When Social Media Goes Right

So, once I ended my tenure at Starwood, I decided that for me to be successful, I needed to practice "personal distribution". What does that mean? "Burt", the brand, is about creativity, ideas, relationships. Since I believe that Social Media is a tactic, not a strategy, it was one of the tactics I employed for self promotion. My FaceBook account, LinkedIn account, blogs, twitter, youtube, flickr, etc all became ways for me to promote myself.

What has it gotten me? For one, a job at Knowledge Universe. On top of that, I have been a published photographer (http://amzn.to/cZ2MUE) in two books, and was most recently asked to speak to a group of 200 about Mountain Climbing. Its actually pretty incredible when you think about it. I have spent some time marketing myself, and not in push marketing. But, as people look for information, they are finding me!

The web offers a ton of free distribution. As we all know, anyone, or any brand, would be crazy not to take complete advantage.

Megatron, what I love about Social Media

My new favorite use for social media is the Facebook page, bit.ly/90I8jZ. The fan page was set up by a guy who obviously bet his sister that if he got 1 million fans, she'd have to name her unborn child Megatron. Well, it spread like fire. He is at 1.3 million as of today, 3/13. Whats amazing was the speed with which the page ramped up. I looked on Tuesday and it was in the 800k range. Every time I refreshed, it grew at least by 5k, usually more. Finally, by Friday, his sister was toast. Read the comments, highly entertaining. People demanding birth certificates, asking if the middle name will be skeletor, and having a good time.

Nice to know the tools exist to help give children ridiculous names!

Welcome To Anyone Coming from My FaceBook Ad Campaign

Today I placed my first ad ever on behalf of myself on FaceBook. Its pretty cool. I targeted by age, by geography, by company, and had a host of other target filters available. I bid .25 on a CPC figuring low risk, and why not take any volume I can get? I am driving everyone here.

Its a 10 day campaign so I will let you know the results over the next 10 days! Want to try it yourself? Go to FaceBook and click on the advertising link on the bottom.

Lets see how the campaign works and thanks for visiting my blog!

Everything Communicates

As I have mentioned before, being laid off gives me great opportunity to talk to a lot of people and also to crystallize my own thoughts on a variety of topics.

I have been thinking a lot about social media; what it is exactly, how it fits in, how people use it, etc. What's apparent to me, is that social media is not an end, but a means. Its also very apparent that social media is not some online phenomenon, but online has developed the set of tools that make conversations easier and louder. One could argue that a conversation in class, at a bar, at work is a form of social media, but now those conversations can get very wide distribution through online tools.

The other thing that has become more obvious, is that with the advent of the online tools, EVERYTHING becomes marketing. Customer service is now as much of a marketing tool as advertising. A bad customer experience, can lead to a Tweet, FB Status, blog post, YouTube video etc about the experience.

So, EVANGELISM should now be a key objective, and the one that potentially drives social media use. In my opinion, ROI is nice from social media, but the value of it is the ability to "Democratize Your Distribution" and create brand evangelists with loud voices and broadcasting capabilities. The attribution (latency) period might be longer, but in the end, its more valuable.

Twitter and Cable TV - 500 Channels and There's Nothing On (Thanks Bruce)

I have been using and following on Twitter for a while and there are some things I love to follow and am impressed with:

• CEO of Zappos
• Onward Search
• Hang in There Jack

But, as Twitter gains in popularity and usage, my lists of Tweets are becoming unwieldy. Sure, I have TweetDeck that helps to organize the tweets, but still, everytime I look at TweetDeck do I want to invest 30 minutes to catch up? and the more cool people I find to follow, the more unwieldy and unusable it gets. What happens when every brand I love, every friend I have, every company I want to work for are all tweeting? I am a big offender, but do I need to read everytime someone sees a movie or eats something? Isn't it just too much?

It might end up that there is so much, its just easier to ignore all of it. I am not there yet, but I am a little at a loss on what to follow, how to read it, and when to care! I will continue to work on this one. Maybe there is a business that allows for real filtering of tweets with notifications?

Social Media Diagrams

I was going through TweetDeck and checking out today's crop of tweets from friends, pundits, corporations, job people and came across a Tweet from Tech Crunch with a link to the Future Lab blog that offers a number of great diagrams illustrating the social media universe.

Check them out. Its very helpful to be able to see everything laid out in a visual form.

All About Me -- Social Media

I have extensive experience leveraging social media on behalf of brands.

While at Starwood I led the development of the first hotel travel blog dedicated to travel content (as opposed to program content), www.thelobby.com. I developed and authored the vision and development of www.sheraton.com, built on user generated content and the first major brand to bet its success on its users (other brands used micro-sites). I was heavily involved in the measurement strategy around UGC on Sheraton.com to determine the impact of social media on hotel bookings. I have led numerous initiatives involving blogs, FaceBook, distributed content, guest and member engagement and research efforts to better understand how SPG members engage with social media. I furthered direct conversations with SPG members through a variety of means including webinars, phone calls, and a 3rd party frequent traveler site, www.flyertalk.

One of my last projects, although small, was a labor of love that highlighted all of the cool work we did at Starwood with a number of social media apps and other innovative platforms, www.room-51.com.

In addition to efforts on behalf of Starwood and others, I author two blogs, Tweet, am on FaceBook (friend me!), LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and others.

So enough about you, what do you think of me?

Being unemployed and "networking" (a term I don't like, not sure why) has been fun. I am meeting a lot of people and learning something new from everyone I speak to. One of the interesting suggestions I received lately is to put some narrative together on topics that would be of interest to potential employers and to showcase thoughts, examples of work, etc. So, I have started.

As time goes by, I might begin to intersperse some of those paragraphs within this blog. Just wanted to explain what "all about me" means when you see it as a post!

The Death of TV? Or "Why would we ever speak to each other again?"

So, the world is obsessed with social media (ok, I am obsessed with social media). Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, etc. Whats interesting is that the world also seems to want to talk about the death of television.

Raise your hand if you watched the Super Bowl? Raise your hand if you watched the Office afterwards?
Now raise your hand if you discussed either with anyone else.

My theory? TV and televised content drive a lot of the "conversations" that take place across the social networks. Think about it. How many "tweets" are tweeting during the Super Bowl? During the Oscars? Even during the Golden Globes or SAG awards? How many FB statuses were changed to reflect some element of the Super Bowl last night?

I spoke on a panel once where the person before me talked about the death of TV in an era of DVRs and the web. It continues to drive me crazy! My first question on the panel was how many people watched Entourage? Almost all hands shot up. The second question was how many discussed it with someone else? Almost all hands shot up.

The point is, things like TV drive social media and provide fodder for micro blogging, blogging, video uploads, music, photos, etc.

So, is TV dead? I think not. Just ask Michael Scott.

Marketing to the consumer, or consumering to the Marketer

Loyalty is the greatest thing to happen to marketing in a long time. How so? Most people look at loyalty as the chevron to the right of purchase on a purchase funnel diagram.

Loyalty is the most effective input into marketing that there is. When customers become loyal, not only do they want to repeatedly purchase a product or service, but they want to emotionally invest in it. For proof, look no further than www.flyertalk.com, a frequent traveler bulletin board site.

The people who post on FlyerTalk do it at all hours of the day and night, and go to great lengths to dissect and reverse engineer loyalty programs. My Starbucks Idea launched for people who love Starbucks so much that they want to help build it. REI builds its brand through a coop to drive member participation. So why are brands just now starting to understand the value of their consumers? Why are these brands in the minority?

Brands should solicit input from loyal customers whenever possible. Blogs, forums, social media participation should be cornerstones of marketing efforts. Driving and engaging in the conversation leads to greater emotional investment from the customers which in turn leads to greater product involvement with the company.

Branding: direct response with a longer conversion window

Is it branding? Is it direct response?

Allow me to pose a question. If the ultimate goal of most for-profit companies is to drive sales, is there a real difference between branding and direct response? Isn't the end goal of both to generate more sales? Isn't the real difference the impact and time it takes? For example, someone exposed to a "branding" ad might convert in 3 months because the brand is now top of mind or they had interacted with an ad or a site. Shouldn't that conversion count? Someone exposed to "branding" who becomes a loyalist, will hopefully spend more, increase share of wallet, and become an evangelist thus driving sales from others.

This is where innovation in measurement comes in and needs to play a HUGE role. For example, I would argue that companies should not measure DR and branding separately, but they should measure how they impact each other. Does branding build cookie pools that can be re-targeted with DR? What is the effect that branding has on search queries? Do DR efforts hijack dollars with offers of sales, discounts, etc? These are all things that can now be measured. Holistic measurement is coming and can be done with online programs. Companies should take the time to look at how their marketing is performing together and how programs influence each other. Measuring the traditional way, a program at a time, is not giving anyone a real picture.

Social Networking: Is it a strategy a tactic, a buzzword or a desert topping?

So much is made out of social media, social networking, social this and social that lately that its tough to get away from it.

The evolution of tools that allow companies to speak directly to their consumers and allows their consumers to speak to each other is incredible. As a marketing person, its like a dream to be able to ask a consumer about something and get an immediate reaction. Not only does it help to optimize marketing, promotional, customer service and product development, but it allows the consumers to feel more intimately involved with the process. Thus (and I love that word) creating evangelism, the holy grail of marketing.

All that being said, should you have a social networking strategy, or a brand strategy of which social networking is a tactic? My opinion? Everything should come out of a brand strategy. Social networking is very valuable when placed with in the right brand context. Social networking for social networking sake has failed many times.

Take a look at your brand and determine the types of communications and vehicles that reenforce your brand's promise and more importantly, the consumer's expectation of your brand. A handmade luxury automaker doesn't make sense on Facebook!

Just one man's opinion.