Ryan Anderson dot ca

One of the best books I’ve read in a while is one called Emergency by Neil Strauss.  It chronicles his quest to become completely self sufficient in case of a natural disaster, getting lost in the woods, or some other sort of apocolyptic event that results in a Mad Max kind of society where Mel Gibson rides around the ruins of civilization wearing animal skin and hunting for gasoline.

As such, he finds it necessary to learn how to ride a motorcycle, despite the fact that he’d never even driven a standard in his life.  After a number of stalls and burnouts, his instructor informed him of his problem – he was driving with his sphincter clenched, and that until he learned to relax, all the lessons in the world wouldn’t help his ability to ride a motorcycle.

The notion immediately made sense to me.  I studied jiu-jitsu for about four years, and while I was fairly technically proficient, I was always called out by my instructor for being “too stiff”.  Jiu-jistu is a martial art that’s entirely based in fluid motion in which the entire body works together.  A punch begins in your feet – a throw is entirely controlled by your stance.  Like the force of a whip comes from the energy transferred along its length, the fluidity of motion is what allows a 215 pound male to be thrown through the air by a 13-year old girl (true story).  Introducing tension in the fluid motion interrupts the flow, and weakens the entire stance.

The point of this rather long-winded story is this: one of the biggest problems I see in organizations that want to get into social media is this stiffness, which is usually one borne of fear.  Fear that someone will say the wrong thing, that the organization will be criticized, that someone out there will use your words against you.  But, like tension in a throw weakens your stance, tension in your communications weakens your message.  The result is seen all over the web in the form of sanitized marketing-speak, safe (read: boring) blog posts, and corporate communiques that no one in their right mind could possibly find interesting.

This isn’t to say that you don’t need to be careful what you say on the web – far from it.  However, just like you need to learn to ride a motorcycle or hip toss an attacker, you need to learn and explore social media by doing it.  By engaging in the community, by making mistakes, and by allowing yourself to communicate fluidly.

I completely understand the fear and trepidation that comes before submitting a press release for distribution, an email marketing piece for delivery or sending a large print job to press.  The thing is, social media doesn’t have the same gravity of these things.  Mistakes are easily corrected, and as long as what you’re saying and doing in these realms doesn’t fly in the face of the community or step on ethical guidelines, you’ll recover – and you’ll learn.

Posting something uninteresting on Twitter is not a failure.  Missing opportunities to engage customers in dialogue because of a fear of saying the wrong thing definitely is.  Just relax.

Since I started Fat Canary, I’ve talked to a lot of organizations about social media. One of the trends I’ve seen over the past year or so has been an increased need to bring social media into the organization – no surprise there. The interesting thing has been their reason as to WHY they want to bring social media into the organization.

Perhaps we as PR bloggers and social media pundits have sold our point of view too well over the past four or five years – frustrated by those organizations who “just don’t get it,” but more and more, I’m seeing smart and well-intentioned marketers throwing aside their usual focus on results and driving revenue – you know, that pesky stuff that marketing is actually ABOUT – to invest in social media because either a) their higher ups demand it without understanding it, or b) because the see it as “the next big thing.”

Don’t get me wrong – I think social media can drive excellent results for a lot of different types of organizations, assuming their willing to accept the risk and the culture change that it requires, but not every organization is right for social media. Some require major process and staffing changes that they’re just not willing to make for social media. Some already have the right culture without even realizing it, and with the help of their agency, can dive in and make a serious investment.

The question, when it comes to change, is very well articulated by my friend Joe Boughner.

It seems like I’m splitting hairs but I think they’re important hairs to be split. The tools shouldn’t be leading the strategies. The strategies must define the tools. If your business or association isn’t prepared to be conversational or open, stop trying to get them on Twitter.

I’ve spoken to a lot of organizations who wanted a social media strategy, only to find that what they really needed from us was a solid communications strategy. Sometimes, these included social media components, and sometimes they didn’t, but the important thing is that they were led by outcomes, and not tactics.

I think every organization should explore and understand social media, and that most would benefit from taking the intitial steps of at least listening to what’s going on in their space, but not everyone needs a Facebook page, just like not everyone needs a billboard in Times Square. Marketing is all about understanding your consumer, and bringing relevant information to them while enabling them to inform their tribes about your brand or product. Stop thinking in terms of new media and old media, and understand what your consumer really wants from you – then give it to them.

Let’s face it – we all know there’s a lot of it out there.  The important question is how we advance beyond the advice of self-proclaimed experts and integrate social media into our marketing in a way that moves the needle for our clients or our businesses.

To answer (at least some of) that question, Chris Greenfield, product strategist and Founder & CEO of clever communications will be speaking at the next Social Media Breakfast on the topic Social Media Hype: Getting past the BS and making it work.

From the description:

When ROI means everything, businesses need to focus their social media efforts on their core business goals, with a realistic look at the resources and commitment required to execute well a social media program.

I’ve worked with Chris many times in the past and I can vouch for him being one of the good ones.  He’s also an excellent speaker, so don’t miss the opportunity to see him in Ottawa.  Book your ticket today – http://smbottawa8.eventbrite.com

When

Wednesday, April 15, 2009 from 7:30 AM – 9:00 AM (ET)

Where

Gowlings
160 Elgin Street
Suite 2600
Ottawa, K1P 1C3
Canada

Spring is just around the corner, we’re about to get an exta hour of daylight, and young people’s fancy is turning to thoughts of social media and a light continental breakfast.

That’s right – Social Media Breakfast number 7 is coming up in less than two weeks.  On March 11, we have the pleasure of having Brady Gilchrist, digital strategist and entrepreneur to come and talk to us about the changing mediascape and how social media will fit in with big corporations.  Brady is the digital advisor to many large international brands, so he brings a distinctly unique perspective to the tools we use every day.

As always, you can sign up at the Eventbrite page – http://smbottawa7.eventbrite.com, and we will be hosted at Gowlings Law Firms on Elgin, by our wonderful sponsor, without which this breakfast would not be possible.

In the meantime, here’s the introduction to Brady’s talk:

I hope I’ll see you all there!

When

Wednesday, March 11, 2009 from 7:30 AM – 9:00 AM (ET)

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Where

Gowlings
160 Elgin Street
Suite 2600
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It’s been a little while since last we met, but we’re kicking off the first Social Media Breakfast of the year in style with special guest speaker Stuart MacDonald; CEO of TripHarbour.ca, founder and former CMO of Expedia.ca, and co-founder of the MESH conference.  He’s going to talk about how social media has helped him build the community-driven travel site and the lessons he picked up over his career launching and building online businesses.

This is a must for anyone interested in social media and business.  Stuart is not just an experienced marketer, he’s a fantastic speaker who understands the role of social media in business.

The event takes place on February 20 at the offices of our wonderful sponsors Gowlings, located at 160 Elgin Street.  Tickets are available at http://smbottawa6.eventbrite.com/.

Last Tuesday, I gave a presentation on Reputation 2.0 – reputation management in a social media environment.  I was asked by a few people to put my slides up online, but since they have no real context without me standing in front of them talking, I figured I would write this to accompany the disembodied Powerpoint.  So, as you read this, just imagine me standing in front of the slides saying it.  Then imagine me extremely charming and eloquent, rather than bleary and uncaffeinated from getting up at 5 to set things up.  Got it?  Perfect.

It seems like every week I read more stats about the state of the blogosphere, or new data about who’s using the internet.  These numbers are great for making a point, but they don’t really matter, and they often conflict with one another.  The real information lies in between all of these omnibus studies and online surveys that we cite in our presentations, and that is the fact that most people in North America use the internet, and most of those – especially among the younger and more affluent – are in some way involved in social media.

Reputation, and by extension, the protection of that reputation, has been around as long as self-awareness.  Likewise, as long as there have been companies and brands, there has been a need for companies to maintain their reputation.

Reputation management as a formal business function is relatively new, only surfacing in the early 1900s, but little has changed with regard to the basic principles.  At its core, reputation is the sum of actions, and the perception of those actions.  When media was much more scarce than it is now, most of reputation management centred around perception – it was much easier to spin your way out of a bad spot when there a lack of widely distributed media made it much harder for the public to see through a public statement or key message.

Now, however, media has advanced to the point where anyone has the ability to publish their thoughts to the world, whether they are the smaller percentage of creators – bloggers, podcasters and the like, or the much larger percentage of commenters – those who do not necessarily publish their own content, but add to public review sites like Yelp, ePinions or public forums that emerge around products and brands.

This democratization of production and distribution of product reviews has led to a mediascape that makes it exceptionally easy for consumers to see objective and community-edited opinions on products and companies, and makes it virtually impossible for companies to bamboozle its consumers.  For this reason, reputation 2.0 must focus more on changing a company’s actions than changing the perception of those actions.

Managing your reputation online requires three key elements: listening, analysis and influence.

Listen

The first element is one that every company needs to take to heart. Without actively monitoring the myriad public conversations that are happening every minute of every day in blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, public forums and review sites, managing reputation is impossible.  You can’t change what people are saying about you if you don’t even know what that is.

Start with a simple Google blog search, and find out what people are saying about your brand, about your products, about your company or about your employees.  Listening doesn’t have to be complicated right off the bat, and at the point where you require a more complex system, you can always switch to an enterprise solution like Radian6.

But keep in mind that it’s not only blogs you should be listening to.  As I’ve remarked before, many conversations are moving to Twitter or Friendfeed.  People are sharing photos of your brand on Flickr, videos about it on Youtube and possibly even creating Facebook groups – either for or against – and sharing them with their entire social graph.

Analyze

The second step of any monitoring effort is analysis.  What are people saying about your brand or your company?  Is it overwhelmingly positive or negative?  Is there one thing that many people are harping on?  Is it one segment that is talking about it the most?

These are the questions that should shape your analysis, and will eventually shape what you do to improve or maintain your online reputation.  Look for the good and the bad, and try to really understand what is being said, and especially how these conversations affect your business.  Are people being scared away by bad reviews?  Are they coming in droves because of positive buzz?

Secondly, ask yourself how these comments reflect your actual business?  Take a step back, and try to understand the comments in terms of customer experience.  One comment about customer service doesn’t mean you have a customer service problem, but 100 comments certainly suggests it.  The social web provides you with a persistent focus group – don’t ignore what it has to say.

Influence

The final step of effective online reputation management is influence.  Once we understand what is being said, how do we change it if it is negative, or leverage it if it is positive?

To really influence anything online, you first need to be there – the journey of 1000 miles begins with showing up.  This doesn’t mean you have to spend 30 hours a week blogging, but it does mean that you should be active on Twitter, in comments, and it wouldn’t kill you to have a blog to aggregate it all at one place.

Influence also requires participation – which means engaging with detractors or fans, and going beyond just listening to actively soliciting feedback.  Participation means creating content that places your side of the story in public record – hopefully before you have to react to the other sides negative comments.  Admitting mistakes before anyone else jumps on it can often sway the conversation in your favour, rather than requiring your apologies.  Participation is also about creating a network of sympathetic people who will go out of their way to understand you, and who will eventually help defend you against unwarranted attacks.

There’s a lot of talk about “joining the conversation,” and while that sentiment is 100% valid, there’s one aspect of being active in social media that is rarely talked about.  Dell is active in the blogosphere, and has many sites dedicated to listening and participating, but to suggest that they are there simply because they as an organization are passionate about social media would be silly.  By creating so much content, a search for Dell now requires an entire front page of their side of the story, which is obviously positive, rather than a page of someone else’s side of the story, which isn’t always.

Of course, if your reputation is under fire, you likely won’t be able to SEO your way out of it.  Just like spin doesn’t work as well online, it’s very difficult to suppress the truth through search results.  Google is smarter than that, and is objective in a way that human beings can’t be.  Dell improved its reputation by listening to the commentary about its brand, and changing.  It’s a popular sentiment that we’re no longer in control of our brand – the consumer is.  Of course, that’s not true – companies ultimately control their product, and the content that they produce, but the consumer certainly has a louder voice.  But it’s not because the voice is louder that we should be listening to it – it’s because they’re our customers.  This is not a social media revalation – this is a basic principle of business that was somehow forgotten along the way.

The bottom line to this whole presentation is that on the web, you’ll be seen for who you are and for what is said about you.  If you’re not part of that coversation, you’re not in control of your reputation, and that’s a dangerous thing.

A stage manager I worked with once in my theatre days was asked by a director why he was always so calm, when other stage manager spent so much time dealing with crises.  He replied “being able to put out fires is important, but I prefer to keep the candles away from the drapes.”

Take control of your online reputation, and figure out how to keep the candles away from the drapes.  It’s way easier than putting out fires.

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File this under “posts I’ve meant to write for two years, but didn’t get around to it until I had a decent camera phone.”

This is the chip truck that sits in front of my bank.  One day, I noticed that painted on the side was the sentence:

If you love our fries, tell your friends.  If you don’t, tell us.

That’s a big part of social media, boiled down to its elements, isn’t it?  Spread the word about our product if you love it, and help us make it better if don’t.  Sometimes, all it takes is listening – really listening – to negative word of mouth.

6am – your alarm goes off.  You awaken to a song streamed over the web, and based on your musical preferences and the day of the week.  You fumble, reaching for the skip button, to listen to the day’s top headlines from your news aggregation application.  The clock gives you the weather report for the day, makes suggestions for what to wear, and reminds you that your first appointment is at 9:00.

In the bathroom, you shower and shave, and add a note to your family’s collective shopping list via the bathroom computer that you need more toothpaste.  In the background, an application has already sent electronic coupons to your phone.  As you step onto the scale, your weight and body fat percentage are sent to your lifestream, altering your online workout schedule slightly to accommodate a slight weight gain over the past couple of weeks.

You head down to the kitchen for breakfast, and add a few more items to your shopping list.  You read the rest of your news at the kitchen table on your e-book reader, wirelessly sync your laptop and phone, and head off to the office.

When you get in the car, you find notifications that your friend has sent you a new playlist of songs he thought you’d like, and a crowdsourced website tells you where the best time and place will be to fuel up that day.

When you arrive at the office, you check your communication timeline, a conglomeration of personal and professional messages sent to you from your social graph through any medium.  You notice that a friend has an art opening that night, so you check your wife and children’s calendar, and seeing that they are free, you add the event to yours and notify them.

Your job is different that it was a few years before.  You collaborate with larger teams, most of which are spread across the world.  Projects are managed through an online system, and all documents are stored within the system.  Software is almost exclusively web-based now, with the exception of high-processor applications like video production and 3d rendering.  You communicate with colleagues through a video instant messaging system that allows group meetings, one-on-one exchanges or broadcast messages that will be added to a timeline.  Email is still part of the organization, but it is primarily used for contracts and purchase orders.

At lunch, you leave the office to run a few errands.  As you walk down the street, your GPS enabled phone alerts you that a friend of yours is in the neighbourhood.  Since you both have your status set to “available,” you call him to meet up for lunch at a nearby cafe which was recommended through your mobile device.

On your way back to the office, your phone once again notifies you that one of the items on your shopping list is available for well below regular price at a store you’re near.  Checking the price, you decide to stop in and pick it up.

After the day is done, you head back home, but first you need to pick up something for dinner.  Before you left work, you checked into your online meal planner, and selected a few favourites based on your mood and how much time you had to cook.  You sent the suggestions to your wife, who narrowed it down to salmon with asparagus and rice.

Knowing that you were out of salmon and low on rice, your shopping list automatically added the ingredients to your list on your mobile, and based on your location, route, best prices and user reviews of quality, directed you to the best store to do your shopping quickly before heading home.

Later that evening, at the art opening, you tell your network via your mobile device that you’re at the gallery, and find out that one of your friends has a colleague in the same business as you at the same event.  He introduces you remotely, and you meet in person and talk about the exhibit.  When you part, you add each other to your respective networks wirelessly, and you tag him as a friend of your friend, and a potential business partner.  This tagging system lets you control the flow of information, separating your personal and professional life seamlessly.

When you return home, you unwind in front of the television for a little while, selecting a couple of shows to watch before bed.  Broadcast television is still around, but you watch most of your television on-demand through your internet connection.  You select one network show, and an independent comedy show from Australia produced by a couple of writers in a small studio.  While you watch, you discuss the show with a number of other loyal fans, some of whom you’ve added to your network.  Your personal ratings and feedback on the show actually affect the content of the episodes, so you always make a point to watch and discuss it.  Since the user feedback module is through your remote control, your wife, a recent convert to the show, gives her feedback along with you.

Your ad experience is the same through all shows, and streams information and commercials based on your profile, and what you’ve requested.  Since you’re planning a trip to Italy in the summer, ads for luxury travel packages are common.

Before bed, you head to your computer to pay a few bills.  The system has identified a cheaper banking plan for you, and noted that you keep going over your mobile minutes, and suggests a better plan.  You click ‘accept’ and it deals with all the paperwork for you.  You check your account where you’ve been saving for a new boat, and read some suggestions from fellow bankers on how to save money faster.  One of the members is a chartered accountant, and makes a suggestion that will help you reach your goal a month earlier.  You contact him through the network to say thanks, and to set up an appointment for financial planning.

Before bed, you set your alarm and wakeup preferences, updating your status to “away,” and taking you off the grid until the next morning.

This was a bit of a thought exercise for me, but I don’t think that it’s a social media future that is too far off. In fact, most of this technology already exists, at least in some asynchronous form.  Here, the recurring themes are a single, unified social graph, ubiquitous access to that graph, integration across all platforms, location-aware services, and above all, non-intrusion.  From a marketing point of view, the ads were all served to an individual as information, not as a mass message.  As a result, they were accepted, and not filtered out.  Above all, the entire experience was unobtrusive and simply part of life, rather than another thing to do or website to check.

Social media has a long way to go before it’s a part of everyone’s life, but as the technology for mobile, entertainment and home computing continues to improve and become more connected, a future of social media as an enabling tool in our daily lives, and as a means of connecting in real life is very likely.

Joe Thornley nails it with his post about credibility in social media coming from firms actually being active in the space.  In my day job, I work with a lot of agencies, both advertising and PR, and almost all of them claim to be experts in social media.  The reality is, however, that many of the agencies who tout themselves as experts do not invest adequately in training or in actually participating in the space.

I’ve talked before about the importance of marketing peopel to really dig into social media – exploring both the mainstream and the esoteric, and really understanding the culture.  Sadly, it’s easier to jump to conclusions about technologies based on a cursory knowledge of the space than it is to actually experience the culture and the people.

Traditional advertising has almost nothing in common with social media.  Old models do not apply as they once did, and in order for agencies to call themselves “experts,” they need to move beyond assuming and start participating.

Every now and again, I’m asked to give lectures on marketing and social media. I truly enjoy doing it, simply because I enjoy the feeling of actually educating a room full of people and helping them understand something new or to shed a new light on something they already knew. I don’t think I’d ever want to be a teacher full-time, but the occasional guest lecture is always fun.

I particularly enjoyed speaking to the group I talked to at the University of Ottawa last Wednesday. In the last few years, the business school started an entrepreneurship track that is led by a friend and former professor of mine – Bruce Firestone. I had a lot of business professors when I was in University, but I have to say that Bruce definitely had the biggest impact on my career and my life. Plus, it’s always easier to take business advice from someone who has done something as incredible as found an NHL team, rather than just another academic. It’s exceedingly rare to find both in one person.

My lecture was on, as you may have already read, The Social Startup – the notion that the group most perfectly aligned to make use of social media is entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurial culture of networking and creating opportunities has been largely overtaken by the corporate broadcast mentality – something that has sullied the name of the entrepreneur and created shills and laughable late-night commercials. In reality, the possibilities afforded by social media to the masses are much more in line with entrepreneurship in its purest form – being connected to your customers, understanding their needs and responding quickly.

In an hour, I gave them a brief overview of advertising history, the way media consumption habits are changing, an introduction to the ethos of social media and some examples of entrepreneurs and corporations alike who “get it.”

Overall, I was impressed by how many took what I said to heart and got thinking about how they can start getting more active with social media. I’ll go into more detail on what I said and the questions they asked in the next couple of weeks, but overall, speaking to a group of really smart young entrepreneurs underlined for me the importance for entrepreneurs (or intrapreneurs) to be active in their online communities. We may not be face-to-face with all of our customers anymore, but at the very least, we can understand and connect with them as individuals – and that’s a big part of what being an entrepreneur means.