Isabel Walcott Draves

Reminder: Social Media is for People

I lately suffered a cruel reminder that social media is meant for people, not bots.  If you live under a rock and don't know what a bot is, it's a program that automatically does something online, like post to someone's Facebook wall.

Spam is always spam, and never welcome.  But there's something worse than just plain spam. If you are going to automatically post ads on someone's wall, say because they "liked" your company page, there are times that it's really not appropriate to do so.  For example, if someone just announced that their mother died, their wall is inundated with sympathy posts, and your bot posts an ad for your funeral parlor, legal services, party rentals, or consignment shop.  This looks grossly like ambulance-chasing, profiting off of someone's death, and taking uncouth advantage of the fact that their wall is receiving a high number of visits right then.  Spamming someone's wall with your ad at this time in their life could end up doing way more damage to your company's reputation than at another time, when it would just be a mere annoyance (or perhaps the person would be glad to get 15% off).  Highly unwise tactic, from a social media strategy point of view (and a common sense point of view).

And that's what I saw the other day.  Someone's bot posted an inappropriate ad at an inappropriate time.  Stupidly, I opened up my big mouth and told the spammer off, because I was outraged at this classless, hurtful behavior that I felt was an insult to my friend.  And here's where it gets weird.

The spammer contacted me with his own outraged excuse.  His story?  "I had nothing to do with that post... I have no control over those posts...My company software sends the ads out when it sends them out, it's out of my control".

Really?  You set some bot in motion and say whatever it does is "not your fault", and your excuse is, you "can't control it"?  Why are you even posting ads to people's walls with your bot in the first place?  Who told you this was a good idea?  Are you actually paying them?

The problem with robots is just that.  They're robots.  They're not people, and they can't tell when it's a really, really bad idea to do their little robot thing.  Which is why you should never use them to make posts for you in social media.  Social is called social for a reason.  It's for people.  The more people assign posting tasks to bots and then say their interaction with their facebook friends is "out of their control", the more social media will be ruined for everyone for ever.

If you want to tell people about what you've got going on at your business, post to your own wall, not theirs.  If you're posting to their wall, look around you first.  The atmosphere there determines the nature of your comment.  You yell across the ballfield; you whisper in the library.  For all you beginner social media marketers out there - it's a conversation you're joining.  Act like a human.

 

Changing your Facebook Privacy Settings

As I wrote an email about this topic to a relative recently I thought I would post it on my blog as well.  If you're not someone who lives and breathes social media, you probably need to change your privacy settings.  Here's how.

Go to Facebook and find your own profile.  Under account, hit privacy settings.

At the top it says "basic directory information", some text, and a tiny link that says "view settings".  Click that link.  The first 2 are fine to have be everyone: search for me and send me friend requests. The rest, if you'd like to be more private, could either be friends and networks, friends of friends, or friends only.  "Networks" means, if you say you went to a college, anyone from that college can see it.

When you're done there, click "back to privacy" at the top.

Under "sharing on facebook", click "custom" and find the little blue "customize settings" link.  For each piece of info you have, you can choose who can see it.  I have "friends only" for most of it but i let "friends and networks" see some things and for my website URL, which is how I advertise my services, it is set to "everyone".

How to Choose a Social Media Marketer

Here is a 10-point checklist for choosing a social media marketer. 

1.    Has the person built an online community before?  How many people participated and how did they interact with each other? 

2.    How long has the person been working with user-generated content?  What kind of content and how much have they worked with, and how intimately?

3.    Small, independent, highly interactive web communities offer marketers excellent learning experiences.  Check the marketer’s client list for attributes like connecting community members with each other, helping members find content online, helping members build a repository of quality content (not junk content), and viral success.

4.    Be on the lookout for buzzwords used to make a marketer sound more social-media savvy than s/he really is.  Rather than listening for keywords like tagging, Facebook, WOMM, Digg, blogging, and Twitter, listen for concepts like fostering community interaction, facilitating discovery, relinquishing control, open culture, application platforms, and reputation building.

5.    Being a participant in a user-generated content community is not the same as building or running one.  Does the marketer have community management experience?

6.    Some social-media savvy folks don’t have commensurate experience working with corporate clients.  Make sure your marketer can understand your needs as well as the social media scene.

7.    Web design or online publishing experience is not equivalent to social media experience.  Social media is people communicating amongst themselves, not just visiting a site that’s made by professionals.

8.    Corporate messaging experience is not a selling point for social media expertise.  The more corporate messaging experience your marketer has, the worse they may be at social media advice.

9.    Don’t be fooled by a blue-chip client list.  Big-name clients are still less likely to have cutting edge social media strategies, so this isn’t a case where “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” applies. 

10.    Work directly with the expert, as opposed to with someone who works for the expert.

Measuring Social Media Success - an Interview

Yesterday, I conducted an interview and conversation as part of our Facebook Marketing 2.0 Group.  Although the interview was originally scheduled to be with Katie Paine of KDPaine & Partners, we ended up speaking with a methodologist from her team, Peter Kowalski, as Katie was pulled unexpectedly into moderating a meeting of her own at the last minute.

The audio from the 55-minute call is located here and can also be found (along with some comments from conference call participants) on the Facebook event listing.  The conference call - which was extremely well-attended - just begins to scratch the surface of the rich topic of how to measure the success of your social network or social media campaign.  This is a topic that I hope I will be able to come back to again and again, because I know there is a lot of interest.

Among other things, KDPaine and Partners looks at the placement of where and how people are talking about a company, before and after a social media campaign. Peter's tips included

1) Setting clear objectives prior to the campaign
2) Being precise about your definitions - saying you want more "engagement" is not enough; what does "engagement" mean?
3) Trying to integrate your measurement work with other research work done within the company, including integrating with other marketing and media metrics. 

He stressed that simply counting eyeballs or clicks -- the basic measurement that most folks do -- is just not good enough.  Proper measurement of social media means measuring connections and relationships. 
Social Media maven Howard Greenstein was kind enough to take notes on the call and summarize the content for us at the end.  He's also threatened to blog about the conversation at http://howardgreenstein.com/blog/.