Almost 1 year ago I wrote what has been my most controversial and widely read and debated blog post.  I got reactions from Justin Kownacki, Scott Monty, Jeremiah Owyang, and many, many more.  

It was mentioned by Shel Holtz, and many more in blog posts across the internets. (Although Shel accused me of possibly writing just for link bait.  Read my blog some more Shel, you’ll see that’s not true.)

And then today on the Edelman Blog I found this photo of David Armano talking about social media in a corporate structure:

Excerpt of Original Image which can be found here

And you’ll notice that David and Edelman Digital (the largest PR firm in the world) are espousing that all departments of a company need to be using Social Media today.

Many of the comments I received last year were basically pot shots at HR.  Ignoring the vitriol, let’s take look at the basic premise of my idea.

·         IF HR indoctrinates 100% of your employees in social media policies- THEN 100% of your employees will have access to social media.  Why is this important?  Because Mashable reported a survey of Facebook users interacting with Brands today and they reported that “65% of Facebook users only access Facebook when they are not at work.”

·         Companies that fail to engage via social media end up being trashed by it, frequently simply for their failure to engage.  Jeremiah Owyang keeps a Punk’d List of Social Media Failures for your enjoyment & education.

·         If your Marketing department or PR Department are the only ones involved in your social media they are bound to be overwhelmed.  Marketing and PR are not staffed to deal with customers.  But Sales and customer service departments are staffed to deal with customers, see next bullet.

·         Using social media for customer service (expanding social media beyond Marketing and PR) like AT&T and Microsoft are doing really works. (Following in the footsteps of @ComcastCares)  These companies are now reaping tremendous rewards in customer loyalty and word of mouth marketing as a result.  Microsoft even got a Guinness World Record for Most Responsive Corporate Account on Twitter.  (What the hell kind of a record is that?  But that’s a subject for another blog post.)

So in the end all that was saying 1 year ago, and that I’m still saying today is: Get all of your employees involved with your social media efforts, because it helps.  More good and less harm will come of it.  Keeping it siloed in one or two departments will hinder your responsiveness.  Oh, and by the way, your employees are doing it on their smart phones anyway, so live with it.  You can’t stop it, it’s like calculators in schools.

Give me 1 Good Reason why you shouldn’t involve every one of your employees in your social media efforts?

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I don’t visit news sites anymore, yes I watch CNN or one of the other news channels when I have a few minutes.  But I don’t sit down deliberately to see the news.  I don’t get the newspaper anymore either.  And I’m not in the minority, but you knew that already.

So my question is do we really need curators, and news agencies anymore?  I like the stuff that Guy Kawasaki finds and tweets about, but I’ve got my issues with it.  And Guy and I discussed it, too.  But I’ve found that my Twitter my Facebook and my LinkedIn networks can deliver all of the news that I’m interested in knowing about. 

My connections span personal, family, and professional and tell me about events local, and worldwide.  They tell me about what’s happening in business, politics, society, my hobbies and everything that I need to know about.  I don’t think that I’ve missed a significant story in any facet of my life, personal or professional in almost a year.  That wasn’t the case 3 years ago.  I can remember being surprised that someone had gotten married or had a child, or that there was a new war, or famine, or a business competitor had folded.  But that simply doesn’t happen to me anymore.

So I simply don’t need Guy Kawasaki, or ABC News most of the time.  When I’m in the car I’m just as likely to listen to news as I am to sports (OK only during football season), or to music.

Some will say that news agencies are needed because they provide trusted news sources.  However, my feeling is that they are squandering that trust in their unending quest for sensationalism.  We’ve all had our weekend ruined by the “monster storm” approaching “Be sure to watch/listen at 6 or 11PM to catch the latest.” Which never materialized.  The news today is so competitive that they sensationalize everything they can to gain a few ratings points.  Remember Balloon Boy?  Another decade of this and the news agencies won’t be any more trustworthy than cousin Fred.

If your social network tells you about every major story you are interested in, what does that leave for the news agencies?  Up against Google and Wikipedia I don’t know if there’s a long term future for them.  AP today announced they are going to credit bloggers as sources for stories.  I don’t think that the future is going to be full of curators like Guy Kawasaki either.  Because we fill our lives and our social networks with people that curate for us naturally.  Perhaps some people will still need and want curators, but I think as most people become social media savvy they will not need them.

Give me 1 Good Reason why you think we need news agencies and curators.

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BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) 42% of internet users over 50 year old are now using social media sites with +80% growth rates.  Analysis:  If your Grandma has an email address then she will likely friend you on Facebook in the next 12 months, if she hasn’t already.  Grandma, has disposable income especially if she’s on the internet.  Therefore marketers will follow and spend more time and money on social media.

A new report “Older Adults and Social Media” by the well respected Pew Research Center is available for your free download here. Which highlights the changes in social media use by people 50 and over.  Some of the main findings, are:

·         Of those on the internet social networking use nearly doubled from 22% to 42%.  Which means nearly half of connected older adults are using social media today.

·         86% of those 18-29 use social media with a growth rate of 13% which pales in comparison to the 86% growth rate of the 50-64 year old age group or the 100% growth of the 65+ age group.

·         Social Media usage rates by age group: (of adult internet users)

o   18-29 yo 86%

o   30-49 yo 61%

o   50-64 yo 47%

o   65+ yo     26%

·         Twitter usage: 11% of 50-64, and 5% of 65+, is basically in its infancy in this age group.  However Pew reports that the daily usage rates are similar to those of younger age groups for those older people who do use Twitter.

·         Email is still king for older adults.  92% of internet users 50-64  and 89% of 65+ send or read email daily.

·         The unusual thing about social media is it’s stickiness.  Meaning the ability it has to cause users to return frequently and spend time on the sites.  44% of the respondents to the survey 50 or older had used a social media site the day before.  Compare to under half of online banking users 50 or older used the site the day before, and under 20% who use online classified sites (eBay, Craig’s List, etc.) visited “yesterday”.

What do people do at social media sites:

Source: Pew Research Center report Older Adults and Social Media 8/27/10

Pew reports that social media may be more popular with older people because of three main reasons:

·         Reconnecting with people from their past which can provide a powerful support network. 

·         Older people are more likely to be living with chronic disease therefore needing support and information online.

·         Social media bridges generational gaps.

So right now your odds of grandma having a Facebook account if she already has an email account are 42%.  But grandma’s are joining Facebook more quickly than granddaughters so by next Christmas your odds will likely be North of 60%.  So now’s the time to clean up your status updates and get ready.  It’s also the time to plan your marketing, and get your social media presence established.  A great idea for service companies for older people? Create a way for your company to help them understand and use social media more effectively.

Download your free copy of the Pew Research Report

Give me 1 Good Reason why you’re not using more social media to reach your target audience. Leave your comments below:

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After reading Ian Lurie’s excellent blog post “It’s plagiarism day!” I decided to look around for my own plagiarists and I didn’t have to look very far.  I discovered one site that had copied an entire blog post and simply added a single line “via 1GoodReason.com” at the end.

To fix the situation above I wrote a comment on the blog post something like this:

“You are reproducing copyrighted material without permission and I hereby demand that you remove it immediately.  Do not copy any of my material without prior written approval.”

To his credit @JDeragon did remove the post immediately.  However he argued with me via DM on Twitter stating: “sharing your content with links back to you is usually considered a compliment. I am happy when people "steal" mine” and “BS is thinking that any content on the web isn’t to be shared with others. I won’t share yours with others or reference it”  Contrary to what @JDeragon may think, I love it when people share my content in Fair Use.

There seems to be some confusion on the issue of Fair Use with many people.  Copying an entire blog post and reposting it on your blog is plagiarism, even when you post a link and provide attribution.

In a nutshell: “Fair Use” is the concept that you can refer to another article somewhere and quote from it to add context and information to your story.  Fair Use means that I can quote an article in the New York Times without being sued, as long as I don’t reprint too much of the story.  And as long as I add something to the discussion in my article.  (This is where @JDeragon fell down, his copy of my blog post added nothing.)

There are no hard line rules for Fair Use, but there some generally accepted guidelines:

1.       Excerpt must contain a link to the original.

2.       Excerpt must use less than 50% of the original content.

3.       Excerpt must also use less than 100 words.

Read this post on PlagiarismToday to learn more about the rules of Fair Use.  You can also read the Wikipedia article on it.

To answer the headline question for this post; quoting a brief excerpt of an article or blog post while giving a link is good therefore, not plagiarism, (and I’d love you to do that.)  Copying the whole thing is bad, link or no link, therefore it is plagiarism.

Give me 1 good reason why you think plagiarism is OK?

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Look Ma!  No Hands! (Photo Credit richardmasoner on Flickr)    

A friend of mine recently received a letter forwarded to her by a colleague she respected with a pitch for a new social media program offered by a company titled: “Hands-Off Social Media Marketing”  My purpose here isn’t to call out small companies for their terrible marketing techniques so I’ll not identify them.  (But there’s always Google if you’re really interested.)

It seems to me that this should be the epitome of snake oil Social Media salesmanship.   How could anyone create a program that offers to represent your business in a social situation when your business doesn’t need to be involved at all?  A totally hands-off approach of representing you to your customers?  Think about that for a minute- I’ll represent YOU to YOUR CUSTOMERS, and you don’t need to be involved at all. 

In the real world this would be laughable- Let me open another store for you but you don’t need to know anything about it at all.  We’ll do everything for you.  Pick the location, signs, sales people, the stock, hours of operation, and the way we treat your customers.  All you have to do is rake in cash, after you pay me of course!  In that context everyone would say this is bullshit- however, if you do it in technology and social media it doesn’t seem to stink so much.

I’m not going to go into the absurdity of the rest of the pitch letter- where they promise to put your company on 150 social networks and get you 500 targeted social media connections in less than 60 days.  (Let’s see 500 people on 150 networks is less than 4 each- yea that’s doable in 60 days.)  I’ve included the entire email pitch with identity redacted to protect the innocent (recipients, not senders).

But if you’re on 150 social networks, who’s going answer any new friend requests you receive from people on those networks, after the initial 60 days.  Let’s not talk about the fact that 60 days in social media is just the beginning of the relationship, and you’ve not developed anything at all.

Actually there is one good thing in this letter, they are keeping it limited to only 5 select customers.

In my view as a social media professional this type of “Hands-Off” approach to social media is the last thing that any company should consider.  In reality this approach will ultimately do more harm than good.  The companies who buy this service will suffer from poor representation and their clients and prospective customers will be angered or dissatisfied with their poor responses to social media.  In the end the companies who hire these charlatans will suffer as a result because they will have alienated customers.

He’s the pitch for your enjoyment:

I am writing you tonight to check in with you about how things are going with your 2010 business goals. Are you currently leveraging social media to increase your revenue?

Let me share you with a simple truth. Your business will not continue to be successful or reach its full potential if you are not integrating social marketing into your business development programs. I am sorry to be so blunt, but it is really just that simple. 

Big businesses are using social marketing to do things like (i) decrease costs; (ii) retain and attract more clients; (iii) build client loyalty and ultimately; (vi) increase revenue – while smaller companies miss out.

"Hands-Off" Social Media Marketing is our brand new all-inclusive, cost-effective 60-day social marketing program. We are making this program available to only 5 new clients.

Here is what you get:

Establish Your Profile On Social Networks. We will establish customized profiles for your business or personal brand on 150 social networks. This includes Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We will also optimize your LinkedIn profile by using targeted keyword that are strategically selected to increase your search engine placement. We do this to protect your brand name on popular social networks and build your online presence, quickly.

  >> 1. Online Community Building. We will help you build a targeted online community of at least 500 people within your social networks who are in your target market or geographic location.

  >> 2. Social Media Strategic Planning. We will create a custom social marketing strategy for your business, so you know how to build a magnetic brand image and maintain momentum in the online world.

  >> 3.  Personal Consulting. You will have access to SIX 30 minute consulting sessions (3 per month) with me by telephone or Skype – your choice, to refine your integrated marketing program.

  >> 4. Daily Updates on Social Networks. We will make daily, automated updates on 10 social networks (which shall include Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) for 2 months. We will both write the updates and post them on your social networks. This is designed to help you develop a strong online presence and increase your influence, quickly.

We developed this two month/ 60 day all-inclusive social marketing program for busy business owners like you, who want to leverage the power of social media right now, but do not have enough time or know how to get started the right way.   

This program is perfect for professional service firms in the legal, accounting, coaching, consulting and recruiting industries.

If you are ready to jump-start your social marketing program with the all-inclusive support provided in our "Hands-Off Social Media Marketing" program, please give me a call at (800) 753-6576 and we will get you started.  

I encourage you to call right away while there is still space available. It would be my pleasure to support you.

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I’ve been using a free image editing program called IrfanView for about a decade.  It’s a wonderful little program that I love and has worked well for me over the years.  However, the user interface is a little spartan and when I recommend it to people they seem a little put off.  It doesn’t have the pretty icons and stuff that we’re used to seeing in new programs. 

Could IrfanView use a facelift?  Yes.  Will I still recommend it today? Yes I recommend IrfanView for your lightweight photo editing needs without reservation.  (Full disclosure: I don’t know anyone from IrfanView and have no connections with them that I’m aware of.  I’m not compensated in any way for this endorsement.)

Here’s what IrfanView looks like:

Sorry for the digression,  I decided to look for a newer image editor that I could use and recommend.  I found Photoscape 3.5 on CNET’s www.Download.com  Photoscape has had 15MM downloads since May so I figured it was pretty good.  I downloaded Photoscape and installed it.

When I’m installing new software, especially free software, I pay attention to the questions they ask because it’s become popular to slip in paid placement software such as Yahoo, Bing, or something else along the way.  However, this time I missed the screen where they ask you if you want to install Google Chrome and make it your default browser:

The rough part here is to change your default browser.  That’s a big deal for almost everyone, especially the less technical.  (Changing your default browser means that when you click on a link in an email a different program will open with that link than the one you’re used to.)  I know that my wife would have a problem with that question.  At that point she would abort the install entirely and give up.  I feel that many users would do the same.

Installing Photoscape also installed Google Chrome, and made it my default browser- I didn’t think that I’d agreed to that.

Even as a technical person, I thought if Firefox doesn’t ask me to make it my default again, I’m going to have to search for how to change the default browser.  Thankfully when I relaunched Firefox it did ask me, so I didn’t have to search.  But it was a very visceral experience for me. 

My browser’s too important to me for you to mess with it.

I wonder if the freeware providers have done any testing to see what happens if they set the default to not include these programs with their downloads?  I would bet that they would see a much higher success rate if the  default is not to install riders along with the original program.

In any case I think Photoscape needs to reconsider that “Make Google Chrome my default browser.” default because it’s really making a big change for the users.  It’s quite a surprise to open a link in an email and have it come up in a different browser. And the non-technical user is going to uninstall the last thing they installed- your software Photoscape, not Google Chrome.  When they are trying to fix the issue.

And I would appreciate CNET adding a warning to a download about rider software installs.  I understand that they are a big part of the monetization of Shareware/Freeware software.  However, these riders are seriously damaging the trust users have in these tools and undermining the adoption of them.  In the long run they hurt not help the industry.

And yes, the link for IrfanView in this blog goes to TuCows not CNET because they don’t include a any riders on that download.  I’m not sure if CNET’s download of IrfanView has a rider or not.  But I’ve lost some faith in CNET, and I also don’t trust Google so much, and I’m not going to try out Photoscape.  All in all this experience has left a bad taste in my mouth for these brands. 

Are there user experiences your brand is delivering that mirror this?  Give me 1 Good Reason why you shouldn’t find them and fix them?

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In my last post I mentioned that it would be good for marketers to plan to avoid troublesome dates for Twitter outreach.  In an effort to expand upon this concept I’m going to compile a list of dates when the crowd thinks Twitter will be unreliable.  Towards that end, I’m going to ask you my readers to contribute to a list which I will curate and make available to everyone  with predicted Twitter Twoubles.  I’ll get the ball rolling with the following dates: 

(Please leave comments with new dates and I’ll update the table as we go.)

Twitter High Traffic Predictions

I’ll be turning this into a living document that you can bookmark and check whenever you are planning a Twitter marketing plan.  If we crowd source this I’m sure that we can make it work and be a useful tool for all Twitter Marketers.

When do you expect Twitter to encounter twoubles?  Leave your comments below.

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Music for this blog post:

Listen to this song while reading the following blog.

As Twitter struggles with popularity they also struggle with reliability.  There is an inherent problem with the design of the system that causes traffic to mushroom, especially when very popular users tweet and are retweeted.  Today Twitter turns off features in the system effecting most or all users as the system loads increase.  Below I’ve compiled a list of my best guess to how Twitter degrades their services:

How Twitter’s service degrades: (Unofficial Guesstimate)

·         Shorten the time searches can look back in history. (You will see a message like “Additional Tweets currently unavailable”.)

·         Stop saved searches. (saved searches don’t return anything new.)

·         Stop API searches (from programs like Tweetdeck, and sites like tweepsearch.com.)

·         Stop profile updates (changing picture or bio info.)

·         Stop all searches.  (The problem here is that the searches appear to work, but return nothing.  There is no error message.)

·         Stop API access (all programs like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, etc. will fail but the Twitter.com website will still work.)

·         Failure to update, lost @replies, missing messages on Twitter.com.  (Warning Will Robinson! Danger! Danger!)  This means Twitter is about to die.

·         Release the Flying Whales. (This is the end of the Tworld as we know it- queue music here.)  a.k.a. when all else fails, fly the fail whale.  (The whale is actually a custom error message which replaces the more common:  “503: Service Unavailable” message you’ve seen on other sites.)

What can you do about this?

·         Plan your editorial calendar carefully, don’t plan any major Twitter social media outreach when there’s a major event going on. (Especially North America)

·         Avoid: World Cups, Elections, American Idol Finales, Oscars and other popular culture events.

·         Plan to use Twitter.com in the event API’s are shut down.  Train your staff to use the site as well as your favorite software.

·         Consider your social media marketing plan carefully and don’t put all your tweets into one basket.  If a major event happens during your primary push you could be out of luck with Twitter.

·         Move customer service conversations off of Twitter to email to ensure reliable communications.

·         Hope and pray they figure out a way around this mess but it’s not very likely because it’s a basic math problem.

I appreciate any and all feedback with corrections and suggestions to these lists. Please leave your input in the comments below.

If you’re curious (I was) here are the lyrics to “It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine) by REM.

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A few weeks ago I wrote this blog post about Coldwell Banker’s new website.  Too often when a company is publically criticized it fails to react.  In the past this strategy often worked because the magazine or newspaper was an “evaporating media” which would soon be forgotten.  However, in the age of  Google that’s no longer the case.

NEW RULE: Respond to all serious online criticism of your company or product so there is some balance in the discussion for discerning readers to consider opposing viewpoints.

All too often in recent history social media has proven that the failure to respond to criticism leads to speculation that the attacks are true and unassailable.  In most business situations that’s not the case.   The reality is complex and there are trade-offs that must be made (Better, Cheaper, Faster- pick any two because you can’t have all three).  Reasonable people can disagree on the wisdom of a choice, but rarely will they argue that the choice needed to be made. 

Coldwell Banker or rather more specifically David Marine, Director of Interactive Products & Services responded to the blog post.  David took an unusual tactic by picking up an ancient device, the telephone and calling me.  We spoke for a while on a Friday evening and I invited David to put his reply in writing as a comment on my blog, which he did. 

David then invited me to come to corporate headquarters and meet with Coldwell’s CMO, Michael Fischer, Senior Vice President of Marketing.  To discuss the strategy of the website design and to learn more about what Coldwell is doing in online marketing.

I met with the Coldwell Banker marketers in the company cafeteria, and the meeting was very good. They are an intelligent and dedicated pair with many accomplishments to be proud of in the area of online marketing.  The meeting started off on a high note for me when they discussed running a SWOT analysis of their marketing strategies which is an all too often overlooked tool in marketing.  I’ll discuss their marketing plans and my thoughts on them in a future post.   The main thought for today is that they took the time (about 45 minutes) to meet with me and discuss my blog post and their reasons for doing what they are doing.  This goes a long way to improving my impressions of their efforts. 

Dialog actually works!  You should try it sometime.

Image credit:   Uploaded on March 16, 2009 by plenty.r.

Give me 1 Good Reason why your company doesn’t respond to criticism online…

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