Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Everyone who is tired of anecdotal “social media success stories” please raise your hand. OK, you can put it down now (but keep reading anyway). This article is not a lecture about why you should be using social media for customer support. This article is a tear-down of how to do it correctly.

I had a very short Twitter exchange with UPS this morning. It was quick, enlightening and illustrative. It begins with my frustration over waiting for my second Motorola Droid 2 replacement phone in a week. Naturally, both failures occurred on a Friday evening and so I had to wait until Monday for delivery. The interesting thing is that the ability for me to track shipments – a very good feature – actually becomes a frustration for me. I happen to live about ten minutes from the UPS warehouse at Manchester airport in NH. When I look up the tracking data for my phone, I can see that it was loaded on to a truck for delivery at about 6am this morning, but I also know that I am dead last on the route and won’t receive my phone until after 4pm.

Which lead to the following Twitter exchange:

Social Media Customer Support “Done Right:”

1. The elapsed time between my Tweet to @UPS and their response was 4 minutes! Even for a big company, that is impressive.
2. The response was from a person (@evanatups), and not a faceless, generic corporate account.
3. They gave me information that was valuable, timely and will improve my customer experience while also reducing their costs.
4. While it’s not on the screen shot above, he also joked around a bit, responding to my claim for credit with “The check is in the mail (DISCLAIMER: A check is not actually in the mail)”

So what exactly did they accomplish?

For starters, they made a customer happy and demonstrated that they are listening. This improves my perception of their business and makes me much more likely to use their service. From an ROI perspective, they just spent about two minutes of employee time and substantially reduced their bottom line costs. How? I’m going to use this option many times in the future to go to their location and pick up my packages, cutting the cost of the truck and driver coming to my house.

Maybe I would have found out about this option some other way at some point in the future. But how? I never watch TV commercials anymore because of my DVR. I listen to satellite radio in my car. I haven’t read a (print) newspaper in about 4 years and have an ad-blocker installed on my browsers. Whatever means they would used to reach me, I can assure you it would cost them more than these couple of Tweets.

And let’s not forget the added value of my re-Tweets and this blog article. They were able to satisfy a customer, gain additional visibility through my promotional activities, and build important social capital with this blog article.

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A few weeks ago, I saw a fairly steep drop in my Klout score and wondered about it for a few minutes. I chalked it up to an algorithm change – something they are not shy about doing.

However, I’ve been live-Tweeting the 2011 Inbound Marketing Summit for the past few days and was curious to see how it affected my score.

Obviously, the score was going to go up due to the unusually high number of updates and re-Tweets. But then, looking at the time graph it occurred to me to ask, “When exactly was WordCamp Boston?” That happened to be the last live-Tweeting event I attended.

As it turns out, the steep drop in my Klout score occurred exactly 30 days after WordCamp Boston:

It’s not terribly meaningful, but it does provide some insight into the Klout algorithm. Apparently, there the Network Influence and Amplification Probability calculations are performed over a 30 day moving window. It further seems to be a fairly simple calculation that is not using any sort of moving average, but just a basic summation.

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“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it.” This sage advice comes to us from the wise and prescient Ferris Bueller. In a world where strategic business planning is typically measured in years, the pace of change in the world of search is placing constant stress on internet marketing plans.

Google’s “Panda” update earlier this year is the latest example of search game-changers. What’s a company to do? This video from the search experts at SEOmoz explain the reason for and implications of this algorithm change. Before you watch this important video, here are a couple of important takeaways:

Search Engine Gaming Is Getting Harder

There were lots of automated, black-hat techniques that were effective at generating inbound links, boosting your page rank and improving organic search ranking. While inbound links are still important, other more social factors are getting involved in the algorithm that are harder to game. At the end of the day, the formula for success is still the same: Create remarkable content that people want to consume and share with others.

Ignore Social Media at Your Own Peril

The search algorithms are increasingly incorporating more and more data from social media APIs. This means that by not participating in social media, you are potentially hurting your organic search engine results. In other words, you may not generate lots of leads from social media activities like Twitter but alone that isn’t a reason for not participating.

Dump Metrics, Adopt Analytics

The Grand Pooh-bah of web analytics, Avinash Kaushik, warns against confusing metrics with analytics. “When people say, ‘web analytics,’ they really mean web metrics. Your boss rarely asks for analysis; she asks for ‘data’ (metrics) or ‘reports’ (KPIs)… If you remember nothing else, remember this: life is about taking action, and if your work is not driving action, you need to stop and reboot.” Old metrics like page views and inbound links used to tell most of the story. But now that’s no longer the case. Search optimization requires diving much deeper and finding answers like, “Why is the bounce rate on this page so high?” or “How can we increase the conversion rate of this page?”

It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Setting proper expectations for search optimization is critical. As the system becomes harder to game and increasingly requires social validation, the results will take longer and longer. The reason is that you need to build an audience, which takes time. There are exceptions, of course, when you can catch lightning in a bottle go viral but those are infrequent scenarios and unreliable. Remember, hope is not a strategy.

UPDATE: Less than two hours after publishing this article, Search Engine Land published an article about “The Bleak Future of Commoditized, Outsourced SEO.” It explains in detail why the shortcuts are disappearing.

How Google’s Panda Update Changed SEO Best Practices Forever

Without further delay, here is a great video from SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday series.

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Jeff Atwood said (loudly) what many others were thinking: That there was “Trouble in the house of Google.”

Then Matt Cutts told us that Google was tweaking their algorithm to do better at excluding content farms and then announced a Chrome extension to crowdsource that effort.

And now Google is getting personal. On their blog last Friday, Google announced three changes that were all based on the searcher’s social graph. These changes are:

1. Social results used to be second class citizens relegated to the bottom of the page, but now they will be interspersed throughout the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) based on relevance.
2. They’re annotating results that were shared by friends in your social graph. For example, searching for “jeff atwood google trouble” may return a link to his blog post with my mug below it and a note that says, “Jon DiPietro shared this on Twitter.”
3. In addition to allowing you to configure social accounts publicly in your Google Profile, they will now be allowing you to link accounts privately through your Google Account.

Since I wrote about Internet marketing’s new currency last August, Google has been on a slow but steady march to incorporate more and more social search results into their algorithm. Last week’s announcement ups the ante significantly. Traditional SEO is still important – and always will be. But remarkable content and an extensive online social circle are increasing in importance every single minute.

Get that blog going. Start engaging online. And make sure your website has strong calls to action with well constructed landing pages.

DO IT NOW…

Here’s a video from Google that explains social search (and hints at how important it is to have a complete Google Profile):

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You may have heard this already, but this social networking thing is starting to get popular. It’s fundamentally altering the way we conduct our daily lives and that has lots of people coming unhinged. Daily shrieks on my Facebook wall warn of a new plan from the modern day Trilateral Commission(Facebook, Google, and Foursquare) to turn us into strung out, ad-clicking junkies so they can cut off our heads and mount them on pikes. News reporters who wouldn’t know the difference between a browser cookie and an Oreo cookie write terrifying stories about web sites stealing deep, dark, private secrets: like the URL for your Facebook profile that is already indexed by Google.

But I had to write this post after reading the latest prediction of the privacy apocalypse from the Intelligentsia. In a February Wired Magazine article titled “Your Life Torn Open,” Andrew Keen wails that we are being led down a primrose path to Hell with these social networking sites. Fear mongering has a long and glorious history – especially in journalism and politics – because it’s such a powerful emotion. If Gordon Gecko were a journalist instead of a wall street banker he would have said, “Fear, for lack of a better word, is good.”

While being concerned about your privacy is very important, articles like Keen’s focus the attention in the wrong place, in my opinion. In an effort to warn people about an impending doom, he’s inadvertently doing more harm than good. His article peddles three untruths that I see commonly thrown around and I will take exception to them now.

#1 – Social Networking is Narcissistic

In my opinion, this is the laziest, most gratuitous slap anyone can take at social networking. Almost invariably, they cite Tweets about what someone had for lunch or wall updates about their pet did this morning. Since social networking begins with us talking about ourselves, it’s really easy (too easy) to make quips about it being narcissistic. But it’s also demonstrably false.

If social networking were truly narcissistic, then NOBODY WOULD FOLLOW ANYONE BUT THEMSELVES. And that would pretty much defeat the whole purpose of a social network, wouldn’t it? The very fact that someone has Facebook friends or Twitter followers annihilates the argument. I follow other people because I either learn something from time to time, or am entertained by that person, or want to keep my relationship with them warm by seeing what they’re doing. I’m interested.

There are billions of people on this planet who could not possibly care less about what I have to say. From their perspective, I’m obviously self-absorbed for writing about stuff they don’t care about. But I’m not talking to them. I’m talking to few hundred or thousand who do care. I’m talking to you. Does that make me a narcissist?

Now, I have no doubt there are true narcissists in social networks, but that’s because they are already narcissists and would be whether Facebook existed or not.

#2 – We Aren’t Naturally Social Beings

This line in Keen’s story made burst out loud with incredulity. This is absolutely demonstrably false. There have been countless experiments that illustrate the fact that much of our irrational behaviors are specifically geared toward social acceptance and group dynamics. Fear of public speaking is an example. We developed a fear of standing out from a crowd as a survival mechanism because there’s safety in numbers. Cognitive researchers have shown that our decision process is highly dependent on and easily swayed by others’ opinions. This helps promote harmony in small groups so that consensus can be reached on important decisions.

Keen opines that “human happiness is really about being left alone.” Really? Do I really even need to make an argument against that? Everybody likes some alone time now and then, obviously. But for my entire adult life I’ve heard about how our social fabric is being torn apart by people moving out of cities and into solitary lives in suburbia.

Now all of a sudden we’re all Greta Garbo? Here’s a free tip if you’re feeling too “social” – shut down your laptop and turn off your phone for a few hours. Problem solved!

#3 – Social Graphs Are Evil

Whereas the first two points I’ve made are demonstrable facts, this one is a little more of an opinion and personal preference. However, I feel like the whole paranoia over privacy settings gets a bit hysterical sometimes. First of all, you’re in complete control over what data you want to share and what data you want to keep private. Yes, reasonable people can argue about whether or not it could be more user friendly but the capability is there.

Second, we’re not talking about sharing social security numbers and credit card details. We’re talking about the brand of car you drive, your favorite songs and television shows, and news articles you’ve read. Lots of people think it’s “creepy” that this information can be used to target advertisements to us when log into Facebook or visit a newspaper website. I prefer to think of it as spam-blocking. I’m all in favor of giving these websites information that lets them improve the ads I see and offers I receive so that it’s more relevant to me.

Let’s Be Smart

OK, please don’t waste our time by mis-characterizing my point: I am not saying you should make everything public. I am not saying there’s no such thing as identity theft. I am saying that you should be concerned about the important things, like strong passwords and recognizing a phishing attack when you see one. Those are much, much more important than preventing Facebook from telling someone your favorite artist is Justin Bieber.

Well, maybe you do want to keep that one private.

Let me know what you think about privacy and targeted ads. I think there are more dangerous things to worry about but maybe I’m missing something.

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