Master Inventor Extols “the Unedited Voice of the Individual”

May 17, 2012

This past May, Tony Pearson had a problem. He was visiting with a group of customers in Australia —  nearly 8,000 miles away from his home base at the IBM System Storage Executive Briefing Center in Arizona — and needed to know if the IBM XIV Storage System would work in a particular competitive environment.  And so the master inventor and senior managing consultant posted his question on Twitter and waited.

Within 30 minutes, he received return tweets from the two non-IBM hardware manufacturers involved letting him know that they both support the proposed configuration.

“I got my answer without even knowing who to call or who works in those companies,” says Tony. “I just put it out there saying: I have this question. Does anybody have an answer?”

Tony’s story is just one more example of how he’s been able to use social media to benefit IBM and build his personal brand as a system storage expert and go-to guy.

How it all began

Back in 2006, Tony was asked to create a set of podcasts to explain and promote IBM’s renaming of its disk and tape products under the IBM System Storage product line. Thinking his voice was unsuitable for a podcast, he decided instead to blog about the changes. A year later, when he was transferred to IBM’s Executive Briefing Center, he continued to publish his blog, changing its content and readership to support his new organization and job responsibilities.

Tony’s philosophy on blogging stems from a book he read early on titled Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. “They had a very crisp definition of a blog. It’s the unedited voice of the individual,” he says.

So what does he talk about? “I talk about new announcements. I talk about how to use the products. I don’t talk about conversations I have with clients, but I might say: ‘These questions come up fairly frequently at briefings … so I thought I’d clarify this position or how IBM feels about this.’”

And every now and then, he’ll write about something personal — a vacation he’s taken or his volunteer efforts.

Tony believes his blog also helps open up IBM to the outside world. “IBM in the past has been seen as this impenetrable fortress,” he explains. “And I tell everybody … if you have a question about storage and you don’t know who to ask contact me and I’ll find the right person.”

His passion and commitment to his “Inside System Storage” blog have helped make it one of the most active blogs on IBM developerWorks. “People know who I am and they can trust what I say versus someone else who they’ve never seen or heard from before,” he adds.

Tips for success

Tony likes the progressive, open approach IBM has taken regarding the use of social media by employees. “One of the things that IBM did well is develop a very robust, simple-to-follow set of social computing guidelines,” he says. He cites “don’t pick fights” and “identify who you are” as two of the guidelines that can help people starting out avoid common mistakes.

And he encourages all of his colleagues to find their voice in the blogosphere, express their opinions on Twitter, share their presentations on SlideShare.net or post photos, graphs and diagrams on Flickr.com. His recipe for social media success rests on four essential ingredients:

  1. Stick to your expertise. “I saw a great quote that I used in one of my blog posts that said that the food in museums was as bad as the murals in restaurants. It was a good reminder that you should focus on what you know.”
  2. Do your homework. “People should read before they write. You’re more credible when you can say ‘I’ve read everyone else’s writing first, and here’s my opinion’ as opposed to adding little or no value to the conversation.”
  3. Devote the time. “There’s a lot of work to create a blog post … gather the research and do all the stuff so you make a complete quality post. It’s not going to happen with10 minutes a day.”
  4. Keep active. “One person told me a great thing: blogging is like jogging. If you don’t jog daily or weekly, and only jog every now and then, it’s not going to be of any value.”

He also warns people to avoid perfectionism when blogging. “I think people are worried … that they’re going to say something that makes them look like they’re not the experts that they claim to be,” says Tony. “Just like in real life, you can edit the blog and say ‘I made a mistake. This is what I meant to say.’”

Leave a comment
Uncategorized
Tags: ,

A chat with Willie Favero DB2 for z/OS evangelist about is secrets for social media success

May 01, 2012

With close to 6,000 RSS subscriptions and 14,000 to 15,000 hits a month, Willie Favero runs one of the top DB2 for z/OS blogs on the Internet. So when Willie talks … people listen.

But it wasn’t always that way for the senior certified IT software specialist. Spurred on by a friend in Toronto who had started a blog on DB2 for LUW (Linux, Unix, Windows), Willie began his blog in 2005, “… when most people I dealt with didn’t know what a blog was,” he says.

His approach, which Willie maintains to this day, was simple: frequency, brevity and informality.

  • Frequency. “If you write a blog post once every two months, no one is ever going to read it because no one is going to take the time to check periodically. But if you always have information up in front of your readers that is of interest to them, they will continue to read.”
  • Brevity. “The idea of being able to read something that isn’t as lengthy as an article is really quite nice for a lot of people. They sit down, they get their cup of coffee in the morning, they check what new blog entries are out there.”
  • Informality. “You can’t write it formally like you would a white paper or an article. You write the blog as if you were talking to the person across the table from you because that’s what they’re expecting.”

He also advocates an occasional non-technical post — “Be careful not to overdo it,” he warns. So, for example, when he bought his new motorcycle or became a grandfather for the fourth time, he blogged about that. And his readers love it.

Soon after he started his blog, Willie built a LinkedIn profile, jumped on Twitter and started using other social media platforms, such as SlideShare, through which he could further promote and explain the inner workings of DB2 for z/OS. He even developed a small Web site which ties everything together.

Making a difference

Today, Willie is constantly bumping into IT professionals, both customers and colleagues, at conferences and seminars who faithfully read his blog and tweets. He recalls sitting in sessions when the presenter “will quote something and he’ll say, ‘I picked up this item in my presentation from Willie’s blog.’”

“Now that’s really nice,” he adds, “because not only do I get the satisfaction of knowing someone’s getting some use out my blog, but I just got a free piece of advertising in front of 50 to 60 people in the room.”

The DB2 for z/OS evangelist’s blogging also caught the eye of his manager. “My manager looked at my interest in social media and said, ‘You like doing this and we benefit from you doing this, so let’s make it a bullet on your performance plan.’ Now I’m supposed to write at least one blog entry every week.”

Willie really likes having his manager’s buy-in because it takes the pressure off his blogging activity and he’s recognized for it. He believes everyone active in social media should get that same support.

Here’s how to connect with Willie:

 

Leave a comment
Uncategorized
Tags: ,

SocialMedia in the Underground World of B2B

Mar 16, 2012

I just returned from SXSW Interactive, it was my first experience attending this event and I was thrilled be a part of it. If you’ve heard from others that it has to be experienced to be understood, it’s true – I’ve never seen anything like it. There was an incredible vibe from the massive amount of high energy innovators who are all on a quest to lead the future of digital & social innovation. Representation ran the gamete from small start-ups to well established global brands leading the way and shaping this exciting period of our history.

I had the privilege to represent IBM Social Business leadership by participating in a panel: SocialMedia in the Underground World of B2B  #SMB2B  in which we discussed many of the pressing issues of implementing social media programs and leveraging social media as a competitive advantage from a leading B2B brand perspective.

Melissa Chanslor from Text 100 Moderated the panel. Participating along with me were marketing leaders Duane Schulz – Xerox, Jeanette Gibson – Cisco and Shanee Ben-Zur – NVIDIA.

Left to right: Melissa Chanslor, Shanee Ben-Zur, Jeanette Gibson, Duane Schultz and Susan Emerick - Photo courtesy of Text 100

Here’s a summary of key points I shared based on our IBM Social Business leadership initiatives:

- Conduct social listening research to better understand how and where your constituencies are participating in social and apply insights gathered from the research to your marketing planning process and tactical execution roadmap.

- Deploy subject matter experts (SMEs) to build relationships with key influencers and those that follow them based on your understanding of the social ecosystem. This approach will position limited, high value resources strategically to drive business outcomes.

- Support SMEs to build their personal as well as your brand’s reputation by implementing employee enablement programs that support high value thought leaders to engage in the right place, at the right time in a secure way. Set clear priorities for engagement.

- Help SMEs understand the many benefits of committing to sustaining engagement by sharing examples of other leaders like them who’ve successfully established a position of authority as a trusted topical thought leader.

You can listen to the panel on the podcast on demand to hear the honest dialogue and many great recommendations shared amongst the team. Thanks to you can also read a summary of the Twitter steam on Storify

 

Leave a comment
Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,

“Server Chick” Uses Social Media to Set the Record Straight

Mar 09, 2012

Being referred to as a “server chick” on a blog post may not flatter most women, but to my IBM colleague Elisabeth Stahl, it was a sign that she had come into her own in the world of social media. It also affirmed that she was having a growing and positive impact on how people viewed IBM’s products and capabilities.

As a chief technical strategist and executive IT specialist at IBM, Stahl, focuses on systems performance and benchmarking across IBM platforms for the Systems and Technology Group.

“I make sure we highlight how great our servers and storage perform,” Stahl says, “so we can let our clients know that our products are really the ones they should be looking at, and the ones they should buy.”

From paper to blogs and tweets

In the so-called early days, Stahl would write “one-way” technical papers as her primary means of communication to clients. But as the competition increased and the use of social media in business blossomed, she realized she needed another outlet to tell the IBM story.

“I was starting to get very tired of our competitors saying things about IBM in their press releases and their blogs that just weren’t true,” she recalls. So she looked into creating her own blog as a fast and more immediate way of setting the record straight. But there was some initial hesitancy on her part.

First, despite having published some technical papers, Stahl didn’t like to write — one of the main reasons she chose math as her college major. Second, she wasn’t quite sure how much time blogging would take away from accomplishing her day-to-day responsibilities. Stahl’s first blog entry was read by two people, primarily because she asked them to. Now, her entries are read by hundreds as her contacts and social eminence continue to grow. “It’s amazing the contacts you can make with social media,” she says. “I’ve developed new relationships worldwide with clients, with business partners and with IT analysts.” Some, she adds, have responded to her posts from as far away as Nigeria and remote parts of China.

In addition to a growing blog audience, Stahl is building a Twitter following as well. She tweets whenever she comes across a paper or an article of interest she thinks would really interest her followers. “And not what I’ve had for breakfast,” she jokingly adds.

Building a reputation as an SME

Not only is Stahl convinced that her efforts are contributing to IBM’s bottom line, but, equally important, her own reputation as a subject matter expert, both internally and externally, has spread considerably — a personal and professional bonus, she says, that would never have happened so fast and so far.

What advice does Stahl have for other Subject Matter Experts who are considering social media as a way to share their expertise?

  • “Just do it!” But make sure to take advantage of the resources available. It’s also important in the beginning to ask others for advice, which Stahl says gave her more confidence and really helped her take off.
  • “Realize it takes time to do this.” Stahl remembers the pressure she put on herself in the beginning to do a certain number of blog entries, for instance a couple of times a week — which she thinks is still a good idea when first establishing a presence. But now, she only blogs when there’s really something good to write about and she feels passionate about the subject.
  • “You need to be factual, honest and engaging.” Stahl asks herself three questions before posting an article she’s written: “What would my clients say when reading this? What would my manager say when reading this? What would my mother say when reading this?”

“In the end,” says the server chick, “I found that I really loved the writing, I loved working with social media, I loved telling a story and especially interacting externally with clients in that way.”

Leave a comment
Uncategorized
Tags: , , , ,

Thoughts on establishing a branded blog

Jan 10, 2012

Working for a Global Brand can bring questions and challenges for employees when it comes to whether or not they should establish a branded blog in their respective region or country. I recently worked on this guidance and thought it would be helpful to share with other B2B marketers who are working to establish branded blog guidance for their employees.

Online collaboration platforms — such as blogs — are fundamentally changing the way people work and engage with one another, clients, partners and prospects. By blogging, your ideas and expertise can be shared enabling dialogue with clients, shareholders, and individuals in the country in which you market. Blogs can be an important part of your country’s overall communication strategy, however as you consider getting started, it is critical that you begin with an understanding of the worldwide strategy for your program, brand or service, and determine how to support that strategy before establishing your own country or regional branded blog.

Whether you integrate with an existing branded blog or create your own because one does not already exist, remember that you represent your company and must uphold the standards of quality pertaining to content, creation and curation, relationship management, real-time listening and engagement. Individuals are responsible for the content they publish online, whether in a blog, on a social network, or any other forms of user-generated media, so it is imperative that you provide social computing guidelines for employees to follow. As an example, here’s a link to IBM’s IBM social computing guidelines. Also, be sure to provide employees guidance to follow on any branding, naming and messaging guidelines that have been established.

Avoid Redundancy

A key aspect of a successful brand strategy is to provide value to social outreach and relationship building. Think about how you can centralize efforts to increase reach and impact rather than running the risk of duplication and redundancy which could be the result of working independently.  Begin by taking an inventory of what already exists and work to collaborate as a contributing guest blogger as opposed to creating a new blog. Group blogs are encouraged and often overlooked as a strategic option.

Make A Plan

Establish the editorial calendar, messaging and subject matter experts to contribute content that will ensure the blog will provide value to the target audience, be a long-term, sustainable presence that fosters two-way dialogue.
Should I set up a blog?
Before getting started consider the following: Does a branded blog already exist that offers the same type of content and reaching the same constituents as you would like to? If so, then you should work with the blog author to contribute as a guest rather than establishing a separate and potentially redundant branded blog.
What are your objectives?
If no branded blog exists, you should clearly define the objectives for your blog before you establish one. Consider what role you expect the branded blog to play. The more specific your goals — defined over a timeframe — the easier it will be to focus your efforts.
Who is your audience?
As you begin planning a branded blog, it’s important to do so with a focus on customer relevance.

  • Whom are you trying to reach?
  • What knowledge are they seeking?
  • What problems or issues are they challenged with?
  • Are they consuming social media — and if so, what are their venue preferences?

Looking at a combination of these factors will help you ascertain the value of your blog and will help you evaluate if there is a place for a branded blog within your overall strategy.
Next, you should identify the needs of your target audience.

  • What are their goals and objectives?
  • What other blogs are they reading and why?
  • How will your blog be different from other industry-leading blogs?
  • What topics do they find of interest?
  • What are their pain points?
  • How will your branded blog provide them solutions?

Do you have the necessary resources to effectively manage a blog?
Before establishing a branded blog, you should be committed to maintaining a long-term, ongoing presence. This is not broadcasting, but relationship building. For this reason you should write in the first person — you are communicating to other readers in a one-on-one fashion and creating a relationship. You’re not simply delivering news, you’re delivering information and content through the lens of your experience and expertise. You’re delivering it in such a manner that others will find it useful or helpful. You’re adding value to the industry news by applying your observations or your perspective.

  • Are you committed to engaging in a conversation?
  • Will it be supported by you alone or by a team of owners?
  • Are your authors skilled in first-person blog-writing style?

You should plan enough time to author new posts regularly, listen to your followers and respond in a timely fashion to comments they share on your blog, and expand your network. You will want to post at least two times a week, with an ideal post length of around 500 words.

  • Are you able to effectively manage and maintain valuable content and grow and nurture relationships? Keep in mind that readers will post at all times of the day and night — and may expect responses within a business day.

Will you have a person dedicated to responding to your audience, or will you do it “in your spare time”? Be realistic about the amount of time you can spend on this work.

What criteria will determine the success of the blog?
Key performance indicators (KPIs) can be used to gauge the success of your branded blog. The challenge is knowing which measures are meaningful. Some important criteria to track would be Reach, Engagement and Advocacy. A monthly review of your success metrics and your goals will help you keep track of your progress.

Understanding policies:

  1. Ensure that your branded blog complies with your companies Social Computing Guidelines. This includes all entries within your blog, whether you author them or not.
  2. Remove any community-generated content that violates your companies policy and if, necessary, report any violations.
  3. Follow any processes established for starting blogs, reporting defects, requesting technical support or submitting requirements.
  4. Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.
  5. Follow messaging and naming guidance.
  6. Protect all confidential and proprietary information.
  7. Don’t cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their approval.
  8. Know the rules for engagement: what is appropriate to share and what is not.
  9. Identify yourself. Names of the administrators must be publicly listed in the “about” section.

Maintaining your blog
Successful blogs have an editorial plan with a publishing cadence and are relevant to a topic that the target audience finds interesting and of value. Blog owners should establish an editorial calendar to help plan at least two to three posts a week. Offer content that aligns with the interests of your target constituency, is thought-provoking and timely. Here are a few examples:

  • Thought-leadership pointsofview (POVs) around industry hot topics or products.
  • Commentary on industry trends and forecasts.
  • POVs on other blog posts.
  • Responses to common questions.
  • Review of industry-related news from reputable third-party resources.
  • Information such as company press releases for new products.
  • Identification of current events and how products and/or a virtualized environment could have played a role in preventing, improving or evolving the situation. These types of posts are dependent on outside circumstances but allow readers to apply the benefits of technology to issues and situations that resonate with them.
  • Pre- and post-events coverage: Before and after events, write posts detailing your attendance/participation and link to other industry influencers who are either planning on attending or did attend. Following the event, write a recap and link to any Influencers you may have met or listened to while in attendance. For example: A post could revolve around “Five Things I Learned at Event XYZ.”

Promoting your blog
Once you have set up a branded blog, you should consider how you will promote it and attract a following. To ensure that your content has the highest potential to be viewed by new audiences, there are a number of tactics that can be utilized. Here are some starting suggestions:

  1. Build a strong blogroll— a blogroll is a list of blogs that you might recommend or link to on your blog in a sidebar list. Your blogroll should contain influencers and peers.
  2. Comment on — and link to — influencer blogs and blogs in your blogroll frequently. The best way to generate awareness around yourself (or the team) as a thought-leader and the content you post to your blog is to actively participate in conversations and comment on other bloggers posts of interest. By exposing yourself to industry influencers, you have the ability to initiate a discussion and share your point of view by leaving a comment and linking back to your blog.
  3. Use the same keywords you use in your blog posts when writing your comments, as this information is searchable and can increase search results.
  4. Be sure to include your name and a link to your blog in open fields or at the close of your comment.
  5. Link to interesting/valuable content posted on relevant blogs
  6. Share links to posts on other social media properties for example: LinkedIn Status Updates, Twitter, etc.
  7. Ask your readers for feedback or future topics they’d like covered or where you can provide additional details and information; pose questions to audience or bloggers as part of your post.
  8. Reach out to fellow bloggers for guest post opportunities on your blog and on theirs
  9. Approach other bloggers or team members, who don’t necessarily have their own blogs but would like to contribute, and encourage them to build their social eminence by authoring a guest article for your blog. Also, consider co-authoring posts.
  10. Include a link to your blog in all social profiles and in your email signature(s).
  11. Enhance search results by using consistent keywords in the metadata (tags/categories) that resonate with your target audience – be sure to use their language. Consistency of key terms will be indexed by search engines — impacting organic search results.

1 comment
Uncategorized
This post has no tags

Using social for business

Sep 30, 2011

There are so many ways that I use social to conduct business, it’s become natural and critical to my productivity. I realize after some reflection, quite likely I take it for granted. Many companies don’t have the culture, governance, policies, tools and infrastructure in place to support employees to conduct business through social means the way that IBM has for many years.  Working as a mobile employee for nearly 14 years, real time collaboration tools and the telephone are my life line and allow me to conduct work with my IBM colleagues, our agency partners and business partners across the globe.

Here’s a glimpse at how I use social for business daily (and as my friends and family know, into the wee evening hours also).

I conduct web conferences nearly every hour on the hour. Using Lotus Live, I’m able to share various applications, presentations, other content sources and more in real time. Having this ability ensures that everyone in attendance is able to follow along and not wasting time scrambling to find a presentation that was sent via email or other channels. When conducting web conferences, a key feature that I love and use quite often, is the ability to easily pass control to another speaker by simply granting them presenter rights. This allows for a much more collaborative work session. I can also record the session and make it available for replay. The integrated instant messaging/chat function is great for group discussion and questions. The team can post comments, questions and discussion items in real time throughout the conference. We can address the chat in real time or chose to address during the last portion of the call as a Q&A session. The chat function also allows you to send messages to everyone or privately to designated participants as needed. It also has the ability to save the chat dialogue, which I find quite helpful to ensure that follow up items don’t fall through the cracks and to share with others who may have missed the call. All presentation materials, call replay, chat history can then be posted in a collaboration space on Lotus Connections.

I have used Lotus Connections communities for several years now and have become a power user. Originally I started using it as a community manager to conduct digital and social strategy development across a business unit where I had responsibility for multiple product lines. In the beginning, the community had only 10 members, it has since grown to over 700. As an administrator, the membership functions allow me to invite and on-board IBM SMEs from across organizations and geographies to the community very easily. The Wiki space allows me to break out important materials into brand/topic specific categories. I can post and tag files, create work teams to focus on specific activities, use communications tools to inform the community members of upcoming events, new information that is available, a new blog entry and so much more.

I also use some external social venues throughout my work day like Twitter and LinkedIn, which allow me to connect with other like minded professionals who are working on similar initiatives and have valuable information and insights to share. Following and connecting with others has helped me to stay on top of new trends, learn from others who are dealing with similar challenges or just share related topics of interest.

Yes, social is for business, that’s why we call it social business.

Leave a comment
Uncategorized
Tags:

Traits of Subject Matter Experts who are successfully sharing their knowledge and expertise through social networking

Sep 08, 2011

Over the last few years I’ve been working with colleagues across my company to provide them guidance on becoming more effective with sharing their domain knowledge through social networking and collaboration. Many Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) I’ve worked with often ask me “What characteristics are common amongst those that are the most effective and influential?”  The following is a collection of my observations as well as some suggestions from my work enabling the social workforce.

Be true to yourself

Always be true to yourself when you engage in social activities. When establishing a social presence it should be an expression of who you are and what you want to share with others about what you know. Consistently present yourself, using the same tone, in every interaction and communication. Know yourself and be authentic. Be Genuine. Be Real. Be yourself – only you can do that!

Putting yourself out there

I find that the SMEs who become known are those that are comfortable collaborating, commenting, and publishing in social environments in a sustained and highly engaged way. You should assess your comfort level with establishing a public persona. By nature, being active on social means you are putting yourself out in public. When doing so, being honest about who you are and what you know is critical. You need to be comfortable and have a willingness to share your name, your thoughts, opinions, and recommendations to help others who seek your domain expertise. Doing so will help build your character and establish credibility. As you think this through, know your limitations. If you are not comfortable with sharing your knowledge and expertise in such a public forum, you should recognize and respect that.

What are your goals? What do you want to accomplish?

Are you looking to monitor competitors, connect more closely with your customers, or to establish yourself as a prominent thought leader in a particular area? Think about your goals and what you want to accomplish before you get started. Establishing goals will help you to be true to yourself, know your limitations or obstacles as well as provide you context for which tools and venues you should consider as best fit to match your intentions.

Know your audience

Successful SMEs listen to their audience and are willing to leverage listening tools to gather social intelligence and identify the existing social graphs of those they most want to connect with. Consider enhancing your online professional network by:

–       Studying your target audiences wants and needs

–       What questions are they most commonly asking?

–       What issues/problems are they looking to solve?

–       Understand the knowledge sought – do you have something of value to offer? Knowing what is happening TODAY in product or technology vertical is critical

Gather social intelligence to better understand the social ecosystem

–       Pay attention to where they most often participating on-line

–       Which venues? Which communities? Which forums?

–       Who are they connected to?

–       Who are they influenced by?

–       Are you connected with them? If not, why not? Perhaps you should be

Know the rules for engagement

If you are sharing your professional knowledge about a brand or product, you should be sure that you understand the way that topic, brand or product should be represented.

- How should the technology, product or brand be referenced?

- Understand the messaging

- Understand the keywords and natural language your audience uses to discuss the topic, brand or product

- Understand what is OK or NOT OK to share

- What digital assets are available for you to share which would help you help your audience further understand?

Only the passionate survive!

Those that have deep subject matter expertise to share and are passionate believers that knowledge they possess is of interest and will benefit the community they intend to share it with, are the most successful at building a degree of influence. They are relationship builders at heart, who are comfortable with and find value in creating relationships digitally. Successful SMEs are on a quest to make connections and deepen relationships with those who are seeking and understanding of the topic that they are passionate about.

Commitment to sustained engagement

A key trait of successful SMEs is commitment. They strive to sustain engagement long term, while growing and evolving their participation over time to achieve personal and business objectives. They understand that it takes time to build credibility, trust and a degree of influence. They understand that it requires a long-term strategy.

Inquiring minds want to know

Curious by nature engaged SMEs don’t pretend to have all the answers. They know that ambiguity breads commentary and feedback. They often leave the last word to their audience. Doing so allows them to learn more about their audiences needs. It also provides them a way to be responsive to the topic/discussion in a more engaged and relevant way.

Karma

Successful SMEs understand the basic premise of cause and effect, what goes around comes around. They strive to serve the needs of others while receiving insights for themselves. They know that what they publish is permanent and can not be taken back. Remember, if you publish something inappropriate, embarrassing, or hurtful, there will be a record for years to come.

Do you have ideas to share on guiding and enabling SMEs? I’d love to hear them.


2 comments
Uncategorized
Tags: , , , ,

Defining your social strategy

Aug 14, 2011

As you begin planning your social strategy, it’s important to do so with a focus on customer relevance.

You should learn how your target audience is currently using social media, how they’re engaging, what their general preferences are and where they’re participating most often. Looking at a combination of these factors will help you ascertain the value of one given venue versus another, and help ensure your engagement plan is on track with an eye towards maximizing potential. The best way to get started is to develop an ongoing social listening practice that informs your overall social outreach plans. Doing so will ensure that you are targeting your audience with precision.

Social engagement planning with your target audience top of mind

For each social outreach effort, you must determine who you are trying to reach. Historically, this has been done through market segmentation, but the rise of digital media requires us to think differently about the people we wish to engage and how best to connect with them. You should define your target audience sets and then consider:

Who are you really trying to reach?

How will you identify & locate these target audience(s)?

What are their demographics?

Where do they most often participate online?

What are their issues & ambitions?

How do you describe their current relationship to your organization?

Are they positive, negative or neutral toward your brand?

What are their shared pain points and interests?

Once you have these answers, work to define the value your brand provides to the target audience and build a team of Subject Matter Experts who can engage with the audience and share their domain expertise and contextually relevant content. The more targeted and specific you are up-front about your target audience, the easier it will be to create an integrated digital and social outreach plan they will respond to.

Social media can play an integral role in your brand’s overall marketing plan, but like any other tactic or channel, it should not be approached independently.

Rather, social should be incorporated into your larger digital strategy and connected to other properties where and when relevant. When planning to leverage a social presence it’s important to understand what role you expect it to play in supporting your overall business and marketing goals.  This will not only help you frame your approach, it will also help put in place measures to monitor performance, progress, and success.

Social media is not just another venue used to push out content; rather, social gives you the ability to connect your target audience with with members of your brand team and other individuals who have a stake in your brand’s message. It’s about helping you develop long-term relationships.

 

1 comment
Uncategorized
Tags: ,

Keyword selection is critical to social research success

Jun 21, 2011

Selecting keywords for your social listening research is the most critical first step to harnessing relevant insights. In a world with a billion computers, four billion cell phones and a robust global Internet, there is an overwhelming amount of digital messages being posted online every day. Since most are likely not relevant to the brand or specific product you’re building a social marketing strategy for, it is important to determine keywords that are contextually aligned to the on-line conversation you’re interested in understanding.

So how do you get started?

Establishing predefined keywords allows you to narrow down the universe of all possible posts to only those that are relevant to the research objectives. Much like developing a screener to determine who you want to invite to a focus group, for example: “Small Business Entrepreneurs” that are “IT professionals” and are the “primary hardware purchase decision-makers” in the “U.S.”

Determine the criteria for inclusion in the listening sample set by defining the keywords that signal: Include this POST in data collection. If the keywords are too broad, then you will get “noise” (irrelevant posts) but if they are too narrow, then you miss relevant conversation and may draw erroneous conclusions.

Created in collaboration with IBM Market Insights, Social Insights Practice

Keyword Refinement Process

When conducting conversation mining, several “strings” are needed:

– A category string designed to pull in discussion relevant to power-type servers

– A branded string designed to pull in mentions of IBM within the larger discussion of power-type servers

– The category string is shaped into a Boolean keyword string*

– It is primarily composed of the most commonly occurring phrases in the product areas, the idea being that by zeroing in on the terminology that buyers actually use, we will best capture their online conversations

The branded string is primarily based on the IBM branded product names and terms

The original list is re-shaped into a Boolean keyword string*

Here’s an example of a topical hierarchy from a recent project I did for IBM Server & Technology Group, Power Systems brand:

Created in collaboration with IBM Market Insights, Social Insights Practice

 

The following recommendations will help you to get started selecting relevant keywords for social listening research:

  1. Review all of the brand, product specific messaging available to you
  2. Review messaging of key competitors
  3. Categorize keywords into a topical hierarchy
  4. Consider adding a qualifier, such as the Topic name (e.g., Unix, Server)
  5. Think of what other meanings the words you are using may have in the marketplace (e.g., storage, ensembles, power, service management)
  6. Be sure to clearly define what you would consider irrelevant, for example: Power Systems related to technology is relevant but Power Systems related to Power Tools or Power/Utility Systems is NOT relevant
  7. If you are including acronyms, be sure to define and qualify them
  8. Consider qualifying keywords by proximity mentioned to other relevant keywords, this helps to indicate topical relevance of the dialog
  9. Validate keywords through Google or other search engines to validate your selection and qualifiers
  10. Validate keywords through using Twitter search; Think of how Twitter may change words, in terms of abbreviations and slang (e.g., “service” may be “SVC,” “management” may be “mgmt”)

 

*Note: Boolean Keyword String – A set of keywords that employs Boolean logic to focus and return specific, relevant messages in search

 

1 comment
Uncategorized
Tags: , ,

Blogging aspirations to share

Jun 10, 2011

I’m a goal oriented person, so as a neophyte blogger, I’m attempting to establish some goals for myself to help keep me focused and (hopefully) motivated too! I thought these might be helpful to others just getting started. If you have tips to share, I’d appreciate receiving them.

My blogging goals …

  1. Strive to write about what I know and the work I’m leading which I’m passionate about; In every post I’ll do my best to communicate clearly and hope to share information others find useful
  2. I hope to come to know my audience and keep the content that I post relevant to their interests and provide value to readers through sharing experiences and things I’ve learned along the way.
  3. I’ll work on getting to know people that I want to connect with by reading their blogs and when I find content is relevant , I’ll try to link to it
  4. Time is a challenge, but I’ll try to post at least one a week (I’m struggling with this one!)
  5. I’ll try to think about search optimizing my content with keywords and tags that are topical and relevant
  6. When I quote another blogger I’ll be sure to credit the creator
  7. When I post a  comment on another bloggers post, I will always be transparent about who I am and my affiliation
  8. Learn something new about blogging best practices weekly, build on these skills, contribute to discussions on topics of interest amongst the other bloggers I’m connected to
  9. I’ll follow the IBM Social Computing & Blogging Guidelines
  10. Remember, you’ve heard from other bloggers who have gone before you … Don’t give up, even if you’re struggling to find the time or what to write about …. blogging is not meant to be hard, it’s a journey, it should be fun!

1 comment
Uncategorized
Tags: ,

Older posts «