Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

I occasionally post subjects with the subtitle, “I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.”  The subtitle pays homage to one of my favorite sources of movie quotes, The Princess Bride (you can view this particular quote on YouTube).

Today I’m commenting on the current plague of companies looking to enslave college students and recent graduates in order to help them establish a presence in social media.

I subscribe to multiple Craigslist RSS feeds and every single day there is at least one advertisement from a company looking to bring in unpaid interns for various jobs.  Many of them are mundane, computer-oriented tasks but many of them look just like this one:

Do you tweet, blog and use social media like Facebook all day, every day? Are you a creative individual who can take things to completion? Does the event industry interest you? You may be the perfect fit for our next internship!

[company name removed] is looking for a detail oriented, knowledgeable and passionate person to help develop its’ social media campaign.

The perfect candidate will have experience in all areas of social media; Facebook, Twitter, Blogging Platforms. Have exceptional writing skills. Proficient in MAC and Basic HTML. A passion for weddings is a plus!

This is an unpaid internship, but has great potential to become a full-time position. Internship credit is available.

Please email resume. No phone calls please.

Aside from the spelling errors and poor grammar, what’s so bad about this?

Crime Doesn’t Pay

That’s right, if your internship doesn’t meet six federal legal criteria you are violating federal labor laws.  Many employers mistakenly think that they can hire unpaid interns because they are providing enough value through the experience the interns gain.  However, this is the wrong perspective. They need to consider whether or not the person materially provides value to the company.  If so, they must be paid.  If not, why are you wasting everyone’s time?

Hobbyist Vs. Professional

Let’s try rewriting the advertisement listed above using a different profession and see how it may turn out…

Norm Abram is the seemingly superhuman master craftsman who has hosted the PBS television show, "The New Yankee Workshop" for some 20 years.

Do you caulk, paint and watch television programs like the New Yankee Workshop and This Old House all day, every day? Are you a creative individual who can take things to completion? Does the construction industry interest you? You may be the perfect fit for our next internship!

[company name removed] is looking for a detail oriented, knowledgeable and passionate person to help develop its residential construction business.

The perfect candidate will have experience in all areas of construction; hammers, nails, saws. Have exceptional painting skills. Proficient driving Fords and Chevys. A passion for subdivisions is a plus!

This is an unpaid internship, but has great potential to become a full-time position. Internship credit is available.

Please email resume. No phone calls please.

Sounds absurd, no?  Just because a person knows how to use a hammer or circular saw doesn’t mean they know how to build a load-bearing wall, right?  And watching Norm Abram every weekend for two years doesn’t mean you’ll be able to build a ten foot Clancy sailboat from scratch.  Knowing how to use tools does not mean that a person understands how to design, finance, construct, and sell a home.

Well, just because a student posts pictures of friends’ compromising antics on Facebook and has a few thousand followers on Twitter doesn’t mean they understand how to effectively architect, implement, and measure a social media marketing campaign.  That’s even assuming that the business already understands how the social media marketing strategy will fit into its overall marketing strategy, but they frequently do not.

What’s the Harm?

Here is a short list of some of the missteps that can lead to more harm than good:

• It is possible to attract the wrong audience. The first rule of search optimization is, “do no harm.”
• Blogging carries legal responsibilities including copyright infringement and Federal Trade Commission regulations.
• Facebook’s Terms of Use are complicated and even contradictory. Violating them can get you banned.
• Anything worth doing is worth measuring. Fan and follower counts do not tell the story.
• Creating compelling, engaging content is challenging and dynamic.
• Hope is not a strategy.

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

This week’s High Five theme is, “Social Media Grab Bag.”

#5: Government websites get the chop

As part of the UK government’s austerity measures to combat rising debt levels, it announced that it will be shuttering over 600 web sites.  But that’s not the interesting statistic. As Chris Rand puts it, “Sadly, like most public sector projects, the cost of running them is eye-watering.” He cites one example in which a UK government web site cost over $7M to build and received just under 400k visitors at a cost of over $15 per visitor.

Link: BMON

#4: Former Facebook Executive Adam D’Angelo Confirms New Google Social Networking Effort

There has been some Buzz (rimshot) about Google’s next move to combat Facebook’s growing threat in the social search space. This article suggests that Google drastically underestimated Facebook’s potential and never made social networking a company priority – until now.

Link: Inside Facebook

#3: How To Rank #1 In Facebook Search In 60 Seconds For Any Term

My reason for highlighting this article isn’t so much for people to learn how to accomplish this feat, but to understand the implications of the 21st Century Land Grab. Whether or not you intend or a ready to fully engage in social media marketing, it’s important to plant a flag to prevent someone else from claiming your territory.

Link: All Facebook

#2: How This Author Got 674,716 Facebook Fans (Worth, Uh, $92 Million!)

Like the previous article, the most important lessons of this story aren’t the most obvious. While the author and columnist question the true value of a Facebook fan, what struck me was the negative impact that such a throng of the wrong fans can have on your brand. Like accidentally optimizing for the wrong keyword, having a fan page populated by the wrong demographic can be just as damaging.

Link: Advertising Age

#1: Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world

There are a trillion hours per year of “spare time” that are currently spent watching television. When you think about social media and wonder aloud, “Where do people find the time?” now you know. Shirky wants to start talking about how we should be using this cognitive surplus.

Link: TED: Ideas worth spreading

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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Many non-profits still use personal or work email accounts for sending communications to their members. There are lots of reasons why this is a bad idea, none the least of which is that there are excellent solutions available for free.

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One of my favorite, most quotable movies of all time is The Princess Bride.  While a small group of kidnappers is pursued by a masked man, the ring leader (Wallace Shawn) repeatedly exclaims, “Inconceivable.”  Eventually, Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin) grows weary of hearing this every time their plans are thrown of kilter, saying, “You keep on using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Which brings me to the point of this post.  I saw another marketing article this week (which shall remain anonymous) from a highly respected thought leader in the industry, which looked at a very small set of statistics and made ridiculous claims and conclusions based on dubious data.  I see this far too often, especially in the blogoshphere and Twitterverse, where self-made marketing mavens abound who may be very successful and knowledgeable in many areas but also have a tendency to play “weekend warrior” with statistics in order to prove a preconceived point.

Common Mistakes

My engineering and quality control background give me just enough knowledge to be dangerous.  I would never claim to be a statistical guru, but I do know enough to understand when statistics are being abused (sometimes).  I’m going to try to keep this list short and as non-mathematical as possible in the hopes that it can help people be a little more suspicious of titles they read and conclusions they adopt.

Mistake #1: Assuming Normal Distribution

The vast majority of statistics that non-mathematicians use and understand are based on normal distributions.  This is what people commonly understand as the “bell curve,” in which the majority of occurrences in a population are centered around a mean, and tail off more or less evenly on either side.  Whenever you use a term like “average,” “mean,” or “standard deviation,” they must describe data in a random, normal distribution in order to be accurate.  There are mathematical ways to deal with non-normal distributions, but they are rarely applied by the “weekend warriors.”  There are two common fatal flaws that happen:

1. The data itself is not random.  In fact, data is generally much less random than we think; especially if we’re talking about marketing data because human behavior is rarely truly random.  But there are often situations in the physical world (like boundary conditions) that result in non-random distributions also.
2. The sampling is not random or not representative.  There are numerous examples of this, including cherry-picking, small sample groups, placebos, etc…  Garbage in, garbage out.

Mistake #2:  Assuming Causality

This is probably the most common (just a guess on my part) form of statistical abuse, and it comes in several different flavors:

1. Reverse causality: Most basketball players are tall.  Therefore, playing basketball makes you tall.
   Or, if you prefer a marketing example:  Most shared posts on Facebook contain word “x.”  Therefore, word “x” makes your post more sharable.
2. Spurious relationship:  Vodka and water gets you drunk.  Scotch and water gets you drunk.  Gin and water gets you drunk.  Therefore, water causes intoxication, since it is the only common factor (alcohol is the hidden variable).
   Or, if you prefer a marketing example:   Most Twitter re-tweets occur around 4PM.  Therefore, people create better content in the afternoon.
3. Coincidence:  Sales of ice cream increase in direct correlation with increases in drowning deaths.  Therefore, ice cream causes drowning.
   Or, if you prefer a marketing example:  The number of Facebook users has increased sharply during the same period iPod sales have exploded.  Therefore, Facebook is responsible for the success of the iPod.

Mistake #3:  Gambler’s Fallacy

The gambler’s fallacy is rooted in a misunderstanding of randomness.  We feel that a distinctly non-random pattern increases the likelihood of a particular result.  For example, if a roulette wheel lands on black eleven times in a row, we mistakenly believe the changes are greater that the next result will be red.  The chances of a truly random outcome are always the same, regardless of previous outcomes.

Risks

Examples abound from prominent marketing companies and mavens who draw spurious conclusions, based on questionable data sets and containing logical fallacies.  I am concerned that businesses may be making important decisions that result in the mis-allocation of precious resources (time and money) based on declarative titles like, “Data Shows: X Gets Shared More on Y.”  Caveat emptor.

Comic Relief

This post was prompted in part by this brilliant and hilarious TED presentation, “Lies, damed lies and statistics (About TEDTalks) – Sebastian Wernicke.”  As is so often the case, it’s funny because it’s tragically true.

Hat tip to Garr Reynolds for once again provoking thought.

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Don't be a social media lemming.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “Get 300 followers per day on Twitter!”

We all have, and I’ve heard this and other similar enticements in just the last couple of days.  This topic has been covered ad nauseum by every social media and marketing blogger out there, but apparently the message isn’t getting out.

So here is one more shot…

Metric vs. Strategy

Measuring is a good thing – provided, of course, you’re measuring the right metrics.  The number fans on your Facebook fan page, or followers on Twitter, or subscribers to your blog are all important metrics that (indirectly) measure the reach of your message.  But they are not a strategy!

Getting additional followers on the social media channels is relatively easy, but what is the point?  Many businesses hold the mistaken assumption that more followers will somehow equal more business.  All it equals is more opportunity for business, but you need to have a plan to turn those opportunities into customers.  The real question is how many of those fans/friends/followers will convert?  What reason are you giving them to convert?  How are you tracking your conversion rate?  That’s what inbound marketing is all about.

Inbound Marketing

If you combine a large number of followers/friends/fans with an effective inbound marketing infrastructure, then you’re in business.  But building a large following without it is putting the cart before the horse.  Here is a basic outline of what inbound marketing entails:

1. Create compelling content. Which is easier said than done for many people.  Creating remarkable content in the digital age requires some competency in four skills: webapprentice, designer, storyteller, and marketer.
2. Optimize it for search. Inbound links are by far the most important factor for search engine optimization, which is why #1 is extremely important.  But it is also important to understand the basics of on-page optimization in order to maximize the visibility of your content to search engines.
3. Share it with others. This is where your large following can start to pay off.  Once you’re creating compelling content, share it through your social media channels in order to drive traffic back to your web site.
4. Create calls to action. Once the traffic is flowing into your web site, it’s important to have clear, prominent calls to action.  Make the visitor some sort of offer that gives them value in exchange for their contact information.
5. Nurture your leads. Ideally, your leads would be entered into some form of database or customer relationship management system so that you can follow up appropriately and move them through the buying cycle.  Cull them when necessary.
6. Convert your leads. That’s what it’s all about – convert leads to prospects, and prospects to customers.
7. Measure. You need to be measuring all of this activity every step of the way.  Understand where your traffic sources are and which ones are the most/least effective.  Compare those against your conversion rates and use the data to optimize your efficiency and scrap ineffective strategies.

Having 100 extremely engaged followers is far more valuable than 1,000 who are not paying attention.  And even if those 1,000 are paying attention, without an effective strategy for converting that asset into business you’re just wasting your time.

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