A survey of Inc. 500 companies shows the first decline in corporate blogging since 2007. Many are switching their content efforts to Facebook. Big mistake, as Janet Meiners Thaeler
points out in the post linked above. I agree with everything she says.

And here’s another way to think about it; Facebook is a valuable channel, but it’s not the Internet. It’s a walled garden, as we’ve come to call it. If you put your content solely on Facebook, you’re saying, “I don’t want my content on the Web, just this one place that can only be found one way by one group of people.” (Even if there are 800 million of them.)

As Janet suggests (and many of us have been advising companies for years), publish to your blog, then share the link in all your other networks.

As long as people still search the Web, a company blog should be at the core of your content strategy.

I recently got a robocall call from a home security company, offering me a free system so they could get a foothold in my neighborhood. I considered it for a moment, and then hung up, even though I want a home security system. Why?

Because I assumed they were lying. Do they really mean free, or are they just waiving some fee? Do I really think it’s going to end up costing me nothing? Clearly not.

Every time I get on an airplane, the pilot lies to me.

If there’s anything we can do to make your flight more enjoyable, please don’t hesitate to ask.

I’ve rung the call bell exactly once in all my miles of air travel, to ask a flight attendant to throw away a half-full cup of water. I had a two-year-old on my hands and nowhere to put the cup. She glared at me as though I had asked her to disrobe and sing show tunes.

How do you think your boss would react if you went into your next performance review and said, “I did everything I could possibly have done as well as anyone could possibly have done it. I am flawless and perfect.”

Yet that’s what most companies do with their marketing and communications. And when a real issue comes up, only then do they admit there might be something possibly that could maybe be ever so slightly better, and now that it’s been raised to their attention, they’ll address it immediately.

Your customers and prospects, especially the ones you want to attract and keep, know as much or more about your products and services as you do. They know the flaws as well as the benefits. They know how you stack up against your competitors. They know if you’re cheaper or more expensive. They know if you’re easier to use, or provide more value.

In every industry I’ve ever worked in, our prospects were extremely intelligent and well informed. When they came to us, they had done their research. They didn’t want a sales pitch; they wanted an honest exploration of whether or not our products could meet their needs. And I’ve been fortunate enough to work for companies who felt confident responding honestly, knowing that we would prevail.

Why is “We’re only human” an excepted tenet of life, but a last resort and an admission of failure when a company says it?

What’s the worst thing that could happen if you admitted to your customers that you know the truth as well as they do, are sincerely working to make things better and value their input in the process?

Could that really be a bad thing?

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.