Social Media « GREG SWAN

Equip and empower your social media manager

January 8, 2010 by Greg Swan Leave a Comment

I thought this was a very compelling take on the dilemma of social media gurus holding all the keys to/responsibility for social media and the mentality of relying on one person to own a specific communication tool.

Conversation Marketing: Fire your social media manager

Social media is another way to talk to current and potential customers. Like the phone on your desk, or e-mail.

Do you have a single ‘phone manager’ at your office? Probably not (I hope).

Do you have an ‘e-mail manager’ who handles all sending and receiving of e-mail? Again, no.

Everyone uses these tools to do their jobs. It’s part of the routine.

Social media is rapidly becoming the same thing: A tool, not a technique. Your social media manager’s job is not to take the job of online communications away from everyone else. Her job is to help everyone else use it to better help customers and build the business.

It’s so critical to have a wide base of stakeholders involved in the online community for a brand. The hurdles are shorter than our brains think sometimes, which is why it’s great to have one or two social media experts in an organization who can train, lead and fire that starting pistol.

Beyond the person(s) in your organization who has the responsibility, I talk to a lot of clients/organizations about this in the realm of access to social media tools at work, too (e.g., blocking Facebook, YouTube).

Building on this metaphor, we all have telephones at our desks, and we all have e-mail on our computers. As long as your work is getting done, your boss is probably not worried about a personal phone call or a personal e-mail or two. In fact, s/he’s probably counting on you to understand how to use the phone and e-mail system, so a little personal time figuring them out isn’t bad.

The same goes with social media — particularly when your company has online stakeholders. And these days, that’s just about everybody.

Filed under Social Media Tagged with online community manager, social media manager

BlogWorld 2009: What’s Next in Social Marketing

October 26, 2009 by Greg Swan Leave a Comment

My new post on Social Studies:

This was my third year at BlogWorld New Media Expo, and it just gets better and better.

Sure, there are plenty of cewebrities, blogerati and scenesters, but BlogWorld continues to bring out some of the best in social media and social marketing thought leadership.

Congrats to the show promoters, the speakers and attendees who got my brain running and thinking about new and exciting possibilities in social marketing.

My biggest takewaways from the conference (via notes I took in 140 characters or less):

Even the best businesses have negative customer comments. Don’t be the boy who cried “FAIL”
Humans don’t scale. We only have so much bandwidth. Humility and honesty go a long way in biz/personal
“By the end of the year, we’re going to talk about Twitter lists, not follower numbers.” -@scobleizer
Social isn’t just about marketing/PR. This is a cultural shift. It’s about people and relationships.
Twitter lists has mega-implications for PR/journalist relationships. @scobleizer already on 211 lists.
Kids are creating multiple MySpace profiles for friends and other ones for their “real” friends
Google Profiles, Sidewiki, Wave are part of a stealth social network. It’s not a destination. It’s a zen attack.
Corporate sites should be the hub of a robust Web strategy that goes to where the conversations are outside .com.
Develop active listening program AND THEN empower a customer advocacy program to tell your story, defend you, etc
PR is curating disparate SM monitoring databases that should be connected to corporate CRM for customer support
Five years from now URLs won’t matter. Information will come together in a new way we can’t yet fathom. -@jowyang
Entire crowd is focused/stuck on SM ROI, and you can sense the aggregate frustration at the implicit vagaries.

I want to touch on that last tweet. In Jeremiah Owyang‘s “The Future of Social Media and Business” presentation (great breakdown here), the audience asked many questions about legal, ROI, lead-generation and the culture of fear that surrounds investing in new technologies and strategies without a guaranteed pay-off. Mr. Owyang didn’t have answers beyond his analysis, partly because the answers people were seeking aren’t easily answered in a large forum. The future of social media, by its very nature, will not and does not mirror traditional advertising strategies nor the metrics that fuel them.

Companies who today are seen as innovators in the social media space — whether it’s micro-media customer support, humanistic corporate blogs or social network engagement — didn’t get where they are by betting on a sure thing. Social media has changed the game. Even if Nielsen says X millions watched a primetime show last night, we know a key percentage had a laptop open at the same time. And although I can back up that assertion by pointing to the top Twitter trends on any given evening, most companies cannot quantify that “buzz” directly into sales to the point they can justify a spend with guaranteed results.

Rather, an online conversation is just as valuable — possibly more valuable — than a point of sale impulse display or a print and broadcast advertising buy with guaranteed impressions. The reason Mr. Owyang couldn’t give us the 1-2-punch for selling in social media is that 1) it doesn’t exist, and 2) even if it did, it would change tomorrow.

What can we do in the interim?

Innovate
Set measurable objectives
Benchmark
Evaluate and adjust

We must change this perception of fear into a lens of opportunity. The control isn’t coming back, and neither is the sure thing.

BlogWorld has me pumped and even more passionate about the possibilities. I’m not waiting around for the sure thing; are you?

- Greg Swan

Comments locked. Please leave comments over at Social Studies.

Filed under Social Media, Social Studies Tagged with blogworld, bwe09, jeremiah owyang, social marketing, Social Studies

Greg in Finance and Commerce

October 13, 2009 by Greg Swan Leave a Comment

I’m quoted in this Finance and Commerce piece on social media measurement: Beyond guesswork: Companies work to measure the impact of social media

…But even despite the lack of an industry standard, experts say businesses engaging in social media must begin to measure and monitor their efforts even if they are at first measuring against themselves.

“What I say is benchmark today,” said Greg Swan, digital group manager at public relations firm Weber Shandwick. “For some of our clients for whom we have been measuring different social media impressions for years now, at this point we have a really good benchmark.”…

A company that has a manual sentiment analysis system to help clients measure and monitor social media is Weber Shandwick. Swan, at the company’s Bloomington office, said that the company’s Digital Media Scorecard can analyze the volume, content and sentiment of online conversations about a company or brand and then assign a numeric value to it.

“Software can calculate the number of comments on a post, but it takes a human to analyze the sentiment,” Swan said.

In fact, the lack of a gold standard in terms of measurement may force companies to set some parameters themselves instead of trying to live up to a standard, especially since most don’t expect a standard to emerge, now or ever.

So, for a business-to-business company, a few hundred views of a video that marketers put on YouTube may be a success. For a consumer-facing company that might be in the tens of thousands, Swan said. Thus, the onus of defining those objectives falls on businesses themselves.

Monty of Ford echoed Swan…

Read the entire piece here.

Filed under Social Media Tagged with Social Media, social media measurement

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