Social Media Revolution

Tools for Your Online Fans are a Slam Dunk!

Everyone knows the value of word of mouth marketing. It’s a concept as old as dirt, but not something most businesses know how to embrace. The social Web is a great avenue to allow the people that know and love you (aka, your Citizen Marketers) to promote your business in a fun way.

Citizen Marketers are basically customer evangelists. These are people who will generate media (primarily online) on behalf of products, services, companies, or anything/one who inspires them.

In order to generate a posse of Citizen Marketers you need to make sure you’re ready for them. You need to provide them with a tool kit that allows them to easily promote you. Oh – and this goes without saying – you’d better make sure you DON’T pay them. First of all, most don’t like to get paid. Once you pay them they feel like they’re an “employee” and now promoting you is an obligation as opposed to a personal desire.

Below are some tips for generating and keeping Citizen Marketers:

1. Post Community Guidelines: If you have an online community, blog or other social site – make sure you post a “Communities Guidelines” section where you spell out the guidelines for posting/sharing on your site. I personally like Flickr’s guidelines.
2. Seed Your Community with Love: Seed your community with people who already know and love you – and you only need 15-25 to get things going. This group will set the tone for your community. They’ll also take pride in ownership of your community and police it for you – so when/if someone talks crap about you or your products, they will be the first to stand up for you.
3. Reward your Citizen Marketers: Do this in ways that make sense for your business (remember, no money!). For example, provide free samples of your products to this group, ask them to talk about your product on your site, blog, community, etc. Invite them to grand openings, product launches, product research sessions, etc. They need to feel their contributions are valuable.
4. Transparency is Paramount: It’s extremely important to be transparent and authentic. It’s important other potential citizens (customers) don’t think you’re paying people to say great things about you. That’s not a slam dunk, that’s more like a body check! Honesty is the best policy my friends!
5. Provide them with a Toolkit: Just like you would give a sales person a toolkit, you should do the same with your Citizen Marketers. Examples include, sharing your company goals with them, provide them with the embed code so they can easily share your videos and widgets on their own social sites, share results with them – let them know their efforts are paying off!
6. Be ALIRT: By this I mean, Ask, Listen, Implement, Respond and Thank. This needs to be a 2-way relationship. Don’t just take, take, take from this group – you’ll piss them off and they’ll drop out of the game. Ask them what they think, listen carefully to what they say and repeat back so they’re sure your heard them correctly (this can be done on or offline by the way), Respond to their needs. Make sure you’re interacting with them and responding to any questions they have. Ignoring this group is the kiss of death. And lastly, Thank them in as many ways you that can think of!
7. Part of Your Team: This may be one of the most important tips of all – Citizen Marketers need to feel the love. They need to feel they’re part of your team and not some separate entity that you use and abuse.  Invite them to meet new clients with you, share challenges, successes and results with them, promote them (and by this I mean, feature them on your community, or write about them in your blog). This is money in the emotional bank for Citizen Marketers.

Have fun!

Top 10 Reasons Start-ups Fail

Having started my own Web 2.0 company – and then having to dissolve it 2 years later – I learned a ton about what to do and what not to do in a start-up environment. Developed partly for therapy, and partly because of my eagerness to share this wisdom with fellow first-time entrepreneurs. There are obviously several other reasons why start-ups fail, but these are the ones I resonate with the most. Please feel free to add to the list…

Geeks and Geezers Survey: Social Media links Youth and Young at Heart

Yet another survey indicating the need for businesses to embrace social media tools – especially those trying to reach a market between the ages of 18-44.  You can download this report for free at the Success Performance Solutions site.

Some of the survey highlights are:

• More than 50% of all respondents have opened accounts on LinkedIn, a business social networking site.
• LinkedIn participation seems to be a site frequented more by 4-year college and higher graduates than high school and technical grads; Facebook enjoys a more universal appeal regardless of education.
• Only eighteen percent of respondents 55 years and older have a Twitter account but more than 25 percent of Gen X and Gen Y college graduates have one.
• Downloading music from the Internet seems to be an activity shared by young and old alike: 62 percent of pre-1945 respondents said yes to downloading music, just slightly less than the 68 percent of the 44 year old and younger crowd.
• YouTube by far had the most universal appeal with 76 percent of all respondents watching videos on this multimedia site.

Posted using ShareThis. Image from www.super-solutions.com

An Overview of Social Media

Below is the presentation I deliver to provide an overview of social media and how traditional media is undergoing a significant paradigm shift. Please contact me if you’d like me to deliver this presentation in a workshop format.

What do you think?

Wake up newspapers!!!

photo credit: aditya.internet on Flickr

When are the newspapers going to wake up and smell the new media and social media scene?? Grant it many have, but there are still major Luddites on the scene. I’m not saying the traditional news engines should go away, and bow down to the mighty electronic media gods – on the contrary. I say they should join the forces and modify their strategies for dissemination of news. Part of the problem is just that – the word “dissemination.” It makes me think that THEY are the deliverers of all messages in the world of news. If the newspapers (not to mention the TV broadcast world, magazine world and radio world) want to stay afloat in this era of participatory consumerism – then they need to provide opportunities for consumers to actually participate and interact with their publication in more than the print format.

This latest story - The Tribune Company announcing they are filing for bankruptcy today – is just one more example of the need for traditional media outlets to converge with new media outlets and create digital strategies. [Note: The Tribune Company publishes The L.A. Times and The Chicago Tribune.] Oh – and when you read this article, notice who the Tribune’s top creditors are – JPMorgan Chase and Merrill Lynch for example. Are we supposed to be surprised this is happening???

I like Steve Outing’s recommendations to newspaper CEOs in his “11 Points to Ponder” article (written on December 1, 2008):

photo credit: editorandpublisher.com

1. Issue and edict: Digital is First!
2. Consolidate print and online editing functions
3. Print edition: Don’t bother chasing young people
4. Print edition: Focus on the core demographic
5. Guide older print loyalists to a life online
6. Reduce the number of print editions
7. Online: Broaden definition of news to include micro-personal
8. Hire a social VP (I love this recommendation!)
   
9. Experiment, fail, experiment more (I’ve done this one)
   
10. Leverage your remaining staffers, and augment them
11. Consider retirement

Are we advancing or being “pulled” along?

I named this blog “THINK” with a subtitle of “Things that make ya go hmmm” – and I want to make sure I’m providing enough information that lives up to such a heading. I’ve challenge myself with this topic on a regular basis and I’d love to hear what others think about this as well…

We’re in this technological society that many would say is advancing us. However, I question who’s actually advancing and who’s being “pulled along” for the ride. I also question whether the supposed “advancement” is truly moving us ahead in the long-run, or merely serving a capitalistic need in the short-term.

As much as I’m a fan of the social Web and grateful for the many Citizen Journalists out there sharing and uncovering important events (like Harvard Medical School’s assistant professor Arun Shanbhag’s blog and Twitter coverage of the recent Mumbai attacks). I’m equally concerned about how far some people, businesses and government alike, are presenting this access under the guise of “research,” “competitive advantage, ” or one of the many other euphemisms floating around in our money-making/power-seeking world. It’s one thing to gather this information from others, but another to know how and where it’s being applied. Who’s benefiting from this information? How are they benefiting from it, and why???

What’s even scarier is when people volunteer to be followed or tracked by a company in exchange for a piece of technology – like the smartphone. This NYTimes article shares how young M.I.T. students agreed to have their every move tracked in exchange for a free smartphone. Is this ethical? Does it make it okay if these “kids” agree to that level of personal access? At what point, I wonder, will we begin to revolt against this access and revert back to simpler more private lives, where we can go about our daily activities without the threat of our actions being tracked?

It may not be too far off to consider that business and government are omniscient characters in a novel about your life. Our actions are tracked in many ways – credit card purchases and returns, phone calls made and received, Internet sites visited (including how long you stayed and what links you clicked) – and use of our passports to name a few. One blogger named Adam Berger posted a satirical entry about “How to stop the government from tracking you.”

I’m teaching a class this winter term called an “Intro to Social Media,” and I want to make sure I include a discussion about the ethics of the Social Web. There is a sense of responsibility that comes along with participating in social media and social marketing – both as the deliverer and the receiver. And I’d like to know what others think about the ubiquity of our lives in the advent of technology. If we’re advancing technologically does that also mean mean we’re advancing socially as humans? Grant it, I’m asking this question while I sit here at my laptop, blogging, monitoring my Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, groups, Google groups, other social networks, RSS feeds – and on and on…

The word “advancement” seems to be a relative term – what does it mean to you? What do you think?

What’s your 571?

Okay – so you’re probably wondering what the heck a “571″ is – well at least I’m hoping you are. A 571 is something completely unfair that has happened to you and you need support from others to help right this wrong. You want people to be aware that something like this is happening out in our “free country,” and you feel justice must prevail.

Let me start by giving a little history on where this idea of a “571″came from.  My business partner and I recently met with our bookkeeper to discuss taxes. She was sharing what we owe to the government and why we owe these taxes. We found out that my business partner owed $571 more than I did because her marriage is not recognized by the state of Oregon (she’s married to a woman). Even though Oregon recently passed a domestic partnership law, there are groups opposing it – and attempting to collect signatures to put the issue up for a vote on the January 2008 ballot.

I however, received more tax benefits because I am married to a person of the opposite sex – lucky me!

So this is where I came up with the idea of 571 – since this was the amount my business partner must pay for marrying a woman almost 13 years ago!

It got me thinking about all the other injustices happening everyday in this world – and I wanted to provided people with a place to vent them. And who knows – maybe others will read them, get equally pissed off, and decide to ORGANIZE and TAKE ACTION! Especially now – in the age of SOCIAL MEDIA and CROWDSOURCING - where people DO have the power to make their 571 ubiquitous!

So please share your 571 here – and let’s work together to right these wrongs!

istock photos

I’m running for President!

I hope I get your vote!