Chapter 7

Using the Social Media in Social CRM

There's a conversation going on. A majority of your customers are engaged in a discussion about brands they like, the service they don't, and just about everything in between. If you're not part of it, you're missing out on an opportunity to learn what your customer really wants. The customer is ready to tell you.

But you need to listen in a way that is meaningful for your customers and your business. Auto magnate Henry Ford was quoted as saying, “If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would've said a faster horse.” Developing a relationship with your customer is a careful blend of understanding and vision. But make no mistake; social CRM is also big business. Forrester Research predicts that software to run corporate social networks will be a $6.4 billion business by 2016.

In this chapter, we show you the implications that social media have for every aspect of your business. We examine the rules for creating valuable content and the need to collect and track behavior.

Understanding the Role of Social Media

Social media has impacted many facets of our lives. When you consider that social media is a relatively recent phenomenon, you can see just how big an impact it has made. Everyone seems to be online and using social media.

According to the Nielsen Social Media Report from the third quarter of 2011, the average social media user is

That's how Nielsen describes the average user, but what about your customer? Do you know who he or she is? Your customers might not look anything like the average user. Knowing who you're speaking to is the key to a successful online business. Speaking to your audience through social media is the way to have the most impact.

Social media can be viewed as a two-sided coin used to establish relationships. It is both an experience and technique. From your customer's point of view, it's an experience. From your point of view as a businessperson, it's a technique. If you don't understand both sides, you won't develop the kind of full relationship you hope to achieve with your customers.

The following are ways to think about each side of the coin:

If you think of managing social platforms as only a technique and not also an experience, you miss out on the richness of the relationships that can be formed. You need to see the potential of both to build your social CRM. Creating experiences for your customers and analyzing their reaction will help you get to know and understand them.

Changing CRM with social media

To illustrate how social media has transformed CRM into social CRM, Get Satisfaction created an infographic called The Evolution of Social CRM. You can find the original infographic at Get Satisfaction's blog, at this address:

The analysis illustrates what makes social CRM so different from the business functions of previous years. The critical points in the Get Satisfaction infographic, in terms of how social CRM has changed, include the following:

It's easy to see that social CRM requires a whole new paradigm. The customer is the center of all the action. Effective tools haven't completely caught up with the requirements. For this reason, social media tools are layered on top of typical CRM systems to gather all the needed data.

Dipping into real-time analytics

Understanding how customers respond to your material is key to producing more of the best content. To do this, you need to spend some time monitoring your campaigns, website, and other channels to see what works and what doesn't. For this reason, you should consider using one of the following realtime monitoring tools:

Building the Content Pillars

Without solid content, you'll have a difficult time attracting and holding an audience of any kind. There are several ways to look at what content means to your business. One way is to think of content as the foundation upon which you build a successful business. For this reason, some have used the term pillar content to refer to the content that you need to have to support your business. Pillar content includes the basic information that you believe your customers should know.

For example, if you run a gardening site, your pillar content would include everything you think hobbyists should know about planting and caring for a garden. As shown in Figure 7-1, Garden Guides (www.gardenguides.com) is a membership site, run by Demand Media, that provides extensive content on gardening. You can see what Garden Guides considers pillar content by looking at the main menu items. They include such topics as plants, gardening design, and organic gardening.

Figure 7-1: Garden Guides.

Creating and using content

The key to understanding the type of content that you'll create is knowing who your audience is. Are you speaking to a shareholder audience? Does your content need to convey a serious tone for potential investors?

One of the mistakes that content creators make is to use the same tone for all their content. Your social media channels are read by a multitude of audiences. You want to sing a coherent song, but you need to use more than one note.

You can find lots of paradigms used to present the ideal content process. We think that if you boil it all down, there are three key components to creating great content. You want to

The following sections explore each of these ideas and identify tools to help manage your content.

Write or curate content

As anyone tasked with writing content knows, it can be challenging. You'll find books filled with advice about the many facets of developing good content. To start, you should think about the “why.” You need to ask yourself why you're writing it. What's the goal? Do you want to sell something, educate, or entertain? Probably a mix of all three would be ideal. As we discussed, when you know the tone of the piece and the intended audience, you're ready to write.

Before you starting writing a piece, assemble all your material: images, links, and anything else that must be included. (See the upcoming section, “Writing your brand post” for more on the process for developing content.)

Curating content means that you find great content on the web and share it with your constituency. As we know, the web has unlimited content. Much of it is good, but there's a lot of junk, too.

Curating content adds real value because a person with expertise is involved in selection instead of a search engine. You take the time to read and select what you consider to be the most informative material.

The following tools can assist you in content curation:

Figure 7-2: Scoop.it.

Use content

When you're writing a specific blog post or a sales letter, you know where your content will be seen. If you're writing more general content, make sure that content is used immediately for some purpose. The reason for this is simple: The content monster must be fed. You have a hungry crowd that constantly wants to consume new material. People are attracted by what's novel to them. If you don't supply fresh content, they won't seek you out.

If you're not sure about all the ways your content can be used, you can always repurpose it (use it in different ways, such as turning a post into a video script) at a later date. You'll learn something about what your customer wants whenever you publish content, so keep working. You should consider everything you post as an experiment.

As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus is quoted to have said, “You can't step in the same river twice.” That's a great mindset to have when you're doing anything online. A river is always flowing and changing; so too is the web. You're speaking to different people all the time. Popular culture is also shifting so that what works for you today may not work tomorrow.

If you've written something that gets a great response, you'll know you need more on that topic. If no one reads it or comments, you'll know that writing more about it will be less valuable. Make the time you or your team works on content as productive as possible.

Share it

When it comes to social media, sharing is what it's all about. A customer using your content to learn about your products is valuable, and that customer becomes even more valuable when she recommends that product to her network. Then she becomes part of your sales force.

Following are some free tools that you can use to share content:

Figure 7-3: Sharing content with ShareThis.

Discovering storytelling principles

Storytelling has become a hot topic for marketers and other content developers. Information overload causes customers to skip the long boring text passages that marketers carefully place on a website. From this realization, the phrase customer engagement was born. Managers began to understand that they were going to have to work a little harder to capture someone's attention. As marketing guru Seth Godin famously declared, “interruption marketing” is dead.

Customers want to consume their marketing content using games, videos, funny tweets, and so on. What they don't want is the dry, dull corporate-speak that populated the web in the early days. The competition is fierce, so all eyes turned to Hollywood. Content creators realized they had more in common with the storytelling of Walt Disney than the dull documents of Dow Jones.

I'm sure you struggle with making your content engaging. Almost everyone does. Creating interesting prose had previously been the domain of novelists and script writers. Now it's your job to tell the stories. But how? Collecting and making sense of customers' comments, data logs, and marketing campaigns was never easy. Now you're inundated with data from all sides.

One way to get a handle on creating engaging content is to understand what makes a great story. Well-known screenwriter Robert McKee has said that a story “unites an idea with an emotion.”

A story isn't memorable if it doesn't evoke some emotion in the person hearing it. When you've heard about great tragedies during your lifetime, you always remember where you were when you heard the news. That's because it evoked such a strong emotion that you took note of everything happening at that moment.

The following are some ways you can approach your business content from a storytelling perspective:

Look at two examples that perfectly illustrate how great stories constructed for the web make a difference. In 2011, Google started a project called Project Re: Brief. The purpose was to demonstrate that the iconic advertisements of the past could be reimagined for the web using stories. They contacted the creators of several of the iconic advertisements and asked them to update those ads for today's web audience. Here's how they recreated two of those advertisements:

Figure 7-4: Volvo's “Drive it like you hate it” commercial reimagined.

You can see how much more appealing the information is because these old commercials are bundled as stories that take advantage of tools not available to the creators at the time like video and custom links.

Figure 7-5: Alka-Seltzer's “I can't believe I ate the whole thing” commercial reimagined.

Sometimes, if you haven't thought the story through, a story strategy can backfire. Social customers can be unpredictable. They don't always do what you want them to. After a 2012 incident when a Twitter hashtag (see more about hashtags in the upcoming section on Twitter) unintentionally invited unwanted Twitter comments, Rick Wion, director of social media for McDonald's U.S.A. commented, “You don't control things. You can only hope to steer things in certain directions.”

Following is a brief description of the incident that caused McDonald's to quickly pull their social media campaign:

McDonald's wanted to showcase the farmers they work with to emphasize their interest in quality. They created a hashtag called #meetthefarmers to support the campaign. Concerned that they weren't being specific enough about what the hashtag represented, they quickly changed it to #McDStories.

But instead of getting the stories they anticipated about how fresh their ingredients are, they got a torrent of negative stories about the quality of their food. Even when they took the hashtags down, the stories continued. It was clearly a PR disaster.

This exemplifies the fact that a company vision of itself and its products may not match everyone's opinion. Whether the negative comments represented the actual customers, they were enough to stop the campaign dead in its tracks.

Should McDonald's have anticipated this response? Probably. But clearly they were thinking that they understood the social customer. They forgot that everyone with an opinion can use the hashtag, not just their loyal customers.

Did McDonald's learn a lesson? Apparently so. In May of 2012, McDonald's purchased a promoted trend with the hashtag #bluberryoatmeal to herald their new breakfast offering. This time, things went better. It seems that blueberries and oatmeal are less controversial.

Taking a trip with the customer

Sometimes the easiest way to understand your customer is to “walk a mile with his mouse.” Ok, we know that's not really how the proverb goes, but when you need to determine where your customer gets lost, can't buy, or loses interest on your website, you need to create a content trip to investigate the problem.

A content trip describes the path a customer makes to complete an action on your channel (such as a website or blog). If you take the path as though you were a customer, you can begin to understand what can be improved. If you pair that with data and feedback, you can craft a solution.

Here are some key items to consider when creating customer paths:

Keeping a content inventory

Whether you're in an enterprise or a small business, your inventory of content is likely scattered and unmanageable. Don't assume that big companies manage their content any better than small businesses. Most businesses are just too busy to organize their content.

Even if you have a web team that manages such areas as press releases or the videos collected from conference interviews, that content isn't integrated with everything else. Only companies that dedicate resources to their knowledge base will know what they really have in the way of information assets.

Incorporating Blogging

Blogs have been around long enough that some experts have already pronounced them dead, but they are alive and well and a great source of customer traffic. They also play an important role in your social CRM. They are part of the conversation that you need to integrate into your system to ensure that you're interacting with your customers.

When blogs started in the 1990s, people used blogs like diaries or journals. They wrote mostly about their day or their interests. The blog form slowly gained favor, and businesspeople began to use blogs to talk about their brands and business. Thought leaders and others found them to be a useful way to share their expertise and build a following.

According to the Nielsen Wire blog post, “Buzz in the Blogosphere: Millions More Bloggers and Blog Readers,” more than 173 million blogs were tracked by NM Incite in 2011. Who are these bloggers? According to Technorati's report, “The State of the Blogosphere 2011” hobby blogs make up around 60 percent of the population, and business blogs make up approximately 40 percent. The Technorati report indicates the following about the business blogs:

Defining a brand blog

Because of the large number of blogs, you may assume that most companies have one. Not so among the Fortune 500 companies. According to Go-Gulf.com, only 23 percent of Fortune 500 companies have public-facing corporate blogs. This indicates that many corporate managers may be reluctant to undertake an endeavor that requires a public risk.

Most successful business blogs are a fine mix of conversation, information, links, and products and/or service information. When you create a brand blog, you're usually speaking to an audience of customers, vendors, investors, and other interested parties. Because anyone could drop by, carefully consider your brand blog before taking it live.

One of the most effective ways to ensure that your company has a cohesive voice is to create a guide for your employees. (See more about employee guidelines in Chapter 13.) A guide for bloggers is akin to the type of guide you create for your brand look and feel. For example, Pepsi's ad creators (as well as ad creators for any major brand) are required to follow certain guidelines that dictate the size of the logo, the fonts, and so on. Create a guide that applies to all of your social media channels and helps everyone understand how to maintain the look and feel of the brand.

If a blog is written by the owner of a small business who has sole responsibility for everything, guest posters will be the only ones who need guidelines. If your company has financial restrictions or many bloggers, then you'll need more comprehensive guidelines. Don't regard the guidelines as restrictive. If you don't establish clear rules, you could end up in a PR mess.

Here are some questions that brand managers need to ask when creating a brand blog:

Searching the blogosphere

When you're planning your company blog, you want to make sure you get an idea of what others — especially your competitors — are doing. Make a point of looking at several blogs and taking notes about their pros and cons. Understanding how your competitors' customers respond to their content will help you craft your own. In addition, make sure to look at blogs that are popular regardless of topic. Looking at the best content will help you ensure that your blog has integrity.

The following resources can help you find your competitors and their blogs:

Figure 7-6: Google Blogs search.

Planning your posts

One of the hardest parts of sustaining an active blog is to constantly feed it with new posts. To help with this process, create an editorial calendar. Most magazines and other publications maintain a calendar so that their content is created in advance. The last thing a publication needs is a big hole in its content.

A blogging schedule will help you manage blog content, whether you're working with a team or alone. If you're working with a team, you can assign posts in an orderly fashion and ensure that all your bloggers have something productive to do. If you're working alone, you need to prepare for the times when the unexpected happens and you don't have time to create a post. The key is to have something ready to go when your schedule dictates it's time to publish.

Following are some decisions you need to make to create your calendar:

With this tool, you can easily drag and drop posts into a calendar. This visual method is much easier than having to type in the information line by line.

Writing your brand post

Brand posts should engage the customer and make her feel like you're interested in what she has to say. Like any good social media content, you want to develop a dialogue with your readers.

It's hard to stare at a blank screen and hope inspiration will strike, especially when your job might depend on how well your blog posts are received. Management rarely buys the excuse that you just weren't inspired. If you send out posts to be written by team members or outsourced writers, give them specific instructions about the post you want. The instructions are important because you want all the posts to be consistent and use the same terms and tone. Then, when visitors read several blog posts in a row, they aren't confused by different styles.

As you write posts on your own or direct writers in the content you want, consider the following blog post formats

Fitting SEO into blog content

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a topic that many businesses would like to ignore. SEO is frustrating because it's a moving target, and there's no one right way to do everything. But you can't ignore SEO because search-engine friendly content enables people to find your blog content when they need it. As we explain in earlier chapters, showing up on social media channels when and where customers have a need is critical to a social CRM strategy.

In SEO, the greatest concern is the keywords you place in each post. For example, Google will help users find your posts if the keywords correspond to searches that your potential customers run. Google will also penalize you if you try to stuff your posts with keywords; repeating the same keywords over and over beyond their usefulness is just as bad as not using them at all. The key is to find the correct balance between including the keywords that are needed for SEO versus making the post seem overstuffed with the same words.

Your company probably has a defined list of major keywords that everyone uses. However, when you're writing a blog post, you will also want to add keywords that are specific to that post to encourage traffic. For example, if your post mentions specific industry leaders or company products, include them as keywords for that particular post. That way, people who search for those specific names will find you through that post.

Following are some tools to help you find the right keywords while you're writing your content:

Figure 7-7: Inbound-Writer.

Encouraging readers to leave comments

On your blog, comments on each post help create community and build relationships. However, the value of the comments section is often overlooked. One reason may be that comments aren't easy to come by. Some blogs have a wealth of comments, but most have just a few. Social customers are more likely to comment within a social media platform like Facebook than on a specific blog.

The kinds of comments you want on your blog are the ones that invite discussion by a larger group. To encourage readers to leave comments, especially comments that generate discussion, help your readers frame their responses. For example, in a blog post, ask readers specific questions that they can reply to. Replying to a question is an easy way for your readers to interact with you. You could also describe an experience that happened to you and ask readers to share a similar experience. Broad questions aren't as likely to generate comments. When you ask readers to simply “Let me know how you feel,” you're inviting a blank comment box.

Looking at the available blogging tools

Blogging tools are relatively easy to use. They're structured so that you use a template to fill in all the required information that helps search engines find you. This information includes the title, text, keywords, images, and links.

The following two tools are especially popular among business bloggers:

Figure 7-8: WordPress.org download.

Discovering the Podcast

No company using social media should overlook podcasts. A podcast is an audio file that listeners can either directly download to their computer (or mobile device) or stream (play) online. It's most likely formatted as an MP3 file. (In this definition and the research that follows, songs are excluded.) Podcasts allow companies to vary the content format.

When podcasts were first introduced early in the 21st century, the technology wasn't perfect, and downloading was difficult. As the technology improved (including the introduction of the iPod), podcasts became more popular.

Now, most companies understand that podcasts have value, but they don't always use them to the extent that they could. The problem isn't hard-to-use technology, but finding people who are willing to speak at length in a nonrehearsed way. Just like any public speaking, discussing a topic in a podcast requires the willingness to try.

Defining the value of podcasting

To understand who podcast listeners are and what social media they consume, a survey, The Current State of Podcasting 2010, by Edison Research, found that the average podcast listener is

The percentages of people on social networks who listen to podcasts are as follows:

Apply the preceding statistics to your company's podcasting strategy. For example, because a high percentage of Facebook users listen to podcasts, if your audience is on Facebook, consider linking to a podcast via your company's Facebook page. Is your audience in the 35–44 age range? Then podcasts could be your medium.

As you develop your podcasting strategy, don't go by these statistics alone. Do testing on your own by tracking them in Google analytics or other analytics package. This way, you will know if your assumptions about your audience are borne out by real-world tests.

Benefitting from podcasts

Are podcasts of interest to you? Here are some ways that creating podcasts could benefit your company:

Planning your podcast

Recording a great podcast can be challenging if you don't plan what you're going to do ahead of time. The first step in planning is to gather inspiration by listening to popular podcasts. The following podcasts were among the nominees for the Podcast Connection's 7th Annual Podcast Awards:

Because these podcasts represent one of the final nominees and the winner, the standards are high. Don't be intimidated by the quality and content. Just try to see what makes them so interesting.

Figure 7-9: Planet Money.

When you're gathering your team or planning a podcast on your own, consider these tips:

Choosing podcasting tools

To create podcasts, you can choose from several types of tools. Your choice will depend on such things as the following:

The different types of tools are as follows:

In Table 7-1, you find an example of each type of podcasting tool.

Figure 7-10: Blog Talk Radio.

Table 7-1 Examples of Podcasting Tools

Getting your podcast heard

After you've created a podcast, the next step is to spread the word to potential listeners. If you're creating podcasts for an internal audience, your distribution is clear. If you want to attract traffic to your website, attention to your product, or credibility as a thought leader, you'll need to find wider distribution.

One good way to figure out where to distribute your podcast is to look at how people find podcasts. The Edison Research's 2010 report on the state of podcasting (mentioned earlier in this chapter) asked its respondents the following question: “How do you typically find out about the podcasts you listen to?” Their responses were as follows:

We recommend using all these channels and any others that relate specifically to your audience.

Including Video in Your Mix

Video has become a very important content format for social media users in the last few years. Its impact on the web is enormous. In February 2011, com-Score Video Metrix released the following data about online video viewing:

Most people like the idea of using videos. The problem arises when you have to shoot videos. You have to figure out answers to all sorts of questions. What should I shoot? How should I do it? Unless you outsource videos or work in a company with a video studio, you're going to learn more about taking video than you ever expected. The following sections help you create a plan for your online video.

Knowing how to use videos

Before the bandwidth and technology for online video became available, businesspeople and users alike eagerly anticipated online video. Now that it's here, everyone is hoping to launch the next viral video (as long as it goes viral for a good reason, not because it's a PR disaster).

Your customers can view your videos in two main ways:

You can create videos to serve a variety of business purposes. Consider the following:

Figure 7-11: Embedded video on The Rise to the Top.

After you decide what to create, you need to figure out how to proceed. Depending on what you're shooting, you can use a relatively inexpensive video recorder or even a smartphone. When you want to grab an interview with someone on the fly, these devices will suffice. Obviously, if you're recording a more formal event such as a speaker at a conference, you'll need a more professional rig that includes a good microphone.

Understanding video-hosting requirements

Video hosting is an important consideration. If you don't want to host videos on your site, you need to pick a host that will serve your needs. When you're reviewing sites, consider the following:

Following are some possible video-hosting sites (see the upcoming section on YouTube) to consider for your business:

Figure 7-12: Vimeo.

Considering YouTube for video hosting and distribution

When you are evaluating how to distribute and host your videos, you may want to consider YouTube where you can do both at the same time. Its built-in features make it worth considering. You can host a video in a variety of places that don't have distribution. What makes YouTube valuable is that they have a huge waiting audience to which you can distribute videos.

The benefits of using YouTube for video distribution include the following:

Figure 7-13: Orabrush on YouTube.

Tweeting with the Microblog Twitter

People either love or hate Twitter. The ones who hate it say they just can't pack enough meaning into 140 characters. The ones who love it say that they can establish relationships with people they could never reach any other way. Twitter lovers have an important case to make for anyone involved in social CRM. Because Twitter is such a powerful tool for reaching out to people, you can't ignore it. According to statistics compiled by Cara Pring at The Social Skinny,

Twitter creates the opportunity for the pint-sized post that packs a wallop. In this section, we look at the true value of making Twitter part of your social CRM ecosystem.

Understanding the microblog (Twitter)

Just like the hours in the day, you get the same amount of Twitter characters as everyone else: 140 characters, including spaces. If you use them wisely, you can reach a large audience. Twitter allows you to easily connect with your niche. No matter what your interest or business specialty, you can find like-minded followers on Twitter.

But are you? According to a 2011 study by Maritz Research, only 30 percent of the people surveyed received a company response to their tweet. This unresponsiveness defeats the purpose of having a Twitter account as part of your social CRM. Not only do you want to show customers that you care about what they have to say, you also want to capture data about your loyal followers. You won't be encouraging them if you don't engage.

From a big-picture perspective, tweets serve two basic functions:

Tweets allow you to communicate with others in real time. If you monitor your Twitter stream throughout the day, you'll see brand mentions and developing news right in your stream and in trending topics.

Reviewing Twitter basics

To participate in the tweet stream, it's useful to know something about the elements that make up Twitter. Following are some of the key parts:

Looking at some specialized Twitter tools

A whole industry of tools has grown up around Twitter. People have figured out ways to make it easier to follow and use. For example, here's a quick introduction to tools that can help you with the following tasks:

Figure 7-14: Twitalyzer.

Figure 7-15: Tweriod.

Figure 7-16: Tweetwally.

Figure 7-17: Timely.

Facing the Valuable Facebook

Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla. In March 2012, it had over 900 million monthly active users. If you know anything about social media, you know that Facebook is considered the platform to be on. Its sheer size makes everyone pay attention. But just like any site or tool, you have to make Facebook work for your specific business.

Understanding the importance of Facebook

In 2012, Facebook is facing some challenges. Its IPO was investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and General Motors pulled all its advertising. Like any other publicly traded company, Facebook is open to a higher level of scrutiny, but no one expects a mass exodus of users in the near future. According to comScore, one out of every seven minutes spent online is spent on Facebook. That's a hard habit to break.

Discovering Facebook features

A study by CMB Consumer Pulse and iModerate Research Technologies reports that of those who click a brand's Like button on Facebook, 60 percent of them are more likely to recommend that brand. That gives most brands a reason to be on Facebook.

To maximize your use of Facebook for your brand, following are some of the most popular features for you to consider:

Figure 7-18: Pepsi's cover photo.

Adding Specialized Social Platforms

In most of this chapter, we discuss the major platforms that most companies who use social media choose first, but other specialized sites might be just right for your business. If you have a niche that's clearly defined, you might find another network that's perfect for your business.

Considering social network alternatives

If you think that being on the major sites assures that your customer will find you, think again. Is there something unique about your product or service that lends itself to one of the less traveled social networks? They include the following:

Figure 7-19: Google+ circles.

Using visual platforms

Some popular social networking sites that emphasize visuals have been cropping up of late. The following two make sharing graphics and photos very easy:

Figure 7-20: Tumblr.

Presenting as a Social Campaign Tool

When considering content creation, some companies don't realize that presenting is a powerful social tool, because they don't realize that any content they create can be repurposed and shown elsewhere on the web. We discuss some ways to repurpose content in the following sections.

Hosting webinars

More and more companies are jumping on the webinar bandwagon. The word webinar — a mash-up of the words web and seminar — refers to any online meeting where information is exchanged.

Webinar content can be sent to prospective customers, used in training, and edited further for audio podcasts. Links to the content can be sent through all the major social networks.

Early webinars were clunky, but that's not the case today. In the formative years of the webinar, the technology would cut you off, fail to record, or incorporate strange noises that rendered it unintelligible. Today, the technology has improved to the point that most webinars are enjoyable to attend.

When you're choosing a webinar host, consider the following:

If you're selecting a webinar host, consider the following services:

Figure 7-21: Instant Teleseminar.

Extending your reach with slide shows

We've all experienced what some people refer to as death by PowerPoint, but have you considered the value of sharing your presentations on a slide sharing site? Sharing your presentations gives them a second chance at a life. If they don't contain proprietary information or reveal some great competitive truth, you'll find a larger audience by sharing your presentation.

Some say the presentations increase in value because they can be watched at the viewer's convenience and don't have the droning voice of the presenter attached to them. If you're doing research or looking for new ideas, a presentation site may be just what you're looking for.

Sharing your slide presentations includes the following benefits:

If you'd like to upload your presentation to a site that houses slide shows, consider the following options:

Figure 7-22: SlideShare.

Figure 7-23: Prezi.

Sharing e-books

It seems like everyone is reading e-books. It's a convenient way to package up your brand's information and share it. Don't be limited by the notion that an e-book has to mimic a physical book. You can create e-books that include your product information, recommendations, and anything else that interests your customers.

For example, Seth Godin's Tales of the Revolution (Domino Project), promoted in Figure 7-24, tells the stories that happened as a result of the Domino Project publishing Poke the Box. The key idea here is that now that we can publish digital book content so inexpensively, we can make an e-book from almost any ideas. In contrast, when a physical book was the only option, many ideas weren't published because of the high cost of publishing a physical book.

Another great example of using both digital and physical books to spread ideas is the book, End Malaria, by Michael Bungay Stanier (Domino Project). This book (its accompanying website is shown in Figure 7-25) is available in hardcover and e-book formats. By partnering with sponsors who were committed to spreading the word, the book raised over three hundred thousand dollars to fight malaria.

Figure 7-24: Tales of the Revolution.

Figure 7-25: End Malaria.

Rethinking what constitutes a book is a great way to make your own business content go viral.

Mining the backchannel

Have you heard of the backchannel? If it sounds mysterious, it's not. The term backchannel refers to the stream of real-time comments on social platforms like Twitter when someone is giving a presentation. This can be another source of content from a presentation.

A few short years ago, the backchannel didn't exist. People sitting in the audience might comment to one another, but there was no widespread sharing of opinions on the spot. The backchannel allows anyone on a social platform to publicly share their opinions, make a nasty comment, or praise the speaker.

Some companies, aware of the power of the backchannel, establish a Twitter hashtag for a presentation before a conference or event begins. Companies know they can't control what's being said, but they can at least watch the comments along with everyone else. This is a good idea for your company. When you're aware of what the audience is saying, you may have the opportunity to modify what you're saying or respond to the comments.

At some conferences and other presentations, the backchannel comments are projected right on a big screen beside the presenters. When the comments appear on stage, the presenter can use those comments to further the discussion and extend the presentation's content.

One example of this is Pivot Conference (http://2012.pivotcon.com), as shown in Figure 7-26, a social media conference run by Brian Solis. Not only were the backchannel comments projected on the screen during the conference, but after the conference concluded, the conference presenters continued to capture tweets relating to the content. This is a great way to keep people engaged.

Figure 7-26: Pivot Conference.

Having Influence

Influence is a topic that every online business wants to know more about. Robert Cialdini, a psychologist, has written a classic book on the topic called Influence: Science and Practice. In it, he outlines several ways that people are persuaded. They include things like reciprocity (you give something and get something in return) and social proof (other people have purchased a product before you and were satisfied).

Influence has taken on new importance for social media users because people who write blogs and communicate to large groups online now wield influence. Several tools measure influence, but it's hardly an exact science. There has been much debate about whether these tools really measure influence or just social media activity. Following are some free tools you may want to use to check your company's (or your own) influence score: