Those of us involved in the social media space understand how powerful social media can be for things such as relationship building, PR, and marketing.  But should social media be pitched to companies that aren’t already using it?  I don’t think so.

In my opinion a company needs to realize how beneficial social media can be and should then actively look for help.  To me this signifies a commitment on the part of the company to want to learn and explore.  if you pitch social media to a company and have to convince them to use it, then you are taking away from the authenticity and transparency of the whole process.  Convincing a company to get involved in social media is like making a kid do his homework, sure it may get done but if you have to convince them do it then the end result is probably going to be sub par and then nobody is going to be happy.

This goes back to my whole philosophy of social media which is, be creative and be clever.  In general when a company comes to you for help they are more likely to be open minded which leads to creative and clever ways to use social media.  There is still this idea floating around that social media is relative simple, that all you need to do is create a blog, make a twitter account, upload a few youtube videos, and then people are going to want to talk to you and interact with your brand.  If this were the case then we would definitely every company out there with a blog or a twitter account and social media consultant type folks would be out of a job.  The truth is uploading the videos and creating the accounts is easy, sure anyone can input their email address and sign up for anything, but then what?

This is where the being creative and clever part comes into play, it’s one thing to have access to the tools but it’s an entirely separate thing to know what to do with the tools once you have access to them.  By pitching social media to a company and convincing them to get involved in the conversation you are going to limit the creativity and the cleverness of the campaign, which will ultimately end in failue.  Then the company you pitched to will have a negative association with social media and will most likely not get involved again.

It’s one thing to educate a company about social media put pitching them and convincing them to use it is a different story.

They say you can lead a horse to water but you can’t force it to drink.

What do you think?  Should you pitch social media?  Why or why not?

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Yesterday Lee Odden wrote a post on word visualization on search marketing blogs, I decided to do something similar for social media blogs.  I decided to look at Chris Brogan’s blog, techcrunch, Jeremiah Owyang’s blog, Read Write Web, and Mashable.  Here is what I found

Chris Brogan’s Blog

Techcrunch

Jeremiah Owyang’s Blog

Read Write Web

Mashable

Jacob Morgan’s Blog on Social Media, Technology, Marketing, and Life

I decided to include my blog as well just to be fair.

As Lee Odden points out, these cloud images come from a single day snapshot of the pages and do not analyze the entire site content.  I think this tool will become very interesting when coordinated with specific industry events such as an Apple Keynote, a social media conference, or some other tech/social media news.  It would be interesting to see how many of the large social media blogs out there talk about the same thing.  You can see from the visualizations above that today there is a fairly good mix of various topics across the different social media blogs.  This clouds were created with Wordle.

What social media blogs do you read and why?

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“House of Leaves” is a book based on the famous Winchester House in San Jose. Those of you not familiar with the story I highly recommend you Google it or visit the house itself. The house is of particular interest because of the many oddities, i.e. staircases that lead to nowhere, confusing passages, etc. So how do you avoid creating a social media strategy that leads to nowhere?

I’m assuming you have already thought about your goals and objectives for your social media strategy.

Step 1

Select your social media channels. Are you going to use Facebook to market your product? Are you going to upload your videos on Youtube? Are you going to join the global conversation on twitter? Obviously I can’t tell you which social media channels to invest in because it depends on what you are trying to accomplish and who you are trying to reach. Try to remember that if you have a very specific niche market that there are very specific social media channels that cater to niche markets. Check out the web 2.0 directory for the many niche’s.

Step 2

Create quality content. If you are going to succeed in your social media objectives you are going to have to create something of value for your users. Simply uploading a product demo onto Youtube does not constitute quality content. Maybe you offer some behind the scenes footage of how the project was created on youtube, offer a tutorial on how to use the product/features on Youtube, write about the overall marketplace or industry you are in on a blog(e.g. real estate), etc. Create something that provides value and if it’s a video make in unscripted. Maybe you can even offer special promotions via whatever social media channel you choose.

Step 3

Be active in the social media world. This means responding to comments when you get them, this means reaching out to people with similar interests, this means finding other industry related blogs and commenting on them, and this also means proactively engaging in conversations and attending events OFFLINE! Social media is not just about online; make sure you are active offline as well.

Step 4

Connect your social media channels together. This is a huge oversight for many companies and individuals. Don’t just create a Youtube channel or a Twitter account and leave them as independent entities, you have to cross promote them. If you uploaded a video on Youtube share the link on twitter on Facebook. If you write a quality post on your blog share it! All of the social media platforms out there make it very easy to cross promote. If you leave all of your social media channels isolated then you will definitely suffer from the “House of Leaves” with a strategy that goes nowhere. Connect and promote (don’t spam!) wherever applicable.

Step 5

Be creative with your social media strategy. If you run a dogie day care business then take pictures of the dogs playing around and upload them onto flickr, then when the owners come pick the dogs up, let them know where they can find the pics. If you are a movie company, why not create an online film? You can chop it up into pieces and when the first video receives a certain amount of views then you can release the next one. The possibilities are virtually endless but you have to be creative and you have to be clever, don’t be scared to try something new and don’t always try to copy what the competition is doing.

What else would you recommend to avoid the Social Media “House of Leaves?”

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Who do you consider to be a social media expert and why?  There are a lot of people out there who proclaim to be social media experts, I am not one of them.  First of all what is a social media expert?  Is it someone who knows how to use all of the social media platforms out there?  Perhaps the social media expert is someone who knows how to make money from social media?  Maybe the social media expert is someone who knows how to interact and engage with users?

In my opinion there is no such thing as a social media expert, there are only social media “learners.”  This is because social media is a continuously evolving and changing medium based on social interaction and relationships.  As social media learners we are all looking to get more information on the best approaches to social media.  There are those who understand social media and relationships and those that don’t.  I like to think that I do understand social media and relationships, yet I do not call myself a social media expert because social media is not an exact science, it is also an art.  To me this is like saying you are an expert painter, well what are you good at painting?  Still life, animals, landscapes?  And who is to judge what one painting or artist is better than the next?

I try to spend some time each day reading up on how companies are using social media.  I like to hear about the new and creative things that individuals and companies are doing so that I can learn from them and perhaps use their ideas for inspiration in the future.  No social media strategy is going to work 100% of the time, that is because you are not dealing with numbers and statistics, you are dealing with human beings with emotions, and sometimes it is easy to misread people or make mistakes.  It’s important for people to understand that social media is becoming more and more of a way of life, meaning that in order to be an “expert” you need to be able to read and understand people 100% of the time, and so far I have not met anyone that can do so.

Relationships are very fragile and should be handled with the utmost of care.  It’s easy to spend weeks thinking of a social media strategy, but when push comes to shove if your campaign hits the wrong emotional notes, your weeks of strategizing to get conversions is lost.  It may sound a bit touchy feely and a bit emotional but it’s the truth.  Social media deals with more than just a platform, a conversion metric, or ROI, it deals with culture, sociology, psychology and emotion.  The most effective strategy in my opinion is to be yourself.  Treat your social media approach as you would a new friend, be honest, be upfront and try to better yourself and the other person.  Once you change your mindset from one of conversion and ROI to one of relationships and communication, you will successfully be a social media “learner.”

Keep learning my friends

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(photo was taken from a small yogurt shop in Santa Cruz)

When I say critics I mean customers, users, clients, bloggers, etc. I mean anyone that uses your product or your service; how are you getting feedback from them? If you offer a product or service to people but then are not getting good or bad feedback, it is difficult to evaluate success, satisfaction, and company direction. Your users would love to talk to you and tell you what they love and hate about your product, let them! That way you know what you need to improve upon or what you should leave alone. There are many ways to get feedback from your users:

• Comments from blogs
• E-mails directly to management
• Surveys
• Phone calls with clients (or users/etc.)
• Meetings with clients (or users/etc.)
• Twitter replies or direct messages

The list can go on and on, virtually any social media platform can become a method of getting feedback from your “critics.” Feedback is probably one of the most valuable things for a company and should be encouraged, especially from the loyal users and enthusiasts. Look at the Apple fans. Year after year they demand and ask for things from Apple and most of the time they get it, because they are very vocal about what they want and Apple encourages and listens to user feedback. This is probably one of the greatest reasons that has contributed to Apple’s success. If Apple didn’t encourage and get feedback, how would they what features to build into their products? How would they know what they need to improve on? How would they know what the users expect? The answer is they wouldn’t. Don’t underestimate the importance of feedback and make sure to ask and encourage it whenever and wherever possible. Make it EASY for people to give feedback, if you ask for feedback and make users go through a 5 step process, then you might as well not bother.

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