Yesterday we talked about how funny shows like The Office and Better Off Ted were/are – until they’re a mirror into our own business lives.

And I wanted to take a closer look at the idea that business is missing several essential elements of social media. Because of how critical human interaction is to the process businesses that are purposely set up with mechanized glory in mind fail.

(For more on this, you have to read Humanize, and at least listen to Welcome to the Fifth Estate.)

For some the answer to a social media’s bad fit is to just skip social media, or put it off for another day.

But for years now, we’ve needed social media to enhance our search results, and its importance is underscored dramatically in light of Google’s most recent updates.

Be it the solo entrepreneur operating a Kindle publishing mini-empire, a family-owned pizzeria, or a nationwide insurance company chain, you can’t afford to wait until it’s too late to start using social media to help circulate your content – and you simply must have content to be in the conversation, not to mention the fact that it’s the most proactive form of reputation management. 

To simply ignore social media is to do so at your own peril.

People don’t read the newspaper anymore, they log in to Facebook, and let their friends lead them to news web sites or applications. This shift can be seen as a lost opportunity or as an entirely new way to directly reach your customers, and to develop a relationship before they need you. Then you can be the obvious choice when they’re ready to buy.

Which brings us back to the hard part – there’s an extreme disconnect between

• the way companies traditionally work,
• the content most enjoyed by pivotal groups in social media, and,
• how people typically use their various social media tools.

I’m sure you’ve heard this next part before but it’s important enough to repeat.

We Humans Have Built a Machine That Could Destroy Our Livelihoods

Social media is shaped and driven by the things that make us fundamentally human. Forming, operating, and marketing corporations are actions traditionally shaped by the notion that companies are best run as efficient machines.

And yet there are people inside these machines – and it is those people, not the mechanized, politicized, organizational structure, that people will connect to on some level.  So you’ll need people inside the company to connect with the people outside the company via social media.

Here’s where the problems then come – who owns what?

Who is allowed to speak and who isn’t?

When there’s a crisis, what’s the response procedure?

What are the 25 things we have to check off on the list before we can make a blog comment on another blog using the company URL?

In the age of the old media, this was fine. Press releases were mailed or faxed. Showing up in print or television news gave much more lead time to plan all these things out, and put processes in place that we relied on.

Advertising wasn’t subject to the opinions of people because most offended parties were not upset enough to write a letter, which then had to find its way to someone with influence. By that time the commercial in question may have been old news, and a new one in production.

But Twitter is happening

… ten minutes ago.

There’s already a Facebook group somewhere discussing the problem they have with how your company (or one like it) responded to that national crisis yesterday, and how they hope you’ll solve it.

People are acting, moving, and your company is getting left behind.

Why?

There’s a strategic issue at hand here. Because social media is so human and companies are so mechanical, the instinctive urge to slap social media on top of whatever we’re doing often fails. It’s like putting a band-aid on a broken leg- though the attempt at some repair may be appreciated, in practical terms, it’s completely ineffective, and as such, useless. Proper implementation is key.

And the social aspect of the tools are not the only issue – it is the impact the way the new media is being used and changing so many things, so rapidly.

Can We Put Our Companies Back on Track By Cutting Off Our Robotic Arms?

There’s a much bigger wave just underneath the surface of social media that is the threat to any stagnant company. We must change our companies from the inside out in some very key ways.

1. To succeed in social media, we must be people-centered.
2. Once we’re centered on the people inside and outside our company, we will want to listen to what their concerns are, because…
3. … We’ll have to get their attention in a way that’s a bit different than the way people related one on one. To woo them, we’ll have to produce content they find relevant, so that there’s a reason for dialogue since…
4. Dialogue starts the key conversations/connection that lead to subscriptions, clicks, and/or sales. And then?
5. We have to maintain that attention, not merely through content, but through connection, since that’s largely how the web is re-orienting.

I realize that I haven’t proven a single one of these hypothesis, nor am I linking to places where they are demonstrated. There are multiple sources that help bear these examples out that we’ll be discussing in future days.

First up will be our next few discussions, which will rest on a discussion on what being people-centric means in practical terms. How will we need to change? IS your company truly getting there, or is it just paying lip service to the idea? What are the key areas where we need to improve if we are truly centering around people?

This discussion will include some pretty fun embarrassing situations I’ve found myself in. Until then, try this visual exercise.

Imagine a hug. Warm arms that envelop you, the almost palpable wave of emotion migrating from another person to you. Who can truthfully argue that hugs suck?

Not most emotionally stable people.<

And while our mission is certainly not to hug our customers, we often have the intention of embracing technology that helps us serve our clientele. But picture that hug again - only this time imagine that you have the arms of a super-strong robot, who isn't programmed to understand how much pressure to apply.

In your imagination, I'm willing to bet that you either crushed your hug-ee into jelly, or gave them one of those butt-out, barely touching non-hugs. Even in our minds, robots can't quite do the jobs that we can as humans, though they are suited for certain things.

Your robotic arms represent your company, and the person you're hugging represents social media.

Feel me now?
 

An Exaggeration of How Much I Love This Book. But Not Far From the Truth

Human beings may have been creating organizations for thousands of years but that does not necessarily make these organizations particularly human.

Remember we’ve also been creating machines for thousands of years …. machines have been integral to our growth as a species as well in fact may have maybe they have been a little too integral.

From Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World, by Jamie Notter & Maddie Grant

In the science fiction television series, Battlestar Galatica, the Cylons are a race of humanoid machines, initially created by humans as intelligent machines built to serve humanity. A running theme throughout the show was that these new Cylons were so close to human that some sleepers lived as humans, and didn’t even know their true nature themselves.

We’re, of course, nowhere close to suffering this particular danger. Even in new media, it’s apparent which people are interacting with you in real time, which accounts are being run by an entity functioning as a team, and which ones are a mix of people and software updates spread out over time.

Though people don’t seem to mind whether a Twitter account is run by a company, a person, or a person assisted by software, we all like to know who we’re dealing with in this age of transparency.

One thing is clear though: people don’t mind getting their news headlines from a bot, but they want to interact with people. Seems simple enough, right?

But if it were, social media ROI (return on investment) wouldn’t be such a hot topic – the return on investment would be obvious, despite the fact that some of it isn’t measurable.

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MIrror.me helps you visualize what topics you talk the most about on Twitter, with a word cloud based on your tweets. I use it to monitor how much I’m talking about things my customers are interested in, rather than just the things that interest me.

It’s also a discovery tool as it will help you find other people in your network who are of like mind. I’ll demonstrate how in the following video, as well as how to test it out without needing to log in.

You can find the Mirror.com folks on Twitter too (@MirrorDotMe). When you do tell them I said hello, and that I enjoy using their tool.

Itty Bitty KITTY Committee

You Gotta Have Pizazz, Kitty

Obviously this post isn’t about kittens.

Well, it isn’t JUST about kittens.

It’s about personality. It’s about infusing the things you do online with YOU-ness. You’re going to have to make a crapload of content to make it online. A freaking lot of content.

Blog posts.

Tweets.

Facebook Posts.

YouTube videos.

Press releases.

Newsletter updates.

Guest blog posts.

Presentations.

And that’s just if you want to hit the high notes.

Even if you assign some of this to a team (stop laughing, solo entrepreneurs), it still has to be dealt with, you’ll have to edit, approve, or hire someone you can trust to edit and approve. The point is that someone will have to do the work.

And that’s just half of the deal. Which brings us back to our main point. You will have to get that content noticed.

I’m not going to go into all the clever things you can do to get your content noticed today – I’ll probably write about it this coming Tuesday over on my AGBeat visibility column. I just wanted a place to talk about why I say “Now with Kittens”, and why you should do your own thing in social media so people will remember you.

Even if it’s for something slightly silly, it’s better that people remember you than not notice you at all.

If great content was enough, we’d all just hire the best writers, actors, artists, graphic designers we could afford and be done with it, yes? Great content is Everywhere these days.

What’s the Deal with the Kittens, Tinu?

Like Meow Me Now, Google’s innovative kitten project, the “Now with Kittens” tagline that appears on some of my Twitter updates, is kind of a joke. But that’s not the whole story.

On Twitter, I often tag my oldie but goodie posts to Twitter with a promise of kittens for 3 reasons.

First, its part of my offline vocabulary.

In face-to-face conversation, I often call men who I’d prefer would stfu “kitten” in my sultriest voice if all other forms of manipulation don’t work. (I do this with women too, but the voice is Far from sultry.) In online conversation, it’s my favorite term of endearment or stab prevention.

Second, I call everyone cat, as in “that cat is always using his friends as umbrellas. what a d[redacted].”

The third instance is as a mockery of the old way of marketing.

In advertising and marketing copy, the now with phrase became a common afterthought selling point. Think: “Toasters – now with bread!”

After its popularity peaked, the now with offers became more and more desperate and ridiculous, with the added-on feature becoming something popular but completely unrelated to the initial sales item. To me, it represents everything that is wrong with the traditional marketing model, and the stench of hopelessness attached to people determined to force this paradigm into new media.

Thus, of course, I began to mock these publicly, often mocking myself in the process. In order to do this in a way people like me would “get” instantly, I figured it had to include something that had always, and would always, be popular online, but that was also the furthest possible thing from what I write about.

And what’s more popular online than Kittens?

This mini-meme is now

1. kind of an inside joke between me and my followers,
2. a conversation starter, and,
3. a short hand used with my long-term followers that says this tweet is not a new post.

Enough about me.

What’s your favorite display of personality in social media?

It’s quite simple really.

It’s the easiest promotional secret ever and it’s staring you right in the face. There’s one tiny thing you could be doing differently that would bring you tenfold the results in sales, subscribers, clients or customers for exactly the same effort or amount of money that you’re expending now.

I call it Magnifying Your Audience.

Before I tell you what process goes with that moniker, let’s look at how many of us, even those of us who are experienced, promote our blogs, articles, videos and documents in social media.

We create content.

We proliferate it among the people we already know – current customers, even peers.

We send copies through our current social media outlets – groups we’re members of in LinkedIn, groups we love on Facebook, our profiles, and on Twitter. If we have staff members, we make sure they duplicate our efforts.

We may prod our friends to help distribute our work or call in favors. We could call out to them using great tools like Livefyre, or organize their efforts using Triberr.

We usually get a response that’s similar to the last response we got — or if we created something incredible, we see a temporary boost. Maybe we’ll do a little advertising.

Then we create the next piece of content, hoping that as our community slowly grows, and as we connect to new people on social media, in person, and via referrals, we’ll have a slow, upward climb to an audience that will one day be huge.

It’s essential to understand that there’s actually nothing wrong with this method on its face.

The problem comes in under two particular circumstances:

1. When you repeat the process the same way each time, or,
2. When you vary it but among a mis-targeted audience.

Why?

In the first scenario, when you simply go through the same steps of promoting each time, you may be talking to the same group each time. That’s great if that’s an active group that’s made up of focused people who are constantly growing, changing and constantly promoting you.

But that’s rarely the case. Usually it goes to the same group of peers as yesterday, who may share your content if they remember or see it in time, but most likely will only do so about 10% of the time. And that’s fine.

Everyone is busy and has their priorities. You can’t expect people to spend all their time talking about you.

But if you’re always talking to the same, unchanging group that isn’t bringing new people to your content, it may be time to shake things up a bit. Don’t forget what you were doing when you first got excited about networking with people on and offline – you met new people, helped them, met their friends, got introduced to new groups of people.

You publicized yourself among groups of people who didn’t know you yet, and were likely to be interested in your products and services.

As you continue to promote to people already in your audience who haven’t bought, shared or subscribed, think of new audiences. Maybe even better audiences.

You get the picture.

The second item is much more in line with my point though. I’ve been guilty of it myself. We humans have a tendency to stick to things that are familiar and safe. And if I publish blog posts and share them with my current peers, many of them will think I’m as brilliant as I think they are and in turn, share them with their audiences.

And I adore them for it. It means so much to me when my peers approve of what I’m doing.

But if my peer group stagnates and I’m not meeting new people, so will the reach of my audience, if I’m only promoting to my peers. It’s great when people are willing to put you in front of their audience. But you also have to using methods that put you directly in touch with the people you want in your audience as well.

You can’t just count on the so-called influencers either – they’re not always the ones who spark viral growth.

The easiest way to get out of such a rut is to ask yourself this question: “What kind of person thinks the work I’m doing is like some kind of magic trick?”

Your parents, yeah, probably, but you want to cast a wider net – you want to think groups of people, who will buy what you’re selling in droves.

Keep asking that until the answer you get is a group that’s in your target audience. Then go find THEM online.

What do you do once you know where they are? Well. I guess that’s the next blog post, right there.

Networking! by amydpp, on Flickr

So you missed What’s Next DC? Or you were there but missed something?

You sad sack, you.

I only say that because we’re in the same boat, and that’s what I said to myself. I was there as a floating expert (more on the irony of someone who sometimes can barely walk being called a “floating” expert later- LOL!). And I almost stabbed myself when I missed Rand Fishkin’s presentation.

But I’m also here to rescue you from possible shame and embarassment in front of your friends, because after going over the following resources, you’ll be able to front like you did. There’s no future in frontin’, but that’s another blog post isn’t it?

I started out the day intending to blog my reactions to the presentations, but so many people already did such a good job doing that. So instead, I’m going to link to those, and give you the inside scoop later on:

• being a floating expert,
• talking to Debbie Weil,
• the fantastic networking at What’s Next DC,
• the IRL connections,
• How Twitter Changed One Speaker’s Life,
• and more….

We’ll come back to all that in the days that follow, on my various social media, corporate web visibility, and online company owner blogs, as well as here.

For now, here’s a quick round up of What’s Next DC blog posts I found. And below are my brief reactions to my favorite presentations.

More Resources

You can also see my Quick Resources Overview of What’s Next DC at my corporate web promotion services blog, Leveraged Promotion.

This is part two of a series I’m doing to fulfill my promise to the attendees of the Grow Smart Business conference who attended the session I was a panelist on: “Stories, Content, & the Search Engine Sword Over Your Head.”

You can watch the re-broadcast of the Grow Smart Business 2010 Conference tomorrow.

Today I bring you a short rant in which I reveal some things I secretly HATE but still use to increase my traffic, and thus my subscription rate, and thus my sales, and ultimately, my income.

If you can’t see the player, you can download the audio here.

Losing Twitter fans or friends, even newsletter subscibers isn’t as important to me as gaining new people unless the people leaving provide me with information.

Allow me to explain.

For our purposes, a Twitter fan is a person who is following you that you’re not following, and let’s define a Twitter friend as a mutual follow.

Generally speaking, a person newly connected to my Twitter account is either following me back after I found them, or they found me  through seeing a retweet or @ mention from me in a hashtag,  someone else’s stream, or following links from one of my sites or articles.

Either way, I look at a person’s stream and basic stats to rule out the possibility that they are a spammer, as well as to find some common ground before deciding to add them as someone to follow, or someone to put on a list.

Now, when I lose a fan, that’s either because I didn’t follow back soon enough for their liking, or they don’t like

• me,
• how often I tweet,
• my information, or,
• the way my mother dresses me.

Now, this is useful information – if/when there’s a feedback loop.

At one point, I used to read every single reason for unsubscribing from my newsletter. Then I found out that there were only four reasons.

1. They didn’t find it useful for their purposes. (No longer in business, etc. Can’t change that.)
2. I emailed too often or too infrequently for their tastes. (This is a matter of preference. Either I can’t change it or I won’t – it’s always either due to health reasons, my activity level or learning through study of what will most likely lead to sales.)
3. They never planned to buy anything from me, ever, so the blog was enough. (I never pitch directly in my blog. Ironically, those same people bought from a sales letter link in the blog about 1/2 the time. Another reason for my Blog Daily Challenge.)
4. They perceived that I had not done something they assumed I would do. (Sometimes they were right – I’d say I was releasing something and then get too sick to do it on the timetable expected. Sometimes I was just lazy or tired. Sometimes it was an assumption on their part.)

In other words, most of the time their un-subscription was either unpreventable at that point in time, or in line with my desires (i.e. They weren’t going to take an action I would have liked, so it was probably best for both of us that they unsubscribe).

I used to chase everyone of those people down, but I found that it enriched my business more to make those who were content deliriously happy, as they tend to be my best customers.

People who complain do help me improve my business greatly – I don’t mean to say I ignore them. I take all feedback seriously.

But I’ve also learned that at the ends of each spectrum -

a- There’s no pleasing some people no matter what you do, and fighting to get the people in that 1% fringe to stay rarely ever comes with positive or profitable results.

b- You can always make the opposite 1% of stellar prospects, customers or clients happier, and you almost always get some kind of profitable results from it.

So this information, is, in fact, useful on a newsletter service that allows people to share why they unsubscribed.

But there is no such feedback loop on Twitter.

And Twitter subscribers aren’t divided into buyers, prospects and browsers.

So there’s no reason to throw good energy away by begging people to stay, or even tracking when they go, beyond trying to learn if there is a correlation between something you said or did and a mass exodus.

There’s far more benefit in creating stronger relationships with incoming subscribers.

This is why I’m not going to  rush a return follow just to keep someone from unfolllowing. Truth is, if a person bases their follow practice purely on whether I’m following them, I’d prefer not to maintain that contact.

Therefore it’s not as urgent a situation losing a fan as it is a friend.

But even with friends, I’m going to do my due diligence and make sure it’s not a customer or prospect responding to some hole in my customer service. If it’s not that, whether I continue to follow will be a result of a re-evaluation of whether I’m enjoying or otherwise benefiting from the connection from my side.

Gaining friends or fans is therefore more important to me than loss.

The majority of the time, there’s no saving a loss of a fan OR friend in Twitter.

That’s because it normally follows under one of the preference headings – it’s people obsessed with following back, they don’t like my message or I tweet too often for their tastes.

My raw numbers just aren’t that important to me in an of themselves. I figured out how to get 100,000 followers or even 1 million followers about 2 years ago. And I’ll probably increase one of my minor accounts to that level just to prove a point.

But for my main, flagship, branded account? I want pure quality. This is the account my reputation, my business, and the few influencer metrics I care about is based on.

So losing people is actually a plus for me – it means my audience is self pruning and my remaining fan base is that much purer.

But gaining a new fan – that’s an opportunity to make a connection while the initial contact is still new. I can also tie that into my other research about the Tinu business persona – did fans go up when I released an article or was the guest tweeter in a Tweet Chat?

As important but less urgent is gaining a friend. Simply because I can walk back across a bridge that’s already built. I’ve already followed them. They have the power in the situation – check out my account and follow back if I seem like a good person to bet on.

It is with my most why-isn’t-this-on-TechCrunch-already enthusiasm that I present a behind the scenes look at the Customer Service via Twitter Toolkit that I’ve been raving about, most commonly known as Hy.Ly.

(That’s pronouced Highly, I was corrected, by none other than the CEO. Not HEE-lee, which is what I called it about half the time during the video.)

I actually use it as my main Twitter client now – it’s an incredible bundle of Twitter tools for the small business or solopreneur set.

More notes after the video, which you can view on Screencast if you’re getting this via syndication. The video is also embeddable if you want to share it with your audience.

A YouTube version is forthcoming- at 19 minutes, I’d have to cut off the introduction to make it short enough.

Important Notes;

• Intended use is for Customer Service via Twitter.

And works very well for that – I especially love that you can backchannel and plug it into your CRM software.

Works quite nicely as a Twitter Client, too.

• Eliminates the use for about five other sites I use for Twitter research

I’d name them but I don’t want to be a meanie.

• Has a database, and keeps a history of the things you want to save from Twitter going back to the time you registered.

(I think a neat paid feature would be to have it grab all the data from the time you registered for Twitter.

I imagine it would take some time to grab your timeline back that far but if it was possible, even through Google to organize and store all that information? Man.)

• Here’s the link to the Follow Friday Tweetshow I made

I’m making another that better showcases the people I want to suggest be followed.

• Here’s a link to the Free Traffic Chat Tweetshow @shashib of Network Solutions made

< brag > Yes, I was the featured guest. < /brag >

• Invite code to sign up: Tinu

Sign up now. I don’t know when it expires, or when it does, how much it will cost for you to sign up when that happens.