Can You Fake Social Media?

Some things I keep hearing (and saying as well) about social media is that:

• It’s a conversation
• You need to be generous
• You should act nice
• You should be a good listener
• You should share things that have value

Well what if you, your business or the employees at your business aren’t like this? If social media is all about authenticity, what if this isn’t your authentic self? Can you make your employees do it even though they don’t mean it?

Can you fake social media? And if you can, is it okay, as long as no one finds out and every one is happy?

Actually, I think you can. It’s not that much difference from teaching sales people in retail or customer service people on the phone to act one way with customer even if they’re some of the biggest assholes in the world. The danger is that at one time or another, especially under stress, the asshole part will ultimately come out.

One thing that strikes me is how I hear people in and out of business say it doesn’t feel natural to use Twitter or LinkedIn. They’re not comfortable sharing, they don’t know what to say so it’s easy for them to find other things to do instead, even though it’s part of their business outreach.

I say to them, my kids don’t feel it’s natural to say Thank You. I have friends who don’t feel comfortable at parties with lots of other people they don’t know. I have relatives who hate having official conversations on the phone.

There are lots of strategies and tactics for dealing with things you don’t feel comfortable with, or that are new or that are just downright strange. My old boss kept saying “Fake it ‘till you make it!” He never made it, unfortunately, but his clients never could see the difference.

I think you can fake social media. You can make your checklists, or you can pretend you’re an actor and assume another role. As long as your consistent and follow the list above, do we really care that you, or your brand isn’t really like that? I don’t think so.

A friend of mine told me how she had met a famous writer. We oohed and aahed, until she said that he was kind of a nebbish in person. We realized that you don’t really want to see some people in person. They work better from afar.

That’s why faking social media might work for you and your employees in the end.

Why Agency Sites are NOT the Future of the Web

When Crispin Porters Web site went beta last week, the digital world was atwitter. What started as a rumble with Zeus Jones, shot forward with Modernista, awed us with Skittles suddenly went super prime time with http://beta.cpbgroup.com/. Finally, proof that all that we online marketers had talked about over the past year or so was starting to come true. The future of the Web had arrived via the hottest ad shop in the world.

Amidst all the gushing, by people who I think are some of the smartest people around, I couldn't help but thinking about how the gushers reminded me of Sally Field accepting her Oscar Award.  The very fact of Crispin following our flow instead of leading it made it sound like a collective gasp of "Alex, you like us. You really like us!"

The Crispin site is a good site for them. Just like the EVB site is good for those great digital marketers and the Barbarian Group's site is a sharp picture of who they are. Personally I love good agency sites, mostly because there are so few of them. But they're not the future of the Web. Not even close. Here's why:

1. Agencies use their sites to show that they get it - First it was cool flash sites, and now its user generated, social media connected sites. Why? Because agencies need to use the medium itself to prove to prospects that they have command of the latest digital trends. For this subset of service providers, the medium IS really the message. For most businesses that's not the case. They don't have to show that they're flashy or hooked into social media to prove anything. It might help in some cases, but they're not selling the medium itself.
2. People don't make purchase decisions on agency sites - While I've heard anecdotes I've never heard real stories of people who visited an agency site and hired them right there and then. Never. I can imagine some very small clients doing this but none of any significant business size. Has anyone else? People visit agency sites in a longer process. They've heard about the agency, they've seen some of its work; they're planning on visiting or asking them to respond to an RFP. They look at the agency site to confirm what they're thinking or to fill in some holes (and hopefully not create others). E-commerce sites (agency clients) need to sell something. Service businesses need to prove their competence and personality in areas that have nothing to do with the Web. Can you really take a look at a law firm's site design and technology and conclude they're very good lawyers? Probably not.
3. Size matters - Many businesses have far more information to organize than do agency sites. Especially when you get into deep e-commerce sites. I love sites like EVB's and the Barbarian Group's because of their simplicity. It's much harder to do this with multi-layered, multi-national companies. Or maybe its not that much harder. It's just harder to convince those clients to go simple. While aggregation might seem to be the wave of the future even for these corporate giants, how the heck are you going to find out about the group you're really trying to contact through the company's Web site if everything is aggregation? Maybe the evolution of the semantic Web will solve this, but social media aggregation probably will not.

I think the new Crispin Porter & Bogusky site is great. But I liked their old site a lot too, with its simple, visual layout, where the work was front and center. I loved how they put their handbook right where everyone could read it.

There are a lot of businesses for whom this makes a lot of sense. Brands whose sites look to entertain and that thrive on conversations and image more than commerce. Starbucks, for example, or BMW. For   those brands, they can look at CPB and learn and aspire.

But many brands still look to the Web as one of their leading sales channel instead.

The new site, like EVB's, isn't necessarily a harbinger of the greater Web world. It's just a bunch of super smart people showing clients that they get how the digital world changes, and that they can master those changes. Rather than taking the execution as the model of the future, business should look at the concept behind what these firms are trying to achieve. Proof of their abilities.

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

We've heard over and over how social media is like a relationship: you have to nurture and sustain it. You need to be generous and forgiving. You need to listen and be nice. You should be honest yet loyal.

It sounds like we're saying that we want brands to fall in love with its customers in the same way that customers fall in love with brands.

Well, what if brands aren't looking for love? What if they're looking for one-night stands or maybe even friends with benefits? What if, like roaming gigolos, brands are incapable of love and simply doing what they do best: quick moments of pleasure?

Over the past month, I've heard marketing directors lavish kind words on social marketing. They want to use it for their brands and recognize that something is afoot with customers. The marketers look over plans, give the go ahead to initiatives but within a few weeks, inevitably ask: "How is this going to raise sales in the next two months?"

When you start with a social media following of zero, using social media to raise sales in the next month or two is a huge, and sometimes unreasonable challenge. It is not a short-term tactic, turned on and off at will and whim. You need to be in it for the long haul, for the relationship.

Marketing Lotharios want to look at social media as the roses they take to dinner to seduce their dates. Look great, smell great, big impact and dead after a week. No, social media is like a rose bush, not a single rose. It takes lots of care, pruning and attention.

Are customers and social media advocates just plain unrealistic? Maybe we won't find this love in brand relationships and maybe we should just settle for quickies.

As a marketer who uses social media, I think the best course is to build the short term sales promotions in parallel with social media and be very clear with clients that they need to commit to social media for six to twelve months, at least, unless they have some larger push or event to connect to. This two-track approach gives everyone a chance to get what he or she wants.

Most of all, it shows the impatient marketers that, in the end, love is really worth the wait.

Of course, some brands will never get this. They'll come on to the scene, dashing and exciting. After a few years, they'll need a Logo tuck, and then later a Brand augmentation. They'll evolve into a stretched out image of their former selves.

While, hopefully, the brands in love will have a long, two-way relationship despite all of their wrinkles.

Where’s Your Energy?

Social Media Question #1: “What should we do? What should we talk about?”

Every time I speak with people about social media, this is the question I get. Since I speak to marketing people most of the time, they answer the question, usually, with
“Sales promotions.”

Here’s what I try to answer:

Where’s the energy in your company right now? What are people most excited about? It doesn’t have to be big or even new, but if they’re talking about it inside, chances are it’s something people on the outside will find interesting.

Image by adambowie via Flickr

A funny thing happens then. Everyone stops, takes a breath, and start talking all at once about the fun and interesting things going on. It’s like someone flipped a switch. Instead of talking about what they think they have to talk about, they start talking about things they like. With passion and energy and engagement.

That’s a great start in social media. Yes, we’ll get to those sales promotions; we have to, to keep the lights on at night. But we’ll be talking about them in a different way. And the energy inside can come from anywhere, from any employee.

New things inside don’t have to be big. Remember, it’s not a marketing campaign. Marketing campaigns start slowly, usually have a big promotion and rely on splash and media. Social media can start quickly, cover multiple promotions, and rely on personal connections and conversations.

And no one wants to hear the same old thing from you every time, either. When we have friends like that, we tire of them quickly.

Your energy will change over the months. Be aware of where it is inside your company, tap into it, and share it with the rest of us. It’s a great way to start a conversation.

Arm Those Employees

One challenge you run into in ramping up your business’ social media presence is deciding who’s going to do what. A big challenge is not to overload marketing people who already try to do too much and risk dropping the ball on engagement. But on the other hand, marketers don’t want to enlist other, busy people, who they have to manage closely in order to listen, react and share on social media platforms.

The biggest risk is that nothing happens and your business goes AWOL after a brief appearance in SM. Out of sight, quickly out of mind.

One of the best ways I’ve seen to get around this is to engage employees to connect with your brands’ social media profiles and to encourage them to participate on behalf of the brand. That’s right, a classic case of letting your employees act as brand ambassadors since they’re probably the most authentic spokespeople the brand has.

Do you dare to do this? Marketers always seem squeamish when they put employees in the forefront. But, you know, this is marketing’s problem. From a business standpoint, employees are always in front, that’s who people see and talk with.

Want to know who does this the best? Look at Zappos. At last count 198 Zappos employees were on Twitter. Check out this article on what they do.

 It doesn’t stop with Twitter. Your employees should be your Facebook fans and some should even help administer your fan page. Think concentric circles here. Adding your employees helps to add their friends to your fan base, and their friends and, well, you get the idea. It’s a lot more interesting for friends of employees to share their friends’ stories than yours, in many cases.

It’s the same thing with LinkedIn. Yes, some of your employees use LinkedIn to look for new jobs, even while they’re working for you. They’re not stupid, thank God. Encourage your employees to create LinkedIn profiles, then create your company group and let them engage each other and share questions and problems on it.

Sounds easy, right? It isn’t. The leadership and the marketing leadership at your company need to let people know this is okay, that you encourage it, and that there might even be some reward in it. Then do it yourself, personally, and keep reminding people around you. Read that last sentence again. Do it yourself and keep reminding people around you.

I’ve seen too many leaders talk about the importance of relationships and collaboration but yet never seem to do it themselves. If, as a leader, you can’t walk the walk, step aside and let someone else lead this.

Employees are one of the best social media weapons businesses have. Are you ready to take aim?

Stop Speaking Marketing!

When I was a kid and we wanted to take a picture of my grandmother, she’d put on her “picture” face, which was rigid and unsmiling, instead of her normal, nice face. We’d laugh afterwards, because she’d always looked terrible in those pictures. We realized if we wanted a good picture of her, we’d have to sneak one.

Marketers have the same problem. Social media raises the stakes for marketers and makes it easier for people to sniff out, and turn off, when they sense a hard sell.

The marketers’ challenge is to stop speaking to people as if they were your consumers and targets, and to start speaking to people as if you liked them and had an interest in them.

I ran into a marketer yesterday who wanted some advice around social media. Personally, he was totally into an endurance sport, and he would travel around to watch and participate in those events. It turns out that his company was about to sponsor this endurance sport and had put together a special offering to promote the sponsorship. The marketer was totally psyched.

After telling me about this, with the excitement rising in his voice he wanted to know if he could tell people about this on social media. His suggestion?

Go on Facebook and Twitter and write: “Endurance sport special. Click here for sales.”

I stopped him immediately. “Say it on social media in the same way and passion you just told me,” I suggested. He had taken his excitement at telling another person and, instead, put on my grandmother’s picture face. He had stopped talking to me like a person and started talking to me like a sales number.

While I’m picking on this person, I see this a lot. Part of it is also a writing/talking breakdown. Here’s my suggestion:

If you write or talk marketing copy, try saying what you’re writing to another person. Now call someone you like and try saying the same thing. If you find that you’re talking to those people in ways you’d never normally talk to them, try again.

You can be conversational, convincing and selling at the same time. Especially if you’re talking about people have an interest in. On social media, it's too easy to tune out, so what you say, and how you say it, is important. It's important everywhere, it's just more apparent on social media.

So stop talking like a marketer and start talking like a human being.

[By the way, that's not  my grandmother]

Change and Power

You know a book is good when you finish it and the ideas still resonate in your head for weeks after. I’m still digesting Ignore Everybody and one phrase has grabbed me. The more I think about it, the more I think it’s a great lens to view what’s happening in marketing today.

“Change [new ideas] alters the power balance in a relationship.”

When these ideas threaten the power balance, those in power will push back, hard.

Think about this in context of online marketing and the rise of social media. These new ideas threaten the comfortable and predictable marketing system of the last 50 years. There’s a lot of power invested in this.

The change is creating dialogue through digital channels to give more power and real influence to consumers (and even employees). The promise of this change is to stop doing something that’s working less well and start doing marketing that has a higher value and authenticity.

Who’s going to push back? Who’s power is under siege?

Marketing Departments – Marketing departments and the people who staff them will push back for two reasons. The first is that it’s quite comfortable and easy to pass off the brand stewardship and advertising execution to agencies. It means they don’t have to do that work. Social media and dialogue mean they’ll have to be more involved. Where are they going to find the time? The second is that they’ve fallen into standard operating procedure. In Graham Allison’s brilliant book “Essence of Decision” he describes how organizational procedures take on life of their own, despite the work of rational actors.

Agencies – Agencies will push back because this change threatens everything about them. Agencies have made great money on production markups and media commissions. They’ve convinced marketing departments that their crack teams can understand and craft brand essences better than anyone. The former is in a state of irreversible decline. The later becomes less and less relevant daily as customer experience and word of mouth show their true power. Many agencies are turning somersaults to reinvent themselves, some by hiring digital gurus and others by buying sharper, smaller shops. While they make cosmetic changes, the agency core, its raison d’etre rarely changes. The question is whether they can compete over the long haul against newer, more agile shops like The Advanced Guard, Undercurrent or the dream team at The Dachis Group.

Mainstream Media – When you start looking at all the alarming news about MySpace, Facebook, online perverts etc, you find that most of these are overblown reports and most of them start with the mainstream media. Cynical as I am, I can’t help feeling that this is one of the big pushbacks by one of those groups with the most to lose. If online were “dangerous” who would want to advertise there? It’s too bad because we need mainstream media and its content still has huge value everywhere. Media hasn’t figured out how to make digital as profitable as traditional and while some try to reinvent themselves, not enough do so.

If you’re moving into social media and digital, pay attention to who’s pushing you back. You’ll probably notice that they feel that they have something to lose and don’t want things to change for that reason.

If you’re in a marketing department or agency, take some time to reflect on this power shift and start strategizing about how this change can seem less threatening and perhaps even beneficial to the person pushing you back.

Review: Ignore Everybody

Sometimes I’m a sucker for a new book pitch, especially if there’s a free prize inside. A few weeks ago people started buzzing about Hugh McLeod’s new book “Ignore Everybody” with the sub title “And 39 Other Keys to Creativity.” Not only did Seth Godin blog about it but Hugh also offered a free extra book to the first 500 purchasers. Very Godinesque.

I’ve followed Hugh on Twitter (he’s @gapingvoid) and I read his blog. I looked forward to reading this book a lot more than others I’ve bought recently. And this is not because I try to ignore everybody (at least I think I don’t).

Hugh has a great story. Ad copywriter turned illustrator/business card comic creator. This is a story about someone who became very good at something unusual and followed his passion. He didn’t quit his day job for it, but he was able to turn this passion into a very new direction for himself.

I don’t know that I got much out of the parts around creative habits in the book. However, I thought Hugh and some really interesting insights into personal change and motivation. For that reason, here’s my one line recommendation:

“If you’re trying to figure out what’s next or are already in a transformational period, read this book. Looking back on my own big change a year ago, I wish this book had been available then.”

Two things jumped out at me from Ignore Everybody. The first is that when you finally have that idea for what you want to do, the idea that change the way you do things, expect a lot of resistance. According to Ignore Everybody, change ideas alter the power balance in a relationship. And everyone wants to keep his or her power.

Think about it: we experience this daily. At work, our bosses and colleagues resist ideas fro all sorts of reasons. When you put it into the framework of power relationships, it makes more sense.  Looking back through these lenses, I understand a lot more of some of the things that happened in the past. Hugh also posits that even friends resist change because they fear that the status quo in your friendship will suffer the effects.

In fact, most everyone, except you, is probably just fine with the way things are. This book, more than anything else, is a recipe to break your inertia.

The other idea Ignore Everybody pushes is the power of sovereignty. When something is yours, you not only care for it more, it also excites other people more. We want more control in our lives. From career to how marketers treat us. The idea of sovereignty is a powerful one and one of the best motivators around. It goes to the core of who we are as people.

Hugh MacLeod has a lots of smart thinking and truisms in his book, some practical, like the amount of work you have to do to succeed, some philosophical, like not looking for approval.

At the end of the day, Hugh changed his life through his drawings. If you’re trying to figure out how to change yours for the better, Ignore Everybody is a quick read that could give you some insight on how to move yourself.

Special Offer

Since I'm receiving an extra copy, I want to share in the goodness. If you're looking to change, have a creative passion you'd like to follow, or just want some good advice on how to be more creative, write something here or send me an email.

I'll give my extra copy of Ignore Everybody to whoever has the most compelling reason.

The Revolution Will Be Tweeted

[This post is from a VPR commentary I gave 6-18-09]

A few days ago I found myself in the middle of the Iranian protest against the re-election of President Ahmadinejad. At least virtually. And the experience has left me with great hope for democracy around the globe.

As almost everyone knows by now, the Iranian people had a presidential election. The incumbent Ahmedinejad, bane of the West, had a big lead until his challenger, Mousavi, caught fire and began to look like a sure winner.

On election, night, however, the government declared Ahmedinejad the winner by a big margin. The opposition cried foul and rose up in protest.

Now keep in mind that this is Iran. Protest is risky, if not life threatening.

But the Iranians did protest and when the government tried to cut off all conventional means of communications, Iranians found alternative ways to tell their story, this time through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and other social media sites.

The first thing I noticed was a topic trending up on Twitter, the phrase IranElection, which I began to follow. Suddenly, I was transported via social media to the University in Teheran, where defiant yet frightened students were sending live Tweets describing how they were under attack. Iranians posted pictures and shaky cell phone videos showing government agents opening fire on public dbemonstrators and it was hard for me not to duck behind my desk.

I listened in as they warned other Iranians as to danger spots, worried about injured friends, and plotted about getting out of one part of the city and into the other. And as I watched, listened and read, I forwarded their stories to people I knew, to show how brave and determined they were.

Soon, all of this began to have an impact here. People started Tweeting that CNN wasn’t reporting this so CNN pumped up its coverage. Twitter itself canceled a planned maintenance last Monday after getting pressure from Iranian and US Tweeters to not shut off the protesters’ main outlet. When the Iranian government shut off Internet access, people around the world set up new servers for the protesters to communicate through.

It has been inspiring to see the democratically deprived people of Iran challenge the ayatollahs’ stranglehold on information and censorship. And thanks to social media, everyone in the world is watching.

Even though a change in government won’t magically turn Iran into a US friendly nation or cause them to give up their regional aspirations, I still I hope the Iranians succeed - if only for the sake of democracy. 

Because I like to think that social media may be doing for today’s democracy what Tom Paine’s printing presses did for Americans in the 1700s: giving people everywhere the power and freedom to challenge those who abuse power. Because this time, the revolution will be tweeted.

From Your Mouth to Google’s (or Bing’s) Ear

Microsoft launched Bing recently in order to take up the fight against Google’s dominance. However good Google is, search in general is a fairly sorry solution to finding things online. Imagine walking into a store and asking a salesperson where to find something and they gave you 10 various answers of which only one, maybe, was correct.  Personally, I would not want to be that salesperson.

The same is true of search. I use search ALL the time. While I get some good results, I feel like I’m never quite getting what I need. Sometimes I don’t get what I need at all.

The problem is that the question I’m formulating in my head is never the taxonomy and description that companies use to describe products or services. Even when it relates to information, the search results break down.

Here’s a simple example from my life as a yard-taker-care-of-er. I need something to spray my new fruit trees so that bugs don’t eat up all the leaves. I could just go up to Ace Hardware or Home Depot, ask anyone that question, and get a good answer. I’ve tried every variation possible online and I never get a good answer to what product I should buy. It’s amazing that it’s still this hard.

I thought with Bing would improve this, but not so. Bing provides categories to narrow down your search. It does, however, allow you to see part of the page you’re going to click on so you, hopefully, don’t waste so much time browsing through page results that don’t work for you.

Adding human intelligence doesn’t seem to work very well either; older search engines tried having editorial boards rank things, to little avail.

Nope, unless someone develops a chip to embed in our brains that takes our ideas and concepts and translates them into something search engines can understand I think we’re stuck with what we have for a while. Because what we’re really trying to do is to translate concepts into a common language. Without getting into Wittgenstein, that’s a human problem that not even Google can even solve.

My answer is to go to the social Web, ask the question, and hope that some one answers. Or better yet, I think I’ll just hop in the car and go to the store and ask. I’m lucky to have the Gardeners Supply outlet store nearby as well.At the very least someone will say, “I don’t know” and point me in the right direction.

Or maybe I should just Tweet it…