As I’m riding the commuter rail from Worcester to Boston on my way to catch my flight back to Boulder, I saw some really cheese-ball ads on and off the train that made me think about the “measurable” associated with community management development via social media. Where do you measure your impact or ROI?

Didn’t actually see this one, but it’s corny as hell

I think the perspective of what a well developed social community is important in deciding whether a business should invest money into a social media strategy.

My perspective is this: the value of a single perceived interaction between a brand and a consumer through social media is greater than if a person drives by a billboard advertisement 100 times in a year.

The social media space allows for numerous dynamic engagement opportunities for brands to reach out to their current and potential consumers. There are a huge array of tools that allow you to monitor conversations that are directly or indirectly related to any idea, keyword or brand or person.

Some would say that there is too much “noise” in the social media space, even though it is so new to our world. I’d say the noise is negligible for brands and consumers because of the ways we listen. There are countless radio frequencies, television channels, billboard ads and other types of invasive, one way attempts of communication. People can’t shut their eyes when they drive past an advertisement, so they tune it out, ignore it and maybe even develop some resentment towards the brands that use hokey, tasteless ad techniques to get your attention for a split second.

There are plenty of goofballs in the social media space. It’s literally impossible to grab a hold of every message that is being sent out through the numerous channels. But, the difference between traditional advertising and social media community development is that people are purposely tuning in when they turn on their computers and some so finely that they’ll seek out exactly what they need and want through search engines.

So when a consumer signs up for Twitter or Facebook and starts to figure out how information flows and which tools to use to seek out specific keywords, hashtags or web-pages. If that consumers eyes come across your presence in social media without any sort of potential for engagement (a.k.a. you haven’t tweeted since 2009 or every message in your timeline consists of a link back to your blog and no @ replies), they will move on and find some other brand to buy from.

An example I like to use is of a national retailer that I’ve been a life-long customer of, L.L. Bean. My backpack broke after many good years of use and I happened to Tweet about how my stuff fell everywhere on the train. I mentioned L.L. Bean in the Tweet and within several minutes, their PR manager @ replied me reminding me of their return policy and that I could get a new bag whenever I wanted. It’s not like L.L. Bean was following me on Twitter and monitoring every little thing I said on a daily basis, but clearly they had some sort of keyword searches running so that when something like a broken bag or customer service issue came up, they could hop right on it and fix it.

I’ve always been a fan of L.L. Bean for the most part, but the fact that their PR person reached out to me the way she did and to this day will interact with me if I shoot her a message means that I’ll be more loyal to them than other retailers that have no channel of contact beyond stepping in line at customer service or calling a 1-800 number.

All businesses are competing for consumers short attention spans in one way or another. It’s like the eternal battle between good and evil, Star Wars vs. Star Trek, Soy Milk vs. Dairy. Something can be sail for clever ad campaigns that touch the hearts of people during prime-time like those mommy-focused Olympic commercials, but most businesses can’t afford that kind of exposure and it’s probably a better idea to make some friends on Twitter and Facebook than it is to pay thousands of dollars to annoy your potential customers with cheesy billboard ads and radio commercials on their morning commutes.

Every conversation = impact. Every dollar saved on traditional advertisement = ROI

I’ve been on Twitter since May 16, 2008. As of today, I have 3,346 followers. Last month I had over 3,400 followers. I’m hemorrhaging followers at a pretty steady basis on a week to week basis. To some people, it would be quite alarming to lose that many followers. I mean, imagine losing 60 friends in a month? What’s worse, 60 customers?!?!

I signed up for a service that emails me every day with all of the people who un-follow me. Sometimes it’s not a surprising list of folks who’ve decided my Tweets aren’t worth their time anymore; mostly spammers, brands, people who’ve bought huge lists of influential people to follow en masse and then automatically un-follow if that person doesn’t follow back within a day. I don’t bat an eye. Then every once in a while I’ll see someone has un-followed me that I know as an acquaintance or maybe even as a real life friend. My reaction at this point is usually “what the fuck? Why’d they un-follow me?” Maybe I wrote a guest post for them within the last few years, connected them with a contact in our industry or maybe I gave them props on something they did. Why would someone un-follow me?

The first impulse might be for people, including myself at one point, to try and find this person on email, GChat or whatever and ask them what was up. It’s like in middle-school when you find out you weren’t invited to a sleep-over. You feel a little rejected and hurt and want an answer.

So the answers, when I first started asking “why did you un-follow me?” usually consisted of “I’m so busy, I just can’t follow everyone these days and needed to pare back.” Or, I get the semi-entertaining response of “you tweet too much. I can’t deal with it.” Maybe I’m offensive (my account is personal and I speak freely) or maybe I don’t provide enough value. Who knows?

Regardless of losing more followers on a monthly basis than some people can acquire over several months, my social media statistics keep going up. If someone ever calls me out or complains about something I do via @-reply or private DM, I always respond and address whatever the issue is. I’ve never bought into an auto-follow program, I’ll never beg people to follow me and if someone decides I’m not entertaining or informative anymore, I respect their choice and turn my cheek.

But, I should mention that I’ve gotten some followers back without sacrificing my dignity. I don’t automatically un-follow every person that un-f0llowes me. I keep some un-followers around because:

• Some people are simply worth following whether the interact with you or not. Their insight, humor or general presence are valuable enough to keep around even when un-reciprocated.
• Sometimes you fall out of touch un-intentionally.

I find simple re-tweet or giving someone props in an @-reply is enough to at least garner a response, if not a re-follow. You may not be BFF’s again (you probably never were BFF’s to begin with), but having touch points with people who you want to have touch points in a social setting, even if they are superficial, is really what social media is all about.

So what story does this anecdote tell? I’ve got 3,348 followers and I personally follow 3,119 people. I may not be the best at building a Twitter following, but I am good at building relationships and adding value. Outside of a handful of celebrities, authors, artists, athletes and specialists that I follow who will probably never follow me back, I have reciprocal Twitter followings. I distribute content, interact with individuals and value good insights and people who pay me a moment of their attention.

I suggest to get the most out of Twitter, use it to build relationships, not an army of mute faces that may or may not advocate for your brand.

You know the really sharp dressed man or woman at the networking events that have expensive clothes on, start name dropping, passing out business cards, talk to everyone (they actually won’t shut up) and don’t listen to a word you say when you actually try to interact with them? Yeah, those people are kind of lame. Brands who do that are lame too and what’s worse, is they’re wasting money on social media campaigns and employees sending out messaging in all the wrong ways.

Relationships do not scale. I live by this rule in my personal and professional life. I’ve worked for or consulted with several prominent companies in the social media space and I’ve seen all sorts of stumbles when it comes to either relationship building or maintenance.

Big brands get excited about Facebook pages because you can essentially post content to them and have anyone that “Likes” your page comment or continuously “Like” whatever you say or post. Facebook pages essentially alleviate some of the measuring and ROI issues that you have with Twitter. With Twitter, you can pulse messages into the ether and anyone who follows your updates can respond in kind. But Twitter relationships always fade when a company acquires lots of followers (thousands, sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands) and start Tweeting PR-esque sound bites to the universe without interacting with the people who Tweet back.

Granted, you cannot interact with every person whom you’ve established a connection with on a consistent basis, whether on social media or in real life. But, some sort of connection pathway must exist in order to keep the initial encounter from withering up and dying.

Here are my main tips in relation to the tools in establishing and maintaining relationships via social media:

• Blogs have been, are and should continue to be the home base of your brand’s social messaging. You don’t need to post every day (though you should have a regular posting schedule) and you don’t need to write case studies and have epic, 1200 word pieces every time, but continuous and dynamic posts of branded content are so important to keep your brand feeling alive and active to the outside world.

• Twitter has been a god-send for my personal brand and I’ve known some companies who just absolutely kick ass at using it strategically (L.L. Bean ranks among the best). Twitter is a channel for you to distribute content. Twitter is a place to acquire new customers and relationships. Twitter is not a place to come and bull rush an audience development plan and acquire thousands of followers over night (often by shady means) without having Tweeted @ someone, ever. It’s okay to admit that you can’t be everything to everyone and have conversations with every person who follows you on Twitter, but paring down your community to people who influence your brand and who (you should be thankful and grateful for) are influenced by yours will make it much easier to acknowledge individuals, rather than speaking in generalities to a mob of un-interested bystanders.

• Facebook allows you to have an ongoing portrait of the interactions between your brand and your “Likes.” You can continually post witty quips about industry news, your clients or your employees and initially get some responses from the people you email blasted to come join the conversation, however, if you don’t actually respond once in a while to comments or conversation strings on your page, engagement will falter over time no matter how interesting your content is. The distinct advantage to having Facebook as a content distribution channel (driving traffic to your blog or elsewhere), is that you can also develop conversations on your walls, which are visible for all to see (for better or worse). Keep branded content flowing on your Facebook pages and ask a quirky or relevant question every now and again to your “Likes.” Those interactions mean something to followers of your brand and they’re also demonstrative to the rest of the world that you listen and interact.

These are just basic tips that I’m offering and may or may not sound like common sense to people both in and outside the social media marketing space. However, I’ve literally seen hundreds of brands mess this up and try to keep up with the Jones’ by setting up social media accounts in haste and not taking the time to understand what the hell they’re going to do with them.

Having a good product or service to market is a whole other topic, but only you can answer if what you’re selling is worth buying.

Too many times have I had to explain to business owners about the benefits of using Twitter and social media, no matter if your brand is relatively big or small.

A few years back, I took to my blog to call out my student loan company for some really bad customer service that was ruining my days and night. Nothing worse than getting threats of collection agencies when you don’t owe any money… I used my blog to vent to my readers and spread the word about what went down. Through my years of experience working for social media reputation management software companies, I know that the power of social media to turn customers into brand evangelists is just as easily turned against them if they’re not doing the right thing.

But, my student loan company found my blog post, called me, made right by their mistakes and all is placid between them and I now.

The other day, my girlfriend and I were getting ready to go out to a local restaurant here in Boulder for a date night. A week before I had found a little Italian restaurant called Radda, I had heard so many good things about this place that I was thrilled when I found $50 gift certificates on sale for $20 at Restaurant.com, so I snatched one up, eagerly awaiting a free night to use them for a dinner and a movie night. As we were both getting ready to leave, a voice in my head reminded me that I saw on Twitter that I needed to be careful about using Restaurant.com gift certificates because some restaurants were not honoring them. In order to avoid an embarrassing situation after ordering a bunch of food and wine, I called Radda on a hunch. Sure enough they said, “No, we will no longer honor Restaurant.com gift certificates after tomorrow.”

Bummer! Our plans had been seriously altered, but luckily, my girlfriend had a gift certificate to another restaurant called Mateo and we went there instead and had a great meal. **Side note: the movie we wanted to see “Inception” was sold out too. It was not our night! But we had a great time walking around a random music festival after our meal at least.**

Our Concession Dinner Wasn’t So Bad After All!

One Of Boulder’s Better Cheese Plates (modeled by the lovely Grace)

I felt pretty screwed and falsely advertised to, so I took to the interwebs and hit up Restaurant.com on Twitter. Luckily for me AND them, when I Tweeted about my disappointment in their service and how it had affected my night, they got back to me first thing Monday morning and promised to refund my purchase and apologized for my inconvenience. Now whether the person who had warned me about Restaurant.com having issues with several restaurants not honoring their gift certs was right or not, they at least were able to reach out to a very public complaint geared towards them.

You look at companies like BP and many other giants who’s social media specialists can’t go to the bathroom without having a board meeting to discuss it and it’s mind boggling how and why these big companies stay in existence. Granted, they have money, but the lazy, ignorant approach they take to customer service and branding would never work if they were competing as a smaller company among their contemporaries in current economic conditions.

It is important to realize that the social web isn’t an empty space that you simply yell into without response. Brands are reaching you and bombarding you with messages every day and it’s your job to filter out the bullshit and call companies on their mistakes every time they mess up. It’s not about how neat of a logo or how cool a brand can seem with scheduled Tweets that are probably written by a third party advertising executive, it’s about how you, the consumer, are responded to when there’s a problem. If brands don’t listen when you complain, your friends and everyone else in your social network sure will and that’s not the kind of evangelism companies want.

*Note of Caution: Radda is still listed on the Restaurant.com website as being a restaurant that accepts their gift certificates.*

How many good ideas are formed in a vacuum?

It’s interesting to think about how many businesses were formed by hermits or people who didn’t do much collaboration around the things they were interested in.

I think there may be a tendency to isolate yourself, for some people, when you’re trying to stay true to yourself and be original, but more often than not, I’d say ideas that stew in your own brain that don’t get tested, shot down, re-evaluated and re-built are going to stay right where they originated in – your head.

Just like how there isn’t really a lot of room on the bandwagon when it comes to a lot of new businesses for jacks of all trades to hop on (although I’ve been lucky to be included on the proverbial bandwagon more than once by several gracious startups), you should also establish and develop community in as many different ways possible early on in your formative professional years.

Even if you’re moving to a new area that already has a solidly established community (tech incubators, small business networking groups, blogger meetups) in which ideas your interested are being developed, you can step up to the plate and offer up your services and help in any way in order get involved with successful professionals already doing their thing.

Even if you’re not 100% sure about what you want to be doing or how you’d like to change your career or even grow a business, by placing yourself among actively thinking and acting business people and having your own ideas challenged or encouraged, you’re setting yourself up for a breakthrough, one way or another.

There are people out there who would be interested in meeting you, who are doing the things you want to do and might even be willing to help you. Place yourself out there, be useful and assume you know almost nothing. That’s the path to a breakthrough.

I wanted to highlight a new feature I installed on NotSoLiteral.com which is a new and interesting tool I wanted to test out with my readers – Kapost, a social content management system.

What does that mean?

Well, basically if you have a blog, you can install this widget into pretty much any content management system or platform that you like (Wordpress, Tumblr, Blogger, Drupal, and more to come), and your readers can contribute content to your site.

Why would you want more content on your site?

Well, more (good) content is always a kickass thing to have. Plus you, as the site owner, have the ability to monitor and approve which posts get used. You can highlight people who think your ideas are awesome and if you’re not too chicken, you can post comments from the haters!

Why would you want to contribute content to someone else’s blog through a social content sharing platform?

Content is social by nature. The idea of having proprietary content to keep your impressions high and blah blah blah is all good and fine, but in reality, if you want to grow your social network, you need to create and participate in discussions about the matters that are near and dear to you. With a lot of blogging platforms, comments are out of site and sometimes closed off altogether. With Kapost, you can jot down a quick response or give someone props via a blog post, hit submit and then they can feature your stuff in a higher profile manner than simply letting your blog comment sit and stagnate on the back end.

Want to try it?

If you want to try out Kapost on your own blog, just click on the image above and you can sign up from the home page. Then there are just a few steps on the backend of whichever CMS that you use and you’re golden. It’s really easy!

What do you think?

Click the Contribute under “Your Ideas Here” to the right of this post and let me know what you think.

“Fix the need, develop the taste. Buy the products or get laid to waste”~Rage Against The Machine

So Mark Zuckerberg seems to be Big Brother with these ridiculously invasive privacy stances he’s taking with Facebook. He’s actually the same age as I am, except a month older, so seeing as I can’t physically wrestle him into submission and tell him to change the privacy settings back to the good ol’ days of when I signed up and enjoyed Facebook, I guess I’ll need to just flip him off, tell our parents what assholes they are for letting him get whatever he wants and pack my shit and leave.

I can’t hate on Zuckerberg for building a nerdy social network into a multi-billion dollar business, lord knows I know others who are trying to do the same thing, but I also can’t be part of it. I love aspects of social media and marketing, but what I’m growing to hate about it is how marketers are being put before the consumers. You know, the cart before the horse.

Facebook no longer resembles a brand worth respecting or being a part of. It’s just a community of consumers that will be funneled towards whichever advertiser sends a check.

There’s got to be a better way. We’ll have to build it.

Peace out Zuck.

Where does the blogger stand in the world when there’s constant motion and conversation going on?

I used to think that each of us were entitled to our own little billboard. A little bit of real estate for us to paint on our canvas however we choose. I thought we’d be high above our crowds, hoping they’d look up at us as they scurry about during their days and nights in the real world, seeking some sort of connection to a beacon of ideas put out by us, the bloggers.

This was the fashion of blogging I felt obligated to do and promote for a long time.

Now I’m not so sure anymore. Lately I feel like I’m writing for the few, while accepting most won’t relate, read or respond to what I have to say. I’m fine with this. I’ve taken to the idea that I’m basically among the many, hustling about my days and nights on a quest for something. I’m on the ground level with everyone else, experimenting, ignoring most of the messages being shone down upon me from above. I’m relieved to not feel the need to be above the crowd anymore. This shift in my perspective came suddenly too. It’s quite strange.

Yet, I still shuffle through the streets with the many, I’m still a blogger and I wear my message and yearning for connection not on my sleeve, not on a billboard, but hopefully more like a piece of paper taped to my back that hopefully doesn’t read “kick me.”

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Just wanted to take a quick moment to say thank you to everyone who reads my blogs, comments, doesn’t comment or maybe just browses for ideas to critique social media with. I don’t always know where I’m going with this or what I want to prove, but I thank you for giving me a place to try… and yes, I feel like I’m only a blogger if my readers let me be.

Hi Folks! Just wanted to let you know that I was still writing evasive, perverted, contradictory, over the top blog posts that you shouldn’t take literally for my sake (or if you do, please don’t judge me, I’m sensitive, I swear).

Everything from notsoliteral.blogspot.com and notsoliteral.wordpress.com is here. I’m kind of excited about it!

Just want to take the opportunity to shout out Andrew Norcross for being incredibly helpful. Really, he just goes above and beyond all the time. Find him on Twitter and say hello or check out his website for samples of his work. You’ll be impressed!

I’m a big fan of these guy’s work. I’ve donated a little bit of money to see if this project can be made. The shorts come off as goofy and funny (they are!) but there’s a lot of smart social commentary going on that I haven’t seen too much elsewhere.

I’d love to see this film get made. So, check out their webpage http://internetscelebrities.com/ and look up their stuff on Youtube under Internets Celebrities… or just go straight to their channel. I hope you like it!