social media ROI

“There are basically only three things the boss cares about: how much money did we make? How much money did we save? Are our customers happy? Social media hits the last one really hard – and this is the one you should seek to quantify, however you can.” – Erin Flis

fantasy valuations – if you can’t sell at a profit…

You can’t sell at a profit and make it up in volume. This is just business-common-sense. And this matters because as employees of realistic corporations that are required by reality to sustain themselves, we get frustrated keeping up with the Kardashians. Even the Joneses aren’t keeping up with the Joneses. It’s a scam dude. 37 Signals says it well:

“Now this was all fun and games until somebody promised the Newark schools $100 million in stock based on the fantasy valuation of his under-profiting company. But now it’s real. They’re selling the skin before they shot the bear or peeing their pants to get to the hut or whatever you want to call it. It’s just not good, alright?”

- No outrageous profits after seven years and half a billion users

On the flip side, as they say in the trailer “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.” Maybe they are worth 33B. Lord knows as small as our business is, there is no shortage of people hating. I used to take it personally. Not so much these days. It just goes with the territory. It just is.

audience notes on social media presentation

Notes taken by Rachel at a recent social media presentation I gave. She stated that she wrote down the things the audience responded to and expressed an interest in. I read that as “what they care about.” So here is the list:

1. Linkedin—get on it if you are in business
2. Have a homebase—blog or SME on subject blog
3. Use wordpress for blogging
4. Make a FB page—the owner has to do it. Ownership is permanent
5. Dual monitors are important
6. Read The FB Marketing Bible $50 PDF
7. Google Alerts
   1. Community + Competitors
8. Technorati
9. Search blogs, SME’s
10. Feed Reader
    1. Google Reader
11. Lynda.com $30/month unlimited video training
12. Logo—crowdspring.com

Questions:

1. Where do you get the time?
2. How to manage PR for oil spill?
3. Advertizing vs. Social networking to build a brand?

To tackle those questions with candor:

1. Where do you get the time?
   1. Cut out TV. Done.
2. How to manage PR for oil spill?
   1. Look to Dawn detergent as an example.
   2. Make Communications a more authoritative position in your company. Don’t lie is rule 1.
   3. And I’ll let the millions of people writing case studies on the oil spill take the rest.
3. Advertising vs Social networking to build a brand?
   1. I’d rephrase that as “Advertising or PR to build a brand?” and my answer is what Ries said “You build a brand with PR, and defend it with advertising.” So a younger brand should focus on PR and use Social Media as part of the tactics within an overall PR strategy.

Notes on Social Objects

If you haven’t read the story of the Microsoft Blue Monster, and Hugh’s thoughts on social objects, I highly recommend it. The full blue monster story is here on Hugh’s blog. I was just rereading it for an upcoming talk that discusses Social Objects.

And of course I would be remiss if I did not embed the video of Jyri Engstrom talking about social objects from 2006.

From Jyri’s talk on strategy when you are building a web site around a social object:

1. Define your object
2. Define your verbs
3. Make those objects shareable
4. Turn invitations to gifts
5. Charge the publishers not the spectators

Rephrased as a question checklist (from 22:21 in the video)

1. What is your object?
2. What are your verbs?
3. How can people share the object?
4. What is the gift in the invitation?
5. Are you charging the publishers or the spectators?

Great notes from the video are posted here.

Along a similar line of research I was reminded of Activity Theory as it relates to Social Objects. From slide 12:

1. Actors have Agency
   1. Power over objects
   2. Attraction to objects
2. Objects have a lifecycle
   1. Construction
   2. Instantiation
   3. Linking

One of those posts that are mostly for me. But if you read this blog, you already know that. #peace

Ford Fiesta Movement Mission 4 film from Team Houston

From the description on youtube:

zenfilm — June 09, 2010 — The Ford Fiesta Movement Mission 4 film from Team Houston “Pause” presents an unusual twist on romance with sci-fi/fantasy overtones. Pause was filmed in one day by the Zenfilm creative team and features the sights and sounds of America’s 4th largest city set to the music of Houston artists Southern Backtones and Tyagaraja. To vote for this film in the competition simply text “Zenfilm” to 44144 . There will be no spam… we promise. Thanks for your support.

faulty redundant asynchronous communication is efficient

I found myself with 60 relevant business emails in my inbox last Wednesday, the morning before I flew out on a business trip, and I jumped over to twitter to find out if anything important was going on. Baroo? Why did my brain tell me to do that?

Four things about twitter communication of note:

1. Human editors. You follow people who by nature editorialize. You know a human is posting something that they find interesting.
2. Redundant. Lots of people retweet the same content. So if you miss the message from one person odds are you will see someone else post it if the message is important enough.
3. Asynchronous. You have a minute to think about it before you hit send. This time delay is key to avoiding mistakes common in real-time communication.
4. Faulty. There is no guarantee that someone saw your last tweet. And we LIKE this fact. The imperfect delivery is a good thing. We get annoyed when someone asks “did you see my tweet?” as if it were email!

I had an old boss in the early 1990s who used to not watch TV or read the newspaper. When asked how he would know if something big happened he always replied “if it’s that important, the news will come to me.” And I think he was right.

When looking at the four elements above, if you change “human editor” to “biological” you have a very accurate description of evolution. Biological, redundant, asynchronous and faulty are all attributes of all living things and result in an intelligent and evolved communication method.

When these attributes (biological, redundant, asynchronous, faulty) are applied to Neural Networks, these researchers show

Biological systems have a large degree of redundancy, a fact that is usually thought to have little effect beyond providing reliable function despite the death of individual neurons. We have discovered, however, that redundancy can qualitatively change the computations carried out by a network. We prove that for both feedforward and feedback networks the simple duplication of nodes and connections results in more accurate, faster, and more stable computation.

It turns out that “No, I did not see your tweet” creates a more accurate network. A neural network of humans processing whatever it is they are processing on a given day. And somehow that means the news comes to us.

And oh ya, you should follow me on twitter here.