Talk It Up!

Facebook questions: a rat maze?

Yesterday, I posted my first impressions of Facebook's new Questions feature, along with my own lukewarm reaction. Curious, I checked back in today to see the response rate to the Questions I'd posted.

According to my Facebook wall, I've never asked a question:

However, I did receive emails indicating that the questions had received some pretty kick-butt answers. Clicking the embedded email link brings one to the Question page, but the questions and answers for some reason don't appear on the Wall. And there doesn't seem to be an easy way to get to one's own Question page to track and follow the answers as they come in.

For this, I give Questions the Fail Award. No way to track on the Wall or find them after you've posted? Not quite the rat's maze that is the new privacy settings, but close.

Facebook questions: brilliant or blah?

Facebook has just rolled out a new feature, Questions. Taking a lesson in conversation from old-school social networking site LinkedIn, Facebook now allows users to ask a general question to the public and/or to specific friends within the user's network.

Mashable has pointed out a few useful features for Questions, such as polling, topic exploration and tagging by category.

Asking a question does change the homepage and the bar at the top:

And, as is noted above, all questions are public. No complicated privacy filters here, so your 2:00 a.m. musings from the Mashable Birthday Bash about whether that guy likes you or not might not be the best use of the feature.

Questions also allows the possibility to ask the question to specific friends in your network by tagging:

And the Question tab does appear at the top of your wall for easy asking and tracking of conversations. The most useful feature so far seems to be the ability to tag and track questions by category.

So far, the general reaction seems to be a bit underwhelming, to say the least. Really? Social networking monster Facebook finally caught on to a feature that LinkedIn has had for over a year? The functionality offered by Questions doesn't as yet add any significant value over Facebook's other myriad opportunities for connection.

I vote meh. How about you?

Managing your brand: how to set up a Google Alert

The number one question after today's wonderful social media panel at the Women in Nuclear conference was this: how do I set up a Google Alert?

The first step in any social media effort is listening. And if you're creating a social media presence online, whether that be for yourself (your personal brand) or for your entity or organization, your first move is to be aware of the conversations that are already happening around that topic.

So let's start with the easiest and most obvious monitoring: what are people saying about you as a person?

I believe firmly that absolutely everyone, from the CEO down to the receptionist, should be aware of her image online. And monitoring is the key to awareness. As personal branding guru Dan Schwabel Twittered recently, "Your first impression isn't a handshake anymore. It's your online presence." How many of you have researched someone you have a first meeting with by Googling him? It's a best practice for both personal and professional connection. And more than half of employers Google potential employees. Even if you're not looking for a job, it's smart to know what your connections will find when they Google you.

How to set up a Google Alert in five easy steps:

1. Go to www.google.com/blogsearch and enter your name surrounded by quotation marks into the search box and hit Search Blogs.



2. In the left hand side bar, under Subscribe, click Blogs Alerts.



3. Under Type, choose Everything. This will return not only blog mentions but Web results and mentions on social networking sites as well.


4. Under How Often, choose Once a Day (unless you want to receive several emails a day).
5. Under Deliver To, enter your email address. Click Create Alert.



For a preview of today's mentions, Google now offers a handy-dandy Preview Results box, so you can see the top five results for today.



And that's it! Now you're monitoring your online presence. Check your email inbox and scan daily to see mentions. And while you're at it, you might want to choose a few topics you'd like to track. For example, for Spoken Communications, I have Google Alerts set up for "contact center," "call center," "IVR," "customer experience," "customer service" and a few others. They provide a wealth of content useful for researching and creating blog posts and informative tidbits to post to our Twitter stream.

Questions?

Poll Everywhere: live from Women in Nuclear

I got the chance to try out a nifty new tool at the Women in Nuclear conference today, Poll Everywhere. It allows you to do a live audience poll in which the audience sends in their votes live via SMS or Twitter, kind of like American Idol. It worked beautifully the first time out, embedded neatly into my PowerPoint presentation and delivered real-time, live results as the audience members texted in their responses.

Within about three minutes, we had these results in from 27 members of audience of about 50. Interesting statistics. In the past, LinkedIn has been the winner, but it seems that Facebook has overtaken it, at least in this crowd of professional women. And it was fascinating to see the poll results coming in live. I recommend it to make presentations a bit more dynamic and interesting.

It's easy to use; just set up the poll in advance. Poll Everywhere provides downloads for PowerPoint slides for both Mac and PC and for Keynote to easily drop into your presentation, and it also provides copy to brief the audience on how to participate (and to remind them to leave their phones on vibrate so as not to interrupt the speakers that come after you).

Hat tip to Shauna Causey for turning me on to this nifty little tool!

Hospitals and customer service: a winning example

Hospitals generally aren't known for their customer service scores, but as the health care market broadens, that is beginning to change. This weekend, I accompanied my mother to Texas Presbyterian Health for a double hip replacement. The doctors, nurses and surgeons were spectacular, checking her name, birthday, reason for surgery and ID no fewer than five times before she went in.

What's really amazing, however, is the support that is available for the family. Once the patient is wheeled out, the family's job is to wait and worry, something that can be rather unpleasant, depending on the situation. What helps with waiting and worrying? Transparency.

Texas Presbyterian Health has just implemented a surgery update board in the surgery wing. Patient status is displayed using an ID number that is given only to the family. The progress board shows where the patient is in the process: patient arrival, pre-op arrival, surgery arrival, surgery complete, recovery arrival, case complete, and even a final column to list the hospital room the patient is discharged to. It all works much like the flight status board at airports.

As the waiting/worrying family member this time, this was a great resource. And I imagine it also took quite a bit of pressure off the staff on providing constant updates and allowed them more freedom to do their jobs more effectively. And what was involved? A database, one big flat screen TV, and a corporate culture of customer service and transparency.

And the kicker? Free wifi available throughout the hospital, so family can answer emails, get some work done and generally busy themselves instead of pacing and drinking too much coffee.

Blown away by the brilliance of Old Spice

It's not very often that a case study in the making captures attention. After the fact, the numbers can be staggering. But it takes a very special case of advertising, PR and social media marketing integration to garner excitement during the campaign.

And that's what Old Spice has done. This is a brilliant example in the making of true integration: a commercial integrated with a full-on, interactive social media campaign, interwoven as tightly as the strands of a Persian rug.

Strand 1: Wieden and Kennedy created this ad for Old Spice featuring actor and former NFL athlete Isaiah Mustafa:

The next ad kept the same cheeky tone and muscled star, with over 13 million YouTube views to date:

Strands 2-115: And then the brilliance happened. Interactivity happened. Instant gratification and personal interaction happened. If you send a Tweet to @oldspice, Mustafa will create a video responding to your Tweet with the same quirky, pseudo-macho humor that pervades the original ads, right from the shower set and complete with rippling abs.

Here are the videos he's made in just the last 90 minutes, including one to George Stephanopoulos:

In the last two days, he has created response videos to over 100 Twitter requests, including the Ellen Show, Kevin Rose, Alyssa Milano, and plain old folks like Code177 asking random questions about how a dinosaur would respond to Old Spice.

The videos are going up as fast as they can be made--note how the most recent are spaced 15-30 minutes apart. I'd love to hear how the team was assembled and organized to attack what must be a fire hose of Tweets directed at the brand with alacrity and humor that stays true to the original commercials.

Among the 100+ videos, it's hard to pick a favorite, but I did love his response to Starbucks' Twee:

"You look cold. Would you like a cup of hot coffee?"

What did Old Spice do right?

1. Captured the spirit of a mainstream ad campaign and made it internet-accessible
2. Made the character interactive and responsive
3. Made it about the interactivity, NOT about the product
4. Responded immediately, humorously and prolifically to Twitter requests
5. Kept a sense of humor
6. Didn't try to sell anything

Social Media Strategy for Dummies, Step 1

A half-dozen times a week, I meet with folks to sit down and take the first steps towards a social media strategy. Sometimes, there is a level of expertise; sometimes not. Sometimes the organization has captured the brand across online properties; sometimes we're starting from scratch. Often, the questions, "do I need a Facebook page?" or "how do I use Twitter?" arise.

Here's the dirty little secret: we social media managers each have some type of process for determining which strategy will work best for each organization we work with. It's not rocket science. Or brain surgery. Or rocket surgery. It's just a matter of mixing a bit of expertise and familiarity with the space with some field research and going through a series of questions and brainstorming sessions with the client to determine which approaches have the best likelihood of being successful, based on stated goals.

This is the first in a series of posts detailing the process. We'll start with the simplest first step, tried and true: Forrester's POST analysis. This is a great place to start, whether you're an individual entrepreneur or a larger organization. Why? Because no one can implement a social media strategy without first determining who they want to reach and why. It's the very first step in brainstorming, and it will be refined many times over the course of implementation.

Here's what it looks like:

People

Who are we trying to engage with? Who is the ideal customer? Where do they work? Play? Where do they hang out online? Where do they hang out offline? What do they want? Are they critics, joiners, collectors, spectators? What content do they ingest? (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, audio, video, YouTube, Digg, etc.) What type of content do they create? Are they involved in social media? To what extent? Who are the influencers in this space? What do the influencers care about?

Objectives

What are your objectives? To listen? To communicate a message? To support your people/community? To increase sales? Traffic? To extend your brand? To increase attendance at an event? To garner positive WOM?

Strategies

Where is the best place to listen first? Which communities already exist? Do we create a new community? How do we plan on participating in their existing communities? Which organizations can we partner with? Will content tone be professional? personal? Informational? promotional? What content appeals most to them: audio, video, Tweets, podcast, blog? 

Technology

Which technology do the people prefer to use? Are they active on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LibSyn, Digg, Delicious, Eventbrite, blogs, podcasts, Foursquare, Gowalla?

When I go through these with a client, I usually create a mind map or some type of visualization of the data. It's not yet organized, and creating some type of diagram as we brainstorm and freewrite eventually helps to create a focus. For example, this week, we looked at how we might help a local pet boutique increase its contact with its regular customers. The People diagram looked like this:

Now, for the Strategies, we hadn't yet researched to determine where these people consume their media. So that step will require a bit of research. Before we can create strategies, we need to discover how these people consume media about pets and where they hang out, both online and offline. To that end, we created a map of topics to guide research on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other social media community sites in which we suspect these people might be engaging:

 

Next Step: Research

The next step is research to hone down the best strategy. This step can be quite labor-intensive; in most cases, 10-20 hours of research is appropriate. Allow 5-10 hours to discover the most active community sites in each category and 10-15 hours to monitor those sites for two to four weeks to get a feel for the level and tenor of activity. And always use the social media manager's favorite tool to organize them: an Excel spreadsheet.