Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

Advertising Age ran a story last week about “How This Author Got 674,716 Facebook Fans (Worth, Uh, $92 Million!).”  Justin Levey was a New York law student who applied for an internship with the Israeli consulate but ended up “in Jerusalem writing speeches for Ariel Sharon during one of the most turbulent times in Israeli history.” He accumulated more than 674,000 fans largely due to misinterpreting the book’s title for a new Facebook meme – Shut Up, I’m Talking. His fans were liking his page because they were making a statement, not necessarily identifying themselves with his book.

The article discussed the obvious questions this situation begs: How much is a follower worth? How much do people really pay attention in social networks? In Levey’s case, this situation has very little downside. However, if you’re a business or non-profit the wrong follower demographic can actually be doing you a disservice.

Negative Optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of maximizing your web site’s visibility to search engines in order to obtain the highest possible organic search ranking. While there are lots of things you can do to have a positive impact on SEO, there are also plenty of actions that can hurt. One example is inadvertently emphasizing keywords that you don’t necessarily want associated with your site.

“Shut Up, I’m Talking” exemplifies a different type of negative optimization; guilt by association. Social search differs from web search because it relies on the demographics of your fan base to determine relevancy. In Levy’s case, his audience demographics don’t differ all that much from Justin Beiber’s. That particular audience probably isn’t heavily weighted by people interested in reading about Middle Eastern foreign policy.

Marketing Takeaway

Levey’s fan page is an extreme case and many could make a reasonable argument that it’s a good problem to have. However, the risk isn’t really that your fan page or website will have and abundance of the wrong kind of attention. The risk is that, on a smaller scale than this example, your website will optimize for the wrong keywords or your fan page will appeal to the wrong demographics and cost you traffic. Search engine optimization must be deliberate and involves examining every aspect of your presence, including the title of your Facebook fan page. You do have a Facebook fan page, right?

Like the Hippocratic Oath, the first rule in search optimization is “Do no harm.”

Continue Reading

“Groundswell” by Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoffis one of the earliest and most influential books on the business effects and uses of social media.  It is often at the top of recommended reading lists, and for good reason.  The book is very well written, informative, practical, actionable and soaked with real stories and examples.  I recommend the book to anyone involved or interested in how social media affects organizations and the ways in which they can leverage it.

But there’s one large caveat; Li and Bernoff (unsurprisingly) take every possible opportunity to inject research analysts into each step of the process.

The Skinny

Why it rocks:

The book brilliantly paints a picture of your organization before, during, and after engagement in social media.  It lays out the influences it is having on all businesses, provides clear and understandable (i.e. non-techy) strategies and tactics for implementing it, and then predicts the aftermath of embracing social media.

Why It Doesn’t:

At every opportunity, the analyst-authors espouse the importance of using analysts to properly align your strategy with the social demographics of your target audience.  On its face, it sounds perfectly logical and back in 2008 (yeah, way back then) it was probably much more important than it is today.  One reason is that the ROI calculation was much more delicate two years ago than it is today, as the investment was generally higher and the return significantly lower.  In other words, it is arguably much easier to earn a positive ROI on social media engagement today.  Also, given the ubiquity of social networking sites and the advent of real time search, there are lots of fringe benefits to social media engagement that, in many cases, can make the ROI case themselves.  Finally, more and more customers expect their vendors to be present in social media.  This means that not participating can become both an opportunity cost and have a negative impact on their brand, both of which are hard to quantify.

Who Will Dig It:

Managers and executives who are ignorant, dubious, curious, or all of the above with regard to the hows and whys of engaging their organizations in social media will find the book very valuable and a fairly easy read.

The Essence

Part one focuses on understanding the groundswell.  This first section by itself would make the book worth reading!  It provides solid background and compelling examples to underscore the concepts.  But it also introduces the core idea of the Social Technographic Profile.  While I think this is a valuable thought exercise, I feel that the concept is a bit overdone.  The idea is that you should tune your social media presence according to the technographical makeup of your target audience.  My thoughts are that there are now sufficient tools available that the cost of leveraging all of the channels makes it a no-brainer to do so regardless of your target audience.

Part two of “Groundswell” builds on the concept of the social technographics profile and describes strategies and tactics for tapping into the groundswell.  With chapters on listening to, talking with, energizing, and helping the groundswell, no stone is left unturned.  Once again, my only beef is that the importance of determining the social technographic profile and shaping your strategy around it is slightly overemphasized.  I would argue that similar to writing a business plan, the journey is more important than the destination.

Finally, part three talks about the transformation that an organization fully engaged in social media will undergo.  These are important considerations, because like many initiatives, an organization cannot simply go through the motions.  Doing so will be painfully obvious to the social media world and will cause more harm than good.

The Verdict

Though I found the self-promotion of the analysts to be a bit strong and notwithstanding the fact that some of the concepts are becoming slightly dated, the book has too much valuable information not to recommend it.  And I do recommend it strongly with my previously expressed caveats.  So, as they say at the end of the book, I “look forward to meeting you in the groundswell.”

Continue Reading

In a recent discussion with ISA leaders regarding how to lessen the number of emails it sends members, the topic of Facebook fan pages came up.  The context of this discussion was focused on how ISA could be at least as effective at marketing its publications while reducing the number of emails it sends.  I was asked to explain specifically how a fan page compares with email marketing, and I came up with seven advantages:

1) “Opting In” vs. “Not Opting Out”
People must take an affirmative action to “become a fan,” which says a lot more than “I choose not to opt out.”  From a marketer’s perspective, these become your top shelf, number one, gold plated prospects.  And you treat them that way.

2)  Marketing Upside
When someone becomes a fan, all of their friends see it. This has tremendous marketing “up side.”  When someone doesn’t opt out of emails, nobody knows and there is zero additional up side.

3) Build a Community
Fans can interact with one another on the fan page, providing book reviews, answering questions, talking about their favorites, etc.  This is the very essence of Web 2.0.

4) Analytics
Facebook provides detailed statistics with regard to interactions that occur on fan pages.  This makes is very easy to quantify the value of the page over time.  Typical email marketing solutions provide counts of the number of times a message is read or a link is clicked.  However, Facebook has additional metrics that can measure interactivity and “buzz.”

5) Reach
Fan pages are open to everyone on Facebook (that’s 325 million users) – not just your email database.

6) Demographics
The fastest growing age demographic on Facebook is 35 to 45 year olds.  This is a critical demographic for many organizations.

7) Cost
Fan pages are FREE.  Enough said.

Let me know if I missed something.

Continue Reading