In my last post, I discussed 10 rewards for companies that are early adopters of social media. There’s another side to this that I want to address separately: the biggest risks companies face when jumping into an unknown community.

Failure
Of course this is the big one, but it’s easily avoided. Failure means that the brand comes in and behaves like it does on other platforms instead of understanding what the community wants. Don’t regurgitate. Innovate.

Mistakes
Or better put, not learning from mistakes. Your brand will make mistakes. But the inability to learn and adapt is where the risk is.

Criticism
Many social networks are communities of friends, whether they know each other in real life or just virtually. To have these trust networks overwhelmed by brands trying to market or sell them products often feels like an invasion of privacy.

Platform Never Gains Popularity
One of the biggest risks in a young social network is that it might not take off in the way you expect. It’s not as much of an issue for individuals. But for companies, there’s a lot of time and effort invested in building a new presence (and integrating that presence across multiple places).

Audience Not Ready
Or rather, your audience isn’t. Maybe the people you care about communicating with aren’t part of this group yet. It’s likely that the demographic makeup of the new platform is not in sync with your brand’s audience.

No strategy
In the rush to be “first,” did you forget to determine your objective for being there in the first place? This happened time and again with Second Life, Twitter and Facebook Fan Pages, which now lay dormant.

Small Audience
A nascent social network consists of people that like to be the first to try something, people that sign in once and then don’t come back, and friends of founders. If you get in too early, you risk spending too much time building relationships with too few people. That time might be better spent on a larger, more established platform.

Measuring ROI
You can’t at first. What you can do, however, is determine what is important to your organization and begin by measuring that. You can help co-create tools that others can use to evaluate what success might look like, as Hubspot has done for Twitter.

Losing Your Star Employee(s)
This is one of those inevitable risks that I think is worth it. We’ve watched some of the brightest early adopters move on from the companies they once championed to other ventures. Giving employees the opportunity to experiment, grow and share your brand socially has the added effect of creating valuable employees that are sought after by your competitors. And sometimes, they will move on.

No Precedent
What are the rules governing your employees’ use of new platforms? Some companies, so eager to be first, forget to set rules for use that their employees can follow, and as a result, end up with more trouble than they anticipated.

What do you think? Are the rewards worth the risks? More important, what are some other big risks companies need to consider?

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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One of the best parts about going to social media conferences is seeing which case studies the “experts” draw from. In the beginning, many pulled from the same four or five case studies (Dell, Starbucks, Blendtec, Comcast…).

Now, the gates have opened up and it’s more interesting, in many cases, to look at the companies who AREN’T using social media. But here’s a short list I put together of the 10 biggest rewards for getting involved with social media early:

Mainstream Media Attention
If your brand is among the first to establish a presence on a new media platform, you can be sure it’s going to generate a bit of mainstream press. Of course this is beneficial, but it can also work against a brand when this is its sole purpose.

Community Goodwill
On most platforms, community members are happy to see the brands they interact with on a daily basis join their community. I have had many positive experiences interacting with @JetBlue on Twitter, so much so that I will look for customer service there before I try a phone call or airport desk.

Reputation
Early adopters earn a reputation as forward thinkers. I haven’t read much about Starbucks actually employing any of the recommendations from MyStarbucksIdea, but their reputation among marketers and PR people is strong based on the establishment of this feedback platform.

Leniency
One brand has to make the first foray, and in doing so, it will probably make some mistakes. Those that aren’t yet participants will seize the opportunity to lambast the brand for its mistake but community members are much more forgiving for those who at least try.

New Communications Channel
In this era of evolving social networks, first mover advantage allows those that jump in to capture the interest and attention of its customers and partners before the competition.

ROI
Determining ROI is a challenge regardless of when one enters a new arena where measurement is still untested. I would argue that the first brands in can help set establish these standards and many others will join.

Thought Leadership
New social media platforms offer a new theme for executives, a new audience for presentations and a new opportunity to communicate directly with stakeholders.

Popularity Within Company
Social media provides those employees who spearhead related programs a more visible role within the company. I’ve seen this take shape in many ways: more face time with the CEO, a more prominent role at events and a seat at the table on initiatives spanning many departments (HR, Legal, Communications, etc.)

Ability to Experiment
With the right attitude, every new social media platform allows companies to experiment with new ways to engage key audiences. Some will work and some won’t, but trying something new before a competitor offers many brand managers to push the envelope.

Fun Party Trick
While this may sound tongue in cheek, do not underestimate the value of being able to say, “You’re not on Foursquare?” or “We used QR Codes in our latest campaign” before the journalists, marketers or competitors know what that actually means.

What would you add/subtract from this list?

Stay tuned for my next post on the 10 Risks for Social Media Early Adopters.

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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I recently spoke to four different start-ups in the social analytics space, all looking for insight into what features are most important for perspective buyers (PR agencies and their clients).

If I still worked at an agency (and had the weight of Fortune 500 companies behind me), here are the features I would insist upon from my vendor:

Client View/Agency View: There should be a way for an account team to share graphs and data with a client without exposing them to the back-end. This is both for convenience and to ensure they don’t mess it up.

Outstanding Support Forums: Strong documentation as well as a community space where developers and users can share best practices and provide feedback. I find Apple phone support utterly useless, but I can often find the answers I’m looking for submitted by other users in their hosted forums off the website.

Dummy Proof Analytics: Ideally, social media analytics software would be set up by a dedicated social media person within the agency. In reality though, it’s set up by entry-level account team members charged with tracking coverage across all mediums. Furthermore, an agency with 50 clients needs a solution that they can customize for every account, and that can be altered without much effort based on a client’s ever-changing needs. Most of the current services do not support this type of interaction with the product.

Minimal Training Investment: See above. There are already a host of tools an agency expects its employees to learn. Adding one to the list should still result in an overall savings of time (and therefore, money). Do not build the software with a front end that requires someone with an advanced degree and years of analytics research.

Real Time Reporting: There are typically two times when PR people need to share reports with clients — at the end of the day/week of a product launch, or the end of the month. Make it easy to deliver analytics based on both these timeframes.

Incredible Spam Filters: Most analytics services will boast about the millions of blogs/Twitter feeds/Facebook fan pages that they source. They neglect to indicate what percentage of those are splogs, Tweetbots or otherwise junk.

Easy Data Export: Yes, I am capable of making a screen capture, but it would be awesome if my expensive software made it easy to export different types of graphs for my report, which is typically built in Microsoft Word. Or export the highlights to an Excel spreadsheet. I don’t need the names and readership of all 5,000 blogs that referenced my client, just the top data points. That’s all the managers often care about, anyway.

Accurate Sentiment Analysis: What some developers don’t understand is that the mom who blogs about her baby might have two readers (grandma and grandpa), but if it mentions the client it goes into a report at the end of the month and gets treated with the same weight as TechCrunch. This is incredibly inefficient. When the client sees that someone has referenced the company negatively, they invest thousands of dollars in billing hours investigating the blog, building a relationship and passing all correspondence up and down the management food chain. This could be avoided with a bit more research invested into creating more accurate sentiment analysis tools.

What else? If you work at for an agency (PR, Marketing, Advertising), what are the features you think are missing from your current product suite?

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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Situation

I wanted to start a new blog to share links, graphics, photos and other interesting nuggets encountered during my endless hours of Internet research, which my wife refers to as “piddling around.”

I created a new scrapblog using Posterous, an upstart blogging platform that was all the rage in social media circles two months ago.

During the next two weeks I added a link or so a day, but didn’t tell anyone about it. You can imagine my surprise then when I checked my Feedburner statistics and saw this:

611 subscribers! Woo-hoo!

Analysis

Then reality set in. Impossible. There’s no way anyone knows about this blog. I started digging through the analytics and discovered that nearly all my subscriptions came from Friendfeed, a popular aggregation tool of social networking sites that was recently acquired by Facebook.

Since I only had about 150 collective views, it was totally impossible that so many people had “subscribed” to my blog. They hadn’t even seen the content! Apparently when I added the new blog to my Friendfeed profile, they were automatically counted as individual subscribers by Feedburner since my new posts appear on my Friendfeed page.

These aren’t actual subscribers. The majority of these users won’t view my blog or my content, as you can see:

Lesson

A little bit of Googling revealed that I’m not the first to discover this discrepancy. But when I talk to clients about measuring social media ROI, I now have a great example of why counting subscribers, comments or page views aren’t valuable metrics. They are all easy to artificially inflate with no effort.

Most social media savvy clients accept this in theory, but continue to have a difficult time selling the concept to management. My hope is that more stories like this will illustrate the value of new metrics. While there is still no standard, the pressure is on for companies like Radian6 and Visible Technologies, now armed with several years of data and statistical samples, to demonstrate their value in 2010.

Have your social media success metrics changed in the last 12 months? If so, how? Please share in the comments.

The below links are referenced in this post:

Aaron’s Posterous blog
Aaron’s Tumblr blog
Friendfeed
Feedburner
Google Results for “Friendfeed AND Feedburner”

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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Soldiers: These are the commenters who enjoy being the first to comment, even if they have nothing to say. Soldiers comments are typically encouraging but lack substance. They include phrases such as, “great post,” “interesting,” and “nice work.” Soldiers are always polite. Their comments are short and serve more of an acknowledgment that they read the post or visited the blog rather than substantive or thought provoking. If your blog had a “like” button, they would probably just click it. Most bloggers, myself included, appreciate these comments. They are at least one form of feedback that people are reading our posts.

Contributors: These are the most sought after types of commenters by most bloggers. This group might not leave a lot of comments around the blogosphere but when they do, they are worth reading. Contributors comments push forward the conversation started by the blog post. They can be both positive and negative, but they add substance to the conversation. These people are most likely to also retweet or otherwise share the post with their online networks.

Link Baiters: Most similar to Soldiers, link baiters objective is to try and build their own site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by creating a new incoming link from your blog. They are selfish, thinking of their own interests before the blogger’s. Link baiters comments are short and often plug something that they’ve written on a similar topic. Many marketers try to behave as contributors but, especially when they start out, end up as link baiters instead.

Trolls: The Wikipedia definition works here: “a troll is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.”

Spammers: Most spammers are actually bots that post off-topic comments on a blog to promote a commercial site, typically a pharma or porn site. Again, I’ll reference Wikipedia for a pretty good definition: It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target. Adding links that point to the spammer’s web site artificially increases the site’s search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer’s commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers.

I’d like to consider myself a Contributor, but I often end up as more of a Solider. I want my friends and other bloggers to know that I’ve stopped by to read their posts. However, I often feel short on time and end up just posting a quick sentence or two instead of something more substantive. I’m going to work on that in the next year.

What am I missing? Let’s expand this list. Also let us know what type of commenter you are and why.

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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I hear a lot of people that are looking for jobs discouraged right now. There’s a belief that most companies shut down their HR departments between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.

If that’s what most companies do, take advantage of this lull and increasing your own recruiting efforts at a time when your competitors are slowing down.

Even if you don’t want to hire until after the new year, use this time to search for new talent.

• Request resumes
• Conduct preliminary interviews
• Brainstorm new ways to find candidates (Twitter, social networks, professional organizations)

This strategy not only separates your from the competition, but it also encourages job seekers at a time when they need it most.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is not just about timely donations and greenwashing products. It’s about showing your company cares. This might be an excellent way to do it, especially if you’re on this list.

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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Those of you who follow my blog closely (mom? dad? bro?) may note that I haven’t posted in several months.

No, I haven’t given up blogging. No, I haven’t decided that Twitter is a better medium for my thoughts. And no, I haven’t been so busy with client work that I had to put Disruptology on the back burner.

In fact, I had a medical issue that required surgery and a considerable amount of rehab.

I don’t typically post about my personal life here, but my eight days in the hospital proved to be a pretty transformative experience. Here are some of my revelations:

I didn’t miss social media

I didn’t feel an overwhelming need to update my Facebook status, check in with Foursquare or see what blog posts I had missed in Google Reader for weeks after my return home. This might not sound like a revelation to some readers, but as someone immersed in social media for the last eight years, a month without email/iPhone/Twitter is akin to solitary confinement.

When I returned to social media, not much changed

About four weeks after I returned home, I started to slowly reemerge from my self-imposed exile. Here’s what I found:

• The same marketers posting too frequent Twitter updates continued to pollute the stream.
• The conversations about social media ROI, the iPhone vs. the Droid and the exaggerated death of news media continued unabated and with little in the way of new information.
• Google Wave came and went, and now everyone is back to talking about Twitter.

I missed writing…

I always thought that I wrote to share my knowledge with you, but I realized that I also write this blog for my own gratification, which is good because…

…but my voice wasn’t necessarily missed

Don’t worry, I don’t take it personally and I’m not at all bitter. When I stopped posting in September, readers simply moved on to the next blog. I would do the same. But this realization helped crystallize for me why I write and what my objectives are. As a result, I expect the content and the tone of this blog will change. We’ll see.

I’m going to try blogging more. I invite your feedback on my posts and I thank you for taking the time to read and comment, as always. If I’m slow in replying to comments, it’s because I’m still limited in how much time I spend online by my pesky surgery.

Image credit: Shutterstock

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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Tagnic is my new favorite game on Twitter. Unlike previous games like Spymaster that annoyed and alienated both friends and customers alike, there’s no DM spam and playing is pretty unobtrusive. In fact, your friends might not even know you’re playing until you let them in on it.

Tagnic is the first social game created by a young startup called SocialBomb. I am friends with its founders (@doryex, @scottiev and @rebelprince), which is how I came to start playing.

HOW IT WORKS

Start by signing up here and following @tagnic on Twitter so that the bot can keep track of your tweets. Then, when you’re writing to someone, you can assign them different descriptive words by adding a plus sign (+) before the word in your tweet.

For example, if I wanted to play with my friend Paull Young (@paullyoung), I could write, “@paullyoung is a PR +crimefighter and great +blogger.” Paull would then receive “crimefigher” and “blogging” points.

Similar to the popular iPhone/Android game Foursquare, Tagnic assigns badges based on various combinations of words. Here’s an example.

What I like about this game is that it’s social, it’s fun and it’s a new way to interact with your friends on Twitter. This of it as personal hashtags.

BRAND OPPORTUNITIES

Games like Tagnic are an opportunity to help better define our social interactions in a fun and engaging way. While I have no idea what Social Bomb plans are for further Tagnic development, imagine how a brand could get involved by sponsoring a badge.

For example, if a user receives a combination of words like “caffeine,” “addict,” “coffee,” “awake,” and “Starbucks,” that individual could receive the Starbucks Java Junkie badge.

Marketers could also reward users for obtaining certain badges related to their brand or gain insight into how people talk about their brand based on a combination of words.

CONCLUSION

Tagnic is still in its early stages of development. I want to be able to showcase my badges easily on my Twitter profile, not just on the Tagnic page. But the concept is really strong and has the potential to add a new level of fun on top of an already highly engaging platform. Give it a try. It might take a quick explanation to get your friends/followers involved, but once they catch on, you won’t be able to stop.

@Tagnic is +addictive, +fun and +easy to use!

Once you’ve played, please leaves some feedback about it below!

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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A collection of awesome posts from blogs that might not be on your radar. There are some case studies, some tutorials and a lot of great analysis. Enjoy!

HOW TO: Add Twitter and YouTube Tabs to Your Organization’s Facebook Page: Heather Mansfield is a social media consultant focusing on the non-profit space. Her posts on Change.org are certainly worth following, and this straightforward explanation is one of them.

Using Mobile Technology to Influence Healthcare Reform: Ben Stein’s Mobile Commons helps non-profit companies build social media strategies in really unique ways. This post shares examples from companies that have used SMS (text messages) to raise awareness among different communities about important social causes.

Chick-fil-A is the First Restaurant Chain with 1 Million Facebook Fans: I can’t believe it, either. Never underestimate the value of a good Cow Appreciation Day Photo Contest.

Numbers we track in our online/offline life: Sam Lawrence examines what it means to be a “friend” these days and delves into the numbers we track online (friends, status, dates) vs. those we track offline (sleep, weight, money). An interesting take on what metrics matter and why.

Image credit: Shutterstock

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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As a communicator, you’ve probably learned a lot about the power of social media over the last 12 months. What would happen if you used that power to try and hurt a company rather than help it?

My Problem

I recently purchased a piece of furniture from a company in New York. It wasn’t anything special, just an ergonomic desk and monitor arm to improve my home work station. When I ordered it, the salesperson told me it would arrive in three separate shipments (from two carriers) and that it would take four weeks to ship.

I’ve ordered enough products online that I am accustomed to waiting for a week or so, but four weeks seemed like an eternity. Although I understood that it would take some time to arrive, I was not prepared for the lack of communication along the way. At the very least, I expected an email informing me when it shipped.

For one month, I heard nothing. Not a peep.

I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say I received zero communication from the company. No tracking numbers. No ship dates. No estimated arrivals. Not one call or email to let me know they hadn’t forgotten about me. My first communication was from UPS informing me I had missed their delivery.

Finally, two weeks after I received both pieces of the desk (sans assembly instructions), I started emailing (passive) and calling (aggressive) to get updates abut the remaining shipment from a customer service rep who was less than enthused to help.

Seven weeks later, I am sitting at the desk still waiting for the monitor arm that the factory shipped to an address in Pennsylvania that no one seemed to catch until I started calling again. I’m frustrated that they company isn’t working to help me fix their error. I’m angry that they are shifting blame to the factory even though I ordered it from them. And most of all, I’m tired of wasting time tracking down this shipment.

Dave Dougherty and Ajay Murthy write in the Harvard Business Review that:

More than half of the customers we surveyed across industries say they’ve had a bad service experience, and nearly the same fraction think many of the companies they interact with don’t understand or care about them. On average, 40% of customers who suffer through bad experiences stop doing business with the offending company.

What would you do? As someone who has some experience using social media and who is familiar with the case studies about companies that ignored their customers at their own peril, how might you react?

My Solution

My first thought was to begin posting negative tweets to a couple of thousand Twitter followers and to write similar updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. I could spread the bad word about this company to thousands of people in less than a minute. That would feel good. It’s also what most people do: they vent their frustration to anyone that will listen.

I realized, however, that most of my friends and Twitter associates are either not looking to buy a desk nor are they necessarily going to remember my updates when its time to do so. It was the right platform, but not necessarily the right audience. Also, I wasn’t looking to create a United Airlines type of situation (although I felt much the same way) for the company. I just wanted to share my own frustrations with other people considering buying their products.

I wanted something more enduring. Something that might show up in search engine results. My next thought was to write a nasty post here naming the company and hoping it would come up along with their name during a Google search. But one lone voice of dissent does not a purchase change. I started thinking about how I make a purchasing decision, and it turns out (obviously) I am very interested in what other communities of experts have to say.

If it’s electronics, I typically check CNET and PCWorld reviews (both the article and the user comments). If it’s books, my first stop is Amazon and if it’s a restaurant, I’ll see what people wrote on Menupages, New York Magazine or Yelp before making my reservation.

And that’s what I did. I added a customer review to some of the sites where I had done my original research. It might have taken a bit more time and ultimately, fewer people may read them. But I feel better. I shared my experience with the people that affect the company’s bottom line. Even if customer service doesn’t matter to this company, hopefully it will make a difference to their potential customers.

Image credit: Shutterstock

© Aaron Uhrmacher. Visit DISRUPTology for more posts on social media and communications.

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