Category Archives: Social media

Facebook Needs at Least One Woman on Its Board

Business Ethics, Social media,

(Note: I posted this earlier today on the Huffington Post. I’m reposting it here because this is my main blog, and I believe what I wrote, so I want it here too.)

Why would a startup as important as Facebook, run by somebody as young as Mark Zuckerberg, whose users are more than 50 percent women, go into all-important public stock offering with a board of directors composed of seven men?

For no good reason.

Not that these seven don’t make a great group. It includes Peter Thiel, Donald Graham, James Breyer, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Reed Hastings, and Erskine Bowles. So that’s the founder, several world-class successful entrepreneurs, the CEO of the Washington Post, a venture capitalist, and a former university president who was also co-chair of President Obama’s Commision on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. That’s an excellent group of men.

Still, qualified as they may all be, seven men and no women? After all, the purpose of a board of directors, Wikipedia says is to govern the organization, establish broad policies, review the CEO, and answer to stakeholders for the organization’s performance. That purpose isn’t better served with at least one woman in the seven-member board? I don’t believe that. Do you?

There is research indicating that including women on a board of directors is better business. For background on that, read Why Your Next Board Member Should be a Woman on TechCrunch, or The ‘Terrible Truth’ About Women on Corporate Boards on Forbes.com, just to cite two of many. And, if you like irony, listen to Cheryl Sandberg, Chief Financial Officer of Facebook, in this Ted talk from 16 months ago, worried about under representation of women in the upper ranks of business. She cites a statistic I’ve seen elsewhere, that over the last six years, women have held a static 15-16 percent of c-level corporate jobs and spots on boards of directors.

Frankly, nobody can say there aren’t qualified women available. Search the web. That’s just dumb.

So why?

I was contacted by the group behind the Face It Campaign, at http://www.faceitcampaign.com. I went to their website, saw the video on YouTube (embedded here), and signed up. They’re not asking for money, just support for what should be obvious.

If change is going to happen, it takes place one step at a time. This seems like a good time to take this step.

(Note: if for any reason the embedded video doesn’t show up here, it’s on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8DMdSPeBuvU)

Social Media is Littered with Business Carcasses

Social media, ,

It occurs to me that the social media landscape is littered with the carcasses of failed business efforts.

There are blogs that started, had some posts, then stopped. Twitter accounts that tweeted for a while and then stopped. Facebook accounts that never get updated. The accounts stay there, visible, abandoned, but dead. Like carcasses.skeleton

And I apologize for the picture here, which is an ugly image — but that’s what carcasses look like.

What’s my point: social media is a powerful new opportunity for business to engage with customers, improve service, offer content, etc. People think it’s free because the accounts for blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus are free. But it requires time and effort because it’s publishing, and it’s content. And the time and effort has to be spent consistently over a long time before it pays off.

By the way: If you were listening two days ago to this radio program with Howard Lewinter, this blog post came up in that conversation. This is what I was talking about then. This link goes to the archive that has the entire conversation available online.

(Image: bigstockphoto.com)

Age vs. Experience Not Always Obvious

Management, Social media, , ,

It must be awfully hard to be a Gen Y person and have to deal with all the discussion about Gen Y and Gen Y stereotypes. At least with my generation, the baby boomers, we were all just one big vague hippy-long-hair-freedom stereotype and we didn’t mind it. But with Gen Y, all this stuff about entitlement and selfishness, jeez, what a drag.

SocialMediaOverload.jpg

One random though here about age vs. experience, that I think works into the Gen Y stereotype and what’s often wrong with it: social media. Specifically, Facebook.

Here’s what I suggest: go back in time to Fall of 2005. Imagine the typical 18-year-old college freshman of that year. She was by definition one of the first fluent users of Facebook. It seemed like second nature to her.

Flash forward to 2012. Seven years later. She’s 25 now, classic Gen Y, and might seem impatient with managers who don’t understand Facebook and Twitter. She’s been working with Facebook from the very beginning, and adapted Twitter in 2007. She’s taken social media as instinct, commonplace, something obvious.

But the world around her thinks she’s demanding too much too soon.

Does that make sense?

What? We Don’t Want Sex? Love? Health? Just Food and Cars?

Business Research, Social media, ,

This morning I opened Mashable’s What Men and Women Really Want, According to Social Media, a fun info graphic. You can see the conclusions here, in my illustration. Mine is a tiny clip of their much larger infographic, which has a lot more information. infographic

This is a lot of fun. My conclusion, however, is that it’s only a lot of fun. Not great information.

The conclusion:

  1. The top three wants for both sexes are the same, just in different order.
  2. The top 10 lists for the sexes overlap by 70%.
  3. 80% of the items on both lists are food.

What? No sex? No health? No love? No longevity? No owning your own business?

I don’t know about you, but I’m not posting what I really want onto Twitter. I really don’t have that much need for sharing. Ice cream, maybe; a car, maybe; coffee, cookies, and all that, maybe. As long as it’s pretty much trivial, or it dresses me up in my business persona.

I really like the idea of mining large amounts of data to get past what people say about themselves and into what people actually do. Sales information and actual purchases, for example, tell me thousands of times more than what people say they want or plan to purchase.

But in this case, we’re talking about social media. And that’s publishing.

Question: are you putting real personal information into your social media feeds?

LiftFive: My Favorite New Startup Launches

Social media, Starting a Business, ,

(Ed note: things change. LiftFive no longer exists and Megan is now VP Product at Octane AI. This was posted nine years ago.)

Are you looking for real expertise in social media? Megan Berry today announced the launch of LiftFive, her new startup. I wish her all the best on this exciting launch day. And yes, she is my daughter and I’m very proud of her.

liftfive_announcement.jpg

You can reach Megan as @meganberry and now also as @liftfive on Twitter, or visit the new website at liftfive.com.

Congratulations. A great launch today. Very exciting.

Was it Social Media That Defeated that Bad SOPA/PIPA Bill?

Current Affairs, Social media, , , , , , , ,

I was delighted to read Vivek Wadhwa’s take on Social media’s role in politics on the Washington Post:

vivek_on_wapo.jpg

To frame this battle properly, a loosely organized group of Internet leaders outwitted a well-funded lobbying organization. And they did so in grand style, convincing dozens of lawmakers to reverse their votes virtually overnight.

he goes on to liken this phenomenon to the voice of the people in Egypt and then the rest of the Middle East last Spring. But also something else altogether, this:

A sleeping giant — the technology world — finally rose. Google, Mozilla, Reddit, O’Reilly Radar, Wikipedia, and thousands of other Websites rose up to protest PIPA and SOPA.

I like the idea that the defeat of SOPA/PIPA are, like the political changes in the Middle East, due to changes in possibilities and the way people work together. I’d like to think that in this case technology is in a broad scope it’s like what happened a generation or so ago when Mahatma Gandhi, and a few years later Dr. Martin Luther King, changed the relationship between individuals and governments by establishing the power of the public non-violent protest. Isn’t that similar? Disenfranchised, silenced people discover a voice.

Was it social media that defeated SOPA/PIPA, or people suddenly getting annoyed and complaining?

Mine isn’t the greatest analogy, either: It works way better with the Arab Spring than with SOPA/PIPA, because in the first case it did seem like a collection of voiceless individuals; but in the second, that so-called sleeping giant was hardly voiceless. Just distracted, perhaps. Looking in the other direction, and then suddenly confronted with a threat.

Either way: hooray!

Curation is the New Creation

Blogs and blogging, Social media, , , , , ,

I think it was inevitable. First, the web, then blogs. Content is king. Then Facebook, and then Twitter, and social media is real. Long live the king. The king is dead. We’re gagging on all the content. We need curation. We need to gather and collect — call that curate — our favorite content. The new collection of content is content.

Megans_Pinterest.jpg

Damn, I don’t need another social media platform. I love Twitter, tolerate Facebook, dabble with Google+, keep up with LinkedIn. I like the ones that let me sign in with Twitter or Facebook. But who needs another one?

But those are all so last year. Now it’s the curation and collection functions driving content. Collect all those tweets, those updates, the links you like, the pictures you like. You put them up on your new curated content site.

Small wonder that Tumblr, Pinterest, Paper.li and others like them are taking off like crazy. For now and 2012, we’re generating so much content everywhere that we’re driving ourselves crazy. I don’t want to estimate how much of my time I spend clipping and linking and gathering and collecting. And everybody’s doing it. Collect and post.

2012’s going to be the year of content collection, and curating.

(Image: click it. You’ll see. That’s Pinterest)

Some of Social Media Marketing is Community Management

Marketing, Social media, , ,

Suggestion: don’t just call it all  social media marketing. Call at least part of it community management.

Why? Because words and phrases get worn out. Or they get clogged like a motor boat’s propeller in a swamp. And social media marketing has been worn out by too many people with too many fake names talking up too many products with too many fake offers.

I’m not at all against social media marketing; it makes perfect sense in some contexts.  The big brand using social media to deliver messages, for example, is social media marketing. And Marketing is not a dirty word. Marketing is getting people to know, like, and trust your brand, so social media ought to be one of the tools.

But community management is a better way to describe the business role of developing personality, relationships with people, and conversation.  Marketing is getting people to know, like, and trust. Social media belongs there. Social media should be part of the marketing mix, especially for smaller businesses, individual businesses, and expert businesses.

But there is a part of social media that differs from most of the rest of the marketing mix because it’s inherently conversational.  Conversation means as much listening as talking, and no shouting.

Furthermore, the conversation is social media isn’t just a simple dialog, with two people at a time; it’s multidimensional conversation, with a lot of different people involved, at different levels, and different times. Authenticity, meaning real people, real opinions, and real participation, makes a huge difference.

And that, essentially, is community. So at least a subset of social media marketing is community management.  It’s helping people, solving problems, expanding the community, and managing issues. It’s building the sense of belonging, involvement, commitment, and caring.

What do you think?

(image: bigstockphoto.com)

Are Business Social Media Campaigns About Listening?

Social media, , , ,

Brian Solis, author of Engage, expert on social media for business, posted  The End of Social Media 1.0 last week on his blog. Not that there is a 2.0 or 3.0 exactly, he explains, but he says we’re at an inflection point.

… the end of an era of social media that will force the industry to mature. It won’t happen on its own however. Evolution will occur because consumers demand it.

The key point, Brian seems to suggest, is listening. Keep the social in social media, don’t turn it into one-way media.  Corporate social media campaigns – twitter streams, Facebook fan pages, and so on – tend to be one-way communication, Brian suggests, talking without listening:

… there’s more to social media than clever campaigns and rudimentary conversations. Talking isn’t the only thing that makes social media social. Just like adding Facebook, Twitter and other sharing buttons will not magically transform static content into shareable experiences. Listening, learning and adapting is where the real value of social media will show its true colors.  Listening leads to a more informed business. Engagement unlocks empathy and innovation. But it is action and adaptation that leads to relevance. And, it never ends.

I see that as an interesting challenge.  It’s not entirely up to the company whether you communicate with it or not; it’s up to you. Do you engage with logos as people? Do you expect a logo to listen? Does it care what you think about issues, topics, or anything but its brand? Do you care what it thinks about issues and topics outside its specific brand focus?

What do you think?

(Image: istockphoto.com)

Does it Take a Social Media Code of Ethics or is it Plain Obvious?

Social media, Weblogs, , , , , ,

This is the complete unedited text of an email I received last week. It’s just the latest one. I get a lot of them.

Hi Tim,

I was wondering if you took paid guest posts on your site?  Not a traditional “guest post” but one you’d be compensated for and have complete editorial control over.

I’m part of a business that does high-end brand placements worked into guest posts on a variety of subjects. The posts don’t advocate or review our clients, they are informational and/or newsy.  We include a reference link to our clients amongst other topical links inside the content. We’d provide the article, written by a domain expert, and money for you to review and post it upon your approval.

(If you don’t take guest posts, we also have arrangements where we discuss your upcoming post and find one in which a link makes sense and pay you to include it.)

Is that something that you would be interested in?

I always say no. Do you?

Back in the dinosaur days (1970-71), when I studied Journalism in grad school, they taught ethics in journalism. There was a code of conduct. And It’s still around, if you’re interested. Here’s a quote from the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics:

Journalists should:

—Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
— Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
— Disclose unavoidable conflicts.
— Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable.
— Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.
— Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; avoid bidding for news.

I say all non-advertising writing, not just all journalism, should follow that code of ethics. Not just blogs, but all of social media too. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+: if you get paid to endorse something, say so, or you’re sleazy. Social media is also publishing. And this is just simple right and wrong.

Besides which, if sell yourself like that, then you have no credibility.

What do you think?