Rhymes with Cars

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Social Media ROI: Socialnomics

Great video on the value of social networking. YouTube - Social Media ROI: Socialnomics.

Tagged Business Cyberspace Editor's Take Media Social Networking Watchdogs marketing social media twitter

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Crush It - A Review of @garyvee 's New Book

I'll admit upfront, I'm a big GaryVee fan. When he announced his new book, Crush It, I ordered it no questions asked. I knew that it would be that good. Plus, I've mooched off of his unbelievable content for the past 2-years, it's the least I can do for the guy.

I first heard about Gary when he came to San Francisco and my friend JJ invited me to go see him do a live taping of WineLibrary.tv. Of course, I was a dummy and turned down the offer. I had never heard of Gary, I don't really drink wine so I passed to hang with my family. A few days later, I watched the video and kicked myself for a couple of days more.

If you've ever watched Gary, even once, you know the voice. That unmistakable, semi-hoarse, kind of screaming, enthusiastic voice. That voice was in my head the entire time I read this book. I thought that was cool. Here is a book about building a personal brand and I can't even get this guy's voice out of my head. Talk about brand.

The book itself, like his videos, is pretty short (total read time was only about 2 hours), easy to digest and extremely motivational. You can't read this book and say ho-hum, I'll stick that on a shelf for a rainy day. Hell, it's even got me blogging again. It's also got me thinking about how I can help my dad in his pending retirement and my sister with her new pet store and my buddy the artist. You just want to go out and spread the gospel.

If you're pretty savvy on the social media front, a lot of this will be second nature to you. You'll know all the tools that he talks about. You'll probably have them all set up and you're using them from time to time. If you've spent anytime with anyone that has built a good personal brand, you'll know a lot of the strategy that Gary lays out, but what you won't know is the hustle that he describes. As he points out in the beginning, this isn't a get rich quick scheme, this, like all good schemes, it's a get rich slow with a lot of work one.

But he spells it out for you. In the book, Gary shares with you everything that he did to build his own personal brand. It isn't rocket science, it's work. It isn't get a million twitter followers over night, this is get them over 2 - 3 years of hard work and brand building. But the directions are there, all you've got to do is follow them.

Tagged Crush It Gary Vaynerchuk Marketing & Management Sales San Francisco Social network personal branding social media twitter

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Why Sales People Need Social Media

If you are in sales, you need to read this white paper put out by Axel Schulze and his team at Xeequa: 10 Reasons Sales People Need to Care About Social Networking [PDF]. It offers a number of very compelling reasons why you, as a sales person, need to leverage social media as much as possible. Some hits:

A) All of the following 10 aspects have one common objective: Create a better customer experience for your clients that allows you to compete in a smarter way with a much higher degree of effectiveness. B) The “Social Media Question” is not whether you or your company is ready. It is whether you or your company can catch up with your customers who are already there.

Today, prospective customers (like all of us) search the Internet, read blogs, forums & group discussions, ask questions in their social networks, join on-line communities, and, in the end, know very well what they want, where to buy, and how much to pay. The more significant the purchase, the more completely the customer educates himself.

All in all a social media savvy sales person has 3 major advantages over the one who care less: 1) They know much more in much less time about the same customer than their competitor 2) Even more important, that same customers knows so much more about the sales person and where and how to reach them, that the competition has a hard time to even have a conversation. 3) A positive relationship between buyer and seller has begun, even before any direct contact or face-to-face meeting The rest of the paper is excellent. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Convince your boss to let you use this stuff. It will make you a better sales person.

Tagged Social Networking axel schulze enterprise 2.0 social media

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My Guest ZDNet Post - Don't Forget, Your Users are People Too

I got really lucky today and was able to write a guest post for Jennifer Leggio at ZDNet. I'm really honored that Jennifer chose me for this. Here is the post. Don't Forget, Your Users are People Too I regularly have an interesting conversation with our CEO, Eugene Lee, about who uses our platform and what are they doing with it. Here, I'll give you a test in 2 questions. Question One: When implementing a new system, any new system, for your community, how do you refer to the end users? What if you are implementing social media for your company? Who is going to use the system? Users? Employees? What about people (maybe the title of the post gave that one away)? Far too often, I meet with people that that simply think of the end users as users. Sometimes with a capital 'U', but always users. Heck, even the lawyers are in on it with EULA. Simple lesson: users use word processing systems. Users use spreadsheets and complex, dated, home-grown systems that helps allocate customer service resources. Employees take up space and use electricity. Employees are a number. People, on the other hand, have names. People share ideas and information. People form communities. People, are the backbone of your organization and their ideas, especially in a crumbling economy, are the ones that will make or break your company. People, not employees and certainly not users. There are many important components to a successful enterprise social media strategy, tools, goals, design, roll out strategy and many others, but few are as important as who is going to use the system and what they are going to use it for. Who is going to use the system, as described above, are the people who form communities of photographers and a network of REST Ninjas. They are the people who are developing your new ad campaign and the people who are driving revenue and the people who play Ultimate on Wednesday afternoons. People save the day. Question Two: What are they going to use the system for? If you said collaboration, that is a serious FAIL. Of course you are going to use social media to collaborate. That is like buying a fax machine for faxing or a word processor to process words. But what are you going to collaborate on? Please, don't say documents and spreadsheets. Listen, you don't go to the doctor because you are sick. Sickness is the by-product of something deeper, something more concise. You go to the doctor because you have a headache or a stomach ache or numbness in your left arm. If you just show up at your doctor and say your sick, but can't describe any symptoms, you'll be given a sugar tab and sent on your way. If you have a more specific problem, you can diagnose it with a very specific solution. Your enterprise social media strategy needs a similar level of specificity in order for it to succeed. It is great to 'want to collaborate', but for an implementation to really succeed and in order to get the highest level of adoption, what ails you has to be very clearly defined. Case in point, I spoke with a firm last week whose collaboration strategy on weekly sales reports was for the VP of Sales to send an emailed report to her 30 reps. Each rep had a specific window in which they had to fill out the report and mail it back to her. At the end of the week, she would compile the report and roll it up to her CEO. The process took each rep about an hour to do and was more complex than what could be completed in a traditional SFA. The VP of Sales was spending a measurable part of her week on this report. Not only was this a very well defined problem, it was a problem that had serious revenue implications. Not investing in social media to fix this is akin to not taking your medicine that the doctor prescribes to you for high blood pressure. Baseline Magazine just named Enterprise Social Networking as one of the top IT trends for 2009. If you've made it this far, enterprise social media is undoubtedly on your radar. As you develop your strategy, early identification of the people who will be using this system and a laser defined purpose will ultimately ensure the highest level of adoption.

Tagged Social Networking Socialtext ZDNet eugene lee jennifer leggio social media

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My Evil Mad Genius Idea for Social Advertising

I logged into Facebook this morning and noticed the ad unit to the left. 'Hey' I thought, 'that looks like my friend Blake'. Blake is in ad sales, but I know that he doesn't work at Facebook, so it is obviously just a coincidence that the two of them look alike. But the ad got my attention. So much so that I pinged Blake and asked him if anyone else had said that he looks like the guy from the Facebook ad. He hadn't seen it, but did agree that the guy looked a lot like him. Here's where the mad genius part comes in. If I'm an advertiser, I buy stock headshots of 10,000 or so models. Whatever the number is, make it a big enough sample that you have a pretty good chance that most people on the planet will look like someone in that pool. Next, create ad units of people using your product, but make the head dynamic and swappable with any of the 10,000 images that you previously purchased. This doesn't need to be HD quality video, a simple banner ad will work a'la Facebook. Buy placements on social sites, especially social properties where people have uploaded photos of themselves and so have all of their friends. Facebook, Google, Hi5, Yahoo, etc. Then, leverage basic facial recognition software to scour the viewers friends and map the friends basic features (skin tone, hair color, hair style, weight, etc) to the database of models. Drop that models head into the dynamic ad unit. The next thing you know, you'll be saying to your friend 'It's amazing how much you look like the guy in the Mercedes, drinking a Pepsi, listening to the latest Nickelback CD'. More importantly, you're interacting with the ad. Don't believe me, even Seth Godin has a doppelganger. So do I.

Tagged Social Networking blake boznanski facebook mad genius seth godin social advertising social media

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More on Getting Smart People to Share

I spend a lot of my time talking with organizations about how to encourage adoption of social media tools amongst their employees. Lately, the conversation seems to have turned to why it is hard to get smart people to share their ideas, thoughts, brainstorms & suggestions via social media. The general feeling is that older workers are going to be less inclined to use these types of tools, but it isn’t just the baby boomers. It is entire organizations. Moving from email and siloed data stores to a global collaboration platform is a significant cultural change. It is a change for the better, though, and as more people recognize the efficiencies of social media in their personal lives, the more they will bring it with them into the workplace. But how do you get smart people to share? A lot of people question the tools and say things like ‘Oh the boomers will never use this stuff.’ I don’t really buy that. In fact, I’m pretty certain that my 85-year old, stroke inflicted grandfather would learn to juggle chain saws on hot coals if it meant that the croquet players stayed off of his grass tennis courts . It isn’t the tools. Don’t get me wrong, a shitty tool can significantly impact adoption, but I’ve seen how SharePoint gets adopted and things don’t get much worse than that. So it isn’t the tool. What is it? The problem isn’t the tools. The problem is a lack of goals (or too tightly defined goals) and a lack of passion. Collaboration without a goal = FAIL . I’ve seen people spend countless hours sharing ideas and trading stories in everything from NFL chat rooms to cancer support centers. Sharing is in our DNA. Goals around collaboration are difficult to define and people love independence. If you need me to go to the supermarket and pick up chicken breasts for dinner tonight, no problem. We will have chicken breasts in the house before our general dinner time. I have a goal and some general direction and flexibility. Now, if you tell me that I need to go to WholeFoods, on Bascom, and give me turn by turn instructions and explain that you only want free range organic chickens that are massaged by eunuch monks once a week, I’ll probably just go to the local Safeway and grab Foster Farms because, hey, chicken is chicken. Goals for collaboration in your organization are the same way. People in your company collaborate today. Don’t believe me, ask people what they are doing for lunch. Odds are, they will go out together and come up with great ideas on how to make things better in your company. They will talk amongst themselves and nothing will ever get done, because these people don't have the outlet or direction to share these awesome ideas. In order to get people to collaborate, using social media, you just need to get them going. Give them tools that are easy to use and a clear goal of what success looks like (go get chicken for dinner) and let them go. You will be amazed at what forms. A deeper sense of trust, unique communities and a culture that continues to foster a sense of trust and sharing. Goals for collaboration shouldn’t as ambiguous as ‘I want my team to collaborate and magical stuff will happen to our bottom line’. Likewise, they shouldn’t be so directed as people just think that it is another corporate standard that will waste their time. If you want someone’s opinion or ideas, generally, all you need to do as ask. Social media provides a great opportunity to develop that conversation between all of your employees. A different problem is passion. People must have a level of passion for success of their community, their department, their company for enterprise social media to succeed. If they don’t have this passion, why bother? It is the ‘What’s in it for me’ element to collaboration. As a company, as an employer, as a person, it is your duty to ensure that your team has a passion for what they are working on. A partner can’t give your team this passion. This has to come from within. The good news is that passion breeds passion and passion is addictive. Starting an internal book club social network let’s people share ideas and discuss books that are of common interest to them (passion). They are dipping their toes in the water. Can they develop a similar passion for a project that they are working on? Maybe not everyone, but if one person is passionate about a topic enough to set up a community to make her voice be heard, that is a community that will be successful. What is the takeaway? Good Tools + Defined Goals + Passion = Success What do you see as the success factors for social media at your company? Leave me a comment. Alan Lepofsky was crucial in developing this post. Thanks, Alan.

Tagged Social Networking enterprise 2.0 goals passion sharepoint social media social networks

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Yes It Can

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how social media will make the world a better place . The past Tuesday, I think that this point was proven to the world as a junior senator from Illinois was elected the President of the United States. Much has been written about the way that, over the past 2 years the Obama campaign, has leveraged everything from YouTube to Facebook to MySpace to Flickr to Twitter in order to convey a consistent message and increasingly gather support for his bid for President. By the end of September, while the McCain camapaign seemed to be making a presence in these new fangled interweb thingies, the Obama campagin was moving full throttle, like Katamari Damacy , gathering up more and more supporters, $5 at a time, with a message of hope and change. In the end, Obama had out raised McCain by over 2 times. But more importantly than the money raised was the way that Obama reached out so frequently and was so transparent and so consistent with his message. When I look at the stats of their respective social media sites, it is clear that Obama was far ahead in having a medium that allowed him to communicate asynchronously with his supporters.

Unlike politics over the past 12,000 years, another unique component of the Obama campaign was the level of transparency and the interest in reaching out to get the opinion of his constituents never before seen. Obama and staff sent out regular missives, sometimes to the point of being spammy, to all willing to receive them. These messages were fairly consistent - this is where I will be, this is what we are working on, this is why, please make a donation. After 8 years of secrecy, this is just another one of things that Obama recognized that people wanted, a level of transparency in their government. Sounds simple doesn't it? The past 4 days, since Obama's election have been no less interesting in terms of the usage of social media. The day immediately following the election, the Obama administration (that sounds great) launched Change.gov , a site maintaining that level of transparency. The site keeps all of the public up to speed with what is going on with the administration and has even asked the public for ideas and job applicants. Of course, all of this information has been available on some hard to navigate site. What Change.gov does is make it easy to find and easy to communicate. This past week also saw a lot of Al Gore . He supposedly signed up for Twitter . He was on DiggDialog and make the closing talk at the Web 2.0 Summit . All amazing stuff. As I mentioned in my previous post, I believe that people want to do what is best for the community and do what is best for the environment. The election of Barack Obama shows that social media can really work to make a tremendous change. We now have the soon to be President of the US that fully embraces social media as well as the person most outspoken for climate change both building armies of people willing to listen, spread and modify their lives based on their message. It is a great time to be alive and to be part of this happening.

Tagged Barack Obama Social Networking Sports facebook flickr john mccain katamari damacy social media twitter web 2.0 youtube

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