Branding Needs to be Simple
On Monday, Adobe decided to come out with Creative Suite 6, a part of their powerful lineup of media creation products. For those in the creative industry, this a big move because it finally gives users the ability to access Adobe Software in the cloud. The move is definitely a game changer for the future.
I glanced upon the price offerings today, and I am overwhelmed. If you look at the image above, seen in closer view on the article linked, you’ll notice there are a lot of different price points across all the different types of collections.
In other words, its crazy complicated.
Most companies love to do this. In the effort of offering everyone access, they create multiple levels, resulting in confusion. No one wins in the end.
When you create your social media strategy, take the approach of simplicity. Realize which networks your audience are on, and craft a simple yet powerful message to get your brand name across. The more complicated you become, the more people will tune you out. The less complicated you are, the more you relate to others.
Albert Qian is the author of Albert Qian, The Social Media Dude and believes in simple marketing. Contact him on Twitter @albertqian!
Social Media Analysis Should Tell a Story
Social media metrics are a key part of every social media strategy and campaign. I swear by them, and if you’re in the industry, so should you. Running metrics is like telling a story, with each engagement, activity, and moment of impact told in the form of a story.
Wired Magazine ran an article yesterday called “What Your Klout Score Really Means” and in my eyes, didn’t do anything more than give the company the typical once-over, from Joe Fernandez’s idea in a coffee shop to the interesting celebrities that have a Klout score, such as Justin Bieber and his score of 100 (I for the record, am at a 63) and of course, cite the critics. It doesn’t actually tell you how your Klout score is calculated, but that’s beyond the point.
What troubled me was the story that they led in with:
Last spring Sam Fiorella was recruited for a VP position at a large Toronto marketing agency. With 15 years of experience consulting for major brands like AOL, Ford, and Kraft, Fiorella felt confident in his qualifications. But midway through the interview, he was caught off guard when his interviewer asked him for his Klout score. Fiorella hesitated awkwardly before confessing that he had no idea what a Klout score was.
The interviewer pulled up the web page for Klout.com—a service that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100—and angled the monitor so that Fiorella could see the humbling result for himself: His score was 34. “He cut the interview short pretty soon after that,” Fiorella says. Later he learned that he’d been eliminated as a candidate specifically because his Klout score was too low. “They hired a guy whose score was 67.”
Partly intrigued, partly scared, Fiorella spent the next six months working feverishly to boost his Klout score, eventually hitting 72. As his score rose, so did the number of job offers and speaking invitations he received. “Fifteen years of accomplishments weren’t as important as that score,” he says.
I talked about Klout here last year when they did their re-score and created an uproar. Since then, the network has been relatively quiet, merely adding partners like Gilt and giving those with high Klout scores access to a variety of perks.
What worried me about the story here was not really so much about Klout. The platform serves as a great tool for understanding one’s influence, but as the vignette indicates, for some the tool serves asthe onlymeasure of influence and breadth of activity. Much like how asking how many Twitter followers you had 3 years ago was the hip form of social media measurement, the measurement today tends to gear towards what your Klout score is.
And that’s wrong.
The Story of Social Media Metrics
I have no doubt Mister Fiorella is a capable individual. His resume according to the article indicates that he’s a man who’s worked in great positions at Ford, Kraft and AOL and has accumulated 15 years of experience. Yet despite not knowing what Klout was, he was shoved out the door with not much else asked, with his Klout score of a shade under 40. And while he has since raised his Klout score, the fact that there is religiosity on this topic raises a clear problem.
It’s time to tell a story.
When I teach my interns and others interested in social media about measuring their strategy, I spend time on Klout but I also direct them to TwitterCounter, TweetStats, Tospy, Bit.ly, Google Analytics, Facebook Insights (For Pages), Tweriod, Empire Avenue, PeerIndex, Kred, TweetSpinner and others. Because social media is so fragmented, these tools are not only optional but mandatory for understanding your social media strategy. Just as a story is not usually linear, but a combination of plot lines, character development and action, your social media metrics strategy should reflect that too. Don’t look to just one dimension. Integrate it.
An integrated social media strategy brings in multiple viewpoints. on TweetStats, paired up with TwitterCounter and Bit.ly, you can see why you might have grown in followers, who re-tweeted you most and which links were clicked. Added in with Klout for example, you can then see why your true reach grew so much and why you are getting +Ks from your audience. When you have one point of view, your depth of understanding is shallow. Additional points of view create a much more open mind. They create the richness that we seek when we read a great book, and they create the richness we see when our social media results come into plain view.
So when you do create your social media strategy and measure the results, take note of what you are doing. Don’t be addicted. Integrate the numbers and take a look at the entire story. A social media result is like a story, and Klout is like a cover. If you judge it solely by that, you’re missing the entire point.
Albert Qian writes for Albert Qian: The Social Media Dude
Instagram, Facebook and Internet Boredom
The dust has finally settled on the Facebook/Instagram merger. A week later, many are still asking why this acquisition ever happened, and the answers number in the many. Whether you believe its the competition from Pinterest, the defense against Google or just Zuckerberg being Zuckerberg and hustling as CEO, the reasons could be endless. All I know is that there’s a party cooking in this valley, and boy, the cooking is better than ever - Almost like you’d think its 1999 all over again.
The Internet has become an interesting place in the last 20 years. Since Tim Berners-Lee launched what we call the Internet revolution, the landscape has gone from rotating GIFs and Geocities pages with poor design to a more mature area. We bank online, shop online, message others online and find the love of our life online. With the advent of Facebook, we now make friends online, stalk past lovers online and see how others embarrass themselves. Everything that you came to know in High School in reality, is now plastered all over your Facebook timeline as well as your news feed.
As Facebook prepares on its eve of going public next month, its important to consider what the Internet has become and where its going. The purchase of Instagram is not as much Facebook’s show of power that $1 billion dollars is a drop in the bucket, but more so that the Internet is Facebook as much as Facebook has become the Internet and our reliance and our fourth need in today’s world, beyond food, water and sleep. Most major sites that you go to now give the option for Facebook login for commenting, account creation as well as Liking. Two have become one.
But as much as two become one and the Like button becomes a part of our personal ecosystem of habits on the Internet, the Instagram acquisition by Facebook points to a larger picture: Facebook relevance. Much as we talk about Yahoo! and Google in the natural lexicon of day to day conversation, both have become engrained in our heads. There is nothing special anymore about the two, besides the fact that you can get your email on both, use both to search, get your news and watch the occasional happy video featuring kittens and some home furnishings.
That’s right - I’m implying that Facebook has officially become boring.
The Instagram acquisition for Facebook points to the fact that the Menlo Park company wants to remain cool, and wants to retain the image of being the thing you should talk about everyday, all day. Whether you believe that the move was to circumvent Pinterest’s rising popularity, Google’s potential purchase or just because Zuckerberg felt like it, the ultimate point is that Facebook is again showing why it wants to be Facebook, and not MySpace, Google, Yahoo, Cisco or any other major Silicon Valley tech giant that has faded into everything else. When the core product is watching what others do online and connecting each other to be closer, you can only go so far. Humans after all, no matter how social, do get tired of each other. As one person told me today, “Facebook is boring now”.
So as we move into the middle parts of 2012, we’ll undoubtedly see one of the greatest IPOs ever to come across Wall Street. In the cocktail parties afterwards, people will discuss how Facebook has officially made it, and that social media is here. Our news networks will replay the story of the boy who dropped out of Harvard, struck it gold and invested with Sean Parker, all while inspiring an Oscar winning biopic. The problem however, lies deeper and beyond the billions that will be invested and the nice Yachts purchased - all that is about the now and the present and what happens in 2013, 2014, and so forth. Beyond what growth and power social media has - and that is here to stay - the networks that we engage upon with for social media will change. The battle for that change however, will go to the company that promises to change the game with attention and spice, rather than defensive and luxury acquisitions.
And that fight for attention, brings us to this new era. Let’s make it a good one.
How Politicians Can Use Social Media for 2012
The American political system is an unfortunate sprint to the finish every four years. Politicians never stop campaigning for a coveted spot in their community, state, city or country.
I was lucky enough several years ago to help run a campaign by a dear friend, Chad Greer for District 9 City Council in San Jose, California. Social media in 2010 was much different than now - the networks were more sparse and I wasn’t aware of as many tools. Two years later, that’s all changed.
In the year 2012, everyone has gone social. For a politician to ignore social media completely would be a death sentence to their political campaign. Don’t ignore the network - it might save you a job.
Check out these five ways that a politician (you?) can use social media to succeed in 2012. Aside from the obvious Facebook, Twitter and YouTube channels, these look at ways to further understand how you are being seen, what you can do about it and other creative methods. Tell me what you think!
1. Solidify the content strategy
Content is king on social media. On the local level, content matters even more because news media doesn’t usually get to all the stories unless you bother them to. So make your own stories and borrow the stories from elsewhere. a content management platform like BundlePost can do just that - spend a part of your day putting in articles for the next five, schedule them, and spend the rest of the time talking to constituents about the local issues that really matter.
2. Target the right market
Twitter unfortunately does not have the right search functionality, but TweetSpinner does. Target the individuals in your community complaining the most about every topic that matters to them. Target those who say the right tweets and target your competitors as well. You will still have to kiss babies, however, and you never know where you might find your next devoted follower.
3. Measure Your Pulse
Social media is better when there are numbers to back up the talk. Its even better than the numbers when you turn that talk into sentiment. On a national level this is important but on the local level just as key. A tool such as Mantis Pulse Analytics will be able to help in being able to see how you are faring against your foe in the election — and perhaps you can see who wins the vote before votes are even cast.
4. Make it Mobile
As a politican its important to go out and see the community. When you do see that community, its also important to reward supporters for showing up. Using an application such as Foursquare is beneficial because it allows you to not only see who has checked into your event but also gives the ability to provide incentives for those that do. This is a perfect way to show ROI of who is at your campaign and how popular you might be.
5. Pin down the Causes
One great way to show how much you care about the community and garner the female vote is to visualize what matters to the community. Using Pinterest to start the conversation and display where you are from, what your platform is and what your goals are as a community leader is important, and visualizing makes even more sense. You can talk all day, but a picture tells a thousand words, and those thousand words are the story of why you are trying to make your community the place to be.
What You Post on Social Media Is Impacting
Last night, I was working on my website Socialize With Us, and was looking to use my Macbook’s webcam to shoot some video podcasts. Unfortunately, as someone who has grown up with a lazy eye (Ptosis), I have to deal with one eye being bigger than the other. Nonetheless, because my Facebook community is generally supportive, I posed a question. It was risky, but this is the screenshot:
You’ll notice the beginnings of the conversation. You can find the rest of it here and see that various friends are interested in helping me out and giving me tips that looks don’t exactly matter. I agree to an extent - they don’t, because if you can talk, sometimes how you look doesn’t really matter either.
I came home this afternoon from work and opened my news feed. To my shock, an acquaintance of mine from college who had lived with me on the same floor freshman year, had posted the photo to her friend’s wall, with some less than kind words. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that she posted this to mock and make fun of the fact of my looks.
The screenshot:
A little bit of research led me to discover that she works at a restaurant in Hawaii. The food business is one of people, where people serve others to quench the need of food and satisfaction of hunger. While most brush off this important concept, the point is pretty clear: this is a breach of ethics, and poor taste in people.
I have since emailed the restaurant, tweeted the head chef and left a review on Yelp stating my dissatisfaction with the employee. Regardless of what happens with these messages, the underlying point is clear: If you want to make fun of, ridicule, insult, badger and mock people over social media, your best choice is to do it offline where no one can see you.
In a world where social media posts go viral and come back to hurt others, its important to pay attention to what you do, much less try to hurt someone who has a career in social media and understands the channels of communication to get a message across.
And because its a Friday night that I’m posting this, its even more important to note. What you do on social media can be detrimental to your reputation, your brand and who you are. What you do as a brand to protect is important, and what you do as a content producer matters as well.
Albert Qian is a Social Media Consultant and the author of Albert Qian: The Social Media Dude, living, working and playing in Silicon Valley. Chat with him on Twitter today @albertqian
What Gregg Williams Can Teach You About Social Media
If you follow the world of American football, no doubt you’ve been following the New Orleans Saints and their bounty controversy. While rough play is a part of the Football pastime, to pay for the reckless injury of someone is way out of line. Additionally, to speak of taking someone out of a game as Gregg Williams did (Video NSFW), borders on the line of practically wanting to murder.
Sports might be entertainment, but its entertainment with a smidgen of business on the side. In the world of business, its the business of people. And when you ignore people and instead vilify them, you open yourself up to immense criticism. Because of this audio, Gregg Williams may never, ever coach again.
While Williams failed to consider the consequences of his actions and who it would affect during his tenure as the Defensive Coordinator for the New Orleans Saints, it does not mean that you should not. Here are three things Williams can teach you about your social media policy and strategy:
1. Use Social Media to Empower, Not Destroy
Bullying is an unfortunate part of today’s social media culture. Luckily there have been the campaigns against it, but the fact that people still hate using the Internet is prevalent. When you’re on social media, use it to promote community among people, not to create hatred. While acting as a brand, do the same, for it creates loyalty, friendship and customers that are willing to go the extra mile for you.
2. Realize That There are Consequences for Actions
For every action you do, there are positive or negative consequences. Nonetheless, for every social media post you garner, there are actions and consequences as well. If you post content, have goal in mind and a point that you’d like to make. If you’re in a crisis mode, bear in mind the type of responses that you expect to get. If you’re on your personal account, know what types of responses you’ll get if you post something religious, political or potentially offensive. Realize that as a result of what you post, you may either lose your brand image, connections, friends or all three.
3. Compete to Connect, Not to Harm
Social media is used today as a business platform to connect more people to each other than ever before. That said, compete to connect with as many people as possible, not to harm them. If you can build connections, even among your competition, its all the better for the end customer.
What do you think? Share your thoughts below or tweet me @albertqian.
About Albert Qian
Albert Qian is a social media advisor living, working and playing in Silicon Valley, and the author of Albert Qian: The Social Media Dude. Find him on Twitter @albertqian and chat with him today.
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Social Media
The market for social media valuation is hot in Silicon Valley these days. Instagram, the photo sharing app that everyone came to love, just sold for $1 billion dollars to Facebook despite having zero revenue and zero monetization. My buddy Robert Caruso talks more about the photo aspect of this over on his blog, and looks at the acquisition of Instagram from a competition perspective with Pinterest.
While some company founders are now very, very rich and flush with cash - and probably moving on with their lives to their next project, the rest of the social media world is left to wonder why. Reactions, all over the web, indicate that many users were pretty unhappy with the acquisition, and in many minds, wasthesellout of sellouts. The app that many were happy to snap up, become instant photographers and famous among their own friends for knowing how to apply a filter, became instant millionaires.
It is a constant agony, and constant ectasy.
The acquisition of Instagram is no doubt a game changer for the industry. For a platform that changes like the sun rising and falling, this will point yet again to more changes in your news feed and social experience. The Timeline release, already confusing and hated by many for its complex approach to fitting your profile in a scrapbook (See a quick primer), has been constantly complained about on my news feed to no end. Yet despite the fact that I like it, for every one person like me, there are about ten more who would rather have the Facebook they remember from 2004-2007.
The tech community would call these folks Luddites for not accepting new technology. From a business perspective, the better phrase to be used might just be “out of touch”.
What happened to the user?
Simpler Days
I remember Facebook back in its simpler days. Up until the appearance of the live feed where it was displayed every single activity you did on your profile, the social experience was relatively simple. Until today when Facebook released its new feature for colleges, Facebook was just that. You needed an email from your college to sign up, and the usage method of Facebook was to say hello to friends, upload a few photos, tell everyone where you were, and that was that. I even remember using Facebook and having cookie cutter status updates to choose from, like saying that you were home or at work.
Simpler days of course, gave away to business needs. Even though the company was receiving a ton of funding from venture capital firms, the basic point of any business is to make money. If you’re in it just to make friends, you’re in the wrong kind of arena. And so users saw the rise of advertising, the creation of brand pages, and now, when you log out, a goodbye message sponsored by a company. If you have a mobile phone, this will soon also have advertising. Imagine getting served an ad after writing a post on a friend’s wall, much like after you beat a level in Angry Birds - the experience will soon be no different.
The User Economy
Next month, Facebook will have its initial public offering on Wall Street. Zuckerberg and company will be on the trading floor ringing the opening bell, and FB will be traded on NASDAQ. It will probably be the biggest public offering in the history of all histories, and people will be made rich. National headlines will glorify the Harvard dropout who created Facebook at first to compare girls. People will point to the Aaron Sorkin film and talk about that as a watershed moment in human history where someone singlehandedly created a platform that has delivered news faster than the mainstream media, has helped the Arab World come out of its clutches and served importance in divorce cases.
As for the 800 million users? Thanks for logging in. While Zuckerberg and a lot of the early employees who held stock will be vacationing and enjoying the riches and luxuries of their new found wealth, the rich, will get richer. Beyond the users like me who use Facebook to promote business and promote others, the average person who logs in to check on their aunt, cultivate relationships with those farther than a car drive and hang out with friends will never see a single cent. And like the users who saw and loved their beloved app in Instagram, these users too will feel a slight ting of hurt, a hurt brought on by a love of business.
But still, they will stay.
The Agony and the Ecstasy
Yet despite the changes that everyone knows will come to Facebook, people will still likely stay on the platform. The Internet is still a part of daily life, and people will log in, even if Facebook begins to look like Geocities. The social need in itself, is now understandably inelastic, and even the folks who work on Google+ know this too, that no matter how many changes they make, people still might not use them beyond a simple Hangout. Like Ronald Reagan, Facebook has become the Teflon network, unfazed mostly by changes. While sites like Gawker see tremendous site traffic drops after changes in user interface, Facebook has somehow dodged the bullet, and rightly so. People after all, can get their tech, celebrity and life hacking news elsewhere, but there is nothing so quite like being able to chat with a long lost friend on Facebook.
As I observe this, my question is mostly, “Why?” I see and observe the agony and the ectasy of social media every day. For every fail whale, random notification and slight news feed tweak, there are cries for incompatibility, wails for new changes and threats to leave. But nobody does. The platform gets bigger, and we are willing to sell out for the platform that itself, will sell out, and starting in May, sell out quarter after quarter at the expense of the average user. I for one, won’t be going anywhere - this my career, but the customer who uses it for the social purposes will. And this, while making my life easier, is an interesting look at what has happened to the human psyche. That much like millennials won’t move to a new state to get better employment, people similarly, are unwilling to leave a social network because their friends are there. In the follower-leader world, we, for the most part, have become followers.
Where that leads us, is a mystery still. But I predict, that it might be pretty dark.
Will anyone ever wake up?
Socialize With Us: Bringing Social Media Pros Together
If you know me, I’m a man of many different projects. Perhaps its merely a Silicon Valley thing, where nobody just works one job and one job only, but I like putting on many hats.
Several months ago, Morgan Barnhart approached me with an idea. She and I are both social media advisors to multiple companies and wanted to bring together social media professionals for the good of sourcing ideas, providing good opinions and creating meaningful conversation that went beyond the simple “Like”, Follow and blog post. And so Socialize With Us was born.
Socialize With Us is a site for social media professionals, by social media professionals. In a world where its made to sound so easy and so complicated, this site seeks to simplify the understanding of social media into bite size pieces that everyone should go for. From topics surrounding music, health, food and drink to entertainment, business and entrepreneurship, there are topics for just about everyone to take in and learn more about how and why social media impact the industry.
The site is still very new and in its early phases of development. Because of the newness, we’re looking for writers who are willing to share their own ideas and spread their knowledge of social media. If you want to write, leave a comment in the space below, ask me on Twitter, or go to this page.
In the meantime, come Socialize With Us and learn more about social media!
About Socialize With Us
Socialize With Us is a site founded by Morgan Barnhart and Albert Qian in 2012 for social media professionals, by social media professionals. Follow the page on Twitter or Like the page on Facebook.
About Albert Qian
Albert Qian is a social media advisor living, working and playing in Silicon Valley, and the author of Albert Qian: The Social Media Dude. Find him on Twitter @albertqian and chat with him today.
Twitter at 6: A Happy Belated Birthday
Here’s to another six years - with less Fail Whales and more success stories. Connecting people, closer than ever!
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Facebook EdgeRank
One of the oddities of using Facebook is the EdgeRank platform. For marketers, this is a welcome technology because it gives the ability for content to go viral. Even if something was posted last month, and there is a comment today, friends of the poster will be notified of the event happening, giving potential new life for content.
For individual users, the existence of EdgeRank can be an absolute pain. If you comment or say something on someone else’s posts, your posting can be seen across every one of your friend’s feeds, even if they aren’t friends with your friend. So if you have your significant other on Facebook, make sure not to go off and like everything they post, for it could get very, very awkward.
Albert Qian is the author of The Social Media Dude and has many odd run-ins with Facebook EdgeRank. Comment on his stuff on Facebook today and make your feed look awkward. Follow him at @albertqian.
