The Foush » strategy

SES & Social Media Strategy: what happened to ethics?! (A rant)

Rahaf — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 03:35:31 +0000

I was all set to cover the Social Media Success panel at SES Toronto. I was excited to see how I could apply my New Media & Strategy background to generate higher traffic and ranking. Little did I know what would be said in that panel.

Details: It should have been called “What not to do in Social Media.”

Moderator: Mitch Joel, President, Twist Image

Speakers:

Marshall Clark, Director of Search, Organic
Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts, LLC
Liana Evans, Director of Internet Marketing, KeyRelevance
Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear

I was especially looking forward hearing Mitch Joel speak because I have been reading his blog for a while, and he is definitely one of the brightest voices in the Social Media & Marketing space. I also love his work at PodCamp. You should definitely subscribe to both his blog posts and his podcasts.

Anyway, a little into the session and I started to get a little puzzled. While Liana Evans had presented some actual examples of how certain companies had used the social media space to build a dialog with their consumers, what Marty Weintraub and Stephan Spencer had to say really disturbed me

SECRETS DON’T MAKE FRIENDS

The focus seemed to be on corporate strategies trying to get as many people as you can to subscribe to your social network profiles by almost tricking them or manipulating them.

YOU CAN’T MAKE PEOPLE CARE

Stephan Spencer spoke about a corporate MySpace tactic to building a large base of friends. He suggested to trick consumers into thinking that you were popular so that they would be more willing to add you to their contact list by to adding “Bands, celebrities and DJ’s because they’ll take anybody.” This will inflate the number of friends you have. Then, after a while, once your hapless consumers have joined, you can quietly remove the celebrities and bands leaving you with only your consumers.

At this point, I was visibly appalled and judging by the expression on his face, so was Mitch. Joey DeVilla, the who was also liveblogging echoed my sentiments. I couldn’t believe this was the advice that was being given to people! I mean seriously, so you’ve got two thousand friends but SO WHAT?

I always tell clients that it’s all about what you want to use the medium for that matters. So are you communicating with them? Do you want them to try or buy something?

YOU CAN’T FAKE REPUTATION

Stephan also had a lot to say about “building credibility” on sites like Wikipedia, so that you can use the influence to negotiate with Digg Power users and other social networking superstars who will then push your content in exchange for you helping them out on. So in exchange for Digging your article, you’ll help them set up an article on wikipedia. That’s all fine and good but if you’re going to negotiate posting content based on a corporate agenda, then you’re going to lose all the “street cred” you’ve worked so hard to build. People will see your intentions aren’t authentic.

He even suggested heavily using the StumbleUpon feature to send it to all the contacts you’ve amassed because if you send it to a specific person, then they’ll have to view the URL before they can continue stumbling. It’s one thing if the site is interesting, but to do it in the name of raising rankings is annoying, and quite frankly short sighted.

Mitch tried to undo some of the damage but I think even he was unprepared for the what was said today. He was fabulous and gave some great advice on how to build authentic conversation which I will put in a following post along with the interview I did after the session.

My Take: Defending the Social Media Space

Here are my personal pillars of Social Media- and what I wish I could have told all those people in that room taking notes today. I say this as a blogger, a content creator, a consumer and a human being. I also say this in defense of the countless of corporations and people like Mitch, and Joey and Amber who are putting time and effort into creating truly value adding content to the web.

Social media is about meaningful conversation – do you run into a party where there are people you’ve never met and start screaming in their faces about something you’re selling or something that you want? No. (If you do, then you probably have bigger problems than social media strategy) What you do is probably walk in take a look around, listen to the conversations, approach different groups and then add something meaningful into the conversation. If you’re not bringing anything of value to the table, then you probably shouldn’t be saying anything at all.

Meaningful conversation takes trust- The old bait & switch doesn’t really work with people on the internet. At least not for long. You can’t pretend to care about what they’re saying and then a short while later reveal your true intent to sell them something or manipulate them. Trust means you give and take. You share what you know with others and help others when you can. Relationships both online and offline are forged by trust, and by a track record of authentic actions. You might be able to fool people in the short-term but the long term damage to your reputation might take longer than you think to fix.

Trust requires authenticity – Who you are online and offline should be pretty close. Don’t pretend to be something or someone that you’re not. Say what you mean and mean what you say. Authenticity means that when you engage me in conversation, that you have a pure intent. You are actually interested in what I have to say and value my conversation

The internet has a short attention span and a long memory. Be smart. Treat your consumers like idiots and they won’t stick around for long.

SES Toronto – Measuring Success in a Web 2.0 World

Rahaf — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:09:32 +0000

Moderators:

Kevin Ryan, VP, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch
Andrew Goodman, SES Toronto Co-Chair & Principal, Page Zero Media

Speakers:

Heather Dougherty, Director, Research, Hitwise
Bret Grinslade, GPM for Website and Media Analytics, Microsoft
Adam S. Goldberg, Chief Innovation Officer, Clearsaleing
Mike Grehan, Global KDM Officer, Acronym Media

The Highlights: The Kevin Ryan Show

Ok I have to say that this panel was hilarious. Kevin Ryan did not hold back especially when it came to Microsoft and bloggers. I will be sprinkling his comments in throughout the post.

On Making Choices:

Kevin Ryan to Bret Grinslade of Microsoft: Two bucks a share, all you had to do was up it and you could’ve had Yahoo!, what happened?

Grinslade: No comment.

On Investing in Analytics: People not Technology Will Make Or Break You

Mike Grehan: At the end of the day, we’re really big about analytics. I live by the mantra from the 90/10 rule, for every 10 dollars you spend on a tool, spend 90$ on good staff using the data. It’s about the people hwo are sitting behind the tool and making sense of the data. Setting objectives is important. Jim Stern who has written books about internet marketing, he once said he could “measure the movment of a mouse across of your monitor” but why would you want to do that? So analytics could be based on garbage in, garbage out, if they don’t know either piece of the puzzle.

Common Pitfalls of Advertisers Trying to Get Numbers

Bret Grinslade: Some of it is technological, like having different servers. There are issues. I think because the internet is data driven, people want those numbers to match up. But that’s not the point, you want to measure marketing, end goals etc. From a broader perspective in offline marketing, which regular people call marketing.

Ryan: Do they call Chinese food, Chinese food in China?

Focusing On the Right Thing

Brett Grinslade: We have campaigns where we have a bunch of spend, and then we run a $15 million ad campaign on TV. We pretend the metrics within digital media space is isolated. In the end, the common thread are the people. The key words are not by products, they are proxies for people’s intent. You should know who comes to your website and why.

We’re focusing more on the details to understand the audience instead of analyzing each piece of behaviour. You need to have layers:

the operations around managing keywords,
business strategy to manage short term goals,
At the CEO level, you need a business plan, growth phase

Each of those layers needs a different type of information. It’s not as simple as matching

On The Context of Feedback

Kevin Ryan: Is attitudinal a made up word? What do you mean by it?

Brett Grinsdale: You have to be able to understand the perceptions of consumers analyzing data, even in rich media. If you track comments, then it matters if out of 1000 comments how many of them said you suck, or have a good product.

Ryan: “Are you talking about Vista? I’m a Vista user, now I’m a prozac user as well”

On Trends and Forecasting

Heather Dougherty: Let’s use Social Media as an example, since everyone talks about it. In the last panel Dustin said something about how search shows intent because people are telling you what they’re looking for. Social Media is about expression.

Victoria’s Secret has one of the biggest allegiance on Facebook . Now marketers need to recognize that dialog and start giving back. So in the group, members get coupons and elitist feelings. Marketers need to give assets and engage them.

On Brand Advocacy

Heather Doughty: At the end of the day it’s about the bottom line, which gets Executive’s attention. Back then it was hard to find them, so it was attitudinal. Now they are really easy to find, they make it public and you can pick them out easily.

On Filtering Feedback

Kevin Ryan: The internet has given everyone a voice and they’ve used it to bitch about your product and services. What do youpay attention to, and what do you ignore?

Mike Grehan: Voice of the customer, it’s very important to do this buzz monitoring and understand the attitude, what it is that they are saying. I think there’s a lot to go on sentiment analysis. People are talking, but what are they saying. You can go looking everywhere.

On Blogger Accountability

Ryan: So you just roll with it? It’s really hard to figure out what to pay attention to and keeping with the measuring theme, you’re measuring the opinion of “Some guy in his parents’ basement who doesn’t even have a right to his own opinion. Go live in the real world and come talk to me.”

Mike Grehan: Companies have to listen now, it’s not a broadcasting model anymore. Get the cues that give the meaning.

Andrew Goodman: You don’t have to go far. Rotten tomatoes is one. We’re still left with the idea of who do we trust on ratings? Users challenging other users is how you discover localized truth.

On Tracking

Brett Grinsdale: There are things that are easy to track, like profit. Not all traffic is created equal. So I have 10,000 more visitors this week doesn’t mean you have met your business goals. So from my point of view, you want to understand these metrics. So if you run a small hotel you can’t ignore TripAdvisor. So you can’t ignore those forums. You have different strategy. Some people want a do-it-all dash board.

Ryan: I have a vista dashboard, it’s still loading, I started in in January.

Selected Audience Questions

Question: I have broken down my linked in contacts into different categories, I have about ten thousand contacts-

Ryan: Sir, we need to get you a hobby.

Ryan: Don’t the linked in people get kind of pissed at being used like this?

Mike Grehan: The next guy who tries to head hunt me off of linked in, I’m going to go around to their house with an ax.
Ryan: The opinions expressed here by Mike Grehan are not the opinions of SES Canada

Questions: Is there methodology in terms of classifying your network?

Adam Goldberg: You want to track every type of advertising that you have: Influerncers, Introducers and Closers.

Question: It’s been about 45 minutes and we still haven’t gotten into measuring success in a 2.0 world…

Kevin Ryan: Sir, we have another 45 minutes, we’re getting there and you have to ease people into that you can’t just drop this on them.

At one point, I asked a question, making sure to point out that I do not live in my parent’s basement, and Kevin Ryan said he actually has heard of “The Foush” and that it was a good blog! Thanks Kevin!!