Maureen’s post is terrific and a must read for any marketer who considers themselves a “branding” professional, as well as for any person who provides a service, thus needs to market themselves as their “product”.

So, with the two blog posts swimming around in my mind, I went back to what I’ve been working on lately, a seminar to teach individuals how to build an online profile that will help them increase their professional opportunities, as well as enhance their personal life and hobbies. The blog posts were causing me to rethink some of the terminology I was using in the seminar presentations. I was actually about to use the term “brand yourself” to try to get across to seminar attendees that they will want to illustrate who they are beyond boring data points. But as my Tara has been heard to say, “Instead of a personal brand, why not just get a personality?”

The line makes me laugh, but in my former career life (working with and counseling host families, schools and high school and university students from around the world) I discovered that for many people, sharing very much of your personality with people you don’t know yet can be a scary thing. Some people need a bit of guidance or perhaps a better way of looking at it is, they need a plan.

Sure, there’s no doubt that many, many careers can benefit from creating a thoughtful online presence and actively participating in online conversations, building relationships with influencers in specific industries. And, many people already understand the entertainment value of online gaming and social networking sites and others realize the enhanced enjoyment of personal hobbies when they connect with groups and individuals online who have common interests and share and tag information and multimedia. But perhaps I should define what I’m talking about regarding “Online Profiles.”

What is an Online Profile?

Many websites and social networks have users create a “profile”, but in this case I’m talking about creating a profile as a collective presence online. Search engines will do the work for anyone looking for you. All you need to do is have your information out there and know where to put your information in places that make sense for your career, your goals and your personal interests. Just because a social network or a web community is popular doesn’t mean you need to be there. It may be more appropriate for your career, goals and personal interests to be on niche sites. The best coarse of action is to understand the differences, choose what’s right for you, share information that is appropriate and that you’re comfortable with and participate in the conversations that are taking place.

An Online Profile is:

• You, in Digital Form
• As much or as little as you want to share
  • Personal Details, Contact Information & Calendars
  • Images, Videos & Audio Files
  • Communications & Documents
  • Medical, Lifestyle & Financial Accounts
  • Social Media & Web 2.0 Networks, Accounts, Communities
• What others share
• Information you “claim” or “tag

So, now I’m thinking I won’t use the term “brand yourself.” Maybe, “personalize your profile.” Or how about, “create a Profonality.” Get it–profile+personality… Oh, that’s just terrible! Back to the drawing board.

The Market Conversation: People, Locations and Tools

Came across an interesting blog post today: The Evolving Face of Social Networks. A bit more science-ish than I normally would be interested in, but as it pertains to social networking I was intrigued. The blog post raised two interesting thoughts (and I am paraphrasing): 1) If social networks are so popular/widely being adopted, why haven’t the social network companies figured out how to monetize better? and 2) The use of social networks by companies to create positive externalities for consumers and influence network members may have in choosing to pass along a stimulus created by a company that will increase purchases (or other actions) for that company.

Here’s a bit from the article that will shed some light:

Evolutionary graph theory provides a quantitative language for describing how replicators behave on networks – and may lead to new ways of quantifying the value of influence on the web.

The Gist: “Replicators” being the people who seem to get other people to join the social networks, thus growing the networks’ size. So, in the conversation marketing lingo, these are mostly the Influencers (individuals or organizations that wield enough influence in some way to attract the interest of others to join their “club” (i.e. social network).

“When a company pollutes, it is often the case that they don’t have to pay for the pollution they generate. By destroying a collective resource without paying for it, the company does us all a disservice. Economists call this a ‘negative externality.’ But companies can create ‘positive externalities,’ too, and social networking sites might be one example. They create all this wonderful collective resource, without really getting paid much to do it.”

The Gist: Hmmmm? Did the social network itself “create” the positive externality or did the Replicators/Influencers (and anyone else who adds content that people want to view onto the network) actually “create” the wonderfulness that inspires people to join in droves? If you know me, you know how I see it. The medium does not create the draw. People (people as reps for their company or organization) joining and creating groups and fan pages, etc., on these networks is what has created the “everyone join” factor. So what does that mean for the social networks and the fact that they aren’t making much money? I don’t really know. That’s up to brilliant business people to figure out. As a marketing professional, though, it’s clear that selling ad space for more companies to advertise at people within this new space of social media/networks isn’t the answer. Let’s think about that? Print newspapers and magazines, radio and TV have been struggling for a good number of years now because they can’t sell enough ad space. Why can’t they sell it? Because it doesn’t seem to give companies the return on investment (in other words, people tune out the ads so they aren’t buying stuff from those companies because of an ad, thus companies are realizing that traditional advertisements don’t work well anymore.)

What is the likelihood of people forwarding on items that they receive in a social network such as Facebook (news items, links, video clips)? What is the likelihood of people responding to messages, or re-tweeting other people’s tweets on Twitter? “The idea we need to explore is this: what is the likelihood that a particular stimulus within a social network leads to a particular response?” says Lieberman.

The Gist: Now this is what I’d like to see scientists and research experts look into further. Social networks aren’t a new concepts. Oh sure, as we know them today, to be these online locations where people can communicate and companies can build fan pages, haven’t been around long, but only the medium, the technology, is new. People have been gathering together to build relationships and exchange ideas since the beginning of time (ok, the beginning of modern man’s time.) Online social networks are simply a fantastic new way for people to “gather”. Just because they gather there, though, doesn’t mean they want advertisements in the way. The more interesting aspect mentioned here is “influence”. In the market conversations happening on and offline there are 3 groups: Influencers, Participants and Listeners. Influencers are the ones who raise topics, invite discussion, pass on information, and more. Participants comment on what Influencers do or pass along the info to others. Listeners really join in the conversation–they prefer to read the conversation and just Be.

“In my opinion, as we get better at measuring what happens within social networks, I predict a lot more organised marketing efforts on social networks as well as systematic influence campaigns.”

The Gist: The post ends with this statement. This is the real crux of what inspired me to write this post. Marketing professionals have known for years now that traditional advertising activities were not yielding the return on investment that they once did. They also know that social networks and other types of social media have made a major impact, but many can’t seem to figure out how to make use of that to benefit their companies. As the science of measuring what happens on social networks and what drives human nature to share information with others within the social networks companies will have a better idea of how to participate in their market conversations.

This series of blog posts looks at what is means to participate in the market conversation. True participation requires a company to look at meeting 5 objectives: Listening, Speaking, Caring, Sharing and Building Relationships. (Read 1st of 6-post series for more details.)

Listening
Your current customers, prospects, industry experts and other influencers in the market space have things to say and want to be heard. Listening and internalizing what that information can have a major impact on improving your business, increasing sales and driving product development to meet the real needs and wants of the market. Set your company up for a successful Listening strategy and action plan:

1. Who to listen to: Certainly you want to listen to your current customers and prospects, but to answer this question further, go back and consider what your product or service offers–what need or want does it fulfill? Identifying the Influencers–industry experts, analysts, technology gurus, academics, reporters/publications, industry events, etc. requires a bit of research, but the place to start is with keywords that focus on the need or want and not necessarily the product/service marketing keywords. Whether you use an outside agency like Idiom Strategies, or you look to do the research in-house, you’ll notice Influencers begin to emerge as people your customers and prospects are listening to.
2. Where to Listen: For current customers and people who stumble upon your website, be sure to offer an easy option for them to speak directly to you. Outside of this, consider your ideal customers? What do you know about them and who theylisten to and what can you conclude about where they are talking about their needs/wants? Market conversation locations can be both the physical and online places where Influencers, Participants and Listeners are interacting, such as:
   • Social Media Networks
   • Blogs and other Social Media Outlets
   • Forums
   • Chat rooms
   • Conferences and Tradeshows
   • On and Offline Publications
   • User Groups
   • Industry Trade Organizations
   • Webinars
   • Sponsored Events
   • Podcasts
   • Webcasts
   • Research Reports
3. How to Listen: Wow, this is a big part of the marketing industry’s market conversation right now. There are so many emerging companies offering services for web and social media monitoring, not to mention traditional press monitoring. Check out these sites for links to some of these Conversation Monitoring Tools companies: How to listen in a bad economy- 67 social media/web/reputation management tools and sites and Social Media Monitoring Solutions Wiki.
4. What to Listen for: Certainly monitor for mentions of your brands/products/company and you’ll probably want to listen to what is being said about your top competitors. But if you listen a little deeper, you’ll find terrific data for product improvements, new product offerings, ways to improve your customer relations, opportunities to encourage word of mouth mentions and terrific proofpoints to counter sales objections. Go back to those need/want-focused keywords–people may not mention a specific product or brand, but they’re still talking about their needs and wants and looking for advice and options for fulfilling them.

“Every person who does marketing, sales, product design or any other job that influences customers directly should spend at least an hour a week answering the customer service lines, using the same tools your customer service people use.”

Well said, Seth! I want to go a step further and challenge marketing and sales professionals to eat their own marketing dog food. Every time you and your company make a decision to post ads, email prospects/customers, send newsletters, cold call, email unsolicited sales pitches, flat out spam people, troll for leads in special intrest groups or forums, create self-serving noise in social media outlets, post ad-style comments on blog posts, etc., etc., etc. first think of all the conversation Locations you use personally (blogs you read, sites you visit, mags you buy, Twitter hashtags you watch, forums you go to, etc.) and consider how you would like it if a company did those “marketing” things to you.