weekend
thinking about Stephen Baker (pictured) & Heather Green of
Business Week regarding his latest cover story: Beyond Blogs (sub
context…social media will change your business), a follow up to his
fantastic 2005 article; Blogging Will Change Your Business.Let me start by saying this 2005 article had a huge influence on me. Additionally, Steve’s cover story of Janury 2006: Why Math Will Rock Your World is the reason I subscribe to the paper version of Business Week…the only paper subscription I have.
Let me be clear from the start that I'm a fan of Steve's, love his work and he is one of the few Print Journalists I feed to my homepage....I just think this story misses the mark.
This
weekend I also read “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch. I’m sure
most of you have heard by now about this book highlighting a final CMU
lecture by a dying college professor. Here is the video….Randy has some great lessons here, but one that kept coming back to me was to “focus on the fundamentals.”
This is what kept nagging me about Stephen & Heather’s updated Business Blogging article…they really seemed to ignore the fundamentals.
There are basically two big problems with reporting on Social Media that it seems all journalists fall into...(wait! I just thought of a third…)
1. Chasing the newest thing. There is a lot changing in social media. But the big story for business isn’t Twitter or Facebook, it’s new and more effective ways to use the basics: Email and Corporate Blogging. Randy talks about his early youth football days. How a coach made them practice with no balls because, like Vince Lombardi says, this game is about fundamentals. In Randy’s talk a kid asks why they have no footballs. Coach answers: “how many people on the field don’t have the ball?” Answer: “21”. Right says the coach: “We are going to focus on what those 21 people are doing.”
What happens with getting hung up on the newest widget or Twitter is it distracts from what the vast majority of people are doing online…..email and Search. There are amazing strides being made in data driven email dialog and blogging is revolutionizing Search Engine Optimization and engagement.According to the Pew Interent and American Life research, (see graph) this is where the people are. This is where business needs to be focused. Yes, keep an eye on new things, but focus energy on perfecting what is working today. Search and Email are the biggest parts of the Social Media mix and present the largest opportunities for business.
2. Celebrity. So many journalist covering Social Media focus on Celebrities and celebrity bloggers. There are 20,000,000 businesses in the United States…and this doesn’t count non-profits. Hearing stories about Jimmy Wales, Michael Arrington, Kerry Miller or Jonathan Schwartz is great if you’re People Magazine, but this is Business Week. Tell me about real businesses using these tools. The story at Sun Microsystems isn’t the story of a CEO/Celebrity blogger (Jonathan's Blog), the story is the thousands of normal everyday Sun employees that blog. Who are they? What are the benefits to the organization? (hint…it’s not touchy-feely....the ROI is found in winning searches and converting those visitors to prospects….)
There was a great quote from Richard Edelman in the Dallas Morning News the other day:
“It’s clear that when it comes to traditional authority figures – whether they’re chief executives or heads of state – people trust them less,” says Mr. Edelman. “Employees are the new credible source of information. We have data that shows an employee blog is five times more credible than a CEO blog – and I say this as a CEO blogger.”
This is the big story in Social Media as it relates to Business.
Fundamentals are about focusing most of your effort on the things that are most important…with Social Media as it relates to business, that is the amazing strides being made with Email driving engagement through data and Search made through widespread employee blogging.
3. Journalism. Journalists can be forgiven for sticking close to home when considering Blogging and Social Media. A quote like this is typical:“According to a recent study by Forrester Research, only a quarter of the U.S. adult population even bothers to read a blog once a month."
Journalists think in terms of circulation…. of a fan base that is going to be loyal to a given author. This doesn’t work in business. More importantly it’s shouldn’t even remotely be a measure of success for business. Again, this makes people like Kerry Miller or Arianna Huffington interesting to Journalists but not really relevant to the other 19.9M organizations that are not involved in publishing.
Businesses measure success based on metrics like traffic, engagement, conversion, leads, sales…that sort of thing. How is social media being successfully executed against those metrics…..now that’s a story.
By no means do I want to minimize the power or potential of these new tools. Internal Wiki’s are perhaps the greatest thing to happen to internal organization communications and collaboration since the telephone…or at least the Outlook Calendar. Both BT and Best Buy have great cases to make. But the reality is that every CEO on the planet wakes up with one thought first and foremost….sales.
What’s missing from the conversation about Social Media is how any of this affects the actual numbers. It’s almost like it would be ‘dirty’ for anyone to talk about how a business should use social media to drive sales.
Sales happen when there is a need and a solution that comes together for mutually agreed value. (I value that flat screen more than I value my $1,000 in cash)
What’s been lost from traditional marketing since the advent of TV has been a fundamental premise we all learned from Zig Ziglar. People buy from People. Marketers have been corrupted by “Brand” and “Consumer” for so long that they forgot about the people on both sides.
The greatest gift of Social Media is the ability to reintroduce people to the mix. Email, Search & Employee Blogging all are social media….and all drive better relationships, higher engagement and more business. That’s what the entire Social Media phenomenon is telling us. We trust people more than we trust institutions.
Posted by: steve baker on Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Chris, thanks very much for the kind words and illuminating post. I'm especially interested in learning more about data-driven e-mail dialog. Regarding a few of the points you made. Yes, we're naturally interested in what's new, and we focus more on people. I learned this lesson the hard way when I was covering steel in Pittsburgh 12 years ago. I kept getting less and less space for my stories, which as I saw it dealt with important themes, like the future of American manufacturing and competitiveness in the global economy. Around then, I turned to tech... Anyway, there are two sides to our coverage in this latest package: social media in business, and in media. It's in media where you see the celebrities, such as Arianna, Jarvis, and our own Kerry Miller. But in the articles, both the main story and IBM, we talked more about business. I get it that that part came up short in your eyes, because we focused on the new and largely steered clear of sales (except for one tiny Dell example) But I don't think the value of social media will be felt first in these measurable domains. Look at wikis, for example. They're a staple in engineering firms, both for collaboration among far-flung teams and for documentation. People at Sun make the case that they're vital for innovation and efficiency. But do they add to sales? Probably not one penny. You say that every CEO on the planet wakes up one one thought... sales. But they also think about controlling costs (including travel), stitching together global teams, and innovation. It's in these areas, more than sales, where I see the impact. Those who wait for measurable ROI are going to be late. John Byrne asked me on the podcast if every company needed to be embracing these tools. At the risk of undermining the story, I said No. Lots of companies will look at social networks and microblogging and conclude that they do fine without them. But I think everyone should at least be knowledgeable about them, and aware that their competitors, sooner or later, may be putting them to good use. I agree with you, by the way, about the importance of social media bringing people back into the mix.