When time permits I’ve been known to talk just a wee bit about sports, especially the Red Sox. Often those posts are housed over on Big Pabelbon, started by my friend Aaron Strout. Because of this affiliation, some would call it addiction, I received this email:
Hey Kyle!
How are you? I was wandering from Red Sox blog to Red Sox blog, and came across yours listed in the blogroll section of OverTheMonster. I know Red Sox fans are pretty die-hard (especially when it has to do with the Yankees), so I thought you might appreciate this contest that Overstock.com is holding, called “The Ultimate Red Sox Experience.”
You get a chance to win tickets to see the Red Sox pummel the Yankees on October 2nd- including round trip air-fare,a pre-game VIP tour and the chance to turn the numbers on the Green Monster scoreboard during one inning. If you’re interested in knowing more there’s also a video that goes over the details.
Appreciate the contest? I LOVE the contest, especially since I live in Austin now, so it would be that much sweeter. But as a long time marketer and PR guy, who kind of “dabbles” in this “social media” stuff I also loved the pitch. Kudos to Selena Narayanasamy, the Director of Social Media Outreach at BlueGlass. Not sure if Selena knew some of the folks behind the Papelbon blog including Aaron, Tim Walker, Bryan Person, Adam Cohen, and Jim Storer…but let’s just say they are a bit of a big deal in the social media world and even bigger deals within Red Sox Nation.
Too much time is spent on the best practices of social media, or PR, or marketing, or lead gen….but what it all really comes down to is a few simple things that Selena did right:
Research your audience
Tell your story succinctly
Tell me why I would care
Make it easy for me to share the story
You could say the same thing for a great white paper landing page or email newsletter. The more things change in terms of our medium, the more the old best practices come in handy. I was so excited about this pitch, not simply because it really does seem like the ultimate Red Sox experience, but because it was a perfect example of a great communicator at work. If you want to check out the video it is below:
Do you finish your day and realize you didn’t really accomplish anything?
Oh sure, you DID stuff, a lot of stuff. But nothing was truly accomplished. Ask yourself how you spent your time throughout the day. Were you going back and forth from task to task, biting of small bits of each task, only to swallow it quickly and move onto something else?
Or did you sit down, shut out everything else and eat up the entire task, while actually taking time to taste?
You will only be successful when you multi-task, not multiple-task.
Conventional Wisdom is what knowledgable people know. / Conventional Belief is what the masses think they know.
Unfortunately we often times confuse conventional belief with conventional wisdom, particularly in marketing circles. For example, if you just listen to the masses, social media is still THE top vehicle for marketers. But shift through the noise. Log off Twitter and those annoying #chats and talk to some really smart marketers who are working in the trenches. The conventional wisdom has it that the tried and true practices of marketing are making an enormous swing back into the mainstream. But they have been rejuvenated by the social media assault of 2008-2010.
Direct mail. Email Marketing. Events. And, yes, even advertising, are getting the best results these days.
But today they are done in a smarter and more focused manner. Because of all the social media noise these smart campaigns have become a breathe of fresh air. Certainly creativity and strong content still win the day, but the “old school” delivery mechanisms remain the best way to sell your product.
I’m not trying to write some “social media is dead” post, not in the slightest, but it goes back to something I wrote in January of 2007, when the blog was the highest form of “social”, in the post “Blogs are to hieroglyphics as Scoble is to _______?“:
“Content is still King, the blog is just one form of transportation.”
Don’t be blinded by conventional beliefs that social media is a revolution that you must be a part of or you will never succeed as a marketer. Instead listen to the conventional wisdom and realize that social media is (still) just another fantastic tool for you to use. Use it as a compliment, not in place of fantastic content and creative results-driven marketing campaigns. Always trend towards the wise and away from the believers.
People love to talk about customer service stories. Good, bad and ugly. We all share them with each other as if they are our own personal scars. Head on over to Twitter, Facebook, Yelp or any other online network and you’ll read what people think about the customer service they just received. We all know that more people talk about horrid customer service. Sure I have a large amount of those stories (I’m looking at the continuously poor service of ING). Fortunately though people do take the time to provide some kudos when the service is divine. Today, I share one of those stories.
Marketing tools can often be confounding. They are overly expensive and over designed. They get deployed before they have a team to support the tool. They work, sometimes. But we try them all in hopes that they deliver what we need and provide us with more insight into the work we are doing. One of the tools I use each day is Act-On software and you can read how it provides real-time B2B marketing analysis, email management, demand gen automation and more, but it is not the tool I care to discuss today. Today I want to talk about Andrea and Dan, two people who work at Act-On and provided me with a wonderful example of proactive customer service.
One morning last week I got an email that Andrea and Dan, helping us with another issue, came upon something we had done wrong in implementing our forms. This was not a major deal, but it was causing problems in certain browsers (yes, that means IE). Now here is what could happen after they discover this issue:
Ignore the issue, AKA “Bad Customer Service”
Alert us to the issue, AKA “Customer Service”
Tell us how to fix the issue, AKA “Good Customer Service”
Fix the issue then tell us about it, AKA “Amazing Customer Service”
The fourth form of customer service is what I call proactive customer service and it goes way above and beyond what you expect of any company. But it is also that type of customer service that creates a loyalty to a company, a product, a person, a brand. That morning Andrea and Dan of Act-On took the fourth approach on customer service and it made a huge difference for my day. Rather than trying to figure out the problem and wasting a few hours I was off and running. Proactive customer service is the ability to put your customer’s needs completely ahead of your own, but then going even one more step further and providing a true solution.
Thanks Andrea. Thanks Dan. Thanks Act-On.
Take a moment and share your story of proactive customer service.
Privacy is important, or at least it should be, but unfortunately most people ignore their role in this tale. On the other end of the spectrum we have an organization like Facebook that has decided that privacy is the least of their problems and they are going to exploit an inherent weakness in people: Online Privacy Ignorance. This blog is not the place to resurrect what is currently going on in the world of privacy and Facebook, you can get that from better sources. But this latest privacy run around and “fix” has woken me up to the fact that I had created a very large group of FBFs (1,400+), many of which might or might not fall into the Online Privacy Ignorance category. Most, however, did fall into the “why do I feel it is OK to share with them what I am sharing” category. Listen up now, what I need to tell you IS very important: It’s not you, it’s me.
That’s right, we are no longer friends on Facebook. Please. Stop. Crying will not help us get through what are sure to be trying days. Instead I want you to think back on all the good times (cue cheesy flashback music and start montage):
Hiding your Farmville updates as quickly as humanely possible.
Removing that disgusting comment you made about me when I posted a family photo.
The hours I spent building lists thinking that it would create different pockets of privacy.
Hiding your MafiaWar updates as quickly as humanely possible.
Disabling my wall to protect me, and you if I can be so frank, from malware and Phishing expeditions.
Hiding your updates altogether during the last Presidential election cycle.
Laughing out loud at the fact that you are still the only person that uses the “Poke” function.
Wondering why you post drunken updates every Saturday night…with accompanying pictures of you in the restroom of local bars.
It is always hard to remember all those good times. Speaking of remembering, can you remember when we became FBFs? Or why? Strangely enough, I can’t even remember ever having met you in real life. When you have those types of challenges in front of you it is a wonder that our relationship, even this digital one, lasted for so many years.
The time has come for us to no longer be friends on Facebook. You may not even notice the change, since there is no way for me to contact you once we are no longer FBFs and we don’t even live in the same state and in some cases the same country. But thank you for being my FBF during a time when we all felt comfortable sharing intimate details about our lives with complete strangers. Today the world is simply a different place, and FBF, I’ve grown.
Perhaps one day I’ll regret this, but with my cursor poised over the “Remove Connection” button I bid you and 1,200 of my closest FBFers, adieu.
When I think of a resource for B2B social media I think of Jeff Cohen and Kipp Bodnar because, well, they run Social Media B2B. Not many folks know what us B2B marketers are up against when it comes to integrating social media, but having read their blog and spent time with them both I always leave the conversation with new ideas and inspiration.`
Therefore I was really thrilled when Jeff asked me to sit (actually stand) down for an interview during SXSWi and I wanted to share:
It’s event season for most B2B companies, particularly in the technology world. In the next six weeks I’ll be going to a bunch of shows for BreakingPoint, mainly to demo our cyber simulation capabilities to folks. As you prep for your upcoming schedule of events how are you telling your community that you will be out and about? Couple of suggestions:
Blog about the events you are attending, why and what you will be doing at the event.
Set up Twitter searches for the show names or hashtags, connect with people talking about the event.
Post events to LinkedIn (groups and their actual event feature).
Send out an email to segments who may be attending certain shows with an offer (we have a super cool t-shirt).
If you don’t tell people you are going to be someplace, don’t be surprised if they fail to show up.
Conversation is defined, in many dictionaries, as the “informal interchange of thoughts, information, etc., by spoken words; oral communication between persons; talk; colloquy”.
Communication is defined, in many dictionaries, as the “imparting or exchanging of information or news”.
Let’s agree that the definition of Conversation should change a bit, to at least include “written words” along side those that are spoken.
Now, a question for you.
On Twitter, do you have Conversations or Communications with people?
On Facebook, do you have Conversations or Communications with people?
On eMail, do you have Conversations or Communications with people?
On the phone, do you have Conversations or Communications with people?
Last month, when you told me how many Twitter followers you had by simply inserting it into the conversation, much like you would tell someone about the weather during your vacation, I ignored the cry for validation.
A few weeks ago during another awkward social media “tweetup”, when you casually dropped your Hubspot Twitter Grade when talking up the waitress, I swallowed my retort since it actually looked like you would get her number.
Last Monday, on a chain of emails that was supposed to be about a possible fantasy football league trade, you actually typed the words “The way Frank Gore is running the ball this season reminds me of how I created that series of Posterous posts on graffitti and linked it to my Flickr group on urban art.” I didn’t even reply.
And last night, over a beer, you mapped out in avid detail your penultimate plan for aligning your 20,000th Tweet with your 10,000th follower, your 1,000th Facebook Friend, your 500th FriendFeed subscriber and 50th FourSquare badge. I drank.
You have been my friend for a long time so let me just tell you this as straight forward as I can. Nobody cares about your personal social media numbers. Nobody wants to know how many follower/friends/subscriber/badges you have “collected” or what you plan to do during an artificial social media milestone. Most people won’t tell you this, but I know that deep down, below your glazed over eyes from staring at your TweetDeck columns, my old friend is still in there.
Remember the numbers you used to care about? No? Let me remind you.
The night before my wedding you told me about how you came up with that killer marketing campaign that increased recognized revenue by 285% in one quarter.
While I was on a business trip in Europe you sent me an email, excitedly detailing for me a new blog post you were writing that would kick off an online resource center for your community of 500 app engineers.
The day I introduced you to my second son we spent a lunch where you used approximately 15 napkins to illustrate for me how you were going to use SalesForce.com, WebEx and some homebuilt application to launch a fully integrated online demo system, with the goal being to reduce your company’s current sales cycle by three months.
I miss my old friend. The one who knew which numbers mattered.
The beginning of this year I found myself wrapped up in the conversation sparked by Peter Kim concerning the “echo chamber”. At the time I wrote a post “Think About It: Changing Your Social Media Habits” where I discussed how I was currently escaping the echo chamber, primarily because I was getting impatient with the discourse that is coming from marketers and ’social media types’. Truth be told that never happened…until now. The past thirty days I actually did escape my echo chamber.
Twitter stats for the past 90 days...
Surely I would love to regale you with my strategic plan to make this happen, but truth be told the past month found me spending much of my time focusing on our corporate blog, our corporate Twitter, the other facets of my work, travel to trade shows and of course my family. Pinpointing my focus has allowed me to do really fun things at work, which I’m going to write about next week, and center myself around our marketing plan for the second half of 2009. Not only did my personal Twitter activity drop by two-thirds, but I posted sporadically here on the blog (traffic went down by nearly half), rarely ventured to Facebook and didn’t even realize FriendFeed had a new UI.
On the flip side, I was in LinkedIn every day with our community of network engineers in our network testing tools group. Our corporate Twitter grew in followers and in it’s engagement with people. Last week our corporate blog recorded it’s largest viewership of 2009. And we just finished analyzing the positive impact of these activities and others on the leads that came in thus far. I escaped my personal echo chamber without leaving the world of social networks. Instead I was able to have conversations with folks about what we provide at BreakingPoint and it served as a great break from the social media/marketing echo chamber that had soured many of the social networks for me.
The echo chamber, the personal one that you may currently be living in, is a result of our own work. We have the power, at all times, to remove ourselves from this chamber, even if it means seeing our precious “follower” numbers plummet. For example, last week I got rid of one of my TweetDeck groups that was entitled “Social Media/Marketing Peeps”, leaving me with one group that simply reads “Friends”. There are approximately 50 or so people in this group, but during my Twitter hiatus they were the people I kept thinking about and wondering how they were doing and what they were up to…I missed them in my life. Perhaps I’m missing out on the conversations I once read from that larger group of marketing folks, but the beauty of social media is that you have the option to control who you are engaging with, when you engage, how and about what.
It comes down to a few simple questions to answer that will guide you:
What is my personal goal for using this social network?
What is my professional goal for using this social network? (Important for those of us also Tweeting for our company)
What do I LOVE about this social network?
What tends to frustrate me about this social network?
Yesterday I was back on Twitter in force for the first time and I got to catch up with folks friends AND engage with our community.
