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5 Ways to Sell Social Media to Your Boss (Shyftr Comments)

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Posted in ReadWriteWeb (View Site) by Guest Author - 2 days ago

I recently outlined why I'm sick of the 'ROI in web 2.0' discussion. To be specific, the debate as to whether there is one at all.

In that post, I gave examples of how naysayers reacted to social media tools in the past - and how they were left in the dust of those who experimented with these web 2.0 tools. So, where do these naysayers come from? Why is there a resistance to web 2.0? In this post I'll explain how to sell social media to those people and/or your boss!

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This is a guest post by DJ Francis, founder and author of OnlineMarketerBlog.com

Your Responsibility

Seth Godin says it's not because your boss is stupid. It's not that your boss is ignorant of Facebook, but that they know the 30-second spot. Seth says that the best way of changing the world is to open the close-minded and you do that by presenting more data in a palatable way. It's your job to teach your boss about web 2.0 tools.

Here are some suggestions for ways other companies have used social media tools. Consider how these could apply to your business. Be creative and don't think about what you could do - think about what your customers want. Then determine which social media tools can help you deliver what they want.

Ways To Sell Social Media Tools To Your Boss

1. Keeping Up With The Joneses

Your boss doesn't want to get left behind and it's getting more likely that s/he's seen some of this fancy social media stuff at work. Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson report that familiarity with and usage of social media within the business world (the Inc. 500 in this particular study) has nearly doubled in the past 12 months.

This means that your boss is likely primed for a conversation about using social media in your business. You just need to fit a web 2.0 tactics to your current business objectives. Your boss might just be looking for someone to lead the charge.

Barnes and Mattson report that "When queried on the importance of social media, 26% of the respondents [Inc. 500 members] in 2007 felt social media is 'very important' to their business and marketing strategy. That figure rose to 44% in approximately one year."

2. Listening (Customer/Market Research)

Social media offers infinite market research, branding, and listening opportunities. I dare you to search for "[Your brand] sucks" and see what you find. Listening - a simple yet often over-looked aspect of human life - may be the Web 2.0 killer app and smart companies are catching on.

TNS/Cymfony found that "Revolutionaries" - companies that focused on listening rather than selling - "have a more sophisticated approach to creating strong relationships with consumers and as a result are gaining a competitive edge," said Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer Jim Nail. (Bill Green at MakeTheLogoBigger concurs that social media leads to listening that eventually leads to monetization.)

When I heard AOL had bought Bebo earlier this year I cringed just thinking about the energetic startup in the clutches of a Web 1.0 holdover. From The Economist: "The non sequitur is to assume that the new service will be a revenue-generating business in its own right." But the service could be amazingly valuable if marketers used it as a listening mechanism.

3. Responding

Social media gives marketers the chance to give quick feedback and break down unnecessary walls. Businesses are using Twitter to personalize a brand (@Zappos), quickly solve customer's problems (@ComcastCares), and create more immersive interactive media experiences (@_S_A_R_A_H_ from the Sci Fi Channel's Eureka).

And these comprise only one social media tool. Response ideas are endless considering the vast array of tools at your disposal.

And speaking of response, the best way to get that is...

4. Talking To Actual Customers

Some bosses - maybe yours - are so removed from their customers that they get a kick out of hearing from them. After all, if you spent 20 years getting your customer feedback from memos, you can imagine how disconcerting but exciting it would be to hear from, you know, a real human.

I recommend starting with positive feedback. Grab a sampling of social media feedback from your customers (just Google your company name or check Yelp.com, if nothing else). MarketingVox reports that reviews are usually positive - 87% of them, in fact. Print out a few and put them in front of your boss. Seeing glowing customer feedback will only get your boss more interested in hearing from customers.

In the up-coming book Secrets of Social Media Marketing, author Paul Gillan describes it this way: "Once they start taking direct feedback from customers, they tend to get addicted. Direct customer relations is like a drug."

5. Set The Boss' Sights Long-Term

When discussions of ROI come up, a time frame almost always comes up. "What will we get in the next quarter for this investment of time or resources?" "I want monthly reports on this expenditure."

This discussion is worthwhile and statistics should be kept to track progress. However, you will have more success in social media if you set your boss' expectations to cover a longer period of time. Engagement is a long-term project.

Valeria claims that engagement and impact on retention can take two years to measure. That's not to say you won't see results before then. Lewis Green talks over at MarketingProfs about the ROI his company received from their blog. But manage your boss' expectations and keep them looking at the long-term goal.

BL Ochman put it succinctly in this interview:

"You need to have realistic expectations, and know that conversational marketing produces results over time. It is not a quick fix or a magic bullet. Instead, social media must be integrated into the overall marketing plan for the long haul. And over time, you can build traffic, sales and your customer/donor base with these new tools."

In most instances, when marketers talk about measurement or ROI of social media, they are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. You can't apply a Web 1.0 gestalt in a world where the audience cannot only respond, but can also generate more content than any single company.

Instead of measuring how well we are pushing our message onto potential customers, we should instead gauge our success on the number of conversations listened to, problems resolved, and useful suggestions received from the community of customers we already have.

Your challenge is bringing your boss around to this worldview. And it is a worldview, not just some notion. It changes the way you interact with the world, so it's no small task. Likewise, it's a big job, so you'd better get cracking right now.

Social Media Linked To Trust

Don't forget that the reason to sell social media to your boss is so that you can begin to build a cache of trust with your customers. In truth, that trust is the real return on investment. The more they trust you, the more they will buy from you and respect your opinions.

Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, said in AdWeek that "The other risk is that in the zeal to track, marketers and agencies will lose sight of the need to trust that getting closer to customers is a worthy goal in and of itself."

Marketers seem obsessed with assigning value to interactions on social media sites. But real success comes when you value the interaction itself.

Have you sold your boss on social media tools already? How did you accomplish that? Please leave suggestions in the comments section below. And if you haven't already, subscribe, where I regularly blog on these topics.

DJ Francis is the founder and author of OnlineMarketerBlog.com - a business blog at the intersection of marketing, copywriting, and social media.

Ning Adds OpenSocial Support (Shyftr Comments)

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Posted in ReadWriteWeb (View Site) by Frederic Lardinois - 2 days ago

Social networking platform Ning just announced that it now supports OpenSocial. Thanks to this, developers can now easily create applications for the Ning platform. At this time, Ning already features 30 applications that users can embed into their profile pages, including support for file sharing with Box.net and poll creation from Polldaddy. One of the highlights of Ning's implementation of OpenSocial is that the widgets automatically adapt themselves to the branding and design of the individual networks.

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Ning is a social networking platform that allows its users to create their own, custom social networks. Some of its high-profile customers include celebrities like 50 Cent and Ellen DeGeneres.

For now, users can only add OpenSocial applications to their profiles, but not to their networks. This will change, however, once future versions of OpenSocial are developed, as Caroline McCarthy reports.

By adding support for OpenSocial, Ning is joining a growing number of social networks that support this standard, including MySpace, hi5, Orkut, and Bebo. For developers, supporting OpenSocial makes good sense, as they can reach a far larger audience with an OpenSocial application than if they just programmed for a given network's own APIs. The only hold-out with regards to supporting OpenSocial is Facebook, though Facebook is also considering the option of opening up its development platform to other social networks in the future.

Ning itself is growing nicely and just celebrated the creation of its 500,000th network. By supporting OpenSocial, Ning now gains the ability to offer its customers an even larger array of options, though it would have been nice if Ning already supported OpenSocial apps on network pages and not just on profiles.

Real VC Might Be The Safest Asset Class Today (Shyftr Comments)

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Posted in ReadWriteWeb (View Site) by Bernard Lunn - 2 days ago

In downturns there is a "flight to safety". Typically you would put Venture Capital (VC) at the risky end, with something like a Money Market Fund at the safe end. Well today even the safest stuff is looking scary, thanks to the games that the financial engineers have been playing. So maybe investing in a real business that disrupts the old order with a fundamentally new value proposition is actually the safest thing to do. That is "Real Venture Capital (RVC)". But RVC is very, very different from "Momentum Venture Capital" (MVC). MVC is under a significant threat.

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RVC Is A Different Asset Class From MVC

Real Venture Capital (RVC) is anything that takes a risk and works hard to create something fundamentally new. Many classic VC funds fall into this category. So do many angels. But I would also put entrepreneurs who bootstrap their ventures into this category. I would also even put Private Equity and Hedge Funds that do turnarounds and transformations.

This is very different from Momentum Venture Capital (MVC). The old asset class categories make less sense in this context. You get all kinds of MVC that would traditionally be called VC, Angel, Entrepreneur, Private Equity or Hedge Fund. But they are fundamentally different from Real VC. MVC jump on trends and amplify them. If they are lucky and smart, they get out in time. They are the bubble inflators. Their core competency is timing trends. They ride momentum.

In a downturn such as this, MVC get crushed. MVC that timed it well and got to cash are sitting pretty, playing golf ready to jump in a gain when the cycle turns. But MVC left "holding the bag" at a time like this get crushed.

RVC is contrarian. They invest when most people are scared and sell when everybody is bullish. MVC is the opposite. Smart MVC invest when the trends are obvious and get out quick, the classic "flip artist". Dumb MVC invest when the trends are obvious and don't get out in time. But both smart and dumb MVC are primarily trend spotters.

Warren Buffet is the RVC Hero

Warren Buffet ignores Mr. Market and buys companies that generate lots of free cash flow. RVC build the kind of companies that Mr. Buffet would want to buy (which mean that anybody would want to buy and that you don't need to sell until the right buyer comes along).

Sure, But Safe??? Look At Alternatives

No asset class looks safe now. Remember that the objective is some cash after inflation, and inflation has certainly reared its ugly head again. Here are some of the usual assets that people turn to in difficult times. (In brackets are the classic "Chicken Little" fear mongering questions that you hear today).

1. Cash (in what Bank? After Inflation? In what currency?)
2. Money Markets (frozen assets in panic, no inflation protection)
3. Muni Bonds (what did Schawzenegger say about California needing emergency funds?)
4. Property, "safe as houses, right?" ('nuff said).
5. Oil (will drop if global economy slows)

I could go on and on. The point is that when nothing is safe the risk/reward of investing in a new business that you really understand, with people you trust, suddenly looks less out there on the risk curve.

The Playing Field Just Tilted To The Little Guy

This is what we wrote about yesterday related to SaaS and traditional IT vendors.

That maybe part of a bigger historical shift of power from BigCo to SmallCo, reversing what happened in the last 50 years when the share of US GDP controlled by Fortune 500 went from 1/3 to 2/3. Coase's Law and the reduction in transaction friction created by the Internet are the theoretical underpinning of this shift.

This historic shift makes it safer to build disruptive innovation from scratch than defend an incumbent position. To put it more simply, today it is better to be a Barbarian than a Roman.

In short, it is time for Real VC to be bold. Some will be bold. Some won't. Enough will be bold for this to work out just fine.

Image credit: Thomas Hawk

Verizon Suffers Security Slip in Security Seminar Invites (Shyftr Comments)

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Posted in The Inquisitr (View Site) by JR - 2 days ago

Talk about awesome irony: Verizon accidentally included the private e-mail addresses of 1,200 IT professionals in a mass-mailed invitation for a seminar about protecting personal data.

The communications company sent more than a dozen e-mails containing the addresses, according to technology professionals who contacted Network World. The messages touted a series of upcoming events, including one called “Secure the Information, Secure the Infrastructure,” and another called the “Data Breach Investigations Report Road Show.” The Verizon employee who sent them put all the e-mail addresses in plain view in the “To” field, rather than obscuring them in the “BCC” field as most mass mailings would do, the recipients say.

When one IT worker responded to point out the problems, Verizon wrote back and apologized for the “lapse in judgment,” he tells Network World. The worker says he received 17 different messages from Verizon within the day, each with hundreds of e-mail addresses listed at the top.

Let’s hope Verizon saved a front-row seat at the seminar for its employee to attend.

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An Ignoble But Much Needed End To Web 2.0, Marked By A Party In Cyprus (Shyftr Comments)

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Posted in TechCrunch (View Site) by Michael Arrington - 2 days ago

In May 2007 I wrote “Times are good, money is flowing, and Silicon Valley sucks” in a post about how, in my opinion, Silicon Valley was ripe for a downturn.

This week, without any doubt, we got that downturn. It was different from the last downturn in that it wasn’t driven by the crazy bullishness of Silicon Valley venture capitalists and investment banks. This time, Wall Street and our government screwed everything up all on their own while we minded our own business and acquired our own instead of going public at crazy valuations.

So what exactly just ended? Easy capital to start. And that means already funded companies are going to tighten their belts in a big way, per the request/demand of venture capitalists like Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Ron Conway.

The first to go will be the bulging marketing and communications departments at all those startups - the very people who make Silicon Valley such a nasty place to be in the boom times. But as the number of startups dwindle, it won’t be so hard for them to get attention from press and users, so those marketing and PR flaks won’t be missed all that much (of course, the people without jobs won’t be happy).

We’ll look back in later years and think of this most recent boom as the Web 2.0 period, when we were wowed by the magic of user generated content, copyright violations on a massive scale, and neat little widgety things that used Javascript and Flash to turn web pages into pretty close equivalents to the old desktop apps. Of course there were other evolutions as well. Advertising technology has advanced steadily, particularly in tailoring ads to an individuals needs, and tracking them properly. This is the period that social networking as we think of it today was born, and we’ll never be rid of it in our lifetimes.

So why the use of the word ignoble in the title? Well, all this went down at an unfortunate time for a score of Silicon Valley posterboys and girls as they partied 1999 style “the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in October of 2008 for a week of reflections on life, love, and the Internet.” They leave behind an absurd video that would have gone unnoticed a month ago. But this week, with the walls tumbling down, they look like a bunch of jackasses who have no idea what’s going on back at home. And this video will always be associated with the end of Web 2.0.

Goodbye, Web 2.0. I hope I never have to type those words again. Now can we please get back to work? There’s still a ton left to do before we get to Matrix-style virtual reality, the Singularity, and mobile phones with batteries that last a whole day.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Watchmen Video Journal: Blue Monday - Dr. Manhattan (Shyftr Comments)

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Posted in FirstShowing.net (View Site) by Alex Billington - 6 days ago

It's that time of the month and that means we've got the latest Watchmen video journal to share with all of you. SciFi presents the 7th of 12 behind-the-scenes video journals chronicling the development of the film. Today's video journal focuses on the one true superhero from the Watchmen universe - the blue man known as Dr. Manhattan. It's obviously a monumental task integrating a giant glowing translucent blue man into nearly ever last scene, but Zack Snyder and crew knew it was an integral part of pulling off a literal adaptation of the graphic novel. Billy Crudup stars as Jon Osterman / Dr. Manhattan and gives us an intimate look at the process of making the CGI superhero come to life on the big screen.

Watch the seventh Watchmen video journal - Blue Monday:

Each new video is release on the 6th of every month, so check back again on November 6th for the next Watchmen video journal in the series. Last month: Watchmen Video Journal: The Look of Watchmen.

Watchmen is directed by Zack Snyder (of Dawn of the Dead and 300) and written by David Hayter (The Scorpion King, X-Men, X-Men 2) and Alex Tse. The movie arrives in theaters everywhere on March 6th, 2009. Stay tuned for even more Watchmen coverage, photos, and more exclusives right here at FS.net!

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Immortals (Shyftr Comments)

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Posted in GENZOMAN's Gallery (View Site) - 4 days ago

EXCLUSIVE: Apple to launch $800 laptop (Shyftr Comments)

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Posted in The Inquisitr (View Site) by Duncan Riley - 4 days ago

Some Apple retailers in the United States have been given price lists for a new Apple laptop line, and there’s a big surprise: an $800 laptop. The information comes from a source we would categorize as reliable, would have access to such information, and who has been accurate in the past.

According to the source, Apple retail stores have been given price sheets that list 12 price points for the new range, with prices between $800-$3100. Current lines only have 8 price points, 3 Macbooks starting at $1099, 3 Macbook Pros and 2 Macbook Airs. According to the source, retail outlets usually get the price lists 10 days before products hit the market. Technical specs for the new laptops were not included on the price sheet.

An $800 laptop would be the first sub-$1000 laptop offered by Apple, and would signal a shift from Cupertino to target a broader range of price sensitive customers for the first time. Whether this laptop is a sub-laptop or ultra-portable we simply don’t know, it could be Apple more aggressively pricing their new Macbook range, or it could be a completely new laptop altogether, presumably utilizing the much discussed “Apple Brick” manufacturing process (pic above). What we do know is that there will be four additional price points, so unless the updated versions of existing lines are offered with more options, we would presume that Apple may actually launch an entirely new laptop altogether.

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The Inquisitr welcomes Steven Hodson to the writing team (Shyftr Comments)

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Posted in The Inquisitr (View Site) by Duncan Riley - 4 days ago

I’m pleased to announce the first addition to our writing team since launching in May: Steven Hodson.

Steven has been in working in technology for 20 years, and had his first start in content creation in the BBS era. Along with a passion for computers, Steven has worked in a professional capacity as a programmer, and took that love to establish Winextra 7 years ago as a set of NNTP newsgroups for the rejects and cast-offs from the old Lockergnome newsgroups.

He’s best known today for his personal blogging at Winextra, and as a blogger for Mashable. He is also an active podcaster, doing his own shows, and is a regular member, along with Cyndy Aleo-Carreira and myself for the Things you can’t say about the Internet podcast.

Steven will be bringing his honest take on the web and technology to The Inquisitr. As well as covering important tech stories along with the rest of the team, Steven will be offering opinion pieces on the news of the day, and the broader web and blogging space. I expect 100% that I won’t always agree with every opinion he gives, which is what makes him such a great hire; Steven brings a unique voice that I know will add to The Inquisitr by broadening what we cover, and the angle we approach it. The net result I believe for readers will be richer reading experience.

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Microsoft Office Labs Releases “Touchless” Multi-Touch Software As An Open-Source SDK (Shyftr Comments)

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Posted in TechCrunch (View Site) by Erick Schonfeld - 4 days ago

No, Microsoft is not getting into the car-wash business. But it is releasing “Touchless,” multitouch software from Microsoft Office Labs that uses a regular Web camera and everyday objects as input. You can think of this as a low-end version of its Touchwall technology, which uses more precise lasers to detect movement and objects. The software developer kit is available now under an open-source Microsoft Public License. The SDK only works on Windows (what did you expect?).

Like Microsoft Surface and Touchwall, the Touchless software makes it possible to create applications that turn hand gestures and physical objects into an input device like a mouse. Touchless detects both the size and location of “color markers” (which can be fingers, toys, pens, M&Ms) as they move through space. Microsoft engineers Ian Sands and Chris Pratley have created four demos to showcase the technology:

1. Snake - where you control a snake with a marker.
2. Defender - up to 4 player version of a pong-like game.
3. Map - where you can rotate, zoom, and move a map using 2 markers.
4. Draw - the marker is used to guess what…. draw!

Try it out. Free TechCrunch T-shirt to whoever creates the coolest Touchless app and uploads a video in comments.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0