November 4th, 2009

Nothing is viral, but everything is contagious

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:42 am

Categories: Corporate Social Networking, Marketing, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Digg, Web Site, Web Site Development, Web Technology, Internet, Jennifer Leggio

* Jennifer Leggio is on vacation

Guest editorial by Brandon Mendelson

It was approaching midnight when the phone rang. Usually, one of two things go through your mind when someone calls that late: “Who died?” or “Do I have enough to make bail?” I was wasn’t so lucky. It was a television show host I was working for, calling from a hotel room somewhere deep in the heart of America. They had an idea. “We’re going to make this campaign go viral! What do you think?” I said the idea was terrible and went to bed.

You don’t need to be Miss Cleo to know how the campaign ended; however, there’s an important lesson for those new to social media: How does something really spread?

Thankfully, there’s a paint by number formula to answer that:

Step 1: Create something funny or informative. It used to be in the form of text, now it’s almost exclusively video. This material has to be good. So good, your friends like it enough to comfortably share it. If you stop promoting here, your prospects will taper off because we can only know so many people willing to share your material. (150).

As a tip: You can measure if something is truly viral if it spreads into the real world. Usually when that happens it’s watered down and / or no longer funny. So be warned. Example: Everyone at work using “Fail” in regular conversation.

Step 2: Then, through a variety of ways, but most notably through Digg’s upcoming section, you and your friends promote the item. You need about thirty friends, the more the better, to help vote for the item. Unless you bring in the votes, nothing is going to move on Digg under their current system.

The point of submitting to Digg and having your friends vote isn’t to get on Digg’s front page. The point is to keep your item visible for websites who pull content off Digg. There are many who do this and twice that of people who find rising items to submit to these sites. And increasingly, to their own followers on Twitter. In turn, there are larger websites who monitor these smaller websites and pull the content from them.

That’s why you often see the same stuff posted online. It’s rarely if ever viral, people are just pulling material from the same source.

Step 3: With luck, you can make these feeder websites and that’s where the content begins to legitimately spread. Why? Credibility. From here, the material might make the Digg front page, a celebrity might talk about it, or a  mention on a national media outlet may occur, which is where the item then translates into something mainstream.

Doubt it? If I told you something was funny, only a few of you would take my word for it. If George Carlin told you something was funny, you would all take his word for it.

We trust George Carlin. We trust the celebrity. We trust the national media outlet and their blog. We don’t trust random, unknown bloggers or Twitter users that no one has heard of.

That second step is often glossed over or totally ignored by social media “experts” but it is critical. No matter how great your material is, and it better be contagious, you need to make it visible and allow for others to feature it. This lends your item credibility and allows for it to spread legitimately.

If all else fails, buy your way to success. A lot of deep pocketed marketers have figured out they can buy access to these web sites and have them feature their content, inflating their view counts and creating the “illusion” of viral success.

Don’t buy the hype or the books. This is something anyone with a motivated group of friends and good material can do.

Brandon Mendelson is the author of the wannabe viral sensation, Dracula And Kittens. When not desecrating public domain masterpieces, Brandon can be found blogging about social publishing, whatever that is, on Soap Box Included.

October 8th, 2009

Sears Holdings Corporation: A silent giant in social media

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:23 am

Categories: Branding, Community Management, Corporate Social Networking, Fortune 500 Series, Marketing, Reputation and Privacy, Social Business, Social Business Case Studies, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Sears Roebuck & Co., Social Media, Customer, Q., Jennifer Leggio

Sears Holdings Corporation (SHC) has been a silent giant in social media for some time. Its online community now boasts more than 300,000 users and it was one of the first major retailers to adopt OpenID to connect MySears.com directly from major social networks. The company has been injecting social into most of its brands, which, in addition to well-known Sears, include KMart, Lands End and Orchard Supply Hardware. It hasn’t always been a pretty story, as Sears has suffered some online woes as well, most recently a defaced group of product pages on the Sears Web site. However, the company credits an existing social media presence with helping them deal with that crisis swiftly by allowing immediate engagement with its customer community. I spoke with Rob Harles, vice president of community for Sears Holdings Corporation, about this and more.

Q. [Jennifer] How is SHC using social media?

A. [Rob] We are one of the only retailers – and the only one of our size – that’s created online communities specifically for our customers (MySears.com, MyKmart.com, MyVoice.com for our MyGopher concept). The goal of these communities is to connect with our customers. We offer discussion forums to facilitate questions and answers between customers and associates, an ideas platform to hear what new innovations are most important and product reviews written by customers. The communities also offer an opportunity to address customer service issues. We offer members information about sales, deals, discounts and access to unique coupons and specials for their participation.

Q. How did the use of social media start?

A. We started our first version of our customer community about two years ago. It was primarily intended for research; we used it as a platform for surveys and online focus groups. We realized the greater potential in this forum and quickly moved to expand our community offerings. We launched MySears.com and MyKmart.com in the spring of 2009 with product reviews, discussion forums, member profiles, a company blog, the ideas platform and a number of options for members to find and connect with one another around similar interests. MyVoice followed in July.

Our marketing initiatives have included a social, online interaction, component for some time now on platforms like Facebook. We are becoming more and more purposeful about engaging with customers on those platforms. One example is the recent Sears Back to Campus campaign where we utilized Facebook, Twitter and blogs to let consumers know about the product offering from Sears. We also created several online interactions like the Facebook application that allows college roommates to plan the lay out of their dorm room together, online. They can then buy what they design, creating a link to social commerce.

Q. For which brands, and how?

A. All SHC brands have a social component to them. All brands are represented in our customer communities and have their unique platforms and programs on the greater Web that meet their customers where they are.

One example is our Kmart Design brand. This initiative has introduced our Kmart designers and their design process through blogs, videos and Twitter to customers. Being transparent and upfront about what goes into our design process has proven to be successful; we’ve seen great response in customer engagement and in sales.

Q. What are your social media objectives:

A. Being present in a variety of social media outlets is part of our “Shop Your Way” concept. Shop Your Way is about letting customers choose what works best for their schedule, their shopping preferences and their budget and providing for them through our SHC properties. Our social media efforts offer a choice of online forums for customers to learn more about our products, to share their thoughts with us and to have their concerns or service questions addressed and answered. All within the course of their current online habits.

Support and crisis response –>

September 28th, 2009

SocialToo gives social networkers a false sense of security

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:43 am

Categories: Security, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices, Social Media and Security

Tags: Twitter Inc., Antivirus, SocialToo Direct Message, Phishing, Cyberthreats, Spam, Viruses And Worms, Security, Spam And Phishing, Jennifer Leggio

Last week social network “companion” Social Too announced that it had created an “automatic antivirus solution” for Twitter. I saw it retweeted multiple times, with apparent users excitement. I was terrified. Why? For one, it’s not an antivirus solution.

The SocialToo “antivirus solution” promises to act as a middle man between Twitter and your inbox for direct message (DM) delivery. Users log into SocialToo and select “Send SocialToo DM Emails” and then a user’s DMs are re-routed to SocialToo rather than emails going directly to the user. Then SocialToo service then promises only to pass through the alerts to your inbox that are presumably safe.

I talked to my friend Tom Eston, security researcher from SocialMediaSecurity.com, about this service and we agreed on a few things that are alarming about this service:

1. Again, this is not an antivirus product by any stretch of the imagination. It will not prevent malware (malicious files) from being installed on your computer like a traditional anti-virus (signature based) solution. It only applies to DMs.

2. Calling this an “anti-virus” product will give the general social network user a false sense of security.  These are not “viruses” being sent via DM’s…they are phishing links (or in the case of trending topic spam, links to malware).  This might cause users to think that this will protect them from all threats on Twitter just because its labeled an “antivirus product”.

3. Even calling this an anti-phishing solution is stretching it.  There are possibilities of being phished via retweet spam or links from your friends on their feeds after their accounts are compromised. SocialToo’s service will do nothing to protect against these threats.

Continued –>

September 26th, 2009

I don't care if your company is on Twitter

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 4:41 pm

Categories: Social Business, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Twitter Inc., Jennifer Leggio

I remember early 2008 just like it was yesterday. Twitter had become the social media standard among most early technology adopters yet the mainstream world was still slightly out of reach for the social network. We got excited whenever something new would happen on Twitter. Blog posts would pop up celebrating companies for “tweeting” or for using Twitter to deal with customer service issues. It was so new and shiny. I was definitely among the bloggers who got excited about every little move on Twitter.

These days I’m looking for a little bit more. I’m looking for depth. I’m looking for substance. I realize that a lot of companies are just now starting to get onto Twitter and that’s a big deal… for them. But several have already laid the groundwork so much that analytics tools are abundant, integration is on the horizon, and if social media has taught us anything it’s that Twitter is not the end all, be all of social strategies. It’s not even a strategy.

I find my eyes starting to glaze over whenever a company or public relations agency emails and says “Hey, X is on Twitter, do you want to talk to our C-level executive about how this impacts our business?” My response is usually silence, but I’m sometimes tempted to say, “Really? Your CEO wants to talk to me about Twitter? Can I talk to him about his overall marketing strategy instead?”

I want to be sensitive to the latecomers. But even the earlier companies who were first to join the Twitter ranks aren’t doing much other than that. These companies are not all innovators. Some of them are still merely using Twitter and aren’t doing much to manage it or grow the brand or presence. Some haven’t figured out that if Twitter were to magically go away (or become less reliable due to spam, which is more likely) then the bottom falls out of their so-called social media strategy. The social Web is much larger than Twitter and while it’s well and good if you’re using it, don’t expect anyone who knows better to jump up and down about it anymore.

Look at the companies that you might admire in terms of their social presence. Then strip Twitter away. What’s left? That’s when you really see who is social and who just jumped on a trend.

September 25th, 2009

Quick'n'Dirty podcast's chaotic no. 16: pay phones, paper clips and oneforty

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:30 am

Categories: Flickr, Quick'n'Dirty Podcast, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices, Social Media and Security, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Podcast, Phone, Twitter Inc., Social Media, Flickr, Tom, Security, Jennifer Leggio

The sixteenth episode of the Quick’n'Dirty podcast was one of the most exciting ones that we had, thanks to a series of technology failures. Being the pros that we are, of course, Aaron Strout and I rolled with the punches (or, tech failures) and brought together a very fun show, if we do say so ourselves. That was, after I was able to get Aaron on the line with only a minute left to spare at the start of the show. I blamed the switchboard. Aaron mocked me. I still vote it was a tech error, not a user error, but on with the show.

Laura Fitton, founder of freshly launched oneforty, author of “Twitter For Dummies” and owner of Pistachio Consulting was scheduled to be our guest. We knew our time with Laura would be short as she was at LAX waiting for a flight to DFW, but we did not expect iPhone failure when her device decided that it no longer had a SIM card and wouldn’t let her call in.  A series of frantic email exchanges ensued as we went along with the show. She raced around the airport trying to find a pay phone. Did Laura make it on? I’m going to keep you in suspense as I highlight what we talked about:

Read the rest of this entry »

September 24th, 2009

Does social media reward whining?

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:17 am

Categories: Community Management, Corporate Social Networking, Customer Loyalty, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Customer Service, Social Media, Product Marketing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Marketing, Enterprise Software, Software, Jennifer Leggio

Here’s a real-life scenario that most of us have encountered: You’re in line at the front desk at a hotel patiently awaiting checking in. There’s a couple in front of you ranting and raving about an issue they’ve been having. They are screaming about wanting to be upgraded to the hotel’s “best room.” “Wow,” you think. “The hotel must’ve really screwed up.” Yet in the end you overhear that the offensive issue was simple: there wasn’t an ice bucket in the room.

Thus proven: the customer isn’t always right.

Social media is great and the way that some companies are using it is innovative. With Twitter specifically, there’ve been some big brands who have been using the service for some time to assist with their customer service. We all know them by now — Comcast, Zappos, Jet Blue, etc. I wonder though, in retrospect if these companies that were early on so praised for their innovative approaches were actually enabling a customer service downfall?

Jeremiah Owyang took a swing at a similar notion in a blog post the other day in which he asks if companies are training people to yell at their friends. He makes some fantastic points about how customer service organizations need to dig deeper than social technologies to solve their service problems. What I don’t think a lot of people talk ahout, however, is the investment that companies need to make to manage these socail customer experiences. Many of them (the likes of Pizza Hut, for one) have had to invest in additional personnel to support their Twitter feeds. While there is not an investment made in a social technology, there is a necessary investment made in human capital. And for what? So more people can shake their fists and demand rewards.

Companies are in a tough spot. Now that so many case studies have been published, and influencers have cheered on companies who respond to angry tweets and give free services, there’s not much going back. The social Web in its very nature thrives on vanity and entitlement, and it’s those same people that you get stuck behind at the hotel who are most likely to bypass normal customer service channels and start beating their chests online.

Again, Owyang makes some great suggestions for companies and their service structures. I think the road these companies have to take is a slippery one — stopping the enablement while still protecting the brand. But I want to put some of the onus on the consumers: Just because the option is there to throw a tantrum online doesn’t mean that you should. I’ve made that mistake in the past with the kind folks at Jet Blue, but it was also only after all other customer service options were exhausted and I hadn’t received a response. In the end, I’m still not sure it makes it right.

Don’t be that awful couple at the hotel. Don’t be the screaming kid who gets coddled by his or her parents, only to grow up spoiled and dysfunctional. Let the companies evolve and figure out how this social customer service should really grow, and stop taking advantage of them.

September 8th, 2009

Quick'n'Dirty Podcast: EMBARQ's social strategy and corporate microblogging

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:24 am

Categories: Podcast, Quick'n'Dirty Podcast, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Strategy, Embarq Corp., Social Media, Bryan, Deb, Podcasts, Internet, Jennifer Leggio

Notice anything a little different? Well, I’ve decided to move my part of the Quick’n'Dirty recap over to this blog, because this blog is about social media and business and that’s what we talk about over on the Quick’n'Dirty podcast. Welcome! Now, with pleasantries out of the way, let’s move on to talk about episode 13.

Aaron Strout was speaking at the very cool Ubiquity Marketing unSummit on Thursday so I once again had a guest co-host — Bryan Person. Bryan is a friend of both mine and Aaron, and happens to be the founder of the popular Social Media Breakfast . He’s also a social media evangelist for LiveWorld. We interviewed Zena Weist, who is responsible for interactive brand strategy at EMBARQ, a Fortune 500 telecommuniations company. It was a fascinating discussion as Zena explained the very detailed process that EMBARQ went through — including revamping its entire communications policy — in order to create the social presence it has today. If you want more on this story listen to the interview or read Bryan’s detailed recap over here.

Other discussions:

• Social Network: Up on the roster this week was Yammer, a microblogging service in the cloud for businesses. Bryan discussed how successfully he and his Social Media Breakfast team have been using Yammer while I expressed continued trepidation over the idea of employees determining whether or not the company should invest in the service. In theory, we both agreed that Yammer is a service that is helping a lot of companies, but I still have concerns about any proprietary information contained in the cloud and the potential hidden costs for large corporations.
• Featured Twitterer: We love Deb Robison aka @debindenver on Twitter. Deb is a public relations and marketing consultant for Rudy Media and also conducted the popular “Red Couch” interviews (brought to us by Level 3) at last year’s South By Southwest Interactive. She always has great insights, is an engaging conversationalist and is definitely worth a follow. As a funny aside, when we chose a random caller later in the show to bring on the air, we coincidentally chose Deb!
• Point / Counterpoint: While it wasn’t as lively as my debate with Aaron last week over iPhone vs. BlackBerry, Bryan and I had a great discussion about online image and how it impacts professional perception. Sure, it’s an older discussion, but our take on it focused on this newer age of “transparency” and how we’re all encouraged to be ourselves online. And if being ourselves online, i.e. me posting videos of a karaoke outing, should that negatively impact my professional reputation? Listen to the recap for the full conversation.

On a final note, Aaron and I would like to thank Marc Meyer, author of the Direct Marketing Observations blog, who included the Quick’n'Dirty podcast on his list of 14 social media and marketing podasts worth a listen. Thanks Marc!

This week we’ll have Thomas Hoehn, director of brand communications and new media at Eastman Kodak Company, on to talk about Kodak’s foray into social media and community.

Remember, the Quick’n'Dirty podcast is recorded live every Thursday at 3 p.m. PT / 6 p.m. ET. Join us in the chat or dial-in to listen and potentially become a surprise call-in guest! Also, archives of the show can be found here and via iTunes by searching for QuicknDirty.

August 11th, 2009

Fortune 500 Series: How EMC used social media to recruit, re-brand, rebuild

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:36 am

Categories: Branding, Career Development, Corporate Social Networking, EMC, Fortune 500 Series, Social Business, Social Business Case Studies, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Social Networking, Brand, Social Media, EMC Corp., Storage, Hardware, Jennifer Leggio

EMC can best be described as an entity. Not only in the Fortune 500, the infrastructure information provider was recognized by Fortune as one of the 10 most admired companies for product and service quality. This success didn’t come easy to the giant, which needed to significantly rebuild its business after the 2001/2002 recesssion. Part of that rebuild included acquiring more than 40 companies over a handful of years. The other critical part of the rebuild included attracting top talent to help drive a more successful business. To achieve the latter, EMC turned to social media for its recruiting efforts. The below interview with Polly Pearson, vice president of employment brand and strategy at EMC, details how the company acquired talented employees through social media, how career fairs via Second Life can actually work, and how the company measures success.

Q. [Jennifer] How is EMC using social media as part of its HR efforts?

A. [Polly] We are using social media to build awareness and relationships between EMC and the talent market.  We see social media as an ideal resource to further our employment brand in a meaningful, high-reach and low-cost manner.  For example, externally EMC is using tools such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and employee blogs and tweets to build awareness and affinity with the talent market.  We use these tools to provide a genuine, testimonial-based look at EMC’s culture, careers and capabilities, as well as to bring awareness to certain job openings, company developments and general career tips.

Internally, we have a global social media platform for community building, collaboration and knowledge-sharing.  This internal platform has resulted in the serendipitous development of organic EMC brand ambassadors who have taken their new found voices and confidence as spokespeople to the external social network airwaves. This has, in effect, multiplied EMC’s external efforts to build genuine relationships with the talent market.

Q. How did that start? Why did you want to add social media into the program?

A. Following the recession of 2001/2002, EMC experienced a multi-year turnaround. We rebuilt our business by entering adjacent markets, altering our business model and acquiring more than 40 companies.  This evolution was a remarkable success. It, however, left some employees with a mild identity crisis.  By late 2006, roughly half of our company was made up of employees who were new to EMC within the prior 18 months. On top of that, by 2007 we were looking at thousands of jobs to fill, a major college hiring program, and the sizable growth of EMC’s emerging global operations in markets such as India, Russia and China.  As we looked at ways to elevate EMC’s brand with our target talent market, we realized we could not out spend our competition.  We wanted to build EMC’s brand at the lowest possible cost, do it on a global basis and reinforce EMC’s core brand attribute as a leading innovation company.

Enter social media. The first tool we used was, interestingly enough, the least mainstream yet came with high buzz and superior results: Second Life.  We held a series of highly effective recruiting fairs in Second Life that showed us the undeniable power of social platforms for business.  The scale was infinite and the cost was low. The connections and relationships happened with a type of immediacy we had never experienced before on a business platform.  In the summer of 2007, we launched behind our firewall EMC’s first customized internal social network.  We named this platform EMC|ONE and today the majority of our employees worldwide are connecting on it and sharing information regularly in a 2.0 manner.

Next: Measuring for success –>

August 5th, 2009

Security risks of Web 2.0 tools should not be overlooked by enterprises, individuals

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:49 pm

Categories: Brand Management and Monitoring, Corporate Social Networking, Security, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices, Social Media and Security, Social Networks

Tags: Web, Network, Malware, Tool, Current Technology, Web 2.0, Social Networking, Networking, Security, Internet

Like it or not, the use of Web 2.0 technology use in enterprises is here to stay. Even longstanding enterprise software providers, such as Salesforce.com, have created tools for integrating social networks into the customer support and lead generation process. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a Fortune 500 company that doesn’t, at the very least, have a corporate blog.

Over the last few weeks, two organizations issued study results focusing on the use of social networking within the enterprise. RSA Conference, in its “What Security Issues Are You Currently Facing?” report, surveyed nearly 150 C-level executives and professionals charged with directing, managing and engineering security infrastructures within their respective organizations.

Social networking and security was a consideration, however it appears that organizations thus far claim to have been minimally impacted by social network threats. According to the survey, 84 percent of respondents allow Twitter and Facebook in the enterprise, however only 3 percent were seriously affected by the recent Facebook and Twitter phishing attacks.

“The fact that only 3 percent of people surveyed said that their companies had been impacted shows how big the problem really is,” said Mike Murray, chief information security officer for Foreground Security. “The problem is that the security technology they have in place doesn’t allow them visibility into the threats. Current technologies are not looking for threats that take advantage of human weakness. It’s like having your hands over your eyes. It’s such a bad problem they can’t even see it.”

In another study, Frost & Sullivan issued its “Web 2.0 Tools: Consumer Technologies Entering the Enterprise World” report. The firm surveyed more than 1,400 Web 2.0 tools users who work fulltime within a U.S. organization. According to the report, there are many perceived risks of Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise, including fear over confidential information inadvertently being published, allowance of malware onto corporate networks, network bandwidth issues and loss of employee productivity. Respondents ranked social networks as the tool with the largest perceived risk, above blogs, wikis and team spaces. While to the users social networks presented the greatest risk, that risk is still perceived as only “moderate.”

The fact that both studies indicate a lukewarm concern toward Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise is alarming, and to Murray’s point shows that those surveyed may not understand the larger problem at hand. Earlier this year Kaspersky Labs issued a report stating that attacks through social networks are 10 times as effective as distributing malware through email. That Web 2.0 tools, including social networks, pose a larger security risk to individuals is a misconception. Any of these types of attacks could present serious ramifications for businesses.

Next: Methods to address the madness –>

July 19th, 2009

The psychology of social media: Can a visible brand ruin your life?

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 3:11 pm

Categories: Career Development, Personal Branding, Reputation and Privacy, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices, Social Networks

Tags: Employee, Brand, Boss, Relationship, Social Media, Life, Branding, Marketing, Jennifer Leggio

I read a lot about social media. Partly because I am interested, partly because I have to in order to write this blog. In all of my reading, there is one implied thought I run across more than others: “Social media is powerful.” It gives any average person who has access to the Internet and a bit of ingenuity the opportunity to create a more vivid, accessible “personal brand” and, if done right, that person can spend 15 minutes in the Internet spotlight. But at what cost?

We’ve all read the stories about people stupidly posting Facebook status messages about ditching work, only to have their bosses read it. We’ve also heard the stories about the guy who gets caught cheating because he was sloppy with his social networking. I’m not talking about those costs - that kind of human error deserves grief.

I’m talking about the side effects of creating a successful personal brand and, even if you make all of the apparent right decisions along the way, how it can create upheaval in both professional and private lives. The savvy engineer who creates a presence for himself via a blog or social network, only to make his boss feel threatened and then hamper his internal visibility. Or the rock star entrepreneur who feels she can’t get a moment to herself without the world watching, including her boyfriend.

“In business settings, the impact-for better or worse-of social media activities on relationships will be determined by a company’s culture,” said Dr. Pamela Rutledge of the Media Psychology Research Center. “In personal relationships, social media will expose insecurity and a lack of transparency (aka honesty). Social media amplifies information and behaviors. If we value authenticity, this is a good thing… The good news is that social media exposes inauthenticity and selfishness very quickly, so it’s easier to see them.”

Next: Workplace Impact –>