Let the Conversation Begin (Interpersonal)

Chapter 22

Safko, The Social Media Bible

Interpersonal social media, as Safko defines them, are those that allow people to communicate live and real-time in one of several ways: one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many.In each of these three categories, there are many kinds of technologies available. Some are free, some carry a nominal fee. None of them require any particular expertise to operate, and in many cases no software is required beyond a web browser.

Safko spends almost all of this chapter running down the list of interpersonal media, dispensing with the history. It seems to me that the potential uses of these media for marketing purposes is discussed less than in previous chapters.

Because the nature of these technologies is real time – that is, you need to be there at the same time as the intended targets of your message, actually interacting with an individual or group – their potential for marketing to mass audiences is, in my opinion, not as great as other social media where you can use typed-in text and prepared images to network with many thousands of members of a network, all in minutes or hours a day.

Still, interpersonal media can be effective for some types of marketing activities. A few that come to mind: Product roll-outs to dealers or targeted audiences (early adopters?); demonstration, training, or Q&A sessions with product users (a good way to strengthen customer bonds and build loyalty); and gathering feedback from target audiences (again, a way to build stronger customer relationships).

Really, interpersonal media have the strongest potential for intra-organization use, IMO, and Safko probably provides more examples of this type of activity than any other in this chapter. Meetings, training sessions, planning, brainstorming and so on, especially when distance is a real factor.

I feel like I’ve mentioned this in an earlier chapter blog, but this type of technology is well-suited to Extension, whose mission is disseminating research-based, sometimes technical, information to target audiences of clientele. Time and distance are often a limiting factor for these clients, yet workshops and meetings have typically been conducted as daylong sessions in meeting rooms in the largest town in the county. Making training available via a two-way web connection with both audio and video, and sometimes other rich content, with the possibility of recording the event so it can be reviewed later if the clientele need to, has much potential for Extension. This is the type of technology that is well-suited to sharing technical information with targeted audiences who are separated by large distances.

The Formidable Fourth Screen (Mobile)

Chapter 21

Safko, The Social Media Bible

Movie, television, computer and mobile phone: four kinds of screens that have transfixed uncounted people over the years. The many types of social media described in Safko’s book all have the power to transform relationships or give people communications capabilities that they never had before. But mobile phones, because of their ubiquity, portability, and ever-expanding capabilities, may have the most potential of all.

Safko walks through the history of the technology and provides a laundry list of applications and providers. His conclusion: “The mobile telephone is truly social media in a box that includes nearly every social media tool in one device. Today’s smart phone lets you take pictures; upload them to your blog or photo sharing site; send them to friends, colleagues, and customers; or view others’ photographs. And you can do the same with audio, music and video. You can surf a web site, get tweets, and send and receive text messages. You can receive up-to-the-minute news and stock quotes, traffic reports, and weather. You can listen to music, watch a full-length video, have it wake you on time in the morning, give you turn-by-turn directions, let you know the best pasta restaurant closest to you … and even make a call.”

Of all the mobile phone’s capabilities, those that seem (to me) to have the most potential for commercial firms to exploit for marketing include game playing, partly because of the sheer numbers of people who play, and also advertising that takes advantage of the mobile phone user’s location in real time, instantly. Apps that tell you where the nearest and best restaurant, or promise to connect you with single people nearby, hold a lot of promise. That goes for any similar app or ad that provides immediate information to people base on their location.

But my work is not about selling. It is about providing information to people, many of whom are farmers. So for Extension, mobile devices may not have significant potential for marketing. But they DO promise to be revolutionary in sharing important information. Farmers, like young people and several other classes of users, have embraced the mobile phone. For farmers, its mobility is key. They can take their phones to the field (assuming there is service available; and increasingly, mobile providers are filling in the blanks in the coverage maps).

Farmers already use cell phones for tasks such as checking markets and controlling center-pivot irrigation systems. There is much potential for Extension to provide research-based information when and where farmers need it, including some interactive tools to improve their decision-making. One example is a project that I’ve been involved in, along with a faculty member (farm machinery engineer) and a programmer. This project will produce a web-based calculator that sugarbeet farmers can use to help determine the correct settings for their planters. The grower enters information such as the spacing between rows in his field and the plant population he desires at harvest time, and the calculator generates information on seed spacing setting. This simple Java-based calculator will be deployed on several web sites. But it could easily be adapted for mobile devices.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of similar apps that could greatly enhance farmers’ abilities to make decisions in the field. Could information like this eventually replace workshops that require farmers to spend several days in meeting rooms watching Powerpoint presentations? Time will tell.  

Marketing Yourself (Search Engine Marketing)

Chapter 20

Safko, The Social Media Bible

Search engine marketing (SEM), paying search engine providers for sponsored ads on search engine result pages, offers an excellent return on investment (ROI), Safko points out. The advertiser pays according to the amount of traffic sent to its Web site. No traffic, no cost to the advertiser. Not only that, but a good job of choosing key words and key word phrases can translate into a better class of clicks – prospects whose interests match the advertiser’s offerings more precisely.

Other advantages to SEM: The advertiser may submit a significantly higher per-click bid than the second-place bidder for a given keyword, but will not be charged the higher amount – just enough to be higher than the second-place bidder. Plus, there are built-in safeguards against fraudulent clicks by competitors.

According to Safko, SEM is most effective as part of a broader marketing program that also includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and blogging.

As a communications staffer for the University of Nebraska, I found myself wondering while I read this chapter how relevant SEM is to me. For tax supported organizations, advertising is sometimes a questionable use of tax dollars. But I can also see that SEM might conceivably offer a safer, must justifiable way to make paid advertising a part of a total marketing plan. It depends on the purpose of the marketing program. For commercial interests, promoting your organization is a means of strengthening the brand. But using tax dollars to promote an organization, though it may be part of a sound marketing plan, may be harder to justify.

Pay-per-click advertising allows a public entity to sidestep these questions in several ways. First, the organization is paying to drive traffic to its web site, not to promote itself. Hopefully your clientele will find something of value at your web site. Second, PPC advertising avoids another thorny issue related to paid advertising for public entities, that of being fair to several competing media. SEM sidesteps this issue because the search engine providers used SEM are not local media.

Spotlight on Search (Search Engine Optimization)

Chapter 19

Safko, The Social Media Bible

If you build it, they will come … right?

No, according to Safko. The chances of your Web site being found by somebody who is searching for content like yours increases greatly if your site is listed on the first page of search results returned by Google or Yahoo!. And that doesn’t happen by itself. It’s a result of a time-consuming process known as search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO has several important components that affect the entire process of building web pages: choosing page URLs, assigning page titles, formatting headers and text, writing content, and assigning keywords and other meta content. After the page is posted, the SEO process isn’t complete; obtaining external reputable links from other sites with high search rankings also affects your page’s rank.

And much of this is time-consuming. Two important steps in SEO, keeping content updated regularly and contacting other web masters to obtain some good reciprocal links, are especially an ongoing investment of time and effort. These are two of the key parts of optimization, yet for a one-person shop such as myself, the time and effort to get these accomplished are hard to assign a top priority. It’s not that they are unimportant; it’s just that so many other things are just as important, and there are still only 40 work hours (give or take) in a work week. So what to do? I like Safko’s suggestion on page 369 to integrate SEO into your daily routine by setting aside an hour a day to blog, post, comment and share and add comment to the web site, social profiles and on-line groups. This might be a way to build these processes into the daily routine.

A previous chapter listed as a source of further information a book titled “Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day.” Amazon.com, here I come.

RSS - Really Simple Syndication Made Simple

Chapter 18

Safko, The Social Media Bible

 RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is key to the way many people use the web today, based on personal observation. And the primary subjects of my observation are my daughter, age 25, and son, age 20.

Fifteen years ago, when I started surfing the World Wide Web regularly, I used several methods that now seem quaint and old-fashioned to find web sites that had information I was seeking: word of mouth or e-mails suggesting sites; links from other sites that I had already found; and occasionally through search engines, although Yahoo and Google were much more primitive then, and most Web sites did not pay attention to search engine optimization. Even today, I tend to rely too heavily on bookmarks to keep track of Web sites I’m interested in. In my browser I maintain an elaborate list of folders that organize bookmarks by subject.

But my kids, and I think they are representative of the vast majority of Web users younger than me, by and large do not repeatedly visit their favorite web sites to see what’s new. I think their bookmark lists are much shorter than mine, and they are much more inclined to use feeds and Google searches.

All of this makes it important for web masters to make sure their sites have an RSS feed. Even when visitors find their sites via a search engine, they might not be likely to return repeatedly to see what’s new.

Safko explains how RSS was developed (as well as Atom, another syndication technology). He explains how syndication makes it possible to notify the whole wide Web (your subscribers, at least) about updates to your site, and also its role in making podcasts possible. Safko also explains the several methods of aggregating and reading feeds, and lists providers.

What I thought was missing from this chapter was an explanation, for do-it-yourselfers like me, of how to add an RSS syndication feed to a web site that you maintain. Many web masters, if they know something about programming, already know this. But some of Safko’s readers do not, and I would have appreciated some basic explanation of how to do this, as well as a list of suggested software.

But in my opinion, an RSS feed and a panel of social bookmarks is rapidly becoming essential to any web site used in marketing goods, services or information to the public.       

Gaming the System: Virtual Gaming

Chapter 17

Safko, The Social Media Bible

What’s striking about the world of on-line virtual gaming, as Safko describes it, is not only the number of players worldwide (millions or tens of millions in any given game) but also the broad demographics of the players: their variety of ages, occupations, and backgrounds. Also amazing is the amount of time they spend on line – 22 hours a week average, and 60 percent of the players have played for 10 continuous hours at one time.

Sixty percent! Ten continuous hours! Simply astounding, and for advertisers who want to make their products or services visible to large audiences, on-line games are a fertile field to begin plowing. Safko also mentions the strong emotions generated in on-line games, another factor that could predispose players to become customers.

A further indication of the potential for businesses to influence the behavior or customers or prospective customers in the first life is the way in which the line sometimes becomes blurred between games and reality. Safko cites the creation of real economies, as he did in the previous chapter on virtual reality. Virtual money and transactions sometimes result in real wealth for the players. What’s more fascinating is the corrupted blood epidemic of 2005 described on pages 328 and 329. A temporary programming error created a virtual plague that had some of the characteristics of real-world epidemics, and it was studied as a model. It seems weirdly organic that art (or technology) should imitate life in such unintended ways. Maybe the computers will take over someday.

 For now, though, it is enough for advertisers to know that massive numbers of people spend massive amounts of time, and invest strong emotions, in on-line gaming. The potential for product placement is obvious, and for more imaginative marketers, there are possibilities yetd untapped.