My office isn’t quite this Crate & Barrel-worthy, but it serves well as BVM Central!

It’s been a crazy few months, not least because we’ve been busy retooling our services, bringing on new clients, in addition to working with the clients we currently have. We faced some setbacks in 2012, not the least of which was a partnership that turned out to be not-so-beneficial to us, so we’re reviewing what we’ve learned from that failure (and yep, it was a failure more than it was a success — ain’t no shame in that, especially if you run a business!) and analyzing what we can do to avoid making those mistakes again. Because as you know, in launching and growing a business, failure is entirely acceptable, even embraced, and mistakes are inevitable, even welcomed, but making them again? Uhm, no. That should tell you that there’s something fundamentally wrong about how you’re running your business, and it’s something that needs to be fixed before it poisons everything else in your company and brings it down entirely.

Not going to happen here.

In the meantime, I continue to be amazed at how much there is to learn about running a business, even more than 3 years after I launched Blue Volcano Media. I’d once applied for the International MBA program at Thunderbird’s School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona, which enjoys a stellar reputation as one of the two best International Business programs in the United States (the other is the University of South Carolina’s Darla School of Business, with which it frequently trades the top spot on the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings, and whose liberal arts graduate program I attended back in the day). Even in my ripe old age of my mid-thirties, I naively assumed that everything you ever needed to know about business — even international business — could be taught in two years, especially if you were under the tutelage of some of the best biz school profs in the world.

Now, nearly 3-1/2 years after launching Blue Volcano Media, I sometimes still feel like a novice. As I’m beginning to understand, entrepreneurship is a dynamic endeavor, much like surgery, engineering, law, and many other knowledge-intensive specialties. You will spend your entire career as an entrepreneur learning new things, which may be one of the reasons why I and so many other smart people are drawn to it. I still sometimes dream of going back and getting the Thunderbird credential — in fact, I wear the navy blue T-shirt I got during an Open House I attended in 2009 at least once a week, AND I’m wearing it as I write this post — but I take lots of comfort in the fact that regardless, my company is itself probably the best business school for a student like me.

So here’s what I’ve since learned over the past three years, and it’s one that I continue to endorse in the wake of the Marissa Mayer controversy about working remotely: small businesses can and do thrive while working in the cloud. In fact, I would argue that for many small businesses, working in the cloud is essential to the very survival of their business. Without it, profit margins would be depressingly low, and not just because of the usual suspects of overhead such as rent and utilities.

Except for a couple of months early in our company’s life when we paid a few hundred dollars to sublease office space from one of our clients, our team has always worked remotely. Even when we were still with our previous business partner, which had a sprawling office suite and which had offered me space at a reasonable cost, we resisted the call to figuratively hang up a shingle somewhere. Don’t get me wrong — I still love the fantasy of having fancy suites with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a sparking city skyline. I like the idea of having all my employees under one roof, hearing the exciting buzz of ideas being discussed and projects being executed, all under a giant, custom-made sign announcing that Blue Volcano Media has arrived, and how.

When I step down from my fantasy, however, and take a harder look at what we’re really about, I realize that while the impressive digs and even more impressive views might be ego-boosting, it can also be wallet-busting, and in the hyper-competitive industry in which we operate, especially in this economy, few but the lean survive. Our clients still feel the pinch of the recession, even though theoretically in our rearview mirror, and we’re all demanding greater efficiencies. I want my employees to work better, smarter, harder, and leaner, just as I am, and just as my clients are. Fancy office space can not only be counterproductive to that, it can also absolutely kill it. Ever longer commute times, the inflexibility and demands of real estate on even the most successful businesses, and the tiresome realities of office politics? No, thank you.

One of the biggest blessings of running a business in 2013 is that the choice to work in the cloud is made infinitely easier by the plethora of tools and applications that allow anyone with a laptop and reliable Internet access to manage her company anywhere she wants. Our team is scattered across two states — Illinois and Texas — and we occasionally bring on freelancers, some of whom have come from California, Tennessee, Michigan, Canada, and even as far away as the Philippines and India. We’ve worked with clients in the United Kingdom as well as California and New York. And throughout that time? I’ve run it all from my home office here in Irving, Texas. Growth can happen anywhere, whether you start in a garage (as many a Silicon Valley success story has), a kitchen table (as I did), a basement (as one of my previous employers did) or in a rented closet in some downtown high-rise.

We use cost-effective and very efficient tools like 37Signals’ Basecamp, Google Apps, Freshbooks, WordPress, Outright, and many other applications to manage the day-to-day operations. We also rely heavily on third-party, industry-specific marketing tools to manage our client accounts. We use Skype and WebEx to communicate internally and externally. My smartphone (a Google Nexus 4 with a T-Mobile pay-as-you-go account) is my second “office,” allowing me to keep track of everything that’s going on in my business no matter where I am. (I answered emails and text messages this morning while sitting in my mechanic’s waiting room hoping that my beloved 1995 Geo Prizm, affectionately named Maggie Mae, will make it one more year.) I’m not a big fan of multitasking, but efficient mono-tasking to take advantage of all those pockets of time we otherwise would go to waste sitting in lines, waiting rooms and parking lots really does make a difference.

Would we ever move to a “real” office, complete with a gleaming Keurig machine and layouts reminiscent of a spread in the latest IKEA Business catalog? Maybe. I try to think of the future in terms of growth in client accounts, profits, and staffing, not necessarily in personal perks. Right now, though, our recruiting succeeds in large part because of the incredible flexibility that we offer incoming team members, despite the fact that, as a startup, we’re not quite at the point where we can offer IBM-scale benefits and salaries. We’ve made some hiring mistakes for sure — not everyone has the maturity or motivation to do remote work, as Ms. Mayer and Yahoo! are finding out — but what company doesn’t? What we do know is that working in the cloud is working for us now, at this stage of our business growth, and that it’s a model I can confidently attribute much of our success to.

What about your company? Do you work in the cloud, even part of the time? Is remote working an option in your company? As many have found out, working in the cloud has its share of challenges, much of which can be overcome with careful planning and a solid communications infrastructure in place. If you’ve tried to implement a remote working solution in your company, please feel free to share your successes or even failures in the comments.

Photo courtesy of WintrHawk on Flickr.

Does this look like social media to you?

At Blue Volcano Media, we use the word “audience” a lot, as in, We have to build this audience! Listen to your audience! Who is your audience?

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking that we’re using that word all wrong. In fact, I think the word is the wrong word to use when referring to the folks with whom we’re engaging all day, every day, on our clients’ various social networks. Sure, we use audience in proposals, newsletters, emails, and even blog posts. I’ve used it in countless speaking engagements, client presentations, reports, and meetings. And why not? Social media folks always talk about reaching out to one’s audience, i.e., both the people who actively follow your brand as well as those who could be following your brand but aren’t aware of you and/or your social media presence just yet.

But is that really the right term? Webster’s defines audience as a group of listeners or spectators, or a reading, viewing or listening public. Actually, the very first definition is the act or state of hearing.

At first blush, that sounds just about right. Marketers and advertisers have talked about audiences ad nauseam over the years: the audience for a client’s commercial, ad, or brochure. An audience of tens of millions tune in to watch the Super Bowl every year. Beyoncé’s concerts always attract huge audiences. An estimated half a billion people around the world sat glued in front of their television sets back in 1969 and served as the collective, global audience to the first transmission from the moon by the first humans to ever walk on it.

Yet when you think about it, that’s not what social media is doing. Not if you’re doing it right, anyway. You’re not merely transmitting words and pictures to an audience, the very definition of which assumes a certain level of passivity. No one is sitting back waiting for golden words to pour out of your mouth, in the way that Beyoncé fans do in massive arenas. And the Super Bowl may have become a very social media-centric event, but the social stuff is pretty recent. Most previous Super Bowls weren’t about fans texting furiously to their friends and to the brands splashed across the screen in million-dollar, half-minute increments. They were about folks gathered around the TV and absorbing the game, not interacting with it.

Audience is who you talk to, not engage with. It’s not a conversation but a monologue. You (the advertiser or marketer) have your little prepared speech/ad/commercial/brochure/sales pitch, and you deliver it with clipped precision (with maybe a little, jaunty jingle thrown in), and then you sit back and start watching your metrics. Remember: it’s about folks listening, viewing or reading. It’s not about…engaging.

Now there’s another oft-used word in social media: engagement. The thing is, that’s actually a good word to describe what works in social media. Back to my trusty Webster’s: engagement is defined as emotional involvement or commitment.

Now, how exactly does that jibe with the previous definition we offered up for audience? Audience is passive, non-participatory, inert. You don’t engage with an audience. Ads don’t engage with an audience. Commercials don’t engage with an audience. Advertisers send out their message like NASA shooting a rocket into outer space laden with data, and then hope that someone, somewhere gets it.

Ad metrics can tell you how many people heard it, when, how much it cost you to send that message, and maybe even how many people (approximately) actually performed an action as a result of that message, but it can’t tell you anything about what the people actually thought or felt about your message. If you do — via surveys, polls, comment cards, etc. — it’s always long after the fact, and even then it may not reflect the respondent’s true feelings and thoughts, given the passage of time.

In other words, there’s no emotional involvement or commitment. There’s no engagement.

Clearly, then, we need a better word than audience. A word that truly describes what it means to sit down in front of your computer and start having conversations — real, genuine, candid conversations — with the people who follow, like, and link to you. A word that reflects the give-and-take, honest, no-holds-barred nature of social media. Remember that ads are about controlled messages, where the advertiser spins a monologue about its product or service and then hands it all on a platter for the audience to consume.

In social media, no one controls the conversation. Sure, advertisers can do all they can to help shape it, nurture it, expand it, promote it, etc., but as many, many, MANY corporate social media crises have proven (Hello, Chrysler! Good morning, Burger King!), you can no longer control it. Ever. The control room has left the building. Social media is all about user-generated content, and the user — heretofore lacking the broadcasting power and budget of institutional publishers and advertisers — ain’t afraid to use it.

So here’s a new word we’re going to start using within Blue Volcano Media, one that’s already in widespread use within many other social media agencies elsewhere: community. Again, back to my trusty Webster’s, which defines community as an interacting population of various kinds of individuals in a common location (underlined emphasis mine). 

In a community, people talk. They argue. They discuss, debate, invite others to join in, shout, commiserate, compliment, promote, and share. They interact. They engage.

And that’s what brands must do if they ultimately want to succeed in social media. They must create a community, not cling to the outdated idea that an audience is still what they must strive for. Audience is so 20th century, so 1994. Since BBS began to flower in the 1980s, conversations have poured out of the dark corners of the Internet and taken over its networks. No matter how much money you have, you can’t control the message anymore. Egypt’s civilian protesters — who overthrew a dictator decades overdue for it — relied heavily on Twitter to organize and share news and information. God forbid you call them an audience. Now that’s emotional commitment.

That’s not to say that you would want your audience community members to start a riot on your Facebook page or harangue you on Twitter. What you, as the brand, want is to get down from your pedestal from whence you used to broadcast your ads and start chatting with the folks who are your buyers, users, consumers, listeners, fans, followers. Say hi to them when they join your comment thread. Thank them for following you. Take pictures of them in your store and post them on Facebook (with their permission, of course!). (Three Dog Bakery, a gourmet bake shop franchise with two branches in North Texas, does just that, and boy, do they have a lot of fans for a local dog-only bakery!) Give them exclusive discounts on your products or services.

And yes, listen to them when they complain about your service. Don’t just ban them from your page or — horrors! — delete the comment entirely. Have more respect for your community members’ intelligence than that and address the criticism head-on. In social media, everyone can hear everyone else’s scream, and you don’t want to come across as the censor. As many brands have found out the hard way, social media folks don’t like that. At all.

So there you go. Rather than social media managers and coordinators, we have community managers and coordinators. It’s a recognition that social media isn’t just a tool anymore but a powerful platform on which communities are built, brand reputations are made, and brand ambassadors are discovered.

How are you engaging with your community? When was the last time you said Good morning on Twitter or Facebook? Do you know who your most ardent community member is?

Photo by Iguana Jo on Flickr.

There’s been a lot of confusion the past few months over Facebook’s changes to its algorithm back in the fall of 2012. Many brands swore they witnessed a jaw-dropping plunge in their overall engagement numbers and worried that this may be a result of yet another nefarious plan by Zuckerberg and Company to ease their newfound shareholders’ concerns about the soundness of their investment in the social media company. 

Many agencies, including Blue Volcano Media, did see something funny, but we weren’t quite sure what it all meant.

CASE STUDY #1: Boutique marketing agency

One of our clients, a boutique marketing agency with fewer than 15 employees, works primarily in the B2B space. It launched its Facebook page about two years ago and has a small (fewer than 1,000 fans) but supportive community.

From Q3 to Q4 of 2012, the client experienced a 4.4% decrease in the number of Page Impressions. However, it also witnessed a nearly 84% increase in the amount of user engagement during that same period. (We define engagement as any interaction a visitor has with a page, e.g., sharing content, liking a post, commenting on a post, etc.). Furthermore, while the average Reach of posts declined by nearly 30%, average engagement per post more than doubled during that same period.

Needlessly to say, we were both impressed and stumped.

Consider another client of ours, a local, fast-growing nonprofit organization. While it obviously reaches a different type of audience, its numbers reveal more interesting insights into the maddening but fascinating world of Facebook marketing.

CASE STUDY #2: Small, local nonprofit organization

This client has a very loyal base of supporters, volunteers and donors. It launched its Facebook book four years ago and earned every one of its 2,500+ fans through sheer effort, good will and lots of very compelling graphics, including videos and photos. The volunteers who manage its page clearly understand its power and reach and knew how to harness its ability to generate excitement, enthusiasm, and most important for a nonprofit, the desire among readers and fans to give money.

The organization also spent a few hundred dollars a month on print advertising, however, but wasn’t sure where the money was going or if it was really making a difference. The ads generated a few phone calls a week, but almost none resulted in a conversion.

We analyzed their website analytics and found that Facebook was the second largest source of incoming traffic to their site (organic search engine traffic topped the list). Not surprising — their engagement was at 12%, and their reach relative to the number of fans they had was extensive.

The organization wanted to really leverage Facebook, however, and opted to experiment with an advertising campaign. We created two separate ad campaigns in order to compare their performances against each other and elected for a modest budget of $5 a day for both ads. They launched on November 1st.

Within two months, the number of fans on the page more than doubled. Total Reach more than doubled as well, although average reach per post increased by only about 5%.  What was most surprising of all, though, was that user engagement stayed flat at around 4%. (It may also be important to note that donations during the two months of the ad campaign increased by only 1% compared to the same period in 2011.)

CONCLUSION

So is Facebook hoping to monetize its hot property by forcing brands to pay up to reach the audience they worked so hard to nurture and grow? Based solely on the admittedly small sample of these two small organizations, I’m not sure. And I’m not the only one who thinks this way, as other digital marketers working for brands of all sizes and industries have found much the same results.

If you’re just looking to grow the number of eyeballs who see your content — judged by the number of Likes, your Reach, etc., — then you’ll probably want to pay up. That, however, is the “old” way of measuring Facebook performance and tells you nothing about how effective your marketing efforts are.

If you’re serious about using social media to deepen your relationships and communications channels with your audience, however — regardless if its size — then I’m not sure that the old metrics apply.

You can have a million fans, after all, but if you’re only getting 5% engagement, how much of that is really contributing to your branding and marketing efforts, and how much is just play? Sure, you might be raising brand awareness, but that’s a harder measure to track. When someone engages with you by clicking on, sharing, or commenting on your content, they’ve added one more brick to the path that connects you to them.

Our small sample does prove one thing: content matters. It’s always mattered, and it matters even more now that Facebook has clocked over a billion users and is generating new brand pages every single day. Content is what ultimately inspires engagement and builds the impression your audience has of you and your brand. The size of your audience thus matters less than whether or not they want to interact with you, so make sure you give them content worthy of their attention and time.

We’ll continue to monitor Facebook’s evolution as a brand marketing platform and share with you our analyses and insights in future newsletters, but in the meantime, feel free to drop us an email if you have any questions!