social media


B2B’s biggest social media screw-ups

Nov 3rd

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While the case for social media as a marketing channel is compelling for consumer products companies, I’ve been particularly interested in how it is being used … or not … by mainstream industrials.  Earlier this year I assessed the social media presence of most of the major Fortune 500 B2B giants looking for case studies.

I found some great examples, but for fun, I’ve decided to start out with the WORST companies I found out there. With few exceptions, major industrial companies are not utilizing – and in many cases ignoring — social media as a stakeholder connection point. A few fun facts:

  • Number of Top 25 B2B companies with more Twitter followers than me (None)
  • Worst B2B corporate Twitter-er (by far) — DuPont. An example: “Back off weeds! 4 new herbicides are coming to get you …”
  • Most popular corporate social media platform: Facebook
  • Percent of companies with either Facebook or MySpace pages: 75%
  • Percentage with both: 25%
  • Most popular use of social media: A place to post press releases

With no further delay, let’s take a look at the Top Five biggest B2B social media screw-ups.

5. 3M Corporation – I love 3M. I’ve always cherished their heritage of innovation and product development. If any company in America could take advantage of the awesome power of global community it should be 3M. Where are you guys? We need you out here.

4. General Dynamics — There is a not-very-good techno rock band called General Dynamics who dominates the social media bandwidth. That’s a problem for a Fortune 100 company with the same name. This is the time for the company to flex some legal muscle and tell them they were there first! In the corporate world, this ID theft is tantamount to a porn starlet naming herself “Pepsi.” You have to take action on this, General Dynamics! Go kick some techno butt!

3. Oracle Corporation – You would expect an ego-laden company like Oracle to be sucking up the social media space, but not so. The Twitter account is exclusively a press release machine and their other sites are ill-attended placeholders. Larry, look at what SAP is doing with social media. Work it baby.

2. Johnson Controls — This Fortune 50 titan has had their name usurped on Facebook by a bunch of disgruntled employees. An example of social media gone very wrong when you’re asleep at the wheel.

1. Dow Chemical Company. The pinnacle of social media mayhem. The first search result for Dow on Twitter is called “spillspill” and the largest company-related Facebook page is called Fuck Chemical Valley and Fuck Dow (42 members). The MySpace presence has also been hijacked, complete with fake logos, fake employees and a mission statement that includes: “minimizing damage by angry citizens who have been affected by our pollution through legal suits and PR campaigns, making sure scientists who find our products to be dangerously toxic are not allowed to publish.” Dow has a proud history of PR fubars. The legacy continues.

Disclosure: My ex-wife had family ties to the chemical industry. While clinical tests have shown she is toxic to humans, she is not associated with the Fuck Dow campaign.

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Warning: Social media may be hazardous to your health

Oct 29th

13 comments

A lot has been written about the “danger” social media poses to companies and brands, but what about the real threat it poses to us as individuals?

Immediate, transparent, global, free communication is one of the most breathtaking information advances since the telephone. But when there is an opportunity for human corruption, there probably WILL be human corruption. Here are the biggest threats posed by the advent of social media:

Risk to personal security. For fun, I follow a few celebrities on Twitter, the digital Post-it note. The other day, one of them tweeted: “Down at Gino’s having a pizza with my boys.” Earlier in the day he had established the city he was in. With this kind of shoot-from-the-hip public broadcasting, it’s only a matter of time before we see the first Twitter-related crimes. Even for non-celebrities, how safe is it to post to the world, “My husband and I are off to Boston for the Web 3.0 conference.” Not very … unless you want your next post to be “Our house got wiped out by crooks while we were away!”

Risk to public safety. People are easily duped and through social media, we are creating the most effective rumor mill in the history of mankind. We caught a small glimpse of the destructive power of viral misinformation when rumors of swine flu being caused by eating pork spread around the globe in a nanosecond. The innocent pork industry is still recovering. Numerous experiments have shown the ease of planting falsehoods that become reported as fact, even by legitimate news agencies. What happens when a sinister prank goes out of control and creates a panic far beyond a loss in pork sales? It will happen. What can prevent it? Nothing.

Risk to personal finances. Every time you register for a site, sign up for an app, or populate a social media profile, you are adding to a databank all about you. Strangers can find names, birth dates, family members, school and work history, e-mail addresses and much more. One blog writer recently quipped, “Honestly, it doesn’t take a genius to steal a person’s identity online.” Even more severe than identity theft and the obvious financial ramifications for an individual — we will begin to see online crimes being committed under the alias of another person.

Risk to personal reputation. Thankfully, nobody was holding a video camera in my face during my college years. But the lives of today’s youth are explicitly documented on You Tube, blogs, photo albums, and social media sites, creating a permanent online record. One corporate recruiter told me that a web search is more important to him than a resume. How will your Google-image affect your future job prospects, personal relationships, political aspirations? Did you read about the teen girls who took pictures of themselves in their bras at a sleepover, texted them to friends and then hours later ended up on porn sites? How do you erase something like that? Google never forgets.

Risk to data and information. A few weeks ago, a computer worm, using Twitter, infected tens of thousands of computers as it replicated itself across the Internet. The worm was created by a 17-year-old to “expose the vulnerabilities” in Twitter. The red-hot social networking/microblogging service has been scrambling to plug cross-site scripting and other Web site vulnerabilities to thwart worm attacks but, as one researcher points out, it’s much easier to misuse the Twitter API as a “weak link” to send worms squirming through Twitter.

Risk to personal health. Neurologists and doctors warn that obsessive immersion in screen technologies and social network sites will lead to short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize, weight gain, and a tenuous sense of identity.

Risk to personal productivity. A friend recently told me that he needed to find a way to block himself from social media sites at work. “I’m hooked,” he said. “I can’t stop myself from getting online every minute that I can.” According to a U.K. study, British firms are losing $264 million A DAY on lost productivity due to undercover activities on Facebook. Businesses are starting to look for ways to deal with the social networking problem. Several companies in America already block social media sites.

So, where does this lead?
I’m a fan of social media. These new platforms have connected me to countless interesting people, opportunities and ideas. The purpose of this article is to serve as a counter-point to those who seem to be hypnotized by the hyperbole and beat the drum of social media while ignoring these certain consequences. There is virtually NO dialogue on the risks of the inevitable corruption that will result from having a free and pervasive window into YOUR life.

I’m hoping the dialogue will start now …

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Three chronic problems emerging for social media professionals

Oct 27th

20 comments

Over the past two weeks I’ve had the chance to personally interview a dozen leading American companies on their use of social media. The SM success stories are starting to emerge, but so are the problems. Here are three chronic problems I heard in almost every interview:
Sponsorship. A true story: One of the most talented and successful social media marketers I have known recently got sacked because his boss thought his whole program was “stupid.” I have had many people ask me, “How do I explain this to my boss?” While individual or “grassroot” efforts can work under the radar for short periods of time, without executive sponsorship from the top, the effort will eventually wither.
Measurement Systems. Here’s the dilemma: Lots of free statistics are available, but who has the time to collect, organize and interpret all this data? Emerging “listening” platforms are too expensive for many small companies. What the world needs is an inexpensive, comprehensive, cross-platform social media measurement dashboard. Are there any out there?
Time. All of the people I spoke to have been in their traditional marketing jobs for some period and took on social media as an extra effort. Every single person is struggling with the time soak of social media. Companies typically aren’t hiring extra people to work on social media, especially in this economy. What are your strategies for social media time management?
Do these issues ring true for you? How are you coping?

Story behind the photo: This is a shot I took at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London a few years ago. I can’t recall the sculptor. Natural colors — no PhotoShop! : )

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The REAL math behind your followers, Mr.Twitter Bigshot!

Oct 26th

19 comments

I attended a webcast featuring a famous consultant and blogger (Let’s call him Twitter King) who mentioned that he had could exert influence over his 50,000 Twitter followers.

REALLY?

I dissected his follower list (public information) and estimated HALF were “trash,” meaning they were spam-generated, get-rich quick spammers, or porn. Those followers are not going to be effective in receiving or re-transmitting any message of “influence.” So that brings us down to 40,000 potentially effective followers in TK’s community.

The latest Nielsen numbers show that 60 percent of Twitter users quit after the first week, that’s one-third the retention rate of other social media platforms. Let’s be generous and say if they found this fellow they’re sticking it out more … but 30% who are showing up as users have already quit. That brings his number of followers down to 28,000.
The Harvard study goes on to say that 90% of the tweets are generated by 10% of the users — a user concentration even higher than Wikipedia! So, let’s define these leading Tweeters as the “thought leaders” we are all trying to connect to. This would imply that, on average, TK has just 406 (0.5% of his followers) who represent people who actively contribute to the conversation.But wait a minute — we need to rule out kids, right? In a business setting, let’s assume we want to connect and influence people over 24. That represents just 33 percent of the population on Twitter. Adult, meaningful follower total: 135.

TK is based in the U.S. and has an American-based consultancy. If he is trying to reach influencers in the U.S. to grow his business, you have to consider that only 40% of Twitter traffic is based there. So active, adult, thought leaders who are also American represent 54 people.

Let’s further assume 15% of all these folks are on vacation or away from their connection for a day (45 people left for TK) and they spend just two hours per day on Twitter where they could actually see and process a tweet from this guy. According to data on Sysmos, about 4% of your users will be active during any one hour of the day. That leaves one person actually seeing and processing your tweet, Mr. Bigshot.

And that would be me. So now who’s boss?

Photo credit: This is an ACTUAL photo of the species Twitterus Poppycockus appearing at a social media forum last week.

Harvard released a study this month showing that among the people who don’t quit, the median number of lifetime tweets is one. I think it’s reasonable to define an “active user” as somebody who tweets at least once a day (less than 15%). Applying that reasonable logic, the number of ACTIVE users this media mogul brags about is actually 4,060.

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