As organizations increasingly turn to social media to engage with (or broadcast to) their audience, the etiquette for setting up a corporate account needs to be considered.

Frequently, an organization will set up a company-branded Twitter account, complete with a corporate logo as the avatar and devoid of any sense of personality. This seems “safer”, more like the sterile press releases they’re used to sending out. As well, by not tying it to an individual, there is less risk of that person moving on with all the brand equity and relationships they’ve established.

But here’s a secret, and the reason why you need to break away from what’s comfortable to be successful in social media.

You can’t hurt coke’s feelings. You also can’t get that grin of satisfaction when Coke turns to you for advice and tells you you’re a lifesaver. Despite what those big agencies will tell you, people can’t truly forge relationships with brands. So when I’m trimming my followers list because I can’t keep up, I may hesitate to unfollow @GibranX, who I met at a conference in November, but I wouldn’t worry about offending @CocaCola.

Beyond offering value, offer personality. It’s the real thing.

Related posts:

1. The OPEN Imperative
2. Personality not Included – Interview
3. So your boss wants you to tweet..

According to MarketingCharts.com, as of November 2009 Facebook has 46% of the US market share of social networking site visits.

Does that mean you need to have a Facebook presence, because nearly half the people you want to reach are on there? Well, is your target audience all US social networking site visitors? (This is a trick question. The answer is NO).

Don’t get caught up in trends if they’re not relevant to your specific objectives and audience. Respect your new or potential constituents and refine your strategy to fit them, not the amorphous majority of all Internet users.

That’s why I like the Forrester Social Technographics Profile Tool. While it still makes some broad generalizations about Internet usage, at least there are some distinctions made. Obviously, direct surveying of your audience will help even more in ensuring your strategy fits with their needs and behaviors.

Related posts:

1. What’s the deal with “Crowdsourcing”?
2. Social Media Confession: I Hate Online Video
3. Want effective online marketing? DON’T build a website.

The other day I ‘fanned’ Heartless Wheels on Facebook.

Heartless Wheels are a specific type of wheel used for roller derby; they are narrower and lighter than other types of quad wheels like Atom or Radar Wheels. Some of my fellow skaters use Heartless Wheels, but I don’t. So when I fanned them, one of my Facebook friends asked me why.

Yesterday, Heartless announced, via their Facebook page, a contest to win a free set of wheels. Now my friend understands.

For all extents and purposes, I’m not a brand advocate for Heartless. They don’t have a single cent of my hard-earned money. But that could change if handled correctly. Obviously, winning a contest is going to make me a true advocate for their brand.

Introducing me to their products in a non-pushy way can also get me there. Lululemon does a great job at featuring their products on their Facebook page. Got questions about a product? Ask it here and they will respond back. This is super for a brand where people may not be able to “try something on/out” before buying. Dedicated administrators can answer questions or encourage discussion, or eventually the passionate community can entertain itself.

Too often in social media, we concentrate on what we want to have happen (generate fans, comments, and ultimately sales) without considering what our target audience wants. How can we help them achieve their goals, and then how does that translate into our own? What will encourage them to fan us, and then to continue to be engaged, and eventually perform some action beyond hitting “become a fan”?

(Incidentally: an article on Inside Facebook outlines the policy regarding requiring individuals to become fans in order to enter contests on Facebook. Definitely worth a read if you’re planning on creating a contest on the page itself.)

Related posts:

1. Google Does The Open Brand
2. 1.8 million Victoria’s Secret fans on Facebook
3. does your brand need to be OPEN to fully embrace social media?

I’m a marathoner: in 2009, I completed 7 marathons, ranging in finishing time from 3:29:36 to 6:42:15. Why the big discrepancy? Every race is different.

There are external factors: course and weather, as well as internal factors: training, nutrition, mindset. And all can have an huge impact on the end result.

When you look at a campaign out in the wild: either one you’ve done yourself, or something you’ve seen a competitor take on, don’t assume you can replicate the success. Certainly, you can learn what works and what doesn’t, but there are so many different factors, there are no guarantees.

Frankly, the excitement and challenge of the unknown is what keeps me in the race.

Courtesy John Noltensmeyer: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnnynotes/

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In my first day of Linguistics 201: Semantics, the instructor showed us a British roadsign:

All the students laughed at the unintentional ambiguity of the statement. And in our amusement, I don’t know that any of us actually focused on the true meaning of the sign.

Every time you put something into the public domain, you risk being misunderstood. Step outside your domain of knowledge and bias, and consider how it may be interpreted by others. Bonus points if you can actually craft a message that really resonates and speaks more to others than to yourself.

Forget what you’re trying to say – what are you really communicating?

Image courtesy of Lazlo Woodbine

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While at Resource Interactive, I took training in and worked on several products with the ATG product suite. ATG is at the core an e-commerce solutions provider, with a stated goal as follows:

Our goal: to power the world’s most engaging and rewarding online shopping experiences. We are our customers’ first stop in providing the solutions, services, and ongoing guidance needed to power a more relevant, personal e-commerce Web site; continually attract and captivate new prospects; convert them to buyers; and ensure their satisfaction so they become loyal, repeat, profitable customers.” (emphasis mine)

How can software ensure something is engaging, rewarding and personal? Well, by offering a more personalized experience, I suppose. When I was enrolled in ATG training last Spring, we spent a fair amount of time learning how to display relevant content based on explicit user-specified preferences and more subtle user behavior on the site. Increasingly, we come to expect that our experience on a web site will precisely meet our own needs. And indeed, with the plethora of resources online competing for our attention, web visitors have the luxury of looking elsewhere if a site is frustrating or in any way lacking.

Amazon.com and Pandora are two well-known services that make recommendations based on the users’ previous interactions with the site. In some way, this is the equivalent of the waitress remembering our “usual” and letting us know about something new on the menu they think we’ll enjoy; we are forming a relationship, and there are inherent benefits thereto.

Both of these services offer suggestions based on what we’ve done. But as the web becomes increasingly social, the notion of leveraging the wisdom of the crowds and the power of personal influence may come into play. You’ve likely seen this before, but did you pay attention? Again, Amazon lets you know what others purchased. Does this help sway your decision, or introduce other options?

Facebook taps more directly into your network. Friend suggestions may be based on your networks, your employment or school history, shared friends.. or other attributes. Recently several people have noted they are being suggested friends who share the same name as their existing friends. Unlike the Amazon and Pandora examples earlier, there is no link to see why these items are being suggested: Facebook is blatant in their name-dropping. The entire basis of their social ads (in all the incarnations, from beacon to sponsored ads with photos to friend recommendations) is to serve up “tailored ads” based on “actions your friends have taken on the site”. Whereas ATG stuck to providing an enriched experience based on an individual’s behavior, this extends to their trust network as well.

Recommendations are intended to offer a more engaging, personalized experience. Or to increase interaction and sell product or services. Recommendations may be subtle (showing contextually-relevant content), or explicit (“you may also like”). The rationale behind the suggestions may be disclosed or suppressed from the user, and lastly the recommendations may be made based on system rules, the behavior of the user or the behavior of the user’s network.

Are there certain situations where these different types of recommendations work well? Obviously for explicit recommendations based on the behaviors of friends, the site must be aware of such a network. But beyond those logistics, there must be merit to such a recommendation. I’m not necessarily going to select a paint color, a washer and dryer or a home based on the preferences or buying habits of my network. But offering me a complementary color palette based on a color I select provides a useful service. In contrast, the recommendation of something social like an event is likely to be much more effective if it comes from someone within a trusted network.

How do you think these different types of recommendations affect your purchase or engagement decisions? Are any more appealing than others?

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1. what’s the deal with… personalization
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3. The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited – Book Review

In addition to being a marathon runner, I also recently started skating with one of the top ranked roller derby leagues in the nation, the Denver Roller Dolls. In addition to skating, every member of the league must serve on a committee. When I joined in January 2009, I made the simple choice to join the PMS committee (public relations, marketing, sponsorship), and quickly got involved on the website redesign project that was taking place.

The project was fun because it was well within my comfort zone, yet I got to sit on the “client” side of the table for once. I’ve been able to derive and execute on strategy with almost complete support from others. It’s an ongoing effort, but it’s certainly been enjoyable thus far.

The site design and development was already underway before I joined the committee: Ryan Lee of Think to Make came up with a great design, and pulled in developer KC Tunstan of 525Creative to make it come to life. As a recovering developer, obviously I’m the worst sort of client, but I was really impressed with KC’s work and his dedication to the project. The guys did a great job at incorporating a few of the last minute suggestions I threw in: adding news to the homepage and a twitter feed to the fans section.

The site was built with Expression Engine, and KC provided great documentation for updating the site. As a result, we’re no longer limited to having a few individuals with HTML experience updating the site. Because we’re an organization based on events (bouts, service projects, appearances), it was important that information could be added easily and expire automatically. KC also created three RSS feeds for us: News, Events and Bouts.

Two weeks ago, the Denver Roller Dolls were featured on Fox 31 news, and we decided it was time to “flip the switch”. The new site was live: now, did anyone know (or care?)

Before each bout, we give away a few pairs of tickets via social media. This month I ran a twitter promotion that encouraged individuals to “tweet to win”. Yes, after reading the ReadWriteWeb article that basically called this sort of promotion “spam”, I feel bad about it, but at the time I felt it was a great way to introduce our new site – people visited our site for contest details, and hopefully explored it further.

The RSS feed I mentioned earlier? Of course I created a widget from it, to make it easier for our fans to receive updates about our activities. I run the RSS feed through Feedburner so that I could monitor subscriptions and item use.

With the ease with which we can now do site updates, I’ve been eager to ensure our news is getting pushed out to our other online outlets. I don’t maintain our MySpace, Facebook or Twitter profiles, but I’ve been working with Jersey Trouble to figure out how best to use these sites. We recently created a ping.fm account to ensure consistent messaging across several of the platforms, and just make it easier on ourselves to continue to offer our fans fresh content.

Just as I preach to clients that you can’t simply build a great website and expect people to flock to it, my current focus is to drive people to our website. The other day University of Denver film student Beca Freitas-Wolfe posted “Rollermama” on Vimeo. This was a film she produced with fellow students Jason Bach and Kim Crane, featuring some of our players. Rather than pointing people to Vimeo to view the great short, I pulled it into our own video gallery and promoted Rollermama on the Denver Roller Dolls website instead.

The fun part about a side project is the lack of constraints, the challenging part about a side project is the lack of accountability. I have plenty of ideas to further enhance the online presence of the league, but I want to ensure that I’m being responsible to the league and their overall objectives and not acting independently. Still, it’s been a fun project thus far and I look forward to continuing to work on our organization’s digital initiatives.

Related posts:

1. Develop an Effective Online Marketing Campaign by Asking ‘Why’ Not ‘What’
2. Want effective online marketing? DON’T build a website.
3. Facebook’s Project Beacon and Online Privacy

The folks at my former agency Resource Interactive work with some pretty big clients. It was fun to be among the first to hear about the new Victoria’s Secret facebook presence (one of my former colleagues, Michael Krotscheck can truly claim to be their number one fan!)

VS is a huge brand with a huge following and an already well-established web presence, so it was no surprise when they amassed an incredible amount of fans. Yet even I was amazed when one of the Associate Creative Directors at Resource tweeted:

Wow, it may well be a record.

So what?

Many organizations are moving away from using pageviews as a success measure. Yes, people are visiting your site. But are they learning / buying / whatever your objective is? If not, do views matter?

Sure, we obsess over numbers as something quantifiable. There are many programs are out there now to “increase your twitter followers”, because we have this idea that a larger audience is important.

We know Victoria’s Secret is a huge brand, and 1.8 mil is a huge number. But what does the fanning really indicate? What I’d love to see is how this number compares to the number of email subscribers they have, or how many catalogs they send out.

Right now, the number is simply saying “1.8 million people who know about VS are on Facebook and willing to click a button to say they like it”. How does that translate into being good for business?

One feature of the page that is really well done is (what appears to be) exclusive content. With so many folks fanning the page, VS knows they have a lot of eyeballs on their content. Could this almost be considered a “Super Bowl” mentality? You know you have great exposure?

Hm, that’s actually an interesting analogy, since Victoria’s Secret promoted their first ever online fashion show via a Super Bowl ad back in 1999 (Incidentally, the fashion show attracted 1.5 million web visitors, which at that time was a higher volume than the site could support.)

So anyway.. just buying ad time during the Super Bowl doesn’t guarantee results: the ad itself still needs to stand out. Super Bowl ads garner a lot of attention because time and effort is put into making them great due to the expected exposure. So really, all that Victoria’s Secret is achieving through amassing an incredible amount of fans is raising the bar to come up with the “Super Bowl ad” equivalent of a Facebook page. The numbers themselves may not be significant, but what they have the potential for.

Yesterday, VS debuted a new scent. Are people excited about this? You decide:

Yes, that’s over 500 comments. About a new product (or rather: an event of a product launch). Some of the comments are completely ridiculous, but there is still some level of engagement going on here. People are taking note of the message Victoria’s Secret is sending out, and responding to it. The relationship between consumer and brand is deepened. It’s questionable if simply having that number of followers with no measurable engagement (be it people commenting and offering feedback, sharing with friends, or otherwise) is useful at all, other than to have a number to mention.

I don’t mean to imply that creating a fan base of 1.8 million in three weeks is anything less than amazing, and I know many brands would love to be able to see that level of growth. But building a base of brand evangelists hasn’t been something VS has had to worry about for awhile. Rather, their greater challenge will be in figuring how best to leverage their network and strong following. And rather than that killer 30 second ad, let’s hope they’re prepared for a long-term online relationship with their followers!

Related posts:

1. Is your Facebook Focus Privacy or Publicity?
2. Why Should I Fan Your Brand?
3. Why are you on Facebook?

While many may not be familiar with the term ‘crowdsourcing‘, most Internet users are familiar with Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopedia. Indeed, it has even gained some legitimacy as some courts have allowed the inclusion of information found in Wikipedia to be used in cases. When evaluating your online presence, should your organization have a listing on Wikipedia?

Who should control the message?

Wikipedia is an open platform: anyone can add to or edit an entry. While the community policies itself fairly well against abuse, it does not limit who can contribute to the entry. Are you comfortable with the primary source of information about your organization being composed by others?

Who do you want cited?

If you have a website and a Wikipedia entry, which do you think people will cite elsewhere? Do you really want Wikipedia to get the backlink?

Those links from Wikipedia to your site don’t ‘count’ anyway

External links from a Wikipedia page are “nofollow” links – that is, search engines either don’t follow the link to index it, or don’t ‘count’ the link in assessing the site’s PageRank.

Uh… backlink? PageRank?

Part of what influences your Google PageRank is the number of links back to your site, relative to the importance of the sites doing the linking. So if CNN.com links to your site as a credible resource, that link is weighted more heavily than your aunt’s Website about cats. So if part of your site ranking in search engines is related to how many links there are to your site, you want people to link to your site, rather than to Wikipedia. This is doubly important since you don’t even benefit PageRank-wise from a link to your site from Wikipedia.

I still want to be on Wikipedia!

Ok, ok. You can create a page on Wikipedia describing your organization…provided you’re considered Notable.

Part of what makes Wikipedia the resource it is are the standards that have been established. For a topic to be considered worthy of its own article, it must be considered “worthy of note”. In the case of organizations and companies:

An organization is generally considered notable if it has been the subject of significant coverage in reliable, independent secondary sources. Trivial or incidental coverage of a subject by secondary sources is not sufficient to establish notability. All content must be verifiable.
(from Wikipedia, obviously!)

The article on Notability for Organizations clearly calls out the need for verifiable, non-editorialized content. In my experience, it is important to find several external references and cite as much as possible in your entry. Press releases issued by the organization itself are not considered a credible resource.

There is an entire policy page on “what Wikipedia is not“, in which it clearly states:

• Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought
• Wikipedia is not a mirror or a repository of links, images, or media files
• Wikipedia is not a directory
• Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information

Wikipedia has become recognized as the resource it is in part due to these restrictions. If your content has received interest elsewhere online, it may be considered as appropriate for inclusion. But just because anyone may add an entry to Wikipedia does not mean each topic is appropriate for inclusion. Before jumping to add your content to this venue, it is important to ensure others also find your content notable. Having external references to cite in your entry may well make the difference between exposure and deletion.

Related posts:

1. 6 Reasons Your Organization Needs Google Voice
2. Learning about Learning to Listen
3. What is IT? Information vs Interactive Technology

The inevitable business card exchange occurs at a networking event. You meet Jay Simpson, who tells you he’s an IT director.

IT? What does that even mean anymore?

A few years ago, IT was “Information Technology”.

Information technology is a general term that describes any technology that helps to produce, manipulate, store, communicate, and/or disseminate information.
- from Wikipedia – Information Technology

But more often these days we speak not of Information Technology but of Interactive.

Interactive Marketing refers to the evolving trend in marketing whereby marketing has moved from a transaction-based effort to a conversation…Interactive marketing is not synonymous with online marketing, although interactive marketing processes are facilitated by internet technology.
- from Wikipedia – Interactive Marketing

The astute will notice that the second definition is about marketing and doesn’t explicitly refer to technology at all. The focus is less on the specific technical specifications and moreso on the application thereof. Interactive also encompasses the user experience: how individuals engage with and how they perceive this engagement with technology to achieve their goals.

At the NTEN conference in San Francisco in April 2009, Beth Kanter declared in a session about social media metrics that Page views are dead. We can no longer simply focus on the technological implementation to measure success. We now look at engagement and influence, and need to actually consider how technology helps with meeting user goals, and then organizational objectives.

It is not sufficient to see technology as simply a tool to “produce, manipulate and store” information. While information is obviously important, it is truly the application thereof that is of significance.

(Photo credit: Shapeshift on Flickr)

Related posts:

1. Technology and Social Media at NTC
2. Resource Interactive Representation at Spring
   2008
3. iCitizen – Open Source Communication Channels?