The Biggest Problem in Social Media is Content

Producing it, that is.

Without content, Facebook fan pages are as empty and hapless as a shuttered shopping mall.

Without content to link to, tweets are endlessly chatty and will likely fail to produce measurable returns.

Without a steady stream of content, blogs are updated irregularly, or with the turning of the seasons. Or perhaps those intermittent posts uncannily coincide with a product marketing manager's dental appointments, when he or she finally has some down time with a laptop and a mouth too numb to return calls.

We've all seen the pattern: Company X is won over to the importance of social media. They figure out what their blog will be about, who will write the drafts, what the approval process will be, and so on.

With much fanfare, the blog is launched. And the initial post sits there. And sits there. And who has time to write a second post? Or update the Facebook page? Or tweet?

To help company X (and companies Y and Z, as well, because this problem seems common), here are some suggestions for getting content on line.

Leverage What You Have

Has your company just launched a product, published a white paper, or hosted an event? Write a short description and link to the relevant Web page, PDF, or Flickr photo set.

(Speaking of Flickr photo sets, make sure someone on your team has a digital camera. Then set up a Flickr account and link to it from your blog, your tweets, and so on.)

Put Blogging on the Agenda

Track the production of blog posts, Facebook updates, and other social media content just like you track the production of anything else. Like any accountable activity, each content production task should be assigned a name and a date.

While your team is discussing projects, events, and announcements, ask what can or should be shared through social media. What could be published on a blog or Facebook page? What news or links could be tweeted?

Get in the habit of asking what social media content can be wrung from any major activity or milestone.

Let Us Join Your Great Conversations

Over lunch, you and a colleague had a great discussion about something relevant to your industry.

Share it with us. Ask for our comments. When we post comments, respond.

Make Jotting Ideas Down a Habit

Create a folder on your desktop for blog ideas. Or if you use a note-taking application like Evernote, set up a Notebook for blog ideas. Or simply carry a notebook or a stack of index cards.

When an idea pops into your head, jot it down. Then spend 15 minutes a day, sorting through your ideas and filling them out, converting your hasty note or outline into a short post of 250-500 words. It's best if you make that 15 minutes early in the day, before you're interrupted or trapped in meetings.

The nice thing about this approach is that you're suddenly able to accomplish big things (writing that content you haven't found time to write) by taking a bunch of little steps. You never have to face the daunting prospect of a Blank Page Expecting a Complete, Well-formed Piece of Writing (cue organ music and the Wilhelm scream). You're simply jotting down idea you've already thought of and that's practically begging you to record it, or you're developing an idea you've already written down and simply producing a short, pithy elaboration. And you're writing regularly. And your blog and your Facebook page are living up to your expectations. Wow.

What Have You Read or Seen that Inspired You?

Tell us. Ask questions about it.

Make Lists

Like this one. You can't only make lists. But a list now and then is a fine idea.

And The Most Important Thing Is . . .

Get going. Now.


Shopping mall photo credits:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/akasped/ / CC BY 2.0

Benchmark Your Social Media Responsiveness

I wrote recently about social media metrics and quoted Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang talking about how difficult it is to measure the value of social media communications.

In some areas, such as tweeting and blogging, numbers are essential, because frequency is important. In other areas, such as video, frequency may actually dull results. (See this Technology Review story about an HP study that found an inverse correlation between the frequency of videos posted on YouTube and the videos' popularity. If you post lots of videos, the popularity of your videos tends to decline.)

In addition to measuring hits, tweets, and posts, it's important to benchmark your organization's responsiveness to social media communications. If you're at a dinner party, it would be rude to sit silently for 5 minutes before responding to a comment or question that was addressed to you. Similarly, online, it's rude—or at least a missed opportunity—if you wait too long to respond to a tweet or blog post, especially if it's from a customer.

How to Benchmark Your Social Media Responsiveness

1. Pick 3-5 important social media events from the past week. These could be tweets, blog posts, or blog comments. They could occur on your media properties or someone else's. They could even be press releases or announcements of importance to your business, but not originating in a social media tool at all.
   
2. Check the time of the event and the time of your organization's first response.
   
3. Examine how the conversation developed. Did it broaden, involving multiple departments? Did the right people respond in the right way? Were the right people notified in time? Which tools did people use? Did a tweet lead to a tweet, then to a blog post? Did the conversation end up involving legal or PR?
   
4. If you uncovered any breakdowns in communication, or learned any lessons about the importance of promptness, review them with your team, and try better this week. You might need to fine-tune email aliases, ensure that blog readers are updated with the right RSS feeds, establish corporate policies regarding the content of social media communications (e.g., respectful, nothing off-color), and so on.
   
5. Repeat this exercise in a week or two, and see how you're doing. Did any past problems reappear? Did you notice any patterns?
   

By benchmarking your responsiveness, you can ensure that your organization is ready to respond as promptly and effectively as possible to important communications from customers, partners, the press, and the online community at large.

Stopwatch photo by wwarby, some rights reserved.

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.

Au Courant: Making the Most of Twitter for Business

Lots of high tech companies still don't use Twitter or use it well (e.g., they read tweets, but never post; they don't monitor keywords related to their business; they never initiate dialogs with strangers).

These tech-savvy but Twitter-naive companies could learn a thing or two from the world of letters. A growing number of small presses are taking advantage of the Twitter platform and 140-character tweets to share news, build communities, and offer promotions.

New Directions Press (@NewDirections) regularly posts about upcoming publications (and since they frequently involve Roberto Bolano, I update my bookstore wish list accordingly). Richard Nash of SoftSkull Press (@softskull) is another frequent Twitter user. He recently used Twitter to announce a new catalog:

Soft Skull Spring 09 catalog now available, yo. Download http://is.gd/8zrR & email for review copies. (Here's Winter 09 http://is.gd/8zE1 )

Today he retweeted a promotion from highly esteemed Graywolf Press (@GraywolfPress):

RT @GraywolfPress: REMINDER: get 25% off your entire order at www.graywolfpress.org. Use code "twitter25" in customer notes Good til Monday.

Businesses of all kinds, including software companies, could learn a thing or two about social media strategies from book people like Nash and the Twitter users at these other presses. And, of course, business people will also want to take advantage of that promotion from Graywolf—a longtime publisher of wonderful books. And then there's the new catalog from SoftSkull and ...

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.