I am beginning to feel a little nervous about Social Media. I am beginning to get a little skeptical of all the Social Media initiatives around me.
But then I also read that a little anxiety and nervousness can be a good thing. A little increase in the heartbeat before you meet that someone special or before that important presentation is helpful. It just means that you care about what you are doing and want to be successful.

I read this on David Spinks‘ blog

There’s a problem, and deep down, we’re all aware of it…but to do something about it would make many feel hypocritical and so they push it aside whenever it’s brought up.

The Social Media Growth if allowed unchecked will be the next bubble to burst. There, I said it. The cat is out of the bag.

An important lesson from the dot-com bust (should be a lesson from common sense actually!!) was that companies that don’t make money cannot survive. Advertising, no matter how clever, cannot save you. Consider online pet-supply store Pets.com. Its talking sock puppet mascot became so popular that it appeared in a multimillion-dollar Super Bowl commercial and as a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. But Pets.com was never able to give pet owners a compelling reason to buy supplies online. After they ordered kitty litter, a customer had to wait a few days to actually get it. And let’s face it, when you need kitty litter, you need kitty litter. The company lost money on most of the items it sold. Amazon.com-backed Pets.com raised $82.5 million in an IPO in February 2000 before collapsing nine months later.

Companies chased eyeballs, saying “don’t worry, revenues will follow”. People had business plans that had no mention of revenue. Web agencies popped up all over the place: building websites without a goal. You only needed “Web Programmer” or “Java” written on your resume to charge $200/hr for your services.

Fast forward to 2007. Similar story but same result. They said,

Buy the biggest house you can. Don’t worry about the downpayment. Don’t worry about the principal. Flip the house. Cash out. Live the “American Dream”.

We are still feeling the effects of the last one.

Fast forward again to the “Now” Network and we again see signs of the Social Bubble

• A search for “Social Media Consultant” on LinkedIn yields 46,069 results. “Social Media Expert” gives 12,426 results, “Social Media Evangelist” yields 1749 results and “Social Media Guru” gives 1477 results. For an industry that is 2-3 years old, that is a really large number. [Lesson: better to choose "guru" than "expert" ]
• At most of the digital conferences, the theme is “social”.
• VC money being poured into social networks, microblogs, real time search engines and other cool SM startups that have no clear revenue models. “We will eventually get there”. There is so much free in the industry that advertising alone couldn’t possibly sustain it.
• Each company and their mother is jumping into Social Media, rushing to build a Facebook fan page or Twitter following. According to Bertrand Russell, “Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity towards those that are not regarded as members of the herd.” It is the fear of being “left out” or not being part of the herd that is driving a lot of companies into Social Media. The prime ingredient for a bubble is the desire to do something because everyone else is doing it.

Adam Sarner, an analyst with market research firm Gartner, projected that close to 40% of social networking initiatives at Fortune 1000 companies with Web sites will will be classified as failures.

I Love Social Media: Don’t get me wrong. I do believe Social Media has gone mainstream. I do believe that the SM tools when used in the right manner can increase both personal and business productivity, improve customer engagement levels, make innovation faster & cheaper and build new relationships.

2010 is supposedly the year when Social Media will be tested. Investors will start demanding some visibility into returns and cash flows.

To keep the Social Media Wave going, it is our responsibility as Social Media Leaders/Experts/Consultants/Evangelists/Gurus/Advocates (whatever fancy term you want to use) to ask the right questions:

• QUESTION 1: HOW IS IT GOING TO BENEFIT THY COMPANY?
• Engagement, loyalty, brand building are all good things. But they are all warm and fuzzy words that others in the firm may not understand. Start thinking and talking in a language that your CFO/CEO understands. Will customer engagement and brand loyalty result in increased sales or lower costs? List down all the potential benefits and see if/how they can translate into $$$. Any marketing initiative can only be sustained if it has the support of the folks who control the dollars.

  And PLEASE, stop chasing followers. Don’t fall into the trap of “How to build 10,000 followers in 10 days”. Success in Social Media is not measured by the number of followers you have. This is not a competition on “My brand has more followers than your brand”. Social Media is for the long haul. It takes time to build the relationships and start seeing ROI. If it hurts to hear that, don’t do it.

• QUESTION 2: HOW IS IT GOING TO BENEFIT THY CUSTOMERS?
  Social Media is not a channel for self promotion. It is frustrating to see so many corporate Facebook pages, blogs, Twitter feeds ONLY talk about the firm. They are in a broadcast mode. They are not engaged with the customer. They are not listening to the customer. They are not solving customer problems. They are not building loyalty.
  You need to think how you can make the customer experience better or simplify their life or add more value.

I heard this somewhere: “People like to interact with brands. But more importantly, they like to interact with the people behind those brands”.

Ford is a perfect example here. During 2008 and early 2009, the automobile industry faced unprecedented challenges: demand plummeted and credit became unavailable forcing GM and Chrysler to go on government life support and ultimately file for bankruptcy. During all of this, Ford not only survived without the taxpayer’s money but gained market share from its competitors. So while all companies were aggressively cutting down on costs and working with dealers to increase sales, Ford adopted a slightly different sales strategy. Ford Motors used Social Media to turn their thought leaders into sales people.

Ford’s Global Digital and Multimedia Communications Manager, Scott Monty, and CEO Alan Mulally leveraged Social Media to humanize the brand and increase sales.

And these are some reactions to the video

Scott, you are great. You are an inspiration for me as a marketer. I am even more proud to drive a Ford now! I am really happy that we share similar interests. I followed this conversation on Twitter and I really like the authenticity. Best!

Great post. It is awesome to see big companies like this actively listening to their customers. Very impressed! -Jordan

What a nice video. Alan came across as such a nice person. And…I drive a Ford too (here in the UK). It’s a Ford Focus, and I love it. It’s 8 years old and still going strong – and even manages to sparkle after it’s been cleaned.

From Facebook pages, to blogging, Twittering, YouTubing, Fiesta campaign and Flickring, Ford has been very active with Social Media. And it is showing some results too.

But wait. I didn’t see “sales” in Scott or Alan’s titles. Scott’s title reads the Global “Digital and Multimedia Communications Manager”. Scott’s thinking and approach has been innovative, helping turn critics into believers. In a world where products and services are becoming commodity, Social Media has allowed executives at different levels to interact directly with the customer, building a relationship of trust and drive sales.

Sun Microsystems’ Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz pioneered use of the corporate blog as a tool to reach customers, employees, and others. In Sun’s effort to recover some of the glory and profitability it had in the first Internet bubble, the company has embraced open-source software, adopted servers based on Intel and AMD’s x86 processors. But that posed some challenges. According to Jonathan,

Sun makes money by selling the innovations in data centers, but that’s a hard market to reach. Free software and free ideas are the best way to reach the marketplace. Blogs and open-source software are complementary.

Despite the success of companies like Ford Motor and Sun Microsystems, it is frustrating to see that most companies don’t get it. Firms need to complement the traditional channels (sales team, partners, affiliates, dealer networks etc) with their internal thought leaders to drive sales.

If you are a consulting, agency or professional services firm, your success is defined by the type of people you have. Before a sales meeting or agreeing to sign the contract, your customers are very likely to Google your top executives or practice leads. And what comes up can be the determining factor for your firm landing the million dollar contract.

Here is a 5 step guide to turn your knowledge horsepower into individual brands.

1. LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the largest professional network today with close to 50M members. I view LinkedIn as a professional branding page. When you do a Google search on someone’s name, many a times the top result is their LinkedIn profile page. As an organization, you need to make sure that the top 100 executives have their LinkedIn profile updated with their professional experience.In the summary section, it is important to highlight the kind of challenges the particular executive has worked on and how she typically brings value to clients.
2. Blogs: With blogs, one of the challenges to keep churning out fresh and relevant content to keep your audiences engaged.My suggestion is to organize and divide the workload. For each practice area within the organization, identify 5 people who are well versed with industry trends and can clearly articulate how those trends will affect your target market. Start with a weekly post with each person responsible for writing one blog post every month.The 5th person comes into use when one person cannot meet the deadlines due to pressing client issues. The post author has responsibility for responding to comments.With fresh content coming via the blogs, your rankings in organic search will improve as well, reducing the need for paid search.
3. Twitter: Twitter is a great developing new relationships and keeping existing ones. Look for current and target customers on Twitter and follow them. Follow other thought leaders in your area of expertise to keep current with industry insights.Be Patient and Genuine. Authenticity and willingness to help others goes a long way in building relationships. Don’t just promote your own products and services.Use Angela Maiers’ 70-20-10 Twitter Engagement Formula. Be purposeful and intentional as you enter the Twittersphere. As you “Twiv to Twet” (give to get) and move away from self-promotional tweets, consider this tweeting engagement formula.a. 70% of your tweets should share resources- sharing others’ voices, opinions, quotes, blog posts, articles, content and resources. But that doesn’t mean you should rwtweet everything because you “need to communicate”. Be fresh, be thoughtful.
   b. 20% of your tweets should engage in conversations with others, responding, connecting, collaborating and connecting with others.
   c. 10% of your tweets can be chirping, chitchat as Angela calls it, on trivial details or self-promotion.

   You can use Twitter to keep your audience engaged and direct them (10% self promotion) to your website or blog.

   According to Diane Hessan, CEO of Communispace:

   Twitter has been a fantastic vehicle for getting information about Communispace into the marketplace fast. Most recently, for instance, when Communispace launched its new blog, Verbatim, I sent a tweet out about it, and more than 1,000 people came to our blog as a result.

4. Communities: Once you have a steady stream of followers on your blog and Twitter pages, it is useful to turn those interactions into an ongoing relationship. At this point, you should think about developing communities on different topics of interest. To maintain strong ties with the community members, it is a good idea to limit the size of the community.For some more reading on developing communities, please read
   a. Size does matter: the secret sauce to building online communities
   b. Online banking: communities help meet psychological needs (though this is for the banking industry, some of the insights are relevant)
5. Develop a 3rd Party Sales Team: As you start connecting with other thought leaders within your subject area on Twitter/Your Blog/Your Community, start developing a relationship with them by subscribing/commenting on their blog.Give the relationship time to mature. When the time is right, in a subtle way, engage the influencers by offering them demos and opportunities to review products and services.

Last but not the least, there is no substitute to human interaction. Take some of these online relationships into the offline world. Whenever you are traveling, try and meet someone from your online world for a beer or lunch.

So go out, turn your thought leaders into sales people.

Over the last month or so, there has been a lot of buzz about Real Time Search. Twitter is already doing it, Google wants to jump in, Bing introduced bingtweets.com and many startups like OneRiot, Wowd, Twingly and Collecta are mushrooming, some with VC money. So is Real Time Search for REAL?

Let’s start with a definition of Real Time Search? To quote Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land

“Real time search” means looking through material that literally is published in real time. In other words, material where there’s practically no delay between composition and publishing. You take a picture and seconds later, it’s posted to the world to see. You think of something, immediately tap it out on Twitter, and your tweet is shared almost as soon as you thought of it.

Twitter, the leader in real time conversations, has 1.9 million conversations everyday. Number of unique trending topics per day on Twitter is approx 8900 with an average “shelf life” of 11 minutes. There are more than 100 million videos on Youtube (with more than 65k added everyday). There are over 200 million blogs on the World Wide Web (with over 900k blog posts added in a 24 hour period).

With the tsunami of information streamed at me every second, do I really need to turn the firehose on? Do I really need to “listen” to each and every tweet about MJs death or the Iran elections?

Google’s Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience, offers some thoughts on the usefulness of Real Time Search

We think the real-time search is incredibly important, and the real-time data that’s coming online can be super-useful in terms of finding out whether – something like, is this conference today any good? Is it warmer in San Francisco than it is in Silicon Valley?

I have a lot of respect for Marissa and what she has achieved at Google. I agree with her that Real Time Search is potentially useful to find out if a conference was good or not. But why do I need real time search to find out whether it is warmer in San Francisco than in Silicon Valley? I have weather.com for that.

Listening to Tobias Peggs of OneRiot at the OMMA Global Real Time Search Panel Discussion hosted by David Berkowitz,

60% of searches on the web are “Navigation” searches (20%), and specific “Informative” searches (40%). An example of a navigation search is when a user is trying to get to Sony.com, or Yahoo.com. They will enter a search query in an attempt to find a recognized home page. An example of an informative search is when a user is trying to find a specific recipe for Cabbage Soup that is definitely “out there somewhere.” They enter a query in attempt to find that specific information.

The remaining 40% of users are performing search queries which display an intent that is best satisfied by realtime search results. Irrespective of industry numbers, Iran – the country, the situation, and the search query – has proved beyond doubt that there is huge demand for search results from the realtime web.

Whether or not the market for Real Time Search is 40% or a lesser number, I don’t think people ONLY care about what is happening “right now”. They care way more about “relevant” and “intelligent” information than “real-time” information.

Gerry Campbell, CEO of Collecta: a real time search engine, says

Is real-time search overhyped? He says it absolutely is. Not because there’s not a ton of opportunity, but because no one’s certain of what the opportunity is yet.

I think most users will be okay with results that are a couple of minutes dated to allow for indexing & analysis of data and make it meaningful. OneRiot and Wowd seem to be on the right path.

OneRiot offers users to sort search results by Pulse (a weighted rank of freshness, domain authority, people authority and acceleration). Similarly, Wowd offers the user two options in doing true search and real ranking (analysis done on the basis of link analysis, popularity, a multitude of search signals like keywords in the title, as well as other signals like the number of retweets on any given tweet, and freshness).

As real time search evolves, we will need to add another “R” in there: RELEVANCY.

Some other interesting read on this subject

• Danny Sullivan on What is Real Time Search: Definitions and Players
• Tobias Peggs on The Inner Workings of a Real Time Search Engine
• Rob Garner on Recency in Real Time Search

Sources of data

• http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere//
• http://thefuturebuzz.com/2009/01/12/social-media-web-20-internet-numbers-stats/
• http://www.slideshare.net/mzkagan/what-the-fk-social-media
• http://bit.ly/1G2D23

Google was caught surprised earlier this year when celebrity gossip site PerezHilton reported that the site’s #1 source of traffic was Facebook and not Google. Whoever wins in the numbers race, one thing is clear that more and more people are relying on social networks and blogs and twitterfeeds to get news updates, product reviews and than ever before.

People are increasingly relying on each other for one simple reason: they don’t trust marketing and advertising. Yankelovich reported that 76 percent of American consumers believe that companies don’t tell the truth in advertising. And this skepticism is getting worse rapidly: Yankelovich also cited that 60 percent of surveyed consumers have a much more negative opinion of marketing and advertising than a few years ago.

The good news, of course, is that consumers’ trust of each other is rising as rapidly as their trust of traditional marketing is falling. Neilsen reports that 78 percent of customers say that consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising, with 83 percent agreeing that online evaluations and reviews influence their purchasing decisions.

In my opinion, the search engine of the future will integrate search results (especially for very involved purchasing decisions) with my friends’ product reviews on different social networks, blogger reviews, twitter feeds and review sites. The results will further be categorized by semantic engines like Newssift and Sprout Labs to understand whether the underlying sentiment with the product/service is positive or negative. Think of it as an integration of Google with SocialMention, Newssift/Sprout Labs with the results ranked and rated and available to view on the search page.

If I am in the market for a car, why do I need to leave Google/Bing to go to Edmunds.com or JDPower or Cars.com to check product reviews and then to blogger reviews and then check with friends who have owned that car for their feedback? Won’t Google be a lot more valuable to you if it searched all the user generated content across Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and Edmunds etc and presented a negative/positive sentiment on the latest model of Lexus?

And imagine the value to advertisers: you never have to leave Google so all your clicks are coming from a single site.

But I don’t think this is going to come from Google. It will be one of the innovative start-ups who will integrate social media with search.

More reading on this subject

• Using User Generated Content to Enhance Conversion Driven SEO
• Google “Hot Trends” integrated into Google Search
• Why are conversations (with the right person) so much better than search?
• Your users trust each other and Not You

So, Social Media has become a part of our daily lives. We discussed in a previous post how 80% of online Americans use some form of social media and how marketers increasingly plan on using it. So, what changed? What is leading to the widespread adoption of social media? I identified 3 trends:

• iPhone: With a iPhone in every hand, it is easier than ever for people to read, create or participate in any kind of social content. You don’t have to wait to get back to your PC to let your friends know about the cool dinner place you just went to or respond to comments on your blog. iPhone and a range of Android powered phones that are coming into the market now have completely revolutionized the internet experience.
  It has given instant gratification a new meaning. The other day I was at the US Open Finals and was using to iPhone to share the experience with my friends: updating match photos, responding to people’s comments on my status on Facebook, sending out tweets.
• Twitter: The average number of tweets sent out everyday is 1.9 million. Twitter is sometimes called the SMS of the Internet. Big companies like Dell, Starbucks, Bank of America and Comcast have been using Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions. But you know when a trend has gone mainstream when small businesses and entrepreneurs are using it as part of their strategy to build customer loyalty and grow their revenues. The Wall Street Journal carried an article last week titled “Entrepreneurs Tweet Their Way Through Crises“. The NYT carried another article on increasing success with small businesses back in July.
  You know when a trend has gone mainstream when the country’s president uses it for fundraising and staying connected with the voters during the presidential campaign.
  You know when a trend has gone mainstream when people are using it for news on crises and emergencies. During the Mumbai terror attacks, tweets were being posted at the rate of 70 tweets every 5 seconds.
• Early Adopters: As of Jan 2009, 54% of Facebook users were under 24 years old. The median age of a Twitter user is 31. Every new platform or tool requires a set of people who are willing to buy into the trend, experiment with it and provide constructive criticism. The work of William Struass and Neil Howe offers some insights: raised with laptops and cell phones, this generation is comfortable with evolving technology.
  A 2004 Pew Internet & American Life survey found 84 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds owned a computer, cell phone or Personal Digital Assistant. Cell phones help maintain an often close bond between young people and parents.
  Other findings in the Junco and Mastrodicasa survey included that 76% of students used instant messaging, 92% of those reported multitasking while IMing, and 40% of students used television to get most of their news and 34% the Internet.

iPhone made social media available on the go; tools like twitter, facebook, blogger and youtube made it easy for everyone to create and share content online and the Millennials provided the critical mass needed to take it past the tipping point.

Do you see any other trends shaping growth in social media?

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/guptanitinonline

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A lot has been written and said about monetizing social networks. Investors are worried that sites like Facebook that has over 250 million users worldwide and is a market leader, don’t have a clear business model.

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As marketing people, we love social media. And why not? Its comparatively inexpensive, has a broad reach and a variety of platforms available to establish thought leadership, demand generation and customer loyalty.

But one thing that companies need to understand before jumping onto the social media bandwagon is that social media is different from other online or traditional media. Social media is a sacred space. You get it right and you build long lasting customer loyalty. But if you get wrong, it is very hard to undo what you just did.

I recently came across this article on the Harvard blog about Hiring Smarter with Social Media (http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/07/hire_smarter_with_social_media.html). While some of the ideas are good, I was astounded to read the following:

You can strike a balance by asking prospects to friend you for a limited time (24 or 48 hours) on any social network where they’re personally identifiable, so you can see how they present themselves online and make sure there aren’t any examples of bad judgement or online comments that could come back to haunt you (for example, griping about one of your clients).

Oh my god! A company who listens to this advice is not only limiting the pool of potential applicants but also exposing them to lawsuits related to discrimination. The info I share with my “friends” via Facebook or other such sites includes personal information that you would NEVER ask in an interview such as marital status, religious beliefs/affiliations, political views, etc.

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