Dec 13, 2011
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Archive for the ‘socialmedia’ Category
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, Uncategorized0 CommentsJul 12, 2011
Make no mistake about it!
The killer app for B2B social media at trades events is, believe it or not, the app.
But not just any app. Mobile apps. More and more, attendees are using iPhone and Android apps to network digitally at events, and marketing them in the process.
Most of us have had some experience using mobile applications at professional conferences and corporate events to post status updates, tweet, check-in and exchange ideas with others who are either in attendance or following the event remotely. With the help of hashtags on Twitter, the social media back channel makes for better networking, spreading awareness worldwide all the while.
So powerful is the prospect of mobile social networking at events that a number of conference organizers have already taken a stab at building their own, branded mobile apps. So far, the results have been mixed. Because just like any other social media channel, those that go the distance prevail.
That means using technology to add value to the stream, whether it’s through content marketing, community management or automation. You’ve got to offer people something of value, be it ease-of-use, networking with a targeted community or the ability to engage in a niche back and forths without spamming your friends and family. B2B mobile apps can deliver this value at events.
For a B2B mobile app to deliver, it’s got to help attendees get more out of an event and give the conference organizers a way to generate excitement before during and after the program dates. For an app to get used, it’s got to do more then just provide the program schedule, speaker bios and basic event info. It’s got to enable interactions, both in popular social media, and via partitioned, semi-exclusive spaces. But what exactly does that mean? And what specifically does it take to succeed and delivery a truly useful B2B social media mobile app?
Here’s my punch list:
- Social Sync – Perhaps the single, biggest benefit a mobile app can offer event attendees is the chance to see if anyone they know is registered to be there. Social sync gives them a way to see of any of their Linkedin connections, Twitter followers or Facebook friends are planning on attending. Working with Janrain, the mobile app at SXSW 2011 allowed attendees to cross-reference their social networks with registered attendees to see who they know that’s attending.
- Make Public Posting Optional – It’s great to be able to publish to Twitter or Linkedin from a branded, mobile app, but don’t force the user to do so. They may want to use the app to have a segregated conversation with attendees without crowding up their Twitter feed. Not that they would need to keep those conversations private, but they should be able to decide, on a per share basis, what they want on Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook, and which ones they think are only useful to people on site at the event.
- Think Beyond the Event – It may be tougher to get people to download and invest their time in a mobile app for a single event. From a B2B social media marketing standpoint, the whole idea of the app is to generate excitement for the event before it happens, and extend that excitement after it’s finished. Cisco Events used Double Dutch to build what is one of the most useful apps I’ve seen to date for extending the reach of B2B events via the social web.
- Location Based Social Networking – B2B mobile app should let attendees “check-in” on their mobile device at different locations. This can be a great way to drive traffic to exhibitors or sessions. To make sure attendees don’t check-in without visiting an exhibitor’s booth, build a QR code reader into your app, and offer incentives to attendees who check-in the most.
- Auto Generate Hashtags – For those attendees who choose to publish their shares from your mobile app to their Twitter stream, make sure you give them the option to include the conference hashtag in their tweet. If it’s an internal company training event, use different QR Codes on the last slide of every presentation deck and use incentives, like leaderboard listings and other event privileges, to attendees who collect the most QR codes.
- Socialize the Photo Opp – In the old days, trade show exhibitors would book a celebrity to come by their booth for photo opps. Nowadays, it would by silly to do something like that without integrating social to extend the reach via the web. Make sure your app offers a way for people to share photos and video among conference attendees and easily publish them to Twitpic, TwitVid, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook as well. Remember my cardinal rule of usability: ease of use drives adoption.
- Notifications – Don’t make your attendees have to open your app to see new activity. Offer push notifications as an option and make darn sure the mobile app icon on the device home screen displays a number in a red circle in the upper right hand corner of the desktop icon to indicate new activity since last time it was opened.
- Offer a “Pull” Option - The value of syncing your Linkedin account with your Twitter account is not so much the ability to syndicate tweets to Linkedin, but rather to search the tweets of other Linkedin users by industry, geography, company and time frame. Go to Linkedin, sync up your twitter account, and try searching Linkedin Signal. The tweets from your first, second and third tier connections appear, and can be segmented by a variety of options. If your app can pull in and display all the social networking activity of other conference attendees, that’s useful, even after the event is over, because it serves as a sort of lens to bring social networking activity of a particular community into focus.
- Offer Keyword and Klout Score Search – B2B decision makers in different parts of a company have different priorities. Give users the ability to isolate the discussions they’re most interested in by keyword or phrase. To fight digital illiteracy, let them also filter by user’s Klout scores, so they can learn what online influencers do to stimulate engagement. These are features in Hootsuite’s premium service, which is very useful when conducting influencer relations at live events.
The Cisco Events app that I mentioned earlier offer many of these features. But if I had one piece of criticism, it would be that the app offers social sync for Facebook and Twitter, but not Linkedin, which is, in my opinion, the most important network to B2B users. According to my discussion with the folks at Double Dutch, this is something they expect to offer very soon. In fact, some time has transpired since we spoke and I wrote this up, so it’s entirely possible they’ve got it up and running now.
If you’d like to hear my briefing with Double Dutch, I released it as a podcast at On the Record…Online, so jam the like button, follow us on Twitter or subscribe on iTunes and listen in.
In my book Social Marketing to the Business Customer with Paul Gillin, we deep dive into every aspect of B2B social media marketing, from winning buy-in from disengaged managers and clients to B2B search and social optimization, and it will be no surprise to readers of this blog that Linkedin is by far the most important social network for business professionals.
I hope my B2B mobile app list of features is helpful. What features did I miss and what B2B mobile apps do you think are most effective?
Which are the best B2B mobile apps from a user and a B2B social media marketer’s perspective. Please post your favorites here, and let’s see of we can get a list of the most important functional specs for event-focused B2B mobile apps ever assembled.
What features would you put in a mobile app designed for use at B2B events?
May 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 24, 2011
As psyched as readers of this blog may be about the benefits of integrating social media into marketing, PR and organizational communication, we’re still in the dark ages when it comes to appreciating how these channels are redefining information discovery and reputation management.
Despite the wide spread adoption of social media on a global basis, most companies remain clueless about how digital technology is changing the way people communicate and share information.
How else do explain the ineptitude that spurred articles in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal about these events:
- Burson-Marsteller’s email smear campaign against Google for Facebook. Seriously? That’s the best they could do?
- A famous British soccer player’s lawsuit against Twitter to unmask his anonymous critics. You’re kidding, right? Does he think he’s going to gag Twitter?
- Comcast’s threat to cut funding to a nonprofit that criticized its hiring of a former FCC commissioner on Twitter. And they did so via email. Did they think that was maybe a little risky? <sarcasm>
- JC Penny and Overstock.com’s decision to employ black hat SEO tactics, resulting in their websites being manually demoted in the search rankings. Guess that’s what happens when senior management is clueless about organic search.
The cold, hard truth is that these lapses in judgment are so sophomoric, all you can do is chalk it up to digital illiteracy. And by the way, if the errors they made aren’t clear to you, you’re digitally illiterate too. But don’t feel bad. You’re not alone. And chances are, it’s even not your fault.
You’ve probably been to a few social media conferences where you learned just enough to be dangerous. Speakers took the stage and told you how well they did with social media to promote themselves and generate new business. They avoided the gory details. No one’s ever actually sat you down and explained how these channels really work, or how to master them. Why would they? They want you to hire them.
The fight against digital illiteracy will not be won through keynotes or panel sessions. What’s required is practical, applied knowledge. You need to know how to:
- Build a social media monitoring dashboard to find, listen and engage with your existing online community. You may not know it, but you’ve an online community already.
- Use white hat search engine optimization tactics to make it easier for your customers to find you via search. Coming up forst for the name of your company doesn’t count. Google gives you that one for free. It’s about coming up for early-stage, buyer-oriented keywords. Has anyone ever actually showed you how to find them? It’s not that tough.
- Or how to optimize a website or blog for social sharing. Can you install Facebook “Like” button, “Tweet” button and Linkedin “Share” button on your corporate website? And can you optimize your Facebook status updates from maximum engagement so you rank high in the social newsfeed?
Over the next few days I’ll be running a series of posts to help you stamp out digital illiteracy in the workplace. I’ll lay out specifically what you and your colleagues need to know, and how to teach it to those with only minimal exposure to social channels. And if you want to take a short cut, join me for my Social Media Marketing Workshop in Los Angeles June 30 – July 1, 2011.
Or just stay tuned to my blog. I’m going to share my recipe for bringing digital immigrants up to speed and for winning resources and buy-in from disengaged managers and clients.
If you’re a past attendee of one of my trainings, what did you learn? Was it valuable? And how, if at all, has what you learned helped you avoid a major mistep?
Just because you know social media does not mean you know how to social media market for travel. Over the last few years, the recession put travel marketers through the ringer. But now, as we emerge from the bottom, social media marketing is more important than ever for travel PR Pros. If you want to know why, read this post.
Social media travel marketing was an advantage for hospitality companies competing for rare leisure and business travelers during the recession. For better or worse, fierce competition for hotel guests promises to persist now that travel spending is on the rise after years of pain.
Travel marketing is heating up again this season, with Bloomberg Businessweek’s Nadja Brandt reporting last week that stock prices for Marriott, the largest publically traded U.S. hotel chain, rose along with increases in vacation bookings.
Travelers are feeling better about the economy, a sentiment captured by the Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index, which has climbed steadily for a month in line with growing employment. Forecasts for the upcoming travel season will take clearer shape shortly as Wyndham Worldwide Corp. releases its earnings on April 27, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. (@StarwoodBuzz) on April 28 and Hyatt Hotels Corp. (@HyattConcierge) on May 3.
As the opportunity for growth returns, competition for customers will be as, if not more, intense than it was during the recession, with the leadership of major hotel chains already pledging not to lose market share to competitors as business picks up. It may be a good time for travel marketers to ask the question: am I prepared to make the most of the social media communications revolution that has taken place in the time since the travel recession began in 2008?
Social media PR became even more vital during the recession with consumers demanding “the big deal,” requiring more online touch points to make decisions and demanding service in real time, says Karen Gee McAuley (@gemtweet), executive vice president of Blaze PR (@BlazePR_LA), and a veteran of developing social media capabilities on behalf of hospitality industry clients. Karen’s insights should prove useful as you craft travel marketing plans this spring.
1. Remember Recession’s Lesson: Focus on the Real-time Deal
Recession marketing PR programs shifted as “the deal” became all important to consumers, who demanded a reduced rate, and at the luxury level, that extras be thrown in with the price of the room (a spa treatment or a round of golf).
Travel industry prospects should begin to recover shortly, but marketers will need to mindful that a cost-driven consumer mindset will linger.
Furthermore, there may be long-term strategic value in pursuing population segments that have continued to spend money on travel despite the recession, including baby boomers with intact nest eggs.
Online travel agents like Priceline (@THENEGOTIATOR), Orbitz (@Orbitz) and Travelocity (@Travelocity) grew dramatically through the recession because the new consumer is focused not just on the deal, but on the real-time deal. This change will continue to force consultants to create systems that promote discounts offered by the online services on their client’s properties with Twitter-like speed (too fast for traditional media).
2. Employ Social Media to Influence Returning Travelers
Social media travel marketing in the last three years has come to play a central role in outreach by public relations firms to media that customers consume, along with an upswing in direct communication to customers, Karen says.
Social media travel PR includes the pushing out of promotions via Facebook and Twitter pages that travel customer communities have learned to pay attention to, including online venues of major traditional media outlets.
Every major daily newspaper now has an online operation that often offers content not available in that newspaper’s Sunday travel section. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, has the Daily Dish and the Daily Deal blog. Perishable product does well online, and this impacts media targeting.
Online travel marketing gained added credibility when a survey fielded by the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International found travel consumers need seven online touch points to influence their travel decisions. Social media may provide the opportunity to have the required series of conversations needed to sway a prospective traveler, as opposed to a single interaction.
3. Use Measurement to Drive Strategy
Social media metrics can be captured by aps like Omniture and Google Analytics. The results of client social media campaigns can be measured daily or weekly, and should focus tightly on which sources drive most people to the website.
Click throughs are the key, and it may not be a mention in the Wall Street Journal that drives the most traffic. A niche online article may deliver more click throughs, and may keep delivering over time. Social media travel PR, more than ever, must advance client priority metrics, whether it be message delivery, preserving the rate charged, driving click-throughs to a website or capturing data to guide distribution of an e-newsletter.
During the recession, the key strategies to emerge included attempts to “keep the guest dollar on property” with stronger promotion of in-house spas, restaurants and golf courses. Marketers also switched to a regional “drive-in” strategy to attract the “staycation” customers in their backyard who were less willing to fly. If indeed a recovery is underway, marketers will need to quickly determine which trends are replacing these to succeed, and in part by listening to the marketplace via social media.
This post is a follow up to a podcast with Karen Gee McAuley and Joann Kileen Furtney on Travel PR in a Recession at the PRSA International Convention.
About the Guest Blogger
This is a guest blog post written by Greg Williams (@gregscience), an independent consultant specializing in public relations for medical science and technical companies. After beginning his career as an editor for the Associated Press, Greg has since served as a public relations strategist for two international public relations firms and two university medical centers, and as a writer for institutions including Eastman Kodak and the National Academy of Sciences.
Categories: socialmedia