THINKing

Social Nets vs. Email

A new Nielsen study shows that social networks have overtaken email as the most popular online activity. Says a story in Adweek,

Active reach in what Nielsen defines as “member communities” now exceeds e-mail participation by 67 percent to 65 percent. What’s more, the reach of social networking and blogging venues is growing at twice the rate of other large drivers of Internet use such as portals, e-mail and search.

No real surprise there. Email is maturing. It has settled into its niche as an excellent longer-form instantaneous communication tool.

How mature? Friend Mark Harrison and I were discussing this recently. Email has become so mature that spam has decreased in our inboxes. Now, we’re starting to see spam infiltrate social media. When spam arrives, so has your medium. You can learn a lot from spammers. But that is a topic for another day.

Eventually, every medium finds its place. Radio didn’t kill newspaper and magazines. TV didn’t kill radio. The web didn’t kill everything else. I’m still a believer in the power of email, as I’ve said on numerous occasions.

Email is a superb customer retention tool. I think its effectiveness in acquiring new customers is suspect. Smart businesses use email to keep customers informed, reinforce their brand and to drive traffic to stores or their online presence. In 2008, the average return on investment for email was $45 for every $1 spent for an ROI of 4,400%. Sounds like email is working to me.

The best marketers have figured out how to integrate all the communication vehicles. Remember, there is a time and season for all things. Do it right and you win.

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Big Brand Blogging

Friend Jim Deitzel handles social media programs for the Rubbermaid brand, a Newell-Rubbermaid company. This is a big brand that truly gets social media, so I thought you might like to hear a bit about their efforts. The content of the Rubbermaid blog focuses on organization, one of their key brand drivers. Some of the recent stories on the blog include a Q&A with a professional organizer; laundry room organization; and festive holiday containers. The brand’s coordinated use of a variety of social media vehicles as a means of marketing content, I think, is the key to their success.

But you don’t want to hear me prattle on. Let’s hear from Jim Deitzel on Rubbermaid’s social media program:

Q: Not many major brands seem to have utilized or been as successful with social media as Rubbermaid has. To what do you attribute that?

Jim Deitzel: I’m not sure that’s an entirely correct statement. Most of the major brands have used or are using one form or another of social media. If you include reviews & ratings, polls, contests with voting, etc. then most brands are doing social media. But newer tools such as blogs, twitter and facebook – only a few companies are currently using them. Rubbermaid, Graco and Sharpie now have blogs. Rubbermaid and Graco both utilize Twitter. There could be many reasons for it. Some of it can be attributed to resources, people, time, etc. I do believe you’ll see some of the other brands beginning to engage soon.

Q: What was Rubbermaid’s primary objective when wading into the social media pool?

Jim Deitzel: Our objective was to connect with people who have an interest in organization. Professional Organizers, who happen to be heavy users of social tools, were the main focus of our outreach efforts.

Q: Can you briefly explain how you got the program started, which social media elements you included in the effort and how the program progressed?

Jim Deitzel: We started our blog and twitter usage at about the same time (actually we had a twitter account since nearly day 1 of twitter, but never used it). The blog began with content surrounding a specific product launch we had last spring. From there it expanded into a more general blog with content surrounding organization.

Q: What has been the most surprising result from the social media effort?
Jim Deitzel: The wonderful connections I’ve made with professional organizers. I have come to know some of them personally and it’s been great. The openness and willingness for them to participate with us has been outstanding.

Q: One of the things I like about your program is the way professional organizers seem to have embraced what you are doing. Can you tell us a little about how that has happened and evolved?

Jim Deitzel: As I mentioned before, one of the key goals was to get in touch with the organizers. Connecting with people online is not much different than connecting with people offline. You meet, get to learn a little about each other, and then begin to have longer and deeper conversations. We now involve professional organizers in our blog, the content on rubbermaid.com, they talk about our products online, and we actually meet up at professional organizer tradeshows. It’s been really great.

Q: You’ve used Twitter and your blog very nicely in a concerted effort. Please tell us how that evolved.

Jim Deitzel: Both tools have their own unique method of communication. Twitter allows for quick, ‘stay in touch’, messages. It can also be used as a ‘look what’s new’ tool. The blog allows for longer length content as well as comments/reponses from our followers. We even ask our followers for input on home makeover projects we are working on.

Thanks, Jim.

If you know of any big brands doing it right, drop me a note or comment on this posting.

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Social Media Best Practices

The OnlineMarketerBlog threw out the challenge for us to discuss our social media best practice. The blog’s author, DJ Francis, called me “impressively tenacious”. That’s politically correct for cranky, I think! Anyway, here goes.

Social media is public relations. PR is about dialogue, always has been. Social media allows us to extend our conversations beyond our limited geography. Despite that, the best practices haven’t changed from PR to social media. My best practice was said in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: to thine own self be true.

What I mean by this and what Shakespeare meant may diverge a bit. I believe that you must be yourself. No false persona. This is the PR advice I have always given clients and used myself. I don’t want to be one person at work, another at home, another with my friends, yet another online. To have a consistent brand, you must always be the real you. You must not let various publics define you.

This is why we so often dislike politicians. They say one thing in California, another in rural North Carolina. They let the audience and the occasion define what they say and how they say it. This is decidedly not being true to yourself. This also is probably why I’ll never be elected to anything. Want to know where I stand on an issue? Just ask me.

It is just too hard to juggle different selves. Even more so with the advent of social media where everything you say is recorded for posterity and fed by RSS, Twitter, and Friendfeed for the world to see.

So, be yourself. End of sermon.

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