If there is anything that I am more passionate about than social media, it would probably be fantasy football.  Every summer, myself along with millions of others across the globe count down the days of summer until the end of August, beginning of September.  This is when the thermometer begins to drop while our excitement rises with the anticipation of another NFL football season.  To many, including my wife, this type of excitement is seen as a tad bit off and potentially crazy.  I don’t see anything wrong with having a countdown clock counting the days, hours, minutes and seconds until my league’s scheduled fantasy football draft.

Last night as I was putting together an email to my league, (yes we are already emailing and talking about this season) I began to think about how there are a number of similarities between two of the things I enjoy most – Social Media and Fantasy Football.  I have finally found a way that I can combine my two favorite things.  (Insert evil laugh with heavy reverb here.)

Community

I have loved playing and watching football since I was a kid.  I love waking up on a Sunday morning knowing that there will be games played at 1 pm, 4 pm and finally 8 pm.  JOY!  But, I feel confident in saying that I wouldn’t be this “into” the NFL without fantasy football.  What I love most about participating and managing a fantasy football league is the community.  I am in several leagues, but the one that matters most to me is a fantasy league that I have been running for more than 5 years.  The league consists of 10 friends, we call them owners as each owns a team.  We use to all live in NC, but over the years we have had a couple move away, but they are still in the league.

There are times that I will go months without seeing some of these guys, but we keep in touch via email because of fantasy football.  As I get older and priorities like career and family take center stage, it becomes harder and harder to keep friendships and relationships alive.  Fantasy football enables me to keep connected with some of these friends.  We all get together in person for the draft, we have an end of season party, we give out trophies, we bet and play for cash and most importantly, we continually and relentlessly bust and make fun of each other.  It’s wonderful and this community would not of been possible without fantasy football.  I treasure this community and the people in it.

Isn’t this exactly why social media is so powerful and growing at epic speeds?  The web has no borders or boundaries, it  allows people to find and engage with people of similar interests.  Social media is allowing people to truly create real human connections that are so very powerful.  People feel the same way about people they have only met online as I feel about the guys I play with in my fantasy football league.

Voice

Without question, what gets me most excited about social media is it allows anyone and I mean anyone an opportunity to let their voice be heard.  The burden of entry is incredibly low.  All you need is a computer and an internet connection and you have the opportunity to let your voice be heard far and wide.  Think about how incredible this is.

My fantasy football league is very similar.  We have ten guys who have different backgrounds, jobs and interests.  We have single guys, we have married guys, we have guys with and without kids.  But no matter what, each owner has a voice in how are league is run and what changes we make in the future.  At the end of each season, all the owners come together and discuss changes to the rules, how we play, etc.  Whether you came in first place, like me or last, you have an opportunity to be heard and persuade the other owners in voting your way.  It is a democracy at its finest, the majority vote wins.

Clean Slate

One of the guys who participates in our league named Tom came to last seasons draft with a strategy.  He thought he had figured out a way that would guarantee a fantasy football championship and all the glory that comes with it.  He shocked the world (hyperbole) by how and who he drafted.  He was confident and stood tall in the face of criticism from the other owners.  Unfortunately for him, his championship strategy didn’t work out too well and his team did not live up to expectations.  Throughout the season, off season and into this years draft, he has taken and will take a lot of ribbing.  But you know what on September 2, this seasons draft day, he gets to start with a clean slate.  He can come up with a  whole new strategy that might actually work this season.  (I doubt it, but there is always hope.)

I think of social media in a very similar way.  You continually have the opportunity to reinvent yourself, try new things, take chances, see if something might work and if it doesn’t, you might take some shots, but you can just dust yourself off and try again.

Now all I need to do is figure out how I can get paid to do social media, but all I focus and talk about is football.  *pinch me*.  Championship!  34 days, 2 hours and 16 minutes until draft day.

“There are times during the football season when my wife sees me yelling at the TV that I have no doubt she questions why in God’s name she ever married me.” – Cord Silverstein

The Department of Energy in the wake of the whole BP debacle has developed a new social media strategy by launching a blog and a Twitter account to go along with their Facebook and YouTube accounts.  I think it is great that a government agency is looking to engage and communicate better with interested citizens.  I have taken a closer look at the DOE’s new blog and Twitter channel and while I applaud them for this initial launch,  I would like to share five recommendations for how they can do better.  You listening DOE?

1.  Social media is about creating and developing a two-way conversation.

You do not offer commenting on your blog.  You could easily moderate comments to ensure nothing goes live you do not want to, but instead, you chose not to offer it.  Seriously folks, why create a blog at all?  What’s the difference between your blog posts and the press releases you have been churning out since the beginning of time?  They are both one-way conversations with you showing very little to no interest in what we (the voters, the taxpayers, you know US!) might have to say.

Lesson: You want to educate, inform and engage with us in social media, you have to respect us enough to allow a two-way dialogue.  Trust that for every negative comment you might receive, if done right, you will also reach someone you would not have had the opportunity to reach before.

2.  Speaking of those press releases, why?

You have created a blog to engage with the public and in the top right hand corner above the fold are links to (big exhale and let down) press releases?!?!?  The public does NOT read press releases.  They are dry, they are boring and they usually offer very little information that a individual user would find interesting.  You know who reads press releases, the media.

Lesson: Understand who your target audience is.  If you want this to be a place for media to get their information, great, but tell us that.  Don’t take a one size fits all approach, it does not work.

3.  Who are you people?

Secretary Chu posted your first blog post, but after that you have all these different people posting for you, names like John Schueler, Scott Blake Harris and David Sandalow.  My question is who are these people?  I would love to know a little about who is writing these posts.  Unfortunately, you do not offer any type of bio’s on these folks.  On the bottom of each post, you have tag links that says “Learn more about:  David Sandalow”.  When I clicked on that, it just took me to a search page of everything he has written.

Lesson: Understand that you need to earn your users’ respect if you want to have an impact.  That respect begins by properly introducing who these people are and what they are about.  Why should I believe what this person is writing when I don’t know who this person is?

4.  Social media is all about transparency.

Very similar to my last point, on your DOE Twitter page, you have more than one person tweeting, but you are not identifying who these people are.  President Obama mentioned a number of times during the campaign and during his tenure as President that his administration would be more transparent.  You need to represent accordingly by adding tilde’s ^ to each tweet and add the initials of whomever is tweeting.

Lesson: There is nowhere to hide in social media.  You need to come out from behind the curtain and be willing to stand up and be heard.  If you are not ready to do that, you are not ready to play in these social media waters.

5.  Follow people damn it!

I am tired of government organizations attempting to play on Twitter, but the only people they follow are other government agencies.  Look at your follow list.  You don’t have to follow everyone, but if someone writes an interesting blog post that is relevant to the Department of Energy (Like this one!) show that person some respect and follow them.

Lesson: Social media is just not about talking, it is about listening.  You need to show that you are able and willing to listen to the people who are supposed to matter most to you, your constituents.

To my Department of Energy peeps, I am hoping that you are actually listening and have found and read this post.  I hope this was helpful and might provide you with some suggestions on how to improve this important and necessary initiative.  And if so, I would be tickled pink to hear back from you on any feedback,  thoughts or opinions you might have.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Last Thursday the internet connection at my house died. My wife works from home and without an internet connection, she cannot get her work done. She called Time Warner Cable and the recording said there was an outage and crews were working on it. They did not give any estimate on how long the outage would last.

I did a quick search and found @TWCableHelp on Twitter. I sent them a tweet asking if they knew what happened and how long the outage would be. Within minutes I received the following tweet:

“@Cord Looks like there was a fiber cut. No ETA but we are in the field working on it. ^BP” – @TWCableHelp

I responded back thanking them for their quick response and asked if they had any kind of estimate on how long the internet would be down.  We were trying to determine if my wife needed to go elsewhere to get an internet connection.  Again, in minutes I received the following tweets:

“@Cord In many instances most fiber issues are resolved within 48 hours, many of those the same day. The ticket doesn’t reveal the extent of

@Cord the damage so I cannot accurately advise. ^BP

@Cord Will keep an eye on the ticket. However you’ll likely see services restored before it is closed. ^BP”

At times, I catch myself thinking about social media and potential marketing programs in these grand schemes.  I get caught up in my world and I forget that sometimes it is the little things that can make all the difference.  Time Warner Cable showed me that they have made a commitment to have employees listen and manage a Twitter account and they are empowering these employees to engage with their customers.  Just by engaging, Time Warner Cable has won the battle.  If you see  by the tweets I listed above, they did not know when the issue was going to be resolved, but instead of hiding and obfuscating, they were open and honest with the information they had and they offered to “keep an eye on the ticket” for me.

They took a customer, me who was once totally in the dark with no information and instead of having to call an 800 number, choose thirty-two different options in their voicemail tree and wait on hold for 30 minutes, I engaged quickly and easily online with a person who treated me like a real person and provided me real answers.  I cannot ask for anything more.  I would like to send my props to BP (rough initials) at @TWCableHelp for a job well done.

We have to keep reminding ourselves it is the little things that can make significant differences in people’s lives.  What is the low hanging fruit that we tend to skip right over that could make an impact on our customers?

Last week, I worked with a number of fabulous folks from the Triangle AMA to put on a Social Media Boot Camp.  We had an amazing turnout with a talented lineup of speakers and a great group of eager participants.  My presentation focused on how to Protect Your Brand in the Conversation Age.  There was one section that I discussed that seemed to resonate with folks so I thought  I would go into more detail here.

One of the challenges when it comes to monitoring your company, products, people, brand and even yourself online is the incredible amount of information available.  I work with several clients that their company name alone is written or spoken about online more than 5,000 times a day.  Most companies don’t have the resources or the time to be able to go through all that noise.

One of the ways I get through all the clutter is to triage my mentions.  By triaging, I can quickly determine the discussions I need to spend more time and attention on and which ones I can kick to the curb immediately.  When I think of triage I always think of the old TV show MASH.  Remember that show with Alan Alda based in the Korean War?  When the helicopters and buses came in with wounded GI’s, they would go running out to meet them to determine which guys were hurt the worst.  The triage allowed the soldiers with the most serious injuries to go to the head of the line ahead of the less serious.

Social Media triage is the exact same thing.  We need to quickly look at what our monitoring has identified and determine what needs your time and attention and what does not.  There are a number of tools and technologies that say they can do this work for you.  To be honest, I have not found one that I am willing to make a financial investment in, so I have put together a rag-tag way to triage my online mentions without having to pay out any cash.  Here’s the Silverstein Social Media Triage process:

SearchStatus – My browser du jour is Firefox, if you happen to use Chrome, I am sure there are plugin’s like this one.  SearchStatus is a free Firefox plugin that embeds the Google Page Rank, Alexa ranking and Compete numbers right on the bottom of your browser.  Very quickly, I can go to a web page and get a good idea on what kind of visibility a specific webpage and website receives in Google as well as how much traffic it gets daily, weekly and monthly.

If you are not familiar with Google Page Rank, Google assigns every page within its index a ranking from 0-10.  This ranking determines how much visibility it receives in Google’s natural search results.  I think about the rankings this way:

• Page Rank 0-3 – MIA – Website/page is not competitive in Google
• Page Rank 4-6 – Visible – Competing on some of their keywords
• Page Rank 7-8 – Rock star – Top rankings and strong visibility
• Page Rank 9+ – Oprah – Owns it!

Please remember if you are on a blog page that just launched, the page might not have any page rank because it is too new.  My recommendation is to go to the blog’s home page and see what their page rank is there.

Next let’s look at our Compete numbers.  If you right click while your mouse hovers over the Compete graph, it will tell you the average monthly visitors the website receives.  If you would like, you can click over to compete.com and get more information.  Registration is required, but basic package is free.

In just a couple of minutes you can pull together the following information:

• What kind of visibility a webpage/website has within Google.
• How much traffic this website receives daily

With knowing these two items, you can make an informed decision on whether this mention deserves more of your time or not.  Though, I have one more item to add into your bag of tricks.  I believe one important characteristic of an “influencer” is he/she creates or develops conversations on their own website as well as on other websites.  I like to look at how many and what kind of comments does the original post have?  How active of a community does this website have? Are there other conversations taking place elsewhere that are linking back to this original post?

To see conversations on other websites linking back to one place, I like to use this cute little bookmarklet called Convotrack.  This is a tool that you add to your bookmarks toolbar and when on a web page, you click it and it shows you any and all conversations taking place on the web that are linking back to a specific page.

This quickly can show you how many folks are talking about the post and what kind of visibility is it receiving out on the interweb.

Everything that I just walked through should take you no more than a couple of minutes to complete once you have the tools setup.  Is this full proof?  Absolutely not.  All of these tools should not be taken as the gospel by any means.  I believe these tools and others like them will allow you to quickly triage your online monitoring to  help you spend more time on what is most important to you.

If you have your own tools or tips, please feel free to add them to comments below.

If you took some time off yesterday to spend it with a loved one,  you might of missed the Twitter cage match that went down between writer, actor and director Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines.  I am not going to supply the blow by blow details, but you can read all about it on Gawker.

To summarize what took place, Kevin Smith was removed from a Southwest Airline plane because the captain deemed him too large to fly in just one seat.  According to reports, Kevin was strapped in and on the plane and was forced to get his things and leave the plane before takeoff.

If something like this happened to you, you would be embarrassed and probably pretty pissed off.  Kevin was and immediately took to his Twitter account with more than 1 million followers to express his anger and frustration towards Southwest Airlines.

This incident and Southwest Airlines “size policy” is going to be debated for weeks.  I think both sides have valid points.  Though this is not what I want to cover in this post.  What I want to focus on is the great social media case study this incident represents.

An out of touch captain for Southwest Airlines kicks a famous person off of his plane.  Kevin Smith would absolutely be considered an influencer as he has more than a million Twitter followers, not to mention millions more who watch his movies, read his books and listen to his podcasts.  No matter who you believe is right or wrong, you have to take your hat off to Southwest Airlines for how they handled this crisis.

Let’s remember that all this took place beginning Saturday night and things got interesting  Sunday Valentine’s Day.  Let’s break down the game film:

Kevin Smith sent out the first tweet on this incident at 8:52 pm on Saturday Feb 13th:

ThatKevinSmith: Dear @SouthwestAir – I know I’m fat, but was Captain Leysath really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated?

Southwest replied to Smith’s tweet a little under six hours later on Sunday Feb 14 at 3:10 am:

@SouthwestAir “Hopefully you received our voicemail earlier this evening” All lines checked, no voicemail message on any 323. Try again.

This began a back and forth Twitter throw down that Southwest Airlines could not win.  When you are dealing with an influencer who has the backing of his people, right or wrong, the people are going to have their say against the big bad corporation. This is where Southwest’s social media strategy truly took flight.

They did the following:

• They responded to each individual who tweeted to @SouthwestAir about the situation.  No matter how mean the tweet was, they responded.  They apologized that Mr. Smith had to go through what he did and explained their company policy.
• They posted a blog post once again apologizing, but also explained the airlines position.  When their blog went down because of all the traffic they were receiving, they moved their blog post to another Web site so people could read it.
• If you check out the comments on the blog post, you will see users who left comments with curses and writing some not so nice things about Southwest.  Did they remove these comments or take the easy route and just turn the comments off, no. (Note: the Web site is still real slow because of all the traffic they are getting.  You might not be able to get to this page.)
• They had a VP from Southwest reach out and speak to Kevin Smith on the phone.

Can I remind you that all this took place on a Sunday.  How many large publicly traded corporations could of turned all this around within eight hours during the work week let alone on a holiday weekend?

Whether you agree or disagree with Southwest and the incident, the one thing I think we can all agree upon is how well Southwest has handled this crisis.  Instead of running and hiding, they immediately engaged in the online conversations.  They did so without legal or corporate communications double speak,   their responses were conversational and honest.  They knew they were going to take a beating but still decided to pull up a chair and be a part of the conversation.  More corporations should learn from this incident and how Southwest dealt with a crisis in the electronic age.

Special shout out has to go to Christi Day.  She is a member of Southwest’s Social Media team and was the author of the blog posts, comments and tweets this weekend.  Christi did a phenomenal job during what had to be a challenging time.

When I have developed and presented social media training for C-suites and Corporate Communications clients,  I try to get across a couple of main points.

• In social media, you cannot control the conversation.  Don’t even try.  Your goal is to listen, understand, engage and potentially influence.
• You are never going to make everyone happy or solve everyone’s problem.  Using this case study as an example, Kevin Smith is not going to be a fan of Southwest Airlines no matter what they say now.  But Southwest understands that they are fighting for the hearts and minds of the thousands possibly millions of other people who are witnessing and discussing this incident online.
• Finally, half the battle is just showing up.  Southwest knew they could not win this argument.  They knew they were going to take their lumps, but they understood that not engaging in these conversations would be shortsighted and deliver far worse results.

What I think more corporate executives need to realize is something like this will at some time happen to their company.  It is not a question of if, but when.

It has already been wildly reported on the announcement from Facebook that they are going to be selling ads on users’ profile pages on items that users might have already purchased or recommended for others. In layman’s terms, Facebook is hoping to deliver the best targeted ads that we have ever seen online. An example of that might be if someone goes to Amazon and purchases a book. Amazon would ask the buyer at the time of purchase, would you like this purchase to be included on your Facebook profile? If you say yes, every single one of your friends will see the book you bought and where you bought it from. Very cool, but also a bit creepy.

I think anyone who has been in this business knew that this was eventually coming from Facebook. Now the question is whether it is going to work? I think there are still a lot of unanswered questions. The first one of my list would be whether this is going to piss off Facebook users? Facebook has always been the anti-MySpace. While MySpace was the wild wild west and when you signed on you got thirty different flashing and totally annoying banners and pop-ups. While at Facebook, you logged in and got exactly what you were expecting, the run down on everything that your friends have been doing all nicely structured and controlled. How much of that will change?

Another important question and still an inherent problem with online advertising is that for Facebook advertising to be successful, users are going to have to leave their beloved Facebook and go somewhere else. So again, using the Amazon example I used earlier, if I see one of my friends purchased a book, I am going to have to leave Facebook and go over to Amazon to buy it as well. We have seen a multitude of data that people do not like leaving their cozy little social networks.

And my final question would be how is Facebook going to handle the high wire act between targeted advertising with their users privacy? Facebook members love Facebook and they trust Facebook. Now that Facebook is going to be mining this incredible wealth of data they are capturing each and everyday to better target users for advertising, will Facebook lose that all important trust factor with its users?

These are all important issues and in my opinion, Mark Zuckerberg has continually made the right calls so I think he is going to be successfully doing this as well. I still get a little dizzy when I think of him turning down 1 BILLION dollars from Yahoo many months ago, but look who is laughing now.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, targeted ads, Amazon, online advertising, privacy, Yahoo

I received a great deal of email from folks who had thoughts on my previous post, MySpace is Finished. Unfortunately, I wrote something that generated a lot of interest and my database craps out on me causing the comments not to work. But I do appreciate the people who took the time to drop me an email with their thoughts, thank you. Since others could not see all the emails I received and all the questions that were raised, I thought I would post a follow up.

Several emails I received said pretty much, “MySpace is free and you get what you pay for.” This I find very hard to agree with. Even though we do not pay to become a member of MySpace or any other social network for that matter, we as users give MySpace something far more valuable than a few dollars. We give them our time and attention. Think about the amount of time people spend within the MySpace walls and community? For a business that makes their revenues through online advertising, there is nothing more important. And for that reason alone, MySpace should have a singular focus on delivering the best user experience possible on their site for their members. In my opinion, not only does MySpace not deliver a good user experience, the web site has terrible navigation, atrocious look and feel and more error messages than a beta version of Windows Vista. How does a web site expect to continually grow when the product your selling, your web site, is broken to say the very least?

MySpace even after continued attempts has non-stop spam going through every facet of the web site. There is no enforcement or pro-activeness to try to stop the deluge of profile, comment and email spam. All of this adds up to only one thing, a terrible user experience.

What this says to me is that MySpace is forgetting who is truly important to them – their members! Because without you and I and the millions of other members coming on daily and updating our blogs, adding new content to our profile pages, sending emails to friends, etc, etc. They have no business.

Now let’s look at this in another way. I am assuming most of my readers are marketers. MySpace recently announced a new targeted advertising program that they call “Interest targeting” which they will be pulling content from members profiles and based on what that user has written on his page, MySpace will tailor ads towards that content. This should not come to a big surprise to anyone as everyone is moving into that direction. I guess my question is what type of company would actually take advantage of this service or for that matter any other MySpace service? Even if, my target market were youths as a CEO of a company would I be willing to risk having my brand being advertised on profile pages that could have a picture of a half naked woman on it or a guy with a picture of a swastika? Who would be willing to jeopardize their brand by advertising on MySpace?

This time I am hoping comments are working.

Technorati Tags: MySpace, social network, online advertising

I hadn’t logged onto my MySpace page in several months. I saw via email that I received a message from a friend I had not spoken with in quite a long time in MySpace so I decided to login to see her message. As I logged into MySpace, the only thing that I could do was shake my head in disgust.

When I first registered on MySpace several years ago, I thought it was one of the coolest things I had ever seen in cyberspace. A place where you can communicate with friends, meet new people with common interests as well as listen to music that you could not find on regular radio. As I logged in today, what I saw was a once proud neighborhood in cyberspace now turned into a sleazy back alley filled with nothing other than porn and spam.

As I said, I had not logged into MySpace in quite a while so I had several hundred messages in my inbox. Out of 107 unread messages, 100 of them were spam from profiles that no longer existed. There were 17 new comments posted, 10 of them were spam of one kind or another including a guy selling iPhones and a couple of links that went to spyware sites.

As I was deleting these messages, I was really excited when several new pop-up advertisements were served to me, beating my pop-up blocker and causing several new daughter windows to be opened. Nice MySpace, good idea to serve pop-up ads to the people who are most important to you – your users.

I thought maybe since I was already logged in, I might check out the music section and see if there was any new music that interested me. Unfortunately, I tried to click on several different links and each link brought me to that error page that says the MySpace team has been notified of the problem. Could you imagine if someone was actually getting notified each time there was an error on MySpace? The guy would never have a second to sleep, let alone eat or go to the bathroom.

As I surfed around, I looked at the advertisements that was on MySpace. They were all the same things. “Click here to get a free iPhone”. “Which rapper is this a picture of?” “Get a free ringtone today!”. All the lowest kind of advertising by the lowest kind of advertisers.

It’s really sad to be honest with you. MySpace was such a great idea and had so much potential and possibilities. Unfortunately, the founders got rich and Fox would not understand social media if it walked up to them and introduced himself. I finally made a decision that I think it is not in my best interest to have a profile on MySpace anymore. I decided to send some last emails to friends with my email address so they can contact me outside of MySpace.

Tom, you are not my friend anymore and I hope all that money you guys got from Fox will ease the pain of knowing just what you could of accomplished and just how far you guys have fallen.

A report recently released by the North Carolina Attorney General states that MySpace has identified more than 29,000 registered sex offenders all members of the MySpace community. This is more than four times the amount News Corp, the owner of MySpace said they identified back in May. This news came to light during a hearing in front of the North Carolina state House of Representatives — which is considering a bill, already passed by the state Senate, that would require parental consent for children to join MySpace.

I don’t think this comes to a huge surprise to anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the last couple of years. For a sex offender, MySpace must be like shooting fish in a barrel.

I do think that some sort of regulations need to be put into place for not only MySpace, but all social networks when we are dealing with underage children. Though unfortunately, when law makers get involved they either go way overboard on the restrictions or they make laws that make absolutely no sense because they do not understand the internet, technology and especially social networks.

My question here is where are the parents? Don’t the parents have to take some sort of responsibility here when it comes to monitoring what their kids are doing in cyberspace? I don’t think I have the answers on this, do you?

Technorati Tags: MySpace, sex offenders, News Corp

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been lucky enough to be meeting with some of our Fortune 500 clients who are finally coming around to the fact that social marketing and all this wacky web 2.0 stuff is not going away. It has been interesting for me to hear these senior executives of these companies ask questions using these “buzz” terms when in reality they don’t really understand the questions they are asking let alone any answers that I could give.

I was meeting with a small group today and the meeting began with a number of people talking about their priorities for their company in the coming year. What they want to accomplish, what needs to get done and they were looking for my team to come up with some marketing tactics to meet and hopefully exceed their goals. I allowed them to speak for a bit and then someone turned to me and asked me a question. Instead of answering the question, I posed a different one. I asked a fairly simple question,

“What are your customers saying?”

The room was quiet so I added to the question. “What do your customers like? What don’t they like? Where areas do they believe you are failing as a company and where are you succeeding?” After a little more silence, someone jumped in and said, “We believe that they are happy with….” I interrupted him.

“What do you mean, you believe? Is this your opinion or actual opinions of your customers?”

I did not want the silence to go on any more so I began reciting quotes that I pulled from blogs, discussion boards and web sites from customers of their company. Some were good and some were not so good.

I moved forward and told the group that discussing specific tactics at this time is premature. We need to first find and understand what people are presently saying about their company and their services. Once we have been able to collect and analyze this information, we then can start talking about specific initiatives and tactics that will address the concerns and issues in this customer feedback.

My point to all this is that what marketing mediums and tactics that are used in marketing programs are really somewhat irrelevant until we as marketers can show and prove to our clients that before they do anything, they need understand who their clients/customers are and even more importantly, understand what they are thinking and feeling.

A co-worker of mine, Tola, came up with an incredibly basic, but truly to the point definition of social marketing, “Taking a one way broadcast and making it into a two-way conversation”…

What do you think? What’s your definition of social marketing?

Technorati Tags: Fortune 500, web 2.0, social marketing