Yesterday, a prospective client called.  He was having difficulty convincing his company management to budget for social media, and he posed an excellent question to me: Why should a successful established niche B2B company spend time, money and resources on social media?

Social Media is not an Island

I think the answer lies in understanding that social media is not distinct from other online marketing efforts; it is really part of the same effort, one of the many levers that could be pulled to reach strategic objectives.  It is just one part of a smart integrated marketing strategy.  While SEO is used to drive traffic to your website, and advertising is used to build awareness, social media works in concert with all the others efforts and aims to get more people to talk more frequently in more places about your products, services, and company, with the goal of selling more products, more frequently, and at higher margins.

From what my client told me, they had been able to generate excellent word of mouth referrals and that has been a great source of sales leads. This is awesome and I suspect the same business qualities that have enabled them to generate this word of mouth, could be extended online.

Over the past few years, there has been a dramatic increase in both the quantity and quality of online social interactions.  Facebook just hit 350 million users.  Millions of people write nearly 6 million tweets per day, and YouTube streams more than one billion videos in a day.  People are commenting, social bookmarking, sharing and socializing online, both personally and professionally.  So, the obvious question is: how could they extend what was successful in face-to-face interactions to the social realm of the Internet.

Start with SEO

After a cursory examination of their website, it was clear that they should start with SEO.  This became obvious after I did a Google search for the keywords they used in their metadata and on their site and did not find their site after looking six pages deep in the Google search results.  Ideally, they want to show up on the first page, hopefully near the top.

If you haven’t yet optimized for search STOP everything else and go do this NOW! It is absolutely crucial for you to figure out what your customers type into the Google search bar when they have the problem that your company solves!  You need to know exactly what they type; these are the keywords that you should use in the copy of your website, as well as in the metadata.  The Google keyword tool can help you figure this out.  If you don’t know how to use this tool call me (831) 239-6745 and I will help.  Doing this will make it much easier for your future customers to find you, and more likely that they find you before they find your competition. You can work in your differentiation points around the keywords.  SEO is key, and if you have a website that’s not optimized for search, a huge part of the benefit of having a website is being wasted and sales are being lost. Social media can be great to make people aware of who you are and SEO can help them easily find you when they need you.

How to use Social Media to improve SEO

Not only will social efforts reach and influence people directly, they will improve search ranking.  The more your site is linked to by other sites, the higher it will place in Google results, especially if the linked text is the same as your keywords and if the links come from well respected high traffic or academic websites.  Another factor that influences page rank is the “freshness” of your site; a measure of how current the information is and when it was last updated, as well as, the frequency of updates.  A blog can help with this.  If you specialize in shipping expensive equipment, write the definitive guide to doing so and post it on your blog, comment about it in forums, etc.  Create a slide deck about it and post it on Slideshare, maybe even share videos about it on YouTube, as well as on your site, and have everything linked back to the appropriate page on your site.  Find out where the conversations are already happening.  Look at blogs, forums, social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Linked In, for discussions of  topics of your expertise and participate.  You can find these conversations by setting up Google alerts for your keywords, you company name, the name of your competition, or important products or issues.  When joining a conversation, use your real name and show you company affiliation, be transparent and authentic and look to give value and do not directly try to sell; this will build credibility.  The sales will organically come both directly through these interactions and indirectly as part of the resulting brand equity and presence.  All else being equal, people do business with people they know and like.  Go build relationships, become known, be likeable and helpful.

Being Social is Not New, you know how to do this already!

Social media is a set of tools and techniques that are used to do exactly what you have been doing via traditional methods for years – getting people to be interested in and to comment about your products, services, and company.  The great thing is that when it’s done online, it can reach more people more quickly and at the right time.  Most of all, social media is storytelling – tell your story and you will differentiate yourself from your competition.  Give your customers something to relate to, something they can remember.  One key to success lies in understanding that stories are told and consumed differently on the Internet than in traditional media or in person.  They are told in snippets; a video here, a comment there and an insightful blog post – what emerges is a picture who you are, what you stand for, and why your customers rely on you. This is your brand image. You have the choice to make your website a static online catalog or a dynamic experience for your audience. One is not that much more difficult than the other. You also have the choice to embrace the social internet and create a presense that extends past the walls of your website, or go about business as usual.  The choice is yours but I tell you that your competition will sooner or later do this.  The social internet is still in its infancy and you have the opportunity to benefit from early mover advantage. When you do this, make sure that your efforts and the tactics you choose are guided by your greater marketing strategy.

How to get Help

First and foremost, whomever you choose to work with must understand your business.  Many companies struggle with social media because they rely on so called social media “experts” who know the social tools, but lack the marketing background and strategic experience to understand their prospective clients’ business and their unique challenges. Look for a consultant who listens more than they talk and who is asking salient, probing questions about you and about your business. They should be able to explain how the social web is changing the relationship between customers and companies and, in turn, how that is changing the definition of “brand” and what customers expect of brands.  They should also be able to share with you their success stories of working with other clients, both in traditional marketing and social efforts.   Make sure they walk their talk and have created an effective social media presence for themselves.  And, the last piece of advice is to work with someone you like.  Part of their job is to help you understand the world of social media and to help you build relationships, so if they’re not a good communicator and likable, it is a pretty good warning sign that they may not be the right person for you.

I would love to hear your stories and challenges, what you learned, and what I missed in this post; share your thoughts with me here or tweet me @andrewmueller.  Thanks for reading!

I would like to speculate a bit about why Twitter has chosen to architect the new “Retweet feature” without the ability to edit, and why they chose to call it Retweet even though it does not serve the same function as the cultural convention that we currently call Retweet.

Retweet as a Cultural Convention

Retweet, as  a cultural convention has been a significant driver to Twitter adoption and even more so in creating Twitter evangelists.   Many of the most diehard Twitter users frequently use Retweet.  In doing so they not only distribute others content but connect to their followers.  They add value through edits that add content, context, Humor etc.  Often this added information is appreciated and conversational.  In turn, the retweeter gains visability and credibility as a curator of good content and fosters conversations about the content.  I suspect some of the most diehard Twitter users would revolt if they were confined to the new Retweet feature, wherein edits are not possible.

Motivations to Retweet

Danah Boyd @zephoria, Scott Golder, and Gilad Lotan are Microsoft researchers who have done extensive research on the significance of the Retweet and will soon  publish a paper on the Conversational Aspects of Retweet.   As part of their analysis, a series of questions were posted via @Zephoria’s account to her 12000 followers, the responses reveal the following motivations for retweeting (and I quote):

• To amplify or spread tweets to new audiences (e.g.,@rootwork: RT sees value and amplifies it and@lazygal: that which I think the majority of my“followers” haven’t seen already)
• To entertain or inform a specific audience, or as an act of curation (e.g., @jmccyoung: to inform or amuse the handful of people who follow me)
• To comment on someone’s tweet by retweeting and adding new content, often to begin a conversation(e.g., @anitsirk: to start a conversation about the content of the tweet)• To make one’s presence as a listener visible (e.g.,@doctorlaura: it shows that one is not just talking, but also listening)
• To publicly agree with someone (e.g., @rzouain: retweets are the ‘me too’ 2.0)
• To validate others’ thoughts (e.g., @amandapey: because sometimes, someone else just says it better)
• As an act of friendship, loyalty, or homage by drawing attention, sometimes via a retweet request
• To recognize or refer to less popular people or less visible content (e.g., @laurelhart: to support under-recognized people or topics)
• For self-gain, either to gain followers or reciprocity from more visible participants (e.g., @gravity7: to increase own followers, as a favor, possibly for thereturn favor (from influencer))
• To save tweets for future personal access (e.g., @peteaven: so I can find the tweet later by searching on myself, checking my updates)

While some value retweeting, others lament users’ selfish motivations (e.g., @earth2marsh: at best retweets altruistically propogate interesting info with credit to originator.  At worst it’s pandering for social capital” and @argonaut: educated gossiping meets karma whoring). In doing so, they acknowledge that retweeting can be both a productive communicative tool and a selfish act of attention seekers.

In this last paragraph, the last sentence is critically is important;  Retweeting, as it  is used today,  may be simultaneously selfish and beneficial to the communty!  So wouldn’t it be up to the community to self police the use of Retweet?  There is a simple method of doing so called unfollow.  The question is how the new Retweet feature will effect the motivations to Retweet.  In many cases, the inability to edit or add info to a Retweet would have a negative effect on the motivation to do so.  Therefor we could expect to see less distribution of information to the long tail of twitter users. But surprisingly Twitter still chose to design it this way.

Retweet is not Retweet

The new Retweet feature is not what Retweet, as a cultural convention, has evolved to be.  The inability to edit and see the chain of discovery makes the new Retweet feature something different and should be called something else; a “Relay” maybe.  It should sit side by side with the old ReTweet convention and not try to replace it, nor fight for mindshare; this just adds confusion where non needs to be.

Could this be about Bringing Value to Search Partners?

So, if this causes confusion why would Twitter do it?

Evan Williams, Twitter’s CEO, posted ” Why Retweet works the way it does” to his blog.  In this post he explains some of the reasons for the decisions behind the design of the new Retweet feature.   Almost the first thing Evan says is “I’m making this post because I know the design of this feature will be somewhat controversial”.   This set the tone of the post as one defending the decisions that Twitter made.  Many of the reasons are certainly valid, but the tone of “we know what is best” was disturbing.  I was particularly taken back by “Also, old-school retweets are still allowed” Allowed?

Twitter knew  that this would be controversial and must have strong business reasons for designing this feature this way and calling it Retweet especially when their it could have simply been called Relay.  It is the naming of the feature “Retweet” that has caused all the contoversy.

I would venture to guess that this has something to do with  Google and Bing search deal, for surely this new feature adds considerable value to search by providing metadata, and Twitter likely wants to convert as many people as possible to using the new Retweet feature so they can deliver more value to their search partners.  Thus by calling the new Twitter feature “Retweet” they attempt to gain mindshare over the old cultural convention the community calls “Retweet” in hopes that the latter will fall into disuse.

It would have been so simple to call the new feature “Relay” or “Quoted Tweet” or something else and avoid this whole mess.

I hope someone can correct me and tell me I am dead wrong, but to me it seems all too obvious.

Leave a comment and tweet me @andrewmueller and let me what you think about this.

Some other good reading about retweet:

Twitter Plans to Mangle ReTweets #SaveReTweets, by Dan Zarrella  @danzarrella

Simple Is As Simple Does: The Risk Of Retweet, by MG Siegler @parislemon

Twitterloo! How to send Twitter on a hasty RT Dennis van Staalduinen @DenVan

There is a new game in town and it is called Twitter lists

As I write this post Twitter is rolling out lists.  If you are not yet familiar with twitter lists they are basically a way to categorize people into logical groups based on your own perceptions and the way you use Twitter.  A list can be private or public and, if public, others can see them and can add users to their own lists directly from them.  This seems like pretty simple and basic functionality, but I tell you it will create a fundamental change in the functionality of twitter and the value that users will get from it.

Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) has written an excellent post that outlines all of the features of lists and makes some conclusions about them.  Robert is a power user and I think some of his conclusions are biased by his particular use case scenario,  but in general Robert is spot on in saying “(twitter lists are) brilliant because it instantly made Twitter much more usable and interesting again”

While this is true, I think it will have some other interesting repercussions:

Ease of Adoption

Lists are curated by individuals.  Each member of a list has been hand selected by the list creator for the value they contribute.  Services like Listorious that make finding lists easier have already launched.  One reason that it takes a while “to get” Twitter is that it takes time find people who bring value to your Twitter experience and, in turn, cultivate a Twitter community.  Lists destroy this barrier to entry; from day one you can easily find a list or multiple lists of people with similar interests or experts in a field.  If you your interested in the stock market you can follow @stocktwit’s suggested list, if you like to cook follow @ZagetBuzz’s celebrity chefs list.  Immediately the content you see will be demonstrative of the greater value that you will gain form twitter as you begin to interact and cultivate your own twitter community.

Lists make the utility of twitter much greater for the casual user who can identify a few highly curated lists and simply follow the list stream rather than the people.  Once Tweetdeck, Seesmic and others Twitter clients integrate lists into their apps you will likely be able to view individual lists as columns in the application.  In this scenario it makes sense that “follower” growth rates will decline. After all why should I curate a list of “Influential in Tech” when Robert Scoble has done it for me; or “Thought Leaders” when Josh Weinberger has done it for me!

Taking lists and Making Them Your Own

Eventually people will realize that they need to cultivate their own lists.  This could be done by starting from scratch or starting from an existing list created by someone else.  One reason to make lists your own is that if you follow and rely on someone else’s list, and the creator deletes it – It’s gone!  Or if they delete or add someone, then you are subject the change.

It’s very likely that Twitter clients will soon make it easy to copy other peoples lists and will make it possible for you to convert your existing groups that you created in their native applications into twitter lists and vice versa.  In a recent conversation with Loic LeMeur (@loic) CEO of Seesmic, told me that they already have the API that enables them to incorporate lists into their client and web application, and Iain Doddsworth (@iaindoddsworth) of Tweetdeck, in response to my tweet “Wishing I could take Tweetdeck columns and convert them to Twitterlists with one click”, hinted to the same when he responded “watch this space”.   Already Dabr and TalkinPuffin have integrated lists into their Twitter clients. Until this is done effectively, it is really very difficult to use list and get value from them, unless you have a very specific purpose and the list is topically on point for your purpose.

Once you can see lists in columns in these clients the efficiency and productivity will be greatly increased, especially if you are able to change the constituents of the group directly from within the client.  True to Twitters nature they implemented a core feature and have left it to 3rd party developers to innovate.  This is a huge opportunity for Twitter clients and the Twitter client that best implements lists will be deeply loved.

Power and Influence

So what does this really mean to social structures within Twitter?

The act of creating lists may result in a dual class of Twitizen – Those who are on lists of influential people and those who are not.  To some extent lists may freeze the status quo of power structures within Twitter as they exist today, giving those with influence even more, while making it much harder for new users to be discovered and may hinder engagement by the long tale of users.

Lists are quickly becoming unwieldy and it takes a lot of effort to create and curate a list.  Anyone can create a list, but it is likely that the lists created by already influential people will be those lists most quickly adopted.  These widely followed lists will either be followed directly or used as the core to create one’s own list.  Either way, those who are on these lists will gain additional reach (one basic measurement of influence), while those who have not made the cut will have a difficult time being heard and their value will be lost in the background.

Everyone can see how many lists a person is on and people’s perception of each other will naturally be influenced by the quantity of lists that someone is on; this will become a default measure of their value.  Listorious is already ranking lists by number of followers.  This further amplifies the perception that quantity of followers a list has represents quality of the list itself.  This perception makes it more likely that the individual members of the list will be followed and amplifies their reach and influence.

The number of followers someone has, and the number of lists one is on, are both poor measures of influence for the simple reason that influence resides in context to presumed expertise – their domain of influence.  There are domains of influence in which a person could be extremely influential and other domains of influence where they may have very little influence at all.  Let’s take Barack Obama, he would have a huge influence if he were to say that there is a raised security threat and that Americans should not fly, but comparatively little influence if he were to say that kids should be careful of what they post on Facebook.  He is influential in the domain of national security and not so much in the domain of social matters of children.

In a perfect world, lists are a much better measure of influence than the number of followers that someone has, but just like follower counts have been gamed, so will lists.  In the near future you will see automated systems for reciprocal listing.  Also people will reciprocate as a social courtesy.

Still many people will create great lists, and these great lists will make it easier for people to gain value from their Twitter experience.  The problem is that many people will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of lists and will likely use the number of people who follow a given list as the measure of the quality of the list itself, where it is more accurately a measure of the popularity and/or influence of the list creator, or the result of first mover advantage.  This means that many great lists will go largely unnoticed.

Regardless of their imperfections, Twitter lists are a significant step forward.  While they are an imperfect measure of influence, in general they could be a great indicator for you to evaluate how and to whom you add value.  This is especially true if you have not yet created lists of your own, so the lists you are on are free from the influence of reciprocal listing.

My hope is that Twitter Lists are used by most people as a mechanism to discover new people to follow and they actively use the feature to create at least some of their own lists from scratch.  This would certainly make twitter more effective for many,  but I suspect that  many casual users will simply follow existing lists and only a serious few will take the time an effort to cultivate their own, in this scenario power differentials expand.

To be perfectly clear, I think list are great despite their imperfections and am deeply honored and humbled by all those who have put me on their lists, and I am glad that I have been able to add value.

I would love to hear your thoughts and impressions of lists and encourage your comments, or just tweet me @andrewmueller if you’d like to discuss it.

For some suggested etiquette and strategies for using lists you might want to check out Liz Pullens Twitter list 101 post

Update: 11/1/09 According to Techcrunch, Twitter Client Seesmic become the first major Twitter client to integrate lists, Tweetdeck will soon follow. You can find out more about this here.

I’ve been following the Social Media ROI discussion for a while and it is great that many are working to make social media a “profession” by encouraging discussions that may eventually affect the creation of standards by which “professionals” are ethically bound. Social media is in its infancy and the process of making it a profession is really just beginning.

It seems that the question of how to measure Social Media efforts is elusive and a critical component that needs to be addressed as Social Media evolves into a profession. Social Media is a disruptive technology that affects numerous industries.  Modern companies have evolved to measure the efforts they put forth and investments made in terms of how much profit or loss those same efforts have generate (ROI). Since Social media disrupts industries and business practices, it is often hard to grasp exactly how social media initiatives perform in respect to ROI.  Additionally, new metrics such as, mentions, blog posts, comments, engagement, etc. have arisen as a way to quantify the effectiveness of social media initiatives in terms of reaching strategic objectives.

This begs a couple questions:

1) how much emphasis should be placed on traditional ROI as opposed to other metrics?

2) How do these metrics give an indication of how social media efforts affect “brand” and how this may in turn affect sales over time?

Olivier Blanchard is probably the most outspoken advocate of measuring ROI for Social Media efforts.  His fervor is largely created by the ease at which anyone can raise a shingle and call themselves a Social media expert and the lack of standardized methods and history to measure expertise against. Olivier seems to believe that in order to engage a company as a Social Media Professional that one should be able to address the question of ROI for social media efforts; ROI in the standard business sense of how much profit or cost savings accrued from a given effort.

Others including Greg Satell find the quest for Social Media ROI to be largely unattainable.  I find both these stances to be a little extreme and the answer for most companies to be somewhere in the middle.

It appears that many businesses are analyzing their social media efforts but are measuring them against desired outcomes rather than in true ROI.  Is this a bad thing?  Is it less valuable than measuring ROI? For some maybe, but perhaps not for those that have a deep understanding of their businesses, who understand how customer interactions at every touchpoint determine the brand, and how changes in brand sentiment affect frequency, reach, and yield.  Perhaps it is because the Social Media component of the overall marketing spend is too small to justify calculating ROI. Perhaps this is because they don’t yet know exactly how to measure ROI from their initiatives and they feel the urgency to be part of the disruption before it disrupts them. Maybe they intend to learn along the way.  At some point the CFO, will scrutinize the efforts and want to maximize financial return and will need to look at ROI to do so. They have a choice at this point to roll Social media initiatives into larger buckets or break them out and calculate ROI individually for each.

Don’t get me wrong, I firmly believe in measuring the as much of the financial impact of your social media efforts as possible and it is definitely possible to measure some of the impact of social media efforts in terms of true ROI. The problem is that is very hard, if not impossible, to measure the long term effect that social media efforts can have on your brand sentiment positive or negative and how this translates to an increase or decrease of sales over time. For instance if you succeed in creating a truly charismatic brand that evokes customer loyalty and diehard evangelists, you will be able to sell more product at higher prices. How would you divide the return among the many activities and facets of your company that worked in concert to achieve this feat? This does not mean that a company should disregard measuring as much of the ROI for social media initiatives as they can, but does mean that the actual ROI, if positive, would likely be greater than what you can measure.

As I said earlier, Social Media is a disruptive technology and behavior that spans numerous corporate silos including, marketing, pr, customer service, HR, R&D, communications and more that will change your corporate culture.  Honestly, even though I believe that true ROI is measurable for well defined social media initiatives and direct marketing initiatives through social media channels, I am skeptical when anyone tells me they can accurately measure the ROI of a broad social media effort that spans numerous corporate silos, and it is exactly these companies, that are fast to move with a well conceived strategy on broad social media efforts, that will be positioned to benefit the most.

I am in complete agreement that “for social media and social technology to really work businesses need to measure its impact, positive and negative”, and this needs to be done with both hard (financial) and soft (trending) measurements. The results need to be compared to benchmarks, and predetermined desired outcomes; from here the strategies, tactics, methods, can be tweaked to achieve better results.

So how should a company begin?

1. Understand that the effective use of social media should and will change your company culture and is a long term commitment to providing value to customers, vendors, employees, and/or partners

2. Define Strategic Objectives

3. Identify the Social Media Platforms are best suited to achieve these objectives

4. Define tactics to be employed to achieve objectives

5. Determine what metrics and actions indicate success in regard to objectives (including but not limited to ROI)

6. Select tools needed to deploy tactics and measure effectiveness

7. Dedicate resources to launching and maintaining initiatives

8. Plot all marketing efforts and results on timelines including social media activities and anything of significance in the competitive landscape.

9. Look for correlations between actions and progress toward strategic objectives

10. Evaluate progress, calculate ROI as best you can, and adjust strategy, tactics, methods as necessary

11. Repeat

Sponsored tweets have arrived in earnest and are creating quite a controversy.  People are very passionate about this topic and view it as either a great thing or something that will send Twitter to the grave.  Ultimately the effect will probably not be so extreme but sponsored tweets will likely have repercussions of varied strength across the entire Twitter ecosystem.  Stakeholders include: advertisers, spokespeople, users, and the platform itself – the question is how will this play out and how will these stakeholders be affected.

The latest sponsored tweet program is brought to you by IZEA and has some high profile advocates and spokespeople already signed on.  Basically, the sponsored tweet program works by aligning advertisers with “spokespeople” who would send out “approved” tweets in their behalf.  Anybody can sign up to be a spokesperson, but the compensation for sending this tweet varies by the amount of influence the spokesperson has.  Factors like Twitter Grade, # of followers, follow/follower ratio are considered to arrive at a value for a tweet by a specific spokesperson.  If you would like a more in depth description, Jennifer Van Grove in this article for Mashable did a nice job of explaining the new IZEA program.

I know there are many people in the twitterverse who are excited about the opportunity to earn money by sending sponsored tweets, and these are people whom I greatly respect.  And why shouldn’t they be excited?  They have worked hard to cultivate a following and to provide value to them, and believe they should be able to get paid for their work.  Many say that they would only accept sponsorship opportunities from companies and products that they would evangelize regardless of the pay.  They say that it is important to maintain their integrity and credibility with their followers. This makes me wonder how many products or companies are exist that I feel so strongly about that I would organically evangelize – I can think of 3, 4, possibly a dozen if I really thought about it.  So how likely is it that I would be able to match these natural affinities to a paid sponsorship opportunity? Probably not that frequently.

This type of sponsorship done with integrity is perfectly legitimate and ethical but its ultimate effect is a far cry from unpaid evangelism that charismatic brands organically generate.  The very fact that someone gets paid to take an action, alters the actions that they will take. The very fact that they are earning money by promoting a brand affects their opinion of the brand.  It is how the subconscious mind works and part of human nature (we have good feelings for things that benefit us).  Integrity in respect to sponsored tweets may be more difficult to maintain than many realize.

So how does this affect the advertiser? Transparency is a feature of this new sponsored tweet program; disclosure is mandatory.  How will viewers respond to a sponsored tweet?  Will they value it as much as a non-sponsored tweet that evangelizes that same product, service or company?  Will it inspire the same gut feelings in the mind of the customer, and have the ability to align groups that would naturally evangelize, or will everyone want a part of the pie and those who don’t get a piece because there isn’t enough go around become resentful?  Will sponsored tweets generate backlash and negative sentiment if seen as an attempt to purchase favor?

In order to understand the true value to the advertiser one must consider what a follower really is and how they follow.  Following is really a misnomer.  We don’t follow people on twitter any more than we follow a TV or Radio station.  We tune in from time to time and hear what’s on the air, but for the most of us we miss most of what has been broadcast.  Yes, it is possible to go back and look at recent tweets from any unlocked twitter account but how often do we do this?  TV and Radio advertising work because they have large passive audiences to which the advertisement containing a carefully crafted marketing message is repeated over and over again.  Twitter is an interactive experience the audience is actively scanning for information and all tweets are fighting to be noticed.  There is no benefit of visual or audio technical events to catch the viewer’s attention.  How comfortable would a spokesperson be with posting a sponsored tweet over and over again?

This begs the question of how this affects personal brand.  How will yours be affected if you choose to broadcast sponsored marketing messages to your followers?  There is no one answer for this.  It is unique to the person and the gut feeling that their audience has about them and the method and frequency that that person chooses to broadcast the messages.  For some I suspect it would damage their brand, for others it would have little effect and for a few it may positively affect their image.

Sponsored blogs have been around for some time and after an initial negative reaction have been largely accepted as an honorable way to earn money for ones efforts.  People use this as a justification for the efficacy of sponsored tweets but I feel the analogy fails.  A sponsored blog usually contains a banner and link but rarely does a blogger incorporate a sponsors marketing message into the body of their blog.  Blogs are fundamentally different than tweets – Tweets are broadcast in real time and appear in your stream.  Blogs are visited either at your leisure or through RSS feed that you read at your leisure.

All this leads me to believe that sponsored tweets that include a specific value proposition and call to action (direct marketing) like “25% off for the first 100…” would the most effective, acceptable and offer the greatest value to followers.   Additionally, advertisers love analytics that can quantify the true ROI of the campaign and direct marketing type efforts are easiest to measure.  I guess it would be possible to cultivate sponsored conversations on twitter but this could backfire if the spokesperson is not knowledgeable about the product and aligned with the values of the brand.

I could be completely wrong, and if I am please tell me so, but it seems to me an advertiser’s would benefit much more by focusing their, energy, creativity, and dollars at cultivating organic word of mouth that will yield a long term boost in brand sentiment than the short term effects they could achieve through a paid word of mouth promotion.  It certainly will be interesting to see how this plays out over time.

And finally, the other big question is how all this will affect twitter as a communications platform.  What will users think and how will they react if brand messages coming from their friends start to account for a greater percentage of overall message volume?

I realize that this post raises more questions than it answers and I hope you take the time to comment and discuss these questions and more.  Thanks for reading.

Recently I watched a video by Jeff Pulver, wherein he contemplates why he is hosting a social media conference, the 140 Characters Conference” later this June.  As you can tell by the name the conference focuses on twitter, but is it really something more?  This is what I think:

The social web has begun a profound and irreversible cultural change.  The ease and speed at which information is transferred and the ability to share knowledge and opinion with each other, enables us to align ourselves in numerous flexible ungoverned groups. The alignments, immediacy, and interactions that take place give us a feeling of belonging that is core to what it means to be human. Our busy lives in modern western society have largely limited these types of analog interactions and the Social Web is filling the gap.  

At the same time, this profoundly affects business.  A company’s “brand” used to be pretty much synonymous with corporate identity.  In the past, a business could gain consumer awareness though advertising, project their message though numerous media channels upon the consumer or audience who could not quickly or easily respond to the company nor share sentiment with each other.  Now, in 140 Characters, from anywhere, anytime, on the go, the audience can share sentiment and this changes the nature of what a “brand” is and how companies must approach the customer.  

I like Marty Neumeier’s definition of brand “the gut feeling your customer has about your product, service, or company.” I would say this definition can be extended to personal brand as well, “the gut feeling that people have about you”.  For some reason, it seems really easy to share opinions, feelings, ideas, and knowledge in 140 character bursts and in the process of doing so people get a “gut feeling” for each other and align themselves accordingly.  

Like Jeff alluded to in his video, Twitter may be gone or change very soon due to economic pressures, but as a culture we have grown to crave the types of interactions and empowerment that we gain through tools like Twitter and I would suspect that something else would soon emerge to fill that demand.  The Social Web is here to stay and is affecting many industries.  

So, In terms of the 140 Characters Conference, Twitter seems to be a jumping off point to explore some very important issues created by the emergence of the Social Web…the Realtime Web.  I see the 140 Characters Conference as a way to take the pulse of these industries, explore the challenges created, and brainstorm solutions with industry and thought leaders.  Hopefully, a greater understanding of how the social web is affecting both individuals and industries, and a glimpse of the future will emerge.

In case you haven’t heard, Jeff Pulver has gathered 140 of the top social media characters and is hosting a conference to take a look at Twitter.  The conference is called the 140 Characters Conference (#140conf) and it is the characters that will define the event.  Make sure to take a look at them.  The conference will take place at: New World Stages in New York City on June 16/17.  I can’t wait!

“the original scope of the event was to explore “the effects of twitter on: Celebrity, “The Media”, Advertising and (maybe) Politics”, the scope of the event has expanded and we will be covering these topics and a lot more. #140conf will be taking a look at twitter as a platform and will be taking a look at some of the industries which have been disrupted by the advent of twitter.” – 140 Characters Conference Website 

Also in case you haven’t heard, Jeff will be providing scholarships to 30 people who would like to attend but the cost is prohibitive.  This is how it works:

“If you would like to apply for a “#140conf Scholarship”, please send me a message via email in 140 words or less on “Why YOU would like to attend #140conf.” Extra consideration will be given to those people who also post their entry in their blogs and share a pointer to their blog post on twitter and include the #140conf hash tag.”

“This offer (has started) and will continue until each scholarship is awarded. The winners be awarded on an individual basis and access to the event is not transferable. It will be up to each respective winner to get to New York City to attend #140conf as travel costs are not included. I hope this scholarship program will provide access for a group of people who will benefit from the experience and who will contribute to the event.” – Jeff Pulver

So this is why I want to attend in exactly 140 words:

Over the past six months I’ve become fascinated by how social media, especially Twitter, has changed the traditional power dynamics between individuals with power and those without, as well as, between customer groups and companies.   It seems that this has given the” little guy” a much greater sphere of influence and companies need to pay attention.

Like many others, the economic turmoil has hit me and my family very hard.  This is the time in my life that I need to make a change and I have thrown myself head first at social media.  I see tremendous opportunities for companies and orgs to use social media to build stronger relationships with their audiences and very few are doings so effectively.  I hope to come away from the conference with a deeper understanding that I can use to build my business.

Good luck to everyone and hope to see you there.  It looks like #140conf is going to ROCK

 Tweet about this with me at: http://twitter.com/andrewmueller and use the #140conf hashtag

Everyone who has used Twitter for more than a couple weeks has surely seen, and likely participated in, #followfriday — Don’t!    The once productive and effective way to recommend to people to follow has turned into an unsustainable self promotional orgy that is clogging the arteries of twitter.   Although this has been percolating in my mind for some time, Seth Simonds opened my eyes with his blog post, Out With #FollowFriday, In With Connected Communities

As Seth points out, one of the problems with #followfriday is that so many people recommend others for the sheer goal of receiving a reciprocal recommendation, I’m guilty!  This has resulted in a significant increase in number of #followfriday tweets, as well as, a great deterioration in their quality.  #followfriday recommendations now compete with each other and it has become very difficult to identify recommendations that would bring value to your twitter experience.  In effect, what once helped us increase the quality of our networks has become a tool to simply increase the quantity of followers.   People add as many as then can regardless of the effect upon the greater experience, as if the quantity of followers signifies their importance.   Well, I tell you it does not.   It also does not signify your ability to mobilize your network to achieve any specific result.  The key to both these things is building a network of quality followers who engage and take action for things in which they believe.  I guarantee taking this approach will provide you with a richer more manageable Twitter experience and allow you to provide more value to your followers.

I will take the following approach to recommending people that I believe will add value:  I will tweet whenever I interact with an individual that adds significant value and tell my followers why.   I will use #rec as the hashtag and will not recommend more than one person per tweet. I will also try not to recommend more than three people per day.  This will ensure the quality of my recommendations.

I hope that others will adopt a similar approach and share this with others so we can all build more sustainable high quality experiences and interactions.  If you like this approach, tweet about it so others will know.  You can also tweet with me @andrewmueller about this.

In my last blog post I discussed the significance of Ashton Kutcher beating CNN in a race to be the first account to amass 1 million Twitter followers.  After this accomplishment, Ashton went on Larry King Live and proclaimed “We now live in an age in media that a single voice can have as much power and relevance on the Web, that is, as an entire media network.” This insinuates the individual has transcended the traditional power dynamics imposed by the structure of corporate media.  

While this may be partly true, we must remember that Ashton Kutcher is a celebrity and celebrities are brands and to understand this whole ordeal we must define brand.  I like Marty Neumeier’s definition of brand, “the customers gut feeling about a product, service or company.  Celebrities are both a product and a company.  Ashton used twitter as a platform for brand management, as he should, and did so very effectively.  Until now corporate media controlled almost all influence of a celebrities brand; Ashton demonstrated that he can take matters of branding into his own hands. This is great but at the same time he may have a disproportionate amount of influence on social media channels similar to the influence differential in corporate media.

As for the charity of donating 10,000 mosquito nets and bringing awareness to the horrors of Malaria, Bravo, I cannot commend him more!  It was a beautiful thing to do and a highly effective move for his brand.  But that is said and done; now there are more issues to raise, things to talk about, and inequities to understand.

My premise was that while this event signifies a milestone of relevance for social media, it simultaneously signifies the imbalance of power inherent within.  With that I suggested an experiment to see how much influence that I could exert by attempting to activate my twitter followers and coordinate the action.  I designated Monday April 20^th 2009 as Unfollow Ashton Kutcher Day, wrote a blog about it, and used social media to get the word out.

Unfollow Ashton Kutcher day was not about Ashton Kutcher, it was an attempt to understand the power imbalances inherent to Social Media.  Honestly, I think that if Ashton Kutcher were to read this blog he would agree.  That said, I am glad that he did not or at least did not make any mention of it as it would have skewed the results of this experiment

While we failed to reach the goal of reducing Ashton Kutchers follower numbers back below 1 million, we succeeded in bringing attention to, and generating conversations about the issue of power imbalances inherent to social media

 Ashton Kutcher had net gain of more than 50,000 followers. The Oprah effect and net momentum that Ashton built dwarfed the amount of media attention that I was able to generate through my 1200 followers. 

So this is how it all went down:

·         I wrote a blog talking about what 1million followers signifies both between corporate media and social media and suggested a test to mass unfollow Ashton Kutcher and posted that blog on Friday late afternoon.

·         I created a hashtag #ufapluskday and started tweeting about Unfollow Ashton Kutcher Day and linking to the blog post.

·         I sent Twitter Direct Messages to people who I thought would be interested in helping.

·         I sent @replies to people on twitter that were not following me but I wanted to get involved or inform of the idea and my blog.

·         I commented on others related blog posts and left links back to my blog.

·         I submitted the post to Digg.

·         I engaged with those who retweeted the post thanked them and built alliances.

·         I posted all comments made to my blog Pro and Con and answered nearly all.

Some results:

·         More than 1400 people viewed my blog between Friday night and Monday evening at midnight (about 80 hours). Keep in mind that was posted to a brand new blog with zero existing traffic.  

·         According to Retweetsist, the tweets were retweeted 61 times.

·         The blog post was Stumbled.

·         Allies were created and Evangelists appeared that took it upon themselves to promote the issue.

·         I had 20+ comments to the blog  People truly engaged with the issue and did not just pat me on the back for making the post. These comments were both pro and con, and I answered many.

·         Some of my tweets were retweeted and then those people who retweeted were retweeted.  In some cases my original tweet was shortened and other times my name was mentioned in another person’s tweet,  but in the process of the retweeting cycles, the other person’s name was left off and mine remained attach to their tweet.  This was interesting as the link to my blog was attached and my name attributed but the message was off target and I was uncomfortable having a this message being attributed to me.

Some Observations:

·         The more followers a person had, the more they seemed to resist helping with the effort.  In fact, it was clear that some folks understood and approved of the action as a test, but were reluctant to be vocal.  They had personal brands (images) to manage and did not want to take sides as they were unsure how their followers to react.  When I look at many folks with lots of followers I notice one thing in common, they have distinct personalities, actively engage with their audiences, but rarely tweet about issues that may be controversial.  This is unfortunate as taking a position is demonstrative of authenticity.  It shows who you are and what you believe in.  A lot of folks build huge followings by being benign while others build more targeted group of followers by taking positions and openly communicating them.

Some Conclusions

·         So Ashton you are right about social media — the little guy does have a voice, no matter how many followers they may have.  And this voice has the potential to engage and influence others to take action.  It is just that the voices of a “popular few” have much greater reach. 

·     Imagine what would have occurred if Ashton Kutcher were to take the same steps that I took above to promote an issue… How many blog hits, retweets, diggs, stumbles and ultimate effect would he have.  I suspect he would have crushed my achievements and that is illustrative of the power imbalance inherent to social media.  A “popular few” have a much greater potential to influence the community at large than the average member of the community. 

·         The fact that we were unsuccessful does not mean that an individual with relatively little influence cannot generate a social media groundswell that could have viral impact on a mass scale but rather that this attempt did not succeed in achieving its stated goal.  It is much harder to prove something impossible than something is possible. 

·         I must confess here that this was an imperfect experiment but nonetheless I believe we succeeded in demonstrating both the amazing democratizing effect of social media, as well as, its inherent power imbalances. 

I encourage your comments on this blog or tweet me at http://twitter.com/andrewmueller