Churbuck.com

Why do efforts by brands to get me to “like” them on Facebook strike me as hopelessly shallow and stupid? There’s this totemic fetishism among marketers to show off their likeable prowess by tallying followers and fans like so many ears on a necklace around their necks.  And I guarantee you, there are more than a million social media marketing consultants and digital PR drones willing to sit on a conference panel or fire up a SEO optimized blog post and debate the “true value of a Facebook Fan.”

Acquisition strategies that involve baiting a trap with a sweepstakes or other freebie and then requiring the sucker to enlist others in their quest are as old as the hills and a throwback to tried and true email marketing tactics to build direct response database. “Refer a friend” is one step removed from the pyramid schemes that occasionally sweep through forgetful societies who are more than eager to enlist friends and family in their quest for riches. These Tupperware parties seem to be the heart and soul of Facebook marketing tactics.

And who cares if a “fan” gives a damn, the more the merrier.

So assume Amazon succeeds in driving me to the more-and-more loathed Facebook and induces me to “invite” three friends to also pile onto the “win a Kindle for yourself and three friend” come-on. What do they do with the names?  This reeks of some shallow brainstorm by a digital marketing agency who is going to declare a specious ROI victory when Amazon’s Facebook fans swells from A to B over the next few weeks. Then what? My “news wall” or “timeline” or whatever the Zuckerborg calls is begins to be ever after polluted with authentically cheesy brand tweets from some junior marketing drone? The fact the Endive Society of America shows up in my Facebook stream  every so often makes me wonder if the world has devolved to the point where it’s just more and more noise signifying nothing.

I know I’m overly cranky, and I know Facebook is the biggest walled garden of the moment, a pool of the world’s names so tempting to try to sell to, but as that pool gets shallower and shallower, and more polluted by corporate messages shuffled like so many jokers in a deck of family photos,  shared links to headlines, invitations to the latest Zynga MafiaFarm, I just want to stick my fingers in my ears, close my eyes, and rock back and forth to shut it all out.

I’m not a fan of anything I’ve ever purchased. I hate my refrigerator. My car only wants my money.  My endives wilt and my laptop likes to crash.

The New York Times has an excellent expose in its Sunday business section about a Russian-emigre scamster who has turned Google’s algorithms to his benefit as he rips off customers with counterfeit designer eyeglass frames; proving in essence that bad publicity is better than no publicity at all, the scheme uses well intentioned customer advocacy sites like GetSatisfaction and RipoffReport to build Google juice through mentions and backlinks — things Google likes in its opaque rankings.

After years of flogging the theme that Google defines brand more than anything, and pushing a “customer is always right” posture on customer service relations as the best way to influence a brand online, I found the Times piece frighteningly propheti about how the underbelly of the Internet, primarily the dim world of domain squatters, virus writers, search engine optimization consultants, affiliate marketing weasels and pay-per-post bloggers, has come to insidiously eat away at good intentioned promises of sentiment and influence to make negative commentary a good thing thanks to robotic search results.

Staggering but true and hence I won’t fall into the scamster’s trap of goading outraged handwringers like myself to mention his site or name.

Leroy Stick – the man behind @BPGlobalPR.

I love this line, an indictment of PR consultants and social media gurus who “know” how to handle the mob.

“I’ve read a bunch of articles and blogs about this whole situation by publicists and marketing folk wondering what BP should do to save their brand from @BPGlobalPR.  First of all, who cares?  Second of all, what kind of business are you in?  I’m trashing a company that is literally trashing the ocean, and these idiots are trying to figure out how to protect that company?  One pickledick actually suggested that BP approach me and try to incorporate me into their actual PR outreach.  That has got to be the dumbest, most head-up-the-ass solution anyone could possibly offer”

And now for today’s Cluetrain moment:

Who owns the social media mission in your company? The public relations team most likely. Sorry, make that the press relations team — as the modern PR professional doesn’t talk to the public directly, but to them through the press. Handling the unwashed masses and mobs with their pitchforks and torches was usually the lot in life of the 1-800 telecenter drones and the hapless ticket agents in the terminal. Social changed all that. Now that neat blog you built to talk about your chili contest and good works with the local Walk For Hunger, the one the PR team uses to ghost expressions of empathy and good cheer from the CEO?; well now the comments are stuffed with a lot of people with dirty faces and tattered hems calling bullshit and pointing out your lack of clothes and complicity in the death of the orangutans and polar bears.

You can’t measure ROI from your Facebook pony when its stable is full of poop. Consider Nestle and be warned. When flaks and spinmeisters meet the mob, the result is predictable. There Will Be Blood. From Slate:

“Enter Facebook. Nestle has a Facebook page, and until this week it was a quiet backwater. But on Wednesday, defenders of the rainforest and its orangutans began to visit, illustrating their profile pictures with various clever permutations of the Nestle logo — “Nestle Killer” — and making a series of mean comments about the company. The powers that be weren’t pleased. At 11:26 p.m. Thursday night, the moderator of the page posted on the Nestle Wall:

To repeat: we welcome your comments, but please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic — they will be deleted.”

(and a disclaimer, my PR colleagues get this stuff, and we don’t hang them out to dry in our various outposts, they get support from people who know the Golden Rule)

via Nestle’s brave Facebook flop – How the World Works – Salon.com.

“Lenovo has seen a 20% reduction in call-center activity in the U.S. over six months because nearly 50,000 customers go to its community website for information about laptops.”

Congratulations to Mark Hopkins, the moderators of forums.lenovo.com, and Lithium for a great success story. One of the best payoff stories for social media and community marketing.

via More marketers use social networking to reach customers – USATODAY.com.

via Beware the Social Media Charlatans – Business Center – PC World.

Someone had to say it:

“Lately it seems I can’t go anywhere without running into a gaggle of social media consultants bloviating about the wonders of social network marketing. Sure, you’ve seen ‘em, too. Slick shake-and-bake “experts” promising to help you leverage the power of Twitter and Facebook to raise your profile and, inexplicably, boost your profits. But scratch the surface on most of these claims and they instantly crumble. Meanwhile, it seems the only people making any money in social media are the consultants themselves.”

A big rule in community relations — don’t ask the Chinese government to go fish for the identity of someone posting bullshit about your brand.

“NIKE on Tuesday issued a strong denial of Internet rumours that it forced Chinese athletics hero Liu Xiang to pull out of the Olympics, adding it had asked authorities to investigate the posting.

‘The posting is a malicious rumour, and has not only misled netizens, but also seriously damages the company’s reputation,’ Nike, one of Liu’s major sponsors, said in a statement emailed to AFP.

‘We have immediately asked relevant government departments to investigate those that started the rumour.‘[emp. mine]

Nike denies web rumours it forced Liu to abandon race.

CC BBaunauch

Some shameless horn honking. Sitepoint named Lenovo to its list of companies that get the whole blogging thing.

“Below is a list of 15 companies that really get corporate blogging and produce blogs that are informative, fascinating, and a joy to read even for people who aren’t die-hard fans of the company. ..

…Lenovo – The great collection of blogs from computer maker Lenovo demonstrate that the company really understands blogging. Lenovo intersperses posts about its product line with musings about business, design, life, and technology. Definitely don’t miss the Design Matters blog, which should be a must-read for any designer.”

We’re in great company — Dell, Sun, Adobe, 37Signals…..

SitePoint Blogs » 15 Companies That Really Get Corporate Blogging.

Somehow this news from CSO Online that Facebook is a possible malware venue doesn’t surprise me. The number one annoyance in my experience is the incessant app downloads that ask a user to spam their friends to enable it for themselves. The app Lenovo is using during the Olympics from Citizen Sports is not malware, but, any perceptions by users that applications are risky is going to quickly injure confidence in the Facevok platform. IMHO.

“August 07, 2008 — CSO — The popular networking site Facebook is the target of a new attack that is spreading messages with malicious links.

Boston-based IT security and control firm Sophos is warning users about the problem. Sophos said Facebook user’s computer can be infected after they view a video that is infected with the bad code.

According to Sophos, messages left on Facebook users’ walls are urging members to view a video, which appears to be hosted on a Google website. But users who click on the link are taken to a site which urges them to download an executable file to watch the movie, according said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. The file downloads malicious code and displays an image of a court jester sticking his tongue out.”

Sophos: Facebook Malware Attack Puts Work Computers at Risk – CSO Online – Security and Risk.

Ben Worthen at the WSJ blogs on a Deloitte study about how businesses overinvest in tech when building communities.

1. Going out with the claim that 60% of businesses invest over $1 million in online communities thanks to a Deloitte typo that should have stated 6% is not a great way to get off on the right credibility foot. Worthen does the correction, but …

2. The comments on the post are cluttered with community vendors, imagine that.

3. “Community” as a term, is tired and over-fraught with implications of good will, social good, and cooperation among customers and companies.

4. This is bad research on a tired topic.

“One of the hot investments for businesses these days is online communities that help customers feel connected to a brand. But most of these efforts produce fancy Web sites that few people ever visit. The problem: Businesses are focusing on the value an online community can provide to themselves, not the community.”

Business Technology : Why Most Online Communities Fail.

All Things Cahill » Blog Archive » The Shine is off Social Networking
Very smart post by Mark Cahill that echoes my current irritation as the hype pendulum swings waay too far toward hyperbole over social media. Very much worth the read.

“Say it ain’t so, Joe! Over the past few weeks, it’s begun to look like Social Networking, the current darling of the conference and consultant set, might have jumped the shark. I personally would peg the exact point where it went careening off track as the day that Waste Management (the guys that probably run your local honey truck) opened their own social networking site.”

Twitter – John Battelle’s Searchblog

“I am very, very tired of the ouroborosphere’s take on Twitter. It’s time for the service to either fish or get off the pot, so to speak. And with $15mm in the door, it’s obvious which way it has to go.”

Echo chamber, reflecting pool — whatever you want to call the closed-terrarium of social media pundits that tweet and post and opine all day long about tweeting, posting, and opining — Battelle nails it best with “Ouroborosphere.”

And trolling for Yanks tickets on Twitter? That’s like looking for supermodels at a sardine cannery.

On the face of it, Facebook groups would seem like one of those cheap, quick, and effective ways to build quick cross-enterprise communities. Set up a group, invite attendees, guide the non-users in how to establish an account, and then control membership.

The alternatives would be a paid account like 37Signal’s most excellent Basecamp, but that is less quick and less dirty than a Facebook group, which to my eyes has a lot in common with the Web 1.0 world of Yahoo Groups. One could also think about any number of wiki solutions, but let’s say the requirements come down to an virtual team room for a collection of four to 400, heck 4,000 users all united in some cause that requires a fast, familiar, and cheap platform.

Facebook would meet that bill except for one vital detail: not everybody can use it.

It’s blocked, along with some other social networks, by many corporate network admins. Right there game over. I was pretty surprised to be in a meeting today, to hear Facebook proposed, and then watch it get shot down in less than one minute as first one, then two, then three seriously senior IT people said their organization’s blocked Facebook. I would argue that no big deal, the platform was, after all, designed for college kids to check each other before attempting a hookup. Having old farts and suits invade it as an enterprise collaboration system was not its intention.

So, the old issue of cross-organizational collaboration is still with us. How would you solve it? Rules are: open platform, open APIs, no fee, no onerous set-up. Needs a file sharing/library including rich media hosting. Must be secure.

 

All Things Cahill » Blog Archive » Social Media – Shark Jumping?

Jeremiah’s Tweet that Avenue A has trademarked “social influence marketing” prompted me to ask rhetorically if the shark had been jumped. My good buddy Mark Cahill posted:

Corporate employee blogs: Lawsuits waiting to happen? | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
Tip of the hat to Chris Kobran for this del.icio.us link to a recent CNET story about a Cisco patent dude getting sued by some patent attorneys after the Cisco guy uncloaked his anonymous authorship of a personal blog about patent stuff:

“Cisco said it still believes “common sense” should be a guiding force for employees sharing information online, but it also added the following rule to its three-year-old Internet postings policy: “If you comment on any aspect of the company’s business or any policy issue the company is involved in where you have responsibility for Cisco’s engagement, you must clearly identify yourself as a Cisco employee in your postings or blog site(s) and include a disclaimer that the views are your own and not those of Cisco.”

Seems pretty clear to me what the dominant rule is: blog about whatever you want on your own time, but if you talk about the company you identify yourself as an employee. Sames goes for company related comments on other blogs, editing of corporate, competitor or industry related Wiki entries, forum postings, bathroom graffiti …..

Web Worker Daily » Archive Open Thread: Does Your Company Have a Blogging Policy? «
I know it is in vogue to say “feh” to blog policies and focus more on blog strategies, but this post on GigaOm’s WebWorkerDaily provokes a $64,000 question:

“What comprises an effective blogging policy? How do you go about developing such a policy? Do employers have authority in dictating what an employee blogs about, given the company’s name is never mentioned? [emphasis mine] Do you know if your company has a blogging policy? If so, is it too restrictive?”

The question is more accurately stated as: do employers have authority in dictating what an employee blogs about on a personal blog, given the company’s name is never mentioned?”

I say no way. No authority. If an employee wants to blog about some heinous activity or state some very radical opinions that is entirely their free right to express those opinions as their own. I do believe a company has a right to request that an employee blogger not blog about work on a personal platform, or, if they do, to insure that the Golden Rule of Cross Examination applies, to wit: “Would you want what you said or wrote read back to you by the plaintiff’s attorney when you were sitting in the witness stand.” I would imagine most confidentiality agreements and intellectual property covenants that are de rigeur for new employees would be binding.
In other words, blogging about work on a personal blog and saying, “Man, working like a dog on a big project. Sucks the vending machine is out of Cheetos” is a lot different than saying, “I think the new Gonkalator project is going down the tubes fast. It’s a shame, we invested so much money in that and to see it die is really sad.”

I mentioned Lenovo here from time to time. I actually blog about the company to give it some link love. I try to be a good corporate citizen here. But, I always go back to the late Tony Churbuck’s advice after I was caught mooning the M/V East Chop one summer afternoon in 1976 from the deck of my sailboat somewhere near Horseshoe Shoal (the captain recognized my boat, and I worked for the same company, I was not known then, as now, for my good discretion). The old gent said: “Buddy: Never $*%& where you eat.”

Mooning Amtrak

Customers Should Avoid Community Software Vendor Lock In: Own your data

Jeremiah is right — a company entering into SMM should be very wary of outsourced relationships. If you do go outside for support, make sure you are in a portable format so when and if you decided to bring the operation in house, you can easily import the data accumulated under the outsourced relationship:

“I’ve been talking to more and more companies that are creating their own corporate communities around their brand. For the most part, they lean on the SaaS models that the white label social network, collaboration, or even insight community vendors provide. While it certainly makes sense for marketers to lean on application service providers (it’s all setup, ready to roll, without the hassle of dealing with internal IT) and a decent to moderate price.”

We used Ogilvy Digital Influence to launch our first corporate blogs, but insisted it be build atop WordPress so we could migrate the archives onto our own boxes when we hit the tipping point that justified a self-serve. Photos are all in Flickr and easily exported and migrated (well, not exactly “easy”), videos are moving to YouTube.

In NYC today for the Ogilvy Verge conference — a one-day digital discussion for Ogilvy’s partners and clients.

Highlight was a late afternoon panel of John Battelle from Federated Media, John Bell from Ogilvy’s Digital Influence Project, Nick Denton of Gawker and Owen Van Natta of Facebook. No bon mots spring to mind, but the key insight was delivered by Battelle and confirmed by Denton — essentially, the current digital model of impression based media is not going to survive, that some new media model is required and has been lacking for over a decade, and that in the end the mostly likely place it will be found is in Social Media.

Battelle recounted a Dell campaign run in Facebook — seemed semi-interesting, but not earth shattering. Bell called out the move from 101 SMM to 201 and AP level discourse on the finer points. Indeed, moderator Polly LaBarre basically told the crowd of mostly clients that if they haven’t gotten the “transparent, authentic, marketing-is-a-conversation memo” then they were essentially under a rock.

Bell is working with me on a very cool Olympic play I’ll disclose next week. I don’t feel compelled to rush into Facebook anytime soon, and as for Federated — we shall see.

Planning session tomorrow morning, working lunch, then back to the Cape of Cod where it looks, but doesn’t feel, like spring.

I guess I stepped in the big cow-pie last week when I called out the SMM Pundits for overworking the elementary level of social media discourse – “be authentic!” “be transparent!” “it’s a conversation!” – as 101 Thumbsuckers. Now I am officially Mister SmartyPants 201 and feel compelled to play the part of know-it-all weenie. I guest blogged on a sample “201″ topic for Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester on how to avoid blowing a corporate policy through a private action. I also threatened to give Jeremiah a list of example topics I want to see more discussion on. Here we go. In the Kawasakian Tradition of Blog Lists: here are ten random things that I don’t see a lot of discussion about:

1. Tool and platforms: what tools a corporation uses for its social media platform says volumes about its credibility. I look at the footers: Is it a WordPress blog? Do they use Flickr for their photos? Do they license those photos as Creative Commons 2.5? Do they use MediaWiki for their wiki platform? Do they launder their feeds through Feedburner? Are there Digg and del.icio.us tagging tools? There are smart tools which to me indicate a deep understanding of certain basic precepts crucial to effective SMM. Are the tools favored by the organization also widely adopted by users or did the company seek a commercial vendor relationship and non-standard proprietary tools? Is an agency supporting and providing sysadmin functions?
2. Pronouns: I have a bug up my you-know-what about the overuse of the Royal We in addressing one’s audience. Am I alone in viewing “we” as an attempt to dilute personal accountability for an organization’s actions? How many corporate SMM, community managers take accountability and responsibility on their shoulders by using “me” and “I?”
3. Metrics: this is a 101 topic that is a 301 headache. SMM has no Internet Advertising Bureau or Web Analytics Association to codify a set of uniform measurements, and as all of us have to bow to the God of Accountability, how ROI is proven is going to be debated forever and ever. Let’s get off the “engagement” thing and go to the next level. Is it comment counts? Rank and influence? Pageviews and gross tonnage? Net Promoter Scores gathered through surveys?
4. Rogue SMM: what do you do when a member of the organization launches into a blog brawl by stepping into a customer’s comments and says, “Blow it out your #$%, you have no idea what you are talking about you whiny $*%#%$@!” How can you manage the unmanageable? How do you keep you employees from editing the Wikipedia entry for your brand? What do you do when legal and security ask you to help them track down the identity of an anonymous employee blogger who is leaking company secrets? How do you educate rather than discipline?
5. How to do SMM/SEO right: how do you promote favorable expressions about your brand and should you? When is it ethical to promote a piece of social media (e.g. “Digging”) and when is it unethical? (demoting a negative comment or flagging a negative comment as “objectionable” without identifying yourself. Knocking off hats to draw attention to yourself (something I a good at, it would appear.)
6. Going Uplevel: what are your escalation paths? When do you pull the fire alarm? When do you declare Code Red and ask for all hands on deck in resolving an SMM crisis? Have you established crisis “service level agreements” with the legal and PR teams? Is there a formal mechanism for bringing an issue to the attention of an owner and getting a public statement out within a reasonable amount of time?
7. Organizational Ownership: where does SMM belong? Customer service? Marketing? Public relations? All three?
8. One vs many: a single corporate blog or many? How does SMM loosen control without losing control over the organization’s burgeoning ranks of bloggers? Where do you drawn the line between corporate and personal blogs.
9. Review mechanism and buddy systems: how do your SMM statements (blog posts, forum discussions) get vetted and approved? Should they? How do you make your bloggers sensitive to the “RSS is eternal” phenomenon so that there is no such thing as a “deleted” post. Do you use a buddy system.
10. The politics of being a know-it-all: okay, you’re the authority. You’ve done the Social Media 101 stuff, you’ve read the books, you went to the conference, you have all the right pundits in your RSS. You can b.s. about transparency and Marketing 2.0 and the ClueTrain with the best of them. You get your wish and now you’re the SMM person. How do you deal with those less enlightened recesses of the organization that view you as a loose cannon? Who do you threaten? How do you navigate the shoals of internal politics?

I could do ten more – throwing out topics is easy — delivering something substantial and actionable is another issue altogether. If 101 is theory and broad practice, 201 is operations and execution, the sort of stuff you’re going to stumble into as you go along. Dealing with customers and partners, critics and competitors – that stuff is either natural or it isn’t. Writing a solid corporate Social Media Marketing strategy document, knowing the difference between it and an SMM policy document, building a strong operation without paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in licenses and agency fees …. That’s SMM 201. I’ll try to tackle one of these every week – amidst posts about clams, the King Phillip War, sculling, and interactive/digital marketing. And, in the spirit of 101 advice, always end your blog posts with a call to action to your audience: tell me what is on your mind.

Here’s a conundrum for which there is no answer: what do you do when an employee decides, on their own, to go off and comment on a customer’s blog and a) disagree with them, b) divulge incorrect information, or c) opens an “anonymous” blog of their own and begins to talk     about life inside the organization?

From editing Wikipedia to commenting on customer blogs to launching their own blog, I predict the next great issue, in corporate blog policies will be how to stem the tide and reputational risk factor of employees who decide to engage with the world at large on their own terms. I have no issue with a disgruntled employee or ex-employee grinding an axe in public – that sort of thing is inevitable. But how do you let the body politic know there is a mechanism and a policy for getting the word out there and connecting to customers?

PR people never had to worry about someone in manufacturing issuing their own press release. Social Media Marketing teams, in effect, do.