Twitter Integrates with Google, Bing and Yahoo! – Now what?

Twitter finally lands a few business deals, but at what cost?

Truth in Advertising

Last week Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending, networking, connecting and speaking at the Type A Mom conference in Asheville, NC. Kelby Carr did an amazing job and I was proud to bring my clients to the conference to help support the blogging community.

One of my panel sessions was called “Working with Companies”, moderated by the lovely and talented Lucretia Pruett, aka GeekMommy. She and I spent quite a bit of time together discussing the industry and where it’s going, but I’ll save that for another post. The session was a split between a moderated discussion by the panel and an open Q&A with the 200-something attendees.

For those who know me, you’ll know that I worked my way up the agency ranks by innovating and creating opportunities – not only for myself, but for strategic partners. My clients value my experience and advice as do the Associations I belong to and regularly speak at. If you could see the feedback I’ve received from students, colleagues and conference attendees you’d know that I aim to please and usually put on a show. If you’ve never seen me present, it’s something like this: I get up on stage, share practical advice without any BS and am happy to share everything my experiences have taught me. It’s as real and as honest as it can be, because I have been an attendee at conferences, sat through classes and been lectured to and thought “Can you just tell me what I need to know? (without the fluff)?”.

This conference was no different. As the conference slogan asked, I “brought it”. And by “brought it”, I said things that some bloggers didn’t want to hear. While sitting on the panel I heard a lot of fluff and some “WHAAA?”s. One such “WHAAA?” was from a competing agency’s “social media” person: “Make it easier for me to do my job”. Another said: “You need to clean up your act”. The first is simply a plea from someone who doesn’t know how to sell. The second was a more aggressive stab at some of the more snarky behavior that takes place in the mom blogging community. I didn’t comment on how people should blog per se, but stayed true to the panel’s topic on how to work with companies. My advice was and is as follows:

• How to approach agencies/companies/brands. Have an idea? Sell it. “How am I supposed to find out who works for what brands?”. Here’s a tip: Google it. Subscribe to a few free trade publications. It’s not hard to find this information once you check out a brand’s “About” section and hit up LinkedIn.
• Don’t sign contracts that aren’t equitable. Some moms were quite vocal about receiving “Free cupcakes” in lieu of payment. Starting December 1st the FTC is going to make people disclose everything, even those free cupcakes. Update: One comment that was made at the conference was “we can’t afford lawyers”. They can be expensive so I totally understand, however reviewing basic contracts isn’t going to cost you an arm and a leg. In fact, for a 5-10 page contract my dad quoted me “$250 to review it”. Too much? Well, I remember him routinely handling traffic tickets for friends in high school in exchange for manual labor, e.g. sanding our deck or painting a room of our house. And this isn’t unusual. In fact, most lawyers will do work in exchange for work. Call around, I bet you’ll find one willing to work with you in exchange for some promotion online. If you’re not getting paid that much then I’d question why you’re even considering signing the thing.
• You are a brand. As such, companies try to match themselves up with personalities (see: Celebrity spokespeople) that match their brand equity and values. That being said, shallow people make judgments — sometimes unfair ones — based on what they read about you online. I know a lot of moms curse. I do too. And I’m telling you that it’s OK. I don’t want you to change who you are or how you write. But understand that brands are looking at this stuff and if you aspire to work with certain brands they will put you under the magnifying glass.Personally, I dig deeper to find out more about people than what I might find on their blog or Twitter stream. I don’t pass judgment for a few things folks might say or do because that’s not my job – my job is to find talent and work with it to the best of my ability. Case in point, I’ve been working with several conference goers and speakers by hiring them, supporting their ad networks, collecting resumes for future work and giving them advice when asked via email and Twitter in order to truly support the blogging community. Not by having flame wars, not by ostracizing people, not by being a jerk, but by having meaningful dialogue with people to find ways to work together.
• Understand your value. See above re: contracts, but your brand online is worth more than a few dollars. Most of the people I’ve spoken with since that conference, including some keynote-worthy speakers at other conferences, have no clue as to what they’re worth when it comes to negotiating with companies.

One point I was unable to make during the conference due to time constraints is what brands talk about when it comes to metrics. Ahh! Not measurement!

Most bloggers rely on their Sitemeter or Google Analytics to self-report their stats. Some bloggers and webmasters complain that third parties like Quantcast report their stats as being too low. Again, I’m not passing judgment, just telling you how you’re being judged: No one believes your self-reported numbers. Here’s why:

• Spiders and bots. Know how Google always seems to have your freshest posts indexed? That’s because it and other search and monitoring services crawl your site to index it or monitor it for specific keywords. If you see “Andiamo Systems” listed in your log files it’s a company called Techrigy. It’s someone monitoring you or specific content on your blog. Doesn’t count as a unique visitor, the same way Google’s spider doesn’t count.
• Your friends. No one wants their web site to have 0 comments. It hurts. I means that all of the effort you poured into writing a post, regardless of actual merit or quality, may have been read but didn’t provide any “engagement“. Fortunately or unfortunately, a lot of bloggers play deceptive games with comments and links to game Google and advertisers to make it appear that they have a lot of comments, when in fact if you clicked each commenter’s name or did some homework you’d realize it’s a big circle of fake link love and comments. Having a blog post with 20+ comments, all of which are from other bloggers, doesn’t count. You’re giving advertisers a reason not to trust you right off the bat.
• You. Everyone I know wants to know how their site and blog posts look when they go live. And they want to engage with their readers. Guess what? It doesn’t count. It’s like walking in and out of your own store over and over again. Sure, the security camera shows someone coming and going all day, but at the end of it you’re the same one unique visitor jacking up your numbers — which makes your monthly and unique post impression number totally false.

Twitter just became a little more irrelevant

Facebook announced that they’re integrating Fan Pages with Twitter and if you want to understand what this means for your business check out Jeremy Pepper’s blog post on it.

From a “What this means for Twitter” it’s pretty simple – they’re now just a channel that (even more so) drives people away from their site and over to Facebook. It also helps Facebook close the loop on owning your internet experience with brands. Today I linked my Fan Page with my Twitter account and it works seamlessly. Will I post every nonsensical tweet to my Fan Page? No — but I can probably post at least a quarter of what I tweet from my Fan Page, which means Twitter’s monthly impressions just went down. Oh, and as Facebook’s metrics and reporting system matures, don’t be surprised if the return bit.ly links are included in their administrative interface. Also – since Facebook is using bit.ly you currently lose the tracking from those truncated links unless you post your own links via bit.ly or whichever service you use as part of your status update.

Something else to consider if you are thinking “Great! My company only needs to update once!”:

Not so fast.

Sure, it sounds like the ultimate solution for consolidating your Twitter and Facebook accounts. But consider the audiences: People may follow you on Twitter but not be a Fan on Facebook (think subscribing to RSS vs. having an emotional connection to a brand). That’s a quite a difference when it comes to how you interact or choose to engage with a brand, as one (Twitter) may lead to the other (Facebook), but it’s not a given.

Contest: Vote for my SXSW Panel

I tweeted this earlier but if you go vote for my South by Southwest panel – and I make it - I’ll take you with me. No joke, I have set aside marketing budget and will pay your travel (hotel, flight) and ticket.

How can you enter?

Click this link to the SXSW Panel picker, then retweet it and you’re entered to win. You can enter every day, as much as you’d like until the voting ends.

Reading a blog post ripping “social media experts” from a so-called “social media expert”. Ugh. I’ll post a follow up that discusses this at length but just fyi – making accusations that others are frauds doesn’t exclude you from the lineup.

Twitter’s New Home Page Launches Today

Those using third party apps may not have noticed, but Twitter went live with a new home page today:

Twitter home page

It’s very clear that they aren’t targeting existing users, as evidenced by the lack of any change to the interior pages. You’ll find my take here.

Aesthetically it’s much nicer than the old home page, except for one thing: What the hell are new users to supposed to do? Search? I already have a reliable, scalable search solution – it’s called Google.

By the way notice how they’ve fallen in line with every other search engine by copying the leader:

Google home page

One minor addition is the use of trending topics/tags on the home page of Twitter. Not a bad idea so that people unfamiliar with the site can “jump in to” a discussion right away, however the usability of the site once you’re in still sucks. Unthreaded conversations about topics you may care about. Or better yet, a chat room for slow people.

What’s your take?

The Best Social Media Campaigns Are The Ones You’ve Never Heard Of

A few weeks months back I spoke at a MediaBistro/PRNewser event on social media and was asked what my favorite social media campaign was. As a marketer I have a few that deserve the golf clap and some that deserve a standing ovation. I say this because most campaigns aren’t targeted at me, a 35 36 year old, workaholic, white guy. And just to be clear, I’m not supposed to be the target for most of these campaigns. Mass/reach plays don’t typically work when it comes to social media.

And as I stated on the panel, just because it’s in the trades doesn’t mean it was a good campaign. I’ve been preaching the difference between niche and reach plays in social media for a while now and I’ll say it again for those who skimmed the first paragraph — most reach plays don’t work. Look it up. Papa John’s, Burger King, some cause stuff and what else? Not a heck of a lot of success, but a whole lot of fail.

That being said, you’ll never see someone give some credit to brands, campaigns and yes, agencies, that have run some pretty great word of mouth campaigns that utilize social media. One reason might be competitive advantage. Another might be because every company is different, as as such their campaigns, results and success aren’t transferable. I’d like you to share your great social media campaigns in the comments of this post.

I’ll kick it off by giving the answer I gave to the MediaBistro event attendees. The campaign is called Fiskateers, created by Brains on Fire, a branding firm in Greenville Charleston , South Carolina. I met Spike and Geno of BoF through WOMMA and have seen this project since nearly day one of the launch. The concept is simple: Crafters love Fiskars scissors, so let’s give them a space to connect with each other and the brand. Spike recently tweeted that the project delivered $1.6MM in ROI for the brand. Wham-bam, indeed.

How you know Twitter is doomed

Check out the launch of Twitter 101 for Businesses, aka “No, really, you should be on here!”:

http://bit.ly/yNB8b

Talk about a horrible set up to future cost implementation. The site’s not scalable, people drop it like a bad habit and there are security flaws. Sure, my clients would be thrilled to pay for that!

Social media strategy today at large companies

I’ve been reading a lot of posts and tweets about how companies need to “get with the times” and stop thinking about social media from a short-term perspective. BL has a post that outlines some of the short term thinking that’s gone on in the evolution and embrace of the medium. Let’s get something straight – it’s being embraced.

Someone asked me back in 2005 how I got clients to “buy in” to running what were then called word of mouth campaigns and my response was “someone willing to take a risk”. By risk I didn’t mean one that could get them fired, but one that intrinsically felt like the right thing to do. Time, research and measurement tools have proven those brave marketers and communicators right, however the game has changed significantly since then. Sure, you may have gone to a conference recently and heard that some big Fortune 500 isn’t sure how this whole social media thing works. As someone who works with them daily, I’m here to tell you — that is purely a myth.

Yes, there are companies that haven’t engaged — but with good reason. I actually heard a prominent Twitterer (nice distinction) tell a Fortune 500 that “all of you and your brands should be on Twitter”. I guess that’s the difference between being a professional Tweeter and actually working on client business — those of us in the trenches, working on said business, through the org charts and politics and mess of who owns what, actually know the difference between a communications objective for a non-regulated industry and those that have severe restrictions and limited guidance from regulatory officials imposed on them. Bottom line is that when you ask ignorant folks who live in a small, social media bubble for their advice you’ll get their limited knowledge.

BL makes a good point that this is a long term strategy, but as she and I had it out a while ago on her blog on the Twitter debate re: brands engaging, it’s recently just started to make sense for brands to incorporate it into their marketing and communications. It’s called critical mass.

Sure, the minority of vocal Twitterers can easily cause your brand headaches (see: Motrin Moms), but the reality is that most people aren’t using Twitter and are probably over on Facebook. And they still deserve the same respect and attention that Twitterers get from the likes of @comcastcares, @jetblue and the rest. In fact, I’d argue those who haven’t bought in on the latest social media marketing craze deserve more.

So are big companies really engaging in social media? Yes. And are they trying to do things properly and not have disparate channels, voices, personalities, processes and metrics around it? Yes. And are they trying to figure out that the bad advice many of the so-called “experts” are giving don’t really apply to their brand, company and structure? You betcha.

2 more speaking gigs lined up: one for PRSA (Advanced Twitter course) on July 16th and another at http://www.typeamomconference.com in September (24-27), 2009.