There’s an interesting topic being discussed over on Web-Strategist.  Once again, Jeremiah Owyang challenges us to think of a new paradigm that could change the way companies relate and react to their customers.  Ultimately, I disagree with what he says although I think he’s onto something:  communities of customers, when banded together will have greater power in product development to the extent that companies will have to adjust their product strategies to meet these demands.DIGITAL STREET JOURNAL

You should read the whole article.

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I happen to love the attention I get from personal brands. There’s nothing like feeling that you’ve been singled out to be chatted up by a Tony Hsieh — CEO of Zappos.com, or Gavy Vaynerchuk from WineLibrary.tv, or any of the many personal brands who are active on social networks.

That’s just one upside…and for me, it’s all personal.

Well, actually, as smart companies know, it’s not all personal. Good one-on-one interaction is good business.

It makes it easy for consumers to choose that company’s products and service offerings. So much beauty in social networking — companies engage in online conversations and customer communities to boost business! Who doesn’t love to feel like they’re getting personally heard from a company representative? It’s so Mom & Pop, but with much better, faster service due to the internet.

So what’s the downside?

The sole person behind a personal brand simply cannot maintain the same level of personal interaction a team who is representing a company can. So, one day a ‘lone cowboy’ personal brand may interact heavily with customers and prospects. The next day, business obligations may prevent any interaction at all.

For some customers, this is just enough for them to loudly proclaim to their social network that Company X sucks because Personal Brand at Company X ignored their pleas for product support, or whatever. You get the idea.

From a customer standpoint, personal brands can potentially cause more brand damage than good for the company. Customers demand attention when they want it, and don’t give a flying flip about anything else that may be more pressing to personal brand respresentative. Upset customers vent all over the internet. The reputation management fallout is a lot more expensive for companies than simply hiring a team to help manage their brand online.

This is all just common sense. Companies, if one of your star employees is looking to become a star on the internet, seriously consider whether it’s in your company’s best interests to support that during work hours. If you decide that your business will thrive by having one shining star out of your employees represent it, definitely develop a contingency plan — a Social Media Brand Management Plan B, if you will, in the unfortunate event of that employee’s exit from the company.

Considering the precarious nature of managing your brand via Social Media in the first place, what should your Social Media Brand Management Plan B entail? Here’s a few, for starters:

• Immediate team brand deployment to regain control of conversations regarding your brand.
• Company branded Twitter, Facebook, etc, social network accounts.
• Full access to conversations and contacts made by your previous social media star

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The Sundance marketing team collaborated with us to create an amazing Sundance/Salt Lake City Tweetup featuring Ondi Timoner, who was awarded the Grand Jury prize a few days after our Tweetup at the Sundance Film Festival for her documentary, We Live in Public.

We met in the lovely Beehive Tea Room in downtown Salt Lake City. Not only did we have Twitter users attend this event, but we also welcomed a few who have never used Twitter, but wanted to join the group to meet a Sundance director. Ondi Timoner, Josh Harris, and crew joined our Tweetup in between showings and graciously spent some time telling us about the documentary, and Tweeting their experience.

Director Ondi Timoner (@onditimoner) and Josh Harris

Tweetup attendees listening to Ondi Timoner and Josh Harris talking about We Live in Public

Here’s a partial list of the Salt Lake City Sundance Tweetup:
@rmiriam12
@kittygutz
@roxycross
@ThomAllen
@carysnowden
@ambeestar
@taranaki
@latent_image
@highpointe
@ghennipher
@kevinDwhite
@littleidea
Danica Cross
Krista Smith

Many thanks to Sundance Film Festival, Ondi Timoner and Josh Harris for coming to our Tweetup! We all had a great time! And congratulations to Ondi Timoner for winning the 2009 Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary We Live In Public.

Suntweet Charity Tweetup January 22, 2009

One thing I love about Social Media is the power it has to support a good cause. The #suntweet charity Twetup event definitely supported a great cause, and raised over $600 for Serenity. We also UStreamed the event and even made the front page!

#Suntweet panelists prepping to talk about social media.

@ghennipher with fellow #suntweet panelist Jesse Stay (@jesse)

We all had a great time with the Tweetups during the month of January. I’m really proud to have had a part in supporting an important charity — Serenity, and to support a budding documentarian, Ondi Timoner.

If you’re an organization in Utah that would like to be part of our SLC Tweetups, please contact me. Your customers are actively using social media and talking about your brand via social media. Theres no better venue to reach this audience than through social media — online and offline. I would love to connect you with this wonderful group of social media users and help you design a strategy to provide real value to your customers during these difficult economic times.

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Geoff Livingston posted a great list of 25 ways to know whether you’ve got a strong Social Media Consultant or Agency. This was in response to the recent influx of “social media experts” entering the space who are clearly unqualified and can cause more harm than good to your business.

Some salient points for Marketing/Communications Managers to consider from his post:

• “Integrates social media as part of larger marketing strategy(example: Razorfish)
• Understands that Radian6 and other monitoring tools are vastly superior tracking tools in comparison to Technorati (which really isn’t an indicator of much these days) (example: Fleishman’s Matt Dickman)
• Understands that social media expands beyond search engine optimization tactics that lead to Diggs, Stumbles (StumbleUpon) and link baiting (example: Key Relevance’s Li Evans)
• Knows that social networking works best when they are conversing, sharing, and being human (i.e. doesn’t self-promote) (example: Jason Falls)
• Understands that social media is more than just creating and delivering content or regurgitating existing promotional copy Joseph Jaffe”

If you’re ready to start communicating with your customers via social media, choose your social media consultant with care. Check out the full article here.

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Think about that for a minute. A targeted advertisement by one of the most respected pharmaceutical companies in the world was brought down in less than 48 hours by a relatively small number of social network users. What’s more, these social network users were on Twitter — one of the social networks many companies find most challenging to use because of its format of 140 character messages, and a culture of interaction — not broadcast.

Motrin used traditional media to distribute the advertisement — they weren’t using social media specifically for distribution of this ad. It was on the Motrin.com website and YouTube, but it was also distrubuted via traditional and print media — “Safe media”. Not using social media for the main ad push likely made Motrin advertisers consider putting resources elsewhere, and not in a social media monitoring strategy. Yet, by not having a solid social monitoring strategy in place, the outrage of Twitterers to the ad swelled so quickly that Motrin didn’t notice until it was too late, and ultimately lost complete control of the entire campaign.

Some consequences of no Social Monitoring Strategy

The advertisement was a bust — it had to completely stopped. The financial implications of their misstep are likely painful. Here’s a shot of the graphic on the Motrin.com homepage.

Motrin apology

Motrin did the right thing in acknowledging it’s mistake of offending baby-carrying Moms, and then removing the ads. Their sincere tone and thanks for public feedback will likely help this debacle become a thing of the past soon.

But your company is likely not as well funded as Motrin. What lesson should you take away from Motrin’s very public social media misstep?

Don’t ignore Social Media: Even if you never promote your company via social media networks, don’t ignore it. Hire a Social Media Marketing Consultant or agency today to help you develop a relationship and monitoring strategy. Skipping this step can devalue your brand, and cost your company millions of dollars and customers.

Check out some of the brands who got punk’d by social media (via Forrester’s Jeremy Owyang).

UPDATE:
For those of you who haven’t seen the ad yet, the Motrin Moms ad is still available here.

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“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

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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!

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Here’s the top 3 results I think are especially sapient (Ha!) for those of us in social media:

• More than 1/3 of marketers surveyed revealed that they are not confident that their current agency is well-positioned to take their brand through the unchartered waters of online digital marketing and interactive advertising.

• When trying to engage consumers with their brand, 90 percent of respondents agree that it is becoming increasingly important that their agency uses ‘pull interactions’ such as social media and online communities rather than traditional ‘push’ campaigns.

• It’s no surprise that marketers want an agency that can report on where campaigns succeeded, fell short and where they should be fine-tuned. Sixty-five percent ranked analytics at the top of their agency wish list.

These results are a real kick in the pants for interactive agencies. I recently met with some execs from a local interactive shop representing the 2nd largest advertising agency in the world. They were scared stiff to even consider talking about social media to their largely tech clientele. This agency excels on the creative side, and recently won awards for a great “viral video” they designed for one of their Fortune 1000 clients. But a search for this viral video doesn’t immediately connect it with the client it was representing! The only search results for the client promoted in this “viral video” are well below the fold. No viral video results at all show when I search for the company name. It takes some real searching to even figure out who the viral video was created for. There’s a HUGE disconnect there. That client paid 6 figures for this ‘viral video’ campaign, and yet finding out who the video is supposedly promoting is a real challenge. What’s the ROI in that for their client? It seems to have paid off more for the interactive agency, what with the design awards and all.

This is the kind of thing marketers can no longer tolerate. In the past, when advertising successs was measured only by reach, this may have been considered a successful campaign. Now with the specific analytics tools which make agencies much more accountable for the results of their campaigns, results like the ones above are simply unacceptable.

Smart interactive agencies will continue seeking out social media professionals and re-evaluating how to best serve their clients. Social media marketing is certainly not about creative advertising that still “pushes” a message on customers. That old standard is crumbling fast, and many agencies are hurting as they scramble to understand the new medium that is totally “pull” based and customer-centric.

Some social media marketing detractors speak against the need for a professional standard to this medium since its ruled by customers. But as a consultant, I look at things from both the business’ and the customer’s viewpoint. Businesses are completely like a fish out of water and frustrated when they see customers lamblasting their brand all over social networks. So they generally either bury their heads in the sand and throw money at their interactive agency to create more digital advertising, or bravely create social network accounts and sometimes anonomously get involved in a negative discussion about their brand and try to change opinions – unknown and with no authority, so often to be found out – heaping even more dirt on a struggling brand. Don’t think this won’t happen with you or your clients – some of the biggest brands in the US fell into this trap.

A Social Media Professional’s job, especially in consulting interactive agencies and/or their clients, eliminates this kind of self-inflicted brand wound and can very often stop the hemorraging from previous decisions based on the traditional “push” mentality. In business, its the customers that matter anyway – not the creativity of an ad. The real focus should be on building relationships with the customers, not so much on the Creative Director of an agency. Social Media Marketing professionals are needed as the solid bridge from traditional marketing to greater levels of business transparency and customer interaction.

Check out the full text of the CMO answers here: Survey Reveals Brand Marketers’ Top 10 Wish List for Agencies of the Future

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Why enter the Corporate Socializers competition? The competition is described as “a program designed to recognize communications professionals who have implemented innovative and effective corporate social media.” In this Wild West era of social media, recognizing companies who have implemented Best Practices in their Social Media marketing efforts is sorely needed, particularly when there’s investor and shareholder expectations to consider. Companies who have crossed those treacherous waters are encouraged to enter. Corporate communications as a whole benefits from good examples of how to manage social media marketing.

What do winners get? All accepted entries will get mentioned on the Social Corp blog, the official blog for the book. The companies with the best overall results will be mentioned in the Social Corp Book, due out by the end of the year from New Riders, an imprint of PeachPit Press.

How do I enter? Find out the rules and details at the Corporate Socializers Competition blog.

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Its amazing to me to see the real life implications of online social media. Take the Beijeng Olympics, for example. There are groups of Twitter users meeting together online to dispatch Tweets about what they see offline at the games. These Twitter users will likely meet offline for a meal or drinks, as do many other Twitter user throughout the world.

Social networking has proven itself to be much more than a buzz word in the Internet world. It’s reality. Humans are social creatures, and no matter if we’re tethered to our internet-enabled devices, or perhaps even more so if we’re connected to our internet devices, we crave face to face human interaction. Twitter has made that bridge easier to cross for people of all nationalities during the Beijeng Olympics.

Keep up on some of the Beijeng Twitter happenings here:

#080808 Twitter campaign — started by Chinese Twitter users. One of the best ways to keep up with the excitement

Ogilvy China Digital Watch — There’s tremendous buzz online about the Games, no surprise there, and they’re frantically following all the goings-on.

#080808 Twitter Campaign for Olympics — This is a link to a great collage of #080808 Twitter buddy icons.

This is certainly one of the most exciting events I’ve experienced on Twitter — no doubt due to its global scale. And huge agencies like Olgivy and others are taking the lead in bringing the event to social media networks. I’m looking forward to seeing some of the research strategies that come out of this global social media case study. Exciting!

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