Social, Media & Company

[The Insider] 6 Wunderkinder

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 09:58:00 +0000

A new star appeared on the startups sky above Berlin. And it came with a bang. 6 Wunderkinder published their first to do list application wunderlist in November 2010 not even two months after they have been founded. It runs straight the top in major tech blogs, magazines and goes wild on Twitter.

Luckily the place we work is literally across the street of their offices. So we poked them on Twitter and arranged a meeting with “the marketing guy” Robert Kock to talk about this boost start and the role social media plays in this company.

And this role is a big one. It is the main core of the communication concept of 6 Wunderkinder: openness and transparency, honesty and bi-directional communication. So even before they published the first app, they set some simple ground rules for all of their communication on Twitter and Facebook Page:

be aware of what is happening
don’t leave any message unanswered (whether it is someone, who needs support through Twitter or someone who just wants to tell the world that he loves the app. Make sure they understood that you received their feedback)
every (official) tweet and post gets reviewed by a coworker to assure the quality and the tone

But beside the “official” accounts the team also decided on some ground rules for the way to post in social networks personally. Of course everyone is free to post whatever he likes but he/she should be aware that the appearance in social networks is the main aspect of 6 Wunderkinders publicity. So before posting one should always rethink if this might reflect bad on the image of the brand. And maybe keep drunk party pictures to a minimum. But as the employees are friends themselves they see what others are posting and act as a personal corrective afterwards, too.

Their serious use of social media is the most important reason for their quick success: Blogging, tweeting and posting on Facebook allows them to tell others what they believe in. And with publishing their first app for free under open source conditions (on github) they did more than just give back to community, they made a mission statement: We create high quality productivity software with great usability and a design, that totally rocks.

The message more and more caught on. There was no “classic” marketing, no banners or TV commercials not event AdWords. There was just a clear mission statement, a great product, open communication and word of mouth. And it caught on, people like their product and the way, they work. They start spreading the word on Facebook, Twitter and in real life. And before you even realised they are mentioned in a mayor german software magazin, important news networks and even on mashable. All just fueling the fire. The iPhone App doing its part, too.

And even though they don’t do any money with this application, it is a total win for them. A bunch of people no one had heard before, pulled off a great product and are able to shake the hard fought market of productivity software. Only within month they produced a great community and got unbelievable feedback: from support requests and bug reports up to pure endorsements. And especially the later is a big motivation booster. But their biggest win is the community itself: all them already know the name 6 Wunderkinder and especially their upcoming project “Wunderkit”.

Robert couldn’t tell us either, what it is about. He just mentioned there would be quite some concepts in the world of productivity software which “just haven’t seen through yet”. Also, the design will kick ass. We are excited, actually can’t wait for that tool and see what other things these 6 Wunderkinder pull out of their sleeves. Robert already promised us a follow up article, until then follow their Twitter and Facebook Page for more updates.

Undoing Years of Efforts

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Scholz) — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 09:20:00 +0000

Some days ago I read a tweet by Jeremiah Owyang (jowyang) - in my opinion one of the most interesting people to follow on Twitter when it comes to social media. It said:

Oh my gosh, he is so damn right!

Well, I love the fact that social media seems to enter companies in different areas. We spoke to a lot of companies who use social media actively. Especially small companies often have good ideas when it comes to the question how to engage and involve customers through social media.

At the same time I fully support Jow Yang's statement: marketers should not just settle on one horse but combine their existent web presents with new ways online like Facebook and Twitter.

There is one aspect that a lot of people still do not understand: social media is not a channel for promoting and selling products and services and therefore it is not an option to focus on just Facebook if you have an existing web presents. Social Media is another way of communication, engagement and last but not least listening to customers needs and wishes: what do they say about your corporate homepage? What do they think about your products and services? How can you improve them?

Long story short:

The corporate homepage is the place to present service and product.

Social Media is the place to get to know people using your service and product.

Use both to drive traffic "home". Go!

[The Insider] 15 Talents

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 18:02:00 +0000

When you want to be the leading market place bringing together talented students with interesting company projects of innovative companies, you need to be where the students are. When the 15 Talents SIBE GmbH was founded in early 2008 it was the leading rule for structuring the company. This simple but powerful rule was the reason why 15 Talents was created with Social Media at its core, making it a true social media company.

Two years later the responsible for Sales and the company site within Xing, Andreas Griesbach, is giving us insights of the company structure and how it works today through an interview.

But to be able to understand where this important decision came from we have to take one step back. The company was created out of a problem: many companies came to University Professors with well-paid, interesting short-time jobs and practicals / internships but it was hard to find enough talented students to fulfil those, mostly because of the lack of available time. The demand increased and soon became too much to handle for the career centres of the universities, so it was decided to outsource the job of finding talented students into one single company. Right from the beginning there hasn't been a shortage on projects but on talented students. As a result the main marketing strategy, still used today is focussing on finding talented students. And because students basically live a second life¹ in these social networks it was obvious that 15Talents needed to participate there to find the right students for their projects.

But which networks should it be? As the jobs often require unique skills, for example in software programming or speaking foreign languages you can't focus on just one social network - moreover as you don't know which skills future projects might need. In order to find as many good people as possible 15Talents decided to go broad. And the only way to go broad without lowering content quality is by putting more resources on it. By now, Andreas told us, roughly 60% of marketing resources are spent on Social Media. Company resources, spent during company hours.

To cope with the huge amount of data, the different writing styles and rules of each social networks they have decided to split the job up over various employees. Each employee is responsible for different platforms because he/she knows best how to handle it. This way they are able to write blog posts frequently, post interesting links on Facebook and Twitter and engage in Xing forums and groups. Another technique they are using to deliver content efficiently is linking them up.

Always on the right side - the links to stay
connected with 15Talents

For example the RSS Feed of latest projects is directly linked to Twitter, posting and informing all their followers about new job offers. And to make it even easier for everyone to stay connected with 15Talents all those involvements are stated on the side of each of their web page, including the home page.

But the autonomy of the employees doesn't mean they are totally independent. While everyone is responsible for staying connected and delivering content on their own, they decide together to emphasise topics requested by companies and students, e.g. SEO & SEM. When working on these topics each employee is doing his/her part of bringing it to the surface in their networks: One might write a blog article, the other shares links on Facebook, yet another starts and participates in discussions on Twitter, Xing or LinkedIn. This way everyone is responsible himself and can rely on the full team for support at the same time.

Besides 15Talents is using another technique, making them a true social media company: When they receive a new project offer they don't have any students listed for yet, they go hunting themselves in Social Media. In quite a few forums and blogs they are already known for having interesting offers for talented people. But in rare cases some forums don't like such postings and consider it spam. If they are rejected, Andreas told us, they respect that and leave them alone.

They don't want to annoy people, they just want to make a good offers. And Social Media allows them to do this easily and efficient. Being able them to find people through their interest and likes, 15Talents brings together talented students and interesting short-time company jobs to everyone's benefit – just like a real market place does.

¹ Got the pun?

Flip and think!

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Scholz) — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 01:05:00 +0000

Recently I found an interview hosted by Mark Suster (@msuster) with the rapper and entrepreneur Chamillionaire. Firstly I was a little bit cautious about it because I knew Mark Suster from the side of an entrepreneur and active social media user. Chamillionaire was known to me as a musician and tech addicted. I thought it was a strange mixture but this interview really got me thinking about a lot of things regarding business and especially Social Media.

One point that got my attention was Chamillionaire stressing the importance of feedback in this world of business. No matter what you do and how many marketers you put behind the product and how much money you spend on commercials - in the end the customer has to like the product. The best way to find out what he likes/dislikes is to get feedback and engage him, which works ultimately good using Social Media. Although there is a small "but": "Not everything is going to work for everybody. You kind of have to try a lot of things to get to know what really fits to you and your needs/customers.(...) Don't try to use everything at the same time. It won't work!"

Chamillionaire, true words!

Now, I won't bother you any more, and I urge you to watch this interview!

Should Business-to-Business-Companies care about Social Media?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 12:57:00 +0000

When we talk about successful usage of Social Media one often talks about nice brands targeting end customers. Not only because there are many of good examples but also because they are more visible than others. But being a company doing business to business products or services one wonders what to do with social media. You barely establish your brand with it, only few try to do business to business over the social networks like Twitter and Facebook yet. Asking themselves: Should I care about Social Media?

Over those great example on brand building one easily oversees the other aspects coming with social media. And quite a bunch of them are attractive for business to business companies as well. Let me give some examples:

People talk anyway
The first and most obvious reason why you simple can't "not participate in social media". Is that you already do. There is a good chance that at least some of your employees are enganged in social media, if you have no no-private-surfing-policy probably even from your office. But those aren't the only ones mentioning you, others do, too. They discuss your products and services. And more'n'more they do it publicly online. With everyone else to find and read. There is no "not being involved" any more. So instead of looking the other way it is better to know what they are talking about.

Bonding employees
One thing I can't emphasise often enough is the social part of social media. People don't just talk to each other, they communicate and with it socialise. Many books of small talk and communication say exactly this: ask a general question and let the other person talk. Just because of that they like you, and feel like they had a create talk, might even feel connected to you. This is true for social media, too. And you've probably heard that a lot already. But I had so say it once again, emphasising: This isn't only true for your customers but for your employees, too!

In fact most of the Insiders we've talked to sooner or later realised most of their earliest fans have been their own employees. Resulting in your employees getting more involved and attached to your company. Being proud of what they all accomplish together. For some it might be their most important news feed in their lifes. There is no team-building-activity your HR department could do having such a long lasting effect as doing social media.

Extended Network
Now most say there isn't any value in having a twitter account for news where only their employees listen. Au contraire, mon cheri! There is quite a gain. In every network of people you have what is called the "extended network". Those are the people who know people you know. Just with a few employees this makes a huge network. And even though these people don't know you, but you can reach them. Now let's consider you tweet about the new job openings. One of your employees in IT where the opening is going to be, retweets it and all his followers have your message in their timeline. Now he has some IT-Friends, some even think about changing jobs. And now your opening appears in their timeline.

Of course this works offline, too, but with social networks it is faster and much more effective. These two might not be that close or your employee doesn't know of that guys plans to change the job just yet (not all people brag about such a thing upfront ;) ). Social media gives you access to a huge extended network to find people, projects, services and broadcast your news. You just have to post the right things.

Feeling of Transparency
As a result some understand social media and tweeting as the modern version of the internal company news letter. Might be started out of cost reduction (paper is expensive) it gained a certain reputation over time. Your employees get the information faster, they are closer to the actual happening and it allows reactions on it, even discussions - the social way of interaction. And caused by the fact that their are broadcasted using Twitter or Facebook they are publicly available. While in the beginning that threatens the writers on the long run it shows the transparency of your company.

Even if you are the most locked down building in the world. If you post your Christmas party pictures on Facebook, the latest funny joke on the black board or tweet about the squeaking door, your company becomes more than the concrete building at the end of the street. By being able to look inside it looses the touch of the black box and gains the feeling of transparency. And with transparency comes trust.

Future employees
With the emerging skills shortages your company is interested in the best employees possible. Therefore you have to stand out of the crowd, you need to be a place some really wants to work at. While some might don't care most people want to work somewhere fun and modern on something they can be proud of. When a future employee now prepares for the interview he'll do a research about you on the internet. And then he finds your company news letters in form of a public Facebook Fan Page or Twitter account. Having the fun photos of your last office party on the page. And then the list of employees owning a Twitter account and he finds the two people who have been said to be in the interview with him the next day.

What do you think this looks like? Like an old-school company only caring for their own profit or like a modern company with fun activities and smart people you wished you went to high school with? Now, who wouldn't love to work for you?

In a nutshell
As you can see there is much to gain in social media even for B2B Enterprises. Though you probably won't get any leads with this media, it is a great to way to connect to and engage with your employees. With some simple action, like moving the company news letter into Blog and Twitter your company can show it's not hiding anything but is a modern and transparent enterprise your current and future employees want to work at.

Becoming Social Network Marketing Manager

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 13:42:00 +0000

When I read this Dilbert a few days ago, I knew I had to share it with you:

It's funny because it's true.

An open letter to Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 09:19:00 +0000

Dear Marketing,

congratulations you are once again making a fool of yourself! I mean don't get me wrong, eventually you've understood that people care about the way the product gets produced, its quality and the service around it.Good for you! But there is one lesson you never learn: It's not about saying, it is about doing it. And with nowadays technology and world-wide networks and organisations like greenpeace there is no easy hiding anymore. So what is your answer, marketing? You do greenwashing and adverts showing the company friendly, supportive and offering the best and easiest service - while they do not. We normal people call this "lying": you help companies to pretend being better than they actually are.

Of course, you are doing it for the money, so no harm there, eh? But do you guys know the story of the boy who cried wolf? And in the end no one believed him, when there was a wolf? When I was a kid I was told the story every time I was caught lying. And it has point; if you lie people don't believe you, don't trust you any. So if anyone at all is believing the ads you are doing lately, they won't do it much longer. Leaving companies who actually care at a bad place: they can't advertise with these terms and those promises. Those got broken too often for anyone to believe them. So even if those companies grow bigger the only way to make people believe that they care is by actual action, by doing it. Advertising this is pointless, might even does harm as people question it. Got it?

Even when those companies grow there isn't much point in doing classic advertising as no one will believe them! This way of pretending without action you, dear Marketing, are supporting at big companies nowadays isn't only bad for the company it is bad for you! By doing this you are making yourself useless, destroying your own future. You should seriously consider being more picky about your clients: choose those with the good product over the one with the pile of money and ensure that what has been said gets done. But most important: don't Lie! Only if people can trust advertisments, they might consider believing you. And only if people believe and trust you, you stand a chance when the upcoming companies with good service and high quality products grow bigger and re-evaluate their communication strategies. Think about it!

With kind regards,
Benjamin Kampmann

[Should I care about] Fans and Followers?

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Scholz) — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 22:57:00 +0000

Social Media is mass media. More than 500 Million users in Facebook, more than 160 Million on Twitter. I am sure you know the numbers. But what about your Fanpage or your Twitter account? Are there are lot of people around? Is it even neccessary to have the ultimate goal to boost those numbers? Really: should I care about my Fans and Followers?

Let's have a quick look at the offline community of customers, first. Companies create new products, advertise them, pay millions of dollars and then they watch their customers buy it (best case scenario). An additional approach, that especially brings Apple large success is to build a community of early adopters. And we all know, early adopters are one of the most important groups of customers. Companies do not need to canvass them. Early adopters choose a product because they know the brand, the quality and their own needs. Early adopters are convinced. Saving company real money.

Let's switch to the online community. First, companies use Social Media to gain attention for their brand. Secondly, they want to know what the community thinks about their products, what their needs are and how they like the company at all. That is where Social Media Costumers (like Fans and Followers) join the game. As they have already choosen to follow the company (most likely because they have made some good offline experience before) they are some kind of "social early adopters". Researches have shown: They are more likely to buy products of companies they "liked" - do follow on Twitter or other social networks. They are also more likely to share information and convince others to have a glance on this and that new stuff of yours.

They are such a strong and powerful part of your customer base and the most important aspect is not the number of social customers but the way you engage and satisfy them. There is really no obvious advantage in having 500 thousand Fans on Facebook. Especially when nobody interacts, maybe when there is even no communication at all. But especially for small and mid-size enterprises, maybe like yours, a small, loyal and engaged base of Follower and Fans brings up enourmous opportunities.
Such as:

the company gets a picture of their community
their Fans and Followers are frank and helpful when it comes to the opinion about your products
they are persuasive and creative when it comes to convince other people of your brand
their friends are more likely to become one of your new customers because of their similar interests and needs
they come up with new ideas for your products and advertisings (e.g. Discover or the issue about the new GAP logo)
and the best thing: they will do all this mainly for free!
(small hint: everything they post on your wall their friends will see as well. Cool, heh?)

So, let me cut a long story short: you should definitely care about your Fans and Followers. They are a strong community offering a lot of opportunities for the brand. The most important thing (and yeah, the most difficult) is to keep them attracted, regardless of the dimension of your Fans and Followers. But if you achieve this you will be very thankful because there is no other chance to get so close to your audience. It is not the number of Fans you have but what you make out of it.

Think about it!

Schuster bleib bei deinen Leisten!?

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Scholz) — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 12:33:00 +0000

Ein CEO hat oft genaue Ziele, welche dann so schnell wie möglich mit so wenig Arbeitsaufwand wie nötig erreicht werden sollen. Ich bin mir nicht ganz sicher, ob es überhaupt eine Situation insbesondere in der Welt der Arbeitenden gibt, die diesen Wunsch ermöglicht. Social Media ist wohl auch eher ein Fall für Zeitaufwendigkeiten und deswegen nichts für die Geschäftsführung. Oder sehen wir das falsch?

Wir hatten vor kurzem ein Gespräch mit einem kleinen Unternehmen, welches aktiv in das Gebiet von Social Media einsteigen wollte. Nach einem gemeinsamen Brainstorming, in dem Interessen, Ziele, Wünsche und mögliche Vorgänge erörtern wurden, kam die Frage auf, was wir als beratende Einheit übernehmen würden. Erwartet hatte man, dass wir jegliche Art von Strategie bis hin zur Ausführung der Social Media Aktivitäten für das Unternehmen durchführen würden.

Der Grund: Zeitaufwand, den beide Geschäftsführer von sich und dem Unternehmen (Mitarbeiter) fernhalten wollten.

Das Argument: die Aufgabe, allen voran der Geschäftsführung, ist es, die Firma nach außen hin zu repräsentieren und Kundenkontakt zu halten bzw. zu vertiefen nicht aber zu Bloggen, zu Twittern und bei Facebook zu chatten.

So falsch ist das gar nicht. Die Rolle des Geschäftsführers ist es doch tatsächlich, ein Netzwerk zu bilden, auf welches unternehmerische Tätigkeiten aufbauen können. Insbesondere die Pflege zu wichtigen Kunden und eine strategische Ausrichtung nach deren Wünschen steht im Aufgabenbereich eines Geschäftsführer weit oben auf.

Aber:
Social Media ist nichts anderes. Ziel ist es ein Netzwerk aufzubauen, das vor allem Interessen und Wünsche möglicher Kunden wiedergeben kann. Social Media muss, richtig angewendet, eine Diskussionsplattform werden, die die strategische Ausrichtungen für Unternehmen, egal ob klein oder groß, mit definiert. Warum sollte dieses Gebiet nicht auch, zumindest zu einem großen Teil, in die Hände der Geschäftsführung gelegt werden?

Schließlich hat sich eine Sache im Unternehmen auch nach dem enormen Einfluss von Social Media in der Wirtschaft nicht geändert: das letzte Wort für die Entwicklung eines Unternehmens hat die Geschäftsführung. Und bestenfalls entwickelt diese das Unternehmen strategisch in Richtung des Kunden(wunsches). Und wo haben wir die Möglichkeit den Kunden zuzuhören?

Richtig! Social Media. Der Kreis hat sich geschlossen.

[The Insider] Schwarze Dose 28

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 13:22:00 +0000

Since the start in 2008 Schwarze Dose 28 (also called "28black" in the US) has been more than just an energy drink based on the açai berry. Right from the beginning the brand stood for quality, natural ingredients and aesthetics. Resulting in a huge success; offline and online. When they hopped on the Facebook-Hype going through Germany last year, they took over a community Fan Page with about a thousand fans. By now they crossed the 20 thousand marker and head for even larger numbers.

Julia Akra, Head of PR at Calidris 28 Germany, met with us and gave some insights about the beginning, the current state and the future of the Social Media involvement of Schwarze Dose 28.

Graph1: Showing the increase in Likes over time

The first time Schwarze Dose noticed Social Media was during the Facebook Hype last year. Back then the Fan Page of Schwarze Dose was community driven and had about one thousand fans. When Julia researched the area she soon realised that this can't be managed by an external agency; it had to happen in-house, giving ideas and insights right from the source. As she was the only person in charge of external communication by that time and a little facebook junkie herself, she took over the community page and started experimenting with it.

There was no bigger plan behind it. She was doing what felt right; posting about internal and external affairs, answering questions and helping people find a place to buy their product. Soon the fan base started growing while service requests decreased: before a lot of people used the contact form to ask common question now they found the answers Julia had given others. But it stayed a part time experiment until they reached bigger numbers. When the Fan Page became more and more successful and the fan base grew over the 10 thousand even the Management acknowledged Julias enthusiasm, putting a link to the Fan Page in the header of the home page.

Around that time she realised there was something bigger going on. Something the Facebook Fan Page statistics confirmed: she created a vibrant and big community without even aiming for it. Giving the company a great argument in discussions with potential business partners like event agencies. But also leaving her with the questions who these people actually are. Sadly you can't get a full list of all of your Fans in Facebook so the only way to find out what topics they like to talk about is try'n'error.

This way she found out that this community likes big cars, party-ing and cocktails while other topics don't create much buzz. Like the campaign for "HalbtagsJob 2010", a creativity contest asking the competitors "what would you do with 4 hours more per day?" where the winners get paid to work on their idea half-time for half a year. Julia had expected more buzz and input from their facebook community. So Julia talks more about topics like the Schwarze Dose cocktail recipes, promotes cooperations and events (like the Golden-Limited-Edition for the Bambi) or the latest products in their online shop. And engages the community with more general questions they can relate to or does puns with the number 28. Doing all this in a forward and direct but still friendly way is how they like it a recent poll showed.

Even though this might not be the main target group the branding is aiming for there are people interested in the brand and the product, being Fans of the it actually. And having fans has its advantages: like the one time when a guy annoyed the community with repeatedly posting about same topic. Julia didn't have to use any moderation features from Facebook herself, other fans told him that they didn't like his way of annoying them so he stopped.

While their Fan base is constantly growing Julia thinks about expanding their involvements, too. Continue to look for the target audience, the Urban Creative Class above 25, and establish Schwarze Dose 28 as an alternative to Coffee and Coke during the day. Maybe with a more elaborated strategy involving twitter this time. We'll see what they'll come up with. But one thing she ensured us: While they might receive creative input from the marketing agency, Schwarze Dose 28 will not outsource Social Media!

Outsourcing Social Media? Bad idea!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 14:32:00 +0000

With all buzz around Social Media you've properly discussed it in your company or with your media agency now or then. And they offered you to create a Social Media strategy and execute it for you. While it is a great idea to let them develop a plan for you - as you have bigger problems to worry about - you should not let them execute it for you: it won't work! No matter what you agency is promising you, it won't work. They can support you, come up with ideas and train your writing skill and how to behave in certain areas of Social Media, but they should never be in charge of execution.

And the reason for this lies in the deep root of Social Media itself. As I already said 8 month ago, Social Media is communication boiled down to its basics: you communicating with your customers. If you let others speak for you, it's simply not you the customers talk to - with all it's downsides; You don't know what your customers are concerned about, the media agency isn't able to help the customers properly (as they are not in your processes of your company) and most of the time agencies don't even have a clue what they are talking about. While they might be experts in PR and communication, you are the expert in your field, you should be the one talking.

But the most important of all reasons is; Social Media requires honesty and you can feel whether there is someone behind it who actually cares (for the customer, the company and/or the brand) or just a phony media agency trying to pretend to be you. This drives customers away. But even if they stay they talk to a pretentious ghost writer, someone they can barely connect to. So they won't get emotionally attached to you nor your brand. Ever. Period.

So keep it in-house by the people working and actually caring for your brand. Even if you are not a nobel prize winning writer - consider this: I'm not one either! - you're the only one able to express what you want and need to say. Everything else is just wasted money.

Who's afraid of Social Media?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 09:41:00 +0000

Recently we gave a presentation discussing the potential marketing of an upcoming product. Alex and me suggested using Social Media to make the step from the phase of early adopters to the mass market. Thought the listeners were quite young people and were aware of social media and its immense power they were quite sceptical, to not say scared. That got me thinking: are people scared of Social Media? And if so: Why? How can we prevent that? What can and should we do about it?

The examples we use
After thinking about it for a while I came to the conclusion that it is our fault. Mine and yours, the people who try to get companies to use Social Media, publicist and journalist who talk about it. The root of the problem lies in the way we approach them. Think about it: when we try to persuade people how powerful Social Media is we use the big and well known examples; we talk about how dell made millions last year, that Barak Obama is president of the US because he used Social Media the right way and how Social Media took companies down or damaged them deeply, like the dominos pizza video incident or the KaffePartner example (the later one is widely known in Germany & Austria at least).

The good
And now think about them again. Consider that you are new to Social Media. Look at these examples closely. The first two are quite abstract: Most companies don't have the size of dell, won't make millions using Social Media and barely anyone seriously believes to will become president of the United States in the foreseeable future. Besides, behind both campaigns stand big piles of money, money most of our listeners simply don't have. But what makes them appear unreal is the size itself. It makes it hard to picture which actual actions and small steps caused such a success. There are so many of them that we leave them out most of the time and only speak about the basic concepts behind it. Making these examples look even more abstract than they already are.

The bad
So the only examples most people are able to understand are the unpleasant ones: When we talk about the power of Social Media taking companies down or damaging brands for years. They almost always start with one tiny action by some person in the community that gets spread all over the place without the company having any control about it. This is so fascinating that in such an occasion we do speak about the actual cause of action, talking about how few time it took them to set it up and how much damage they made with it. All of this makes the image to the listeners even more vivid: The rather small and mid-size businesses taken down by some nerds with just a blink of an eye.

The ugly
Looking at it from this side, which example do you think is it your listener will have in mind the next time someone talks about Social Media? Their brain will connect to the more vivid examples, those fitting their businesses more than others: they'll see how Social Media is threatening their business. It has the power to bring everyone down. No matter what. That is the lesson they've learnt. So they get scared and rather not interact with Social Media at all instead of doing something wrong and loosing their business. But we both know that is the totally wrong approach. But they taking this road is our fault, yours and mine! Because that is the way the communicated it.

Proposal: emphasize the right thing
But what can we do about it? I think we have to change the way we present the problem. Yes, it is fascinating that Social Media can tear down big business. But there is a reason before that. Social Media is not able to do that on its own. Each of the bad examples has a pre-story. In case of KaffePartner one can simply say that they had (have) a bad product, bad contracts with awful conditions and in this particular case a broken product with really bad customer support. That is what the person made mad in the first place. People don't want to rant about a company for the sake of it. They first look for solutions, you wouldn't be taken seriously if you didn't try anything possible before posting a blog article anyway. So they tried their best but were not able to find a solution.

And that is where the real reason is; They were not treated with respect from the company, the company offered bad service or none at all, so in the end they didn't see any other solution than going nuts on the internet. This is what we should emphasize when telling these stories: The one that got tore down was the one with the bad product and awful service. If a company has a decent product and really cares about its customers, their customers will value it and there is no reason to rant about. Therefore Social Media isn't a threat to this company at all.

There is a similar lesson to learn behind the dominos pizza video incident as this great article points out: teaching ones employees about these tools. It is not enough to "create a Social Media Department" in a company. Social Media is accessible to anyone and no one will be able to prevent his employees to playwith it (instead: one should encourage it!). But what one can do is teach them how to use it and make them understand what their actions could cause. In most cases something bad happened because people didn't know about the damage they were causing. And after they've learnt the lesson the hard way they are deeply sorry. Teaching ones employees about Social Media allows them to foresee the possible outcome.

What I already said about customers is also right for employees. They barely want to harm you, they do it out of accident. They understand if the company goes down they will, too. And no one likes to loose his job even if it might not the best one they ever had. What companies have to do is teach their employees about Social Media, make workshops and encourage them to use it. But as there might certain things companies don't want their employees to talk about, like business secrets. Therefore a company should discuss (not dictate!!!) rules and policies for Social Media usage with its employees. If the company approaches the employees correctly and treats them with respect they will understand the companies concerns making it even easier to follow the rules.

How to cure the scared?
But for some reason you are faced with a company already being scared. Might be caused by yourself and the missunderstandable way of communication you or mass media did. Don't worry, they are not lost yet! You just have to emphasize what I just said above. Besides there is also another important lesson to learn from the article mentioned: one should always be aware of what is going on. If people are scared about Social Media looking into the opposite direction doesn't help them. If something bad is going to happen then it will. And it is better to know about it to be able to react to it. Of course telling them this will scare them even more first, but they will get the point. And as you will to explain them how they should address such a bad situation (if it ever happens) and offer your support right after, they won't be that scared anymore.

And we both know: After they started using it, it won't take to long until they understand there is no one wanting to harm them. They just need to get wet, soon they'll like to play in the water.

[The Insider] Hotel Berlin, Berlin

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 09:19:00 +0000

With its 52 years "Hotel Berlin, Berlin" clearly is not a new comer in hotel business. But when the hotel was bought out of a big chain in 2006 the heads decided to reinvent the hotel and its meaning once more. Beside a new facade for the building this included a new brand and new ways of marketing; taking the hotel into Social Media.

And once again Berlins third greatest hotel is leading hotel business to new innovative ways. Last week we got the great opportunity to talk to Anne Bubner, Brand and Media Manager and her Assistant Maria Langhammer both managing the Social Media appearance for the hotel. Like no one before they showed us how Social Media is more than just another communication channel and deeply effects the hotel and its processes.

But before they started using Social Media they created a strategy; platforms they want to use, topics they want to talk about, the target groups they try to reach and similar marketing questions. One thing they figured out quite early is the fact that you can't understand Social Media as "yet another communication channel" but you have to understand it as a culture. A culture of communication and transparency, real relationships and actual caring, of collaboration and trust. And you don't understand this culture if you look at the revenue only, as Anne told us. Of course at the end of the day there needs to be income but Social Media is more than that. As Anne phrased it "revenue is a positive side effect of Social Media" but not its main purpose.

One big part of their strategy is the location marketing. While most big chains like the Ritz or Hilton allow the customer to decide the chain first and the location second it is different for "Hotel Berlin, Berlin" where the customer has to choose Berlin as his location first, Anne explained us. That makes it more challenging after all Berlin is an attractive place to go to, with all types of venues and events. So Maria tweets live from the IFA 2010 or the Berlin Marathon and posts updates from Handball Games of the local team "Die Füchse Berlin" on Facebook. Staying in contact with their audience even - or should I say "mostly"? - off work hours and during the weekend.

They told us about one very successful initiative, the Schnitzeljagd. A kind of paper chase game they played with their followers and fans online: they posted small details of photos of public places in Berlin and the users had to guess where they had been taken. Every day they posted another picture. The feedback was immense: People loved this way of exploring the city. But it hasn't always been this easy. They started with quite a few followers back in 2008 and most of them were even employees of the company itself. Something they didn't know until they figured that there is only one way to know your audience: take a close look at them, where are they from, how old are they, what do they talk about.

Getting to know your audience certainly doesn't end online. When a guest books a room over the Facebook App or comes from twitter "Hotel Berlin, Berlin" tracks this information. So every employee looking into the internal booking system directly knows where the guest comes from. When the guests checks in Anne personally comes to welcome them. Thus they are letting the community know who is behind the otherwise anonymous Facebook and Twitter appearance and create a even more personal relationship. Furthermore a special welcome card is waiting for them at their rooms.

This way Social Media became a part of the companies inner processes and procedures. And only because of the close relationship to their audience "Hotel Berlin, Berlin" is able to really get to know them. Only because they took a close look, Anne and Maria found out that a lot of their Facebook Fans and Twitter Followers also seem to be fans of electronic music. A target group they've not thought of so far. But now they think out loud about including more club and party events in their feeds.

Another very important group inside their Fans and Followers are their colleagues. Though it took them a while before they noticed but most of their earliest Fans where working at the hotel, too. Information such as news about "Hotel Berlin, Berlin", the hotel business and events in Berlin, videos, pictures and insights of the hotel aren't only interesting to customers but also to employees. Social Media makes it easy for them to follow what is going on. And they are curious, they are happy and proud of what they can see there.

But Anna and Maria want to take this into a higher level than just reporting about hotel insights like the trainees cocktail creations they are promoting using facebook or the latest promotion photos. They want their colleagues to participate and publish Social Media content themselves. Like the one time when their chefs have been in Singapore to a cooking contest and were letting their colleagues know about their state using Twitter. At the moment Anne and Maria are working on a strategy to include Social Media for their "House of Talents", their academy for new trainees. One idea is to let the trainees blog about their time there, tweet or create a video blog. Having another great side effect: showing prospective job applicants what a great working place they are, becoming the first choice to them.

"Hotel Berlin, Berlin" is a great example of a company having understood the requirements and changes Social Media brings. It is not just another way to communicate it is a change in the relationship between a company and people like employees and customers. Like no other business the service driven feels this shift happening right now, the change in the lifestyle of so many people. And only few have understood as well as "Hotel Berlin, Berlin": If you do Social Media right it doesn't stop when you leave work or shut down the computer. It goes way beyond that influencing our daily tasks and ways we (have to) behave and the procedure we follow.

[Should I care about] Location-based Services (LBS)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 13:01:00 +0000

Even before the latest peak in downloads of scvngr Location-based Services had a huge buzz in the internet community; Foursquare's and Gowalla's (both launched last year) growing user base put Facebook under heavy pressure. So heavy that about a month ago they launched their competitive service called Facebook Places.

Location-based services promise to "socially engage" users for your local business like cafés, bars, museums and similar public places. But how do these systems work? Why is there a hype about them? How do they try to keep this promise and what would I - as a business owner - have to do to participate? All boiling down to one major question: Should I care about Location-based Services?

What it is
In its classic sense a Location-based Service is simply a service taking into account the "where" attribute of an activity. In this sense the "yellow pages" have offered such a service for a long time: looking for a certain type of business in a certain area. But when we speak of Location-based Services in the Social Media Landscape, we mean services connected the "where" attribute to the social "who" as in "friend".

These services offer much more than what Google Maps or Qype offer for years: telling you where your friends are, what they do there and how they feel about. On top of this these new services do this on a much higher level than GPS-Coordinates as they make it possible to identify public places, restaurants, bars and basically all type of venues.

Depending on the venue the user is at these web services offers him various actions/activities. The best known is the so called "check in". By triggering this action the user is saying "I am at this location right now" and all his friends in his network receive a notification about. So you know where your friends are and are able to join them. The second best known is the commenting: A lot of services allow their users to leave a comment at a venue. As comments are public they allowing you and others to see what you thought about it.

Like your friends. Simply consider the following scenario: You are in some street in your city you are not very frequently. You are hungry and there are a couple of restaurant near by but you don't know which one is good. But your friends do! So you fire up Gowalla or Foursquare on your iPhone and look at the comments your friends have left about the places around. And you'll see that guy from PR who always suggests these awesome places often visits in the sushi bar near by and gives it good critics. So you go into that place and you love it. You are checking in and commenting yourself.

This is exactly what makes these system so powerful. They make a connection between the social graph online and real life. And more and more companies jump on this train giving people special gifts and promotions who check very frequently. And the presents in these services offers a wide range of possibilities. Up to location specific activities that only a certain company offers or special promotions you can only get after you've checked in using the web service. This way venues are able to reward loyal customers while creating buzz around themselves.

Services
With almost 3 million users Foursquare is the biggest pure location-based service. The basic idea behind their model is to engage the user to "unlock your city". There are various badges you can earn if you master certain exercises and activities. The best known is the "Mayor"; it shows that you are the person who checked into a certain location the most. Depending on which badges you own (and proudly show off) some companies give you special offers. By the time of writing there are already 15.000 venues experimenting with special offers through Foursquare; like giving free beer to their mayors.

Gowalla, by numbers the second biggest pure location-based service, has a slightly different approach. You can "check in" into location as well, collect badges and receive and exchange items but overall the discovering of new places and location stands in foreground. Users can create trips and upload pictures for venues. And you can follow others around the trips they are doing (like a rockband on tour or their current example: John King). This does not prevent any business to give special offers to gowalla users, too, but the fun part of following what other are doing is clearly in the focus of this service and its users.

A very controversy discussed services was once again launched by Google: In its range of mobile apps Google Latitude is definitely the most discussed one. As many other Google mobile Apps you can launch it from a mobile device only. While in most services the user actively announces where he/she is Google Latitude works differently; they track where you are all the time using the GPS of your phone. And publish this location allowing your friends to see where you are and what you are doing in real time. This feature gave it the nickname "Google Stalker Tool". How Google wants to include local businesses or make money out of this services is still unknown. But if they do ever come up with a good idea they can fall back on a big community; by now already 8 Mio users signed up and about 3 Mio use Latitude actively.

The newcomer in this field just announced they had over 100.000 downloads of their app in the first 24 hours after launch: scvngr (pronounced "scavenger") launched their playful version of what a location-based service could look like just about two weeks ago. Instead of only a simple "check in" action the user has various actions including the so called "social check in" where a group of users is announcing that they are at the same place by holding their phones together [link to the video]. Their app is available for iPhone and android devices and allows companies and institutions to build "location-based mobile games" using their online builder. This feature allows venues to be much more creative and individual and attract users with a fun game instead of simply offering promotions and the way scvngr wants to make money: having more than game on at the same time costs a monthly fee.

Should I care?
Especially the last example shows that there is still room for new ideas and concept in this market. Though the basic idea is not the youngest the products in this market are still in their kids shoes. If you are interested in new things and have a static place or venue you want to promote investing in these concepts is clearly not a bad idea. How the users except it - specially if it becomes more complex - is another question though. And only time will show which of those concepts will last. But be aware of the possibility that the winning concepts might not even exist yet. There are going to come much more over the next few years. Even if you might not be interested in it yet you should have an eye on what is happening in this market because it will grow a lot and engage more and more users over the next couple of years.

Marketing by Sharing

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Scholz) — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 14:37:00 +0000

Oh no, thats not just another TED Talk. It is not, really! If you want to see some interesting TED Talks about marketing and social media I would suggest you to have a look right here and here. They won't dissappoint you. I promise!

But lets get back to the main topic. I guess a lot of you know 37signals. They are the creators of "Basecamp" (and more) and writers of "ReWork" and "Getting Real", some awesome books on building web based services.

Jason Fried (Co-Founder and President of 37Signals, the guy in the video) talks about a possible way to promote and marketing your products and services: marketing by sharing.

That means nothing else than to help people, to teach people (e.g. cooking), so they will remember your name and you brand. They will more likely to buy some of your products because they got stuck to you, they identify themselves with you, because they remember you. Don't you remember people easier when they were able to help you?

Social media comes along with this approach. I think it is one of the key features for a succesfull social media performance. You do not sell things through social media. You do not aggressively advertise your products in order to get something sold.
You bring people to create a need to purchase (your product). And the best way to do so (even in social media) is to teach and help.

But enough of my thoughts, let Jason Fried do the rest:

Good Night my Blog, Good Morning Twitter!?

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Scholz) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:30:00 +0000

Das Wachstum rund um die Nutzung von Microblogging in Unternehmen erinnert mich in vielen Facetten an die Veränderung der Firmenkommunikation mit dem "Einbruch" der Blogs. Das Gefühl man müsste den alten Zug verlassen und mit einem anderen weiterfahren um ans Ziel zu kommen ist nun wieder erkennbar.

Vor kurzem bekam ich einen Artikel zu lesen, in dem die Meinung vertreten worden ist, Microblogging würde den Blog in Kürze ablösen, denn die Tendenz zu kurzen Mitteilungen sei nicht zu übersehen.

Dabei bin ich der Meinung, dass sowohl Blogs im ursprünglichen Sinne als Microblogging für eine gelungene Social Media Kommunikation unabdingbar sind. In einigen Gesprächen mit Unternehmen kam immer wieder die Frage auf, ob es sich denn tatsächlich lohnen würde, einen Unternehmensblog weiter zu führen, wenn doch Twitter und ähnliche Dienste vorhanden seien.

Ich sage ja!, es ist sinnvoll, aus den folgenden Gründen.

1. Blog gibt (Themen)-Freiraum

Ein Blog ist, wie alle Social Media Kanäle nicht dazu da um klassisches Marketing=Werbung zu betreiben. Ein Blog kann genutzt werden um Ideen, Visionen und Problematiken aus Sicht des Unternehmens zu allen möglichen Thematiken zu schildern. Im besten Falle kann man so eine konstruktive Diskussion in Kundenkreisen anstoßen, welche dem Unternehmen die Meinung dessen Zielgruppe zeigt und andersherum. Mit Twitter ist eine inhaltliche vollwertige Diskussion eingeschränkt möglich.

2. Blog macht lebendig

Menschen wollen teilnehmen. Menschen wollen sehen, was hinter der Fassade geschieht. Das verbindet. Nicht nur im privaten Leben, sondern auch in Unternehmen-Kundenbeziehungen. Ein Blog ermöglicht diese Nähe zu Kunden. Sei es durch Artikel aus dem Alltagsleben des Unternehmens oder durch Artikel zu Produkten/Produktentwicklung oä. Gute Beispiele hierfür sind United Prototype aka Fliplife oder auf internationaler Ebene 37Signals . Twitter ermöglicht den Einblick "in einen Moment" des Unternehmensgeschehens (z.B. durch Fotouploads). Nicht immer reichen 140 Buchstaben um das "Drumherum" kommunikativ zu beschreiben.

3. Blog definiert

Ein Blog gibt die Möglichkeit Handlungen und Produkte zu erklären. Warum heißt das Produkt so und nicht anders? Warum wurde auf den Zeitungsartikel nicht reagiert? Was steckt dahinter?
Ein Blog soll kein Tor für Firmeninterna werden, aber ein Tor um mit mehr als nur 140 Zeichen eie Unternehmensphilosophie aufbauen und kommunizieren zu können.

Anstatt also einen Zug im Gleis stehen zu lassen (Blog) und den anderen zu nehmen (Microblogging) würde ich vorschlagen beide Züge zu verbinden um so sicherer das Ziel zu erreichen. Twitter ist gut, Twitter ist sinnvoll, aber wie jede Idee nur wirklich stark in Verbindung mit anderen Tools und Fähigkeiten.

[The Insider] Freunde des Mauerpark e.V.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:54:00 +0000

The Mauerpark in Berlin (between Pankow and Wedding) isn't a park as all the others. When you look at it during weekdays it looks like an old, dry fallow land you would never call "park". While on weekends it is overcrowded - feeling more overcrowded than alexander platz - and filled with all kinds of artists; there are bands playing, people dancing, there is open air karaoke and a fleemarket every sunday. It is a really special place.

And like every special place the Mauerpark needs people who take care of it. One society of 25 volunteers taking care of the Mauerpark is the "Freunde des Mauerpark e.V." ("Society of friends of the Mauerpark") who are trying to establish the park as a constant in Berlin, its culture scene and tourism. So when they thought about relaunching their webpage last year it was decided to get off the path of a "normal society webpage". The people behind "Freunde des Mauerpark e.V." wanted a website transferring all facets of the Mauerpark - they decided to go "social media". We had the great opportunity to talk to Alexander Puell from dfacts.de, the designer of the concept, the creator of the page (software wise) and the one behind most of the social media involvement of the foundation. And, boy, did we learn a lot!
The dedication for the idea of a "community page" already starts when you look at the homepage itself. While most foundations are focused on themselves the Mauerpark and its community is clearly in the centre of interest. Based on the blogging software Wordpress the news about the Mauerpark takes the biggest part of the content. Only a couple of static pages offer more general information (map etc).

But the most interesting things can be found in the right sidebar (as you can see on the screenshot on the right):

the latest tweets related to the Mauerpark (a)
a couple of latest pictures of the Flickr Mauerpark group (b)
a weather plugin showing the current weather (c)
Facebook Fanpage widget (d)
a button to Flattr the foundation (e)
even an advert for the mobile-version (f) and more

Looking at it one by one, we can see how "Freunde des Mauerpark e.V." tries to make all facets of the Mauerpark available to everyone. While most of the content on the blog itself is written by Alex and some other authors, the content in the sidebar is mostly community driven.

The "Latest Tweets" just shows tweets containing the #mauerpark hashtag. This gives the reader a good impression of what is currently happening in the Mauerpark, Alex told us, it is basically a snapshot. Moreover it is especially interesting as most people don't know that they are showed there. The hashtag just comes up naturally and you can notice a raising rate of international tourists coming to the park and tweeting about. They've probably never even heard about the homepage. But still they are involved in creating it.

For Flickr this is a bit more obvious. Alex is observing some searches on Flickr, looking for pictures of the Mauerpark and if they are any good, he invites the people to join the Mauerpark-Flickr-group and share their pictures. With joining that group these pictures are also shown on the website; the Flickr widget shows the latest pictures which were uploaded. By now, Alex made 128 People contribute 777 pictures to the group. An amazing amount of free content! They even used some of the picture - of course after they've asked first - for a post card series of the Mauerpark they did.

With over 7,000 friends the Mauerpark Facebook Fanpage is one of the most successful parts of the social media landscape Mauerpark is involved in. Though, Alex admitted, the better part is probably tourist, who visited the park once, found it on Facebook and said "Oh yeah, I liked this", but still there are around 2,500 people more or less active. For a foundation of 25 members this is a huge community. This doesn't come out of nowhere. Alex is using the Facebook-Page actively to involve the community.

There are always topics, press releases and interviews you would like to share, but a blog article is usually not the right way to do this. So Alex uses Facebook and Twitter to publish such information and share it with the community. Like an interview he read the other day about the construction works at the Mauerpark. He shares such links on the Facebook-Page and through the Mauerpark-Twitter-Account. Furthermore he puts them and other related content to discussions.

His experience is, that the barrier for comments seems much lower on Facebook. Though people have to talk with their names published, they are much more willing to express their thoughts than they have ever been e.g. on the blog. Most of the discussions of the community happen on the Facebook fan page today. But the low barrier has also his down-sides. Specially discussion about expanding the Mauerpark quickly turns highly emotional. And some people even instrumentalize the Fanpage to propagandise their point of view and rant about people. When this happens, Alex tries to calm down the discussion and push it back to the main track of the question.

Only in the rare case that someone is just insulting someone else he is deleting the comment, although he is terrified to do so. The community is meant to be an open culture and he doesn't censor opinions he doesn't like. If someone found out that he would censor the comments the community would be dead within a minute, he ensured us. But reading and moderating the comments takes a lot of time. Not rarely he spends up to one hour a day on the Facebook Fanpage. But still he tries to publish news or a question two to three times a week on Facebook and Twitter.

But time is a hard decider. Or mostly the lack of it. There has been a really great video series on Youtube. The Mauerpark even has his own Youtube-Channel. Voices was a trial to make those facets of the Mauerpark come to life on the website. Though the videos have been quite good, the lack of time have let the project vanish. And that lack of time is holding back some other great ideas Alex and his friends have: e.g. real multilingual blog articles for tourists, a better map with more information, QR Codes in the park or an augmented reality app showing the Wall of berlin in the park. Yes, the Mauer has gone through this park, that is why it is called the Mauerpark! Not only for these projects but generally Alex is looking for help. If you'd like to help him manage the community, drop him a line!

One thing he had time for and he is proud of - and has every right to be! - is the mobile version of the Mauerpark page. This page contains the information you need on the go; A weather widget, the events-box and - very important - a map. Because, Alex told us, there are a lot of people, specially tourists, checking on the way where the location is exactly. This service helps them find and experience the Mauerpark much easier.

Because in the end that it is what it is all about. Social Media is not a end in itself. It just helps you, it helps the people to get an idea what the Mauerpark really is. But it will never be able to give the full experience. You need to get there in real life and experience it yourself; And on your way there, the homepage of "Freunde des Mauerpark e.V." will guide you with a mobile version, after you arrived you tweet about and later you'll take some pictures and upload them to Flickr as well. Sharing your experience with people who experienced the same or are interested in experiencing it makes up a great important part of social media activities.

Online and offline go hand in hand. Specially for topics of public interest like events or places like this park.

Remarkable

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Scholz) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 17:52:00 +0000

As you may have noticed we provide you with TED Talks regularly (e.g. here and here). It is not a secret, that we love them, as far as some "Social Media and Company"-Points are in as a topic. So, here you go with another great one.

This talk is held by Seth Godin (Blog), a great marketing mind. He speaks about marketing actions and in some points about product creation. Seth Godin points out that both have to be remarkable and aim for the right target audience. That doesn't sound new to us, n'est pas? But at the same time we see a lot of companies struggling to realize especially when it comes to remarkable product and marketing strategies as well as brand management.

These are also, and as I think especially, main points which you should consider if you are about to start some kind of social media activities. And yes, I am sure that social media is a great opportunity to build your community which will have a big impact on your brand management and product creation.

Social media activities need to be remarkable and aim for the right target audience if you want to be heard in your community and get reaction/respond. Try something risky, invent some new kinds of social media experience. Don't go the old way like this proverb says:

“One who walks in another's tracks leaves no footprints.”

Now let Seth Godin do the talking!

"

Remember that!

Demand and Supply

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Scholz) — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:10:00 +0000

One of the big hyped surprises last week was, without a question, Twifficiency. We told you who was behind this viral tool. The whole Twittersphere was busy linking this tool to their Twitter accounts in order to let it calculate their "Twifficiency".

We all know the result: a tweet from your personal account was sent with a number in per cent related to something calculated somehow and comparing something with something (by the way I've never seen a number higher then 60). Only after comparing your Twifficiency with others you could see how good or bad you actually were. Tip: dont take this comparison to seriously, it explained nothing ;)

What was much more interesting were two facts coming along with the phenomena "Twifficiency".

First:
People underestimate the viral possibilities caused by Social Media.
Did you see how many accounts did use "Twifficiency" all around the world? It was not because it was so useful. It worked out, because people believe people they follow (some kind of good working "word-to-mouth" effect).

Second:
The high demand for tools analyzing and measuring the efficiency of social media activities gets bigger and bigger as further companies/people move and improve their abilities and possibilities in the social media sphere. Without such a high demand it would have been very hard for such a small tool to have this big boom-success in such a short period of time.

I don't say, that both of these points were deliberatly intended by James Cunningham, but still they show how well social networks can work for you, your product/brand and your idea.

Remember that!

How to not be a Bad Email Marketeer

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 18:13:00 +0000

I am not very fond of email marketing myself. The reason for that is one every one knows: It is often misused for spam. The guys from MailChimp, one of the best email marketing tools out there, know about this, too. But they also know: spam is not always intended. Often it just happens because people just don't know about "the email marketing etiquette". The people from MailChimp have understood that they need to provide more than just a tool if they want their users to be successful in this area. Therefor they created a really creative video campaign, explaining this problem in the style of a 30ties b/w education video.

Though this blog doesn't have email marketing on its list of main topics, some of our readers might play with the thought of using it. So I decided to publish it on the video on this blog. For that reason and because there are a lot of parallels to social media: quite a lot of people, often companies, are willing to try this new technique but don't know about the etiquette and right behaviour. Though having the best intentions in mind they break unspoken rules, drive off users and might even damage their brand or company. And that is one problem we try to solve with this blog.

But now, without any further introduction, said video:

Found on swissmiss.

The End of Top-Down Control

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Scholz) — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 12:30:00 +0000

I'll keep it short today, I promise.
I just want to show a really good TED-Talk about how Social Media is changing the way people communicate and participate in things politicians and also companies do. This TED-Talk was held by Clay Shirky in June 2009.

Clay Shirky says, that we are moving away from the one-way communication (company=sender, people/consumer=listener) to a multi-way of communication (company/people/consumer=sender/listener). Additionally there is the obvious possibility that people become senders without evening listing to the companies message, but listening to other consumers. The challenge for companies right now is to stop the era of top down communication and become a listener and speaker on the same level consumers are. Although Mr. Shirky is generally talking about politics there is no doubt, that we can associate the same with companies and consumers.

This is what we talk about here and partly talk about here and here.
Enough talking, let Clay Shirky do the rest:

[Should I care about...] Microblogging

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:52:00 +0000

A new services type emerged over the last two, three years in the internet: microblogging. With his most popular representative Twitter Microblogging became very well known and widely used. But what is Microblogging? How does it work? What services are out there and how do they differ? And most importantly: As a an owner of a [BUSINESS_TYPE_HERE] business: Should I care about Microblogging?

I say yes, if you want to use a service which helps you to provide your community with information and which doesn't take up a lot of time updating it. But...

What it is
Wikipedia defines Microblogging as "a passive broadcast medium in the form of blogging. A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically much smaller, in both actual size and aggregate file size. A microblog entry could consist of nothing but a short sentence fragment, an image or embedded video."

I usually don't like to start with quotes from dictionaries but this one is pretty good. Microblogging is - as the name already states it - a small form of Blogging. To be totally exact it is not different from Blogging but a sub-form of Blogging; a Blog of small Blog entries. But as always the definition of a term changes over time and as a result today Microblogging involves a bit more; the amount of self-hosted Microblogs is practically zero as Microblogs are often hosted on special platforms. This allows them to be tightly interwoven and create some kind of "social network".

How they are hosted differs from service to service. While some allow you to upload media data (like video or audio files) to embed them into your page others use external services or email for content publishing. One thing these networks differ from classic Blog hosters like Wordpress or Blogger.com is that they made publishing even easier again. Most of them allow just some simple way of text formatting and media inclusion, others don't allow any formatting at all and include data using links (like Twitter). You don't have to write often, it doesn't take long and you don't have to write much (sometimes they even limit you in how much you can write).

These services became specially popular with the raise of smartphones everywhere. These devices made it easier to stay connected to the internet and share content. But you don't want to write a 2-hour-articles on them. So smaller, simpler services with less overhead became a lot more attractive. And they started offering an easy way to stay-up-to-date with the social-network on these services as well.

Services
There are many services allowing you to do Microblogging. We picked the three most popular services:

The classic under the Microblogging services is Tumblr. Already looking at it it reminds you of classic Blogs - just with smaller content. The service is totally webbased, allowing you to upload pictures, videos or write text. One of its specialities is that you can create a "network of Tumblrs" you like, stay up to date with them and easily share every other Tumblr article with just one click on your tumbl blog with your network. This made this service particularly attractive for compilations like the Audrey Hepburn Complex, ampersandandampersand or about Britney Spears. Because of the flexibility in designing the blogs of Tumblr are also used by celebrities like Katy Perry to stay connected to their audience.

The most popular Microblogging services is Twitter. Though looking into the feature list you could ask: Why is this the most popular service? There is no text formatting, no file-upload, limited page designing and you are even limited to 140 characters per message. Twitter became this popular because of its social structure. Besides the page of all your latest messages you have a page with all messages people you "follow" are shown and the later is the starting page. Specially attractive became this with the open API and the raise of thousands of clients allowing everyone even with old-school-smartphones of the Symbian age to easily check on what is going on in your friends network. The networking aspect obviously is the most important feature of Twitter. And every feature you are missing gets implemented as an external service multiple times like the picture services TweetPhoto and Twitpic.

A bit "special" is what posterous is doing: You don't have to create an account and write blog posts on their website, you just write email. You send it to the posterous service and they publish it. As email is one of the most used and best known service in the internet its makes this service incredibly easy to use for everyone. And also a lot of mobiles phones of the pre-smartphone era are able to sent emails already. Making it easy to share your thoughts and pictures on the way. One really neat feature is the one of private-blogs-for-groups. Allowing everyone to create a small blog accessible only for known people like for a travellers group or club.

Should I care?
As almost each other Web2.0-Service Microblogging needs time. Constantly. And therefore you should only do it because you like it. So if some marketeer comes up and says "oh yeah, and then we do some microblog about it and involve the community", you simply ask: "Alright and who is going to create the content? And keep it up to date?". If you already have a blog and always hate yourself for not writing enough because it needs to much time. Or you are thinking about blogging for some time already but are scared about having to write a lot and big articles regularly, these services are worth the look.

They've been built to scratch exactly this itch. This can be done private or as a company. For example to document what projects you are working on. A picture with the mobile phone, sent via email once or twice a week might just be enough to engage your customers and have a closer relationship to you.

The New Era of Advertising

noreply@blogger.com (Alex Scholz) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 11:11:00 +0000

If we take a look at the global advertising market, we see companies investments heading more and more for online marketing and advertising. It is not about the general growth of the advertising market anymore but it is about the allocation between offline- and online advertising in the future and the way companies promote their products and services. That is going to be an interesting thing to talk about.

The online advertising market benefits from the enormous amount of mobile and social applications which allow advertisers to broaden and differentiate their possibilities and, of course, break new grounds of advertising.
Let us think about location based advertisements via Foursquare and Gowalla directly to the consumers smartphone. These services face a huge interest not only by end consumers but also by companies wanting to gain attention and attract new clients. Lately Foursquare proudly announced the number of 1 Million "Check Ins" per day (you check in at a location to tell your friends you are there and collect so-called badges/bonuses.).

Furthermore there are applications like Twitter and Mobile Payments like Square and Apple's iAd, which leverage the complete online advertising market. They use aggregated user information, topics, users and their friends talk about and the GPS-Signal to place advertisements directly to the users phone.

Last but not least there are the really big players like Facebook and Google using their huge amount of information to contribute specific advertisements on the likes and needs of the users. Even if Sheryl Sandberg (COO Facebook) recently underlined that the anonymity of each and every user is extremely important to Facebook and its new "Facebook Advertising", the core of the system is to collecte data, evaluate and use it for promotion on each and every individual Facebook Page.

There are two scenarios, that I believe, will become true:

First, consumers attention referring to advertisement decreases, companies have to spent more and more money on attentive advertisements which lowers the profits of the product to a point where either the price must be set higher or the product does not even make any profits at all.
Secondly, the user is overloaded with individual advertisement and bridles or even worse quits most of the activities he used to do in the world wide web.

As the first scenario is already "on its way" lets take a look at second one.

The advertising market is going to get into a crucial stage, not only in terms of relations between offline and online promotion, new plattforms and more specific ways of exploiting advertising results, but also in terms of arrangements and types of advertising.
I even dare to predict: what we call advertisement right now (banners, display etc.) will lose its significance and will be replaced by a more individual dialogue between the company and the consumer (similar to what we call "support" today).

It is not a secret, that the amount of money spent on new consumers is much higher then keeping consumers. But people are up to buy something faster if they get personal consultancy for e.g. from friends or a salesman. As soon as there is the feeling of individual help the consumer identifies himself with the product easily and is more willing to buy it. Companies need to understand these characteristics, get more personal, speak human and get the right intuition for their different groups of consumers.

We are moving away from classic banner advertisement, bloomy descriptions of products and high tech commercial videos towards personal and social advertisement. And with social advertisement I do not mean private messages with a link to a product, I do talk about specific promotion to help the consumer individually. I do talk about a dialogue between consumer and company on the same level, which allows both to better understand their desires. And social media will enable us to make this possible in a scale we never achieved before.

[The Insider] Taz - Die Tageszeitung

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 09:36:00 +0000

"Die Tageszeitung" (aka "taz") is a German left wing cooperative owned daily newspaper with their offices in Germans capital Berlin. Since they started their "project" in 1979 the taz has evolved into a publisher with around 250 people on the payroll which still has some kind of outsider position in the newspaper market of Germany. As a result of it the taz has always been curious to experiment with new ways of publishing and journalism.

Years ago it was the first german newspaper you could read online and search their archives digitally (first published on CD, now you can get access online as well). Now it was one of the first publisher involved in Twitter, Facebook, using flattr for their articles and publishing a daily ePaper for the iPhone.We had the once in a lifetime opportunity to talk to Nina Schoenian, Creative Director of the taz.de and New Media.

One thing Nina made clear from the beginning is that there is no such thing as "Social Media Strategy" at taz. At least not in the term most marketeers mean it: a plan what to do and where to get involved. As there is no dedicated "social media marketing" team everyone is doing what he likes and thinks is useful. As most employees are journalists themselves there is barely a problem with "outside communication". Most of the journalists have private facebook accounts and as they are mentioned with their full name beyond articles online and in print readers are able to find them and discuss their positions directly. But this just happened, it wasn't planned to be like this.

Though you were able to foresee this progress: Nina explained us, that the taz is a very transparent and open company. This starts with the building and ends in the heads of the employees. If you want to survive as a journalist nowadays you need to be able to cope with critics. And criticism definitely increased with the new comments feature on the website. Though, Nina told us, the readers of the taz have always been very involved and never hold back with criticism. The new ways just made it much easier for them. And it has become more directly; As the comments are right beyond the article they are no longer filtered by a chief editor you can hide behind. Each employee has the responsibility to act accordingly with his own voice. This way of direct, personal communications leads to a much closer relationship between reader and author.

But this is essence of social media, Nina said. It is the dialogue with each other as individuals and finding a common platform to discuss topics. This is also why the taz added the comments-feature not only on their blogs but for all articles on the website. Although some might say they don't read the comments, Nina told us, she doesn't believe them: Everyone wants to know what others think about the work they have done. And if the comments are important or there is an interesting topic on the internet it is added to the print edition of the newspaper, too. Internet and Print are not de-coupled; besides the weekly magazin the full newspaper can be read online and offline.

Having the online version opens new possibilities, specially for new colleagues: you are not limited by the space available on a sheet of paper, she emphasized, and it gets more easier to get published. Some articles get published online first and are added to the print edition later. But it is a challenge at the same time: you have to find the right amount of text for the topic. Social media only works right for you if you create content, add actual value. Each one has to take more responsibility, there are no correctors any more, no reviewers, no pre-print version, there is only you (your colleagues) and the "publish this post"-button. According to Nina the involvement of new media flattened the hierarchy.

Though there has never been much hierarchy in the taz but with the new media it became even more plane: today it is much easier for new journalists to get printed. From day one you can start writing, experimenting to find your own style and publish it online, e.g. on a blog hosted by blogs.taz.de. Some are so good that they are published on the print version as well. But that doesn't mean taz uses their blogs to recruit new journalists only. Nina told us about hitler-blog: the aim of the author is to work off Hitler satirically. The blog became very popular and got many awards e.g. the LeadAward (German), but the author decided to keep this a spare time project. This it totally fine, because the taz wants to be a platform for discussion and new ways of seeing things.

One of this new ways is the demonstration live ticker. As journalists are able to get behind police lines legally, they often know more than the demonstrators themselves. And the taz decided to publish these information as live tickers during the events on the website and (partly) over Twitter. It was so unbelievable successful, Nina said, that they just decided to expand it a lot. Without experimenting with new media in the first place they had never known that there is a need for that kind of service at all. But apparently it is of a lot of help for the organizers as well as the demonstrators.

Another of those experiments is the usage of flattr, a social micro repayment service. As the taz is not doing any adverts on their website there is no income for the articles you can read online. Flattr allows readers to donate money for an article they like with just one click. Another thing taz is testing at the moment is bringing their newspaper to smartphones like the iPhone.

But there is the one thing Nina would have liked to realise earlier: with all these new technologies the customer/user/reader becomes much more involved. And even more than you could have ever imagined before; sometimes they make something to scratch an itch they have personally and suddenly become a very important part of your distribution ecosystem. Though this turns out to be very good in most cases, you can't ensure it is always going to be because it is outside your control. In this particular case someone once created a taz-App for the iPhone because he wanted to be able to read the taz on the go. A lot of people downloaded and used it but sadly it didn't work perfectly all the time. Readers blamed the people at taz and wanted them to fix it without them knowing what readers were talking about nor having any influence on it.

There are so many technologies and techniques out there that is very hard to keep track of everything, Nina concluded. There will always be things that just slip through without you noticing. That might be good, that might be bad. This is why you should keep special attention on everything involving your businesses distribution channels and ensure that they work decently. You don't always have to intervene but should at least know what is going on and where it might be good to offer help.

What we've been working on

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:58:00 +0000

It is time to unveil what we have been working on the last couple of weeks. As I already said earlier we wanted to bring more value to you as the reader of our blog. Therefore we decided to start two new series: "The Insider" and "Should I care about...". We want to have one new article at least one a month for each series. They will be tagged with theInsider and ShouldIcareAbout to make it easier for you to find new and old articles. Don't forget to bookmark the links!

But first, let me explain you what they are about:

The Insider
So far we were only able to talk about social media from a third-party-type of perspective: looking at tools, trends and techniques and analyzing them. This new series is going to give you an inside look of companies dealing with social media. We are talking to companies doing/using social media, talk about the "how, what, when and mostly the way". What we learnt from them will be used to write a small social media profile about the company, with tips, ideas and tricks from the real inside(r).

We'll start this series with the article about taz.de published later this month.

Should I care about...
As the title of this series already says we want to answer the question as you - as a business owner of every kind - should care of some new trend, tool, technique you've heard about. We just want to give you ammo so that some of these web2.0-marketing-geeks come along and say "oh.. and we have to do [newest_trend] and also we are going to do [other_useless_buzzword]" you know what this means, what it is (what kinds of them are available) and does it make any sense that you and your business adopt that.

We call our mission accomplished when you are able to answer him "but wait, you mean [this_platform] and [this_tool], right? But this aims for [other_kind_of_business] mostly. This is not what we do. I can't see anyway it is good for this business, it is just wasted money."

We'll start this series with an article about microblogging this month.

As usual we are always happy about comments, questions and critics. In this case we are specially interested in your opinion; we are already working on the first articles and if you have an important topic or company you would like to hear more about, let us know!