The Social Web Party: BYOB

By Lon S. Cohen

Ideally, Social Networking may be for everyone but many companies are jumping into the fray with little or no idea about what they want to accomplish or with expectations set too high. One thing you have to remember is it takes lots of time and hard work and a little bit of money. The community is not out there for the picking just waiting for you to join the party. You have to bring something special to your Social Marketing plan. Don’t be the guy who shows up to a bash with nothing, eats all the food, drinks all the punch and then passes out in the bathtub with a lampshade on his head. Just don’t. If the Social Web is like a party, then it’s definitely BYOB.

Since it’s all the buzz in the media these days, Twitter seems to be the one place every company just has to be. Every day I get followed by a plethora of new Twitter profiles from Real Estate Agents to equities investors to the next great Social Media Maven. Twitter is already littered with thousands of defunct and abandoned profiles. So while it’s a great place to have a conversation, Twitter is much less effective for strict marketing.

Everyone is thinking that same thing: I’m different. I’m not “selling” anything. Like attending a cocktail party or a mixer, I’m just here to talk to people and let them know about my company and products and services—if it happens to come up in conversation, I mean. Or they think that Twitter is a great place to point an RSS Feed so that all those people will follow and click on links to a brilliant stock market forecasting blog or the feed that tells people the daily fluctuations on CD rates. Can you think of anything you’d want to follow less than a Twitter feed that drones on and on about percentage rates? I can’t. Know that guy you met over the weekend at your friend’s bar-be-que who went on and on about the laddered techniques of his municipal bond investment strategy? Don’t be him.

If you’re just starting to get onto the Social Web, I suggest you forgo the big plans for a little while and do some investigating. Tale a page from Jay Rosen when he said that the best way to understand something is to try it out. Play around. Get to know the way things are done. One of the good things about the Social Web is people like to share ideas so there’s a lot of great information out there to get you up to speed. From banking to nonprofits, your favorite insider newspaper or magazine probably has already covered Social Web Marketing for your particular industry with some great case studies. Better yet, hire a consultant to train you and your marketing staff on the ins and outs of the Social Web and how other companies like yours may have already benefited from it.

At this point, unless you’re a true online marketing innovator, you’re probably not going to jump onto the Social Web and change the game, especially if you’re new. People are sophisticated enough to spot the rookie mistakes. But don’t worry because they’re also very forgiving. They’ve probably made a few of the same mistakes themselves along the way. (Remember your first weekend away at a college party? Anyone?) If you make those newbie mistakes prepare to take a little ribbing but don’t worry about it too much and don’t get too defensive. One thing that Social Web people excel at is forgiveness in the face of sincerity.

But even if you’re jumping in with both feet and don’t know a #hashtag from a Fan Page, if you stick with it, read up on best practices and approach it with honesty and good intentions, you’re bound to succeed over time. The Social Web is about being a part of a community then staking out a little bit of ground within that community by becoming a knowledge leader in your specialty or a respected editor of information.

Like I said, forgo the big overarching strategy for now. Do some market research. See if there’s a model to follow already in place by others and then tweak it to your specific plan. Engage in honest conversation. Ask lots of questions and keep asking them even if no one answers right away. Jump into the middle of someone else’s conversation if you have something constructive to offer. Make comments on news sites and blogs related to your industry already on the web. Marry your specialty to the Social Web by offering to write an expert article on some influential websites or blog. Point out your own blog or website to others when you think they could benefit from the information. Then keep building upon any success you achieve. In this way you are building a little place for yourself one little stone at a time. Eventually you’ll have a nice little home here and people will start to come around to visit you, ask you for advice and want to know how you became such a respected knowledge leader in Social Media.

And suddenly, you’re the life of the party!

Is There A Difference Between Social Media And Social Networking?

By Lon S. Cohen

I sometimes have trouble when I’m talking to people at work who aren’t savvy with this whole Web 2.0 thing we’ve got going on here. I use the words Social Networking for some instances and Social Media in others. I don’t explain the differences because to most laypeople, there is none and really, when I start to go into my theory, eyes glaze over and my colleagues suddenly find that the coffee truck must be outside the building somewhere and they have to hurry or Bob from accounting is going to take the last corn muffin.

But since this is the bread and butter of many of the people reading this right now, I think it’s safe to assume we can skip the gory details and get right into the meat of things. First, is there a difference between Social Media and Social Networking websites? Yes. And no. And it depends.

There is a big distinction in the terms Social Networking and Social Media. While many use these two terms interchangeably, you can separate them and the websites that represent one or another or even both effectively.

You can parse out the word Social from Media and Networking in each term. Social Media can be called a strategy and an outlet for broadcasting, while Social Networking is a tool and a utility for connecting with others. Essentially, you can lump both terms together under the umbrella of Web 2.0.

They way I do it is by taking the words and separating them into their different meanings. According to the Dictionary.com website, here are the definition listings for each:

Social: 1. pertaining to, devoted to, or characterized by friendly companionship or relations: a social club.

Networking: 1. a supportive system of sharing information and services among individuals and groups having a common interest: Working mothers in the community use networking to help themselves manage successfully.

Media: 1. a pl. of medium. (ok that doesn’t help, let’s go to the second definition-L.S.C.) 2. (usually used with a plural verb) the means of communication, as radio and television, newspapers, and magazines, that reach or influence people widely: The media are covering the speech tonight.

The difference is not just semantics but in the features and functions put into these websites by their creators which dictates the way they are to be used. There’s also a kind of, which came first, the chicken or the egg kind of argument to be made here. I suspect that Social Networking came first which evolved into Social Media.

First there was Arpanet. Years later, Web 2.0 allowed for user generated content, democratization of information on the web and blah, blah, blah… We all know the history; we’re a part of it, for Tweet’s sake.

Social Networking.

LinkedIn is a good tool for Social Networking. It’s your resume on steroids. Your interests, the companies you’ve worked for, your schools all become links to others who share your same history. Your personal profile even looks like a standard resume format. Visually everything comes across as a line item. It’s terrific for business purposes. It does one thing very, very well and that is to allow people to network in a profession online arena. You can recommend the work of others, search for jobs, and link up with connections of others in your network through introductions. You can crowdsource your connections by asking questions. And you can post or apply for jobs either through a query or through your existing connections. See how it’s all modeled on real like business networking? These are its strengths.

Since it’s formation, LinkedIn has decided it needs to be a little more like Facebook and it’s added interest groups and the ability to publish links to articles you find interesting. In that respect it pales in comparison. LinkedIn is a Social Networking website. Everything about the structure and format screams business utility. Nothing about it screams media. That’s because so much of the personal pages are taken up by business profiles ala the resume format. For a site like LinkedIn to bust out of its stogy Business Networking reputation it needs to totally reformat its look and function. A tiger can’t change its stripes and LinkedIn can’t shake the fact that it is a functional website for hooking up people wanting to do business with each other. LinkedIn is good at what it does and I’d hate to loose it.

Social Media.

YouTube is a really good Social Media website. It’s television on the web with a bazillion channels. I like the exploding Coke bottles, the funny Panda videos, monkeys falling off of logs and people crashing into garbage cans just as much as I like the step-by-step instructions on how to make an origami Millennium Falcon, viral comedy of Matt Koval and educational presentations on the history of the Internet. YouTube is a no-brainer marketing tool for any business that wants to make an impact on the web and provides one of the easiest distribution channels for video since the advent of Betamax. The elephant in the virtual living room is, of course, the Obama administration’s embracing of YouTube to distribute the POTUS fireside chats to the American people.

But if I want to network with friends and business associates, I’m not using YouTube. Sure I can subscribe to other people’s feeds and get updates whenever they post a new video but I’m never going to get the same depth of information that I’d get on LinkedIn. YouTube lets me put up my standard profile, but it’s not where I’m going to go to find my next business hire or even my next date. And I’m definitely not going to find out that my friends are all meeting up at the latest hip bar on the Upper East Side tomorrow night at 6:30. No. YouTube stands firmly in the camp of Social Media.

Social __________?

Twitter and Facebook are Web 2.0 sites with the whole package. They straddle the Social Media and Social Networking divide perfectly.

Facebook’s layout provides ample space for me to broadcast my pictures, my links, my book lists, my blog posts all while finding my first girlfriend who got married and moved to Virginia. The pictures I post act both as media and a networking tool because I can tag my friends and other people can place their own tags on my photos, labeling that hottie I wanted to talk to who just happened to get into the background of the bar I went to last week. For the most part, Facebook is a Networking site but because it devotes so much of its layout to a space where I can pack in my own stuff it is perfect for Media too. The density of information I can project is almost limitless.

Then there’s Twitter. Such a simple tool. By taking out the status update function of MySpace and Facebook and blending it with the idea of the chat room, the creators have developed one of the most versatile sites in all of Web 2.0. Twitter’s is first and foremost about projecting your words within 140 characters. What you do with those words is totally up to you. You can Tweet out a original work of fiction, you can pretend you’re a character from a TV series, you can sell stuff, inform people, link out to other websites, have conversations, piss people off or keep a low profile while taking it all in. But the essential part is connecting to others for whatever reason you want to connect with those people. In so many ways, Twitter’s most useful to distribute small bits of information but it’s the connections that make it all worthwhile. The minimalist functionality of Twitter is probably it’s most powerful feature enabling it to be many things to many people. The debates rage on whether Twitter should be for brands, for celebrities, or just for conversations with real people. The real secret is, it’s for anything you want.