Social media is all about conversations.  And apparently even the big brands are still looking for ways to join in.

At least that’s one of the many things we heard at the MIMA event last Wednesday night at Solera in downtown Minneapolis.  Over 300 social media expert “wannabes” attended this event, appropriately titled, “Duality Reality:  Who Controls Social Media in the Enterprise?”.  Many of Minnesota’s biggest brands were represented, including:

• Jason Kleckner, Manager, Information Architecture, Target Corporation
• Jim Cuene, Director, Interactive, General Mills
• Brad Smith, VP of eCommerce & Digital Marketing, Fingerhut Direct Marketing
• Gary Koelling, Creative Director, Social Technology, Best Buy

(We should also give a shout out of thanks to Michael Kraabel, Group Creative Director, Gage, for a fine job moderating what turned out to be a candid, insightful and often funny conversation.)

If you missed it, make sure that you download the podcast; it’s well-worth the time to listen to what these “big guys” have to say.  I won’t recap it verbatim here – that’s what the podcast is for – but here are some of the themes that stood out for me:

• It’s a two-way street:  The mass-market, one-way-communication model that built these iconic brands doesn’t translate successfully to the social media realm.  It’s less about what we (branders) want to say, and more about what our customers want to tell us, and how we respond to them. Which leads to the next theme…
• The need to listen:  Brands need to acknowledge that, in order to participate in the social media conversation, they don’t control the communication any longer.  To succeed here, brands need to learn to listen better.  In fact, the panel advised that one of the most important first steps a company or brand can take in social media would be to create a tool that allows you to listen to your customers.  Then respond in ways that your customers will value
• Develop your social skills:  For a brand to succeed here, it has to learn to act like a sociable person.  That means listen.  Be interesting.  Be relevant. Offer something of value.  Be worth being heard and attended to.  The quote of the night goes to Gary Koelling, who aptly summed it up this way:  “Brands are going to have to figure out how to behave like people.  You can’t show up at the party in a leisure suit anymore and expect to get laid.  It’s not going to happen.  You’re going to have to show up and behave like a decent human being.” 
• The need to try:  Large corporations haven’t figured all this social media stuff out, either.  No one has “cracked the code” on harnessing it, controlling it, measuring it, etc.  – and maybe never will.  It’s more about the opportunity cost of not being there, than what is its ROI.   So the advice from the panel is to “Try.  Fail.  Fail fast.  Then try again.”

So in the end, did we learn who controls social media in the enterprise?  I think so.  It sounds like it’s the consumer.  And if we take these guys’ advice, we (brands) all need to listen more, quit trying to monopolize the conversation, and behave like people we’d like to hang out with. 

Resources:

• Jim Cuene’s blog
• Groundswell by Forrester Research’s Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff 
• TechCrunch
• Techmeme  
• Andy Bio’s blog
• Marketing Vox 
• Tim O’Reilly’s blog
• Who Should I Follow 

I bet that got your attention. I hear that comment from a lot of people. They tell me that search engine optimization doesn’t work anymore, search engine marketing is the new “SEO”, it’s all about social marketing now, and PPC is a better use of a company’s money than SEO.

Like all black and white thinking, there’s some truth in all of these statements but they all “throw out the baby with the bath water”. It’s foolish to rely on just one form of marketing. And yet a lot of businesses do exactly that. A better approach is a multi-faceted marketing plan that utilizes two or three of these online methods.

And search engine optimization is the perfect backbone or adjunct to any of these other forms of online marketing. Search engine optimization does work. It isn’t just about utilizing the right keywords or making certain that all the HTML is clean or eliminating dead links or regularly creating appropriate content or even using the right URLs. SEO requires a wholistic approach to web design, maintenance, and strategy.

However, I’d like to address the people who say keywords are dead or are a waste of time in search engine optimization, especially with Google. To them I say two things:

1) Any way you want to slice it, Google and all the other search engines really only have one criteria they can use to determine if a website deserves the attention of their clients: words. Yes, they look at incoming links for votes of confidence because, to a certain extent, it is a popularity contest. But in the final analysis of whether a site gives their searchers what they are looking for, it still comes down to the words in the title, description, and the page copy. If this weren’t true, no amount of tweaking of meta tags and copy would affect placement. And my successful work with client’s websites contradicts that.

2) Adwords. Adwords is probably one of the best analysis tools out there to figure out what your keywords should be. Adwords ads are short, tasty and to the point (at least the good ones are). Even the change of a single word can have a huge effect on results. That same power can be used to create an incremental effect on your website placement. Because SEO is about incremental improvements, not a “big bang”.

Lastly, if you analyze the copy of the top placing websites for your client’s keyword phrases, it gets pretty obvious pretty quick, that there really is a relationship between copy, keywords, and search engine placement. And the competitive analysis and resulting recommendations are what my clients are paying for.

Search engine optimization is not dead. Nor is it the “be all, end all” of online marketing. It is just a potent tool that should be the springboard for all other online marketing approaches.

No offense to my print designer friends (and really, some of my best friends are print designers, I swear!), I’ve lately been thinking about how much I love Interactive designers. And production folks. And developers. Maybe it’s because many people seem to think that a designer is a designer is a designer and the result of this way of thinking is working with clients who, for whatever reason, want the person who designs their offline materials to also create their web site. “You guys can work with so-and-so, right? He’ll do the design and you guys can produce it.”

Sure. Sure, we can. But, the thing is, the web is a unique medium. Compared to print, we have far less control over things like fonts, or colors, or even alignment. I can’t tell you how many times in the past couple of years (or even months) I’ve had to explain to a print designer that the pretty, perfectly-sized boxes they laid out are going to get jacked all to hell as soon as the client starts putting content of different lengths in each one. Or how many times I’ve gotten a web site design where everything is Flash and/or images because the designer wants to make sure that they control every aspect of the experience.

The reason why Interactive people are MY people, why I love them with a burning passion matched only by my love of IKEA meatballs and Gossip Girl, is that they are supremely flexible. They understand that what they lovingly create in Photoshop will vary slightly when it’s produced, and when it’s viewed by me on my Mac or their mom on a PC. They create designs that can handle those variations. They are accustomed to constantly reviewing and revisiting their design in production and tweaking it to optimize both the display, and the end user experience.

Print designers*, on the other hand, tense up at the thought that the headlines and body copy can’t all be [insert obscure font name here], or that my Grandma could increase the size of the body copy WITHOUT THEIR PERMISSION. So, when they are directing the creation of a web site, tension is created between the well-controlled viewpoint of a print designer (who is used to having the ability to tightly control font, layout, color and overall presentation) and the chaos-theory viewpoint of a web production team, who knows that they must plan for a variety of viewing situations that range from cinema screens to Blackberries, PCs to Macs, and browsers, browsers, everywhere!

But while it may make a print designer feel good to control the user experience, and while that may be a perfectly reasonable way to think about a print (or even television) experience — that level of attempted control makes for a very poor user experience online. It can make the site harder to find on search engines. It makes it impossible for someone to resize the font for readability. It can make access by disabled users difficult or impossible. In short, it can succeed at looking good and fail at being usable. A controlled experience is great in print, but it doesn’t translate well to the online world.

As I said, no disrespect to my print designer friends. But please, let my people go.

*I’m generalizing here, and I know it. I know there are a few designers out there savvy enough to design well for both print and online media. But, they are few and far between. So for the same reason you wouldn’t ask your kickass web designer to create a billboard for you, stop asking your kickass print designer to create your web site. A good print designer and a good web designer can — and should — work together under an overall creative direction and produce the best representation of that creative direction in their respective medium.

Coming off of AdTech SF and barreling into the Web 2.0 Expo, I keep hearing talk of Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and every other 2.0 social network phenomenon imaginable. Many a glass is raised to toast the advent of social media marketing and the dawn of the conversation age, but when I log on to my Facebook account, I see this:

IS THIS WHAT WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR? A boring insurance ad that knows I am in the Bay Area and a random Discover ad rotating between gambling ads with no idea of who I am or what I want.

Perhaps the champagne should be corked long enough for us to realize the power of marketing in the age of Web 2.0 doesn’t lie in the technology. Rather, it lies in the ability to interact and to connect with each other like never before.

We bore and annoy the consumer by using technology as a crutch instead of a tool. This is the time to delve into the psychographics of a consumer on a grand scale and interact on a very personal level.

Copy and art direction can be as personable and creative as we allow. The corporate voice can give way to personality and an emotional connection between consumer and brand can finally take place.

We have the technology now to interact with the consumer. It’s up to us to make the conversation interesting.