Haven’t heard of sexting? Your kids certainly have. Almost one-third of youths admit they have sent a photo or video of themselves in the nude or have received such items via e-mail, text, Facebook , etc. Sex + Texting = Sexting.
Kim Zetter of Wired writes a great story detailing these recent findings. Some of the more interesting items:
Girls were more likely to share a naked image of themselves than boys
Those who are already sexually active were much more likely to send an image than those who were not sexually active
29 percent said they shared naked images of themselves with someone they knew only online
The survey was conducted by MTV and the Associated Press. It involved 1,247 youths between ages 14 and 24.
The survey results and article express an important takeaway for me; since these kids have grown up in the digital age there is the misconception that they understand how to best use the digital tools at their disposal. This is not always the case. Parents shouldn’t be intimidated by getting onto social media, it’s part of your job as a parent to be aware of your kids online activity and give them appropriate guidance where needed.
If your kids aren’t open to listening to you, perhaps a series of somewhat humorous commercials involving James Lipton in conjunction with LG may deliver the message about proper digital behavior. I’ve posted the most popular of these above (over 65,000 views), but all four can be viewed at Give It A Ponder YouTube Channel.
Even funny commercials may not be getting the sexting message across as evidenced by these two photos (above)
Sadly however, even these commercials may not be sinking in, as evidenced by the screen shots of the photos for the two most recent comments on the Give It A Ponder YouTube Channel.
Social media is still in the early stages of development, and with that comes many questions. I’ve picked some of the most often asked questions by companies and individuals and have responded with my thoughts. Please let me know whether you agree or disagree. This is a re-post from my SEW column this week.
Q: Are there things that should always or never be done in social media, things to consider or options to weigh when deciding which one to join (or stop using!)?
A: Fun and common sense — have plenty of both.
Q: Are marketers betting on social media marketing already? If they aren’t, what do you think they are afraid of?
A: Marketers are afraid of the unknown and also giving up control of their brand. They are also afraid of making mistakes. That is why it’s important to fail fast, fail forward, and fail better. You aren’t going to get it right the first time so be quick to listen, interact, react, and repeat.
Q: Why do you believe social media is so important?
A: As human beings, we have the dichotomous psychological need to be our own individual, yet we also want to feel like we belong to, and are accepted by, a much larger social set. People are willing to have an “open diary” as a means to stay connected — as their ultimate desire is to feel accepted.
Part of this lies in a yearning to have a clear understanding of what the majority is doing. It was much easier to know what the majority was doing when all one had to do was tune into Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40″ to find out the latest and greatest in music or to flip through “Vogue” magazine to quickly grasp every fashion trend. Social media help us make sense of information overload by quickly seeing what our friends find important, helpful, or interesting. It also helps eliminate people performing the same tasks — if three of your friends have already performed the task (finding a good hotel in Bermuda), why should you be redundant?
Q: Which is the best business model for social media? Is advertising the only way?
A: That is one revenue stream, but there are many more. Think about people exchanging gifts in social media, small businesses setting up their businesses and using PayPal-type functionality (mircopayments), and craigslist-type interplay. There is also search revenue to be had, as people care more about what people think about products and services than an algorithm.
Q: Who is going to lead this new marketing? Big agencies? Specialized agencies? Media agencies? Brands themselves?
A: It’s a people-driven economy, stupid — people will lead the charge. People that shepherd brands (e.g. Scott Monty, Morgan Johnston, Barry Judge) will also play leading roles. Technology development (application development, etc.) will continue to be outsourced to specialists/agencies.
Q: How will social media force the hyper-acceleration of better search results?
A: You’re already seeing this. Google recently launched four products that are social in nature: Google Sidewiki, Google Searchwiki, Google Hot Trends, and Google Wave. Google understands its main competition will come from social media. That is why in October we already started to see search deals being cut between Microsoft and Twitter/Facebook. This is only the beginning, but it’s happening much sooner than I thought.
Q: Who helps you stay informed?
A: Lee Odden (TopRankBlog) Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group), Mashable, Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff (Groundswell), Chris Brogan & Julien Smith (Trust Agents), Shel Israel (Twitterville), Steve Levitt (Freakonomics), Dale Carnegie books, Laurie Sullivan (MediaPost), Mark Walsh (MediaPost), Dan and Chip Heath (“Made to Stick” and Fast Company), Silicon Alley Insider, David Meerman Scott (The New Rules of Marketing & PR), Abbey Klaassen (AdAdge), CNET “Buzz Out Loud” Podcast with Tom Merritt, Molly Wood, and Jason Howell, Buckhead Church Podcasts, ESPN Fantasy Football Today Podcasts, and of course anything Michigan State Hoops related.
Q: There are many social networks nowadays. Should advertisers try each one, or how should they choose the right ones?
A: Start with the placements that have the best chance for success and progressively grow from there — eventually you should be everywhere that is contributing to success (however you determine that). If you’re engaged and using the tools, it’s pretty easy to determine which social media tools your customers are on. If you can’t figure this out, Forrester has a good Social Technology Profile Tool that will help direct you to where your customers are.
Q: Do you know an agency that is doing it right in social media? Or a brand?
A:Zappos, Comcast, Ford, JetBlue, Skittles, Starbucks, Ben & Jerry’s, Best Buy, Dell, and Virgin are leaders in the space. Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Razorfish have been progressive in this area as well.
Q: What is the “next big thing” in social media marketing?
A: The merging of search and social.
Q: What about those who just want to say, “Enough of this online chatter, I just want to connect with people in the real world”?
A: Social media isn’t a zero sum game. Just because you can stay connected with your daughter in college via social media doesn’t mean that there isn’t a need anymore to meet face to face. Social media is great at keeping people connected when distance/time is a hurdle or limiter. Also, remember that sometimes the opposite can occur — meeting offline after first meeting online. Think about Mashable’s popular Tweet-ups or that one out of eight couples married in the U.S. met online.
Erik Qualman’s #1 Amazon Best Selling book “Socialnomics” can be purchased at all major bookstores and online.
A big question out there these days is: What is the ROI of Social Media? Or the ever popular how do I measure the ROI of social media? Often when I get this question it’s appropriate for me to retort: “What’s the ROI of your phone?” Other times it’s not appropriate to respond with this answer, which, if done in the wrong tone, or place, can win you a free punch in the face. Then there are the naysayers that adamantly proclaim, “We aren’t doing social media because there isn’t any ROI.”
To borrow from the Conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, Benjamin Zander, there are those in life that sit in the back row with their arms folded, judging, and complaining. Then there are those that sit in the front row with a vision and they are spending their energy on making that vision a reality. This article and video have been put together with the hopes of it being a viable tool for those with a vision to get those seated in the back row to stand up and see the social media light.
Drafting off the success of the Socialnomics: Social Media Revolution Video – over 1.2 million views and counting – thanks for the support! This newest video Socialnomics: Social Media ROI showcases that social media can help you achieve success on almost any front. While the video uses familiar nomenclature like ROI, many pieces of social media behave so differently than anything we have ever seen, that I prefer to use “What does or will success look like?” rather than “What’s the ROI?”
After all, why are we trying to measure social media like a traditional channel? Social media touches every facet of business and it should be viewed more as an extension of good business ethics. Which, if done properly, will harvest sales down the line. Co-Chairman Alex Bogusky of Crispin Porter & Bogusky puts it best when he states:
“You can’t buy attention anymore. Having a huge budget doesn’t mean anything in social media…The old media paradigm was PAY to play. Now you get back what you authentically put in. You’ve got to be willing to PLAY to play.” – Alex Bogusky, Co-Chairman of Crispin Porter + Bogusky
However to speak in a business vernacular that is more readily understood today please find below some salient examples and data points which are found in the video:
1. Over 300,000 businesses have a presence on Facebook and roughly a 1/3 of these are small businesses.
2. Gary Vaynerchuk grew his family business from $4 million to $50 million using social media. Gary’s eccentric personality and offbeat oenophile knowledge have proven a natural path to success with his Wine TV Library.
3. Vaynerchuk found first hand that $15,000 in Direct Mail = 200 new customers, $7,500 Billboard = 300 new customers, $0 Twitter = 1,800 new customers.
4-5. Wetpaint/Altimeter Study found companies that are both deeply and widely engaged in social media significantly surpass their peers in both revenue$ and profit$. The study also found the company sales with the highest levels of social media activity grew on average by +18%, while those companies with the least amount of social activity saw their sales decline -6%.
6. Lenovo was able to achieve cost savings by a 20% reduction in call center activity as customers go to community website for answers
7-8. Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice Facebook program incented users to give up ten of their Facebook friends in return for a free Whopper. The estimated investment for this program was less than $50,000 yet they received 32 million media impressions which roughly estimated equals greater than $400,000 in press/media value. Which to put in context is somewhat like reaching the entire populations of 19 states (understanding this doesn’t account for unique vs. repeat visitors, etc.)
9. BlendTec increased its sales 5x by running the often humorous “Will it Blend” Videos on YouTube blending everything from an iPhone to a sneaker.
10. Dell sold $3,000,000 worth of computers on Twitter
11. To put things into perspective, only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive return on investment. This is where the majority of media dollars reside today. I don’t believe the majority of media dollars will reside there tomorrow.
12-14: “You can’t just say it. You have to get the people to say it to each other,” says James Farley, CMO Ford. Ford seems to know what they are doing, especially with Scott Monty leading the social media charge. By giving away 100 Ford Fiestas to influential bloggers, 37% of Generation Y were aware of the Ford Fiesta before its launch in the United States. Is it any wonder why 25% of Ford’s marketing spend has been shifted to digital/social media initiatives? Ford is the only US auto company that didn’t take a government loan.
15. Naked Pizza, a New Orleans Pizzeria that specializes in healthy pies, set a one day sales record using social media. In fact 68% of their sales came from people “calling in from Twitter.” On top of that (no pun intended) 85% of their new customers were from Twitter. So, yes, social media does work for small businesses. Feel free to have a bottle of Vaynerchuk wine with your pizza.
16. Volkswagen goes 100% Mobile for launch of GTI. The reason that I mention this is that mobile drives social media usage and social media usage drives mobile. More and more we will see most social media usage on the phone.
17. Tweets for a Cause sent out a tweet from Atlanta to encourage support of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. As a result of retweets from such notables as @mashable, @G_man, @zaibatsu and others, the Atlanta Chapter site received 11,000 visitors in 24 hours as a result of this initiative by ResponseMine Interactive.
18. Intuit introduced “Live Community” into their TurboTax® products 2 years ago. Due in part to the resulting word-of-mouth, they have seen unit sales increase +30% each year and have now integrated “Live Community” into their other products like QuickBooks, Quicken, etc. “Live Community” allows customers to ask other customers questions which has proved both beneficial to the customer and to Intuit. In some instances, the customer can answer questions that Intuit isn’t allowed to answer because of regulatory restrictions.
19. Software company Genius.com reports that 24% of its social media leads convert to sales opportunities
20-23. During Barack Obama’s rise to the White House, he garnered 5 million fans on social media and 5.4 million clicked on an “I voted for Obama” Facebook button. Most importantly this resulted in three million online donors contributing $500 million in fundraising. An astounding 92% of the donations were in increments of less than $100.
24. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center witnessed a 9.5% increase in registrations by using social media.
25-28. Web host provider Moonfruit more than recouped its $15,000 social media investment as their Website Traffic soared +300% while correspondingly sales increased +20%. They also saw a huge lift in their organic search engine rankings getting on the first page for the term “free website builder.”
29. eBay found participants in online communities spend 54% more money
30. Co-Chairman Alex Bogusky of Crispin Porter & Bogusky puts it best when he states: “You can’t buy attention anymore. Having a huge budget doesn’t mean anything in social media…The old media paradigm was PAY to play. Now you get back what you authentically put in. You’ve got to be willing to PLAY to play.”
31. “Think of Twitter as the canary in the coal mine.” – Morgan Johnston, JetBlue
32. 71% of companies plan to increase investments in social media by an average of 40% because: a) Low Cost Marketing b) Getting Traction c) We Have To Do It
33. “Our head of Social Media is the customer” – McDonald’s
4-5. Wetpaint/Altimeter Group Engagement db study, 2009 http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/social-media-engagement-directly-linked-to-financial-success-9858/ & http://www.altimetergroup.com/2009/07/engagementdb.html
Estimate based on taking 32 million impressions at an average CPM of $13 based on eMarketer estimate found here. http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007053 Less than $50,000 is a very conservative estimate (probably cost much less) to actually build the application + the cost to Burger King to give out less than 20,000 coupons/whoppers. Please note these are estimates, but they error on the conservative side.
8. Based on state populations of Arkansas, Kansas, Utah, Nevada, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Mississippi, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population
11. “Marketing to the Social Web,” Larry Weber, Wiley Publishing 2007
12-14. David Kiley, “Ford Spending 25% of Marketing on Digital and Social Media,” BusinessWeek, 10/16/2009 http://www.businessweek.com/autos/autobeat/archives/2009/10/ford_spending_2.html
15. Jacob Morgan, “Two Examples of Companies Measuring Social Media ROI,” Social Media Globetrotter, 10/12/2009http://www.jmorganmarketing.com/two-examples-of-companies-measuring-social-media-roi/
16. Karl Greenber, “VW Goes All Mobile For Launch Of GTI,” MarketingDaily, 10/22/2009 http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=115919
17. Interactive Agency (Atlanta, GA)
18. Intuit Inc. (Mountain View, CA)
19. “Increase B2B Lead Generation Using Social Media,” Social Media B2B, 7/14/2009 http://socialmediab2b.com/2009/07/b2b-lead-generation-social-media/
20-23: Jose Antonio Vargas, “Obama Raised Half a Billion Online,” Washington Post http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2008/11/20/obama_raised_half_a_billion_on.html
24. Ed Bennett, “Hospitals and Social Media,” SlideShare http://www.slideshare.net/edbennett/hospitals-social-media
25-28. Daniel Adler, “Twenty-One Top Twitter Tips,” Forbes, 7/31/2009 http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/31/top-twitter-tips-entrepreneurs-technology-twitter.html
29. Marshall Kirkpatrick, “Social Media ROI: Dell’s $3m on Twitter and Four Better Examples,” ReadWriteWeb, 6/12/2009 http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_media_roi_dells_3m_on_twitter_and_four_bett.php
30. Alex Bogusky, Co-Chairman, Cripin + Poter & Bogusky
31. Daniel Adler, “Twenty-One Top Twitter Tips,” Forbes, 7/31/2009 http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/31/top-twitter-tips-entrepreneurs-technology-twitter.html
32. Social Media in the Enterprise White Paper by Vignette Software, 2/2009 http://www.vignette.com/dafiles/docs/Downloads/Social-Media-in-the-Enterprise.pdf
Someone suggested I periodically post some of the main questions I receive and my corresponding responses around Social Media. I thought this was a good idea (please let me know if you don’t feel this way). Hence, below are a few question pulled from an interview I did for the McCombs School of Business (University of Texas) with David Weneger.
David Wenger: You posted a video on YouTube called Social Media Revolution, I think it’s had over one million views. What was that about?
Erik Qualman: That was designed to get people thinking about social media. The term Socialnomics is introduced, but I primarily wanted to give a tool to every marketer and every individual who has been struggling with all the hype about social media. Is it a fad or is it the next revolution? The video is designed to show it’s not a fad and here are some hardcore statistics that show that it’s actually the biggest thing since the industrial revolution.
DW: For every social media pioneer there’s also some senior executive who says, “Come on isn’t this just for kids?” What do you say to people that are hanging on to that outdated perception of what social media is?
EQ: Sometimes we’ll start with statistics. A good example is Twitter. It isn’t just for kids because of kids that are 12-to-17 years old, only 11% are on Twitter. Another stat is that the fastest growing segment on Facebook is females age 55-plus, and the reason is they want to engage with their sons and daughters and also their grandkids. Facebook has more photos than all the other photo sharing sites combined: Snapfish, Flicker, and Photobucket. Going back to the video, when I pull up the stats for the 500,000 people that have viewed that video the most people are ages 45-to-55, both male and female.
DW: That suggests that social media is great for consumer products. Does it work for B2B or other kinds of marketing?
EQ: We get a lot of the B2B questions. And the answer to that is it’s huge, because social media is a lot about relationship building. And you could argue that in B2B you have a smaller pool of clients and the relationship is that much more important. So it doesn’t replace the face to face, it just strengthens your current relationship. It allows you to be in touch more often with your most important clients. Then the second piece is that companies can see downstream past their client into their client’s customer, so they can see the pain points. If you’re selling chips — let’s say you’re Intel and you’re selling chips to Dell and also Apple — you can see the pain points of the customer by seeing the conversation on Facebook, on Twitter and all these other social media tools, so you’re a step ahead of the game.
DW: So it actually becomes a type of market research.
EQ: Yes, it’s all transparent, if they roll up their sleeves and use social media as a type of a focus group i.e., collecting data on Twitter, to figure out what the pain points are, they’re going to be ahead of their competition.
DW: A lot of companies are trying to get on the social media bandwagon. You might have two companies, both wanting to leverage the power of social media but one gets it right and the other struggles. What’s the difference?
EQ: The biggest shift for a lot of companies is to make sure your mindset is outward-in rather than inward-out. In the past you’d have marketing divisions that sit for a year and scope out what’s going to be their next message, and sit behind closed doors and think they have all the answers, when the answers are actually now on their fingertips externally. Their customers are more than happy to provide what their needs are. So that’s the biggest shift is one company that’s thinking outward-in is going to beat the company that’s thinking inward-out. That’s a huge paradigm shift.
The other piece is to keep the investment relatively light, because you’re not going to get it right the first time, so it’s important to be flexible and to adjust accordingly. Coca Cola gets a lot of things right but they jumped into Second Life thinking it was the next best thing and it was great, but they jumped into it a little too much. They didn’t go in with a light approach, and so they spent tons of money and then they only had about 30 people come to visit this pavilion that they built within Second Life. Some of the stuff is changing quickly so it’s important to be as light as possible and adjust quickly.
A great term to use is Beta. Google uses Beta a lot when they’re doing their stuff. From a tax purpose you can write that off as an investment.
DW: Have companies figured out how to monetize social media?
EQ: Dell’s already been able to sell $3-million dollars on Twitter and that’s one great example. There are different ROI metrics. There are hard metrics like a sale. There are other metrics like traffic…so you look at how much traffic is now coming from Wikipedia, how much traffic is now coming from YouTube, from Facebook, etc. Then there are softer metrics. If you have 500,000 Facebook fans you can run against your database to figure out did these people stay a customer more than someone that is not a fan. Did they cancel less? People are starting to measure engagements, trying to figure out what that is worth. Other stuff is more of a brand awareness standpoint. Here are our overall sales before we ran social media, and here are our sales today. Obviously there’s a lot of other stuff baked in there but sometimes you have to take a huge step back and just look at the whole picture of your company.
DW: Is there a role for brand building in social media that is simply reputation building?
EQ: By all means. Let’s say you launched a video in your dance studio and that video gets 100,000 views, because you’re teaching how to tango, and you’ve got some brand messaging in that instructional video. It might be difficult to track exactly who came from that video to actually sign up for your dance classes, but it’s a huge brand awareness for your dance studio. There’s definitely a huge brand play involved within social media.
Even before social media, Ben and Jerry’s gave away free ice cream cones hoping to get foot traffic into the store, and people would buy more than just that free cup of ice cream. They gave out free ice cream on election day and their Facebook fan base went from around 200,000 to 300,000, they gained 100,000 followers in just one day. That cost them nothing in terms of messaging because they just pushed it out on Facebook. They still have the cost of giving away the ice cream, they’ve historically always done that, but now they’re able to track it better and get that word of mouth out a lot more.
DW: Part of the concern many executives have is they feel they’re losing control of the conversation. How can a company establish some sense of boundaries about what they feel comfortable with, and what they don’t feel comfortable with?
EQ: They do have to come to grips with their customer taking a lot more ownership of the brand and that’s actually a good thing on most aspects. If everyone thinks your product says this but you think it does that, then there must be something inherently wrong with your product, or it’s a huge opportunity.
DW: So there’s an element of trying something, taking a risk, and possibly being a failure at your first entree into social media. There’s also the aspect of letting go of the conversation. These are great concepts but it must scare the heck out of a lot of business people that you work with.
EQ: Anything that’s changed in a new world is always going to be scary. A lot of companies say we’re not going to do social because we’re concerned about letting go of the conversation, and what I argue is that’s like an ostrich putting their head in the sand. You’re not as powerful as you think. You’re not going to enable social to happen, it’s happening without you so you might as well have a piece in the conversation and be part of the conversation.
A year ago on John Deere, who sells lawn mowers and heavy machinery, did not have a presence on Facebook yet there were 500 Facebook groups, and many of those groups had over 10,000 followers. A lot of them positive and a couple of them negative. So this stuff was going on without John Deere jumping in there. They have arguably a fairly boring and mundane product, a lawn mower and heavy machinery, yet the consumer had a passion for that brand. And then there are also a couple of negative groups out there, so the worst thing that John Deere can do is not be part of that conversation. Now they have launched a Facebook fan page and it has, last time I checked they were close to 100,000 fans. So they’ve realized they do need to be part of that conversation.
The full article/interview can be viewed on ID University.
There has been a lot in the news lately about companies banning social media in the office. The USA Today reported on October 22, 2009 in their Snapshot®* that 54% of companies completely block Facebook, whereas another 35% apply some form of limits. That leaves only 11% that don’t put any limitations on Facebook use in the work force. Why does this feel like déjà vu? Maybe it feels familiar because a few years ago many companies banned Web mail (Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc.) in the work place. A few years before that, companies banned the Internet at the work place. And it’s not just companies that placed these types of bans; teachers often ban mobile phones in the classroom as well. Is this the right thing to do? Let’s take a closer look.
Banning social media in the work place is:
Analogous to banning the Internet
Analogous to banning the phone because you might make a personal phone call
Analogous to banning paper and pens because you might pass a note that is not related to class or work
Could potentially signal to current workers and future recruits that your company just doesn’t “get it”
“People who do surf the Internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t,” Dr Brent Coker, from the Department of Management and Marketing at The University of Melbourne. More from this Australian Social Media study can be found here.
Before we dive back into the workplace, the teacher example is a good dilemma to review. There are phones today that have such a high pitch ringer that the teachers can’t hear them while the students younger ears can hear them. But, is this really a technology issue, question, or problem? Or is it a historic problem that teachers have been wrestling with since the dawn of time? Whether a student is whispering, day dreaming, sleeping, passing a note on parchment, doodling, or sending a text it’s all the same thing. The teacher is not reaching them. I heard the Chairman of Walmart, Lee Scott, speak recently and he said for his first four years on the job he was looking for new critics, when all along he should have been looking to produce a better product or store experience.
Capturing students’ attention has been historically difficult. The teacher’s task is not an envious one, however the really good teachers each century have been able to overcome the hurdles presented them. If you ban today’s technology, does it solve the problem? Probably not. Also, texting is probably less intrusive than whispering, or passing notes, as it doesn’t affect the others in the room as much.
Isn’t texting or mobile surfing the same as:
Passing a note?
Whispering?
Daydreaming?
Doodling?
Also, a good student might suffer as they may be potentially looking up something on their mobile browser that the teacher is covering to a) fact check b) see if there is something visual that clicks with their brain better than how the teacher is attempting to explain it. Or, if they have already grasped the concept why shouldn’t they be able to learn something else new and exciting at their fingertips?
In fact, some teachers may benefit by leveraging this technology in the classroom; they have grown up with technology. Rather than being lectured at they are used to dynamic interaction with various technologies and sources to provide possible answers.
Now back to company restrictions on social media. Banning something like social media could send the wrong message to current employees and potential recruits as a company that “doesn’t get it.” Also, how can companies learn what to do in social media if they aren’t allowing their employees to even use the tools?
That being said all new tools have a learning curve. When people started using phones in the work place they had to be educated not to make thirty minutes worth of personal calls, call internationally or speak too loud. More recently when e-mail was introduced classes were held in the workplace on tonality of e-mails, not replying to all, not wasting much of the workday on e-mail, etc. With social media similar instruction and guidance should be given to the work force. For example Facebook IM chatting with your friends may not be the best use of your time, and it will make it difficult for you to achieve your goals, nor is it wise to status update “glad I’m out of the jail I call work for today.”
An employee is either producing desired results or they aren’t. If you have one employee that reads Wikipedia during their break time but produces 40 sales per week and you have another employee that reads books outside during their break but only produces 15 sales per week, which employee are you going to keep? If you are in the business of making money, you will keep the one producing 40 sales per week. “Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days work, and as a result, increased productivity,” says Dr. Coker.
In fact some employees might benefit from having social media in the work place. If you’re in outbound sales for home insurance it would be helpful to receive a tweet from a friend in California indicating that the wild fires have taken a sharp turn toward Orange County or that the telephone lines are out in Minneapolis. Or to see a user generated picture or video of the fires taking place that includes a geo locator on them.
Or think about sales in general. What’s are two of the top rules of sales? Listen and know they customer are certainly up there. Google isn’t so great at supplying real-time results, but social media certainly is (there is a reason why deals have been cut between Bing, Twitter, Google and Facebook this week). So, if I’m a sales person about to make a phone call some pretty helpful tools are technorati, search.twitter.com, and Wikipedia to figure out what the heck is being said about this prospect or prospect’s company. Why would you ban tools that are valuable to your work force? An answer to this may be because you don’t trust them not to abuse the sites for other reasons. Is that a social media issue? Or is it a work force issue? I would argue it’s a workforce issue. Also, whether you are at work or in the classroom if you treat people like kids by not trusting them, well then you can expect them to behave like kids. And, is that what you want? Do you think Apple or Google bans people from these sites? Their stocks are up 140% and 79% respectively in 2009. They must be laughing out in Silicon Valley because the rich get richer when other companies still don’t “get it.”
Now occasionally some bans do make sense. For example if a University bans downloading music on their network because of bandwidth issues that is reasonable.
However, before instituting social media bans at your school, company please keep this in mind. In the near future we look back and say “remember when we used to ban social media, what were we thinking?” Don’t be a dinosaur, because after all, they became extinct.
*data courtesy Robert Half Technology survey of 1,499 chief information officers. Weighted to represent actual population. Snapshot® compiled by Jae Yang and Julie Snider, USA Today.
Hyper Island, Stockholm:Is this the visionary school for what many colleges and universities will look like in the future? I had the fortune to visit Hyper Island outside of Stockholm, Sweden. This is the school’s main campus and is composed of a little over 100 students.
The term “hyper” is an appropriate one as these students are full of energy and ideas; the passion is palpable. All the students within these walls are digitally focused. There are no accounting or biology majors here. Rather there are experts in creating digital monsters, videos with Adobe After Effects, iPhone applications, etc.
There are also no professors here either. Rather there are rows of modern long white tables with Macs a plenty loaded with the latest software. When students are not editing video or creating avatars these Macs are usually displaying one of the major social media sites.
Hyper Island Uniqueness
Lectures are replaced by collaboration and weekly team readouts of problems each team is experiencing and attempting to resolve
Coaches instead of professors
No books: learning is achieved via “hands-on” practicums with Fortune 1000 companies
Will the modern student get their first computer before they can walk?
This approach appears to be working for Hyper Island and its students. These students are gobbled up for jobs and internships by the Crispin Porters, DDB Needhams and Great Works of the world. The modern worker may greatly resemble one student that I spoke with who received his first computer when he was 3 ½ years old.
Whether you are a business or an individual there are many complex issues to wrestle with when it comes to social media. Often these can be overwhelming. Where to even begin you might ask?
Rather than be paralyzed, it’s often best to understand that there are four simple, yet critical, steps to social media which are outlined in the diagram below:
As showcased in the diagram, the four steps are:
1] Listen
2] Interact: Join the conversation
3] React: Adjust your product or service based on [2]
4] Sell
Companies often enter the social media fray and jump straight to step four, selling. This is the worst thing you can do, and it will not be effective. You need to start with step one which is listening. Without listening the other three steps will not achieve any degree of success. As many have said before me, there is a reason we have two ears and one mouth.
Notice in the diagram that the steps for the customer than happen in the reverse order of the company. If it makes it easier to grasp you can consider these steps 5, 6, 7, 8. Here the customer buys the product from the selling company. The customer’s first step is to LISTEN for what to expect and do with the product or service. They will then INTERACT with the product or service and REACT according to their experience (good/neutral/bad). The consumer’s reaction to the product or service will determine if they SELL for or against (the company/product).
That is the beauty of social media. As a company, if you appropriately engage in the four steps than the stairs act more like an escalator (pun intended) rather than a traditional stairway. It will create a positively circular motion, which, with the appropriate greasing (effort), will continue to take your product or service to the top. And that is the true beauty of Socialnomics.
I will elaborate on this in a future post, but for now, let’s keep it simple.
Chad Hurley, CEO and Co-founder of YouTube had this to say on the YouTube blog today: “I’m proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you.”
Hurley went on to point out a few fundamental tenets that contribute to YouTube’s success:
Speed matters: Videos should load and play back quickly.
Clip culture is here to stay
Open platforms open possibility: Content creation isn’t our business; it’s yours.
YouTube has added a tiny Post-IT style note next to its logo to commemorate this feat. It’s important to note that this billion number includes views from embedded players on other sites. In recent social media news YouTube is often drowned out by the frenzy over Facebook and Twitter, but it’s hard to ignore 1,000,000,000.
Perhaps Google’s stiffest competition in the immediate future is not Bing and Yahoo, but rather it’s Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Just as we no longer search for the news (24 of the top 25 newspapers have shown record declines in circulation) in the future we will no longer search for products and services rather they will find us via social media. Google has made billions by being the masters of the search world. As these new social media players look for potential revenue streams, monetizing search will certainly bubble to the forefront for the executives.
This will occur on two main fronts a) consumers searching for products and services b) companies searching within the millions of conversations and meta data to garner relevant and real-time customer feedback as well as potential leads and sales. One of the most powerful items about Twitter is the ability for companies to go to search.twitter.com and put in relevant brand or product terms and being able to have insight into what is being said about their product or service. This is one of the main drivers behind why Facebook has been adjusting some of their platform to be more in sync with Twitter. Facebook understands there is “gold” in these conversations.
Speaking of adjustments. Google has made advancements in their search algorithm over the years as well as adjustments to other products. However, for the past few years they haven’t been pushed hard by any major competitor and they haven’t made many MAJOR adjustments to their core business. You can’t blame them, why fix something that isn’t broken. As a result they’ve also been able to supply the world with many free tools that we use in our day-to-day lives. However, as a result, search hasn’t advanced as much as it could have if there was a more competitive environment. Also, people care more about what their friend thinks than what an algorithm does and that is where social media has a potential advantage on Google in the future. However Google is looking to close that gap as evidenced by some of their adjustments:
Google Wave: This is Google’s collaboration tool to combat Twitter and Facebook – some have dubbed it 21st Century e-mail. Computer World’s Sharon Gaudin titled in article “Google’s Wave could prove a threat to Facebook, Twitter.” This same article quotes analyst Rob Enderle, “Thus Google, with its marketing clout and good name, may have a good shot at disrupting the likes of Facebook and Twitter, “This represents a displacement threat for everybody,” Enderle said. “Everybody in this space — Twitter, Facebook and MySpace — is nervous at the moment. If they’re not nervous, then they’re missing the memo. The market hasn’t settled and when it’s not settled, then something like Wave could come in and make headway.”
My take: The biggest hurdle here is that it may be too bleeding edge for the masses. If they make it easiest enough to use for Mom & Dad to adopt than they have a home run on their hands. That is what has been one of Facebook’s biggest successes – the mass adoption by older generations.
Google SearchWiki: In Google’s words SearchWiki is a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you prefer to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong. My take: Too much burden placed on the user to supply relevant input that can easily be leveraged by other searches. I believe you also need a Gmail account for this to show up. Also, hardly anyone knows this exists. The beauty of a tool like Facebook Connect is that it easily resolves a problem (people don’t want to have to enter logins/personal information for various sites) with limited effort on the user’s part.
Google Hot Trends: Similar in concept to top Trending Topics on Twitter this functionality or box shows up whenever you type in a search term that is one of the top searched on items in the past few hours. “Trends is all based on a different kind of tweet. Instead of the 140 character tweet, it’s the 20 to 25 character tweet, the keyword search. And those come in much faster than tweets do. In our view, that’s the highest fidelity information for trending topics,” said RJ Pittman, director of product management for consumer search properties at Google.
My take: Yahoo had a similar, less robust concept with Yahoo Buzz several years ago. I just find it interesting that Google is perceived (whether it is true or false – I’d argue false) by the public as following Twitter (no pun intended) with this offering. Great article by Danny Sullivan can be found here
Google Sidewiki: In Google’s Words, “Google Sidewiki allows you to contribute helpful information next to any Web page. Google Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where you can read and write entries along the side of the page. Instead of displaying the most recent entries first, we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed. More information on Google Sidewiki
My take: This is a game changer. There are other companies that have been trying to tackle these “layers” on sites, but with Google now in the game it signals that Google is really getting serious about social. Websites aren’t going to like this loss of control, but it should be a big win for the user if done properly. To make it truly social it should allow the user to highlight or bring to the front specific individuals that they trust. Look for social media companies to get more search oriented and look for Google to continue to get more social.
Erik Qualman is the author of Socialnomics which has made the Amazon #1 Best Seller List. Click here to order Socialnomics.
Some companies are afraid to jump into the social media waters because of potential negative feedback. They do have one thing right, there will be negative feedback no matter how good your company or product is. Good companies embrace negative feedback because:
a) free information about potential product/service deficiencies
b) gives them a chance to correct the problem
c) it’s an opportunity to shine with the customer in a public forum by listening & responding
d) creates a seamless path to have an ongoing conversation with the customer
Well, if you still aren’t sold by the above reasons than you may be persuaded by this: having reviews, even those with negative comments, actually helps drive more sales. At least one small business owner found this out first hand. The story and findings are highlighted in a timely CNNMoney article by Jennifer Alsever ["Even bad reviews boost sales"].
The article points out that AlpacaDirect saw sales climb 23% on items that had customer reviews, even for products receiving bad customer reviews like the golf cardigan which received a few three out of five star ratings for being “kinda sweaty” and a “poor fit.” The article has a few other helpful tidbits and is worth a read.
It’s funny that several years ago when company’s received feedback in the mail (yes the kind with a stamp on it) whether it was good, bad or indifferent, they were excited. After all, they actually received some form of feedback. Well, it’s time to get excited about real-time customer feedback via social media, even the negative kind.
Socialnomics: How social media transforms our lives and the way we do business from Wiley Publishing is in bookstores and on eReaders. Please click on "The Book" tab above for more information.
2. Gary Vaynerchuk grew his family business from $4 million to $50 million using social media. Gary’s eccentric personality and offbeat oenophile knowledge have proven a natural path to success with his Wine TV Library.
this program was less than $50,000 yet they received 32 million media impressions which roughly estimated equals greater than $400,000 in press/media value. Which to put in context is somewhat like reaching the entire populations of 19 states (understanding this doesn’t account for unique vs. repeat visitors, etc.)
spend has been shifted to digital/social media initiatives? Ford is the only US auto company that didn’t take a government loan.
donors contributing $500 million in fundraising. An astounding 92% of the donations were in increments of less than $100.
another 35% apply some form of limits. That leaves only 11% that don’t put any limitations on Facebook use in the work force. Why does this feel like déjà vu? Maybe it feels familiar because a few years ago many companies banned Web mail (Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc.) in the work place. A few years before that, companies banned the Internet at the work place. And it’s not just companies that placed these types of bans; teachers often ban mobile phones in the classroom as well. Is this the right thing to do? Let’s take a closer look.
Chad Hurley, CEO and Co-founder of YouTube had this to say on the YouTube blog today: “I’m proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you.”
made billions by being the masters of the search world. As these new social media players look for potential revenue streams, monetizing search will certainly bubble to the forefront for the executives.
company or product is. Good companies embrace negative feedback because:
