Twitter’s role as a conduit for the Zeitgeist is unrivaled, and it has almost single-handedly ushered in the era of real-time search, and social CRM. But, it’s the online equivalent of HBO – important more because of who uses it and the media’s infatuation with it, rather than the actual size and impact of its audience.

Don’t get me wrong. I advocate participating in Twitter, and I’ve certainly grown my own audience via that channel, and it should be part of almost every company or business professional’s social media tool kit. (great post here on Social Media Examiner on how to methodically grow a Twitter following)

But, Twitter alone does not constitute social media, and you’d think it does given all the disproportionate attention being paid to it at conferences and trade publications. I presented a half-day workshop at the Email Evolution Conference on social media strategy (slides here) recently with DJ Waldow and Mike Corak, and the significant majority of the questions from the audience were about Twitter. That got me thinking that perhaps social media types aren’t fully recognizing Twitter’s limitations?

So, fully expecting each of you to tell me I’m wrong in the comments, here are 7 reasons why Twitter is not the Valhalla of social media:

1. Growth Is Slowing

The true size of the Twitter audience is a bit tricky to pin down because 55% of its users do so via third party and mobile applications. But, new data from Compete.com shows a clear stagnation in Twitter’s runaway growth.

According to these numbers, the audience using Twitter actually declined from August to December, 2009 (during the same period, Facebook went from 250 million to 350 million members).

2. Young People Don’t Use It

Today’s marketing coordinator is tomorrow’s CMO, and younger Americans don’t embrace Twitter. A new Pew Research study shows only 8% of U.S. teens using Twitter, compared to 66% engaged in texting. Do young people not appreciate the many to many nature of Twitter, preferring the 1:1 paradigm of text messaging?

Regardless of the reason, as the current teen population ages, it threatens Twitter’s preeminence unless adoption rates soar.

3. New Features Aren’t Being Used

Last Fall, Twitter rolled out the option for users to “tag” their location onto Tweets, to add geographical context. In true Twitter fashion, it wasn’t “rolled out” per se, it just appeared as part of the API that third parties access. Since then, .023% of all Tweets include location data, according to Sysomos. Not an overwhelming participation rate. (Further, there have been some reports of issues with accuracy in the geo-location feature)

Twitter lists, while useful for categorizing people to follow, haven’t really taken off either. Nor has the new, integrated retweet capability.  With each new release of features being met with tepid response, Twitter users are making the statement that they like Twitter just the way it is. That’s great for keeping the existing user base satisfied, but further impedes growth potential.

4. Facebook Sharpening the Knife

You may remember that Twitter refused Facebook’s $500 million buyout offer last September. So as expected, Facebook just added Twitter-style features and functions to its service, to evaporate Twitter’s competitive angle.

Updating Facebook from third parties like Tweetdeck? Check. Tagging people with @ within status updates? Check. Posting to Twitter directly from Facebook? Check. Stripped down interface option, with status updates at the core? Check (Facebook Lite). Retweet-style sharing tools? Check.

Functionally, everything Twitter does, Facebook does just as well, with the exception of mobile usage. Because Facebook has so much more overall functionality than Twitter, the mobile experience is a bit more clunky than Twitter. However, it’s important to recognize that 3 times more people use Facebook from a smart phone every month than use Twitter at all.

5. The Better You Are at Twitter, The Worse You Are at Twitter

Being a new user on Twitter is as lonely as Michael Boublé at a Green Day concert. What’s Happening? it asks, followed by a box and a blinking cursor. Twitter success requires an understanding of the unique rhythms and cadences of the community, and a give first, get later mentality that is a bit counterintuitive at first. The site is exceptionally poor at welcoming and training new users, which may result in its high churn rate.

But a bigger problem with Twitter is that like CB Radio, it doesn’t scale well. If you have a few hundred followers, you can semi-coherently keep them straight, and watch what they are doing via your public stream. But, once you get into the many thousands of followers, that public stream is a cacophony at best. Twitter lists can help in this regard, but many Twitter power users lament that the way they use the service is forced to change significantly as their own Twitter connectivity increases.

Much less time is spent in the public stream, where discoveries occur, and much more time is spent answering replies, and monitoring relevant topics via Twitter search.

When you’re most popular users are the ones that have the hardest time using your service to its full advantage, you have some issues to consider. However, Twitter’s announcement this week at SXSW that they are adding @anywhere – essentially Twitter’s answer to Facebook Connect – should make the follow/following process easier and more contextual.

6.  FourSquare and Gowalla go Back to the Future

The new location-based darlings FourSquare and Gowalla are stealing a lot of the place-based intimacy that originally propelled Twitter. The “original” Twitter contained a substantially larger percentage of tweets about the author and what he or she was doing in their own life at that moment. That type of status update has been migrating, first to Facebook , and now to the location services.

Because you actually know the people you are connected with in most cases, FourSquare and Gowalla feel a lot more like the original Twitter, with a sense of engagement that today’s Twitter can’t deliver.

7. Measurement Lacking

Other than retweets and clicks – data that inexplicably is only available from third parties – Twitter provides no statistics to its users other than followers/following. Meanwhile, Facebook has been busy adding layers to its Insights platform, which provides a nuanced dataset enabling business users to test, optimize, and evaluate the efficacy of their time spent on Facebook.

The lack of integrated metrics on Twitter may not be a big deal for personal users, but for corporations looking to embed Twitter into an integrated social CRM approach, it’s a gaping hole that is currently being patched by inefficient, home grown workarounds.

I love Twitter. It enriches my life every day. I hope it sticks around for a long, long time. But, figuring out what you want to do on Twitter is not your “social media strategy” – it’s just a short-term, tactical plan for a platform that survives despite its shortcomings.

(Post originally written for Social Media Examiner – modified today for this version).

The Best of Twitter 20

From the forward:

I’m sitting in a ballroom in Indianapolis in September, 2008 watching Joseph Jaffe give a masterful presentation on social media transforming corporations, when I come upon the idea to interview him on Twitter. So many of his points fit neatly into sound bites, that it seemed a natural – and relevant – forum for a conversation.

From that spark of an idea, long before live chats and interviews on Twitter became commonplace, we end up here. With a comprehensive eBook featuring ideas and opinions from some of the best social media minds, concisely chronicling the state of social media today – and where we’re headed.

I anticipated that interviews on Twitter would boil the process down to its purest essence, eschewing the ramblings and trappings of the customary approach, and it’s proven to be true. In re-reading each of these interviews multiple times to create this compilation, the information and insights conveyed in a short format are exceptional.

Thank you so very much to each of the Twitter 20 participants, who gave so freely of their time and their knowledge in the true spirit of social media. Also, thank you to the supremely talented Tzeyee Goh, who this eBook. I crowdsourced the design using Crowd Spring, and selected Tzeyee and her design over dozens of other contenders. Her design very much adds to the invigorating nature of this book.

I’m looking forward to an all-new group of Twitter 20 interviews in the coming months, and hope you’ll be right there with me – tuning in, asking questions, and telling your friends.

Someday, we’ll all look back on these days and say we were there at the beginning of the social media transformation. I think this book perfectly captures this exhilarating moment in time. Maybe you will also.

Please enjoy, and don’t forget you can find full text transcripts of all interviews at www.twitter20.com

Thank You

Thanks to everyone who tunes in Twitter 20 via Twitter, and special, gigantic hugs of appreciation to all of the social media geniuses who have participated – your brilliance inspires and motivates me every day.

Joseph Jaffe
Scott Monty
Jason Falls
BL Ochman
Ann Handley
Mack Collier
David Alston
Todd Defren
Beth Harte
Lee Odden
Shannon Paul
David Armano
Amber Naslund
CC Chapman
Valeria Maltoni
Beth Kanter
Danny Brown
Spike Jones
Olivier Blanchard
Gary Vaynerchuk
Dave Fleet
Diane Hassen
Dan Zarrella
Trey Pennington

Please let me know what you think of the book!

A recent study by Econsultancy called “The Value of Social Media” shows that companies are overwhelmingly using the “Big 4″ of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Linkedin for their social media efforts.

And while I don’t have any issues with those sites (in fact I wrote about Facebook marketing in-depth here), but is treating social media like a checklist really the best possible solution for your company?

There’s More Out There if You Look For It

Every day, 22 million Americans eat at McDonald’s. But, there are 108 million other people that eat at restaurants each day in America that are NOT McDonald’s.

A recent feature on CIO.com on “10 of World’s Strangest Social Networks” gets it all wrong. Somebody’s “strange” social network is someone else’s potentially thriving customer community. And when you stick 100% to the Big 4, you miss those opportunities.

Sure, the StachePassions social network (for mustache aficionados, natch) is a little unusual on the surface. But, if you think it through, many companies could succeed by participating in this community. Of course facial hair supply. But, what about photographers or digital cameras? What about Baskin Robbins – with a promotion offering free samples (and extra napkins)?

There are more than two million specialty communities on the Ning platform alone, giving you ample opportunities to find your fans and customers.

It’s About Engagement, Not Eyeballs

I worry that by focusing so much on the Big 4, we start to look at social media through the prism of audience size, which is a vestige of the old marketing. Remember, social media is about meeting your customers in their house, on their terms, and working together. And if your customers are on VampireFreaks.com (which has 2.2 million members), then maybe that’s where you should be as well – even if that means you don’t participate on Twitter.

I’m not saying you have to have a social presence in every single place one of your customers has an account. That’s impractical and unnecessary. But, in the rush to “do” social media, companies are forgetting that the communities that are most social (and thus carry the most potential) are those that are topically focused.

Do you really know where your customers are in social media? Are you ready to look harder?

Without a statistical measure of your blogging progress, adding content to your blog on a regular basis can be an incredibly lonely proposition. Is anyone out there? Does anyone care?

However, even within the business (non cat) blogging arena, there are a wide variety of potential measures to gauge your momentum. It’s imperative that you select the most relevant ones that match with your blog’s purpose and intent.

What’s the Point?

The first step in that process of course is knowing why it is that you’re blogging. This sounds simple, but it’s shocking how many bloggers aren’t clear on the core business rationale behind their blog initiative.

As I see it, there are 3 options here:

1. Blogging for Content
This is the scenario where you are writing a blog with considerable emphasis on search optimization, attempting to drive traffic to the blog via strategic content creation and keyword inclusion.

2. Blogging for Commerce
Related to the first, but commerce-oriented blogs are more interested in conversion events than in traffic generation. Funneling traffic from the blog to some other Web destination (typically a corporate site or lead form) is the prime objective.

3. Blogging for Community
These blogs seek to guild a consistent readership that interact with the blogger(s) and advocate on behalf of the content on other social outposts.

If you are blogging for content, I see these as your key metrics:

• Total visits
• Percentage of new visits (a recent study by my clients at Compendium Blogware to be released soon shows that among 86% of corporate blogs, first-time visitors comprise 60%+ of their total traffic
• Visits from search engines

If you are blogging for commerce, I’d opt for these success measures:

• Average length of stay
• Number of pages viewed per visit (both of these metrics measure depth of engagement, a key consideration when you’re trying to educate a potential customer and get them to take action)
• Referrers from other sites (if there are other sites that are driving significant traffic to your blog, you need to know what they are, to try to replicate that success with other sites of similar type)

If you are blogging for community, I’d pay closest attention to these statistics:

• Repeat visits
• RSS subscribers (repeat visits and subscribers both measure stickiness and consistency, blog elements that build community over time)
• Comments
• Referrers from social outposts like Twitter or Digg

Note that the recommended success metrics are entirely different for each type of blog. Yet, in much of my social media consulting work corporate blog owners are invariably most interested in total visits and RSS subscribers.

This is especially misplaced with group written blogs, where the broad content focus and inconsistent tonality makes RSS subscription less likely. Imagine subscribing to a magazine that was about tennis one month, and about cooking the next month. That’s what a lot of multi-author corporate blogs feel like, so is it any wonder that there aren’t many subscribers?

Blogging success is a slow march, not a mad dash. If you create consistently good content, and promote it vigorously, your blog should eventually succeed. But, to ensure you aren’t disheartened in the meantime, select success metrics that are appropriate for your goals.

For more on advanced blogging, please see my post and slide presentation: 11 Must-Dos for the Serious Blogger.

(photo by Teriyaki Tofu)

Yesterday, I gave a presentation in Tempe, AZ to Agencyside, a conference of advertising and PR agency owners. I emphasized that to remain relevant, agencies must differentiate themselves by providing advanced social media services, not just the basics.

An Enormous Opportunity

The huge (and expanding) reach of social media, and its relatively low cost (at least from a production fees perspective) makes it an incredibly attractive proposition for marketers.

Forrester Research shows that from 2009-2014, U.S. corporate expenditures on social media will increase by an AVERAGE of 34% a year, and that by 2012, as much will be spent on social media as on email marketing.

Agencies, are there any other services you provide likely to grow 34% each year? Maybe Selena Gomez autographs, or Danica Patrick NASCAR collectibles. Otherwise, good luck.

Me Too. Me Too

Agencies realize how hot social media is, and they are scrambling to add social media expertise (real or imagined) to their services mix. In fact, a search for “social media agencies” on Google yields more than 41 MILLION matching Web pages. Sifting through that pile to separate the experts from the pretenders is a near impossibility.

Social media builders and evangelists almost literally grow on trees, and the basic social media services being offered by many agencies do not provide much that clients couldn’t do themselves, if they chose to do so.

Strategic social media integrators are scarce, and agencies that want to succeed long-term in the provision of social media services need to get into that camp FAST.

Think Different

Here’s 6 ways to differentiate agency social media services:

1. Social is an Ingredient, not an Entree
Help clients find ways to add social components to existing marketing (print, outdoor, broadcast, direct mail, email, search, live events) – rather than viewing social media as a freestanding silo.

2. Codify Listening & Engagement
I still maintain that when the dust settles, we’ll all realize that social media is much better for customer retention than for customer acquisition. Consumers are using social media (especially Twitter) as a 1-800 line, and agencies should be helping their clients answer the social telephone by setting up listening posts and protocols, and trying marketing to customer service in real-time.

Agencies should also be working with clients on using social media as a market research tool, by surveying fans or creating dedicated, invite-only brand communities that serve as a living focus group.

3. Keep Score
Social media metrics are widely available, but require effort and integration to be gathered and analyzed successfully. Allowing clients to treat number of Facebook fans as the core success metric is a dereliction of duty. Go beyond the obvious and use customer service metrics, social connectivity of customers, and Web traffic patterns as measures that matter.

4. Communicate with Content
After strategic thinking, the key to social media success is content creation. Help clients take their message to consumers directly, impacting purchase intent by providing truly helpful information at the right time in the buying cycle. And make sure to atomize your content, taking one idea and propagating it in as many places and formats as possible, each reaching a different audience.

Content creation isn’t enough, however, because content isn’t king – optimized content is king. Help clients tie search success to social media through wise keyword analysis, multi-media optimization and ongoing link acquisition. Remember, the most important customer of EVERY company is Google.

5. Learn the Science of Social
Like any other online marketing program, social media is widely measurable – and testable. Don’t just let your clients post to their Facebook page willy nilly, or write random blog posts whenever they feel that Wordpress urge. Social media is at least as much science as it is art, and the agencies that develop those capabilities will have a meaningful edge.

There’s an optimal time of day and day of week to tweet. There’s a way to get your Facebook update seen in more news feeds. There’s certainly a methodology for attracting blog readership. Between bit.ly and Postrank, and Tweetmeme and Topsy and Facebook Insights and about 1,000 other tools you can use to precisely measure social media success, there is literally no excuse to not ALWAYS BE TESTING.

6. Make Social Portable
Facebook’s true genius isn’t Facebook.com, it’s Facebook Connect, allowing consumers to import their friends and their friends’ opinions onto hundreds of thousands of other Web sites. When you can go to an appliance Web site (like my new client Conn’s), and see not just reviews of a refrigerator, but reviews from your friends and friends of their friends, the world changes. And it is.

Combined with the new geo-targeted social interaction tools like Foursquare and Gowalla, and the just over the horizon technology of QR codes, social graph portability and the “site-less” Web (as Paul Gillin calls it) is an area that smart agencies need to know now.

Grab a Seat at the Table

In theory, I believe agencies actually have a huge role to play in smart social media adoption and execution. Companies often get so close to their own knitting that they cannot see the knots, and that brand of myopia is especially difficult to overcome in social media. Agencies can provide the counsel, the wisdom, the expertise, and the distance necessary to be an important rudder as companies navigate the choppy waters of a world gone real-time.

But that requires agencies to get beyond “setting up” a Twitter account or other one-and-done services of dubious strategic value.

(If you’re an agency that has all of this figured out, congratulations. I wasn’t talking to you.)

(If you’re an agency that needs to go down this path, give me a shout. I work almost entirely with agencies. I’d be happy to share my slide presentation with you, too).
(photo by Steven Depolo)

My friends at ExactTarget announced a moment ago that they have acquired CoTweet, the leader in enterprise Twitter management, and will be building a social products lab to add tie-ins for Facebook, YouTube, and other elements of the social communication ecosystem.

All members of the CoTweet team, including uber-sharp CEO Jesse Engle will stay on board, and the CoTweet name will continue.

This is the first salvo in what I anticipate will be a flurry of moves to bring together email and social media into a coherent whole. As I wrote just a couple weeks ago, email and social media are more alike than different, and the major corporations that comprise much of the customer bases of ExactTarget and CoTweet are embracing that concept.

Really, what is social media from the brand perspective but email 2.0? A way to remain top-of-mind with your customers, in a way that’s (hopefully) relevant and engaging. Not the ready, fire, aim email that’s the bane of your inbox, but smart, contextual email that sends the right message to the right person at the right time.

That’s been ExactTarget’s territory for a long time, and extending that concept of message-centric, platform-agnostic to social media is a natural fit. And the fact that Forrester Research projects social media spend in the U.S. to be larger than email by 2012 doesn’t hurt, either.

4 Milestones to Social Business

There are numerous granular issues to consider, and it will be fascinating to watch ExactTarget and CoTweet work out the operational details (I might even get to help a little, as ExactTarget is a client), but I see 4 primary hurdles that have prevented the full synergy of social and email to-date. This move will start to eliminate all of these obstacles:

1. Personnel Integration
In many (most?) mid-sized and large companies today, the email group and the social media group are not the same, and communicate infrequently. Having a single platform (the combined ExactTarget/CoTweet) will enable those groups to work together, creating operational efficiencies.

2. Database Integration
While CoTweet has made the most progress toward solving it, the big flaw with customer service and consumer interaction via Twitter (and Facebook to a lesser degree) is a lack of knowledge about the person on the other end of the keyboard. If someone asks a question or complains to @yourbusiness on Twitter, you can possibly provide some immediate triage and basic assistance, but because you don’t know who the person really is, what their account history is, etc. it’s difficult to get into much detail.

And then, if you do solve someone’s problem via Twitter, how do you capture that data? Print out your tweet stream and put it in a file folder?

I suspect ExactTarget’s database capabilities (quite robust due to heavy email customization needs of customers like Microsoft and Home Depot) will be tied to CoTweet and other platforms quickly, enabling companies to use ExactTarget (or its tightly integrated partners, Salesforce or Microsoft CRM) as the customer database of record, with a variety of API-driven messaging options riding on top.

This will provide companies with an holistic view of their customer relationships and each customer’s communication modality preferences. You can look at Jay Baer and determine that he’s a follower of your Twitter account, and has commented on your blog 3 times. But, he’s not a fan of your Facebook page, nor is he a subscriber to your email newsletter. And, you’ll be able to send relevant messages to him accordingly.

3. Messaging Integration
This type of unified understanding of who is connected to your company via what social outposts will usher in a new era of messaging strategy, where companies develop content ladders that dictate how a particular piece of content is modified and syndicated across Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, blogs, brand communities, email, and elsewhere.

This will be a major time saver for brands, as today there is too much reinventing the wheel on the content side, with different people creating disparate messages in each platform. It will also enable companies to move faster, and with more messaging consistency in the event of a social media-fueled crisis.

4. Metrics Integration
Due to its online nature, social media is inherently measurable. Today, however, creating truly meaningful success metrics often requires a custom statistical hodge-podge that tries to tie together data points from across the social spectrum. Try to figure out what your Facebook fan page’s impact is on your number of Twitter followers, for example.

The social media community is starving for a viable way to track customer behavior throughout all social outposts (as evidenced by the massive number of retweets for this post I mentioned recently about a new way to tie Google Analytics to your Facebook fan page).

With ExactTarget and CoTweet working together (not to mention ExactTarget’s built-in ties to Omniture and WebTrends), can the holy grail – an integrated, customer behavior-based, social media metrics dashboard be far behind?

Both Social, and Media

There will probably be social media purists out there wringing their hands raw about this, as a big email company that has <gasp> never exhibited at South by Southwest bought one of the (rightful) darlings of social media. Sure, ExactTarget is a company that’s about messaging – the media side of the social media equation.

But, speaking from firsthand experience, they’re a smart crew that’s not about to turn CoTweet into some sort of spam bot. They bought CoTweet as a first step, not a last step, and as I understand it, are throwing a huge development effort behind it to create major advances in the social/email integration area that go well beyond today’s announcement.

Fundamentally, we’re entering the era of social business, where we have to start treating social media with a level of oversight and accountability. We can’t continue just tweeting randomly and hoping to make “viral videos.” The big companies understand now that all of this needs to be about dollars at some point, and we’ll all be making the social media to social business leap soon enough.

This is a major step in that evolution.

(A good post on this news from my friend Kyle Lacy)

Guest post from Susan Baier, a 20-year marketing strategy veteran with an MBA in Entrepreneurship. Her company Audience Audit provides strategic marketing support and audience segmentation research that helps organizations understand their customers better.

Being relevant to customers isn’t about just using their first name in an email. True relevance grows from a deep understanding of what motivates your customers, and ensuring that every contact they have with your organization shows to what degree your company values their reasons for choosing you. That deep respect for what drives your customers and prospects can’t be faked, either – you either live it or you don’t, and they can tell the difference.

The best example I’ve ever seen of this is from a company called ThinkGeek, which prides itself on carrying the most robust collection of unique, thought-provoking products with the biggest nerd appeal on the planet. They have 3 million unique visitors and 35 million page views every month.

ThinkGeek has a robust involvement in social media, with over 68,000 followers on Twitter, 50,000 fans on Facebook and over 11,000 subscribers to their channel on YouTube, which features company-posted videos demonstrating items like their proximity-meter t-shirts and fake-blood-filled, realistically gummy heart for Valentine’s Day.

They are successful because they unabashedly have the same interests as their customers, and they are incredibly consistent across all outposts. Here’s what they’re doing right:

Engage, Don’t Sell

ThinkGeek has separated their Twitter messaging into TWO feeds – one designed to sell stuff (which is hilariously called @thinkgeekspam and posts updates about products and promotions) and one which posts all sorts of geek trivia and responses to fan questions and comments, called @thinkgeek.

According to Jamie Grove, the company’s Director of Evil Schemes and Nefarious Plans (i.e. Marketing), ThinkGeek is “all about serving our community. Our social media activities live in our customer retention sphere, not customer acquisition – because the minute it’s in customer acquisition, it changes the nature of the conversation.”

Speak Your Customers’ Language(s)

ThinkGeek’s product descriptions are peppered with arcane references to geek culture, “inside jokes” that their customers not only understand, but appreciate. They have a navigation element on their site titled “OMGWTFUN”, and they recently sent an email with the subject line “ThinkGeek less than threes you.”

But the best example I’ve seen is on their Facebook page, where one fan posted an update on their wall — in BINARY CODE. ThinkGeek responded in binary, which spawned a number of additional comments and discussion, again in binary. If this isn’t speaking your customers’ language, I don’t know what is.

Be Human

ThinkGeek’s blog recently featured a post about their newest employee Guillaume, who is French – and “largely ignorant of our favorite American movie and television memes.” So, ThinkGeek launched “Operation Guillaume” – a full-scale effort to “convert” their newest employee to red, white and blue geekness.

For Part 1 of “Operation Guillaume”, the company launched an online poll of their fans to identify the highest-priority “geek” movies. Guillaume will watch the top movies and post reviews to the ThinkGeek blog – thereby connecting this employee with the company’s fans in a perpetual feedback loop.

Allow Your Customers to Express Themselves

The company also devotes a lot of website real estate (and effort) to encouraging their fans to share their enthusiasm for everything geek. Every product features customer “action shots” showing the product in use. (According to Jamie, ThinkGeek was one of the first companies to incorporate customer product photos into their online presence.) They have an ongoing “Techie Haiku” contest in which fans can win $50 (one of my favorites: “TPS reports./Didn’t make a coversheet./See you here Sunday.”)

They’re currently running a video contest for owners of ThinkGeek’s Electronic Guitar Shirt (which really plays) in which customers can upload rock videos of themselves playing the shirt for a chance to win a $500 gift certificate. They’re running another contest for owners to send in pictures of their own creations on the Lego-like Brick Construction Shirt. Engagement with their products is half the fun, and the folks at ThinkGeek encourage and cherish every fan’s own experience.

Integrate Marketing and Customer Service

After Christmas I had to return an electronic item from ThinkGeek that had stopped working. William, the Customer Service representative I chatted with saw my mailing address and mentioned the Noah’s Flood-type deluge the weather channels were predicting for us in Arizona that weekend. Jokingly, he asked if I was aware that ThinkGeek also sells arks.

That got a chuckle out of me. But what really surprised me was when I posted a Tweet about the great customer service I’d received from William, and got a reply back from @thinkgeek that the accolades had been passed along, and that William had offered to fly out to assemble my ark and bring my replacement item with him.

WOW! Within moments of my customer support conversation, the ThinkGeek Twitter feed was connected to my conversation with William. According to Jamie, the company’s employees “live on instant messaging, so customer feedback is shared all the time.”

ThinkGeek’s engagement with their customers is an organic result of their shared enthusiasm for all things geek. But the opportunity is there for any companies whose employees believe in and love what they provide.

What can you do to connect with customers who share your passion?

Why? because through social media, customers are praising and criticizing companies in public in a way that requires marketing to triage and respond.

Three years ago, if Kevin Smith would have been kicked off a Southwest flight for being too fat, he would have yelled at the gate agent, written a letter, told his friends. Now, he tweeted it to his 1.6 million followers, and it becomes a national incident in minutes. Southwest Airlines has to coordinate its marketing and customer service response, in real-time, create its own content on its blog and Twitter account, while also dealing with the media jackals. All of this is happening to companies (maybe yours) every minute of every day.

Marketing isn’t about campaigns any more. It’s always-on. And that puts it in the unique and powerful role of being the ligament that forces intra-company cooperation like never before. It’s an exciting time to be a marketer, but it’s also a tremendous responsibility.

Power, Risk & Accountability

Today, I gave a presentation to LEAD San Diego, a group of Southern California business leaders. I was joined by my friends (and clients) Jon Bailey and Indra Gardiner of Bailey Gardiner, an integrated agency in San Diego (check out their excellent blog - Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid).

The theme of the presentation was this new era of marketing-centrism and what it takes to succeed in an environment where marketing plans are not month-to-month, but minute-to-minute.

I developed 6 new requirements that all social media savvy, marketing-centric organizations need to have.

1. Active Listening
Social media doesn’t create negativity about your brand, it puts a magnifying glass to it. If you’re not willing to listen to what your customers are telling you, when they are clearly using social media (especially Twitter) as the new 1-800 number, then you have a problem with your corporate culture that social media can’t fix.

2. Always Be Marketing
Marketing is real-time now, and consumer opinion and search-engine results can change literally in seconds. Speed kills in this environment, and you can’t succumb to endless committee meetings, planning and spreadsheets, when you can win or lose customers every minute of every day.

3. Develop Rules of Engagement
The only way to succeed in a world where marketing is a waterfall, not a lake, is to have codified rules for how you’re going to handle social media circumstances. Who’s listening? When? Who do they tell if an opportunity occurs? How much can you say? What can your employees do in terms of being “accidental marketers” for the brand? You must take the time to build a cross-functional team in your organization, and figure out your policies and procedures. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to move fast enough if you’re trying to ponder your options in real-time.

4. Manage Expectations
Brandie Feuer is Director of Marketing for the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. On a recent panel discussion we were on at AZIMA, she made a terrific point that if a consumer places a phone call, they’ll wait on hold 15 or more minutes. If a consumer emails a company, we’ve trained them to expect a response in a day or so. But, if they tweet your brand, they expect you to answer in seconds.

This is a tricky proposition. You of course want to be responsive to your customers in social media, but disproportionately so? Are you creating a chasm, whereby you treat your social media customers better than your non-social media customers? And is that appropriate?

Regardless, you need to set some expectations in social media, which is why companies are starting to list hours of operation on their Twitter accounts, etc.

5. Build a Crisis Plan
Is today the day that a social media-fueled crisis erupts for your brand? Probably not, but maybe. Southwest is widely applauded for their use of social media, yet it only took one employee to kick off the wrong portly film director for it to blow up in their face. It only took Domino’s two employees to put some cheese in their nose, and global reputation suffered.

You’ll probably never need your social media crisis plan. But, if a crisis were to occur, and you don’t have a plan, you’ll sure wish you did.

6. Discover Opportunities
If you’re actively listening, you’ll find natural opportunities to market your company contextually. You’re not “selling” you’re “helping” – and that’s the most powerful type of selling there is.

On a near-continuous basis, consumers are asking for help making purchasing decisions. How can you take friction out of that process by just-in-time tweeting, participating in Yahoo! and/or Linkedin Answers, or create a series of helpful YouTube videos (like Coldwell Banker).

Is today the day you start integrating social media with marketing and customer service?

Like Sonny divorcing Cher (or was it the other way around?) there’s a schism coming in social media between companies using it for marketing, and companies using it for customer service and CRM.

Thus, one of the first questions I recommend you ask about your social program is whether it’s true mission is to gain customers, or retain the ones you have. And at the execution level, it’s an important distinction.

If you’re trying to gain customers, your social program is more about content creation, influencer identification, and virality. Sample tactics include writing blog posts, sending promotional tweets, creating and posting videos, and blog commenting.

If you’re trying to retain customers, your social program is more about listening, problem resolution, and turning customers into advocates. Brand communities, contests, most social listening, and non-promotional tweeting fits into this category.

Match Your Social Media Tactics to Your Social Media Goal

The problem we’re faced with today is that very few companies seem to be thinking about their efforts in this way. Instead, we find solely self-promotional Twitter programs (I’d argue this is flawed and Twitter is the de facto tool for customer retention).

We also find Facebook fan pages that try to explain product features (wrong again, as it’s unlikely that non-customers are going to fan your page, thus talking about features is preaching to the converted).

Conversely, many blogs are too community-oriented, taking an overly insider approach, given that new research from my friends and clients Compendium Blogware shows that search drives 60%+ of total traffic on 80%+ of corporate blogs. People coming from Google don’t know who you are yet, so you can’t treat them like a Facebook audience that’s already drinking your Kool-aid.

Of course, this isn’t entirely an either/or scenario. On Twitter for example, if you’re tweeting about your company’s new product, you’re engaged in a customer gain event. But, if one of your followers tweets and asks you to solve a customer service problem, and you answer back, you’re engaged in a customer retention event.

But, figuring out which of these is the primary reason you’re active in social media, and how to allocate resources accordingly is going to be a major issue, as norms, software, and staffing around each approach are starting to diverge.

Sure, you can use social media for both customer acquisition and customer retention, but which is your PRIMARY goal?

You run over to check your Twitter account. Then you dash to Facebook to see what’s going on there. Then Linkedin. Maybe your blog. All the while you’re feeling like you’re playing catch-up, that something awesome may have happened, and you missed it because you weren’t online. Sound familiar?

Sure, you can centralize some of your social media chores (great post by Chris Brogan), by using Tweetdeck or Seesmic. But that only helps if you’re online and “in the flow.”

For normal humans that check social media a couple times a day, NutshellMail may become your new favorite social companion. And it’s free.

Like RSS for your relationships

NutshellMail sends you a highly customizable email digest (from 1 to 24 times per day) of what’s happening in your social media spheres, so you can browse and get up to speed quickly, without having to visit several different destinations or fire up your iPhone’s social apps.

Twitter Without the Hassle

Want to know who has signed up to follow you on Twitter today? Who unfollowed you today? All the DMs and @ replies you received in the last three hours? NutshellMail batches it all up and sends it to you in a tidy email at the exact time of your choosing. You can even include Twitter searches in your feed, enabling you to use NutshellMail the same way you’d use TweetBeep, or an RSS feed of Twitter search results.

Handy Facebook Reminders

It’s pretty tough to find a credible excuse for missing people’s birthdays on Facebook. NutshellMail saves you from being labeled an ingrate by reminding you of all the birthdays of your Facebook friends this week. The email also can be configured to show you all new friend requests, status updates from pages that you’re a fan of, as well as photos, videos and links from your friends. Plus, event invites, and photos in which you’re tagged.

And More…

Although I’m not using it presently, you can also configure your NutshellMail to include Linkedin and MySpace content, as well as updates from the Ning groups of which you are a member.

Also, if you have several different email accounts, you can use NutshellMail to automatically combine the emails sent to your secondary and tertiary accounts and forward them together to your primary account.

All the content shown in each email is clickable. So, if you want to see more about a new Twitter follower, you can simply click the name or photo in the email, and instantly visit their bio. You can also manage your customization preferences by clicking links in the email, so visiting the NutshellMail Web site isn’t needed after initial sign-up.

Social Integration in an Instant

One of the outstanding new add-on features of NutshellMail is their Facebook app, which enables Facebook fan page managers to easily add an email newsletter tab to the page. Subscribers then receive a digest of all the content posted to the fan page. I’ve been talking a lot about the integration of email and social media, and this is another example of using cross-functional technology to build content creation and deployment synergies. Note that NutshellMail is funded in part by FBFund, Facebook’s venture capital arm.

Here’s a nice video demonstration of NutshellMail and how it can save you time and social media aggravation.

I’ve been using NutshellMail for a few weeks now, and find it indispensible. (Thanks to my friend Will Smith – the world’s second most popular Will Smith – for turning me on to it).

How can you make use of NutshellMail to simplify your social media chores?