Dec 28, 2011
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Archive for the ‘social networks’ Category
With all the talk about the complaint PhoneDog.com filed against Noah Kravitz for “misappropriation of trade secrets and damaged the company’s business, goodwill, and reputation” some companies are liable to update their social media policy.
But those that do are making a mistake. Because if they’re going to be heard through social media, they’re going to need as much help as they can get. And they’re not going to get it by imposing ownership claims over their personal social media accounts
I don’t intend to make any substantial changes to my Social Media Policy Template because of it, and here’s why:
On social networks, crowds direct our attention. If it trends, it upends. And if it doesn’t, it just ends.
What one person tweets matters only a little. What the crowd retweets, matters most. The same social gravity applies on Facebook, Linkedin and G+. An effective corporate social media policy protects the organization and its employees alike. Afterall, why would your employees retweet your message on their personal social networking account if they’re concerned it might get them fired, or if they’re concerned you might someday try and take it away from them?
Imposing strict ownership requirements over an employee’s personal social media account discourages them from using social media for on theior employers behlaf, which means they won’t be retweeting your message. And in nowadays, you need retweets, Likes and +1s to get noticed. So a good social media policy must encourage employee participation.
Sree Sreenivasan, a professor at the Columbia Journalism School, who is paraphrased in a story about the incident by New York Times reporter John Biggs (@JohnBiggs) says it best:
…many industries had policies that required sales staff to leave their Rolodexes behind, but that these policies were as relevant to social media as Rolodexes are to the modern office. After all, social media accounts are, almost by definition, personal.
He also said that the average Twitter account had less clout than many might think.
On social networks, we crowd source news and information. If companies want to get noticed, they’ve got to get crowds talking. And in most cases, their employees are going to be easiest place to start.
Do you intend to update your social media policy as a result of this complaint, or will you wait to see what legal precedent, if any, transpires?
Image By: Dbarefoot
Categories: social media policy, social networks0 CommentsDec 13, 2011
The biggest search and social networking companies to date were born in America, so it’s easy to be seduced into thinking that the American way of doing things online is the best way of doing things online. But most netizens today are not Americans.
The majority of Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin users reside outside of the US. And in many of those places, commerce is not necessarily the primary objective of business. In some countries, the ambitious are suspecting of undermining the public interest. Profits are like air. You need it to live, but it is not the purpose for living. Surely, you can’t deny that in the US, there are corporations that profit at the expense of the greater public interest.
Maintaining sensitivity to cultural nuances outside the US is key to successful online communications. SXSW, the annual mecca for the global tech community, draws an international audience. But it happens in Austin, so the global perspetive is diluted through an American lens.
Le Web on the other hand, which happens every December in Paris, showcases the global tech scene through a distinctly European filter, which is extermely valuable to communicators residing inside the US. Produced by Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, it is the fastest-paced, most entertaining of the tech conferences — with the best food and the higest production values — and packed with hard newsbreaks.
Here’s some of the announcements at this year’s conference:
- Release of the new, new Twitter with a new algorithm “discovery feed”
- Live demo of Ice Cream Sandwich, the next Andriod OS, with desktop widgets and facial recognition
- Facebook’s committment to HTML5, even though the BRIC nations won’t have the infrastructure to support it for years
- Uber’s $32 million in funding for an app that makes cars services in most major cities available via mobile
- Evernote’s deal with Orange which will give customers access to the premium version for a year for free
But the bigger, more strategic lesson I got came from experiencing the emerging online tech sector in a mature market like France. Consider the history. The French government has long been regarded as overly bureaucratic, contempous of corporate greed and downright arrogant. Here are a few examples:
- Just a few days ago the Autorite de la Concurrence slammed P&G and other soap companies with huge fines for price fixing
- Wirelss broadband is simply not available from any local provider in Paris without a one-year contract
- Last minute scheduling changes at Le Web happen daily. It’s just the way they do things. Shut up and wait.
It’s easy to dismiss the French as aloof. But my take is, they just have different priorities. You may not be able to get online easily, but if you have a medical emergency, they’ll take care of you for free, with or without insurance. The French also have a much lower tolerance for anticompetitive practices and revile unchecked corporate power. They seem to legitimately want to put the public interest before commerce. It’s a noble goal. You don’t get ripped off on soap and you can get healthcare when you need it. But it doesn’t always work, especially when it stymies innovation.
In his keynote, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said the role of government is to equip citizens with reliable, fast and affordable wireless and stationary broadband, so they can innovate themselves out of the current economic funk. Rome had roads. Then came highways. But today, if you want to spur innovation and commerce, you need high-speed broadband.
Easy, cheap access to the Net in Sweden lead to a number of breakthrough technologies including the peer to peer file sharing, which led to Skype, and more recently Spotify, a social network that lets user share privately, who’s founder also presented at Le Web. Silicon Valley needs a competitor, says Schmidt, and unless you want to live in Berlin or Stockholm, other European governments need to make it easier for people to innovate.
Some say unchecked corporate power in the US has led to an environment where corporations have grown at the expensive of individuals. Last week the Federal Reserve reported said household net worth declined 4% over the summer, while company holdings climbed for the fifth consecutive year.
The bigger lessons from this year’s Le Web is this:
- It’s less expensive that ever to access global markets
- The cost of doing business keeps coming down
- The size of the market keeps expanding
- Access spurs innovation
- Incentives spur commerce
But cultural differences really do matter. Different cultures have different expectations which anyone selling to a global audience needs to be mindful of.
I rented an apartment in Paris through AirBNB while attending Le Web and after getting locked out, l was challenged to overcome a difficult situation without anyone to advocate on my behalf in a timely manner. I have since exchanged tweets with the company’s founder Brian Chesky inviting him to discuss my experience at On the Record…Online, and spoken to the company’s staff, but no one appears to be willing to talk to me on the record about my experience.
In my next post I’ll write about my AirBNB experience. I’d like to acknowledge AirBNB’s point of view of in my post, so I hope Brian, or someone at AirBNB, will agree to a constructive, civil dialogue about my Paris apartment rental experience.
Categories: Facebook, location based, marketing, mobile, social networks, socialmedia, UncategorizedMay 31, 2011Are you ready to win the war against digital illiteracy?
The first step is the toughest one. But it’s also the most important.
Provide everyone with clear-cut, easy-to-follow guidelines to help them distinguish between conversations that can happen in public, and conversations that need to be kept private.
Social media has become an integral part of our personal lives. Unless organizations take the time to specify how (not if) employees can use social media at work, they risk forfeiting the chance to:
- Capitalize on social marketing opportunities
- Attract and retain top-notch personnel
- Thwart obsolescence
Here’s why:
On social networks, trends direct our attention. We have more confidence in crowds than individuals. A Yelp restaurant listing with a 3-star average and 300 ratings is more meaningful than one with a 5-star average and just 12 ratings.
For the same reason, organizations realize the true value of social marketing when everyone gets involved. The more people there are discussing a topic, the greater the likelihood others will discover it.
A corporate Twitter feed and Facebook page driven by a PR department are nice to have, but they’ll never be as useful as the conversations of a diverse, engaged community. And the larger the community, the more confidence we have in what they say, and the more likely we are to give it our attention.
Whenever an employee uses social media to get their job done, they leave behind a digital record that can be found and shared indefinitely. If you have no policy, that notion is more than a little scary. But if you’ve thought it through, it becomes a productivity windfall, because marketing becomes the byproduct of using social media to get the job done.
Remember, your employees are using social media already in their personal lives. If you’d like them to use it for business too, they need to know what’s expected. Leadership needs to set clear-cut boundaries, so employees know what is and isn’y acceptable. Companies that fail to take this step, will most likely also fail to mobilize their personnel to make the best use of social media.
It’s critical that the social media policy leadership sets be fair and just. Blocking access to Facebook from the corporate network while expecting employees to respond to email outside of business hours sets uneven standards. In fact, blocking access to social networks is both unfair and futile, because workers should have the right communicate with their friends and family, as long is it doesn’t interfere with the quality of their work.
Social media blackouts are the result of digitally illiteracy. They are enacted by misguided leaders from an age when the restricting information flows was possible and effective. But as Wikileaks, Twitter and Napster have proven, the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Or as Esther Dyson said back in 2006, companies that profit from inefficiency will die, and for many types of communications, social media is simply more efficient.
Once the boundaries are in place, and everyone knows what can be public and what should be private, social media becomes a productivity gain, not drain.
Check out how Johns Hopkins and Avery Dennison are using internal social networks, or the workplace productivity gains of Chatter.
In this environment, the organizations that can draw a clear line between public and private have a huge advantage. The road to getting there runs straight through policy, because you can’t draw that line between public and proprietary unless you do the homework to figure that out, and you can’t teach others to respect boundaries if they don’t know where they lie.
Social media without governance is reckless. And rules without training are toothless. Take a look at my Social Media Policy Template to accelerate your policy development efforts or attend my upcoming Social Media Marketing Workshop in Los Angeles June 30 – July 1, 2011, where we spend a fair amount of time on this subject.
Welcome to the social media world of uncontrollable communications. You’re in it, whether you like it or not.
In my next post, I’ll start getting into what it takes to host an effective social media training.
May 18, 2011
Company and industry events are a great way spark online community interaction.
Professionals with common interests and goals regularly invest time and money to attend B2B events where they can network with others in their trade.
They’re engaged.
They’re motivated.
And they’re all in the same place, listening to the same speakers and visiting the same exhibitors.
They’re all on the same page.
What better place to launch a digital initiative that extends the excitement and the knowledge shared via social media?
After the carpet’s rolled up, and the staging’s been struck, and the keynote speakers have all gone home, what do you have to show for your efforts but a stack of business cards? But if you could capture and archive what happened online, it could be discovered through search, shared on Facebook and Twitter and pay dividends in perpetuity.
Earlier this week, I conducted a B2B social media workshop for event planners at the Event Marketing Summit in Chicago (#emschi) organized by Dan Hanover. I showed plenty of examples of how B2B marketers can use social media to generate excitement before, during and after business-to-business events like trade shows, conferences and strategic corporate training events.
Here are some of the take-aways from my workshop:
Socialize Your Event Website – Make your hashtags easy to find. Include them in your logo, or in the banner of your event website. Don’t gang all of your sessions up on one page, or one page per day. Put each session at its own permalink, so people can tweet links to specific sessions. Include each speaker’s Twitter ID in their bio and make it clickable. Use Linkedin “Share” and Twitter “Tweet” buttons. Never mind that Facebook isn’t distinctly B2B. People spend time there, and there’s nothing more powerful the a personal recommendations from a friend. Install a Facebook “Like” button as well. And include an “add to calendar” widget that makes it easy to add sessions to your Outlook, iCal or Google Calendar with one click. Make sure the calendar item has all the pertinent info about the session including the Twitter IDs of the presenters and the hastag for the conference or session. For some ideas on event website best practices, check out the Event Bright and Cvent webpage templates.
Offer Social Sync on Your Website – How many times have you registered for a conference and wondered who you might know that’s attending? At SXSW 2011, Janrain built this feature into the SXSW website, so you could cross reference registered attendees list with your Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter contacts. This was an awesome feature, because it gave you the chance to schedule more meetings and network smarter.
Promote Your Call for Speakers - If you want to generate excitement before an event, promote your call for speakers harder than the event itself. Email market a call for speakers with a deadline and send two reminders as the date approaches. People are more responsive when there’s something in it for them. Blog your call for speakers as well. And share a link to your blog post on relevant Linkedin Groups and via Twitter.
Post Your Event to Linkedin and Facebook – Go to Linkedin > More > Events and select the “Add an Event” tab on Linkedin Events. Post your event and send out notifications to your Linkedin contacts who might genuinely be interested. You can also advertise your event on Linkedin, and the targeting options are very precise. Post the event to the Events area on your Facebook page. Ask an easy to answer question and rewrite your meta data to encourage engagement in the stream. The more “Likes” and comments you get, the higher the post will rank and the more people who will see it.
Post the Speaker PowerPoint Decks to SlideShare – Set up a channel and post the PowerPoint presentations directly following each session. Velocity here is key, because tyou want the session attendees to retweet the link, and they’ll be more inclined to do so right after the session, then a day of two later. Use your momentum wisely. Tweet out a link to the deck with the conference hashtag and the Twitter ID of the speaker and watch the ReTweets come in.
Register Your Event on Foursquare – Take the time register your event in advance, and ask your sponsors NOT to register the event themselves on Foursquare, so you don’t wind up with multiple registrations for the same event, which confuses attendees. If it’s an annual event, start the name of the event with the year, so people will be able to check in at the next event regardless of the location. If you can get your hashtag into the name that you register on Foursquare, all the better. And ask each speaker before the start of their session to remind everyone to check in on Foursquare.
Podcast Your Sessions - At this point, the cost to record the audio from your sessions and make it available after the fact is pretty much just the cost of labor. Bottle up the knowledge and insights your speakers share on stage and make them available immediately. Draft a search engine optimized transcript, give the final MP3 file name that’s search friendly, upload it your blog, park your RSS feed at iTunes, social media optimize your feed and count the downloads. If you have the dates and location for next year’s event, include a brief, soft-sell announcement at the beginning of each recording to generate excitement for next year’s event. Don’t worry about losing registered attendees because you’re giving away the session recordings for free. People go to events to network and press the flesh. You can’t do that on a podcast.
Offer a Branded Mobile App – DoubleDutch, a San Francisco start-up that recently secured VC-funding, offers a ready to go, skinnable mobile app with all the features you’d want at a B2B event. Users can create profiles, connect with other profiles, use social sync to find Twitter and Facebook friends, share status updates, photos and links to an activity stream, like and comment on items, publish out to Facebook and Twitter, check in on the app and on Foursquare, unlock badges and watch video. Cisco Events is using the app very effectively to sustain the buzz they generate at their corporate events. They’ve even built in QR Code reader right into the app, which can be used for check-ins. Now you can use incentives to drive foot traffic to exhibitors and sessions by offering unique QR codes at different destinations.
Event Marketing B2B Social Media Boot Camp Presentation
View more presentations from Eric Schwartzman.
By the way, I recorded the audio for the workshop which I’ll be releasing at On the Record…Online, so head on over now and subscribe if you want to make sure you don’t miss it.
How do you use social media for B2B events? Share your best tips for applying social to B2B events here as well. And if you attended the session, what you think of it, and how are you applying social media to B2B event marketing?
Categories: #emschi, B2B, blogging, email marketing, location based, mobile, professional development, social media, social networks, training courses
Jan 20, 2011
If the case studies and news highlights in this blog post are any glimpse of things to come — and I believe they are — social media dotcoms will start to become less important as marketers learn that the real power of a social network is not so much the Facebook.com or Linkedin.com websites, but the data they store about your customer’s preferences.
The dotcoms will remain important to individuals. But for companies, the real opportunity is the ability to collect, analyze and market to the connections, identities and interests of a social network’s members. When aggregated, this data becomes a research panel that is richer and more accurate than ever before. We are starting to see evidence of web marketers using this data to drive sales on their own websites.
It is already possible for websites to integrate social networking features with Facebook’s Graph API, which lets visitors bring their friends and interests with them to any website.
It all starts with the “Login with Facebook” button. It gives visitors the chance to log into your website with their Facebook user name and password, and is followed by a “Request for Permission” screen (above), which gives website operators a chance to capture extended information about the visitor, such as the “like” buttons they’ve clicked, their birth date, the city they live in and more.
Unlike Facebook’s Social Plug-Ins, which are very simple and easy to install, the Graph API is a bit more difficult to get up and running, but it also offers much greater access to read and write information from Facebook.com to a third-party, destination website. Websites that take time to do that, have access to richer information about their visitors than ever before.
Facebook users profiles and actions create more accurate, detailed demographics than any other media channel. Integrating the Graph API allows online marketers to build stronger relationships with website visitors through greater insights about the preferences.
Rather than just offer a searchable database of albums, artists and tracks and overwhelm visitors with infinite choice, online music service Spotify integrated the Graph API so users can see the music their friends like. Users can share play lists and see which songs their friends listen to most. “Spotify now sees 60% of their traffic coming from Facebook,” says Facebook partner engineer Simon Cross. The power of the Facebook platform is not so much Facebook.com, but rather, the connections, identities and interests of the network’s users.
Amazon is using Facebook’s Graph API to take even more guesswork out of gift giving. Amazon introduced recommendations before Facebook even existed, but they were recommendations from anyone who had purchased something we bought. They weren’t personalized. They weren’t social. By integrating the Graph API, Amazon lets visitors know what recording artists and authors their friends like, what they’ve bought themselves in the past and when their birthdays are.
Facebook Places recently announced their first European mobile integration with review site Qype, which has 17 million unique users across 10 countries and 9 languages. Since the launch, they’ve had 1 million mobile downloads of the iPhone App, which lets users see where their friends have checked in, see their friend’s check in history and check in at a location on Qype and Facebook in one action. “For us, the importance of Facebook information is about the power of friends to make a local decision,” says Qype Country Manager for France Vincent Wermus.
From a marketing standpoint, Facebook’s Graph API solves a longstanding problem advertisers have with social media. They know mainstream media is inefficient, but at least they get demographics. RSS is a great distribution tool. It’s effective, efficient and cheap, but you have no idea who’s downloading subscribing to your blog or podcast, and no what they think about it. On the other hand, Facebook’s Graph API allows marketers to collect demographics on visitors, and in some cases, demographics visitor’s friends as well. When you have a rich store house of user preferences to cross reference website activity against, you’re in a much better position to profit from them.
From a consumer privacy standpoint, as people start waking up to how the Facebook Graph API works, they’ll become more demanding about the quality of the services they trade their personal information for. If it’s lame, why give up your extended data, or your friend’s data?
Facebook’s Graph API is the most powerful way of leveraging the Facebook platform, but Facebook’s Social Plug Ins and Facebook Pages are worth investigating as well.
Interestingly enough, last week Hoover’s announced a deal with Linkedin to provide “seamless integration between Hoover’s information on 31 million companies and 37 million people with LinkedIn’s professional network of business contacts.” We’ll have to wait and see how the actual wind up doing that, but what we’re witnessing is the next evolution in social marketing. Companies are beginning to appreciate that when you have a rich store house of demographic and psychographic to cross reference your website activity against, you’re in a much better position to satisfy your customer’s preferences.
This post was written from a presentation delivered by Facebook partner engineer Simon Cross at Le Web 2010 in Paris. A podcast of his presentation is available as well.