I love Jackie Huba’s blog, Church of the customer it’s always relevant and so…customer-centric. With that being said, you might enjoy the light fare that I’m throwing your way. have a good 4th of July.

I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time. I’ve read iterations from other notable bloggers and marketers but my questions are these. Where does social media make the best sense in say, a B2B setting? Or. for that matter, a B2C setting? Could it be customer service?  It’s funny to think that in 2008 that a novel concept could be communicating with the customer! Reaching out to the customer. Talking with the customer, listening to the customer  before, during and after the purchase.

Now don’t get me wrong there are plenty of companies out there that do a good job in maintaining a relationship with the customer but… But the problem is, the model that they are operating from is cut from the “old school” of marketing and customer service. It consists of 2-3 major direct mail campaigns per year, a decent if not underperforming customer service call center in which most customer issues are resolved amicably, and a website that takes orders and ships them on time etc. etc. You get the point. I’m sure you can think of at least a half a dozen companies like that. You see them everyday. You interact with them EVERY day. They do just enough to satisfy your expectation of customer service.

However, when a company reaches out to you or goes above and beyond your expectations, you raise an eyebrow. You’re surprised. Why? Because your expectations are so low that you expect NOTHING! and when you do get a friendly note, someone that speaks with you instead of at you, or the least bit of CSR love, you a) are surprised and b) become a customer for life and c) you tell your friends.

Lets do  a quick test. Think of 5 companies that suck. And perhaps they suck because you have heard that they do, which in an of itself is not good. Why? Because maybe they don’t, though chances are they do, but the viral reputation dictates that they must suck because so many have said so. Ok so quick, think of 5.

Most of the ones that come to mind for me are airlines. How about you? If you talk to Joseph Jaffe, he’ll go off on Delta But I would guess that most of you, if you fly with an frequency, will volunteer an airline. Ironically, I’m thinking that because our expectations are so lowered when we fly now, that when we do have a good experience, we think of that as a WIN.

But here’s what happened. If you’re fed bread and water for so long, you expect it. When they add an apple, you consider it a treat. But the reality is that you SHOULD be getting a balanced meal, but your expectations have been lowered so much, an APPLE is considered a score by the customer. How pathetic is that?  What’s worse is that customer service representatives throw us bones and we snap them up and thank them up and down and then we tell everyone about the great customer service we just received. Again, I say to you, how pathetic is that? I mean look at Seth Godin, he’s amazed at this small act of customer service.

Becky Carroll, who has a blog called Customers Rock wrote a post called Social Media Empowering Customer Service: Guest Blogger Brian Solis in which Brian Solis and Becky blog about social media empowering customerservice. That’s my point, it makes perfect sense for social media to be an extension of what customer service does FOR the customer. As new media marketers and observers, it’s up to us to explain to large companies and even small ones, that, here is a way to find out more about your customers instead of the usual demographic info.

Social media does empower customer service, if it’s used for that. But how many get that? How many examples can you, me and everyone else out there, think of? I think what’s more of a viable statment is: “Social media will eventually empower customer service and social media should empower customer service”. 

This video was sent to me via email and naturally I sent it on, because that’s what we do. But computer graphics notwithstanding, this is still a pretty cool, “wow” type of video.

Just got done with the twebinar hosted by Chris Brogan. It was an interesting way to push information out regarding social media. For those in the know, it gave them insight as to how some of the movers and shapers of social media, marketing and media think in regards to how social media is changing the game. It also was presented in a way that if someone who had “heard” what social media was, but was not entirely sure what IT was, could, perhaps in laymans terms utilize or understand it.

The mashup was interesting in that we had video, we had twitter, we had live webcam, we had twitter aggregators and we had live participants and we had half participants who were following the tweets and not perhaps the video. Even more interesting were the ways that participants were communicating. The primary means being Twitter, but in the Twebinar format, they were talking with individuals that were in the video, they were talking with the moderator, Chris Brogan and they were talking with each other.

Now picture that happening in any other type of moderator, speaker, panel, discussion presentation where everyone was, for the most part, talking at once. In this format it worked. It was staccato like in its essence, but it worked.

With a couple of tweaks here and there. I can definitely see this becoming some type of workable app for future conferences. Perhaps embedding the Twitter app in the screen of the presentation so that everyone could tweet and everyone could read everyone elses tweets without having to possibly toggle betwen Summize and the actual presentation? Either way it worked. Good job to David Alston of Radian6 as well. The good news? This is a 3 part series. What are you waiting for?

With that being said we should not expect what is tweeted to be completely accurate all the time., or rather we should expect what we read coming off of twitter with a grain of salt.  Someone got ahold of this parody website about Jared of Subway fame and tweeted it across the Twitterverse.

To get the full story, go over to LouisGray. At the least, instead of tweeting what you hear, do some research on your on. If you or they had at least visited the site in question, a quick read would have told you that it was all bullshit. Here’s a blurb:

Jared was more than the public man we all came to know and love, he was veritably the private man with whom we all wished we could have split a bag of baked Lay’s. Like any onion, you start peeling the skin and you find another layer, another and another, each one as eye-wateringly sad as the one before it.

Buddy, we miss you and we always will.

Jared played him some mean table tennis (ping pong, if you prefer) and could beat even the best players in a best 3 out of 5 more often than not.

He had a retro Asteroids machine in his garage he used to challenge us to, but he had the high scores on it, and it seemed like, no matter how grand any of could aspire to become, once we returned, all the scores were once again reset to his own, as if by divine intervention.

Come on people…Between Twitter being down, or not showing replies, or just plain not working right, and now the spreading of erroneous information. I’m surprised Twitter isn’t melting before our eyes! With that being said, they are far from being a reliable and credible media source.

I wanted to thank the fine folks over at Alltop for choosing to feature this blog as one of their sources for worthy information. Alltop is a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. Alltop sites are starting points—they are not destinations per se. They enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed.

The bottom line is that Alltop collects stories from “all the top” sites on the web, which means we must be doing something right, and for that we are grateful for the love and the recognition.

I have to give props to Peter Shankman on this one. As soon as I saw this video, it made me smile and then think that maybe the world we live isn’t so messed up as we think it is. All anyone wants is a warm meal, a roof over their head and something to smile about every day. Suffice it to say, the below video accomplishes 1 of 3.

I write as much about marketing and social media as the next person, but every once in awhile you have to lay down the pen, the judgement, the criticism and just realize, at the end of the day, it’s important to smile. Thanks Matt  for being extraordinarily ordinary.

You know, we don’t talk about MySpace the way we used to. At least I don’t. Perhaps because there are so many great social media stories out there since MySpace came on the scene. One thing though you cannot ignore is MySpace traffic.  the bottom line being that MySpace receives a massive amount of visits; In addition to receiving over 25% more visits-per-visitor a month than Facebook, the site jumped to 72 million unique visitors in June, generating over 1.3 billion total visits. That, my friends, is a lot of traffic.

With that being said, lets look at the numbers as compiled by our friends over at Compete these numbers might seem a little out of whack, but they base the rankings on amount of attention as well as traffic. Thats why some might appear to have more traffic than others. the bottom 10 have more of an ethnic diverse, niche like quality than the top 10 as well.

But given the rush to crank out a social networking group these days, being ranked anywhere in the top 20 is not such a bad thing. It may actually mean you’re making money!

1. Myspace with over 72 million visitors per month.
2. Facebook with 22 million visitors
3. Bebo with 3.5 million
4. Tagged with 3.3 million
5. BlackPlanet with 1.9 million visitors
6. myYearbook with 2.89 million visitors
7. hi5 had 2.98 million visitors
8. Classmates had 11 million visitors
9. Friendster had 1.3 million visitors
10. Xanga had 3.7 million visitors
11. Orkut, intrestingly enough had 460,000, but was ranked 11th.
12. Asiantown came in at 147,949 visitors
13. Flixter had 3 million visitors
14. Migente had 1.2 million visitors
15. Reunion tracked 6.2 million visitors
16. Quepasa had 177,000 visitors
17. Tickle had 2.1 million
18. Piczo had 660,000 visitors
19. Multiply had 656,000 visitors and last but ceratinly not least and somewhat surprising is
20. Linkedin at 1.4 million visitors

How many of you have been to these sites and have given them a test drive? Which user interface makes sense? Which do you see continuing to grow and which do not have a snowballs chance in hell? Personally, I may check out Multiply, the rest I am somewhat familiar with, with the exception of the hispanic sites. I am surprised as well by where Orkut is. With summer being a time when we spend more time outside than in, lets regroup in September and see where we’re at.

Ok so Twitter has been up as of late, so maybe the above cartoon is not as applicable. But something that is, are people’s opinions or their  general “take” on Twitter. Want to see some of the more creative answers to the question, do you Twitter? Interesting insight to say the least.

-”Personally, I don’t see the need to follow anyone that closely nor for anyone to follow me that closely. Nor do I want it either way”

-”Marc, call me a troglodyte, but I see no allure to this.”

-”, I don’t give a twitter if someone is looking at olives on isle four third shelf up. “

-”Big Brother, anyone?? “

-”No, I am not interested in what you had for lunch, nor do I share such information with those following me.”

-”I’ve tried it. It could become a black hole that you never get out of. It can suck up your time.”

-”Maybe it will become the new texting once devices catch up with the tech.”

- It’s a question of establishing followers that I find the least attractive aspect of Twitter — if you don’t have followers, you can become sort of psychotic, always talking to yourself in a tiny room with no one to listen to your persistent updates. “

-” It seems pointless and just another time waster and login you have to try and remember”

-”The internets biggest waste of time ever!”

-”If Twitter is as I understand it, I’m not clear on how it is that any user types anything other than “I’m typing on Twitter”.

-”Either I need enlightenment or Twitter users need lives. Maybe second lives?”

-”Seems voyeuristic or reminiscent of horror and stalker flicks!”

-”It’s a time suck”

-”God bless. to each his/her own, and other sundry platitudes to that effect. But for me, nope. “

-”I don’t know if it will ever become mainstream. But it does remind me of the way my teenagers use text messaging now. “

To each his own I guess. I find it interesting that there is such a strong negative opinion, but even more interesting is that some of them may have not ever used it, either. What is your opinion of Twitter? Obviously, even if you have not used it before, you seem to have one. Mad shout out to geek and poke btw.

 Check out my man here. He’s heard a lot about social networks and he wants to check them out. He’s not sure why he should, he just knows that everyone is talking about them, they use them to meet people and they use to talk to friends and relatives and it is THE Thing to do! But where should he start. What social network is right for him? Should he do some research? If he does he’s going to find differing opinions from all over the place.  He’ll hear about the notion that Linkedin is not Facebook for grownups 

Or maybe he saw this video that parodies Facebook? And now he’s all WTF is Facebook about? 

 The bottom line is  that when you decide to Join the online social community, this is what happens:

You are a lone individual that is joining a community of individuals. At that point, it is now up to you to join the conversation. But joining the conversation does not mean that you are, in theory “part” of the conversation. You could move your way up the social media spiral but that would mean that you are doing a majority, or want to do a majority of the below stages of the spiral:

 But you don’t need to. You just want to know what it all means and where you fit in. You just want to know, what exactly is a social network? Let’s segue to our friends from Common Craft shall we?

Ok so now you have an idea but what should you do now? Maybe, just maybe you could jump into a social network, but do you even know which one? Here is a quick primer of two of the more popular social networking sites. Honestly though, if I’m explaining this, you have to be living in a freakin cave. But I digress..

If you’re going to use Facebook  then you need to know that it has more than 60 million active users, an average of 250,000 new registrations per day since Jan. 2007 and over 55,000 regional, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks. More than half of Facebook users are outside of college and the fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older. Is that too large for you?

If your cup of tea might be MySpace maybe you should know that it has more than 110 million monthly active users around the globe, however, 85% of MySpace users are of voting age (18 or older) One in four Americans is on MySpace. MySpace is translated in more than 20 international territories: U.S., UK, Japan, Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Canada, Netherlands, New Zealand, MySpace en Espanol, Latin America, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland.

But thats just 2 of the big ones that I’m sure you have heard about. Here is a nice breakdown of the top social sites provided by compete

In the end, you should check out each one and see if it fits the criteria you want in your selection of a social network. It will be up to you to decide which one fits you the best. Because in reality, this is how the social networking funnel should look:

 Ultimately, and you will see, if not already, that the best way to thrive in a social networking setting is to be amongst people that are of like mind and spirit. Thats why if you are in your mid 30’s and love reading books and are more concerned about what is in your 401k, maybe MySpace ain’t the ticket.  Eventually we will all have our own sense of where we should be within a social network, it’s merely up to you to find your way and craft, meld and shape your online indentity in the social network that makes sense to YOU.