Warren Whitlock

Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

When you change your frame of reference, and take a 10,000 foot overview, you see thing that you may have missed

Gary Flake shows how we can get out of the pile of trees that we have seen as the Internet and view the forest of knowledge assembled for us.

More on PIVOT:

• Video: Discovering Insights with Pivot
• Article: Making Sense of Mountains of Data

Way back in the world before computers and cell phones, one of my favorite funny lines from TV was WKRP salesman Herb Tarlek assuring a client that everything work out OK

Del, goshdarnit I’ve got to go, but if you need anything, anything at all, I’ll be in my car somewhere.

Back then, if you didn’t stick around to see what happened, you really didn’t know.

Are you still using 1980’s Technology for Phone Calls?

Now that we have voice mail, cell phones and instant messaging, we don’t have to be tied down to a location. Herb Tarlek can leave the remote broadcast in the hands of Dr. Johnny Fever and the crew, keep the phone on and get more done.

There’s a lot of places where we need to be. Many relationships that can grow stronger when you show up with more connections and more business, we end up with more of these opportunities.

Yet, many end up sitting at a meeting with their phone or computer tuned into someplace else. After all, it still takes time to check in to voice mail, email, Twitter and wherever else people are trying to reach you.

Rethinking the Multiple Points of Contact Theory

I’ve talked to many a busy person who comes up with one way or another to manage all these contact points. If you have an assistant screening, you can get down to one point of contact, but that isolates you.. sometimes good, sometimes bad.

Others drop one medium for another. This week, I’ve seeing announcements that a new service is great and a user suggesting that no on try to reach them on the old one “cause I won’t be checking in”

That may work for some, but I’m convinced that the future of marketing, business and living is to Listen and Love.. I want to know when people are reaching out to me, filter out the noise and respond to real human to let them know I care, and what I can do to help.

I think the answer is a universal in box. Google has several initiative in place for this, Google Buzz in our Gmail accounts, search for just about everything, and Google Voice to replace voice mail.

Here’s how it works:

Most of my calls end up going to voice mail, with Google Voice, they are instantly transcribed and available to view and respond to… right in my Gmail account.

While I’m getting a lot less calls as people learn to reach me via email, buzz, Twitter or blog post comments, there are still a few that pick up the phone every time they think of it. With a universal in box, I can respond quickly.. often sending back an email before I get off the conference call I’m on or while waiting in line at one of those 3 minute intersections here in Vegas.

You can import contacts and forward numbers, so Voice can be integrated with just about any other system you’ve been using. It’s free. Some suggest Google is using the massive data points gained from transcribing messages to improve voice recognition and search algorithms. So I suppose you don’t want you billion dollar secrets left on a Voice Mail message (even if it’s a old fashion answering machine)

Last I checked, Google Voice was still BETA, but it pretty easy to get an invite and may well be open for all now.

I’ve been experimenting with a couple of tools that bridge databases to make it easier to reach friends and contacts where they want to be reached.

We’ll have an update on this weeks Social Media Radio Show.. including some stats on what social networks have the best connections and how one site promises to get 43% of your email list to open an email (unheard of on some mailing lists today).

With Facebook opening profiles to the search engines by default, this is going to get easier. I think that soon we’ll be able to talk directly to a contact in exactly the way they want to hear from us.. Text, Tweet, Post or Email. In the mean time, let’s make it easier to show where we want to be reached.

BusinessCard2 is trying to do that. I just updated my entry. You can get your own there free.

I read all the comments from this site. Some people don’t know that and still not sure how to reach me.

So I add this cool connection form. It should appear from time to time on posts and pages now. I just add a short code inside a post.

Send me a quick note and let me know it’s working.

Comment on I’m Giving Up My 37th Birthday!

Clean drinking water is the most universal of needs. I will share this with all I can reach

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost/a

We’ve been talking about the social media changing the speed at which we do business.

I say that when you can get real time information, the value of aged information is greatly reduced. That’s why people like Twitter, Facebook and other social media.

Now Google takes the next natural step with real time results from the social media above the older listings:

Now more than ever, we need to know what our customers, readers, friends, fans and foes are saying about our brand

I’m told that the big corporations provide jobs for millions of people who like to believe they are secure there. That’s not been my experience, but what do I know? I’ve been an entrepreneur for most of my life and never set policies for thousands of employees.

From my limited point of view, all employees of any sized company are people.. I do know a few things about people. 350 million of them are now on Facebook, with about a million per day joining. You got to figure that your employees, your customers and the public have found Facebook by now. I suspect that most employees with a computer know about it.

Yet today I’m reading Advertising Age (sorry no link.. I’ll explain below) and read that as many as 70% of companies surveyed are banning social media in the workplace. The article goes on to show how this is a dumb policy (duh) and suggests that “social media is like recess” and that happy employees will be more productive.

Recess?

To be fair, the lower ranking bullet points suggest that an employee may be able to keep up with information about their field and that maybe “brand evangilize” .. then concludes that we ought to consider letting folks use social media at work.

I was amused at the baby steps the author of this article was taking. I decided to leave a comment and suggest that “social media in the employee benefit package” is behind the times and that we should be pushing our people to use social media more to give better customer service, speed up communications and advance the goals of the company.

I wanted to leave a comment.. but Advertising Age still requires a login to participate.

I guess they think that commenting on their articles is recess and a privledge that I have to earn. No problem.. I’ll just log in and.. Wait! What’s this, you need me to confirm? … I can do that, Fire up the email window and click a link. DONE!

OK.. back to the article, scroll to the bottom, smile at the discussion about security issues and employees wasting time (so 2005).. there it is, the comment box. Typed in my 2 cents worth of added value and my user name and password and hit SUBMIT.

A new surprise.. another log in page. DRAT.. I’ve probalby lost my comment… no wonder I seldom comment on old media sites.. but I’m determined and log in for the 4th time.

That’s when I see this message:

This comment will cost you 1 credit. You have zero credits

That’s when I decided to put my comments here. No need to take on the old media, I’ll just bypass them… all I need is a link to that article. But first, let me reread it to make sure I’m quoting them right.

Oops. Can’t do that either. Seems my log in has alerted the system that I’m more engaged than a casual reader.

Access to this article is restricted to Advertising Age subscribers… click here to order

Advertising Age… the voice of the 20th Century Corporate Communications Paradigm (and quickly becoming irrelevant)

I’ve been hearing a lot from one of my favorite companies.

I purchased their product a couple of years back, used it, and been very happy with the outcome.

However, in the past few weeks, my email IN box has been flooded with special offers and announcements. Multiple items in each email with links to buy or give the product as a holiday gift. Special offers for new purchases but nothing that would enhance my use of the product or relationship with the company. Nothing to help me use the product better.

When I see nothing but “special sale” emails.. I begin to wonder “Is this company in trouble? Why are they so desperate?”

Today being Cyber Monday, I decided it was a good time to remove myself from a few of these mailing lists. I scrolled down to the bottom of today’s 23 offer email and found some fine print disclaimers and a few links.  I squinted to find the link that would unsubscribe me and noticed a button just above the fine print that invited me to become a fan on Facebook

Nothing for the fans who already bought?

Despite being there to drop my connection with this company, I must say I found it interesting that they were willing to pay $15 if I were to click on a button on Facebook.

I had to look.

I clicked through to the “fan page” and found 5 unanswered comments from customers using the product. All were politely asking for help with some small problem… no sign that anyone at the company saw them, let alone responded.

My first impression was that the company didn’t get social media (the professional way of saying “this sucks”).. so now I wanted to know: Is there any communication going on here?

Scrolling down, I found an ad for the $15 bribe and videos and photos posted by users, including an graphic with the word “PORN” .. but no comments on any of the wall posts.

Back to the email…

Preparing the post, I went back over a few emails to make sure I wasn’t missing anything that spoke to me as a user instead of just a person to help them get more sales… I had skipped to the bottom of today’s email and had missed this juicy headline:

we want to hear from you
review a product and help your fellow fans make the perfect choice

..followed by photos of their product line

(I’ve removed the product name before the word “fans”)

We have the tools today to segment our databases and provide a unique experience for our fans or customers.. speaking to each of them in a voice that makes sense and initiating a real conversation.

Just a couple of years back, a sales flyer from a company was expected.. and I believe still useful as one form of communication. However, when you decide to get into social media, and use terminology like you want to have a conversation.. you best be ready to have that conversation.

When you do engage your customers you will be adding real value and reap the benefits.

used to be an excuse we used to say “I can’t get to all my email”

now we’ve learned that people, not the medium are important.. and we have to put tools and systems in place so that we are in touch

Originally posted as a comment by warrenwhitlock on Best Seller Book Marketing Strategies

I go to meet people, hear about their products.. but I shake of leg humpers immediately