Naming things is hard. I’ve been paid to create business and product names over the years and it is a big challenge. A great name must be unique, memorable, protectable and compelling. For a business it also really cannot be a common word or phrase. When you add in the need to own the name as a dot com URL you really narrow the field. Buying your URL has become a start-up expense for many businesses and it can get expensive.

Because my start-up is a project rather than a typical business, my title needs are a little different. The need to find a new title has worked out however because it helped solve another issue that came up. I was given input by a publishing insider that using the words ’social media’ in the title and sub-title was a problem as there are a rash of books out there on the subject. This jibed with my thinking as I’m increasingly realizing that social media is just a piece of the revolution, albeit a significant one. So right now my draft title and sub-title is: Real Time: Redesigning Your Business for a Socially Connected World.

Disclaimer: This title is subject to change at any time!

With the privacy controls a user can completely change Facebook to serve their own ends. If you only want to use it as a private club for your friends, set limits on everything. If you want it to take on a Twitter-like functionality, open everything up to a public conversation. By giving us these expanded options, Facebook has taken a direct shot at Twitter. Twitter is a public forum. Anyone following you can see your conversations unless you block them individually. This works great as an ongoing stream of news, opinion, links, etc., that can be tracked and searched. With the ability to open our Facebook privacy completely you can duplicate this aspect of Twitter with the broadly expanded capabilities inherent in Facebook: videos, pix, blog posts, links, conversational threads, etc.

For me this means I probably don’t need Twitter at all in the long run. As it stands Twitter is almost useless as a tool without a third party app set up to track certain keywords. Is there any reason I should be using both Twitter and Facebook if Facebook offers everything Twitter does and more?

All Facebook has to do is give me a stream on my page that lets me track keyword usage in all public conversations and I’m done with Twitter.

The Facebook strategy is to own the online communication space- and they are nearly there.

Money quote:

“I’m going to quote a competitor to Mediapost, Advertising Age, but its packaged-goods reporter, Jack Neff, said it best: “BlogHer helps solve the mystery of how marketers will manage to spend money on social media despite showing relatively little interest in ads on Facebook or MySpace and the numerous free opportunities available everywhere.”

Neff than goes on to quote Jill Beraud, the Global Chief Marketing Officer of PepsiCo, who explains that wooing the mommy bloggers is a long-term ROI effort. As for the entire roster of advertisers at BlogHer, it reads like a who’s-who of the blue chip: Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, General Motors, Gymboree, Unilever, Kodak.”

Twitter is a business tool

The reason you should get to know Twitter is that it is becoming a critical tool for business. You can monitor Twitter for mentions of your brand and related keywords, including competitors. My former employer offers a powerful online tool for doing this and there is a usable free version. Once you’ve set up your keywords you can have an Alert sent to your inbox every time someone Tweets about you or your products, services, competitors or business sector. Let’s look at how powerful this becomes as a marketing tool.

Keyword mentions are qualified leads

Because of search, keyword phrases are the key marketing tool of the new economy. You don’t need advertising, cold calling, direct mail or any other marketing tactic if you have a clear understanding of the keyword phrases associated with your business. Developing your keyword list can be a tricky process but it’s worth it ( I can do this for you on a contract basis, contact me for info).

Keyword mentions in social media are pointers to qualified leads. A person talking about your product or service in these public forums has self-identified themselves as being very interested in your business, even if their comments are negative. This is the ultimate targeting. Simply respond to their comment on Twitter with something helpful. They will respond positively if you add value to their conversation.

Social media exposure is exponential, one to many

But isn’t this too labor-intensive? No, because of an incredible aspect of Twitter and other public social media platforms: Everyone following the person you respond to will see your response. They are following that person because of shared interests. And if they like what you’re saying they can Retweet you to their followers, spreading the word virally. And you can include a URL in your Tweets (use www.bitly.com to shorten URLs and track clicks- it’s free)

Is the light bulb going off yet? Through Twitter you can reach a highly targeted group of prospects for your products and services instantly and globally. These people are asking for information! And you can reach out to them by following them and using a Twitter feature call Direct Messaging that sends a message from you into their inbox. Pretty cool, eh?

Commercial interruption: I do contract marketing for growing businesses

If you want to know more or need help with setting up your social media marketing, contact me at www.martinedic.com.

Resources:

Good beginner’s guide to Twitter, Part One and Part Two

Though we throw the phrase ’social media’ around as though it were a clearly defined thing, the reality is that social media is an extremely complex mix of sources, platforms, authors, responders and more. Each has its own unique characteristics- Twitter is very different than a blog which very different than a Ning network which is completely different than a wiki or YouTube. Yet each is defined as social media because they all provide a place users to post and respond to content.

Social Media Monitoring Is A Complex Process

My background is in social media monitoring and measurement tools, specifically SM2 from Techrigy. SM2 is a complex piece of software that performs, IMHO, far better than most of its competitors. However I do hear all the time from users about issues like repeat results, spammy results, irrelevant results, etc. That’s because the complexity described above means that a software designer must build a collection system that is tailored for each different kind of social platform and they must also create universal metrics specifications that make meaningful comparisons between sources possible. And they must continually adapt these designs as source providers change their software, servers and APIs, among other things.

Understanding Your Keywords Is The First Step

Another factor in the quality of the results from social media monitoring searches is the user’s expertise. These searches are built on keyword phrases that must refined to eliminate irrelevant or spammy results. The use of Boolean operators like AND and OR, excludes and avoiding very general phrases like “Google” is critical to getting relevant and useful results. If you’re searching Delta faucets for instance, you’ll want to exclude references to rivers and airlines. You might want to do a search on phrases like “delta” and “faucets” to find results that specifically include both keywords together. Unless you have experience in SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing), you probably haven’t spent time refining the keywords associated with your business, brand or reputation. In the new world of social media marketing, developing a sophisticated keyword phrase list is the first marketing activity you should be pursuing.

Social Media Analysis and Metrics Help You Understand Massive Numbers of Conversations

Another problematic aspect of social media monitoring is the sheer quantity of results you may discover. That’s why I am so positive about SM2- it offers the most powerful analysis and sorting tools available. When you have hundreds of thousands or millions of results from a major brand search, understanding what they mean is a daunting task, especially if you’re tasked with explaining the results to a group who are not familiar with the implications of social media. The metrics tools enable you to make estimations of demographics like gender, age and geo-location, of tone, sentiment and emotive content, of buzz by date or individual keyword and more. You can extract themes, see how social contributors tagged their own posts, measure the relative reach of the sources and make comparisons.

The sorting tools are equally important. You can sort by source (Twitter, Ning, Blogs, Wikis, etc.), by keyword phrase, by any metric category, by things like Political, Legal or Religious and by any custom category you create. Those sorted results instantly are parsed and charts built to analyze just that subset of the total results. Want to know the sentiment of female Twitterers using a single keyword phrase? No problem.

Look for Indications of What People Think Rather Than 100% Accurate Measurements

All of these metrics and analysis tools are indicators, not 100% accurate. The software depends on the quality of information provided by the source user. It only collects publicly available information and makes best guesses on what it means. Thus, things like sentiment analysis are guesses based on negative or positive terms in proximity to your keywords. Because software cannot (regardless of what semantic software people tell you) understand irony and other complexities of human communication, no one can do accurate sentiment analysis without humans reading and marking the results, a very costly option (marking individual results is an option in SM2).

Becoming A Social Media Monitoring Expert Now Puts You In A Leading Edge Position

Social media monitoring and analysis is critical to your social media outreach campaigns. While imperfect, it is being improved constantly and will be your primary marketing toolset in the very near future. My advice is to skip the freebie tools out there because they simply cannot provide any degree of accuracy or capture all the relevant conversations. Buy the tool that works for you and become a power user or assign that role to someone in your group. You’ll automatically be at the forefront of this new marketing paradigm.

From helping customers to avoiding them: Try contacting Google

This data-driven culture is typically managed by IT and software people. Many of the most successful newer companies were and are started by techies. Techies are notoriously adverse to the human contact parts of doing business, i.e. sales, marketing and customer support. They often believe that technology can eliminate these messy interactions. Ever try to contact Google for instance? I challenge you to find a phone number or email address anywhere on their sites. There may be a few there but I guarantee you won’t get a live human ever.
Part of the reason companies stopped talking to customers is that it was not efficient. A one to one conversation might fix a problem but it only fixed that problem for that person. In theory an automated system captures a solution and a problem and shares it with whomever has the same problem. Unfortunately these automated system designers started being pressured to use these systems to avoid contact with customers rather than to resolve problems. According Jarvis’s book, Dell customer service reps were rewarded for having the least amount of phone time per call. This created an incentive to transfer calls rather resolve problems!

Social media and customer support, market research, product development and marketing

Enter social media. Conversations about brands and products and reputations run rampant. Feedback from users is ubiquitous and immediate. Companies that don’t talk get blasted in very public forums that are global and part of the new ‘permanent record’. That’s why social media is in every headline and infiltrating every level of society.

Companies that get this are just at the beginning. When they realize that social media is not just a thorn in their side that they need to deal with and start understanding what an amazing resource it represents we’ll see a real revolution. Social media interaction will drive product development, market research, customer support and marketing. It will be a recruitment tool. It will replace advertising and conventional publicity. These aren’t predictions, they are observations.

Here’s the money quote:

“You used to wait to go to the water cooler or a cocktail party to talk over something,” said Richard Laermer, chief executive at RLM Public Relations in New York.

“Now, every minute is a cocktail party,” he added. “You write an e-mail and in an hour, you’ve got a fan base agreeing with you.”

The only problem with the article is that they think email had something to do with this- it was not email, it was the buzz that spreads exponentially across social media. When a guy like Kottke reblogs a design critic’s take on the packaging, thousands of his readers see that story in real time and they spread it to thousands more. It’s my classic brushfire effect analogy:

“Twitter is the ultimate focus group,” Mr. Shankman said. “I can post something and in a minute get feedback from 700 people around the world, giving me their real opinions.”

This is why you need to actively listen to what they’re saying about your brands. Unfortunately it appears the ad agency that did the redesign, Arnell, doesn’t monitor social media ,since they seem to think it was just a few loyal fans who complained. Kottke, for example, is one of the widest reaching blogs out there and has a very general audience whose ‘reach’ may be in the millions. Ad agencies in general are pretty far behind the times when it comes to the new marketing model, however they were for PPC, SEO and SEM, not to mention their proclivity for building client sites in Flash.

This blog is about the real world application of social media marketing as the primary marketing medium going forward. Even the word marketing is limiting when it comes to social media: SM can drive product development, customer support, reputation and brand management- even build global market share. I’ll be sharing real world stories, interviews and examples of all of these applications. Though my business, WTSsocial, is focused on social media monitoring and engagement in higher education, I won’t limiting my focus- everything is connected in social media.