Dot Tom

Recently I had a great conversation with Lisa a senior e-commerce marketer.  Lisa observed that she hadn’t seen enough evidence that social media was relevant to her organization.  She raised some very legitimate concerns including the negative business impacts of customer criticisms; identifying resources to manage it once launched and how to tie sales back to e-commerce.
As our conversation continued I reminder her that her own site had launched product reviews last year – We all tend to forget the less sexy types of social media.  Lisa went on to share about a very interesting relationship with an important thought-leader in her industry that regularly mentions Lisa’s web site in his public speaking engagements and on his blog.  Later I visiting this guy’s blog and found dozens of links and references to Lisa’s web site.  Lisa wasn’t paying for this exposure except by making herself available to answer questions and sharing promotions as they occurred.  Of course that’s social media too, and very measurable.

Lisa mentioned that one of her competitors launched a “community” but she wasn’t terribly impressed.  In her view the community lacked innovation and leadership and failed to drive concrete business objectives.  Having a look at the competitor I found that while there were a lot of features, an active community with interesting content it seemed disjointed with more monologues then dialogue.  There didn’t seem to be that much direct interaction between the host and it’s visitors and while there were plenty of text links and banners leading to the corresponding e-commerce site none of the links were tagged for analytics reporting.  It’s little wonder Lisa was not impressed.

Lisa was also anonymously participating in industry related blogs and engaging in some other Twitter activities with industry leaders.  In spite of the unofficial nature of Lisa’s strategy, her organization seems to be benefiting, if only modestly from her social media activities.  What’s more Lisa doesn’t have to jump into the responsibility of managing a community or hire more staff to continue to make important and beneficial strides in her social media activity.  As Lisa  engages cautiously she just needs to continue to avoid three common mistakes…

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Posthumous portrait of Christopher Columbus by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio.

When Christopher Columbus made his maiden voyage in search of a western route to the East Indies there were many similarities between that venture and the pioneers of social media in organizations today.  It’s an unprecedented request; potentially requiring significant funding & resources; a business case with research and data must be developed; and the project must deliver an attractive and measurable ROI!

It took Columbus more then two years to persuade Queen Isabella’s committee.  Central to his case was his estimation of the circumference of the earth and the argument that he could get to the east faster by going west.  There was also the promise of a huge ROI making Spain competitive in the Indies spice trade.

Once approved, Columbus set sail with the blessings of senior management.  Unfortunately Columbus drastically underestimated the earth’s circumference and assumed there was only ocean between Spain and the Indies.  He landed in the Bahamas. He also misinterpreted this data believing he had landed on the East Asian Mainland.  Nevertheless this voyage is remembered for many crucial discoveries and his subsequent travels benefited from improved metrics.

In the world of Web 2.0 the evolution of social media is well beyond any “Pre-Columbian Era”.  We stand on the shoulders of explorers that have gone ahead of us paving the way with ever more user-friendly and commercialized solutions.  The state of social media simply awaits inspired ideas, informed intuition, and strategic vision applied to unique industry needs to be the catalyst for further exploration and innovation.  In the future, today’s tools may seem as antiquated as a Model-T but unlike the advent of commercial auto industry, the roads are already paved for social media.

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