This is what Questions looks like in your news feed

If you’re not addicted to Twitter you may have missed this bit of news: Facebook launched its new Questions feature. Check out Caroline McCarthy’s write up in CNet about its functionality both for consumer and brand use.

I’ve played around with the service a bit and it’s still pretty beta. Some of the main benefits I can see are:

• By making a question and answer public it spans beyond just a brand page, or an individual’s page. you have the potential to reach ANYONE who has an interest in a particular topic
• You have the ability to poll your audience in somewhat more organized way. See the list below on areas for improvement
• I noticed that when you’re looking at the answer thread, Facebook displays what your relationships are to the people who have provided responses. It’s like a weighting system for trust. if i’m friends with a person, there’s a high likelihood that I will trust their answer. That’s something Yahoo! Answers just doesn’t provide
• Aggregating questions by categories could be a boon for Facebook, taking it into the realms of wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers and the like. Essentially FB could become more than just a place to see what’s going on with your friends or favorite brands, it could be a knowledge resource for all things.

Now, for the areas of improvement:

• To make this truly useful for brands, you’d need to be able to glean data about the people who have answered. Sure you can assume that your sample size is the entirety of your fans, but that’s not realistic because usually only a small percentage are actually engaging. We want to know demographic information, potential interaction history with the page (what things are these people interested in), we want graphs and charts…you know all the things that you’d get from a real market research firm
• a way to syndicate the question off site. Now this may be possible already with Facebook connect and I just haven’t tried it, but it would be great to offer Questions, say, in a blog post, or a product page, and then have people’s answers be run through Facebook and spit out the same data I outlined above
• Facebook currently has the call to action already shown in your feed (see image above) but what’s really interesting are the responses, and currently it’s not clear where to access all these Q&A threads. They may already be working on it, but some kind of contextual advertising would be great. IE if a user is typing in a question on their personal status update, maybe answers auto suggests a thread for them to check out?

These are just my personal ramblings, but I’d be interested to hear what you think the possibilities/areas for improvement are for this new Facebook feature. Sound off in the comments.

I'm serious AND a blogger. Image Courtesy of: RogerImp on Flickr

1. Empower Employees – At NVIDIA we’ve kicked off a series on our blog called “Inner Geek” which highlights NVIDIA employees’ passion for technology and how it factors into their personal lives.   We’ve opened up the series to the whole company and are actively taking submissions from anyone who wants to share an anecdote.  Lots of good feedback so far, internally – I hope to see this series grow.

2. Share Your Policy – We recently established and published our official Social Media Guidelines. It’s really a great feeling to have this, and a must for any large company. People are talking online. Period. These guidelines just help set up a framework so that employees can do that in a constructive way.  If you look at many of the other social media policies, you might think, “Well this is just common sense.”  And, you’re right, but for a lot of folks it helps to have this common sense written down so that there’s no confusion. It also lets employees know that you are monitoring their activity and that what they say can make an impact. Essentially it spurs a heightened sense of awareness for employees before they engage online.

3. Enable Comments – Otherwise, what’s the point?

4. Invite Guest Contributors – We’ve invited journalist and blogger, Steve Wildstrom to the NVIDIA Blog. He initially began contributing to the blog with coverage from CES, but his role has evolved and now he helps pen entries for a series called “The World Isn’t Flat, It’s Parallel” which is about the GPU’s importance and the future of parallel processing.  We’ve also had contributed posts from partners, and will continue the practice. It’s nice sometimes to get out of your own world, and invite a third party’s perspective.  It’s beneficial for your audience and also in relationship-building with the folks who are contributing.

5. Establish an Editorial Calendar – For me, this calendar has been most useful in identifying where gaps are.  Sure, there will be last minute posts that come down the pike, but you really need a baseline of pre-scheduled content to ensure that you’re giving readers a steady stream of posts to consume.  Out of sight, out of mind holds very true for blogs.  It’s also helpful for when there are big content bursts, and you want to ensure authors can see when potentially competing content is going live.

6. Be Interesting – This one is kind of funny, but I guess it’s worth mentioning. It’s also the most difficult to achieve. It reminds me of what my parents used to say when I was in school…while all the other kids’ parents said “Oh, Billy as long as you try your best that’s good enough for us”, my parents said, “Don’t try to get an A, just do it.”    So, just do it.  Be interesting in your blog posts, and really try to think “If I wasn’t on the payroll, would I want to read this?” Some posts will obviously be more interesting than others, but as long as you’re able to deliver some value to a reader, you’re in good shape. And, my own rule of thumb is this: If after reading a post you hear a voice in your head saying,  “Buuuut WAIT, there’s MORE!” or “Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!” then you need to reel back the marketing lingo

I know there are tons more tips, so don’t be shy, drop yours in the comments.

When folks come by my cubicle at work and say things like “you’re a social media guru” I get a little itchy. Why? Because I know that I’m still learning, I know that I’m not an oracle of the interwebz. We’re all still learning, and anyone who says otherwise is the metaphorical equivalent of a greasy used-car-salesman who’s trying to hock a lemon.

Here’s my favorite quote from Estrin’s article:

“The quality of the social media workforce is a direct reflection on the hiring managers, who in many cases have no idea what skills are needed for this emerging role,” says Angela Connor, social media manager at Capstrat. “When the role isn’t clearly understood or well-defined, hiring mistakes are unavoidable. There’s a growing list of people with titles like social media strategist who have never developed any kinds of strategies in their entire career. They know enough about social media to talk themselves into a position that has no real objectives or success metrics and three months in, everyone is miserable.

According to Connor, a big part of what’s driving social media to staff up with a less-than-qualified workforce is the misguided belief that millennials are somehow social media ninjas by birth”

I’ve always wanted to be a ninja, but I just don’t think it’s fair for me to try and claim that title because of when I was born.  Instead I’m trying to earn my stripes by creating measurable and strategic programs…silly me.

What do you think? Are we headed for a social media bust?

You should know that I’ve thought about TONS of blog ideas. They were all fantastic and you wouldn’t have LOVED to read them. Unfortunately, I didn’t actually put the proverbial pen to paper and publish any of said ideas.

That dark phase is behind us though, and I think we’re both mature enough to move on, accept that we’ve both made mistakes, are now a little older and wiser and ready to face this new…what the heck am I talking about.  Forgive me, I’m rusty, and thus I digress.

The point of this post is to talk about how fantastic I found all of Woot!’s blog posts and video yesterday regarding their acquisition by Amazon.

First off, you MUST read the CEO’s letter to employees. He’s hilarious and really does a good job of squashing the fear that normally creeps up in employees of acquired companies.

Second, watch this video that Woot made announcing that they’d been acquired (below). It’s not just a video, it’s a full-on rap with some excellent editing. You can tell this wasn’t just thrown together, they had this launch strategy in mind and it really paid off.  I’m particularly fond of the lyric:
“And then BOOM we got acquired by Amazon / So no more rollin’ in late with our pajamas on”

In conclusion: Congratulations to Woot on their acquisition, and thank you to Woot for bringing so much light to my day that I just had to blog about it.

photo courtesy of dreamcicle19772006

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Myth #1: Social media is a magic bullet

Truth: Yikes people, there is no such thing as a magic bullet. Social media is not a magic bullet. If you have brand perception issues, if you’re not connected to your community and if you want to get involved in social media because “everyone else is doing it” then yes, you can leverage the social web to help you change those things. However, saying that you’re going to do social media does not in and of itself solve your problems. Just creating a Facebook fan page, a YouTube channel and even having a blog does not solve your problems. It’s what you do with these things that make the difference. It’s how you use these tools to connect and engage that shows the value of social media. I also want to highlight, underline, italicize and bold that this cannot be the responsibility of only one person. You need to have the buy-off and involvement from many stakeholders including:

– Executives
- Product managers
- PR teams
- Marketing teams
- Web teams

Without these groups’ commitment, your social media initiatives cannot grow/thrive. And, I think it’s also worth mentioning, that social media is a long term investment. Campaigns do not a social media program make.

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Myth #2: Social media is free.

Image courtesy of Don Hankins, Flickr

Truth: Double yikes. I know I’m going to break a few hearts when I say this, but social media is definitely not free. Aside from the time investment that you’ll need to take from many team members, there are also dollar costs involved. Whether that be for the analytics suites you buy, or the Twitter clients you use (note: there are many free Twitter clients, but once you start needing enterprise grade management across several profiles, including measurement and reporting…Tweetdeck just doesn’t cut it) or the developers you hire to build sweet Facebook apps for your fan page…it’s just not free.

Remember: there is no free lunch (not even online).

What social media offers in return however, is a way to scale your marketing programs and create relationships that will pay off in the long run. Once you invest and build a strong foundation in social media, than you’ll be able to cultivate a community that will help spread your message. They’ll act as online police for you squashing the naysayers, they’ll be your brand advocates and they’ll write the reviews that turn into sales in the long run–they’ll even give you feedback to ensure that your products are in line with their needs/wants. It bears mentioning that the investment you’re making in social media is probably less than you already do in many of your traditional marketing and PR efforts. Keep yourself accountable by measuring the affects of social media, and change course when the investment is not justified by the returns. But remember, it’s not an overnight thing. Just like building a friendship, gotta give it time.

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I know there are more myths circulating out there…which ones are you fighting?

Gotcha.

It’s a trick question. Personally, I think it’s a little bit of both. The difficulty with this is that in most large organizations these two groups seems to operate quite independently. SM practitioners now need to act as negotiators who combine the needs and functions of both departments, for the benefit of the online community.

PR helps drive the content, and for the most part they can also handle engagement with the community, but online marketing helps provide the infrastructure to ensure that your social media presences are discoverable and optimized.

The important thing for SM managers at large organizations, and of course for small, is to acknowledge the needs of both groups.

In my opinion the real issue is the complexity of making the best custom setting decisions. For folks who aren’t addicted to the interwebz there’s a real danger that they’ll end up with profiles that are more open than they intended. I’ve seen my dad try to work the VCR–this is way more complicated and much less gratifying. I heard one commentator liken Facebook’s options to a airplane’s dashboard (apologies, I can’t remember who said it…) and it’s true. So many nobbies and options, it’s easy to get mixed up.

Perhaps the solution is to offer a few levels of default/customization, much like the Internet Options on Internet Explorer. You know, where you have a slidebar where you go from high security to lower, and then IE makes some assumptions based on your preferences (screenshot, below). Facebook could have the same – from super open, to super closed. (or the option of selecting manually).

Some resources worth checking out:

• From AllFacebook.com 10 New Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know
• Facebook’s official Privacy Policy

What do you think?

First, let’s say what Social Media is *not*:

• Blogs
• Twitter
• Facebook
• YouTube

“But, Shanee, those are exactly what Social Media is, aren’t they?” Common misconception. What you need to remember is: Social Media is not the tools. I repeat. Social. Media. Is. Not. The. Tools.

“So, Shanee, what is it?”

Pretty simple, really. Social media is engaging an audience in a two-way conversation. If you are only pushing content out, regardless of the platform you’re using (Twitter, Facebook, etc), then it’s not social media. The tools are just vehicles for the conversations. I’m sure some people might be shaking their heads furiously at this, but to them I say, leave a comment and let the discussion begin.

“Why should I be doing social media?” I think a lot of companies’ answer to this now, is “because everyone in our industry is doing it, so we want to as well.” That’s really only half the reason, the other half is because your community, media, partners and analysts are already engaging online. (Of course, you should first confirm that this is actually the case, that these folks are online, see below for some first steps on how to do this and to get involved in social media). It’s like everyone’s at a party online, having a great time, they’re swapping stories and making new friends. You have the chance to attend that party and join in the fun–everyone’s really welcoming–or you can stay at home and watch The Hills.

“How do I start doing social media?” There’s no right answer to this, but I’ll give you a few easy steps to kick you off.

1. Set up some listening profiles. Use Google Alerts, Twitter search, RSS feeds, whatever. Just figure out what people are saying about you online. Get a sense of what people feel about you and where the hot spots for conversation are. The good, bad and ugly. (note, there are amazing premium tools that can also help you do this, but if you’re short on cash, don’t be afraid to do the legwork). If you see there’s a need for you to jump in, based on your findings, then move on to…
2. Put together a plan. This is one of those important steps I think a lot of folks are jumping right on over. But, without the plan you’re not really going to be able to keep your program on track. You’ll just be shooting in the dark. The plan can be simple, think about answering the following:
• What is our goal? (Increase sales? change perception? address FUD? get input on products?)
• Who are we trying to reach? (Customers? partners? analysts?)
• How will we measure success? (use your goal you outlined in bullet point #1 to decide what to measure)
• What internal resources are available to us? (Social media takes time, especially if you want to do it effectively. Figure out who can help and how much time they can dedicate. Budget’s of course something you’ll want to figure out as well)

One thing I do want to mention here is that bigger isn’t necessarily better. 10 super engaged fans are more valuable than 100 people who followed, then forget you. You’ll need to factor in this type of context to your reporting, so you can decide if there’s a need to course-correct your social media strategy.
3. Get started. Choose whatever vehicle you want, (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook etc) based on where your listening profile shows you your audience is, and start talking, listening and responding. Keep your expectations realistic and know that if you give your community value through things like exclusive content/offers, customer service/support etc, they will respond in-kind.

For most of you, all of this is old hat, and to you I say, keep on truckin’ and keep on sharing your wisdom with the rest of us. For those of you who are new to social media, just remember not to get caught up in the tools. Yes they’re important, but if you know who you’re trying to reach, why you’re trying to reach them, and how you’ll measure if you’ve reached them successfully the tools will be interchangeable.

Additional resources:

• What the *** is Social Media? Mashable
• Social Media in Plain English
• How to Measure Social Media
• Understanding the Big and Small of Social Media Measurement

Questions? Comments? You know what to do.


Tagged: how to, Social Media ]]> http://shaneebenzur.com/2009/12/07/what-is-social-media/feed/ 2 sbenzur http://shaneebenzur.com/2009/11/23/pinch-me-so-i-know-its-real/ http://shaneebenzur.com/2009/11/23/pinch-me-so-i-know-its-real/#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:08:23 +0000 Shanee Ben-Zur http://shaneebenzur.com/?p=317 ]]> Well, one week in and I’m still alive. Lots to do, and even more to learn. I’m trying to find my footing in this huge company (I am coming from a company of about 50 to a company of 5,400). Everyone warned about the transition, and they were right. It’s amazing to see how efficient a huge company is, out of necessity. It’s also scary to think about being a small fish in such a big pond. But, those of you who know me know I live for a challenge.

This morning I walked out of a meeting thinking, “wow, I can’t believe I was just in a room with so many smart people…and having them listen to me.” It’s surreal, like, how did I get so lucky? How did I get to this place where I get to talk about something that actually interests me (no, I’m not talking about trashy television) as my job. Now I have to figure out how to best convey all the knowledge that’s in my head, to all the said smart-people.

In terms of logistics, I’m sitting in a sweet cube, which is more like a mini office. I don’t have any pictures up….I’m not much of a decorator. But I do have a half eaten apple that’s helping me get through the mid-morning hunger.

Another small, yet nonetheless pleasing perk of working at NVIDIA now is having a cafeteria. I know that even if I forget my lunch I won’t have the desperate hungry feeling…you know the one that makes you look in the shared refridgerator and say “who would be the least mad at me for eating their food?”




Tagged: nvidia, work ]]> http://shaneebenzur.com/2009/11/23/pinch-me-so-i-know-its-real/feed/ 0 sbenzur