I am very pleased to announce that Jeff Pulver has asked me to assist him in finding sponsors for the 140 Conference in New York April 20 & 21.  The 140 Conference last year was an unqualified success and one of the most sought after tickets in the social media scene in New York.  This year Jeff has vowed to create an even better event with more people and better speakers.  And it will be streamed live on the web for everyone who can’t make it to the live event.

You can’t charge people to sit in the audience and charge people to sit on the stage at the same time and make them all happy.

One of the reasons that I believe the 140 Conference is so exceptional is that Jeff has a belief that you can’t charge people to sit in the audience and then charge people to sit on the stage at the same time.  That is the way that most conferences are run today.  The people in the audience pay to attend and most of the speakers are sponsors who have paid for the privilege to speak to the audience.  This results in speakers who are often not very inspired, or particularly knowledgeable about the subject.  And they are often there to sell the audience their products or services so the speeches are a little bit about the subject, and a lot about sales.  This type of compromise leads to poor conferences where everyone is looking for the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) and coming up empty.

But at the 140 Conference things are different because the speakers are people with something interesting to say, and not just a few of them, but every one of them.  For this reason the conference is uniquely exciting and engaging. But don’t just take my word for it read a few of these posts by other bloggers. Therefore I am proud that Jeff has asked me to be a part of making this event a success.

If your company or someone you know is interested in becoming a sponsor for the April 140 Conference in New York, please contact me Chris@140conf.com or via this blog post.

Give me 1 good reason why I won’t be seeing you at the next 140 Conference?

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“Unless users are typing in your URL, “people just default to Google. You reinforce actions that hurt your brand and reinforce Google’s brand.” Mark Cuban digiday:Daily

In my opinion this is an old school mentality that hasn’t realized that it’s dead yet.  If the NYT, or the WSJ or any other paper puts their info behind a pay wall, someone will simply paraphrase it under the fair use doctrine and distribute the news for free. 

Newspapers, and every other news organization need to realize that they don’t have a monopoly on news anymore.  Anyone with a cellphone, and the intelligence to use it is a reporter.

This week at Social Media Week NYC I’ve met literally dozens of out of work writers.  Copy writers, feature writers, this writers and that writers.  The reason they are out of work is that quite simply the art and skill of writing is suffering from over supply.  As a matter of fact, I’m writing right this very moment.  And anyone can do it today.

Mr. Cuban, and the rest of you old school journalists need to realize that the future is in aggregation.  Follow my buddy Saul Colt and check out Thoora.com and Alltop.com and Mashable.com for the future of journalism.

Give me 1 Good Reason why newspapers are still relevant in today’s world.

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BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) Start your social media program by listening first.  This will teach you where your customers are, and how to engage them in social media.  And you learn valuable insights into your competition which will demonstrate clear ROI for management buy in.

Should we start our social media effort with a Facebook page or a Twitter account?  Are the customers on MySpace or iVillage? Who is going to be allowed to do social media in the company?

If you’re asking these questions then the my answer to you for all of the above is simple, NO.  You and anyone thinking about how to start social media need to start with listening.  Because it has a much higher ROI (Return On Investment) for you than anything else SM has to offer you, just yet.

What do you listen for?  You begin by listening to your customers, and your competitors customers.  You listen to learn what your customers think, and what they are complaining about.  And you listen to your competitors customers are talking about, complaining about and happy about. 

In reality Social Media is a 24/7, always on, real time focus group for you to monitor and learn from.  It contains valuable insights into your competition and customer’s minds.

Listen for a about 6 months before you think about jumping into the social media pool.  Put together a team of people who’s job it is to monitor the social media chatter.  Make sure your assumptions about customer wants and needs are correct. 

One of the early benefits of the social media listening program is that it will give you some additional insights into your competitors.  Look for info about competitors and their clients and report this to management.  This will demonstrate a quick ROI for senior management to ensure their continued support of your efforts.

Suppress the urge to jump in and start talking.  Because we will all make mistakes in the beginning.  But if you deploy a  listening campaign your social media team will learn what these mistakes are from others demonstrating them for you, long before you have the chance to put your foot into your own mouth.

After you’ve listened for several months you’ll find out several things.  There is little conversation about your products and services on this network, but that one seems to be the hot bed of activity.  You won’t have to ask the question, which networks should we be on?  Because you’ll know which ones matter having listened to them all for a while.

And most importantly you’ll learn a few things about your competition that you didn’t know before.  These will be valuable insights that help to fill in a few blank spots in the picture of what you know they are doing.  This will be all the better when you learn that your competitor isn’t involved in social media so you’ve got a leg up on them.

Now having listened to social media for 6 months you’ll know exactly where to to begin. You’ll what people are talking about and where you need to focus your effort.  You’ll know what confusion there is in the marketplace, and where you need to focus your efforts.

So give me 1 good reason why you don’t start your social media listening program tomorrow?

Image credit: from pipiwildhead on Flickr

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BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) Become an aggregator for your social stream by repeating (RTing) links to good articles and links that others give you via your stream.  Real time feedback from your followers will help you to tune it to what they want.  This makes your social media stream more informative and useful.

There’s just too much good stuff on the internet today.  I don’t have any hope of finding very much of it. But what I do have is friends who find it.  So I read my Twitter stream and I look for people that I trust recommending articles, links, and stuff that I might find useful. 

No, that’s not right, it’s not even useful.  Sometimes it’s the stupid picture of a dog eating a, that gives me the break I needed during the day.

But other times it’s that incredibly moving video I posted last week.  Or an excellent article on how to make your social media work better that I need to use when drafting the strategy for my latest client.

But in reality I spend a lot of my time on Twitter and Facebook promoting the work of others.  And I think that’s all right for two reasons.  First because I’m telling you who it was that brought it to my attention (with a RT @_____ via Twitter) so they are getting the credit for finding the original work.  And second because the web has so much good stuff that it’s almost impossible otherwise for use to find it.  And I’m also giving the article or thing that I find interesting a wider audience than it may have had before by promoting it to my circle of friends and followers.

I believe that this makes my Twitter and Facebook streams valuable to others.  I believe that for two reasons too.  First because others tell me that in replies and RTs of my messages.  And because I know that I find value in the RT’s and repeats of others in my stream.

So just as I said in my predictions post, I believe that the future belongs to aggregators, and I’m one of them.  Just on a small scale.

So go out and do something to make your stream more valuable to your friends and followers today.  And no, Farmville isn’t valuable to anyone.

-- Chris Kieff CEO, 1 Good Reason Social Marketing Consulting www.1GoodReason.com ckieff@gmail.com Cell: 201-519-0391 Let's stay in touch! Twitter: www.Twitter.com/ckieff or @ckieff LinkedIn: www.LinkedIn.com/in/chriskieff Facebook: www.Facebook.com/ckieff

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As part of a recent project I was looking at a bunch of corporate fan pages on Facebook today.  There are fan pages for nearly everything you can think of, do you like your office chair?- it’s probably got a fan page.

I’ve looked at a lot of facebook fan pages for a lot of different brands and found one theme in common.  A total lack of engagement.

There are page after page of brands, big and small who are not engaging with their customers, fans, and advocates.  Don’t even think of asking a question, even something as important as where can I buy it?  Because you won’t get an answer.  But there is one page that is doing it right and it’s most likely the last place you’d expect- AT&T. 

Full disclosure I’m a customer of AT&T but not in any other way connected with AT&T, they don’t pay me anything in any way.  Of course if you work there and wanted to fix my bill for 2010 I wouldn’t object.

AT&T has taken a lot of heat recently about the very successful Verizon Maps commercial series.  They’ve reacted with a commercial series and simultaneously launched their AT&T Communications Page on Facebook.  I doubt that the two are related but they occurred at about the same time.

What AT&T is doing that every other brand should emulate is they are engaging the users.  When someone asks a reasonable question they get an answer.  Even when others aren’t so reasonable, see the example below:

Even when people aren’t quite so polite AT&T responds:

And you’ll notice that what I predicted in my first blog post about the AT&T Facebook account is happening- that is the advocates are coming out and defending the company against attacks.  Notice the two people who responded to Mike above, they are advocates defending AT&T.  I’ve seen this behavior before and expect it will continue.  Here is what I said back on 12/16/09:

I think in the long run AT&T will come out on top with this Facebook outreach if they have the fortitude to stick with it and take the slings and arrows of outrageous competition.  Over time, the fact that they are willing to listen will bring out their supporters and advocates.  I’ve seen it before in social networks where the brand doesn’t need to defend themselves because their advocates will do it for them.  But it takes some time to build up the social capitol for that to happen.
The AT&T Facebook Fan Page-Analysis and Prediction

It appears that AT&T has built up their social capital rather quickly with their excellent responsiveness.  The AT&T responses are peppered with customer service reps email addresses.  And it appears that many people are involved.  This seems to be a well coordinated and orchestrated effort by the company to try to make a difference using Facebook.

The account is very active with comments constantly being added.  The variety of questions and responses range from “how do unlock my XYZ-123 type phone”, which is answered with another personal email for the customer service rep who knows about these phones.  To “how much will calls cost me in Cairo Egypt?” Which is answered with a link to a site that tells you exactly what will work and how much it will cost.

All in all, this the most impressive Facebook Brand page I’ve had the pleasure of running across.  My congratulations to the AT&T team for putting this in place and making it work at 100+ year old bureaucratic company.  I think this will go a long way in helping to mend the damaged public relations they are suffering now.

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It was a submission to an AARP U@50 video contest, but don’t let that color your impression.  Enjoy it  and tell me what you thought in the comments.

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For my Twitter followers this means I’ll be tweeting a lot.  I try my best to keep it topical and valuable, but I’m sure there will be a lunch in there or two.

I’m also open to more ideas so if you have an event you think I should attend, please let me know in the comments or via email or Twitter or Facebook, or LinkedIn… (you get the idea.) I’ll be blogging and tweeting all week.

You can check out the calendar of events and set up your own schedule here: http://smw-newyork.sched.org/

Monday 02/01/10

10:30-12:30AM Branding the Future with Social Engagement, sponsored by Pepsi Refresh (I’m always interested in what Pepsi is doing)
5:00- 7:00 PM OnMedia NYC presented by AlwaysOn (Looks interesting)
9:00-1:00 AM Digital Somethings THIS EVENT IS INVITE ONLY (Thanks DB for the invite)

Tuesday 02/02/10

8:30-10:00 AM Managing Social Media Data (should be good)
12:00-2:00 PM PCNY Presents the Wall Street Journal, et. al (Wondering what they are planning)
2:30-4:00 PM The Science of Social Media (Looks interesting)
6:30-8:30 PM Mediabistro.com Tweetup (I’m always up for a Tweetup)

Wednesday 02/03/10 (When I lots of scheduling issues)

8:00-10:30 AM Social Media in 2010 + Soc. Media Speed Dating (This one looks good)
9:00-11:00 AM The Future of Space & Time hosted by Wired.com (This one looks fun)
12:00-2:00 PM Social Graph Optimization, sponsored by Meebo and hosted by JWT (This looks interesting)
4:00-6:00 PM Navigating Social Media & New Technology in Healthcare & Pharmaceutical Industries (Pharma has interesting challenges in Soc. Med.)
5:30-8:00 PM Meet the Media: Gadgets and Gizmos: Not Just for Geeks Anymore. Communicating Technology Innovations… (This looks fun)
6:30-8:30 PM The Suxorz: The Worst Social Media Campaigns of ‘09 (And this looks entertaining and educational)

Thursday 02/04/10

10:00-11:00 AM The Road From Listening to Activation, hosted by Converseon (Should be very good)
12:00-2:00 PM Putting The Social In CSR, a ThinkSocial/Media Council event, sponsored by Pepsi Refresh Project (More of what Pepsi is up to)
6:00-9:00 PM Social Media and Startups (Should be good people here.)

Friday 02/05/10

All Day Media Camp NYC  (I’ll most likely make the afternoon of this event.)
12:00-2:00 PM Unleashing Social Media on the Sports World, hosted by the New York Times (This should be interesting to get the inside perspective.)

Saturday 02/06/10

All Day Event Camp (I’m not sure if I’ll make this but it looks interesting.)

Be sure to let me know where you’ll be so we can meet up and say Hi!  I’m on 4Square and Gowalla as ckieff with phone #201-519-0391.  Feel free to friend me and let’s connect!

See you next week.

-- Chris Kieff CEO, 1 Good Reason Social Marketing Consulting www.1GoodReason.com ckieff@gmail.com Cell: 201-519-0391 Let's stay in touch! Twitter: www.Twitter.com/ckieff or @ckieff LinkedIn: www.LinkedIn.com/in/chriskieff Facebook: www.Facebook.com/ckieff

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I’ve been a lifelong fan of football (American style) having grown up in Canton, Ohio, the home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.  (I was 18 and moved away before I realized that all balls don’t have points on the ends.)  This season has seen many sports leagues adopting new rules for players use of Twitter and Facebook during and before games.  But one aspect of how social media will effect the game hasn’t been discussed in depth.  How will the fans effect the coaches and front offices?  And how this relates directly to how businesses will react to social media chatter about them online.

Coaches of professional sports teams have always had to deal with zealous fans and commentators commenting about them.  We all have our share of vocal critics in our faces to some degree.  But social media has the ability to change this equation, when people are talking amongst themselves.  When there’s a Twitter conversation among a circle of friends criticizing the coach’s decision to run up the score against an inferior opponent it has a different effect upon our thoughts.

This is because when someone feels strongly enough to talk directly to us we treat it differently than when they talk about us to their friends.  Those conversations about you that your friends have are very revealing.  And as social media metrics improve, along with their expanding adoption will that change the behavior of professional sports teams?

For instance if the fans voice their disapproval not by shouting at the coaches but by talking with their friends, will the business operations of the Team’s feel differently?  We will react differently when we know that people are talking about us, not to us.  We are social animals and will react to that more strongly that we do to public discussions we are party to.

I believe that the fans reactions can be read more accurately when they are talking amongst themselves, than by the vociferous few who make their feelings known.  And that using social media as a barometer for these fans feelings will give the companies (teams) more accurate and demonstrable feedback than any measure available in the past.

And for any Fortune 500 the same questions apply.  There are always haters who criticize the company who have made their feelings known.  But reaching the vast “Silent Majority” has been hard. Now the tools are available for companies and sports teams to truly gage the feelings of people vis-a-vie their actions.

For instance, would the Indianapolis coach change his mind if he knew that 75% of the fans opposed his decision to rest the players instead of try for the perfect season?  Would New England’s coach think twice about running up the score if 88% of the fans felt it was a poor reflection on the team?  Or would the executives at the local shopping center consider public reaction to their actions when they announce a change and see the Twitter traffic spike?

Give me 1 Good Reason that social media will not change the face of sports and business as we know it.

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BLUF: (Bottom Line Up Front) Today I review the Hubspot report “The State of the Twittersphere”. In my analysis the Hubspot report is of questionable value and cannot be used to extrapolate from the sample used to the general Twitter population.  I do not recommend that my clients use this report to draw any conclusions about Twitter.

Hubspot released their January 2010 State of the Twittersphere report today, a free report which if you spend much time on Twitter should be a good read.  So I decided to dive into the report and see what I could learn.  I would recommend that you take the data in this report with a grain of salt.  The reason I say that is that the data is based only upon people who choose to have their Twitter accounts analyzed by Twitter Grader. I feel strongly that we can’t make generalizations on Twitter as a whole based upon this data.

Twitter growth has plateaued, I think this reflects the trend of Twitter in the direction of an influencers and communicators platform as I described in my predictions 2010 post.  The report has no analysis of the reason for this trend.

The big growth this year according to the Hubspot report is in average Following and Followers, and number of posts.  All of these metrics are growing, meaning that people are following others more, and being followed by others more often.  Now I would attribute this to the fact that more people are Getting Twitter and understanding that it’s much more useful when you have a larger group of people to interact with.  Hubspot attributes this shift in numbers to the decline in new users, in other words a maturing user base.  I would attribute this to a failure of proper analysis of this data.

I’m not a statistician, but I’m confused with these numbers:  The report states that the Average Following went from approximately 50 in July 2009 to about 170 in January 2010 (Page 3 of 10)  and that Average Followers went from about 70 July 2009 to about 300 in January 2010 (Page 4 of 10).  On page 6 of 10 they state that “82% of Twitter users have less than 100 followers” and “81% of Twitter users are following less than 100 people” If both of these are true, then the typical user has not significantly increased their counts in either category much at all.  Other reports show very different numbers: Sysmos 6/2009 “93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people”  Again, the report states that the average Twitter user today has 300 followers and is only following 170.  This is wildly inaccurate, while it may be statistically accurate the data is misleading.  The true average Twitter member has less 100 followers and is following more people

The largest single factor that will effect the results is the sample of Twitterers that HubSpot uses.  Because the sample is based upon people who have chosen to use the Twitter Grader service they are automatically more interested in Twitter than the normal population of people on Twitter.  This means that it is very likely they are more engaged, have more contacts and are overall more involved with Twitter than the general population.  Secondly, I think that the statistics are flawed because Hubspot apparently didn’t remove unusual accounts such as those that have over 100,000 followers, or that send many tweets per day. These accounts will seriously skew the results.

I’m sure that the numbers are exactly as Hubspot has reported them.  However, I think a statistician would have analyzed the numbers differently which could lead to very different interpretations.  I feel that considering the data as presented from the statistical methods and due to the sample source that this report is of very limited use.

Overall I’m an advocate for Hubspot.  They have many excellent products in their “Grader” line and offer excellent value to their clients.  I’ve used their products for years and will continue to do so.  However this time I think they missed the mark.  I had a telephone conversation with Rick Burnes the Author of this report.  I explained my issues with the report and Rick agreed that the data could have presented in other ways that may be more easily understood.  Rick however mentioned that the data does indicate overall trends in Twitter usage.  I still feel that it’s not reasonable to extrapolate the data from this source to all of Twitter.

In conclusion, I recommend that my clients and fellow bloggers not use this report as a guidepost for understanding Twitter user behavior.

Leave a comment with your 1 good reason why I should take this report seriously.

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As a person with a large social network I get lots of requests to support causes and charities.  In the wake of the devastating earthquake in Haiti I’ve gotten dozens of requests to help this “friend of a friend”.  Many are coming through either Facebook or LinkedIn. 

So how do we figure out if the appeal is real?  Because even those we trust could be duped into supporting a charity that is a scam.

Here are few quick tips I can offer, if you have any other quick ideas, please let me know in the comments.

As a guinea pig I’ve chosen a site www.HeartsOnHaiti.com that an acquaintance of mine on LinkedIn sent to me.  I don’t know this person very well, so I’m a little suspect.  Here are the steps I took to verify the charity in my mind:

1. Look up the Who Is file for the site.  Google “who is” or simply use the excellent http://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search  This will tell you the registered owner and more importantly it will tell you how long the website name has been registered.  In the sample below we can see that this domain name was created on 18-Dec-2001- That’s good news!
   

   Domain ID:D81350702-LROR Domain Name:HEARTSWITHHAITI.ORG 

   Created On:18-Dec-2001 16:52:21 UTC Last Updated On:06-Dec-2009 01:45:46 UTC Expiration Date:18-Dec-2010 16:52:21 UTC Sponsoring Registrar:GoDaddy.com, Inc. (R91-LROR)

2. Second we may want to look at traffic for the site using either Alexa.com or Compete.com.  Alexa only offers detailed traffic on the top 100,000 websites, so it’s not likely to have much info.  But Compete.com often has more info.  In this case Compete shows that the site had a spike in traffic last May.  I don’t know why that happened, but that shows me the site was running before the quake.
   
3. And finally you can ask Google for lots of information about a site use the following advanced Google search operators
   link:website.com This will tell you which sites link to the site you are interested in.
   related:website.com Tells you other websites that Google thinks are similar to that site.
   info:website.com Tells you what Google knows about the site.

Using these pieces of information I was able to determine in under one minute that Hearts With Haiti is a legitimate site.  I also tried to use the Wayback Machine which will show you archived copies of older versions of a website, but it was down.

Please leave your suggestions for other ways to improve this technique in the comments below:

-- Chris Kieff CEO, 1 Good Reason Social Marketing Consulting www.1GoodReason.com ckieff@gmail.com Cell: 201-519-0391 Let's stay in touch! Twitter: www.Twitter.com/ckieff or @ckieff LinkedIn: www.LinkedIn.com/in/chriskieff Facebook: www.Facebook.com/ckieff

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