Tag: social media

Is social media the new CB radio? 10-4 and negatory.

Dave

When I was 11 years old in 1976, I wanted nothing more than a CB radio. The song “Convoy had come out and everybody was talking about them. I was sure a CB radio was the coolest thing in the world.

By wheedling and cajoling and combining Christmas and birthday presents I managed to get my parents to buy me one: a Radio Shack CB walkie talkie, which I liked because it looked like something GI Joe carried. Also, being 11, I did not have a car in which to install one.

I took it out of the box, put in the batteries, turned it on… and almost immediately realized I had nothing in common with truckers. I think I got tired of it in about a week. As did many people who bought a CB that year, which explains its persistence as a shorthand reference for fads.

But the fact that I stopped pestering truckers for smokey reports I did not need did not affect the CB radio’s usefulness to them “in fact I’m sure it enhanced it”. They kept on sharing information about road conditions and weather and speed traps, using it to connect with friends and pass the time on long trips. Judging by the technology aisles at the truck stop near my last job, those folks who understand the value are still using CB radios today.

I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. I don’t care how many people signed up for Twitter and never come back. Those are the people who probably had no need for it in the first place.

There are lots of people out there who, no matter how much they love Oprah and follow her advice, don’t really need or want to join the conversation. They get their news from TV or talk radio “or they don’t get it at all” and they either don’t have a lot of interests that are well-represented online, or they’re too busy to go out and find who’s talking about them.

That dynamic, of course, does not change the value that you and I see from blogs or social networks or Twitter. It just makes it a bit harder to justify to the folks who have a knee jerk reaction against anything popular.

If we wait it out, maybe they’ll stop talking about it. In the meantime, keep it between the ditches.

What three days with a netbook have taught me about Twitter

Dave

Don’t bother spending a lot of time and effort on a cool Twitter background. People viewing via a netbook or mobile device either can’t see it, or it’s compressed. If you’re going to make one, look at the design on a small monitor to see what actually shows up.

And don’t forget your profile info in Twitter itself. That’s the first thing I look at when I’m trying to decide whether or not to follow someone “especially on this small screen that requires me to take my fingers off their hard-won position on the tiny little home row and scroll down to be able to see much of anything.”

That info also shows up when you mouse over a Twitter username in your follower list, so that can be just as valuable, if not more, than what you put in the sidebar of a background.

Take a look at your photo, too. People may well be looking at that on a tiny screen. Is your photo tight enough that people can make out your face? How will it look if someone is viewing it on a mobile device and it’s roughly a centimeter square?

I’ve also learned that you should test drive any potential netbook for at least half an hour before buying, because this itty bitty keyboard is still driving me nuts.

What Chuck D taught me about social media

Dave

Chris Brogan mentioned Chuck D in passing this morning in a post whose title defies being ignored. “In case Dad is reading this, Chuck is frontman for Public Enemy, one of the most principled and politically aware rap groups ever.”

Before I came to SAS I ran web sales and marketing for Yep Roc Records and Redeye Distribution. Redeye distributed PE’s “New Whirl Odor” in 2005. When Chuck came to visit “out in the middle of nowhere in Haw River, NC, 20 miles from Chapel Hill” he made a point of speaking with everyone in the company, going from office to office introducing himself and taking pictures with everyone. When my turn came, he told me to sit at my desk and he sat in my visitor chair, pretending he was applying for a job. It’s pretty damn funny. It’s not on this computer, unfortunately. I’ll post it when I get home. Here’s a cheesy handshake photo:

I'm the one on the right
I'm the one on the right

 

What’s the social media tie-in, other than the fact that Brogan likes Chuck, too? Chuck was beginning a business relationship with us, but he didn’t do it by walking into our office and shouting about what he wanted “even though he certainly could have”. He did it by establishing a genuine human connection with everyone in that company, from the owners to the accounting department to the guys in the warehouse. And I promise you that after he left, there wasn’t a single person in that company who wasn’t dedicated to doing whatever he or she could to help Chuck sell records.

The people who know what’s important in personal relationships know what’s important in business relationships, and they also know what’s important in online relationships. And it’s the same thing in all of them.

:::UPDATE:::

Here’s the photo of Chuck applying for a job:

me and Chuck job interview

SAS Global Forum showcases the value of social media for events

Dave

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

I’ve been back from our annual user conference, SAS Global Forum, for three weeks but I’m still amazed at what I saw. Even in this economy more than 3,300 dedicated SAS users came together to learn from each other. It was my first time attending the event, and one of the most remarkable professional experiences I’ve had.

This year’s event was a test bed for a number of social media activities as well, and we learned a lot. Here are some highlights.

The Crowdvine networking site set up for the event drew more than 200 members, which is a great base to build on. The Netvibes aggregator page brought together all the social media assets “blogs, blog searches, Twitter searches, video, photos, etc.” into one place and received positive comments from visitors. The SAS Global Forum blog at blogs.sas.com was extremely active, with 76 posts as I write this. The SAS video team put in their usual hard work chronicling the event, which also spurred us to create a SAS presence on Flickr, which I look forward to helping develop.

I want to single out Twitter as well, since it’s such a new tool and SAS Global Forum was the first time we’ve focused on it for SAS events communications. Twitter was very popular, with more than 500 messages posted using the #sgf09 hashtag during the event, and more than 1,000 since it was created.

Some people still question the value of Twitter, and just like blogs in the early days there can be a lot of noise. There’s noise on the #sgf09 hashtag. People like to talk about themselves and don’t always stop to think if anyone cares where they ate lunch. But far more important than that, if you look at the hashtag search, you see messages like this one, from a user:

SAS EG 4.2 supports office 2007 hurray. Need to get it. #sgf09

Or this one from a SAS partner, linking to a press release on sas.com:

Reading about SAS Customer awards at #sgf09. http://tinyurl.com/dfv44j


Or this one from a SAS partner in the Netherlands:

Just back from the sasCommunity.org focus group at #SGF09. Very positive, open discussion on improving the site, contributions and content.


SAS folks were also tweeting madly at the event, picking out nuggets of valuable information from customer presentations and panels and adding them to the stream.

#SGF09 presenter says SAS CI 5.1 upgrade was operational within 3 weeks. Slide says Yes Man!!

Business Analytics panel #sgf09. Customers emphasizing the necessity of analysts working closely with business units, marketers.

Business Analytics panel #sgf09. Keys to making analytics part of your org culture: Case studies, build trust, show you’re adding value.

Twitter gets mention in Customer Intelligence Panel. Companies trying to understand value of data housed in twitter and how to use it #sgf09

For every example of a banality, I see a dozen tweets talking about the event, sharing information, asking questions, thanking people for their presentations, making connections and sharing links for further information. And these are conversations that probably wouldn’t have taken place online if not for Twitter, other than in a few blogs. Even the tweets that might be dismissed as banal show there’s a life and a pulse and a buzz at SAS Global Forum that up to now you could only experience in person. Sure, following a hashtag search isn’t the same thing as being there in the flesh. But I have no doubt that anyone who didn’t attend this year’s event but followed it on Twitter feels like they missed something valuable, practical and fun. And I guarantee you some of them are already planning to attend #sgf10.

The Marketing 2.0 Council

Dave

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

My stated intention for this blog was to talk about the things we’re doing at SAS to integrate social media into our communications, and share information about what’s working and what isn’t. It’s unforgiveable that I’ve waited this long to talk about the Marketing 2.0 Council, because it’s been our biggest success story to date. I’ve recommended this as a tactic to several folks working on social media in a company setting.

The Marketing 2.0 Council began in late 2007 with a mandate to look at marketing 2.0/Web 2.0/social media as a whole, decide what was important to SAS and how we should go forward. The list of attendees at the first meeting included representatives from all corners of SAS: marketing, public relations, marketing editorial, online strategy and services, education, publications, advertising, email marketing and too many more to name. That first meeting was standing room only in a conference room designed to hold 30 people. I was lucky enough to be invited to join, having been a vocal advocate of incorporating social media into our public relations efforts. The assembled group had a wide range of awareness and understanding of social media but we were all agreed that we needed to figure out a strategy.

Our first major activity was a brainstorming session designed to put all the Web 2.0 outlets we could think of on a white board and narrow them down to the list we wanted to consider first. Somewhat surprisingly, that activity generated a manageable list without any bloodshed. We agreed to focus our attention on blogs, social networks, content syndication, podcasts, online video and Wikipedia. We soon realized that none of those channels would be worth much if we didn’t have something useful to feed them, so we added content as a category of its own.

From that starting point, we put together a task force for each area, led by a member of the Marketing 2.0 Council and made up of people who were either vocationally or avocationally interested in the field. The task forces met over the course of several weeks. They looked at the prevailing wisdom about their area, found examples of companies approaching them well, looked at what SAS was doing and put together recommendations for what we should be doing. That may sound like a simplistic explanation, but there wasn’t much more to it than that – the advantage of clearly-defined objectives.

Once we had all the task force recommedations compiled in a standard format, a working group of council members put them together and drafted a set of overarching recommendations and priorities and a proposed timetable. Even with a comprehensive outline, we felt the need to suggest only two new positions: social media manager “the one that I got” and an integrated content manager, to make sure we had valuable information delivered in a consistent manner to all the 2.0 channels.

With that work behind us, our executive sponsors were confident we had examined all the angles and gave us the green light to fill the new positions and get started on the recommendations. As the person selected to fill the role of social media manager, it’s been extremely helpful for me to know what a broad base my position was built on.

So, if you’re finding yourself trying to get your arms around social media at your company, creating your own council could be a big help. My suggestions:

1. Figure out all the people in your organization who have a stake in communicating your message and get them in the same room.

2. Resist the urge to invite only the people who you think will agree with you. Better to smoke out any objections now and deal with them.

3. Get the lawyers and the HR folks involved from the start, because they will have concerns you will probably never think of yourself.

4. Make sure you have a good cross section of decision makers and doers. In other words, if it’s all practitioners you’ll always be running upstairs to get approval, but if it’s all executives you won’t have anyone to do the grunt work like research and writing the recommendations and making pretty PowerPoint slides.

5. Make sure to create a mechanism for communicating your activities internally. We have an internal Marketing 2.0 Council blog and a SharePoint site where we house all the documents, including the task force reports and the draft social media guidelines and recommendations.

Hard candy shell not as hard as you might think

Dave

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

So Skittles threw in the towel. They didn’t have the stomach for profanities and racial slurs showing up on their “homepage,” which they had given over to a Twitter search page showing real-time results for “Skittles.” When I wrote about this yesterday, I was thinking of it as a bold move, and even with all the potential pitfalls it would probably still pay off for Skittles in terms of attention.

I wasn’t surprised to see how the public played with the shiny new toy Skittles handed to them. What does surprise me, though, is that Skittles seems to have been surprised. Didn’t they know this was going to happen? They must have had hours and hours of internal debate about the wisdom of this move. I’m reminded of the movie War Games, where the computer goes haywire at the end and the screen scrolls the list of all the possible conflicts it is programmed to consider, like “USSR first strike” and “Albanian decoy” and “Canadian thrust.” In the Skittles war room, didn’t they have a big board with “racist hijack” and “profanity blitzkrieg”?

I’m wondering, based on a not-inconsiderable experience with the way decisions can be made in large companies, if someone a level or three above the person who decided to begin this experiment stepped in and decided to end it when they saw how it was going.

Corporate marketers expanding their presence in social media are used to answering the question, “What will you do if someone says something negative about your products or your company?” and the answer usually is something along the lines of, “At least the negative comments will be on our site where we will know about them and can respond in an open, transparent way.”

Yes, but what about when there’s nothing to respond to, when the negativity is purely for the sake of negativity? That’s when we really find out how thick or thin are corporate skins are.

Yesterday I also said, “Naturally, some people can’t resist the urge to spam the channel with anti-Skittles childishness, but they’ll get tired of that eventually.” I just spent five minutes paging through search results and couldn’t find a single obscene or racist tweet. While “skittles” was the number one trending topic on Twitter yesterday, it’s not even showing up on the top ten today.

Maybe Skittles melted too soon. With the short attention span of online pranksters, maybe they only had to wait another day to get out of the crosshairs. No less a social media personage than Charlene Li has already declared that the Skittles experiment “redefined branding.” Maybe they were mere hours away from becoming the social media success story of 2009, rather than a case study of how social media can bite back.

Like the number of licks required to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know.