I’m a little frustrated right now. Over the last several years, quite a few people have asked me for advice about getting into social media. Some of them are good friends, and a lot of them are people with a professional communications or marketing background.

My advice has been the same for the last several years: if you’re a professional communicator or marketer, you must understand and use social media if you want to stay relevant in your profession. Some of them have heeded that advice. Some of them haven’t.

And that’s fine. I have no problem with people ignoring my advice. I am far from always right. Just take a look at my resume. Or ask The Mrs.

Here’s why I’m frustrated: if some of those people had taken my advice when I gave it to them, I would be hiring them right now. I need to find smart, resourceful people who understand the enterprise business world, and also understand how social media fits into it. Those people are few and far between, and the really good ones have really good jobs.

The people I’m thinking of as I write this post have all of the requisite skills I need, except for experience in social media, which they could have developed on their own in the time since I first gave them that advice.

You don’t need to be doing social media as part of your job in order to build your own understanding of how companies use social media, and in the process make yourself more valuable as an employee. There are dozens of webinars, blogs, e-books and podcasts—free and paid—to help you learn more about enterprise social media.

When I am evaluating a potential hire for my team, I am willing to except a lack of professional social media experience if they can show me a well-written blog, a well developed LinkedIn profile with recommendations, and an active Twitter presence that addresses business issues. If you can show me that you understand business and know how to engage with people and to write, I know I can teach you the rest of it.

So here are my recommendations for any communications professional who wants to stay relevant:

1. Start a blog

Start a blog on WordPress.com and write about the industry you’re in or want to be in. I’ve said this before, but if you can show me a blog post that I wish you had written on our company blog, that carries more weight than all the superlatives you can cram into a static resume. I hired somebody this year in part because she had already written an informative, well-written post targeted at the audience I need to reach. I didn’t need to wonder if she could do the work; she had already done it.

2. Build your LinkedIn presence

Build up your LinkedIn profile with people in the industry you want to be active in. Get recommendations. Get active in the LinkedIn groups that discuss your field, and show me how you’ve added value in those groups.

3. Develop your Twitter, Facebook and Google+ presence

I don’t need to see 5,000 followers. I need to see you understand how businesses are using these networks to meet their bottom-line objectives. You can show me that by showing how you are using these networks to meet your career objectives. Then I’ll know you can do it once you’re hired.

4. Show a sense of wonder and curiosity

The people who are the most successful and interesting in social media are the ones who just know, without someone having to prove it to them, how cool this stuff is. They knew it the moment they first saw Facebook, or an iPhone, or Twitter. They hate the idea of being left behind. We are in the midst of a revolution, and I want to work with people who know that and are excited to be part of it.

If building your personal networks feels like a chore, either you’re in the wrong business or you haven’t dug in enough to see the real excitement, wonder and value.

Sure, go ahead and question if you really need to be on Google+. But get on it anyway and see what it’s like. No, you don’t have to be on every network. But the people who feel a tingle when they hear about a new network and think, “I really need to get on there before someone grabs my username,” are the people with the attitude I value most.

I know it’s a tough job market out there. I know there are a lot of smart, capable people who are unemployed, underemployed or in jobs that are going nowhere. Social media is not going away. Don’t limit your opportunities by leaving yourself behind.

I picked up my iPhone 4 yesterday and one of the coolest new features is the Siri personal assistant. A lot has been written about this already, but I discovered something cool about the speech to text feature last night that I thought I would share.

Siri lets you compose Twitter updates, Facebook updates, notes, text messages and even blog posts (I’m using it to write this) by voice. When I first tried it, I was disappointed to see that it didn’t include any punctuation. As a writer and former English major, that bothered me.

Then I tried the approach that I’ve learned to use with all Apple products; I tried the simplest thing I could think of.

To add punctuation, just speak the punctuation you want to add.

To compose that sentence, I said “To add punctuation comma just speak the punctuation you want to add period.”

It’s an extremely elegant solution, and one that has allowed me to write this (properly punctuated) blog post in about three minutes, almost exclusively using my voice.

I just got a call from my local Subaru dealer. “We notice it’s been four years since you bought your Subaru and we just wanted to check in to see how everything is going.” It doesn’t take much to translate that into, “It’s a slow sales month and we’re going back through our records and calling people who might be ready to buy a new car.”

This is the only time in that four years that anyone from the dealership has contacted me, other than to send oil change coupons or follow up on service visits. Their attempt to “engage” with me felt spammy and one-sided, in no small part because it came out of the blue. I’m sure the strategy is “contact customers who might be ready to buy,” but in practice it becomes “contact customers every four years and start over again.”

By the time the sales process was complete, I had spent a fair amount of time with the salesperson, and we’d developed a bit of a rapport. That vanished the moment I drove off the lot. I can’t remember his name. If I wanted to buy a new car today, I wouldn’t have a clue how to find him. “Hi, I was in here four years ago and bought an Outback from a white guy, kind of young, about yay high, blue shirt. Is he around?”

The fact is, I did buy a new car about four months ago. And I test drove a Subaru. I suspect, knowing me, I probably talked about it online. If Whitey McBlueshirt had stayed connected with me, I might have bought a Subaru WRX from him instead of a VW GTI from another guy who dropped off the face of the Earth as soon as the ink was dry on the contract.

If you engage with your customers in an honest and mutually-beneficial way, they will appreciate it. If you build a relationship, there are many tools available to help you maintain it. If you repackage traditional, hackneyed, one-sided sales techniques with a veneer of “engagement,” all but the most naive will see through you.

image by s myers

Peter Shankman has a post today about an ill-conceived comment posted to 7-11′s Facebook page. I haven’t researched it to find out what their reaction is, but we can guess based on past experience. They will issue an apology, and someone might even get fired.

Peter’s blog is full of comments from people discussing whether the comment is offensive, whether we’re being too PC and what this slip-up says about 7-11′s social media policies and corporate voice.

The issue raises lots of questions, but as to the question of “How did this happen?”, I can answer that one:

A person made a joke in an effort to amuse other people. It didn’t work.

Don’t suppose that’s ever happened to you?

Folks, we’ve got to get used to this. If we want brands to use social media and be more edgy, more interesting, more topical and more timely, they are going to screw up every now and then. If every screwup becomes a new target for America’s favorite pastime of self-righteous indignation, brands are going to stop trying.

Do we want every company communication in social media to be boring, bland and homogenized? If so, then let’s keep attacking them for every misstep.

When I worked for a small independent record label and music distribution company, I accidentally sent a newsletter to one of our artist lists where I got the name of his most recent album wrong. I immediately sent a follow-up email apologizing for the mistake and blaming it on a long day.

In the interim, at least three people wrote back calling me some variation of an idiot who deserved to lose his job for this grievous error. One of them, on reading my apology, wrote back again. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’ve had a long day, too. There was no need for me to be so unpleasant.”

What happened to change his mind? My first email, in his mind, came from a faceless company. My second came from a person, and he could empathize with the idea of a person making a mistake.

Keep that in mind the next time some corporate tweet or status update rubs you the wrong way. It probably wasn’t written by a committee, but by a person trying his or her best.

image by fireflythegreat

We’re having a lot of work done on our house, including turning our attic into my awesome home office/aerie/fortress of solitude. I like our contractor very much, but now that the work has stretched past two months, it’s starting to wear me down. Earlier this week we were talking about the schedule and without thinking, I said, “I’m really tired of having you guys here.” His very reasonable response was, “Yep, it’s not a convenience.”

I started thinking about the many little ways that this experience has been inconvenient, and some of them could be alleviated somewhat with freely available web tools. So, if you’re a contractor, here are some things you could do that I’m sure your customers would appreciate. They may not all involve social media per se, but the general principles are there.

1. I never know who’s going to be here when.

Once or twice a week, usually when one of us is on our way out the door, the contractor will tell me the upcoming schedule. I don’t write it down, so I certainly don’t remember it. How about putting the schedule in a Google Doc and updating it daily? Or a shared Google Calendar? That would require some extra time at the end of the day on the contractor’s part to update all the schedules for all jobs, but it would be well appreciated.

You could also create a Posterous blog just for this job, and the contractor, subs and homeowner could update that via email. Or a private Facebook group.

2. I don’t know who all these people are.

In the course of our various endeavors, there have been roughly 1,012 tool belt wearers in and out of the house. I have been introduced to all of them, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten a lot of their names. (Although, given that this is the Chapel Hill area, I’ve known a few of them for 15+ years and one is a guitar player famous in the indie rock world).

Take a picture of the folks who are going to be working on my house with your cell phone, and post them somewhere. They could go on the Posterous blog or the Facebook group, too.

3. I’m not always here to answer questions, and even when I am, they don’t always get asked.

I spent 20 minutes talking to the painting contractor on Monday about what colors went where. On Wednesday his guys showed up without him, and painted one (thankfully small) hallway the wrong color. Again, how about a Google Doc with all the information that anyone can refer to?

4. How can I recommend you to my network if you’re not online?

Again, I’ve been very happy overall with our contractor. I would happily recommend him to my friends. If he had a Facebook page for his business, I would go there and like it, and leave a positive comment. But he doesn’t. I know, like everybody, he’s busy running his business and trying to have a life. But the hour that it would take him to set up a basic page would be time well spent, especially in this tech-heavy, relationship-oriented community.

There are lots of other tools that Google makes available for small and local business, and I’m finding I search for a lot more than just restaurants on Yelp. Plus, small businesses benefit from the Google juice they get from having searchable content on a blog or videos on YouTube, just like big businesses. There’s an electrician in town with a white truck that says www.chapelhillelectrician.com on one side and www.carrboroelectrician.com on the other. That’s a guy who understands the value of SEO to a local business.

But we’ll leave it at that for now. What suggestions would you have for local service providers that would make you a happier customer?

image by geishaboy500

I’ve been writing like a fiend all weekend, trying to finish my part of The Executive’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy. Last night around midnight I finished a particularly thorny section on listening, monitoring, analytics and calculating the ROI of your social media activities. I think I’m feeling a bit punchy, because here’s a paragraph I just wrote, about sales people using LinkedIn to make connections.

There is one thing many LinkedIn users agree on: if you’re requesting a connection to someone you don’t know or who you met in passing, for the love of all that is holy, personalize the message that LinkedIn sends with the introduction request. Nothing says, “I’m in a hurry to get as many connections as possible” more loudly and clearly than sending the standard, “I’d like to add you to my professional network” message. Your request is much more likely to be well-received if you say, “Looks like we share similar interests in particle acceleration,” or “We met at the National Association of Underwater Taxidermists conference in Poughkeepsie. I spilled pomegranate juice on your man purse.”

photo by smi23le

Last night The Mrs looked over my shoulder at Tweetdeck and said, “Everybody’s talking about Old Spice.” It’s the hottest topic in social media, marketing and advertising right now. Built on the success of the video embedded above, which now has more than 13 million views on YouTube, the integrated social media campaign features shirtless ab merchant Isaiah Mustafa, who recorded dozens of personalized YouTube responses to all kinds of people who mentioned Old Spice on Twitter and Facebook. And not just Ashton Kutcher and Alyssa Milano: in a quick scan I saw three videos addressed to people I know personally, not just through social media.

No doubt this campaign will win dozens of awards and be the subject of multiple case studies. I look forward to seeing some hard analytics showing how this campaign actually affects Old Spice sales. In the meantime, assuming one of the goals was to raise awareness of Old Spice, I think we can mark that goal achieved.

I just had a lunchtime conversation with my colleague John Mosier, who leads our content strategy initiatives. We talked about the reasons we think this campaign succeeded. In essence, they used the techniques of social media and raised them up to the brand level in a way that few companies have done.

In other words, they made it scale.

(It was no mean feat. This excellent article at ReadWriteWeb talks about the team that made it happen.)

Here’s what they did right:

1. They understood the communities they were addressing. They knew how people communicated in those channels and how they liked to be addressed. They spoke the right language. They even got positive responses to their video directed at the “anonymous” users of 4chan, which is perhaps not the easiest community to impress.
2. They understood the channels they were using, what the individual characteristics of those channels were and what benefit they could derive from each.
3. They had great content. Everybody wants their campaign to “go viral,” and the Old Spice campaign demonstrates once again what it takes to make that happen. The scripts for the videos are genuinely funny, edgy and innovative.
4. They had great talent. Despite my description above, Isaiah Mustafa is much more than a pretty torso. He’s a talented comic actor with great timing, and is apparently an ironman, considering he stood in a towel for a very long time, cranking out video after video. Isaiah was supported by a social media team and a group of writers who are obviously at the top of their game. I’ve watched a dozen of the videos and haven’t seen a single one that wasn’t genuinely funny.
5. They knew when to quit. Rather than milking it to the point where people were sick of it, they left on a high note, ending the personalized video responses today with a thank you video to everyone. The comments to that video on YouTube are mostly along the lines of “Oh, no! You can’t go!”

No doubt we will see a flood of imitators trying to duplicate Old Spice’s formula. Many of those efforts will ring hollow. Inevitably, some will be downright embarrassing. I’m sure a lot of corporate marketers are looking at this and thinking, “All you need to make a splash on the Web is a good gimmick.”

Good marketers already know that breakthrough campaigns are built by smart people with great ideas, amazing content and a solid understanding of their customers and the places they congregate, backed by intelligent execution.

This blog post is now diamonds.

When a telemarketer calls from a company I do business with, I’m more likely to listen to at least the start of their pitch, because I already have a relationship with them and maybe they’re calling with something relevant or important. Companies know that and take advantage of it.

A lot of those calls start off like this:

“We’d like to thank you for being a valued customer.”

Well, that’s nice. You’re welcome. Is that all?

No, that’s not all. What inevitably follows is something like, “… by giving you the opportunity to buy this other product or service from us.”

Oh, so you’re not really calling to thank me for being a valued customer, are you? You’re exploiting our existing business relationship to try to sell me something else.

Funny, I don’t feel so valued anymore. I just feel like somebody who gets an extra sentence added to the front of your script.

I had a great call with Zena Weist recently, a lovely human being and one of the first people I met in social media. Zena is now director of social media at H&R Block. We talked about their Get It Right initiative for my upcoming book, The Executive’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy.

The whole point of the Get It Right community and the activities surrounding it is to answer people’s tax questions and use their expertise to help people. Their stated purpose in creating the community is customer retention, which, when you think about it, is bizspeak for “thanking our customers.” (And, brilliantly, they will answer anyone’s questions. They don’t ask whether or not you’re an H&R Block customer.)

How much more meaningfully can you say “thank you” than by being there to help at tax time?

Think about what you’re giving your customers who have chosen to follow you on Twitter, read your blog or “like” you on Facebook. Are you sharing content, information and assistance that makes their lives better? Is anything you offer online going to make it easier for someone to sleep better at night?

Are you really thanking them for being your customer and giving them something of value? Or are you exploiting the relationship to sell to them?

If you want to say thank you, say thank you. If you want to say, “Thank you, and…” make the “and” something your customers want, not something you want.

photo by SOCIALisBETTER

In my last post I mentioned I had sent a friend a long email in answer to her questions about using social media to promote her orthodontia practice. I talked about the difference between spamming your friends and promoting your business. In the second part of the email, I gave her some specific tips for integrating all the social media channels.

Here’s a quick blueprint for what I would do if I were starting a small, service-oriented local business:

Try to give your business a unique name that you can own in Google search results, that has the URL available, that you can get as a user name on Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. All of that will make you more searchable. Think about how people might be searching Google to find an orthodontist.

There’s a white truck I’ve seen driving around town. On one side it says chapelhillelectrician.com. On the other, carrboroelectrician.com. There’s a small business owner who understands search engine optimization.

Once you’ve picked a business name that you think you can own:

1. Buy the URL from someplace like GoDaddy or Network Solutions. Once you buy the URL, you can point it wherever you want, like to a blog or your business’ website, (although these days there is less and less difference between the two).

2. Set up a blog at WordPress.com. Write about who you are and why you’re starting the practice. Try to post something useful and interesting at least once a week. If you read a great article somewhere that answers a question a patient might have, write up a quick post about why you think it’s interesting and then link to the article you read. You don’t have to write something original, long and thoughtful every time, as long as you’re frequently sharing things of value.

3. Set up a Facebook page for your practice. Let all your friends know you’ve started the page. Use your personal Facebook account to let people know you’ve created the business page, but only mention it occasionally. Let people decide if they want to follow the professional you; don’t force it into your personal stream.

But don’t shy away from mentioning what you’re doing at work. When you open the practice or have milestones, share them in your personal stream if you want. That’s what I do. I don’t talk about SAS all the time, but I do link my SAS blog and mention big happenings, because that’s part of the totality of who I am.

Link your blog to your Facebook business page, so that when you post on your blog, it’s shared on your Facebook page as well. You can do that through the Facebook Notes feature, but I find the Networked Blogs Facebook app works better.

3. Create a Flickr account for your business. Maybe your patients will let you take pictures of them and post them there. (You’ll have to feel that out. No idea if that runs afoul of HIPAA. Also, a lot of your patients are likely to be minors and then you’d need parental permission.)

Link your Flickr account to your Facebook page as well, and promote it on your blog.

4. Create a YouTube channel for your business. Buy a small handheld video camera like a Flip or Kodak Zi-8. Shoot a video of yourself talking about who you are and why you became an orthodontist. Shoot videos that explain procedures, or answer questions people have. I’ll bet if you made a video called “Top Ten Misconceptions People Have About Orthodontists” and put it up on YouTube, you’d get lots of hits.

Link your YouTube channel to your Facebook page, and embed the videos as posts on your blog.

When you post blog posts, videos or photos, include key words in the description and tags like “orthodontia,” “orthodontist,” “braces,” “Chapel Hill,” “Carrboro,” etc. That will make it more likely people will find them in a search.

4. Create a Twitter account for your business. Use the Twitter account to promote your blog posts, videos and photos. But more important, use it to share information about orthodontia that people will find useful, as I described above.

Search Twitter for all the important keywords and see who is talking about those topics. Follow them, and the people they follow. See if there are any Twitter lists devoted to your field.

Use a tool like Tweetdeck that will allow you to set up search columns. You could set up columns for search terms like “Chapel Hill orthodontist,” and you’d see if someone tweeted, “Does anybody know a good orthodontist in Chapel Hill?” You could respond and say, “I’m a Chapel Hill orthodontist. What questions can I answer?”

You can also set up Google Alerts for all those keywords as well, and you’ll get an email notification from Google whenever anybody talks about them.

Lots to think about. You wouldn’t have to do all these things at once, or all of them at all. In order of value I would suggest:

1. A blog
2. A Facebook page
3. A Twitter account

Set up all three of those and get them integrated, then think about adding other channels.

For even more information about using social media to promote your business, big or small, I highly recommend the Marketing Over Coffee website and podcast. They have these connections — especially local search — down to a science.

And for more specifics about Facebook marketing, my friend Justin Levy wrote the book.

photo by ShieldConnectors