Successful Blog

Will You Remember Who Paid the BAAA-Studs?

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Saturday Night at the Virals …

Picked this up from a fabulous article at influx about the new sophistication in the world of viral.

Looking at the world of viral, it seems to have shifted into a new gear recently. The LED sheep film for Samsung is evidence of the sophistication of viral. It’s no longer a one hit gag wonder, it’s layered and detail and full of lots of elements.

Watch this it’s a fabulous 2 minutes and 44 seconds

Influx makes the point that social media is now about special and specific tools, understanding data sets, and people with the ability to create socially applicable and strategically-relevant responses with immediacy.

But the question remains …

A week from now, will you remember who paid the BAAAA-Studs in the video?

Or will you just remember the extreme sheep LED art tricks?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Who's Worth Listening to?

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Listening

Listening is the critical start of an effective social media plan.

Whether you’re a big brand or a solo blogger gathering up the conversation about your work helps develop perspective, adjust perceptions, and make plans to serve the people who love what you do. Listening has been called the new marketing. We’re learning to sort through the chatter for:

  • people who are talking
  • volume and location of conversations
  • tone and sentiment — content and context
  • advice, complaints, ideas
  • direction, timing, and growth

We’re learning to sort to the relevant:

Congratulations. People are talking about you and your industry so much that you need a more robust tool for making sense of it all. Several good monitoring services can help, including Radian6 and Nielson’s BuzzMetrics. –NTEN, Got Your Ears On? How to Listen to Your Audience Using Social Media

We’re even beginning sort the signal from the noise to see:

  • the positive and negative
  • the patterns and trends
  • the random and the regular

The information we gather can be overwhelming and contradictory. How we decide when it should move us to change what we do?

Who’s Worth Listening to?

People online are talking all of the time. Sometimes what we say is influenced by the moment or by the group. Sometimes our opinions are uninformed, missing bits of the big picture, bits that would change what we thought or what we would suggest someone might do.

Beyond all that it’s important to remember that we’re a self-sorted group. Everyone online has access to a computer and is literate. Not everyone who has an opinion offers it. Some who offer their opinion have agendas other than helping us improve. And those opinions and the wisdom we offer can fall woefully short of the depth of our feelings. Those opinions and that wisdom also can be far from what we’d actually do.

Even when we listen in the best of faith, we’re still we’re likely to be confused by whom to listen to.

How do you know when a complaint is worth changing a feature or strategy?
Do you listen to the critics?
Do you listen to the fans?
Do you listen to the people who don’t care all that much about you?
Do you try to get the folks who usually don’t talk to weigh in with an opinion?

Seth was brilliant on just this point this weekend.

… the critics won’t be placated. Changing your act to make them happy is a fool’s game.

Here’s a surprising thought, though. You should ignore your fans as well.

Seth suggests that the most important feedback comes from the folks who thrive on sharing what you do. Those “sneezers” are the people who will help you grow.

How do you recognize your “sneezers.” How do you listen for the folks who thrive when you do?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

The Little Brother Effect

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Gary Vaynerchuk captures the essence of the New Media in this passionate video:

Good defeats evil (finally) because Little Brother is watching. All. The. Time.

[The Little Brother Efect: You are very likely to be recorded in the background of someone’s camera. Anywhere, anytime. And these recordings get posted to the internet for all to see.] The definition of “Privacy” will continue to evolve as the price of digital storage approaches zero and connection bandwidth becomes more ubiquitous. The convergence of these two trends will create the opportunity for millions of people to create their own “TV Networks”, narrow-casting their daily activities 24/7.

E = mc2 of Business — Better than Flow

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E = mc2

You’ve probably heard that.
In the world of physics, it’s explained as

Total energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.

Not long ago, I had the rare and amazing experience of being in a group, with a group, part of a group of coworkers who are on common quest. They’re building a company and they’ve invited Amy Derby and me to join their social media quest.

The room was electric with ideas. The total kinectic and potential energy really did equal mass multiplied times the speed of light squared. I can’t stop thinking about what makes that happen — because when we went back it happened again.

  • The leaders are learners who liked learners around them.
  • Every person in the room is clear on his or her role.
  • Every person has the power to see what see and know what they see and know.
  • Information is the currency of getting thing done and the trust was the speed of execution.
  • Making progress and enjoying it is more important than being right.
  • They understand how to be personally invested without taking things personally.
  • The challenges were within reach for the skills and the time line.
  • Everyone knew which priorities came first.

The first four-hour meeting sailed by with total engagement, without self-consciousness or boredom. The seond one did too. It was group flow — that state of “being in the zone.” Twitter was discussed, but no one even thought of tweeting.

E = mc2 of Business is putting all of our social-relational team energy into our work. It’s better than flow, because it’s got the exponential power of a team.

I wonder if they were aware how much they smile.

Have you ever experienced the E = mc2 with the people you do business?
How do you know when you’re with a team that has it?
How do inspire it and fire it up?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

 

Who Owns Social Media

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who owns social media
who owns social media

Advertising Age Magazine saysShops Seek Control in Social-Media Space “Agencies of all stripes want to lay claim, and no one wants to cede control.”

This is an interesting article from two points of view. The first is in terms of “traditional” marketing practices using the new tools of the internet:

In some ways, media agencies are a natural for social media. As people increasingly spend their “media time” on social sites — in some cases at the expense of traditional channels — agencies need to figure out if they can put marketers’ messages in those places. According to Frank Magid Associates, more than 22% of 18- to 24-year-olds say they are watching less TV since they started using social-networking sites.

The social challenge

Yet, thus far, media agencies haven’t shown they can own social media. Most media agency-driven social-media campaigns look a lot more like traditional media with a social twist than they do created-from-scratch communities such as Dell IdeaStorm or social-utility staple Nike Plus. And they tend to be defined in campaign terms rather than the kinds of inside-out transformations of culture and organization that companies such as Zappos have pulled off.

While some social-media pundits will discount media agencies for that reason, there are practical considerations for these agencies’ approach to social media.

The other viewpoint is that the social media (or Social Media) marketspace is by it’s very nature individualized and non-media oriented. It is about people talking to other people. This part of the social media landscape tends to take a harsh view of commercializing what the users see as “their” space. As an example, look at the recent controversy over Chris Brogan’s sponsored post about Kmart (see Advertising and Trust, Twitter search)

The “ownership” of Social Media and the new internet marketspace is going to be hotly contested due to the enormous amount of user-generated content that is impossible to predict. It will be the users that determine the fate of advertising:

Craig Daitch, senior VP at promotions firm Measure2X, has logged time at PHD and Digitas working as a sort of social-media evangelist, and laments the problem. “You can’t append a CPM to it, and you have a hard time putting a profit and loss to it. So the question is: Who pays for it, how do we quantify ROI and how do I convince clients this is a worthy endeavor?”

He said digital shops need to embed a social-media way of thinking with their planning groups. He pointed to one, albeit old, example to illustrate the difference that can make. When Mentos saw the videos of two guys in lab coats dropping its mints into two-liter bottles of Diet Coke and making them erupt in a fizz-filled geyser, it bought ads on YouTube. Coke’s initial reaction: That’s not what you’re supposed to do with Diet Coke.[emphasis mine, ed.]

“You shouldn’t see it — it’s all about conversation,” Mr. Daitch said. “When something pops and people are talking about it, you look for brand involvement.“

Daitch hits the nail on the head – “when something pops” is completely out of the control of the advertisers, the marketers, even the brands themselves. I would submit that the answer to the question “Who owns social media?” is We do.

Silly Out-of-Context Tweets — Can They Hurt?

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Ever heard someone describe something you weren’t prepared to hear about? Ever had it happen online? Ever had one of your random “tweets” show up in a Google Search or a Google Alert?

Tabz said: @lizstrauss Yep. Some of my random tweets show up in Google Blog Search.. it’s weird.

Aruni said: @lizstrauss yes, it’s weird. I’ll get a Google Alert with one of my tweets but it’s not consistent…

It can be weird. It can be funny. But the potential of words out of context doesn’t feel good. We know what we meant, but not everyone who see those out-of-context words would.

Imagine how a random tweet might seem to folks who just dropped in to see who we are, to get reference, or to explore some social media topic our comment was in. It’s probably a good thing most clients or family wouldn’t start with Google Blog Search or a Google Alert.

Can silly out-of-context Tweets hurt?
The Internet has a long memory and no eraser.

Andrew Lightheartsaid Re: Alerts – it does worry me a little. I *try* to not say anything too out there just in case…

Twitter is discoverable in court.
Twitter is findable by Google.
Twitter is more than 140 characters that float away on the stream.

As the phrase goes, I’m just sayin’ … what do you say to that?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

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