Successful Blog

The Beam Global Interview with Jason Falls Continues

by

A SERIES in the quest to know more about the offline world

Part 2 in A 2-Part Interview with Jason Falls

Recently, I asked Jason Falls, Social Media Explorer. if he’d check in with with Beam Global. to see whether we might share the story of their cultural switch to a social media relationship with their customers — as it started and as it goes through it’s life cycle. I’m delighted to say that everyone thought the idea was great way to let folks see how things are working — this is part two of the first of those interviews.

Hi Jason! Can you share some of the growth of the social media ideas from conception to final version, you’re calling “The Stuff Inside”?

The great thing about “The Stuff Inside” is that the concept about who we are and what we stand for was already in place before we fully developed the social media strategy. And, as you can tell, the concept is tailor made for the social media audience. Our research told us that the adult, male consumer of legal drinking age is tired of a fake world – he is looking for something genuine and authentic to hold on to. This parallels the same quest many social media users are on and why they’ve flocked to the web to get away from the mainstream media experience. So drafting some tactical compliments to “The Stuff Inside,” which allows people to be authentic, genuine and engage with one another and the brand, was almost easy.

I can’t say how impressed I am that you offered to have your work critiqued in an focus group of social media pros at SOBCon. Were you anxious to hear what they had to say? Did they say what you thought they would?

I was not only anxious, but nervous. The folks in that focus group are my peers. They do many of the same things I do and even one in particular (Chris Brogan) is a friend and professional hero of mine. To have them look at the campaign with constructive criticism was nerve racking. To make it worse, I couldn’t be there to hear the feedback first hand since my daughter was born the week before. Needless to say, I was a wreck that weekend down in Kentucky wondering what they had to say.

The good thing is that they said what I thought they would. They had positive feedback, a few minor criticisms here and there, but generally embraced it as well thought out. Perhaps an even better result of the weekend was that, by not being able to attend, J.J. Betts and Scott Kolbe from the Beam Team went in my stead and got to hear that feedback about our social media efforts from third party folks and not just me. It allowed them to verify that my ideas weren’t crazy and know that we were on the right track from a strategic standpoint. Shashi Bellamkonda’s video with J.J. bounced around the web a few days later and literally helped the Beam Team see that just participating in the conversation is a powerful act.

Is there more that you think we should know about the story of this social media endeavor and the Beam Global sponsorship at SOBCon?

We don’t think of “The Stuff Inside” as a campaign. This really is a change in how we behave as a brand and how we market our product. Instead of pushing bourbon, we’re helping people identify the qualities of our brand in themselves and others. Instigating and facilitating a greater conversation about character, integrity is our ultimate goal. This is a journey, not so much a destination. The community that participates at www.theTheStuffInside.com will have a lot of say in where we go next.

That, and we think Liz is fabulous. Thanks for welcoming us both at SOBCon and here.

—-
More to come as we report what happened when we shared the Beam Global social media plans with a few select folks at SOBCon08.

Thanks, Jason and Thanks, Beam!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
Get your voice into the conversation!

You can read the first Beam Global Cultural Shift Interview here:
The Beam Global Cultural Switch to Social Media: How It Began

The Beam Global Cultural Switch to Social Media: How It Began

by

A SERIES in the quest to know more about the offline world

A 2-Part Interview with Jason Falls

It was at SxSW that I finally metJason Falls, Social Media Explorer. It wasn’t hard to see that our ideas about business and relationships were of the same vintage. Not a surprise, I suppose that a saloonkeeper’s daughter would get along well with the guy who manages social media for the most prestigious international spirits distiller — Beam Global.

Beam Global Logo

Conversation turned to video — a video about SOBCon08, Biz School for Bloggers. Soon enough we were talking the places that SOBCon and Beam Global had mutual interests and goals — our conference on social media and business; their business and their new social media campaign. Jason proposed the idea to his clients, JJ Betts and Scott Kolbe. Beam Global became a SOBCon a fully participating sponsor/partner, just weeks before the soft launch of their first social media campaign.

I asked Jason Falls to check in with Beam last week to see whether we might tell the story of the campaign, both as it started and as it goes through it’s launch and life cycle. I’m delighted to say that Jason and JJ Betts both thought the idea was great way to open the curtain a bit and let folks see how things are working — with that I begin this series of interviews.

Hi Jason! How did your relationship with Beam Global begin? What sort of advertising and promotion were they doing? Why did they come to you and Doe Anderson?

I was a public relations account manager at Doe-Anderson for a while, but one who was constantly jumping up and down, yelling that more needed to be done in terms of social media strategy for our clients – blogging included. We offered social media programming from a PR perspective, but like a lot of agencies at the time, we didn’t have a great deal of takers.

Beam Global, which is the parent company for two of Doe’s signature clients — Maker’s Mark and Knob Creek (& Small Batch) bourbons — came to Todd Spencer, our CEO, and asked him to help them find what they were calling at the time an, “Internet Trends Analyst.” After a couple months of not really knowing who they were looking for, Todd finally put two and two together and realized that what I was yelling about was what Beam Global was asking for. After a quick meeting with Sam Seiller, the director of whiskeys for Beam, I had a new role.

Prior to my counsel on a number of the brands in the Beam Global portfolio, there were some small steps Beam needed to take in order to dive into the social media space. The brands were all playing in traditional advertising, both above and below the line, fostering a sense of community around their customer relationship management programs. My job was, and still is, to see to it that each brand gathers a group of brand enthusiasts through their social media efforts as well as open the lines of communications between the brands and their consumers.

I’ve always said that spirits companies are the most social, which would make the move into the social media space seem relatively easy. However, there are the always important legal restrictions for alcohol, wine and spirits advertising that make social media more of a challenge than one would expect. The good news is that the company is completely committed to new ways of thinking, particularly with this new Jim Beam effort.

How long had you worked together before you started to talk about the opportunities of social media? What was Beam Global’s initial reaction?

Since they came looking for them, right away. The folks at Beam knew they needed to play in the social media space in order to continue their 200-plus year heritage of being leaders in the spirits industry. “The Stuff Inside” effort is one of the first major social media efforts for the spirits industry

Were there long lists of ROI questions? What was the tipping point that made social media a positive direction?

ROI was, is and will forever be a huge question for brands in everything they do. However, Tom Flocco (Beam Global’s CEO) and Rory Finlay (Beam Global’s CMO) changed the way of thinking within Beam Global a little over a year ago when they launched the Beam Global Vision – To build brands people want to talk about. That opened the door for what we’re doing now with social media. While Beam Global is a big company and is used to many of the traditional measures and reporting that determine success, this new way of acting is from the top down. We want people talking about our brands, we want to listen to what they’re saying and respond and we want that activity to positively effect sales.

Jason, can you share some of the growth of the social media campaign from conception to final version?

The great thing about “The Stuff Inside” is that the concept about who we are and what we stand for was already in place before we fully developed the social media strategy. And, as you can tell, the concept is tailor made for the social media audience. Our research told us that the adult, male consumer of legal drinking age is tired of a fake world – he is looking for something genuine and authentic to hold on to. This parallels the same quest many social media users are on and why they’ve flocked to the web to get away from the mainstream media experience. So drafting some tactical compliments to “The Stuff Inside,” which allows people to be authentic, genuine and engage with one another and the brand, was almost easy.

—-
More from Jason on Wednesday, as we report what happened when we shared the Beam Global social media plans with a few select folks at SOBCon08.

Thanks, Jason and Thanks, Beam!

–ME “Liz”Strauss

Drafting – Do Your Social Media Profiles Raise Your Net Worth?

by

Introductions in Person and in Text

The Living Web

I’m on a quest to organize my social networking. I don’t want a model — one that balances relationship and connection to ensure high return on the time I invest — not a dashboard that tracks everywhere I’ve been. To that end, a modified version of the writing process is working well.

In a recent discussion about networking, we talked about how to introduce ourselves. We agreed that it helps to know about the person or the situation that brought us to the introduction. It seems obvious I would introduce myself in one way to a client and in another way to my son’s newest friend. Introductions are relational and situational.

We know to adapt our personal introductions when we’re face to face, but forget online. Text looks like text.

Do Your Social Media Profiles Raise Your Net Worth?

What’s the first thing we do when someone we don’t know asks us to connect? It makes sense to go to their page to find out who they are. Unfortunately, most of us wrote our profiles before we knew anything about the people on the site. Have your read your profile the day you signed up? Have you thought about the people who have?

The second step in the writing process is Drafting. I’m using this stage to define settting up our presence on a social site. Possibly the most important thing we do in developing a successful presence is define who we are on our profile page. The profile pages serves as an introduction for anyone who wants to know who they’re about to meet or who they’ve just met. Does your profile raise your profile

Use these tips to get more mileage from your social media profile pages.

  1. Research the culture of site.
    • Form a description of the primary group and secondary groups who use the site.
    • Make note of the groups they form and the kind of activities and information they share.
    • Most importantly, read their profile pages to learn the customs and language of the site. Read how your heroes and friends describe themselves and decide whether what they’re doing works.
  2. Write an authentic, but targeted profile for that social group. Think about how you would introduce yourself if you were in the same room.
    • Choose a picture that reflects the spirit of the social group. Including a picture makes your profile more memorable. Including the right picture makes that memory good.
    • Write formally or informally to match the culture and your goals. If you could only say one thing to this group, what would it be? Underscore that idea in the information you choose. Limit the extraneous details that might distract someone from seeing your most important thought.
    • Check the amount and type of information you share against the profiles that impressed you most. It naturally follows that the folks you want to connect with will find the same things important.
  3. Check back often to review your profile to be sure it’s still relevant and up-to-date.

A great social media profile can open doors and make connections that we might have missed had we done less. Like the about page on a blog, it represents us when we’re not there. Time spent to communicate with the audience who visits is a high-return investment.

Have you checked whether your social media profiles add to your net worth?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Need help with your profile? Ask Liz!!
SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!

Pre-Networking – How Well Do You Know Your Social Networking Sites?

by

A Model to Organize a Social Networking Life

The Living Web

I’ve been wondering and wandering around social networking for more than a year. The socialscape of the Internet keeps expanding. I keep finding connections to my friends in more places and getting more detail about their activities than I might have imagined. If I don’t figure out soon how to manage the information, I’m sure I’ll soon be buried by bits and bytes.

I’m on a quest to find a model to organize my social networking life. I don’t want a fancy dashboard to track things. I want personal competence and right choices made from experience. Right now, I’m looking at the writing process.

The Writing Process as a Model for Social Networking

When we write, we start a conversation. We put ourselves and our thoughts out there for readers we might or might not know. Public writing is a reaching out to connect with other people. The writing process balances structure and expression so that what we offer is clear, concise, and compelling to the people we’re trying to reach.

Social networking and writing both strive for authentic and successful relationships through communication. It seems that the writing process might serve for carving my way through the overwhelming world of social networks.

The writing process I work with looks like this.

Writing Process via Voyages in English (with permission)

The blue ovals show the steps in the process that focus on expression. The green ovals show the steps that focus on structure. Social networking is not as much about expression and structure as it is about ourselves and our connections. I’m going to modify the model to reflect that using the blue steps for ourselves and the green steps for our connections.

Pre-Networking – How Well Do You Know Your Social Networking Sites?

If you’re like me, you probably belong to many social networks already. For the sake of this exercise, choose only one. We can’t write a book, a poem, a magazine article, and a dissertation at the same time. They each have a different form, format, audience, and message. Choosing only one social network will let us focus on how to get the most from our time.

The first step in the writing process is Prewriting. So I’m calling this Pre-Networking.

  1. Pick a topic: Choose one social networking site.

    Choose a site you know something about and where you already have friends and connections. Facebook, LinkedIn, or StumbleUpon might be good choices because each has a breadth of features. If we do this deeply for one site, that site will be a benchmark for all sites we use.

  2. Research the site. See how it’s structured. Go wide and deep.
    • Notice which friends participate and which seem just to be there.
    • See how and how often people act and interact publicly and privately.
    • Look for how they share information and the kind of information most shared.
    • See how the site handles groups, events, and links to other networks.
    • Read reviews and notice who writes them.

    Record what you learn some way or post about it.

  3. Narrow your focus: Choose one audience / purpose for that site.

    Every social networking site has its strengths. Some are social. Some are about content. Some are strictly business. Decide how the site you’ve chosen best works for you. By choosing your purpose for using that site, you’ll know in an instant which features support you and which sort of communities you want to be part of there.

  4. Note what information you might want to share.
    Over the next few days, read profiles of the people in your chosen communities.

    • Freewrite or outline the ideas about yourself and your work that you want to share.
    • Make a few notes about the kind of connections that you’ll have in this venue. Will you be an open networker? Keep this to friends? Concentrate on business contacts or potential clients? What sort of information will you share and not share?

    Sound like a lot? If you think about it, it’s an investment in saving time. Having a strategy and knowing a site inside out from the start, can save hours of time spent on things that don’t serve us, . . . or even worse, save us the loss of finding out months later that the feature we wished for has been there all along.

    How well do you know the social networking sites that you’re on?

    –ME “Liz” Strauss
    Next: Drafting that Profile
    Work with Liz!!
    SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!

How Has Social Media Changed the Way You Do Business?

by

one2one blog post logo

More to Pick From

Dawud is back, a proud dad of a new baby, and we’re picking up the conversation where we left off.

At the end of his recent post, Dawud asked me a question is far simpler than its answer.

What’s one way you’d say social media has changed the way you do business?

Forgive me Joyce Kilmer,

I think that I shall never see
a clock as hungry as social me – dia.

An activity whose hungry mouth is prest
Against my blog’s flowing breast.

A front page that looks out all day
While bloggers talk, submit, and pray.

How Has Social Media Changed the Way I Work?

When I turn on my computer, it’s not really that unusually that within a few seconds I might get a Twitter message. I jump on and say, “Hi Tweeple!” And folks answer with their greetings. We pass messages that eventually become conversations about what we’re doing.

Some Twitter folks are folks I’ve met. Some are folks who visit my blog. Some are neither one. Some are folks I’ve wanted to meet for a long, long time. We all message to each other in the same 140 characters. Occasionally that leads to a telephone call or an email.

When I Digg, I don’t break a sweat. And when I Stumble, I don’t fall. I find myself among a group of people who surf the Net and serve me up a menu of ideas and inspiration in the form of articles and blog posts that they have found. Sometimes we meet under the surface by way of a message to discuss what we do when we’re apart. I’ve done business, been introduced, and gotten beautiful picture gifts from folks I’ve met in those two places.

Over at the local Facebook and down at the Linkedin location, I connect with folks I know and meet new ones. I especially look for folks who live in Chicago or who are coming to visit. It’s a good thing to get a chance to have a sit down with a new friend face to face. I never know where such a meeting will lead me, but those hellos usually become important working friendships.

Those are just five, but I think you see the patterns.

Of course, it happens that people I meet in those places often tell other folks about me, and everyone knows I just can’t keep quiet about the cool folks who cross my radar. They come to visit my blog. I go to visit theirs. More than anything we share ideas in every way we can.

It’s time invested in new places, but going to the same end . . . relationships.

Speaking of relationships, I ask Dawud and everyone reading . . .

What do you find is the key to great relationships with social media friends?

—

One2One is a cross-blog conversation. Find the answer at dawud miracle on Monday. You can see the entire One-2-One Conversation series on the Successful Series page.
In Case You Missed It: Writing 06-13-07

B.A.D. Bloggers, Leah Jones and Jeremiah Owyang on the Strategy of Listening to the Web

by

Bloggers About Dialogue

BAD Blogger Button

Ask a blogger why he or she started blogging and it’s likely you’ll hear that it had to do with sharing a wealth of knowledge and finding an audience to teach. I enjoyed a conversation last night with a blogger who had been blogging for 5 years and she told me that she started for every same reasons. It’s information sharing that gets us here. But it’s the conversation with real people that keeps us engaged and building communities — for our businesses and as part of our lives.

Though we participate in the conversations on our blogs and others, two of our own Successful and Outstanding Bloggers were extending the conversation to the folks who don’t necessarily do that.

Have you met Leah Jones and Jeremiah Owyang?

Leah Jones in the Chicago Tribune November 23, 2007

Look there’s Leah Jones, above the fold on the front page of the Business Section of the Chicago Tribune!

Leah Jones, Conversation Analyst for Edelman in Chicago and Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst for Social Computing at Forrester Research were featured in a piece called, “You talk, they hear on web.” by Tribune staff reporter, Eric Benderoff.

Here’s a virtual article base on what these two prominent bloggers had to say. The questions are mine. The answers are from the article text. [Please note: These quotes are presented dynamically with an eye to maintaining the speakers’ original intent, despite this new context. My hope is to offer a closer glimpse of the blogger behind the words. The original, must-read article carries the full story.]

Leah, what does a conversation analyst really do?

“I pay attention to what people say online,” said Leah Jones. . . “My job is research and education,” Jones said. “I do a lot of small group training on social media.”

So, do you talk as well as listen?

“To get a true sense of what people are saying on blogs or in forums, we don’t get involved in the conversations,” Jones said. . . . “If I e-mail a blogger, I tell them ‘I’m Leah, I work at Edelman and I’m writing you because … ,’ ” she said.

So what are you looking to do with and for your clients?

“When we look at 2008, we’re asking, ‘What’s our news? What’s our online strategy? What are our conversation strategies?'” Jones said.

Jeremiah spoke on social media strategies as well.

Jeremiah, what’s the key to social media strategy?

“If you have a social media strategy, you need the right people,” said Jeremiah Owyang.

Why did you say 2008 will be an important year for social media?

“For the first time, you will start to see budgets set aside for social media strategies and processes,” he said. . . . Later he added that “As customers get more involved, expect their feedback to shape new products.”

Both of these bloggers are genuine and engaging conversationalists, who set aside their own thoughts to listen in to what we are saying, to learn where the conversation will go.

Leah and Jeremiah, you are B.A.D. Bloggers! Thanks for taking the conversation to the world of print.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Want to be a B.A.D. Blogger see the. . . a B.A.D. blogger page