Trevor Cook

H&R Block (Kansas) on using social media (video)

• Focused on building brand.
• Social media spend is about 0.5% of overall brand promotion spending.
• ROI is largely about learning
• Made stuff relevant to each community rather than creating it over and over
• Be careful about pushing outer limits of technology
• Blogged on tax legislation as it went through
• Created forums for people to ask questions (about tax changes) and then respond one-to-many
• Keep looking for ways to drive engagement deeper (the more engaged, the more loyal the customer)
• Offered free tax advice on facebook - scaling up is a problem. Answering 20,000 questions is a lot bigger problem than 2,000
• Used a brand evangelist on Youtube
• Backlash against brands on Youtube - has to be funny and purposeful
• Brand evangelist also used on myspace
• Second Life a 'wonderful corporate challenge' - offer tax advice in avatar form using a dance scene - really good for customer engagement
• Used twitter, interaction with Robert Scoble. Twitter experiences have been great
• The biggest measurement is changing perceptions of brand - takes time

The 5 Rules for Building a Community on the Internet

Andy Hadfield's Cowboys & Engines Blog:

"Community before commerce. In the words of John Hagel III and Arthur G. Armstrong (authors of Net.Gain), 'put community before commerce.' That is, the purpose of these efforts is to build a community, not sell more stuff, so cool it on the commercialism. The community exists for its own benefit, not yours.
Communication comes next. Build in the capability for people to communicate with each other via message boards and Internet mail lists. Peer-to-peer communication is more important than being able to communicate with the company. You're hosting the event, but it's a cocktail party, not a lecture.
Place the community's interests above your own. The big picture is that a vibrant community will help you, but getting to this place means sacrificing short-term intere
sts. For example, people should be able to freely discuss and endorse competitive products. Tolerate criticism. Not only should peple feel free to plug competitive products, they should be able to criticize your own. This freedom produces two desirable results: first, good public relations because tolerating criticism on a company-sponsored site is unheard of; second, free and voluminous customer feedback.
Encourage 'personalities.' Remember how one of the keys to the success of MTV was veejays with an attitude? The same is true of a Web site, so encourage your employees to develop online personalities to show that corporate thought police don't control your site."

These are concise, and excellent, and they represent a huge challenge for most organisations which are more used to doing exactly the opposite ie they put commerce first, rarely engage in genuine communication, place their own interests first, avoid criticism at all costs and prefer a bland corporatese over personality.

Using social media for advocacy (VIDEO)

Rubenstein (american cancer society network) talks about the decline of credibility of sending email to congressmen (too many, astroturfing) and the decline of effectiveness of blast emails to volunteers. In response, they are using social media to encourage volunteers to do the offline stuff which still impresses pollies. He says they are going back to an older style personal approach before email existed. They are using technology to empower volunteers. See it as critical to grassroots organisations who want to stay politically effective. Fascinating stuff.

Dell Incites Internet Buzz - WSJ report

Business Technology, WSJ.

Dell hit a viral-PR homerun last week when photos of a not-yet-released computer — candy-red miniature laptop — swept across the Internet, creating excitement in advance of the release. The buzz-generating computer

The buzz wasn’t an accident: It was the payoff from a year-long effort by Dell to engage more directly with bloggers and others who write about the company online.

Vin Cerf (google) on leveraging social media (VIDEO)

Learning to blog from Australian bloggers

It's the question you always get asked - at conferences, in client meetings - what makes a blog work, how do we get traffic? The short answer involves three Cs - content, conversation and consistency.

All three are a problem for many organisations. Content raises the issue of approval processes, as well as writing skill, time issues and so on. Conversation - what if we get bad comments? and Consistency, can we keep it up - day after day for evermore.

You're right. These are not big issues at all. They're easy stuff to deal with them. Mostly, they are used as excuses for putting off the new and sticking with the world we know.

Nevertheless, there is more to being good at blogging than just sticking up a website and calling 'Joe's blog' and thankfully there are now plenty of people to learn from.

Interestingly, quite a few of Australia's best known bloggers write a lot about blogging. Which just means there is a market for that information and you are not the only one asking the questions, not by a long shot.

Six bloggers to learn from

1. Problogger. Based in Melbourne, Australia's most successful blogger. He makes a hundred grand plus a year out of blogging so he commands a lot of respect. He writes mainly for people trying to make a living out of their blogs but much of what he says can be easily translated to the corporate blogger who is trying to bring honour and glory to his employer.

2. Skelliewag. Another Melbourne blogger, with 8 years experience writing for the web, who specialises in writing content that will get a lot of online attention.

3. The wrong advices. Yeah, the name's not promising but there is lot's of good stuff here.

4. Young PR. Paull Young is an Aussie lad who now works for an online PR agency in New York City, and he knows his onions.

5. Better Communications Results - Lee Hopkins and I produce a social media guide together which has got attention around the world. Lee does a lot of work in social media - teaching, advising and so on. Heck, he's even doing a phd on second life.

6. Laurel Papworth - Laurel does a lot of conferences and seminars including a recent trip to Saudi Arabia to teach Arabic women.

Citizen engagement (government 2.0) on public transport in Toronto

This is a great presentation. I can just see Railcorp embracing this stuff, and it would have been great if the Australia 2020 summit had been conducted along these lines. Anyway, some points from the presentation that I found interesting:

• the current public consultation process is broken (us and them)
• find the most passionate 1% of citizens and engage them deeply, not just with the organisation but also with each other
• create 'third spaces'; unconference events and online communities
• the project generated innovative and unexpected ideas that would not have emerged through traditional public consultation methods
• people felt engaged with the process
• community engagement has to be integrated with communication strategies and planning processes
• creating online communities is only one part also need to go where people are today ie find related communities of interest
• create a community evangelist role

How-to do social media

I've set up an archive of relevant posts on this topic for easy access by people interested in finding some more practical information and tips.

Social media in plain english

One in a series by Lee Lefever found via Jeremiah Owyang who also has an archive of them.

One Egg, One Hundred Baskets: Social Media Leverage

Social Media Leverage: "It is time to become the Social Leveraging King or Queen and squeeze every last drop of goodness out of the tools that are freely available to get the traffic rolling in. This strategy acts as a platform wrangler and drags the big names of social media, networking and aggregation together. We are going to create one page/blog post that will hit on social aggregator from ten different directions."

Interesting stuff.

How to be a social media provocateur? (VIDEO)

This is a short video (10mins) from Harvard Business School Digital which deals with the big issue that faces so many of us - how to get organisations to actually do it!

It is an interview with Josh Bernoff: "vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. Over the past thirteen years, Mr. Bernoff has become one of America's most frequently quoted research analysts. His analysis, which aims at a deeper understanding of people and how they use technology, has been cited by sources from The Wall St. Journal to "60 Minutes." He is the co-author of the book "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies," which offers myriad data-based strategies for companies that want to harness the power of social technologies like blogs, social networks, and YouTube.

Here is the core of what he has to say:

Lesson 1 - Start small, pick one objective and get started as soon as possible

Lesson 2 - Get an executive sponsor - this is true of all change management, of course.

Lesson 3 - Don't sneak it - talk to other stakeholders in advance (eg accounting, regulatory affairs etc)

Lesson 4 - Move quickly. Dell got there blog up and running in 3 weeks. Its best to start and adjust rather than plan for months

Lesson 5 - Use case studies and examples from other companies

Lesson 6 - Make friends. Your friends are going to be people doing the same things in other companies. Go to social media clubs etc.

Lesson 7 - Measure success.

Using social media to market your website

URL link to video

We still need strategy, we just need it faster

adliterate:

"The truth is that strategy is needed now more than ever – to simplify, guide and inspire. But if we are to combat the obsession with firing before taking aim we have to deliver great thinking faster, rather than asking people to wait while we deliberate. Of course there is nothing clever about strategy, it is simply about having a plan. And a good plan need not take an age to develop, it simply requires a bit of inspiration and to safe guard a little time in the process. And that’s the idea behind Fast Strategy. Fast strategy is about delivering powerful thinking quickly, whether in days, hours or minutes, so that strategy remains in the picture and we can at least aim our activity before squeezing the trigger."

I was talking to someone the other day about social media strategy and in the discussion it occurred to me that a lot of people are treating social media as we did previous technological innovations eg the video.

Social Media U: Take a Class in Social Media

ReadWriteWeb:

"Social media. Web 2.0. You know what these things are and you take advantage of them every day on the net. Whether you're socializing on Facebook, updating Twitter, or just adding a new bookmark to Ma.gnolia, social media has become an integral part of our daily lives. However, that doesn't mean that it's something that everyone innately understands or knows how to use - especially when it comes to using it for marketing, PR, or other business-related purposes. That's why many of today's colleges and universities are now offering 'social media' classes as an option for their students."

Read the rest

SEO & PPC: Better Together

SearchMarketingGuys.com

Organic search engine optimization (SEO) can have a greater impact for less cost than paid search advertising (PPC). Now that’s not something you’re likely to hear often by a guy who makes his living selling paid search. I should add an important caveat. It’s also likely to take a lot longer. A recent study released by eMarketer (Search Engine Marketing: User and Spending Trends, January 2008) emphasized the value of SEO. The reason? People value a disinterested referral more than a paid advertisement. No great surprise. Who are you more likely to trust, a friend’s opinion or a salesman’s pitch? What is surprising? In 2007, eMarketer estimated that 62% of all search engine spending was on PPC with only 18% on SEO. ‘…SEO tends to be less expensive than paid search. Therefore, even small boosts in SEO spending relative to paid search "