Marketing Technology Blog

This isn’t your typical learning seminar where you sit and listen, maybe take notes, or fall asleep. Web Camp 2.0 is not aptly tagged “Get Your Hands Dirty” for nothing! You will experience a learning series like you have never experienced before. This interactive edition of Web Camp will allow you to learn-by-doing. Think more along the lines of High School chemistry vs. English lecture; test driving a car vs. reading about it; petting zoo vs. the regular zoo.

You will have the opportunity to learn from the professionals of Indiana’s longest standing Web services firm while experiencing first-hand the things you are learning. By the end of the series, you will acquire a better understanding of how to make your Web investment dollars work for you.

So dig in, put your work gloves on, and Get Your Hands Dirty at Web Camp 2.0!

When: Starts Friday June 5th
Where: 1st Floor Training Room, 11460 N. Meridian, Carmel, IN 46032
Time: 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Cost: $150/person for the whole series

• Competitive Analysis Friday, June 5th
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Friday, June 12th
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Friday, June 19th
• Designing & Writing for the Web Friday, June 26th
• Content Management Systems & Application Development Friday, July 10th
• Analytics/Right Team & Strategy for the Web Friday, July 17th

Register Here!

Space is limited to 10 Companies with no more than 2 people per company.

This morning I met with a company and shared as much as I could on how and why businesses are adopting social media technologies.

Too many companies have been diving first and then trying to sort out the issues later but I believe this could severely handicap a company’s success. Too often, we don’t get a second chance to implement a social media strategy. There’s a growing graveyard of abandoned social media projects, including corporate blogs, started by companies with talented employees and great intentions.

Being careful to develop a great foundation will allow a company to benefit much more when implementing social media technologies to save money, grow revenue and improve communication with employees, clients and prospects.

1. Platform – It’s not enough to use what everyone else is using when it comes to your company. Every platform should be reviewed for security, privacy, backups, maintenance, optimization, integration support as well as understanding the resources needed to implement and maintain the platform(s).
2. Transparency – it’s important for companies to recognize that this is not a brochure site, nor is it a place for spamming. Employees, prospects and clients want you to utilize social media because they want to know YOU and fully understand how a relationship with you will benefit them.
3. Consistency – You must fulfill people’s expectations for content and periodicity. Social media is not a sprint, it’s a marathon that often requires a lot of resources to engage the audiences early on.
4. Passion – Your success will largely depend on finding human resources who love the mediums. Making resistant employees implement and utilize social media will instantly ring false and ultimately result in failure.
5. Participation – A social medium’s power is in the numbers. Commenting and networking drives traffic and rank in social media. You must promote and reward participation… especially in the early days of growth.
6. Momentum – Along with consistency, it’s important to recognize that social media isn’t something you turn on. Growth and success requires steady, unrelenting, and consistent effort.
7. Committee – Diversity in implementations will result in better results since different employees are attracted (and often distracted) by different tools. It’s essential that a team share strategies and goals to provide direction.
8. Coordination – Social initiatives that are launched in a silo grow slower and often fail. Physical integration between mediums, automation of content, and coordination between departments is a must to quickly grow your program. Promote your social initiatives on your site and in email. Push content between each to cross-pollinate traffic effectively.
9. Monitoring – Setting alerts and monitoring analytics will allow your team to take action based on the findings.
10. Goals – Companies tend to dive into social media without thinking about what they are actually looking to achieve or how they’re going to measure success. How will you measure success with your social media program? Fewer customer service calls? More customers? Improving employee performance? Think before you leap!

One of the analogies that I like to provide a company is a look at the Burj Dubai. Currently at 800 meters tall, the Burj Dubai will be the largest skyscraper in the world. At this point, no one actually knows how tall the building will be… the owners continue to extend the planned height.

Key to being able to climb higher is the impervious foundation that the building was built on. The Burj Dubai foundation has 192 piles extending over 50 meters into the ground, covering 8,000 square meters, and including over 110,000 tons of concrete!

Effectively planning and building your company’s social media strategy will ensure that it’s built on a foundation that will help social media program grow well beyond everyone’s expectations. Come up short and your company will risk failure – something all too common.

Americans hate to lose a war, period. In one view, the dying automotive industry is a war that we think we’re losing. I don’t believe we’re losing anything, I believe we’re progressing. Jobs moving overseas always sounds ominous, but people always ignore that we’re creating new jobs right here in this nation that have never been heard before.

I’m a living example of this. Fresh out of the Navy, my first job was an industrial electrician at a Newspaper. I stayed in the newspaper industry for a decade before I was pushed out, and I’m forever grateful. I wonder what would have happened if my superiors were bailed out and didn’t need to change. Would I still be suffering in a dying industry?

Check out the Social Media Manager position that’s open at HP. They’re looking for someone with a proven blogging record, a knowledge of Wikis and Twitter. They want to transform that person’s knowledge and develop Key Performance Indicators for the business to monitor their social media strategy.

Computer manufacturing moved offshore many years ago… are the guys that lost their jobs overseas looking for a handout from the U.S. Government? No, they shifted direction and turned their talents from design and manufacturing and moved it into the entrepreneurial and ingenious startups in the Internet.

If our nation (and others) wish to remain at the forefront of leveraging technology, then we need to constantly be looking towards the future. We’ve done automobiles already… check it off the list and let it move to a country that is hungry to take it over. Meanwhile, our auto industry employees should be looking to the next challenge such as engineering and constructing alternative energy sources.

For ol’ school marketers, it’s time to move on folks! Begin educating yourself and your clients on the next opportunity – blogging, reputation management and social media are here – they aren’t on the horizon. It’s time to make the change, before you find yourself in line begging for a bailout.

On a side note, kudos to HP for anticipating the need to develop an internal social media strategy!

This is part 2 of a 3 part series. Part 1 was When Should a Company Dive into Social Media? Sorry for the delay on this post, it’s been a heck of a week at work – 3 projects coming to a close, one of them over a year in the making!

I also paused since there was some great discussion around the first post, especially in a post from the folks at Deep Tech Dive:

But I question Doug’s assertion that you should first “involve all the leaders in your company — those who own the strategy of the corporation.” Perhaps Indianapolis is on a different planet (Jeff, you’re from Kentucky, what do you think?) where the executive team has the time and understanding of social media to reach kumbaya. But here, the quickest way to kill a new communications initiative is to hold it hostage to top-level consensus. Not that leadership approval isn’t important, but that it is nearly impossible to achieve, especially BEFORE you can show any concrete ROI.

I probably missed the mark on this one in my post: I’m not concerned about having a consensus decision at a boardroom level. What I’m really concerned with is helping the leadership of the company recognize the opportunities and traps that will arise by opening your business up to this strategy. The author continues:

A start-small strategy sometimes works better, in a number of ways. All you need is one enterprising writer, some very inexpensive tools, and one communications problem you can measure. Perhaps it’s as basic as getting more traffic to your Web site. Or raising awareness of new support materials and programs. Or broadening customer interest by telling interesting anecdotes about how real people are using your products or services.

While i agree that this will supply your company with a quick start and not enough time to go to the ‘black hole committee’, I have seen this approach have both excellent and devastating results. Perhaps the best example I saw of this strategy was friend Chris Baggott’s blog on Email Marketing Best Practices. Of course, Chris had the advantage of being both the owner and Chief Marketing Officer of ExactTarget, so it was a little easier to jump back then.

The question isn’t whether Chris’ blog had impact. It had incredible impact! The question is whether or not it reached its full potential and had the business impact, organization-wide, that it could have. Chris left ExactTarget to start Compendium Blogware (disclaimer: I helped Chris develop the original concept) because he envisioned this as well!

Chris learned the ropes of blogging over several years on Typepad. By the time Chris figured out the potential of the blog on Search Engine Marketing, integration, etc., it was too late to move off of Typepad and take full advantage of the blogging medium. He was backlinked everywhere (he’s still #1 for Email Marketing Best Practices“. There were a few dozen other terms that Chris would have liked to have been associated with for lead generation at ExactTarget, but he had no way of understanding that the day that he just jumped and started blogging. He also would have loved to have other people in the organization blog as well – to compound the impact.

Who’s Telling You How?

This is why I’m such a huge advocate of finding the right Social Media consultants for your business. A great consultant can review your tools, your business and find the appropriate tools that will fit into your strategy. Local social media consultants are also aware of the social media landscape – and can assist you with where to execute your strategy, not just how.

Your IT guy can have WordPress running in 5 minutes (the famous 1-click install). Does that mean he knows how to construct your theme for search engine crawlers? Does he know how to layout the permalinks and page titles for maximum impact? Does he know what plugins are a must have? No, he doesn’t – otherwise he’d be running a successful blog, speaking, and consulting on the side. This is one of those areas where you can get totally duped by the Open Source spirit.

I love Open Source! I love WordPress! Would I use it to start a comprehensive social media strategy for a corporation? Nope. WordPress is an author-centric content management system, not an enterprise company-centric content management system.

Who’s the Voice of Your Company?

Often, your marketing department are not your best resources for executing a social media strategy. Marketers are a keen bunch. We think on our feet and we often have the overall brand strategy in mind when we speak. If you enter a social network and start slinging lingo that’s usually reserved for B.S. Bingo, it’s an automatic F. If you aren’t asked to leave, be prepared to have your company harangued publicly for violating the key principle of social media – trust.

There are people in your organization right now that have built credibility, authority, and a huge network in their industry. Those are the connectors and influencers that you need to recruit into your strategy!

Don’t Eat Just One!

Last point on how to get started. Please don’t put all your trust in a single ‘expert’. Expert is a term that’s relative, especially with regard to social media. Companies are just scraping the surface right now on how to leverage this incredible medium to build relationships and findability for their companies. Beware of extreme terms like never, all, nobody, everyone… the strategy you don’t bet on may have been the one to get you your biggest win.

Find a few social media consultants, folks who can understand your business, your industry, your marketing strategies, your technology adoption and who can educate your leadership team on this fascinating new medium.