What chat client do you use to talk to people online?

Right now if you want to chat with someone you have to log into a platform, whether the platform is aim, gtalk, or facebook is irrelevant.  The point is that you need to log in to “something” to have access to your friends, contacts, networks, etc.  Online networking and communication is fragmented with a countless number of platforms, chat clients, tools, and resources.  There is information everywhere yet nowhere.   How do you think online communication will change in the future?  What are the possibilities?

Perhaps this is a hypothetical topic, perhaps not; but think about this.  What if the internet became it’s own social network.  Meaning, there was no login, there was no platform.  What if every time I moved my mouse and showed that I was active online, all of my contacts and connections immediately new and could connect with me?  Using the internet as a social network would make the internet the ultimate aggregator and macro social network that could exist.  But is it probable or even possible, and what would happen to sites such as facebook?  I’m curious to see what will happen to social media and online community collaboration and communication in the next few years.  Could internet service providers, computer manufacturers, and technology companies offer a universal client that came preinstalled on every machine and with every internet connection, for free?  If not, then how much would it cost?

We are seeing sites such as friendfeed and socialmedia act as aggregators and we are also seeing sites such as ning allow for the creation of extreme niche networks.  We are moving to the fringes on both sides, to two extremes, the ultimate niche networks and the ultimate aggregator networks, but when does it stop?  How much of a niche network can you get and how much of an aggregator network can you get?

I ask these questions because I think it’s important to look at the big picture and to understand where things are now and where they can possibly go.  I don’t know we wold create an internet social network that acts as the ultimate aggregator but then there was a time when people didn’t know how they would light up a room, explore space, or communicate with each other without seeing each other.  We have the technology…will it happen, when?

What are your thoughts?  Can the internet become it’s own social network?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and anything else relationg to the subject.

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One thing I don’t hear a lot of social media consultants/experts/gurus or whatever talk about is starting the social media strategy process.  If you listen to Forrester you use the POST (people, objectives, strategy, technology) method and if you listen to any other consultant they will all say you start with listening to the conversation before you engage.  Ok, that’s great.  I say start with your SEO and your analytics.  Let me explain.

If you are a large brand or company you are using an analytics solution such as google analytics (you are using one…right?) to track your traffic and understand your visitors.  Do you seeing where I’m going with this?  I think the first phase a social media strategy should be understanding what your users search for when they are looking for your product or brand.  For example if you are Microsoft and you are looking to create a social media strategy around Office, what are you going to do?  Sure you can “listen” and research around the web to see what people are saying about your brand, but the answer may be right in front of your nose.

Let’s briefly outline some of the things your analytics can show you and why these things are valuable:

• What keywords users are typing into search engines to find you, this can give you a good idea of how users see your company or your brand.  What keywords or phrases do they associate with you/your brand?

• What keywords users are NOT typing into search engines to find you.  If the company brands itself as one thing, but the users see the company as something else; well then you know you have an issue here.  Understanding this will help you create your communities.

• Where your traffic is coming from, is it through digg, twitter, etc?  This can give you a good idea of where your communities already exist (if you have them) or where you need to create them.  If I see a good portion of my traffic coming from twitter, then I probably already have an evangelist or a community that I can tap into.

• What part of the world are my users coming from?  This will help me understand where I need to focus my efforts of community building.  If I am a global brand trying to target Germany yet I see no traffic coming from there, then perhaps I want to step up my game, maybe hold a few offline events/speaking engagements, create a more German targeted site, etc.

• Top content categories.  If I have a page with several tabs (X, Y, Z) and I see that Y is the most popular tab, then perhaps I would want to build a community around “Y” or see if existing communities exist.  Knowing what your users love the most on your site is a great starting point for a social media campaign or strategy.

• Visitor segmentation by language.  This is simple yet powerful.  If I see that I have an English speaking site that is getting interest from a lot of foreign speaking countries, then I should create communities or microsites for my foreign speaking friends.

• Drilldown by network location.  I can actually see if most of my users are coming from charter, comcast, verizon, bellsouth, etc.  Understanding this may help in possible cross-branding communities or promotions through social media channels.

• Visitor loyalty lets me see how many times the same person has visited my site.  This can help me understand if I have possible fans or evangelists out there, of course this is crucial.  If I see that I have a few brand evangelists I would invite them to help me promote my content.

These are just a few of the things your analytics can show you.  Keep in mind that this all information you have access to right now at the click of a button.  Open your analytics and get to know your users and consumers.  I’m not knocking listening and I’m sure some of you may even group this into the listening phase but I have not heard about or read any posts that mention starting social media from your analytics or SEO.  The benefit of having a background in SEO and in social media is that you can understand how to sync and utilize the two together to build a powerful and effective strategy.  Every time I think about social media I inherently think of intertwining SEO.

Something as simple as understanding what keywords your visitors use to get to your site can help you understand the anchor text to use when/if you write guest posts, which in turn can help you rank higher in search engines for your target phrases, which in turn can help increase brand awareness and visibility and hopefully and eventually increase revenue.

Yes, there are a lot of variables that come into play such as whether or not a company is already using SEO.   The point of this post is to get you to realize and understand that you have a lot of the data you need to get started with a social media strategy right in front of you.  Your site analytics is a very powerful tool that will give you a lot of targeted information specifically about your users.

How are you using SEO and analytics information to mold and form your social media strategy?

Thanks for reading!

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I was speaking with my friend and colleague Tyler Willis today about social media and he made a good point which should be pretty obvious but is oftentimes overlooked.  The topic dealt with being able to debate and articulate your position in a conversation.  This doesn’t have to deal directly with social media, but in our case it did.  In social media (and for that matter in any field), there are going to be different types of people; some will be extremely analytics and ROI focused, others will understand that 1.5 billion people are on the web and it’s crucial that their company is too, and other folks will be right in between.

The key to addressing anyone on any topic is to understand both sides of the argument.  If you’re in the social media space this means understanding why an executive or an employee may have a problem with social media (or with anything else for that matter) as well as understanding the arguments for social media use.  The way you convince people or win a debate/argument is to understand and present both sides of the argument and then show how one of those sides falls apart.

Here are some arguments that an executive at a company might have against using social media:

• It’s too time consuming
• People can bash us online
• Can’t track direct sales or revenue
• Don’t have the resources
• Time could be better spent on things that are trackable
• It builds personal brand but not company brand

Here are some arguments that a social media strategist (such as myself) might have for using social media (directly correspond to arguments above)

• Time spent building relationships is the most valuable thing your company/brand can do.  Every relationship you build is another consumer or user that you can reach out to for feedback or information.  Every relationship you build can turn into a brand evangelist which can then turn into another 5 relationships.  Without user and consumer relationships your brand cannot succeed.

• It’s not a bad thing if people bash you online, it’s how you deal with the negative comments that matters.  Negative comments are just as valuable as positive ones because you will understand customer pain points and how to fix them.

• In some ways you can track direct sales or revenue.  For example, Dell made over $500,000 from listing discount and refurbished products through a twitter account that they created.  You can also track and measure things such as links, comments, brand image, etc. that overall contribute to brand awareness and brand visibility.  Think about how much more trackable that is then a large print advertisement or a bill board.

• If you don’t have the resources start small.  Create a blog and devote one hour a day to it.  As it grows and as the conversations increase you can begin to add other social media channels and features to the mix.

• Again social media is far more trackable than any other type of medium.  It all depends on how you set out to define your goals.  If you want leads you can get leads, if you want increase brand awareness and visibility then you can do that too.  Anything online is much more trackable than anything offline.

• It builds both.  Take a look at what Richard at Dell or Frank at Comcast are doing.  Both are representing companies that have received kudos from the entire social media community.  Frank responds to every comment or complaint about Comcast, I posted one earlier today and received a response within 5 mins.  Frank is saving Comcast a lot of time and money by acting as their social media customer support representative; he can fix and diagnose problems from twitter!  Richard from Dell reported that since the company started using social media that their negative online presence has decreased by 30%  These are just two examples of how individuals have been able to use social media to build brand awareness while contributing to their personal brand.  Personal brand does not sacrifice company brand, it enhances it!

Now it’s your turn.  Let’s hear some of your arguments against or for social media.  How you debate for social media with an executive?  If you were (are) an executive how would you debate against social media with a strategist?

thanks for reading!

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This year is slowly coming to an end and folks are already planning their new and exciting conferences and events for next year.  I’ve been contacted by a few people who want to know what I think some of the hot topics in the social media space are going to be for 2009.  I definitely think there are a lot of interesting and “hot” topics, some of which are currently pressing issues of this year.  With that said here are a few of what I consider “hot” topics in the social media space for 2009:

• Budgeting for social media.  Who pays for it and why?  Should social media be it’s own department that generates it’s own departmental results?

• Video marketing and distribution.  No doubt the video space is hot and will be hot next year.  How can companies utilize video marketing and distribution channels to reach their audience and drive company goals and objectives?

• Social media tools.  What should companies be using and why?  What are the new tools and platforms that are making their way into the spotlight?

• ROI/Value/Measurement, whatever you want to call it, companies and executives are going to want to know what they can expect and how they can measure it.

• Executive and employee social media education and training.  How can companies go about changing the corporate culture to encourage social media usage?  Do they want to?  Why or why not?

• How do corporations deal with social media obstacles.  For example if one person complains on a blog and a company gives a refund does the company now owe a refund to everyone who complained?  How can corporations manage their users in a cost effective and efficient way?

• Communication, both internal and external.  What are the possibilities with social media?  What are the different ways that companies can use social media to build relationships with their users and with their employees and stakeholders?

• Mobile social media and mobile marketing.  What does the horizon look like?  Is it still too early for mobile?  What are the successes and failures?

• Advertising.  Who are the social media network advertisers?  Does advertising on social networks work and to what degree?  How do you advertise on social networks?

• Scalability.  How do companies implement social media strategies across various platforms, domains, geographical locations?  Can a company scale a social media campaign globally?  How?  What resources are required?

• Case studies and results.  Companies are going to want to know about the successes and failures from 2008.

• Integrating social media and traditional media, can it be done?  How?

These are a few of the topics that I think are going to be hot for 2009.  Some of them are hot topics in 2008!  I’d love to hear from all of you, what are some of the issues/topics that you think are going to be hot in 2009?

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You can spin it and call it anything you want but the point is that there needs to be something to show for using social media and that “something” needs to be worth more than or as much as what was put in…why?  Let’s say your company set up a social media campaign that cost 100k a year.  The campaign was generating links, building relationships with users, coming up with product ideas, and just overall making customers happy.  Let’s also assume that the company tried to put an ROI or dollar amount around the social media campaigns/strategies that they were creating and each time the ROI amounted to something much less than the cost of 100k for the year.  Then what?  Do you cancel all social media efforts?  Do you close down the blog, suspend the twitter account, remove the facebook fan page and just pretend it never happened?  Then what?  What do you think will happen to your users that used to talk to you and engage with you?  You can bet that they aren’t going to be very happy, in fact your users may reach out to social media to bash your company for bailing out on them.

The ROI before engaging in social media and the ROI once you engage in social media are different.  Before you engage in social media your ROI is usually a guess or an estimation of what you want or hope to achieve.  Once you start social media your ROI changes depending on how your users respond to your campaign/ideas/strategies.  If you started a social media campaign and then found out that your users really hate you, then your ROI now focuses on maintaining a positive brand image (in addition to the other things you had).

The assumption that companies make is that social media needs to bring in a dollar amount at the end of the day, I’m going to play devils advocate and say when it comes down to dollars and cents, social media is going to lose you money!  Now if your a company, you probably don’t want to hear this.  However, think of social media as the extra bonus that your customers get for your product or service.  “Hey if you buy our product you are also going to get to build a relationship with us, help us come up with product ideas, get access to special promotional offers, etc.”  Think of social media as the “free prize inside.”  Companies create offers, discounts, deals, etc. all the time that don’t necessarily make them money.  Think about the Super Bowl ads that cost around 3 million for a 30 second spot, you think you are going to put a dollar amount on your ROI from that?  You think you are going to see these “results” that you care about?  Absolutely not.  Social media does not cost millions of dollars and you will probably see a much higher success rate?  How high?  I don’t know, engage in social media and find out.

Let’s use a different example.  Remember when Apple released the 3g Iphone and then lowered the price?  There were a lot of people out there who were pretty angry because they purchased the iphone before the price drop.  What did Apple do?  It gave folks who purchased the phone within a certain time period a refund for the difference.  Did this make them money? No.  Did it keep customers happy?  Yes.  Let’s also look at call centers and customer service support centers from around the world.  All day people call in and complain a product or service.  These departments exist to make users happy and so that customers will continue to shop with them and tell their friends about their products.

I don’t think we should convince or persuade anyone to do anything.  If you don’t want to use social media then don’t use it.  The clever executives and managers understand the value of a relationship, they understand that having users interact with and participate with a company is one of the most valuable things a company can ask for.  Want social media examples or case studies? There are plenty.

check out this list from Peter Kim

or this list from Now is Gone

In fact, has anyone come across horrible social media examples that have actually really hurt a business, product, or service?

The truth is that measuring things is not THAT big of a deal.  If companies really wanted to they could spend tons of money on creating expensive software, creating correlations, trying to predict behavior, etc.  For social media at least, the ROI of trying to measure ROI may not be worth it.  If we are talking about spending thousands of dollars on a social media campaign/strategy and double that on an advanced analytics package then why bother?

I really want people to start thinking about social media and communications differently.  I want people to understand that justifying something based on a dollar amount is not always the most logical thing to do.

What do you think, am I just nuts?

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