“From the last seven years of polling, we’ve found that what older people like best about the Internet is being able to connect to family and friends,” - Susannah Fox - Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Kaiser Family Foundation

New family social networks are popping up almost every day. The real draw to these sites for Boomers seems to be the huge disconnections families have these days. More families are geographically separated from each other than ever before. With the holiday season rapidly approaching, the family event coordinator (usually a Boomer) is looking to the internet to connect geographically distant family members. Family is a big deal to Boomers, and family social networks provide an easy way to gather the family group together again.

Boomers also feel a need to pass on to their family and the next generation the story of where they began. So family social networks are not only a place to connect socially, but they’re also a place to discover your family’s past, and discover yourself in the process.

In meeting with family social networking executives recently, I’m finding that one of hottest trends in family social networks is in the field of DNA social networking. I recently spoke to a company whose USP is based on having a large database of DNA results for users to access. There’s huge potential in this area of social networking. So much so that Google recently invested $3.9 million in a DNA social networking startup called 23andMe. The goal of DNA social networking sites like this is to help users gain a better understanding of their genetic information, and track down lost or distant relatives.

Famiva.com

Famiva Home Page

Famiva  just had a major update over the weekend, and the look is clean and appealing.  Within Famiva, users can work with family members on a secure site to “build your family tree, share photos and stories, stay current with family events and reminders, and much more.” What Boomers will like about Famiva is how easy it is. There’s no sign-up required and has really great features to capture genealogy as well as connect current family.They also have a great tour which makes it easy to know exactly what to expect from the network.

Genoom.com
Genoom is an innovative site with a bevy of tools to create private family networks. Genoom helps family researchers not only learn about their past, but connect family together for current events and create digital heirlooms for future generations.

Geni.com
Geni  is a great great family social network which helps users trace their family roots. Geni also has the family tree, photo sharing, and event calendar of other family social networks, but it also allows users to add family friends as “friends of your family tree”.

Obviously, boomers are becoming more active in social media, one study last year cites that 45% of boomers online are using family social networks. What does this mean for businesses looking to advertise on social media? Don’t count out baby boomers in your social advertising plans. They’ve got financial strength that many Gen Y and X don’t have yet, so if your product or service has any overlap for the boomer generation, either as users or buyers, make them the focus of some of your marketing efforts.

If you’re ready to create a social media marketing strategy, and would like to see how you can incorporate boomers into that strategy, contact me. Let’s talk about how we can work together to help you reach your goals.

ghennipher [at] ghennipher.net

If you haven’t noticed already, Social Media Marketing is different. Don’t let the word Marketing fool you. The days of Ad Gurus, sitting in their Ivory Towers, dispensing magical potions on your products to bring in automatic sales from Television, Radio and Print are GONE. Your customers are immune to that brand of “magic”. They have diminishing loyalty to brands they hear about via the traditional methods.

Your product sales and customer loyalty will also not be improved anymore by paying high-minded consultants high fees to berate your previous marketing campaigns and insist that only their proprietary (read: excessively expensive) methodology will work for you. Your customers are rejecting that kind of manipulation.

Celebrity endoresements? Press releases? Interactive advertising? SEO? Still effective methods to get your website seen, to be sure. They’re nothing to dismiss in your efforts for website visibility. But you want *more* than just to be seen, right? You want customers who are loyal to your brand, even when other companies slash prices. You want customers who are so excited about your product that they tell their friends. And their friends, in turn, tell their friends. Ultimately, you want more sales, more consistently, with less expense on your part. You want the promise of Social Media Marketing. But leveraging Social Media to reach concrete business metrics is a mystery to most companies still.

Your customers ignore marketing messages and refuse to be manipulated - but that’s what traditional marketing is built on. So how do you use Social Media to reach your customers with the message they want to hear? The message they want to respond to?

I’ve consulted businesses in the area of social media strategy, and what follows are some of the most common (and easily solved) concerns about social media marketing I hear.

Mystery #1
“We created a blog and our own social media network, signed up for other popular networks and blast our specials to our “Friends” but our sales haven’t really improved. In fact, we sometimes even get hostile reactions to our offers. What gives? We’re just trying to help.”

Mystery #2
“We got celebrity endorsement for our product, set up a website with a blog, do SEO and PPC, but our online sales are still flat. The product really moves when customers who love the product tell their friends about it. We’re thinking of going into an MLM model.”

Mystery #3
“Social Media Marketing is a fad and it doesn’t bring in revenues. We’re just focusing on improving our search engine rankings, and we think that’s enough. We’re only getting into social media marketing because our strongest competitor is, and we have to stay competitive.”

In my next post, I’ll share some of the advice I gave the companies who made these mysterious statements above, and give some anecdotal results of improvements made when implementing a solid social media marketing strategy.

Let’s say you’ve gotten the approval to get your company involved in social media marketing and are ready to launch a campaign. How do you define whether your campaign will be a success or not?

This is an important question, because a large number of companies have jumped into social media campaigns without any clear business and communication strategy. Before the financial meltdown of the last few weeks, some companies had the resources to experiment with social media without worrying about financial accountability. But now, most businesses are forced into having solid success metrics for social media.

In fact, the lack of good metrics is cited as

more…

Salt Lake City’s Twitter community is coming together again tonight for our monthly Tweetup. This time we’re welcoming Danny from Provo UT to our group. He’s a contestant in Wells Fargo’s Someday Stories contest. The contest encouraged people to submit a 250-word true and inspiring story about their “someday” dreams and how Wells Fargo could help them achieve it. Danny’s one of the five finalists chosen and you can see a video of his story here. The video with the most votes wins the grand prize. All we need to do to give our support is vote for his video. This is social media and viral marketing in action!

Danny has a great story, has a dream of becoming a physical therapist, and our support can help him achieve that dream with $100k from Wells Fargo. I’m also really proud to support the causes being helped by this contest. One of the causes you can support is Jr Achievement. A turning point in my life was when I was invited to join Jr Achievement in middle school. It really opened up my dreams to be an entrepreneur. From the site:

“Junior Achievement helps young people become economically empowered. The volunteer-driven, K-12 programs uses hands-on learning to teach students how to be work-ready, entrepreneurial, and financially literate.”

Jr. Achievement is my preferred cause, and I encourage you to check out the other causes and vote for your favorite. The other 2 causes you can support via this contest are Habitat for Humanity and Boys and Girls Clubs of America.

The Tweetups have been a great way to connect in real life, and I’m really looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new Twitter users at the Tweetup tonight. It also feels great to know we can use social media for more than simply connecting in person - we can actually provide genuine support for those who need it most.

I hope to see you there tonight.

Tweetup Details: Salt Lake City Roasting Company tonight
Address: 320 E. 400 S
How to Find Us: We’ll meet upstairs again
Agenda: Meet some great fellow Utah Twitter users, and learn about some great causes you can help support.  

If you have any trouble finding the Tweetup or any of the attendees, message me on Twitter @ghennipher

“Social media strategy should tie to business and communication strategy, rather than being based on the available tools. But it is not possible to develop a social media strategy without at least having an understanding of the various tools that are available, their functionality and purposes, and the kinds of audiences and conversations for which they might be best suited.” - Joel Postman, Principal Socialized PR

I don’t usually give a lot of time on this blog to social media tools, simply because their coolness tends to distract marketers from basic business objectives for their social media campaigns. The thing to always remember is that social media is simply a medium (albeit exciting & effective) to help your company meet it’s basic business/revenue goals.

As Joel Postman points out above, social media needs to tie into business & communication strategy to be truly effective for your company. Social media tools should not be used for the express purpose of: being more transparent, being conversational in the blogosphere, online visibility, or any other goal not specifically business process and/or revenue related. Of course, by now, you know all of these things are important. Yet to focus on them independent of the reason you’re in business spells disaster. Your likely end goal should be to boost your overall business revenue, streamline your business process, etc. Strategic use of social media tools - with success metrics attached to each implementation - is one of the most solid ways for your company to meet foundational business goals.

One troubling aspect of ‘citizen journalists’ and the relationship unknown and untested bloggers have with respected online news journals is that sometimes these bloggers submit posts which have a detrimental effect on business. This situation has been seen over and over again. Last month for instance, a wrongly dated post about United Airlines caused stock prices to plummet 75%. Most recently in yet another false post about Steve Jobs’ health, Apple stock plummeted upon news on iReport.com of Steve Jobs being rushed to the hospital after a heart attack. Apple officials quickly rejected the post as untrue, and the story has since been pulled from iReport.com, where it originated.

If the false post wasn’t enough of a pain for CNN (the owner of iReport), the SEC is now investigating the false claims about Jobs. Registration on iReport.com only requires a working email address, but CNN is handing over what information they have about the author of the Steve Jobs post.

Twitter was abuzz with news of Steve Job’s heart attack, and many considered the value of their Apple stock declining in tweets to this popular micro-blogging service. Anecdotally, I noted very few tweets relating to the story being revealed as bogus once Apple rejected the claim. Much work is going in to correct the rumor and speculation, but for Apple, the damage is ongoing. 

Who is ultimately responsible for ‘citizen journalists’? If we, as bloggers can post to mainstream media news sites, what obvious system is in place to ensure the accuracy of each post? Offline when I take my old clothes to a consignment shop for donation, each item goes through a simple inspection to make sure they’re up to the stores quality standard. Certainly online, when ‘citizen journalists’ have the ability to post news stories which can erase millions of dollars in market value, why isn’t there at least the most rudimentary quality standard in place? The short answer is speed. News networks are under increasing pressure to be the first to release an important news story, so they prefer to deal with possible consequences later rather than miss the opportunity to be the first. I submit that a simple quality check should be in place for all mainstream news sites, which requires first and last name, working email address and no submissions from a blocked IP address. Surely, there are simple workarounds to these rudimentary submission standards, but also as sure they will likely eliminate some of the market instability caused by the rumor mill.

What other submission standards should online news journals implement to help ensure the accuracy of stories submitted by ‘citizen journalists’? I’d like to hear your views.

Our little Salt Lake City Tweetup group is gaining some speed. We’ve planned a short-notice tweetup for October 2, 2008. Incidentally, this tweetup occurs on the same date as the VP debate, so we’ve adjusted our original location to allow those who want to watch the debates to do so at the Tweetup.

Here’s the Tweetup details - we’d love to have any Twitter friends, old or new:

Coffee Break
435 E 400 S
Salt Lake City, UT
7 PM -

I’ll be uploading photos of the Tweetup soon, and here’s a little advance notice - we’ve got a very special Tweetup planned for October 20. Please clear your calendar and join us.

See you at the Tweetup!