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Social Pros 16 – Jay and Eric Strike Back

Posted on 18. May, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Customer Service, jay baer, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media crisis management

This is Episode 16 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features special insights from hosts Jay Baer and Eric Boggs, Eric’s Social Media Stat of the week (this week: social media users will tell an average of 53 people about their bad customer service experiences), and some tough questions for both hosts.

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Huge thanks to data-driven social media management software company Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft, Janrain, and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; Janrain is our crackerjack social integration company, and Jim is our guest host for the podcast (and a smart guy).

Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment, Thanks to Speechpad for the Transcription

Jay: Welcome all to Episode Number 16 and that is a 1-6, for you scoring at home. I am Jay Baer joined as almost always by my friend, the man, the myth, the legend of Argyle Social, Eric Boggs.

Eric: Ah, thank you for that kind introduction Jay. We’re 16, I think we can get our driver’s license now.

Jay: That is fantastic. Can we get a VH-1 reality show as well? Isn’t there some sort of a, we get a fancy dress…

Eric: My Sweet 16.

Jay: Yeah, like Red Hot Chili Peppers play this episode or something like that. That would be awesome.

Eric: Oh geez, I’ll be the petulant 16 year old. You can be the other petulant 16 year old.

Jay: Perfect, perfect, yes, the death of civilization is upon us. So, thanks as always to the sponsors of the Social Pros Podcast, Eric’s company, erstwhile Argyle Social, social media management software, data driven, in fact, who we use for all of our social media stylings, our friends at Infusionsoft who we use for email marketing, our new friends, our new sponsors at Janrain, all kinds of social sign-in and advanced craziness, and our good pal, Jim Kukral, from DigitalBookLaunch.com. Let’s talk a little bit about Facebook, shall we? Some of the people listening to this podcast may have heard of Facebook.

Eric: I think this is going to be the Facebook episode.

Jay’s Thought of the Week

Jay: It may be, so we are recording this in the shadow of the Facebook IPO, and two things actually happened today. This is real time podcasting, people. Two things happened today that were interesting. One, “research” was released by “news organizations” Associated Press and I think it was CNBC if I recall correctly, that purported to show that 46 percent of Americans believe that Facebook is a fad. Now, that surprises me, partially because when you have 900 million people doing anything, even like eating or sleeping, it’s hard to say that it’s a fad, and I also wonder, given the fact that I guess it’s good that they random sampled the survey, they actually controlled for population, et cetera. Number one, it was mostly a home telephone survey, so are the people who willingly answer telephone surveys at home, representative of people who would think Facebook is a good idea? I say, probably not.

Eric: Yes, Tom Webster would have something to say about the methodology, I’m sure.

Jay: Yeah, I would think so, and then the other question is, look, 56 or 54 percent of the people in the country are on Facebook, depending on who you ask, and 46 percent think it’s a fad. What I want to know, which they did not publish, is what percentage of the people who are not on Facebook thinks it’s a fad versus the people who are on Facebook? Look, I don’t know anything about a lot of things. If you ask me, “Hey, is this brand new sort of a mineral that we discovered in a mine in Botswana a fad?” If it’s a fad, I have no idea.

Eric: I’ve never heard of such silliness.

Jay: I mean if you ask people who have no frame of reference if that thing is a fad, they’re going to say, “Yes, it’s a fad,” so I think it’s flawed research to begin with. So, that’s my first sort of weird thing that happened today, and the second thing, we were just talking about this off air, the very interestingly timed announcement that General Motors is pulling a $10 million media buy from Facebook because they don’t believe that Facebook advertising is effective. That is interesting in the run up to the IPO.

Gary Vaynerchuk, tweeted right after, he thought GM was going to try to buy Facebook stock on the cheap now, which I thought was a pretty astute observation, but here’s the thing. Whether GM has success with Facebook advertising doesn’t necessarily weigh in on Facebook’s effectiveness as an ad platform. Maybe, it’s more about whether GM is good at Facebook advertising.

Eric: Yeah, I was going to ask, I wonder who is the agency of record for GM, for their social stuff. (Editor’s Note: It was formerly Big Fuel).

Jay: I mean it’s a focus group of one at that point, is it not? I mean it’s so anecdotal, but I think the bigger trend here, and not just those two data points, but what I’ve been reading in the paper, what I’ve been seeing on television, certainly what I see on the interwebs, is a crescendo of Facebook is overvalued, Facebook is over-hyped, it’s much ado about nothing, et cetera, and I think as part of a larger societal trend, which is that we move so quickly now that we actually tear people down before they even reach the mountaintop, right?

At least, in Groupon’s case, we waited for them to become a success before we shit on them. Now, we don’t even give people the luxury of their moment in the sun before the backlash occurs. We’ve actually gotten so fast and so rapid in this society that we’ve turned ourselves inside out. We’ve ripped a hole in the space/time continuum, so much so that we actually start to tear people down before they actually succeed all the way and I think it is dangerous and I think it’s foolish.

Eric: Yeah, well it aligns with my sweet 16 jokes at the top of the show, right? It’s kind of the same societal trend, not to turn this into a sociology dissertation, but it is sort of an acceleration of expectations, an acceleration of sort of growing up, I guess, both for people and for companies.

Jay: Yeah, and look, I don’t pretend to have any sort of disproportionate Facebook crystal ball, but what I can tell you is that I’ve been doing digital marketing for almost 20 years, and give it a chance, right? I mean to think that Facebook today is what Facebook will become is just ridiculous. If you sort of weighed in on what Google was going to become or whether Google was going to be a fad, just a few years after Google really had hit its stride, you would be very surprised in terms of what it is today and the same is true for a lot of other companies.

Eric: Oh yeah, well I have fuzzy memories of the Google IPO. I think it offered at like $80 a share or something like that. It was a Dutch auction, they very much kind of thumbed their nose a bit to the Wall Street establishment in the selling process, and everyone was up in arms about how it was overpriced and how Google didn’t cut in the bankers on the deal the way they should have, and it became Google, and it took another seven or eight years for that to happen, and we’re going to see the same thing with Facebook.

Jay: Well, and conversely, I remember quite clearly 1999, Yahoo had a 55 percent share of search in this country, and number two was Excite, number three was Altavista, number four was Infoseek, and number five was Lycos, and I am pretty sure you, Eric Boggs, have not used your Lycos toolbar today.

Eric: No, I have not.

Jay: And in ’99, we thought, “Hey, this game is over, Yahoo has won, mail them the trophy, let them wear the sash,” and then Google entered the market and turned it upside down overnight, but I can tell you, we thought it was done. We thought Yahoo had won the “search war”, and then Google comes along and now look at Yahoo, right? They can’t even keep an executive team, much less prosper.

Eric: Yeah.

Jay: So, I think people who get so caught up in the pace of social that they make decisions day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, are going to look back at this time and say, “Maybe, we were a little rash.”

Eric: Well, this is sort of the salad days, right? I had a conversation with someone earlier today, that we’ve crossed the chasm in terms of social media being important, and we all have Facebook to thank for that, like our entire industry, all of my customers at Argyle, all of your clients for Convince & Convert, all of the people that listen, kind of owe a big fat thanks to Facebook for building our industry. This is sort of a massive milestone in the development of this new marketing channel or business platform, however you want to think about it, and I agree that it’s a little frustrating to see people kind of throwing rocks at it. What Facebook has built is unbelievably significant and unbelievably impressive.

Jay: Well, and the thing is, any organization that is of that breadth and magnitude, is going to have things that you can complain about. I mean, there’s certainly things about Google that we don’t love either, or Ford, or the U.S. government, or Apple for that matter. There’s a lot of exposure and a lot of chances to fall short of expectations when you have a company of that size, and I think people tend to keep Facebook in their mind as a plucky little upstart, when in reality it’s anything but, and Groupon’s the same way, right? I mean Groupon, I’ve said this in the past, I don’t think I ever said it on a podcast, but Groupon went from plucky upstart to evil empire faster than any company in world history. I mean it was literally like four hours. It was like, oh, we don’t like them anymore, what?

Now in that case, it was more of a suicide than a murder, but still, it’s still funny how much our perspectives can change about corporate America and really, corporate anywhere because we see so many tweets and updates and we believe, we believe what we read. In fact, speaking of believing what we read, what is the social media stat of the week?

Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week: Social Media Users Will Tell 53 People About Their Bad Customer Service Experiences

Eric: That was an interesting transition. My stat of the week was going to be the $10 million account, Jay, but you kind of upstaged me on that one.

Jay: Sorry.

Eric: No, that’s fine. So, the stat of the week actually comes from, I actually had it in my web browser, pulling it up. It’s actually about complaining which aligns perfectly with our intro. It’s a study from American Express and Echo Research. They did a broad international survey back in February, a thousand adults over 18 about customer service experiences, and social media users who have had bad customer service experiences will tell 53 people about the misfortune of their event, on average, 53 people, as opposed to 24 people for people in the general population, so social media users are complainers. I think that aligns with a previous stat a few weeks ago where we sort of waxed poetic about social media strategies built around the idea of mitigating bad as opposed to amplifying good because there is so much negative chatter in social channels.

Jay: Yeah, and I don’t know if the takeaway there is that people in social media are disproportionately negative, or just that people in social media are disproportionately chatty, which absolutely stands to reason, that’s what the medium is for. I don’t recall if that particular article included it, but I would love to know whether they are also more likely to tell good things.

Eric: They are; social media users will tell an average of 42 people about a good service experience versus an average of 15 for the general population.

Jay: Yeah, and to me that’s just as interesting of a finding, right?

Eric: Yeah.

Jay: It’s that people in social media are your vocal critics, but as much so, they are your vocal supporters and insofar as your company does more good than bad, and I suspect mathematically that’s typically the case or you wouldn’t be a company, the fact that these people are likely to advocate on your behalf, I think, is really, really interesting.

Eric: This is a very broad and sweeping question, but sort of the long term viability of the social endorsement or the social sort of negative comment. I see so many tweets about horrible airline experiences, or so many things like, “Oh my God, this new record is the best thing ever,” that I almost don’t even listen to them anymore.

Jay: Yeah, I actually just got off a Webinar before we started the show, with Social Media Examiner, the Social Media Success Summit 2012, and I did a session on social media crisis management, and one of my key points was that you have to understand what constitutes a crisis, and a negative tweet isn’t a crisis. Somebody being mean to you isn’t a crisis. It has to be a deviation from the norm, and it has to have a potentially broad-based negative business impact, and you have to have some sort of information asymmetry where you don’t really know what’s going on. That’s a crisis. If your company sucks, Twitter’s not your problem.

So, the example I used was Nike, although perhaps a more modern example would be Apple, where both companies have been criticized for labor practices and their supply chain in the past, but that’s old news, right?

Everyday, somebody complains about how Nike shoes are made or how Apple computers and iPads are made, et cetera. That is table stakes for them. That’s not a crisis; that is the new normal. Just as you say, somebody saying, “Oh boy, Delta sucks,” you know what, do you know how many customers Delta serves a day? They have so many opportunities to get one small thing wrong. Their points of failure are in the hundreds of thousands a day potentially, right, so you’re going to get a few negative tweets a day just by doing business at that scale, so people tend to get a little too excited and as I said in my webinar, don’t be scared, just be prepared.

Eric: Yeah, well, this is actually a pretty cool study. We’ll link it up in the follow-up posts.

Tough Questions for Eric and Jay

Jay: Because we don’t have a guest on the show today, I am going to ask Eric a difficult question, and then Eric is going to ask me a difficult question. Then, we’ll do some Social Pros shout outs.

Eric: All right, well, you go first. I’ll have to think of a difficult question.

Jay: I’ll start. My question is this, so Argyle Social, as everybody knows, I use Argyle Social, love it, big fan, Eric comes from the email marketing space as I do, and so we are simpatico in how we think about social and testing and experimentation and data, but a lot of people who use social media management software are not from that school of thought, and there are a number of players in your category, i.e., HootSuite, people like that who actually provide a significant amount of functionality, I think you would agree, at a very low price.

It seems to me that the business you’re in, as well as things like Facebook management software, where you’ve got Buddy and Vitrue and those guys, and I’ve also used software from Agorapulse which is very good, and it’s like $100 a month as opposed to many thousands of dollars a month. It always seems to me like it’s a race to the bottom on pricing on all of that kind of stuff, and how do you handle that as a company? Doesn’t that concern you as an executive, like people just give stuff away, and what does that do to your company?

Eric: Yeah, boy, we could have a long conversation about things that worry me as an executive, for sure, so yeah, a very astute summary of the market and one that I absolutely agree with. You mentioned having a background in the email space, and in terms of a forward looking opinion on our market, I think that the social media marketing, social media management space is actually going to shake out a lot like the email space where there are high end, very expensive, very complex, very enterprise-y companies. In email, that’s Responsys and Unica and ExactTarget. In social, that’s Buddy Media and Vitrue, and then on the complete other end of the spectrum you have email products that are simple and small business-y and still kind of pack a punch, but they’re never going to fit sort of the significant businesses needs.

Jay: MailChimp, Constant Contact…

Eric: Exactly, and in social they’re the exact same equivalents, and you named a couple of them with HootSuite and Sprout Social. Then, there’s this big swath across the middle and in our space, no one is really, in the social space no one has really addressed that well, and we’re building products to address that segment of the market. It takes time for that market to develop in the same way it took time for that market to develop in the email space.

It’s just fascinating, the questions that our customers are asking us today are fundamentally different from the questions that our customers were asking us six months ago, and it’s really encouraging because the questions are about, “Hey, how do I integrate this with Salesforce.com,” or, “Can you just give me this data in a raw format so that I can build pivot tables and do all this complex analysis.” That makes us feel really good because it indicates that the market is getting a lot smarter and it’s maturing.

Jay: It’s a really interesting point you made about mid-market solutions taking longer to germinate, but it’s absolutely true because if you are a mid-market company, you have to understand either that the up-market software is not worth the money for you, you’re not going to get all the features out of it to make it worth your while and/or realize that the down-market solution is not going to satisfy your needs, and both of those scenarios take time to play out.

Eric: Yep, and we’ve won deals from Buddy Media and we’ve won deals from HootSuite. We have people trading down, and we have people trading up.

Jay: Yeah, it’s funny, Infusionsoft is in the same place, so they do a lot of mid-market on the email side as well. And so, they’re definitely more than what you would get from a Constant Contact, things like that, because they have CRM capabilities, quite robust CRM capabilities built into the system, but yet by their own admission, they’re not Marketo, they’re not Eloqua, they’re not Salesforce at scale, those kind of things. Certainly, they’re not ExactTarget on the email side. They want to play in that middle market, and I think that they’re in the same spot that you are in some ways, in that people have to try on some other clothes and say, “You know what, I look ugly in these clothes,” or they say, “Oh, these clothes that Argyle Social has…” In your case, it would be social or Argyle perhaps…

Eric: No, everyone looks good in Argyle.

Jay: No, that’s absolutely not true. I can say categorically that that’s not true. However, you look good in Argyle. We may have to link up the picture of you in your pants yet again.

Eric: You can never have too many pictures of Argyle pants.

Jay: That’s right. Actually, you know what, Jill looks better in the pants than you do.

Eric: I wholeheartedly agree. So, now I get to ask you a difficult question?

Jay: OK, I’m ready.

Eric: I still haven’t thought of a difficult question, your question was so difficult it required…

Jay: It was so difficult it prevents you from actually conceiving of a question.

Eric: It required such nuanced thought. So, one day you created a Twitter account and you had zero followers, and today you have a Twitter account and you have a kajillion followers. What are the things that you think have sort of amplified your status, in our business, someone with a platform who’s really smart and that people look to for opinion and thought?

Jay: Well, thank you, first of all. I try to reject the layer of self-importance that settles upon many people in my world like a cloak. I think there are a few things. One, I was fairly early in Twitter, not super duper early like Brogan, but pretty early and being early helps. Two, I believe very much what David Meerman Scott writes and what he told me a few times which is, “You are what you publish,” so I am very serious about quality. I try to share primarily good and useful things and I think over time that works, and I try to be approachable. I mean, I’ve been on a lot of lists of people who do this and people who do that, and that’s always gratifying, but some of the lists that I’ve been on that I’m actually happiest to be on, are the lists along the lines of “most approachable people in social media,” or “nicest guys in social media.” That’s the kind of stuff that really matters to me because I think over time it generates business, but again it’s over time.

This is my fifth start-up company and I have always been a big believer in where are we going to be years from now, not where are we going to be two months from now, and there’s certainly other people in the social media business who have up-leveled faster than I have, and that’s OK, that’s OK with me. It’s not a race. Partially I feel that way because I’ve been on the start-up merry go round several times in the past, and so I don’t get all hot and bothered by it, and partially I just don’t want to work that hard. I think part of the reason why it works is because I’m not trying to game the system although certainly given my background and yours, I do pay attention to the science of it, no question about it, but I just generally like people and what I really try to do is educate.

As I’ve said in the past, if the stock market wouldn’t have collapsed, and the real estate market wouldn’t have collapsed at the same time, I’d be teaching in college right now because that’s what I was going to go do when I sold my last start-up. I was going to go teach at a university, but I couldn’t afford to do it, so I said, “All right, one more trip on the merry go round, let’s start another company,” and here I am, but I feel like what I do now is just teach, whether it’s the blog or the podcast or the email or my speaking or the books. I feel like what I am now is the world’s best paid college educator.

Eric: There are a lot of college educators who would probably love to get half the salary that you get, Jay.

Jay: Well, you know, it can be done, and maybe that’s the solution, right, is that maybe education and maybe teaching and maybe information conveyance needs to be removed from institutions and distributed one tweet at a time. I think that’s one of the things that’s really, really fascinating about social media and content marketing is that the knowledge, the cutting edge knowledge isn’t in institutions. It’s in individuals and I think that’s, I don’t want to say unprecedented, but certainly unusual.

Eric: Yeah, that is another conversation for another episode, I think. The higher education needs to get disrupted episode.

Jay: Yeah, it’s getting there, it’s getting better, so much better now about social and digital than it was when I used to run agencies, and they didn’t even teach digital marketing, and that was not that long ago, right?

You’d get interns and they literally didn’t know what Google was. It was scary.

Eric: Yeah, that’s cool. I appreciate you sharing, Jay. It’s cool to hear you open up and sort of share some of the deep thoughts of Jay Baer.

Jay: Well, one of these times we’ll talk about my background in politics and giving prison and landfill tours. It’ll be a great episode. That’s what we should do one of these times is “other jobs that we’ve had before this job.” That would be a fascinating episode.

Eric: Let’s mark that one down for Episode Number 17.

Jay: Okay, great. I like this, just me and you rapping, it’s fun. All right, do you have a Social Pros shout out before we wrap it up?

Social Pros Shout Outs

Eric: I do have one quick shout out to Nick Westergaard, @NickWestergaard on Twitter, who tweeted a couple of days ago, “My lawn mowing ritual is listening to Social Pros Podcast with Jay Baer and Eric Boggs.” Thanks for listening, Nick.

Jay: Oh, he’s a good guy, he’s a really, really good guy, very loyal listener. I think he does that while he’s lawn mowing so he can’t hear us actually. I think he doesn’t even use headphones. Nick is great, thank you, and we should just take a moment, because it’s just the two of us and just really, seriously, if you’re listening to this, thank you. We do see your tweets and we see your emails and we see your expressions of support out there. Podcasting can be a little bit of a lonely endeavor, more so than blogging I’ve found, but I know that there are people out there who really like the show and thank you. We enjoy doing it, and please keep telling us that you like it because it makes us want to keep doing it.

Eric: Yeah, likewise, I echo the thanks.

Jay: Just a quick Social Pros shout out from me. I just want to say a shout out and really just congratulations to my friend and yours, Mark Schaefer, who is just blowing up. I mean such a humble guy, talking about somebody who was a college professor at Rutgers teaching social media and other things, and his book, “Return On Influence,” went super Nova and sold out the first run in eight weeks. Now, he’s in New York and he posted a picture the other day with him and Seth Greenberg and he’s just gone like super celebrity on the Today Show, stuff like this, and he’s sort of gone Gary V, and he is an unlikely suspect for that kind of ascension because he’s so humble and so down to earth and such a great guy, and so I’m really, really, really happy for him.

Eric: Yeah, very cool.

Jay: We’ll link up some of his stuff in case you don’t know his work, although that’s probably unlikely. All right, this wraps it up for Episode Number 16 of the Social Pros Podcast. Thanks as always to Eric and his company, Argyle Social, also our friends at Infusionsoft and Janrain and our buddy, Jim Kukral, from DigitalBookLaunch.com. Next week, we’re talking a little internal social media with Yammer, is that right?

Eric: Yeah, Maria Ogneva from Yammer. She’s as smart as they come. She’s going to be great.

Jay: Yeah, she is super sharp. I unfortunately will be on the road that day, but Jim will be sitting in for me. I’m sorry I’m going to miss that because I like Maria a lot, she’s great.

Eric: Yeah, Jim and I will make as many disparaging comments about you as humanly possible.

Jay: As expected, as expected. I’ll just edit them out of the transcript. Thanks everybody, we appreciate it. Take care now.

About the Jay Baer: Jay Baer is a hype-free social media strategist & speaker, tequila guy, and co-author of The NOW Revolution. Jay is the founder of http://convinceandconvert.com and host of the Social Pros podcast.

Social Pros 16 – Jay and Eric Strike Back is a post from: Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting

4 Quotes That Show Facebook’s New Touchy-Feely Intentions

Posted on 18. Mar, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, facebook, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

Most online retailers talk only about themselves on Facebook. Those days are about to end.

According to research compiled by data-driven social media marketing company Argyle Social (a sponsor of this blog, and the software that we use for social communication), 65-66% of 566 online retailers surveyed only post content about their own company on their Facebook pages.

With the release/forced march of the new Timeline format, Zuckerberg’s brigade is mandating an end to the “me” “me” “me” era of Facebook communication. The lack of default landing tabs, the prohibition of promotional items on Cover images, and the prominent display of friends’ interactions with the brand combine to put something other than commerce and calls-to-action at the forefront of the Facebook Page experience…….emotion. (See 14 Ways new Facebook Betrays Small Business)

In an excellent piece on VentureBeat, ace tech journalist Jolie O’Dell quotes Facebook design lead Sam Lessin as saying:

“(Timeline is about) the whole concept that organizations have identities, that a nonprofit, a sports team, all have identities that they want to express.”

About the new Cover photos, and in particular Facebook’s ban against promotional messaging in them, Lessin said:

“The key with cover photos is storytelling and expression. We want to create a good experience for everyone, and we think these guidelines really help brands… They’re encouraging people to create engaging content that people want to come back to and create and emotional connection with.”

Perhaps the most underreported and puzzling statement about Timeline was this gem from Facebook project director Gokul Rajaram:

“Brands don’t want to be overly promotional; in the long-term, they know it’s a turn-off to people… They want to have a deeper connection.”

Why Would We Want to Make Money When We Can “Engage”?

I’m not sure I agree that brands don’t want to be overly promotional, or that they inherently want to have a deeper connection. Brands want to be successful, period.

If direct mailing miniature bags of popcorn carefully scented with a special fragrance formulated by Angelina Jolie herself proved to be effective, brands would be all over that tactic like a feral cat on an unguarded ham. In fact, as the infographic below suggests, two-thirds of online retailers on Facebook are almost purely promotional.

It’s perhaps more accurate to state that some people (including me) believe that being too promotional on Facebook is a slippery slope and can ultimately fray the relationship with customers. Facebook seems to agree (in spades) because they have decreed that brands must embrace the photo-centric, feel-good ethos of Timeline.

Facebook is on record as saying that its goal is to have brands act and interact just like people, and if your company wants to actually make money from Facebook? Well, there’s a whole bunch of advertising options available for that.

Jolie O’Dell nailed it in the summary of her article:

Marketers love and live by calls to action, so if calls to action are illegal in Page cover photos but legal in Facebook ads, marketers will still be shelling out for Facebook ads to the tune of billions each year.

Social Pros Podcast – Justin Levy, Citrix Online

Posted on 16. Feb, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Infusionsoft, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media strategy

This is Episode 3 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features Justin Levy, the head of social media for Citrix Online. Read on for insights from Justin, our “Work It Out” advice segment, and Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week (this week: are people comfortable giving their credit card information to social media sites?).

Next week’s guest is Lauren Fernandez from Landry’s Restaurants.

Listen Now

Click the play button to listen here:

Download the audio file: http://socialpros.podbean.com/mf/play/v7h7s4/SocialProsEpisode3.mp3
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Find us on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/convince-convert-blog-social/id499844469

Please Support Our Sponsors

Huge thanks to Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; and Jim is our guest host for the podcast and a smart guy)

Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment

Transcription services from our friends at Speechpad.com

Jay: Hey, it’s Jay. We’re here on Episode 3 of Social Pros with my trusty digital marketing and social media sidekick, Eric Boggs from Argyle Social. Eric, what is going on?

Eric: Hello, hello, Jay. I’m very happy to be here. It’s a nice, cool day in North Carolina.

Jay: It’s not a particularly warm day in Indiana, either. It’s nice to be back on Social Pros with you after last week’s live podcast in a sports bar in Tampa Bay with Scott Monty.

Eric: That was a good time.

Jay: It was a good time. We’re back to the regularly scheduled program. We’ve got a fantastic guest today, Justin Levy from Citrix Online, who’s going to talk to us about all things GoTo; GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, GoToBathroom. There are all kinds of products they have that he’s going to fill us in on and how he whips them into shape in social media.

First and foremost, though, I want to thank our sponsors, including Argyle Social, the presenting sponsor of Social Pros, as well as our friends at Infusionsoft, who we use for all of our email stuff, and Jim Kukral from DigitalBookLaunch.com. Jim’s going to take the hosting chair here in a couple weeks. He’s going to jump in while I’m out of town. So make sure that you are kind to him, Eric.

Eric: I will be as nice as possible.

Jay’s Thought of the Week

Jay: I appreciate that very much. We’ll start off the show as we always do with my thought o’ the week. It’s funny, this one rings a little bit personal. I got into it on a blog last night and the comments with somebody who wrote a blog post about social media “experts” ruining the ethos of Pinterest by posting social media-related content and infographics and things like that.

I created a board about best social media books and some other things and put up some quotes, and apparently that rubbed some folks the wrong way. I feel like it’s one of those circumstances where the social network of choice of the day takes on the personality of its early users, but then when somebody comes in and says, “Oh, I want to use it differently,” there’s a hullabaloo about that.

Eric: Nobody can kill the goose that lays the golden egg faster than a marketer.

Jay: It happens every time, doesn’t it? We cannot help ourselves. If we see an opportunity, we must exploit the opportunity. You may have seen the cartoon, we’ll make sure we link it up in the blog post about this podcast. There’s the guy at the keyboard and he’s freaking out, and it says “Pin All The Things.”

Eric: Yeah, I think Shauna Causey gave that in her talk at Social Fresh.

Jay: Exactly.

Eric: That was a very funny picture.

Jay: In this blog comments that I got into yesterday, there’s one that says “Must Co-opt All The Things” with the same guy. It’s super-duper funny. I’m actually starting to use Pinterest as a bookmarking tool. In lieu of Delicious or something along those lines, I’m actually using Pinterest as a place where I log and store all the things I want to remember that I read in social media. It’s sort of a visual Evernote, but on that platform.

Eric: That’s an interesting use case. There are certainly many more, I’m sure. I’ve seen a few, in particular, B2B software companies, use Pinterest as a visual gallery for whitepapers and videos and things like. It actually looks really good. You’ve got to wonder if they’re getting traffic or traction. But it really is a beautiful way to present otherwise boring resources.

Jay: One of the things to think about is that when you’re creating a blog post, in particular, I think most people feel like you should try to have an image in your blog post. But with Pinterest and the whole notion of pinning, it becomes really critical to have a signature image large enough for Pinterest and the browser plug-in to grab and that will actually resonate when people see it in their Pinterest stream.

Eric: There’s the next cottage industry to pop up. You have email subject line testing, you have tweet timing and content testing. There’ll be Pinterest thumbnail image testing before we know it.

Jay: Sounds like a company we need to create on the side with today’s special guest.

Eric: I just patented that, by the way. First to invent.

Jay: Excellent. We will put up the registered trademark icon when we talk about this in the podcast.

Eric: Pinterest actually came up at Argyle today, so it’s funny that you brought this up, Jay. Jill and Tristan, I’m not exactly sure what they were talking about, but the quote from Tristan, I think, was, “This might sound ridiculous, but we should probably consider Pinterest for that.”

Jay: I always like when the marketing guy prefaces it with, “This might sound ridiculous.” Way to sell your ideas in there, Tristan.

Eric: What was funny, Tristan said that and Jill, basically, responded with a “Ha, ha, ha. I told you so. We should use Pinterest.”

Jay: You guys have so many interesting charts and graphs from the research that you do. It’s not infographic, though you have done some infographics, but part and parcel what you do is you’ve got a lot of interesting individual data points. I can certainly see a circumstance where Pinterest would be a play there.

Eric: That’s been one of the interesting things about the advent of Pinterest and this tidal wave of infographics that we’ve seen over the past 18 months. There’s been a re-focusing on the visual presentation of data. The underlying data may or may not be crap, but things that are presented beautifully and creatively and thoughtfully are always interesting, even if it’s NBA basketball scores or marketing data or sleep patterns or who cares?

Jay: I think it’s part of a larger trend towards Johnny can’t read or Johnny refuses to read. If you think about what’s gaining steam across the entire social community, it’s all visual. Pinterest, Instagram, Path, etc., it’s all visual instead of words, and certainly instead of podcasts. But it’s all that direction and I think there’s a larger trend at play there around communicating, not just data, visually, but communicating every aspect of your life visually as opposed to textually.

Eric: I don’t know if you saw the new homepage that Marketo launched. Marketo.com?

Jay: I did. Yep.

Eric: Their homepage is an interactive infographic.

Jay: Yep.

Eric: For lack of a better description. It’s really amazing, it’s striking, but you’ve got to wonder if it’s going to convert the same way that a good, old fashioned landing page will convert.

Jay: Well, if only they were a company that could figure that out.

Eric: If only someone would invent marketing software to track it.

Jay: I’m pretty sure that they have a conversion rate test running at Marketo. I did see that and it’s a really interesting homepage. We’ll make sure that we link it up in the show notes because it is, no question, a stake in the ground. That’s not an evolution, it’s a revolution in how they present their front door to the world. It may or it may not work but I give them for credit for rolling the dice.

Eric: Yeah, without a doubt, it’s a gutsy move.

Jay: Yeah, Maria’s smart like that. She’s got gumption. We’ll have her on the show at some point, too.

Eric: That sounds great.

Jay: Speaking of Pinterest, there’s been a ton of blog posts and research and quasi-research about it that has come out recently which is fueling the mania, a lot of data points. But that’s not today’s social media stat of the week from Eric Boggs.

Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week: 55% of Adults are “Uncomfortable” Providing Credit Card Information to Social Media Sites

Eric: It is not, actually. The social media stat of the week, though, does have a tangential Pinterest connection. I’ve been hung up on social commerce for the past few weeks, in part because Argyle has done some research in the area. We’ll be unfurling a new infographic in a few weeks. We’re doing a webcast…

Jay: If you’re going to unfurl an infographic, are you actually printing it on a scroll? Is it like on papyrus?

Eric: It is. We’re going to unfurl it on the side of our building.

Jay: I like it, I like it. I appreciate that. I think it’s got the wooden dowels, at the top and bottom. It’s going to be nice.

Eric: Exactly. Social commerce has been of interest to me over the past few weeks for a variety of reasons. Interestingly, Pinterest was in the news because of some commerce-related issues in which they were, I think, injecting affiliate codes onto the end of some product URLs. I don’t want to go down that path, but it is related to a potential business opportunity for Pinterest, and that is really as a commerce engine or a commerce referral engine. Neither here nor there.

I wanted to talk a bit about some research that was published, I think, this week by Digitas, or sponsored by Digitas. It was actually conducted by Harris Interactive. They did a survey of over 2,600 U.S. adults that are 18 years and older, the vast majority of whom identified themselves as social media users. They asked quite a few questions about social commerce. 55% of that sample stated that they were uncomfortable – and I’m doing air quotes, “uncomfortable” – providing their credit card information to social media sites for the purposes of conducting transactions.

Jay: More people uncomfortable than comfortable?

Eric: Yeah.

Jay: Giving their credit card to a social media site. That sounds like a stat. If you replace “social media” with “website”, and published that data ten years ago, it would make perfect sense.

Eric: Exactly. The interesting context around this is the fact that everyone predicts that social commerce is the next gold rush on the Internet. Booz & Company estimates that it’s going to be a 30 billion dollar global industry over the next five years. That was a number that was thrown out a few weeks ago.

It’s interesting to see that social commerce is pretty much agreed upon as a rising tide that’s just beginning to pick up steam. But, when you look at the actual user data and the user behavior, people really aren’t that into it yet. You don’t even have to look at the user data, you just have to talk to your buddies that sit next to you. People just aren’t conducting a lot of significant transactions on Facebook.

Jay: I guess on one hand, I see it as I’m not so sure I want to give Facebook my credit card number either. But then I look at it conversely and say, “Well, they know everything else about me. What’s the big deal about giving them my credit card number?”

Eric: Exactly.

Jay: They can probably infer it, do some sort of algorithm, anyway.

Eric: Exactly.

Jay: They can probably guess it like a safecracker.

Eric: There was another nugget that was pretty interesting out of this same report. One in five, it was like 21% percent, something like that, but basically, one in five of these people, and I’m quoting from the report, agree that, where possible, they would purchase products or services from their favorite brands on a social media site. So one in five, where possible, would purchase. I found the phrasing of that really funny because it didn’t say one in five did make a purchase, it said one in five agreed that they would make a purchase.

Jay: Sure. But I wonder if the thought there is, “Well, then we’re giving the credit card to the brand, not to Facebook.”

Eric: I don’t know. That, along with a few other things, are some questions that this survey left me with in terms of, the people that are afraid to provide their credit card information, how frequently are they shopping online? Is this really going to take the same path as e-commerce, where people, over time, just more and more transact socially as it becomes more the norm? Or is there really some sort of hidden line out there that people are just afraid to cross because they’re nervous about interacting this blend of commerce and transactions and their social daily lives that are online.

Jay: That’s interesting, because I think the party line today around social commerce maybe not being a tremendous force yet is that it is a user experience cluegy problem, as well as a ‘social commerce ain’t that social’ problem. It’s not a better mousetrap today, it’s just sort of a mousetrap.

But maybe it’s something bigger. Maybe there is an important trust factor there that supersedes ease of use and some of these other factors. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. If I were going to put a bet down, I would say that, like we did with regular web commerce, eventually people’s fears will be overcome. Since we’ll be spending so much more time on social networks than on websites of any stripe, eventually social commerce will become the default just because you’ll be spending all your time on social networks. But I’ve been wrong in the past.

Eric: I tend to agree with you. I think it is going to happen. It’s just fascinating to watch how it’s happening through fits and starts and very slowly.

Special Guest: Justin Levy, Citrix Online

Jay: Absolutely. Speaking of somebody who knows a little something, not about fits and starts necessarily, but about social media commerce and communication, it is today’s special guest on the Social Pros podcast, Mr. Justin Levy from Citrix Online. Justin, good sir, how are you?

Justin: I am well. How are you? Sorry I missed you guys down in Tampa last week.

Jay: I know. You were all scheduled to be part of that whole deal and now that you’re a big corporate poobah, you got called into a meeting and couldn’t make Social Fresh. You could have hung out on the podcast live in the sports bar.

Justin: I would have loved to, but you know how those meetings go. They fill up the schedule.

Jay: Actually, I don’t, because I don’t work for corporations, Justin.

Eric: Yeah, I don’t know how meetings go, either. Tell us about those meetings. Actually no, wait, don’t tell us about those meetings.

Jay: I’m not wearing shoes.

Justin: I’m not wearing shoes, either, but I still have to have five or six meetings today.

Jay: What did you use for those meetings, Justin? Did you use something like GoToMeeting?

Justin: Possibly, with HD faces.

Jay: With HD faces. Actually, we were just talking before we went on air, Convince & Convert has been a long-time GoToMeeting user and the new HD faces application within GoToMeeting, which allows you to do HD quality video calls, is really spectacular. I really, really like it. I try to do as many virtual meetings with customers as possible and it’s terrific. The quality is really excellent.

Justin: Thank you. We love it, too. All of our conference rooms use it. We use it on our laptops and what have you, and webcams. We’ve converted our conference rooms to having large displays built into the walls, like a 55-inch TV with just a simple $80 or $90 webcam bolted into the wall. That’s how we conduct all of our videoconferencing now.

Jay: And think about what a videoconferencing system, point to point like that, used to cost. Tens of thousands of dollars.

Justin: In a lot of ways it would only be available to the C-suite or to a very select group of folks because of how expensive it was.

Jay: It’s amazing. Now, I think, most of the GoTo products are available on tablets and mobile and things like that. I have the application on my iPad, I just haven’t done it much. I don’t know why that it, I just haven’t. What’s the penetration rate? Are you guys getting a lot of mobile and tablet usage?

Justin: We absolutely are. We’re seeing a lot of downloads and usage of GoToMeeting and GoToMyPC, especially on the iPad and on the iPhone. As we continue to update the products and add more features, we expect those downloads and usage to go up. But it’s great because you’re not tied to your laptop anymore. You could be at a meeting or in a hotel room with just your iPad and be able to jump on a meeting and see the slides and everything. Whereas before, if you had to be away from your desk and a meeting was scheduled, you’d just have to call in and ask people to advance the slides or to describe something to you on the slides so you could respond to it. But now you can do that right from your phone or from your tablet.

Jay: Amazing. You mentioned GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar and GoToMyPC. There are a lot of GoTo products, as I talked about when the show opened. How do you, as the social media lead, coordinate all of those things? I think a lot of people don’t even know Citrix, necessarily, as the parent company of all these products and maybe that’s by design. But how do you balance the different needs of all the different product sets?

Justin: One of the things that we look at is scale on this. You see a lot of conversations on the web about social media moving into social business. When I take that back internally, the way that I look at that is in order for us to become a social business, we have to scale it and empower our teams.

I work on ways that I can partner, that we can empower product teams. We can have our product teams and our demand generation teams and those responsible for creating content and externally facing teams to actually help us build that content and get out there and manage those properties, and be at events and share, say, tweets from an event or where we might be sponsoring something.

Over the past few weeks, we did three spots on Jimmy Kimmel Live. We had some of our team down there and they were taking pictures and feeding them back to my team so that we could get them up on Facebook and Flickr in real-time as opposed to waiting for a delay or having to send one of our team members there to simply take a picture.

For the online division of Citrix, or Citrix Online, I just did a count and we have 50 active or soon-to-be active social media accounts to manage, including WorkShifting.com and the surrounding properties around WorkShifting. That doesn’t take into account all of the other Citrix properties. We have a corporate social media team that manages those.

Fifty properties in some form of active or inactive state is a lot to manager. But it also depends on the priority. Not all of them need the same level of attention. Twitter is definitely different than Facebook and YouTube. Different teams interact with it. We use Twitter and Facebook mainly as the customer support channel. 65% of all our engagement on Twitter and Facebook is of support nature. We have someone that sits in global customer support whose full-time job is to provide social support as part of the customer support team.

Eric: That’s fascinating, Justin. Are those problems getting resolved through social interactions or is that person routing the social interactions through existing processes and platforms internally?

Justin: Both. His name is Glen and you’ll see him on Facebook. Either star his name and put Glen or the caret symbol on G.D. on Twitter. Glen sits in customer support. He grew up in customer support, a career customer support rep, and showed an interest towards technology. He’s into all this technology and the web outside of work. When we were bringing together our social accounts, he showed an interest in providing support through there. He also had this base of knowledge around our products. Obviously, customer support deals with a variety of different things on a daily basis, whether it’s problems with an account, whether it’s an issue with a meeting drop in our technical issue, it might be feature-set request, it might be workarounds on the products or things like that.

All that information flows into the global customer support team. Glen, being on that team, is able to respond more quickly than if that flowed into, say, a centralized social media manager, who’d then have to go check with global customer support and wait for this delay in response. He’s able to respond very quickly and he generally responds within one to two minutes.

We take that information and flow it into normal business processes that the business has, whether it’s creating customer support cases or adding it to product workflows for feature and enhancements requests or bugs, whether it’s feeding it into a customer insight scene that does research into our customers and might put together surveys and things of that nature. So that information gets captured and then flows back into the business.

Jay: It’s interesting that you tapped him to do social, partially because of his deep knowledge of the company and its products. I think that’s a point that gets overlooked quite often. Instead, what companies do is say, “Let’s find somebody who is inherently social and teach them the business,” instead of finding somebody who inherently knows the business and teaching them social.

Justin: It should be a mix of that. You have to have someone in a strategic role that hopefully understands both, that really deeply understands social and understands the strategy behind social, but also gets the business. Then you can have people on both sides that either really know the business and learn social, or know social really well and then learn the business over a period of time. I think there’s a benefit to both.

Jay: I’m glad you mentioned Glen using the caret and initials. One of the things I noticed when looking at some of your existing 50 channels is that the company is really strong at humanization of social interaction. There’s almost always a name and a face and a real person associated with it. You’re not hearing from GoToMeeting, you’re hearing from Glen or yourself or other people on the team. I really believe that’s the best practice. I think, Eric, you’d echo that as well.

Eric: Without a doubt.

Justin: We see brand humanization as a big deal to the company. For social business or social media over 2012, it’s one of my six key objectives, to use brand humanization. We see it as a competitive advantage to us and also as a way to show the faces behind a company and to show the culture that we have.

It helps with recruitment and retention of employees, but it also helps us to be human to our customers and to our prospects, to show that we’re out there and we’ll have fun through our social channels while we’re helping people, and there’s always someone that you can identify. That’s why it’s important for even something as simple as a caret symbol on your initials; they know who they’re talking to.

Jay: At the end of the day, there’s no such thing as a relationship with software.

Justin: Exactly.

Jay: It doesn’t actually exist. You can have thoughts about that software and you can have perceptions about how that software works and how it fits into your life, but relationships are inherently personal and I think it’s really, really smart to do that. It’s amazing to me how many B2B companies, in particular, are resistant to allowing real employees to step out from behind the curtain.

Justin: And there are so many other opportunities to that, which I don’t see people taking advantage of as companies that we’re even trying to do a better job of. I think the first step is to initial your tweets and your Facebook status updates when you’re replying to someone so they know who they’re working with, especially in a customer support manner.

I know that, at least for our company, there are so many things that we do in the community and events that we sponsor and events that we speak at, and things that we do at our company, whether it’s a cookout or it’s a bocce ball tournament that happens at our campus, or just a variety of activities. All it takes is someone with a camera and some best practices and some alignment in partnerships with your legal and HR teams to make sure that you’re covered and that the employees are okay with, if it’s of employees, of sharing the pictures. You have to make sure that your legal and HR bases are covered.

There are so many opportunities to capture content that don’t take additional bandwidth at all. I think a lot of times in social it becomes this big, heavy lift in bandwidth, it’s going to take forever to launch and you have to have all these designs and all that. You can set up a Pinterest account really quickly to test, or you can take a couple pictures at your company barbecue to show the human side, like you said, of a product. Otherwise, it’s just there and it’s supposed to work when you want it to work and if it doesn’t, you call a number. If you identify with the product team that built HD faces during the bocce ball tournament, people feel more beholden to the brand.

Eric: You know, that’s something we did recently at Argyle. We launched a new feature and we took a page out of the Google playbook and had the primary developer behind the feature do the 90-second demo. It’s Stacy on our team and we spent a few hours shooting it, cutting it and producing it. She just looked right at the camera, saying, “Hi, I’m Stacy. I’m a software developer at Argyle and I developed The Hopper.” It was great. Our customers loved it and we loved it because it shows someone from our team who is actually building the guts behind Argyle. We’re huge proponents of that kind of thing.

Jay: Justin, do you have an internal social network that you use to communicate those things within the enterprise?

Justin: We have a few, so we’re testing. We’ve spent probably the past six months or so, maybe more, testing a SharePoint Intranet because our company is a Microsoft company, so we have SharePoint as an Intranet. Our internal Comms Lead updates that regularly and we have a social media section of it. But then we’re also testing with different teams, Chatter, Yammer, and other internal collaboration tools, to see what resonates with employees beyond email and email newsletters and things of that nature.

Jay: Just so people will have a sense of scope, how big is Citrix, how many employees?

Justin: Citrix Systems is about 6000 employees. The online services division, or Citrix Online, as a lot of people know it, the makers of the GoTo products, or the division that makes the GoTo products, is about 1400 employees.

Jay: It’s a pretty going concern over there, no question about that. You mentioned that humanization is one of your six big directives this year. What are some of the other things that you’re trying to tackle in 2012?

Justin: Some of the things are internal focus, the operationalization and governance of social. There’s the need to have enterprise-level toolsets, and we have some of them now and are looking to bring on others or how we manage these tools. As you set up these new accounts on different social networks and start to engage in it, as you look to scale the business, you don’t want to be giving out the corporate social media password to the entire company.

Jay: Right.

Justin: There’s a need to manage that with administrative tools, whether it’s access to Twitter, Facebook or something new like Pinterest, with the contributor function that Pinterest has now and who knows what they may roll out for brands for the future, if they do roll out features. There’s a focus on that, especially, as we expand social globally, which is another one of my objectives.

How do we expand this globally into markets that we are either already in or that we’re looking to enter over the course of 2012, and how do we make that a repeatable framework? There are a lot of considerations that go into entering a global market or entering a new region socially. How can we make that a repeatable framework where we will always have this decision tree to go to when we look to a new market and then actually launch them within those markets over the course of 2012?

Jay: It certainly sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you. That is a lot to tackle this year. I’m very impressed with what you guys are doing so far in stitching together a lot of different products under the umbrella. WorkShifting is one of my favorite social media and content programs ever. In fact, we talked about it in The Now Revolution. It’s fantastic and I know you had a lot of hand in that program before you even came to work for Citrix, so it continues to be awesome.

Justin: Well, thank you. We have some big plans for that site. We have a new site design coming really soon with a bunch of new content and new features.

Jay: Fantastic. Please let us know, maybe we’ll talk about it again on the podcast or write a guest post or if you want to write something like that. WorkShifting.com, we’ll make sure we link it up. Justin, thank you as always for the time and your expertise. It was fantastic to have you here on Social Pros.

Justin: Thanks for having me, guys.

Jay: Next week on the podcast we have Lauren Fernandez, who is the head of social media for Landry’s Restaurants. They just made a big move and bought out all the Morton’s restaurants in addition to the existing hundreds and hundreds of restaurants that they own. We’re going to talk a little bit about social media in the restaurant business. Hopefully, we’ll be able to be eating steaks during the podcast. Eric, what do you think about that?

Eric: Jay’s guests are nothing more than a selfish quest to get free good stuff.

Jay: I’m waiting for the social media manager at Don Julio to join us for the podcast.

Eric: HD faces, steak, Ford . . .

Jay: I’m working on it. Justin actually used to own a restaurant. Do you still own the restaurant, Justin?

Justin: I still am a partner in the restaurant, yeah. One of my best friends owns it so I still stay tied into it, obviously, through that.

Jay: Speaking of steaks, Justin originally came to fame in the social media community for his adept usage of social for a Brazilian steakhouse.

Justin: Argentinean steakhouse.

Jay: Argentinean steakhouse, sorry.

Justin: Close enough.

Jay: Well, you know what? If it was a soccer game, that would be a serious transgression.

Eric: Yeah, I think you would have just gotten beaten up, Jay.

Jay: Yeah, that’s OK. That’s all right. That’s why I live in the Midwest. So that’s on the docket for next week. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. Thanks again to our presenting sponsor, Argyle Social, also Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch.com. Until next week, thanks very much.

Social Pros Podcast – Scott Monty, Ford Motor Company

Posted on 09. Feb, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Infusionsoft, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

This is Episode 2 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features Scott Monty, the global head of social media for Ford Motor Company. Read on for insights from Scott, our “Work It Out” advice segment, and Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week (this week: do brands use free or paid social media tools?).

Next week’s guest is Justin Levy from Citrix Online.

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Huge thanks to Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; and Jim is our guest host for the podcast and a smart guy)

Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment

Transcription services from our friends at Speechpad.com

Photo by @nateriggs (thanks Nate!)

Jay: Welcome to Social Pros. I am Jay Baer accompanied by the man, the myth, the legend, Eric Boggs. A very special guest on the show today, Mr. Scott Monty, Global Poobah of social media for a little startup in Detroit called Ford Motor Company. It’s actually amazing we’re here live. This is only the second episode of Social Pros, and we’re already breaking out of the format to do a live show in some crazy sports bar in Tampa. We’re here for Social Fresh.

Eric: Episode three, clip show and show the greatest hits.

Jay: Episode three, we go to Disneyland, and then there’s a rodeo. We introduce the young cousin. It’s actually interesting to have Scott here as the guest on the second show, because some people who have read Convince & Convert for a long time may remember I used to do an interview program called Twitter 20, where I interviewed people live on Twitter. Mr. Scott Monty was actually the second guest on that program, and we did it live at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in Scottsdale. There’s massive synergy here.

Eric: What was the fate of the Twitter 20?

Jay: You know what happened? I started that three and a half years ago. We actually have an eBook of all the greatest hits of that program. But as Twitter got so big and so cacophonous, then it became really mechanically difficult to do one-on-one interviews. The stream got too messy.

Eric: Well, if it made it to a greatest hits, that’s pretty good.

Jay: We did. We did like 22 of them or 24 of them or something like that.

Scott: And I’m honored, once again, to be number two.

Jay’s Thought of the Week

Jay: Exactly. In everything but guest hosting. So, we’ll start off the show as we always do with a thought of the week. My thought of the week is this, Eric. It wasn’t so long ago that it would have been unthinkable, unconscionable to show your Super Bowl commercial before it actually aired. It would have been crazy talk.

Eric: Definitely.

Jay: Now, the pendulum has swung almost all the way to the other side where almost every commercial was seen before the game. Is that a good idea, or is that just insanity?

Eric: My wife is like many wives in the sense that she recorded the Super Bowl so she could watch halftime and the commercials multiple times. I didn’t really watch the game. That’s what happens when you run a startup and you have a baby and you’ve just got other things to do. But there were multiple times where my wife shouted for me to come into the living room and say, “Ooh, Eric, this is the one with Ferris Bueller.” So they were so hyped before the show that she knew it was coming before it was coming, and there was just this sense of anticipation and eagerness. I think it’s brilliant. All of those commercials are going to live on YouTube forever anyway. Why not just go ahead and get it out there?

Jay: Yeah, but if everybody’s doing it, is it brilliant? The problem with marketing is that we insist on killing the golden goose. We can’t help it. Now the pace of change is so quick, as soon as somebody has a good idea, it’s beat to death in 20 minutes.

Scott: Don’t be a lemming. Zig while others zag.

Jay: If you’re doing the same thing that everybody else is doing, you by definition have no competitive advantage.

Eric: Which is an excellent segue to Mr. Scott Monty, who just gave a talk at Social Fresh in Tampa, which is great by the way, Social Fresh. Scott made a point to call out that Ford does not do Super Bowl commercials anymore, which is mind-boggling considering that car companies and beer companies have bankrolled for the years.

Scott: They’ve pretty much made the Super Bowl what it is, right?

Eric: Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Scott: For one, our product cadence this year does not align with the timing of the Super Bowl. We’ve got major vehicles coming out in May and in September, and that really doesn’t make sense for us to buy advertising now, primarily because, from a legal perspective, we’re restricted in advertising only within 60 days of the launch of a vehicle. So one, we can’t from a legal perspective.

Jay: You can’t advertise earlier than 60 days?

Scott: Exactly. We can’t run advertising any farther out than 60 days.

Jay: Is that in case, not in your case, but in case a car company goes out of business before the model exists?

Scott: It’s probably more to do with production delay and different expectations . . .

Jay: That’s why you don’t see any Saab commercials 90 days out or anything like that, because you never know.

Scott: It’s also a strategic decision. Everybody else is there spending exorbitant sums of money. We are not. We’re not there, and we’re not spending exorbitant sums of money. We have a limited marketing budget that we have to work with. It’s large, but it’s limited, and we want to spend it in the most effective way possible, not being part of the rest of the crowd.

Jay: You saw also the number of tweets during the game broke the record for the number of tweets per second, 10 million or something crazy thing.

Scott: 10,000 per second I think was the number. (actually, 12,233)

Jay: Yeah, which stands to reason.

Scott: And only half of them were about Madonna’s age.

Jay: Yeah, and the rest were her hamstring.

Eric: That’s what my wife was talking about, by the way.

Jay: Yeah. Women of a certain age were glued to that Madonna performance and probably rightly so.

Scott: Yeah, she looked a little slow to me.

Jay: Yeah, the hamstring. She had a pulled hammy in practice.

Scott: That’s what I’m going with.

Eric: Regardless, Madonna gets a retweet, plus one, and a like from me for her halftime performance.

Jay: A for effort. Exactly. Do you think this whole social TV, whether it’s American Idol or Super Bowl or what have you, this back channel, we’re watching it with one eye, we’re tweeting it with the other eye, is that ultimately a good thing? Because clearly you’re taking attention away from the core medium, which is television. I watch TV with an iPad religiously, and there’s no way you’re watching TV with the same amount of attention as you were before you had an iPad in your lap.

Scott: Well, I agree, but think about it this way. I actually wrote about this last year. The notion of live television having gone away seemingly, we’re all on DVDs or TiVo or whatever. To me, creating a social experience around a television show, whether it’s a premiere, a season finale, a special episode, whatever, you’re basically creating a digital living room of 100 million people. We used to sit around television sets with families, or farther back sit around the radio and watch the radio back in the ’40s and ’50s before there was television, and it was a shared experience. People would have that experience within their families. Now, it’s just a larger digital family. I think that connection that people are seeking, that back channel commentary, whether it’s snarkiness or sharing a love of a good joke or commercial or whatever it happens to be, that unites people together. So I think we’re actually seeing a return, in some ways, to live television and live events rather than a flee from them.

Jay: Interesting.

Eric: Conferences are the same thing. You saw, too. When you’re on the stage at a conference, you have to . . . I know when I think about building my presentations, I build them for the Twitter audience just as much as I build them for the live audience.

Scott: You’ve got to have those sound bites in there. I’m looking through here now (note: social fresh tweets). One thing I knew would end up here and I didn’t intend for it to be was that I said, “How frigging lazy to find us on Facebook.”

Jay: You saw what Kip from HubSpot did. He actually had his tweets in a quote bubble with a Twitter icon.

Scott: Yeah. That’s like he knew it was coming. Right?

Jay: Let me bludgeon you to death.

Eric: All the act was like, “Please tweet this.”

Scott: “Just take a photo of this screen.”

Jay: Instagram it and then share that. It’s fantastic! Speaking of today’s presentations, both Scott and Eric gave great presentations here at Social Fresh today. Eric, one of the stats that you had in your presentation was very interesting and got a real rise out of the audience. We’re going to use that as this week’s social media stat of the week. Cue stat of the week intro music.

Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week: 91% of Big Online Retailers are Using Free/Cheap Social Media Tools

Eric: So, Argyle has done some research in the social media marketing practices of online retailers, which is a core segment for us and just an interesting segment in general. We took the Internet Retailer 500 as our sample, and we took 38 data points, publicly available information. One of the things that stood out was their usage of social media management tools. We found that 91% of the Internet Retailer 500 are using free or cheap – when I saw cheap, I mean $50 a month or less – social media management tools.

That’s interesting for a couple reasons. One, it indicates that there’s not a lot of investment in the space yet. Two, when you compare that to the technology spin that retailers are making in shopping cart platforms, email marketing platforms, social is a blip. It got a rise out of the audience. It got a rise out of the Twitter back channel. For me, as a CEO in the Internet space, I’m encouraged by that. I think the market is going to continue to evolve. Someone asked a question about how many of those are actually free versus cheap. How many people are actually using native Facebook, native Twitter versus TweetDeck or HootSuite, something like that? My hunch is that of that 91%, the majority of those are actually using the native tools on the platforms.

Jay: Do you think some people have moved to native because of the imbroglio with Facebook, where they were condensing third party tools and posts through apps and that whole thing, and that the word has not gotten out that that’s not as much of an issue anymore? Is that a possibility, or is that too inside baseball?

Eric: I think it’s a little too inside baseball. At Argyle, the deals that we win, typically we’re not displacing another competitor. We’re displacing logging into Facebook and logging into Twitter. So I don’t necessarily think it’s that. I think it’s more reflective of a maturing market. At Ford, do you guys use social tools, or are you guys logging right into Facebook? Or is it a mixed bag?

Scott: Both. When there’s free stuff to go around, who’s going to say no to that? You said cheap technology. It’s cheap in terms of cost, not in terms of actual output. The results we get are still okay. Now, Facebook doesn’t have the most robust analytics in and of itself, but it’s okay for what it is right now. We’re not going to waste money on a third-party solution that can basically extract the same stuff that we’re going to get out of Facebook anyway.

Jay: It’s an X and Y axis, right? So you have labor in your organization to actually do these things, and then you have software which theoretically makes these things easier or better. It would be really interesting to redo this study and say, “What tools are you using, and how many people do you have on your social media team?” Because I actually bet that at some point, the more people you have, the more likely you are to use free tools, because you don’t need the software to help you.

Eric: That’s a good point.

Jay: Thank you, Eric Boggs.

Eric: This is sort of off the top of my head when I think about Argyle’s customer base. B2B teams tend to be more spread out. There tends to be more people using the tools. Online retailer teams, the use case is typically somebody in marketing or the person in email marketing, and it’s a person or maybe a team of two or three. I think as your team federates and there’s more organizational machinery, without a doubt, the workflow that these tools enables becomes enormously valuable. For us at Argyle, we think about it more from a measurement perspective, and that’s the part that’s kind of befuddling a little bit.

Jay: It’s not so much the posting in advance. It’s the stats on the backend. And partially, as the presenting sponsor of the podcast – commercial insertion now by Jay Baer, host – is that because Eric and his team come from an email marketing background, as I do, they think about social from a very defined, measured standpoint, which is why I use Argyle. End of commercial

Eric: End of social media stat of the week.

Special Guest: Scott Monty, Ford Motor Company

Jay: Perfect. Let’s talk about Ford Motor Company and our friend Scott Monty. So, I saw in one of the trades today that your company is now allowing dealers to insert, I believe, real-time inventory into their Facebook pages. That seems like an enormously complicated program, fraught with all kinds of peccadilloes.

Scott: One would think. We have a great partner in Ford Direct, which is a joint venture that we own, that integrates with tier two and tier three dealers, which is really the bulk of where our . . .

Jay: Is that by actual revenue? Is that how you tier those?

Scott: By size. So not the big conglomerates, but some of the mom-and- pop shops, some of the collectives, like Southeastern Florida Ford dealers, for example, they kind of come together as a collective, and they get, obviously, better rates on software, lots of different things. It’s long been my personal contention that you shouldn’t be on Twitter and Facebook just throwing your inventory up. The way they’ve approach this is obviously through the customized tab experience, where it’s not the wall and the communication you’re actually getting from the dealer, but you can actually go on a separate part of their Facebook page and look through the inventory.

Why this is so important is, as you said Jay, it’s real-time. So many times, people see, God forbid, a newspaper ad. Bring them something advertised on the Internet, and they get to the store, and the dealer is like, “No, sorry, we sold that yesterday,” or “I don’t know what that was. We never had it.” So this actually ties with our backend system, so it is tied directly to what we see back at corporate in terms of what’s moving and what’s next up and whatnot, what the pricing is, all the options. That’s going to feed directly through Buddy Media and through Ford Direct into the backend of the dealer’s Facebook page. It’s a really, really powerful tool.

Jay: Not to mention the fact that, you guys both acknowledged it today, Facebook has 850 million members and an accompanying traffic stream that any dealer website, even Ford.com, doesn’t. People spend way more time on Facebook than they do on any other website. So ultimately, the future of communication digitally is in taking the best of what you have and sprinkling it in all the places where the audiences are as opposed to what used to be, back when we all got involved in this business, which was “Come to my website.”

Scott: Right. And people are still going to come to our website to do things. We do this on Facebook too, it’s not just the website – to do a build and price, to spec out what their vehicle is going to look like.

Jay: Configure.

Scott: You configure that vehicle, and then you want to see if it’s available, right? So if you’ve got a button on Ford.com that takes you to your local dealer’s website or Facebook page – either way now, it doesn’t really matter – to see what the actual inventory is, that’s where we’re going to get that stickiness.

Eric: I think that’s the big leap forward for retailers.

Scott: Absolutely.

Eric: Not just taking your inventory and splatting it on Facebook, but taking your inventory, splatting it on Facebook, and building a social experience around it that’s deeply integrated into the Facebook platform, has all the social gesturing associated with it. Building a Mustang, sharing it with my brother who might say, “Oh no, the black one is cooler,” or “You should get a white one.” That’s pretty cool. That’s social commerce.

Scott: It is cool. Have you tried the Mustang customizer app or the Mustang customizer page?

Eric: No.

Scott Monty shows off the Ford Mustang Customizer iPad app during a live taping of Social Pros

Scott: You can actually build your ideal Mustang and then battle with your brother and see who comes to supremacy on the best Mustang built.

Eric: That’s cool. My brother would come to supremacy. My brother is a car guy, not so much me.

Jay: It’s funny that you talked about Mustang. It’s fascinating to me Ford’s strategic plan as it relates to social, because more so than many, many companies that are active and recognized for their social media prowess, you have such a broad array of buyer personas and buyer circumstances. As you’ve referenced in your talk today, the Mustang customer and the F-150 customer and the Flex customer, as I am, is a different audience. Yet, it’s all still Ford. How do you balance that? How do you bake consistent attributes into all the things you do social, but yet still do things that are brand specific so that they’re highly relevant?

Scott: Well, we just market to people who drive. That’s pretty much it.

Eric: Keep it simple.

Scott: We have to. We absolutely have to. When you’re doing something like the Mustang customizer . . .

Eric: By the way, Scott’s got the Mustang customizer flowing on his iPad, and it’s pretty awesome.

Jay: It is pretty awesome. I’ll take a picture of it for the podcast.

Racy, unproduced Mustang ad

Scott: And see you’ve got the name of who did each one there. So, I think the important part is understanding your buyer persona. We came up with an ad for Mustang that was even too racy for Mustang owners. We wanted to see if we could build a little bit of attention around the Woodward Dream Cruise, which is a big auto thing in Detroit. A whole Saturday afternoon, people take their vintage cars, and they drive them up and down Woodward Avenue in Detroit. It’s so much part of the car culture. People love it, and they come from miles and miles around to show off their cars. So we had a billboard ad that we were getting ready to promote for the Mustang. I don’t think I have a photo of it here. If I can get it, I’ll share it with you guys to give to your listeners. It was on the wall of our agency, and I took a picture of it. It was a Mustang peeling out, just smoke coming out of the rear tires, and you had this white box above it that looked like the Surgeon General’s warning. It said, “Warning: May cause pregnant women.” Now that’s very different from . . .

Jay: I like it.

Scott: That’s Mustang. That’s very different.

Jay: That’s more like that crazy Kia ad from yesterday which was just . . .

Scott: Boy, that was something, wasn’t it? They’ve gone a long way. But even for Mustang, our brand team determined that was a little too racy.

Jay: A little too much.

Scott: We would never do that for something like the Focus or the Flex or, God forbid, an electric vehicle.

Eric: I’m thinking of two songs in particular by this band I like called the Drive-By Truckers.

Jay: I love those guys. DBTs, nice.

Eric: They make a reference to “I used to go out in a Mustang. Me and your mama made you in the back.”

Jay: You should be sponsoring their tour.

Eric: Yeah, so I know of one band that would stand behind that advertisement for sure.

Scott: There you go.

Eric: I was going to ask you about Google+. We’ve kind of talked around that a little bit. Ford is working very closely with Google on the development of Google+. Give us some context around that. Scott just gave about an hour long talk, super detailed, super fascinating about Ford and Google +.

Jay: Send us your slides and we’ll link them up from the podcast notes.

Scott: All right.

Eric: Ford’s evolution on Google+. What’s worked well for your guys, and what do you see as the next thing that you’re going to be working on, on the platform?

Scott: Give us some time to perfect this one first. As I mentioned in the Q&A there, we always have to be ready for what’s next, but I think we have to master the major ones that are here. I really feel like we’ve just gotten to the point where we’re getting more out of Facebook than we ever have before. We’ve reached a critical mass with a number of our pages. The Mustang page has over 2.7 million fans right now. The Ford page has 1.6 million. Once you hit that 1 million mark, there’s a natural momentum that takes place. You kind of can take a hands-off approach in terms of the build of the base. You still have to put content in there, but it takes on a very, very different flavor at that point.

Similarly, I think there’s a lot more potential, as I alluded to, with Google+ than we’ve even given it credit for. The notion of having a single Google+ page for the entirety of Ford Motor Company globally is really, really significant. If we can create a circle for Germany, and it’s only German language updates and it’s tied to Ford.de, think of the potential there where we can really have a unique and intimate relationship with those fans and give them exactly what they want.

Jay: People then opt in for the communication modality and topic that they want. They basically select their own relevance. As you mentioned earlier today, it’s much more similar to what we see in email.

Scott: Absolutely.

Jay: This is the topic of my conversation tomorrow, 10:30 at Social Fresh.

Scott: You could think of Google+ potentially as a sophisticated email platform. It just happens to take place in a more real-time environment. It has search implications there to a much greater degree than an email newsletter. You’re giving people the exact content that they want in the mode they want it delivered.

Jay: It becomes Facebook but upside down. Or instead of you shooting in the dark hoping that you’re relevant, people tell you what’s relevant.

Scott: Well, that’s one way of looking at it. When I did an analysis of this, I said, “Think about the evolution of Facebook versus the evolution of Google+.” Facebook was an inside out approach. It was started by Mark Zuckerberg within Harvard, and it eventually branched out to other universities and then to the rest of the world as we know it today. Now, it’s integrating itself into lots of different web products. Google, on the other hand, has basically bought, acquired, or built sections of the Web that you can’t do without, and everybody has a piece of, whether it’s search or video or blogging or 28 other things, and they’re bringing it all together with Google+, which I think is a much more powerful connection, because again, it’s about weaving social into everything we do rather than making you go to a single platform.

Jay: Absolutely. Google has so many more advantages. The only thing that Facebook really has going for them, and it shouldn’t be dismissed, is single sign on. They have become the passport of the Web the way that Microsoft wanted to be with Passport years ago and failed. That’s not an insignificant advantage.

Scott: I’ll take it one step further. Thinking of it from a retailer’s perspective, if we’re able to create a customer experience on our own websites with a single sign on, whether it’s Google or whether it’s Facebook, we’re suddenly going to have access to a whole bunch of social data about somebody and their behaviors that will help tailor customer service, our next email campaign to them, etc., to be able to know what really makes them tick. Now, if we come to this split in the road where it’s either Facebook or Google+ and we’re only getting a certain portion of their life and their actions in one versus the other, we’re going to have to make that decision.

Jay: That’s why I’m so bullish on Janrain as a platform and their social sign in capabilities. I’ll be talking about that a little bit tomorrow. I just really think they’ve got it figured out. Those guys are going to get bought for a bunch of money, because it’s just really, really effective.

Scott: Sign me on.

Jay: Exactly. Let’s talk about our famous segment, famous here on the second episode, called . . . what did we call it? Making it Work.

Eric: I think it was called Working Out.

Jay: Working It Out.

Eric: Work It Out.

Jay: Work It Out.

Eric: Cue Work It Out theme music.

Scott: Making it Work Out.

Work It Out

Jay: Making it Work Out. Cue Work It Out theme song. This is the section of the show where we actually try and help a podcast listener who has a social media question or concern, and we turn to Eric Boggs and our special guest to try and solve that problem. This week, we actually have a question from a relative of mine. My uncle, Lloyd Meyer, is the COO of Leo A Daly and Associates, which is one of the top five architecture firms in the world. I don’t know why he couldn’t just ask me this question. It actually makes me feel a little bit uncertain that he has to go through the podcast process. He couldn’t just call me.

Scott: What’s his name?

Jay: Lloyd Meyer. Clearly I don’t know anything.

Scott: Uncle Lloyd. Hello.

Eric: Hey Jay, could you please ask a social media expert this question?

Jay: Exactly. Ask Scott Monty, because your book doesn’t mean anything. So, the question is, obviously, Ford Motor Company is a household name and has 1.6 million Facebook fans, etc. and has a lot of social chatter just day to day. In his case, it’s an architecture firm, albeit a large one. Their customers are very distinct. They’re municipalities. They’re Native American tribes, things like that. Very classic B2B. What should their play be in social media, and what is the role for something like Google+ or Facebook in their world?

Eric: I’ll defer to our special guest, Scott Monty, on this one.

Scott: Excellent question, Uncle Lloyd. I’ll see you at the family barbecue to follow up on this one.

Jay: Next time you’re in Omaha. Four Jacks and a Jill.

Scott: Get some good steaks. So, you’ve got to ask yourself this first, Uncle Lloyd and everyone else listening. Where are your customers? What are they doing? Are they on this stuff? Are they on Google+? Are they on search for that matter? Are they on Facebook? Determine where your customers are and weave that into it. It’s not like you need to avoid it simply because it’s B2B. Last time I checked, people are behind these businesses. It’s not institutions talking to each other on Twitter. It’s people. So get that notion out of our head that it doesn’t matter because it’s B2B. But then ask yourself, “Where are they spending their time? Where are they making their decisions? Who are they talking to, and where do they get their information?”

Jay: I always feel like in a B2B circumstance, the social media playbook always tilts toward content. It becomes more of a content marketing play. These guys have massive expertise, especially in certain types of architecture. They do a lot in healthcare, a lot of hospital design, a lot of casino design. You could go deep in those verticals. SlideShare would be a great opportunity, infographics, podcasts like this one. You could do a lot of things.

Eric: Think about the things that they know about designing a hotel or designing a casino, whatever the inner workings behind these massive services machines. There’s got to be some remarkable content to be shared.

Jay: Helpful information well merchandised always works, always.

Scott: Helpful information well merchandised always works.

Eric: Everyone can tweet that.

Jay: Thank you. I just made that up. I should do this for a living.

Eric: You do.

Jay: There you go, Uncle Lloyd. You can call me next time. Or Scott Monty, whichever you want.

That’s going to do it for this episode of Social Pros. Next week, a man we know, Justin Levy from Citrix Online will be joining us on Social Pros. I want to thank Eric Boggs, the presenting sponsor of Social Pros from Argyle Social. Also InfusionSoft, we use for all of our email marketing, and then Jim Kukral from DigitalBookLaunch.com. Thank you to Mr. Scott Monty.

Photo of Eric, his pants, and our friend J from www.jseverydayfashion.com

Scott: My pleasure. One final question, if I may ask you two, Eric, where do you get your pants?

Eric: The question is in regards to the argyle pants I have on. It’s my game day uniform when I give a talk. I like to get my pants at LoudmouthGolf.com.

Scott: Nice.

Eric: And I prefer the blue argyle pattern.

Jay: Why aren’t they a sponsor? Why isn’t LoudmouthGolf.com a sponsor? Let’s make it happen.

Eric: I don’t know. With the amount of Twitter feedback I generated with my pants today, they should maybe ship me the matching blazer. Hint hint, wink wink, nudge nudge.

Scott: And the knickerbocker version, too. Right?

Eric: Yeah.

Jay: Thanks everybody. We’ll see you next week.

Do The Work – Introducing the Social Pros Podcast

Posted on 30. Jan, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Infusionsoft, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, super-bowl

My new podcast debuts this week. It’s called Social Pros – Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media.

I’ve done a little podcasting in the past, and quite a few interviews here on Convince & Convert, and I’m thrilled to be adding Social Pros to the array of high quality content we create every week.

Tell Me More. What is Social Pros?

With your help via the reader survey I published a few weeks ago, we’ve designed a podcast that will be worth your time each and every week.

Social Pros shines the spotlight on social media practitioners, people doing the real work for real companies.

Each episode includes:

1. Interview with a leading social media strategist, manager, director of community, or similar working for a corporation or organization.
2. Social Media Stat of the Week, discussed and ratified or debunked by me and Eric Boggs of Argyle Social.
3. Work It Out, where our weekly guest, Eric, and myself attempt to solve a listener’s social media issue in five minutes or less

You don’t have time to waste, and neither do we, so every episode of Social Pros will clock in under 25 minutes (ish), so you can listen on your commute, during a reasonable jog, or while your spouse is watching some crappy half-hour reality show that you can’t stand.

Also, every episode will be posted at Convince & Convert with a full transcript, because we know first-hand that sometimes you subscribe to podcasts, but then let them pile up in your iTunes.

Awesomeness! When Does It Start?

Now! Our first recording is tonight, featuring Taulbee Jackson, CEO of Raidious. His firm built and is managing the Super Bowl Social Media Command Center in Indianapolis (about an hour from Convince & Convert headquarters).

Barring any technical issues (fingers crossed), you’ll be able to listen via iTunes late Tuesday, and the first transcribed episode will appear on Thursday. We’re shooting for a Monday record, Thursday transcript schedule, and we’ll stick to it best we can, given travel schedules and guest coordination.

Who Should I Thank For This?

Argyle Social is the presenting sponsor of Social Pros, and in addition to the Social Media Stat of the Week segment, is handling much of the production work. Thanks guys! (for more on Argyle – the social media management tool I use personally – see this blog post about them).

Social Pros is also sponsored by our friends at Infusionsoft, who have an all-in-one email and CRM system that’s purpose built for small business. (for more on Infusionsoft – the email tool we use – see this blog post about them).

Digital marketing genius Jim Kukral whose new company Digital Book Launch helps authors market their books, is also assisting with Social Pros, and will be your guest host when I’m unavailable.

Can You Help Me? Can I Be On The Show?

If you have a social media issue you’d like me and a guest to tackle, or if you’d like to be a guest yourself, please fill out this form to send a quick note to our managing editor, Jess Ostroff, and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

How Can I Spread The Word?

Thanks for asking! It would be delightful if you’d consider tweeting, sharing, +1′ing, or buffering this post. Also, please subscribe to Social Pros- Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media in iTunes (soon), and check out (and share) the transcribed post on Thursday.

Let’s get this party started with a bang, shall we?

Thanks as always for your support of me and Convince & Convert. We have some other new surprises coming soon!

B2C Facebook Results Are 30% Above Average on Sundays

Posted on 30. Oct, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, facebook, jay baer, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media research, Twitter

Last week I did a Webinar with my friends (and Convince & Convert sponsors) Argyle Social about social media timing. I use Argyle Social to send most of my tweets, Facebook and Linkedin updates et al, and the guys at Argyle (which specializes in advanced metrics and social reporting) agreed to put some of my crazy theories to the test.

We uncovered a great many interesting factoids, and even some “non-advice’ including the finding that if you’re a B2B company what day you tweet (within the work week) is irrelevant.

The big take-away (I hope) from our Webinar is that AVERAGE PEOPLE CARE ABOUT AVERAGES. Listening to some huge survey that says “on average, the best time to tweet is 2pm Wednesdays” is a mockery in stereo. First, that data is totally bogus, and whomever propagates that crap should know better. Secondarily, YOU should know better. The reality is that YOU need to determine what’s right for YOUR COMPANY.

As we talked about in the Webinar you need to create a defined hypothesis, and test that hypothesis with enough data to be significant statistically, while ensuring that you are not changing more than one variable at a time. Easy? Nope. Important? Yep.

Social media success is exiting the era of sympathy, and entering the era of science. Are you ready?

The reality is that your results may vary. However, one finding that we uncovered in the research is that there may be a large opportunity for B2C marketers on Facebook on Sundays. We found that few companies publish status updates on Sunday, yet engagement (clicks divided by audience) is 30% higher that Saturday, and even higher that than versus weekdays.

I know your community management team may be at church and/or gorged on buckwheat pancakes and apple-smoked bacon, but this data from Argyle Social suggests that you need to try Sunday Facebook posts, even if they are staged in advance. (recording of the Webinar available at: this link.

Which of our findings did you find most interesting?

If You’re B2B, What Day You Tweet Doesn’t Matter

Posted on 23. Oct, 2011 by Jay Baer in B2B, B2B Social Media, Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media research, Twitter, webinar

(at least on weekdays)

On Thursday October 27, join me and my friends at Argyle Social for a valuable (yet free) Webinar that puts some of the big questions about social media timing under the experimental microscope.

Register here

We’ll cover a lot of ground about when’s the best time for Twitter and Facebook communication in different scenarios. We’ll dispel some myths, and probably create a few new ones.

One of my favorite findings from the research (which analyzed more than 250,000 social media messages sent via the Argyle Social platform in 2011), is that despite what you may have heard, for B2B companies it really doesn’t matter what day you send your tweets.

Our analysis finds no statistical basis for tweeting more on any particular weekday, with only very slight increases in engagement on Monday and Tuesday (and those increases are correlated with increases in volume of tweets sent on those days).

The Right Answer is No Answer

Sometimes, like in this case, despite how hard we look for it the answer we seek just isn’t there.

I find this piece of B2B “non-advice” interesting, because dating back to the early days of email marketing, we’ve always wanted to believe that message recipients’ behavior differs enough through the week that we should stage our communication accordingly. We used to send emails on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday because more people are on vacation Monday and Friday. Then, everyone starting sending their emails mid-week, and we flooded inboxes so much, engagement rate plummeted.

This particular dataset (B2B, Twitter, Weekday) found no discernible pattern that you can act upon, but that’s not at all true for our entire study. We’ve got some very interesting findings about B2C, Facebook, Weekends and more, that will get you rethinking how and when you communicate in social media.

For those, you’ll need to tune in on Thursday. We’ll also teach you how to run legitimate testing experiments on your own data, in your own company. I hope to see you logged in at 1pm eastern.

(note: Arygle Social is a Convince & Convert sponsor, and I use their tool for my own tweeting, etc.)

Holy Twit – Increased Tweet Volume Drives Results

Posted on 04. Oct, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media statistics, Twitter

One of my favorite Twitter add-ons is Buffer, an easy-to-use service that allows you to quickly queue up many tweets at one time, with those missives and bon mots then automatically parceled out one at a time on a schedule you determine.(Buffer also works for Facebook)

For people like me that do a lot of curation via Twitter, this is a real workflow advantage. Instead of finding and tweeting interesting content several times daily, I can scan dozens of blogs and email newsletter and RSS feeds in one sitting in the morning, and then use the Buffer browser app to set up tweets throughout the day. Doing so allows me to focus my other Twitter interactions on engagement and response, rather than curation.

I’ve used Buffer off and on for a while now (and I REALLY want Buffer to get together with my guys at Argyle Social, which I use most often for social media marketing due to their extraordinary statistical capabilities).

When I’ve used Buffer consistently, I’ve seen my clicks and retweets increase, and new research of 2,000 users finds that effect isn’t isolated. Buffer’s data shows that within 2 weeks of starting to use the system, users’ clicks increase by 200%, and retweets by 100%.

There are two seemingly plausible hypotheses for this impact (but a fully controlled study has not been conducted to isolate or confirm, so please take all of this with a degree of skepticism).

People That Use Buffer Tweet More Often

After signing up for Buffer ($0 – $30 per month), users send 150% more tweets than they did before using the application. More tweets will almost always yield more response because unless you are very new to Twitter or particularly maladroit at it’s norms and customs, every tweet you send should generate some response.

This makes me feel good about the Buffer stat of 200% more clicks, but less happy about the 100% more retweets. If you’re sending 150% more tweets, shouldn’t your retweets go up by at least 150%? If not, then it would appear that the likelihood of a retweet on any given tweet actually goes down after signing on to Buffer. This actually makes some intuitive sense, however, because if you start tweeting substantially more, your followers won’t necessarily want to retweet you multiple times daily to keep pace – it looks too stalkerish. Except when live tweeting an event, I don’t think I’ve retweeted the same person twice in one day, ever.

People That Use Buffer Tweet in Prime Times

There is a lot of research around the “optimal” time to tweet, but these types of broad generalizations are difficult and somewhat dangerous, as they typically do not adjust for time zones and other circumstantial factors.

The idea that there are universal “best” times to tweet reminds me a lot of the long-ago rule in email marketing that you didn’t want to send on Monday or Friday because many people were on vacation. So, everyone started to send T-Th, and the volume on those days spiked so high that response rates fell through the floor. So in response, the new best practice became to indeed send on Mondays or Fridays. Madness!

Yes, you should pay attention to optimization research and social media science. But also recognize that slavish devotion to conventional wisdom 100% guarantees that you will never be extraordinary at anything. Average people worry about averages.

The fact remains, however, that Buffer automatically sets up your tweets to be sent when more people tend to be using Twitter, naturally increasing potential audience for many Buffer users. You can override the Buffer default settings (as I do) to Tweet more often, on a more diffuse pattern, to include nights and weekends, and/or to Tweet closer to the top and bottom of the hour. By the way, I’m working on a super cool Webinar with Argyle Social to reveal some very interesting, thorough research on social media timing. Join us for free on October 27.

The other issue is that while clicks and retweets are psychically satisfying in the same way a perfectly cooked In-N-Out Burger hits the spot, that’s not really your goal is it? Remember, the objective is not to be good at Twitter, the objective is to be good at business because of Twitter. And that usually means some sort of conversion event, and data on that point isn’t available yet.

Buffer saves me a ton of time. I recommend it constantly. I very much like their team personally (Leo Widrich is a one-man clinic on community management). And I like what it’s done for my Twitter results – and it appears the results of a bunch of other people. But let’s keep all of this in the proper perspective. Ultimately, it’s not about timing and volume and software. It’s about people, what you tweet, and how you treat.

New Research Finds the Curation vs Creation Sweet Spot

Posted on 06. Sep, 2011 by Tristan Handy in Blog, content creation, content curation, Guest Posts, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media marketing, social media measurement

Whether you’re on a first date, meeting new people at a dinner party, or making it rain on Twitter, it’s just not a good idea to go on and on about yourself. It’s just awkward.

Conventional social media marketing wisdom suggests that brands should avoid being overly self-promotional. Thus, brands seek to “be a part of the conversation” by sharing links that are relevant to their followers but often not specifically about their products and services. This act of finding good content and sharing it is known as content curation.

Contrast this with another nugget of conventional social media marketing wisdom: that “content is king” – that the best thing that a social media marketer can do is create content that people find valuable enough to share with the world.

But…isn’t promoting your own content akin to talking about yourself? And isn’t that rude, and thus ineffective?

This creation-vs-curation paradox inspired me to look for some answers in the data.

Analyzing 150,000 Social Media Posts

The data behind this analysis comes from a sample of customers’ activity on Argyle Social, a social media marketing software provider. (Full disclosure: Argyle is a Convince & Convert sponsor and my employer. Also: we’re hiring!)

The selected sample included more than 150,000 tweets and status updates from more than 1,000 Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts between November 2010 and July 2011. Our customers are typically professional marketers representing a range of company sizes across most major industries.

Examining Typical Sharing Behavior

The graph below shows the sharing mix across all companies in our sample.

In short, 30% of the companies in our sample are curation-focused: 75% or more of their posts link to third-party websites. 13% of companies are creation-focused: most of their posts link to their own websites.

There are clearly a broad range of strategies employed, although companies tend towards strategies dominated by content curation, with 2/3 of companies linking to others more frequently than they link to themselves.

Which Works Best, Curation or Creation?

The real question, though, is what should companies be doing? What is the optimal content strategy, creating or curating? To measure that, let’s look at the impact of content strategy on click rates and conversion rates.

When looking at clicks, curation clearly dominates. Posts linking to third-party sites generate 33% more clicks than posts linking to owned sites. This makes sense — the very best content on the Internet is typically not going to live at yourcompany.com.

However, if you’re looking to drive conversions, content creation is the optimal strategy. Posts that link to your website have a 54% higher click-to-conversion rate than posts that link to third-party websites. This makes implicit sense, since conversions happen on your website. If you’re not driving people to your website and giving them good content to read when they get there, they’re not going to convert.

But the choice isn’t really between creation and curation — you should be doing both. The question is really what mix of those two strategies you should employ for maximum clicks and conversions?

Part of a Balanced Social Media Diet

To dig deeper into what mix of creation and curation works best, I’m going to revisit the behavior segments that I outlined above. What kind of results are companies in each of these segments seeing?

Curators = Companies that link to third-party sites 75% or more of the time.
Companies in this group focus very heavily on curation and rarely, if ever, link to their own content. Their results bear this out: they generate a lot of clicks, but very few conversions.

Balanced = Companies that link to third-party sites 50-75% of the time.
Companies in this group employ a balanced strategy of content creation and content curation. Their clicks per post are lower than Curators, but they generate significantly more conversions.

Self-Promoters = Companies that link to their own content 50% or more of the time.
Companies in this group link to their own content a majority of the time. This negatively impacts their clicks per post, and this reduction isn’t made up by an increased conversion rate.

It’s clear from the data that companies in the Balanced category achieve the best results overall. They generate 20% fewer clicks per post than Curators, but their conversion rate is 10X higher. I’ll take that trade any day.

The Creation and Curation Sweet Spot

We already determined that linking to your site 25-50% of the time generates the best results. But what if we look at the practices of the top five companies in generating clicks and conversions? What are they doing that has been so effective for them?

The top five companies in our sample that generate the most clicks link to their own sites 37.9% of the time. And the top five companies in our sample that generate the most conversions link to their own sites 41.6% of the time. This feels like a pretty solid sweet spot.

Lessons Learned and Takeaways

After digging into the numbers, the optimal balance for most companies is to link to your own content between 25-50% of the time, with 40% being the ideal mark.

But beware the law of averages! Just because these numbers are true of overall does not mean that they are the best numbers for you. Outliers exist.

My favorite example of an account that breaks the mold is one of our customers, TiqIQ. TiqIQ is in the business of publishing deals on sports tickets via social media. Almost every one of their posts links to a site where visitors can purchase tickets from them, so they almost never curate. However, their click and conversion rates are off the charts, because their audience is specifically following them to receive these deals.

If you’re new to social media marketing, a 40% content creation rate is a good place to start. But make sure you measure your own efforts and find out what works for your company.

About the Author
Tristan Handy is the Director of Operations for Argyle Social, a social media marketing dashboard that helps businesses create real returns from the social channel. Follow him on Twitter @jthandy.

Social Media Optimization 3 Steps to Tweeting with a Purpose

Posted on 18. Aug, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media measurement, social media optimization

Social media optimization gives you the ability to not waste bullets. Every tweet and status update has a cost associated with it. Perhaps not a direct financial cost, but a real, and at times considerable labor cost.

The time you spend tweeting and Facebooking and Google Plussing on behalf of yourself or your company is time you could be spending on some other form of communications or customer service. Alternatively, it’s time you could be spending watching Project Runway. Or hanging out with your kids. Or making fun of Lebron.

As Charlene Li said – and I routinely steal this line – “social media isn’t inexpensive, it’s different expensive.”

Smart companies are using social media optimization and social media marketing software to add some clarity to the value of their behavior on the social Web.

Getting smarter at social analytics requires three things:

1. A mindset shift on your part about social media optimization

You must embrace the concept that all tweets are not created equal, and there’s value in doing this stuff with additional rigor and analysis.

2. Killer social media marketing software

You need the data ecosystem necessary to make relevant, judicious decisions about your social media behaviors.

I’ve been playing with Argyle Social for a few weeks (they are a Convince & Convert sponsor, so they gave me a free account), and I am hooked. The data they offer is extraordinary, and perhaps more importantly it’s easy to understand and access.

The guys at Argyle come from an email marketing background (like me) so they were raised on a diet of analytics, testing, and identification and isolation of meaningful variables. They are smart, data nerds first, and social media marketing software developers second. And the product is better as a result.

3. A commitment to actually doing something with social analytics data

Just because everything is trackable doesn’t mean you should track everything. The core challenge with social media optimization isn’t availability of data (with the possible exception of Twitter impressions data, as I ranted about here in my social media measurement post).

Instead, the challenge is knowing what the data MEANS, and what to DO about it.

Too many companies in social media tend to misapply breadth and specificity. This results in hand-wringing about the success of a specific tweet, when looking at your social behaviors over a much longer period is far more illustrative. It also results in companies evaluating the success of a particular channel (Twitter and Facebook, in particular), based on aggregate fans or followers, which has almost zero analytical or prescriptive value.

What is useful about good social media marketing software – and Argyle Social in particular – is that it is inherently set up to allow you to understand how your social efforts are trending and progressing by looking at them from a batched perspective.

Social Media Optimization Table

Here’s an example from their new, free white paper on how to set up social media statistics (check it out, it’s great). In this hypothetical case, a real estate developer builds multiple campaigns to create silted social analytics for his posts about trends, financing, news, and owning a home.

With this type of structure – and goals or conversion events plugged in – you can see important value patterns emerge over time that will help you use your social media marketing resources (most notably, time) more efficiently.

There’s several components of Argyle Social that work well for me.

• The ability to easily curate content using the browser bookmarklet. I can find an interesting blog post, and send it out in about 3 seconds. Argyle automatically attaches rich tracking codes.
• The unified inbox that shows me Twitter @replies, retweets, and DMs plus Facebook comments in one place. This of course is not rare functionality, as several social optimization packages have it, but Argyle Social’s version is as good as any.
• Scheduling of posts in advance is a breeze, even if you have multiple people working together as a team.
• I can create custom tracking URLs in a few seconds, even if they won’t be used in social media, and setting up conversion goals is equally simple (provided you can drop a small piece of code on your website).

Social Analytics Dashboard

Social Analytics Report for Me

But the social analytics dashboard is really the star of the show.

From there, I can at a glance see how I’m trending on clicks, goals, interactions, and subscriberson a week-to-week, month-to-month, or custom date range basis. Then I can drill down to look at specific campaigns, or even individual tweets.

Tweet-by-Tweet Social Analytics

Smartly, Argyle automatically combines the results of tweets and status updates that contain the same link. This is very handy for people that tweet new blog posts more than once (like me).

Knowing which campaigns to set up and what to call them is sometimes a bridge too far at the onset of a social analytics campaign. Argyle Social lets you assign particular tweets to a campaign after the fact, which is very useful for down-the-road analysis.

Free social analytics white paper

I’m getting better at social media optimization thanks to Argyle Social. My pal Jason Falls is a big believer too. Take a look at the white paper, and/or check out a free trial. Prices range from $149 to $499/month – there’s also an excellent white label version for agencies.

It’s definitely more expensive (in most configurations) than social media marketing software like HootSuite, but I think it’s worth the investment. If you want to embrace social media optimization – and eventually serious companies will have to – I think you’ll agree that it’s worth the step up.