Somebody told me they couldn’t see their colleague’s contacts on LinkedIn and she wanted me (a LinkedInner from waay back) to help her fix her settings. I agreed, since I was so sure she must be doing something wrong. After all, I can see the contacts of all my friends. Or, so I thought. After accepting an invite to LinkedIn, I almost always scan the person’s contacts and see if there might be a long lost buddy of mine with whom I could re-connect. That’s all part of the fun, isn’t it?

I’ve since learned that LinkedIn allows you to block others from viewing your network. I’ve even found a couple of friends’ listings that “do not allow” browsing of their contacts. Why would you do that? Isn’t the point of social media for us to interact, connect, re-connect and network with each other? It seems that blocking others from seeing your contacts is kind of “Anti-Social Media.” What do you think? Do you dis-connect with people that block you from seeing their network??

It took a couple of pining hours, but when Sara our blog guru and fashionista de officina arrived she immediately said “Oh my gosh, look at your shoes! Oh my, those are amazing.” And then graciously she endured my enthusiastic telling of the siting and capture of these stunning pink and wedge heeled mary janes finished with white trim, a peek-a-boo toe opening and a big white flapper-dancer button clasp.

Just about now you just might be thinking “I thought this was a b2b web marketing blog,” or “Crud, I Googled s-h-o-e instead of s-e-o; I must really be tired…”

Hang in - you’re in the right place. This is a b2b internet marketing agency blog. The topic today is online social networks, and the question is how much of an individual’s personality is appropriate for their social network presence, especially in industries like ours, where we are likely to have an online presence for career that flows quickly in to our personal online profiles.

Barring the extreme, say, for instance, a case where I’d have a facebook persona called Notice My Cool Shoes, and another account with completely different credentials called Susan McElhenney Views Source…where does professional social networking stop and personal hanging out on the web begin?

A creature of detail, I’ll move us to examples. That I do Search Engine Optimization, that’s professional. That I am a working mom with 2 young children…appropriate detail for my Facebook profile? Linked In? How about my interest in transcendent bikram yoga? OK, now, how about the detail that I’m a long distance runner? What if I run with a group called Marketers Marking Miles? What if I run with a group called Moms For The Right to Nurse Our Babies While Standing In Line At the Bank? Are these affinity groups part of my work blog profile? My linked-in profile? My facebook profile? What do you think: Can I twitter my new pink shoes?

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

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?

Enough about the search engines’ market share, already! It is spring in Austin, and it’s a great time to get out of the office. It’s good for the soul to remember that, in a non-virtual, totally offline life, “twitter” and “tweet” are words that anchor you to life, and are not trendy at all.

This Flickr “badge” is a widget–a little bit of code that does something interesting–to show you how easy it is to incorporate your photos into your social networking. If you click on a picture, you’ll go to Flickr and get an enlargement, and from there you can view the entire photo set as a slide show. Very yummy pictures of nature, wildflowers, waterfalls, etc., if I do say so myself. Good motivation to get you up and OUTSIDE. ;>)

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.

Here’s my post on what I got out of Tom Parish’s SM Marketing Metrics panel. If you’re looking to read about the Meebo/Tweeter mini-revolt, it’s in posts below. Email me or drop a comment if you have any questions or want clarification on any of these points. I’m sarasco (at) refreshweb (dot) com.I’m here in the audience listening to experts discuss and debate social media strategies and metrics. I had always thought SM would be easier with bigger companies. They already have brand following and a huge number of users. If 1% of the Microsoft or Apple users create content and interact in meaningful ways, that’s a heck of a lot of people. Those are the kinds of things to look at and wish for when you’re approaching SM for a small or medium sized business. The audience size makes it easier. However, the giant gnarly corporate structure makes it incredibly hard to get things implemented–and you have a lot more pressure to prove the value of something. Regardless of the size of your organization, there are some things that hold true.

• You can’t start by hosting a fancy, new platform for interaction. You start small, build a reputation and experience. Then you can move into the next phase.
• Blogs are where to start. It’s not unusual for the page views of the blog to surpass those of the site. The buzz that a blog can generate may very well be the push the C-levels need to give the go-ahead to moving into further SM programs.
• The other way to go might be an internal effort. If people start interacting and being more productive through the ease of social media interactions, how much more valuable will the interaction be once it introduces feedback and input from customers? Internal, firewalled blogs like Dell’s are one option, but really anything where you get people from different departments able to be talking to each other is a good thing.
• Moving customers out of the marketing loop and into one for retention risks losing their customer evangelism to their friends because they stop being marketed to. The message becomes that you’re not as valuable anymore, when, in fact, these people are incredibly valuable assets that are seriously under-utilized. SM is a way o keep them in the marketing loop while giving them tools they need to evangelize to their friends.
• Regarding reputation and crisis management… A press release is not a platform. When these things happen, you have the opportunity to demonstrate how it could have been avoided and how you can fix it through social media. Companies that had been hesitant or resistant before are often suddenly very receptive once they understand how helpful using SM could have been.

The last question was awesome: Regarding the net gen who uses social media and networks constantly and in a totally integrated way, there are billions of dollars at stake going forward. What needs to be proved and how do you utilize these for marketing in an authentic and provable way? The panelists talked about creating things of lasting value that are actually useful–i.e., actual content and not ads. I agree, but what do you think?