How many people do you follow on Twitter?

a) What’s Twitter?

b) None

c) I don’t know, about 20

d) More than about 20

If you answered a, you won’t be interested in this post. Stop reading and go do something useful with your afternoon. If you answered b, well done. I wish I was more like you, but I’m a social media marketing strategist and I’d look dangerously ignorant (or arrogant) if I wasn’t using Twitter. If you answered c, you’re like me, that ain’t so bad, but you still need to get a life. If you answered d, you were either teased a lot in high school and are trying to compensate somehow, or you’re a politician. Either way, you’re being silly.

As a communication tool, Twitter is next to useless, as my friend Kate points out quite succinctly. No one really gives a flying fuck about what you are doing every second of the day, not even your mum. Tell your mum what Twitter is, explain the stupid shit you talk about and then enquire politely if she’d be interested in following you. She won’t. She’ll tell you you’re stupid. Go home from work this afternoon and tell your girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/wife/partner/dog/teddy bear/flatmate/secret friend/pet rock as much about your day as you told the 200 random nobodys who follow you on Twitter and they’ll be reaching for the TV remote before you can say “mmm, morning coffee, how good is caffeine” or “yay, friday… finishing up report for accounts dept. then I’m outta here, woo-hoo”.

Twitter is a stupid, useless, annoying fad and I wish it would die, BUT. As a zeitgeist of brand sentiment - as a snapshot of the dialogue taking place around your brand, Twitter Search is the greatest thing since Google Trends. It is a direct line into the mundane, mind-numbing every-day subconscious of your customers. Corporations and Politicians should forget about trying to use it to communicate - you can’t build lasting, meaningful relationships with Twitter, but you can use it to tap into the bubbling brook that feeds the underground water table of social conversation (at least at the tech-savvy, early-adopter end of town).

If only it was this good…

Kirrihill Wines sent me some bottles of vino a couple of weeks ago as part of their wine for bloggers program. I blogged about the wine from a social media marketing perspective a couple of times and a lot of people read with interest. In fact, as is the nature of the medium, word spread around the world. A few US wine critics even took notice.

Which is lovely, but the feedback from most comments was “that’s great Matt, nice use of social media marketing, but what did you think of the wine?”

I figured it was about time I told you. In fact, it was pretty good. I sampled half a dozen bottles with friends and gave half a dozen away to co-workers who expressed interest. I wanted to wait a couple of weeks before I wrote anything about the wine so I was working from my lasting impressions, rather than my immediate impressions.

The results are as follows:

• After two weeks I could not remember the exact name of the winery that had sent me the dozen bottles. I thought it was Kirrihill Wine and had to go back and change the title of the blog post when I visited their website just then and realised it was Kirrihill Wines. Not a big deal, but, interesting.
• Of the 10 people in this office who saw the bottles on my desk, the six who professed to be the most interested in wine were given a bottle. None of them can remember the name on the label, although two knew it started with a K and one thought it was Kirribilli. So, including me, that’s 0/11 brand recall after two weeks. They all thought the wine was OK and said that if they saw it in a bottle shop they’d consider buying it again, but none were raving about it. Ouch.
• I sampled the following wines:
  • Chardonnay Viognier
  • Riesling Pinot Gris
  • Sémillon Sauvignon Blanc
  • Garnacha Rosé
  • Cabernet Merlot
  • Shiraz Viognier
  • Tempranillo Garnacha
• I was actually really looking forward to trying the Riesling Pinot Gris and went to the trouble of having a dinner party and cooking a thai-style bbq prawn and macadamia nut salad to match the wine, and it was OK, but it didn’t really stand up against a few of my other favourite mid-range rieslings from Petaluma and Pewsey Vale.
• The Tempranillo Garnacha was fantastic and unusual. I would buy it again. In fact, I would actively seek it out in a bottle shop. If I could remember the name. It would be nice if their website mentioned more about it because it’s such an unusual variety.
• The rest of the range was OK, but to be honest, I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy them again.
• I loved the packaging.

I’ll drop Kirrihill a line in the next few weeks and do a more in-depth interview about how the campaign went because it’s certainly generated some buzz, but for now, those are my thoughts as a wine drinker.

Oh, by the way, if you’re a wine fan and haven’t checked out Project Vino, make sure you do. It’s an online Australian wine community and it’s brilliant.

Take this bit of real-life dialogue which was recently published online:

“I want to add my voice to the growing chorus of Australians who realise that the big giant Telco in the Sky (Telstra) really does suck, have really been the cause of Australia’s useless position in the world telecommunication market place and are extraordinarily guilty of putting NOTHING in front of their own profit and monopoly for too long. And it is all of us that pay the price of that selfishness.”

If you worked in Telstra’s marketing department you’d probably want to respond, but think about how different your reply would be if you knew the comment came from:

• Sol Trujilo
• The Editor of The Financial Review
• A Telstra Call Centre Employee
• A Telstra Customer with a blog about telecommunications that was read by 2,000,000 subscribers every day
• A Twitter feed from a mobile phone user with 2,000 followers and 2,000 Facebook Friends
• An Optus Media Release
• Me
• My kid sister who has no friends, but has just discovered Twitter
• A Maverick Politician

There are billions of coversations happening online. How are you going to sort the wheat from the chaff?

Imagine if you knew exactly what your customers were thinking. Imagine if you knew EXACTLY what they wanted. Imagine if you could switch your TV to a channel which showed non-stop, live coverage of your customers thoughts about your brand, their concerns and their ideas on how you could do things better. Imagine if it was free and, as a company, you were encouraged to participate in the conversation. Sound satisfying?

Get Satisfaction is a community that helps companies engage their customers in dialogue. The concept is that members of the public with an idea can share their thoughts and then employees can jump online and show that your company is listening – it could be a rep from your corporate affairs department, or a guy from the mail room – it doesn’t matter. 6,873 organisations have joined the site, including some big names like Adobe, Apple, BBC and Dell. It’s early days yet, but the theory goes that rather than calling a customer support line and getting an average answer, customers can leave a comment on this website and get exactly the answer they want from the right department in a day or so. It’s a completely new approach to customer service, but it appears to be working.

• Books are souvenirs that hold ideas
• If it’s so dangerous to have your ipod on during takeoff and landing, how come you’re allowed to have it with you on the plane at all? Does all the scolding actually increase safety? How?
• Being noticed is not the same as being remarkable. Running down the street naked will get you noticed, but it won’t accomplish much.
• Permission is like dating. You don’t start by asking for the sale at first impression. You earn the right, over time, bit by bit.
• Given the choice between amazing, guaranteed service with a one day wait or interminable waits on hold with people who can’t really help you right now… well, the choice is pretty easy.
• Maybe you can’t make money doing what you love
• Attract people in trouble–>Help solve their problems–>Build your reputation–>Sales happen.

This list of social media includes the biggest and most popular social networks, websites, tools and platforms. I haven’t tried to be comprehensive, but if you want to start investing time monitoring conversations about your brand online, this is your best starting point.

Popular Social Networks

• Facebook — The world’s most popular social networking site is an online directory that connects people (and companies) through social networks and allows them to share photos and communicate with each other.
• MySpace — An online community that lets you meet your friends’ friends, write messages, share photos, publish music and chat. Once the dominant player, now losing ground to Facebook. Almost every band in the world has a MySpace profile.
• LinkedIn — LinkedIn is an online network of more than 25 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries.
• Bebo — Allows users to share photos with music, and blogs, and draw on members’ White Boards. Not as popular in Australia as in the northern hemisphere.
• Ning — An online service to create your own social network.

Blog Resources

• Twitter — A ‘micro-blogging service’ which allows people to share short text messages (up to 140 charactersd) with anyone who chooses to follow them.
• Google Blog Search — Use Google’s technology to search blogs.
• Technorati — Real-time search for user-generated media (including weblogs) by tag or keyword. Also provides popularity indexes.
  
• Feedburner — A blog distribution company.
• Blog Catalog — A social community for bloggers and one of the largest blog directories on the Internet.

Multimedia

• YouTube — The web’s largets collection of videos. Users can view, upload and comment.
• Flickr — The world’s biggest photo sharing tool.
• Photobucket — Photobucket is the most popular site on the Internet for uploading, sharing, linking and finding photos, videos, and graphics.
• Vimeo — Vimeo is a thriving community of people who love to make and share video.
• Second Life — A virtual, interactive online world.

Forums

• Google Groups — A collection of Forums hosted by Google
• Yahoo! Groups — A collection of Forums hosted by Yahoo!

Information Resources

• Wikipedia — A giant online encyclopedia that anyone can edit or contribute to.
• Yahoo Answers — Allows users to post questions and answers on any topic.

Customer Service

• Get Satisfaction — Get Satisfaction is a place where people can get the most from the products they use, and where companies are encouraged to get real with their customers

Social Bookmarking

• Delicious — Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.
• Stumble Upon — StumbleUpon integrates peer-to-peer and social networking principles with one-click blogging to create an emergent content referral system.
• Digg — Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web.

1. Make your customer service truly remarkable. No, seriously, you don’t understand. Not good. Not brilliant: remarkable.
2. Find time to get active in your industry association. Offer to be secretary and do an amazing job. Do extra stuff that no one wants to do and do it really well. You’ll be a captain of industry in six months.
3. Read everything you can get your hands on. Whether you are the head of marketing for Coke or an Iranian potato farmer, right now, this very second, there are 100 insightful people blogging about ways you can grow your business and 100 book titles on Amazon which you’ll be recommending to your friends as ‘must-reads’ in 12 months time. Get an RSS reader and get to work 15 minutes early to read blogs. There are new distribution channels and opportunities popping up all the time, but you won’t know about them if you don’t read.
4. Start a blog that establishes you as an expert in your area of expertise and publish something useful EVERY day. If you can’t write, draw. If you can’t draw, make videos. If you haven’t got a video camera, make audio recordings. If you’re a deaf, blind mute that’s no excuse - you and I both know that Helen Keller would have been the world’s most prolific blogger if she was alive today. Stop whinging. Get over it. Start blogging.
5. Stop watching fucking Lost.
6. Hire someone to do something that is taking up too much of your time. The more time you have to think about marketing your business, the better off the business will be. Be brave. Take a risk. You’re smart. It’s the old adage — work ON the business, not IN the business. It will pay off now more than ever. Your competitors will be cutting back and you’ll be investing in idea capital. If you work in a large corporation and the powers that be won’t spend a cent hiring someone new in this current economic climate, convince your boss it’s a good idea by taking a big pay cut now in return for a big bonus when your work pays off. If you don’t believe in yourself enough to do that, what the f–k are you doing?
7. Engage your customers properly, start conversations with them online and offline (you know, like, when they’re in your store) and do it because you want to, not because it’s the latest fad. Smile like you mean it.
8. Create partnerships and do people favours. If you’re a wedding photographer, set up a deal with a local catering firm to send each other work. If you are a local catering firm, find a boutique local winery and help them set up a restaurant in the vineyard on Sunday afternoons. If you’re a boutique local winery start sending lots of free wine to local tour operators. If you’re a local tour operator, get a local wedding photographer to take a professional photo of everyone at the end of the tour and email it to them with a thank you note. What goes around, comes around.
9. Ask everyone in your company what the best thing about your company is and make it better. Ask everyone in your company what the worst thing about your company is and fix it.
10. Make your company a great place to work, give your employees free lunch, love them, not literally, and they will tell all their Facebook friends how amazing you are and their friends will tell their friends. If you want to find people to blog about your product, the guy in the mail room, the girl behind the reception desk and the lady with the mop are the greatest brand evangelists you’re ever going to find. Henry Ford paid all his workers double the award wage. Guess what they did with all their extra money? Bought cars. Think about that.

For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.

A frustrated journalist wrote that 30 years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His name was Ernest Hemmingway.

You need at least four bits for a story: a protagonist, a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning sets the protagonist on a journey, the middle heightens the tension and the end moves you because someone’s life has changed. It doesn’t matter how long the story is, it will move you if it has those four bits.

Unless an ad has a story, it’s never going to move you.

TV advertising is so good because the master story-tellers of the last half century — the ones who put those four bits together better than anyone else — worked in TV advertising — they don’t work in ‘digital’, yet. You can bet that if Shakespeare or Hemmingway were alive in 2007 they would have been making Budweiser commercials for the SuperBowl and John West videos for YouTube. Give it another half century and the master story tellers will be using another medium, it will be digital — in that ones and zeroes will convey the information — but we will almost certainly be calling it something different.

I can’t wait to see what it looks like.

I made a deal with Kirrihill Wines a week or so ago.

We didn’t sign any contracts or even shake hands. I haven’t met anyone from the company, I’ve never been to see their grapes growing, in fact I haven’t even been to the region.

The deal we’ve made isn’t written down on paper, in fact it hasn’t even been spoken about. What we have is a social media marketing pact. They’ve engaged me in an online dialogue and we’ve made an exchange.

The exchange was as follows:

• As an ‘influencer’ I get: a dozen bottles of wine
• As a wine manufacturer they get: a conversation

Zakazukha Zoo isn’t a blog about wine. I’m not an influential wine critic. While I’m under no obligation to blog about their product, if I like it, statistics show that the chance of me recommending it to my friends is greater than 50%. They are presuming I will at least like the wine and they are hoping I will love it. They have confidence in their product and as someone with some social media reach, they think my dialogue is worth investing in.

Here’s why…

The reason they chose to send me 12 bottles, as opposed to one bottle, or a gift voucher, or a nice comment on my blog, is because the following information is public knowledge about my reach as an influencer:

• I have a blog which is regularly read by at least 30 people (they don’t know the actual stats, but that’s the number of regular commenters)
• I blog mostly about social media, Google and Facebook, but I also mention wine from time to time and I have blogged specifically about Kirrihill Wine.
• I have 177 friends on Facebook
• I have 34 Twitter followers
• I have 30 connections on LinkedIn

I’m going to presume they have this information stored in a database somewhere and while I’m clearly not James Halliday, I’m also not a hermit. I’m not a hugely powerful wine influencer, but I’m someone they think would be handy to have on their side. In their database I will probably look something like this:

• Name: Matt Granfield
• Property: http://www.e-cbd.com/zakazukhazoo/
• Industry Authority Score: 1/10 (I have very little influence in the wine industry)
• Social Authority: 6/10 (My Facebook and LinkedIn connections are bang on the median, but I have a larger blog following than your average Australian)
• Industry Reach: 0 (I have no obvious wine industry connections)
• Social Reach: 271 (the total number of social media connections I have)

If I like the wine, their stats will tell them that following is likely to happen:

• I will buy 3 bottles each year for the next five years
• Based on my social authority, I will influence 5% of my social reach into buying one bottle each
• Based on my industry authority, I will influence 5% of my industry reach into buying one bottle each

So, presuming the average price of a bottle of wine is $15, and they’ve already sent me 12 of them, you can use the following equation to figure out the value (ROI) of the social media pact I’ve made with Kirrihill:

ROI = 3 x 5 x $15 + 271 x 5 ÷ 100 x $15  + 0 x 5 ÷ 100 x $15 - $15 x 12

ROI = $248.25

So, Kirrihill Wines will make about $248.25 from me this year. That’s not too bad really. Obviously the figures I’ve used are examples, but they’re probably not far off the mark. I’ll report back in 12 months time and let you know if I’m right!

P.S. It’s good to see Kirrihill Wines have taken my advice and put a tear-off tag on the back of their bottles so you can remember what wine you drank. I’m claiming full credit for that one, even if I find out the labels were printed before I mentioned it.

P.P.S I love the packaging, and it’s nice to see they are launching a range of wines called ‘companions’ with a social media marketing campaign. Bloody marvellous work and full credit to Network PR.

Someone asked me for a definition of social media marketing this morning. I had to pause for a second, but eventually came up with this:

“Social media marketing is engaging people in online dialogue and using those conversations to exchange value.”

I’m going to run with that for now. I haven’t seen a consensus on the definition anywhere else.

Next up: elevator pitch.