The Essential Ingredient for Every Start-up's Home Page: Proof

If you're working at a start-up and you're finally, finally, finally ready to launch your product or service, be sure to ask yourself this hard-nosed question: why should anyone visiting your Web site believe that what you're offering is worthwhile?

Sure, you're convinced you've created something great or close to great (otherwise why would you be toiling in a start-up?). But why should anyone else give your company more than a moment's notice? There are hundreds or thousands of new companies launching every day, each convinced that they've created something unique and compelling. No one, not even industry analysts or business journalists, can possibly give all these companies due consideration. So what specifically are you putting on your home page to seize your prospect's attention and prevent him or her from clicking away?

You need proof. Proof that you really have created something valuable to others (not just to you). And to be credible, that proof must be offered by somebody else (not you).

Here's a list of the types of proof you should post on your home page to demonstrate that you really are as worthwhile as you say you are:

• Customer testimonials - The ultimate proof—and if this doesn't appear after a few months, it doesn't really matter what other proof you offer. Preferably the customers you're citing paying customers, rather than users of a free version of your product or service. Ideally, they're leaders in their markets, so that when other companies see that these guys have bought your product or service, they'll interpret that investment as a serious endorsement.
• Major partners such as OEMs - While perhaps not as compelling as direct customers, evidence you have signed with resellers and other partners can suggest that you've passed a minimum level of scrutiny. Of course, the partnership has to be meaningful. Simply joining the partner program of a major network equipment vendor or database vendor, for example, doesn't mean a lot. These companies have thousands of partners. You may have passed some minimal level of scrutiny, but you're not necessarily valuable.
• Independent studies or benchmarks - Objective evidence that you really achieve the results you claim to achieve. Even better if the study or benchmark shows you outperform major players in your market.
• Praise from industry analysts - Again, nice to have, because it suggests that you've passed a certain level of scrutiny with people who know your market well. But some analyst firms have a reputation for selling their praise, so some members of your audience (especially engineers) may be skeptical.
• Investors - Like analysts, investors study markets closely. Their investment signals a vote of confidence. Their approval can at least make you a company to watch.
• Management Team - If your co-founders are recognized experts in their respective fields, the whole company gains some creditability. Eventually, though, you need to offer evidence of market traction—proof that your talented team has really delivered on their promise.

Take a look at your home page. How are you proving your value to visitors? Assume your visitors are lingering for just a moment before clicking away to Facebook or some other site. Can you hook them and compel them to learn more? If not, it's time to go back to the drawing board. You're probably not ready to launch.
Updated: April 23, 2012

A Gentle Critique of McAfee Product Marketing

Fifteen-second summary of the marketing lessons discussed in this post:

1. Write, chat, and speak in plain English.
2. Don't put populating fields in your CRM system above serving your customers.
3. Create demos that really demonstrate.
4. Build Web sites with tiers of information, so if customers want to dig for details, they can.

If you've already practicing what these lessons preach, feel free to click away and find useful instruction elsewhere.

But if you harbor a sliver of a doubt about your own organization's ability to do all the things I've listed above, then read on . . .

The Story

One of my systems needs to go into the shop for repairs. It's an old system, and it's got a ton of files on it. Some of the files are confidential, so I'd like to encrypt them. I don't need to encrypt the whole disk, just certain files and folders.

I know that there's disk encryption software out there, and I'm sure that David Strom (a writer I know and like) has written about this sort of thing, and I thought about digging up his old columns. But I'm a customer of McAfee's. Their AV software came installed on my laptop, and I'm pretty happy with it. So I decided to start there. Actually, I decided to look at McAfee, Symantec, and PGP.

Let's take these in reverse order. PGP emphasizes whole disk encryption and encryption for email (not something I'm looking for at the moment). Their disk encryption software, which I'm sure is very good, starts at $99 (though that page is a little hard to find; looking for it just now, I ended up on a page for a similar product costing $149). Not egregiously expensive, but more than I was looking to pay. After all, I just want to encrypt a few folders.

A quick glance at Symantec's Web page describing their security products for Home systems leads me to conclude that they offer a bunch of nice features, but not disk encryption.

Which brings us back to McAfee. Of the three vendors, McAfee's positioning for the home computer market seems to be the strongest. Their Web page design is bright and clear, and Web copy doesn't suggest that you need to place an order of 100 units or more to begin to be interesting to their sales organization.

Here's their Web page for their encryption product, which it turns out is called McAfee Anti-Theft.



I think this page is well done. (None of my quibbles concern McAfee's UI design but rather their UX design.) To call attention to just a few things I like about this page:

• It's clear and legible. There's a product shot and a check list of key features.


• There's a bright "Buy Now" button with a legible footnote explaining exactly what it is you're buying.


• The ribbon-like design treatment in the upper right reinforces the suggestion of trust conveyed by the gold badge. It looks like they've won a badge for merit.


• More technical details, such as the fact that the product supports AES encryption, appear below. (As they should. Headlines up top. Details down below.)
  

You'll notice that below the photo of the box, there's a View Demo button. That's where my trouble with trying to purchase McAfee Anti-Theft began.

The demo animation runs for roughly 2:30 (two minutes, thirty seconds). Of that, 1:30 is a slide presentation basically recapitulating the information that appears on the Web page. OK, fine. I realize you're selling to the home market, and you need to spell things out really clearly. The last minute presents a demo showing how to set up a "vault," assign it a password, and drag files into it.

The last minute of the demo—the real demo part of the "demo"—is good as far as it went. But it only showed a file or two being dragged into the vault. I wondered if I could drag whole folders. I mean, yes, almost certainly in 2010, I would expect that a product like this would accept folders, as well as files. But the demo didn't show any folders being dragged in. The Web copy doesn't mention "files and folders"; it repeatedly just says "files." The 2-page data sheet, which I opened as a PDF, does not include the word "folder." Which made me wonder: can you drag in whole folders? Wouldn't that have been an easy thing to show or mention, if it did?

Every now and then you buy a product assuming it will do X and Y, and you discover that no, it only does Y.

OK. This is a pretty straightforward question. Can I drag whole folders (preferably a multi-layer hierarchy of folders) into a McAfee Anti-Theft Vault. Yes or no? Yes, folders, or no, just files?

I click around the site. Suddenly there's a chat window popping up on my screen. OK, fine. I'll start a chat. This should be easy.

Here's a transcript. (With names changed: I have no interest at all in impugning any individuals here; I'm simply concerned with site architecture and process. I have a great deal of sympathy and admiration for people who work in call centers and help desks, and my admonition to myself [which I admit to sometimes failing to heed] is to always be unfailingly polite.)

Chat Conversation	Commentary
Please wait while we find an agent to assist you... Hello, welcome to McAfee Chat. My name is John Doe. Please briefly describe your goal or question so I can connect you with the best resource to meet your objectives.	Wow. Who wrote that? It's so stilted. It reads like it came out of a committee that drew a diagram on a white board analyzing customer requests ("some of the users will have goals and others will have questions, so our copy should reflect that"). It reminds me of a story a tech-writer friend told me about starting at a company where a fellow writer greeted her with the words, "I'll be happy to show you the supply cabinet where you can obtain all the supplies which you'll utilize." And it makes me admire companies like eBay who make a concerted effort to make their Web copy clear and friendly. McAfee's chat greeting is a cold bucket of corporate-ese splashed on a user who on the Web site was treated as an ordinary home computer user trying to protect his tax returns or pictures of favorite grandchildren. But this opening copy, though awkward, is important. The person I'll be chatting with is not someone who has answers; he's not even someone who is supposed to have answers. He's less of a support rep and more of a concierge who will direct me to someone who really does (supposedly) have answers. Two thoughts here: First, McAfee should make this process quick. This hand-off provides no direct value to the user; it's simply an implementation detail for McAfee. Second, let's explain this role in a friendly way. Something like: "We have a lots of different groups at McAfee. First we're going to connect you to a Customer Service Concierge who will find out what you're looking for, then transfer you to the right group. We'll make this quick." But for now, I need to describe my goal or question. Then I'll be connected to the best resource.
John Doe(the name I'm giving the rep in this blog post): How can we help you today?	That's better. "How can we help you?" Friendly and to the point.
Customer: Quick question. With the Anti-Theft product, do I have to drag files into the vault one at a time, or can I drag entire folders and subfolders? John Doe: Were you considering purchasing protection today?	Uh-oh. To answer my question, you shouldn't need to know whether or not I'm about to purchase. I'm happy to talk to a sales rep at some point, but a lot of inside sales people don't know technical details. But OK, fine. I'll go along with this.
Customer: Yes. John Doe: Ok, what I can do for you is transfer you to one of our Sales Agents and they can assist you in processing your order and make sure you get the appropriate product Customer: Before I buy it, though, I'd like an answer to my question. Customer: I'm comparing it to PGP's product, which apparently lets me encrypt folders. John Doe: A Sales Agent will be able to assist you with your questions as well John Doe: My purpose is to direct you to the best resource that can help you with your inquiry. By asking a few questions I can determine what kind of assistance you need, in this case our sales team Customer: OK. John Doe: OK, I will need to collect some information in order to manage your request appropriately. Can you please provide your first and last name email address and your phone number	So I'm in a chat session in which a customer service rep needs to collect more contact information so McAfee can answer a question about a basic feature of a product. Chat sessions imply instant service; that's why users join them. If I had wanted to get talk to a salesperson on the phone, I would have called Sales. But already we're talking about "processing my order." I still don't have an answer to my question.
Customer: I don't want a phone call. I just want an answer to my yes-or-no question. You can email me at [ email address ]. John Doe: As per your question you have to simply drag the files to the vault. Is anything else I can do for you? Customer: I know I can drag individual files. Can I drag entire folders? Customer: If I have a folder hierarchy with 120 files, do I have to drag them all individually? The demo on the Web site is pretty cursory, and it shows only individual files being placed in the vault. John Doe: If you need assistance with that you have to contact tech support, as I mentioned I am only an operator to direct you to the appropriate department to assist you. You can visit www.mcafeehelp.com or contact them at 1866-622-3911	They won't answer my question by email or by transferring me to another chat agent. They have to have a phone number. Or I can call Technical Support. What's wrong with email? Why offer the chat session at all? Why not just post numbers for Sales and Tech Support? Somewhat stunned.

Oh, if only that 2:32 video had been 2:37 and showed a folder being dragged. Unless, of course, it couldn't.

So I called McAfee sales. I spoke to a service rep. She asked if I was a customer. I said I was, but that it shouldn't matter: I was calling about a different product, and I just had a simple question. She said she needed my email address before she could continue. I gave her a valid email address. It turned out not be the one in their records. I asked her if she could direct me to someone technical who could answer my question. It's a yes/no question, I reminded her. She told me to look for technical information on the Web site. I told her I wasn't going to buy her product and said good-bye.

As I mentioned earlier, I was almost certain that David Strom had written about disk encryption products for personal computers. I surfed to his site, www.strominator.com, clicked on a few tags, found the relevant article, saw that he uses PGP Disk but also recommends some free open source products.

I found an open source product that supports AES encryption of files and folders. Installed it. Encrypted my files. Yes, the interface is not as friendly as the interface to the McAfee product, but it's the end of the day now, and my files are encrypted. I still don't know if the McAfee product can encrypt whole folders in addition to individual files.

And now, nor do I care. I've solved my problem. And my biggest expense was time dealing with McAfee marketing and customer service.

A Lesson

I understand the temptation of sales and marketing folks to capture every interaction in a CRM. Budgets are tight, and accountability is more important than ever.

But workflows shouldn't put collecting CRM data over fast, friendly service. A single rep with a good, old-fashioned FAQ or knowledgebase would have made my day more pleasant and McAFee $29.95 richer. That's chump change, I realize, but I wonder how often interactions like this play out across all the various call centers at McAfee.

Content Is Still King in IT Marketing

Another finding of the TechTarget/Google research I mentioned in yesterday's post, was that content is still king when it comes to marketing and selling SMB and enterprise IT solutions.

White papers, email newsletters, and case studies still play important roles in helping customers understand technology and best practices, and in helping customers with choose one product over another.

Customers look for different types of content in different stages of the purchasing process.

White papers are important in the awareness and consideration phases of purchasing. They're much less important in the final decision-making stage. By then, customers are interested in product comparisons, case studies, and, above all, trial software.

The table below describes how customers use various types of content. (For an explanation of these phases, see yesterday's post.)

Content Type	Purchasing Phase
Postings in online communities	Awareness Consideration
Email newsletters	Awareness Consideration
White Papers	Awareness Consideration
Case Studies	Awareness Consideration Final Decision
Product Literature (e.g., Data Sheets)	Consideration Final Decision
Online Vendor Demos	Consideration Final Decision

One conclusion from this study: Social media, however popular, doesn't eliminate the need for traditional marketing, when it comes to selling sophisticated IT products or products in highly competitive markets.

Google/TechTarget Research Ties Keyword Search Terms to IT Purchasing Cycles

One of the more interesting insights presented by TechTarget at this week's ROI Summit in Newton, MA, was this:

IT purchasers change their search terms as they move through a multi-month purchasing process.

TechTarget reached this conclusion after undertaking an extensive study with Google of 2,200 professionals who play decision-making roles in IT purchases.

Phase I: Awareness
TechTarget and Google found that IT purchasers begin by searching for information about an issue or problem (e.g., data leak protection or VoIP quality).

Searches might include keywords such as "risk," "troubleshoot," and "optimize."

Phase II: Consideration
Once IT purchasers are familiar with the nature of the problem and the types of products available to address it, they begin searching for information about specific products and solutions.

Keywords might include the word "solution," as well as specific brand names.

Phase III: Decision
Finally, as they focus on a few key vendors in preparation for making their final purchase decision, they search for information comparing one product to another. They no longer search for general information about the problem; they understand the problem well and want detailed information about product capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses.

Searches will likely include product names and the word "comparison."


The Changing Prevalence of Search Keywords in IT Purchasing Cycles

The chart below shows how keyword searches evolve across the three phases of the purchasing cycle: Awareness (of a problem), Consideration (of various approaches to solving the problem), and Decision (as to which product to choose).



Conclusion for marketers: Make sure you have content and search keywords that address each phase of the buying cycle.

Tired of Jumping from One Google Tool to Another to Manage a Campaign? Try Google AgencyToolkit

At a SEMPO meeting last night in Cambridge, I got a chance to see a new Web site that Google has put together to make it easier for marketers to find all the tools available for running a highly effective Google AdWords campaign.

Now, instead of jumping from the AdWords Editor to Hot Trends (to see whether certain key phrases are becoming more popular or less) to Google Optimizer (for checking the results of your latest A/B tests of Web site content), you can start from a simple, clean page that presents all these Google tools in one neat, orderly place.

The new destination is Google AgencyToolkit. The site groups tools into four categories:

Plan
AdPlanner, Insights for Search, Blog Search, Hot Trends, Traffic Estimator

Place
Placement Tool, Ad Preview Tool, Site and Category Exclusion Tool

Create
Search-based Keyword Tool, Campaign Optimizer, AdWords Editor, AdWords API

Measure
YouTube Insight, Analytics, Conversion Optimizer, Conversion Tracking, Website Optimizer, Webmaster Tools

(If you roll over the links above, you'll see just how widely scattered these tools are across Google's properties.)

The site looks like this:



If you're running an AdWords campaign or if you'd just like the convenience of having all these in one location, give the site a visit.

How to Measure the Results of Social Media Marketing

In some ways, marketing has changed a great deal in the past few years: there are fewer big tradeshows, there's a lot less paper collateral, no more middle-of-the-night press checks, more time spent online, more time spent tweeting and Webcasting and podcasting, and a great deal of focus on SEO and SEM.

Yet the mission of marketing hasn't changed. It's still the function that represents customer needs and wants to the rest of the business, directing the development and delivery of products and services. And it's still the function that introduces, explains, and promotes the product and services the business has created. Marketing is just doing that work with a lot more @ signs these days.

But does social media marketing, which relies of Facebook rather than direct mail and Twitter instead of phone banks, deprive marketing of the instrumentation it has come to rely on? Consider:

1. Over the past decade, marketing has become increasingly instrumented, and marketing professionals have been measured (and sometimes compensated) according to their results.
   Online advertising, which allowed click-throughs to be measured, facilitating A/B testing and brutally frank assessments of a campaign's ROI, contributed to this Taylorization of marketing. So, too, did CRM systems, campaign management systems, marketing automation systems, and a variety of other management tools. The goal of this instrumentation to eliminate the vague connection between effort and reward that seemed inherent to marketing, especially in advertising. That vagueness was neatly captured by John Wanamaker's quip: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Web 1.0 and 2.0 marketing automation promised to clear up the mystery.
   
   
2. As a result of both consumers and businesses working and playing increasingly online, businesses have reduced marketing investments in print and in live events, while increasing marketing investments in e-commerce, online promotions (e.g., email marketing and Web seminars), and other Web-centric activities.
   No doubt that many of the decisions supporting this change were supported by the glaring metrics made available by sales force and marketing automation systems mentioned above.
   
   
3. In the past year, social media marketing has emerged as the hottest area in marketing.
   Companies are trimming and sometimes slashing investments in other areas of marketing and focusing on social media activities: tweeting, blogging, interacting with customers on Facebook, etc. For example, I know a mobile services company that has trimmed marketing to two people: a product manager and a social media manager. I suspect that there are many reasons for companies making this switch. Customers are increasingly familiar with these tools from their recreational time outside work. Most of the tools are free, so companies investing in them largely are only paying for their marketing staff's labor. And the use of the tools must be effective. Customers success stories about Comcast and Zappos on Twitter, for example, demonstrate the viability of social media marketing.
   
   
4. Measuring social media activity itself offers little information about the value of social media activity.
   Are 60 tweets better than 30? It depends on how the tweeter's audience responds to the tweets. Ten thoughtful, empathic, and helpful tweets will likely be received more positively than twenty hype-laden tweets. Mere numbers alone can't convey the effectiveness of social media, because social media rely on human values such as tone and empathy that resist numerical characterization. This is an important point that Forrester analyst Jeremy Owyang made during a panel discussion on April 1 at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Here's a summary of his remarks on this topic from Susan Etlinger of the Horn Group:
   

   
   Jeremiah says that most marketers are measuring social media incorrectly; they're focusing on the measurements of yesteryear. There is no access to server logs on Facebook and other tools/networks, so you have incomplete data. And even if you had that data, it wouldn't tell you what is happening: there just aren't good enough automated methods to measure changes in tone. (As someone who does this regularly, I can attest to this: quality analysis doesn't scale that well.) A lot of companies are trying to tackle this problem.
   

   
   


5. Is it true then that marketing, which has become increasingly quantified and Taylorized, can't apply metrics to its hot new practice, social media? Well, yes and no.
   No, because, as Jeremy points out, measuring the frequency of tweets is largely meaningless, and measuring Facebook activity is difficult and in some cases impossible. (True, you can measure some Facebook activity, such as the number of fans who have signed up on a company's profile page, but most activity will be difficult to quantify.)
   
   However, outside of social applications themselves, marketing teams can certainly measure key performance indicators such as:
   
   
   
   • customer satisfaction (through surveys)
     
   • inbound leads to landing pages referenced in tweets and on Facebook
     
   • length of sales cycle
     
   • mean-time-to-resolution on trouble tickets
     
   • sales overall
     
   
   Think of social media activity as a conversation. If you have lots of good conversations with lots of customers, you would expect that your customers' overall opinion of your company would improve and that your new sales and maintenance renewals would increase—so measure those things.
   
   The companies that have cut back on data sheets and trade shows and invested in Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are doing so not because they love being tactful and responsive 24 hours a day, but because they think it's the best way of serving their customers and growing their business. Recession notwithstanding, if a company treats its customers well, serving them through any channel of communication, then it should see positive results on the bottom line. And those traditional bottom-line results are probably the best metrics for judging the success of social media marketing.
   

I'm launching a social media project for a new client, and that's how we'll be measuring the project's success: by the numbers of inbound leads and units sold. The marketing technology might be new, but the nature of a business's bottom line hasn't changed at all.

If you have other ways of measuring social media marketing success, please share them in a comment!

Photo of a weighing scale by pareeerica, some rights reserved.

Tips for Running a Successful Web Seminar

With travel budgets tight and the need for lead generation more pressing than ever, I expect that this year we'll see more interest in Web seminars than ever before.

In the late 90's, I worked for one of the first Web conferencing companies, so I have over a decade's experience seeing what works and what doesn't in Web seminars.

Here are tips I've picked up over the years. Feel free to comment and add your own.

1. Inform, Don't Sell (Well, Don't Sell Too Much).

People attend Web seminars to learn something: news about market trends, tips for using a software program, best practices for their profession—something that's genuinely useful. They might assume that you're going to do some selling in the course of your presentation, but if you lay on the sales pitch too heavily, you'll turn off your audience. And they'll show it by hanging and disconnecting from the session.

If you're presenting genuinely interesting information is a compelling way, you'll lose only a few audience members in the course of a 30-60 minute presentation. If you're dropping audience members every few minutes, it's time for you to go back and rethink what you're presenting and how.

2. To Inform, Present New Information That's Not Readily Accessible.

This is where guest speakers come in. Opening your Web seminar with a 20-minute presentation by an analyst or expert sharing new research is a great way to drive up registrations and keep your audience engaged.

The other advantage to guest speakers is that they often have their own mail lists and promotional materials, which can dramatically bolster the size of your audience.

3. Keep the Format Lively and Varied.

Studies show that audience members begin to lose interest in a presentation after hearing only one voice talk for seven minutes, so never let one person talk for more than five or six minutes straight. Be sure to have at least two people in the seminar, even if one is a moderator who only introduces the main speaker, then interjects comments and questions from time to time.

Some of my most highly rated seminars followed the format of a radio talk show: a conversational tone, real back-and-forth dialog, a little humor. (After all, what would you want to listen to for 45 minutes in your office? A dry presentation of a script or two people really engaged in conversation?)

Here's a format that's worked well for several of my clients:

• 1-2 minute introduction and overview by moderator
  
• 20-30 minute presentation by guest speaker with comments and interjections by moderator or another speaker
  
• 10-15 minute product and service overview by sponsoring company; if the company is promoting software, a live demo is worth a thousands words of narration
  
• 5-15 minutes open Q&A with audience members
  
• 1 minute close by moderator; if the seminar is part of a series, point audience members to a Web page listing other events
  

4. Give Audience Members a Chance to Ask Questions.

Whether they type questions into a Q&A feature of your Web conferencing software or ask questions at the end, do give audience members a chance to ask questions, express doubts, and dive deeper into the subject matter.

5. Give Audience Members Extra Time to Get the Software Started.

Inevitably you'll have audience members racing to join your event after getting out of a meeting or coming back from lunch. Some of them won't have downloaded or tried out the seminar software ahead of time. Give them a few minutes to get through the download and start-up process. Greet your audience a few minutes before the event, and then every minute or so let them know that you're going to start a few minutes after the hour to give everyone a chance to join the event.

6. Always Let Audience Members Know They've Come to the Right Place, and Where to Go for More Information.

You don't want audience members wondering if they've come to the right place when they connect to your seminar. Fifteen minutes before the seminar starts, post a welcoming slide identifying the title and time of the event, along with contact information for technical support or questions.

In the final moments of the seminar, display a slide or Web page offering phone numbers, email addresses, or URLs where people can get more information or contact the presenters.

7. Avoid Interruptions.

Always mute the audience's phone lines during the main presentation. Otherwise, you'll have some audience members conducting side conversations in their offices, ignoring your requests to mute their lines, and turning your carefully planned event into a cacophonous jumble. That ping-ping-ping sound is the phone system letting you know that other audience members have lost patience and are hanging up.

So keep the audience phone lines quiet until the Q&A session, and do everything possible to keep attention focused on the presentation itself.

By the way, be wary of those free conference call services. I've found them to be unreliable. One of them—a popular, free service used by many IT companies—disconnected our main guest speaker, just as he was beginning his presentation. It took him several minutes to rejoin the seminar. The other speakers and I were able to cover for him, but it was nerve-wracking (and potentially a waste of a speaking fee).

8. Rehearse. A Lot.

I can't stress this enough. I recommend at least three complete run-throughs of any seminar. In the course of rehearsals, you'll discover that the flow of your presentation can be improved, that some material is redundant, and that other material is cryptic. Especially if you have two or more speakers, you'll want to rehearse transitions from one section to another.

I ran a Web seminar series for a client last summer. We had different guest speakers every week for several weeks in a row. (We had just launched the company, and we wanted to make a splash.) We rehearsed daily, sometimes twice daily. Everyone agreed that these rehearsals dramatically improved the quality of our presentations. They also gave us an opportunity to get to know our new business partners and to better understand how they presented their offerings to customers.

That's my list. What's on yours? Post a comment, and let me know.

Two Suggestions for Social Media Strategies

A friend of mine who runs a PR agency called me yesterday, asking for my thoughts on social media strategies. Here's what I told him.

In addition to all the standard advice—start a blog, comment on other people's blogs, participate in forums, communicate and collaborate with your customers online, etc.—remember that an effective social media strategy involves both online and offline work. The online work is fairly obvious (the aforementioned blogs, etc.). The offline work may not be obvious, but it's pretty simple. Go meet with the people in your online communities. Blog about topics, then go to events where people talk about those topics. Meet new people there, and continue the relationships online. Your customers and partners are real, walking, talking, full-blooded people, not just users who who filled out profiles on your site. Meet them face-to-face, and have conversations you would never have online. If you think social media means hunkering down in a cubicle, blogging, linking, and fine-tuning SEO, think again. Social media is about being social with other people, online and off. Budget for travel. Get your social media marketing manager out there at trade shows, in restaurants, in blogger's lounges, and at any other location where your community hangs out.

Second, as I've said before about growing communities in the open source world, you've got to both "do" and "show that you do." In other words, you've got to document all your community work. If you show up at an unconference attended by 250 people in Cambridge, chances are that 50 people at most will remember meeting you (maybe 100 or 200, if you're already a big name or especially vocal or you're the guy wearing the weird hat with the flashing lights—but do people really know that guy?). None of your prospective customers in St. Louis or Chicago or London will know you went there. So you need to blog about. Post photos on Flickr. Link. Document your sociability and your community involvement. That way, your community involvement will have a much broader reach.

Ever notice that social media pundits are always posting pictures of themselves drinking good burgundy or Belgian beer with their fellow social media pundits? Now you know why. (Besides the fact that they're just having fun. Which is a good idea, too. And good burgundies should be celebrated, I suppose.)

Now, if anyone out there would like to grab a beer and continue this discussion, just let me know.