Good luck keeping all your balls in the air in 2009!

You can find out more about my work at my new company SocialSphere by reading this blog or by visiting my company’s Web site.

Best wishes for 2009!

Todd Van Hoosear

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The 2009 predictions are out–I think Peter Himler has one of the best roundups. Here’s my prediction: if you don’t have a community manager already and you care about social media, you’ll hire one (or appoint one internally) in 2009. Why?

Because it’s very difficult to engage online communities part time, especially if you don’t have time to really understand how those communities work, and few marketers do, even in today’s day and age.

So what does a community manager do? Jeremiah Owyang described the role to a ‘T’ last year. S/he (I’m paraphrasing much of this):

• Serves as a community advocate to the company–an ‘ombudsman’
• Serves as a brand evangelist for the company
• Has good communication skills, and shapes the editorial strategy for the company
• Gathers community input for future products and services

Still not convinced? Look at all the companies that have community managers.

Still doubtful? Well, you can’t argue that big companies are doing it. What about small ones? Read what ReadWriteWeb has to say about community managers for smaller companies.

Finally convinced? Great! Now take a look at Chris Brogan’s suggestions for the essential skills of a community manager. Chris says:

• The best community managers are like a good party host mixed with a fine restaurant host.
• Community managers must be experienced communicators.
• Community managers are ambassadors and advocates in one.
• Community managers are bodyguards and protectors.
• Community managers must build actionable reports.
• Community managers cultivate internal teams for further support.

Good luck with your 2009 social media initiatives, and remember, social media is about more than marketing!

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So here’s a preview of where my brain is in terms of SocialSphere. As we’re working with our clients to position their organizations for success with today’s Web 2.0 and tomorrow’s Web n.0 technologies, we’re looking at a number of different aspects of their online presence and business needs. One way to break things down to simple matters is to think in terms of the “three Cs of social media:”content, community and conversation.

You have to have all three of these in place in order to truly succeed with social media. I think it’s also very interesting to see how these three spheres align, and where they don’t. This is simplistic and a first stab at something we’ll be discussing more early next month as we plan out 2009 as we all try to visualize what a “social sphere” really looks like (and how many there are). Without giving away much more, I will say that good things are definitely coming from SocialSphere in the coming year!

I’d love your thoughts. I’ve also been playing with “spheres of influence” and other ideas…

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Matt Bacak is a survivor. He survived bankruptcy to build up a multi-million dollar business. And more recently, the man, who for a short while held the title of “The. Biggest. Douche. in. Social. Media.” (sometimes referred to as a “New Media Douchebag”), survived a social media s**tstorm (it all started with this admittedly awful press release).

On my post about Lessons from social media marketing failures (and successes), I wrote that

When Matt Bacak’s over-the-top press release got him a great deal of negative attention on Twitter last week, he wasn’t afraid to apologize and admit his mistakes. While it took him longer that most of us would’ve liked, he certainly responded faster than the Motrin folks, or some of the old school horror stories like Kryptonite.

It turns out he’s done more than apologize. He’s gone person-to-person to address the criticism. He’s eaten a whole lot of humble pie, and is coming out not as an example of a failure (though that release will still go down on the top of my list of bad press releases), but as an example of how to handle yourself in a social media crisis.

He’s gone so far as to agree to have his picture taken with a t-shirt that I designed (see above–the shirt first appeared on a blog post by Warren Whitlock, which also includes a link to a long audio podcast interview with Matt). The shirt is not something I’d wear in mixed company, but he’s going to wear it to a session he’s leading tomorrow. That takes guts.

Matt, thanks for wearing my shirt. Keep up the good work. Tune down the rhetoric in those releases, but don’t lose your enthusiasm. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve more than redeemed yourself–you’ve come out shining.

You can see our complete, and extensive dialog on Twitter below. For Twitter neophytes, you’ll want to start from the bottom and work your way up, as they’re in reverse chronological order.

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I got asked the other day how to get people to care about a company’s product. I was about to start with my usual social media lecture, but paused for a second. “You know what,” I said. “Nobody outside of your company probably does care about your product. And you know what? That’s okay!”

You see, your job as a marketer or business leader is not necessarily to get people to care about your business or your cause—at least not directly. Your job is to make it easy for a potential client to understand how your organization can help solve a problem they’re facing. Then maybe they’ll care, but that comes later.

I think someone who really explains this well is David Meerman Scott, and I’m looking forward to the release of his new book early next year.

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I get a LOT of questions about why anyone should care about Twitter. I gave up defending it long ago, though I will still explain it to people who want to try and understand its uses. I’m also still very happy to help people understand how to effectively use Twitter.

I admit, like most, I had a rough start with Twitter. I didn’t get it. But I saw something there, and figured I’d try it. I decided to pick a theme that would get me to post at least once a day. I picked quotations. My earliest “tweets” consist, in a large part, of short quotes from other people. Still to this day I “favorite” quotes, and still try to post at least one quote a day in my Twitter feed. Guess what? I got a growing number of followers, and a fair share of (encouraging) replies, just by doing that.

I’m not a member of the Twitterati, but I do have a decent share of followers. So allow me to make some suggestions for organizations and individuals that want to use Twitter as one of their public communications tools.

The most successful twitterers, in my experience, combine three ingredients in roughly equal parts when it comes to “baking” the content that they share on Twitter:

1. Promotional tweets: Yes, it’s okay to use Twitter to talk about yourself or your company. It helps to warn people that it’s self-serving (in the spirit of transparency). Feel free to link! Just don’t make these the ONLY tweets you send.
2. Informational tweets: In addition to self-serving content (that still hopefully helps others), you should also mix in other helpful content. Mention a competitor’s resource, or a good analysis or report on your industry. Don’t forget to link!
3. Conversational tweets: Finally, don’t ignore the conversation. If you like what someone else tweeted about, reply to that tweet, or “retweet” it (making sure to give the original twitterer credit of course) so your followers see it too. Ask questions in your tweets to encourage others to participate.



Remember, things happen fast on Twitter. Don’t think of Twitter as a broadcast platform like television. Just because you have 300 followers doesn’t mean that 300 people will read every message you send. If they have a lot of followers, your message might quickly get buried in the “river of news.” If you see something you like, retweet it—others will return the favor. Finally, don’t forget to follow other people on Twitter. Now, I can’t guarantee that if you do this you’ll have tens of thousands of followers and make tons of money. But you will grow your followers.

If you need more help figuring out Twitter, follow @Pistachio and check out her great blog.

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I just finished interviewing Paul Gillin for a new podcast we’ll be starting at SocialSphere–he’ll be featured in episodes one and two. Here’s the raw audio: there’s some really good stuff as we explored social media marketing, ROI, control, influence, measurement, blogger relations, emerging technology, Twitter, the future of journalism, and much, much more. We’ll clean it up and split it in two for the podcast. I’ll also re-record the intro, as my voice gets chopped up fairly regularly (fortunately Paul’s voice comes through perfectly, except for the occasional Skype glitch). Warning: this is big: 44 minutes. But it’s worth it!

Bear with the audio glitches in the first few minutes during my intro. Promise I’ll re-record things. Also, if you listen, you’ll get a preview of what the podcast is all about. I’ll also share the cleaned up version with Tim Allik for the PRobecast.

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I give Justin Whitaker an A+ for effort but maybe a C- for logistics… He was host to last night’s Boston Winter Tweetup in Harvard Square, where I met some great people, and got to catch up with other friends I know well. Well, it turns out he came up about $120 short for the event. Could you contribute a few dollars to help him? I set up this ChipIn widget to make it easy:

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While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will be up to, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.
– Arthur Conan Doyle

Torture numbers, and they’ll confess to anything.
– Gregg Easterbrook

The blogosphere was baffled again late yesterday with statistics coming out of that venerable research firm Forrester. This time, bloggers took the hit as their communication tools showed up on the very bottom of the list of trusted information sources. It turns out, the people surveyed trusted personal email almost five times as much as they trust corporate blogs. Hell, they trusted message board posts more than corporate blogs! The numbers, as Josh Bernoff himself commented, are bleak:

We examined these results further. Among people who regularly read blogs (at least once a month), 24% trust company blogs. Among people who blog themselves, 39% trust them. These are low numbers any way you slice it.

This isn’t the first time that Forrester has issued some rather surprising and depressing statistics. Back in October, the company declared that only 11 percent of consumers are using RSS.

Now I’m not about to argue that Forrester is wrong. I’m pretty confident that these numbers are accurate. But we need to sit down, take a deep breath, and figure out exactly what Forrester is measuring.

In the case of the much touted RSS statistic, I’ll quote Mashable:

You can’t ask mainstream users whether or not they use RSS in their daily course of Internet usage any more than you can ask the average couch potato whether or not they use Cathode Ray Tubes or Liquid Crystal Displays.

The truth is that it’s pretty difficult to hit a website these days that doesn’t use RSS in some way, shape or fashion. If you look at the average page here on Mashable, there are about two or three sections which rely on RSS to pull in information relevant to the readers. If you turn your attention to the most popular sites on the web, sites like Facebook, MySpace and Google all have syndicated content strewn all through them.

While only 12 percent fessed up to not knowing what RSS was, I’ll bet the number of clueless consumers is significantly higher–one indication of that was the 45% who were “neither disinterested or interested in using RSS in the future.”

Let’s see what one expert has to say about this kind of use of statistics:

(Was Scott Adams inspired by the Forrester report? Probably not–he writes his strips a few weeks in advance.)

I enjoyed what Dwight Silverman had to say about the “Luddite” crowd of social media naysayers–of course, he was speaking of folks that were at least savvy enough to figure out how to comment on his blog posts.

So let’s come back to how Forrester conducted its most recent survey. Josh Bernoff took great care to qualify the data as much as possible in describing the methods and the limitations of the survey (emphasis his):

A note about how we collect data. The data comes from an online survey we conducted in Q2 of this year. Our online panel is as representative as we can make if of the US online adult population (18 and older). Companies use our data all the time, and I believe it’s the best available survey of its kind; we’ve been conducting surveying consumers since 1997. In this case, we surveyed over 5000 people. We asked them to rate how much they trust information sources on a five-point scale, from 1 (don’t trust at all) to 5 (trust completely). Respondents could also answer that they didn’t use a particular information source. In this case about 80% of those we polled said they did use corporate blogs. Of those who used them, only 16% rated them 4 or 5 on the five-point trust scale.

Re-read those last two sentences, and re-think your conclusions. Step down off the ledge, and read some of Josh’s own advice:

This means that if you blog, your goal should be to create a blog about which people say “I like that – I don’t think of it as a company blog.” For the most part, that’s a hurdle you need to jump to gain their trust. I don’t mean to hide who is writing the blog. I mean it has to be more about your customers than it is about you.

Blogs exclusively about companies and products are what I think generate these low trust ratings. So don’t do a blog like that.

Did you take these recent surveys with a grain of salt?

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