As I read Sheila’s previous postPost reviews, I started thinking (and couldn’t remember) when was the last time I walked into a room in which an ongoing conversation/discussion was going on, and I just interrupted it with a random thought. Nor do I remember when was the last time I walked into a meeting and blurted out my opinion without, at least, acknowledging what they were talking about… I hope you’re already getting the sense of where I’m coming from with these thoughts.

I find it quite disappointing that us, as professionals in the Social Media field, want to make everyone believe that this Social Media stuff is “a great way to establish a genuine communication… that will relate your brand directly with your consumers… that it is an ongoing conversation…” and on and on, without actually doing it ourselves. Yeah, it all sounds nice and interesting, but it seems that we’re spending so much time trying to humanize brands/businesses/services that we’ve forgotten we’re humans ourselves and, like Sheila, I wonder where has all the social gone!?

You know, there are hundreds of posts out there outlining the best Twitter “etiquette” rules, and to be honest with you, I don’t understand people that actually have to read them in order to know how to behave in public. That’s pretty much what all this Social Media is about, right? One big public conversation.

If you’re following someone, it is because, I hope, you’re interested on what they have to say a.k.a tweet, I assume. And when someone talks to you when you walk into a room, you don’t just ignore him/her, right?

So here’s what I propose: from now on, when you log on to Twitter for the very first time each day, you’re going to acknowledge the Tweet at the very top of your page (the latest one on your timeline, and assuming it has a link - not just the lame/typical “good morning Twitter peeps” - I can understand if you ignore those…) and one way or another engage with that follower of yours in relationship to that link he/she is sharing - at least check it out, and if you like it and/or find it interesting, then retweet it, comment or do whatever you feel like doing; after you, at least, took a look at it. To that specific tweet (your first of the day), I encourage you to write the hashtag #my1st. This way you walk into the room and not just interrupt the ongoing conversation we’re all telling our clients about.

Are we ready to make this a place where sociable people interact with decency?

Aroldo Nery
Strategist/Brand Director @ The Re Agency

We’re introducing a new category of Blog topics called Wise Bytes, simply put they are short, objective, intelligent observations proposed as humbly as possible from us to you (whomever you might be), below is the first installment.

Lately you can’t open a single industry website without the words social media, digital marketing, social marketing, interactive media, or any other combination of words meaning the same thing: consumer engagement. Expert upon expert is available through twitter, facebook, blogs, Internet communities, or any other medium you can imagine to tell you exactly what you need to know to create a successful social media anything. These “experts” drill you with information that reads like it’s been recycled and regurgitated several times before finally reaching your curious eyes.

My question is simple. Amidst this social media information frenzy; WHERE’S THE SOCIAL?

I challenge you to open your Twitter account and review your tweets along with those of fellow tweeters, what percentage of those tweets is an actual interaction and how much of it is shameless promotion? Now before you all pipe up about “what’s wrong with shameless promotion??”, my response: absolutely nothing but there’s more to it than that. Obviously twitter is excellent for distributing useful information about your brand, organization, or corporation (In addition to linking to your blogs, news releases, company bytes and what not). But where are you engaging in overflowing social networking pages with mundane link after mundane link? Is that not the equivalent of a piece of direct mail? Is that really what social media is about?

How can you expect a consumer, colleague, or other possibly interested member of the social media community to take interest in the professional aspect of your company, if you can’t display one sign of human life from your end. A “good morning” and a ”good night” are a great start but that’s not sharing much of anything you wouldn’t share in an email. I’m talking about substance: anecdotes, jokes, inquiries, responses, likes, dislikes, COMMUNICATION.

Every day I see beginners,gurus, experts, mavens, and the very top of the social media social ladder commit this obvious faux pas. Twitterers who exert no personally, no actual social engagement but are indeed the first in trying to create a “viral spread” of either their own content or their cronies content. Correct me if I’m mistaken but that’s not a community, that’s a non-community (which, in case you missed it, is a word I just made up)

The point of my post?

1.Know your roots: it’s easy to get caught up in the hype and forget what social media is really about (which just a reminder..) it’s about socializing.

2. Practice what you preach: You’re selling engagement, relationship management, customer service, and online social interaction. Go ahead and try your own product from time to time.

It’s that simple.

Federico Rodriguez-Gasquet

Social Media Manager @ Re Agency

In my research for interesting and useful statistics I came across this video originally posted by Buzzshift, I liked it so much I had to share it with all of you. Pay close attention to the facts, particularly the rates at which traditional media grew versus social media. It makes us feel proud at Re that we’re part of this media revolution.

 In other news we’d like to extend our appreciation to AllTop for incorporating us into their AllTop Social Media category. If you’re looking for the latest and greatest news in social media blogging, technology, or really anything you can wrap your mind around. AllTop’s got it.

Sheila

Social Media Communications Specialist  @ The Re Agency

As I traveled around Latin America during the last two weeks, and stopped in Colombia, I noticed a refreshing attitude on the streets and it made me think about the way society in Latin America interacts with one another and its relationship with Social Media. If you were here, and walked up and down the streets, you’d notice the desire of the masses to engage, interact and be part of a social/cultural evolution. People on the streets are willing to help one another and come up with ways to give a hand in order to just get a few Pesos in return. Driving down from Monserrate, on a traffic-jammed street in the outsides of Bogota, I noticed men and boys running up and down the bumper-to-bumper lines of buses at the traffic lights. They’d run by the bus drivers’ window, shout a number, listen to what the driver had to say and write it on a scribbled notebook as they collected the few coins the drivers handed to them. The point of this running-up-and-down at traffic lights is to give bus drivers the times/frequency in which the previous buses, covering their same routes, go by this specific area in the city. It helps the bus drivers keep a distance (time-wise) from the bus ahead of them, so there is enough time for more people to gather at the bus stops for them to have a worthy day at work, which is equal to enough passengers in their buses. Seems complicated but it is rather simple and resourceful from people with lack of technology managing to come up with a way to help, interact and make some Pesos in return.

Now, if this is the nature of our people, of our culture; why is it that corporations, brands, businesses and/or services haven’t had a stronger initiative to find ways to connect with the other half of the country/region that do have access to technology and are practically early adopters of this Social Media type-way-of communication? Catalina Ruiz-Navarro is just one influencer in a community of almost 20 million internet users in Colombia, with an overall growth (internet users) of approximately 40% annually - and similar numbers throughout the region. I don’t want to dwell on the Common Sense approach to Social Media Communications but as I mentioned on a previous post, “the idea of Social Media is to be spontaneous, genuine, personal…” and it is a great opportunity  for businesses to figure out a genuine, non-intrusive message to establish a relationship with a genuinely-formed community that would be willing to be part of your community if you have something to contribute.

Aroldo Nery

Strategist/Brand Director @ The Re Agency

The Internet is huge. When I think about the size of the Internet, I’m reminded of the ocean and how surviving online as an up-and-coming website can be much like surviving in the wild and although it is obviously hyperbole, the reality is pretty similar.

According to news.com.au it would take the average person six hundred decades of non-stop reading to entirely read through the information currently available online. Microsoft’s Bing claims over one trillion web pages, and Google, well, they’ve already indexed more than one trillion discrete web addresses. This means that as of right now there are more websites than there are people on Earth, seeing as there’s only 6.7 billion of us.  Mark Higginson director of analytics for Nielson Online states in an interview with news.com.au that out of these 6.7 billion people 1.47 billion are Internet users, this represents a 16%  increase since 2007. IWS (InternetWorldstats.com) is a website that combines multiple data from the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, Nielsen Online, GfK and US Census Bureau and according to their research the latest global figure of Internet users is an astounding 1,596,270,108.

Thats 23.8 percent of the estimated 6,706,993,152 people in the world.

This information poses a rather looming fear in my mind as it probably does in yours and at the same time it poses a rather positive question. How does one stand out amongst this expanding numerical sea of sites and then… once one has figured out how to stand out, how does one keep a nice percentage of those 1.6 billion users in one’s web space from leaving to another more “attractive” space. Basically, how do you survive?

Darwin said, in nature it’s all about survival of the fittest, he who can adapt himself accordingly, using either superior intelligence, creativity, and strength will ultimately outlive the other. So what defines your survivability online?

The answer is simple; CONTENT. Sweet, delicious, fresh, updated, intelligent, interactive, fun-loving content. Content is made up a few different elements, it’s not exactly written, it’s not exactly visual, and it’s not exactly social. It’s actually, exactly ALL OF THESE. In a perfect union. A perfectly balanced ecosystem if you will.

To bring people to your site you must generate quality content, and then once you’ve started gathering a crowd, you must simply keep generating the same quality content that brought them there in the first place.

The following is a breakdown of the levels of content that can be useful to anyone that yearns for that exciting first spark of visitor generated life that occurs when you’re doing it right.

Research.

And you thought you’d never have to do research again after college, didn’t you? Well, you where wrong. Part of having a vibrant website with a thriving user community is doing thorough research into the subject of your site. Research creates a solid backbone, it gives your site credibility and more importantly quotability. If you create viable and usable research rich content with sources that can be backed up you’ll be doing much more than selling a product or service, you’ll be teaching. Focus on research that is not directly correlated with your subject but also has creative relevance. Let’s say for example that you have a site that dedicates itself to providing high quality gourmet ice cream. Pictures and copy won’t be enough to drive users and spread word of mouth about your brand. So why not include a history of ice cream, where it comes from, who made the first ice cream, the most peculiar flavors made to date, etc etc. Creativity is essential in the process, so put your forward thinking hat on and remember that the majority of people are online to be informed and entertained. If you can do both, then you’re in business.

Multimedia creation and implementation.

Multimedia provides something the written word cannot: Visuals and Voice. Enticing the senses could be just what your site needs to give it a solid boost of traffic. With visuals you can display and portray the story of your brand, the life of your brand. You can conduct interviews on the street, you can create animated quips about your industry or humorous spoofs about your product/service. Visuals give the outsider an insiders view, if this point is used intelligently and creatively you’ll stand out from the crowd in no time. Building upon the ice cream example, you could include a portal with a video of the process used to make ice cream. You could also incorporate employees by surveying them as they work about their favorite flavors and combinations. You can provide gourmet recipes that your Ice cream can be used for. Anything that provides visual stimulation and a possible viral spread, works miracles. The implementation part is derived from where you specifically place that content around the Internet and even in your site, a strategic approach in any development is vital. Again creativity helps make this a lot more successful.

Interactivity.

People LOVE to interact, with companies, with each other, even with inanimate objects, i.e. Robots… You name it, and human nature will undoubtedly drive you to create an interaction. We are social creatures by nature and as such, if we are not engaged, we are bored. Ultra-bored. Adding interactivity to a website can not be forgotten or dismissed by any means today. Interactivity provides you with market research you couldn’t get anywhere else not to mention that anything enticing participation brings in the masses. For example creating a forum where people suggest ideas they’d like to see and monitoring the forum for possible ideas would surely give relevant feedback that could mean a lot for growing businesses, in addition to creating a buzz about great customer service and innovative business models. For example with the Gourmet Ice Cream Company, they could open a forum where users could make suggestions about flavors, or possible combinations they’d like to try, if the company felt the flavor could work they would offer samples to those involved in the forum and have their own focus group of actual customers, word would spread and eventually thousands of people would be visiting the site posting suggestions and offering up priceless information. This is just off the top of my head, but imagine what could be done. There are a great number of ways you can provide an interactive atmosphere online for low costs if you use creativity and a dash of common sense.

So, what have we learned?

1. The Internet is like an ocean and much like Darwinian theory it’s very much about survival of the fittest.

2. Successful content creation is derived from three elements that make a bigger picture and take a lot of unique strategic thinking.

3. The only way to stay at the top is too simply continue generating the same type of informative and entertaining content.

It’s a competitive market for every market nowadays, so do your best to stand out, and not only survive, but excel at the top of digital food chain.

Sheila

Social Media Communications Specialist @ The Re Agency

Change in social communication is part of our global history, it may be one of the few things we all have in common to this day. We love to talk, to divulge information, to chatter, to relate, to disagree, and to debate. In every advanced civilization, there is always a marked and defined form of social interaction. In Greece there was the public square created by the Senate, in Egypt there was the papyrus posted by the Pharaoh, in Ancient China there were smoke signals created for the purpose of war; study era to era and you’ll see the effect that ONE solitary variable can have on an entire culture. So it brings me to my next point: what causes social interaction to shift? What is that variable? You’ll only need one guess. Well, eventually everything becomes obsolete because it’s replaced by something that works better, faster, and more efficiently.The way we communicate changes because technology moves forward and as what we create moves forward, so must we.

In the Atomic Age (1950-60’s) when Television was brought into the world as the lovechild of marketing and advertising, at first it was met with disbelief,  questioning professionals wanting to get rid of it, fearing it was the end of Advertising’s golden age; they yearned for the comfort and reliability of the good old print medium. Nothing fancy, just candid illustrations detailing the modern miracles of that time. Which happened to be Snake OilSnake Oil reviews. However, whilst skeptics fidgeted their fingers and remained stagnant in their ways, some very innovative individuals decided to take a bit of chance. Little did the skeptics know that Advertising would experience it’s real golden age because of television.

Shows with names like “Krafts Television Theater” and “Man against Crime sponsored by Camel Cigarettes” (Yes, that was the title) started to pop up at every hour of the day, brands associated themselves with entertaining and informative content to connect viewers to their product through this medium. the phenomenon grew, soon every family in America owned a television set, and chose their brand loyalties according to the content perceived.  Agencies and independents were forced to take part in the mass media frenzy, while those few that had pioneered the movement and started long before, were already very much ahead of the game… In 1964, Marshall McLuhan published “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ . Dr. McLuhan essentially proved with years of arduous research that mass media could literally move the masses, sway them, mold them, and most importantly reach them in their homes in their chairs and pull them into the world of your choosing. His focus was upon the effects of technology on popular culture and social communities he referred to as “the Global village”( Sounds familiar?). Indeed, the global village was a direct result of his infamous aphorism “the medium is the message“.  What Mr.McLuhan meant was that every message made through a popular medium essentially becomes embedded into that medium thus making a “symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.” The power behind this, is quite possibly the most significant correlation between society and it’s technology. Which we’ve all benefited from for many years. However the era of the Television ad is coming to an end, it has lived a great life, and while it’s 1.0 way of getting your message across taught us many things about society and the way it digests information; we should all start saying goodbye. The reason for this as many of you have noticed, is that once this research came around, we exploited the resources to the point where you can’t go anywhere, not even a public restroom without being sold something. We’ve become cynical, we don’t trust advertisers, and we sure don’t trust companies. As Bob Dylan once said “the times they are a-changing..”

So what now, what do we do? Do we blow another several million on an TV ad knowing that half of America has a a DVR system and simply fast forward through your Million Dollar investment, do we really want to go out like that? What about Print? How far will that full page ad get you, when the same content can be found online, for free? Technology has beat us out once again but it’s different now. It’s not just about mass communications. It’s transformed into something deeper, something more real, tangible. It’s now about mass interaction. Not just relaying the message and depending upon a 50 person focus group, but rather relaying the message and receiving a response, instantly. Faster than the radio waves, faster than the satellite, faster than any of us could have been prepared for. The internet and its many interactive platforms are redesigning our entire strategy of approach.

Disbelief in Social media, in the effects that this essentially personalized form of mass media can be effective are comparable to disbelief in years of study on the human mind. If you doubt the abilities of social media, it’s much like doubting the abilities of word of mouth, and direct to consumer advertising. It doesn’t work because of the quantity of upfront engagement, it works because of the quality of the engagement. From Jakarta to Jackson, the digital global village is trying to speak to us, he’s sitting in his chair waiting to be pulled, waiting to be responded to. Are you there? Is your brand there? Your company? Your small business? Your corporation? Your organization? Your agency?

Yesterday my colleague wrote an excellent piece on common sense, and the way that major corporations and ad agencies tend to ignore that little voice in their head that thinks logically and makes connections in a structured and sensible way. Well look around you, it’s the 21st century, and we’re once again at a crossroads of the significance of mass media; except you can choose to micro-target the mass audiences you wish to reach. Wake up man, it’s here. Don’t ignore ‘the Global village” because you’re afraid to leave your comfort zone. Look into the past and accept that those who have been successful and have endured the test of time have not been afraid to innovate, to test the water, and essentially dive in head first.

Don’t ignore “the Global village”, no, no, on the contrary embrace it, embed your message, and don’t wait for the report to be published ladies and gentlemen, help write it.

Sheila

Social Media Communications Specialist @ The Re Agency

I read a postPost reviews at Social Media Optimization that made me think about what is it that a “valuable brand” means nowadays; and I look forward to hearing your opinion on this one.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, valuable means:

1 a: having monetary value b: worth a good price
2 a: having desirable or esteemed characteristics or qualities <valuable friendships> b: of great use or service <valuable advice>

In today’s ever-changing cultural landscape, I have to go with 2b. SM (social media) isn’t about cluttering every possible medium with your colors, your brands, your products; but rather an opportunity to create an environment of support and/or service, selecting specific channels to reach your audience. Therefore, I find it unnecessary to categorize brands by “most valuable” and/or “mavens, selectives, butterflies and wallflowers,” according to their SM activity (find the study here). The concept of a valuable brand is so subjective, making it impossible to determine whether any of those brands within the top-ten are more valuable than the Corner Store Down The Road is to its community. A few days ago, the NYtimes published an article on the results one of the many social networks has had on its users, and to save you the time to read it; it pretty much draws a picture in which all brands can be as valuable to their specific niche.

As an industry, we need to stop making such specific categorization causing marketers to believe that being “mavens” is the only way to succeed in SM; when it is not true. These sorts of categorizations tell us that one can’t be “selective” and expect the same results, when the idea of SM is exactly that: to be selective. To find your niche and create an environment of support that -if done right- will bring your brand the monetary value you’re looking for: ROI. Just because a valuable brand within the top-ten has thousands and thousands of followers and friends, doesn’t mean that it is more valuable than the Corner Shop in a community of twenty thousand people and four thousand followers and friends (20%).

This is a new way of communicating, people, and there is no room for such specific categories and lists in a world in which we (as consumers) have the freedom to jump from niche to niche as we please.

You can be anything you want; maven, selective, butterfly or wallflower, so comparing yourself to such specific brands is no longer an option to measure your success. You are unique, so your value is the one given by your specific community; while we -as an industry- need to start thinking smaller and smaller… on terms of execution.

Aroldo Nery

Social Media Brand Director @ The Re Agency