Here are two videos I captured of Jeremiah presenting the POST method. It was received quite well from the audience; and was perfect for the Cluetrain Manifesto 10 year Anniversary Conference. I wanted to get video of all the speakers but I was having some technical difficulties.
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Let me admit up front that this is a blog post about a blog post. Apoligies in advance if that is too post-modern for you. But I think I have good reason to blog about a blog: I need your help.
Yesterday I wrote a post on Intel’s corporate community site asking if community members thought the site was too commercial. The site itself–called Open Port–and some of our community managers had received recent feedback that their focus was too marketing in nature. This is weird given all the community managers for the site are serious tech dudes who just happen to have a passion for the space they manage.
The Nacho Analogy
To help the community frame the discussion, I used my colleague Bob Duffy’s nacho analogy. He theorizes that nearly every restaurant carries nachos on their menu. Yet not all nachos are created equal. Some are better than others and Bob contends that it’s the cheese-to-chip ratio that counts. Too much cheese drowns the chips and too little cheese makes the chips dry and difficult to swallow.
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Go viral or go home
Since 1996 Tim Draper of Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson has claimed he invented “viral” marketing when his portfolio company, Hotmail, included a line on the bottom of each email that said “Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com/.”
Although viral marketing as we now know it was used by companies much earlier, the Hotmail example perfectly illustrates why marketers chase “viral” as if it were the cure to stopping spam. After getting the right message, the biggest challenges facing marketers are message distribution and authentication. If someone doesn’t see your message, you lose. If they don’t think it’s legitimate or don’t trust its source, you lose. Viral campaigns solve both those problems; accelerating propagation faster than we could ever do ourselves and authenticating the message by having it delivered by a trusted source. It’s marketing Nirvana. Forget visions of sugar plums dancing through my head - when I sleep I see social networks acting as Force Multipliers; delivering my carefully packaged message to receptive and qualified customers.
Easier said than done
But hey if it were that easy everybody would be doing it. There are many perils on the long winding road up the peak to Marketer’s Paradise not the least of which is crafting the perfect message. But let’s say you get through that, how on earth do you build a messaging vehicle that has the potential to go viral? And even after you do that what’s really the benefit of doing so? Is there any way to measure the effectiveness of viral effectiveness on buying decisions? I mean, even if the message is right and its delivered by a trusted source in a reasonable time frame is it more effective than a billboard in Times Square?
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Community managers like hats. And that’s a good thing – because they wear several.
It’s hard to list everything a community manager does because that list varies from company to company and Web site to Web site. It’s also a moving target.
I recently spoke with a friend of mine at the Patricia Seybold Group, Matthew Lees, who was writing a report titled: “How Should You Manage Customer Communities?”
Matt asked me about my background and how my professional experience helps me do my job. I told him it does more than help me “do” my job – it helps me “shape” my job. This apparently piqued his curiosity and forced me to think back to events that have transpired since my 1988 college graduation.
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Does this sound familiar? You arrive to the office on a normal, bleary-eyed Monday morning to find an email from one of your company executives. He or she has just returned from a conference where “social media” was the topic du jour. You can almost feel the excitement oozing from this individual as he or she exclaims how your company needs to start doing social media, beginning with a blog you need to ghost write for this awestruck executive.
Once you get over the shock of hearing an executive issue a mandate to do a particular marketing tactic without a solid strategy behind it, you wonder if he or she is really serious. How do you know if the company is truly committed integrating a social media marketing strategy into your overall marketing mix? Well here are some ways to tell if they are truly convinced or if they are just paying lip service to the idea in hopes they have discovered one more new and “untapped” channel through which they can talk at customers instead of with them. Keep reading »
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As social media gains acceptance I see more and more corporations/brands hiring bloggers to manage their social media efforts. This is pretty smart since if someone is a blogger they probably understand the nuances of managing these efforts.
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Social media marketing is more than just adding social bookmarks on your site in hopes that your content spreads like a virus. It’s more than seeding your content in sites like Digg; and/or trying to game their voting algorithm. It’s more than creating multiple profiles and/or adding a multitude of friends in all the social networking sites; and then blasting out bulletin messages. And, while optimizing your site for social media is important, there is still much to consider.
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Hi all. I need your help. I have been invited to moderate a panel on social media next week in Chicago. The panelists include marketing and sales professionals from Myspace, Bebo, Facebook and CafeMom. I am super excited to attend the event and meet some of the panelists, especially since Andew Shue (co-founder of CafeMom) will be sitting on the panel. In case you don’t know, Andrew is a pretty awesome actor and was “Billy” on Melrose Place. He is also the brother of Elizabeth Shue, an actress who gained her popularity playing Daniel’s girlfriend in the Karate Kid (and yes, like most boys my age … I did have a crush on her and I did sign up for karate lessons). Okay, back to the topic at hand.
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Some call it social media excellence some just say we’ve gone crazy…whatever you call it, it seems to be working.
As an extension to the social media efforts that we’re leveraged for Cisco’s ASR launch, Cisco announced a tournament around the EDGE QUEST game where they are offering $10,000 cash plus a Cisco ASR 1002 router to the sole winner. Not a bad deal for playing a game but the competition is stiff with a top score currently at 204,540.
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“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” – Howard Aiken
As Dr. Aiken discovered, knowing which direction to go doesn’t mean much if you can’t get your team to follow. Thankfully, unlike Dr. Aiken we don’t have to convince people to buy in on an idea as crazy as building a computer at a time when phones were considered state of the art. But knowing that doesn’t make our job any easier.
All marketing campaigns come down to getting time, money, or resources and to be done properly, your Social Media Marketing campaign will likely need a little of all three. For many of us, this means approval from one or more decision makers on a marketing campaign that may be fundamentally different from anything they’ve done before.
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