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.

Worse Than Spam

The Windows Live team isn't fooling anyone by trying to pass promo spam off as a tech support email.

The only thing worse than SPAM is when the company spamming you, acknowledges within the spam itself, that they aren't supposed to spam you and trys to pass the spam off the as something else.

Today, I received this email from the Windows Live Team.



They acknowledge within the email, "your settings do not allow Microsoft to send you promotional information", yet they are emailing me anyway?

Maybe they think that they are fooling someone by disguising it as "contacting you regarding your communication preference settings". As if this makes it non promotional.

But at the end of the day, they sent me this email to promote the changing of my settings so that they could send me promotions. Lame attempt.

I don't actually use this account for anything real. I use Gmail. But I guess it fits, since I only use this account to fill out forms that I think I might get spammed from. And I did.

I've been #twitterjacked

Over the weekend, I discovered that I had been #twitterjacked. An account by the name @lncjmsjones76 had been stealing my tweets (@ljjones) and republishing them as if they were his own without giving any credit to me. It was easy enough to do, as I am sure the person just grabbed my Twitter RSS feed and used a robot to republish it to his account.



Like anything rising in popularity, Twitter has experienced its own forms of spam and nefarious behavior. We have seen many accounts set up to impersonate famous people. While some were created out of respect for the famous person, many have been set up with the intent to deceive.

The great thing about Twitter is that everyone is willing to look out for the people in their network. I was alerted to the fraudulent account by a friend of mine named Anthony Power (@apowerpoint). I had sent him an @reply a few days ago, and over the weekend, he received the same exact @reply from @lncjmsjones76. Realizing someone was stealing my tweets, he sent me an email with a link to the account.



What I can’t figure out is why steal my Tweets. I would like to think that it is because my Tweets were so full of wisdom that they are worth stealing, but I am sure that’s not the case. I was probably randomly picked by someone too lazy to tweet themselves who was trying to build a profile. The weird thing is that I couldn’t see any objective in creating the profile. The profile looked liked it used a fake name that it had created from my initials and there wasn’t even a link to a website.

After doing some investigating, I contacted Twitter and they suspended the account for me, but not before I had a little fun with it. Knowing that it was all automated, I figured I would post a few tweets proving that the account was a fraud. So I tweeted and an hour later, this tweet showed up in the other account.



If you think you have been #twitterjacked, grab one of your tweets that’s a few days old and plug it into the Twitter search. Do it both, with and without quotes around it. If you do find that someone is doing something suspicious, report it to Twitter through their @spam account.

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.

The Real Shaq is the Real Social Media Guru

By now its no secret that the real Shaquille O'neal is on Twitter as @THE_REAL_SHAQ. The truth is, he is doing a great job and people could learn a lot from watching him.

Shaq Is Real
The greatest thing that we can learn from him about participating on Twitter is that he is participating as a real person who just happens to be a celebrity. Its not his assistant or some marketing agency acting on his behalf. Its him, sending tweets from his phone and tweeting with normal, average, everyday people just like you and me. Now that's cool. After all, he could have just followed and tweeted with other Twitter celebrities like Lance Armstrong @lancearmstrong or Steve Nash @the_real_nash.

He is real. He is personal. And he also has fun with it.

Recently he gave away two tickets to a suns game with this Tweet.

People n phoenix u have 5 min to touch me I have 2 laker tickets n my hand I'm on a corner at a bus stop
4:42 PM Feb 28th from txt

And 9 minutes later @austino won.

Wow the winner is @austino he saw mw walgreens on 7th and glendale congrats follow him
4:51 PM Feb 28th from txt

Be real. Be personal. And have fun. It takes time, but you will be rewarded.

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.