Last week I collaborated with two of my Social Media Club colleagues, Philippe Tassin and Tara Coomans in a three-hour consultation with the very cool folks at Montgomery Motors. If you don’t know them, they are a sixty-plus year old, family-owned, and Hawaii-born and bred company that sells motorcycles and related cool gear.

There are a number of things about this meeting that really rocked the house:

• Ross and Ann and their marketing consultant Clint really know their brand, their customers, and their business and want to keep growing it stronger and larger. (Seriously, lots of small businesses can be too close to what it is they do well, and this makes it hard to work on marketingplans – social media or traditional.)


• I got to do this with two awesome colleagues! Who, on any other day, could be classified as competitors. Being able to work together though is a particularly strong feature of social media. We pros recognize that the space is huge, and no one person knows it all, much as we try.


• We worked in the truly functional and creative-juice-hub known as the ING DIrect Cafe in downtown Waikiki. Part of their business model is to share their space with outside groups, knowing that we will tweet and blog about them in a most flattering light. Please follow the local peeps @INGdirectHawaii on Twitter.


• The bonus gift for me was that I asked Ross and Ann at the very last minute , as we were all leaving, for a short video testimonial. They said yes! Then they rocked it as one take wonders. See for yourself below!

I shot and edited this video on my iPhone 4 using iMovie on my short flight home from HNL to OGG, aka Honolulu to Kahului, Maui.

Aloha,

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When speaking to newbies about the what, where, why, and how of social media, I often remark how social media seems to help business people actually have fun again with their business! We all go into business because we like doing something – be it fixing cars, flying planes, making muffins, or creating ad campaigns.

But then we get bogged down with hiring and firing, taxes, government regulations, market share, and all matter of other requirements that for many of us are no. fun. at. all.

Along comes social media which is so conversational, creative, interactive, mostly free and bam! Business is fun again. Here are a few examples inspiring me today:

1. Star Wars Remake – Crowd-Sourced Edition

2. JetBlue “All You Can Jet” Pass

“I think it’s fair to say we were gobsmacked with the success of All You Can Jet,” says Robin Hayes, the airline’s chief commercial officer. “I would describe that as a nonstop party. We had flights with 80, 100 All You Can Jetters on them. I mean it really was 30 days of a very carnival-like atmosphere at JetBlue.” To add to the carnival-like atmosphere, JetBlue is helping its “Jetters” get organized, with a Facebook page where travelers can make plans to meet up, ask advice, post their personal dos and don’ts, or list their favorites spots.

3. Mailing a Package Becomes a Video Tutorial

4. WOMMA Awards Are Looking for Your Story!

Aloha,

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This week is the first ever Nā Hōkū Festival, a celebration of the arts and culture of Hawaiʻi. I am fortunate to be a guest speaker at their conference event, which features three days of educational and inspirational sessions covering every aspect of being a Hawaiian musician. Other events include concerts around Oʻahu, and the kick off event, the annual Nā Hōkū Hanohano Music Awards happening tonight. (You can watch the ceremony live in HD via local TV station Hawaii News Now. Scroll down and look for the player in the left column if you don’t see it featured.)

Really, though, this post is about Kenneth Makuakāne. He is an independent Hawaiian musician, earning a comfortable living for himself, his lovely wife and their small child. So yes, it can be done, and I want to share with you some of how Kenneth does it. Here is an excerpt of a phone interview I did with him just in time for Nā Hōkū Festival!

Rox: How long have you been using social media?
Kenneth: About 4 years ago I joined Myspace. I attracted about 4000 fans. Over time though, I noticed Myspace was not about friends really but about signing up a lot of people. It was not really faciliting my needs other than serving as a free artist site. Then Facebook came along, and after 3 people asked me to connect with them there, I did. I find it a much better format for me because it is much more interactive. Podcamp was a real experience for me too. I started using WordPress for my blog after than and going to the Social Media Club meetings to learn more.

Rox: How are you using Facebook? I know you have a fan page for your music.
Kenneth: Well, I leave it on all day when I am at my computer. I get the notification sound and can respond whenever someone interacts with me. There is more interactivity and ease of use; it is easy to create events. It has a chat capability – fans see you are online and want to talk! I had to finally turn it off though, as I get too much – I only use it when I have time. The good thing is people can message and I can respond when I have time. A lot of Japanese fans now, sending me photos, etc.

Rox: What is your larger strategy in using social media?
Kenneth: I’ve changed my branding to being a solo artist. First I was a “lei and white pants musician” at the hotels, then musician for musicians and record producer, now back into the performance end. Had to rebrand myself and find another avenue. Social media has done that for me – it creates opportunities for younger and older people to connect – they feel like they can talk to you now! Greatest part – you don’t have to have live chat – you can respond in your own time. However I always answer my fans; that is very important.

Rox: What other tools do you use to connect with and support your fans?
Kenneth: Well, I learned I had to build a fan base. One by one. So they trust me and know me and call me a friend and know that Im a real person. They know I will answer. I do my Google Alerts to find out who is talking about me in other places. I go to those places and start commenting to people and then it drives them back to my site.

It takes time, but is well worth it. I have gained loyal fans, they are buying my albums, reading my stories, telling their friends about me.

Rox: Do have a specific example of how social media directly is supporting your business?
Kenneth: Yes! last year and this year I held a CD release party at the Ala Moana Hotel. We only used social media to get the word out, and both events were standing room only! That was the only marketing we did.

Rox: You also sent me some links showing you were ranked in the top 10 on both the folk artist (where you are #3 today right behind Makana!) and the world/reggae.
Kenneth: Yes. Just like when my music was used on your Beachwallks.tv, my fans use their own Google alerts and find me there and that helps build my connection to them, and your fans come to my web site too. All these links from other people help me on the ReverbNation charts.

Please visit Kenneth’s website here.
Please visit Kenneth’s blog here.
Please visit Kenneth’s Facebook page here.

Thank you Kenneth!
Aloha,

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This presentation was for the Hawaii Court Reporters and Captioners Association. These are the fine folks who work in the courtroom transcribing the proceedings, in lawyer offices taking depositions, and providing captioning for the hearing-impaired. Where would be without them?!

Here is a transcript of the slides I used, which was followed by real time web surfing looking at real life examples and Q&A. I will update with links after the presentation. You can download the PDF of my slides here. View and share the slides on SlideShare.net.

Promote Yourself with Social Media

• People Talk. Help them! Your identity. Your locations. Your messages. Your time.
• A Picture Is Worth…
• The Person – The Biz: Be clear about your identity: Keep it consistent across the internet. It’s not just your name and your avatar! Actions speak louder than words.
• Free eBook on howto manage your online identity: www.KnowHowCafe.com
• Your website is your prime real estate.
• Online Networking You’re invited! Culture matters. Find friends. Schedule smartly.
• Marketing The Good News: Other people can spread your message for you. You are no long limited by small staffs. You can benefit by creating “assets” that serve others as much as they serve you.
• Your New Media Voice Text Blog Podcast Internet Talk Show Photo Blog Live Video Stream Internet TV
• Tech IQ: Smart Phone Mobility RSS Efficiency Etiquette Literacy
• Best Practices: Ask. Respond. Share. Centralize strategy and Deputize across the organization. Personalize your goals and measure accordingly. Incorporate into normal j-o-b activities. Make it easy for others to talk about you.
• Online Self Promotion! Open 24-7!
• See you online!

Here are the links we visited

Note: All links open in a new window!

Aloha,

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The social media flap du jour is about the Nestlé fan page on Facebook being slammed with comments about their use of unsustainable farming in Indonesia for palm oil. It’s perfect timing as I held a webinar training this morning with a new client who shared concerns about the possibility of negative comments and inappropriate photos as a reason her brand is moving slowly with social media. (Otherwise I tend to stay away from flaps du jour!) In her case, it is an awesome brand with very high positives. So let’s deconstruct this a little bit to create some ease and markers on the social media roadway.

• If your brand already has high favorable sentiment, you are ahead of the game. The more people love you, the more people (read “other people”) will come to you defense in the increasingly unlikely chance of a firestorm. Social media rewards the well-loved and well-behaved brands powerfully and frequently.


• If your brand has questionable behaviors, it is definitely more vulnerable on the social web. You must be ready and willing to hear the negative feedback. That doesn’t mean you have to take it lying down – you can set your own rules for conversation, such as “posts that defame our individual employees, that misappropriate our registered logo, or that use profanity, will be deleted.” Keep in mind the more restrictions you place, the more heat you are likely to receive.


• If you are in the midst of an online attack, remember basic communication and parenting skills! Let people vent, respond that you hear them, don’t try to win the argument at this stage of the game. Most importantly IMO, make note of their concerns, collect data, and be willing to present this to your peers/bosses internally. This is what this article is about. When people take their time to tell you how wrong you may be about your business, consider that gold. These are the canaries in your cold mine. It is your duty to take that back to your decision-makers. Nestlé has over 91,000 fans now on their Facebook page. This is a sizable, engaged audience that is hungry for a positive message about this situation. I hope Neslté will be able to deliver, though it may take some time.


• Most all controversy gives your brand free attention. What you do with it, is up to you. But if you step back and look at this mechanically, as a bean counter, you can see the advantage. It is your most opportune time to influence opinion, to change internal processes that will make you a better company. In this case, the issues are protection of the orangutan habitat and sustainable farming. There is an undeniable trend that people on planet earth are increasingly in support of these type of issues, whether you are or not. Turns out it is cost-effective marketing too.


• This particular issue, corporate social responsibility, influences not just fans but employees. A company’s ethical behavior was cited as an important factor in deciding where to work by 97% of the 7,000 surveyed by Kelly Services. You could say these Nestlé protesters are canaries in all of our cold mines – if you are a business person.

The Takeaway for Today

Here’s a very inspiring quote from Nick Jacobs, President and CEO of Windber Medical Center & Winder Research Institute from way back in 2006! Keep in mind this is healthcare, truly a life and death matter.

“Live on the edge, the view is better from there.” That has always been my business sense. When it comes to people’s lives, we don’t take any chances. We are very very conservative, but when it comes to things like complementary medicine, the newest technologies, the best approaches that embrace mind, body and spirit, my personal life’s path has proven to me that we are all different.

Aloha,

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When I am doing social web training these days, at least once or twice an hour I implement what I call “Rox’s 180 Rule.” It is very simple, though not always comfortable to implement. As people and companies are learning how to participate on social networks, deciding what sorts of content to create, or even how to set pricing for web-based services, they initially experience that nervous pit in the stomach that comes from a lack of knowledge in the space. Travelers know this angst well – will I be scammed by unscrupulous merchants and fall into a tourist trap?

Most companies tend to move into research mode at this point and seek out what others are doing or attempt to guess what others would want. They find safety in being a copycat, even though that cuts off a key source of creativity right at the beginning: your own experience and understanding. The faster life moves, the less I rely on formal research. It’s something I am exploring in my personal life as well.

Instead I often recommend using the 180 Rule. Simply turn the tables and think of yourself as the customer. What would you want? How would you want to be treated? How much information is too little or too much? What would you be willing to pay? What does that road look like from behind your own eyes?

The old hierarchies of the marketplace are gone now. Anyone can be a publisher, a reviewer, even a service provider. No one entity is in charge of your brand. Thanks to blogging and Twitter, even people who have never used your products can have more influence on buying than any other marketing channel! You can use this peership to your advantage though.

Bruce Fisher of Hawaii-Aloha.com runs a highly personalized travel service here in Hawaii and competes very successfully with the mega online travel agencies like Orbitz and Travelocity. Not only does he use internet platforms smartly he also understands the value of providing local and personal service. He gives what he wants to get: live customer service from people who actually live in Hawaii.

Likewise, 37 Signals, a very successful tech company that proves daily you can charge for your web-based apps, implements the 180 rule in their pricing strategies. They do often have the luxury of creating products with little initial competition. But even when entering such competitive spaces as online jobs, they rely on their own perspective: “What would I be willing to pay for this service and believe to be getting a good value?”

I think the side benefit of this 180 rule is that your business more organically attracts the type of customers who are a good fit for the things you are creating and selling. It’s one more aspect of having genuine conversations with the marketplace, starting in your own office and radiating from there.

Life can be this simple. Look at the situation from 180 degrees—not what would they want but what would you want—the next time you feel confused about how to proceed.

Aloha,

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At a recent meeting of the Hawaii Chapter of the Social Media Club, I talked briefly with Dr. Bill Haig of Power Logo Design about the shifting sands of brand credibility and how that gets created and managed. He has a successful business and several white papers on the specialty of “credibility based logo design.” He has found it can increase conversion rates by two four times on the home page.

He emailed me today talking about how this impacts social web brand building and I offered to create a poll. So here it is after the jump! Please add your vote and share your comments with us.

Aloha,

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The social web has made it so easy for people to connect with each other and have a voice at the table like never before. Last night at a tweetup here in Honolulu, I met Larry Heim, CEO of HonBlue. This was a Tweetup Treat, as Larry and I do not normally travel in the same circles. Later back at home I could Google him. Then find his LinkedIn profile on the first page of Google’s results. Then click through to a known company here in Honolulu. “That was easy!”

Contrast that to a situation this past week. I was approached (via several urgent phone calls over the weekend), to become an affiliate of a new web site and to also have this company make a presentation at our upcoming Social Media Club meeting. Let’s just call him Sammy.

By coincidence, Seth Godin tackles this topic of the tacky techie on his blog today:

...you can see the danger anyone who introduces new technology faces. While you’ll attract Les Paul and the 37Signals guys, you’re more likely to attract spammers, scammers, opportunity seekers and others that will bring our culture down as easily as they’ll bring it up.

• Contacted me via phone rather than via email. I rarely answer the phone if I don’t know the caller. If you have your caller ID blocked, you will never have me pick up live. It’s just a function of how many incomings I get and that the phone is an interruption when I am working on someone else’s project. I reserve the same courtesy for you if I am working on your project.
• Left very urgent voice mails after normal business hours: Fri afternoon, Sat morning, Sat evening, then Mon morning. I know, the web is 24/7, but even though I might be web surfing for pleasure on Sat night does not mean I want your business problem at that time. The more you call me during non-business hours, the less likely I will respond at all.
• Made false and unsubstantiated claims. “We launched our Site 10 day’s ago and according to Alexa Rating we surpassed twitter in 3 days.” That is an actual quote! And it is patently false. I checked Alexa.
• Has no verifiable bio or resume to be found online, nor any links on reputable sites with biographical details. When all I can find about you on Google search are things like message board postings or a one-off weight loss blog offer, then you are not a serious business person IMO.
• Used a Hotmail address when he finally contacted me via email. You may not know this however Hotmail and AOL email addresses do not inspire confidence in savvy business professionals. Get an email address at your domain (the same domain that has your biographical info and references) or get a Gmail address. Because Hotmail and AOL are infiltrated by spammers and force you to wade through mountains of blinking ads to check your own email, no serious business person I know has the tolerance or time for that.
• Had numerous mis-spellings and grammatical errors in the email. The web is very informal in many ways. However, we business folk still get the “nails on chalkboard” feeling when an email comes in written by someone who appears to be using English as a second language while posing as a native speaker.

On the other hand, because it is easier than ever to connect, it makes strategic sense to list verified credentials and facts when you are reaching out to someone, versus dropping names and over-stating your case. It may work on the short term but over time you are hurting your credibility by trying to make your self, your brand, your idea, more than it actually is at this moment in time.

What tips do you use to make it easy for people to tell you apart from the blowhards and scammers who make a lot of noise on the social web? Contact me if you’d like to see an anonymous copy of the email response I sent “Sammy.” I don’t believe in being rude tho I do believe in calling out the facts.

Aloha,

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Twitter and Facebook were down some today due to “Denial of Service” (DoS) attacks. Here’s some information on what they are, how they occur, and what you can do as a netizen to help prevent them!

A DoS occurs when a malicious programmer or programmers unleash commands across thousands computers that have been infected with viruses (those computers are referred to as “zombies”) telling them to “hit” or visit a specific web site on a specific date and time. Large popular sites are typically the victim. These large sites (Google, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft) have complex back end programming that make the site run as expected as well as front end programming to control the incoming traffic and direct it to available servers, known as load balancing.

A DoS attack is like thousands of people converging on Wal-mart for a giant sale and the crowd overwhelms itself thereby preventing anyone from getting in.

Say Wal-mart has 6 big front doors. As you approach the entrance a family of 5 shows up and heads for the first door. You naturally head for one of the other doors. You’ve “load balanced” yourself by picking an entrance that is less crowded. The routers that sit in front of the server farm that houses the Twitter WEB and DATABASE servers does that load balancing for the requests that come into Twitter. They notice that servers 1,5,8, and 10 are busy so they send your request for your Twitter page to server 2.

When hundreds of thousands of people (requests) rush the doors (front line routers) the doors just can’t organize (load balance) fast enough. And even if they could, the WEB and DATABASE servers sitting behind them can’t answer the requests for pages fast enough. Even if 100,000 people managed to get into the store, there wouldn’t be enough employees, shopping carts, or space to handle the crowd, and everything would screech to a halt.

Hacking is when a malicious entity actually gains direct access and control of the WEB and DATABASE servers. That DID NOT happen today. Today was the DOS attack – the swarm of hundreds of thousands of simultaneous requests that overwhelmed the ability of the Twitter servers to respond. There is very little that can be done about that, because the attack is actually carried out by “zombie machines” – perhaps even the one on your desk via which you are reading this article!

I am not kidding.

If you have a PC, and you run a Windows OS, and you are not incredibly vigilant about your anti-spyware software, there is a decent chance that you have inadvertently been infected with viruses and your machine could be used to unknowingly join the other “zombie” PCs and assist in these DoS attacks.

System Administrators (Sys Admins) see malicious efforts to hack into their sites frequently. You rarely see a well-managed site actually get hacked, as there is a lot a Sys Admin can do to protect from the inside. Much less can be done to protect from zombies converging on the outside. By looking at the unique IP address of the attempted hacker, a Sys Admin can block incoming traffic from that IP or group of related IP addresses. With a DoS attack, the requests are literally coming from all over the world, via unsuspecting zombie computers that are infected with a virus.

Now please go out and get a Mac or go clean up your PC!

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I am speaking on a Social Web Panel at the YWCA this week on Tuesday, May 5th, along with Laurel Boylen of chi.mp and Kelly Mitchell of Prudential. Here is a little blurb I wrote for their newsletter as supporting inspiration.

The talk is for members only; maybe this is a good time to join?

I just did!

The social web is all about connecting with others and having conversations. The foundational question that is continuously asked in the background of peoples minds is, “Who are you?” This is answered in everything you do online. Every email you send, every screen name you create, every network you join, and the people with whom you connect, all add to the collective definition of who you are as perceived by others.

UPDATE June 30, 2009: The YWCA has posted photos here from the event.

The internet is also an archive, and there are sites (such as www.archive.org) that are capturing copies of nearly every web page. So even if you remove a page that was the “old you” it’s probably still out there. The bad news to some is that those old hair styles you wore can still be found, but the bigger good news IMO (in my opinion) is that you can let go of trying to be perfect every single day. The aspects of humanity that make us most lovable and most real, are our slips as much as our achievements.

Whether you are communicating for a company where you work or only on your own web sites, you are showing the world who you are, how you think, and what you stand for. That is enormously helpful to others in deciding whether they want to move closer or walk on by.

This is incredibly liberating!

You no longer have to bland yourself down to be palatable to “everyone.” You can be YOU and that actually makes it easier for people to find you who want someone just like you.

Aloha,

Related Post:
Finding Your New Media Voice

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