online marketing

This one will be short and as concise as possible. I just came from a great event put together by the team at FoundPages. It was about 5 easy-to-use tools to improve your online marketing efforts. Great turnaround! 5 presentations followed by a few discussions were quick, to the point and very well moderated by Jimmy Wong. Presenters line-up was a follows:

• Twitter Basics by Terence Fong of Business Instincts
• Google Places for Businesses by Kathryn Blair of FoundPages
• Google Alerts by Shannon Bowen-Kelsick of sbk MARKETING
• Posterous.com by Bryanne Miller of Be Real Communications
• ActiveProspects by Ritu Singh of ActiveConversion

Feel free to contact each of the presenters using the links above to request a copy of the presentation. Lear more about the event and sign up for the next one at Meetup.com. I'll definitely be looking for more events by this group!

As promised, below are some notes from the second day of the event. Please note that it only includes notes for presentations by the following people: Shawn Ohler, Ernest Barbaric and Ken Chapman. I had to leave at the lunch break.

Social meida insights from Shawn Ohler, ATB Financial

• Social media campaigns are rarely a success, but when they work, the results are amazing.
• Asking audience "what do you know about our company?" is often a good first step to solve a brand recognition problem.
• Many companies say they care about communities, but in fact they rarely do. So, identifying a strong value and sticking to it is very important. The idea is to create a value that resonates with the entire company. ATB Financial found it as "we are Alberta".
• WeAreAlberta.ca, or any other social campaign site is not a place to sell your product. The company treats it as a place where conversations start.
• According to 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer, the top 3 corporate reputation factors are: transparency, quality of product / service being offered and trust.
• Based on ATB Financial's experience, traditional media started the conversation and social media picked it up and continued.
• Asking your Facebook friends to contribute to your social campaign does not work. Instead, look at relevant conversations in relevant online communities, offer help, contribute, share value, then ask for help.
• According to Shawn, any social media project should accomplish 3 things: publishing (content development and distribution), engaging (starting conversations with the target audience), and influence (ability to influence audience's decisions based on the relationship formed during the campaign).

Social media trainer and consultant, Ernest Barbaric, Ernest Media

Ernest's presentation was of two parts: trends and social media campaign steps. Below is the summary of key points.

• Trend 1: Mobile. Smart phones are taking over the market. According to admob data, 50% of all phones are smart phones. 30% of mobile users access social networks from their phone. In short, our experience is becoming increasingly mobile. As marketers, we need to make sure we strongly consider this mobile revolution.
• Trend 2: Location-based services. It's about here and now. Yelp and FourSquare are two example of location based services that have been growing substantially in their user base. Google Places is a good example of bigger company concerned with location-based services.
• Trend 3: Augmented Reality. Conversations are happening outside of places they originated. For example, I wrote an article on my blog, distributed to my social networks profiles. As a result, my article is discussed on those networks, not on my blog. Another lesson is that conversations are happening where it's most comfortable for your audience, not you. Learn more about Microsoft Augmented Reality Research.

To be continued with more from Ernest Barbaric and Ken Chapman.

I still believe that nothing has changed with the advent of social media. People are people with their needs and desires, pet peeves and moods. However, communication tools and techniques have changed, especially if you're reaching out to youth. Social media has brought in a set of new techniques and tools that affects many of the HR functions including recruitment. As of May 24, 2010 there is 44,240 users under the age of 16 within 50 miles of Calgary on Facebook alone.

So how do you use new communication tools and techniques to connect with the audience? Below is a list of recommendations designed to help an HR professional get on board with social media.

Know your G.A.P's (Goals, Audience, Product)

Your organization is a product. Your aim is to communicate your benefits to the right audience using the right tools. GAP here stands for Goals, Audience and Product. Knowing these three variables will help along the way.

Be where they are

In addition to asking people to visit your site for job postings, engage with your audience on their turf. Creating a Facebook page and regularly posting interesting links and articles will simplify your engagement.

Stop broadcasting, it doesn't work.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that they want your organization. They now have options. We all have options. And we learned to cover our ears to block advertising. Instead, listen, identify the need, and engage to fulfill the need.

Engage with potential candidates before they are needed

Instead of reacting to the position needs, start being proactive. Get into the conversations before the need arises.

Listen first, listen continuously

Listening is more important than speaking. Use the following listening tools to monitor candidates, and identify opportunities.

• Social Mention. A free social media monitoring tool. Much like Google but focusing on the buzz from social media sites.
• Google Blog Search. One of Google's search engine products focusing on searching through the blog universe. It can help you find blog content by your potential job candidates.
• Google Reader. An RSS management tool. Helps you get all your news in one place. The tools can be configured to list almost any type of content including mainstream media, Twitter, Facebook (open pages), Linkedin, etc.
• Radian6. A state of the art platform to listen to Social Media buzz. Allows you to stop buzz trends on your brand, company, competition, etc.  A very costly alternative.

Get in on conversations, engage

Once you spot interesting content though listening activities, feel free to engage into the conversation. For example, blogs, forum discussions. You can also engage offline through organizing events at schools, career fairs, etc.

Engaging with social media can be a tricky endeavor. But starting with listening and understanding of the type of needs and problems among your audience helps simplify the process and makes it fun.

A list of references and further readings

• StatCan's HR Management Strategy 2010-2011
• Canadian Internet Project, an ongoing study of how Canadians use Internet.
• A list of new media writers, bloggers to follow
• Twitterville by Shel Israel
• Groundswell by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff
• All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin

I want to share what I learned at an event that was organized by Bruce Jensen through Calgary Web Communications Strategy Group on meetup.com. The key difference of this event was that attendees were either from communications departments inside major companies or from associations within energy sector in Calgary. The only person I knew was Doug Lacombe, who MC'd the event and did an amazing job.

The event was a mix of a panel discussion and short presentations by social media practitioners. Presenters shared their experiences of managing social media for both small and large companies. The three featured companies were: More than Mangos by Belinda de Wolde, TVI Pacific by Rhonda Bennetto and Encana by Belinda de Wolde. Here are my takeaways from this event. I hope it'll help you see how different companies deal with social media.

Social media lessons

• Simplify the way your customers connect with your brand. Connect, connect, connect. Create a separate page on the website: Connect with Us. For example, TVI Pacific page features three different ways to connect with the company.
• Social media can fix the trust issue. Transparency is the key, social media can help gain trust through making your company transparent. Engaging into conversations with your customers can help energy sector companies to regain trust.
• Always consider your audience. Explaining social technology in human terms helps a lot. Speak in the language of your audience. Blogging, tweetting and socializing on the web should be done considering the age and background of the audience you're talking to.
• Engage with your audience through conversations. Create a discussion board on Facebook page. Moderation is, of course, one of the biggest challenges but having a please where people can share opinions and ask questions about your company is extremely useful. TVI Pacific's practical application: every time a press release is issued, a new Facebook discussion topic is created, and Page Fans are invited to discuss the matter.
• Social media helps general awareness. Social media is not about a new opportunity to broadcast, but a new way to engage with your clients, vendors, partners, investors. Engagement with various parties is the key in distributing information through social media. Encana's practical application: Encana's helps community organizations. These organizations help Encana by linking back and talking about it in the social space.
• Ensure consistent messaging. Regardless of how many social media properties / network profiles you have, make sure the information is consistent across all of them. Ensure the information is consistent between traditional and digital space too. Create ways for your customers to connect with your company through press releases and other traditional marketing channels.
• It's worth hiring an expert. To train you or even take part in expanding your social media presence. For example, hash-tagging of messages on Twitter helps syndicate the messages through the web. This is not obvious when you first start with social media, but an expert, Doug Lacombe in this case, helped Rhonda a lot.
• Blogs are not always necessary. If you don't plan to update it at least weekly, don't start it.
• Be a champion inside your organization. Teach everyone inside your company by doing it and showing results. Dealing with social media you always have to be prepared for controversy and criticism from both inside and outside of your organization.
• Experiment. Test. Flirt. Track. Measure. And be consistent. Have been at observing, flirting stage of social media engagement. Haven't we all?

Thanks again to organizers and participants! Were you there too? Feel free to contribute in the comments section.

I recently presented at a conference. Once of the questions was: Can you suggest a list of books to read to get better at social media? It was a good questions, and, of course, I gave a crappy answer. But this got me thinking. Here is the result:

1. To learn social media is to practice social media. Social media is the way we communicate by sharing. It changes, it evolves, it happens now. So the best way to learn it is to do it.
2. It's no longer about books (books take time to be published), it's about faster, up to date knowledge that's developed through the community members sharing information. So, it becomes a question of NOT "What book to read?" BUT "Who to follow?".

Instead of a list of books, here's a list of select people I follow and listen to. Actually most of the have written books on the subject. Unfortunately, by the time most of those books came out, the online community has already evolved beyond the book's contents in many cases.

• Guy Kawasaki, GuyKawasaki.com
• Jeremiah Owyang, Web-Strategist.com
• Charlene Li,  Groundswell Blog
• Chris Brogan, ChrisBrogan.com
• David Armano, Logic+Emotion
• Seth Godin, Seth Godin’s Blog

Here's a list of more people I follow on Twitter. And I'm sure I'm missing some of the brilliant modern minds, so feel free to suggest more people to the list above. Who are YOUR gurus?

Scanning through Twitter yesterday I bumped into a link to a new service called knowem.com. It allows people to protect their online brands by offering to register social networks profiles on over 380 networks.

The tool checks your brand presence on a variety of social networks. The lists are arranged by category of social networks like Photo, Video, Business, Blogging, etc. See a complete list of Social Networks. The service offers a number of plans including personal and corporate. You can register each profile yourself or you can pay and your brand profile will be registered for you.

Advantages of using the tool:

• Once you register those profiles, your brand name is preserved across major social networks.
• If the name is already taken, you can see who owns the name.
• It's a good tool to keep track of your social network profiles.
• You can export your social networks lists to a CSV file to share with a client.

Disadvantages or things that are missing:

• Lack of proper list management interface where I can track social networks I own.
• As the product is still new, there's a few bugs.

If you know of any other similar tools or have a comment on this one, please leave in the comments to this post.

One of the key questions I get when discussing social media with businesses is: how can we see a result of a social media benefiting companies. Here's one of numerous examples of how public perception, real-time data and tools like Twitter shape the new future for marketers.

This is real life, real-time case that's happened to me over the past hour. I use Shaw as my ISP and about 30 mins ago, the thing stopped working. Tried rebooting the modem (often a solution suggested by ISPs). Didn't work. So, I wend to search.twitter.com on my Blackberry and typed "shaw internet". Got the following:

Twitter comments: Before Shaw solved the problem

* Please note that this is an image that was taken through a web browser on my machine once the problem was resolved. But I saw exactly the same when I browsed mobile.

This is real-time, real life example of social media shaping the future of digital marketing. Public has a say. If you screw up as a business, people will know. They will also spread the word by sharing or RT (re-tweeting) to help others form an opinion about the quality of your service. We share, we contribute, we, the public, form opinions of masses in real time, using real tools.

This snapshot was taken when the situation was resolved by Shaw. Although people are getting happier, there's still a bad aftertaste on Shaw's brand name showing between the lines.

Twitter comments: After Shaw solved the problem