Back to school. Even if you aren’t going back to school, that feeling is in the air during this time of year. You can sense the movement into a new season. Time to sharpen your pencils and pull out a fresh, crisp piece of 81/2 x11 ruled paper…or your iPad. Time to start something new, or put a new spin on it, get a fresh perspective, or sketch out new goals.

Okay, so you may have let the summer go by sitting on the side lines of social media. Or, maybe you did dip your toe into the pool, but that’s about it. Is it too late? Do you just ignore it? Has the ‘shiny object’ dulled for you? Do you set a different strategy and objective?

If you have been keeping yourself tuned into blogs and news around the social media topic, you could very well be having a case of the blahs. It’s as though everyone has said everything there is to say about the topic, over and over again. Yep, well, the rules of engagement are the same (funny show, btw), etiquette is the same, the tools are the tools (even if they morph on a daily basis), and so on.

But, what is going on that you should care about? We think we moved toward this medium, and perhaps we did, but now the medium is altering us. This changes expectations… between people, between businesses, between people and businesses, between employees and businesses, between…well, you get the picture.

So as the new season enters, as a metaphor for new beginnings, what are some fresh questions you might ask yourself that are relevant to social media?

• Have I noticed a sizable drop off from a form of communication I use with my customers? Where did it move to?
• Have I noticed a different type of conversation that I am having with my customers? Are they asking different questions? Offering more feedback, different feedback?
• Do my customers want to participate with the company in a different way? Do I know in what way?
• How has the content changed in what I am presenting to prospects and customers? Has the language style changed? Are my customers using different words to describe their needs and challenges?
• Are customer expectations changing? How?
• Are employee expectations changing? How?

…and there are certainly more questions.

How will you be starting this season with a brand new perspective?

Me, me, me, me, figaaarroooo, figaro, figaro, fiagro. Warming up your online voice enables you to create some essential content.  As a start-up or small company, figuring out key areas to cover in your marketing material and then developing all of that content can be overwhelming… especially when you are wearing a multitude of other hats. But what if you could cover two bases at the same time?

Building a blog voice (or blog voices) can springboard a start-up or small company’s content creation. You may have one voice, or you may have two or three covering specific areas and expertise inside your organization. This can lay some great groundwork to uncovering what information and messaging is most important and it can begin to put some details around those vital topics.

What you are also doing is forging some ground in social media. Yes, that’s right. You may not be twittering or facebooking, or doing the foursquare, but you have now entered the dialogue with your company blog.

Look at what you cover when you begin building the framework for your blog:

• Retrieve key and deep information from the knowledge leaders in your organization
• Research what your industry is discussing online, what’s hot?
• Research the industry blogs including your main competitors
• Connect with your clients and ask them what they would find valuable

What do you get once you’ve built up some blog articles?

• In-depth viewpoints on niche topics
• In-depth discussion around important industry trends related to your product or service
• Supporting graphs and data
• Industry quotes
• Customer mini case studies and quotes
• A hub to other social media programs, if desired
• And more….

You also practice becoming less formal in how you communicate, which is already the direction of business communication. And, you get to try out many different angles in how you might communicate the same idea.

How do you see blogs helping create content for your organization?

Fresh on the heels of some missteps or no steps in social media comes a social media study. Key question is, ‘Does your company currently have a social media marketing strategy?’ The response shows a whopping 72% saying ‘Yes’. My hunch is that there are some folks in that mix who believe choosing types of social networking tools is a strategy. However, I am still amazed by the high number of companies that are engaging (or maybe it’s soon to be) in social media.

That aside, we are seeing, even from the ‘big guys’ that there is a gap in deploying social media and knowing how to use it. It’s as if they have a strategy that looks good on paper, but when something hits the fan, they are having their own disconnected conversation in the corner while the blogosphere, twittersphere, facebooksphere are ‘sphering’ all over the place. Hello, hello, is this thing on?

There’s a strategy of ‘why and how we are going to roll this out’….and then there is a behavioral component to social media. If your company hasn’t understood the reality of what public engagement means to your business, take a step back and break down what it means to make that shift as a whole company. It can be a cultural shock for some.

What did we get from JetBlue and their previously high on ‘Blue Juice’  flight attendant flip out incident? Radio silence—with a continued conversation in the corner with themselves. A Steven Slater Fan Facebook Page was created and lit up like a xmas tree . HP and their CEO scandal show similarities. In this case, others such as Oracle’s CEO weighed in publicly (a letter in The New York Times, no less).

Then there are those who will want to try to ‘save face’, Nestle, but that doesn’t go over well on social networks. Kinda like how selling doesn’t. But the bad as well as good sure does get amplified!

Social media is about humanizing companies. The way to do that is through behavior, not just a strategy about which networking tools you’ll be using. BUT, I will say that you should use a ‘traditional’ PR damage control framework. Just set it up for social media. Here’s an example.

There are those who are handling ‘negativity’ well as the Mashable article points out…Best Buy, Virgin America and Ford. It can be done.

So, are you just drinking the blue juice or are you making the behavioral shift your social media engagement needs?

UPDATE: JetBlue added a short post to their Bluetales blog, “Sometimes the weird news is about us“.

Simply, Marketing 2.0 was born out of Web 2.0, which Wikipedia says is, ‘…commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with each other as contributors to the website’s content…’

So… people are finding, creating and sharing information very differently than before.

The shift

In an article, ‘The Marketing 2.0 Revolution’,  LaSandra Brill gives a nice comparison between Marketing 1.0 and 2.0. Here are a few:

• interruptions—>integrations
• building websites—>building communities
• press releases—>blog posts

Channeling

While I agree with Bruce Temkin that social media is ultimately a channel and will not be a differentiator down the road, for marketers and businesses it is much more than a channel. Marketers and businesses overall have to change their game (Or, ‘tricks’) because of this ‘channel’. Social media won’t be a differentiator, but it  does change how marketers market and businesses operate internally and within their industry. That’s a big new ‘trick’!

Hybridization

Brian Solis outlines a ‘Hybrid Theory Manifesto’ in three parts, 1, 2, 3 where he discusses how social media has ‘upset the balance of top down communication’. He goes on to outline that it is requiring a hybrid approach to the workforce—creating a need for someone with ‘social prowess and business savvy…they will possess the ability to understand customer touchpoints, channels of influence, market dynamics, challenges and opportunities that face consumers, and how engagement and the production of social objects trigger measurable reactions that impact the bottom line.’ True, but we have to get from here to there.

Two thumbs up for marketers who understand the need for change and who are methodically taking steps, while also helping to transition the business. You can start with small bites, or should I say small new tricks? Yes, you want to take some risks so that you can get better and move onto bigger tricks, but start small so you can sustain your momentum.

Start at the Beginning

• How do you currently interact with your customer, prospect? What works well, and not as well and why?
• How are your customers, prospects currently using social media?
• What resources do you have for social media? What could you handle to begin?
• What content do you already have that could be repurposed for social media, such as a blog article?
• How could you pool internal resources to tap into domain knowledge to share socially?

Getting some ideas flowing can begin getting you into the marketing 2.0 mindset, which is how you start building momentum.

How have you shifted from 1.0 to 2.0? What tricks can you share?

In this case your children are your customers and prospects. Not in the sense that they are immature, helpless, or need rules and discipline (that’s how some people see children). Instead, that you may be new to them or have something to share and teach. You can teach through your content. Social media begins with a conversation, and a conversation begins with content.

High value teaching comes from you sharing your deep knowledge of the industry you serve and new ways of thinking about solving the problems your customers and prospects face every day (Or it can be something outside of an industry topic, but important to your audience).

Traditionally, companies spend all their communication time on product and service features, functions and benefits. While benefits get you a brownie point, it doesn’t get you very far in marketing the new way.

An industry I worked in, legal electronic discovery, did engage in the teaching aspect–out of necessity. That teaching aspect is Continuing Learning Education or CLE. Legal professionals seek these sorts of programs out in order to keep their credentials current. Companies and event organizations used this to draw the legal professional audience. Many of these programs and courses were of high value, but some fell flat and became just a ‘check mark in a box’.

Without an incentive of getting CLE credit, most companies need to work a little harder at offering content that has impact. A little house work is in order to begin. Here are a few thoughts on how to go about it:

Start by looking at what you already have—What white papers do you have? Any special presentations or reports you prepared for a client or prospect? What about any PR related content that was created, like an article? Do you have materials from going out for VC funding?

Check in with your partners—Did you develop any co-branded papers with you partners? Have your partners created any special reports or presentations? Any co-branded articles? Could you work with them on building content, like how-tos for instance?

Check in with your customers—Do you have case studies, testimonials? Any co-authored articles? Do you have any webinar videos or podcasts that you completed with your customers? Ask them what they need to know. Ask them in what format they prefer their content delivered. What have they received from the competition that they found valuable?

That’s a start.

The idea is to begin pulling information, ideas, and resources together while considering what your audience really needs and wants. Webequity recently wrote an article about social media strategy and how you should think like a reporter. They provide a nice social media slant to the always relevant who, what, when, where, and why. Strategy and content mix well.

When you are molding the content that will teach keep some words like these in mind:

• Share
• Educate
• Change
• Motivate
• Connect
• Inform
• Collaborate
• Tutor
• Engage
• Transform
• Inspire

Then, your audience just might go away with something that they can then share, engage, inform, transform….

How are you teaching your audience?

What are some major barriers for businesses today (and yesterday, and tomorrow)? How about trust, influence, industry and competitive noise, money, the state of the economy? …just to name a few.

Trust particularly stands out these days for reasons we are all very aware. Trust flows into influence. If these two are ‘captured’, a business can rise above the noise in the industry which flows nicely into increased revenue, a.k.a, money. If all of these pieces come together, then the economy can become less of a burden to the business (especially if the business is about sound sustainability vs. constant growth…my extra two cents).

The barriers are the barriers.

What if you are a small business with no marketing budget and little to no influence? What if you are an innovative company in your market with a ton of domain knowledge, but have a small marketing budget? What if the economy hurt your industry, but you have a ton of trust and knowledge? What if you have some of the best customers in your market, but have a small marketing budget?

There is no magic bullet.

BUT, what if you could take your ‘ton of domain knowledge’, influential and happy customers, innovative and problem solving ideas, excellent customer service and weave it into highly desired content and dialog? What if that led to, over time, a very dedicated audience that you could connect with in a moment’s notice, to say….confirm product development plans that would keep and increase revenue, or, to deliver a major announcement that gets forwarded and reproduced many times, or, to solve problems on the fly and in real time to many vs. one at a time, or….. (fill in the blank). What if you could do this for a lot less money than traditional means?

Enter social media, ta da.  No, no magic, hocus pocus here, but it is a very real opportunity, especially if you are in a market that is slow to adopt social media.

If you hear the words ‘social media’ and begin to feel a meltdown coming on, just erase the words from your mind. Instead, think, just like I use computer applications to create efficiencies in my business there is now a way to produce, distribute and share my knowledge, and to uniquely and closely connect with my market and customers. That’s definitely a good thing for my customer and my business.

Whew! Better way of looking at it? I hope so.

As Katie Morse wrote in her article, Do we remember how to talk to our customers?,  “A good majority of the world I work in is new. Twitter and Facebook haven’t been around for that long, and blogging certainly isn’t ancient either.” ….”What’s not new is what the tools enable us to accomplish.” I think Katie points out that you don’t want to lose yourself in the tools. They are just tools! Don’t be a tool using your tools. Maybe that’s the point that Prince really wanted to make when he said that the Internet is over. (Though, maybe the joke is on us and Prince actually did use the Internet to promote his upcoming new release via his anti-Internet comments…which are all over the Internet. Hmm.)

Prince, I think is different. Okay, well we know he’s different (Not a bad thing I might add! We love Prince.). What I mean is that the allure for him is the mysteriousness vs. the total transparency. The Internet / social media is not for everyone. But, it could just be the platform that enables an easier, wider exchange between you and your customer and audience opening doors to accomplish your business goals.

How have you broken barriers using social media?

I’ll take social applicability for $500, Alex. It is a definition of this word.  Alex, I think it’s…What is Relevance? Ding, ding, ding, ding. That is correct! And more and more companies are winning the relevance prize by engaging in social media. Isn’t it interesting that the definition includes the word ‘social’? There it is, right there.

Brian Solis recently wrote about the rewards of engagement in social media. And in his article, under engage or die, he included comments from a recent study. There is now an expectation that businesses not only have a presence, but that they engage their community in social networks. Here’s one of the comments, “….they (businesses) need a strong electronic presence or you doubt their relevance in today’s marketplace.” Even if the number of people who feel this way is low, it’s growing.

Relevance

If you are someone who has continued to tune into American Idol, you will be very familiar with Simon Cowell using ‘relevant’ as part of his critique, in both a positive and negative way. In the positive, it was for a contestant who took an old song and put their mark on it making it fresh and current. In the negative, well, it was for someone who didn’t do this.

Now, initiating social media is one part of becoming relevant, but like the Idol example, it’s what you do with it that counts. You would not be relevant if you set up a blog and only copied your press releases in it, or tweeted only about your company’s news. You may have given people the ability to comment on these things, but why would they? Most likely they would not, because it is not relevant to them.

As Tara Hunt said in her book ‘The Whuffie Factor’, “You are embarking on the process of shifting from being a market capitalist into a social capitalist. That is, one who is more concerned about raising social capital rather than market capital (although the latter will come as a result of the former).” That shift is happening. Making that shift means you continue to strive to be relatable to your customer and prospective customer.

The conversation in your market has already started. If you are only providing (pushing) packaged marketing messages, you are not in the conversation. Your relevance is slipping because lively, real time exchanges of ideas are happening in someone else’s blog and network…and without you.

Don’t slip and fall. Just be willing to trip a little while making the shift. Don’t worry, lots of tripping going on as everyone is figuring out how best to use social media for their business. But these businesses are willing to get a few scrapes and bruises in order to keep their relevance ranking high.

Relevant is not always easy. Hey, I had a hard time finding a relevant image for this post. I went with the idea of ‘fresh’.

How are you keeping your business socially applicable, a.k.a. relevant?

(photo by: omdur)

How you do business matters more. It matters more than before. It matters more than what you sell. It really matters. The how, though, is not your processes, efficiencies, strategies and tactics. It’s the people interactions of listening and responding, giving and sharing, taking responsibility, doing the unexpected.

Do you have the company culture now to be able to offer this to your customer? You may already be doing this or some of this, but possibly in a one off, subculture way. If you can be honest and say that this is not your culture, could it be?

Do you think it would be a waste of time to cultivate this type of culture? If you do, then you definitely would think social media is a waste of time. If you have seen people in your organization foster close connections with your customers, then you know the value behind a social culture…and you would identify with Robby Slaughter’s discussion about why social media isn’t a waste of time.

There’s been relationship selling, customer relationship management, relationship marketing….we know the importance of relationships. But, it has continued to get trapped inside a process and procedure. We seem to be comfortable in putting a lot of time and effort into these programs. However, much of the time is spent inside the data instead of connecting with the customer.

How can you extricate yourself from the traditional manner of doing business?

• Remove your corporate goggles and let the sun and fresh air in
• Spot the patterns then define and create new more rewarding ones
• Discover how you are already being social with customers
• Get in tune with your already existing company personality
• Uncover how you have influenced your customers and how they have influenced you
• Tap into and identify the passion of your business, employees, and customers
• Look at the content you have generated and get creative in how you could share that same information in a new, dynamic way
• Start by being social inside your organization

Then you can graduate to, yes, using tactics (social media tools) to facilitate conversations and community building outside of your organization.

It just might open new doors.

How have you changed how you do business?

(photo by tawheed manzoor)

For sure I am trailing numerous articles about the Facebook privacy debate. And, it is definitely a topic for social media discussion. It made us look again at privacy—a good thing to continually check in on. Even if you think news of private data leaks is over blown, awareness of how and what and where you are sharing your information out in the digital landscape is just good personal responsibility. Many people do not have this awareness (of course many do not care, either).

Heck, people still don’t get that sending personal emails through company email systems is not a good idea. When the company is sued, and they always are, guess what gets collected? Everything. Having been in the electronic discovery industry, I know the ‘range’ of digital material you can collect from ‘prestigious’ corporations.

Now, I still think social networks are a great way to share, and to share personal information. I also think cloud computing is the way to go. In order for that to work we need to trust the companies that offer these services and by the way, they need us to trust them. Social media has actually been helping to build back some of that trust between customer and company.

With Facebook, however, it could be that we are witnessing a network that is getting bigger than all of us and so it won’t have to answer to us. We have to answer to it or not play. Therein lies the rub, or frustration (to say the least) for many.

The point I really want to make…. why the Facebook debacle is important to the world of business social media. Facebook is in a PR crisis management situation. Many companies have and will continue to face media emergencies. Whether or not the company is participating in social media, in a crisis, they will be because people will be talking about their predicament online.

The firestorm hit Facebook. From a coordinated dumping of Facebook, to a discussion of their plans to take over the world, and to those who defend Facebook.

You can see how proponents of social media are in a bit of a quandary. There is the real issue of privacy (and control, really) and then there is the continued evolution of social media, making the Internet more social, across the board. The dilemma comes across in Robert Scoble’s letter to the Facebook CEO as well as his article on why it’s too late to regulate Facebook.

Then we get a rush of Facebook privacy tips and how to scan your Facebook privacy settings to see what settings you have that might be unexpectedly public. As we speak, Facebook is doing some backpedaling on privacy.

Social media is an amplifier. Plain and simple.

We love it when it’s in our favor. But boy oh boy, when it’s not, watch out. Thing is, it is also an advantage in a crisis moment. Why? Because companies can connect in a more personal way which gives them a better chance of diffusing and even correcting something that is inaccurate. You become human instead of a zipped up, closed down, press release messaged corporation. People can relate to you and will probably cut you some slack.

Companies that embrace new media in times of crisis can gain a great deal, and so can their constituents.

What are some of your thoughts on using social media in a PR crisis?

(Photo by Jim)

Meaningfulness can imply many things. That’s great news! It means (ha, ha) that there is more opportunity for you to be meaningful. Joining the social media stream requires producing content. Now, marketers have been doing that all along. However, the traditional content, unless you are presenting, does not have an interactive audience. Recently Matt Ridings of Techguerilla Talk asked if we are ready for an interactive audience, and warns that the move to this social interactivity breaks a lot of the business models we’ve built. Oops. Social media not only requires content, but…you got it…meaningful content, for it to stick. Don’t worry, you already know the answers to this test. Keep reading, I have questions to help.

Tom Fishburne who shares insightful business life cartoons on his blog, recently posted a cartoon and article that discussed the obligation companies have to be ‘newsworthy’ and ‘dynamic’ if they use social media. And to ‘start there, not with social media’.

You may need to dig a little, but it’s there.

I do agree that a company’s content should be valuable to their audience, of course. But don’t shy away from social media because you don’t think you are ‘clever’ enough or ‘cool’ enough. I previously wrote about why blogs are so important to businesses and the risks of not having one. Building good content boils down to reminding yourself why you got into business and why you are still there. Uncover that essence and create conversation from that position. Where can you dig up meaning? Ask yourself….

• Why did we start the business?
• What was our distinctive motivation and vision?
• What is it about our background that makes our business unique?
• What excites us about our product or service?
• What is exceptional about our business, product or service?
• What are we providing that no one else is?
• What unique things about our customers make our business unique?
• What makes our customers enthusiastic about our product or service?
• How are we helping our customers?
• What excites us about our industry?
• What problems did we solve that energized us and our customers?
• What current industry topics are compelling to us and why?
• What provokes us in your industry?
• Where do we see things going in our line of work and industry?
• What information can we share that is different and valuable?
• How can we use social media tools to help our customer more?
• How are our customers using social media?

Companies are in business to solve problems. At least that’s the idea. Coming up with a solution can be thrilling. There’s a lot to share there. Providing insights, stories, examples, frustrations, humor, new twists, …all can offer value to your audience.

Don’t forget you will also gain those things from them, as will the rest of your readers or viewers or listeners. You may surprise yourself and become ‘clever’ and ‘cool’ along the way.

How have you uncovered your meaningfulness?

(Photo by Neglekt)