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It was a wicked sense of déjà vu. The feeling was strong. I lost concentration driving on I-40 during rush hour (not a good idea). For a moment, I was channeling a former life. September is the quiet before the storm for e-commerce B2C retailers. September is the last time “quiet” can be safely used until about March. As a Director of Ecommerce, I didn’t sleep much between September and Christmas. Sweating and pacing I remember, sleeping not so much (lol).

We don’t want you to sweat and pace so much this fall. This post shares ways Atlantic BT can help your website make more money this holiday selling season. E-commerce is so sensitive. Business-to-consumer (B2C) Ecommerce websites can be tuned at this time of year. A tiny tweak here and there NOW makes more money over the next 12 weeks.

Five Ways Atlantic BT Can Help B2C Customers Today

Here are 5 B2C audits I would hire Atlantic BT to help with if I were still a Director of E-commerce.

Email Campaign Audit

Most e-retailers have a schedule for their email campaigns already on paper. Some have campaigns waiting in a tool such as Constant Contact, Bronto or Responsys. Campaign creative and segmentation are queued and ready to fire on a schedule. When I was a Director of E-commerce, Email was our most profitable channel. Email marketing consistently produced profit margins greater than 30%, much higher than the next most profitable channel. Ask these questions to increase results from your email marketing this holiday season:

• Is your marketing segmented and using personas?
• Are you sending relevant creative to your segments? (Hope you aren’t blasting same offer to everyone, a very BAD idea now.)
• Do your emails tell a story?
• Do your emails curate valuable social content?
• Do your emails look good on mobile devices?

If YES is the answer to all of these questions, you should be good to go. But it never hurts to have another set of experienced Internet marketing eyes reviewing your email campaign strategy and testing your assumptions. A tiny tune here or there can make a BIG difference in email marketing results.

Related article:  Email Marketing is Live Ammunition

Post Panda and Penguin SEO Audit

Google’s Panda and Penguin updates are creating sudden and dramatic changes to the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Even if you’ve come through fine until now, Google algorithm changes continue. Don’t wait until there is a problem. Hire Atlantic BT (or someone) to check SEO basics. Search Engine Optimization is an area where tiny tweaks can keep you on page one or banish your website to the cheap seats, forcing your website to earn its way back (been there, done that; trust me, you NEVER want to have to live through a Google reset).

Landing Page Audit, PPC Review & PPI

Do you have special landing pages for the holidays? We organized gifts for him and her with special search result pages, links, copy and graphics. We also increased our PPC and drove to specific landing pages on hot products or unique merchandise bundles. Landing pages are as much art as science. If you’ve tested and tested and tested all summer and are ready to use the winners from those tests, good. But even after a summer of testing, a quick landing page and PPC review can come up with small suggestions that may double conversions. Such a look over your shoulder is especially important if you don’t have a testing culture (take our Testing Culture Quiz).

Google is offering Pay Per Inclusion, PPI, for the first time this year. PPI functions similar to a shopping comparison site such as PriceGrabber.com. You load a feed and BUY your way into the “organic” index. If you’ve never purchased PPI, GET HELP. We bought PPI from Yahoo back when Google said PPI was original sin and I was a Director of Ecommerce. If you can’t work your way into your most important organic terms in this lifetime, PPI may be a good answer for presence on key terms. PPI is NOT intuitive and only as good as your feed, so get help unless you are a shopping comparison engine pro.

WebSite Audit

It never ceased to amaze me when our customers saw our website better than we did. Customers don’t have what the Heath brothers call, “the curse of knowledge” in one of my favorite books, Made To Stick.  When you look at a website each day, you don’t see it anymore. Since 20% of your pages will capture 80% of your holiday revenue, hire an external resource to review those pages. Have someone audit those “mission critical” pages with a fine tooth comb. Grammar and spelling matter, image size matters to site speed, and too much javascript in your <head></head> hurts SEO. Get another trained pair of eyes or two to review your most critical pages, and make sure they look behind the curtain at code.

Mobile Audit

Holiday 2012 will be the first MOBILE holiday. Mobile commerce is coming, but mobile curation is here. If your website or emails don’t look good on mobile devices, you will lose sales and traffic. Mobile is used to curate communication. Mobile is easy to use to delete or ignore groups of emails. If your website doesn’t look good on mobile, if it is slow or if your emails aren’t optimized for mobile devices, you will lose sales and damage your brand. There are technical things Atlantic BT’s team can do to help your website and emails look better and sell more on mobile devices this holiday season. If you are uneasy about mobile, ask Atlantic BT for a Mobile Audit.

Monday Tips For B2B
There are other ways we can help, other audits that would provide value, such as a Google Analytics Audit or a Social Media Marketing Audit. We can discuss the other ways we can help if you have questions or concerns. Conducting one or several of these B2C e-commerce audits will help you sell more this holiday season. Need help conducting those audits?

Call us at: 919.518.0670

Email Mike.McTaggart(at)Atlanticbt(dot)com (Head of Consulting Services)

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Cool Twitter Header Contest Winner

And the winner is….

We All Won Here’s How
We all won by watching two social media titans, Phil Buckley (@1918) and Gregory Ng (@GregoryNg) compete. Watching taught valuable Internet marketing lessons such as:

• 1:10:89 Rule.
• Gamify.
• Speed Matters.
• Storify.
• Fun is contagious.

1:10:89 Rule
The 1:10:89 Rule says 1% of your website’s traffic will contribute, 10% will vote on the contributions of the 1% and 89% will silently consume and support. Phil Buckley (@1918) has 3,314 Twitter followers. Gregory Ng (@GregoryNg) has 3,906. These local Raleigh social media experts weren’t the only ones mentioning our Twitter Header Contest.

Topsy puts social mentions of the Twitter Header Contest at almost 200.  Figure an average Twitter following of 2,000 followers and the Twitter Header Contest generated 400,000 impressions. There were 352 votes. Some would look at such a spread and feel failure. Perhaps I’ve been doing this Internet marketing stuff too long (lol), but I think about a little game like our Twitter Header Contest differently. Here are some of the positives:

• New Organic Page 1 Listing (Twitter Header Contest we are #5 according to Mike’s).
• 106 Tweets, 87 Facebook likes, 4 G+
• Votes came from 20 countries including Japan, Canada, UAE and Jordan.
• New Tent Poll (this idea can link out to new content creating new conversion points).
• Have a contest we can repeat (and it will get bigger as awareness grows).
• New Traffic (can’t create a relationship with people that don’t know you exist).
• Low cost game (like most games, this one didn’t cost much)

I’ve had to learn an eastern philosophy to be an Internet marketer. Everything we do matters. Everything teaches and helps. Even things that seem to HURT really help because we learn, modify and move on. Would it have been great to have 30,000 votes? Sure, but we are thankful for 352 people who took time out of their lives to think about Atlantic BT and the cool twitter headers we shared and who voted. Thanks.

Gamify
Is there any Internet marketing that isn’t better with a game? NO is the answer to that question (lol). Games guru Jane McGonigal believes games can save the world. I’m reading her book Reality Is Broken and becoming a believer. I was half there already after writing Gamification: Winning Hearts Minds And Loyalty Online with the Jordans (Jon and his sister Joanna) and the team here. Games may be the stickiest content on earth as our Twitter Header Contest proved again.

Speed Matters
Phil and Greg demonstrated the give and take, stimulus/response nature of what we do for a living (Internet marketing). Back in the day, when I worked in marketing for M&M/Mars or NutraSweet, we could campaign like an army invading a country. We could organize our strategic plans, anticipate response and move slow and deliberate.

That time is gone. NOW is the time that matters most in Internet marketing and now changes in unanticipated ways every second. When every action has an equal and opposite reaction winning is in the margin. Another way of saying this is tiny things make huge differences online. Tiny things, those things easy to loose in the fog of war, are the difference between a new car and a set of steak knives. Speed matters.

Storify
With two days left and votes starting to lag I wrote a little Casey At The Bat story on Google Plus about our clash of local social media titans. That story, the magic of a deadline, and the “Who Will Win” tension between @1918 and @GregoryNG put new life in the contest contributing 15% of the votes.

I heard a Marketing Director for Warner Brothers discuss, “Putting impressions into the marketplace,” at the Expion Racing Ahead Social Media Summit a few months ago. Putting impressions into the marketplace with intent is an apt description of Internet marketing where “intent” is conversion. Storify is the best way to “put impressions into the market” so those impressions engage and convert.

Fun Is Contagious
Humor is a form of currency online. How else can you explain the popularity of cat videos (lol). I say that and boy if you could only see the crazy things MY cat does (LOL). Our desire for  THE FUN is increasing as time compresses our lives. Our lives are being compressed by computers, phones, families, school, dogs, cats and everything, so creating fun games with a story feels like a great idea.

You don’t have to convince any of our finalists, power Internet marketers all, about the importance of fun, games and stories. Our thanks to our local titans (Phil @1918 and Greg @GregoryNg), our international curators (Khaled @Shusmo and Susan @eddebainbridge) and our newcomer (Chanda Gohrani @black_headed).

Thanks to everyone who shared Twitter Headers. People who submit are the magic 1%, the 1% who help us all become better.

Thanks.

Twitter Header Resources

Great, simple example of how to change your Twitter Header is on SarahsFav.es.

Why Changing your Twitter Header is a Darwin thing on ScentTrail Marketing.

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What business are we Internet marketers in now? I know the ROI brigade believes we are in the making money business. Here is a shocker for them. Making money is at the end of a much longer means curve. Making money is NOT and never has been a means to some greater end for a company. Making money is a trailing indicator, a final report card. Asking one of those simple and complex at the same time questions helps. What is money?

What is Money?

Money is an idea, a confidence. Pegged to gold, money had a physical value, a physical presence (still mostly mirage, but that is another post). Nixon set money free from the gold standard on April 15, 1971. Money then became what it has always been – pure confidence.

Money has a single mission – to replicate itself. That mission isn’t judgmental, biased or much impacted by our human desires and wills (lol). Money as an abstract construct, as an idea, only has a single purpose – self-replication.

Warren Buffet explain why he didn’t give money to charity, years ago, before he made his amazing gift to the Gates Foundation. He was a better captain of the money replication team than any charity, he explained. Buffet would end up giving over $40 billion to the Gates Foundation to save the world. Pretty cool, and hard to argue with Warren as the captain of the money replication team.

If this talk of replication as a single mission sounds familiar, you are an Internet marketer who has been reading my posts (here or on ScentTrail Marketing). As Internet marketers, we understand an important marketing truth: Content is king, and content has a single mission – self-replication via likes, shares, tumbles, blogs and links.

Content’s Mission – Self Replication

The beautiful thing about content’s mission is there is no Warren Buffet, no 86,000 pound content replication silverback Gorilla who dominates the replication market. I’ve had blog posts dashed off on a Saturday end up reaching almost a million people via power Retweeters. If you’ve read Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, you recognize my Content Replication Cycle bell curve as his technology adoption life cycle:

Our jobs, our Internet marketing mission impossible (lol), is to move the slider on the bell curve, to increase the size and speed of content replication. Content replication laws are forming NOW (almost as I write this). There are no hard and fast, “Will Go Viral,” rules, and there may never be such immutable rules or laws. Things that make content go viral, such as pop culture, change fast. Change happens on whims, much like a school of fish responding to a signal only they feel: Content influence darts this way and then that.

Here is another look at Moore’s famous bell curve. This curve describes how much of your content will go viral, a small amount to the very right of the curve:

I’ve had 5 pieces reach more than 2M people via Retweets. I did some back-of-the-envelope math, and that is a little less than 1% of the content I’ve created.  This “Highly Viral Content” is on the far right of the Content Replication Performance chart above.

Since our jobs as Internet marketers is to move the viral bar, to increase the number of posts that earn viral pickup, here are common characteristics of my 5 “highly viral” posts:

* Shorter is better.
* Power Retweeters MUST support.
* Didn’t write to be viral: Viral happens.
* Surf (i.e., write about) large cultural and business waves such as Social Media Marketing.
* Use powerful platforms such as Technorati sometimes.
* 2 of the 5 were written and posted on Saturday (breaking every rule, LOL).
* Tools and tool reviews are important. Every post discussed cool tools in some way.

Is it possible to use these conclusions to move the slider of the viral marketing bell curve? Maybe (lol). Don’t forget we are discussing the top and middle of a conversion funnel. Viral content can fill up the funnel, but conversion all the way to money requires another series of very delicately balanced steps – Imagine a ballet around broken glass. Don’t get lost in the viral content chase. Chase viral content because it chases back in the form of CASH (lol).

Perhaps my most valuable advice is Don’t TRY to create viral content. If you TRY, you fail. There is no way to automate viral pickup. Viral pickup requires too many spontaneous variables to ever become routine.  Increase chances by:

• NOT trying to get mass pickup (irony is a bitch).
• Write about what you know and love.
• Get to know some power retweeters.
• Don’t be above asking for a favor.

I keep a running total of “owed” and “earned” favors. Some favors I won’t be able to pay back in this lifetime, but that doesn’t mean I won’t try.

Good luck, and if you have a great purple cow, dog-bites-man, content-goes-viral story, be sure to share. Maybe we can help create a second act for your, “I was on the way to the store when….”, highly viral content. If you have stories of content that “should have but didn’t” go viral, share those too (we all have ’em).

Keep writing, and write more and more, faster and faster and better and better no matter what happens.

Thanks to Jan Gordon and her consistently GREAT curation on Scoop.it. Jan inspired this post. See my post from yesterday on Why Your Content Must Spring Legs and Walk Around the World.

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What Business Are You In?
The world is a noisy place. Our job as Internet marketers is to win the battle for customer hearts and minds. Great products are the table stakes of this new Internet marketing game. The ante is knowing how to use content as a knife to cut through the chaos and clutter of contemporary marketing.

Storytelling is a very important tactic. Storytelling isn’t hidden anymore. The secret is out. Everyone is hearing about the importance of telling great stories. Many talk the storytelling and viral content talk, but few walk the walk. My friend Jan L. Gordon, Curatti, talks and walks new marketing in magical ways. Jan’s approach is to share, explain, cajole and coax knowledge from key ideas such as content curation. Her tools are words and images, images and words.

Below, I’ve copied a recent important example from Jan’s Curation, Social Business and Beyond Scoop.it. I will weigh in tomorrow. If you don’t already follow Jan, you should:

Jan L Gordon on Scoop.it

@Janlgordon on Twitter

Jan Gordon on Linkedin.

Quoted from Jan’s Scoop:

This piece [by Chris Sietsema] is from Convince&Convert. I selected it because it addresses a challenge that those of us who create or curate content face on a daily basis – how do we make our content socialable?

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

We know how difficult it can be to find balance between intrigue and usefulness. We understand that it is much easier to talk about or simply develop a tool than it is to create a talkable tool.

Meanwhile, there is a realization that we need to develop a hybrid content marketing solution – one that is social and has substance.

Socialable content has to invite discussion, create a call to action, while informing people.

Here are some highlights:

Give your content youtility:

**Answer common questions. Does your website have a FAQ section?

**Why not translate that into useful, shareable content?

**Ask your consumer base what they need. What better way to find out what appeals to your customers than simply asking them.

Make Your Content Talkable:

**Make your content human. Sometimes utilities can fall flat if we don’t offer a way to show how they can and have impacted others

**Provide testimonials and attach real stories to your utilities so your audience can identify with their purpose.

**Add bits of entertainment, humor, fun. Is your content just boring?

**Give it elements that people would actually want to share and talk about. Simply add the ability to share. Creating something useful is more than half the battle. Often times, we just forget to let our audience spread the word.

**Allow and encourage your customers to share.

**By combining the effects of content that is worthy of chatter and extremely useful, we can create a harmonious content marketing program.

**Above all, try to avoid creating drab content that lacks both utility and appeal.

Reviewed by Jan Gordon covering “Curation, Social Business and Beyond”

Read full article on www.convinceandconvert.com.

Marty’s Note

I will continue the theme with a piece tomorrow, even though Jan’s intelligent discourse is always a tough act to follow.

If you don’t want to miss Atlantic BT’s viral content:

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Two summers ago I rode a bicycle across America (Martin’s Ride to Cure Cancer). As you might imagine, there were times when life was at risk. But the most dangerous moment wasn’t on a bicycle. To add another irony, earlier in our most dangerous day, we (I had hired a team of two to help Martin’s Ride make it to the Santa Monica Pier after leaving from the Duke Cancer Institute) were wondering what it would be like to drive on one of these steep mountain roads during a driving rainstorm.

We weren’t RV pros. It had been a long day. We didn’t notice when all the RV pros pulled off the road. Suddenly and quietly, all the cutouts were full. We did notice a quickly darkening sky as we climbed up to 6,000 and then 7,000 feet.

One moment we could see, and the next we couldn’t . Rain came down so hard it laughed at the RV’s wipers even on the highest speed. Conversation died. Lightning struck on our right. My head jerked to look outside at the sound and flash. Turning back, I saw our driver Jeremy’s eyes hadn’t left the road. His concentration was immense. We weren’t going very fast, but it felt more precarious than 100 mph in our thirty foot long rented RV. The mountain was one lane over to our left. It became alive with water. Little rivers formed. Water washed rocks into the road. No one spoke. There was no choice now. We had to drive on.

Later I would think about the irony of riding several thousand miles on a bicycle, risking life and limb coming down mountains at over 60 mph, to possibly die in an RV rolling down God’s Grand Staircase. But in that moment irony was in the future. All we could do was hope and concentrate. After twenty tense minutes, the rain lessened. Jeremy said, “Will someone please say SOMETHING?” We laughed the BIG LAUGH of people glad to be alive driving down to the world’s most beautiful basement.

Expion’s Journey Toward “Social Business” – Summit Day 2

The second day of Expion’s Social Business Summit reminded me of Martin’s Ride’s perilous drive into God’s basement. Every Internet marketing team knows the feeling of fear and dislocation the web creates. Some smart Internet marketers have pulled into the RV cutouts to wait out our current storm, while others must drive on. Any marketing takes courage, focus and concentration. Driving in a lightning storm above 7,000 feet on a tiny road with a sheer drop takes the courage of persistence, a student’s humble approach, and great teachers.

Yesterday’s summary of Expion’s Summit Day One planted the need to create awesome “holy smokes” content into concrete, into the foundation of a new kind of marketing. Few can doubt days of making money from average anything are gone. Day two exposed two other important pillars for creating social business platforms: Storytelling and Mobile.

Peter Heffring, Expion CEO, Demonstrates Expion’s New UI

Before discussing Storytelling and Mobile, a quick note about Expion. Every now and again you meet a new genius, a genius you weren’t aware of prior to that moment. I don’t generally sling the “g” word around. I’ve had the chance to work with a few, like now with Atlantic BT’s founder, so I recognize the kind of intelligence worthy of the word. Peter Heffring (@pheffring), Expion’s CEO, is a genius. Jason Falls (@JasonFalls) tweeted, “Few know how smart this guy really is,” as Peter showed us his new baby – Expion’s new User Interface and Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards.

Enterprise social media seems like an oxymoron. Q: Social media is so hyper-local, how can it also be “enterprise”? A: It can’t. Social media, to be effectively used by a large multi-location company, has to have the right mix of command and control. Too much command from a Big Brother source, and an enterprise just looks stupid and solipsistic on social media. Too little control, and an enterprise’s social media volatility index goes through the roof.

I’ve worked for Fortune 100 companies. One thing they don’t tolerate is volatility beyond their ability to hedge. The truth of most large companies is THEY ARE ALREADY RICH. My father, a “pension plan manager” for wealthy individuals, made a good living hedging natural forces that tear wealth apart (taxes, bad investments, death, divorce).

My father’s clients were already RICH. Their goal was to never be POOR. The slow adoption of social media by larger companies was strange to me until I thought about my father’s career. My former employers P&G and M&M/Mars must hedge. Until Expion created the concept of “enterprise social media”, social media looked like a wild tumble down the Grand Staircase in an RV from the perspective of a large businesse.

Even the most risk adverse BIG COMPANY can understand how to use a tool to hedge, to move forward with “enterprise social media”. When I worked at M&M/Mars, there were years when the commodity trading desk made more money than the rest of the company by trading cocoa futures. Big companies understand how to hedge. Hedging is one of the things that made them big in the first place. Now you see why I KNOW Peter Heffring is a genius. Peter and a very talented team have created a new trading desk – an enterprise social media trading desk. Large, multi-location enterprises use Expion to hedge social media risk. Well done and brilliant.

Storytelling and Mobile

Expion’s Social Business Summit helps us start to see the three-legged stool of the new marketing: awesome content, shared as stories, across any device at any time. This is not to say traditional business values and practices don’t apply. Valuing customers in new and innovative ways, providing outstanding customer service, being relevant and creative aren’t LESS important, nor is social media marketing MORE important. Traditional marketing and sales are table stakes to play the new social storytelling mobile poker.

Social media means you are only as strong as your weakest social link, and your systems, your defenses, are probed 24/7/365. Welcome to the new marketing.

Expion Social Business Summit Summary

The link above is to an excellent summary of every Expion Social Business Summit presentation on Expion’s blog. Matt Wurst (@MWurst), Director Brand Strategy and Emerging Media at 360i, made a great presentation. Matt’s career started in sports marketing, and you can tell he is having fun. Q: How do you get mega sports stars to listen to your marketing ideas? A: Be very good, and have a coach’s enthusiasm.

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I kidded Matt on a tweet that his presentation included many “Tweetable Moments”.  Here are some of those “Tweetable
Moments”:

• Content is currency.
• Content’s purpose is the creation of a tribe of fans, supporters and advocates.
• Understand your audience by listening at least as carefully as you are speaking.
• Content marketing is the convergence of creative, community and promotion.
• If you are not combining earned and paid media, you can’t win.
• Be a good storyteller.
• Connect O2O (online to offline and vice versa).
• Live in Real Time, and realize marketing is 24/7/365 and “always on” now.
• Content and content marketing are evolving.

I could write a thousand words (our current word count if you are stalwart enough to still be reading this post) on each of these ideas. My favorite idea is the combination of earned and paid media. Matt’s forcefully stated idea plays to one of my favorite themes – Marketing is a tapestry weaving seemingly disparate elements into a beautiful quilt. The new marketing is rarely an “either/or” decision.

Just before the summit, an Atlantic BT customer asked me if he should be using Twitter OR Facebook. There is no OR anymore, as Matt’s presentation artfully implied. Tapestries need every warp and weft to make cohesive sense, to be strong and beautiful. I understand the locus of the question. The desire behind the question was to lighten the load, to do one thing less instead of one more thing.  Sorry, I had to explain, Facebook does different things than Twitter. Facebook AND Twitter are more powerful than Facebook alone. The marketing tapestry we weave depends on “awesomeness”, as various speakers explained, and that need only grows.

Regular readers of my posts here and on ScentTrail Marketing will recognize my Internet marketing secret: More and more, faster and faster, better and better. Matt’s presentation reinforced yet another favorite theme – the need to become a great content creator, a great tapestry weaver. Matt’s focus is on being a great marketer, NOT on being a power Facebook or Twitter user. It is easy to get lost. It is easy to focus on the wrong thing, such as becoming a power “X tool” user. Becoming a power user of Facebook, Twitter or Scoop.it doesn’t HURT, unless attaining such expertise distracts from becoming a better marketer. There is an old cliché that if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.

This kind of “hammer/nail” prejudice can be expensive in the storytelling, mobile and content-is-king, evolving environment Matt described. Any prejudice is expensive, but seeing the world as full of nails when it is in fact full of zebras, elephants, screws and drills creates the kind of blindside risk prejudice-free competitors love to exploit. Writing that last sentence, I realize why I love tools such as Expion.

The right tool, used at the right time, wipes away ego and prejudice. Once data is visualized, many manifest truths become clear. I’ve only ever “created” one website, FoundObjects.com, in 1999 (now RIP). People’s desires expressed via data told me and the teams I’ve managed what to do from there on, across the hundreds of sites we’ve created. That statement is only a little hyperbolic. In this brave new awesome storytelling delivered to a mobile device to a constant demand audience marketing world, the thing that keeps us from tumbling down God’s Grand Staircase is courage and faith, faith and courage. Both faith and courage were on display in abundance at the first, and what I hope will be annual, Expion Social Business Summit.

Thanks to Peter and the Expion team.

Further Reading

My notes from Expion Social Business Summit Day One.

Expion’s blog has several excellent summaries of the summit including:

Master Summary: http://www.expion.com/2012/09/racing-ahead-2012-thank-you-for-an-amazing-social-business-summit/

Jeremiah Owyang’s Keynote Summary

Highly Recommended – Content is the Currency in Social Business (Content: The Social Atom) by Owyang

Following social media thought leader Jeremiah Owyang, also highly recommend: @jowyang 

Big Brand Strategies from Coca Cola and H&R Block

Highly Recommended: Coca-Cola: Expressions Are More Valuable than Impressions, presented by Laura Ruff.

***
I apologize for being a day late on this post. My Twitter analysis is sitting in my brain, not on paper yet too. My first cuts at the Expion Social Summit tweet data from TweetReach are interesting, so stay tuned over the weekend as I attempt to catch up. Thanks again to the Expion team for a great event and including their web developers (us). – Marty

Expion’s first Social Business Summit was a hit. The summit came at you as fast as social media does, so very fast. Expion, an enterprise social media platform that helps manage the unique social media challenges of brands with multiple social location faces, pulled off a large and challenging event. As the conference wrapped on the second day, Peter Heffring, Expion’s brilliant CEO, admitted to having misgivings before the conference but none afterwards as he thanked a great team including Zena Weist, VP Strategy and Erica McClenny, VP Client Services. We are proud that Expion is an Atlantic BT web development partner. We helped create their website.

Given the  long agenda of great speakers and the amount of information, it was impossible to adequately liveblog Expion’s Social Business Summit. Great information fast and furious, so I gave up my love of the liveblog. There was so much great information, I broke it up into:

• My Impressions and Thoughts on Day 1.
• Impressions and Thoughts on Expion Social Summit Day 2.
• An analysis of the summit’s tweets (post by Friday).

Expion’s Social Business Summit Day 1: Marty’s Thoughts

Amber Naslund (@AmberCadabra) and Matt Ridings (@techguerilla) opened Expion’s Social Summit with a challenge. Isn’t it time time to move beyond social media? The facts are in, and they point to something new, they point to “social business”.

Amber and Matt were ambitious. Most social marketing presentations, they noted, discuss adoption vs. reality, where we are vs. where we want to go. Where we want to go is usually a series of incremental steps taken from where we are now. But Amber and Matt pointed out that we can’t get to a radically new “social business” platform unless we understand and adopt a new framework. They refused to “dumb down” their presentation to match the usual conventions. I applaud them for tackling the right issue in the right way, and I had a chance to share that feedback with them before they left on Day 2.

Thinking “Social Business Platform” and working backwards, instead of looking at where we are and climbing an incremental ladder. Wow, the idea of working backwards from the ideal destination, social business, is a great and important idea. Just because something is on this side of NEW doesn’t mean those doing it know what they are doing well enough to justify copying them. Incremental improvement of HERE rarely gets your marketing to THERE.

Here is an interesting chart Matt and Amber used. This chart from eMarketer surveyed marketers worldwide asking how they are using social media marketing:

Matt and Amber pointed out the 41% of marketers who indicate social media can help reduce costs.

At AtlanticBT, we see confirmation of every bar in this chart. We see a group of larger customers beginning to tap social media for internal communication and so reducing costs even as communications speed up. I like using the cost reduction data. Cost reduction speaks to creating a “social business”.  When social media does the heavy lifting of cost reduction, a social business framework is closer.

Creating A “Social Business” Framework
What is social business? Here are Matt and Amber’s notes explaining a new platform called “social business”:

First, we reach toward tools we love in order to understand where we should focus our efforts. We establish social media “maturity models” based on certain social table stakes: being on Facebook, having a listening platform, responding to customer inquiries on social sites.

We love maturity models for the same reason we love case studies: they help us take the shortcut that other organizations have learned the hard way. Maturity models give us a nice neat picture to use as reference, as a starting point and gut-check for what we’re doing or about to do.

Long term maturity models are extremely limiting. They’re based on averages, on businesses in the middle of the bell curve, on an amalgam of companies that don’t share your quirks, challenges, goals, uniqueness, or anything.
[emphasis mine, from Social Media To Social Business slides on SlideShare]

After managing a team that generated over $30M in online sales, I’ve learned the core truth of Amber and Matt’s idea. Internet marketing and social media marketing are in a constant roil where revision follows revision. Stand out, create awesomeness, find Seth Godin’s elusive “Purple Cow” content and discuss it in novel ways with a commitment to “social business”, or you won’t make money. Do what everyone else is doing, how everyone else is doing it, and your marketing will lose before you start.

I won’t deep dive Amber and Matt’s “social business framework” since they cover it well in their SlideShare.  I add my endorsement of the need for a larger idea, the idea of a social business platform with all the novel ideas, unique creative and collaborative impulses such an idea implies. Flip “Be Amazing” over, and “Be Creative” is on the other side. Adapt and adopt Matt and Amber’s framework or create your own, but write, “Become a Social Business” on your strategy and planning calendar for 2013.

Jason Falls: No BS Social Media

Jason Falls (@JasonFalls) does not disappoint. As Matt Wurst (@MWurst) noted on Twitter, “Jason Falls is about to start yelling at me, I think”.  Jason was about to yell at all of us (lol). He is the new Tom Peters, a passionate advocate for truth, justice and American marketing way. Jason’s ability to be funny and perfectly on point at 9 o’clock at night after an open bar that started at 6pm is testimony to his superhero social skills. That Jason has the ability to call BS only intensifies his punch.

The audience of over a hundred people were social media believers, but Jason’s presentation asked an implied question. You talk the social media marketing talk, but do you understand how to walk the new walk? Taco Bell knows how. Jason discussed a recent dust up on Twitter between Taco Bell and Old Spice.

You can read more about the social wrestling match between two power brands in Adweek. I received a more direct example.  A social media angel visited @ScentTrail:

As if summoned by Jason, @TacoBell picked up my 9:05 PM tweet with the Adweek link and responded, “Good Times” within 30 minutes. Note there was NO “@TacoBell” in my tweet. Taco Bell is just awesome, as Jason pointed out. They live and work in the REAL TIME that is social media marketing. I bet Taco Bell has an advanced ORM (Online Reputation Management) system such as Radian6 AND someone at the wheel who knows what they are doing. The need for having someone OTHER than an intern managing your social media is becoming apparent (read my post calling for a “Social Media Flow Manager” on ScentTrail Marketing).

Jason didn’t disappoint. His, Amber and Matt’s admonition to, “Be Amazing, Create HOLY SMOKES Content,”  set one of the three pillars of the Expion Social Summit in cement. Learn about the other pillars tomorrow when I attempt to do justice to a day so full of social media gold it will be hard to mine.

Our thanks to the Expion team for including us and selecting Atlantic BT to create a web presence for a very cool company. If you need an enterprise social media management platform, have someone run your team through an Expion demo. Once you stop gasping AWESOME, you will see how social media’s ROI is easy to discover, and even easier to create with the right tools. More on Peter Heffring’s demo of the new and improved Expion tomorrow.