The first post on this topic, the Trinity of Social Media, connected three basic components of a social media strategy – the blog, and microblog and a social network. Each has been the subject of a separate post expanding on why they are connected and this post explores the social network and how it fits into the overall strategy.
This post is about the third and final element of the Trinity – a social network.
The idea of social networking is not new. It’s actually pretty ancient – think back to the time when when people gathered around commonly-held or agreed upon beliefs, ideas or tenets. Among the myriad possibilities, you could choose to align yourself with civic, faith-based, or business-based networks. People actively networked with one another, promoted one another’s reputation, shared in one another’s prosperity, and stood together to be counted for whatever reason.
Fast forward to today; this same kind of network is migrating to online communities. We, as a culture, are tearing down the barriers of time and distance using online tools and technology.
People without any technical skills can now use the technology to communicate with one another regardless of location or time of day. They are too; with housewives in Gilbert, Arizona, Middle School kids with cell phones and brands with global reach are all discovering what they have in common. Whether you see it as a virtual water cooler, the neighborhood corner, a cocktail party or night club, you are right.
Online is fast becoming the place people gather to share their ideas, photos, video and more. It’s also getting easier to find out where people you like, and are like you are hanging out – try searching for almost any topic that interests you in a search engine and you will likely be presented with a variety of online communities.
Audience and Strategy - The audience you want to connect to and the purpose for the communication will guide your selection of how to best deploy or involve your company in a social networking platform. You may find a private network will meet you needs best, but likewise a large pre-existing network with a global reach might better serve you efforts to connect to your audience.
Are My Prospects or Customers Online in Social Networks? Yes, The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported in January of 2009 that “The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% in 2005 to 35% now”. They categorize adults as 18+. The fastest growing segment has recently been an older demographic (25+), but the 18-25 demographic is still the dominate age band.
Nielsen in March 2009 reported that social networks / blogs now 4th most popular online category – ahead of personal e-mail. Does that make it important? Only if you want to actually connect with people and engage in a real conversation.
What Should I Expect? People – lots of people and variety – lots of variety. When referring to online community involvement and participation, a popular statistic running around is 90-9-1. 90 percent of the visitors to the site will visit and not interact – they are only there to consume whatever content you are posting. 9 percent will interact periodically and if the subject is something compelling to them. 1 percent is the number you can count on to drive the conversation and to be regularly involved in the discussion.
What About The Security of My Information? Public or private community? Open or closed? The answer to this concern is yes; you can be as open or protective of your online presence as you pretty much wish to be. Some of the controls and the settings are not intuitive as they might be, but in most cases you can restrict or manage how your profile and information appears and to whom the information is available to.
Why Would I Do This For My Business? For any one of a myriad of reasons. The top three departments or functions in a company that seem to benefit most from the use of social media are -
- Customer Service
- Sales
- Marketing
It is emerging that there are other departments that might benefit from the implementation of social media tools, but these are the ones that will get the most immediate return on the investment of time and resources.
Engagement becomes an effort to blend content in the proper context so that the audience will hear about you, discover you are engaging and opt-in to create a meaningful dialog.
Summary - The ability to craft a strategy that is both compelling and meaningful does require regular attention and you will spend a lot of time and effort until you hit on an effective strategy by yourself.
It would be an error and a social media faux pax to use social media to broadcast a message one-way; that’s the model of traditional media that is unsustainable and unwelcome in a most social communities. Businesses, nonprofits and individuals are exploring the change and the most forward looking of them are aggressively pursuing online strategies that listen to the community and engage them – that’s the way to do it.
In the earlier post on The Trinity of Social Media, we explored blogging and I stated that the blog is a foundational component. The basic components are a blog, a microblog and the social network.
This post explores how the microblog fits a basic strategy we laid out in the Trinity of Social Media. Hope you enjoy it and comment on how a microblog has worked for you, or even if you still cannot get your brain wrapped around why should you use one at all.
The idea behind the Trinity of Social Media is that any one of the components are a good start, but a strategy of these three elements are better – much better.
What is a microblog? In The Social Media Bible, (chapter 15, pg 263) we write that "Microblogging is text messaging and a bit more". Yeah – I’ll go with the "bit more" side of the comment.
To begin with, we see the term ‘blog’ embedded in the name, which to the uninitiated, suggests a blog like function. In many ways, it does have many of the functions of a blog. The blog was explored in depth in this post.
To begin with, a remarkable differences is the length of the post. A microblog post follows the constraint of the mobile phone text message, which is approximately 160 characters. Giving up part of that 160 characters to a user ID puts us at 140 characters.
So while a blog post is about 200 words, a microblog post is 140 characters – so the post it’s like 8 times smaller than a blog post.
At it’s core, microblogging can be seen as the sending, or posting, of text message by one person to a site on the web. At the web site, other people can come and visit to read their posts. Like a blog, the reading can be constrained by the person posting the message. If they wish to allow it, visitors can subscribe to the messages posted and get them automatically sent to them.
With most microblogging services, the posts can be received on a mobile phone or on a computer. If on your computer, it can be in your web browser or in a special program that runs on your computer. When making a post, it can be sent from all the same places (computer, cell phone, browser, desktop program, etc.) as well, so this model presents a very flexible too to connect and communicate with an audience.
The net effect of the service is that you can send messages to not one person, but a whole network of people, or subscribers. Imaging those subscribers as friends, customers, prospects or stakeholders. Likewise you can receive message from a network of people in the same way, so you get to determine what is interesting to stay on top of?
Breaking news stories have emerged in microblogging networks well in advance of when mainstream media can get to it. Today we can expect that every new agency monitors the microblogging stream of messages for relevant news that they might investigate further and prepare for scheduled mainstream media broadcasts.
How does a business use a microblog? Examine the model I’ve just laid out; a one-to-many, publish & subscribe communication model that the pubic at large can opt-in to, and opt-out just as easily.
As a retail business owner you might leverage the capability to instantly connect with customers and prospects informing them of specials that have a time limit. A corporation might insert it into their customer service model, listening and instantly responding to customers that indicate they are unhappy. A sales team might listen for topics or mentions of their brand (or a competitors!) that indicate when to connect or reconnect with a prospect.
Give subscribers a link to your blog to explore your latest blog post, view an uploaded video or a picture.
Here’s a very popular thought – how about asking them what it is they want or need so you can then offer specifically that?
How does this fit into the Trinity of Social Media? The first element was the blog, the blog is a semi-formalized communication with your audience. It does, or should, require some kind of research, linking and images or video to make the post interesting to your audience. The frequency of a blog post is however fairly regulated, daily at most, weekly at least or if you like me, when you can get to it while you’re growing the company.
A lot of life happens between those blog posts though – urgent matters arise, meetings are held, pictures are taken for sharing and new prospects and customers find you. The frequency of a microblog posting is much more frequent than that a blog. A bearable stream of 2 to 5 posts a day are common and a dozen or so to an interested audience is entirely bearable.
What microblogging tools are best? Twitter by far has the greatest presence of any public microblogging platform on the planet. It has been the subject and carrier of participants and first arrivals for breaking news on the 2008 election, USAir plane landing in the Hudson River, and citizen vs. government unrest in Iran. A lot of good comes out of the Twitter community as well; local meetups that raise funds for charity (@Twestival) and there are microbloggers for almost every cause from AIDS Healthcare (@AIDSHealthcare)to to Saving dolphins and whales (@SaveTheDolphins). Lastly, it can be just plain fun! Check out Sockington the Cat (@Sockington) to get a smile as a cat shares her quirky thoughts as she explores her masters house with over 1.2M of her followers know as the Sockington Army.
There are other tools in this space (Jaiku from Google, Plurk, Tumblr all come to mind) and each provides a little different spin on the basic premise of connecting to an audience with a short message. At one point I came across a listing of over 200 microblogging services form around the world, so no matter where you are, there is a microblogging tool and audience for you.
Image from http://www.eventslisted.com/socialmediastrategies/
I earlier posted about the Trinity of Social Media and in it I laid out three fundamental components in the strategy – a blog, a microblog and a social network.
We get a lot of questions at TSMB Media about social media in general and blogs in particular. This is a foundational post in a series about The Trinity of Social Media and blogs in particular that I hope you use, enjoy and reference often.
Lets start at the beginning -
What is a blog? A blog is a collection of articles, often by the same author or company, that is presented on the Internet, often for public consumption and comment. It can contain any type of electronic or online content – audio, video or text. I suspect that when we can transmit smell or touch over the Internet, it’ll contain them as well! So a blog is not just the sharing of text for everyone, it is a sharing mechanism for whatever kind of content you might have. I like text on a blog most, but that is because of the way the search engines index content – they work best on text right now. The tools are coming into play that will better index image and video content, but the technology is just not there yet or widely used by the audience – text is easiest to index right now.
What do you talk about on a blog? Your blog is where you, as the individual or as a company, will create posts (or articles) of 200 or so words that showcase your company, your product, and your business philosophy. Whatever you feel would be relevant to communicate to your audience of customers, prospects and stakeholders. I have clients that have not one blog, but three! One is targeted at their core business audience, one is more personal and one is a place they post industry observance. Each of them draws a particular type of visitor or reader. Likewise, I have clients that only have one blog and there, they post just video files with some text for consumption.
The content on a business blog then is primarily about the organization and why you are the company your customer deal with and prospective customers should deal with. That is not all your blog should contain though – endeavor to share a bit about the company picnic, pictures and posts of internal events, videos of subjects that relate to your products, links to other blogs that support your comments or suppliers and places your products are being used or demonstrated.
How often do you use or post to a blog? Frequency of posts is relative to where you are in the life of the blog and the number of current visitors and subscribers. Early on in the life of your blog you may want to post more often. Frequent posting leads the search engines to make a determination that the posting source is a relevant news source and should be visited often. More frequent updates = more frequent search engine visits, more search engine visits = higher authority, higher authority = better placement in search engine ranking.
So just post to a blog and I get readers right? Nope – not quite how it works. In the Trinity of Social Media under the ‘Platform’ leg of the model, we point out two items; a ‘Posting / Publishing’ leg and one under ‘Reading / Commenting’.
The reading of complementary and competitive content blogs is a very important step. Participating in blogsphere will drive readers and comments / links about your blog elsewhere on the web – all good relative to your search engine ranking.
Your blog should be positioned as the foundational element in a social media strategy. It should be the place you refer people to in your microblog post for more info, it becomes a place you connect to your off-line marketing, and it is where you always link your social network profile.
Why am I blogging? Passion… blogging gives you the control over what you are able to say about your passion, how often you want to say it and the context of how your message is presented. If you are not passionate about your topic, it will show. Your audience will not manifest and people will not come back to read your posts. Zig Ziglar always said “fake it ’til you make it”, referring to being happy or successful. This tactic will also work in social media… but only for a while. If you do not find your passion, your voice will waiver and fail. Find your passion and stick to it.
What if your passion wanders? No problem – the underpinning here is that you have to be true to yourself and you have to let it resonate in your blog content.
Are there pros and cons of one platform over another? Sure, that question is beyond the scope of this post however. I know I have the WordPress logo in the bubble, but it can be any blog platform you wish – important is to get the content out there and iterate on the message.
What else do I need to consider relative to my blog? There are a few more parts of what makes a blog work for you. My perspective is that unless you have a blog presence, the other aspects of the social media trinity lack the ability to create traction for your brand – without that blog there is just no where stable and consistent to point them.
I enjoy the wandering path that is social media for me. The twists, turns and links I find are fun and most often illuminating.
Yesterday I found Jason Falls and his blog “Social Media Explorer”, because Lon Safko had told me about a comment Jason made using ‘Social Media Bible-Thumping’, which probably came up in his Google Alerts under ‘Social Media Bible’.
I quickly found Jason in a search, checked his blog, saw that he was a co-founder of the Social Media Club in Louisville and that he was an active Twitter user. I followed him right away on Twitter, because I like smart people on social media. This morning I saw that followed me back and I clicked to looked over his recent tweets. The latest tweet was “Reading some good stuff from @griner – http://tinyurl.com/c623u3 – Smart dude.” – on which I clicked to see what he considered to be ‘Smart dude’ stuff and came across David Griner’s blog ‘The Social Path‘ and his post “Is there really a right or wrong in social media?“
I loved David’s post and his reference to Chris Brogans’ post “Your Doing It Wrong“. I had to leave a comment and then I felt that just commenting on it was not NEARLY enough – I had a little more to say on the topic.
What I’ll say is that we MAYbe all doing it wrong, only the future will tell us otherwise. Chris comes up with a 14 items on why you’re doing it wrong, some perfectly contradictory with one another (… you aren’t using FriendFeed, you are using FriendFeed…) and this is what people will pay us to help them decipher – to answer the question “What’s the right way to do social media?”
As far as I’ve been able to decipher, there are only a few real ‘rules’ to social media –
- Be Honest
- Be Respectful
- Don’t Get Irritated by Criticism
- Do What Your Most Comfortable With
Here’s a few words on each –
Be Honest – trying to pimp something you do not believe and using social media as a way to reach friends, associates, customers, prospects, stakeholders, etc. will come through in whatever you do. Gary Vaynerchuk is the most freaking passionate guy I’ve ever seen, a little loud at times, but ALWAYS passionate about what he’s doing and what he is sharing – we could all use a little Gary in what we do. If you are not honest, if it is not your voice that surrounds you in your online presence – it will show and the desired result of building social capital will diminish or evaporate all together.
Be Respectful – While I do see that being somewhat confrontational gets traffic, I do not believe that being intentionally rude and disrespectful is ever the path to success in social media. I think the ultimate end to this kind of behavior is alienation by your peers and the audience. Examples abound… I refuse to link to them.
Don’t Get Irritated by Criticism – A tenet of social media is transparency; people will see many of your warts – and you might actually be wrong in what you present. Robert Scoble is the best possible example I can imagine of this aspect – his book with Shel Israel, Naked Conversations really set the stage for his open, take-it-as-it-comes style and it has really set the tone for social media participants since it was published in January 2006.
Do What Your Most Comfortable With - if you like to write, get a blog; if you like to communicate with pictures, post your life on Flickr; if video is your thing, YouTube is not the only or best option around, but it is a great start; if you like to orate or speak well, podcasting might be your thing; if community is your thing, social networking on Facebook or 3D communities like Second Life can feed the need. The point is whatever you like doing, whatever satisfy’s your craving to connect & communicate, just do it. If connecting is not your thing – that’s an even easier problem to solve.
The last item has a lot of correlations with offline behavior as well. I’ve met quite a few people who wonder what the online hoopla is all about, they’ve been involved in social networking in real life for decades, they’re not sure what the big deal is about online. I can support that perspective as well, the rampant online activity is a migration to using the tool we call the Internet in a more personal way – much more personably than we could ever before the advent of Web 2.0 technologies.
So what if we are doing it wrong? When telephones came out, they were all wired one to another; television signals were sent wirelessly to a set of rabbit ears. Today there is a sharp reduction of public pay phones because everyone has a wireless cell phone and most people have their television connected to a cable.
As a society & culture, we figured it out – we’ll figure this one out too. heck, we might even be on the right trail by now.
The first post on this topic, the Trinity of Social Media, connected three basic components of a social media strategy – the blog, and microblog and a social network. Each has been the subject of a separate post expanding on why they are connected and this post explores the social network and how it fits into the overall strategy.
Audience and Strategy - The audience you want to connect to and the purpose for the communication will guide your selection of how to best deploy or involve your company in a social networking platform. You may find a private network will meet you needs best, but likewise a large pre-existing network with a global reach might better serve you efforts to connect to your audience.
