Good People Day April 3rd: Refocusing on the Positive

You can’t deny that Gary Vaynerchuck has passion. I think it seriously just drips from him.

He’s got a video up on his site from a couple of years ago, talking about the need to highlight the good work and the good people out there. He kicked it over to me for consideration, rekindling the notion that we need to do more of this. It’s a simple message, but it matters. Here’s why.

The velocity of the web makes it so easy, fast, and inexpensive to spread information.

But the truth is that the bad stuff has always moved faster and farther (even before the web took the world by storm). It’s the whole “have to turn and look at the car wreck” thing. We thrive on controversy. Feed on others’ shortcomings. Feel empowered somehow when we sanctimoniously point out where people or businesses have gone wrong in our eyes.

I’ve felt and seen it a lot lately, and perhaps Gary was reading my mind or heard me say so. The rash of impatient, reactionary #FAIL declarations day in and day out. The social media lynch mobs. Entitlement and opportunism. Criticisms and “advice” that are not so constructive. Judgmental behavior and comments based on precious little context or information. And all of them wielded through easily accessible online channels, sometimes carelessly and without regard for the people on the other end.

I’m sure there’s some sociological or psychological pile of stuff about what makes us do that. But Gary’s trying to make sure we take time to do the opposite, and I’m glad. Because I need to put my money where my mouth is and rather than lamenting the existence of the bad stuff, I too can shift my perspective and shine a spotlight on the great examples.

There are promising organizations being built and fostered to do good with the technologies we’ve created.

There are displays of humanity, generosity, wit, humor, and smarts all over the place. I’m on the lucky end of lots of those folks, too. There are brilliant writers, helpful content creators, positive-minded businesses that are trying to improve the communities around them, whether virtual or concrete or both.

It would be really hard for me to draw up a list without excluding someone, so I’ll probably take a different approach that I’ll have to think about. But I hope you’ll mark your calendar for Good People Day on April 3rd, 2010 and do something to focus on the good people and ideas that surround you.

Whatever that means for you is great. Blog it, tweet it, podcast it, make a video. Or just pick up the phone and call someone and tell them they matter to you. I think that counts, too. If you publish it, tag it #GPD10 so folks can see it.

It sure can’t hurt to make a conscious effort to showcase the good stuff. We’ll always have more than enough evidence of the ugly side to go around.

You in?

image credit place light – flying not physically

Wiring In Social Media Measurement

Businesses that struggle the most with measuring social media are the ones that struggle with measurement, period.

Social media isn’t harder to measure than any other area of business. It’s harder to prove causality, but then again, direct and independent causality is awfully hard to prove for any singular event that impacts a sale. Sure, you can track your direct response codes all you want, but you can’t tell me definitively that the advertising you did, or the relationship that person had with Bob the Sales Guy, or the article than ran in the New York Times didn’t also have an effect on that eventual decision.

But I digress. Back to the point.

What Are You Measuring Now?

My sense is that if you’re a company that’s in a measurement frame of mind in the first place, you’ve managed to measure and quantify (or qualify) something that you’re doing. For instance:

• What’s the conversion rate of your e-newsletter subscribers to actual prospects or sales?
• What’s your resolution time on customer service calls?
• What’s the cost of having a human resources department?
• What percentage of your customers renew after the second purchase?
• How do you calculate your customer satisfaction, and what is it currently?
• What return do you get on your advertising dollars, direct or implied (and which is it)?
• How do you justify your investment in your IT department and infrastructure?
• What is your return on training materials or continuing education for your employees?

Guessing that the last two might have thrown you a bit, but these are legitimate measurements, too, aren’t they? We often term measurement as only having value when it relates to dollars in, but I’d venture to say that measuring (and justifying) dollars out is important. After all, if you know your stuff about the actual calculation of ROI, you’ll agree completely.

If, however, you don’t have an answer for anything above or anything that looks like those things, you probably need to improve the practice of your measurement to start with.

Measurement Needs Infrastructure

I’m going to put this simply. If you’re not already rigorously applying measurement (i.e. justification) standards to other areas of your business – on both the cost and revenue side – you can stop blustering about needing measurements for social media specifically. Why? Because you’re not equipped, and you don’t have a discipline of measurement upon which to build.

Measuring things properly takes, at least:

• Time: In terms of man hours to actually do the gathering of data and the further analysis of it, over a period of time that can actually provide context and account for trends and anomalies.
• Tools: The ability to capture, aggregate, and correlate the data you wish to measure, whether that’s a spreadsheet or a more complex software application.
• Humans: One metric alone means little. You need people to draw relationships and correlations between the data points that indicate progress toward the goals you’ve set. Few machines alone are capable of such insights and conclusions. Those people also need to report back their findings and offer recommendations for acting on them.

It’s staggering to see how many companies are demanding measurements and some mysterious definition of ROI for social media that can’t even tell you their conversion rate on various website properties, or the retention rate for their customers. Please stop demanding something you’re not prepared to do as a matter of business, and as a cop-out for not implementing a strategy that is unfamiliar to you.

Start With What You Know

You might think you need to develop and invent a whole new set of metrics to illustrate how social media impacts your business. Sometimes, that might be true or valuable, because there are things we can measure now that we couldn’t measure easily before. For example, I’m particularly bullish on the potential for metrics like Share of Conversation.

However, if measurement of the new stuff confounds you, start with what you know. Figure out how social media activities and participation impacts and influences the metrics you already use.

For instance, when you launch your blog, do your email newsletter subscriptions go up? If you know the average conversion rate of those subscribers (and perhaps their average value as a customer), you’ll be able to correlate the increase in your blog awareness to those subscriptions. Are they the only driver? No. Can you map the two together over time and see if they rise proportionally to demonstrate impact? Absolutely.

If your call center costs you $5 per incoming issue and you deploy a DIY YouTube help series or a Twitter team to triage in the social media realm, watch your daily call volume. Does it drop over a 30 day period in conjunction with those efforts? How much time and manpower does that Twitter team or video series cost you overall? Line up that investment against the drop in call volume by $5 per call, and see if you end up in the red or in the black.

It Doesn’t Have To Hurt

Measurement doesn’t have to be arduous and painful. It should be something you can stream into your daily or weekly processes. Remember that the goal isn’t the measurement itself, but the insights you get out of doing it. Keep it straightforward, simple, and utterly tied back to the goals you’ve set for yourself. (Start over here if you need help setting measurable objectives).

Make measurement a part of each department or function’s leadership. Put it in terms they’re familiar with. And at least to start with, measure social media against and along with the things you’re already tracking. See whether it has an impact either way.

And above all, be sure that you’re building a discipline of measurement and accountability in your business before you blame the medium itself for being immeasurable.

There’s loads of opportunity to evaluate your efforts, if it’s a mindset you’re willing to take.

Over to you. Agree? Disagree? I’m here to listen.

Social Media Ebooks You May Have Missed

Because I’m not always stellar about updating some of the other pages of my blog, I wanted to collect the ebooks I’ve written all in one place, so you can have at them if you need them, and so I have an easy place to point folks to when they ask. I’m hoping one or two are useful for you.

In the redesign of the blog (soon!) these will be better organized, but for now, here are the ones I’ve compiled in the last year or so. They’re all free, and hopefully helpful. Let me know what you think.

Getting a Foothold in Social Media

A rundown of some of the basic, fundamental elements of building a social media plan, especially directed at smaller and medium-sized businesses, but certainly consistent for companies of any size. Click here to download the PDF.

The Social Media Starter Kit

Here, we cover some of the most popular social media tools and technologies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and blogging, as well as some productivity and supporting tools to make social media task management easier and more fluid. Click here to download the PDF.

Building a Social Media Team

If you’re considering deploying a team to tackle your social media efforts, have a look here. We’ll discuss why you might need a team, how to assemble one, roles and responsibilities, and more. The ebook includes a look inside Humana’s social media “Chamber Of Commerce” and how their interdisciplinary team is driving social media efforts at their company. Click here to download the PDF.

Social Media Time Management

If you’re struggling with information overload and how to sort your priorities in social media, this ebook will give you some practical, actionable ideas for managing the firehose. Includes some thoughts on resource allocation and time commitments for social media strategies inside a business, as well as 9 strategies for keeping the social media monster manageable. Click here to download the PDF.

Tools Can Be Strategic

No, it’s not all about the tools. If, by “it”, you mean the Big Ultimate Goal of All of This Stuff and Why We’re Doing It In the First Place. I don’t think we need to debate that point any further, do we?

But it’s important to point out, as a bookend, that tools can be strategic, or at least part of developing sound strategy.

Blogging can be a strategy that helps you reach a larger goal of awareness or reach or idea testing or personal exploration or whatever. Twitter can be a viable part of a distribution network strategy or engaging the community you have in other places. You can vet its adoption or value for your audience, test ideas, track its usefulness as a traffic driver for your website.

For many companies, forays into social media include testing and experimenting with the mechanisms that are available, and let’s face it, familiar and comfortable. And it’s hard to ask an established business to commit to a full-blown social media strategic plan if they can’t kick the tires on a few of the tools to see how they might work (or not).

What’s important is that the company take the approach of testing and seeking tangible experiences that might relate to larger goals. That help provide some experience, some evidence, some immersion. A starting point.

As my friend Tamsen says, it’s the why that matters, not the what. If the mechanical experiments help shed some light on what the bigger strategy should look like – the why – I think that’s an okay thing indeed.

The trouble starts when we forget to connect the dots, make presence on a tool the goal in itself, and stop at “hey, look, Facebook!”

Having a strategy isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about mapping a process to try and find them, and constantly checking progress and adjusting along the way. Sometimes, tinkering with a tool or two can be just the way to do that.

See the difference?

image by comedy_nose

20 Questions To Start a Social Media Discussion

Let’s make something clear: you can be the person that starts asking the questions and initiating the conversations that move social media forward. You. Sitting right there. Yes, you.

I don’t care if you’re the marketing assistant, the PR coordinator, the customer service manager, the HR director, or the mailroom clerk. What it takes is the intent to be part of the progress, the bravery to start an open conversation, the maturity and patience to not make it personal, and the investment in the outcomes to take it a step further.

These are not just conversations for the communications department. Be courageous. Pick up the phone, or fire up the email, and ask for 15 minutes of time from the people that can help move social media forward in your organization (or at least reduce some of the friction around it). That means the marketing folks, the customer service folks, finance, HR, PR, product management, QA, sales. Yes, that includes the people you’ve never talked to before, and the ones that aren’t in your “box”.

Ask them one or two questions that can help you form a business case for social media. Your goal is to align social’s capabilities with the problems your organization needs or wants to solve for their own business. Note that the questions below aren’t all specific to social media; they’re attempting to uncover some of the underlying culture, brand, and operational issues that social media could help address. Remember, we’re talking culture change as well as operational change. You need to be the one to translate.

1. What do we do and why, in your words (not a vision statement)? On what could we, as a business, spend more time, energy, and focus?
2. Are you passionate about your role? If so, why? If not, what would help you be?
3. What goals do you have for your role this year? How do you hope to impact the success of your department? The company?
4. How would you describe the culture of our organization?
5. How do you use the internet in your work life? In your personal life? Where are the overlaps?
6. How do you believe your team uses the internet for their work? Have you heard ideas or feedback for ways they’d like to use it more or differently to do their jobs better?
7. Where do you turn when seeking resources or information about your role? Our company? Our industry?
8. What does our ideal customer look like, aside from demo/psychographics? What do they seek from us?
9. If you could ask our customers whatever you wanted, what questions are on your mind? What would you like to know about them and their relationship to our company?
10. How is your function in the business most impacted by customer satisfaction and loyalty?
11. Do you think our brand presentation aligns with our reputation in the industry? Why or why not?
12. How strong do you think our internal communication is? What would make it better? What information do you wish you had more of?
13. What kind of marketing or promotion do you think we do really well? What’s gotten you excited about the way we put our company out there, and why?
14. How well do you think we communicate with customers overall and solicit their feedback? What strengths and gaps do you see? Does it impact you, and if so, is it for better or worse?
15. What sorts of measures do you use in your current role to evaluate the success or impact of your work/department?
16. How flexible and adaptable do you feel our internal processes are? Are there some that are outdated? Cutting edge?
17. What’s your perception about social media based on what you know/have heard/have read?
18. Do you believe social media has a place in our work and business? Why or why not?
19. What are the worst case scenarios you can imagine from social media? What scares you, and what are the risks you’re most concerned with?
20. What excites you about social media, if anything?

These questions reflect some of the deeper discussions I get into with companies around laying the groundwork for social media, but they are by no means exhaustive.

What questions have you found useful in your social media discussions with clients, colleagues, management? How are you crossing hallways and walls and talking to people outside your department about this, or encouraging others to do so? What are your “yeah, but…” comments for me about why this is so hard to do?

image by mikecogh