Following on from by previous post about a social media and connectedness case study from the Socialnomics web site, here are my thoughts having read this book...
Listen or connect? - Following blogs is likely to form connections, it is largely a "listen" form of communication closer on Marshall McCullan's 'broadcast' culture that the 'digital' culture that we are moving into now, especially with social media. Social network platforms like Twitter, Facebook or Linked In are much more likely to create conversations and connections. From a business perspective these are much more likely to generate interest and new leads.
Its all very well for Qualman to show how large companies like Starbucks can tweet about a free coffee and afford to give loads of small value items away, but smaller companies and charities have finite resources, especially time which is expensive to give away.
Qualman says on page 133 "Middlemen are becoming less important than they have been in the past, and the rise in power is shifting rapidly to the social graph". With peer review and recommendation together with the trust of people in your network there will be less need of middlemen. Or to putting it subtly, not, bypass the middleman and go to the horses mouth?
On page 130 he says "Often our customers will market the product better than we can". In a social media world this can be really powerful". We have always had personal recommendation but it has always been a one to one word of mouth. How we have what Qualman describes as a 'world of mouth', or a 'many to many' digital culture to use McCullan speak, our clients can tell the world how good we are and it will have much more respect than saying it ourselves. So we need to encourage our clients to share their experiences of our services. But we have to make sure that we maintain the correct balance in our conversations so that the marketing doesn't stand out as 'selling'.
Qualman dedicates chapter 6 "Death of Social Schizophrenia" to the need for everyone to have one persona or identity in this connected world. Where as before we could have a work, social, and family peronas and maintain them because we could keep each segment of our lives separate. Now in a connected world we can't get away with it. Our work colleagues see what we are doing at home, our friends see what we do at work and so on.
Play to your strengths, on page 135 Qualman says "Being well rounded as a company, or an individual is less beneficial. Its more productive to play to your core strength. This differentiates you from the competition. You need to stand out in order to be outstanding" He then goes onto to refer to a book called Strengths Finder which I have read and been through the programme to identify my strengths a while a go. If you haven't done it, I can strongly recommend this programme above other similar ones. A number of times I have considered some possible diversification routes, like becoming a video editor and rejected them. I am an audio editor and producer, sound is what I do, so I am much better to play to my strengths than invest a lot of time and money trying to improve weak spots, only to end up making them less weak.
Embed the sponspor - Qualman does an in depth study of an American series called Football Fantasy and how the presenters decided to set up a podcast in their own time. One of the reasons they did this is there were TV presenters one day a week as it was a weekly show, where as they have made the podcast a daily show and so are able to react to changing stories and audience responses so much quicker. Also because it was a podcast they didn't stick to a standard programme slot. They made the podcast as long as it needed to be to cover the content that day, rather than make the content fit the slot. They also developed techniques for embedding the sponsor and the sponsors content into the programme. They didn't use standard ad format straps and spots. Rather they worked the sponsors message into the programme content which provided variety so they weren't using the same spot every time. Qualman says on page 142 "Consumers today in particular Millennial's and Generation Zer's don't want adverts to shout; they'd rather have conversations and ongoing relationships with companies". If the ads top and tail a podcast they can easily be stripped off when the content is spread virally. However if the sponsorship references are embedded in the programme and become an integral part of it, then they travel virally too!
On page 148, Qualman talks about CNN anchor Rick Sanchez who started tweeting and realised that it was more important to talk less about himself and more about the interviewees. I need to balance my posts and tweets about my work with other material so I don't just end up shouting about myself.
On page 175 Qualman outlines how social media gives you so much more data about your audience and their habits. We need to use that data to determine our marketing decisions, 'The audience has spoken'. Remember if we create conversations, that will lead to a trusting relationship which is so much more valuable. So shouldn't PR folk be asking what we can do to create these conversations.
With our experience surely we can help clients develop these conversations, also look at the complete web presence. On page 221 Qualman outlines the Skittles experiment with their web site in 2009.
They turned their static web site into a simple landing page with some links took you off their site to social media.
"Connect = Skittles Facebook page
Video = Skittles YouTube channel
Photos = Skittles Flickr account
Info = Skittles Wikipedia entry
News = Skittles blog.
Skittles were acting as an integration point or hub to great authentic content that existed elsewhere about them".
This shows that we need to be prepared to experiment and that will mean we fail sometimes but Qualman has a phrase he repeats through the book about failing - Fail forward, fail fast, fail better.
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