Of course, there are lots of books – and blogs, of course! – on blogging. I’ve always viewed Debbie as the expert’s expert on this topic. But more importantly, corporate executives themselves view Debbie as the
expert. Like Bob Lutz, former vice chairman of GM, for example, who wrote the forward to the book.
But back to Debbie. It’s hard to call her a social media marketing expert. She’s much more than that: She’s a first rate digital communicator
who is greatly admired by those of us who live and breathe in the world of social media and
executives who do not. We’re all looking for level-headed answers and a down-to-earth approach to the questions we face every day relating to internal and external blogging.
Debbie supplies the answers with wit, wisdom and a refreshing warmth that permeates her writing.
The fear-based questions are by far the most common of the questions and at first blush the trickiest to handle but Debbie masterfully illustrates, from her hands-on experience in advising the C-Suite, not just book knowledge, the best way to deal with those questions. In a word: Head on. Indeed, she seems to argue for an approach that embraces
the questions and even the messiness of the process so that better strategies and guidelines can emerge.
For example, Debbie astutely points out the importance of not relying on dryly written policies and procedures that are crafted by those sitting on high. Instead she proposes a more transparent, bottom-up approach and quotes the wise counsel of intellectual property attorney Denise Howell:
Blogging is about to get much more popular and multifaceted than ever before. (See my previous post on Cloudforce for a glimpse of what the future holds for internal microblogging and enterprise 2.0.)
Be ahead of the fear curve rather than being dominated by it by taking the first step and reading this book.
But don’t take that advice from me. Take it from Bob Lutz, former Vice Chairman of GM, who wrote the forward for “The Corporate Blogging Book” in which he offers the following advice if you’re still not convinced:
Burying your head in the sand out of fear is a strategy to be sure.
But before you decide to go that route, you’ll be doing yourself and your company a favor if you at least download a free sample of Debbie’s book, here.
Full disclosure:
The link immediately above is not an affiliate link. Neither Hugh Macken nor VMR Communications, LLC has been compensated in any form to write this post.
The user-interface model for the future of enterprise software looks an awful lot like Facebook. At least according to Marc Benioff who I think is rightly passionate about his belief that so-called “Cloud 2” platform architecture similar to that of Facebook is best suited to bridging the gap between what Salesforce Chief Scientist JP Rangaswami refers to as “systems of record” and “systems of engagement.”
2. Native Social Media Integration Has Improved But Has a Long Way to Go
The Salesforce team clearly understands the importance of bringing relevant conversations occurring in the social web into the Salesforce user interface and fully integrating those “systems of engagement” with the Salesforce systems of engagement such as Chatter. But I’m not sure they fully appreciate the massive scope, scale and strategic business importance of platforms other than the Big Two – Facebook and Twitter. The major problem, in my view is that presently Salesforce offers only very limited native
integration with only the Big Two and none of the many thousands of social sites consumers are using today.
When I asked Benioff if he thought it would make sense for Salesforce to acquire a social media monitoring firm such as Radian6, he replied that the company is always looking at acquisition possibilities and he hinted that the popularity of the Radian6 app which will soon be unveiled in the Salesforce App Exchange will be a significant factor in determining whether any such acquisition might have merit.
3. Ensuring Maximum User Adoption within Salesforce is the Best Way to Move the Needle on Customer User Adoption
Salesforce is one of the very few technology companies with a Chief Adoption Officer, namely Polly Sumner who spoke briefly during the analyst luncheon. So I was surprised to note – in light of the priority the company seems to be placing on UA, and in light of Benioff’s entreaties for attendees to ask Salesforce employees how they were using Chatter – that one Salesforce employee I spoke with was using email to communicate with a colleague who was also at #Cloudforce. Salesforce would do well to tweak the product or roll-out processes to ensure more broad-based
Chatter adoption within its own ranks and then blog about such adoption experiences as extensively as possible.
4. Marc Benioff Is a Dynamic Leader and is Not Afraid to Link the Salesforce Brand Strongly to His Persona
He’s a superb leader with a natural ability to inspire the best from those around him. Benioff’s style of leadership appears to me to be quite similar to his approach to software development: It is highly collaborative, decentralized and against the grain. For example, I was quite impressed, during the analyst lunch I had the privilege to attend, to note his ability to ask various members of his executive team to answer questions posed by those in attendance. Like his mentor Steve Jobs at Apple, Benioff has a warm and engaging personality that lends itself to brand dependence – and perhaps over-reliance – on his persona. It would be wise for Benioff to begin sharing the limelight more strategically with potential successors. Seesmic.com and LeWeb founder Loic Le Meur does not have the same level of executive experience but Benioff may wish to bring Lemuir on the Salesforce executive team to ensure Salesforce has more than one “face of the franchise.”
5. Integrated Philanthropy Is Central to the Salesforce Business Vision and Could be a Strategic Differentiator
Contrary to the opinion of esteemed economist Milton Friedman, the “business of business” is not only business according to Benioff. Integrated philanthropic initiatives, centered around causes benefitting children, have become a hallmark of the Salesforce brand. Benioff’s participation in America’s Promise, a program spearheaded in part by Benioff’s mentor Colin Powell in 1997, appears to have had a lasting impact on not only the Salesforce co-founder’s philanthropic vision but his business vision as well. As Benioff states in his latest book, “Behind the Cloud,” co-written by Carlye Adler:
As I mentioned to Salesforce’s Gordon Evans, I see Chatter as having the potential to be used as a cross-enterprise, real-time collaboration platform to solve global challenges. Salesforce will need to find creative ways to provide for such collaboration without threatening its reputation as a highly secure repository of business data.
6. Native Integration of More Social Media Systems of Engagement is Imperative
Natively integrating password and non-password protected external systems of engagement such as YouTube.com, Linkedin.com, Quora.com, GetSatisfaction.com, the blogosphere and other social outposts which will continually emerge may not be in high demand presently but as enterprises and SMBs become more aware of the vast scope of social media and understand use case scenarios and ROI opportunities, I suspect Benioff will realize that it may make sense to ensure more native, easy to use integrations with such sites. And that may necessitate a strategic acquisition of a social media monitoring platform such as Radian6 that has a slick workflow dashboard or perhaps – more appropriately – a data mining – focused platform such as DataSift where the Salesforce user interface would compensate for the lack of a sophisticated workflow dashboard.
Salesforce appears to be waiting for demand to emerge but in a highly complex industry where customers need an educational partner just as much as a solutions partner, this may not be the wisest approach. Salesforce – or one of its competitors – may decide to pro-actively educate customers on why such integration is critical to ensuring all
systems of engagement are integrated with systems of record and accessible in a user interface that accommodates the differing executional needs of business groups (eg, Customer Service, Sales, PR, Product Development, Legal, HR, etc…).
7. The Future for Salesforce and Its Customers Looks Extremely Bright
Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Linda Crawford, Peter Coffee, Gordan Evans, and others could not have been more gracious and open to chatting with me during #Cloudforce. And that culture of transparency and openness is what impressed me the most. It was quite literally something I could touch, feel, see and hear today at #Cloudforce. The future looks extremely bright and I feel privileged to be a part of this very exciting moment in the social technology industry’s history.
Did you attend #Cloudforce? What were your take-aways? If you did not attend, what more would you like to know about Salesforce and the future of socially-integrated enterprise software?
—-
Correction
: The original version of this post referred to Cloud 3. Although “Service Cloud 3” was announced during Cloudforce, when Salesforce executive Marc Benioff refers to the “Facebook Imperative,” it is what he calls the next phase of computing, or Cloud 2, not Cloud 3. Special thanks to Carlye Adler for clarifying this. – Hugh Macken, March 14, 2011
Or maybe it’s just that I’d simply like to have more of it just because I can’t run my business without it. But one way or another, one thing I know for sure:
Making money ethically – and profit in particular – is the #1 goal of my business.
And if you’re in business, it better be your #1 goal as well.
I’m certainly not advocating greed or that you make money your god.
On the other hand, the amount of money your business makes is really the only metric that ultimately matters and I think those of us who live and breathe in the social media strategy world need to listen more closely to those outside of the echo chamber – especially those whose business is understanding the factors that influence the bottom line. But more on those folks in a minute.
In fairness, I need to acknowledge Jim Sterne, co-founder of the Web Analytics Association, Kyle Lacy, author of Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and Wendy Troupe,
CEO of Terametric, a cross-channel analytical measurement and optimization solutions provider, who together delivered a comprehensive and thought-provoking webinar today on measuring twitter ROI. Their webinar got especially interesting for me toward the end and I thought it might make sense to continue the discussion that began to emerge on the issue of correlating social media metrics with financial ROI.
So here then is my first bit of food for thought for you to munch on courtesy of one whose business is analyzing the factors that influence a corporation’s bottom line. namely, Blake Fernandez, an oil industry research analyst with Howard Weil, an energy investment boutique that provides equity research, institutional sales and trading, and investment banking services.
According to the company’s website, their “Annual Energy Conference is one of the premier energy investor conferences in the industry… [It] attracts institutional investors from all over the world to New Orleans for presentations by, and interaction with, CEOs and other top-level management representing a broad range of energy companies.”
CFOs and CEOs at major corporations like BP take seriously what Blake Fernandez and his financial research peers have to say. Mainly because they understand money and what factors correlate with making more or less of it. I think it makes sense for those of us in the social media community to understand how social media is perceived from a financial perspective and I could not think of a better firm to help us in that regard than Howard Weil.
Mr Fernandez was kind enough to respond to an email (an edited version of which follows) that I sent to him many months ago. So with apologies to Mr Fernandez for not publishing this sooner, I think it’s about time I shared his views. Here then is my email and the response:
Mr Fernandez’s response to my 3 questions are below:
What I find interesting about Mr. Fernandez’s response is the issue of correlation. It’s all well and good to quote stats that companies performing well in the stock market are more likely to have invested in social media communications but the more important question is whether their increased social media investments positively correlate with increased shareholder value.
That’s a question that VMR helps our clients address using a variety of methods including (1) linear, (2) polynomial, (3) exponential, (4) logistic, and (5) general nonlinear regression analysis
, among other methods….Like playing rock, paper, scissors, shoot!
We believe the C-suite deserves to know which of their social media investments are paying off and which ones are just one big, fat waste of time and money.
On Friday of this week (at 3pm EDT), I’ll be chatting with special guest Christopher Penn of Blue Sky Factory on Blog Talk Radio and with all who care to join us using Facebook’s Live Stream and twitter (#emchat). We’ll be discussing email marketing strategy in general and these questions in particular:
1. What is Facebook’s Project Titan? 2. Will Titan usher in the end of an era for email marketing as we know it? 3. How can offline conversions from email marketing campaigns be tracked within google analytics? 4. What is the most common mistake email marketers make and how is it costing them dearly? 5. Blue Sky has unveiled a new featured called Social Sync. What is social sync so useful? 6. What’s the best way to grow your email subscriber base? 7. Is email marketing compatible with the social web or will the social web render email marketing obsolete? 8. What is the best way to ensure maximum email open rates? 9. How does Blue Sky compare to other email marketing companies? 10. Mobile internet use is rising rapidly. What services is Blue Sky offering to help marketers reach mobile email users?
Karlie Justus wrote a thought-provoking post recently on the pros and cons of banning social media at your B2B company. Banning your employees or athletes from using Twitter does not prevent third parties connected with your employees or your athletes from posting something online that results in legal problems and/or a damaged reputation.
Take t
he case of University of North Carolina, whose football coach, Butch Davis ( according to an ESPN report) informed players yesterday that they are now forbidden from using the popular microblogging service.
This move is understandable in light of all the problems UNC has had as a result of Twitter. But my concern -perhaps unfounded – is that Butch Davis and other college coaches think they have eliminated the risk that Twitter and other social media pose when they ban its use by the people who are under their supervision.
A larger risk most definitely remains. And here’s why:
One of the biggest misconceptions about social media risk in general is that if you stop employees, contractors, athletes and others under your supervision from communicating through social channels, then you eliminate social media risk altogether. After all, your organization is, therefore, “not getting into social media” by doing so.
Right?
Wrong.
Here’s the reality: Even if you could block people under your supervision from using social channels 24/7 (which of course you cannot practically or legally speaking for corporate employees), you’d still have the problem of *third parties* outside of the institution posting information, images and other material that could result in just as many headaches.
Again, UNC is a good case in point. As the Washington Times reported, Natalie Nunn was a model who had appeared on the reality television show “Bad Girls Club”, not an athlete at UNC. But her tweet *referenced* an athlete, and ended up being one of the many factors contributing to an NCAA investigation and the athlete’s suspension by the team.
The debate about whether to ban people affiliated with your organization from using social channels is a fair one. But focusing on that debate often results in overlooking the fact that unaffiliated third parties can cause just as many headaches and pose every bit as much of a threat from a legal and corporate reputation perspective.
The legal system is not likely to bury it’s head on this.
Neither should you.
Failing to understand the fully transparent and vast online ecosystem (Twitter is one of literally hundreds of social sites used by today’s young people) known as the social web is a strategy that has already gotten plenty of companies and organizations in legal hot water, resulted in massive financial losses and damaged their reputations in the process.
At the very least, learn from their mistakes: Formulate, Implement and Enforce.
One final piece of advice for Butch Davis and other coaches around the country: The best way to keep your school out of the headlines is to keep your athletes on the straight and narrow. That’s one very, very tall order, which is why I agree with ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit, who recently suggested on ESPN radio that, in order to help address the issue of sports agents paying college athletes, sports program’s should have one full-time person whose sole responsibility is to watch over the well-being of the athletes.
In light of all the potential headaches that social media can cause for athletic programs, I would propose that that number should be two full-time supervisors. Kids need to be protected from themselves and taking just this one step would go a long way toward nipping the problem in the bud.
This really just scratches the surface of this issue but hopefully it gets you thinking in more level-headed terms about the magnitude of the threats for every organization and person regardless of their official involvement in the social web.
Important: “Any information contained on this site is general in nature. You should not rely on any articles, postings or other information on these pages as legal advice or to create an attorney-client relationship. If you are in need of legal advice concerning a particular matter, you are encouraged to contact an attorney in your state.”
Surprisingly, though, neither MindJet nor any of its competitors (to my knowledge, at least) currently offers Social Network *API-driven* Mapping.
Say wuh?
Say this…
Go on over to http://apps.asterisq.com/mentionmap/ Type in the username of someone on twitter you’d like to know more about in terms of their connections. Try chrisbrogan for example. Then, press Start.
Pretty nifty, right? Hat tip to the folks at Asterisq.com.
But here’s what I have a hard time understanding: To my knowledge, there’s not a single mind mapping application out there (mindjet being the best of the best from what I have seen) that is able to tap into the APIs of social outposts like twitter to create these sorts of maps.
Why not?
What if you could automatically create maps like this based off of your linkedin connections?
Or your blog community?
Did I mention Facebook?
How might you use a mapping tool like this that was able to tap into social network APIs?
I’d love to hear your ideas.
As always, I will be listening!
Full Disclosure: Neither VMR nor Hugh Macken is currently affiliated with MindJet or Asterisq.com in any way.
Relationship Economics is about understanding both the art and science of business relationships. It has been my experience that though many get the art – 30 second introductions, remembering names, building rapport – few truly understand the science. The concept of Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been in existence since the 1930s and is the intersection of psychology, anthropology, sociology, organization design and mathematics – specifically graph theory. Its roots are ingrained in academic circles and are too complex for many to comprehend, much less apply to teams within organizations.
What is Social Network Analysis?
Social Network Analysis, in its simplest term, is the process of mapping and measuring relationships and flow between people, groups, organizations, and other information/knowledge-processing entities. SNA provides both a mathematical and a visual analysis of human relationships. The term has been used as a metaphor for over a century to convey complex sets of relationships between members of a social system. In 1954, a social scientist, Jay Barnes, began using this term to denote patterns inside and outside founded groups such as tribes or families and social categories such as gender or ethnicity. In recent years, SNA has evolved from suggestive metaphors to a true analytical model in various methods and research circles.
Analysts are able to deduct key insights from a deep dive of “whole to parts” from structures to individual interactions and from behaviors to attitude. By studying the whole network, which contacts specific ties or relationships between individuals, key assumptions can be made as to the frequency, quality and expansive nature of an interaction between two individuals.
Think about it: Why do you socialize with some co-workers more than others? Why do some colleagues’ names appear more often in your Sent e-mail folder than others? Give me a copy of a person’s calendar and checkbook and I can tell you the breadth and depth of their relationships. The same could be said for several key attributes of individuals with whom you tend to engage considerably more often than others. A number of those attributes could be easily explained by your role or realm of responsibilities.
Other attributes of our most valued links simply include people who get us. These are the people who are a lot like we are and with whom we have chemistry. If you have been through any of the behavioral or psychological assessment tools, you realize that similar profiles naturally gravitate toward each other.
Why Social Network Analysis Matters
The shape of our social network – whether small or more expansive, both internal and external – can also highlight the true collaborative nature of an individual or team. In other words, a group of individuals who only communicate and collaborate with one another already share the same knowledge, and to a greater extent, the same set of contacts. Conversely, a group of individuals with connections to a broader, more diverse array of social worlds is more likely to have access to a broader knowledge base and, by deductive reasoning, access to greater opportunities to overcome obstacles.
This is why it is critical to prioritize diversity as the single biggest asset in your portfolio of relationships. The broader your social network, the bigger your relationship bank and sphere of influence.
David Nour is a social networking strategist and one of the foremost thought leaders on the quantifiable value of business relationships. In a global economy that is becoming increasingly disconnected, David and his team are solving global client challenges with Strategic Relationship Planning™ and Enterprise SocialNetworking
best practices.
David is the author of Relationship Economics
(Wiley, 2008), The Entrepreneur’sGuide to Raising Capital
(Praeger, 2009), ConnectAbility
(McGraw-Hill, 2010), and the Social Networking Technology Best Practices
Series. He is a contributor to TheSocial Media Bible
(Wiley, 2009) and is currently researching and writing his next commercial book on Listen Louder.
David’s unique perspective and independent insights have been featured in a variety of prominent blogs and print publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The AtlantaJournal and Constitution, Association Now, Entrepreneur and Success
magazine.
Jon is a Senior Emerging Channels Specialist at Digitas, which is a digital marketing and media agency and member of the Publicis Groupe S.A. He recently wrote a very useful post
on the criteria enterprises can use to evaluate listening vendors like Radian6, ScoutLabs, and Attensity360 as well as full service (often tool-agnostic) listening firms such as Sentiment360, Spotter, VMR and others.
Jon makes a number of excellent observations in the aforementioned post including the fact that “ Technology [alone] will not get you to the promised land.”
Indeed, some would say it won’t even get you close.
According to the Web Analytics 90/10 rule
put forth by highly regarded web analytics strategist, educator and author Avinash Kaushik, 10% of web analytics expenditures ought to be spent on the technology. The remaining 90% are best spent on expert human analysts.
Do check out Jon’s post and Avinash’s. Both are well worth your time to read if you are interested in the field of social media listening and analytics.
I admit my expectations were quite high given all the positive press to date. In a post for Mashable.com, Brogan narrowed down exactly what he liked the most about Batch Book:
John Jantsch, one of the leading small business development and business planning experts in North America also gave it two thumbs up:
You get the picture. Renowned small business experts like Jantsch and social media community experts like Brogan have sung the praises of Batch Book. And built-in social network insight reporting seems to be what those who really like it love the most. The company itself seems to practically hang its hat on this feature.
Maybe I’m being overly critical but the important first part of contact-centric social media monitoring that involves bringing into a record a person’s social media profiles is something Batch Book could do a lot better.
Here’s specifically what I mean. Here are two examples of profiles I tried to create for two people – Avinash Kaushik and Paul Miller – I don’t know much about other than the insightful things I’ve read from them online. I wanted to learn more about them, their social footprint, and follow the other insights they are sure to share in the future.
So, when you first go into a contact record in order to start adding contact details you see a “Search Social Network” button, as you can see below:
Here’s an example of my search for Paul Miller’s public social network accounts. Note that I did enter Paul’s individual work email address before doing this search.
In fairness to BatchBook, they do offer a nifty feature called Super Tags which enables you to manually add social network account URLs associated with your contacts.
But having seen what contact-centric social search tools like Gist.com can do, I was hoping for more sophisticated profile search technology from Batch Book too.
Having said all this, there is one option with Batch Book that I figured might reverse my disappointment with the limited social profile account search capabilities. It’s something with which readers of this blog will already be familiar:
It’s Flowtown.com and it too has taken the small business email marketing world by storm. For good reason, in my opinion. For those who don’t know, Flowtown is a service that, to quote from the Batch Book website
I had a feeling that the integration that Batch Book offers with Flowtown would resolve the issue I’ve outlined above. At least, that is what I was hoping.
In order to integrate with Batch Book, though, I had to upgrade to a paid Flowtown account which starts out at $17 per month, which I did.
I then tried out the service on one of the contacts above and here’s what I got:
So the integration definitely solved problem #1 (not narrowing things down enough) but I was a little disappointed still that only 3 social network profiles were included and nothing else.
What even more interesting is that Flowtown itself does a spectacular job of building a complete profile of someone as long as you have their email address. With just an email address, Flowtown came up with the following in a matter of seconds:
Do you see all of the blanks that Flowtown just filled in?
Let me list them:
Please chime in here. Social CRM is hugely important for today’s marketing and PR professionals and its in our best interests to share ideas with one another to help inform the decisions of those who are building the exciting social business technologies of tomorrow.
Full Disclosure: Neither Batch Book nor Flowtown are clients of VMR Communications, LLC or Hugh Macken.
Gilchrist will be presenting “The 12-Step Program to Conquering Twitter On and Off the Platform.” Attendees will discover what all the tweet is about, and:
•Learn how to engage in the conversation without becoming birdshot; •Learn specific ways to grow your personal brand through Twitter; and, •Learn seven Twitter tips to extend the lifespan of your speech in the Twittersphere.
“Twitter has turned the online marketing paradigm upside down and now the little blue bird is winging his way into your presentations,” says Gilchrist. “In this fast-paced session, you will learn how to integrate Twitter into your personal branding and increase engagement online and on the platform.”
The Gilchrist Group® is a strategic business consulting firm. Founded in 1999, as PR~Link Public Relations, LLC, the firm serves clients in a wide-range of industries including: financial services, healthcare, technology, manufacturing, engineering, government and non-profit. Gilchrist’s professional team works with leaders on next level leadership, branding roadmaps, go-to-market-strategies, issues management and marketing/PR including social media integration.
I’m happy to share this with the readers of our blog because I think it’s important to provide visibility for fellow PR professionals who are paving the way for our profession.
Are you a speaker? If so, would you care to share any tips with the readers of the VMR blog for leveraging twitter as a tool to increase engagement online? What has worked for you to communicate more effectively with your respective audiences? Do you find using a hashtag during your talks helps to enliven the conversation during your speaking engagements or does it serve as more of a distraction? I’m really curious to know if Pamela is planning to encourage conference attendees to tweet during her presentation. If so, you can be sure we’ll be monitoring it! I love the story that Time Magazine shared
about a conference in New York City that, thanks to Twitter, generated nationwide participation literally overnight.
Wouldn’t it be cool if important talks like Gilchrist’s generated a national conversation among PR professionals on account of the little bird called Twitter?
