The Brains of the Outfit

It’s election time in lots of locales, and that has made for some interesting social media bedfellows, if you will.

I’ve heard more about local and state elections and referenda than I could imagine possible – or that I really care to know, to be honest. Some of the state issues are interesting, since they have bearing on the overall national agenda, but the local stuff isn’t quite so fascinating.

A case in point: I recently spoke to the Roswell, Georgia Kiwanis club on Using Social Media to Build your Business, a presentation I thought went very well, and it garnered me a few local Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and LinkedIn connections. Well, many of those folks work for the municipality, are running for public office, or are campaigning for someone who is running for public office.

I’ve heard more tweets about voting for various city council candidates in the last week than I can shake a stick at. I can’t vote for these folks. I don’t know their platforms. In many cases, I don’t know what party they represent.

I’m hoping that I’m the exception in these Tweeters follower group – but I doubt it.

One particular gentleman running for State House truly has missed the point of community-building, both off- and on-line. I met him in person at the Suwanee Business Alliance. (Great local business alliance, by the way). He came on really strong – classic politico – shaking hands, introducing himself, immediately launching into his pitch, starting with his party affiliation. I politely excused myself, letting him know that I’m not a voter in his district. I didn’t tell him that I was in general disagreement with his party’s politics. Maybe that was my mistake.

He somehow got hold of one of my business cards. I hand them out like water, so it’s not surprising. The next thing I knew I was getting his direct e-mail campaigns, he was following me on Twitter, I got a friend request from him on Facebook, he invited me to become a fan of his campaign on Facebook, and he asked to connect with me on LinkedIn. This from a guy who I politely blew off at a networking event!

Know your audience, folks. Targeting is the key, whether it’s on social media or anywhere else. You can very quickly make an enemy of someone who at worst was indifferent. I’d rather have someone not care at all about what I’m doing than actively discourage people from voting for me or buying my product.

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During my guest appearance on High Velocity Radio, I talked about using event marketing to build your online community, but that’s only a small part of the story. Your offline and online communities should feed each other in an infinite loop.

I attend a lot of offline networking events, and the first thing I do when I get home is go through whatever business cards I’ve gathered and try and find those people on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. For large events, this can be pretty time consuming, which is why I can’t wait for the future that Cory Casciato of Westword postulates, where social media is completely integrated. If I find them, I invite them to connect.

If they connect with me via whatever channel they choose, they’re going to receive notifications of new blog posts, my media appearances, and probably see what events I’m attending on my profile. I’ll frequently meet with people from my online network at real-world events they’ve seen on either my social media profiles or those of my online connections. I’ve also gotten anecdotal evidence from people that they’ve seen or listened to one of my media appearances after seeing it on one of those outlets.

This is where your own events come in. Realize is hosting Food (& Wine!) For Thought on October 28th. We started promoting online earlier today, and already we have a pretty respectable number of attendees, all through social media channels. Interestingly, some of them have already passed the online invitations on to their friends, who have signed up for the event, and will likely join my online community. They’ll then get invited to future events, and get notified of offline activities.

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My dad is a pretty close follower of my company. He’s a fan of Realize on Facebook, claims that he reads my blog occasionally, and generally watches out for us.

I got an e-mail from him about a week ago. Apparently, he clicked into my Facebook profile and saw the word “crap.” Now you have to understand that I have no idea where the word “crap” appeared in my profile. Possibly one of my friends posted a comment with the offending word in it, but who knows? It brought about an interesting point about a major pitfall of social media – you don’t have 100% control over it, no matter what.

So how do you deal with it? Aside from some basic care about the choices you make in your networking, I think the answer is largely that you don’t. And it’s okay. Your brand will live, and thrive in the messy world of social media conversations.

Marketers like to think that we have control over our brands. We carefully craft messages. We push them to appropriate channels. We create tracking to make sure that we know people are reading them. We painstakingly design and craft and push and track and think that we control the brand.

Not so.

Sure, we can control what messages get put out in what channels, and who says what when we’re pushing our brand out there. But what we don’t control is brand perception – the ways in which those messages are received. We, at best, influence opinion about our brand, and thereby our company and product or service.

Social media gives us an opportunity to both push our messaging, and receive immediate feedback about the perception. But it does another thing, as well – the lack of control creates a level of humanity. People connect with people more than brands. Yes, you can argue brand involvement here, but overall, people connect more quickly and readily with the human. Also, people are willing to explore your brand if it has a viable social media strategy – it gives them a voice in what they like, don’t like, and allows them, at some level, to self-qualify.

And what’s better than that? I like having lots of prospects in my pipeline, but the prospects I like best are the ones that understand my business, what we can do for them, and realize there’s synergy.

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The first “P” of marketing, price, has been suffering on the Internet well prior to the advent of Web 2.0 and social media. Price continues to be slaughtered online.

When setting a price for a good or service, generally accepted principle says that you should cover all of your variable costs for one unit, and a portion of your fixed costs.

In the digital domain, variable costs are frequently so low as to be considered zero, while fixed costs are relatively much higher. This is due to the ease of which units of a digital product are reproduced and distributed once created. A great illustration of this is the uproar caused by music sharing. For an individual, the costs of ripping a CD to MP3 or copying a purchased MP3 are so little that millions of people do it frequently, much to the chagrin of the music companies.

This, and a perception factor, has led to the demise of smart pricing for Internet-based products, though these two things are closely related.

The perception is that the Internet and software should be free. What created this perception? A variety of factors combined to create this – one, open-source software, much of which is available for free. Another is the wide variety of commercial and personal products that are available for free online. There are also many freeware versions of commercial applications that are good enough to be used on their own. The frontier-like nature of the Internet also helped create that perception.

What is a company really designed to do? Make profits for its owners. How many household Internet names do that? Very, very few. Youtube doesn’t. Twitter doesn’t. LinkedIn doesn’t. Facebook is profitable on an EBITDA basis, but not yet cash-flow positive. Why? Because all of these give away their basic service and depend on ad revenue to survive – a model that venture capitalists are fleeing.

How to counteract this? Well, first, charge a sustainable price for goods and services – even digital ones. Second? Take advantage of it. Use the free and inexpensive services provided on the Web to minimize the “investment” side of the ROI equation, creating enormous returns on investment for online marketing projects.

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Even when a startup company like ours is really 10 years old, it’s still scary and exciting setting all this up. Building a brand identity, and then capitalizing on that brand identity through a Web site, collateral material, business cards, and social media is a ton of work!

The funny thing is this – we’ve been so busy supporting our clients that we haven’t had time to focus the marketing mirror on ourselves until now. And then when we really started to build it all, everything changed in a really great way.

We realized a couple things. First, nobody is going to believe we know any of this stuff unless we’re doing it for ourselves. And not just personal Facebook and LinkedIn pages, and tweeting on Twitter, and writing this blog. But all the strategies that make those channels valuable to our clients. So we’re trying to be the exemplar, and that’s a lot of work – especially when you can’t bill for it.

The other thing was that while our personal networks are powerful, we’re starting to reach the ends of our ability to expand, and expand we must if we want to best serve our clients. So here we are. Welcome to Realize.

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