1) Since having a social media presence is about reputation and relationships, it needs to be personal to the individual.  … The approach needs to be custom-tailored to fit the client’s personality and worldview, and the client needs to have a lot of say in the development of this fit.  … Agreed.

2) Having an effective social media presence is different from traditional marketing, and it’s also different from the ways we’ve been using the internet in the past.  True but overstated.  There are three golden rules of social media marketing:

• Make your messages robust.
• Train and trust many of your employees to deliver the message, implicitly and explicitly.
• Trust your employees to show their own personalities without hopelessly undermining the “personality” of your enterprise.
  

The first two have actually been good management practice for decades, and the third one frequently worked as well.

3) Developing a social media presence has to be done gradually.  A client has to pay attention to what’s working and what’s not, listen to feedback from the community, and constantly refine their approach with little changes. Agreed.

4) The social media consulting model is in contrast to the web development consulting model, where you just build something and walk away until it needs to be updated.  It’s also in contrast to the idea that social media consultants exist to give expert advice — if clients think of them that way, they’ll only go to them with the big questions, and try to answer the little questions on their own.  But social media success is in the details, and it’s the little questions that will make or break an online presence. Agreed. I have clients who ask me to review a large fraction of their individual blog posts. I think that’s a great use of my time … but then, I think the same thing about press releases.

Most people are looking for an expert to solve a very specific problem. Some examples from within social media:

• They want to learn how to create content that compels Digg users to vote, which will in turn bring them more pageviews and ad revenue.
• They want to use Twitter to build a bigger profile in their field.
• They want to create a blog that turns readers into customers.

Who are they going to hire, all things being equal?

• The expert in creating and marketing Diggable content for pageviews, or the ’social media expert’?
• The expert in creating super-accounts on Twitter, or the ’social media expert’?
• The expert in business blogging for conversions, or the ’social media expert’?

On the other hand, people with such narrow expertise are (in most cases properly) pigeon-holed as low-level tacticians.  As I recently noted, social media should not be done in some kind of silo, let alone in a whole collection of silos.

Only the largest or most aggressive consumer marketing organizations will be able to afford and make proper use of the range of expertise Skelliewag suggests.

Grrr!! Any suggestion that there’s one right way to communicate rubs me the wrong way.  Indeed, I’ve been arguing that there’s an evolving information ecosystem that will ever more depend upon there being healthy occupants of many different niches.  Most particularly — and few vendors have yet wrapped their minds about this — it will increasingly be the case that primary news sources are analysts with NDA obligations. And yes — every once in a while it is important to be the one who breaks the story.

I don’t even like the idea that there be rules about fact-checking, error-correction and the like, for a couple of reasons.  First, that kind of thing can lead minimum standards to also be regarded as sufficient care. Second, such things can easily be framed in a way that sets up vendors as arbiters of who does a “proper” job of writing about them and, even worse, who will be given enough information to be able to write about them.

Oracle once evaded my requests for information about app servers for 18 months and then called me “unprofessional” for writing about Oracle’s app server without a recent briefing.  Unsurprisingly, I was eventually proved right.

But all my caveats notwithstanding, I highly recommend that pair of posts to at least be skimmed through.

With mainstream media dwindling at the same time the number citizen publishers is rising, it’s not surprising that individual influencers are becoming a promising target. Even professional editors and reporters are increasingly turning their attention to the blogosphere and Twittersphere as a source of expertise and even news. The first place a reporter goes when looking for sources these days is Google. As a result, popular bloggers are suddenly inundated with media inquiries. This is an opportunity for marketers. Some publications are going even recruiting bloggers to contribute to their branded sites. These financially driven actions are having the effect of amplifying the volume of individual voices.

That’s all very true in the technology world in general, in the enterprise IT world in particular, and very particularly in my own experience. For example:

• I blog for pay for two of the three major tech publishing groups, IDG and TechWeb.
• I am quoted quite a bit by some of the remaining true tech reporters.
• Those quotes can be delivered on the phone (least likely), by email, or just in one of my blogs (usually DBMS2).

To [bloggers and the like], their online outpost is a display of their passion for the topic that they cover.  They care deeply about the subject matter and they usually know at least as much as the PR person who contacts them.  Often they know quite a bit more.

In the longer form of that, Paul lumps in analysts with overworked and necessarily-superficial journalists rather than thoughtful, reviewer-like bloggers.   I wouldn’t wholly endorse that, in that I think the best analysts can combine large aspects of the old-style analyst and new-style blogger worlds.  But otherwise, I agree with what he’s saying.

You’d better come prepared to this engagement, because some influencers will take lack of knowledge on your part as an insult.  This can capsize junior agency people who aren’t prepared for the depth of questions they will get or the scorn they may endure if they can’t answer.

I’d say that a mouthpiece who pretends more depth than he has — whatever level that may be — is the one who’s in trouble. If you use PR people as glorified appointment secretaries, that’s fine.  And if you go into a call or meeting unaware of how the influencer wants to to engage — which, realistically, happens a much larger fraction of the time than it ideally should — you’d better be prepared to adapt quickly.

While journalists are expected not to share any biases, bloggers often do what they do precisely because they have opinions to share.  Fortunately, a little advance reading can often clue you in to someone’s agenda and even help you decide if they’re worth contacting all.  You don’t want to come in with a strong Windows pitch, for example, to a blogger who’s passionate about the Mac.  You also don’t want to be blindsided by someone who has made his or her opinions clear and who is offended by the fact that you don’t know them.  Again, 15 to 20 minutes of reading can save you a lot of aggravation.

Amen! Worst is when somebody insistently tries to “educate” me on something I already — often visibly — know, or even disagree with. or perhaps just don’t care about.

Unlike journalists, [influencers are] probably not interested in analyst quotes or customer case studies.  It’s more likely they’ll want to talk to the VP of engineering or the CEO than to the head of marketing.

Paul overstates that point a bit.  However:

• Few things companies do annoy me more than when they present quotes from my competitors as some sort of authority or, worse, suggest I call those competitors to be educated.
• I absolutely want to talk to somebody who actually understands the technology, rather than being relegated to people who are in “Well, this is what I’m told by the techies” mode. (Ditto “I’ll check on that and get back to you” — that’s a guarantee of obfuscation and lack of opportunity for follow-up.)

The right influencers have as much credibility in their community as product reviewers or analysts.

I’m not sure analyst-vs.-influencer is even a meaningful distinction any more.

Related link

• An example-laden interview with Paul Gillin

• Many of these so-called “experts” greatly overstate their expertise.
• A lot of what passes for social media “success” just amounts to these “experts” getting attention from each other.

I wouldn’t go out of my way to argue with all that. But I think there’s also a more fundamental reason why specialized social media “experts” should not be taken very seriously:

Social media done in a silo is social media done wrong.

Advertising is only a shallow part of marketing. Classic PR is only a shallow part of marketing. And for the same reasons, the same is true of isolated social media initiatives. Marketing efforts need to span multiple channels, and use them to tell an integrated story.

To see why, please consider two of my major themes in this blog. First, successful marketing requires telling a multi-layered story. In principle you can do that entirely through social media, specifically a blog. But if you try, you have to be very careful to sound — Buzzword alert! — authentic. And for most sets of marketing messages, it’s very hard to simultaneously stay authentic, drive traffic through techniques that social media “experts” favor, and lay out the whole story.

If your whole business is selling Make Money Online! advice to fellow cyberschmoozers, please feel free to disregard the prior paragraph. In that realm, thinly-veiled inauthenticity is the message.

Second, marketing needs to reach many different kinds of people. It is rare that one channel is a good way to reach them all. But your communications with different groups, through different channels, of course have to be managed for consistency.

Anyhow, I’m not a “social media expert.” I’m just a guy who:

• By the standards of the enterprise IT sector, is a successful blogger.
• Compared to other people in the enterprise IT industry, has substantial reach on Twitter.
• Makes much of his living consulting about marketing (to the aforementioned IT sector).
• Reads a lot, including about social media.
• Writes a little bit about social media as well.

With that as background, here are some of my thoughts on how enterprise IT companies and other businesses should pursue social media.

• Publish a blog (or multiple blogs). The biggest single reason is that blogs are the least-constrained of all the communication media. You can say whatever you want in a blog, however you want to say it. All other media have unfortunate limitations.
  
• Your blog should have two main purposes — to express yourself and (optionally) to drive search engine traffic.
• Getting regular readers should not be one of the purposes of your blog. The techniques for doing that clash with too much else that you want to achieve.
• In particular, disregard the usual “rules” about posting frequency. Those are irrelevant to the main purposes of corporate blogging. What’s more, your best people don’t have the bandwidth to keep up with that kind of posting frequency anyway.
• Have multiple individuals blogging. Different people in your company have the talent, knowledge, and status to be successful with different styles of blog post. If one person coordinates your blog, however, that’s fine.
• Encourage your senior customer/public-facing personnel to use their choice of personal-page sites such as LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace (blech), et al. Think of those sites as steroid-laden business cards. Those sites’ other benefits are oversold, but they truly work for spelling out who you are. Other social media use (if any) should be even more optional, and hence more tailored to your people’s individual personalities.
• Establish a corporate presence on Twitter. It’s a great way to maintain personal relationships with influencers – and to fix them, if for example the influencer is an unhappy customer badmouthing you. (For example, Dell did just that very successfully with me.) And if you’re too small for that to make sense, there’s a good chance you’d benefit just from the interaction with fellow small business folks.
• Send somebody to participate in whichever online forums, blog comment threads, etc. are most important to your target audiences.
  

As for gimmicks and glitz — well, do they have a large role in how you market through other channels too? If so, then it might make sense to get cute in social media as well. Otherwise, play it straight.

• My “How to pitch me” post was already arrogant enough.  I don’t want to repeatedly conflate “This is how I like to be dealt with” and “This is how you should deal with analysts in general.”
• The nature of my business is such that, by the time I’m having a particularly good relationship with a company, there’s probably something confidential going on, or at least something I should be careful discussing in public.

As an alternative, I’d like to share a particularly good example of outreach I just discovered in the political sphere. Last Tuesday, New York Times columnist David Brooks laid into the Obama Administration, writing

… the Obama budget is more than just the sum of its parts. There is, entailed in it, a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs. There is evidence of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor — caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it to solve all problems at once.

Friday, Brooks wrote a follow-up column, saying

Within a day, I had conversations with four senior members of the administration and in the interest of fairness, I thought I’d share their arguments with you today.

Right there, you know something went very right.  An administration critic was pitched, and promptly chose to present readers with counterarguments to his own views.

Brooks didn’t entirely change his mind; that would have been too much to hope for. Indeed, he wrote:

I didn’t finish these conversations feeling chastened exactly. The fact is, after years of economic growth, the White House still projects perpetual deficits of more than $500 billion a year. That’s way too much, …

Plus, I’m still convinced the administration is trying to do too much too fast and that the hasty planning and execution of these complex policies will lead to untold problems down the road.

But he did change his tone, finishing with

Nonetheless, the White House made a case that was sophisticated and fact-based. These people know how to lead a discussion and set a tone of friendly cooperation. I’m more optimistic that if Senate moderates can get their act together and come up with their own proactive plan, they can help shape a budget that allays their anxieties while meeting the president’s goals.

More precisely, he reverted to and indeed went beyond one of the two tones he was vacillating between in his earlier piece, which ended

Moderates are going to have to try to tamp down the polarizing warfare that is sure to flow from Obama’s über-partisan budget. …

If they can do that, maybe they can lure this White House back to its best self — and someday offer respite from the endless war of the extremes.

In essence, Brooks changed his opinion — not on policy proposals per se, but about his perception of the Obama Administration’s approach. Instead of ignoring concerns such as his, they showed in fact they take such issues very seriously.  It’s not that Brooks is taking them at face value (and I suspect his skepticism would have come through even more clearly if he weren’t constrained by a print-page word limit).  But the mere fact that they’re engaging him in this dialogue, in this language, suggests — both to him and to me — that they deserve much more benefit of the doubt than he previously was giving them.

All things considered, that’s a highly successful example of spin.

Maria Winslow notes that “Open Source” is an example of

Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics:

Bad jargon drowns out good.

Now, I won’t pretend that’s really original with me — but then, it’s based on Gresham’s Law, for which Sir Thomas Gresham apparently doesn’t deserve the credit he gets either.

The idea behind the “Law” is this:   If a term connotes some kind of goodness, marketers scarf it up and apply it to products that don’t really deserve it., making it fairly useless to the products that really do qualify for the more restrictive meaning.

“Predictive analytics” sounded cool, and now covers a fairly broad range of statistical analyses, most of which don’t involve any kind of explicit prediction.   Some “native” XML data stores are dressed-up tourists from either the relational or object-oriented worlds, while a lot of “thin clients” actually do their shopping at Lane Bryant.  “Transparent” connectivity layers tend to be cloudy, and “portablilty” commonly involves considerable heavy lifting.

By the way, Monash’s Second Law of Commercial Semantics is much more technologically oriented:   Where there are ontologies, there is consulting. I first said that at the Text Mining Summit, and it seemed to win immediate, widespread agreement.

But while strategy often needs to be made more complicated, tactics often need to be simplified. This hilarious video — hat tip to my favorite web designer — tells the story.

Creating a successful business requires effective persuasion. This study shows that great persuasion sometimes occurs when people don’t expect it. This means that you should always be selling—you may persuade people when you least expect it. This is also a good argument for the potential power of tools such as Twitter and blogs. These new approaches can open doors for people who haven’t thought about a new concept.

If you think about it, what Kawasaki really means is: You should always be marketing.

Looking at him briefly from afar, I’d guess that Kawasaki’s priorities are something like:

1. Keep building awareness.
2. Stay on message.

Judging by the recent election season, most political campaigns would agree. In enterprise IT, however, I’d tweak and flip them, to:

1. Stay on one or more of your messages.
2. Build awareness in the right audiences — prospects and influencers alike.