This past Friday I had the pleasure of presenting two sessions on Social Media at the MIVA Merchant Conference in San Diego. OK, so it was one session twice. That totally counts. This year was the first year that conference used an official hashtag for their event, and the difference it made is huge. One of the organizers of the event was able to learn about and deal with a bad router while away from the conference site because he was monitoring the hashtag and saw people talking about it on Twitter and was able to respond. People attending the conference had more networking opportunities because they could meet and speak with other attendees who were in the same rooms or sessions as they were.

During my session, people were commenting and posting pictures and providing feedback that could be useful to organizers when they’re planning the breakout sessions for next year’s conference. At Blogworld, individual sessions had their own hashtags to people attending the sessions could ask questions to panelists and comment on the session as it was underway. You can project that feed on a screen and create engagement without having to raise your hand or step up to a mic, for those who are uneasy speaking in public.

You can make lists of attendees for others to follow, share the conference with those who are unable to attend and keep a conference alive long after it’s over.

How have you used twitter at conferences you’ve attended, or how would you like to see it used at conferences you have coming up?

BUT…..(you knew this was coming)… everything you do in your life doesn’t have to have a concrete measurement.  Todd Carpenter said, “if you coach a softball game”, do you measure the ROI of getting new clients?”  Now, that is just silly. Of course not.

People keep asking about the value of Foursquare.  I love the application.  I use it a lot, mostly when I travel or when I am out in the evening.  During the day, I rarely check in, but if I wanted to, I bet I could be the mayor of my mac. 

On Sunday, I had an extended layover in the Dallas Fort Worth airport while in Boston, Chris Brogan was happy to be getting an early flight.  My tweet to him caught the eye of Mike Neumann. 

I consider Mike to be my friend from blip.fm.  (Odd little social network.  Really has no value, right? ) It is the place I engage with him most often.

So who cares what airport, I was in?   Or Chris Brogan was in?  Mike cared.  He was in the same airport.

And next thing you know….

If I look a little road weary, I was.  I was exhausted after multiple airport delays and too much travel.  But more than anything, I was delighted to finally get to meet Mike, my friend from this odd little social network called blip.

On Sunday night, I noticed I had been added to a new Twitter list, Mike’s “met-irl” list, meaning we had met face to face.  This is not isolated.  This happens to me all the time.  When I go places, I often look to see who is checked in our Foursquare.  I now find people to follow on twitter who have checked in on similar places on Foursquare.  What’s the ROI? Where’s the value?  Do people care where I check in?

The value is the people.  I own two businesses.  Both of them are driven by people.   If there were no people, I wouldn’t be in businesss.

Perhaps we should start measuring the ROP- Return on People.  Or ROR.  Return on Relationships.

I am not saying we shouldn’t have metrics to track our activity. As I mentioned above, I love metrics as much as the next numbers geek.  But everything doesn’t have to have a metric.

If the only reason you go on FourSquare is to get a sale, you probably shouldn’t be on it.  Facebook, same thing.  (Facebook Business page- different story.  You should be tracking metrics on that.) These are personal networks.  If used appropriately, they can enhance your business opportunities.  They have an ROR.  A return on relationships.  They may have an ROI, but they don’t have too.

I have developed relationships that turned into clients from blip.fm, twitter, facebook and foursquare.  Just as I have developed relationships that have turned into clients from Junior League, the school foundation, and mommy playgroups.  I don’t track the ROI of taking my kids to the park and shoot me if I ever do. 

Every interaction we have doesn’t need an ROI.  Just because you don’t understand how someone is using a particular platform doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value.  Every interaction leaves a trail of social objects- connections that bloom into stronger relationships and opportunities.

SMMI is pleased to announce the appointment of Jay Thompson to our advisory board.  Jay is commonly known as “the Blogfather” in the online real estate space. 

Jay founded the real estate blog Phoenix Real Estate Guy in May 2005 and has developed it into one of the most widely read real estate blogs in the country. 

Jay’s blog was recognized by Inman Real Estate News as the Most Innovative Real Estate Blog in 2009. Jay has also been named multiple times to Inman’s Most Influential Real Estate Blogger list and is widely recognized as one of the top users of social media in real estate.

Jay practices what he preaches.  Approximately 95% of his real estate business has been built through blogging and social media. Jay has been quoted in BusinessWeek, U.S. News & World Reports, and is often called upon by local television news reporters to discuss the Phoenix real estate market.

We are thrilled to welcome Jay to the SMMI team.



ReadWriteWeb recently wrote an article about AOL & Facebook’s “Facebook Connect” feature titled “Facebook Wants To Be Your One True Login”. What was most remarkable wasn’t the content of the article; it was the fact that over 100 people left comments under the assumption that they had arrived at a new version of Facebook. While this was amusing to a lot of people, it highlights a big obstacle for people who may be “expected” to get involved with social media: Technophobes. People who have never really learned how to use their computers much less navigate the web. Are they left behind? I don’t really think so-  the modern computer is user-friendly enough to help pretty much anyone get where they want/need to go.

I think the issue is with the teachers. I’ve taught VERY basic computer stuff before, and it’s easy to take for granted the things a lot of computer users know - like how to reboot, or how to close a program instead of just a window. Once these tasks are learned and the geography of the desktop has been understood, then it’s simple to engage in social media because you aren’t thinking about the technology anymore.

We always say it’s not about the technology with social media, and we truly believe that. I also know that there are people who think it IS about the technology only because computers are a mystery to them. Solving that mystery is the real key to overcoming their fear.

People flew in from Montreal, Colorado, Los Angeles and more just for the weekend. Why? They flew in for the perfect blend.  No, I am not talking about a new wine.  I am talking about the perfect blend- the mingling of online and offline.  Through social networks, we have developed followers, who have become acquaintances, and turned into friends. 

We continue to say that what starts online needs to be taken off.  #time4wine weekend is a good demonstration of that.  There really is no substitute for time spent face to face. 

So if there is no substitute for time spent face to face, why bother building the relationship online?  Online relationships strengthen offline relationships in a way that most purely offline relationships cannot do.  Why?

By regularly updating our status in online spaces, our friends and followers are involved in what we do on a daily basis.  They probably don’t see every update (unless they are stalking you), but if you update often, they probably have a general sense of what is happening in your life or your business.  I call it the “peripheral knowledge’.  Often, we don’t even realize that our sub conscious is paying attention to what is happening around us, but when prompted, we are able to remember the updates we saw.

On multiple occasions at the #time4wine event, I had people ask me questions about blog posts I have written or status updates I had posted.  In many cases, I had forgotten I had even written about them, but at that moment in time, those peripheral recollections were triggered.  Online relationships enable us to reach in and have a deeper understanding and awareness of our online friends and our offline friend.

The initial starting point, whether online or offline is somewhat irrelevant.  The perfect blend occurs when you close the circle and seal the bond.



I’m sitting in Wichita’s Mid-Continent Airport right now after spending the last week attending the REALTOR Association Professional Development Directors’ Summit in Old Town. It was a really well put together event during which Amy, Ginger and the Gentlemen Lublin got to interact with Professional Development and Education Directors from all over the country and talk with them about social media education. While that was rewarding and the opportunity to network with professionals from all over the country is always great, for me I really enjoyed the opportunity to learn and grow through interaction with other instructors, and participating in  instructor development workshops.

The CSM couse will always be a work-in-progress; the online social landscape keeps changing, and so our course must change with it, adding relevant material and cutting away the now-irrelevant material. Perfection is a moving target, and not really the point of what we’r trying to accomplish. Our goal is to teach relevant, digestable and most importantly actionable material to our students. The ideas generated through these instructor workshops that will begin to work their way into the classroom will help us to create an even more enriching and dynamic experience.

We’ve received plenty of praise for our course in the past, and we appreciate it, but we’re also invested in the continued improvement of our course. The experience of these development workshops is going to help make our course even better.

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. 

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?

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.”

“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.