Social Networking | a thousand cuts

On Facebook and the Death of Etiquette

Let’s face it. Etiquette is a lost art. Forget “interruption marketing” for a minute and think about how people interact on a regular basis. New technologies change that behavior as people seek to leverage the convenience they provide.

When the phone was invented, an etiquette had to evolve on how to greet a new call, what’s an appropriate time to call, how to converse without interruption. (Lots of room to improve here still – I can’t understand why politicians don’t have to follow the “do not call” list rules, but that’s another story).
Email etiquette arguably doesn’t exist – in a business context, companies have a culture around when people turn to email and when they don’t. Email between friends and family has a broad range of what’s “socially acceptable,” but over time people at least develop a sense of when people will reply and why.
Two years ago, no way I’d tell you that it would be acceptable to converse via text message/SMS with grandparents. Same with instant messaging.

In each of these small examples, the communication is mostly 1:1. Email can be broadcast 1:many, but it’s deliberate who the communication goes to – you select email addresses to include. Enter the world of Facebook, where the communication paradigm is different. We have 1:many as the default – post once and share with many, who consume the content (status updates, photos, videos, links) at their leisure. Forget that most people don’t have a common understanding of what they see in the News Feed and why. The barrier to communication is low – it’s easy to share a picture or post given so many ways to share, from mobile to desktop.

Sometimes people forget that the communication medium isn’t important – the content of the message is, along with the dynamic. Is it something that should be shared 1:1 or OK to share 1:many? Making that choice with the context to understand the medium is crucial in relationship building – for businesses or individuals.

I recently asked some folks on Twitter and Facebook about etiquette, and heard many bizarre stories. From the unexpected sonogram photo to first hearing of a family death, people are choosing Facebook for the wrong type of communication at the wrong time. Have an example to share? Do you thing Facebook etiquette is a lost art or a lost cause?

Photo credit: fdmount via flickr

Friends with Benefits: Starbucks and Foursquare

This week Starbucks announced that mayors of locations on Foursquare between now and June 28 can get one dollar off the custom Frappacino of their choice. This morning I tried it out and received my discount. I’ve been a user of Foursquare for several months, but for me personally it was the first time I had experienced a benefit as a consumer. Starbucks is clearly just experimenting here, but I like the approach – there is little cost or downside to a promotion like this. Some quick thoughts based on a nice discussion with the employees of the store:

Most of the employees didn’t know what Foursquare was, but were really excited about it.
They had been eagerly waiting to find out who the mayor was – wondering when the person would show up, what they would say, wondering if the person would be a jerk and pound a fist demanding a discount, claiming “I’m the Mayor!” and wondering if they would know the person already.
The employee running the cash register had to check the official “Need to Know” bulletin to know what promotion code to use when ringing me up. I wasn’t surprised since this is a new idea and approach, and didn’t involve a paper coupon I could turn in.
We talked about several other ideas they could explore, like rewarding every 5th checking with something similar to benefit more than just the Mayor.
I explained that my role is very social media focused, and since I had been on Foursquare for awhile it may be common at a lot of stores that early adopters (also in the biz) would be most likely to retain mayorships.
As I left I heard some other employee ask, “Hey, was that the mayor? He’s here all the time, cool.”

Aside from the recognition, the discount was practical and got me to try a drink I wouldn’t have otherwise purchased (Iced Americano or Iced Latte are more the usual for me). I appreciated the conversation starter to build a better relationship with the folks who worked there, although we already somewhat knew each other. My primary suggestion to Starbucks would be to see them expand to have more folks benefit.

I could really see an application here for the retail space if handled and designed properly. Any company that has a multi-channel footprint could leverage Foursquare (or perhaps one of the other location services, like Gowalla, Brightkite or the coming Facebook changes) to build fun and relationships into their strategy. On the flip side, because these technologies are so new and not as widely adopted, there is an opportunity for more “buzz” just by being first to market. Or second, after Starbucks and some others (Gradon Tripp pointed out that Ben & Jerry’s offers 3 scoops for $3 for checking in, a 4th free scoop for the mayor, sparking a conversation with Sarah Wallace and others about the correlation between Foursquare and weight gain) .

Get your discount yet? What do you think about the approach? Is it a flash in a pan or a part of a bigger picture?

UPDATE: Tipping Point Labs’ Andrew Davis (a previous Marketing Hot Seat author here) today published a great perspective on Starbucks’ promotion, highly worth the read.

The Social Media Revolution – Part 2

Last year Eric Qualman released a terrific video loaded with stats about social media. This week he released an updated version with new statistics, references to the iPad, mobile and many more statistics that make social media hard to ignore. Worth the view.

Facebook Changes Relationship Marketing, Again

The discipline of relationship marketing is already facing waves of changes with social media providing a variety of new approaches and opportunities to communicate with customers. Optimizing communications with email marketing alone has been an ongoing challenge for companies of all sizes. Developing an appropriate communication strategy requires understanding the needs, attitudes and behaviors of customers, fine tuning copy and frequency that will resonate with customers a business is trying to reach.

Clearly social media is already having an impact. Customers opting to follow Twitter streams, join community programs or become “fans” on Facebook are signaling they are opting in to some sort of communication. I met recently with a financial services company who is leveraging these opt-in communication points to offset email marketing – literally, they are sending less email because customers are choosing to interact with their brands through different vehicles.

Facebook just threw yet another a monkey wrench into the mix. With the ability to “like” any page or content out there with a unique URL, a communication strategist has another dimension to manage. When a customer “likes” a page, or perhaps even a specific product, the brand then has the capability to communicate directly with those fans. For example, as a reader if you “like” this blog post (you can choose the verb “recommend” instead, in the settings for the API), I have the ability just like a normal fan page in Facebook to communicate to just the fans of this post. Facebook creates a ‘ghost’ page only available to the admin, which will allow me to track statistics and see an explicit list of people who “like” or “recommend” the post.

Imagine the applications. Companies in all industries could consider implications around targeting through Facebook for specific brands, product lines or individual products. A pharma company, for example, could leverage this function to communicate with Facebook users around specific conditions if they happen to “like” a specific treatment. Retailers could too, except they need to be careful – do they really want to manage communications and fans at a SKU level? Nike could integrate communications via Facebook likes for fans of Air Jordan, but it’s probably not sustainable for each shoe. Bookstores could manage communications with folks who “like” historical fiction different those who “like” Manga.

At the big business level I think there is going to be an emerging emphasis on communication management, copywriters and ongoing relationship marketing strategists to digest these technologies and build case studies to drive business results. Have a favorite example of the application of Facebook’s new “like” API and approach? I’d love to hear it.

Photo credit: Christopher S. Penn via Flickr – who also provides a template for businesses wanting to create a similar sign

Spread the Joy: A Little Augmented Reality and a Rosetta Snow Day

What do augmented reality, snowdays and New Orleans have in common? A Happy Holidays card and helping to spread some joy from Rosetta.

Every year agencies of all types like to show their stuff with digital holiday cards. Looking to raise the bar from last year, the Rosetta team is trying something new. Our team took their passion for technology, social media and working for a good cause to dream up something fun – and we hope people find it to be a “different taste” from the usual agency card. Grab your webcam and see what I mean .

Happy Holidays from Rosetta

What’s more joyful than catching snowflakes on your tongue? If we catch a million snowflakes, on February 20, 2010, we’ll be in New Orleans providing some joy to local children at City Park: a snow day. Read more at the card site, and I look forward to sharing stories of the joy from that event in a couple months. Have a happy and healthy holiday season.

Note: We’ll be watching usage and looking to fix or upgrade features – would love your input on what we could improve.

UPDATE: The WSJ covered our holiday card today (“Stop Licking Your Monitor,” 12/15/2009). My favorite quote is about “on-tongue recognition technology” from Rosetta partner Toni Hess.

5 Twitter Tips You May Not Know

As Twitter turns the corner on the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and heads full speed ahead into the “Trough of Disillusionment,” I thought I’d share 5 tips that have continued to make Twitter a meaningful, useful tool. Some of these you may know, some may be new. This is aside from new features coming like Twitter Lists and the ability to report spammers directly from the web version. If you know of others I’d love to hear them.

Authorize your API connections. It seems like every other week a new Twitter scam pops up sending DMs on behalf of many unsuspecting users. Of course you can change your password to protect yourself, but many apps require an authorization for your account. Be sure to check http://twitter.com/account/connections to make sure everything there is legitimate.
Twitter provides their own widgets. There are apps galore out there, but did you know Twitter has developed their own series of widgets for you to use on websites, blogs and elsewhere? Check out http://twitter.com/goodies/widgets to find widgets to show search results, your recent tweets, or your favorite tweets. Here’s a quick sample of a search widget, showing scrolling chatter ahead of the 2nd TWTRCON conference coming up on October 22 in DC (want to attend? I have a 20% discount code: TWTRAC – I think the agenda is shaping up to beat the first one in SF earlier this year…) [Reading via feed? Please click through to the post to see the widget.]
Use RSS to track mentions. I use Google Reader to keep up with many blogs, but sometimes I miss a reply on Twitter if I haven’t logged in for awhile. If you want to make sure you never miss a mention, create a simple Twitter search on your Twitter name and grab the RSS feed in the top right corner. I’ll go through that list on occasion to make sure I didn’t miss anything, but a business could import that feed into a more robust tool for reporting and assigning responses.
Get more use out of your Favorites. I’ve always thought the “Favorites” function was under-utilized. I tend tto use favorites most often to mark links to go back to read later, especially while I am on the road and using my Blackberry – sometimes taking the time to click through to links doesn’t help. Once again Google Reader to the rescue. Your Twitter Favorites are actually available via RSS as well, even though there is no RSS link on the page. Here is the syntax: “http://twitter.com/favorites/{twitter name}.rss” - now I can use them like a bookmarking service, feed them to a widget elsewhere and save them even for sharing with others via Google Reader’s sharing functions. It’s almost a backdoor way to “retweet.” Here is my feed, which I use very similarly to how I decide what to bookmark in Delicious: http://twitter.com/favorites/adamcohen.rss
There’s an app for that. Everyone has their favorite Twitter applications – the proliferation of 3rd party apps is profound. My personal crutch is Tweetdeck, which has allowed me to create groups in order to more closely follow friends, industry experts and mentions of clients (more casually than a social media monitoring tool). Rather than go deep on more apps, in the last few weeks one of my favorite microblogging experts, Laura Fitton, has launched One Forty at http://oneforty.com – it’s the online equivalent of Apple’s App store but much broader – there are mobile apps for the iPhone, Blackberry and other devices, desktop apps, Twitter analytic services and more. Integrated to your Twitter profile, oneforty.com allows you to rate and suggest services. This site will clearly help sort through what the best and worst 3rd party apps are out there. Laura is a featured speaker at TWTRCON too.

What other Twitter tips do you have to share? I’ve been using Twitter for more than two years but continue to learn ways to make it an effective tool and build connections. Were these tips old news to you? (Did you know that Disqus, the comment system which I recently installed here, allows you to authenticate via your Twitter account? Sweet.)

Photo credit: cotinis via Flickr

How Twitter and Social Networks Can Make History

Every once in awhile a video comes along that inspires thought and challenges assumptions. This video of internet guru Clay Shirky speaking as part of the TED series is no exception. From the advent of the printing press to modern community platforms, Shirky uses stories from China, Iran, the Obama campaign, and other political uprisings to demonstrate the power of Facebook, text messaging and Twitter to make a real impact. This is worth the watch.

(Thanks to David Armano for sharing this on Twitter. Feed subscribers please click through to see the video).

How to Show The Value of Twitter In 2 Minutes or Less

Twitter is not a service that will appeal to everyone. Allegedly 60% of Twitter users leave after the first month (although this doesn’t include those who switch to desktop apps like Tweetdeck). I’d argue it’s because they only have Oprah and Ashton Kutcher showing them the ropes and need some better guidance; Twitter is intuitive to use but not to build a network or get the most value out of it. Here are some simple steps to show someone the value of Twitter.

Pick a topic the person is passionate about.
Go to http://search.twitter.com and run a search on the term.
Find an interesting tweet or post about the topic, and click through to the profile of the person who posted it. If the profile looks interesting, follow that person. Follow a few folks like this.
Start a conversation, reply to one of the posts as if you had started a conversation in line at the supermarket.
Look for someone sharing a useful website or blog post related to the topic, click through to the blog and consider subscribing to it. Maybe reply to the author via comment or back on Twitter to let them know what you thought.
Spend a few minutes in the conversation and see what happens. Try again the next day.
Repeat.

Within a few minutes you’ll likely get valuable content and conversation to you, relevant to a topic you are interested in. You might even find a job listing. I just tried this approach on 3 people – using photography, user experience and summer camp – and went 3 for 3 on “wows.” New to Twitter? Let me know if this helps. Twitter veteran? What else would you recommend to get someone started?

ps. Try “ball bearings” – you’ll find manufacturing suppliers, engineers, and people who like Fletch.

photo credit: 2create via Flickr

Understanding How Social Media Impacts the Purchase Path

Few marketers dispute PPC as an effective and measurable online channel. Social media, in contrast, is currently subject to dispute.

One of the more compelling arguments for pay-per-click search marketing is the ability to attribute web sales directly to clicks from search advertising. ROI can be measured to multiple decimal points tying the amount of spend invested in bidding on keywords to the direct revenue and conversion. When the conversation changes to social media, there are debates about ROI, a lack of proven approaches and many marketers still viewing social media as experimental. ["Conversion" for those not familiar with web analytics is defined as a visitor to a web property who completes a targeted action, including signing up for an email newsletter, adding a product to a shopping cart, or completing checkout.]

Skepticism Abounds

A way to address the skepticism marketers have about social media is to draw the same correlation to the purchase path as search marketing. Notice I did not suggest “the” way to address the skepticism – providing better metrics won’t give the complete picture of social media benefits, but it will start to quantify the role social media can play in a marketing strategy in terms that internet marketers deal with already. For example, today Webtrends and Radian6 made a joint product announcement tying traditional web analytics to social media monitoring, through Webtrends’ Open Exchange platform. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Establishing Credit

Traditional analytics tools give credit for conversion to the tracked marketing activity before the conversion takes place – a “last click” methodology. This could be a search query prior to a site visit, an ad clicked through on a search results page or a banner ad. Those in the SEM and Display Advertising industries would tell you that while these metrics are precisely measured, a major challenge is to quantify all the “other” touchpoints a consumer has prior to conversion. (Rosetta, my agency, has a differentiated approach to marketing analytics that does capture “view-thru” – tracking that a user saw a display ad days or even weeks prior to a conversion event).

Here is what I would like to see analytics vendors or social media monitoring platforms do to start to quantify the measurement:

Track participation in social technologies in similar fashion to traditional ecommerce sites (defined conversion events, page views, length of visit). A potential limitation is that brands may only be able to track measurements based on assets they control (hosted communities, hosted blogs, custom widgets, etc).
Tie search engine queries, organic search site visits and PPC ad clicks – and ultimately, conversion – back to whether the user had participated in a social technology, and measure typical length of visit/level of engagement both before and after conversion.
Provide in one dashboard the ability to identify the direct correlation between social marketing initiatives to conversion and revenue.

This level of data would help marketers more directly measure the success of social marketing initiaitves and make at least part of the intangible, tangible. Is that a lot to ask?

Photo credit: premasagar via flickr

The Second Coming of Twitter

Twitter is all the rage. CNN talks about it at every opportunity. Famous people from Shaquille O’Neal to MCHammer to Demi Moore are using it to share snippets of their daily lives. Legions of new joiners are popping up each day. Books are being published left and right about Twitter for business and monetizing Twitter accounts (some questionable, others focusing on the community in microsharing – the most anticipated one I’m looking forward to is Laura Fitton‘s (aka Pistachio) Twitter for Dummies). Blog posts about Twitter are profilic. Yep, I’m full of irony by adding to the mix – and there are some that would probably say what is happening now is a third or even fourth coming of Twitter.

Observations

I’ve been on Twitter for a year and a half and here are some observations about what has changed, for better or worse:

Spammers have become more advanced, using bots, auto-follow/un-follows, and other nefarious ways to collect followers.
Gone are the days of “Twitter Karma” where we all try to maintain equilibrium of follower to following ratios. Now it’s more focused on how we can be useful or interesting to each other.
People are very caught up in numbers – of followers, of retweets, of conversations. New tools continue to crop up to grade your twitter participation, experience and influence.
The more followers you have, the more reliant you become on solid third party tools like Tweetdeck and Tweetworks to manage groups and connections that are most important. Tags and search capability are key functions in day to day use.
Twitter is no longer solely for the early adopter tech crowd or the social media consulting/services crowd. It’s clearly a useful platform for lawyers, real estate agents, graphic artists, moms, dads, sports fans, you name it.
The coverage of Twitter use in traditional media, like the evening news on TV, to me seems like hunting and pecking for needles in a haystack. It can be devoid of metrics or real analysis, using it more like finding a funny tweet and showing it to the audience. It reminds me of the Chris Farley show on SNL. (“Do you remember that?…That was AWESOME.”)
The echo chamber of people on Twitter talking about Twitter has grown louder, stronger and more frequent, which can be good and bad. It’s good for educating folks on what tweetups are, how to use hashtags to help track conversations, which 3rd party apps are great for desktop and iPhone use. It’s also good when businesses are leveraging the platform to connect with customers and resolve or acknowledge challenges. It’s bad when people presume to know about someone’s intentions or preach too strongly about how to use Twitter.

Back to the Basics

With all of the hype, there are many who forget or neglect what I would describe as some basic guidelines on Twitter. I am by no means an authority but am sharing my thoughts as a long time (in technology terms, anyway) user, and I would welcome your suggestions and input.

Twitter is for conversations. Find people who like to talk about topics you’re interested in, connect and participate.
It’s a great tool for sharing useful or fun information.
Sure, Twitter can be a promotion vehicle, but spend less than 10% of your time on Twitter promoting your own wares (hat tip to Chris Brogan who mentions this approach often). Would you go into a large networking event and start shouting? How successful would it be?
I try to look at all of the numbers and measurements of grading one’s Twitter use with a grain of salt – they can be indicators of intent, suggestions and guides on what to do differently, and in some cases show influence, but in the same regard do you keep measure of offline conversations with friends, families and coworkers? I don’t, especially not to decimal points. I like to check out the tools but I don’t get too caught up in them.
Twitter enables meaningful connections, but they are not a given. Building relationships, just like meeting new people at a conference, party or event, takes time, patience and sincere interest in connecting with other people.
Twitter represents a way to build relationships, find useful information, gain access to expertise and connect. Here is a representation (definitely a subset) of many folks who I have met through Twitter and others who I hope to meet but follow because they share something useful and meaningful – they are real people. (Twitter Mosaic courtesy of sxoop.com, get your own here).

Have you been on Twitter for a long time? If so, how have you seen the community and use evolve? If you’re new to Twitter, what brought you to the platform and what do you think so far?

Photo credit: left-hand via Flickr

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