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    Tuesday
    26Jan2010

    Would you hire an intern to be your spokesperson?

    So, you know your association or your company needs to get online. You don’t have budget to hire a full time staff person to do this stuff and it’s not so easy to sell to the finance types because solid ROI metrics are still being developed.  I often hear from companies that they are ready to get their social game on.  It’s all the rage, right?  So Janie, who places the newspaper ads, is going to pick up the social media piece. Better yet, they might even hire a student intern to do it.  If they are in college, they can do Facebook, right?

    If Forbes magazine called you and wanted to do a story about your company, would you let your summer intern be the voice for the piece?  Would you hand it over to Janie, who places the newspaper ads?  Probably not.  It is likely to be the CEO, the Director of PR or the Vice President of Marketing conducting the interview.

    Hal wrote a great post about taking responsibility for your online voice in December.  Hal  says, “The choices we make in how we communicate with others is going to dictate to a large extent who we wind up associating with, both in the physical world and the virtual world.”

    What we say and how we present ourselves or our company in the online space dictates who our customers are and how they will perceive us. It is ongoing and continuous public relations.  In essence, Janie or that student intern is now the Director of PR. You are not only assigning someone unqualified, you are actually letting them engage with your potential, current and past customers and they probably know very little, if anything, about your products, services, company culture, value proposition and brand.  Regardless of whether they are tweeting, engaging on your facebook page, or blogging, they are your online public face.  They are your spokesperson.

    Finding resources to have a qualified person handle your online presence may be challenging, but it is crucial.  You are far better reallocating that intern to create your snail mail postcard and putting real resources into your online presence.  Why?  That postcard is temporary.  It is likely to be tossed in the garbage.  It may have a fleeting effect on your brand identity, but what you do and say online lasts far longer.

    Online = permanent

    If you want your summer intern to create your reputation and brand for a significant time to come, by all means, roll the dice. You may think having an intern or other unqualified employee handle the online social side is less important because you aren’t established yet online, but our online voices can have a tremendous amount of reach, even when we aren’t established yet or doing things “right”.  Reputations and identity take time to build but they can be destroyed in an instant online.  Companies who truly care about the image that is portrayed need to focus their resources accordingly. 

    Tuesday
    26Jan2010

    Measuring Influence Online: HootSuite

    When we teach our course, we talk about the ROI from social media not in terms of Return on Investment but Return on Influence.

    What does that mean, though? How do we measure influence? Is it in the number of Facebook fans we have, Twitter followers we pick up? Jeff Turner wrote a great post about numbers that mean something last year - I’d like to look into just one of the ways our influence can be measured online.

    Twitter, as much as it’s about conversation and engagement and listening and relationships is also about sharing information. The use of shortened link services like bit.ly and tinyurl are now standard. Services like Twitterfeed actually tell you how many people click on the links it sends, which is helpful for determining which content is connecting with people. HootSuite has taken this a step further in my opinion. Every link you shorten with HootSuite’s “Owl.Ly” service is tracked, generating reports telling you which links were most popular.

    They also have a great “Hootlet” bookmark that lets you turn any page/article into an Owl.Ly link. You can edit the message or stick with the default, which simply displays the title of the page.

    For those of you out there using Twitter as a business tool, here are some honest-to-goodness metrics for you. I’ll be the first to say that it’s about relationships and listening and engaging, but why not use this type of data to refine the value you add? You can see what’s getting clicks, which can tell you a number of things:

     

    • Optimal times to post
    • Subjects of Interest
    • Sites that people find useful/interesting

     

    While you may not measure dollars in this space, there are measurable results, and furthermore understanding the correlation between metrics and sales (a similar discussion about adwords was posted here - I think the general principle applies). The point is, track your clicks. Analyze them so you can understand your community a little better. Not everything in a relationship can (or should) be measured, but the things we CAN measure, we should.

    What measurement tools are YOU using?

    Saturday
    16Jan2010

    Dear FaceBook Friends - Don't invite me to a meeting in Texas 

    Dear FaceBook Friends - Don’t invite me to a meeting in Texas because I live in Connecticut!!


    Facebook is fantastic for connecting with friends, and clients, We can tell everyone about upcoming events and keep them informed. BUT, please don’t do a mass update to everyone in your Facebook database if they are not local to that event. I receive on a daily basis invitations to fund raising events, dinners, and cocktail parties located … all over the country. It is a waste of my time because I have to spend time deleting these invitations.

    Why not use lists instead. As you friend people Facebook gives you the option to classify them in lists. Think about the lists that you want to create. Create them. For example, I have: Family, Coaching clients, Clients, Past Clients, Sphere. You can add people as you friend them or after the fact.

    Lists work for two reasons. The steady stream of posts is fun but sometime you miss key people. I always click on my lists and read those posts first!

    Secondly, it is easy to send a private message to that list. How? Click on “INBOX”> “Compose Message” Type in the name of the list. Write Message. Send message. Just like you would do in email, type in the name of the list and everyone on the list will get the message. One note, on Profiles, only 20 people in a list can get “a message.”

    Saturday
    16Jan2010

    Grow A Set! My David Alston Interview. 

    Ok, that was a cheap trick, but I really love the Motto of Radian 6 - of course, as you can see in the Video below, they’re talking about growing a set of ears to listen to what people are saying about you in all of the venues they monitor for their customers. According to David’s blog, TweetPR  Radian6 is “a software firm providing a social media monitoring solution for advertising and PR professionals”. Even more interesting to me is David’s explanation of his blog

    Whether it’s tweets in Twitter or media of any type designed for the ever growing media snacking culture, I think the world of PR is in the middle of a disruption. Everything is about to get thrown into the food processor, literally. What will hopefully come out the other side is a whole new generation of communicators that “tweet” highly concise messages to highly targeted audiences that care to listen because of context and because of relationship”

    David (as you can see from his explanation) is any extremely smart and articulate guy with a great handle on social media working for a company that is completely invested in the phenomenon of social media and the need businesses have to monitor what is being said about them and their brands. 

    During the Inbound marketing Summit in Boston, David took a few minutes away from working the Radin6 booth to answer a couple of questions. Though I can’t share the pleasure it was to meet David in person, I hope that you will enjoy hearing from him and learn from his perspective.

    Wednesday
    13Jan2010

    Consumers Drive the Economy

    Always have, always will. After a really bad experience with customer service, I felt the need to write a post about how much power the consumer has nowadays (I’ll reserve some of the seething snark that I spewed there). We have so many different channels for publicly praising or criticizing a company (or contributing to its success), and yet some companies seem content to use these same channels to promote themselves without listening.

    Here’s the great news: we’re moving towards an economy that resembles a sort of social ecosystem where companies provide products or services that improve through the feedback of the customers who benefit them. If your primary market is the public consumer, this means you. Whether you make candy, sell houses or rent cars, you can do it better, and instead of trying to improve in a vacuum, or by using a competitor as your benchmark you can go straight to the people who actually use your product and learn from them. At the risk of seeming like some “aw, shucks” kid from a Frank Capra movie, isn’t everything better when we work together? Companies, do we need to have a talk about what can happen when we assume what people want/need? (*cough* CRYSTAL PEPSI *cough cough* NEW COKE *cough cough cough*) I didn’t think so.

    The essential component of conversation (two-way communication) is now becoming a part of the business landscape, whether you like it or not. The ability to adapt to this shift is essential. I’m not proposing that you let everything be dictated by people outside of the company; I’m merely suggesting that consumers be let in. After all, they’re already out there talking, aren’t they?