Conversation Agent

Who cares about your news?

2009-07-10T07:00:00-04:00

I mean who wants to hear from you? How is the information going to help them be smarter, do their job better, sell more? One of the most frequent pitches I get says something like "we thought your readers would enjoy to hear about 'x'".

Would they? How do you know? We had an interesting conversation in the comments at John Cass blog a couple of weeks ago when he posted about a pitch he received from Gary Vaynerchuk's publicist.

In the comments to that post, I wrote:

Neville and John, you now make me feel special as I received the very same email on June 5. I was going to write a post about the fact that media "celebrities" - and Gary qualifies as one - might really have a chance to change the game on this whole social media thing with execution.

Passion is high on my list, but I don't think that's why I got the email pitch. I do understand that scale gets challenging once you go beyond a certain threshold. [Sorry to miss you at Mediabistro Circus, Gary, I was speaking on the same day. Congratulations on your daughter.]

My other thought was that perhaps a few bloggers might enjoy spending time at Gary's site. Going back to what both John and Neville said in this thread, it's not be about generating traffic opportunities for a personal site... but it might be about making connections with a different community and Gary has a very loyal community.

Just brainstorming here. Because of my passion and involvement with Fast Company, I've met many authors over the years and helped those who wanted to connect with live events - we did two for Dan Pink, one with Ben McConnell, two with Bill Jensen, one with Bill Taylor and Polly LaBarre... I could go on. Only on one occasion, the author, who will thus go unnamed, felt he wanted to get paid to come and promote his book. All of this is in my blog bio, within reach.

Reach means different things to different people and connection depends on the ability to find that out. Good discussion, thank you all

Gary's response was brief:

Thnx Val u hit the tone as those were many of the things I was hoping to do, in hind site I picked the wrong of communication, I should have made a video..and I will :)

Gary was being brief. But there is one indication of whether you care about someone or not - spelling their name right. For those reading (and pitching), I absolutely dislike any name shortening or mishandling, like using the Anglicized version. But that was not going to be my point.

You see that in my comment I make a couple of very specific suggestions to Gary. Do you think anyone followed up since June 15? Not a peep. When you're asking others to care about you, do you ever consider for a moment who cares about your news?

Stop trying to count number of impressions and start working on making an impression, being memorable. We discussed connections yesterday. What if I have only a few readers here, but a very large network off line? What if I speak to or know the one person who will sneeze your news to the whole world?

When you pitch someone, stay away from the obvious mass emailing - just because you can, it does not mean it will give you the best results. Also, fewer and more targeted sites or relationships may open you more doors. This may not be the case for Gary - who doesn't like Gary Vaynerchuk? It will be your case in similar circumstances.

When is it a good idea to include bloggers in your media outreach?

If you can pass the straight face test - this matters to their readers
You have an integrated approach - part of the story fits the new media landscape like a glove and you have something unique to offer for that one media property
Their traffic is your audience - chances are a blogger's traffic is much more targeted than a magazine's, but more fragmented
You intend to dedicate time and resources to being authentic - cutting-edge, leader, authority in whatever it is you do tend to sound fake to someone who writes for passion
You're open to a two-way dialogue and accept that ideas may come back to you as a result of the conversation - do you have a plan to follow up with that specific person?

How do you figure out who to pitch?

Do your homework. Read their work - not just the first three words of the last post so you can tack them on the beginning of your email, please. We can read, too and if your email doesn't make sense you've lost your chance. I provided an example of a good pitch here.
Get to know them, develop relationships. Aren't you in public relations? What happened to the "relations" part? Or do you think your job is just to send out lots of emails? What is better, several ignores and relegation to the spam folder, or a few quality (for the blogger) conversations?
Make it easy for them. Whatever happened to the much hailed social media release? Why are PR agencies not using that? It works [hat tip Shel Holtz]

Also, if you spend time online, you will know the tone, and topics that resonate. People share a lot - on Twitter, FriendFeed, Delicious, etc. Maybe you feel this as you're reading - we've been over this before. Why beat a dead horse? Well, it's not old until it's done and today very few, not so many, ok maybe one and they're my cousin, do it.

How do you measure success?

Please don't tell me you count impressions or media by the number of readers I have. Don Bartholomew has it right, let's not get carried away by the numbers of followers or readers. Relevance is a very much fragmented concept in social media. Ask yourself: what numbers are real?

[image of yesterday news by Zarco Drincic]

How I do the Connecting Thing

2009-07-09T07:00:00-04:00

Jay Baer let the cat out of the bag, so I might as well confess - I am a connector, and a life time one, too. Someone said on Twitter today that she wished people understood that the loudest ones are not necessarily those who are making stuff happen (I'm paraphrasing here). Many collect people, I learn about them - what they're looking for, what they're passionate about.

From strangers to friends on trains (part of being Italian and trains never arriving on time), to discovering amazing talent among people in a room crowded with voices intent on networking. I don't have a very sophisticated method, I'm afraid. No big spreadsheets or ultra-tech tools, although the human brain is probably the most sophisticated of all systems.

I just choose to observe, find out, and remember. Because I know a time will come when I'll be able to connect a dear friend with a resource, a business with a partner, an acquaintance with a job opportunity.

What do I get out of it? Why do we need to get something beyond the being helpful part out of it?

Connections is one of the topics here at Conversation Agent. I met Jason Falls when he noticed my first post on connection Katas. I still remember his comment about it.

Being that we're enamored with data, I can tell you that quantity and quality of connections both matter. There is a tipping point when you begin to know fairly well a good number of people and you can help exponentially.

I started making introductions to people early in life and my network has grown organically as a result - on two sides of the pond. Community can also form from the connections made between smaller networks.

During the years when I was facilitating online conversations at Fast Company and organizing live events - yes, 98 free live events, way too many to compete with anyone doing them today - content was the determining factor for inviting the right people to the conversation. Like any good Italian meal is an excuse to be social, right?

You want to have a mix of professionals in organizations, consultants, and service providers/agencies at events. And you don't want especially to be preaching to the choir. There needs to be a nice mix to make things interesting for everyone.

One of the weaknesses of professional associations is that often there are many more providers than buyers at events, for example. Our community/network cut across professions, industries, and organization type. And it grew organically over time.

You can turn the dial with content and change results.

The other great thing is that because we had series of events, we had a great deal of diversity among attendees within the same community. We played with Legos, worked on the digital strategy for a museum and tested restaurant technology, we brainstormed with CEOs, and went shopping for the right internal communications strategies.

I summarized some of it here, the rest is what you learn with me in posts and through the connections we make now. It was never about me, it still isn't. It's about exchanging ideas and meeting people. In some cases, it's about giving the stage to anyone who decides they want to connect.

Give it time. It may not work today, but I will remember tomorrow, and the day after. I don't believe we lost the ability to pay attention to what's important - and you are important.To make the right connection, where the is a fit, takes time. But when you do, you fly, you're in "flow".

Yes, I do the welcome bit - an email on your first comment and whenever we have something to say to each other, email is the new offline. I do the the facilitation, answer questions - this post was the result of a question - the connecting - usually most of it behind the scenes - and thank often, in many languages.

Finally, as I wrote to Jay the other day, I think it ironic that my posts show such a low comment count, because they are shared and discussed in many places - I wish TypePad had thought of innovating in the direction of aggregation vs. its own sign up system.

Steve Rubel says blogging may be dead - not by a long shot. It's "and/and", rarely, "either/or". I'm with the getting to know you movement, and for that you need to actually be impressionable and have enough content to invite discovery - in one place.

As for the impressions I make, I know it takes time to notice someone else. I'm in no hurry. I'm in it for the long haul.

What about you? How do you make real connections?

[image of world's tallest Lego Tower]

Producers, Meet Colleen Wainwright, the Communicatrix

2009-07-08T07:00:00-04:00

In a recent post, she wrote about travel: "The destination may surprise you. It will probably surprise you. When you get to what it is you’ve been working toward—a primary relationship, a VP title, your own business, a gold statuette—it will not feel like or seem like or look like what you thought it might on the way there."

And I guarantee that it will indeed do just that. Working towards something is a lot more fun and challenging - some days in good ways, others in not so good ways - than being there. The growth is in the motion.

Have you ever watched a tree or a plant grow? You probably won't see it day to day when you want it to show, but you will see it in the end. The destination often is also an opportunity to look back and see how far you've come. Colleen writes at Communicatrix. This destination will surprise you, and so will the exposure to her ideas.

I'm one of those people who connect with stories, that's why I write so much about them. And her story is intriguing. Colleen's transparency is the kind Jim Collins talked about when he was on stage with Alan Webber at Fast Company Real Time in Phoenix talking about "the three circles". Finding that place of intersection - and interest - between passion, DNA, and economics. Straight from the About You page, here's a conversation with Colleen.

Why are you online?

Colleen: Aside from TMZ and all the awesome pr0n, for two main reasons:

First, it is the cheapest, fastest, easiest way to put the word out there. Growing up, I always wished I had my own publishing company; now I do. She shoots! She scores!

Second, as many of your wiser and more articulate subjects have already said, the Internet is a genius way of connecting with your right people. "Right" is going to vary from person to person, but for me, it's about finding people with whom I share Significant Areas of Overlap, and expanding my knowledge base from there.

For example, we may both be fascinated by marketing, but you come at it from the perspective of a multinational conversation-starting sharpshooter with experience in big-boy stuff like tech, whereas I'm a loopy clown who has happily frittered away her life writing jingles, playing dress-up and waxing rhapsodic about her intestines. Where in real life would we have met? Maybe SXSW, but even then, not without the Internet intervening.

What prompted to post in "About You" at Conversation Agent?

Colleen: Because it terrified me to do it. I think it's pretty important to do stuff that terrifies you on a regular basis.

Also, I see what you're doing as providing a bridge between people who might not otherwise meet, and whose connecting will certainly change them, and might change the world, for the better. That's something I want both to take advantage of and to support.

Also-also, because I knew if you decided to interview me, I'd get to see how you describe me. Since half the time I have no idea of how to describe myself, I shamelessly throw myself in the paths of those who can do it for me.

What are you working on that you feel will connect ideas and people?

Colleen: I wish I had some big, schmancy-cool, global foundation or think-tank or what-have-you to get people on board with, but really, it's just me, the entertainer, and my mission: to be a joyful conduit of truth, beauty and love. Not exactly Joan of Arc material, but hey, we all have our jobs.

Currently, mine translates to a lot of writing about my own processes—on my blog, in my newsletter about effective communicating, in a monthly column about marketing for actors. I'm halfway through a year-long project that's about "marketing out loud"—I'm externalizing the day-to-day work of marketing a small business via a separate blog and podcast. I speak as often as I can about non-hideous ways to put yourself out there on and off the Internet, and I've got a few other strange little creative projects cooking on the back burner.

I suppose you could say the main thing I'm constantly doing is working to make myself a better, more joyous conduit. Is that even a thing? I'm doing it, so I guess it is.

Who would you like to connect with?

Colleen: At a recent unconference I helped facilitate (an amazing experience I heartily recommend to anyone thinking about it), a friend of mine, Jason Womack, answered this question the best way I've ever heard: I don't know what I don't know.

I have a long wish list of people I know I'd like to meet because I think they're cool, but I'm equally interested in meeting the people I don't even know that I want to know. I'm pretty sure I'd like to meet someone who likes producing as much as I like creating; I'm much, much better at generating content than I am at putting it out there. And it would be amazing if they were fellow travelers who get that self-development doesn't have to be ponderous, dull or poorly written, and who want to put some good, juicy, fun stuff out there.

But really, I'm open to what I'm not so sure about, too. Serendipity rules!

______

A couple of immediate connections I would make for you come to mind:

my friend CK, who I admire for keeping it real and managing to be kind, generous and graceful while kicking ass in the marketing department
I know you would also enjoy meeting the talented Karen Hegman, a communicator passionate about narrative
and my Australian friend Gavin Heaton, a servant to chaos and a master of story

I open the floor to the community for more suggestions and ideas on who you should meet, as well as of course, the connection they can make with you directly.

100 Thoughts on Marketing

2009-07-07T07:00:00-04:00

Leo Babauta has written the perfect post for some of the thoughts I've been having about marketing, social media and the age of the customer. In it, he encourages us to be lusting for life, not stuff. I couldn't agree more. I find that the more I know myself, the more refined and specific grows my taste on wines, food and yes, stuff - like jewelry, clothing, cars, even vacations.

Plus, there's something else - I'm all bought out. In fact, it's been a couple of years that I started paring down what I own and being very deliberate about purchasing only when I need something and mostly to replace something else. Take my iron, I've had that for 15 years (wow, do they make things that last that long?).

It seems that the more time I spend creating and being creative - at work and with writing on the blog, etc. - the less I need to acquire things.

Part of the process and the joy is to get to know new people, to exchange ideas and make connections and the realization that you cannot touch someone without being touched in return. Which is a far better experience than the momentary gratification of a new thing. Ok, maybe technology warrants a separate post, I'm an aspiring geek and all that.

You probably find this, too - the less you buy, the less you want.

This is a big problem for marketers, isn't it? And for an economy that based its faith on consumers, which is probably why companies are ill organized to deal with customers anymore. Everything was optimized towards that sale of a certain kind of thing. That's probably why the amount of spam has never been greater.

The social part of digital experiences has unleashed or highlighted - along with awakening the creator in us - a desire to be that is far greater than that to have. Presence tools like twitpic and many more Twitter apps are very much in vogue. A while back we took the 100 thing challenge.

Stuff, especially marketing stuff, is due for a tune up. Let's take the meaning challenge for marketing. Here are 100 thoughts:

be short on pages for the Web site, long on user experiences
optimize the relationship, not the click throughs
let the user guide your next steps
provide experiences
use multimedia for learners and readers with different styles/preferences
use your content and smarts to elevate the other
be relevant
give trust and care
realize that the most important person on the phone is the customer
make the product rock
help the customer rock
ask questions and listen
get personal and stay personable
communicate often, simply, kindly
be engaged and participate
simplify
make it easy to deal with you by being where people are
learn, improve, innovate
liberate your inner fan often
transform your business processes
change your assumptions
think community vs. transactions
collaborate internally
create value
be passionate
be authentic
stay open to change
provide a platform for customers to find others with like interests
build interaction in your conversations
integrate, connect the dots, connect
breathe life into what you do
create magic
learn to speak your customer's language
test your ideas with the marketplace
play
use games to accelerate learning
allow your fans to brag about your products and services
let your employees be evangelists
observe more, judge less
watch the social triggers that make stuff happen
figure out where you can be more transparent
streamline your onboarding
make customers wish they never left by throwing them a party when parting ways
leave the door open
make realistic promises you can keep
go the extra mile
smile
be contagious
think long term, prepare to excel each moment
share
think relationships more than public
keep the fire in your belly burning
scrap most brochures, make eBooks - or your could go the other way and
use your brochures as souvenirs of beauty and style
make your marketing materials not just simpler, but fun, too
delight and surprise (in a good way)
give customers useful data about themselves
provide a better context around customer experience
communicate more
contribute to meaningful conversations
empower your experience designers
talk to the people who want to talk with you
learn to deal with the challenges those people face, when they face them
overdeliver
let special circumstances guide pricing
be hungry for improvement
discover the deep emotional associations with your brand
find out when to dial in intimacy and camaraderie
find your tribe and lead it
make your coupons collectibles
audition customers for private screenings/previews of your new product
help your customers do more with you and with less stuff
be agile
adapt
be portable - mobile is the next technology
be sincere
cultivate relationships and ideas
earn your media
break down your silos
help build networks of interest or communities of practice
connect networks with each other
invest in your customers
tell the customer story
know your story and values and live them
focus on the product and the experience first
remember that changing the world can also mean making someone's life easier
put people before procedures whenever you can
solve customer problems
learn about the ways people respond to your content online
find ways to match your content better with the people who want it (it may cost you more)
educate
entertain
be curious, interested and interesting
think about the many-to-many relationships in the marketplace
follow through
consider dimensional not just as a direct marketing tool
write great emails - packed with knowledge, easy to read and share
send emails only to those who sign up
encourage sharing by giving the example
mix it up - it's not all about you, make it about the industry, and the people

A penny for your thoughts?

[image courtesy of cobalt123]

Own Your Story Again

2009-07-06T07:00:00-04:00

Customer service is the new marketing because it is grounded in competency, people, and contact - all things that can help you with innovation and relationships and that cannot easily be outsourced. They in turn create the experience your customers have that contributes to your story - that of your company and your brand.

I thought about how owning your story is the true business currency these days as I read the telling dialogue reported in Douglas Rushkoff's book Life, Inc. (you can find chapters at Boing Boing):

I’m regularly called in by companies looking to improve what they call their “stories” -- the way consumers and shareholders alike perceive them. But when I interrogate them about what their companies actually do, many are befuddled. One CEO called me from what he said was a major American television manufacturer. I happened to know at the time that there were no televisions manufactured in the United States. But I went along with the charade.

“So you make television sets?” I asked. “Where?”

“Well, we outsource the actual manufacturing to Korea.”

“Okay, then, you design the televisions?”

“Well, we outsource that to an industrial design ﬁrm in San Francisco.”

“So you market the televisions?”

“Yes,” he answered proudly. “Well,” he qualiﬁed, “we work with an agency in New York. But I am directly involved in the ﬁnal decisions.”

Fulﬁllment and delivery were handled by a major shipping company, and accounting was done “out of house,” as well.

Just what story was I supposed to tell? The company no longer did anything at all, except serve as the placeholder on processes that happened in other places.

Branding, marketing, and public relations are not a substitute for maintaining a semblance of competence. These activities simply play back what the business is doing. The value needs to be baked into the business to show up in communications. And the business needs to interact with customers, employees and people in general to create its own story.

Businesses that do not seem to have a clear path to help employees participate in that very value they created are starting to show that discrepancy in the customer experience. Which in turn shows up as customer dissatisfaction or poor customer experience that ends up being a problem for sales. Customers have replaced consumers, even though we still behave as the latter in many ways.

Is the Internet the place where you can own your story again? After all, we know that value can be created from anywhere, where people can participate in the value they created, for example:

Firefox by Mozilla - better and safer than Microsoft Internet Explorer (I would also add faster)
Wikipedia by crowd sourcing - broader and more comprehensive and often more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica (I could add more interesting)
YouTube by crowd sourcing - more diverse and filled with talent than what Hollywood proposes (often formulaic and playing just to the center of the bell curve)
Itex by members - where B2B can barter services crating a cashless economy
Support groups for people with rare diseases
Open source projects
... and more

But wait, isn't the pipe that is keeping me connected something I rent from a corporation? Isn't the software I'm using to post something I pay for every year? Aren't all my clicks and online navigation being monitored and tracked by marketers that will push the appropriate content my way? Are we simply trading one form of controlled experience - that of television - with another - that of the technologies and tools we've become so accustomed to?

Reading Rushkoff is quite the sobering experience.

There is so much discussion about what to do and what not to do, about definitions, about real value online today. Let's think for a moment here - do we own our story when we worry about the number of friends or followers we have and judge others using this very metric? Do we add value when we measure what we can learn from a post based upon the number of comments it receives?

Are we outsourcing our own critical thinking to others? Do we pitch before engaging? Do we expect value without giving value ourselves? I'm a strong believer in the pursuit of knowledge at the service of human potential. If it's true that we're in the attention economy, our measure of success is the actual connection formed between people and between ideas and people.

Genuine conversation between people may be less easy to exploit, but it's a whole lot stickier than any Web property or shiny object of the day. The very essence of human potential is paid off in the concept of community, where service becomes the main currency. Service goes hand in hand with empathy and compassion.

As for the word customer, I leave you to some interesting etymology discoveries.

Today at Fast Company Expert blog we talk about how you can get the most out of customer service - and this is valid both for the company and the customer.

[six word story by zen]

Is Your Company Thinking that Social Media is a Job?

2009-07-05T07:00:00-04:00

I'm asking because technically, it really isn't.

Let's take a step back and think about the strong word in the term social media. We've had all kind of media for ages - print, then the novelty of radio, then video that supposedly killed the radio stars (they also said that sound in movies would never take off, oh my), then the Web.

Well, there have been many technologies in between and now plenty in continuous development (and fashion), I'm just skipping through this.

The progression is easy to see even within each medium and format. I remember when television commercials had their own time slot, then they became more intertwined with the programming, to the point that now you Tivo them (imagine a language plastic enough to make verbs out of product names).

We're seeing the same devolution online where media companies sell more and more interrupting ads because ads online do not really deliver the same results as they did and still do in print - not even close. But you can measure your lack of results with ever increasing levels of precision.

That's why you integrate off line and online and advertising with many other tools in your marketing communications mix.

Why do we ignore the ads better online? It turns out that to be effective, online ads need to be by companies and products you want to notice in the first place. Amazing how everyone is noticing the online Apple ads at the New York Times talk to other ads now, for example. We ignore the others because when we're online, we're there to be social.

Sure, we're social animals offline, but online amplifies our behavior. We expect to talk back or even initiate a conversation. And in the case we are just sitting on the fence or observing, we want to find out what our friends or peers are saying about a product or service before we go to the company's Web site or we take action in any way.

Why do people go online in the first place? For many reasons - self-expression, loneliness, intellectual curiosity, networking and relationships, narcissism, entertainment, community, intellectual stimulation, peer pressure, collaboration, globalization, common interests, modern life demands, to feel human. I could go on. In social media people want to share. If you want an example of that, look at what happened after the death of Michael Jackson.

While people want to share, marketers want to sell.

Indulge me on a lateral example before we get to the crux of this post. Think about the other sexy and trendy topic - that of green and sustainability. Companies focus their attention on things - namely their products and buildings - rather than the effects that their policies have on people. Jeffrey Pfeffer (hat tip Mark Earls) writes:

[...] companies and their management practices also have profound effects on human beings and the social environment. And the evidence suggests that, in many instances, these effects are even more pervasive and more harmful than the effects on the physical world.

As a few examples, companies in the United States have cut health insurance to both their active employees and retirees, causing problems in accessing health care. Many organizations have either curtailed completely or diminished their contributions to employees‟ retirement, and have thereby shifted the financial risks of having enough resources to retire to their workers.

Such actions have increased financial stress. And the waves of downsizing and economic insecurity created by wage givebacks and involuntary, part-time work have had profound affects on both psychological and physical well-being.

Human nature doesn't change, but human behavior does.

This social media thing is not just about a series of tools that whomever you hire needs to be more or less proficient in using to help your business. There's an awesome discussion on job titles and skills led by Olivier Blanchard (read the comments).

If you did approach media as new channels, then to gain a presence there, you need a team. Let me say that again - this is not the job of one person. Even with a team, without the support - or alignment - of the whole business, you are like the company that slaps a coat of "green" paint and checks the box on sustainability.

Because it is direct to customer and prospect, social media can help you in many areas:

customer service - gathering information and recommendations in addition to real time support
research and analysis - tracking new trends, gathering feedback
marketing - bringing ideas back into the business and products to a market that wants them
public relations - communicating efficiently with stakeholders
product development - R&D, finding problems to solve
innovation - collaboration, inspiration, influencing

But it won't do those things for you. Before you have a culture where sharing is not only possible, but encouraged, you need to a have qualified and experienced team of people leading the organization there. People who are able to analyze issues, problem solve, recommend, implement, learn, and give you the business results you seek along with the proof of return on your investment. Your returns will be proportional to your ability to align the organization behind this team.

Depending on the challenges your organization faces, you may look to hire marketers, communicators, customer service reps, and public relations professionals (exemplary list), who understand the dynamics of social media and have used those tools for business. There's a big difference between using these tools to just hang out and to generate conversions.

My colleagues responsible for SEO and SEM know and understand marketing, for example. It's important that you stay grounded in that because SEO is but one sliver on Web and online presence. You can be optimized all you want, if the content has no value and does not map to your buyer's needs, you get a lot of first dates and no game.

The true spirit and message of The Cluetrain Manifesto was not that companies would learn to market in new channels. If I cannot persuade you to read the book (it's free), Geoff Livingston will, so read his post. Geoff quotes Locke:

We long to be part of a world that makes sense rather than accept the accidental alienation imposed by market forces too large to grasp, to even contemplate. And this longing is not mere wistful nostalgia, not just some unreconstructed adolescent dream. It is living evidence of heart, of what makes us most human. But companies don’t like us human. They leverage our longing for their own ends… Our role is to consume.

There is a lot more going on here than meets the eye. This is about people re-adjusting and rebalancing the very idea of business. Building a sustainable company should consider the human as well as the physical dimensions of company actions. Social media tools have brought this conversation to the fore.

Best practices for utilizing the tools are being developed as we speak.

There are professionals out there who are broadening the scope of their business knowledge by researching, and observing, and doing. If we look at a group of prominent names in social networks at the moment we can see that these professionals are grounded in business skills.

Amber Naslund has experience in fund raising and brand building, Olivier Blanchard has built brands, CK is a marketer with more than ten years in solo business in NYC (if you can make it there...), Frank Eliason has deep experience setting up and managing customer service support, Chris Brogan has built his practice learning part time - an overnight success years in the making, Peter Kim joined the conversation from the research and analyst side after being in marketing. I could go on.

Your applicant should be excited about your business if they want a job in your company.

They should know marketing, understand communications, have worked in customer support, or have been in the trenches with public relations. Those are the foundational knowledge, experience, and skills that will guarantee your programs and dialogue with customers and prospects will make business sense.

Plus, these newly created positions that incorporate the digital space in social networks are the work of a team, not of a lone ranger. As I said in on Twitter just last week, depending on your product and service needs, you may need a content curator, a community facilitator and a team of experienced product development conversationalists.

Just to take one of the points on Olivier's list:

Applicant actually knows how to use Twitter to help your company build brand equity online and offline without having to DM people for help.

You need to know not just how but what building brand equity means in the first place.

As for those companies looking to hire professionals who understand how to use these tools - you need to first figure out what your objectives are, then hire someone who has extensive experience solving problems in that area.

If you come across a really good candidate, he/she will be all over social media. She/he understands this is a game changing thing and has taken steps to learn, integrate, adapt, even coach the team, and get results already.

We will talk about how you get there in a subsequent post. Questions?

My Twitter 20 Interview on Conversation and Community

2009-07-03T07:00:00-04:00

In case you missed it, I was a guest on Jay Baer's Twitter 20 interview on Twitter this week. Thank you for that, Jay. It was fun, especially since I had no idea what questions you were going to ask.

I met Jay at SxSWi when I had the opportunity to have face time with him and a group of smart professionals like Debbie Weil and John Havens of BlogTalk Radio.

We had a reunion recently at Marketing Profs B2B Forum in Boston. The Twitter appointment with 20 questions was a natural progression - although some call the medium a regression.

The ultimate presence tool, Twitter allows people to be "on air" without having to move away from the office and making a big production. Everyone can play and participate.

Some of the points that resonated - read: were retweeted - most with the audience from the dialogue were (emphasis mine):

Companies should let go of assumptions when listening. There’s such a thing as thinking you’re too smart.

Hire those who lean forward, who are curious and interested, who listen before they answer, who love learning.

Brand is not the logo, it needs to permeate every aspect of business… and take into account the feedback it receives.

Customer service is marketing. Your processes are marketing. So is your receptionist, your building, your people…

How about a community facilitator, a content curator, and a team of conversationalists for product development/innovation?

It’s a team effort to help the organization own its brand. Think about the words: organization, company->organism, together.

conversation is the art of thinking together to find something new. It’s good to have new people/ideas in it + mix it up.

Pick your tools based on your “flow” – where do you feel energy? What suits you? Leave room to explore new places every week.

Explore, experiment, test, fail – within your abilities to stretch but not to the point of fatigue. Manage your attention.

Good content writing has not changed – we’ve changed.

I believe that it’s a team and not one person that defines a company and owns a brand, so here I’m part of a team.

During the interview I asked for feedback - how do you think blogging has changed? Is it now about lifestreams? Is it because there was no innovation in fragmentation that some are moving more towards aggregation and multichannel steaming of the same content?

Steve Rubel says blogs are out of beta but bloggers should always be in beta. I agree with Louis Gray who responded to the post on FriendFeed that blogs still occupy an important role in the digital ecosystem - that of long form "how to" content and thought leadership.

What do you think? Are you finding it easier to tweet (now potentially trademarked - shall we have to resort to twit instead?) and comment on FriendFeed or Facebook? Or maybe just use a Posterous or a Tumblr account? Should we skip Web 2010 and move directly into Web 2012? What happened to Web 3.0?

Enough to make your head spin, isn't it? What's your take on all of this? Too much?

Right Place, Right Time - Free

2009-07-02T07:00:00-04:00

One of the things that you probably learned by hanging out with me here at Conversation Agent is that I tend to bring together a lot of ideas in a short space, show you how those ideas are connected, and why you need to care.

But, here's the thing, you care only if I catch you in the right frame of mind, if when you're reading this post you wrestle with the very same thoughts.

Attention and context

In other words, I have your attention - and sometimes I'm even fortunate enough to have your take in the comments - when you're already paying attention to that issue yourself. It's like buying a car, you're thinking about a particular make and model and, lo, you see it everywhere. That's because you're attuned to it, it's on your frequencies.

The mind is a very powerful instrument. It's held somewhere in the brain, the only closed system that can grow by use. What happens though is that it gets trained - we train it - to draw conclusions from partial information. We make assumptions. It's built in our genetics, too. That survival thing again and the brain's ability to compress complex stimuli and data into narrative.

We take shortcuts. Something would need to be in the right place at the right time to get us to move away from our patterns. That's why we don't do change so well, too. It's not so much that we don't want to - sometimes we do, others we have to - it's that we don't know how. We need someone to show us how.

Best practices and change

Hence the thriving industry around benchmarking research, workshops and conferences, and the gossip columns for good measure. One of the most frequently asked questions at events is give me a detailed case study - show me exactly how.

How do you put my business in the right place at the right time? What steps do you need to take to become the go to place for "x"? How many tweets does it take to amass 10,000 followers? What should you charge to blog for someone? Where should you build a fan page - Facebook or your own Ning community? How do I write great content that makes my stuff fly off the shelves?

And please tell me all of this personalized to me in 45 minutes, while in a panel discussion with another 4 people. Perhaps doing some homework and preparing ahead of time would help with activating the content of the session. "How to" depends also on you.

Free

There's an inter-blog conversation right now that involves four panelists, one moderator, three books and one idea. The idea of free.

I shared with you in the past that I think free is not a benefit, it's a feature. It doesn't become a benefit until it's activated by you in the right place, at the right time. Even if you go ahead and grab free, you won't benefit from it unless you do something with it.

Free has been used by marketing in direct response successfully for years. It's the offer in the campaign, the incentive to fill out the survey, pick up the phone and call, pay attention to the message in the mailer. It's an incentive with the promise of up-sell or to mitigate risk. If not free, then I will give you a money back guarantee. (Since this post is free to you, I hope you won't ask for your time back if you didn't like it when you get to the end.)

Redrawing the lines

The trick is to make it appetizing enough so that you would give it a second thought and pay attention, but not too much so that you would be a total mercenary about it and just go after the offer. That was not the point of the campaign. The point - and money - is on you picking up the phone or going to the landing page on the Web to learn more, and buy something.

It's the reverse psychology effect of getting a fine. The fine needs to be large enough that you would follow the rules, but not too little thus tempting you to eating the cost for the sake of convenience. In both cases, the tipping point is achieved and drawn from experience, from best practices.

What happens when the line start fluctuating? When your customers become more resistant to marketing messages and offers? Citizens are flush with cash but have little time to walk the extra mile so they opt for the ticket? New rules need to be drawn and implemented, from which best practices emerge. And so we go around again.

The Web changed the game

The digital age has transformed how things are made, distributed, and sold in such a way that there are no set rules anymore.

Normally these cycles take a while to work their way into the business lifespan. However, we live in a time where the very tools that were going to set us free have accelerated the pace of change not just on our time and attention, but on the nature of the very things that used to consume or employ our time and attention.

Media companies are now wrestling with this issue. Individuals are wrestling with it, too.

Chris Anderson says free is the future of a radical price, Malcolm Gladwell says it's priced to sell but doubts that free is the future, Seth Godin says Malcolm is wrong, while Mark Cuban makes the distinction between free and freely distributed. Members of the press who met me at Mediabistro Circus might enjoy Cuban's post a lot. He writes:

printed content producers should have a brand, and use their institutional knowledge, their core competencies and ability to procure, improve and market to maximize the value of their brands and the perceived value of their content. Whether its on a central website, a co produced website, in print or on a hologram in the evening sky, I should go to the NY Times because they have demonstrated to me that they have the very best articles on the subjects I am looking for.

Chris Brogan seems to agree with Mark Cuban and thinks Seth, too is right. There is one thing all of these gentlemen have in common, and that is a passion for figuring out what the right place, right time is.

In a world of free, everyone can play.

Writes Seth. And you can be successful utilizing this model, as Chris Anderson explains while disagreeing with Gladwell. So why feel so threatened? As long as you're in the right place, a the right time, you should be fine. "The Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online," writes Gladwell.

Except for you will need to figure out what that right place, right time is for you. Mitch Joel just joined the conversation by saying the idea of free is radical, so people are going to freak out. I think people are freaking out because they want to understand how - to get attention, and time, and funds to make things work out for themselves and their business.

Sustainable and repeatable innovation - especially if you need to reach economies of scale - is hard in an environment that changes so rapidly. If only this conversation had no merit, if you could just go back to your daily grind without paying attention to it, all would be well.

You can't. When everyone can play in a world of free, you need to figure out what makes you different. Your ability to sustain a business depends on it.

Free hugs anyone?

UPDATE: A really interesting conversation on the same topic at TechDirt with Mike Masnick. [hat tip to Taylor Davidson].

Social Media Program Lifecycle

2009-07-01T07:00:00-04:00

Or as Gianluca Arnesano calls it, the only slide you need to know. I translated the word campaign as program, because I do really believe that it's a cycle with a long tail that probably nearly doesn't wear off or go to zero. This is the work of Italian agency Frozen Frogs born out of the work the agency has been doing with consumer goods companies.

It's a brilliant rendition of the dynamics of attention, something Gianluca has been working with for a number of years.In this graphic, which he explains in the PDF offered at the post, he distinguishes between the actions of the company and/or agency, which are designed to create higher, artificial buzz, and the reactions of the public involved. You can see in the graphic, how those generate lower buzz, yet genuine (here we say authentic) engagement.

This seems to be the week of engagement, the newest marketing and social media buzzword. Are your activities buzz worthy? Let's take a look.

On the higher-buzz, false engagement type-A activities, we have things like:

blogger dinners - you need to understand that a sit down dinner with great food is a major social element of the Italian culture
social aperitifs - that's my second favored activity, a glass of good wine and great company
buzz paradise - I'd be curious to learn more on this one
spamming 2.0 - this is awesome that an agency (and a company) would admit its own heavy tactics
product sampling - for some categories or products there is still no equally engaging substitute for the tactile experience of driving, or tasting, or touching the item itself
Facebook apps
Videos

There is some doping of the engagement levels in this phase. Customers do not really live the product here - the environment and context created around the promotion is artificial. This is the phase where the agency and/or company are and need to be highly active. Pumping content out, cross promoting on different platforms, and involving networks and respective influentials.

On the lower buzz, genuine engagement type-B side of the graph, we have various discovery moments by real customers who:

discover the company and the product itself
find new product uses
uncover potential defects and malfunctions
call customer support
send in complaints
write spontaneous reviews
ask for advice on forums and boards

In this phase, customer engagement becomes real immersion. This is the right moment for the company to capitalize on the feedback received during the first phase. A and B are the critical phases of the project.

What's important?

Launch and SEO effect are part of a continuum, they're not isolated moments. People are important - what they think, do, and say in the long tail has repercussions for your business. The social media lifecycle has a feedback loop, which is where new marketing comes in. Some questions for you:

What cultural barriers in your company will prevent you from listening to and talking with your customers on the B side of the graph?
How will search evolution affect what you do on the A side?
How will you use what you learn to develop better products and services?
How will you sustain and nurture that engagement on your side of the conversation?
What transformation will your company be willing to undergo to sustain communication and relationships over the long haul?

Your turn. What questions do you have?