Why Can’t We Teach Sociability?

By Lon S. Cohen

There is a great post on the Direct Marketing Observations blog that perfectly illustrates a problem in Social Media and companies. See the post here.

In a very easy to understand and striking way, it really does address the problem most people have with Social Media. You can learn the mechanics of the tools but putting them to use is a whole other ball game. Of course, the post probably hits on the failing of Social Media professionals more than the people who they work for. Shouldn’t we also teach people not only how to use Social Media but to USE Media Socially? Meaning, can’t we also teach people to be social? Follow up with them? Coach them? Isn’t that an untapped market in a way?

This incorporates some psychological and sociological professions. We Social Media professionals sit back and shake our heads because we seem to “get it” but we don’t understand why no one else does. I think it’s time we also offer to teach sociability to company managers so they can use Social Media and in turn encourage their employees to be social as well. I don’t mean we have to make every shrinking violet the life of the party but along with discussions about return on value and the next Twitter application, we should be teaching businesses how to be more social. I am sure that we can adapt plenty of other fields on study into this discussion to develop a set of accepted guidelines.

In Beth Harte’s post “19 Things Social Media Consultants or Agencies Can’t Teach You” on the MarketingProf’s Daily Fix blog she lists the things that companies will have to learn to do for themselves. Now it’s true that you can’t teach someone to “have a personality” or to “desire real relationships and conversations” as Beth says, we can point out to business managers that these things are important and that if they truly want to learn them, then there are steps to take to help. While you can’t teach personality, you can help them see the personality within their brand or to recognize that there may be a personality on staff who’d be great for representing a brand.

Some things on her list you can teach by example. For instance it’s easy to show someone that they should “want to implement internal systems to track all of your social activities.” You can inspire and then follow up on progress. There are ways to change behavior but only if you can see results. Putting Beth’s list in order you may be able to show someone why they’d want to “really care” and “commit to transparent communications” if they see that this will help them “get the benefits of being an ‘unmarketer” after they “embrace the value of having a measurable plan.”

According to Beth in a Tweet David Armano gave a good start to this conversation in his post, “Debunking Social Media Myths” on the Conversation Starter blog, which I highly suggest you take a look at.

Twitter? As If!

Sorry Twitter. Teens just aren’t that into you. And Facebook – you’re next.

I just read this article in the Financial Times about how Social Media sites are losing popularity with the young. I’m really not surprised.

I find it weird that anyone ever assumed that teenagers (sometimes called Millennials by marketers) used Twitter. I haven’t seen many teens at all ever on or talking about the service. Twitter is definitely for us old guys. It seems to have a magical appeal for the Gen X-ers (Possibly Gen Y too) and older. Definitely for geeks and for techies. As a matter of fact, my teen (I asked him) says he and his friends don’t use Facebook much at all either and rarely utilize Social Networks, except for MySpace perhaps.

Teens are more about texting, photo sharing (my son claims Photobucket is very popular with his peers) they use and IM (still). Again, except for MySpace, teens seem to want super-fast communication that is limited to access between their friends only (sometimes exclusive of other peers entirely – cliques) and not public (parents or others can’t just search out them and find them there.) MySpace was popular, I think, with teens because it didn’t catch on very much with older people like Facebook did. Also, MySpace was much more customizable than any other Social Newtorking website, which for teens was a bonus letting them express their individuality through colors, backgrounds and pictures but was more of a turn-off to anyone older, seeming a little schlocky.

Twitter is actually too much work for teens, believe it or not and Facebook is too open and static looking. It’s also too popular, especially now and their parents, family, etc. are always requesting to friend them there. I think teens keep Facebook profiles for the family interaction but it’s more of a big Gen X site (and Baby Boomers more and more too.)

Teens like their privacy and individuality at least as it pertains to their social group. They also want to have the perception at least thet they live in their own world. They make up fashions and styles, adopt musical tastes that never fail to offend their parents and speak in an ever more colorful series of slang language. (i.e. Valley Girl talk in the 1980s, Hippie slang from the 1960s or the Beat language of the 1950s?)

Don’t you remember when you were a teenager? Did you go in for anything that you even remotely thought your parents were involved in? Didn’t you actually go out of your way to reject things as passe as soon as the parents got hip to it? Did you want to fly under the radar? Twitter is too popular for them, believe it or not, as is Facebook. IM is quick, private and personal. It can be turned off and hidden from parent as can texting (for the most part).

So I am not surprised to learn that kids aren’t taking to social networks (at least the popular ones) in record numbers as they were before. If I were a youth marketer, I’d be concentrating on iPods, mobile phones, text and IM. That’s where you’ll find the kids – on ever smaller and smaller screens.

Paring Down

By Lon S. Cohen

I’m starting to pare down the number of things I’m involved in. What does this have to do with Social Media? Everything. Just take a look at any of the life stream or control panel type of Social Media applications like Ping.fm or Friendfeed that let you either repost from or post to all of your other social media websites. There’s a million of them. OK more like a hundred, but you get the point.

There’s so many websites to get involved in and they all look so colorful and fun one ends up opening an account on too many and feeling guilty about ignoring them. Have I twittered lately? Am I feeding the Friendfeed beast? Am I commenting back? Did I select a list of songs? Updated my Wish lists? Write a review on Yelp?

Add in my three personal blogs and one blog for work among all my other duties managing the communications at work and I’ve just got too many distractions. (That doesn’t include my freelance writing.) In this economy, you need to be focused and with all the free toys out there on the web, I know that I get distracted. In reality, I’m only using Facebook, Twitter and maybe Friedfeed on a daily basis. I also want to make sure that my work is not taking away from my social life (the IRL one, I mean) and most importantly my family – especially my children. I used to be addicted to the laptop almost 24/7 either chatting, updating, blogging, writing, pitching, managing, consulting, and who knows what else! I’ve given out free advice, written long responses to associates who seek my expertise and then turn them all into a new blog post. I needed to come back to earth.

So I’ve made a conscious effort to pare down my social media, blogging and everything else to what’s really important. I haven’t made an official list (yet) but I do know in the back of my mind what I need to divert my full attention to:

1) Family most importantly my kids.
2) My full time job, which includes all related SM activities.
3) Freelance work that actually pays me money.
4) Looking for more paying work, either full-time or freelance.
5) Freelance that pays me in other ways like exposure and social capital.
6) Social Media including my Twitter obsession.
7) Personal blogging when inspired and when it doesn’t interfere with the above.

I am not advocating giving up the digital life in any way. I am probably becoming better at my digital life by not spreading myself so thin. I’m focusing on one or two endeavors at a time and letting some others that I started—and that only kept up out of some weird guilt for thinking about abandoning—die on the vine, at least for now.

I’ve given up my long form novel that I was researching, my extraneous blogs, my long comments and threaded conversations and most of all my free work. The economy is really bad and it’s looking like it’s not getting better very quickly or any time soon. It’ll be a long slog and to better prepare for what’s ahead, I need a tighter focus.

In good times, I tend to stray with side projects and pursuing endeavors that may or may not lead to a dead end. That’s OK. And I’m not saying in tough economic times, experimentation and innovation should stop either. I’m saying if I’m experimenting, I’d better damn well have a good plan beforehand and I’d better make sure there’s at least a faint light at the end of the tunnel instead of groping around in darkness.

What do you think? Do you have a priority list or have you decided to pare down recently? If so let me know about it.

Geeks Celebrate New Year’s Rocking Eve Style As URL Land Grab Comes Timed Just Right By Facebook

By Lon S. Cohen

True geeks were up to count down the seconds until Facebook opened up its newest feature on Friday night. The ability to grab a vanity URL for your Facebook profile became available at midnight on Friday, June 12th. Curiously, Facebook never instituted the standard of allowing users to sign up with a unique URL of their choosing. I can only speculate that when the service started as a way for university students to keep in touch with each other and share photos and status updates, that the user base was small enough that this was not a factor thought to be programmed into the original application. Now with hundreds of millions of users across the globe and with other Social Networking services long offering the ability to customize the URL for your account, Facebook decided it was time to play catch up and pack on this particular feature. Where before the link to my Facebook profile was an obscure computer generated string of characters, On Friday night I was able to snag my name as my profile web address: www.facebook.com/loncohen.

There was excitement in the air around the geek community as customized URLs allow for people to quickly share profiles in a logical way and gives the service cache once reserved for websites like Twitter. On Twitter I share my handle by telling people to look me up as @obilon. Most people are conditioned to recognize the @ symbol from email. Twitter users adopted the feature of using the @ symbol to alert another user that they were speaking to them or replying to something they Tweeted. As Twitter gained in popularity, the @ symbol became the de facto way to refer someone specifically to your twitter account leaving off the extraneous www.twitter.com/

Now that Facebook has made it possible for users to grab unique user names, the service can share the same cool kind of shorthand. When you tell someone to friend you on Facebook you only need to tell them you’re /loncohen or whatever your unique handle happens to be instead of sending them a request specifically or a complicated url (which no one ever bothers to remember.)

It also will make Facebook profiles easier to share on paper. Printing it out on a business card or advertisement like so:

Twitter: @obilon
Facebook: /loncohen

As I mentioned before, we’ve been conditioned to remember and share specific user generated handles on the internet from email addresses to AIM profile names. This comes on the heels of Facebook offering businesses and celebrities the option of moving their very limited Facebook Group pages to more versatile Facebook Fan pages that act more like regular profile pages. Fan pages with more than 1000 friends were also offered the opportunity to select a unique URL. This is a strategically shrewd business move for Facebook still struggling to monetize an enormous user base. I can only imagine the possibilities that customized URLs will offer large businesses like say Starbuck when they can now put in print that you can friend them on Facebook at /Starbucks. It’s harder to refuse the Facebook advertising salespeople when come calling about custom marketing programs when your company has millions of friends on their Social Networking website.

While some specific people’s custom urls were pre-reserved by Facebook, I don’t know yet if they also captured many brand name URLs for the specific purpose of offering them (or selling them) to the brand owners – think /Apple or /Microsoft, although a rumor on Twitter last night claimed valuable custom URLs like /iPod were still available.

The entire process seemed to have gone smooth for Facebook. Mashable.com reported on their Mashable.com/chat live from Facebook headquarters in an exclusive by Ben Parr that within the first three minutes of launch 200,000 user names had been reserved and that within the first hour they tallied about 1,000,000! So while the true geeks waited with baited breath for the precise moment, about 400 uber-geeks (myself proudly included) were crowded around the live Mashable chat with video commentary by Mr. Mashable himself the always charming and way too young and handsome, Pete Cashmore playing Dick Clark along with the always lovely Jennifer Van Grove and straight-man utility-player Ben Parr reporting from an empty room at Facebook HQ with 1970s furniture and the sounds of cheers, music, shouting and even some bagpipes (which Pete said was in honor of him, being from Scotland and all of course) emanating from an unseen room of engineers off somewhere behind the walls giving the entire scene with Ben an eerie feeling that he was somehow embedded inside the building and spying on the whole affair without permission through a hole in the wall. At other times Ben ran off to record video or audio and bringing back reports at Pete’s bequest looking like the set up in an old SNL skit. In any sense, the crew of Mashable put on a great show that spanned the globe from Scotland to California. They did it all in earnest, covering the entire event from the pre-show to the 10-second countdown all the way through the after party. I must admit the trio brought a very sparkling air to the event that probably made it more entertaining and exciting than it really should have been otherwise. Even Mashable COO Adam Hirsch popped into the chat for a little while, forlorn at the option he was forced to pick for his own vanity url. (My personal favorite Mashable.com liaison, Sharon Feder was missing from the videos but I heard she was in the chat room somewhere.)

The next day I heard very little in the way of buyer’s remorse at the URLs people chose. For the most part it seemed to be a rousing success. Only time will tell how this all pans out. For now it looks like it was a great move on Facebook’s part to offer this feature now especially after migrating Groups to Fan pages a short time ago. It also served as great buzz for the monster Social Networking website probably exceeding their expectations.

5 Ideas to Build, Sustain and Utilize Your Social Networking Communities for Nonprofits

By Lon S. Cohen Technorati Profile

I work for a nonprofit full time as the Director of Communications. I’ve spent almost a year now building the Social Media presence at The ALS Association Greater New York Chapter and I even won an award from our national organization for my efforts. I believe that nonprofits are a shoe in for Social Media because of the opportunity to build a community around a cause. Here I offer five ideas for nonprofits to consider when managing their plan to embrace Social Networking. I hope to build out a special section with advice just for non profits but this is a good place to start.

Invite your community to contribute.

Give your community a way to express themselves by opening up your Social Media for them. Web 2.0 is about conversation, sharing and user created content so use your established Social Media outlets to give people a voice especially if your mission is to help others. Sometimes it’s important to give the people you are helping a voice because that may be the only lifeline they have. Let recipients of your charity talk about the impact your organization has made on their lives. Do you donate technology to schools in third world countries? Then let them use that technology to update people on their progress. Remember those photos and letters that the charities on television used to promise you’d get if you donated to help feed the hungry children? That was a perfect interactive model. You can do that with a blog and a Flickr account. It connects your followers and fans directly to a human face. Or let donors speak about why they donate. Many times a donor has a specific reason or connection to your charity. Let them share that with the would through their own words. No matter if you’re in healthcare, technology, or conservation the specialists in the field you are working in can usually tell great stories about the good things they do. Remind people to send, add and tag photos to you and on your Facebook fan page or Flickr account. You’ll also find plenty of people already advancing your mission online in their own way. Ask them to blog or tweet about your cause. What nonprofits do best is create goodwill and inspire others. Social Media offers people a way to share that inspiration. The best thing that can happen is to get goodwill to go viral.

Don’t make Social Media an island unto its own.

Make a direct connection between online networking to offline events and gatherings. Offer substantial volunteer opportunities at your events, attendance to support groups, and invitations to informational presentations to your community. Your Social Media presence should always support the work you do in real life. Volunteering is the crux of the success of many nonprofits. Use those connections you’ve spent so much time fostering to bring people together. And not just to attend another fundraiser. Ask for people to help you do the real things that need to get done for your organization, you may be surprised at the results. On the flip side, at your events and meetings, let people know about your Social Networking. This will help keep people connected to you in between events. Tell them about all the ways they can see or hear about everything going on with your organization through any number of Social Networking websites. If your constituents aren’t very web savvy, offer a real life how-to-connect session and invite people to learn about all the ways your organization reaches out on the internet to have conversations and alert them to important happenings.

Highlight contributions by people on your website/social media spaces.

If you do your building correctly, use best practices and have patience, soon you’ll have a sizable community gathered around many different channels. You might ask yourself, what you can do with this community of people. One thing is to highlight the accomplishments of members. Your supporters go out of their way to help, whether it’s a hard day of work volunteering, throwing a community fundraiser on their own or advancing your mission in one a number of other ways. For the most part they don’t expect to be lavished with attention for their efforts because they do it for a higher purpose. But everyone likes to see their name in lights. When you find those special people use your network to highlight what they are doing. Not only that, use it as an opportunity to teach others how to do the same thing and learn from the trials and tribulations as well as success.

Take a lesson from Zappos.com.

Use your Social Media program for “customer service.” That means listen to your community, which in turn means you have to be attentive to their needs. Your community is filled with complex individuals with unique motivations for being there, opinions they want to share and suggestions to give. You do not have to take every one and use them especially is you have limited fund and resources but explain that and then let them know how they could make things happen on their own if they feel passionately. Your nonprofit will make mistakes or need to attend to bumps in the road. Watch the comments on your blog, the wall posts on your Facebook page and the @ replies on your Twitter account. Once in a while, ask for feedback directly from the community. Sometimes people have an idea brewing in the back of their mind but are afraid to offer it up unless the opportunity is opened to them. One good way to get feedback is to put up an anonymous survey. Encourage people to take the survey and then really listen to the feedback. It will help you tweak your message and the delivery system for your information. And it does feel good when someone tells you you’re doing a good job. But just as you can learn from constructive criticism, you can also learn from kudos. If people tell you a certain aspect of your programs are fantastic and unique then maybe you can capitalize on it even more.

Forget the so-called “Obama effect” of micro payments.

Heresy! I know but this doesn’t work for anything less than a broadly appealing campaign within a finite time period and a sense of urgency. Unless you can fit into that criteria then forgo the idea of micro payments adding up to millions of dollars and try the “soft sell” instead. Take a lesson from the street corner performers. People in your community are inundated with requests from your organization already with direct mail appeals, fund raising events, etc. Learn from the street performers you might see downtown in any city. They don’t make a big sign asking for donations. They “ask” without asking. Putting a hat on the floor next to them speaks for itself. Do the same thing with a donate button or a link to your “how to help” page when you tweet or put up a Facebook status update. Use your Social Media to empower and inform. Tell a story. Make an emotional connection. Make them care so much they can’t help but give. Then have your donate button or a link in discreet yet obvious places. But be sure it’s everywhere so when they’re ready to give they can easily find out how. Make the message and imagery of your donate button as consistent throughout your websites as much as you can. Social Media is not an optimal place to raise money as a long-term plan but it’s phenomenal at raising awareness, which facilittes giving. Once you’ve capture the attention, the generating donations should come next, not because it’s hip or trendy to make a micro payment to your cause but because you have engaged them, tugged on their heart strings and made your cause personally important to them.