Social Media: Presence matters most

The lead fr0m the eMarketer article says it all:

Social media marketers feel that having a presence on social sites is more important than advertising there, but there are still challenges related to keeping a community running online.

And so it is today as it was in the beginning: Social media is about showing up and showing what you know. Because, let’s face it, in today’s world no one will give your ad a second look without trusting you first. That’s especially true in the B2B space. And that is the beauty of the power of social media.

Blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, to name the biggies, give you ample opportunity to seek, build and engage an audience in a way that positions your people – and by extension your company – as industry experts. And when you take the step of sharing your expertise in public forums the market takes note and comes to see that your people can be relied on to offer counsel without without an invoice attached.

So we all seem to understand the importance of taking part in social media, but where we, all of us, still struggle is the all-important content creation. It’s not a question of how to do it, it’s a question of how to find the time to do it. I wish I had a good answer for you other than making time – 20-30 minutes – every day, or every other day, to scan your Google alerts for ideas (where do you think this came from) and decide how you want to handle them: Is it blog-worthy, or will a simple tweet do, and then handling them.

Of all the possibilities for social media involvement Twitter is, by far, the most forgiving. It takes very little time, yet it will expose your company and it’s people to an audience you won’t find anywhere else. Add a hash tag or two into the mix and you have the potential to grow your audience even faster.

Let’s be honest, we are constantly making accommodations for our time, letting something slide because another, more important, thing pops up, or dropping activities altogether. If you believe there’s value in social media, you will find the time to work it in. And as its value to your marketing programs grows, you’ll find yourself dedicating more time to it.

Regardless of time, market expectations say you have to be involved, so it’s time to get in and make your presence known.

Playing with the LG Revolution for social media evolution

By day I’m the director of marketing for OptiMine, a paid search bid management solution and I spent last week in Boston exhibiting at Shop.org, a trade show for online retailers. Most of our marketing efforts are executed across the Web and social media is becoming a major part of that. I say becoming because we are a young company, almost four years old, and, as the first marketing hire, I got started only three months ago.

Using a smartphone while on site is a must for anyone who is doing trade shows. There is no better way to capture the activity. For Shop.org I was fortunate to have gotten my hands on the LG Revolution with Verizon service. I say fortunate because it allowed me to accomplish everything I set out to do.

While meeting prospects and customers is the primary objective for any exhibitor, Web 2.o and smartphone technology has made it possible to go beyond, bringing the wider experience to a much bigger audience. I’m talking about more than live tweeting with a hashtag. For example, the video below was shot using the Revolution. I was standing a few feet away from the subject and, although you can hear the background noise, y0u cannot appreciate just how loud it was. That’s how good the mic on the Revolution is. In terms of use, shooting video and stills and immediately uploading to YouTube, Twitter or Facebook is as simple as selecting “Share” and deciding where you want to send it.

 

The Revolution is 4G and the speeds are amazing, but the call quality does leave a little something to be desired. While I didn’t experience any problems, I did use the phone to call several people and a few did comment it sounded like I was speaking in a cave.

If you’re looking to shoot video, or stills and upload to your favorite social networking site – for  business or pleasure – the LG Revolution is a great option.

Fire me, please!

Relationships do not all last forever. There comes a time when even the best break apart. Think The Beatles, Martin & Lewis, Simon & Garfunkel, Gumby & Pokey (RIP Art Clokey).  So where’s all this going?

In my quest to find new employment I have met with several agencies in the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Some big, some small, some in between. Through the years, I’ve worked on both sides of the agency/client relationship and, therefore, feel eminently qualified to comment on a part of the relationship I’ve not heard discussed before: the part where one tells the other it’s over. Most often this happens when the client calls the agency and tells them their services are no longer needed, but agencies can, and should, fire clients when appropriate. It may sound counterintuitive – and it is to almost anyone who gets a piece of the revenue generated by their clients – but when done properly telling a client you can no longer offer your services to them will be good for all parties involved.

Several years ago I hired an agency to do project work. It was, and I trust still is, bright, creative and dynamic agency that was doing tremendous work with several companies in the Twin Cities. I hired them to help SoftBrands break free from the ERP clutter. I wanted new and creative ideas that would differentiate us from the competition. The agency did not disappoint. The ideas were fresh, the staff responsive and the work was always ahead of schedule until…

The agency was on a growth trajectory when I first engaged them. Unfortunately for me, they were growing faster than the revenue I was supplying. Where SoftBrands had once been a big part of their business, the percentage has slipped dramatically and along with it went the responsiveness and ability to hit deadlines. In the end, with a bad taste in my mouth from the way the account was handled, I called the account executive and told him we were moving our business elsewhere. At the time I found it strange that he seemed relieved by the call, but after reflecting on it I’m sure he was.

He had moved on to bigger clients that provided bigger commissions. Who could blame him for not wanting to continue managing an account that could provide little revenue to him or the agency. But how much better would it have been if he had called me and told me he was unable to continue managing the account? How would it have ended if he had told me we weren’t growing at a rate that matched the agency and that he had 3 or 4 agencies he could recommend that specialized in smaller project work.

Simply put: If he had fired me – rather than the other way around – we might very well have parted on better terms: no bad taste and no sighs of relief. Instead, I think about the lousy customer service they offer to their small customers and how happy the AE was to be rid of SoftBrands as a client.

We may both end up living happily ever after, but somewhere a bridge is burning.

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.