Social Media
December 7th, 2011 by Canright Communications
There is such a thing as too much Twitter.
The University of Chicago and Chicago’s public radio station WBEZ recently hosted a talk called “More than a Century of Style” in honor of the Chicago Manual of Style’s historic influence on the written word. A detailed description of the event and its panelists can be found here.
I was interested in the talk, but I didn’t feel like actually going to the U of C campus. Lucky for me, that didn’t matter. I watched and listened to the live stream of the talk on the U of C Facebook page, and I used Twitter to type my comments and questions in real time to @chicagomanual.
After my first question failed to yield acknowledgment from the moderator on my computer screen, I decided to dig deep for the best question I could think of. Recalling an essay titled “Authority and American Usage” that I read in David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster, I tweeted:
To my surprise, it didn’t take long before I heard my Twitter handle and tweet read aloud. I felt my heart quicken and blood rush to my face.
Several questions popped into my head: Why am I participating more in this discussion than the folks who actually made the cold trip to the university? How did technology just prompt several biological responses? Am I going to get more Twitter followers?
As I lay on my couch in my sweatpants, I listened to Anita Samen, managing editor of the University of Chicago Press Books Division, thoughtfully answer my question. The advantages of using social media for events like these were clear: access and participation.
However, the talk also demonstrated how social media can be burdensome when misused. In this case, it suffered from too much Twitter.
First of all, why would a discussion completely bar those in attendance from asking questions? I think a mixture of live and digital questions would have been more rewarding for the physically present audience. Organizers should think of these live panel discussions as an entree with several complementing dishes. Twitter and Facebook should be the salt and pepper.
The non-stop Twitter feed chopped up the discussion among the featured panelists and even distracted panelist Jason Riggle enough that he lost track of what they were talking about. Events like this should be a flowing conversation and even at times an informal debate. Constant twitteruptions are momentum killers.
It also gives voice to people who don’t always deserve one. Here we had some of the foremost experts and authorities in grammar, style, and linguistics, and they were consistently being interrupted by tweets from the peanut gallery. The questions were at times trivial (numerous questions about the Oxford comma), ridiculous (Would you make Dave Eggers conform to Chicago Style?), and outside the discussion’s scope (What about email?).
As one of the lazy armchair grammarians who stayed in to stream the talk and live-tweet questions, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I appreciate the University of Chicago for consistently sponsoring events like these. The university’s commitment to not only engaging everyone it possibly can, but also directly involving them is admirable. I look forward to more streaming and tweeting in the future, but I hope that the tweets only help tease out the discussion, rather than dominate it.
You can watch the full event here.
You can read David Foster Wallace’s essay as it was published in Harper’s here.
- James
I was interested in the talk, but I didn’t feel like actually going to the U of C campus. Lucky for me, that didn’t matter. I watched and listened to the live stream of the talk on the U of C Facebook page, and I used Twitter to type my comments and questions in real time to @chicagomanual.
After my first question failed to yield acknowledgment from the moderator on my computer screen, I decided to dig deep for the best question I could think of. Recalling an essay titled “Authority and American Usage” that I read in David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster, I tweeted:
Tags: a century of style, alison cuddy, anita samen, armchair grammarian, ben zimmer, carol fisher saller, chicago manual of style, chicago style, eight forty-eight, Event, Facebook, grammar, jason riggle, on language, panel discussion, Social Media, stream, style, talk, the subversive copy editor, Twitter, university of chicago, wbez
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September 7th, 2010 by Collin Canright
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“Our investment has created a home for thousands of new jobs and has helped shine a national spotlight on Chicago as a technology leader,” [Chicago Mayor Richard M.] Daley said. “The fast-growing technology field is an essential part of our plan to make Chicago the most competitive destination in the world for new businesses and new jobs.” Chicago on the tech move, from Brad Spirrison’s Chicago Sun-Times column
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I’m living in the post-PC revolution. I’m in a desktopless world that is about feeds and profiles running in all my browsers and mobile devices, and interacting in exciting new ways. It doesn’t matter if I am in the office, at home, or at Starbucks—I am productive wherever I am. The enterprise is not just going to the cloud, it’s now going social, and it’s going mobile. Facebook and Twitter have shown us the way. Guest post on TechCrunch by Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff.
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Remember this, though. When you’re reading something here that’s getting you really riled up, stop. It may be that you really should be thinking the exact opposite of what you are. And if you find yourself floating through a post agreeing with all the subtle pandering, wake up! Michael Arrington from TechCrunch
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Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers. Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind . . . William Gibson on Google and Google chief Eric Schmidt’s recent interview.
Tags: Chicago, Social Media, society, technology
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March 9th, 2010 by Collin Canright
Research and articles that have caught my attention this past week.
SMB Marketers Segment Emails by Preference, Behavior
Email marketing research on trends for small and medium businesses.
Does social media generate leads?
Reasonable and realistic assessments of Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook for business lead generation.
Differentiating Your Company’s IT Services Menu
Thoughtful discussion of ”trusted relationships” as the differentiating factor in IT services (and other professional) firms, from Ben Bradley of MaconRaine.
Social media strategies that work
Report on research from MarketingProfs.
Atari Computer Concepts
Very cool photos of product concepts c. 1981.
Tags: B2B marketing, computers, lead generation, Social Media
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February 25th, 2010 by Collin Canright
Content sharing and the way a network can multiply influence is one of the least glamorous and likely one of the least discussed effects of social media. A lot of online activity, social media as well as email, is the result of one person sharing something they find interesting or noteworthy and passing it on to others.
I am interested of late in how content is shared and what results content sharing generates. As an example, I heard about a potential project that originated from LinkedIn. One person posted a note to his network on the type of person he was seeking. I receive that note from two people who forwarded their LinkedIn email to me through internet email. Then I received a phone call from another friend who had also received the LinkedIn note and thought I’d be interested.
That’s the network effect of content sharing, and I’m sure the person who put out the request on LinkedIn was successful, given the breadth of his network to begin with and the power of cross-channel content sharing—in this case the message went from a social channel to an email channel and the telephone channel.
In another instance, I ran across a Twitter post that had an intriguing title about a business accelerator for start ups. I don’t know who sent it, but I clicked through to see http://www.exceleratelabs.com/. I knew that Ron May, publisher of The May Report, would be interested in the website, so I sent him an email. Ron follows venture capital and entrepreneurship, and he published my email and the link in his newsletter. I know because someone told me. And now, the link is published in a blog. Again, the network effect operates across channels, from Twitter, to email, to email newsletter.
The content-sharing power of social media emerged as a main theme at tonight’s Social Media Club of Chicago panel on social media in financial services. Panelists from financial publisher Morningstar discussed how the firm uses social media to share thought-leadership content from its analysts and magazines as a way to generate web traffic and build relationships, and in the end I was struck by the cross-channel nature of communication and how social media both contributes to and speeds the sharing of content.
“It’s about creating ways that make it easier to share your content and make it easy to talk about. Not through one channel, but a good mix because people consume and share information differently,” said Panelist Shannon Paul, community manager for PEAK6 Online, parent company of online brokerage OptionsHouse.
Twitter has the highest click through and highest bounce rates. Email has the lowest click through but the highest engagement, she noted, citing research by the sharing utility publisher Share This.
Share This sees sharing as the “heart of the social web.” Read more in the post, “Sharing and ‘Socialgraphics’: Why Marketers Should Be Paying Attention.”
-Collin
Tags: network, Social Media
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February 11th, 2010 by Collin Canright
The future of media and marketing continues to unfold this week in social ideas and products.
Much buzz this week about Google Buzz and its direct competition to social networks (Facebook) and microblogging services (Twitter). Daniel B. Honigman of Weber Shandwick gives you three reasons why you should care.
The reasons and refutations are well worn, but this posts summarizes the primary reasons why you may not care even if you know you should.
Chris Brogan shows how to start putting social media together, starting with your blog but viewing its content not in the isolation of the blog but as part of a greater content system. “Your blog is only one destination, and it’s only reaching one channel of a much larger opportunity and demographic,” he writes.
In this post, Brian Solis continues his explorations of social media and how it’s changing news media and public relations. “As a new hybrid of collective journalism takes place, reporters who remain plugged-in to communities outside of their domain will open new doors to relevance–connecting to new stories and people that propel information beyond the reach of any one network at the speed of the now web.
all content as part of a whole.
Tags: content marketing, Social Media
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February 10th, 2010 by Collin Canright
I am trying to figure out where most business-to-business companies land in the social media market, after a conversation with a colleague yesterday. I was thinking of a Brian Solis article I read about a month ago, “10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration.”
Solis lays out a continuum from observing, getting a social presence, responding by reacting, and researching to provide relevance and focus. I decided our firm was emerging into the fifth or sixth stages Solis outlines.
Stage 5: Turning Words Into Actions. The two tag words here are “empathy” and “purpose”; understanding in order to best connect and giving an audience something to believe in. I think we’re getting closer.
Stage 6: Humanizing the Brand and Defining the Experience. The tag phrases here are “humanization of the brand” and “experience,” meaning establishing a persona worthy of attention and directing traffic to a more dynamic, vibrant, and useful web and brand experience. Maybe.
I figure that’s about as high as most organizations go today—mostly because I really only understood the next level, Stage 7: Community, and I know most businesses have not developed truly vibrant social media communities, though I know some that have.
Solis uses the phrase “attention economy” in his discussion of the last stage, “Business Performance Metrics.” It’s a notion from mid-1990s internet discussions and the subject of a book that came out in 2001 and likely has more history than that.
It’s an interesting notion. Attention is scarce, and it’s the cyber currency that marketing communications and public relations are designed to bring in.
I have no grand conclusion on these matters, but am pondering a basic Stage 5 question that’s critical in an increasingly social marketing environment, in which all participants get increasingly more news from increasingly more sources that are increasingly more personal (as opposed to mediated): to what do you want your audience, customers, and market to attend to and why?
-Collin
Tags: B2B marketing, Social Media
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February 2nd, 2010 by Collin Canright
The most critical element of maintaining contact and building relationships with a network is to touch people as many time as practical using as many ways as possible—from emails to blogs to newsletters to social media to phone calls to face-to-face meetings. Here are some ways to maintain contact with a network that we know, from our own experience, work:
1. Publish a networking calendar.
We’ve created the Canright Calender, a list of networking events in Chicago for executives, marketers, entrepreneurs, and innovators that we consider attending, and send it by email each week. It’s become the thing we do that people comment on and appreciate the most, building goodwill for our firm. We also run into people we know at events we would not have known they would be interested in, but they read about the event in our networking email and come. Several other people do the same thing, and we list their calendars at the bottom of our weekly Canright Featured Event emails and posts.
2. Send a regular enewsletter.
The key word is “regular,” which is a synonym for “consistent.” The content is, of course, the news business thrived for years on familiarity and punctuality, and those qualities are still required to make an impression. We seek to make our enewsletter personal through our staff media recommendations–they’re the more commented on and read portions of every issue of Canright Communicates.
3. Solicit comments for your blog.
In writing our White Paper Basics report, we posted a link with a request for comments on the topic on LinkedIn and sent a request for comments in emails both to people we knew well and people we hardly knew at all, as a way of “crowdsourcing” information. We posted the feedback on our blog and incorporated it into our report.
4. Distribute articles through social networks and media.
We wrote a summary of recent research in the payments market as part of a promotion surrounding the SIBOS 2009 Conference. We emailed the article to contacts we thought might be interested, posted the article on LinkedIn groups and the SWIFT payments community, and even wrote an article about the article in ourAugust 2009 newsletter. LinkedIn became the top referral source to our blog.
5. Continue the “old-fashioned” ways.
The telephone still works as well as it did when the Bell System advertised in LIFE magazine “You could never without a telephone” in 1953, though most people believe that email gets more response. I regularly call frequent readers of our enewsletters and people who register for our white paper report to see what their interests are and whether we can help with their marketing.
I aim to meet with people in person. Indeed, in-person meetings—off-line connections, if you will—remain the goal of most network contacts. Perhaps it’s a predictable backlash to connecting online or to continuing travel restrictions, but Hyatt Hotels is using the slogan, “Great Happens When People Get Together” for its current meetings and events promotion.
Tags: email marketing, networking Chicago, Social Media
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January 25th, 2010 by Collin Canright
Social media marketing takes the next step in 2010, from the next new thing to a powertool in the integrated marketer’s toolbox, for both business-to-business and consumer marketing, as reported last week in major marketing and technology media articles and blog posts.
Optimism, accountability, social media top trends
BtoB Magazine reports “cautious optimism,” especially over ad budget increases, and the “integration of social media as a marketing tool” as top trends in 2010.
Study Finds Marketers Embracing Social Media Marketing In A Big Way
TechCrunch reports on an Alterian study showing that “66 percent of respondents will be investing in social media marketing (SMM) in 2010.”
2010: Marketers Get Serious About Social Media
Forbes columnist Jeremiah Owyang opines that “senior marketers must have a plan for social marketing” as consumer adoption grows and CMOs get organized around social media–”get over the cool factor” and relate to customers.
The New Social Gurus
Adweek reports that “big brands are on the hunt for help in figuring out their approaches to connecting with consumers on Facebook, providing service on Twitter and instituting internal social media guidelines.” Are the new experts up to the task?
Spending on custom content expected to increase this year
BtoB Magazine reports on an Junta42 study showing that spending on “custom content,” the lifeblood of social media marketing, is set to increase in 2010, with marketers surveyed planning to allocate some 33% of their overall budget to custom content.
Tags: B2B marketing, economy, Social Media
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January 13th, 2010 by Collin Canright
Social media is all the rage and will cement its place in the marketing mix in 2010 as companies realize that people are interested in the “communication” portion of “marketing communications,” whether they are consumers or business buyers. What about good “old-fashioned email,” as I called it in the “Content Marketing Strategy, White Paper Tactics”?
Each member of the social media trinity—Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter—can reach an audience, but that audience isn’t necessarily following your updates as religiously as they’re checking their email. People may log in to Facebook several times a day, but their email windows are constantly open. The fact remains: email is still popular.
Indeed, eMarketer reported in November 2009 that college students are holding tight to email use despite the explosion in social networking sites. “These results may be surprising to some, but not if you consider the role email continues to play in the day-to-day lives of Gen Y,” the report stated. “As long as email remains the collection point for social networking updates, including alerts around new followers, discussion updates and friend requests, it will remain a powerful force in marketing and our lives.”
Similarly, SocialTwist, a widget provider, reported in Social Media Sharing Trends 2009 that, “Despite the social media revolution – traditional forms of networking like email and instant messaging continue to be the most popular mediums of sharing content across the Internet. Nearly 60 percent of overall sharing happens over emails.”
As perhaps the top social and marketing developments of 2009, social media are adding a personal touch to the public web—at breakneck speed. Or more precisely, at conversational speed.
Yet because of its ubiquity, email retains its position as the wires of online communication. Any 2010 marketing strategy should take that reality into account.
-Collin
Tags: email marketing, Social Media
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January 12th, 2010 by Collin Canright
At the start of the new year, I set my strategies and goals and plan my tactics on how to achieve them. This year, we are positioning our marketing communications services on content marketing: the use of relevant and educational content to engage an audience and generate interest in an organization and its mission.
A good portion of social media is based on sharing content, whether through articles and blog posts distributed on the social-media trinity of Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Or through pay-per-click advertising, website downloads, or good old-fashioned email marketing.
(And if email marketing is old fashioned, what of print? Maybe it’s not wired but certainly not expired. Most of the projects we do happen to be print.)
The first tactic in our own program is a focus on white papers. We’ve updated our white paper report as “White Paper Basics: the Dos, Don’ts, Whys, Whats, and Hows of White Papers.”
The report explains why white papers are written, what they are–and are not–and how to use them to educate an audience and generate leads. We also provide examples of different types of white papers, including a few we’ve written. Our list of white paper and lead-generation resources is excellent.
Feel free to download a copy–no registration required–and pass it on, along with our January Jump Start Offer: 10% off the cost of writing and designing a white paper or report.
Call Collin Canright at 773 426-7000.
Tags: content marketing, email marketing, Social Media, white papers
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