This interview is 7:45 in length. We chat in my studio about SXSW 2009 this year, the rise in people suddenly adopting ’social media consultant” titles, and comments about his book “Social Media One Hour a Day”.

This was shot with a rental camera I was testing and I didn’t get the focus as razor sharp as I had hoped. That’s how it goes sometimes when you’re testing new gear.  Anyway, it’s the content that counts so enjoy the conversation. Dave is easy to connect with, a good friend and one heck of a smart social media dude.

Here’s Dave …

Tom

Starting each day out right is a true challenge in this age with all the constant changes. So each day between now and Friday, March 13, I will share a short thought to inspire or a piece of experience to teach. These articles stem from my strategy work with social media and social networking systems and SEO work over the last 8 years and IT management over the last 20  years and most importantly the amazing experiences I had working with an AI spin-off from MIT called Symbolics throughout the 80’s. I learned the importance of learning and embracing tools that help you be more creative.

Let’s start with right attitude of ABC and ABL. Always be creating and always always be learning.

The number of existing  web-based social media tools and new ones being brought out each month can feel overwhelming. Ever visit www.Mashable.com? Subscribe to that feed! And read www.ReadWriteWeb.com or www.TechCrunch.com? Monitor them for tools that help you become more aware of what’s possible with the systems you’re using. Tools like Sharepoint, WordPress, Facebook, Google and others can make life easier after surviving the learning curve! No you don’t have to learn them all. Pick the ones that are worth exploring. Test them. Use them. Throw out the ones that are of no value but remember to cycle back.

Watch how you dig in and justify that you know enough already.  Are you saying – ‘no more’ I don’t need this social networking stuff? I don’t have the time. I’m too busy. I can’t keep up anyway. Take notice when you get into that line of thinking and just let it go. You’re not in a Catch 22 situation. You CAN both learn and ‘be’ who you want to be and have control over your time and what you share with others. I remember when I worked for a major US corporation for 12 years all through the 90’s and early 2000’s. I felt trapped. Middle management was like being stuck. Can’t leave, paid too well. Can’t advance; not in the inner circle.  Don’t have time; always too busy just trying to stay even. Then… I got laid off.

Last night I watched Catch-22, the movie by Mike Nichols.  Take some time and watch it again. Watch carefully for who gets out of the catch 22 and most importantly ‘why and how’ he did it.

Always be creating. Always be learning. These are your unalienable rights.

Tom

Here’s an illustration of the way things are changing so you/your company can help Marketing and Sales use the Internet to build engagement and trust that lead to greater numbers of qualified prospects.

I’m going to take some liberties here and poke a bit of fun at traditional marketing, for the sake of making a point. Traditional marketing efforts in B2B have been largely focused on driving traffic to a landing page with enough enticements to move people through the long sign-up form in hopes of a payoff, such as a white paper, at the end. I once heard a presenter says that it’s analogous to what we do in Texas with cattle at branding time: We try our best to get ‘em to move through a chute with various enticements and prods in order to count ‘em and brand ‘em so we know our total worth in beef.

What’s on offer now is a perspective that lets the most interested or qualified prospects through the filter, but does it in a different manner. Think about all the traffic interested in visiting your site (a product site or social networking component of your site, or your media content, now spread all over the Internet). This traffic falls into one of three types: Yahoos, Bluebirds or Shy Yesses.

The Yahoos are a small percentage of people on the left side of the bell curve that are lost or kicking tires or whatever, but you’re not marketing to them.

The Bluebirds are the visitors who come to your site on purpose and engage directly. You focus on moving them into the sales process directly. You’ve been a Bluebird, haven’t you?  When you just call up and order something directly from a company–no salesman contacts you–that’s a bluebird sale. It’s the small percent of the bell curve on the right-hand side and, regardless of their numbers, you’re really not marketing to them either.

In the middle of the bell curve of behavior is the Shy Yes traffic. These are all the people coming to the website or bumping into the hundreds of podcasts and blog articles your company has distributed all over the Internet for the last few years. These people have some particular interest. Likely they have a need brewing on the horizon but the last thing they want is a sales guy calling, and they sure don’t want to tip their hand by filling out a long form just to get a white paper and then have someone start hounding them.

Long before a salesman comes into the picture, your company gets involved in a scoping or planning session to do something and wants to figure out how to proceed before getting vendors all hot and bothered.  This is the makeup of a Shy Yes. I’m sure you can think of other behaviors of people finding your content and hovering over product pages, checking things out.

What’s needed are ways to entice or engage the Shy Yes with small pieces of interaction … what you get is more and more of his/her attention by satisfying their need to learn more, to ask questions without worrying about a sales guy calling, to be better informed about making budgeting decisions on projects.

I think of the social media (audio podcasts, video podcasts, blogs, comments, and so forth) and social networking (being a member of a community to exchange useful perspectives and information on pertinent topics) as a kind of birdseed.

Remember when you were a kid and you went to the park? You’d put a few pennies into a seed dispenser so you could feed the birds. At first you would just run and throw the seed at the birds, thinking you were giving them what they wanted, but the birds would fly away. Over time, however, you noticed people who were sitting patiently on benches and had birds eating out of their hands. You noticed that the people got up slowly and put food down in small, separate portions, giving the Shy birds the seeds and space they needed to build trust. Over time the birds developed enough trust in that relationship to come right up to the person on the bench.

Social media and the container for engagement/social networking are the birdseed. They are what will draw the attention of the bulk of the web traffic poring over your site each month. This is the Shy Yes traffic, picking up information piece by piece, engaging more and more with your company. They spend more time on your site, which is garnering more of their attention during the day, and maybe in the evenings on their iPhones and iTouches. You’re there, and when they are ready they start to communicate with you because you’ve made it easy.

There are so many more ’seeds’ of engagement now with social media and social networking, compared to the old days of only one landing page per 45-day sales campaign. And now every touch point can be counted and used for gentle encouragement to offer help or for the Shy Yes to contact you when they want to know more.

As I’ve said many times before, none of this replaces traditional marketing efforts. Those will always be with us and always have value. I’m simply introducing a new perspective on other ways to find qualified prospects from the web using the various social tools now at hand.

Tom

One reaction I’ve noticed while performing social media assessments and giving social marketing strategy presentations to prospective clients is the worry in their eyes when the discussion comes to creating content for a multitude of online social media distribution channels.

B2B companies that already have a fairly well-defined traditional marketing group think a particular way, so it’s important to align your thinking with their current focus on product announcement dates, press releases, white papers, conferences, and so forth. If you can position your social media strategy to align with what they already know, you’re more likely to get them thinking about what’s possible instead of putting up roadblocks. All too often their worrying comes after you explain ‘how and why’ to use a variety of social media channels like Twitter (micro-blogging), blogging, audio and video podcasting, and various RSS tools to help with Internet visibility (and engagement, if they have a social networking site already or plan one soon).

One of their concerns is how in the world will they come up with content for all those channels (not to mention, who’s going to do that) and another is when to use all those social media channels of distribution. I have a simple way that gets folks enrolled.

A traditional marketing person’s ‘style’ of thinking is often calendar-based, meaning they look at least 6-12 months out (especially given they have a yearly budget to spend). I suggest that they consider two ‘types’ of content workflow, one that somewhat synchronizes with the scheduled marketing events for the year, and the other being more asynchronous, to fill in the gaps. Big waves and little waves, I call them.

The big waves utilize variations of existing content to repurpose and retransmit the news about the product release/update into your blog, Twitter, and one or more audio/video podcasts (either at your site or ‘with’ others who podcast about your products to their audience).

A specific scenario might be: Collaborate with the Product Marketing manager who knows everything about the product to get the typical white paper that is such a part of traditional B2B marketing efforts. Think about the subtopics discussed in that white paper and write one or more blog articles which relate to, and link to, the white paper. Consider some creative way to write short, text-based interviews with the white papers’ author(s) or related industry experts. This is a great way to start and gives you a segue from yammering on about the technical nature of the product to actually focusing on how ‘users’ are adopting the product. Keeping a keen eye on comments and emails will guide you in the direction to take those blog articles.

And remember, every time you blog also post a Twitter note about the blog(s) and, where appropriate, mention the availability of that white paper with a URL to it.

Next, schedule an audio or video podcast on the product (or service) release. Just have a conversation about the product, not a word-for-word redo of the white paper. Think about how Robert Scoble does his interviews with product managers and CEOs of smaller companies. It’s just 10-20 minutes and they talk about topics relevant to the product and how it makes life easier for the customer in some fashion. You will, of course, post a short blog article with a summary of the podcast and a link to it, as well as a Twitter with a URL to the podcast and/or blog article.

An important strategy to keep in mind: Whether you’re doing podcasts yourself or with a outside vendor, make certain they show up well in the search engines. Make sure the RSS feed is syndicated to all the major RSS aggregators so you get maximize visibility of that content. If you’re expecting a lot of traffic and comments you may want to configure a ROOM in Friendfeed.com or some other tool for monitoring the comments.

The idea here is to post content that’s fairly synchronous with your existing marketing activities. I say ‘fairly synchronous’ because it’s critical that the posts be thoughtfully timed. There are often reasons to post slightly before or slightly after the event. For example, traditional marketing activities include real-world social events you attend, like mixers, conferences and so forth, that are planned for the year. These are always good opportunities to blog, Twitter, post pictures, capture short videos and so forth, all aligned with your existing calendar of activities.

Now for the little waves of social media content. Just think of these as ’salt and pepper’ to keep alive the listener’s ear. If you already have one or two posts regularly coming from your big-wave planned marketing activities, then you might not see the need to sprinkle in little-wave blog posts and Twitters. But if your product release dates are, say, once a month or less, then you’ll want to find ways to talk about what’s going on in the industry, find out what other bloggers are saying about your product or company (setting up a custom room in FriendFeed may help here) and repost the ones that have some bearing on the product, especially those that mention creative ways to use your products and services.

As an aside, give the following a read for helpful hints in Tweeting news about your company.

Keep in mind that anyone who is reading RSS feeds like blogs and Twitter is reading a number of them at once. They are often scanning for news of interest and, at times, resending what they find to others. Regardless of how often you post for your company, make it educational, directly useful and/or highly interesting. If you don’t have anything that day or that week, breathe, relax and focus on when you will have something. I know that the mantra is post often and be regular, but I don’t think that’s all that useful, especially for B2B-type companies to be that stringent. It’s better to focus on quality of what you’re creating versus quantity. This isn’t a race it’s about educating and engaging with others and this is what will get their attention so you’re remembered.

If you have any questions or have a different opinion, be sure to let me know.

Tom

During five years of field-testing social media and social networking systems, I’ve found it important to leverage webmaster tools at Google and a plethora of social tagging and social bookmarking tools from a range of vendors to maximize visibility of a website. The idea is to make appropriate use of these social tools to establish your site (or blog) on the Internet so it’s fully visible to search engines and blog directories, and to create visibility of its content by creating more tags. In time, these activities will improve your search engine visibility and increase traffic to your website.

There are two parts of my typical rollout plan:
•Part 1 is establishing the validity of the website, using Google webmaster tools
•Part 2 is posting entries into social tagging and social bookmarking sites when significantly new content is added to your site.

Our goal here is to make certain that Google and other entities quickly know about your website and can verify that it is real (meaning, it’s not a SPAM site). Then to appropriately use social tagging and social bookmarking with new content to create links back to your website(s) for improved search engine visibility.

Another critical point: Register all RSS feeds at Feedburner for the purpose of having centralized metrics.

Also, a designated person in your company needs to create a large number of logins to various services and securely share this list periodically. This person needs to be certain he/she keeps a record of any login and password changes so that new people in the company have access to the services they need to contact. This is especially needed when there is turnover in the group; i.e., a designated person needs to make each email address generic, not specific to a person. For example, use info@mycompany.com instead of Tom@mycompany.com so the email address can be easily and quickly reassigned to a new person as needed. I’ve had clients experience major setbacks and loss of productivity when people used their own email address, instead of a generic one, for a login and no one had a record of their password … and then they left the company. Heed my advice here; you do not want the hassle that comes with not doing these things. So make certain this process is clearly defined and rigorously followed, even if you have only a small 1- or 2-person business.  Even a small company has a lot more than one or two logins and passwords.

Consider using one of these two online password managers that greatly simplify the river of logins that you’ll accumlate. Two examples of such services are http://www.PassPack.com and http://www.Clipperz.com.  I’m even seeing the beauty in this myself, for all the sites I manage for my business. When I’m working with a client it’s a lot easier to hand over an account to them at PassPack or ClipperZ and say, “Here you go! All the logins and passwords for all the sites you’ll want to manage yourself from this point forward are right here.”

Process for Establishing the Validity of a Site (New or Existing) on the Internet

1.    Claim the website at an account at Technorati after you create an account there. You can claim all websites and blogs you create there. It helps you to be recognized as real (not SPAM).

2.    Also, claim the website or blog at Google Webmaster Central. Next, run the webmaster website tests to make sure all is well from Google’s perspective. I’m often surprised what is found that needs attention.

3.    It’s important to go to http://www.google.com/submit often and resubmit your home page or blog and, in particular, the pages way down inside your site that are new. This works. Google will make a point of coming to visit your site. You’ll want to do the same at Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html.

4.     If you have a new RSS feed, like for a new blog, make sure it’s registered to your own Feedburner account. ALWAYS use the Feedburner RSS URL for the public, too, so people subscribe to that one, not the one specific to your site. This way if you move your blog to another site or platform you can keep all your subscribers.  This is another critical one to abide by.

5.    Use the PC software tool called RSS Submit to submit the Feedburner version of the new RSS feeds to 100+ RSS directories. This will help increase visibility and traffic of the feeds over time. It’s not critical that you do this, but it doesn’t hurt.

Now for the Ongoing Activities: Social Tagging and Social Bookmarking

The question of how often to post into the social tagging and bookmarking sites comes up regularly, and rightly so; you don’t want to trip a SPAM alert at one of the sites.

I think it makes sense to post into each social tagging and social bookmarking site when there are new audio podcasts and video podcasts that publish on a weekly basis.

On blog articles, I would apply this process only to those articles that are of educational value or possibly high-visibility importance (events, review-of-product releases, newsletters, how-tos) because you don’t want to overdo your use of the tools.

For each piece of content, copy and paste the title and description into the social bookmarking and social tagging-related system. And if you’re handing this off to someone else to do, add in a requirement for that person to double-check and correct any spelling errors and feed that back to the appropriate person. It’s important to do this so the client can correct the misspellings themselves on the originating blog or website.

Here Is What You Want to Do:

1.    Create accounts at the following sites. Remember to have a process in place before you start to securely save and share all these logins and passwords.

a.    Del.icio.us
b.    Digg.com
c.    Stumbleupon.com
d.    Twitter.com
e.    … you can add others. This is a good start.

2.    Since you might end up with 7-10 of these sites to update, consider creating an account at http://www.socialmarker.com. Social Marker makes it easy to update every one of them at once and reduce the amount of time spent on this task.

3.    It’s a good idea to look at the final postings that show up with the Social Marker tool, just to be certain the system is working properly. Some social tagging and social bookmarking sites will truncate titles and descriptions. You may need to adjust titles slightly if this occurs.

Getting Some HelpI imagine that after reading this your head could be spinning with ‘how’ you’re going to do all this work, especially if you’re a small company. There are two avenues you can pursue. One is to use an intern from a local school or university. Students like this kind of work. Another approach is to post your process on www.Elance.com and competitively bid (globally, I might add) to get the work done. You’ll find a bevy of people from other countries interested in doing this at extremely competitive prices. Look for someone you can build a relationship with and earmark some of your marketing budget for these tasks every month. Start small and simple at first with just a few social bookmarking and social tagging sites. Make sure the process is working for you in a way that frees you up to focus on creating content versus managing it. Then slowly expand the number of sites you use.

Hope you find this helpful.
Tom