We interact with the world through our 5 senses: hearing, visions, smell, taste, and touch. We should consider the 5 senses with our marketing efforts, specifically with efforts with Social Media.

Sense of Hearing – If you listen to your audience it will help you understand their language, culture, needs, desires, interests, etc. It will help you be relevant in offering value as part of your SoMe engagement. It will help you be a better brand and make better products.

Sense of Vision – There’s nothing worse than rehashing what someone else has already done. The Big Idea isn’t dead. Be Imaginative, be Innovative, be Passionate. Begin with a Vision.

Sense of Taste – Humor, sexiness, focus, intellect are all valuable assets in SoMe. However, there is a fine line between humor and potty humor, sexiness and porn, focus and myopism, intellect and being a smart ass. Stay classy people, keep your sense of taste in check.

Sense of Timing – Social Media is about timing and timeliness. Trends can change by the minute, don’t let an opportunity to be relevant pass you by. Don’t wait until tomorrow for a conversation you could have today.

Sense of Humor – Social Media needs to be social, or shared, or viral, or pass-aroundable. Nothing does that better than buzz-worthy content and no content is more buzz-worthy than humorous content. The most widely ingested media is humorous. Check out this video which clocks in with 214 million views. It is the third most popular video of all time on YouTube, behind Justin Bieber/Ludacris’ Baby and Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance (both of which are arguably funny):

Image courtesy Nayski

Typical marketing campaigns can last from days to years. My shortest campaign was 5 days. A Super Bowl commercial may only run once.

Social Media is a different animal. Social Media should not be treated as a campaign but as a relationship. To make a relationship successful requires constant work (ask my wife). Social Media is an ongoing relationship between people, brands, etc. Engaging in short term campaigns typical of traditional and online marketing is like a sandwich board promoter, standing on the street shouting out tag lines and sales prices. An attention getter for sure but will you buy what they sell? Will you remember the brand?

Engaging in a long term Social Media strategy has obvious perks. For a decade I’ve been building micro-sites, splash pages, ad banners for companies.  They spend fortunes on these short bursts of marketing. Imagine if they didn’t have to build a new channel from scratch? A few years ago I was talking to a small PC gaming company whose products targeted women. Their games followed a continuous set of characters. I recommended setting each character and the group in general up each with their own Social Media presence. The idea was to keep communication going between characters and with fans. This would allow a small community to build up around the franchise, a robust and loyal channel for marketing. Rather than building new promotions for each new game, the company could spend months seeding game info through characters, even kicking off the game with a pre-story or augmenting it with side-stories. Between games the channel could be a little less active then ramping up as it got closer to product launch time.

Needless to say, they didn’t follow the strategy and still only dabble in Social Media, but at least they’re trying now. The idea of achieving success through short campaigns in Social Media is the opposite of what SoMe is all about. Take your time and commit to building your community and keep the conversation going because with Social Media, commitment and conversation is what it’s all about.

Image by antydiluvian

“Best practices” is a bit more disturbing. The term is being used as a value proposition or a differentiator more and more. The problem is that the world has changed. Social media has changed it. I’m not talking about Twitter and Facebook, or any of the technological aspects of social media, I’m talking about users. How a consumer interacts with a brand or vendor has changed, not just online, but in every facet of their lives. Consumers want communications on their terms. Users won’t just watch your commercial and go to your stored to make their purchase. They’ll Google for reviews, they compare prices, they’ll tweet for feedback, they jump to another brand because they had a better mobile site or switch stores because they got a coupon in the mail that day. People understand the power of the Internet and understand that they can get personalized attention. That understanding has led them to be more critical of customer service not just online or by phone but in brick and mortar stores.

How do you stand by “best practices” when there is so much diversity in the abilities, needs, and desires of your audience? How do you do it when your brand is not like other brands? I read a recent blog on “best practices” that claimed the optimal screen size for a web site’s design should be 1024×768. Well, my mother’s computer would only support 800×600, my go to web browser is 320×356. So, which is  the standard? The fact is, none are. Lazy developers, designers, and marketers like to fall back on “best practices” so they don’t have to do the work of getting to know their audience, or to avoid developing multiple options for different audiences. This blog is set up for 1024×768 as well as 320×356. That’s because I know my audience has a fairly new computer (2-3 years old) or a mobile device.

This is just an example of the problem with “best practices” from a technical web design standpoint, now think about social media. Twitter has alot of trouble telling us how many active users they have. Some access Twitter via www.twitter.com, others through any number of third party sites, desktop and mobile apps, and some through SMS. If this creates a nightmare of technical issues, think about the millions that use Twitter, their interests, their lifestyle, their content, their intentions, their networks. Think about the idea of transparency. That’s a big buzz word among social media experts. It is claimed to be one of the tenants of social media best practices. I just had a lengthy discussion (lengthy for Twitter anyway) with another Boston social media strategist about content of social media. He claimed that venting publicly about your insecurities was a sure way to lose business. In that respect, transparency is not a best practice, clearly you should not be transparent about your insecurities. But as another user commented, this is hypocritical. The originator of the comment claimed that it was fine for Twitter but not for a corporate blog (though Senator McCain would probably disagree with transparency on Twitter being okay). Even just in this one opinion there are significant differences in what is considered best practices on Twitter and best practices on a blog. However, if you’ve found that being honest and open is actually goof for business, how does best practices apply? It doesn’t.

The fact is that everyone is becoming a marketer, if not for their business, then for themselves. And everyone is a consumer, even businesses. Each has to define it’s own strategy according to it’s audience, goals, mission statement, desires, etc. What works for some on Twitter doesn’t work for others on Twitter. Your Facebook widget isn’t going to work on QZone. What feels comfortable for some individuals and brands in social media, doesn’t sit well with others. A soft-sell marketing strategy works for some industries but not others.

So, take your “best practices” and put them back “in-the-box” where they belong because some times you DO have to reinvent the wheel.

The release of Tweetdeck for iPhone last night may change all that. From what I can see so far the app has all if the functionality if the desktop version, with a few proprietary iPhone features such as shake to change columns.

The app is free in the iTunes store at the moment. Here are some screenshots of the UI:

Many brands are still struggling with whether or not they should implement web2.0 thinking. After all, is it worth the effort? What is the ROI? Can’t I just keep doing business as usual?

First of all, business ISN’T as usual. Don’t believe me? Second of all, I’d like to draw your attention to IWI: Irrelevance Without Investment. Brands that do not make a serious investment in thinking in so-called web2.0 terms are doomed. Even web companies that thought they were savvy but didn’t keep up with trends found themselves picking out headstones. Need numbers? Here are a couple of examples of well known brands or web products that are getting their butt kicked.

As you can see, the properties that sat on their laurels or decided to wait out web2.0 have either barely maintained their status or saw it decline. Even so, the upstarts that adopted new technology and adapted to new trends saw their engagement skyrocket. Even brands born online such as Yahoo, saw their social network sites decline against new comers (at the time) like Mypace, simply because they didn’t keep up with change.

Like the legions of species who have fallen into extinction, those that did not adapt to the new environment they existed in have become a thing of myth.

Charts above based on Pew Internet Research, Oct 5, 2006 “Riding The Waves of Web2.0″

• 75% of all online adults use social media.
• 93% of social media users believe a company should have a presence in social media.
• 85% believe a company should not only be present in, but also interact with its consumers via social media.
• 56% of users feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.
• 43% thing companies should use social networks to solve their problems

Consumers are increasingly more interested in communicating their needs to the companies they deal with.

• 41% feel that they should be solicited for feedback on products and services
• 37% of consumers want companies to find new ways to allow them to interact with their favorite brands.

So, what is your company, or your agency, doing to satisfy your customers? After all, if they don’t buy from you, they’ll but from someone else.

(if you’d like the full report, please contact me for consulting)

15 years ago, when web sites began to appear on the horizon of corporate agendas, there was a great deal of confusion as to who should be reponsible for them. At the time, graphic designers weren’t technically savvy enough and IT specialists didn’t understand design and communications.

It’s around this time that people like me were entering the communications field. We came into web design when it needed a hybrid of design and programming. Of course, a decade later, there are entire departments and companies built around web design manned by highly specialized experts.

Social media is at the same place web design was in the early 90s. There are experts from PR, marketing, and web design all adding social media to their list of responsibilities. Few companies are dedicating positions or departments to social media. Many agencies are adding social media services to their offering, generally giving the responsibility to staff that has shown interest in SoMe. In these companies and agency, even in the industry in general, there is much discussion of who should be responsible for social media: PR, marketing, web design, etc. As a matter of fact, there are articles popping up all over the place discussing what makes a social media expert or poking fun at the idea of a social media expert at all.

In the coming years SoMe will no doubt me staffed by teams of specialists in analytics, character Twitterers, Facebook community managers, and more. It may be some time before social media becomes a must-have of a company’s marketing and communications plans. Until then social media will no doubt be helmed by the same type of jack-of-all-trades types that were there for the explosion of the Web.

What I’m getting at is: Should an existing profession be the one to take the reigns of social media for their employer or client? Or, should a new profession emerge, just like the webmasters of the 90s, to focus on pulling all the SoMe bits together? At least until they can afford to staff their department with specialists!

The SoMe Pro:

So what do we call these hybrids? “Social media expert” already has a bad wrap. Online Communications Consultant? Digital Community Ambassador? Anyone? Bueller?

Image by Rafa Llano.