Mediameme

I’ll give you a hint with a quote from the IAB: “In 2008, if you are not on a social networking site, you are not on the Internet”.

But does social networking actually offer a measurable return on marketing investment for business? Does it help build brand equity? Should CEOs invest in ‘the long tail’ of niche products or, after reading this excellent article in the ‘schools out for summer’ edition of the HBR, should they continue to focus on a blockbuster approach? Many executives are pushing their marketing people to experiment with social media (aka have the agency build a Facebook page or a Twitter profile) only to find that after a few weeks, shockingly, no one has visited.

<cue: crickets>

Desperate marketer, now convinced job is on the line, frantically emails everyone in her Outlook address book to find a someone who, like Rumpelstiltskin, can magically spin a social media campaign from a paltry ‘pilot’ project budget that has already been half spent by the traditional agency (who built the Facebook page and set up the aforementioned Twitter account):

Looking to connect with a real social media marketing therapist. Charming and a good listener, you must be someone who actually knows what they are doing instead of just writing about it and hyping your book with lots of twits tweets. I must warn you that I love the advertising ‘lifestyle’: big, splashy tv campaigns, tickets to every imaginable sporting event, going to lots of parties where, as the client, I am the center of attention and everyone worships me. I share meals with my media reps more often than my kids.

I’m looking for someone really smart (but not smarter than me, obviously) who knows how to make social media work so I look great to my boss, become the envy of my colleagues and win an award or two (Cannes, sil vous plait). You need to be available 24/7 just like my psychotherapist and personal shopper because I travel constantly and will need reassurance regardless of my time zone. And if you do your job well, I will get a promotion next year.

Turn ons:

• Loves to shop
• Knows latest celebrity gossip
• Can get us into any restaurant/party/club
• Knows everyone
• Thinks a spa is a great place for a “strategy discussion”
• Doesn’t expect me to pay ever
• Intelligent but doesn’t act like it (no one likes a nerdy know-it-all)
• Rich, well-connected parents (in case the social media-thing doesn’t work out for us)

Deal breakers:

• Always wanting to talk about <shudder> business or marketing
• Pressuring me for more budget
• Breakfast meetings <clarification: meetings before noon>
• Offices in a fly-over state, or one ending in an “A” (except LA, obviously)
• Wears a size 4 or smaller (if female)
• Wanting to link with me on Facebook
• Client list with brands I’ve never heard of (because if you are good at what you do…)
• Acting like mass media is dead

Influencers.

Chris Anderson’s Long Tail is a foundational theory for digital marketing. Perhaps you’ve heard the term and vaguely understand what The Long Tail means, but why is it important and how does it change marketing and business?

See where the dinosaur’s head is located?  Those are the generic places online that capture a wide cross-section of audience: Facebook, Google, YouTube, eBay, etc.  The tail refers to the more niche sites, for instance within social networking it may be bookworms who want recommendations by friends or cyberfriends they trust at Goodreads, so if you are in the publishing business, joining the conversation both at the head (e.g. Facebook — create a bookswap group) as well as a niche site like Goodreads means you are working both the folks who might have a more casual interest in your brand as well as the influencers who can catapult masses of people into your brand with a few lines in a post or comment.

Where do you find the long tail communities like Goodread? Mashable posted this great list of 350 social networks by interest, which is a good starting point. From there you may find people who blog on more specialized subjects. You’ll also find links to forums and other information in users’ profiles once you join the networks that are closely aligned to your brand.

Happy Hunting!

<image of the Long Tail for this post comes from Left Click, a NZ-based SEO and usability firm>

What ARE they teaching kids these days?

I thought I’d start with the education parents pay the most cash for their offspring to attend: Ivy League schools.  Harvard Law School has an ‘ever-evolving’ course called The Web Difference with the key themes: socialization of knowledge, economics of peer production, web as medium, morality, citizenship and democracy. Any course that includes required reading from Courtney Love, Hobbes and Shakespearean Sonnets on Wikipedia is worth taking a look at their syllabus which, in this case, is a blog.

Brown offers a digital Art course with a great summary line: What would Andy Warhol’s Facebook page look like? What would John Cage have done with an iPod? The course is production-oriented, examining art and digital technology. Judging by their recent Curator project, these young people are ones to watch as future thought leaders and artists.

UC Berkeley is offering a well-designed sociology class on virtual communities being taught by Howard Rheingold (who, for the Boomers in the house is the equivalent of a 20th Century American Literature being taught by Ernest Hemingway). The course is designed for active learning. The students are required to blog, comment and post on a secured wiki in addition to reading the theories and engage in discussion.

My degree is in film & media studies, so I wanted to see how much the curriculum has evolved with web 2.0. Another Ca-school, The University of San Francisco has an honors-level seminar called Digital Literacy being facilitated by David Silver, who is half of the partnership behind The September Project, a grass-roots initiative designed to interconnect libraries around the world. Aside from Silver’s blog format that is very user-friendly, I liked that he required a Flickr Pro account as part of the course resources. It made me realize how much value is generated from a Flickr Pro account versus buying <another useless> textbook that will be out-of-date the minute it is published.

Universities are the ultimate curators of knowledge.  Fascinating to contemplate what effect this will have on the workplace as these graduates flood the market in the coming years.  More to come on this important series.

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Last night I had the opportunity to participate in a panel hosted by Derek Mehraban on Social Networking and Social Media. My fellow panelists were the uber-networker Terry Bean and brilliant social Economist, Edward Vielmetti who shared some wonderful insights and ideas with the audience.

Here are the Top Social Networking / Social Media tips we shared that are also available on Derek’s new blog called The Digital Bus:

LORI LAURENT SMITH
1. WordPress. Start a business blog. Doesn’t matter if you are a middle manager or 1-man band, you need to blog. It’s a great way to open up a dialogue with your customers, and that connection is the reason social marketing exists. WordPress is free, open source software—so the price is right. It’s easy to use and the content you develop is portable. Don’t forget to comment on other blogs as well. The time investment is completely up to you for blogging and commenting, but the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out.

2. Yahoo Answers or Linked-in Answers. If you’re a service-based small business, you already know that your expertise is your No. 1 marketing tool. Yahoo Answers is a great way to share your knowledge with people (consumers) who are looking for it—a direct connection with potential customers. As a B2B (business-to-business) marketer, I use Linked-in Answers, but I’ve found some great contacts through the questions I’ve asked and the answers I’ve given. Spend an hour or two a week on this task and you will be rewarded with an uptick in blog traffic (which is why starting a blog is the most important task).

3. YouTube. Many laptops are made with web cams nowadays. If yours isn’t, a good video camera can be found pretty are cheap on eBay. Editing is ridiculously easy and the software is also inexpensive (or included with newer machines) How-to videos are an obvious choice. So are interviews or other ways to share your expertise. In addition to using them on your own web site and blog, You Tube allows users to create their own channel – a great brand building opportunity. Don’t just produce for YouTube — local search is also embracing video with CitySearch and Yellowpages allowing local video ads on its listings.

4. Flickr. A picture is worth a thousand words, or, in the digital realm, tags. Flickr is a great marketing tool. The time and cost investment is minimal. And thanks to Flickr’s incredibly active photo groups, you can share photos of your products with people who are interested. A veterinarian could share photos with the 25,000+ members of the Dogs, Dogs, Dogs group, which is one of hundreds of animal-related groups. A crafter who makes iPhone and iPod cases could post nice product photos in the Apple group, with its 4500+ members. A construction company that makes custom homes could post photos on one of the many architecture groups or in the appropriate city group, like Ann Arbor.

5. StumbleUpon. Of all the pliggs (Digg, Reddit, etc), StumbleUpon is perfect for the lazy marketer. Joining groups related to your industry and adding friends from those groups can be done quickly. Once you do that, as you add pages to StumbleUpon—including your own great content—other users will “stumble upon” what you’ve added. As those visitors give it the “thumbs up”, your content is then shown to even more users, creating greater awareness and reach for your brand and company.

Lori Laurent Smith
http://mediameme.com
http://linkedin.com/pub/2/AA9/03A

DEREK MEHRABAN
1. Be Social. Social networking is first and foremost social. Get out there and network. Then bring people into your Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Plaxo, etc. Build the online network that will stay with you throughout time and space.

2. Optimize Your Network. Use social networks to optimize search engine results. Keyword optimize your Linkedin profile. Send your blog posts to twitter and use RSS to extend your blog into other social media.

3. Spread Good Karma. Comment on blogs, DIGG people’s posts, comment on Flickr photos, take a minute to recommend someone on Linkedin. Good karma comes back to you in social networking. That’s how it works.

4. Pay Attention. Track people you like/respect on social bookmarking sites like Delicious to see what they’re saving. Set up Google Alerts to know when topics you like are talked about. Pay attention and be rewarded.

5. Work It. Commit to social media, whether a blog, podcast, or Linkedin. Commit to it and build it over time. Your social network adds value to you and your business.

Derek Mehraban
CEO Ingenex Digital Marketing
http://ingenexdigital.com/social-media.html
http://thedigitalbus.com
http://linkedin.com/in/mehraban

EDWARD VIELMETTI
1. That which is measured improves (Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems)
If you are going to keep track of something, it will improve. Take good notes. Build systems that take notes for you so that you don’t have to think about taking notes.

2. Reciprocity is a human universal (Wayne Baker, Ross School of Business)
People respond in kind to action. You can get a lot of benefit by generalized reciprocity, where you are generous to a group, and the group is in turn generous to you (and to the rest of the group).

3. The strength of weak ties (Mark Granovetter)
Most of the value of networks is not in the set of people you see day-in and day-out but in the space of friend-of-a-friend, people you don’t know but for whom an introduction will be easy.

4. Own page one (Pure Visibility)
On all networks there is a search function; people will search for you there; own that page. Decide how you want to be presented and present yourself that way.

5. Proximity is the killer application
A lot of your success depends on who you are near in physical, real, tangible space, not just in cyberspace. Distances are real.

Edward Vielmetti
Chief Economist, Pure Visibility
http://purevisibility.com
http://vielmetti.typepad.com
http://linkedin.com/in/edwardvielmetti
TERRY BEAN
1. Determine on which side of the Quantity (open networker) V. Quality (closed networker) debate you fall.

2. Create and stick to a strategy, but be pragmatic when it comes to evaluating new platforms/tools

3. Realize that social networking is very similar to face to face or traditional networking in that the results you seek are totally correlated to the efforts you make.

4. Have a focus and try to stay with it. It’s a very big world. Most of it can find you online.

5. Be cognizant of how you present yourself online. Everything is part of your digital footprint so tread carefully.

Terry Bean
CNO, Networked Inc.
http://networkedinc.com
http://motorcityconnect.com
http://linkedin.com/in/terrybean