L&S Unscripted

In the ever evolving realm of social media platforms, Google has just launched the latest utility – Google Buzz. This new platform has ease of use and convenience in mind, not to mention the extensive following and familiarity Google already possesses.

Similar to Facebook and Twitter, Buzz is a platform where friends can connect, share thoughts, photos, videos, chat and link accounts with other social media sites. But there are a few distinct characteristics that set Buzz apart from the rest. One being that Buzz is built directly into Gmail, giving it approximately 150 million immediate users from day one. This gives users a social media component in addition to full service email in one convenient stop.

Another delineating characteristic is Buzz’s slightly more advanced and selective privacy features. Users can switch from a public conversation thread to a private chat via Google Talk in Gmail. Furthermore, lists can be created that allow users to control which friends see certain content, while blocking others from that specific buzz. Users also have the option of making their Buzz public or just for friends.

After investigating my own Buzz, I found the convenience of the instant connections and only one login for Gmail and Buzz to be a nice component. I have not witnessed much activity yet, but I am sure that will soon change as users start to learn of this new utility and its many features.

Google’s omnipotent power and presence in the search engine and email markets will only add to the growth that Buzz may potentially see. As we all know, social media is advancing and gaining momentum daily. Keep your ears open as the “Buzz” is sure to spread.

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Since 1999 Search Engine Strategies (SES) has been presenting one of THE best conference series on search engine marketing. Doesn’t matter if you’re a novice or an expert, interested in search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) placement, digital PR or analysis of a campaign’s ROI, SES offers a wealthy of information.

Robin Temple, Director of Digital Marketing at Lawrence & Schiller attended the most recent SES conference (San Jose). In this episode of The Extra Minute, Robin discusses what’s new in search marketing now and what we can expect in the future.

The San Jose SES Conference also provided an opportunity for Lawrence & Schiller to step up to the speaker’s podium. Billie Jo Waara, Director of Account Planning and Research, spoke on “Small Voices, Big Impact: Social Media for the Little Guy.”

For all the talk about Twitter and Facebook you’d think everyone is America is tweeting and updating their status. But the reality is nearly two thirds of American adults have never created an online profile and joined a social network.

If you’re part of this silent majority, it’s time to start managing your online identity. Here are three simple steps you should take to claim your virtual territory and protect your personal brand.

1. Investigate

• Go to Google and search your name. Can you find yourself? Who’s listed before you? What line of work are they in? If someone is searching for you, who might they mistakenly find?
• Go to Facebook and search for your name. How many matches are there? Do the same on  Twitter .

Now that you have an idea of how competitive the online space is for your name you’re ready for the next step.

2. Build

Stake a claim to your online territory by setting up accounts in the top digital properties.

• Whenever possible use the same profile name. I typically use “DaveHaan1″ (e.g. www.Twitter.com/DaveHaan1) because someone beat me to the punch and starting using “DaveHaan” before me. Admittedly this variation isn’t as good as my regular name but it’s close and consistently used.
• Enter enough information into your profile so people can find you. Uploading a picture of yourself and sharing your city, where you work and the name of your alma mater is a good place to start.
• Set up a profile in each of the top social categories. The names will change as new players enter the game but today the top sites are:
  • Networking with friends = Facebook
  • Microblogging = Twitter
  • Professionals = LinkedIn
  • Video = Youtube
  • Photos = Flickr
  • Social bookmarking = Delicious
  • News = Digg
  • Blog = WordPress or Blogger (setup takes less than five minutes)
  • Email = Gmail and Yahoo
  • Domain name = Go Daddy (register your name for $10 or less)

After setting up your accounts, use them! Find people with similar interests. Listen to their conversations and join the discussion.

3. Monitor

 Just because you’ve established your online identity doesn’t mean the job is done! Now is the time to start listening for comments, feedback, anything that mentions your name.

• Set a Google Alert for your name and profile name. An email will be sent each time your name shows up in a blog post, news story, web page, etc.
• Social Mention is another free service that will listen for your name. It will even say if the mentions are positive, negative or neutral.
• Tip: learn more about social media monitoring from Week 3 of the Lawrence & Schiller Social Media Boot Camp webinar series.

According to Pew Internet research, nearly half of us have searched online for information about ourselves. Unfortunately only 3% do it on a regular basis! Once you’ve established your online identity you won’t be able to manage it unless you monitor on a regular basis.

See More Of The Story
Click on the play button below to watch “Claiming Your Virtual Territory“ from KELOLAND-TV.

So you have started to monitor to the conversations and social activity after Week Three of our Social Media  Bootcamp, and you have an idea of what conversations are happening, where people are postings, and what the tone of the conversations are.

But like everyone else, you’re looking direction about how to engage and become part of a digital community’s conversation in an effective and acceptable manner that can help your business without alienating the passionate members of the community you’re trying to reach.

What is a digital community -   a communication system of social networks whose participants share a common interest, idea, task or goal that interact in a virtual society across time, geographical and organizational boundaries and where they are able to develop personal relationships.

Growth cycle of a digital community:  Tend to grow slowly at first – people are more motivated to provide content and contribute as the size of the community grows.  As potential audience increases, so does attraction of writing and contribution. 

Who are the citizens that make up a digital community?

• Peripheral  (lurker) – observes.  An outside, unstructured participant. Usually visits community in response to the prompting of others.
• Inbound (novice) – newcomer, just beginning to engage in community.  Starts to provide content.  Tentatively interacts in a few discussions.
• Insider (regular) – fully committed participant; consistently ads to the community discussion and content. Interacts with other users.
• Boundary (leader) – Recognized as a veteran participant.  Connects with regulars to make higher concepts into ideas. The community grants their opinion greater consideration. 
• Outbound (elder) – Leave the community due to new relationships, new positions, new outlooks; community may have moved in direction they don’t agree with. 

 Why you and your company should be engaging with Digital Communities:

1. Education

• Get the inside scoop – be the first to know what is going on
• Ask and answer questions – participate in the conversation
• Stay up to date on your industry trends

2. Networking

• Meet like-minded people
• New hires/staff
• Business opportunities

3. Public relations

• Know what people are saying about and how reacting to your brand
• Respond to press quickly
• Plant a story/lead
• Influence public opinion

4. Fundraising/Philanthropy  

• Tie into a cause – ask to join
• Special offers for those that participate – Incentives

5. Brand Awareness

• Around events and sales
• Reviews, ratings
• Tell your story

6. ROI

• Can track web traffic, click-throughs, RRS subscriptions, offer redemptions, digital mentions/conversations, downloads, customer surveys, subscribers, referrals, links

Social media expert, Jeremiah Owyang, provides a glimpse into his Forrester Research study on the Future of the Social Web. He interviewed 24 of the top social media application experts across the nation - leaders from Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Looking at the next 4 years, Jeremiah presents five eras of the social web:

Social Relationships (fairly mature) – connect with others online and share information – MySpace, Facebook, Twitter

Social Functionality (current) - social networks become like operating systems allowing you to add applications to social networks and perform activities beyond sharing static information. Multimedia / Multi-platform collaboration. Example: Facebook and LinkedIn. This era is not at all mature, much growth ahead.

Social Colonization – wherever you go online or with your mobile device, your friends can go with you. You can make decisions based on this peer review wherever you go. Also, you’re constantly connected to people.

Social Context – now that we have portable identities in our devices or online, you can exchange parts of your identity for more relevant content. Personalized content, even to the extent of personalized television and multimedia content. Demographic, psychographic, preferences, previous buying behavior and social context (people you know) will affect the kind of content you will have access to. Because you control your identity, registration pages will go away. Lead tracking will be reinvented.

Social Commerce – Communities will work together to define the products/services that they will buy. Product feedback will become part of the product development process. Again, a new level of customization. Brands will bid for their information. Community buying. 

Great perspective – watch the video to hear Jeremiah firsthand.

Some might say there are no rules of conduct within the realms of social media. And they’re right. Hard and fast rules haven’t been adopted.

At the same time expectations of etiquette clearly do exist. 57% of the people attending Week 4 of the Lawrence & Schiller Social Media Boot Camp webinar series say they consider etiquette every time  the post online.  The remaining 43% think about it occasionally.

What are the behaviors to avoid? What things must you do? And what workplace considerations should you take into account? Click on the player below to view the recorded archive of “Social Media Dos and Don’ts”. Or scroll down for a brief recap along with poll results collected during this webinar.

Social Media Don’ts

• Social Media isn’t show & tell. Don’t use it to brag about, or worse yet, exaggerate your experiences and accomplishments.
• Don’t be pushy. No one wants to be spammed or read a post stuffed with keyword phrases or follow as your status is updated every five minutes or be invited to every Facebook group under the sun.
• Don’t be a headcase. Social media can be a place to vent (in moderation) but it isn’t therapy. Not a good place to complain about your boss or swear how much you hate your job.
• Don’t be sinister. Don’t try to hide behind someone else identity and be careful with the party pictures.  Snapshots uploaded after you’ve had too many shots will come back to haunt you.
• Don’t be offensive. “Funny” is subjective. Your sense of humor may not translate well online. Don’t cross the line into offensive. When in doubt, don’t do it.

Social Media Dos

• Do showcase your personality. This is what makes you interesting and fun to follow. Remember there is a difference between showing your personality and giving out too much personal information.
• Do consider limiting the number of groups you join. If you can’t keep up with all of them, it may be time to scale back.
• Do manage your tools. Take advantage of the applications which connect your blog or tweets to Facebook… IF your audiences are similar and the message is appropriate for all destinations. Learn more about Connecting the Dots in week 7 of our webinar series.

Workplace Considerations

• There is no privacy. Especially if you’re using a workplace computer.
• You represent your company online even if you’re posting on your personal account.
• If you work for a publically traded company, your tweets and blog pots can fall under SEC jurisdiction.
• The FTC is proposing guidelines for online marketing.

Bottomline, if you wouldn’t say it in person to your boss, you probably shouldn’t say it online.

Admittedly, we first have to ensure there is dialogue. If you participated in the third part of the L&S Social Media Boot Camp, then you know that we experienced a couple minor technical difficulties – but luckily @markmorgan was able to join the conversation for questions and answers at the end.  Thanks to @courtneylotzer who continued through like a champ and our participants who stayed with us during the bump and if you missed all the excitement, you can watch the updated version of the webinar here or use Twitter Search and query for #TheExtraMile.

Here’s a brief overview for those who missed Tuesday’s webinar.

Where to Start?  Listen. There are numerous tools and online resources to measure and listen to all sorts of conversations online. To start listening, to help filter all the noise, we suggested a few free tools that we find valuable.

• Trendrr
• Quarkbase
• SocialMention
• Technorati Search
• Google Alerts

These are all great tools for providing a snapshot of what people are saying in the online space. Trendrr is probably the most comprehensive (look beyond your initial confusion, just stick with it for awhileJ), Google the easiest and others are fun to play around with if your geeky like our team is!

Lawrence and Schiller uses these tools in addition to our subscription based tool, Radian6. As a company we looked at many different options for our social media monitoring tool of choice.  We debated between Radian6 and Sentiment Metrics. We liked Sentiment Metrics because it automatically assigned sentiment to each post. After researching it further, we came to find out that statistically, the sentiment metric was only correct up to 40% of time, so we chose Radian6 because of its ease of use and functionality.

With the Radian6 measurement platform, you can find your brand on millions of blog posts, videos, reviews in forums, sharing of photos, twitter updates. It is real time monitoring of mentions about your company, product, issues and competitors, and has the ability to quickly find the most important relevant conversations.

Free tools are great for initial competitive review, building broad insights of topics from a general audience and checking your “gut” instincts.  We prefer to use an in-depth tool such as Radian6 for trend analysis and quantifiable ROI measurement.

I’ve listened. Now what? Define your goal, then the tool. We can’t say it enough. Social media should always start with understanding, and agreement, of what you are trying to accomplish with your overall marketing and/or communication efforts.  Measurement of social media is the same. Understanding your goal is the key to defining and selecting an accurate metric for ROI.

And finally, start engaging online and offline (use traditional marketing to promote your online efforts). If you don’t engage on behalf of your company, someone else will. If there is a void someone will step up and fill this role when there is a need for it.

Deserved or not deserved a single negative review or mention can taint a brand for a long time. It’s important to take a more proactive role in protecting your brand before it’s too late. You have the tools, now you can start monitoring the digital space for mentions of your brand, either positive or negative, and it’s the best way you can actually cultivate relationships, too.

Well it depends on if you joined Tuesday’s (4.21.09) webinar or not, L&S Social Media Boot Camp: Twitter Demystified.  We had great questions from the audience of over 120 participants and you can follow the online conversations as well via twitter search, #TheExtraMile.

There were a number of requests for the information presented, so here’s a quick hot sheet as presented by @awayken and @robintemple.

In case you were wondering, L&S likes to describe Twitter as an open forum of short dialogue. Twitter was designed to be compatible with mobile phones and extend text messaging type posts to a larger audience. Think of it as a cross between text messaging and a chat room. Oh by the way, its always changing too – watch the horizon for new innovations and Google’s role.

How To Use Twitter 101:

1.  Don’t use the website…use a Twitter application!

• Tweetdeck
• Twhirl
• Twitterfeed

2. Share Content

• Share Links: Tr.im (trims your links)
• Share Pics: TwitPic
• Share Vids: 12seconds
• Save Thoughts: Birdhouse (a notepad for Twitter)
• Spread Music: Blip.fm

3. Talk the Talk: Twitter Lingo

• tweet – an update or posting to Twitter
• replies – a way of relating your tweet to a previous tweet
• direct messages – private messages
• favorites – a way of marking your favorites
• fail whale – Twitter’s “over capacity” mascot
• @TheExtraMile – a reply to TheExtraMile
• RT – re-tweet
• OH – Over heard
• #awesome – a way of tagging your tweet

Also, I found this great presentation on slideshare.net – a great visual presentation of Twitter words.

4. Listen to the Conversation.

• Twitter Search
• Monitter : Search by topic, geography.
• TweetBeep : Receive e-mail alerts.
• Nearby Tweeps

5. Twitter is for Conversation. Take the time to respond to people and be a part of a conversation

6.  Utilize multiple accounts. Segment your audience (sales versus service) and your conversations, ie Dell, Wells Fargo.

7. Follow interesting people.

• Wefollow: Connect with new tweeple who share your interests

8. Promote: Your account should be in your website, in your email byline, on your tshirt, etc. If people don’t know your twitter account exists, it’s not going to do you much good.

9.  Retweet (RT) but give credit where credit is due.

10. Don’t over-use. Be relevant.

Let us know if you have other questions or comments to share!  Looking forward to next week’s session!

Join our in-house measurement experts, Courtney Lotzer and Mark Morgan, as they lead Part III of Social Media Boot Camp and you’ll walk away with the best social media measurement practices to help your bottom line.

L&S Social Media Boot Camp: Part III

Measure the Digital Dialogue

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

10:00 a.m. CST

The Lawrence & Schiller Social Media Boot Camp is a free 10-week webinar series that focuses on a variety of social media topics for today’s digital marketing environment. Each Tuesday morning, join us for an in-depth discussion and a review of available tools and best-of-the-best showcases from across the country. Social media is inherently social; likewise your comments and questions will be included in the one hour online conversation.

For a complete schedule of upcoming topics, click here.

Register here for Part III of the Boot Camp, “Measure the Digital Dialogue

We invite you to join our upcoming Social Media webinar series. We will focus on different social media topics each week for 8 weeks beginning Tuesday, April 14th.

Week One: Social + Media = What Exactly?
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
10:00 a.m. CST

Recent Nielsen findings stated that social networking is more popular than email. Are you a game changer or are you still wondering what social media is? Either way – you know that social media plays a major role in advertising and marketing to your audience. Join L&S for an in-depth discussion and web conference series. The L&S Social Media Boot Camp kicks off on Tuesday, April 14, 2009, with “Social Media Orientation: A Crash Course for Marketers.”

Digital Marketing Director, Robin Temple, and Billie Jo Waara, Account Planning & Research Director, will provide an initial overview of available tools and best-of-the-best showcases from across the country. Social media is inherently social; likewise your comments and questions will be included in the one hour online conversation.

Full schedule available at http://www.l-s.com/bootcamp/schedule.pdf

Register today at www.l-s.com/bootcamp

I have read many articles lately with headlines like “Social Media will Save your Business” or “Social Media is the Best New Business Strategy”. This may seem foreign to some – as if you need to launch a whole new line of business or an entirely new effort. Good news: for many people – it’s just doing what you do on a personal basis and applying it to business. You’re using social media tools, but is your content really social-worthy? Is it applicable to a large group of people? Is it content that positions you as a thought leader or provider of tools that will help others in their line of business? It can’t be a sales strategy – it needs to be a relationship strategy. Remember, the reader is always thinking to themselves “what’s in this for me”… and the takeaway can serve a variety of purposes: educational, professional development or pure entertainment. It just has to provide an “ah-ha” moment so that they, in turn, add it to their social dialogue.

My sister in-law picked a fight with me. No provocation. Just wound up and hit me with a big, nasty leather pillow. Highly unusual behavior from her. She’s a grandmother for cryin’ out loud. So I retaliated. Smacked her right in the Facebook. The Pillow Fight War of 2008 had begun.

Pillow Fight is a Facebook application that encourages…well, I’m not sure what it encourages. It may just be electronic silliness, but it got me thinking. What was originally the domain of the Millenials has quickly become a part of day to day interaction among those of us who have a little more life experience (or more than a little more).

The interesting thing is the difference in how we use it. Rather than a “here’s-what-I’m-experiencing-this-very-second” stream of consciousness, we treat it more like an electronic bulletin board. Or digital Post-It notes on a universal fridge.

Pictures of high school classmates at their kids’ weddings. Vacations. Reunions. Dog training tips. Birthday reminders. Lists of wines that go with beef jerky. And pillow fights, of course.

Makes me wonder how we’ll use it in thirty or forty years. Maybe something like this:

http://www.straightfrommybrain.com/pages/right/pensionbook.html

By the way, my official Facebook ranking is: Pillow Ninja.

Beware the night.

In a meeting yesterday, I had an ah-ha moment. As we’ve tried to help our clients make the leap to social media, too many times social media brainstorming is limited to banner ads on Myspace or Facebook. As marketers, we know that this is only the tip of the iceberg, so I say: take social media out of the list of marketing tactics… it doesn’t belong there. Really, it’s a paradigm shift in that the social nature of messaging is infused in everything we do online.

Virtually every type of digital marketing has or could have a social component changing each medium from a one-way form of communication to two-way communication stream. For example, we must understand online user behavior to be able to join the conversation. Going in blind simply doesn’t work. This act of online listening can be defined as participating in social media. Cross-linking is social media. Reading and writing blogs, ratings and reviews is social media. Digital PR is social media. I’ve even known certain e-mail campaigns to generate dialogue. And of course, we can build web applications that have social nature and application.

Don’t place Social Media as a line item within your marketing plan – that’s too limiting. Think big. It’s not a new phenomenon, it’s simply the online world in which we live and play. Dive in.

Steadily socializing,

Robin