THINKing

Too Much Social, Not Enough Sales?

Is social media wearing you out and getting in the way of your real work? It’s not bad enough that you have to keep up with a blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendfeed, Youtube and maybe Plaxo, but every day I’m being asked to join yet another social network. There are hundreds of them, it seems. I’ve said no to Viadeo, no to Friendster, no to MySpace, and by-bye to Goodreads.

How many social networks is too many to handle? As in every other facet of business, I believe focus is the answer. Pick three to four that make sense for you and your organization and do them right.

If you are spending all of your time blogging, Twittering, adding posts on your company Facebook page, when are you going to have time to keep the business afloat? After all, the first rule of business is to stay in business. To do this, you must make money.

How many networks are you trying to keep afloat? Have you jettisoned any? Which ones? What is working – or not working – for you?

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Your Online Privacy Is Your Responsibility

OK, I’m going to say it and hack off some folks: your privacy is not Facebook’s responsibility, nor the government’s. Just like earning a living, supporting your family, taking care of your health, paying your bills on time, and raising your children to be productive citizens, ensuring your privacy online is your responsibility.

Now, if you don’t care who knows everything about your online life, then move along, there is nothing for you to see here. But, if you do care about your online privacy, you might want to read on.

Now, I have some problems with the way Facebook plays fast and loose with personal data, but ultimately it is your data. You enter it, you manage it and you control what people can see and how other websites can utilize your data.  Facebook can’t share what you don’t let them share or what you don’t enter in the first place.

If you feel – as I do – that you derive benefit from Facebook’s platform but you are concerned about your online privacy, this article provides a good explanation about what you can do to enhance your data’s security.  Additionally, I recommend running this privacy tool on your Facebook profile.

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#tweeta20 – That’s A Wrap

Well, #tweeta20 – the social media project designed to raise awareness and funds for Thompson Child & Family Focus -  is behind us now and I think it was a success. I think we raised more awareness of the good work that Thompson does than we did money. Although we raised at least $4,000 via social media at last count.

Here’s how it happened. Friend Kathy Rowan (@PRQueen) works closely with Thompson and has for a longtime. She asked me to help with the project she had conceived.

First, we recruited  a great group of Charlotte Twitterati to participate and I’d like to recognize them once more.  I hope you will follow these wonderful people:

@CrystalDempsey

@AlexisAcosta

@ScottHepburn

@prettyannoyed

@beccabernstein

@daily_pinch

@lisahoffmann

@brandonuttley

@kateymarie

Next, we decided upon a catchy hashtag – #tweeta20 – to help track the stream.

Then, we:

- rounded up some Wicked tickets for a drawing from the pool of online #tweeta20 donors (oh, by the way, the winner was @ppnc09)

- pre-promoted the May 11 event to friends and followers to try to prime the fundraising pump

- developed Tweet Cheat Sheets for our 10 Twitterati to utilize and to keep us on message

- mounted a media relations effort to garner media interest, and this paid off with pre-event publicity from The Charlotte Observer and Fox News Rising. The momentum continues: WCNC-TV visited the facility the day after the event, spending two hours there filming.

- set up a Twitter account for Thompson and began following Charlotte, NC area people with the account

- set up a Thompson cause page on Facebook to involve our non-Twittering friends

During Thompson’s May 11 annual luncheon, its big fundraiser for the year,  our group sat at the Twitter Table,  twittering like crazy, utilizing two 4G Overdrive hotspots that @Sprint provided.

We’ve learned a lot about how to use social media for nonprofits, and I want to figure out how to translate this knowledge to other charities in our area. I’ll get back to you on that once I’ve figured it out.

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Tweeta20 – A Non-Profit Social Media Pilot Project

On Tuesday, May 11, nine Charlotte social media folks and I will spend an hour trying to raise money for Thompson Child & Family Focus, an organization that has spent nearly 125 years providing education, treatment and support for children traumatized by sexual abuse, domestic violence or rampant neglect.

During Thompson’s annual meeting at noon May 11, we will sit at a Twitter Table and encourage our followers to Tweet A $20 or more. Each contributor of $20 or more will be entered to win two tickets to WICKED at Charlotte, NC’s Ovens Auditorium.

We’re using the hashtag #Tweeta20 in all of our social media postings  so we can keep up with the social stream, primarily from our Charlotte area social followers.

How can you help? I’m glad you asked.

• Follow Thompson on Twitter @thompsoncff
• Become a Facebook fan of Thompson Child & Family Focus
• Share news on your blog, in your tweets or Facebook status updates about the promotion and use the #Tweeta20 hashtag
• Follow our Tweets from noon to 1 p.m. on May 11 and please RT our #Tweeta20 tweets
• Go ahead and #Tweeta20. We’re taking donations!
• Send any other ideas you have to tweak our #Tweeta20 promotion.

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Time To Plan

There’s usually some downtime at work around the holidays. What are you doing with your break? I’m using mine to meet with clients and prospects and to complete my planning for 2010. Do you have a marketing plan for the year? What new items are you incorporating into your plan?

Here are a few things I’m thinking about for 2010.

How much should I budget – both in terms of my time and money – toward marketing and PR? Does it make sense to spend it in traditional marketing, in PR, in direct marketing, in social media or in some combination?

Have the media habits of my clients and prospects – marketers and HR executives in Fortune 1000 companies – changed? With which media are they spending more time and which ones have they abandoned? Where is their pain in 2010? Are they still short-staffed and looking for outside resources to round out their teams?

Based on some of the research I’m seeing, it looks like marketing budgets will be up a bit this year.  According to eMarketer,

Next year, while broadcast television, radio, newspaper and magazine spending continue to downsize, though more slowly than in 2009, online ad spending will enjoy a nice bump-up: eMarketer currently forecasts 5.5% growth. And the increase won’t all come from search—banner ads will grow 3.3%, and online video will jump by 40%.

This is shaping up perfectly for My Creative Team, since we have a great deal of expertise in the online environment and in developing flash animation and corporate video for online use.

LinkedIn now connects me to 52 million professionals. Is there a better way to utilize my nearly 600 connections on this social platform? How can I use LinkedIn’s advertising capabilities to reach my target audience, specifically the HR audience? We develop a great deal of employee communication and training materials for Nucor, and would like to expand into HR with other Fortune 1000 firms.

Does a My Creative Team presence on Facebook still make sense since we are focused on Fortune 1000 contacts?

Tell us what you are thinking about. We’d love to hear your thoughts on how you plan to market in 2010.

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Social Media Confuses Businesses

It seems businesses of all sizes are conflicted about how to use social media effectively. In a recent CitiBank/GfK Roper study, about 75 percent of small businesses said that social networks are not working for them.  On the other side of the equation, Gartner says that most Fortune 1000 companies will delve into social media by 2010 but more than half of them will fail.

First of all, small businesses may not clearly understand how social media can help them. Nor, do they know how to measure the impact of social networks.  For instance, friending a brand may not always result in immediate sales. So, the small business reporting that social media doesn’t work is probably not giving the program sufficient time to develop.

Additionally, like businesses of all sizes, small businesses have trouble focusing their efforts. They want to jump into Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter all at once. Now, I believe in utilizing all three of these networks, as does Paul Chaney. However, small businesses should pick one platform that makes the most sense for their customers and master that one before adding another one.

And most of them don’t have the necessary resources to make the most of social media.

We’ve written about this often: strategy should drive tactics, no matter what type of business you run or what type of program you are planning to implement.

Duck Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch agrees that the most successful organizations approach social media with a strategic bent. According to Jantsch,

It’s about connecting, not automation. The best companies are using the latest communication tools not for automation or as “just another tactic,” but to truly connect and create relationships with customers.

Are you having any luck with your social media forays? Wade into the discussion and let us know.

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Connect With My Creative Team

Are you connected with My Creative Team? Here are the ways to get and stay connected:

Facebook

Friendfeed

Think (our monthly enewsletter)

THINKing (RSS Feed)

Twitter

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Stand By Your Brand

With apologies to Tammy Wynette, who warbled the song, Stand By Your Man, now is the time to stand by your brand. If you don’t, someone could hijack it or do it irreparable harm.

Prior to the rise of the Internet, marketers had a reasonable amount of time to respond to misinformation being spread about their brands. That was in the day of the daily newspaper. Instantaneous digital communication now makes it imperative that you be ever vigilant to online conversation about your brand.

You can’t afford to ignore it. Blake Cahaill, senior vice president at Visible Technologies, speaks to this today in a column for Marketing Daily.

Mounting pressure to be the first to break a story, and garner the highest click-throughs on salacious headlines – coupled with the rapid decline of resources allocated to ensure fair and objective reporting – have enabled inaccurate and biased information to flood the Web, often leaving a lasting effect on both businesses and personal identity. 

Complicating this picture is the flood of people joining social networks. Twitter has grown by leaps and bonds recently, according to Mashable. And as OMMA points out in a recent story,

Facebook’s seen its 35-54 demo membership blow up by 276.4 percent between June 2008 and January 2009. The 55-and over contingent grew 194.3 percent in the same amount of time. In comparison, that ever-so-sought 18-24 group bounced just 20.6 percent. The total number of Facebook users aged 35-plus in October 2007 totaled just fewer than 845,000, while as of this past January, their combined might totals just less than 8 million – 18.9 percent of the total Facebook pie.

Boomers, if we are not happy with a brand, will talk about it anytime online or offline. You need to protect your reputation. It is a bankable asset that must be kept safe. So, take Tammy’s advice, stand by your brand.

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Links – 5/22/2009

Here are a few item we are reading today that you may also find of interest:

Consumers Like Newspapers Less Than They Do Airlines

In the first quarter of ’09, newspaper customers’ satisfaction rating was 63. To put this in some perspective, those surveyed expressed a greater deal of satisfaction with airlines (airlines!) which scored 64. And cell phone providers (cell phone providers?) which score a 69.

Yahoo Helps Newspapers Book Local Ads

About 150 or so papers have started using a new platform meant to simplify ad targeting and selling that Yahoo delivered last fall. Another 350 or so are up next. The new platform was largely responsible for a 30% increase in online-only ad sales across Scripps newspapers in the first quarter, according to Scripps.

E! Harvesting Celebrity Tweets

E! is planning to harvest the power of Twitter for “Celebri-Tweets.” The network will run tweets from a number of celebrities in the news crawl at the bottom of the screen during its programming. In addition, E! will feature a “Celebri-Tweet” widget on its homepage keeping users up to date on what the celebrity Twitterati are saying in 140 characters or less.

Email Continues To Perform For Retailers

Compared with last year, 56.4% of retailers report their typical sales conversion rate for an e-mail marketing campaign remains about the same. More than one quarter of survey respondents, though, report conversion is up: 22.8% say up slightly and 3.7% up significantly. Only 17% report conversion is down: 13.7% say down slightly and 3.3% down significantly.

FaceBook Fights Phishing Scam

Facebook was hit with another round of phishing attacks Thursday, cluttering members’ inboxes with messages attempting to send them to sites to steal their login information. 

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Get Social Fresh

I’m part of a group which is presenting a social media conference, Social Fresh, in Charlotte, Monday, August 24 at the Holiday Inn Center City. Consider this your invitation to attend. You can register here. Here’s what we have announced so far:

We are very excited announce our first round of speakers. From left to right above, Jim Deitzel of Rubbermaid, Keith Burtis of Best Buy, and Social Media evangelist Wayne Sutton, Laurie Smithwick of Kirtsy.com, Chris Harrington of @VoteWoz, and Social Media developer Mike Rundle. These experts and panel announcements can all now be found on our Content page. We have many other speakers in the works from Fortune 500 companies, hip new social media companies as well as social networking power houses.

This is a solid group of social media experts. If you want to learn about where technology is going and how social media can be harnessed for business purposes, then you need to attend.

Additionally, we are accepting sponsors for the event. If you are interested, please sign up here and we’ll get back to you to discuss our sponsorship packages.

Keep apprised of more announcements by following us on Twitter @sofresh.  Below is the rest of our contact information. Hope to see you at the first Social Fresh.

Links

Site – http://socialfresh.com
Tickets – http://sofreshclt.eventbrite.com
Twitter – @sofresh
Contact – info at socialfresh.com
Hashtag – #sofresh
LinkedIn – Fresh SM Pros
Facebook – Social Fresh Page

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