Look who’s back

Been a while since I’ve been here. My last post dates back to October 1 and I’ve not been back since. I’ve had a very, well, to put it simply, changed filled few months.

The company I went to work for in January 2000, SoftBrands, announced an agreement to be acquired by Infor. Infor is a $2 billion enterprise software firm located in Alpharetta, GA. The deal was set to be closed during the dog days of August, but I figured I’d be better off if I started shopping my talents elsewhere…just in case. As luck, networking and self marketing would have it, in early September I was offered a position in the corporate communications. They wanted me to develop a global social media strategy. My summer went from “Oh no” to “yes” in the blink of an eye. But nothing stays the same now does it?

On November 2, I was notified that corp comm was being realigned to better serve the company and my role was being eliminated. I’ve lost a lot of colleagues over the years to workforce reductions and realignments, but this is my first time on the receiving end. I can’t say I like it much, but there are a couple of good here.

1. I’m interviewing with some great companies for roles that will challenge me and help me grow personally and professionally.
2. I get to spend a lot more time with my ladies – 6, 4 and 21 months – and my lads – 14, 11.
3. I’m able to relieve some of the daily burden from my bride’s shoulders.

Now that I have some down time – when I’m not pushing out resumes and doing interviews – I hope to get back on the blogging bandwagon. I’ve been building up ideas for posts and It’s time I get them down on “paper.”

In the meantime, if you hear of anyone looking for an accomplished marketing communications professional, send ‘em my way.

Thanks.

A short rant about LinkedIn discussion

I just joined a LinkedIn group. It was recommended by a colleague. My first stop, as always, was the Discussions page.

Guess what I found. C’mon, give it a try.

Ok, I’ll tell you. I found 5 featured discussions – the ones with the gold-headed pins in them – and every one of them was put there by the group owner. Now, if that doesn’t seem strange, and perhaps it’s not, this might do the trick…

…The most recent discussion was posted 29 days ago. The others are 9 months, 9 months, 8 months and 3 months old. Here’s the best part, though: there are exactly 2, count ‘em 2 comments among the 5 “discussions”. That is an average of .4 comments per discussion.

LinkedIn groups have a hard enough time surviving. What starts as a forum for peers to collaborate and share best practices too often turns into an unpaid ad for the latest webcast, or place to throw a link to your recent blog post and fish for comments. The groups are becoming self promoting (where did I hear that before?), and now at least one group owner is driving the self promotion bus. Unless we use these groups for their intended purposes – see the first sentence of this paragraph – they will die, and one of LinkeIn’s most wonderful assets will be no more. 

If you joined LinkedIn to take you on an ego trip, please be up front about it. It’ll save the rest of us who actually want to use it a lot of time and headaches.

The social media revolution is over

The social media revolution is over and it’s time for all of us to take a collective deep breath – in through the nose and out through the mouth. Now, before you accuse me of being a complete moron for proclaiming the end of social media, let me clarify what I mean.

I believe social media – as a practice – is in its infancy. We are emerging from a time that saw the development of an amazing number of tools anyone can use to engage on what came to be known as social media. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, blogging platforms, Twitter, YouTube, UStream, Utterli, and the list goes on . Some, like the ones I’ve mentioned here, have been wildly successful. Others have slipped below the surface and  been assigned to the Web 2.0 category of Trivial Pursuit. The ones that made it, and the ones that didn’t, were part of the revolution. Their advent came at a time when we were all comfortable with the Internt. And isn’t that the way it always goes. Just when we get use to the status quo someone else gets bored with it and decides to stir the pot.

We went from needing a website to participate to needing only access to the web. You don’t even need a computer. All that’s required is a visit to your local library. The revolution that is social media made it possible for us to communicate with, potentially, the entire world. It took the concept of global communications promised by the Internet and made it not only possible, but real. Whether text, audio, or video, each of us now has the power to send our message anywhere and everywhere.

And that, my friends, is a revolution if ever there was one. People took something that existed in one form and through a lot of hard work and struggle created something new from it. The old didn’t go away, but it is not what it once was. So where does that leave us today? The same place we were on September 3, 1783 when the treaty ending the American Revolution was signed. The revolution was over, but the evolution was about to begin. And this country has been evolving ever since.

The tools are the revolution, but he evolution are the tools grow up around those tools to make them more powerful. Twitter is wonderful, but the real power of Twitter is in the hundreds of applications we leverage to make it better. Blogs are nice, but RSS feeds, Diggs and del.icio.us are just a few of the technologies that have helped blogs realize the potential of their communication power.

We have the tool to communicate to our markets in ways we never dreamed possible. Now it is up to each of us to figure out how to use those tools to accomplish the goals we’ve set. The original thinking that social media tactics should reserved for communications and not for marketing is already evolving and will continue to do so. 

What we have today is so because people were willing to push boundries of what the Internet could do (revolution) - people a hell of a lot smarter than me. But each of us is capable of taking the gifts they’ve given and evolving them to derive greater and greater benefit than even the revolutionaries might have imagined.

The revolution is dead. Long live the evolution.

Personal v. Professional with Albert Maruggi

 A couple of months ago I saw a Twitter message from the owner of a consulting firm announcing the release of a new survey on the success of ERP implementations. A few minutes later the same individual used Twitter to take a hard line on the health care debate. In my opinion, the guy took quite a risk in mixing his professional and personal lives in a forum like Twitter where following someone is not the same as knowing them.

How many were offended by his opinion on health care reform we can’t know. Nor can we know how many will no longer consider doing business with him. But there is a number that fall into both categories.

Social media requires openness and transparency, but how much is too much? To discuss this, and other questions, I called my friend and former colleague Albert Maruggi of Provident Partners and The Marketing Edge Podcast. The outcome is the first ever Wondering Out Loud Podcast.

During out conversation we talk about the risks of mixing the professional with the personal, about the danger of “blurting” in 140 characters or less, and about how we are quick to label and categorize others. As always, Albert is thoughtful, serious and funny.

Enjoy.

Mark Palony speaks with Albert Maruggi about the risks of mixing the professional with the personal in social media.

Are you self serving or self promoting

As the adoption of social media by business expands at an ever increasing rate, its misuse grows along with it. When you engage in social media activities are you self serving or self promoting?

Have you ever considered the difference? Both deal with the self, but if you choose to practice the former over the latter, you are headed for social media failure.

Here are the definitions from dictionary.com:

Self serving: Serving to further one’s own selfish interests.
Self Promotion: Promotion, including advertising and publicity, of oneself effected by oneself.

Done correctly, self promotion will result in all the benefits – increased leads, sales and revenue – you can get through self serving means, without turning away a good chunk of your audience. If this sounds difficult to achieve, it’s not. Promoting the self – you, your colleagues, and your business – is as easy as showing your target audience what you know. How you show them, however, goes a long way toward defining which side of boarder you are on between serving and promoting.

Let me illustrate with an example of a LinkedIn discussion:

Q: My boss wants me to buy a list of emails we can use for marketing. We’ve never done this and I’m looking for advice on picking the right provider. Thanks for your help.

A1: You can buy any list you need from my company Lists-R-Us. We specialize in providing 100% opt in lists for every conceivable industry – and a few you can’t conceive of. Call me at 555-1212.

A2: Before you pick a provider you’ll want to ask several questions including how they compile their lists, what information they gather about the individual and the company, can they segment based on SIC codes, and what are the counts within the SIC’s you are targeting. Also ask to see a sample cut of the data and what accommodations they make for non-deliverable addresses. If you want more I’ve included the links to a couple of credible resources below. Hope this helps.

I will grant that the example I provided is fictional, but it is most certainly not extreme. Go through the discussions and you’ll find any number of questions and answers that are commercials. But LinkedIn is by no means the only site that suffers from sledgehammer marketing. Blogs – posts and comments – are not immune, nor are Twitter and facebook for that matter.

Provide help with information the individual can use to solve their issue. It is a way of promoting yourself, without selling yourself. Over time, as your credibility grows, you will find a growing number of people who follow you, listen to you, and offer your name to others a resource that can be trusted.

A social media strikeout

In earlier posts I ranted against theabuse of LinkedIn by people pushing products and services and the proliferation of top 10 lists on blogs. So today I’m looking through some LinkedIn discussions and came across this beauty:

Top 10 Reasons for going with (product name removed) Content Management System

As you sift through the marketing hyperbole trying to decide which CMS suits your needs best, the main question still exists; “Why should I purchase one CMS over another?” This Insight will give you ten core reasons on what makes (product name removed) CMS different than the other vendor’s products.

An Insight into what makes (product name removed) CMS stand out… Here is the link – (not gonna give you the link ‘cause I don’t want to give them any publicity)

I haven’t even clicked on the link and this abomination already had two strikes against it. Being the curious sort, I moused over and clicked on the tiny url. And what did I find but three tiny fields: First Name, Last Name and Email.

Strike three! You’re out!

Is Apple too good to join the party?

An interesting question was posed today by Ann All of IT Business Edge on her Business of Tech blog. Ann asks if Apple’s Silence (in the world of social media) is sending a message to its customers. I’d like to add competitors, analysts and the market at large to customers.

While the rest of the known business world – especially those in technology – are embracing social media as a way to reach out to their customers, Apple is conspicuously absent from Facebook and Twitter (I did find them on LinkedIn).

Regardless of the reasons, I think steering clear of social media is a strategic mistake. Like the BMOC skipping the party at the start of the school year, it may not have an immediate impact. But if he continues to stay away, his reputation suffers until he’s stripped of his BMOC title.

It’ll take a while before Apple suffers to that degree. But no company is immune to the whims of the market, and those that believe otherwise are are likely to learn a very hard lesson.

Social media: The great mixing pot

Social media is obviously a melting pot, but I’ve been thinking more about how it’s a mixing pot. Social Media, if what I see on Twitter is any indication, has become the place where people are comfortable mixing their personal and professionals lives. But many don’t stop there. More frequently I am finding messages through Twitter, FaceBook, and LinkedIn that openly stake out strong and passionate positions on any number of issues. And I, for one, am surprised that people would take the risk of turning away people they hardly know for the sake of expressing an opinion.

We all have opinions, but is the Internet the right place for your to express them?

On Friday of this week I have the pleasure of recording a podcast with Albert Maruggi of Provident Partners and The Marketing Edge Podcast ,and a Senior Fellow with the Society for New Communications Research. Together we’ll explore how people are mixing their personal and professional lives in ways we could not have imagined just a few years ago. We’ll talk about the right and wrong ways to go about it and the inherent risks of doing it at all.

If there are any questions you would like me to ask Albert about the mixing pot throw them in the comments section of this post and I’ll be sure to cover it with him.

The recording will find it’s way here sometime next week.

The Wall Street Journal and LinkedIn should be friends

TechCrunch has reported that the Wall Street Journal has LinkedIn in their cross-hairs – or do they – with a something called WSJ Connect. For those keeping score the article points out that this is WSJ’s second attempt at building a social/professional networking site. And the first went so well they decided it was worth another try.

As a supporter of a free market, I welcome competition and am overjoyed when someone invents a better mousetrap, but there are times when I scratch my head. I’m scratching today because I’m trying to imagine what it will take for me to rebuild what I have at LinkedIn within WSJ Connect. By the time it becomes live, and it is still in the concept stage according to TechCrunch, I will be so locked in to LinkedIn it will take something just short of an act of God or government directive to make me start over.

Unless they provide path for data migration, I’m more than happy to stay right where I am. There may be another way to entice me to consider a new beginning – and without data migration that’s exactly what it will be – and that is to include killer functionality that I simply cannot live without. I don’t know what that looks like, but will know it when I see it. 

What I do know is I don’t what the WSJ getting involved in the networking game, at least not as the lead.  I would rather see them stick to their core competency and approach LinkedIn as a partner (or buyer), not a competitor. The sum of the two parts would make a formidable force in the business world and create an unrivaled environment for innovation. How many of you would like to see the latest WJS headlines on your LinkedIn home page?

I’m not a genius, but I do believe I’m on to something here.

Pitch alert: Abusing LinkedIn

Holy cow, but there are a boat load of groups on LinkedIn to choose from. I’ve joined 16 – some related to my industry, others related to my profession – and have, over time, figured out which have value and which have nothing to offer. In some cases the line between treasure and garbage is quite clear and I can sum it up in one word: Pitch.

Have you ever come across a discussion that opens in a fashion similar to this: “Is your business suffering from a lack of qualified leads.” If you can answer yes to this question my advice is to drop it to the bottom of the list and leave it there.

I may be daft, and am willing to admit it in some arenas, but I’m done with people using LinkedIn as a lead generation tool – recall this post from last week – and am making a point of leaving groups that tolerate it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a marketing guy and am measured on, among other things, how many leads I can drive, but there is a time and a place for everything and far too many are abusing my time time and this place.

Last week I was reading a response to a question on LinkedIn. It was well written, well argued and, just when they had me interested out came the pitch for the beta version of their new software. The only thing missing was “operators are standing by” and “order before midnight and receive a free bamboo steamer.”

Sadly, this is not unique. I had a conversation last week with a company wanting advice on how their sales team could use LinkedIn to generate leads and they were going down the bamboo steamer path. Their strategy was to look for discussions to which they could contribute and pitch their particular products as a way to solve problems. 

 I should have invoiced them for a percentage of the sales I saved them.

Here’s the upshot – read last week’s post - then raise your right hand and swear to the following:

1. I will never pitch my product or service to anyone on LinkedIn unless they ask me to do so
2. I will raise my hand and be heard when I find someone trying to pitch me without my permission to do so

LinkedIn is second to none in the world of  professional networking sites (Plaxo fans can complain in the comments) and it is up to those of us who use the site to keep it that way.