…says the Wall Street Journal. I agree. The book is “Citizen Marketers – When People Are the Message” by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba (favorite bloggers of ours at Church of the Customer).

This insightful book is a quick read and helps explain how social media has come about and how one person can truly make a difference. The book is a social media primer. It’s an historical reference more than a how-to-do-social-media guide, but some of the history happened without my noticing and it’s nice to have a short and sweet explanation of things that now “defineâ€Â� social media.

If you’re not clear what all the hype is about, it’s worth a few hours to read this book. The authors deliver their message via informative, real-life stories. You’ll read about the effect an individual can have on a brand, and how that single person can influence what LOTS of people buy. Get ideas on how companies can benefit — and profit — from engaging Citizen Marketers. Social media is a “trendâ€Â� that’s real and is becoming a new standard for good marketing and communications.

Now I *almost* understand why people spend so much time blogging, posting videos, creating podcasts and composing advertisements. It’s powerful stuff.

Recently, I received an invitation to join John’s network on TimeBridge, a social media site allowing groups of people to share schedules and availability. TimeBridge may be a good solution, but my relatively short experience was pretty bad.
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I happened across an interesting article from Sean Carton with the Clickz Network. It’s titled, “Why Social Marketing Nirvana Escapes our Reach.� Sean talks about the not-so-distant past where businesses were hot to set up “portals.� Portals were sure to keep people coming back … keep them staying on YOUR site … keep them from looking elsewhere for things like news, sports, stock prices, etc. Fortunately, the corporate portal goals have died (and Sean explains why). Unfortunately, the push for the must-have portal sites has become a push for must-have social networking sites. Or, so it seems.

It’s not prudent to create a social networking site just because some businesses are doing it, or because some experts say you have to have one. Your site might do just dandy by only providing customers the information they need to make a purchase decision and the ability to find/buy your products. Of course, you must optimize your site so those customers can find you, but you don’t necessarily have to create a new social “neighborhoodâ€Â� to get – or keep – their attention.

RefreshWeb staffers know an awful lot about social media and we do believe there are benefits to social networks – where appropriate. We’re also good business people and would advise against putting the time, effort and money into something that isn’t strategically important for your business. Are you feeling pressure (from your company or the media) to jump on the newest Internet bandwagon?

Marketing people are very good at communicating. That’s what we call it, and that’s how we make our money, but really, what we like to do is talk, have other people listen, and then see them take action. That’s exciting. On the web, we search marketers pay a lot of attention to what people are looking for, and try to help them find it, but I’m not sure if we marketers are really communicating with the market. That’s where social media comes in…where we get to listen.

Dave Evans pointed out the difference last Thursday at the InteractiveAustin2008 conference, and I wanted to bring it up in the panel I was on, because it needs discussion. That didn’t happen–we did have a lot to cover, between niche marketing on the web and bridging the generations–but it is something to keep in mind as you think about using social media in your marketing mix. Social media is about listening.

Where are people talking about you? What are they saying? Can you help solve their problem with your company or your product? These seem like great opportunities for marketers to get closer to your customers…and learn what they really want, not what we think they want.

We’re kicking off a vlogging series called Search Camp today. There will be short videos on the topics that our clients and colleagues have a lot of interest in. You’ll even have the opportunity to earn merit badges that you can use to breed wild envy among your fellow marketers. Social media marketing is going to be the focus of the first few videos since we get a lot of questions about it. So here’s the first little video… hope you enjoy it!

Click to play

We have a couple of people coming in to interview this week, and it brings questions to mind for me. Not the obvious ones–though those are bouncing around in there–but ones about how I can shortcut the long and winding path to getting what we do. It takes a while. Once you get it, then you can start innovating. Things come zipping along nicely, and it goes from being a bunch of acronyms to being a delicious basket of possibilities. For most people, there’s a hurdle of frustration and boredom before the “aha!” moment with search marketing, made more frustrating because you understand the potential but haven’t quiiiiite clicked with it yet.

This is part of a larger block of thinking I’ve been doing for the past couple of months. It would be awfully nice to be able to have some nuggets of insight in hand this week, though. For me, it’s made more important because we’re interviewing a potential summer intern tomorrow morning. She’s smart–4.0, worked on the AdFed team whose project went to nationals, really wants to learn about web marketing and get some actual work experience. I had a couple of office jobs in college hoping to get experience and learn, only to find myself mired in the admin pool. That sucks, but it sucks more when you’re the smartest one there and get to do things like staple and take an inventory of the magazine and catalogue subscriptions. In the year 2000, I got praised by the boss two levels up from mine for the brilliant idea of using the internet to find the information nobody had been able to locate. I mean praised as in stood up in front of the office and talked about as an example.

The last thing I want to do is waste my time and the time and resources of someone who actually wants to learn and could do a great job. Yes, it’s just a summer job. I get that. But if those of us who live a level or two above the norm in the tech atmosphere could find a way to put people closer to that Matrix moment of understanding by being clear for once, we could reap some really amazing things. Maybe it’s one of those things that’s personal and you find in your own time. Social media is that way–once you figure out how to use it and connect in ways that make sense, it’s powerful and not a task. Virtual worlds are that way–once you make friends or learn to create/build, everything falls into place and you’re hooked.

What’s the magic connecting point for what we do and how quickly can we bring people to it? Is it seeing the results graphs for what happens in the months after the site you redid goes live? Is it finding the competition’s weak spot and trouncing them? Or is it simply moving into mastery of a craft that can’t be skipped ahead to?

My son has mastered the cable remote, which means he’s no longer a captive to Boomerang. Suddenly he can take himself to the rest of the kid’s channels…and be doused in their calculated and scheming heaps of commercials for a bunch of crap.

Thank goodness a friend taught us about “What’s The Lie?� About 15 seconds in to a commercial for sneakers, my son shouts “The lie is that those shoes can make you jump as tall as a building and have cartoons coming out of your feet!� The next one is easy – after a couple seconds he says “The lie is that having that will make a lot of cool-looking kids want to hang out with you.�

The third commercial is for markers made to mix a pair of colors when they write…he has some first-hand data here. “That they work after the first time – that’s the lie,� he says as wryly as a child can be wry. The next up is a public service announcement against kid’s smoking. “No lie in this one, right mom? What’s it called again, a PSA?�

What turns out to be the last commercial in this set is for a boxed set of radio hits from the 70’s. A tough one…My candidate for the lie is that the offered price is a bargain, but what comes through visually is more an assertion that dancing to this music will make you happy…and, well, that’s true.

Here at the office, we more and more frequently are in dialogue about how to assess ROI for the not-quite-so-analytics-friendly tactics - like articles and press releases and blogging, for instance - in our quiver as part of a really thorough web marketing campaign. The ROI here – it has to be about trust, right?

The return on investing the time and resources to educate, inform, inspire, and interact with your customers is that they become invested in your relationship. (Yes, there are benefits that translate into something you can show on a graph or include in a report) The point of these tactics that aren’t exactly marketing isn’t about ROI in the way that PPC advertising campaign management is. The return on that is calculable, downloadable directly from the service in a variety of file formats.

The return on actually sitting down and interacting, on giving away information that helps and enriches your customers, that’s the kind of return you can’t show a direct correlation in a quarterly report. But it is the difference between loving and loathing in a lot of cases. If you go in saying you’re interacting and real, but the whole thing is about ROI and selling, your customers will spot the lie faster than my son can tell you breakfast cereal won’t make you friends with cartoon leprechauns.

Let’s start simple.

When I’m working with a client, one of the key questions I ask is Where do you want to be 12 months from now?

It’s a critical question to consider before embarking on all the effort and money that will be set in play. Remember, in a social media/marketing strategy you’re not just paying Google for click-through ads each month. You’re directly involving yourself, your time and your money by building an ongoing relationship with your web traffic.

For a very small business, it’s usually more than enough to say we’ll start blogging consistently, build an audience and focus on all the tasks necessary to build a workflow of content and enroll others in the company to help. The goal being to build traffic and learn the ropes of blogging and engaging in conversation with other bloggers and your audience. I’ve seen this process work so well that many smaller businesses, typically in the services area, no longer need to worry every month about expensive SEO efforts. Blogging done right (content, connections and conversation) brings about a change in the way you interact with your customers versus buying advertisement to throw at them, hoping something will stick. Of course, this is a simple strategy for smaller businesses that everyone seems to be climbing on board with these days – as well they should, in my opinion. People expect more than ‘billboard’-looking websites that haven’t been updated in months (or years, in some cases).But what about a larger business, especially in the enterprise class? How do you develop social media/marketing strategies that leverage your efforts into business growth and keep you ahead of the competition?Or, what if you have an idea for a start-up business that is social media/community-related? How would you go about doing that in a way that is not simply ‘yet another social network’ site?

Okay, let’s talk about some down and dirty marketing. I have a bee in my bonnet about something, and a survey says a bunch of other people do too. I haven’t come up with a catchy title or neat phrase for it, but it will be a series of posts tagged around the main topics concerned: customers, brands, and loyalty. Surely I can come up with something better… (or maybe you can).

Forgive me, but I’m going to use a little industry lingo because hey, I’m not a philosopher and we’re not reinventing the wheel. We’re all used to looking around at marketing and advertising stuff–the articles, the blogs, the case studies, the campaigns–and we can get really inspired by them. I mean fired up about the kinds of things that are possible. They’re not easy to do, as evidenced by the multitude of failed ad campaigns. They take a team of people working really hard to pull off, and even then they might not be successful. That’s not the intimidating part for me. No, the intimidating part is that they’re B2C, for companies that have a loyal, energetic tribe of followers.

People out there have logos of computer companies tattooed on their bodies. They start blogs to track and detail new products and interact with other fans. How on earth can we inspire that kind of loyalty–even a portion of it–for brands and products that aren’t part of our daily lives? (more…)

One thing that sucks about such a great conference is that hey, there are multiple things you wanted to go to happening at the same time. Fortunately, people like Roo Reynolds videotape them and stick them on teh intarwebs for me to see later. Merlin Mann’s pitch from Worst Website Ever is too good not to share. This panel basically pitched the worst possible website ideas to a VC, in which we all learn what not to do with those shiny new media ops.

His slides are here.You might know him from 43Folders.

The point is, even though they seem cool and everyone runs over there and jumps into the mix with new technologies, that doesn’t mean they’re a good idea for your business. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that most people don’t use or even know about so many of the things we web nerds use constantly. Even if it’s totally lame, you have to be where your customers are. If refrigerator magnets with your phone number are the way to go, then do it. When I want to order takeout, I don’t go visit your SecondLife location to put in an order for pad thai. HP doesn’t go trawling MySpace pages to find the hottest new nanochip technology for their gizmos.