LISTEN, CONNECT, INFLUENCE

The Very Near Future of the Web Part 1 - Niche Networks

2009-11-08T17:26:39-05:00

by Sherry Heyl

Halloween has past which means we are officially in the midst of the holiday season. With the holiday season comes visions of the New Year. With visions of the New Year come predictions of what we will all need to pay attention to in the upcoming year.

Over the remaining 7 weeks - yep that's it, 7 weeks of 2009, I will be posting future trend predictions that are up for discussion on our Facebook Business Page.

Each week I will dedicate a blog post to one of the trends that I believe we REALLY need to pay attention to. This week the focus is on Niche Networks.

Admittedly, I might be biased. Three of my clients are building their own Niche Networks; ATL Insider, Lens on Atlanta, and eRollover. However, there are several reasons why I sincerely believe that the future of the Internet is a web of interrelated Niche Networks.

Some recent statistics I have read suggest that 3 out of 4 Americans use social technology and 93% of social media users believe that a company should have a presence in social media. What that tells me is that the web is social!

As many of you know, this did not happen over night. It started with grassroots blogs and the uprising of the MySpace generation. We then saw Facebook explode and grow to boast of a population that is larger than almost any country in the world and Twitter becoming the place where we get the latest breaking news.

Each of these sites have gone mainstream and become household names. These sites have rapidly changed the expectations of and behaviors on the web.

At the same time, as each of these mainstream sites have grown in popularity, they have been bullied to try to become everything to every one.

Last week I wrote a post about my impression that Facebook is going through puberty. I pointed out that:

There are people who are on Facebook for business reasons, but their business connections are using Facebook to play with friends and family, and some of their friends and family are trying to use Facebook to promote their grassroots causes or political agendas.

Many social media advisors, myself included, have often consulted that our clients need to be where their audience is. I have adjusted that advice recently. I suggest that my clients need to be where their clients expect and want them to be. Although your clients may be hanging out on Facebook, they may be there for reasons other than to hang out with you.

This begins to open up the MANY reasons for brands and industries to develop their own niche social networking sites.

Other reasons include:

Brands are dependent on the existence and enhancements of mainstream networks. Consider the trouble that those who developed Facebook Groups went through when Facebook Pages became the better option.
Currently changes and enhancements to mainstream sites come too frequently for most people and often disrupt the brands effort to build a community.
It is not comfortable to have confidential conversation on sites such Facebook or LinkedIN, even if you do set up the appropriate privacy settings.

Already many organizations have jumped off the mainstream networks bandwagon to develop their own network. Last week Tech Crunch reported:

Ning (a DIY Network) has reached an impressive milestone of 37 million users and 1.6 million social networks using its platform. Growth continues at the rate of one million users every two weeks. 20% of these networks are running at least one Ning app, while the average is two. That's an audience of over 9 million users.

One of the most valuable features of Ning is the ability to pull in content from mainstream networks. Beyond that the develop can chose which feature they want to include based on what makes sense for the community they are building.

In 2010 we will see more platforms developed with the ability to integrate and interconnect with other networks, whether they are niche networks or mainstreams. People will no longer concern themselves with how many networks they belong to because users will log in with one sign in and only have to maintain one profile.

I do not predict the demise of mainstream social networks, instead I predict that mainstream networks will continue to act like a global market place, meanwhile brands and industries will set up niche networks that will act as their local store fronts.

Surprise! Social Media Should Be Handled In-house!

2009-11-01T08:23:19-05:00

The October 1-7 CMO Weekly Poll asked "which of your groups is best equipped to help you with your social media efforts today?"

The overwhelming answer was in-house 65.6%

15.6%Interactive Agency
9.4%PR Firm
9.4%Social Media Agency
0%Creative/Ad Agency

Business Week has a few quotes that explain the thought process behind the CMOs answers.

I have been telling clients this for years! When a client ask if they can outsource their social media efforts to me, I often ask them if they would be willing to send me to networking events on their behalf? to conferences? to sales meetings? Because in essence, if you are outsourcing your social media efforts, it is similar to outsourcing those key sales activities.

So, what kind of help can you get to be successful in social media?

Your PR agency can and should integrate social media channels into their efforts. This can include creating and managing a social media press room, identify and developing relationships with what I call "institutional bloggers" these are bloggers who act more like a journalist as opposed to "day in my life" bloggers, they can monitor for reputation management concerns and create a strategy for managing when things go wrong or leveraging the opportunities of when things go right.

Your Interactive agency can and should be optimizing your web presence for social media. This would include re-designing your email newsletters to include your social media presence, setting up and optimizing your social networking sites, making sure your social media efforts are working hand in hand with your SEO efforts and creating a web site that is dynamic, interactive and buzz worthy.

Your creative/Ad agency has the opportunity to position ads where your audience is most engaged with their peers about topics related to you. They can create ads that are buzz worthy and positioned to go viral.

What about your social media agency? What is their role?

From my perspective, a social media agency should work with all of the above departments to ensure that everyone is on the same page and there is a unified presence and message throughout the web. A social media agency should stay up-to-date on the latest tools and technologies that weave the web together. A social media agency should be able to research the web and identify where your audience is hanging out, what they are saying, and how they are feeling. A social media agency should be able to check out your competition and report what they are doing well and where their vulnerabilities are. A social media agency should be able to train your team on the hows and whys of social media, what each person's role and responsibility should be when hanging out on the web, and how to best manage their time. At their best, a social media agency can also enable a company to leverage social software tools internally to make sure that right information is getting to the right people at the right time.

By providing the intelligence, roadmap, and structure, social media agencies can empower their clients to be successful in this ever changing noisy world. But ultimately, client interactions and engagement really cannot be outsourced.

Creating a Social Media Business Plan (including a Revenue Model!!)

2009-10-25T19:43:10-04:00

by Sherry Heyl

Friday night I attended my first Atlanta Bar Camp event. Bar Camp is a gathering of some of the smartest people in the city in which everyone who attends has to sign up to give a 30 minute presentation.

My presentation was "Creating a Social Media Business Plan (including a revenue model!!)"

Surprise!! My room was packed! Standing room only.

I explained that I have spent my career as a sales person, therefore my approach to creating a social media business plan has always tied in a revenue/sales model.

The room was full of mostly entrepreneurs, the techie kind. From my experience they are the brilliant minds who create solutions in search of a problem.

I explained that before launching into ANY social media initiative, you must first understand who has what problems and what kind of solutions are they search for.

I demonstrated a social media business plan that I created for one of my clients.

The first step we took was to listen. But prior to listening we had to decide exactly what we were listening for.

In the case of my client example we were looking for people who had questions regarding their financial retirement planning. The assumption was that we would find the baby-boomers to be our core demographic.

However, because we were listening for the problems and not focused on our ASSUMED demographic we identified that Gen Y had serious questions about how to fill out their 401K forms when entering the job market. Considering that human resources personnel are not in a position to answer these questions, and many of the parents of this group were just as confused these days as their children were, Gen Y was turning to the web for answers. This knowledge led to creating new offerings to a new client base which meant new revenue opportunities.

We also identified Gen X as having a very unique set of challenges as well as sentiment around their Retirement plans. Gen X is a group that tends to be more DIY and Peer supported than any other group. Our research enabled us to shape our messaging and value proposition to this group.

Our baby-boomers still looked more to advisors for counsel, which means that there was an opportunity to introduce advisors to a core community of people searching for solutions.

We created personas for each group which enabled us to look at the competition through the eyes of each group. From that perspective we were able to develop a comprehensive SWOT analysis on each of competitors and learn what to do and what not to do.

The next questions that we addressed were;

What can you offer for free? The obvious answer is knowledge. Knowledge is no longer power, it is a commodity. Information freely is available everywhere. What is valuable these days is time.
How can we save people time and what can we expect in return? This is the answer to where you can begin to structure pricing around your offering. Ask yourself, how can you save people time and then ask how much would that be worth?
What will your customers need to best benefit from your offering. This is the revenue model I see most people missing these days. In a nutshell it is training. Microsoft generated lots of money in this space. No software was released without a certification tied to it. I am dumbfounded that so many people are skipping this step when a new product is released to the market.

The most important key to capturing our audience is to meet them where they are. Even if we are introducing a world changing innovation, we cannot expect a 360 degree paradigm shift, we have to understand our prospects current world view and meet them there in order to guide them to new opportunities.

I have said it over and over and over again, but it is worth repeating.

Social Media is an EVOLUTION not an add-on. In no time everything on line will be built on social software. So, do not worry about how to make the next million dollars as the next Facebook. Instead focus on solving problems using current (or better) social technologies.

The Whats and Whys of Social Bookmarking

2009-10-18T10:54:24-04:00

by Sherry Heyl,

I personally think social bookmarks are cool. In fact, when asked what my favorite social media site is, I consistently point to Delicious. However, I think social bookmarking gets the least amount of media attention and is therefore the least understood tools on the web. So this week I will review the whats and whys of social bookmarking.

Overview of the Adoption of Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is a way to save, organize and share links on the web. There are currently hundreds of sites dedicated to social bookmarking and almost all social networking sites enable their members to share links with each other. The following graph is from Compete.com, shows that there is a continuous growth in the use of social bookmarking tools.

Currently Stumbleupon.com and Reddit.com seem to be leading the pack. However, in the world of social media, quantity does not always equal quality.

People are using different social bookmarking tools for many different reasons. The features and benefits of each site often determines how the site is used and ultimately who is using the site as well as the site’s culture. Primary uses for Social Bookmarks are:

➢ Save and organize links
➢ Search for content that has been “vetted” by the community
➢ Share content

One feature that seems to be universal to all social bookmarking sites is the ability for an individual to share content with their networked community. Considering the many various statistics suggesting that people are spending more time on social networks and trusting messages that are shared by their peer groups more than other sources, many online publications have developed ways to promote having their content shared within the various networking sites.

One popular tool is the Add This button which is easy to install on almost all platforms, provides the audience a one click option to bookmark content to all of their online communities and provides the content provider statistics on what content their audience is sharing and where.

Different Features and Benefits

Each Social Bookmarking site offers a variety of features and benefits for their community members as well as content producers. Some of the more common ones the extend across most sites are listed below. Features and Benefits for Community Members

➢ Ability to save articles of interest
➢ Ability to organize content by different tags or categories ➢ Ability to post comments on saved links
➢ Ability to discover new and relevant content from “like minds”
➢ Ability to leverage the benefits of RSS Features and Benefits of Content Producers
➢ Content is optimized for organic search
➢ Content is discovered by like minded community members
➢ Gain insights into your audience content consumption behavior
➢ Build a trusted relationships with community members
➢ Ability to leverage the benefits of RSS

Increase Traffic to Your Site

There are many sites and services that promise to significantly increase traffic to a website by submitting content to various bookmarking services.

The first question that should be asked is “is this relevant traffic, our target audience?”

The second question should be “is this traffic sustainable?”

Often times a site will experience a significant spike in traffic, such as the FinalFantasySeries.net site below.

However this is because the bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon have recognized new content (fresh blood) and is testing the content with various members to see how they will respond. If the response is good, more people bookmark the content in their account, content from the site will continuously get ranked high. If the response is not so good, future content will not get ranked very high.

The best way to build and sustain traffic from the various social bookmarking sites is to join the communities, get to know your audience, and create content of value that they are eager to share. Below are three key steps to creating sustainable traffic and viral distribution of your content.

1. Focus on Keywords. Because content producers have the ability to see how relevant content is being tagged by the community, they can leverage the insights of those tags to enhance their own tagging strategy and keywords to enhance their chances of increasing their search results. This is also a great way to join the community. Other community members of the social bookmarking sites can see the content that has been recently tagged and view those pages that interest them.

2. Enable and encourage your readers to bookmark your content in their various selected communities through tools such as Addthis.com

3. Join relevant networks and develop relationships based on sharing content of value. Be sure not to submit only your content. That comes across as self-serving and spamming.

Truly share content that is of mutual interest from various sources.

Identify Communities of Like Minds

In the mid-nineties the way we discovered new content was revolutionized by Amazon.com’s recommendation engine. Amazon.com’s technology “learned” the buying behaviors and preferences of their consumers and provided recommendations based on what similar consumers were buying as well as provided a platform for their consumers to rate and review products. Social Bookmarking sites work on the same ideas of connecting people who share common interests and providing a platform for them to rate and review, not books, but web content. Community members are able to “friend” people they know as well as people they do not know but have identified as having similar ideas and interest. This network of “friends” are able to view what each person is saving, subscribe via RSS feeds to each others accounts in order to be alerts when new content is saved as well as push content to their network.

The Unique Culture of Each Site

No Social Bookmarking site is created equal. Each site comes with unique features and functions which determines how the site is used, as well as who uses it. Also in consideration is when the site went live and what their “go to Market” strategy was. When Concept Hub, Inc researches the social media landscape for a client, we check every main social bookmarking site to identify if relevant content is being shared and which site has the greatest share of our client’s target audience. Although sites like Compete.com shows reddit with a significant lead in audience, Concept Hub, Inc has found Delicious is the favorite site among people in Atlanta. We have discovered Digg is still the favorite site for technology enthusiast and reddit is a favorite among the financial community. However we all have seen how fickle the online community can be and each new site makes it easier for community members to import their links over. It is important to always keep your finger on the pulse of what the community is doing and who is being active in which sites

Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing

2009-10-11T11:57:30-04:00

by Sherry Heyl

This past week I had the opportunity to get to know Kate Rasnick. Kate is launching a mobile marketing consultancy. As many of us know, Mobile Marketing is rapidly growing and proving to have a greater reach than many other marketing channels.

After meeting and getting to know Kate, I was inspired to host my first podcast as a way to introduce her to my readers. Although I have been a guest on a number of podcasts, I never actually hosted one. It was a fun experience and I look forward to hosting more. You can listen to our 15 minute discussion by clicking on the player below.

Listen to Sherry Heyl and Kate Rasnick on Blog Talk Radio

Kate Rasnick has more than five years of project management and client relations experience as well as broad technical and wireless industry knowledge. In these five years Kate has been able to successfully establish and maintain strong relationships with strategic partners, cable networks, multimillion dollar accounts, wireless carriers, Fortune 500 companies, and small businesses. Kate has provided exceptional customer services and lead successful program implementations by leveraging my positive attitude, attention to detail, and pro-active communication. To learn more about Kate or connect with her for advice, visit her LinkedIn profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/krasnick

4 Social Media Dilemmas

2009-09-27T11:04:32-04:00

by Sherry Heyl

In a few short weeks I will celebrate 4 years of being in business. That is 4 years of exploring social media for my own personal branding, personal expression, ongoing education, and marketing efforts. 4 years where I have had the honor to work with over 30 clients, and helped launch 3 new social media sites! (ATL Insider, Lens on Atlanta, and eRollover). I have designed over 3 dozen customized courses and I have written over 2,000 pages of research and recommendations. I have Co-Chaired 3 Social Media Conferences (SoCon07, 08, and 09), been the Chair TAG's Enterprise 2.0 Society for the past 2 years and have launched and managed Digitainment's Social Media presence. I have spoken at almost 50 events and been publish in magazines, the AJC, the Atlanta Business Chronicle as well as featured in several podcasts.

I have forgotten about more social media tools than most people will ever be aware of. I have launched 3 personal blogs, and deleted 2 of them. I have gathered several hundred facebook friends only to de-friend them. I gathered over 1,000 followers on my Concept Hub Twitter account (without tools or bots) in a week, based on a bet (no money was involved, so I guess it was more of a challenge.) Now I am spending hours making that account actually be part of a working strategy.

Over the years I have had lots of successes, but I have also made lots of mistakes, or what I prefer to think of as learning experiences.

As I reflect on all that I have learned over the past 4 years, I decided to share with you my insights on 4 social media dilemmas.

1. Personal vs Professional

The more involved a person gets in social media for business the harder it will become to separate your personal from your professional self. In fact, many people are looking to know more about your personal self as opposed to your professional self, whether they are potential partners, clients, or employers. This is especially true here in the South. How many times have you met someone for a business meeting and spent a good portion of the time talking about sports, kids, vacations, and so forth.

For the longest time I had no problem mixing my personal life with my professional life. I accepted people I barely knew, or only briefly met, on my Facebook page, along with my family and my friends from high school. This did not seem to be a problem for me until:

A good friend posted some very flattering photos of me in a bikini back when we were in high school. They are good pictures, we are not doing anything crazy, but I questioned, do I want people I barely know looking at them?
I took a weekday off and was hanging out at PF Changs waiting to meet a friend for lunch. I ordered a glass of Merlot and posted on Facebook "there is nothing like the first sip of Merlot to make it all melt away." Well, the comments from my high school friends that followed made me realize very quickly that they know a different "Sherry" than the person I am today.
I met with a high school friend that I have not seen in 10 years. She said to me "I try to keep up with what you are posting on Facebook, but I do not understand it." By posting work related topics, I was alienating my friends and family on Facebook.

So, as a result I have set up a Concept Hub Fan Page to focus on work related topics and keep my personal profile page focused on what is going on in my life. I still connect with my professional network on Facebook, but only those who I know; The people that I would sit in a coffee shop with and discuss the latest about sports, kids and vacations along with work efforts.

Anything that I want to keep very closed to only friends and family can be shared through sites that are not as mainstream, or through closed groups, or good old fashion email. Anything that is truly personal, should not be shared online at all.

2. Quantity vs Quality

I sat in a meeting recently where a "Social Media Expert" sold the client on managing their social networking efforts for them. With very few exceptions, this in not a strategy I endorse. To me it is equivalent to outsourcing your networking events. ("Let's see, I can not make it to the CXO dinner tonight, let me call my PR rep to go for me.")

Basically, I do not understand how passion, personality, and expertise can be outsourced.

Beyond that, the promises I hear is "how many followers" they will attract and how many canned messages will be pushed out. How is this different from traditional PR/Marketing?

Social Media does have a place in traditional Marketing, PR, and Interactive Marketing when it comes to getting the right messages to the right people through the channels that your audience wants to receive those messages. But Social Networking is about relationships. Remember, based on a challenge I was able to attract over 1,000 followers in a week. I also was able to push hundreds of messages to those people. But in the end, the efforts that have paid off for me are the efforts I have put into nurturing relationships. Relationships take time, therefore if you are going to invest time into channels where people are expecting to develop relationships with you, focus on who you are connecting to, not how many people you are connecting to.

3. Where to Begin and When Does it End

Where to Begin? Begin by learning what you need to know. There are so many people out there saying "we can help you with your social media too!" and the end result is wasted time, wasted money, and a lot more confusion.

Oftentimes when I meet people with little to no experience with social media I suggest that they use a few tools for personal reasons; vacations, wishlists, and hobbies are a good start. Look for which tools and applications make your life easier and which ones are adding more things to your life. If you do decide to hire an agency or a technology company to launch your social media program, PLEASE check to see how many people on the project are very active on Social Media sites. So many times I have seen efforts that are so counter-logical to me (yes I think I just made up that word). When I look into the backgrounds of the people who were in charge of the strategy, design, or execution I often find that they might have a few profiles set up in several sites, but they are not actively involved on any sites. Therefore they are not exposed to what works and why, which leads to efforts that are counter-logical to those who do live and breathe social media.

So where does it end? Never. It is like the phone, which was an incredible communications invention that was introduced over a century ago, and yet more than 100 years later mobile marketing is still the hottest new thing. Social Media will continue to evolve and grow and will become a part of almost every aspect of our lives.

4. How Do I Know If Social Media Is Working?

I read lots of business and career books and the one thing that they all have in common is the importance of being top of mind and managing the impressions people have of you. Your social media efforts are working if you are top of mind of the right people, the people who can buy from you or influence the buying decisions of others. Your social media efforts are working if you have created an impression of your brand and services that can withstand an attack from a disgruntled customer, employee or competitor.

When I launched my company I was often surprised when I would attend an event and people I have never met in person knew who I was. Now I find myself a little surprised when someone has not heard of me. Of the 50 events I have presented at and the publications I have been mentioned in, I have never pitched or solicited myself to any of them. Each opportunity was presented to me and more than half of my clients have been through referrals or people finding my information online.

There is a lot of buzz right now questioning the value of social media or inquiring about the ROI of social media. Social media is nothing more than an extension of who we are as a person or as a brand. If you and/or our brand have a strong value offering, the proper execution of a social media strategy will provide a strong ROI. If you and/or your brand have a number of character flaws, then social media may expose those flaws and bring you and your company crashing down.

That is the #1 lesson I have learned over the past 4 years. Social Media is simply an extension of who we are; personally and professionally, quality and quantity, from beginning to end.

Who Should Own Social Media

2009-09-20T09:17:15-04:00

by Sherry Heyl

It is a debate that has been going around for as long as social media has been recognized as a force; "Who should own social media?"

I recall times when the debates got ugly between mainstream media and bloggers. The question on the table was who should own the news, who was the most credible. From my perspective the answer was not black and white, bloggers vs mainstream media. It seemed obvious that both bloggers and mainstream journalist had a co-dependent relationship and that they often shared an audience and beyond that, the audience often added their voice to the reports.

For a long time I have also seen the debates between PR and Interactive Marketing. PR is in charge of managing reputation, creating buzz, and shaping the message. Interactive marketing is in charge of selling and serving the customer via the various channels on the web. For over a decade most online communications came from one direction. Now, as we all know, customers are talking back to the institutions as well as talking to each other. Through the years 2005-2007 I spoke with several PR professionals who had one question; "How do we control the message?" The answer was that you can't. But you can manage the message based on how the customer is served and how the relationship is managed. To me that means that PR and Interactive Marketing are now dependent on each other.

Since the reputation of a company is at the mercy of how well customer service is executed, we now have CRM professionals staking their claim on social media. When a company such as United Airlines, makes the wrong person, such as Dave Carroll, feel like he is not a valued customer, amazing things can happen, such as a music deal for Dave and lots of lost revenue and a damaged reputation for United.

It seems that customer service representatives need to be on top of their game more now than ever, and they need to know how to pro actively address customers where they are seeking answers. Organizations like the ACVB currently have their customer service representatives spending time answering questions that are posted throughout the web. Best Buy has established a very active online customer service army.

Advertising has also been very active in looking at ways they can be part of the conversation within social media, how they can track customer interest, and what is the trick to going viral?

Sales professionals have become active in participating in a variety of online networks to identify and learn more about their clients, prospects and competitors.

Human Resource professionals have leveraged social media sites for recruiting and to check the reputation of current and future employees. More often than not Human Resources is also being tasked with creating employee guidelines related to participating in social media.

Considering there are so many departments involved in social media, it seems that the next big tidal wave in the world of social media that is starting to hit is Enterprise 2.0. The use of social software to communicate internally, to be able to react to the market quickly as well as develop unified proactive plans.

This past week I delivered my presentation, Mapping Corporate Goals with Social Media Trends and Technologies, to the International Society for Performance Improvement.

Mapping Corporate Goals

View more presentations from Concept Hub, Inc.

This was the second time I have delivered this presentation and both times it has been very well received. In fact my favorite feedback of all time came from a senior manager that attended the presentation. He said he finally is starting to understand social media, that it needs to be a corporate wide strategy not just a PR or Advertisement initiative. It was a very rainy night that night, but I believe the clouds parted and the stars shined down when he said that.

It took some time, but most people finally understand that social media cannot be controlled. Now if only we can realize it also cannot be owned.

Spotlight on Lens On Atlanta

2009-09-13T09:50:20-04:00

by Sherry Heyl

This week Lens On Atlanta, an online community sponsored by Public Broadcasting Atlanta, will open up to the public.

For the past several months the community has been developing behind a password protected "door." This week that door will be opened. This is a very exciting time for us at Concept Hub.

The Beginning

For Concept Hub the beginning was May 2008 when I first met with the team at PBA and learned about the vision for Lens on Atlanta. However that vision came from PBA's President, Milton Clipper, long before most of us even thought of an online community; almost 10 years ago!

Milton saw that Metro Atlanta communities where expanding and felt that the Internet could be used as a tool to bring the sprawling community members closer together. He recognized that whether a person lives in Stone Mountain, the City of Atlanta, or Alpharetta, we are all neighbors and need to find a way to stay connected with each other.

The Strategy

The team had the vision, our task was to create a roadmap to make that vision a reality. Concept Hub began researching other communities throughout the nation to see what was working and what did not work so well. We read Metro Atlanta blogs to gain an understanding of the needs and voices throughout the area and we maintained tabs on what organizations throughout the area were trying to accomplish through social media. Through our research and many various team meetings with PBA and selected thought-leaders, we identified where Lens on Atlanta could provide immediate value to metro-Atlanta community members.

Building the Community

Throughout the process PBA partnered with organizations who want to reach Metro Atlanta community members such as the:

Atlanta Regional Commission
Beltline
Atlanta Development Authority
Green Chamber of Commerce
Atlanta Education Fund

Concept Hub delivered workshops to help the partners create goal-oriented communication strategies for the site.

For the past several months Concept Hub has also been meeting with several PTAs, HOAs, and NPUs to promote the site to community members. We have recruited over a dozen wonderful community voices who have begun to share their challenges and successes on the site and are connecting with their neighbors throughout the metro area.

PBA also brought the team from AtlantaPlanit.com on board to introduce Metro Atlanta's vibrant Arts and Culture community to the site.

The Goal

The most exciting aspect of this project is that it was not a site that was developed as the "latest trend" that the station needed to adopt. It is a site that leverages the technologies that are available today to enable a vision that was sparked years ago. A vision of Metro Atlanta community members being able to connect with each other to solve problems, to promote ideas, and to work together to make metro Atlanta the best place to work and to live.

It is truly an honor to work with PBA on such a wonderful project. I look forward to welcoming Metro Atlanta to the new Lens on Atlanta community.

The 3 Pillars of Social Media Marketing

2009-09-06T09:54:03-04:00

by Sherry Heyl

This past week I faced an interesting challenge that has helped me to confirm my belief that social media will impact every industry and every department within every industry.

Social Media has changed the face of marketing, not by introducing new channels for messaging but by introducing new technical capabilities that have enabled the fusion of multiple customer facing disciplines, including;

Marketing+Sales = Relationship Marketing

Marketing+Customer Services = Customer Relationship Marketing

Marketing+Training = Educational Marketing

I consider these to be the 3 pillars of social media marketing because no matter your industry, these are the 3 disciplines that will impact your bottom line.

Last week I was contacted by the Reusable Industrial Packaging Association. They are hosting their annual conference in New Orleans and considering having a speaker to present how social media can help their business. Tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and such are now becoming mainstream words, but the exact "hows and whys" of these tools still tends to be a mystery to many people.

The people who will be attending this conference are executives of $5 - 40 million companies that are responsible for industrial reusable packaging such as oil drums. Now for several years I have been saying social media impacts EVERY industry and EVERY department within every industry. But I have to admit, this one stumped me for a moment.

The companies represented at the conference will be:

B2B
Have no or very little PR needs.
Have no or very little reputation management concerns.
Have no or very little concern about protecting their intellectual property.
Are not necessarily trying to grow their client base.

So why would they need to consider looking at social media for their business?

The more questions I asked the more I learned about how their businesses are family owned and rely on their strong relationships with their clients.

Relationship Marketing

I also learned the importance of efficiency and how it is tied to customer service.

Customer Service Marketing

Beyond that I learned that to have a container not in use is kind of like having a hotel room or plane seat not in use; it is not generating money and potentially even costing money. To put these containers in use it is important to keep "just in time" information published about what is available and the costs and benefits of the containers that are available as well as be ready to respond to changing needs.

Educational Marketing

I explained that tools such as Twitter and Facebook may or may not be what these companies are looking for, but the capabilities of these tools definitely need to be taken in consideration. I explained that social software has the potential of revolutionizing industries such as theirs in much the same way the Just In Time technologies revolutionized similar industries over a decade ago. Together we began to explore the possibilities of illustrating how these companies can become more profitable by becoming more efficient and by communicating information in ways that help their clients become more profitable.

Once again I confirmed, at least to myself, that social media will impact every industry and every department within every industry. I will be delving in to understand the impacts more as I put my presentation together that I will be delivering to the Reusable Industrial Packaging Association annual conference in New Orleans.