Advertising is Dead

Social Media is quickly changing the way we communicate with consumers and because of it, the old model of advertising is dead.

Advertising has long been about guessing what your customer needs. Using demographics and other customer profile data, advertisers have tried to narrow it down to "Target" consumers and show them an ad that they will respond to. But in the end, its just a guessing game because advertisers don't really know what the customer needs. They just try and guess as best as they can. The problem is, its a one way communication.

Social Media has opened up a two way communication. Now we can get feedback from consumers like never before. Anthony Power has always said that "Marketing is the alignment of solutions and needs to everyone's benefit." Rather that guessing what a customer needs, why not just ask them?

Social Media gives us the ability to have our customers tell us their needs. This is marketing.

This allows us to not just advertise to them, but to truly market to them, to everyone's benefit.

Social Media For Small Business

I recently had the opportunity to be on a discussion panel on Blog Talk Radio hosted by Linda Daichendt of Strategic Growth Concepts. The topic of discussion was The Basics of Social Media - How to Use it to Grow Your Business. If you are interested in listening to the program you can hear it here.

Value Is The Key To Social Media Success

Value is when the benefit received is greater than the effort that is put in.

As a math equation
Value = Benefit / Effort

Something is valuable as long as the benefit is greater than the effort. You may even get away with the benefit being equal to the effort. But the moment the effort is greater than the benefit, there is no value. No one wants a 1 for the price of 2 deal.

Breaking it down into benefit and effort gives us two manageable parts that we can affect to reach the desired result of increased value. To increase value we can focus on increasing benefit, focus on reducing effort or a combination of the two.

Benefit
To better understand how to affect benefit, we break it down into relevance and net gain.

Relevance is a measure of how important or interesting the audience finds a given message or interaction. It is important to note that relevance does not measure whether an audience finds a particular message good or bad. A counterpoint or difference of opinion is still relevant as long it is centered on a common interest that is shared by the participants.

Net gain is a measure of the overall increase that a person receives because of the interaction. This may be an increase in knowledge, entertainment, ego, financial or social status.

Effort
Effort, as it relates to social media, can be further broken down into the three basic components of accessibility, consumption and usability.

Accessibility is how easy it is to find, see or engage in the interaction. Remove barriers, make it more visible and give people the right information where and when they need it to be able to interact. This includes things like providing a bookmarking button at the end of a post, visible links to your social media profiles in the navigation of your blog or simplifying the form that captures a person’s contact info before they download a white paper.

Consumption means that the message occurs in a form that the audience is familiar with and can easily digest and participate with. For example, a blog is consumable when it’s written in language that the audience understands and the length isn’t longer than the audience’s attention span.

Usability determines how easy it is for a person to apply what they have gained after the initial interaction. It ensures that the message or interaction is easy to use or execute. Things that decrease usability are legal issues, copyrights, downloading third party software, an association that may embarrass a person in front of their peers, or any other hoop someone might have to jump through in order to further use the message. Youtube does a great job with this by providing embeddable code in a neat little window that makes it easy for non programmers to share and post a video.

As I said before, value is the key to successful social media participation. Make a commitment to provide value to those you interact with through every conversation, marketing campaign, blog post, tweet and interaction and you will be successful.

I am currently putting together a Value Checklist which will outline specific action items that should be accomplished in order to increase value in your social media interactions and messages. If you would like to receive a copy of the checklist, please email at ljjones6 at gmail dot com.

One Man's Noise

With the internet and social media making it so easy for anyone to become a publisher, it can be difficult to keep up with all of the content that is produced and can be difficult to find the good content among the noise. As I was discussing this today on Twitter with @mehwolfy, he tweeted that "@ljjones one man's noise is another man's music." A very true statement. What's interesting and relevant to you may not be the same for me and vice versa.

So what is noise?
Noise is content that is not relevant or of value to you or a given audience.

Listening
If you are listening, then you are part of the audience and you need to filter the noise. Don't try to listen to everything. There is just too much. Listen to what interests you and to people who interest you.

Publishing
If you are publishing then you are writing for an audience. In order to write good content rather than generating more noise, you need to know your audience and understand what content they will find valuable. Write for them.

Everyday more content is created and if we don't filter it, it all becomes noise. But always remember just because its noise to you, doesn't mean that it won't be music to someone else's ears.

How do you define Engagement?

Why do I ask this question? Lately, I have seen companies report the success of a social media campaign in "Number of Engagements". While these numbers do show some measure of results, I don't think they truly measure the engagement of the audience. This made me wonder what is actually being reported and led me to ask the question "How do you define engagement?"

The companies reporting success by Number of Engagements seem to define an engagement as any comment on a blog, forum, Q&A site, or social network. But is this really engagement?

The dictionary defines engagement as the act of engaging or the state of being engaged. Which is no help. So if you look up engage you get the definition: to occupy the attention or efforts of (a person or persons). I think the key work here is Occupy.

The word occupy implies more than a simple speed bump on a the social media comment highway. It implies that the engagement grabbed someones attention and that they paused, thought about and possibly even commented back before moving on.

Number of Engagements as it is being used as a metric tells me how many mentions a brand received in a particular space. It does not tell me how many times the audience was actually engaged.

Social media should be about true engagement, occupying a person's interests. Not just about how many times I can mention a brand. Truly engaging an audience requires real participation and real effort and if done properly, is very effective.

Photo Credit rmrayner.

How to make real connections on Twitter

What's the secret to get a lot of people to legitimately follow you on Twitter? Common Interests.

Its the one link that ties together a bunch of people who don't know each other. For more on the importance of common interests in social media see my previous post "The Glue that Holds Social Media Together". I don't know a lot of people that I follow or that follow me on Twitter, but with many of them we share a common interest in Social Media and Internet Marketing. And this gives us a common ground that we can use to start a conversation. The truth is, most people on Twitter are looking to communicate, you just need to show them that you are worth talking to.

The best place to start is with your personal profile because if your profile isn't right, no one will follow you. When people look at your profile, to decide whether or not to follow you, there are two place they will look. The first place they look is at your bio, to see who you are and what you are interested in and to see if they would have any interest in following you. If you share a common interest or your bio seems particularly interesting, then you may get a follow. And you only have 160 characters, so get to the point and say something interesting.

The second place they may look is at your tweets themselves. Your tweets say a lot about you, so tweet about things that you are genuinely interested in.

Once your profile is taken care of, the next thing to do is go out and find people to follow. My rule of thumb when looking for people to follow is, "Could I have an intelligent conversation with this person?" Don't just follow everyone just for the sake of following.

Twitter has made it very easy to find people who are like you with whom you share a common interest. Search.twitter.com is a search tool that you can use to search for keywords in the public stream. Just type in something that you are interested in and see what others on Twitter are saying about it.

Another great way to use the search is to find an event that you are interested in that others may be tweeting about. Twitter users have developed a special way to track events in Twitter. They use hashtags to tag something that they are talking about, like an event. Hashtags start with the number symbol # and are followed by the tag. For example, last night was the world series and Twitterers watching were using the hashtag #worldseries in their tweets. To follow what people were tweeting about the world series last night as it happened you could have search #worldseries in the search, http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23worldseries.

So now you have a list of people who are tweeting real time about an event that you are interested in. Before you reach out to these people, make a comment about the event and tag it with the hashtag. There is a good chance that many of these people are also following the hashtag and will see your tweet. Once you have sent a tweet, go out and follow some of them. After receiving an invitation to follow, they will most likely see your last tweet with the hashtag about the event they are participating in, and because of the common interest, will follow you back. And will most likely follow you right away, as they are sitting in front of their computer just like you.

Twitter is a great way to communicate and find people like you.

The Glue That Holds Social Media Together

A friend of mine named Andrew Roush said it best when he said, "Common Interests are the new demographic." Common interests are the glue that hold social media together. They are what bring people of different ages, backgrounds, geographic locations, races, income status and education together and get them communicating.

Its common interests that start a conversation about the upcoming Presidential Election between a business professional in New York, a farmer in the Midwest, and a mom with four kids in Utah. None of them have met before and all are quite different, but all have some opinion about who should be President.

The wonderful technologies that have been developed in Social Media are bringing people together in ways never before thought possible. Because it is so easy for people to communicate about their common interests, there is something for everyone in social media, they just don't know it yet.

When I say there is something for everyone in Social Media, I mean everyone. Short or tall, young or old, dog lover or cat lover, Star Wars geek, music lover, business professional, or soccer mom, there is something in the billions of pages of content and millions of users that will interest everyone.

My favorite thing to do is to show someone something that interests them in social media and to see that light go on when they finally "get it". Its like when I taught my son to ride his bike. At first, he didn't understand why riding a bike would ever be fun. He thought it was something I was doing to torture him. Until the day he figured out how to ride on his own, and the light went on and he "got it". Social media is a great and has something for everyone, people just don't "get it" yet. But they will.

So how do you find people who share common interests with you? Here is a list of tools that can be used to find conversations about a particular topic. This is not an all inclusive list, but a good place to get started.

www.technorati.com
Technorati is a blog search engine. It regularly spiders content on blogs and allows you to search through and find blogs that might interest you.

www.boardreader.com
Boardreader is a search engine for forums, blogs, twitter, and a number of other social media.

search.twitter.com
Would you like to know what people are talking about on twitter, go to the search and type in a word, and the most recent tweets with that word will pop up. Start following people who talk about things you are interested in.

Social Bookmarking
Check out some of the social bookmarking sites and see what people are bookmarking. www.digg.com, www.stumbleupon.com, www.delicious.com.

Social Network groups
Each social network has some form of groups that people who belong to the network can join. Search through them and look for something that interest you.

Feel free to post any other tools that you think might be helpful.

Not sure what social network to join? Can't find anything on a particular topic or interest? Need some help getting started? Just ask, I am glad to help. ljjones6 at gmail dot com.

The Power of Social Media

This is ancient news considering how fast news travels across the blogoshpere, but its still one of my favorite examples of the power of Social Media and is worth thinking about.

Ze Frank. (www.zefrank.com)

It all started in 2001 when Ze invited all of his friends to his birthday party with an online invitation he created called "How to dance properly". The invitation went viral and quickly generated a large amount of traffic to his site. The site grew to include interactive group projects, short films, animations and video games that featured Ze's unique wit and sense of humor.

On March 17, 2006, Frank took on the ambitious task of posting a video blog every week day for an entire year. The video blog, which quickly became the most popular part of his site, was called "The Show" and consisted of commentary on world news, personal observation and challenges to viewers.

WARNING. Watching the show is completely adictive. If you watch one, you may just watch them all, so start at the begininng.

Ze named the viewers of the show, Sportracers and often challenged them to various tasks and activities. At one point he challenged all of the Sportracers to a game of chess. Every day Ze would make a move and everyday after a discussion on the forums, the Sportsracers would collectively make a move. After about 30 days, the Sportsracers won.

On one episode of the show, Ze dressed his vacum cleaner up in clothes and challenged the Sportsracers to do the same. Excited by the cause, Sportracers dressed up their vacum cleaners and uploaded the photos to the gallery.

The biggest task came when he challenged the Sportsracers to make an Earth sandwich. Just in case you are wondering how to make an Earth sandwich, this involves taking two peices of bread and placing them simultaneously on oposite sides of the Earth. To aid Sportracers in their task, he created the "If the Earth were a sandwich, find my oposite tool" to help them find two opposite points on the Earth.

For those Sportsracers that couldn't fly around the world with two pieces of bread, he encouraged them to participate by placing a piece of bread on the ground and then uploading a picture of it to the photo gallery. And as you can guess, they did.

The craziest part about this is that two brothers actually did it and made an Earth Sandwich. Thats the power of Social Media. A game of chess, pictures of dressed up vacums, pictures of people placing bread on the ground and flying around the world to make the first Earth sandwich. Its powerful stuff if you can just figure out how to use it.



Photo Credit: duncandavidson on Flickr

Social media is more than technology

I often hear people say "We have a social media strategy, our company has a blog and a widget." A blog or a widget, does not a social media strategy make.

Former Yahoo! chief sales officer Wenda Harris Millard said "Technology is very important, but where many companies go wrong is when they think technology is the answer or primary solution to proving a business solution to a marketing problem. The business of advertising is still a business of persuasion. Machines can't make art."

It seems that companies run around opening accounts with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, Blogger, and any other platform that they can get their hands on. Like a wizard brewing a secret potion, they drop in every imaginable technology in hopes that with a wave of a wand and a puff of smoke out will pop a well executed social media strategy, and that the more technology they can add, the more potent the strategy becomes.

This just isn't the case.

While technology is important, it is simply the means that make social media possible. Social media is about people communicating with each other. Its about conversation. When developing a social media strategy, base it on the conversation. Answer the questions "Who is participating in the conversation?" and "What is being talked about?". Then you can decide which of the available technologies will provide you with the best means of executing your strategy.