Ciarán Norris posted “7 Things I Never Want To Read In Social Media Lists Again” and I have to take an issue with part of this list because it’s so vague that it’s the kind of garbage that Social Media experts pull up to give evidence of how awesome they are. I take issue with numbers 4 and 6 because they are in direct conflict with each other. Let’s start with Number 6 and work our way backwards. Number 6 is “Social media doesn’t work for B2B.”

Are you ready for this? I disagree.

Before you get upset let me clarify. I’m not saying Social Media won’t work for all B2B companies and I’m not saying that all B2B companies shouldn’t maintain a presence on Social Media Networks. Let’s also classify “not working.” When I say social media doesn’t work for B2B, I mean it’s not making direct revenue. Show me the Twitter account that sold a $500,000 software solution or sold a server package to a Fortune 500 company. It doesn’t exist and I don’t need to have 10 years of marketing experience to tell you that.

Twitter accounts and Facebook profiles probably aren’t even the best social media avenue for B2B, not that you can’t promote the odd tradeshow or handle the odd customer complaint. But when Ford starts looking for a new tire to put on the 2011 Mustang they don’t run to Twitter. They might run to a community portal thats a lot more exclusive them than the entire internet. Chances are greater though, that this sale is handled the old fashioned way with Ford putting out and RFP and thus starting and incredible long sales process that might take months or even years.

This isn’t something that gets started with 140 characters.

Back to Number 4, “Advertising is dead, the future is viral.” I don’t disagree with this point, nor to I agree with it either but what I take issue with is what comes next, “Rubbish. Ignoring the fact that you can’t make a viral (in that you can’t guarantee virality…” This is what got me, because in his evidence that social media does work for B2B he linked to “Redefining Viral: B2B Social Marketing.”

Wait… you can make viral stuff or can’t you? If I can’t guarantee a viral campaign then why is it his evidence that social media works for B2B? More importantly how do flash mobs sell software again?

His evidence that B2B can go viral a la social media, in that article about a map of 140 of the most influential Twitter users – if that’s evidence of B2B social media, then what is it selling? Is it considered B2B because it is an infographic?

The main focus of that article is “redefining going viral” – and he apparently thinks it needs redefined because his B2B clients don’t understand what it means. When you don’t understand what something means you don’t need to redefine it, you need to get reeducated.

If you’ve ever run a PPC campaign you know that costs can sometimes spiral out of control, and some campaigns might not be generating great results. One of your problems might be competition. If you’re in an industry with a lot of big corporations it might be hard to out bid or even big high enough to keep your ad running. For large companies who aren’t particularly as adept at running effective campaigns as they are drowning out the competition, prices can become so high that it just doesn’t make good business sense. Why would you pay $1.50 per click to sell a product with only $1 of profit? (note: there are legitimate reasons for this, but at face value it doesn’t seem to make sense)

Let’s take for example, Coffee. There are a lot of major players in this market, Starbucks, Folgers, Caribou, Gevalia and so on. There’s also a lot of smaller players, your local coffee shops are numerous. Gevalia offers a free coffee maker with some of its PPC ads. That’s hard to compete with from a cost stand point. It might be time to consider a different approach.

According to Pew Research, “older generations use the internet less for socializing and entertainment and more as a tool for information searches, emailing, and buying products.” Pew defines older generations as Generation X and older or around 33 years and older. This older generation is more likely to purchase online, and one of the most frequent things they search for is health information. As you might be aware, moderate amounts of coffee are healthy for you. This is assuming you’re cutting down on the cream and sugar. Targeting these keywords with relevant ads is a

So now we have found a online consumer that both buys at a higher frequency and is concerned with their health. Yet, if you search for “coffee health benefits” the number of ads shown at any given point are very small, yet it generates over 15 million pages in organic results. The only negative mark on this theory is that according to the Google keyword tool, the frequency of searches is rather low for some related phrases. You still have a untapped audience that is fairly targeted and could provide you with a great conversion rate with little competition. There is a little qualification to this, if your landing page doesn’t talk about how your coffee is healthy, its a waste of time. People are looking for coffee’s health benefits, if you put them on a page that talks about how great your French roast is, they will get lost and go back to searching for something else.

You can expand upon this idea for various industries. Search provides you with many different ways to get in touch with the consumer and PPC can allow you to target phrases which aren’t high priority for SEO efforts.

In marketing folklore (aka college) the often cited story is that of Coke. At some time Coke reached a point where there were no new markets to introduce Coke into that would generate greater sales, so the question was asked, “What are people drinking when they aren’t drinking Coke?” Water, Juice, Tea, Coffee and so on. As a result, Coke owns a lot of brands in many different markets. Can your company move into new PPC keywords to generate more effective campaigns?

If you’re in internet marketing, metrics and data are your part life (or at least they should be.) Permit me to be overly buzzwordy, but using data driven decisions to increase ROI should be a goal. However, understand and interpreting data is what separates the good from bad decisions. In the fast paced world of the internet, people are all to eager to jump on the latest fad in fear that we might miss some incredible opportunity.

Compete, Inc. has released information that shows that Facebook now directs more traffic Google. If you haven’t been paying attention for the past year, every month somebody declares that Facebook is the new Google, and as a person that has chronic ‘this-is-too-good-to-be-true’ syndrome, I don’t buy it.

Here’s why, and this is a shocker, because it’s not a data driven decision. It’s also nothing new, and it’s been said before. People using Facebook or social media aren’t looking to be sold to, they are looking to see what their friends are up to. Aaron Wall said it best, Social Media traffic does not buy.

When people search for something they are actively looking for a solution to a problem. So while Social Media gets more traffic, it doesn’t convert. Traffic by itself is worthless. I’d rather have 1000 unique visits per month with a 10% conversion rate than 10,000 visitors with 0% rate.

B-b-b-ut branding… conversations with the customer… my excuse to use twitter at work!? Sure, those are good points (ok, 2 outta 3 ain’t bad), and any company’s marketing mix should include Social Media efforts, but as lead generation activity, SoMe falls flat compared to search.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go get all these buzzwords off me.

It’s about the conversation – not the number of friends or followers.

Social Media has become the buzz word of the day on the internet. Carrying websites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace and turning them to the glorious way for marketers to make money without spending money. It couldn�t be farther from the truth. For one, if you get everyone in your company to Twitter, you�re taking them away from their real jobs. To successfully work in Social Media you need to have a person who understands it and to continually monitoring and developing the plan.

Having a person dedicated to social media does not mean hiring a full time Twitter intern. Social Media is not simply creating Facebook profiles. Social Media is away for companies to open up dialog for consumers and to achieve granular details about the client like never before.

What really attracts people to Social Media is the fact that they can reach people they wouldn�t normally have access to. If you aren�t responding and actively engaging your customers through your social media initiatives then you�re paying someone a lot of money to screw around on the internet.

It�s laughable to see corporate Twitter accounts being followed by 50,000 people � but that corporate account is only following one person. What is that? There is no interaction, there is no socializing, and it�s not social media. It�s almost more laughable when a corporate account follows 50,000 people and still acts the same way the corporate account following one person does. If you don�t occasionally respond to the people that follow you and ask questions it isn�t social media.

Social Media also isn�t another place to jam your brand down consumer�s throats. I follow about 180 people and I probably actively pay attention to are the people who post funny things or post interesting topics. The people who just post a bunch of links to new products � well I don�t follow very many of those. I’ve also started to trim down the people who I don’t find interesting or hold conversations with.

I recently saw a ‘social media expert’ tweet about how they thought it was funny that people with less followers than them would make posts about how to gain twitter followers, and then followed the tweet with a profane hash tag. That person followed some 3,000+ people, what do you think the percentage of people she actually communicated with out of those 3,000 people was. I’m guessing less than .01%. It’s pretty easy to get 3,000 people following you if you follow 3,000 people. The real expert will be the person following 3 people but its followed by 3,000.

Another way people misuse Social Media is they don�t have a plan. �We�ll do it because the kids are into it� isn�t a plan � well it is a plan, but not a plan for success. If that�s your attitude, it�s time to wake up because the internet isn�t going anywhere. You as marketers have the ability connect and get more data about your consumer than you have ever had. Find out what consumers like and dislike about the product. Somebody somewhere hates your product � get over it.

Social Media isn�t Facebook, isn�t Twitter, isn�t MySpace. Don�t get the idea that being on the most platforms means you�re social media forward. You can get more results just using Twitter than all the others combined if you know how to leverage it. Social Media is conversation and dialog with the consumer. If you allow the consumer to leave feedback on your site and actively us the information it supplies that�s more social media forward, and useful than creating a thousand Twitter accounts to have some phantom Twit post to. Social Media is trendy – today it’s Facebook and Twitter, tomorrow who knows?

Do you think the only place people are going to talk negative about your product is on your Facebook page? Why not take the opportunity to defend your product head on, or realize you have serious problems and actually fix the damn thing. It isn�t the 1930�s anymore � word gets around fast when something�s wrong. Because you don�t let people see bad comments on you blog doesn�t mean nobody will see them.

As Dave Culbertson of Lightbulb Interactive points out even most large corporations don�t get Social Media. A big example of this is Ford, which shouts �We use social media, we�re hip and cool� but it fails to be nothing more than the same old tactics of marketing days of old. He calls companies that do this �social media chickenhawks.� See Ford has social media initiatives � but they don�t use them. Dave explains that Ford started off with a neat idea but dropped the ball by only offering up one vehicle model, one that isn�t even sold in the US yet to and then didn�t even bother to interact with the consumers they lent the car to. This point is clearly lost on Ford as their �Social Media Guru� � Scott Monty, who responded to Dave and just didn�t get the point Dave was trying to hit home. Ford should be letting people review their cars on their site � much like most electronics site allow users review products.

It�s about the conversation. Engage the consumer or take the �Guru� off the resume. Because if you�re just doing the same thing you�ve always done, you don�t need a new title, unless that title is Social Media Chickenhawk.

There have been a lot of social media efforts I’ve seen latley that just don’t cut it. It’s a really obvious problem that gets neglected when social media outlets become buzz words on the evening news. Usually it starts out something like this:

Boss: Hey! I heard about this Tweety or Twitter or something like that on the news last night, are we on that?
Marketing Head: Ummm no.
Boss: Well we should be, get us an account ASAP!

First of all, before I get negative, it’s great that companies are trying to stay current with marketing trends. Ugh, I hate that word, trends. That’s really the wrong word for this. Marketing Fashion is a more appropriate term, or maybe marketing fads. If there is one thing to remember about the internet, it’s that it is constantly changing. While Twitter is vogue right now, the shelf life in indeterminate. We can sit and debate how long Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, etc. have to last or we can approach everything with the same question: How can we use this to leverage our company?

Are you ready for some internet marketing blasphemy? Some companies don’t and/or shouldn’t have Twitter. The reality of Twitter, and social media outlets is that it’s addictive. We might go out there as internet marketers to post a new ad, or to tweet about a cool new company product… but then you get sucked into the vortex of poking that attractive person you met at the networking event last week or retweeting that hilarious YouTube video. Which is a really quick way to get fired because internet marketers have a lot of legitimate work. So you think, I know… hire some college kid to do some tweeting for the company. Ok, great, but now you have someone else doing the exact same thing and wasting a whole lot of time and money.

If you can’t answer the question, how can we use this to leverage our company? Don’t do it! Better yet, look at ways you can actually use things to leverage for the company! Traditional marketing, or what I like to call “dumb marketing” like a dumb bomb is a lot of “drop from a plane and hope it hits its target.” Dumb Marketing is the same approach, the flashy ads, the billboards, the TV commercials, etc. Create a big enough presence and eventually that translates to sales. And look, it’s proven, it has worked for eons and that’s great. There’s a big problem with that, it’s costly and it the actual sales generated isn’t all that great considering how many people see an ad.

So, again, how can we use social media to leverage our company. If you’re a traditional marketer your probably think of this word as “incentive” but internet marketers call it engagement. You need to create incentive, or engagement with your social media efforts. If you don’t give your followers something to tweet about then fire the college intern you hired to tweet because you’re wasting time and money. Besides, interns are supposed to learn something and teaching someone how to twitter takes 30 seconds. As marketing differs between industries I will leave you with the same question: How can we use social media to leverage our company? Stop thinking about following the fashion and try to think about why social media is such a buzzword. I’ll give you two big hints, it’s the data and the interaction.

I’m not sure I buy into Jon Friedman’s approach to Facebook. He thinks Facebook (and Twitter) is for journalists because they can source people. Sure they can, and I can source Wikipedia for my term paper. The problem is that it just isn’t enough. I’d like a little more investigation from supposedly credited news papers like the Wall Street Journal than quotes captured from status updates and tweets.

Why? Because I’m sick of “Buy the rumor, sell the news” mentality of media outlets. You’ve no doubt heard, don’t believe everything you read. Part of that is because of the media. If you missed the humiliation of Jim Cramer on the Daily Show, you missed one of the greatest televised humiliations of a news personality in recent memory. Jon Stewart held Jim Cramers’ feet to the fire and had such indisputable evidence of Cramer’s fraud that even Cramer couldn’t deny it.

Facebook is an invaluable tool for journalists though. For the same reason it’s a invaluable tool for the rest of us, networking. So is Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. It’s about networking, not about news. There might be some truth in tweets and status messages, but dig a little deeper than that. Just like there is valuable information in Wikipedia, but go to the source, don’t solely rely on the Wiki. So Journalists, join Facebook, Tweet away, but when it comes to the news, “Just the facts, Jack!’

In the past month or so at least 4 executives have branched out from both Google and MySpace. If you know what it’s like to work at Google you have to wonder what they are thinking. Apparently, it’s that they think they can do social networking better. Most recently, three executives from MySpace, including Amit Kapur, left MySpace to join a start up. It seems a little crazy to ditch a well paying job in this economy but you gotta do what you gotta do.

The biggest question it sparks, is just how much social networking can we take? Isn’t the social networking market pretty well saturated? Between MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many other sites what are the odds for social networking startups to succeed?

One of these start-ups is Likaholix. Started by a former Googler, Likaholix seems to be a Twitter like item for products and media. The idea is that you make suggestions for things that you like and people comment it and favorite on it. It is still in private beta, so to say it is a tad undercooked is being pretty accurate.

[Read] Total Telecom Three MySpace execs quit, including COO
[Read] Mashable Why Googlers Are Leaving to Start Social Sites

To the non-corporate user (IE, most of us) the most noticeable changes will come in the form of the visuals. Both the Facebook “homepage” and corporate pages are changing to become more personable. Now those pages that you are a fan of will look less corporate and more like your buddy. Also good news for you super friendly types, no more cap on 5000 friends.

The new Facebook Home page

The new “Pages to Profiles” shift allows is supposed to make it easier to interact with with those things you become a “fan” of. It seems to be what Facebook is attempting to do is to go after the music crowd hanging around MySpace. It’s really the way it should have been done in the beginning. I’m always a big fan of K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple, stupid) and it really did not make sense for Facebook to differentiate between company pages and friend profiles. Now that’s been fixed.

What’s Facebook going for here?

Facebook wants to incorporate all the good parts of other social networking sites and leave out the bad. Now it’s worried about Twitter. The microblogging site that is capturing congress and media attention has also caught the eye of Facebook. It wants to be your real time friend connection and has looked long and hard at the Twitter model. They hope to take some of that Twitter audience with the updates to the home page. One way that they have attempted to attack the Twitter paradigm is to make the home page update in real time. It’s also added new sorting features to help users sort through the clutter, something Twitter doesn’t do.

If Twitter is watching this, they should really be concerned. I like the simpleness of Twitter but there are some things that it could better do. It seems the real thing that hinders them is servers. We’ve all seen the twitter fail whale. Twitter should be updating pages to be live using an AJAX page or something similar. Although a lot of twitter apps already do this, can Twitter’s servers handle it if the web page does?

The new home page should be going live according to Facebook. Although the changes are impressive, it still leaves me questioning their profit model… are rather, do they have one? It’s hard to be too critical, what I see Zuckerberg & Co. doing is laying the foundation for possibly one of the greatest connection platforms since email. With that amount of connectivity Facebook is bound to capitalize on the interaction but for right now they seem to be playing it cool and getting people in without cost prohibitive fees. Smart move.

[Read] Tech Crunch: Liveblogging Facebook’s Open Door Press Conference

Yesterday I wrote about Facebook changing its ToS, and how it made people a little upset. This morning I woke up to this message on Facebook:

Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.

If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

It seems Facebook went from being a dictatorship to democracy, or at least willing to listen. So if you felt a little Zucker’d by the disputed ToS it seems Facebook is willing to listen. Apparently, one of the larger concerns is what happens when you delete your account? Does the data go away? Things like the photos you uploaded, or messages you’ve made? If Facebook has led you down the dark path of social networking and high school drama and lawsuits are following you because of your Facebook page, you might want everything gone. On the other hand, you really liked those photos your friend took of you, or the messages you received, if that person leaves do they have the right to take them?

For now Facebook has reverted back to its older ToS which either, nobody objected to, or nobody read. Either way, judgment day on your data hasn’t come yet.

Facebook changed its Terms of Service (ToS) last week. Not surprisingly, Zuckerberg says Facebook has rights to your data. Guess who gave them those rights? You. Zuckerberg’s logic is that in order for you to control who sees your Facebook data, you have to give rights to Facebook, who controls the privacy management to other profiles. In order for them to manage this, you have to give them rights (IE, sign up and input data). This really isn’t any thing to get upset about, in fact it’s pretty standard fair. If you read every ToS for every service you signed up for, you wouldn’t been on the internet, have credit cards, or quite a few other things. It sounds far worse than it actually is.

Here’s an excerpt from Mark Zuckerburgs Blog explaining the low down:

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

But if you’re still angry, Robert Scoble thinks you should chill out.

As Scoble points out, you work for Facebook. If you think about it, this is true for most websites. Yes even this one. Part of the reason is Advertisements. Facebook, MySpace, WSJonline, etc can call justify ad pricing on page views and unique hits. Those numbers come from the viewers, or subscribers. Part of the reason advertisements for “the big game” cost so much is because so many people watch it. That same principle works on Facebook. You make Facebook money just by being there, and in return they provide you with the “Facebook” service.

How do you have control of your data? Learn to live like a hermit, or get over it. Those are your options. At some point you’re going to sign a contract and loose exclusive rights to you data. It’s not a big deal unless Facebook starts selling your phone numbers to telemarketing companies.

The long and short of it is, nothing has changed, there’s nothing to see here, move along.