Social Media continues to be the hottest topic in business, advertising, marketing and communications worlds. Why? Because it is a game changer for businesses. The future of business online (and offline for that matter) for brands will be based on the relationships they have with individual consumers and influencers. The tried and true method of top down brand marketing and advertising is already proving less effective each and every day. And it will continue to become so as social media continues to enable consumers and influencers to define brands, define what is important, set the terms for how to be engaged and where. 

Not Convinced?

Maybe you’re sitting on the sidelines watching with a skeptical eye. Or perhaps you’re somewhat involved personally in social media, but haven’t actively moved forward with your business because you’re waiting to see how this plays out. Forget all the talk about monetizing social media, ROI debates, and chasing shiny objects (social media tool du jour). Social media has morphed into a global phenomenon, and consumers are demanding that brands, companies they do business with (YOU), join them in the social media landscape.

Let’s look at just how big this movement really is. Twitter is the most talked about social network right now, and rightfully so.  Great things can happen there for brands. To date, there have been over 1.4 billion messages sent on Twitter. However, the real story on Twitter isn’t about what is happening here in the US. In fact, over 60% of all web traffic to Twitter comes from outside the US. The rest of the world has a bigger footprint on Twitter. See the graph below for a breakdown by country. 

Let’s turn our eye to Facebook. As of this moment, Facebook is truly international social platform. There are more than 35 translations of Facebook.com available, and an additional 60 others in development. Every month,  approximately 70% of Facebook’s 200 million active users come from outside the United States.

Consider how Facebook users are spending their time. Take a moment to let these numbers sink in:

• More than 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 7 million videos uploaded each month
• More than 28 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month
• More than 2 million events created each month
• More than 25 million active user groups exist on the site

Finally, let’s combine the sheer volume of individual participation and interaction online, with consumer expectations. According to a  2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study, online consumers have some lofty expectations for brands & social media.

“93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence on social media sites and 85 percent believe that these companies should use these services to interact with consumers”

 

Get into the Game

Companies spend a lot of time, money and energy trying to understand what consumers want. They talk about keenly understanding their audience all the time. Social media has gift wrapped a golden opportunity for brands to get the answers these questions and more, by developing real relationships with consumers, on their terms, in the spaces that are relevant to them. Sure it can be scary. You lose control. You open yourself up for criticism and attack. Guess what Mr. Brand, you already did and you’ll be worse off the longer you wait. 

Listen. Understand. Engage. It is time to leave the sidelines and get into the game. Your customers and the marketplace are giving you all the signs you need. 

We often talk about the benefits of social media participation. Done well, it can help you create new relationships with your customers, peers, and partners. Develop new products and ideas. Improve existing ones. And provide thought leadership in your area of expertise, like these folks here, here, and here. For companies, it has the power to transform your business. For individuals, it has the power to help establish your reputation and professional network(s).

No doubt about it, the social media era has changed how people search for a job. Social Networks like LinkedIn give job seekers direct access to hiring managers within companies, and employers can more easily engage with passive candidates. It is becoming commonplace for individuals to pay greater attention to managing & promoting their various social profiles (a practice called known as personal branding and/or reputation management).

The Social Media Resume arrives

Some individuals, like Chris Penn, have taken it even further by creating a social media resume. On his social media resume site, Chris summarizes his skills and expertise, makes his traditional resume available for download in multiple formats, and links to his social network profiles and the web sites he publishes and maintains. This is a great place to start learning more about him, (he’s well ahead of 99% of individuals who do NOT have a social media resume) but it doesn’t provide a complete picture of his background and experiences. Precisely the kind of depth that a recruiter or hiring manager is looking for to help make a hiring decision.

To get a deeper understanding, companies are relying on search engines to provide a more in-depth view of a candidates online footprint. According to a a recent survey of human resources professionals by About.com, a full 50% of them are using Google and other search engines to find both professional and personal information about candidates. Regardless of how you feel about this, the trend is here to stay. Hiring managers want to know as much as possible about a candidate, and avoid making a bad hiring decision.

Resume 2.0 is here

There is now a new resume. The traditional static document that is carefully crafted to summarize your specific experience and expertise is being replaced. Instead, we have Resume 2.0.  It is the combination of your public profiles, life streaming your social activity, and what the search engines say about you. Much like Google is now your new corporate home page, your social activity and search engine results are your new resume. Resume 2.0

More social activity information available

The combination of these trends creates new challenges for companies and job seekers n the social era. For companies, they face an ever increasing volume of information and content to sift through. As individuals participate in social media, they create new messages, new content, share opinions and media with their network. A significant number of these social media activities are discovered and indexed by search engines.

For example:

• Twitter messages (tweets)
• Friendfeed updates
• Message board posts
• Blog posts/comments

are all found by search engines and stored in their massive web site indexes.

As companies continue to increase their reliance on this form of background checking, it will only become more difficult. I expect to see more services and tools become available to help companies deal with this problem. Imagine a social activity background checking service that allows companies to get a snapshot view of your social participation, categorized by topic, by type, by date/timeframe, with positive/negative sentiment ratings. A holistic view of your social footprint. This is the future of online background checking. It may even become similar to how companies do standard background checks for a criminal history, credit scores, or education verification. It’s already happening now, albeit informally. The trend will only increase in frequency and then evolve to greater efficiency.

The potential dark side of social media

As you particpate in social media, you leave a significant trail of evidence behind you. Forever. You’re creating your own personal long tail (follow this link for a more background on long tail effect). The social era has  created a personal content factory about your participation, and your long tail is being fed by it. This factory specializes in providing the search engines a steady stream of content about where you participate, who you interact with and what you say.

The search engines gladly pick up content you produce and index it. And the engines don’t forget. Ever. They act as a storyteller for companies researching prospective candidates. Social media participation comes at a price. The transparency that we ASK companies for also extends to us as individuals.

It is important to be cognizant of this as you participate in social media. Be authentic, be real, but use common sense. Don’t put yourself in a position that you will later regret. No one wants to follow up a terrific job interview with a phone call from human resources in which they inform you that they are passing because they discovered inappropriate behavior about you online.

Don’t fool yourself into believing that this is far fetched. Recently, the twitter user @theconnor lost a job because of his social media participation. He tweeted:

“Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.”

Cisco saw the tweet and responded with:

“Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.”

No one has confirmed yet if Cisco rescinded the job offer, but immediately set his Twitter account to private and removed his profile information. Other people online have heckled him to no end for his lack of “common sense” when tweeting.

Another famous example of social media participation causing trouble is that of a young professional named Kevin Colvin, who was fired from his job for calling into work with a family emergency, only to be discovered attending a halloween costume party. He uploaded the photo above to his Facebook profile, which his coworkers discovered soon after.

The point is, failure to utilize common sense in your social media participation, can have severe consequences. You can LOSE your job. These are 2 extreme examples, but seemingly innocuous behavior at the time can have devastating consequences down the road because of the personal long tail you create. It will get indexed and saved, waiting for someone to enter the right combination of keywords into Google and discover you.

Less obvious circumstances will still influence the perception that people have of you long after the moment has come and gone. Perhaps a message board post from your college days where you made comments that were considered professionally inappropriate. Or maybe some not so innocent tweets, juvenile Facebook wall posts, or disparaging blog comments. Any one of them can be discovered by a prospective employer researching you online.

Simple steps to let your best shine through, for the record

All of this doesn’t mean you have to be a robot, always on, reading from a predefined script of “approved” social activity. It’s social media, so be SOCIAL! Just be you, and use common sense. You can participate responsibly by:

• Assume a Search Engine knows - Google isn’t perfect, and doesn’t pickup every social activity you do, but it picks up enough to paint a picture of you for anyone willing to put in the time to search. Assume there will be enough information available about you
• Do your homework – Perform ego searches on yourself. Setup Google Alerts to notify you when new content is available. If any of it is unflattering, be prepared to explain yourself or try and have it removed (This is difficult to do, although there are services like Reputation Defender that attempt to do this for you)
• Bury the Bad with a Mountain of Good – Provide the search engines with plenty of “positive” content about your social participation. Share some insights by commenting on a blog, share interesting links or articles via Twitter, complete and make your LinkedIn profile public, make sure your blog posts are getting indexed. There are many ways, just make sure the good content is getting picked up by periodically ego searching
• Keep the Unflattering Stuff Private – Face it, most of us have moments and joke, forward funny emails, things we find amusement in but wouldn’t necessarily share with a prospective employer. You don’t have to stop doing this, just do it responsibly. Email may be boring but it sure beats a public tweet, blog comment or message board reply. Keep the private stuff PRIVATE!

I hope this post highlights how easily social media participation can hurt you, if done carelessly. For individuals, it means being in the internet spotlight, constantly. For companies, it means taking a new view of candidates, and realizing that they are human beings, with flaws and imperfections. Have some understanding and be sure to take context into consideration when/if you find something in a candidates background that pops up on your radar as a warning. In the end, we’ve all made a mistake or two. Just don’t let your social media usage make the BIG one for you.

Found another great video. This is none other than Forrester’s social media guru Charlene Li talking about the concepts in her new book Groundswell.

(258MB)

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies – Charlene Li

I love Twitter. Why? Quite simply, because of the amazing community of helpful, knowledgeable, and diverse people around Twitter. I’ve already met many interesting individuals, both on and offline, because we all participate in the Twitter community. And Twitter keeps getting better through innovation from the community. There is a growing trend here, the use of Twitter bots.

What are Twitter Bots? They are special Twitter accounts that perform a special function and provides you with useful information. Twitter bots come in 2 basic flavors:

1) Push Bots - These bots don’t do anything fancy. Once you start to follow them, they broadcast messages to you. The most common uses of push bots to date have been by sports teams (for scoring updates) and weather forecasts.

2) Pull Bots – These bots are more sophisticated than push bots. You can interact with them by using Direct Message commands. The features of pull bots greatly exceed push bots. Pull bots operate as micro-applications behind the scenes, processing commands from a Twitter user, doing some work and then sending the result/data back to the original user via a Direct Message.

A simple example is the Timer bot. It’s Twitters version of a personal reminder service. Here’s how it works:

• Follow Timer bot
• Send a direct message to timer like this “d timer 45 call mom’

The timer bot will save your request, wait 45 minutes before sending a direct message reminder back to your Twitter account that says ‘call mom’

Here is a list of some of the more popular Twitter Bots. If you have others you find useful, add them to the comments and I will update the list.

• gCal - Add Google Calendar events
• HappyTwitDay - Send Happy Birthday Wishes
• WineTweets - Share what you’re drinking with other wine lovers on Twitter (check this out @garyvee)
• TweetBeep - Track topics in Twitter and have them emailed to you
• Tipr - Tells you the amount you should leave for a tip when dining out

To be an effective community professional, you need to walk the talk and use the tools

Google is not a search engine, it’s a reputation tracker

Sean scored high on search engine results for Microsoft Support after a bad story was on Digg.com

Admits there are many buzzwords, yet many forget to look at the bigger picture

Rather than focusing on the Techcrunch/Scoble “Shiny Diamond” to develop a social media strategy

The 5 P’s of Social Media: People, Places, Process, Platform, Patterns

Process is potentially the most important P –but often overlooked

There are more smarter people about your product outside of your company

It’s good and horrible news that it’s easy to publish. Many fractures due to lack of strategy.

Google is the enemy of brand loyalty, if I can find the answer to a question not on your corporate property

Most advocates and influencers are not
helping to help a brand, they are helping other users.

“Pay it forward” a good model and metaphor how a community works

Participation:

Impacts to busienss: Customer Service and Support, Sales and Marketing, Innovation and Product Development

You can’t own the message and the audience is going to change it on their own

Word of Mouth has been a key driver why people buy what they buy, now with access to information through social tools greatly impacts this

Engagement is about brand inclusion, making sure people have their voiced involved

We’ve all seen ugly babies but never had one. We’ve strong attraction to our own products. Uses a MS open source as a case study

Beta is not early enough to get your community involved

If you want raving fans, get affinity, talks about Harley Davidson

Influencer Framework in Web 1.0: Envision and develop, test and release, and sell and support

Suggests that social aspect of employees were only in sell and support aspect, not other areas

Sean had an executive champion, Steve Ballmer

Social graph: as a business strategy we should think about it as\

Notes from SAP Salon: Social Media and Online Communities

I’ve been recently involved in helping some people within our company on Social Media/Networking projects for clients. The focus has primarly been on Facebook, both implementing social ads and Facebook Platform applications. One of the goals is to target a specific demographic among the Facebook user community. No one questioned whether or not the demographic data supplied by Facebook to determine who and where targeted ads will appear was legitimate.

However, after reading this excellent article on the quality of social networking user-supplied data, I need to think about reconsidering how we should approach the advertising component of these projects. The article, by Mike McCamon, suggests there is a dark side to user-supplied data and outlines the risks in blindly accepting it as fact. Doing so will undermine the success of any marketing effort targeting an audience whose demographics data is false or misleading. Now while this may represent only a minority of the overall target, it calls into question whether or not demongraphic data is the most relevant.

The article goes on further to suggest that the future may lie with “intentional data”, information about what a user plans to do in the future. This is what marketers really want to know, a consumer’s honest intentions. Getting users to provide this info will prove to be more difficult than the standard social media demographics which may, or may not, be accurate.

Question of the day: Which social networking sites do you use? Do you reveal personal demographic data that marketers are interested in, or keep a barebones profile?

I just found an interesting Twitter site called Tweet Stats, that will report on a Twitter username’s stats and graph them in the following categories:

• Tweets per hour
• Tweets per month
• Tweet timeline

Do you Twitter? If you’re reading this blog, you probably know all about Twitter. Even though I registered a Twitter account some time ago, I’ve more recently become an active user. I’m enjoying the benefits of keeping up with the happenings of key people, both professionally and personally, but I’m also having difficulty getting other friends to join and use the service. Despite my own personal experiences, Twitter appears to be growing the user base quickly. As reported on over at the Twitter Facts blog, the data shows just that, Twitter.com is rapidly approaching 1 million users.

So far my twittering is limited only to the indivudals in my social circle that are as heavily involved in interactive and the web as I am. I just haven’t found the sweet spot yet where Twitter is reaching the general masses (the ones not online the majority of their waking hours) among my social circle.

Question of the day: Who among your social circle uses Twitter? Professional contacts? Friends? Family?

I came across something tonight while catching up on RSS feeds that stuck out (for obvious reasons).

This post by Susan Merrit, who was recently laid off from Yahoo, demonstrates how rapidly consumers take information and disseminate it across the social graph. Trying to harness this power for the advancement of a product or service to accomplish a business goal is one of the things we work with clients on. That said, it’s a slippery slope and any attempts at artificial manipulation of the social graph will most likely end with a result you won’t be happy with. Consumers are saavy and in control. Speak to them instead of trying to control them.