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.
Listen Now
Click the play button to listen here:
Download the audio file:
http://socialpros.podbean.com/mf/web/fahuhp/SocialProsEpisode16.mp3
The RSS feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/socialprospodcast
Find us on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/convince-convert-blog-social/id499844469
Please Support Our Sponsors
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
Essential Resources on Social Business for Online Marketing
Posted on 13. Feb, 2012 by Lee Odden in Amber Naslund, Blog, edelman, jay baer, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social business, Social Media
Attributes of a Socially Optimized Business – Dachis Group
Add “social” to just about anything and you’ll boost interest in your topic by at least 50%. While many consultants appear to be employing that tactic to boost their interesting-ness, it’s not the case with the topic of social business.
As companies work to figure out what role social media will play with external marketing and communications, there’s a rapidly growing trend with progressive companies that are also viewing social media internally. By that I mean, they’re looking at social technologies as platforms to connect people within the company for the purposes of collaboration, tapping into the collective wisdom of the organization and bringing internal social media literacy to a level that enables external communications to scale.
Implications for social business run the gamut of organizational structure from operations to customer service to accounting. And of course, marketing and PR. The fact that social technology can facilitate connections across groups of people world-wide is pretty amazing, especially with Facebook nearing 1 billion users. What’s equally interesting (to me) is the application for surfacing and connecting internal company expertise, collaboration and the multiplier effect of scaling internal resources for external brand social media participation.
If you’re also interested in the topic of social business, here are a few resources I’ve found useful.
Presentations from Altimeter Group, Edelman, Dachis Group, Ant’s Eye View, and IBM.
Also take a look at Rawn Shah’s excellent presentation: Understanding Social Business Excellence.
For those of you who want to dig deeper into the principles and guts of social business, here are 5 excellent books on the topic by authors: Michael Brito, Anthony J. Bradley, Mark P. McDonald, Mike Barlow, David B. Thomas, Jay Baer, Amber Naslund, Dion Hinchcliffe, and Peter Kim.
Books on Social Business
Smart Business, Social Business:
Michael Brito
The Social Organization:
Anthony J. Bradley, Mark P. McDonald
The Executive’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy: How Social Networks Are Radically Transforming Your Business
Mike Barlow, David B. Thomas
The NOW Revolution:
Jay Baer, Amber Naslund
Social Business By Design:
Dion Hinchcliffe, Peter Kim (Out May 1, 2012)
I will likely update this post with reports, infographics and events in the coming week. So be sure to revisit the post next Monday.
Source: Michael Brito
Even if it has been many years since I studied Sociology and Organizational Development at University, I’d still be interested as a marketer in the trend towards social business. Think of the transformations that have happened across the globe by connecting common interests through social channels. What transformation is possible for companies that could release the same spirit of change and improvement within their own organizations, amongst partners and customers?
Rather than looking at this from a pure OD perspective, I’m seeing the marketing opportunities. As our agency TopRank matures and brings on more consulting expertise, we’re definitely elevating our practice areas to include the marketing and public relations aspects of social business. In fact, we’re already doing consulting in the area of online marketing optimization for social business initiatives right now.
To me, social business is a natural evolution of how companies can internalize the social tools and means of collaborating that are becoming the norm for communications with the next generation. It’s a way to tap into expertise more efficiently and effectively to boost organizational intelligence as well as the ability to act more competently as a brand advocate on social platforms.
When it comes to marketing and communications, one social media manager and a social strategist can only do so much. Most companies don’t even have one full-time person dedicated to their social media efforts. What if a company could educate, train and support internal staff to facilitate certain types of external social media communications and even support ala Best Buy’s Twelpforce?
What do you think? How would your company do in an assessment of organizational social media readiness? Are you already leveraging internal social tools like salesforce.com Chatter or similar applications for internal social collaboration?
You can read about how SEO and Content Marketing affects Social Business in my book Optimize, coming out soon. (Wiley) Get a preview of chapters here.
Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.
© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. |
Essential Resources on Social Business for Online Marketing | http://www.toprankblog.com
Social Pros Podcast – Super Bowl Social Media Command Center
Posted on 02. Feb, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, jay baer, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media
This is Episode 1 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features Taulbee Jackson, CEO of Raidious, the social and content agency that built and is managing the Super Bowl Social Media Command Center. Read on for insights from Taulbee, our “Work It Out” advice segment, and Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week (this week: The Edelman Trust Barometer).
Next week’s guest is Scott Monty from Ford Motor Company.
Listen Now
Click the play button to listen here:
Download the audio file: http://socialpros.podbean.com/mf/web/yyue7/SocialProsEpisode1.mp3
The RSS feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/socialprospodcast
Find us on iTunes too!
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: Well, here we are at long last. It is the debut, the first ever, the maiden voyage of the Social Pros podcast. I am your host, Jay Baer from Convince & Convert, joined virtually alongside by my trusty sidekick, Eric Boggs, the CEO of Argyle Social. Eric, what is going on?
Eric: Not too much, Jay. Excited to get this rocking.
Jay: We are getting it rocking thanks to the support of Argyle Social for bringing the Social Pros podcast to all of you out there. Other sponsors we should recognize are our good friends at Infusionsoft, who we use to send all of our email and such, and my good friend Jim Kukral, who runs DigitalBookLaunch.com and is also going to be our fill-in host when I am ill or can no longer abide Eric Boggs.
We have an amazing guest. It’s remarkable that this is our very first time doing this and we have a guest of this, not only quality, but timeliness. Our friend Taulbee Jackson, the President and CEO of Raidious in Indianapolis, Indiana, is going to join us a little bit later on the show.
Taulbee’s company put together and is staffing, right now as we discuss this, the Super Bowl Social Media Command Center. They’ve got 652 Macs lined up looking at every single Tweet and Facebook post and Instagram photo associated with the Super Bowl, which is happening just an hour from where I stand at this very minute. The man has a lot on his plate, and he set it aside temporarily to join us on Social Pros. We are very fortunate and looking forward to talking to Taulbee in just a couple of minutes.
Eric: He’s a busy guy. I know he’s got a good story to tell. I can’t wait.
Jay’s Thought of the Week
Jay: Absolutely. We are going to start off the show, as we customarily will, with my thought of the week. Eric, I’m sure you saw this news as well, being in the social media software space yourselves. I don’t get this whole thing with Twitter, this idea that starting allegedly this week they’re going to roll out all these new features to brand pages so that you can install tabs, apps, iFrames and all this other kind of stuff on your branded Twitter page. Is it just me or does that sound an awful lot like Facebook to you?
Eric: It does indeed sound an awful lot like Facebook. We obviously are watching it very closely at Argyle because it’s going to impact all of our customers.
Jay: To me, the whole joy of Twitter, the whole reason for Twitter’s existence, was that it wasn’t Facebook. Whatever happened to the benefit of doing one thing, and doing that one thing well? Instead, it’s, “We’re doing this thing, and now we’re going to do all these other pieces along with it.” To me, I really think it’s the death knell. I think it is the beginning of the end of Twitter as a major player in this game if they go through with this.
Eric: Those are some fighting words, Jay. “Beginning of the end.”
Jay: I really do. I think it’s a colossal strategic blunder.
Eric: I definitely see what you’re saying in terms of doing one thing really well. Twitter to date has been laser-focused on real-time burstable content. They do that way better than Facebook.
I think what you’re beginning to see is Twitter recognizing that it needs to be a business. Twitter a few years ago had this mega- thousand flowers bloom strategy with developers. Over the past 18 months they’ve been . . .
Jay: They put Roundup on all the flowers?
Eric: Yeah. They’ve been encroaching a little bit on their developer community’s turf. You have to think that it’s got to be their business customers and their advertising customers that are pushing this agenda in terms of more interactive, more expansive brand functionality on the site.
Jay: It’s an agenda, that’s for sure. It’s going to be interesting to watch. We’ll get somebody from Twitter on the show here eventually and put it to them straight.
Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week: Trust in Peers Up 23%
Jay: Eric, as you will do every week here on the Social Pros podcast, you have uncovered and unearthed, with your archeological keyboard, a social media statistic of the week. As we know, everybody who has a calculator is a social media researcher. We’re going to try and shine the light on things that actually do make some sense. What have you uncovered for us this week?
Eric: I’m really excited to kick off this segment of the show and I guess, in a sense, trying to set the stage for why we’re doing this piece during the broadcast. I want to talk about the Edelman Trust Barometer not only because the most recent edition of that is chock-full of interesting data, but it’s also about trust. A lot of the data that floats around on the Interwebs these days isn’t necessarily trustworthy.
If you haven’t already read it, you can get the Edelman Trust Barometer at Trust.Edelman.com. It was released last week. It’s their 12th annual trust and credibility survey. It is some heavy-duty research that asks meaningful questions. I’m not going to go into the methodology, but it’s legit.
Interestingly, in this edition it draws a direct line from the chaos that’s all around us in government and public markets. It draws a direct line from the problems in that part of the world to implications for business. What that really means for you, the listener, and for guys like you and me, Jay that are in the business of marketing, people are becoming more and more skeptical. The executive summary of the trust barometer is 12 or 13 pages long. It’s pretty meaty.
Jay: Can I get a summary of that summary?
Eric: What I think is the best graphic and the best question is they asked the people taking the survey, “If you heard information about a company from one of these people, how credible will that information be” In 2011, 50% of the people that were asked that question said that information coming from the CEO would be deemed extremely credible or very credible. In 2012, only 38% of the people deemed information from the CEO as extremely or very credible.
Contrast that with 2011, where 43% of people deemed information from a peer, a person like yourself, to be extremely or very credible. This year that number was up to 65%. In short, trust in institutions and institutional leaders is on the down, and trust in your peers and regular employees in organizations is on the up. This is good news for social media marketers like you and me.
Jay: It’s especially good news for organizations that are moving beyond a massively centralized view of social and saying, “Look, we can have the official @company account and the company Facebook page, but perhaps we can also get our employees involved, since ultimately we want to do business with people, not nameless, faceless corporations.”
I think that’s going to be a lot of what we see advanced social media practitioners do this year. What we’ll talk about on the Social Pros podcast is getting more and more people within the ranks of your employees involved in a way that is additive to the corporate strategy, not reductive of it.
Eric: Without a doubt. The headline for the entire report is “Businesses can earn the license to lead.” So it really is all about trust and credibility and honesty.
Jay: Awesome. We will make sure that we link up the report in the show notes, which will be out on Thursday. We will find some other fantastic factoid for you next week. If you’ve got an idea of a social media statistic that you would like Eric to bring to light here on the Social Pros podcast, make sure you email us and we’ll make that happen.
Special Guest: Taulbee Jackson, Raidious
Jay: Now, without further ado . . . we should insert a drum roll, but this is the first episode so we don’t even have a drum roll sound effect yet, but we can work on that.
Eric: Let’s pretend like we’re calling Taulbee. “Ring ring, ring ring, ring ring.”
Jay: Taulbee, are you there?
Taulbee: Hello? Hello?
Jay: Perfect. On cue.
Eric: He was already on the phone all along.
Jay: Taulbee Jackson, the CEO and President of Raidious, digital and content agency extraordinaire in Indianapolis, and maker and manager of the Super Bowl’s social media command center. Welcome for the very first time to the Social Pros podcast.
Taulbee: Thank you, Jay. It is such an honor to be with you.
Jay: That’s not, in fact, true yet, but we do appreciate your time, especially under the circumstances. The details of what you have wrought up there is really sort of mind-blowing. Can you give the listeners and Eric a little sense of what your surroundings look like?
Taulbee: Sure. The Super Bowl Social Media Command Center is a facility that was purpose-built for the Super Bowl. There are about 50 staff members and volunteers working here over the course of about two weeks, last week and this week. I’m actually live at the command center right now, so that’s exciting. There are about 2000 square feet. There’s well over 100 square feet of monitor wall in the facility. Twelve 27-inch iMac Touchdown Stations, six producer stations, a conference room, a reception area, a game planning station that overlooks Meridian Street, and about 300 square feet of whiteboard space. It’s a sight to behold.
Eric: Jeepers. That’s a lot.
Jay: This is, as I understand it, the first time that a command center has been built of this nature, not only for the Super Bowl, but really for any singular major sporting event. Is that the case?
Taulbee: To my knowledge, yes. I’ve not been able to find any other instances of anything quite like this. We’re excited to be a part of history. It’s pretty cool stuff.
Jay: What is the rationale behind the command center? There have been 45 previous Super Bowls. Of course, many of them were before the age of social media, but not all of them, and this is the first time this has been tried. Why has this not been tried in the past, and how do you hope to manage the Super Bowl differently as a result?
Taulbee: I’m not sure why it hasn’t been done in the past. Maybe it has something to do with the proliferation of social media in general over the last few years. Just like with any marketing program, sometimes it’s the last thing that people think of.
We had the benefit of being involved very early on with the Host Committee. They asked us to come and help them with their strategy starting in 2010 and things progressed from there. There’s been a lot of planning from a strategy perspective and a tactical perspective and all of those things, well before the idea came along to build out this facility to manage all of this stuff.
In terms of what we’re hoping to accomplish here, we’re here in Indiana and it’s all about Hoosier hospitality. That’s one of the things that we were tasked with. The mission of the committee is to make sure that everyone has a great visitor experience when they come here to the Super Bowl. It’s not a typical marketing-focused approach like you might see from other social media campaigns. It’s more about safety and service and coverage, and letting people know what’s happening where and amplifying positive dialogue, and things along those lines.
Jay: The idea is that you scan a wide variety of hashtags and keyword usage across primarily Twitter, I presume, but I’m sure you’re monitoring other social outposts as well?
Taulbee: Twitter has obviously been where most of the activity has happened for us, but we are seeing stuff come in from blogs and bulletin boards and places like that all over the Internet. It’s very much listening first. We have a group of about 300 different keywords that we’re monitoring for and have been for about the last year to try and understand how to respond to statements or questions that we see online to help people do things like navigate the city and find parking and generally have a good experience. If they don’t know where the Super Bowl Village is, we want to help them find that area. It’s a very service-focused approach to this particular initiative.
Jay: What’s fascinating about that is since the Super Bowl has never been in Indianapolis before, you’ve got to create the answers to those questions for the first time. How often do you have an answer at the ready, because somebody has said, “All right. We know what to say in the scenario.” How often do people post something in social media and you and your team have to go find the answer?
Taulbee: That’s a great question, and in the last year we’ve done a few different pilot programs. One was around the NCAA Big 10 men’s football championship. One of the things we found out in the course of doing that pilot and just doing our day-to-day client work here at Raidious is that when people need help, they don’t necessarily ask a question. Furthermore, even if they did, there are so many different ways to ask the same question that it’s almost impossible to figure out what to listen for.
We took that back to our friends at ChaCha.com. If anybody’s familiar with that service, it’s a Q and A service and they’re actually headquartered here in Indianapolis. We are leveraging the ChaCha database of questions and answers to understand all the different questions and all the related answers to those when we see something pop up online.
Jay: What’s the workflow? Is there an escalation path, to the government institutions or public service institutions in Indianapolis?
Taulbee: Not for most of what we see. We’re actually connected to two other control centers here in Indianapolis. There’s one that is kind of a central command which is all of the logistics that have to do with running the event. Then there’s another one that’s outside of the downtown area, about 10 or 15 miles, that houses Department of Homeland Security, NSA, FBI, CIA, all of the alphabet soup agencies that are concerned with security around an event of this magnitude.
We do have an alert system that goes to all of those different command centers from one central area. If we pick something up in monitoring, we can push that to the command center for evaluation, and if there’s an action that needs to be taken, they push that action back out to us. But in terms of day-to-day governance for things like, “I need to know where the Hard Rock Café is,” those are answers that we already have, and related questions to those all in the ChaCha database.
Jay: You’re a guy who runs a company that’s very metrics and results- focused in social media and content marketing, and rightfully so. How do you put a success equation around this kind of initiative?
Taulbee: It’s a challenge, to be honest. Again, the mission of the committee is to make sure that there’s a positive impression and a positive perception about the City of Indianapolis. One of the things that we’re looking at really closely is sentiment analysis. That’s turning very positive so far, at about 3 to 1 across the board.
We didn’t really have a baseline because I think one of the problems that people have had with this particular event in the past is just the level of volume around the Super Bowl. The whole world is talking about it at once; it’s 5000 or 6000 tweets a second. How do you listen to all of that and make good decisions about what to respond to and what not to.
Our approach being very locally-focused has been different than anyone else’s. The volume and the monitoring that we’re dealing with are all happening on a geo-targeted basis in a 50 mile concentric circle around Indianapolis. We’re filtering out the large majority of the noise, but it also means we’re kind of establishing a baseline for events like this moving forward at the localized level and not at the national or global level. We don’t really have any metrics to compare to.
Jay: What are the tools that you guys are using to ingest all the content and process it?
Taulbee: Lots of different ones, actually. The main tool that we’re using, and my apologies, Eric, but we’re actually using the Awareness Networks social hub.
Eric: They’re good guys. They’ve got a good product.
Taulbee: They really are, and to be totally candid, we had been using a different social media management platform in 2010, and those tools change so fast and the teams that are working on them just keeping making them better and better. We have a standing six month review that we do for all of our clients, for all the work that we’re doing for our team internally to make sure that we’ve always got the most up-to-date, the best options that we can have.
At the last six-month review we looked at about 60 different platforms and wound up changing from what we had been using for the last couple of years to this Awareness Network’s tool. Their technology is great but the support team there has been fantastic to work with, even though they’re all Patriots fans.
Jay: That’s too bad.
Eric: That is too bad.
Taulbee: So we’ve been using that. Basecamp has been huge for us. That was one of the first companies that we spent money with as Raidious, and we’ve continued to use it. It scaled up great for us to manage all of the workflow and content gathering and project management behind the scenes.
We’re a Google Apps shop so all the documentation that we’re using is real-time documentation that you can collaborate on, so we’re actually sharing a Google Doc with the other two command centers that multiple people can be logged into and typing on.
There’s a tool called Geckoboard that we’re using that displays lots of different data feeds for us. Let’s see, I’m trying to think of what else. Social Mention is a nonprofit sentiment trend analysis visualization tool called WeFeelFine.org that we’ve been looking at up on the big board.
So, lots of different tools, and we’ve actually collaborated with Ball State on a data visualization application as well which we are going to be sending some screenshots out for probably later this week.
Jay: Who are the people on your team? Is it your agency or is it volunteers?
Taulbee: From our team at Raidious, all we have here is content people so it’s writers, reporters, editors, and producers. We don’t have media buyers or creative directors, or the typical ad agency staffing. We’re set up just like CNN except all we report on is the brand.
We’ve got our team functioning in a editorial capacity and in a producer capacity and a leadership capacity, and then we’re back- filling for scale with students from the David Letterman School of Journalism, the Center for Media Design at Ball State University, students from Butler University, and students from IUPUI here in Indianapolis. So there are about 16 of my team and about 30 volunteers working two shifts, 15 hours a day.
Jay: Sounds like the world’s greatest internship program with beer and nachos and football.
Taulbee: Yes. It’s pretty awesome. I think the kids are having a good time and they’re learning a lot. And we’re hiring, so that all works out.
Jay: Exactly. It’s only a two-week gig, right?
Taulbee: That’s right.
Jay: You are going to be one tired cowboy come Monday.
Taulbee: Yeah, I think so, but not nearly as tired as Ryan Smith or some of the other guys from my office that are actually out there doing the day-to-day. Ryan is our VP of Production and Brian Wyrick, our Head of Operations, is actually the guy that concepted and built out this whole facility. Those two guys have just been working their butts off. I wouldn’t be able to be here talking to you if it wasn’t for them.
Jay: We’ll make sure to add some links to some of the graphics and the tools, and some of the resources that you guys are bringing to bear for people who check out the podcast that will be good information for them.
Eric: Who’s your pick for the game, Taulbee?
Taulbee: Oh, you know, I want the fans to win. That’s been my stock answer and I’m going to stick with that one because I don’t want to upset anyone from Boston. I really hope the Patriots don’t win but I think they’re going to. It’s a strong team and whether you like Tom Brady or not, the guy can play some ball.
Jay: And he can win Super Bowls.
Taulbee: Yeah, they know a thing or two about winning Super Bowls there.
Jay: I’m predicting Giants. I think it’s a Giants victory. I really do.
Eric: I was so happy. I think it was 2007 that they played. What an incredible play. That was such a great game.
Jay: It was. That was epic. That was when they played in Arizona, where I used to live.
Taulbee: Oh, okay. Awesome. The Super Bowl just follows you around.
Jay: Seemingly so, but I never get to go. In fact, I was going to go, of course, this year, but I managed to book a speaking gig for myself in New Orleans on Super Bowl Sunday. That was brilliant. It never fails.
Work It Out
Jay: Let’s move into the final segment of the Social Pros podcast, Work it Out.
Eric: We need some Work it Out theme music, Jay.
Jay: We do. We need some Olivia Newton-John kind of track, something like that.
Eric: I just realized that. I’m going to work on that as soon as we wrap up here.
Jay: We’re going to work it out on the Work it Out sounder. Work it Out is a section where we take a request from a podcast listener about their social media program, and the three of us try and give them a little help in two or three minutes. Since we don’t have any listeners yet, I made one up, which is this.
Taulbee, obviously you guys are listening almost around the clock. I know you’re sleeping in the wee hours, but you’re almost doing round-the-clock, seven days a week monitoring and response. Is that necessary for all brands or for some brands? If you, as a customer, are on social media and midnight, is it a fair assumption that the brands that you come into contact with will be online at that time as well?
Taulbee: That’s a great question, and we actually have several clients that we monitor multiple shifts for, for lots of different reasons. Whether it’s a fair expectation or not, I think has to do with whether or not the brand sets that precedent and whether or not the brand communicates that and manages those expectations.
That’s something you can do really easily as a retailer or as a CPG brand. It gets a little bit more difficult when you get into something like health care. We do have a healthcare client that we work with who we monitor for in multiple shifts. I don’t know that if I was sick that Twitter would be the first place I would go, but some people do that.
Jay: I’m too weak to do anything but tweet.
Taulbee: Yeah. Or maybe it’s late at night and they’re in the ER and they’re having a bad experience, and they want to share that with people. There are all kinds of reasons for healthcare organizations to be listening at all hours of the day and night.
A lot of that has to do with volume. One of the retail clients that we work with has, I think, over 950,000 Facebook fans at this point. There’s a lot of chatter going on that they need to be able to respond to. They have a really interesting scenario where their audience actually changes from basically the day to the night. Between the hours of 3:00 and 5:00 their audience goes from being 35 or 40-year-old to 16 to 24-year-old as kids get out of school. There’s this whole other need from a content perspective and from a monitoring and moderation perspective for that particular audience at that particular time. It really depends on the brand.
Jay: I’m glad you mentioned expectation management. It seems to me that very few companies do that well today. If they aren’t monitoring double shifts or weekends, perhaps you ought to acknowledge that.
One company that actually does that well is Xbox. Their Twitter account @XboxSupport actually has in the bio the hours that they respond on Twitter. I think that’s a best practice for a lot of brands.
Taulbee: Absolutely. We just had that happen with Super Bowl where last week we were 9:00 to 7:00 and this week we’re 9:00 to midnight. There was some confusion around that so we had to update our Twitter page and let people know, “This is when you can expect us to be here to help you.” It’s part of expectation management, just like having the hours for your customer service line or any other function along those lines.
Jay: Having a sign on the door of your deli.
Taulbee: There you go. Absolutely.
Jay: And it seems like, as you mentioned, volume is a driver of this. If you’re a B2B company that gets four tweets a day, to say that you need to staff that nights and weekends is probably not worth the additional expense, but you never know. Something crazy could happen at 10:00 and you wish that you were listening at that point.
Taulbee: It could happen.
Eric: I think for a B2B, Jay, it’s also interesting that one of those four tweets could potentially be worth tens of thousands of dollars versus a B2C company with a million fans and followers. Those may be transactional or maybe the people are just buying the Coca-Cola off of the grocery store shelf.
Jay: That’s why we always say even if you’re not actively listening, you need to be passively listening and set up alerts, and have somebody in your company who can at least take a quick peek before they go to sleep or something like that.
Eric: I think email alerts address a lot of the issues. But yeah, you’ve got to draw a line.
Taulbee: Another thing that we talk about to our clients a lot is understanding the impact of influence. Is that person that’s speaking to your brand at 10:00 at night somebody like me, or is it somebody like Jay Baer that has a bazillion followers and a very high level of influence that you need to take note of.
Jay: Eric, what’s the best tool for doing that? Can you set up alerts that are defined by ripple on the pond?
Eric: There are a lot of ways you can address that. Google Alerts are free and fairly powerful, often full of clutter and noise. That’s a place to start. A lot of social media management tools provide a mechanism to ingest content, run some analytics over the text or the person that has produced the content, and then set off rules- based emails based on different people in your organization.
I would remiss if I did not say that my company software does just that, but I do know that a lot of tools make it easy to be on call but maybe not be in front of your computer all the time.
Jay: Perfect. Excellent. Well, let’s wrap it up here on the debut episode of the Social Pros podcast. Thank you for being here, Taulbee. I know you’ve got a lot going on. It’s really exciting to see what’s happening with Raidious and the Super Bowl Social Media Command Center and the Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis. I am a proud Hoosier right now, as are you. Congrats on everything, it’s going great. I’m looking forward to seeing you tomorrow.
Taulbee: Likewise. Thank you so much, Jay. It’s been an honor to be your first guest.
Jay: My pleasure. Eric, we did it. We managed to pull one across the finish line. Looking forward to making this happen every week.
Speaking of next week, Eric and I will both be at Social Fresh East in Tampa, Florida, giving speeches to the crew out there, and our guest is going to be Scott Monty, international head of social media for Ford Motor Company. We’re going to try and do it live, so the three of us will grab a quiet corner somewhere and we’ll try and do the Social Pros podcast face-to-face in only Episode 2. We’re going off-script in the second episode. It’s crazy.
Eric: Cross your fingers for us. It remains to be seen how we’re going to be able to do that live, but we’ll figure it out.
Jay: Do you know what? That’s why we have our trusty producer, Tristan. He’s going to figure it all out for us.
Thanks, everybody, for tuning in and for all your support, your tweets, your reads, your shares and your listens. We really appreciate it.
I’m Jay Baer from Convince & Convert, joined by our sidekick and erstwhile sponsor, Eric Boggs of Argyle Social. Thanks also to Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral. Taulbee, thanks a lot. We’ll see you next time.
10 Content Marketing Books to Help Sell the C-Level
Posted on 12. Jan, 2012 by Joe Pulizzi in Ann Handley, Blog, brian solis, CC Chapman, content marketing, David Meerman Scott, jay baer, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Just ended a pretty impressive Content Marketing Institute webinar hosted by Joe Chernov, VP of Content Marketing for Eloqua and Rebecca Lieb, Analyst for Altimeter. During the Q&A session, Joe talked about how to sell content marketing to the C-level through some amazing books. Below are some recommendations from Joe (and some that I would recommend as well) for the marketing pro that needs more content marketing budget.
The New Rules of Marketing & PR
I consider this David Meerman Scott book mandatory reading for all marketers. This best seller, now published in over 25 languages, clearly states the case for why we need to think about marketing differently. A big part of that…the creation of valuable, relevant and compelling content that positions you as the expert in your industry.
Get Content Get Customers
Yes, forgive me…this is my book written with my co-author Newt Barrett. This was the first book that really talked about the content marketing industry as we know it today and how to actually handle the changing rules (as DM Scott describes above). The first half of the book tells you the why of content marketing…the second half is chock full of online, print and integrated case studies.
Content Rules
Where Get Content Get Customers leaves off, Content Rules ramps it up a notch, with clear instruction and motivation on everything from content strategy to newsletter creation to blogs and social media…with some amazing case studies along the way. Really like the practical tips in this book, like how to develop a publishing schedule and ideas on “reimagining” your content across different platforms.
And, it couldn’t have been written by two better people: Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman.
eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sell
This incredible resource from Ardath Albee is one I recommend to marketers very focused on the B2B industry. Ardath details the complex sales cycle that most B2B marketing executives deal with and the important the role that content serves in each of those stages. Do you have a long sales cycle with multiple client touch points? If so, this book can’t lose.
Managing Content Marketing
Sorry, guilty as charged…mine again. This time, Robert Rose leads the charge. Simply put, if you are a marketer trying to actually develop a content marketing practice within your organization, this book will help you with the structure and process. This is not a book for the beginner, but for the believer that wants to take the next step.
Content Marketing: Think Like a Publisher
I love Rebecca Lieb’s writing style…and on my favorite topic no less. The best part about this book is the amount of real-world examples that will show you the true impact of content marketing on the organization, and on customers themselves (PS: I wrote the foreword).
The Best Books for Specific Content Needs
For agencies trying to sell services in this new content marketing world: The Marketing Agency Blueprint by Paul Roetzer
For content marketing on a small business budget: Launch by Mike Stelzner
For selling social media into the organization: The NOW Revolution by Jay Baer and Amber Naslund and The End of Business as Usual from Brian Solis.
Oh, and by the way, Ann Handley, C.C. Chapman, Ardath Albee, Robert Rose, Paul Roetzer, Mike Stelzner and Jay Baer are all speaking at Content Marketing World 2012.
It’s amazing that just a few years ago, there were NO books on this topic, and now we have 10 amazing books. Did I miss any that you would recommend?
The original post is titled 10 Content Marketing Books to Help Sell the C-Level , and it came from The Content Marketing Revolution .
Will You Abandon Your Friends to Seek Real Relevance
Posted on 01. Nov, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, book review, brian solis, Connected Consumer, jay baer, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Book, social media books, social media research
(video production by my friends at Candidio. Fast, inexpensive video editing and production. Check em out!)
Excerpted from the video:
I was happy to interview Brian Solis, a futurist, new media raconteur, and principal at Altimeter Group. Brian recently published his 5th book, The End of Business As Usual
which I believe to be his finest work to-date.
Jay: Hey everybody. It’s Jay Baer from Convince & Convert. Hope you are having a fantastic day. I’m joined this afternoon by a man who needs no introduction, but I’ll provide one anyway. Futurist, big thinker, gadabout, raconteur, and author of “The End of Business as Usual”, Mr. Brian Solis. Also a champagne lover, as I recall.
Brian: This is true.
Jay: So that is a lot of things. Congratulations on the new book. We just can’t stop you from writing books!
Brian: There’s just a lot to say right now.
Jay: You won’t be held back. I appreciate that. It’s great. I really actually read it, on a long plane flight out to the west coast. In fact, I was in your town for about five minutes earlier this week, but didn’t get a chance to say hi to you or the folks at Altimeter, but really, really enjoyed it. And what I like about this book in particular is that it’s got a lot of chapter breaks in it, it’s really the kind of book that you could read for half an hour and then set aside and then come back and not feel like you’re all confused. It’s really well packaged in that regard.
Brian: Thanks for noticing that, actually. And for everybody watching this, I did not seed that question. I appreciate that, because this time I wanted to write a book that could be, I don’t want to say easy to read, but could be thoughtful in how the reader would sit down, considering all of the things that they have to do, and still provide value knowing that they’re busy. I also wanted to write at the executive level, because one thing I heard about The End of Business As Usual
was that Engage was more of a reference guide than a book. People would read certain chunks as needed . . .
Jay: And refer back.
Brian: . . . and refer back. This one, even though I’d like to think it’s also a reference guide, it tells a story.
Jay: Yeah, but it’s a story that I find you don’t necessarily have to read in sequence, which I think is really interesting. It reminds me a little bit of UnMarketing
, although obviously at a much more executive level and detail than that. You probably could read it in somewhat random chapter order and still get a lot out of it. I think that’s really commendable.
Brian: Thank you.
Jay: One of the things I loved about the book is you talked about how we’re all wired for distraction now. We’re always like, “Squirrel! Tweet!” And it’s so true. It’s so true. I really notice it now, how hard it is to pay attention for any length of time. I don’t think it’s probably a net positive as a people or as a society, but I’ve thought a lot about, “gee, is a book too much sandwich to ask people to eat?” Should we be publishing sequential chapters in eBook format or things of that nature? Obviously the publishing business is disintermediated, and we understand that. But is long form publishing counter-cyclical?
Brian: Wow. So much to think about here. The answer is you can’t stop creating the content in the way that people you’re trying to reach consume it. That was the most challenging part of writing this book. You’re an author. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve got to write a book. You have to keep up your blog. You have to keep up your Twitter stream. You have to keep up your Facebook. Now your Google+, your Foursquare. You have these seminated audience or groups of people that are connecting with you because they find value in those channels. But yeah, there’s a fantastic audience for books and the need to have information at their fingertips. But I did design this book a little bit differently, considering that we are wired for distraction. Every chapter has almost tweetable summaries of what the insights were in each chapter. So if you have to go back and just kind of remember what the value was, or just read those, you could still walk away with the value your way.
Jay: Absolutely. Great summaries. It was a fantastic illustration that you have in the book that shows your own personal media usage habits and the channels across the social Web that you used a few years ago versus the ones that you use now. I counted them up, and it was something like 47 different outposts that you were present in. Flickr, going back to FriendFeed and Plurk and things that we don’t necessarily use now. Then I counted the ones that you use today, or at least refer to in the book, and I think out of that 47, there’s only 10 that you still use. So I think to some degree, the industry is wiring itself for distraction, because we keep creating new stuff and new stuff and new stuff. You and I have the rare luxury of doing this for a living, but take an average marketing director or average CEO. They’ve got to be like, “What the hell is going on?”
Brian: Right. I was talking to John Battelle on the video show that I run, and he’s got a book called “What Hath We Wrought?” that’s coming out in a year or so. It really looks at how it’s not the technology that wired us for distraction. We embraced this technology and wired ourselves for distraction. There’s sort of a subliminal message in the first half of my book where, even though it’s written for executives and professionals to help them understand how to embrace this type of consumer, there is this underlying theme there where I hope that people pick up on it, that if you are that “connected consumer”, that you’re understanding that, number one, you’re not alone. But number two, part of the onus of improving your own online experience, your own digital experience, is becoming a very critical curator of those experiences through relationships, through information that you share and consume.
So what you saw in those two graphs, my point was that I shrunk it and that I found the channels that had the greatest value to me. Not just for me to promote what it is I’m working on, for me to learn. Also what’s really important is that I change who I follow in each of those networks as it pertains to what I find fascinating or interesting or where I think I can add value. So I’m constantly expanding and contracting these networks so that there’s value on both sides. That’s part of the theme of that first half of the book. If you are the people that you’re trying to reach, you have a responsibility to improve your own online experiences, which I call the egosystem.
Jay: Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned changing who you connect with in different outposts. As you know, there’s been somewhat of a micro trend recently of people just sort of saying, “You know what? I’m throwing up my hands. I’m going to, especially on Twitter, unfollow everybody and then start from ground zero.” I know Chris Brogan has done it and other people have done it. What do you make of that? Is that a sign of the times? Is that a sign that we did it wrong the first time? To me, that is a symptom of a bigger issue.
Brian: I’ve studied this actually, the idea of social network fatigue. And there’s parts of this in the book where we talk about the effects that this is having on society. I use examples of students who are feeling like, even though they’ve wired themselves for this, they can’t keep up with what it is that they’ve created. There’s this sense that not only are they always on, but there’s this psychological need to be always on. Otherwise they feel like they’re missing out, they’re disconnected, their relationships are going away from them. So part of this is self-created. But also, it’s perpetuated through the “social media experts”.
I can tell you that year after year, I would have to get in debates that would justify my friend to follow ratio on Twitter, for example. And that the idea of following somebody back is of reciprocal value to show as a thank you to someone who’s followed you.
Jay: An interesting stat that I saw in the book was that people on Facebook, I think it was, created 90 pieces of content a month. I think that was the stat that was in there, which is a lot, right? It’s three pieces of content a day. Do you think that can continue to grow? I think we take it as gospel that people’s usage of Facebook has no cap, but I can’t imagine that that’s true. Eventually, enough will be enough, but they seem to try and find other reasons for us to participate on that particular platform. Now with f-Commerce and other things that perhaps you used to have to leave Facebook to do, now they want you to do within their platform.
Brian: I really like that question. They call it Zuckerberg’s Law – that you will double the amount of content that you share every year. And to counter that law, this was a few years ago, I had come up with my own theory, and that theory was something that I called Social Graph Theory. That every year, you would double the size of your social graph, depending on what you were sharing.
Jay: Stands to reason.
Brian: In many ways, that’s proven true over the years. You probably read in the book that I switched. I didn’t want to perpetuate that theory anymore. I wanted to believe that we were going to follow what I call the Interest Graph Theory, and that was that we were going to shrink our networks and rebuild them based on value and interests. We see that with Chris Brogan, for example. We see that with other individuals really starting over again. But the content creation side continues to double, and that is because people find value. This is why I spend part of my time as an aspiring social scientist.
The need for people to share isn’t just because I want to push something out into my network. It’s because I enjoy the reactions that I get in sharing, and that fosters engagement. That fosters community. But I think what we have to be mindful of is we can’t just do it for the reaction. We actually have to do it for the value in that. I know that I’m saying the word value, but it’s true. I want to have more meaningful engagement with the people that I’m connected to, so I’m going to be more thoughtful about what it is that I curate and put into the stream.
Jay: Absolutely. There’s a lot of conversation these days about influence or outreach and Klout, with Klout’s new algorithm change recently. A lot of people wringing their hands and things like that. Whether you use Klout or any number of other software programs out there that can give you some sort of number, do you find that influence or outreach is scalable for brands, that it really has the ability to be a core part of your social program, your communication program?
Brian: This has been another area of study actually going back to the 90s before there were influence scores. I used to call it the IF, the influence factor, and its importance in business engagement. And I started a company in 1999 developed around simply influencer identification and engagement. By “influencer,” I meant people who had the capacity to cause effect, not a score. And by cause effect, that means that I recognize that you, Jay, are a master in the world of new business models and new engagement and media, and I have this particular solution or service or product. You’re going to be influential for me, but I can’t go to a service and find all of the people who have a score above 55 and expect them to take interest in what I do.
I have a report coming out on this very soon with Altimeter. That is the difference between social capital and influence, because they’re very different. To answer your question specifically, yes, an influencer engagement program will help businesses cut through the clutter instead of doing this en mass, one to many broadcast technique that they’re very used to doing. I’m focusing on the very select group of people who are incredibly connected within these sites – incredibly influential. I call it the one to one to many approach. Yes, there is value in that, whether it’s through an advocacy, through an influencer program or an engagement program, all of the above, an expert program, an advisory program. All of those things should run simultaneously.
But I do not know that I could find value in social capital relations, finding people who are influential. That said, we are seeing examples of sales, loyalty, and service aspects of the organization embracing all forms of people with social capital, because then they’re excited to share their experiences, and that’s a different value. I guess what I’m saying is it comes down to intent and the ability to know what it is that you want out of those relationships and then design the programs and find the right people that will help you execute, at least according to plan.
Jay: My favorite is the one to one campaign that is actually a broadcast campaign, where you send out 5,000 press releases to theoretical influencers at the click of a button. I’m like, ”
Wow, the irony of this is unbelievable.”
Brian: I have an inbox full of them.
Brian: Yeah. This is an important part of the book. It’s probably also, I wouldn’t say the easiest, but it’s the one where you can have the most impact. Really what the book is talking about in that section is change management, and this is the quickest part to getting on a new road to change. I talk about earlier in the book the idea that your brand is sort of this collection of shared experiences, and I show examples. If you search a particular brand on Twitter or Facebook and you feed that into a word cloud, all of these words are the words that people feel about your brand. There’s nothing you can do or say about that. You just recognize it. This is where a lot of business say, “This is exactly why we don’t want to be in new media, because we lose control.”
Jay: But you actually never had control, but that’s another point.
Brian: That’s right. You never had control, because those are the experiences, real experiences of people right now. You actually now have an opportunity to take control, because you can steer those experiences. There’s a lot of stories and formulas and frameworks that I’ve shared on how you can steer experiences. What’s your vision? What’s your mission? You’re talking about aligning with people, and what people are saying, especially in social media, is they want to be able to align with your values.
Jay: You have to know what those values are.
Brian: Yeah. What are those values? What is our vision? So a lot of companies that I work with today, we reexamine those. It’s quite a political conversation, as you can imagine, but when they see what the output can do, where people can align with it. And then more importantly, that it drives your online and your digital strategy and management programs, because you’re operating around a new vision that people can stand behind. Actually, it takes on meaning, and it’s not just a temporary thing, it’s actually a mantra.
Jay: Absolutely. I’m glad you documented the pieces of change management and the processes you go through, and you actually talk about identifying the “change team” within the organization – having people tasked with making this work. What sort of attributes do you look for in somebody who would be a good member of a change team?
Brian: I’ve got to make the point here that in “Engage” I talk about building a new media task force, where you bring cross-functional representatives together around the table so that each one of those stakeholders, quite honestly, getting their hands dirty and have stake in how social media is going to transform their particular function in the organization overall. But with a change management team, what we’re looking at is sort of taking that idea of a task force, decision makers across the organization who recognize that it’s much bigger than social media, that the business has to mean something to a different customer.
And quite honestly, it’s a healthy exercise to go through, but what we’re looking at is people who can speak on behalf of the employees. For example, HR becomes a big role in this. Legal becomes a big role in this. Leaders of lines of business, leaders of the executive team. In fact, it does talk about having an executive sponsor who can oversee this and has reports that bring it back to the top level. It also shows that the size and shape of that change management team is going to depend on sort of this internal audit that you do that talks to leaders and change agents within the organization to recognize the gaps, so that becomes your mission on how to bridge those. But it really is a powerful team to bring together, because really at the heart of what it is that their tasked to do is change the organization to matter for a new era of business.
Jay: I always find it to be the great paradox of modern business that everything in communications happens so much faster now. It’s Twitter in real-time and all these things. But yet, the type of change that you are recommending in “The End of Business as Usual” is absolutely slow. This is not “we’re going to make this happen in two weeks.” So here we are in this real-time world, but we are predicting change that happens over a period of years?
Brian: Yeah, absolutely. Many companies that I’ve worked with on these particular tasks, the stories I tell have been underway for two, three, four years already, and we’re still a long way to go. But understanding that it’s slow is why you have to begin sooner than later.
Jay: It’s a great book. I really, really enjoyed it. Thanks so much for being here, Brian. It’s The End of Business As Usual
Brian: Thank you, Jay.
Will You Abandon Your Friends to Seek Real Relevance
Posted on 01. Nov, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, book review, brian solis, Connected Consumer, jay baer, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Book, social media books, social media research
(video production by my friends at Candidio. Fast, inexpensive video editing and production. Check em out!)
Excerpted from the video:
I was happy to interview Brian Solis, a futurist, new media raconteur, and principal at Altimeter Group. Brian recently published his 5th book, The End of Business As Usual
which I believe to be his finest work to-date.
Jay: Hey everybody. It’s Jay Baer from Convince & Convert. Hope you are having a fantastic day. I’m joined this afternoon by a man who needs no introduction, but I’ll provide one anyway. Futurist, big thinker, gadabout, raconteur, and author of “The End of Business as Usual”, Mr. Brian Solis. Also a champagne lover, as I recall.
Brian: This is true.
Jay: So that is a lot of things. Congratulations on the new book. We just can’t stop you from writing books!
Brian: There’s just a lot to say right now.
Jay: You won’t be held back. I appreciate that. It’s great. I really actually read it, on a long plane flight out to the west coast. In fact, I was in your town for about five minutes earlier this week, but didn’t get a chance to say hi to you or the folks at Altimeter, but really, really enjoyed it. And what I like about this book in particular is that it’s got a lot of chapter breaks in it, it’s really the kind of book that you could read for half an hour and then set aside and then come back and not feel like you’re all confused. It’s really well packaged in that regard.
Brian: Thanks for noticing that, actually. And for everybody watching this, I did not seed that question. I appreciate that, because this time I wanted to write a book that could be, I don’t want to say easy to read, but could be thoughtful in how the reader would sit down, considering all of the things that they have to do, and still provide value knowing that they’re busy. I also wanted to write at the executive level, because one thing I heard about The End of Business As Usual
was that Engage was more of a reference guide than a book. People would read certain chunks as needed . . .
Jay: And refer back.
Brian: . . . and refer back. This one, even though I’d like to think it’s also a reference guide, it tells a story.
Jay: Yeah, but it’s a story that I find you don’t necessarily have to read in sequence, which I think is really interesting. It reminds me a little bit of UnMarketing
, although obviously at a much more executive level and detail than that. You probably could read it in somewhat random chapter order and still get a lot out of it. I think that’s really commendable.
Brian: Thank you.
Jay: One of the things I loved about the book is you talked about how we’re all wired for distraction now. We’re always like, “Squirrel! Tweet!” And it’s so true. It’s so true. I really notice it now, how hard it is to pay attention for any length of time. I don’t think it’s probably a net positive as a people or as a society, but I’ve thought a lot about, “gee, is a book too much sandwich to ask people to eat?” Should we be publishing sequential chapters in eBook format or things of that nature? Obviously the publishing business is disintermediated, and we understand that. But is long form publishing counter-cyclical?
Brian: Wow. So much to think about here. The answer is you can’t stop creating the content in the way that people you’re trying to reach consume it. That was the most challenging part of writing this book. You’re an author. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve got to write a book. You have to keep up your blog. You have to keep up your Twitter stream. You have to keep up your Facebook. Now your Google+, your Foursquare. You have these seminated audience or groups of people that are connecting with you because they find value in those channels. But yeah, there’s a fantastic audience for books and the need to have information at their fingertips. But I did design this book a little bit differently, considering that we are wired for distraction. Every chapter has almost tweetable summaries of what the insights were in each chapter. So if you have to go back and just kind of remember what the value was, or just read those, you could still walk away with the value your way.
Jay: Absolutely. Great summaries. It was a fantastic illustration that you have in the book that shows your own personal media usage habits and the channels across the social Web that you used a few years ago versus the ones that you use now. I counted them up, and it was something like 47 different outposts that you were present in. Flickr, going back to FriendFeed and Plurk and things that we don’t necessarily use now. Then I counted the ones that you use today, or at least refer to in the book, and I think out of that 47, there’s only 10 that you still use. So I think to some degree, the industry is wiring itself for distraction, because we keep creating new stuff and new stuff and new stuff. You and I have the rare luxury of doing this for a living, but take an average marketing director or average CEO. They’ve got to be like, “What the hell is going on?”
Brian: Right. I was talking to John Battelle on the video show that I run, and he’s got a book called “What Hath We Wrought?” that’s coming out in a year or so. It really looks at how it’s not the technology that wired us for distraction. We embraced this technology and wired ourselves for distraction. There’s sort of a subliminal message in the first half of my book where, even though it’s written for executives and professionals to help them understand how to embrace this type of consumer, there is this underlying theme there where I hope that people pick up on it, that if you are that “connected consumer”, that you’re understanding that, number one, you’re not alone. But number two, part of the onus of improving your own online experience, your own digital experience, is becoming a very critical curator of those experiences through relationships, through information that you share and consume.
So what you saw in those two graphs, my point was that I shrunk it and that I found the channels that had the greatest value to me. Not just for me to promote what it is I’m working on, for me to learn. Also what’s really important is that I change who I follow in each of those networks as it pertains to what I find fascinating or interesting or where I think I can add value. So I’m constantly expanding and contracting these networks so that there’s value on both sides. That’s part of the theme of that first half of the book. If you are the people that you’re trying to reach, you have a responsibility to improve your own online experiences, which I call the egosystem.
Jay: Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned changing who you connect with in different outposts. As you know, there’s been somewhat of a micro trend recently of people just sort of saying, “You know what? I’m throwing up my hands. I’m going to, especially on Twitter, unfollow everybody and then start from ground zero.” I know Chris Brogan has done it and other people have done it. What do you make of that? Is that a sign of the times? Is that a sign that we did it wrong the first time? To me, that is a symptom of a bigger issue.
Brian: I’ve studied this actually, the idea of social network fatigue. And there’s parts of this in the book where we talk about the effects that this is having on society. I use examples of students who are feeling like, even though they’ve wired themselves for this, they can’t keep up with what it is that they’ve created. There’s this sense that not only are they always on, but there’s this psychological need to be always on. Otherwise they feel like they’re missing out, they’re disconnected, their relationships are going away from them. So part of this is self-created. But also, it’s perpetuated through the “social media experts”.
I can tell you that year after year, I would have to get in debates that would justify my friend to follow ratio on Twitter, for example. And that the idea of following somebody back is of reciprocal value to show as a thank you to someone who’s followed you.
Jay: An interesting stat that I saw in the book was that people on Facebook, I think it was, created 90 pieces of content a month. I think that was the stat that was in there, which is a lot, right? It’s three pieces of content a day. Do you think that can continue to grow? I think we take it as gospel that people’s usage of Facebook has no cap, but I can’t imagine that that’s true. Eventually, enough will be enough, but they seem to try and find other reasons for us to participate on that particular platform. Now with f-Commerce and other things that perhaps you used to have to leave Facebook to do, now they want you to do within their platform.
Brian: I really like that question. They call it Zuckerberg’s Law – that you will double the amount of content that you share every year. And to counter that law, this was a few years ago, I had come up with my own theory, and that theory was something that I called Social Graph Theory. That every year, you would double the size of your social graph, depending on what you were sharing.
Jay: Stands to reason.
Brian: In many ways, that’s proven true over the years. You probably read in the book that I switched. I didn’t want to perpetuate that theory anymore. I wanted to believe that we were going to follow what I call the Interest Graph Theory, and that was that we were going to shrink our networks and rebuild them based on value and interests. We see that with Chris Brogan, for example. We see that with other individuals really starting over again. But the content creation side continues to double, and that is because people find value. This is why I spend part of my time as an aspiring social scientist.
The need for people to share isn’t just because I want to push something out into my network. It’s because I enjoy the reactions that I get in sharing, and that fosters engagement. That fosters community. But I think what we have to be mindful of is we can’t just do it for the reaction. We actually have to do it for the value in that. I know that I’m saying the word value, but it’s true. I want to have more meaningful engagement with the people that I’m connected to, so I’m going to be more thoughtful about what it is that I curate and put into the stream.
Jay: Absolutely. There’s a lot of conversation these days about influence or outreach and Klout, with Klout’s new algorithm change recently. A lot of people wringing their hands and things like that. Whether you use Klout or any number of other software programs out there that can give you some sort of number, do you find that influence or outreach is scalable for brands, that it really has the ability to be a core part of your social program, your communication program?
Brian: This has been another area of study actually going back to the 90s before there were influence scores. I used to call it the IF, the influence factor, and its importance in business engagement. And I started a company in 1999 developed around simply influencer identification and engagement. By “influencer,” I meant people who had the capacity to cause effect, not a score. And by cause effect, that means that I recognize that you, Jay, are a master in the world of new business models and new engagement and media, and I have this particular solution or service or product. You’re going to be influential for me, but I can’t go to a service and find all of the people who have a score above 55 and expect them to take interest in what I do.
I have a report coming out on this very soon with Altimeter. That is the difference between social capital and influence, because they’re very different. To answer your question specifically, yes, an influencer engagement program will help businesses cut through the clutter instead of doing this en mass, one to many broadcast technique that they’re very used to doing. I’m focusing on the very select group of people who are incredibly connected within these sites – incredibly influential. I call it the one to one to many approach. Yes, there is value in that, whether it’s through an advocacy, through an influencer program or an engagement program, all of the above, an expert program, an advisory program. All of those things should run simultaneously.
But I do not know that I could find value in social capital relations, finding people who are influential. That said, we are seeing examples of sales, loyalty, and service aspects of the organization embracing all forms of people with social capital, because then they’re excited to share their experiences, and that’s a different value. I guess what I’m saying is it comes down to intent and the ability to know what it is that you want out of those relationships and then design the programs and find the right people that will help you execute, at least according to plan.
Jay: My favorite is the one to one campaign that is actually a broadcast campaign, where you send out 5,000 press releases to theoretical influencers at the click of a button. I’m like, ”
Wow, the irony of this is unbelievable.”
Brian: I have an inbox full of them.
Brian: Yeah. This is an important part of the book. It’s probably also, I wouldn’t say the easiest, but it’s the one where you can have the most impact. Really what the book is talking about in that section is change management, and this is the quickest part to getting on a new road to change. I talk about earlier in the book the idea that your brand is sort of this collection of shared experiences, and I show examples. If you search a particular brand on Twitter or Facebook and you feed that into a word cloud, all of these words are the words that people feel about your brand. There’s nothing you can do or say about that. You just recognize it. This is where a lot of business say, “This is exactly why we don’t want to be in new media, because we lose control.”
Jay: But you actually never had control, but that’s another point.
Brian: That’s right. You never had control, because those are the experiences, real experiences of people right now. You actually now have an opportunity to take control, because you can steer those experiences. There’s a lot of stories and formulas and frameworks that I’ve shared on how you can steer experiences. What’s your vision? What’s your mission? You’re talking about aligning with people, and what people are saying, especially in social media, is they want to be able to align with your values.
Jay: You have to know what those values are.
Brian: Yeah. What are those values? What is our vision? So a lot of companies that I work with today, we reexamine those. It’s quite a political conversation, as you can imagine, but when they see what the output can do, where people can align with it. And then more importantly, that it drives your online and your digital strategy and management programs, because you’re operating around a new vision that people can stand behind. Actually, it takes on meaning, and it’s not just a temporary thing, it’s actually a mantra.
Jay: Absolutely. I’m glad you documented the pieces of change management and the processes you go through, and you actually talk about identifying the “change team” within the organization – having people tasked with making this work. What sort of attributes do you look for in somebody who would be a good member of a change team?
Brian: I’ve got to make the point here that in “Engage” I talk about building a new media task force, where you bring cross-functional representatives together around the table so that each one of those stakeholders, quite honestly, getting their hands dirty and have stake in how social media is going to transform their particular function in the organization overall. But with a change management team, what we’re looking at is sort of taking that idea of a task force, decision makers across the organization who recognize that it’s much bigger than social media, that the business has to mean something to a different customer.
And quite honestly, it’s a healthy exercise to go through, but what we’re looking at is people who can speak on behalf of the employees. For example, HR becomes a big role in this. Legal becomes a big role in this. Leaders of lines of business, leaders of the executive team. In fact, it does talk about having an executive sponsor who can oversee this and has reports that bring it back to the top level. It also shows that the size and shape of that change management team is going to depend on sort of this internal audit that you do that talks to leaders and change agents within the organization to recognize the gaps, so that becomes your mission on how to bridge those. But it really is a powerful team to bring together, because really at the heart of what it is that their tasked to do is change the organization to matter for a new era of business.
Jay: I always find it to be the great paradox of modern business that everything in communications happens so much faster now. It’s Twitter in real-time and all these things. But yet, the type of change that you are recommending in “The End of Business as Usual” is absolutely slow. This is not “we’re going to make this happen in two weeks.” So here we are in this real-time world, but we are predicting change that happens over a period of years?
Brian: Yeah, absolutely. Many companies that I’ve worked with on these particular tasks, the stories I tell have been underway for two, three, four years already, and we’re still a long way to go. But understanding that it’s slow is why you have to begin sooner than later.
Jay: It’s a great book. I really, really enjoyed it. Thanks so much for being here, Brian. It’s The End of Business As Usual
Brian: Thank you, Jay.
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?
Treadmill Desk and Multi-tasking
Posted on 22. Sep, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, Convince & Convert News, jay baer, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Here’s video proof of my new treadmill desk. I like it a lot. I have significantly more energy in the afternoons, and while I’m not logging a ton of miles (too much travel inhibits usage), I figure 2.5 miles/day (approximately) whenever I’m home is a net positive. I can type (I wrote this blog post while on it), create presentations, do spreadsheets, and even write hand-written notes. The writing is the hardest part, but it’s not a big drawback for me because nobody can read my writing even if I’m not moving. Too many years on a keyboard, I suppose.
Treadmill Desk Equipment
While you can definitely make your own treadmill desk, I opted for the safety and security and ease of a purchased version. I use the TrekDesk Treadmill Desk
(affiliate). I got it on Amazon for about $479.
I use a Pro-Form CR 610 treadmill. It’s a mid-range model, but certainly does everything I need it to do – which is very little. Set it at .8 miles per hour on a 1.5% incline, and get walking! The desk fits right over the top of it, and is height adjustable for people of all sizes.
I only have two problems with my treadmill desk (one is pretty funny). Watch the short video to see what they are.
If you have the space and the inclination, I definitely recommend the treadmill desk. It’s multi-tasking at its finest.
Treadmill Desk and Multi-tasking
Posted on 22. Sep, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, Convince & Convert News, jay baer, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Here’s video proof of my new treadmill desk. I like it a lot. I have significantly more energy in the afternoons, and while I’m not logging a ton of miles (too much travel inhibits usage), I figure 2.5 miles/day (approximately) whenever I’m home is a net positive. I can type (I wrote this blog post while on it), create presentations, do spreadsheets, and even write hand-written notes. The writing is the hardest part, but it’s not a big drawback for me because nobody can read my writing even if I’m not moving. Too many years on a keyboard, I suppose.
Treadmill Desk Equipment
While you can definitely make your own treadmill desk, I opted for the safety and security and ease of a purchased version. I use the TrekDesk Treadmill Desk
(affiliate). I got it on Amazon for about $479.
I use a Pro-Form CR 610 treadmill. It’s a mid-range model, but certainly does everything I need it to do – which is very little. Set it at .8 miles per hour on a 1.5% incline, and get walking! The desk fits right over the top of it, and is height adjustable for people of all sizes.
I only have two problems with my treadmill desk (one is pretty funny). Watch the short video to see what they are.
If you have the space and the inclination, I definitely recommend the treadmill desk. It’s multi-tasking at its finest.
6 Takeaways From 23 Years as a Consultant
Posted on 29. Aug, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, jay baer, personal branding, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
This is an interview I did for my friend Debra Ellis for her blog series Lessons Learned and Learning. I write a lot about the importance of humanization here at C&C, so in an effort to follow my own advice, I repost the interview here, hoping you’ll learn something about me you didn’t know.
——————–
I am what the professional sports community would call an “old” 41 years old. I have a lot of business and professional miles on these tires, because I started my consulting career when I was just 18, and have started or owned six companies since then. Other than time off to finish my university degree, I’ve been working as a professional for 23 years.
I’m also not a big self-help guy. I don’t read many books on personal growth. I don’t go to seminars. It’s not that I don’t want to “Awaken the Giant Within” it’s just that I’m an experiential learner, and prefer to figure it out my own way – on my own timeline. It’s a slower, more dangerous, sometimes frustrating process. But it works for me.
Here’s some of what I’ve learned:
Some days you’re the pigeon. And some days you’re the statue.
Seriously, it’s never going as good as you think it is. And it’s never going as bad as you think it is. Letting yourself get emotional about short-term successes and failures is a waste of energy and will wear you down mentally.
Happiness is a process of elimination
Especially from a career standpoint, it’s easier and more reliable to figure out what you don’t like to do, than to figure out what you do want to do. Until you’ve done something (worked for yourself, worked for the government, joined a circus) it’s impossible to really know whether you’ll like it day-to-day.
You may be seduced by the IDEA of that occupation or style of work, but you may find the reality doesn’t match your expectation. That’s why I encourage young professionals to change jobs often, as long as the jobs are meaningfully different.
I know I don’t want to work for a big company, or the government, or a lot of other things, because I’ve done them.
Become friends with whom you hire, but don’t hire your friends
Some of my most rewarding relationships have been and are with people I’ve hired to work for or with me. You end up spending as much or more time with those people than you do with your family, so it’s natural for bonds to be built.
Conversely, hiring your friends to come work with you is a recipe for having fewer friends, and a struggling company.
No is more important than yes
If you’re any good at your profession, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to get involved in projects, take on new clients, volunteer, take a leadership role, etc. But just because you could do something doesn’t mean you should.
Most of the worst projects I’ve ever been involved in were times when I forgot this lesson and agreed to participate when it wasn’t my core strength – or a core strength of my company.
Try to live by the rule Derek Sivers espouses in “Anything You Want”: if the project or opportunity doesn’t make you say “hell, yeah!” then say “No, thank you.”
The inequality of dollars
Your top line revenue is irrelevant. Profit is all that matters. Taking a huge project where you don’t make any money can absolutely kill your company, especially if you’re small. Chasing new business at the expense of keeping your current (perhaps less sexy) clients happy, is another move that’s very risky.
Understand as quickly as possible what represents “good dollars” to your company, and focus your attention there.
Speed wins
I built my largest company based on two principles: telling the clients the truth about Web strategy and online marketing, even if it’s painful; and being the fastest firm in the business.
We live in a world of NOW, and people want their needs met as quickly as possible.
I know it’s all the rage to be a lifehacker and only check your messages a couple times a day. I hope those principles get even more popular, because they just create more opportunities for me. Whenever possible (when not on an airplane) I try to reply to emails, tweets, calls, etc. as quickly as possible. In under a minute in some cases. By being faster and more responsive than the other guy, you’re sending a strong message that you CARE MORE than the other guy. And that’s a profitable differentiator.
Connect With Us Here:
