LinkedIn – The importance of using invitation texts

In the last months, all social business networkers on LinkedIn have shared the same experience. They have received different invitations from people all over the world with the following invitation text…

“I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.
- Surname Name”

Short, targeting, and easy to understand – for everybody all over the world. Hmmmm….?!

This raises some questions in my head on the importance of invitation texts. And I would appreciate your views and get some feedback of people who also use LinkedIn for social business networking.

Personalization
Is it ok to use the standardized version of the invitation text by LinkedIn? We are all marketers and we know that personalization is key. So, isn’t it better to re-phrase the standardized text version and write a short PERSONAL message?

Curiosity
If somebody is not writing a personal message, is it a sign that this person wants me to respond to him/her, and ask WHY this person wants me in his/her business social network? Even think about the impact on playing a psychological game on hierarchy thinking. Or is it just the peek a boo effect? Or is it just a hunters and collectors business?

Test
If somebody leaves the standardized personal message, the contacted person might think this is a TEST on his/her social networking capabilities. So, companies might check how serious job applicants take social networking, how quick potential employees respond, or how much somebody is engaged in social media in general. Or just to test if this person understands effective lead generation?

Spot On!
Should not LinkedIn change its service? The one who is contacted cannot see what the contacting person has ticked in the box in terms of the business relationship, he or she is referring to.

What is your view and experience on invitations by social networks – especially from a business perspective.

BreakingPoint: Insights in their social media strategy

Yesterday, I was refering to the case study by BreakingPoint to show the impact of social media for lead generation. And I promised to get some feedback from the responsible person at BreakingPoint on how they made these results happen. Kyle Flaherty gave me some insights in BreakiingPoint Systems social media strategy which I am allowed to share with you.

In his eyes, the succes of companies with social media needs to follow a company’s philosophy in a way that “social media should not be a separate entity in the marketing or communications strategy, in fact it must be part of your company DNA if it is to be successful.”

The main question I was asking myself was how they at BreakingPoint organize their social media activities and content production. Kyle told me that it was a long learning curve. Today, he is working with a team of eight bloggers (all highly technical) who fill their Twitter program (nearly 25% of company members are on Twitter), Facebook, LinkedIn Groups, corporate blog, etc. And he describes the content production process as follows:

“For our blog it is a very organic process, which I believe works best. I send notes out to potential bloggers each month discussing certain themes and asking if folks are working on anything in particular. This sparks some thoughts around blog posts, which they send my way for editing and SEO. As for LinkedIn, every member is put through a qualification process and given very clear engagement rules for the group. I enforce these from time to time by explaining to people how they should engage, kicking out spammers, etc. I also will go into the group on a daily basis and pose a question to start up conversation and ask particular members to respond in order to facilitate communication.”

The question of people who want to involved in social media is always: What is the overall investment in starting social media activities? Kyle responds that the investment was not massive spendings. Although it has to be said that Kyle managed web development projects for years in his last job which probably saved the company some dollars.

“Two specific areas we spend money when it comes to social media. First is with equipment for podcasts and video, which is an important element of our social media strategy. In 2009 I spent only $2,000 (U.S) for equipment. The other element is our website and the development of a new blog (debuting in February!). This is obviously a more substantial cost, but one we would have done no matter what. In my opinion a good site development, depending on what you are doing, can be done for around $15,000 (note that I managed web dev projects for years in my last job). Otherwise our budget is spent on “traditional” marketing areas such as drip email marketing, events, demand gen, etc. But it is important to note that we integrate social media with each of these elements.“

From a sustainability point of view it is often argued that social media can save money as a positive factor compared to traditional marketing. Kyle tells me that using social media is not a tactic to save money but that the budgets spent follow the same KPI rules of traditional marketing efforts.

“We worry less about saving money and more about making our activities work for us. For example, we map nearly every dollar spent back to sales. If a marketing activity, whether traditional or social media focused, is not brining in sales we do not engage in that activity for much longer.”

Today, 30% of their generated leads are coming from social media activities – and all leads are new contacts.

Kyle Flaherty is Director Marketing and Communications and manages external communications, community relationships and influencer marketing at BreakingPoint. He also blogs on b2b marketing topics on his personal blog Dance with strangers.

Social Web: “When you decide to jump in, resist the temptation to sell, sell, sell.” – Interviewing Scott Monty

At the Detroit motor show 2010 Ford executives from around the world spent one entire day engaging with Ford Fans and online influencers on social web platforms like Twitter, Facebook, BlogTalkRadio, CoverItLive, and more.

TheStrategyWeb was given the chance to exchange some questions with Scott Monty, head of social media at FORD Motor Company, about the company’s digital tactics, the social web and their web-strategy.

Q: Scott, FORD has launched the new Ford Focus. How much was the design and product development influenced by the “One Ford” strategy and your social media activities?

Scott Monty The design and development process was very much a One Ford process. German-based Gunnar Hermann has been the lead for the new global C-car platform. He worked with a team of global engineers, including people such as Jens Ludmann and Jim Hughes, who are the Focus lead engineers in Europe and North America, respectively. While we’ve seen a steady stream of customers in the U.S. showing interest in the current generation of the Focus in Europe, the process for developing a global car was well underway before we implemented our social media strategy.

Q: In which way is the One Ford strategy influenced by your team’s social web activities, or vice versa?

Scott Monty When Alan Mulally joined Ford in September 2006, he set the company on a course of brand consolidation and product planning that incorporated the One Ford vision. Our business plan and communications goals were set, and our social media strategy was developed to support both.

Picture above: FORD CEO Alan Mullaly and Social Media Scott Monty at Detroit motor show C-level social media jam.

Q: What were the biggest challenges when the Ford top-management decided to implement a social web-strategy?

Scott Monty Surprisingly few. There has been no resistance to change, and indeed, there’s been an incredible interest in this developing field by a wide range of our most senior executives. While we’ve enjoyed success in our social media activities over the last year (especially in the U.S.), the challenge ahead of us is how we effectively scale the operations and how we roll it out regionally.

Q: How important is it for companies to have all employees understanding and living the social web engagement of the company?

Scott Monty To the extent that a company is involved in social media and invites a culture of participation and transparency, it’s vitally important. But more than just understanding the tools and platforms; what we’re talking about is cultural change and a transformation in the way we do business. If we can help employees to understand that, we’ll be successful regardless of what social network our strategy is executed on.

Q: How important is web-strategy for the Ford business today?

Scott Monty It is vitally important, as that’s where our customers are. It’s where they do their research and it’s increasingly where they’re having conversations about our brand. We’ve dedicated 25% of our marketing budget to digital and social media – more than twice the rate of others in our industry. And when you consider that consumers trust people like themselves more than companies, it’s vital for us to open up ourselves to them and have them experience our vehicles and tell their networks about us.

Q: Why should companies have a (social) web-strategy in place in the upcoming decade?

Scott Monty The web – particularly the mobile web – is increasingly where people are spending their time. When they first stop to research your product is Google, everything you and your customers do on the web is trackable. And it’s where your company’s reputation is being built, every day.

Q: What advice would you give to companies that think about setting up their social web-strategy?

Scott Monty Listen first. Take time to discover what people are saying about your business and to understand the unwritten rules of the online communities in which your customers participate. Become a member of those sites or networks and spend time looking around. And when you decide it’s time to jump in, resist the temptation to sell, sell, sell. People are on these sites to talk with each other, not to be marketed to. Try to provide value. Be helpful. Ask for feedback. Give them unique and interesting material they can’t get elsewhere. Doing all of this over time will build trust and a deeper relationship with your customer base.

THX Scott for the time and your interesting insights!

About Scott Monty
Scott is head of social media for FORD Company. Or do you want his official title, then here you go: Global Digital & Multimedia Communications Manager. And he is a blogger. As a marketing and communications professional he has worked for a number of industries (healthcare, pharma, biotech, travel, automotive, tech, and communications), and numerous clients, from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. Today, he is a strategic advisor on all social media activities for FORD.

Paid Advertising 2010: What changes for marketers?

Seeing 2010 from a paid advertising perspective, we might argue that business will only change slightly for marketers. Paid advertising won’t die this year, right?

Now, eMarketer published a statement by their analyst Debra Aho Williamson on social media ad spending forecasts which touches the “tiny” shift in paid advertising:

“Paid advertising will not be the primary focus, but it will serve to drive traffic and engagement with the larger social network presence.”

The main difference will be that paid advertising is story-telling about a social media presence (also offline with print ads or bill boards) instead of selling their a traditional business website. Is this not already a massive movement in the ad industry? Paid advertising promotions are not about business websites. It is pushing the company’s social web presence.

Nevertheless, marketers still have their targets on contacts, leads and conversions. And they still need to reach a lot of these targets by promoting their web-presence offerings with online advertising, be it display, text-ads or search. I assume that product marketing has no other option here. The modern social web world calls this generating “engagement”. Just a nicer wording than talking about leads and sales?

The term “engagement” was discussed intensely by Jason Falls, Tim Schigel and me in the last weeks. But don’t we not all know that generating engagement is nothing new in the advertising world.

The word “engagement” is one of the most hyped words on the modern social web platforms like blogs, Facebook or Twitter? In my eyes engagement has become a buzzword 2.0. And, most of us media dinosaurs wonder how the ROI in paid advertising on social media platforms will evolve and how to measure it compared to the old paid advertising measurement on pis, visits or clicks.

The difference is that this modern engagement shall be generated, established and converted via dialogue, resulting in a close business-customer relationship – instead of people clicking banners or links, sending emails or filling out contact forms on landing pages. In the end, everything serves one purpose: customers shall buy products – online or offline.

But what if customers are starting conversations on the platforms that are promoted via paid advertising? Conversations is new in the paid advertising world. And it is more time-consuming, more challenging, and a more sensitive topic than waiting for a customer to respond on i.e. bannering the traditional online way.

Ten years ago, companies owned the road that was leading customers to get engaged with them. Today, the social web owns a ring-road around a company or brand with hundreds of roads linking, talking and refering to a company. The strategic question for paid search could be: Which one is your main access-point for the near, middle and long-time future?

PS: In order to maintain the customer dialogue companies need the right resources. So, the challenge businesses have is setting up their social web-strategy before they start spending on paid advertising. There is no other way for companies to support customer needs for a long lasting business sustainability.

Spot On!
Paid advertising continues to serve finding access to the modern customer’s world. But let’s ask marketers: Is there a difference if paid advertising is promoting a social media presence or a traditional business website? Will the work for marketers and media planers be the same? Only the links will be different? If you know how to serve, sell and talk to customers, the work and business that is aiming at “engagement” won’t change compared to 50 years ago. It will remain to be hard work…? No matter, what paid advertising is promoting, right?

News Update – Best of the Day

Talking about Tiger Woods and his reputation nightmare and how to solve it with social media is something that can be done best by the social media expert that has been working for Accenture – Tigers sponsoring partner for years. Antonio Altamirano has been my point of contact for the Top Strategy Consultants: What is your Twitter strategy? post. He contacted me as he is not working for Accenture anymore. Here is is excellent post about the end of the Tiger and Accenture relationship and how this could have been handled with the power of social media.

Comscore is celebrating their 10th anniversary – Happy one! Watch their celebration video to the past, present and future of the internet.

News Update – Best of the Day

Social network users love to spend time watching videos according to the latest Nielsen figures. The total amount of time spent was 999.4 million minutes in October – an increase of 98% to 2008. People watched 349.5 million videos (up 45%). Facebook was the No. 1 online social networking and blog platform for video consumption in October with 217.8 million total video streams, followed by MySpace with 85,2 million video impressions.

The latest CMO Council study shows how relevant it is to provide good content, as well as sending out mass mailings carefully. The study, “Why Relevance Drives Response and Relationships,” states that 91% of respondents have unsubscribed to e-mail newsletters. 46% of those said that the content wwas not relevant.
Even worse is to receive emails with product promotions people have already purchased. 22% won’t buy from the company after receiving such irrelevant mails.

Connecting offline and online in a funny and intelligent way by iCarphone Warehouse. Can somebody explain why it got banned?

PS: Also found some good new videos – check out my new The Strategy Web YouTube channel.

About being a good listener…

The web 2.0, and especially the social media, industry loves to talk about the wonderful habit of becoming a listener as a collective, a community, or a company. And it seems that almost every social media expert has something to say about the value lying in the fact of having to listen to your customers. You just have to follow this Twitter search.

But ‘listening’ is nothing new, nothing special. It is one of the basics of communication, and of the sender recipient relationship. These days, it seems that it has been merely reinvented by social media experts. Lately, it is regaining relevance for business people. And the social media industry needs to be careful not to make a famous buzz word out of it.

Doesn’t it sometimes sound like an antithesis to our upload habits: the word “listen”?

Is it because the web 2.0 world is the upload industry, producing content all over the place in social networks, discussing topics in forums, and (micro-)blogging on different platforms. How much spare time do we have on our hands compared to some years ago. Do we even have any time left today to be a good listener? And then we all still go on talking about how to be a good listeners…

I am reading an interesting book at the moment, given the fact that it is an amusing and recapturing resource for basic strategic things. Our brain does not keep basic things forever and it is always good to refresh the little brain cells. The book’s title is ‘Persuasion‘ and written by James Borg.

In the book I found a wonderful quote that really speaks volumes:

”
His thoughts were slow,
His words were few,
And never made to glisten,
But he was a joy
Wherever he went
You should have heard him listen.
”

We all know that it pays good dividends if we listen to our clients. Listening creates relationships, friendships and valuable business talk. And although I love to listen to Jeremiah Owyang who takes the meaning and importance of the word ‘listen’ to a higher level in a business strategic sense with his ‘Evolution: The Eight Stages Of Listening‘, the question will remain:

What does it mean to be a good listener? Do you know? Have you found another good quote?

Will be listening carefully to what you think about how to be a good listener… and I hopefully will finally become an even better listener.

Tel. domains – the future of digital business cards? Interview with Khashayar Mahdavi, CEO Telnic Ltd.

One-on-One Interview with Khashayar Mahdavi
CEO, Telnic Ltd. (since 2003) – kash.tel

Khashayar Mahdavi has successfully steered the company Telnic. Ltd. through the 2004 ICANN application, and is now managing the process to launch the .tel service. He previously worked in the international department of Lazard Frères in Paris, where he led government advisory assignments, which included corporate reorganizations, privatizations, debt restructurings and bond offerings on the international capital markets. Mr. Mahdavi holds a degree in finance from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris and an M.Phil in Economics from Oxford University.

The Strategy Web interviewed Mr. Mahdavi to get his view on the relevance of .tel domains for businesses purposes.

Q: Congratulations! Your .tel domains commercial just recently won the domain name video awards. Is it so successful because of the wonderful woman, the story board or the power of the .tel domains?
Khashayar Mahdavi Thank you! We were very pleased with the online commercial, as were our partners, some of whom have taken it and shown it on television stations here in the UK through to cinemas in Germany. I think all three points that you mention are the reason why the commercial has been very successful in supporting .tel registrations. We aimed to get the functionality across with simplicity and humor and Victoria Pile, a very successful television director here in the UK who has a history of very funny and successful comedy programs was gracious enough to create something powerful, engaging and entertaining for us. And of course we were pleased to have Laura Haddock in it!

Q: Will .tel domains become the new digital business cards?
Khashayar Mahdavi From the moment .tel domains were accessible, they instantly became the new digital business cards, amongst other uses. There are many people that have contacted us to say that they’ve simplified their email signatures, printed business cards and other points of contact down to just a .tel domain. There’s no other system that can provide access to contact information with encryption built in for sharing private information that also operates as a single point of contact and which can be accessed by any device connected to the internet. So technically, yes, it is the de facto standard, but obviously it’s very early on in its life-cycle and still in early adopter phase, so we’ve yet to engage the mass market in discovering how simple it is to use and share.

Q: What are the latest figures about registrations and feature trends?
Khashayar Mahdavi We’ve passed a quarter of a million registrations which we’re very pleased about and registrations continue to rise. This is mainly through our existing relationships with ICANN registrars – those organizations that specialize in selling domain names – but new resellers, such as Blenz Coffee (with 55 outlets in Canada), PR Newswire (a global news distribution network) and other organizations which have never had an interest in selling domain names previously, are coming on board very soon with direct relationships and messages to a whole new community who can benefit from the service that a .tel domain provides, without them having the hang-ups of it being a domain name in the traditional sense.

Our feature developments are a matter of public record on our website, but we’ve recently added multi-lingual support to sub-folders, which effectively enable multi-lingual sub-domains, which is useful when supporting customers in multiple countries and communities. Additionally, we’re working on new applications for the Android to supplement our BlackBerry, iPhone and Windows Mobile applications, enabling more and more people to manage and lookup .tel domains on their handsets easily and at low cost. We’re always getting more suggestions and feedback from the .tel community and there will be a couple more features popping up soon.

Q: Can we expect an evolution of .tel domains into some kind of community comparable to Facebook or Twitter?
Khashayar Mahdavi Every .tel owner is automatically part of a community and, if they use the free TelFriends service, can begin to connect in more meaningful ways by sharing private contact information or links to content, pictures, music and so on, today. However, the intention is that the owner of a .tel domain has a unique place that they own, with which they can decide how they use it. A .tel domain is inherently about relationships and communication, and making that a smooth transaction; what it isn’t about is hosting rich content, games, music and other content directly – it is a single point of contact to help the .tel owner point to those places where they can if they so wish engage, so that friends can then participate on those platforms.

However, we will be building functionality into the .tel to enable status updates to be placed in a .tel perhaps being drawn directly from Twitter or Facebook or another service, which enable some kind of direct communication with others. A .tel isn’t meant to replace any communications channels however, but to be an open platform from which a .tel owner can publish different contact points as new solutions emerge.

Q: Why should companies use .tel domains for their web-strategy?
Khashayar Mahdavi There are at least two benefits that we would suggest will benefit a company, regardless of whether they have a website already or not. The first is that a .tel domain is accessible from any device connected to the internet, so it immediately provides a mobile-optimized presence without any hassle or additional cost. Looking at the growth in the mobile internet, this has to be a consideration for companies today, to be discoverable on mobile devices. The second is that a .tel domain is a strong tool in the search engine optimization arsenal, providing the ability to store inbound links and link relationships with the main website whilst not being disregarded as providing duplicate content by search engines. We are hearing of positive results even after a short time of .tel domains being live in Google, through the good use of .tel domains for links and keyword content. We believe that this in itself is justification for the cheapest $20 a company can spend on SEO! Of course there are more benefits, like the fact that VoIP phones such as Kiax, voipGATE and digitrad all can ‘dial’ a .tel domain directly, enabling people to brand their communications online also. Additionally, because the information is stored in the DNS, there are no websites to go down, so it’s a permanent point of contact in case of emergency.

Q: Which .tel domains can you recommend as case studies for companies?
Khashayar Mahdavi There are many examples of good .tel domains for individuals, small and large businesses and new emerging directory services companies on our site at http://telnic.org/community-weeklytel.html – but I would flag up a couple including Schuh.tel (the UK’s largest footwear retailer), Watershed.tel (a local cinema using real-time data about screenings to update people on mobile devices) and Representative.tel/ (an example of a directory, listing all of the House of Representatives, but which could equally be individuals in any large organisation). We’ve also had some great individual examples from DanMeyer.tel (An American Idol participant from the US) through to Canadian-based Realtor JohnMcKenzie.tel. In Germany, some good examples include BoschSecurity.tel through to Jochen-Schweizer.tel. But there are many other examples.

Thank you for the interview and your time, Mr. Mahdavi!

PS: Sure… The Strategy Web and Martin do have .tel domains – check them out: mm-g.tel and thestrategyweb.tel.

News Update – Best of the Day

When managers talk to executives about social media the main question is always: Will the executives see the value for relationship- and brand-building. A new whitepaper called “Social Media: Embracing the Opportunities, Averting the Risks” says: Yes, they do!
And if your executives still don’t know why they should implement social media guidelines, Brian Solis has some good arguments for you.

Case studies on employer branding and how to leverage it with social media is hard to find. Brett Minchington, Chairman/CEO of Employer Brand International (EBI), interviews Kerry Noone (Marketing Communications Manager, Sodexo) about how their social media strategy is building a stronger employer brand at Sodexo. Listen carefully…

Sometimes old TV spots turn out to the best…

PS: Find new books in my The Strategy Web bookstore. Just updated today…!

News Update – Best of the Day

Today, the focus is on personal branding and your career…

Are you a top executive? The so called C-level manager? And you want to understand what you resume needs in order to be interesting for recruiters. Meg Guiseppi has 10 top secrets for a great senior-level executive resume.

In our online social networks the term ‘friend’ has a complete different meaning than in our offline world. Getting this straight in terms of a strategy becomes even more complicated. Chris Brogan writes an interesting summary on friends, reputation and endorsement. And he makes us think how we handle this topic.

One thing is for sure… In order to be successful in business we all need a good contact network. Now, in the era of social networks the question rises what is more important: quantity or quality? Thomas Power gives an answer… (although there is no proof it sounds quite realistic).

Interested to hear about your view and how do you handle your friend, colleague, partner or customer relationships… – Tell us about it!

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