B2B Social Media – Moving Beyond the Hype

Several of our team members were in London for the annual Internet World Exhibition held at Earls Court between April 27th and April 29th. As one of the few exhibitors and speakers in the B2B Social Media Industry at the show, we noticed a lot of confusion about using social media and what social media could do for a B2B focused organization.

For example, we noticed a large number of email vendors selling the idea that email is social media (it’s not). The idea of renting a list of unknown people to send your message to was presented as social media (it’s not). Lastly, there is so much confusion over using social media applications like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for business that we spent much of our time helping people learn the basics of the applications and why they might want to consider using them.

But just as important to us, there were many people who were disappointed using social media as they didn’t get the results they wanted or thought that they would. Why? Because in most cases, their companies were using B2C techniques to engage with the B2B audience for their services. Many were following the common theme of retweeting others, constantly updating their Facebook pages with product information, building a network of as many followers as possible, and joining as many groups as they could on LinkedIn. And most of it was a gigantic waste of time.

At Internet World, I presented a short case for why B2B Social Media is very different from B2C. The presentation covered the idea that most people are focused on the tactics at the expense of their strategy by following the common wisdom of social media experts and gurus who only understand B2C marketing. B2C is concerned with building awareness, then trial. That’s why couponing is so effective for B2C. B2B is concerned with building relationships. It’s harder and takes much more time than B2C social media tactics. But in the end, it leads to tremendous value when executed properly.

You can download the presentation’s slides here: B2B Social Media – What Works 2010. The slides are helpful when viewing the actual presentation below: (Quick Note, the edited video below is courtesy of Seminar Streams, so you’ll have to register or log in to see the video. Or enter our username Impact and our password impact. The video will play right away and you won’t have to search for it.)

 

 

 

If you’d like to learn more about using B2B Social Media for lead generation, customer support, training, channel or partner management, or another specific purpose, please contact us.

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Baseball and Social Media Success: It’s the Little Things

by Matthew Lees

Springtime seems finally to be reaching the northern hemisphere in actuality, not just in name. The April rains that crossed the US have caused their shares of headaches (or worse), but they should eventually bring May flowers; school children are sensing they’re on the home stretch toward summer vacation; and baseball season is underway.

As social media analyst and baseball fan – I met my wife at Doc Gooden’s no-hitter in 1996 – I’ve often observed several similarities between the two realms, the most relevant of which is the importance that baseball and social media place on doing the little things well.

Baseball
Baseball is ultimately about the small moments. A game may ultimately hinge on a grounder that just glances off the diving second baseman’s glove with two outs in the 6th inning, an alert runner on second tagging up and taking third on a foul ball the right fielder catches halfway in the stands, or a sacrifice bunt that moves a runner into scoring position.

Sure, a game-winning three-run homer in the bottom of the 10th is exciting. Effective, too. But these don’t happen every day. More often than not it’s the small play, the play that goes unnoticed at the time, that makes the difference. Add these up over the course of a 162-game season, and it’s the little things that separate the playoff contenders from the “We’ll get ‘em next year” crew.

(The importance of the little things is the reason why there aren’t many great baseball movies. Baseball is about holding the runner on third base when there’s a grounder to first, fouling off four pitches before drawing a walk, and bringing in a relief pitcher an inning earlier than planned to give the starter’s sore arm a little more rest. And most of the time during a baseball game is spent with ostensibly little going on, with the inactivity is broken by intense bursts when the ball is put into play. But producers of baseball movies tend to require high drama, the 3-2 pitch with two outs in the bottom of the ninth that the aging slugger hammers into the center field seats. The pace and unpredictability of real baseball doesn’t play well in the theaters.)

Social Media
As with baseball, it’s the little things that matter in social media. For every video that goes viral – the social media equivalent, perhaps, of a home run – there thousands of seemingly insignificant interactions with customers in branded communities and throughout the social Web: the reply to a question in an online forum, the blog post that gets retweeted, the Facebook post that announces an upcoming event. It’s the aggregate of these day-to-day interactions between you and your customers, readers, subscribers, users, and partners that have the biggest long-term impact.

How? None of these actions is big or brash or glamorous. But they’re part of the slow and steady relationship building that, though unheralded, gets long-term results. The question you answer in the community forum could solve a customer’s problem without the need for them to call your contact center (thereby saving your company money while saving your customer the time and effort); the blog post you write could generate a conversation that sparks a new product idea; and the Facebook post could draw someone who eventually becomes a new customer.

If your social media initiative hits word-of-mouth gold, that’s great. But focusing your strategy on home runs is like stacking your baseball line-up with power hitters. You’ll get some dramatic wins, but be in last place at the end of the year.

It’s spring time, when everything can begin anew. And it’s the little things that matter most. Play ball!

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Social Business Summit 2010- Looking at the Big Picture

Image by Worldle.net

The Dachis Group’s Social Business Summit 2010 in Austin has come to an end. Like many conferences, it featured a variety of dynamic speakers providing their view on the topic at hand whether it was macro trends or the specifics of their experiences. But what comes from this conference is a little bit more interesting than most…

Taken as a whole, the Social Business Summit 2010 presented a compelling case of how doing business has changedand how successful organizations like Intuit, Citibank, Comcast, Yum Brands (KFC), and many others are dealing with the change in a way that creates value for their organizations. But where the summit differs is in the organizational aspect of that change. Having taught Organizational Design & Behavior during my MBA program, this is always an area of business that I believe is overlooked when a disruptive event or technology occurs. My eleven years and counting in the online community/social media/interactive industry have provided numerous examples of how organizations embrace the change or ignore it.

For example, in Charlene Li’s session on “Making the Case for Open Leadership” I could identify with my own experiences in the Property & Casualty Insurance industry where closed, top down leadership is practiced with vigor. At Safeco Insurance Company, we sat on huge volumes of customer data that were stored untouched in company databases. In 1998, working with several agencies, brokerages, and employees, I put together a business plan for using the data as a means to drive down the combined ratio (the main metric for insurance companies) and generate new revenues. The plan was shot down immediately with the statement “we’ve been doing it our way for over 100 years and it works, why change?” Management at Safeco was unable to be open to ideas that came from its sales team (agencies) and employees in the field. Instead of listening and treating them as partners, and adapting to the market’s direction, Safeco was stuck in its past where control dictated that you told your sales team and employees what to do and didn’t want feedback. This idea was so culturally enmeshed at Safeco that as business practices changed with the adoption of the Internet in the late 1990’s, it could not and would not adapt. By believing that only one way communication worked, Safeco missed opportunity after opportunity in its business to stay successful. Instead it slowly died with consistent management turnover and poor financial results until finally Liberty Mutual purchased them. It’s not that Safeco senior management missed one opportunity, it’s that their management style and lack of vision missed so many that their organization became less relevant over time. 

But don’t think this type of thinking is relegated to heavily regulated industries. Citibank’s Jaime Punishill relayed to me at lunch that it takes time and a lot of pushing to move your organization, but it can be done if there are senior managers willing to listen. Citibank whether it wanted to or not is moving towards open leadership and working with its stakeholders to drive change (and hopefully value) to its shareholders.

Where does Open Leadership work? Our client Cisco was mentioned by Charlene. We helped Cisco launch its first online community in 2000, the Cisco Network Professionals Community. Over the years, we’ve helped launch and manage numerous communities for Cisco around the globe. There is one constant. While Cisco may have many of the same issues as any other large organization, it recognizes that command and control model of management doesn’t work. It lives and breathes the strategic and tactical oxygen of change, adaptation, and listening to the customer. While macroeconomic forces certainly helped Cisco in the 1990’s, it culture has helped it succeed where others like 3Com, Lucent, and Nortel have failed. Other successful organizations with this approach include our clients NetApp and SAP.

The second most important theme of the summit to me was the network. Not just a social network, but the network of customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and competitors. Too often conferences confuse strategy with tactics. Taken together, the summit’s sessions provided a strategic look at how business is moving quickly to a social business model and presented the tactical results to back that assertion up.

While I don’t agree with some of the comments about how corporations have ruined networks, trade, commercial transactions, etc. or how we’re moving back to a peer-to-peer economy,  I do agree that the network has always been in place. First it was local, then regional, then super-regional (think Europe), and more recently global. Large multinationals have made the economic process more efficient than it has ever been. Yet, it is still rife with inefficiencies. The understanding that building relationships with your network can make you more efficient is just catching on. For all the talk of rapid adoption of social media, we see far too many disjointed efforts where marketing, support, sales, and internal efforts are all operating independently (and inefficiently).

One great example of using the network properly is that of Intuit’s TurboTax team. Christine Morrison gave a wonderful talk on how it is about making money with the network while also meeting the network’s needs. The overall takeaway was that it is more profitable to pay attention to the network and become part of it than to try and dictate to it or worse, ignore it.

While there are differing opinions on how to utilize the network, several key features of successful networks are:

1. An executive who believes in the power of interacting with stakeholders and has the power to implement a plan, hire staff (in-house or outsourced), and measure the results objectively
2. An organizational culture that truly wants to listen to its stakeholders (lip service doesn’t work) and take action based upon what it learns
3. A focus on results that matter to the audience (customers, employees, suppliers, investors, etc.) which in turn translate into value for the organization in the long run

Corporate culture leads the way to long term success or failure (the Safeco example above shows what can happen when you believe that your organization can dictate to the network rather than work with it). And that’s what social business is all about to us. It’s not the technology, it’s about understanding how your targeted audience wants to interact with you and if your culture can withstand the change or not. In our consulting and management projects with Global organizations such as Cisco, SAP, NetApp, Intel, and others we’ve seen how this idea is so much a part of the firm’s success.  

So what was missing? Well from our standpoint, there were a couple of items that were either untouched or glossed over which are incredibly important to the success of any social business project. First is the issue of trust. Until the last session of the day by Lee Bryant, trust wasn’t even mentioned. Social business runs on trust. If you are unable to trust your audience, peers, employees, and other stakeholders you will be unable to act upon their input.

Second, the idea of globalization and culture was not discussed despite its implications on social business. There is a very large difference in how people do business because of their cultures. Social businesses must account for this. The culture in Japan is different than Poland which is different than Germany which is different than the U.S. Online activities reflect that difference. We’ve seen it in action in our work with Cisco’s NetPro Poland as well as SAP’s local communities around the globe. The one comment about global efforts was from KFC’s Rick Maynard who said ”We don’t have a global strategy, we have a strategy that we localize for differences.” While the network is global, local tactics that meet your audience’s needs demonstrate that you understand the local culture and how it impacts your communications.

Overall, the Social Business Summit was a success.If you take a strategic view of the content presented, you hopefully came away with a better way of looking at social business. There are several other folks who attended who have shared their comments and the tweetstream from the event as well:

• Steve Ellis
• iMediaWorks
• @CarrieBugbee (Tweetstream of #SBS2010 tweets)
• @adamcohen (Tweetstream)

We’re looking forward to next year’s event, you should too….

Mike Rowland, President

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Social Media Management Tools – Are they Ready for the Enterprise?

by Matthew Lees

Over the past 6-12 months a lot of companies and technology platforms have entered the market purporting to make it easier for individuals and organizations to participate throughout the social Web. If you’ve got accounts at one or more social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and LinkedIn, why, for example, should you have to log into each one? Wouldn’t it be much easier simply to log into one interface to organize, read, post, and search comments?

I’ve seen the phrase Social Media Management used as a catch-all for these types of tools. That sums things up as well as anything else.

To a basic degree, this is the idea behind Twitter-centric apps such as HootSuite, Seesmic, and TweetDeck. If you’re using Twitter on your own, these programs may meet your needs just fine. But the social Web stretches beyond Twitter and, if you’re responsible for social media at a large organization, you’ve got quite a few requirements beyond convenience. When the stakes are high, when there are more than one or two stakeholders involved, and when time – yours and your colleagues’ – is at a premium, many of these systems fall short.

What Makes Social Software Enterprise* Ready?
I see six main categories where enterprise social applications differentiate themselves from software that isn’t ready or appropriate for enterprise environments:

1. Security – We’ll start with what’s probably the most obvious item on the list. Enterprise social software adheres to high standards of security, both in terms of technology (i.e., secure protocols) and process (i.e., the ability to define access and keep audit trails; see below). How comfortable would you be sending your social security number to someone via a Twitter direct message?
2. Access, Accountability, and Auditing – These are the three As of enterprise social software. (Well, I just made that up…but it works well.) Social software for the enterprise lets system administrators set user permissions and access in a granular and effective way; it tracks activity and creates an audit trail, so you can determine who did what, when; and it allows for passwords to be recovered and/or changed as appropriate.
3. Content Management – Twitter is an example of a very rudimentary form of content management, which is pretty much based purely on a “push” model of publishing. Once you tweet, it’s out there…you can’t take it back and you can’t change it. Enterprise social software includes content management capabilities that let you save, undo, modify, and schedule for publishing at a later date. It also lets you adapt content to the particular channels you’re sending it to, and to choose which channels to send what (i.e., “I want this post to go to Twitter and Facebook, and I want that comment to go to our corporate blog).
4. Performance – This primarily encompasses speed, scalability, and reliability. For example, if Flickr or Facebook go down for a while, you’ve got little, if any, recourse. With enterprise social software, you should have support people to talk with and (usually) SLAs in place.
5. Integration Points – Enterprise social software will have hooks that allow for bi-directional integration, so data can come in from appropriate sources, and be sent out to other places (such as other applications, such as a CRM system, sites on the social Web, or your branded customer community). The architecture is important here, as ideally the platform’s engine is robust enough so that when the next new big social network crops up, it would be easy enough to configure its integration.
6. Analytics and Reporting – Social analytics providers are doing strong business helping organizations make sense of the social Web. Most social sites and tools provide woefully limited statistics. Of course, they weren’t designed with reporting in mind – particularly unified reporting, which lets you look at everything from one place — but if you’re using them for your business, you need to understand their effectiveness and impact. And that goes beyond counting how many Twitter followers and Facebook fans you have.

Note that many of these items translate into increased productivity. Social Management Tools, whether enterprise-ready or not, are largely, though not exclusively, about making it easier for individuals and organizations to do social media more efficiently and effectively.

Social Media Management Platforms
A few of the companies doing some interesting and promising things in the Social Media Management space are:
•    Socialize Your Stuff (Butterfly Publisher platform)
•    Regroup
•    Social Agency (Spredfast platform)
•    Spry Hive Industries

Community platform vendors are also thinking about how branded communities fit into all this, as well. On the leading edge of the trend toward connecting your customer communities to the social Web are:
•    Awareness
•    Lithium Technologies
•    LiveWorld
•    RightNow Technologies (Social Experience platform)
•    Pluck

Of course, the tools can only do so much. Technology platforms won’t get you where you want to go without a sound business strategy and a plan for engaging with your customers, members, readers, followers, prospects, etc.  But if you’re evaluating — or reevaluating – your social media strategy and presence, the six items above will play a central role.

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* What I Mean by “Enterprise”
“Enterprise” is one of those buzz words that means different things to different people. I’m using it here in a somewhat non-rigorous way to really mean a level of sophistication and maturity. Enterprise software is sturdy and full-featured, to meet the many and varied needs of professional organizations. In this way, it relates to the concept of enterprise architecture, particularly the definition from the MIT Center for Information Systems Research: “Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the firm’s operating model.”

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Ricky Gervais (Unintentionally and Eloquently) on Facebook vs. Customer Communities

by Matthew Lees

While driving yesterday to pick up my sister at the airport, I listened to a delightful interview on the radio with Ricky Gervais. He was on the NPR program Fresh Air, talking with David Bianculli — nope, it wasn’t Terry Gross, but veteran TV critic Bianculli is very good, too — about his new animated series on HBO, “The Ricky Gervais Show.”

I’m a fan of Gervais’s, despite the fact that I haven’t watched many episodes of either the US or UK version of “The Office.” (Steve Carell stars in the US version, which is based on the original UK program, created by and starring Gervais.) Through his other shows, his stand-up routines, and his podcasts, you can tell he’s a funny, clever, candid, and amiably self-deprecating guy.

About halfway through the NPR interview, Gervais gives his take on making big-budget shows that aim for mass appeal versus smaller shows that may find only a relatively small, but more interested and passionate audience. He says:

“But, I think I’d rather do stuff that makes a big connection with a few people than a small connection with loads. I’d rather this be a few people’s favorite show, than, you know, millions and millions of people’s 10th favorite show. Because what’s the point otherwise?”

There you have, in a nutshell, the essential difference between a Facebook community and a branded customer community.

Big Connections with a Few vs. Small Connections with “Loads”

You can potentially and relatively easily build up a Facebook fan base that’s much larger than your own branded customer community. With just a single click, people can “Become a Fan” of your organization (or TV show); there couldn’t be a much lower barrier to entry. And marketers tend to love volume.

But the strength of these “Fan” connections isn’t particularly great. Most fans probably never return to the organization’s Facebook page again, and the conversations in the Discussions area tend to be superficial.

In a community that you sponsor and manage, though, you’re building much closer relationships, with stronger connections to your organization and the products and services you offer. (You’re also enabling stronger connections between community members, too.) You members are discussing topics and issues of interest and concern; they’re asking questions and giving answers; and they’re bringing up problems and providing solutions.

Strong and Weak Ties

Network theorists and sociologists call these different types of connections strong ties and weak ties.

(Contrary to how Gervais phrases it, though, there are indeed benefits to weak ties. There is indeed an answer to his rhetorical question “…what’s the point otherwise?”, as good things certainly can come out of being the 10th favorite show of millions and millions of people, especially if you’re an advertiser or an actor, writer, or producer on the show.)

But the main point that Gervais encapsulates is that it’s not always about reaching the most people you can. Big connections (i.e., strong ties) can be more meaningful than small connections, at least to some people and organizations. Marketers (and others in your organization) love deep relationships with people, too.

Your social media strategy should ideally include programs that leverage what both strong- and weak-tie connections have to offer.

Of course, you may not want to base your entire strategy on Gervais’s musings. He’s also the man who said (via David Brent, his Office persona), “If at first you don’t succeed, remove all evidence that you tried.”

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For Further Reading
A lot of interesting and useful information is available on the types and degrees of online social connections. Some is academic in nature and some discusses real-world ramifications and practical aspects of these connections. Here are a few sites with good stuff on ties…
•  Karrie Karahalios: Strong and Weak Ties in Social Media, by David Weinberger (March 3, 2010)
•  40 Years On: The History & Evolution of Social Media, by Jenny Ambrozek (November 4, 2009)
•  Weak Ties Build Strong Networks, by Adrian Scholes (May 21, 2009)
•  Design Your Own Custom Ties on Zazzle

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Gaming the System – Why Follower Counts Don’t Represent Influence

In December of 2009, I wrote about Misleading Indicators – Followers and Friends after seeing a tweet from Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group. In that post, I explained why follower or friend counts do not represent a metric of influence nor should they be utilized as a relevant metric of importance. After several good comments as well as several emails to Impact Interactions giving me grief for disputing one of social media’s closely held beliefs, I decided to run an experiment on gaming the system.

My basic premise was that these counts are a false statistic which like placing value on “hits” in web metrics analysis leads you to focus on the wrong metric of your activities. Want to increase “hits”? Add more photos, widgets, content blocks, etc. to each of your pages. Each one adds a hit each time the page is opened. You can make the hit count be anything you want simply by adding more items to each page. In 2000, most people didn’t understand that aspect of the measurement so they used “hits” as a proxy for visits or even for influence of their content and site. We still have companies that talk about “hits” when they approach us about measurement. It’s a lasting issue that has thrown a lot of folks away from the important issues in measurement.

There have been several blog posts written about how to game Twitter to gain followers in order to look more important than your competition.  One of my absolute favorites is from Chris Cree of Success Creeations. His blog entry “How to Game Twitter to Add Thousands of Followers Every Day” should be mandatory reading for all social media marketing professionals. It spells out how you can game Twitter, but also why that is such a bad idea. So with that advice in hand, we set up a little experiment using free tools to game the system.

The Experiment Begins

Using a tool we won’t name here, we were able to almost double our number of followers for our @impactinteract twitter account in five days. Granted we were working from a small base, but the results show how easy it was to pull off. So let’s go to our experiment.

We started last week with 143 followers who found us either from our website, our efforts on LinkedIn, our speaking engagements, or organically from our tweets. We were following 43 members who were mostly our competitors. On Monday, I signed up for a free demo of one of the many tools which advertise that they can add followers quickly. By using the key words of “Social Media” and “Online Community” the tool returned over 700 accounts on Twitter that had potential for us as followers. These accounts had either tweeted the key words “Social Media” or “Online Community” in the past ten days. Sounds good so far right?

The tool then allowed us to follow the accounts in order to grow our followers by getting their auto-follower to reciprocate.  The demo of the tool we choose allowed us to generate up to 250 new followers before we would have to buy a license. So we started the process using the tool of following 250 accounts. It was fast and painless. In the fifteen minutes it took to follow these accounts, we were able to work on other activities. Once the 250 follows had been accomplished, we waited about a day and then unfollowed any account that didn’t auto-follow us. Over the next several days, we repeated the steps. Here is the table of our activities:

 

To keep everyone who autofollowed us aware of what we were doing, we tweeted a message several times during the experiment that stated:

We are testing a few of the tools that advertise that they can build your follower base for an upcoming blog #socialmedia #Twittermarketing. 

The idea was that if the new followers actually read our tweets they would also know what we were doing. That way they could unfollow us as quickly as they auto-followed us. Incredibly only 9 new followers over the course of the week unfollowed us. None sent a direct message about what we were doing. So in a little over a business week, we came close to doubling our followers. Total time including the time to download and set up the tool was about 2 hours total.

“Ah ha, the tool worked!” you might be saying to yourself. But did it really add followers for our corporate Twitter account who might spread our message and help us grow? Let’s take a look and find out if our tweets on social media and online community news and trends, as well as our company news is really relevant to our new found followers.

Of the 136 new followers, 14 (10%) sent the same auto-messages to me about making money on my tweets:

MAKING MONEY for your Tweets? I am. Making 20 daily on autopilot. Make money too – TODAY! http://bit.ly/xxxxxx Thanks for following

Another 9 (6.7%) sent an auto-message inviting us to join their multi-level marketing scheme or affiliate marketing network:

Thank your for following me at http://bit.ly/xxxxxx. We’re looking for affiliate marketers to help us. Do you know any?

Welcome to AffilBits! Want to know how to get thousands of targeted Twitter followers and earn a 50% affiliate commission at the same time?

Two follows were from famous and semi-famous people: Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame and a porn star.

12 (9%) new followers were from two unique members who used multiple accounts, but the same photo.

So out of the 136 new followers, we found 37 (27%) were not, nor would they ever be interested in Impact Interactions.

Influence scoring of our new followers shows the truth in the fallacy of follower counts. We used a scale of 1 to 5 to rank our new followers in regards to our ability to be influential with them or in their networks. A score of 1 means Impact Interactions is not potentially influential at all, 2 means probably not potentially influential, 3 means neither potentially influential nor not influential , 4 means somewhat potentially influential, and 5 means Impact Interaction is potentially influential. (And yes, we understand that this is not scientific because we are making the judgement. But how many people on Twitter really analyze their follower base on an individual level?)

Our influence score would be 1 with the group of 37 detailed above.

But what of the other 99?

We reviewed their tweets over the past ten days to see if these would really be good followers for us or not. What we found was 65 were simply folks who had retweeted someone else’s message about a social media topic. They were neither working for companies involved in social media or online communities nor were they particularly interested in the topics based upon analysis of their tweets. In fact several of the members were serial retweeters. We went back through several weeks of tweets and never found a single tweet that they created. So our influence score for these twitterers would be a 2.

There were 7 new followers who are in the search engine optimization industry, another 20 who are potential competitors or individual consultants trying to find work in the social media industry. The influence score for these followers would be 3.

The remaining seven new followers were blog publishers creating newsletter style blogs of others’ content around social media and online communities. They were linked to content aggregation sites rather than competitors. As these sites could potentially help us to influence their readers, we gave them an influence score of 4.

There were no members of our target audience of corporate social media or online community management staff amongst our new followers.

The weighted influence score for our new members was better than we expected at 2.02 (meaning Impact Interactions is probably not potentially influential to this new group of followers).

So, does our newly increased follower count mean that we’re more influential in the social media and online community world? No, it does not. You shouldn’t be impressed with the number of your Twitter followers either. With the set of tools available today, you too can gain thousands of new followers in days. But those followers won’t buy into your view of the world or your brand. In many cases those counts have been culled from the Twitter Borg, not from an audience that cares.

Organic growth of your audience builds an audience that actually is interested in your message or company. Use your content, flair for creativity, and on-target messaging to grow your followers. Include your Twitter account information (@ImpactInteract) in your email and other outgoing communications. Your influence will be stronger, even if your follower counts are smaller. Bigger isn’t always better, but don’t buy into the myth that more followers equals more influence. If we don’t put an end to this measurement idea, we will be having the same discussion in five years that we do with “hit counts” today, more than ten years after it first came up. 

To all of you who began following us during the experiment, thank you for taking part. If you wish to unfollow us, we’ll understand.

Mike Rowland, President

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It’s Not About You: Where Organizations Miss the Boat on Social Media

By Matthew Lees

Way back when (in the 80’s, perhaps?) I remember watching a stand-up comedian do a funny and perceptive routine on how magazine titles had changed over the years to reflect important changes in society. I’m paraphrasing — the old memory chips aren’t as good as they used to be — but here’s the gist:

Early on, there was a magazine called “Life.” It was pretty much about everything.

Later, someone came up with a magazine didn’t have such high aspirations, but still looked to include a large portion of what life is about. It was called “People.”

Apparently that wasn’t specific enough. So a new magazine hit the market: “Us.” It wasn’t about all people. Just some people. Not those people, of course. Us people.

Guess what! Even that was too broad. Who wants to know about Us? That still covers too much ground. Much better to focus on what’s really important. So what do we get? The magazine “Self.”

What’s next? Maybe they’ll just sell mirrors in the shape of magazines, so you can just stare at your own reflection.

There are times it seems the social Web is going down a similar path, where it’s all about “You.” What You’re doing. Who You know. Who knows You. What You sell. (And many of the times where it’s ostensibly not about You, it really is. Kind of like the old joke about the egotist, “So enough about me. How do you like my tie?”)

But what I’m really talking about here is organizations, not individuals. It’s You, the company, not You the person, who’s largely missing the boat on social media.

OK, I admit (happily) that it’s not really all about You out there. This is demonstrated by the organizations that support their own online communities, and engage on social networks in transparent, conversational, collaborative ways. And, yes, it’s appropriate for some things to indeed be about You: customers and prospective customers do want to know about Your businesses, how Your products and services can help them, and how and why You’re the best in the business; and members want to know about Your associations, and how You are helping those You’re supposed to help.

But social technologies sure make it easy to make it about You.

Yet the organizations that successfully leverage social media are the ones that don’t go this route. They’re the ones that make it about Them. Who’s Them? They’re your customers (or users, members, subscribers, readers, business partners, employees, or whatever audience is relevant and whatever terminology you prefer).

So how do you make it about Them? Here are some thoughts:

• Take Their Viewpoints and Ideas into Account. Crowdsourcing is a great way to make it about Them. Today’s technologies make it relatively easy to run a crowdsourcing program that gives Them a place not only to give you their ideas for making your business better, but also to vote on and rank each others’ ideas. The outcome is that the best and most feasible ideas bubble to the top, ready for you to take the actions that are most important to Them.

• Support What They Care About. Hard as it may seem to believe, They are interested in more than just your company, your products, and your services. So don’t just talk about your stuff; add some value related to the other things they care about. You can do this by blogging about trends you see in your industry, sponsoring an online community where They can to talk with, connect with, and learn from each other, and tweeting fast-breaking information that’s timely and relevant to what’s important to Them.

• Make Them the Center of Attention. I remember an interesting networking tip. It suggested that you bring other people with you to networking events. In particular, bring someone who is looking for something new, such as a new job or new business. When the two of you are there, don’t talk about yourself. Act almost as if you’re your friend’s agent. Introduce her to other people, highlight what she’s good at; turn conversations towards her. You’ll be seen as a connector, and as someone who goes out of his way to help others. So your own networking stock will rise, not by blowing your own horn, but by making someone else look good. Extending this to social media means retweeting good stuff your followers say, spotlighting your customers on your Web site, asking them to share their stories on your blogs, and helping them “strut their stuff” (as Patty Seybold would say) on your online community.

The promise of social media is that, when we’re all engaged and communicating with each other, all boats rise. You are part of that equation, but so are They.

How are you making it about Them?

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Having an Impact

By Matthew Lees

I must admit that I’ve always liked the word “impact.” In just two short syllables it conveys significance and manages to be somewhat onomatopoetic. It both sounds like, and makes you think that, something important is happening.

Even when it’s used to describe something unpleasant, such as an automobile collision, the word brings an air of style. It’s much more refined than “crash,” and much more serious than fender-bender. (I’m speaking only of the noun; the adjective drops down more than a few levels in my book. While I’m fortunate, for example, never to have had an impacted molar, it doesn’t sound like a particularly delightful experience.)

In my role as an analyst and consultant, I use the word as part of the phrase “business impact,” to refer to the organizational benefits of online communities, social media, and social technologies. I’m not the only person who gravitates toward this term, of course but I have used it regularly and consistently over the years, much preferring it to the abbreviation “ROI” to help organizations focus on the bottom line. (While ROI is a perfectly valid and often necessary term, it tends to carry a bit of baggage.)

So when I first heard the name of Mike Rowland’s company, Impact Interactions, my ears perked up. I liked the sound of it from the get-go. It tersely and alliteratively says, “Let’s make a difference in the way you connect with others.” But there’s a large and vital difference between having an effective company name…and having an effective company. After getting to know Mike over the past few years, after having hearing him speak at conferences and other events, and after seeing him work to move the industry forward in a thoughtful, collaborative way, I quite resonate with his approach and his perspective. The company name fits.

I wouldn’t have taken this on otherwise. So it’s a great pleasure to have this opportunity to interact with you in this space. It’s a great responsibility, as well, to provide something of differentiated value amidst the depth and diversity of experience, knowledge, and opinions that pervade the blogosphere.

In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be writing about my observations on the interactions between people and technology, between business needs and customer goals, and between best practices and less effective methods, all as they relate to online communities and social media. I hope you’ll interact with me along the way – discussions are certainly more fun for participants and readers than monologues – supporting or questioning what you read here. That way, we can have an impact on each other.

~ Matthew

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Welcome to our Special Guest Blogger Matthew Lees

 

I grew up watching television shows where each week there was a “Special Guest Star” on an episode each week. These guests provided a little extra to the show and usually were cool celebrities. Think of all the villains on Batman for example or the Brat Pack on “Vegas” or the vacationers on Fantasy Island…or for those of you a little younger, the guests on the Simpsons.

Following that idea, I’d like to introduce our Special Guest Blogger, independent analyst Matthew Lees.

Matthew is a well respected analyst in the Social Media and Online Community World (see his bio here). He is the author of reports through the Patricia Seybold Group such as:

1. Selecting An Online Community Platform
2. Best Practices In Crowdsourcing
3. Analyst Report: Lithium’s Social CRM Suite

After reading his research and reviews of his findings, I thought Matthew truly understood how to make social media technology work in an enterprise organization. So, like all good social media practitioners I followed him on Twitter (@mlees) and his blog. Matthew and I first met in person at one of Forum One’s Online Community Unconferences. We’d been reading each other’s blogs and reports and discovered that we come to the industry with the same high level focus… using these tools to improve business results. While Matthew focuses on the technology and its impact, we focus on the process and the users. Together, we cover the issues that all enterprises need to succeed in their social media projects.

We decided in late December over a crab cake lunch here in Maryland, that we should find a way to collaborate together. Our idea is to inform, educate, and drive the best practices we’ve developed to a broader audience with this blog and our twitter accounts. Matthew will be posting here over the next few months both independently and collaboratively with our team members.

If you have a suggested issue of topic for us to cover, please contact us by adding a comment on this entry or by using our contact form.

So, with that said welcome Matthew!

Mike Rowland, President

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Misleading Indicators – Followers & Friends

Saw this on my twitter feed yesterday:

What immediately struck me was the implied assumption that the number of followers you have infers a level of influence. In our opinion that’s a risky assumption to make especially if you are going to make a business decision using this as a key metric.

Here is what I sent back to Jeremiah via DM:

Let me translate my Twitterese….

The number of followers is not a direct measure of influence. Too many ‘experts’ in the social media field believe that it is and continue to sell this notion. I can quickly and easily increase the number of my followers using hashtags and keywords that are popular. Yet that doesn’t necessarily mean that I am a stronger influencer than I was with a lower number of followers.

Those folks with a larger number of followers should not necessarily receive special treatment from brands. The number of followers or friends a person has on Twitter or Facebook really has minimal bearing on their actual influence. (I know that’s a bit heretical, but I’ll get to the why in a little bit.)

• How many people have used the various advertised services to build their followers rather than organically growing their followers by posting relevant content and ideas?
• How many people send an invite/friend request/twitter follow to every email address they have expecting the ‘polite’ return linking/friending/following behavior?
• How many of the top people in terms of followers have a large brand behind them, providing follower building support? (Example, if you only tweet about HP or Oreo Cookies you’ll develop following due to the power of the brand not necessarily because you are a thought leader in the space.)

Because these numbers can be manipulated, they are not to be trusted as a direct metrics proxy for influence.

The example that I use in our social media workshops uses a metric that everyone thought was a useful metric way back when in 2000-2003: Hits. The logic at the time was that the more hits there were in a given period of time, the better the site was in meeting its goals. But alas, this metric could be easily manipulated. Want more hits? Add more banner ads, objects, photos, etc. to the page. Voila! Higher counts so more success, right? Well, not really.

Follower counts are the same as hit counts. Look at some of the top people on Twitter with 5,000+ followers. If they are focused on a single topic, they probably do have influence. But most people are not that focused, tweeting about business, sports teams, their family, current events, pets, politics, etc. Do these folks really have a sphere of influence that marketers can embrace and attempt to cultivate through the Twitter Celebrity? Hard to tell.

The idea of identifying influencers in an easy to understand and quick manner has been a search for the holy grail since online communities started becoming more popular in 2000. At Participate.com, we hired smart people to analyze metrics and activities to develop relevant networked connections that indicated a level of influence within the community.  We used the new techniques of social mapping as well as relationship metrics of interactions. The work was never easy and it never gave a true understanding of influence. What did give some insight into influence, was looking to see how others interacted with the individual, not how many individuals read his or her content.

For marketers, a better way to measure influence is to analyze the content being added on Twitter in conjunction with analyzing who the person’s followers are. This is a tough, manual project. But in the end, you’ll have a much better understanding of whether or not a particular individual with a high following is actually an influencer.

As much as we want one, sometimes there is no holy grail. Using simple metrics as proxies is not a substitute for the hard work that data analysis takes to prove a hypothesis. Don’t fall for the trap of taking the easy way out.

Have a different opinion? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments’ section.

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