This is a guest post by Kimberly Wilson
I read an interesting article the other day about how frictionless online sharing is causing information overload and thus decreasing the practical value of social media. This not only affects the casual users of social media, it also affects the marketers.
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Marketing like many other branches of business often introduces jargon that may confuse readers. The latest of these is the term inbound marketing. In demystifying this term, we will show you a concept that is even more useful. That is marketing from the outside in
That thought provoking question came to mind after reading a UIE Brain Sparks SpoolCast entitled: Company Culture Meets Customer Experience with Brian Kalma of Zappos.
Brian Kalma is Director of User Experience and Web Strategy for the darling of Internet retail, Zappos.
On top of these duties, Brian also passionately supports social media outreach, where all employees are encouraged to look for comments about their company on places like Twitter and Facebook, and then actively engage with those customers, without oversight. For many companies, that would be a nightmare. Brian says it’s an amazing by-product of their dedication to their employees and their employee’s dedication to the customers. This is the basis of the Zappos culture, which Brian has to translate into content on their web site and use to drive sales.
And drive sales he has. 75% of their sales are from repeat customers, spending more than 2.5 times more in the following months than their initial purchase.
That is really impressive. But think on those words in the quotation: For many companies, that would be a nightmare. If your company is one of those, you might ask yourself one of the following questions to determine why you dare not follow the Zappos example:
So many companies seem to need to closely control what their employees are allowed to say. The legal department may even rule on what outside communications are permissible. If you need to closely control what employees say, which of the three answers above is the reason for that. Whichever it is, it is an indictment of the management decisions that are being taken.
If control is exercised because it has always been that way, then you need to realize that the Internet has changed the way people and organizations interact. It’s time to move into the 21st century. If for no other reason, then do it to make more sales.
In a recent post I suggested that Google might replace Facebook. I was talking about Google Profiles but I must apologize for my over-enthusiasm. As I begin poking around in the Google Profile world I find there are some very loose ends.
To help you better understand my concerns, perhaps you would like to check out whether Google knows about you, or at least has a profile on you. That may be the biggest surprise you’ll get from this post but there are more to come. Why not search for yourself and then use your back button to come back here:
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Here is how Google describes some features of Google Profiles:
A Google Profile allows you to control how you appear on Google and tells others a bit more about who you are. With a Google Profile, you can easily share your web content on one central location. You have control over what others see.
That sounds good as far as it goes. However it mentions that if you’ve been writing reviews on Google Maps, creating articles on Google Knol, sharing Google Reader items, or adding books to your Google Book Search library, you may already have a Profile.
The Google Profiles team clearly see all this as a work in progress.
We’re still working to improve profiles on Google. Please submit your suggestions and comments to help us decide where to go next.
Perhaps before you get too involved, you might wish to check out how well this Profile system is supported in Google. (Note that these are comments as of today and the profiles might be changed in the future.) Larry Page does not seem to have a profile. Eric Schmidt does have a profile which could be described as adequate. Sergey Brin on the other hand rather surprisingly has his profile in Portuguese. Here is how it looks today, although clearly it may have changed by the time you go to see it. (Now blocked – see Google Profiles Update April 21
Whether this is to appeal to the Brazilian members of Orkut, I am not sure. However Sergey Brin seems to like to leave a historical trail since his web page at Stanford is still to be seen.
More seriously I believe Google profiles have some more major problems. Search for Matt Cutts and you will find there are two profiles for him. My friend Donna Fontenot also has two profiles although at least in that case they are the same. One problem here seems to be that there is no way of removing a profile as far as I can see. If you set up a separate Gmail account and mistakenly allow it to be treated as a profile, then that is one way you may end up with two profiles.
The problem is one of Identity Consolidation. This is the ability for a user to indicate that one or more identities, profiles or URLs across different sites all represent that same user. It is also known as profile aggregation or profile equivalency.
It is suggested that identity consolidation should be done in a user centric way without any "surprise" or automagic identity consolidations. Users get upset when identities/profiles they thought were different (say, because they were on different sites) are unexpectedly auto-collapsed/consolidated. Users do not expect sites to share information behind the user’s back (like their email addresses). That seems to be the problem that Google is running into.
One way that can be used to limit this is the "me" rel value, which is used to indicate profile equivalence and for identity-consolidation. rel="me" is used on hyperlinks from one page about a person to other pages about that same person. The code looks as follows:
If you use that approach, then you can really optimize your appearance when visitors check you out in a new Firefox plug-in called identify. You can read more about this approach in a post by Marshall Kirkpatrick. It is based on the Google Social Graph API, which tracks the connections between pages linked together for a single person.
British developer Glenn Jones demonstrated the most compelling tool I’ve seen yet for leveraging this powerful technology, called simply Identify. This Firefox plug-in can draw from any web page that has links tagged rel="me". Just click the control key and the "i" key to get a pop-up offering information put together from all around the web about the person the page is associated with. It works on Twitter profile pages, LinkedIn pages, blogs with good markup and other profile pages.
It is better to use the alt key and the "i" key but apart from that minor quibble with what is reported here, Identify really is impressive. Perhaps Google Profiles with more of an Identify appearance may yet be that FaceBook killer that we were talking about earlier.
Courtesy www.PeggyDuncan.com
This morning, I became acquainted with what Jay Deragon has been writing on social media and suddenly the light came on. As he said:
There is Friendfeed, Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and a host of other platforms and tools for social conversations and user generated content. To say the least the space is very confusing and crowded if not overwhelming for those just entering and trying to figure out what to do and how to do it. While all these conversations stir interest, few focus on the critical elements required to effectively leverage the art and science of social media for specific gains.
That passage is taken from his article, Is Social Media An Art? He goes on to say that the four driving factors are:
He summarizes that in another article, Is SM ROI Really Important? which is when the light bulb moment occurred.
The more business people I talk to about all this social stuff the consistent response I get is “Show me how to make money with it”.
Any good sales person will tell you their number one objective is building relationships over time. Yet few if any company bothers to measure the cost of building relationships rather they measure the results of relationships. Measuring the results doesn’t tell you “how to build effective relations” or “which methods create the best relations.”
Relationships come from human experiences, not corporate spin and hyped promises. Human relationships are measured by trust, sincerity and common values. If you want a return on social media, then focus on conversations that build lasting relationships based on value exchanged and create great experiences.
There you have the crux of the matter. Your company should measure how well it is working with social media by evaluating the relationships the company is creating with its customers and its prospects. Unless worthwhile relationships are created, then efforts in social media will be ineffective and may even be without value.
This blog post is a follow-up to a recent article, Customer Service, New Marketing in the Internet Age. The article was addressed to business owners to remind them that the world has changed dramatically. Customers are now in control. The Internet gives customers new information and powers. This post is one place where you can exercise that power. You can add a comment if you found a company particularly poor on customer service. Equally if you found a company particularly good on customer service, then why not proclaim it to the world.
In the past people were sometimes reluctant to complain to a company, since problems were often not resolved by talking to the company. Now there is an alternative: you can talk to everyone out there. People do that in a variety of ways. For example on the recent opening of competition to the Canadian cell phone market both the Globe and Mail article, Cell phone giants lose stranglehold, (now behind a subscription wall) and the CTV article, Ottawa’s wireless auction could cut cell phone rates, each received scores of comments in very little time.
If you do a Google search for poor customer service, you can quickly confirm that customers are speaking out. Sometimes it’s in their own blogs and sometimes it’s via surveys. Here are some of the relevant links. Some of them are now some years old but they still timelessly signal someone’s discontent:
The rapid growth of social media such as Facebook means that the word is passed even faster now. It’s a customer revolution. If you’re not happy, or if you’re elated, then pass it on by adding a comment here.
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