• Here’s What’s Wrong with Social Media: Sharing without Consumption – on Spark Minute
• Why Sharing Online Content Might Be Too Easy – on Mashable

In summary, the two articles show multiple cases where aggregate sharing of content exceeds actual consumption. While it’s difficult to show motive, the following about sharing and online identity appears to be true:

• If sharing is a means to promote content, then total consumption should be a multiple of total shares, not a fraction.
• People will share content via Facebook and Twitter without watching or reading what they’re sharing. They are reacting to the content’s headline.
• The act of sharing is incredibly simple. It takes only a single click of a Facebook “Like” button or a Retweet button to share across your entire social network.
• Share buttons are usually placed right below the headline. One only needs to read the headline to have the motive to share.
• People share content to their network as an expression of themselves. In aggregate, your online sharing is a component of your online brand.
• Services such as Klout and Kred measure your online presence, but only via microblogging services such as Twitter and Facebook. They put little value of content creation outside of microblogging. For example, they won’t measure this blog post by itself. I will only receive credit for it if someone tweets it out with my Twitter handle, @dspark. If they tweet it out without it, and then someone retweets their tweet then the original tweeter gets the credit and score boost and I receive nothing even though I’m the creator of the content.
• Companies take these third-party ratings as a measure of Internet influence. One friend applied for a job that required him to have a Klout score of at least 30.
• High ratings on these services result in increased prestige but also free services and products. For example, because of my Klout score I received a free phone from Microsoft.

Accessing your audience’s audience

I recently returned from a social media conference in Las Vegas produced by Ragan Communications. One of the repeated themes said by both of the keynote speakers, Brian Solis and Chris Brogan, and many others was the fact that to enable social media you need to speak through your audience. The point of social media is to get access to your audience’s audience. It’s not really “social” media if you just put out a broadcast to your own followers and it just sits there and no one relays it. Therefore, the only way one can speak through their audience is to actually create something that people want to share.

And that comes back to my first point that people are selfish sharers. We share as an expression of ourselves. If a headline alone can speak enough to your personal brand then there’s no reason to actually consume it. If you just want to gain benefit from it, all you need to do is share the content.

Understanding these realities and think about the content you’re creating and the headlines you’re writing. Are you just broadcasting information about how great you are? Or are you putting something out there that would spark a conversation? Or is it something that people want to share that would reflect positively on them? Is it funny, insightful, controversial, informative, and/or speaks consistently to a specific aspect of your industry? If you want others to share your content, think about how you can make them look good, not you. Don’t worry, you’ll get the recognition through the sheer manifestation of their giving you access to their audience. But it can only happens if they share your content. And that’s only going to happen if you give them the opportunity to use your content for selfish reasons.

Creative Commons photo credit to Fire Monkey Fish and Britta Bohlinger.

How often have you heard that? All you need to do is create “valuable” content. It’s just that simple. Why haven’t you figured that out?

I find that answer, “Just create valuable content,” to be rather dismissive. No explanation is given as to what is valuable content or how one goes about creating it. It’s either a situation of they don’t know how to do it themselves or they’re not willing to open the kimono and show their secrets of creating great content.

Here’s what I believe it takes to create “valuable” content.

Your production skills need to be up to snuff

Whether you’re writing, producing video, or a podcast, your skills need to be up to snuff. This article is not going to make you a better writer, video producer, or podcaster. If you do have your technical skills in check, then read on.

Linkbaiting has a short shelf life

There are certain techniques for getting people to click on and share articles. There is no automated formula for creating “great content.” While there are subject lines that people fall for a lot, it doesn’t necessarily translate into valuable information underneath.

In essence, you can’t “fool” people into thinking you have valuable content. Don’t try to succeed with the idea that people are lemmings that’ll fall for any linkbaiting infographic or top ten list you create. When people get burned they don’t keep coming back.

Build an argument and show your work

People respect and recognize well thought out research and work. One way to create valuable content is to simply research your topic and show you’ve done your work. Quote people, cite sources, and create evidence for your argument.

Share experiential information

If you had something that happened to you, and only you, and the knowledge you gathered from it could help others, that can easily be made into valuable content. Tell your story. People will be able to relate to it.

Interview people with more knowledge than you have

You don’t know everything and no one expects you to, but by interviewing others you build relations and extend your visible knowledge through association with your interview subject.

Deliver on what people are asking for

When I’m prospecting for customers, the number one question I ask is “What is the number one reason you’re losing sales?” They’ll tell me because people don’t understand X technology or we lose out to competitor Y. When I get that answer I always ask, “Do you have a piece of collateral that explains X technology or a side-by-side comparison explaining how you’re different and better than competitor Y?” Almost always they say no and then give a range of excuses as to why they don’t have it. But if this is the number one reason you’re losing sales, it should be the number one piece of content you’re creating. There should be no excuses.

Deliver on what people aren’t asking for, but want/need

Henry Ford was once famously quoted, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

The argument is people don’t know what they want until you create it for them. No one knew they wanted an iPod, iPhone, or iPad until Steve Jobs created one for them.

I’m not suggesting you invent the car or the iPhone. But what you can do is not constantly copy others, but rather offer some new ideas and new suggestions. You’ll have to test the waters many times before you get people to jump on board.

Engage people in an industry debate

One of the best ways to create valuable content is to crowdsource answers to a contentious issue in your industry. Simply ask many people the same question, and then edit their answers. This will start the flow of an initial debate that will usually continue in the comments section of a blog post.

What’s your technique?

Do you have a method for creating “valuable” content? If so, can you share it with us? Let us know.

Creative Commons photo attribution Tracy Hunter.

Developing a social media strategy is a never ending moving target. Regardless, there are some standard things almost everyone does, such as getting a Twitter account and a Facebook presence. Many often think that’s it: “Our social media strategy? Well, we’re on Twitter and Facebook.”

For basics on getting started read, “Looking for a social media strategy? Try this one.”

We all know that’s not enough, and even if you do a lot more, any social media strategy can truly have an endless number of moving parts. There’s always something you’re not doing. Still, I believe there are there are a number of critical issues that are often skipped or not fully thought through.

What could you possibly be missing with your social media strategy? Here are some suggestions:

1. Blocking social services is moot

If your company still has a policy to block services such as YouTube and Facebook, it’s completely pointless. The penetration of smartphones in your office is very high, and any service you may be blocking via the corporate network can be access through a mobile phone. In addition, many of those phones have their own hotspots so people could use their mobile phone’s wifi to circumvent any service blocking you have. If you believe your employees are using these social services unproductively, then it’s your job to train them to do otherwise.

2. Simplify discovery of what’s most important

It’s not too hard to find us fall into the trap of link overload. So often sites try to point people to everything all at the same time. Nick Bilton of the NY Times did a really interesting study where he analyzed 98 of the most popular sites just to see how many links they have on a single page. The results were surprising. Huffington Post had 720 links on a single page. Other well known sites had more than 500 and 400 links on just one page.

It’s impossible to put all your social media efforts on everything. Some people will be more involved in Twitter, a discussion board, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Wherever you want people to spend their time, you need to direct them there with less links, in more obvious locations.

3. Turn blogging into a challenge among colleagues

Ever try to get an office of non-bloggers to all of a sudden start blogging? It never works. In the early days of blogging for a completely unknown site and bloggers you get little to no response. Really hard to keep people motivated to blog when it seems so futile.

For that reason, in the early days of a corporate blog you need to gamify blogging within your organization. Give out awards and badges for small accomplishments such as first person to get five retweets, or first to publish three blog posts in a week, or maybe first to get a comment from a non-coworker.

To avoid social media strategy failure, read “Will your company ignore your social media strategy?”

4. Time, time, time

Similar to the last item, web developer Tom Belknap advises you to build time into the strategy. “The biggest mistake people make in getting into social networking is the thought that, well, we post a few updates on Facebook and we’re all set,” said Belknap. Plan on your social strategy taking time.

5. Own a singular identity across all social services

A successful social media presence has a lot to do with having a consistent identity. Too often organizations don’t plan out what their social identity is going to be. We’re “CompanyX” on Twitter. “CompanyXCorp” on Facebook. Our web address is “CompanyX-Inc.com”.

All these slight differences which may seem simple to you, are massively confusing to everyone else.

Pick one name and use it across all the services you plan on using. Use KnowEm to see if the name you want is available on all the services you want to use.

6. Move existing content from private to public space

A successful blogger is able to spot private conversations that could and should be made public in a blog post. We have private conversations in emails, IMs, over the phone, and at professional networking events. Learning what should be made public is what will make blogging a lot easier. For more, read my article, “Blogging advice for people who ‘have no time to blog.’”

7. Engage your top customers/connectors A LOT.

You’re going to learn and gain the most from the people who are your biggest supporters. For that reason, you need to feed that fan pipeline by communicating with them a lot. “Ask them if they had to replace you as their supplier how would they go about finding someone else? What keywords would they enter into the search bar, what social media sources would they pay attention to and consider to be authoritative,” said Phil Lauterjung, Duct Tape Marketing Consultant.

8. Your offline social strategy

Your strongest social media connections will be initiated in real life. Most people have very poor follow up skills. For example, 1-in-20 people I hand my business card to actually follows up. Not only should you follow up with someone via email, but also try to connect with them via all necessary social connections such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn so that you can more seamlessly maintain a relationship, even if it is only ambient intimacy.

9. Integrate with all other communications efforts

When it comes to customer relations, it is sadly the norm that you’ll get completely different service depending on how you contact the organization. I’ve noticed that the more publicly I discuss an issue (e.g., complain on Twitter, write a blog post about a poor product experience) the better service I’ll get from someone high up in the company. Conversely, if I chose to pick up the phone, I’ll wait a long time and get some phone lackey that may or may not work directly for the company, and not have the authority to give me the service that I need. They may not care about my dissatisfaction. I have always seen disjointed customer experiences. The trick is to simply bring everyone to same table and train them simultaneously, no matter what medium the public uses to connect with you.

10. Your strategy should be to help others

Almost everyone who begins in social media comes at it from the marketing angle of “How can I get people to pay attention to me?” If you flip that poorly aimed philosophy to ask yourself, “How can my social media strategy allow others to express themselves and their own interest,” then you will have a lot more success with social media.

Even though you need a strategy. The best social media strategy I think is to just start. For more read, “No more, ‘What are we going to do in social media?’ meetings.”

What’s your advice that I didn’t consider?

This is far from a comprehensive list. I’d like to know your rarely considered, yet highly important, social media strategy advice. Let me and your fellow readers know in the comments.

Stock photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

“Build your network now, before you need it.”

You’ve heard that advice before. It’s pretty standard advice for anyone looking for a job. But given that everyone is a publisher through social media, our network and our channel are becoming one, explained Julien Smith, co-author of Trust Agents and blogger at InOverYourHead.net.

The definition of “friends” on our different social networks is heavily misleading. An individual really can’t handle more than 150 relationships and most of us have far more than that on Facebook and Twitter. These followers and our connections are both part of our network and our channel. If you’re interacting with people through social media, you have a channel, Smith said.

Like your network, you need to build your channel so you can use it in the future. Build it now when you don’t need it. “Controlling your future means controlling your channel,” said Smith.

To get people to pay attention to your channel, you need to build something for a large group of people so that it matters and that it becomes part of their existence. Are you creating something that matters to people, that is at the center of their existence. If you’re not, how can you be, asked Smith.

Smith goes on to tell a well-known story about the founder of a company called Soapier who reached out to the Reddit community to help his business get out of the red. While people come on to Reddit all the time and ask the community to do something for them, this instance was different because the Soapier founder was already an established member of the community. When he reached out for help, which he hadn’t done before, the genuineness was clear and that’s why the community responded positively in droves.

What the Hassel Map implies is that a focus group of 1 isn’t necessarily a bad thing, look – as Adrian notes –how Netflix got kicked off, but what’s really important is that once you’ve had that selfaware ‘a ha’ moment you need to action it and grow it out beyond the one person group and truly experience what your customers are going through…at every point of contact, and make sure that its living up your brand’s promise.

What also struck me when reading this is the notion that we can’t simply lump consumers into one bucket, we need to dive a little deeper and understand consumer types versus only consumers.  The argument here is that your customers are at different points in their, and your, life cycle and understanding this and adapting your offering to it can only lead to good things.  Mr. Slywotzky closes with a great thought that there’s a gap between what consumers buy and what they want.

Ok so what’s the net takeaway here…at the risk of repeating myself, the net takeaway is that you need to listen to your audience, consumer, customer, user, agent or whatever word you like to use, just find a way to listen to them and more importantly, put yourself in their shoes and see what they see when they interact with your brand.

So will you be Hassel Mapping anytime soon?  Drop us a note and let us know what you think.

It was announced today, http://selnd.com/qcySJG – that Walmart, bought One Riot, those with the “Killer Social Targeting Engine” (their words not mine), to better be able to connect with customers.  They speak of the intersection of social, mobile and retail being and how this will help give consumers what they want at any time.  Coming off of the idea that Social Business is the future, this acquisition by the world’s largest retailer, makes for some really interesting thinking.  Big Brands buying out development and research shops…is this what the future of Social business looks like or is it just a case of not being focused on the core business?
Drop up a note and let us know what you think.

This great article by Drew Neisser in @FastCompany (http://bit.ly/q0iOF2) should make you question whether your company is simply waving at social media as the blogs, articles, posts and tweets float by you, or are you truly committed to making your enterprise a social business.

The subject of the article, IBM’s Ethan McCarty, asserts that the time has come to move from social media to Social Business and that Social Business is the future even for companies, like IBM, who are aren’t even selling to consumers anymore. My takeaway…inherently you need to be committed to being social to have a successful social strategy. You can’t farm it out, you can’t set up a page and call it a social strategy. You, and your company as whole need to be engaged, and engaging, in a social dialogue, hey if IBM can do it….

So what do you think, are you a Social Business or a Social Bust? Drop us a note and let us know.

Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk’s (@garyvee) latest book The Thank You Economy opens by emphasizing the role of “individual voices” in the current economy. He offers an analogy of the days when the store owner had to be an intrinsic part of the small community, genuinely engaging with it, charming it, and keeping it happy. If a customer was unhappy, word of mouth would spread and harm the business. Gary flashes forward, summing that we became busier, more fragmented, less personal and our individual voices stopped mattering as much to businesses. Essentially, they could get away with not caring…

Not anymore.

The proliferation of social media has reverted us to a community where each individual’s voice matters considerably, where amplified negative experiences can mobilize people to topple governments and surely where the business owner needs to authentically care and should want to communicate with the individual for a lifetime of ROI. Businesses basing marketing decisions on such assumptions as “it worked in the past, therefore it will work now” are relics – they are throwbacks to the days when marketing was a top-down exercise in overwhelming airwaves, shutting out the competition and grabbing customer awareness. That Sony’s “next-generation” PSP console tragically still requires physical format games in our app-saturated marketplace is good example of a bloated company being unresponsive to the voices of its customers. Neil Young (@ncyoung), CEO of mobile game publisher ngmoco, lambasted Sony in an interview with IndustryGamers by declaring that the “NGP will be dead-on-arrival” because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what the customers truly want.

What behooves me is that it has never been easier to be acutely tuned in to the individual voices of the community, yet countless brands remain clueless. All you need are free tools like TweetDeck or Yahoo! Pipes. Like conversations in a cocktail party, the online brand conversations are happening whether or not you are in attendance. The question then becomes: do you want to be part of the conversation? Extending that idea, the question that must be asked is: why are businesses not listening to their customers? My advice to such businesses afraid of feedback: get over it! If you’ve got a bad product, come to terms with it. Then improve it, or scrap it and move on. Save your marketing dollars! Look to progressive companies like Zappos to help shape your own social media strategy.

Feedback shouldn’t be frightening. It should be taken in stride as constructive criticism to improve upon a product/service or refocus business priorities. In his book Personality Not Included, author Rohit Bhargava (@rohitbhargava), Founder of the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence team, advances the idea of creating an “insanely good product” that people actually want. His rationale is that if you’ve got a shoddy product, then no matter how much marketing dollars you throw at a campaign to shove marketing messages down the collective gullet of the consumers, they will spew it right back out at you, and likely tarnish your brand messages the process!  – simply search Twitter for #RogersMobile on any given day and you’ll be hard pressed not to find an expletive-laden rant from a dissatisfied customer.

Make no mistake about it: not listening to the individual voices in the community will hurt your business. Great products and services are unique, authentic, and most importantly, talkable; they sell themselves. To create great products and to keep customers satisfied requires integration into the daily conversations and the creation of a feedback loop. Companies that fail to do so will not make it past the next round of evolution.

Am I out in left-field here? Would love to hear back from you below:

Recently, noted journalist Matthew Ingram wrote a great article on Gigacom.com providing evidence for the value of a Facebook Fan and suggesting how much they are really worth.

In his research, Matthew found that in a report released by Syncapse in June 2010, they found that an average Facebook Fan is worth about $136.38. He also notes that for some very successful social marketers, the value could be higher and for some less successful companies, the value could be as low as zero.

According to the Syncapse survey and the article, they found:

“On average, fans spend an extra $71.84 they would not otherwise spend on products they describe themselves as fans of, compared to those who are not fans.”

“Fans are 28 percent more likely than non-fans to continue using a specific brand.”

“Fans are 41 percent more likely than non-fans to recommend a product they are a fan of to their friends.”

“It also seems that the value varies widely, as an average fan may participate with a brand ten times a year and will make one recommendation. But an active fan may participate thirty times and make ten recommendations. The impact this has on fan value is quite dramatic. In the case of Coca-Cola, the best case for fan value reaches $316.78 but is $137.84 for an average fan. In the worst case scenario, a fan is worth $0.”

The full article can be found at: http://gigaom.com/2010/06/11/how-much-is-a-facebook-fan-really-worth/

So, how does this translate to Intertainment products and services?

For Intertainment, Ortsbo (www.ortsbo.com) is probably the best example of our products integrating with Facebook and its Fan platform. As of the writing of this blog, Ortsbo has approximately 12,000 Fans, likely reaching over 1.2 million Facebook users (each having 100 friends on average).

Considering the Ortsbo Facebook Fan page is only slightly less than 3 months old, I humbly believe that Ortsbo has quickly reached a level that many brands are having a tough time achieving. As Ortsbo is international, we are attracting users from all over the world, so our reach to Facebook Fans is not as limited as it might be if we were a retailer or specific product offering.

Facebook is only 1 of 13 current platforms for Ortsbo, as it covers all the major social network platforms. Does this increase the value of the Fan that might have more than one social media connection and bring it above the average value that Syncapse found? I can’t really say, as we haven’t done the research, but I do believe that the more opportunity you provide for your customers to connect on their preferred network(s), the higher the potential for increased long term value.

On a separate note, I wanted to point an interesting and valuable blog that has been very generous in their ongoing support of the Company and I encourage you to take a look at www.thetradersdigest.blogspot.com I personally find the information very informative and hope that you will too.

Lucatch is not alone. Every day, 67 million people that aren’t running public companies are playing Zynga’s social games on Facebook. They’re currently the best model of how to make money with online content. Within the game you can pay real money to purchase virtual goods. Well now, Zynga, the $2 billion valuated company, is poised to make even more money. They’re offering pre-paid game cards at major retailers such as 7-Eleven, Best Buy, GameStop, and Target.

This is a brilliant move on so many fronts:

• What game do we buy your nephew? I don’t know what he likes and I don’t know what he has, but I do know that he likes to play Mafia Wars. I constantly get his invites on Facebook. Let’s just get him a gift card.
• Every year, an estimated 10% of gift cards go unused (source: TowerGroup consulting). That estimate was more than four years ago. Today I would guess it’s a lot higher. Have you noticed the racks and racks of gift cards now available at your super market? Here are some other amazing numbers from a Seattle Post Intelligence article from 2006.

Limited Brands Inc. said last week that unspent gift cards contributed $30.4 million to fourth-quarter revenue, boosting profit 4 cents a share. Best Buy Co. reported 4 cents in earnings last quarter from gift cards that it concluded would never be redeemed. Home Depot Inc. in June reported $43 million in pretax profit from cards sold before 2002.

• A great marketing ploy to the physical world. They’re now going to expose their brand to physical spaces and be seen. In total, Zynga will be physically distributing their game redeemable cards at more than 12,800 retail outlets. They couldn’t do this at all before with the model they had.

David Lucatch’s birthday is coming up in June. He may be a man that has everything, but he could use a few more tractors.