social media

Women hold the purse strings – talk with them!

Women hold the family online shopping purse strings, so no matter what your product, you should be talking to women. Women are the ones using social media to build their relationships, and in this era of Relationship Commerce, those relationships are pure gold.

It’s the women who will take the time to ask for and give product recommendations. It’s the women who will tap into their networks to find the good deals. It’s the women who will gladly make sure all their friends hear about a wonderful new product they discovered… or a terrible product they would never buy again.

However, these relationships are meaningless for you and your brand if you don’t have ways for these women to easily talk with you. They want to know they can trust you, and how do they figure that out? They build a relationship with you, the “influencer” (seller) just like they do with their friends and other trusted information sources. You absolutely must make sure that women find it easy to talk to you and about you!

  1. Make sure social media tools and your own online communities are as easily accessible as your online product information. This shows that you are not afraid to have your customers / clients talk with each other, so you must not have anything to hide.
  2. Interact publicly with individuals of your audience. You know that the most successful relationships are two-way streets, so keep that in mind as you interact with your “audience.” Social media allows you to build very visible relationships (2000 Twitter followers? 2000 possible observers of any of your interactions) so every single interaction counts. An information push won’t get you anywhere – you have to ask questions and answer them! Then ask follow-up questions and answer those also. Follow me on twitter (@TedRubin) to see what I mean.
  3. Communicate consistently. Don’t expect to build trust if you are only responsive to your audience every now and then. Build social media response time into every day and your consistency will pay off. Only pay attention once in a while, and you have no chance to build a relationship. In other words, just like you can’t disappear in non-digital life and expect to keep your relationships in tact, you can’t just disappear online.

So take another look at your product and your brand offering. Are you talking with the women? You should be. You need to be. If you’re not, start making changes TODAY – your brand success depends on it.

Ted Rubin

The Relationship Commerce Revolution

We’re hearing more and more about “Relationship Commerce” these days – but how many of us actually understand its implications? I’ve spent years in the midst of the evolution of commerce: As traditional commerce shifted into a digital world, through it’s evolution into Social Commerce, and now as we come upon the brass ring – Relationship Commerce.

There are some guiding principals to Relationship Commerce. None seem drastically different on their own; though they seem radically new when applied to the realm of commerce:

Relationships matter. Discovering something you love is great, learning about it from someone you trust is even better.

Buying from someone you like is way more fun than buying from a BIG-BOX robot.

Shopping can be better.

Relationship Commerce is simple yet novel, it’s buying from people you know and trust.

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Social media: to plan or not to plan?


In the debate regarding whether or not social media should be planned, I typically fall on the “yes” side, while others may feel it should be more organic. Really, though, my answer is, “it depends who you are and what you’re doing.”

If you’re a large organization like Aurora Healthcare, you’re going to benefit from a more formal plan, for these reasons, according to Jamey Shiels, Aurora’s Director of Marketing:

“Our social marketing strategy is planned and documented. We have a corporate plan and smaller plans for internal partners that feed the larger plan. The documentation is critical for keeping groups focused on the long term strategy and goals. While documented, the material is not lengthy, one to two pages and is flexible to adapt to performance, user feedback and overall activity. Our success and ability to measure becomes easier to achieve with this approach.”

Yet, on the flip side, if you’re an individual, a small business, or a small, grassroots effort, having the “plan in your head” can be enough.

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Is Social Media the Cure for Apathy?

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but somewhere over the last 50 years the majority of people in the world lost their mojo when it came to fighting for change. Didn’t matter whether the issue was big or small, even bad customer service and poor quality flourished because of the divide and conquer realities of slow one to one and the high cost of mass communication.

People grew tired and weak from being browbeaten into submission to the point where apathy set in when it came to believing in, mobilizing and exercising their power as an individual within society.

The ability for people to communicate, organize and take action around an issue or idea had become very slow, difficult and costly. Even more significantly, the poor results often seen by those who actually made the effort led many to accept “Is it really worth the bother?”

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Mistakes being made trying to measure Social Engagement

The mistakes I see being made is trying to measure Social engagement with the same tools we measure every other digital touch point. In my view email, search, even banner ads, have spoiled marketers into thinking everything can be and must be measured with the metrics used to gauge success in other mediums. I am not sue of what the next stage will be but right now as we are building our Social Media audiences, and testing. I have three stages with which I measure… #1 is Audience growth, #2 is Reactivity… getting them to take an action, and #3 Stickiness… keeping them coming back, engaged and interacting.

In addition setting expectations is important. Setting goals for number of follows/fans and how you interact and engage with them and them with you, can be very useful. Growth of your audience is very important and as clearly outlined in the study by CMB, consumers engaged via social media are more likely to buy and recommend.

Five reasons corporations are not using Social Media effectively… 1. They don’t talk about anything broader than their own products, 2. They listen to customers but don’t take any action (which means they aren’t really hearing), 3. Companies can’t expect to have a strong social media presence when social sites are blocked internally to employees, 4. There is a fear that exists about jumping in, but while there have certainly been some hiccups and miscues along the way, social media has yet to be the undoing of any company, 5. When employees are more concerned with what’s in or out of their job description than doing the right thing to help the customer, that’s not a culture that’s likely to build trust and advocacy for a brand and there is no way social media efforts can be effective.

Ted Rubin

I Still Believe

I’m a pragmatist.

One of my strengths is that I can take a big, lofty idea (usually conceived by someone else), and help bring it down to earth. Break it down into reality, make it happen. Tamsen excels at that, too. (The blog’s tagline here is no accident). So for most purposes, I’m pretty practical, and I’m sometimes the killjoy as a result.

But I’d like to say something.

I’ve been in the business world for nigh on 15 years now. I’ve worked in nonprofits and the corporate world, mostly in communications roles like fund development, marketing, client services. I’ve seen little business, big business, slow business, and fast business. I’ve experienced bringing the web into the business world, and all that’s entailed (for better or worse). I’ve watched a lot of stuff change, and a lot of stuff stay the same.

In the 3 years or so that I’ve been working in and around social media specifically, I’ve seen some amazing things happen. I’ve been in awe of the implications, the changes, the subtle shifts (and the not so subtle) that have been happening in the way we communicate with one another, be it business or personal.

And I’m still excited.

I know negativity sells. Controversy catches eyes, and it’s all the rage right now to, well, rage against the machine that is social media. Or point out all its shortcomings. Or declare things or people dead, over, overhyped. Or spend time tearing ideas down instead of applying true critical thinking, and figuring out how to build something from the rubble.

But I just don’t think that’s very helpful.

We are indeed at a time of unprecedented opportunity. The web and its agility give voices where there were none, ways to connect that defy time and geography, opportunity for ideas that might never have seen the light of day. It’s helping businesses rethink everything from their culture to their people to the systems they’ve built, and even big ships are finding themselves turning in new directions.

And we’re starting. We’re trying. We’re learning with little things that feel comfortable and familiar (and don’t always go so well, but that’s the nature of progress). There are missteps and misunderstandings and lots of imperfections, but those will always be there. The nature of a gawky adolescent with limbs too long and a mind too easily distracted.

But we are moving. Waking the sleeping giant. Growing and maturing with flashes of brilliance amid our zealousness. And things are indeed changing around us…for good.

I think that’s pretty spectacular. We’re part of history right now, and not an insignificant part. To all of you with enthusiasm and knowledge, I say let’s leave people with things they can do. Focus some of our boundless energy into the hard work of creating, of criticizing with thoughtfulness and progress in mind, and laying a foundation upon which we can build this next generation of human connectivity.

I still believe. Do you?

Amber Naslund

photo credit: Bob Jagendorf

Long Tail death knell… I think not!

Some in the digital media world are declaring the death of the long tail due to digital ADD, the exponential growth of and time spent on Social Media platforms and the time taken up by gaming. I have to strongly disagree. The long tail is alive and well, and if anything, experiencing a re-birth of sorts with regard to media and independence.

As stated so well by Chris Anderson, even if he is changing his mind now… “One of the most frequent mistakes people make about the long tail is to assume that things that are not viewed by a very large audience are ‘not as good’ as things that do have vast distribution. A given niche has both quality content and a lot of junk across a broad spectrum. Sturgeon’s Revelation states that the percentage of crud (junk) is in the range of 90 percent. On a store shelf, or in any other limited means of distribution, the ratio of good to bad matters because it’s a zero sum game: Space for one eliminates space for the other. Prominence for one obscures the other. Long tails in the online world are not pre-filtered by the requirement of factors such as shelf space, bandwidth, or the biases of purchasing managers.” Companies are popping up every day to serve and offer valuable services to the long tail at very affordable rates and the desire for people to communicate, build audiences and relationships, is not only growing, but a very basic part of human nature and something that is gaining momentum, not the other way around.

As long as publishing is low-cost and easy, and people have an easily accessible means to access that content, the long tail will not only live on, but thrive.

Ted Rubin

Who Do You Trust?

It’s been well documented that people don’t trust corporations as much as they used to. But who do they trust? It’s largely people from two categories: third party experts
(academics, some media sources, analysts, etc.) and “people like me.”

But when it comes to social media, we’ve also heard that people don’t trust bloggers (from Forrester, no less). I’ve often doubted that assertion, particularly because it seems rather misleading. While the category of bloggers as a whole may be untrusted, people develop relationships with the blogs they follow and read most closely, and therefore develop a sense of trust with them.

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Dog Days of Social Media… I Don’t Think So!

In his recent must-read post, “The Dog Days of Social Media,” Drew Neisser reminds us that just because Facebook has lost some fans, and Forrester “recommends a cautious approach to Foursquare,” we shouldn’t panic and jump off the social media ship.

I agree wholeheartedly with Drew and appreciate his addressing such a timely topic. “Dog Days,” my ass! We are only scratching the surface here of social media potential! And even if your audience does abandon a platform “en masse”… so what? Scalable social platforms are not going away, migrations will happen — they always do eventually — but if it is not Facebook or Twitter it will be somewhere else you can still reach out, engage your audience, and interact with them.

So we need to keep in mind that, going forward, long-term brand success will not be dependent on a specific social media tool; it will be relative to the depth and breadth of the relationships built using the tool. Building relationships and interacting with consumers is where the commerce of the future is heading. Yes, real relationships = brand interest & loyalty = success (money). In fact, at OpenSky, we believe so strongly in the power of relationships as commerce that we have built an entire platform and business model around it.

Remember, though, that social media is a facilitator of relationships, but it is not the relationship itself. Use whatever combination of ways to interact works best for you and your brand. In other words, experiment! Use Facebook, Twitter, blog posts, and YouTube (don’t forget YouTube!), and use them each in several different ways. Notice what tactics engage your audience so much that they interact not only with you/your brand but with other people loyal to your brand. That’s where the magic happens!

Once you find what works for your audience, drive a truck through that opening. It’s not enough to drive that truck through and keep on going. You need to park that truck, and get out to interact with your audience. “Listen” to your market and you will be able to relate to and engage your customers, evolving with them as they evolve and change. Remember… relationships are never static, so your brand must be able to move along with the relationship or be left behind.

Bottom line: the more responsive you are to your audience, the more responsive they will be to you. Don’t wait for them to make the first move.

Ted Rubin

Does Your Personality Type Affect Your Social Media Success?

We’ve all heard of people described as Type A or Type B personalities. Type A’s are said to be impatient, controlling, ambitious and aggressive. They take their work seriously and stop at almost nothing to get it done. Type B personalities are the opposite: relaxed, easy-going and laid back. (Type As might call them lazy or unmotivated.)

You’ve probably considered your personality type at some point. But have you considered how your personality type affects your social media success?

Type A on Social Media

Type A’s are intense and hard-working people, so they likely approach social media accounts the same way. They may log in at the same time each day to post something thought-out and edited to perfection. They may take a systematic approach to growing connections and networking, adding 15 new Facebook friends every week or responding to 10 Twitter messages each day.

Type A personalities thrive on social media because they take their success seriously. In a world where many social media accounts go abandoned for weeks or even months at a time, Type A’s have no problem putting in the effort to update accounts regularly.
They may be turned off by social media’s casual atmosphere, where not everyone takes time to spell-check their status updates or respond to messages. If Type A’s vocalize complaints, they risk becoming unpopular.

Type B on Social Media

The laid-back nature of Type B’s is both a blessing and a curse when it comes to social media. Type B personalities usually fit right into social media’s casual, conversational atmosphere – if casual conversation is going on. They may also have a hard time getting their message heard.
“It appears that the more aggressive and outspoken you get, the more attention you get,” Frank Reed writes on his blog Frank Thinking About Internet Marketing . “I call this the Rush Limbaugh factor. In today’s world of ‘everyone is right. The bigger the bluster, the bigger the splash.”

Of course, Type B’s may be so laid-back that they don’t care about being heard through the din. Depending on the agenda, that may be fine. But Type B’s should approach social media with some agenda in mind; otherwise, social media may be a waste of time.

The Bigger Picture

Of course, any type of categorization is based on stereotypes. Your own personality – and your social media experience – is probably far more complex than the two described here. Use these insights as a springboard to better understanding your own social media behavior, including what you’re doing well and where you may need to improve.

How has your personality type affected your experience with social media? Or has it?

Renee Warren