The jhP social media team guest-lectured in China this week – digitally speaking!

Alissa and Angie connected with a college class in China via video chat to give a live presentation about the effects of social media on businesses. At 7 p.m. May 18, Topeka time, it was 8 a.m. May 19 at Wuhan University of Science and Technology (WUST) in Wuhan, China. Alissa and Angie have both guest-lectured for Dr. Bob Boncella at Washburn University in Topeka, Kan., but this was their first international lecture for one of the traveling professor’s classes at WUST.

The social media team met with Miranda, a WUST graduate and current international student in the MBA program at Washburn, to discuss usage of social media in the Chinese culture. Alissa and Angie’s presentation covered the similarities and differences between U.S. and Chinese networks, focusing on how the networks are beneficial to businesses.

Facebook is very similar to RenRen in China, but businesses aren’t using RenRen to engage customers. The Facebook conversation focused on discussing examples of how U.S. businesses use Facebook pages to reach their customers to achieve a variety of marketing objectives.

Twitter has no comparable Chinese networks, so it was necessary to define Twitter, its purpose and how businesses can can use it. Examples helped students understand how businesses may benefit from a micro-blogging site.

The presentation also covered YouTube (similar to Youku in China), Flickr, Foursquare and LinkedIn. There were two brief live demonstrations of Twitter and LinkedIn at the end of the presentation, as requested by Dr. Boncella and the students. Dr. Boncella was very pleased with the presentation and is looking forward to future jhP presentations via video link.

Here’s a big thank you to Dr. Boncella for choosing the jhP team to speak to his students. It was a rare and exciting opportunity. We look forward to guest-lecturing in many Chinese classes to come.

Until next time, zai jian!

I am not a fan of syndicated updates from brands – whether they’re from a third-party vendor such as Ping.FM, or integrated within your existing Facebook/Twitter profiles. We’re discussing the situation when an update is entered in one place and it posts that same message across all of the networks connected to that service. Don’t get me wrong, there will always be a use for those in my social media mix. But when syndicated posts become thoughtlessly automatic, I question their effectiveness
for brands.

I have many concerns, but here’s my biggest: Each social network has different parameters, a different personality, and in most cases, a different audience. To entice your customers/prospects to take time to engage with your brand, you need to make sure you’re approaching them the right way. Think about it from a traditional media standpoint – would you take a newspaper ad and run it as-is for a TV commercial? That’s exactly how it is with new media. You need the appropriate message and delivery to catch your audience’s attention and to move them
to engagement.

Facebook offers a lot of opportunities for brands to engage people. Page updates can incorporate multi-media attachments (images, video, links) and can be tagged to include hot links to people’s profiles, events or other pages/groups within Facebook. This gives brands the platform to tell a rich story with extra visuals.

Conversely, Twitter’s tweets are short and much less inclusive of multi-media. Sure, you can add links to images and video, but they count as part of your 140 character limit. Twitter also incorporates @replies and #hashtags to help people understand the context of the message and who you’re talking to/about.

Bulk-messaging both Facebook and Twitter will often lead to failures in each channel. Messages created for Facebook are typically too long for Twitter and get cut off. Twitter updates that are pulled into Facebook are usually bland because they’re missing the additional content. How are either of those scenarios going to be encouraging to a customer who likes your Page or follows your brand on Twitter?

And one more thing. If you’re using syndicated posts to save time, are you remembering to follow up with the responses people may have posted in both mediums?

All I’m saying is that the point of social media is to engage and be interactive. Cutting corners through regular update syndication can potentially derail the efforts you’re making. What do you think?

Last week Alissa and I represented jhP at the Free State Social a social media conference in Lawrence. While there, we had the opportunity to hear from some of the country’s top social media thought-leaders. So what did we take away? Check it out – the first of a series of two blog posts covering the event.

Thursday kicked off with a BANG with keynote speaker Chris Brogan, President of New Marketing Labs and New York Times best selling author of Trust Agents on stage. Then we heard from Shawna Coronado, author of Gardening Nude. Here’s what we learned from these two …

In social media it’s all personal. This is something we already know, encourage and practice regularly, but Shawna made a great point in her presentation – when you think about it, aren’t some of the best sales people the best because they are personal?

If that’s true, then how do you keep this in perspective and not end up spending all day building relationships through social media? A good tip given at the conference was the 2-hour rule. Chris referenced this in his presentation. If you have two hours a day to spend on social media then spend 30 minutes listening, 60 communicating and 30 minutes publishing. There’s no foolproof formula – this is just a reference to show you how important it is to communicate with your audience.

At the end of the day, these new media channels are a place for social networking and we need to do just that – be social in our networking! So engage with your friends and followers. Build those relationships by sharing something personal about yourself. Office out of diet coke? Share your frustration with your followers – it’s a great way to start a conversation! Just be real and authentic, don’t hide behind your brand’s logo and expect people to engage with you.

Our nerdy claim to fame? I got to have lunch with Chris Brogan and Alissa got him to autograph her copy of Trust Agents! Check it out:

We do a lot of college class presentations – they’re just another fun part of our job. Recently we were at Washburn University when a student asked if we push info out to our personal social media networks, on behalf of clients, and if so, how. We get this question a lot and it’s a valid question. So much so that we’d like to share our thoughts on the importance of transparency in social media engagement and marketing.

Social media is about establishing and maintaining relationships with real people. Healthy relationships are based on trust – consumer-brand relationships are no different. When consumers are interacting with a brand online, they want to know who they’re talking to and what that person’s affiliation is with that brand. For example, if I’m looking for new shoes and I get advice from a guy that manufactures shoes, I have a good idea of what to expect from him and how to merit his advice. If I’m talking to the CEO of that same shoe store, I expect a different perspective and give it different merit.

By being transparent in your posts you are building trust and understanding in the content, the author and the brand. That’s why we feel VERY strongly that in order to build that trust you HAVE to have honest and transparent communication. We feel so strongly, in fact, that the jhP social media policy promotes it for team members regardless of posting on behalf of the company, ourselves or on behalf of our clients. So we’re required to clearly identify ourselves and our affiliation with jhP or the client.

Kohl’s is a great example of why we need to be transparent in social media. It all began with Ed Gawronski posting helpful tips on the Kohl’s page encouraging customers to visit the website where they could provide their email in return for discounts and cash-back opportunities. Unbeknownst to the other users, Ed just so happened to be the vp of marketing at Kohl’s. It didn’t take long for someone to call him out – going so far as to leave the link to his LinkedIn page. The real kicker was the comment, “Masquerade much?” That one question could have potentially been damaging to the brand – check out more about the case HERE.

When you’re posting as a representative, we recommend the following simple steps to prevent public embarrassment and damage to the brand:

1. Identify who you are using your full (real) name.
2. List your affiliation to the brand.
3. Discuss whether you are acting on behalf of a company, client,
   self, etc.

These three steps allow you to be honest and respectful and to engage openly in a conversation with others. Essentially, it’s doing just what you’d want others to do. So tell us what you think. For what other reasons do you feel it’s important to be transparent?

Of course the Internet is changing. Change is what it does best – faster and better than any other medium ever. Although we launched the jhP blog just a few years ago, social media has rapidly gained influence. So now’s an ideal time to reinvent our online presence. We concentrated on three key areas.

Conformity

Building a solid brand requires thoughtful repetition. While jhP has built a presence on most major social media sites, they were constructed one at a time – over time. The existing materials, though strong in and of themselves, expressed different visual philosophies.

It was time to take a look at everything we had going, all at once, and establish a more uniform look. We like to think of jhP’s style as being sophisticated simplicity. Our new designs should collectively reflect that.

Usability

Slick visuals are good, but a website serves a purpose. Users want to quickly access information. We at jhP want to make that easy. The new blog is designed with functionality and simplicity at its heart.

By removing extraneous ornamentation, simplifying the color scheme, and standardizing the appearance of elements, we draw attention to the content and what the user can do with it. Large areas of white space and careful use of the company orange coordinate to focus attention where it’s due.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social media tools have been integrated throughout. Users can comfortably and easily share content with their friends. That interchange is vital in making the jhP online presence meaningful to visitors.

Flexibility

The Internet will change again tomorrow. We’re building to accommodate that change as easily as possible. That means using strong, flexible, accessible standards. The new blog is designed to accept quick revisions to structure and appearance to adapt to whatever comes next.

Thanks for visiting our latest evolution. We hope you like it. Whatever you think, let us know. There is always evolving yet to do.