John C Havens of BlogTalkRadio

The speakers at this year’s BST conference will be sharing their insights into how social media works within business. To give you a glimpse of what you can expect at the live event (which happens on Tuesday, May 5), here are 3 questions with Tactical Transparency author and Director of Partnership Marketing & Integration at BlogTalkRadio, John C. Havens.

Q:  Why should companies be investing their time and effort in social media?

A:  Why shouldn’t they?  This question in 2009 is, to me, the equivalent of asking, “Should your company have a website?” in 1995.  Social media is simply too broad a spectrum, with too wide a variety of opportunities (many of which are free in cost if not minimal time) to ignore.  Specifically, however:

• SEO—  The more content you create online with your brand’s messaging, the more opportunities Google has to raise your rankings.  You cannot expect to have just your main website/portal and get the kind of presence on Google that you need.  Utilizing your blog, Tweets, BlogTalkRadio shows or any other medium that lets you put in metadata including your company name/keywords is a MUST.  Period.
• Presence—  As I talk about a lot in my book, if you don’t demonstrate that your brand is trying to have a presence online, people will wonder why you’re silent.  (If they wonder about you at all.)  More likely, they’ll be listening and interacting with your competitors, who have demonstrated that they care about what consumers think.
• ROI—  The ROI is substantial, and please stop thinking, “but I have to have X number of comments on my blog post,” or “a social media campaign is no better than a banner ad.”  Let’s talk COA—if just one person comments on your company blog (even to complain) and you connect with them in a real manner, what did it cost you to do so?  $150 for a series of postcard/direct mail campaigns? No—the time for one person at your company to respond and connect.  Yes, you have to have a person in the company who does those things, and they have to know what they’re doing, but you get the point: stop wasting stamps, and utilize the free, permanently digital PR that you can get when you demonstrate that you will answer customers/employees with a real voice, where you hear their concerns and address them.

Q:  Tell us about one emerging social media trend that you’re keeping an eye on, and why.

A:  Twitter, like everyone else.  But BlogTalkRadio uses it as a broadcast medium to help boost the live listenership of shows.  We’ve increased live show participation by 12-15% by having all of our hosts who tweet do so 30, 15, 10, 5, minutes before a show and then during.

Q:  What are some ways you have seen companies directly benefit from using social media?

A:  Please download the case study for our recent Wal-Mart campaign for the movie Twilight.  We were able to demonstrate actual lift in sales via social media, which is the holy grail for any social media campaign.

Learn more from John C. Havens and the rest of our speakers at the 2009 Business Smart Tools Conference on May 5 — register here!

Earlier this month, Dan Zarrella of HubSpot posted a highly-detailed blog suggesting that 22 tweets a day was the best way, statistically speaking, to use Twitter.  His research included the Twitter habits of more than 1.6 million Twitter users, with emphasis on the habits of the most-followed (or, in Twitter parlance, most popular) users.

Undoubtedly, this “22 tweet” proclamation was then pinned to the bulletin boards of countless marketing offices and pasted into numerous Power Point pitches.  But, as Zarrella pointed out in the blog’s actual title (”Is 22 Tweets-Per-Day the Optimum?”), that number is flawed, because it doesn’t tell you the whole story.  For example:

*  It ignores the content and context of what’s actually in the tweets

*  It doesn’t specify the time of day those tweets were sent — or seen

*  It doesn’t indicate how many people are actually seeing those tweets, vs. the potentiality of the Twitter user’s entire aggregate audience

*  It doesn’t delineate between original tweets and retweets (or “forwarded” tweets from others)

*  It implies that the “most-followed” Twitter users (like Barack Obama, The New York Times and Zappos) are being followed as a result of their frequency of Twitter use, rather than their brand-name attraction.  (Obama’s account, for example, has been dormant since January 19th.)

*  It defines Twitter success solely in terms of followers, without regard for whether one’s audience will take action (in terms of sales, marketing, activism, direct feedback, etc.) based upon that user’s tweets

Unfortunately, marketers, consultants and advertising agencies are so eager to quantify the impact of social media — if for no other reason than to understand what percentage of their bugdet (and time) they think their clients should be investing in it — that they’re looking for any statistical shorthand that can help make their work (and their clients’ decisions) easier.

But just as you can’t quantify a baseball player’s impact on the game based solely on his batting average, you can’t summarize social media’s impact on your business based strictly on a pre-determined criteria of “followers,” “views” or “comments.”  The “22 tweets” results are interesting and, in some cases, may be useful, but when it comes to conversation-based metrics, mathematical statistics only tell one part of the story.

Image by ©aius.

We have a lot of smart, talented and insightful speakers coming to the next Business Smart Tools conference on May 5.  But as well-versed as they are in the ways of social media, marketing, business growth and general communications, there’s one thing they DON’T know (yet):

What do YOU want to learn about at the BST conference?

Whether you’ll be there in person or you’re hoping to catch glimpses of the event online, let us know what topics and questions you’d like to ask Scott Monty, Cindi Bigelow, John C. Havens and the rest of our illustrious lineup.  That way, our speakers will be able to tailor their talks toward the needs of the audience, and help you down the path toward the answers you’re after.

This past weekend, Chris Brogan started a great discussion on his blog about the latest video for Bigelow Tea (which was produced by Business Smart Tools’ parent company, Creative Concepts). The video features Cindi Bigelow talking tea with complete strangers in New York City — some of whom have never even heard of Bigelow before, despite it being one of the top-selling teas in the city.

The comments on Chris’s blog reinforced a lot of the reasons that Bigelow thought the video was a good idea in the first place:

* It provides the company with a public face and personality
* It lets Cindi share the history of her family-owned company
* It presents the “good” and “bad” of being recognized (or not)

But despite all the positives, some potential drawbacks were mentioned as well — particularly by fellow blogger Nalts, who points out the difficulties of:

* interesting casual viewers in a business-branded video
* promoting something without a YouTube “star” attached
* navigating the attention spans and entertainment needs of a casual audience

And guess what? All of these comments are what made producing the video worthwhile, because:

* Cindi was able to connect directly with people on the streets of New York
* The Bigelow brand developed newly-interested followers online
* The company received creative suggestions on what did (or didn’t) work for various viewers

But, most importantly, the video got people talking about tea (and Bigelow Tea in particular). And that’s the primary goal of any social media marketing: to generate new discussion about a brand. Because people can’t buy your product if they don’t know it exists.

You can hear more about Bigelow’s approach to social media when Cindi Bigelow speaks at the Business Smart Tools conference on May 5!