Social Media – Best Practices | Philly Marketing Labs

Social Media – Best Practices

Google+: The Effects on Social Media and Search Engine Optimization

January 27th, 2012 by KellyK | 1 Comment

Fact is…

Google+ has 90 million users and is growing very quickly, adding approximately 625,000 new users per day (as of Jan. 19,2012).

The prediction:

“I predict that 2012 is going to be a breakout year for Google+ and that it will end next year with more than 400 million users,” Paul Allen wrote.

Yes – 400 million users by the end of 2012. [That is not a typo.] In December alone, nearly 1/4 of all Google+ users (24.01%) have joined. Some of that growth is coming from the 700,000 Android devices activated daily and this number is expected to grow as well.

So, how do you know if Google+ is right for you? Given the fact that Google has just released 3 recent changes to their search algorithm on 1/10/2012, known as “Search Plus Your World”, it’s giving the mixture of Search + Social a whole new meaning.

Let’s dig into this…

What Makes Up Google+

Google+ is a place for real-life sharing and connecting online. So what exactly are all the pieces that make up Google+? It starts with your profile.

Google+ Profiles

Your Google+ Profile is a way to share information about yourself. With privacy settings, you can choose to share this information with the world or with a select circle of contacts, depending on your comfort level. It’s also a great way to share content created by you or that you suggest for further reading.

Google+ Pages

Google+ Pages are a way to spread the word about businesses or brands by connecting with customers and fans. They can follow your Google+ Pages by adding them to a circle or recommending you with a +1. Connect even further by having a Google+ Hangout, which gives you face-to-face interaction between your brand or business and customers and fans.

Circles

Organize your circles to make it easier to share relevant information with specific groups of people. You may want to send certain information to only friends and other information to your professional network. Having control over what you share with who is really easy with Google Circles.

+1’s

Recommending content and Google+ Pages has never been easier with the +1 button. The number of recommendations content receives or a Google+ Page gets shows up in Google search results. This +1 button can be integrated in websites to make it really easy to receive recommendations.

Hangouts

Face-to-Face interaction happens live with Hangouts. This can be done on an individual level through your Google+ Profile or represent your business or brand and start hanging out with customers and fans through your Google+ Page. It’s a great tool for engaging with your Circles, customers and/or fans via a casual meetup.

Google’s 3 most recent changes to search (As of 1/10/2012)

The Google+ tools are providing a fully integrated and personalized approach into your search results. From the number of +1’s received for content and Google+ Pages and the number of circles you’re included in, these types of social activities are starting to influence how Google search results appear to you. Here are the 3 most recent changes Google made to the search algorithm that integrates Google+ pretty heavily.

Personal Results

When you search for information, your results will now include Google+ photos and posts – both your own and those shared specifically with you. These results will be unique to only you on your results page.

Profiles in Search

Profiles appear both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following.

High-Quality authors show up in these results, which is why it’s important to “claim your content” by getting validated as an author. [Check back for a future blog post about authorship coming soon!]

Once you select a profile and you’re signed into Google+, it’s very easy to add them to your circles right from the results page.

People and Pages

Help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. The idea here is that behind every search query is a community.

How is social media affecting your search results?

Search Plus Your World is creating a personalized search experience based on your social media connections and what they’re sharing. If you drive any business from online, you’re going to need a Google+ page if you want to achieve page one domination in the future.

Google has been pushing its Google+ results ahead of other social media networks and natural search results; which is basically forcing the adoption of Google+. With over 200 signals that make up the Google search algorithm, is it realistic to think a social media network is providing the most relevant information? Larry Page said long ago, we want to give you back “exactly what you want,” but with social networks at the top of the search results, the relevancy of information is debatable.

As the world of social media continues to explode with zero consistency, there is no way to determine what will be ranked for relevance or popularity on a consistent or long-term basis. Google makes changes to its algorithms on a weekly basis and as they are testing various strategies and receiving feedback about how they are leveraging their Google+ social media network, the algorithm will continue to change until there is a happy medium in the search engine results driving the most relevant content. I just hope Google doesn’t lose site of delivering “exactly what you want.”

While there is no simple answer and never a guarantee like 1+1=2, what always sticks with social media is being a valuable resource and building professional relationships with your social network, thus driving people to you directly. Building professional relationships through your social network through engaging conversation is one thing the algorithm can never change. It also requires consistent nurturing and feeding of content and overall dialogue. Get started today!

5 Quick Tips to Get Started In Google+

Strategy: Think about your G+ Business Page strategy – what value do you want to bring to your target audience/customers/fans?
Profile: Create your G+ Business Page and populate your profile.
Segment: Create circles to segment your target audience. This will allow you to make the most of having relevant conversations with your target audience.
Engage: Seek out industry experts and your target audience. Engage in conversations with them.
Share: You can never go wrong with sharing information that would be of value to your target audience or industry experts. Use your circles to share relevant information to specific segments of your target audience.

Top 3 Social Media “Game Changers”

November 29th, 2011 by Skip | 2 Comments

I had the pleasure of attending the Social Media Plus Conference on November 16 at the Philadelphia Convention Center. Hundreds of Social Media enthusiasts converged on Philadelphia from all over the country. I came away with dozens of tools, tips and ideas for powerful Social Media Marketing.

In this post, I wanted to highlight 3 trends worth considering in your Social Media Strategy. These themes seemed to permeate most of the talks that I attended and I believe they represent leading edge topics for Social Media.

Visibility into Social Media Performance. Koka Sexton shared that nearly 60% of B2B companies aren’t able to track their leads from Social Media. Its challenging to determine what’s working in Social Media. Was it your recent Meetup? Perhaps a Webinar contributed to your recent sales? How about your sales team’s participation in LinkedIn Answers? Google Analytics has recently added “multi-channel” funnel visibility which helps your company to see “assists” from Social Channels towards a particular goal.

If you are serious about using Social Media for business, you must invest in tracking performance, setting goals and measuring results. While complexity remains, Google Analytics and other tools are providing a new generation of visibility to help answer questions about contributions from Social Media.

Personalization. Koka also pointed out B2C has been built on personalization, but not B2B. Yet B2B companies can take advantage of one to one marketing using Social Media. Changes in executive profiles, updates on company acquisitions or new product roll-outs are opportunities to create and extend relationships. Invest the time and reach out to your B2B contacts. Meet them on the channels where they are hanging out. And BTW – as far as I’m concerned, the telephone IS a social media channel. Personalization is taking place on search results too… which leads us to…

Google+. Wil Reynolds provided excellent insights into how Search and Social are starting to play together. Wil’s insights make it clear that Google has the upper hand on search with Google+. You’d better be on board to play in this game if you are serious about competing online. By integrating social sharing results (e.g. +1, Facebook likes) with your Social Circles and personalized search results, power is shifting to those who are engaged with their audiences – and Google plans to reward those who use their platform as well.

Do you think these trends are game changers? What other game changers are you seeing in the Social Media space?

(Photo credit: Magnifying Glass from www.ereleases.com )

Who? Where? Why? Using Integral Personas for Social Media Marketing

August 22nd, 2011 by Skip | 1 Comment

There are a number of challenges in adopting social media as a marketing channel. Companies embarking on social media efforts need to seriously consider questions like:

- Who is our audience?

- Which social channels make the most sense for our business?

- Are we confusing our perspectives with the perspectives of our audience?

- What kind of language resonates with our audience?

- Are we behaving in ways that are acceptable for our audience?

In this post, I’d like to introduce the idea of Integral personas, which can greatly enhance marketing efforts. At Philly Marketing Labs, we apply personas to help develop social media strategies using a framework derived from Integral Theory. We find that persona development supports rapid discovery with the client and organizes useful insights for action.

The approach described here builds on the work by philosopher Ken Wilber. Wilber’s Integral Theory model (aka AQAL) is a five-part roadmap to human experience. We use a component referred to as the “Quadrants” in AQAL. The quadrants recognize that everything in nature, including us, are actually both an individual and a member of a collective. We are both human and humanity. Furthermore, each person has both an interiority that every one of us comes to in private way. We can describe it, but only our individual self can experience it directly. We also have a set of exteriors that can be measured and defined. Think of these as our credentials, our demographics, our activities and personal statistics.

Similarly, each collective has an interior and exterior. The collective interior is the world of culture and meaning-making. It is used to answer questions about what a group considers good, cool and bad. The collective exterior defines social structures like organizations, associations, corporations and social media.

The template below demonstrates how a marketing team might parse discovery items into the four quadrants.

So what? We build these nice little quadrants. How can a marketing initiative take advantage of the personas?

1) Organizing. It helps us to organize our thinking. In working with clients, we usually find two to five core personas that we should be thinking about. By segmenting the results, we can gain clearer insights and avoid mixing strategies and messages.

2) Messaging. Beyond helping with organization, persona quadrants lay out the foundations for messaging. Motivation, values, and core imagery are often readily apparent from a newly created quadrant. With these in hand, we can improve website copy, advertisements, newsletters and our social interactions.

3) Discovery. The persona quadrants allow the discovery of key social media platforms for meeting and integrating with our audience. Through a thoughtful conversation around a persona, we can fill out the lower-right quadrant with the social media platforms most likely to yield connections to that audience.

Consider this simple sample persona for an audience of stay-at-home moms with toddlers:

Once you spent some time critically thinking about this persona, I’m sure you could find ways to extend and improve it. However, you can also see how it could inform campaigns and launch initiatives, advertising efforts, and messaging.

Organizing, messaging and discovery are just the beginning of the journey. But they make a strong foundation for composing campaigns, developing analytics and creating results.

If you’ve used some helpful models to understand your audience, I’d love to hear about them in the comments section. Please let me know what you think of the ideas presented here as well.

Businesses: Start Preparing for Google+ Business Pages Now

August 10th, 2011 by admin | 2 Comments

It’s true, Google+ is not yet available to you as a business—large or small. But it will be at some point, and you can (and should) take steps to prepare now. We know you may be thinking:

Why should I waste any time on Google+ when I’m not even sure it will stay around?

Good point. Google+ may not have legs, but right now it has over 20 million users. That statistic can’t be ignored.

The better question is: What will happen if Google+ does stay around? Do you want to have to play catch up in your competitors’ trail of dust? (Okay, that was two questions.)

If you want to be ready for Google+ once it opens up to business pages, focus on these three things now.

1. Pay closer attention to your Twitter and Facebook followers.

Listen more closely to your followers on every social network you’re on. What are they saying about Google+? Are your follows and likes decreasing or are they still increasing? Poll your Facebook and Twitter followers who are also using Google+. Get their thoughts on what they want to see from brands on Google+ business pages.

2. Get familiar with personal page functions now.

Create a personal Google+ page, and have people on your team do the same. If you’re a Marketing Director or CEO, you can start representing your company now until brand pages are released. (For an example, see what Michael Dell is doing.)

With your team, test out the features and talk about what features your audience seems to be using most. Notice that you can also use these features for business purposes:

Circles – You have time now to name your circles thoughtfully, so do that. Plan out how you want to segment people you follow and people who follow you. Now you can follow back customers and separate their stream of posts from other streams. You’ll be able to segment your messages and send out more targeted info and promotions.
Hangouts – Video chat with your team and test out potential customer service uses. Role play and practice potential scenarios so you’ll be able to experiment and prepare away from the public eye. Even better, test out Hangouts as an informal focus group tool. You’ll have a chance to get small groups together and chat with them on a regular basis. (Remember this also when naming your circles.)
Huddle – Test crisis response. Huddle allows you to text as a group, as you would talk as a group in a conference call. A perfect scenario for using this function is any sort of emergency. For example, you have a public relations nightmare brewing and it’s after hours. You need to get your team together quickly and share messaging. You can do it by text. Get comfortable using Huddle now so you don’t have to fumble around when speed of reaction is crucial.

The point is to start brainstorming now on all fronts, so you’ll be ready to implement once Google+ brand pages become open to you.

3. Start working on your Google+ page now.

Get photos ready to display and videos ready to load. Have an editorial plan ready to go. How will you migrate followers and information from other social channels? How will you integrate your marketing efforts?

Yes, you may have to make changes once the final version of Google+ business pages is released, but you will already be ahead of the game, instead of at square one.

In your overall marketing strategy, integration and coordination are crucial. Your Facebook page and Google+ page can’t be the same. They can be similar and have similar purposes, but you must have different strategies for each—based on their different audiences and the way people use them (among other things). Strategy is something you can start talking about now.

Once Google+ brand pages are open to all, it’s time to execute. Don’t be the only company still standing at square one.

As always, if you need help, you can rely on Philly Marketing Labs as your strategic marketing partner.

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Post written by Coreen Tossona, Digital Communicator and Brand Strategist for Philly Marketing Labs. This post is repurposed from her original post in her In the Crowds marketing blog.

Pitching Social Media to Organizational Leaders: Crowdsourcing Solutions

June 10th, 2011 by admin | No Comments

Last week I played facilitator to a group of super-sharp social media professionals at the SoMeBizLife conference in Doylestown, PA (put together by Chuck Hall). This group helped me crowdsource some answers to tough social media questions like:

How can we be sure a client is ready for social media?
What are the common objections that we hear from organizational leaders?
How can we demonstrate value in social media efforts in advance of a project?
What kinds of expectations need to be set?

I’ve updated my presentation with a number of the deeper questions that the brain-trust came up with – as well as some of their solutions. Thanks to all of you who participated!

My favorite five takeaways (shown below) are all included in the SlideShare presentation on Pitching Social Media:

Remember the ROI (Risk of Ignoring). Conversations happen with or without you. Do you want to be able to influence the conversation?
Listen first. Start with listening. Discovering what people want and care about and how your competition is playing is a powerful and smart strategy.
Integrate social into transaction points. Make it easy to leave testimonials or to tweet, as in “Hey! I just bought a cool supersonic widget from Widget Masters!”
Help educate clients that costs and demands will change. I like to think of this as crawl-walk-run. The needs for a listening project are different from an engagement effort – and will change as engagement is progressively expanded and moved to internal team members.
Use the marketing needs pyramid to determine if the basics are in place BEFORE a company contemplates a social media presence.

We don’t have to stop here though. Check out the full presentation and all of the other great ideas put together by this group. Please add your questions and ideas on pitching social to organizations in the comments below to continue the conversation.

Post by Skip Shuda, shown here doing some “deep listening” to his collaborators!

Corporate “Therapy” In 3 Steps

March 22nd, 2011 by admin | 1 Comment

I view social media as an opportunity to gain “corporate therapy“. The way I see it, social media is a means of going through the KFC process:

K: Know what you want (or who you want to be).

F: Find out what you are getting (or who you are at the moment).

C: Change what you are doing until you get what you want (or become who you want to be).

Social media can provide feedback and empowering tools to support this KFC process. As a growing business, social media can be an opportunity to help customers and prospects see your strengths. It’s also an excellent way to bring a positive light to your vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

Social channels can help you gain valuable feedback from your customers. If you are a business manager, you know that customers can be brutally honest about your weaknesses. They will tell you exactly who they want you to be. But don’t take it personally! Customer feedback accelerates the evolutionary process, helping you ”Know who you want to be”. It’s an opportunity to “Find out who you are”. Knowing who you want to be, and finding out who you are now, is a key to success. Now you know where you want to go, and you can “Change until you get the results you want”.

At the same time, you can turn your vulnerabilities into strengths by providing honest insights to customers to help them understand where you are in the process. Customers may not like your weaknesses, but they’ll be happier if you are on the path to positive change.

37 Signals provided a great example of this process. When their Campfire product was going down for intermittent periods in 2010, they used social media as a way of interacting with customers. They told customers that they were actively working on the problem. They asked for feedback about how to compensate customers for the problems. And they provided regular updates until the problem was fixed. This was a type of therapy, both for 37 Signals and their customers. 37 Signals’ method of handling this problem fostered stronger loyalty in customers and made the employees proud to be part of such an honest, communicative company.

Are there ways that you can use social media therapy to develop a stronger image and better serve your customers? You bet…. maybe it’s time to reach out to your current customer base and ask for their help to become a better, stronger company.

– post by Ryan Draving, SEO Consultant with Philly Marketing Labs. KFC Process comes from Nicholas Boothman, author of How to Connect in Business in 90 Seconds or Less.

Can You Engineer Social Media Campaign Success?

October 10th, 2010 by admin | No Comments

MIT Media Labs won $40,000 by putting together the fastest crowd-sourcing team in the world this past winter. The MIT Media Lab team attributed their deep knowledge of social networking mechanics as being central to their victory, as outlined in a Forbes article about the Red Balloon Challenge. In a nutshell, they made heavy use of crowd-sourcing with a recursive, incentive structure for the social network. By recruiting a strong, well dispersed team with a big focus on sharing the incentive to not only find the balloons but to spread the word and recruit more potential balloon finders, the MIT team was able to generate a Social Network of

It got me wondering – could we all engineer our way to social media success?

So I started doing some reasearch. My first stop was the cyber-anthropology series on Influencers that Dr. Michael Wu of Lithium has been putting together. Social Networks, Communities, the components of Influence and conversational dynamics are all covered with clarity and depth. His blog is a terrific source of insight and inspiration for anyone hoping to understand the deep mechanics of Social Media.

Dr. Wu identifies six key factors contributing to influence in Social Networks; two for the Influencers and Four for the likelihood to be Influenced. Influencers have two key factors they can leverage:

1) Credibility (expertise in a given domain)

2) Bandwidth (ability to transmit message/knowledge through social media channels)

The likelihood of a person being influenced is impacted by four key factors:

3) Relevance (the right information)

4) Timing (the right time)

5) Alignment (the right place)

6) Confident (the right person)

All of these factors were prominent in the MIT Media Lab victory. However, the role of incentive for this “campaign” also needs to be considered.

Next, I researched DARPA’s project report from the Red Balloon project. They identified a wide range of factors in being an effective competitor for the Red Balloon project. Those factors are repeated below, with my interpretation of how they fit into Michael’s influence model. You’ll see that his six factors are spot on for supporting the Red Balloon crowd-sourcing effort. I include the six factors below in parentheses, where applicable.

Media coverage of the team (Bandwidth)
Team built around an existing social network (Bandwidth, Alignment)
Name recognition of the team (Credibility, Confidence)
Planning time available to organize the social network (Timing, Alignment)
Method for searching Twitter posts (Relevance)
Search engine ranking for the team (Credibility, Bandwidth, Confidence)
Mobilization and dispatch ability (Timing, Alignment)
Team geographic coverage (Bandwidth, Alignment)
False report rejection strategy (Relevance)
Mobile phone App (Alignment, Timing)
Team overall Strategy
Team network hierarchy (Bandwidth, Alignment)
Trading/Collaboration strategy
Operations center for coordination, mobilization, tracking and entry decision making (Relevance, Timing)

The DARPA team also identified eight distinct tools for the geo-location problem, meaning how they answered the question, “How do I quickly reach and communicate with a wide, dispersed audience across multiple, social media channels?” The eight factors were:

1) marketing and media broadcast strategies to recruit team members

2) Recursive, incentivized recruiting of networks of friends/associates

3) Extraction of data of reported balloon locations from open Internet Sources like Twitter

4) Automated means of extracting data

5) Deployment of technology with automatic reporting capability (e.g. iPhone Apps)

6) Dispatching team members as spotters to search or confirm reports

7) Website design that motivates, encourages recruitment, or allows easy, secure reporting

8 ) Search engine rank optimization of website

In our work at Team and a Dream (soon to be Philly Marketing Labs), we’ve found that Social Media at the campaign level can be done quite effectively. With embedded incentives, the ability to tap into an area of interest or passion can be driven towards specific outcomes (register for a newsletter, watch a video, make a contribution or find a red weather balloon). In the case of the DARPA contest, several teams used social networking mechanics.

In fact, the MIT win was impressive, but not decisive. Given that the entire contest lasted under 9 hours, eight other teams had considerable momentum and used many of the MIT techniques as well. But given over 4,000 entrants to the contest, the quality drops off pretty quickly. By the 43rd place, the number of balloons reported near the end of the race had dropped to just 2. In fact, the winning strategy was not exactly obvious before-hand. A quick review of some brainstorming of social media strategies before the event shows that while crowd-sourcing was identified as a critical success factor, the idea of how to motivate that crowd was not anticipated in the blog post. Furthermore, the MIT Media Lab’s prominence and influence seems to have played a critical role.

The Wrapup.

What are some conclusions we can take away for this quick study of the DARPA Red Balloon experiment? Here are a few takeaways for your consideration.

1) Social Media strategy and team quality matters. The top 1% of the contest entrants outperformed the rest by a strong margin. Part of this “quality” has to do with credibility and the attendant reach of the team. Part of it has to do with applying a well-informed strategy grounded in an understanding of the campaign objective and aligning with the available channels.

2) Social-Search tactics rule. The prominence of Search strategies combined with Social Media techniques becomes evident in the post-contest analysis. Strong SEO rankings for the recruiting web-sites as well as powerful search tools for scanning Twitter, Social Media and news reports allowed for a broad, pre-contest reach and rapid identification of relevant information during the contest.

3) Whats in it for me? The MIT strategy to distribute the winnings maximized incentive for the network members to actively participate. Bragging rights are nice, but hard cash is better. In fact, the number of man-hours employed to win this efforts likely amounted to pennies per hour of effort. There as a bit of a lottery effect, but you had control over you odds. The more people you helped recruit, the better your odds of winning some cash. The recruiting/bootstrapping efforts via the web site and email outreach reportedly increased the team from an initial 5 to 5,000 in 48 hours, with hundreds of thousands of page views in a very short timeframe.

4) Strategic Use of Technology can help. While I don’t think the MIT team used an iPhone app, some of the top competitors did. The strategic use of mobile computing can help with this type of geographically based initiative. Thinking about your mission might imply other strategic technologies. For example, voting tools for panels or ideas, video submission tools or bar-code scanning apps are examples of tools that could play a role in distributed or crowd-sourced initiatives.

5) Campaigns vs. Community. Understand that this is an example of a very focused campaign-oriented effort. This is very different than building a sustainable, long-term community organized around a common mission or passion. In a community building effort, a number of other factors, like roles in your social networks could be taken into consideration. Food for a future post.

Have you used any of these ideas with success in your Social Media marketing efforts? I’d love to hear from you. Or leave your comments on our analysis to add to the discussion. What did we miss? Do you have another perspective you’d like to share?

Simple and Focused: Jim Sterne’s Social Media Metrics

June 24th, 2010 by admin | 3 Comments

How refreshing to come to the end of a book on a deep topic and feel like I have a number of actionable take-aways. Jim Sterne is a founding father of Internet Marketing and his wisdom comes through in his latest book loud and clear.

“Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment” (2010 published by John Wiley & Sons) lays out a solid strategic framework that covers all the Social Media bases. He makes generous use of the thinking from other thought leaders and their blogs, tweets and reports. As a result, its not a bad way to get an insider’s tour of the technorati of the Social Media Marketing tribe.

Here are the kinds of takeaways you can expect, with a sample from each of the book’s nine chapters.

Chapter 1: Getting Focused. With a focus on the big three (increased revenue, lower cost and improved customer satisfaction), Sterne leads you through the kinds of questions you need to ask to make your goals truly useful to your business. With his tongue-in-cheek example of analysis around the question “Are fat people lazy?” , he shows how discipline and being crystal clear is critical to useful analysis.

Chapter 2: Getting Attention – Reaching Your Audience. This is where Jim Sterne’s years of experience as a sales and marketing pro really shine. He marries the importance of brand recognition with the world of Social Media reach metrics. Using models from a couple of industry leaders (Avinash Kaisuik, Charlene Li and Jason Stamper) he outlines some ways in which you can measure the effectiveness of your reach across blogs, Twitter and Facebook Apps. The chapter wraps with a cautionary tale of why the numbers from different tools don’t usually match up. Learn to live with it.

Chapter 3. Getting Respect – Identifying Influence. How valuable are your followers? Sterne dives into a discussion of the different kinds of influencers in your Social Network and how they drive conversations. This is a great chapter to unpack questions about authority, impact and empty metrics.

Chapter 4. Getting Emotional – Recognizing Sentiment. As a student of Artificial Intelligence in the 80′s, this was a particularly interesting chapter to me. Sentiment Analysis represents the leading edge of Social Media analytics, but is also fraught with the same challenges AI systems have suffered from for decades. Sterne surveys the latest and greatest thinking in this space and explains the pitfalls of having computers decipher the Tweets:

“My crab cakes were bad” from “Skied moguls all morning. That mountain is BAD!”

Chapter 5. Getting Response – Triggering Action. Some very helpful thinking around getting responses that cover Social Bookmarking and the Engagement Food-chain model lead us to understanding of whether our Social Media efforts are generating productive activity.

Chapter 6. Getting the Message – Hearing the Conversation. Sterne tackles the nature of the conversations taking place about your industry and your brand. Ratings, reviews and recommendations - and the tools that track them are covered here. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is becoming an industry standard in measuring customer satisfaction for its ability to predict future company success. Sterne integrates the NPS gracefully into this chapter on listening through Social Media.

Chapter 7. Getting Results – Driving Business Outcomes. Finally, we come to business outcomes and Key Performance Indicators. Tying everything he’s covered back to the goals discussed in Chapter 1, Sterne tackles the challenging topic of Social Media ROI (Sterne’s short answer to this industry hot potato – Yes, you can measure ROI!). Again, some wonderful frameworks are shared from industry experts including Lithium’s model for measuring community health. Good stuff.

Chapter 8. Getting Buy-In – Convincing Your Colleagues. How do you get Social Media accepted in your organization? Sterne dons the cape of the Change Agent and gives us a six step process, complete with a typology of managers we’ll have to navigate to get our Social Media initiative recognized.

Chapter 9. Getting Ahead – Seeing the Future. A perfect wrap to the book ends with a view towards where this might all be heading. From patented mind-reading technologies to the Cluetrain-driven shift from business-focus to the consumer-focus, this chapter had me scrambling for my closest search engine to learn more.

To be sure, Social Media is an exploding arena which our businesses and cultures need to examine and understand more fully. We need a discussion about tribal marketing and connecting to audiences, we need conversations about good conversations and we need to keep our hearts open to generational differences within Social Media. However, Social Media Metrics fills an important gap in our understanding of how to operationalize Social Media and begin working it into our daily business.

Have you read this book? If so, I’d love to hear your impressions in our comment section below. Please share any other Social Media business books that you think people could benefit from.

Samurai Women and Renaissance Men – Social Media changes business

May 15th, 2010 by admin | 3 Comments

The Samurai was a warrior who was also expected to be well-versed in the arts, literature and social skills. Similarly, the Renaissance man typically refers to someone who is able to deep-dive into a wide range of topics, applying their knowledge to solve problems with agility.

The premise behind this talk is that business people must become more multi-faceted to operate in today’s Social Media driven world. The age of specialization has come and gone. We are faced with the need to be anthropologists, psychologists, scientists and business people.

This talk was first delivered on May 13, 2010 to the Community College of Philadelphia, Corporate Solutions Group by Skip Shuda of Team and a Dream. It runs through the reasons why business people should care about Social Media, where it is heading and what we should do about it. The meat of the presentation contains a framework for Social Media Strategy – as well as some case studies illustrating different objectives in Social Media. We also touch on using teams to create your business Samurai… when you can’t do it all yourself.

Samurai Women and Renaissance Men: Social Media changes business

View more presentations from Team and a Dream.

If you’d like to have us speak to your organization about these topics, please contact Team and a Dream for more information.

Cast in the spirit of Leonardo DaVinci, the audience brainstormed some of today’s best examples of Samurai Women an Renaissance Men. Some names that came up? Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, Steve Jobs, Angelina Jolie.

We’d love to hear your favorite nominees for Samurai Women and Renaissance Men. Who would you suggest?

Do you have ways in which you have had to flex into being more multi-dimensional for Social Media? Leave a comment and tell us about your experience.

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