You Are Not The Benchmark

If you’re making the decisions about your business purely because you say “Well I’d pay for that”, you’re making the dangerous assumption that all of your customers, clients, potential clients, and the world at large think exactly like you do.

Perhaps more importantly, if you’re the kind of person who tends to run against the grain – if you’re the one, say, that actually paid for the Radiohead album to support the band instead of downloading it for free – that’s cool. But that doesn’t make you like everyone else.

You can be as proud as you want about the fact that you run contrary to conventional wisdom, but that might not be where the money is. In fact, it’s probably NOT where the money is. You need to know this, recognize that, and realize that if you’re in business to make money, you have to design your offerings based on what your customers and potential customers will pay for. Not just something you think is cool, and not based on your idea of what they want.

One of the reasons social media is so effective for conducting research is because of how easy and quick it is to start listening, asking questions, and paying attention to the responses. You can see, in real time, how people are responding to the products, media, and content that’s created out there. And that may completely debunk the assumptions you’ve made about what’s working and what’s not.

Part of the flaw in traditional marketing has been that it projects one perspective: that of the brand itself. It’s putting words in the mouths of your customers, telling them how to perceive you. Trouble is, they may not share your perspective. Or worse yet, you might be trying to solve the wrong problem, or missing key elements that would take your offering from okay to amazing.

How to know what they think? Ask. Listen. Then, adapt. But do break out of the idea that your way is The Way. That because your product or service is your baby, you know best what sells. Let the people paying your salary – you know, the people buying your stuff – tell *you* what your brand is to them.

Why do we keep missing this? Can we break out of this cycle of myopic and self-centered marketing, and how? What’s your take?

A Social Media Job Interview

This week’s rockin’ guest post is from one of my fave Twitter people, Scott Hepburn. Scott is a copywriter for PRstore, a full-service marketing and PR company with franchises nationwide. He blogs at Media Emerging and plays devil’s advocate on Twitter as @ScottHepburn.

So, you’ve finally scored an interview for a social media gig. A client or employer would like you to lead them to the social media Promised Land. But should you turn them down?

Before taking the job/project, ask some questions. It’s a good idea in any job interview, especially when the employer (or client) has visions of social media grandeur. How they answer might raise red flags about their readiness for social media.

Here are some questions to gauge an employer’s social media readiness:

Listening

-  How are you listening to your customers currently?
-  Who is currently monitoring conversations about your company/brand?
-  Where have you set up listening posts?
-  Are you listening to customer conversations that aren’t about your brand, per se?
-  Are you listening to conversations about your competitors?
-  What tools/technologies are you using to monitor conversations?

Customers

-  Are you willing to give customers the tools to tell others about their experience with your company?
-  Are you willing to let your customers own your brand?
-  Do you know who your brand enthusiasts are?
-  Do you know who your brand critics are?
-  In what ways are you already interacting with your customers – aside from the actual transaction?

People

-  Who are the voices of this company?
-  Are you prepared to let others become voices of this company? Are you willing to promote those voices?
-  Are there stakeholders you don’t want representing the company?
-  How much freedom do you give employees to participate in the company’s social media projects?

Goals

-  Why do you want to use social media?
-  What do you hope to accomplish through social media?
-  How did you choose these goals?
-  How do you plan to measure progress?
-  What are your benchmarks? How did you determine these benchmarks?
-  Do you have a deadline for success?

Resources

-  How much time are you willing to dedicate to social media projects?
-  How much money are you willing to invest?
-  How did you arrive at these resource allocations?
-  Will other departments invest their time in social media initiatives?

A job in social media or an exciting new client project can be a rewarding challenge. But before you bite, do your due diligence. Extracting yourself from a social media minefield is tricky business. Asking the right questions is a good way to survey the landscape.

PodCamp Toronto: Insights Outside the Sessions

The great thing about the unconference format – specifically PodCamp – is that as much learning and insight can happen in the hallways or the social settings as can take place in the sessions themselves. Getting such a pile of people together in one spot makes for some super interesting and diverse perspectives. Here’s a few things I took away from the event:

Challenges We’re Still Facing

We need to keep thinking outside our own backyards. Unless your business model hinges on local for a reason, realize that the social and new media – and business – landscape extends far beyond your geographic limitations.

We’ve gotta stop using ourselves as the benchmark. I’m still hearing lots of “this is how I do things” instead of “this is how other people are doing things.” The former is relevant to share with others and help them learn. The latter is relevant if you’re actually trying to do business in the business world with the media you’re making.

If you want to create revenue from new and/or social media, you have to know what the people with the money are willing to pay for. The media has to support something larger than itself. Cool is not a business or revenue model.

Tough love: still lots of excuses about why measuring social media is hard. Or why being solo limits your capacity to scale. Or why our media is brilliant but we can’t sell it to a paying client. The hard truth is that this stuff takes work. Get out there and start executing. Build stuff. Form coalitions. Act. Make mistakes, learn, and execute again. Nothing has ever gotten done by talking about it for the 30th time. See below for the upside of this one.

Happy Truths

Generosity and curiosity abound. People are willing to share amazing amounts of knowledge and information, and there are lots of people still seeking even the most basic of answers. If you don’t have the answer to something, ask. Someone does. Or there are people willing to help you find it.

The discussion is moving forward on important things like the right metrics for new media, ethics and transparency, treating our practices like businesses, and the potential issues and risks that come with online omnipresence. They’re not easy discussions, but these are the things that will take social media from cute to enterprise-viable.

There *are* people doing the doing, making things happen in this space, even quietly. See also Dave Fleet, Jeremy Wright, Bob Goyetche, Angela Misri, Sean Power, Julien Smith, Whitney Hoffman, Hugh McGuire, Sue Murphy, Dave Delaney. (Do I need to list Chris Brogan here? Okay. Him too.) You can learn from them. I am.

Meeting people in person still kick’s Twitter’s ass. And Canada still has great beer.

Special thanks to the great PCTO organizing team for putting on an event worth freezing for.

Connect?

I’m going to be at a whole pile of events this coming year, including the Main Street National Conference, SXSW Interactive, SES NYC, the Module Midwest Digital Conference, SCIP International, Inbound Marketing Summit San Francisco, and SOBCon 2009 just to name the next eight weeks. If you’re headed to any of these or are in the area, let’s be sure and link up somehow.

So what do you get out of these events? If you were at PCTO, what did you learn and observe? I’d love to hear more about your experiences.

I am a Material Girl and want to live in a Twitter World

Today’s post is courtesy of the lovely and talented Ms. Rachel Reuben (@rachelreuben).

Rachel is is the Director of Web Communication & Strategic Projects at the State University of New York at New Paltz. She’s a member of the blogging team at http://doteduguru.com , and published “The Use of Social Media in Higher Education: A Guide for Professionals in Higher Education” in July 2008. Oh yeah, and she’s smart and fun and I’m delighted to have her guest post.

One of the sentiments I hear most on Twitter is: “The Twitter community is so helpful.” And, they’re right. So, why don’t we experience this more in real life?

I’ve found being hooked into the right network on Twitter has made a world of difference in my every day life — both professionally and personally. I get helpful tips for everything from developing a code of conduct for my online community, to how to make the best hamburger.

After a challenging afternoon at work, I recently tweeted about this helpful phenomenon, and it made me wonder why aren’t so many people we interact with in real life like this? I want to live in a Twitter world. Is this too idealistic?

@AmberCadabra responded, “What do you think the difference is? Birds of a feather flocking together and that? Or something else?” So, here’s my best guess at what causes this phenomenon.

In great part, we come to Twitter to find like-minded people. We are attracted to those with similar interests in real life. In certain fields and geographic locations it’s especially hard to find them physically nearby. Twitter gives us a virtual world filled with creative, brilliant, entertaining, people, and most of us have at least one common thread — we aren’t afraid to ask for help, and we’re equally as happy if we can provide it. It’s natural we flock together. We realize, there are more people like us out there. We’re not in this alone. There are others going through similar professional challenges and life changes. It’s a support group where you can hide behind your avatar, and not have to be in a room facing other people. Others who have been through similar situations are happy to jump in and share their lessons learned, or even just to be a virtual shoulder to cry on. There’s something ridiculously comforting knowing there are perfect strangers out there who support you, even if it is only 140 characters at a time.

I’ve developed some incredible friendships with people I only know through Twitter — most of whom I’ve never met in real life. Every single one of these relationships started because they were helpful to me, or I was fortunate enough to be helpful to them.

We tweet about our professions. Regardless of our individual fields, there tends to be overlap with social media. If I’m looking for help on something technical inside a Ning community, I don’t have to just reach out to my colleagues in higher education. Community managers across the globe spanning all industries can and often jump at the chance to help. Twitter difuses geographical boundaries. It sort of reminds me of the old-school chat rooms in Prodigy and AOL in the early/mid 1990’s, but in a much more immediate and focused way.

Imagine what the world would be like if real-life was like our Twitter world. You’d go to a grocery store and there’d actually be a real-life bagger, and s/he would ask if they could bring your groceries to the car for you. (Oh wait, that does exist at Publix in Florida.) You’d go into a Wal-Mart, where everyone has aprons that say “how can I help you?” and they actually would, instead of nervously avoiding eye contact and running away from you when you can’t find something in their behemoth of a store. You’d sit in on a committee meeting at work and offer to help with the next task at hand, and everyone in the room jumps at the chance to help as well. You walk into a packed auditorium and ask if anyone knows how to fix your broken Facebook application, and half the crowd stands up and shouts the answer to fix it.

In reality, most grocery stores I frequent don’t have baggers, would never offer to help bring groceries to your car, and are never around when you need help finding something. Committees tend to be filled with naysayers and difficult individuals who aren’t there to really contribute much.

But… what if they did? What if Comcast repair technicians were all as helpful as Frank Eliason is on Twitter (@comcastcares)? (Side tweet: Is Frank giving customer service workshops to regional directors who supervise these technicians to spread their service throughout the organization?) What if every single employee at Home Depot responded as quickly and kindly as @thehomedepot does — including follow-ups 24 hours later? Do these companies have the same inward culture as they appear with their Twitter personas?

If you’re representing your company/business/brand on Twitter — are you being helpful? Or, are you just “listening” and there for damage control? Excellent customer service is still the foundation of solid business success, and Twitter provides the perfect way to expand your customer service initiatives into this space. If you’re helpful on Twitter, that will build a strong foundation for relationships outside the Twitter world, which is, unfortunately where the far majority of us have to live most of our life. We could use more helpful people in this real life world.

What do you think it is? How does Twitter breed helpful people? Is Twitter doing the breeding, or are we just flocking together as Amber suggests?

I don’t know about you, but I want to continue being useful and surround myself with helpful people who reciprocate. I’ll wait here over in this Twitter world.

Engineering a New Bedrock

One reason we might be struggling with social media’s “fit” within companies is because we’re trying to put it in a box. Is it PR? Is it marketing? Is it customer service? What are the rules? How do we behave? How does this relate to what we’ve done before?

It might just be time to stop thinking top-down, and start considering what lies beneath.

Engineering Foundations

The architect Daniel Burnham and his partner John Wellborn Root broke barriers in architecture in the late 1800s in Chicago. They learned how to defy the soft, clay-ridden ground in Chicago that caused buildings over a few stories to sink and falter. Bedrock in the city was over 125 feet underground, and it was impossible to sink caissons that deeply in order to allow for a taller building.

Until Root had the idea to engineer a new bedrock. He designed a system for pouring concrete slabs that were interlaced with a grid of iron bars that ran the span of the building base. A fundamental support structure that touched every part of the building.

Once he engineered this foundation, Root made it possible for him and Burnham to design and construct the first of the country’s skyscrapers.

Social Media Underneath

We’ve been trying to set social media on top of what we’ve already built, sometimes whether or not that structure is sound. And we’re attempting to tuck it neatly away in a marketing- or PR-related box because that’s what’s familiar and accessible to us when we think “communications”.

But perhaps social media needs to be woven into the foundation of our organizations instead. Not the tools, mind you. Forget about those for the moment. In fact, skip the term “social media” altogether.

Think instead about how you would create communication across your organization if you could start from scratch today. What constants would you impart to make sure that information could flow seamlessly both inside your company and between you and your community? What barriers exist now that you’d tear down? Where are the outdated processes that are hindering your agility, your ability to create and share information?

Even more radically, what if you could redefine the departments in your organization not in terms of their function but in terms of creating a more uninhibited flow of information and results from company to customer? Maybe by making them just a bit messier, less rigid?

Imperfect Communication

There’s so much more to social media’s implications than just reconnecting with a high school buddy on Facebook or having your company tweet product discounts. It’s not about just another communication channel. We’ve got plenty of those, for crying out loud.

What social media is changing is the foundation of all that communication. Its very fabric. We’re engineering new bedrock for how communication works, whether we realize it or not. And whether that makes you uncomfortable or not doesn’t change it.

If all you see is a collection of tools with silly names, you’re missing the fact that the splintered, nimble communication that’s happening around you is what’s really at issue. The ease, portability, and networked nature of media. All those careful, controlled processes that we all deluded ourselves into trusting because they were oh-so-carefully crafted and thought through in endless meetings? Breaking. Because they were built on a crappy foundation.

Yes, You Can Evolve

I can hear it now. “But Amber, you’re talking about shaking the very foundations of business! Some companies will never change! They’ve always done it this way and are afraid to evolve, to change, to do anything different. We need to understand the risks. The ROI. The dos and don’ts.”

To a point, I say that teaching and understand and education are all wonderful things. Learn. Take baby steps. Grow in context and with business goals in mind. I believe in forward progress, even if it’s methodical.

But for Pete’s sake. If the building is sinking but you’re determined to build skyward, you don’t curse the soft ground. You engineer a new bedrock.