Business Insight Zone

This morning I made the early drive from Austin to Waco to speak at the Waco Social Media Breakfast. It was a great, friendly crowd, and we enjoyed excellent food at the Cafe Cappuccino.

My friend Bryan Person, who brought the Social Media Breakfast concept with him last year when he moved from Boston to Austin, wrangled the technical details to live-stream the session. Here’s the video (52 minutes’ worth!) of my talk:

If 52 minutes is too much of a commitment, you might prefer the five-minute audio I did with Bryan after the session for his daily podcast series. Here it is:

I hope I’m starting to get the hang of this — this is my third time to speak at an SMB. If you like, you can read writeups of my Austin and San Antonio talks in the archives.

Life is so much easier when smart people say what you’ve been wanting to say. In this case, the smart person is David B. Thomas of SAS, who takes up the defense of “Social Media Manager” as a job title.

Why I am right and Chris Brogan is wrong.
(At least about this one thing.)

. . .

Right now my title might sound odd to people on the cutting edge, but it sounds pretty forward-looking to the people I most need to influence. By the time it starts sounding odd to them, I’ll probably be out of business cards anyway. Plus, I’ve been saying since before I got the job that if I do it right, I will eventually make my current position irrelevant.

A few weeks ago — after returning from Chris Brogan’s Inbound Marketing Summit, as it happens — I took the picture at the top of this post. Chris and I are friends, and I certainly understand and respect his take on “Social Media Manager,” so I thought it was funny that I wore that badge at his conference.

Anyway, I considered putting the photo to use in a post of my own on the subject, but let the idea slide once other things intervened. Now I’m glad that Dave (who, by the way, has a delightfully scorching dry wit in person) has laid out the case so clearly.

John Wilshire, writing at Feeding the Puppy, offers an excellent overview of the marketing appeal of social media:

Dell and Twitter; thousands not millions

I encourage you to read the whole piece, not least for its engaging graphics. The upshot of it is that marketers used to target millions of potential customers/consumers to reach the thousands who would actually be interested and consider buying. But social media channels allow a radically different approach:

. . . the cost of communication, sharing, and conversation is now so low that companies (and their agencies) have available to them the approach that they arguably would have wanted in the first place. Just talk to the thousands.

Wilshire focuses on the example of Dell’s @delloutlet account on Twitter, which I discussed at length last week. He’s particularly acute in discussing (1) the low cost of time and effort to make @delloutlet a success, and (2) the longer timeframe you have to give to social media as you build up a genuine audience.

The whole piece is well worth a read.

You may recall that we ran a little poll — on the Hoover’s front page and on this blog — asking “Does your business use social media for competitive intelligence?” Here are the results we got:

Caveats as we head into the analyis:

1. No, the results aren’t scientific, because we didn’t normalize for region, industry, size of firm, et cetera.
2. You think this would be a pretty savvy audience, what with its members’ being readers of this blog, users of Hoover’s, or both. :)

It’s heartening that the largest category here is of people who do use social media for competitive intelligence. People are out there on blogs and Twitter and forums and whatnot, talking about you and your competitors and your industry — so why not listen to them and harness the information and opinions they’re sharing?

The 21% who use social media, but not for competitive intelligence, have an easy opportunity in front of them: they can build on their current use of these channels for marketing or customer support or whatever, begin using some simple tools (as laid out in the talk I gave a little while back on this subject), and easily enrich their understanding of their competitive space. Good.

The folks who said “No” have a HUGE opportunity in terms of both social media and competitive intelligence. They can take the steps just outlined to improve their CI, but also take advantage of social-media channels to communicate better with their audience(s). As I’ve said before, not every social-media tool will fit every company; some CEOs, for example, would make horrible bloggers. But any company that wants to hear more from its users and talk more openly with the world ought to explore the benefits that social media might bring them — including the CI benefits.

I worry about those who clicked “What is competitive intelligence?” Maybe they do it — monitor what’s going on in their competitive space — without realizing that there’s a formal name and professional discipline around it. Maybe they’re small-business owners who are utterly tapped in to their local or niche market, so much so that they don’t need to think of CI as a separate function. I hope that’s it, because the idea that companies are wandering around not paying attention to the competitive arena in which they operate . . . that just scares me.

How would YOU interpret these results?

~

Related:

• Using social media for competitive intelligence

~

Last night I drew the fun duty of speaking about social media in business to the Texas Exes Austin Professionals group. (That’s them waving for the camera.) Since I worked in the UT Alumni Center for two years in the mid-1990s, it was a particularly pleasant trip down memory lane for me to be there.

The panel I was on included:

• Eve Richter of the City of Austin;
• Kristi Kingston of the Austin American-Statesman;
• John Morgan of Whole Foods;
• and our moderator, Kim Brushaber.

After talking about how our respective organizations use social media to enhance business, we addressed a couple of major topics:

>> What advice would we give to a company considering adding social media to its marketing strategy? Answering this question, I made three main points:

1. Understand that ROI may be complex to measure. (Yes, you’ve heard this before.)
2. Understand that many social-media channels are not ideal for closing sales, but rather for opening relationships.
3. Social media often starts from marketing or P.R. teams, but it may ultimately serve your organization better in terms of:
   • customer support (on which topic this article raises interesting points)
   • training
   • internal operations & collaboration (as at IBM)
   • community relations
   • etc.

>> What predictions do we have for what will happen with social media?

• It will grow, but it will also change — probably radically. If we look back across the histories of all the modern media, we see that their early days were marked by rapid, often chaotic, change. And if we compare social media to, say, television, it’s not clear that we’ve reached the stage of Milton Berle yet, much less Johnny Carson or American Idol.

Because the discussion was rollicking along and we wanted to leave lots of time for audience questions, we didn’t get around to one of the prepared questions that I was eager to answer:

>> What suggestions do we have for audience members on how they can best use social media?

1. Find the right setting / tools / platform for you. Not every social network or tool will work for everyone. (That said, if you’re going to try Twitter, give it more than 20 minutes to make sense.)
2. Be yourself, because fakery is obvious.
3. Decide how much of yourself to share online.
   • Damning evidence endures online forever, so don’t be naive. Even if you think something is private, it might not stay private. (Eve Richter made this point in one of her answers, too.)
   • Be aware of the impact of what you share about your politics, religion, family, romantic life, and so on. Decide in advance which areas of your life you’re comfortable exposing online.
4. One of the great things I’ve experienced in social media is that it’s like a great big staircase we’re all climbing together, and in my experience the people higher up the stairs are happy to reach down and give you a hand up. You can do the same by bringing others along, offering help, and paying it forward where you can.

Thanks to Kim Brushaber and the other worthies of the Texas Exes Austin Professionals group for inviting me to speak on this topic, and for hosting such a great event. I saw old friends at the meeting, but also came away with new ones — both from the panel and the audience.

There is a devoted slice of the social-media-marketing population intent on demonstrating the commercial value — and especially the ROI — of Twitter. For them, the news that Dell can credit something like $3 million in revenue to its @delloutlet Twitter account is very good news indeed.

But here’s my advice: don’t focus on the money.

In his post on the Dell news, Brian Solis quoted Richard Binhammer of Dell thus:

Like you say in your book Brian, this is about putting the public back in public relations where relationships are direct. The dedicated practice of connecting with customers generates real results on many levels. While this announcement focuses on revenue results and referrals to dell.com, they are also reinforced by the relationships and direct connections we have with customers everyday using the Web.

Just so. A similar point emerges from Marshall Kirkpatrick’s treatment of the subject — “Social Media ROI: Dell’s $3m on Twitter and Four Better Examples” — and especially in the “four better examples” Marshall gives at the end of the piece, which include much lower cost for customer-support interactions that take place through social-media channels.

So, great — there are many reasons besides raw dollars to like what Dell is doing. But why not focus on those millions of luscious, luscious dollars?

Because it’s too simplistic — for two reasons:

1. If I had an itty-bitty company and used Twitter to generate $3 million in revenue in less than a year, that would be amazing news. But Dell took in $61.1 billion in revenue in 2008. So $3 million, while a lot nicer than a kick in the teeth, represents about 26 minutes of revenue, based on what Dell made all-day-every-day last year. A lovely drop in the bucket, but a drop in the bucket still.

2. Let’s imagine that I bring the good news to my boss that a new social-media sales channel is bringing Hoover’s $100,000 per month. For extra fun, let’s imagine that I’m really wet behind the ears.

Me: Hey, our new XYZ program is bringing in $100k per month — and it looks sustainable!

Boss: Great! How much is it costing us to bring in these dollars?

Me: Not much at all! [Cites low-low figure.]

Boss: Awesome! And how much of this is incremental revenue?

Me: Excuse me?

Boss: Incremental revenue? New money that isn’t just being siphoned away from some pre-existing channel?

Me: . . .

You see what I mean.

So, Dell’s figures are excellent, and the more numbers like this we see, the more they flesh out the concept that selling via Twitter (and other social-media channels) can be valuable, not only in raw dollars but in terms of (a) the cost of doing business and (b) the additional benefits of enhanced brand interest and customer evangelism on a company’s behalf.

Great. But it’s not the same thing as three million new dollars falling out of the sky onto your company’s top line, or mine — or even Dell’s.

Care to voice your opinion in our little poll?

Does your company use social media for competitive intelligence?(poll)

I’ll be blogging about the results later.

~

Related:

• Using social media for competitive intelligence.

~

This Advertising Age piece by Jonah Bloom is well worth a read, even if you’re not in advertising — or, for that matter, in marketing at all.

Dedicated Social-Media Silos? That’s the Last Thing We Need

Here’s a key excerpt:

Social media isn’t a box to be ticked or a department to be manned or even a campaign to be launched. It’s about thinking differently about marketing, customer service, the entire company. It’s about realizing that consumers are running the biggest recommendation service in the world and that, as has been tiresomely often repeated, they define the brand (no, this is not new; yes, this is becoming more obvious and important by the day). All thinking about product, customers and communications, needs to take this into account — it cannot sit in a silo.

Emphasis added.

Not every social media tool will be useful to every company, so it’s possible that your company doesn’t need a blog in particular, a Twitter account in particular, a customer wiki in particular.

But thanks to the dirt-cheap cost of many social-media tools and their ability to help you link arms with your customers / users / fans / people-who-care, you’d be silly not to think about how social media could help your efforts to do more business.

Not just your marketing.

Not just your customer-service.

Not just your selling.

Not just your branding-and-community.

Not just your internal collaboration.

But ALL of your efforts.

All of them.

~

Related Posts about Using Social Media outside the Silo of Marketing:

1. Social media across the enterprise.
2. Social media and the acid-bath of ROI.
3. The three-part litmus test, for social media and everything else.
4. Using Twitter for Business: my presentation to HIMA.

~

Photo by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, used under a Creative Commons license.

I gave a little summary of the Dallas IMS last week while the event was still going.

My pal Richie Escovedo went considerably further in summarizing the sessions of the IMS that he was able to attend — to the point of embedding slide decks. Very good stuff:

Dallas Inbound Marketing Summit — From the Back Row

But now my friend John Johansen has taken the cake, writing up bullet-point summaries of nearly every session at the two-day event, and then handily indexing them into this single post:

Inbound Marketing Summit Wrap-up #IMS09

Posts like these do a real service to the community of marketers who can put this material to immediate use in their businesses, but aren’t able to attend the Summits.

Check out these posts to see what you can learn from some of the cutting-edge thinkers of the social-media world.

Social media is not just about marketing. As I said the other day, there are good reasons that its use has started within marketing departments at many companies, but it’s impossible that it will be contained there.

Jeremiah Owyang — someone you should read regularly if you care about this stuff — hits that nail on the head with this post, which I encourage you to read:

As Social Technologies Become Pervasive, Prepare Your Company

Here’s my comment on Jeremiah’s post:

I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that social media is not — cannot be — just a marketing or PR/corp comms item to be checked off a list. It is becoming more pervasive by the day, and while different companies, industries, and individuals will take up use of different types of social media at different rates, it’s naive to think that any of them *won’t* take it up.

As always in business, the focus should come back — as you rightly say — to customers. How do we serve them & give value to them? How do we build value across the enterprise? How do we differentiate ourselves in the marketplace?

These questions were relevant before the birth of the telegraph. They’ll still be relevant for as long as there are companies and customers — regardless of the specific technology in play.

What do you think?