Reality Spikes

Social media – love it or hate it, but in 2010, it’s a fact of business life. So, you’re going to have to get into it now or plan for your brand to fade like those famous Cadillacs left baking in the hot Amarillo sun.

The good news? You can get up to speed quickly and begin using these fabulous tools to build and manage relationships among clients, vendor partners, referral sources, and prospects.

To get you going, here are some stats on three of the most influential social media sites used by businesses today.

LinkedIn – professional network “connects you to your trusted contacts and helps you exchange knowledge, ideas, and opportunities with a broader network of professionals” (per LinkedIn)

• 53 million users
• Established in May 2003
• 488,000 groups (433,600 in English)

Webworkerdaily.com says, “You can do so much more with it than simply look up contacts: find gigs, sell products, expand your networks, grow your business and gain free publicity.”

Nielsen’s posted numbers on LinkedIn’s advertising page reveal that LinkedIn is the “world’s largest audience of affluent, influential professionals.”

According to Andrew Ran Wong on Studio13.com, “LinkedIn Groups is your destination to find and join communities of professionals based on common interest, experience, affiliation, and goals. Stay in touch with organizations, schools, and companies that you are and were a part of, network with professionals with similar interests and goals, and collaborate in a professional community online.”

Facebook – social utility to improve communications among people

• 350 million active users (those who have visited Facebook in the last 30 days)
• Founded in February 2004
• Extreme recent growth: 100 million users in August 2008, 250 million in July 2009, 300 million in September 2009

On the Social Media and Your Business blog, Stephanie Chandler encourages the use of fan pages (”You can create a fan page for a business, product, book, author, speaker, celebrity or just about anything you want.”) as well as groups: “Online groups allow you to network virtually with potential clients and peers.”

New York Times’ Kermit Pattison cites that, ”A growing number of businesses are making Facebook an indispensible part of hanging out their shingles. Small businesses are using it to find new customers, build online communities of fans and dig into gold mines of demographic information.”

And Pattison advises businesses to avoid hard-sell techniques: “The best practitioners make Facebook less about selling and more about interacting. Engage with fans and critics. Listen to what people are saying, good and bad. You may even pick up ideas for how to improve your business.”

Twitter – realtime microblogging (140 characters) platform that capitalizes on the texting capabilities of smart/mobile phones

• Established as independent company May 2007
• Approximately 50 million Twitter accounts

“Twitter has more raw capability for users than anything since e-mail,” said Clay Shirky, who wrote “Here Comes Everybody,” a book about social media. “It will be hard to wait out Twitter because it is lightweight, endlessly useful and gets better as more people use it. Brands are using it, institutions are using it, and it is becoming a place where a lot of important conversations are being held.”

David Carr, business writer for the New York Times, writes that “the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice.”

Carr continues, “On Twitter, anyone may follow anyone, but there is very little expectation of reciprocity. By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.”

A quick glance at the stats for these three resources shows growth over the past 24 months that cannot be refuted. Longevity for social networking in some form is considered a sure bet for our future.

So, how complicated is it to get engaged in social media? These three are presented here as the basic trio for small and mid-sized businesses (all Fortune 500 businesses have key executives participating on Twitter, and most have Facebook presence). 

Tips for engaging with each of the three I’ve shared can be found at the sites below. My best recommendation to the as-yet-unannointed business decision-maker is to just pick one and dive in. Expect to begin by reading and lurking to get a feel for the tone of the site. And plan to spend some time setting up at the beginning. But know that it will be worth it in the long run.

• Social Media for Business - from Mashable
• The Building Blocks of Social Media for Business - Chris Brogan’s Blog
• Guide to Facebook Pages
• LinkedIn for Business
• Twitter 101 for Business
• Facebook for Business (e-book) - from Hubspot

These three sites are the tip of an enormous iceberg of social media and marketing resources for business. Other business-relevant realms to explore include SlideShare (a delicious resource), Flickr, YouTube and the blogosphere. But more on these later….

Conspicuous consumption is out. Frugal is back in fashion. Whether you serve the retail market or survive in the business-to-business world, cautionary spending is the norm and value is the new black.

According to Kathy M. Kristof who writes a personal finance column for the Los Angeles Times, the shift to careful spending is significant.

“The brutal economic downturn has battered stock portfolios and home values and made easy credit tough to come by.

“All the data tell the same story. People who spent every dime of their disposable income two years ago are now saving and paying down billions in debt. They’ve shifted from shopping at luxury stores to buying from discounters. They’re scrimping with more vigor and tenacity than economists have seen in decades.”

Popular culture no longer turns up its nose at the discount shopper. For example, the Smart Cookies exhort their members (former overspenders and careless shoppers) to exploit any and every resource to avoid going into debt for holiday purchases. Cutting back is chic, with discussions of where the best deals can be found dominating the coffee talk.

According to Kristof, blogs that encourage cheap chic, written by the Web’s frugalati, abound: The Frugal Diva, Budget Fashionista, Thrifty Chick, and Frugal Fashionista (even Neiman Marcus advertises on the latter site!). These are the new tools – the new strategies – of the wise and successful shopper.

Jack Kyser, founding economist of the Kyser Center for Economic Research at the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp says, “Roughly two-thirds of economic activity comes from consumer spending. If consumers are being very cautious, that’s going to act as an economic brake.”

And it’s not just about consumer-focused products and services. How is the typical business’ approach to marketing, selling and decision-making changing? A review of numerous insights, commentaries, blogs and “top ten” lists about the incoming year 2010 reveals much…

About brands, from BrandingStrategyInsider.com:

• Brand authenticity and brand value are key. Empty brands will not be acknowledged by those whose purchase decisions require sticking power.
• Consumer expectations are expanding, not contracting. According to Robert Passikoff, “Every day consumers adopt and devour the latest technologies and innovations, and hunger for more. Smarter marketers will identify and capitalize on unmet expectations.”
• Pre-purchase word of mouth and post-purchase buzz will drive changes in customer care matrices, media spend constructs and how businesses view and use social marketing and social media.

Personal branding is one of the new requirements for small business leadership. As described by Dan Schawbel in his post Personal Branding Trends for 2010 on the Small Business Trends website, “Your brand is your clear differentiator and your competitive advantage.  It’s also the first impression you have with potential customers and the source of attachment you create with your current customers.”

The famed JWTIntelligence shares the top ten trends about business, the economy, culture, the aging population, and the environment:

• Everything is in real time, thanks to Twitter, Facebook, and the digital revolution.
• Transparency, disclosure and details are at the top of the discriminating purchaser’s list.
• The image is more compelling than the written word.
• How green is your packaging? Not caring about your carbon footprint may create problems for buyers.

Sales trends: Drew Stevens suggests that those who manage and execute sales will need to be more efficient and more productive in 2010:

• Lead generation can benefit from technological advances in target market optimization.
• Preparation by an invigorated, well-trained sales force means knowing more than the client about its challenges, the service/product being sold, and how to customize solutions.

Finally, from Geoff Ramsey, founder and CEO of eMarketer.com, expect to see ”an accelerated migration of ad dollars from traditional to digital media. According to Forrester Research, 59% of US marketers plan to increase their budgets for digital by pulling funds from traditional outlets. Other sources support this shift, including a recent survey among Association of National Advertisers members and a separate study from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.”

Bottom line: To outsmart and outsell your competition, your team needs answers from your internal and external constituencies to establish a plan to move forward on these critical issues. Do you know how your firm will position itself? What must you do to be recognized as wise yet frugal? Can your marketing and communications strategy break through the morass of messages targeting customers to secure their interest (first) and loyalty (ultimately)?

You might want to begin asking questions of your target markets.

What the heck is going on? The furious dialogue between liberals and conservatives about the president’s decision to address students - for the first time in 18 years - in their classrooms doesn’t seem to be about the same activity. How could two sides have such emotional, angry and diverse perspectives? And what does this mean for our country, which was purportedly going to become less divided following last November’s elections ?

A quick summary of concerns from the two perspectives:

As of two days before the planned delivery, the White House was attempting to allay some parents’ fears that the planned, back-to-school speech is an attempt to ply American children with liberal propaganda.

On Face the Nation, Education Secretary Arne Duncan stated that the president’s message was about “personal responsibility and challenging students to take their education very, very seriously.” He said that the Oval Office wants to see more high-performing schools, higher academic achievers, more college-bound students and more successful graduates.

Conservatives and critics were concerned that the aim of the speech was to recruit students to the liberal cause and brainwash them with socialism, based on the Department of Education’s “Menu of Classroom Activities” which was sent to schools and included the activity suggesting that school children write about “how they could help the president.”

CNN reports that conservatives were upset, even enraged, about the intrusiveness of a school-based address in an era of online access. Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer expressed his concern about the Oval Office using taxpayer money to indoctrinate children in a press release.

“As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology. The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the president justify his plans … is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power.”

There were those who remain perplexed with the resistance engendered by the president’s proposed address to students. According to Andy Ostroy, Huffington Post,

“President Barack Obama will address the nation’s school children in a speech promoting education, ambition, perseverance and the need to become civic-minded. It’s a terrific message designed to challenge and inspire today’s youth. But as expected, the issue has been hijacked by the right-wing lunatic fringe that’s either gone completely mad or lost all control of its racial bigotry. Either scenario is equal parts frustrating, infuriating, shameful and scary. Wild, unfounded accusations of indoctrination are flying at the president, and many children will be kept home from school to avoid the speech. It’s America’s Parents Gone Wild.”

The uproar over the speech is uniquely severe in Texas, where I live: the president’s plan to speak to public school students has elicited a full revolt among conservative Texas parents, many of  whom are planning to keep their children home Tuesday if their children are required to listen to the presentation. At this point, numerous major school districts have arranged to allow students to opt out of listening to the broadcast on campus.

To revisit my initial query, what the heck is going on?

• Might this strategic communications decision be part of an effort to boost Obama’s job approval ratings which have been on the decline this entire year?
• And whose fears are real: those of  conservatives or those of liberals?
• Finally, how might this presidential address be used to bring together a nation that is rapidly dividing each week?

What are your suggestions? I’m hopeful that someone will be able to apply some sense to this insanity.