All Aboard Working World

Dear Working World,

You've been given a free ticket on the Twitter train and you're not using it!!!

Twitter has over 75 Million users with growing numbers everyday. What are you so afraid of?!

What's that you say? You have five reasons?

According to socialmedia.biz, they are....

1) You're afraid you’ll lose control of your brand and open yourself up to negative feed back —

A conversation by nature is risky business, a chess game of words if you will. You say one thing and your conversational partner responds. There's no way of knowing how he or she will respond to what you say and how you will need to adjust the conversation from that point. However, you manage to have plenty of these exchanges everyday.

Some are in person, some are over the phone (or in text) and some are in email and even snail mail. Now, they are online over social media platforms. Whether they be 140 characters in each pass or pieces of a 2 hour coffee break, they are all fundamentally conversations.

That being said, your partner's response in the conversation is much the same as 'feedback' in social media. Sometimes it's hard to hear, and other times it's wonderful, and even sometimes you could take it or leave it.

Positive feedback is something that can be captured in a screenshot and count as measurable effectiveness in terms of that one person. However, what is unmeasurable, yet valuable, is the fact that the positive comment was read by anyone following that person on twitter and anyone reading the brand's profile on twitter. It's like a bug you want your consumers to catch.

Negative feedback, on the other side of the coin, is just as powerful. It is not only seen by you as a brand, but seen by all followers in this public space.

Facebook reflects on a problem such as this, "If you roll out a feature to 10 million people and 10% don't like it, that's a lot of hate mail," says Mike Schroepfer, VP of engineering.

However, it's not enough 'hate mail' to put Facebook out of business. In fact, if a company uses social media to their advantage, they will evaluate negative feedback and enhance their brand accordingly. Then, all of the observers of the 'hate mail' will see your response and actually positively respond to your care for the consumer.

2) You don’t understand it —

Social media is, by definition, social. Multiple platforms offer information sharing and conversational outlets. Whether you use Facebook(social networking), Twitter (micro-blogging), Flickr (photo sharing), etc., you are interacting wtih people you know and don't know for a common reason. All of the platforms offer search where you can turn the platform into a refined information source. (Google it)

3) The effectiveness of social media is hard to measure —

While it may be harder to measure than the already vague, yet agreed upon, impression numbers that are derived for print media; but, effectiveness can be measured through the use of hashtags (#) or hits on the website. When used correctly, social media is merely a component of a brand's promotion. It works along side advertisements, word of mouth, promotions, in store products and the corporation as a whole. However, since it is hosted online, you can relate it to visits to the brand's website. For instance, if you are having an online only sale and you promote the sale on social media sites with a link, and your website gets a lot of hits that day as well as sales, you can assume (without making anything out of you and me) that the effectiveness was, in part, due to involvement on the social media site. It's word of mouth, but sight of eyes.

A social media consultant remarked, “I think back to the ’90s with Web sites and companies that said, ‘I’ll never do that,’” said Murray Izenwasser. “I don’t know any business now that doesn’t have a Web site. It’s just for the legitimacy factor now.” Social media is called new media for a reason. It is new, and not going anywhere. It is the new logo, the new commerical, the new website -- it's the next step in maintaining a brand. (Don't miss the boat.)

4 You're afraid that employees will be on Facebook and twitter chatting all day

Some companies actually BEG employees to be on twitter all day. (Maybe not Facebook unless you're the employee responsible for programming on it for the company.)

Twitter allows the company to have a minute-to-minute voice, an approachable outlet to connect with consumers, both new and old. Twitter is a valuable way to pass around information, about the company and about what the company knows. Tweeting valuable industry news shows those watching you that you're in-the-know. You know your industry, you know your competition any you're making informed choices.

A critical perspective of this would agree with the following: We are becoming mommy penguins. We eat something, don't digest, and then pass it off to someone else hoping they will make full use of it. However, even this act is valuable.

The companies that worry about activity online disrupting the workflow, take to 'locking out.' "Locking out the sites is a common practice throughout the corporate world where managers are dually concerned about lack of productivity and the risk that someone posts something harmful or disparaging while on the clock." Sadly this practice discourages conversation, learning from others and modern growth. Block systems that do not contribute to your company, but I am unable to think of a reason why you should block Twitter. Tweets are 140-character pops of self-promotion. If your company chooses a hashtag (#) to associate with tweets (that employees should use at the end of messages) you will receive a following bigger than you may have known possible.

5) Social media is costly —

One source disagrees with, "Even traditional media do not offer such a following for free. That is the beauty of social media. They are powerful tools for communicating with millions of users for such affordable fees. In fact, Twitter and a host of other social media are free and the only investment you need to make is time, which depending on your representative can be really cheap for your business or really expensive." This is why in house communications teams may maintain a constant voice with a company name Twitter avitar while employees add to this with #'d comments - to spend time where appropriate. Companies also hire PR agencies to maintain their online persona, sending Tweets out to followers with a branded voice. So yes, social media may be costly, but it's only innappropriately costly depending on your priorities in message output.

All in all, social media can benefit, and at the very least be used by, all types of businesses. From handing out coupons over the internet, to linking to an article on your site, to telling family in waiting rooms what exactly is going on in the operation room.

For a long time, brands conducted focus groups and went undercover in their consumers element to try and find out what they are thinking and how to best reach them. However, the secrecy, unless desired by the brand, isn't necessary anymore. Now, consumers are placing themselves in portals where brands also live and are ready and able to engage in conversations with them. The best companies will see this opportunity and rather than deny themselves of it, they will strategically approach the Twitter train and ride it in a way that reflects their company correctly.

Real Time - Weekly

First it was bra colors, now it’s celebrity look-alikes, and coming up might be Urban Dictionary. What’s next?

Last week, Facebook became star-studded as people changed their profile pictures and filled in their status to read: “Change your profile picture to someone famous (actor, musician, athlete, etc.) you have been told you look like. After you update your profile with your twin or switched at birth photo then cut/paste this to your status.”

It was Facebook’s newest status update trend: Doppelgänger Week. Or maybe we should call it Facebook Social Media Case Study, Part II.

The last Facebook update uproar was about bra colors. The viral campaign—started by an unknown user—was meant to promote breast cancer awareness by having women change their status to the color of the bra they were wearing. The results are unknown, but the amount of impressions gained was impressive.

Critics such as Time suggest that “this was Internet slacktivism at its finest, a pointless gesture that raised no money and took no tangible action.” Yet it did garner hype and attention—just as the Doppelgänger campaign has been doing.

As Mashable points out, “the result is still both interesting and hilarious, depending on who your friends think they look like.” I didn’t notice the viral takeover until one of my girlfriends popped up as Kenny G. This was comical, as my friend’s curly red hair mimics, to a T, the musician’s old-school looks. Others are just plain debatable; after all, would the highest-paid actors in Hollywood really be what they are if they had hundreds of identical twins? Probably not.

Doppelgänger Week is different in two obvious ways from its bra-color predecessor: 1. AsTime notes, it does not support a viable cause. 2. Both genders can participate.

But it’s the same in one very interesting way: It proves that social media does operate in real time, and that it can create a communication phenomenon quickly—and globally. The current Facebook campaign, allegedly started by IT guy Bob Patel (a Tom Selleck look-alike), again shows the power of a simple viral campaign. With no microsite or cost factor, the campaign has wide participation on Facebook and is being cross-promoted on Twitter.

The bra bit and the celebrity look-alikes should count as ample preliminary research on which both marketers and corporations can base viral campaigns. It doesn’t take a million dollars and a dog-and-pony show to catch your audience’s attention. All it takes is a fun, participatory online event that the consumer wants to be associated with. In this case, who doesn’t love a good narcissistic moment or the opportunity to laugh at someone else’s?

In an interview on Facebook’s blog, Sam Gosling, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, said: “So many people are on the social networking sites. And although from the outside their activities may appear frivolous, they clearly aren’t, because so many people devote so much time and psychological energy to them.”

So, although Time might think these campaigns are examples of slacker-activism, they possess immense value because of the psychological energy that consumers invest.

Ultimately, the goal of any online campaign is to create buzz around a message in order to lead to a measurable result—profit, awareness, donations, etc. The bra color campaign might not have been initiated by a breast cancer–related organization, but it did create a global conversation among many of the 325 million (and counting) people on Facebook about breast cancer awareness. Likewise, the Doppelgänger campaign might not seem to have a practical purpose, but it drove millions of users to MyHeritage.com, a family tree site with an application that allows you to find celebrities that resemble you.

It’s rumored that the next big thing is going to be Urban Dictionary Week, when people will go to Urbandictionary.com to find what their name means according to this street-lingo-wise dictionary and post the definition as their Facebook status.

This might be a trend that consumers tire of, or it could become something that people look forward to each week. If that’s the case, the pioneers of grassroots weekly status campaigns and what Time calls “Facebook groupthink” have opened up a whole new bag of social media tricks that will become a coveted tool for marketers. Facebook’s growing population and the word-of-mouth buzz that its traffic creates just might have brands and causes competing for the limelight at the start of every week.

Mine:

Mine