Social Media and Your Reputation

Just in case you were wondering: those funky party pictures (remember? the BBQ last summer with loads of beer!? - Yeah - THAT party....) of you that your neighbor published on Facebook could be the reason the headhunter isn't calling you back. Hmmm.... maybe it's time to start paying a bit more attention to your digital reputation? I just read a report titled "Dealing with your Digital Dirt" (on Execunet.com) and immediately did a search on myself on dogpile.com . You might want to do a search yourself, just to find out what kind of things total strangers can find out about you.

B2C2C

Quote from a T-Mobile newsletter to me: "Sehr geehrte Frau Spaltmann, empfehlen Sie T-Mobile Ihren Freunden und sichern Sie sich als Dankeschön Ihre Top-Prämie aus über 30 Prämien. Zusätzlich wartet auf Sie die Chance, ein New Beetle Cabrio oder einen von 10 Plasma Fernsehern zu gewinnen!* "

It's not that recruiting new customers for a business through recommendations from existing customers is something new, what is new is the name for it: B2C2C (business to consumer to consumer and so on and so on.)

I am an avid reader of the daily Early-to-Rise subscription newsletter (www.earlytorise.com) and today's issue covers just this topic, recruiting new customers through word-of-mouth advertising, including a good breakdown on Andy Sernovitz's structured, professional method on the tools you can use to influence consumer decisions through word-of-mouth-marketing. (See the newsletter here: http://www.earlytorise.com/2008/01/18/use-your-mouth.html#more-447 ).

A few moments after reading this article, I analyzed my in-box from this morning: I have the above mentioned email from T-Mobile, an invitation from one of my favorite boutiques to come to a "valued member's only" sale with the option of forwarding this special invitation to a friend; an invitation to register for a conference where I can sign-up for myself and for a colleague....

Have you considered how you can incorporate word-of-mouth recommendations in your marketing communications portfolio?

PS: My own email newsletter has a "Forward to a Friend" button on it since its inception!

Thinking about social media/online communities and "real" people

I was talking to someone recently about online communities - social webbing stuff, and was surprised to find out that although there are still a lot of people that don't do Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, etc. for whatever reason, (and there are still many folks that just downright don't want to), but also because I found out that there are many people that don't know "how" to (and I am speaking of tech-saavy folks here). This response sparked my interest, so I did a bit of informal market research and asked around ... I wanted to hear who "did" social webbing, and if not, why not.
It seems the main issue most folks I asked have, is: "why should I?". Like: Why should I write a blog? or: "Why should I want to put up a list of my favorite music onto a social website?" or: "Who could be interested what I have to say about that?", or: "Why would I want to put up pictures of my hike with my dog for total strangers to see?" etc.etc. There were quite a few more questions like that, but this kind of sums it up.
The other subject that came up during these discussions were: "doesn't that take up a lot of time?"; and comments like: "If my staff were doing this stuff during work hours, we'd never get anything done"; and some tough things to consider, like: "what if what I post there backfires on me/my company? What happens then?"
These questions certainly have their legitimacy. There are plenty more considerations that need to be given their due respect as well: like what if you are on Facebook and your worst performing staff member wants to hook up with you "as a friend" and give you, the boss, a gold star for being such a "cool friend". Egad!! Many of these thoughts would probably not merit a sweat for the kids that use these social webbing sites today, geezz - they grew up with the Internet and they know how these things work - but that is a totally different story if we're talking about people in business using these tools - especially in an environment that is not familiar with the culture of social webbing platforms.
I will follow the development of how these near-Best-Agers that I talked to, decide to handle this: on the one hand, they want to join in on the fun - on the other, they are wary of the consequences their joining in on the fun could have on them.