Web Business by Ken Burbary

Social Media Business Cards

Is Social Media redefining how we exchange contact information? Will it push traditional business cards out of the picture? Contxts hopes so. Contxts is a new service that uses text messages to share your contact information with others. I learned about this service while chatting with fellow speaker Shannon Paul at Automation Alley’s Social Media Boot Camp.  Shannon recently began using the Contxts service and suggested I give it a try (word of mouth marketing at work!). While not perfect (Contxts is still an alpha service), it is a useful and very convenient way to share info via your mobile device if you are away from your computer.

Basically, Contxts works two ways. You can PUSH info directly to someone, or they can PULL your info through an SMS request.

The PUSH method works like so:

You send a text message to Contxt service in this format:

send *recipient_phone_number* 50500

So, if I want to send my contact info to friend Adam Cohen, assuming his phone number is 555-555-1234, the text message to Contxts would look like:

send 5555551234 50500

This would trigger Contxts to send the info, which I provided during the account setup earlier, and Adam would receive a text message that contains:

The PULL method works similarly.  Anyone can send a request to 50500 and retrieve your contact info, as long as they supply the correct username. The format for a PULL text message is:

username 50500

So, if I wanted to pull down the contact info of someone I met at a conference, Tweetup, etc.. but didn’t get to exchange business cards with, and I knew his/her username on Contxt, I would send:

johndoe 50500

This type of Digital exchange could be extremely handy if you’ve run out of business cards, at an event where you meet a large number of people, or simply prefer to manage your contacts info digitally like I do.

The recipient ONLY gets the info that you want them to. You can control this using the edit info screen after you register.

There is a potential down side that I see already. Like many popular social media services out there,  someone can request your info without prior approval. There is an option that you can check to alert you when someone does pull your info, but there isn’t anything you can do to filter who can/can’t or protect it. For many people this won’t be a concern, but for others, it may make them uncomfortable. I suggest being careful what information you make available via Contxts if you’re in the latter category. Remember, it is a free, public public service, so treat it as such when it comes to privacy.

That said, it’s fast, convienent, eco-friendly (no paper) and could ultimately be the beginning of another change in our Digital behavior.  Goodbye business cards. Hello Contxts!

If you need my info, feel free to retrieve it by sending this SMS message: kenburbary 50500

Five in the Morning

For those who aren’t regular readers of StickyFigure (if you’re not, you should be. Check it out), Steve Woodruff has been consistently churning out great discoveies with his Five in the Morning series. Five in the Morning is basically a blog post that highlights 5 of the most interesting and well written posts throughout the blogosphere.

Lately Steve has been inviting guests to add some new perspective and fresh content to the mix. When he approached me about being a guest author, I immediately said yes! So without any further ado, here is your daily dose of Five in the Morning:

Digital media continues to blur our online and offline lives. Spruce up your presentations and educate your colleagues with this fantastic list of 49 Amazing Social Media, Web 2.0 and Internet Stats, compiled by Adam Singer on the FutureBuzz blog.

Learn how to use a often overlooked feature of Twitter, “favorites”. Darren Rowse and Ari Herzog put together an excellent post on the Twitip blog that reveals how to use favorites, why you should use favorites, and illustrates how other people are using them.

It’s early, but one of the themes of 2009 seems to be “stop talking. start doing”. Shiv Singh, of Avenue A Razorfish, reminds brands of this and says Brands Must Do! Start doing by listening to consumers. It’s not done enough.

The ultimate do-it-yourselfer Marshall Kirkpatrick has outlined how to Build the Ultimate Social Media Cheat Sheet. Use it to get you up to speed on the social media activity in your market.

And finally, take these tips from The Difficult Art of Cold Pitching by Jon Burg, and apply them to avoid any mistakes when reaching out with a request to a community of people you have a weak relationship with. Chris Brogan even chimes in with his take.

Subscribe: Ken Burbary’s Web Business blog / Steve Woodruff’s StickyFigure blog
Follow on Twitter: Ken Burbary / Steve Woodruff

Improve your marketing with the social media halo effect

The volume of social media marketing conversations is at unprecedented levels. The discussion has gone mainstream, and is so loud that it is causing marketers, advertisers and PR professionals to think about social media and start asking questions. One of the most asked questions is:

Should I be engaging in social media to help achieve my business objectives?

Many early adopters, innovative marketers and anointed social media experts will answer unequivocally, YES! And in many cases, they are absolutely right.  However, a business needs to think carefully about this question before deciding how to answer because there are several components of a social media strategy. With this post, I will lay out a simple approach to help you get you started with social media marketing, in a way that will augment your existing interactive marketing efforts with a “Social Media Halo Effect”.

The 4 components of Social Media Marketing

Getting involved in social media, either for a business or personal brand, is not an all or nothing proposition. Much like interactive marketing, as Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang reminds us, social media marketing comes in several flavors.

• Listening - This is an ongoing exercise to monitor online conversations about specific topics, keywords, or brands. It is the basis for getting started in social media, and can provide ancillary business benefits in other ways, to be outlined further in this post.
• Engagement - Most commonly thought of as the  “talking” part of social media, this can manifest itself as a variety of forms. Everything from responding to blog posts or video posts via comments, or establishing a twitter account to engage in micro interactions with your customers . The most appropriate way to explain engagement is to think of it as being helpful, because as David Armano points out, we live in a world where the little things really do matter.
• Community- This may be appropriate if your brand has identified a customer need that it can fill better than anyone else. However, it’s not all sunshine and apple pie. Building and maintaining a community takes commitment, and hard work. If done well, the results can be more than expected, just ask Cisco.
• Experimentation - New tools, platforms, and services launch daily. Don’t be afraid to try them. Adopt new tactics that work, and shed ones that don’t. Don’t get hung up on small failures. Learn from them and move on. As Valeria Maltoni says, rapid prototyping should be your philosophy.

Start listening to conversations about your brand

Doing this is much easier than you might think. An entire micro-economy has emerged with the rapid growth of social media. There exists many vendors that offer listening tools and conversation monitoring services. Whether you decide to purchase a tool like Radian6, Techrigy’s SM2 or get started with free tools  like Google Blogsearch, Google Alerts or Twitter Search, the point is to start listening. Resist the urge to jump in and start talking. No one likes a loudmouth that only wants to talk about himself.

Dell and Verisign have been listening. So much that they have published case studies on how their social media monitoring has helped. You can download PDF case studies by clicking below:

Dell: Free Range Marketing

Verisign and Voce Communications

The Social Media Halo Effect

Listening needs to be the bedrock of your marketing strategy. In you want to have strong, valuable relationships with your customers and followers, then you need to be a good communicator. And good communicators are the best listeners. Listening to the online conversations about your brand will allow you to:

• Identify the most influential people online that are talking about you
• Identify where the conversations are happening (which sites, which social networks, which forums, etc…)
• Identify unmet customer needs
• Identify, in real-time, key events/issues that effect your brand reputation

The insights and learning that social media monitoring reveal is where the magic happens. This is the halo effect. What you learn by listening can impact many other components of your interactive marketing strategy.

Listening improves your strategy and research activities. You gain new, previously undiscovered, insights into not only your brand but also your competition.

Listening clarifies your content strategies by revealing what content is making an impact and what content should be reworked. It could be content that is delivered on your brand web site, email marketing programs, or online advertising campaigns. There are people having conversations about all of your online efforts, whether you’re listening or not. Why not listen and incorporate the feedback and learning into the content and messaging that you send out?

I touched on this briefly already but it warrants a deeper dive. Listening gives you a competitive edge. It broadens the reach of your competitive radar. You can learn about issues your competition is having with customers and exploit those opportunities to serve unmet needs. It allows a brand to  see/hear/learn about the competition in ways that in the past have been either 1) too expensive to do  2) simply not feasible

Listening can do more. It will also identify your brand ambassadors, influencers, and critics. Tell you where they are having conversations, what those conversations are about, and whether or not they have a positive or negative conversations.

Listening is underrated. And undervalued. I’ve described some but not all of the benefits listening will provide you. It has the potential to improve many of your marketing efforts, not just social media ones.

Don’t fret over figuring out which places you should be participating in social media. Some may be right for you, some may not. However, if there is only one social media step you take, it should be listening.