Margie Clayman

Marietta, OH

Archives for December 2010

What do I know about you?

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Don’t you hate it when someone who isn’t really involved in “Social Media stuff” says that it’s just so narcissistic? You try to say, “Well, no, it’s about sharing and giving information, and…and…” You have all kinds of answers, right?

So let me ask you a question.

If I go to your Twitter account or your blog page right now, what will I think I know about you?

It’s something perhaps we in this space don’t think a lot about. We think about how we want to project ourselves. We think about what we are putting out there. But maybe we need to approach it differently on occasion. What are others seeing? What are people “getting” if they don’t have the full context of our brains and souls in mind?

Here are some questions. Let me know how you think I or someone else would answer these about, well, you.

What does your picture say about you? What do I “know” if I look at your avatar? Are you an egg in front of a pastel background? Do you not take yourself seriously enough to put a real picture in there? Are you a happy person? Kind of distant? Do I know if you’re male or female?

What does your bio say about you? What do I know about you after reading your bio on your blog or on Twitter? Do I know where you work and what you do? Do I not know anything because there’s nothing there? Are you hiding something? Do I think that you are extremely religious? Do I think that you care about baseball more than what you are tweeting about?

What do your tweets say about you? Do your tweets tell me that you are a vulgar person who swears a lot? Do I think you are not really serious about your work? Do you seem to watch television more than working your job? Do you want to talk with me, to me, or at me? Am I worried about working with you because you seem too goofy or childish, or am I afraid of you because you seem confrontational or snobby? Or do I think we’re on the way to creating a strong friendship?

What does your blog say about you? Do I know what you are passionate about? Does it look like you take the time to proofread and do a spellcheck? Do I think you are phoning it in, or do I think you are working your butt off? Do I think you love your job or hate it? Do I know what you are trying to do?

If you didn’t know you, what would you think? What do you think you know about other people? Have you found out that you’re right? Have you found out that you’re wrong?

Do I know all of the wrong things about you?

What are you going to do about it?

Let’s talk it over.

Do you have SMMPD?

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You’re sitting at your computer staring at Twitter, and you’re thinking, “Hmm. I can count the responses on my @ page with half a hand. I don’t even need all five of my fingers for this.” You’re trying to figure out what the problem is. You’ve read everything out there about how to tweet. You’re keeping your tweets to 120 characters so that there’s room for people to retweet you. You’re posting links to interesting articles. You’re trying to talk to people. But it just doesn’t seem to be working. So you decide that it must be your persona, or your user handle, or some combination of the two, that’s holding you back. You’re going to start again, and this time you’ll keep a certain tonality through all of your tweets. You’ll update your avatar to really seal the deal!

You, my friend, are on the way to a serious ailment called Social Media Multiple Personality Disorder, or SMMPD.

I’m not just blogging about SMMPD, I’m also a survivor

You are not alone in heroically fighting this acronym of an ailment. I’ve had about as bad a case as doctors have ever seen. Over the last year, I’ve had:

4 different Twitter handles

3 different blog sites & URLs

2 different Facebook accounts

And I’m not even going to talk about my partridge in a pear tree.

This is serious, folks.

Now the nice thing about SMMPD is that it is a very preventable burden. You just need to put in a little time.

Start before you start

Do you remember the big 80s anti-drug war call, “Stop before you start?” If you’re too young to remember that, please don’t tell me. Anyway, to avoid Social Media Multiple Personality Disorder, you actually need to start before you start.

Start what, you might well ask, as well you should.

You need to start thinking about what exactly you’re going to be doing. You need to have a game plan. You need to have some X’s and O’s laid out.

I know, this can be a real buzz kill. You’re ready to jump on the Twitter and blogging bandwagon, right? But hey, look what happened to me. Do you want to admit, one year from now, that you went through 4 different Twitter handles? I would think not.

So, let’s talk about things you can plan in advance. These are things I really wish I would have thought about at least a little bit before signing into Twitter hastily during a lunch break (true story).

What are you hoping to achieve? When I started that first Twitter account, I had the very loosy goosy, not 100% honest objective of “seeing what Twitter was about so that we could discuss it with our clients.” That was part of my goal, but that’s not really something to shoot for. As a result, my tweets were scattered, not very personal, and probably were kind of boring. My blog? I had less of a plan for that. What do you really want out of Twitter? Or if you’re tweeting for business, maybe the better question to ask is what actually need from Twitter. What do you want your blog to do for you? Don’t say, “Oh, I just want to write.” Really think about it.

How are you going to achieve those goals? Your goals will create a path for you, but you can still decide how you want to travel on that path. Some people just walk on the path – their tweets might be straight-laced for the most part, very professional, very business-oriented, perhaps. Other people might run – they want to reach their objectives as quickly as possible. Still others might choose to skip or hop on foot. How are you going to travel on the path you’ve set for yourself?

Who are you? This probably seems like either a really deep and existential question or a really simple question. Either way you slice it, you need to know how you want other people to be able to answer this question. It doesn’t really matter how you answer it, right? You already know you. You already know your company. If you ask someone a year from now, “Based on my tweets or on my blog, who do you think I am? What kind of person am I?” what kind of answer do you want to get?

This is just the beginning of what you need to start on before you actually start tweeting or blogging. Now, don’t panic if you’ve already started tweeting and blogging. Take a step back, invest in some time to answer these questions, and then see if you want to stay on the path you’re on or if you want to move on over to another one. Changing once is “finding yourself.” Changing as much as I did is when you need to see your Social Media physician.

What I did wrong

So how did I end up with SMMPD?

Simple. I didn’t start before I started the first time, the second time, or the third time. I jumped from one idea to another without really thinking about the ramifications. I didn’t have a compass. I didn’t even have a destination. I was just loafing about, hoping that something I would say would magically become viral. Viral in a good way, not in an “Ew” kind of way. Guess what? It didn’t work.

Now let’s talk about you

Are you worried that you might be showing signs of SMMPD? Are you feeling that itch to change your name or move your blog or create a whole new online persona for yourself? Before you jump into something new, let’s talk about it. Why are you feeling the need to change? Have you thought about ways to achieve your goals based on where you are now?

Talk to me. Let’s prevent SMMPD.

Image by Benjamin Earwicker. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/bjearwicke

Do you need a slap in the face?

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Well, do ya? Punk?

Maybe you’re saying to yourself, “Man, my Google Analytics graph looks like it’s trying to dig a hole to China. Maybe I should give up.”

Maybe you’re saying to yourself, “I’m just tired of tweeting as if I’m alone in the universe. It’s so depressing. I don’t get it. This isn’t worth my time.”

Maybe you’re wondering if this whole Social Media experience is just a reflection of how dumb you are, or how inept you are, or how unattractive you are as a person. After all, look at all of those successful people. It all seems to be effortless for them.

Yep, you need a slap in the face. Are you ready for it? Lean in, a little closer. OK, here it comes.

We. Have. All. Been. There.

Here are a few things I can tell you.

The people for whom it all looks effortless – they’re like ducks. They might look nice and serene floating around on the pond, but their legs are paddling madly under the water. And guess what? This’ll really knock you silly. The more effortless it looks, the more effort it takes.

Social Media is maddening. It’s maddening because it’s all about people, and people are unpredictable, weird, silly, aggravating, and all kinds of other things. Nobody can really predict what an entire population will do about anything. Do you think you’re the only one who gets mad amounts of traffic for posts that you think are your worst? No way. Not by a long shot.

It all takes so much more time than you think it will. I know, you came into this thinking that it would be a matter of minutes a day. Maybe an hour. It’s not. It’s hours, and the hours pile up into days, the days into weeks, and so on. And sometimes, like maybe right now, you just aren’t sure if it’s all worth it.

It’s worth it. You’re worth it. So now what?

Let’s figure this out together.

We’re going to figure out this game. Over the next several months, we’re going to talk about Twitter and how you can defy the overwhelming chorus of crickets that greets you. We’re going to talk about your blog and why no one seems to care about what you’re saying. We’re going to analyze how you can build your blog into your Twitter account and how you can bring your Twitter crowd to your blog. We’re going to look at what you’re doing and see what’s working and what’s not.

This is not going to just be me babbling at you via my blog posts, so don’t think you’re going to get off easy. I need to learn a lot too. Maybe you have that darned corner piece of the puzzle that I’ve been looking for. Maybe you have that “Q” that will work really well with the “U” I’ve had since we started the game.

No more Debbie Downer or Dirk von Depressing

We’re going to work together as a team, and we’re going to strengthen each other as we go. But do you know what will be our kryptonite?

Those thoughts I threw out at the top of this post.

It’s entirely possible that you are not yet as successful as Darren Rouse. It could be, and I don’t want to shock you here, that you haven’t made a fortune on Facebook yet.

So what?

It ain’t over till it’s over, and we’re far from that point, now aren’t we?

I’m looking forward to embarking on this journey with you. I hope you are looking forward to embarking on this journey with me.

You are ready, aren’t ya? Punk?

what lies at the core of good customer service?

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What is the essence of good customer service? It seems like it should be an easy question to answer, doesn’t it? But when you try to pin down exactly what defines good customer service, it becomes slippery.

Of course, defining bad customer service is really easy. Long hold times. Poor product quality or poor support. The stories of companies who do it wrong are numerous.

Who does it right?

As you think about this issue, take a look at this amazing post by Fred McClimans analyzing the qualities of leadership that good customer service requires. Who embodies those characteristics? Who is our role model?

Image by Rob Owen-Wah. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/lockstockb

Book Review: UnMarketing

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I have here at my desk a copy of Scott Stratten’s UnMarketing, My review: it’s good, but it could be better.

Let me get the good things in front of you first.

The tonality of the book is extremely engaging. Scott has a great writing style, and you can see that he clearly infused his personality and passion into this work.

The topics in the book are extraordinarily important for marketers to consider. It is an invitation, in book form, to analyze the old ways and see if they are really working for you. In particular, I think that Scott’s idea of the hierarchy of buying is extremely important for businesses today. Essentially, as outlined in the first chapter, UnMarketing describes how relationships and trust can make or break your business. The way that you market creates trust and relationships, and therefore, you need to think about how you’re marketing. This, to me, is the single most valuable nugget, kernel, and core of the book.

The book is based on the premise that cold calling is the best way to shoot for the bottom of the barrel when it comes to both trust and relationships. If you’re cold calling, you’re reaching people who have absolutely not expressed any interest in you so far as you know. They have no reason to trust you, and in fact, since you’re cold calling them, their trust of you is probably starting at  a negative 57. The peak of the hierarchical mountain is the current, contended customer who trusts you and who may even spread the word about your products and services.

Based on this foundation – the hierarchy of buying, UnMarketing proceeds through many different topics, ranging from customer service, Twitter use, Social Media in general, events, and seminars.

There are a LOT of nuggets in here that can be useful. For example, are you aware of all of the gaming that goes on with book testimonials? With Amazon best seller lists? It’s pretty interesting stuff.

How it could get better

The reasons that I enjoyed this book also create the foundation for where I think it could be better. I felt at times that the chapters kind of meandered away from the central theme a bit. For example, when you get to Chapter 42, titled “Hello, Walmart?” you encounter a brief description of how Wal-Mart’s motto is great customer service, but how Scott conducted an experiment and found that Wal-Mart’s customer service leaves much to be desired. It seems that Wal-Mart’s reputation for low prices outshines its reputation for customer service for a good reason. Now the lesson in there is good – practice what you preach, be authentic. But you want there to be more to that tale.

Here is my opinion – I think that the book could have been narrowed to far fewer, much longer chapters. Many of the chapters are just two pages, and they really appear more as vignettes rather than full supports for the main thesis. Maybe it’s my academic background that is making me a biased reader, but at the end of a lot of chapters, I was left thinking, “Okay, so, where can we go with this information?”

An example of a chapter that I think could have been built out or added to another is chapter 37, titled “Your transparency on Twitter.” I agree with every single thing in this chapter. Auto-tweets can be dangerous if you aren’t telling people those are auto-tweets. People get upset when you don’t interact with them. If you’re using a team of people to run your Twitter account, you should let people know, and you should give your community a way to know who is talking at what time. Couldn’t agree more.

But the chapter just delineates those facts. It left me hungering for a bigger meal of information. What are the ramifications of being inauthentic on Twitter, for example? Guy Kawasaki’s use of 2-3 other people to run his account is mentioned. Has that admission hurt Guy’s brand? Seemingly not. Would it hurt a business’s brand? Has it?

How can your transparency on Twitter translate back to targeting that highest bullseye of the buying hierarchy – the trusting, contented customer? I think there are a lot of important lessons there that go outspoken. And sure, if you’re smart you can probably piece things together, but the particular style of the book makes me want to see how the author pieces those things together. I’m disappointed it’s not there.

Do I recommend reading this book? Yes, especially if you are new to the world of using Social Media for business. I think UnMarketing could serve as an extremely helpful guide as you go along, especially in terms of avoiding common pitfalls.

Did I like the book? Yes.

Could I have liked it more? Yes.

If you’ve read the book, what did you think of it? I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

Integration in Action

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Last Monday, the topic of #mmchat was Best Buy’s TwelpForce, and we got to hear directly from John Bernier.

Check out this great summary of the conversation by Joseph Ruiz, including emphasis on how Twelpforce succeeded in part because of an integrated approach – not just integrating the company’s efforts but creating something that was of and for the customer.

What other companies are succeeding in the use of integration? So often we hear that “nobody gets it.” Clearly Best Buy does. Are they the only ones? Tell me about your examples!