The Social Media Professor

Good Domain Parenting

by 4 Comments

When speaking about social media, I often draw laughter when I say that I find it incredible that there are still parents out there who name their babies without first checking if the matching domain name is available. What they don't know is that I am only half-joking when I make that statement. Perhaps “incredible” is an exaggeration but I do maintain that you could do your child a great favor if you think ahead in this regard. I registered our two kids' domains when they were about 5-6 years old and was lucky myself to find them still being available. Yes, it is possible that .com as a top level domain will be more or less irrelevant when the time comes for them to “brand” themselves online as technology changes. Still, the expense of about $10 a year pales in comparison to all other investments parents make in their kids future and the rewards could be significant.

Case in point. In today's class when I said the above, one of my students came up and said that that was exactly what his dad did when he was born! His name “Zachary Campbell” is a common one as well but thanks to his dad's foresightedness, he now outranks others with the same name, even some semicelebrities.

B2B Social Media in Silicon Valley

by Leave a Comment

Santana Row, San Jose

Took the Southwest shuttle from Orange County to San Jose in Silicon Valley today and met with some marketing executives at a major B2B company. It was educational for me to hear first-hand accounts from marketers about their struggles selling social media initiatives to non-marketing executives. Without strong companywide support, the social media efforts undertaken, however well-intentioned, may not even get a fair shot at being successful as they tend to be understaffed and underfunded. Even the projects that do get some traction on social media can suffer from not get the recognition they deserve due to a general lack of appreciation of the power of social media. Continuing to provide some good examples could perhaps convince them over time. However, it would clearly be ideal should they have the very senior management's blessing. A great way of demonstrating such support would be if the CEO would jump on board and started tweeting or blogging, wouldn't it?

What Social Media Can Do

by Leave a Comment

In my first social media marketing classes today, students were asked to identify various uses of social media, preferably with a business use case in mind. If you cannot read my handwriting… here comes some of the prominent uses of social media:

  • Communication/Conversations
  • Connection/Network
  • Humanization/Personalization
  • Marketing Research/Opportunity Identification
  • Brand presence/Awareness creation
  • Reminders about ones existence
  • Employee relations and employer branding
  • Collaboration
  • Communities
  • News

Social media is quite multifaceted in other words! Not bad, huh? So, are you leveraging most of these uses or are you limiting yourself?

3 Keys to Social Success

by 5 Comments

There are many guidelines out there when it comes to how one can achieve success through the use of social media. To me, three core perspectives stand out as being particularly critical.

  1. Long term perspective. Without the patience to develop long-term relationships and networks, one is likely to fail. To strive for short-terms results may not be wrong per se but it cannot come at the expense of long-term customer satisfaction.
  2. Generous approach. Give more than you take and you will be offered plenty in return. This is related to the long-term perspective as well and the generosity is also about proactive sharing, offering ideas, connections, and resources to those in your network you believe would benefit from them without them asking for them.
  3. Human appearance. Trying to sound corporate, professional, or intellectual can on social media come across as being snobby and standoffish and is thus also less likely to engender any interest in interactions by other parties. A more casual, informal, and sometimes humorous communication style is a much more effective way to get other people to open up and be willing to develop better relationships with you. In the end, it may very well be seen as being unprofessional to be too professional!

What do you think? Other factors you think should be a top priority as you find your approach on social media?

Social B2B Relationships

by Leave a Comment

The fact that many business-to-business (B2B) relationships are characterized by long-term norms of trust and commitment should not be news to either academics or practitioners. The value of establishing loyal partnerships between buyers and sellers to ensure consistent delivery of customer satisfaction has become increasingly evident. Such partnerships typically involve multiple people in each company having multiple relationships with people in the other company. Over time, such social processes make a specific buyer-seller relationship difficult to break as the the organizational boundaries begin to blur. Over time, many staff in boundary-spanning jobs experience a role conflict in that they almost forget which company they work for or at least which company's goals they hold, or should hold, closest to their hearts, at the same time as this is for the good of the whole partnership.

Even if most would agree with the above statement, now with the emergence of a plethora of often free social media and networking technologies that are getting easier and easier to use by the day at the same time as they become more and more powerful, some still question the potential value of social media in a B2B context. This is puzzling. Yes, there may be too many platforms to choose from. Yes, there could be situations where social media may not be applicable. But still. What could be wrong with having more tools as your disposal to further strengthen and develop existing relationships between buyers and sellers?

In a B2B context, you often hear naysayers say things like: “I don't need social media to manage my customer relationships, I only have a handful of customers to manage and if I have a problem, I just pick up the phone.” Still, wouldn't it be helpful to also know what is going on in the lives of your customers when you don't have a problem? Perhaps they have a problem, a problem they may even voice on social media, and you are nowhere near to pick up the signal. That sounds like a problem to me. Or, what do you think?

The Social Media Professor

Orange County, California
United States

Also at NiklasMyhr.com

Contact

Please email me at niklas [at] thesocialmediaprofessor.com if you have any questions.