I would like to thank all of you who participated in my Google Plus Attitude and Usage Survey. I received 447 responses and I think the data provides a useful snapshot of user sentiment. Now, a lot has happened in the week since I posted the survey. The day I made they survey public was the same day of Google’s rollout of official business pages. Yesterday, they opened they opened their API to third party social media management systems.  Hopefully, these developments don’t make the results too stale.

Google Plus Attitude and Usage Survey Results

The survey was a short, simple, eight question form aimed at finding out who’s on there, what they feel about the service, whether business pages will enhance the experience, and whether they plan on using the platform more in the future.  Again, thank you to those who participated.  Here are the results:

There appears to be a wide range of sentiment, but overall, many seem ready to keep with their Google Plus efforts.  Ultimately this is less about social networking and more to do with strategy.  Google Plus add a layer of social measurement within their page rank ecosystem.  So if you’re an online publisher, it’s less about engagement and conversation and more about that little +1 button.  It really doesn’t matter what you think about Google Plus.  Businesses especially may have to embrace the platform if they hope to maintain page rank.  I’m starting to like it better already.  So what do you think of the survey results?  Are they what you expected?

Speaking at IMS09 - Photo courtesy Steve Garfield

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to speak at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Foxborough, Massachusetts.  (video of the presentation at the end of this post)   It was back in August, in a cramped, dimly lit Jimmy Seas restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard where Justin Levy and Nick Saber first approached me about presenting at #IMS09.  Over generous pans of of pasta, we shared stories and ideas about social media, traditional media, marketing and where all of those things intersect.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been asked to speak publicly about my perch at the intersection of old and new media, but each time forces me out of my comfort zone.  As a network news cameraman, I’m far more accustomed to leaving the public speaking to the folks in my viewfinder.  Telling cocktail party stories about my life as a news camerman – flying in Chinooks over Afghanistan,  rocket attacks in Baghdad, or traveling on Air Force One – is great among friends.  But  my challenge was to create value for the few hundred marketing professionals who would be listening to the story of a news cameraman cum early adopter of social media.  It’s flattering to be asked to speak, but unless you deliver valuable, useful information to business professionals, you’re wasting their time.   So here’s the condensed version.

OVERVIEW

Organizations often cringe at the notion of employees speaking openly about the company on social networks. Many regulate, or downright ban the practice. The risks have been well established, and there are plenty of horror stories about workers going off-reservation online. But the rewards are abundant if companies provide guidelines and encourage those passionate about social media. Who are your best brand ambassadors? Believe it or not, empowering rank and file staff to engage the social web can often result in more promise than peril.  Conversely there are scant rewards for ham-fisted, clumsy, corporate social media efforts.  As Comcast’s Frank Eliason aptly put it at the Blog World Expo this past week

“Don’t force people into this social space if it’s not a natural fit for them.”

@comcastcares

I’m reminded of a story told to me by a PR person I had worked with on a shoot.  A reporter from a major national daily newspaper was told to produce a pre-determined number of Tweets per day and those Twitter posts would be “graded”.  Really???  Wow, talk about sucking the oxygen out of the experience.  We’ve got to do better than that.

DATA

A  Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law study, entitled “Social Media: Embracing the Opportunities, Averting the Risks”, surveyed over 400 marketing, HR, and management executives on their attitudes toward social media.  Some key data points:

• 73% increase in US use of social media (Neilsen)
• just over half of those surveyed believe social media is bad for productivity
• nearly half believe social media use can damage brand reputation
• 8 out of 10 believe social media, as corporate communications, can build relationships with customers and build brand reputation

OBJECTIVE

By sharing my story with the marketing professionals in attendance,  I hoped to demonstrate that empowering rank and file employees of an organization can be a useful, organic extension of a firm’s marketing and PR efforts. I wanted to show that it isn’t necessarily or SOLELY – the communications or marketing director, or the CEO who might be your best brand ambassador. 

Interestingly,  two presentations that preceded me helped frame and define my journey into social media.  Paul Gillin outlined some dismal trends in traditional media consumption in his talk entitled “World Without Media: What Will Fill the Void?”.  

He was followed by new media video visionary Steve Garfield who held a APEC sized photo-op, empowering the audience  with thier video cameras to become legions of content creators.    

It’s clear that the world of mainstream media will never be the same.  Also clear, is that I’m still figuring out how my skills mesh with that emerging landscape.  Legacy media needs to meet people where they are and engage them in the way they consume and produce media.

Below is the video of my presentation in it’s entirety. So assembled readers, did I deliver what I set out to achieve? And if you were at IMS09, did I meet your expectations? (Audio is thin, so you’ll have to strain a bit to hear it)

Greg Cangialosi over at The Trend Junkie has tagged me with the “measurement” meme in a post entitled “Metrics, Measurement, and Social Media”. In the same week author, entrepreneur and marketing strategist Geoff Livingston included me in a “DC Area’s Top 12 Social Media, Marketing, and PR blogs” list. So I’m scratching my head here. I’m a cameraman for a major network news organization, right? I’m not a marketer… or am I?

In my journey with social media, my blogging, and use of platforms like Twitter and Facebook, I’ve discovered that I’ve become somewhat of a personal micro-media brand. I’ve been able to measure the tangible results of my personal brand building in terms of hard data, and in terms of harder to measure, yet deeply enriching professional and personal connections. The hard data is readily available and demonstrates that listening to the very smart people in this space, and engaging them in meaningful conversation goes a long way in building your brand. By hard data, I’m talking about Google search ranking and analytics, Technorati ranking/authority, blog traffic data, and friends in my circle of influence on various social networking platforms.

That more difficult to define measure of my social media involvement is how it’s enabled me to connect with incredibly smart, visionary, driven entrepreneurs. With fourteen hundred Twitter friends, I have a knowledge base of deeply engaged, early adopters drawn from the ranks of venture capital, PR, marketing, social and traditional media, web strategy, and technology. Social media enabled CC Chapman to connect me to my first professional speaking engagement and meet Geoff Livingston and Valeria Maltoni. People like David Eckoff of Turner Broadcasting cite me as a case study of how to use social media on panels at Streaming Media West. I use Facebook to organize events and affinity groups. Recently, I hosted a breakfast for Seesmic CEO, Loic Lemeur here in Washington, DC. In short, I’ve become relevant in this space. None of this would have been possible without my deep engagement in social media. I see TREMENDOUS value in all of that.

Talking Twitter to marketers, Photo courtesy of CC Chapman

Twitter is my most front-facing social media tool. I post frequently every day, much of it on assignment for NBC News. People tell me they find this behind-the-scenes look into the news fascinating. Many have told me that I put a human face on “the media” that they would otherwise have no real connection with. So I think there is a real value here in being a bridge between the Facebook generation and traditional media. Those type of fuzzy metrics, while interesting, aren’t enough for corporations. They want ROI – and whether you define the “I” as “investment” or as Valeria Maltoni prefers “involvement” – a social media effort should produce measurable results. So it’s not enough that I’m the “crazy uncle” running around NBC evangelizing shiny new social media platforms. Big companies, like my current employer, want real definable results.

Kami Huyse points out that you should begin any social media effort with well defined relational objectives.

One of the things I will stress is the importance of having well-defined objectives. By definition, objectives have to be measurable, “What would you like to see happen and by when as a results of engaging in social media?”- Kami Huyse

John Bell, of Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence practice, helps us further define some of the nuance of social media measurement, exploring the distinction between influence, authority, engagement, and impact.

So, dear readers, how do you measure your social media activity, or in fact, do you measure at all? How are you defining reach, influence, and impact? Frankly, I’m still much of a noob at all of this. At the end of the day, at the core of my being, I’m just a cameraman..right?

A few weeks ago CC Chapman connected me with DC area author, marketing strategist, and entrepreneur, Geoff Livingston. Somehow these two got it in their heads that I’d be a great speaker at the “New Media Marketing Day – The Era of Conversation” session that the DMAW is hosting. So I’ve got some ideas about discussing personal branding, avoiding missteps when using social media, video as conversation agent – and I plan on referencing the usual suspects: Robert Scoble, Connie Reece, Chris Brogan, and Chris Heuer to tee off some “big ideas”. I just want to make sure I’m not missing any important thoughts. Here’s my track from the DMAW website:

Track 1 – Sponsored by Executive Biz
New Media Basics: Hammers brass tacks into some of the more popular social media tactics. Forget the exotic. We’re talking about the everyday activity your organization needs right now to enjoy immediate success in the emerging social media/web 2.0 elements.
from DMAW website

This is where I need YOUR HELP. Do YOU think I’m using social media successfully? If so, why? How can big companies better use social media? What are important points that I should draw from our collective experience in social media? As always, your comments here MAKE this blog. I’m looking forward to your insights! Thanks.