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Are YOU a Social Asset to Your Company? Are Your Employees?

Posted on September 24, 2013 by jessestay

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One of the things I talk about in Google+ Marketing For Dummies is the importance of getting your employees and brand loyalists involved in social media. This is something I’m seeing has more and more importance with the emergence of Google Authorship and the affect a public profile on Facebook has for individuals. The truth is, our culture is evolving from a culture of brands to a culture of people. The focus is no longer on your brand.

For that reason, I think it’s more and more important that you get your employees, or if you’re an employee, yourself, involved more and more in social media. In the future (and to some extent, now!), your job is going to depend on this!

Let’s take Google Authorship as an example. For one organization I worked with, we implemented Google+ profiles for high ranking officials/executives of the organization, and tied those profiles, using Google Authorship, back to content they had written on the organization’s website. With no content whatsoever on the profile, and solely the link to that individual’s profile, the organization saw a 300% increase in traffic on the individual articles written by those individuals on the company’s website. Imagine what it would have been like with MORE followers and MORE content on those profiles! You can see why I talked about making your website more about people, with content written by actual people in your organization in my books.

Just yesterday, SEO experts started complaining that Google was no longer providing keyword data back to websites for identifying the keywords people are searching for when they visit your website. Google is making it clear that it’s not about keywords any more. It’s about people, and real, genuine content. Your employees and the people behind your brand are a critical part of your SEO strategy now. You see the same with Facebook as they try to penalize “memes” and other brand-focused spam in the News Feed.

Google Authorship is just one strategy though. If you follow me on Facebook, you know I don’t have a Facebook Page for just me. I have Facebook Pages for my books and other brands, but not myself. Instead, I use what’s called a “Public Profile”, and allow people to “follow” me there. I actually do this on purpose. There, of course, are disadvantages to not having a Facebook Page for myself – I can’t advertise as easily (I can do a Promoted URL or Promoted Post back to my personal profile, however). There are no Insights/Analytics for personal profiles.

However, the advantage using a Public Profile is it focuses on me as an individual. It allows me to show the person behind my brand. When people follow me they know they’re following a real individual. I can comment much easier on others’ posts. In addition, I show up in Facebook’s suggestion algorithms as a person, which in my opinion favors more highly than Facebook Pages do. All of this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Here’s one example of why all that’s valuable: Yesterday Mark Zuckerberg changed his profile cover image on Facebook to an old graphic of all the relationships that exist around the world on Facebook which their data team put together back in 2010. Within minutes, he saw tens of thousands of likes on the cover image and I was seeing half my friends share it. I was familiar with this graphic because it hangs on the wall in my office – awhile back I blew it up and printed it out so I could show it off (If Facebook provided a way to purchase these they would sell off-the-charts!).

I commented on Mark Zuckerberg’s cover image stating that I had this hanging on my wall. All of the sudden that evening I started seeing friend requests from people trying to friend me, and new followers coming in like crazy! Within 12 hours I gained more than 1,000 new followers on my profile. It turns out Mark Zuckerberg liked my comment along with a few other of my friends that worked at Facebook, and that alone was enough to highlight the comment as the top comment on his cover image. Organically, 1,000 new followers in 12 hours is pretty good, and now I have the chance to build a personal relationship with every single one of those followers! Seriously, if you want to get some quick followers go reply on my comment that’s already highlighted there (only one reply right now!).

So as you can see, it wasn’t my brand, but my personal profile that provided the value. I couldn’t have accomplished that with a brand page, or bland brand website. You (the person, not the brand), and your employees need to be doing the same.

Next time you think about your presence on social media, stop thinking about Facebook Pages and Google+ Pages, and start looking at ways you can engage your employees and yourself as people on social channels. Make them “social embassadors” for your brand, and you should see ten times the success you are seeing with just one marketer and one team in your company focused on just the brand.

In these days, EVERYONE is a marketer! You need to be training your employees to be social assets for your company. If you’re an employee, your social presence, and even more than that, value (number of followers, etc), will be a defining factor of whether you, or the guy being interviewed next to you gets the job. It’s time to start learning to build audiences through social media, and build your own value for the companies you work for.

For companies and business owners interested, I provide a “Social Embassador” training curriculum as part of my “Everyone a Marketer” program. You can learn more about it here. Talk to me (jesse@staynalive.com) if you’re interested in training your own employees as social assets! I am also doing a webinar in 3 weeks that you and your employees can learn how to grow your brand through Facebook ads. Go here to purchase your tickets and learn more!

Twitter Hires 140th "Character", Adds Lucene Committer Michi Busch to its Search Talent

Posted on February 16, 2010 by jessestay

It’s no secret Twitter has a desire to have a stronger search presence. With business models that thrive on content publishing and organization, a strong search product is necessary to provide the most revenue down the road. Just today, while announcing its 140th employee and celebrating to the music of BT, Twitter hired Michael (Michi) Busch, search indexing expert and committer to the Open Source Lucene search project to its team as a “Search Engineer”, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Busch brings with him not only strong experience in his contributions to Lucene, but also a firm background at IBM working on IBM’s eDiscovery Analyzer product, focusing on indexing and search technologies there as well. Busch is a regular presenter at various ApacheCon conferences, so I’m sure this won’t be the last we hear of him while working for Twitter.

Just after Twitter’s announcement today of its focus on Open Source standards, the hiring of Busch just solidifies that there will continue to be a focus on open technologies at Twitter. Lucene, perhaps one of the most widely used open source search indexing products in the world, we can now wonder if it will play a part in that process. With one of its committers working for Twitter, we can hopefully expect real-world cases of search indexing technology integrated into the open source product in the future.

Twitter continues to expand its team of smart talent, and it seems almost weekly continues to add to its pool of geniuses from the likes of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and IBM. As I said before, it’s this talent pool that continues to excite me about Twitter and have a strong belief in its future. With Busch now working on the search product, there’s no doubt that Twitter has an interest in good technology, and helping the community as it grows. I can’t wait to see what Busch can bring to Twitter.

It’s About Technology That Creates Community

Posted on October 28, 2009 by jessestay

I’ve been rambling on Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook tonight about the differences in how Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed’s founders participate in each community. Look at Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Fan Page. Notice how he basically talks at the community? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a comment by him with his followers (perhaps part of the reason why it’s so difficult to manage Fan Pages right now). Now look at Ev Williams and Biz Stone’s Twitter profiles. You’ll notice a little more participation, but mostly with their inner circles and occasional outreaches to the community. Now go read Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor’s FriendFeed profiles. Notice that they’re very actively involved in the conversation, responding in their own threads to people they barely know, participating in others’ conversations, etc. I think if you look at the profiles of other employees in each of the three organizations you’ll see a similar trend. Why is it that the community where the founders and employees participate the most is the smallest community with the lowest growth rate?

I’ve been contemplating this tonight. FriendFeed, as a whole has one of the tightest communities of all. For those that participate actively in the site, we quickly come to know each other – it’s the place where everybody knows your name. That’s why Scoble, and Louis Gray, and myself are so passionate about it. It is a great place to go meet new people, find more information, and grow with a community that cares and knows you. I asked the question why Facebook and even Twitter don’t see this as an opportunity to win a new audience, much of which feels a bit betrayed by the sale of FriendFeed to Facebook, and many who have never done much venturing outside the network to new places. It seems like an opportunity to me – after all, when Facebook bought FriendFeed, they bought the technology, not the community. The community is something that has to be earned, not bought.

Yet, at the same time I wonder if it really matters. With Facebook and Twitter’s immense growth, do they really need to be paying attention to the small FriendFeed community? FriendFeed has great technology, and great talent that built that technology, now working for Facebook (one who just left). Can the community be won in other ways? I think it can, and it goes back to the first paragraph above – look at the numbers compared to participation. I argue a community’s growth is not relative to the participation of its founders, but rather the technology’s capability to build community even further. It’s the technology that trumps community any day because it creates and enables that community. Technology that empowers individuals to create their own communities wins any day, and trumps founder participation hands down.

Gasp! You say – you mean I don’t have to participate to build a community? No, that’s not what I’m saying. If you’re a user of the tools, you definitely must be participating, nurturing, and sharing for your community to grow. What I’m saying though is that no matter who the founders are and whether they participate in your personal community or not, you’re going to take your community to the places that enable you to nurter, build, and grow a community the best. That’s why Facebook grew the fastest. That’s why people use Twitter. It’s also why FriendFeed was the smallest, yet had a great acquisition of some very talented individuals who know how to build this type of technology.

Let’s look at the technologies:

Facebook

Facebook not only enables you to share status updates with your friends, but enables you to share photos, videos, notes, links, and more, all in an integrated environment. You have privacy controls to which you can control how public the information you share with your friends is. This encourages a native environment where family and close friends can communicate and share with each other, focusing on each individual’s roots to build community out of. You have lists that you can organize these individuals and filter their updates in your news stream.

At the same time Facebook provides Fan Pages, indexable by Google, for which you can subscribe, or “fan”, similar to the way you would do on the other networks. This is your public, more anonymous persona, something I think each individual needs as well. This enables you to share with the rest of the world what you’re doing, and build community and share through that means.

Then you have the API. Not only as an entrepreneur, developer, or community builder do I have access to create applications that create and nurture community within the Facebook environment, but Facebook has also given me the technology and tools to do that on my own website, all with the community I’m working to build on Facebook itself. It enables me to do that with my own community, and enable them to bring their communities into my own.

The richness of that experience is what makes Facebook so big, and is the reason for its growth. That has nothing to do with its founders or their participation. I’m not sure they need to participate so long as they keep building technology that further enables individual communities on the network.

Twitter

Twitter baffles me at times, but I think I understand it. Twitter’s openness and focus on such a simple thing, status updates, is what has made it grow so big. Users can do whatever they want with the network. They can use it to update their friends with what they’re doing, respond, and grow a community through open communication.

Twitter also encourages the initiation of conversation. You post something on Twitter, link to somewhere else, and the communication continues elsewhere. Some times that filters back to Twitter. Some times the entire communication happens on Twitter.

Twitter’s API is as open as it can be. It’s fairly limited as compared to Facebook’s, but has enabled many people to bring their communities on Twitter back to their own brand and vice-versa to further grow community.

The problem with Twitter as compared to Facebook is that it is only status updates. You can respond, reply, and even retweet items you read, but it all centers around those status updates. There’s not much more depth than that, limiting the type and size of community one can build on the network. Yet at the same time the openness and lack of rules around users and its developer platform has enabled people to do things they would not normally be able to do with a community on Facebook. That’s why they’ve continued to grow and are the size (and hype) they are right now.

At the same time because they’re not quite the enablers of community in regards to their technology which Facebook is, I think their Founders and employees need to participate and get involved a little more. The technology still doesn’t quite sustain the building of community the way Facebook’s does.

FriendFeed

I could probably argue FriendFeed has better technology that encourages and enables community building better than Twitter’s. The problem with FriendFeed is that almost all the technology found in FriendFeed keeps getting gobbled up by Twitter and Facebook. There’s not much new to it, and now that they’ve been bought by Facebook, that doesn’t appear to need to fully compete – it would just be an additional complement to the community-building offerings Facebook offers.

Beforehand FriendFeed was doing a good job keeping up, and perhaps could have even caught up to at least Twitter. Its growth was even starting to show that before they were acquired. Yet their founders still participated, as did the other employees of the company. Why is this? It was possible because the community was smaller – the founders were simply growing with the community, and the community was and is still a tight-knit community of people that knew each other.

I think as FriendFeed continued to build technology that enabled others to build community and relationships, that participation would have slowly evolved to each of the founders’ own close communities. They would not have needed to participate for the community to grow.

Conclusion

So what do we make of all this? I think the moral here is that entrepreneurs need to focus more on building technologies that encourage and enable community. When you’re writing code or having others write it is it enabling people to build relationships? Is it enabling people to share with others? How much so?

The Facebook/Twitter or even Google or Microsoft or Apple battle isn’t over yet – in the end it will be the one that best enables their users through technology to build their own communities and communicate better with each other. The better competitors will master this. There will be other entrants. It’s not the participation of a community’s founders that determines its success. It’s the technology of the company which creates community that does. In that regard, technology trumps community, hands down.