John McCrory

Really? How do you know? I’ve heard this line many times and it’s one of the most common reasons people in small business give for why social media isn’t a good fit for them.

What about advertising? Direct mail? How many of your customers are you reaching through those channels? A lot of the small business owners I’ve met aren’t sure they are getting any value out of ads and mailings. “Truth is,” they say, “I get most of my customers through word of mouth.”

Guess what? If word of mouth is your top marketing channel, you had better rethink your attitude about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the rest. Social media makes word of mouth visible. Because of that, I happen to think that social media are more relevant marketing tools for small and medium sized businesses than they are for big national brands.

If you integrate online and social media into your advertising and direct mail with something as simple as promo codes, you can even make the formerly invisible effects of your traditional marketing visible. But don’t take my word for it. Measure it.

Consider the case study of a retailer cited by Olivier Blanchard in his talk on measuring word of mouth the other day at the Word of Mouth Supergenius in Chicago: Though 90% of their marketing spend was on newspaper ads, E-mail, Facebook, and the retailer’s blog all brought in significantly more customers than print.

• 4% came from print ad codes
• 69% came from email
• 17% came from facebook
• 10% came from the blog

Not to trash print ads, but too often they are the default for many small businesses, nonprofits and educational institutions. In my experience, most small businesses never measure the ROI of different marketing tactics and channels, and proceed with advertising largely on faith. (Businesses based on direct-mail sales being a prominent exception.)

Alas, according to a recent survey, small business owners still have a long way to go in online and social media marketing. But the real problem is not knowing what works, and the solution is to measure and find out. I’ll choose evidence-based marketing over faith-based marketing any day. So before you say “My customers don’t use social media” again, ask whether that’s just your impression, or if you have real data to back that up.

Want more? If you still aren’t convinced, say, because “my customers don’t use Twitter,” Laura Fitton provides 5 great reasons why businesses should be on Twitter even if they think their customers aren’t.

In what may only be a sly little bit of linkbait, Joseph Jaffe calls for a ban on Twitter at conferences. It’s an issue that’s been bobbing around since the Great Keynote Meltdown at High Ed Web 2009 in October and danah boyd’s hard time at the Web 2.0 Expo last month. Jaffe complains that Twittering at conferences rips off the content that you paid for with your registration to share with your community of followers, akin to illegal file sharing. He also charges that the twittering has speakers under attack by abusive mobs of badge-wearing meeting attendees.

Jaffe’s trying to be provocative, and it’s cute, in a way. But he’s just plain wrong.

First, check out his video, then read a few reasons why he’s wrong:

Why Joseph Jaffe is wrong about Twitter at conferences

Twitter augments the live presentation with annotations. Backchannel participants often post links to sites, applications, studies, articles, or other things mentioned by the speaker. If a speaker mentions someone who’s not at the session, someone on the backchannel will let them know. All this creates a rich, connected record of the talk, through fairly easy, crowdsourced effort. It happens in realtime but is a handy reference later.

The Twitter stream can set up and improve the Q & A. Participants can submit questions via Twitter, and some basic ones can be answered by other participants on the backchannel.

The twitter backchannel is great marketing for the conference and for the associations sponsoring the conference. How many of the folks following along from home on Twitter will come to the conference next year? Jaffe’s baloney about stealing the content is a canard. Sharing the conference experience makes you a salesperson for the conference. And in the there’s no such thing as bad publicity department: I’ll bet Joseph Jaffe a bottle of Ardmore 30 year old Highland Single Malt that the High Ed Web conference in 2010 will have at least 10% more attendees than 2009 despite the down economy. And I’d chalk up its higher profile to the viral kerfuffle created by the back channel’s response to a terrible front channel.

The backchannel can be great publicity for the speaker, if s/he does well.

The twitter stream is another way the presenter can learn which parts of the talk resonated, and which fell flat. A lot of talks are given over and over again to different audiences. The best speakers refine them over time. Sometimes you can tell what works from the audience’s response in smiles, boos, laughs, or applause, but sometimes you have no idea what they are thinking. As a speaker, you can look back after a talk at the twitter stream and see which of your lines got quoted, which got questioned. It’s a more moment-to-moment record that post-talk survey cards provide (though they are useful, too.)

The Twitter backchannel is usually constructive and respectful, like most of the discussion at conferences. People are there to have fun and learn. The few examples of the backchannel “turning on” the speaker are the exception to the rule. Attendees who paid good money are not a mob, and they don’t act like one. Speakers always have to prove themselves, but they aren’t under attack.

When a speaker is truly outstanding, the backchannel quiets down. I’ve seen the twitterers close their laptops and go off the grid for a great, inspiring presentation. The audience knows when they need to just sit quietly and take in the experience of a great talk, and so do most of the twitterers on the backchannel.

All of that said, twittering at conferences needs to evolve, and backchannel participants will need to learn how to tweet appropriately.

Leave the backchannel in the back. The challenge danah boyd faced at ew2 was caused in large part by having the backchannel broadcast to the entire audience on giant TV screens behind her which she couldn’t see but everyone watching her could. I first saw this technique at the first Personal Democracy Forum in 2003 (?) and it was distracting and annoying. Participation in the backchannel should be voluntary. Don’t make me watch it when I’d rather just focus on the speakers. Plus, the speakers shouldn’t have to share the stage with the backchannel. I’d be happy to see this practice (which mainly happens at tech shows) banned at conferences. I agree with Jaffe that speakers shouldn’t have to monitor the backchannel while they talk. Instead, have an aide monitor it for the speaker and create places in the presentation for the aide to forward any important information or questions from the backchannel.

Bad behavior on the backchannel will be dealt with by the backchannel. Most people on Twitter are presenting themselves as who they really are, and not hiding behind anonymous handles. Their reputation will be affected by their tweets and they will be accountable for what they say. The backchannel will learn to police itself to stamp out really bad behavior. Over time, I expect twittering at conferences will be a self-healing system.

What do you think? Does Twitter enhance conferences? Or does Twitter destroy the experience of a professional meeting? Maybe he’s just stirring the pot a bit, but is Joseph Jaffe right or am I? Or are we both right?

Update 12/21/2009: Chris Pirillo phrases the issue as a question: Should Twitter Be Banned at Conferences?

Based on the example by @jaybaer, who wordled @juntajoe’s great roundup of predictions for social media content marketing, I gathered the text of a dozen other posts from many sources about what’s coming in the next year more generally for social media, then used Wordle to make the resulting word cloud. For this exercise I removed common words, including social, media, internet, and web.

Twitter beats Facebook. Like beats make. People beats content. People beats technology. Networks beat companies and organizations. Marketing beats enterprise.

My opinion? I think 2010 will be about mobile, location, and communities. And there will be some spectacular major brand name social media bungles. Authenticity will be important, too, but I’m saving that for 2011.

You’ve heard social networking is the next big thing for businesses. It’s the future of communications, PR and marketing. If you don’t want to fall behind, experts say, you better get on Twitter, set up a Facebook fan page, create a YouTube channel. You gotta start pumping out updates, funny videos, and podcasts to get your message out to your customers. Content is king, baby.

I have three words for you: Shut up and listen.

This brave new world of social networking, social media, web 2.0 and all this great internet stuff is transforming everything about how businesses, nonprofits, schools, and governments communicate with the public, but stop — go back to that word transforming. This change in communication is not just a new technology for doing what you’ve always done. It is not just the new tube through which to send your message. So put your megaphone down…

What? You can’t put your megaphone down because it’s missing? You lost your megaphone?! Oh, wait—I see it. Look out there. See it? See all those people? No, not the public but your customers, your members, your students and their parents, your employees, your constituents and citizens—all of them have the megaphone now. It’s not as big and loud as it used to be, but — ssh! Listen! They’re talking to each other. What are they talking about?

They’re talking about their favorite movies. Some song lyric they misheard. They’re talking about Afghanistan, President Obama, their cousin who was at Falluja. They’re talking about their favorite whiskey. They’re talking about their children and the funny things they said today. They’re talking about their grandmother who just died and their best friend who just lost to cancer at the young age of 37. They’re talking about how they beat cancer. They’re talking about Lady Gaga’s latest video and Susan Boyle’s new CD. They’re talking about Tiger Woods and and the future of journalism. They’re talking about what they had for lunch and how delicious it was and if you’re lucky it was at your restaurant. Woo Hoo! Social Media FTW!

Yes, sometimes they are talking about you. Are you ears burning? You better hope it’s good, because they could also be talking about how your service was terrible, how they got food poisoning from your blue plate special… and they’re talking about it with their friends (who trust them) and through the megaphone they’re also talking about it with a lot of your other customers.

So what are you going to do about it? Put out a press release? Here’s what to do: Go direct to them. But be careful.

It is tempting to jump right in and mix it up with them, but look at all the other stuff they are talking about. Do you really want to be in their face when they’re still mourning their best friend? When you go direct, you’d better be respectful. The world is watching.

So, apologize for the bad service (what does that cost you, really?). Then, do something about it. Back up the apology with action. Remember that if they care enough to complain about you, they care about you. So be grateful for the feedback. Who needs to hire mystery shoppers when you have real customers with megaphones 24/7/365?

That’s better. You can now go do your home work—read and follow Seth Godin, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, Mitch Joel, Kristina Halvorson, Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, Dan Zarella and that’s just for starters.

But before you go, and this is very important, keep in mind that:

Social Media is not an add-on

If you are exploring the world of social media and web 2.0 and thinking you just need to add some of these new channels to your bag of tricks, stop now and go back to what you were doing. Social media won’t help you.

Don’t get me wrong, the only way to understand how social media work is to learn by doing. As Jay Rosen says, “You gotta grok it before you can rock it.” So, you can start tweeting, create Facebook page and a LinkedIn group and start watching your follower, fan, and member counts rack up. It might make you feel better about yourself, and you will start catching on to how it all works. Just, don’t expect any of it to matter much.

Social media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 are far more than new communications channels. A collection of internet-based software tools and platforms that enable people to share and collaboratively manipulate information with each other, these technologies are part of the Internet’s ongoing disruption of the information ecosystem, a transformation now more than 20 years old.

I point this out not to sound like some kind of internet triumphalist, but to put social media in a proper context. Social media is not only transforming the transmission of information from point A to point B, it is transforming how we work with information.

The changes to the news business, marketing, buying and selling are just the tip of the iceberg. For organizations who are trying to figure out how or whether to use social media, this means the relevance of social media extends beyond the marketing department. Social media will be transforming every function within your organization, from facilities and maintenance to accounting, customer service, HR, and on and on. No one in the organization will be unaffected.

Playing with blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and the like can be a lot of fun, and it can be a timesink. That’s okay — for a little while (see paragraph 2). We marketing and PR types have tended to be the early adopters of social media, but we have to look at social media as more than just marketing tools we can add to our existing programs.

The implications are significant for folks “inside the firewall” (to borrow a phrase from Michael Brito) who make the stategy, budget, and staffing decisions.

Are you willing to shred your budget? Kill sacred cows and start from scratch? Print thinner brochures and magazines. Send out direct mail fewer times a year. Stop advertising. You’ll have to find the money somewhere. A lot of social media are free in that they don’t cost money to use. But they do cost time and attention to do well. If you want to really make a dent in this new world, you’ll need to blow up your budget and start over.

This is not about new media destroying old media. Nor is it about social media replacing so-called traditional media. What’s emerging is an information ecosystem which is a hybrid of old and new. But, you can’t work effectively in that new ecosystem if you are organized to produce for the old one.

As new marketing strategies and plans are drawn up, the structure of the marketing department is going to have to change to execute those plans. You will need to upend your marketing communications staff. If you are going to succeed in the new world, you will need to reinvent your production process. The production requirements have changed. You will need to manage a different kind of media, on a different schedule, and that is going to require a completely new set of skills than your marcom department currently possesses.

It’s going to be painful. I know capable, wonderful people who have built up twenty or more years of experience and are still years from retirement whose strongest skills are just not relevant to the new needs marketing directors are going to have. Some are adapting, but many are not.

The InDesign expert who puts together your printed materials in-house may not be as valuable to the new campaign as the multimedia producer who can make podcasts and videos and zip them onto the internet. The new positions you’ll need to create on your staff will involve skillsets that current staff can’t easily be retrained for.

My point is that if you are, like most people in business, just dipping your toe in social media, or like some early adopters, have been working with it for two or four years or longer—at some point in the near future, you’re going to have to commit to some radical changes in staffing and budget. I think most of these changes will be a huge net positive, though not without some hurt. Are you up for it? Excited by it? Prepared to fight for it?

A lot of us talk up organizational change as a kind of tonic for business, but inertia is a powerful force in the workplace. A lot of the wariness of social media is in fact a result of the frustration of how hard it has been to foster cultural acceptance and embrace of earlier generations of promising technologies in the workplace. We’re very good at changing technology. We’re not very good at changing culture.

I hope this round of change will be different from the last. It will take a lot of commitment to fundamentally reorganize ourselves to actually get the most out of social media. You know who’ll show you how to do it? Your customers!

Olivier Blanchard (The Brand Builder) began a very interesting and lively discussion on his blog Friday when he called into question the legitimacy of the “International Social Media Association” and, in particular, it’s $3,000 professional certification program. His main objection was that this organization was marketing itself with a misleading identity as some sort of international accrediting body.

Boiled down, it seems that two individuals are trying to launch an international industry association largely on their own. Perhaps such an association would be a welcome presence, but when the association seems primarily to be a positioning tactic for marketing a not-inexpensive training course, it isn’t surprising that the initiative might not smell right to a few people.

Read through the discussion and decide what you think about ISMA. A few defenders of ISMA and its founders have chimed in over the weekend. Fundamental to the topic, I think, is the issue raised by Kristi Colvin, Amber Naslund and Aliza Sherman of whether certification in social media is even a good idea.

I don’t think certification makes sense for social media, and here’s why:

Social media is not a distinct discipline, industry, or product platform. It’s an evolving set of software tools and practices in the internetworked world that are used by people in many different disciplines and industries. Though marketers and PR professionals are social media’s most prominent early adopters, people in many other industries/displines are using social media to conduct business. Colleges, hospitals, software firms, news organizations, and many others are leveraging social media in ways having nothing to do with marketing or PR in their organization’s core activities.

The potential uses and users of social media are just too broad in scope to be considered a discipline with a standardized body of knowledge and skills.

Many of the tools used in social networking are evolving so quickly that no standardized body of knowledge can be identified. What you need to know today will be obsolete tomorrow.

The tools are also going to become generic, in the sense that they will become ubiquitous applications used in many different kinds of work, much like word processors and spreadsheets are today. In the job descriptions of the future, say ten year from now, facility with social media will become a standard requirement that everyone will need to possess.

Added 12/7/2009 at 9:58 pm:

Tanya Roberts comment on the original post reminded me of another reason certification is unnecessary: an international accrediting body assumes the role of a central authority, yet such structures are antithetical to the distributed nature of authority in the internet age. Authority to validate or “certify” a social media professional would more naturally come from the crowd. Or, as I said in my first comment, “your validators will be your network.”

Those are my answers, what are yours?

What makes a good tweeter?

I’m developing a Twitter measurement tool as part of an overall social media performance assessment, and since there’s a lot of debate about what is really important to do or avoid on Twitter, I though I’d ask your help through a short, 6-question survey on how to grade tweeting. The survey is designed to be completed in under 2 minutes.

How much should different elements of tweeting matter? Which is more important — the number of followers you have or the number of times you are retweeted What kinds of things should a tweeter earn bonus points for and which actions should cost them?

The measurement tool is aimed more at helping someone to track their own performance over time than comparing it to others.

I really appreciate your help by giving me your thoughts about what makes a good, effective tweeter. Take the survey!

After you complete the survey, let me know what you think I forgot or left out. Return here and enter your suggestions or ideas in the comments.

What is Twitter for? A lot of folks who use one or another form of social networking media nevertheless have trouble “getting” the point of Twitter. About a year ago I jotted down this completely random list of ways Twitter could be used. It illustrates how Twitter’s 140 characters, far from being restrictive, are actually quite flexible and powerful. It’s not about telling the world what you’re having for lunch, but about sharing bits of information you possess that may be of use to others or that may be entertaining to others.

1. Running commentary, reaction to a live televised event such as a football game, political speech or a popular program, especially in conversation with friends in other locations who are also watching
2. First-person accounts of an important event, such as an earthquake, a political demonstration, or a meteor shower
3. Review of a restaurant where you have just dined
4. How to instructions at an event such as a demonstration or a concert
5. “Meet me at” announcements to make arrangements with friends or followers
6. Self-organizing virtual live chats via hashtags
7. Raffles and give aways
8. Ask a question to followers or of participants in a hashtagged conversation
9. Special alerts to a group “There’s a blue Honda in Lot C” with its lights on
10. Emergency alerts “Springfield elementary will be closed today due to snow”
11. Recommendations: Read this, try this, see this, use this
12. Report celebrity sightings “Just saw David Byrne riding his bike up Lafayette”
13. Share pictures of celebrities arriving on the Red Carpet in real time at the Academy Awards.
14. Share favorite quotes or witticisms of your own invention
15. Report unusual things you overhear
16. Announce to a group that you are running late
17. Tell others about traffic problems in specific places
18. Issue coupons or specials sales through codes
19. A restaurant could announce its specials for the day
20. A bar could announce drink specials, new items on tap
21. Make requests to a DJ at a dance party
22. Lost and Found announcements
23. A calendar could send tweets of meeting reminders to all attendees
24. Professional conferences could announce room changes
25. A to do list/calendar application could send you a reminder of the tasks and appointments for the day each morning
26. Announce items you are selling as you would via Craigslist or newspaper classifieds
27. Traffic and transit sensors could be programmed to send tweets about current conditions
28. A weather station could tweet current weather conditions
29. Students could cheat-tweet during tests or quizzes (not recommended!)
30. Birth and death announcements
31. Sports scores or play-by-play
32. Headlines of breaking news, or newly-posted news articles
33. Tweetfiti: geocoded tweets could be attached to a specific location; “Kilroy was here”

When I drew up this list there were many fewer users of Twitter than there are now. Today people are using Twitter in many of these ways every day and in many more ways besides. This short list scratches the surface, since tweets can contain links to pictures, videos, web pages and more. For anyone who is trying to get their head around Twitter, I hope this helps.

You can follow me at @johnmccrory.

What is the #1 most significant implication of the new geotagging option in Twitter? It enables you to tell people where you are in real time, right? WRONG. It’s more significant than Google Latitude, Loopt, or other “presence” applications.

Why? Because one of the most intriguing opportunities created by Twitter’s new option for geotagging one’s tweets is the ability to place virtual notes in public spaces for other people to find. Since a tweet can include a link, I can place all kinds of content in that location — a video or audio, a blog post, a picture. The possibilities are endless.

For example, I could visit the Lincoln Memorial and record an Audioboo about how, in the 1960s, my mother used to stand on steps with a sign saying, simply, “Equal Opportunity in Housing” and how some of the visitors to the Memorial would spit at her. (Better yet, I’d record her telling the story, ahead of time.) While standing in front of the statue of Abe Lincoln, I could post a tweet with a link to that Audioboo, and with it geotagged, it would then be placed there for others to find.

The natural next step for geotagged tweets is a tool for discovering tweets in a given place. Someone might then be able to visit the Lincoln Memorial, take out a smartphone or other digital device and “sniff” for tweets geotagged to that spot. They could listen to my mother’s story. They could watch a youtube video of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech.

A person could then cross the street to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and discover tweets about the people whose names are on that wall, audio and video reminiscences by their family members, and so on. The point? Real-world space can now be layered with media in all kinds of interesting and moving ways.

The concept of attaching virtual content to actual spaces isn’t new, of course. David Gelernter described something like this in Mirror Worlds nearly 20 years ago (motivating the Unabomber to target him). However what Twitter’s geotagging promises would be the opposite of what he envisioned in that it would be lightweight, personal, and distributed. Various schemes have sprouted over the past two decades for using the internet to record information related to a specific place. I recall a company marketing a device that you could wave like a wand in front of a store window and get information about the place. Feel free to mention similar services in the comments.

What makes Twitter’s geotagging vastly different than earlier schemes is that it makes this potential universal, device independent, crowdsourced, and searchable — a very powerful combination.

Some ideas of how geotagging tweets could transform our day-to-day experience:

• I could walk down a street looking for a place to have lunch, and then search for tweets by people who’d dined at restaurants I walked by to see their reviews. Imagine if the local newspaper geotagged tweets to all of its restaurant reviews so I could find them in real space.
• I could create a virtual scavenger hunt by leaving Twitter clues in specific places. Real-time treasure hunts could give new meaning to “following” someone on Twitter. I imagine a brand of liquor might create a bar-crawl scavenger hunt that “follows” someone–a character, a model, a celebrity–who represents the brand and leads explorers through a weekly expedition.
• I could walk down a street and see Tweets about special deals and sales from stores on that street.
• I could stand on a corner and search for real-time geotagged tweets from nearby bus and subway stops to find them and know how many minutes it will be until the next bus or train arrives
• I could visit my grandmother’s grave and read Twitter messages from other family members who’d been there.
• If I were a delivery person, I could check Twitter at a given address to see if there were warnings about a mean dog.
• Imagine if the local newspaper geotagged tweets to its archive of news stories… I could walk down a block in Manhattan and see all the New York Times articles about events, people, buildings, and businesses on that block.

There are disturbing possibilities, as well. A restaurant owner could leave fake negative “reviews”  at competitors’ restaurants. An abusive boyfriend might leave derogatory messages or compromising pictures at an ex-girlfriend’s house. Porn and spam tweets can be littered everywhere. A racist might virtually spit at my mother again, 50 years after she stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial. But these are problems that the open forum of the Internet has to deal with in any case.

There are limitations in how accurate location data can be. In dense urban areas, the GPS accuracy (typically 50 feet or less in non-urban places) is not as good. But in most cases the typical GPS accuracy will be fine. Add to that the volume of geotagging that may occur and many places will get extremely crowded with contributed content. It’s clear that geotagged search will be a hugely interesting challenge in the next few years. Hashtags to categorize these geotagged stickynote tweets will likely arise from users. There will need to be a way for users to mark certain geotagged tweets as spam or porn, to offer corrections and comments, rate tweets, or otherwise “grade ” the content of a tweet or what it points to.

The possibilities are endless, exciting, and boggle the mind. But I think Twitter may succeed with this kind of location-based virtual stickynote where previous attempts failed — and it’s going to be very interesting, challenging, and fun. I’d love to hear your ideas for how to use this new feature. Please share them in the comments.

“A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times”
–Randall Jarrell