Lorton Data

At some point during the last twenty-four hours, I’ve accessed Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Facebook, Salesforce’s Chatter, Groupwise Messenger and Google+. I also talked to my father on the phone and received a text message from my wife—it said “moo.” While the time I spent on each communication platform wasn’t excessive, it adds up quickly to an amount that would allow me to build an addition on my house—or at least get the dishes washed. There are some people that can reach me on as many as nine of these eleven different communication mediums! It’s hard to believe any one person can manage all of those platforms in a twenty-four hour period with less stress than is involved in setting the timer on the coffee pot. Here’s the essential question when I think about this: Is it better to be tied to many different platforms and manage interactions across all mediums, or would it be less challenging to manage fewer platforms but wade through more information?

Most days I just coast along and do communication rather than think about it. I write emails at work, wade through tweets, occasionally smirk at a Facebook status and try to figure what I should be doing with LinkedIn. Some days I do all that, and blog! However, with the release of Google+, I’m starting to evaluate all these different platforms and trying to make sense of my daily communication. I’ll freely admit that I wasn’t interested in Google+ until I got an invite to join (funny how that happens). While I need another social media platform like I need that hole in my head from the ill-advised earring from college, there’s something very compelling about Google+. There is also something very concerning to me.

In a quick overview, Google+ is kind of like a long-form version of Twitter with the ability to comment like Facebook, Tumblr’s ability to integrate images into posts, a whole slew of other nifty features, and the promise of even more integration with other Google applications. It sounds fantastic, but it also sounds like an informational firehose that will be difficult to turn off. Google Circles is the following/follower management system for Google+ and its premise is that it allows you to post to the people you want, when you want, based on the Circle you’ve placed someone in. It breaks down the “Walled Garden” concept of other social media platforms, where the application is separate from the web at large, and transcends the specific one-on-one communication of email. While it sounds great for the broadcasting aspect of Google+, I worry that it won’t actually work for inbound information. In a sense, you always go to the main “Stream” page much like Facebook’s “News Feed” where you are inundated with everything everyone wants to say. It’s like ordering cable, but being forced to watch all the channels at once.

Today, I can ignore Facebook for a few days before the guilt rolls in. Or, I can take a night off from Twitter and if someone wants to reach me they can. My business life won’t end if I don’t check LinkedIn. With Google+, the potential to have all of those different audiences together (even if they are parceled out into different Circles) could make it too compelling to never take a day off. The non-stop flow of information into your stream will be challenging–even moving from Circle to Circle, the idea that “just one more group” could leave us wide awake late into the night. Adding to this is the possibility that having it tied to everything else I do on the web will make it a bit too overwhelming. I’m not predicting this is the Matrix, but if I want to take five minutes to read the latest musings from my favorite unemployed stand-up comic in one circle, but always feel compelled by guilt to comment on what my mother had for lunch (in the same application) we are moving away from something we do, to something we have to do. And for me that’s the biggest concern with breaking out of the siloed approach to social media that Google+ plus offers.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to cross post the link to this blog on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and email it to my friends. Oh yeah, and I have to do it on my personal and work accounts.

You know those extra buttons at the bottom of a dress shirt that you never actually use? They just sort of get in the way and eventually fall off and are never around when you actually need one. Then you get rid of the shirt and six months later you find the replacement button hiding in an athletic sock that you haven’t worn since the last time you went to the gym. That’s how I’m starting to feel about the “share” buttons at the end of every single piece of media content I read. While individuals do have very passionate feelings toward their social media information aggregator of choice, I wonder if it’s really valuable for a personal or corporate brand to manage all these different sites. Does it really make sense to spread yourself all over the interwebs with every social network possible, or is it more effective to manage a few and be more focused?

As I’ve written before, Lorton Data has a Facebook page, a new Twitter account, a LinkedIn account, a YouTube page, an email newsletter and this rather lovely blog. That’s enough for an organization of our size to manage. Bringing in more social media platforms would be problematic for us. Recently, we’ve attended quite a few lunch-and-learn webinars (why don’t they ever email us pizza and a nice salad beforehand?) that argue that we should be social in every aspect of our business and that each social media platform is the most important thing since the invention of the telephone. What they don’t do is tell us how to manage it all. It’s like a cocktail party where the volume increases as the night goes on until everyone’s yelling cancels each other out and you can’t hear anything over the raucous cacophony of noise.

My advice: Try to keep it simple. You really don’t need to be reached on every single social media platform 24/7/365. If you are a multibillion dollar international business-to-consumer organization, sure maybe it’s a great idea, but if you are a small-to-medium sized business, it just doesn’t make sense. Pick your battles (or platform). Focus on only a couple of social media sites that are easy and comfortable for you to work with and make sense to your client base.

Last year, TechCrunch posted an interesting analysis regarding social sharing on the web. Unsurprisingly, Facebook and Twitter combined for 73% of all the traffic. Many of the smaller social media sites were outstripped by the emailing of information and good old fashioned print button (just don’t tell the office supply gatekeeper). So, in reality if you aren’t monitoring del.ic.io.us, Digg and MySpace, how much revenue are you going to leave on the table?

Yahoo just released a study that related how nearly 50% of tweets consumed are generated by just 20K users. Part of that mix is bloggers talking about people’s blogs. You’ve got a better chance of getting picked up by that crew, than becoming the next Digg star. With Facebook, 51% of the American population over the age of 12 has an account. As an organization, I’d hazard a guess if you focus on them you’ll generate a lot more traffic than playing fifty-two card pickup with the plethora of social media sharing sites out there.

Finally, I’ll leave you with this thought. You know the people that get to the front of the line at Starbucks and still don’t know what they want to order? Imagine those folks trying to decide where to share your article. *Shudder* Too much choice can be absolutely paralyzing. So start small, focus on a couple of sites and most likely you’ll get better feedback than spreading yourself too thin.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to make sure you ignore the “share all” option below and just focus on the Twitter and Facebook icons. Nothing to see here people, nothing to see.

There are four tips to leveraging Twitter in a B2B context. There are seven strategies to being successful, ten “musts” for every online organization, twenty suggestions for getting more Twitter followers, and forty ways to use social CRM for selling. My head spins three hundred times whenever I try to wrap myself around all the advice floating around the interwebs about how to be a company and use social media to find other companies to expand our business. Of course we have a LinkedIn page, a Facebook page, a YouTube account, and now a Twitter account to reach out and explore every pocket of the internet.

Having a Lorton Data Twitter account inherently makes us hip, trendy and exciting right? We have our festive logo as the avatar and a groovy water droplet themed background that metaphorically represents our A-Qua Mailer offering. We’ve even tweeted already, providing some useful information, a couple of links and a joke about a 1:45 AM fire alarm at MAILCOM (with a hashtag!). All we need to do is turn all of our personal brands into a collective corporate brand, then just sit back, put our organizational feet up and watch the followers roll in. It sounds so easy.

Or maybe not.

Lorton Data operates in a business to business environment, and unless your Great Aunt really needs the addresses for this year’s Christmas cards cleaned up, your average Twitter user probably isn’t going to be inherently interested in what we have to say. It’s the honest truth. While we provide database hygiene services to organizations as large as major governmental bodies, to as small as the neighborhood church around the corner, it’s hard to market our business outside of the traditional direct mail context. We think Twitter could be a good avenue to spread the word about Lorton Data while also providing additional information to help our customers.

Much like all the hundreds of thousand voices out there talking about social media in a B2B context, we haven’t figured out our game plan yet. We actually haven’t even really started. There are tons of tips, suggestions, ideas, beliefs, blades of grass tossed into the wind and shaken magic eight balls, but many of them contradict each other or seem to suggest those ideas only work in one specific context.

So we might just have to wing it a little bit.

According to a statistic I just made up, 99% of all articles about social media explain that there is nothing more important than generating interesting content. And yes, I completely agree. I’ve been using Twitter personally for a little over a year now and have come to realize that nothing is more important than original content. It’s more than blindly retweeting the latest iPad analysis from Mashable, but it’s less than sharing every single thought that passes through our organization. We need to engage our audience with @ replies and discussions, (it’s social media after all) but I don’t even think we honestly can project who our audience will be yet. My user experience on Twitter as an individual (or more silly as a Personal Brand) will be markedly different from my projected experience on Twitter as Lorton Data employee. By understanding that out of the gate, our organization should be able to set different expectations and understandings of how to engage with Twitter as an organization of multiple voices working together to communicate with the world at large.

As someone has probably already said, “you can lead a customer to Twitter, but you can’t make them tweet.” Or follow, or something like that.

So, we are interested in hearing what people are looking for from Twitter in a B2B business context. What will have you interested in hearing from us? Of course you can reply on our Facebook page, follow us on twitter or comment on the blog.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get this blog reviewed and posted so I can link to it on Twitter.

As the temperature hovers around 50 degrees on this mid-February day, my thoughts drift to the summer: sitting outside, swatting mosquitoes and swapping stories with friends over a cold frosty beverage. I’m not the only one; just yesterday local Minnesota Brewery @Summitbeer tweeted, “The urge to drink a beer on a patio today is very strong in this one.” It’s ingrained in the Upper Midwest attitude, and many histories of the region discuss the fancy beer gardens built by breweries before prohibition.

The Twin Cities based Surly Brewing Company wants to continue the tradition of Midwestern beer gardens as part of a plan to build a new $20 million brewery. According to a recent article on Minnesota Public Radio’s website the company proposes a “60,000 square-foot brewery and restaurant with a beer garden, roof deck and bar.” The facility expects to create 150 new permanent jobs.

A beer garden, roof deck and bar sound like an absolutely fantastic way to spend the six evenings in the Twin Cities where snow isn’t either falling or melting.

There is only one hitch in Surly’s master plan. It is currently against the law for a brewer who brews more than 3,500 barrels of beer to sell alcohol directly to the public. In other words, Surly can certainly open a restaurant, but they can’t serve any beer at the restaurant. I had my brilliant lawyer wife read through the legalese and essentially the law states that if you have a license to manufacture “intoxicating liquors” you can’t also have a retail license to sell the liquor.

In other words, Surly Brewing Company needs the law to be changed to move forward with their plans.

To do this, not only have they appeared in traditional media outlets like the local news papers and radio but they reached out to their dedicated following on Twitter, Facebook and their own corporate blog.

They’ve shared with over 19,000 Facebook friends articles on the issue at hand, and asked for feedback on what their State Representatives have said about emails to change the law. Surly has done the same with their 8000 followers on Twitter. Finally on their Brewer’s Blog two days ago, they posted extensive information on the question posed to the legislature and how people can help.

Surly is a small organization, and makes fantastic beer, but no one is going to call them a titan of the brewing industry. However, the company has been very active on various social media platforms and their calls to action seem to have been heard. In less than an hour on Facebook, 46 people had already replied about communicating with their legislators and are sharing their experiences about lobbying to get the law changed.

We don’t yet know if Surly will be able to successfully leverage social media to help get the laws changed, but I wouldn’t bet against them. They make an excellent product (which I’ve tested enough to appoint myself as unofficial quality control) and they have a very dedicated following. While I can’t speak for my organization, I don’t really see anything negative with this plan. New jobs, a beautiful proposed destination, and another exciting place for Minnesotans to go and enjoy delicious Surly beer.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to head off to my secret basement laboratory to make my special DEET and sunscreen concoction for summer patio season.

In an informal study by the University of Making Stuff Up, 95% of all Twitter users have a first tweet along the lines of “*Tap* *Tap* Is this thing on?” or “Still figuring this Twitter thing out.”

Still figuring this Twitter thing out… I’m pretty sure even the most successful social media folks will tell you they haven’t figured Twitter out completely, and if they propose that they have, they might just be selling you some snake oil.

Recently I’ve highlighted some successful uses of social media with Twitter and Tumblr, but today I want to talk about one of the pitfalls of not understanding the social media platform being used, and how simple things can have serious ramifications.

I was followed recently by a large non-profit after a tweet regarding their cause. I looked at their timeline and made the decision to follow back. I figured that with their small number of tweets, it wouldn’t introduce too much noise into what I am looking for from Twitter, and I could also help show my support. A few hours later, I received a direct message that said “Thanks for following, please friend us on Facebook.”

There are a couple of problems here. First, you should not send automated direct messages thanking people for following you. It’s considered inappropriate for personal Twitter accounts, and especially for corporate accounts. This has been true for several years now. With your corporate account, it proposes the idea that instead of just sending us news via your Twitter feed, you’ll also directly message us individually anytime you want to advertise something. Not that you necessarily will, but it illustrates that you don’t respect the direct messaging functionality of Twitter. On a side note, many people get notifications whenever they get a direct message. So if you send me a note, not only do I get the message but an email as well. In other words, you better have a good reason for making the red light on my Blackberry go off. Sending me a direct message thanking me for following you isn’t it.

The second problem with this message is that the non-profit was directing me to their Facebook account. I wasn’t sitting on my couch thinking, “you know Joel, you are following them on Twitter but maybe that isn’t enough. If only they had a Facebook account and maybe LinkedIn as well, then I could be assured of getting each message from the organization THREE different times. Then, and only then, would my life be complete.” If I wanted to follow this organization on Facebook I would have signed up on Facebook.

You need to be willing to engage your customers, or donors in this case, on the social-media platform they want to interact with you on. If your Twitter strategy is to try and direct your followers to Facebook, I’d suggest just having a Facebook account and deleting the Twitter account entirely. I have too many Facebook friends and I probably login every other day, but honestly Twitter is my social media application of choice. If you want to get your message to me, you need to be able to do it on Twitter. For others it might be Facebook, or even MySpace, but be prepared to meet people on their home turf. This would be similar to sending a direct mail piece asking people to listen to your radio advertisement. Just because it’s free to push your content on social media doesn’t mean you should abandon the most basic marketing fundamentals.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to clean my Gmail account of the “thanks for following” emails.

My Pink Bathroom

Thanks to social media, I took two hours of vacation last Monday to scour my shower to a glistening shine. I went inch by inch with a toothbrush and despite what my dentist would say; I did draw the line at flossing. What does my obsessive cleaning of the bathroom have to do with social media? And why were there a bunch of people hanging out in my sparkling bathroom? While it is a somewhat convoluted story, it serves to show how social media allows you to make interesting and unique connections no matter how esoteric your interests.

Two and a half years ago, my wife and I purchased a mid-century home with an original pink bathroom – the type of bathroom inspired by Mamie Eisenhower and apparently beloved by many people (please forgive the author for knowing very little about bathroom styles). At the time we purchased the home, my wife posted quite a few photos on Flickr, including one excited reference to “Our Pink Bathroom!” That caption led to her being contacted by the head of Save the Pink Bathrooms, a group she later joined on Flickr. From there, she learned about Retro Renovation, a sister site to SPB, which she friended on Facebook. When Retro Renovation put out a call for pink bathrooms in the Twin Cities metro area, my wife emailed them. A little while later, we had a writer and photographer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, as well as my wife and I, crammed into our tiny pink bathroom for a thirty-minute photo shoot.

If that story wasn’t enough to tire me out, the alchemy of cleaning supplies created a dangerous haze that I was probably warned about in the film strips of my youth. So even a week later, I might just be a touch light-headed.

What’s really interesting with this story is how social media helps you make connections—often more quickly than traditional means of communication—and those connections allow you to network in ways that may have been previously prohibitive. Just five years ago, it would have been a far greater challenge to find enough bathrooms to write a lifestyle section article on something that’s retro cool. With one picture on Flickr, a whole set of dominos fell into place, leading to a metro newspaper hanging out in my bathroom for an evening. There are a myriad of inventive ways to grow participation within your group or businesses using social media. Sometimes you can even be creative enough to get someone to clean their bathroom. And if that isn’t cool, I don’t know what is. Actually, that my wife and I could become “retro cool” and hip without doing anything is much better.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go sit on the couch and wait until my flannel shirts and grunge aesthetic are in fashion again.

I don’t know Nevin very well. We are friends on Twitter and Facebook and I’ve read her posts on Tumblr, but we’ve never met face to face. She’s a wonderful person – smart, funny and warm, and because of her influence, I some day might be able to help save someone’s life. She’s the person who introduced me to the need for donating bone marrow. Because of her, I’ve signed up for the National Marrow Donor Program on Be the Match. I’m not the only one. Nevin shared her story and her need for a bone marrow transplant on the blogging site Tumblr and a significant number of people were moved to sign up with the registry.

Nevin’s story brings to light how Social Media has the ability to transform the way nonprofits and individuals can interact with donors and volunteers. Traditionally, these sources inundate us with communication that tells us that one person can make a difference. One person can make the world a better place. One person can save a life.

But we easily get lost in the numbers. The sheer number of requests and amount of time or money needed often removes the immediacy of need from the impact. We donate food at Thanksgiving and buy gifts for families at Christmas. We donate to victims of natural disasters. We are moved to act by stories of pain and suffering. Then once the cause drifts from the public eye, we don’t think about it again until the next news cycle or the next postcard in the mailbox. With social media, there’s immediacy to helping and an opportunity to keep the success stories fresh in the mind of people who’ve expressed interest in a cause.

After Nevin’s Tumblr post about her situation, people stepped up to be tested as potential bone marrow matches. What’s interesting is people didn’t just sign up for Be the Match. After completing their sign up packet, they posted pictures of their registration, or more comically, photos from swabbing their mouth for their sample. Every few days, there would be another picture and post to Tumblr of a new person signing up. So instead of reading a compelling post and maybe acting on it, or forgetting a day later, active Tumblr users were getting a weekly or sometimes a daily reminder of the importance of donating bone marrow.

Angela Helga shows off her Be The Match paperwork for Tumblr

Angela Helga, another person I’ve never met but am pleased to call a friend, responded to me when I reached out to ask people about the relationship with Tumblr and the National Marrow Donor Program. She said, “When she [Nevin] decided to use Tumblr as a forum to educate people about donating bone marrow, I thought it was so wonderful that a group of random internet people jumped right on it and registered.” Not only did they jump right on it, but people continued to sign up and continued to post their photos and messages on Tumblr. With a few minutes of effort, it becomes easy to keep the message alive and not contingent on a quarterly marketing cycle.

The ongoing immediacy of the interactions on Tumblr illustrates the value for nonprofits to be engaged with social media in a variety of ways. While the National Donor Program organization isn’t the one driving this on Tumblr, Nevin’s one post has helped to jump start a successful social media donor campaign.

One emotional and important story and some simple pictures posted on a blog site have created a compelling reminder that one person can do good. That one person can make a difference and save a life. This example stops the traditional cycle of marketing and allows for an ongoing message. In this situation we have a typical sense of urgency about how we can help, but it transcends the holiday stories or the quarterly mailer.

And that’s a great thing.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I just got my kit in the mail. I need to fill it out and post my picture to Tumblr.