should return to the fundamentals of our strategy and ensure that our social media and networking presence aligns with them consistently.

Twitter Tumult

Early this morning, I was asked by a colleague to offer some advice regarding a negative (what I call a "Heat Tweet") Tweet re a client of his. This client is relatively new to the Twitter sphere and other social media mechanisms and their initial reaction was to retaliate by lodging a harassment complaint with Twitter. As I have opined before, because these applications are merely tools in what should be a much broader and comprehensive customer dialogue, we need to evolve our usage of them to align with our marketing and outreach strategies. Additionally, the rapidity with which information may be shared and the exponential number that our audiences reach when we provide content via them, makes me even more emphatic that organizations ought to consider a Social Media DJ whose primary responsibilities would be to re-craft our message and content appropriately Twitter, et al. If we issue a press release in response to a negative situation, we have a little more luxury in terms of crafting my response and messaging. Absent an overall strategy that outlines clear objectives for our participation in social sites, we are much more prone to knee-jerk reactions to feedback and elicit even more negative responses because of their wide-reaching favor.

I offer the following thoughts vis-à-vis response to negative Tweets:

1. Don't React. Asking Twitter to remove or suspend an account for harassment or particularly outrageous Tweets may be a moot point. In some ways, this is just common sense, but it is worthwhile to highlight the fact that if a client is particularly aggrieved, removing their ability to express themselves may aggravate them further AND given how easy it is to simply turn to another social media or networking location to express the same thoughts, it may be futile.
   
2. Participate. Acknowledging all feedback, negative or positive, speaks to an organization's credibility in terms of its customer service, consideration of input from various audiences, and it dilutes any particularly harsh criticism. Rather, I would recommend that we respond publicly in our timelines, even if our message is along fairly vanilla lines.
   
3. Deliver. By carefully responding, organizations can very quickly turn shift the focus of the community to more credible information sites, e.g., "More information about this issue can be found….." Any other tactic may be perceived as a "cover-up" and thus elevate the Tweet to a visibility and status that is undeserved.
   
4. Research. Any client who will take the time to harshly criticize is most likely a member of other networks and feeds their comments to other sites and forums. People who are passionate about social media do not typically embrace one mechanism. Do the research.
   
5. Research Again. Unsolicited Twitters should be considered an EXCELLENT resource for understanding user community perception of our solutions. Just using the various applications to do Twitter searches should be a mandate of every marketing organization. I would actually advice doing this as a piece of Phase I in an organization's plan to roll-out a corporate Twitter account.
   
6. Mean What You Say. Transparency and Credibility are key issues in current social media dialogues. Again, the rapidity with which information is exchanged via these networks also means that if we strike a false note in our messaging or we are too generic in our responses, we risk being exposed as just jumping on the Tweet bandwagon to comb for leads rather than to initiate meaningful dialogue with a variety of audiences. I suggest that not only should businesses consider corporate Tweet responses to negative messages, but also direct message the Tweeters when possible. For larger organizations, part of our implementation must be the development of tools that will receive, sort and track Tweets and direct messages and ensure that they are delivered to the appropriate groups in our organizations for follow-up. Almost worse than retaliating against a negative Tweet would be to ignore it entirely. Worse would be establishing a corporate Twitter account and just letting it run in idle.
   
7. Integrate. Organization's need to develop ways of accommodating the information delivered, exchanged, and developed for social media and networks in a centralized, scalable, accessible fashion. If I look at negative Tweets from the perspective of overcoming objections in a sales cycle, I should be integrating them into my other customer collateral and marketing tools.
   
8. Innovate. We need to consider how we engage various communities on our behalf in response to negativity. Organizations might be in "listen mode" on Twitter, but should consider actively supporting and launching customer communities in other applications. The ability to link feeds, blogs, Tweets, and Facebook Updates means that we can use all of these tools in complimentary ways. Organizations should look at their existing methods for delivering "testimony" and re-purpose content from those environments to Twitter, et al and vice versa.
   

Until next time….

Social Media Methodology and Metric Mania

In the last couple of days, my fascination with the social media trend has turned to establishing some repeatable paradigms around measuring the effectiveness of these tools in the B2B world. I continue to opine (quite firmly), that until a strategy around an organization's use of social media and network facilities is established, developing measurement criteria about their use is a futile and misguided effort. I can't, however, help being personally curious about whether or not my footprint with these tools has any relevance and how to discover the best ways to track interaction with my various 2.0 dabblings. Let me outline some initial thoughts re methods, using my own presence as a metaphor:

1. What is Lisa's reason for playing in the social media world?
   

   Education. I need to evolve my understanding and skill-set re the Twitters (and the many accompanying tool-sets that support), Blogspots, Facebooks, Linkedins, Naymz, Nings, etc etc etc.
   

   Conversation. Both from a familial and professional standpoint, the various networks support my desire to communicate with with my professional friends and family, and colleagues across time zones, geography, and technical/technique barriers. The mechanisms available don't really care whether you are a Windows machine or an Apple, iPhone or a Blackberry, Eastern time or Pacific, etc., etc., etc.
   

   Efficiency. Although I posit that the barriers between my professional and personal personas are and should be breaking down, the social media world affords me the luxury of taking the same content and quickly altering and adjusting it for various audiences. My brother may not be interested in deep-dives in this social media topic, but I may want to alert him to the webinar event that I am moderating or particular blog posts. I belong to professional networks that are duplicated across Linkedin and Facebook, yet my profile in Facebook is not 100% available to members of these groups while my Linkedin profile is.
   

   Ego. I think that everybody wants to "hear" what I have to say and I don't have a global megaphone. J
   

   Advice and Comments. Despite the last objective, I do solicit and welcome constructive criticism and pointers from both my professional and personal associations. Barring sending out a survey to everybody I know about a variety of topics, I can easily accept and review solicited and unsolicited review of my opinions and interest via these tools.
   

2. How is Lisa going to use all of these tools? (Although this seems similar to number one….bear with me)
   

   Keep friends, family, and colleagues updated on what is going on. I really despise and question the credibility of annual Xmas letters. Social networks afford me the ability to exchange up to the minute updates and information with a variety of people. I'm also saving trees by not sending out massive paper missives at set times throughout the year. I can tailor the information being exchanged to specific people and interests. Vice-versa, I can choose to alert myself to content in which I am interested.
   

   Determine whether anybody is interested in my opinion. By using alerts and statistics and rating and ranking, I can do some self-editing of my own content (I'm sure everyone is happy about this!) I'm currently playing with Hoot Suite and looking at "visits" to my various updates; I track my blogs for visits and commentary; I deploy various other tools of measurement for other footprints. If I mean what I say by welcoming constructive criticism, then I can use these measurements to customize my content and post about things in which people are interested rather than about things in which I think they should be.
   

I think that these types of questions about my personal interaction with social media and networking are very appropriate first steps for any organization that is contemplating these mechanisms as toolkits in their marketing, sales, and customer relationship practices. Just these two questions have driven me down a pretty structure path to formulating my own strategy and purpose for being "present" and certainly have enabled some filters around the various tools available for measurement.

Brian Solis' Conversation Prism Model for Social Media

As I was scanning my feeds on this Sunday morning, I read with interest Brian Solis' recent blog post introducing The Conversation Prism as a way to wrap our over-stimulated brains around social media efforts. Rather than synthesize his comments and regurgitate them, I will leave it to all of you to digest the article, but my comprehension of our evolving exploration of this trend is akin to my belief in the FSM (Flying Spaghetti Monster). I believe that social media and networking provide us with marcomm and sales theology that is far broader than customer relationship approaches that we have all traditionally taken. Even CRM and SFA systems that play extremely well with anothers in terms of their ability to integrate with a variety of contact and lead generation tools and methodologies do not begin to approach the capacity of Web 2.0 functionality. Although I quite sternly advocate against social media and networking being in and of themselves a strategy, the flexibility and variety with which we may deploy these mechanisms in just, as an example, our lead generation, is indicative of the nature of the approach we should take.

PR 2.0: Introducing The Conversation Prism

Social Media DJ for Corporations

When I starting spinning up my internal dialogue and musings on the social media/networking facility in corporate communications, relationships, marketing and branding, I came up with the metaphor that helped me personally frame the way I think that organization's should approach the subject: A social media DJ. As I was expanding my footprint beyond the basic networks like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc., I recognized that although the core of my message has threads across all of these spaces, that I was definitely tailoring it contingent upon the venue. I started reflecting (reminiscing) that what I was doing was in terms of picking and choosing content and ordering depending upon the network, was akin to creating mix tapes in college and today burning CD's from playlists in my ITunes library. I was using the same fundamental content or songs, to create new footprints (playlists) that would appeal to different audiences. Rather than exposing myself to claims that I suffer from a form of multiple-personality disorder, I posit that because I am presenting similar content just in different ways, I am actually acting out a virtual DJ role: looking at my life's personal and professional song list and ordering and styling it for each context.

For those you who have been the victims of my evangelism for my metaphor (and might still be raising their eyebrows), I challenge you to review your own profiles across your networks and ask yourselves if they are completely dissimilar or whether they reflect a core message that has just been spun in slightly different ways? From there, I challenge you to reflect on corporate messaging and whether or not the true objective is for marketing and sales to "play" the same songs but edit the length, fade-ins and outs, and order to fit the sales cycle, prospect profile, and particular solutions you are pitching.

I believe that we can quite quickly come to the conclusion that the viral nature of social networks, the facile way that they enable us to quickly select content from a library and "templatize" for a Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, blog, comment on a blog, etc. are precisely the role of a DJ with Web 2.0 expertise.

Have you come full-circle with me? Rock on colleagues, rock on.

Saturday Morning Twitter Play Launches New Blog

I have been negligent and lazy regarding my posting. I have been so entranced by the social media and networking world lately that I have not invoked my writing muse. For this ex-English major, the world of Facebook, Twitter, etc is a dangerous one. It affords my ego the opportunity to reactively and often pompously respond to the Web 2.0 world without the more careful consideration I give to more expansive writing. As I was opening a new document to capture some stream-of-consciousness around Twitter as a business tool this morning, I saw that Word now provides a blog post template, so I thought I would capture my thoughts this way as a test.

"Social Media and Networking" has become the newest buzz phrase for organizations and individuals who want to play with the cool kids. I have been working on building a practice around how the various mechanisms in this arena can facilitate organizational customer relationships, service programs, branding, and marketing. I was Tweeting around several topics this morning and have been testing some of my theories about how Twitter in particular can be positioned as a B2B sales tool. Bear with these random thoughts and trust that I am going somewhere with this:

How B2B sales and marketing departments can utilize Twitter:

1. Use applications such as Tweet Beep to create alerts around your company name, employees, topics relevant to your solution or your clients.
   
2. When you get notifications that somebody is following you, check out their profile and any accompanying url's (their website, personal blog, sites of interest to them) and determine whether they are a lead for your company.
   
3. Start following them and set up Tweet Beeps for their organization, name, etc.
   
4. Check out all those people that are following THEM!
   

Very quickly, by following just step number two, I identified five new leads for my company that are in the appropriate vertical and appear to be a good target for our solutions. Counter-intuitively, this did not take up much time!