There are a lot of ideas coming to life right now thanks to social media and networks. A year or so ago, I asked -- Has Web 2.0 has made you happier? Are
your online relationships as productive or satisfying as your real
ones? And if the answer here is "yes," do you have many real
relationships?
Has Web 2.0 empowered your customer service people
-- or just thinned out traditional marketing and personnel budgets? Are email, Twitter, and IM services helping you to communicate
better -- or just flooding you with noise?
Have all the social bookmarking services brought you closer to great
content, or has it just added to your workload? Has greater access to information about everything created more opportunity for learning and enriching thought -- or has it just created a bigger divide between those who can think critically and those who can't?
Two of the main cultural threads coming together are:
the concern that the real time Web is destroying our ability to contemplate and process information thus impoverishing our critical thinking -- if you're reading this post on your iPad, while tweeting and IMing, bookmarking and sharing, you may see only the bolded words in the post
the enormous potential of connecting readers with authors, artists and collectors, thinkers and doers, learners and knowledge, directly; the opportunity to collaborate, co-create, and crowdsource that comes from seeing what other people are working on
What prevents someone from developing their potential, aside from choice?
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
defines literacy as the "ability to identify, understand, interpret,
create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials
associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of
learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop
their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their
community and wider society."
Get there early
I believe that every child at birth has the potential of Leonardo da Vinci.
Literacy is my passion cause, the reason why I buy tons of copies of How to Teach Your Baby to Read (Amazon affiliate link) so I can give the book to every expecting parent. Reading is the beginning of the gift of literacy, the gateway that opens up the world to a child. Parents are the first teachers.
Buy the book, enjoy the experience with your child, get there early.
Getting connected
There are many other worthy organizations that help children, from the global to the very local. Here are a couple:
Room to Read, founded by former Microsoft executive John Wood, collaborates with local communities, partner organizations
and governments, to develop literacy skills and a habit of reading among
primary school children, and support girls to complete secondary school
with the relevant life skills to succeed in school and beyond
Pennies for Peace, founded by Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea
Donors Choose is an online charity that grew out of a Bronx high school where teachers experienced first-hand
the scarcity of learning materials in our public schools and wanted to connect donations directly to the schools/projects [hat tip RaynaNyc]
The Web is helping us connect with those organizations and follow the progress of their mission.
What about staying connected?
Does TV help with literacy? You don't have to answer that, just think about it.
Linda Odell shared one of her favorite
moments with Literacy Kansas City, an agency focusing on teaching
adults to read, from a different student. On Facebook, she wrote about a middle-aged
man who spoke proudly of having progressed the the point of being able
to read "Little House on the Prairie." "I was really surprised," he
said, "to find out how much better the book was than the tv show."
There may or may not be a loose correspondence in the list of most literary cities and that of top cities on Twitter.
At TED, Ethan Zuckerman highlighted the issue that cripples social media and ultimately
potentially the power of the internet to really connect humanity -- the
fact that we have increasingly segregated conversations online
imprisoned in filter bubbles and what he rather brilliantly called
'imaginary cosmopolitanism'. [hat tip Richard Huntington]
Indeed, in the words of a Sufi, "Knowledge that takes us not beyond ourselves is worse than ignorance." [hat tip Elik Şafak, TED]
Are we on board with the world of connection and possibility, are we looking beyond our own ideas, statistics, and world and using our gifts to reach out to others and share what we know? Or are we merely gravitating towards what we think we know?
Choose to make a difference today.
Buy How to Teach Your Baby to Read (Amazon
affiliate link) for a colleague, a friend, yourself, or a stranger who is beginning the wonderful adventure of parenthood. Go find an organization that supports literacy. Or broaden your horizons in social media beyond the circle that follows you and agrees/disagrees with your every word. Stay connected.
You'd have to live in your own personal social media bubble to not have heard about or seen the Old Spice campaign executed by Wieden+Kennedy this past week. It was definitely the case of videos going viral. When it's all said and done, to be a marketing success, it will have had to achieve a specific, measurable goal beyond impressions.
Rob Gonda has pulled together some of the statistics on the YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter accounts that made up the campaign. As Scott Monty describes in his post linked above (emphasis mine),
the marketers targeted a handful of influencers to kick off the process -
Kevin Rose (founder of Digg), Ellen Degeneres, Ashton Kutcher, The
Huffington Post and others. Questions were requested and collected on a
number of platforms: Twitter, the Old Spice Facebook page,
YouTube, Reddit, 4Chan, blogs and Yahoo, to name a few. And then, during
the course of the day, the questions were answered in near-real time
via custom-made YouTube videos.
Think about it. They took the concept of the pitch and turned it on its head.
Instead of telling a wide group of influentials a bunch of things about the product via a press release, or even a custom pitch via email -- which would have essentially been indistinguishable from all the others they normally get -- W+K created a meme.
By approaching influencers in public with an unusual request, and then responding in real time on the same or main platforms with the results of that exchange, they started engaging the rest of the marketers and pundits in those networks.
The good social media execution attracted the attention of many bloggers -- I'm writing about it now, and so have dozens of others who may not normally write up product pitches, including some publication that get up there in readership like Mashable and TechCrunch.
Mainstream media followed with the Toronto Star writing about the campaign, how both the writing and acting in real time have been the keys to achieving 16.3MM views as of Friday afternoon (Visible Measures). The good social media execution did some heavy lifting in the PR department.
What is influence? Are communities changing the dynamics that engage influence, or are they simply injecting transparency into them? How do you connect with real results for your business? Can influence be bought or sold?
These are all age old questions and, for many, the answers have been a moving target.
There are other, subtle, and possibly even more powerful forces that influence outcomes. You may not have thought about them in those terms, you should. You know about parents, loved ones, and those you find yourself with in close quarters in a long journey.
Do you think about:
the people you hire -- are they helping you move the needle in perception by thinking expansively, by being agents of change, or are they merely telling you what they think you want to hear? Are they going to solve problems creatively, or are they going to be the bottleneck for your organization to get out of its own way?
the people you do business with -- are they good partners, transparent and upfront, helping you build a healthy network of relationships, or are they not telling you about issues that could potentially jeopardize your position?
mentors and teachers -- do they help you break away from your own patterns, see beyond the obvious, feel like you matter? Or are you seeking those who confirm the choices you've already made?
What defines influence in business? Join us for the chat on Twitter at 12Noon ET today. Hash tag #kaizenblog.
Would you try a product on the recommendation of someone you don't like?
Like has a bit of a double-meaning these days. Ever since Facebook implemented the "like" button everyone has kicked into high gear to get you to like them.
However, you can agree with a specific thing someone says and like it, while totally disagreeing with their world view. Same thing could happen with a business project vs. the business itself.
Although likability can be borrowed, it is transferred only based on a more permanent philosophical alignment or agreement.
You move in when you can live with that individual. You're eager to show that business association, when it makes you look good on more than one level. Liking, it turns out, is not uni-dimensional.
Is it easy to engineer?
How to win friends and influence people
With respects paid to Dale Carnegie and his work, it's fairly easy to become an influencer. Here are the steps; put some enthusiasm in them, and you're on your way. Now you can get the word out on your blog, be friendly on Facebook, while displaying the most appreciative character on Twitter.
You might even get a few hundred folks to click on your stuff, comment, interact with the agreeable, likable you.
Is this a reflection of true influence?
Look at the evidence
People are doing all kinds of things online. They check out events, catch up with friends, buy stuff they searched for and compared, and encounter serendipitous situations -- like for example, coming across people with similar or complementary interests.
They're online, yet they're still people. To understand the role of influence, you need to take a deep dive on purpose and motivation.
How many followers did Mother Theresa have?
Influence is with the influenced
Motivation is a start. There's also another mechanism at play here -- because we're social by nature, and cannot possibly know it all, though a few of us do try, we rely on clues from others when making decisions. Say your business is working with an influencial who tells people to buy a certain product, and their friends are telling them to buy another, the friends win.
We're not going to solve the influence question with a post.
In thinking about the increased desire of businesses and individuals to want influence -- which by the way is not measured merely in the number of followers -- I wondered what happens when likability comes into play. Social networks are exposing the private nature of our offline connections and interests.
And by doing that, they're encouraging a more general approach to information in people -- the broader the content in applicability, the greater the network of friends. I do wonder if with that, there is a forced sense of likability -- people who are genuinely not really interested in what you say or who you are, who for lack of a better word, suck up to you in public so you buy their wares, so to speak.
Does liking someone make a difference in purchase decision? When I asked: would you try a product on the recommendation of someone you don't like?
on Twitter, something interesting happened.
The first few responses, probably reactions to the question, were in favor of "no" -- dislike overpowers authority. Then, after a couple of minutes, the answers changed to more rational responses -- if the recommendation was fact-based and sounded credible, one can dislike someone, yet still value their opinions in areas where they
agree, if it's evident the product is working for such a person, wouldn't let the dislike be a show-stopper.
Would you try a product on the recommendation of someone you don't
like?
When Harry and I met, I had just started blogging. I knew him as the marketing headhunter from the career column in the Wall Street Journal's the Career Journal online.
He was the first one to put me on his blogroll. That was a vote of confidence for sure, and the ability to see beyond a few posts to the person. Because I'm still here, as prolific as ever.
Recruiting high level candidates for ecommerce, like he does, requires a certain agility to do a special kind of math of the talent pool. To tell who is a good fit for which company and job, and I'm sure you realize, to detect who's ready to move up and who still needs experience is a skill.
How does he do that? He's a really good listener, knows what to listen for, and questions to ask. He's not been afraid to get his hands in the business he recruits for -- which puts him in a very good position to spot the real deal from fakes. My definition of fake is -- has no intention of putting in the work to get there.
Recruiting in good times is hard. It's even harder when the economy contracts. The job market is also changing a great deal, marketing and communications/PR jobs require analytical skills and social media experience more and more.
So I thought it would be helpful for us to learn more about recruiting for top talent from a top recruiter.
_________
How did you get to becoming a executive recruiter specializing in integrated marketing and new media?
Harry
: I was a business development consultant who had a process for researching, identifying, and developing profitable new market niches for B2B clients.
Part of each engagement involved trying to teach my clients' inside sales reps my multi-step process, which involved choreographed phone contact, permission-based direct mail, and email.
Over time, I noticed that some inside sales reps were simply more talented than others -- and much more importantly, some were simply more driven.
Occasionally, in like 5% of cases, I'd see trainees who were both talented and driven, and it seemed clear to me that the other 95% was either unwilling or unable to rise to that level.
After a year in the business, I decided to chuck it and go into a business where I could be an agent for the "5% who matter." That business was recruiting, and integrated marketing was the closest practice area to what I had been doing.
Your work is designed around understanding the skills of top online marketers and delivering results for brands. Can you tell me a little bit about the challenges and rewards of your activities?
Harry
: One of the most challenging aspects of my job is to help my clients understand what it is they really want in a new hire.
Clients will come to me with statements like "The new hire MUST come from an Internet Retailer Top 50 company." And I'll say "Why is that?" And they'll say "Because we're huge, so the candidate must know how to operate in a huge company." Which of course, does absolutely nothing for the customer.
So I have to gently press the client and say "Wait a minute. Who is your customer? How do they think? How do they buy? What are there top three daily frustrations as it pertains to the problem that your product claims to solve? Is there a built-in bias to the way they buy online ... like, are they logical or emotional, etc?"
In my mind, the only question any client needs to address is "Can we find a candidate who sells stuff in the same way our customers buy currently -- and can this candidate ultimately predict how our customers will want to interact with our brand in the future?"
One of the most rewarding things about my job is that I have been doing it for so long that I have begun to work with the same candidates as they progress from one job to another. Candidates that I placed in 2005/6 are coming around now, asking "What's in the pipeline? I'm ready for a new challenge."
It's like being a sports agent. I've placed managers, directors, and VP's with some of America's most successful brands. It's a privilege to be in the middle of all that at this time in history.
Do expectations align between employers and candidates? Why/why not? What was your worst experience?
Harry
: I'll close my 100th executive search this year, and I have seen some crazy stuff. I've seen deals collapse that I thought would go through -- and deals that had died come back to life and close. Having said that, disasters are rare.
When they do happen, it's usually because one party wasn't shooting straight with the other. Come to think of it, it was the companies who didn't play fair in the couple of deals where somebody got burned.
I'm not a big fan of companies that want a 90-day money back guarantee from me, and then make the candidate a job offer that includes an "employment at will clause" with employment beginning with a "90-day probationary period."
If I were to ever look for another job myself, I'd ask the recruiter about his deal with the client and I would run from any company that has zero skin in the game in the event that the deal doesn't work out after only 90 days.
What piece of advice would you give to someone looking to earn attention
online?
Harry
: Two things:
1.) Blog.
Have a teachable point of view in your professional area of interest and make sure that your POV is reflected in a way that clearly transmits your integrity, passion, experience, knowledge, skill, leadership potential, commitment to your profession, vision for the industry, and humility.
Then develop an editorial platform of topics you will and won't blog about. For example, nobody wants to read about your cat.
2.) Tweet only to the extent that you can showcase your teachable point of view in 140-words or less.
Don't Tweet about random things. Tweet about things you might blog about if you had the time. Be professional. People are paying more attention than you think.
***
He makes you want to be a better candidate, doesn't he? Harry was able to pick a new direction in his career because he worked hard at understanding what aligned with his passion, *and* worked extra to teach himself how to transfer that skill.
There are plenty of opportunities for professionals who build that agility in their attitude and approach, for those who while still in school, or in a job they're comfortable in, ask themselves:
how's the market changing
what are businesses' needs tomorrow
what kind of problems need solving?
what kind of thinking is required?
And put themselves to work on figuring it out. Forget corporate politics, in today's market the ability to develop new skills, to participate in the knowledge flow, to think and tinker matter.
Do you have a Delicious account? What on earth is Delicious?
Delicious is an apt name for a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag,
save, manage and share web pages from a
centralized source.
It puts emphasis on the power of the community, and it can help you discover new content, save it for reference later, and share it with your colleagues.
It comes in handy for two main purposes:
1.) Bookmarking and tagging content you find useful
2.) Browsing content others have found useful and tagged
You can write notes about why you liked that content when you bookmark it as a short hand for later. Both activities can get you on your way for great content ideas that map to your content strategy.
Bookmarking and tagging content
As you develop your blog's and micromedia content calendar, it may be helpful to use Delicious as a tool to bookmark content you find interesting, instructive, and helpful. Pick a series of tags that reflect your focus, and select articles and posts about the topics you'd want to write about.
You can even start your posts right there by writing a brief comment to the tagged URL. If you syndicate your bookmarks to a feed, for example FriendFeed, you could also observe or ask for reactions from your network about that topic and comment. Of course, this presupposes that you participate in discussions there for people to respond.
I bookmark big stories that inform my thinking on trends. That's how I use Delicious. You could open separate accounts per line of business, or product line, and have different subject matter experts keep tabs on what's being written by bookmarking on each one.
Other ideas on bookmarking and tagging:
become a go-to resource for industry information on a specific topic -- the more defined, the better. For example, start an account on cloud computing, accounting software, captive insurance, email marketing, etc.
build a platform around a specific issue in your market -- look to define the problem better. For example, bookmark stories on upcoming legislation on privacy, new EPA regulations, open source coding integrity, etc.
comment on stories written about the business you're in -- think about defining and communicating your company's position on it. For example, a major story was posted about SaaS companies and you were not featured, make a note of what you would have said as a quote in the comment to that URL.
These bookmarks will be useful as you write blog posts and tweet about topics as well.
Browsing content tagged by others
Say you're interested in finding out what other people who read content online are interested in -- either for research purposes, or to see what's trending on a particular tag, for example popular software, you'll be able to do that on Delicious.
Many successful bloggers make it a habit to scour their blog syndication readers to find out what other people are writing about and adapt it for their audience. In some cases even making the topic wildly popular in their own style.
There are hardly any new ideas out there -- yet you can find many new executions.
***
In some cases, Delicious can be a way to blog without an official blog. And you can integrate it with major product launches in you PR program as a way to track the stories written about you.
Delicious had 1.7MM unique visitors in May, compared to 5.7MM on StumbleUpon [Compete.com data]. However, it has more traffic than Technorati, which holds fairly steady at 1.1+MM [Compete.com) and used to or had the potential to be the reference site for blogs.
I found Delicious useful for content bookmarking and tagging. Have you explored the site for content ideas? Do you use it at all?
The bar for customer service is admittedly still not very high across the board. In many, if not most cases, it's because of business issues that keep an organization from focusing on the product or service -- hence the need for extra support.
Many organizations are still looking at customer service as a cost center, when they could be taking a different view, especially with social media. The best way to communicate about something being better is by letting people see satisfied customers.
We started this conversation a couple of years back, when we said that customer service is the new marketing. Social media is a
first-hand means of finding and responding to customer
problems, needs, and also documenting satisfaction, trends, and product suggestions. If you're willing to listen, customers will help you refine
your current marketing and outreach programs.
In that sense, they're so much more than additions to the bottom line, they're your brand guardians and they will actually tell you how you
can do better.
It's simple to see why this is important -- no customers, no business. In the age of relationship, when everyone is so connected with each other, the pool of people who've never heard about how your business fares may be incredibly small.
1.) Do you have good content on your site to address known issues?
2.) Did you enable a chat button for people who need to speak with you on your site?
That would be a line of first defense in attacking the issue of support aggressively. Social media is not an excuse to abandon customers in your own digital home, is it? And you do want to come up in the default home page for any business -- Google's search page -- for known issues, possibly ahead of the complaints.
Customer service on Twitter
While the bar is pretty low in phone tree land, and sometimes even on
Web sites, it is set pretty high on Twitter. Blame it on Frank Eliason @comcastcares, he taught us that customer support doesn't involve automation on the front end.
For several months, Frank was the first and only responder when people had issues with their cable connection. True, he had a team behind him that could diagnose and solve the issues, and he automated listening in on conversation.
However, the powerful part is that people soon learned to tweet with his handle when they had questions and problems. In other words, he took the sting out of complaints by being very responsive. How responsive? A Twitter minute responsive.
Which is issue number one you need to address if you're thinking about putting someone on Twitter for customer service. And many companies today have done that. None of the we'll get back to you in 48 hours responses will fly in a medium where messages get old so quickly.
What else?
What are some of the other reasons you'd hold back doing customer service on Twitter until a business is ready? Have you had good experiences with some of the companies that are doing it?
[image courtesy of Hugh McLeod. some content may be strong]
When Twitter lists first came out, I described them as a new mainstream media-type content channel. And maybe media companies have missed the boat on what interests readers vs. PR practitioners.
If you look at the lists from CNN, for example, you will see that the most followed list is that of anchors and reporters. I don't know about you, I just don't tend to follow people I'm not interested in building a relationship with, and it seems to me that common sense would dictate regular citizens follow stories, and not the people who write them.
As I revisit those mainstream media lists, I notice how they continue to be mostly about themselves, with a few weak attempts at building something useful for followers beyond their own publication.
Things have indeed changed little since last November, when I did my review:
The Huffington Post seems pretty well on top of the content
it covers with its lists. Other news businesses have started their own
lists as well. Among them:
CNN - not
as comprehensive as I would have thought, but they have many Twitter
streams
When I took a look at my own lists, what I noticed is that those with the greater follower count were in the most altruistic and more clearly content-driven categories -- #kaizenblog, our weekly chat about kaizen in business strategy, community builders and community evangelists.
If Twitter were less people- or account-centric and more topic-centric, there would be greater opportunity to crowd-source beyond iReports to the nature of news itself. Then it could become a destination for the connection of topics and the stories that inform them.
To the credit of many news organizations listening online, namely the New York Times and the Washington Post, more articles and blog posts have been published recently about content and news that interest people. I do wonder...
Why isn't Twitter organized to track topical content? (trending topics aside) Is this the reason why news organizations and and PR professionals are still thinking about social networks as extensions of the old ways of doing pitches in a vacuum? Not knowing what angle people are interested in until after the pitch and publication?
Are you experimenting with Twitter lists and topical content?
This is my blog and not a public space. Critical discourse is welcomed. I will, however, delete your comment if you descend into personal attacks, inappropriate language, disrespectful behavior, or excessive self-promotion and link-baiting.
Book Reviews
Disclaimer
The opinions blogged herein represent only those of Valeria Maltoni and do not reflect those of her employer, persons or companies mentioned herein, or anyone else.
