I have just joined Google Wave

If you haven't heard about Wave then hold on because I'll be writing about it in the coming months as I use it.

I have often stated that we use computer applications in silos because that's the way they were designed, as stand alone applications. When these applications are grouped into office suites we gain some benefit of interoperability. But for the most part the applications remain entities unto themselves.

Wave is the antithesis of this silo approach. A Wave is a continuous conversation in which you can continuously interact using multimedia, email, chat, video and voice seamlessly. Instead of working the way the computer dictates, with Wave we can begin to see an approaching model that is more like regular interaction whether in an office or among friends.

So watch for my Wave prognostications and observations in the coming weeks.

Creating a Plan for Implementing Social Media in your Marketing Strategy

From time to time I have the opportunity to read other bloggers columns and share them with you here. The following excerpts come from Taylor Ellwood, a social media coach and writer who resides in Portland, Oregon. Her recent posting on BizNik is entitled, The Five Elements of Basic Social Media Strategy.

Taylor's 5 elements include:

1. Define Your audience. She points out that audience is more than just existing clients. It includes prospects and partners. Your target audience may be a subset of your total audience because not all of your clients, prospects and partners may embrace social media. Consider age and other demographics in determining your social media audience.

2. Define your business model. Is your business model B2B or B2C? For example, B2C is a determining factor when considering Facebook whereas B2B may be LinkedIn, Biznik, Partnerpedia or similar social networking site.

3. Pick out your key words and phrases that define what you do. Match your key words and phrases with those that make your clients and prospects pay attention to you. These are the words and phrases clients use to describe what you do for them. This is a magnet to attract other members of a social network with similar needs, members that you have never met.

4. Define your goals for using social media, but keep them realistic. Taylor advocates that you need to go into the social media space with very specific goals. I'm a great believer that any action plan should have distinct and measurable goals and a social media strategy is no different.

In her article on this point Taylor states "It's important to define realistic goals for using social media. A realistic goal is publishing an article to be more visible to your social network. An unrealistic goal is expecting that the article will automatically help you convert readers into clients. It's unrealistic because it's not something you have much control over, and you will get frustrated if it doesn't happen. Recognize the technology for what it is and what it can do and plan accordingly with your goals."

5. Assess how much time and effort you will need to spend learning how to use social media sites, as well as what social media sites you need to be on. Also be mindful of using blogs, e-newsletters, internet radio, video, and other forms of social media and factor those into your assessment.

The last point stated above are Taylor's words not mine. It is very important that you recognize the time commitment you need to make in a social media strategy. Unlike investing dollars in advertising on web pages, or in a magazine, the cost of social media marketing is more a measure of the time you need to spend to create a successful, measurable outcome.

Finally, my additional two cents....it is important to continually test to see what works and what doesn't in social media. This is a brave new world for business to venture into. But as I have stated previously it is hard to ignore the number of people that are on social media sites. The Facebook nation is the fourth largest community in the world, almost equal in population to the United States. LinkedIn is better than one-and-a-half the size of Canada in population. To ignore these numbers in your business strategy is to miss a golden opportunity.

Friending a Brand on Facebook

In my previous article I talked about how your business can use Facebook. In the November 18 ezine, "eMarketer - Digital Intelligence" comes the following interesting statistics from a study done by Razorfish, the global digital marketing firm.

The company's “2009 FEED” survey studied US users who had high-speed Internet access and had spent at least $150 online in the previous six months. These consumers demonstrated strong brand connections. Almost 25% participated in brand-hosted contests. About the same percentage followed brands on Twitter. And more than 40% had "friended" a brand on Facebook or MySpace.

Why "friend" a brand? Because in doing it these consumers were being offered special discounts and deals that made the effort worthwhile. Most as well reported enjoying the brand website, and deriving entertainment value from their online experience.

Digital consumers who visit your website today are not looking for information alone. They want much more - a memorable experience. In your web marketing strategy it is important to keep that in mind.

Use polls, create multimedia, invite them to participate in questionnaires, hold contests, create discussion forums, and encourage comments. It's about engagement, entertainment, connecting emotionally.

It is a proven fact that most of us make our purchasing decisions because of the emotions we derive from the buying experience. Think of just how important colour was in your car buying decision. Yes, the fuel economy was important, but more often than not you were ultimately sold on appearance and how it made you feel.

Engage your digital customers and prospects to heighten their emotional connection with your brand. It works. To get more statistical results from this study you should visit Razorfish.

What Can Facebook and Other Public Social Networks do for Your Business

I have a Facebook page. I have a Facebook corporate page. You may ask why? One reason is Facebook pages come up in Google search results. That means one more search hit for me when someone is seeking a company that provides marketing and business development consulting services like mine.

The other reason I am both personally and corporately on Facebook is the size of the community. Today Facebook has over 300,000,000 members. If it were a country it would be the fourth largest in population, just behind the United States. That's a lot of potential customers.

Here are the top five reasons for you and your business to be on Facebook.

1. Facebook Company Pages

If you are already on Facebook then you have created a personal profile. Did you know that you can create a public company profile with the similar functionality and design? Unlike your personal page there is no limit to the number of fans you can have on your publicly viewable company page so take advantage of this feature to create a fan base and stay in touch with them.

2. Facebook Events

Facebook offers the ability to announce events. Events are a great way to create visibility for your brand and business. A Facebook event can be a cause. A Facebook event can be a webinar or online workshop, a physical meetup, even a discussion activity. Events are great ways to attract and retain customers.

3. Facebook Groups

With Facebook you can join groups. Groups can be thematically or geographically organized. Participating in a group is a great way to find new customers and tell your story even if just in passing. Remember your 20-second elevator pitch. You may get many opportunities to tell it when you join groups.

4.Facebook Share

Share provides the ability for you to hyperlink your Facebook page to your website so visitors can share your web content with their Facebook friends. Share requires a little bit of HTML know how but is easy to install. It's just another tool for spreading the word.

5. Facebook Connect

Through Connect you can use your Facebook account to populate other social networking sites without ever having to fill in the information for these sites. It's almost like having a portable phone number that you can take with you if you leave your cell provider. Now your Facebook profile can go anywhere. Considering the fact that I am a participant on many social networking sites, the connect feature in Facebook means I can publish once and automatically populate numerous sites.

Finally I would like to talk briefly about Facebook Ads.

You may have tried Google Ads as a marketing investment, purchasing sponsored sites to gain search engine positioning on the top or right-hand side of Google search results. Or you may have enrolled with Google AdSense to earn click through revenue from visitors to your company web site.

Facebook Ads resemble both of these types of ads. They are primarily text with the opportunity to include an icon or small image. Unlike Google Ads, however, Facebook ads can include a friend's endorsement in which an action and picture appear.

Is Facebook a good place to advertise. It really depends on your target demographic. Genreally speaking Facebook ads are not very effective. Generation Y and Z Facebook users do not click through. Whereas older Facebook users, people my age, or more inclined to click on ads. But the average click-through rate for Facebook Ads is very low, in fact less than 1/100th of 1 percent. So unless you are targeting the 50s plus Facebook audience I do not recommend purchasing Facebook ads.

Conclusion

So what can you conclude from this article?

1. Facebook is a big community, the largest online community in the world. Where there is a big community there is a big opportunity.

2. Facebook has lots of tools that can create greater visibility for your business, whether large or small.

3. Facebook can be a great way to connect to other social networking communities without having to input all of your company information over and over again.

4. Facebook is a poor place to buy advertising space unless you are selling to a specific demographic within the community. But Facebook is a great place to create events and activities and attract fans and new customers.

5. Facebook is free. That's hard not to like.

Five Reasons Corporations Are Failing at Social Media

I have just read a blog from a young woman, Amy Mengel, whose musings on social networking are very much akin with mine. I share with you extracts from her most recent article bearing the above title.

Social media isn’t complicated. When you boil it down it’s about listening to your customers, being helpful by offering your knowledge and giving them interesting content to share and thereby advocate for you.

So why is it so difficult for so many companies to successfully integrate social media?

1. They can’t talk about anything broader than their own products

Citrix Online created the Workshifting community to address the rise of telecommuting and remote work. Sure, it ties in with Citrix’s GoToMeeting/Webinar/PC product line, but the blog isn’t a commercial for its products. The same holds true for Kodak’s photography blog. It’s about photography and creativity in general, not about Kodak cameras. Humana developed Freewheelin bicycle sharing communities with plenty of online and “real life” components to the program. Bicycles don’t have much to do with health insurance specifically, but they are about being healthy. If a company is only talking online about its specific products and not looking for ways to connect to the bigger picture, it’s pretty difficult for people to be engaged.

2. They listen to customers but don’t take any action

If you’re going to listen to your customers, you’d better be ready to do something about what you hear. If a company creates an online presence that’s open and allows customer feedback, it creates the expectation that the company is going to do something with that feedback. Worse than not being heard is being heard and then ignored. Southwest Airlines shared how a simple blog post stating the airline was considering assigned seating amassed tons of customer comments showing a lack of support for the idea. This feedback changed the direction of their internal debate and led to a new boarding procedure that maintained the open seating arrangement.

3. They aren’t calibrated internally with the technology

Many corporate Web sites are little more than online brochures. Customers expect interaction. Content creation is key to social media success, and every company should have a Web site with a content management system that allows for quick, easy content creation without the IT department needing to recode a Web site. Anyone in the organization should be able to publish via a CMS. And companies can’t expect to have a strong social media presence when social sites are blocked internally to employees.

4. They’re not framing risk accurately

A corporate blog has never been fatal to an organization. Often a company’s entry into social media is a clumsy, shotgun blast and that there’s an equal chance of looking foolish by having a ham-fisted marketing department launch a social media presence as there is if a rogue employee “goes off” on Twitter. The risk of social media is not abated by not participating. And really, while there have certainly been some hiccups and miscues along the way, social media has yet to be the undoing of any company.

5. Their internal culture isn’t aligned for social media success

The customer should be at the core of the brand. When policies, procedures, products and processes become more important than the customer, there’s no way social media efforts can be effective. When your employees are more concerned with what’s in or out of their job description than doing the right thing to help the customer, that’s not a culture that’s likely to build trust and advocacy for your brand. Zappos is cited time and again as a case study, but largely because it has a culture that makes social media work. All of its employees are focused on customer service at the core. The same holds true for Southwest Airlines.

These are great examples of simple, effective social media strategies that have humanized organizations and allowed them to build better relationships with customers. But time and again companies are either rejecting social media or participating in a way that defeats the purpose.

I encourage you to read more from Amy Mengel by visiting her blog or following her on Twitter.

Social Marketing: Tying Social Networking to Personal and Business Goals

Public social networks are by their nature very poor marketing venues in the traditional sense. Click through rates on advertisements on sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are very low. So many small businesses see public social networks as too difficult and too time consuming to master. They are partially right in their conclusions.

Figuring out the "business angles" in social networking takes considerable time and practice. That's because public social networks are primarily "social." The business that works best on them is "social." The younger audiences that use them find traditional advertising hype to be intrusive and inappropriate. To them it's not cool to be on a social site and be thinking business.

Social marketing is not a new concept. According to Phil Kotler, who along with Gerald Zaltman, coined the expression in the 1970s, social marketing is defined as marketing that seeks to influence social behaviour, not for the benefit of the marketer, but to benefit a target audience or society in general. Since social networks are virtual societies it would seem that social marketing would be a good strategic approach for small business and individuals to engage these online communities.

There is nothing like a good cause or social purpose to find a community of common ground. How to do this effectively is a skill set worth acquiring. Nedra Weinreich, of Weinreich Communications, offers courses including webinars on the subject of social marketing. Although Nedra's focus is on using social marketing to advance such health and social causes the principles and strategies she describes in her book, Hands-On Social Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide and blog articles are applicable to any organization and any cause.

Here are some ideas to consider when addressing the social marketing potential of social networks:

1. If you currently have a social cause that you are drawn to and that you want to share with others in your business community, then make it part of your web presence and feature it on your business website. For example, I have a link to Kiva on my blog site and you will find it on my Facebook page as well. I don't do in-your-face promotion of Kiva on either site but I can come up with strategies that can make Kiva a shared conversation with prospective clients and existing customers.

2. Create an event around your cause. That event can be an activity that invites prospects and customers to an actual physical location with the purpose of raising awareness, and money, in support of the cause. If your cause is "cancer awareness," or another high-profile medical issue, plan to include other interested parties that can give your efforts further legitimacy. For example, you can consider affiliating your event with a larger campaign.

3. Build a cause site on your social network and link it to your website and your social network profile account. Make it graphic. If you are committed to raising money in your social cause put a graph on your site to show how well you are doing.

Large organizations have been doing this sort of community service for years. Having just called on Accenture, the management consulting firm in the last week, while waiting for my meeting, I picked up a glossy, four-colour 50 plus page publication focused on the company's social marketing.

And don't forget Guy Laliberte's recent International Space Station trip where he created a show from space involving actors and performers from all over the planet to promote his cause, clean water for all. Although that gambit cost him $35 million, one should recognize the essential strategy that Mr. Laliberte deployed, social marketing with a very specific social goal.

On a more modest level and as a method for getting exposure for you and your business, social marketing is the right strategy to engage the social networking community.

What is Appropriate Social Network Behaviour

In this latest article posted on Kiwi Commons I talk about the lure of posting information about you on social networking sites. What is appropriate? What is inappropriate?

If the axiom, "social media is all about communication with low expectation," then it is important for you to understand the audience that connects to you and your social networking profiles. Although your connections are referred to as "friends" on places like Facebook and MySpace, these are not friends in the conventional sense. In fact, if you invited them to a night out on the town, most would never show up even if they accepted your invitation. So that is one meaning of low expectation....l0w results.

But low expectation can mean something entirely different. It could reflect the fact that when you post you have low expectations about readership. Is anyone really looking at what you write? Does anyone look at the pictures you post?

Another meaning of low expectation.....is what you say about yourself evoking low expectation on the part of your readers? When they read your profile are they drawing a negative conclusion? If you are applying for an important job, or trying to make a good impression on someone important in your life, then what you say in about you on your profile may evoke much higher expectation in those who view it.

So please connect to the Kiwi Commons link and let me know your thoughts about appropriate social network behaviour.