Has social media become so mainstream as a marketing/PR tool that it has lost the excitement of being shiny and new? Are the early adopters really starting to move on to newer and “shinier” things?

Perhaps – but I happen to think that now is the time when social media marketing will truly thrive and the really interesting stuff is just starting to appear.

So what do I mean by “shiny and new?”

There’s an interesting trend you’ll find in some slices of the marketing profession: Shiny New Thing Syndrome. It’s not something I’m going to bag on, because it can be fantastic, rewarding, even necessary. For all the many marketers and PR professionals that seem to be lagging adopters of new tools and concepts like social media, there’s a far more visible group that is laser-focused on being out in front, spotting the new trends, and leading change.

When that new stuff goes mainstream, their attention shifts to whatever’s next on the horizon while the rest of the industry settles down to developing best practices, refining tactics, and so on. In short, they are focused on whatever is shiny and new, and when the shine wears off, so does their interest.

I was inspired to write about this as Tac Anderson makes this point in a post discussing what happens “When Social Media Stops Being Shiny“:

Social media has made the big time. We’ve crossed the chasm, we’re mainstream, people are finally taking us seriously. We were right and they were wrong…

Every trend, even really big ones like social media, hit  point where in order to be sustained the early adopters have to step out of the way and let people who don’t get easily distracted manage processes and create best practices. Things early adopters aren’t typically that good at.

I agree that for the most part, social media has crossed the chasm. It’s almost impossible to find a marketing, ad, or PR campaign that *doesn’t* include a social media element to it. User submitted content contests, “like” buttons, Facebook tab promos, etc are basically everywhere – many well planned and executed, many not.

From the early adopter standpoint, the point isn’t in if the medium has been perfected (far from it), but that it has simply gone mainstream. They are off to the next shiny, which in all likelihood sits somewhere between your smartphone and a cloud. It reminds me when blogging suddenly became passe, and Twitter all the rage.

Given all that, back to my opening point…

Personally, while I *love* the shiny and new, I also think that some of the most exciting stuff is yet to come in social media marketing.

Why?

Because there’s still a ton of experimentation happening that is well beyond the refinement of yesterday’s ideas. The discipline itself is professionalizing, and lots of incredibly smart people from diverse backgrounds are flooding into it. Big brands, having started to buy into social media as a viable marketing channel, are increasingly willing to bet bigger dollars on it. The tools and networks we use are continuing to grow and evolve at ever faster rates.

Also, the concept of social media marketing is itself extending outwards to embrace the shiny and new, as we can see with campaigns built around Foursquare, SCVNGR, and (soon) Facebook Places and those mixing mobile ads with social calls-to-action.

Throw it all together in one big, creative pot and all signs point to some pretty amazing things on the horizon for social media marketing. I love reading the thoughts of those who dive headlong into the shiny and new – as I myself do fairly constantly – but I’m also looking forward to seeing how social media marketing is going to mature now that some serious talent and resources are being focused on it. Good times ahead.

Photo by marfis75 on Flickr via CC License

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In case you hadn’t heard, Facebook launched yet another category-redefining feature last week. This time they shook up the still-emerging world of geo-location services, where buzz-worthy startups like Foursquare, Gowalla and Booyah (MyTown) had been steadily and somewhat quietly testing models, adding features, and building user bases.

Not anymore. While the jury is still out on the long-term impact of Facebook Places, one thing is clear: in one shot, Places took the idea of ”checking in” and made it both universal and effectively generic. With instant access to 500 million active users and near ubiquity on smartphones everywhere, Facebook Places has turned checking in from a cool and unique feature into a utility on par with sharing or liking.

Does that mean Foursquare and all the other pioneers who also offer geo-location check-ins are headed for Friendster status? Not necessarily, but it is clear that just offering a service to say  “hey I’m here!” or even “I was here more than anybody else!” is no longer sufficient to make users stand up and care enough to keep using your service.

Read more…

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Small business owner? Budding entreprenuer? At all curious about the practical side of social media? Live pretty much anywhere remotely near North Carolina?

Then I’d recommend signing up for the upcoming ConvergeSouth 2010 conference in Greensboro NC, October 1-2. It’s less than 100 bucks to attend ($10 if you’re a student!), as it’s organized through volunteer labor for the benefit of the regional business and creative communities. This is not a profit-seeking venture by any means.

Yes, I’m a volunteer, presenter and moderator for this year’s event, so I have a vested interest in getting everyone I can to show up (my ego hurts talking to empty seats). My specific sessions will be announced shortly, as they are still taking shape, but if either one comes off remotely as interesting as I hope, they’ll be some of the most fun I’ve ever had at a conference.

I say that with all modesty: They’ll rock, outshone only by all the other great sessions from Brent Payne (Tribune Co’s SEO Director), Wayne Sutton, Jeffrey Cohen, Jeff SanGeorge, and Tammy Colson among others; a startup Pitch Camp organized by John Cass; and a bevy of local politicians talking about how the Web affects politics.

@ConvergeSouth10 is the longtime labor of love of @SuePolinsky, and has a stellar group of volunteers working on it this year. Come join what’s been called the South’s original social media event, support the Piedmont-Triad social media community, and maybe learn something along the way.

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Jeff Bullas posted today on the “6 Reasons Not to Have a Facebook Page” (via @JasonFalls) and focuses on some of the very real risks and challenges:

1. Facebook own your page not you ..think of it as renting or cyber squatting if you don’t comply with their terms and conditions your Facebook page can be terminated with the push of one button. If you have a blog on your own domain and self hosted then you own it and have total control.

2. Facebook is not forever. As with all trends it will fade away (eg AOL) or morph into something else as the Web continues to evolve.

…

Good stuff, but I believe it focuses on the technical without addressing the *real* number one reason why you shouldn’t create a Facebook page for your brand (wait for it…):

You can’t define the VALUE you will bring to your fans.

People fan a brand page on Facebook largely in order to derive some kind of value from it, be it practical or emotional. That value could be any number of things – access to exclusive content, membership in the cool kids club, early bird discounts and special offers, technical support, first word on new product announcements, or even behind the scenes looks at how the sausage is really made.

If you can’t articulate which one of those you will provide to your fans, then you should step back and put the keyboard down until you can. If your content posting plan (you *do* have one, right?) doesn’t clearly make the case for why people should become a fan (and remain one), then you need to consider a serious redo.

Already have a Facebook page for your company? Then take a fresh look at from the perspective of fan value. What are they getting out of it? Beyond “because they like us” can you clearly define why anyone should Like your page?

No? Then get to work.

Photo by rene_berlin on Flickr via CC License.

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It may be a week late, but here’s my entry into the “Social Fresh Charlotte Recap Post” ring. There are already a ton of great ones, collected in places like here and here to start.

What did I take away? First off, the conference was extremely well organized, so hats off to @jakrose and team for pulling it all together. Second, it’s clear from the energy, enthusiasm, and experiences of the attendees and presenters that the field of social media marketing is alive, thriving (despite the recession) and rapidly congealing into a focused marketing, communications, and support discipline. It was fun to be a part of all that.

I took notes on a bunch of good sessions, but for the sake of time I’ll share my thoughts on just two for now (self-servingly, one of those I was a part of):

SESSION: Bert Dumars (@bwdumars) – Building Social Media Across Multiple Departments

Bert is a walking case study in how large companies with multiple consumer brands are handling (successfully) the challenges of social media marketing. His talk reflected a lot of what I see in our own clients – a centralized set of social media domain experts working closely with the brand marketing leads to incorporate social into their existing marketing strategies. Bert shared a wealth of good examples and I ended up furiously taking notes to share back home.

What I took away:

• User-generated content (UGC) gets Rubbermaid the most mileage. Interested concepts like the Sharpie Doodle contest over on SharpieUncapped are great examples of how you can tap into the underlying passions of your existing customers to create a stronger, more personalized connection.
• Well-moderated communities thrive. Something of an intuitive finding that jives with what my own experience tells me, but nice to hear what Rubbermaid has gone through. Bert noted that as the Sharpie Facebook page grew past 1 million fans, the time needed to clean out spam and moderate the comments grew dramatically. However, the faster they cleaned out the junked, the faster they found their fan numbers grow. People appreciate a well-moderated discussion space.
• Social media marketing strategy is a component, not the be all end all. An oft repeated mantra, but one that people often forget. You need a marketing or brand strategy that incorporates social media, not the other way around.
• Rubbermaid is selectively using social media in the brands that make the most sense. Sharpie, definitely. Papermate or Uniball? Not so much. Despite all the attention, social media marketing just isn’t a great fit for many brands.

SESSION: Social Agencies, A New Model (Panel)

I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussing how agencies are adapting to and pitching social media, involving panelists from four agencies each with a different angle on social media: Steve Parker (@levelwing), James Andrews (@keyinfluencer), Ted Shelton (@tshelton) and myself (@kevinbriody).

Though I’ll have to rely on anyone who was in the audience to tell how it really went, I think from the perspective of a panelists the flow went pretty well and we covered quite a bit of ground, ranging from general thoughts and trends to specifics like pricing agency services (by project, not by the hour, was the unanimous opinion). Hats off to Steve Parker for stepping up at the last minute to moderate.

What I took away:

While I often describe my employer, Ignite Social Media, as a “pure” social media marketing agency, that distinction is a lot less clear to me now after talking with Steve, Ted, and James. The lines between social media marketing and direct, relationship, ad, PR, etc are blurring so fast that it seems we’re more accurately described as a marketing agency with a special focus on social media as a channel and toolset.

After all, we have an analytics team, a media buying team (from search to display to social), full creative and technical teams…all in addition to people doing strategy, blog outreach, new content, and so on. Ted rightly called me on the fact that while we focus on the social media domain space, our capabilities make us more of a full service marketing shop than I would previously thought. It’s definitely interesting to be involved in the evolution of a whole field of marketing…

I also want to call out Amber Naslund (@ambercadabra) and Dave Thomas (@davidbthomas) both put out some great stuff. I wrote a bit about Amber’s presentation last week, nothing yet about Dave’s, something I hope to remedy soon (especially as he’s moving to a new role which I’m sure will put him solidly on the speaker circuit).

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In short, no. Now, an explanation of the cryptic headline question. I’ve seen assertions made periodically that in order to be a legitimate and effective social media director (or manager/practitioner/insert job title), you absolutely need to be very visible and active on a personal level across various social media channels. Strange assertions like:

• You must have been an active blogger for at least 5 years;
• You must have at least x,xxx followers on Twitter;
• You need to have been a speaker at some of the cool kid conferences.

And so it goes.

While any of these arguments may be a positive point to consider in someone’s background when deciding how qualified they are to be leading social media marketing initiatives in an organization, not one of them should be considered a “must have.” At best they are an indication that the person in question is smart and enthusiastic at marketing themselves – nothing to scoff at, but certainly not a sign that they understand how to effectively integrate social media marketing techniques into a multi-channel product launch campaign.

Some of the best social media practitioners I know – the people who are deep in the trenches doing the work, executing campaigns, crafting the stuff everyone else writes glowing posts about – are simply not very active on an individual level in social media. Sure they have Twitter accounts, Facebook logins, and so on, but they aren’t out there focused on gaining thousands of Twitter followers (for themselves at least), posting personal webcasts to YouTube, or authoring authoritative personal blogs for the last X years.

Rather, they’re busy as hell behind the scenes doing all that for their company or clients. They are the engines that drive all the wonderful social media campaign case studies the rest of us read and tweet about. They may not be a known name rockstar in the field, and you’ve probably never read their blog (if they have one), but you’d know them through the incredible work they produce.

I understand and sympathize with the rationale behind trying to come up with criteria to weed out the snake oil salesmen- it’s a real problem in a new field like social media marketing. However as the field professionalizes, which it’s starting to, it will be increasingly easy to tell the real practitioner rockstars from those whose primary talent is marketing themselves. The strength of their resumes and portfolios – not the size of their blog or Twitter followings – will set them apart.

(This post was inspired by a comment I left last month over on @thebrandbuilder’s blog and some offhand comments I’ve heard more recently. It’s not intended to slam any one blogger or individual, rather I’m commenting on a set of assertions I still hear all over the web and at conferences.)

Photo by marquette on Flickr via CC license.

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The short answer, and one my experience tells me is dead on, is that in companies that have started to aggressively jump into social media, no one team, group, or discipline “owns” social media. In the past, and still in many companies today, PR might claim social given their traditional role in managing public perception and the flow of the conversation; marketing might claim it given its utility as a customer acquisition channel; advertising might jump on it given, hey, it’s *media* after all.

That squabble appears to be less and less of the norm, and more of the exception. Social media is starting to earn its chops as a key part of the strategic marketing, communications, and even customer service mix, and as a result it’s becoming less of an issue of “I OWN THIS” and more of “How can THIS help out our existing products and programs.”

Slide/image from Amber’s keynote presentation, available on Slideshare.

Amber outlined a new way to approach social media organizationally – the council model (see image above), where each team leader (budget/plank owner) has their own social media strategy, mandate, and (hopefully) budget and resources and they then collaborate with each other on best practices, ideas, and standards that span the entire company. Often they are helped by corporate-level staff that act as subject matter experts to help guide the whole discussion along – Bert @ Rubbermaid essentially sits in just such a role.

Is this the ideal way for a company to handle social media? Depends – on how large the company is, how many divisions it has, how the functional responsibilities are split up, and so on. But it’s a model I’ve seen at several clients, and it’s definitely one that’s being employed successfully by others in the field.

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The problem was one of trust and integrity. The trust the loyal community of readers and independent bloggers had in the overall integrity of the ScienceBlogs community, and how that appeared to be seriously violated by Pepsi and the community’s leadership. Food Frontiers, the offending corporate blog, purported to be on healthy eating topics but created and run by a soft drinks company, was given a home within the ScienceBlogs community.

A revolt among the site’s usual bloggers ensued:

The offending blog, which has already been operating for some time on the PepsiCo website, greatly diminishes the credibility of ScienceBlogs by providing a corporation with a platform to advertise to readers without actually calling it advertising. A newspaper or magazine would not allow PepsiCo to write articles about global health or nutrition – there is a very clear conflict of interest there – so I am absolutely dumbfounded as to why the SEED management team thought it acceptable to give the corporation space here. If PepsiCo wants to have their R&D scientists blog on their own site, that’s fine, but in moving Food Frontiers to ScienceBlogs, the company is trying to trade in on the reputation I and other Sb bloggers have built while simultaneously tarnishing that reputation...

For more on this controversy, see these posts from PalMD, Abel, Isis, Janet, Zuska, Blake, Christie, Sharon, Jason, Greg, Orac, PZ, Mark, and GrrlScientist, as well as the notes from James H., Alex Wild, Scicurious.

So what went wrong for Pepsi? As the ScienceBlog leadership notes in their “apology” post linked above, “Although we (and many of you) believe strongly in the need to engage industry in pursuit of science-driven social change, this was clearly not the right way.”

Pepsi, and even the ScienceBlog community leadership, didn’t seem to have a firm grasp of the nature of the community on their own site, and completely misjudged how receptive they would be to a corporate sponsorship of this particular nature. A community is not like any old content site, it’s not just a collection of blogs and forums pushing content out to passive readers. Very often a strong community is full of advocates who will passionately defend the nature and integrity of the community, and anyone seen as attempting to mess with it, or shove themselves in uninvited, will be received less than warmly.

The lessons to be drawn form this for Pepsi and others?

Do your homework, and get to know the community

The #1 lesson for any company attempting to ingratiate themselves with or even sponsor a strong, thriving, and clearly passionate and opinionated community. You simply have to do your homework, spend some time reading, talk to some of the community members and generally get a solid understanding for the tone of the community and how it reacts to outsiders, corporations, and so on. Perhaps Pepsi did this, or more likely they relied on the opinion of the ScienceBlog leadership (which as noted apparently didn’t have a solid grasp of their own community’s likely reaction).

Engage the community, become part of it, don’t just buy your way in

A community of serious science enthusiasts likely would have been at least moderately receptive to a company attempting to engage in open, honest, rigorous and humble conversation within the existing structure of the site. A well versed brand, even with a touchy reputation, engaging like this, might have been able to develop real trust or at least a touch of respect for a willingness to be part of the community. Buying your way in, and in a manner viewed as attempting to hijack the integrity of the community to legitimize your own brand…not quite the right tactic.

Basically, approach established online communities like you would any large, thriving, well-connected group of friends or colleagues you might be introduced to offline. Don’t just barge your way in, or start bragging to the world you’re a part of the group without bothering to actually *become* a part of it in the first place. It’s a sure fire recipe for backlash.

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It’s still there of course, cranking through a million+ unique visitors and no doubt disturbing both the bored and the drunkenly curious on a nightly basis. But as an article today on Salon points out, what was once the next revolution in social media seems to have dropped from our collective consciousness in near record time:

It always seems the stars that burn the brightest are the ones to flame out the fastest. So it was as unsurprising as it was sad when the news broke early Tuesday that Chatroulette’s cultural relevance had expired overnight. Cause of death: penises.

It’s that last line, and the explanation that follows it, that seems to provide the best explanation for why this amazing petri dish in spontaneous Web social connections more or less ceased to be all that relevant once March rolled from lion to lamb. In short, Chatroulette just became dominated by guys interested in showing off their “assets” intermixed with other guys vainly searching for girls willing to show off their own.

As the RJ Metrics guest post on TechCrunch famously noticed, “You are twice as likely to encounter a sign requesting female nudity than you are to encounter actual female nudity.”

That’s just not a recipe for a healthy and sustainable user community, much less social media world domination, so it’s not altogether shocking the site isn’t at the top of the buzz list anymore. What is shocking though is how all the buzz seemed to just…stop.

Traffic to the site, while still healthy, has been on a definite downward trend since the peak back in March – perhaps not just coincidentally the same timeframe as that March 16th RJ Metrics revelation on just how much the site was dominated by lonely and often perverted guys. March also saw Chatroulette hit The Daily Show and get famously drafted by Ben Folds into one of his live concert performances. March was also when, in what I’d like to call out as one of the more creative and seriously brave leaps into social media for both a brand and agency we’ve all seen in a while, McKinney and their client Travelocity launched the garden gnome into the land of the pervasive phallus.

Since March? Errrm, not much. Even some of the “best of” fan blogs seem to have grown bored of the site and wandered off about that time. OK, this guy has at least posted once since March [NSFW], but for the most part it seems like Chatroulette’s turn at the cultural zeitgeist dinner table came to a sudden and very abrupt end. And yes, I know the site has been back in the news of late through an affiliation with Shawn Fanning and, disturbingly, a move to employ a “penis-recognition algorithm” (thank you Popular Science for searing that term into my brain). But it definitely feels like a fix coming a bit too late to save the site from eventual oblivion and obscure Internet trivia question status.

If anything, the short and spectacular rise and fade of Chatroulette points to how insanely fast the Internet as a whole, and social media in particular, are moving. How our tastes for the latest fad spike and crash in a period of weeks rather than the months or years we might have grown up with, and what that means for marketers and agencies scrambling to keep up.

But enough with the deep thoughts. Let’s just leave off with a safe-for-work favorite. Batman meets Obama, only on Chatroulette.

No related posts.

Every time I get too caught up in the bubble I necessarily inhabit, and think the basic principles that my work relies on are all shiny and new, I like to jolt myself and think back to what my first “community marketing” job entailed – supporting developer user groups. Those old-school, meet every 2nd Tuesday with a guest speaker and door prizes, shared learning and networking groups.

When I started working with them, most user groups had some kind of web presence but almost no type of online social tools. This was pre-Facebook, pre-LinkedIn, pre-Twitter, and (except for some edge case guys) pre-blogging. If the user group members congregated at all online, it was through the occasional forum, or more likely, Usenet newsgroups. But the social fabric of the groups revolved around the monthly face-to-face get together, and for the most part still does.

Not a profound thought for a Monday morning, but a useful reminder that while the tools, scale, and impact may have changed, being social is nothing new.

*Photo by wka via Flickr and a CC License

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