A Marketer's Guide To Being Anti-Social Online

posted by Rohit Bhargava (reprinted from Influential Marketing Blog, with permission)

Everyone wants you to be social. If you're a marketer, you have heard about a million times in recent weeks, months and years about the power and necessity of social media. Get a blog, get on Twitter, create a fan page ... every piece of advice seems to point towards being more social, more open and more transparent. Let's take a deep breath together. This post is not the kind of advice you'd expect to get from a "social media guy" like me. In fact, it's downright antisocial. To put it more accurately, it is about the right times to be anti-social.

This is a strange post when many brands are struggling right now to even find the right ways to be social online. Engaging with social media is an imperative for most brands (though the way you do it can and should vary greatly depending on your business and goals). There is plenty of good advice online for how to do this well, though. I like to think I have shared a decent amount of this type of advice here on this blog. But as marketers we also want to avoid the landmines. The situations or instances in social media that may be likely to blow up in our faces. Those are often the situations where being anti-social is the best strategy.

Here are a few situations and pieces of advice I have gathered on how to be anti-social online and help your brand succeed at the same time:

NEVER allow YouTube comments. I have had the opinion for some time now that allowing people to comment on your YouTube videos without moderating is an idiotic thing for a brand to do. Why? Because the vast majority of YouTube comments lack substance, include uninformed or somehow offensive remarks, and offer little context or real discussion. Instead, if you want to foster dialogue on your videos, create a video blog and embed the video into the blog. Then allow people to comment on the video in the blog. This will generally result in far higher quality comments, and less infantile useless banter.

DON'T friend/follow everyone. As a brand, the temptation is to friend and follow everyone who contacts you or requests to be your friend. Resist that temptation, and instead make it the job of someone on your team to actively monitor these requests and approve them based on criteria that you set. This criteria can be lax (not a robot account) to more specific to your industry or area of concentration. The effort will pay off, though, when it comes to using a particular social network as a marketing platform and tool for collaboration because you will only be talking to people who really matter.

MODERATE your profiles actively. What is written online is not written in stone, and as a brand you have the right to set the ground rules for your own profiles and sites online. What this requires is clearly posting your policy about what is ok and what is not ok for people to post and share in your environments. This doesn't mean to try and delete anything negative or critical ... but off topic or offensive comments or posts can and should be moderated. And in cases where people are posting incorrect or flawed information, you have a right and obligation to correct them (but allow their comment to be posted if it meets your criteria).

SEPARATE private content. There are legitimate reasons why you might want to share brand content among a small subset of users or internal users online. Just because content is online doesn't mean that everything needs to be open and public. If you feel you have a legitimate reason for sharing password protected private content, you should do it. And if it is extremely sensitive, make sure you take the right steps to protect it and prevent it from getting in the wrong hands.

PROMOTE yourself and your brand. Part of the benefit of using social media is that it does allow you an authentic place to share branded offers or promote your products and services. Unfortunately, some brands are advised that just because they are on social media they should never consider using it for marketing reasons. The fact is, if you are using social media in an authentic and not overly promotional way on a daily basis, you can earn the right to share marketing information at various points and not lose your audience. The real trick is to strike the right balance.

Rohit Bhargava is the force behind the Influential Marketing Blog and is the award winning author of Personality Not Included.

How Starbucks makes money from 3.8 million Facebook fans

Posted by Melissa Allison (reprinted from seattletimes.com)


Starbucks passed Coca-Cola last month as the most popular brand on Facebook, according to InsideFacebook.com, and plans to leverage those and other digital relationships during this fall's national rollout of its instant coffee, Via, BrandWeek reports. (StarbucksGossip.com posts say the launch begins Sept. 1.)

Alexandra Wheeler, Starbucks' digital strategy director, tells BrandWeek that the chain relied heavily on digital channels to promote its Free Pastry Day last month. Nearly 600,000 people RSVP'd for that event on Facebook. "That was a digital and PR effort we would say is widely successful," Wheeler said. Almost a million people RSVP'd "yes" or "maybe" to its promotion last holiday season with Product (Red) to contribute 5 cents for every beverage purchased to the AIDS-fighting project.

"Facebook has been really great about it. They are thrilled with the success," she said. "They have lots of other brands. [Our success has them now asking,] 'How can we even do this? How can we repeat the success for them?' It speaks to the power of the Starbucks brand and how well it connects with our consumer in this space."

How to Archive Your Tweets

Did you know that your tweets have an expiration date on them? While they never really disappear from your own Twitter stream, they become unsearchable in only a matter of days

ReadWriteWeb has the latest on how to archive those tweets.

Twitter Lessons from the British Government

Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments

Twitter Is Great But It's Still Not The Phone

In case none of you know, I'm tracybb on Twitter. And for months, I have fruitlessly been applying to contests on Twitter. Most of these involve winning an iPhone and since I still have an old school phone, that prize sounds great to me. I tweet for moonfruit, or other silly things, in hopes of that elusive iPhone.

The other day, at the last possible second, I saw a posting on Facebook for a contest to be a TJ (Twitter Jockey) for the twiistup event. Tweet your reason why you should be the twitter jockey by 1 pm that day. It was about 10 at the time. Since the event was currently out of my budget (but I REALLY wanted to go), I decided to apply. Instead of being cutesy or trying to be funny, I just typed up a few reasons why I should be picked and sent it off.*

Previously, I would furiously check the sites to see if I'd won the prize. But this time, I promptly forgot. I don't seem to win these contests anyway. Oh, and I had my TweetDeck open all that day. But SOMEHOW, through all those annoying beeps on my TweetDeck, I missed the tweet that I had actually won! Me! It was me!

I check my many email boxes (yes, I have several, don't you?) all day long. I have Facebook open all day long. I have my phone at my side. But somehow, I missed it. When I get a direct message on Twitter, I get an email alert and it tells me the message. But when you just get an @ reply, there is no message. I don't really check my @ replies and the twitter user interface doesn't show them that easily either. So, I missed @socialmediaclub's tweet. Didn't even notice it on TweetDeck, as I have set up several filters of my own.

But, here's the rub. My Twitter profile has my URL on it. My site has all my contact information including my phone number, my email address, my Facebook page, even my business address. I could be contacted in a multitude of ways. Twitter was still not effective enough to reach me. I got the message a day too late, sort of like Morse code.

Ironically, I actually learned about the contest on Social Media Club's Facebook page. So, if they had contacted me that way, I'd have been a twittering fool. As I mentioned, I'm parked on Facebook all day and find that interface much easier to follow -- and they send me constant emails all day so I'm sure not miss one thing from my friends.

While people may mock the phone, it is still one of our best social media tools. It is instant messaging without the carpel tunnel. You not only get instant feedback but hearing a voice is more personal. If only I'd gotten a call.



* The winning tweet: @socialmediaclub: TJ me. Reasons: cute, concise, good writer, tech & social savvy, know the players (by name), local, and not shy. Please!
9:58 AM Jul 29th from TweetDeck

If you can't fight 'em

If you can't fight 'em, join 'em. But where to start? PR has been evolving and changing with technology since there was such a thing. I'm sure press releases weren't always faxed before there was a fax machine!

I have been in the PR business for 15 years and when I began, most publicists were still using blast fax to get their releases out to reporters. Or, in some cases, even mailing them! I was an early adopter to the Internet, however, and from almost the inception of my career I have been working with Internet companies and using the Internet to publicize them. I worked for InterActive Agency in Los Angeles before anyone knew what "interactive" even meant. Those were the good old days when you could just get press about a company launching a Web site.

But times have changed. Now, you have to fight for every column inch you can get, cyber or otherwise. So it's important to keep up with all the newest tools. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, how do you fit all these things into your PR plans and budgets? What role do bloggers play? Is Second Life significant? There are constantly new platforms emerging and others on the wane.

Well, now there is a way to keep up with them here. I hope to aggregate all the best content on social media right here on this site, along with basic tutorials on how to use the technologies (with a slant toward PR and marketing). I'm also going to post information on free or low cost webinars and real life seminars to teach social media practices. And just like the social media sites themselves, I hope that this blog will be constantly evolving and changing to keep up with the industry. One thing that will probably remain true is that social media marketing has become part of the fabric of public relations. So it's time to join the ranks!

Social Media Education

Well, in case you haven't heard, social media is all the rave. What, you don't know anything about social media? What is social media? According to Wikipedia (which is in itself a form of social media), "Social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings....Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC)...."

Wikipedia also cites social media software applications including blogs (like this one), microblogs (Twitter), social networks (Facebook and LinkedIn), photo sharing (Flickr).

So, for those of you that are unfamiliar with this new revolution, here is a crash course on some best practices. I have made a list of some of the best articles I have found on the subject (most of them are lists themselves). I hope you find it helpful too.

• Five Easy Ways to Find People with Similar Interests on Twitter
• How to Be a LinkedIn Superstar
• Twitter Professors: 18 People to Follow for a Real Time Education
• CNN, MTV Rank Among Top 10 Most Social Brands
• Kevin Rose: 10 Ways to Increase your Twitter Followers
• Social Media and Traditional Business Mores
• An Insiders Guide to Marketing on Flickr

By the way, these are all from blogs.