July 2nd, 2010
by Corey Mahoney

This past Sunday (as usual), we found ourselves looking for brunch. The nearest place is an odd little corner café descriptively named the Volunteer Park Café. They have delicious quiche, good salads, and a nearly overwhelming banana French toast dish. From a block away, we could see someone standing in the doorway with a boom mic. Was it a news crew? Was the café still open? People seemed to be going in past the filming operation, so we followed them in.

Inside, there was a note on the register explaining the video shoot: a friend of the café had volunteered to film “Love letters to VPC” in support of the owners and café community. Customers were encouraged to share if they had anything nice to say about the café or their experiences at the café over the years.

Why Love Letters?

It turns out that the café has been working on building a back patio for some outdoor seating, and one of the neighbors objects. That neighbor has filed a complaint with the city pointing out that the building is historically zoned as “grocery” instead of “grocery/café.”

In order to stay in its spot—and continue to grow—the café will need to request a zoning change from the Department of Planning and Development. And in order to do that, they’re collecting customer stories to build a “supportive argument” for the café.

The oldest social media

From my spot by the wall, I can hear what’s going on around me: two elderly gentlemen in the corner are discussing the Federalist Papers; one of the owners is greeting a baby whose mother is standing in line; two men with dueling MacBooks are working beside me; and several pairs of friends are meeting for lunch.

Video testimonials, customer evidence, and new media may be popular buzzwords and growing marketing practices, but this is the oldest “social” media: people gathering to talk with each other, work together, and build communities. It seems only natural that video and “new” media should support this place’s existence.

It’s a good reminder: the boom mic may be new, and the Twitter account might help a little bit, but the real secret to great customer evidence and strong testimonials is helping them fall in love—with your space, with the products, with each other, and with the community.

tags: customer evidence, social media

June 8th, 2010
by Eric Burgess

Today, we’re happy to share a blog post by Eric Burgess, a Social Media Strategist on the team that works with Microsoft’s Startup Business Group. This was originally posted on his blog, but offers some grounded advice about how he does great work for our clients.

Being a Social Media Strategist at Microsoft (by way of Projectline) involves much more than just tweeting and maintaining a Facebook page. It’s about building community. Our product, one in the educational sector, requires a lot of online networking. I work hard to establish and build trust with educators around the world. While you think the Microsoft name alone would give you a shoo-in to any community – it simply doesn’t.

Teachers want to know that you are just as passionate about education as you are about the product you are marketing. To show them this, when I tweet out something, I usually always sign my name at the end to help give it that personal touch. Many Social Strategists and Community Managers sign only with their initials in this fashion: ^EB. I go the extra mile and sign: -eric. On Facebook, I will send them personal emails and comments with my own profile (Eric Burgess) as well with my Mouse Mischief profile. It’s absolutely crucial in this day and age to be as reachable as you can to your customers. The old way of conducting customer service by way of 800 numbers and expensive CMS email software is on its way out. People want immediate access to you – so why not give it to them? It’s all a part of the community building I mentioned earlier. How can you build a community without making you and your product as transparent as possible? You can’t. Below are some important things to consider as you work to build up your community.

(more…)

tags: online communities, social media

May 14th, 2010
by Corey Mahoney

Yesterday afternoon, I drove across the bridge to have lunch with a friend. The conversation (as it inevitably does) turned to Twitter. This friend is a technical guy, responsible for keeping infrastructure current, secure, and reliable. He’s not a marketer, he’s not in sales, and he doesn’t do most of his socializing online. So I was hardly surprised to hear, “I’m not a ‘twitterer’” and “it seems like such a broad audience – when we’re trying to reach people, we’re trying to reach really specific contacts.”

I’ve had this conversation once or twice (or twelve times) before, so I didn’t argue, I just explained: “Twitter—my personal account—is often the first thing I check in the morning and the last thing I look at before I go to bed. It lets me know what people are talking about and helps me find the stuff I really don’t want to miss.”

“So…Twitter is for knowing when your friends’ birthdays are and what they’re doing, right?”

“Well, let’s see: Kristina Halvorson, a business owner I really admire, tweets fantastic links about web content. My friends tweet when they try a new restaurant they love. I used Phinneywood’s Twitter feed to stay informed when there was a string of fires in Greenwood. If my website goes down, MediaTemple’s Twitter account is the first place I check to find out if there’s a widespread incident.”

I wish I had a video of what happened then: His whole expression changed, he leaned back in his chair, he said: “Oh, I could use that,” and launched into an explanation of how hard it is to communicate with all his users when there’s latency or maintenance or a need to let them know in advance when there might be an issue.

It was one of those breakthrough moments. A few specific examples turned “I don’t get it” into “I could use that.” It might be a while before he joins Twitter or finds a place for social media in his work, but it sure was fun to watch it click that social media can be as practical as it is shiny, as useful as it is new.

tags: social media

April 30th, 2010
by Corey Mahoney

Last week, Facebook made some changes. Depending on the slant, they either “seized control of the internet” or basically sewed buttons on everything in sight. A lot of the changes were under the hood, but I’d like to focus on the shift from the ‘Become a Fan’ to the ‘Like’ feature, along with the accompanying proliferation of Like buttons across the internet.

Do you like-like me, or do you just like me?

On users’ profiles, Pages are public: they’re broadcasted endorsements of brands, causes, ideas, and organizations. They are, like all the other pieces of profiles, one of the building blocks of a Facebook identity. On the old Facebook, ‘becoming a Fan’ of something meant consciously endorsing that thing as part of your digital identity.

That’s a high bar for engagement: it meant that Fans were clear advocates for the brand and interested in ongoing interaction (with the exception of Fan-building contests).

Meanwhile, we all got used to ‘liking’ our friends’ status updates, conversations, and links. ‘Liking’ something was the Facebook equivalent of smiling at it, nodding vigorously, or giving it a hug.

The Result? People ‘liked’ things more often than they became ‘Fans.’ So Facebook, cleverly, decided to parlay the habit of ‘liking’ into Pages. Now there’s no semantic difference between liking your friend’s graduate school acceptance update and liking the Coca-Cola Company. The only difference is the resulting engagement: one of those will be published publically as an endorsement and enable continuing communication, and the other remains a casual expression of congratulations. It’s like a flashback to 6th grade, when it was easy to spend entire bus rides explaining that you liked that guy, but it didn’t mean you like-liked him. Totally different, guys.

So what’s the difference, anyways?

For brands, this means that the barrier to Facebook engagement is much lower. Pages are likely to wind up with more Fans, but they will be less committed to the engagement. ‘Liking’ will be more common, but it will mean much less. This is good for companies for whom liking is enough—Coca-Cola, Sketchers, the Seattle Mariners—but less good for companies who count on deep engagement to build relationships and share content—the New York Times, consulting companies, financial organizations.

The “like” feature could become the next big marketing thing, or it could lose all meaning. For the marketers who rely on measurements like number of Fans, it’s going to require a reassessment of what that number means. For consumers, it could mean a backlash when they realize that ‘liking’ things grants access to news feeds.

Your turn!

Would you rather ‘like’ something or become a fan? Do you read ‘Pages’ as endorsements? How much engagement are you committing to when you like something? How much engagement do you hope others are committing to when they ‘like’ your Pages?

Speaking of which: do you like us?

Or do you like-like us?

tags: customer engagement, social media

March 10th, 2010
by Brian Hobzek

Talking about social media and business often feels like trying to hit a moving target. At first MySpace was just for social connections and Facebook was a way to connect with college communities. LinkedIn became the de facto social networking tool for business and then Twitter for broadcasting brief thoughts. Now we find (etc.) on corporate websites, movie posters, and email signatures. These buttons have become ubiquitous for marketing campaigns and, more recently, customer service and customer feedback.

The influx of social networking into marketing practice has changed how we think about web analytics and business intelligence. For a long time, analytics were concerned primarily with visitors, pageviews, and stickiness (how long a visitor remained on a site). More recently, the focus is on click-throughs and conversion rates—and now behavior-based analytics track influencers and analyze how we interact with people in our social networks. Clearly, web communities allow each of us to influence other people through what we say, what we buy, and what we recommend. Companies are struggling to balance the importance of mining customer and social network data with the risk of jeopardizing the apparently organic experience that spawns the growth of social communities.

Just last week, web analytics giant Omniture (now owned by Adobe) announced an expanded partnership with Facebook that will help companies monitor their marketing return on investment while targeting communities within Facebook (especially notable as we see Google and Salesforce.com edging into social media spaces). It will be interesting to see how this impacts the online marketing space longer term. Does a marketing dollar spent to advertise in social networking have the same impact as a marketing dollar spent on search? I believe both search and social networking will stay important to marketers in the long run.

For my work, this announcement raises a couple of questions: Will it force other networks or platforms to align themselves with analytics tools? I would not be surprised to see an announcement between Twitter and perhaps Webtrends. How will this increased emphasis on advertising and marketing impact the users of Facebook? It will be exciting to see how the new deal plays out, both for web analytics and for Facebook as a network.

What do you think? What does this partnership mean for businesses marketing through social media? What does it mean to you the consumer of social media networks? Are you excited or apprehensive?

tags: business intelligence, social media

February 12th, 2010
by Corey Mahoney

Now that the initial duststorm has settled on Buzz, we (along with our clients) are starting to wonder: what will this mean for us? Will Buzz be a new channel for engaging with customers or a set of personal and semi-closed conversations? Will it be a boon for marketers or a disaster for privacy concerns?

Mostly, let’s try to answer one crucial question: if you’re an enterprise marketer, do you need to add another social media channel to your plate?

My answer, in several flavors:

• Not yet. Buzz is, like Facebook, set up for most interactions to happen between individuals (it’s linked to Gmail accounts for now) rather than between brands and individuals directly. Unlike Facebook, though, there is no separate entity (‘Pages’) for brands. Building your professional network on Buzz makes sense, but your brand may not need to jump in just yet. In all likelihood, Google intends for brands to participate by buying Google advertising real estate rather than behaving like users.
• No…but you need to pay attention to your other channels. Buzz aggregates RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, and photo sites. Shared Google Reader items will suddenly be easier to converse about and re-tweets by Buzz users may start semi-closed comment threads. Your content will—if it’s worth it—be able to reach your readers’ networks more effectively than before. If you’re going to work on getting up to speed in response to Buzz, focus that energy on your content: make it valuable, worth sharing, and well-done.
• Yes, for some things. By default, Buzz makes it publicly visible who you follow and who follows you. This has some major security and privacy implications (which have been covered elsewhere), but for marketers it means another way to discover circles of influence. Identifying the public profiles of major influencers could provide wonderful insights into who they’re engaging with on a more reciprocal level than Twitter offers.

But at this point, within a week of Buzz’s launch, it’s hard to say how this will affect the social media landscape. What do you think? Will this be an extension of email and RSS, a new way of seeing the old tweets, or a more fundamental shift? What do you hope to see happen as Buzz settles into people’s lives and inboxes?

tags: customer engagement, social media

January 29th, 2010
by Corey Mahoney

Every year much of the pre-Super Bowl buzz is about the ads, and this year is no different. Some weeks ago, Pepsi made a splash (at least on the marketing blogs) by announcing they’d be forgoing the big ad spots to invest $20 million in social media campaigns. Pepsi’s caused a stir just by making the announcement—which won’t be true for the second, third, and forth companies to forswear the Super Bowl. It’s entirely possible that this move is just as much a PR gesture as a genuine bet on social media.

It will be interesting to watch how Pepsi uses that $20 million, and whether it works for them. So far, they’re using it to launch the Refresh Project, which will crowdsource the question of where Pepsi should donate the cash. Of course, corporate philanthropy is worth cheering for, but it’ll also be interesting to see if it works to strengthen Pepsi’s brand—and sales.

This week Intel announced they’d be taking a different tack by sponsoring the CBS post-game show and debuting two new commercials during the game. This set of choices, at first glance, seems almost backwards—with consumer giant Pepsi moving away from broadcast advertising and technology supplier Intel looking to reach a broader general audience.

But Intel knows social media. Their social computing guidelines are often cited as an example of best-practices policy, and they have an active family of blogs and twitter presences that are generally well-regarded. Because Intel knows social media, Intel’s marketers know that one of the most successful uses of video-sharing tools like YouTube is to serve as another channel for distributing popular TV ads (especially if they’re funny, which Intel hopes they will be). Their Super Bowl presence may be a counter-intuitive social media move, if they’re hoping it will spur online discussion, sharing, and viewership.

Which move do you think will work better? Can social media and traditional advertising work together?

tags: advertising, social media

January 4th, 2010
by Corey Mahoney

Last weekend, as I wandered through the farmer’s market, I discovered a storefront I’d never been inside before. Just inside the door was a gorgeous display; of course, I pulled out my phone to take a picture. As soon as I got the picture, a man rushed over to me and asked me—brusquely, but politely—to please ask before taking pictures. “Of course!” I said, “I can delete it right away! So sorry.” He assured me that I needn’t delete it and explained they’d had trouble with people copying some of the designs for sale. I asked for a business card, apologized for my thoughtlessness, and left (with permission to post the picture).

The experience of being personally chided for the very possibility that I might steal designs without giving credit reminded me of the recent etiquette and culture debates I’ve seen on Tumblr, Twitter, and Delicious (the 3 networks I’m most active in personally). It feels like everyone is worried about attribution. As things get easier to pass around and pass along, our reputations (as organizations and individuals) depend on what we share as much as what we create.

Interestingly, this can also offer a new model of customer engagement. Newsweek, for instance, has a Tumblr blog that links to Newsweek and external content, provides an easy way for readers to share Newsweek articles, and—last but not least—enables Newsweek to reblog readers’ best content and suggestions. On websites and traditional blogs (like this one), user-generated content is often relegated to the wilds of comment sections or discussion boards. Newsweek’s Tumblr interacts with users as equals (while maintaining order through careful curation). Suddenly, an organization that seemed faceless and one-sided is a potential reader or partner in conversation; to me, this seems like the very heart of customer engagement.

Pop quiz:

• What kind of attribution do you expect from your network?
• What makes you trust re-tweets (RT), reblogs, or links? What makes something worth passing along?
• How do you think Twitter’s new RT feature (currently in limited rollout) will affect attribution and engagement?

tags: customer communities, customer engagement, social media

November 2nd, 2009
by Corey Mahoney

In about a month, the FTC’s new Guides for using endorsements and testimonials in advertising will go into effect (read the press release or the full text in PDF). It can be easy to get sidetracked by a narrow understanding of endorsements, but these guidelines have implications for all kinds of marketers.

So, what’s the big deal? How will this affect customer engagement marketers?

(Keep in mind: we’re not lawyers, and we’re not giving you legal advice.)

• The new Guides throw out the old loophole that let advertisers get away with putting a cursory disclaimer next to an exaggerated claim (i.e. “Results not typical”). They stress that one way to avoid implying typicality is by providing the details of the situation—we think the best way to do that is a thorough, detailed case study!
• The revisions explicitly address new and social media, stressing that “consumers’ willingness to trust social media depends on the ability of those media to retain their credibility as reliable sources of information” (see page 11). Arguing for transparency and honesty, they make clear that both advertisers and endorsers can be liable for obfuscation or dishonesty.
• The Guides expand potential liability to the endorser, which makes sense in the context of blogs and customer communities. The key to avoiding the pitfalls of consumer-generated endorsement-confusion? Clear policies and processes.

So, are the new guidelines good or bad?

Of course, there are some tricky things about the Guides. You’ll want to make sure you have someone monitoring or managing your social media presence, blogs about your products, and customer communities. You’ll need to double-check that you have solid processes in place for reviewing and approving consumer-generated content. You’ll have to make sure that final editorial pass has legal and ethical issues in mind.

But ultimately, we think the revisions are pretty great. Social media, testimonials, and customer stories are only as powerful as the trust between companies and their clients. The FTC’s choice to weigh in (relatively) early, rather than in a few years, is only a good thing for those of us who know the real value of customers’ trust.

tags: customer communities, customer evidence, editing, ftc, social media, testimonials

October 1st, 2009
by Projectline

Projectliner Elliott Lemenager is at San Francisco’s West Coast Green conference this week to present on social media’s role in sustainable business. If you’re there, check out his presentation tomorrow (Friday) at 12:30—and enjoy the conference!

tags: social media, vlog