social media

The “Relationship” in “Relationship Commerce”

We’re hearing (and doing) more and more about “Relationship Commerce” these days — but what does that really mean? Does having 2,000 Facebook “friends” or “fans” mean you have 2000 relationships? Or 28,000 Twitter “followers” mean 28,000 relationships?

It depends. Any one of us obviously does not have time to keep up thousands of face-to-face relationships at a time, but with the help of social media, we can certainly build and keep substantially more relationships going. However, it takes more than simply sending a Facebook friend request or clicking the “follow” button on another Twitter user’s profile.

To build relationships online, you (brand or individual) have to offer something in return, such as valuable information, personal introductions to your already-established connections, or even part of yourself through engagement and interaction.

It’s no longer enough to just suggest that someone should be interested in your product or service. You need to engage your market — ask questions, propose ideas, or simply communicate through social media in a way that gives your followers a chance and a reason to respond.

Then when they respond, interact with them to solidify the relationship, or it will just fade out. Directly acknowledge their response, ask follow-up questions, and share their insights with others. Don’t simply be responsive, be incredibly responsive. Always acknowledge those who reach out or spread your ideas. Follow me on Twitter (@tedrubin) and you will see what I mean. Bottom line: the more responsive you are to your audience, the more responsive they will be to you.

Online relationships will not survive without trust. The key to building trust is simple, but not always easy: Always be good to your word (true to your brand), always be authentic, and always be genuine. Remember, most of your social media interactions are public and very much interconnected – let a positive, trustworthy reputation be the only thing out there to spread!

One final point in this post – although Facebook and Twitter are fantastic tools for meeting and engaging with your audience, don’t forget that you can use them in combination with other relationship-building tools. Email, phone, and in-person meetings are all essential tools for bringing the virtual world closer to your “real world.” Use whatever combination works best for you, and you will quickly turn your connections into raving fans and outspoken advocates!

As you can see, Relationship Commerce is not just about financial exchange; it’s about interpersonal exchange, aka the “relationship.”

Ted Rubin

Lennon & McCartney, a Lagniappe, and Social Media Muscle

Some things just deserve a spotlight. A Twitter friend — @9inchmarketing (John, IRL) – reminded me of this when he introduced me to the Purple Goldfish Project. This is an organized effort to draw attention to the existence of Lagniappes (the practice of giving something extra) in the course of everyday business. Herein is one such tale.

I met Bob Magruder more moons ago than either of us care to admit. Chances are, you know him, too; or you know his voice, at least. For more than three decades he’s been the “voice” of local, regional and national advertising campaigns, as well as the authoritative persuader on promotional, instructional and training videos. You can sample some of his work here.

I was an inexperienced ad guy. He was a pro. From the outset it was clear that Bob employed an approach to his business that set him apart. His “customer is the boss” perspective was surprisingly rare among commercial talent the agency worked with. And he always showed up prepared, wanting to give more than was expected to make every project better; but that is not the story.

Bob’s lagniappe is found in the significant something extra he did – and continues to do for colleagues, apprentices and out-right competitors.

Yes…even competitors. For years I watched as one of the busiest and most talented guys in the highly competitive and often cut throat “voice acting” business would invest in teaching aspiring talent how to take work away from him!

To be fair, he did sell his instruction from time to time; but, for years I’ve watched him give time and often even foot the bill to help scores of folks trying to make it in the business.

Now, this isn’t a conventional lagniappe. I don’t remember ever hearing him talk about why he did this. For that matter, he never talked about doing it at all. When he reads this he’ll wonder what the fuss is about, because this was not a strategy or tactical approach. It is born of who he really is, and what he believes in: give clients more than is expected; and give back to an industry that supports you.

In recent months, while reading, thinking, and writing about the growing impact of social media, I’ve been reminded of Bob’s style. He would talk with anyone, share ideas, wonder about trends, and always welcome a conversation. But it never felt like strategizing. It was, in my view at least, the natural response of a guy that enjoyed conversation and collaboration, was always willing to listen, and from whom you would always get more than you paid for.

A Lennon-McCartney tune on the “Let It Be” collection captures what Bob taught me (and hundreds of others). It is social media’s hidden muscle. “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

Magruder reminds me that nothing is more powerful than sharing with someone. This is the heart and soul of social media.

Eric Fletcher

The Power of Social Reach

Remember the Yellow Pages? When we needed business information or personal contact information, we would have to find the right book from a huge stack, then flip through all those pages to find what we were looking for. If we needed a contact in a different state, we had to make phone calls to find a possible connection to someone we already knew. And we probably didn’t even think about making connections with someone in another country.

Now it’s a whole different world with social media, with almost instantaneous personal connections to people all around the world. Instead of just one-to-one connections, we get one-to-very-very-many connections as we can now tap into the extensive networks of everyone on our own social graph.

If I need a contact in a particular company, or city, or country, all I need to do is post a question on Facebook or better yet, Twitter, asking if someone has a trusted contact in that company or location, and I will soon have a name and contact information. If a colleague across the country needs help in their own town, a quick tweet will likely reach at least one person who can either directly provide that assistance to my colleague, or at least provide the right connection.

We also need to remember that bloggers are an important part of social media’s reach. Just recently, I had two different situations of helping bloggers reach other bloggers in another part of the country – due to the broad social media reach I have created by putting relationships first, I was able to help them connect and get the assistance they needed within minutes by simply tweeting out a request for a contact in a very specific community. Complete strangers tied together through one trusted connection, and time and distance were immediately condensed through the use of social media.

At OpenSky, we are all about the relationships and social reach of our trusted influencers (bloggers, authors, editors, celebrities, social media mavens) and their communities (networks). Instead of just offering products for sale, we offer connection and community to influencers who have products they believe in (from innovative suppliers) and want to share with (sell to) their network. This is the new way the world will connect, where relationships matter.

The world is now your oyster, use social media to find the pearl(s)!

Rick Wion first #MarketerMonday Chat Guest!

This evening at 8:00pm eastern marked the launch of the #MarketerMonday Chat utilizing hashtag #MMchat and Rick Wion @rdublife, Director of Social Media for McDonald’s was the first SPECIAL guest on the chat!

Tweetchat was hosted by yours truly @JeffAshcroft aka @TheSocialCMO and our topic was Social Media Alignment. Check out the full transcript of the chat which was lively with many great questions from the 77 people who joined in the chat posting almost 400 tweets! The only thing better than the questions were Rick’s insightful and interesting answers provided from his unique perspective as the Director, Social Media for McDonald’s.

Next Monday August 3rd, @TedRubin of #Opensky will be our second #MarketerMonday Chat SPECIAL guest and Relationship Commerce: Return on Relationship (ROR) will be the topic!

A SPECIAL thank you to Rick Wion for joining us and making this launch a very memorable evening indeed! And thanks to all of you who participated and please feel free to comment below on our inaugural #MarketerMonday Chat!

Cheers

Jeff Ashcroft

@TheSocialCMO

Social Media and Future of Advertising

What is the future of advertising in Social Age?

Well, we may get as many different answers as the number of Social Media gurus and Advertising pundits out there, which by the way is not a small number!

“Nature of commercial message is not going to look like a display ad, it’s going to provide functionality and a different kind of interface for the user to act on something. People in Social context don’t want to be interrupted, instead want continue to be engaged and want functionality that eases a task they are about to engage in”.

Watch this excellent panel discussion and listen to what four real experts have to say on this subject. The experts are:

I like what Irwin Gotlieb says: “Nature of commercial message is not going to look like a display ad, it’s going to provide functionality and a different kind of interface for the user to act on something. People in Social context don’t want to be interrupted, instead want continue to be engaged and want functionality that eases a task they are about to engage in.”

Enjoy the video and do share your thoughts on what advertising will look like in Social Age.

Harish Kotadia

Old Spice: Now That’s Viral, Man!

If you haven’t followed the Old Spice phenomenon from this week, you’ve missed out. It’s a great example of a really strong performing viral campaign that harkens back to some of the classics like Subservient Chicken, Shave Everywhere, and Tea Partay.

It started on on television earlier this year with the following Old Spice commercial, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” (link for those of you in RSS readers):

(If you’d like to see how this was accomplished, Leo Laporte has a great interview with the agency.)

That commercial, first aired during the Super Bowl in early February, as of this week has garnered over 14 million views. And then the next commercial, “Old Spice: Questions“, went up on YouTube:

Those ads are pretty funny to begin with and were passed around a good deal. But this week, Wieden + Kennedy, creators of the campaign for Procter & Gamble, took it to the next level.

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Sniffing Out Real Expertise in Social Media

As the field of social media matures, there is the inevitable march of the unqualified and snake-oil sellers into this area of expertise. This is not something surprising given that social media *looks* simple, fun, hip, and sexy. Plus there is draw of, “yes you can be paid actual dollars to play on Facebook and Twitter.”

This march of the pretenders is not something new either. If you worked in the digital world through the booms of the Webmaster, push/pull technology, e-commerce or the early days of SEO, this new set of annoyingly unqualified competitors will be nothing new. However, this wave of shameless self-promoters is all the more concerning because they are using their social media footprint as their main qualifier. In a recent interview, a candidate for a job told me, “you can tell I’m an expert because I have nearly 10,000 followers on Twitter.” Hate to break it to you, but popularity does not equal expertise. 10,000 followers shows me that you are good at buidling followers, but anyone who truly knows the social media world appreciates that it is very complex and pointing to a single number as a demonstration of expertise only shows inexperience.

I have been thinking about a post on this for awhile and then I found an amazing post on the topic from Olivier Blanchard on the Brand Building Blog.

A few things about it really stuck with me:

  • A true expert is about more than numbers
  • They need passion that they can demonstrate through experience
  • That passion should easily come through in any conversation
  • They also need to be able to plan, but not a pre-baked, one-size-fits-all plan, but one that organically adapts to your organization

Read the full article. It is one of the best posts I’ve seen about this subject.

Rick Wion

13 Truths About Social Media Measurement

1. If you aren’t measuring anything else, social media measurement isn’t the problem.

Measurement is a discipline, and it needs to be business-wide. If you’re going to ask about the ROI, value, or impact of social media and how to measure it, I’m going to ask how you’re going about determining those things for other areas of your business, and ask you to translate or adapt some of those practices over to social initiatives.

If you’re not measuring anything else, you’ll have a learning curve. A steep one. It’ll come complete with needing the right tools and platforms to collect data, the right people to analyze it, the buy in from management to spend the time doing all of this, and the commitment to use the measurement as a means to underscore your strategy. The social media data is available for the taking, so that’s not the problem. The *real* issue is connecting the dots. See #4.

2. Measurement is not the goal.

The goal is to derive insights that teach you something of value, and then act on them. Measurement is a waystation, a path, but is not the goal in itself. You don’t get a cookie for measuring.

You probably need to spend three times as much time and effort evaluating and acting on your data than you do collecting and formatting it. Why? Because the analysis is what yields direction, plans, action steps, you name it. You START with the data. You need to end up with a course of action, or the act of measuring (and all the time you spent doing it) is wasted.

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Video Interview: Social Media in the Supply Chain

Happy to have the opportunity to share with all of you the video of an interview I did with SupplyChainBrain on Social Media in the Supply Chain recorded at the Aberdeen SCM Summit in San Francisco.

Even if you’re not in supply chain directly, many of the concepts discussed on employee engagement and empowerment can equally be applied in many industries and large organizations. As well one of my favorite topics lately which can also be generally applied is functional integration and this represents a key benefit to be gained through companies using social media.

This speaks to functional integration both within your own company but social media also facilitates the ability to more easily functionally integrate across company lines back to your suppliers and downstream to customers as well.

Once you’ve watched the video I’d be very interested in your sharing comments here and on the You Tube channel of how this resonates with you or any related experiences and successes you can share.

Cheers

Jeff Ashcroft

@TheSocialCMO

Mastering social media is all about who LEADS!

Having been continuously inundated for the last few years with social media how to books, articles, the five steps to the ten steps of social media greatness and so on, I am now at the point of saying enough already, STOP!

Under such duress my brain has been crying out for a way to crystallize a simplified explanation of the core requirements and sequence required to assist people and businesses to master social media in a straight forward, meaningful and practical manner.

And so recently the LEADS social media concept was born and simply stated, it is an acronym for Listen, Engage, Activate, Dominate and Social mandate or just LEADS for short.

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