Blogging is not a piece of cake

Posted on July 8, 2010 by Crystal King

From Flickr user vovchychkoToday has been a weird day of frustrations for me in the land of giving advice to others on blogging, on a few different levels by very different people, all of whom are ignoring the advice I’ve doled out. I’ve banged my head against the keyboard on multiple occasions over the last few hours. The frustrations essentially stem from the same place–a mistaken understanding that blogging is something that it’s actually not.

What I have been trying to say in a variety of ways today is that:

1. Blogging is not the best way to get rich quick. There are a lot of programs and people out there who will help you set up multiple blogs so you can spam search engines and benefit from advertising impressions but in the end you are more likely to make the guy on top rich while you are left realizing that keeping blog content updated is actually a LOT of work. I’ve been blogging for ten years…and it’s easy enough to look back and see how spotty I am. Ask any successful blogger how much time they spend on making sure it all works well and they’ll tell you it’s not just a matter of setting it up and slapping a paragraph up every once in awhile. And if you think it is, you’ll be sorely mistaken.

2. That blogging is not really a marketing tool. Well, that’s not exactly true. It is, but in a very subtle way. Successful blogs are more media than marketing. They’re a way to establish thought leadership, provide information, create connections, and build and protect brand reputation. People don’t read blogs for the advertising. They want advice and information (preferably non-biased unless it’s a help/support sort of blog) from smart people (and smart companies). If you are only talking about yourself, people tune out. If you only push advertising at them, they’ll never come back. And if you are pushing out content into a network of people that aren’t going to care about that particular type of content, you are just wasting your time.

As for that last comment, part of the reason that I have three blogs is because the content won’t matter to everyone. I have an audience of writers that read my writing blog. They probably could care less about this blog, so why would I embed the information about fiction writing into this blog or promote it in an area that isn’t focused on writers? This seems obvious to me, but apparently it’s not to everyone.

Blogging is hard. I mean just plain hard. You need an ongoing schedule of content to keep people coming back. Then you need to write that content, edit the content and find public domain or Creative Commons licensed photos, videos and other resources to help spice it up. You need to micromanage your software to keep out spam, make sure plugins are updated and that any ad content is relevant and useful for your readers. You need to focus on your readers, providing content that makes them come back. And most time consuming of all, you need to promote the blog–search engines and links on social media are just the tip of the iceberg. The truly successful bloggers know that the blog is just part of the package. It’s about ongoing engagement with other readers (via comments and social media). If you are a company that blogs, those blogs should be a core part of your strategy for outreach.  And hardest of all, to be truly successful, you need to be consistent.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not as consistent as I would like to be on my blogs, for various reasons that I’m ok with at this point in my life. However, over the course of the last ten years I have seen what consistency and engagement does for blog success. When I’m consistent and deeply engaged in my blog community my stats skyrocket. Incoming job offers abound. Article opportunities and guest blogging possibilities come out of the woodwork. Good things happen–when I work hard at blogging. When I don’t, people stop visiting, commenting and engaging.

It’s not rocket science, but it is work.

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Social Media: The Voice of the People

Posted on June 29, 2010 by Crystal King

One of the things that constantly amazes me about the power of social media is how much it changes the fabric of our very society. It forces companies to change the way they do business, policy makers to respond and even sports organizations to revise the way they work.

This was especially evident this morning when I perused Mashable and saw the article about FIFA reconsidering the use of video technology as a result of outrage over so many bad ref calls.  I mean, for years, bad ref calls have been a part of the sports world and many sports clubs have been resistant to adding technology into the mix to determine calls, but in today’s world it just doesn’t make sense. Too many people are watching and more importantly, talking. By eschewing technology physical and virtual riots result because there is no real definitive answer that everyone can see and agree on. Additionally, there are also new security issues at play. The ref making the bad call between England and Germany could be subject to angry fans stalking him down, hunting his personal information down on the Net and taking it out on him and his family. Before social media people just ranted to each other or wrote letters to the editor or in the early days of the Net they would rant on a blog. But now everyone can share that information with a touch of a button. They can watch live video while they are at the game. They can receive information and texts from friends wherever they are. FIFA can’t compete with that. No one can.

A few articles down from the FIFA post on Mashable you can also find another interesting update–Firefox added an incremental update, a very small one, specifically in response to the fact that their most recent browser update caused Farmville to crash. And with 80 million people playing the game, Mozilla was smart to respond quickly. The last thing they want are users defecting to Chrome (my browser of choice), Opera, Safari or heaven forbid, IE.

It’s an interesting example of democracy in action. Or mob mentality. Or perhaps a bit of both.

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There’s bad press and then there’s BAD press

Posted on June 25, 2010 by Crystal King

In 2007, JetBlue had a very bad press day after several of their flights were grounded in a snowstorm, one of which sat on the tarmac for over nine hours without letting passengers leave the plane. The media had a heyday with the news, shredding JetBlue (and I imagine, their stock with it), inciting a whirlwind of angry rants on the Net and leaving JetBlue wondering how to turn it all around. To their credit, CEO David Neeleman issued a public apology shortly thereafter, taking the blame and announcing they were issuing a “customer bill of rights,” a move which prompted other airlines to consider similar actions. Instead of laying low and letting the media pile on the dirt, they stepped up and faced the bad press head on.

That bad PR will always be part of the JetBlue legacy. That incident is referenced in nearly every news report about (and truthfully was the impetus for)  the new Federal regulations about the amount of time passengers can sit on a runway. Yet it no longer hurts JetBlue because they have taken very significant steps to ensure that such treatment doesn’t happen again to their customers.

However, there is BAD press that doesn’t quite go away…that can linger and resurface after many years of hibernation.

Recently, on Reddit, an email memo from Neal Patterson, CEO, Chairman of the Board and Co-Founder of Cerner, a medical software company, has resurfaced. The letter is scathing, ripping into the company’s managers, talking about the incompetence of employees and demanding unrealistic working hours and conditions for the staff. It’s actually a shocking note–the tone is mean, impetuous and essentially, soul-crushing. Why on earth would anyone want to work for someone like that? It’s resonated with many (it did with me–I’ve worked for bosses who were assholes like that) as is evidenced in the comments on the article.

This is where it gets interesting and the fearsome power of the Internet’s dark side comes into play. It’s hard to determine the date of the memo from the majority of the postings about the letter. You have to dig deep into the Reddit comments to realize the note might not be current and likewise, this referenced Star-Ledger article doesn’t deliver the timeline either. Essentially, 9 years have gone by since Patterson sent his horrible missive to his managers.

When the email reached the Web, notably Yahoo, (note that in 2001 there was no social media as we know it–primarily email, Web sites and forums, and Google was nowhere near the giant it is now) Cerner’s stock plummeted 22% down from $1.5 billion (around $17). Pretty significant for an email screw-up.

The company has recovered over the last nine years, with its stock at 76.23 at this writing. Wikipedia even tells us, “In April of 2010, Forbes magazine named Patterson fourth on their annual list of “America’s Best-Performing Bosses” based on a formula for calculating which executives delivered the best shareholder value relative to their total compensation. Factors included stock performance relative to industry peers over the past six years, annualized stock performance during the leader’s total tenure and performance relative to the S&P 500 over that time, and total compensation over the past six years.”

Of course, best-performing doesn’t necessarily mean best boss overall.

Patterson apologized later in an email to employees (you would think he would just steer clear of email after that massive faux pax) and at an event had a comedian joke about the situation as a way to bring levity to the situation. But this is a scenario very unlike JetBlue. An apology isn’t really enough in this case. And I doubt that Cerner decided to compensate employees at all. My hope is that the Board cracked down and demanded better employee programs to build positive morale (and since the company is doing well they must have figured something out), but it is pretty impossible to retract the sentiments expressed in that email. It was character-revealing and it left bare to the world how the company is run from the top-down. I bet they had a hard time bringing in new talent for awhile after that email came out.

Will this 9-year old story matter much to Cerner now? Maybe not. But it could if the fire under this email decides to take off and ends up being passed around via email, Facebook or on other social bookmarking sites beyond Reddit. Web guru and Mahalo founder Jason Calcanis just bookmarked it, so clearly there is buzz. There are two lessons here:

1. If you don’t want it on the Internet, don’t write it down and don’t set yourself up to be recorded via audio or video.  Assume that even the most innocuous information could end up being shared. Very little is sacred and private in today’s world of the Internet.

2. And, as a result, if you have the slightest inkling that you may come across as a class-A jerk, maybe you shouldn’t push that button. Because, trust me, the last thing you want is a PR nightmare years and years after you thought you put it behind you.

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Watching Viral Video in Action: Greyson Michael Chance Does Lady Gaga

Posted on May 13, 2010 by crystal king

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a marketing colleague or one of the many people with whom I discuss social media think that a video of theirs will “go viral.” Whenever I hear that, I struggle not to roll my eyes. It’s very very difficult to create a piece of content that will truly become viral. Ad agencies dream about it--it’s the ultimate goal but not realized very often. Most of the time it happens purely by accident.

Just throwing up a video on YouTube won’t do it. Sending it to all your friends might help a little. Posting a link to your video on Twitter and various social bookmarking sites may push momentum along, but in the end, it comes down to a few things:

  1. Luck. That the RIGHT someone--a person of influence in the social community, with zillions of followers, takes notice and shares your video, with commentary. And even then, that might not work…this is where the luck part comes in.
  2. Original, interesting content. Something that someone hasn’t seen presented in the same way before. Your content might be something totally normal, but with some sort of twist that makes it intriguing. Something that will make the viewer watch beyond the first 10 seconds.

The best example I’ve seen in recent months of a true viral video is that of a 12 year-old Oklahoma kid, Greyson Michael Chance. The video is poorly made…the camera person jerky enough to make you sick, the sound quality is not so hot and it’s just a few minutes of Greyson playing piano at a school recital--the type of video that usually only a mother would love.

But this was different. The unusual is that the kid is 12 but has the confidence and talent to pull off an incredibly difficult popular song by Lady Gaga, “Paparazzi.” He does it with gusto, his fingers flying across the keys and his voice, which I hope matures without cracking, is enough to make you nearly weep. Okay, maybe the last bit is an exaggeration, but you could have a tear or two when you view it.

The luck? It hit Reddit and Digg on Tuesday and was swiftly upvoted. When I first posted the video to my Facebook wall on Tuesday the video had about 1200 or so views. That evening I checked back on a lark…nearly 100,000 views. By yesterday morning he had over 1 MILLION. Ellen announced on her show yesterday she was flying him in for a performance on today’s show. She knows a good thing when she sees it.

This morning? CBS’s Early Show mentioned him. As I write this he has 8,107,977 views. After he performs on Ellen within the next hour I imagine those hits will skyrocket even further.

The kid is an instant star. In less than three days. His parents must be freaking out.

Now THAT is true viral video in action. The stuff most people who make videos can only dream about.

Haven’t seen it yet? Let me indulge you:

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Those Dirty Rotten Public Relations Pros

Posted on September 17, 2009 by crystal king

pubrThis morning I came across an interesting article on Truthout about how major food companies are trying to be “helpful” and let consumers not worry about taking the time to read labels, but instead look for a checkmark that signifies a “healthy” food. Except that the foods labeled as healthy are often anything but.  The article was interesting to me as I’m someone who avoids processed foods and know how much havoc they have wreaked on my family’s health in the last 30 years.

But I took issue with the line in the article, “What we have here is yet another corporate PR scam.”

I see this a lot, especially in relation to political stories.  In this case though, the author of the article doesn’t seem to know the difference between what PR does vs. what marketing does. PR in a corporation like that isn’t going to have much to do with packaging and pushing out product to the masses. Instead they’ll be dealing with the backlash that occurs when editors and bloggers report the story and consumers get upset about the program as a result of the shady tactics of what are probably just a few higher ups with the bright idea to pull the wool over the eyes of their customers.

Over my 16 or so years in marketing and PR, I can’t tell you the countless times where I have recommended where the company I was at shouldn’t talk about a product because it’s only half-baked or is just an idea or one of the 12 people on the board of directors has their panties in a bunch and wants a “press release” to be issued for a reason that makes no sense whatsoever except in their own mind. Or makes sense, as in this case, because their company is losing money and they have demanded a marketing and PR campaign to bolster the sagging sales. That doesn’t mean that the individuals executing said plan are necessarily behind it.

What I’m trying to get at is that the PR professional is often the victim of their clients, whether it is internally or externally, and often, when they ignored when they give advice about the direction of the news (or what may be non-news, unfortunately) they are being asked to promote.

I’m not saying that there aren’t shady people in PR out there. Of course there are, just like there are in any company and in any position and in any industry. I mean, I can point out all sorts of unethical tactics by all sorts of companies. But I think that to give a blanket statement about the “corporate PR scam” is far too general.

Maybe I’m naive. Maybe in the world of politics it’s different and more cutthroat. But in my world I’ve not met many PR pros that are desperate to deceive their customers in order to make a buck. Usually when they are forced to participate in programs that aren’t on the up and up, they’ve cautioned their client or employer about the potential consequences and suggested alternatives. And if it happens too many times, they’re likely to look for another job where they aren’t backed up against such a wall.

I do find that many people don’t know the difference between marketing and PR. They overlap but usually have different roles entirely within a company. Even internally at the companies I’ve worked at I have had to explain what my role is, how PR works, and how I work differently than those on the marketing team. So it’s not surprising that PR tends to get lumped in with marketing, which has a bad name again, as a result of the few.

Over at the Art of Nonconformity, Chris Guillebeau explains really well why people hate marketers.  It boils down to intent. The difference  between influencing and manipulation is a very fine line and those that purposefully seek to manipulate are the reason that both PR and marketing have such a bad name.

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The Next Evolution in Sales & Customer Service: Twitter in CRM

Posted on September 11, 2009 by crystal king

sftwitterEarly this week Salesforce.com announced that they have added Twitter functionality to the latest iteration of their product, Service Cloud 2. This is intriguing news for enterprises and represents some forward thinking by the Salesforce team. Enterprises have been dabbling with Twitter for the last couple of years but it’s been hit or miss as far as creating a scenario of collaboration between the enterprise and the customer. This move by Salesforce.com is an exciting step toward a more holistic relationship between salesperson and customer/prospect.

This makes sense. After all, sales is often a relationship game. If the prospect has a rapport with the salesperson they are going to be more likely to choose that product over one from a competitor. Twitter is all about connections and building relationships. I’m not a salesperson but I can tell you firsthand how much of a difference Twitter has made for me when I go to networking events or conferences and have people say, “I follow you on Twitter,” and boom!  Instantly we have a stronger connection than if I had to get to know them from scratch. I like that they follow me and like that they care about what I’m saying (even if I don’t really know that may be true). The reverse is true as well. Those relationships continue on Twitter after the conference. I pay more attention to that person’s tweets and vice versa. I am more likely to buy or recommend their products or services. The relationship has been formed and extended through the power of social media.

The new features in Salesforce.com allow reps to monitor conversations, respond to customer complaints on Twitter (by easily logging support requests) and to respond directly to customers through the social media service.

To me this move by Salesforce.com demonstrates a crucial step for B2B social media communications. It legitimizes the idea that social media is not just for kids, and not just for sharing silly videos or playing games. It puts social media in the center of the sales cycle, something that will make executives sit up and take notice. It takes the idea of using new media technologies beyond the realms of PR and marketing and takes advantage of the true power of social media — the building and nurturing of relationships.

Suddenly security and Web teams at corporations won’t be able to say that social media is just a way to waste time. Their resistance to new media technologies will have to give way as C-level executives see the power that the tools bring to the sales team and the bottom line. No longer is social media just a marketing trend or means of personal connection. Now it’s a way to build the pipeline and truly grow revenue.

It seems like a small thing but integration along these lines is just the first step toward drastically changing the way that we communicate with the world at large. Email is no longer the end all be all. It’s a small part of a much much larger system to bring people together.

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My love of feedly

Posted on August 9, 2009 by crystal king
Image representing feedly as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

If you are a Firefox user but aren’t using feedly yet, it’s time to take a good look on how it can help you improve your ability to keep on top of the plethora of blogs that you would love to read but feel like you don’t have time to do so.

feedly is a magazine-like layer that works with your Google Reader feeds and provides valuable context and dashboard information on how to get the best out of the news that’s important to you.

There are three main views, the Digest, the Cover and the list of latest posts, as well as the ability to drill down into specifically defined categories.

feedly also adds in Twitter and Amazon to provide you with information on what others are saying or books that can help bolster the information you are reading.

What I love most is the layout. You can easily see photos and videos, clearly see the links and share news with your friends on a variety of social media sites. Best of all though, you can expand each link to see more without having to go to the Web site itself.

You can highlight your favorite blogs so you see them first when you visit feedly and you can easily subscribe to any RSS feed with a tiny Feedly icon  in the address bar.  There’s also a Karma feature that works a bit like bit.ly and other link services in that it allows you to see how many people click through your links on Twitter.

Essentially feedly makes a lot of the extraneous sites you may have used to manage your feeds and information completely unnecessary. You can do most everything you need right from feedly.

It’s changed how I read my RSS feeds and has enabled me to better manage the content that I care about.  I get the top posts right up front and can easily drill down to receive additional information. When I visit other Web sites I get a small flag in the bottom right corner that gives me the ability to share the post in feedly and Google Reader, to favorite it, share it on Twitter or it may recommend other related links.

Suddenly the way that I view my RSS feeds is interactive, contains context and helps me to be more organized, productive and to become better educated (or amused! I do have a celebrity category!).

With so much information available at our fingertips, it will be tools like feedly that will truly transform the way people use the Net. Creating interaction and context through aggregation, using an easy-to-use dashboard/home page provides immense value. Tweetdeck and Seesmic also come to mind when it comes to these sorts of tools.

So now I wonder, why hasn’t Google bought feedly yet? What it does for Google Reader is truly game changing.

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Scalejacking: Quantity Over Quality

Posted on June 23, 2009 by crystal king

redsocialIn a recent post, Seth Godin talked about how Dave Balter, CEO of BzzAgent, coined the term “scalejacking”  to refer to the practice of inflating your social media network followers by any means possible.

It describes the quest of marketers for size at all costs. Because marketers were raised on the scale of mass—TV, radio, newspapers—they have a churn and burn mentality.

You can find this happening on most social media sites but it’s especially noticeable on Twitter where you often will see people with anywhere from 10,000 to 35,000 followers. It seems impressive at first, but then you realize (or if you haven’t, you should) two things:

  1. There is no way that the account owner can possibly keep up with that many people and much of what they can grasp may be completely irrelevant to their primary interests/goals.
  2. Many of those followers are likely to be spam or just other people trying to jack up their follower count.

Having such scale is useful for many types of companies and organizations. CNN for example, as a media company, wants their stories to get out to as many people as possible and for the most part it doesn’t really matter who that follower is. This may be the case with consumer companies as well who can benefit from scale, but for most people and organizations, mass scale isn’t necessarily the thing you might want to have. As Seth mentions:

Scalejacking inevitably tarnishes most communities, because individuals (people) hate being treated like numbers just standing by to be filtered. [snip] On the Internet, the mantra that works is, “Be with the ones you love (and the ones that love you.)”

On a personal level, I try to follow this faithfully, in part because I just don’t want the extra work of weeding through all the information/people to get what I want. For example, in Facebook I limit it to people I actually know or with whom I have a significant rapport. In Twitter I will only follow you back if you appear to be someone who is interesting in some way, who may have similar interests to me (mostly marketing, mobile, books, writing, poetry, food, Boston) or who I actually know. I do work to reciprocate follows but in the end, it is about the quality of the possible relationship that decides it for me.

At my company, CA, we have found that with Twitter this is especially true. We’re not looking for mass followers (although in some ways it would be nice and impressive) as much as we’re looking for quality.  For example, having 10 influencers (bloggers, analysts, editors, freelancers) following is, for us, better than 100 random unknown followers. Reaching customers and prospects is more probable when we narrow it down to specific verticals than if we are looking for as many followers as possible.  Again, it’s more about finding ways to cultivate what might become a mutually beneficial relationship.

B2B companies in particular should steer clear of scalejacking scenarios. Many consumer marketing/communications initiatives might benefit from driving follower counts to huge levels, but for the most part, that’s not the case with B2B organizations. In the B2B world, many products have very long buying life-cycles. It takes a long while to find the customer, sell to the customer, implement and then there may be a long subscription cycle that follows. Quality in these cases is FAR better than quantity. If you can nurture and build a relationship over time, you have a better chance of keeping and up-selling that relationship over time.

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The Art of Timing: Google Wave vs. Microsoft Bing

Posted on May 29, 2009 by crystal king

Yesterday Google did something that most companies dream about doing–they stole the thunder away from its biggest competitor. Granted, the Google/Microsoft rivalry is a big one, and they are always at each other’s throats, but from a communications perspective, it’s a great example of how timing can be everything when it comes to news in the high tech world. 

Pre-announcing vs. a live unveil is always a tricky decision in the world of communications. Pre-announcing a product can build incredible hype, as Google knew when it decided to talk about Wave yesterday. Or, it can also backfire, as it did for Microsoft Bing (why the name Bing, btw? All I think of is Mr. Crosby himself, or a bowl of cherries). If Google had not come forward with Wave yesterday perhaps the pre-announce of Bing would have been the talk of the Net, but as it was, Microsoft lost its opportunity, not just because of the power of Google Wave, but also because it could have made a much much bigger impact, despite the Google news, if it had launched the new “decision” engine yesterday. 

People want instant gratification. It’s the same with editors and bloggers who are writing the stories. So when companies pre-announce (especially weeks or months in advance) in no way will it have the same impact. Sometimes anticipation will build, but you better have a stellar product coming out of the gate.  Google Wave is impressive, but imagine the news and feedback and buzz that Microsoft would have had if Bing had been live yesterday. People would Twitter their feedback, bookmark it on Facebook, Digg the search engine finds. Microsoft would have had a much larger share of the news overall if the engine was up and running. 

One of the other challenges that Microsoft had is that it was well known when they planned on announcing Bing this week. The news had been “leaked” (probably on purpose) that the new code-named Kumo engine would be released, which gave Google ample time to decide to pre-announce their big news (complete with flashy demos to make Google devotees drool)–on the same day. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to deciding when to announce news, it’s often not the communications experts who get to make the decision. Time and time again I’ve seen mandates come down from the CEO (often as a result of pressure from board members) or from high-ranking ELT officers who feel desperate to get news out for some reason or another but don’t want to hear from communications about the pros and cons of the timing.  Time and time again during my career I’ve watched as no news splash occurred, or minimal or greatly reduced coverage resulted from not listening to, or even asking, the PR team when it comes to that decision. 

There are multiple factors involved when considering when and how to make an announcement. One of the most key things to consider is that you are announcing on a day where your news won’t be drowned out by a competitor. And when your competitor is someone like Google, who always has a trick up their sleeve, you need to be extra prepared. Either don’t pre-announce (which is hard as news of that nature is bound to be leaked) or be ready to deliver when the announcement finally comes. Otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for potential disaster. 

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Top B2B Questions about Social Media

Posted on April 21, 2009 by crystal king

I have groups of people that come to me on a regular basis, essentially saying, we know we need to start using social media, but what is it and how do we use it? Underlying each and every conversation I have with these individuals are a few bigger questions:

1. Can you tell me how to use it without me actually going there and trying it out?

2. Why do I really need to be part of the social media “conversation?”  

3. How much time is it going to take? How long do we have to do this (this meaning Twitter, or commenting on blogs, etc.)?

4.  Which social media outlet is best? 

The first question is, of course, the most annoying.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I can understand this question coming from a CEO or SVP of such and such product, but if you are in marketing, get thee to the Internet and start checking out these tools for yourself. Social media is not a fad. That means that if you want to continue to provide relevance in your role as a marketer, it may behoove you to understand how social media will influence, impact and shape all of your marketing campaigns moving forward. Most of the social media sites are very self-explanatory, take just a few minutes to sign up for and maybe a few more minutes to understand the basics of how they function. Google is your friend when it comes to finding “how-to” guides on everything ranging from Facebook to Twitter to YouTube. Don’t be lazy. This is the future of marketing and you will only be further providing value for yourself and your company if you start paying attention. Go to Mashable. Buy the Groundswell book. Read all you can…it’s not as though there aren’t enough “social media experts” in the fray to help you along.

The second question about the Why and What of the social media conversation, to some extent, goes hand in hand with my answer above. Why? Because your audience is using it. Because your influencers (media, analysts, bloggers) are using it.

A recent Forrester report,  ”The Social Technographics of Business Buyers,” by Laura Ramos and Oliver Young, published back in February, showed that B2B buyers are not just relying on traditional print and Web methods to research information. In fact, it showed that social media is becoming the norm when it comes to communication and gathering data.

As mentioned by analyst Josh Bernoff on the Forrester Groundswell blog,  this is the breakdown of how B2B buyers are using social media:

  • Spectators  91%
  • Critics   58%
  • Joiners  55%
  • Collectors   48%
  • Creators  43%
  • Inactives  5%

Also of note: 

“91% of these technology decision-makers were Spectators — the highest number I’ve ever seen in a Social Technographics Profile. This means you can count on the fact that your buyers are reading blogs, watching user generated video, and participating in other social media. Note that 69% of them said they were using this technology for business purposes.”

So there is the Why. Essentially, you can’t afford to not be where your audience is, which is an old school marketing mantra. It’s just that the medium has changed.

Take the time

Question three: how much time is social media going to take? And how long do you have to do it? This is the problem–you can’t look at social media as a “task” with a finite deadline. Granted, you may deliver a campaign using social media channels and THAT may have some sort of ending, but your interaction with social media should not be looked upon as something that “ends” at any given point. 

The difference is that social media gives power to the people, not to the companies. It’s not the same as picking up a magazine and seeing a print ad. Social media drives conversation and discussion. It’s where you network and meet people of relevant interest. It’s a way to ask questions and find answers. Your customers, prospects, influencers and vendors are using social media for a million different reasons. Time to jump into the conversation so when the discussion turns to something relevant for you, you are ready and able to participate.

For those of you who want definitive answers on time it takes…it depends. Once you set up your networks its often just a matter of monitoring or maintaining. I probably spend 20 min a day with Twitter. About the same on Facebook. The rest is just a mish-mash of time depending on needs or projects. Some days I spend a lot of time managing my company’s YouTube channel but then will go a week without needing to touch it. If you have a lot of videos to manage that may not be the case (or if you are being redundant in areas such as Viddler or Vimeo and you need to upload multiple videos).  So really, it’s about your needs, the size of your network, the quality of the conversations in your network, any campaigns you might be running, etc.  

4.  Which new media outlet is best? 

Again, it depends. What you need to do first is to sit down and determine what the overall needs of your company are. Ask yourself some key questions.

  • Who is your audience?   Media? Analysts? Auto mechanics? Web designers?  Healthcare professionals?   Knowing your audience will help you determine if you need a broad strategy or a niche possibility.
  • What kind of content do you want to share with your audience?  Video? Slideshows? White papers? Podcasts? Webinars? All of the above? There are new media sites for all of those assets and many that give you the ability to share them all.
  • How much discussion do you want? Most of the various social media and new media technologies give you power over commenting. Some companies are terrified of getting customer feedback in a public forum, others relish the opportunity ( http://www.twitter.com/comcastcares ). Be ready with a strategy for responses to feedback, how you will participate in the discussion, how much moderation is needed, who you choose to be part of the conversation (are you comfortable with random employees Twittering or sharing information on SlideShare?). More and more companies are hiring people to specifically respond to social media activity and for good reason.

In order to best answer #4, the number one thing that you can do to help determine the right outlets for your company is to get involved. Sign up for a few services and watch how people use the tools. Comment, respond, join in the fray. There are no definitive answers when it comes down to what is “best” or even possible. A week of futzing around to understand the new media technologies and social media sites at your disposal will go along way toward helping you fine tune what makes the most sense for your organization.

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