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How to get employees involved in social media: focus on ideas

May 20, 2011 By 11 Comments

Many marketers involved in social media management tell me that they struggle to get their subject matter experts engaged in social media. But focusing solely on engagement is the wrong goal. What we should be talking about instead is getting those experts involved in creating ideas.

In an interview this week with Stephanie Tilton (thanks, Stephanie!) on the Savvy B2B Marketing Blog entitled How to Gain Real Traction with Thought Leadership, I talk about how marketers need to create an idea network within their organizations to spur their subject matter experts to start thinking.
Create an idea network as the basis for social media
Marketers need to facilitate a process for internal development of ideas and for external feedback. The combination of internal and external creation and feedback creates friction and competition. Experts need to defend their ideas, get input and collaboration from others, and compete for attention. Here are some examples of how this can work:

Internal

  • Knowledge share sessions
  • Awards programs
  • Primary and secondary research
  • Competitive intelligence

External:

  • Customer councils
  • Collaboration with academics and analysts
  • Partnership with trade associations

Creating an idea network helps demonstrate the importance of ideas to the organization. Many companies take it a step farther by making idea development part of employees’ annual goals. The high-end consulting firms like McKinsey have done this for years. Ideas are baked into the culture. To rise in the firm, consultants know they need to come up with good ideas and try to get them published.

Marketers need to help create that culture in the company by facilitating the idea process. Companies need to create a platform—and an expectation—that enables subject matter experts to be thinking all the time.

When ideas are an expectation, social media participation is easier
When employees know that they are expected to be thinking—and getting that thinking out into the market—engagement in social media participation becomes easier. They have something to talk about! Social media becomes a great test bed for testing ideas and getting feedback. It also becomes a way to slice up big ideas into more consumable pieces.

What do you think? How are you getting subject matter experts to engage in social media?

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Social media’s Hallmark Moment: the Twitter Auto DM

May 13, 2011 By 7 Comments

I take a perverse pleasure in reading my Twitter DMs, 99% of which are of the automated variety, looking for the heartfelt sentiment that goes out to me and thousands of other close personal friends every day from people I’ve started following.

I try to imagine the impulses that motivate the writers behind these parsimonious hanging chads of fake individualized attention. Technology is wonderful isn’t it? It allows us to divide the equivalent of a single “Have a nice day” into thousands of infinitesimally smaller investments of effort and goodwill. Automated DMs are like giving a new acquaintance a sliced off sliver of a single piece of mini-Chiclets gum and saying, “There you go. I hope you enjoy that.”

Since I think that automated DMs are about as useful as egg on sand, I like to parse them into snarky categories (these are all actual auto DMs I’ve received). See if you agree with mine. Perhaps you can add some yourself. (No doubt I’ll have fewer readers after this post—“Gosh, what’s his problem?! I’m just trying to spread a little good cheer!”—so I can use all the help I can get.)

The “You’re lucky to know me” category:

  • “@ me to follow you if I haven’t already.” Yes, I’ll look into that right away.
  • “What do you do?” Okay, so you want to automate the fact that you can’t be bothered learning anything about the people who follow you?
  • “If you miss my tweets, you can catch a summary in my monthly newsletter here.” So good you need to send them twice. Thanks.
  • “[            ] uses TrueTwit validation service. To validate click here:” Will I need two forms of ID for that?

The “I’m genuinely interested in knowing you more—no really I am” category:

  • “Let me know if I can help you in any way.” This is what salespeople say to me at stores. Except I’m usually standing amid consumer electronics or racks of clothing when they say it, so it makes sense. But now I’m on Twitter and I’ve just met you, so what kind of help are we talking about here? Oops, I’ve just invested more attention than he did writing the auto DM. I feel so used.
  • “Look forward to learning about your interests.” And yours, and yours, and yours…

The “I’m totally desperate to get some freakin’ cash out of you or anybody else—can you help with that?” category:

  • “I’m using this to make money on Twitter, I hope you find it useful.” Thanks a bunch. If I wanted fake Viagra pills I would have stuck to email.
  • Looking forward to chatting. Download a free value calculator.” Wow, king of the transition sentence, aren’t we?
  • “Here are links to my book, my blog, my company.” Gives new meaning to the phrase “cut to the chase.”

The “I just wanted to let you know that I’m trying to game my follower count” category:

  • “Plz help spread the word about me! I wana rise to the top!” Yes, spamming is such a competitive field these days.

The “I’m going to redundantly echo the empty sentiment of the act of sending Auto DMs by repeating that empty sentiment in my message to you” category:

  • “Have an awesome day!” But what about tomorrow, and the day after that? I feel so lost.

The “I’m trying to sound humble” category:

  • “I clearly see I’m going to learn a great deal from YOU!” Not if you’re auto DMing me.
  • “We will do our very best to keep you informed and entertained.” Why do I think this person has won an “excellent attendance” award in the past?
  • “Will try to keep it interesting.” Will try? Way to lower those expectations. What about doing your very best—every day! Hey, that’d make a catchy auto DM, don’t you think?

The “I often creep people out” category:

  • “I got my eye on you. Thanks for the follow!! If your on Facebook too hit me up!” Cause hitting peeple up on Facebook is what me like to do.
  • “Smile, you only have one today!” Cringing, not smiling. And what, I’m only allowed one smile today? I guess when you’re auto DMing smiles you have to ration them carefully.
  • “Glad to have you in my Twitstream.” I suddenly get this feeling that I should be ahead of a Twitstream rather than following one.
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How to measure influence in social media marketing

May 6, 2011 By 12 Comments
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Measuring influence is the new obsession in the social media world—adding another layer of anxiety to the dark cloud of existential dread that is marketing ROI.

Social media present us as individuals seeking status within a community, which is something that humans have been working at since our days as monkeys. Indeed, science tells us that monkeys would rather look at pictures of high-ranking members of their troop than eat. The only difference between us and the monkeys is that we usually remember to eat while we watch the Oscars or check our Twitter follower counts.

Influence is the ability to affect others in their thinking or actions. But we need validation that it is happening. Since social media leave digital footprints, companies create complex algorithms to come up with simple answers to measuring social media influence. These fall into two categories:

  • The number generators. These tools assign a number to influence based on factors such as popularity, number of connections, and share of conversation. The best of these is still Technorati, because blogs are, in and of themselves, the most influential channel within social media. Face it, unless you can come up with enough to say to sustain a blog, it’s difficult to become influential. Others include Klout and Twitter Grader, which focus on the social networks. Another category of tools “gameify” influence by giving us fake shiny objects as rewards for engaging others. These include Foursquare and Empire Avenue. But all these numbers have little use beyond the ego stroke.
  • The monitors. These include the proprietary tools that look across all the online channels to determine how brands are being talked about. These social media monitoring tools have more use for marketers, but they require significant human intervention and can easily become very expensive versions of the number generators if not used with a goal in mind.

How to measure social media influence in a marketing context
Influence is usually presented in the context of figuring out who is engaging us and who we should be engaging with. But I think as marketers, we need to think bigger. I’d like to suggest that we look at influence as part of an integrated marketing strategy. In this context, influence has little to do with algorithms and more to do with something that marketers have been measuring for a long time: perception.

The two most important components of influence
I see successful marketers getting their companies to set two reference points to measure influence across all their marketing programs:

  • Who we are. Through surveys, both qualitative and quantitative, marketers ask their target audiences to tell them how they perceive the company. Classic versions of this are unaided awareness (“Name five IT services providers”) and aided awareness (“Have you heard of x company?”).
  • Who we want to be. This is where the strategy comes in. This reference point is in the future and requires careful definition. It requires all the key players in the company to decide how they want the company to influence the market in the future. For example, many ITSMA members are companies that began by selling B2B products but are now trying to become known as full-service solution companies. They have built or bought services divisions and created services offerings, but they cannot yet influence their target audiences to see them as anything other than product providers. Marketing’s job is to influence buyers to move from the existing perception to the new one—using all the available tools at its disposal.

Over time, we measure our influence by asking our target audience if they see our companies as we want them to be seen. Looked at this way, measuring influence becomes simpler and clearer.

What do you think?

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