Cameron Olthuis

My buddy Mat from Dream Systems Media did an awesome little Q&A with me on Social Media. He asked some really great questions, like this one…

What would be your best tips for someone brand new to social media? (how to grow in the communities etc.)

The best tip I can give anyone brand new to social media is to actually use social media. Before you jump in the pool you need to learn how to swim. Take some time to understand how certain social media sites work the way they do. Watch and learn from others marketing campaigns. Get to know how the social media crowd works, how they think, and what interests them. Expect a fair amount of trial and error before you hit a home run.

Check it out.

All you business and website owners listen up and listen well. Avante Gardens, an Anaheim Florist, is going to school you on building loyal customers, links, and positive buzz all in one shot….

So how many of you remember my story about FTD Sucks and how they screwed me over on Valentine’s Day? If you don’t the click over and read it really quick so you can be up to speed.

So, there is this super bad-ass floral shop up in Anaheim that took notice of my post and decided they’d use my bad experience to their advantage to win over a new customer, me. Shortly after I checked into my hotel for SMX I got a knock on my door. It was a room service dude that had a bouquet of flowers for me. At first I thought maybe I had a secret admirer that wanted some lovin’ or maybe the SMX crew was just going the extra mile for their speakers. Nope, I was wrong. The following note was included in the flowers…

Dear Cameron, After reading your plight with FTD during Valentine’s Day, I just want to put in a plug for local florists. I’m looking forward to your presentation.

Wow! My heart melted. I was in love. I thought this was one of the coolest things ever and couldn’t believe someone remembered and cared about little ol’ me.

I just snapped that pic of me with the flowers. The ladies tell me that’s a super nice bouquet. Huge thank you to Avante, you effin rock and I love you.

Hope you all learned something. This would have been a great opportunity for FTD to step to the plate and make good with me… they didn’t and now they can kiss my badonkadonk. I will never order from that piece of crap company again and have told as many people as possible not to as well. They obviously don’t care about their customers. Now, on the flip-side – you all know a good florist.

So I’ve been using Twitter now for a couple weeks and to be honest with you, I can’t say that it has provided any real value. Actually, that’s not totally true. I did get an intro to someone that ended up interviewing me about 5ones for a blog. Other than that though it’s been a pretty big time waste so far. Maybe I just need to stop checking it so much. I’m going to give it a couple more weeks before I make a decision to stick with it or drop it. If you’re on Twitter you can follow me, my name is @Factive. I also have one setup for 5ones.

I can see how it would provide tremendous value if you have 10,000+ followers, like Mr. Calacanis. But lets face it, I’m just not quite as popular as Jason which is evident by my 50 followers compared to his 10k+.

If you’re a Twitter user I’d love to hear why you use it and what value you find in it? Also, drop me your name and I can add you to my follow list if I’m not already.

Andy Greenberg from Forbes wrote a great article about the power of Digg. Andy was in attendance at the conference yesterday and it’s obvious from his article that he paid a great deal of attention to what was being said. I think it also goes without saying that all the presenters did a great job of getting that info through. I am fortunate enough to be one of the speakers mentioned in the article.

“Who wouldn’t want to rank fourth for a search term like ‘life insurance’?” Olthuis asked the audience of search marketers assembled at Tuesday’s Search Marketing Expo. “That’s huge.”

Congrats goes to the others who were also included: Chris Winfield, Brent Csutoras, Neil Patel, and Tamar Weinberg.

My good friends over at 97th Floor have released a new Firefox extension called Social Media for Firefox. The tool is designed to help you build up a power account (or maintain a current one) by saving you time submitting stories to the social news sites.

Don’t you hate it when you waste 5 minutes trying to submit something to Digg only to find out that it’s already been submitted? Me too. This tool will actually tell you which social media sites a URL has been submitted to when you’re on the actual URL. This way if it’s already been submitted you won’t waste time.

The tool also has a feature where you scan social news sites to find stories that haven’t been submitted to others. For example, I can scan the Reddit popular page to find stories that haven’t yet been submitted to Digg. I can then submit those stories to Digg and have a pretty decent chance of making the popular page since people on other communities have already validated the content. However, not everything that the community finds interesting on Reddit will work on Digg, and vice versa.

I was fortunate enough to test this tool and to be honest I didn’t want the guys to publicly release it. Maybe that’s just me being selfish but I had a huge advantage with having exclusive access. The tool rocks and I recommend it for anyone serious about social media marketing.

BTW – The guys at 97th Floor do really good SEO work and would highly recommend them anytime.

There’s a great discussion going on about the different questions you should ask before taking on a social media or community manager type role within a company. I’ve been contacted several times in the last few months by recruiters for exactly these types of positions so I thought I could chime in with my experiences.

Just about all of these companies and recruiters I’ve talked are fairly inexperienced with social media. When it comes to engaging people in social media they really don’t have a crystal clear understanding of what it’s all about and even the reasons why it is so important. So you should expect to do a fair amount of educating up front. Not that that is a bad thing as it gives you the perception as a expert or thought leader in your industry.

The other thing that I’ve noticed, which goes hand-in-hand, is that they don’t know the right questions to ask in order to find out if you really are the best person for the role they’re looking to fill. That’s why you should be ready with these types of questions.

Here is the list of questions from James Durbin.

Jeremiah Owyang chimes in with some additional questions as well.

My additions
How do you envision this role?
Where do you see the value in the position and with social media in general?
What role will community feedback play in shaping the future of your business?
How transparent are you willing to be?
Are you willing to let consumer have some control over your brand? If so, how much?
How authentic will these conversations be?
What outcomes are you expecting?
How much influence will I have on the future direction of your website?
How much influence will I have on the online marketing strategies?

Jeremiah Owyang has a great post this morning on the need for evolution on corporate websites.

We’re tired of the corporate website and all it’s happy marketing speak, stock photos of smart looking dudes or minority women crowded around the computer raving about your product, the positive press release, the happy customer testimonials, the row of executive portraits, the donations your corporate made to disaster relief, the one-sided view never ends.

Great point! You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who isn’t sick of that. This is precisely the reason that consumers don’t use corporate websites to research products. They’re only getting one side of the story, the marketing speak. What we really want to hear is both sides of the story. We want to hear the real story from consumers who have hands on experience with the product so we can truly find out what the product is really like. The endless amounts of user generated product review sites and blogs are testament to this.

Jeremiah goes on to make several suggestions, one of them being for corporate sites to allow customer feedback right on the site.

A savvy marketer will allow content to appear from peers, customers, and the market. These will not always be a product rave, in fact it may be downright criticism.

While I agree that it would be great to have the non-biased product reviews on the corporate site, I don’t think that quite solves the problem. That’s because we don’t and can’t trust the corporations to be truly transparent. To think that a company will allow unfiltered negative reviews along side their products is absurd. That’s why third party social review sites are here to stay.

Instead I think these corporations would be better severed to be active on the social review and other social media sites. They should be interacting with the consumers to recognize their faults, improve their products, right their wrongs, and build consumer trust in the process. As Jeremiah points out, this can also be done on community sites that are setup by these companies, like Dell’s IdeaStorm.

Do you have any other ideas how corporate websites can improve?