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Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment

Transcription services from our friends at Speechpad.com

Photo by @nateriggs (thanks Nate!)

Jay: Welcome to Social Pros. I am Jay Baer accompanied by the man, the myth, the legend, Eric Boggs. A very special guest on the show today, Mr. Scott Monty, Global Poobah of social media for a little startup in Detroit called Ford Motor Company. It’s actually amazing we’re here live. This is only the second episode of Social Pros, and we’re already breaking out of the format to do a live show in some crazy sports bar in Tampa. We’re here for Social Fresh.

Eric: Episode three, clip show and show the greatest hits.

Jay: Episode three, we go to Disneyland, and then there’s a rodeo. We introduce the young cousin. It’s actually interesting to have Scott here as the guest on the second show, because some people who have read Convince & Convert for a long time may remember I used to do an interview program called Twitter 20, where I interviewed people live on Twitter. Mr. Scott Monty was actually the second guest on that program, and we did it live at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in Scottsdale. There’s massive synergy here.

Eric: What was the fate of the Twitter 20?

Jay: You know what happened? I started that three and a half years ago. We actually have an eBook of all the greatest hits of that program. But as Twitter got so big and so cacophonous, then it became really mechanically difficult to do one-on-one interviews. The stream got too messy.

Eric: Well, if it made it to a greatest hits, that’s pretty good.

Jay: We did. We did like 22 of them or 24 of them or something like that.

Scott: And I’m honored, once again, to be number two.

Jay’s Thought of the Week

Jay: Exactly. In everything but guest hosting. So, we’ll start off the show as we always do with a thought of the week. My thought of the week is this, Eric. It wasn’t so long ago that it would have been unthinkable, unconscionable to show your Super Bowl commercial before it actually aired. It would have been crazy talk.

Eric: Definitely.

Jay: Now, the pendulum has swung almost all the way to the other side where almost every commercial was seen before the game. Is that a good idea, or is that just insanity?

Eric: My wife is like many wives in the sense that she recorded the Super Bowl so she could watch halftime and the commercials multiple times. I didn’t really watch the game. That’s what happens when you run a startup and you have a baby and you’ve just got other things to do. But there were multiple times where my wife shouted for me to come into the living room and say, “Ooh, Eric, this is the one with Ferris Bueller.” So they were so hyped before the show that she knew it was coming before it was coming, and there was just this sense of anticipation and eagerness. I think it’s brilliant. All of those commercials are going to live on YouTube forever anyway. Why not just go ahead and get it out there?

Jay: Yeah, but if everybody’s doing it, is it brilliant? The problem with marketing is that we insist on killing the golden goose. We can’t help it. Now the pace of change is so quick, as soon as somebody has a good idea, it’s beat to death in 20 minutes.

Scott: Don’t be a lemming. Zig while others zag.

Jay: If you’re doing the same thing that everybody else is doing, you by definition have no competitive advantage.

Eric: Which is an excellent segue to Mr. Scott Monty, who just gave a talk at Social Fresh in Tampa, which is great by the way, Social Fresh. Scott made a point to call out that Ford does not do Super Bowl commercials anymore, which is mind-boggling considering that car companies and beer companies have bankrolled for the years.

Scott: They’ve pretty much made the Super Bowl what it is, right?

Eric: Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Scott: For one, our product cadence this year does not align with the timing of the Super Bowl. We’ve got major vehicles coming out in May and in September, and that really doesn’t make sense for us to buy advertising now, primarily because, from a legal perspective, we’re restricted in advertising only within 60 days of the launch of a vehicle. So one, we can’t from a legal perspective.

Jay: You can’t advertise earlier than 60 days?

Scott: Exactly. We can’t run advertising any farther out than 60 days.

Jay: Is that in case, not in your case, but in case a car company goes out of business before the model exists?

Scott: It’s probably more to do with production delay and different expectations . . .

Jay: That’s why you don’t see any Saab commercials 90 days out or anything like that, because you never know.

Scott: It’s also a strategic decision. Everybody else is there spending exorbitant sums of money. We are not. We’re not there, and we’re not spending exorbitant sums of money. We have a limited marketing budget that we have to work with. It’s large, but it’s limited, and we want to spend it in the most effective way possible, not being part of the rest of the crowd.

Jay: You saw also the number of tweets during the game broke the record for the number of tweets per second, 10 million or something crazy thing.

Scott: 10,000 per second I think was the number. (actually, 12,233)

Jay: Yeah, which stands to reason.

Scott: And only half of them were about Madonna’s age.

Jay: Yeah, and the rest were her hamstring.

Eric: That’s what my wife was talking about, by the way.

Jay: Yeah. Women of a certain age were glued to that Madonna performance and probably rightly so.

Scott: Yeah, she looked a little slow to me.

Jay: Yeah, the hamstring. She had a pulled hammy in practice.

Scott: That’s what I’m going with.

Eric: Regardless, Madonna gets a retweet, plus one, and a like from me for her halftime performance.

Jay: A for effort. Exactly. Do you think this whole social TV, whether it’s American Idol or Super Bowl or what have you, this back channel, we’re watching it with one eye, we’re tweeting it with the other eye, is that ultimately a good thing? Because clearly you’re taking attention away from the core medium, which is television. I watch TV with an iPad religiously, and there’s no way you’re watching TV with the same amount of attention as you were before you had an iPad in your lap.

Scott: Well, I agree, but think about it this way. I actually wrote about this last year. The notion of live television having gone away seemingly, we’re all on DVDs or TiVo or whatever. To me, creating a social experience around a television show, whether it’s a premiere, a season finale, a special episode, whatever, you’re basically creating a digital living room of 100 million people. We used to sit around television sets with families, or farther back sit around the radio and watch the radio back in the ’40s and ’50s before there was television, and it was a shared experience. People would have that experience within their families. Now, it’s just a larger digital family. I think that connection that people are seeking, that back channel commentary, whether it’s snarkiness or sharing a love of a good joke or commercial or whatever it happens to be, that unites people together. So I think we’re actually seeing a return, in some ways, to live television and live events rather than a flee from them.

Jay: Interesting.

Eric: Conferences are the same thing. You saw, too. When you’re on the stage at a conference, you have to . . . I know when I think about building my presentations, I build them for the Twitter audience just as much as I build them for the live audience.

Scott: You’ve got to have those sound bites in there. I’m looking through here now (note: social fresh tweets). One thing I knew would end up here and I didn’t intend for it to be was that I said, “How frigging lazy to find us on Facebook.”

Jay: You saw what Kip from HubSpot did. He actually had his tweets in a quote bubble with a Twitter icon.

Scott: Yeah. That’s like he knew it was coming. Right?

Jay: Let me bludgeon you to death.

Eric: All the act was like, “Please tweet this.”

Scott: “Just take a photo of this screen.”

Jay: Instagram it and then share that. It’s fantastic! Speaking of today’s presentations, both Scott and Eric gave great presentations here at Social Fresh today. Eric, one of the stats that you had in your presentation was very interesting and got a real rise out of the audience. We’re going to use that as this week’s social media stat of the week. Cue stat of the week intro music.

Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week: 91% of Big Online Retailers are Using Free/Cheap Social Media Tools

Eric: So, Argyle has done some research in the social media marketing practices of online retailers, which is a core segment for us and just an interesting segment in general. We took the Internet Retailer 500 as our sample, and we took 38 data points, publicly available information. One of the things that stood out was their usage of social media management tools. We found that 91% of the Internet Retailer 500 are using free or cheap – when I saw cheap, I mean $50 a month or less – social media management tools.

That’s interesting for a couple reasons. One, it indicates that there’s not a lot of investment in the space yet. Two, when you compare that to the technology spin that retailers are making in shopping cart platforms, email marketing platforms, social is a blip. It got a rise out of the audience. It got a rise out of the Twitter back channel. For me, as a CEO in the Internet space, I’m encouraged by that. I think the market is going to continue to evolve. Someone asked a question about how many of those are actually free versus cheap. How many people are actually using native Facebook, native Twitter versus TweetDeck or HootSuite, something like that? My hunch is that of that 91%, the majority of those are actually using the native tools on the platforms.

Jay: Do you think some people have moved to native because of the imbroglio with Facebook, where they were condensing third party tools and posts through apps and that whole thing, and that the word has not gotten out that that’s not as much of an issue anymore? Is that a possibility, or is that too inside baseball?

Eric: I think it’s a little too inside baseball. At Argyle, the deals that we win, typically we’re not displacing another competitor. We’re displacing logging into Facebook and logging into Twitter. So I don’t necessarily think it’s that. I think it’s more reflective of a maturing market. At Ford, do you guys use social tools, or are you guys logging right into Facebook? Or is it a mixed bag?

Scott: Both. When there’s free stuff to go around, who’s going to say no to that? You said cheap technology. It’s cheap in terms of cost, not in terms of actual output. The results we get are still okay. Now, Facebook doesn’t have the most robust analytics in and of itself, but it’s okay for what it is right now. We’re not going to waste money on a third-party solution that can basically extract the same stuff that we’re going to get out of Facebook anyway.

Jay: It’s an X and Y axis, right? So you have labor in your organization to actually do these things, and then you have software which theoretically makes these things easier or better. It would be really interesting to redo this study and say, “What tools are you using, and how many people do you have on your social media team?” Because I actually bet that at some point, the more people you have, the more likely you are to use free tools, because you don’t need the software to help you.

Eric: That’s a good point.

Jay: Thank you, Eric Boggs.

Eric: This is sort of off the top of my head when I think about Argyle’s customer base. B2B teams tend to be more spread out. There tends to be more people using the tools. Online retailer teams, the use case is typically somebody in marketing or the person in email marketing, and it’s a person or maybe a team of two or three. I think as your team federates and there’s more organizational machinery, without a doubt, the workflow that these tools enables becomes enormously valuable. For us at Argyle, we think about it more from a measurement perspective, and that’s the part that’s kind of befuddling a little bit.

Jay: It’s not so much the posting in advance. It’s the stats on the backend. And partially, as the presenting sponsor of the podcast – commercial insertion now by Jay Baer, host – is that because Eric and his team come from an email marketing background, as I do, they think about social from a very defined, measured standpoint, which is why I use Argyle. End of commercial

Eric: End of social media stat of the week.

Special Guest: Scott Monty, Ford Motor Company

Jay: Perfect. Let’s talk about Ford Motor Company and our friend Scott Monty. So, I saw in one of the trades today that your company is now allowing dealers to insert, I believe, real-time inventory into their Facebook pages. That seems like an enormously complicated program, fraught with all kinds of peccadilloes.

Scott: One would think. We have a great partner in Ford Direct, which is a joint venture that we own, that integrates with tier two and tier three dealers, which is really the bulk of where our . . .

Jay: Is that by actual revenue? Is that how you tier those?

Scott: By size. So not the big conglomerates, but some of the mom-and- pop shops, some of the collectives, like Southeastern Florida Ford dealers, for example, they kind of come together as a collective, and they get, obviously, better rates on software, lots of different things. It’s long been my personal contention that you shouldn’t be on Twitter and Facebook just throwing your inventory up. The way they’ve approach this is obviously through the customized tab experience, where it’s not the wall and the communication you’re actually getting from the dealer, but you can actually go on a separate part of their Facebook page and look through the inventory.

Why this is so important is, as you said Jay, it’s real-time. So many times, people see, God forbid, a newspaper ad. Bring them something advertised on the Internet, and they get to the store, and the dealer is like, “No, sorry, we sold that yesterday,” or “I don’t know what that was. We never had it.” So this actually ties with our backend system, so it is tied directly to what we see back at corporate in terms of what’s moving and what’s next up and whatnot, what the pricing is, all the options. That’s going to feed directly through Buddy Media and through Ford Direct into the backend of the dealer’s Facebook page. It’s a really, really powerful tool.

Jay: Not to mention the fact that, you guys both acknowledged it today, Facebook has 850 million members and an accompanying traffic stream that any dealer website, even Ford.com, doesn’t. People spend way more time on Facebook than they do on any other website. So ultimately, the future of communication digitally is in taking the best of what you have and sprinkling it in all the places where the audiences are as opposed to what used to be, back when we all got involved in this business, which was “Come to my website.”

Scott: Right. And people are still going to come to our website to do things. We do this on Facebook too, it’s not just the website – to do a build and price, to spec out what their vehicle is going to look like.

Jay: Configure.

Scott: You configure that vehicle, and then you want to see if it’s available, right? So if you’ve got a button on Ford.com that takes you to your local dealer’s website or Facebook page – either way now, it doesn’t really matter – to see what the actual inventory is, that’s where we’re going to get that stickiness.

Eric: I think that’s the big leap forward for retailers.

Scott: Absolutely.

Eric: Not just taking your inventory and splatting it on Facebook, but taking your inventory, splatting it on Facebook, and building a social experience around it that’s deeply integrated into the Facebook platform, has all the social gesturing associated with it. Building a Mustang, sharing it with my brother who might say, “Oh no, the black one is cooler,” or “You should get a white one.” That’s pretty cool. That’s social commerce.

Scott: It is cool. Have you tried the Mustang customizer app or the Mustang customizer page?

Eric: No.

Scott Monty shows off the Ford Mustang Customizer iPad app during a live taping of Social Pros

Scott: You can actually build your ideal Mustang and then battle with your brother and see who comes to supremacy on the best Mustang built.

Eric: That’s cool. My brother would come to supremacy. My brother is a car guy, not so much me.

Jay: It’s funny that you talked about Mustang. It’s fascinating to me Ford’s strategic plan as it relates to social, because more so than many, many companies that are active and recognized for their social media prowess, you have such a broad array of buyer personas and buyer circumstances. As you’ve referenced in your talk today, the Mustang customer and the F-150 customer and the Flex customer, as I am, is a different audience. Yet, it’s all still Ford. How do you balance that? How do you bake consistent attributes into all the things you do social, but yet still do things that are brand specific so that they’re highly relevant?

Scott: Well, we just market to people who drive. That’s pretty much it.

Eric: Keep it simple.

Scott: We have to. We absolutely have to. When you’re doing something like the Mustang customizer . . .

Eric: By the way, Scott’s got the Mustang customizer flowing on his iPad, and it’s pretty awesome.

Jay: It is pretty awesome. I’ll take a picture of it for the podcast.

Racy, unproduced Mustang ad

Scott: And see you’ve got the name of who did each one there. So, I think the important part is understanding your buyer persona. We came up with an ad for Mustang that was even too racy for Mustang owners. We wanted to see if we could build a little bit of attention around the Woodward Dream Cruise, which is a big auto thing in Detroit. A whole Saturday afternoon, people take their vintage cars, and they drive them up and down Woodward Avenue in Detroit. It’s so much part of the car culture. People love it, and they come from miles and miles around to show off their cars. So we had a billboard ad that we were getting ready to promote for the Mustang. I don’t think I have a photo of it here. If I can get it, I’ll share it with you guys to give to your listeners. It was on the wall of our agency, and I took a picture of it. It was a Mustang peeling out, just smoke coming out of the rear tires, and you had this white box above it that looked like the Surgeon General’s warning. It said, “Warning: May cause pregnant women.” Now that’s very different from . . .

Jay: I like it.

Scott: That’s Mustang. That’s very different.

Jay: That’s more like that crazy Kia ad from yesterday which was just . . .

Scott: Boy, that was something, wasn’t it? They’ve gone a long way. But even for Mustang, our brand team determined that was a little too racy.

Jay: A little too much.

Scott: We would never do that for something like the Focus or the Flex or, God forbid, an electric vehicle.

Eric: I’m thinking of two songs in particular by this band I like called the Drive-By Truckers.

Jay: I love those guys. DBTs, nice.

Eric: They make a reference to “I used to go out in a Mustang. Me and your mama made you in the back.”

Jay: You should be sponsoring their tour.

Eric: Yeah, so I know of one band that would stand behind that advertisement for sure.

Scott: There you go.

Eric: I was going to ask you about Google+. We’ve kind of talked around that a little bit. Ford is working very closely with Google on the development of Google+. Give us some context around that. Scott just gave about an hour long talk, super detailed, super fascinating about Ford and Google +.

Jay: Send us your slides and we’ll link them up from the podcast notes.

Scott: All right.

Eric: Ford’s evolution on Google+. What’s worked well for your guys, and what do you see as the next thing that you’re going to be working on, on the platform?

Scott: Give us some time to perfect this one first. As I mentioned in the Q&A there, we always have to be ready for what’s next, but I think we have to master the major ones that are here. I really feel like we’ve just gotten to the point where we’re getting more out of Facebook than we ever have before. We’ve reached a critical mass with a number of our pages. The Mustang page has over 2.7 million fans right now. The Ford page has 1.6 million. Once you hit that 1 million mark, there’s a natural momentum that takes place. You kind of can take a hands-off approach in terms of the build of the base. You still have to put content in there, but it takes on a very, very different flavor at that point.

Similarly, I think there’s a lot more potential, as I alluded to, with Google+ than we’ve even given it credit for. The notion of having a single Google+ page for the entirety of Ford Motor Company globally is really, really significant. If we can create a circle for Germany, and it’s only German language updates and it’s tied to Ford.de, think of the potential there where we can really have a unique and intimate relationship with those fans and give them exactly what they want.

Jay: People then opt in for the communication modality and topic that they want. They basically select their own relevance. As you mentioned earlier today, it’s much more similar to what we see in email.

Scott: Absolutely.

Jay: This is the topic of my conversation tomorrow, 10:30 at Social Fresh.

Scott: You could think of Google+ potentially as a sophisticated email platform. It just happens to take place in a more real-time environment. It has search implications there to a much greater degree than an email newsletter. You’re giving people the exact content that they want in the mode they want it delivered.

Jay: It becomes Facebook but upside down. Or instead of you shooting in the dark hoping that you’re relevant, people tell you what’s relevant.

Scott: Well, that’s one way of looking at it. When I did an analysis of this, I said, “Think about the evolution of Facebook versus the evolution of Google+.” Facebook was an inside out approach. It was started by Mark Zuckerberg within Harvard, and it eventually branched out to other universities and then to the rest of the world as we know it today. Now, it’s integrating itself into lots of different web products. Google, on the other hand, has basically bought, acquired, or built sections of the Web that you can’t do without, and everybody has a piece of, whether it’s search or video or blogging or 28 other things, and they’re bringing it all together with Google+, which I think is a much more powerful connection, because again, it’s about weaving social into everything we do rather than making you go to a single platform.

Jay: Absolutely. Google has so many more advantages. The only thing that Facebook really has going for them, and it shouldn’t be dismissed, is single sign on. They have become the passport of the Web the way that Microsoft wanted to be with Passport years ago and failed. That’s not an insignificant advantage.

Scott: I’ll take it one step further. Thinking of it from a retailer’s perspective, if we’re able to create a customer experience on our own websites with a single sign on, whether it’s Google or whether it’s Facebook, we’re suddenly going to have access to a whole bunch of social data about somebody and their behaviors that will help tailor customer service, our next email campaign to them, etc., to be able to know what really makes them tick. Now, if we come to this split in the road where it’s either Facebook or Google+ and we’re only getting a certain portion of their life and their actions in one versus the other, we’re going to have to make that decision.

Jay: That’s why I’m so bullish on Janrain as a platform and their social sign in capabilities. I’ll be talking about that a little bit tomorrow. I just really think they’ve got it figured out. Those guys are going to get bought for a bunch of money, because it’s just really, really effective.

Scott: Sign me on.

Jay: Exactly. Let’s talk about our famous segment, famous here on the second episode, called . . . what did we call it? Making it Work.

Eric: I think it was called Working Out.

Jay: Working It Out.

Eric: Work It Out.

Jay: Work It Out.

Eric: Cue Work It Out theme music.

Scott: Making it Work Out.

Work It Out

Jay: Making it Work Out. Cue Work It Out theme song. This is the section of the show where we actually try and help a podcast listener who has a social media question or concern, and we turn to Eric Boggs and our special guest to try and solve that problem. This week, we actually have a question from a relative of mine. My uncle, Lloyd Meyer, is the COO of Leo A Daly and Associates, which is one of the top five architecture firms in the world. I don’t know why he couldn’t just ask me this question. It actually makes me feel a little bit uncertain that he has to go through the podcast process. He couldn’t just call me.

Scott: What’s his name?

Jay: Lloyd Meyer. Clearly I don’t know anything.

Scott: Uncle Lloyd. Hello.

Eric: Hey Jay, could you please ask a social media expert this question?

Jay: Exactly. Ask Scott Monty, because your book doesn’t mean anything. So, the question is, obviously, Ford Motor Company is a household name and has 1.6 million Facebook fans, etc. and has a lot of social chatter just day to day. In his case, it’s an architecture firm, albeit a large one. Their customers are very distinct. They’re municipalities. They’re Native American tribes, things like that. Very classic B2B. What should their play be in social media, and what is the role for something like Google+ or Facebook in their world?

Eric: I’ll defer to our special guest, Scott Monty, on this one.

Scott: Excellent question, Uncle Lloyd. I’ll see you at the family barbecue to follow up on this one.

Jay: Next time you’re in Omaha. Four Jacks and a Jill.

Scott: Get some good steaks. So, you’ve got to ask yourself this first, Uncle Lloyd and everyone else listening. Where are your customers? What are they doing? Are they on this stuff? Are they on Google+? Are they on search for that matter? Are they on Facebook? Determine where your customers are and weave that into it. It’s not like you need to avoid it simply because it’s B2B. Last time I checked, people are behind these businesses. It’s not institutions talking to each other on Twitter. It’s people. So get that notion out of our head that it doesn’t matter because it’s B2B. But then ask yourself, “Where are they spending their time? Where are they making their decisions? Who are they talking to, and where do they get their information?”

Jay: I always feel like in a B2B circumstance, the social media playbook always tilts toward content. It becomes more of a content marketing play. These guys have massive expertise, especially in certain types of architecture. They do a lot in healthcare, a lot of hospital design, a lot of casino design. You could go deep in those verticals. SlideShare would be a great opportunity, infographics, podcasts like this one. You could do a lot of things.

Eric: Think about the things that they know about designing a hotel or designing a casino, whatever the inner workings behind these massive services machines. There’s got to be some remarkable content to be shared.

Jay: Helpful information well merchandised always works, always.

Scott: Helpful information well merchandised always works.

Eric: Everyone can tweet that.

Jay: Thank you. I just made that up. I should do this for a living.

Eric: You do.

Jay: There you go, Uncle Lloyd. You can call me next time. Or Scott Monty, whichever you want.

That’s going to do it for this episode of Social Pros. Next week, a man we know, Justin Levy from Citrix Online will be joining us on Social Pros. I want to thank Eric Boggs, the presenting sponsor of Social Pros from Argyle Social. Also InfusionSoft, we use for all of our email marketing, and then Jim Kukral from DigitalBookLaunch.com. Thank you to Mr. Scott Monty.

Photo of Eric, his pants, and our friend J from www.jseverydayfashion.com

Scott: My pleasure. One final question, if I may ask you two, Eric, where do you get your pants?

Eric: The question is in regards to the argyle pants I have on. It’s my game day uniform when I give a talk. I like to get my pants at LoudmouthGolf.com.

Scott: Nice.

Eric: And I prefer the blue argyle pattern.

Jay: Why aren’t they a sponsor? Why isn’t LoudmouthGolf.com a sponsor? Let’s make it happen.

Eric: I don’t know. With the amount of Twitter feedback I generated with my pants today, they should maybe ship me the matching blazer. Hint hint, wink wink, nudge nudge.

Scott: And the knickerbocker version, too. Right?

Eric: Yeah.

Jay: Thanks everybody. We’ll see you next week.

Video production by my friends at Candidio. Fast, inexpensive, great service.

(Abbreviated transcript below. Please watch video for entire interview. Somehow, my side of the video got cut out, so it’s only audio for me!)

Jay: Welcome everybody to Convince & Convert. It is Jay Baer joined today by a very special guest, my friend who is the Director of Community and all things fabulous at BlogWorld and also the author of Online Community Management For Dummies, Ms. Deb Ng. Deb, how are you?

Deb: I am terrific, Jay. How are you?

Jay: I am marvelous. I love your festive red background for videos.

Deb: Thank you. This is my dining room. We’re renovating. So everywhere I was sitting today, I’m like, “Oh, I don’t want people to see that. Oh, I don’t want people to see that.” So I came in my dining room where it was just a red backdrop.

Jay: It looks great. You should use it. I really like it. It pops as they say.

Deb: Well, my husband is Chinese, and red is a very lucky color.

Jay: Well, I loved the book. I thought it was really, really fantastic. I recommended it to several clients already. It really is a treasure trove of advice and best practices around community management. How was it writing it?

Deb: It was fun writing it. It’s the stuff I’ve always wanted to write, and it’s the stuff I talk about when I speak at conferences and I blog about. And it was actually a hard sell for Wiley. They weren’t sure people would want to buy a book about community management. But it sort of wrote itself. It was the easiest thing I ever wrote, I have to say. It was so simple to write.

Jay: Wow. That’s a ringing endorsement. Easiest thing you ever wrote. That’ll work.

Deb: Well, it’s second nature I think, to me. I don’t know if that sounds kind of silly, but it just all came so quickly.

Jay: You can tell when you read it that you actually have done this and that you’re speaking, in many cases, from a place where you have experienced these scenarios. That’s one of the things I really liked about it is that it walks you through a lot of “Hey, if this happens, do this thing, and if this other thing happens, do this thing.” It’s not just theory of community management. It’s very tactical, very practical and something that I think people will keep on the shelf and pull down and say, “Let me flip to that section. I remember Deb said something smart about that.”

Deb: I hope so.

Jay: One of the things that I see all the time, and you do as well I’m sure, now that many companies have come around to the belief that they should have a community, there isn’t a lot of community activation, or perhaps not as much as there should be. You talked about that a little bit in the book. How can we get people to do stuff as opposed to just click one button and join?

Deb: It’s hard, because we don’t want to spam people, and we don’t want to say, “Will you please comment on my blog, dammit?” I think we’ve all had those frustrating moments where nobody answers our calls to action. So I think we have to make it entertaining. We have to make it enjoyable. We can’t always be a commercial for our product. You have to make life a conversation and draw the community in. If they feel as if they have a say in the brands and that they’re a living, breathing part of the community, they’ll participate more, and they’ll advocate for you.

Jay: What we see now is, as companies get more serious about this kind of work, an increasing usage of content calendars and community calendars and things that have more of a plan around how to do this. Do you think that kind of work is the enemy of true community, or can they coexist?

Deb: Yes and no. I do have some things that I do on a regular basis. For example, the first Monday of every month is brag your blog day on the BlogWorld Facebook page, because I don’t want to forget. If I don’t schedule a certain day for things, I forget. I will say I’ve never scheduled a tweet in my life. I don’t believe they’re engaging. I have scheduled blog feeds on Twitter, but I don’t schedule tweets, because you can’t have a conversation. You can’t schedule community. So, I think there are times when you can create an editorial calendar and plan out a course of action. But as far as scheduling engagement, I just don’t see it happening.

Jay: I like that quote, “You can’t schedule community.” That’s good. Consider that stolen.

So many times now, it seems that Facebook in particular has become the de facto community platform. How do you feel about that?

Deb: I have mixed feelings. First of all, Facebook is where the people are. The majority of Americans or even globally, the people who we want to reach are on Facebook. So it makes sense that we put a lot of our effort into Facebook. Most of my friends and neighbors don’t want anything to do with Twitter or Google+ or Pinterest or any of the other social networks, so it makes sense that we’re on Facebook. But I really do wish that I had the same engagement levels on the other social networks. Twitter has turned into such a disappointment for me, because it used to be the best place to go for conversation. Now, it’s sporadic unless we have our weekly Twitter chats, and it’s sort of like a link farm. So, I will put half my efforts, I would say, for the day into Facebook to grow that community, because that’s where we have to be, and that’s where most of our community are, but I won’t give up on the others as well.

Jay: One of the things that you said in the book was trying to steer your community away from negativity, which I thought was a really commendable point to make, because we see, certainly in the social media space, there are blogs out there that seem to use negativity as their oxygen. I try not to fall into that trap myself, but they’re out there. What’s your take on it?

Deb: I think that negativity begets negativity. So, if you have a space that makes people feel uncomfortable, it’s going to be like the earth after the apocalypse. Only the cockroaches are going to be there. People who thrive on negativity are going to stick around, but the people who want an intelligent conversation where they’re not always being accused of something or being called a loser, they’re going to move on. So I have no problem with disagreement as long as it’s respectful disagreement. I know that I’m not right all the time, most of the time. But you can tell me why without telling me to go make a sandwich.

Jay: So, can we disagree without being disagreeable?

Deb: Exactly.

Jay: One of the things that I loved about the book was your section on the welcome plan, which I think gets overlooked so often in communities. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a blog or Facebook. That first time that person peeks their head out is when you really have to give them succor and comfort and make sure that they stick around. Can you talk a little a bit about that welcome plan and how you think it should be done?

Deb: Sure. I compare it on my community to the high school dance. So nobody ever wants to be the first one up to dance. So maybe the chaperone will sort of start encouraging people to get up and dance. They might introduce a couple or get up to dance herself, although we would laugh at any chaperone who did that.

Jay: I was just thinking about that. I’m like, yeah, that would really get the party started, when the chaperones are dancing.

Deb: But somebody has to get the party started, and that’s where the community manager or moderator comes in. This probably works mostly for forums or blogs, because they have an area for this, but a welcome folder with frequently asked questions, a place to introduce yourself, and just a place to ask questions make people feel at ease. Then maybe the community manager can help to get that person, make them feel comfortable around the community, introduce them to people, and just bring them into the conversation. I honestly believe that it’s in a community manager’s best interest to know as much about her members or his members as possible, because then they can draw them into the conversation and know their areas of interest.

Jay: One of the things that you’ve always done really well is the combination online/offline community. Your community doesn’t really exist unless it exists at some point in three dimensions. Can you elaborate on that a little bit and how you can make your community work in the real world?

Deb: I think that it’s fine and dandy for you and I to tweet a lot and talk on Facebook now and then. But what do we really know about each other besides what we share? You don’t really know a person, I think, until you meet them online. When you know people, you trust them.

Jay: And that’s one of the great things about BlogWorld. It allows those kinds of interactions and conversations to take place and why it’s an event that most of the people in the social media and blogging industry would never dream of missing.

Deb: It’s the first conference I ever attended actually.

Jay: Wow. I want to see if anybody else who is watching this video, the first time they ever went to a conference ended up being the community manager for that conference. That would be some sort of a crazy . . .

Deb: Years later, too. That was in 2007. I was hired in 2010.

Jay: Wow. I didn’t know. That is a crazy tale. How about that? Good for you.

I am a big fan of this book, Online Community Management For Dummies. Do not let the fact that it is a Dummies book scare you, or do not look down your nose at it, because I feel like I know a fair amount about this kind of stuff, and I learned a lot from this book. It’s like a fire extinguisher of knowledge, and I’m really, really glad that you wrote it.

Jay: Deb, thank you as always for all that you do and for writing the book and for spending a little time here at Convince & Convert.

Deb: Thank you so much for having me, Jay.

Arnie Kuenn is the president of Vertical Measures, a search, social & content marketing company . He is author of Accelerate! Moving Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing.

An ideal connection between social media and search might just be “Answer” sites. The essential concept behind an answer site is that visitors can post a question eager to get it answered by someone considered an expert, who is knowledgeable in the subject matter. The response could also be powered by public knowledge with consensus determining the “best” answer. Answer sites offer users the capability to be both the inquisitor and the expert.  More often than not, in basic human interaction, we can answer each others’ questions based on our own personal familiarity. We can achieve this on a massive scale using these Answer Sites.

Create Content That Answers Your Customers’ Questions

People can ask questions of all kinds on nearly every subject imaginable, and as you analyze what visitors are asking, you can more easily spot trends. From a market research perspective, this means that you’ll focus on the people that have been asking questions concerning your industry and your niche market. This way, you can obtain constructive market data about the people who are looking for solutions to their problems.

If you find a widespread theme, you can create content that answers those questions and touches closely to the specific subject matter.  You might even phrase your content’s title in the form of the same question people are asking. This gives your content the greatest chance to be discovered when someone types that inquiry directly into a Google search. We have found that a rising number of people use that type of search method (question format).

On top of observing the current trends, you can get real time feedback about your industry from the consumers that are engaging with it using these answer sites. Ask a question on an answer site that relates to your product, and see what type of response you get from the community. These raw answers can give you very useful, and informative marketing data.

Let’s take a look at the “Big 4″ Answer Sites, and how to conquer them.

Yahoo! Answers

Yahoo! Answers

Yahoo! Answers is one of the most popular answer sites, and has accrued millions of questions and answers. The site gets a huge (and sometimes bizarre) assortment of questions, ranging from homework to dating to home and garden. Because of its popularity, during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, and John McCain submitted questions to the site, leveraging their campaigns on the Internet and generating a huge response from the public.

The way Yahoo! Answers works is pretty straightforward: participants will submit questions to be answered by the community; when asking a question, the participant categorizes it by topic, making it easier to search and easier to answer. As an incentive to ensure that answers are accurate and free of spam, Yahoo! developed a point system. Answers are ranked by other users, and the “best answers” are given the most points. Users that accumulate points have proven to be highly regarded, and are granted certain privileges, such as the ability to ask, answer, vote, and rate on a more frequent basis.

Yahoo! Answers allows you to browse by category and see what types of questions are most popular, newest, or have received the fastest responses. You can get very specific, too; every user has to categorize a question by topic before submitting it. So, it’s much easier for you to research inquiries that are relevant to your market. You can search keyword phrases to browse questions that are being asked, either within subcategories or among all categories.

Answers.com

Answers.com

Answers.com marries the best of community-driven questions and answers with hundreds of respected and trusted editorial reference books. The site knows the best answer to give you, whether it summons the extensive collection of community answers from WikiAnswers, or it taps into its ReferenceAnswers database – a comprehensive set of editorial, licensed reference topics.

If you have a specific, unique, complex or more social question, and you are seeking a to-the-point answer, WikiAnswers is the best place to ask your question. Anyone can ask, answer, edit or collaborate on answers in thousands of categories and subject matters. It’s another great place to see what your customers are asking about.

Simply enter your keyword phrase and look to the right for various questions people are asking. Or browse through categories related to your specific market.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn is primarily a social networking site aimed at business professionals. With more than 100 million networked individuals, the site boasts the capability for linked professionals to collaborate on projects and develop their ability to communicate across their industry through LinkedIn Groups. LinkedIn offers an Answers channel as one of its tools for collaboration. The Q&A feature offers the ability for industry experts to show off their expertise to a network up to three degrees deep (your contacts, your contact’s contacts, and your second-level-contact’s contacts). Depending on how wide each level is, this could amount to a very extensive network.

The driving force in Q&A is similar to Yahoo! Answers, as the motivation for answering is driven by a user rating system for credibility. Here the recognition is professional, where the best answers demonstrate a working knowledge of the industry. LinkedIn further rewards members by recognizing the top answerer in a weekly ranking. The motivation for making this list is industry-wide exposure as top expert in the field.

LinkedIn Answers has predominantly good data for Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing. You can find questions your potential customers are asking about as they try to solve their toughest questions. By spending time in LinkedIn, you’ll get an insider’s view into the problems that your business can solve for your customers.

Quora

Quora

Quora connects you to everything you want to know about. Quora aims to be the easiest place to write new questions and share content from the web. They organize people and their interests so you can find, collect and share the information most valuable to you.

When you want to know more about something, Quora delivers you answers and content from people who share your interests and people who have first-hand knowledge — like real doctors, economists, screenwriters, police officers, and military veterans. On Quora, it’s easy to create a personalized homepage of everything you want to know about by following topics, questions, people and boards.

Like the others, Quora is meant to be a useful knowledge-indexing tool, a database of information provided by users. However, Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers, reviewed by users, edited by users, flagged as useful or not by users, and organized by everyone who uses it. The creators’ goal is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.

Question Yourself

By using Answer sites for research, you can quickly develop a list of content development ideas helping you through one of the biggest challenges of content marketing.

To learn more about boosting your content marketing efforts, check out Vertical Measures’ 8 Steps to Successful Content Marketing, a free guide that features actionable ways to create an implement a content marketing plan using popular (and often free) industry tools.

To what end? What are you really trying to accomplish – as an agency – with all of this content and social media? You’re not selling ads, so website traffic isn’t inherently valuable. Do clicks and retweets or Facebook fans really build your business? Not in a linear way.

There are only four reasons agencies should be spending even one scintilla of time on content and social media.

4 Reasons Agency Content Marketing Might Be Worth It

I’ve listed these in order of importance and feasibility.

1. Retain More Clients

With the exception of SEO-driven blog traffic (more on that later), the majority of agency content and social interactions will be with people who already know and support the firm. Who reads the blog? Clients. Who follows the agency on Twitter? Clients. Who is a Facebook fan? Clients (and employees).

Agencies need to stop looking at content creation solely as a customer acquisition vehicle, and start looking at first and foremost as a customer retention vehicle. Every single day your clients are thinking (perhaps subconsciously, but it’s still there): “Are these the best guys to help build my business?” The agency’s content initiative helps ratify and perpetuate the decision-making of clients.

“Look at that smart blog post, and Webinar, and infographic. These guys really do know what they’re talking about, and I’m glad they’re in my corner.”

That’s what you want clients to be thinking.

Measure It: Establish a baseline retention rate. After your agency truly commits to content, determine how that retention rate changes. Also be aware of which clients are consuming your content, and run reports showing retention rate of clients who do and do not habitually engage with your content and social efforts.

2. Up-Sell New Services to Clients

Like Justin Bieber to Usher, this is a companion benefit to retention.

One of the traps many agencies fall into (especially in blogging) is putting too much thought into thought leadership. Nobody wants to read your open-ended manifesto, Kaczinski. Blog posts need to have a takeaway.

At least one agency blog post per week should be tactical, describing how marketing can be improved in some fashion (software, process, thinking, etc.). It shouldn’t be a commercial, but should indirectly highlight a service the agency provides. (Convince & Convert provides social/digital consulting for agencies throughout U.S. and Canada – see how that works?)

For clients that might benefit from that particular product or program, make sure that blog post gets seen. Consider having your account manager or agency CEO email it to key clients.

Remember, content is not just for new customers. Even a big content machine like ExactTarget (client) has their sales reps send ebooks and white papers and Webinar invites to current clients – often before they are publicly released.

Measure It: Closely track client up-sell and cross-sell, noting which add-on services you sell, and which of them you have created content about on the blog and elsewhere.

3. Improve Your Conversion Rate

The worst thing that can happen in an agency is to consistently finish second in pitches and RFPs. (I lived through a streak of about 6 in a row once. Ouch).

Second is more damaging that seventh in almost every way, as to get to the finals your agency has to expend significantly more unpaid effort than if you’re knocked out in the early rounds. The only upside is being able to have more and closer dialog with the potential client, who may decide the victor is actually a sheep in wolf’s clothing someday, thus turning back to you in a “if Miss America is unable to fulfill her duties, the scepter and sash shall pass to the first runner-up” scenario.

But, sharp content and social engagement can help close business. You know who else reads blogs, beyond clients? Potential clients, during the comparison shopping and due diligence process.

If you’re pitching a telco, you damn well better be creating some brilliant blog posts about marketing advances in the telco industry. Surprise, surprise, those posts will be found and read by the selection committee. It’s like adding an unspoken section to your capabilities pitch. You have to be wise about the timing of this content, and you can’t make it too obvious – clients only like agencies to pander after they’ve been hired.

You’re starting to see how strategic your content calendar needs to be, right? You can’t just assign a date to each agency team member and ask them to blog about whatever they want on their special day.

Measure It: Establish a baseline conversion rate (win rate), if you don’t already have it calculated. After your agency truly commits to content, determine how that conversion rate changes. Also be aware of content created purposefully for a particular vertical, and measure conversion rate by vertical accordingly.

4. Generate More Leads

This is often the sole reason agencies offer for their blogging and social engagement efforts. But it’s by far the hardest execute, and requires far more time than most agencies are willing to devote.

To successfully use content as a lead generator, your agency needs to be very focused about what types of clients it wants, and specific services it wants to provide. Then, you need to create focused content that is exceedingly well-optimized for search. (we recommend inboundwriter.com for this).

It also helps if your agency (and more importantly, its personnel) are active in social media and other online communities, giving them the ability to contextually drive eyeballs back to the agency blog.

Also consider mixing content curation with content creation, as being the arbiter of what’s good and worthy can be valuable to the professionals you seek to impress. Note that this only works if the agency has a fairly tight niche. It’s a lot more realistic to build a following for your agency as curator of important content in health care marketing, or marketing for the bicycle industry, than it is to be the curator of insights about marketing in general.

Measure It: Several potential metrics here, including new visits to the blog/website; visits to the blog/website from search; social interactions – especially with people working at target accounts; social mentions; and volume of branded “agency name” searches.

Notice that number of Twitter followers and Facebook fans didn’t make the list.

Next week: What it takes in staffing and resources to do it right.

Next week’s guest is Scott Monty from Ford Motor Company.

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Huge thanks to Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; and Jim is our guest host for the podcast and a smart guy)

Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment

Transcription services from our friends at Speechpad.com

Jay: Well, here we are at long last. It is the debut, the first ever, the maiden voyage of the Social Pros podcast. I am your host, Jay Baer from Convince & Convert, joined virtually alongside by my trusty sidekick, Eric Boggs, the CEO of Argyle Social. Eric, what is going on?

Eric: Not too much, Jay. Excited to get this rocking.

Jay: We are getting it rocking thanks to the support of Argyle Social for bringing the Social Pros podcast to all of you out there. Other sponsors we should recognize are our good friends at Infusionsoft, who we use to send all of our email and such, and my good friend Jim Kukral, who runs DigitalBookLaunch.com and is also going to be our fill-in host when I am ill or can no longer abide Eric Boggs.

We have an amazing guest. It’s remarkable that this is our very first time doing this and we have a guest of this, not only quality, but timeliness. Our friend Taulbee Jackson, the President and CEO of Raidious in Indianapolis, Indiana, is going to join us a little bit later on the show.

Taulbee’s company put together and is staffing, right now as we discuss this, the Super Bowl Social Media Command Center. They’ve got 652 Macs lined up looking at every single Tweet and Facebook post and Instagram photo associated with the Super Bowl, which is happening just an hour from where I stand at this very minute. The man has a lot on his plate, and he set it aside temporarily to join us on Social Pros. We are very fortunate and looking forward to talking to Taulbee in just a couple of minutes.

Eric: He’s a busy guy. I know he’s got a good story to tell. I can’t wait.

Jay’s Thought of the Week

Jay: Absolutely. We are going to start off the show, as we customarily will, with my thought of the week. Eric, I’m sure you saw this news as well, being in the social media software space yourselves. I don’t get this whole thing with Twitter, this idea that starting allegedly this week they’re going to roll out all these new features to brand pages so that you can install tabs, apps, iFrames and all this other kind of stuff on your branded Twitter page. Is it just me or does that sound an awful lot like Facebook to you?

Eric: It does indeed sound an awful lot like Facebook. We obviously are watching it very closely at Argyle because it’s going to impact all of our customers.

Jay: To me, the whole joy of Twitter, the whole reason for Twitter’s existence, was that it wasn’t Facebook. Whatever happened to the benefit of doing one thing, and doing that one thing well? Instead, it’s, “We’re doing this thing, and now we’re going to do all these other pieces along with it.” To me, I really think it’s the death knell. I think it is the beginning of the end of Twitter as a major player in this game if they go through with this.

Eric: Those are some fighting words, Jay. “Beginning of the end.”

Jay: I really do. I think it’s a colossal strategic blunder.

Eric: I definitely see what you’re saying in terms of doing one thing really well. Twitter to date has been laser-focused on real-time burstable content. They do that way better than Facebook.

I think what you’re beginning to see is Twitter recognizing that it needs to be a business. Twitter a few years ago had this mega- thousand flowers bloom strategy with developers. Over the past 18 months they’ve been . . .

Jay: They put Roundup on all the flowers?

Eric: Yeah. They’ve been encroaching a little bit on their developer community’s turf. You have to think that it’s got to be their business customers and their advertising customers that are pushing this agenda in terms of more interactive, more expansive brand functionality on the site.

Jay: It’s an agenda, that’s for sure. It’s going to be interesting to watch. We’ll get somebody from Twitter on the show here eventually and put it to them straight.

Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week: Trust in Peers Up 23%

Jay: Eric, as you will do every week here on the Social Pros podcast, you have uncovered and unearthed, with your archeological keyboard, a social media statistic of the week. As we know, everybody who has a calculator is a social media researcher. We’re going to try and shine the light on things that actually do make some sense. What have you uncovered for us this week?

Eric: I’m really excited to kick off this segment of the show and I guess, in a sense, trying to set the stage for why we’re doing this piece during the broadcast. I want to talk about the Edelman Trust Barometer not only because the most recent edition of that is chock-full of interesting data, but it’s also about trust. A lot of the data that floats around on the Interwebs these days isn’t necessarily trustworthy.

If you haven’t already read it, you can get the Edelman Trust Barometer at Trust.Edelman.com. It was released last week. It’s their 12th annual trust and credibility survey. It is some heavy-duty research that asks meaningful questions. I’m not going to go into the methodology, but it’s legit.

Interestingly, in this edition it draws a direct line from the chaos that’s all around us in government and public markets. It draws a direct line from the problems in that part of the world to implications for business. What that really means for you, the listener, and for guys like you and me, Jay that are in the business of marketing, people are becoming more and more skeptical. The executive summary of the trust barometer is 12 or 13 pages long. It’s pretty meaty.

Jay: Can I get a summary of that summary?

Eric: What I think is the best graphic and the best question is they asked the people taking the survey, “If you heard information about a company from one of these people, how credible will that information be” In 2011, 50% of the people that were asked that question said that information coming from the CEO would be deemed extremely credible or very credible. In 2012, only 38% of the people deemed information from the CEO as extremely or very credible.

Contrast that with 2011, where 43% of people deemed information from a peer, a person like yourself, to be extremely or very credible. This year that number was up to 65%. In short, trust in institutions and institutional leaders is on the down, and trust in your peers and regular employees in organizations is on the up. This is good news for social media marketers like you and me.

Jay: It’s especially good news for organizations that are moving beyond a massively centralized view of social and saying, “Look, we can have the official @company account and the company Facebook page, but perhaps we can also get our employees involved, since ultimately we want to do business with people, not nameless, faceless corporations.”

I think that’s going to be a lot of what we see advanced social media practitioners do this year. What we’ll talk about on the Social Pros podcast is getting more and more people within the ranks of your employees involved in a way that is additive to the corporate strategy, not reductive of it.

Eric: Without a doubt. The headline for the entire report is “Businesses can earn the license to lead.” So it really is all about trust and credibility and honesty.

Jay: Awesome. We will make sure that we link up the report in the show notes, which will be out on Thursday. We will find some other fantastic factoid for you next week. If you’ve got an idea of a social media statistic that you would like Eric to bring to light here on the Social Pros podcast, make sure you email us and we’ll make that happen.

Special Guest: Taulbee Jackson, Raidious

Jay: Now, without further ado . . . we should insert a drum roll, but this is the first episode so we don’t even have a drum roll sound effect yet, but we can work on that.

Eric: Let’s pretend like we’re calling Taulbee. “Ring ring, ring ring, ring ring.”

Jay: Taulbee, are you there?

Taulbee: Hello? Hello?

Jay: Perfect. On cue.

Eric: He was already on the phone all along.

Jay: Taulbee Jackson, the CEO and President of Raidious, digital and content agency extraordinaire in Indianapolis, and maker and manager of the Super Bowl’s social media command center. Welcome for the very first time to the Social Pros podcast.

Taulbee: Thank you, Jay. It is such an honor to be with you.

Jay: That’s not, in fact, true yet, but we do appreciate your time, especially under the circumstances. The details of what you have wrought up there is really sort of mind-blowing. Can you give the listeners and Eric a little sense of what your surroundings look like?

Taulbee: Sure. The Super Bowl Social Media Command Center is a facility that was purpose-built for the Super Bowl. There are about 50 staff members and volunteers working here over the course of about two weeks, last week and this week. I’m actually live at the command center right now, so that’s exciting. There are about 2000 square feet. There’s well over 100 square feet of monitor wall in the facility. Twelve 27-inch iMac Touchdown Stations, six producer stations, a conference room, a reception area, a game planning station that overlooks Meridian Street, and about 300 square feet of whiteboard space. It’s a sight to behold.

Eric: Jeepers. That’s a lot.

Jay: This is, as I understand it, the first time that a command center has been built of this nature, not only for the Super Bowl, but really for any singular major sporting event. Is that the case?

Taulbee: To my knowledge, yes. I’ve not been able to find any other instances of anything quite like this. We’re excited to be a part of history. It’s pretty cool stuff.

Jay: What is the rationale behind the command center? There have been 45 previous Super Bowls. Of course, many of them were before the age of social media, but not all of them, and this is the first time this has been tried. Why has this not been tried in the past, and how do you hope to manage the Super Bowl differently as a result?

Taulbee: I’m not sure why it hasn’t been done in the past. Maybe it has something to do with the proliferation of social media in general over the last few years. Just like with any marketing program, sometimes it’s the last thing that people think of.

We had the benefit of being involved very early on with the Host Committee. They asked us to come and help them with their strategy starting in 2010 and things progressed from there. There’s been a lot of planning from a strategy perspective and a tactical perspective and all of those things, well before the idea came along to build out this facility to manage all of this stuff.

In terms of what we’re hoping to accomplish here, we’re here in Indiana and it’s all about Hoosier hospitality. That’s one of the things that we were tasked with. The mission of the committee is to make sure that everyone has a great visitor experience when they come here to the Super Bowl. It’s not a typical marketing-focused approach like you might see from other social media campaigns. It’s more about safety and service and coverage, and letting people know what’s happening where and amplifying positive dialogue, and things along those lines.

Jay: The idea is that you scan a wide variety of hashtags and keyword usage across primarily Twitter, I presume, but I’m sure you’re monitoring other social outposts as well?

Taulbee: Twitter has obviously been where most of the activity has happened for us, but we are seeing stuff come in from blogs and bulletin boards and places like that all over the Internet. It’s very much listening first. We have a group of about 300 different keywords that we’re monitoring for and have been for about the last year to try and understand how to respond to statements or questions that we see online to help people do things like navigate the city and find parking and generally have a good experience. If they don’t know where the Super Bowl Village is, we want to help them find that area. It’s a very service-focused approach to this particular initiative.

Jay: What’s fascinating about that is since the Super Bowl has never been in Indianapolis before, you’ve got to create the answers to those questions for the first time. How often do you have an answer at the ready, because somebody has said, “All right. We know what to say in the scenario.” How often do people post something in social media and you and your team have to go find the answer?

Taulbee: That’s a great question, and in the last year we’ve done a few different pilot programs. One was around the NCAA Big 10 men’s football championship. One of the things we found out in the course of doing that pilot and just doing our day-to-day client work here at Raidious is that when people need help, they don’t necessarily ask a question. Furthermore, even if they did, there are so many different ways to ask the same question that it’s almost impossible to figure out what to listen for.

We took that back to our friends at ChaCha.com. If anybody’s familiar with that service, it’s a Q and A service and they’re actually headquartered here in Indianapolis. We are leveraging the ChaCha database of questions and answers to understand all the different questions and all the related answers to those when we see something pop up online.

Jay: What’s the workflow? Is there an escalation path, to the government institutions or public service institutions in Indianapolis?

Taulbee: Not for most of what we see. We’re actually connected to two other control centers here in Indianapolis. There’s one that is kind of a central command which is all of the logistics that have to do with running the event. Then there’s another one that’s outside of the downtown area, about 10 or 15 miles, that houses Department of Homeland Security, NSA, FBI, CIA, all of the alphabet soup agencies that are concerned with security around an event of this magnitude.

We do have an alert system that goes to all of those different command centers from one central area. If we pick something up in monitoring, we can push that to the command center for evaluation, and if there’s an action that needs to be taken, they push that action back out to us. But in terms of day-to-day governance for things like, “I need to know where the Hard Rock Café is,” those are answers that we already have, and related questions to those all in the ChaCha database.

Jay: You’re a guy who runs a company that’s very metrics and results- focused in social media and content marketing, and rightfully so. How do you put a success equation around this kind of initiative?

Taulbee: It’s a challenge, to be honest. Again, the mission of the committee is to make sure that there’s a positive impression and a positive perception about the City of Indianapolis. One of the things that we’re looking at really closely is sentiment analysis. That’s turning very positive so far, at about 3 to 1 across the board.

We didn’t really have a baseline because I think one of the problems that people have had with this particular event in the past is just the level of volume around the Super Bowl. The whole world is talking about it at once; it’s 5000 or 6000 tweets a second. How do you listen to all of that and make good decisions about what to respond to and what not to.

Our approach being very locally-focused has been different than anyone else’s. The volume and the monitoring that we’re dealing with are all happening on a geo-targeted basis in a 50 mile concentric circle around Indianapolis. We’re filtering out the large majority of the noise, but it also means we’re kind of establishing a baseline for events like this moving forward at the localized level and not at the national or global level. We don’t really have any metrics to compare to.

Jay: What are the tools that you guys are using to ingest all the content and process it?

Taulbee: Lots of different ones, actually. The main tool that we’re using, and my apologies, Eric, but we’re actually using the Awareness Networks social hub.

Eric: They’re good guys. They’ve got a good product.

Taulbee: They really are, and to be totally candid, we had been using a different social media management platform in 2010, and those tools change so fast and the teams that are working on them just keeping making them better and better. We have a standing six month review that we do for all of our clients, for all the work that we’re doing for our team internally to make sure that we’ve always got the most up-to-date, the best options that we can have.

At the last six-month review we looked at about 60 different platforms and wound up changing from what we had been using for the last couple of years to this Awareness Network’s tool. Their technology is great but the support team there has been fantastic to work with, even though they’re all Patriots fans.

Jay: That’s too bad.

Eric: That is too bad.

Taulbee: So we’ve been using that. Basecamp has been huge for us. That was one of the first companies that we spent money with as Raidious, and we’ve continued to use it. It scaled up great for us to manage all of the workflow and content gathering and project management behind the scenes.

We’re a Google Apps shop so all the documentation that we’re using is real-time documentation that you can collaborate on, so we’re actually sharing a Google Doc with the other two command centers that multiple people can be logged into and typing on.

There’s a tool called Geckoboard that we’re using that displays lots of different data feeds for us. Let’s see, I’m trying to think of what else. Social Mention is a nonprofit sentiment trend analysis visualization tool called WeFeelFine.org that we’ve been looking at up on the big board.

So, lots of different tools, and we’ve actually collaborated with Ball State on a data visualization application as well which we are going to be sending some screenshots out for probably later this week.

Jay: Who are the people on your team? Is it your agency or is it volunteers?

Taulbee: From our team at Raidious, all we have here is content people so it’s writers, reporters, editors, and producers. We don’t have media buyers or creative directors, or the typical ad agency staffing. We’re set up just like CNN except all we report on is the brand.

We’ve got our team functioning in a editorial capacity and in a producer capacity and a leadership capacity, and then we’re back- filling for scale with students from the David Letterman School of Journalism, the Center for Media Design at Ball State University, students from Butler University, and students from IUPUI here in Indianapolis. So there are about 16 of my team and about 30 volunteers working two shifts, 15 hours a day.

Jay: Sounds like the world’s greatest internship program with beer and nachos and football.

Taulbee: Yes. It’s pretty awesome. I think the kids are having a good time and they’re learning a lot. And we’re hiring, so that all works out.

Jay: Exactly. It’s only a two-week gig, right?

Taulbee: That’s right.

Jay: You are going to be one tired cowboy come Monday.

Taulbee: Yeah, I think so, but not nearly as tired as Ryan Smith or some of the other guys from my office that are actually out there doing the day-to-day. Ryan is our VP of Production and Brian Wyrick, our Head of Operations, is actually the guy that concepted and built out this whole facility. Those two guys have just been working their butts off. I wouldn’t be able to be here talking to you if it wasn’t for them.

Jay: We’ll make sure to add some links to some of the graphics and the tools, and some of the resources that you guys are bringing to bear for people who check out the podcast that will be good information for them.

Eric: Who’s your pick for the game, Taulbee?

Taulbee: Oh, you know, I want the fans to win. That’s been my stock answer and I’m going to stick with that one because I don’t want to upset anyone from Boston. I really hope the Patriots don’t win but I think they’re going to. It’s a strong team and whether you like Tom Brady or not, the guy can play some ball.

Jay: And he can win Super Bowls.

Taulbee: Yeah, they know a thing or two about winning Super Bowls there.

Jay: I’m predicting Giants. I think it’s a Giants victory. I really do.

Eric: I was so happy. I think it was 2007 that they played. What an incredible play. That was such a great game.

Jay: It was. That was epic. That was when they played in Arizona, where I used to live.

Taulbee: Oh, okay. Awesome. The Super Bowl just follows you around.

Jay: Seemingly so, but I never get to go. In fact, I was going to go, of course, this year, but I managed to book a speaking gig for myself in New Orleans on Super Bowl Sunday. That was brilliant. It never fails.

Work It Out

Jay: Let’s move into the final segment of the Social Pros podcast, Work it Out.

Eric: We need some Work it Out theme music, Jay.

Jay: We do. We need some Olivia Newton-John kind of track, something like that.

Eric: I just realized that. I’m going to work on that as soon as we wrap up here.

Jay: We’re going to work it out on the Work it Out sounder. Work it Out is a section where we take a request from a podcast listener about their social media program, and the three of us try and give them a little help in two or three minutes. Since we don’t have any listeners yet, I made one up, which is this.

Taulbee, obviously you guys are listening almost around the clock. I know you’re sleeping in the wee hours, but you’re almost doing round-the-clock, seven days a week monitoring and response. Is that necessary for all brands or for some brands? If you, as a customer, are on social media and midnight, is it a fair assumption that the brands that you come into contact with will be online at that time as well?

Taulbee: That’s a great question, and we actually have several clients that we monitor multiple shifts for, for lots of different reasons. Whether it’s a fair expectation or not, I think has to do with whether or not the brand sets that precedent and whether or not the brand communicates that and manages those expectations.

That’s something you can do really easily as a retailer or as a CPG brand. It gets a little bit more difficult when you get into something like health care. We do have a healthcare client that we work with who we monitor for in multiple shifts. I don’t know that if I was sick that Twitter would be the first place I would go, but some people do that.

Jay: I’m too weak to do anything but tweet.

Taulbee: Yeah. Or maybe it’s late at night and they’re in the ER and they’re having a bad experience, and they want to share that with people. There are all kinds of reasons for healthcare organizations to be listening at all hours of the day and night.

A lot of that has to do with volume. One of the retail clients that we work with has, I think, over 950,000 Facebook fans at this point. There’s a lot of chatter going on that they need to be able to respond to. They have a really interesting scenario where their audience actually changes from basically the day to the night. Between the hours of 3:00 and 5:00 their audience goes from being 35 or 40-year-old to 16 to 24-year-old as kids get out of school. There’s this whole other need from a content perspective and from a monitoring and moderation perspective for that particular audience at that particular time. It really depends on the brand.

Jay: I’m glad you mentioned expectation management. It seems to me that very few companies do that well today. If they aren’t monitoring double shifts or weekends, perhaps you ought to acknowledge that.

One company that actually does that well is Xbox. Their Twitter account @XboxSupport actually has in the bio the hours that they respond on Twitter. I think that’s a best practice for a lot of brands.

Taulbee: Absolutely. We just had that happen with Super Bowl where last week we were 9:00 to 7:00 and this week we’re 9:00 to midnight. There was some confusion around that so we had to update our Twitter page and let people know, “This is when you can expect us to be here to help you.” It’s part of expectation management, just like having the hours for your customer service line or any other function along those lines.

Jay: Having a sign on the door of your deli.

Taulbee: There you go. Absolutely.

Jay: And it seems like, as you mentioned, volume is a driver of this. If you’re a B2B company that gets four tweets a day, to say that you need to staff that nights and weekends is probably not worth the additional expense, but you never know. Something crazy could happen at 10:00 and you wish that you were listening at that point.

Taulbee: It could happen.

Eric: I think for a B2B, Jay, it’s also interesting that one of those four tweets could potentially be worth tens of thousands of dollars versus a B2C company with a million fans and followers. Those may be transactional or maybe the people are just buying the Coca-Cola off of the grocery store shelf.

Jay: That’s why we always say even if you’re not actively listening, you need to be passively listening and set up alerts, and have somebody in your company who can at least take a quick peek before they go to sleep or something like that.

Eric: I think email alerts address a lot of the issues. But yeah, you’ve got to draw a line.

Taulbee: Another thing that we talk about to our clients a lot is understanding the impact of influence. Is that person that’s speaking to your brand at 10:00 at night somebody like me, or is it somebody like Jay Baer that has a bazillion followers and a very high level of influence that you need to take note of.

Jay: Eric, what’s the best tool for doing that? Can you set up alerts that are defined by ripple on the pond?

Eric: There are a lot of ways you can address that. Google Alerts are free and fairly powerful, often full of clutter and noise. That’s a place to start. A lot of social media management tools provide a mechanism to ingest content, run some analytics over the text or the person that has produced the content, and then set off rules- based emails based on different people in your organization.

I would remiss if I did not say that my company software does just that, but I do know that a lot of tools make it easy to be on call but maybe not be in front of your computer all the time.

Jay: Perfect. Excellent. Well, let’s wrap it up here on the debut episode of the Social Pros podcast. Thank you for being here, Taulbee. I know you’ve got a lot going on. It’s really exciting to see what’s happening with Raidious and the Super Bowl Social Media Command Center and the Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis. I am a proud Hoosier right now, as are you. Congrats on everything, it’s going great. I’m looking forward to seeing you tomorrow.

Taulbee: Likewise. Thank you so much, Jay. It’s been an honor to be your first guest.

Jay: My pleasure. Eric, we did it. We managed to pull one across the finish line. Looking forward to making this happen every week.

Speaking of next week, Eric and I will both be at Social Fresh East in Tampa, Florida, giving speeches to the crew out there, and our guest is going to be Scott Monty, international head of social media for Ford Motor Company. We’re going to try and do it live, so the three of us will grab a quiet corner somewhere and we’ll try and do the Social Pros podcast face-to-face in only Episode 2. We’re going off-script in the second episode. It’s crazy.

Eric: Cross your fingers for us. It remains to be seen how we’re going to be able to do that live, but we’ll figure it out.

Jay: Do you know what? That’s why we have our trusty producer, Tristan. He’s going to figure it all out for us.

Thanks, everybody, for tuning in and for all your support, your tweets, your reads, your shares and your listens. We really appreciate it.

I’m Jay Baer from Convince & Convert, joined by our sidekick and erstwhile sponsor, Eric Boggs of Argyle Social. Thanks also to Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral. Taulbee, thanks a lot. We’ll see you next time.

I was ready to jump back into the fire in 2012, with a nifty new topic, interested publishers, and a plan to use this new book as a real springboard to the future. But sometimes, life conspires to make you focus on the present.

On January 6, my life got shaken up like a snow globe. My little brother, Jeff Baer, died in his sleep of a heart attack at age 39. Jeff was my only natural sibling, and even after the services and paperwork and craziness, it’s difficult for me to process and accept that he’s gone forever. As I said in my eulogy, he was a bon vivant. A raconteur. A scallywag. Everyone who ever met Jeff remembers him, and that’s a rare quality in this world.

(Many thanks to the dozens of friends and clients who donated to the scholarship fund in Jeff’s memory. With your support, my parents and I are endowing two, full-tuition Jeffrey A. Baer Memorial Scholarships to the new Arizona State University – Lake Havasu City campus that opens this Fall)

As you might have surmised if you’ve read this blog or followed the progress of Convince & Convert, I’m a hard charger. Type A. Overachiever. Whatever label you want to put on it, you know the deal. And until Jeff died, I had never intentionally done less of anything. But something like that will force you to take a long look at what you’ve wrought.

As my Dad said to me at lunch a few days before the memorial service, “Jay, what are you trying to prove?” I’d never been asked that – even by myself – and the fact that I didn’t have a good answer was telling. It’s not that I’m ungrateful for the life and extraordinary career I’ve cobbled together over the past 20 years – much less my amazing wife and smart, perfect kids. I even have a cool dog, Mr. Cheeto. It’s not so much that I take all that for granted (although I often do). It’s more that I am wired to believe that good enough is not enough. That within my field there is no reason I can’t sell books like Godin, pack the room like Vaynerchuk, and build a large consultancy like Dachis. Maybe it’s ego, or hubris, or folly, but I’ve just never put psychological constraints on what I can accomplish. 

I still believe I can do those things, but I’m going to tackle them at a more modest pace, leaving me more time to focus on my health and my family. And that’s where the book comes in. From experience, I know that if you have a busy day job, the book writing happens at nights and on weekends. Once the book is published the real work begins, which is promoting it. Very few business books sell themselves. The authors make them sell, hence the tour Amber and I undertook last year.

So, I’m not going to do it again. Not yet. I’ve got to use my time a bit more wisely for now. Even before Jeff, I had every single genetic and behavioral risk factor for heart disease and so forth (except smoking, which I quit 11 years ago). The last time I worked out with any degree of rigor and consistency was 1985. Yes, Reagan was President the last time I lifted a weight. I’m no expert, but that’s probably a sub-optimal fitness regiment. I have been a recent member of the Bacon-of-the-Month Club….and without irony.

Play time is over for me. I have a personal trainer. A nutritionist. A dermatologist. A new doctor. My payroll is increasing in inverse proportion to my waist line. But it’s worth it – or it will be. I’m joining the ranks of Brogan, Falls, Shankman and others who have decided that paying attention to your health is a worthwhile endeavor.

So, I’m not writing a book this year. I’ll still be plenty busy, of course. We have a ton of great clients at Convince & Convert. A new podcast – Social Pros – that debuted last night. A ton of speaking gigs (just not 65 cities’ worth). And a family that will hopefully see more of me.

I wasn’t always the best brother to Jeff, and that makes me sad – and always will. But I loved him, and he knew it. And he loved me, and I knew it. He gave me countless gifts through the years, especially laughter. I’m hoping his greatest gift will be this one: a wake-up call. 

I’ve done a little podcasting in the past, and quite a few interviews here on Convince & Convert, and I’m thrilled to be adding Social Pros to the array of high quality content we create every week.

Tell Me More. What is Social Pros?

With your help via the reader survey I published a few weeks ago, we’ve designed a podcast that will be worth your time each and every week.

Social Pros shines the spotlight on social media practitioners, people doing the real work for real companies.

Each episode includes:

1. Interview with a leading social media strategist, manager, director of community, or similar working for a corporation or organization.
2. Social Media Stat of the Week, discussed and ratified or debunked by me and Eric Boggs of Argyle Social.
3. Work It Out, where our weekly guest, Eric, and myself attempt to solve a listener’s social media issue in five minutes or less

You don’t have time to waste, and neither do we, so every episode of Social Pros will clock in under 25 minutes (ish), so you can listen on your commute, during a reasonable jog, or while your spouse is watching some crappy half-hour reality show that you can’t stand.

Also, every episode will be posted at Convince & Convert with a full transcript, because we know first-hand that sometimes you subscribe to podcasts, but then let them pile up in your iTunes.

Awesomeness! When Does It Start?

Now! Our first recording is tonight, featuring Taulbee Jackson, CEO of Raidious. His firm built and is managing the Super Bowl Social Media Command Center in Indianapolis (about an hour from Convince & Convert headquarters).

Barring any technical issues (fingers crossed), you’ll be able to listen via iTunes late Tuesday, and the first transcribed episode will appear on Thursday. We’re shooting for a Monday record, Thursday transcript schedule, and we’ll stick to it best we can, given travel schedules and guest coordination.

Who Should I Thank For This?

Argyle Social is the presenting sponsor of Social Pros, and in addition to the Social Media Stat of the Week segment, is handling much of the production work. Thanks guys! (for more on Argyle – the social media management tool I use personally – see this blog post about them).

Social Pros is also sponsored by our friends at Infusionsoft, who have an all-in-one email and CRM system that’s purpose built for small business. (for more on Infusionsoft – the email tool we use – see this blog post about them).

Digital marketing genius Jim Kukral whose new company Digital Book Launch helps authors market their books, is also assisting with Social Pros, and will be your guest host when I’m unavailable.

Can You Help Me? Can I Be On The Show?

If you have a social media issue you’d like me and a guest to tackle, or if you’d like to be a guest yourself, please fill out this form to send a quick note to our managing editor, Jess Ostroff, and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

How Can I Spread The Word?

Thanks for asking! It would be delightful if you’d consider tweeting, sharing, +1′ing, or buffering this post. Also, please subscribe to Social Pros- Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media in iTunes (soon), and check out (and share) the transcribed post on Thursday.

Let’s get this party started with a bang, shall we?

Thanks as always for your support of me and Convince & Convert. We have some other new surprises coming soon!

Last week, the group convened to learn more about the Super Bowl festivities – which have a breadth almost unfathomably far beyond the football game. (see the killer mobile app) In addition to a briefing by the host committee, we were exhorted to help make Super Bowl 46 in Indianapolis the “most connected” Super Bowl ever. What that means in practice was (and remains) a bit murky.

The original plan was for the participants in the Social 46 who created the most chatter to receive special prize packs for their social diligence. This idea was scrapped by attendees who almost universally expressed a desire to help shine the light on Indianapolis as proud residents, eschewing game mechanics.

Generally, the group has taken to the cause like a crafter to Pinterest, with dozens of tweets, photos, blog posts, and more popping up daily – and the game isn’t for another 10 days. Former reporter, now PR guy Tom Spalding is chronicling the blow-by-blow with regular Storify collections from the Social 46 trenches.

Personally, I’ve done very little on the Social 46 front other than live tweet the initial confab. There are three reasons that I’ve been on the sidelines:

• I’m a new Hoosier, having moved to the state in August 2010. I don’t have as much of a connection to it as others in the Social 46.
• I live in Bloomington, not Indianapolis. I’m about 75 minutes south, and still get lost in downtown Indy where the festivities are taking place. I don’t have a lot to offer in the way of insider tips.
• My “influence” is not Indiana-based. 4% of my Twitter follower are Hoosiers, according to Peek Analytics (which I love for in-depth examination of persons in social media). This compares to 84% for Tom Spalding, for example.

I’ll do more next week, when I’m visiting the official Super Bowl Social Media Command Center (run by Indy social/content agency Raidious), and checking out Super Bowl Media Day, the Super Bowl Village, and NFL Experience with my family.

Shooting the Super Messenger

For now, however, I’m more interested in the burgeoning kerfuffle (a great band name, feel free to steal it) around the Social 46 itself.

Social 46. Instagram shot from @meggiehd

In exchange for lending our time and personal networks to the Super Bowl cause, the host committee plied us with a laptop bag, a Super Scarf, a beanie hat, a time-specific ticket to the NFL experience, a ticket to NFL media day and the “right” to use the #social46 hashtag (which of course anyone could use if they want to do so). By my estimation, total value of $150, max.

Am I grateful to receive these gifts? Sure. The scarf is toasty. The media day ticket saved me $25 out of pocket, and who can turn down the joys of a special hashtag? But do these items influence how, why, or whether I participate in this program? Not really.

However, it concerns me that the host committee did not instruct any of the Social 46 on how to disclose that these items were provided for free, potentially putting the host committee and all participants in violation of FTC disclosure guidelines. A quick (albeit cursory) check of content created by the Social 46 shows that disclosure is mostly absent (good job by Bob Burchfield!). I have addressed it below through cmp.ly (which I love, am an investor in, and very much wish the host committee would have adopted).

(EDIT: Ashley from Klout reminded me that on the Web page where you accept Klout Perks (all, not just this one) is a note about making sure you disclose promotional items. Thanks for pointing that out Ashley. FTC does state thought that the party responsible for compliance is the brand or the organization, not the blogger. Thus, I’d still argue that the committee probably should have mentioned it at the meeting. Could have been just a 10-second aside, but would have been a good CYA.)

Beyond the fact that the host committee dropped the ball on disclosure, there is a truly extraordinary amount of vitriol within the Indianapolis social media “community” about who was (and who was not) asked to participate in this Social 46 program.

Some of the complaints are simply misguided – like this post from local communications consultant Allison Carter – who seems to believe that companies and organizations should be required to publicly state how they determine who to include in outreach programs. I’m sure Wal-Mart will gladly publish their blogger outreach criteria. Ford too. And Dell. Just ask. Maybe a Wiki? Should companies also publish the rationale every time they send a targeted coupon in the mail to high efficacy consumers based on past purchase history? Ridiculous.

In other cases, the ire is downright nasty, with all manner of name calling and reputation questioning occurring on Twitter and elsewhere. I guess I’m fortunate that none of it has involved me personally, but I’ve never been happier to NOT be part of the Indianapolis social media “community” which is making that label look more and more like a misnomer.

As Ms. Carter states in her post:

And I’ll be honest: I would have loved to have been chosen. But this isn’t about me. This is about helping our city come together to show the world what we have. However, this program is causing divisions, cliques and confusion. I hope this program is a smashing success and Indy becomes a social media darling. Social 46? Prove me wrong.

If your objective is to “show the world what we have” then why do you give a hoot about a free ticket, a silly hashtag, and a goddamn scarf? Is the subtext that unless you’ve been selected and anointed as part of the Social 46, that you are not eligible to help visitors enjoy the game? Where’s the community spirit in that? If you want to help, help. By tying reward to the behavior so intrinsically, you are supporting the very construct you rail against.

As Ricky Gervais says, offense is taken, not given. And the participants in the Social 46 didn’t request to be included. They were identified by a computer and/or by members of the host committee. To tear them down because someone – for reasons algorithmic, altruistic, or otherwise – selected them versus you or anyone else is the ultimate shoot the messenger scenario. If you’re not happy about being “left out” of the uber-prestigious scarf giveaway, take it up with Klout or the host committee.

Long ago, when I was a political campaign consultant, I learned a maxim that seems particular apt in this case: The smaller the stakes, the bigger the fight.

Klout Kan’t Win

I’m on record as liking Klout, and not just because it keeps me ensconced in beanie hats. (see my post: 3 Reasons critics of Klout are missing the big picture) Does its methodology have flaws? Of course it does. But you know what else has flaws? Having PR interns surf the Web to semi-randomly click on blogs and Twitter accounts to put together murky Excel spreadsheets of “influencers” that are then sold to clients as “research.” At least Klout provides half-truths with a side of mathematics.

And the reality is that whether it’s Klout or something else, companies and organizations WILL continue to make liberal use of social scoring data. It’s a shortcut, a way to find the trees in the forest. We are entering an era of bespoke relationships, whereby your real-time interactions with companies will be dictated (at least to some degree) by your purchase history, “influence”, location, and other factors. It’s the Delta SkyMiles program on steroids, and unfolding second-by-second. If you don’t think companies are going to start routing social customer service inquiries to different teams based on Klout score (or similar), you need to wake up.

Do I wish we were all treated equally? As a human being, yes. But that’s not the way the real world works, and it’s certainly not the way we’re headed in an era where every behavior is tracked, and Big Data can be used to filter and segment and optimize.

The Lesson of the Sneeches

Most Klout perks are of the product variety, or are national in scope so that the recipients and non-recipients aren’t personally acquainted. Do I bemoan the fact that I’m not eligible for free RoC Deep Wrinkle Night Cream? I guess, as I’m not getting any younger. But I don’t begrudge those who can use their Twitter habit to smooth their crow’s feet.

In the case of the Social 46, the psychology is altogether different. Because the participants were selected to be signal amplifiers and adjuncts of the host committee, there is a perception that we are “representatives” (albeit reps that are unofficial and untrained – as Ms. Carter wisely pointed out in her post, which was not wholly without merit). And conversely, that those not selected are not “worthy” of being representatives.

The reason people are bent out of shape (far disproportionate to the reward, I’d say) is that the “haves” and “have nots” are public. This is the lesson of the Sneetches, as delivered by the sneakily wise Dr. Seuss:

If the star belly Sneetches got their stars via email; or were notified 1:1 by Sylvester Monkey McBean when they logged on to his website; or just got a star shipped to them via FedEx, the Sneetches without stars would never have known about it, and wouldn’t have put up a fuss.

If you’re going to use Klout as a sorting and identification mechanism, think twice about doing so in a local or regional market (or any other closely knit community online or otherwise). And if what you want your group to do is shout about their participation publicly over a short time frame, be prepared for blowback.

That’s my view from ringside. What’s your takeaway from the Social 46?

(EDIT: I want to make it perfectly clear that I believe this to be on the whole an excellent program, and a darn fine idea. Was it perfectly executed? No. But that’s why it makes a good case study for others to learn from down the road. Viva Super Bowl.)

Clinton Bonner is an Open Innovation author/blogger, futurist and Marketing Manager at TopCoder – a global Open Innovation platform and community.

Look no further than a very recent post by the purveyor of Convince and Convert and you’ll notice something remarkable. As Jay lays out 4 Nearly Guaranteed 2012 Social Media Predictions, what do you notice? Have a quick look at his 4 predictions:

1. Multi-Media Soars – Jay is speaking about video and photo apps that enhance social media, draw more users off of the likes of Facebook and into new channels driven by mobile app technologies.
2. Reading Tea Leaves – Jay is speaking about the emergence of Big Data. Social is fantastic at collecting the data, but to date, many, with the exception of IBM and Google, do not understand how to begin to leverage this data. I would personally add to Jay’s list and confidently state that 2012 is the year “Big Data” starts to make sense as consumerization ensues.
3. The Year of Mobile – Seriously – self explanatory and nice nod to the emerging NFC (Near Field Communication) chips headed to a mobile phone near you – NFC as a platform will be tremendous.
4. Staffing and Resources – Having the right talent on the business side of the equation to drive all of these initiatives.

OK, so the pop quiz becomes: What trend do you see in Jay’s predictions? Assuming the Jeopardy theme song just ended in your head as well, let’s see your answer.

Why Marketers are Now Technology Geeks?

If that was your answer, you are correct. There is a sincere convergence happening between the creative genius that stems from top marketing departments and the technology expertise needed to bring these things to market, where they actually create value for the business. It’s important to recognize how we got to this point.

15 – 20 years ago: IT (and the IT side of the business) ruled the enterprise. Websites needed constructing and the only people equipped with the skills to bring it live were of course in IT. Conversely at this time, marketing is “stuck” in the final days of traditional advertising print-radio-tv era and valuation for all that spend is fuzzy at best.

10 years ago: Blogging becomes much more popular and powerful and the consumerization of IT begins. IT departments worry not, blogging won’t really have that much of an impact! Marketers begin to see potential beyond the traditional web.

5 years ago – Present day: The consumerization of IT is rampant fueled by the mobile smart-phone and the app culture that is born on top of this new platform. “Suddenly”, (quotations because of course the very most things are neither sudden nor surprises) there is a remarkable power shift inside the enterprise. IT who was king only a decade previous is now the one struggling to define their value add. Security and “keeping things running” doesn’t quite cut it anymore. Today, value is driven in scores by those on the business side, much of that value stemming from marketers (encompassing those in social media) who are envisioning new user experiences and finding ways to bring the idea to market in the form of applications and creative digital assets.

This comical comment below comes from a very recent article on Wired.com entitled: 2012 Will be the Year of Apocalyptic Reckoning for CIOs. The comment sums up the sentiment many have with regards to their IT department.

Congrats, You are the Driver… Now What?

As value shifted inside the enterprise, so has the power to drive technology decisions. As 2012 gets nicely underway, marketers find themselves empowered and wanting to prove that they indeed deserve this new found responsibility and can routinely deliver value back to the enterprise with it.

No Man is an Island – Technology is hyper-fragmented. Look no further than the current state of mobile/tablet devices and the various operating systems they must run upon. The emerging web 3.0 – and I mean literally emerging as we speak – will make today’s fragmentation look minuscule. Those who can truly drive enormous value for their companies will learn that they are no longer “First Seat Clarinet” and instead they are the composer of an entire symphony of value creation. What does this mean?

Composers of grand value will seek out and find new ways to get an enormous amount of innovative work accomplished. One such vessel is clearly Open Innovation and specific Crowdsourcing platforms. They enable people with vision and ideas to bring them to life without having to know or own in-house, the specific talent needed to develop the particular technological want. The 21st century employee – the successful ones that emerge as force-multipliers and create a tremendous amount of value for their organization – will understand how to wield knowledge platforms in order to produce extreme value outcomes.

Marketers are in the pole position. You have budget, you have big ideas and now – thanks to mature global innovation & productivity platforms – you do not need to “own” the talent to bring the idea to market. But you do need to understand your new role as a technology driver for your organization.

You are no longer just in marketing. You are a technologist, you are a social enterprise creator, you are a consumer co-creation strategist, you are a User Interface architect, you are empowered to drive value for your company through non-traditional means, technologies and innovation platforms. You do not need to know how to expertly play every single instrument. But you better be certain you are prepared to conduct. Going forward, this will separate the good from the exceptional.

In a recent podcast, Mitch Joel interviewed Fred Reichheld, author of The Ultimate Question 2.0, and creator of the Net Promoter methodology. Fred made a statement that has stuck with me in the several weeks since I tuned in:

“You can’t be the best place to buy, if you’re not the best place to work.”

As social business moves from the toddler stage to youth stage, it’s becoming accepted wisdom that the best and most social organizations transform from the inside out. Whether it’s Charlene Li’s Open Leadership, The NOW Revolution from Amber Naslund and me, Humanize from Maddie Grant and Jamie Notter, Smart Business, Social Business from Michael Brito, or Olivier Blanchard’s Social Media ROI, there is a chorus postulating that people make your company social, not tools and technology.

Does Being a Good Place to Work Impact Social Business?

Last week’s release of the 2012 FORTUNE list of 100 Best Companies to Work For got me thinking about whether being employee-centric inherently impacts the social business aptitude of the company.

To search for a correlation, I turned to the Dachis Group Social Business Index, which ranks companies in near real-time based on the ongoing social media conversations about them from internal and external audiences. For each of the 100 Best Companies to Work For, I matched up their Social Business Index ranking (where applicable).

Social Business Comparison

Observations on Social Business and Employee Centrism

When starting this investigation, I had no idea what I’d find. I recognize that this is not an apples to apples comparison, as many of the companies (especially smaller ones) ranked as Best Companies to Work For are not in the Social Business Index at all. Also, some of the companies that are Best Companies to Work For are in industries (finance, healthcare) where outward facing social participation (as indexed by Dachis Group) is sometimes still in the embryonic stages, with growth often stunted by a diet of regulation and fear. And of course, the methodologies of the two rankings are massively different.

Even with the analytical shortcomings of this approach, however, the findings were surprising to me:

• Among the 100 Best Companies to Work For, 40 are ranked in the top 900 companies in the Social Business Index
• 29 of the Best Companies to Work For are ranked in the top 400 companies in the Social Business Index
• Among the top 100 companies in the Social Business Index, 11 are also Best Companies to Work For in 2012