1. Malcolm Gladwell says you have to do something for 10,000 hours to be an expert.
2. Social media tools like Twitter are not 10,000 hours old.
3. You can’t have used Twitter for 10,000 hours.
4. Therefore, there are no social media experts.

This is utter bullshit.

Most of the NSME (”no social media experts”) crowd seem to think it’s the use, knowledge, and experience of the tools that make one an expert. The tools are not important. The tools are just tools. Real expertise lies in two other areas: message creation and social psychology. That is, what to say, and how it will affect your chosen audience/group.

(Big thanks to my friend Lalita Amos, author of the now-famous N-Word Manifesto, for helping me come up with this idea. A never-long-enough meeting with her launched my brain in this direction. She deserves the credit for pushing it off that way.)

Speak to the dog, in the language of the dog, about things that matter to the heart of the dog.

Marketing relies strongly on those other two areas. The true social media experts are actually reformed marketers and PR pros. They’re Message Experts. They know how to create strong messages, and they know how those messages affect their targeted groups. They’re not tool experts. They’re not necessarily experts at graphic design, TV and radio production, or website creation. They hire the people who are. They focus strictly on making the best possible message.

Similarly, they’re Social Psychology experts. They know how a message will affect their target audience, and how and when to change the message for a different audience. They know they can’t just throw a message out there and hope for the best. They can, as I like to say, speak to the dog, in the language of the dog, about things that matter to the heart of the dog. The good marketer/PR pro speaks Dog. They may not be a dog, but they speak it as a second language.

The Tools Don’t Make the Carpenter

Norm Abram, the master carpenter on PBS’ New Yankee Workshop and This Old House, learned how to build houses and woodworking projects from his dad. Norm is old enough that his father taught him these skills on hand tools. Norm’s dad built houses using a hammer, hand saws, drills, and block planes. So Norm learned how to use these tools.

However, as Norm got older, he began to use power tools. Now, on his show, he has about 10 routers, multiple power drills, and enough nail guns to start a war with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. His dad, on the other hand, never made that jump, until after he retired.

One time when his dad was visiting for several days, Norm taught his dad how to use the tools.. He had never used routers or table saws before, so this was a brand new experience for him. But after a few days, he was up to speed on these new tools, and was creating projects with the same quality and skill he had been doing with block planes and hand saws.

According to the NSME crowd, Norm’s dad would no longer have been an expert, because he hadn’t spent 10,000 hours using those tools, as if all the knowledge had flown out of his head.

However, it wasn’t the knowledge of these new tools that made Norm’s dad a master carpenter, it was the knowledge of how to make straight cuts and fasten pieces of wood together. For his dad, it was the decades of knowledge of joinery techniques (message) and how to assemble the wood into functional pieces of furniture that would be appealing to people (social psychology).

Those Who Can’t Do, Coach

Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule is about people who have a freakish level of mastery of their chosen skill. They’re the Peyton Mannings, Michael Jordans, and Tiger Woods of the world. They have a level of expertise in all three circles. They’ve got expertise in the tools, the “message,” and the “social psychology.”

Peyton Manning has the tools, the message, and the social psychology. He’s 6′4″ with the laser rocket arm, he has a mastery of all the plays in the playbooks, and knows how other teams will react to the plays they will run (he does this by studying game film with an almost compulsive obsession. So Peyton Manning is obviously a 10,000 hour expert.

But what about Clyde Christensen? He’s the new offensive coordinator for the Indianapolis Colts. Clyde has never played professional football (he was a QB at North Carolina University), but he has been a coach since 1979. He doesn’t have the same tools as our laser-rocket-armed quarterback, but he knows as much about the plays and what the other teams are going to do. Similarly, Larry Coyer, the Colts’ defensive coordinator, knows what his defense needs to do when the other teams look like they’re going to run certain plays.

Neither of them have the tools that their players do, or if they did, they don’t anymore. But they’re masters of the other two.

That’s where the real expertise lies. Not in the tools, but in the knowledge of the other two areas.

For the real social media experts, and there are more of those than the social media haters realize, we know about proper messaging, and we know how to package that message to our different target audiences. The tools we use just make our lives easier.

Five years ago, we had to communicate with websites and emails. Fifteen years ago, we communicated with TV and radio commercials. Twenty years ago, we communicated with newspaper ads. And while we had experts in creating content for those tools, the important knowledge — messaging and psychology — has remained the same.

Until the tools become so wildly different that messaging and social psychology has to change with it, we need to accept the fact that there are real social media experts in the world, and we know what we’re talking about.

Tweet This Post Digg This Post Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I’ve decided it’s wrong.

We’ve heard this “no such thing” argument from a lot of people, including me, who all sound like a bunch of 8-year-olds fighting on the playground.

“Nuh-uh! Social media isn’t even 10,000 hours old. Malcolm Gladwell says you have to have 10,000 hours of experience to be an expert!”

Fair enough. Malcolm Gladwell’s idea that if you want to have a true mastery of a skill, you need 10,000 hours of work, practice, and study in that field.

However, keep in mind that this is to be a superstar in your field. The Michael Jordans, the Peyton Mannings, the Tiger Woods. If you want to be that good, then yes, you have to have 10,000 hours or more of practice.

But what about to be just “decent?” To be better than most? You don’t have to be better than everyone, you just have to be better than your clients., your colleagues, or the people who just invited you to speak to their trade association for a few thousand bucks. (Do you really want to tell those guys you’re not really an expert?)

Think about it. Do you truly have 10,000 hours of experience in your chosen field? If you’re a public speaker, have you given 10,000 1-hour speeches? If you’re in public relations and you consider yourself a good press release writer, have you truly written press releases for 10,000 hours? And how many years would it take to rack up 10,000 hours of experience as a professional photographer?

Let’s face it, there aren’t that many experts in any field. The 10,000 hour commandment we’ve all accepted as gospel from St. Malcolm is not appropriate for us.

My friend Doug Karr decided it was a load of bullshit last month, and has a new definition for an expert.

Peter Shankman has a big list about ways to tell if your social media expert is not really an expert. (My favorite: 5. Everything they learned about social media they learned by reading blog posts (i.e. no application). You can learn a ton about sex from reading Kinsey’s manuals, but I’d still rather be with someone who has some practical experience.)

So I think we need a new standard when calling ourselves an expert, whether it’s social media, public relations, photographer, etc. And it’s a simple, 4-question survey. If you can answer yes to all four of these questions, you’re an expert. If you can’t, well, then get back to work until you can.

1. Do you know more about your tool/method/equipment than most people? Would you be graded on the 90th percentile or even 95th percentile in terms of knowledge?
2. Can you speak intelligently about the inner workings of that tool/method/equipment? Are you asked to give presentations and/or teach others about it?
3. Have you written extensively about that tool/method/equipment? Have you published articles, blog posts, or even books on the subject? Do you have an extensive body of work that demonstrates your knowledge?
4. Are you generally recognized by your peers as having some authority and credibility in this subject? Does your name come up frequently when someone asks, “who knows a lot about X?”

If you can’t answer yes to these questions, it doesn’t matter how many hours you’ve spent on that subject. I can think of six people who I would gladly hang the label “social media expert” on, because they can answer “hell, yes!” to each of these questions.

To the people who put “social media expert” in the same “no such thing” camp as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, get over yourselves. Just because no one is recognizing you as an expert doesn’t mean you have to get all snarky about the ones who really are. I’m with you when it comes to booting out the so-called experts who have only been using Facebook for six months, and that’s to play Pirate Clan. But when you’ve got people who are truly well-versed on the tools, don’t give me this “10,000 hour” bullshit when it just doesn’t apply in this case.

It doesn’t matter if these tools are less than five years old. It’s not the tool that matters. The tool is useless and pointless, and it doesn’t make you an expert.

Knowing what messages to send and how your message and those tools will affect a group (social psychology) is where the expertise lies. In a few days, I’ll be writing about how knowing how to use the tools is not nearly as important as knowing what messages to send and the social psychology of a group is where the true expertise lies.

Tweet This Post Digg This Post Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Useful Social Networking Apps for Crisis Communication

Blog posts, PDFs, and PowerPoint slide decks

If you can think of any others, please feel free to add them. If you add enough, I’ll do an addendum to this post.

Tweet This Post Digg This Post Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I used to be the Risk Communication Director at the Indiana State Department of Health and one of the things we prepared for over and over was “pan flu.” At the time, we thought it was going to be the H5N1 bird flu, and we prepared by practicing drills, simulating events, writing tons of press releases, and creating processes to get information out to the media and public. Quickly.

The problem is the old model of sending out press releases via email was fast enough three years ago, but since the explosion of Twitter and social networking, and the decline of the traditional newspaper, people just aren’t getting their news through traditional methods anymore.

With social media, the public is getting their information as it happens, rather than waiting for a newspaper to publish day-old news, watching network news at certain times of the day, or cable news that only has time for a national focus, but nothing deeply local.

I’ve been using Twitter to get national news from sites like CNN, the BBC, and USA Today.

I’ve been watching the Google Maps case markers, the CDC’s swine flu investigation, and even listened to a couple of the CDC swine flu podcasts.

There are a few ways public health and first responders could use social media to educate the public, and get ahead of the rumor mongering and bad information that many people seem to perpetuate, whether accidentally or otherwise.

Create a Twitter account.

Someone posted a tweet today that the Twittersphere was talking about swine flu the most, so this is the place to start. Use Twitter to quickly answer questions, debunk rumors, and give out good information and news links.
1) Use the name of your agency AND the emergency (for example, IN_SwineFlu.)
2) Download TweetDeck from TweetDeck.com.
3) Set up a search column for “#swineflu and swine flu.”
4) Use Twitter’s Find People function to find media outlets and journalists in your area, and follow them. They’ll follow you back.
5) Use NearbyTweets.com to find other people around your area. Search for the city AND keywords like “#swineflu” and “swine flu” to find local people talking about those topics. Follow them, and they’ll follow you back.

Set up a blog

Don’t screw around with the rigamarole of getting your IT department to set up a blog on your agency’s server. They’ll have to ratify it in their bi-weekly committee meeting, and want to create a mission statement and all that crap. Use blogs to publish press releases, send out quick updates and stats, give information that can’t wait (i.e. locations of hospitals and medication).
1) Go to Blogger.com, and set up a blog for your agency (i.e. http://youragency.blogspot.com). You COULD screw around with WordPress, which is actually better, but we’re going for speed here. Plus you can’t do this. . .
2) Set it up so you can send emails and texts to your blog. If you’re one of the lucky people who has a Blackberry, you can send blog updates that way. Ditto with photos.
3) Go to TwitterFeed.com and have your blog automatically update your Twitter account.

Monitor your traffic

It’s important to monitor your traffic so you can know what messages are getting the most attention, what ones are being repeated, and where your biggest traffic sources are from.You need to know how many people are coming to your blog, reading your tweets, and paying attention to what you’re saying to know which areas you need to improve on.
1) Set up your TweetDeck URL shortener to use bit.ly, not Tiny.url or any of the others.
2) Go to www.Twitalyzer.com, and enter your Twitter ID. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and click on Return on Influence. You’ll be able to measure how many people have read your Tweets.
3) Install StatCounter into your blog. I usually like Google Analytics, but they only update around 3 am EST. StatCounter updates minute to minute.

Those are the basics of using social media to communicate with the public. If you have any questions or suggestions for best practices, post them here in the comments. I’ll put up new blog posts to answer big questions

In the meantime, please take a few minutes and watch this video to learn how to avoid spreading colds and flu, not just swine flu.

Tweet This Post Digg This Post Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I belong to a community of humor writers called the NetWits. We started out as an email news group 8 or 9 years ago, and have grown into a community of more than 200 writers from around the world. This post is based on an article I wrote specifically for them.

There are three areas any humor columnist needs to focus on to improve their readership: their blog, their domain, and Twitter.

Starting your blog

If you’re not blogging, you need to be. It’s all well and good to send stuff out to an email list, but if you don’t have a web presence, you’re not going to get new readers.

1) If you’ve got the cash (and even if you don’t), buy your name as a domain name. You can get cheap domains at GoDaddy. for less than $10. And if you google “GoDaddy promo code” you can find a discount code that will save you about 25% on your purchase. I’ve bought domains for less than $7 before. You want your name as the domain name because you’re promoting yourself as the brand.

2) Host your blog on WordPress.com. They will let you “mask” your blog with your domain name on their server. Otherwise you’ll get http://erikdeckers.wordpress.com. The cost is $15 per year to do this. Once again, this will help you promote your name/brand in search engine marketing. (If anyone wants, I can teach you about search engine marketing too. Let me know.)

Twitter

I loooove Twitter for a promotional tool. For one thing, it’s a great way to communicate to people. For another, it helps you pick up readers. You can find people in your city, who share your interests, or who talk about certain topics. As far as I know, there are only three other NetWit Twitterers. (Does that make us NetTwits?)

1) Join at www.Twitter.com (use a non-work email. Get Gmail if you don’t have it.) You can follow me at www.twitter.com/edeckers.

2) Find people who live in your city at NearbyTweets.com.

3) Find people who share your interests at Twitterment.com. Search for keywords. For example, if you’re interested in restoring muscle cars, search for various terms your blog is about: muscle car, car restoration, mid-life crisis, “oh God, where did my youth go?!?!”

4) Download TweetDeck. It’s a Twitter browser, like Firefox is a web browser. You get Twitter messages from the people you’re following. You can respond to them right from TweetDeck. It’s a great way to keep track of your conversations. Do NOT use the Twitter.com page. It’s a royal pain and hard to use.

IMPORTANT NOTE: A lot of people will give up on Twitter just a day or two after they try it, because they don’t get it. You MUST STICK WITH IT!! Give it a few days. Give it 10 days if you can. Just keep TweetDeck open, and as you see a comment you want to respond to, respond to it. People will respond back. Once you get into some conversations, this becomes easy. Almost second nature.

Promoting your blog with Twitter

This is where it gets REALLY cool. Your followers will read your stuff if you’re interesting, AND you’ve been engaged in conversations with them. If all you’re doing is talking about your blog, you look like a one-trick pony, and they’ll get bored of you and never read your stuff.

1) Starting out, whenever you write a new post, copy the URL and paste it into the Shorten Tweet window of TweetDeck. Write something like “New humor post: The Problem with Apostrophes http://bit.ly/xRqm4″ That jumbled-looking URL is automatically created by TweetDeck. Your followers will read that tweet (a message is a tweet), and follow it. Boom! You’ve got a reader.

2) For advanced users, go to TwitterFeed.com and set up an account. You can have TwitterFeed visit your blog every hour, 2 hours, or even 5 minutes. When it finds a new blog post, it will automatically post it to Twitter for you. Then, you don’t need to take the extra steps of doing #1 above.

Tweet This Post Digg This Post Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Actually, this rule, and two others, aren’t really rules at all. One is a faux rule that our English teachers mistakenly clung to, and the other two are slowly dying.

Michelle Pierce, writing for Copyblogger.com, discussed the three grammar rules we’re allowed to break.

1) Don’t End your Sentences With a Preposition.
2) Don’t Begin Your Sentences With “And,” “But,” or “Or.”
3) Don’t Split Infinitives.

I’m glad to see that some real writers are following language developments, and not just regurgitating centuries-old superstitions.

Don’t End your Sentences With a Preposition.

Martha Barnett and Grant Barrett of the “A Way With Words” public radio show have stated that this is not a real rule at all. In fact, Grant Barriett said it’s an old rule clung to by people who haven’t upgraded their grammar education since the 5th grade.

This rule was created by old school –– I mean really old school –– grammarians like John Dryden (who died in 1700) and Edward Gibbon (who died in 1794) who wanted to standardize language rules. They were so uptight about it, they blindly followed Latin’s grammar rules, which puts the prepositions at the end of a sentence, and stuck us with that one.

A story on DailyWritingTips.com relates that Gibbon was so uptight about this, he even avoided ending words with adverbs that looked like prepositions. For example, in “He ran after the wagon and jumped on,” the word “on” is an adverb, not a preposition.

In other words, the rule is an artificial one. Sure it’s old, but that doesn’t make it right.

Don’t Begin Your Sentences With “And,” “But,” or “Or.”

This one was a real rule, but it’s breaking more and more. It grabs a reader’s attention, it’s becoming more acceptable. And it looks cool.

“But it creates sentence fragments!” wail die-hard grammarians. Then they clap their hands over their mouths, because they just started a sentence with “but.”

Take a look at those last sentences. And it looks cool and But it creates sentence fragments. Are those really sentence fragments? Drop “and” and “but,” and they’re complete sentences. Such as a bottle and a glass. is a fragment.

Okay, I could buy the argument that we should limit this usage, at least in the formal, professional world. But this is the real world. People in my position write like we talk. We use short words and short sentences. We start sentences with “and” and “but.” And we don’t apologize for it.

Don’t Split Infinitives

“To boldly go where no man has gone before” is the example grammarians point to and grit their teeth.

According to TheWritersBag.com, an infinitive consists of the word “to” plus a verb. To go, to be, and to run are all infinitives.

“To go boldly where no man has gone before” is the better option, say the grammarians. “To go boldly where no man before has gone” is the most technically correct option, if you’re still following rule #1 above. (Now do you see why this is just stupid?)

The Oxford English Dictionaries –– the Oxford freakin’ English Dictionary, the mack daddy of all dictionaries –– have said this is just a myth, a superstition. Changing the sentence, they said, to “to go boldly” weakens the sentence, and “boldly to go” is overly-formal and ruins the rhythm of the language.

Henry Fowler’s book, Modern English Usage, even tried to put a rest to this myth, saying it wasn’t necessary:

The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and approve; and (5) those who know and distinguish.

I guess I’m a 4.

There are actually times when not splitting the infinitive will change the entire meaning of the sentence. Grammar Girl said in one of her podcasts:

EXAMPLE: Steve decided to quickly remove Amy’s cats.

Now, instead of saying that Steve removed Amy’s cats quickly (zip zip) while she stepped out for a minute, you’re saying that he made the decision to remove the cats quickly.

Language is always changing, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. In this particular case, one rule never should have come into existence. It actually is okay to end our sentences with prepositions. It was in incorrect rule in the first place.

The other two rules –– starting sentences with “and,” “but,” and “or” and splitting infinitives –– are falling by the wayside. While it’s still important to follow the rules in formal writing, like sending letters to the Queen, you can pretty much skip them when following the rules make you just sound like a stuck-up grammar geek or when it changes the meaning of a sentence entirely.

Tweet This Post Digg This Post Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

One person said there were no tools that allowed people to measure this kind of activity. “You can’t measure how much time you spend on social networking and then tie it back into sales” was the gist of their complaint.

Uh, actually you can. I even have the equipment to measure it. I wear it on my wrist. It has little hands that move around and tell me how long I’ve done things, or when it’s time for dinner. And with this thing and a computer, it’s actually quite simple to measure the ROI on social media. Here’s a basic plan of how anyone can do it.

1) Create a log sheet that measures my time spent on certain activities. Use Excel or Google Docs. The latter is free.

2) Budget your time. Spend one hour in the morning and one hour in the afternoon to do social networking. Spend your time wisely on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and local/niche sites like Smaller Indiana. If you have an iPhone or Blackberry, you can even give yourself some Twitter breaks during meetings, lunch, etc. Make sure you have a purpose though. Don’t just screw around and waste time. Watching YouTube videos does not count as social media time.

3) Keep track of the amount of time you spend on these activities –– use that wrist thingy I mentioned earlier –– and record it on your log sheet. This is how the lawyers and freelancers do it. They track their time in 15 minute increments, and bill their clients the appropriate amount. (Special note: realtors and insurance agents also measure their sales activities this way. Saying they can’t is just plain wrong.)

4) Use a customer relationship manager (CRM) program like SalesForce.com, as they now allow users to capture social media information. When you meet a new client, you’re already supposed to keep track of how you met him or her. You keep notes about what kind of effort you’ve put into them, quotes you’ve sent, meetings you’ve had, and time you’ve spent on them. So, just start adding social media interactions too.

5) Here’s the cool part: CRM software already lets you track sales per customer. Divide the size of their sales by the amount of time you’ve spent with them, and you’ve got not only your sales ROI per customer, but even how much the time was worth. If a sale is worth $5,000, and you spent 50 hours getting it, the sale is worth $100 per hour. If your time is worth $50 per hour, then your ROI is $2,500, or $50 per hour.

You can even break sales out by how you met the contacts. Were they referred to you by your friend, Bob? Did you meet them at a trade show? Or did you find them on LinkedIn? By using basic statistics and that high school algebra we thought we’d never use, you can see which of your efforts have netted you the highest amount in sales, which have wasted the most time, etc.

The net result is, you can see if social media is paying off for you or not. Just add up the amount of time you’ve spent on social media (that’s what your log sheet is for), add up the sales you’ve gotten specifically through social media contacts, and then divide money by time, and you’ve got your ROI.

If your total sales from social media is $50,000, you spent 100 hours online, and your time is worth $50 per hour, your sales from social media are worth $500 per hour. Your ROI is $450 per hour, or $45,000.

It’s not only small businesses that are measuring their ROI through social media. You can even download a report that shows how Toyota, Vodafone, Dow Chemical, New York Life, NetApp, and John Deere are all doing it. You can find the report and download a summary of it here.

So, if it’s working for global companies like Toyota and Vodafone, maybe it’s something smaller businesses should be looking at too. You’re already more nimble and able to move much more quickly than these behemoths. Put that nimbleness and basic common sense to use, and see if social media is beneficial to you.

I’ll even tell you where to find that time thingy you wear on your wrist.

Tweet This Post Digg This Post Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

The problem, Kyle says, is that Marketing 1.0 folks are expecting old school results with 2.0 tools. They still expect to measure thousands and thousands of views, like they used to see with TV and radio commercials, billboards, and newspaper ads.

Even as recently as five years ago here in Central Indiana, TV and billboards reached hundreds of thousands, radio and newspapers reached tens of thousands. Across the country, Web 2.0 is only reaching hundreds and thousands – tens of thousands if you’re lucky, hundreds of thousands if you’re Amazon, Microsoft, or Apple.

These “low numbers” are having a chilling effect on some marketers, especially the Marketing 1.0 folks, because they’re used to seeing the BI-I-I-I-G numbers. They have these too-high expectations because they have been lied to by traditional advertising and PR.

The Golf Channel’s Inflated Numbers

On the Golf Channel’s website, they tell us “the Golf Channel has a global reach of almost 110 million homes.”

Ooh, squeals the marketer in capitalistic delight, if I advertise on the Golf Channel, my ad will be beamed into 110 million homes.

Not so. Who typically watches the Golf Channel? Golfers. And how many of them are there? According to the National Golf Foundation, in 2008, that number was 29.5 million Americans. That’s not even 10% of the entire country.

In other words, the Golf Channel wants us to think they’re reaching 110 million homes. That may be, but that’s not how many people might watch it — 29.5 million. And of those, how many are actually watching it? It sure ain’t 29.5 million.

The Golf Channel won’t even say. In a press release from this past February, they said:

Preliminary projections of Wednesday’s coverage – which also marked the highly anticipated return of Tiger Woods – show Golf Channel will garner the highest first-round rating on the network, and likely will surpass the network’s highest rating ever (2.0, Friday of 2008 WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship).

Highest ratings? Compared to what? They never said what those high ratings looked like, or even their daily viewership.

But Sports Business Daily did. They said — probably to the chagrin of The Golf Channel — the average daily viewership is 77,000, while their primetime viewership runs around 131,000.

Let’s see, 77,000 viewers divided by 110 million homes is. . . .07%. Not even one-tenth of one percent the Golf Channel likes to brag about. But you can bet every Golf Channel ad salesperson is telling their customers, “We have a reach of 110 million homes.”

But the Golf Channel isn’t alone in these misleading figures. Newspapers and magazines like to boast about print runs, but don’t mention actual readership (often less than half). Radio’s Arbitron ratings and TV’s Nielsen ratings are based on surveys and estimates, not actual numbers of viewers. (And don’t get me started on cable companies that lump in dozens of stations no one watches and then count them to pad their advertising rate cards. Like I really want 12 different home shopping channels or an HD version of the International Military History Channel.)

Therein lies the problem. There isn’t a completely accurate way to measure the number of viewers on a TV channel, but marketers have been conditioned to think they’re reaching 110 million.

The same is true for PR. Let’s say a newspaper has a print run of 500,000 copies but a real readership of 300,000. The PR person will say, “we reached as many as 500,000 readers,” but they can’t tell how many people read an article, clipped it out, sent it to others, or stuck it at the bottom of the bird cage.

Why We Can’t Measure Traditional Media

PR, traditional marketing, and media people like to say they can measure their efforts by measuring sales, web views, numbers called, etc. They run a few commercials, or get some airtime and column inches, and look for a spike in sales.

“Look, sales went up right after we ran our commercial,” they say. “We made it all better.”

But that’s not completely accurate. They can’t prove the cause-and-effect of their efforts. Was it their latest ads? Or the previous set of ads? An unknown newspaper article? Coupons? A full moon?

I agree, the PR/ advertising most likely led to the increased sales. But which commercials at what time? Which story on what TV news program? And how many of those particular commercials led to a particular percentage of sales?

There is no piece of software on earth that will tell me that 10% of Friday’s sales increase happened because of Thursday’s 6:00 TV news segment, and not the article in the newspaper. And I’ve got nothing but surveys and estimates to tell me that I need to focus more attention on the NBC news, not ABC.

We Can Measure Social Media Though

Now that we’ve got some great tools to measure social media, people aren’t seeing numbers of millions or even hundreds of thousands, they’re seeing thousands, and sometimes even hundreds. (And sadly, these are the numbers they were probably getting all along.)

And marketing people, used to that 110 million figure, are writing off Web 2.0, because it doesn’t have the same numbers as big media. Of course, they write it off, not knowing important figures like commercial viewership, or how many people are fast-forwarding through their commercials on the DVR.

Sports marketer Pat Coyle often writes about the problems he’s facing with marketers who are very interested in in-stadium sponsorships and reaching 60,000 people per week for 8 – 10 home games, but balk at sponsoring a social network with 20,000 raving fans because they don’t have “high click-rates.”

What these marketers are missing is the passion of the raving fan that social media harnesses. A raving fan who finds the latest song, article, or video online will tell their friends about it through Twitter, post it on their blog, or even post it on a discussion forum. Their friends pick it up, and forward it on through the same channels. This ultimately drives traffic to the website, thanks to the exponential growth of they tell two friends, and they tell two friends. This leads to increased sales or viewership, which leads to more raving fans, which leads to increased sales, and so on, and so on.

The benefit of social media is that we can measure the passion of Web 2.0 users, and how much they love the company or brand. We can use services like Radian6 to measure the real reach of our marketing and PR 2.0 efforts.

Programs like Radian6 tell us who the raving fans of our brands are. One raving fan is worth more to a company than 200 people who glanced at the TV ad or raced past a billboard at 70 miles per hour. The raving fan tells their friends, who in turn become fans and tell their friends. The cool thing is, social media measuring tools can follow that train. It shows where the raving fans are talking, and how often they’re doing it. It will show us who that first raving fan was, and how much of the actual number of sales they created.

Social media is still new enough that there isn’t a standard method of measurement, but that’s because there are too many methods. We’re spoiled for choices, and because this is such a new way of doing things, the people who find out the best way and can standardize it will own social media measurement.

Meanwhile, marketers need to learn that if they want to learn how to measure the effectiveness of their online campaign, they need to begin understanding the emotion and passion of many of their customers. If you can harness that, then you’ll finally begin creating the traffic –– and sales –– you’ve been looking for.

Tweet This Post Digg This Post Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Weeding out non-followers

Earlier this week, I dropped 300 non-followers, using Twitter Karma. And I’ll probably have another whack at about 50 more. This brought me well below the Twitter-imposed 2,000 follower cap, and leaves me room to follow people who actually follow me back. Here’s how to do it:

1) Visit Twitter Karma, and pull up your entire network.

2) Select “Only Following” and then sort by Last Updated. Drop the people who have not updated in the last 3 months. If you jump over to your Twitter page, you can see your following count change. Just hit refresh a couple of times and watch it drop.

3) Refresh Twitter Karma, and pull up the network again. Select “Only Following,” but this time, sort by follower count. Drop the people who only have a few followers, because they’re probably not very active. You can determine this by clicking their link and jumping over to their Twitter page. Fewer than 20, and you followed them a few weeks ago? They’re not going to follow you back, so dump ‘em.

4) Tell yourself, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and these jerkweeds can bite me!” Then unfollow the people who have tens of thousands of followers but follow fewer than 100. If you’re following them because they’re celebrities (or “cewebrities”), remind yourself that they’re probably really not worth following. If they’re social media professionals who shriek “participate in the big conversation” as their battle cry, unfollow. You’re better than them, and you don’t need to waste your time or API count on them.

Tweet This Post Digg This Post Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

Bookmark It

Hide Sites