We’ll Always Have Blogging

Image credit: Express Monorail (Flickr)
“Round up the usual suspects.” With all of the Facebook and Twitter commentary, out there, you’d think there’s nothing else of significance worth doing on the Web any more. But of course, you know that’s just crazy talk.

Corporate blogging has been with us for quite some time, with some major companies having forayed into the space in the early to mid 2000s. Yet there’s surprisingly little attention paid to it today. Why is that? Is it that the shiny object / GMOOT (“get me one of those!”) syndrome has worn off? Or is it that there’s a purpose that isn’t served by blogs?

“I was misinformed.”

If you look at the recent statistics shared by eMarketer (“Corporate Blogging Goes Mainstream“), you’ll see that only about a third of companies use blogs. But if you look at the growth over the last three years, the use of blogs has actually doubled (!).

The focus on Twitter and Facebook is understandable: they’re nearly universal, they’re easily accessible via mobile devices, and there’s the ability to instantly connect users’ thoughts, actions, and comings and goings via those platforms. But blogging is more than that – or at least has the ability to be more than that.

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WOMMA Summit 2010: Global word of mouth differences

It’s hard to believe it’s a week since I was in Vegas at the WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) Summit, which brought together over 600 marketers, agencies, brands, academics and researchers over three days to share thought leadership, case studies, best practice and provocative debate. Over the next few weeks running up to Christmas I’ll be showcasing some of the best keynotes and insights from the event, and I thought I’d kick off with a personal perspective.

As President of WOMMA UK, this year I was heading up an international panel examining the global differences in word of mouth.

via WOMMA@Flickr; L-R: me, Barak, Craig, Jo, Shige


The idea for the session came from my experiences last year – I saw several excellent case studies from the likes of Tropicana and Mom Central but also realised that the very ‘American’ approach just would not wash with many European consumers.

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How to Win with Social Media by Running Your Own Race

Laura Click & Kyla Cofer - Nashville Women's Half MarathonIn September, I ran my second half marathon with my friend, Kyla. As we trained for the race, it became clear that Kyla was a bit faster than me. And, on race day, she decided to run ahead of me about half-way through the race.

Although it was incredibly lonely to run the last seven miles by myself, I knew it was the right thing to do for Kyla, and for me. She had to run her own race, and so did I. And, in the end, we both accomplished personal records.

In life, and in business, it’s way too easy to worry about keeping up with the infamous Jones’. You know the ones…they have the fancy car, the perfect house and the incredibly gorgeous children. In business, the Jones’ are the ones who seem to have endless amounts of success, seemingly without any effort.

Social media has made it so much easier to keep up with the Jones’. Now, we can see people’s social media efforts in full display. We see how the business down the street uses Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and we constantly read stories about how businesses are using the latest tool, network or gadget.

Social media is the shiny new toy that everyone wants to play with and it’s very easy to get caught up with what others are doing. We think that every business needs a Facebook page, even when they don’t. We believe every business should use social media, even if it’s not a fit. Although social media is a fantastic tool for business, it isn’t right for everyone. Or at least, it might not be the first weapon in your marketing arsenal.

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A Quiet Night Under the Arches

I know it has been a fortnight or more since I’ve posted, but I wanted to get back to the blog and talk about the multitude of activities going on at McDonald’s USA.

I am now 7 months in to my new role and feel I’ve gotten my sea legs on the massive and ever rolling ship that is McDonald’s. So what is going on?

TONS.

If you live under a rock, you might not know that the Mc Rib is back. Through a careful mix of pre-seeding and launch activities, we’ve been able to generate a HUGE amount of chatter about the national return of my personal favorite menu item…that is if you count Wall Street Journal, Colbert, John Stewart, USA Today, Google Trends, Yahoo Hot News and a few hundred millions other traditional and social media posts a big deal.

McRib turned in to a trending topic on Twitter (before our promoted trend) on Google and Yahoo (twice). Oh, and Bill Clinton also talked about how excited he was about it.

McRib was also our first test of promoted Tweets and Trends. Yes, there were some negative tweets, but there were nothing compared to the huge majority of fans showing uber excited about the return of McRib. Fortune had a great write up on this subject:

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/11/17/why-it-doesn’t-mcmatter-if-you-dont-like-the-mcrib/

Beyond McRib, we had a great pilot program with Farmville. Great meaning engagement of many millions more than expected.

Our Facebook places launch is raising $50,000 for charity and our virtual hands program is kicking in another $10,000.

Once things settle down, I hope to post more about each program.

Rick Wion

Questions and Answers about Relationship Marketing and Relationship Commerce

Ted Rubin is the Chief Social Marketing Officer at OpenSky and also one of the early members of The Social CMO Crew! Based on his previous work at E.L.F. Cosmetics and now at Open Sky, Ted is leading the way and becoming clearly recognized as a leader in the emerging field of Social Media Relationship Marketing and the rapidly growing phenomena of advocacy triggered sales known as Relationship Commerce. Below is a Question and Answer piece first published earlier this week by SMM Magazine.

1: Relationships: how do you build them online?

I believe everything we do in our personal and business lives revolves around relationships—now more than ever. With effort, an online relationship may begin from the request of a Facebook friend or following someone on Twitter. But make no mistake—that initial request or follow will never create the relationship. Trust is built upon interaction, when you’re true to your word, authentic, and genuine. To build relationships online, you (as a brand or individual) have to offer value in return.

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Seven Reasons I Won’t Follow You on Twitter

In the past few weeks, the blogosphere has been abuzz about various philosophies for choosing whom to follow on Twitter. Mitch Joel and Mark Schaefer recently dueled on their opposing approaches – be selective in who you follow or follow (mostly) everyone. Gini Dietrich also weighed into the debate.

Although people are quick to point out that there are no “rules” in social media, there are certainly best practices. Determining how to use the tools to your benefit is certainly up to you and what best aligns with your social media goals.

Because I use social media to develop relationships and to build business, I follow most people who follow me. However, I don’t use an automated system to follow people back. I look through every person who follows me. That’s right, I take a minute or two to look through the profile of every person who decides to follow me. I think it’s important to get to know the people who care what I have to say online. And most times, I will follow people back.

But there are also some reasons I absolutely will not follow someone. For instance, I will not follow you if:

  1. You don’t have an avatar. An avatar is the picture or image associated with your account. If you have the Twitter goose egg there instead, I won’t follow you. I want to see the person or business behind the account.
  2. Your bio is incomplete. The bio is only 140 characters. Take a few minutes to say a little bit about yourself. If you leave this blank, why should I get to know you?
  3. Your avatar is a picture of money. I avoid get rich quick Tweeters like the plague. If you are all about “making money online” (the spammy way), I won’t come near you. Sorry.
  4. Your avatar is something even less savory. Twitter has cleaned up the spam quite a bit, but for a while, it was common to get followers with some inappropriate photos. Those followers, I block…and fast.
  5. You’ve never tweeted. It’s amazing to me how many people open up an account and let it sit. Don’t let analysis paralysis keep you from tweeting. Put yourself out there and say hello. If you don’t say anything, why should I follow?
  6. You’ve never replied to your followers. For me, the point of twitter is to build relationships. If you’ve never @replied to your followers, it shows me you don’t care about a two-way conversation. There are some exceptions to this rule, but generally speaking, I want to connect with people who are going to talk back.
  7. You only promote yourself. Plenty of people simply use Twitter to promote their own stuff non-stop. It almost turns into a 24/7 RSS feed of their blog. If that’s your thing, that’s fine, but I’m not tuning in.

One sure-fire way to guarantee I’ll follow you back? Engage with me. One of the main reasons I’m on Twitter is to build relationships. It’s amazing how many wonderful people I have made in-person relationships with all because we struck up a conversation online.

So, if you want to connect with me or anyone else on Twitter, say hello. Chances are, the person will talk right back.

What are the reasons you choose not to follow someone? Is there anything we should add to the list?

Laura Click

Social Media and the Helen Keller Effect

Update to start 2012: Quick search for the exact phrase “Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much” for the entire year of 2011 shows close to 33,000 results still being tweeted an average of almost 3,000 twitter mentions per month!

In January 2010, The Social CMO blog you are reading and this amazing group of bloggers now affectionately known as The Social CMO Crew was formed. When putting up the blog using WordPress, as always there’s a spot for the blog subtitle and because it seemed so fitting I used a quote I had seen fly by on Twitter at that time not aware of its’ original source and it has since stuck.

Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much!

Since January 2010 this has been our rallying cry here at The Social CMO and been proven out in many ways including the creation of our #MMchat held every #MarketerMonday evening at 8:00pm. In addition as a group The Social CMO Crew now has more than a million followers that are all amazing tweeps who are continuously reading, retweeting and supporting this dynamic team of marketers as we interact across the social media sphere.

It wasn’t until months later that I was actually told that this quote was from Helen Keller, one of the most famous disabled individuals ever and avid advocate for the blind and other disenfranchised groups. I will not repeat her biography here, but you can review her entire story through her Wikipedia page. So why I am I telling you all this on Sunday in late November? It’s simple because this one phrase really captures the essence of the power of social media. That’s why I instinctively chose it for our tagline at The Social CMO and it appears that I am not the only one who has felt and been inspired by what I am calling the Helen Keller Effect on Social Media.

Yesterday I was at a chess tournament with my son and wanted to send out a tweet on my Blackberry of our tagline and Who Are We? page link as I do from time to time. It has been awhile since I had done this so didn’t have the tweet and link handy so instead thought I would just Google it to pick up my previous tweets with the link. Well much to my amazement for the next few minutes the results of this search literally flooded my small screen!

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Loyalty Programs are Passé, what about Customer Advocacy Programs?

Customer Loyalty programs have been around for more than a century and marketing managers have used them very effectively for rewarding loyal customer behavior, especially repeat purchase. According to Gartner, U.S. companies spend more than $1.2 billion per year on customer loyalty programs. It is also estimated that more than 75% of consumers today have at least one loyalty card and number of people with two or more is estimated to be one-third of the shopping population (for more, see The Lowdown on Customer Loyalty Programs: Which Are the Most Effective and Why:) Knowledge@Wharton.

It is time for business to look beyond Loyalty Programs that reward repurchase and consider having a Customer Advocacy Program instead.

But given recent growth in Social Networking on the internet and our ability to precisely track outbound Word of Mouth (WOM) and its impact on customer behavior, it is time for business to look beyond Loyalty Programs that reward repurchase and consider having Customer Advocacy Program instead.

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Want to Lead Corporate Social Strategy? Read This.

Few people understand the constant pressure that the corporate social strategist is faced with. On any given day, the pressure can include internal challenges such as culture change, demands on proving the worth of programs, program development and execution, vague understanding of the role by some colleagues, the necessity of integrating the function throughout the enterprise, as well as external demands such as interview requests and a constant barrage of questions via email, Facebook and Twitter.

The role is clearly evolving and is one that many companies, small and large, are currently filling. I was lucky enough to be selected to fill the role of global digital & multimedia communications manager (aka head of social media) for Ford Motor Company in July of 2008, and I’ve witnessed much of the above – and more – in my role. We’re definitely at a crossroads in terms of the maturity and evolution of the function, particularly in integrating this nascent field into more business processes and making it live beyond the realm of just a handful of people within the organization.

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Is Social Media Just a Channel?

I have been in some interesting debates recently on Twitter in chats such as #mmchat and #techchat on whether or not Social Media is just another channel. While I disagree with almost every word these particular people type, I wanted to make sure this topic was approached objectively… well, somewhat objectively.

Why not just share my intensely subjective perspective on this subject? Well, here are a couple reasons…

  • Its a burning question for many marketers (and now senior executives) that once answered provides perspective on strategy, integration, approach, internal/external policy, and execution of your social program.
  • I take my responsibility as a blogger and consultant very seriously when it comes to presenting and arguing issues. The last thing you want is a lop-sided diatribe for or against… unless that’s your bag.

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