Last week I participated in a #CMGR tweet chat (a tweet chat for community management professionals). When I do find time to participate, it’s always a real treat, and so it’s one of my top tweetchats that I try to attend. Last week we talked about influencer programs. As a community “purist”, I’ve always felt a little torn about influencer programs, and a little uneasy about the term “influencer”. When I think of what an influencer is in social media circles (vs. what an influencer really is), my mind conjures at times unsavory images. Here are my feelings on the subject of influence and influencer campaigns.

What’s influence anyway? Here’s where I could take a cheap shot at current measures of online influence, which would get me some traffic and clicks. I’m not going to do that because that would make me a social media d-bag. All I’m going to say is that what we see online is only one teeny-tiny part of actual influence. Actual influence is a composite and complex notion that has to include online, offline and everything in between. In the context of online influence, what we should be concerned about is driving either awareness or action (click, participation, engagement, purchase). The ability to link these in a meaningful way still does not exist; or maybe I just don’t know it — if so, just leave me a comment here. The analytics market is still in its infancy, and I’m pretty confident in making that statement.

Let’s say you were able to identify your influencers — hopefully you looked at qualitative and quantitative measures, across several tools (one of which should be your “gut” and your knowledge of your own industry). Here are some thoughts to keep in mind…

Read the rest of this entry »

“Should I have a personal and a professional account? Should I keep them separate?” I get this question all the time. Or this: “I have many interests, wouldn’t I want to tweet them to different accounts so that people can choose to follow what they want?” My answer has been and will always be to have one account, and here are some reasons why:

Can you really separate? In this transparent social world, it’s getting harder and harder to separate the professional and personal. Since social emphasizes relationships, how can you expect to build professional relationship without transcending into personal? You will always have a stronger business relationship if you can relate to people as a human being.

Read the rest of this entry »

Made you look, didn’t I?

I actually didn’t come up with this title to get clicks. I was feeling genuinely bored of “How to set up your Google+ Circles” and “Whom to follow on Google+” blogposts. I was counting down the days until we have lists of top 10 people to put in your circle. And then Netflixgate happened, at the best possible time. What the heck is Netflixgate? Have a look at this lovely blogpost — apparently our beloved Netflix decided that it loves us so much it will give us the “lowest priced plan ever”.. For streaming.. Double that price for a DVD plan. Needless to say, there are several thousand comments across the blog commenting system and Facebook. Add to that the Twitter avalanche… Yikes, I’d hate to be their social media person right now — trust me, I emphasize as someone who works in this space. However, my pity and understanding only goes so far, since Netflix committed some pretty obvious faux-pas, at least to a trained eye.

Before I go into an obligatory list of “what went wrong”, I’d like to explain the title of this blog. I do think that how businesses act in a situation like Netflixgate is actually much more impactful to the future of this whole social thing. Google+ is a tool. Tools are operated by people. When people from a company tweet and blog, they engage with people, regardless of the tools they use. As a social business, your job is to build an organization-wide process that allows and empowers these people to act in a way that adds value all around. This kind of business wouldn’t let Netflixgate happen. It is painfully obvious to a trained eye that social isn’t part of the business fabric at Netflix. It’s an afterthought and a silo that happily tweets at people.

Ok, now time for the obligatory list of what went wrong:

Read the rest of this entry »

In case you are wondering, I’m the horse, and this is coming from my mouth, as I’ve been working in the industry, and have been (and currently am) a hiring manager. This post was inspired by over a hundred resumes that I looked at over the past week in search of the next superstar to be Yammer’s social media intern. It is understood that interns are at the beginning of their careers — still at school or recent graduates –no one is expecting oodles of experience or the polish that’s expected from a more mature professional. However, we, the hiring managers are looking for raw talent, passion, commitment and success characteristics. While reading these resumes, there are a few common threads that I discovered, and I wanted to share them here, just in case it can help someone:

Read the rest of this entry »

Social media has undoubtedly changed the way we share information and our voices, exchange our life stories, lend approval and criticism. There’s no arguing that things are different now, and for better or worse, things will continue to evolve, and at a faster rate than ever before. Of course, social media has its critics, and we are still working on translating social into business results as an industry. One thing that’s clear is that the unfettered, and oftentimes, unfiltered dialogue has changed the way we talk to each other as friends, family, colleagues, sellers, buyers. The cultural values are changing in favor of openness, honesty sharing, accountability and a greater connectedness.

I think social has done a lot for community building as it’s lowered some barriers to entry; communities are more participatory as structure can melt away quickly. They come together and disband to support ad-hoc models of conversation and collaboration. In some ways, communities are multi-platform, as well as platform-agnostic. At the same time, the lowering of barriers has weakened the ties and the loyalty that community members feel towards each other. For example, coming together for a tweetchat or a hashtagged conversation is usually a wonderful experience by which you can build real and lasting relationships with people. However, sometimes these events fall victim to unscrupulous users “hijacking” a hashtag and using it for blatant self-promotion without much concern for the community. Of course, looser connections are partially to blame, as is the fleeting nature of some social channels. As a result, lack of forethought going into tweets generates a consequence-free environment. This consequence-free environment is, of course, erroneous for several reasons ranging from personal branding to professional reputation.

Read the rest of this entry »

In my highly-connected digital world, it’s really nice to take the time to talk to my friends in person and discuss life, work, love, and the meaning of it all. I’m particularly fond of my conversations with Danielle Morrill, and every time we talk, we have this ability to tease really cool big ideas out of each other. That’s exactly what happened yesterday, and this is one of the many things we talked about.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and throughout my experiences I’ve come to the realization that Corporate America is driven by the short term thinking. This is not exactly an astounding revelation, but I think it’s worth exploring vis-a-vis its impact on how businesses are run and the impact of that thinking on companies’ social media health. Here’s how I see it… Due to the influence of Wall Street and quarterly earnings, the Western economy seems to live and die by what happens in the next 3 months. Of course, having measurable short-term goals is very important — how else would you reach your big goals if you don’t break them up into chunks? However, you can’t focus on the short-term without a very disciplined commitment to the long-term. And this is where things fall apart.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past 1-2 years, I’ve been having a conversations with savvy folks lately who run in the social media / startup world about a sticky point that seems to have some complexity. That issue is privacy, ownership and portability of social graphs and communications by the “social employee” who does any outreach or relationship building on behalf of the company / brand that he / she represents. It’s a hairy issue.

Evangelists and social media, community and PR professionals are often hired for their connections. Social media, if used right, really accelerates the speed with which relationships can be built online and offline. A lot of us come to jobs with strong existing networks, and we continue to build them as a result of being on the job. A truly social business understands that to truly fulfill the “social employee” and get best results, there must be a symbiotic relationship between building the personal brand and the company brand simultaneously. For the social media practitioner, it is very important to keep developing his / her voice while developing the voice for the company, and deepening professional and personal relationships. Social media has really blurred the lines between personal and professional relationships, which only further obfuscates the issue of who owns what, and how you “split up the goods” when you split up. Just like with marriage, most people don’t think about their exit when they start working, but here are some things you should think through:

Read the rest of this entry »

I have some big news to share today. I have accepted a new gig as Head of Community at Yammer, where my first day will be a week from today —  next Monday. For those of you that don’t know, Yammer is the enterprise social network that allows employees to collaborate, share knowledge and achieve better business results by doing so. It launched in 2008, and is already used by 100,000 organizations, including more than 80% of the Fortune 500 companies.

To me, this is not just another job. In many ways, I feel like everything I’ve done up until this point was to give me the tools and skills to do this job effectively. Also, all of my prior work has helped me appreciate the importance of internal collaboration and communication, in order to deal with the demands of today’s business.

Read the rest of this entry »

I got to have a chat with my idol and friend Paul Greenberg over the holidays and we had a fascinating discussion about self-interest in life and in business. I’m rather ashamed that it took me a month to publish this post, but I guess that’s how life goes when you work for a startup and are starting a newly married life. Not making excuses; rather, I’m going to focus on publishing more original content for this blog.

So.. Back to self-interest. Since I was quite young, I remember coming to terms with my own, and overall human, selfishness. Since childhood, I remembered how good it felt to do something nice for others, and I wanted to do more of it. The reverse is, of course, also true — when you mistreat others, willingly or not, you feel bad. This is why participating in charitable activities is such a win-win, in my opinion — you get to feel good while doing something good for others. The benefactor of the charitable activity benefits from the product of the activity, while you benefit from the good feeling. Even though you do charitable activities with the goal of helping others, the real reason why people do them, is because they feel good. Even though altruistic readers of this post may get up in arms over this last statement, I do think that self-interest rules all other human emotions.

Read the rest of this entry »

CrowdThis post was reposted from the Nimble blog, with the purpose of retaining a copy of the blogpost in my blogging portfolio.

I was working on a blogpost the other day, talking about humanness in corporate social media, as well as the phenomenon of the professional and personal worlds blending. I knew that somewhere, a long time ago, I came across someone’s personal anecdote about receiving more compassion in a service role after adding a photo with kids to social media avatars. For the life of me, I couldn’t think of who said that, about what company, or what the platform of expression was (tweet, blog, forum, etc). Go figure! My colleague and I scoured Google and Twitter search for mentions of anything that had the words “kids, service, avatar, compassion” — you get the point. Nothing! It’s was much like finding a proverbial needle in a haystack. Read the rest of this entry »

top