Conversations and Connections - social media at SAS

There's a paradox in my involvement in social media that people who know me well will understand: Often I don't want to know what most people are thinking. For instance, the absolute nadir of human communication is occurring in the comments sections of YouTube and local news sites. I avoid them as much as possible.

I had a moment this weekend with Facebook that showed me a future I find as unpleasant as it is likely. Facebook is essentially becoming the shadow Internet, from email and chat within the site to photo and video sharing to applications and the ability to share links. More is no doubt on the way, all geared toward keeping people on the site as much as possible.

I still remember the first time I was shocked by someone's callousness on the Internet, in the mid '90s. A relative of a Lockerbie victim said in a forum he was sure those who died in that crash were all in heaven, and someone argued with him. I felt shocked and saddened that someone within what I had previously seen as a polite and supportive community would go out of her way to say something pointlessly hurtful.

I'm seeing inklings of that on Facebook now. The first (very mild) one for me was several months ago when someone I've friended on Facebook but don't really know challenged a comment I'd made about music by admonishing me to have a more open mind. I was a bit taken aback. Anyone who actually knows me will tell you my musical mind is pretty darn open. Put my iPod on shuffle and you might get Icelandic rap, John Coltrane, vintage Chapel Hill punk, '70s African funk or Erik Satie.

Today while looking at posts from two of my (actual, real-world) friends, I read comments to their posts, made by people I don't know, that really annoyed me. I won't go into the details but the comments were smug, confrontational and ideological in nature. They were basically written to scold the person for not thinking the way they did.

That's not what I come to Facebook for. The real world gives me enough of that. I'm not interested in debate. I'm not interested in your politics or your cultural biases. And I'm certainly not interested in reading things that make me angry written by people I don't even know.

I'm also more than a little worried about the petitions to create a "Dislike" button. I'm sure a lot of people will use it to say, for instance, "I'm sorry your car broke down in Boise," but a lot will see it as the "I disagree with you" button. How can making that quick and easy contribute to a more positive discourse?

I know I can unfriend people and hide comments, but I don't think there's any way I can keep from seeing your jerky friends' comments. Maybe we all need to agree to unfriend jerks. I'm just dismayed that, like I had to do with the Internet 15 years ago, I now have to come to terms with the fact that Facebook isn't a big party of like-minded, polite, well-meaning people. It's a microcosm of reality, and we'll have to get better at filtering out the realities we don't want.

Inevitable, yes, but a shame nonetheless.

Panelists (left to right) Laura Fitton (@pistachio), John Andrews (@Katadhin), Lucretia Pruitt (@GeekMommy) and Jason Falls (@JasonFalls)

My notes from The Future of Business on the Social Web panel at the Social Media Business Forum

Jeff Cohen started the panel with a question: Has social media gone beyond communications? Does it impact everything a business does?

Jason: "Social media" is an adjective. There's always something after it. The "thought leaders" in the social space have been talking about the concept of social business for the last year or so. If you take away all their marketing spin, it comes down to how we are engaging customers. Social media marketing allows for individuals and brands to engage their customers on a level they've never done before. If you transfer the online engagement to offline, like Panera offering free wifi, yes they are turning themselves into a social business, but they're finding a new way to engage customers.

Lucretia: I argued against the term "social media" pretty vehemently for about a year because it referred to the tools. One of the things I've found is you don't get to control what people call something. The community, and by that I mean the people with the loudest voice, tend to pick their own terms. A couple of years ago we were stuck on "Web 2.0." "Social media" has become our junk bag term for "anything that might possibly use Twitter." It really is supposed to be in relation to using specific tools to achieve a goal, but that's not how people use it.

John: When I was a lowly marketing assistant for Sara Lee, the magic bullet in marketing was getting the right message to the right customers at the right time. Now you have that power and it's freaking everybody out. Who cares what you call it? In the end of the day it's about engaging people in a real, authentic and meaningful way. We'll go through another naming cycle in the next six months. The reality is it's about customer engagement.

Laura: The word is "media." We'll get over the "social" part eventually. Do we call it "book media" or "radio media"? In March 2007, I looked at my then-husband and said, "Where do I do the browser upgrade to get Web 2.0?" And I wasn't kidding. It's silly to have a social media specialist.

Jeff: Beyond the term, what is changing about how businesses communicate? Should companies wrap their heads differently around how they engage with customers?

Lucretia: "Only if they want to do better." The 20th century is over but we're back to 19th century ways of communicating. It's about how people share information. It's the same as it's been for centuries.

Jason: Because of social tools that businesses see as beneficial, we're returning to our moral compass as a marketplace and a society. We hear terms like honesty and transparency. If you strip away the technology and corporate mumbo jumbo, consumers are saying, "Stop lying to me and telling me to buy crap. Allow me to rely on the word of mouth marketing and referrals I get from my friends, not listening to marketing and advertising spin."

Lucretia: Criticism is a privilege to a business owner and if you don't see that, you're missing an opportunity to do better.

John: We're still in early days. Jason and I were saying that next year we need to spend more time at conferences talking to people outside of the group of people who already understand social media.

Jeff: We realize that times are changing. What do businesses need to do now to be properly positioned in the next three to five years?

Laura: Start listening. My four word social media hack: Listen, learn, care, serve. The more useful your content is for someone else... This is a service business.

Lucretia: I'm not sure about the "serve" part. A lot of people in social media don't have that noble intention, but I didn't go out to make the world a better place. I wanted to connect with people, but it wasn't with the intention to serve.

Laura: If a company is generally solving someone's problem, their sales go up, so it isn't as altruistic as it sounds.

Jason: Companies have to relearn how to have conversations with people. It's not that we've forgotten as individuals. For some reason, there's been this detachment between individuals and companies having conversations. We have this fear that the CEO is looking over our shoulder, or the legal department will slap our hands. We have to understand that our customers want to have conversations with people, and sometimes it's with people who work for companies.

Lucretia: One of the things I keep hearing, when we mention the legal department, it's said as an epithet. If you want to change it, we'll have to change the legislation. Companies need to get active in changing liability laws so that those things the lawyers are worried about won't be an issue in five years. The lawyers arent' just mean; it's their job to protect the company's interest. How do we change the legislation to reflect how our businesses will operate in the future?

John: This will come down to business results. At the end of the day if you can't answer the question empirically that it sold more stuff, it won't get done.

Jason: Mainstream reality check: For the most part, people don't mind advertisements from companies they like. They hate advertisements from companies they don't.

Laura: Another social media strategy hack: Make good sh*t. People say Apple has no social media strategy, but they have the most thriving social media community in the world because they have so many evangelists.

Jason: Apple has created a community without trying to create a community, because they make good products. Fan groups for products, TV shows, etc. have grown up because of the fans.

Lucretia: No Facebook fan page will ever make up for a crappy product.

Laura: It's hard to do, but it's becoming easier every day to make great products because we have a huge firehose of people talking about what they want. Social media needs to get past marketing and get down into R&D and product development. Social media needs to filter in to many places in the organization.

Jason to Laura: You said yesterday that you put all of your eggs in the Twitter basket. What if Twitter changes or goes away?

Laura: In 2008 I staked my whole livelihood on the idea that Twitter would take off. The key of Twitter is mobile, social, networked small messages. If Twitter goes away, the things I am still interested in will endure.

Question: You talked mostly about social media for marketing. Can you reframe the comments on how to use social media for publishing? When you're trying to get the news in social media, how do you reach the people who are used to the newspaper.

Lucretia: I don't think social media will kill the newspaper. It's the difference between data and analysis. The analysis aspect of social media is huge. We turn to newspapers and periodicals to answer the question, "What does that mean to me?" Facebook, Twitter and all the other tools allow us to ask people, "What does that mean to you?"

Question from Wayne Sutton: There was a time when businesses were trying to create their own social networks. It really didn't work because they found their customers were on Facebook, forums, Ning, etc. Is it valuable now for businesses to create content and own it on their websites?

Jason: I agree that businesses need to be all about creating content, but they have to be not content centric but consumer centric. If your customers are on Facebook, give it to them on Facebook. They may not want to go to your Web site.

Laura: Be super careful what you measure. If the numbers are "super easy" to measure, they may not actually be valuable. I had a business ask me how many Twitter followers meant we were doing a good job. It depends on who you are and what you're selling.

Adam Covati question: There are a lot of people here with a lot of needs. What have you seen that is your pet favorite that actually does something useful?

Jason: When I worked for the alcohol, wine and spirits industry I spent all my time on a forum about bourbon at straighbourbon.com, because those guys were "flippin' crazy about bourbon." I could go to them and tell them we were launching a new product and not just get the message out to 300 people, but 300 people who would influence thousands. Forums and message boards, depending about the niche, can be a very important component of your marketing mix.

Lucretia: My favorite thing this year is Whrrl. Robert Scoble said it's the next Twitter.

Question: As a state government employee I had to fight to get here. I have to go back to my office and explain why we should engage in social media. I need concrete advice.

Jason: Social media has emerged because this is where the majority of the American people have gone to talk about products and services, including governments, and you work for us.

Laura: Social media saves money. As a taxpayer I'm getting annoyed that my tax dollars are being spent on expensive things that don't work.

John: Show them that people are already talking about you online and that you aren't there.

Question: I have a personal pet theory that B2B and B2C are going away. It's all just P2P. What are your thoughts on B2B and B2C emerging as just "marketing"?

Jason: Laura said it earlier: It's person to person (P2P). You sell to people. If you're reaching out to them in an honest way, you'll win. That's how it's always been; we're just putting it into words.

Lucretia: People don't buy from companies, they buy from people. If I'm going to refer a service provider it's because I have a relationship with them.

Question: What's the one thing you think you did wrong when you first got started, and the one thing you knew was right the moment you did it?

Laura: The reason my name is Pistachio is because I had a hideous green home office. My first Twitter account was called Pistachio and was very anonymous. Don't look at anybody else and think they know it and you don't. Just do it and screw up and iterate. My best thing? Be lucky. I've been in the right place and I'm grateful.

John: As a 12-year consumer packaged goods guy, you get trained early on that Proctor & Gamble invented it and there's a model for how you do it. That model does not work here. I tried to use it and failed miserably. To get over that model I talked to the most knowledgeable people in the space and asked, "How do I do this?" and I listened.

Lucretia: I've blogged for a really long time. As a college professor I used to teach people how not to leave an Internet footprint. For the first year on Twitter I refused to say who I was and refused to trust anybody. It wasn't until January 2008 that I decided to come from behind the curtain and took responsibility for what I was doing. Owning what you do is the hardest thing ever, because sometimes we do really stupid stuff. The smartest thing I did? I've been very lucky in my opportunities and the people I've gotten to know. Those opportunities present themselves; the smartest thing I've done is to take them.

Jason: I did not prioritize search for my clients for a year or so and I regret that because I could have done a lot better job for them. The one thing that I've done right, and has gotten me in trouble, is that I am unbelievably honest to a fault and have no edit button whatsoever. When people ask for my opinion, I give it.

Panelists: (left to right) Jason Falls, @JasonFalls; Ilina Ewen, @ilinap;Gavin Baker, @GavinBaker

My notes from the "Who should own social media?" session at the Social Media Business Forum

I came in a bit late for this one. When I arrived, Jason was saying it's better to have a person who is active and engaged lead your social media strategy, regardless of what department they're in.

Ilina: You've got to look at how social media fits into your entire strategy, not just look at what you need to do on Twitter.

Jason: I worry about hiring the 20-something right out of college to represent your brand if they don't have an idea of how it ladders up to your strategy. Quite frankly, I was in my early 30s before I understood what tactics meant in relation to an overall strategy. But it's all about the individual. If you can find the right person and they're in their 20s, go for it.

Ilina: Until agencies get social media and figure out how to bill for it, marketing departments that work with those agencies won't get it.

Question: What do you do if your execs think they get it, but really don't?

Jason: You have to keep showing them what they're doing wrong and give them examples. Social media is still on the bottom of the bell curve. We're nowhere close to social media being a big part of business and commerce. We have to keep evangelizing and showing people what's important.

Gavin: People who aren't doing it "right" aren't going to see the results they want. If their goals are a certain number of followers, for instance, they won't get to that. Gavin follows the Pizza Hut "twintern" (who just got hired full-time apparently) and all she does is "tweet marketing speak." Gavin's example: Ruby Tuesday's calls their salad bar a "fresh garden bar." "Do I call it a 'fresh garden bar,' or do I call it a salad bar, because everybody knows what a salad bar is."

Ilina: Pizza Hut's move adds to the perception that social media is a fad. We need to educate people that they need to determine if they if they do indeed need a social media strategy and if so, to explore the best ways to do it.

Question: I'm 24 and I do have experience. How do I overcome that age stigma?

Jason: Show them you know what you're doing and they'll get it.
Ilina: Demonstrate that you understand social media is not just a tactic, but has to be part of a strategy.
Gavin: It's competence, and the ability to push back if necessary. Demonstrate thought leadership, for instance in a blog, outside of just what you do every day.

Question: Will social media be its own department, or are we putting a square peg in a round hole trying to say who should own it?

Jason: Saying "everyone should own social media" is a cop-out. Someone needs to drive the strategy, the training and coordinate the activities. (Amen!)

Ilina: It's like saying "everybody's is responsible for the brand." That's true, but it still should stay in marketing, or at least a department. It's got to be housed somewhere to keep things consistent.

I made a comment that titles like mine (social media manager) may sound like we're trying to tell people what to say in social media, but what we're actually doing is driving the strategy, the policies, the training and communication of social media principles within our organizations. For SAS it puts a stake in the ground that shows social media is important to us. In a few years there might not be a need for a job like mine if I work successfully to integrate social media principles and practices throughout the organization.

Jason: I've told clients in the past that my job is to get them to the point of social media competency that they don't need me anymore.

Question from Ryan Boyles: Marketing can't own social media because you have so many other people in customer-facing roles.

Ilina: Marketing owns the brand and in a smart organization they understand that the brand permeates all the way down to the janitor. We held brand messaging meetings at American Express with people throughout the organization including customer service. The brand drives how you answer the phone, what your sales materials look like, everything. That has to be housed in marketing, not just from a sales perspective but because they will understand the more intricate meaning about your brand.

Gavin: In ten years that's a different question, but right now you need to have somebody who understands it and pushes it forward. You have to start with someone who knows it, and then it will spread across the organization. It will move to training, product development, our executive chefs, etc. It has to sit somewhere and that's marketing for now.

Question: We're all new to social media no matter how long we've been participating, since it's always changing. Tell us about a mistake you made and what you learned.

Jason: When I first got started I did not emphasize search enough, because 85 percent of all transactions on the web start with search. Social media helps with organic search, but every client has as priority one or two optimizing search. I learned that the hard way with some clients. Please make sure that search is at or near the top of your list.

Ilina: One of the key things I flubbed with clients early on was not telling them to listen first, instead of just jumping in. You have to establish rapport first.

Gavin: I'll share a corporate example. Our CEO tweets. I've been at the company since June. In July we raised additional public money to pay down some debt. He tweeted, "I'm in New York and just raised an additional $70 million to strengthen our brand." That tweet violated the FTC's quiet period requirements. It got picked up locally and nationally. We didn't suffer any consequences but we could have. It became my responsibility because it was "my messaging platform." It was one of our biggest mistakes not to make everyone in the loop and know that people would be tweeting.

Question: Clients are looking for agenices that can integrate PR and social media. Should companies outsource to two different agencies?

Jason: It depends on the client competency and need. You need to understand that if people at your agency are going to do social media for you, you need to make them aware of the brand and give them access. What we need to be doing moving forward is training our clients and brands to own social media themselves so they never have to ask that of agencies in the future. Do you trust someone who works at Ford, or someone who works at an agency that works for Ford? I'm always going to go to the root.

Ilina: It's irrelevant to the customer who pushes the buttons. It's fine if an agency needs to handle it while a client gets up to speed and great to integrate with PR, but a client shouldn't assume the kind of risk it would take to hand it over to an agency.

Gavin: Agencies have a hard time because they aren't inside your organization. If they don't know the right people to talk to and to call into the meetings, it's going to be a fail.

(left to right) Stephanie Miller, Beth Harte, Jason Baer and Michael Brito

Thirty ideas from the Digital Marketing Mixer you can implement tomorrow

The closing session of the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer featured a team of four "mixologists" who gathered and shared their top takeaways from the event. The mixologists were Jason Baer (@jaybaer), Stephanie Miller (@StephanieSAM), Michael Brito (@Britopian) and Beth Harte (@BethHarte).

Stephanie handled the Must Know track:

• Build credibility before you start selling via social media.
  
• Allow open (but governed) access for employees to Twitter and blogging.
  
• Broadcast emails are not effective. Create relevancy and be helpful - even once a month.
  
• Use your Facebook fan page to promote key content of your email newsletter.
  
• Join the right conversations at the right time.
  
• Think about your front page as a collection of pages, not one home page.
  
• Improve search spending ROI by using down-funnel data. Use a human filter to get rid of the keywords that don't perform.
  
• Invest in social media. It's not free.
  

Jason Baer handled the Integrating Marketing Programs track:

• Companies are telling people that they have to blog because of their position, but you should find the people who really love it.
  
• Don't be afraid to test things that defy convential wisdom, because you might be surprised by the results.
  
• Clean up your landing pages.
  
• Keep your troops informed.
  
• Insert retweet buttons into PDF documents.
  
• Remove gates in front of content. People are getting used to free content and are less likely to register unless you have really great content that no one else has.
  
• Use your brand community as a free market research program. ("I actually crowdsourced this beard.")
  
• Engage in online communities as a person first, as a marketer second.
  
• Use Google keyword tool to determine how your customers describe you, your products or your category.
  
• Optimize all your content for search.
  

Michael Brito covered the Engaging with Customers track:

• Build relationships with firestarters (influencers).
  
• Build community first, monetize later.
  
• Offer value on Twitter, don't self-promote.
  
• Have passion and jump on every possible situation you can on the social web.
  
• Through the social web, building relationships with customers creates a memorable brand experience.
  
• When you launch a blog or Twitter account, set goals, measure, iterate.
  
• Social media guidelines should be short and succinct.
  
• Be organized internally to effectively manage social media externally.
  

Beth Harte covered the Peer-to-Peer track:

• If you're blogging, no one really cares about your products. Tell them how your product fits into their life.
  
• Humanize your blog.
  
• Get your legal counsel talking to other companies who have succesfully implemented social media.
  
• Have conversations with senior management to find out their appetite for social media.
  
• Provide your community something that is personally beneficial to them.
  
• Let your members decide how they want to use 'their' community.
  
• When doing video, be mindful of people's time, attention and surroundings.
  
• Use trackable links to help track back to metrics.
  

Beth: You need a plan. Benchmark where you are and create measurable objectives. Your objectives will drive your strategies, your strategies will drive your tactics. When someone questions why you're doing this, you can say, "It's in the plan."

Best quotes:

"Content doesn't win. Optimized content wins."
"People don't expect your company to be perfect. They expect you to provide solutions."
"Don't train. Simplify."
"Measurement is like laundry. It piles up the longer you wait to do it."
"Your customers are listening in social media, and so are search engines."
"Many crummy trials beats the big thinking."
"The art of Twitter is in the retweet - you must be interesting."
"Tactics without a strategy is like doing nothing."

(left to right) Mike Volpe, Ilya Mirman and Charlie King

My notes from the Business Blogging: Tips and Case Studies panel at MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer.

Panelists:

Mike Volpe, @mvolpe
Charlie King, @CharlieKingGolf
Ilya Mirman, @IlyaMirman

Mike:

Smaller companies can get a lot of leverage out of inbound marketing. The amount of money you have no longer dictates how many people you can reach. The reach of your blog is about the brainpower, creativity and effort you put behind it.

Stop thinking like a marketer or advertiser. Start thinking like a publisher and socializer.

Target content to your personas. Know who the people are that you're selling to and make sure they will enjoy and appreciate the content. Content is what makes you interesting in social media. It's what you link to in Twitter or Facebook, and the blog articles behind them. Without blogging as a core part of your strategy, just adding social media can be a mistake.

HubSpot's blog is their third-most important source of leads and drives about 10 percent of visits to the company website.

SEO and social media are equally important for HubSpot. 25-30 percent of visitors come from SEO and 20-25 percent from social media.

They look at every article they publish from an editorial perspective and look at the number of inbound links, comments and visitors and discuss that information in monthly editorial meetings to talk about what's working and how to enhance it.

They track traffic, leads and sales by channel or source. They can see how each channel is performing. Their two key goals for the blog are to get more traffic and more conversions.

Charlie King, Director of Instruction, Reynolds Plantation

Charlie was named one of the top 100 golf instructors in the world. David Meerman Scott's "New Rules of Marketing and PR" first alerted Charlie to the possibilities. His audience is golf instructors who want instructional materials. Any time he deviates, he gets low traffic numbers. "Blogging is so democratic," he said.

He's also done a lot of video tips. His first video was called "Three Steps to Proper Club Throwing," a funny video which showed up on golf.com. Charlie's first thought was, "This could be 19 years of legitimate golf instruction right down the tubes." He was concerned about the reaction but kept getting positive emails. Golf.com told him the video had gone to a million views in a week, and is now up to about two million views.

"My serious videos, they're in the hundreds." One called "Golf's most important lesson" is up to 18,000 views. He has about 30 videos on YouTube.

Charlie writes 8-10 blog posts per month. He works to keep them SEO optimized and keyword-rich. He has 30 videos and an e-book called "New Rules of Golf Instruction." (No doubt a tip of the hat to David Scott.) His blog now has more than 600 subscribers and more than 15,000 e-book downloads. More important, where most businesses are down 20-30 percent, they are breaking even.

Tips and Takeaways:

• Content is king. You can be your own media mogul.
  
• Get started before your competition to get ahead.
  
• Make SEO part of your blogging strategy.
  
• Even non-technology businesses can benefit from a blog.
  

Ilya Mirman, VP Marketing, Cilk Arts

His company is focused on developers working with multicore processors, a startup that raised a "couple of million dollars" and had a staff of nine. The goal was to create a worldwide standard for multicore processors. They were acquired by Intel, "So that's pretty cool," he said.

Their go-to-market approach revolved around inbound marketing and an open-source business model. They hired no sales people, but had one marketer (Ilya) eight months before shipping the product to implement the inbound marketing approach.

Results:

• Reached more than 100,000 developers
  
• Traffic and awareness matched or exceeded competitors
  
• Adoption at >250 universities worldwide
  
• >6,200 inbound links
  
• >3,000 leads
  
• Blog posts boosted search engine ranking for key terms
  

Tips:

• Get the whole team engaged. Everybody can blog a little bit.
  
• Don't obsess over the number of comments.
  
• Inbound links drove their search engine rank.
  
• You don't know ahead of time which posts will drive the most traffic.
  
  They kept an eye on traffic stats and put together the most popular content into an e-book, and drove a big spike in traffic (close to 20,000 copies distributed worldwide).
  
  Do:
  
  
  
  • Get your whole team engaged.
    
  • Be real, be genuine, let your personality come out.
    
  • Build an editorial calendar with a broad set of interesting, valuable content. Target the key personas you care about.
    
  • Discover which topics are worth investing more in. Invite guests to contribute.
    
  • Leverage content in many ways: blog, e-books, tutorials, etc., make it consumable via YouTube, SlideShare, social media sites, etc.
    
  
  Don't:
  
  
  
  • ...be a blatant self-centered commercial.
    
  • ...focus on just one topic.
    
  • ...make your blog your only social media effort, instead spend time on other blogs, community sites, and contribute.
    
  • ...worry about number of comments.
    
  • ...worry about slow periods (number of visitors, subscribers, comments).
    
  
  The slides from this session are available at http://www.mikevolpe.com/mpdm.
  
  Questions:
  
  What kind of editorial guidance do you give bloggers?
  
  Ilya: You need some kind of guidance and editorial control. We suggest that you need at least four or five paragraphs to cover a topic. Sometimes it goes longer.
  
  Charlie: For me it's been more about the videos than the words. If I was trying to do instruction just via words, it could be easy to misunderstand. I have short posts that lead into video.
  
  In order to get a blog off to a good start, you need to give up something to commit the time to it. Did you give up other things or attract new resources?
  
  Charlie: For me it goes in waves. Spring and Fall are my busiest seasons. Now I'm trying to stick to a schedule. I just have to stay later that day. I guess it would be called "giving up time with my family."
  
  Ilya: There's no such thing as a free lunch. I made the case for us investing a quarter of our time in doing this, but it was cleear because of our community-related business value. If you look at it as a marketing investment, stop doing things that have lower value and spend time or money on blogging.
  
  Do you get a lot of negative comments. Are you worried about that?
  
  Charlie: I've had mainly good comments. What I'm doing is not really normal within golf to have a blog yet. Sometimes to get people to sign up I call it a "weekly email update" because the term "blog" does not resonate well with my audience. He got one negative comment about the "New Rules" book. You can't have a thin skin. There's no way to have 100 percent acceptance.
  
  How much does SEO drive your editorial calendar?
  
  Ilya: For us it was more the tail than the dog. We were mindful of wanting to do better on relevant terms but we didn't pick a word and then right a blog post around it.
  
  When you launched your blog, did you do any publicity?
  
  Ilya: We did none of that. I'm not saying that's a great best practice. We wanted to first see if it was of interest to anybody. If the content is bad, all marketing will do for a blog is let more people see that it sucks. When we had the e-book we started sharing it with more people, editors, etc.
  
  Charlie: I had to be stealthy. The general feeling in our company was negative about blogging. My answer if I was asked was that I was writing about golf and golf instruction and our industry, not a personal blog. A year later it's a little bit better.
  
  Do you see the number of golf blogs growing, people copying what you're doing?
  
  The ones who already have bigger names than me have a competitive advantage, but I'm hoping they don't catch on for another year or two. Most of the blogs I see now are golf enthusiasts, not golf instructors.
  
  How much personality should come through in a business blog?
  
  Mike: A lot of it depends on what your brand is. HubSpot has 8-10 people who blog regularly and bring their personalities, but we do want to stay close to the corporate brand. Don't use profanity, for instance, even if you would in your personal life.
  
  Ilya: The bigger deal is not the tone and the personality but the topic. You don't want to be totally irrelevant. Don't talk about what you had for breakfast that day.
  
  Final thoughts: What's your one piece of advice about getting started in blogging?
  
  Ilya: I get no commission, but I would say read "Inbound Marketing." The blog is recurring traffic, recurring revenue. You write a good blog post and it pays dividends forever.
  
  Charlie: I have the email that Mike sent me about what he wanted us to talk about. Not once did he say, "Talk about HubSpot.com," but that is my piece of advice. I followed step-by-step what David Meerman Scott, Seth Godin and HubSpot had to say, and every piece of advice they've given me has been true. Other than that , I would say, "Start small." Have a goal and work toward it. Blogging is a tool to help me reach my goal, and as time goes on it will become a more important part.
  
  Mike. It's a marathon, not a sprint. For the first few months it can be very depressing. You have to think about a long-term strategy. You need a six-month runway before you'll start seeing any real traction. All the examples I've seen, and it was true for us as well, the first few months are depressing.
  

My notes from the Integrating Social Media into Your Marketing Strategy to Gain a Greater Response panel, from MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer.

Panelists:

Pam O'Neal, Vice President of Marketing for BreakingPoint Systems, Inc., @poneal
Glenda Ervin, Vice President, Marketing, Lehman's, @Galen_Lehman
Debra Ellis, Founder, Wilson & Ellis Consulting, @wilsonellis

Pam O'Neal, Breaking Point

Pam led off with an extremely tidy and well-organized slide showing all the different social media tools BreakingPoint uses and the ways they use them. I sincerely hope she'll make her presentation available online. Here's my untidy text-only summary:

Market Intelligence
Monitoring (RSS feeds, Twitter, Clicky, BuzzStream)
Crowdsourcing (Twitter, LinkedIn groups, HARO)

Thought Leadership
Education (blog, Twitter, forums, RSS feeds)
Awareness (community, blogs, video, twitter, marketwire)
Community (LinkedIn groups, blog, YouTube, Facebook)

Demand Generation
Search/onling mktg (Google, Bing, Yahoo, StumbleUpon)
Web traffic generation/conversion (RSS feeds, Twitter, blog)
video/podcast/webcast

Sales Enablement
social prospecting (LinkedIn Q&A and groups, Twitter, blog)
pipeline influence/nurturing (blog, Twitter, LinkedIn)
sales education (YouTube, blog, Twitter, Yammer, Wiki, RSS feeds)

Glenda Ervin, Lehman's

Lehman's carries "the largest selection of old-fashioned, non-electric appliances in the world," Glenda said. Customers have choices. When her father started his store, it was the only store you could go to. Now customers choose how, where and when they want to shop. "For us it's not about the how many, it's about the who."

Their social media strategy revolves around "branding Dad." He has his own Facebook page, a video, his photo on the side of trucks, etc. "It's not fake, it's real."

Glenda pointed out that it's no longer enough to satisfy a customer. What you want is a loyal customer. A satisfied customer will leave. A loyal customer will come back. Take quality and marry it to consistency, and that breeds loyalty. "And then for us, we put Dad's picture on it."

They began to realize all the different things they did that could be shared in social media. "If we're doing a cider press demonstration in the store, why not shoot a video of it and put it online?"

Lehman's also subscribes to the theory that it's better to have negative comments on your own site where you can see and deal with them.

"We love to get bad reviews. We want to know immediately so we can address it. Plus, in our small marketplace it shows that we care."

Random tool mentions: They use Kaboodle and StumbleUpon, which work well with their predominantly female audience. They see Facebook as "an international, free, real-time focus group."

Steps for getting started:

• Start by looking at sites you like and seeing what they do well.
  
• Have somebody get involved and keep up with it.
  
• At the very least, set up a Google Alert for your name. Find out what people are saying about you.
  
• Comment carefully and non-defensively in social media because it sets you up as an expert. Answer other people's customer service questions.
  
• Never ignore a super-negative post or a super-positive post.
  
• Join and make a commitment to offer relevant content on a regular basis.
  

If people say they don't have time for social media, that's irrelevant because "it's not about you, it's about the customer."

Their blog is the number one referrer to their Web site. They post based on what customers are interested in, "from plant to plate to pantry."

Some successful blog posts have included:

• Why do people become and stay Amish?
  
• What are you growing?
  
• What to know before you grow
  
• What to do in Amish country (written by her 10-year old daughter)
  

I looked at the @Lehmans Twitter stream. This was the second tweet I read:

You can remove the hulls from grain by hand. http://is.gd/4pNX6 But, it's slow. Anyone know of a home-sized grain cleaner/dehuller?

Debra Ellis, Wilson & Ellis Consulting

Debra began by focusing on how to sell social media to clients and bosses. Her advice: Have a plan. You can't walk in and say "social media is great." It needs to have goals, tangible objectives, strategy, contingency and scorekeeping.

The social media view is, "It's all about the conversation. But at the end of the conversation if we haven't discussed something about business, I don't know what you do and you don't know what I do."

The typical corporate view features a continuous cycle of Merchandising - Marketing - Operations - Financial. Where does social media fit in?

In the revised social media view, it's all about using conversation to enhance the customer experience and expand marketing reach.

The goal of traditional marketing is to get the sale. When you add social media, the becomes not only to get the sale but to get the customer talking about your company and your product.

When presenting to people inside your company you need to convince, Debra suggests presenting your ideas in corporate language: increased sales, reduced costs, specific goals, measurable results, intangibles.

Focus on what's right for you, your community and your corporate culture.

Debra's takeaways:

• Begin with the end in mind - look for the ROI.
  
• Keep it simple and strategic.
  
• Complete the cycle: add consumption to the marketing/sales/fulfillment cycle. Make sure your clients are using your products and services and talking about them.
  
• Get out of the fishbowl. If you hear about some new channel you think you need to try, go back and see if it fits into your plan.
  
• Connect the pieces: marketing, channels, employees, operations and customers.
  

Debra's ebook The New Rules of Multichannel Marketing is available at http://tinyurl.com/wec-mpdm

One audience question asked about Google vs. Bing. Both Debra and Glenda are Bing fans. Debra said, "I love Bing. People go deeper and stay longer." Glenda added, "Surfers use Google, shoppers use Bing."

I'm in one of the last few sessions at Blogworld. I've hit the point of overload. I truly appreciate all the time and effort all the speakers and organizers have put into making this an incredibly useful and practical event. I love how much people are willing to share. I just looked at today's schedule again and there is honestly not a single session I would not find interesting. It was an embarrassment of riches.

Now to carp a little bit. It's my job to create the strategies for incorporating social media into SAS' marketing and external communications. Most of my job revolves around coordination, training, sharing resources, creating policies and guidelines, and building consensus.

A lot of it involves overcoming objections. Some of those objections are far-fetched and ill-informed. A lot of them are completely legitimate. I can't do anything to advance the cause of social media at SAS unless I can convince everyone that we're doing it the right way.

Stop telling me that no one should own social media in a company and that it must be part of everybody's job starting right now. I agree, but changes like that don't happen overnight, even if everyone agreed it was a good idea.

Stop telling me that everyone in my company should be empowered to talk to anyone about anything whenever they want. That idea still scares the hell out of a lot of people. If I lead off with that, 80 percent of the people I need to influence will stop listening and write me off.

Stop telling me that our CEO and all our top execs must be blogging and tweeting. I would love that, but they're pretty busy right now trying to run the company in a tough economy. Some of the people I've heard this week seem to think I can plop myself down in our top execs' offices whenever I want and preach at them until they're convinced.

I cannot.

And finally, stop arguing about what ROI means. For us it means how much money we spent compared to how much software we sold. No other measure matters to the people I need to influence.

Here are some things I want:

• Show me organizational structures from companies that are doing it well.
  
• Give me case studies, and not the same ones I've heard. I know about Comcastcares and Zappos. And more enterprise and B2B examples, please. I'll share ours when I can.
  
• Show me a flow chart of how to track a tweet to a sale. Or show me how you think it would work.
  
• Show me companies that are using Facebook and LinkedIn really well, and how they set their pages up.
  
• Point me to great training materials that I can use.
  
• Walk me step by step through an example of social media/CRM integration.
  
• Give me real-world examples and statistics to prove that open communication isn't dangerous.
  

I'm ready for the nuts and bolts.

Considering I'm at Blogworld it's not surprising I've been thinking a lot about the ways we communicate in social media and how blogs fit into the equation. I contributed to my first blog in 2001 and started my own in 2003 back when there weren't all these other options, like Twitter. I like Twitter for the connections I've made and maintain, and for the instant stream of useful information I get now that I've filtered my streams with TweetDeck. But I had a realization yesterday that's likely to change the way I use it.

When I arrived at BlogWorld I started tweeting interesting tidbits from the early sessions. Watching the hashtag, I realized I was basically tweeting the same nuggets of information as everyone else. Often it was interesting and useful, but it was also fragmented and lacking context. More important, I realized I was spending half of each session paying attention to my iPhone rather than the speakers. In a weird way I was limiting what I absorbed and remembered to what I tweeted. I was self-limiting my own experience of the event to what I would get if I were sitting in my office following the hashtag.

Wayne Sutton has been blogging the sessions and posting them to his blog within a few minutes of the end of the session. That's providing real value to his readers, as well as giving him some great searchable content for his blog. When we were talking about this yesterday, he crystalized it for me pretty succinctly with a concept he attributes to Louis Gray: Tweet less, blog more.

With that in mind I decided not to tweet from Chris Brogan's keynote and instead turn it into a blog post. I took notes in Google Docs during his keynote, then tidied them up a bit as soon as he was done and posted them. (I will never regret having started my career as a reporter.) I sent a tweet linking to the post and tagged it with the BlogWorld #bwe09 hashtag.

The result: quite a few people retweeted it, including Chris. As of now, about 18 hours after I posted it and two hours after Chris tweeted it, I've had 350 people click the link, according to bit.ly.

There are several lessons I've learned or re-learned from this, none of which are new:

1. Provide good content that people want to read and they'll read it.

2. Writing a blog post takes more effort than sending a tweet, but in the end you have something of substance.

3. If you want to get attention in this space, you've got to work. It would have been easier for me to send some tweets, then bust out of the room and go get a drink. Instead I sat in the room for another half hour getting the post up and adding a photo. In the end, time well spent.

I'm in Charlotte, NC today for the Social Fresh social media conference. I'm on the Social Media B2B panel with Nathan Gilliatt and Jeff Cohen, moderated by Kipp Bodnar.

When we met a few weeks ago, we decided we wanted to share stories, engage the audience and interact with them, so we decided not to make slides. I know that's the cutting-edge view these days but for a guy like me with a corporate background, being told we'd be presenting without slides makes me only slightly less uncomfortable than being told we'd be presenting without pants.

Since I don't have a slide deck to share with you, here are some of the questions we identified in advance, and the answers I wrote out in preparation.

Let's get this out of the way. What do you say to B2B folks who say their customers aren’t online?

Everybody needs to be the expert in their own market, so if you tell me your customers aren't online, I'm not going to stand here and tell you you're wrong. But these days in nearly every business, at least some of your customers are going to be online. If they aren't yet, they will be sooner than you think. And even if you don't think your customers are online, are your competitors?

What are some successful practices you have seen or used to ensure that your social media strategy aligned with business objectives?

You need to think of social media as a set of tools, not as a strategy in themselves. Presumably you already have established objectives for your business, and you probably also have a marketing and communications plan. Don't think, “What is our social media strategy?” Think, “What is our established marketing strategy and how can social media support that?”

Don't just get on Twitter for the sake of being on Twitter. Look at your marketing campaigns and see if Twitter can support them.

Are you going to a trade show? Do you have a goal of getting a certain number of people to your booth? That's a measurable goal and something you can support with social media. Does the show have a hashtag? Is there a Facebook event page for the show? Those become other avenues, in addition to the ones that have been successful in the past, that you can pursue.

Social media isn’t always the best option from a marketing standpoint. How do you define the ROI before you decide to execute?

Don't abandon anything that's working for you in favor of social media. Think of social media as another tool. Make sure you have a measurable objective before you start. “We want to increase web traffic to our marketing campaign landing page by 30 percent over the next quarter.” That's a measurable objective.

What social media tools are you going to use and how are you going to track them? Once you establish the metrics and the method of measurement, and if you take the time to do it in a comprehensive manner, you'll see what kind of results you get. Then you've established a benchmark. And let's not underestimate the importance of establishing benchmarks.

If you're just getting started in social media, then “Establish a benchmark” is a valid objective.

The big question: Who should “own” social media in an organization?

I have two answers for that. The first is, it should be owned by the person or people who are most enthusiastic about social media; the ones who are champing at the bit to get started. Because if you force it down the throat of someone who doesn't know or care about social media, it's just going to become another chore, and you won't see any progress.

Now that's not always practical, so my politic answer is, “It depends,” both on the size and type of your organization, and what you hope to accomplish with social media. Ultimately you want to make social media tools available to everyone in your organization who has a role in communicating a message.

Marketing folks should be in charge of how they use social media to support marketing campaigns and generate leads. The external comms or PR folks should be responsible for the reputation monitoring and management aspects. Your sales folks should be using social media tools for prospecting, getting market information and building and maintaining relatioships. Your tech support and customer service folks need to take responsibility for doing those tasks in social media.

But if you have to start with overall responsibility in one place, my bias is toward the marketing communications or PR folks, because they should have an overall view of your branding, messaging and communications objectives.

Is there value in allocating resources to educate customers about social media?

Absolutely. If your customers are interested in social media and want to get started, if you show them how to do it, you're creating a built-in audience for your message. My father jokes that he's a Mac guy because the first computer he ever used at work was a Mac, and he imprinted on it the way a baby bird imprints on the first thing it sees when it comes out of the shell. If your customers learn how to use Twitter because you teach them, you can be pretty sure they're going to follow you.

If you're worried that your information isn't getting through the noise to your customers, create a campaign to show them how to use RSS feeds, and make your feeds easy for them to get.

And even if you're not very active yourself yet, I think there's a tremendous value in saying, “Are you curious about social media? So are we. Follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our blog, and we'll figure it out together.”

When is social media wrong for B2B?

Again, everyone needs to be the expert in their own market. If you're not sure if social media is right for your audience, you need to do some research, whether it's web research and reading analyst reports, or just asking your customers directly.

But it's true there are times when social media isn't going to be a viable option. If you have a lot of customers in government, for instance, you might find they can't use social networks at work. If you're in a very traditional industry and your major customers block access to YouTube, for instance, you wouldn't put a lot of time and effort into a video campaign.

Do I ask for permission or forgiveness?

That depends on your company and your boss, but speaking as someone who works for a company of 11,000 people, it's much easier for me to do my job when I have consensus, and when I have a reputation for being someone who can be trusted to take all the relevant factors into consideration before beginning an initiative.

What is the most important thing companies should know about starting a B2B focused blog?

Find someone to write it who is really excited by the prospect, not someone who should do it based on their title or position and isn't really interested. Ideally it would be someone who already has a blog about your industry. Then make it a part of his or her job and make sure it's built into that person's job description, so they can make it a priority and keep it active. Because I still believe a dormant blog is worse than no blog at all.

What should folks read to stay current on social media and thoughts on its marketing applications?

ChrisBrogan.com, mashable.com, socialmediab2b.com, ConversationsMatter.org, socialmediatoday.com, the Marketing Over Coffee podcast.

What should folks tell their boss about what they learn from this panel?

If you think you don't have time to get involved in social media, look at all the information you share every day either through email, on the phone, in conversation, in meetings, the articles you forward to you friends. You could be sharing all of that on a blog, on Twitter or in a social network. Once you get started and develop your “social media muscle,” you'll start finding more and more to share.

You don't have to do everything, but you can't do nothing, so do something.

If you're active in social media, especially if it's part of your job, you've probably gotten used to the feeling that you're doing everything wrong, or that you aren't doing enough. In the past few weeks, I've been told - directly or indirectly - that a Facebook fan page is vital to our brand and we need to get one ASAP, that we're using Twitter wrong, that we need a much more aggressive video strategy in social media, that we need to radically expand our blogging program and that I shouldn't be allowed to have my job because I moderate comments on this blog, instead of making them open. I'm sure I could think of more.

That's one of the hazards of reading the social media thought leaders, and the people who, for whatever reason, can do whatever they want in social media. If you, like me, are trying to integrate social media into a large company, you have a lot more factors to consider than a startup with five people or a small company with a one- or two-person marketing department.

We have 11,000 employees around the world. We have a marketing division, a legal department, an HR department, an IT organization, an external communications team, an internal communications team, a creative services department, and others who have a vested interest in how we communicate, how we present ourselves as a brand, and how we behave online.

Things don't happen overnight.

That doesn't mean we don't have a sense of urgency, or that we don't understand the value of social media. But it does mean that it takes some time to make major changes.

I try to keep that in mind when I read about the next big thing we aren't doing yet, or just as accurately the next big thing from six months ago we're still investigating. Or the thing we're doing wrong, or that we aren't pushing hard enough. We have to set priorities and address what makes the most sense for us, and that means we'll never be doing everything we could, or doing everything the way we're "supposed" to be.

If you've never worked in a big corporate environment, it's easy to say, "Just go for it and see what happens." If you're in it on a daily basis, you know that consensus takes time but yields the strongest results.

Feel free to accuse me of making excuses. But I'm not speaking to the mavericks and the consultants and the gurus and the startups. I'm speaking to the people who have jobs like mine in companies like mine.

There are a lot of experts out there who will tell you what you need to do. Read what they have to say. Study the success stories and case studies from companies like yours. Keep up to date with the news and trends and tech.

But only you can decide what will work best in your organization.


Photo by Foam.