I use my personal brand here with the self-titled blog: GregdeLima.com for a few purposes:

• Networking
• Sharing Ideas
• Giving other people a place to learn
• Share my thoughts whether you like them or not

The purpose of using my Personal Brand as a money making opportunity, whether though ads or affiliate marketing is not my priority, nor is it even close to being one. But some people see their personal brand as an opportunity to reap the benefits of “twitterati” status, to keep making more money than the amounts they make as consultants.

A personal brand for me, is a way of self-promotion, making a name for yourself, and proving your worth in whatever field you focus on. If you are a marketer, a scientist, a camp director, whatever; your personal brand is a form of expression and proof, not a lucrative money making machine.

Granted, if they have the traffic they deserve it, without a doubt. But I find there to be a problem when making money from your personal blog, is your priority. Business and personal should be separate.

But that’s just me… What do you think?

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The general statement is that,

Gen-Y isn’t leaving social media.

And while that might be true, the focus around that statement isn’t as is should be. The assumption that we’re addicts and the fact that simply because we have grown up with all these Web 2.0 tools means we will forever be online is a general assumption that could be a terrible demise.

The statistic that has gained the most flame and fanfare is that, 67% of experts agree that,

By 2020, Members of Generation Y (today’s “digital natives”) will continue to be ambient broadcasters who disclose a great deal of personal information in order to stay connected and take advantage of social, economic, and political opportunities.

The problem I have with this isn’t the “experts” that aren’t even Gen-Y’ers, or the fact they’re basing off of statistics that aren’t data backed, but are opinions. Opinions cannot be measured. There may be people who agree with opinions, but there is no data to back an opinion.

The assumption that the Gen-Y’s willingness to share, express ourselves online, and as a whole be more “social” online cannot be true for just Gen-Y. There are plenty, if not, a vast majority of people who are outside of the millennial age-range who share as much, if not more than us.

The growth of the demographic range that isn’t millennial, is equally important for marketing purposes as the focus of the Pew Internet Poll. We, as millennials, are not the only people willing to share our data, nor are we the people who will become the most sharers in the future. As it stands I know more people outside of my generation who are more likely to share about their lives and become some of the most “stalk able” people online.

Two friends of mine have their baby children on Twitter with their own accounts and updates. Over at Pingdom they have graphs of Ages of Social Network Users.

Of the top user groups, ages 24-44 dominate for the majority the social networks sphere. So how does it compare to say that Gen-Y will become the major factor in the future of the sharing network? Yes, Gen-Y has the potential to become a massive force in the sharing world in 2020. At the same time however, we are more conscientious of the fact of how are data is used. We have grown up with Spam emails, Facebook Privacy issues, and an overall knowledge of our privacy. We are cautious in what we do and how we do it.

What do you think of the way Gen-Y uses social media? Will we be as the Pew internet poll says? Leave a comment!

Download the Pew Internet Study.

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The issue here is that there are people that use Facebook for things other than playing Farmville or whatever the next Zynga game is, and use it to connect with their friends or share pictures or use Facebook for what it was originally intended for. A Social Network!

As marketers we try to get to those people, tap into what their needs are and create a desire for a product or a service. But there comes a point where the users of these social networks don’t give a rat’s ass about what’s going on in the Ads sidebar of Facebook or any ad whatsoever.  Especially my generation -”Gen Y”- is so used to being bombarded with pop-ups, cause I mean, hey…we grew up with it. That simple ads must become relevant, built upon our necessities in a way that isn’t intrusive, but is interesting enough to make us click on it. No easy feat when an ad can receive a .025% Click Through Rate commonly.

One of my favorite ad platforms is Hulu’s. Every time a commercial is show, it asks, “Is this Ad relevant to you?” I use that button every time a commercial comes up! Why am I being shown an ad for birth control? I’m quite positive I’m not a female, so I click No. The next day I got a beer ad for a beer I enjoy, might have been Heineken(I think?), and what happened? I swear to you the next day I bought Heineken instead of Yuengling, a tough feat being I love my Yuengling!

The truth of it all is, not everyone wants to be engaged. Not everyone goes home opens Google Reader and starts reading 50 different blogs a day. Not everyone comments on the blogs or ReTweets on Twitter.  We cannot shut these people out of traditional marketing techniques, and at the same time we cannot make them use Social Media or Social Networks in the way we want them to.

Sure you might call me too nice about it, or not strong enough in my techniques. But that’s just it, the consumer needs to be respected, not forced and cajoled. If you’re not creating something that satisfies a need, what benefit are you giving the consumer?

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Go Offline

Building communities online is great. The best way, though, to build a community is to take your online presence and go offline.  A worked with Carrboro Creative Coworking for a summer and one of the ways I used to build our community was to create a TweetUp. This allowed people to come into the business, explore, tinker, and become a part of the place even if it was for just a couple of hours. By getting people together so they can know each other on a personal offline level the interactions and the lasting effect of being around and shaking hands is infinitely stronger than just chatting it up on Twitter.

Be Human

Being human goes to even Social CRM. The key aspects of being human isn’t to sit around, automate everything you do on an online profile and just let things whip by. I’m not saying you need to be online every hour of the day, or respond to every single email that comes your way, but the simple fact that people recognize that someone is out there filtering information and only passing on what matters becomes a strong point in the eyes of the people that you’re engaged with. Being human isn’t about the vicious cycle of commenting, retweeting, or liking, but rather an obvious and empathetic point of view online towards others.

Email Works

Email marketing is by far the most optimal and effective means of Social Media Marketing. Personalization, transparency and basically not screwing it up, you’re better off with email as a more direct and thorough way to really reach out and build a community around your brand. Check out Blue Sky Factory or hit up DJ Waldow (@DJWaldow) for some info on their email marketing, and how you can build a strategy through BSF.

When it comes down to the end, what really matters is how are you giving back to the people? Are you giving them what they want, what they need?

Start building and stop being a robot! What do you think? Leave a comment!

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3. Student Branding vs Professional Branding

Quantitative Metric

Looking at metrics both website and click through rates from Twitter of Facebook will play a huge part in analyzing the raw numbers. What do the numbers mean as expectations? Do these match an ideal number that you need or want? How are these numbers converting into leads?

Raw numbers often imply identifying factors that as the interpreter we’re not 100% sure how to read the factors and how they will turn out in the short term.

Qualitative Metrics

Interpreting the quantitative metrics into the non-numerical goals of the business.  Take for example a qualitative metric I focus on: Is the time on the site resulting in more comments or more feedback through Twitter? Or, How are the new vs. returning visitors affecting interaction overall and distribution of the articles?

Taking the numbers and being able to relate them to a factor as part of the short-term expectations will allow you to keep track of where your small efforts are converting into larger leads. If you can manage to track these small efforts, in the long-term using these successful short-term ideals will lead to a stronger long-term result.

Copywriting

The short term bases a lot of it’s focus and metrics on being able to bring people through the blog, and have them become engaged in a part of your business.  There is one way to do this and it is through quality copywriting. By using keywords, out-linking, and linking within your own webpage, this helps you out on the Google end of things, organic searches. But apart from the SEO benefits, good copywriting is clear for the reader and makes the content easier to digest, and later, pass along.

By no means are these three an exhaustive list of ways to look at a short-term social media strategy.  These smaller (not less important), goals and opportunities in a short-strategy are like stepping stones in the overall Long Strategy.

What do you think? What would you add?

Image by NotSoGoodPhotography

Related posts:

1. Long or Short Social Strategy: Part 1 – Long Term
2. “Screw Google”
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Go Long

In the long term social strategy, the benefits are widely accounted to be a factor of the:

• Overall Strategy
• Goals Defined Within The Strategy
• Time
• Earned Media not Paid Media
• Scalability

By defining an overall strategy a company looks as to what the general marketing goals are, these aren’t the goals set aside just for the aspect of what is to be done in social media, but the entire goals of the marketing campaign as it fits into the company’s long-term goals. Should it be increased sales or an increased market share, this will naturally be a fluctuating variable. As this objective gets more clearly defined, the goals of just the social strategy become a huge player in the game.

I tend to believe that yes, numbers do not matter, but you must take that with a grain of salt. It’s not the number of Twitter followers you have, but how the followers that you do have are passing on the message and enhancing the brand online relating to your parent goals. Very Official Blog makes a great note of this noting,

Defining the Scope of  Conversation

Note, Shannon Paul here uses conversation as one of the leading factors in long-success of a social media strategy. In addition to the questions she poses I give you these:

Is what you find valuable to your customers or following base?

This was proposed to me by a contact at prAna. Is what you’re giving to your customers, whether through a blog, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube video beneficial to what their interests are? How will they use this to their benefit and later on bring them to being a part of your community? Being able to give quality work, whether your own or otherwise, shows that you care about who you are reaching out to. Building this base through true content and things that matter to them will be key for a long-term following.

Should you be arrogant or share the wealth?

This relates in a way to the question above. I tend to see a huge gathering of, especially Twitter, users pushing out/retweeting/@ replying information, blog posts, and generally content on just themselves or their brand. I personally think this is absolute BS. There is a reason these networks are called, “Social Networks”.  We are here to help out, whether it is a competitor, enhancing product, etc. the true benefit of social media comes from it’s virility and ability to reach out to hit the notes that get to our clients, this goes both for B2B as well as B2C.

Are you a creator, enhancer, or listener?

Where do you lie within these three? As a long-term strategy, the key is to embrace all three. As an example, Hubspot does an excellent job at this, both curating content, and absorbing content for later research, example: Must Watch: 12 Awesome Social Media Tutorials. This a prime example, by both combining top-notch content that is being enhanced through a widely view agency, brought in by listening carefully to the their sources to give it right back out again to their client base.

As time comes into the factor, Social Media Examiner often conducts their own research. Most recently, their main question asked was, “Just HOW MUCH time is needed to see solid success?” – the result?

When drilling down to the actual hours spent using social media tools, the largest group was in the 1 to 5 hours per week range.  Of that group, 43% are spending 4 to 5 hours each week on social media activities. A significant 56% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more each week and 30% for 11 or more hours weekly.  It’s interesting to note that 12.5% of marketers spend more than 20 hours each week on social media.

The most notable being,

The more user experience one has with social media marketing, the more valuable every minute spent on social media sites becomes.  The time spent on social sites is not as important as the actual results.  What we really should be looking at is what kind of results are you getting for that 1 hour, 4 hours, even 12 hours per week?

So as your strategy becomes further and further refined and enhanced, the time you need to spend online becomes less and less, hence the left handed offset in the average hours/week used online.

Source: Study Shows Time Pays With Social Media Marketing

Finally Scalability – I ask you to read a post I wrote a while back – Ignore Scalability: Until You Can’t

Stick around for Part 2 – How Short Term Fits Into The Long Term

Image By Another Print Please…

Related posts:

1. Long or Short Social Strategy – Part 2 – Short Term in Long Term
2. “Screw Google”
3. Social Abroad

The Data

The data that can be collected through customer programs, email lists, or any of the hundreds of sources available is precious; you don’t need me to tell you that. Every small piece of information that can be collected or responded to via Twitter or Facebook is an entity sensible enough to tip a customer in or out of what you offer. Jeremiah Owyang mentioned at Altimeter Group that,

For companies, real time is not fast enough. Companies need to be able to anticipate what customers are going to say and do, in order to keep up.

However this may be true, it seems almost unfeasible. Problems can be expected and they will arise; we cannot predict when and how they will come about, but as a company focused towards our clientele the client can expect for us to know about them and their problem.

Using the data in a way to understand, predict and embrace the client we are catering directly to the client’s expectations about the relationship they have with the product or service and going beyond what they expect. Why? Because “we” know already what they are expecting. Take for example, a customer expresses their concern via Twitter before engaging us we are aware through the data we collected: their situation, their concern, them as a customer, and their expectation. The data allows us to meet and exceed expectations and engage the client before they engage us!

The Human

The client doesn’t care what your department is or what your job description is. If they have a complaint or a problem, they expect an answer or a solution quickly, efficiently and that works on the first time around. Mashable has a very well expanded post on Social CRM and this graphic was included by Jacob Morgan of Chess Media.

The focus here for me, is on the right hand side noting “Human Decision”. This point here in my opinion is the make or break point in any social CRM interaction. Whether the decision by the human becomes an automated response or a human response should depend on the type of problem and the type of interaction, these choices should never be programmed responses until verified by a person.

Because of the expanse of social media and the interactions the way they can flow through blogs, Twitter & Facebook updates being transparent in your policies and bring the whole company together to understand the client, the problems possible, expectations of resolution will always be the key to understanding the best way to approach and be socially responsible for the fallout or success.

Social CRM is not new, nor has it changed the ways a company should treat it’s customers. Why is it though, that every customer service I interaction I have had through Twitter exceeds the kindness and more importantly the effort put out by when I call or email a customer service department? This isn’t right.

Whether or not your are being reached through social networks or not, the key aspects to giving excellent customer service from my view are:

• Listen – Take in everything the customer has to say, let them workout the details for you, vent (if they’re mad), and really just be quiet until they are done.
• Analyze – What have they said? What are their priorities? What do they want your help with? How can you give them what they want?
• Empathize – Don’t feel sorry for them and don’t throw a pity party, that would only make them even more frustrated. Truly try to understand what their situation was, and how would you feel if you were in that situation.
• React – Find the best solution that gives them back what they need. If possible, do something extra for them. There will always be policies to abide by, but if you can give them something better or go beyond what they need I can promise you they will come back.

Incorporating the data and a human element (empathy) social CRM will and has begun changing the way we look at social media.

Image by mcgill.alumni

Related posts:

1. We’re Losing the Social
2. Going Beyond The Sale
3. Long or Short Social Strategy – Part 2 – Short Term in Long Term

I have mentioned my use of Twitter for airlines or even when I have issues with my AT&T service(@ATTCustomerCare)or Bank of America(@BofA_help). In reality these are my first forms of outreach over calling or emailing a concern to their customer service department.

But, why do I reach out online first?

I choose to use Twitter primarily for customer service issues because these online presences recognize how quickly a bad situation can spread. All it takes is for someone else with a similar problem to ReTweet or acknowledge the concern and reply to it. These online entities tend to recognize social users much quicker and effectively, often giving better solutions, than if you were to rely on “old” forms of communications for customer service.

These online entities go beyond the sale of their initial product or service to give you a much better experience and bring you back to use them again and again. The increasing uses of social media for CRM is one that pushes these companies to adjust their policies and learn to truly give back to the clients investment with enhanced service and quality.

Here’s where I really want to give a shout-out to the BlueSkyFactory team and DJ Waldow (@DJWaldow) for really hitting up the opportunity and push their marketing to a phenomenal level.

I downloaded a BSF eBook (Ultimate Guide to Email) a while back, and like other online businesses filled out a contact sheet prior to the download; I didn’t think much would be done with this. Then, a few weeks later I received an email from DJ asking me if we could talk about BSF’s email marketing and how it it could fit in with what I do.

The problem here was unfortunately as a currently unemployed student (still overseas) I don’t have a use for email marketing. I told DJ this, and I messaged him on Twitter for “being a waste of his time and effort.” On the offhand though, that was because I didn’t have an immediate need to use email marketing.

The simple fact that BlueSkyFactory took the time to sit down, email me, and engage me makes me for when someone asks me about a preferred email marketing service, my first idea is going to be them, BSF. I understand that they are engaging seeking more clients and more users of their system looking for the sale and the revenue. But it was the attitude behind DJ’s actions and words both through email and Twitter that builds my trust and makes me want to choose them over another competitor.

The second implication I took from the actions taken is that when I do need email marketing, I will expect the same quickness and efficiency I found through them before purchasing anything as I should have after I begin to use their service. If not even better.

These kind of relationships are the ones that define inbound marketing and customer service relationships outside of just making money and increasing sales. They define the entity of the business, their trust, and the kind of relationship you should anticipate from a modern company. Imagine having your neighborhood mom & pop customer service from every company you deal with today.

What do you think? Do you have any recommendations or how CRM is changing with the online world?

Image by Piers Mason

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I often notice that when I am starting up with a new network or begin using a tool there are friends of mine that are already on there and have been using that source for a good time before myself. As a marketer this can turn out to be essential and with so many people deciding to leave Facebook (12,923 committed at 8:15am 22/04/2010), it leaves choices as individuals and advertisers whether or not using Facebook will continue to be a viable source of traffic and income.

The Big Four

When I’m asked by people who are just starting in personal branding or in the social media sphere, the top question I’m asked is, “What should I use?” If you’re a big social user you know what these are.

• Twitter
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Blog

The way we use these sites changes quite a bit depending on the user, company, or brand. As these four networks provide the largest collection of individuals and entities, along with the highest visitation rates on the entirety of the internet, these are by far the top networks to look for marketing opportunities.

In my perspective, while you don’t need to be everywhere to increase your visibility, a good use of good copywriting (affiliate link) within these top networks will get you the search engine results you need and turn your brand into everything that you expect.

However, taking most of this into account is from a personal brand point-of-view. This will drastically change depending on what you want to use these networks for. A while back I began using a service called DandyID. What it does is collect your social networks all in one place, and allows you to post them on your blog (you can see mine at the bottom) or on your Facebook page. Not only does this allow you to keep track of your own networks but allows other people on those networks to find you easily.

What networks do you use? Which do you use most? Is less more?

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2. Student Branding vs Professional Branding
3. Where Are You Going?

• Karl Sakas – @karlsakas – Blog – Marketing manager for HRBC, and a great person to interact with. A man who embraces change, incentives, and making the customer happy.
• DJ Waldow – @DJWaldow – Blog – The Social Butterfly Guy, he is the Community Director for Blue Sky Factory, and an email marketing wizard.
• Lisa Sullivan – @LisaSullivan – Blog - Founder and Lead Organizer for Tweet Divas, and works in PR/Marketing for NBC17 in Raleigh.
• Phil Mancuso – @PHMancus – MySpace page for music – One of my longest had friends in the Raleigh area. He composes his own songs, and performs often at The Pour House and other Raleigh bars.
• Meredith Morgan – @MMorganTriangle – VP Director of Marketing for CBHPW, conversations with her are never dull, and often lead to interesting ideas.

That is all for this week. Have a great weekend!

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