How to Extend Your Social Networks with Ease

I'm a social person—I fully admit it. As I've mentioned in my blog posts before: I love social—the connections, the collaboration, the exposure to new ideas. I'm transparent about my social savvy—my email auto-signature includes links to my LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, plus a link to my blog.

When I was coaching colleagues on using social media, I found that many people were unsure about who to connect with on the big three social engagement networks: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, so here are my top tips and tricks for making it easy and effective.

Twitter is Best For: Trends, News, and Solutions

Twitter has the lowest barrier to entry, is the most open social media platform, and has the easiest-to-make connections. I don't follow everyone who follows me, but I do follow those who have educational or thought-provoking content, and I engage with their followers. To find interesting people to follow:

• Review the "Who to Follow" recommendations Twitter shares on the right side of your Twitter web client and follow the ones that look interesting. Twitter will continue to personalize and add to that list over time.
• Look for experts in your field.
• Add people you meet face to face.
• Follow journalists and bloggers whose writing you admire.
• Take advantage of the top 100 lists of influencers publications compile and add them to a list.
• Keep an eye on trending hashtags for relevant Twitter voices.

You don't want to be one of those people who only has 25 followers but is following 5000. Follow slowly and thoughtfully. Your followers will grow as you share relevant content and engage with other Twitter handles.

If you have strong political, religious or controversial views on particular topics you intend to share on Twitter I recommend that you consider two handles: One for your professional life and one for your personal life.

Facebook: Personal Connections,  Storytelling, and Targeted Advertising

Facebook, while ever expanding and morphing, it is still the most personal of the big three social networks. Not registering as yourself violates the TOS (Terms of Service), which filters out many of the spammers and trolls you find on Twitter.

Facebook makes suggestions of people you might know. It warms my heart when my friends find themselves interacting with each other about my posts and friend each other.

Because you have the opportunity to openly share your thoughts, opinions, and life events here with your friends, I recommend being discriminating about who you accept as friends. You can customize the "Who can see my posts" settings, but it's best to err on the side of under sharing.

Facebook's powerful ad platform enables advertisers to target with amazing accuracy, so you'll see ads customized to your interests.

LinkedIn: Powerful Professional Connection Tool

LinkedIn is the largest professional social networking site with 467 million members. When you populate your professional profile, there's an added layer of comfort and identification when connecting with others.

 There are two schools of thought about LinkedIn connections. LIONs (LinkedIn Open Networkers) accept connection requests from all. On the opposite spectrum are those who only connect with people they've met face to face.

I'm right in the middle of those extremes. I've created guidelines for myself that are not set in stone, but help me quickly scroll through and act on the 30+ connection requests I receive each week.

• If I've met someone face to face at a networking, professional or social event, I always accept those connection requests.
• I always accept connection requests from One Brick volunteers or TEDxSanJoseCA volunteers/attendees/vendors. Volunteering is a passion of mine, and I love making virtual connections that complement the real world ones.
• Because I've managed different LinkedIn groups for years, many group members request to connect. I rarely accept those. Group members can request to connect with fellow group members. Before you accept, review both their profile and their contributions to the group. If their only contributions are shameless self promotion, feel free to decline. 
• Working for a company as large as IBM means that there are droves of IBMers on LinkedIn and I always accept connection requests from them.
• LinkedIn is optimized for recruiters. If you're open to discussion, accept them.

Ultimately you need to be comfortable with the connections you've made on social networks. If you find someone offensive, delete the connection. If you enjoy their posts, let them know. Virtual or real-life, connecting with people and adding them to your network can expand your world. Give it a try.

Museum Week: An Engaging International Twitter Campaign

Did you know it's Museum Week? And that there's an organization, website, Twitter ID and Twitter #hashtags all in support of  this first ever internationally coordinated Museum Week? Museums and museum lovers across the globe are sharing their photos, Vines, memes and selfies on Twitter with the hashtag #MuseumWeek from March 23 to March 29, 2015.

This group of leading-edge museums have evolved in how they engage with their newest patrons — the Millennials and Generation Z — who interact differently and more socially than their parents and older siblings, and aren't content to passively stare at exhibits.

7 Days of Hashtags

As an article in the Guardian explains it, "Instead of shouting at rule-breakers with camera phones, more and more museums around the world are starting to embrace the twitter crowd by removing their restrictions on photography and by providing free institutional wireless access so we can snap-and-live-tweet photos of their collections. This was an important decision because everyone knows that a few tweeted photos can provide only the tiniest taste of reality, and for that reason, often serve to lure in more inquisitive people rather than fewer."

I'm smitten with the entire #MuseumWeek program, and eagerly comb through my Twitter feed, thinking "I'll retweet that one and that one....". I follow the @MuseumWeek ID, and check my Twitter feed several times a day for new tweets. The entire program is a feast for the eyes, and the "7 days, 7 themes, 7 hashtags" program is ingenious, eye-catching, and ground-breaking in how they're re-positioning their collections.

• The organizers have cleverly included  a Twitter space page on the website that includes current statistics, with lots of clickability built in and includes:
• A representation of tweets and retweets of the eight official hashtags since March 15
• The top museums as represented by number of tweets and filterable
• A list of the countries represented by the participating museums (2207 strong)
• A map of those tweets
• And of course, the tweets themselves. 

If you're so inclined, there's even a widget builder to customize and embed #MuseumWeek content into your blog or website.

It's a fun and interactive page that's definitely worth checking out.

This Twitter campaign definitely deserves an A+ for creativity.

5 Social Media Myths That It's Time to Put to Rest

Have you seen this statistic from the Pew Internet and American Life Project's Social Networking research report?

As of September 2013, 73% of online adults use social networking sites.

Regardless of whether you're using social media to keep in touch with friends and family, play games, follow the news, or research goods and services, most of us are logging into these sites multiple times a day. Statistical research has revealed that more than 95 percent of Facebook users log into their account every day. The same number for Twitter is 60 percent and for LinkedIn is 30 percent.

And as with all new technologies, there's a learning curve, and an even steeper curve of understanding before we truly comprehend the impact of social networking. And while we are at the bottom of the social networking curve of understanding, there are five myths that need to be put to rest now.

1. Twitter is about nothing but what people had for breakfast
   That might have been true for the first six months of Twitter, but we've moved past it. News organizations and celebrities are the most followed accounts, but the virality of Twitter means that anyone can start a trend. Two examples? Arab Spring and the Boston Marathon bombing — both hit the world consciousness via Twitter. Breakfast? Not any more.
   
2. No one cares what personal stuff I post; my privacy settings will protect me.
   So there's trusting, and there's foolishly naive. How much do you pay for your Facebook account? Nothing? Well, no, actually you do pay — with your data. Your likes, dislikes, opinions, friends, religious affiliation, political affiliation and more are all tracked, stored and shared. As long as you are aware that you are paying with your data, you can be circumspect about what you say. But to count on your information to remain unused and unshared with advertisers, is well, Pollyannish at best. Every day we hear about another data breach. Your social media data is not immune to hacking.
3. Recruiters / hiring companies don't pay any attention to this stuff.
   Yes, actually they do. According to this survey by Reppler, 92% of recruiters admit to checking out and screening out applicants based on their profiles on social networking sites. For more information, read my blog post, Think Before You Post: Your Digital Footprint Lives Forever.
4. Googling yourself is narcissistic.
   No, it's really not. It's smart. See #3 above.
   
5. Social media is a fad that won't last.
   Will today's social networking platforms look the same in five years? Unlikely. As with all technologies, they will mature, users will mature, and the platforms and how we use them will evolve. The proliferation of smart phones and the millennials' comfort level with sharing their lives online essentially guarantees that the social media genie will not go back into its bottle.

So why don't we let these five most pervasive myths about social media rest in peace. Of course, additional myths are created and perpetuated every day. Which additional ones would you like to see disappear?

Think Before You Post: Your Digital Footprint Lives Forever

It's safe to say that 10 years ago no one knew what a digital footprint was, or that everyone who is online has one. Today, of course, it's a very different story, and like many emerging technologies, there are potentially and previously unknown positive and negative results from using the technology — in this case sharing your life online with friends, family, and the world.

The upside?
You create and control the online image or persona that you present to the world.

The downside?
You create and control the online image or persona that you present to the world.

In a recent Mashable article, 1 in 4 Young Adults Regret Social Media Posts, Survey Says:

 Legal-information website FindLaw.com conducted a "demographically balanced" survey among 1,000 American adults, asking them questions about their behavior surrounding Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and other popular social platforms. Among younger adults aged 18 to 34, 29% said they have posted a photo, comment or other personal information they fear could compromise their current or future job prospects.

It's not an irrational fear.

An article on examiner.com, Current and potential employers are looking at your social media pages, points out:

A survey of more than 2000 hiring managers and HR professionals conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of CareerBuilder in February of 2012 found that 37% or nearly two in five employers check social media when looking at a potential employee. An additional 11% stated they would like to begin using social media to screen new employees. 

If you google "people who've lost their jobs due to social media mistakes", you'll see quite a few examples, such as:

• In March 2009, a 22 year old thoughtlessly tweeted about a job offer from Cisco.
  "Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weight the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work."
  Cisco employees saw her tweet, and shared it with her hiring manager. The job offer was withdrawn. Her tweet, and the entire story, went viral.
• Matt Watson lost his job at All City Coffee in Washington, DC after he was outed as the voice behind the sarcastic and snarky comments on the blog The Bitter Barista.
• There have been multiple reports of teachers in conservative school districts who have lost their jobs after posting "private" photos of themselves on Facebook drinking alcohol,  smoking, or posing in revealing lingerie.

As the millennials move into positions of power, everyone will be more digital-savvy and the stigma of a less-than-stellar digital footprint will begin to fade. But until that time, and because the Internet is forever and nothing is truly "private", here are three easy rules to keep yourself out of trouble:

1. If in doubt, don't post it. This goes for your Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram photos, reddit or tumblr accounts, and comments on articles and blogs.
2. If you would be embarrassed if your grandmother or second-line manager saw it, don't post it.
3. Enable the Facebook photo tagging permission so that your "friends" can't tag you without your approval.

The good news? You control your digital footprint, and can put your best foot forward, digitally speaking.

Image courtesy of Simon Howden/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Trend Spotting: Instagram & the U.S. Government

You just never know when the first whiff of a trend is going to reach out and grab you to say, "Hey, pay attention to me!"

I was scanning through my feeds tonight, and realized that I'd just seen the third article in a week about United States government agencies now on Instagram.

I know, your first thought was, "Instagram, really?"

You mean the popular social/photo sharing application started by two Stanford University graduates and purchased by Facebook a little over a year ago for a cool billion dollars? The free iPhone and Android application used by 130 million users a month who've shared 16 billion photos, at a rate of 45 million photos a day, and which garner 1 billion likes a day?

Our federal government at the forefront of social media?

Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

The first item I saw about the White House featuring President Obama, really didn't surprise me, and I retweeted it without much thought.  I wrote a blog post late last year, How Social Networking Won an Election and Paid for Cancer Treatment, about the unbelievably social-savvy team working on President Obama's re-election team. 

 And the article from Mashable about the Department of the Interior joining Instagram actually delighted me — a new opportunity to view stunning photos —  636 at last count. (This is from someone who is notoriously lacking in the photo taking skills arena, according to her teenager.)

Just one row of stunningly gorgeous photos from the Department of the Interior's Instagram account. And they're all this beautiful!

But tonight, the article from Forbes about the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) extending the reach of The TSA Blog TSA Week in Review feature by opening an Instagram account and sharing photos of confiscated items — now that one both made me pay attention and frightened me. Fireworks, loaded guns, a belt buckle knife. Seriously, what were these people thinking?

Instagram photo of a belt buckle knife confiscated by the TSA.

Of course, now I'm intrigued. It turns out that NASA has been on Instagram long enough to attract 345,000 followers. The U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources only has 66 followers, but I'm sure they'll catch up. The U.S. Air Force has 1287 followers. I'm stopping now — I could easily stay up until 3 am googling, finding and following these accounts.

When you step back and take a look, this trend makes sense. Check out the usa.gov website. It's enabled with social sharing buttons, and has hundreds of free apps. (When I'm done with this blog post, I'm definitely going to check out CIA Mobile.) Many agencies have Twitter accounts.

If you want to reach out to and connect with people — prospects, customers, constituents, students, friends, volunteers, advocates — you need to go where they are. As the U.S. government has clearly figured out.

How Social Networking Won an Election and Paid for Cancer Treatment

I've always loved TIME magazine. It's well-designed — lots of action shots, catchy headlines, and insightful and informative articles. Now I follow TIME on Facebook and on Twitter, so I don't always read the hard copy that shows up at my house every week. I do try though. I've been taking it in the car — grabbing a few minutes while I'm waiting for my daughter at school or an appointment.

The December 3 issue — yes, the one with the colorful fruits and vegetables on the covers supporting an article on What to Eat Now by the well-known Dr. Oz — had two articles that grabbed my attention.  Unfortunately, neither article is available online unless you're a subscriber, but they both very matter-of-factly focused on how fast and how much social networking is changing our world. I mean I know this — I'm passionate about it and do it every day — but to see it in black and white next to world news, the AIDs epidemic in South Africa, and an article about the fiscal cliff.... I was immediately pulled in.

The first article, Friend Request. How the Obama campaign connected with young voters appeared in the Nation section: fair enough. If you've read some of the campaign post-mortems that I've read, you've seen that it wasn't the much-publicized Latino vote or female vote that swung the election for President Obama, but the youth vote — voters under 29. And it turns out that over half of the voters in that age group targeted in swing states didn't have landline phones, making the traditional last minute phone calls impossible.

Instead, the Obama campaign, a social-savvy team from day 1, built a Facebook application. (Are you thinking, "Of course they did!"? With the perfect vision hindsight gives us, I don't know why I was surprised.) It was rolled out to the more than one million Obama backers signed up. This app, like all Facebook apps, gave the campaign permission to look at the subscribers' Facebook friends. And communicating with this highly-valued, hard-to-reach target audience was made even easier because who do you trust more than your friends? Not some political campaign or advertiser. More than 5 million contacts were reached by the 600,000 Obama supporters who agreed to share messages. And so the campaign was won.

And the final word from TIME Magazine?
"In 2008, Twitter was a sideshow, and Facebook had about one-sixth its current reach in the U.S. By 2016, this sort of campaign-driven sharing over social networks is almost certain to be the norm. Tell your friends."

The second social-networking article that caught my eye was in the Health section, and titled, Crowdfunding a Cure. The sick are getting strangers to pay their medical bills. A quick glance at the sidebar shows you this headline: How This Cancer patient Raised $144,000.

I've been fascinated with the growth and potential of crowdfunding this year; writing a three-part series on the IBM Social Business Insights blog (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Instead of people raising money from their social circles for projects such as books, gadgets, CDs, or documentaries, crowdfunding sites such as GoFundMe and GiveForward enable patients and their families to raise thousands of dollars for medical treatments such as surgeries and cancer treatments that would otherwise be out of their reach.

We're on the cusp of the most amazingly creative period in human history. Hyperbole? I don't think so. Worldwide collaboration, powered by social networking platforms, will give everyone a voice. Gender, age, ethnicity, language, location, education, ability — none of this will matter. Innovative companies like IBM will continue to pioneer enterprise-level collaboration platforms, enabling the worldwide, mobile, collaborative, inclusive workforce*. And consumer networking platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter and Kickstarter and GoFundMe and tumblr will continue to enable the collaboration and crowdsourcing that can help build a better world, for all of us.

Now truly, doesn't that just make your day? :-)

*Full disclosure — I am an IBM employee, and totally amazed by the forward-thinking creativity that goes on at my company every single day.
"Vote Button On Mobile Screen" image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
"Financial health" image courtesy of renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
"Social Network" image courtesy of  cooldesign / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Twitter's New Strategy: Serving Up What They Think Is Relevant to Me

I got this new now-weekly email today from Twitter. If you have a Twitter account, you probably received one also, which looks similar to mine. Note: This is a longggg graphic — there's more blog content below it, so don't give up quite yet.)

Twitter has quickly jumped on pushing their recent purchase of Summify into Twitter production in record time. (Summify was a start up social news aggregator that collected news from users' social networks and compiled it in daily emails.) According to Twitter's blog, they're delivering "The Best of Twitter" to my inbox.

If you glanced at my long, long graphic above, you can see that there are two parts to this new email, which are as follows, according to the Twitter blog: 

• The first half is a "...summary [that] features the most relevant Tweets and stories shared by the people you’re connected to on Twitter."

• The second half of the ginormous email "... features the most engaging Tweets seen by the people you follow, even if you don’t follow those who wrote them. You can see who from your network retweeted or favorited these Tweets and click “View details” to retweet, favorite, reply or view the conversation around them." 

And here's where I start to get uncomfortable. I was reminded of a Ted Talk video I watched late last year, and went digging for it, to see if I remembered correctly. And I did. Twitter's new summary doesn't prevent me from following specific tweeters and hashtags, but it seems to be the first step in becoming a gatekeeper by surfacing the content that the Twitter algorithms determine is relevant to me, and is yet another example of the "online 'filter bubbles'" that Eli Pariser talks about in his nine-minute TED Talk, that I've embedded below (and highly recommend you watch). TED summarizes the video this way, "As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy."

(A colleague and I tried the Google search experiment where we both searched on the same word, then compared what we found — and we did not get the same search results — so the online filter bubble is in play right now.)


 So in "summarizing" the stories and tweets sent to me in this weekly email, Twitter is perpetuating and embracing the "online filter bubble" that Eli Pariser talks about; deciding for me what is relevant to me, just by serving it up in a weekly email.  I subscribe to several social media aggregation emails — one of my favorites is from SmartBrief; but aggregating is what they do and it's what I expect of them.

All of this makes me wonder where we draw the line in this age of information overload, and how we choose between:

• News customized to what you've looked at so far and the news and articles your social network is reading
  
  or
• News that helps you stretch your mind and your opinions, and lets you step out of your clearly defined point of view to learn and decide on your own? 

So what do you think? Are they mutually exclusive? Do we have to choose one or the other? Or is there some way to make them both work?

Repost from IBM Social Business Insights: The Social Media Wars (Part 2 of 2)

Earlier this year I started blogging for the IBM Social Business Insights blog as part of a team of IBM Redbook Thought Leaders. I'll be reposting those blog posts here on my personal blog.
The Social Media Wars (Part 2 of 2)  was originally published on April 20, 2012, and is owned by IBM.
I recommend checking out the IBM Social Business Insights blog for some compelling and though-provoking content. 

The Social Media Wars (Part 2 of 2) 

By Holly Nielsen

Social Media Manager and Webmaster, Human Ability and Accessibility

In The Social Media Wars (Part 1 of 2) I defined the terms of social media, social networking and social business, reviewed why you might want to include social media channels in your marketing plan, and how to define your objective before you select a channel(s) and get started.

Here are my thoughts about the current top pros and cons of each of the Big Five (in alphabetical order) to help you decide which social media channel might best meet your needs.

Social media channel	Pros	Cons
Facebook	Easy to create a business page. Largest user base of 850,000+; over half log on daily. Easy to upload photos and videos. Easy to share relevant information from other pages and users with your audience. Latest status update character limit is 63,206. Mobile version available. Can customize your URL when you have 25 followers.	Difficult to organically grow fan base without advertising or using additional promotional vehicles. You must have a personal page to start a business page.
Google+	Circles are an elegant means to let you separate your different audiences and easily customize messages. Easy to upload photos and videos. Easy to share relevant information from other pages and users with your audience. Mobile version available.	No customization of URLs The majority of the users are male, a problem if your target audience is mostly female. Users do not log into Google+ as frequently as they do to the other channels.
LinkedIn	Groups are business oriented, and your audience is a professional one, since they’re all using it for professional networking. Limited mobile app available. Sharing links with other groups or individuals is supported.	Users do not log into LinkedIn as frequently as they do to the other channels. No customization of URLs. You must have a personal account to start a group. No direct photo or video uploading.
Pinterest	Popular images (with links back to the original source) can get repinned on hundreds of other users' boards. Pinning function makes it easy to share relevant information from other Pinterest users with your audience. Limited mobile app available.	80% of the users are female, which is a problem if your target audience is mostly male. You can only pin photos and videos, so, if, for instance, your web content is text-based you’ll want to choose a representative (and compelling) image to enable participation. You need to have a product set that translates easily to the Pinterest user base interests. No customization of URLs.
Twitter	Use of #hashtags makes it easy to extend your message beyond your existing followers. Many third-party apps available to help you categorize your account, thus finding accounts to follow and add followers.  Mobile version available. Unique URL available. Multiple third-party clients available.  Retweet (RT) capability makes it easy to find and share relevant information from other Twitter users with your audience.	140-character limit means your messages must be very brief, and depth of interaction is limited. Profile information, called your bio, is also limited to 160 characters and a URL. You need to repeat your tweets multiple times because there is so much content that it is easy for your followers to miss your tweets.

Some general rules apply across all of the social media channels and you must be prepared for them before you execute your social media plan:

• All of the channels take significant resources to maintain, whether you trade off among staff or dedicate one person. One of the worst mistakes is to start an account or page, then neglect it. Your followers will drop off and not come back, a potentially paralyzing blow to a corporate brand.

• Spend the time doing your competitive research. Which channels are your competitors using? Are they using them well? Could you do it better? 
• There is no avoiding negative feedback. Professional naysayers, known as ”trolls,” are also a fact of life online. Consider social channels as a mechanism to address legitimate customer concerns promptly and publicly. Ultimately, resolving customer concerns in these highly visible public forums can improve overall customer loyalty and satisfaction. Acknowledge complaints immediately, even if you don’t have a resolution or you could become a case study in a blog like the one I wrote in January 2012, Preventing Customer Service Fumbles from Going Viral: A Social Media Cautionary Tale.
  
  When a troll tries to engage you, keep your responses professional and on topic. As a rule, if trolls can’t get the emotional reaction out of you that they’re seeking, they will eventually leave you alone and search for easier targets. If the interaction becomes profane, offensive, abusive, or continues for more than a couple of interactions, don’t hesitate to ban the troll and delete posts. Your followers don’t want to see that stuff either.
  
  Note: Arizona just passed a law against online trolling that is waiting for the governor’s signature. It’s not expected to hold up in a court challenge, but it does show that trolling is an annoyance, and unlikely to go away, so having a strategy to deal with them is the prudent thing to do.

• Engage in conversation, be a resource for relevant, related content and build your community. If you do nothing but push your products and services, you’ll turn off your potential customers quickly. A good rule of thumb is to only mention your “stuff” every 10 posts, tweets, or pins.

• My recommendation is start slowly. Pick one social media channel and work on building your following there, then add more channels as your bandwidth allows.

I manage social networking for IBM Accessibility, and for now, you’ll find us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. At some point, we may increase our presence in additional channels, but we’re meeting our objectives with our activities in these three.

A few resources to get you started (I can hardly do this justice—so many talented and knowledgeable people are out there):

• Blogs: Mashable, Sandy Carter, Chris Brogan, Altimeter Group (multiple analyst blogs), Social Mouths, Jeff Bullas,  Hooked on Social Networking
• On Twitter: Guy Kawasaki, Social Media Club, SocialMedia411, socialmedia2day, Smart Brief; and so many amazing IBMers that I can only name a few here: Sandy Carter, Kathy Mandelstein, Colleen Burns, Joyce Davis, Luis Benitez, HollyNielsen
• On Facebook: ReadWriteWeb, Social Media Examiner, All Facebook, Mari Smith

Readers, if I missed your favorite social media experts, please add them in the Comments section.

Thanks!

Six Ways Social Networking Is Changing My Life

I follow and manage my work group’s social media presence as part of my job, so I’m sure I spend a lot more time online than many people. But I think because I’m always searching, comparing, and analyzing news, that I can step back and take a good and impartial look at the ways it’s changing my life.

#1 I’m better informed than ever

It used to be that you’d have to subscribe to multiple papers and magazines to get a well-rounded view of the world. Once I had my first child, my quiet early mornings reading the local paper with breakfast flew out the window – never to return. Now, all of the news is online, and thanks to social media, news organizations are pushing their hottest news stories out to me – I don’t even have to visit websites unless I’m searching for a specific story (how many advertisers did Rush Limbaugh lose or what’s the latest news from Syria), or want to get multiple viewpoints. I follow the major news sources on Facebook and Twitter, so the latest news is pushed right to my desktop or smart phone.

#2 The organizations I follow can communicate more easily with me

I admit I have a lot of varied interests (moderation is often difficult for me), and I love that organizations can easily keep me informed about their latest doings via social networking. And on the other side of that, since I manage several Facebook group pages, I appreciate being able to update our fans/followers easily via posts or tweets. 

I follow our local food bank, local family shelter, a micro lending organization, bands, accessibility organizations, friends’ small businesses, radio stations, entertainers, trainers, George Takei (he makes me laugh every day), and a multitude of other personalities and groups. I can easily customize my feeds; adding and deleting as I find new sources.

#3 Grass roots activism is keeping me in the loop

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been signing a lot of petitions lately. And I do believe they’re having an impact. Just in the last few days, I’ve signed a petition against the US government buying pink slime to put into school lunches, and a petition requesting that the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) reverse its decision to give an impactful film about bullying an R rating, making it inaccessible to the teenagers who needs to see it the most. I feel like my opinion counts, and governments, businesses and groups are listening. Grass roots social media is taking the world by storm. The Arab Spring, Komen Foundation, Rush Limbaugh, and U.S. politics, just to name a few, have been in the news, and all started with social networking.

#4 My virtual/worldwide water cooler

Social networking lets me catch up with colleagues and friends who live around the world. I work at home and remotely from my team, so team lunches and happy hours aren’t part of my colleague relationships. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t want to know what they’ve been up to, or check out the latest kid pics. And those friends from high school and college who’ve settled overseas or out of state and didn’t make it to the last reunion? What a great way to keep in touch. Plus, when these Facebook/Google/Twitter/Pinterest friends share their interests and causes, I find out 1) a lot more about those people that may not surface in a face-to-face working relationship and 2) new stuff to learn about.

#5 I get to share the causes and news in which I’m interested

This one may drive you nuts if you’re friends with me or following me on social networking sites, but I love sharing my interests and causes. I am always looking to recruit volunteers for the volunteer organization I manage events for, and if I sign a petition, I like sharing that information too. And if you don’t agree with me or don’t want to read what I’m sharing? You can easily skip over it, or if I really offend you, de-friend or unfollow me. And of course, vice versa. But I rarely do that – I love the exchange and varied opinions I find.

#6 YouTube videos

Need I say more? Okay, I’m not sure there’s a positive here, except that when I’ve had a tough day, I don’t mind zoning out for a few minutes and watching cute kitten, puppy, elephant and baby videos. And the number of how to videos is truly astounding – ranging from cutting your own bangs to installing a garbage disposal. I’m sure we all have our favorite YouTube genres.

So, has social networking changed your life, and if yes, how? I'd love to hear what you think.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image: jannoon028 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image: worradmu / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Preventing Customer Service Fumbles from Going Viral: A Social Media Cautionary Tale

There have always been companies who are disreputable, uncaring or too self-important to listen to their customers and have ignored complaints seemingly without penalty. Consumers have traditionally had few options to get their issues addressed. The Better Business Bureau takes complaints, but has no teeth to actually penalize a company. Taking a company to small claims court is difficult, and usually not worthwhile. Often a customer’s only recourse was to contact newspapers and television stations who had a columnist or reporter dedicated to resolving these customer horror stories. For example, my local paper, the San Jose Mercury News has a daily feature, Action Line, by columnist Dennis Rockstroh, who has a wonderful record of getting companies to do the right thing. (Plus it makes for interesting reading.)

Today, thanks to social media, the traditional landscape of customer service and satisfaction has morphed dramatically — full of pitfalls and traps for the unresponsive or slow-to-respond company. The customer now has the power to make a company publicly uncomfortable for ignoring complaints. Companies that don’t quickly and correctly address customers’ concerns can have a public relation nightmare on their hands at lightning speed, thanks to the immediacy of social media and the ease of interesting stories taking off virally.

Here are two cautionary tales that all social media practitioners, if they haven't already, should be taking to heart.

Regretsy and Paypal

Regretsy is a website I’d never heard of before the pre-Christmas drama with Paypal. According to an article by CNN Tech, “Run by actress-comedian April Winchell, Regretsy is a snarky blog created primarily to mock what it considers awkward, ugly or otherwise head-turning offerings on the arts-and-crafts site Etsy. It’s a site that makes fun of Etsy items for sale.”

Ms. Winchell has a close knit group of fans, and every year she raises funds from her fans to buy and send gifts to families who need a little help for the holidays.

This past Christmas, for the first time, she used the Donate button on Paypal to collect these donations, which were thousands of dollars. Using the button triggered a Paypal alert, and they froze her Paypal accounts. She got on the phone with a customer service representative, who was arrogant and dismissive of her problems. According to April Winchell, part of the conversation went like this:

PAYPAL: Only a nonprofit can use the Donate button.
ME: That’s false. It says right in the PDF of instructions for the Donate button that it can be used for “worthy causes.”
PAYPAL: I haven’t seen that PDF. And what you’re doing is not a worthy cause, it’s charity.
ME: What’s the difference?
PAYPAL: You can use the donate button to raise money for a sick cat, but not poor people.

I won’t repeat any more of it here — it was poorly managed  by Paypal at multiple points and got worse before it got better, while it dragged on for several days. You can read the full Regretsy article on the website.

The Twitterverse picked up this story — which is how I became aware of it — and it trended for a good 48 hours, with an immense amount of backlash against Paypal.

End result:  Paypal finally did the right thing by unfreezing April Winchell's accounts, and even made a donation to her Christmas present fund, but it took too long and it was not pretty.

Here's the second cautionary tale I’d like to highlight.

The Sons of Maxwell and United Airlines

In 2008, a band called the Sons of Maxwell were flying to a gig in Nebraska, according to their story. At the Chicago airport, a baggage handler was seen roughly handling band member Dave Carroll’s custom-made $3500 guitar; causing significant damage. Dave Carroll bounced around from person to person at United Airlines, with no resolution to his damage claim for nine months, so he wrote a song about his experience and posted it on YouTube. It went viral almost immediately, and today has had 11 ½ million hits.

United Airlines resolved his case immediately then, but the incident reportedly cost the company $180 million, according to an article in The Business Insider. 

Often, these customer service mishaps are first posted on a company’s social media channels, giving the social media manager the opportunity to fix it before it gets out of control. 

However, there was a frightening article published in October, 2011, that stated: 70% of Companies Ignore Customer Complaints on Twitter. In addition, it also says, "Previous research from ExactTarget called Twitter X-Factors showed that fewer than 1% of customers use Twitter as their first stop in problem resolution. In almost every case, the people complaining on Twitter are doing so because your company already failed to satisfy them in one or more traditional customer service channels."

Scary stuff, isn’t it?

So the moral of the story for social media managers?

You can’t control the customer service department at your company, even though a direct line to a management connection in that department can help immensely. But you can respond immediately when a complaint appears on any of your social media channels, and let the customer know that you’ve heard him, and are working on an answer. And then do it. Escalate the issue as quickly as you can internally, and when you have a resolution, make sure that you publish the resolution on the social media channel where the complaint first appeared. How you respond will be noted by your fans and followers.

I don't know about you, but being held up as the poster child or business case study of "what not to do" is nothing I'm interested in pursuing.

Image: graur razvan ionut / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image: Pixomar / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Twitter for the Casual User — How to Make It Work for You

It's probably not surprising that I view and use Twitter as a business and professional communication tool, based on what I do for a living. It can clearly be advantageous to tweet professionally and/or about your business, as I wrote in a blog post a few months ago.

Recently I've been asked what value Twitter has to the more casual user — someone who's not promoting a business or using it professionally. Twitter is one of those experiences in life that is hard to explain (even though I'm going to give it a go here), but becomes amazingly clear once you understand the ground rules and try it out yourself.

At its most basic level, Twitter is a social networking channel. Because there is a 140 character limit, it's ideal for sharing small bites of information and links. Twitter's reputation — while not totally undeserved — as nothing more than the latest way for the self-absorbed to overshare the mundane details of their lives ignores how well it enables the communication of relevant information quickly and succinctly. Are there people tweeting about what they ate for breakfast and what color shirt they're wearing today? Most likely. A communication channel is only as good as the content filling it. Garbage in, garbage out still applies.

But when you ignore the garbage and focus on the "communication of relevant information quickly and succinctly" then that is when Twitter reveals its value. You can customize Twitter so that it delivers exactly the information you're interested in, and you never have to send a single tweet (40% of Twitter users don’t tweet every month but watch others tweet*). To create a road map through the approximately one billion tweets created every five days*, I've categorized tweets into six groups, with examples, to help new Twitter users navigate their way:

1. News
   Every media outlet tweets. Follow BBC World News, the New York Times, CNN, CBS News, or your favorite news source. Most magazines also tweet. Usually you'll get the headline and a link to an article if you're interested in finding out more.
2. Favorite celebrities, authors, actors, photographers, musicians or sports teams
   So many of them tweet. Anderson Cooper, Coldplay, Robert DeNiro, Annie Leibovitz, Maya Angelou or the San Jose Sharks hockey team are just a few examples. You can use the Who to Follow function in Twitter to search for the people or groups who interest you.
3. Elected representatives
   Members of Congress (Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren in my case), governors (Governor Jerry Brown in California) and even the President of the United States all tweet to communicate with their constituents.
4. Local businesses
   One of my favorite social networking success stories is about the catering trucks who tweet their locations so that their customers can find them. Mashable covered the trend in an article titled How Social Media Is Fueling the Food Truck Phenomenon. One example cited in the article, Kogi BBQ,  has 87,000 followers who follow five trucks.
   I can follow one of my favorite French restaurants, Left Bank, keep an eye out for sales and new merchandise at Nordstrom, or find out what local events are taking place with tweets from the San Jose Downtown Association.
5. Favorite causes or hobbies
   Whether it's disability advocacy, organic gardening, nature conservation, micro lending, running, hiking or trumpet playing, you will find someone who is tweeting about topics that interest you. A few examples include the Harvard Art Museums,Yosemite National Park, or Knitting Network where knitters share patterns and information.
6. Trending topics
   This is a daily Twitter feature that tracks the most frequently used hash tags. Including a hash tag in a tweet makes that tweet appear in topical searches, such as #Egypt, #Occupy or #accessibility.

And here's the amazing thing about Twitter. You choose how you want to use it. You can set it up as a simple feed, where tweets on the topics you're interested in come to you, via your computer, tablet or smart phone, or even as cell phone texts. Or, if you want to connect with others who have the same interests, Twitter can help you do that too. You can respond to that person who has the perfect non-toxic aphid spray and ask for the recipe. Or you can tell the governor that you are opposed to the bill she is poised to sign. (Twitter has a very good Basics page to tell you exactly how.)

With Twitter, you define your experience — engage as much or as little as you want, and as frequently or infrequently as you like.

* 11 New Twitter Statistics

Stuff IBMers Say — Following a # Conversation on Twitter

The last 24 hours have been a lot of fun and laughs tracking the IBM Twitter conversation about common IBM sayings, hashtagged #stuffibmerssay.

 The impressions were on their way toward a million (granted there are over 400,000 IBMers), several hours ago. I've shared the URL with a few friends, and no one was quite as amused by it as I was, lol. I'm not sure if you have to be an IBMer to really "get it", or if working for a large corporation would be sufficient.

Two things about the thousands of contributions really struck me:

1) I've not seen any metrics about this yet, but I would say there were more sayings about conference calls than about anything else — IBMers obviously spend a lot of time on the phone working on teams that are spread across countries and across the globe. (For instance, I only have one other teammate on the West Coast. The majority of my team are on EDT or CDT. I work early hours compared to most other Californians.) We participate on calls at all hours, and have a lot of common sayings. (I'm going to be self-conscious now every time I say, "Who's joined the call?" or "I was talking on mute", lol)

2) We use collaboration tools all of the time — we are eating our own Social Business cooking, as the saying goes. I hadn't realized how ubiquitous so many of them have become that we don't even think about how we use them daily. Communities, team rooms, status updates, expert locators, full function instant messaging where you can drop in a screen grab or file, pull other people into a conversation, instant web conferences, you name it. We use these social collaboration tools without even thinking about it any more.

At a glance, working for a company with 400,000+ employees spread around the world sounds large, intimidating, impersonal, distant. This Twitter conversation has shown me once again how social — social networking, social business, social collaboration — connects us all, personally.