» Social Media

One of the phrases you hear a lot in discussions about social media is

“It is not about you”

This is because when you come across anyone who is all “me-me-me” that is a turn off. It is certainly not attractive, and in business attraction is a vital first step in making our online efforts turn a profit.

The danger though is that people take the simplistic view, they take the guidance and exaggerate it to mean “It is not about you at all“. This is just as bad as having too much you.

People come to you for a reason. They want to hear what you have to say, and they want to get to know the people behind those words.

When I left the advertising agency world to strike out on my own, I set up a company website. The language in that site was all “we”, “us”, “team”, “our solutions” with a view to making my company look corporate friendly. Quickly though I found out my customers were not attracted by that, it in fact made them nervous. They wanted to work with me, and would be constantly looking for reassurance that I was not going to hand their business over to someone else who they did not know.

Of course the solution would have been to have a team page showing photographs and descriptions of team members, and get them involved in blogging and communicating with customers. I could not do that though, because my “team” was actually a basket of freelancers who I would outsource to on a case by case basis, so my solution was to drop the company site entirely and base my whole business around my blog.

The lesson was while the services were the same, and my ability to deliver did not change, this stand-off approach was damaging my business rather than helping it.

You might be doing the same thing.

Social Media is Socializing the Internet

More and more customers are becoming attuned to the social side of the internet. They like to deal with people rather than faceless corporate robots. This means letting personality shine, and relating to them.

Consider this as relationship building. Relationships are not just about gaining “opt-in” to your communications. It is like in any human interaction, yes there are narcissists who talk to you just to hear their own voice, but for the most part there needs to be an exchange of information, and some kind of bonding process for any kind of relationship to form.

When it is about you

• Are you real? - There are so many spammers and scams online that anything that shows you are real human beings will provide reassurance. This human face will also encourage people to interact with you, it is much more welcoming and inviting, and will encourage people to want to get to know you better.
  • Write under your real names
  • Show photographs
  • Add personal details to anecdotes
  • Use multimedia so people can hear and see you
• Your stories - We do not want to hear the same old stories that everyone tells, we want to hear your case studies, your anecdotes, and learn from your experience.
• Show proof - Potential customers want to see evidence of your solution and expertise, can you actually deliver on the promises you are making? When I write a public blog critique I get more customers. My expertise becomes self-evident, because they can see real world solutions in action. How can you make your expertise self-evident?
• Build trust - For anyone to make the leap to actually putting down money with you they need to be able trust you. Are you established, capable, honest, and reliable?
• Do I like you? - Service businesses where the customer works closely with the vendor are often differentiated by relationships, they need to like you and want to work with you.

In summary … Why YOU rather than anyone else?

… But it is not ALL about you

We should not get carried away, as mentioned earlier, “me-me-me” is not good. Your messages still need to come down to how everything relates to your prospects issues, wants, challenges, problems and desires.

• Audience focus - Focus on the exact people who you want to attract and on serving their needs. It is not about selling your product but about matching your solutions to their problems and communicating how that works.
• Find the pain points - Continually drill down into your audience, do surveys, polls and speak to customers to find out the issues they are facing and what their biggest challenges are.
• Provide beneficial context - Rather than talk about your products features, describe your customers problems then explain how you solved them and the benefits and results your customers achieved.
• Show empathy - If you do all of this right then you are demonstrating that you understand your audience and therefore can help them better than anyone else. The combination of this empathy together with expertise and an attractive persona will encourage more customers to confidently go with you rather than any competitor.

In summary … WIIFM - answer the big question in any prospects mind; “What’s In It For Me?”.

Be the Solution With Personality

Today with social media quickly becoming a key weapon in your outreach arsenal, it is not enough to just have a solution, you have to be the people your customers are happy to work with and want to interact with. This means being three dimensional human beings, with compelling stories, and self-evident expertise to back it up.

Talk to your customers about their subjects, presented how they want it, but with your personality and case studies, and your customers will be attracted and buy from you with confidence.

Over to you

What is your experience? Have you bought something based on your relationship with the people in the company? Do people buy from you because of your relationships? Please share your thoughts in the comments …

Between blog posts and tweets, internet users generate an enormous amount of content on any given topic daily. While there’s many products and websites that will aggregate this data, relatively few actually analyze it. We at Boalt interactive thought it would be fun to put together an website which does just that with a topic that people are sure to talk about - Gossip Girl.

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Social Media has had a positive and negative affect on e-commerce. Some may immediately say, it holds people accountable, but what happens to those customers you’ll just never be able to satisfy?

Take for instance our start up, RushMyPassport.com, we’ve helped close to 20,000 people receive expedited passports in just 2008 alone but when you search our company online you get a couple complaints on the web from companies like Ripoff Report or the Better Business Bureau. What about the 99.9999% of our satisfied customers? You don’t hear about them on those websites.

So let me ask this question, why is it that major companies get to trade carbon credits and offset their carbon footprints with the good of others to cover up their bad, and these companies focus so much on just the bad? They should give you an opportunity to publish the good as well. It’s kind of annoying if you ask me. I can’t even begin to tell you how many potential customers we’ve lost due to a couple inaccurate complaints. Especially to the BBB, we pay them a yearly fee so that consumers can complain. It’s ridiculous, their rating system is based on number of complaints not a percentage of satisfied customers to unsatisfied customers. This model seems to work in the favor of the business with less customers.

I think the important thing to remember is that it’s very important to encourage your satisfied customer to share their experiences with your company online. You can easily do this by adding a simple widget like Addthis.com.

Tonight, I headed over to the Science Club, a cool little bar in Washington, D.C.  (trust me, it’s cooler than it sounds)  and I heard Tim O’Reilly talk about government 2.0 and social media.  He specifically talks about government transparency,  public/private partnerships and trying to bring web 2.0 into the government.  I was fortunate to have my camera on me and I filmed him talking.  Try to zone out the darkness and background music…

Mark Zuckerberg's lame corporate profile shot

We all know that Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire but the big question that I have is, did he sell his soul to the devil getting there?

I’ve been a big fan of Facebook since its inception.  However, in recent days, it’s become more evident that their approach to success is selfish and user security and privacy is slowly becoming less of a priority.  I see more and more users getting hacked and sending out crazy emails that bait you into some sketchy malware website - urgh.  I even got fooled the other day by some crazy message.  Where’s it going to stop. (not to mention Facebook is done a good job at keeping this out of the media)

I liked the days where Facebook had a targeted niche of well rounded individuals that didn’t play dirty.  I feel like its become a centralized highway of unsolicited crap that I get on a daily basis which I have to weed through to actually hear from my friends.  It’s getting annoying.

I’m a big fan of opening up the application development but there has to be some sort of quality control, some of these apps are just plain ridiculous and all they want you to do is click on ppc links.

So is the house of cards going to collapse?  Probably not, but it’s due for a major correction.  Current market conditions are making the few surving online advertisors smart and this will eventually catchup with Zuckerberg.  I think he needs to stabilize his growth and think about quality and not quantity.  Advertisers would be happy to pay more to have better conversions.

Call me crazy but I see this as the beginning of the end of the 10 billion dollar valuation.  Facebook is here to live on forever, but I think Zuckerberg is in for a big suprise.

This morning TechCrunch posted an article of some talks of Facebook acquiring Twitter.  The rumor on the street is that that Facebook was offering $500 mil of their already overvalued stock.

TechCrunch reports: “Facebook has raised $516 million in funding to date, while Twitter is backed by $20 million in investment. Twitter boasts 6 million active users, while Facebook reports more than 120 million.”

I’m on the fence as to whether this would be good for the tech community.   I like the idea of the expanding Twitter’s existing reach and making it a lot more powerful than it is.  I also like the idea of it becoming a more stable platform with the right team behind it.  My main concern is that Zuckerberg will try to integrate it in with Facebook too much and cause it’s unforeseen death.

Either way, Twitter, of which I’m a big fan, does need to start thinking about its future and quick burn rate.

What are your thoughts on Facebook acquiring Twitter?

Last night, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins, from Mashable wrote the blog entry, “Just What is Social Media, Exactly?”  As an owner of an interactive agency, this is a topic that’s of great interest to me and I am always interested to learn other points of view on social media.

Marks start’s out by referencing Brian Eisenberg’s post from FutureNow:

“The biggest problem I have with the term “social media” is that it isn’t media in the traditional sense. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all the others I don’t have the word count to mention aren’t media; they are platforms for interaction and networking. All the traditional media — print, broadcast, search, and so on — provide platforms for delivery of ads near and around relevant content. Social media are platforms for interaction and relationships, not content and ads”

I think that Brian is trying to deconstruct the meaning of the word “media” too much and should be focusing on the broader picture.  To that extent, I do agree that social media is a platform and the term “social media” applies, as does the term “new media”.  I don’t think there is much confusion between new media and the traditional sense of media either.  Why can’t social media simply be defined as the interaction and relationships formed on new medias?  We’ve just barely seen the tip of the iceberg.  Social media is about to entrench us in every type of way we know, including mobile and eventually TV. (more…)

Embracing the green space in today’s eco-friendly world has proven to be an overwhelming success for my client and friend, Shawn Burst of Jeriko House.  Every bit of this story is like a marketing fairy tale.  Hug a tree, test the waters and find yourself in a forest of greenies lining up at your door for what could be the next, most revolutionary home to hit the housing market.

It all begins in the wake of hurricane Katrina when Shawn had just lost his family’s dream home.  Determined to build a new home and not willing to wait years, he set out on a mission to find a new high-end housing alternative overseas.  After visiting engineering firms in Germany and exotic finishing manufacturers in Bali, Shawn came home with the most incredible vision which he named Jeriko House.  He called BOALT to design and develop a new alternative home brand literally from scratch.

After investing a significant budget in developing his website, he left faith and one press release to do the rest.  It was only a matter of days before the website started to received hundreds of visitors a day from blogs such as InHabitat, TreeHugger, JetsonGreen, Luxist and Architect Magazine to name a few.  Some reviews better than others but you know what they say, all press is good press.
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After several weeks of hard planning, I’m sure that Peter Corbett of IStrategyLabs is glad to know that the Apps for Democracy was a huge success.  I’m glad that BOALT took home the agency 1st prize and was able to build an application that was going to help the community so much. So what’s next for DCHistoricTours.com?

After speaking with D.C.’s Chief Technology Officer, Vivek Kundra, last night, he told me that one of the reasons we were chosen was because they wanted to use our application on main D.C. inauguration website.  This would provide the many anticipated visitors this January a helpful resource to learn more about our nation’s capitol.  I thought that was pretty exciting so naturally I stayed up last night wondering what I could do to improve the app. (more…)

There is an old saying that cobbler’s children have no shoes. This holds equally true for BOALT, even though we don’t have any children.  We tend to get so entrenched in developing social media strategies for our clients that somehow we end forgetting about our own.  This seems to be a trend with any agencies self-promotional efforts.

I’ve never been one to cut the line but the other day I decided to make it my mission to focus on our own social media campaign.  As I was thinking about the different resources available to me, I decided to take a very different approach.  I created an online banner test campaign and pointed it to my Twitter page to see if I would gain any new followers.  I hope that I didn’t sell my soul to the devil.

The results were less than impressive. We served 10k impressions on 3 websites just for my own amusement.

1. TechCrunch received 21 clicks out of 10526 impressions.
2. Mashable received 22 clicks out 10530 impressions.
3. Silicon Valley Insider received 7 clicks out of 10528 impressions.

We’ll never know how many of these clicks actually converted and yes I know, 10k is a very small test but it gave me enough insight to know that you can’t cut the line. Back to the traditional labor intensive, time consuming social media strategies that we know work.