Long before Postrank was a sponsor of SME, I asked them to do me a favor and help me rank the top education blogs. That post continues to be one of the most visited at Social Media Explorer because it serves a valuable purpose for people looking for blogs in that category. In order to both provide an additional service by ranking blogs in a category of interest and show off the evolving technology that runs Postrank, I asked the gang there to help me produce a ranking of the Top Environmental Blogs.

I pulled together an OPML file (which is a collection of RSS feeds) of each of the blogs listed in Postrank’s community curated lists of Environmental Blogs, Green Blogs and Sustainability Blogs and sent that master list to Postrank for analysis. I asked Jim Murphy, Postrank’s stat guru, to expand the filters from Postrank’s main tool, however, so we could give folks a nice resource to play with. Postrank’s consumer tool displays engagement scores based on the last week’s worth of information. I asked him to give us a bigger picture of these blogs and score the engagement over six months. The following are the Top 25 Environmental Blogs based on June through November 2009 engagement.

Before you get up in arms that your favorite environmental blog may not be here, keep in mind this list was procured from Postrank’s publicly curated lists. It may not be all-inclusive. Jim also ran some extended numbers on the top five on this list. I found this chart interesting. It shows how AutoblogGreen shot up in engagement with an active fall. Comparisons like these are useful for public relations and marketing professionals performing blogger outreach because it shows who’s hot now and who’s consistently engaging over time. This is why Postrank is a valuable service.

A six-month comparison of the top five Environmental Blogs based on engagement from Postrank. (Click for larger view)

Murphy did say that the information he provided me was really a look at what the technology can do, not what Postrank provides … yet. While new features are continually being worked on, the consumer tool for Postrank does give you a more real-time analysis rather than historical per view as we have here. Postrank’s Analytics tool for your blog (technically the service that sponsors SME) does a really nice job of giving you deep analysis of both what your blog does over time and how each post on your blog performs along various engagement parameters.

The reason I accepted Postrank’s Analytics tool as the first true sponsor of Social Media Explorer is because they are a service I think the majority of my readers would find useful. If you are a blogger outreach person (PR, marketing, social media), Postrank helps you determine which blogs matter most and right now. If you are a blogger, Postrank helps you analyze what pushes your audience’s buttons to help you get better. It can also help you quantify your blog’s success to monetize it more effectively.

And I also knew they’d be hip and help us produce some lists that folks would find useful. Enjoy the list of Top 25 Environmental Blogs. And if you work with green bloggers or are one, let us know how we did in the comments.

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• Visualizing Online Content Ranking: PostRank (akbani.blogspot.com)
• Traffic vs Engagement vs Influence: Top 10 Posts [August 2009] (newcommbiz.com)
• Finally! A Blog Post Scoreboard (socialmediatoday.com)
• PostRank Combines Google Analytics With Social Media Stats (mashable.com)

Let’s make something clear: you can be the person that starts asking the questions and initiating the conversations that move social media forward. You. Sitting right there. Yes, you.

I don’t care if you’re the marketing assistant, the PR coordinator, the customer service manager, the HR director, or the mailroom clerk. What it takes is the intent to be part of the progress, the bravery to start an open conversation, the maturity and patience to not make it personal, and the investment in the outcomes to take it a step further.

These are not just conversations for the communications department. Be courageous. Pick up the phone, or fire up the email, and ask for 15 minutes of time from the people that can help move social media forward in your organization (or at least reduce some of the friction around it). That means the marketing folks, the customer service folks, finance, HR, PR, product management, QA, sales. Yes, that includes the people you’ve never talked to before, and the ones that aren’t in your “box”.

Ask them one or two questions that can help you form a business case for social media. Your goal is to align social’s capabilities with the problems your organization needs or wants to solve for their own business. Note that the questions below aren’t all specific to social media; they’re attempting to uncover some of the underlying culture, brand, and operational issues that social media could help address. Remember, we’re talking culture change as well as operational change. You need to be the one to translate.

1. What do we do and why, in your words (not a vision statement)? On what could we, as a business, spend more time, energy, and focus?
2. Are you passionate about your role? If so, why? If not, what would help you be?
3. What goals do you have for your role this year? How do you hope to impact the success of your department? The company?
4. How would you describe the culture of our organization?
5. How do you use the internet in your work life? In your personal life? Where are the overlaps?
6. How do you believe your team uses the internet for their work? Have you heard ideas or feedback for ways they’d like to use it more or differently to do their jobs better?
7. Where do you turn when seeking resources or information about your role? Our company? Our industry?
8. What does our ideal customer look like, aside from demo/psychographics? What do they seek from us?
9. If you could ask our customers whatever you wanted, what questions are on your mind? What would you like to know about them and their relationship to our company?
10. How is your function in the business most impacted by customer satisfaction and loyalty?
11. Do you think our brand presentation aligns with our reputation in the industry? Why or why not?
12. How strong do you think our internal communication is? What would make it better? What information do you wish you had more of?
13. What kind of marketing or promotion do you think we do really well? What’s gotten you excited about the way we put our company out there, and why?
14. How well do you think we communicate with customers overall and solicit their feedback? What strengths and gaps do you see? Does it impact you, and if so, is it for better or worse?
15. What sorts of measures do you use in your current role to evaluate the success or impact of your work/department?
16. How flexible and adaptable do you feel our internal processes are? Are there some that are outdated? Cutting edge?
17. What’s your perception about social media based on what you know/have heard/have read?
18. Do you believe social media has a place in our work and business? Why or why not?
19. What are the worst case scenarios you can imagine from social media? What scares you, and what are the risks you’re most concerned with?
20. What excites you about social media, if anything?

These questions reflect some of the deeper discussions I get into with companies around laying the groundwork for social media, but they are by no means exhaustive.

What questions have you found useful in your social media discussions with clients, colleagues, management? How are you crossing hallways and walls and talking to people outside your department about this, or encouraging others to do so? What are your “yeah, but…” comments for me about why this is so hard to do?

image by mikecogh

20 Questions To Start a Social Media Discussion

Yesterday’s NY Times had an article about Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter being auctioned off for charity.  I read the article because I enjoy his work and like to read basically anything about him.  He’s typed all of his books on this simple Olivetti portable typewriter that he bought from a pawnshop in Knoxville in 1963.

image from the NY Times

Then I ran across this post from George Tannenbaum about how the fact that McCarthy has written about 5 million words on this simple typewriter shows that ideas don’t come from tools. Doesn’t matter how much RAM your Macbook has or how cool the cover of your Moleskine looks, ideas don’t come from the tools.

Since my job is mostly based on ideas, looks like I’ll still be needed for awhile.

For those of us working in organizations as employees, vendors, or consultants, the ebb and flow of our time is greatly affected by a schedule of daily meetings.   

Influential leaders recognize, accept, and capitalize on the significance of meetings in everyday work life.

They astutely leverage this valuable time to motivate others to collaborate on initiatives, expedite decision-making, and facilitate the production of needed deliverables. While it is true that influential leaders artfully employ efficient meetings, it is also true that running productive efficient meetings increases personal influence. The Catch-22 is that it is much easier to organize and conduct productive meetings if you have a lot of influence as a leader. That said, people in the process of growing their influence can follow certain protocols to improve the efficiency of the meetings they run in order to enhance their credibility, improve their reputation as someone who “gets things done”, and build trusting relationships with others throughout the organization.

Typically, successful meetings embody some or all of the following characteristics:

• The “right” people attended
• Everyone was properly prepared
• There was a steady focus on the right topics
• The meeting produced well informed decisions and/or tangible results
• The meeting outcomes were supported by consistent relevant follow up

Leaders whose meetings consistently model these characteristics carefully attend to the three parts of every meeting:  Preparation, Facilitation, and Follow-thru.

Which part do you think has the greatest impact on the effectiveness and productivity of a meeting?

Anyone who’s had a meeting start late, get off track, fail to produce any tangible results, and then end late knows the price to be paid for inadequate meeting preparation.  It’s important to keep in mind the frustration that comes from attending a poorly planned meeting; especially when faced with the decision of how much time and effort to invest before the participants convene.

Though our tendency is to “borrow” time from meeting planning to be used elsewhere, just know that, more often than not, we end up paying back this time plus interest both during and after the meeting!

Starting with preparation, the posts will cover a set of guidelines for how to plan, facilitate, and follow-thru on productive meetings. For optimum results, these methods should be executed in an environment conducive to and supportive of their application. Though not impossible, it is certainly an uphill battle to implement efficiency strategies in a culture that has grown accustomed to or even promotes counter-productive meeting practices. For more information on the impact of organizational culture on meeting efficiency, you may want to first read Productive Meeting Is Not An Oxymoron and/or Culture: The Organizational 12^th Man.

 “Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up.” ~A.A. Milne

FIVE PEAS IN A PEAPOD

This is a catchy little device for remembering all of the steps to take when preparing for meetings:

1. Purpose
2. Payoff (3 H’s)
3. Ponder the purpose
4. People
5. Process

            Potential Pitfalls

The first step towards a productive meeting is to develop a brief Purpose statement for the meeting. Answer questions such as:

• Why conduct this meeting?
• What do we want to achieve?

Once the purpose is clear, determine the meeting’s  Payoff or tangible output:

• What will participants have in their Hands (deliverables, materials, action plan, etc.)
• What will they have in their Heads? (knowledge, information, awareness)
• What will be in their Hearts? (Beliefs, commitments, values)

Based on what you want to achieve with the meeting and the Payoff for the participants, it’s now time to Ponder the purpose. Ask questions such as:

• Is this meeting really necessary?
• Is there an alternative way to achieve the Purpose and Payoff without the time, effort, and/or expense of a meeting?
• Could we get the same results using an alternative method such as email “round robin”, electronic survey, or one-way dissemination of information?
• If a meeting is required, does it have to occur face-to-face or can it be conducted via teleconference, or video-conference?
• If the meeting does need to be face-to-face, what is the appropriate venue (specific room requirements, food, AV equipment, on-site, off-site, etc.)?
• How much time is needed to cover each agenda item? Is the total time required to complete the agenda too much for a single meeting? Can some of the work be accomplished by participants before the meeting?

Once you’re certain that the meeting does in fact need to be held. Your next step is to assess the People part of the equation. Develop a list of people who must attend in order to achieve the meeting’s Purpose. In other words, if there is no way to fulfill the Purpose without the individual, then that person must be there. Create a separate list of people you’d like to have attend or think could benefit or add some value, but without whom the Purpose could still be accomplished.

Before contacting People on either list, take the time to outline the Process you will use to achieve the Purpose. This is a list of the topics that need to be covered starting with a Review of the Agenda and ending with a Summary of the meeting. When you send this out as part of your invitation to participants, include the Purpose, Payoff, and a complete list of People.

A strong influence building strategy is to give the Must Attend participants a preview of the agenda. Ask for their input and ideas. As much as possible, incorporate their suggestions into the final agenda you send out to the group. This will ensure that the individuals critical to the meeting’s success have ownership of the outcome. It’s also an excellent way to secure attendance.

 For the Nice-to-Have individuals on your second list, provide them with a copy of the agenda and take a few minutes to discuss your interest in having them attend and the benefits they can gain by participating. It is important to graciously accept a decline from any of the people on this secondary list. By asking them to the meeting, you are signaling that you recognize their value. Extending them the courtesy of opting out without negative consequence (guilt, griping, grudges), you are reinforcing your understanding of their worth and demonstrating a sincere respect for their time. The trust and rapport you establish with this practice will make it that much easier to obtain their commitment and cooperation regarding future meetings.

You’re not quite done yet; the last step in thorough meeting preparation is to anticipate the Potential Pitfalls. On the tactical side, confirm administrative items such as whether or not the venue selected can comfortably accommodate the attendees. For the more strategic aspects of the meeting, consider questions such as:

• What questions or concerns could arise about the Purpose, Payoff, or Process? How can these be addressed efficiently either before or during the meeting?
• What are the “Hot” items that need to be addressed but could end up taking too much time or creating tangential discussions? What can be done to handle these constructively?
• What items could come up that really don’t have anything to do with the meeting purpose and should not be addressed?

What other strategies have you used to prepare for meetings?

Have you ever experienced an inefficient meeting run by an influential person? What went wrong?

guest article by Nance Rosen

Personal branding is not shameless, endless self-promotion. It’s not direct messaging me with your faux request to “take this IQ test and see if you’re smarter than me.” It’s not directing me to your website with every post. It’s not seeing yourself as the epicenter of everything to do with your industry, category, talent, idea, or area of expertise. It’s not starting every conversation with “I…”

Maybe you shouldn’t be personal branding quite yet. Here’s a quick self-assessment to tell you if you need to keep your personal brand really personal right now.

1.    You don’t shower everyday.
2.    You’re been house-bound since Oprah’s announcement.
3.    You’ve been blocked for stalking or spamming.

The list could get pretty long, but you get the idea. You can’t be fundamentally anti-social, greedy, jealous, boring, self-centered, creepy or anything else that ensures you’ll be someone’s ex-husband (or ex-wife) someday (or again) and do yourself proud in personal branding. You have to lift the other end of the couch, not sit on it, while your roommate is moving out – unless he’s trying to take your couch.

Consider what’s real for you. Maybe you don’t have even a smidgen of the mensch gene, that is, you’re a person with little or no empathy for others. You don’t connect with people in person. You don’t consider public service anything but a way organizations sucker people into doing free work for freeloaders. You’d like to compete in the Special Olympics because you’re not in any way challenged, so the odds are really good you’ll win.

Social media merely amplifies your personal brand

In that case, you just might quietly get into group therapy before letting us all know the real you. Seriously, you aren’t doing anyone any good – especially yourself and the company you represent – by using social media to broadcast just what a lout you are. Of course, if this cautionary post doesn’t apply to you, then print it out (wear gloves so it can’t be traced) and put it on the desk of someone who it applies to.

What brought all this on? A recent YouTube video on personal branding by Carlos Mandelbaum poked holes in my personal branding bubble. See it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbvMZbDGFb8.

Plus, perhaps like you, I have found too many of my friends do too little to report, yet they report way too often on Facebook.  For example, a whole lot of people tell me when they’re turning in for the night or that they’re coloring a girlfriend’s hair before baking brownies in their hometown in Kansas (I live in LA, so no brownies for me; hence, I don’t want to know).  A lot of the chatter reminds me of flying to Hong Kong from Los Angeles, lying next to a stranger (business class seats go all the way down). For 20 hours I knew everything about this woman, in real time and in the mini-series she relayed of her past.

Preparation is key

Before you make another social media move or affix your name badge at the next mixer, be ready with no less than 3 entries for these categories:

1. Unusual facts or advanced tips that can help a person move forward in your area of interest.
2. Experts in your field that you can learn from and connect with, along with a question you want to ask them.
3. Reasons why you want to serve and lead your tribe.

Author:

Nance Rosen is the author of Speak Up! & Succeed. She speaks to business audiences around the world and is a resource for press, including print, broadcast and online journalists and bloggers covering social media and careers. Read more at NanceRosenBlog. Twitter name: nancerosen.

Related posts:

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2. Adding “Connector” to Your Personal Brand Much of my joy from networking comes not from what...
3. Tips to Develop Your Personal Brand from Michael Port, Marketing Guru The first book I read by Michael Port was Book...

Diane Hessan knows the wisdom of crowds first-hand. As the CEO of Communispace, a fast-growing major player in the brand community creation and management industry, she’s helped drive consumer insight and product innovation for dozens of Fortune 100 companies. Co-author of the book Customer Centered Growth, Diane was recently named Entrepreneur of the Year by the Boston Chamber of Commerce (a town that has one or two entrepreneurs floating around).

An avid (rabid) Red Sox fan, Diane is an interesting, entertaining, insightful force that’s helping major companies meld customer experience and social media. She shared her experience in community building in this live Twitter interview on December 1, 2009.

1. @jaybaer: Should every company have a brand community at this point? Are there company types that shouldn’t be involved?

• @communispaceceo: I think every company should be in conversation with their customers at this point. Doing it via a community is one easy way.

2. @jaybaer: What do you find are the primary benefits of brand communities?

• @communispaceceo: “Community” means a lot of things. At Communispace, we use them largely to help our clients get insights from customers.
• It’s a terrible time to lose touch with your customers! Listening=more innovation, increased marketing effectiveness, increased relevance.

3. @jaybaer: What about ROI? Is the idea that community participation increases brand kinship & loyalty? How is that measured?

• @communispaceceo: ROI is TRULY better/faster/cheaper & all can be measured. Regarding loyalty, it is easier to measure in B2B, but you can always ask.

4. @jaybaer: In terms of insights, do you prefer brands ask specific questions of community members, or just open it up?

• @communispaceceo: The real breakthrough in using communities to listen is that it eliminates the “ad-hoc-ness” of most corporate listening.
• And, listening is a hugely underrated marketing strategy.
• If you have a good community, you do both: you ask specific questions, and they talk openly about anything.

5. @jaybaer: How then do you see communities aligning/intersecting with tactics like social media monitoring?

• @communispaceceo: Do both. Monitoring = finding trends, knowing who’s saying what about you; Communities=insight/co-creation/understanding.

6. @jaybaer: Do communities need to be branded to be effective? Could you create it here, or elsewhere? (h/t @rustyspeidel)

• @communispaceceo: Branding isn’t required, but it’s better! Members will work harder if they know who the sponsor is and it’s transparent.

7. @jaybaer: What about Facebook? A lot of brands are toying with making Facebook their social media home base. Pros/cons?

• @communispaceceo: Our communities are private: targeted consumers. The conversation’s strategic: Not what you’d share with competition.
• I love Facebook for “energizing your base”, but it’s not structured enough for ongoing insight, (e.g., ideation).

8. @jaybaer: Communispace believes in invite-only communities, right? Who gets invited? How? By whom?

• @communispaceceo: We believe in lots that we don’t do.
• But we do invite-only and the client drives who we recruit: their most loyal customers? nonusers? mix? A new segment or two?
• It’s unbelievable what people will share and what they’ll do for you if they think you are really listening. The value of social media for listening.

9. @jaybaer: Are the members of the communities you manage compensated? Thus, is it more like a post-modern focus group?

• @communispaceceo: Lite compensation for lots of hard work. Focus group on steroids (500 people in a room “all the time”.)

10. @jaybaer: Can you explain your engagement principle – why smaller communities are better? This is a paradox for many people.

• @communispaceceo: Think about it: Are you more likely to talk/open up in a small group or in a large group? Shouldn’t be a paradox.
• Intimacy is so powerful. People feel special, they trust you, & vice versa. Very important if you need game-changing insights.
• @jaybaer: I think the paradox is that it runs counter to the “more followers, fans, & friends” is a legitimate success metric.
• @communispaceceo: More followers/fans/friends is critical for messaging, energizing, etc. But you don’t need huge numbers to learn how to be relevant.
• And, you can have lots of small communities. You know the deal: “Let’s all break up into small groups so that we can talk!”

11. @jaybaer: Great white papers on your site. Interesting concept of community “rituals” Can you explain?

• @communispaceceo: Yes, there is a lot of “secret sauce” to good facilitation, especially because you don’t have everyone online at once.
• Thanks on the white papers. Yes, we have some great ones. Check out the latest on the Sandwich Situation.
• In our communities we average 3 projects every week. Could be different topics or all for one insight.

12. @jaybaer: How do you feel about community managers & humanization of brands? Communispace folks facilitate, yes?

• @communispaceceo: I’m not sure brands need to be human. However, companies are filled with humans and benefit enormously when they leverage that.

13. @jaybaer: Do you proactively seek to make community members the star, rather than the brand?

• @communispaceceo: In our arena, the members are the stars. Our clients want to understand their lives/dreams/frustrations.

14. @jaybaer: Given the emphasis on insight gathering, do you recommend one community per brand, or one per initiative?

• @communispaceceo: Don’t need one per brand if your target consumers buy multiple brands. Typical: one per segment, but we can combine segments.
• I tell people that if you did a big traditional market res project before 9/14/08, throw it out. Learn the New Normal!
• @jaybaer: What is the significance of that particular date?
• @communispaceceo: That’s the day Lehman Bros fell and the world changed. Honestly, things change every day; it’s why you need continuous listening.

15. @jaybaer: You mentioned focus group on steroids. Do you get members that get TOO powerful/influential? How do you handle?

• @communispaceceo: Rarely get TOO powerful like offline. If obnoxious/unprodutive, we can say goodbye. Change their password. Be mean.

16. @jaybaer: Column in Forbes on how you adopted Twitter was great. Your take on state of Twitter now?

• @communispaceceo: I love Twitter. It is my news source, my networking tool, a great source of learning, & I get to meet you, to boot.
• But Twitter is like anything else: you get out of it what you put in.

Social media monitoring often gets lumped into very traditional departments inside organizations, and when this happens, certain aspects of the practice can be overlooked. There are many features of social media monitoring beyond its ability to help manage your brand’s reputation via customer service. When brands come to Ignite asking for help with 'social media monitoring', we think holistically with the understanding that the practice helps service many different channels inside of their brand (not just customer service).

The four cornerstones of social media monitoring are (1) Competitive Analysis, (2) Product Development, (3) Reputation Management and (4) Outreach.

Competitive Analysis

Social monitoring can be an extremely effective way to keep tabs on your competitors. In fact, depending how thorough of a job you do, you can effectively use social media monitoring to legally spy on your competitors. The kind of information that can be unveiled can be worth its weight in gold. So long are the days of wondering exactly what your big brand competitors are doing. The only social efforts that are even remotely hidden are some interactions on Facebook. Other than that, most things are free game, and can be effectively monitored. It is not difficult to unearth specific strategies and tactics your competitors might be launching in the social sphere.

Another area regarding competitive analysis that should be thought through is the metrics obtained from your competitors’ overall brand health. Now that you are able to identify specific campaigns they are running, you should be able to assess the overall reaction of a campaign via sentiment analysis comparisons.

Product Development

In the past when a company needed to conceive new ideas for products they would research what their target market wanted via focus groups and other outside research agencies who would mine traditional media clippings. Granted those are still effective practices; however, now that users share anything and everything online, companies have the ability to tap into a vast wealth of knowledge from their customers. There is huge potential for brands to effectively use social media monitoring to help supplement the product development process.

Reputation Management

When fellow social media practitioners discuss social media monitoring it is generally in regards to customer service and reputation management. When companies setup a process for monitoring it generally involves an employee(s) reading posts/tweets/videos/images and deciding whether or not they deserve a response. When companies make the decision to spend budget on a social monitoring plan this is typically what it gets ticketed as, a means to monitor and react to customers.

Unfortunately, as I have noted, there is much more to monitoring a brand and reacting to customers than the customer service angle. Simply sticking the oversight of your monitoring plan with the brand manager or lead customer service representative typically means many of the additional benefits of social media monitoring get kicked under the rug. If you must go this route make sure those in charge of the plan are educated on the real ramifications and make sure they have the means to share information with other channels quickly and efficiently.

Outreach

The benefits of running targeted blogger outreach campaigns via social media monitoring insights can be quite significant. If you are skeptical, listen up. Monitoring really is a means for discovering your passionate customers. Utilizing those fans and turning them into fanatics can have a huge impact. What you do with those individuals discussing your brand is up to you; however, here are a few things you can do to help market your products:

• Send a blogger who mentioned your product free product
• Bloggers who discuss your brand consistently can be asked to join a bloggers club
• Customers who mentioned your site without directly linking to it can be asked to link to the site with custom anchor text
• Etc.

Summary

As you can see, a holistic monitoring process really crosses over many different segments of a business. Simply sticking monitoring in the customer service department and calling it a day is a huge mistake. Work towards developing the structure and efficiency that is required to effectively orchestrate a well oiled social media monitoring process inside of your organization.

I was fortunate enough to be part of a webinar organized by Steve Cunningham with Tara Hunt.   Tara presented the ideas in her book, The Whuffie Factor and I got to share a few ideas about how to use Whuffie for good.

The most interesting part of Webinars is the q/a.  Someone asked Tara a question about measuring Whuffie or influence.  Her response:

This is one of the biggest reasons I don’t like to measure Whuffie. I get the question time and time again when I talk about the book. The question I *should* be getting is ‘what can I do with my Whuffie?’. We should be less concerned about how many followers one has and more about what that person does with that many followers. Not only is Whuffie left better in the non-fungible, ephemeral realm, but it is inconsequential. The measure needs to be in the impact. If we concentrate on our influence, we forget the end goal. We get caught up in our ego.

She pointed to this video from Chris Brogan about overnight success - and how important it is to focus on the results of the work, not the hype or number of Twitter followers.   Tara goes on to say:

Focus on the big prize. All too many times, people stop at the influence part: how popular is that person? how many followers do we have? who is talking about me and my company? how much love do people feel for me?

Learning Loops from the Networked Nonprofit

While she was talking, I thought about the diagram I had just finished in the book I'm co-writing with Allison Fine.   The chapter is called learning loops is about tracking and reflection.   We make the point that the focus should be on the impact or the change in the real world.

In early October, I had approximately 20,000 Twitter followers and today that number is almost ten fold.  In October, I was placed on the Twitter Recommended User list along with a handful of other nonprofit and philanthropy Twitter users.  I tried to leverage this for other nonprofit/charity Twitters by adding lists of Twitter users to my Twitter landing page.

There's no way to maintain strong ties with that many people with such fast growth.  So, the point here is that numbers in social media don't matter as much building relationships one person at a time.

A lot of followers doesn't equal influence.  As Stefano Maggi points out, there's more to influence besides numbers, there is also affinity.  Geoff Livingston put it another way:  relationships matter more than numbers with Twitter following.  We did an experiment to prove our point.   

The bottom line is to focus on the results of your social media strategy, don't get distracted by meaningless metrics like the number of followers, and value the relationships.

What you think?

Over the past two years there’s been a raft of research showing that women are increasingly more active than men in social media…for example last year there was the Rapleaf study showing that women tended to have more social network friends than men.

Another piece of research by Royal Pingdom confirms the trend.  It shows that most of the networks that could be considered to be ’social’ in the real sense of the word - Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Bebo have a user base that’s 50%+ female.  Networks that are arguably much more functional in the sense that you save or tag articles - Reddit and Digg by comparison have more of a male bias.

The chart below shows more detail.   All in all, 53% of users across the 19 sites were female and 47% were male.

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• 19% of Internet users use Twitter or update status site : Up nearly 100% since April (kevin.lexblog.com)
• Women Rule the Social Web (mashable.com)

So if a course is going to be taught what should it cover? How do you get past the fact that so much will change during the semester? I’ve outlined what I would tell the professor, but I want to know what you think too. Here are my thoughts on the subject.

credit

Have Them Wonder Why Social Media Works

Why does social media marketing work? What makes it different from other marketing strategies? These are questions your students should be asking themselves.

Before you can effectively create a social media strategy, you need to understand why it works. Is it relationships? Is it the platforms? Or is it because of the large number of consumers in one area?

Once the students can identify the individual effects of social media on a marketing strategy, then they’ll be able to incorporate it into a larger campaign.

Ask Them to Monitor Their Social Media Usage

Tell your students to watch how they use social media. What do they do on Facebook? When are they using Twitter?

Make your students take notes on what they do online and why they share things. If they can better understand what they do, they’ll better understand how people use social media platforms.

That knowledge is what helps a strategist differentiate from a campaign that will spread versus one that no one will take part in.

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Teach Them to Collect Data

A social media marketer should be collecting data on everything. If you’re on Facebook, how long are you on it? What did you do? How many pages did you go to? Why did you share that article? Why did you friends share that article? How many of your friends shared the article?

If the students aren’t taught to collect as much data as possible, they won’t be any different than any other social media user. Users only take advantage of social media platforms, strategist try to learn it.

Use Case Studies to Show Innovation, Not to Copy

One of my gripes with many of my professors is that they always showed the “one right way”. There is no “one right way”. Some things work and some don’t, there may be better ways, or you may fail miserably. To be a good online strategist you have to be creative and willing to try new things.

As a professor, use case studies to highlight how the team tried something new. Emphasize the creative thinking instead of the actual act. Let students see how they can use that thinking to create their own campaigns instead of copying what’s already happened.

Don’t Teach Platforms, Teach Fundamentals

Too many online marketers already focus on platforms instead of fundamentals, don’t continue the trend by teaching it to new marketers.

Right now, people think of Facebook Strategies and Twitter Strategies but you need to understand how social media works before you can create your own strategy. The person who outlines a FourSquare strategy will first need to understand the intricacies of how people use the mobile web and what drives consumers to “check in”.

Teach students to identify the fundamentals of why people do things online and how that can apply to marketing a product or brand.

Bonus: Convince Them to Write a Blog

What is the most effective way to learn online marketing strategies? Create a blog and promote it.

Inspire your students to write about what they like. They’ll be hooked from that first comment. Teach them to track analytics, test what worked and what didn’t work. Have them strive to make a better blog and teach them to monetize it.

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Social media should be taught in colleges. It should not be part of a single section, but instead needs to be at least a course. There is a lot to learn.

What would you add to this list? If you’re a professor, how are you teaching right now?

As we’re learning, many updates on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks are actually invitations for answers regarding brands. We’ve also discovered that 44% of users readily share brand-related information with others. And, as action speaks louder than words, 48% of those who came into contact with a brand name on Twitter and 34% on other social networks went on to search for additional information on search engines.

Does this information in and of itself serve as an invitation for brands to engage?

Most likely not. The invitation is delivered in the monitoring dashboards of those actively monitoring relevant conversations. Opportunities reveal themselves and also introduce a point of entry.

The data does, however, present a compelling demonstration of activity after the debut of a brand within the statusphere and channels a powerful revelation that companies not paying attention are missing an incredible transformation in consumer behavior. It is a migration that makes participation and engagement increasingly onerous the further it progresses and evolves. Nevertheless, do not despair. Your time is now.

The invitation to engage is evident in the conversations that populate the search results for keywords in any listening tool. But others, those that truly drive activity and ultimately affect the decisions of those seeking information and guidance, are obscure to those without a trained sense of detection and perception.

Before we are marketers, we are consumers. We make decisions based on our experiences, observations and research. We also heavily rely upon recommendations of friends, peers, and influencers, and they have embraced social media as their platforms for exercising authority. It is the convergence of online and real-world dialogue that leads to action.

This collective of voices across all subject matter represent the new influencers.

The buyology of consumers spans from awareness to consideration to purchase to experience to recommendation or discouragement.

As reported in a recent article in eMarketer, “The power of online brand interaction is not to be denied: A solid majority of connected consumers have had their opinion of a brand swayed, either positively or negatively, by an online experience. And more than 97% said that experience influenced whether they purchased a product or service from that brand.”

This data stems from the recent RazorFish “2009 FEED” survey that polled U.S. broadband users who had visited a community site, consumed or created digital media, and spent at least $150 online in the past six months.

The study found that line consumers were not only connecting to each other, but also to brands directly.

Interestingly enough, just under 25% had produced content to participate in a brand-related contest. About one-quarter of those polled follow a brand on Twitter. And 40% had friended a brand on Facebook or MySpace.

Consumers reported that their primary motivation for following or friending a brand was to procure access to exclusive deals or offers. @DellOutlet reported $3 million in sales that derived from deals shared on Twitter.

However, here’s the writing on the online wall, quite literally. 64% of consumers reported that they make a purchase from a brand because of a digital experience via a Website, microsite, mobile coupon, or e-mail.

The effect of friending a brand on Facebook or MySpace engenders almost unbelievable results. 96% either always, usually, or sometimes recommend the brand to others (22.94%, 39.15%, and 33.9% respectively). 98% consider the brand when in the market for the product or service (22.69% always, 40.90% usually, 34.41% sometimes). Just under 97% (21.45 always, 38.65% usually, 36.66% sometimes) recognized that engagement raises their awareness of the brand. And, a staggering 97% reported buying a product or service from the brand (17.46% always, 42.89% usually, 36.66% sometimes).

This is why monitoring, establishing and cultivating a strategic presence and inspiring meaningful engagement is so critical in social media. It impacts the bottom line. If we are not present within the attention dashboards of our existing customers and prospects, we intentionally remove ourselves from their decision-making funnel. Consumers are among the new influencers as they now have access to the same tools and channels that reach peers and shape their impressions.

Creating a program rich with value and rewards will cause measurable action. Thus, allowing us to generate goodwill through online participation while tracking consequential business metrics based on actual interaction and performance. Defining and capturing performance data before engagement allows us to establish the “R” to actually calculate the “I” in ROI. Without a proactive participatory program with integrated metrics, not only do we disappear from consumer view, we lose our ability to derive the insights necessary to grow the programs necessary to compete for the future. What’s the return in ROI if “I” equates to ignorance?

In the end however, engagement isn’t the only paradigm necessary for influencing decisions of peers, prospects and customers. The same rules apply to that of product development, packaging, delivery, and support. Each represent an opportunity to shape and steer perception and experiences that ultimately impact the likelihood of future purchases, referrals, and community evangelism.

We earn the relationships we deserve.

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