Monthly Archives: November 2008

Social Media Best Practices

Written on November 30, 2008 by Josh Peters in Advice, Business, Social Media
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CeilingFan

In order to keep some fecal matter from hitting the proverbial fan I’m going to keep a lot of this post anonymous as it relates to a client I am working with and something that has recently happened to them.

I have been working on an Evaluation of the current social media efforts done by a client of mine. They have had some “pro” working for them as their social media marketer and I was given one of their reports to do a review on. One of the services I offer is an audit current social media plans and then a revision of what’s been done to see what could be done better, areas to expand to etc. This particular client’s weekly report looked VERY impressive at first glance… and then I dug deeper.

The structure of the report was very misleading, the descriptions, accounts, and activity on the report were very misleading and after doing some research it turned out there was quite a deal of room for improvement.

Based on this I want to put this up as my best practices advice. Be honest. Yes its’ easy to pull the wool over someones eyes in this field (even if you don’t mean to), but it’s just as easy for someone like to me come behind you and figure out what you’ve done. It’s the social web, it’s out there for any one to see, so be honest.

Don’t pad numbers, don’t write misleading documents, and don’t try to make it sound like more was done than truly was.

Be Honest, be clear, be concise, be HONEST.

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

p.s. I’m working on moving this blog to my own hosting so posts are going to be a wee bit more sporadic than normal and I might miss a few days as I get it all setup on my own WordPress install.

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Sometimes it really is the worst case scenario – A rally cry for Social Media

Written on November 26, 2008 by Josh Peters in Advice, Business, Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking, Strategy, Web/Tech, Weblogs
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A27534

I’ve seen so many articles lately about how people need to stop worrying and just go about business as normal, I’ve seen articles telling companies to increase spending. It isn’t as bad as it seems, and to ignore what’s going on. That this really isn’t a worst case scenario.

Last fall I had gotten a bit sick, but I wouldn’t take a sick day (those are for when I feel too good to go to work). After a day or two I started feeling better… and then I got a rash. Being the internet addict I am, of course I went to Web MD and self diagnosed myself with scarlet fever. I remember thinking “didn’t that go the way of small pox, polio, and bonnets?”

When I awoke the next day it was worse, much worse. The rash had spread to my face, neck,torso and both arms. So I decided to consult a professional. The nurse took my vitals, the doctors looked inside my top most orifices, gave me a good look over and then announced. “You have scarlet fever”. Wow.

So there I was, a model of my own worse case scenario that I had never thought would happen to me. This is relevant.

Over and over I keep seeing this quote pop up (I’ve even used in a presentation)

“Maintain marketing spending. it is well documented that brands that increase advertising during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good economic times.” Harvard Business School “Working Knowledge,” Marketing Your Way through a Recession. March 2008

The quote is absolutely right, those who market themselves more will gain more exposure than those who start to pull themselves back from the public eye, that’s just common sense. However it fails to add in the second part of that equation. Budgeting smarter and strategically redirecting funds. Just because you’re marketing doesn’t mean you’re actually being heard.

For a lot of people this is their scarlet fever, their worst case scenario.

We see it happening left and right these days, companies reducing headcount instead of redirecting funds. What would happen if instead of pumping even more money into a national television ad campaign your company hired a social media consultant / agency to show your employees how to effectively leverage the tools available and engage your customers? Were the old ways really working that effectively now? Were you able to target who you wanted to very effectively?

Marketing more, or even just the same amount, will help you come out on top in a down economy. Marketing smarter and bringing in tools to be more effective will help even more. Making your customers into brand champions will pay off in spades as they do your WOM marketing for you. Becoming more transparent and trustworthy in times like this will resonate with people and they will remember you when the good times return.

This is the time for innovation, bootstrapping and smart moves.

Scared? You should be. There are hundreds of tools out there and it’s difficult to know what your employees know and how to get them to use the tools and who even wants to. It’s a lot of work finding out where your customers are at online and listening to conversations and monitoring your brand.

That’s why there are people like myself who eat, breath, live, and study this stuff. Social media consultants and agencies that have logged the time studying, and conversing with like minded people and think about new ways to utilize the vast sea of tools labeled as social media.

This is not the time to go to sleep thinking it won’t happen to you just to wake up with scarlet fever. It’s the time to engage your customers in new ways and discover the ROI of social media for yourself.

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Social media for small businesses – Coffee Shops

Written on November 23, 2008 by Josh Peters in Advice, Business, Consulting, Ideas, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
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This is part of an ongoing series about social media and small businesses. Living in Salt Lake City, Utah I’ll be using examples from the beehive state but obviously the ideas I’ll be presenting in these
article will work anywhere.  Small businesses are the backbone of our economy so if you know any SB owners that might benefit from this article please send them a link to this information.

CB

For the most part I like where I live. It definitely has it’s problems and has quite the controversy surrounding it currently but there is a lot of charm in this salty city. We have plenty of underground culture and a lot of it seems to revolve around the local coffee shops, so I thought it was only right that I start my new ongoing series about social media for small businesses using these bastions of caffeination.

I don’t know what it’s like in other locations around the globe but here in Salt Lake City, Utah coffee shops seem to have a theme to their clientele. Nostalgia seems to invite more of the business professional book club and student types.

Nobrow coffee attracts a bit more of the artsy / hipster crowd, and Salt Lake Coffee Break is probably the trendiest place to get your coffee. The place is usually packed on the nights and weekends with kids and students of all kinds. Most have a steady flow of customers but when I talk to the business owners (something I always try to do at some point with any local business I frequent) they all seem to have the same
concern. How to drive more business and how to market effectively online.

Most of the coffee shops have a MySpace profile or website (which I’ve listed below for reference), and that’s awesome and all but most of them don’t really leverage it very well. So outside of what we’re developing with RoyalAnts I wanted to help with a few ideas for these local shops of java love.

  • Create a Twitter account and advertise it on your MySpace account. Then get something like TweetDeck so you can see separate your DM’s, replies, etc and start taking To-Go orders from your followers. I can’t tell you how many times I wish Nostalgia or NoBrow had this kind of a setup so I could just walk in, pick up my latte, pay and go. This would be a boon to your more tech savvy, in a hurry business types.

  • If you have a social network presence, like MySpace, why not start leveraging it with some coupons? On notoriously slow days send out a “coupon” using a bulletin to your friends. Send out a message saying that from 2-5 on Tuesday anyone who comes in and says “I saw this bulletin thing on MySpace” gets $1 off a latte. Pretty soon your dull Tuesday afternoons will be booming.

  • Use your hobbies to leverage your business. Are you book addict, a philosophy nut, or a knitting superstar? Find where these groups hang out online and engage them. Then next time they want to have a meet up somewhere offer up your coffee shop. Maybe give a discount to members
    of the group during the meeting. This will expose your shop to new people and gain some new clientele based on mutual interests.

  • Are you already a social person by nature? Do you have some form of communication skills (you better if you own a business)? Know any of the other coffee shop owners around Utah? Start a group online! Make a MySpace group for the owners of local coffee shops and then invite them
    all to join and talk shop. Once you get your group going start having weekly or bi-weekly meetings at your shop, or even rotate with the other owners of local coffee shops. This is a great way to meet other local business people and trade war stories and strategies used in your specific business.

  • Utilize the social networking platform of your choice to track down local talent to perform at your shop. I’ve seen plenty of great acts like Calico at local coffee shops. Finding them on a social network has 2 main
    advantages in that you will be able to tell all your friends about the performer and when they’ll be there and so will the performer. Doing this you have just leveraged 2 groups to help bring in the dough, your friends and theirs.

These are just 5 quick ideas I came up with for these purveyors of delicious trimethylxanthine. What ideas do you have? How would you use social media to help a coffee shop market itself online? Leave a comment below with your ideas.

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters
p.s.
If you know a coffee shop owner please send this article their way,
thanks. If you are a coffee shop owner please feel free to contact me
with any questions you might have and if you need some help with any of
these ideas I’m usually willing work in trade ;)

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Traditional Marketing + Social Media = Win Win Situation

Written on November 20, 2008 by Josh Peters in Advice, Business, Ideas, Marketing, Microblogging, Social Media, Social Networking, Strategy, Web/Tech
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OddCouple

Over at Jacob Morgan's Blog he put up a great post about Mixing traditional media with social media and in it he asks some questions about what if traditional media mixed with social media to create a new type of media marketing mutant? He describes some fantastic ideas about how to mix the two together followed by the query "How would you integrate traditional media with social media?"

I wanted to comment really bad, I had a flood of ideas, but after I started writing I realized I had too many to put in a comment section and I didn't want to take up the whole page, so here I am making a post about it. So Jacob, here's my response to your question.


Toys and Games
The holiday season is upon us and as it grows ever near people want to get that special hard to get gift to make their little tykes feel special. So why not have a link at the end of a Barbie, Hotwheels, etc commercial that sends people to their FaceBook profile or fan group and the first 1,000 get a free special edition toy, or chance to buy a "collectible" at a reduced rate.

That could also be done with accessories. "Join our FaceBook group and get a coupon for one free Barbie convertible" or something along those lines.

Board games always come with advertising inserts for other games the company makes, what if instead there was a code to download a free version of the game for your iPhone or PC? Or if you already downloaded them it unlocked features like playing live with your friends.

On the flip side if you download Monopoly for your iPhone why not send a link along with it that takes you to a coupon you can print off for a discount on the board game.

Food
Let's say Nabisco wants to test out a new cracker. So at the end of a commercial they put up a link for a free trial. On the site have an offer to let people try the new product for free and if they blog about it and send the link to Nabisco the blogger would get a couple boxes of their favorite Nabisco products. Which most people would then blog about again once they got their free stuff.

At the end of a Pizza Hut commercial put a code for people to DM to their Twitter account. Then send those people back a link to an exclusive coupon only available by sending them that code over Twitter.

Make a commercial filled with great looking food all made with Kraft products and then at the end put up a link to Kraft's FaceBook group and have a sultry voice say something like "Learn how at FaceBook now". If Kraft wanted to take that further they could create their own social network all revolving around cooking, sharing recipes and food tips where they could give special offers to members.

Aural Fixation
Here's the scenario. Trendy Band is set to release a new album. Their last album was mediocre so people aren't as excited about the new album. What's a record label to do? Instead of just slapping an ad in AP, AMP, or Blender about their "Killer new album" how about you run a campaign that ties into the bands MySpace Music page? Put the first song on there and state that you won't release another until that song hits 20,000 plays or something like that. Do this until you have revealed the whole album on MySpace and then send out a link to the bands MySpace friends to go and Download the album for cheap. Like $5 kind of cheap. BOOM! New fans. I don't know if I should leave this idea out there the RIAA is likely to find it, use it, and then sue me for mentioning Trendy Band without their consent.

Let's say a Radio Station wants to get people more involved in their local radio broadcast. How about if you post up a list of songs on your web site, use some radio commercial ad time to announce a new feature, and then invite people to create podcasts of themselves giving intro's to the songs or even making a little spot for the radio station. People can then vote on who has the best intro's and now the radio station has people listening for themselves or their friends introducing songs. "Here's Trendy Band and their new single It's all the same, which we are only hearing because their fans listened to it 20,000 times on MySpace. Way to go fans!"

Tv and Movies
Let's get some interaction going with the TV huh. Lets say you're watching CSI and Grisom gets Richie to hack into someone's Twitter profile to see DM's and there are some links there. Well have those links go somewhere and if the observant watcher writes down the is.gd/23rt link they will get clues that help you figure out the killer while watching the show.

Have the characters of a show use Twitter to talk to each other and have said posts show up on Twitter links and everything, but have the sites be password protected so you have to watch the show to get the password to get to bonus features of the show. Previews, bloopers, un aired extras, etc.

Instead of having the long ass trailers in front of movies have a teaser and then a URL for the movie / movie companies MySpace profile. If you friend them they send you a link for an exclusive trailer for the movie.

I've seriously got about a dozen more that cover quite the range of topics from how to get TV audiences more engaged in the shows they watch even after the show is over to social media generated commercials. However I'm going to stop there because the post is getting long, my dinner is getting cold, and my drink is getting warm.

What do you think? How would you meld traditional and social media together?

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It takes 1,000 delicious bookmarks to have a revelation.

Written on November 20, 2008 by Josh Peters in Uncategorized
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I've just hit a milestone on Delicious. I've just hit my 1,000th bookmark today, and if you want to see what it is cick on this link to see my delicious account.

Why is it important, why is it something worth blogging about? Well because it brings me to the point of this post. I want to ask you, the people who visit this site, your opinion on something I have wrestled with.

Recently I have decided that it's ok for me to add my own articles to Delicious. I used to think it was just shameless self promotion and that I shouldn't be doing it, and then I realized that I was getting close to 1,000 saves and so my ratio of self promotion vs promotion of others in this ralm is very small.

There is no magic metric I have found for how much self promotion makes you a ME person, but I think 20 posts in 1,0020 is a low enough ratio.

What say you? How do you feel about putting your own info into social bookmarking sites? Do you feel there is a golden ratio that should be adheared to?

Thank you for reading,
Josh "Shua" Peters

Want to know more about Social Bookmarking? Here's a link to my Delicious bookmarks tag SocialBookmarking

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The only thing you will hear me say about Motrin and Social Media

Written on November 18, 2008 by Josh Peters in Business, Current Affairs, Social Media, Web/Tech, Weblogs
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Motrin

There has been A LOT of talk about Motrin lately and their delayed reaction and how they angered people and etc. It’s still a hot topic on Twitter, and honestly I find the whole thing a bit absurd. Not how they depicted Mom’s, but the overzealous reaction to a commercial that was trying to be funny and “hip”. The tone of the commercial, the way it was done was not in a serious manner, it sounded like a cheesy Mother’s Day card sponsored by Motrin.

As the title suggests this is all I’m going to say about it and so to make this quick and dirty I’ll present my ideas with some bullet points and a few links at the end sending you to what other people think about it.

My Thoughts

  • Can’t help but think that incredibly harsh reactions like this will only scare companies away from social media. They will begin to fear screwing up and be more worried about not offending anyone than trying and learning from their mistakes.
  • We need to learn to take things a little less serious on the internet. When something is presented by Tetris shaped text and a really lame crazy face animation at the end it’s probably meant to be lighthearted and take with a grain of salt and two Motrin.
  • The larger the brand the slower they move. With the numbers as low as they are for big brand participation in social media, is it really a surprise they weren’t listening to what the internet had to say?

Now for some links from what other people had to say about the whole deal.

And here is where I also debut a new feature on my blog posts. In my ever going crusade to be more of a social media artist I’m going to post links to related articles that I have saved in my Delicious book marks.

Related Delicious bookmarks – Motrin

Questions, comments, thoughts???

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

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MailOnFeed, Notify.Me, NutShellMail, and the productivity idea

Written on November 17, 2008 by Josh Peters in Advice, Business, Ideas, Productivity, Web/Tech, Weblogs
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Rss

I’ve talked a little about NutShellMail and how much I enjoy their service, and even suggested a few features which I would like to see added to their service, but one that I didn’t even think about hit me smack in the face the other day while I was checking out one of my favorite sites LifeHacker.

Over there they were talking about getting your email sent to your RSS reader of choice. Immediately I thought of NutShellMail and how amazing of a feature that would be for them to add (hint hint), but in the meantime there are several utilities that will do the same and below are links to LifeHacker articles about those awesome utilities.

Now what if you have multiple email accounts in Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and you want to also get the notifications of your MySpace, LinkedIn, and FaceBook accounts? That would be a crap load of RSS traffic added to your reader and a huge time suck with it updating non stop. That’s where, once again, NutShellMail steps in to save the day and boost your productivity.

Setup your NutShellMail account, then have all your updates sent to just one of your accounts (Gmail with the label NutShellMail is what I use) and then use one of these services to send the account update email to your RSS reader of choice to get a quick glimpse of your email accounts and if there is anything you need to respond to.

This will save you time because you don’t need to log into any email accounts that you don’t need to and will help with the constant compulsion to check your email. Setup the NutShellMail updates to hit at certain times of your day when you usually have a few spare minutes and when your RSS reader updates you will have the time to respond to any emails that need your attention.

Simple productivity tip that can add a few extra minutes to your day. Please feel free to add any similar utilities or your own productivity tips in the comments below.

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

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Tagger or Public Artist. Which are you?

Written on November 12, 2008 by Josh Peters in Advice, Business, Ideas, Microblogging, Social Media, Social Networking, Strategy, Weblogs
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Banksycrop

You’re probably thinking this is one of those silly “Take this test and I’ll tell you what you are” things, but it’s not. It’s a blog post, and as we all know the internet is serious business. So lets get right to it and start with some definitions shall we.

Tagger – A person who runs around putting their largely illegible name on stuff that doesn’t belong to them. Acting like 5 year olds with black (or color of choice) bandannas over their faces they run around scribbling their name on anything they can and provide no value or service to the community and cost business owners and private citizens millions a year cleaning up after them.

Public Artists – People who want to share their art and who add to the surroundings with a well places image or two. They work hours and hours perfecting their craft and work tirelessly to bring us their vision. Some of them get so famous, like Banksy or swoon, that fans threaten to sue when someone covers up their art or their art sells for hundreds of thousands, and most of the time they just give it away for free.

So what does this have to do with social / new media?

Well, we have all had it pounded in our heads by the greats, the
successes who we want to be like and it all comes down to value and
sharing.

Taggers get online and the whole time just scream me me me look at me. They don’t contribute to much, they don’t do much in the way of adding to the conversation unless it’s about them. Taggers don’t share, they just hop into something so they can have their name on it and don’t contribute. If you think about it you could probably think of people like that. I’m not in a mean mood so I’m not going to post any links to people, business, etc that I would deem social media taggers.

Public artists get online and they share. They share their research, their discoveries, thoughts, and they share the work of others too. They contribute to the communities of which they are a part and they share other people’s thoughts and discoveries as well. This of course fosters a community of their own around them and even when they get insanely popular they still just keep giving it away for free. Some of my favorite examples of social media public artists would be Chris Brogan,
Jacob Morgan, Amber Naslund, Louis Gray, and Jeremiah Owyang. I’m constantly getting great (free) information from them and have engaged in a good conversation or two with most of them and traded ideas back and forth.

So how can you become more of a social media artist?

These are a few of the things I do to share and contribute to the global community. What about you? What do you do? What are your favorite methods of sharing information? Feel free to leave a comment below with your favorite methods of distributing the information you come across.

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

p.s. This post was inspired by one of my favorite websites, the Wooster Collective. Go check it out.

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How to increase your blog readership and Twitter following

Written on November 10, 2008 by Josh Peters in Advice, Current Affairs, Microblogging, Social Media, Social Networking, Web/Tech, Weblogs
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I awoke this morning to find that I had an unusually high volume of Twitter follows, my blog readership hit a new high mostly from incoming Twitter traffic, and I have a new email subscriber (hello new email subscriber) and I didn’t know why. Then I opened up my Google blog reader and read the ever informative Jacob Morgan’s new article on Why You Need a Social Media Marketing Department and he thanked me for my late night Twitter contributions.

If you haven’t read it yet go read it now.

Back?

Ok, the lesson here is one that has been stated time and time again from the likes of Chris Brogan, Seth Godin, the guys over at CopyBlogger and well just about anyone else who has used the above title in a blog. Get involved in the conversation.

You want more readers to your blog? Go read other blogs and comment on them. It’s free publicity.

Want more followers on Twitter? Engage to the ones you have and your followers will grow when other tweeple see your name showing up on their friends @ messages.

Thank you Jacob Morgan for the nod, and thank you (new and old readers alike) for reading,
Josh "Shua" Peters

p.s. I stole the whole thanking people for reading thing from Jacob Morgan. I liked it and decided to do it myself.

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Yammer update

Written on November 10, 2008 by Josh Peters in Microblogging, Review, Social Media
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I while ago I wrote a post titled Is Yammer missing the mark or am I missing the point? and the three main problems I had with Yammer were

  • No groups for separate departments
  • No direct /private messages
  • The payment structure

There is still no way to privately message anyone, however they have fixed the groups problem. You can now setup private groups and when ever you say anything in the group or reply to something in the group on members of the group can see it. Pretty nifty.

The pricing thing still boggle me, it’s like they are purposely trying to keep large businesses from using them. Instead of a hard set $1 per user for advanced features why not do something like $1 per user for the first 100, $.75 for 101-300, $.50 for 301-500, $.25 for 501+ with a cap on the total monthly payment never to exceed $500 or something like that. It would make more sense to do it that way and wouldn’t discourage the larger businesses from buying in.

edit: Keith from Yammer has corrected me, there is now a special pricing structure and 1 to 1 is coming. Thanks for the update Keith.

Thank you for reading,
Josh "Shua" Peters

p.s. Here’s a list of related services (like on the Yammer post) please add any others you know of in the comments section and I will update it.

Professional:
     • Edmondo – Microblogging for education environments
     • Identi.ca
     • I Did Work
     • Joint Contact
     • Laconi.ca
     • Mixin
     • Present.ly
     • Prologue
     • Social Cast

Recreational:
     • Fidj.it
     • FriendFeed
     • Jaiku
     • Plurk
     • Pownce
     • Seesmic – Video equivalent of Twitter
     • Twitter
     • Utterli (formerly utterz)

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