Margie Clayman

This second fabulous post for the series is by Dawn Westerberg. Based in Austin, Texas, Dawn Westerberg Consulting LLC serves companies from coast to coast and border to border. Dawn Westerberg is the president of Dawn Westerberg Consulting LLC. An Authorized Duct Tape Marketing Consultant, she invites business owners to “Fall in Love with Your Business Again” through sound marketing strategy.

I have a series on my blog called Twitter for Beginners. As I write this post, I’ve got 15 installments in the series. When I posted Part 14, I got a tweet from an acquaintance who asked “If you’re on Part 14 are you really still a beginner?”

In all honesty, I’d have to say yes.

It was two years ago that I really began practicing social media. Prior to that I had seen it, heard about it, and was only registered with LinkedIn. I viewed LinkedIn as the ultimate contact management system with the great advantage of putting the onus of updating contact information on the contacts themselves – a truly great way to stay in touch with all you colleagues past and present. LinkedIn holds vastly more potential than the initial benefit that I saw in it – and that’s part of the reason that, in all social media platforms, I would describe myself as a veteran beginner. With every facet that you master, several new uses emerge.

The next realm I entered was Twitter. I was introduced to Twitter at a conference and several friends gave me a crash course and showed me how to utilize hash tags to see what other attendees were saying about the conference. I was hooked. A year later I was asked to speak on Social Media at that very same conference. I’ve learned so much more since that speaking gig, that it seems to me, I’m still a veteran beginner.

In my early days with Twitter, the more I toyed with it, the more I seemed behind the game and unable to get any critical mass. I seemed pretty stagnant at about 200 followers. I didn’t feel like I was really connecting. I would look at folks that had thousands of followers and wonder what I was doing wrong.

Let me break here and make a quick analogy – Twitter is a lot like XM radio, which I’ve got in my car. At first it was a little overwhelming. Of all the choices, how do you decide what to tune in to? One sunny Austin day, I sat out in my car with the XM station listing in hand and set about programming all of my radio buttons. First, I had to put down the listing and refer to the Honda’s owner’s manual to figure out how to program the buttons. Then, painstakingly, I read through the list and selected channels that I thought would be of interest to me.
How does this relate to Twitter? It’s kind of the same exercise – you need to plug into things that attract people with similar interests. Things started to move for me when I started to participate in Twitter chats. I started to utilize Twitter lists and used Tweetdeck to keep multiple lists open. Between chats and being a more responsive and encouraging follower, the needle started to move. I also thank people for retweeting my links and tweets. Today, I am well over 3,000 followers. I follow most of the people that follow me.

I have various tribes on Twitter. I’ve got my sports tribes – which I connect to via hashtags, e.g. #Longhorns, #Cowboys, etc. I’ve got my chat tribes – #tweetdiner, #imcchat, #blogchat, etc. I have friends that I check in on regularly via my lists.

The next frontier for me will be Facebook. I participate daily (Tweetdeck allows you to keep a column open on your Facebook and LinkedIn feeds, so that’s a big help) but I know that I am not as proficient on Facebook as I am on Twitter. My goal for 2011 is to become more knowledgeable and active on Facebook.

There are many more platforms than just LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook (and I hope to explore more of them soon) but here’s how I differentiate the three (something I shared at a recent #tweetdiner chat): LinkedIn is a business network for me. Facebook is a collection of friends, family and friendly business associates. Twitter is more of an open house. Twitter, for me, is relaxed. It’s also a place for learning, sharing, asking questions – it’s raucous, educational and fun. In contrast, with Facebook and LinkedIn, I am very selective with whom I connect and the tone and frequency of communication is different.

In closing I’d like to share what has been the reward of persevering with Twitter:

1. Great friends. I have met some incredibly wonderful and generous and encouraging people on Twitter. In a couple of weeks, I will meet in person for the first time, someone I have had as a Twitter friend since my early days.

2. Collaborators. As my business has grown, I’ve had the need for outside help. My intern, a press release guru, and a copywriter/designer have all made money and helped me tremendously – all of whom I met through Twitter.

3. Education. I have learned so much about blogging and marketing and the industries that my clients serve through Twitter. Without Twitter, my learning curve would have been slower and less productive.

4. New business. I have actually made money as a result of businesses getting to me via Twitter.

5. Thrills. I’ve had authors I admire and who are active on Twitter comment on my blog!

6. An opportunity to give back. Through Twitter I’ve been able to help and encourage people. In that small way, I feel better about me because I can help as others have helped me.

It has been difficult at times, frustrating at times – but the rewards, as I hope you see, have been more than worth the effort.

Image from hollrahs.com

Have you ever gone to the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame? Apart from the fact that it’s in Northeast Ohio, which means I automatically love it, there are a lot of neat things to see in there. One of my favorites is the room where you can trace influences from one back to another, something that was around long before Pandora came along. Geoff Livingston recently alluded to strings of musical influence, and it got me thinking.

As a blogger, it’s really important that you frame yourself not as someone who can be imitated, but as someone who can influence. In the music world, Roy Orbison embodies that balance perfectly. While a lot of people have been influenced by the man in black, for my money, no one has ever come close to imitating him.

So how can Roy Orbison help you prevent imitation? Here are some things to think about.

Infuse your soul into your work. It’s pretty darned easy to identify a song as one sung by Roy Orbison. With every song you hear, you feel like you’re listening to someone just singing those words for the first time, whether they are words of sheer joy or words of tragic misfortune. Roy Orbison felt every song that he sang. Do you feel every blog that you write? Do you pour your soul into it? It’s a great way to avoid imitation. After all, who else has your soul other than you (If you have a story about a crossroads and the devil, this may not apply to you)?

Tell stories you can believe. Some of Roy Orbison’s most famous songs are the ones in which he tells stories. Pretty Woman describes a scene where a fellow is walking down the street and sees a woman that is just too gorgeous to believe. It seems like she’s walking away, but oh, guess what? She walks back to him. In Running Scared, the story is of a lover’s triangle and the singer winning his lady’s love. If you ask me, few song endings are more joyful and triumphant than the endings of those two songs. As a listener, you feel that suspense, and then you feel that surprise joy. Tell your readers stories as you experienced them. Add details that make the stories uniquely yours. Put your own spin on an experience your readers can relate to.

Don’t pigeon-hole yourself. It would have been easy for Roy Orbison to choose a single type of song and just stick with that throughout his career. He could have been king of the rockabillies. He could have been a crooner. The problem with mastering just one thing is that then you’re offering people tons and tons of ways to study how you do what you do. You can’t help but develop a technique for doing the same sort of thing over and over. Roy kept exploring until the day he died. He sang solo, he sang duets, and he sang with the Traveling Wilburies. He sang heart-wrenching songs like Crying and silly, catchy songs like Oobie Doobie. Could Only the Lonely and Anything You Want be more different? Yet you know it’s all him. His voice, his style, keep it all tied together. This doesn’t mean niche blogging is bad, by the way. It just means that you can approach that niche in infinite numbers of ways. Try things out. Keep the imitators guessing.

Raise other people up. This is something that imitators can’t touch. Roy Orbison easily could have worked solo his entire career, keeping all of his fame to himself. But he did just the opposite. He raised KD Lang to greater heights of fame by singing one of his most famous songs, Crying, with her. His famous concert, Black and White Nights, spotlighted tons of other people including Jackson Browne, Elvis Costello, KD Lang, and of course, Bruce Springsteen. When he joined the Traveling Wilburies he shared the spotlight with Tom Petty, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, and Jeff Lynn – quite an unlikely gathering, by the way. No one can imitate your community building techniques because it’s all about how you interact and engage with people. You just have to do it.

All of these things can influence people in major ways, both in general and in the nitty gritty details. You might have people who will come along and try to sing one of your songs. You might run into someone who is compared to you because of a certain nuanced part of how they do what they do. But you’ll still be you. And there’s no imitation for that.

One of the first posts that I read when I really started blogging a lot was a post by a woman who was coming out in the open about the fact that she was being physically abused by her husband. I read it and experienced a myriad of thoughts. First, I thought it was really great that she was airing her family’s dirty laundry so that she could let other people know that they were not alone. Then I saw it being retweeted all over Twitter, and I thought, “Hmm…what if it ends up in the wrong hands because of all of that retweeting?” Then I thought, “I feel kind of weird knowing that much detail about a person I don’t actually know at all.”

The seduction of many comments

The super personal posts in Social Media are kind of like sirens. They sing to you and say, “Ohhh, you’ll get such good traffic from this. So many comments.” And often times, it’s true. The other nice thing about personal posts, and I think why a lot of people write and publish them, is that they take care of that whole “be human” thing you hear so much about online. If you write about a serious illness, the death of a loved one, or some other major life-changing experience, you are showing people a side of you that has nothing to do with your business.

Then again, it has nothing to do with your business

Here’s where it starts to get a bit thorny for me. If you are out here representing a company, whether it’s your company or one you work for, are you fully weighing the possible ramifications of writing that super personal post? This is what I worry about for people new to the blogosphere.

You see, a lot of times, when you write a personal post, you attract readers that may not normally read your stuff. If you are writing about a struggle with Cancer, for example, you may get readers who are suffering through the same fight. If you’re writing about child abuse, you’ll probably get visitors who are touched by that subject in some way. But if your profession does not have to do with those issues, your new visitors will eventually melt away as you get back to business. You won’t keep them around for the long haul.

It likely will not bump your sales.

The other thing I worry about when I read super personal posts sometimes is that you might be revealing things that could come back to bite you. If you write that your health is really bad, is it possible that someone might say, “Well, that doesn’t seem like a sturdy situation right now – I’m going to hold back.” If you write about something super personal that your friends or family or co-workers didn’t know about, will that come back to haunt you?

Be careful

Of course, I don’t think that personal posts are “bad” or “wrong.” I’m just saying that it can be tempting to send one out into the world after you watch the 50th personal post get 500 comments. Make sure you think about it for 24 hours before you hit “publish.” Think about how you would react to it if you didn’t know you – because a lot of people who read it won’t know you. Think about possible ramifications. Weigh those against possible benefits.

Make sense?

image by Darko Skender. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/ime

Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer wrote a really thought provoking post a few days ago called “Why Ad Agencies Struggle With Social Media.” Jason makes a really interesting argument. He says he feels that the primary obstacle in the way of “traditional” agencies getting more social is the time factor. In other words, where once you placed ad space, waited for the magazine to come out, and then waited another month until your next ad came out, now, with sites like Facebook and Twitter, you could literally be talking to your audience several times a day. Certainly several times a month. This must, without question, stand as a major change from what agencies used to do (and what some still do).

Jason was speaking specifically to agency creatives because his post concentrated on the creative output agencies are putting out there. Now, in our agency, I do a lot of the copywriting but I am not a graphic designer by any stretch of the imagination. However, having worked in the agency world for close to seven years now, I would like to offer some ideas on why agencies might not be creating social campaigns, or at least not social campaigns in the same hemisphere as “Old Spice.”

1. Relationships must be redefined: While Jason is right to note that the time factor is a major change, Social Media is also asking agencies and their clients to redefine how that whole relationship can and should work. As we know, Social Media is very much about the “now now now.” The thing is, if an agency is responsible, they don’t sneeze unless their client authorizes them to do so. The ones that go off on their own are the ones that give agencies overall a bad name. We don’t place space without our client’s consent. We don’t send art to a vendor without a client’s approval. We believe this is good business. I’m sure a lot of agencies do things in a similar way. To work in the fast-moving world of Social Media, the agency and the client must sit down together and work out how that good business relationship can be maintained without negatively affecting the Social Media campaign. This can certainly be done, but the issue needs to be recognized first, and then worked through.

2. The client needs to make some decisions. While an agency can certainly consult with its clients about how best to approach Social Media, there is a lot to the social space that really must be hammered out by the company being represented. An agency can advise on what the corporate voice should be, but the company needs to be completely on board with that proposal. An agency can suggest what to use for a blog design or a Facebook company page, but the company needs to approve those things. That approval can only stem from a corporate understanding of what the goals and objectives are, and that takes a lot of planning.

3. Companies may not feel that traditional agencies can do it. There certainly are plenty of blog posts out there condemning “traditional” agencies, as I discussed in my response to Jeremiah Owyang’s post about Social Media boutiques, digital agencies, and traditional agencies. And, as I said, there are some agencies out there who are still trying to make it as production houses. They certainly can’t make a case for being effective Social Media advisers. Factually, though, agencies can help with all facets of a Social Media campaign, from consultation and design to actually implementing facets of the campaign itself. The issue is that if agencies are doing things right, the definition of “traditional agency” is changing rapidly to become that “hub” I’ve talked about before.

4. Agencies need to figure out who’s doing all of this work. We are all pretty familiar, probably, with the job titles most agencies have. You have your creatives, your copywriters, your account executives, the media department, the accounting department, and so on. So, which of those departments handles Social Media? This is something agencies (and digital agencies count for this as well) need to work out. I think in the end it’ll turn out that the creatives and copywriters and AEs can still work together, just like they did when graphic design moved from pencils and markers to computers and FTP sites. But this is all a transition, and transitions often seem a lot more complex before they are finished than they do after.

5. Agencies need to be treated as a many-headed employee. As I wrote on Dawn Westerberg’s site a couple of months ago, agencies need to make themselves as easy to work with as if the entity was a single employee. This is especially critical when it comes to Social Media. Agencies from top to bottom must be aware of what their client’s objectives are for a Social Media campaign, what roles the company’s customer service department and others are going to play in the campaign, what the expectations are, and many other details. The work should shift seamlessly from the client to the agency as much as it would between different people within that company (maybe even more seamless than that). Again, there are agencies out there who would stand in the way of this happening – but the good ones will want to work with you this way.

One final footnote, as I alluded to in the comments section over at Social Media Explorer, I come from (primarily) the B2B world. Executing a Social Media campaign in this sector of the marketing world can be (though is not always) very different from the B2C world. We aren’t talking to people who will use the products all of the time. We’re talking to the people who will buy the product to make another product that people will use. That can be at times a tough message to get across via a Facebook page or a Twitter account. Not all companies are perfect matches for Social Media, though I know that may be shocking to hear. Painting with broad paintbrushes is almost always a dangerous endeavor because there is always at least one person, case, or company who will prove to be the exception rather than the rule.

Those are some of my thoughts on traditional agencies and Social Media. What have you got going on in your brain? I’d love to continue the conversation with you!

1st Image by Frank Köhne. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/frko

2nd Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/cfi02