Leveraging the Power of Social Media for your product, your business and yourself
by Chris Vora 08/27/09
Social media has truly transformed the internet landscape. It's large and pervasive reach through various channels has given new meaning to the always-on, always-connected world.
But how does one leverage the immense power of Social media?
An event organized by SIPA held on August 20, 2009 explored many aspects of social media. The experts on the panel, who work with social media everyday provided many practical insights on how to harness and benefit from the social media.
The event started in earnest with the panelists introducing themselves and their companies.
Edith Yueng, the moderator talked briefly about her own business of TechBizdaily and the events she hosts for small businesses and entrepreneurs are meant to educate them on the tools and technologies they can use to advance their business. Edith had worked at many software companies before. Edith explained that companies start out with using a coins-and-slot-machine approach i.e. trying out different social web techniques before settling on one channel or technique or methodology that yields the jackpot i.e. gives them the desired results.
Gary Swart CEO of oDesk explained that his company's model is all about hiring and managing remote employees, service providers and contractors and operating as a virtual team. oDesk has an active blog (www.odesk.com/blog), Facebook page (facebook.com/odesk
), and Twitter account (@odesk) - as well as a vibrant and interactive community in the site's own forums. Gary had previously worked at Rational which was sold to IBM.
Megan Casey is a founder and chief editor at Squidoo. Squidoo www.squidoo.com
has an interesting model of creating overview pages (called lenses) on topics of interest. Her prior experience was in publishing at Penguin and Random House.
Himanshu Jhamb founded Active Garage www.activegarage.com
which attempts to provide rich content that is posted by the best business experts. Himanshu will be publishing his first book titled Project Management Tweet later this year. According to Himanshu, he learned to use the social media as a channel and by using the right tools and contributions from the experts he learned how to increase his site's brand value and participation from his audience and content providers. He believes that by using the social media channels and tools as Active Garage has done, anyone can brand themselves on an equal footing with the big folks.
Tony Welch is the lead for Social Media strategy in the PSG division at HP. He constantly evaluates the latest tools for HP. His experience spanned 14 years and he was the person responsible for setting up Sun's blog systems which posts CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blogs.
With so many tools and channels available, how does one choose? asked Edith.
Megan's answer was that one should choose to focus on one channel instead of spreading oneself thin over several social media channels at once. Her advice was to not try to be everywhere but instead to focus on one channel for a few months e.g Twitter and develop a deeper relationship in that channel with the target audience. Emails in your in-basket about these channels or otherwise still get read. So these emails should be engaging. Readers should be delighted by the content and providers have to give delight to the audience.
Gary indicated that social media is like free beer and provides nearly free publicity whereas spending on Google Adwords is expensive. Blogs have been very successful for Himanshu and great content has led to the increase in audience to 30k visitors/mo. Facebook fan page for businesses and/or individuals have been an effective way to gain audiences and get "buzz". One can update readers about new content by tweeting on Twitter, updating the status on Facebook and Linkedin. Comments and discussion can follow from the reader community.
HP uses tools such as Friendfeed to simultaneously spread or distribute content through social media and tools such as Radian6 and Biz360 for listening. They also have special tools for moderating, filtering or creating dashboard for monitoring and analytics. Third parties can also be contracted to do these activities and/or responding. Virgin America and Comcast use the social channels to provide customer service as well.
Edith cited an interesting example of a Kogi BBQ truck tweeting about its menu and about its lunch time itinerary in LA. It has quite a following, some 20K strong, and probably very hungry or salivating, eagerly following every tweet and this story was prominently featured in the LA Times.
Edith asked the panel to talk about a success story of using the social media in their companies.
oDesk talked about theirs. They had posted a blog about "The top tweeters you ought to be following". oDesk's post soon went viral with their tweet being re-tweeted multiple times attracting attention to oDesk. oDesk provided value to its readers and in that process increased its brand awareness.
Himanshu elaborated on his example where he was able to figure out the strategy, tools and channels. In the early days of his company he was puzzled about how to increase his audience. He discovered tools such as Tweetdeck and his strategy about positioning the company was then formulated around tweeting and posting good content. He also discovered that the Discus commenting tool was a great tool to have when one reader expressed that he was happy to be at Active Garage because the site was using the Discus commenting tool.
HP discussed the example of when an irate customer posted a blog about how he would set fire to the HP Mini and drag it behind his motorcycle through town. Tony spotted this blog and simply responded by saying " Can I help you". He was also able to work with the customer to find out where he was and dispatched an HP employee to meet him in person in Thailand ! The customer was happy with the service he got and even posted a 20 min. video on youtube. The example served as a reminder about how important it is to review and respond in a timely manner to customers.
Megan cited her example in which her greet box is able to figure out where the user was coming from. If the user landed into Squidoo from search engines or sites such as MSN, Digg, Linked in then she would know that the user would be in a hurry and the best content should be made available at the first click. If on the other hand if the user came from Facebook or Twitter then they are used to seeing 16 pages on average of content and 18 friends of theirs may have seen the same pages and they would spend 9 minutes on average at the Squidoo site. Knowing where the user came from helps Squidoo provide the right amount and type of content to the user.
Edith also explored how the panelists monitor and measure the impact of social media for their sites and how much time they themselves spent on social media.
Megan pointed to tools such as Google Analytics and stated that she found Mint to be a better tool. Feedburner measures engagement so as to figure out how many users like the site enough to subscribe.
Gary stated that his time goes in editing the publication on his site. He spends 15 to 20 min on Twitter in a day. One may need to monitor Facebook events, contests, affiliates etc. Megan cited the fact that although 'you are what you measure' there is a risk of over-measuring and under-prioritizing. Gary also mentioned that they closely monitor the cost of the 'free' acquisition as compared to paid acquisition and aim for continuous improvement. Tony stated that he spends as much time as possible tracking the social media that HP uses, almost all day. He cited the example of people whose job was not like his and were 'twouted' i.e let go because they tweeted to people and were supposed to be in a meeting on time and arrived late as a result of tweeting. The bottom line according to the panel was to use tools that best served the strategy one had in mind. Megan explained that they do campaign tracking, mood dashboards to see how many people love, hate or are ambivalent about brands. For instance. www.brandsinpublic.com
Edith also asked the panelists about their favorite disaster story.
Tony mentioned that he is often amused by how creative people can be in their insults. One person for example wrote that 'I hate HP so much that it hurts my 'something that rhymes with the last letter'. Some folks just want to blow some steam and are not looking for further engagement. Other times one has to actively manage posts in real time. Gary cited another example where a person tweeted that she got a job in Cisco but is not excited about it. Apparently some folks at Cisco shot back a tweet saying do us all a favor and don't take the job. Sometimes people post negative reviews on yelp and it best to address these instead of ignoring them. Another famous example of a negative review is the song called "United breaks guitar" on youtube. A strange case was brought to light about Best Buy's CMO who tried to 'cut off' a person tweeting negatively about Best Buy in which case the CMO got a lot of hate mail/tweets. Hiring tweeters to write positive reviews can lead to embarrassment if that is 'outed' i.e. made public so it is best to avoid that.
At Squidoo an email bug during the early phase led to a broadcast of a negative email to all the users. Megan and other founders quickly reached out to the subscribers and offered to talk to them in case they wanted to discuss the negative email. The subscriber base at that time was small but their gesture created a positive sentiment for Squidoo at that time. Megan suggested that one must listen and respond, applaud or redirect as need be.
One of the questions from the audience was regarding the distinction in the use of social media for professional and consumer markets. Gary described his approach at oDesk and suggested that it is best to start the test and measure process on a small scale first to study effectiveness of lead generation, sales and payment. In his case he uses feedback to generate test scores of the virtual team members that are employed so as to be a good criterion for their future selection. Linked in is also a great channel for SMBs. A small business can join groups, post comments, participate in Q&A, provide support etc. Authenticity is key to long terrm success. Free tools are available for tracking keywords in postings. Following key influencers and giving information to them gets something back from them when they cite you as a source of information in their posts.
Another question from the audience was about brand awareness and loyalty. Megan reiterated that her strategy was to keep affiliated parties engaged and the way she did it was by teaching her volunteers a way to tweet and blog effectively and thereby help her site and the volunteers in turn would rise up in the ranks and influence as their posts became more read over time. Gary cited the example of eBay's customers who used to be supported very well by other customers and vendors, so much so that some of them were recruited by eBay to be permanent employees. eBay demonstrates to us how to create a great community with transparency, mutual co-operation and support. Gary pointed to a great opportunity for entrepreneurs to take advantage of the 'social graph' i.e a graph/map of how people are connected and related to each other (see http://www.readwriteweb.com/
)
Edith's final question to the panelists was to identify the "one thing to do" and one last piece of advice or take away point for the audience.
Gary pointed to what is at the heart of the social media phenomenon. He said that that the social phenomenon has not changed the principle that was applicable before, i.e. it is (still) about the conversation, it is still about being true to yourself, who you are. Technology is an enabler and the reach is on a much grander scale and so is the speed. Social media ought to be used strategically and it is not about selling first but rather engaging with people. Megan reemphasized that one must stop using the social media channels until such time as when one knows why one wants to use it and what one wants to achieve and by when. In other words set your goals and know what is achievable by when. For example one can state that I want to achieve an increase in Twitter audience growth of x% in the next month. Find your focus and figure out what works. Edith cited her own blog titled 7 habits of effective Linkedin users. An example of tactics may be to buy a list, do a mailing, track the source of activity, how much they buy and how many repeat customers are there. An ROI can be tracked easily i.e spend $1 and get back $2. Megan pointed out that the marketing strategy in the age of social media is still about having a vision, being persistent, having great products, compelling stories and telling the story in an interesting, convincing way.
Publications such as Techcrunch, articles such as "How the top 100 Brands use social media", "Twitter as a Marketing tool", books such as "The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web" by Tamar Weinberg are a good source of information on social media.
After the event I had a chance to talk to Richard from HP on the panel. I asked him about who are good bloggers to follow for social media and what websites may be good to follow. Here are some names he suggested.
Jeremiah Owyang, Steve Rubel, Chris Brogin, Brian Solis, Shel Israel, Marshall Kirkpatrick. The websites to follow include Mashable, Readwrite web, Adage. Yahoo Experts in various fields are also a good resource.
I also talked with Edith and asked her about which types of companies may benefit most from the social web. She was unequivocal about the fact that services businesses can certainly benefit a lot from using the social media/web. Why? Because the audience they serve are there. The product companies would very likely benefit from using Yahoo or Google local, Yelp, and traditional channels.
The event and panel was a huge success providing the attendees many strategies and insights. More importantly it inspired everyone to start to use social media and increasingly harness its power to connect and communicate with their relevant communities and ecosystem. Everyone can benefit from the various channels and tools of social media, whether it is for themselves, their products and/or their businesses.
I know I came away excited and inspired by the event and discussion. Excited enough to write my first blog ever ! Thanks for reading it !
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