Flickr photo credit: Loren Javier
While it still plays a big part in society and business, human gatekeeping needs to be supplemented or replaced by technological gatekeeping in order for organizations to scale. Some technological gatekeeping is put in place to hide or remove public information. The CEO’s direct line can’t be listed on the company website, and his or her email address shouldn’t be something easily guessed, like firstname.lastname@companyname.com. In 2009, The Radicati Group projected that the number of spam emails sent per day would reach 424 billion in 2013, making up 84% of all messages. But, thanks to automated filtering, only 20% of them actually show up in inboxes. This gatekeeping comes at a significant cost, however, as the same report found that medium to large companies are spending millions each fighting spam.
Some gatekeeping occurs without the people behind the gate ever knowing it. Controlling the flow of information is one of the oldest forms of gatekeeping, and we often have no say in the matter. Media outlets choose which programs and content to air, newspapers choose what to print, and the audience traditionally has no say in these decisions. Information that is of high value may never reach us, and in the old media environment, the best we could hope for was that some of it does. As we’ll explore in later chapters, social has radically changed both distribution and consumption. It amplifies our ability to reach and influence people with information, and is not constrained by the same level of media gatekeeping.
Flickr photo credit: A. Davey
Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!
-Alexander Graham Bell, March 10, 1876 (the world’s first phone call)
inviting coworkers
-Jack Dorsey, March 21, 2006 (the world’s first tweet)
Social media has created an incredible array of side doors, and all of them remain open—if you know where to look. Right now, social media is the telephone before secretaries and voicemail. It’s email before spam and autoreplies. History tells us that this degree of access is not sustainable, and side doors don’t stay open. Sometime soon, we’ll be telling “remember when” stories. It’s up to you: do you want to be the storyteller, recalling how good the social side doors were for you, or do you want to be the audience, wishing you had known—and acted?
One year after Bell invented the telephone, the world had 3,000 working telephones. Think about the calls placed to and from those first 3,000 telephones, the excitement with which they were placed and received, and the elite circle that one instantly entered just by placing one of them. By dialing a number, one could connect directly with those who are all but unreachable by other means, an exclusive channel of access that opened up for these early adopters alone—a technological side door.
The normal rules of polite society would, of course, apply to early telephone communication—no foul language, no harassment or violations of privacy. But outside of these limitations, one would have free reign to explore a brand new communications channel. The voices on the other end were no doubt tinged with the excitement of early adoption. Most calls were between familiar parties, and the telephone was a new way for existing contacts to connect. For the most part, it helped maintain and build relationships, not start them.
There were certainly a lot of doubters of the telephone’s potential. Among them was Western Union, who dismissed the technology in an 1876 internal memo: “The telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” On the other end of the spectrum, there were early evangelists, who trumpeted the telephone’s invention without much evidence of its eventual success—some of history’s lucky guessers. In between the two extremes were the early adopters, who focused on the telephone’s utility at the time and stayed out of the predictions business.
This is where we find the opportunists throughout history. They’re busy putting the technology of the day to work for them. Whoever made the world’s first sales call was among this group. I imagine this person taking a deep breath as the operator connected them to their intended prospect. The recipient answers, expecting a familiar voice, only to find a stranger on the other end. An exchange of greetings, and then the moment of truth. Does the prospect hang up, or cut the conversation short? Or does he or she sit and listen to what the stranger has to say? I suspect it’s the latter. The recipient has no concept of phone solicitation. It probably hasn’t yet dawned on them that this new network can even be used to conduct business between people or firms. To him or her, the person on the other end of the call is not a nuisance, but a member of a limited circle in which having access to a connected telephone is the sole qualification. And people do business with those in their circles, even if the circle was entered through a side door.
It was early 2010, and I wanted to make the jump from salesman to marketer. I had almost no on-paper experience in marketing, and my resume was far from impressive. That cell phone kiosk was the first interview I had, and I went to it because I had begun to doubt whether anyone would give me a chance in marketing.
A few days later, still feeling pretty hopeless about my situation—why did I major in Political Science again?—I found a blog post about a young PR job seeker named Grant Turck. He had targeted the agencies he wanted to work for with Facebook ads, and he was getting some interest, as well as publicity from well-known bloggers. I decided to give Grant a call, and he was happy to walk me through his strategy.
Even before the first click, I felt a renewed optimism. I was doing something different, something only a handful of people had tried—ever. My Facebook ad targeted marketing managers and executives in Austin, mentioned the fact that I was looking for a job in social media, and finished with, “Can you help? Click here.” I put together a special Hire Me page on my blog, linked the ad to it, and waited.
It started with a few blog comments from well-wishers. Then I got a handful of emails offering to connect me to companies that were looking for talent. Within a week, I was talking to hiring managers, setting up interviews, and getting consulting inquiries. It was working, and I promised myself I wouldn’t settle for the first offer on the table.
Three weeks and less than $200 in ad fees later, I had multiple offers to choose from, all of which were infinitely better than that damned cell phone kiosk. While weighing which offer to accept, I got a call about a job I had previously been screened out for. It was perfect for me: a social media manager position at Bazaarvoice, my top pick for employers. I had written about wanting to work for them in a blog post about my job hunt, and the CMO had found it after my post had triggered a Google Alert for the company name and sent him an automated email. Several interviews and a test presentation later, I had my dream job.
Writing about the experience brought me some attention, and has helped a lot of other dispirited job seekers. But I had stumbled onto something much bigger than a new job hunting technique. I had found an entirely different way of doing things, an alternate path to achievement in almost any realm. Why stop there?
What I found was a social side door, a way around the barriers that pose constant threats to our forward progress. I later realized that I had found social side doors before, but hadn’t known them as such. In my sales work, I had been using my active social media presence to reach prospects that were otherwise unreachable. Before that, working in collections, I had honed a detective-like knack for tracking down and reaching out to people that had learned not to pick up the phone or return email. And now, working in marketing, I’ve developed ways of engaging with C-level business decision makers and earning more of their budget for my company. I’ve been able to interview my heroes, people like Seth Godin. My words have been printed in Harvard Business Review, and I’ve written for many of the top blogs in the world. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, but it continues to happen for those of us that have the discovered social side doors in our lives and careers.
Social side doors have opened everywhere. Through them, we can engage with billionaire business leaders, famous authors and heads of state. We can shift massive amounts of spending in our company’s direction. We have the unique ability to earn the attention of people and organizations that are bombarded every day by countless competing traditional requests for attention and consideration—resumes, emails, phone calls, invitations, meetings and more.
Through these side doors, a universe of opportunity exists that few people are even aware of. My job is to explain how these side doors are changing our world, and to show you how to discover them for yourself. Your job is to walk through them before they are overrun and, inevitably, locked. We’ll talk to some truly fascinating individuals on both sides of the side door, and learn how access has changed, and will continue to change.
The delta between our aspirations and reality might be wide, but social media offers us more ways than ever to navigate it—if we can find the social side door.
It sure beats the hell out of pushing cell phones at the mall.
Flickr photo credit: user Maggie Osterberg
When people talk about social data, they usually focus on two dimensions that are relatively easy to measure and articulate—volume and source growth. More data coming from more places. But something else is happening with a lot of social data that makes it difficult to draw conclusions from on its own—noise is increasingly making it difficult to achieve true signal strength. A lot of companies may be experiencing this without even realizing it.
Let’s say I’m a corporate user of the average listening tool, and I’m trying to trend some of the standard social metrics over time. Specifically, I’m looking at number of mentions, follower/fan/subscriber numbers, and sentiment for Twitter, Facebook and blogs.
Mentions
Imagine that hundreds or thousands of tweets and blog posts mention my brand every week, and that number went up this week. In raw form, what does that number tell me? On the surface, it tells me we’re doing something right…right? Not necessarily. How many of the accounts that tweeted it are actually human, controlled by humans and followed by other humans? Estimates of the prevalence of Twitter spam accounts are difficult to come by, but some are as high as 48% and even 57%. It’s clear that spam mentions shouldn’t factor into your assessment of your brand’s social performance, but that’s just the tip of iceberg. Redundancy matters, too. If two accounts for the same entity tweet the same positive thing about your brand, for instance, that doesn’t mean you have two advocates. The best you can hope for is that different sets of real people follow them, and that same message thus reaches more people.
Within that spike of activity, you notice that blog mentions of your brand have gone up. You dig a little deeper and see that the blogs are actually saying the same exact thing—down to the letter. It’s scraped content that has been duplicated over and over across the web, usually without the original author’s permission. Maybe a keyword in the text triggered it, or maybe your own content has been added to a feed that disseminates it into hundreds of nearly-identical (and totally useless) scraping sites across the web. If only one of these mentions is original content, and 100 of them are scraped content, the raw data tells you that your presence on blogs has increased a hundred times over. It hasn’t. In fact, if it’s your content, you’re likely being hurt because duplicate can hurt your search rankings.
Sentiment
Now let’s talk sentiment. Most tools out there today for assessing sentiment from unstructured social data aren’t very accurate, but that’s not a problem with the data itself. One of the biggest problems is that most companies want to know the sentiment of people toward their brand and products, and raw, unstructured social data is full of data from non-people, like automated RSS feeds. For example, if my company puts out a press release—which of course will contain a lot of positive text—and it’s picked up by 10 different automatic Twitter or blog feeds that post things from the various press release wires out there, this tells me absolutely nothing about how people feel about my brand. If an actual human reads the release and posts something negative about it, my aggregate sentiment data is going to reflect something completely false: that positive sentiment is 10 times higher than negative sentiment.
Followers/fans/subscribers
On to follower/fan/subscriber numbers. Would you rather have100 followers/fans/subscribers that never interact with you in any way, or one follower that does? The only thing those 100 followers can do for you is provide a tiny amount of social proof by making you look more important to people that use follower count as a proxy for importance. But if your single follower actually pays attention to you, responds to your calls to action, or shares your content with their followers on occasion, he or she is way more valuable to your brand—and you’ll have to earn it.
What’s a brand to do?
Tom Foremski outlines the problem well:
“Accurate data on social media users is essential. It’s the foundation of all successful social media marketing and advertising campaigns: the precise targeting of related groups of users with their interests.”
The best solution to this problem has three parts.
- Raw, unstructured social data needs to be processed, filtered and cleaned up before it means much of anything
- Once signal is separated from noise, it should be paired with reliable data from other sources to create a more accurate, holistic view of your customers. For example, you can match your social data to your CRM records
- Look for direct results, not proxies. Are visitors from Facebook converting at higher or lower rates than other visitors? How much did revenue increase after a product change was made based on your analysis of social feedback?
None of these things are particularly easy. All of them are totally worth it.
Tweets, Facebook updates and news headlines are strikingly similar in two ways:
- They convey limited information at breakneck speed
- Their value is entirely contextual
Social updates are short by design. They each tell part of a larger story. Their accuracy and usability depends on the credibility of the person creating them, and the content they reference and link to. People get this, mostly. But no one can read the piece behind every link, or separately assess the authority of the people sharing it with them.
Headlines work the same way. We can’t get the full story from them alone. We can’t truly say whether we agree or disagree with an article if we’ve only read its headline. The article and author behind the headline give it almost all of its value.
But we take shortcuts, because it’s impossible to fully evaluate every piece of content aimed our way. If I trust The Economist, I’m not going to be as skeptical of its articles as I would be of the “news-repurposing turbine” that is HuffPo. If my friend is an amazing cook, the opinions she tweets about food will carry more weight than tweets from my culinarily-challenged college roommate. And if enough people point to a headline, people start to think the headline tells more of the story than it actually does. It’s human nature.
When the conversation is about something as complex as social, that effect is amplified. How do headlines like these shape our understanding of social’s value?
- Social Media Impact On E-Commerce Called Overrated
- Facebook, Twitter Fail to Promote Brands; Offline Works Better
- Most Consumers Still Don’t Talk About Brands on Social Sites
- M-Commerce Rocked the Holiday Season. Still No Word About F-Commerce
- Why Social Isn’t Helping Online Retailers Find Customers
Together, these headlines appeared in thousands of tweets, Facebook and Google Plus posts. The research and reporting behind them is actually pretty solid and nuanced. But headlines and nuance don’t mix well. As a result, the conversation has a difficult time evolving past the narrowly-defined, shortsighted understanding of social’s value.
Traffic, conversion, followers, likes, mentions (we might as well add pins to the list now)—all good things to celebrate, monitor, analyze and even worry about. There’s a whole other universe of value to unlock. We get there by trying our damnedest to answer questions like:
- What do my customers actually care about?
- What are they getting out of sharing their data with me?
- How can we build social experiences without building barriers?
- How can better data move “influencer engagement” past sending people free stuff, and hoping that they’ll blog about it?
One of the unfortunate realities of the conversation about social is its tendency to swing between hyperbole and incredulity. It’s just like political coverage in this way:
Hyperbole
- Fake SM headline: Drop everything and get on [new social network or tool] now—or you’ll be sorry
- Fake political headline: [Candidate name] is unstoppable
Incredulity
- Fake SM headline: What’s so great about [new social network or tool]?
- Fake political headline: [Candidate name] wins [state name], but does she really have a chance?
If there’s one thing we in new media love talking about—and writing about—it’s how different “our” new media is from “their” old media, how much better we are. In a lot of ways, we are better. But on this point, whether we’re really less prone to sensationalism and superficial exploration of topics that deserve deeper digging, I think we’re far from proving it. Let’s change that.
Flickr photo credit: WoofBC
This one’s going to be short. Here we go…
Social professionals don’t get to decide that ROI isn’t important. Our clients and bosses decide that, and it’s usually coming from the right place. We can joke among ourselves about ROI-crazed executives and managers, but I think we all know that it’s pretty cool that our companies are putting any money into social–into us–at all. Of course they want to know what they’re getting for it.
That’s one end of the ROI attitude spectrum, the scoffers. I’m not going to devote this post to proving that social ROI can be calculated–that’s something they’ll need to do for themselves (before someone higher up asks for it).
At the other end of the ROI attitude spectrum are the obsessed. They believe in social ROI, as they should. But the way they think about it is neither sustainable nor scalable. To them, ROI is something that justifies what they’re doing. Sometimes it’s even a defensive calculation, as in, “I can’t believe they’re shrinking the social budget–just look at this ROI!” Most of the ROI-obsessed rarely have to play that card, because they’ve always got their finger on the number, which figures into all of their reporting, etc. But why tread water when you can swim? Both will keep you from sinking, but swimming gets you somewhere.
Reporting is good. ROI is good. They both have so much more to offer. Truth is, if we obsess on reporting-as-justification we only get a sliver of the ROI we could see if we used reporting as a basis for optimization. That’s right, improvement.
Social is the most dynamic, interesting development to hit business in the last few decades, and we’re using numbers in a static, one-dimensional quest for approval. Imagine if we decide to devote 10% of our reporting to justification, and the other 90% to improving what we do, and delivering more ROI than before.
Who would disapprove of that? Let’s stop treading water and see where swimming takes us.
This post started as a comment on Brian Solis’ blog.
I've got problems. Flickr photo credit: faberzeus
Champagne problem:
n. A choice between two positive or ideal things; a problem that actually demonstrates one’s good fortune.
It’s hard to think of something that I would write about here, but not on my company’s blog. Let me assure you that this is a champagne problem, not a case of low standards. But it still feels like I’m letting someone down by not updating this more often; perhaps that someone is you.
The truth is that social media exaggerates our sense of self-importance. I admit that I feel a tinge of guilt when thinking about the dearth of content on this blog, as if you’re sitting there twiddling your thumbs, just waiting for my next burst of genius. Ha.
At the beginning of 2011, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to consistently update this blog with quality content, because in reality, that would be at the expense of quality content for my employer. Here’s the math I used:
- I like when people read my writing
- My employer benefits (inbound contacts, 3rd party coverage, etc.) when I post on their blog, and also when I guest post on 3rd party blogs
- Tons of people read Bazaarblog and blogs like Convince and Convert, SME and MarketingProfs
- This blog’s audience is far, far more…intimate
- So, it makes more sense for me to write original content for other blogs
Add to that the book I’m trying to write and the wedding I’m trying to plan, and tons of fresh posts here just aren’t in the cards. Instead, here’s a roundup of some of what I’ve been writing about lately elsewhere.
- I wrote about brands that let their customers drive, and brands that are too afraid to give up the wheel.
- I unfairly divided everyone working in social into two species: foxes and hedgehogs. Everyone thinks they’re the fox, but just like geniuses, we can’t all be one.
- I tempered our current enthusiasm for social data with a dose of reality—most companies won’t be able to harness its value until they understand the three major impediments to proper social data analysis.
- I explored what I know best—b2b social media, and argued that only data will assuage the doubters.
Getting content shouldn't be like pulling teeth. (Flickr credit: US Army Africa)
Managing is different than creating. But social media is so new, so amorphous, management and creation are usually conflated out of necessity. Companies hire social media managers to manage and create content. They’re the ones doing the listening and the talking, the posting and the writing. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these dual responsibility sets. In fact, managing social media from concept to execution across every channel gives the social media manager a tremendous amount of room to do things their way, and in many cases, to be recognized as the public face of a company’s social presence.
But when it comes to blogging, many social media managers find themselves struggling to keep up with demand for content. Their successes fuel this demand, which feels great, until other projects suffer as a result. Shortly after I first started at Bazaarvoice, I wrote Un-silo your social. At that point, keeping up with the “content curve” was already a challenge, and I laid out the things I had learned about getting others within the company to contribute content. Well, more than a year later, I’m still racing against the curve, but I’m catching up. So, in this post I’m going to update the list of content-sourcing tips with two things I’ve learned since then.
1. People must be able to write blog posts instead of some of the other work on their plate, not in addition to it. Unless their boss has bought-in and told them they can devote some of their time to blogging, they won’t do it. It’s not that they don’t want to; they just have priorities that will always trump blogging…unless you work with their superiors to change that. Show the bosses how a well-written blog post from someone in their department benefits them and their work. When it’s them asking for it, not you, you’ll get your content.
2. Merchandize, merchandize, merchandize. Promote the hell out of the internal contributions you do get. Make sure everyone sees that colleagues they know are writing and receiving public credit and praise for their efforts. They’ll want some of that action, too. In fact, if you do this part right they’ll start competing with each other to contribute the best content, the most often. When people realize that blogging is an amazing way to showcase their expertise to an audience beyond their immediate coworkers, they’ll write to get the spotlight to shine on them. It’s your job to make sure it does.
Photo credit: Flickr user mandiberg
Maybe this will be a series. Maybe it won’t. But I’ve got one metric ton of ideas to unload, and the bandwidth to pursue just a few with passion and tenacity. The last time I shared an idea, some very smart people ran with it and I was beyond pleased. There’s always the chance I’m the only one that thinks it’s a good idea, but all it takes is one good idea to make incredible things happen. So shall we do it again?
The need:
“Whatever happened with that [insert once- deafeningly-buzzy news story from a few weeks/months/years ago that has since been bumped out of the news cycle a million times over]? I wonder [how that turned out / what they discovered / if they ever caught him / where they are now / if they succeeded]?”
Recognize that thought? To answer a question like this, you google the few details you remember and what do you find? The original story, over and over. And then you give up, because you’re wasting your time.
The idea:
A site dedicated to following up on once-popular news items. Crowdsourced and fueled by curiosity, it would become the go-to destination for such questions and their answers. Post links to news items you’re trying to update, or take the initiative to post a wrap up. Dedicated editors (more feasible if monetized) create special features, follow-ups to the biggest stories of yesterday. This content will be irresistibly shareable, and the most interesting stories will generate viral loops that bring in fresh visitors continually, and so on.
If you like it:
Tell me how it could be better. Create a wish list of features in the comments. Experiment. Have at it, and keep me in the know!
The Blogville Ghost Town. Image credit: Flickr user Pascalbovet.com
Every tech company in the world thinks they’re innovative. A fraction of them truly are. The companies that have widespread recognition as innovators had to earn that recognition before anyone would listen when they talked about themselves. But the majority of tech companies talk about themselves as if they’ve earned your attention. And they haven’t. They imagine you’ll come back again to read more. And you won’t.
This is a low barriers to entry story, as is so much else in social. Blogs are free or cheap to own or build. They cost nothing to use. Why bother devoting time and energy to creating great content for something that you and I and everyone else can get for free? “But if my website comes with a blog, I have to put something up there,” says the tech company. “What do I have lying around here? Let’s see…release notes, press releases, customer testimonials…” Those are easy to cross-post on a blog, and they make that vacant real estate look like it’s been lived in. They’ll quickly find that these post types aren’t the golden content they’ve been looking for, so they resolve to create some original content of their own. It’s a step in the right direction.
Then they discover how easy it is to blog about themselves. “I could do this all day,” says the CxO, or marketing guy, or PR intern. And they could! But no one reads it, or cares. Sooner or later, when that ROI never appears from the ether, they give up. And then they’re really blogging like a tech company, because they’re actually blogging so infrequently, it’s a sad little ghost town of quarterly posts.
Because people only care what you do or think once you’ve given them a reason to.
Google could devote 12 blogs to how it cleans its bathrooms at the ‘plex, and thousands of people would read them every day. Marc Benioff could blog about his hand soap collection, and people would care, because they care about Marc Benioff; they want to get inside his mind. But 99% of tech companies aren’t there yet.
Blog like you have something to prove, even if you don’t think you do.
Get rid of the product release content and write about the ideas that led you to that release. Congrats on winning that award, but your blog is a better place to talk about the philosophy that enabled the work that qualified you for entry, or what you learned along the way. What is the space your solutions are filling? Blog about that space, not those solutions.
At a certain point, you’ll know when people are really listening, and you can flip the switch and start writing about yourself. But take note; even the best, most revered tech companies in the world don’t write about themselves exclusively.
The best tech companies tell great stories in which they’re not always the main character. But by mastering this idea-driven storytelling, they are positively associated with the ideas expressed. If you put 10% of the thought that you put into your products into your blog, you can come out ahead of the 99% of tech companies that see their blog as a content dump.
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