8 reasons why we love Social Media

I have come across many executives from various countries and diverse backgrounds and it seems that they fall in either of 2 categories: those who love and those who hate Social Media (née Web 2.0). To many a big logo, social media is fascinating in more than many ways, to others it’s a no go area for serious brands, and best left off to techies. However strong the opinions they may express, in either direction, these aren’t always backed up by fact. Let’s review some of these arguments and feel free to comment and add your thoughts. Part one of this article is dedicated to the

8 reasons why we love Social Media

• #1: Social Media holds the promise of exponential growth, as inspired by the success stories of the likes of Facebook or, more recently, twitter. It is hard not to be tempted by such a promise. Social media is also seen as a privileged way of gaining access to generation Y. But not just (re.LevGrossman’s Time magazine story entitled Why Facebook Is For Old Fogies“). Social Media may seem easy, you just have to create a Facebook account and hey presto! You’re rich and famous. Well in fact, you aren’t. Social media is a medium of its own and has its rules. Not anyone is granted that sense of cool which is going to make you immensely popular. And social media requires hard work. Really hard work, I mean it, success is not for the faint-hearted,

• #2: For brands, it is also a new way of reaching(more and better)people in a less intrusive, more personal, morelikablefashion.As a result it provides a valid response to the increasing difficulties faced by many big corporations in trying to reach target audiences because of traditional media fragmentation. Traditional top-down communications is just not appropriate anymore (to prove my point let me point you toWells Fargo’s storyand learn from their evolving means of communications by watching the videos of their US commercials over 3 decades [exhibit 1-exhibit 2]). But that’s not all. Internet users are even more exacting about your brand. You can’t just go on delivering the same old messages over and over again. So, play by the rules and be humble, writing for the internet is a job in itself and requires training,

• #3: It is more modern and fashionable than your old-fashioned website. But is it a valid argument? Just becauseSteven Fry is a heavy user of Twitter(forFry’s twitter page click here)andPosterousdoesn’t mean that your business can benefit in the same way. Let’s face the facts, Fry didn’t need twitter to become popular, for he was so long before he chose to use twitter. Not all brands can become cult brands, and likable, and going online will not just make up for years of marketing failure. Strangely enough, some very popular brands like Apple chose not to have Corporate blogs (see Forrester’s Bernoff’s comment on Apple here). Social media should be chosen not because it’s cool, but because it enables brands to initiate and engage in passionate discussions with clients and brand fanatics, or become opinion leaders or evangelists. At the end of the day, there has to be some sort of return on Engagement from social media (and please note that I didn’t mean return on Investment).But if there is no point or synergy with your brand, you should forget about it altogether,

• #4: It is – the Internet in general – more measurable (with a few minor adjustments though,but at least we can measure something). Visits can be traced, people recruited individually, newsletters and files built from nothing. Well, almost. For you to do that you’ll need to break free from that oldInternet presencesyndrome (i.e. merely reproducingonlinewhat you have done in print) and learn how the medium works. For advertising carpet bombing is not a valid strategy insocial media. And opportunities abound:Facebookoffers targeted banner ads, Netvibes makes it possible for brands tocreate their own universe(see Cap Gemini’s personalised start page), orpersonalised widgetswith guaranteed numbers of downloads, and YouTube also allows brands to personalise their YouTube channels (see Wal-Mart’s example here) etc.,

• #5: It also holds the promise of being cheap.And it’s true to a large extent. That is to say as long as you have hired the right kind of professionals who understand social media live and breathe the stuff. As #4 in this list was about highlighting the new ways chosen by social media platforms to make (or try to make) money with targeted advertising, here are a few examples which cost nothing to set up and are bringing results anyway (example 1, example 2, example 3),

• #6: At the end of the day. It also bears the promise of personalised, ‘one-to-one’ marketing by targeting ads to content and linking it to profiles.At least, it enables advertising agencies to propose performance based digital marketing campaigns either through PPC – PPL – PPA – PPS (*), which provide an alternative means of advertising content, newsletters,products or services. With such a system, enterprises no longer pay for a number of banner displays but for an actual result. Such examples exist coupled to social media websites or blogs and enable better targeting of ads,

(*) i.e. pay per click, pay per lead, pay per sales, pay per action etc.

• #7: To certain managers, social media appears often as “this stuff in which we can go so as to manipulate opinions by infiltrating social networks”. I have heard that often, and even stopped a couple of these digital gunslinging initiatives. Don’t believe that no one knows you’re a dog on the Internet because it’s not true at all. Many an Internet illiterate has tried this and it’s not even that it doesn’t work but it’s about the fact that it can really be dangerous and damaging for your brand. If you don’t believe me, just read FT’s February 2009 story entitled Blogs That Spin a Web of Deception. Disclosure is not an option for brands which want to go into social media. Read about Andy Sernovitz’s tips an trick here,

• #8: Social media appeals to many a professional marketer because markets are conversations. All Internet experts know that, except that it is not always true. High tech products (such as mobile devices for instance) trigger passionate discussions but lesser known, niche professional products or services (such as enterprise telephony or outsourcing for example) are more difficult, and that does not always have something to do with market sizes. Don’t believe for instance that setting up a community website is all that is required to kick start online discussions. The first thing that you’ll need is traffic, before more qualitative interaction can take place. Contrary to what most people think, web 2.0 is not about technology, it’s about people. Web 2.0 is not about adding widgets on your static website, only nerds can believe that.

Social media is a tremendous opportunity for Marketing managers wanting to add zest to their strategies and campaigns as long as they can decipher the myths behind social media, avoid the common traps, learn the language and hire the right kind of seasoned professionals to handle such initiatives properly.

8 Tools For Online Reputation Management (ORM)

Managing one’s online reputation has become a must. It is absolutely unthinkable for anyone who wants to make a professional appointment to leave a photograph on one’s facebook profile in which he or she is holding a glass of champagne and assuming weird poses (and God knows I came across quite a few counter examples). Many chances are that the person with whom you are about to have an appointment has just gone straight to ‘Google’ your name on the Internet. This is what is called online reputation (or online identity) management (abbreviated ORM), that is to say your image as it is showing online through Internet and social media exposure.

In this article I will list 8 kinds of tools which could help you work on your own online reputation, or check upon other people’s online presence.

• ORM tools #1: metasearch engines (i.e. an aggregator of all search engines) for social media such as http://samepoint.com , will help you check whether you are popular online or not. Samepoint will combine results from various sources such as social networking sites (facebook, mybloglog, linkedin, typepad, wordpress.com, blogger etc.), wikis, bookmarking sites such as delicious and others. I used my own example and I found out my samepoint request could produce up to 1000 results. This is not very surprising in fact, because this is the effect of my online work for the past 15 years. Internet presence takes time to develop, even though impressive results can be obtained very rapidly if you are committed to working on it. What is interesting too is that samepoint shows whether your documents contain ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ keywords. Very few ‘negative keywords’ were found in my case and this is not coming as a surprise either, as it has also been my choice from day one not to communicate online on anything negative or overly critical. Another example of a metasearch social media engine is http://socialmention.com which also deduces a social ranking from the results although it is difficult to relate that ranking to the quality of your work. Social media pundit Guy Kawasaki has reached a ranking of 89/100, and he certainly raises the bar very high given his frantic online activity (Guy has 77,916 followers on twitter as of today),
• ORM tools #2: blog search engines such as technorati or http://blogsearch.google.com make up the second kind of tools which you can use to manage your online reputation. Obviously, the more your write on blogs, including other people’s blogs of course, not just your own, the better your chances to increase your online reputation. Eventually, you will establish the credibility through your writing. For instance, many a CV-related issue in job-seeking can be circumvented in that way (here’s the result of my research on ‘marketing & innovation’ which shows that my blog comes in pole position, just above my Belgian friends from future lab). Thus, writing in blogs can actually position you on top of search engine results without having to pay for anything (this is commonly described as SEO i.e. Search Engine Optimisation), but it also means that you are producing content on a regular basis, not just from time to time,
• ORM tools #3: news search engines such as Google News which are not only scouring the Net for information from newspapers and press releases but blogs too – as long as they have been deemed reliable sources by the Google people. For your blog to be taken into account by Google you would have to go through the manual process of getting your blog registered. Finding the right place for you to submit your URL can be a bit tricky, so here’s the link which will make you save time. Please note that not all blogs are allowed to join the Google News list of reliable sources and that it is a manual process. Within hours of my main blog being accepted by Google News I received a phone call from the people monitoring employee blogs in my company to congratulate me for being registered,
• ORM tools #4:some other search engines look for comments you may have entered on social media sites. http://www.backtype.com for instance, shows a relative low number of comments in my case. This can be explained by the fact that I’m rarely using my own name in comments, even on my own websites and blogs (I prefer to use my brand name so as to enhance the reputation of my website on search engines),
• ORM tools #5: forum search engines. They are a good example is available at bigboards or Google Groups. In my case, little or nothing is showing through search engines for I very rarely go to forums (if I do wish to enter a personal comment on any of them however, I usually don’t enter my name in full for the particular reason that I don’t want it to show. Comments in B2C forums can sometimes be pretty direct and they don’t always provide real value with regard to your online reputation. As to expert forums and technical forums however, they can be very instrumental in publicising your expertise). One thing is worthy of note: comments in forums are online for a very long time, hence the reason why you should be very careful about them. Here’s an anecdote about that: I once entered a comment about Internet set-top boxes on a consumer forum in 1996, which I later regretted, and it took me at least 5 years to make it disappear. In fact in never really disappeared, I merely added more comments on top of that one. Actually, Google Groups will still show comments I made way back 1996, and my former e-mail address – no longer in use fortunately – is also showing through Google. As a conclusion, traces are left everywhere on the Internet, one should be very careful about that,
• ORM tools #6: the next category is micro-blogging search engines such as http://search.twitter.com which scans the most popular micro-blogging engine www.twitter.com. that’s how you can recap on someone’s tweets or even trace those who forwarded or commented on your tweets or blog posts,
• ORM tools #7: this category consists of social network aggregators such as Yahoo’s outstanding Mybloglog social website which enables you to link your blog to others and make friends with other bloggers and promote your articles,
• ORM tools #8: this is the final category of online reputation tools which I’d like to present here, and it is that of people-centric search engines. I would namely recommend http://www.123people.com. One of the biggest issues with social media is that you are entering profile information in all sorts of different places and cannot point people to a single page which merges all this data from various sources and delivers an executive summary. This kind of search engines just does that for you. It will mix all the sources of information from the Internet – including multimedia files – which are related to you and merge them into a mash-up. You can have a look at my own 123people example here. Sometimes results are a bit weird because they show photos of other people which have nothing to do with you. One may actually prefer another tool such as zoominfo which can show more accurate results. In zoominfo, once you have signed up, you will be also able to claim ownership of your profile (through the “reclaim profile” option), which will give you an opportunity to gain control over it. My zoominfo profile can be seen by clicking here.

As a result, you now have evidence that you are leaving traces about yourself all over the Internet. To a large extent, in the past 4 or 5 years (mostly since 2004), social media has even exponentially increased that issue. Now you also have the means – with this very simple toolbox – not just to evaluate your current online reputation but to actually do something about it, as well as communicate positive information about yourself and actually shape your online image.

Down to business now, and remember that there is no erase and rewind button on the Internet!

Futurelab’s Thys: in innovation “the wrong questions turn out to be the right questions”

Alain Thys: a relentless innovator and profit-tracker

On March 4th, 2009, I was able to meet and have breakfast with, at last and after a few missed opportunities,  Alain Thys in Paris. Alain is one of the partners of futurelab, a consultancy based in Belgium (of which he originates) together with fellow Stefan kolle. I can’t actually remember when,or how we came across each other, but it is bound to be on the web, and that’s probably how we ended up cooperating on the Futurelab blog by the way.

 

What I know though is that Alain is the author of one of the most important Marketing presentations that I have seen at slideshare.net, which I keep using over and over again, and is entitled marketing accountability (you will find the direct access to the presentation at the end of this article). Alain Thys’s biography is also very interesting.

He describes himself as a “shopkeeper”. He has had extensive experience in European advertising and marketing at companies like Mexx and Reebok. He was in charge of marketing at Reebok Belgium for a while, when it was decided to merge it into the Dutch arm of the company, at the beginning of the 1990s, and that’s when the Internet arrived. It is also when Alain discovered these “funny computers” and the things that we could do with them. A 3-year stint in the Netherlands at the head of the Reebok  marketing unit ended up in a re-org and a sabbatical in Mexico (lucky him!).

At the beginning of the year 2000, he then decided to go into start-up mode and work for a joint-venture in which AOL, and LVMH (Louis Vuitton) were involved. Their new plan was a groundbreaking online idea for the travel industry. This was “way ahead of what was done in those days with regard to online travel”. In fact, it was a bit like à la carte holiday packages, what is commonly described nowadays as dynamic packaging (although very little of it is still to be seen in the field, which means that it’s still ahead of its time).

The usual cash burning story about 2000 bubble start-ups is unfortunately repeated in this venture of Alain’s: a $130 cost per customer was leading unfortunately to a meagre revenue of $16, hardly enough to generate profit. Vision doesn’t always lead to profitability, but there is one thing about visionary people, is that they shall never be deterred. And that’s exactly why Alain decided to move on to the next idea. So he started a new incubator for e-payment in Ireland, related to mobile payment. He admitted to having a lot of fun creating the new start-up, and he did this for a couple of years before joining a media group in Belgium in 2004-5.

This media group, itself a media pioneer in Belgium, led Alain Thys to focus on “creating new things and generating new profits”. He admitted to “not being very knowledgeable about the Internet world” which actually led him to ask “the wrong questions, which turned out to be the right questions”.

Alain was lucky enough to actually see the Internet at its inception, he grew with it (not exactly generation Y though). And he learned as he was going along. As matter of fact, and to be honest with him and yourself, everybody’s learning as we are going along in this market (a case of the blind leading the blind I guess).

He then created futurelab in 2005, and Stefan joined him in this transition period. Futurelab is a consultancy geared towards “generating new profits out of marketing and innovation”. This consultancy is actually working very much based on word-of-mouth, and is expanding across Europe, doing little or no cold-calling or direct marketing. But it is taking WOM to the next level with the help of the Internet.

Their work is mostly based around marketing strategy consulting, and their aim is to “generate profit through innovation and customer centricity”. Future lab’s objective is actually to “deliver on that promise of a value to the customer”. He described innovation as being “doing something differently, and that you haven’t done before.” But he also has profitability in mind.

Alain Thys declares that “in 80% of current projects, we see marketing & innovation fail in that respect”. When asked about the reasons why such an obvious metric is actually not taken into account, which seems zanyish and at the same time is happening on a daily basis, he answers thus:

1. it is either that people forget about the bottom line altogether. However, there must be some sort of payback on innovation,
2. the second reason why innovation fails is that most innovators “forget about what it means to the customer.”

So, Alain adds, very often, “what is needed is a different perspective, and this is when consultants become really useful”.

Most of Futurelab’s business is done through word-of-mouth using their Internet website and blog, an incredibly comprehensive digest of the most authoritative Internet and blog writers about innovation, which can be found online. The blog is available at http://blog.futurelab.net and shouldn’t be missed. I would also recommend Alain’s set of slides which are available and downloadable in creative Commons format from sideshare.net.

economic downturn shouldn’t deter job seekers bnet expert says

Catherine Hearn - a seasoned expert at Heidrick & Struggles, an exec search company, and a Bnet columnist,  has this interesting story on Bnet about job seeking in the current downturn. And I think she has a very valid point. After all, if an executive search is saying that there are very interesting jobs to be had out there in the cold, she must be right. 

At the same time, the virtually never ending gloom echoed by the press, namely in the UK and especially on the BBC, is somewhat weighing thick on the morale of not only job seekers but people in employment too. 

Come on people, keep your chin up!

• Read on at Bnet.co.uk by clicking here