And they heard two friends.. and so on, and so on..
Search Engine Land recently ran an short article posing the question: Is Trust in Social Media Dying? It’s a quick statistical look at the dip in trust across social networks.. and the problem seems to be “marketing.”
I’d like to take their analysis a little further.
Yes marketing messages have infiltrated every nook and cranny of social media networks (whether that’s apps that friends recommend you get, groups they want you to join, or games they’d like you to play). Yes – the proliferation of acquaintances rather than real, trusted friends is part of the problem. Everyone seems to think they’re a micro-business (or some kind of eBay/e-commerce part-timer).
From my vantage point, the extended issue involves a re-introduction of traditional marketing methods on an organic medium. What do I mean by that? Here’s the simple version: People are attempting to force old methods – like multi-level marketing techniques, aggressive networking and referrals, and spammy recommendations that lead to affiliate links – onto the new social channels, and it’s not working.
Couple this phenomenon with the fact that noise levels are at all time highs, and you’ve got distrust. Social media was supposed to cut down noise after all. Your trusted group was supposed to help you filter out the noise. Yet people have been shooting themselves in the feet because they treated “friending” as a gold rush scenario. Collecting followers does not lead to valuable information exchanges.
So what do you do to gain back that trust and make your social networks work for you?
1. Delete spammy acquaintances from your personal social media networks (use a tool like Twitter Karma, for example).
2. Participate with authenticity – send out the messages and information that you’d like to see coming back your way. This is another karma play of sorts. You get what you give – it’s that simple.
3. If you’re using Social Media Marketing (SMM) for business, start acting like an artist (ask Seth Godin about this – or read his Linchpin Book). And I don’t mean acting as in faking. I mean acting as in action. Create something remarkable, give gifts, push through to make it better, and connect people in meaningful ways.
4. Tell the truth. Stop saying your feet hurt so you can score a free pair of shoes (like the Timberland guy did on Twitter). Those days are over. That was yesterday’s creative PR move. Write honest reviews of products. And, treat your product reviews as a niche business. Huh? Yes – pick a tight little corner of the world and dedicate your reviewing resources to that (foi gras, 1-inch heels, gerbil racing, nudist party planning, the worst selling products on Amazon, beard growth tips, whatever). Who knows, some day some company might want to advertise on your site and tap your network.
5. Connect offline. Go to tweet-ups, meet your friends in person (heck, use something like Gowalla or FourSquare to make it happen), and talk about the ideas you’ve been sharing online. There is no substitute for social contact (faces are amazing things), and the serendipity of discussion often reveals precious insights because it’s not premeditated (like a Tweet or FB post). Get out there an blurt in the real world.
These tips should help you filter out a lot of noise and get you back to the genuine, productive, value-rich conversations that social media is so good at cultivating.
If you do it right you don’t have to sweat this declining trust trend.
Online communication is becoming central to most of our social and business lives. Face it – a laptop and smart phone/iPhone are the tools we use these days. It used to be the traditional telephone and the mail box, but now we have a lot of different ways to “explode” our messages, “go viral” and keep large groups of people updated.
The problem is… it’s really difficult to figure out what tools to use and how to stick to some habits and processes.
Here are five of my favorite tools/processes (I don’t have any affiliation with these co’s – I’m just an online tinkerer):
1) Ping.fm – I use Ping.fm to update business messages to a variety of different social media/business platforms. I use the ping.fm toolbar to share stories that I find useful with my Twitter, Plaxo and LinkedIn groups. I find that some people are more active on certain networks, and I don’t want to have to manually update everyone separately. Ping.fm works great for this. I don’t update my primary Facebook page with this tool because those are mostly “social” friends in there. But I do have it set up to update my QualityWriter fan page.. which is really a nascent thing. There’s a good article about the best ways to set up Ping.fm here. Chris Brogan and ProBlogger Darren Rowse have good articles about how to structure your information sharing hub with a “home base” and “outposts.” They’re worth checking out for strategy purposes.
2) Eye.fi – This is an SD memory card that goes into my digital camera. It stores photos and has a built-in Wi-Fi antenna (I’m amazed at how small the technology is – looks just like a regular SD card!). Whenever I arrive at my local network/home wireless network, Eye.fi auto-downloads all my photos and videos to folders on my computer and automatically uploads them to my services (Kodak Gallery, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook) based on my settings. This thing is dynamite. This has changed my photo managing habits. I now try to delete all bad photos and videos off of my camera before turning it on near my wireless network… before the “auto-up-suckage”. Another way to handle this is to use the Protect feature on your camera. Only photos that are protected are uploaded to your folders and networks.
3) Google Voice – Google has a voice/phone service that integrates your landline and cell phone and texting into a unified “inbox”. I give out my Google Voice number to select clients and friends. When they call it, both my office phone and cell phone ring. It’s like a “Bat Phone.” From my laptop, I can SMS text my Gmail contacts (which are really all my contacts). This makes it easy to type out longer txts without doing the big-finger-blackberry thing. All messages go through my Google Voice inbox. They’re transcribed into text and emailed to me, too. I think I can have them sent as texts to my cell phone, too (not sure about this one). There are lots of other cool features – check it out, you’ll see.
4) ShareIn – If I want to update Facebook and/or Twitter friends about a story I’ve just read or a video I’ve just watched, I use ShareIn. This is a browser bookmarklet that gives you a “one click” way to do so. No more copy and paste. I wrote an article on how I came to embrace ShareIn here: How to Simplify your Social Media Life: The Pros and Cons of Posterous, Soup.io, ShareIn and FriendFeed. Ping.fm does this, too. But Ping.fm is better for touching all groups at once. ShareIn is good when you know exactly who you want to send something to – Twitter folks (who are more business for me) or Facebook (who are more social friends).
5) Posterous – This blog/hosting services is a quick and easy to share photos, thoughts, articles, sounds and videos with friends and associates. See the “How to Simplify” link above for more of my thoughts on Posterous. Essentially, I use Posterous as a place to update close family and friends with my videos and photos of family life. I wouldn’t do this kind of in-depth posting on Facebook, because I don’t want to spam a loose group of social friends with too much cuteness, kid soccer games and such. Posterous, however, is a great place to archive stuff and allow family members to catch up. My family and friends don’t need to have an account or log in any way. It’s just my Posterous URL. Simple… and I can update it via email or the browser toolbar bookmarklet. Easy peasy.
Check out these awesome services. They’re all free – except for Eye.fi, which is a one time cha-ching (mine cost $69.99 at Amazon – with free shipping – shipping is a little steep from the main eye.fi site).
Please let me know your tips and tricks too by commenting below and sharing this post with your networks and groups. Thanks. – Phil
Participating in social media activities is like participating in any other social activity. It can be as valuable as a lunch with the boss or as vapid as a breeze shooting session at the water cooler. Or vice versa.
What follows are some highlights and lowlights from a typical day of “connecting” in my life. I find the most value appears when I’m connecting with people who help me get my job done, of course. On the other hand, some exchanges are just plain fun even though they won’t help my business right away.
For starters, I posted a question to several of my LinkedIn contacts that I know have experience in the marketing and Web development field. I was looking for a WordPress developer that could help quickly launch Word Press Web sites. I’d need the person to “turn the lights on” every time I launch a new site or have a client that wants to transition to the flexible, powerful WP platform. I quickly found a great resource (in New Zealand of all places) that’s already helping out with a rather extensive client project. In the words of Jack Davenport on Britain’s Coupling, “result!”
Next, I read a bunch of links from thought leaders and link-sharers that I admire and trust. I use Seesmic Desktop and Twitter to do this. I follow quite a few people on Twitter, but Seesmic allows me to put them into groups (I think you can do this with TweetDeck, too). I have a group called “A-List,” and this is the place where I filter out those that consistently bring useful and entertaining links, ideas and articles. This can be a major time sucker, because if you follow a lot of the thought leaders on Twitter, there are a lot of tantalizing titles flying around. I try to limit my window for this activity to an hour or less. I like to take one action idea from each piece I read and get it into my calendar or task list. That way, I’m not just admiring articles. I’m actually using information to move my business forward. I came across an article yesterday that was really intriguing, How I got to the first page of Google thanks to ONE bookmarklet (by Zee on TheNextWeb). It shows you how to use Posterous and optimize WordPress for an ultimate SEO pick-me-up. I’ll be tinkering with those tools/tips today.
Then I moved into the realm of the unproductive. I put up some pictures of our kids’ soccer games [taking very little time, mind you: 1) Eye-Fi wireless SD card takes the pictures from the camera and automatically uploads them to my computer and Kodak Gallery, 2) A quick email puts the best ones on Posterous, which 3) automatically updates to Facebook]. Everyone’s updated in a matter of minutes, and I’ve only clicked a couple of times. The videos from the camera go to YouTube automatically, as well. It’s amazing.
Next, I commented on a bunch of inane but funny Facebook friend stuff. There were some good/ugly Kanye West/Michael Jackson funeral jokes and more of those silly Hitler videos from Valkyrie, where they put in subtitles about current events. I also caught up on friend photos, videos and whereabouts. I may score a ticket to the Cal-USC football game, as a result. That would be productive!
How do you use social media for fun and profit? Any stories or tips that are useful and insightful?
One of the biggest problems with social media communication is the drudgery of sharing links, making comments and updating groups.
Several sites aim to make this process easier… namely, Posterous, Soup.io, FriendFeed and ShareIn. I’ve tried all of them, and I’d say they’re “almost ready for primetime.” Each has value, and each has significant drawbacks.
This is a quick review that’s interested in answering the question: “How can these tools make my social media life easier to manage?” I’m not so much interested in questions like, “What’s the most powerful, flexible blogging platform?” That’s another issue together (and the answer is WordPress, btw).
I’ll start with ShareIn, since it’s the simplest tool of the three. Here’s how I use it: I opened an account, dragged their bookmarklet to my Firefox bookmark toolbar, adjusted my settings in ShareIn to update my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and then started selectively posting links, videos and photos to my pages via the bookmarklet. It’s useful, because if I’m reading an article and want to share it with friends without emailing it (a less invasive or interrupting method of sharing), I can do this quickly with a couple of clicks.
ShareIn places the appropriate links and images in my Twitter and Facebook feeds. I can do both at once or just do only Twitter or only Facebook. I notice that there’s a delay for image loading within my Facebook page. During this time a ShareIn logo sits in the position where the media image or photo should go. That’s slightly annoying.
When users click on the links, they’re sent to the article or media. Pretty direct and simple. There’s a ShareIn banner at the top of the web page that can be clicked closed. I’m calling it a banner, but it’s really just a strip at the top which allows users to continue to share the link on their social networks. It’s viral that way. When you close it, you’re presented with the original URL and page. Either way – open or closed – you have a nice big view of the article or media. Here’s an example of how a ShareIn link looks.
This does make sharing info easier on Twitter and Facebook. It works as advertised and has some nice back-end reporting features that show you the popularity of your posts and so forth.
I tried ShareIn because I was frustrated with Posterous’s quirky linking practices. But Posterous has some nifty features and advantages. It’s much more than ShareIn, even though it does some of the same kinds of things.
What do I mean by quirky Posterous linking? Here’s the deal. When you link to online media and articles with Posterous, the link you share is a link to your Posterous blog… not to the original article. That’s problematic for me. This linking process (and the Facebook/Twitter integration) is done via a bookmarklet in Firefox, like ShareIn, and your “share” settings within Posterous (they include more services than just Facebook and Twitter).
[BTW – Posterous is essentially a blogging service, like Soup.io, Tumblr and other blogs.. but it’s different, because it’s primarily designed to blog things that you send in via email. You send content (photos, videos, documents, etc.) to post@posterous.com, and the information is nicely posted to your Posterous blog. Mine is http://phildunn.posterous.com/. It’s quick and easy to set up. Check out the Posterous site to see more of the benefits and unique features. It’s pretty slick.]
The way Posterous links is problematic, because of the way my Twitter and Facebook followers consume information. In Facebook, for example, the peruser of my content sees a nifty graphic or photo related to the story I linked to, but the link itself goes to my Posterous page, and on that page there’s only a tiny little link that goes to the original article (it’s easy to miss it). The common experience on Facebook is to click on the link and arrive at the article or media. With Posterous posts, I’m forcing them to jump through a multiple click process – if they even see the link to the original content in the Posterous post. The same thing happens with the Twitter links that are created by Posterous.
I didn’t like that – so that’s why I ended up at ShareIn.
Posterous is great, however, for sharing family photos and videos.. and then having them automatically blast out to Twitter and Facebook friends. That feature works great. Posterous makes slick galleries of multiple photos and those show up really nicely in Facebook. If you post from YouTube that shows up nicely in Facebook, as well.
My deal is that I want one tool to make all these things happen with a minimum number of clicks. Is that so much to ask?
Soup.io is somewhat different animal. It’s like Posterous in that you can send emails to Soup.io, and they’re posted on your blog page. In a way, it’s like Posterous in reverse, however. With Soup.io, you *import* content into your blog page from other services like Twitter, FriendFeed and so forth (I didn’t see Facebook integration available). This reminds me. I want to talk a little about FriendFeed at the end of this article.. coming soon. Here’s what my Soup.io page looks like: http://phildunn.soup.io/ (admittedly, I don’t spend as much time here as I do other places).
When I set up “import” with Twitter and YouTube, for example, Soup.io grabs all my shared content on those services and shows them in my Soup.io feed. This happens automatically moving forward. I’ve yet to see a way to click the “post to soup” bookmarklet and have that content automatically update my Facebook and Twitter feeds.
So Soup.io is not quite there yet, either. All these platforms have nifty features, but they’re not quite optimal for a user like me who wants to share articles, videos, photos and personal blog info, links, etc.
I’d say ShareIn is the best option for posting online content to Twitter and Facebook. Posterous is great for posting personal photos and videos and having that propagate out to Facebook and Twitter automatically (along with a host of other platforms – you can even have it automatically update your own blog, like a WordPress blog or Blogger blog). Soup.io is good for bringing everything to one place… the problem is that you have to update all the other services separately, and that doesn’t make any sense at all to me. I want a place where I can post once and forget about visiting Twitter and Facebook until there’s some interest or discussion going on those particular platforms.
Now this brings me to FriendFeed, which is kind of a hybrid. It’s half Soup.io because it allows you to import content from a lot of your favorite sites, like Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Picasa, Flickr, Digg, YouTube, etc. And it’s half Posterous, because it allows you to automatically publish (export) your FriendFeed updates to Twitter. There are currently Facebook apps that appear to enable updating of Facebook via FriendFeed, but I’ve yet to see something that looks reliable (please let me know if I’ve missed something). The intriguing thing is that Facebook recently bought FriendFeed, so there’s bound to be better integration coming down the line… or a transformation of Facebook and the obliteration of FriendFeed. Who knows.
So there you have it. I’m sticking with ShareIn for most of my needs. But I am using Posterous for family stuff (photos, videos and such). One caveat: if you want all these things to work well together, you need to have your settings in each platform perfect. Otherwise, you’ll multiple post to different social media sites. And that’s annoying. It’s pretty easy, though, so I won’t get into it here.
UPDATE:The better way to accomplish this these days is with ping.fm or hellotxt.
One of my associates in the writing and marketing world just asked me how I link up all my social media accounts so I don’t have to trot around to each site/tool to keep everyone informed. At first, I started to scratch my head… How did I do that? It took place over several months, piecemeal. So I traced my steps, drilled into some menus and put it all together…
These will make your social networking/social media life easier:
I’ve clipped some of the insightful tid-bits below. Thanks Roger!
Insight #1: “For B2B web sites, the content that really matters in terms of positioning and prospecting isn’t your ‘markitecture’ pages – your product and services descriptions, corporate histories and such…. it’s your ‘thought leadership’ pages – the places where you express opinions and ideas rather than features and benefits.”
Insight #2: “Furthermore, what of the people that you lose along the way? To me, a commitment to form-filling is no great measurement of the quality of a sales lead. A far better tactic is to set your thought leadership content free and give people more ‘opportunities to engage‘ with who you are and what you stand for.”
Warner continues, “Let’s face it, most of us are commitment-phobes when it comes to the web anyway. Why not just accept this fact and move on?”
Here are Warner’s review questions for evaluating your own white paper exchange process:
“Ask yourself:
What’s your most valuable and engaging content?
Do you make you accessible enough?
What’s the upside of providing more opportunities to engage with it?
What’s the downside of removing a subscription line?
How scientific is your answer to the previous question? (Gut feeling, conventional wisdom, or based on small side-show experiment and validated by stats?)”
Most progressive companies are now blogging to drive thought leadership, manage public relations, sell products and provide customer service. Most simply post when they can.
In a nutshell (hey, I’m in a nutshell get me out of here)… here’s what they found:
After lunch, between 1:00 PM and 3:00 PM (PST – Pacific Standard Time) is the best time to post on any given week day. Between 5:00 PM and 7:00 PM is also good (after work). Thursday is the best day.
What’s the worst time to post? Between 3:00 PM and 5:00 PM PST on the weekends. Everybody’s out doing something else. That makes weekends a good time to get posts together and then schedule them for posting on weekdays in the optimal time slots.
If you’re interested in technology trends, I wrote an article for D-Link about RSS photo feeds. This kind of application is simple, like ring tones – hence the title of the article. Yet it’s so much more clever and elaborate.
I write blog posts for D-Link from time to time, and this is the latest one. Which reminds me… are you blogging about your products and services? It’s a great way to communicate with consumers, explore new ideas and uses for your products, and learn from your user/consumer community.
This is a handy little tool that allows you to write quick blog entries about a page that you’re visiting. I used it to create this post. You simply click the “blog this” button, and it pops up your Blogger account, with the title and link fields all set.
As a marketer/writer, you should always be blogging, posting and generally writing about your personal expertise to generate interest in your business and establish your authority. This makes it quick and easy.
The more you tell (even indirectly), the more you sell.
—JOHN SCULLEY
“Marketing is really theater. It‘s like staging a performance.”
