Social Media

Social Media and Vigor of Expression

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Customer Evidence, Marketing Operations, Social Media

I’m a professional writer. After a career spent putting ideas and experiences into words, I have come to believe in what Mark Twain called, “compactness, simplicity, and vigor of expression.” Twain might not seem entirely relevant in an age of social media, but you have to admit—that is an excellent formula for a good tweet.

Economy, clarity, accuracy, and immediacy are always high marketing virtues, no matter how many characters you get. Well-made customer evidence should clearly illustrate an organization’s experience with a product or solution and make it relevant to decision makers at other organizations. Like any good story, an effective case study or impact article should be about people that readers can relate to.

In shorter social media formats, the value of economy is obvious, but without a little vigor of expression, compact can turn out to be just short. Benefit metrics and customer quotes give case studies impact, and they can be easily repurposed into shorter formats to good effect. But good stories are usually more than the sum of their highlights, and on its own, a metric or a quote has a lot of work to do. When an IT manager at Acme Energy says, “I reduced my PC costs by $1 million,” it does have a certain je ne sais quoi, but it’s not the whole story. It begs the reader to ask, “How does Acme Energy compare to my business? How do that manager’s challenges relate to mine? It worked for her, but will it fit my needs?” Specific, concrete details about real business experiences provide genuine credibility and applicability to the quotes we use and the success metrics we cite, and credibility and applicability are exactly what makes good customer evidence so powerful in the first place.

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Using Gamification to Engage with Customers

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Customer Engagement, Social Media

This afternoon I arrived at the Marriott San Mateo to participate in the Summit on Customer Engagement, a place to learn about new ideas and best practices for customer engagement programs. As I was circulating the room at the happy hour mixer tonight, I ran into folks from Influitive, Software AG, Intel, SMART Technologies, TechValidate, Wings4U and more. Through our discussions, I learned that there was one common question and discussion topic—“what is gamification?”

Although there will be a great presentation by Influitive on Wednesday, called ”Using the Principles of Gamification to Maximize Reference Engagement in Demand Generation”, I wanted to share with you a brief overview of gamification so that you can actively participate in the conversation.

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Learning to Curate: How to Become a Modern-Day Trader in a Lost Art

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Content Strategy, Marketing Musings, Social Media

Remember back in your college days when one of your friends was always listening to the latest local bands or piecing together new and interesting outfits? Well, in their own way, they were curators. You may think of museums when you think of curation, but the truth is everybody curates in some way.

Creator vs. Curator
In our digital world, you’ll sometimes see people refer to themselves as a creator or a curator. Some people do both and some prefer to do one or the other. Creators are people who make videos, write blogs, take photos, write reports, comment on blogs, actively tweet their thoughts, etc. Curators spend time finding interesting content to share with others or to use as a reference for later. They are more concerned with sharing good content and being part of the action of developing stories in the social media world. Of those people online, nearly everybody does both, but a few tend toward one or the other.

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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….”

Taming Social Media Data

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Business Analytics, Marketing Musings, Social Media

I’m a Business Intelligence Analyst. I’m also a data geek. So when a client recently asked me to oversee the development of a comprehensive Social Media report, for monthly presentation to their upper management, I was both excited and wary.

Excited Me: Cool! The latest thing! A vast untapped resource of dialog and opinion straight from customers!

Wary Me: This stuff is mostly free-form! How are we ever going to glean relevant, actionable data from these sources? It’s like the Wild West out there…

Some basic social metrics are easy to gather and interpret. How many Facebook likes did we add this month? How many unlikes? How many Tweets were made with a hashtag we might expect, like #ProductName? How many people liked our client’s latest Facebook post? It’s a good start, but our client’s management wanted more in-depth insight.

There are several tools available for social media analytics. Visible Intelligence, Radian6, Sysomos (MAP and Heartbeat), Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics, Crimson Hexagon, etc. They all offer valuable insight but go about it in very different ways. Instead of picking a tool and prying out what we could, we worked backward from our client’s requirements. We tried various tools, analyzed the results, and chose the solutions that provided the most relevant analyses for their needs. Here’s a partial list of some of the in-depth analyses we were able to generate:

Buzz Volume: Using keyword searches across Facebook, Twitter, and select blog, video, and photo sites, we came up with a “buzz” volume that we could track over time. This is good to watch for overall social interest—for example, to see the buzz from rolling out a redesigned website or a new product version.

Sentiment: Some tools are quite good at classifying posts by sentiment: positive, negative, or neutral. Tracking counts of posts by sentiment month-to-month proved to be very useful, particularly around new product version releases and press releases. For further insight we picked out specific sample posts, positive and negative, and provided links to the actual posts.

Topics by Media Type: This breaks out a percent of posts by where they occurred: Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. Watching shifts in these volumes proved valuable. For example, we knew that discussions in this client’s forums tended to be mostly about troubleshooting technical issues, so an increase in forum buzz proportionally to other sources could indicate an emerging technical issue.

Top Contributors: We identified the URLs of forums, URLs of blogs, and handles of Twitter accounts providing the highest number of posts in the month. This provides a nice short list for further investigation of who is “buzzing” about our client’s product the most and might be worth approaching for a more formal relationship. For example, a person who frequently blogs about usability of the product might be an excellent person to have as a beta tester.

Competitive Analysis: Why just track buzz volume for the client’s product? We track buzz volume for competitors’ products as well, then combine and track over time to see how our client stacks up. The percentage that our client’s buzz contributes to the overall buzz in their category could be termed “Share of Voice” and is a good metric to track. When our client releases a new version, does their Share of Voice go up? If not, do they need to retool their launch marketing efforts?

Website Visits by Referring Domain: Most common web traffic tracking tools can report the domain from which a visitor came. Because many of our client’s social media posts include a call-to-action to click on a link to our website, we can track referrals from twitter.com, linkedin.com, etc. to determine how much web traffic is being driven by their social campaigns.

Success Events by Referring Domain: Going one layer further with web analytics, we worked with our client to define specific “success events” we wanted to track. These were desirable actions taken once the visitor landed on the client’s website, such as watching a video, reading a whitepaper, or downloading a software trial. Analyzing these success events by referring domain allowed us to see the level of engagement of visitors from social sites. Combining Visits and Success Events, both by Referring Domain, we calculated a “Success per 100 Visits” metric-another good way to see how effective our client’s social media posts are at engaging customers.

Blog Traffic Analysis: We used standard web analysis tools to track interaction on our client’s blog. Initially, their blog showed entire articles on the main page. To enable more detailed analysis, we drove changes to their site structure so that the home page shows only the first several lines of each article with a “Read more” link. This way, each full article receives a unique URL, and we’re able to track how many in-depth reads each article is receiving.

Blog Traffic by Referring Domain: Again, it’s interesting to see how people are getting to our client’s blog. This analysis reveals some noteworthy sources of links to their blog articles, and it can also identify sites that could be approached for a more formal relationship.

In its infancy, the process of analyzing social media data can yield some very helpful insights for marketers and managers. It’ll be exciting to see how the tools evolve—no doubt providing richer and more accurate data in the future—and to discover how we can further leverage this rich source of customer feedback data to benefit our clients.

#SIC2011 Attendees Tell the Conference Story Via Twitter

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Community, Marketing Musings, Social Media

This week, I attended Seattle’s first annual Seattle Interactive Conference featuring the connection and convergence of online technology, creativity, and emerging trends. If you’re in the social media or digital marketing space, you probably attend dozens of conferences and events each year to stay current and active in a fast-paced industry. If you’re not able to attend a conference, I recommend simply searching the event hashtag to read all of the attendee comments—good and bad—about the content shared. I’ve read recap after recap of the Seattle Interactive Conference and decided that I’m not going to summarize the event in my own words; I’m going to let the attendees do that. Here’s what they had to say using the official conference hashtag on Twitter: #SIC2011.

Day One: November 2, 2011

I registered and picked up my badge at the Battle of the Geeks event on Tuesday night…

But many did not attend and therefore, stood in a really long line on Wed morning.

If you made it in by the first session, you would have caught the “official” keynote speech by Jeff Barr of Amazon. When I put official in quotes, it’s because there were other sessions going on during the SIC claimed keynote, which is very unusual for a conference.

The Mad Woman Panel was packed! Moderated by Hillary Miller of Wunderman, she brought up some interesting topics around how well Don Draper from Mad Men would do in today’s society using clips from the show.


Shauna Causey of Nordstrom and SMC Seattle kicks off the co-creation talk by taking a picture of her audience and tweeting it. She shared valuable insights on the importance of co-creating with your consumers. If they say “that was my “idea” you know that you have won.

At the end of the first day, Ben Elowitz, Founder and CEO of wetpaint, shared stories of his start-ups and what has been successful for him via social media platforms.

While I was in a different room, Rand Rishkin of SEOMOZ said this:


The first day was quite a haul. From SEO and UX to cloud talks and women panels. It was time to hit up Shabazz Palaces at the Showbox Market.

Day Two: November 3, 2011

On Thursday, there wasn’t a registration line, but people were sure lined up to see Sir Mix-A-Lot. He talked about how we spend a lot more on music now than we used to. We’re not walking into record stores, we’re buying it on Shazaam, iTunes and other digital spaces because it’s convenient.

In the afternoon, Yelp and Urbanspoon presented on social media reputation models and how to respond to positive and negative reviews on their site. In fact, both companies admitted that they will flag and remove reviews that come from the same IP address. What do you think about that? Some reviews may be legitimate from same person, but it could also be the owner of that company trying to increase their positive reviews.

In the social media analytics panel, Founder of Meteor shared this interesting stat:

Then we heard this, which shouldn’t be news to the folks who run communities. It’s the same stat.

For my last session, I attended the #SoLoMo panel (social, local, mobile) which focused on the rise of social behavior and connecting through physical locations. Two panelists were from MapQuest and Glympse. Knowing where your friends are at all times used to be considered stalking or creepy but now it’s called location-based marketing.

For example, the leader in location-based marketing is Foursquare…

It was a long two days, but full of information, networking and fun. Out of all the 2,500+ tweets with the #SIC2011 handle, this was one of the most re-tweeted.

Hopefully in the future, you’ll follow me at other social media and digital marketing events. For now, cheers!

Karin Zabel
@kazab

The Writer’s Dilemma: Pursuing Mastery in the Age of Social Media

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Content Development, Marketing Musings, Social Media

I started my writing career before the Internet became widely available. It was only during my final year as an undergraduate that the University of Oregon School of Journalism started requiring students to learn to operate computers. My first computer was a Mac 512K, which was more or less a glorified typewriter. I conducted primary research by phone or in person and did secondary research at the public library. There was no dial-up Internet in those days, and the hardcover thesaurus my grandmother gave me as a graduation gift was almost always open on my desk. To wit, as a young magazine journalist, I delivered stories to my editors on 3.5-inch floppy disks, which I carried to the office by bicycle like a courier.

Recently, one of Projectline’s leaders asked blog contributors if we had any response to this story by Alissa Walker, a Los Angeles-based writer who points to the predominance on the web of bulleted “listicles”—a common editorial device used to draw in readers. If you haven’t heard of the listicle before, now you’ll see it everywhere. Your favorite regional lifestyle magazine will feature the following cover story: “Top 10 Fall Getaways in the Pacific Northwest.” This approach sells magazines at the grocery store checkout line. As Ms. Walker notes, “It had been proven somewhere (where?) that people love lists.” Blame David Letterman if you must. But don’t blame the Internet, because I’m here to tell you that I delivered listicles on those 3.5-inch floppy disks.

Ms. Walker, who is a fine writer, takes issue with the influence of usability and traffic data on prose writing for the web. (She does acknowledge, however, that when she writes on topics relative to web trends, it seems to increase her page views, which she likes.) She also criticizes the Huffington Post for purposefully misspelling “Superbowl” in a headline in an effort to optimize its place in search results. I agree with Ms. Walker on this: Disregarding editorial standards in the name of SEO is going too far, especially for a respectable publication. I’m grateful to any publishing entity that manages to churn out copy without hurting my eyes.

Regardless of the medium, and whether you call yourself a writer or a “content creator,” the goal is the same: clear, concise copy that has a compelling message or story. As Marshall McLuhan famously wrote, “The medium is the message.” That is, any medium affects society not only via the content delivered through the medium, but also through the characteristics of the medium. This doesn’t scare me at all. Good writers will always be able to use their skills—including improvisation—to take advantage of whatever medium they use. The English language is precise and versatile. All writing should lend itself to the mandate of editorial integrity. Indeed, whatever the medium, there are no real excuses for a writer; there is only the pursuit of mastery.

For Projectline blogs, I choose topics that are relevant to the company’s business practices and grounded in my experience. Being quite new to both Twitter and blog writing, I’m fascinated by the idea of skimming trending topics and writing a related piece. Like Ms. Walker, I enjoy seeing mention of my work in the ongoing conversation that is social media. For example, I just now went to my Twitter account @mollydeewrites. and noticed that Casey Hibbard, who wrote the book on customer evidence, tweeted a mention of my story on writing case studies. I’m thrilled!

Maybe someday I’ll write an Internet classic that’s referenced for years to come. In the meantime, I’m going to participate in the modern publishing paradigm—while doing my best every day to honor the old-school lineage of distinguished print journalists who taught me my craft.

I’d love to know—What helps you pursue writing mastery while writing for the web?