Universal Information Services

Posts for Social Networks

Subtitle: Go Break Your Own Leg!

After a short conversation with a friend and fellow Downtown Omaha business inhabitant, Jeff Slobotski, I found myself considering possible social networking trends for the coming year, 2011. In line with my #samerules #newtools philosophy, Jeff and I had been discussing the importance of striking a balance within the virtual living of social networks. One needs to balance themselves on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and even Linkedin for the professionals, by actually getting out and participating in life so you can contribute original content to the living fabric of these social networks. Always at the top among lists of "how to be successful in social media" is the need for compelling content.

A potential downside that may develop into a trend in the next year, is that of social media addiction. You can find plenty of opinions on this newest addiction, and like other activities in which people over indulge, living solely within your social network(s) will have fundamental problems for some people (#samerules).

In my news monitoring and media analysis role at Universal Information Services we're seeing patterns develop where people are simply living vicariously through others within their social networks, without bringing new value to their network. The incidents of retweeting, rather than posting new content, is accelerating at an exponential pace. On Facebook you'll notice more people only taking the time to "Like This" rather than posting a newly formed thought, or comment, to a specific post. It seems that the great power of social networks also has the power to let us check out from actually doing something, and simply observing what others do. Is this healthy for you in mind and body? Is it healthy for your social network?

In an ironic twist, I chose the above subtitle to demonstrate the notion that be it good or bad, you must own your own experience...then let us know your thoughts on that experience. Whether for business or personal, social media and social networks are only effective when we have an understanding of the person behind the information. People do want to know you, your opinions, and what you can teach them through your social networks. Stated differently, go out and break your own leg.

I can tweet about how great skiing was until I broke my leg. I can even post pictures of the ski patrol, my cast, and even the look on my wife's face. But truthfully, I'm glad it was my leg...a real life experience I own and can appropriately share with others.

Now I don't want to break a leg all the time, but I do want to have enough real life experiences so I can contribute compelling content to my social networks. One must be able to seed their posts, comments, and tweets with interesting thoughts that come from their life or business. So metaphorically, go break your own leg...and let us know all about it. Your social network engagement will go up, your credibility will go up, and best of all, you'll see more of the World.

(Disclosure Statement: I did not actually break my own leg. Yes, it made for a better title than, "I broke my collar bone when I tripped over the soccer ball and hit a wall". Next post, "Credibility and Content: Does the truth still work?") Leave your comments and links to related topics. Your network will thank you.

Comments (5)

Every year, but with growing frequency, people and organizations try to create order out of the prior 12 months (11 months in most cases). This ordering process takes form of the "Top 10 List" and purports to rank any and every topic imaginable. As a blogging technique, or social networking strategy, all the books and experts will tell you that it is actually a very successful tool. People like lists, and as it turns out, it appears search engines also like them. There's even a site devoted solely to Top 10 Lists, http://top-10-list.org/

Seeing a tweet, Facebook post, or even a Linkedin discussion with the words "Top 10", "Top 5" or even "Top 3" piques the interest of enough people that it is truly a strategy for engagement. If you are creating a list you should be asking yourself, "What can I place in order that will truly be of interest to others?" Generally, as Warren Buffett would say, invest in what you know. What is your sandbox, your product, your area of influence? Straying outside of what you know usually has the worst impact a marketing person could achieve, little to no impact at all.

The beauty of a "Top X" list is that it can be fairly simple to create and very enjoyable to compile. At Universal Information Services we come in contact with virtually every news story that breaks throughout the year. As a complete news monitoring service we not only see all the news online, but all the news that was actually broadcast or published. Our news monitoring and media analysis teams have the ability to quantitatively measure the biggest stories, then compile our list of "The Top 5 Biggest News Stories"...by volume. Our list uses statistics to measure which news stories were seen the most, not necessarily which stories had the greatest impact on society or represented the greatest value. We can, however, localize our "Top 5" lists to specific cities, helping ensure greater exposure from traditional and social media outlets.

So we use the media to create our Top 5 list, which in turn generates more media exposure for Universal Information Services...media begets media. Ironically, this is completely in line with our #samerules #newtools philosophy. The new tools of social networking help amplify small messages to the point that traditional media takes notice. As traditional media now uses the same social networking tools that we all have access to, they are able to cover stories in the traditional media that previously would have earned no placement.

As we enter December, brace yourself for the onslaught of Top 10 Lists. As a fun exercise, use your preferred Twitter client, I prefer Tweetdeck, and open a search for "top 10". I began writing this blog about 20 minutes ago and in that time I have averaged about 1 tweet per second that includes a mention and link to a top 10 list. Many of them are retweets because, well, most Twitter users don't really want to create new content, they'd just rather RT someone's idea and be considered part of the "engaged" crowd. Not that I have anything against retweeting, I do it all the time. But one of the top two rules for social media engagement is to be sure you provide compelling content. That's a topic for another post.

Leave a comment or link to your favorite Top X list. Who knows, maybe I'll release a Top 10 List of the Top 10 lists received.

Cheers!

Comments (2)

At Universal Information Services our national news monitoring and media analysis efforts have evolved to a point where our client prospects are mostly found through inbound systems. In other words, with the growing use of #newtools from social media platforms, the need for us to interrupt/disrupt our prospective clients is greatly reduced.

Many resources have illuminated this shift away from outbound marketing, but essentially the #newtools (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin, Groupon, etc.) now let any organization that must routinely generate new clients, attract those clients to them rather than hunt them down and interrupt them with a marketing pitch. Mix in Google Analytics, and you have an amazing way to analyze your effectiveness for inbound marketing. Whether you call it "interruption marketing" or "disruption selling", it is a much harder sell than allowing prospects to find you when they are looking for what you have.

If you look at the economics of maintaining a staff of national sales people, how many calls and follow-ups do they have to make in order to bring one new customer to you? We both know the answer here, and that number is somewhere around a "boat-load". Figure in salaries, support staff, CRM costs, other consumables, and the expense in finding a new client is very high. But, if you can decrease the number of outbound marketers you employ, and convert those people devoted customer service representatives, you'll find that your ROI is much greater when focused on retention of clients and in selling additional services to those happy clients.

Allowing low, fixed-cost social media tools to funnel leads to your inbound marketing staff means your team is working with those who are already predisposed to want what you are selling. Equally important to this inverse marketing path, is the #samerules concept that clients want to have an enjoyable experience when working with their vendors. From the beginning of the sales cycle you now have a pleasant relationship instead of one that starts with disrupting your client's day.

Outbound marketing (interruption/disruption) has become a mostly adversarial encounter as we are all trained to initially say, "No!", when approached by a salesperson. In some cases the salesperson gets lucky and can warm the prospect up to what they are selling. But this conversion is the rare occasion for any service. The excessive abuse by the bad apples of telemarketing and direct marketing has inoculated everyone against the cold call. But if that cold call is now a warm call, and is initiated by the end user and not the marketer, you have a very potent sales mechanism.

Here are several resources that can help you make the jump from disruption marketing...the #newtools of social media.
Rick Burnes, Inbound Marketing & the Next Phase of Marketing on the Web
Brian Halligan, Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing
Lee Odden, 22 Social Media Marketing Management Tools

I love the idea that I don't have to deploy a force of clever sales people charged with penetrating the natural defenses of our future clients. It's much more enjoyable to be viewed as a solution to a prospects need when THEY contact us. We do still identify and proactively approach organizations that clearly need our services, but now we can be much more selective and increase our probability of winning that business.

The costly, shotgun approach of disruption marketing is dieing, but certainly is not dead. We'd love to hear your opinion on inbound vs. outbound marketing. What #newtools have you found that increase your ROI for marketing and sales?

Todd Murphy
Vice President
Universal Information Services
http://universal-info.com

Comments (2)

…for Public Relations, News Monitoring, Design, or Services of Any Kind

You have heard it almost everywhere over the past few years. If you haven’t, you’re not getting out enough. For this post I decided to discuss the blue ocean strategy of being different from your competitors. It can also be explored as “being remarkable” as described in Seth Godin’s Purple Cow book. This post is “different” in that I’m writing only with subtitles (actually, about half in subtitles). What can I say, it’s something different. I like subtitles because they often tell what the author really wants to say, but couldn’t in the official title.

“Yes, Different Is Good”
Subtitled-
Separate Yourself from Your Competition
Clients Quit Services When the Service Grows Stale
Clients Find New Vendors When They Don’t Get Strong Support
Clients Like Innovation that Works
New Communication Tools Can Help Amplify Most Efforts (but not all)
The Media Amplifies Your PR Effort
Let Social Media Drive a Greater Audience In Traditional Media
Are You Exploring How to Differentiate Yourself from “The Same Old”?
Are Your Points of Difference What Your Client Truly Cares About?
Are You Monitoring the News You Need?
Are You Analyzing Media that Is Truly Important?
Are You Using A Service You Have Real Faith In?
Are You Tired of These Questions?

In the end, being different, or making a change for change sake, is a waste of time and resources without practical goals in mind (#samerules). Evaluate what you are doing for your clients, how you are doing it, and how they view the value you provide them.

For Universal Information Services, http://universal-info.com , this exercise has brought us to where we are today. We are different. Clients find us when they need something more in terms of service, support, or cost savings. We don’t compete on the same old parameters for news monitoring and media analysis defined many years ago. We do provide real customer service, real client support, honest solutions, and prices that are really tied to our cost to serve the client. Our press clipping, TV monitoring, or web monitoring services are truly remarkable. Most importantly, we provide innovation that our clients really need.

It’s ironic, but the #newtools concept of “being different” is almost a result of common sense others have lost (#samerules). Develop, design, or deliver what you do in a way that separates your from your competitors. My suggestion is you do it now before your competition does it first.

Visit Seth Godin's blog for more insight on this topic and let us know what you think. Leave a comment, we enjoy the dialogue.

Yep, another blog about customer experience. If you're like me, you're probably thinking, "Seen it, read it, know it...I get it." I'm going to keep this short and sweet, but underscore the fact that the points you might think you're competing on have nothing to do with what will make you a great company.

First, almost every service or product now has scads of competitors. For example, I'd hate to be in the "social media tool" industry right now (damn, I think we are). Just yesterday I read a blog about "220 Indispensable Social Media Tools". Ok, how do you go about differentiating yourself when 219 of them are SaaS systems? The reality is you do it either through a massive sales program (hire the college grads, pay only commission, and pump that service), or you be the ONE company that does it with an exceptional customer experience. Price, user interface, fancy charts and graphs...everyone has those. You need to be different. You need to stand out. You need to offer a customer experience that tells all who inquire, "We are the company you want to use."

Universal Information Services uses the far-from-unique approach of "take care of the customer first, and the cash will follow". Many companies like DELL Computers have ingrained this notion of outstanding customer experience within their organization. Backup 11 years to this Fast Company article and you'll see we're really talking about the #samerules applying to the #newtools of Customer Experience. With our Media Analysis and Social Network Mapping we don't just give you access to data, we interpret the results for you. The difference between a tool and a service, in my experience, is that a service delivers what you need, in a form you can digest, without requiring gobs of your own time to analyze and figure it out. We call this "reading the tea leaves".

PR professionals and business communicators still only have 24 hours in the day. Our job is to do the work they pay us for so they can focus on their mission critical activities. These professionals were not hired to measure stories, maintain a database of metrics, input earned media hits, AND THEN interpret what that means. That is the service they buy from Universal Information Services...and we go over the top to make sure their experience is great.

What is it you do for your customers or clients? From their perspective, are your clients having a great experience when working with you? If not, they'll find the company that does make their experience great. Customer Experience is truly the piece you are competing on with your peers...It is the one thing that can make you different.

For another perspective on Customer Experience, check out Marc Meyer's blog, "The Customer Experience Revisited". Please tell us your unique perspective on the customer experience. Your comments are important to us.

If you watch Twitter or follow public relations groups on LinkedIn, you've seen a common question about the #newtools for monitoring news or social media. Over the past week I counted no less than 200 sources people had offered up as their favorite new tool for tracking media. Some are free, some are paid, but what all of these services have in common is they are trying to help users and organizations cut through the deafening media noise. People want solutions, the answers, an educated interpretation of what their media exposure means in terms of values that are important to them. 99% of the services out there are missing the mark.

The subtitle of this post is "The Art of Noise", not as a reference to the avant-garde alternative band of the 1980's, but as a reference to the growing volume of news and information available to everyone. What PR professionals, corporate communicators, and anyone tasked with tracking media need is simply an answer to the question of, "What stories should I be focusing on? Show me what is truly important and why."

Here are a few of the services I believe have sound methodologies for generating meaningful earned media placements: Cision, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, BlueVision, and Carma. Yes, these are competitors: Universal Information Services offers many of the same services, but these companies have also demonstrated a high rate of reliability and are worthy of mention.

In contrast, the shortcoming in almost every online news monitoring solution available is that it is a software-as-a-service (SaaS). Invariably this means you, the customer, must know exactly what you want to track, what metrics you want to see, and then you have to do the work of correctly entering that information into an online tool. All of this effort on your part must occur before you can see any analysis or report outlining your results.

For accurate media monitoring and pr measurement, and to cut through the noise to just the news you need, human reasoning is ultimately required. Computers can only decide a yes or no proposition (1 or 0). Yes, the human is still critical for accurate news monitoring and media measurement. So, in the end your use of SaaS solutions, or a system that includes customized human interaction, may be the difference between receiving an overwhelming amount of media noise and getting truly valuable information. How loud must it be before you can no longer do your job well? We look at the #newtools with the #samerules in mind…then do what is best for our clients. What do you do?

Welcome to our first ravings related to news, information consumption, social media, tools of dissemination, and how all this is impacted by Human Nature. Universal Information Services has created this blog to illuminate ideas related to the intersection of communication fundamentals and new channels of information distribution. Basically, our media analysis and position as a news monitoring service has led us to the conclusion that the fundamental rules of public relations communications has not changed, only the tools we have at our disposal are new (#SameRules #NewTools).

We’ve even chosen to hash tag these two phrases to underscore the importance that social media has on media engagement, media placement, and public perception. It is true, social media has greatly enhanced our methods of communication. But be careful, professional communication by any mode has not fundamentally changed. Therefore our blog will feature postings related to two areas of public relations and communications. We'll also focus on issues related to news monitoring, media analysis, social network influence. From press clipping to TV news clips to web monitoring, our broad spectrum of news monitoring and media analysis experience opens a wide door for discussion.

First, the fundamentals of writing style and the need for compelling content are not new. If you can’t write, spell, structure a sentence, or convey compelling ideas, it does not matter what channel you use to communicate, your audience will remain small and ephemeral. The same basic rules of communication survive today and are only slightly modified to match each medium (print, broadcast, web, social).

Second, how you harness the enormous power of the new tools like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Foursquare is a testament to your ability to apply your skills across the #NewTools. You should be thinking “in addition to” rather than “instead of”. Human nature, as well as common sense, dictates that one should meet their target audience through whatever communication tool they prefer. For this reason all of us need to stop referring to social media as something outside of mainstream media. Never has a new medium supplanted an older medium. Newspapers did not kill discussion, radio did not kill newspapers, television did not kill radio, the Web did not kill television, and social media will not kill any of the aforementioned mediums. The communication pie only expands while dividing into smaller pieces for each medium…growth instead of replacement.

I’m sure some will hold on to the false notion that there has been a complete shift in the communication paradigm. I hope to receive comments that the world has changed as we know it and we will forever be changed. These comments will help prove that no matter what our technical mode of discourse may be, human nature controls how we communicate…and that is fundamentally unchanged.

I am not a writer. You will see an overabundance of commas in my postings and I may not always structure my sentences correctly. Yes, you may correct me if you want, but in the end it is the ideas I’m hoping to spark interest with, not my writing prowess.

#SameRules #NewTools represents an extension of the media research we do here at Universal. This blog is for the “engaged community”. This does not mean only those who are social media savvy, but anyone who understands that humans create content and humans consume information. Those who fail to consider human nature when creating tools are doomed to repeat history by creating solutions that are DOA. There will be little acceptance of their #NewTool because they have chosen to ignore the importance of the #SameRules.

Future topics include: Niche content and The Long Tail, The Importance of Compelling Content, and an answer to the “Who Cares” question (ROI).

The conference season has been in full swing over the past 30 days, as if it ever really slows down, and we have three great reasons you should make conference attendance a regular part of your business and new media education.

First, if you at all have a passion for your job or what you are pursuing, then continuing education must be a part of that path you follow to success. Nearly every industry, and variation within industries, has some form of a meeting where you can learn new tricks, rub elbows with peers, and hear from experts in your field. My news monitoring and media analysis industry has no less than five opportunities per year. I can attend PRSA, IABC, NDS, and even Rotary conferences...and many others. All of these opportunities allow you to further yourself in your position. Whether CEO or intern, gaining new perspectives is an essential part of fully realizing your potential. Here are a few resources I use to find helpful conferences in my areas of interest.

http://mashable.com/category/events/

http://www.prsa.org/Conferences/

http://www.bigomaha.com/ (don’t let the name fool you, this may be the most important conference you ever attend)

Second, if your success depends on your own creativity, then attending industry meetings and conferences allows you to get outside of your own head. At Universal Information Services my primary role is to envision, create, and deploy new services for our clients. I have implemented all of Universal’s TV and Radio monitoring, media analysis, and web monitoring services…but only through the insight I’ve gained from my pears throughout the industry. Developing services in a vacuum can be a dangerous path to believing all that you dream up is of great value to others. Interacting with competitive and cooperative peers exposes you to ideas that help keep your own mind in check and accelerates your own development.

Third, the ability to connect the dots may be the greatest benefit to attending conferences. I refer to connecting the dots as the ability to hear new ideas at meetings and conferences, but hearing them in a way that connects with a seemingly unrelated concept you may have rattling around in your head. This is critical to innovation. I use The Action Method, developed by Scott Belsky’s mind at Behance, to help me manage my ideas and visions This should be mandatory training for anyone with a creative thought.

Leave your comments on what conferences you have found the most beneficial. I’m always looking for better ways to get outside my head and connect the dots. Many of these fun ideas are found in our new site.

Next post: Number 1 Reason to Skip A Conference