As I mentioned recently, I’ve been working my way through the book/audiobook of Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation for a while now. Well, I’ve finally finished it… here’s my take…

The Good

• Well-written – Six Pixels of Separation is written in Mitch’s usual friendly, candid style. Though the 270+ pages of content took me a while to get through, it certainly wasn’t because it was a hard read.
• Well-targeted – social media is reaching a point where small businesses can effectively use it to build a presence online. There are a lot of people out there who don’t know how to go about it. This book aims at them, and keeps its beady eye on that audience throughout.
• Good background – throughout the book, Mitch makes reference to the ways that traditional marketing works, and the ways social media marketing differs from that. It’s a useful perspective for people new to the field.
• Good primer – Mitch takes his readers on a well-constructed tour through most of the basic elements of social media marketing. If you’re new to this stuff, it’s a great primer. If you’re a recent convert, it’s a good reminder.

The Not So Good

• Nothing new – Take this one with a pinch of salt as I’m not the target. Whether it’s Join the Conversation or even back to ClueTrain, this book adds little that hasn’t been said before.
• Same people – listen to Media Hacks or to Mitch’s podcast? You’ll have heard either directly from or about most of the people mentioned in this book.
• Not so practical – this book is all about “why,” not “how.” If you’re looking for the “how” of social media, look elsewhere.

The Take-Aways

• Nowadays, everyone researches things online. When they do that, you want them to find as much good content about you as possible.
• Control is a myth. If you matter to people then they are talking about you, whether you know about it or not and whether you like it or not. The only choice is whether you participate.
• Content is king.
• Social media lets you choose and define your own niche, and own it.
• Mobile marketing is emerging as a powerful channel.

Who should buy this book

Not you.

This book is targeted at small business owners who are still searching for the “why” of social media. If you’re reading this site, you’re probably beyond the “why” and into the “how.” You won’t learn much new from this book.

You.

(See what I did there?)

If you’re into social media or the evolution of marketing, you’ll probably enjoy this book. Unlike some other books out there, it’s not a string of blog posts strung together but a well written, cohesive book that flows well. So, if you’re looking for something to reinforce your general thoughts on social media, this is a good start.

The Conclusion

Most of the criticisms above are based on my prior knowledge – I live and work in this space and I either know or know of almost everyone mentioned in the book, so I’m clearly not the in the sweet spot. This book just isn’t targeted at me.

Despite those minor criticisms, though, I really enjoyed this book – enough that I was willing to pay for the audiobook as well as the hard-back copy. It’s easy to absorb, easy to understand and hard to put down. I’d happily recommend it to a small or medium-sized business owner looking to learn more about this space.

There’s my brief take. Have you read Mitch’s book? What did you think?

A hypothetical scenario for you: your communications director comes to you and tells you that thanks to their department’s activities, there were 200 mentions of your brand online, of which three quarters were positive in tone.

Is that good news? Is it bad?

My answer: I have no idea.

Why? Because there’s no context.

Context, please

As social media begins to mature as a communications opportunity, the pressure to demonstrate measurable results will only increase. However, that measurement needs to have context.

Having three quarters of conversations about you be positve may actually be a bad thing if 80 or 85 per cent are usually positive. Two hundred conversations may actually be a drop in volume compared to the norm. Without context, you have no way of knowing.

Telling me that our online outreach increased the proportion of positive conversations by 15 per cent to 75 per cent means a lot more than just the number alone.

What’s your baseline?

People often talk about social media being a long-term proposition. We need to think about measuring social media in the same terms. That means setting baselines – investing a small amount of effort to draw a line in the sand, from which you can measure your results. Sometimes the baseline may be zero, but in most situations that won’t be the case.

How do you draw that line? Here are a few options:

• Do a conversation audit – use free or professional listening tools to look at online metrics over a period of time
• Conduct some market research – commission a few questions in an omnibus poll to measure how things stand
• Analyze your website statistics – traffic volume, sources, conversions, etc

The way you measure your baseline is up to you. The most important thing is that you do it.

For communicators to justify their budgets, they need to show the delta – i.e. the difference between before and after. Without “the before,” you have nothing.

Make sense?

(Image: Shutterstock)

I’m going to take a guess and say that around 5-10% of what I write on this site misses the mark. Maybe I’m wrong about something, or I write something to which people don’t relate, or I write badly.

I know when this happens because on those posts I’m deafened by the silence in the comments. When I get it really wrong, people will tell me but for more things it usually just gets really quiet.

For many of us, especially those thinking from a corporate perspective the fear of the consequences being wrong online is a little greater than that associated with a personal blog. The fear of critics; of trolls; of brand damage; of financial or legal consequences in severe situations can be great. It requires a bit of a shift in thinking to realize that, in conversational channels, it’s ok to be wrong occasionally.

Why should you be ok with being wrong occasionally online?

• Admitting you’re wrong is, in its own way, a powerful way to connect with people. It brings you down from your pedestal.
• You can learn from the comments you’ll receive from your readers.
• No-one is perfect. If you’re never wrong, it likely means you’re not breaking out into new territory. That gets boring pretty quickly. Few people really want to be boring.

Of course, we’re talking about opinions here. When it comes to financial, competitive or IR information you can’t mess around. However, if you’re using social media to connect with people, many times we’re going to find ourselves giving opinions.

It’s ok to be wrong.

What do you think? Are you ok with being wrong occasionally?

(Image credit: gundolf)

It’s hard to argue nowadays that search isn’t important. It’s not often, though, that you see a real-world product completely base its advertising around it.

Check out these ads for the movie 2012, being launched on November 13:

No website on either of them – just an instruction to “Search: 2012.”

If the website for this movie didn’t make it onto the top few pages of search results, through either organic or paid search. The movie would be in trouble, as the URL isn’t obvious either (whowillsurvive2012.com).

Fortunately for the studio, the movie tops the organic results (especially fortunate given there’s no sign of paid search):

Would you be confident enough in your website’s SEO to leave your URL out of your ads?

The concept of the “personal brand” is still quite controversial. Not in whether it’s possible to build a significant personal brand (it clearly is), but in whether it’s the right thing to do.

Over the past few years we’ve seen lots of people develop strong personal brands through social media, and levered those brands to develop their careers.

Recently, I’ve noticed what seems like an increasing use of auto-reply emails by many people with strong personal brands.

They usually read something like this (but far more eloquent):

“Thanks for your email. Please note that it may take me a while to get back to you, as I get a large volume of email.”

I got to thinking about a fundamental problem with big personal brands (this isn’t a shot at people with them – just exploring the issue):

*You* aren’t scaleable

The problem with building a strong personal brand through social media is that you are the brand – not your product, service or company. That means that as it grows, you get additional attention. Unfortunately, your time can’t scale to go along with the additional attention.

Something has to give. You have to either lengthen your work day even more, find efficiencies somewhere, sacrifice some other element of your day to handle the flow or start to lose the connection that likely helped to build your brand in the first place.

*You* can’t be delegated

Can you offload some of this work to someone else? You can, but you are the brand, not them. That means people want to connect with you – they want to work with you; they want your input.

Over time, in my own small way, I’ve wrestled with jamming 28 hours of activities into a 24 hour day. Meanwhile, I’ve watched as much higher-profile people have wrestled publicly with this problem. Almost uniformly, they’ve been forced to cut back on the interaction that built their brands in the first place.

Can personal brands be a liability? Is it acceptable for people who’ve built their careers around connection to disconnect slightly? Or is it an understandable side-effect of success?

What do *you* think?

(Image credit: ralaenin)

I just downloaded the audiobook version of Mitch Joel’s book “Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone.”

I bought the hard copy of the book two months ago when it was first released. So why get the audio version too?

Books just don’t work for me any more.

I love books. I have a stack of books in my office and a full bookcase in my home office. I love being able to hold, see, wave-around and annotate the hard copy of something as I consume it. However, I’ve had this book for two months now and am only half-way through.

On the flip side, as I make a concerted effort to live up to my commitment to myself to get back into running I’m finding myself consuming more and more audio content via my iPod Nano.

On the way home from work yesterday, I got through more of the audiobook than I’d consumed in the last two weeks via the hard copy, despite being on vacation.

Communicators: Think beyond one medium

It’s all too easy for us to think in terms of individual communications channels. PR folks do their thing; advertising folks do their thing; maybe the social media folks do theirs too.

That kind of thinking isn’t as effective nowadays, where people are used to consuming information in the way that they want. A ‘book’ doesn’t work for me, but the same content in a different medium is perfect.

As communicators, I think we need to move towards what I think of as a medium-agnostic approach to communications. Part of that is reaching your target audience wherever they inhabit, so each person can consume information in the way in which they choose. So think – are you re-purposing your content wherever you can?

It’s all about making your customers’ lives easier. How are you achieving that?

Image source: sxc.hu, via d-s-n

Earlier this year I published a short series of posts on how to go about creating social media policies for your organization.

I’ve now pulled the essence of these posts into an ebook on corporate social media policies, to make the content even easier to reference when you’re working on these documents for your organization. You can download the Social Media Policies Ebook here, or check it out on SlideShare.

Want to join the Thornley Fallis team? We’re hiring a senior Consultant to join our Social Media practice.

We’re growing. Over the last while, we’ve added four new members to our team at Thornley Fallis/76Design. We’ve welcomed a new Creative Director, a new Executive Producer of our Video practice (which is itself a new entity), a new Lead Designer and a new Account Coordinator.

We’re also growing from within – last week, I also had the pleasure of promoting an existing team member (yaaa Kerri!).

As the social media side of our business continues to grow, we are continuing to build our team.

What you’ll do

The successful applicant will play a key role as we continue to develop the Social Media practice. You will:

• Play a key role in new business pitches
• Lead client projects from start to finish
• Manage relationships directly with clients
• Help to mentor other staff
• Represent the company at industry events and gatherings

Who we’re after

We’re looking for a senior-level consultant, based in our Toronto office, to take a key role in our Social Media practice.

The ideal candidate:

• Has 3-5 years of marketing/communications experience, ideally with some or all of that in an agency setting
• Has experience managing client projects and budgets
• Closely follows, and is excited by, developments in online communications for businesses
• Is willing to go above and beyond for a team that will do the same for them
• Obsesses over achieving measurable results

Want to work with a wide variety of clients of all shapes and sizes? Want the opportunity to have a big impact on a fast-growing area of our business? Want to be challenged by those around you – and to challenge them – every day?
Send your resume to fleet [at] thornleyfallis [dot] com.

Note: this position is available immediately.

It’s easy to jump on the “mainstream media is dead” bandwagon. Journalists are jumping ship, outlets are fragmenting and readership is, in many cases, down. What’s more, it’s what a lot of the “cool kids” are saying so it must be right… right?

But here’s the thing – your local newspaper still probably has higher readership than your corporate blog… and as for tier one outlets, well, you’re probably not even close to their audience size.

Their audience is still bigger than yours

Mitch Joel recently wrote about the conundrum facing newspapers – more and more people say they will go elsewhere if their favourite news site suddenly introduced fees. Beneath the surface though, there’s a useful point for PR folks. As Todd Defren wrote in a separate post yesterday, “Though the news media still struggles to figure out how to make $$$ from journalism, the audience is present and accounted for.”

You catch that? The audience is present. It’s not as targeted as niche communities, but the reach is there (the reach/niche debate is one for another day).

Long term/short term

Social media is at its best long-term. I believe that; you probably do too. Yes, you might get lucky and get immediate attention but let’s face it, that’s not so likely.

As Dave Jones noted on a recent Inside PR podcast, agencies are fond of telling companies not to worry about social media results now; that in a few years they will – without necessarily having any evidence to back that up. See how your CFO or client reacts when you tell him he needs to wait for a couple of years to see the result from the budget he carved out from other marketing programs to give you.

How will you reach people?

You may have the best social media program possible, but if that’s all you have, how will people find out about it? Devoid of an audience, you run the risk of standing alone in a forest and shouting at the trees.

Depending on your company, you may already have an established visitor base for your corporate website. If so, the weight is off slightly but you’re still not off the hook. Search engine optimization is obviously key, but vaulting up to page one of important search terms isn’t usually a short-term endeavour.

Where does that leave us? With the established audiences of mainstream media – whether you’re buying placement through ads or earning it through media relations.

The definition of mainstream media has broadened (we can now count sites like TechCrunch, Mashable, Daily Kos, HuffPo etc as mainstream) but the old channels still matter.

What do you think?

I’m re-launching DaveFleet.com today with a new, sleeker look and feel and a whole load of new functionality.

The big changes include:

• Professional: The old site was built from a template when one man (me) and his dog read my posts. The new design was created by my colleagues at 76design. I hope you’ll agree it’s a big improvement.
• Focus on conversation: I write this blog for the conversation. I learn more from you than you possibly can from me. The new design is based on conversation, and the layout is focused on making that easier – from featuring my latest tweets to the Facebook Connect integration (update: teething problems with this one; disabled for now) to threaded commenting.
• Connection: Making it easier for you to connect with me – whether you want to subscribe to this site via RSS or connect through any of the other social networks I inhabit.

What do you think of the new site?

Before:

After: