There’s quite a few cool things happening over at Tourism Queensland lately… not least of which is our current Facebook campaign, “Passport to Shine”… which is yet another part of the launch of the new branding “Queensland, Where Australia Shines”. Suffice to say, it’s pretty damn cool, and you should head across that way to check it out.

Another pretty cool thing that’s happening at the moment over there is our current foursquare promotion. Tourism Queensland and foursquare have released the limited-edition Shine Seeker badge, and – again – great holiday prizes are up for grabs for those who manage to unlock the badge. Regardless of whether you go in for badges or not, I’d suggest you check out our foursquare page anyway… there are some really cool tips of things to see and do around Queensland… even for us locals!

Which brings us to the point of this post… in order to celebrate our “Shine Seeker” badge, we’ve decided to schedule a foursquare meetup/”swarm attempt” at Queen St Mall in Brisbane this Thursday. If you’re one of the 50 to check in and help us unlock the badge, come and find us there… if you’re one of the first 50 to find us, we have real life “Shine Seeker nerd badges” for you to proudly wear and proclaim your geekiness… so come along, will ya?

All details can be found here, but in a nutshell: this Thursday, 21 October, between 8 – 9am, Queen Street Mall. Be there, or be square. Actually, be there AND be (four)square.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m as big a believer as the next guy that the world has changed, and that marketing has to change with it. And yes, communities are more important than ever. I get that. Hell, I’ll stand by your side when you say it.

But, while that may be true, that does NOT make you an expert on how businesses should conduct themselves.

Because twitter limits you to 140 characters, it’s easy to throw out sound bites that sound catchy and insightful, but then conveniently never have to elaborate on those sound bites. It’s nice to hide behind that character limit, isn’t it?

Yeah, you can ask a business, “Hey, why aren’t you building a community? Why aren’t you taking an active interest in what people out there are saying?”. It’s easy to ask those questions, without having to actually wait around to answer them.

Here’s a tip: if you haven’t been involved in marketing a particular business, don’t presume to know how they should get involved. Or if they should even get involved in the first place. The truth of the matter is that – while it would be nice if every business could communicate more, in an open forum – for some businesses, there simply might not be enough return for them to justify that outreach.

That’s the thing that gets to me. A lot of people think it costs nothing to be open, interactive and “transparent” . Let’s be clear here kids: it does. Whether you want to accept it or not, it does.

So here’s what I have to say: Cut it out.

Unless you have actively been involved in putting together, and – more importantly, in my eyes – actually implementing a “social media plan” for a brand, AND unless you’ve pulled it off successfully, your word counts diddly squat.

Plenty of the people I’m speaking to in this post seem to have developed huge followings. And what worries me is that all they have to do is keep talking loudly until people believe them, without looking into what they have actually done. I’ll repeat this again, because it bears repeating: If you haven’t actually done anything, your word counts diddly squat. Talking does not equate doing.

So, in the end: sure, there’s no harm in putting your suggestions out there. If it makes sense to the business, they just might use it, and you can feel happy knowing that you’ve made the world a better place.
But please don’t harp on about how this company or that company “doesn’t get it”. How do you know they don’t get it? Are you employed by the company? Do you know the inner workings of how decisions are made in the company? Do you have access to their financial records? Do you know their main sources of revenue? Do you know exactly and unequivocally, down to the cent, that your suggestion would make them more money than would be spent to implement it?

I doubt it.

Cut it out.

However, one of the things that I personally found most interesting from the post was Ev’s discussion of the “redundancy of tweets”, and how this new format will tackle the problem. Ev states that:

Now, I think this will have more of an effect on promotions run through Twitter than most people realise. A bog-standard competition “format” that you often see floating around Twitter is the “Retweet this to go into the draw/win this fantastic prize”. Hardly original, it’s true, but I’d say 80% of the competitions I see run through Twitter have this in their requirements in some form.
With the new retweet format being rolled out, those competitions will hardly be as effective… the brand will get less exposure (instead of being broadcast multiple times, the tweet will only be broadcast once, with attribution to those who have retweeted it below) and it makes me wonder how the virality of certain tweets will be affected.

What do you think?

The report has some great outtakes, but one I would like to highlight is this:

But, according to our study, consumers don’t want a conversation with brands—they want deals. Of those who follow a brand on Twitter, 44% say access to exclusive deals is the main reason. The same holds true for those who “friended” a brand on Facebook or MySpace, where 37% cite access to exclusive deals or offers as their main reason.

I think this is something that a lot of so-called “social media gurus” should pay attention to. It’s fine to say “It’s all about engagement. It’s all about conversations. It’s not about selling“, because often, it isn’t. But don’t repeat that mantra on blind rotation. Because sometimes, just sometimes, people are after deals. And that’s nothing to be ashamed of.
I’ve said this before in an unrelated discussion, but while we (people interested in social media) often harp on about how “this promotion” or “that promotion” misses “the point of social media”, I’ll say it again: generally speaking, we are not the average audience, people. We need to step back and see things from the eyes of the average consumer. Because, ultimately, that’s who the brand is going to be targeting.

Other points to take home from the FEED 09 Report? It’s all about the experience. But we always knew that, didn’t we? The technologies may come and go, but keep it about the experience, let consumers associate you with a positive mindframe… and everything just falls into place from there.

Anyway, go read it.

Some of the highlights, for me? (times are approximate, blip doesn’t exactly cater to those looking to jump to a certain time point in a video)

– 7m30: Chris mentions a brand who “dedicates” “50% of one person, and 3 interns to managing their social media presence”. This situation just resonates with me. I’m glad to hear others are in the same boat. The cost of the fallout of only allocating a makeshift resource could be far more than paying a full time wage. Just sayin’ is all.
- 16m30: “We’ve all been in the bullhorn business. It’s time for the telephone”.
- 19m20: “Not every company has to blog. Not every company has to be on Facebook or Twitter. Stop saying that”.
- 21m35: Don’t get too caught up in these “games” (facebook, twitter, blogging etc). “It’s all chips. When you get a win in these games, pick up the chips and bring them to the next table. Stop playing the little game”.
- 26m30: “Be at the elbow of every deal… You know who gets a lot of business opportunities? The person who is known for connecting people”.
- 30m30: “Give your ideas handles… make it easy for other people to pick your ideas up, and make the their own ideas” (something I’ve discussed before)
- 45m00: Bring ROI back to a $ amount. Don’t fall into the “shiny sword” syndrome.

Q & A Section
- 49m00: “How do you stand out when everyone is shouting ‘Look at me, look at me!’? Don’t be the same. Say, ‘Look at them’ (connect people) or ‘Look at this cool thing I made that is going to benefit you’.”

Those are just a few of many highlights, but I’d really suggest watching the whole thing of you have the hour to spare. You won’t regret it. While there were a few points (particularly how to demonstrate ROI) that I wish had been devoted more time, but you take what you can get, y’know?

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Demonstrating ROI on Social Media. ‘Nuff Said.

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Ok, ok, maybe a bit more needs to be said. Now see, here’s the thing. I’ve definitely been doing a fair amount of reading on “ROI and Social Media”, so I’m not one of those guys who complains about the rainy clouds before even looking outside at the weather. I know that there’s a lot of unfair discussion about Social Media ROI from those who just assume it’s impossible to measure, when it clearly is possible. I mean, just read KD Paine’s blog, or Jeremiah Owyang’s and you can see that some brands are not only measuring Social Media ROI, but kicking ass and taking names at it.

Tracking social mentions isn’t hard. Time consuming, yes (if you can’t afford to pony up for services such as Radian6, anyway), but hard, no. There are numerous technologies available for tracking mentions, most of which are ably summed up by Jye Smith over at his blog, so I won’t bother to rehash that here.

Apart from that, there are no end of people displaying test cases for Social Media ROI… not least of which is Chris Brogan with his “success stories” in his Delicious tags.

My problem comes in that most of these cases are written from the point of view of people who create content on their own sites. So often they can use simple metrics as page views, RSS subscribers, unique visitors, returning traffic, etc etc. But what about those sites that don’t have that business model? That simply want their site to remain a “no nonsense, in and out, complete the transaction” site? (whatever that transaction may be). In other words, I’m talking about the brands who DO want to engage with their customers… but because excessive engagement on their own site might be against the “business model” (and I know most of you smartasses are going to say “change the business model then”), they are forced to use outside properties for that engagement.

So we’re talking forum discussions, twitter, Facebook pages etc. You know the type.

Now, my main bug bear here is measuring interaction with (for example) Twitter users. Obviously there are certain things you can measure, such as customer service tickets handled through twitter, collaborative innovations initiated through open conversations on twitter and the like… but up until now, I’m still struggling to find a sure-fire way of tracking commerce initiated through twitter.

Now, before any of you say, “But bit.ly and cli.gs and the like all give you stats for your Twitter links! If you put a link out on Twitter to your site, you can track how many people clicked on it. Hell, you can even track WHERE those clicks came from!”… yes, I’m aware of that. I heart cli.gs in a way that a man should never love a free online service.

BUT, while bit.ly and the like can do a great job telling you how many people clicked on your link, that’s pretty much where the helpfulness ends… after all, they can’t track what those people did once they landed on your site… they can’t track the path of their visit, so to speak.

And people are now going to say, “Yes, but that’s where analytics like Google Analytics & Omniture etc are your friend. Use those, and you’ll be able to track all you like”. Well, not really. Usually, yes, but if a visitor clicks on a bit.ly link in a third party client, such as Tweetdeck etc (which I think most Twitter users would be using, as opposed to the web), then those clicks are attributed to your “Direct” traffic, which means you can’t measure your income generated by your Twitter traffic.

Here’s the thing: For links that you yourself put out, there’s a way around this… use your own tracking codes. There’s a great article on this over at the More Visibility blog.

That takes care of that. But how do you track links from other people? That’s the bit that gets me. I mean, let’s say as part of your “Social Media Campaign”, you’re going out there and getting people talking about you. You’re entering into conversations, you’re finding out what customers are looking for, you’re listening and you’re acting to make yourself better. And then, because of that, your brand starts going wild on Twitter (side note: excuse the constant use of Twitter here, it’s just the easiest example given the current climate).
So you’ve done a great job, as I say your brand’s going wild on Twitter, for some reason people are sharing links to your site left right and centre, people are clicking on those links and gosh darn it, they’re transacting on your site. Who’da thunk it, right?

Well, actually, I would have. Or, in keeping with the narrative, you did. You went out there, you saw the benefits to actually listening to your customers (imagine that, right?), and as a direct result of all the goodness that you’ve done out there, you sales are going gangbusters. You should be on top of the world.

BUT, those links that people are sharing out there? They won’t have those tracking codes we discussed a few paragraphs earlier. Those were honest to goodness natural links that they just shared themselves. And because there’s no tracking code on the link, every. single. one. of those sales that should be attributed to the social media campaign is tracked as a “Direct” visit, and not notched up to your work.

Every. Single. One.

Now, as I say, I’ve been doing a lot of reading, but for the life of me, I just haven’t come across an answer to this yet. And, again, while I used Twitter in this case, there are many other “channels” out there where the same problem in principle applies. And it’s one of the most frustrating things to me about justifying social media to businesses. If you can’t put a dollar value to it, no matter how wrong it is, it’s often dismissed. If you’re limited to participating in conversations on properties that you struggle to track properly, how can you really measure a ROI to take to the boss and say, “Hey, you know what? We did good“.

Anyone out there able to educate me?

The first thing I find difficult about “Social Media” is the tenet of “Don’t Be Afraid to Let Other People Take Your Idea and Run With It“. (or, as Rohit Bhargava termed it, “Don’t be afraid to let go of a message or idea and let others own it“).
Now, don’t get me wrong here, I can definitely understand that in a world made for sharing ideas and collaborating, this is a belief that should basically go without saying. That said, it’s my sheer human nature that I get… well, let’s just call it slightly protective over things I consider “my baby”.

I’ve always been like that, even in my old band days… songs that I wrote were “my babies”, and accepting others had ideas about those songs always made me slightly agitated. Most of the time they were great suggestions, but all the same, I selfishly wanted it to be known that these were my songs.

Stupid, huh? But that’s me.

Or, I suppose, it was me. I’m trying to change that. Where I can, I’m collaborating with people online to try and further ideas, to further learning, and, ultimately, that furthers my own education. But, when it’s an idea of mine that gets picked up and run with, ultimately being claimed as another’s, I admit to still feeling a pang of… pettiness, about it.

As I said, I’m trying. Not always succeeding, but it’s a journey, no? But that’s #1 in a series of things I find difficult about social media. What’s yours?