This is most of the commencement speech I gave to the Art Institute of Portland class of 2009. I hope that as some of the graduates from my alma madder approach their big day tomorrow, that they can find some inspiration from my experiences. More importantly, I hope it helps you fully realize your own dreams.

From the archives.

To the class of 2009, congratulations on your achievement. Proud parents and families, thank you for letting me be a part of your special occasion.

It wasn’t all that long ago that I was sitting in your position. I remember it being a mixture of elation, and stomach-grasping terror. Does that sound about right?

Read the rest at: http://www.caffelli.com/congrats-grads/#more-303

Social media has really been the hot topic this past year between my clients and my agency—there is a good chance that those of you reading this are still chomping at the bit to figure out how social media can make your weekly PowerPoint status-slide sing.

A couple of years ago, it seemed that I couldn’t get a marketing manager to even fathom the idea that Facebook had any amount of relevance to their target audiences. All things social media, even as recent as a couple of months ago, were vocalized to me as fringe and fleeting fads that the youth and their hippity-hop cultures waste-away on—not what sophisticated business people spend time reading.

What seems to really be the tipping-point [sorry to steal a Gladwell buzz-word] in the trajectory of conservative clients accepting the magnitude of social media, is the promised impact social media can have on Business-to-Business relationships. Simply put, from an agency perspective, the golden medallion for this year is to position yourself as the conduit for B2B relationships on social networks.  For those of you that are client-side, the bullet point that shows an increase in B2B relationships and their retention are sure to put you above the rest come review season.

But before you go making promises that will give you self-induced IBS, here are a simple list of positioning rules that should keep you in line—consider it my gift to you, towards a successful and rebounding 2010.

1. Define your/your-client objectives by how they impact the business relationship to other businesses. Do not kid yourself into thinking that simply shooting towards fan-base count will do anything for you in the long run. The C-suite doesn’t give a damn about your fans, tweets, check-in’s or followers. More often than not B2B social media is more about relationship management while also achieving business success—so position yourself to also be successful by identifying that relationship as your main objective.‘My company needs to enable partners to reach their customers through our social media efforts in order to shorten the sales cycle.’
2. Identify what pain points your business-partner needs to solve that are influence, awareness, sales, or quality based. By identifying what specific point we desire to remedy or strengthen, we can set our creatives up for success when reaching the desired audience. Again, stay away from awareness for awareness’s sake—through friend acquisition. There needs to be a business reason to engage an audience.‘Our partners have had great product performance reviews, however their product isn’t moving. We need to enable our partner to better-know their customer-base.’ A pain-point like the one above give us something to dig-into. In a scenario like this we can develop messaging, incentives and drive loyalty that will take a product to market easier, and shortening a sales-cycle, by engaging customers earlier in the design process. This statement screams for customers to vote colors, preferences, features, etc—let them buy in early, that is what this is all about.
3. Redefine your goals with decision-makers. Glass or a whiteboard happens to be my favorite surface to work on, and there is no better time to do it than when figuring out B2B social media strategy. Insist that you need your client—or peers if you are client-side—in the room with you working through numbers and projections to achieve their stated business goals. Simply put you need your top social media minds re-aligning click-through-rates, followers, cost-of-acquisitions for followers and cost-of-interaction for each and every goal. The C-suite might say 10,000 votes on features outlined in point-#2 are just too few—this is where social marketers show value, by white-boarding the math that will produce their stated goals and talking real business.In my opinion, the majority of failed campaigns on social networks, are failures because the goals were canonized by un-savvy executives muscling their only-strong-on-their-blog social media experts. Show your value by reaching a business decision collaboratively—don’t enter into a poor business engagement.

There has been an overwhelming amount of interest with regards to my post on Return on Interaction being the new ROI. Thank you all for your emails, and Tweets! With that said I felt it was only right to really set-the-stage about social media and a simple set of rules on how to start formulating your strategy. Think of this article as the technique section of social media from which you can start thinking about potential and desired ROI.

Below is a slide from my social media presentation to NASA.

Social Network Proper Usage

‘Much like toilet paper, proper usage is important….it keeps us out of messy situations.’ If we cannot first start thinking of the things that social networks are and are not for, we cannot find success, nor can we set goals and achieve a risk appropriate ROI in the CURRENT landscape of social media. So here are a two rules to live by.

1. Chinese Food and Hamburgers Before you do anything on a social network, consider what interaction you want to have with a potential customer. But make sure that it is an interaction that is social network appropriate.

My favorite analogy for driving this point home revolves around the weird recurrence of hamburgers on Chinese restaurant menus. Much like a Chinese restaurant, when a social network displays content that does not belong, the likelihood that a customer will engage on that out-of-place content diminishes greatly. So when you are at a Chinese restaurant, you are most likely in the mood to eat Chinese food. You are NOT there to eat the hamburger. And speaking from experience, if the user does in fact order the burger, they WILL be disappointed!

So let’s bring this back to the world of social media. When patrons of social networks are sitting there compulsively clicking ‘refresh’ on their browser because they want to know what their friends are up to on Mob Wars, they are not looking to ‘add to cart’ a product. They are looking for the Chinese food of their experience. They are looking to fan, friend, or follow. Remember that….fan, friend, follow.

2. Social Content vs Real Content So the first step is done. You have convinced yourself and your peers not to post inappropriate an non-actionable content on your social media presence. The second rule to apply to your strategy is to distinguish what voice your content is in. Simply put there are two categories for your content: Social and Real.

Real content is defined as content you can use to sell a product without getting sued. That desk on Ikea’s website costs $259 and has the dimensions of blah-x-blah. This ‘real’ information is the stuff that is factual and for a lack of better terms, real.

Social content is defined as content that is conversational and sharable in nature. It has less to do with the specifications of something and more to do with the emotive and incentive based ideas behind a product.

Still confused? Type in ‘sham wow’ on both Google.com and Facebook.com search fields. You should see the difference between product specs and product sentiments.

Conclusion So next time you are facing the ROI talk, first step back and ask yourself two questions. Am I communicating with social network appropriate offerings? And am I operating in a content bucket that is easily digestible on a social network?

List-erine

I’m not going to get into the ‘top ways’ to use Twitter lists. That topic is already the new hot thing to write about and it all sounds the same.

Simply put Twitter lists are great for organizations trying to promote their outreach efforts, but lacking for the ‘social’ element Twitter hoped to accomplish. It chirps for Tweeps to befriend a list of friends, cooler than their own. Anecdotal thought: I will reference Gore, a company that has built itself on not having a group larger than 150 people for anything. They believe that anything beyond 150 people kills its effectiveness…keep this in mind for your communication pool.

Does this remind anyone of the check boxes that subscribe you to mass amounts of email lists when registering with various Websites on the internet? Anyways, for your humor I now unveil List-erine!

Some very interesting thoughts from Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google. My takeaways were keep investing in social media and user generated content [duh] and pick up a Chinese phrase book.

The UFC has done a pretty great job of utilizing Dana White, the president of the organization, for all things promotions and personality. Dana White IS mixed martial arts to many fans, in that he embodies a straight-shooter attitude that so many fans are drawn to. On top of being good in front of the camera, and having an innate ability to handle media frenzies, White also can be listed as an early adopter for integrating social media into the core structure of his organization.

As far as Twitter celebrities go, White has the ratios, a constant stream of posts, and a personality that is enjoyable to follow. 690k Twitter followers is nothing to shake a stick at! Dana is also a YouTube sensation with his video blogs. His video blogs also give viewers a behind the scenes look at the UFC as a business. What this really does for the organization is enable it to shed too much harassment from dissenters just wanting to dog ‘the man’ for not being benevolent.

How so? They aren’t hiding behind marketeer messaging fluff, they are showing that it is a business and it needs to be sustainable. You see it when Dana records his conference calls, he is indeed a savvy businessman. So when contract disputes come into play, there is no mystery about the UFC, nor their fearless leader Mr. White.

Dana White and Twitter

In addition the UFC has developed a Facebook Application that allows users to supposedly vote on who of their friends could beat up their other friends. I cannot verify this though, as it appears to be broken. And also worth mentioning the UFC actually promotes their athletes online persona’s and places it right smack on their homepage. Much more evolved than the National Football League, they have no misconceptions about their athletes; some of them are meat-heads, some of them are annoying, but it all makes for good traffic, so game on!

UFC Home Twitter Feed

So here is how the UFC fared:

GEEK GRADE: B+

Wins

1. Dana White. This guy is a social media strategist’s godsend.
2. Consistent branding presence across all platforms.
3. An understanding that athletes are who they are. And they are ok with letting them talk and embarrass themselves.
4. An early adopter approach that will enable them to reach their target audience on any emerging social media platform.

AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT

1. The Facebook Application is a complete failure. Not only does it not work, it also is idiotic with its messaging. Cmon guys, think this through: which one of your friends will beat up who? This isn’t a sport solely enjoyed by brawlers and meat-heads. Suggestion: make the application about the online gaming happening with your recent Xbox title UFC Undisputed or maybe deliver them content on their favorite fighters instead. And fellas, QA your code.
2. Bring the Dana White video blog more into the spotlight on the homepage. In fact, I don’t think I even see it on there!
3. @DanaWhiteUFC should have been @DanaWhite. Offer the guy 5k and move on. Or forever face the gamut of followers missing out on your brand entirely with the one ‘I rule.’ post.
4. Design a better usage of the @DanaWhiteUFC page background. Cool background, but no follow through to the many channels you are connected. Design a simple callout box on the left that has indications of where to find you on YouTube, Facebook, Myspace, etc.
5. Lastly, when attending UFC 102 here in Portland I was very disappointed that there was no crowd social media interactions designed into the event. The Rose Garden is outfitted with wi-fi, why not have fans attending the event be given incentive to Tweet at the event? Contests, polls, whatever tickles your fancy, Dana.

Poaching from soshable.com. Thanks for the awesome video link!

With a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos in hand, watching football this past Sunday I saw Southwest Airline’s newer ad campaign roll out in all of its glory. The Bags Fly Free campaign has a great message, and though its earlier rollout had less creative writing, the newest piece, which I am searching for a link to, has much better creative and really lends itself to step up with social media.

GSD&M Idea City were so close to having a campaign with legs. There is still time friends, read your Geek Grade and ratchet it up. GEEK GRADE D+

Wins

1. Great messaging showing your client’s true value-ad in a down industry.
2. Plays very well with the current Southwest Airline brand.
3. Budget. This is a win in today’s media buy times
4. A parity push on Twitter with #bagsflyfree.

AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT

1. Totally dropped the ball on making this a social media frenzy. This was one step away from being something great. Try this to get yourselves started: Go to Facebook and start a Fan Page for ‘Bags Fly Free’. Post some videos, commercials, and vacation stories from the bags as if they won a contest to fly free on Southwest Air. Run a contest on Facebook for their owners to fly free, drawn from the first 10,000 fans of the Facebook group. If you get stuck, email me Enjoy a renew of your hefty budget, and maybe throw some mentions and love over to the social media geek.