CopyDiva

Last night’s Mile High Social Media Club at The Whisky Bar in Denver was quite a happening. It’s great to see repeat attendees, plus many new ones as well. And, to top it off, the panel was terrific too.

Bryan Person did a great job of moderating the conversation about community. The focus of the evening was understanding community from the perspective of a community manager of a public community (not a private branded community). TIm Poindexter, from Disaboom, and Tiffany Childs from Denver’s Yelp community gave some interesting perspectives on:

• growing a young community and making it vibrant and engaging enough for members and others to want to participate
• managing a member who is trying to hijack a discussion
• dealing with people who violate the terms of service
• how companies can stay authentic within these communities (by being honest about who you are, good advice for anyone in a community)

It’s always interesting to hear what questions people have. Being as there were many PR people in the crowd, they got a number of questions about how to handle bad reviews (on Yelp), how to pitch story ideas to community bloggers and the community managers, and how to sponsor or advertise in the community without offending the members.

Thanks to the people at Flock for the T-shirts we were able to give to each of our speakers.

Our December event is in the process of being finalized, and is expected to be a breakfast in Broomfield, possible at Sun Microsystem’s offices at Interlocken - close enough to Boulder for those of you who find driving all the way to Denver just too much.

Stay tuned for details within the next week.

Great post today on copyblogger about the effects of social influence on the value of messages online - specifically, in social media. The gist of it, is, how you say it (your message) ends up being your message, so make sure to frame your initial message carefully. Read more, its worth the read: How to Change the World Using Social Media

Rohit Bhargava shares his experiences as one of the 25 — and his take on its effectiveness - plus, there’s some good conversation in the comments as well:

Influential Marketing Blog: Unpacking The “Pepsi 25″ Social Media Rebranding Campaign.

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I, as well as some other folks, have been thinking alot lately about influencer lists. Top 50 this, most influential that, etc. Are they a sham, do they have some value, what is the constant fascination and desire to be on one of these lists?

Then, yesterday, Pepsi sent out promo kits to 25 “influential” personalities in the social media space, to drum up discussion of Pepsi’s new logos. Now, certainly, there aren’t Pepsi influencers in social media. And, there’s no saying that Charlene Li, Chris Brogan, Peter Shankman and others have any interest in, or even drink Pepsi. In fact, I’d reason that perhaps one of the reasons these folks received these packages has to do with their personal/professional relationship with Pepsi’s new global social media strategist, my friend Bonin Bough. Or, their relationship with Steve Rubel, who’s PR firm does work with Pepsi.

So, does influence matter here, or really, is this more about personal connection? And, other than the blip from blog posts, flickr pix and tweets from yesterday, what will Pepsi gain from the experience? They’ve got 100+ subscribers to their pepsi cooler Friendfeed group. What’s that doing for them? Is the goal good will, warm fuzzies from the online community?

Thinking about this reminds me of when I went to pitch a measurement account to Crispin, Porter & Bogusky. Talking about influencer marketing when you’re pitching people who hawk french fries is, well, just a bit silly. There are no french fry influencers. The only people who might regularly talk about Burger King french fries are the food pundits, and they are not saying nice things about those french fries. So, trying to influence them as a way to sell more french fries isn’t a good strategy.

Pepsi has a deep challenge — like other mass market producers and big brands — how can they be highly targeted in social media, which is all about building connections, when they pitch a product with mass appeal? We’ve heard about many of the experiments that larger brands are making in social media, many of them failures or showing few tangible results. Smaller companies seem to do better, at least anecdotally, because they don’t have the scalability problem of big brands.

Maybe Pepsi will figure out the magic bullet in all this for the rest of the big brand marketers. Then again, maybe its just a cool experiment.

Mass market companies will continue to be challenged by the social media need (desire? opportunity?) to go small scale and targeted. It’s not a model they understand or are comfortable with.

Here’s an article I wrote for Energy Central’s Marketing Muse publication - a broad brushstroke on social media marketing:

The Social Media Bandwagon: Jump on board using your marketing sense

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, chances are you’re hearing the drumbeat of social media marching it’s way over and threatening to overwhelm you with new technology, too much information and the grand prophecy of solving all your marketing and communications problems. With so much swirling around, it’s really difficult to make sense of it. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, blogging, social networks and on and on. What can these really do for you in marketing? Will they solve your marketing problems, or will they just consume more time and resources?

The answer can most definitely be a “yes” to all of the above, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The biggest problem for businesses right now is understanding how to derive value from social media. Fortunately there are many potential opportunities to gain value, from product development to internal communications as well as customer support and marketing. But, where do you start? Here are some typical questions I get:

• What tactics work best for the energy industry?
• I get how it works for B2C companies, but how can you implement in B2B companies?
• How can I make any time to participate?
• Nobody talks about (your product or industry here) online, so what’s the point?
• How can I sell my boss on moving some of our budget away from traditional channels and into social media?

Talking tactics

Let me put this out there first: Social media are very new and new forms appear frequently, so at this point, there are not tried-and-true tactics to use in the energy industry, or any other industry. Certainly, companies like Burger King have had one-off wildly successful viral campaigns — like Subservient Chicken — but, as more people delve into social media, there will be fewer of those wild successes and many more smaller ones. Just like in the early days of the World Wide Web, companies are in there experimenting, having successes and failures. But, there are ways to narrow your scope. The best way to do that is to understand how social media changes the distribution of media.

The changing media landscape
The advent of online media — websites, online newspapers, etc. — definitely expanded the way people consume information. But social media has radically changed it. Now, anyone and everyone is free to create content and share it. And, with so many places to find information, anyone with any small niche they care about is likely to find other people online who care about those same things. What this means is that instead of being able to reach a mass audience — or even an audience in a trade publication or a local newspaper — you’ve got to find smaller audiences to go after. It also means that you are no longer in control of the message or the brand. Whether or not you decide to experiment in social media, that fact remains. Customers, partners, vendors, reporters, bloggers, analysts — they are framing your message.
With all that in mind, here is a framework to think about taking steps into social media.

Listen: It’s difficult to know where to even start participating if you don’t know where the conversations are or what they are about. A simple, rudimentary way to start that is to do a Google Blog Search to find some blogs that are talking about topics related to your company and/or your industry. Just plug in some keywords that you’re interested in. Another place to find blogs is within an industry portal, like Energy Central. Many will have blogs themselves and may also link out to other blogs related to your industry. You can do similar searches by topic in other social media as well, including YouTube and Twitter. There are also sophisticated tools you can subscribe to that help you to understand and measure the activity about you and your competitors. This is crucial if you plan on creating a social media strategy or are interested in integrating social media into your other marketing or customer service strategies.

Discover: When you start listening, you discover what the conversations are about. How do people really feel about your company, your industry? What are they saying about you? Who’s active in the conversation? Where is it happening? Is your competition taking part? What about industry experts or analysts? Social media conversations are like being in a conversation at your book club or a party — they are more candid then you’ll ever get from a focus group, survey or research project. Pay attention to what people are saying - you might get ideas for new products or services, or find out about a customer service problem you’re having.
Make connections: Find a post that’s interesting? Comment about it. Thank the writer for the ideas or thoughts. Why would you do this? It’s really just a way of making connections — almost like a handshake through the Internet, a way to build trust, create awareness.

Share: Once you feel more comfortable simply connecting, now it’s your turn to participate. Experiment with asking and answering Expert requests on LinkedIn. Share an article you enjoyed on Facebook or another social network. That back-and-forth interaction is crucial in social media, because others will come to know you by understanding more about you. This level of trust builds as you expand your network through sharing.

Personally experimenting with social media is a good way to get your feet wet and understand the dynamics of these tools, but it may not offer you enough to make decisions about an approach to marketing. The best thing to remember about social media is that all of these technologies and platforms are really just tools you can use in your marketing toolbox. Figuring out the best ways to use them — and which ones make sense for your company — takes a strategic approach.

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Many of you in the Denver/Boulder area have been waiting to hear the whens and whats of the next meeting of the Mile High Social Media Club. We finalized the details today. They will be updated later on the Ning site (you mean you haven’t been to the Ning site yet?), so check that to RSVP.

Mile High Social Media Club

When: October 21st, 2008, 5:30pm - 8:30pm

Where: Forest Room 5, Denver, Colorado

What: This gathering will be part networking, and part learning. The learning part will be a panel on using Social Bookmarking and Social News for marketing, PR and outreach purposes. The panel will only be an hour, and will start at 6pm, so don’t be late if you want to take part in this piece of it!

Who: Panelists are:

• Brett Borders, of CopyBrighter
• Jason Cormier, of Room 214

Visit the Facebook event page to RSVP, or visit the Ning site and RSVP there.

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After presenting two workshops this month on Social Media 101 to marketers, it occurs to me that the rules of engagement for business people might need some definition. This discussion reminds me of when forums and message boards first became popular (oh remember the days of boulder.general or StarTrek.PrimeDirective.CaptainKirkSexLife). Initial discussions on these boards were fun and informative, but after awhile, the spam level from multilevel marketers were enough to make me run from these groups. On top of that, the vitriol that surfaced could be really off-putting.

Already, with Twitter entering the mainstream consciousness, thanks to CNN and the New York Times, I am experiencing spam on Twitter — that’s a first. Fortunately, Twitter makes it pretty simple to deal with spammers, but again, I think there’s more to it than that. Are there basic rules of engagement for business users that we ought to follow? I think so, but I know that some Tweeters will disagree. Why? Because they feel like what they say is so damn important and compelling, that the rules don’t apply to them.
For example, there are people I call the shameless self-promoters. You know who you are. There are some in the “social media guru/expert” space, always promoting just their own stuff (blog posts, conferences, etc. In my mind, this highly transparent self-promotion is nothing but spam. Remember people, this is supposed to be a conversation. It’s not all about you. What that means is, you talk, then I talk.

In Twitter-ville, I personally translate that idea this way: sure, promote your own stuff, but give back too — retweet someone else’s great blog post, tell me about someone else’s photos, podcasts, blog post, conferences, or other words of wisdom. Surely, you aren’t getting all your ideas just from your own genius brain?

But, again, as I write this, I think of a few that I follow where shameless self-promotion might makes sense. Like a business that’s tweeting updates about a sale, or a theme to those customers who want it — an example locally is for one of the few independent video/DVD stores around, The Video Station.

The Video Station promotes, through Twitter, themed movie watching - last week, they posted a link to a top list of Paul Newman movies as a tribute. If you are a regular renter from this store, you will know that they have theme weeks often, and so they are using this as an extension of that theme.

So what’s the difference between The Video Station and a shameless self-promoter?

The difference is that I don’t get 8-10 tweets a day from The Video Station, so I don’t mind it at all. I get one a week. A bad example of I stopped following Whole Foods for exactly that reason — I wasn’t interested in getting multiple tweets a day promoting the store.

Based on my experience using Twitter for business and promotion purposes, here are my rules of engagement on Twitter for business people:

1. Promote your blog posts — but not every one: Sure, go ahead and use it to promote a blog post to those who follow you. But remember that you aren’t the only person who has something compelling to offer. Have you read something today that you liked? Hated? Tweet that. Or, tweet a post from one of your cohorts.
2. Use Twitter to get instant feedback: Interested in what others have to say about what you think? Who agrees? Who has another point of view? Tweet your blog post to get comments from others. I’ve asked for specific Tweeters to comment, people I know that care about the same issue. It’s a great way to start a discussion about something. Again, not for every post. Use sparingly.
3. Use Twitter to inspire discussion: @jasonfalls asked the twitterverse to get in touch regarding small business social media case studies, because he’s interested in writing about them. Others will retweet his request, and I am certain he’ll get some good responses.
4. Airport acronym tweets are boring: Glad to know you are busy, but really I don’t want to know your travel schedule is. EXCEPT. If you are trying to arrange a tweetup or meeting with folks locally, by all means, use Twitter as a good way to possibly connect. EXCEPT. If you are going on a vacation and want to make me jealous.
5. How many posts per day? No right answer here, but this goes back to my first recommendation. If you are using Twitter to only promote yourself and your ideas, I suggest you limit those.
6. Be nice: This probably ought to be the #1 rule. If you want Twitter love, then give it out. If you’re confronted by a mean tweeter, block them (thanks @leahjones for refreshing my memory on how to do that). Remember that the lines between personal and professional twitter usage are very blurry, so forgive people’s excitement about the Red Sox, or the Broncos or World Cup soccer, or the election (as long as they are nice and not mean).

What do you think? What rules of engagement do you follow with Twitter? I want to know. Hey, I know, I will tweet this post and maybe get some feedback…

It seems like every day, there’s yet another conference on social media, web and search marketing, blogging, etc. Many of the presenters at the conferences are the same. Amazingly enough, the conferences are still focused in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Las Vegas and occasionally, Chicago. But, what aImage via Wikipediabout the rest of the people interested in these topics that frankly don’t have the travel budget and don’t live within driving distance?

Well, Bryan Eisenberg has done all of us a favor, and posted an online virtual conference mashup of recorded presentations from conferences he’s been to recently. At the very least, its a great place to start.