Twitter is easy: Make your audience look smart

OK, Marketers, this is going to be short and sweet.

No matter how many Twitter followers you have the real magic is in reaching their followers. And so on.

The way you reach them is to have them retweet your content.

No one wants to retweet something that's personal about your life. Or dumb. Or boring. Don't be any of those things. Be really interesting. Be first with some news or insight or content.

Personally I almost never retweet something that doesn't have a link in it. But that's because I want my followers to see me as someone passing along rich, insightful content, a bar that 140 characters seldom gets over.

If you look at your tweet and admit you'd never retweet it if you saw it, go ahead and send it. To your followers; just don't expect them to pass it along. If instead you see something that your audience would like to share then you're onto something.

Not sure what that looks like? Search for retweets of your content - in my case I do a Twitter search for "RT @brianellefritz".

I know, most of you already knew all this, so go out and practice it ok? And then I'll retweet you like crazy, I promise.

Measuring Social Media - Are we Wasting our Time?

I'm still consuming Marketing Sherpa's voluminous - but important - 2009 Social Media Marketing and PR Benchmark Guide. Here's an excerpt for you folks who want to get a free taste. Granted the full version costs $447 bucks (or just half that if you buy by Nov 30) and if you agree that time is money it'll cost you at least that much to consume it's 200+ pages, but ante up folks, it's money well spent.

Here's one interesting insight that already caught my eye.

"The Most Effective Social Media Tactics are the Least Measurable"

As you can see on this chart (it's also in their public excerpt above for you copyright police), those surveyed didn't see much correlation between tactics they could easily measure and thos they found to be effective. And yet in another question they said one of their biggest challenges is measuring social media ROI.

So there lies a big conundrum in this new craft of social media marketing: that which we conclude works well might not offer much evidence to support that conclusion.

How can that be? OK, let's be practical and acknowledge that lots of things we value in our business and personal lives can't be measured very well. No less than Albert Einstein pointed out that:

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

The Marketing Sherpa report implies that B2B marketers will continue to struggle to provide evidence that their social media investments are paying off. I've blogged before that social media should drive hard for accountability but I also acknowledge that marketing has a long history of investing in hard-to-measure activities.

After all many in marketing would admit after a few drinks that if they wanted to be accountable they'd go into sales.

Joining SAP

To all my peeps and tweeps out there who might not have gotten the word I'm happy to reveal a new venue for yours truly. This month I started a new chapter in my career as Senior Director of Web 2.0 Marketing, joining SAP to head up the social media practice within their corporate marketing team.

For the last two years my team and I - and countless others - have worked hard to elevate Cisco's game in the social media space and I'm very proud of our accomplishments. But the SAP opportunity beckoned and so I elected to make a change.

Let's be clear: SAP is no slouch. Their community marketing is second to none in the B2B space and I'm anxious to share a cup of joe with Mark Yolton and compare notes to see how we can build on that momentum within marketing where lots of cool stuff is already going on.

I'd be remiss in leaving Cisco without a huge tip of the hat to all my Cisco compadres. Special thanks to Bill Robb, Jennifer Bocca and Stephanie Marx who worked their magic alongside me. All too often I got to take a bow for their blood, sweat and tears and I know their hard work and skills will shine on. Thanks guys.

And for the rest of the Cisco pros, too many to name in this blog, I'll miss our daily exchanges and the simple challenge of trying to stay as smart as you are. I look forward to seeing you around Silicon Valley and at the various venues you so deservedly attend.

Social Media Marketing - Strike Out or Home Run?

Recent posts by Laura Ramos and John Bottom, both B2B bloggers who I deeply respect, once again teed up the question about whether skepticism about the viability of B2B social media is well deserved. Their blog posts handle the current debate well so I won't try to revisit their conclusions here but let's fast forward to the inevitable.

Social media will succeed as a viable and cost effective marketing platform in the long term.

And here are three reasons why I feel so strongly:

1. Social media is full of people, millions of them, and more coming onboard every day. Willie Sutton was once asked why he robbed banks and responded simply "Because that's where the money is" (side note - marketers could take lessons from Willie when creating clear and memorable messages). Marketing has always flocked to large audiences because they're efficient to work with. Radio, TV, highways, magazines, newspapers, telephones, web pages and email have all been mastered over the years. Social media is next.
   
2. Problems will be solved. Just looking at the digital era we've seen lots of skepticism cast towards early efforts in web sites (remember the meager "home page"?), communities, email and mobile. All have gone on to prosperity that at least matched their early promise.
   
3. Customers will demand it. And by "it" I mean ready access to the content, service and insight of the brands I care about. And a willingness to listen to me, their customer. When I got near-instant gratification from Comcast after tweeting about an outage I lost patience for their phone queue. Overnight. Customers will raise their expectations, brands will figure out which ones they can meet profitably and we'll gradually move to a center from both perspectives.
   

The bottom line is there are too many motivators to keep social media from succeeding. Brands get access and preference; customers get better content, service, and brand goodness.

There is one more reason for my confidence. I've seen this movie before. I could cite a number of new platforms as example: web marketing, email marketing. But let's look at a monster: e-commerce. For two full years e-commerce rumbled along m0re as a debate than a phenomena. The cons were so numerous: buyer security, shipping, returns, taxation... but one by one these problems not only got solved but they jump started companies like Amazon, FedEx and PayPal. Customers got convenience, value AND piece of mind and brands figured out how to make a buck.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm betting my career that I'm right.

Marketing Social Media Marketing

I had lunch with Mike Metz today who has steadily led the Cisco.com web program up to the top of the technology website heap. My social media group reports up to Mike and I asked the simple question walking back with a cup of espresso in hand (thanks Mike!), "how are we doing?" Mike reminded me of some simple points that are key to all of us social media practitioner.

• You're working on exciting stuff, but
• Don't assume everyone knows what you do.
• Don't assume that if they know what you do, they believe it works.
• Don't let fear of overwhelming demand for your team's services stop you from marketing yourself.
  

Cisco is a huge company, social media is a new practice and it's easy to get swallowed up supporting teams and forgetting to inform others of how they might use our services. Here are some simple steps I've already taken; what have I missed dear readers?

• Always have an updated set of slides in hand that cover our work and results. Keep it simple, compelling.
• Get to staff meetings of my stakeholders. Hold conversations. This is part evangelism, part education.
• Don't get defensive. Not everyone believes this is as cool as I think it is. Education is a process.
• Communicate broadly. Wrap up pilots and projects by sharing results and learnings.
• Get others involved. Give them my slides. Build a community.

Comments please.

Is Social Media Held to a Higher Standard?

My team and I will soon be huddling with our customer analytics team at Cisco to discuss the ROI and metrics of social media marketing.  The idea is to review our current state of relatively simple benchmarks, tactic measurements and tracking techniques and see if we can't derive a better sense of what we can - and should - measure.

While I've been known to huff that social media practitioners are as capable of calculating ROI as, say, television advertising, the reality is that we have a higher bar to get over and here are some reasons why:

1. To invest in social media most campaigners have to divert funds from other tactics and to do that they must assess if social media represents a better value than the alternatives.  Darn few groups put social media into a separate budget line last year and according to Forrester few are planning to do so this year, content for now to continue this borrowing.  Which means in the near term the budget holders will want to understand the economic trade offs.
2. Social media seems to perform best as an awareness and relationship nurturing channel.  Some of its business benefits have no prior equivalent to compare to at all.  Awareness has always been a dicey category to measure and marketing has done so little relationship work (at least in the high tech B2B companies I've worked in) that we often have few or no benchmarks to compare social media to.
3. In the offer-to-purchase end of the demand cycle, numbers are often more tangible but most shops, ours included, have been leery about asking for the order too early lest our social media sensibilities be called into question and the relationship halted before it's begun.  Besides, in shops like ours where sales cycles are long and channel partners fulfill the final orders, tying interest to purchase is difficult even using channels like email or direct mail.
4. Too few social marketing programs are being well designed, honestly crafted and kept in place long enough to measure their impact over time.  Two key culprits in B2B are quarterly budget cycles which hunt for the next quick win, and the lack of always-on roles and programs focused on audiences, not products.  Instead the tactics tend to be more superficial and unpolished than the ones I'm convinced we'll see in a years time.
5. We simply don't understand the horse we're riding very well.  What is social media really best at? Which tactics work predictably?  Who in the organization is best equipped to deliver value to the participants.  What to measure, what to ignore?  

I'm proud of the work my team has done in light of all these questions and uncertainties.  We've advanced a long way towards building social media into a proper marketing discipline at Cisco.  One of the last milestones will be the ability to successfully argue and defend investments in social media from an ROI perspective.  In the meantime, I'm looking forward to the meeting with our analytics team.  We'll take all the help we can get.

Marketing And the Art of Conversation

OK, this isn't really a picture of a B2B marketing person being told they're now expected to "engage customers in a dialogue", but it could be. I've seen an expression nearly this dismal when I've used language like "conversation" or "engagement" with other marketing folks.

Let's be clear: marketing people aren't unfriendly. And they don't mind thinking of customers, it's just the notion of being left alone with one, mano a mano that gives them the heebie jeebies. I mean if marketing liked customers, we'd be in sales now wouldn't we?

Marketing folks are the sociologists of a company. We're the Margaret Meads of the corporate customer scientists. We like tribes, groups, packs. We just call them segments and audiences. We love group behavior and we draw very meaningful conclusions from it. Individual behavior though... freaks us out. It's roguish. Messy, hard to calculate predictions from it. So you asked about a white paper... should I try to sell you something now? Sample sizes of 1,we've been told, are not to be trusted.

Plus in a dialogue we need to be pretty adroit at things like, well... talking. Plainly. Spontaneously. Without lawyers in the room or brand guidelines open in front of us. Personally I edited my first blog comment for 10 minutes before I had the courage to click Save. And then there's the language barrier: in our heart of hearts we know that our native language - Gobbledygook - will draw giggles and stares.

Conversations, we think, might best be left to the psychologists of the corporate world: the sales people. Or to the physicians among us: service and support. They actually like being with customers, one-on-one, and can do so without sweating. They even seem to miss them when they don't see them for awhile. So can't we just let them have these, these... "conversations"? Please?