Metzger Business

March 2, 2011

Talking DADVocate Project

Filed under: Musings,Social Media — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 9:45 pm

I don’t usually talk directly about my other projects on this blog as it is geared to a discussion on social media and business. However I form many of my ideas for this blog by executing them over on The DADvocate Project or through other various outlets. Today however I’m going to solicit this audience directly. If you are a reader of this blog and you are a dad then please go over to The DADvocate Project and take the Survey. If you are a reader of this blog and are not a dad then you most likely have a dad and or are married to a dad. Please ask them to take the survey.

The DADvocate Survey was put together last year as an effort to define who today’s dads are. In the media and press dads tend to get a bad rap and honestly Dads are not a lazy beer drinking group who sit on the couch and do nothing. Dads are also no longer the sole bread winners in the family and our societal role as men in families is changing. By the way our spending habits are changing as a result of the family dynamic change too.

The DADvocate survey looks how and where we dads are spending our time and in some cases money. Over 390 people have taken the survey thus far and I’m closing the survey in May. I hope to have close to 500 respondents by then but to make that happen I need your help. Please take the survey now or tell some friends. Heck post about it on facebook, twitter or linkedin. Thank you in advance.

February 23, 2010

How should Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Use Twitter and Why?

Filed under: Social Media — Tags: , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 12:42 am

CHOA – or Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta is a terrific organization. We recently spent a weekend there with our son when he had RSV. The hospital is amazing. They make you feel comfortable, they have hundreds of services, they offer room service to the parents, they have educational tv programs for adults, there is a computer lab, they have wifi, they do everything necessary to make a hard and scary time easy for the kids and the parents. Children’s is flat out an awesome organization.

While I was at the hospital I was on my computer and decide to see what kind of social media presence CHOA had. It turns out they really don’t have any social media presence at all. This is a true loss of opportunity for an organization such as Children’s because it is such a cheap and effective way to reach their target audiences both customers and donors. The day we were in the hospital happened to be the day of the Children’s parade in Atlanta. Seeing only five tweets mention the parade or CHOA  amazed me and I posted one of them.

Children’s is way too valuable a resource to our community to have such little presence in one of the largest twitter markets in the country.

What would be the objective for Children’s to use Twitter. The number one thing to keep in mind is that social media of all kinds is meant for relationship building and to funnel leads into your sales funnel. So if I were positioning CHOA I would recommend focusing on a major goal of spreading the word for fundraisers and leverage the technology to inform and attract more people to charitable events.

The initial strategy and measurement for this type of work with twitter would be quite easy to implement. A landing page or blog post should be set up specifically for an event. Then  a URL shorten-er that tracks click troughs could be used to send tweets about the campaign.  That is the simple part, the larger part of the twitter effort would be to capture the brand image of service and provide users on-line the same service they get at the hospital. This strategy can be taken in many directions, such as providing nurses to respond to simple customer questions or having doctors tweet about the benifits of a particular surgery. The possibilities are truly endless.

Encouraging customers to tweet about their experience with CHOA would be another great objective and could be accomplished with a messaging campaing asking for feedback from parents. CHOA could choose to measure the success of this program simply by looking at the increase in tweets about CHOA from non CHOA accounts.

Ideally CHOA shouldn’t have to tweet about their parade on the day of the parade because their followers will do it for them but that won’t happen unless CHOA is out there actively interacting with the on-line social community.

January 12, 2010

Response to Reeking of Desperation

Filed under: Musings,Social Media — Tags: , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 12:15 am

An interesting question was raised by Julian Smith about how people spend their time acting desperate to get seen by the big names in Social Marketing.  I formatted the following response but then realized it was more the length of a blog then a comment so here it is.

9 months ago I started my blog MySpellingSucs.com – an unedited discussion of my dyslexia and ADD and my daughters Cerebral Palsy. I started it just to start writing something and do it consistently. I wanted to just say what I felt and do it the way I wanted to. I was tired of listening to fast easy money crowd who really didn’t know what they were talking about and I just wanted to do it my way. I write about how I have learned from my children and parenting, specific issues on CP, and I occasionally interview or write about inspirational folks with disabilities. I love writing there and it has brough me great pleasure as well as some recognition. I was awarded 2009 East Cobber Father of the year and this happened when my readership was only from my local network of friends.

Then about 6 months ago I started getting involved in community – twitter, expanding Facebook and LinkedIn, commenting on other blogs and that kind of thing. I found more readers coming to my site and then I really started getting interested in and attaching to people who were leading this revolution. Julien – Yourself included.

After a few months I found myself backing away from the “Guru’s” and focusing in the “Second Tier.” I do this because they have more time they are just as educated and have as many new and innovative ideas and they communicate more. I know the “Guru’s/First Tier” used to communicate with their audience as much as the “Second Tier” now does but the “Guru’s” don’t have the time to communicate with new folks as much as they would like and they need to keep their loyal audiences loyal so they communicate with as many as possible and are diligent about communicating with the folks that have helped them along the way.

It’s been in working with this “Second Tier” of bloggers that I have found I have the most pleasure and have begun to get the most recognition from the Guru’s. It makes sense.

In any community you want Gate Keepers. A Gate Keeper helps you know who the good and who the bad are when you don’t have the time to figure it out yourself. If the people I trust vet you and say your good than I’ll (as the guru) take a little additional time to find out more about who you are.

I guess what I’m saying is I like the idea of being yourself. That may have something to do with connecting with the crowd but do it your way and find the folks you enjoy communicating with.

This was originally going to be a comment in response to the blog post Reeking of Desperation but was too long. Julien thanks for the inspiration.

December 26, 2009

Twitter Wiki Pages for Your Business. Is Your company monitoring it’s coversation?

Filed under: Big Business,Intranet,Marketing,Social Media — Tags: , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 9:44 am

We have a wiki at the office. It’s not used much. There are a few reasons it’s not used. 1) You have to be on the corporate network. Our sales team who is remote is not set up for remote access or they simply don’t know ho to use it. 2) The wiki is dokuwiki which is somewhat easy to consume but a pain to add pages and info to for anyone who is less technical than a tech type user. 3) The biggest reason that the wiki has not been adopted is that the information out there hasn’t been all that valuable to the population at large.

I know #1 and #2 have to be addressed and they will be with an upcoming intranet project. We’re looking at hosting something on the cloud that we can use LDAP or AD to log on and maintain a single sign-on environment. We also want to find something that will be easy for user’s to add pages and intellectual property to. Finally it will have to serve as a platform for communication to the company. I’m very excited about this project but I’m going to have to reserve the rest of topics 1 and 2 for another post.

The third point I made above has been addressed with 2 initiatives I have completed in the last few weeks. The first was a long process of designing integration strategy and documentation including implementation documentation, project plans, risk scenarios, etc. The second was a simple Twitter page. I want to talk about the value of that twitter page today.

What I did:
I built a page on the wiki that consolidated all the current Twitter chatter about our company and all our competitor companies. I also set up a few searches to monitor our top customers and any discussion with those customers that focus on Shipping. I then showed this page to our Director of marketing, VP IT, director Sales Ops and a few weeks later our CEO. We now have a very nice little dashboard of all the conversations that are happening that are important to us.

How I did it:

  1. Go to Twitter.com/widgets
  2. Create a search widget for each Company name I wanted to follow, You do this by selection Search widget on the entry screen and filling out Google type search entry form.
  3. I copied the code created by the widget
  4. I created an HTML Table and started posting the widgets. I gave a cell in the table for each widget.

Marketing Impact/What we have learned:

  1. End customers – our customers, customers hate our competitor’s offerings.
  2. There is not much discussion about our company out there.
  3. When we found an upset customer, we were able to respond quickly.
  4. If an upset customer receives their package they probably won’t be upset anymore.
  5. Most Important: our company needed a Twitter presence. Our customer’s are there and Our Customer’s Customer’s are there. We now have a service presence and I expect we’ll continue to grow from there.

I do want to make one point. The exercise to build this page took about 3-4 hours. It would take a more skilled person about 1-2. I could do it again now in about 45 minutes.

What are some of the ways you’ve used Twitter in your company?

October 20, 2009

Yesterday’s blog, #NMATL, and @chrisbrogan notes! And Yes Twitter!

Filed under: Big Business,Musings,Small Business,Social Media — Tags: , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 10:54 am

Yesterday I wrote a blog on using twitter for notes and used Chris Brogan’s speech at NMATL as an example of pulling twitter data for notes. I also decided to run some stats on the information I found and posted those stats. Quite frankly the stats are meaningless to anybody and everybody other than perhaps Chris and maybe Brad and Matt who organized the event. You can read the entire post here.

So why did I run the stats? Well imagine if instead of Chris Brogan’s speech we instead inserted Big Company Name X and looked at the same data. What useful information might we find? How could we use the information to better understand what our customers are thinking of us NOW! How many are tweeting about us? What words are they consistently using? I used a dump of twitter data and Excel pivot tables to come up with the stats I posted yesterday in merely 10 minutes for the fun of it (I’m strange I know) what could you learn about your company’s reputation in 10 minutes.

August 27, 2009

Social Media options what works

Filed under: Big Business,Intranet,Marketing,Musings,Small Business,Social Media — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 6:58 am

In this series of blogs I will be examining the various social media strategies and the social media tools that support them. I’ll be examining companies that are using the strategies, looking at why a particular strategy might have been chosen and discussing the success of the strategy. All of these companies and strategies are marketing/PR campaigns.

My goal is to write a case study for each of the social media tools and explain what strategies were applied to make the tool successful for the company applying the tool and strategy.

Here are the Social Media Tools we’ll examine.
Blogging
Bookmarking/tagging
Content Aggregation
Crowdsourcing
Microblogginng
Mashups
Online video
Photo Sharing
Podcasting
Social Networks ie. Facebook, Linkedin
VIrtual Worlds
Widgets
Wikis

I’m going to pick companies that have successfully applied these tools and attempt to define and explain the strategies they have applied. Since I want to be impartial I’ll pick the companies from a list that was compiled by Peter Kim in September 2008 of Social Media Examples. The list contains over 300 companies and the tools they are applying. You can find the article here A List of Social Media Marketing Examples.

Look for the first case study early next week.

August 13, 2009

Social Media part of the College graduate DNA

Filed under: Big Business,Social Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 10:24 am

Kids that are entering the work force this year have been using social media in one form or another since they started high school. They grew up with MySpace always being a part of their vocabulary. The iPhone came out during their freshman year of college. Twitter to this generation is a tool for older folks although I think that’s changing. Theses kids have posted video’s to the web of teachers talking on the phone in class. They have recorded phone calls where parents have lost it and posted the audio. They know how easy it is to use multimedia and integrated it with social media to get buzz, publicity, notoriety, and make things happen. This group completed homework assignments through social network platforms and have even used it to cheat, although cheating will be considered collaboration now that they are in the work force.

So what does this mean for business? The younger workforce will continue to be more and more comfortable with social media, and building online brands, and collaborating together online. While some of the older generation does not feel you get to know people through social media, this generation knows that you are who you project yourself to be. This trait of projecting personalities can be very valuable to businesses if they take the opportunity to cultivate the values they want their employees to project. If your business wants to project honesty, commitment, hard work it’s very easy to do and a benefit to projecting these values through social media is that the values often manifest themselves in real life. It’s hard to project one set of values and live by another. I know personally I’ve become a much better person because of my projections.

The additional value collaborative tools provide is the ability to maximize the employee knowledge base. Collaboration through micro-blogging allows the community to see status on all projects that are currently in progress and provides the opportunity to provide input if the community has expertise to provide. Of course there need to be policies in place so that these tools are not abused but most people at work use the tools for work and if the larger community is using the tools correctly then they will police and moderate the community for you.

Finally on individual projects tools such as wiki’s provide the ability for a team to collaborate on documentation, decisions, and email like communication that should be captured via a company knowledge base. Tracking these communications via a wiki allows for the companies knowledge capital to be centralized and available. Now anyone can see why a decision was made even years later. This process allows future decisions to be better informed and made with all detail necessary. The best wiki tools search all attached documents as well as standard wiki pages and they allow you to convert or attach emails, documents, spread sheets and presentations to the wiki. This provides truly powerful knowledge content management and the new workforce is not only comfortable with it but will demand it from their employers.

Don’t forget that providing these tools helps to raise the moral of your work force by provide better communication and delivering on their expectations. Moving to Enterprise 2.0 technologies is no longer an option but a necessity. It’s only a matter of time if you haven’t started the process already.

August 10, 2009

URL Shorteners: Does it matter which one I use?

Filed under: Small Business,Social Media — Tags: , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 11:13 am

There are many url shortening services available on the web. These services allow you as the consumer of the service to view statistics on click throughs. The service also provides an easy way to publish short urls when typing in Twitter or email so that the link will never get broken.

The problem with a url shorting services is what happens when they shut down. Any url’s that you have hosted with the service will no longer work and you will have to either fix the links or have many dead links to you web site. This weekend the URL shorting service tr.im declared that they would be closing. The URLs will be good through December at which time they will no longer work. So what should these users do? Who should they go with? And if you are a new to URL shortening then which service should you choose.

I personally like the bit.ly service. According to Tr.im in their press release this weekend the bit.ly service is said to be “anointed” by twitter as “the market winner.” It certainly has a large number of Twitter users, is easy to use, has been extended to work in word press blogs in conjunctions with Twitter Tools, and provides excellent data on click throughs. Additionally it will be around for quite a while.

Another good and seemingly permanent fixture is TinyURL.com. I have used tinyurl in the past but they do not provide the same statistical data bit.ly does. I like to know how many people click on my links. The other advantage of bit.ly is that when you log in you can see all previously shortened URL’s.

There are other URL shorteners out there but sticking with these two for now should ensure that you will not end up with dead links on your site.

August 7, 2009

How many ways can twitter be used

Filed under: Big Business,Intranet,Musings,Social Media — Tags: , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 1:57 pm

One hundred and forty characters doesn’t give you much space but it sure as heck gives tons of flexibility. I’ve been a member of the Twitterverse for nearly 2 months now, actually longer so let me active member for 2 months. In that time I’ve learned that twitter is
1) The fastest news service on the planet
2) Incredible for personal branding.
3) An awesome research tool. – You can find the best most current and relevant information on virtually any topic.
4) Goofy – Twitter’s twitters are flat out funny.
5) Incredible market research in your local area or for that matter overall market research.
6) Great for company branding.
7) Might take over the world.
8) Drives traffic to your site like no other tool including all other social media forums.
9) Creates viral buzz about a product
10) And now flat out buy tweets from twitters – provided by services such as tweetroi and Izea.

As I was writing this article I just found a new twitter – You can now follow dead president John Quincy Adams brought to my attention by @stonepayton.

As a tool twitter is too public to provide corporations the ability to communicate internally. Even though you can set up private networks in twitter I’m not familiar enough with the security and I certainly wouldn’t recommend to my company that they use it for anything that we want to protect.

That said if a twitter like tool is set up internal to a company intranet, it can really be useful. Companies that want to share information about what employees are working on and even help teams become more cohesive will find incredible value in this tool that simply lets you write short sentences about “What are you doing now?” There are companies contemplating using twitter like tools to replace status reporting and others who will use it to find internal resources with answer to questions that come up in every day business.

July 29, 2009

Wiki Considerations for Corporate Intranets

Filed under: Big Business,Intranet,Social Media — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 10:24 pm

A Wiki is server-based software that enables any person to create and edit published content using only their browser.

Wiki’s supports basic HTML markup including hyperlinks to other documents in the Wiki as well as to locations within and outside of the Intranet. Most Wiki’s provide a Wiki markup language and the best Wiki’s provide WYSIWYG technology, so adding content is as simple as creating a Word document.

Wiki supports centralization and presentation of corporate data source documents in a variety of formats including spreadsheets, word processing documents, PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, e-mail files, etc. Wikis can also be configured to access and display data from databases.

While Wikipedia, the world’s largest user-maintained online encyclopedia, is a great example of a Wiki, the use in business for collaboration on a project goes far beyond simple collaboration on definition of terms.

Wiki Benefits

  1. Permits the rapid exchange of information between departments, teams and diverse members of the organization.
  2. Low technical barrier to usage promotes collaboration across users with varying technical skill sets.
  3. Supports collaboratively building sales presentations, documentation, knowledge bases, etc.
  4. Agenda and meeting management.
  5. Managing after action reports/lessons learned.
  6. Involves the entire organization in helping to build and maintain the corporate knowledge base.

Corporate Considerations
Wiki’s make a great platform for creating a corporate intranet. It is however very important to decide how the wiki can and should be used. Below is a beginning list of questions to consider:

  • Is security needed?
  • Do you want the credentials to be based on another application such as Active Directory?
  • What types of content do you want the wiki to contain?
  • What policies must be in place to ensure the content meets company standards and regulations?
  • Will the Wiki be used as a company Knowledge Base?
  • If so is there search criteria the wiki’s search engine must be able to meet?
  • What is the structure, layout or information architecture of the wiki to best facilitate finding corporate knowledge?
  • Are there Sarbanes Oxley, HIPPA or other regulations that must be followed when adding data to the wiki.
  • It the wiki is used to create or host project documentation what are the procedures for editing project information?
  • How should project teams communicate on a project with the wiki?
  • If the wiki is used as the foundation for the entire intranet then what kind of corporate pages need to be developed and who will maintain them?
  • What department will be responsible for monitoring the wiki and cleaning up old, dirty, bad, or illegal data?

The above list of questions is far from complete but it’s a start and should help you start thinking along the right lines if you’re interested in implementing a wiki in your company.

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