Connie Bensen

Last week I did a half day workshop at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston. We had a great conversation! Over fifty people from a broad range of backgrounds attended! I was glad to hear that we had more than marketing people. There were some social media people, analysts, community managers, higher education (one in engineering!), programmers, and brands. I was really hoping for that diversity & it really spiced up things.

My hats off to the Enterprise 2.0 organizer, Steve Wylie. When he first talked with me I advocated for sessions on ‘community’. And when I saw the agenda I was so pleased to see many sessions on community related topics!

It was a challenge to create a slide deck to span 3.25 hrs and not know my audience. We intermixed discussion with the slides & we moved through questions & concerns.

Here are my notes that I had going into the presentation:

Fear needs to be overcome. A topic of discussion recently is should social media efforts start at the grassroots level or executive?

There needs to be executive sponsorship and the company’s culture needs to be ready.

• Are you seriously interested in what customers are saying?
• Will you respond?
• It’s not cheap. It’s time intensive

For Case Studies, Peter Kim’s wiki has over 1000 case studies that can be searched by industry.

To ensure success, choose a small project, then establish goals & strategy.

Suggested blogs to read:

• Jake McKee
• Dawn Foster
• Fresh Networks
• Richard Millington
• Brian Solis
• Mack Collier
• Geoff Livingston
• Marshall Kirkpatrick RWW

Let me know what questions you have on the slide deck. And I have other presentations on measurement & community building on slideshare.net

So you’ve built up your personal brand to superstar status. Everyone is watching. You are setting the pace and rocking it as an A-lister. Your community loves & adores you. Everything is awesome right? What could go wrong?

An unintentional mistake …

I’ve watched it happen over the past couple of years. The blogging community is a warm tight knit community. But as with any group the leaders are held to high standards. They’re expected to set the bar.

It’s easy to sit back & watch the kerfluffle unfold. In the past I haven’t said much out loud because it was ‘safer’ to support people in the back channel. We went thru the puppet fiasco with Shel Israel. I got to know him at a personal level by supporting him in the back channel. The puppet videos weren’t funny if you put yourself in his shoes. And there is the person on Twitter who has a parody going. I’m not interested in being on their radar.

This spring I watched when Jeremiah Owyang made a slip on his blog. We talked by phone & he told me that many of the anonymous comments were from the same IP. I was glad to be able to offer my support & suggestions for weathering the storm.

Most recently I saw a post on SocialMediaToday criticizing Gary Vaynerchuk’s PR blogger campaign to promote his book, Crush It. I received the same email & agree that there was one sentence that won’t motivate me to engage:

On your side, anything you do with him is going to get an influx of readers to your blog due to his massive and loyal following.

I was interested in participating in promoting Gary’s book because:

• as a past librarian, books are amazing
• we were invited to suggest how we wanted to share the book with our community/network (allowing creativity)

I didn’t know Gary & so his personal brand wasn’t a motivation (hence that last sentence didn’t resonate with me).

What are the ramifications: At the time I put my opinion on the post, 600 people had viewed the post. I see that 2000 have now. I understand John Cass’ intention to use examples to teach others but at what expense to Gary’s brand? We agreed that we get bad pitches every day but this one came from a social media superstar.

The conversation was taken up on Shel Holtz & Neville Hobson’s live interview on Friday. Gary apologized & said that he realizes that some things could have been done differently.

My take aways:

• I disagree that an effective blogger campaign requires reading each person’s blog to find what motivates them. It’s not scalable. (Gary was trying to grow his community – the email just didn’t describe his book to connect with the audience)
• scaling a brand & connecting with potential new audiences on a personal level is difficult. How can one connect & build relationships?
• empowering others to help you with your work has its risks. They need to understand the space because even though this email was signed by someone else, it still represented Gary’s brand.

Gary graciously expressed his apologies many times in the interview. He did say that of the 500 emails, he had a 50% response rate which is really good. What success rate do professional agencies have?

I look forward to seeing Gary’s book (and the other nine! He signed an unprecedented 10 book deal). You can read John Cass’ follow up is here & I respect his opinions. John’s intent was to use it as a learning experience. After commenting on the post Gary sent me a personal note & we are now connected. He works 19 hrs a day & I am guilty of that too. We need to support each other as we’re all going to make mistakes. Let’s speak up for what we believe in & not be too hard on each other. What will happen when you stumble?

Photo credit: gicol/Flickr

Many conversations have shifted to Twitter. It has become more than just a networking tool. Business is being transacted there.

For my company Twitter is a the perfect place to fulfill the need for people seeking information and tools for social media monitoring. There is an expressed need & my team & I offer our assistance. So for B2C & B2B companies Twitter has huge opportunities if your potential customers are there.

I have noticed a shift from people using email to their reliance on direct messages in Twitter. I first noticed this in the end of December & it is becoming more apparent. There are two things:

1. people expect an immediate response via Twitter

• I don’t have it open all the time
• Twitter quit emailing me notifications of DM’s in mid December
• I monitor email all the time

2. DM’s scare me in regard to archiving messages because:

• they’re not searchable
• management of messages in Twitter is difficult – it’s one message at a time to delete

These are the solutions that I’ve come up with:

set up Tweet Deck. I like the columns so that I can see the following:

Direct Messages, Replies, Search: Techrigy, Search: ‘an industry term’, my coworkers

I still do not have it open all the time though. Sometimes it’s 2 hrs between checking it. It’s easier to have it in the background. Maybe I will need to shift my focus to Twitter rather than email?

For the archival issue, I did find that Tweet Deck has the option to email tweets to yourself (or anyone). I’ve been using this for DM’s that I want to archive.

My last post was on ‘Digital Body Language’ & communicating in the other’s person’s chosen method, so these are the accommodations I’ve made. What have you noticed in regard to social networking & people’s expectations? Has it affected how you’re doing business?

The words “Digital Body Language” are so intriguing to me! I can’t take credit for them. I recently received an invitation to a webinar that will feature Steve Woods, author of the new book, Digital Body Language: Deciphering Customer Intentions in an Online World. He’s using the terms in terms of marketing concepts, but they brought something else to mind for me.

Community builders are masters at reading digital body language. And it applies to both offline & online interactions. Listening & learning are key concepts. Communicating is important too, but ultimately you need to know the needs of your community first before you can decide how to best respond.

At a workshop long ago I recall the statistic that the largest percentage of our communication is nonverbal. It was like 60 percent or higher. Online we lose all of that. That makes our jobs online all that much more challenging. What levels of increased perception does one need to accurately gauge what those around you want/need?

Here are some tips for overcoming this challenge:

• For trolls in your community, engage them in short conversations. Find out what their real intentions are.
• In the case of recruiting advocates, communicate specific engagement efforts so that they can decide without the influence of their peers. Not everyone will want to engage at a higher level.
• Note trends in your community and how your customer segment(s) interact. Ask them directly what their needs are. Provide polls and offer voting options.
• As you build relationships with team members in your company identify early on what people’s preferences are for communication. It varies greatly from phone, IM, email, etc. Now we’ve added Twitter to the mix and some in my network prefer Facebook messages.
• And the same goes for building your network. Connecting with influencers is easy. Don’t be shy about it. But do pay attention to how they prefer to communicate. My best suggestion is keep it brief & to the point.
• Consider the accepted etiquette for the various forms of communication. I was recently helping someone get started on Skype. For me, I ask permission of the person before Skyping them. That is based on my own reality. I have headphones, so my computer doesn’t make noise when someone is calling me. Hence I won’t realize I missed a call. And also, I could be on another call (whether voip, landline or cell phone).

Maybe it’s because I work remotely that I’m very aware of how important these are. All of you participate in social networking to some extent so share your tips for maximizing communicating online.

(photo courtesy of Kris Kros on flickr)