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?

I can feel the 60 cycle background hum from SXSW Interactive, with every blogger, pundit and SEM bandit in the interactive world downtown twitting and liveblogging. RefreshWeb’s social marketing maven Tom Parish’s session on social media marketing metrics is covered in Wired’s blog, from the perspective of Meebo chatters sniping away during the session. Learning about the how and why of metrics on social media would take my undivided attention, and I would probably be taking notes on my shiny new MacBook Pro instead of passing notes in the back of the class, but that’s me. I’m at work sending proposals and depositing checks, and the crew is sitting in panels…when they aren’t offsite showing off Austin’s finest bartenders.

From the Wired post: Here at SXSW this year, Meebo-sponsored chat rooms are a major part of the panel-going experience. They provide live feedback on panelists’ performance with all the decorum and kindness you associate with blog comments. Or, in the words of nancy: “Chat room snobbery: high; chat room maturity: low. chat room dorkiness: (through) the roof.”

The big news today is the audience mutiny against Sarah Lacy’s bumbling interview with Mark Zuckerberg, “who for all intents and purposes resembled a painfully shy 8th grader instead of a billionaire founder of the planet’s most successful social networking site.” For a penetrating analysis of whassup with the whippersnappers and what it means to marketers, read Thomas Myer’s post: “These people had paid a lot of money to attend SxSW, and they wanted to hear Zuckerberg’s thoughts on privacy, tools, and social networking. And they were gravely disappointed.”

As I prepare for my panel at SXSW 2008, I decided to do some short video interviews with other professionals in Austin who are involved with social marketing strategies.

Dave Evans from www.Digital-VooDoo.com makes some excellent points about how you can use what you know from traditional marketing metrics as a starting point for capturing and understanding metrics related to your social media efforts. You can read his recent article on social media metrics at ClickZ where he’s a regular contributor of insightful articles.

It’s all about the conversation, and that’s a great place to start.
Tom

Cory Doctorow’s article in the Guardian, “‘Intellectual Property’ is a silly euphemism” is a good talking point on the noodley world we content crafters inhabit. There’s a friend I go around and around with on IP law and acceptable usage of things like, say, a photo of a famous work of art. If I’m writing about color theory and illustrate my post by putting in Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” and something from Picasso’s blue period–even though we’ve all seen the images before–she says I have stolen art. Not Picasso’s art, mind you. The photograph is someone’s art that I have stolen and should be paying for. The art may be public domain, but images of it aren’t somehow? That’s just silly. It’s an impossibly fine distinction.

Maybe it’s generational. There’s never been a time in my life where anyone couldn’t record something and share it–mix tapes, movies on TV. I remember sitting up late with my boom box in middle school to record the hip hop music on the radio my parents wouldn’t let me buy. It’s not malicious. If I post a 30-second video clip of my dog on my blog and put it to (credited) music that I didn’t write, record, and edit myself, have I committed a crime? Have I harmed album sales? Most people under a certain age would instantly say, “No, of course not! It’s like free promotion!” Have you ever bought music someone else used in this villainous manner? I have, and a lot of it. Music I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

Yes people flat-out pirate, and we all know it’s wrong. That’s not what we’re talking about here. Media is the most accessible way to talk about this because it’s a lot easier than trying to explain someone owning a theory or concept. But as internet marketers, content creators, and people that are in the forefront of emergent forms of media and content, we run into this constantly. We’re out there making mashups and homages to products we love, but a lot of the people whose titles start with a C aren’t happy about it at all. Some companies embrace it, like Apple, who went ahead and used a customer-created iPod ad. That’s the good. Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba talk about fan-created content a lot in their book Citizen Marketers, and they make some excellent points for marketers and corporations to consider when they’re deciding what to do about this loss of control over the message.

The bad is more like blogs populated by bots that post scraped content. Or outright plagiarism. Some people think that just because it’s on the internet, you can take it and use it however you like, without attribution. For me there are two main questions to be answered in determining if it’s right or wrong: is there profit involved? are you attributing the source of what you’re using? Where do you think the line is between what constitutes fair use and thievery?

Today is Valentine’s Day, and I’m here to celebrate long-term relationships. Several of our clients have been with us for three or four years, and the joy of committed relationship is seeing the little love nests of their web sites become fruitful. Here’s a virtual chocolate truffle to my sweeties: Overland Storage in San Diego, SS White Dental Burs in New Jersey, Clifford Law in Chicago, and Prescott Legal Recruiters in Houston.

SEO is a long-term strategy. It takes months to do the work, and months to see results. Like going to the gym. Hiring an SEO firm is like hiring someone to go to the gym for you…except you’re the one that gets to show off the bod.

If you’re thinking about reworking your web site, plan on a month or two to develop the strategy and plan out the work. Optimizing your web site will take a couple of months, then it takes 30-45 days for your first gains in ranking. Next, link development to support your new content and the SEO strategy, including PR and other social media. More links, better rankings, more traffic. Now, you work on improving your conversions. Are you tracking phone calls and emails that come from your web visitors? What can you give away to get some token of commitment? All these go with the territory, so when you’re thinking about reworking your web site, you have to understand that it won’t really be OPTIMIZED for maybe a year. But an optimized web site has leverage–probably the most effective marketing you can do, because of the long-term payoff.

A web site that’s purring along, bringing in traffic and converting them into customers, is worth the effort. Like a new car (and at about the same cost), it’s exciting to feel the power, take a curve, and cruise down the road. Unfortunately, it’s not something you can drive off the lot…it’s a custom rod you spend a lot of time under before you can take it for a spin.

I’m going to the Interactive portion of SXSW in a few weeks. Got any recommendations for panels and parties that aren’t to be missed? Or ones to miss? Our own Tom Parish is leading the Social Marketing Strategies Metrics, Where Are They? panel on Saturday, which will be excellent. I’m hoping it doesn’t overlap with Social Network Coups: The Users are Revolting! (Annalee Newitz), The Suxorz: The Worst Ten Social Media Ad Campaigns of 2007 (Henry Copeland) or Creating Findable Rich Media Content (Jennifer Taylor) that are all on the same day.

If you’re going, shoot me an email or comment and maybe we can meet up. I’ll be the one in jeans and a Threadless shirt with an iBook liveblogging… no, wait! That’s everyone. My bad.

If you’re going and you’re not from here, I’m happy to make recommendations before people send you to eat really awful Mexican food and make you wonder what the fuss about Austin restaurants is if this is the best we can do. (Hint: if the margaritas are supposed to be great, they’re either really cheap or only good if you substitute the primo tequila so they make it with limes instead of mix. This will serve you well at Matt’s El Rancho/Trudy’s/El Arroyo).

Susan the Meticulous has had a relationship with social media like those little birds with twiggy legs at the beach have with the water. They run toward the incoming wave, get a little bit of a leg or beak wet, and then turn around and run away fast. While I believe in the power of telling, and believing a priori is not a strong suit of mine, I go through periods of resistance to blogging, filling out the “about me” part of the social network profile, saying any more than absolutely is necessary. I struggle between desire to share and fear of exposure. Personally, it’s the fear of saying that one very wrong thing. Professionally, well, it’s exactly the same.

What do you think - do younger people, people who have been blogging or reading blogs since their teens and are now in the workforce - have that same fear? Privateness - it just seems to be so, like, out. Controlling who one is to others by self-editing, holding back, playing cards close to the chest…who needs that layer of faking it? Hey, duh, we change, we evolve, we adopt new perspectives. Yesterday we were blue and today we’re red. If we’re smart, we are where our customers are and trying to figure out if orange is next and if so exactly what shade.

Here’s another wonder: for seo agency client companies marketing to people young enough and social-media-centric enough to assume that a transparent evolving personal or corporate identity is the norm, what are the limits of the fabled transparency?

Corporate competition always has been secretive. Will businesses seeking to prosper in a social-media public relations framework adopt a norm of carefully spawning yet another public corporate image - people creating characters whose purpose it is to be real people on social media? Perhaps a persona of a CEO telling all or an entry-level worker climbing the ladder, personas we’re drawn to… personas manufactured as distraction and to give the appearance of transparency.

Or will social media be able to do what it seems like it could do – through sheer volume of uncontrolled communication, be able to establish a fairly enforceable terrain of true and customer-mandated transparency?

Immediate engagement starts before your prospects visit your site. Maybe they’ve listened to those enlightened podcasts you’ve been cranking out for the last few months, or seen the wacky videos you’ve posted on YouTube.

The more you focus on drawing prospects from social media, the more likely they will get to know you on a personal level before they know you professionally. Once they’re engaged, don’t loose them with corporate speak.

BAD, BAD HOME PAGE
Consider the following example from the home page of the fictional Happy Baby Megacorp website.

At Happy Baby Megacorp, makers of Happy Baby Cloth Diapers, the rashless diaper solution, and H.B. Powder Ups, the only baby powder with added vitamins, our goal is to be the global leader in portable infant waste entrapment and removal solutions for working mothers, in-home infant health care workers, and government-supported and private health care facilities.

Seriously, nobody cares what your goals are. They just want their babies’ butts to be clean. Building loyalty comes from helping people meet their needs. As marketing professionals, you already know that.

The danger for us as marketers is the potential disconnect between the personal voice we use with social media and the professional voice we use on our website, particularly the home page. So how do we maintain our professional dignity without losing their interest?

First, be consistent with your message. You can’t just go off on some obscure diaper example without having an underlying message that matches the message on your site. Have fun with the social media, but stay on message.

Second, always talk to your prospects on their level. That gives a consistent feel to the conversation as they move from connecting with you “out there” in the social media universe to their interaction with your website and eventually with you.

Third, engage them at every step. Your vision statement sounds like the Happy Baby Megacorp example above. Keep it to yourself. Consider how your home page sounds to the person who only knows you from your quirky blog posts.

Finally, use excellent organic seo practices. People may be entertained by your social media content, but they will likely use search to find the right solution.

SEO’s flexibility gives you the advantage of being able to quickly change as the market changes. Suppose a competitor posts an obnoxiously cute video on YouTube for their “Super Baby rash-free diapers.” Before you know it, their video is flying around the internet and people start to search on “rash-free diapers”… but you’ve built your empire on “rashless diapers.”

Incorporating new terms in a way that sounds natural is the cornerstone of ethical search engine optimization. When your message is consistent, talks to your target audience on their level, addresses their needs, and when your site uses good seo copy writing so people can find you, then you can connect with them effectively with social media and search.

We have been talking an awful lot about social media here at the old RefreshWeb world headquarters. While a lot of this is either theoretical or the critical examination of how what’s out there actually fits in with our clients’ goals, there’s an aspect that really doesn’t get discussed. You can feel the question radiating off of people in meetings. For the people that don’t already use social media apps in their own lives, they don’t really get the point of marketing by not marketing to people. What’s with all of this giving away information just to have educational resources?

Start talking social media strategies with clients, and they’re very likely to ask a lot of questions about where the ROI is and why on earth they would want to invest time and energy. These questions don’t get asked outright by marketers much. Nobody wants to not know how to use the hot new thing people are so excited about. It’s pretty obvious, though, that the majority of marketers don’t know how to leverage it well. They cram traditional techniques into places people have created to not be barraged by marketing, then they’re surprised when the angry masses revolt.

People are willing to do the work to make something that can be distributed through social media outlets, but the part about doing even more work to build the community connections to make their social media efforts? No way are they going to go around reading blogs and Digging posts. That’s fine. People used to think it was stupid to put up websites. Just like not every business actually needs a website, not everyone is going to benefit from being involved in social media.

If you are thinking about making forays into social media for strategic marketing purposes, I would suggest reading a couple of posts:

• Marketing is NOT Social Media - Social Media is NOT Marketing by Chris Brogan is great. It’s part of his Social Media 100 project–100 posts about social media. He’s not a marketer, and I find his to be an excellent perspective. I love Eric Weaver’s analogy about pushy selling in the comments.
• Tamar Weinberg’s post on becoming immigrants in the social community is super. It’s an analogy that would serve you well explaining how much work and commitment is involved in these endeavors.
• These were both linked (as are other good, relevant posts) in a post on Internet Bard, Social Media and Marketers: Learning to Play Nicely Together