Introducing the world to ArtStarters.org

I’ve been working the past few weeks with my team on bringing a great new website into the world.  As November slips by, we get ever closer to our ‘Hello, World’ moment on ArtStarters.org.  The past two weeks have seen me trying to make some headway on building interest among people who can help us pull in beta users.

So what have I learned?

1. Remember to ask! – Don’t just send notes introducing people to your project.  Make sure you ASK for what you want.  I was surprised and excited to receive a note back from the Editor in Chief of a fairly major online arts magazine saying that she’d be happy to help us gain some visibility for our project.  Asking works!
2. Pull out all the stops.  If you’re a student, tell them you’re a student!  If you have no money for advertising, tell them what you CAN provide.
3. Don’t limit yourself to the traditional – I sought out Facebook Groups and sent notes to the administrators.  I’ve heard back from a few, which is a few more people than I’d have reached if I hadn’t done so.
4. Plan for a fraction.  If you don’t plan on hearing from everyone you reach out to, then you’re not as likely to fall short of your goal.
5. Just do it.  The old Nike slogan still has legs – we covered this point time and time again in our program and it seems so obvious, but it’s probably the hardest thing.  Even if you don’t feel ready, you have to start sometime.  I’m not saying don’t make any preparations, but don’t drag it out.  Prepare the minimum, then put your feet to the pavement, otherwise you’ll find reasons to continue to wait!

Also, I have to confess, I’m loving Twitter lists and Listorious right now.  I think Twitter lists are much more user friendly than Twitter directories like Twellow or WeFollow (though those are great, as well) and are perfect to get started with a new Twitter account.

That’s all for now, but I’ll certainly update again when ArtStarters.org is live encouraging you all to go sign-up and check it out!

Brief ramble on oversharing…

I’ve been thinking a lot about oversharing lately – you know, when someone only needs a certain amount of information but you continue to explain yourself anyway. That’s an overshare.

Particularly, it’s been on my mind whether social media causes us to become ‘oversharers’ in other areas of our lives, too. We become so habituated to sharing the whole story – even if it’s in fits and spurts – that we continue to overshare when we step away from the keyboard.

Oversharing is obviously a rampant problem on sites like Facebook. I’ve done it, you’ve probably done it, and we all hear stories of the person who did it much too big ‘that one time’.

Perhaps a ’stop the oversharing’ PSA is in order…

Culture and Social Media Work

I believe pretty firmly in the subtle cultural differences within the regions of the US. As a person born and raised in the Midwest, I think there are a few key differences that I note (and other people seem to point out to me, too), and I think it’s interesting how they affect my work in public relations/social media.

1. An inherent necessity to at least pretend to be friendly : This one’s actually been pointed out to me by lots of people since I moved, that I ‘can’t be from California’ because I’m ‘too nice’
2. Over-apologizing (sorry for being sorry when you told me to stop saying ’sorry’!)
3. A need to act like I don’t have a life outside of work when I’m at work
4. A need to talk too much about work when I’m away from work
5. A tendency to overshare when dealing with any kind of service representative – waiters, valets, customer service people on the phone, etc.

So why do these things matter to my work?  Because they shape the way that I communicate to people who communicate to me!  I do a fair amount of customer service (as you’ll note from some prior posts here) in my communications role, and my responses tend to embody all of the characteristics I mentioned before.  When I learn of a customer service complaint, the super friendly, very apologetic tone.  And you know what?  It works.

People like that tone when they’re talking to a company.  They WANT you to be too friendly and too apologetic.  But on the other hand, I see the values of a West Coast lifestyle helping with social media in different ways – like the ability to take your work with you but still have fun!  All of these social media folks who live-Tweet events and photograph every attendee – that’s a great skill in social media!  Whereas my Midwestern work ethic means I focus on the moment and often forget to capture things that way, unless I’ve been assigned to take pictures or live-Tweet, but then I often miss the bulk of what’s being said and done!  lol

So what’s your take on cultural differences and work in social media?  Do you buy it?

Intarwebs changes our minds

I was reading the most recent edition of Wired Magazine that landed on my doorstep this week.  There’s an interesting piece written by Clive Thompson using research from the Stanford Study of Writing organized by Professor Andrea Lunsford.

The argument is that we write more than we ever have despite as critics bemoaning that the the internet ruins students’ writing skills.  We’re probably vastly different (and more participatory) writers than humans have ever been.

Old-school reference material

That got me thinking. What else does the intarwebs change about us? I’ve noticed that people in my program at school who are also working in jobs where they are online the most are also the people who are most likely to cite internet sources, or cite sources at all.  Does the internet make us better referencers? Are we all becoming librarians of a type?

And what about kids with mobile phones that access the internet? Are they more social than we’ve ever been? Teens have always been highly social animals, but the opportunity for constant connectivity wasn’t there before; at some point you had to go home and try to sneak privileges to the corded phone. No longer. In another Wired story (apparently my source of choice today!), it’s explained that texting in the company of others isn’t rude – “texting those who couldn’t be there lets everyone feel they’re part of a larger social network.” This was according to research by Mimi Ito, a well-recognized researcher in the electronic culture of Japanese teens.

Another point made by Ito, this one to the New York Times, is that this persistent use of social technologies is not (as many adults would see it) a waste of time, but rather training for the future digital literacy that we’ll all need to get through our lives.  Ito’s point reflects much of what Henry Jenkins argues in his book ‘Convergence Culture’.  All of these new toys and games are really a practice grounds for generative tools that will become part of our social and economic fabric – it’s just that in human culture, those things that become important innovations often start as ‘novelties,’ widely seen as objects of fun or play but not ’serious’ value.

So the next time I walk around quoting websites like a librarian quotes books – you’ll know why.  My brains are being changed by the intarwebs!

My radical prediction

Times they are a-changin'

It’s probably not so radical, but it’s a prediction, anyway, and one that I’ve heard rumblings of but not seen anyone else lay so flat out.

I think that social media/asynchronous communications will completely replace the 1800 number for customer service.

Why do I believe this? So glad you asked!

1. The rise in popularity of customer service ‘chat’ on company websites
2. Remember the Pepsi packaging discussion? It’s far easier to present a universal username than a long 1800 number that people won’t recall.
3. It’s efficient! A single customer service agent can ‘chat’ with multiple customers at the same time. Plus, as a customer, I’d prefer to voice my question and have an agent respond with an answer than sit on my cell phone burning through minutes (or my ear, as cell phones still tend to get hot!) listening to crappy muzak.  Cisco has an intriguing whitepaper outlining the value of multi-channel customer service with a great matrix explaining the priority given to a customer via different channels (though they still include Live Voice Call as an initial contact method, which obviously I’m arguing is outdated).
4. Public visibility keeps things honest – if more customer service happened through channels like Twitter, I as a customer could tell what sort of solution is common and (presumably) fair even BEFORE I reach out for help. Also, public accountability on the side of the customer service agents means a single bad apple can be picked out more quickly by management.

I’d love to see any additional reasons or counter-arguments!

Persistence of Vision

This summer, I’m enrolled in one classroom course for my Master’s Program. The course is a survey type course (broad-spectrum, not a questionnaire) covering research methods. We’ve been encouraged to select a topic area for the majority of our individual assignments, and I continue to doggedly pursue corporate reputation.

Why do I think corporate reputation is so important to my studies? Because of the long memory of the web – a years old problem can still influence consumer opinion because of the depth of information available and the fact that past mistakes are no longer gone nor forgotten. The internet has changed all that.

I believe social media has the potential to most firmly impact a company’s reputation management, from the ability to monitor consumer sentiment to the opportunity to present candid information and response. Used correctly, social media can help a company with internal awareness of their reputation, but it can even give the people within the company an opportunity to build a stronger reputation.

“Where you at?”

Do you remember those commercials from Boost mobile where they made rappers and their friends into bubble-people to represent the dots that show where your friends are on a Boost phone?
It strikes me that I haven’t seen any ads like that in a while; not just the creepy bubble-people, but ads touting the ability to ‘find your friends’. With how frequently people post their location on tools like Twitter or Facebook, I still don’t see much adoption for GPS location pin pointing your location.
I think it may have something to do with the fact that people want to choose when to tell others where they’re at – and when that’s the case, there isn’t ENOUGH sharing to make those GPS location tools worthwhile. I’m not rushing to check where the three or four people I know using Google Latitude are at. There’s just not enough critical mass. Tools like Dodgeball, Google Latitude, Brightkite, Loopt and many others have been available for some time now. Maybe we’ve found a limit to what people will share? Or maybe this is just an idea who’s time hasn’t yet come.

Personal reputation online?

There’s a really great discussion starter over on the Three Minds blog which I just found thanks to my Twitter network. Marshall writes about how the value of Google’s PageRank system is slipping because of the increasing value to a content-driven, rather than publisher-driven, model.

Basically, he argues that reputation should be given to individual articles or pieces of content based on the reputation of the writer, rather

Don't build a wall to the shy contributors.

than basing value on the publisher/forum. I see the argument, but I also counter (as you may see in comments on the blog post) that the already growing popularity of ghost-writers among the heaviest individual publishers (like Guy Kawasaki or various celebrities using tools like Twitter) makes such a thing dangerous.

First, personal page rank would make it possible for the most recognizable names (within any respective topic area) to dominate conversation to an even greater extent.  It would also create an incentive to build a network of ghostwriters under a single name (though it may not be popular in the community I see few ways that an unscrupulous person with frequent publishing that’s even somewhat better than mediocre wouldn’t gain enough reputation to dominate the market), as opposed to having loose associations of people who may hold varying opinions voicing them publicly under their own byline.

Finally, I believe that personal page rank would make many of the infrequent (and sometimes refreshing) contributors intimidated to continue their only occasional responses.  I believe the true power in social media comes from collaboration of those who contribute frequently with those who may not feel moved to share their opinions as frequently or publicly and who, in their infrequency, offer the occasional fantastic zinger or new point of view.  I think encouraging MORE contributions from these less chatty peers is an important pursuit as social media ages.

I hope that’s been a good thought-starter.  I’d love to hear feedback and counterpoint!

Social Media Packaging?

It surfaced this week that Pepsi’s got a new package design for Pepsi Raw for the product stocked in the UK (originally covered by Brand Republic, also source of the picture.) I saw a discussion started on LinkedIn about this topic, and it sparked something in my mind…

Pic from Brand Republic via Mashable (whew!)

The original commenter wondered (as Mashable does, too) if this is jumping the shark and if such a thing could last.

I’m going to argue that it won’t last WITH A SINGLE OUTLET like Twitter. However, more and more, brands are claiming consistent ID’s across social networks and with tools like OpenID it will become easier to have a single identity across networks.

All this comes together to prove the perfect storm for brand to include their social media identity on their packaging. And why not? Twitter is increasingly becoming a tool for customer service, brands like Skittles are replacing their homepages with crowd-sourced content from across the social web, and so on. Why shouldn’t I as a consumer be able to expect to look up a brand using their published ID any place and be able to contact them easily using my choice of tool and at my own time and pace? Why should I have to call a published 800-number and sit on the line? I’d by far prefer to publish my question/concern to an asynchronous tool and get better customer service, too.

As a business person, it makes sense for me, too. If I direct everyone to their selected way of reaching me, I could then offer click-to-call technology for those who want to use the phone (between the mobile web and VoIP tools, this is easy to do TODAY and isn’t a shot for the future, though I think it will increase in popularity) and asynchronous communication via IM, microblog or social media site. The asynchronous communication takes some of the pressure off a call center and is easy and efficient to use (as we’ve already seen with companies like Comcast and others).

The social web is not just changing our online world – be ready to see it start to impact your packaging, too!

Long awaited observations

I tweeted about this topic the other day, but I’ll get on a little bit bigger soapbox here today to say that, like it or not, all roads in communications lead to customer service.  With ever increasing demand for transparency and responsiveness, step one down the road of greater customer engagement is to tackle the issue of customer service.  I’ve even blogged about this in the past, but not from the same perspective of actually tackling customer service head-on.

It’s been some time since I posted, and part of that is because of the high level of activity I’ve been doing on behalf of my current employer.  I’m not certain exactly where my freedom to share ends, so let’s just say up front that none of the ideas, comments, yada yada yada reflect the opinions of the company I’m talking about/working with.

My role is to help this company start to press forward more definitively into social media activities.  We did some planning, looked at some goals (the biggies for most companies? Keeping up with the competitive marketplace, name recognition, reputation management, and so on, at least in my opinion) and began pushing out on the tools we have set up.  The tools we’re using for outreach at the moment are a collection of social shopping websites, Facebook (with a newly launched Page that’s still in growth stages), Flickr (also in growth stages) and Twitter which was quite precocious and virtually popped fully grown and demanding attention from the computer monitor.

As a consumer goods company (ultimately), Mother’s Day is a very serious holiday for the company.  With a fairly recently launched presence on Twitter, we were all girding ourselves for what may come without really knowing how it may shake out for us or for our competitors.  We’d had the discussions about handling complaints in a timely matter, who we thought should ‘man the account’ for the holiday weekend and whether customer requests through Twitter would be handled by customer service team members or by marketing team members referring to the general company guidelines (every company has service guidelines and I’m coming to find the best companies make sure that EVERYONE is aware of these guidelines so all company employees can fairly represent that stance).

We pride ourselves on great customer service so that, also, had to shine through in anything we did on Twitter.

I’m not going to lie; as a former PR person, I thought I could handle these complaints without feeling berated or overly hassled by clients.  I also thought that I understood how emotional a gift purchase can be and what Mother’s Day means to many people.  But let me tell you – this is a new experience.  If you’re a n00b to social media marketing (though I prefer to call it communications), let me tell you, there is NO preparing unless you’ve previously worked in customer service.  I’m not talking about working in a customer facing job like a waitress or a retail store.  I’m talking straight-up customer service where all you connect with every day are people who have had problems with your product/service.  Some people’s complaints may strike you as minor and petty, while others catch even you off-guard by their magnitude.

What I CAN prepare you for, however, is that you cannot break through into real conversation until you have proven that you are willing and capable of handling these customer service issues.  The best conversations we’ve had on our Twitter account have resulted from people who started with complaints and were helped.  I know most people hear this in marketing classes (if you’ve taken them) that turning a customer’s poor experience into a positive experience is the best way to build lifelong customers.  Well let me tell you, the best way to build positive conversation in social media?  Prove that you can handle complaints and criticisms responsibly and politely.  You don’t have to be a whipping boy, but you do have to accept blame for the things that are your fault and support the customer no matter who made the first error.

All in all, we made it pretty well through Mother’s Day.  There were slips and errors, but there always will be.  In the end, however, we learned that the best way forward was to be open and honest and helpful – all things we proved through our customer service.  So I’ll state again – the first barrier to climb as a company entering the social media landscape is that of customer service.  Overcome that obstacle and you’ll see a fruitful landscape out in front of you.  Not an easy one to travel, but fruitful.