Tag Archives: social media

Selfie-centric

Posted on by
1

duck-faceA brief observation here that dawned on me trolling Facebook this morning.

A significant percentage of the pictures posted by my friends are pictures my friends have taken of themselves.

So social media turned our cameras around. Sure, there was always the occasional self-portrait among any photographer – pro or amateur. And everyone has their group shot with friends and family – mementos of experiences enjoyed. Now, though, the proportion has changed. The number of pictures that are ‘selfies’ seems so much higher. Somehow, when able to share, we feel compelled to share pictures of ourselves. Curious.

Sure, the occasional selfie is warranted. Who doesn’t enjoy seeing a newly pregnant friend’s baby bump? And once in a while, everyone is happy to see you have fancy new shoes. Wearing a silly hat? Sure, let’s have a look. But at a certain point it starts to feel a little… well… dull.

Really, aren’t our pictures more interesting when the camera is turned the other way? Isn’t seeing through someone else’s eyes more compelling than looking at them?

It’s been said before: Social media is largely about narcissism. That’s something of a head-nodder now.

Perhaps not as obvious – unless you pause to think about it – is that if social media feeds our narcissism, that means a fundamental (and perhaps even the primary) underlying behavior of social media is about more telling than listening. After all, every narcissist’s favorite topic is of course him/herself.

That has implications folks – especially on the assumption that while we each spend so much telling, we assume others are spending their time listening. I’ve always loved the poster below, which came out years ago and still feels relevant today. (The irony of sharing it here, now, on my own blog, is not lost on me either!)

blogging.jpg

Brilliant marketing simplici-tea.

Posted on by
Reply

Ripe for social sharing without pushing a single pixel.

To be remarkable is to be worth being talked about. It is to be interesting enough to be share-worthy. In our era of social media everything, this is gold.

But in order to be that interesting, you have to narrow your focus. If you try to be too broadly appealing you can’t possibly be interesting. Everyone likes vanilla, few people get excited about it.

I don’t know the Adagio people so I can’t tell you if their idea, that I’m about to share with you, was born of research or intuition, but I think its very well done.

A walk through Whole Foods will reveal numerous tea brands with attractive packaging. A handsome package is not differentiating in the tea marketplace. It’s table stakes. So too is the requisite “thank you for buying” note from company to the consumer. Not all brands do this, but enough do to make that gesture too common to be distinguishing.

What Adagio did that was different is to provide postcards alongside their product shipment. These postcards are pre-addressed to tea farmers in India, Africa, China and other exotic global locations. They are meant to be sent by the purchaser of the tea back to the farmers who grew and harvested it in the first place. Profiles of some of the farmers online flesh out the idea, creating the sense of a real connection between producer and consumer. It also implies a level of authenticity and unprocessed quality. Adagio is an intermediary in the transaction, but a quieter one than is usual in business.

The insight here is the desire on behalf of the pro-sustainability consumer – a big target for the Adagio value proposition – to feel a connectedness with the people they support. Starbucks supports sustainable farming too, but they keep the consumer at a distance. You can read about it, but you can’t personally impact it (other than buying the coffee).

Adagio makes connecting extremely easy. Their postcards create the perception of a personal transaction. The idea that my postcard could be held in the hands the farmer of the green tea I have just enjoyed makes me feel good. In a sense I am saying, “Hey, thank you” to someone who just made me a cup of tea. It’s an old-world transaction that seems rare in an age of big box stores, drive-thru windows and e-commerce shopping. This appeal directly to the psyche of someone who believes in sustainable agriculture.

In short Adagio succeeds by making me feel good – not only because I drink good tea, but because I am able to be recognized on an individual level for supporting some tea farm in some far off land. Whether we admit it or not, most of us want to be acknowledged for the good that we endeavor to do.

This simple gesture of including postcards makes Adagio stand out in a category littered with Zen references, rhetoric about indigenous peoples, and the full gamut of socially-conscious high end eco-consumerism. In doing so, Adagio becomes a company I want to talk about. Making someone want to talk about you is in my opinion one of the highest success metrics achievable in marketing today. Nothing, after all, is more persuasive than a recommendation from a friend.

Notes From The Road: New media, old challenges

Posted on by
Reply

For a local business, global platforms like Facebook and Twitter create some of the same challenges they faced with mass media. Buying in a national publication meant wasting money on impressions that weren’t geographically in your area. Buying in local publication meant investing much the same work to create the ad only to have it reach far fewer people in a reduced circulation. Speaking this week to small businesses in Raleigh and Richmond, it became clear that this same dilemma was on their minds in terms of investing in social media. Reading the same headlines we all do, these business owners acknowledge that the world is irreversibly moving in the digital direction, but when and how deeply they should jump into social media was a very open question.

For a local company it’s an important question too. Small businesses don’t have the budget, manpower or annual revenue to afford much experimentation. They can’t sustain ‘a couple slow quarters’ in revenue while tinkering with new tools to grow business. And most small businesses don’t get an infusion of investor dollars to grow their company with. Most of the time if something needs to be done, they roll up their sleeves and do it themselves.

With 52% of America’s population working in small businesses, the question of when and how to use social tools today is an important issue on a national level. Especially since these small businesses also can’t sustain the diminished returns coming from traditional media which get more expensive even as they become less effective.

It’s like installing a phone line, not like buying advertising.
So when should a small business jump into social media? Actually, my recommendation is not to jump at all, but rather to step in a little at a time. Small businesses can’t ignore social because it’s become a part of how we all shop for and consume products and services. If a small business doesn’t move into social now, it will be harder to do in two years. By the same token, small businesses are more fragile. Introducing too much disruption to workflow at one time can have significant adverse effects.

Unlike advertising, employing social tools means an operational change in how business is done. I try to explain it with an analogy; using social media is like installing a phone line, not buying an ad. When you buy an ad, you create it, run it, and wait for the phone to ring. When you use social media you install a new communications tool. You have to tend to it. No one installs a phone in their office and then just leaves it there. Social media works the same way. So it’s going to add to your workload. The trick is to add it to your workload in a way that can be absorbed by the business and which provides some return for the added effort.

Social media is also more like a referral mechanism than a sales call. No one goes to Facebook to be pitched, yet to a small business owner accustomed to working the phones, this environment is both a little foreign and slow to show revenue. Nonetheless, it is a new reality. Very few of us buy anything from cold calls. When the time comes to buy, we go through our decision making process. Until we’re ready to buy though, we don’t actively shop for things. That means the job of the business is to nurture a relationship during the periods when the prospect is not actively shopping. Doing so positions the business to be top of mind when the time comes to make a purchase decision. Social media is great for this, but to the hard-numbers sales guy that is a tough pill to swallow.

When I asked the business owners who were seeing growth with social media about their experience, they said it was like planting seeds. Those seeds took months, sometimes even a year or more, to germinate, but once they did, there was a shift. More referrals. More engagement. And ultimately more sales. It took patience and nurturing to get there.

Patience and nurturing in a ‘get it done today’ world.
That’s the big irony of selling in this say and age. Everyone in business, from Wall St. to small business owners, is under pressure to sell now, close deals and make numbers. Meanwhile the evolution of selling tools like social media, because they acknowledge the consumer’s ultimate control in the buying process, aren’t organized around the salesman’s deadlines but rather the consumer’s buying habits. These habits are impacted by individual details like need, budget, time to shop, etc. and care little for what sales goals the company has in mind.

Outside the New Yorks of the world, the transition toward social has been more gradual, or at least less all-consuming. That means for the majority of small businesses, it’s important to strike a balance. Now is the time to begin setting up shop in social media. Now is the time to work out the kinks in how you operationalize social media. If you put it off for another few years you’ll be that much further behind.

It is not, however, wise to abandon your tried and true (even if less effective that they used to be) traditional sales tactics. Events, local advertising and even yellow pages ads can still be relevant to some audiences in some markets. It’s more a matter of recognizing that those media are sunsetting as social is rising. This is a transitional period and we all need to jump in the stream and ride the current.

I am encouraging small businesses to break down what appears to be a ton of work to ‘go social’ into simple, small, steps. Do a little bit each day. Over time your social presence will build and the seeds you plant now will germinate. The way you sell will change too, it has to because the way your customers buy is changing.

Starting now means that you will evolve with the media landscape, minimizing the effects of disruption while reaping greater benefits over time. Social media is not going anywhere. You have time to address it. You don’t have to get it 100% right on day one (which is good, because you won’t). The point is to start now, keep an open mind, and change as the world around you changes.

Social media is evolution, not revolution.

Get ready for a pile-up on the Kloutabahn

Posted on by
Reply

Oh WIRED, you went and did it didn’t you? You published a big ol’ sexy article on Klout that’s going to make an even bigger mess of the icky topic of ‘influence’ in social media. Reading the article does just what I feared it would, it makes it sound like by investing in your Klout score you’re on your way to VIP seats at the nightclub of the week, free hotel upgrades and first class air travel, hot warm towels and all. Given the geekery of your readership (and I mean that with love) you’re adding another wall to the echo chamber of social media. You know, the place where everyone who uses it obsessively believes that everyone uses it obsessively.

Worse, and maybe you weren’t even aware of this, you basically portrayed Klout as a platform to be gamed. By tweeting more, spamming often, and adding to the noise – and by trying to do this as far and wide as possible – we can all up our K’s and live the lux life of true digerati. Sign up now!

The trouble is, people will. It’s going to be a mess when they do. Now all our friends will hammer harder, injecting more and more noise into the fray. They’ll try to be retweeted and to get our attention at any cost. They’ll go back to trying to gather as many followers as possible. You know who else does that? Advertisers. And most people find advertising somewhat annoying or at the very least actively try to tune it out.

Remember when Twitter went mass a few years ago and people thought getting as many followers as possible mattered most? People signed up with these slimey services that promised to get us all thousands of followers – quality be damned – if we added our username to the mix. That was gaming Twitter and it became popular for a while there until people realized that the number of followers didn’t matter as much as the quality of the relationship between follower and followee. They also got tired of the noise. Have you ever tried, really tried, to follow 500 people?

Klout is going to do the same thing if articles like the WIRED one find their way to the New York Times, People magazine and USA Today. Then it will be like a T-shirt gun at a baseball game. Everyone flailing about trying to increase their Klout score by whatever means necessary to get free swag. In the din, ‘klout’ will become as meaningless a word as ‘friend’ and ‘fan’ and ‘follower’ are now because of over- and miss use. We will realize (yet again) that many of the social tools we unleash are not most powerful when chasing quantitative measures but because of their ability to create meaningful exchanges between people (and brands) that are both transmitted and received.

We will be reminded that being influential isn’t measured by getting people to pass that simple, low, easily-hurdled barrier of clicking ‘follow’, but rather by being listened to and acted upon.

Until that day, and during the hurricane of white noise that’s coming, at least we can monitor the quality of our online brand standing through funny tools like Klouchebag.