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The Tweetwashing Agency Dilemma

May 26, 2010 by Mike Troiano · View Comments 

“Greenwashing” is how cynics try to capitalize on the public’s growing predisposition to conservation and renewable energy. It’s a bit of flim-flam to make a product seem environmentally responsible, when it really isn’t.

It’s a lose, lose, lose proposition. First, some people are inevitably duped into believing that BP loves animals / trash bags can be biodegradable / coal can be “clean” – all to the benefit of charlatans and scoundrels. Second, the environment suffers despite the best efforts of downstream buyers to express their will in supporting it. Third, opportunity costs build up on two fronts: Buyers become cynical and indifferent, and sellers fail to invest in technology that would render their products more sustainable versus the competition.

The same thing is starting to happen in social marketing. Prospective clients are asking about whether they can “outsource Twitter and Facebook” to us, meaning will we put some underpaid 22-year-old on TweetDeck and ask her to “@” anyone with the poor judgment to tweet that his girlfriend dumped him while coolly sipping a cold can of BrandX.

Why do they want this? Certainly not because it’s effective in building relationships, in driving incremental sales. They want it because access to such a resource would enable them to plaster Twitter and Facebook chicklets all over their web site (which almost never allows comments because “the legal folks won’t let us”).

Call it “Tweetwashing.” A shallow and gimmicky handle for a shallow and gimmicky practice.

Is that the promise of social media? Will it become just another channel for back-slapping bullshit?

For me, the dilemma is this: I don’t believe social media can be an effective branding or promotional medium if it’s not embraced – authentically – by real people from inside brands that want to engage with the truth. I just don’t believe it can be applied as some kind of glossy outer coating by an agency partner, or any third party, and be truly effective over the long haul.

But that seems to be what clients want. They aren’t focused on the opportunities presented by social media. They seem to want to make the social media problem go away, as cost effectively as possible.

So what should we do? What do you do?

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How To Get Started On Twitter

May 14, 2010 by Mike Troiano · View Comments 

Had lunch with a marketing exec today. Senior guy, lots of questions about Twitter, but hadn’t had a chance to get into it yet. I put together a “Ten Step” type note for him, and thought I’d share it in hopes of helping other senior marketing folks get started.

Anyhoo…

  1. Get into the right frame of mind. Read this. I wrote it a while ago, but it was (and is) my best attempt to explain to people why Twitter is worth the effort. I’d also recommend you take a look at this, and this, from the people who taught me about Twitter. Ready? Good.
  2. Create An Account. Go here. Enter your real info, and pick a username people can both remember and spell easily. You can skip the “suggestions,” but definitely look for your “friends.” If you use Outlook I’d strongly suggest exporting your contacts to a GMail account so you can check for them in the system, but if that freaks you out just skip it. If there are specific people you’d like to add you can do so in the “anyone” screen, but you can always do that later as well.
  3. Confirm your account. Check your e-mail for a note from Twitter, and click the link to confirm your e-mail.
  4. Personalize your account. You wouldn’t go to a cocktail party with a bag on your head, would you? For God’s sake… Click “settings” in the upper right, then “profile.” Upload a picture of yourself. Nothing too formal, but a head shot you can live with. Add your location, your site or blog, and a 2- or 3-line bio. If you’d like to spruce your page up a bit, click here, then click the “login to twitter” button, and “Allow” when the Auth confirmation screen appears next.
  5. Follow some smart people and news sources. I created a Twitter List of good accounts to start with. Just go here, and follow it.
  6. Find and follow some other stuff you’re interested in. You a Patriot fan? Have a favorite celebrity chef? NASCAR driver? Politician? Celebrity? Go here, and find some folks to follow. Odds are they’re already here, and getting a little closer to them can be cool.
  7. Get Tweetdeck. Twitter on the web is for dorks. Seriously, dude. Download and install Tweetdeck. It’s awesome. It will help you use Twitter as a tool, you can even feed your LinkedIn and Facebook feeds into it if you have accounts there.
  8. Add a few search columns in Tweetdeck, to track whatever you’re interested in. Follow the people you like, unfollow the people you don’t.
  9. Reply to a few people, or just retweet them. Figure out how to reply to a tweet you like (just roll over an icon in Tweetdeck, and click the back arrow. That will create a tweet with that person’s name preceded by an “@” sign. That tweet will appear in their replies list, and they’re likely to see it.) Huzzah. Retweeting is similar… just use the forward arrow. This sends the tweet through your account, a way of amplifying stuff you like, so it’s easy for more people to find. It’s a good thing for the community, kind of a service we do for each other. Welcome.
  10. Start tweeting yourself. Now you’re ready. What do you have to say? What’s the most interesting thing you came across today? What were you thinking about in the car just now? Just react to the world around you. Be sincere, be genuine. Contribute.

That’s it. Give it a whirl. Let me know how it goes.

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Scalable Intimacy in Politics

March 31, 2010 by Mike Troiano · View Comments 

I live in Sudbury, a dreamy little hamlet about 20 miles west of Boston. It’s very nice; we like it a lot.

Sudbury has the highest concentration of households with school-aged children of any town in Massachusetts, which makes for a very family-oriented town, and also puts a lot of focus on the quality of our schools. Each year the town sets a budget and struggles to live within it – like most towns, families, and people I know. When it can’t, the Town Fathers propose an “override,” meaning a right to raise taxes to cover expenses of the town over and above those that were budgeted.

Each year the proponents of this tax use the same slogan for this override: “Support Sudbury!” Each year they say that to maintain our first-class schools, fire, and police, we need to reach into our pockets and give a little more for the team.

Since 1999 the good people of Sudbury have “Supported Sudbury,” and this well-intended philanthropy has led to a series of challenges for the town well documented in this video highlighting some rather daunting facts and figures.

Anyhoo… I’ve had just about enough of this. And I met a like-minded denizen of the town, Bob Haarde, who’d decided to run for Selectman, and do something about it.

I met Bob for dinner at the local hangout, and we talked about how I might be able to help his campaign through the addition of a social marketing program. I offered to help, but told Bob that in the end, the program would succeed or fail not based on my talents, but based on his willingness to contribute substantive content to the channel, and to engage with the people drawn to that content. I agreed to get him started, and he agreed to create and post three pieces of original content to the system in the next 72 hours. This was important since time was short… the election was a week and a half away.

That night at my kitchen table I created and customized accounts for him on Posterous and Twitter, connecting them to each other and to a Facebook Fan Page I created from within Bob’s own Facebook account.  I took the Posterous e-mail and sent it to him, with instructions to publish whatever he wanted to share with voters, described in a casual and personal way, along with whatever anecdotes he cared to share about the journey of a regular guy into his first elective office.

He began to do so, and after he’d added three or four posts I began following our fellow Sudbury-ites on Twitter, and sharing the page with my own local friends on Facebook. By the election this week – 10 days after they launched – we’d amassed 25 Twitter followers and 60 Facebook fans, collectively connected to hundreds more. The Posterous entries were being published to both channels, and being viewed natively between 50 and 100 times.

Bob Haarde is now Sudbury’s newest Selectman. He has the seeds of a coalition to deliver on his campaign promise (“Cut waste, not teachers.”), and a direct and ready channel to the network of local voters that got him elected.

And he won by 36 votes.

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He Had A Dream

January 17, 2010 by The Team · View Comments 

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Image via Wikipedia
Over the weekend I had the honor of participating in a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was lucky enough to see the Harlem Gospel Choir perform for a crowd of a few thousand people in Cambridge. Their performance was so uplifting and inclusive that I felt compelled to comment on it. The Choir had the audience on their feet clapping, singing, and ensuring that everyone left feeling uplifted and hopeful. Their website says that “the theme of every performance is ‘bringing people & nations together & giving something back’” and they delivered on that promise.
The Choir was formed in response to a tribute to King the same year his birthday became a national holiday, and they are great ambassadors of the message he espoused.

As it happens, the world as a whole is coming together right now in much the same way, albeit through social media, to help out those in Haiti. I wonder what Dr. King would have done to motivate the world if he had Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Google. Would he applaud our efforts to help those in despair or think that in an age of such powerful mediums we should be doing that much more. I think and I hope we have come a long way since April 4, 1968, but I know that sharing in the music and the love that the Gospel Choir brought to us on Saturday night was a good reminder of what we must continually do now. People coming together to embrace a spirit of love and acceptance… I think Dr. King would be proud.

Do something today in his honor, however small.

Posted via email from holland-mark posterous

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PostRank: 80% of Audience Engagement Now Offsite

January 14, 2010 by Mike Troiano · View Comments 

Came across this eye-opening stat today, in light of yesterday’s Content Hub post.

PostRank says that 80% of audience engagement with online content now happens somewhere other than the site on which that content originates.

The slide deck:

Measuring Engagement of the Social Web: 2007-2009

80-freaking-percent. That’s just incredible to me. And yet somehow obvious.

Don’t put your content on an island and hope for the best, folks. Build a system that fishes where the fish are, what we call a Content Hub.

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Ten Steps To Build A Basic Content Hub

January 13, 2010 by Mike Troiano · View Comments 

Using the Web to build your brand is less and less about creating destinations, and more and more about creating content useful to the people you want to reach, then empowering them to access that content wherever and however they like.

The key to this is creating something we call a “content hub.” A content hub is more than just a standalone site or application, it’s both the heart of a distributed network of information, and a destination for those that share the interest it supports.

Rather than explain the theory of a content hub in detail, it’s best to just build a quick-and-dirty one, and use it. Here’s the process I’d recommend to do exactly that:

  1. If you don’t have a GMail account, create one, say acme@gmail.com. You’ll need this e-mail for all the logins, might as well use the same one.
  2. Associate your logo with that e-mail in Gravatar.com; this will also come in handy later.
  3. Create a YouTube account associated with the same Google ID.
  4. Create a Flickr account. You may need a Yahoo e-mail account for this. Just create one.
  5. Create a Twitter account, and customize the profile page to reflect your brand identity. Add an image, and a short bio line, for God’s sake.
  6. Create a Facebook Page. You can do this from your personal Facebook account. If you don’t have one, you’ll need to create one.
  7. Create a Posterous account, and activate the Group Profile feature to make it easier for others to post to the account. Connect your YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook pages to Posterous so that any content you send to Posterous bounces into the other accounts automagically.
  8. Create a simple listening station in Google Reader. You’ll have access to Google Reader automatically having set up the GMail account above. Lots of smart people have described how to do this; just do what they say. Once you get the basics down, you’ll be able to pull any RSS feed into Reader, which I promise will come in handy at some point.
  9. Click the Reader “Settings” at upper right, then the rightmost tab, which is “Send To.” Configure Reader to send content to the destination sites you created above.
  10. Use the damn thing.

The “hub” of the system is your new GMail account. If you log into that each morning, you’ll have access to everything you need.

To distribute original content through the system, just use the Posterous account. This is dirt-simple straightforward… You can post everywhere by sending e-mail to post@posterous.com from your GMail address. Send images and they’ll go to Flickr as well. Send video and they’ll post to YouTube automatically, etc. Links to everything you create will appear on your new Posterous blog, and go out to your Twitter followers and Facebook fans, automatically.

“Curating” content is even easier. Whatever is in Reader can be sent through the system by clicking the “Send To” button. When you do that a drop-down appears with Twitter, Facebook, and Posterous as options (remember, choosing “Posterous” sends it everywhere). Begin to poke around in the local blogs and start raising your visibility. Leave short comments on others’ blogs to draw traffic to your own, and create the personal connection you need to deliver on the brand promise. (Gravatar is already set up if you followed the above, so wherever you log in to comment on someone else’s blog and use your GMail address, your icon will also appear and give you some exposure.)

You can also access your brand “listening station” in Google Reader. Just click “Reader” at the upper left of Gmail, and you’ll pretty much be able monitor any appearance of the brand online. You should add some influential local bloggers to the feeds there as well, and create folders for whatever else you like to read on the web.

So what happens now?

Start posting. Share the content you find interesting in Reader. Build some relationships. Get to know folks. Help people, and watch them help you back.

If you need something more industrial strength, please give us a call. But for 90% of the businesses out there, the truth is this is enough to get started building the relationships that will help build your business.

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