Dow Jones & Company hosted on Wednesday of this week what I have to call a special treat. An intimate cast of leading technology brands
and social media marketers gathered around an antique wooden conference room
table in the Wall Street Journal’s former newspaper Board room to talk new
media. How ironic. Here’s the video compliments of UStream (turn up the sound or get really close to the speakers),
and below my notes.
David Meerman Scott, Marketing Strategist,
Keynote Speaker, and Author of the hit new book, World Wide Rave; Shel Israel, Best selling
author of Naked
Conversations and the upcoming book Twitterville; David Spark, Tech Journalist and Founder
of Spark Media Solutions; and
moderator Daniela Barbosa,
Business Development Manager, Dow Jones, opened up the floor to discuss the new
ways your employees, the outside world and future generations will communicate
and collaborate using “social media.”
“How do you get
started? How long does it take to get it right? How do you build a following?,”
were a few of many questions Barbosa tossed at the panelists throughout the
chat. The first thing is attitude, Meerman Scott responded. People get wound-up
in the tools they have to be on. The four ways to generate attention for
marketers, communicators or innovators are
1) you can buy
attention – advertising
2) beg for
attention – PR
3) you can bug
people – sales
4) social media -
different because you get attention by putting yourself out there on the web
and earn attention.
People are coming
at social media with one of the other ways, not earning the attention,
unfortunately.
Spark says the
same thing. People ask for a video and want to know what it costs. Better to
see whom the audience is and if the audience will want to consume a story in
the video. His four steps are
1) assessment –
assess the situation – what do we have, who are the smart people in this room,
who are our customers / partners who are smart, where are our connections
2) harness that in
our editorial, create our own voice – not begging for attention – we’re being
seen as a peer for equal information
3) production –
instead of five videos, let’s create one video for multiple outputs and
4) social media is
the distribution end – being on Twitter and Facebook is not understanding the business.
People may be
talking about your business on a list serve, and no where else…
Israel disagrees
with both.
He looks at it
differently. Begin by listening and respond when you care to. Social media
should not be approached to get a goal. It’s a “telephone,” communications
tool. He takes the long view. People are pretty much the same. Earlier he was
joking about killing a mastodon as being the dawn of social networking, getting
others to collaborate over the shared need to carry away the heavy pieces of meat.
One person (obviously) couldn’t do it alone.
What it (social
media) does, Israel explains, that previous “social” technology didn’t do is let
people interact very quickly, interact online as they do in “real life.” It’s a
natural phenomenon
that sometimes leads to conversations, sometimes not.
Are you thinking
about your 15K followers when writing a Tweet? Israel has “milked the cow” of
social media to get ideas for his next books. He’s asking questions to get
answers. Israel wouldn’t get all of this help if he were not generous. If you
want something, you have to give something that may not give back, he returns.
From a business
perspective, how you can give to get, Meerman Scott retorts is, “If you’re
interesting, people will want to follow you. If you have a bunch of people
paying attention to what you’re saying or what you’re doing, it depends upon
what you want to ultimately get.”
Social media is a
cocktail party, Meerman Scott smirks. You can be a loud mouth salesperson, an
advertiser pasting up banners all over the party, pay a PR person to talk about
you, or have interesting conversations with people to see how you can help each
other.
The topic is
authenticity.
Do you let your PR
person blog on behalf of the CEO? How do you get a salesforce into the
conversation? Meerman Scott says to think about it, it’s how do you behave. When
you’re thinking about guidelines, the lawyers are one viewpoint. You should
listen to the janitors, secretaries, etc. as well. Take a look at IBM’s social
computing guidelines – publicly
available on the web to get a clue on how to do it right within your
organization.
Divorce the media
from the behavior of communication. How do you teach salespeople to use social
media? Israel says not to push the tool on anyone. Salespeople typically need
to use social media the least anyways because they are on the frontline,
talking to customers all of the time. Social media’s greatest power is bringing
that conversation into where it’s being discussed – outside the organization.
It really takes a
key person to get the conversation going in social media, Spark says. “How do
you teach it?,” Israel asks. What kind of conversation do you want to have?
First start listening to the conversation that’s going on, then join in, if
applicable. The experience always evolves from start to finish - when
executives first start with social media, it never ends as the way it began.
You won’t believe the
results you’ll have doing the tiniest things, Spark says. Meerman Scott says it
needs to start with the people you’re trying to reach. You should have meetings
with your potential customers, if they’re on social media and what they’re
doing. Kids are on Facebook, salespeople listen to podcasts because they’re in
their cars a lot. Organizations fail in social media efforts because they start
from egotistical efforts – it’s all about what they have to offer when it
shouldn’t be…
Israel disagrees
and points out that it’s “less of an audience target sort of way.” You go where
your (potential) customers can be found, does make sense, tipping his virtual
hat to Meerman Scott. Though, Dell finds comments, where people say they suck.
The first group that won’t change their mind is forgotten, but the others who
say Dell sucks -for a reason - are responded to with thoughtful answers that solve
those customers’ problems.
Frank Eliason started ComcastCares on
Twitter. The brand damage was on YouTube, when the Comcast service person
was video taped asleep on the job, but the social media marketing program went
to Twitter because that’s where the Company (Frank) chose to connect with the
customers. Type “Comcast sucks” into Google and there’s a quarter of a million
responses, but there are more than half a million ComcastCares comments on
Google too. There may be a group not in a place you think there is, Spark adds.
The San Francisco comedians are not grouped together on Facebook, Twitter, or
anywhere else. They have their own private wiki.
And what’s the
biggest barrier to social media - fear, fear of the unknown, fear of what the
lawyers may say, Meerman Scott says. It does take time to do social media.
Who’s going to do it? What kind of time is it going to take? But, it all comes
back to fear. Spark adds that if you can’t get business done right now, work on
this time to build your reputation. “Does the social media stuff get me business?,”
he reflects. Prices for Spark’s services have gone up 200-300 percent since he
improved his reputation through his own PR (and social media) efforts.
Quick aside from
Terri Molini, Corporate Communications at Sun Microsystems:
You do have to provide your employees with
guidelines and a direction to the platform. Companies also have to have a
dialog with their employees so they don’t get afraid or get frustrated with the
platforms, which leads to adoption of social media - teaching your employees to
become empowered.
When a person does
something inappropriate in social media, the community jumps on that person,
before the lawyers do, because the community doesn’t want one person to screw
it up for the rest, Israel adds. Social media is real life.
It’s ok to be a dork
or screw up online too. Though, if you make a mistake, and if someone is really
angry with you, let it go. It’s ok to make mistakes with social media. Spark
covered this topic, the biggest
mistakes made by social media gurus, at length on Mashable.
What should you
write (blog) about?
Take inward facing
information, that’s not proprietary, Spark says. People are looking for the
information, and if you get it out there, non-proprietary info, then people
will discover and make decisions on purchasing your product. Meerman Scott adds,
never write about your own products.
Nobody cares about
your products, they care about problems and answers to problems. Once when Meerman
Scott blogged, he admitted, a simple blog post got thousands of hits and tons
of comments, but when he talked about his new book, no one has responded.
Real estate agents
are the worst - rather than talk about the 3 bedroom house on Twitter, they should
talk about issues homeowners are facing, schools their prospective homebuyers
should live near, etc. Blog posts are all about the houses. Why? Real estate
agents should give their audiences give more value.
Social media makes
conversations scalable, Israel says. ComcastCares reaches more people than all
of the people in the call center. However, if you look at social media as a
mass medium model, unless you’re Barack Obama, it’s not going to work for you. In
the reverse, if you can collect information from Twitter streams and blogs,
from live events - get the bodies in the locations that you want them to be,
then you’re golden, Spark adds.
We don’t like
marketing messages, Israel repeats. If a person joins a conversation and yells
“buy my product,” the people in the room are gone, Meerman Scott adds. We like
being listened to. We do like people asking us what we think. Questions like
where do you live, what do you do? That is the natural evolution of a
conversation. As far as scale goes, Malcolm Gladwell wrote, “little things make
a big difference” and you can make a big impact doing little things with social
media.