I recently changed the branding and domain name of my company (which is what you see now). In the process of practicing what I preach on the subject of online marketing and inbound links, I was more than surprised to find many links pointing to the old domain from a sports club I belong to. I was even more surprised when I clicked on the links and was lead to emails I had sent to the distribution list over 2 years earlier. Further review identified that all of the discussions for the entire club for the past 10 years were available to the search engines. In addition, since the discussion list is available to both club members and non-members, literally anyone who wants to can gain access to member information and communications.

Now, on its face it might seem that communications on social events, sporting events and boat maintenance are harmless. But let’s dig deeper into what information is being made available to the world. By following the links, anyone who might be interested can identify list members by first and last name, email addresses, what events they might be attending and when, what boat they own, what trips they are planning to take, what type of alcohol they prefer and what condition they were in at the last party. Get the picture?

You are likely aware of all the privacy issues surrounding Facebook and how people are losing jobs over things being said there, comments made behind what they thought were closed walls. If Sue happens to mention that Johnny was really plastered at the club last night and an employer or potential employer happens to find the comment, it’s possible that someone might lose a potential job opportunity, or even worse, lose their job.

Another potential scenario is that one of the many unscrupulous characters on the web figures out how to crawl the emails, gets a list of who and when people are attending races or events and then goes and robs their houses.

The list goes on.

So, back to my initial questions, if you answered yes, yes and no, meaning you use club email distribution lists and you don’t know who has access to the emails, then I suggest you do a little homework.

The simplest solution is to check with the club’s e-mail administrator and simply ask, “Are our e-mails open to the Internet?” If you need a username and password to login to view the conversations, then chances are that your communications are secure. If not, then the club has some security measures to put in place.

You might also want to inquire about the club’s privacy policy, which should be readily available on their website. If such a policy doesn’t exist, then you might want to offer to assist in creating one. A privacy policy is a relatively new business requirement and not a lot of organizations know how to go about creating one. If you simply Google “[club type] privacy policy,” you will find plenty of examples from which to start. Simply modify an existing one to suit your needs or combine information from several different policies.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulates and oversees business privacy laws and policies that impact consumers. It is your club’s legal responsibility to take steps to properly secure or dispose of the information you provide them.

In the case of my personal club membership, the issue is that there is no password protection on the e-mail discussions. The situation has been presented to the club’s board and I am confident they will resolve it quickly. If you find yourself in a similar situation, hopefully you can be proactive in finding a solution before someone incurs harm because their personal information was made public.

The post Are Club Memberships Compromising Your Privacy and Security? appeared first on yourCMTO.

We’ve all heard of services that offer identitfy theft protection services for individuals. While they aren’t marketed as such, these services are really offering data breach protection. Their ability to monitor your identity and scan for identity theft is, in essence, pro-active protection. These services are actively monitoring your data with the goal of identifying a breach and notifying you asap in order to mitigate and remediate the damage.

Subscribing to an identity theft protection service is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. No one knows where or when the next data vulnerability will strike and what the consequences might be. Just as you have health insurance to help you get through the next illness or injury,  identity theft protection is your safeguard against a data breach that could cause you serious harm.

Is Your Business Next?

The same holds true for your business. If you’re not protecting your Internet-access material, then you are simply locking the front door on your company’s sensitive data but leaving the windows wide open. Every device your company uses that’s open to the Internet (including employee-owned devices) is vulnerable to a data breach.

According to a recent study conducted by Verizon, hacking and malware account for 72% and 54%, respectively, of data breaches experienced by small businesses.  Small to medium-sized businesses are at a disadvantage due to inadequate technology staff resources and reliance on security set up by vendors and other third parties, which can be fatal. Data breaches can wipe you out financially or ruin your company’s reputation.

Even if you have a data breach response plan in place, you could be overwhelmed by what actions your business is required to take. The U.S. has 47 state-specific data-breach notification laws in effect, and they are all different, according to channelnomics.com. If you offer services or have customers in more than one state, the compliance costs to follow each state’s legal notification requirements could be significant. In addition to the notification laws differing between states, so are the follow-up requirements, such as providing police reports and free credit reports.

It’s important to have a business identity theft protection plan that addresses these issues thoroughly.

Make Secure Passwords a Priority

While security mishaps are often beyond your control, you don’t want to make it easy for the thieves. The best insurance against your next data breach is to implement some basic security best practices. Make sure to

• Use secure WiFi when accessing sensitive information online
• Use available security measures like two-step account verification
• Create strong  and unique passwords

I am fascinated by the number of friends and clients who still use the same password on every site, or write all of their passwords down and carry them in their wallet (the photo to the right is from one of my customers – I’ve blurred everything out for his protection). Guess what happens if you lose your wallet? Not only are you out the login information, but if your wallet is stolen, then you have just given someone the keys to every aspect of your life. If you aren’t currently using password management software, then please start now.

Since online merchants and secure websites aren’t doing a very good job of keeping our data safe, despite claims to the contrary, the best defense against your next data breach is to make sure that whatever logins are stolen are both strong and unique. The better password management systems will create the passwords for you. And, the best part about this software is that the only password you have to remember is the password that unlocks the software. Now, isn’t that a lot easier?

As it is said, the best defense is a good offense. By arming yourself and your business with the right protection, tools and strategies, you will dramatically minimize your risk of becoming a victim to the next data breach.

http://teriross.brandyourself.com

The post Danger Ahead: Get Ready for Your Next Data Breach appeared first on yourCMTO.

What I have learned over the years is that the award for the most painful software upgrade experiences consistently goes to Adobe. I vividly remember the experience of upgrading to Abobe CS3, which required a seven  hour technical support call. While one might commend Adobe for their commitment to solving my problem, it just shouldn’t take seven hours to upgrade desktop software.

When I received a solicitation today for a 15% discount on an upgrade to Adobe Acrobat Xl Pro, I decided it was time to take the plunge. As would be expected, the online purchase was a simple process. I received an email with my serial number and a link to the web page where I could download the software.

I followed the instructions and installed the software 3 times. Each time my computer told me the installation was successful. Each time, when I went to launch the software, it was nowhere to be found on my computer.

It took me about 20 minutes to find the adobe technical support options, at which time I opted for live chat. What happened next, as detailed on the chat script, felt like an episode out of Laurel and Hardy.

• Hi, there are 3 customer(s) in line ahead of you. We’ll be with you as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.
• Hi, there are 2 customer(s) in line ahead of you. We’ll be with you as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.
• Hi, there are 1 customer(s) in line ahead of you. We’ll be with you as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.
• Hi, there are 2 customer(s) in line ahead of you. We’ll be with you as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.
• Hi, there are 1 customer(s) in line ahead of you. We’ll be with you as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.

You are now chatting with ‘Rakesh’

Rakesh: Hello. Welcome to Adobe Technical Support.

Rakesh: Please allow me a moment while I look into your account & verify the details.

Rakesh: We appreciate your patience and regret the inconvenience due to high wait time.

Rakesh: As I understand, you have installed Acrobat XI Pro 3 times, but the software is not listed on your computer, is that right?

Teri: yes

Rakesh: Thank you for confirming.

Rakesh: I’ll be glad to help you with that information.

Rakesh: May I have the serial number for Acrobat XI Pro software?

Teri: XXXX-0XX0-7781-56XX-XXXXX

Rakesh: Thank you for the serial number.

Rakesh: Teri, do you have any other version of Acrobat software installed on your computer?

Teri: Yes. Acrobat 9 Pro

Rakesh: Okay.

Rakesh: May I place you on hold for the next 2-3 minutes so that I can research on this issue?

Teri: yes

Rakesh: Thank you.

Rakesh: Thank you for your patience.

Rakesh: Teri, when you tried installing Acrobat XI Pro, did you get any error message?

Teri: No. No error message. The installer says the installation was successful, but the application is not on my hard drive.

Rakesh: Okay.

Rakesh: Please open Spotlight and type, Acrobat and check if it shows Acrobat XI Pro.

Teri: I did that previously. The only app that shows up is v 9

Rakesh: Okay.

Rakesh: Please navigate to: Applications/Utilities/Adobe Installers and check if that lists Acrobat XI Pro.

Teri: It does NOT list it.

Rakesh: Alright.

Rakesh: Teri, in this case, please uninstall the Acrobat 9 and then try installing Acrobat XI Pro.

Teri: Doing so now

Rakesh: Sure

Teri: I have reinstalled, with the same results. The installer says “Install Akamai NetSession Interface,” not Adobe Acrobat. Is it possible they gave me the wrong installer?

Rakesh: You need to download the Akamai NetSession Interface first. Then, you need to double click on the .dmg file which is downloaded to start the installation.

Teri: That’s exactly what I did … 4 times now

Rakesh: In this case, I’ll provide you the direct download link. Please download the software and install it as trial. Then launch the software and enter your serial number to activate the license.

Teri: OK. Thanks

Rakesh: You’re welcome.

Rakesh: First, I’ll provide you the link to open Lightroom 5 trial version page. Please open that page and it will connect you to Adobe servers to use the direct download link.

Rakesh: Once you open Lightroom 5 trial page, do not click on “Download now”.

Rakesh: Click here to open Lightroom 5 trial page:

Rakesh: Let me know once you have opened the above page.

Teri: I have opened the page. It states it is for a free trial of Photoshop Lightroom. Why can’t I just use the publicly available download at http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=acrobat_pro&loc=us&promoid=KHXXV ?

Rakesh: You need to open Lightroom 5 page and it will connect you to Adobe servers to use the direct download link.

Rakesh: You don’t have to download Lightroom 5 software. You just have to open that page

Teri: The Download Now button is the only link on the page and it is a download for Photoshop

Rakesh: Just to make sure, did you open Lightroom 5 trial page?

Teri: There is no other option on the page. Nothing else to open, just a download button for a free trial of Photoshop Lightroom 5, not Acrobat Xl

Rakesh: Click here to download Acrobat XI Pro for MAC:

The link I was provided lead to

At this point, I decided that technical support was a waste of my time, so I simply replied;

Teri: Thank you.

Rakesh: The download and installation should start automatically.

Rakesh: Since you were facing issues with that, you can use the direct download link and it will work perfectly.

Rakesh: You can install the software and if you get any error message, please do contact us and we will help you further with.

Rakesh: Thank you for contacting Adobe. Good Bye.

This chat session has ended.
Thank you for contacting Adobe.

The entire process, which including wait time both before and during the chat took about 90 minutes. After the chat, I simply went to the publicly available web page, download the free trial and entered my registration number. Problem solved.

A few minutes later I received the following email from Adobe:

Adobe Case Update

Your Case Number:0184877421

Case Description:Chat:Installation issue (CH97229227)

This email is in response to support case #0184877421 submitted by Teri Ross.

To respond to this update or review your case history, log in to the Adobe Support Portal online and look for your case number in the “recent activity” section. Should you need to send us additional information, you can do so by opening the case and submitting your update.

 If you have difficulties logging in, consult the Adobe ID and Membership FAQ.

 Thank you,

 Adobe Customer Care

As you can see, the link to the Adobe Support Portal leads to

Adobe’s technical support is consistently as bad as it gets. Note to self. Don’t ever, ever, ever upgrade CS5.

Follow the discussion on my social networks on LinkedIn, and Twitter.

The post Adobe Technical Support Continues to be a Joke appeared first on yourCMTO.

With market forces creating a marketing shift from loyalty to influence, today’s marketers must now target audiences whose behaviors and preferences can be known and predicted with remarkable precision.

The interdisciplinary nature of the skills required for this new breed of marketing officers are demonstrated in the job opportunities. According to research conducted by Lizzy Wilkins, Data Scientist at Nina Hale, the educational requirements identified for recent job descriptions are quite diverse;

The diversity sought in skills for these job opportunities reads like a Sudoku puzzle: computational algorithms, statistical methodologies, communicate findings, statistical techniques, collect data, refine data sources, SQL, Python, PHP, R, Matlab, SAS, Map, Hadoop, Hive, C, database knowledge, market positioning, data strategy, enterprise data strategy identification, machine learning, big data, data mining, user behavior, A/B testing, analytics, reporting and surveying … to name a few.

Nowhere was this diversity more apparent than at the recent Big Data conference hosted by MinneAnalytics at the Carlson School of Management at the University of MN. A review of the job titles of the over 850 attendees confirms the multidisciplinary nature of the work. That the presentations targeted many of the disciplines listed above, and then some, is but one indication that this is still an emerging practice receiving a lot of attention.

What is Big Data in Marketing?

So, what does it really mean? Within the context of marketing, what are we referring to when we say “Big Data?” Here too, the definition varies by business objectives, technology providers and end users.

Gartner defines it as a move away from the concept of a single enterprise data warehouse, replacing it with a multi-system approach that leverages content management, data warehouses, and data marts, that offers a more efficient, logical approach to business and customer intelligence. According to Dixon Jones, Marketing Director for Majestic SEO, its about the explosion in APIs that will create data that enables new products and creates new markets. Mark Simpson, President of Maxymiser defines it as the use of data that provides targeted individual experiences—at the right time—in order to respond to savvy consumers’ needs. Lizzy Wilkins at Nina Hale identifies it as a hacking of human behavior for purposes of delivering better business results.

No matter how it is defined, the goal in using big data is consistent. Rather than analyzing data in a vacuum from a certain marketing channel, such as social media or email marketing, enterprises will seek to cross-pollinate data across these silos to create a more holistic view of brand sentiment and customer demand within the market. They will start blending their reliance on transactional-based metrics like conversion rate, cost-per-action, and return on ad spend with a focus on the customer and customer lifetime value.

A consistent message heard is that it’s not about “big data,” it’s about the “right data.” It’s about getting the right data to the right people at the right time so they can make the decisions necessary to get the quick wins. It’s about creating a measurement strategy, identifying the correct key performance indicators, integrating your datasets, properly analyzing the data and ultimately improving both prospect and customer interactions with your business.

The operative here is “properly analyze,” which brings us back to the new breed of CMOs. They will either have to possess these data analysis skills, or be sure that they have the wherewithal to hire the necessary team.

The Drivers Behind Big Data in Marketing

The primary drivers behind the trend in big data are social media and the emerging omni-channel; a form of multi-channel retailing that is concentrated on a more a seamless approach to the consumer experience through all available shopping channels.

With social media putting control of brands in the hands of the consumer, and the ability for those consumers to interact with those brands 24/7/365 across a multitude of marketing channels and devices, the consumer is now leaving a wealth of data “breadcrumbs.” Those breadcrumbs are providing valuable real-time insights into consumer behaviors that are as good as gold when it comes to building marketing strategies and campaigns.

Marketers are now faced with the task of analyzing the data and altering their marketing channels and strategies based on the intelligence within the data. They can no longer blindly follow the so-called current marketing trends. Marketers need to constantly test and analyze their marketing efforts, in the context of their specific key performance indicators and business objectives, as a means of identifying what is and isn’t working for them.

As John Wanamaker, pioneer of the department store was famous for saying “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” That was the industrial age. As the current technology age advances, it is only natural that insights gained from the technology. and more specifically the data, be leveraged into more advanced business intelligence. With the rise of social media and the omni-channel, the data being provided is about human behavior. If your company isn’t able to leverage that data into actionable business intelligence, then you are fighting a serious uphill battle.

As identified at the Big Data conference, the challenge for most companies is in finding the right talent to meet the market demands. Big employers such as Target and Medtronic are complaining that the students coming out of the schools aren’t properly trained and students are complaining they aren’t getting the education they need to meet the current marketing job requirements. As a result, marketing internships in big data analysis are in great supply and demand.

The challenge moving forward will be in both uniting the field as well as in getting the stake-holders the information they need when they need it. Those challenges are creating opportunities for the new breed of CMOs who can identify what they want to track, the best way to collect and store the data, and can then identify the business opportunities from within the data.

If your company is still relying on disparate data warehouses for consumer insights, not participating in social media, or simply looking at your web analytics to identify the number of visitors and the time spent on your website, then I would suggest you look to see if your CMO has the skills required to take your business to the next level.

Follow the discussion on my social networks on LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter.

The post Big Data in Marketing appeared first on yourCMTO.

A client who had recently purchased a well-established B2C parts supply business was seeking to expand his marketing and advertising efforts. As a mail order catalog business started in the eighties, the previous owner wasn’t particularly tech savvy and left the new owner with absolutely no marketing data on which to make any educated online marketing decisions.

My research identified that we could reach 333,920 of his targeted prospects via Facebook advertising. They could be targeted by geo-location, age, sex, interest in the sport/industry his parts supply, language and prior experience with the brand; meaning they weren’t already Facebook Fans.

Being relatively new to Facebook, with limited resources behind the initiative, the brand only had 82 Facebook Fans when we began. I decided that the first thing we had to do was to raise that number dramatically. With a budget of $10 per day, my client and his staff were giddy with glee when they found the number of Fans growing at a rate of approximately 5 per hour/ 24 hours a day. There were internal bets on both the rate and sustainability of growth.

We reviewed the many claims of false Facebook profiles and suspicious Fan bases reported by others. In making a spot check of the new Fans, we determined that these new Fans were in fact participants in the targeted sport. Even if a certain percentage of the fans were bogus profiles, the numbers were still compelling enough to warrant the advertising tactic a success.

With a feather in my cap, I decided to be a sport and invest another $10 per day in their Sponsored Stories advertising opportunity. The Sponsored Story identifies the same brand message as coming from the Fans who have liked the brand, as opposed to coming from the brand itself. It is targeting the friends of the brand’s Fans.

As with our first campaign, it took about 18 hours for the ad to be approved. Recognizing that the Sponsored Stories campaign had a smaller target audience (a subset of the initial target), we weren’t surprised to find a slower growth rate in additional new fans. That being said, the click through rate of 1.19% was nearly twice that of the initial campaign, so the results were certainly respectable.

This is where I had to remind my giddy client that a Facebook Fan is not a business objective, and that we now needed to focus on turning all of these new Fans into paying customers.

Facebook Advertising Start to Success Program

The Monday following the launch of our two Facebook Like campaigns, I received both a phone call and an email from a member of the Facebook Client Partner team soliciting me to sign up for their Start to Success Program. Available to advertisers who had spent less than $500 on Facebook advertising and who were willing to commit to a $50/day advertising budget, the program is designed to offer live one-to-one assistance with Facebook advertising.

We weren’t able to connect until the next day, by which time I had experienced the frustration of trying to unsuccessfully launch yet a third ad campaign, this one designed to drive traffic to the client’s website, as opposed to simply garnering Facebook Fans.

We worked via WebEx so that the Facebook representative and I were looking at the same screen. With her support, we both revised the ad with the link to the client’s website I had developed earlier as well as created an additional ad campaign. This campaign was for a discount coupon at a consumer trade show in Michigan starting the end of the week. For this fourth ad campaign, the objective was to offer a discount coupon to the same target audience, but only those who lived in Michigan. The coupon would be claimed from the clients website, so this campaign also included a link away from Facebook, as opposed to the initial two campaigns that were designed to drive Facebook Fans and kept the traffic within Facebook.

From here, the experience digressed into a situation I commonly refer to as FUBAR (I’ll let you look up this military slang if you dont know what it means). Facebook would send me an email stating the ads had been approved, yet when I went to the Facebook Advertising Dashboard, it showed that my ads weren’t running. When I logged into the Dashboard using my personal Facebook login and I accessed the account as an Admin, the information I was presented was dramatically different from the information I saw when I logged into Facebook using my clients login. This information was also different from the information I saw when I was logged in using WebEx on the Facebook Client Partners computer.

With each new revelation I would contact the Facebook advertising representative, who would advise me that she was forwarding my information on to their technical department. I also wrote into Facebook using the link on their advertising page, and received no response. With money in hand, a looming event deadline and a sales representative, the only solution offered by Facebook was the recommendation that I try to create yet another ad.

Really? That’s the best you can do Facebook? You have failed, with the support of your marketing and IT departments to get an advertising campaign operating in four full business days and the best you can do is offer to have me waste more of my client’s money and my time to go back to square one and try it again? As I like to say, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Facebook Offers

Being ever the optimist, and not one wanting to allow software to beat me, I remember a solicitation received the week before for the new Facebook Offers program.

That they are offering to let me try it for free makes it a no-brainer. That is, until I discover that the only options for targeting these offers are to people who like your page and to people who like your page and their friends. Why wouldn’t they enable the ability to geo-target as they do for the rest of their marketing opportunities? Without that capability, Facebook Offers are of no value for offline event marketing. Oops. Someone didn’t think that through.

Unfortunately, one week after the experiment, neither of the two advertising campaigns designed to drive traffic to the website were running. I reached out to the Facebook marketing representative, who advised me six hours later that the “little bug” in my account had been fixed.

I looked at the account five days after this response, and found the following stats:

Facebook “Likes” and “Sponsored Stories” Advertising Results (Client Site)

Facebook Advertising for Website Traffic (Client Site)

Both of these campaigns had identical target audiences, budgets, time frames, creative and campaign settings. And yet, the ads seeking Facebook Likes had a campaign reach of 84,823, while the campaign reach for the ads seeking a click to the client’s website had a campaign reach of 308. The CPC campaign for Likes generated a $150 ad spend, while the campaign for clicks to the website generated no clicks and no ad spend. It kind of makes you think the Facebook Edgerank algorithm is VERY heavily weighted for presenting ads designed to keep visitors on the platform. Is this going to make shareholders happy?

I am confident that I am not the only one having these technology, reach and support issues with Facebook advertising. I am also confident that some advertisers are having no issues. It’s not easy to build an advertising platform that supports the myriad of operating systems, browsers, file formats and permission requirements of online marketers. I am confident Facebook will resolve these issues. Whether or not they can do it fast enough to satisfy their prospects, customers and investors remains to be seen.

The good news is that while writing this article, the client has received 11 more Likes on his Facebook page. The company now has 1,914 Fans, and the number continues to increase. We are also seeing a sharp increase in traffic to the website and have even made some sales. The conversion rate from Facebook is nearly 3x that of Google traffic. Great results that weren’t easy to obtain.

The post Our Facebook Advertising Experiment appeared first on yourCMTO.

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This fire hose of data, if collected and analyzed properly, can be a treasure trove of marketing intelligence. To quote Matt Meents (@meents). Managing Partner of Magnet 360, “Big Data is becoming cliché.” As Jeff Dachis (@jeffdachis) CEO of Dachis Group puts it, “You don’t ‘do’ big data. You use data to derive insights. It doesn’t matter if it’s big data or little data, it has to be the right data and accurate data.

Jeff and Matt were co-presenters at the recent MIMA breakfast in Minneapolis, MN. Their exploration into the use of data in scaling social media provided valuable insights and opportunities.

The Big Data Problem

The challenge created by social media is that the data it provides consists of unstructured conversations. Aggregating that unstructured data with structured data and trying to draw meaningful insights within the confines of corporate silos is proving to be a political problem. How do you get disparate data and marketing teams to collaborate and not feel that their turf is being stepped on?

Step number one is to identify your business objectives with the use of social media. It is those objectives that will define the data sets required. The data sets required will identify the tools you need, including data visualization tools. Without a strategy and the proper tools, chances are high that the data will not amount to much more than noise, which will make it difficult to glean actionable insights.

Some of the high level insights that companies will want to identify with their data include:

• Social content – What content is getting shared the most and what topics should we be writing about?
• Social customer care – Where and how are we offering the best customer support and what issues are being identified?
• Value of earned media – How have our social media efforts offered value to the business?
• Optimization of paid and earned media – How can we improve the ROI on both our corporate social efforts as well as the social amplification of our followers?
• Value of earned media via amplification – What is the value of the shares, likes, follows, etc?
• Real-time marketing – How can we take advantage of current trends, news, etc?

Matt and Jeff are suggesting that the key to leveraging social media and social data is to start small. By analyzing smaller data sets of the bigger sets, it will be easier to identify the insights that might be garnered within individual silos. Once those insights are shared with other silos, it becomes easier to build a collaborative team approach to analyzing bigger sets of data that can identify larger insights and therefore bigger results.

Enabling Social Media

Engaging effectively in social media marketing is not as simple as enabling a Twitter or Facebook account. Without the development of an engagement strategy that identifies specific goals, tactics and key performance indicators (KPIs), there will be no measurement strategy and therefore no data with which to identify if your efforts are successful or not.

In addition to strategy, other considerations include:

• Budget – How much do we want to invest in social media?
• Content – What are we going to publish? i.e. articles, videos, podcast, infographics, etc.
• Governance – Who are the stakeholders?
• Policies and procedures – How are we going to engage, what is allowed, what is not allowed, what tools are we using, etc?
• Channel identification – Where do we want to engage?
• Management – Who has ownership, who on the team is going to participate?
• Training – Who needs to be trained and on what?
• Analysis – What data do we want to collect, what tools do we need, what are our KPIs?

Scaling Social Media

As defined by Matt, social media isn’t an advertising channel. Social media represents a shift from brands as mass communicators to a mass of communicators who speak about brands. As such, treating social media like another channel with a team of brand evangelists or a community manager is not an effective strategy for driving meaningful engagements.

Matt suggests a strategy that identifies consumer advocates to engage with their peers; have them tell two friends who tell two friends, etc. This approach requires companies to identify their power advocates, mobilize them and activate them. This creates a scalable social media model.

Which brings us to the subject of social monitoring. While monitoring will identify the power advocates, the bigger picture and ultimate goal is both measuring and controlling the performance of your social media. By collecting and analyzing data that is in alignment with your social media goals, companies will be in the position of not just monitoring what is being said, but driving the social conversations.

Follow the discussion on my social networks on LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter.

http://teriross.brandyourself.com

The post Scaling Social Media Using Big Data appeared first on yourCMTO.

These endorsements are then displayed on profiles under the “Skills” section, where photos of the connections that endorsed you appear next to the skills you claim to have.

Before I start throwing darts at this new feature, I want to say that I am a huge fan of LinkedIn. I have been a member for over 6 years. I have a premium membership, I chair a group for LinkedMinnesota, I spend at least 4 hours per week on the site, and I have found tremendous value in it for both me personally as well as for my clients.

That being said, this new feature has me scratching my head. What does it mean when you endorse someone using a one or two word descriptor? When I endorse a connection for “Fashion,” what exactly does that mean? The connection that presented this “skill” to me is a patternmaker, so in the context of her professional skills, this person knows fashion from a technical perspective. She creates fashion patterns. However, I am confident that clothing designers, fashion editors, models and the like will all make the same “Fashion” claims on their LinkedIn profiles. If we endorse them, what specifically are we endorsing?

Déjà vu

This new feature reminds me of the early days of the web, when grabbing generic domain names was all the rage. There was a gold rush on one and two word domains that could capture a broad audience on a popular search term and pretty much guarantee a lot of traffic.

Let’s take, for example, ski.com. When it launched back in May of 1998, it claimed to be “THE HOTTEST SNOWSPORT SITE IN THE WORLD… If it involves sliding down a mountain in any way, shape, or form, you will find out about it here.” By 2003 it provided information on ski resorts, snow reports, skier forums, ski travel, ski shopping and real estate. By 2006, the site had become “The Inside Track on Mountain Vacations.”

What happened? While I don’t have first hand knowledge, it’s not hard to figure out that a website can’t be all things to all people. As competitors arose, the site had to become more targeted in what it offered to people searching for “ski.” What is the intent when someone searches on the term “ski?” Do they want a place to ski, to learn to ski, to buy a ski? Who knows? As web users gradually learned to be more descriptive in their search terms, and define their intent by using longer search phrases, the value of these simple domains diminished.

LinkedIn Endorsements vs. Recommendations

So, back to my LinkedIn connection, the patternmaker who knows “Fashion.” If I endorse her for that term, and someone finds her on LinkedIn for that term, what does my endorsement say? Why is this one word endorsement a better solution to the “Recommendations” that LinkedIn has been supporting for years? With recommendations, you have the opportunity to endorse a connection where not only is the relationship defined by the companies you both work for and what the relationship is, but the person providing the recommendation can identify a person’s top qualities as well as explain why they are making the recommendation.

There are more than a few issues with the implementation of this new “Endorsement” feature;

• From within one’s own profile, users are force fed the connections to endorse,
• Users are fed the same connections over and over and over again until their connection’s list of “skills” is exhausted,
• Users can only view and endorse four connections at a time from their profile, and
• If endorsing directly from a connection’s profile, users have a tendency to simply click on the skill at the top; the one with the most endorsements.

I am seeing people endorse me for skills they have never seen me use. Yes, I have skills in email marketing. As a chief marketing technologist, is that my primary skill? I certainly hope not. However, according to LinkedIn Endorsements, it’s at the top of the list.

So, before LinkedIn goes on to fix these issues, I have to ask, is there really any value in this new feature? I would love to hear what others have to say.

Oh, and as a case in point, if you go to Fashion.com, you will see that the domain is available for sale.

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