Confessions of an eBiz Junkie

New FTC Guidelines and Social Marketing

On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission approved revisions to the guidelines it gives advertisers on appropriate use of endorsement and testimonial ads.

The update includes new examples to reinforce the notion that connections between advertisers and endorsers (connections that may not be obvious to consumers) must be disclosed. These are timely updates with the continued emergence of word of mouth marketing via the social web. 

From my point of view, this is a welcomed update. We continually work to understand the online behaviors of our audience. Peer to peer content continues to be among the most trusted sources of information during the buying cycle, regardless of size of purchase. Before purchasing just about any product, I always turn to opinions of others for perspective.

The notion of paid blogging (and micro-blogging) has been an emerging and heavily debated trend for some time. To me, exploiting consumer trust by seeding fictitious or paid 'peer reviews' is simply bad business, and runs the risk of truly damaging the credibility of user-generated content and the social web in general.

There's much more detail in the entire update for those interested.  I look forward to digesting a bit more, but in the meantime, will continue to take the approach of transparency rules... It's the safe and proper approach.

Are your ears burning?

Anyone every ask you if your ears were burning? If so, it means they were talking about you in some fashion or another. I often wonder in what context my name came up? Was it good or bad? Who else was in on the discussion?

Imagine if I could have a tool that let me know when such conversations were taking place... Letting me know when I'm being talked about and in what vein... I'd use it - you?

Readers of this blog know that we're focusing energy on driving awareness and subsequent proficiency within the 2.0 world across our global employee population. No small feat.

We've used channels like 'Lunch and Learn' events, monthly community meet-ups, internal Tweetups, etc; - All designed to drive awareness, comfort and proficiency within the social web.

I wanted to share another tool in the arsenal that we've just launched as it may be of value in your toolkit as well. The 'dashboard' below is running on a couple of large plasma screens within EMC campuses' with more being added soon. It pulls in near real-time tweets and photos tagged to our brand.

Friends who hung out at the Bloggers Lounge at EMC World will recall something very similar.

The bottom line - we're putting conversations about our brand front and center. We're using this to remind folks that conversations are taking place 24x7 - and we need to not only be aware, but be listening and engaged.

Will it drive awareness across the enterprise overnight? No... But, it will draw a crowd. It will have employees asking others "What's that? What's a Tweet? How can I participate?". In the midst of transformation, such questions are music to my ears.

An Interview with EnterpriseLeadership.org

I'll be sure to tag this one with #ShamelessSelfPromotion ;)

The nice folks over at EnterpriseLeadership.org reached out some time ago and wanted to understand a bit more about our journey into the social realm - with focus on the internal side of the house. We ended up doing a brief video interview that I wanted to share.

A few bits from the discussion:

• Brands who do not embrace internal social / collaborative tools now will face a significant challenge (not to mention security risks) as employees flock to freely available and easily deployed external tools.
• We discuss our inside - out approach to SM, and how developing internal proficiencies has dramatically improved out evolution beyond the confines of our firewall.
• Be wary of the ROI game. Productivity gains, breakdown of organizational silos, employee affinity, enabling global collaboration, etc; - These are soft benefits, but will transform your business. Don't underestimate them.

Domain Scams - Wanna Buy a Bridge?

Just wanted to share one of those things that crossed my desk and invoked a "Really?!?!" moment.

The world of domain management can be quite complex, but is also a critical component of your digital strategy. Many overlook the fact that a slip in renewing your primary domain(s) could result in your email and web sites becoming unavailable... And in extreme cases, you may not be able to get it back.

As you'd expect, we get emails daily from folks who either want to buy or sell us domains. This one was particularly interesting...

An email offered to sell us a particular domain with EMC in the title. It was for a bargain basement price of $199. What a steal!!! As is par for the course, we did a whois lookup to see who the current owner was and learn about the domains history.

Here's the twist...  It's not registered. No one is currently holding the domain. For a mere $20, I could register it myself in about 18 seconds.

It's clever, I'll give them that. Unsuspecting web folks may be apt to jump on this 'deal of the day', only to unnecessarily give the 'middle man' a 10x markup for doing absolutely nothing.

I'm inclined to buy it for $20, then respond to the 'seller' advising that we're extremely interested in acquiring it - and are assuming that the $199 is just to get us in the door to start bidding.. :)

Keep an eye out, my friends.. And since we're on the topic, when was the last time you checked in to see if any of your domain assets were up for renewal?

Going In With a Plan

It's so easy to be enamored with emerging social tools. You're hard pressed to watch the news these days without hearing about Twitter this or Facebook that. If you're sitting anywhere near a marketer, you can almost hear the gears ticking as visions of mass messaging blasts dance merrily in their heads.

Establishing a presence in the social web will likely backfire if you go in with intentions of pushing out your message in a 1.0 fashion. It's been said 17 bazillion times and I'll likely say it a bazillion more - it's about engaging your audience, establishing meaningful relationships and adding value.

Often times folks need to be on Twitter or Facebook because of it's shiny object appeal. Jumping in for the sake of it will likely lead to failure. Jumping in with clearly defined objectives will dramatically improve your chances of success.

Am I sharing the obvious? Perhaps. I mean, EVERYONE puts time into considering objectives, audience, success criteria, etc; before embarking on a project, right?

I was recently pulled into a discussion with an internal group who wanted to discuss their plans to leverage the social web. I accept the invite fearing that I'll have to do my usual routine discussing the need for commitment, desire to truly engage, and so forth.

How happy am I when I walk in and their lead in slide is 'Primary Objectives'.

It may seem obvious in any project you embark on. However, given the ease of setup in a 2.0 world, I fear it's very easy to shoot before aiming. Doing so will most often lead to failure. Even worse, potential damage to your brand.

Walking in with eyes wide open, understanding WHAT you're trying to accomplish, understanding WHO your audience is and considering how you'll MEASURE for success are particularly important in the social space.

Changing Behaviors

Can you teach Social Media skills? There's a great blog post and subsequent discussion happening over at Adam Cohen's blog.

I land squarely in the 'absolutely yes' camp - But perhaps with a bit of a twist.

I believe we have two crowds in the workforce today. Those who have grown up online, and consider communicating via text messages as routine as eating food, and those who haven't. For the latter, the notion of sharing and collaborating to the degree we do online often seems foreign and perhaps even ludicrous.

From a business perspective, there is one common denominator. You have to set the ground rules.

Regardless if you're a power blogger or if you're first Tweet was a lifetime event for you, there needs to be common rules of the road. First and foremost, establish your over-arching guidelines for acceptable and desired behavior.

So back to training... In a business environment, I'm all about establishing proficiency across the employee population.

I see this as different from training around Social Media (hence the twist). Yes there is a need to understand the tools at hand and how to leverage... To me, it's more about the fundamental shift in the way we were taught to operate. I compare the business world today to that of the mid 90's - It's a completely different playing field.

As we go through our journey at EMC embracing E2.0, I see walls breaking down. I see dramatic shifts in the way we communicate internally and externally. I see new management styles being employed - with far more matrixed collaboration than ever before... The list goes on and on.

We are operating in a fundamentally different way than we have in years past - and have only scratched the surface.

To expedite and get the most of this transformation, I believe foundational training in enterprise 2.0 techniques and behaviors is absolutely crucial. I see Social Media training as a component of this, but would want to re-introduce employees to the new ways to engage and interact behaviorally in a 2.0 world first.

Thanks Adam, for spinning up this discussion. I'd like to think that some type of E2.0 education will be common place in the business world in the very near future.

Measuring ROI in Social Media

I had an opportunity to chat with Andrew Conry-Murray, Business Editor for InformationWeek & Network Computing. Andrew was working on an article that was published this morning entitled "Can Enterprise Social Networking Pay Off?". Give the article a read for context - but I wanted to take the discussion a bit further here as well.

To me, it's less a question of CAN enterprise social networks pay off - but rather HOW. As Andrew suggests, the metrics are a bit softer than we're used to. After all, quantifying productivity gains or the value of breaking down geographic and organizational silos is rather difficult.

So let's start breaking down some of the opportunities to measure ROI here...

Brands, Twitter and Follow Backs

I've recently hit the 2k threshold for Twitter. For those that don't know, there's a mystery algorithm that limits you from following more than 2k people if you do not have enough following you. At the end of the day, it makes sense as they're really just trying to limit spammers... And no one likes a spammer.

I pinged the crew @ Twitter about this, and rec'd a canned response stating something along the lines of 'Best practice suggests a one to one ratio of following to followers....". Great, but not helpful given my situation.

So I'm now forced to go through and figure out how to un-follow some to follow others. This and bad paper cuts are two inconveniences that my life could deal without.

The Blurring Lines of Work and Life

Here's a simple question that I've been pondering a bit of late...

When you participate in the social realm - such as a comment on Twitter or updating your Facebook status - Who do you represent? Yourself? Your employer? Both?

I'm always cautious about what I post. Perhaps to a fault. I'll consider all sorts of angles from potential audience to potential misinterpretation. There's no doubt that my contributions in public forum are influenced by my affiliation with EMC. I'm not suggesting this is right or wrong - it's how I'm wired.

Let me give you an example. I'll make it fictitious to cover myself (see, there I go again).

Intranets - Build it and they might come... Build it cool, and they likely will

I love to connect with industry peers... There's little I find as gratifying as sharing experiences and learning from like-minded folks.

I was chatting with such a group last week and the topic of Intranets came up. They mentioned a very common problem and asked if we suffered similar pains. Specifically, they're struggling with hundreds of disparate Intranet sites across their company... No standards, no common infrastructure, no commonalities whatsoever. A common story, right?

We suffered similar in recent years. I'd be misrepresenting if I suggested we've completely nailed it. We haven't - but have indeed make tremendous progress around unifying the once disconnected experience. While culture is always a dynamic ingredient, I think the path towards unifying your internal web experience can be relatively straightforward.