Social Networking

Guy Kawasaki's blog on American Express had a piece a few days ago, about TweetMeme.

TweetMeme not only tracks popular tweets (here's Alltop's TweetMeme aggregate), it also tracks how many times a post is re-tweeted. Here's why that's interesting:

The Tweetmeme retweet button is more useful than Digg as an indicator of the quality of a link because Digg is about a small number of selected people getting stories onto the Digg home page. The assumption with Tweetmeme is that if you retweet a link, you are telling your followers that it leads to a good site, and you are putting your reputation on the line. If you digg something, you are not risking your reputation nearly as much—if at all.

I plan on adding the TweetMeme button (sample shown here) to my blog tomorrow.

Why? Well, now that I'm using Gigya Socialize for Drupal to push my blog posts out to both Twitter and Facebook, TweetMeme should help me keep track of where they go - at least on Twitter, which I frankly care more about anyway.
Guy's post

UPDATE: as I might have known, as with many things in Drupal - "There's a module for that!".

In this case, the TweetMeme module (surprise!).

Right now, all it does is add the TweetMeme badge to your posts. But it's smart enough to know the Blog posts's URL, as disctinct from the main page URL, so that's handy. You can see it in action at the top right of this post, if you're reading this on the web site.

Later, I'll dig through the project's issues etc. to see if there's plans to add the button to the RSS feed.

Here's an insight from the always-worthwhile Seth Godin's Blog.

Consider that conference attendees lavish attention on the marketers & products they've come to see, whereas when we see advertising for those products in other contexts we probably just ignore it - or actively loathe it.

Which of those environments is better for reaching your customers? One where they've made a great effort and perhaps spent some money to come see you, or one where they're actually trying to do something else and you're in their way?

Here's a quote from Seth:

...advertisers treat prospects online as targets, as victims, as people to subject to interruption. Conferences treat attendees as royalty, as paying customers who invested time and money to be there.

And that's the difference. As long as your site is about something else and the ads are a distraction, you'll see CPM rates drop. As soon as you (or the advertisers) figure out that creating online communities aligned with the advertising, where attendance is a choice by the consumer, then you're creating genuine value.

Seth's post

So in building online communications - should we plan on interrupting the audience with ever-more-stupid ads, or should we create an environment they'll be eager to participate in?

Seems to me the proper use of social media for business is to create an attractive gathering place for your customers - one that's aligned with their operational needs, interests, etc - and become part of the conversation. You will then be a host rather than a salesperson.

Or you could just keep pummeling your visitors with banners. How's that working so far?

B. L. Ochman's "What's Next" blog always has insightful commentary on corporate life and communications in the internet era.

Here's a piece on a favorite topic of mine - the dysfunctional nature of the modern corporation; specifically how sprinkling "magic social dust" on your organization won't get you better customer relations, or higher sales numbers.

This is because - surprise - most companies aren't any good at communicating.

From the article:

Dear big companies: If you want to try using social media - start inside. Create a wiki, internal blogs, company-wide IM, a help line where any employee has access to any other employee's knowledge at any time.

Full article

And of course, a counter-list to the previous list (fewer items, but I guess since they're "sins" they each weigh more...?)

Here's a taste:

Social is PR

Social media is too big for one department. By defining social media in a purely public relations or communications capacity, it limits the scope of your campaign. Keep in mind that in employing social media, there are functionalities and benefits to other departments (e.g. product development, service and support, research), so include those departments as ways to deepen and continue your engagement with consumers. Your audience wants to know more about you than just what you're selling; they want to know about what you do, who does it, and how you do it.

One way to ensure you avoid the pitfall of operating social media in a silo is to ask yourself who else in the organization should participate, and how else can you leverage your social presence beyond just product launches and news events?

Takeaway: PR is great for news and launches, but social media creates the ongoing and sustained interest between news and launches.

Hard to see what the "sin" here is - looks to me like simple short-sightedness, something which everyone who's ever done business with a corporation of any size ought to recognize.

But I guess "Sin" in a headline sells better than "boo-boo", eh?

Full article

ClickZ has this brief list of suggestions for building a following for your company on social networks.

Here's a favorite (fits in with the "Get slightly famous" strategy):

Let go of your secrets. Sharing your knowledge with other people breaks down barriers of engagement. Don't sell a success package for $19.99; instead start a blog. (For example...this article!)

While we all love lists, how do we know this one's any good? Other than appeals to authority (ClickZ is fairly well-known) I guess we don't. We're all figuring this out as we go along, aren't we?

Full Article