Corporate Social Media: After the Buzz
I was a guest on This Week in Social Media hosted by PJA Advertising + Marketing. The show was rebroadcasted last week. I had a chance to listen again and thought there were some interesting nuggets. Mike O’Toole and I talked about the practical aspects of running social for a public company. I really like the way we came up with a top five list of “rules” for helping an organization be more social. 1. Find people who are willing to speak in the first person and aren’t afraid to have a personal point of view. You need people who are passionate about a given topic and have the domain expertise to add value to the conversation. 2. Be ruthless. Help your team find time for social marketing activities. What will they stop doing to make time to join the emerging conversations? Find the bottom 10% of activities and stop doing them – life is a zero sum game and something has to give. 3. Think small and simple. Social media can be overwhelming so people need to get started in simple ways and scale from there. 4. Use agile project management. Social media is still quite speculative and you will need to test things before making bigger investments. Agile provides an adaptive approach that helps accelerate learning. 5. Need to create an open, principle-based policy to provide guidance to the team. It is impossible to create rules for every possible scenario so you need to give people baseline behavioral guidance. There is much more to the conversation if you have the time to listen. Are there any other things we should add to the list? One last ask: I could also use your support for my panel on Agile for Social Media at the SXSW conference. Vote early and vote often my friends. And as always, thanks for your...
Seven simple steps to more effective social media listening
I’m sure that most of us have heard the social media truism that first step to being more social is listening. An entire industry has sprung up around listening platforms. Before you sign up for 12 months of service from the platform of the day, here is my list of low cost/no cost ways to be a better online listener. Identify your top influencers and/or sources of information – If you are like most people, you know your top 5 to 10 off the top of your head. What are the sites you visit everyday? What sites do you feel guilty about not visiting more frequently? What does your boss read daily? You get the idea. My suggestion is find 30-40 sources. I know that sounds like alot but we’ll talk more later about how to deal with the deluge of content. Setup a Google Reader account – I know there are many ways to read RSS feeds but I like the Reader’s ability to share feeds and connect with people on Google. I also regularly use my feed reader as a convenient time waster on my new HTC Incredible. Just scrape the RSS feeds from your source and add to the reader. Create Google Alerts – In my world, there are granular things that I want to watch daily. I know it is vain but I watch my own name and “personal brand”. Some other obvious things include your company, brand, or competitors. You can decide on a comprehensive vs. blog search depending on traffic – one approach is starting with comprehensive and then refine if necessary. I also suggest setting it up for immediate notification by RSS rather than email. If it has more than 10 alerts per day then you are either too popular (yeah, right) or need to refine your search. You can track these through your Google Reader like any other feed. Setup a Twitter search – I think this is the hidden gem of Twitter’s offerings. Just go to search.twitter.com and create searches on your keywords (use the same keywords from your Google Alerts if you want). The best part is you can create RSS feeds for these search and then dump them into your Reader. More advanced tweeters can add a search column in Tweetdeck. Create lists on Twitter – I “follow” over 1,000 people on Twitter. In reality, I probably care about 150 of them (sorry). The best way to keep your signal-to-noise ratio high is to build a list important friends. For example, I have on two lists on my personal Twitter account – Fresh Followers for new followers I’d...
Presentation from MassTLC breakfast – March 18, 2010
My slides from the MassTLC breakfast on where we discussed trends and changes in marketing expenditures for 2010. Mtlc Sales & Marketing Panel, March 18, 2010View more presentations from Frank...
A 21 day plan for creating your own Internet radio or TV show
Image via Wikipedia Wake up everybody. The age of plentiful bandwidth is here. This means a streaming radio show can sound like the host is sitting right next to you. Last summer I blogged about my learning from producing a couple of online radio shows. I created this post as a follow roadmap to help you create your own show. My guess is that this is a new venture so I am a big advocate of testing new media programs in no-cost or low cost ways to prove the concept before “going big”. So how can we get from idea to fresh online radio show in an agile way? Here is my road map I used twice last summer and am currently employing as I produce a new show here at Novell. Strategy: Write a short creative brief – This should be no more than 3 pages. Remember that the show is the product not the document. Sell the idea to the most important stakeholders – You need buy-in but don’t try to sell everyone. The first show (ie “the pilot”) will be your best tool for convincing people to do more. Find an executive sponsor – This person can advise the team and protect the idea from the corporate T-cell types that challenge anything new or different. Your sponsor could also be a possibly be one of your first guests. Operational details Decide on a format – Will it be a panel? Will it be a one-on-one interview? Or a combination? Pick dates for your first three shows – Without a first show date, all you have is an idea. This creates a sense of urgency and catalyzes the team. Decide on frequency – My bias is towards weekly. Unless you have enough content, more than once a week is tough. On the other hand, less than once a week doesn’t give you the chance to develop a rhythm. Identify potential guests for your first three shows – The first shows won’t be perfect so you don’t need to call in all your markers to get superstar guests. Save that for when you have worked out the kinks. Get all your technology straightened out. You don’t need much equipment these days to do radio but you do need someone who can plug it in and make sure it works seamlessly. TV/video has even more moving parts so plan accordingly. Figure out the streaming/hosting – Where will the show reside? There are a number of Internet radio stations to consider. You can also buy some bandwidth from a CDN and stay independent. Content Find a strong host – I...
When I grow up I want to be microfamous
Please accept my apologies for disappearing over the last few weeks. Life has a way of getting busy with things like helping clients, producing a radio show, and performing my mission critical soccer dad duties. Somewhere in between I’ve been able to squeeze in a few hours building my microcelebrity (more like expanding my nanocelebrity). Over the last two weeks I broke the 1,000 followers mark on Twitter (OK, Limeduck I mentioned it in public so you can unfollow me now). Here are some of my observations from the 12 months of tweeting: The number followers doesn’t mean as much as quality of interactions and conversations. This is an obvious point that gets lost in Ashton and Britney’s battle for supremacy. I thank Ivan at Tipjoy for changing my mind on this. Twitter has helped me connect with really interesting people I never would have met in my World 1.0 circles (folks like @jeffcutler, @matthew_t_grant, @robertcollins). A milliscoble of social media infamy is no substitute for my longstanding professional relationships when it comes to new business development. Twitter is a bit like Vegas. Some thing are larger than life on Twitter. Also many things that happen on Twitter stay on Twitter. People can become in social media “experts” very quickly. You can find a ton of great info on Mashable and Techcrunch not to mention the blogosphere about social media channels. FOTS (Friends of the ‘Slice) have heard my regular rants that social media are just media that need to be tested like any other channel making “expertise” less important. I’ve met Chris Brogan three times (but I’m not sure he remembers my name). I want to dislike the whole “social media rockstar” schtick but he is a genuinely nice guy who blogs with a clarity that I admire. I also really like his dad’s poker blog. The credentials that give someone status in the business world (ie Harvard MBA, worked for Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, etc) are not always a big deal on Twitter. I guess you could argue that Twitter is more egalitarian than the real world. Twitter can be a powerful promotional tool. The Skeptical CMO team signed up 100 people for our first radio show back in May almost completely through Twitter. Did I miss anything? There are too many great people and conversations to highlight in one small post. Shameless self promotion: I’ll be on PermissionTV today discussion all thing marketing, social media and tangy. I hope you can join the conversation. Stay tangy my...
