Twitter: Inane Chatter or Powerful Conversation Channel? Our Ford Story in 140 Characters
by Anne Deeter Gallaher

The power of social conversation and social networks in creating fresh marketing approaches is illustrated by a Deeter Gallaher Group case study that follows a car dealership’s foray into the stream of social media.

With the support of our innovation-game clientele, we are honing the two imperatives for anyone wishing to pursue successful social media campaigns: significant investment of time and dedicated people and financial resources.

To be effective in social media you must — engage people in two-way conversations, share ideas and information, measure results and opinions—there is no way to circumvent the huge investment of time and resources on the public timeline. These media platforms might be free for now—Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook—but the man hours and agency hours to create strategies, engage customers, and measure feedback is far from free. Tempering our insatiable desire to learn and absorb all this information with the economic realities of billable time is a Herculean struggle. I know we are not the only firm working to achieve this balance and trying to define the elusive ROI.

Do a quick search of the #marketing, #IABC, or #likeminds hashtags on Twitter, and you’ll find lively debate on social media’s ROI. Whether it’s Return on Investment for the CFOs, Return on Influence for the CMOs, or Return on Information for the CIOs, every client wants and deserves a measurable return.

Business owners and agencies alike wonder, What’s the best social media engagement for us to follow? Should we begin with a 10-page strategy or a one-page blog decision tree like the US Air Force? The good news is that there is no one prescribed methodology for social media success. Listening is not scientific, and it doesn’t take a degree in marketing to glean results from your efforts.

For us, we have created a blend of traditional and social media that is producing impressive returns for our clients. Our latest case study involves Pennsylvania Ford dealer LB Smith Ford Lincoln Mercury, Ford Motor Company, and social media marketing. This is our version of The Ford Story:

1. Engage in social media first by listening to people of influence. Ford’s Global Digital Communications Director, @ScottMonty, tops our list of communicators who provide highly informed, highly valued tweets. His Social Media Marketing Blog is a perfect place for businesses to learn the art and influence of social media.

We engaged with Scott on Twitter and have learned an MBA’s worth of strategy and networking just from listening to him. Soon our listening turned to talking (that’s happened on several occasions with our Twitter friends like @HowellMarketing, @TrendTracker, @CMEGroup).

More important, On June 24, 2009, we brought him to Harrisburg for a professional development seminar on Social Media and Business co-sponsored by Deeter Gallaher Group, LB Smith Ford Lincoln Mercury, and the Harrisburg Chapter of IABC.

Ford’s success in the social media realm has attracted international industry attention and a branding award by the Society for New Communications Research, as well as a recent surprise $1 billion profit announced in the WSJ.

2. Communicate to all your audiences. The printed word is not dead, declares Tyler Cowen in his opening sentence of Three Tweets for the Web. But how can you garner the greatest media mileage from an article that’s in print? A perfect meld of traditional and social media can begin with the op-ed or an 800-word column “opposite the editorial” in a publication.

More over, On May 29, our client Richard E. Jordan II (@RichardEJordan2) wrote an 800-word op-ed that was printed in the Central Penn Business Journal’s transportation issue. Rick Jordan is CEO of LB Smith Ford Lincoln Mercury, in Lemoyne, PA, the number 1 dealer in the Philadelphia region. As part of a campaign that includes full-color ads, targeted event sponsorships, and public relations, Rick’s op-ed offered timely C-level insight in his own words. Teamed with social media, the op-ed packs a strong communications punch.

3. Take it into the social web. As soon as the Central Penn Business Journal ran the article and posted it to their Web site on Friday, May 29, we began tweeting it (which drives traffic to the business journal’s site as well) and linked it to Rick Jordan’s two company Web sites: www.LBSmithFord.com and www.SmithLandUSA.com.

It’s wise to tweet articles using a measurement tool like bit.ly so clients and agencies have an accurate analytic of the force of social mentions. Within a few hours, ““Is Ford at a Competitive Disadvantage? PA Ford Dealer Responds” was tweeted and retweeted across the public timeline.

It caught the attention of @ScottMonty and @Ford. The quality and value of the conversation on Twitter is what propels retweets, so in blog postings or guest columns be careful not to minimize the credibility of powerful language and clear writing. The influence from retweets is vast and deep, forming simultaneous media channels. In addition to Ford dealers on Twitter who retweeted Rick’s op-ed, the article was retweeted by @riGMBlog, @DrivenMediaComm, @nadaguides, @dtdbob3 and throughout central Pennsylvania.

4. Capture the serious attention of C-levels. Knowing how authentic and innovation-focused Mr. Mulally Ford’s CEO is, I felt he would appreciate reading what Rick Jordan had written as “a Ford foot soldier on the front lines of American car manufacturing.”

The day the op-ed ran, I sent an email to Ford’s CEO Alan Mulally with the article link in it. Was this a long shot? Perhaps. Do CEOs really care what people say about their brand? The great ones do. Rick Jordan had quoted Scott Monty, Alan Mulally, and Bill Ford in his fresh perspective on the automotive industry from the dealer’s viewpoint.

5. Never underestimate the power of conversation. The following Monday morning, Mr. Mulally sent a personal email with genuine remarks and appreciation for the “PA Ford dealer” viewpoint. He sent Rick Jordan a personal email as well. Astonishingly, our email exchanges were in the midst of GM declaring bankruptcy on June 1. As a Fortune 10 executive, Mr. Mulally certainly has global concerns that demand his attention, but his willingness to listen and respond to a Ford dealer’s first-person perspective defines his leadership style and successes.

The lesson is that social media conversations are extremely important to a company’s marketing and branding strategy. It’s also an opportunity to carry timely, unfiltered business information straight to the corner suite.

Is Ford listening? Absolutely. Are your customers listening? Yes. Are you telling your story? Social media demands a top-down mandate. If the CEO of Ford Global deems it valuable to sit with his Social Media director Scott Monty and engage consumers in two-way conversations, then certainly it’s a wholesale embrace of new media channels by Ford. Mr. Mulally has invited the “empowered consumer” into Ford’s product decision-making through blogs, the Fiesta movement, and The Ford Story video collection. Clearly the public has responded with renewed brand enthusiasm.

What did the LB Smith Ford CEO Rick Jordan think of our traditional and social media marriage? “I am a social media believer, and although I’m not in my 30s, you’ll find me on Twitter (@RichardEJordan2) and below on YouTube.

“I understand my role as the CEO involves communicating with our customers and the community in many different channels.”

Beginning on Twitter, Rick’s conversations with @ScottMonty evolved into a conversation with Alan Mulally, and he has now achieved a social media Grand Slam. Mr. Alan Mulally will be the first honoree at The Second Mile’s “Celebration of Leadership 2010” event in Hershey, PA, sponsored by LB Smith Ford Lincoln Mercury.

“We are thrilled to invite and honor Mr. Mulally to tell the Ford story of turning the Ford ship around to 1,200 people in our business community,” says Rick.
“Our social media investment and commitment to a conversation has yielded more Return on Investment, Influence, and Information than we have ever imagined.”

The Deeter Gallaher Group, a Harrisburg-based marketing firm, has always taken pride in its tagline: “Powerful language. Smart marketing.SM” The advent of social media, however, has caused us to internally recognize a new ethos: “Powerful conversation. Smart marketing.”

Anne Deeter Gallaher is owner and CEO of the Deeter Gallaher Group LLC, a marketing/ad/PR firm in Mechanicsburg, PA, delivering Powerful language. Smart marketing?.

She can be reached at ADG [AT] DeeterGallaherGroup.com and @AnneDGallaher on Twitter.

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We Care: 5 Easy Steps to Make Listening a Form of Activity

By Anne Deeter Gallaher

Are you tired of reading and hearing about Twitter? You’re bombarded by social media seminars. And now your clients have started asking whether their businesses should have a LinkedIn account, a Facebook fan page, a Twitter profile, or all of the above. (For a complete social media platform base, you’ll also need a blog, a YouTube account, Flickr, and Digg!) It’s time to conquer social media anxiety and join the conversation.

Where should you begin? With the same basic communications protocol @DaleCarnegie explained in 1936. In chapter four of How to Win Friends and Influence People, “An Easy Way to Become a Good Conversationalist,” Carnegie writes about former Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, who said, “There is no mystery about successful business [conversation]. Exclusive attention to the person speaking to you…Nothing else is so flattering as that.” Carnegie observed that “Dr. Eliot’s listening was not mere silence, but a form of activity.”

For a business owner, the thought of paying employees or agencies to listen in silence in social media channels seems wasteful. Businesses need customers, not conversation monitors. Or do they?

The most successful businesses understand their markets, their customers, and their suppliers. The best companies are futurists, trendseekers, customer-centric, and great listeners. The quickest way to forge connections in all these areas is the public timeline, and the ROI can be immediate. By following Ford’s @ScottMonty or @comcastcares you’ll quickly discover the value they bring to their companies just by listening.

Although it’s hard to convince management and clients that being productive now includes listening to hundreds of 140-character tweets or reading industry blog posts from consumer bloggers, that’s precisely the truth. New media has snatched new mindshare, and business media channels no longer cater to the elite. Consumer opinion rules.

To ease into the conversations, here are some simple steps to help you find and listen to people in the social media sphere:

1. Choose one or two platforms to engage in. While you are “doing” business—producing, servicing, selling—smart companies are listening to conversations about their competition and searching the public timeline for opportunities to create their own Blue Ocean Strategy. Listening on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and reading blog posts from consumers in your industry provides enough data to develop a competitive landscape. What’s your competition doing? Who are their customers? Is there a need being unfulfilled? Is there a weakness? Is there a service delivered unsatisfactorily, hence an opportunity? You’ll find your answers in social media channels.

2. Choose what topics to listen in on. Dedicate at least one hour per day to explore conversations of interest and consequence. On Twitter, use the Search function to find people talking about your products or to discover wholesale conversations on your topic—energy, analytics, IT, commercial real estate, non-profits. On Tweetdeck, you can organize your columns by topics and listen to real-time, continuous conversations. As a branding firm, we listen to @Wegmans, @Ford, @comcastcares, @JetBlue, and @Gevalia. We listen to streaming topics which are connoted by a hashtag—anyone talking about #IABC, #marketing, #PR, #likeminds, #entrepreneurs, and #CEOs is noteworthy to us. It won’t take long to find pertinent topics to listen to and influencers in your fields of interest.

3. Choose who to listen to within a topic. You can’t possibly listen to everyone who’s sharing online, but you can discern who is sharing the best content and who has valuable connections. Find the industry experts by evaluating their tweets. Unfollow the people who don’t add value. We listen to PR colleagues @HowellMarketing, @MikeLizun, @SueYoungMedia, @thinkBIG_Blog, @AmberCadabra, @demicooper, and @kimschaumann around the world and learn from them. We read their case studies and comment on their blogs.

Who are the influencers in your field? Glen Gilmore (@TrendTracker) has developed such a strong knowledge-flow and group of followers that he is a media channel himself. The quality and value of his tweets attracts more than 60,000 followers who use him as a Search engine. Follow the people he tweets and retweets.

4. Listen to countertrend and divergent views. Try not to follow only like minds. Listen to those who rebuke social media and who have opposing political, trade, and business views. Learn why people feel social media is a fad and from that column, you will discover more influencers. Read a mashup of blog posts and comments from sites not related to your field to make your own product and consumer research richer. Regardless of industry, listen to local (@CPBJ, @andreacecil, @bydanielvictor) and national media (@WSJ and @USAToday) and local and national businesses (@Starbucks, @DunkinDonuts, @JetBlue, @mayoclinic, @Nordstrom). Listen to leaders and CEOs like @CEO_INGDIRECT, @jack_welch, @shelisrael, and @Scobleizer.

5. Build a rich personal and business community by listening. You can quickly discover where @SuzyWelch is on her new book tour, what new fast food account @ThePowerofSmall won, or what @garyvee says about wine. Your community on Twitter will be filled with people who are passionate about writing books, raising children, starting businesses, running governments, protesting governments, training for Ironman competitions, and curing cancers. Listening to them is the foundation to building your community.

Frank Eliason is @comcastcares and tweets from Philadelphia. His job is to “listen” to Comcast customers who seek his advice and tech help or who need to rant or rave about Comcast’s service. His real value is to be the ears of the corporation. The biggest signal he sends Comcast customers is that he is listening to them—Comcast Cares.

By engaging in social media for marketing, knowledge, or friendships, you are initiating a two-way conversation that begins with listening. And that sends a powerful message that says “I care.”

If you missed my first “Featured” article title: “Twitter: Inane Chatter or Powerful Conversation Channel?” just click on the link. It’s a Powerful In-depth Case Study on Ford Motors Enjoy

The Deeter Gallaher Group, a Harrisburg-based marketing firm, has always taken pride in its tagline: “Powerful language. Smart marketing.SM” The advent of social media, however, has caused us to internally recognize a new ethos: “Powerful conversation. Smart marketing.”

Anne Deeter Gallaher is owner and CEO of the Deeter Gallaher Group LLC, a marketing/ad/PR firm in Mechanicsburg, PA, delivering Powerful language. Smart marketing?.

She can be reached at ADG [AT] DeeterGallaherGroup.com and @AnneDGallaher on Twitter.

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Twitter, the messaging web site that has become an Internet sensation, is nearing a deal to close as much as $100 million of new funding from as many as seven investors, according to people familiar with the deal.

The investor group includes mutual fund giant T. Rowe Price and private-equity firm Insight Venture Partners, which are new investors to Twitter. The $100 million investment is about twice as much as Twitter was reportedly expected to haul in this latest round of fund-raising.

Other investors in this round include venture-capital firms Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners, which have previously invested in Twitter.

The investors are valuing Twitter, which has yet to generate revenue or finalize its plans for making money, at about $1 billion. A person familiar with the deal said investors are applying a similar value to Twitter as that applied to Facebook, which at one point was valued at $15 Billion. By some estimates, Twitter is expected to have 25 million users by the end of 2009. Facebook has 300 million users.

Twitter could not immediately be reached for comment.

The Twitter valuation is quite a lift from the company’s last round of investing earlier this year, in which investors valued the company at around $255 million, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company still isn’t generating any real revenue, though executives say they are discussing various options, including advertising and premium services targeted at businesses.

The deal is expected to close today. It is Twitter’s third and largest round of fund-raising.

WSJ, By Michael Corkery and Jessica E. Vascellaro

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Here are a few ways (sites) you can leverage their success into your own.

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Develop a Popular Facebook Application

Indian brothers Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla developed the wildly popular Facebook application Scrabulous, which in October, 2007 was bringing in $18,000 a month from advertising, according to the Wall Street Journal, and at its peak was rumored to be bringing in $25,000 a month in ad revenues. While the brothers ended up having some legal difficulties because of copyright issues with the Scrabble board game that resulted in the game being shut down in July 2008, monetizing Facebook applications remains a viable opportunity. Just look at recent success of gaming company Zynga. It’s social network applications like Mafia Wars, FarmVille, Texas Hold’em and YoVille had over 60 million active monthly users as of July, 2009. Besides selling advertising, social network applications have raised millions in venture capital and charged users real-world money to purchase virtual goods that enhance the gaming experience.

Use Facebook Marketplace

The application “lets you sell, give away, buy, ask or search for anything you want,” according to Facebook. You can also search the marketplace’s job listings or advertise your own services as a job seeker. If you’re a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, you can list your organization in the Causes section of Marketplace and raise money for your group by selling items or by collecting donations from users who choose to donate the proceeds of their sales to your group. Network for Good, the company that runs the donation program, even sends users receipts for their donations that they can keep with their income tax records. It’s free to post a listing on Marketplace, as long as you’re a Facebook user.

Tweet With Your Customers

Twitter recommends that its business users think of Twitter as a way to build relationships with customers rather than as a way to simply broadcast advertisements about your company. And it’s true — Twitter is an ideal venue for staying on top of what people are saying about your business. It’s easier and faster for someone to tweet about your company than it is for them to track down your contact information and get in touch with you directly, so Twitter can give you feedback you’d never hear otherwise. If you pay attention, you can create goodwill for your company by responding to users’ tweets, whether it’s to resolve a customer complaint or to thank someone for publicly praising your products. You can also offer unique deals via Twitter by providing special coupon codes. If you need more inspiration, Twitter’s web site has ten case studies of how businesses have used the program to promote themselves.

Build Your Fan Base

If you are your own brand, as is the case for basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, social networking tools can put you in closer contact with your fans and make you more of a real person to them. Though Shaq was already famous before increasing his online presence through Twitter, over 1.8 million followers know they can get uncensored and amusing insights into what it’s like to be Shaq that they might not get otherwise. Some lucky followers even get the chance to interact with him. If you decide to use social networking to promote yourself, make sure to create a separate professional profile to keep your personal life separate from your work life, and keep an eye out for impostors.

Get a Job in Social Networking

If you’ve got something special, perhaps you can gain a coveted position working for a social networking company. If the prestige isn’t enough, consider the perks: Facebook pays 100% of premiums for medical, dental, vision, life insurance and disability, 50% of premiums for dependents, and 50% of monthly gym fees for its full-time employees. It also offers four weeks of paid parental leave, $4,000 in “baby cash,” $3,000 a year in daycare assistance, 21 days of paid vacation, unlimited sick days, 11 paid company holidays, free snacks, and a 401(k) plan.

These are just a few examples of how tools like Facebook and Twitter can help you make money. “By thinking outside the box and being savvy about the latest technology, you can take advantage of trends in social networking to maximize your profitability.”

Get The Full Story On Amy Here, Enjoy

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