When Twitter announced their Promoted Suite product late last year, it was easy to see how brands could use this to inject a trend into the conversation.  Using a Promoted Trend on the day the DVD release of Inception to promote the BluRay version was a great example.

I saw Nicorette using this Promoted Trend (#QuittingSucks) on January 4, 2011.  But the message that went along with it directed users to their Facebook Community?  Paying for advertising on Twitter to direct to Facebook?  This was interesting…a Promoted Tweet isn’t cheap, $80K according to this article.

Also interesting is that the link doesn’t really take you to a support community, it’s taking you to a splash screen ad with information and a coupon.

]]> http://www.benphoster.com/interesting-nicorette-uses-promoted-tweets-to-direct-to-a-facebook-page/feed/ 3 http://www.benphoster.com/twitter-analytics-advanced-twitter-metrics/ http://www.benphoster.com/twitter-analytics-advanced-twitter-metrics/#comments Tue, 15 Sep 2009 02:16:31 +0000 Ben Foster http://www.benphoster.com/?p=1490

Driving website traffic is one Twitter’s top benefits for marketers.  It’s a simple recipe, get a large number of followers, write a catchy tweet, publish it at the right time of day, and then measure the conversions.

Twitter Analytics - Advanced Twitter Metrics

If you’re interested in driving traffic through Twitter, then you probably use measurements like these:

• # of Followers

  • Having Twitter Followers is NOT the most important metric, but having more followers gives you more at-bats

• # of RTs

  • A good proxy of the quality of your tweet

• # of Clicks

  • With reports that Google Analytics and URL shorteners like bitly aren’t matching, it’s best to measure this in as many ways as possible

• Site Activity

  • Segmenting Twitter traffic from Search/Direct traffic and measuring conversions and site activity can help quantify the value of Twitter

You can learn a lot from these metrics, but there is a major variable of Twitter that frustrates those who use it for traffic.

Serendipity Problem and Twitter Metrics

A user sees the most recent update posted.  This “serendipity” is frustrating and makes much of how Twitter functions as a source of traffic a guessing game.

Recently, Twitter announced they were looking to monetize advanced analytics for site owners.  Having the right analytics would benefit both marketers and Twitter.

The benefit to marketers is that many questions about how Twitter works would be answered.  Twitter, of course, benefits from people able to better quantify the value of Twitter for their site.

Here are questions that Twitter Analytics should consider answering:

Search Traffic or News Feed Traffic?

• How many users clicked from their standard feed vs. from search
• If from search, what terms in the tweet did they search for?
• If from the feed, how far down on the feed was the tweet?

Twitter Client Usage?

• How much traffic came from a like TweetDeck, TwitterFon, etc vs. twitter.com?
• Did the click come from a “group” in the Twitter Client?  If so, what was the name of the group?  Who else was in the group?
• What groups are my accounts associated with?

Clicks from Other Users

• What traffic was from users following the account?
• What traffic was from ReTweets or mentions?

Twitter Metrics Are Too Easy to Manipulate

Metrics to track Social Media initiatives are the first topic in many leadership meetings.  Social Media is very difficult to understand, especially for leaders who have demanding schedules.  But numbers are not difficult to understand, they are clear, objective, and easy to compare.

However, when you create a metric, you create an incentive to focus on that metric.  Ask anyone that works in sales to tell you a story of how they’ve “worked the system” to maximize their metrics.  It happens all the time.

To prevent social media metrics from hurting your company, here are some common Twitter metrics and how to game them.  By exposing these metrics, I hope to advance the discussion and take a more holistic view of social media’s effect on business

Number of Followers

• Why people measure it – Easy and transparent measure of how interesting someone is
• Why it sucks – Quantity does not equal quality
• How To Cheat This Metric
  
  • Follow everyone you can; roughly 30-40% will follow you back
  • Join one of the hundreds of pyramid schemes advertised each day; Check out “Sponsored Links” on this search
  • Auto-Follow people using search terms like “Make Money Fast“, or “New Post Social Media“;  They’ll follow you back

Number of ReTweets (RTs)

• Why people measure it – Similar to “Net Promoter Score“, it shows how often a user’s content is recommended
• Why it sucks – Automatic Retweet bots and hard to benchmark
• How to Cheat This Metric -
  • Find an auto-retweet user like @CharityRT that RTs everything with a tag #CharityRT
  • Partner with a spammer to retweet each others’ tweets
  • Put “Please Retweet!” in every post; it works
  • Provide leadership with a low target on # of RTs per week (no one knows what a “good number” is)

What Twitter Metrics Matter?

The problem with Twitter metrics is that we focus on the transparent metrics rather than the ones that matter.  The metrics that matter is what happens on your site as a result of Twitter.  Use your analytics software to compare Twitter traffic to Organic Search and Direct Traffic.  My favorites are as follows:

• % New Visits
• Time on Site
• Conversions

Posted by Ben Foster

Photo Credit to szlea via Flickr

Does Twitter drive business results?

Well, I certainly like to think so…but here’s an interesting look at the cable news networks use of Twitter and their cable ratings.

One would think that Twitter is perfect for news.  It provides real time information at very little cost to millions of people.  Let’s look at the numbers:

# of Twitter Followers for Major News Networks as of 8/20/09

1. CNN – @Cnnbrk – 2,650,015 Followers
   
2. Fox News – @Foxnews- 100,868
3. msnbc @msnbc_breaking – 30,113

Cable News Ratings for 8/17/2009 (From TV By The Numbers)

1. Fox News – 1,364,000 viewers
2. CNN – 482,000 viewers
3. msnbc – 382,000 viewers

The obvious argument is that Twitter drives web traffic, so CNN should be thrilled.  But I’m guessing CNN executives are slightly jealous that Fox News has nearly 3 times as many viewers.

But, it doesn’t matter…here’s the only thing you need to know about Fox News

Photo Credit - Life in LDN

About a year ago, corporate leaders were asking “Should Twitter be a key part of my Social Media strategy?”  Management struggled to understand how the medium could help fulfill business objectives and therefore didn’t implement a successful program.  Expert bloggers like Chris Brogan helped create a tipping point for companies by pointing out all the different ways a company could use Twitter to further its business objectives.

Currently, having a well-run Twitter account is moving from strategic advantage to competitive necessity.  From Comcast’s customer service to Dell Outlet’s profitable sales channel, Twitter is proving that it is graduating from fad to tool.

Strategic Competitive Advantage Comes From Multiple Twitter Accounts

Most industries now have multiple competitors on Twitter battling it out for followers and share of mind.  This is great…until we remember that competitive strategy teaches us that more players means less value captured by any individual firm.  So how can you differentiate yourselves from competitors?

Having multiple Twitter accounts allows a company to create a strategic advantage in the following 4 ways:

1. Improved focus on business objectives
2. Develop employee skills and talent
3. Test and refine multiple Social Media strategies
4. More effectively attract the attention of a specific audience

Improved Focus on Business Objectives

The most important benefit to a company is the improved ability to accomplish multiple business objectives through better focus.  We’ve seen Twitter prove its value across a variety of business functions, but with one account serving many purposes, it’s hard successfully achieve results.

Consider the following 4 areas where Twitter has provided business benefit:

• Customer Service – Comcast, Zappos
• Marketing/Sales – Dell Outlet, Starbucks
• Public Relations – GE Reports, Tyson Foods
• Recruiting – Allstate, EMC

Many companies try to accomplish all the objectives of these business functions across one account.  Imagine if your boss asked you to do the job of 4 functions…something would have to give!  Stretching a single resource across all these functions will likely dilute your content and prevent you from reaching your objectives.

Develop Employee Skills and Talent

Developing employee talent and skills through “learning by doing” is an often overlooked, yet extremely critical benefit from using multiple Twitter accounts.  Many  companies have multiple employees tweeting, which is great…but this can be expanded even further by taking it across the organization.  Multiple people writing multiple tweets across multiple functions.

Social Media should not be confined to Marketing, Strategy, or Communications.  Train employees on Twitter and allow them to Tweet on their own to give them first-hand experience of how the medium works.

Test and Refine Multiple Social Media Strategies

A strategy is simply a well-thought out approach to a business problem.  The thing about strategy is that it needs to change the minute that execution becomes reality.  The best strategic organizations are ones that test a strategy in the real world, study the results, and then refine and revise it.  Learn, Fix, Apply.

Having accounts focused on specific and defined strategies allows a company to better assess the efforts and make adjustments based on real-world execution.  With just one account testing multiple strategies, results can be skewed by the multiple variables involved.  Additionally, if you need to make a change, it’s hard to do so without affecting other components of the strategy.

Attract the Attention of a Specific Audience Segment

Twitter uses the follower system to allow users to share with people that have the same interests.  If you’re using Twitter for customer service, you likely have a base of followers who are already customers of your product.  Providing recruiting content to your loyal and committed customers is likely to annoy them.  Best to separate the two and allow users to follow as many or as few as they wish.

Photo By Dan4th

I believe the best way to learn Social Media is by doing Social Media.  There are tons of great Twitter Trainings already on the web.  My spin on it is to provide the basics in 140 character “bullet points” that you can Tweet through your own account.

Value to Trainees

The value to your trainees is that they can learn about Twitter while using the site, instead of a boring PowerPoint.  This makes the training feel more real and makes you look more creative.

Feel free to use, adapt and make suggestions to this list. I’ll update this document from suggestions in the comment.

Twitter Training in 140 Characters

• What Is Twitter?  Website where people write brief messages (140 characters or less) for everyone to read and share with others
• Why is Twitter Important?  Real time information. For example, Hudson River plane crash was first reported on Twitter http://bit.ly/num4a
• TWEET – A single update(message) from a user is a TWEET. You can TWEET from the web, mobile phone, text message, IM chat, or applications
• FOLLOWER – Someone who “subscribes” to your TWEETS.  Many people consider # of followers an indicator of one’s Twitter influence
• FOLLOWING – People whose TWEETS you “subscribe to”.  To better enjoy Twitter, Don’t just follow everyone, follow people who are interesting
• DIRECT MESSAGE (DM) – Private message that can ONLY be sent to someone following you. Used for privacy or individual communication
• @ Sign – Notifies or Replies to a specific person.  An @ before someone’s name links to their profile & notifies them of a TWEET you made
• @ Sign – You can check who has notified or replied to you by clicking on @yourusername on the Twitter homepage http://twitter.com
• # Hashtag – A “#” helps manage topics.  Many people search Twitter for a particular topic. A # sign helps them find it http://hashtags.org/
• RETWEET – Like “Forward” on email, used to share others’ good messages to your followers.  How to Retweet: RT @username “original message”
• URL SHORTENER-  Make long web addresses smaller to meet 140 character limit. Popular ones http://bit.ly http://tinyurl.com http://is.gd
• How do companies use Twitter? Direct – Marketing; Indirect – Employees; Internal – Share info; Signaling – Listen to customers [SOURCE @rww]
• Direct- Marketing/PR; extension of corp messaging. Credibility lost if it feels like spam.  @delloutlet – $1m sales channel [SOURCE @rww]
• Indirect – Employees tweet building company credibility. Forrester analysts like @jowyang, @jbernoff, & @steven_noble [SOURCE @rww]
• Internal – Share info about projects – Risky because it’s open. Humana (@chimoose) shares meeting notes through #hcoc [Source @rww]
• Inbound – Listening to customers to improve service, develop products, and respond to problems (@jetblue and @comcastcares) [SOURCE @rww]
• Twitter is more http://twitter.com. Through an API (Application Programming Interface), anyone can write programs to extend Twitter usage
• Fun Twitter Programs – http://cotweet.com manage multiple accounts, http://tweetgrid.com multi-search, http://zeitheist.net – guessing game
• Export Tweets – Infinity Plus One Consulting has a great Search & Export tool at http://twitter.infinityplusone.com/
• Trending Topics – Twitter automatically lists “Trending Topics” on the main twitter page.  News often breaks there Http://twitter.com
• Effective Twitter: Quality over Quantity; Share Posts & Ideas; Interact, Retweet, Share; Don’t Spam, Don’t only share personal info
• When you first join Twitter, you can find people you know by clicking “Find People” and then “Find on Other Networks”
• My Favorites @mashable @rww @andygadiel @jowyang @chimoose @simonmainwaring @tw1ttertracker @GHCommunity @cubsticker @scobleizer @vctips
• Beginner Tips – Upload a picture of yourself.  People generally don’t follow anyone with a “default background”
• Beginner Tips – Avoid “what I had for breakfast” tweets; build a following by being interesting and creating fresh ideas
• Beginner Tips – Ways to Search Twitter – http://search.twitter.com, http://twitscoop.com, http://monitter.com
• More training at these sites: http://bit.ly/14nw2A http://bit.ly/1Jua4W http://bit.ly/Aqk4x http://bit.ly/ZxZzU http://bit.ly/ux0C1

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Previously, I presented the Customer Experience lifecycle as a framework for companies defining Social Media Strategy and Business Objectives. This model shows you where consumers are looking for information to meet their needs.

By focusing Social Media efforts on where your customers are looking for information, you can better define your Social Media Strategy around helping customers solve their problems.

Here’s a quick reminder of the framework:

The Customer Experience Lifecycle:

1. Realization - Recognition of a problem or need
   1. Best Practice – FiLife Stacker Tool
   2. Learn From – Motrin Moms Commercial
2. Awareness - Connection between need and your product
   1. Best Practice – Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?”
   2. Learn From – Target Rounders
3. Evaluation - Consideration of you (and your competitors) product benefits and tradeoffs as a solution to the need
   1. Best Practice – Best Western’s On the Go With Amy
   2. Learn From – Skittles’ Interweb the Rainbow
4. Transaction - Money is exchanged for product
   1. Best Practice – DellOutlet on Twitter
   2. Learn From – Belkin’s Fake Product Reviews
5. Consumption - Product is used
   1. Best Practice – Lego’s User Communities
   2. Learn From – Kraft Digiorno Pizza – The Ditcher
6. Service - Post-purchase support for your product
   1. Best Practice – Comcast’s Twitter Account – @ComcastCares
   2. Learn From – Any Company Not Using Twitter Search

Consumption – Product is Used

Best Practice – Lego’s User Communities

• Business Objective: Drive repeat sales and increase brand image by educating consumers on new and better ways to use products
• Tool: Social Communities – Through official Lego communities as well as support of external “fan communities” through Lego Ambassador’s program

• What They Do Right:  Encourage passionate fans to create and share content about how to use Legos creatively
  • Technologically adept Lego fans had been connecting to each other for years; how could Lego extend this to less-technical adults and children?
  • Through the exclusive Lego Ambassador program, they harnessed the power of super users to help others connect and share ideas
  • Additionally, the Ambassador’s feedback was captured to improve innovation and new product development

Company to Learn From – Kraft DiGiorno Pizza – The Ditcher

• Business Objective: Increase sales of new product line
• Tool: MySpace Mashup with automatic Texting and Emails – Customers could text or email “excuses” to avoid friends so they could be left alone to eat the pizza
• What You Should Learn From:  Just because there is a consumer need (to avoid friends), doesn’t mean you should leverage it
  • Though some very well-respected analysts like Jeremiah Owyang liked this for it’s “unique interactive experience,” it seems to me like Kraft enabled lying to your friends while trying to create “new” opportunities for customers to enjoy the products.
  • David Title summed up Kraft’s misjudgement perfectly on MyMediaMusings, “Why would Kraft want to put itself in the position of being a liar and helping people deceive others?”
  • Some of the messages were scary…AdFreak reports that one message was “Your kid is in trouble…”
  • What if they would have focused on personalization of pizzas?  I could enjoy pepperoni while my vegetarian friend could enjoy a plain cheese pizza?

Service – Post-Purchase Support

Best Practice – ComcastCares on Twitter

• Business Objective: Improve customer retention by responding to customer problems
• Tool: Twitter – Social Media Pioneer Frank Eliason responds to customer needs in real-time
• What They Did Right: Delivered quick service where customers did not expect it
  • Not too long ago, Comcast was a victim of Social Media with the Sleeping Technician video
  • Frank Eliason recognized and opportunity and through @ComcastCares they created the industry standard of searching Twitter and responding to customers
  • Comcast took an industry cliché (poor service) and reinvented it through great Social Media.  Also, I love how he’s already thinking about how @ComcastCares will scale

Company to Learn From – Any Company Not Listening to Twitter

• Business Objective - Listen to what your customers are saying, publicly, and help them
• Tool: Twitter Search – For your company, for your competitors, and for words your customers use when describing your product
• What You Should Learn From – Because organizations have made customer service a “process”, people will quickly voice disgust on Twitter
  • No longer can we wait for customers to come to us with their problems…they are already complaining, actively, on Twitter
  • Customer service on Twitter has been covered many times but it still isn’t being fully utilized by all companies
  • Customer service over Twitter is rapidly moving from strategic advantage to competitive necessity

What other examples come to mind?

Posted by Ben Foster

Previously, I presented the Customer Experience lifecycle as a framework for companies defining Social Media Strategy and Business Objectives. This model shows you where consumers are looking for information to meet their needs.

By focusing Social Media efforts on where your customers are looking for information, you can better define your Social Media Strategy around helping customers solve their problems.

Here’s a quick reminder of the framework:

The Customer Experience Lifecycle:

1. Realization - Recognition of a problem or need
   1. Best Practice – FiLife Stacker Tool
   2. Learn From – Motrin Moms Commercial
2. Awareness - Connection between need and your product
   1. Best Practice – Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?”
   2. Learn From – Target Rounders
3. Evaluation - Consideration of you (and your competitors) product benefits and tradeoffs as a solution to the need
   1. Best Practice – Best Western’s On the Go With Amy
   2. Learn From – Skittles’ Interweb the Rainbow
4. Transaction - Money is exchanged for product
   1. Best Practice – DellOutlet on Twitter
   2. Learn From – Belkin’s Fake Product Reviews
5. Consumption - Product is used
   1. Best Practice – Lego’s User Communities
   2. Learn From – Kraft Digiorno Pizza – The Ditcher
6. Service - Post-purchase support for your product
   1. Best Practice – Comcast’s Twitter Account – @ComcastCares
   2. Learn From – Any Company Not Using Twitter Search

Evaluation – Consumers compare product benefits

Best Practice – Best Western – On the Go With Amy

• Business Objective Increase sales by providing travel tips (and Best Western deals) through informative content
• Tool: Blogs – Through “On the Go with Amy”, Best Western offers good content mixed with deals on their hotels
• What They Do Right:  Provide tips and advice on how to make the ENTIRE trip more affordable
  • Hotel costs are just part of the travel budget; by sharing tips on how to reduce the total cost, they increase the value to their customers
  • Content is relevant to customers for example use smaller cars which are cheaper to rent AND have higher gas efficiency
  • While the blog isn’t highly trafficked (Alexa rank of #2,201,016 on June 8, 2009), that’s an easily solvable marketing problem. The content is great and is a perfect place to start a dialogue

Company to Learn From – Skittles Interweb the Rainbow

• Business Objective: Encourage consumers to redefine brand
• Tool: Mashup – A combination of Twitter, Wikipedia, and Facebook
• What You Should Learn From: A PR play is not Word of Mouth
  • There’s no such thing as bad pubicity, but Social Media seems to work best when it’s a 2 Way dialogue
  • To paraphrase a famous chart, 1% of traffic were people who care about Skittles; 99% of traffic were Social Media Bloggers
  • Skittles should do more than promote consumer dialgoue, they should USE this as insight for a two way dialogue

Transaction – Money is exchanged for product

Best Practice – DellOutlet on Twitter

• Business Objective: Increase sales by offering exclusive deals on Twitter to PEOPLE WHO WANT THEM
• Tool: Twitter – Using Twitter Search to find and Twitter to execute, DellOutlet promotes deals
• What They Did Right: Increase the outlet store’s value by responding to customer needs in the moment
  • Many companies are using Twitter to promote deals, but Dell takes it further by responding to people’s needs
  • By selling refurbished, scratch and dent, and previously ordered Dell products through Twitter, they increase the perceived value of “used” merchandise
  • Not all posts are deals – Lots of times they offer tips like this one to a new student

Company to Learn From – Belkin’s “Fake” Reviews of Products

• Business Objective - Increase sales through reviews of products at Amazon.com
• Tool: Customer Reviews – Or more specifically, manipulated customer reviews
• What You Should Learn From – Customer reviews are sacred; manipulating reviews is never worth the benefit
  • Though Belkin says they have a high standard of ethics, Gizmodo reports that Belkin had a culture of “doing whatever is needed” to get good reviews
  • Customer reviews are sacred in Social Media.  The payoff for faking a review does not stack up to the damage from getting caught.
  • If you google “Belkin Reviews” , the first thing to pop up is a story about Belkin paying for reviews

What other examples come to mind?

Posted by Ben Foster

Photo by adpowers via Flickr

Summer interns are one of the greatest traditions of capitalism.  Each summer, notoriously ambitious interns join companies eager to make an impact and deliver results.  For the Social Media Strategist, interns can provide a fresh perspective to companies looking to embrace Social Media.

At the dawn of E-Commerce (way back in the 1990s), GE executives gathered for a now infamous strategic session called DestroyYourBusiness.com.  Realizing the threat facing GE from the thousands of start-ups thinking differently, Jack Welch had his managers pretend to be one of the many Dotcoms trying to destroy GE’s existing business models.  This exercise helped GE’s leadership think about how the internet could quickly exploit a company’s weaknesses.

Here’s an adaptation of GE’s classic management idea for a meaningful 12-week summer internship.  Not only will your interns love the challenging and exciting assignment, this can also provide your company with fresh strategic thinking.

Weeks 1-2 – Industry and Competitor Assessment (2 weeks)

• Objective – Develop a detailed understanding of industry adoption of Social Media through assessing competitors
• Tasks for the Intern
  • Analyze the competition and document the best uses of social media
  • Support findings with external validation of competitors’ strategies from secondary sources
  • Develop a ratings scale to score industry players on dimensions like traffic, customer conversations, revenue impact, and scalability
  • Interview managers to develop 5 orthodoxies, or “The Ways Our Industry Always Does Things” that could be overturned by Social Media

Weeks 3-5 – Discover Customer Needs, Problems, and Frustrations

• Objective – Act like a Social Media Market Research consultant to study what conversations are occurring on the web about your brand
• Tasks for the Intern
  • Identify the top sites where consumers are talking about your products or services as well as your brand
  • Compile a database of customer quotes about their problems and how they are using products and services from your industry to solve them
  • Categorize the quotes into topic areas for a qualitative analysis
  • Create findings from categorized quotes to identify customer needs that could be met through Social Media technology

Weeks 6-10 – How would a Start-Up Disrupt the Industry Business Model?

• Objective – Take the role of an entrepreneur and create a business plan ready for a Venture Capitalist that could radically alter the industry
• Tasks for the Intern
  • Identify the vulnerabilities of the current business model used by your company and competitors
  • Develop a hypothetical business plan that a start-up could present to a VC that would radically change the industry business model
  • Analyze 5 start-ups that are already pursuing this model and what the company should learn from their early results

Weeks 11-12 – Create a 12 Week and 12 Month Plan for the Organization

• Objective – Highlight quick changes that can be made to lead the organization to a long-term change
• Tasks for the Intern
  • Identify hypotheses that could be tested through experimentation and prototyping
  • Test these hypotheses by building an implementation plan for quick-fixes that could be made in 12 weeks
  • Brainstorm longer-term ideas that could be implemented in 12 months with knowledge gained from the 12-week experiment

I think this could be a very interesting business school project or paper.  Thoughts on how to adopt this for the classroom?

I am constantly hearing from executives and leaders, “Okay, I get Facebook and Twitter…what’s next?” Even though most companies haven’t fully embraced the second growth of web development, smart managers are deploying Web 2.0 technologies with an eye on how to scale based on what might come next.

The easiest way to impress your manager is to answer, “The Semantic Web”.  Here’s an explanation from “Where is the web going?

Twitter Adds Semantic Human Meaning To Web Documents

Think of how your Tweets add to the description of documents you link.  People are posting pithy descriptions of web links specifically designed to attract others to the content.

What could possibly be better for the development of the semantic web than humans describing web pages?  Current semantic technologies ask the author of the document to describe it or try to derive meaning from existing descriptive data in the document.  With Twitter, we have a concise user description of a web page that means something to others.

Improve Twitter – Replace URL Shorteners With a “Link” Field

My favorite URL Shortener, bit.ly, uses 19 of 140 characters before you can add a description to the tweet.  However, if there were a “Link” field that follows the Tweet, we could increase the description (or meaning) by 15.7%.   Here’s an example:

Old Tweet -

New Tweet -

More characters = More Meaning

By adding the LINK field, we can free up 19 extra characters for me to add “co-workers, & family”.  This provides a better description of the document AND removes all the crazy looking characters that can intimidate novice users.

Photo by ChrisL_Ak

Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta write an ambiguous, bland, and wrong piece on Forbes.com about the need for CEOs to use Social Networking technologies.  Their seemingly decent argument cites Web 2.0 Evangelists (no one particular, just the “evangelists” in general) who apparently claim the following:

Web 2.0 evangelists, on the other hand, argue that social software can be used to boost productivity. They say it can facilitate an open-ended corporate culture that values transparency, collaboration and innovation. Most important, it can be an effective way to build a customer-centric organization that not only communicates authentically but also listens to customers and learns from that interaction.

Of course all this is true, but two of the examples they use, Blendtec CEO’s “Will it Blend” series, and Zappo’s CEO Twitter Feed, feel like a simple marketing channel.

Simply put, CEOs make a lot of money because they are good at managing talented people.

Average CEO of an S&P 500 company was $10.5 million in 2008

Say whatever you want about executive pay…but CEOs have unique skills and are therefore highly compensated.  At $10.5 million a year, and assuming no sleep, that’s about $1,200 an hour.  Shareholders demand that CEOs should focus on what they do best…

CEOs Would Need to Spend Many Hours Building Social Media Skills

It takes a decent amount of experience to use this technology authentically without sounding artificial.  And, the only way to do this is “learning by doing”.  So, if anyone says, “It only takes a couple of seconds to Tweet”, remind them that the best Twitter users are ones that have practiced writing pithy updates.

Johnathan Schwartz is the rare example of a CEO who can do this, but I suspect there is some ghost-writing behind this blog.

The Best CEOs Hire People Who Are Smarter Than They Are

Find a social media expert, apparently they’re everywhere.  But hire them and have them communicate to you like any other functional leader in your organization.  Find a strategic thinker who can drive change at all levels of the organization to impact your business objectives.  Don’t have a CEO spend their valuable time learning Social Media skills when they are experts in the much rarer skills of Management.

I’ve seen a couple tweets pop up from managers recognizing employees for a great job. Rochelle Grayson started some thoughts back in May of last year, that I thought should be built upon.

First and Foremost, It SHOULD NEVER replace the handwritten note made famous by Jack Welch, but for quick “atta-boys” or “atta-girls”, it can go a long way

1 – Quick – 140 characters, bam.  It’s a perfect medium for quick recognition for a job well done.  I’ve seen so many managers get nervous and hesitate to properly recognize their employees…but this is a overwhelmingly easy way to give quick feedback.

2 – Public – I would love for my followers to see that I did a great job at “making a coherent argument for an idea in a meeting…”   A simple @benphoster, and I’m working nights to come up with better arguments.

3 – New - As of right now…no one is doing this.  Show your team that you’re one of those “forward-thinking” manager types that they’ve been hearing so much about.  Set up a #tag for your team to allow the group to publicly see the motivation.

BUT NEVER LET IT REPLACE A HANDWRITTEN NOTE!