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Social Media

Conclusion: It is no longer possible to say ANYTHING original about social media

So it sorta feels like the oxygen has been sucked out of social media or at least the originality.  While I like the slight metaphor twist by Krista Neher and the apparent use of the 5 step approach she undoubtly had ingrained at P&G, where’s the new content?  This isn’t Krista’s fault, the presentation is solid and spot on. The next steps close with connect is classic 5 step, but even with that I still find myself wanting in general for something new to happen in the scene.

Perhaps we are just entering the “no original thought” part of social media.  Pirates, defenders, advocates, rouges, creators, lurkers, trolls, detractors, blah, blah, blah…. Brands in social media need to change their approach to engaging and listening needs to central to the brand’s digital strategy and anyone that doesn’t already know this is just 1 bad quarter from a new job or no job.

Again, NOT to pick on Krista, because she did nail it and is further spreading the word which everyone needs to know, so take a look, since she did get a slot in Vegas which is no small feat:

Brand Management Pubcon Vegas09″>Online Brand Management Pubcon Vegas09

View more presentations from Krista Neher.
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November 21, 2009 by
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Why Don’t Fortune 100 CEOs Care About Social Media?

Two reasons:  it’s simply irrelevant to them at the scale they operate on and there’s no upside to it.  I hate to admit it, but I was link-baited into reading a Slideshare presentation entitled CEOs and Social Media – A Look at the Fortune 100 CEOs and their Online Image and Communications.  I’ve embedded the entire presentation below so you can take a look at it as well.  The presentation was developed by ÜBERCEO, a blog that “follows, comments, reports and discusses everying (sic) about the CEOs who influence the business world.  Unlike other CEO blogs and websites that offer tools and information for CEOs, ÜBERCEO is about CEOs.”  The fact that the authors of the blog can’t get the spelling right on their About Us page is a clue to the quality of thinking you’ll find in the presentation.

Part of my work these days is researching the monetization of social media.  Needless to say I was looking forward to some insights about social media in the largest corporations in the world.  Regrettably, I was disappointed by the shallow analysis contained in the presentation.  I think I can sum up the entire presentation with the following quotes:

  • “CEOs are Laggards in Social Media. We looked at the country’s top 100 CEOs and found that most are sorely lacking in social media exposure, connection or conversations: – Only two have Twitter accounts. – 13 have LinkedIn profiles, and of those only three have more than 10 connections. – 81% don’t have a personal Facebook page. – Almost a quarter have no Wikipedia entry – 31% of those that do have limited or outdated information. – Not one Fortune 100 CEO blogs”
  • “The country’s leading CEOs aren’t anywhere near as connected as their employees, partners, executives and customers are likely to be. They’re simply not communicating in the same way. It gives the impression that those CEOs are distant, disinterested and disengaged.”
  • “The question is not whether CEOs can use social media tools, but rather if they should… and if so, how and when”

I applaud the authors taking a fact-based approach to their research.  Over a couple of week period they diligently scoured Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Wikipedia for evidence of Fortune 100 CEO’s online activity.  I cringe, however, at the relatively naiveté of their conclusions.  I am fortunate, I guess, to have met a few Fortune 100 CEOs (courtesy of my father who was a senior executive of a Fortune 10 firm for many years).  It’s pretty clear that the authors of this piece may never have been in the same ZIP code, much less in touch with such CEOs.

Fortune 100 companies, by definition, are the largest companies in the country.  In 2008 the Fortune 100 generated $6.58 trillion dollars of revenue and $238 billion of profits.  The latest data from the 2007 Economic Census stated that there were 14,436,874 establishments that generated $57.7 trillion dollars in revenue.  In other words, 0.00069% of the companies (Fortune 100) generated over 11.4% of all revenues.

The value of a Fortune 100 CEO’s time is hard to put in perspective.  One way to look at their value is how much revenue and profit their firms generated, on average, every minute of every day in the year.

ceosm

The largest company in the Fortune 100 generated over $14,000 a minute in revenue and over $1,400 in profit.  A typically decent sized company that generates $1 billiona year in revenue only produces about $31 in revenue and a $2.38in profit per minute.  One could infer that a minute of time of a Fortune 100 CEO is significantly more valuable than that of a typical $100 million CEO.  Now this isn’t necessarily an accurate metric or tool, but at least it provides some indication about the relative impact of how a CEO chooses to invest his or her time.

The primary reason Fortune 100 CEOs don’t participate in social media is that there is no real benefit for them.  Their firms have already pretty much reached the pinnacle of their industries.  In fact, what those CEOs crave more than anything else is anonymity.  The last thing they need is to be deluged with direct messages, @replies, or Facebook messages.  The biggest challenge they face is deciding where and how to invest their time.

For the CEOs of the other 14,436,774 companies in America, however, social media is definitely a strategy that can help drive growth and create value.  A classic example is Zappos.com, the online shoe retailer.  In ten years Zappos has gone from $0 to over $1 billion in revenues.  Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh has woven social media into the fabric of his company.  There are a lot of factors that have driven Zappos’ success but social media has been a critical element.

If it takes two minutes to draft a witty Tweet one might infer that such an investment in time would cost Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon Mobil the opportunity to create $28,000 in revenue and $2,800 in profit.  The same tweet might cost Tony Hsieh $60 in revenue opportunity.  Since Tony joined Twitter in June 2007 he’s posted 1,725 tweets and Zappos’ revenues have grown from $840 million to $1 billion. At $60/tweet that’s about $103,000 in ‘revenue opportunity cost’ to generate $160 million in new revenues.  Now Zappos revenue growth was driven by its superior service, products, and employees.  Tweeting played a very small role in it.  One can’t deny, however, that Zappos’ entire approach to leveraging social media has played an important role in their growth.

As promised, here’s the full presentation from UberCEO.  It appears that after publishing this preso, they did a much slicker graphically oriented one that I’ve included as well.  That one has an even better link-bait title “Fortune 100 CEOs Are Social Media Slackers”

Fortune 100 CEOs and Social Media
View more documents from Sharon Barclay.
Fortune 100 CEOs Are Social Media Slackers
View more documents from Sharon Barclay.
September 24, 2009 by
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Planning: A content audit (slacking: 2 of 3)

With the first in the series, Recycling: A Mid-Summers Night’s Writers Block (aka Strategic Planning) – 1 of 3 out of the way, I have continued to sift through content and metrics to see what was of interest and what wasn’t.  Sorta a Win-Loss analysis for content.

Analyzing Context and Content

There are lot’s of things to look at – content and links which was the main focus of my effort until a couple of days ago was actual posts – keywords, visitors and page views.  The main reason I started a comment review was to understand what conversations were where from a content perspective, since a recent comment from Marty Thompson was on a boring event post, which I wouldn’t have thought would get a comment.

Prior to Marty‘s comment a couple of days ago I wouldn’t have thought about reviewing comments.  Spinning through the comments ended up being a fun as part of the work so far, some really good feedback from a bunch of people including, but not limited to, the following:

Looking at conversations and content proved to be not just fun, but informative.  Not sure I have any conclusions, at least I have some data points, like the Duomo post which caused a conversation in real life today, a question on Facebook and a comment from Tessa – another cool person you should read.    The other thing I’ve found thanks to auditing comments is that there is a significant variety of content over the past two years – like random content.

Random Content Rules!

Maybe not, but oddly enough random posts are among the top post here.  The best example of  random content is still my first thanksgiving post which gets a good deal of random traffic on terms like “Funny things to be Thankful For“, most of these people appear to load at 1 other page – I think.   My biggest bounce page is on Geographic Topics for blogging, none of the topics which I think anyone posted on, but it does garner the most amount of spam comments for some reason.   The remaining top 5 terms in search are:

While the top five keyword pages here are randoms, Product Management and Marketing is creeping up with both PM & Social Media and Brands in the top 10.   It’s movement of product management content and brand into the search terms which is nice to see, since this one the strategic roadmap theme over the last year – focus more.

Corner Cases: Content of Interest

After looking at all the content, nearly 500 posts, I find that the content I like writing is not always the most interesting to others and the comments, page views and links prove this out.   While the data recommends otherwise, music and setlists are still going to be randoming into the blog, plus  leadership and career oriented content since these are things I like and have appeared to be sustainable.  Here are examples of some leadership and career posts:

Net-Net

Blogging for the past two years has been an interesting meander and after reviewing the convesations I have a significantly different view on what is valuable and what is not.     I really think everyone with a blog should invest some time looking at the progress, content and conversations over time and put a plan in place based on what you learned.

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July 21, 2009 by
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