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Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

Community Managers: Social Media’s Blockers and Tacklers

The sizzle within social media is the tools – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Wordpress, Ning, etc. But sizzle only gets you so far without substance.

Substance leverages the tools, creates strategic plans and tactically implements social media programs that are well integrated into a company’s communications, marketing and sales efforts.

For a company’s social media efforts to work well, someone has to lead the charge. The person best suited to do this job is the community manager – someone who has solid experience and multiple skills to handle a variety of tasks – everything from business development, customer service, marketing, public/media relations and sales.

Community managers are also evangelists and active within the community to provide a company with a steady presence. And they’re managers, overseeing other people who tactically implement social media programs.

While more companies are hiring community managers, their value has yet to be fully appreciated. This is likely because social media is still in its nascent stages so many companies are still working on creating management structure that incorporate their social media efforts.

It explains why many companies have launched social media programs without having a community manager in place, or they have someone who is social media-savvy but not terribly experienced.

The reality is community managers are the “blockers and tacklers” within the social media game.

While not glamorous – unless you’re someone such as Comcast’s Frank Eliason – community managers do a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes. When a company’s social media programs are successful, it’s not often that you see the community manager celebrated as the hero of the day.

At the end of the day, community managers can make or a break a company’s social media efforts – even those that feature an excellent strategic plan. Without someone at the helm who can effectively oversee day-to-day operations, social media can be a losing and frustrating proposition.

For more thoughts on the importance of community managers, check out this blog post on The Intangibles.

By Mark Evans - March 16th, 2010 - 5 Comments »
Tags: community managers, frank eliason, Social Media
Posted in Social Media

Using Social Media for Competitive Intelligence

The soft and fuzzy side of social media dominates the spotlight – social media is about about having conversations, engaging with people, and building relationships.

If there’s a dark side of social media that isn’t mentioned often, it’s how social media can also be used for competitive intelligence to pursue a rival’s customers or potential customers.

It’s not that this activity is evil or nefarious, it’s just that it’s not a happy, kumbya kind of thing.

When you are looking for weaknesses among rivals such as complaints about their products and services, and inquiries from people who might be interested in what they’re selling, it means operating in the social media shadows.

Truth be told, there’s as much value to focusing on gathering competitive intelligence as there is monitoring your own products, services and customers.

Customers are talking about their desires, needs and issues on Twitter, Facebook and blogs so why not take advantage of all this information to create a strategy built on leveraging the weaknesses of competitors. If your rivals are offering a window of opportunity, it makes complete sense to use social media to take advantage of it.

So, what are the basics for collecting competitive intelligence? Here’s a few tips:

1. Monitor popular keywords within your industry. For home renovators, it could be “renovations”, “home improvements”, “DIY repairs” or “home projects”

2. Keep a steady eye on competitors to see what’s being said about them. In particular, focus on people who are complaining about bad products, service or customer service. Then, step in by offering advice or help, while shying away from trying to sell them something.

3. Look for conversations about trends within your industry. For home renovators, it could be chatter about new kitchens, bathrooms or energy-efficient appliances. Then, you can participate in the conversations by providing advice, insight and recommendations.

There’s a goldmine of competitive intelligence within the social media landscape. Spending some time on the dark side could generate some good business opportunities.

By Mark Evans - March 3rd, 2010 - No Comments »
Tags: competitive intelligence, monitoring, Social Media, tips
Posted in Social Media

Forget ROI, Let’s Focus on Social Media Optimization

As more companies embrace social media, the chatter about return on investment, or ROI, has amplified as executives attempt to determine whether the money they’re spending is worth it. In theory, it’s a good exercise but given it is still early days for social media, it is a challenge to accurately quantity its impact right now.

Rather than focus on ROI, companies should be looking long and hard at SMO – social media optimization.

So, what is SMO? One way to define is that SMO is a focus on making sure that a company’s social media activities are as efficient and effective as possible. It means creating content – be it blog posts, tweets, videos or Facebook updates – that can be easily used and leveraged across multiple social media platforms.

It means making sure a company’s social media person or team is highly productive so that their day-day-day activities are focused and productive as opposed to having a scattered shot-gun approach that consumes too many cycles.

One of the best ways to jump-start SMO is taking advantage of the wide variety of tools that can automate social media activity and extend the reach of your content with no or little manual effort.

For example, TwitterFeed is a easy way to link an RSS feed to Twitter so that every time you have a new blog post, it automatically creates tweet.

Ping.fm is another excellent tool to quickly content to distribute updates to dozens of social media platforms – everything from Twitter and Facebook to LinkedIn, Flickr, Friendfeed, MySpace and Ning.

Hootsuite is a Twitter publishing tool with lots of great features, including the ability to schedule tweets, which means you can create a bunch of tweets at one time, and then have them appear throughout the day.

The underlying theme is using tools to make social media work for you as opposed to working social media. This is not to suggest that social media doesn’t require a consistent and sustained effort but there are lot of ways to optimize how you use social media.

So, let’s have more discussions about SMO to complement the growing obsession with ROI.

For another take on SMO, check out Oren Todoros’ post on “Max Your Brand With 4 Social Media Optimization Tips”.

By Mark Evans - February 25th, 2010 - 5 Comments »
Tags: ROI, SMO, Social Media, social media optimization
Posted in Social Media

What’s the Buzz About Google Buzz

It’s been nearly a week since Google Buzz was unveiled amid speculation it was going to be a Twitter and/or Facebook-killer. So, what is the buzz about Buzz now that people have had some time to use it?

In terms of sentiment, 42% of the conversations are positive, 44% are neutral and 14% are negative. This reflects the mixed reaction that Buzz has generated. Some people believe it’s a major strategic foray by Google into the world of social media, particularly because of the fact it’s built on top GMail, which has 175 million users/month. Jason Calacanis, a high-tech entrepreneur, for example, describes Buzz as “brilliant”.

This positive sentiment is tempered by people who are less than impressed with Buzz. Among the negative criticism is that Buzz doesn’t seem to have any compelling features that would prompt someone to leave Facebook and Twitter, or use them less often.

Steve Rubel, a well-known blogger and public relations executive, suggests that Buzz was created to protect GMail’s advertising revenue from Facebook, as opposed to Google looking to get into social media.

While Buzz attracted a lot of attention when it was launched on Feb. 9, the blogosphere’s interest has dropped off, perhaps because Buzz is not the out-the-gate smash-hit that many people expected.

As far as the leading keywords, GMail is at the centre of the most conversations. Not surprisingly, there are strong links to “Twitter” and “Facebook”, as well “network”.

Speaking of Twitter, Buzz has generated a lot of tweets in the past week – nearly 500,000, which isn’t surprising given Twitter users are likely enthusiastic users of Google services such as GMail and search.

What’s interesting – and different – about the conversations on Twitter is the amount of talk about privacy after people complained that Buzz was publicly disclosing their lists of followers and who they were following.

By Mark Evans - February 16th, 2010 - 1 Comment »
Tags: facebook, google, google buzz, Social Media, twitter
Posted in Social Media

Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

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