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MGD Enterprises, a consulting company I follow on Facebook presents a business question or piece of advice daily.  Today’s comment was "Fact for Friday…Is access to social media critical to employee satisfaction? A global survey of workplace attitudes & behaviors by Clearswift shows that 21% of young adults say they would turn down a job if it didn’t allow them access to social network sites or their person[al] email. What is the situation where you work?"

The first commenter said "That will be the same 21% that will complain about their raise because their lack of focus will lead to their lack of production."  Those of you who know me well or follow this blog will know how I feel about that – to me, social media is not about wasting time and being unproductive.  Which is why I responded to him that "I’d include myself in that 21%, but social media makes me more effective because I use it for my job – I network with people in my field through Twitter and publicize my firms and their accomplishments, and use LinkedIn and Facebook for the same reasons. I think when you have people abusing social media, it’s a human resources issues, not a tools issue. The same people who will waste time on social media would be on the phone making personal calls if they were restricted from it."Continue Reading Social Media: Should it be Restricted in the Workplace?

Last week, a marketing manager posted a question to the Legal Marketing Association’s internal listserv – she wanted to know if there was a way to upload her attorneys’ bios to LinkedIn without them having to do it themselves.  I was both surprised and disappointed to see someone in legal marketing ask this, because she’s missing the point of social media and as a result, not able to help the lawyers at her firm understand and use it for their benefit. 

My response to her was the following:

“Unfortunately, I’m not going to give you the answer you’re probably looking for.  Because LinkedIn is not just a directory of attorneys, I don’t think posting all of the members of your firm is a great idea.  The key to social networking is engagement, whether you’re using LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or Martindale-Hubbell Connected.  For LinkedIn to be effective for your firm, the attorneys need to be involved directly – posting their own information on their profiles, and then staying actively engaged by linking up with colleagues, former classmates, clients and friends and then sharing information with them like articles/blog posts they’re writing, seeing what those people are up to and commenting on it, joining relevant groups and participating in them by answering questions, posting articles they think are useful, etc.  

 Continue Reading LinkedIn – It’s Not a Directory

I finished my Twitter coverage of Social Fresh Portland (because I was locked out by too many tweets!) with the Branding within Social Media Panel, with Kim Brater of Ant Hill Marketing, Steve Parker of Levelwing Media, Matt Singley of M80im, Kristy Bolsinger of RealNetworks, and Andrew Sinkov of Evernote.  Fortunately, although Singley threatened to liven up the panel by making it "pants optional," the whole panel staye fully clothed as they gave the audience some great advice.

The first question was about how branding is defined in each of the panelists’ organizations and translated to social media. Sinkov said at Evernote, they ask themselves, "what is the impression we want to give people?"  Their answer is that they want to be a company that people trust and believe in.  In Brater’s mind, your brand is your business.  Bolsinger said that she considers social media channels to be a way to strengthen their brand and make it something "living."  She encourages using the same brand and message across all channels in marketing, including social media.  Social media can also help to define your brand, because through engagement, you can learn what your customers think your brand is.  Singley said that while he promised not to use these buzzwords for the remainder of the panel, it’s true that branding is about consistency and engagement.  To make sure everyone was listening, he suggesting using liquor to transition the Old Guard to this new media.  More seriously, he said that one of the main questions he gets about using social media is how you can effectively measure it.  He said that he responds by asking how you can measure the effectiveness of a conversation or a relationship – you can’t.  Social media requires a leap of faith.  For bigger brands, this can be a little bit easier because they’re used to being sued for being transparent.  For smaller brands, this might be more difficult.  But Singley pointed out that it’s more about opportunities lost because of not being a part of a conversation, and those brands that ignore social media will lose.  He did agree that at some point, it’s necessary to show the value of social media and Bolsinger said that ROI can be more about what you save the company than what you bring in.  Singley added that persistence and education is how you get people on board.  An audience member asked if there was value in trying to measure the effectiveness of social media. Singley said yes, but he has yet to figure out how.  "Metrics are a necessary evil of agency life," he commented.  Bolsinger commented that if there isn’t a lot of differentiation between your company and your competitors, social media can be a way to differentiate.  Depending on your brant/product, you can show how social media has a better return on investment than traditional channels.  For showing how pervasive social media channels are, the panel recommended Do You Know 4.0.  Brater also recommended looking at Olivier Blanchard’s presentation on ROI in social media.

Continue Reading Recap of Social Fresh Portland: Branding within Social Media

Another great session at Social Fresh Portland was the afternoon panel on Corporate Blogging with Mike Volpe of Hubspot, Kristy Bolsinger of RealNetworks, and Andrew Sinkov from Evernote.  Starting the panel off with a bang, their first question was “should you, as a business, be blogging?”  The short answer was “yes.”  The long answer was “you’re an idiot if you don’t.”  Sinkov said that blogging is an incredibly important part of getting your company’s voice out there.  The panel discussed whether blogging should be considered a part of social media, or in its own category, and Sinkov commented that it’s a “long form of social media.”  Volpe agreed, saying that a blog should be the first step in social media, before Twitter or Facebook, because you’re not that interesting without it – it’s your social media home base.  They took an informal poll of the room showing that pretty much everyone in the audience had a corporate blog. 

Volpe pointed out that blogging is not about you or your company, it’s about your customers.  And if they segregate, you should similarly have separate blogs.  Bolsinger cautioned that from an SEO perspective though, they should all be on the same site.  Sinkov added that the more content you put on the blog, the more you see spikes of people coming to it.  So as soon as you have good content, put it out there, don’t wait for it to stack up. Bolsinger said that in her case, she does have a calendar of certain types of posts, which helps to get people coming back and set audience expectations.  She suggested Outspokenmedia.com/blog as a great blog to be reading to help audience members learn how to blog better.  Continue Reading Re-Cap From Social Fresh Portland: Corporate Blogging Panel

One of the sessions I was most excited about at Social Fresh Portland was the keynote speech by Peter Shankman of HARO – "It’s Not Social Media – It’s Simply Life."  Shankman’s speech had a lot of great takeaways, and focused on the four rules he follows in business and in his life: 1) Transparency 2) Relevance 3) Brevity 4) Top of Mind.  He started by saying that the smart ones are all saying the same thing – social media isn’t going away; it’s entering the lexicon. 

Shankman learned some valuable lessons at the start of his career, which he shared with the audience.  In 1995, when AOL was "the internet," Shankman was working with them and helped to found the AOL newsroom by asking "is there a better way to solve this problem?"  He said that they would go into work every day and try something new – if it worked, they did it again. If it didn’t work, they didn’t do it again – a lesson that’s applicable now in social media. Shankman commented that learning to constantly ask – "is there a better way to solve this?" – has served him well. He said that one of the best things you can ever do is to find a better solution to a problem, because if the solutions that everyone already had already worked, it wouldn’t be a problem anymore. 

Continue Reading Re-Cap from Social Fresh: Keynote: It’s Not Social Media – It’s Simply Life with Peter Shankman

The third session of the day for me was "Social Media for Small Business – A Fresh Conversation" moderated by Ryan Lewis of Bonfire Social Media.  He took an informal poll of the room, which was made up of mostly small businesses, with some agencies.  Since the format of the session was a roundtable, we went right into questions from the room.  An audience member asked, for a small business strapped for time, how do you find a balance between hiring an outside consultant to handle social media versus doing it in-house.  Another audience member responded with a success story of how doing social media in-house has really worked for them, with their preferred medium being Twitter.  There has been a lot of debate recently about this very issue, and I also fall on the side of doing social media in-house – when people engage with someone on Twitter, Facebook or other social media channels, even when they are engaging with a brand, they want to be talking to someone who represents the voice of that company, and knows the company well.  There’s an implied sense of trust that comes along with following or becoming a "fan" of something, and if those clients/customers find out that they’re dealing with a consultant and not someone from the company, that trust can be broken with serious consequences.  I talked about this issue in a little more depth with respect to ghostblogging.

Another audience member asked about who is using Facebook applications, adding that there’s huge success there for those who are.  Someone commented that Facebook adds a layer of demographic targeting that can be extremely useful, though it’s sometimes necessary to test different advertisements to find success.  Another audience member wanted to know if there was an average price point for the products that are selling, using tools like Facebook. He’s found that social media tools are better for branding, because he sells an expensive product.  He wanted to know if a company would be throwing money away if their product is expensive and so they’re only using social media for branding.  The room seemed to agree that the answer was no – even if the sales process is not happening through these tools, developing a reputation for a certain expertise is useful in leading to an offline sales process.  (*Applicable to law firms)

The group then talked a bit about whether Facebook or Twitter was a more useful tool for companies.  Someone commented that Twitter is a great tool for communications, but for indexing and critical mass, Facebook will become a much bigger player.  It was suggested that companies incentivize their fans to join their Facebook pages, which we’d heard in the previous panel.  Incentivizing them to become a "fan" of your company and product is one step, but leveraging this group to build a database is what’s really important.  HubSpot was mentioned again as a company who does this very well.  To get "fans" to sign up their email addresses and information with a company, an audience member suggested reserving some content for release when they give you this data.  Another audience member cautioned that some small businesses think you go right from getting someone to become a "fan" to getting a sale, and said that it’s important to remember to build the relationships further first.  (*Great lesson for law firms)Continue Reading Recap of Social Fresh Portland: Social Media for Small Business – A Fresh Conversation

The second session that I attended while at Social Fresh Portland was the “Social Media B2B Panel,” with Greg Cangialosi of Blue Sky Factory, Jason Peck of eWayDirect, Adam Holden-Bache of Mass Transmit, and Schneider Mike of Allen and Gerristen.  A lot of great information came out of the panel, starting with the first comment that “social media doesn’t just happen.”  The panelists agreed that companies need to put a smart person behind the tools, and get buy-in from everyone in the company, not just the executives.

For B2B companies, their goal is to make their customers more successful than their competitor’s customers.  To identify what they want from a specific social media strategy, they need to start with the bottom line in mind.  Cangialosi commented that social media is just an extension of every other area of the company, but that it’s largely happening out of marketing departments.  The panel advised that the marketing department should lead with their messages, but customer service should be involved as well, and whoever is responsible for CRM, for a more complete strategy.  Peck added that B2B companies need to have communication skills and subject matter expertise to effectively deploy a social media strategy.

Cangialosi said that the true promise of social media is when you can engage with people, which the legal marketers I know in social media would agree with.  When engaging, it’s important to be transparent in social media channels about why you’re there. If you’re not planning to use it for customer service, let them know, but expect people to ask questions anyway.  The panel also suggested working with a public relations team in advance to forecast out what prickly issues could come up. Continue Reading Recap of Social Fresh Portland: Social Media B2B Panel

The first session of Social Fresh, Portland that I attended was “Real Facebook and Twitter Results Panel.”  Since I know many law firms are hesitant to get involved with Facebook and Twitter, the comments from this panel might be especially useful for you in evaluating whether these platforms will work for your firm.  The panel featured Justin Kistner of Webtrends, Carri Bugbee of Big Deal PR, Kevin Tate of StepChange, and moderator and panelist Shauna Causey from Comcast. 

After each of the panelists introduced themselves, they focused on their experiences using Facebook and Twitter for themselves and their clients.  Tate said, about starting a Facebook page, that a company can often learn as much from its failures as its successes.  Kistner agreed with this, saying that his company had thought about starting a new blog, separate from their original one, and quickly realized that it would make more sense to leverage their existing web presence and audience, because they already have put their trust in you.  But in addition to thinking about the external audience, when deploying a social media strategy, it’s just as important to bring your internal audience in and show them the value. 

Tate used the Travelocity gnome campaign on Facebook as an example of a successful use of social media to engage the audience (the panelists agreed that audience engagement should be a key goal when using a social media tool like Facebook or Twitter).  Facebook users could become a “Fan” of the Travelocity gnome, and were able to interact by voting on where he would go next.  This was very successful and continues to see fan engagement.  Tate pointed out that once people feel that they have ownership of something, you have to be careful about taking it away – an example of this from my own experience was when a Facebook user created a Fan page for the Norwegian curling team’s pants.  The page was not endorsed or created by the team, but during the Olympics, it suddenly grew very popular and attracted a lot of fans and activity.  Facebook realized that the page wasn’t created by the team (even though they had contacted the user who started it and invited him to their next match) and they took it down, citing their fan page rules.  But because so many fans were attached to the page, they launched a campaign to get Facebook to bring it back.  After a few hours, Facebook relented because of the outcry. So even though the Norwegian curling team didn’t start the page, the fans were invested in it and didn’t want to lose it.  Tate also pointed out that even when a brand creates the Facebook page, the fans really own it and define the content and interaction.  Continue Reading Recap of Social Fresh Portland: Real Facebook and Twitter Results Panel

Today, I attended one of the Social Fresh conferences, which took place here in Portland, Oregon – for those of you wondering what Social Fresh is, it’s a conference about social media, focused around case studies, and it takes place in some “underserved cities,” as the conference website describes them.  Although it’s not a conference focused around the legal field, I felt that broadening my social media education to find out what other companies are doing and what works for them would be useful in my own professional social media efforts, as well as for the law firms we work with.  

Like LMA 2010, I’ll be posting re-caps of the valuable sessions that I attended today over the next few days, but I wanted to get a quick post up about my thoughts and the key takeaways from today’s conference.  
The theme that I took away from today’s panels and presentations was two-fold – 1) know your social media objectives and 2) know your audience.  In terms of the former – it’s not just enough to jump into social media, to create a Twitter profile or a Facebook fan page (in terms of your company or firm’s brand – I still think there’s utility in experimenting for yourself to learn about the tools).  You have to ask yourself why you’re on there, what you want to get out of it, and what you’re prepared to do with it – have a strategy.  There were a lot of comments that although marketers may be handling a company or firm’s social media efforts, customer service is still a large part of the job.  So even if you enter into social media for the purpose of getting content out there, you must be prepared to answer questions and deal with customer service-type issues.  This is true even in the legal industry – for law firms getting involved in social media, you have to be prepared to deal with questions coming up that border on a client-attorney privileged relationship, possible issues with complaints against the firm, etc.  The overwhelming answer on how to deal with these issues today was “have a plan.”  Before entering into social media, decide who will be behind the efforts, what happens if a person or group starts flaming your Facebook page, what steps are taken if a crisis arises – think about the possible issues that may arise before they happen.  Everyone agrees that social media is just another channel for the same types of marketing that companies and firms have always been doing, so some of this will just be an extension of an existing crisis communications plan your firms have, but it’s essential to discuss strategy and possible roadblocks before releasing a corporate social media strategy.

Continue Reading Social Fresh – What Did I Learn About Social Media?

Last night, I had the opportunity to attend a socialmediatoday webinar on “Social Media in Asia: Where are the Emerging Opportunities?” (For the webcast and slides, visit: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/webcasts/184500) What follows is a re-cap of the highlights, but the key takeaways that came out of the webinar are the following:

– Culture is hugely important – In order to succeed in Asia, you must have people on the ground who understand the social meda ecosystem for that country and can help you to navigate it.

– Mobile devices will be the primary source of access for a lot of people because broadband access is not always available.  So compatibility with mobile devices is hugely important.

– Face-to-face interactions are still paramount.

The speakers for the webinar were Thomas Crampton, Asia Pacific Director of 360 Digital Influence for Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Peter Auditore, head of SAP’s Business Influencer Program and a Senior Fellow at the Society for New Communications Research, and Robin Carey, CEO of socialmediatoday.  They began with comments from Crampton on scale – he said there are 338 million “netizens” (citizens of the net) in China versus only 62 million in France (as of a report from 2009) and also greater than the population of the United States.  However, the top social networks in China are not the familiar ones in the West - Qzone has 183 million users, Xiaonei has 40 million, kaixin001 has 30 million, while Facebook only has 0.4 million.  Crampton observed that the government is very savvy in China – Twitter is blocked, but Google Wave is not.  He also noted that Friendster used to rule Asia, but now Facebook is “romping across the nation.”Continue Reading Social Media in Asia: Where are the Emerging Opportunities?