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Classmates Versus Facebook: The Social Network Dichotomy

January 21, 2009 By 2 Comments

cm_logo The bane of my existence currently is my ever increasing inbox of emails I need to respond to, and I am apparently only worsening the problem as I sign up for more and more social networks.  There is the wild game recipe club, the used furniture network, the parenting pull your hair out network, the underwater basket weavers network, and…well you get the idea.  I don’t actually belong to all of these clubs or social networks, but I can assure you they are out there with more then 3,600 clubs to join and be a part of online. One of the emails I get frequently is Classmates.com.

fb_logo I was looking into this pre-social networking social network recently because I wanted to compare the use of it versus the use of Facebook.  I get my login found out about the page where I could go to see friends and others, and when I tried to navigate to the next step, wham!  The protective firewall dropped and I was shut out, barred, and could go no further.  The next step was something that baffled me.  They wanted me to join for a small monthly fee.  There went the idea of using Classmates.com.  Why?  The answer to that is easy, I can use Facebook for free.

The catch-22 here is the fact that we are all asking Facebook to find ways to monetize and not make it intrusive, and then when a company like Classmates.com is monetizing, we tell them in order to compete they have to make it free. It’s like those arguments I have with my kids.  The only one that understands the argument is 3 years old.  Classmates.com is making money for being a part of its network, and Facebook is free to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection.  It’s like getting cable television and paying for it and having it available over the free airwaves. 

Last time I looked Facebook was worth a boat load of money and it is all anyone is talking about.  Classmates.com comes on the radar as a vehicle for spam and it is immediately ignored.  There is no reason why Classmates.com should not be able to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Facebook and take a large portion of its market share.  I recently sent out a message over Twitter stating the same thing with the gist being, why would I use Classmates for pay when I can use Facebook for free?  I had lots of responses to that Tweet stating the same thing.

I am not beating down Classmates here as that would not be constructive, but I think I have a solution that might work for them.  Open up your application to everyone and bring down that wall.  Thought sounded somewhat Reaganish didn’t it.  It’s true however that they need to change their thinking.  Instead having that mass database grow stale and have everyone treat Classmates like the spam king of email, shop that database as well.  Those that are struggling, i.e. Yahoo, perhaps a purchase of classmates to take on the world of Facebook is a good move? Either way, we will see the likes of Classmates.com fade away as Facebook grows stronger, and then the next thing will come along and be better.

You are the Classmates.com CEO.  How do you compete?  I want to know how you take on Facebook free, when you are sitting on income already coming in?

Filed Under: Advertising, Blog Tools, Blogonomics, Business Blogging, Marketing, Media, Social Media

Budgeting Social Media Management

December 4, 2008 By 1 Comment

Reading Marketing Profs Paul Dunay’s post regarding the company budget for social media I found it interesting specifically about the idea behind content creation. Paul states:

Ok but the real cost (again unlike the traditional media stuff) is in Content Creation to fill up those social media / new media channels – here is where the cost can get large. I happen to think I am very fortunate since I work at a consulting firm where many people are thought leaders – so we have no shortage of opinions ;-)

He does not get into the costs specifically as he does with pricing the actual tools of social media. The tools he itemizes are:

A Blog;

A Podcast;

A Video;

A Wiki; and

A Community.

I refer to these things as tools as I also believe that applications can be used in a social media planned budget as well. The applications are mostly free to very inexpensive. I did notice he did not budget for the activities surrounding the likes of Twitter or other which enhance the above tools. Basically, they are free. He is correct however when he states:

So unlike traditional media – Print, TV and Radio – which can cost big money. Social media’s upfront costs very little…

You have to read through his original post regarding the overall budgets to get an idea of the numbers, but I wanted to wrap my mind around the budget ideas first and foremost. The low cost of social media is right now making it a hot and much sought after way of accomplishing a company’s advertising, marketing and public relations strategy.

The real cost is the people that can manage this strategy, someone that can understand the uses of each tool and application and how to make it work for its intended use. This is where the budget has to be difficult to nail down. The person that is responsible for this doesn’t even have a job title or description these days. Is it the marketing person, the advertising person or the public relations person that handles this? What department do we charge for the implementation of this new way of handling our media? These are some difficult questions to answer. I am personally seeing many more job openings on job boards, and seeing recruiters provide the answers to the question of who to place in the position. The real question I have for Paul is the budget for the wage for this person. How much does your company expert in the leadership of social media get paid? Do you have a budget line item for a social media manager?

Filed Under: Blog Metrics, Blog Revenue, Blog Tools, Bloggers For Hire, Blogonomics, Corporate Blogs, Marketing, Media, Services, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Reputation Management: It’s A Big Ass Internet

November 20, 2008 By 5 Comments

iStock_000005662949XSmall The other night I had a special and impromptu radio show talking about social media and what has become known as the  the Motrin video debacle.

During the discussion and roundtable of experts,  we talked about the idea that Johnson & Johnson, the parent company of Motrin, and more specifically, McNeil Consumer Healthcare the company that is heading up anymotrin campaigns, was not listening and did not respond to the situation in a quick manner.  That perhaps they had an opportunity to jump on this before it got to the heights it did and they could have done something more.  The response, and apology and the aftermath is a different post altogether.

In that discussion one of my guests, Jessica Gottlieb, mentioned that the company is big enough to have a team dedicated to listening to what is being said about them online.  I debated that this was not the reality of the situation. Even the largest of companies have no idea what is being said on a regular basis and they in fact have nothing in place to help them with this idea.  This also made me think of a scene from one of my favorite movies:

President: We didn’t see this thing coming?

 
Dan: Well, our object collision budget’s a million dollars. That allows us to track about 3% of the sky, and beg’n your pardon sir, but it’s a big-ass sky. ~ Armageddon (1998/I)

The line in the movie refers to the fact that a big asteroid the size of Texas was about to hit the earth.  The President of the United States wanted to know why we were surprised by this fact.

I thought about the Motrin incident with the Mommy Bloggers and the Internet in the same fashion.  Turns out the YouTube Video referred to was released to the website in September and didn’t really get known until a month later.  They were completely caught unaware.  The video went viral over a weekend, and I am sure that the folks that are in charge of the campaign were all home for their weekend off and had no idea what was coming.  The Internet doesn’t take weekends off. Monday morning, I can picture the CEO standing in a boardroom with the same conversation as above.  The department head responding the same way, “we are sorry but we don’t spend much time or money on this kind of thing.”

ups I recently attended,  as a representative of the IBNMA,  the Blogwell event put on by the Blog Council in San Jose a few weeks ago and I was introduced to this very idea by Debbie Curtis-Magley, at United Parcel Service.  Debbie is the whole department for their social media campaign as it relates to their online management or brand reputation management and quipped about having difficulty tracking the entire Internet, and knowing that their are quite a few people writing online about “sit-ups” and “chin-ups.”  She has her work cut out for her because like above, “it’s a big ass Internet”.

There are quite a few companies out their that do help companies with their online brand and reputation management and they have proprietary applications that they use to accomplish their task.  They specialize in making sure you are alerted to what is being said about you, your company, or about that crazy YouTube video you put up on your website that set off a wildfire response in the blogosphere.  They can also be there when something good happens.  Normally however, and most unfortunately, the good stuff does not get quite the play as the bad stuff.  What is being said about you and your company?  Are you listening?  It is after all a very big ass Internet.

I would challenge the people I mentioned above to leave a comment if you are monitoring the Internet.  Did you read this post or see it come across your screen?  Debbie, did you pick it up?  Jessica, can you leave a comment here in more than a day or two? How about my own folks at the IBNMA?

Filed Under: Advertising, Blog Mining, Blog Tools, Blogs and PR, Business Blogging, Findability, Marketing, Media, Mediasphere Radio, Services, Social Media

Winning The Web Traffic Lottery

November 19, 2008 By 2 Comments

Lucky Numbers I continue to explain to people that this social media thing is not the quick fix, not the get rich quick and not the answered prayer or the be all and end all of business revival medicines.  Every time a story hits the Internet that gets a viral following, or a YouTube Video goes crazy, or something happens that causes a server somewhere to crash from the load of traffic to a company blog or website, I know I’ll be getting an email or a call.  The question first out the mouth of the caller or the subject line of that  urgent email:

“How can we get a viral component planned for our company?”

My response is something less than jovial, and sometimes it is met with sarcastic responses like “I wish I could bottle that”, or something along the lines of “Better yet let’s go buy that winning Powerball lottery ticket!” 

I recently read a post from a blogger that talked about those social media people that you need to run away from.  He hit the nail on the head when he said to run away from a consultant that says:

“We will implement a viral marketing strategy.”
Uh, no you won’t. Viral is the effect, not the cause. If someone says, “I can make a viral video,” please show him the door.

Yes, I completely agree.  Not only show them the door but make sure to report them to the social media police.

I tend to cringe when I see things like the company that somehow “positions” itself on page one of various networking sites.  The stars aligned well for them and they got a bump or large spike in traffic. Then I see them as they are bragging to all of their friends how their servers crashed under the weight of traffic that came to see their product.  Yes, it is pretty cool to watch and I have seen it happen first hand.

After that traffic spike honeymoon is over however, they don’t talk about the return to normalcy as they continue to struggle to get those much needed conversions.  In fact, they soon find that their conversion and other numbers have been skewed by the strange anomaly that occurred.  At this point, all we can really do as consultants is to tell you where and how to buy your chance at the golden lottery ticket, but I cannot tell you which one of those tickets will crash your server.

Filed Under: Advertising, Blog Consulting, Blog Metrics, Blog Tips, Blog Tools, Marketing, Services, Social Media

Technorati Changing The Way It Does Business

February 29, 2008 By 1 Comment

richardjalichandra Technorati has been an icon of the blogosphere since Dave Sifry began the company to track blogs and provide bloggers with statistics and search.  It was the first thing people downloaded to their blogs, and the first part of setting up a blog.  They seem to have lost that celebrity status.  There are so many companies that have been cracking away at that Technorati keystone that it appears they may crumble.  I have been waiting to hear some news from the Technorati camp and it appears that news is bubbling up as reported by TechCrunch.

When I talked with Richard Jalinchandra in Las Vegas at the Blog World Expo in November, he mentioned then that Technorati was in for some changes and that he wanted to lead the company back to its glory days.  He couldn’t talk then about what he was doing but it seems that the cool stuff I expected and the things the head of marketing, Aaron Krane,  talked about on my Social Mediapshere radio show would make them a shining star again.  I didnt expect them to enter the advertising arena.

Tris an I questioned them on why they were not indexing search results past six months and it looks like they may be rethinking that with adding an advertising component to their search.  Arrington states:

Technorati will certainly be competing head to head with FM, although sources say they’ll focus on the long tail of the market as well (FM only takes larger sites). The network will be a self-serve exchange for bloggers (and other publishers) as well as advertisers. Ad units will include both display and text ads, and will allow units to be charged on both a CPM and CPC basis. (emphasis added)

I was hoping that Technorati would be adding some features that would be more than just another way for bloggers to add a revenue component to their blogs.  I want to see them return to an application I would run to five times a day because they offered a way to see stats and a something that was cool to experience as I did back in the day.

This is part of the reason I have hooked my wagon to the folks at Lijit*.  I certainly see that they have ideas to make their “wijit” something that is a first add-on to a blog.  I am not sensing that Technorati has that coolness factor in mind.  I certainly understand that after raising $20M in funding you might want to start thinking of making money and perhaps they will change the way they run their business and we have only seen the beginning of their new glory days.  It appears Richard is doing his job of CEO and is running the company in the best interest of those investors, but I for one want to see them do some things they used to do, only better.  Don’t make it about the page views make it about the blogger and a company that every blogger loves to use.

[photo via Brian Solis]

*Lijit is a client and I do some evangelism for them.

Filed Under: Advertising, Blog Metrics, Blog Revenue, Blog Tools, Blogging News, Blogonomics, Business Blogging, Marketing, Mediasphere Radio, Social Media

We Live In A Google World

February 7, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I have been preaching to people as long as I remember that “We live in a Google World.  I happened upon a post today by Owen Thomas (no I’m not a Valleywag reader, I thank Techmeme) about Google and its global market share.  He refers to a chart done by Efficient Frontier Insights showing the market share of the search engines across the globe.

globalsem

Obviously as the chart shows, Google is enjoying the lion share of search marketing.  Some say it is because they are more targeted with their technology.  Others say it is because they have more advertisers and more publishers.  I think it is because they do search better than any other company.  It will be interesting to see if Microsoft is able to capture a little more piece of the pie and if they can put a dent in the market share owned by Google.  When I hear that Yahoo is thinking of outsourcing  its search to Google, it does not give me much confidence that Microsoft is getting the best in search from Yahoo, and obviously its search engine at MSN is not making much of a race of search in its own right.

UPDATE:  For a deeper analysis check out HipMojo.com

Filed Under: Advertising, Blog Revenue, Blog Tools, Blogonomics, Findability, Marketing, Media, Partnerships, Search Engine Optimization

Is Commenting On Blogs Part of Your Marketing Plan? Are Your Doing It Wrong?

September 26, 2007 By 10 Comments

Buried under the weight of my inbox and trying to filter the spam from the real stuff I needed to get to today, I ran across a comment on Bloggers For Hire:

I was reading around some of the posts here and I found interesting things that you guys talk about, I just made a blog about quitting smoking resources and ideas that you might want to check out. If someone is interested in this topic just go to; [no I'm not going to give them the unearned link] and let me know what you think.
Thanks in advance.

On its face, this looks like perhaps a proper comment for a blog.  In fact, Andy Beard discussed this earlier about companies, using Bloggers For Hire as an example, that might be offering “paid comments” and whether those might be ethical.  I think that is worth a read if nothing more than to check out the comments that were left and the many opinions that surfaced.

Let’s take the above example and break it down.  The first sentence supposedly lets me know that the commenter has taken the time to read my blog and it’s entries.  It is decent copy that engages and compliments which might get through my bullsh*t detector, but of course I’m a paid professional and it promptly failed.

Next it indicates that he “made a blog”.  This sounds like something that my 2 year old did in his pull-up diaper.  It’s also a perfect example of what Stephanie says is a bad error.  In the statement he talks about smoking.  The comment just lost its relevance.  I have no idea why this person would be talking about smoking on a blog about hiring bloggers. 

Then comes the elevator marketing pitch.  Come to my site, tell me what you think and thank you in advance.  This is a waste of time and space because obviously we have already determined that your comment is nothing more than spam in a dress.  You can dress up the comment, but of course, it’s still just spam.

I am a big proponent of commenting on blogs if you are a company looking to get into the social aspects of blogs, podcasts and other social media tools.  If you are going to comment, please don’t clutter the inboxes of companies and other bloggers with this type of marketing plan.  Make your comment add something to the post and to the overall experience of other readers.  If you are taking time trying to lure readers with the above type of comment, you are wasting everyone’s time including your own.

Filed Under: Advertising, Blog Tools, Bloggers For Hire, Blogs and PR, Business Blogging, Marketing, Media, Professional Blogging, Services, Social Media

Searching For A Local Business: Old vs. New

September 10, 2007 By 1 Comment

yellowpages3 I can remember the first time I had my name appear in the phone book after I purchased my first home.  Like Steve Martin in the movie “The Jerk”, I danced around and shouted, “I’m somebody now”.  Back then of course, I think computers were something in sci-fi movies, and the Internet had not yet been thought about.  But I can still see that brand new version of the white pages all clean and crisp with my name right there alongside the other 30 people that shared my name.

I was recently watching television when the new Dex advertisement came on and I had a trip down memory lane.  I am still amazed that anyone would be spending much time looking at a Yellow page book in the modern era of finding everything through search.  I think the last time I used a yellow pages directory it was for a booster seat for the kids to reach the table better. 

Then I saw a related article recently put out by eMarketer.com.  The article states that online local advertising will reach 2.9 billion in 2007, which is only 13.4% of the total online advertising market.  The study and article are an interesting look at local advertising.  It made me wonder about the dollars being spent on traditional offline products such as the yellow pages.  I also wondered whether what they were being told about the results they would get as business owners and placing the ads.

I can remember the game back in the day of Yellow page advertising, companies wanted to somehow be listed first in their niche.  If they had a plumbing business, they would call it AAA Plumbing, because then they would be listed as the first alphabetical result listing in the book.  We are not that far off now with the way companies are clamoring for that all important number 1 placement in search results.  Now we are doing it with SEO and other tactics.  The ideal is still the same and that is to be that first listed business under plumbing.  Even though advertising is drastically changing since the old days, in some respects it stays the same.

Filed Under: Advertising, Blog Consulting, Blog Metrics, Blog Mining, Blog Revenue, Blog Tools, Business Blogging, Findability, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Services

The New Era of Social Media: The Growth Stage and Education

September 2, 2007 By 1 Comment

On the same vein as my lost post regarding a blogging hiccup or what I see as a new era of business blogging, we are now at a crossroad of corporate advertising, marketing and PR online.  There are many forward thinking companies that are early adopters, and especially in the technical world where technology is seen as a tool to harness if you want to succeed.  So where are we in the adoption of social media as it relates to the rest of the companies and corporations?  We are at a new beginning, the stage of educating the rest of the world. Those companies that didn’t get it, the ones that want to see what the early adopters did and what worked and what didn’t.

800px-ProductLifeCycle We have seen it in our own business model here at One By One Media and Bloggers For Hire.  We really didn’t have to sell real hard to get companies that were contacting us about business blogging and hiring bloggers.  They wanted to adopt the technology and they wanted to make it a part of their online presence.  They were already sold on the idea.  All I or any other social media consultant had to do was implement the tools necessary for the company to join in the social media world.  We had the good life then, and our sales were self fulfilling prophecies.  Now we are in the education stage of the rest of the world.  These companies and corporations are not yet sold on the idea of social media.  In fact, I think it was stated best in a post and thread at the newly canceled Blog Business Summit.

Steve Broback wrote:

Like the Lambada, I don?t believe my original, 1990?s era event model is nearly as viable as it used to be, and certainly not so for the BBS. The BBS really never attracted the huge numbers of marketing and PR types that clearly *needed* to learn this stuff. I tried very hard with the Chicago event to attract that demographic and our efforts washed up on shore like a dead fish.

In addition, we emailed, snail mailed, and telephoned 250 CTOs and CIOs and invited them to come and learn how Wikis and blogs can enable internal knowledge sharing. They were terrified, and only 3 signed up. A couple even said they were ?too busy? with their current efforts to reign in email overload to take the time to attend(!) (emphasis added)

This was a very astute thought and a comment by Kevin Hillstrom about the event:

In the posts of the past two days, one can see that you feel hurt by spending so much time and effort to evangelize something you believe in, only to have to make tough choices that may, on the surface, appear contrary to what you?ve evangelized over a period of several years.

It will probably be hard, but try to not blame people who ?don?t get it?. It is just as likely that people failed to do a good job of educating folks as it is that people ?don?t get it?. You?ll never know which of those two issues is the right one.

Teresa mentioned that companies that don?t get this are ?sunk?. They aren?t. They are simply missing an opportunity to improve the performance of their business.

When the conversation turns to picking on the ones who you are trying to evangelize, you make it that much harder to be successful in the long term.

Don?t feel bad about having to cancel something you so strongly believed in. Spend your efforts moving forward, showing folks that they can benefit by doing what you?re suggesting, and that what you?re suggesting is evolving and changing every day.

I sent two folks to your conference last year. One of those folks made a difference in her organization, armed with the knowledge she gained. Know that your efforts do help others who have an interest in your subject matter.

Kevin’s comment is spot on in my opinion.  We will need to show the examples of the past early adopters.  We need to take those examples and show the rest of the corporate world how the companies used the tool and how it benefited them and provide hard numbers for those companies to see for a return on their investment. As mentioned, Teresa stating that companies not adopting this social media tool are not sunk, but if companies want to differentiate themselves from their competitors, they can, if not, they are missing the opportunity.  I think we agree on the fact that if a company misses out on enough opportunities, sooner than later they will eventually sink  and die.  It will be up to them if they sink or swim, but it is up to us as social media consultants to throw them a life raft if needed.

So where do we go from here?  Now is truly the call for social media consultants to become evangelists. It’s time to stop preaching to the choir and truly find followers that want to succeed in business using social media tools.  Now is when we have the tough sell.  The easy sell is a thing of the past.  Pull in your numbers, get those examples ready, and show what you have done, and what you can do in the future.  It’s not going to be the easy contract that you get now, but one that you truly earn.

Filed Under: Advertising, Announcements, Blog Consulting, Blog Tools, Bloggers and Blogs, Bloggers For Hire, Blogs and PR, Business Blogging, Companies Needing Blogs, Conferences/Trade Shows, Corporate Blogs, Marketing, Media, Professional Blogging, Services, Social Media

Reinventing the Social Media Wheel

August 5, 2007 By 5 Comments

Some of the A-List has been talking about social media overload, and I for one have to join in the same complaint.  As part of what we offer as social media consultants, we provide information about the latest and greatest technology available for a company to use in their marketing, advertising and PR campaigns.  I have been wanting to write this post for quite some time, but it wasn’t until a post by Digital Alex entitled “My Friends Hate Pownce”, that I realized he was channeling my frustration.

Like Alex, I grow tired of the same but different applications, like Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce.  The next company that thinks they have the next big thing in this type of application, please ask yourself will anyone say to you that this application we are making is going to be compared to any of the three above, scrap the project.  If you are changing the colors and making the same application better, chances are it won’t be adopted unless it really knocks the socks off users.  I have all three, but because Twitter was first, I have the largest number of users there.  Why?  because I started building my network there first.  If I have to rebuild my network of friends for each application, it causes me to reinvent my social media wheel.

I like Alex’s solutions to the problem.  I think Facebook is coming close to what Alex describes as a social aggregator, but it still has a way to go before it completes what he intends in his mind.  My reinvention of the social media wheel also follows what he tells us is his solution to the networking.  Migrate all of my friends for me from one application to another.

At this point there is really no need for a money back guarantee, as all of these applications are free, unless of course you have a pro account with Pownce, but I would be willing to pay for a service if it was the be all and end all application that did it all.

Filed Under: Blog Consulting, Blog Tools, Blogs and PR, Marketing, Media, Services, Social Media
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