Social media, without a doubt, is the new media. It’s hot. It’s fresh. And, it’s what everyone, both individuals and business’ want. I don’t blame them – I’m an advocate for these new interactive initiatives. If you haven’t noticed.
However (yes, there’s always a ‘however’ in a blog), there are, sadly, some misinterpretations of the advantages that this new, super-hot and super-cool medium offers your business’ marketing plan. Or at least, there are some things that marketing professionals forget to think about while implementing social media into their plan:
1. It’s NOT free
2. It’s NOT ‘another’ sales person
3. Feedback IS a double-sided sword
4. There are NO experts
What? I thought social media was immortal. I know, I know. I’m sorry. Even the latest greatest marketing medium has holes. Big holes.
1. It’s NOT free
Yes, go ahead and tell your clients and managers to sign up for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. And go ahead and tell them the best part, ‘THEY ARE ALL FREE.’ But, who is going to monitor profiles, monitor pages, create networks, find people, add people, delete people, populate, track people, update, mention, re-tweet, re-post, reply, find articles, read articles, post articles, link articles, post photos, post videos, update photos, update videos, monitor photos, monitor videos, create events, post events, mention events, update events, delete events, invite network to events?
The answer is YOU. The one with the brilliant idea to implement this madness into your marketing plan. And, sadly, your time, effort and research to consistently and constantly maintain these pages and the elements included, are not free.
Solution: Hire a social media director. Make all things SM their job. No one else’s.
2. It’s NOT ‘another’ sales person
‘I thought you said that if I signed up for these social media pages and put their cool icons on my Web site, that my sales will increase?’ The question I would imagine that might be brought up by your boss and/or client.
These are not sales people. They aren’t going to make you a lot of money. They can’t be depended on to solicit new business. They are simply, resources. They are tools. They are a form of communication that allows your clients, customers and friend’s to learn more about you, your services and your products. You can sell stuff here, but open your eyes; people don’t like to be sold. They like to be told. Tell, don’t sell. However, if you do consistently and constantly update your pages, reply to threads, post relevant articles for your network, you will have a cult following and maybe someday, they will get off their ass and into your store.
Example: Best Buy Twelpforce – this is not a sales person for Best Buy. These are dedicated tech god’s that answer your embarrassing tech inquiries. Just tweet them your question, and they respond. They don’t sell because they don’t need you. When they give you the correct answer, they own you. BestBuyer4Life.
3. Feedback IS a double-sided sword
This is simple. I hope you have thought of this. But, people will say great things about you and people will say bad things about you. It’s the 21st century. It happens. So be prepared for it because these are living entities - 24/7/365. They don’t disappear if someone says something bad, they stay on your page for all the world to see. So make sure you play nice.
Example: Bank of America – they have live customer service reps helping customers. It’s a bank. Banking and money are frustrating. And their network isn’t shy about their feelings about overdrafts, loans, ATM issues, etc. I respect the try, but when there’s more bad than good posted, might be a good time to re-think social media land.
4. There are NO experts
It’s true. There are people that are really, really, really good at this stuff, but really, there are no experts. These mediums are too new, too advanced and updated too often for anyone to be an expert. What constitutes someone as an expert? Social media will continue to change and will continue to grow, in order for someone to be an expert, you must see the future. Don’t get smart fans confused with experts.
There are a lot of really smart people in our world that we can learn a lot from. And these people range from teenagers to 70 year-olds. I learn something new every day. I like to think we all do, even the experts.
Example/Solution: There are none. These people don’t exist.
There are no clear rules for social media. It’s too new to have any. It’s too undefined. But the steps for success for any business are not complex. It is simply about being honest, creative and human. At the end of the day, social networking was invented to share opinions and ideas online.
And like everything in our beautiful world, there are negative aspects.
15.12.09
11.12.09
Changing the game. Creating culture.
Since the fall of 2007, I have been asking myself the same question over and over and over again:
As advertisers, are we trying to change culture’s perceptions, or are we trying to create a new culture?
I graduated from Wartburg College in May of 2007, two weeks following this momentous and surprising day; I started working at Harvest Moon Advertising in La Crosse, WI. At the time, I had an idea of what advertising was and how it worked. But what I still don’t know, three years later, is what purpose does advertising/marketing serve? I understand that we are supposed to help market a brand, their products and services – but when I started to think about the role we play in business and society, I wondered if we can do more.
As my career has grown and my experience has evolved, I have started to look beyond the standard advertising definition and considered a different approach. Something more. Something bigger. Something new.
Changing a culture’s perception about a brand is basic advertising and marketing. This is generally what you see on TV and hear on the radio. Changing a perception is essentially, informing the target audience of what the brand is, what it stands for and how it can help you, the customer. Changing perception is safe.
This is what I used to think advertising was. This is what I used to think was our only objective. But what if we had the power to create a new, cooler culture around a brand, product, and idea? Starbucks has.
Starbucks is a coffee shop. And there’s absolutely nothing special about their coffee (except they have a flavor for every damn season). But they have made it cool to do two things:
A) Drink Starbucks coffee
B) Hang out at Starbucks
You can’t go anywhere without seeing anyone – business professional to homely college student – carrying their warm, cup of Starbucks. And if that isn’t enough, they let us, their audience, create a new, universally known brand name – ‘bucks.
Drinking a cup of Starbucks has become a status symbol. It gave us a new status. A cool status.
They didn’t change our perception. They didn’t waste their time. They skipped that step and went right to creating a new, hipper culture that focused around one thing – their brand. Their (product) coffee just kind of fell in line, and then into our hands. They made it cool to carry around a blazing-hot latte on Saturday morning around the mall. They made it cool to walk into class late with cup of joe. They made it cool to ask, “That’s not a Starbucks?” They made us cool.
Starbucks is king of simple marketing, because we do their hard work. They own social media pages on Twitter and Facebook with network sizes that rival blonde homecoming queens. In fact, their interactive push is another outlet for them to create culture. They have followers and friends that post messages, share photos, share videos, share stories on Starbucks’ page. It’s like their social networks have forgotten that Starbucks is a corporation. Or, is Starbucks just that good. Do they make it appear to their network that they aren’t just a corporation? That maybe they are something more. That maybe they are a new, cooler, hipper, culture.
9.12.09
Validity for MB
In my recent “Facebook, approved" article, one of my previous (favorite) co-workers, who happens to be a generation x, posted a comment. And after reading it for the sixth time, I feel the need for a second post.
This is not a retraction. Just a spin-off. Thanks for the comment, MB.
I don’t hate. But I do understand that sometimes my words and thoughts, when pertaining to social media, can be skewed against generation x. It’s not that I loathe or am bias against said generation, it’s simply that as young professionals, we are looked down on. We look young. We act young. We are young. We don’t have experience – same shit, you know the drill.
But as MB put it, generation x’ers need some validation. And I agree. At least, some generation x’ers do. It’s true that they didn’t grow up with the Internet (MB, please note the capital I), cell phone, digital cameras, texting, etc. I get that. And I can understand how hard it would be to begin learning these new initiatives. But my point is simple – things are changing. And when things change, we must change. And lets face it, messages are changing. How we send messages, how we receive messages – everything, it’s all evolving. And in an effort to stay with it and continue to move forward, you can’t be sour about learning new initiatives, you have to adapt. Life-long learning, right?
So, here’s my validation. Some x’ers are changing. One example: text messaging. You may notice that some parents are beginning to text. It’s not because they want to, no one wants to. Rather, it’s because they know if they want to get reach out and contact their children, they have to adapt. They have to change their medium. They have to text. OMG! Social media is another example. X’ers are getting onboard. They are learning, slowly but surely, how to function on the Web. In fact, in the last 60 days alone, the number of people over 35 on Facebook has doubled. WTF!?
Numbers don’t lie. The older, wiser and more mature generation is catching up. As a social media fan, I can appreciate the frustrated questions from x’ers regarding adding friends, re-tweeting or searching for high school sweethearts. I can appreciate the time spent on finding out what the hell these things are and how they work. I appreciate the change.
Professionally speaking, I recognize that this new phenomenon really only pertains to communication based fields, but it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for the baby boomers to give these social media entities a shot. Try them out. See for yourself. If you don’t like them, it’s pretty simple – press the delete button.
This is not a retraction. Just a spin-off. Thanks for the comment, MB.
I don’t hate. But I do understand that sometimes my words and thoughts, when pertaining to social media, can be skewed against generation x. It’s not that I loathe or am bias against said generation, it’s simply that as young professionals, we are looked down on. We look young. We act young. We are young. We don’t have experience – same shit, you know the drill.
But as MB put it, generation x’ers need some validation. And I agree. At least, some generation x’ers do. It’s true that they didn’t grow up with the Internet (MB, please note the capital I), cell phone, digital cameras, texting, etc. I get that. And I can understand how hard it would be to begin learning these new initiatives. But my point is simple – things are changing. And when things change, we must change. And lets face it, messages are changing. How we send messages, how we receive messages – everything, it’s all evolving. And in an effort to stay with it and continue to move forward, you can’t be sour about learning new initiatives, you have to adapt. Life-long learning, right?
So, here’s my validation. Some x’ers are changing. One example: text messaging. You may notice that some parents are beginning to text. It’s not because they want to, no one wants to. Rather, it’s because they know if they want to get reach out and contact their children, they have to adapt. They have to change their medium. They have to text. OMG! Social media is another example. X’ers are getting onboard. They are learning, slowly but surely, how to function on the Web. In fact, in the last 60 days alone, the number of people over 35 on Facebook has doubled. WTF!?
Numbers don’t lie. The older, wiser and more mature generation is catching up. As a social media fan, I can appreciate the frustrated questions from x’ers regarding adding friends, re-tweeting or searching for high school sweethearts. I can appreciate the time spent on finding out what the hell these things are and how they work. I appreciate the change.
Professionally speaking, I recognize that this new phenomenon really only pertains to communication based fields, but it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for the baby boomers to give these social media entities a shot. Try them out. See for yourself. If you don’t like them, it’s pretty simple – press the delete button.
Advertising 2.0
I don’t know what the future of advertising is. I can’t see the future. All I can do is the see the work concepted and produced day in, day out here at our shop. And collectively, I can make my own hypothesis:
Advertising is going social. It has to.
If the whole objective of advertising is to; A) target a niche audience, B) inform and educate said audience and C) be loyal to said audience, it’s pretty clear to see where you should go to spend your resources, time and energy – social media land.
I’m not one of those ‘social mediaites’ that live and breathe on these platforms 24/7/365. I actually have a life offline. But I do speak to social media often and find myself blogging about it just as much. I do so because I get it and it’s remarkably fascinating to me that one medium, can attract and occupy such a gigantic audience. For advertisers, this is a dream come true. For advertisers, this is an obvious approach.
The run-around of targeting audiences, learning their day-to-day initiatives, what they do, how they do it, etc. is gone. We know what they do. Where they go. Where they live. What their hobbies are. Social media has simplified the hardest part of advertising.
If you are a marketing department or an ad agency, drafting a 2010 marketing plan and it doesn’t include at least one social media initiative, you need to reevaluate. And if you or your client thinks that social media isn’t a valid resource, you’re dumb. Everyone, from generation x to generation y, has some form of social media page. There’s your target audience on a silver platter.
Not only is having a social media marketing plan smart, it also gives your clients a cool, new status. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, they’re all cool things. And people like to be cool, because most people and businesses, are not. And this is their chance. They want to tell their customers, “Follow us on Twitter.” Or, “Go to our Facebook page to sign up.” Even more, they want to add the Twitter and Facebook icons on their lame Web site, because it offers a new status. It’s shows their modern and more so, it shows that they care about their customers because they, as a company, recognize where we are – social media land.
Being creative no longer means producing memorable jingles and rhyming brand lines, it means concepting innovative solutions and approaches to interactive and social media integration and developing communication channels through digital and viral elements. It means that you must include some social media and interactive initiatives into each one of your concepts. It means creative is changing. It means concepting is changing. It all means advertising is changing.
Advertising is going social. It has to.
If the whole objective of advertising is to; A) target a niche audience, B) inform and educate said audience and C) be loyal to said audience, it’s pretty clear to see where you should go to spend your resources, time and energy – social media land.
I’m not one of those ‘social mediaites’ that live and breathe on these platforms 24/7/365. I actually have a life offline. But I do speak to social media often and find myself blogging about it just as much. I do so because I get it and it’s remarkably fascinating to me that one medium, can attract and occupy such a gigantic audience. For advertisers, this is a dream come true. For advertisers, this is an obvious approach.
The run-around of targeting audiences, learning their day-to-day initiatives, what they do, how they do it, etc. is gone. We know what they do. Where they go. Where they live. What their hobbies are. Social media has simplified the hardest part of advertising.
If you are a marketing department or an ad agency, drafting a 2010 marketing plan and it doesn’t include at least one social media initiative, you need to reevaluate. And if you or your client thinks that social media isn’t a valid resource, you’re dumb. Everyone, from generation x to generation y, has some form of social media page. There’s your target audience on a silver platter.
Not only is having a social media marketing plan smart, it also gives your clients a cool, new status. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, they’re all cool things. And people like to be cool, because most people and businesses, are not. And this is their chance. They want to tell their customers, “Follow us on Twitter.” Or, “Go to our Facebook page to sign up.” Even more, they want to add the Twitter and Facebook icons on their lame Web site, because it offers a new status. It’s shows their modern and more so, it shows that they care about their customers because they, as a company, recognize where we are – social media land.
Being creative no longer means producing memorable jingles and rhyming brand lines, it means concepting innovative solutions and approaches to interactive and social media integration and developing communication channels through digital and viral elements. It means that you must include some social media and interactive initiatives into each one of your concepts. It means creative is changing. It means concepting is changing. It all means advertising is changing.
8.12.09
@jakehommer_4_Twitter
I’ve compiled a list of the top reasons why I think my best friend, Jake Hommer, would be best suited for a twitter page.
1. I’ve already created a name and double-checked it to ensure availability - @jakehommer
2. I’ve created alternative names in case @jakehommer isn’t sexy enough:
@jakenasty
@longandstrong
@goodbeerdrinker
@bicmaclover
@about2getnasty
3. He’s a man of minimal words – #Twitter caps at 140 characters. Perfect.
4. His Facebook status updates are generally clever as well as intriguing. Similar to a man of mystery.
5. His Facebook about me USED to be his bread and butter. I emphasize USED, as he has toned down on his Facebook awareness due to work, ladies and drinking. All, good reasons.
6. He has a Internet.
7. He has a MacBook.
8. He has an iPhone.
9. He has friends that live on #Twitter.
10. I have already started spreading the word that @jakehommer is going to sign up. More so, some of my followers have joined in on the action. The anticipation seems to be killing them. See image for example A.
I will not stop blogging, tweeting or emailing until @jakehommer is living on Twitter. If you see him, tell him to join.
7.12.09
Facebook, approved
If you work in an office with diverse age groups like me, you probably have noticed how the seasoned and conventional generation x’ers have adopted something from us, the un-professional and un-experienced, generation y’s:
Facebook. Twitter. LinkedIn. Even, YouTube.
Why now? Why just now are these platforms socially acceptable in the work place?
This is my theory. And because this is a blog, I can say whatever I like and let someone on the world-wide-web think of me as some social media genius, or an interactive moron, then post a thoughtful, yet relevant comment below. It’s a beautiful world.
But, to me, it seems that just recently generation x’ers are hoping on the social media bandwagon, signing up for these accounts and really engaging. For the first time, they are truly embracing these mediums and taking the time to comprehend the magnitude of their purpose and recognizing what they are truly designed for – communication.
I’m going to pick on Facebook. When it first launched, generation x’ers most likely eavesdropped on their children’s/nieces/nephews, etc. conversations regarding what so and so posted on their wall, the images following an all-night booze-a-thon at the frat house or the relationship status updates and from this intellectual information, they gathered that Facebook was ultimately, the devil. More so, that Facebook was going to corrupt their innocent children and be the death of sanity, as we know it.
From my perspective, it felt like generation x’ers didn’t bother trying to learn about this living entity. They would rather not – one of those out of sight, out of mind things. And it hasn’t been until now that they have taken the time to sit down, sign up and realize that Facebook is not just utilized for hooking up or sharing/posting regrettable photos from the previous night – that it’s actually much more than that. And most important, that YOU, the user, have control of the information that you want to populate.
You can see it now. Generation x’ers adding old college friends, colleagues and neighborhood buddies. They are beginning to piece together the lost years of the life and embracing what’s new. Whether you like it or not, this is the modern approach to connecting and keeping in touch. It’s fast, it’s easy and it’s 24/7.
So now, thank you to us, you don’t see any more dirty looks or gritting of the teeth around the office when a young-professional types in the evil, social media URL of their choice. Because now, these sites are accepted. Because now, both generations understand what these sites are and more important, what they are not.
2.12.09
Social Study
Consider this a social experiment. I am.
Like you, I have read a number of articles and heard plenty of “experts” speak about this new found power of social media. Essentially, these collective opinions say that social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. can be utilized as legitimate resources - resources that will provide you with information that will help you, give you answers, grow your business, etc.
I have made a decision. I am going to create my very own social study because I am curious how accurate the social media “experts” testimonials are, especially when it comes to social media and cross-platform responses.
You may (or may not) have noticed that the name of my blog is yet to be determined. I have appropriately titled it “BLANK...FOR NOW.” What I intend to do is reach out to my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn networks for help on naming my new blog. My networks aren’t massive, but large enough to construct some conversation. There is no incentive for the winner – no gift cards or cash – I'm too poor, but I will give a nice, big social media thank you.
My goals for this are simple:
1. Find out how long it takes a network of people to respond to a simple, yet creative request
2. Determine how genuine a network of followers (both known and unknown) can be
3. Learn if social media cross-platform increases awareness as well as movement
4. Receive a kick-ass blog name, without having to use my own brain
I will be using the keyword - #namemyblog – this will help me track my responses and gather the appropriate information.
I feel like a scientist. The only bad thing is that I failed, miserably, at all things science throughout my years of education.
Let the social study begin.
Like you, I have read a number of articles and heard plenty of “experts” speak about this new found power of social media. Essentially, these collective opinions say that social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. can be utilized as legitimate resources - resources that will provide you with information that will help you, give you answers, grow your business, etc.
I have made a decision. I am going to create my very own social study because I am curious how accurate the social media “experts” testimonials are, especially when it comes to social media and cross-platform responses.
You may (or may not) have noticed that the name of my blog is yet to be determined. I have appropriately titled it “BLANK...FOR NOW.” What I intend to do is reach out to my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn networks for help on naming my new blog. My networks aren’t massive, but large enough to construct some conversation. There is no incentive for the winner – no gift cards or cash – I'm too poor, but I will give a nice, big social media thank you.
My goals for this are simple:
1. Find out how long it takes a network of people to respond to a simple, yet creative request
2. Determine how genuine a network of followers (both known and unknown) can be
3. Learn if social media cross-platform increases awareness as well as movement
4. Receive a kick-ass blog name, without having to use my own brain
I will be using the keyword - #namemyblog – this will help me track my responses and gather the appropriate information.
I feel like a scientist. The only bad thing is that I failed, miserably, at all things science throughout my years of education.
Let the social study begin.
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