Social Media 2012: Another Year, Another Status Update

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Marketing Musings, Social Media

It seems like just yesterday that I was writing one of my first blog posts for Projectline, talking about social media in 2011. Some of it was accurate (Facebook continuing their dominance) and some wasn’t so accurate (consolidation of social media). I didn’t predict the launch of one of the biggest new social networks, Google+, and who could have predicted the role of social media in the numerous natural disasters in 2011? Enough of that, though—let’s get started on 2012!

Sharing
There’s lots of talk about how content is this or that, but the fact is that content is created to be consumed. While sharing isn’t new, I think the ease with which it happens is where services like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon will strive to make advancements. Social media needs sharing to contribute to the viral factor that the services rely on to gain new users, and users need sharing to prove their ability to find the good content.

Visibility
Related to sharing is something I call social media visibility. This is what social media does to promote activity. You may have heard the “Hey, they put a Facebook in my Facebook!” joke that gets to the heart of this. The actions of both users and content will be more visible on social sites, but I’d also like to see visibility outside of the social networking sites.

Mobile Computing
Mobile computing is the future. Desktops aren’t going away, but people are shifting how much time they spend computing at a desk versus computing in planes, trains, and automobiles. Smartphones are now issued as free phones when you sign up for a new wireless contract. Mobile tags haven’t really taken off, but I think we’re more likely to see augmented reality step in and fill that void. Apps will become smart enough to know what you’re interested in when you point your camera at a billboard or product manual.

From Something to Do to Something That Is
Social media is additive. How often do you friend or follow somebody versus how often you unfriend or unfollow people? Exactly. I feel it too. I work on social media every day for clients, but even though I only have 500 people I follow on my personal account, I still don’t have time to have a meaningful social relationship with all of them. There just isn’t time.

Right now, social media is in between something that you do and something that is. If I want to share a photo from my phone, I have to go to “Share” and then tell it to upload to the service of my choice. I know you can adjust settings to make this automatic, but by default, it isn’t. I also have to go to my Twitter app and scroll through the tweets to find the ones that are important. It isn’t that I’m too good to do either of these, but because social media is additive, the time I have to devote to each of these activities becomes scarcer and scarcer.

I think social media is moving toward surfacing more pertinent content. Facebook has made some changes that reflect this, but as these services mature, we’re going to need this feature more and more. In order for most users to use a social media service, they have to find the service fast and easy to use.

I’d love to hear how you think social media will develop next year. Feel free to complete this sentence in the comments: “In 2012, social media will….”

January 16, 2012: Honor Dr. King with Service

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Community, Company, Marketing Musings

Join Projectline for a Day On, Not Off

Those of you who know Projectline may be aware that we volunteer as a group once per month with local non-profit organizations chosen by employees. People sometimes seem perplexed by this volunteering habit—they can’t believe that folks who work together all week would want to spend evenings or weekends working even more. They can’t imagine committing to spend hours doing things that make their hands dirty or their backs hurt, all for an unknown recipient whom they may never meet. I suspect their confusion comes from a lack of experience, not from differing values. Until you habitually give up your spare time and direct your energy toward a shared goal, it can be difficult to see that the benefits of service outweigh the inconvenience (by tons).

This year, we are raising the stakes and participating in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service on January 16, 2012. On this federal holiday honoring Dr. King, we hope that every single Projectliner will spend the day with their community, either volunteering with us or their own group instead of working. We also hope to sweet-talk our clients into getting away from work on this day to spend time with us too. As well, we are inviting vendors and subcontractors, employment candidates, past employees, future clients, Projectline Book Club members, and anyone else in the Projectline network who is interested in making January 16th a day on, not a day off.

  • When: January 16, 2011, 9:00am to 4:00pm
  • Where: Seattle, Philadelphia, Toronto, London and Bay areas or wherever you are
  • Who: You, me, and everyone we know
  • How: RSVP on this Facebook event page or email Carole Magouryk

Trust me, volunteering with Projectliners is one of the most rewarding, contemplative, and merry days of my month. Whether we are delousing sleeping mats, building fences, staffing a fund-raiser, serving or sorting food, or anything else we are asked to do, the time spent together as a team working for our community is worth every single second. I hope you’ll join us.

Follow @MLKDay and @projectline to learn more about the MLK Day of Service or just to discuss this important day. We want to hear what you are planning. If you want to talk to me about integrating volunteering and giving into your work community, find me @AnikaMarketer.

“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: ‘What are you doing for others?’”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Holiday Greetings From Projectline!

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Company, Marketing Musings

Here at Projectline, we’ve recently started a project to capture all the places we work and bring together our team around the world. Every weekday morning at 10:42 am, our team is invited to send in a picture of where they are, what they’re doing, or who they’re with. Each Monday, we’ll choose our favorite picture of the previous week and share its story here.

3 Christmas Outfits, 2 Kegs of Mannys, and A Partridge in a Projectline Office

May your sweaters be covered in snowflakes and your kegs be filled with local beer this holiday season. We wish you a very merry and successful 2012.

Listening is Believing

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Customer Engagement, Customer Evidence, Marketing Musings

Customer evidence is argued to be the one of the most influential factors in the purchasing process. In fact, it’s second to personal experience. Customer evidence is why Jeremy Stoppelman created the online review community, Yelp. (Yelp experiences an average of 54 million unique monthly visitors, a testimony to customer evidence alone). It’s also why you send product webpages to trusted friends and family members before diving in and making a final purchase. As consumers, we desperately want to feel assured in our spending, and listening to the voice of our peers is a smart way to eliminate risk.

The impact of customer evidence is hard to ignore. It’s transforming marketing messaging, as companies of all industries and sizes are finally putting their customers’ voices before their own. By having true end users tell the story of a product or service’s success, genuine relationships are established. This leads to message believability (see Hierarchy of Message Believability diagram), creating purchasing confidence and eventually every organization’s end goal: happy and returning customers.

Takeaway: Companies need to loosen their grip on communication and let their best and brightest customers do the talking.

Traditionally, organizations have captured customer evidence in standard marketing collateral such as case studies or customer briefs. These are great tools to share with potential customers and even other employees. Yet, with the advent of new social communication channels, there is even more we can do. Facebook, Twitter, and Market Maven blogs are just a few examples of our world’s new two-way information freeways. These channels are changing the way we seek advice and customer evidence needs to adapt.

Today, you can “like” a company and read comments by their fans to gather information. Or you can ask a question directly to the community to poll responses. You can follow an opinion leadership blog about a particular product or service and ask the author directly about his or her experience. Depending on your experience with the blog, you can rate the author’s post or write a comment to express own your opinion. This level of engagement ultimately enhances the experience (and purchasing confidence) of other listeners in the audience. It allows these communities to come full circle, expanding along the way.

With this shift, it is clear that companies must evaluate how they are capturing and delivering customer voice. Are you sharing customer evidence in the channels in which your target audience spends time? Is the evidence “snackable” or consumable? If your organization is currently using more traditional mediums to capture customer evidence, you are ten steps ahead of most marketing teams (again, see diagram and focus on the x-axis). The good news is you can push this evidence even further by tapping into other mediums, using the same content, and delivering it through different channels.

Takeaway: Get the most mileage out of the most sacred part of your business: your customer’s voice.

To give an example, let’s say two-page case studies are your marketing gems. The customer story is explained humbly, and the CEO of the customer organization shares a brilliant metric-filled quote, making your product truly shine. Instead of stopping there, perhaps your marketing team creates a shorter version of the story for a blog post. Or Creatives get their hands on the content and turn the metrics into a visual road map (also called an Infographic). Advertising can also be enhanced by spotlighting the CEO’s quote!

As marketers, it is our job to make the purchasing decision easy for our customers. The second best way to do this is by creating customer evidence and delivering it in a way your customer understands it best. Give your audience an arsenal of tools (or voices) to increase their confidence in your product or service. Deliver it in a way that is easy to consume and share in the channels they live in every day. Your customers are ready to talk; it’s up to you to give them the megaphone.

Purposeful Passion

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Careers, Marketing Musings

Recently, I started my day in a fairly typical way in my technology-driven household—watching a podcast on our television. This time, though, I was really struck by the topic and decided it was worth documenting in a blog post. The podcast featured Kevin Rose, creator of the news site Digg, interviewing Leah Busque, founder of TaskRabbit.

I was captivated by the story of the founding of TaskRabbit, which Busque created in 2008. It turns out that the inspiration for the company was amazingly straightforward. She’d run out of dog food one evening and wasn’t able to head out to the store right away to pick some up. She thought: what if there was a service that let you pay people to handle your errands for you? And from that simple question, the idea for TaskRabbit began to take shape.

Leah Busque grew up fascinated with technology and went on to earn a degree in Computer Science from Sweet Briar College, an all-women’s college in Virginia. She then took a job at IBM as a software engineer. In her interview with Kevin Rose, she talked at length about the vision she had for her company, which she has now turned into a multimillion-dollar venture. She also discussed how the company was always about much more than monetary success. It was about empowering people. TaskRabbit launched just when the global economy took a nosedive. She noted how, to this day, many of the “runners”—the people who provide services through TaskRabbit—are unemployed professionals who are trying to do all they can to provide for their families or pay their bills. She’s creating jobs for hundreds of people who want to use their talents and make the best of a bad situation.

I’m intrigued by this question: what drives the flash of inspiration that Busque experienced? What’s behind our instinct to invent and create value? There are so many ingenious personalities that continue to move our technology-driven world forward. And their stories often seem to have a common thread. All successful entrepreneurs seem to possess a single-minded focus on achieving their goals and are prepared to sacrifice to transform their vision into reality. For example, Busque would sit in her bedroom at home and program for hours on end to hone her skill. Founders of successful start-ups also seem to have a keen sense of where they need to improve. Busque, who enjoyed the problem-solving aspect of programming, knew that she needed to deepen her understanding of how to run a business.

But the integral ingredient, the catalyst for all creative endeavors, is a genuine passion for ideas. I’m lucky that, as part of my job every day, I get to document and share success stories from organizations in every industry. And at the heart all of these stories, there inevitably are individuals who have used their passion to turn simple concepts into notable achievements. By working with clients to help capture their customers’ stories, I have a chance each day to tap into the current of creative passion that runs through companies like TaskRabbit. Seeing the energy and drive that Busque and others bring to their pursuits inspires me to bring that same level of passion to my work each day!

Picture of the Week: East Meets (North)West

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Company, Marketing Musings, Pic of the Week

Here at Projectline, we’ve recently started a project to capture all the places we work and bring together our team around the world. Every weekday morning at 10:42 am, our team is invited to send in a picture of where they are, what they’re doing, or who they’re with. Each Monday, we’ll choose our favorite picture of the previous week and share its story here.

10:42 December 9, 2011

Did you know that we have a team in Philadelphia? They are visiting Seattle this week, and we are torturing them by making them don Seahawks gear. But they’ll be back on the East Coast soon. We don’t have all of the NFL teams covered, but we do have most of the time zones in check.

Six Tips for Working with Content Development Stakeholders

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Content Development, Content Strategy, Marketing Musings

In the content strategy world, experts talk about the tasks involved in creating, delivering, and governing content. What’s rarely discussed is that content experts are usually hired to develop content for one or more stakeholders who work outside of the world of editorial. Those stakeholders—otherwise known as clients—are counting on you to provide the skills and knowledge to deliver useful, usable content. Every client is different, and of course the basic rules of business etiquette apply to all your interactions with stakeholders. Beyond that, here are six tips for providing value to your clients during a content development engagement.

Understand your stakeholders’ situation. You may be working with stakeholders in different disciplines that are siloed within their organization. For example, on a single project, you may work with marketers, product managers, and developers. Each stakeholder may have different motivations and each may be envisioning different outcomes. It can be hard to know who is reviewing a deliverable. (I knew of a project for an enterprise organization where 70 stakeholders had been assigned to review a document!) As a draft moves through the company hierarchy, expect feedback to differ considerably from what you got in earlier review stages. Even small copy changes can result in considerable debate among stakeholders.

Inspire confidence. You’re the content expert. When you meet with stakeholders, you may find they have varying visions for the project. They may have limited insight into the amount of work and time required to deliver on ambitious plans. They may be unsure of what they need. Take it all in stride. Content development tasks aren’t easy; in fact, it’s a sophisticated endeavor that requires working hard and taking risks. You can do it. It’s your job. (It’s a bonus if you can make them laugh with some dry, writerly humor.)

Get answers to fundamental questions. Content strategy expert Nicole Jones wrote this story about developing content for Fortune 500 companies. She includes the following excellent list of basic questions that you need answers to before diving into a new project:

  • Does the project make sense?
  • Why is it important?
  • Who is the audience, what do they need, and what action should they take?
  • Is there any data to support the project?
  • Does the content apply to other countries or languages?
  • Who owns the content and who will update it?

Educate the stakeholders. We’re all in this together. I learn every day from the stakeholders I work with, and I return the favor by educating people about editorial standards. For example, some stakeholders may provide you with overwritten or jargon-filled content. As content producers, it’s our job to create content that delivers the message plainly in the language of the audience. (It’s that simple, really.) It’s okay to explain that common insider terminology (that is, most acronyms and jargon) is hard for most audiences to understand. It’s also helpful to define editorial concepts. I recently educated a client on a presentation project about how using parallel construction (in bulleted lists, for example) makes content easier for readers to digest. He got it right away and soon after sent me some raw content that featured parallel construction. I praised him enthusiastically, and we had a nice moment.

Realize your client’s vision. Your working drafts are the fundamental way you realize the vision for the project. This is especially true when your reviewers push back. Reviewers push back because once they read the message in plain English, they often see an opportunity to change positioning. I use this dynamic strategically and tactically. The written word—especially when it’s been produced—is powerful. People can have conversations with their colleagues and intentions in their heads, but once they see their ideas delivered on paper (so to speak), it’s concrete. Clients can’t reject a message, change a message, or refine a message until you make it clear where the message stands today. Content development stakeholders are going to want changes—significant changes—and often they’ll be able to figure out the changes they want only after they’ve reviewed your draft. It’s not personal. It’s just part of our job.

Defend excellence. On one presentation I developed, the stakeholders added two slides at the last minute. They didn’t want the content on those slides to be scrubbed editorially because they were running up against the end of their budget. As the content shepherd, I wanted the entire presentation to meet standards of excellence. During the final review meeting, I asked for a few minutes to look at those slides. Then I read aloud one (unscrubbed) sentence from a slide and asked the reviewers in the room what it meant. Everyone laughed because no one knew. As content developers, we’re on the side of the stakeholders. Assume the role of an advocate for the highest quality and most effective content possible.