What has struck though me is how many people are already claiming to be Google+ experts. It has been up for what – three weeks? From what I can tell, it is still a work in progress. It appears Google is still tweaking the features. So how can anybody claim to be an expert in something so new?

Frankly, I am always skeptical of anyone who calls themselves a social media expert. I have noticed that the people who are really good at it – Brian Solis, Seth Godin, and Sara Evans to name a few– never call themselves experts. Heck, for that matter I have never heard or read where Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, or Twitter’s Biz Stone call themselves social media experts. Ditto for Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who created the most dominant search engine ever. And of course, it is their company that created Google+.

If the people who created some of social media’s essential tools, and the people who use those tools most often don’t claim to be experts, how can someone out there in Cyberland claim to be? In fact, most of the people who occupy the social media space are still trying to figure Google+ out.

“Robert Scoble invited 1,000 of his friends during the weekend so he’d have enough mass to figure it out,” Gini Dietrich, chief executive officer at Arment Dietrich, Inc.  in Chicago blogged a couple of weeks ago. “Jay Baer thinks there are business applications (I don’t agree…yet). Chris Brogan has 10 reasons he thinks it will be a Facebook and Twitter killer. Jason Falls thinks it is a Facebook competitor and some of his readers hope he’s right just to see something different and/or better.”

I should note that Dietrich is as big a skeptic as I am about Google+. In a July 18^th blog, she wrote: “As of this writing, it has been 24 days since Google+ launched. That is not enough time to figure out a) if it has business applications, b) how it truly works for networking, and c) what it’s value is going to be. For heaven’s sakes. If it goes the way of Buzz and Wave, you’ll have wasted your money. (paying someone for training.)

“Not to mention, it’s still in beta and doesn’t open up to the world until the end of this month. It will be at least a year of use before we figure out its idiosyncrasies.

“But there are still people out there claiming to have all the secrets because they claim to have introduced Twitter to the business world so surely they understand how Google+ is going to affect your daily life. Add to that, they’ve spent 250 hours inside the tool, learning and using.”

Dietrich did the math. She figured out that someone who spent the last three weeks “learning” Google+ spent 11 hours a day doing that. Who has that kind of time to learn one application?

These so-called experts illustrate a major problem with social media. To put it briefly – the used car salespeople have moved into the space. You know the type – the loud pushy ones who claims to be an expert in something. They are not, they are just in it for the quick buck.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are going to fall for their pitch and waste their money on a “training” course that gets them nothing but makes them a little poorer. Those eager ones want to be on the cutting edge, even if all that happens is they end up bleeding.

As Ken Kesey said in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest: “The secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he’s getting it.”

I have previously written about selling social media to a company, but that’s only the first step. There is more to be done after completing the initial sale than there was before the sale.

We who do social media full-time forget what a culture change it is for most organizations. Not just for those people in the C-Suite, but for everyone down to, and including, the receptionist. Remember, up until to about six years ago, most employees didn’t have to worry about social media or marketing their company in any way.

“Too often, people from company “A” will recognize great success that company “B” is having by doing XYZ with social media,” Blogger Adam Christensen wrote. “So, logically, they decide to do the same at company A. But the results are dramatically different. Why? Because they didn’t account for the corporate culture variable which is inevitably different between the two companies.”

Christensen is currently the director of social and digital communications and marketing at Juniper Networks in San Francisco. Until April, he worked for IBM in communications and marketing where he led IBM’s social business strategy and execution globally. He worked on projects including IBM’s Watson and Smarter Planet.

So first, what is corporate culture and how’s it formed?

Well, corporate culture is essentially an internal brand. It doesn’t exist until the majority of people at the company buy into it. The company’s leadership and employees who have the same values and assumptions about their place of work create it. Although it can awhile for a company to form a culture, once formed it can be difficult to change.

Why? Because it provides a sense of belonging and safety to the people who work there. Remember, in every company there are the written and the unwritten rules. The unwritten rules are that which forms the culture. By following both sets, especially the unwritten one, an employee can generally minimize surprises and things out of the ordinary.

The problem is that same culture can keep a company from taking the calculated risks they need to stay viable. Consider the bookseller Borders or the video rental company Blockbuster. While I don’t know the ins and outs of what happened to each, I know from being a customer of each that their cultures were wedded to a way of doing business that was clearly no longer viable.

Those examples are not going to stop other companies from making the same mistakes. Staying in one place is usually the normal human state.

So along comes someone like myself telling the leaders and employees they need to adopt social media if they want to remain in business. Yes, they know about Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and the other social media sites. They might even say they want to do it. But it still means a huge culture change.

So what do you do? Well, first it takes an intensive education program. You need to show everyone how social media works and what it can do for the company. You need to show each employee how they fit into the plan.

You also need to get their input. You need to find out what they are comfortable with and what they are willing to start with. As I always say, you have to crawl before you can walk.

Once you and the leadership feels that employees are ready to dip into social media, start out internally. Set up internal blogs, an employee Wiki and other applications. Let as many employees as possible play, learn, grow, build relationships, and develop the needed collective awareness. Once the employees are comfortable with it, take it public. It will work then.

Let me tell you where I stand – I am very reluctant to connect with someone who does not include a picture. I am active on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Friendfeed, YouTube, Plaxo and a number of other sites. You will find my mug on every site that asks for it. My feeling is the more information one provides, the better.

Although I have not read every comment in the photo debate – who has the time – those taking the time to write something seem to be split 50-50 on the question. What amazes me is that people are writing fairly long posts on the issue. Of course, like most of these discussions, it wanders off course and ends up being filled with invective.

As an aside, I am continually amazed how people are willing to say things on the ‘Net that they would never say to a person’s face. Someone needs to write an “Emily Post” for the web.

Getting back to my main point, providing as much information about yourself and company is extremely important. Let me count the ways:

• A company that would like to do business is going to do its homework. That means they are going to gather as much information as possible about your business. Make it easy for them. It is human nature to favor the easiest path. If you make them search too much, they are going to look at some other company.
• The same goes for those of you looking for a job. The last statistic I saw showed that 85 percent of human resources people go to LinkedIn first. Besides making it easier, the more information you provide, the better. When things are missing, those make hiring tend to get suspicious.
  • A note about running pictures for those job seekers who, like me, are aging. I have heard the argument that we have a better chance with hiring managers if they don’t see our picture. So what are you going to do when you go to the interview? From your resume alone they are going to figure out how old you are. To me, it is a form of lying not to include a picture.
• The more information provided, the higher your company’s search ranking. That is, of course, if you provide the information with SEO in mind. Of course, you want that higher ranking so more people can find your business.

Now I know many people argue that won’t provide some information because of the fear of identity theft. Well, unfortunately, an identity thief doesn’t need your online profile. There is so much information floating around out there about all of us that it is impossible to keep much things secret anymore.

Of course, no one should post such things as their birthday. That’s just common sense. But one of the things you give up when you go on the Web is a lot of your privacy. It is just world we live in.

So lean into it and post that picture and all the other information. It is going to help much more than it will hurt.

Facebook has more users, YouTube has more viewers, Twitter updates more often but LinkedIn is where the people and companies you want to reach reside. As I tell clients, LinkedIn is the adult Facebook.

“ … what businesspeople appreciate and respect about LinkedIn is that is has significant processes and controls that keep it from becoming like Facebook,” writes LinkedIn expert Wayne Breitbarth in his book The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success. Kick-start Your Business, Brand and Job Search.

I highly recommend Breitbarth’s book. I have over 13,000 followers on LinkedIn. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the site. After reading the book, I realized that I knew just enough to be dangerous. Thanks to Breitbarth’s book, I am a much more savvy LinkedIn user.

So the first question is why used LinkedIn? I will let Breitbarth explain. He explains it through what he calls the Power Formula: “Your Unique Experience + Your Unique Relationships + The Tool (in this case, LinkedIn) = The Power.

What he means is that combining LinkedIn with your existing relationships and experiences will give you a decided advantage over your competitors. By using LinkedIn you can develop and refine your brand by a creating strong LinkedIn profile and expanding your network of contacts. Doing those things will help you accomplish your goals for yourself and your company.

LinkedIn is the place to show your experience and your expertise. It is the place where those you respect can state that in an endorsement. It is where you can connect with potential clients and employees. It is pretty much the Swiss army knife of social media sites.

Now there are many ways to use LinkedIn. But use it you must. You cannot simply sign up for it and expect the masses to find you.

The first you have to do is set up as complete a profile as possible. Breitbarth calls the top part where you list your name, title, business and location the “30-second bumper sticker.” The information listed there travels around LinkedIn with you as you post information, join groups, and comment on other’s activities. As Breitbarth points out this is the more important section of LinkedIn. He has found that many people will look no further than that box. Let me add that when I search for somebody, that’s the first thing that comes up on Google.

I also, and Breitbarth agrees, strongly advocate putting a professional looking photo there. To me not including a photo means you are hiding something. I know the argument that many of my fellow boomers make – that people are going to know how old they are if they post that picture. Well you know what, they are going to find anyway. If someone contacts you through LinkedIn for a job interview, what are going to do – have plastic surgery to make yourself look 26-years-old? So just deal with it.

After that, the key to profile to your profile is being as detailed as possible. The last study I read found that 85 percent of human resources people to go LinkedIn first when looking for a job candidate. You want to give them as many reasons as possible to pick you.

The next key is endorsements. This shows what others think of your work. People have been kind enough to endorse my work. It shows potential clients or customers that you are someone with whom they should do business.

Now, I have a firm rule on endorsements. I will not endorse anyone who I have not worked with. It is simply dishonest. How can one provide an objective analysis of work you have never seen. Likewise, I will not ask for endorsement from someone I don’t know.

Now, I have been lucky in that most of my endorsements are unsolicited. I think those are those are the most objective. On the other hand, I can understand asking for them from people who know your work well. I have also done that.

One more thing – LinkedIn groups. I highly recommend joining as many as LinkedIn will allow. That is currently 50. Those are the place to meet like-minded people, share information, get questions answered, and again demonstrate your expertise.

I don’t think there is any social media site that is as complete at LinkedIn. In fact, if you are going to join only one site, make it LinkedIn.

Granted, it would be better if those residents of the C-Suite had a guide who knew how to lead them throw the social media jungle. Obviously I think social media is the best marketing tool to come along since traveling medicine shows. Both relied on word-of-mouth to sell their products. One was and one is highly effective.

While those executives should do a better job of searching, I also fault we social media marketers. We are part of the problem. We need to make a better case for what we do. We need to show the skeptical executives that the social media sphere is the best place to be. These are people who are used to “fire and forget” marketing. In their world they tell their marketing people to hire an agency and produce a campaign. The only time an executive sees the campaign is in the final approval process. You have to show them how social media is replacing all of that.

What those executives want is a demonstrated method that is going to drive sales and profits. They want to know what the return-on-investment for the money, time and effort they are going to have to put into social media. They don’t feel any need to tell their friends where they are eating or whether they are leading in some kind of faux friend race.

So what do you do to convince them there they should be parking some of their marketing dollars in social media?

First, let me tell you what I don’t do first. I never show anyone Facebook as a marketing tool in the first meeting. To the average 50ish executive, Facebook is where their children post pictures of their dogs and friends. Plus, they have had their personal people tell them a seemingly good job candidate was rejected because of those pictures from that fraternity party. At best they see no need for Facebook, at worst they see it has a huge waste of time. As I once had an executive tell me: “there is a reason why I do not want to connect with people I knew in high school.”

What I do show them are the facts and figures showing how effective certain kinds of social meeting marketing can be. I also show them examples of companies such as Ford, Zappos, and others that used social media to expand their footprint in their marketplace.

When it comes to specific sites, I usually start off talking about what Linkedin can do for their company. Why Linkedin? Well in the business world it is viewed as the adult Facebook. Most likely the executives you are talking to have a Linkedin profile. They understand how it works and its effectiveness. They know their company has found good candidates for open positions.

In short, they understand how effective Linkedin can be when used properly. It is an easier sell. Not easy, but easier.

The second thing I talk about is blogging. It is a little tougher to sell than Linkedin. Executives usually balk at first when I tell a blog is not a sales document. But when I show how potential clients are drawn to the company’s website by a well-written blog that demonstrates the company’s expertise, the light bulb usually goes on.

From there I move onto YouTube. Watching a video campaign – such as “Will It Blend” shows the effectiveness of using sites such as YouTube. After that comes Twitter, which I describe as a billboard for their company. It is a term they understand.

I also make it clear that it usually takes six months to a year to see the results of a social media campaign. By then, having seen the results of successful campaigns, they get it and are willing to make the investment.

What I just gave you was view from 35,000 feet of my process. Trust me works, but only if you are careful to separate the substantive from the nonsense.

The key to marketing is twofold: to build word of mouth about your company and to increase your Google rankings. A blog is the best way to do both.

People who read and like your blog will tell others about it. They will retweet it, post it on Facebook, and generally spread the word. This builds credibility for your company. It builds Google rankings because the more people who read your blog, the higher Google will rank your company.

Look at the chart below from Cambridge, Mass. – based HubSpot. Note that companies that blog receive an average of 55 percent more visitors to their websites. But I am not going to bore you with a lot of data. Instead, I am going to tell how I do it.

Now granted I was a reporter from 26 years. I am used to writing on deadline. I know the rules of grammar. But as anyone who is a consistent reader knows I am not perfect. I strive for it, but I rarely reach it. You don’t have to be a great writer to be a blogger.

So here are my keys to blogging:

• First, lets talk about what a blog is not. It is not a sales tool. You try to sell something through a blog and you will have no readers. The social media sphere hates blatant attempts to sell.
• What a blog is a way to demonstrate yours or your company’s expertise in a particular area. It is also a way for current and potential clients and customers to connect with your company. It is a place for them to comment, compliment, debate, and criticize. It is a place for you to respond to all of that.
• Choose an overall theme. This blog focuses on social media, marketing and public relations. My readers know they come to PR 101 to read about those topics. This is important. Every successful blog I have read focuses on a particular area. Readers want to know what to expect when they come to the blog.
• Coming up with things to write about – this is often the toughest thing. It is what usually stops people from doing a blog. Here’s what I did before I started this blog more than two years ago: I wrote out a list of 24 things I felt I knew enough about to sound semi-intelligent about. That kept me going for about four months. Now I do research and follow what’s going on so I always have topics. I also try to have a couple of “evergreen” blogs in the hopper in case I am not able to write a new blog that week.
• A note about length – I read some blogging guides that say your piece should be no longer than 250 or 400 or 500 words. Balderdash. Some of my most read pieces have been over 1,000 words. Write something interesting and compelling and the readers will come.
• Be consistent when you publish. If you decide to post a new blog every Monday, do it. Readers want to know when they can expect to see a new post. Incidentally, I used to post on Mondays and Wednesdays. I moving that to Tuesday and Thursdays because of my work schedule.
• Do your research on the topic you are writing about. Yes a blog is part opinion. But back that opinion up with quotes and citations from your sources. When you do quote someone, link to the site from which the quote came, unless you actually interview them. If you interview them, make that clear. I do both. I think it provides a nice mix.
• It takes time to build a readership – usually at least six months. So be patient and don’t give up.
• To build that readership, you need to post links to your blog on as many sites as possible. I post on Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Delicious, Stumbleon, Friendfeed, Google Reader and Linkedin. I also have a dedicated group of readers who have requested I send them the link via email. In addition, I use Google Friend Connect, which is on my blog site. Those people also get the blog as soon as it is published.
• Which brings up another issue – make sure on your blog has share buttons so your readers can spread the word. I will always be grateful to those people who share my blog with their followers.

I think that advice should get you started. If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask.

An interview with City University of New York Associate Professor Jeff Jarvis on National Public Radio last week actually made me pull my car over so I could listen carefully and take notes. He was talking about the French Prime Minister’s Nicholas Sarkozy’s suggestion that governments regulate the Net.

While I normally confine my blogs to marketing, public relations and social media, Jarvis reported on something that could affect all two billion Net users worldwide. So I felt I had to write about it. We all need to stand up, take notice, and in my opinion, oppose any effort by any government attempt to control the Web.

Jarvis is the university’s director of the Interactive Program and director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. Among his many accomplishments, Jarvis is a national leader in the development of online news, blogging, and other forms of collaborative journalism, blogs at Buzzmachine.com and is the is author of the book, What Would Google Do?

In short the man is an Internet expert.

Prior to the regular G-8 meeting, Sarkozy held an “e-G8” meeting to which the German news site Der Spiegel said he invited three of the world’s most powerful Internet luminaries to a forum in Paris: Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, the world’s largest search engine; Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and head of Facebook, the world’s largest social-networking site, with more than 650 million users; and Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer. Many other Netizans, including Jarvis, went to the event.

Incidentally, note that the power trio is all Americans.

The gist of Sarkozy wants to do is having governments control the Internet. In his view, governments have a legitimate right to regulate the Web as they are only representatives of a country’s cititzens. He argues that things such as child pornography and terrorism have to be dealt with by governments.

“More than three years ago, Sarkozy declared war on the Web,” Der Spiegel reported. “At the time, he referred to it as a “Wild West” and characterized it as an ‘extralegal zone.’ In the style of an Internet Napoleon, he announced his intention to ‘civilize the Internet.’ Since then, he has pursued regulation with nothing short of missionary zeal.”

Curiously, I saw no coverage of this in the U.S. media. I guess they were too busy eating canapés and hobnobbing with dignitaries to notice something this important.

Jarvis said he attended the meeting as an Internet citizen.

“The net is also a new society,” Jarvis wrote in a Huffington Post blog. “That idea is confounding to nations of laws because the net’s own sovereignty depends upon no one having sovereignty over it. That is how it was designed. That is its core principle.

“So it doesn’t behave like a new land that, in Sarkozy’s view, needs civilizing.”

Sarkozy’s argument about crime on the Internet is, in my view, a Trojan horse. Once government can regulate any part of the Net, it will try to regulate it all.

That’s why we has marketers should be worried. Many countries are particularly protectionist. Suppose you have a client based in Ireland that wants to market its products in Singapore. But for whatever reason, the government of Singapore decides it doesn’t want the Irish marketing in their country. If they can control the Net, they can block any attempt by that Irish company to market its wares. Do you want a government telling you how you can market?

Give a government official control of the Net and free access to information will end. Frankly, I think governments are worried that the Internet is causing them to lose control. If they cannot control the sources of information, they have less control over their people.

Think about the Arab Spring. It was pushed and helped by the Internet. Think about what China and other repressive countries would do if their efforts stifle free expression were granted legitimacy.

We all need to oppose what Sarkozy is doing. He says he is just trying to help.

I am not a big believer in anyone offering to help me if I don’t ask for it. As Henry David Thoreau said: “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”

Here’s the first thing that we all should remember – social media doesn’t kill careers, people using social media kill careers. Oh and you can add companies into that also. Social media can also wound them pretty severely.

You must be a monk living in a Nepalese cave if you don’t know what Wiener did. According to ABC News Weiner admitted Monday he had “engaged in ‘several inappropriate’ electronic relationships with six women over three years, and that he publicly lied about a photo of himself sent over Twitter to a college student in Seattle over a week ago.”

The overall lesson in all of this is think before you do anything on the Internet. I am not sure why it is, but many people do not consider the consequences of their actions when posting on the web. I mean does anyone think a sitting US Representative would post a picture of his junk on his office wall? Of course not. Yet when people get on the Internet, they seem to think that the same rules don’t apply. They don’t ask that question I always urge clients to ask before doing anything – “what if … ?”

I don’t get it. Research indicates the average post initially reaches approximately 150 people. If each of those 150 people sends out the same post and it reaches another 150 people each, over 22,000 people will see it and so on. You see how fast something goes viral.

So why do Weiner and others do inappropriate things on the web? I think it is because they don’t understand the power of the Internet. A lot of people don’t get it. They think they are somehow anonymous when they post. Well, they aren’t.

Here’s the second lesson to be learned from this: “three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” That is one of my favorite Ben Franklin quotes. I use it when I discuss crisis communications.

Weiner has been touted as one of the more Social Media savvy members of Congress. Yeah, and I am scheduled to perform brain surgery tomorrow. Did he honestly think that those pictures would stay private?

It is hard to believe that anyone doesn’t know that once you enter the Social Media realm, privacy is surrendered. Anything you put on the Internet is accessible to anyone who wants to see it. If it is something salacious or embarrassing that pretty much guarantees it will go viral. We humans seem to revel in spreading that around. We really like it when it happens to someone who we feel thinks they are smarter than us.

There is the third lesson to come out of this. This is one is about crisis communications. In today’s Internet-based world, you have about an hour or so to respond to a crisis. You cannot wait more than that to formulate a response to whatever happens. In fact, if you decide to do something stupid like tweet pictures of your body parts to college student females, you had better have your story all set to go before you tweet.

Seriously, companies today have about an hour today to put out the fire. That’s why I always urge clients to have a crisis communications plan in place. They need to be monitoring Social Media 24 hours a day, seven days a week to catch those small fires. Wait any longer than that and it’s too late.

If Weiner had come out right away and said, “yes, it’s me. It was a stupid thing to do and I am sorry I did it” the story would have flared and died. Instead, he waited way too long to respond.

As my father used to say: “there is no sense in being stupid unless you show people how stupid you are.” We Coles are sarcastic people. What the Internet has done is expand the opportunities to demonstrate that stupidity.

What the Brewers did and didn’t do is also a lesson for any marketer who has an idea that seems to be a surefire winner. I am willing to bet no one in planning the promotion that backfired asked “what if … goes wrong.” Until you think something through from every angle, you are asking for trouble. As the Chinese military thinker Sun Tzu said: “The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand.”

Here’s what happened to the Brewers. As a promotion, the team placed 1,400 statues of mascot Bernie Brewer across Wisconsin parks early Tuesday morning. Some of the statues had a prize attached, including ticket vouchers, player autographs, and merchandise.

The idea was Bernie would tweet clues to the location of each statue so fans could find them. Under the rules, the contest was to begin at 7 a.m. People were supposed to take only one of the statutes. It didn’t work out that way.

Instead, people were grabbing as many as possible. There were reports of people sleeping in their cars overnight near parks where the statutes were to be placed. One woman tweeted she had taken over three dozen. People were trying to sell the statutes on EBay and Craigslist. This caused a lot of angry comments from people who tried to follow the rules.

Clearly no one at the Brewers thought this thing through. This is a clear case I feel of “you know what would be cool?” No one in the meeting asked the “what if fans get greedy and take more than one” question.  It’s a cliché, but it’s true: “hope for the best, but plan for the worst.”

There are hundreds of comments on social media sites posted by angry fans. The story went viral. I read a lot of the comments. People are really angry or laughing at the Brewers. Neither is good. The fact that the Brewers insisted that promotion went mostly okay shows me they don’t understand the power of social media.

Where the Brewers failed was not taking human nature into account. You announce you are giving away for free something people want they are going to find ways to game the system. Once the idea of the giveaway was decided on, the next topic of discussion should have been how to prevent the hoarding.

Brewers spokesman said the promotion went well with the exception of “some isolated” incidents. Wrong. They should have apologized profusely. That’s crisis communications 101.

What should the Brewers have done, or more accurately what would I have done?

First, there would have been no actual tickets, merchandise or autographed items in the statues if I were running things. What there would have been were vouchers for those items. Stamped on each voucher would be the words “One Prize Per Address or Family.” No, it wouldn’t have completely stopped the hoarding. But it would have cut down on it.

Second, I would have implanted a locator chip in each Bernie statue. Once I saw that more than Bernie was in one location, I would have noted the IDs on the chips (yes, the technology exists.) Whoever brought any of those hoarded statues in for redemption would have been disqualified automatically.

Third, to prevent anyone from selling the statutes on EBay or Craigslist, I would make it very public that the statutes can be purchased from the Brewers for $48. That would kill that market.

Fourth, I would have made those statues a heck of lot harder to find. Scavenger hunts are not supposed to be easy.

Now it is true that the people who thought they would corner the Bernie Brewer statue market are not particularly ethical or honest. But that’s human nature.

The failure was with the Brewers and their planning. You have to think these things through. It is why the first thing JJC Communications LLC does with a new client is an analysis what could go right and what could wrong. If you only do one of those, you end up with a lot of angry fans and people laughing at you.

If you want to learn more about how to such an analysis, let me know.

It is only the foundation though. Just building that webpage is like building the foundation of a house. Would you stop building your house after the footings were poured, the basement walls were built, and the basement floor was laid?

I can remember when I was a child going to visit one of the men who worked for my father. The guy was building his own house. The only thing he had completed when we went there was the basement. He had put the first floor on, but at that time it was the roof. He and his family were living in that basement.

The place kind of looked like a bunker actually. The concrete block walls were sticking up about two feet above ground level. The first floor/ceiling was covered with black tar paper. It sat in the middle of a wooded lot on a dirt road out in the country. It was kind of hard to see unless you were almost on top of it. It wasn’t easy to find.

That’s what happens when you build only a webpage, but don’t add anything else.  You have a structure you can live in, but it’s very basic. It is kind of like that foundation at the end of the dirt round. Unless someone knows specifically what they are looking for, they are not likely to find it – SEO or not.

So what should be done next?

A successful social media campaign only happens if inbound marketing techniques are used. It is inbound marketing that drives the effort. That SEO-enabled website is only the first step. Inbound marketing is building links to your website so it moves up the search rankings.

One of the most important parts of a social media campaign is ensuring that the website in question comes up on the first page of a Google search. Preferably it should come up within the first five results. Many searchers will not scroll down to see more results.

Before I go any further, I should note I build client marketing around Google, not Bing. I keep reading that Bing is going to give Google a run for its money, but I have yet to see any evidence of that. According the monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace, Google held 65.3 percent of the search market in April. It has held about two-thirds of the search market for a long time.

“More than 16.2 billion explicit core searches were conducted in April,” comScore reported. “Google Sites ranked first with 10.7 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.6 billion, Microsoft Sites with 2.3 billion, Ask Network with 491 million and AOL, Inc. with 248 million.”

I always go with the leader.

That being said, how do you seduce Google into ranking your website on that first page? Well, you build links to that website – i.e. inbound marketing.

How are those links built? By spreading your message around the web. That is done by blogging, especially blogging. Several studies by Boston-based Hubspot have found that blogging is the most effective way to build traffic.

There are other ways that also should be in the mix – Linkedin, YouTube,Twitter and Facebook are the big four. There are others though. The more links you can create to your website, the higher your Google ranking.

That’s just the first floor – actually the entranceway. Once you have people interested in your company, you need convert that interest into leads and eventually sales. That I will I talk about later.

So you see you can build and live in that foundation. But it is unlikely anyone is going find you if that’s all you do.

So it would seem at first glance that these companies are starting to embrace new ways of marketing. As most of you know, I firmly believe in melding traditional marketing and public relations with social media. That trilogy of marketing methods is the most effective.

However, I always dig a little deeper. I track these companies’ efforts. What I often find is that instead waltzing with social media, these companies are doing the “Zombie Dance.” All of you remember the Zombie Dance from the first dance you attended. The boy holds his rigid arms straight out and places them on the girl’s shoulders. Because of the distance created by the boy’s arms, the girl is forced to do the same. The pair then moves in a circle, barely lifting their feet off the ground and not bending their knees. It looks like the undead dancing.

That’s what a lot of social media attempts done by large companies especially remind me of – a stiff-armed dance that is about as a rhythmic as a drunk trying to play drums. These companies just don’t get it.

Now I know many CMOs would argue social media is not as important as search for attracting clients and customers. Current research would seem to back this contention up. For instance Google Inc.’s dominant search engine supplies about 30 percent of traffic to the top news sites, according to a study done by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. I would argue that same currently holds true for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business sites.

I know when I am looking for something in particular, I usually turn to Google. It is still one of the best ways to conduct research. However, the Pew study also found that “Facebook and other sharing tools, such as Addthis.com, are empowering people to rely on their online social circles to point out interesting content.” Although I do search for news, more and more I find myself reading stories friends have suggested or Linkedin. The same true when I shop. I will now often respond to tweets or Facebook friend pages when I am looking for a particular item.

This is where a lot of companies fall down, I feel. They are not integrating their social media efforts with their regular marketing efforts. Just having a Facebook page is not going to cut it. There has to be integration of all the marketing efforts. In this many companies are falling down.

Facebook is not the be all or end all. Blog, videos, and many other tools have to put to work. Yet which some notable exceptions – Dunkin Donuts and Southwest Airlines come to mind – most companies are doing all they could do. And I think I know why.

At major companies, people look at social media and consider it just too much work. Too many marketing departments are too used to using traditional advertising and public relations. It’s inertia. They want to move out of the ruts they are in. And then they wonder why they lose business to their smaller, more nimble competitors.

I also went to various news sites to see what they had to say. The only one that I could find that had anything was a three-paragraph story on the New York Times’ home page. It didn’t say much other than reporting that sources were saying Osama bin Laden was dead.

In the meantime, ABC news anchors were stretching, waiting for the President to make the official announcement. They kept showing the same stuff over and over again. My wife complained she was tired of looking at the same videos of the terrorist leader being constantly broadcast.

I spent 26 years as a print reporter. As I watched the bin Laden coverage, it help crystallize an idea I have been mulling – the way my generation of reporters and I learned to do journalism is obsolete.

The old rule was get it first, get it fast, and get it right. Well, traditional media ceded the first two as soon as Twitter and other social media sites grew up. There is no way that any traditional news site is going to beat someone on the scene of a news event who has a smart phone with a camera app. Remember the U.S. Airways flight that landed in the Hudson River a couple of year? Well, there were pictures of the plane floating in the icy water on the Net within about 60 seconds of it coming down.

Traditional media seems to have half-heartedly recognized this change. More and more news outlets are turning to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs for information. All four local stations in Milwaukee now constantly ask viewers to submit video of anything deemed newsworthy.

The problem is people are cutting out the middleman. Why wait to watch something on the 10 p.m. news when you can go to YouTube and find it right away? Why watch a news anchor flail while waiting for an official announcement when tweets about the event are flowing at rate of hundreds a minute?

Now, there is that third part – getting it right. My friends who are still in the news business pride themselves on that. They argue that while they might not be first anymore, the information they provide is more accurate and explains the nuances of a situation better than 140 character Tweets.

I have two related thoughts about. Let provide some background about the history of news gathering to explain my points.

The template for modern journalism – both print and broadcast – evolved shortly after World War II. That model includes the three ideals I mentioned above, plus accuracy, neutrality, and objectivity.

Neutrality and objectivity are fairly recent additions to the journalism canon. I think those two words would have made the press barons of the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century laugh. William Randolph Hearst used his papers to help start the Spanish-American war. If you want to get a better idea of what most newspapers were like prior to World War II, picture the National Enquirer marrying USA Today and spawning a newspaper.

For those papers, getting it first was always the first thing on an editor’s list. Accuracy was important, but not paramount. You have seen movies where newsboys would scream “Extra, Extra. Read All About It” at the top of their lungs. That happened a lot. As soon as something big broke, newspapers would rush to get the information out. If a regular edition was already off the presses, than an Extra was printed and rushed out. People really did shout “stop the presses” so information could be added.

Now, the first reports might not have been as accurate was we would expect today. As the events unfold, papers would keep rushing out Extras to update and clarify what was happening. Nobody excoriated a newspaper if those early stories had incorrect information. People knew more was coming.

If traditional media wants to stay relevant, that’s the model I think they need to adopt. I think they need to get it first and get it fast. As the events unfold, they can keep updating and correcting. If they make a mistake, say so and move on. These days people have short memories anyway.

There is one more thing about newspapers a century or so ago. They weren’t boring. They fairly screamed at you.

I think that colored weather maps and giggling anchors not withstanding, a lot television, radio, and newspapers are often just plain boring. Whether you think of that, most under 35-year-olds will not hang around anything that bores them.

Oh, I almost forgot something – the whole nuance thing. I don’t want that. As Sgt. Joe Friday used to say, “just the facts, ma’am.” I will rely on editorial writers and columnist to provide their take on the events. And then I will make my own decisions.

First, it is wrong, and frankly almost impossible, to block employees from using social media use during work hours. As a social media agency, the people who work at JJC Communications are supposed to be using social media. It is one of the things we do for clients, so we be better be doing it.

Yes, you can block access to any site on your company’s system. But if your employees have their own smart phones; they have access during the day. Or they can just go home at night and say what they want. As technology advances, it is getting easier and easier for them to do it anonymously. Better to have them do it where you can monitor what they do.

Actually, a lot of good can come from allowing your employees access to the Internet. Your employees are your brand ambassadors. They have much more credibility with the general public than your advertising ever will. When I see an employee using their company’s products, I assume they take pride in what they do. That’s a powerful selling point.

There is fear among a lot of senior executives about letting their people access Facebook, or Tweet, do something else during work hours. There are concerns it will turn into a timewaster, an employee will reveal some company secret, or get the company in legal trouble.

Let me deal with those three:

• Show me an employee who doesn’t waste at least some time doing something other than work. In my time, I have run fantasy baseball pools; participated in chair races; figured out my NCAA pool entries and done a dozen other things that would not be considered productive labor. Wouldn’t you rather your employee posting something good about your company instead of playing Angry Birds?
• Every company who allows Internet access has to have – let me repeat that – has to have a manual for Internet use. The U.S. Air Force’s policy is that if a 19-year-old is old enough to die for their country, he or she is old enough to blog or use Facebook. However, each member of the Air Force is issued a manual that covers the do’s and don’ts of Internet use. Break any of those rules and an Airman will have serious explaining to do to their commanding officer.
• As for legal trouble, it is true the Internet is the Wild West of the law. How do you deal with a situation where your employee rips a company in Singapore? That employee might have violated the law in Singapore, but not in the United States. Where do the various doctrines of U.S. law enter the picture? My feeling that Internet is going end up being governed by something akin to Admiralty law, which determines the rule for the oceans. At any rate, here I always urge clients to error on the sign of caution. Make sure that Internet use manual includes a section on U.S. law.

One more thing about the manual. As part of any employee orientation, spend some time going over your Internet policy. Make sure every employee signs something acknowledging they know and understand the policy.

We at the agency do not allow completely open access. Accessing any pornographic, racist, or extremist sites is going to get an employee into a whole heap of trouble. People are told that when they get hired. We monitor those kinds of things. Of course, there is no criticizing clients publically. That would obviously be counterproductive. There is no revealing anything we are working on until we are ready to make it public.

In addition, there is no discussing any other employee either internally or externally. We also expect employees not libel or slander anyone. The AP Stylebook has an excellent section on libel and slander.

We have other rules, but they are designed to make things clearer, not more difficult.

The bottom line is that the Internet is something that never sleeps, never stops and is always accessible. It better to learn how to swim then forbid your employees to jump into the water. Remember, forbidden fruit, and forbidden access, just makes people want something more.

Bloggers note: AirTran has been acquired by Southwest Airlines. It will soon be absorbed into the Southwest network.

As I watched the Delta and AirTran pages stream out of the printer, it made me think about marketing campaigns that do essentially the same thing the two airlines did.

A lot of campaigns are just too complicated, complex, and confusing. It’s the old saw about too many cooks. Too many executives, both at the client and the agency, with different views have had to sign off on the campaign. Before each of them gives their approval, they insist on adding in what they think is important. By trying to everything to everyone, the marketing campaign ends meaning nothing to anyone.

My question always is when I see one of these campaigns, wasn’t somebody paying attention. I always think back to what Kevin Brandt, a senior executive at a Milwaukee agency, said to a class I was taking: “the words I never want to hear from my team are ‘hey, you know what would be cool … ’”

Sometimes those campaigns end up just looking stupid. Other times, they are downright insulting.

Look at the recent Kenneth Cole Twitter campaign, which coincided with the uprising in Egypt: “Millions are in an uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring is online at (sorry, but I not dignifying that with the URL). So let me get this straight, people are risking their lives to free themselves from an oppressive, brutal dictatorship. Kenneth Cole sees this as a good platform to sell shoes.

When Groupon’s incredibly insensitive Tibet Super Bowl ad was roasted worldwide, one of the defenses was that people were now talking about the discount service. Yeah, there’s a client meeting I would like to attend. “Well, I have good news. We have raised awareness of Groupon to 87 percent of the targeted audience. Isn’t that great. Of course, they all hate us and are talking about organizing boycotts, but they know who were are.”

One of my “favorites” is the ad for the gout treatment Uloric. It shows some poor schlump hauling around a giant beaker of uric acid. He gets on a bus for goodness sakes. Would you want to sit next to somebody hauling around a container of sloshing disgusting liquid? He then takes the magic drug so the beaker shrinks down to a size small enough to fit into his fishing creel. Yeah, that’s what I take along when I go fishing – something guaranteed to scare away every aquatic animal for miles.

I am not trying to minimize gout. I know it is a serious, painful, often debilitating condition. But there was no way I could focus on that while watching this guy schlep around a couple of gallons of uric acid.

While I don’t know the insides of any of those campaigns, I have worked at a major agency where I have sat in on creative meetings. I have seen what happens to a campaign when too many people get involved. What should have been a simple message about a client’s product becomes a mishmash of bad ideas and bad execution.

That’s why there is an advertising slogan I keep in mind: “Know when to say no.”

I get an email from the friend the other day, asking about particular social media site. My friends will often ask me which sites I recommend or what I think of a particular site.

Well, as I confessed to my friend, I had never heard of this site. That got me thinking. It seems like new sites are popping faster than dandelions in my lawn in June. But is each of these sites necessary? If someone did a business study of every social media site out there could many of them make a case for their existence?

Obviously, I am active user of social media. I am a social media consultant. I blog, I tweet, I post on Facebook, I use Linkedin incessantly and I am moving more and more onto YouTube. I can make a case for all of those sites. A large part of their appeal is that they are the biggest and easiest to use (more about that second point later.)

I also am a member of Orkut and I just joined a Chinese site called Ushi. I joined Orkut because it has a large number of users in South America and India. Ushi is self-described as the Chinese Linkedin. I do not currently do business in any of those places. But there could time when I do, so I want to have a presence there.

The key to all these sites is simplicity and ease of use. I don’t have to do much to interact with them. Which is good, but I am very busy. The less time I have to spend getting the maximum benefit is what I look for.

I also belong to Plaxo and Xing, but I am not sure why. I really don’t get much out of them.

Frankly, I think I am connected to enough sites. I don’t need any more sites. Yet, I keep getting invited to join others – a couple everyday. The latest is Facebook’s BranchOut. I joined it because I was curious, but so far I see no value in it. It doesn’t do anything that Linkedin or a regular Facebook doesn’t already do.

That’s my complaint about many of the newer sites. They are just duplicates of what’s already being done. Yeah, they might a couple of their own bells and whistles, but not enough to make them significantly different.

I am all for competition if it improves things, but I don’t see any improvement coming out of any of these. They are just not unique. I think this is an area that pretty much been covered.

It kind reminds me of television. ABC has “Dancing With the Stars,” so Fox comes out with “So You Think You Can Dance.” How many cop and doctors shows are on network television. It is all about being a copycat. Eventually, the market gets saturated.

People keep talking about the new Facebook or the next Linkedin. But the sites that might beat those are going to be something entirely new. They are not going to be clones of what already exists.

The newer sites that have taken off, Groupon as an example, did something new.  I belong to Groupon because I reap the benefits.

As long as I am ranting here, I have another beef about the new sites. There are just to many hurdles to join most of them. You want me as a member – make it simple. I think Groupon took me about a minute to join. Not so most of these new sites.  Name, email address, and a password are all that is needed. I will decide if I want to post a profile or a picture. It takes too much time. Yet, they ask for a lot of information. It is not worth my time to supply it.

When the dandelions take over, I pull them out by the roots. When I get site requests, I just ignore. It’s the best of both worlds.

Well, I give you a hint. It all has to with Word of Mouth or WOM. If content is king, then WOM is queen.

Since I prefer to work with small and medium-sized companies, the question usually comes from the owner, the chief executive officer, or the chief marketing officer. It is a legitimate question. After all, I am usually presenting plans that can run into the five figures in costs. (I am not a cheap date. But, I am a highly effective one.)

Many of these companies are going to be marketing for the first time in their existence. They have moved beyond the startup phase. To keep growing, they know it’s time to start reaching out to potential customers.

The men and women who started these companies are engineers, lawyers, carpenters, or bakers. So far ROI has been something measurable. They know if they buy X amount of lumber or flour, they will produce Y amount of product. They can usually calculate their ROI after adding in their other production costs.

Marketing is different. There is a product – more customers and hence more profit. But that’s not something stamped out in a factory. These entrepreneurs are now dealing with something more ethereal – a decision by a potential customer to buy their product. These company owners would like a guarantee that what they invest will provide returns. It is a bet that makes them nervous.

It is true there is a certain amount of gambling in every company. You never really know – even after you do your primary and secondary research – whether the product is going to sell. It is only after the doors are open and hopefully the customers come in that you know your efforts were successful.

That’s the first measure of marketing – the first ROI check off. Are customers finding your business and checking it out?

Keeping those customers coming through the door is where people such as myself enter the picture. It is our job to show customers where the door is and give them reasons to through.

A caveat: I always tell potential clients; marketing doesn’t sell the product. That’s up to the company’s employees. Now, if the job is done right, the potential customer will be strongly leaning toward buying your product or service. I will everything I can to make the customer contact’s job as easy as possible. I will plow the ground and plant the seed. You just have to make it grow.

How is that done? As I said in the beginning – word of mouth or WOM. At its simplest level, word of mouth is simply Jane telling John to buy a particular product or use a certain service because she had a positive experience. What social media has done is amplify Jane’s voice so she can hundreds of people about her positive experience.

WOM is the most powerful way to market a product. According to Forrester Research, there are currently an estimated 500 billion WOM annual web impressions. Several studies have found that WOM is the most trusted form of marketing.

Research has shown that for every $1 spent on creating brand advocates there is a $10 return in positive WOM and sales. The Harvard Business Review found a ratio of 1-to-12 ROI for positive WOM. That was twice the return for any other marketing method.

That’s why social media is so effective. It generates that positive WOM and sales through third party endorsements and conversations. It does that with blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, Linkedin discussion, videos and other social media applications.

So the ROI is there. And social media is the way to generate it.

Social media is not going away. Quite the opposite, actually. Look at the data Marketing Sherpa collected on marketing tactics for 2011.

“As marketing strategies evolve from outbound to inbound tactics, there is also a shift in the ways in which money and resources are spent. We asked more than 1,100 marketers how they foresaw budgets changing in 2011 for the following marketing tactics,” Marketing Sherpa wrote. This is what they found:

Look at the chart carefully – 1,100 marketers see the budgets for websites, search (search engine optimization/pay per click), and social media increasing by more than 50 percent. That doesn’t sound to me like social media is going anywhere.

In order for any of these marketing methods to prove successful, a company must use the three together.  A company needs a top-flight webpage so potential customers like what they see when they land there. Search engine optimization is key so potential customers find that website. Social media is needed to create the inbound links to the website so search engines find it. A marketing campaign that doesn’t use all three is a like two-legged stool.

So, I am not sure why some people seem to think social media is going away. I do have some hypothesis though.

First, I think many people are comparing Facebook, Google, Twitter, Linked in, YouTube and other social media sites to companies that were created during the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. That rationale doesn’t apply to the current crop of digital companies. What killed most of the dot com companies is that they never made a profit. Plus, their stock prices were widely inflated. When the recession of 2001 hit and the investment spigot was turned off, those high fliers suddenly had the aerodynamic properties of a rock.

There were a lot of lessons learned in that period. Companies just don’t operate like that anymore.

As I said before, I think some people are just trying to be provocative. They want to be contrarians. Kind of like the people of Vermont, who will never do what the rest of the nation does. Those social media contrarians just want to start an argument. They see themselves as loners, as people who don’t follow the crowd. I image their forebears rode horses and used kerosene lamps by choice well into the 1930s.

Finally, I think there are just some people who hate the whole concept of social media. They have been using the old ways for decades, dammit, and those methods work just fine. They don’t want to take the time to learn something new. It is too confusing for them. Before you automatically assume these people are all old, I was able to qualify for an over 55 discount the other night. And I love social media.

I suppose it is possible one of the more popular social media sites will go away. I don’t think that will happen, but one never knows. Things do change. I grew up with one phone company, three television stations, a record player and a typewriter. The companies that produced those items either went away or changed out of necessity. Yes, I know some places are again selling turntables and other old technologies. But some places still sell candles, but I don’t see them again becoming our primary source of light.

However, the functions those old ways doing things performed did not. I think the same is true of social media. If Facebook or Linked in disappear, something will take their place. Social media is just too dominant to think otherwise.

What surprises me is how many people believe what they read. They apparently have no built-in B.S. filter. Seeing something posted on Facebook or tweeted apparently bestows some kind of seal of approval. Well, to time burst that bubble. People can and do lie on the Internet all the time. As a reader and a consumer you have to determine whether what a company is telling you, or a blogger is saying, is true.

Here are two things that spread all over the net in which everyone should have known better to ever believe. The first one is funny; the second one had serious repercussions that are still being felt around the world.

In the first case, the Weekly World News reported that Mark Zuckerberg was exhausted. So exhausted that in fact he was going to shut down Facebook. The Weekly World News is the same “newspaper” that reports that aliens regularly meet with the president of the United States and other world leaders.

“The questionable story apparently sent Facebook users into a panic,” The New York Daily News reported. “The phrase “is Facebook shutting down” was the 14th most searched for on Google Saturday (Jan. 8th) and the 10th most as of Sunday (Jan.9th) morning.

“On Facebook itself, groups like “Against shutting down Facebook on 15th of March” popped up with the slogan “No Facebook, No Party”. On Twitter, users fretted about what would happen to their pictures – not to mention social lives.”
That people believed this amazes me. I assume that it spread through the Internet pretty quickly. Didn’t anyone check the source? Didn’t anyone notice Facebook is thinking of going public?

Remember what I said in Monday’s blog about the need for speed when it comes to social media. This is a perfect example of why. Many people will believe something no matter how outlandish it might seem.

Facebook quashed the rumor Sunday evening by issuing a press release saying it had no plans to close. “We didn’t get the memo about shutting down, so we’ll keep working away,” the company said. “We aren’t going anywhere; we’re just getting started.”
The second rumor actually began about 12 years ago. While the conventional media initially spread it, social media kept it alive a lot longer than it should of. In this case, people died because of the idiocy of others.
In this case, “in 1998 English Doctor Andrew Wakefield published a study in another British medical journal, The Lancet suggesting that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine could cause autism,” The Washington Post reported. “The study triggered international alarm about vaccines, but quickly came under intense criticism, was discredited by follow-up research, and was eventually formally retracted by the journal.

“Nevertheless, the incidence of childhood measles rose in Great Britain and elsewhere after Wakefield’s study was published, as worried parents refused to have their children vaccinated against the potentially deadly disease. Parents have also shunned other vaccines. And even after Wakefield’s work was debunked, he continues his research in the United States and to have loyal, highly vocal supporters.”

There were four reported deaths of children in England and Ireland caused by their parents’ failure to immunize them with the MMR vaccine. Hundreds of children were unnecessarily ill because of the failure to immunize.

As a personal note, I had measles as a child. That was before the vaccine was developed. I was very, very ill. I do not recommend any parent putting their child through that.

Yet despite all of the evidence to the contrary, there are people out there who still insist that it was a vaccine that caused their child’s Autism. Google Autism and vaccines and look at the some of the results. A study released last March said one in four Americans believe there is a link between Autism and vaccinations. Despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary, people seem more willing to believe bloggers and others using social media. It just amazes me. I don’t understand it.

As my late father used to say: “people don’t seem to know how to use the brains they were born with.” To which my grandfather would add: “there’s so sense in being stupid unless you can demonstrate it.”

Anticipating how to handle a crisis before it occurs should be a key part of any company’s business plan. The one thing social media has probably made more difficult is crisis communications. A company now usually has minutes, possibly no more than an hour, to prevent a small crisis from growing into a major disaster. A response has to be immediate – within those same minutes of the crisis.

There is no alternative, no other option.

Here in my city of Milwaukee is an example of what happens when the crisis is more nimble than the responders. A suburban mall found itself the victim of what was apparently a flash mob that wreaked havoc throughout the shopping center. Then mall management made things worse by the way it responded

Businesses need planning and practice to be ready for a practice. A business has to have a crisis communications plan in place long before the crisis happens. To ensure the plan works when needed, it has to be rehearsed constantly.

Think about it. Fire Departments, police departments, the military and a host of other agencies constantly train. They do it so when they have to go into action everyone knows what to do.

Here’s what happened to Mayfair Mall in Wauwatosa, WI. I should note that it is one of the top shopping destinations in the Milwaukee metro area and is almost always crowded. In this case, I think the flash mob organizers decided that the crowd of shoppers would be the perfect audience for their “performance.”

For those who have not heard the term flash mob, Wikipedia defines it as a “large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and pointless act for a brief time, then quickly disperse. The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails.”

At Mayfair a group of several dozen teenagers raced through the mall, knocking over displays, running up and down escalators, which scared customers and staff. Mall management said the event was too organized to have been a spontaneous occurrence. They suspect it was organized via Facebook, Twitter or any number of other sites. Adding to the commotion was an apparent attempted robbery in the mall parking lot. Authorities have not said if the robbery was related to the flash mob but a shot was fired, which caused even more panic among. Luckily no one was hurt.

Mall management said they monitor social media sites to ensure things like this don’t happen. They said they were able to stop a flash mob planned for two days before Christmas. In that one, a group of high school students was planning on dancing in the mall.

If mall management is monitoring social media, someone fell asleep at the switch on the disruptive flash mob. For something this large, there had to be multiple posts on Twitter and Facebook. That’s how the word gets spread, by constant repetition across the web. Someone should have caught this.

It is possible the word was spread via text message. Unless you work for the National Security Agency, or some other federal investigative agency concerned with terrorism, those messages cannot be tracked. In that case mall management would not have had advance warning.

Even if Mayfair management did not have advance warning, the ball was still dropped after the incident. The flash mob happened Jan. 2. Mall management waited until the afternoon of Jan. 3rd to respond which meant for 24 hours Mayfair Mall lost control of its brand. In social media years that’s a lifetime. The mall was being defined by the hundreds of comments most of them negative made on social media sites and to the local media

When Mall management finally did respond, they did it by issuing a press release. Kind of like using a carrier pigeon to get the message out. What management said was just as bad.

Most of the statement condemned the group who disrupted the mall. It wasn’t until almost the end of the statement that management said: “the safety and security of our guests are always our top priorities.  We will not tolerate any behavior that compromises that safety.  As a result of this incident, we anticipate that there will be operational changes as well as consequences for those involved.”

What the statement should have said was that security was being increased immediately and there would be an even stronger policy governing when teenagers could be in the mall. The mall later did announce that it was changing its policy regarding when teenagers would be allowed in the mall. But that happened after the initial flurry of reports on the incident, which didn’t have the effect it would have had if the mall had made the announcement on the same day as the incident.

Plus Mayfair competitor Bayshore Mall announced changes to its policy for teenager access at the same time. There have been no incidents at Bayshore so that mall looked proactive. Mayfair suffered by comparison.

In other words, management be nimble, management be quick, or the business is going to be burned by something a lot hotter than a candlestick.

I am not talking about a plant fire or an accident. There might be actually more time to respond to the media on one of those. Most people understand that the average executive doesn’t have time during the event to respond to questions. It is perfectly acceptable to say in such a case that the causes will be dealt with once the immediate crisis is over.

What I am talking about is an information crisis, which can often more damaging that a physical disaster. The fallout from a physical disaster can be mitigated. Unless it is dealt with right away, a consumer complaint or an even an unfounded can spread around the Internet is a matter of minutes.

Even though Mark Twain died 80 years before the rise of the Internet, he summed it up correctly when he said: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Actually, I think a lie can make it all the way around the world before truth gets out of bed.

Part of the problem is many companies still don’t pay attention. I am always amazed that any corporation will spend millions on advertising, but very little on reputation monitoring and management. To not keep track of company reputation is committing business suicide.

One of my firm rules of is that social media can kill you before you even know are bleeding. Someone needs to be watching 24/7. Remember that old saying that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.” That was because the English had colonies on almost every continent. Well, the Internet has a much a wider reach than the Empire ever did.

Facebook alone has over 500 million followers. Twitter is somewhere north of 100 million. If someone posts on Facebook an error your company made, and it goes viral, you could wake up in the morning to find your reputation trashed.

Look at the companies that have run into trouble because of their Internet ignorance: Proctor & Gamble’s Motrin, Comcast, United Airlines, Kryptonite Bike Locks, L’Oreal, Dell Computers, Wal-Mart, Jet Blue – the list goes on and on. (My thanks to SMI for its short history of social media screw-ups.)

Some of those companies learned their lesson and started paying attention to what as happening on the ‘Net. I am not sure others get it even after being punched around.

The only way to deal with is to be proactive. As I have also always preached, you have to be part of the conversation about your brand. It is essential. That’s why I always tell clients that they need to hear the bad comments more than the good. Good comments reinforce what you are already doing. It is valuable to know that so you can expand whatever worked.

Bad comments will tell you where you are making mistakes. That’s more important. Responding to a consumer complaint can build good will. Personally I find I like a place that is willing to own up to a mistake. It shows me they care.

Plus by doing that, a crisis is usually headed-off. If a company doesn’t respond to customer concerns and complaints, the whole thing can grow and get really ugly.

The take away from this is pay attention all time or be willing to pay the cost when you don’t.

Now, if you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I constantly preach about being careful about what you post. I know of companies that require access to a potential employee’s Facebook page, Twitter stream and anything else the person has posted. Do you want a potential employer seeing those pictures of you drinking from a beer bong or making obscene gestures? I also know of companies that have refused to hire a candidate because of something they found on one of those social media sites.

The person I was talking to works in staffing. His company has been very successful in placing employees in many, many companies. He gave me examples of very qualified employees who lost on a job because of one stupid thing they posted. What particularly rankled him is that the post might have been made five years ago. As he rightly pointed out, people change and mature. The person may have changed completely, but is now haunted by something they did five years ago.

He also pointed out all of the information that be gathered about someone can be misinterpreted and misused. For instance, the state of Wisconsin maintains a website known as the Wisconsin Circuit Court Access Program. It is commonly known as CCAP. What it is a list of every infraction committed by Wisconsin residents from speeding tickets to first-degree murder. It also lists divorces and other civil matters. It does not list juvenile offenses.

The staffing guy pointed out that a listing on CCAP can follow someone around for life – even if they were acquitted of the charges. He said most people either don’t read the entire entry, or don’t understand how to read it. So they don’t see that the charges were dropped. Instead, they just assume that the person is a criminal.

He made another point I found salient. If someone did commit a crime, how long do we hold that against them? I agree with that. The point of incarceration is to punish someone first and then to rehabilitate them. So once they have served their sentence and been punished, is it fair to keep punishing them by not hiring them or ostracizing them.

Now mind you, I am not talking about all of those convicted of a crime. There are some offenses are so heinous that those who committed them should never be allowed back in society. I put sex offenders, child molesters and violent criminals in that group. I would also add in those who run large criminal organizations, such as drug dealers.

To me though, it makes sense to hire people who have “paid their debt to society.” You don’t want them committing more crimes do you? That is what they are going to do if they cannot get a legitimate job. Sometimes it is a matter of survival.

The problem is that social media makes it harder for some of those people to come back into society. The information is just too easy to access. Unfortunately too many employees are just too nervous to hire someone who they find might have committed an infraction 10 or 15 years ago. It’s too easy to find that information out now.

Is that fair? I don’t think so. What I think needs to happen is greater education and some redaction of information. I don’t see anything wrong with that, do you?

I was really saddened to read about the suicide of Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi. Reading the stories about how the gay student was harassed by two other students, I was struck by how social media played a part in what happened. It also struck me how social media seems to have in this case broken down the wrong boundaries.

Every time something as all encompassing as social media comes along, a lot of boundaries are broken down. That’s a good thing usually. However this is case, I think the tsunami that is social media destroyed some boundaries that need to be reestablished.

I was a member of a high school class that liked to have a good time. We partied a lot on the weekends. However, we always very careful about publicizing the party’s location. It was strictly word-of-mouth. Notice of the party was always kept from adults. Locations were on a need-to-know basis.

Once at the party, there was another strict rule – we always ensured there was no permanent record of the event. Cameras were never allowed. No one wanted pictures of Saturday night’s revelry to show up on a parent’s, teachers, or coach’s desk. The boundaries were rigid and we knew exactly where they were.

We also respected each other’s personal space. If a couple wanted to go off by themselves, no one followed them to see what was up. If someone wanted to indulge in an illegal substance, they usually went off somewhere private with others of a like mind. They certainly didn’t take pictures of it and put them out in the public.

Those boundaries seem to have broken down. I am amazed sometimes by how many of today’s social media users seem to have no filter when it comes to posting things. In Clementi’s case, prosecutors have charged Molly Wei, of Princeton, and fellow Rutgers freshman Dharun Ravi of Plainsboro, both 18, allegedly used a webcam to broadcast the encounter on the Internet between Ravi’s roommate Clementi and a man who hasn’t been identified.

The tragic result of that is Clementi committed suicide. I don’t think anyone knows all the facts, but clearly he wasn’t ready for the world to know about his sexuality. The boundaries around what he thought were his private life had been blown up.

While this is an extreme example of that lack of boundaries, there are so many others. Look at the number of teenagers who attack someone, film it, and post it on YouTube. A lot of vandals seem to delight in recording their antics and then telling the world about it on Facebook. I know of companies who have decided not to hire someone because they posted pictures online of themselves drunk or naked or both. Then there’s sexting, another thing I don’t understand.

I realize a lot of this behavior went on before social media. I am not blaming social media per se for what is happening. Social media is just a tool. There have always been exhibitionists. Most teenagers are not equipped to look a couple of years down the road. I am really glad there is no record of some of the things I did 40 years ago.

The difference now is that it possible to tell the 1.9 billion Internet users exactly how you screwed up. Plus, once something is on the Internet, it is forever. As I said, social media is a tool. The issue people a lot of people are misusing this tool.

I don’t know the answer. All I know is we have to find a way to reestablish those boundaries.

By now it should be clear that any company that wants to have a successful marketing campaign has to use social media in its mix. Other have said, and I agree, that social media is the 21^st century’s industrial revolution. Leaving other forms of marketing out of a campaign will usually not affect its success. Leaving social media out can cripple a campaign before it begins.

Not just any person or agency can create and run a social media campaign. It takes an experienced marketing person who has both the training and experience in using social media. Too often companies stumble because they try to take shortcuts.

Many companies do seem to realize they need social media. The people in charge see their competitors are successfully using social media, so they decide to jump into the game. But social media is still pretty new. That leads to a lot of uncertainty among chief marketing officers. They look at the social media toolbox that’s filled with dozens of sites and are confused.

When that happens companies do one of two things: The CMO hires someone fresh out of college 22-year-old who must know they what are doing because they have a Facebook page and they tweet; or they turn to their advertising or marketing agency and ask them to put together a social media campaign.

The problems with the two approaches should be obvious. In the first case, a 22-year-old may know how to “like” on Facebook, but won’t have any idea on to plan and run a campaign. In the second case, a company will often find their agency has hired a 22-year-old fresh out of college to do social media for clients. In some cases, I know of old-line agencies have tired to talk their clients out of using social media arguing that traditional media will work just fine. I think that’s because they don’t want to admit they don’t know how to create and run a social media campaign.

I have noticed lately is there are many companies offering for-fee webinars, high-priced conferences, and expensive books. These companies all purport be social media experts. But as far as I can tell, none of these actually have done any social media campaigns. Who trained their trainers? What’s their background? That’s why I am always suspicious of those offers.

What of course a company should do is hire an experienced social media agency. That agency should be experienced in both social media and traditional marketing and public relations. Why traditional public relations? Because social media marketing and traditional public relations meld quite nicely. While it is important to use the new channels, you cannot afford to ignore the old ones.

So, when a company decides to do the right thing and hire a social media marketing agency, what skills and abilities should those making the decisions look for? Here are my suggestions for what should be asked:

• What is the agency’s experience in social media? How long has it been doing social media marketing?
• Who will be working on the campaign? An experienced account executive who has extensive training in social media and its uses or that recent college grad with the Facebook page?
• What social media applications does it use for its own business? Does it have a Facebook page, does it use Twitter, do its principals blog, does it post videos on YouTube, and does it know what social bookmarking is? There are many other questions that should be asked. This is just a sample.
• How many social media campaigns has the agency done? What were the results?
• What will the client be expected to do? This is a key question. Social media demands client involvement to a much larger extent than other forms of marketing. It is one of the things that makes it more effective.
• How does the agency measure ROI on the social media campaign?
• How will the agency integrate traditional public relations methods with the social media efforts? This is an area where a lot of social media agencies stumble. While social media is taking over rapidly, there is an important segment of the audiences who still read newspapers, watch television and listen to the radio. Don’t ignore those people. Many of them occupy the C-suite. Remember to a lot of CEOs the apex of public relations success is seeing their name on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. This is an important group to keep happy.

There are a lot of other questions that should be asked. But those should get your started.

My dog, Chester the Wonder Dog, is an alpha male. According to the online magazine Dog Owners Guide, an alpha dog is the leader of the pack, “the dog that dominates and leads the other members of the pack. The alpha is the boss that makes decisions for the entire pack.”

The same kind of “alpha dogs” exist in social media. They are the leaders of the pack, the first adapters, the ones who influence where everyone else goes on the net.

I discovered Chester was a leader the first time I took him to the dog park. Other dogs were coming up and sniffing him as he sat there. Some actually lay down in front of him. He would give each a very brief sniff and then somehow send them on their way. When Chester wandered around checking out various things, the other dogs followed and checked out the same areas.

I asked our vet why Chester wasn’t that interested in other dogs’ scents. The animal doctor explained that as an alpha dog, Chester didn’t care what the other canines smelled like. It was more important to Chester – and to the other dogs – that they knew what he smelled like. In that way they could follow his lead.

Social media “alpha dogs” act somewhat the same way. They are the first ones to “wander” around social media sites, picking out the best ones. They are the ones that post about the best restaurants, the hottest clubs, the best movies and everything else.

I am lucky enough to know some of them – Sarah Evans and Jason Kintzler are two who I greatly admire. Both have carved unique niches that I check out daily. I often follow their leads.

How do you identify those leaders? Look for the people who are on Facebook who make recommendations first. Check their blogs; follow them on Twitter and YouTube. They will always be at the front of the pack, telling others what’s cool and what’s not.

This brings me to my second point. Marketers have to find these people. You want to sell a product today; you need to build some social media cred. The best way to build cred is to find these leaders, these alpha dogs, and bring your idea or product to their attention.

However, you cannot pitch them. Going back to Chester the Wonder Dog, he rarely takes any interest in any toy I just give to him. I have to give him a reason to latch on to it – it is filled with treats, I will let him chew on it or it does something that interests him. He particularly likes to pay tug-of-war, if I take the time to wave the rubber rings in front of him. I have to be patient. He will play when he is good and ready.

I also know enough not to try to give anything he doesn’t like. For instance, he hates squeaky toys. We found early on that he would immediately destroy any toy that made noise.

The same rules apply to those media leaders. You cannot pitch them directly. It won’t work. You have to entice them, give them reasons to take an interest in your product. If there is something they don’t like, they will ignore it. If continue to try and get them accept your idea, they will tear it apart by telling others not to use the product.

There are no guarantees though. Alpha dogs make their own decisions. They will decide on their own what route they and the pack will want to take.

It’s high time that a C-level individual engaged in social media, and – once and for all –created a high-level overview and synopsis, crystallizing all of the strategic benefits and critical value streams, and distilling them into a language that speaks to executives everywhere in our native tongue – bottom line stakeholder value. So here you go. I’ve done the work for you. What follows is an “Executive Summary” of my findings.

Social Media Value #1:  Unfiltered Feedback

As you already know, some of the scarcest (rarest) yet most valuable information a CEO can obtain is honest, unfiltered feedback. Think about it. You interact all day with managers, employees, and handlers working to keep the boss happy and therefore keep their job. Sure, being surrounded by “Yes men” can be more comfortable, but it can also insulate you from the stark realities of your business. If done correctly, social media enables CEO’s to hear raw, candid feedback from real people – people who aren’t afraid of being fired because they CAN’T be fired. The truth is, leaders with their ego in check are already fully aware that they work for the customer – the customer is his boss – so if the customer doesn’t like dropped calls on their iPhone or the sauce on their Domino’s pizza, it’s their job to make it better.

Now, every customer is not always right (or wrong), but if 850 out of 1000 user comments say tthe new Sketcher’s Sport shoe caused them to sprain their ankle, then something needs to be fixed – and fast! CoolCleveland’s Founder Thomas Mulready is a perfect example of a CEO with this customer orientation. After emailing out his weekly eMagazine for 7 years, he decided that it needed to be updated, and set about introducing a new format with much fanfare. In doing so, he also did something revolutionary – he asked all 90,000 of his readers for feedback on what they thought of the new style – and boy did they reply with scores of comments submitted over the span of a few days. But then he did something else revolutionary – he actually listened, modifying and improving the new site to reflect reader tastes and preferences. Yes, it takes humility (“Who are these people to give me feedback?  I invented this product! Don’t they know they can just click the links?) but the end result is an engaged audience who now feel genuinely empowered to provide even more feedback, emboldened by the knowledge that their comments actually impact (and can improve) the end product.

Social Media Value #2:  Authenticity

Hand-in-hand with the unfiltered feedback above is the ability to leverage social media to authentically communicate with your employees, partners, customers (and non-customers), investors, and media, directly engaging all of your brand ambassadors efficiently and economically. Rather than layers of staff, spokespeople, and sterile press releases, social media now offers an elegant and effective medium for disseminating information either “straight from the heart” or “straight from the horses’ mouth” depending on your preferred idiom. Dan Gilbert’s recent LeBron James “rant” would qualify as both, capturing the owners’ anger, frustration, and competitive resolve just moments after James’ announced his departure. As you’ve probably noticed, nobody can tell the company story and embody the company brand like the CEO (think Steve Jobs) and by offering the ability to immediately and directly engage stakeholders – whether on a typical day, during a product launch, and/or especially during a time of crisis – social media provides an invaluable medium for maximizing brand value and minimizing potential brand degradation. Social media helps firms “keep it real” but couches it in a positive brand-reinforcing context.

Social Media Value #3: Six Sigma (Low Cost)

In case you were wondering, executives LOVE things like Six Sigma because:

1. It reminds us of our Greek fraternity days in college.

2. The other soccer dad’s don’t understand Value Stream Mapping.

3. Six Sigma and lean processes are all about speed and cost sacvings, two of our favorite topics.

By its very architecture, social media is positioned to leverage firms’ Six Sigma orientation by expediting interactions, exchanges, customer service, feedback loops, product launches, marketing, and advertising, and enabling it at a fraction of the cost of traditional media, to a much more targeted audience, and in a far more nuanced and contextual value exchange. Social media options allow your message distribution format to evolve from shotgun to sniper, from billboard to message board, and from broadcast to narrowcast.  Plus, it takes your marketing posture from a one-way, blanketing, bullhorn approach to a more intimate, just-in-time interaction; offering the opportunity for a more detailed, valuable and more profitable conversation and connection with your audience (and you don’t need a Black Belt to do it).

Social Media Value #4:  Balancing Transparency AND Privacy

The only thing worse than not using social media tools is using them in the wrong way. Your firm could very easily invest time and money on social media, and then end up spending even more time and money doing damage control because you did it wrong the first time – talk about a lose-lose situation. With social media, there’s a “right way” and a “wrong way” to do things – so if you’re going to do it, do it right. Remember, anywhere-anytime-anyone social media channels must be handled as the “nuclear options” that they are, with the capability to destroy your brand value in a single Twitter, email, or YouTube video that goes viral.

With great power comes great responsibility, and a healthy respect for the global reach and impact of social media must emanate directly from the CEO, who knows better than anyone that the same programs allowing firms to connect and influence the marketplace can also be turned against you to alienate them. And just as social media can provide the market with a transparent window into the soul of your company, it can also showcase you at your worst, doing more harm than good.  Let’s face it, your firm is already dabbling in social media as it is – so you might as well manage your risk and liability by codifying corporate expectations, establishing specific ground rules, and educating your stakeholders regarding proper use of these seemingly innocent yet powerful tools.

Social Media Value #5: Supporting Statistics

Executives rely on market research to support and substantiate any designated course of action, and devour facts, stats, and data-points like shrimp at a wedding reception. Summarized below are a few statistics buttressing the explosion of this social media trend, and detailing how Corporate America is leveraging it to realize significant revenue and market share growth going forward.

• In the last 7 years, Internet usage has increased 70 percent a year. Spending for digital advertising this year will be more than $25 billion and surpass print advertising spending (forever)

• Lenovo has experienced a 20 percent reduction in activity to their call center since they launched their community website for customers
• Blendtec quintupled sales with its “Will it Blend” series on YouTube
• Only 18 percent of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
• Naked Pizza set a one-day sales record using social media: 68 percent of their sales and 85 percent of their new customers came via Twitter.
• Software company Genius.com reports 24 percent of social media leads convert to sales opportunities,
• Dell has already made over $7 million in sales via Twitter.
• Thirty-seven percent of Generation Y heard about the Ford Fiesta via social media before its launch in the US and currently 25 percent of Ford’s marketing budget is spent on digital/social media.
• Seventy-one percent of companies plan to increase investments in social media by an average of 40 percent.
• A recent Wetpaint/Altimeter Group study found companies that widely engage in social media surpass their peers in both revenue and profit.

(Sources for Statistics: meyersreport.com, lenovosocial.com, George Wright, Blendtec, Mashable.com, econsultancy.com, businessweek.com )

Getting Your Board On Board

Lest we forget, even the Boss has a Boss – they’re called the Board of Directors – and these are the people that recruit and hire CEO’s for the purpose of serving as a charismatic and visionary leader of their organization. And so I urge you, don’t disappoint them when it comes to leveraging social media within your organization. The “Bang for the Buck” value proposition is too compelling to ignore, and the fact is – your competitors are already entering this arena and establishing new service baseline norms and minimum threshold expectations – so standing still amounts to losing ground and therefore is not an option. What you need is a plan.

Do I still hate social media?  No, but I’m only going to embrace it on the “executive terms” that have served me so well to this point in my career and they are, “If you’re going to do something, go all in and do it right.”  From now on, all social media, social marketing, and social networking will be discussed in the context – not of a campaign (which starts and ends) – but as part of an ongoing, strategic, and systematic dialog with our stakeholders and marketplace.

Executives have the focus and vision to road map strategies playing out three, five, and 10 years into the future. But, we’re also “plodders” and are comfortable with short, measured, consistent steps – day in and day out – as long as we know that they are aligned with reaching a desired goal. When we discuss your social media strategy, the focus will be on consistency and sustainability over the long haul. Remember, executives don’t have the ego needs, risk profiles, or the time to be on the bleeding edge, or even the cutting edge. We just want it to work.

I can confidently predict that every month for the next 100 years there will be a new “Must Have” application, portal or community that one of your employees will discover, and then try to convince you that your company will implode if you don’t immediately join, link, or Retweet. In five years, all but three of these ideas will probably be forgotten.  During our meeting, we will discuss how to frame out an enterprise-wide social media strategy, predicated on the foundation of proven tools and that have stood the test of time and offer “Best-In-Class” results, so that you will be empowered to handle these conversations proactively in the context of a larger road map, rather than reacting to these weekly ambushes in a dismissive defensive way. Remember, our goal for social media is not a lark, but a lifestyle and work-shopping a strategy which builds on stable, scalable tools, yet also affords the flexibility to address unprecedented “Black Swan” technology developments, provides you with a welcome buffer from being whipsawed by a weekly website.  Between the two of us, we’ll finally take that reliable “80/20 Rule” and apply it to social media, and then spend time focusing on the 80 percent of stakeholder value that can be extracted with 20% of the effort (while knowingly and purposefully ignoring the remaining 20 percent of value which takes up 80 percent of the effort).

The Bottom Line

In the Forward of Geoffrey Moore’s bestseller “Crossing the Chasm” Regis McKenna writes:

“Fundamentally, marketing must refocus away from selling product and toward creating relationships. Customers don’t like to be ‘owned’ if that implies lack of choice or freedom. But they do like to be ‘owned’ if what that means is a vendor taking ongoing responsibility for the success of their joint ventures.  Ownership in this sense means an abiding commitment and a strong sense of mutuality in the development of the marketplace. When customers encounter this kind of ownership, they tend to become fanatically loyal to their supplier, which in turns builds a stable economic base for profitability and growth.”

While there will always be a “me” in media – social media, social marketing, and social networking tools were designed to work best as a conduit for enabling information exchange, establishing a dialog, and creating a two-way conversation with your audience. At the end of the day, social media is simply about creating and maintaining relationships – and even and executive can do that.

I’m an executive and I hate social media. There, I said it. It’s finally “out there.” But before you Twitter a flaming flash mob link to assemble pitchfork-wielding Second Life villagers outside my door, I urge you to take a deep breath, put down your double frappuccino, remove your earpiece, step away from your iPad, and set your iPhasers to stun, for I come in peace.  If you’ve ever wondered why your CEO also hates social media, social networking and, well, socializing in general, I urge you to continue reading.

Just as Fox TV’s Masked Magician series demystified the tricks of the world’s most famous illusionists, I offer the following as both a behind-the-scenes peak and a confessional of sorts, into the mind of the executive. For to truly understand the conflicting yet predictable stonewalling in this domain, one must search deep below the surface, plumbing the depths of the executive psyche, motivations, and worldviews, for only then will you be able to “crack the code,” engage us in our native tongue and communicate in a vocabulary and language to which we will respond.  Consider this your own personal backstage pass to the inner sanctum of the Executive Suite.

Executive: More Perception Than Position

For starters, the term “executive” isn’t a title as much as it is a mindset or a set of attributes – often leading to career success and the achievement of such rank – but what might surprise most is that this ambition and executive mentality often begins to manifest itself early in life.  For example, while most were partying and hanging out in high school, we were already taking college-level classes while holding down several part time jobs.  And when most were “finding themselves” in college and still deciding on a major after three years, we were serving in student leadership, doing internships, or doubling up on classes to finish college a semester early. And when most were finally in the workforce, instead of clubbing and playing in multiple softball leagues, we were completing an advanced degree in night school, pursuing professional certifications, and framing out retirement plans.

Executives are high achievers – that’s just how we’re wired. Give me a mountain and I’ll climb it. And if you don’t have a mountain, I’ll find my own mountain and I’ll climb it.  And if I can’t find a mountain, I’ll build one – just so I can climb it. But here’s what most people don’t get about executives. Once a CEO climbs a mountain, he doesn’t feel the need to Tweet to the world that he did it. He doesn’t have the natural desire to blog, “Look what a great climber I am” and include multiple pictures with links to his Facebook and LinkedIn account. He did it because it’s in his DNA. He doesn’t require the attention, approval, or applause of others, and therein lies the fundamental source of the problem – executives are non-narcissistic in a YouTube world. We’re outliers. In a society that brags, blogs, and Tweets about the tiniest personal minutia, we could care less because, frankly, we expect success, it’s normal to us. It’s like Vince Lombardi’s admonition to his running back after an overly exuberant display, “Next time you make a touchdown, act like you’ve been there before.”

Eagles Don’t Flock

Executives are “eagles,” and unlike seagulls, eagles don’t flock. We’re not joiners and we’re not groupies, which is why we overwhelmingly prefer challenging single-person sports like running, cycling, weightlifting, and our one concession to “group sports” – golf (which is still technically a single-person sport, but more fun in groups). Lance Armstrong didn’t win his titles without leaving the peloton,and ditto for greats like Sampras, Tiger, and Arnold. They had to go above and beyond the group to achieve greatness, and for this reason it truly us lonely at the top (not that we mind).

Social Networking: The Problem is “Networking”

The reason we hate social networking is the same reason we hate regular networking. Exchanging small talk for two hours in a room full of strangers, with a drink in one hand and a business card in the other, and a “Hi, I’m Doug” name tag peeling off my lapel, and standing – my goodness the standing – and looking unsuccessfully for any food with some protein in it, and wondering if this guy with the too-firm handshake is going to see if we can “LinkIn” after sharing an elevator ride, before glancing at my watch and counting the minutes until I can leave and get back to work. It’s a nightmare. Why? Because – surprise, surprise – most executives are actually introverts, who value their time and their privacy and are constantly evaluating the ROI trade-offs of every hour of every day. (Quiz:  How many times have you heard a CEO describe himself as a “People Person”?)

To say that we are anti-social would be a huge misrepresentation, but when you combine the word “social” with “networking” – let’s just say it sends shivers up my spine. Do I like the company of others? Sure I do – but I want the time to be well spent. Instead of random, shallow, unfocused small talk, CEO’s would much rather sit around with a small group of peers for 2 hours and discuss BIG specific challenges – and their solutions. In fact, the reason so much business gets done on the golf course is because it’s one of the few places leaders actually congregate and feel relaxed enough to discuss what’s really on their minds.

Social Networking: The Problem is “Social”

The next hurdle for executives with social networking are the implications of the root word “Social”, and, by its very spelling, its association to Socialism. Socialism is defined as, “Any system of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively,” and further, “An economic and political theory based on public ownership or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources.” (At least that’s what someone wrote on Wikipedia). The premise and value of the “social media” movement is the power of the collective in the production, distribution, and ownership of goods, and the reason executives resist this model is that it flies in the face of their existing worldview which, quite frankly, has been pretty successful to date. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Most of us have a pretty big chip on our shoulders, attributing our career success to the years of diligence, education, ambition, delayed gratification and sacrifices we’ve made to reach the leadership levels we’ve achieved.

Therefore, the anti-capitalistic notion that my work and contributions would be homogenized with the uninspired masses, and that ultimately my value would be determined by the randomness of the collective is a jarring and unpalatable departure. I want to control my company! I want to control my brand! I want to determine my destiny! It’s too important to leave it to chance (or simply be outvoted by the uninformed bourgeois)! Unfortunately and tragically for us executives, the beauty and power of social media is only fully unleashed when we let it go, and that, my friends, is the hardest thing for us to do (…and also explains why we hate checking luggage at the airport).

Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts

Okay, I promised that this would be a confessional, so here’s a shocker. Over time, there is a tendency for CEO’s to get inflated egos.  Now granted, a healthy ego can serve as a necessary defense mechanism to provide protection from the relentless attacks from subordinates, peers, and the media, but too much amounts to just plain pride. We like to think of ourselves as a pretty smart bunch, and our position is such that even if we don’t completely understand something, we often project to our colleagues that we do.

A classic example of this phenomenon transpired during the Enron debacle, where ranks of senior executives refused to admit that they couldn’t comprehend the mechanics of this powerful conglomerate, until it was too late. It’s the same with new advances in technology, which has accelerated during our careers from “hit or miss” to “mission critical,” going from bricks to clicks and from mortar to mind share, while serving as a platform for everything from infrastructure, billing, and product development, to security, scheduling, and sales. The rapid rate of change in digital innovation has caused CEOs to feel extremely vulnerable around technology because it is something on which we have become very reliant, but which we understand and “control” so little, and this vulnerability leads to fear, and this fear to irrational decisions and suboptimal outcomes. When CEOs don’t have the confidence in their staff to delegate, or lack the humility to admit their ignorance regarding technology advances, they get defensive and act out in fear – or fail to act altogether.

Social Media: Justified Fear?

Executives justify their fear of social media by pointing back to a historic drumbeat of disappointment and unfulfilled promises. They recall with vivid detail the never-ending parade of new online engagement vehicles and “paradigms” introduced over the past 15 years by turtleneck-wearing gurus with names like Kip or Seth, which were then propagated by self-proclaimed “New Economy” experts sporting titles like “Chief Innovation Officer” and “Director of Chaos,” and then championed by side burn-wearing hipster foot soldiers who never met a filter they didn’t like. In the 90’s, we were promised that customers would beat a path to our door if we created something called a “web page” and then “posted” it on this thing called the Internet or World Wide Web or something. Then they convinced us to buy electronic lists and send out “Email Blasts” to our target markets, and next it was a website redesign, push technology, pull technology, exchanged links, partner intranets, eBusiness, eCommerce, blogging, webinars, podcasts, search engine optimization, YouTube videos, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, yada, yada, yada. Each time they promised that this time it would be different, and that this new product/protocol/portal/potion would somehow (magically??) drive revenue, increase efficiency, and optimize utilization (or some other buzz word or invented metric). You told me to blog, so I blogged. You told me to Twitter, so I Tweeted. What’s it going to be tomorrow – scan my body into a mashup simulator to create a hologram so I can telepresence myself into sales calls in Madrid via FourSquare using Flickr? All I know is that I’ve spent a lot of time and money on a series of disjointed initiatives and campaigns and so far none have performed as advertised.

Don’t Feed Me Another Fad

Look, executives aren’t that complicated. While I can handle the many nuanced “gray areas” of business leadership, I prefer to see things in black and white; victories and defeats; profits and losses. I don’t mind making significant, strategic multi-year investments and committing to enterprise-wide initiatives which will improve the future performance of my company – in fact, I ENJOY it – what do you think got me to the Executive Suite in the first place? Just don’t insult me. I don’t want to waste any more time or money on the hype of  “the next big thing” or the newest tool or toy, only to be disappointed when the latest flash-in-the-pan fad fades and goes the way of Harvard Graphics. It’s not that I have a fear of commitment – frankly, it’s just the opposite. I have a healthy fear and distaste for doing things randomly just to be doing something; or because someone saw an article in USA Today, or CNBC did a story on it, or out of fear that I’ll be the last one in my circle to “get on board.” (Believe me, the things that keep me up at night can’t be solved in 140 characters or less). The truth is, I would love to commit to social media in a significant way, but so far nobody in my organization has stepped forward with a cerebral, strategic, multi-generational, integrated, systematic, and sustainable methodology and road map for synergistically capitalizing on this medium over the long haul.

Your Network is Your Net Worth

Executives are uniquely conflicted because we know better than anyone the power of relationships, and the truth of the old axiom, “Your network is your net worth,” yet we are inherently introverts, and gravitate towards solitude versus socializing. We understand on an intellectual level that none of us individually are “too big to fail,” and that even the Lone Ranger had Tonto and Batman had Robin, yet we find initiating conversations and exchanges with others to be draining, distracting, and exhausting rather than invigorating and inspiring. Hence we yearn; as a group we pine; for deep within our heart of hearts burns a great bright hope that somehow and in some way this social media movement or platform or culture or whatever could be harnessed and leveraged to cross that chasm and create valuable, authentic exchanges and relevant, real-time dialogue with stakeholders of all persuasions. If we could just develop an all-encompassing framework for how this would integrate into our enterprise-wide strategy, and manage it like a mission-critical project (complete with milestones, deliverables and accountability instead of fuzzy metrics like “buzz”), I am supremely confident that we could achieve escape velocity and – for the first time – truly establish and be able to articulate a synergistic, sustainable, and quantifiable strategy for leveraging “Best-In-Class” social media options to achieve desired corporate outcomes and maximize financial returns.

A Gift From Media To You

You know, it’s interesting. Somewhere in the convoluted catharsis of composing this confessional, I came to a surprising realization.  Maybe I don’t HATE social media after all. Maybe I just hate the Quixotic context in which most social media conversations exist, featuring a perpetually moving target, combined with an obsessive, cult-like worship of the default worldview, “If Something is New = It Must Be Good”, and where subjective criteria like “mindshare” and “impressions” are considered quantifiable deliverables and irrefutable barometers of success.

Come to think of it, maybe it’s high time that a C-level individual engaged this topic, and – once and for all –created a high-level overview and synopsis, crystallizing all of the strategic benefits and critical value streams, and distilling them into a language that speaks to executives everywhere in our native tongue – bottom line stakeholder value.

Part Two will run Wednesday.

“The number of text messages sent per user increased by nearly 50 percent nationwide last year, according to the CTIA, the wireless industry association,” The Time . “And for the first time in the United States, the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls, industry executives and analysts say.”

“‘Originally, talking was the only cellphone application,” Dan Hesse, chief executive of Sprint Nextel told the Time. ‘But now it’s less than half of the traffic on mobile networks.’”

I said I found it interesting that people were returning to the written word for communication. My friend said that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. He pointed out a couple of things: texts are never very long; and most people are not very good at communicating when they are limited in how many words they use.

I was reminded of one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes: “If I would have had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter.” The point the great writer was making is that it is much for difficult to communicate clearly when fewer words are used. It takes time and practice to learn to do it well. For instance, I usually rewrite my blogs at least twice. If I cannot cut out at least one-third of the words from the first draft, I assume I am doing something wrong.

I doubt anyone rewrites their texts before sending them. I suspect there is a lot of miscommunication because people never read over the text before sending. Plus, many people just don’t know what words mean or how to use them.

I thought that when my friend made that point. I agree, I said, but I am good writer. He agreed my texts and emails are usually well written – short and to the point.

Be that as it may, he added, how many good readers are out there? That brought me up short. So, I did a little research and found:

• U.S. adults ranked 12th among 20 high income countries in composite (document, prose, and quantitative) literacy, according to the Educational Testing Service.
• Nearly half of America’s adults are poor readers, or “functionally illiterate.” They can’t carry out simply tasks like balancing a check books, reading drug labels or writing essays for a job, according to the National Adult Literacy Survey of 1993.
• More than 20 percent of adults read at or below a fifth-grade level – far below the level needed to earn a living wage, according to National Institute for Literacy, Fast Facts on Literacy, 2001.
• 21 million Americans can’t read at all, 45 million are marginally illiterate and one-fifth of high school graduates can’t read their diplomas, according to U.S. Department of Justice.

Apparently there are many people who are not good readers. The Times story noted that almost 90 percent of Americans have mobile phones. So, many of those functionally illiterate people are texting.

Doesn’t sound a like a recipe for good communication to me. I am not even going to cover abbreviations like ROTFLMAO, TTYL, or all the others that seem like a foreign language.

My suggestion – trying actually talking. You might be surprised how much easier it is to communication.

Well, them whippersnappers couldn’t be more wrong. The New York City-based Nielsen found that boomers dominate 1,023 of the 1,083 consumer packaged goods categories. We watch 9.34 hours of video per day, which beats out any other age group. We also compromise a third of all television viewers, Web users, social media users and Twitter users. We are also significantly more likely to have broadband Internet.

“Marketers have this tendency to think the Baby Boom — getting closer to retirement — will just be calm and peaceful as they move ahead, and that’s not true. Everything we see with our behavioral data says these people are going to be active consumers for much longer. They are going to be in better health, and despite the ugliness around the retirement stuff now, they are still going to be more affluent,” Doug Anderson, SVP/research & development for Nielsen, told Marketing Daily. They are going to be an important segment for a long time.”

The Nielsen research found that while we Boomers spend 38.5 percent of all money spent on consumer priced good, only five percent of advertising dollars are spent trying to attract us.

For those of you keeping score at home, the Baby Boom began in 1946. Beginning in second of half of 1945 millions of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines came home from World War II. Those men had built of lot of um, energy, during the war. You can do the math on what happened when they got home.

By the time the Boom ended in 1964, there had been 75.8 million Americans born, according to the U.S. Census bureau. It stopped because of the introduction of the birth control pill.

I am a Boomer – I was born in 1954. I am often ticked off when I see marketing campaigns for products I am clearly interested directed at 25-year-olds. However, I sympathize with marketers trying to figure out how to reach us. Why?

Well, most marketing campaigns are designed to reach the widest possible audience. The strategies and tactics used in the campaign are created to reach the entire audience. You cannot do that with Baby Boomers. We are just too diverse.

Let me explain. Boomers range in age from 64- to 46-years-old. That’s a huge swing. Let’s look at three groups of Boomers.

A Boomer born in 1946 – the first wave – came of age during the 1950s and early 1960s. This was the time of sock hops, malt shops, Rebel Without A Cause, cheap energy and a pretty good lifestyle. This was the group who both became hippies and fought in Vietnam. They are now either retired or are thinking about. A lot of them are grandparents.

Someone like me who came of age in the middle-to-late ‘60s remembers the summer of 1968, with its race riots, anti-war protests, and assassinations. Vietnam had turned into a quagmire. The Cold War was raging. I remember being taught to hide under my school desk during the Cuban missile crisis. It was a dark, cynical time for the most part. We are struggling with the economy, although our children are now mostly on their own.

Someone born in 1964 came of age in the late ‘70s and early 1980s. I went to Woodstock – they went to discos. Theirs was the era Ronald Reagan’s morning in America, CD players, Jane Fonda’s workouts, and Yuppies. It was a much more optimistic time. They are probably trying to figure out how to pay for their kid’s college education.

So there you have it. How do you market to those three groups, even if they are lumped together under one name? It cannot be easy.

So, I was really happy to find out how active FIFA and ESPN were in their use of social media to push the beautiful game in the United States. I think it definitely increased interest in the entire tournament. It was an impressive effort that paid off.

For you non-fans, FIFA is an acronym that stands for The International Federation of Association Football in English. In French it stands for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, hence FIFA. The word soccer comes from the word Association. The English shortened “Association” to soccer. Don’t ask me why, I’m Irish by descent.

ESPN stands for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. Enough with the language lesson.

Overall, viewership was up 41 percent from the English-language World Cup telecasts four years ago, according to the WorldCast website. Coverage on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 averaged a 2.1 rating, 2.3 million households and 3.2 million viewers for the 64 World Cup games. The rating was up 31 percent from the 1.6 posted four years ago, while households increased 32 percent from 1.7 million and viewers rose from 2.3 million, the site said.

“Viewership in the U.S. was at its highest when the home team was playing in the tournament,” WorldCast said. “Through the first 50 games, the rating was up 48 percent, households increased 54 percent and viewers increased 60 percent.”

I should note that attracting viewers in the rest of the world is not an issue. According to ABC News 700 million people watched the championship game between Spain and the Netherlands. Show me any American television event that attracts even 25 percent of that kind of worldwide audience.

FIFA would like to make more inroads into the USA. We are, after all, the wealthiest country on Earth. Soccer is growing in popularity as a youth sport. We would seem to be a natural place for FIFA to focus.

FIFA and ESPN are run by very smart groups of marketing people. They knew if they encouraged the use of social media good things would happen. They apparently do not worry about things like trademark infringement. The results speak for themselves.

ESPN’s Facebook World Cup had over 600,000 people who “liked” the page. I know don’t where that ranks among Facebook sports fan pages, but it is impressive number. The Facebook soccer page has over two million fans. I didn’t count because who has that kind of time, but there has to be over a thousand pages of tweets with the hash tag “worldcup.”

Googling the term “world cup soccer blogs” produced 49 million hits. Now, as a blogger myself, I am willing to bet that there are not 49 million blogs about the World Cup. But, if there is even 10 percent of that number, that is impressive.

A quick YouTube search found just over 800,000 videos that somehow mention the World Cup.

You get the idea. As I said in a blog last week, FIFA knows what use to work won’t necessarily work anymore. So it moved on to a new method and it worked.

Although this wasn’t a rant, I do have one note. On Sunday, a friend and I rode our bikes to Port Washington, Wis. – 26 miles north of where I live. We stopped to enjoy that small city’s wonderful lakefront and marina.

Like any public area, there are posted rules of public conduct. What brought me up short was a sign that read: “Violations Will Be Enforced!”  So apparently rule breaking is required?

Why? It’s simple really – even in a time when I, and everyone else, is more connected than ever, it is important to maintain some privacy. As I have said, I don’t want to know what you doing every waking minute of your day. You shouldn’t care about what I am doing during my day.

I am constantly amazed by the amount of information people spew on the Internet. When I think about posting something, I use the supermarket checkout line test: if I were standing in the checkout line in my local store, would I turn to the person behind me and reveal something deeply personal. Remember, the odds are this person is a total stranger. The second part of the test is would that person care?

Of course, there is far too much interest in the minutiae of people’s lives. I saw an advertisement today for a new show on ABC called “Family Secrets.” The show’s teaser on ABC’s website says: “Why families keep secrets and what happens when the truth comes out.”

Come on, who in their right mind would go on national television and spill everything there is to spill about their family. And who would watch something like that?

There is another concern about being too open on the web – security. I will never understand why people announce to the world that they are not home. The Facebook announcement that the Hendersons are making an extended tour of the American West must make burglars drool.

Come on people, you think that everyone reading your posts is doing it because you are so interesting? Some of those readers are tracking who’s not home, when they will be gone, where they are, and when they will get back. No sense in rushing the theft if there’s no need. You mix a trip announcement on Facebook, some pictures posted during the trip and a couple of tweets about the Grand Canyon and you have burglary.

So, my advice is to be discreet. It is the best path to take.

Incidentally, Asheville, N.C. is a beautiful place. I recommend it highly for a place to relax and recharge.

While all of the sharing social media has caused might be connecting people, I see a lot of danger in that. Is it a really good thing for people to know you ate at Ray’s Famous Pizza in New York, then went to see “Promises, Promises” on Broadway and finally dropped in for a nightcap at your favorite local bar?

I often hear complaints from people who are inundated with marketing solicitations. They wonder why they are they getting so many. Think about it. I think this trend is increasingly dangerous. Do we really mean to give up all of our privacy?

Today (Monday), I read a piece in the New York Times about the late author John Updike. It reminded my just how much things have changed in a very short time.

In the piece, writer Sam Tanenhaus that says “Updike was a private man, if not a recluse like J. D. Salinger or a phantom like Thomas Pynchon, then a one-man gated community, visible from afar but firmly sealed off, with a No Trespassing sign posted in front.”

Updike was a man of the middle 20^th Century, pre-Internet, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogging. I think the reason he could maintain that distance was that there were not the tools to break the walls he had erected.

I wrote on this topic last year. But since I did, even more ways to reveal yourself to the world have come along. Now there is Foursquare, a site that tells everyone what restaurants, movies and other things you attend. There are more and more review sites, which ask people to comment on a hotel, a car or a book. There are location sites that tell people exactly where you live and where you are traveling.

The amount of information people are willing to share with the world – or at least the 1.8 billion people on the web – is staggering. When I was a reporter, I used to tell people in a week I could tell their life story. I could do that because the paper I worked for bought proprietary databases. Some poor person had spent weeks gathering and inputting all of the information those databases contained. It took time to look through them and you had to know how search what you were looking for.

Now, I can do it an hour or two. It doesn’t any particular skill to gather the information. Anyone with some time on their hands can find out just about anything they want about anyone they want. Often that information is used maliciously.

While malicious use of information is one effect of this spewing, I wonder if there are other side effects? Do we really need to know everything about everybody? I am not so sure. I am curious as to what you think.

Remember, social media is all about building a community. All communities need rules or they descend into anarchy. Hard to market anything in that environment.

I decided to start to codify what I believe are social media rules for two reasons:

• More and more, I seeing people do things on social media that really irks me. They have no idea of the purpose or reasons for using social media.
• I spoke last week on social media. I named some of the rules, but realized there was no one accepted set of the dos and don’ts. I have no idea if my list will become that set of rules, but somebody has to try.

So here is my list of social media rules with some explanations on why I feel the particular rule is needed.

Oh, one note – I doubt I will be able to cover all of the rules in one posting. I will most likely continue this Wednesday. Plus, I plan to list any suggestions you make. In fact, I want to encourage you to send me what you think should be rules for using social media. If you don’t like one of mine, tell me why.

Now then, here they are:

• Don’t lie. The reasons for that should be obvious. Social media is particularly unforgiving about anyone who tells a falsehood. It will destroy your, or your company’s, credibility.  No one buys from such a company or hires such a person.
• Do not spam. Here’s the definition of spam I like. It comes from answers.com: “Unsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; junk e-mail.”  You spam me, I report to you whatever provider you come from and I block you. I should add my rule is don’t ever solicit me. If I want a service you provide, I will find you.
• To follow up on that last point, soliciting business violates the spirit of social media. The whole point of social media is to demonstrate yours or your company’s expertise. If people like what you say, they will buy your product. You want to give people solid reasons to buy your product. You want your customers to endorse your products, which provides reasons for others to buy. It is like fishing: you cannot ask a fish to take the hook; you have to give it a reason, such as an enticing fly.
• I have four basic rules for connecting with me:
  • Use your real name. My first thought when someone uses a “cute” name, is what do they have to hide?
  • Post a picture. Again, what are you hiding from? Why don’t you want people to see what you look like? If you are company, post your logo.
  • Post a brief biography and a link if you have one. Again, what do you have to hide? I want to know something about you before I connect.
  • Ask me once, and only once, to connect. I get lots of email – somewhere around 100 a day. I might not get to your request right away. That does not give you license to bombard me with continuing connection requests. Doing that ensures I will not connect with you. One more thing, I do get through all of my email within two days of receiving it. If I don’t respond to your request, it means I have decided for any number of reasons not to connect. Don’t take it personally and don’t ask again.
  • Once we are connected, I also have rules:
    • Do not tell me what you had for breakfast, what cute thing your dog did today or that the sun is shining. I don’t care. I connect with people, who are marketers, bloggers, social media wonks, or into politics, fiction writers or people I find interesting. I am here to learn and discuss. If you post anything that falls into what I view as banal, I will block you.
    • Never, ever try to sell me anything, or tell me you have a surefire method for ensuring I will become a millionaire by working 15 minutes a week. I don’t believe you. I will never believe you.

Okay, that’s enough for today. I will cover some more rules Wednesday.

Please let me know what you think about these rules. Provide with me some of your own. I will report them.

He stops me before I get wound up. His frustration comes from his superiors – he just cannot convince them that social media is the company’s best option. He wants my input on how to perhaps change their minds, although he is not hopeful.

Oh, for those of you who are wondering, my practice is to provide one free call or meeting on social media, marketing or public relations. After that I charge. Hey, I gotta eat too.

I tell the guy that my first rule with a client who has never done social media before is you have to crawl and then walk before you can run. What that means in plain talk is doing two apps before trying to do four or five. Trying to do everything at once is a formula for frustration and failure. I want my clients to succeed.

So, after hearing what the company does and its goals, I suggest starting a blog and creating a YouTube channel. Those two efforts would jive nicely with the company already does. Every study I have read say blogs are the most effective way to establish a brand’s identity. YouTube is a good way to demonstrate a product.

I am deliberately not providing any detail on the company’s location or products. I do not want this guy to get in trouble with his bosses. If you are boss who thinks it was one of your people who called, it probably wasn’t. Besides, my land line covers all of North America and I am adept user of Skype.

So, maybe if he eases them into social media, it will accepted, I tell him. Not going to work he says. He says  there was no way his company would agree to doing even those two applications. They wanted to stick with conventional marketing methods. I am still pondering this dilemma.

However, it is a common one. Despite that the fact that companies from IBM to Mom and Pop restaurants use social media constantly and effectively, many executives still don’t want anything to do with it. I don’t know why, but I have some hypothesis.

They are:

• The herd instinct. None of their competitors are doing it, so they don’t want to be first.
• The fear instinct. They are afraid they might not do it right or it might not work, so they don’t try
• The laziness quotient. Social media demands more time than conventional marketing. Many in the C-Suite don’t want to take the time to write a blog or tweet. They would rather an agency do their work.
• The ignorance problem. They don’t know who effective social media can be and don’t want to bother to learn.

I am sure these people have what they think are other valid reasons. They are not, and that’s just sad.

I have been a writer since I was five-years-old. My first piece was entitled “The Eagle That Had Acrophobia.” It was the first writing assignment I was ever given. It came from my kindergarten teacher toward the end of the year. I think the assignment was given to us to test how much we knew about writing and reading. I am not sure the content mattered that much. At any rate, I got a gold star for using all of the words correctly.

That was my first lesson in writing. Always make sure every word is used and spelled properly. Now, I still have not attained that proper state of writing, although I get closer everyday. I am getting closer because I care deeply about excellent writing and I work hard at it.

Which brings me to the point of this screed – how much just plain lazy and incorrect writing I see everyday. Now, I am not talking about typos. To me that’s an honest mistake. The key to read reread so they can be detected and corrected.

No, what I am talking about is the incorrect use of words, run-on sentences, sloppy logic, and just plain bad writing.

Look, social media demands good writing. I am not saying you have to be a Mark Twain or an Ernest Hemingway. I am saying all of the writing posted has to make sense.

Tell me if you can think of a social media application where the use of language is not important. For instance, every study I have read says blogging is the most effective social media application. Well, a blog has to be written, doesn’t it? Twitter demands clear, concise writing if a  thought is going to be stated clearly in 140 characters. For a YouTube video to make sense, the person speaking has to do it such a way that viewers can understand.

Yet, everyday I hear people talking about “building a new building.” Who builds an old building? Or look at the “new baby.” Ever seen an old baby – in the literal sense? Or one of my favorites – “this door alarmed.” How can one tell if a door is upset?

The other night I was watching the local news in Milwaukee. The newscaster talked about the “tragic death of a five-year-old girl.” Have you ever known the death of a five-year-old not to be tragic? Or “the fire totally engulfed the house.” Look of the definition of the world engulfed – “totally” is not needed.

I did a web search and found sterling examples of bad writing, such as:

• PET OF THE WEEK: Nannouk is a 10-week-old Spitz mix female and will grow to be medium sized. She does well inside. Sterilization is mandatory for anyone wanting to take her.
• Operationally, teaching effectiveness is measured by assessing the levels of agreement between the perceptions of instructors and students on the rated ability of specific instructional behavior attributes which were employed during course instruction. Due to the fact that instructors come from diverse backgrounds and occupy different positions within a given university, both individual and organizational based factors may contribute to the variance in levels of agreement between perceptions.
• The man was eating a fish that still had its head on and was drinking red wine in great gulps. The fish’s eyes looked alive.

My thanks to the University of Minnesota-Duluth for the examples. There are a lot more on the university’s website.

I am not going to get into people who don’t know the difference between then and than. Or writers that don’t know when to use who and that. I could go on forever.

Yes, those examples are all funny, but they are also sad. Allegedly educated people who spoke English as their first language wrote those three examples. What the hell is wrong with them?

I just had to rant about this. I know I am fighting a losing battle, but it doesn’t mean I plan to stop.



However, what these students don’t have is much social media knowledge. That surprised me.

In fact, in the last week it has been driven home to me how many people either don’t know, or don’t want to know, about social media. That was my awakening. It isn’t just students – it people at every level of every organization. I feel like these people are standing at the bottom of a mountain with their backs turned. The social media avalanche is roaring down and about to engulf them. Yet they can’t, or choose not to, hear the rumble of the approaching change.

The rate that social media is taking over is like an avalanche. I could give you numbers about how fast it is growing, but I am going to save that for another blog.

Curious about my metaphor, I did some research on avalanche survival. One of the things that experts advise is to swim in the flow if you get caught. The key is keeping your head above the snow. That’s good advice for people who about to be engulfed by social media – start swimming with the flow.

I do not include most students among that group. They clearly want to learn. That’s why I was asked to come and speak at UW – Whitewater.

When the conference’s student organizers first approached me, I assumed they wanted me to talk about social media marketing. I have met many Whitewater students. They are bright and committed. They also have never known a time without the Internet and computers. In contrast, I have known a time without push-button phones and cable television. Yes, I am that old.

So, I assumed they would know more about the various social media applications than I did. I figured these students didn’t need me to tell the basics. The two women organizing the conference gently disabused me of that notion. They told me students wanted to hear the basics. They wanted to learn about Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube and all of the other social media applications.

Now, I know UW-Whitewater Public Relations Instructor Ann Knabe is drilling her students in social media. I have heard from the students about that. Ann, who is a friend, is very good instructor. However, I guess the students want to hear from someone else who is actually doing it on a day-in, day-out basis.

As I said, I think a lot of people out there would like to know about social media and how to use it. But, they don’t understand the implications of social media taking over marketing. Or, they are just too embarrassed to admit they don’t know what to do.

That second point was brought up at a meeting I was at last week. I am a member of the Southeastern Wisconsin chapter of the Public Relations Society of America’s social media committee. (Say that five times fast.) At a recent meeting another committee member talked about his experiences teaching social media. He said he runs into many adults who are afraid to admit they don’t know what they are doing.

Another thing I like about working with students is that they much higher embarrassment threshold. They are not afraid to admit they don’t know how to do something.

I think that embarrassment is why many companies are not moving faster to integrate social media into their marketing. But, hey get over it. There is nothing wrong with asking questions and admitting you don’t know something. So let this be your awakening. Doing nothing will get buried in the coming avalanche.

Walking around all day, I learned my first marketing lesson as I watched the barkers work. The line for the hootchie shows (girlie shows for you young ones) was long. All the barker had to do was collect the money. The garishly painted signs hanging from the tent did the work. The barker the outside the bearded lady’s tent was working a lot harder. He was literally at times trying to push people into the tent. I think he was even offering a two-for-one deal: the Bearded Lady and the Siamese Twins for the price of a single ticket.

What was I was seeing at the circus? Pull marketing always works better than push marketing. The hootchie barker let his product pull people into the tent. The Bearded Lady barker was not willing to do that. He tried to force the issue. He wasn’t letting his potential customers make up their minds on their own. If I remember correctly, the sign over the tent’s entrance said Bearded Lady, but that was it. There were no pictures.

No, at nine-years-old I didn’t know from push versus pull marketing. However, I did see who was getting better results with their approach. I remembered that later when I sold things for my  scout troop.

That’s the essences of social media – pulling in people through blogging, Facebook pages, Twitter, YouTube and all of the other social media applications. You have to give people a reason to consider your products. You cannot push them into buying anything. They need reasons that you give by using both social media and traditional marketing tactics.

That’s why I rail about things such retailers acting like spammers. No one can be strong-armed into buying something they don’t want. Social media demands what used to be called the “soft-sell.” You want to hold a conversation, not a lecture, with a potential client.

It is why I don’t like to deal car dealers, they always push. It is why I like to shop at Apple stores. You walk through the door, someone asks once if you need help. After that, you are left alone to browse. If you need help, someone answers your questions without trying to sell you anything. I think that’s why the profit those stores increased between 2008 and 2009 when most other retailers saw a sales decrease.

Granted the retail profit only rose from $1.33 billion to $1.39 billion – just a $60 million increase. Of course, sales doubled between 2007 and 2008. Retail profits rose from $573 million to the 2008 profit of $1.33 billion.

I should note I am a member of the Apple cult.

My point in this, though, is Apple and companies like it, succeed because they don’t push. They put their customers’ needs first. They give the customer what they want. It’s the same thing that circus barker did almost 50-years-ago as I watered elephants.

As a note: reporters cannot accept anything of value. It is against most publication’s ethics code. So don’t send anything. Anything I received went to charity if possible. If it was food, it went to a food bank. If it was perishable food or beer (hey, I work in Milwaukee) I shared with the entire newsroom. I always said – maybe I have my price, but other than Bill Gates, I doubt anyone could pay it. A box of cookies wasn’t going to influence me.

When I left journalism just over seven years, I went to work for any agency run by a former reporter. It was a great place to learn. Like everyone else, I did the traditional things one does in P.R. and marketing. The only difference for me was that my pitches and writing were better. I had a good track record there and at my next job.

The appearance of social media four years ago changed everything. It was also when I learned that traditional public relations and social media go very well together. I had a client that couldn’t get employees to open emails. After doing some research, we decided to a series of podcasts. The podcasts were very successful. It wasn’t even called social media then, the usual title was Web 2.0

The employees found out about the podcasts through the traditional channels. There was an announcement in the company’s newsletter; each department head received a written announcement to read to their employees. We also got some press coverage because at the time what we did was unique.

Without going into a lot of tedious detail, I soon learned when I went out my own that social media is becoming the dominant form of marketing. I have done everything I can to learn about it and how to use it. Still, the growing dominance of social media doesn’t mean that there is still not a place for traditional methods.

Do not discount the power of a story on the front page of a local newspaper or on the local television station. While it’s a shrinking group, many people still get their information from traditional media. That includes elected officials. It is silly to ignore those people. They are probably also on line, but what’s wrong with reaching them through multiple channels?

Yes, I advise sending out a social media press release. See last Monday’s blog for the reasons. But it is still a press release. Just in a super-charged form.

Twitter is a great place to release news. Many, many journalist now follow Twitter. Rather than call 50 reporters, you can send out one tweet and get journalists to call you. They might be working for a traditional outlet, but you reached out using social media. See, you married the two methods.

As for employees, I always advise a combination of social media and traditional methods. In any kind of many workplaces, manufacturing, retails, and others, employees are not going to have constant access to the Internet. They probably have it at home, but they are not at home at times when you want to get the word out. If it’s really important, you should have a face-to-face meeting. If it is not that important, but if you want employees to know something, there is nothing wrong with posting a notice where they can see it.

None of this changes my opinion that CEOs should be blogging, companies should have Facebook Fan pages, should be posting videos on YouTube, creating groups on LinkedIn and tweeting company news. That should be the primary focus.

But just as I use a hammer on home improvement projects that first belonged to my grandfather, traditional tools still have a place in marketing and public relations.

You’ve decided it’s time to dip a toe or more into the social media pool. You know the Internet can be a very unforgiving place. You want to make sure you are going to do it right. It’s time to hire agency, but before you do that you want to have your own plan. While you are going to listen to the agency’s advice, you also want to know the landscape and have a general idea of how to get from Point A to Point Z.

This is what I encourage all of my clients to do. Yes, I am the expert, but it helps when they have some ideas of their own. One of the mottoes I live by in my business life is: “all of us are smarter than one of us.” You should do the same. If an agency is unwilling to listen to your input, you are working with the wrong agency. You are paying the bills after all.

Before anything else, this what you have to keep in mind about social media: it is not a tactic, or a strategy or just another way to do what you have always been doing. It is an entirely new way of marketing and it is taking over fast. I am going to cover how fast next week, but know that its use is increasing very, very quickly.

So, what to do first? It most definitely helps that you have your own ideas. The first thing I do when I sign a new client is meet with the principles to discuss their wants and needs. The process goes much faster when both sides have a good idea of the road map they are going to use.

Remember, your social media, marketing and public relations plan should be key parts of the company’s overall strategic plan. Marketing communications should never be treated as an island or silo. Rather, it should be one of the engines driving your company to be successful.

Integrating marketing communications planning with the company’s overall plans is key. I have seen too many companies that keep public relations and marketing in silos. They are only taken out when some senior executive needs to get a message out or sales are dipping. That is just wrong. Public relations and marketing are a company’s front door. It is the first thing a potential client or customer sees.

So, the first step should be to do discuss and define what you want to accomplish. Do a situation analysis. Discuss what the positive and negative forces. Figure out who want to reach and how to do it. Come up with a goal. A goal should be a broad-based destination, where you want your company to go.

It will be up to agency to figure out to reach that goal, to come up with the strategy and tactics for getting you there. But it is key, especially in social media, to know where you are going.

The second thing you should know is that a successful social media campaign takes time and your involvement. This is not like an advertising campaign where you approve campaign concept, check in on the production and then approve the final product.

Social media is a continuing process. It calls for doing things such as blogging, tweeting, creating a Facebook fan page, and posting videos on YouTube. It is highly effective when done right. However, none of those are things you can do once and forget about. It takes your commitment to the process to make it work. Success does not come in a week. Usually it does not come in a month or two. I always tell clients to expect the process to take at least six months to show results.

But when those results do happen, and if done right, they will, the success will be far better than what comes from other method.

When I first met my doctor almost 30 years, I walked into his office, sat down and asked him: “so, what was your grade in anatomy?” He laughed. I asked the question again. He saw I was serious. He pointed to his medical school diploma that was hanging on the wall behind me. It said he had graduated summa cum laude. I was satisfied.

Why did I ask? Because as the joke goes: do you know what they call the medical student who barely passes? Doctor.

You should be asking the same kind of questions when you decide to hire a social media agency. Too many times, I see people and agencies pass them selves off as social media experts when in reality, all they have done is signed up for Facebook and have a Twitter account. When you ask if they use social bookmarking, or how they measure ROI, their eyes go blank. Or, they give you some gibberish about how ROI is difficult to measure.

The agency you want to hire should have a solid grounding in both traditional marketing and public relations and social media. They understand how to use both, how to meld them and how to measure results.

Social media as a method of public relations and marketing matured about four years. That’s when broadband became widespread. Broadband is necessary to run most social media platforms.

Because it is so new, there are not yet any solid standards for determining who’s an expert and who’s a pretender. I have studying and using social media for about three years. I started doing podcast scripts and moved on from there. I have been doing it long enough that I know what I am talking about.

What distinguishes one agency from another is how long they have been using social media, their level of commitment to it, and how successful they have been.

So, if I were looking to hire a social media expert, here would be the questions I would ask:

• How much experience with social media have you and your agency had?

You want to know if they attended a couple of webinars, maybe have a Facebook page and Tweet and now think they are an expert. That does not make them an expert, not by a long shot. Ask to see their blogs, Twitter accounts, LinkedIn usage, Facebook pages, and YouTube posts. This shows they are experienced users. Ask if they use Digg, Stumbleon and other social bookmarking sites.

• Where did they learn social media?

This shows their level of commitment. And also ask how they stay on top of the changing trends in social media. That’s important.

• Ask for the names of clients for which they have run successful campaigns. You want to be able to check on what they did and if it worked.

• How do they view social media – as a tactic, a strategy, or an entire new way of marketing?

The answer is the last one. Social media is not a one-off. It requires a commitment of time and resources. I would argue that it is more effective than traditional marketing, but it takes knowledge to do it right.

• How do they integrate traditional marketing and public relations efforts with social media?

Traditional methods definitely still have a place. Often there is a melding of the old and the new. Many journalists now use Twitter for instance. You need to make sure that traditional methods are not neglected.

• Who handles social media in their agency?

You want to know the senior people are committed to social media. You don’t want to find yourself working with some junior assistant account executive that got the assignment because he or she has a Facebook page.

• How do they measure Return On Investment (ROI) for social media?

There is no one method to do it. Personally, I believe it can best be measured by increased website traffic and sales, but there are other ways. Make sure the agency has a method for measuring ROI.

Those questions you should get started. Next week, I am going tell you about to set up a social media campaign.

And as for Wednesday’s rant: well, I am going to give you my take on NBC’s decision to interrupt the Olympic closing ceremonies.

Since posting the very popular rant last Wednesday on there being too many social media sites, I have had some requests for a post on what is proper social media etiquette. I wrote on the same subject almost a year ago. Like Emily Post did, I think it is time to update. So, let’s get to it.

• Let’s start at signing up for a site. Think of yourself as being at a party or in a meeting. You would tell people your real name, something about yourself and what you do. It’s no different in social media. So:
  • First, use your real name – not something cute. This is the only way that people are going to know you. If you were hunting for an employee, or hiring someone to perform a service, would you hire “drunkguy05” or “sexxxygirl02?” Plus, if you want to be found, the odds are much better if you use your real name.
  • Second, post a picture of yourself, not your dog, not a pretty sunset, or some weird avatar. People want to know what you look like. Why wouldn’t you post your own picture? You on the run from the law?
  • If you have one, include a link to a blog, another site such as LinkedIn or Facebook. This shows you are a real person. Definitely link to your website if you have one.
  • Include a short bio of yourself. Again, this gives people an idea of who you are.
  • This next rule should be obvious, but people violate it all the time. DO NOT SPAM. If you are joining a site simply to sell me something, go away. That’s not the purpose of social media. I am glad you asked – it is to have a conversation, link with like-minded people and share information. It is not to buy real estate in Goa, or some system that promises me I will get rich working five a hours a week. Or a system that makes me into a spammer. If I get those kind of invitations, I will block you, and I will report you to the site administrators. Of course, that goes double for all of those porn people out there.
  • Once you sign up for a site, it is perfectly acceptable to invite your friends – once. Not six times. As I said last week, if I don’t respond to your invitation, it means I don’t want to join. After the third time, I am going to send you to my spam filter, never to return. And know something about the people you are inviting. As a personal example, I am an Apple; I will never be a PC. So don’t invite me to join Windows Live. It is not going to happen.
  • On that subject, there is quantity versus quality debate in social media. Some experts argue that the idea is to accumulate as many followers as possible. Their thesis goes you want to distribute whatever you are sending out to the widest possible network. The other side it is better to be followed by a 100 people who are influencers in their networks. I come somewhere in the middle. It is up to you to decide. However, this is not high school – the person with the most friends does not win.
  • After you join a site, get active on it. Why else would you join?  That doesn’t mean you have to spend every waking minute posting. But, if you join Twitter, tweet twice a day. If you are Facebook, post an update or two each day. You get the idea. I will not follow anyone who invites me to join a site, but has done nothing there themselves.
  • As part of the above bullet, respond to other people’s post. That’s just good manners. If you want people to respond to what you do, you should have the courtesy to do the same for them.
  • Another thing for you LinkedIn people – unless you know someone personally or have worked closely with them, don’t recommend them. And do not send out blanket requests for recommendations to total strangers. How good could a recommendation be if you nothing about someone? Plus, what if you called by a potential employer who asks you about some stranger you recommended? You are going to look dumb and the odds are very good that the candidate will not get the job.
  • A final note – there is no privacy in social media. Well really, there is no privacy in the Internet Age period. So, if you don’t want people to know something, don’t post it anywhere. Things on the web never really go away. Along those lines, all of you college kids who have those really cool photos of that weekend in Cabo where you took your clothes off and jumped into the ocean – take them down. Many companies will not hire someone if they see such photos. Yeah, it is not fair, but that’s the way it is.



I am one of the most active social media users I know. I have more than 5,000 LinkedIn connections, more than 8,000 Twitter followers, about 500 Facebook followers and over 100 on YouTube. I blog twice a week. I also use Plaxo, FriendFeed and some other sites. I should be doing this – it’s my business. I run a social media marketing agency. Would you hire someone to do social media if they didn’t use it?

I have some problems with social media though – or more accurately, the people who are now using it. So, they are:

• The people who invite me to join a site to which I already belong. Every site has a search function that allows you to check members’ name. Do that before you invite someone to join Facebook or LinkedIn.
• The constant creation of new sites. I have yet to see one that could replace LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube or Facebook. Look, this ground has been plowed already. I think those sites are here to stay. Maybe one of those four will be “AOL – The Sequel,” but I doubt it. That is not to say there are not some good sites, but enough already with the constant creation.
• The constant invitations I get to join those new sites. If I don’t respond, it means I do not want to join. Don’t keep sending invitations. It is annoying and a breach of social media etiquette. After three invitations, you go into my spam file, never to return.
• The growing number of multi-level marketing people appearing on social media. To paraphrase Shakespeare: spam by another name still smells as bad. Just because you are sending the information via a new medium doesn’t make it anymore believable.
• As long we are on the subject, no one works five hours a week and gets rich. Steve Jobs, George Soros, Warren Buffett and all those other self-made billionaires worked really hard to get where they hard. I suspect they are still putting in 15-hour days. The only people who make money off those schemes are those selling them.
• And one more point on that subject, you do not have to spend money on search engine optimization to get your webpage to the top of Google rankings. This blog is rated a top website by Google. It is consistently is on the front page of Google searches. I spent a lot of time achieving that, but no money. It just takes work.

Now that I have gotten that off my chest, I am curious what your social media pet peeves are. Let me know.

The latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor estimate the current unemployment rate at 9.7 percent. That’s 9.3 million people who are unemployed. Globally, it is estimated by the United Nations’ International Labor Office that 212 million people are out of work.

As a note, in the United States you are only of work if you are collecting unemployment. Once you stop, you are no longer counted. There are some arguments that the real unemployment rate is 17.3 percent – depending how you want to crunch the numbers.

Things don’t look good right now for a lot of job seekers.  There are approximately 2.4 million job openings in the U.S. according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You know that expression about the five pounds of feces and the one-pound bag – well, I think we are seeing it in action.

I wrote about job hunting back in November. Things have actually gotten worse since then. I thought it was time to touch in the subject again, Here are some other suggestions on finding a job.

How Does Social Media Figure Into That?
What does this all have to do with social media? It’s simple really. With approximately four workers for every position, it behooves anyone looking for a job to develop an edge. The days of just sending out a resume, or responding to a job post are long gone. Let’s face it; any company with an opening is drowning in a tidal wave of resumes and cover letters. I doubt most are even read.

You need to do something to stand out – I mean really stand out. Yeah, you guessed it – get active on social media. Why? It will help you get noticed

Remember, most positions are never advertised. Companies that have openings compile a list of possible candidates through their own searches.

According to author Richard Nelson Bolles in his job-hunting book “What Color Is Your Parachute?” the average hiring manager is scared to death that he will hire the wrong person. Anything you can do to calm that person down is a positive.

Incidentally, I highly recommend Bolles’ book. It is old media, but it is very effective. It helped me when I changed careers.

Here are seven things I would do if I were job hunting:

• If I didn’t have one already, I would create a LinkedIn profile. Studies show that 80 percent of human resources people make LinkedIn their stop with looking for a new employee. Although I not seen a reason why that is, I suspect it is because LinkedIn is a trusted resource.
• On that LinkedIn profile, I would make sure my former co-workers had posted recommendations about me. Again, employers seem to trust these more.
• Also on LinkedIn, I would join the groups that correspond with my profession. I would do that for three reasons:
  • Almost all groups have a jobs section. It’s a good place to start looking
  • It’s a great place to network. Tell people you are looking for a job. Probably 10 percent of my over 5,000 connections list themselves as “in transition.” Talking to others in your profession will give you a leg up in the job hunt.
  • It is a good place to demonstrate your expertise. All of the groups list questions and statement from members. Answer those questions and respond to the statements. Ask your own questions.
• Start a blog about your area of expertise. Several studies have shown that blogs are the most effective kind of marketing. However, blogs are also the rated the most difficult thing to do. It takes time commitment and consistency to produce a good blog. But, it is the best way to demonstrate expertise. Write about what you did in career, talk about how you solved problems and the challenges you faced. All things a human resources person wants to know. Make sure you link the blog to your LinkedIn profile.
• Create a personal web page. It is very cheap to buy a domain name through a service such as Go Daddy. Make is a “business” page with you as the company. Sell yourself as if you were a company.
• Create a video resume and post it on YouTube. Again, link it to your web page LinkedIn profile. This will give potential employers a chance to see and hear you.
• I know some of you are going to ask about Facebook and Twitter. Twitter is a good to tell people about your blog and ask questions. Facebook – well, I am not so sure. Yes there are now 375 million who use the service. But, there is so much noise on it. I will tell you one thing you should do on Facebook – if you have embarrassing pictures, or questionable posts, take them down. Many employers are now requiring employment candidates to allow themselves to be friended on Facebook by the company so the company can review the candidate. The last thing you want them to see is that picture of you in Key West, drinking from a beer bong. I know of companies that have passed on people because of such pictures.

Good luck.

Writers note: I would to thank all of you that signed up with Google Friend Connect. It is both flattering and humbling to know you think enough of this blog to make that commitment.

Print publications are still a viable way to spread the news, a trio of business editors said last week. Print is still a vital to tell people what’s going, the three argued in a panel discussion held before the Southeastern Wisconsin chapter of the Public Relations Society of America.

“We are bullish on print,” Mark Sabljak, publisher of the Business Journal of Milwaukee. “Some people still enjoy a print product.”

All three seemed to be cautiously embracing electronic media. Salbjak seemed to be holding out the most. For instance, he noted he said in 2009 there would no blogging at the Business Journal until the paper found a way to make a profit on such an effort. The paper’s is now blogging because it has found a way to monetize the effort.

However, social media is changing the way news is being covered, said Steve Jagler, executive editor of Biztimes Milwaukee. Sites such as Twitter are not competition, he explained. Rather, it is helping the paper extend its brand, Jagler said. Social media amplifies the paper’s ability to report the news.

“We have a staff that understands the possibilities of social media,” Jagler said.

Social media has turned newspaper in 24-7 operations, said Chuck Melvin, assistant managing editor/business for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The paper now has new ways to deliver the news. The paper is not longer just print-based. It now uses Twitter and other services to disseminate its stories.

“We are not just print-based anymore,” Melvin said. “Social media is a new way of delivering the news.”

Social media has actually improved the Journal Sentinel’s ability to cover news. By using blogs, the paper can pay more attention to niche markets. He cited reporter Tom Daykin’s real estate blog and art critic Mary Louise Schumacher’s blog on the Milwaukee art scene as two examples.

“I see a lot of growth in our blogs,” Melvin said. “We are also working to add more video to our website. It adds a lot of value to the reader experience.”

All three editors said the key to a successful story pitch is keeping it simple, providing relevant information and making sure the proper journalist is targeted. It is important the person making the pitch is talking to the right reporter. That means knowing what people cover and what their interests are.

“Make sure you know the media company’s mission,” Jagler said.

All three also said it is still okay to over an exclusive story to one publication.

“It is the same situation as it has always been,” Sabljak said. “It is more challenging to get one in these days of 24/7 news coverage. But, my reporters are paid to get exclusive stories.”

The increasing dominance of technology has made the role of the public relations practitioner more important, Melvin said. A good P.R. person can play a vital role in telling reporters what’s going on. I would add that because there is so much information being circulated that no one person could ever keep track of it. A good, targeted pitch probably has a better chance than ever of getting a reporter’s attention.

While acknowledging that the need to get the news out faster than ever can be strain, all three also said that hasn’t made their staff’s lose perspective.

“We have not lost the ability to do the in-depth story,” Melvin said.

Okay, social media scares many C-suite people. That’s no surprise. Because if you are honest when you present, you should make them realize that using social media means acknowledging they don’t have complete control of their brand. Of course, they never really did. A brand’s identity is determined in the marketplace. It’s what consumers think – be they business-to-business or business-to-consumer – that defines a brand

It is hard for most senior executive to admit they really never had control of their brand. Facing that means acknowledging that all the money spent on marketing and advertising did not provide a failsafe way to ensure happy consumers and ever increasing sales.

Social Media will allow them to listen to what consumers are saying

Social media won’t do that either. However, unlike advertising, it doesn’t make that promise. What it does promise is a way to listen into and influence the conversation that is already taking place about a company or a brand. The odds are far better that there will be a positive outcome if a company knows what is being said.

Some executives will respond that they already know what their customers are thinking. After all, people will send emails when they have a complaint. That’s true. But remember, a person who is so upset that they are motivated to send an email is usually not representative of the customer base. Blog and Twitter comments will provide a far more accurate picture of what people are thinking.

Also unlike traditional marketing, those using social media want to hear the negative comments. How else does one get better unless one knows what the problems are? The good thing about this method it is much more inclusive. Rather than relying a focus group or a marketing study, a company has opened up its comments to entire customer base. That is much more representative of what’s actually happening.

How does one listen to these conversations? By creating a Twitter brand, by blogging, by having a Facebook page and a LinkedIn group. In addition, videos posted on YouTube are good. In each of these cases, and in other social media applications, you are looking for people to comment. It is from those comments that you will find what people are thinking.

Eventually what you to do is convert those commenter’s into fans and eventually evangelists for your brand. I will talk about how to do that in another post. But, I have just told you the first step.

Social Media takes time

After you describe all of this, the next objection is going to arise – social media takes time. Writing a blog, maintaining a fan page on Facebook, Tweeting and responding to Tweets, answering questions on LinkedIn, posting videos and monitoring and responding to comments are not something that can be done in an hour once a week.

These are many executives who used to their agency doing all the work. All they have to do is approve the campaign and make sure the agency has access to whomever it needs to work with at the company. It is a kind of “fire and forget” strategy. Now, you are asking them to become an active part of their own marketing effort.

Remember, social media is not a tactic or a strategy. It is an entirely new way of marketing. It requires a commitment to stick with it. Nothing turns off a potential customer more than sporadic, unscheduled use of social media. Blogs especially have to be posted on a specific schedule. Nothing kills a blog following faster than making it hard to find. The same thing applies to a Facebook fan page or a YouTube video channel.

This is, of course, your opportunity. You are there to teach them about social media and maintain their accounts. You are the solution to their problems of time management. It why they will hire you.

One note though – do not, ever, write your client’s blog yourself. You can edit it; you can proofread it, but don’t write it. That’s dishonest. PR firms have gotten into trouble for doing things like that. Tweeting for them is fine, as is maintaining the Facebook page. Just don’t be a ghostwriter. You want those thoughts about the company or product to come from someone who really knows it. Plus, consumers react badly when they perceive something isn’t what it purports to be.

There is more to do on social media. I will discuss the most important element next week. Stay tuned.

So, you review your new client’s needs and decide social media is the best course. Or, you are pitching a potential client and feel using social media would be the most effective way to meet their needs. The problem is the CMO and CEO are in their ‘50s and think The Wall Street Journal is the be-all and end-all of information dissemination. They think Facebook is a place where their kids waste time in mindless pursuits and tweeting is what birds do.

This is a more common situation than one would think. It is true that more and more major corporations are turning to social media for their marketing needs. However, there are still a large group of executives who frankly don’t get it.

As an aside, I have run into public relations executives who also don’t get it. They have told me they are taking a wait and see posture on social media. I get the feeling these people’s great-grandparents were buggy whip makers in 1908 when the first Model T drove by. They told themselves this automobile thing was a passing fad.

So, how to do you leap that hurdle?

So, how do you convince the person in charge that using Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools are the most cost effective – and just plain effective – way to market? It’s not easy, but it doesn’t have to be as hard as you would think.

The first step I take is to ask the person in charge if they use LinkedIn. According to the latest numbers I have seen, approximately 80 percent of employment managers go to LinkedIn first when looking to hire. So, the odds are fair to even that the CEO and CMO are at least familiar with LinkedIn. If you are really lucky, they have their own LinkedIn profiles.

The odds are also good that they don’t realize LinkedIn is a social media application. If they have a LinkedIn profile, explain they are already using social media. I often see resistance crumble at this point. Once they realize they are already using social media, explaining the rest is easier. You are not home yet, but at least you have hit a solid double.

But, what if they don’t use any social media?

Now, if they don’t have a LinkedIn profile, I sometimes show them social media’s dark side. “United Breaks Guitars,” the Motrin moms, and the Comcast stuff will often make the people in charge sit up and take notice. What I tell them is social media can kill your company before you even know you are bleeding. For instance, I have read estimates that United Airlines lost an estimated $100 million because of “United Breaks Guitars.” Watch a CFO’s ears perk up when he hears that number.

Of course, fear is not the only motivation you should use. After scaring them, tell them of social media’s successes. Southwest Airlines had one of its most successful fare sales ever primarily by using Twitter, Paula Berg, the airline’s manager of Emerging Media said at a conference I attended last fall. PepsiCo has pulled all its Super Bowl advertising. Instead of television ads, the soda company is going to spend $20 million on a social media campaign.

“… the Pepsi Refresh Project is about getting the global community to nominate projects that need funding in local communities, you upload your video/project profile, gather as many votes as you can by spamming the social sphere and the top projects will win finding from $5k multiple times per month up to $250k a few times every month,” according to the Digital Buzz blog.

There are a lot more examples of the successful use of social media. There are thousands of companies using Twitter. Ford, Honda, Jet Blue, the Marriot Hotel chain, Wachovia, and Sun Microsystems are heavily involved in it. You will find the same results for companies using Facebook.

Remember, most CEOs – especially in this business climate – don’t want to be a pioneer. They want to know that whatever you are proposing has worked for someone else. Once they know it has worked for others, they are willing to listen.

Now, if you find their competitors are already using social media, you have broken through another wall. Remember, those C-suite people are judged on results. Their board of directors, their shareholders, their lenders, analysts and journalists are all looking over their shoulders. Those company leaders do not want to discover they are losing market share to a competitor that is using Facebook or Twitter when they are not. In this case, they already see the benefit.

There is much more to talk about when it comes to pitching social media. I will cover more of the topic in next Monday’s blog.

This is the headline from the Dec. 11, 2009 crainsnewyork.com online business magazine: “367 magazines shuttered in 2009.”

The article goes on to report that: “As bad as the news is, the pace of decline appears to have slowed. In 2008, a total of 526 U.S. magazines ceased publication. In 2007, there were 573 that shut down.

The number of titles that folded may actually be higher, said Trish Hagood, president of Oxbridge Communications, parent company of MediaFinder, which describes itself as the largest online database of U.S. and Canadian publications. She explains that it will take until well into the new year to do a final tabulation.”

A knowledge gap is being created

I decided to write this blog because of last week’s announcement that two venerable magazines were shutting down: Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews are being shuttered.

I know neither of these of magazines would be the kind likely to be sold at the grocery store checkout (except maybe for grocery stores in Cambridge, Mass, the lower East Side of New York and Berkley, Calif.). But, they served important purposes in their niches.

The century-old Editor & Publisher covered the newspaper industry. When I started as a reporter in 1975, it was a must read. If you wanted to know what going on in the business, you read E & P. I got my first two reporting jobs from classified ads in the magazine. It was a magazine in which readers’ actually read the ads first, especially the classified job listings.

Kirkus Reviews published over 5,000 book reviews annually. It was an important outlet, especially for new authors. It was often the first public exposure a first novel received. Kirkus was an important resource for bookstore buyers. They would often choose a novel to offer to their customers based on something they read in the magazine.

Personal note: As one who is writing a novel, and hoping to get it published, I mourn the loss of Kirkus. I also mourn the loss of E & P. It was an important press watchdog.

The closing of those two, and other magazines, is creating a knowledge gap.

Magazines used to occupy a unique place in news and information publishing. Newspapers were looked to as a daily source of information. That role has largely been taken over by Web-based news sources, including Twitter. Magazines were the source of the longer, more in-depth pieces. Magazines had the space and time to really tackle a subject. But, they were more immediate than a book.

With the death of so many magazines, a valuable source of explanation and analysis is going away. Oddly, to me at least, many newspapers are trying to turn themselves into daily magazines. They write long investigative stories that often run for several pages. That’s not why people read newspapers. They want to know what’s going on in the neighborhood. People don’t have time to ready long stories in the morning – when newspapers are delivered.

There is a solution

Yeah, you guessed it – I think magazines should be moving on line completely. I know Editor & Publisher has been on-line since the ‘90s. Kirkus is also online.  However, I don’t think either did a very good job of bringing readers to their websites. Like a lot of other publications, I think they saw the websites as an auxiliary to their print editions. It should have been the other way around.

There is precedent for this – the move of soap operas from radio to television in the early 1950s.

A little history first. In 1946, there were approximately 10,000 television sets in the United States, according to questia.com. By 1950, there were 3 million and by 1953, half of all households in the United States had a television. Kind of sounds like the growth of social media, doesn’t it?

Proctor & Gamble started soap operas on radio during the Depression. It was a marketing decision to sell more laundry soap and other products. When television began to dominate, P & G moved the soaps to television. After all, you go where the customers are – which is a rule of social media by the way.

So, why can’t magazines do the same thing? The web is becoming the dominant media – so why not move to the customers are? More and more people are doing their reading online. I still get Sports Illustrated’s print edition, but I also read it online every day. SI and other publications can do more on the web – post videos, run a lot more pictures, link to other relevant sites and be a lot more immediate in their analysis.

I think that move would save a lot of magazines. In cost alone, it would be a good move. No longer would a publisher have to factor the cost of production and printing.

Seems logical to me. Any thoughts anyone?

Note: I will not be posting on either next Monday or Wednesday. It is a holiday week and I am taking some time off. The next blog will run Jan. 4, 2010.

Welcome to the second part of Public Relations 101. This Wednesday blog is where I will be giving you my opinion on various marketing communications efforts.

I see my Monday blog as a kind of primer on marketing, public relations and social media. There is some opinion in it, but basically, I hope you are reading to learn what I know. I appreciate that hundreds of people who read and comment on it.

I greatly enjoy writing it. I will keep at it. But, because I try to keep the lessons to around 1,000 words – long for a blog I am told – I don’t have the space to review marketing campaigns. So, this blog has been born. I don’t have a title for it, so suggestions are welcome. I do expect to start some debates; in fact I want to start some. It is how we all learn. I do not have all the answers. I don’t even know all the questions.

I hope you all read this one as much as you read my Monday offering. So, let me get to it.

I am very active in social media. As I am sure you have noticed, I blog. I also tweet, spend time on Facebook and am approaching 5,000 contacts on LinkedIn. While I have only posted one video on YouTube, I watch it a lot.

I also am active on Plaxo, dabble on FriendFeed, use Digg and read Mashable. I am willing to bet I use social media a lot more than most. When you throw in my age – I am 55 – I am definitely ahead of any curve you can name.

Yet, lately, some parts of social media have started to frost me.

First, somebody has to destroy the keyboards of a lot of social media developers

Why you ask, a look of bewilderment on your face. You just told us that you are an active user of social media. What’s the problem?

This is how I feel when I get yet another site invitation.

I will tell you. There are too damned many sites coming out there are trying to imitate LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube. Everyday I get invited to join some new site that says it will make my life easier. I think sometimes that the late pitchman Billy Mays’ last act was to  create all of these sites. The copy that comes with these sites is eerily close to how Mays used to sell products.

Look I am a huge believer in social media. I firmly believe it is replacing conventional advertising, marketing and public relations. Everyone should be using the Big Four plus one – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs. Okay, I agree Digg, Mashable and Technorati are also important. A case can be made for Friendfeed and a few others. If I lived in Brazil or the Middle East, I would use Orkut.

But, geez, every time I one of my email accounts, there are half a dozen invitations for sites I never heard of. We don’t need all them. I know the shakeout is coming, but fast enough for me.

Second, I am really tired of all these social media “experts” who claim they can make me a million dollars in the time it takes to trim my nails

To all of you who send these schemes to make millions on the Internet – GO AWAY! You may not know you’re lying, but I do. As the cliché says: “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

If you use the term guru when you send me an email, I going to hunt you down and slap you silly. Guru is a religious title akin to Father, Rabbi or Imam. Here are the first two definitions of Guru: (n) guru – a Hindu or Buddhist religious leader and spiritual teacher; Guru: each of the first ten leaders of the Sikh religion.

So, why not call yourself the Marketing Pope or something and be done with it.

Plus, I want to know what qualifies somebody as a social media expert? I belong to the Public Relations Society of America – the public relations industry group. The PRSA bestows a designation called APR or Accreditation in Public Relations. An APR is earned an by taking both written and oral examinations. The standards are rigid.

As far as I know, there is no social media industry wide group that bestows such a designation. I know there are individual training companies that give out accreditations. But, as I said, there is no agreed upon industry wide designation.

So, to me the only thing that works in proving you are an expert is if you have actually run effective social media campaigns. So, if you haven’t, stay away from me.

Until Monday, later all.

I read a story the other day from the online Kansas City InfoZine about how easy it is to trick Facebook members into revealing personal information. This is a hacker’s dream.

IT security and data protection company Sophos “created two fictitious users with names based on anagrams of the words “false identity” and “stolen identity”. 21-year-old “Daisy Felettin” was represented by a picture of a toy rubber duck bought at a $2 shop; 56-year-old “Dinette Stonily” posted a profile picture of two cats lying on a rug. Each sent out 100 friend requests to randomly chosen Facebook users in their age group.

Within two weeks, a total of 95 strangers chose to become friends with Daisy or Dinette – an even higher response rate then when Sophos first performed the experiment two years ago with a plastic frog. Worse still, in the latest study, eight Facebookers befriended Dinette without even being asked.”

Of those who responded, 89 percent of the 20-somethings and 57 percent of the 50-somethings gave away their full date-of-birth, Sophos said. Nearly all the others hid their birth year, but this is often easy to calculate or to guess from other information provided. Even worse, just under half of the 20ish crowd, and just under a third of the 50ish crowd, gave away personal information about their friends and family.

I hope I don’t have to explain why doing what those people did is a huge, huge, snafu. I am sure most of you have heard of the researchers who were able to figure out social security numbers just from the information posted on Facebook.

Be Careful

The lesson from that story and others is be careful. The Internet is kind of a like a major city. It has high-end areas, middle class areas and its downright dangerous areas. The people who create those dangerous areas will try to move into the other two because that’s where the money is. If you exercise some common sense, you probably won’t have to worry too much about the bad areas.

I say you won’t have to worry too much because a little healthy paranoia will keep you safe – in life and on the Internet. Put another way; exercise street smarts when you are out there.

My rule is I only post information that is already public.

Yes, there are dangers lurking out there, but by using a little common sense, trouble can be avoided.

Do simple things and you should stay out of trouble. The biggest thing to do is be careful who you share your information with. I probably get somewhere around two dozen requests Twitter follow requests each day. I accept maybe half. Multi-level marketers, get rich quick schemes and other things of that ilk always get rejected.

I have a policy that I never, ever open a link from a Twitter direct message – even if I know the person who sent it. As I am sure you have noticed, many Twitter accounts are being hacked. The hackers use those accounts to send out viruses and other malicious things. I have the same rule for email – unless I know the sender.

As for Facebook, I am very careful who I share information with. That is why I have almost 5,000 LinkedIn contacts and only slightly over 400 Facebook contacts. Generally, the people I follow on Facebook have to already friended people I know.

Also, when I search, I very careful what links I open. Hackers have figured out how to create legitimate looking sites. If the site seems the least bit strange, I don’t open it.

That doesn’t mean pull your horns in though

Social media is here to stay. It is taking over, not going away. So, don’t shy away from using it. That’s just counterproductive.

There are some things you should do and not do when you use social media. They included:

• Post picture of yourself – not your dog or the sunset, a short biography and a link to blog or a website (if you have either) when you join any site. Don’t worry, this is not the kind of information that will be much help to a hacker. I wouldn’t put my street address or zip code in, but other information is okay. Those links are important. It will drive your readership up.
• Use your real name. I find it hard to take anyone seriously who uses a name of say “seoguru” or “happygirl77.” You are building your brand here, remember. You want to use a real name.
• You know those Facebook or MySpace pictures of that great Spring Break – the one where you posted pictures showing off the sayings your friends painted on your half-naked body when you passed out? Take them down and hope no one circulated them. I know of hiring managers who decided against hiring someone based on similar pictures.
• Social media means being, well, social. If you join a site, participate. If you join a LinkedIn group, answer questions, or post of your own. On Facebook link to interesting articles and comment on other people’s postings. On Twitter, recommend good people to be followed on #FollowFriday, retweet interesting comments, and post good stuff yourself.

A note about using Twitter – my rule on Twitter is the first time you post what you had for breakfast, or what cute thing your dog did, I will stop following you. To me, Twitter is a site to share information and debate questions, not get cute.

I hope those tips help.

Now, an announcement: starting this Wednesday, I will be posting an addition to PR 101. This new section will be my take on various advertising, marketing and public relations campaigns. It will be on the same URL: http://www.pr101.biz

I see my Monday blog as a kind of primer on marketing, public relations and social media. There is some opinion in it, but basically, I hope you are reading to learn what I know. I appreciate all of the hundreds of people who read and comment.

Because I try to keep the Monday blog to around 1,000 words – long for a blog I am told – I don’t have the space to say everything I want. So, I am starting the Wednesday blog. I don’t have a title for it, so suggestions are welcome. I do expect to start some debates; in fact I want to start some. It is how we all learn.

So please give it a read this Wednesday. Thank-you.

I have to make an admission right up front this week’s blog about job hunting: I am torn about Facebook and its effectiveness. I am not sure whether the largest social media site on Earth – 350 million users and counting – is where you want to be in your job hunt.

I know Facebook can hurt you in a job hunt. I plan to go into the don’ts of social media job-hunting next week. However, one thing I will say now – would you hire someone whose Facebook pictures included topless photos from Cabo or the beer bong drinking championships? I wouldn’t either. Take those pictures down ASAP. Those can never help, especially if you want to be taken seriously.

Be that as it may, I am going into the pros and cons of Facebook and let you decide what to do. I have to say that if I were looking for a job, I would not use Facebook. That’s my bias. I want that stated up front so you know. I will keep try to keep my bias out of this blog as much as possible, but just keep that in mind.

So, let’s get into it.

The Pros Of Using Facebook In A Job Hunt

The first reason to use Facebook is its sheer size. At over 350 million users and growing, it is the largest social media site on Earth. It is has penetrated the entire developed world – just about everyplace you would want to work. Judging by the 400 or so followers I have on Facebook, I would say that the people who use the platform are pretty representative of the Earth’s population.

Secondly, many, many companies are using Facebook for marketing and sales. A lot of people don’t seem to know that Facebook has business pages. A lot of companies use those pages. It is good place to check out potential employers. You can tell by a company’s marketing efforts that they are targeting for sales. It can give you a sense of their needs.

Third, a Facebook profile is more informal than LinkedIn’s. In this age of getting to know the real person, a potential employer will often feel that your Facebook profile is a better picture of who you are.

There are two things about your profile I want to say. This applies to all social media, not just Facebook.

When you post your profile, include a picture. I have face I think scares small children, but I still post my picture. Frankly, I am suspicious of people who don’t. Unless you are the run from the law, your creditors, or an angry ex-spouse, there is no reason not to post a picture. Excuse the pun, but it helps potential employers get a picture of who you are.

Okay, so maybe this is not the kind of picture you should post with your profile. But, it is important to post a photo.

Use your real name when you set up a profile. Again, why wouldn’t you use your real name? Any employer who is doing their job is going to search out all of your various social media applications. How is going to look when they find your Twitter name is “drunkguy39” or “sexxygirl?” Not good I think.

The Cons of Facebook

Before I get started, “The Cons of Facebook” would be a great movie title. It sounds like the title of an S.E. Hinton novel. It could be set in a prison. A group of convicts, led by an imprisoned hacker, could be trying to use the Internet to escape a despotic warden. Think it has legs?

Getting to the real cons, my major complaint about Facebook has always been there is too much noise. Besides profiles and pictures, there are games, ads, causes and a host of other things. It is a not a clean experience for any employer trying to check out an employee.

To me, Facebook is a place to play, while LinkedIn is a place to work. It’s that simple.

Plus, people tend to be more frivolous on Facebook. I don’t know why that is, but happens. I have been guilty myself sometimes. You find yourself answering quizzes such what “Sopranos” character one would be, or backing a political cause. Most companies shy away from any political involvement. It is just bad for business. You never know what a client’s political stance might be. So, I think a hiring manager might not contact a person who espouses some strong belief.

I am not saying you shouldn’t have strong beliefs. Just be careful who you share them with. And if you put them on Facebook, you have shared those beliefs with a lot of people.

Well, that’s my advice for this week. Next week, I am going to write about the don’ts of social media job hunting. I have touched on some of them, but I want to hit them all.

Also, if you have been using social media for job-hunting, I would like to talk to you. I would like some real world examples of what works and what doesn’t work. We can do this anonymously or I can use your name. Leave a comment if you are interested.

Finally, on a professional note, I find I suddenly can handle two more clients for my agency. We are a full service social media, public relations and marketing company. Contact me if you would like to talk. Thanks.

So, last week we talked about using social media to find a job. Here’s the second part of that.

I have been asked two questions on using social media in job hunting. In the first one, the writer said he had a hard time taking social media seriously. He observed that most social media applications were created and used by 20-somethings. He wondered on how many people older than that actually used social media.

That’s an important question. If social media’s primary audience is made up of teenagers and 20-somethings, what’s the point of using it to find a job?

Well, it is true those age groups are active users of social media. However, so are millions of people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond using social media. As for companies, the last figure I saw showed over 15,000 companies using Twitter for a variety of reasons. According to Strategy Labs, the 35- to 55-year-old segment using Facebook grew 172.9 percent between 2007 and 2008.  In January of 2009, Strategy Labs estimated that almost 7 million people in that age group were Facebook users. The average age of LinkedIn users is 41-years-old.

Another statistic – according to Nielsen, 80 percent of employers start their search for employees on LinkedIn. Obviously, that’s a site a job hunter wants to be a part of. In fact, social media is a place a job hunter should want to be.

As for the second question – what does one write about?

Actually, that’s a pretty easy one to answer – write about what you are good at professionally. If you were a supply chain manager, write about the time your chief raw materials supplier suddenly couldn’t give you all of the widgets you needed. Talk about how you handled that situation. Or write about the time you primary shipper screwed up shipping product to your largest customer. Write about you how you solved the problem. You can also write about dealing with difficult employees or the time you planned the employee summer outing.

You get the idea. If you have specific questions, email me and I will try to help.

Here’s the key on whatever you write about: what you are doing is demonstrating your expertise by giving real world examples of how you used it. This is a much more dynamic way to show what a valuable employee you could be than handing in a two-page resume with a three-line description of the situation.

That’s the key to using social media in job searching – it is a dynamic way to show you are the person that fits the job. It is much better than blindly sending out resumes. Think of it this way, you are baiting a trap for potential employers. When they read your blog, they just might think this is a person they need to interview.

Which brings me to my next point, creating and setting that trap. I know I keep hammering this point, but it’s the key to social media: the hunters have become the hunted. While there are never any guarantees, social media can make you the prey for companies looking for someone with your skills. However, you are prey working to attract the hunter.

Another satisfied job hunter who used social media to get back into the workforce.

So, how to do you do that?

Well, the second point I keep hitting is that social media is a toolbox. As I have said before, you can build a house using only a hammer and saw, but it will go a lot easier if you use all of the available tools.

The blog should be your foundation. It will give you the most amount of space to demonstrate your expertise. LinkedIn should be next for three reasons:

• As I said, it is the first place most employers look for potential hires. A LinkedIn profile is more complete and in-depth than a resume. LinkedIn asks for a lot of information, which is a good thing. Someone looking for a new employee will be able to immediately evaluate potential candidates. Posting a link to your blog will help also.
• Most people on LinkedIn have third party recommendations from former co-workers or clients. These are invaluable. Someone who has garnered three or four recommendations will stand out from the crowd. One thing: it is perfectly acceptable to solicit recommendations from people who know you well. It is not to solicit recommendations from people for whom the only contact you had with them is through LinkedIn. How good could recommendation be anyway from someone who doesn’t know you?
• LinkedIn hosts thousands of different groups covering every possible profession. Joining those groups allows you to connect with professionals in your field. Members of those groups post discussion topics or questions. Joining in the discussion or answering the question is another way to demonstrate your expertise. In addition, most groups also post job openings. Those listing are a lot more current than anything you will find on a job board.

The next tool I would suggest using is Twitter. You can tweet about your blog posting – once – as I do. Once is okay because you’re telling people it is up. Anymore than that and you are bragging. In addition, there are many links to questions and discussions posted on Twitter. Again answering shows your expertise. In addition, you can join Twitter discussion groups. Discussion groups are delineated by a hash tag, which looks like this “#.” So a group would like this #publicrelationspros. You find groups by using Twitter Search. You are then talking to like-minded professionals who might just know about a job. Make sure your Twitter profile reflects what you are good at.

As a crazy suggestion, you might want to record and post a video blog on YouTube. They are usually called Vlogs. If you feel comfortable doing this, get yourself a web cam and go at it. I would suggest at least doing an outline of what you are going to talk about. And practice, and practice, and practice some more, before you record. , I have found rehearsing eight times is the most effective for some reason. I don’t why – it just seems to work. You want to sound natural when you talk.

Doing a Vlog gives a potential employee a sense of how you handle yourself. It can demonstrate your presentation skills. But, if you don’t feel comfortable or you are the kind of person who freezes in front of a camera, don’t do it. It will do more harm than good.

Well, that’s all the time we have. However, I am getting so many responses to the job-hunting blogs, I am going to continue writing about the topic next week. See ya then.