Are you tired of hearing that social media is a dinner party?  As good an analogy as the dinner party is, it's insufficient to win the support of top executives on why they should or shouldn't engage in blogs, twitter, facebook, etc.

While sitting with a client, the topic once again came up of social media opening the company to criticism.  And in one of those rare flashes of brilliance, it came to me.

Social Media for corporate clients is a doctor's office.

Here's your new pitch.

The analogy works because more and more people are online, and searching for information.  Companies who hide, leave only the gossip on the table.  The traditional corporate communications messaging is akin to drug pamphlets and questions about the common cold.  You can only read so many pamphlets on PloVax before you reach for the Enquirer.  And if you're not engaged, you're allowing your competitors to provide their news to your customers and clients. 

People get their news online in a myriad of formats.  Companies have a tremendous amount of intellectual capital in the minds of their employees, but they rarely find someone who can find that knowledge and broadcast it to the public.   A good social media program doesn't replace corporate communications, but it does show the competence, passion, and interests of the people who work for that company.  And given the chance, the people you are most interested in reaching, be their customers, future employees, or prospects, want to know more about you.

Give it to them, before someone who doesn't have your best interests in heart reaches them.

Social Networking is an easy target for attack these days, and one of the complaints is it's growing so fast you can't keep up.  "Experts" are derided because social media is too big to know everything. It's a valid argument, and let me explain why.  Let's say you follow 500 people on Twitter.  There are 7,000,000 people and growing on Twitter.  No matter what you think of Twitter, you're getting only a tiny, non-representative portion of the community.  This was true of blogs before they exploded, and was true of LinkedIn before 30 million people joined.

It's the same problem as that of the Renaissance man.  Back in the mid 1700's, it was reasonable to know quite a bit about the world around you.  You could pick up in 20-30 years most of the scientific, historical and artistic knowledge available.  Of course, this was never complete, as it was only the Western world, and the accepted history, science and philosophy the time that one could learn, but it certainly felt that way.  Today, medical students find out that 5-10 years after graduation, half of what they learned is now wrong.  Talk about your information overload!

That's where we are now.  Social media is already too big to really understand.  Your perspective is going to be shaped by who you spend time with.  Thus your statements will be true only for small and specific portions of the networks in which you spend a substantial amount of time.  The trendy definition of spending 10,000 hours on a subject to become an expert is a joke.  When the subject matter is larger than your capacity to follow in ten lifetimes, expertise can only be won in small corners.

But that's the point. You don't need to be a social media expert.  You need to be expert in the way that social media improves your business, and that's it.  You can be an expert in hiring college graduates in Facebook, or an expert in selling cars on eBay, or an expert in using Twitter to generate leads for your accounting business.

There is but one unbreakable rule in social media expertise when it comes to business.  

Are you making money from your actions, and are you making money for other people?

Does it work for you, or does it not?  Does your time online yield a useful result, or does it not?  Yes, this means there is no one right way to use social media tools. There are, however, hundreds of wrongs to use social media tools.  Are you getting value for your time on social media?  Many people are.If you not able to measure that, the problem is between the seat and the keyboard.

Say it loud and say it proud.  I'm a social media expert in Small Business.

Hibbs Homes is a client of ours, and while working through some training this week, I took the opportunity to ask Kim Hibbs some quick questions about social media.  The Hibbs are custom home builders (and you might recognize Kim from his time as a television reporter and anchor). They've only started on Twitter (the blog is coming next), but in one week, Kim has made contacts that he feels have helped him professionally.

Wait until we get him working on LinkedIn and Facebook. My goal for them is to generate a referral for at least one house through Twitter in the first six months, and to generate traffic from Facebook, and LinkedIn to his blog, generating another referral. It's a small goal, but an effective one. Kim (@kimhibbs) and his wife Jan Hibbs (@janhibbs) are not trying to be social media rockstars. They're just using their connections to improve their online profile. All content you see from them, is written by them.


This is a series of small business interviews I'll be doing with St Louis businesses. If you are one of these people, using Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or others, follow me at @brandstorming and let me know when we can sit down for a few minutes.

I'm not sure when it became okay to make fun of MySpace.  On Twitter and Facebook and in social media blogs, mocking MySpace for their layouts, or wondering if anyone uses it anymore has turned into a throwaway comment, kind of like making fun of the Detroit Lions or Chicago Cubs.  It's safe to do so.

But it's also rather snobby. Other social networks may be snazzier.  The cool kids may still tell each other that only losers and porn stars waste time on MySpace, but if you're a marketer, and you want to dabble in social media, you better know the truth before you decide to commit marketing dollars. That truth - is your target population may very well be on MySpace.

Check out the stats provided by TechnoMarketer from the ad section.  Matt really took the time to break out the difference in the two sites.  Reading through them, you see Facebook rapidly gaining in key areas.  Facebook has an older crowd, and it now has a larger global population.  Most important, the engagement levels are highest.  People on Facebook spend a lot of time on Facebook.  MySpace still skews younger, but while it's traffic has slowed, MySpace has three times the users of Facebook in the under 30 crowd.  That's 40 million more profiles. 

HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE? 
Well, marketers in social media are snobs.  I can say that.  I'm one too. Or at least I was until I actually spent time in MySpace, and started thinking about who spends time there.  Musicians - Video marketers, product marketers - and oh, yeah, all those people who didn't go to a four year college, and quite a few who do.  See, the cool crowd likes the many uses of Facebook and Twitter and Ning.  They like the shiny graphics, and the ego-gratifying connections that are so easy to make.  Add 500 friends on Facebook and you're cool.  Add 1000 on Twitter, and you're somebody.  On MySpace, it's all about personal expression.  It's bad graphics and annoying pop-up music and "friends" who leave comments with dirty pictures on your wall, but it is your space.  You get to decide what it looks like and what you do with it.  And because the emphasis is one the user and not the network, those 60 million people under 30 get to use it for their own purposes, without a lot of press or meddling (except when the newspapers are warning you about sex predators and cyber-bullying).

I'm shocked frankly at the nearsightedness of many marketers.  They don't like MySpace, so they assume everyone else must hate it too.  I say, let's figure out how we can market MySpace friendly products to MySpace friendly populations, and use Facebook friendly products to Facebook friendly populations, and blog-friendly products to blog-friendly populations.  I'm talking to a client who has the perfect product for the MySpace crowd.  If successful, my program won't be sexy.  It won't be trumpeted in our marketing friendly blogs.  But it will serve its purpose, boosting sales to a target population.  We'd all be a lot better served if we focused on that metric rather then on the perceived coolness of the platforms.

I started my career calling out of phonebooks. Way back in the days before job boards and internet sourcing, my roommate told me about his great company he was just hired to that would teach me how to sell. 

What did we sell?  Vacation incentives. These were the buy a car, get a 3day/2 night trip deals that were common in the 90's for retailers.  I happened to work for one of the more respectable of these companies, and my job was to cold-call small businesses across the country to set up appointments for an outside salesperson.

I got my leads from phone books, printed ABI lists, and newspaper clippings sent in from the field. Night after night, I would sit in front of the television and clip ads, building a calling list of 125 names for the next day.  As the company matured, we purchased more leads, and eventually created our own database (run on network that had a whopping 27 gigs of memory), but the skills I learned in list creation have served me well for 13 years.  In every new job, I'd head over to the library and create a calling list for my first week on the job.  Most of the time I'd walk into the interview with a fresh list - proving my commitment to cold-calling.

Today, I wouldn't bother.  The growth of social networks has given me a rich list of business leads to call from, and with google and yahoo directories in front of me, I can easily identify businesses to call and the names of the decision makers at those businesses. Now you may think that years of social media may have turned me into a softy, but I can assure you that the promise of social media goes well beyond Facebook fans and twitter meetups.  For those of us who still consider the phone the most important tool in a salesperson's arsenal, LinkedIn is a tool you simply can't do without.

You search through LinkedIn based on the number of people in your network, but with the right tools, you have access to the entire database.  Here's a taste of what you can do.

 
 

I've spent ten years recruiting in addition to my marketing training, and when you combine sourcing with cold-calling you have the makings of salesperson who can bust quota in good times and bad.

LinkedIn is the best free source of on-demand sales leads online.  In my video training available at the Brandstorming store, I show you those secrets. 

Jacob Morgan writes a thoughtful post on the problems with Social Media Outsourcing.  This has been a hot topic in the Twittersphere lately, and I tackled the problems with Ghost Blogging over at SocialMediaHeadhunter.

Jacob lists why SMO isn't going to happen in a guest post at Lewis Green's site. Some of his points are here

There's more, but this is how I break it down. 

1. Social Media takes client interaction.
2. Most Marketing, Advertising and PR firms are set up to work on specific projects that can be brought back to the shop and completed as a deliverable.  They are not set up to work directly with clients (onsite or otherwise), which is very important to make a social media project a success.
3.  It's difficult to bill clients for work when they have to do a lot of the work.
4.  Internal resources have a hard enough time creating change in an organization.  Outside consultants can listen, but they can't really get at the hard metrics of customer engagement and response expected from customers.

Outsourcing in social media can work at the contractor level. We realized this awhile ago, and now refuse to write for clients or take control of their projects. They have to either allocate resources internally (that we can train) or hire a contractor/freelancer whose job it is to integrate with the company, serving as an additional resource.

Trying to outsource the work might bring some fleeting SEO or profile enhancement metrics, but it won't drive long-term sales, especially as it's discovered.  The same is true for hiring interns, college graduates, or social media specialists with no background in your industry. Experience is what makes social media campaigns interesting. Experience with the tools is not the same as listening to someone who has deep experience in the industry.

I won't go as far as Jacob does - I think outsourcing will occur, but it won't yield results that companies will come to expect. 

I'll be giving a presentation on the effect of social media on corporate communicators this Thursday.

Blogs. Podcasts. Social networking sites. Which of these new technologies can augment your IR practice and help
get your messages out?  And what else should IR practitioners know about the Internet's next frontier?

Join Jim Durbin, vice president of social media at Durbin Media, for an IR-focused discussion covering:

A description of these and other new Internet tools

The role of social media in Investor Relations – how can it aid communication with Analysts/Portfolio managers, individual shareholders, and financial media?

The rules of the game – Q&A in light of SEC regulations and IR best practices.

Examples of publicly-traded companies using Web 2.0 effectively

Join us at Ces & Judy's on Thursday, Nov. 20, for this cutting-edge discussion.

We're also ramping up our small business section, accelerating the timetable for a set of training materials on social media.  No dry theory here, and no, coulda shoulda - we're getting down to brass tacks and showing you how to make money with social media.

I'm in the middle of writing a course curriculum for corporate students, and it's striking how different the material is from that of small businesses.  There is overlap, of course, but the sheer resources of a corporation provide a wealth of opportunity, but also a nightmare in tracking problems.

Small businesses can easily see returns.  Sales are easily tracked when coming from social media referrals, and as the principals or only a few people are involved, credit is easily assigned.  Anecdotal stories reign, and are often enough to convince the owner their investment of money or time was sound.

A company is looking for multiples that run into the hundreds of thousands or millions, and as they have concurrent marketing, pr, and branding strategies running, in addition to a salesforce, it's a lot more difficult to track an enterprise wide social media experiment.  The easy way to do so is to focus on small projects and individuals - if a branch office is using social media, and they are outperforming similar offices, it's a pretty clear sign. But small projects are exceedingly hard to green light in large companies.  They fear innovation because it's hard to implement.

This is why ROI for corporations is built around existing metrics - SEO, traffic, and sales conversions.  Done right, social media becomes part of the overall package for a big company, rather than the sole focus.

You can't do this with smaller companies.  High ranking and traffic is nice, but if it doesn't translate to sales, the small business goes out of business. 

And finally, there's the enterprise wide remake of the all systems using social media principles. This is coming, and the consultant who masters the enterprise-wide system is going to reap some very large rewards. 

I'll be reprising my speech on the impact of social media at the Ritz Carlton tomorrow for the Internet Marketing Summit put on by the DMA and AMA.  The goal of the speech is simple - as the economy slows and less money is spent on branding/marketing, companies are put in a position where they are forced to make do with less.

Social media fits that role perfectly, as so much of it is labor-based instead of consultant based.  The goal is to lay out a number of small actions that can improve your online profile, monitor the web for competitive information, and build a reputation inside of a consumer community that will help you sell your products and services.

I'm not yet convinced that social media should be it's own special position. Yes, community managers are important if you are running a community, but there's still something to be said for training internal people to fulfill social media roles instead of relying on outside consultants who don't understand your industry or company.

So in that role, I'm preparing a series of business training courses that will be out at the first of the year on DVD, available to walk marketers, PR folks, and small business owners through the the minituae of social media programs.

Each DVD is built on the premise of training you to do something for 5 minutes a day that has a big impact on your role in the company. It's past time to stop talking about how social media can help, and start showing how it does help.

More to come...if you're interested in getting notified when products are ready, shoot me an e-mail or follow me on Twitter. 

Public Relations companies and staff are increasingly turning to social media to push their message.  Recognizing the power of blogs and social newssites, these firms attempt to contact bloggers to tell them about new products, events, and exciting new, blah, blah.

You know this, and you've been through it. If you run a blog, you get dozens of press releases a week, and they all suck. And those that don't suck, tend not to follow through when you contact. They're just looking for links and stories so they can tally the results and report back to get paid.

There's a lot of talk and forth about how PR can use blogs, but it should be the other way around.  PR shouldn't blogs to pitch a message, and to be honest, they don't have time to form relationships with hundreds or even dozens of bloggers in the shared information utopia we occasionally hear about.

Instead, social media in general, should be used as the content that Public Relations folks take traditional media.

Most pitches suck.  There's no getting around that.  Social media, on the other hand, is messy and wonderful. Rather than trying to push bad material carefully written to bloggers who may or may not be influential, PR should be monitoring and reporting information from blogs, social media tools, and communities to show how their product/service/company is generating interest in the communities they serve.  How's that for a solution?