Go check out my Posterous, if you wish.

The other nifty feature is that Posterous will automatically repost your blog entries to other platforms. In my case, all my Posterous posts go to Twitter, Facebook and Delicious. If I wanted, I could also have my posts come to this blog, but I’ve held off, as the ease of using Posterous has led me to use it for more personal and frivolous posts.

Thanks to coworking mate Peter Fleck for pushing me off the fence. He’s been using Posterous to fuel a hyper-local community blog, in which community members are able contribute via email — no browser access or tech skills required!

Below are a number of resources related to my talk, “Social Media: Friend or Foe?” given on November 19, at a marketing conference hosted by the Farm Credit Bank of Texas. I want to thank Stan Ray and Lora Blume for their tremendous hospitality and everyone who attended for their kind attention and challenging questions.

Key points

What is social media?
Thousands of web sites that allow individual users to create, share, and rate content — and connect with others who share common interests.

Why should you care?
1.    Rapid growth in use & influence of social media sites.
2.    Resulting power shift: individuals exert more control than organizations over content & message.

Top social media sites/activity include:
•    Blogs (77% of active Internet users read them)
•    User-generated content (photos, video, reviews, documents)
•    Facebook (276MM per month)
•    Myspace (124MM per month)
•    Twitter (7MM users)

Social networking by age/gender
•    35% of U.S. adults
•    65% of U.S. teens
•    85% of Gen Y (2% increase since ‘08)
•    28% of Baby Boomers (59% increase since ‘08)
•    35% of men*
•    35% of women*

Farmers & social media
•    55% of farmers online
•    27% have high-speed
•    65% of farmers* use Internet “constantly or several times a day at work”

How can you put social media to work in your organization?
•    Customer service
•    Market research
•    Employee communications
•    Community outreach
•    Public relations
•    Marketing

How to adopt social media in 5 easy steps
1.    Listen to the conversations.
2.    Determine how you want to engage.
3.    Set boundaries.
4.    Rethink your content.
5.    Embrace R&D as a way of business.

Links and references

Ag and Social Media

• Twitter Blog: Twittering from the Tractor
• NPR: A Farmer, His ‘Tribe’ And The Web That Brings Them Together
• TWEET CORN? Nebraska farmers sharing their experiences via Twitter – Free-Press-Release.com
• Farmers embracing Twitter trend – 14 News, The Tri-State’s News and Weather Leader-
• Twittering from the tractor: smartphones sprout on the farm – CNN.com
• In the Field » Agriculture and social media: Q&A with Sue Colucci
• The Voice of Agriculture – American Farm Bureau
• THINKeEXTENSION » Blog Archive » Can Social Media and Web2.0 save Agriculture and Environment
• Farmers for the Future

Internal Use of Social Media

• Social Media Policies For Your Company: Internal Policies | davefleet.com
• Transparency Not Technology: Internal Use of Social Media

Banking & Social Media

• Banks & social media: shred your marketing beliefs
• The Community Banker’s Guide to Social Network Marketing
• Banks try social networking, jump on Twitter wagon – USATODAY.com

Social Media Trends, Statistics & Demographics

• Overview | Pew Internet & American Life Project
• Adults and Social Network Websites | Pew Internet & American Life Project
• Twitter and status updating | Pew Internet & American Life Project
• twitter.com – Quantcast Audience Profile
• Mindblowing #IranElection Stats: 221,744 Tweets Per Hour at Peak
• Social Media 2008 Statistics
• Growth of User Generated Content Contributors in USA : TechCrunchies – Internet Statistics and Numbers
• 82 Million User-Generated Content Creators and CountingBlogging grows by 68% « Mind Juice
• New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets – Conversation Starter – HarvardBusiness.org
• Nielsen: Twitter Was Fastest Growing Community Last Month
  MySpace shrinks as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo grab its users | Technology | The Observer
  Domino’s Discovers Social Media – BusinessWeek
  Micro Persuasion: Social Networking Demographics: Boomers Jump In, Gen Y Plateaus

Resources mentioned in my talk

• Twitter search
• Google Alerts
• Google Blogs
• Google Trends
• Radian 6 – Subscription-based social media monitoring tool
• Techrigy SM2 – Subscription-based social media monitoring tool
• Filtrbox – Free social media marketing tool

Photo of the Texas capital building rotunda, by Flickr user jasleen_kaur

Part 1: Dipping your toe into social media

This is the first in a 4 part series about how you can start a social media strategy program started in a risk-averse company. In part 1, we’ll start out very slowly and just dip our toe in to some of the basic platforms.

I’m sure you have a list of your favorite industry blogs, you’ve dabbled in LinkedIn and Facebook and you’ve even heard of Twitter. You undoubtedly know that you “need” to take advantage of social media to stay competitive, but you’re a bit overwhelmed and your company isn’t exactly sure it’s a good fit.

You know that connecting with your customers on a more personal level can improve your brand and your bottom line. You understand that social media can be a great way to influence behavior with minimal out-of-pocket expenses. And you realize that you’ll need to do something fast just to stay competitive. But, because you’re part of a large company, particularly if you’re in a highly regulated, risk-averse industry like health care or banking, your company may feel there’s just too much risk associated with that level of transparency. And thinking about shifting your marketing communications into conversations, your organization might feel like it would lose control over its message and its brand, and that there could be very real legal and IP considerations.

Here is an easy 4-day (or 4-hour) plan to dip your toe into social media. If you haven’t used these tools before, spend just an hour each week and you’ll be laying the groundwork for implementing a social media strategy for your company.

Day 1: Make it brief
Create a communications strategy brief. The operative word is “brief”. Don’t get bogged down in committee meetings, just create a one-page outline of who your target audience is, what your organization’s goals are for the next year and how you think your company and customers can benefit by adopting social media. Then, write down your top 3 concerns. This will be your guide throughout the process. It’s not set in stone, so feel free to update it at any time.

Day 2: Set up basic accounts
If you haven’t already, set up personal accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and start exploring. This will allow you to get familiar with what each platform offers without involving the company brand. Find a handful of people you know and start connecting with them. These can be friends, co-workers or thought leaders in your industry. The important thing is to explore without any grand agenda.

Day 3: Listen to the chatter
A fundamental benefit of social media tools that often can get overlooked is the ability to eavesdrop on conversations. You can search twitter posts, blog posts and reader comments to find out what people are saying about your brand, your industry and your competition. Here is two good places to start searching–just type in your company name, your product, even your name (come on, you know you want to):

• Search twitter
• Search blogs

What do you notice? Is there even anybody talking about you? Do you see any patterns? Are there people that you’d never heard of that your customers listening to? Did you find anything surprising?

Day 4: Participate in the community
You’ve created your strategy brief (you may have even updated it already), you’re more familiar with some of the core social media platforms and you’ve explored what others are saying about you online. Now it’s time to start participating. The easiest thing to do is to comment on another’s blog. Choose 3 of your favorite industry blogs and post comments on a couple of articles you find particularly helpful or interesting. Your comments don’t need to be lengthy or even deep. Eventually, you‘ll want to provide more insightful comments, but even thanking the blogger for their contribution or insight is enough. Your comments should be informal and authentic and this shouldn’t be used as an opportunity to directly sell your services. Just say what you would if that person were standing right in front of you.

What are you waiting for?
When you start using this simple plan, you’ll be laying the foundation for your company’s social media strategy with very little brand risk. You can do these steps in 4 days or 4 hours. The important thing is to take a little time each day or each week to explore and to participate. Become a part of the community you want to do business with.

In part 2, I’ll kick it up a notch and talk about how you can begin making the case to your risk-averse organization for adopting social media. Part 3 will talk about ideas for implementing social media internally. Finally, part 4 will discuss simple and low-risk ways to turn your social media program outward.

Photo by adactio. Creative Commons image license.

Recently we launched a project for Prolifiq, Inc., a Beaverton, Oregon SaaS (software as a service) provider that offers a killer 1:1 communications platform for sales and marketing. In addition to delivering a revamped Web site and interactive demo, we also created this web video commercial.

The communications challenge
Early in our engagement, we could see that it was difficult to describe what Prolifiq was without getting overwhelmed by an extensive list of cool features and its impressive behind-the-scenes technology. It’s not a blast email marketing platform and it’s not a content management system as we know it. Both can be quite cumbersome for “on-the-move” sales reps to use when they need it. And organizations certainly can’t get their personal email and CMS to interact with each other, much less provide useful metrics. Prolifiq can do all of that and much more.

Telling the story
Of course, the first obstacle in any sales process (especially for complex and technical products/services) is to get your target audience to understand what your product is and how it benefits them. The simplest and most compelling way for us to accomplish this was to create a video that tells the Prolifiq story. The story needed to go beyond a laundry list of whiz-bang features and it inherently needed to be more meaningful to the audience.

This video gives the Prolifiq sales and management team a great tool to introduce their product to prospects and it helps accelerate their conversations to the next level.

(The video is part of a larger interactive demo. Check it out!)

Date:
A Saturday in Februrary or March. We’ll announce the date as soon as things are finalized.

Location:
TBD

Food, drink:
Yes. We’re looking to get some kind souls to underwrite food and drinks.

Topics:
I may need some help honing this down to a couple of snappy sound bites. In the meantime, here’s the big idea in prose…

The last UnSummit seemed to be all about social media. Nobody really planned it that way. It’s just what everyone wanted to talk about. I’m sure the next one will be chock-full-o’ social media goodness. But I’d like to see if we can focus our powers and take on the one thing that’s on everyone’s mind  — the economy.

Whether you’re a freelancer or consultant, business owner, an agency worker or a corporate cube dweller, the economy is creeping into every conversation. If you’re lucky, it’s only altered your plans for 2009. But more likely , it’s resulted in slower business and budget cuts. Maybe even a pink slip.

So, are we helpless in the face of job cuts and plummeting sales? If not, what can we do about it as individuals or as a community? Is there a way to hack the downturn and create Recession 2.0?

As creatives, geeks and entrepreneurs, I think this is a rich area for us to mine. I don’t presume to know all the questions people might have around the economy, but here are the one’s I’m asking.

• Is this downturn the same as the last one?
• Will it result in the same kind of carnage?
• Or will it result in an all-new kind of carnage?
• What wine pairs well with carnage? (seriously, let’s have a wine or beer talk!)

• Is everyone feeling the pinch?
• If you’re not, why not?
• Are you considering altering your business model due to the economy?
• What are some alternative ways to profit from your talents, skills and assets?

• What clever strategies are you implementing to survive the maelstrom?
• Which industries and clients still have budgets?
• What tools/techniques are you using to prospect and make sales?
• What tools/techniques are you using cut costs?

• We’re kind of a go-it-alone state. Still, how can we band together as a community to help job hunters and small biz owners?
• Is there anything we can do to speed up the recovery?
• How can we raise the profile of Minnesota as a go-to place for tech, creative and entrepreneurial talent?

I’m hoping that we’ll see three distinct, yet interrelated conversational currents:

• For freelancers, consultants and employees – focus on personal brand building, self promotion, networking.
• For small businesses & agencies – focus on business models, strategies, sales, staffing and efficiency.
• For community leaders – focus on community building, civic boosterism, making Minnesota more visible at a national level.

What do you think of this rough agenda? What do you want to talk about at the next UnSummit? Please drop a comment and let us know!

(We’ll move the conversation over to the UnSummit wiki in a week or so.)

What probably seemed clever in the mind of a 23-year-old, childless copywriter turned out to be quite offensive to many moms (and dads, to be sure) and unleashed a social media firestorm.

Within a few short hours, a movement was born, complete with its own #motrinmoms hashtag on Twitter, angry blog posts, video rants, CafePress stores, Flickr groups and parody videos. In less than a day, Motrin was forced to take down the ad and apologize.

• Morriss Partee has published a chronology of events.
• Enterprise Social Media has assembled a Harpers-like index of Motrin Moms activity, which also gives a good sense of how quickly, from Motrin’s point of view, this whole thing got out of hand.
• Jack Neff covers the incident in Ad Age.

Update:
My biz partner Dean Gulstad points out an article by Jakob Nielsen on participation inequality, which supports Neff’s view that Motrin acted too hastily in responding to the social media uproar. Nielsen points out that “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.” Therefore, he says, “If your company looks to Web postings for customer feedback on its products and services, you’re getting an unrepresentative sample.”

Yet another update:
Seth Godin pans Motrin’s apology for its lack of humanity.

• NYTimes: Jobless rate at 14-year high
• WSJ: Labor data show pain across economy
• AP: Running on fumes; GM could soon run out of cash

By these accounts, we are headed toward a period of significant unemployment or are already there. Either way, if you don’t already, you will soon have a number of colleagues, friends or relatives who are looking for a job. There’s a better chance than ever that you could soon join them.

I don’t take any of this lightheartedly. I have a deep pang of sympathy for people who are out of work because my father was a victim of the 70s malaise and was chronically underemployed for much of my boyhood. I know from first-hand experience that behind all these grave headlines and numbers lie families and parents who are frustrated and stressed about not being able to fulfill the most basic need of providing for their loved ones.

If I can preach for just a moment, I strongly encourage every one of you who are still gainfully employed to reach out to your unemployed friends and at least offer some words of encouragement. Or how about a free latte? It’s good karma

At the same time, don’t forget to consider your own job security. How safe is your job? How safe is your industry? What should you be doing to increase your “employment security?” (To clarify, employment security is about making yourself more employable and different from increasing your security in your current job, which you may not have much control over). How can you manufacture your own luck in a tight job market?

If you haven’t heard this enough over the years, it’s all about who you know. It’s about the quality of your personal network. According to Paul DeBettignies, managing partner at the Minneapolis IT recruitment firm Nerd Search, between 50% to 80% of jobs are filled based on personal connections.

Fortunately, thanks to new social networking tools, such as Linked In, Facebook and Twitter, among others, you can easily build up a network of colleagues, friends and acquaintances that can help increase your luck in the job market. And the good news for those of you who hate schmoozing, you don’t need to make small talk at cocktail parties to take advantage of these tools. (Check out Commoncraft’s “Social Networking in Plain English” for a great intro to social network tools.)

Five steps to greater employment security

1. Get a personal home page. The domain isn’t critical, although having “www.bobjones.com” could be easier for your contacts to remember. The important thing here is that you have a consistent place to send your contacts. On your home page, you can provide links to other places, such as your social network profiles, your resume or curriculum vitae, your blog, articles you’ve been quoted in or samples of your work. Please note that you can use your blog as your home page. Update: I just found a great service called extendr which lets you build a free home page like I described above. Check out my page as an example: http://donball.extendr.com
2. Create an online resume – As this article explains, your resume doesn’t have to be a highly-crafted Word doc that you send out to prospective employers as an attachment. Instead, your resume can exist as a page in your blog, where people (and Google) can find it easily. You can even consider the entirety of your Linked In profile to be your resume. Bottom line: you have no idea who is going to find you and your experience relevant, so get yourself out there where you can be found!
3. Get on Linked In – As a business owner, this site isn’t my cup of tea. But I do keep a profile there and it seems to have quite a bit of currency among Baby-Boomer, white-collar professionals (in other words people who are further along in their careers and in a better position to help you), so you probably need to be there.
4. Get on Facebook – If you’re already on Linked In (or, like me, find it a bit to sterile), then you might want to expand your network by joining Facebook, where you will find not only professional colleagues, but friends and relatives. Facebook lets you show more facets of yourself, including personal tastes, interests, hobbies and (if you dare go there) political and religious affiliations.
5. Create a blog – This may be the biggest step in the list because it takes time to write for a blog (this article is taking me well over an hour). But think of a blog as a way to help people get to know you before they meet you. A blog gives potential employers the opportunity to see your views on your industry and your profession. More importantly, it shows them that the front porch light is on and someone’s home. As an employer, I can tell you that I would much prefer hiring someone who demonstrates that they’re actively engaged in their work. The best part about blogging is that it’s really easy to start. I started my first blog at Blogger.com and it took me all of 15 minutes to set up.
6. Get on Twitter – (Hey, what about 5 steps? Well, when you have your own blog you get to make up your own rules! And one of my rules is to provide my followers with a laginappe, a little something extra.) Twitter is turning out to be an incredible networking tool that lets you potentially interact with thousands of people in yours and related fields — instantly. It’s also a great way to tell your contacts about any changes in your situation, new blog posts or to request information on a prospective employer. But there’s a catch. If you create a Twitter account and do nothing else, you’ll be underwhelmed. You have to take the extra step of searching for and following people you know (and then, perhaps, some of the people they know). Feel free to follow me. I’ll follow you back and even ask my Twitter friends to connect with you. Want to learn more? Again, Commoncraft has a great video intro.

Of course, it’s never to late to start, but these are steps you should try to follow BEFORE you are laid off. If you suddenly become the recipient of a pink slip, you will wish that you already had your network in place. And you could lose precious time trying to get all the pieces in place.

What are you doing to soften the blow of a potential layoff? Or, if you are looking for work, what techniques are you using to make yourself more employable? Please share in the comment section below. Good luck!

Maybe your bosses, colleagues or clients seem to be dragging their heels into this “new-fangled” social media thing. Remind them that it’s been around for quite a long time. It’s as old as word-of-mouth marketing. Buy them a copy of the book, send them to the site or give them this PDF of the 95 Theses. Because if they don’t get off their butts and find effective ways to use social media, they’ll be kicked to the rear.

If you haven’t read the Cluetrain Manifesto recently, read it again–you can read it for free online. It emphasizes the importance of social media to an organization’s future: the unique opportunity to have conversations about your products and services in places where those conversations are already happening…with or without you. And if you’re not there, your competition probably is.

So, my friend just got back from a big conference on social media and is skeptical about the potential for using social media in the kind of marketing she does.

If I were to paraphrase the challenge as she described it, it goes like this:

• I know that all this crazy social media stuff is a force to be reckoned with.
• I don’t want to be late to the party.
• But, let’s be realistic. We sell to CFOs, financial managers, upper level, even C-level managers. They’re not exactly hanging out online waiting to be engaged by you or anyone else, right?
• So, is social media a mostly consumer-focused trend that will have little impact on our business and approach to marketing?
• Or are there B2B applications that are waiting to be discovered and/or pioneered?
• What are some cost-justifiable ways, if any, that we can use these tools (blogs, social networks, micro-blogging, etc.) to market more effectively?

What I’m asking for is your response to this challenge. Is it too early for my friend to do anything? Are there things that she needs to be doing now? What are your ideas? I will publish them in a follow-up post and of course give credit where it’s due

I just got wind of a old (Jan. 25, 2007) report by Forrester that takes on a real sticky wicket: calculating the ROI of running a corporate blog.

I’ve ranted on more than one occasion that marketers should use social media, including blogs, as an R&D tool and not to expect a hard return. But, if anyone can build a more hard-core argument for blogging, I’m all for it. After all, these are difficult times, which means money talks.

According to this post on Forrester’s Groundswell blog, if R&D (i.e., gathering customer insight) is one of your goals, you can measure your ROI by figuring what it would cost you to gather those insights via traditional means, such as focus groups, surveys, ethnographic studies, etc. If you can gather comparable or better insights via your blog at a lower cost, the difference is your ROI. If a monthly focus group costs $15k and your blog costs you $10k, your ROI is $5k.

The article makes some interesting points, including:

• There is no standard ROI model for blogs
• Your ROI depends on your metrics, which depend on your specific goals
• Measurable blogging goals might include:

- Increased brand visibility
- Savings on customer insight
- Rduction of impact from negative user-generated blogs
- Increased sales efficiency

Update:

I nearly forgot, but Gary Vaynerchuk recently posted a frantic and entertaining rant on the benefits and ROI of online marketing in a soft business market. Ya gotta check it out!