Sg2009wc:socialbiz

From She's Geeky Wiki

Title: Social Media in Business

Session: 7-J Bay Area Jan 2009

Conveners:Jen Leggio - ZDNet, Jen - Community at Adobe

Notes Taker:

Attendees:

Notes:

Introductions

Jen is not a big fan of social media consultant even though she writes about them. If you pay a lot of attention, because they'll set up a twitter feed and a facebook profile - you have to have a presence and that's bad. Yes there are companies and businesses that benefit from social media, but unlike any other strategy, there's not blanket approach. For example, a large company with B2B focus, one of the first things you need to ask yourself if you're doing this "What exactly is the end game?" Start with the same questions you would for any other strategy. There are a lot of tools to reach customers, but really the same tactics apply. Do you want to sell more products? Do you want to increase brand recognition?

For instance, if your goal is to engage with more customers. Then you do need to engage and do market research, just do your own searching, surveys of customer networks, your peer groups. Where are they spending time? Where do you look? You want to be where people make those decisions. For B2B, we want to know where people that are interested in your product are. If you have a strategy in mind (increase traffic, get a sense of customers), the first question is "Where are your customers online? " This question is answered with research. Find out where your people are.

Sometimes failure happens because you dont set up where your customers are. You can't assume your customers will come to you online. You will have a failure, and you will waster your time. A White Lable social network, if you don't go on facebook, myspace, you might set up your own network - such as Ning, these companies provide that service. Be where your competitors are, because they are going after your customers.

The other piece is that, when you're looking at social networks, if you're looking beyond just business, there are all types of communities. Look at Hi5 for geolocational stuff. If you're in Spain, the stuff you see is based on where you are. Do some research outside of the big 5 that might be tailored to what you're interested in.

What makes twitter better than IM? Jen used an analogy: IM is a conversation between two people, no one can see whats going on. Its like the old school party lines. Anyone can jump into the conversation and anyone can read whats going on. There's lots more engagement. Twitter is not better than IM, its just different.

Strategy and Tactics: Should you separate your business and personal persona online. Why? Because companies will look when they are hiring you, you have different audiences. We don't yet have a way to manage all the different audiences. Facebook has it, but its hard to use. Why for the opposite case? Its important to put a consistent image across all sites. It also depends on your profession. Corporate Attorney has different concerns than someone writing and working in social media. There is an allusion that we can keep anything private.

Check out Pipl - Puts all your information together and takes away the control of your identity.

If you're in relationship selling you should be transparent. There's a practical topic of time and trying to manage all these different identities. We're not good with CYA. Sometimes its about community, and human touch, and being honest, the world is not a sterile place. In client facing positions, people appreciate the human touch.

Impromptu experiment - connected to some on LinkedIn and Facebook. She likes the people better that are on Facebook too because it increases their familiarity, nothing is way too personal, but she likes them better. That is pretty valuable.

Address this issue the same way you address social networking for your business. Are you trying to build a personal brand? Its not gonna be any good if you're not comfortable. You have to be comfortable and not terrified of what people are seeing.

Bad things in social media: you have to be comfortable with whatever you put out, even if you have security controls, anyone can see it. You can't control what people say about you, you can't control what people say about your brand. Managing brand and managing people are very similar. If you are THAT concerned, maybe you don't want to be on the site.

See Reputation Defender if you need help to manage what is out there, its a recommended service.

How do you find affinity groups to find out if they are your target customers? How do you find target customers in an effective way? Find slices instead of everybody at once. Use a mind mapping tool to find a pathway around the different keys. Trial and error, try different patterns. This is where social tools help, blogrolls help you find what sites link to can be more useful than a google search. Look at trends, cause people post what networks they are involved in. Go to the social networks and look for groups or rooms. TweepSearch and Twiter.grader.com has an intelligent search for common strings that they talk about.

When we talk about Social Media, people are sharing and broadcasting. What are some other ways that social media is valuable? And what are the new trends? Customer response has an amazing effect, everyone can help with customer service. You are solving a problem in front of everybody.

Is it important to have the same avatar? No! How do you deal with Social Media site burnout? You're not required to be anywhere, just goes to which ones you're interested in. Ping.fm is an aggregator tool if you want to update status across many sites.

Business use of social media? Different people in the company put links out there. User groups should be tweeting about their meetings, community is free, funding is an issue, use free tools to amplify your message. How does this reconcile with one image/one brand? Rachel says you don't, Jen says to let go. There's still PR with press releases and does all that "mainstream" stuff, this is going to be less important. More transparency to the e-level is great, they need to let go, companies need to bring the engagement to the front page. It shows you are listening to your customer, you are addressing the issues, and it becomes less about marketing, its a channel for support and engineering.

Customer support people are traditionally the only people that understand the user's problems the most. The chasm between the front stage user/customer experience is rarely crossed to the back stage designers and developers. By allowing anyone to represent the company and address user problems allows the user's goals/needs to infiltrate the entire development experience. (small plug for lindsay's paper from grad school: bridging the front stage and back stage http://dret.net/biblio/reference/glu07a)