frankly speaking

2 years ago

Diff’rent Strokes for Differ’nt Folks

Facebook, Twitter. Twitter, Facebook. That’s all people seem to be talking about these days. When it comes to telling people where you are, who(m) you’re with, what you’re doing or what you’re reading, it seems like the best way to publicize it is to break out your phone and thumb away a quick message to let the world know.

Most people go to the extreme and post the exact same content on both sites and do so in the name of efficiency. Hell, even I’m guilty of doing so, occassionally. While I agree it’s efficient, I think it’s lame, especially if I follow you on both Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc (which is common in today’s social media world). I couldn’t care less to read the exact same message from the same folks across all three mediums.

Why do it? Think about it. You’re Rupert Murdoch - you own the Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and Fox News - does it make sense to publish the EXACT SAME content in all three mediums? Of course it doesn’t. Your audience is different for all three mediums. For me, Facebook = Friends/Family, so my messages there range from political, to sports, to family. Twitter = business/friends, my messages there are focused on business, personal, and few political/sports ramblings. LinkedIn = all business all the time. I’ve never posted anything personal on there except where I’m traveling on my next business trip.

I get that people have the need to constantly let people know what they’re doing and who they’re with, but make sure you’re targetting the right audience.

2 years ago

Social Media Excellence - A Case Study

A couple weeks ago I wrote about a situation of social media failure. Today, I’m happy to write about a situation of social media excellence! A few days ago, I checked into Specialty’s via foursquare:

Three days later (coincidentally, I happened to be standing in line to order food at Specialtys) I received an @ reply via twitter from Specialtys entitling me to a free cookie:

Let’s be honest, I could care less about the cookie. What I find interesting is the fact that Specialty’s has the common sense enough to recognize that social media is a powerful marketing tool and in this case, is using it appropriately to try their products.

Not only do they have a customer, but now they will have someone who goes patronizes their business at least twice a week.

2 years ago

Social Media Failure - A Case Study

In early December, when I found out I would be heading to Salt Lake City for the Holidays, I decided to try a little social media experiment. I wanted to see how engaged the people running the twitter accounts of major airlines, luxury hotels and luxury automobiles were. The deal was simple: sponsor all or part of my trip and I’ll tweet about your company every day for the next 30 days. The result: these companies are not very engaged. In fact, no one from Delta Airlines, United Airlines, JetBlue Airlines, The Waldorf Astoria or LandRover cared to respond to ANY of my tweets or Facebook messages to them.

Granted, there are a couple reasons why they didn’t respond a) because these companies have outsourced their social media management to an agency (ok, not really a good excuse but just go with me on this) or b) these companies are so inundated with requests that they just didn’t have time to get back to me (I have a hard time believing this was the cause because it’s not like the 25 year old who manages these accounts is obsessively updating the executive staff of his/her company on the current happenings of their grand social media strategies) or c) they simply didn’t think I mattered enough to respond.

I tend to think why I received zero response from anyone running social media from Delta, United, JetBlue, Waldorf and LandRover was the fact that they perceived I wasn’t influential enough (on the web) to matter. How they made this assumption is unclear. I tweet fairly regularly - 3 to 4 times a day. I have a decent sized follower base. My tweets tend to be pretty content rich (i.e. I don’t tweet stuff like ‘Standing in line at Whole Foods’). On Facebook, I try to update my status once a day. I have a few friends.

The point to me was crystal clear - these companies still do NOT understand the value of social media in relation to mainting good reltationships with customers or potential customers. For all of the above companies that I mentioned, LandRover had the most to lose - the lease on my car is up on 12 months and I was hoping that by allowing me to test drive one of their vehicles over my vacation I might have been convinced to purchase/lease from them in the future. I suppose they just lost a customer.

2 years ago

Above is a good example of email marketing from GoGo. I recently took advantage of the Virgin America / Google free in-flight internet promo. Their service provider is GoGo. After giving them my email address, I received this message. A couple things make this message great:

- The messaging is short and to the point. The entire email is 5 sentences long.

- At the bottom, it reminds users to connect with GoGo via social media by including links to its Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages. I wish more companies would do this in their email marketing.

The overall look and feel of the email is very warm and is relevant to the upcoming holidays. Good job, GoGo.

2 years ago

Just sayin’…

The Golden Triangle

Fred Wilson (MD of Union Square Ventures) posted this the other day and I agree with it 110%:

I heard something this past week that stuck with me all the way to the weekend. To the life of me, I can’t remember who said it but at least I remember what was said:

The three current big megatrends in the web/tech sector are mobile, social, and real-time.

I like to think of this as the golden triangle. You can build interesting businesses in each of these three sectors. The iPhone is the poster child of mobile. Facebook is the poster child of social. Twitter is the poster child of real-time.

But it is what happens inside the golden triangle that is really interesting to me. What if you build a service that is mobile, social, and real-time? Well that’s a big opportunity folks and I’ve been seeing quite a few entrepreneurs doing exactly that. It is an exciting time.

2 years ago

Social Media Guru, courtesy of Adam Kleinberg

2 years ago

Misunderstanding Social Media

There was a recent article in AdAge about USocial promising to deliver all the Twitter and Facebook users/follwers you could ever want. All you have to do is pay USocial a small CPL fee (in quantities of 1000 users) and you can give the appearance to the whole world that you too are popular.

Let’s explore why this is a prime example of being a HORRIBLE social media tactic:

1) It’s disingenuous. Whenever you buy media, you’re taking people from one area of the internet to another area usually through some sort of advertisement (keywords or banners) that has a value propisition that users may be interested in. What USocial is proposing to do for its isn’t really a solid media buying tactic. Simply telling USocial that you’re interested in pumping up your friend/follower count simply to make yourself look credible. In the end, it will have the oppisite effect

2) Your new users will get annoyed. Let’s say, for example, that I buy 1,000 new followers for my twitter account and start inserting promotional tweets into my twitter feed for the sole purpose of making money by distributing a message for another advertiser. If these followers are worth their salt, they’ll start leaving as soon as I make the first promotional tweet.

3) The new users that you do receive will be questionable at best. This is a variation of the point above. Let’s say that you buy users/follwers from USocial or a similar agency. How do you know that those users will buy the product that you’re trying to sell. For all you know, the users that you are buying are 60 year old males, living in Nebraska, praying that the government sends his next medicare check.

The article goes onto describe how Digg negligently allows paid placement from the Marines and the Mormon Church (these organizations pay USocial to vote up their stories on Digg). This is another prime example of two companies that a) don’t get social media and b) outsource it to an agency that says it does social media, but really doesn’t.

If you’re going to invest in developing a social media strategy (and you should), it’s going to take time, money and the right person (who knows what they’re doing) to manage it.