I’d like to start with an excerpt from a a recent Gregg Morris post. This is an email from one of his associates, expressing frustration at an inability to convince small businesses to engage in social media marketing:

Social networking is making zero inroads into any of the businesses (SMBs) we have visited and interest in “mining” those networks is similarly zero.  It’s not that they are rejected as future possibilities, but rather that SMBs haven’t time for it, since they sense the costs far exceed the benefits … The facts are the facts – SMBs are still the same as they always were: overworked, scratching for dollars, but now fighting even harder for market share. They are competing not just with local competition but also with online, distant suppliers and, of course, big box retailers.

To the point: Joe average – architect, restaurant owner, retail store – are not stupid, nor are they unaware of the need to handle their customers better. All I see … is the same, stupid Social CRM Expert-type of messaging. A bunch of esoteric bullshit skimming the surface of the problem, with no real solution offered. Everywhere I look, they all say the same thing: “You have to communicate with your customer…”, “you need to serve your customer…”, “you need to do this, that or the other…”. Lots of “you needs”, but few “here’s exactly how”

This little rant hit a chord for me because I teach a social media marketing class for small businesses and I constantly hear these same concerns.

There is a business cultural gap that is keeping many SMB’s from working this channel: Typical SMB ”advertising” is a hand-off. All the work is done by an ad agency and/or the advertising sales people.  There is little personal time expenditure and the cost/benefit is usually easily measurable. Not so with social media marketing.  There is more hands-on doing and the results may not be immediate.

When I consult with small businesses, I recognize that for many, the time commitments and demands of maintaining a consistent, effective presence seems overwhelming so I help them cut through the hype and FOCUS.  I encourage them to consider five very practical questions:

1) Do I know enough about social media marketing to make the right decision for my business?  Not knowing the possibilities would be the same disadvantage as operating a business without knowing such a thing as television advertising existed.

2) What is mybusiness strategy and how could a social toolkit align with my key initiatives?

3) Are my customers using the social web?

4) Are my competitors using this channel, and what are the competitive implications if I decide to participate or not?  Could I create advantage by being an early adopter?

5) Do I have the resources, or can I acquire the resources, to conduct limited, focused experiments to see if working through the social web can provide a cost-benefit exceeding traditional advertising?

After my students walk through these questions, they usually conclude a) yes, this is something with a lot of potential and b) there are practical and manageable methods to approach this if I stay committed and focused.

Does this make sense to you?  What is your experience with SMB’s and the social web right now?

{grow} community alert: Pete Mosely, a frequent contributor to {grow} has a new eBook out on promotion fundamentals which is a nice companion piece to this blog article.

At this time of year I’m not thinking too much about marketing and business so I just thought I would tell you a Christmas Story.

This is the tale of the only Christmas present that ever made me cry.  

When I was a little boy, all I ever wanted for Christmas was a Lite Brite set.  Lite Brite was the Photo Shop of the 1960s.  You could create beautiful picture light shows by manipulating tiny colored pegs on a black paper screen.   This was right up there with 8-track tapes and Seas Monkeys as the technology marvel of my generation.   

But I was the eldest of six kids and we didn’t have a lot of extra money for Christmas presents.  Actually asking for something as glorious and exotic as a Lite Brite seemed impossibly greedy.  So I kept my little secret between me and Santa Claus.  Every Christmas morning I would open my presents and find socks and shirts and maybe a baseball, but no Lite Brite.  Yuletide after Yuletide passed, never brightened by the phantasmagoria of Lite Brite masterpieces that lived so vividly in my mind.

Eventually I grew out of my Lite Brite phase but never really stopped wondering what it would be like to feel that little peg break through the crisp black paper to unleash its beauty.

Fast forward 30 years.  I received a mysterious Federal Express package.  No return address and it said “Don’t open until Christmas!”  Being just a little spooked in an era of terrorist bombings and anthrax letters, I opened it right away.  It was a Lite Brite set with this enclosed message: 

Dear Mark,

You will never guess what happened. I was cleaning out my sleigh and found this Lite Brite set for you!  It must have dropped from my sack many years ago.  You were a good little boy and deserved this present.  Sorry I goofed.  Have fun!  

 Love,  Santa

A grown man had tears in his eyes as he finally opened up his Lite Brite set, a gift from a sister who had paid attention, kept a secret, and had a loving heart.

May your Christmas, and every day, be filled with the joy and wonder of a child painting with little colored pegs!  — Mark

I recently moved into an older home that needs a lot of repair work.  As luck would have it, I had a new Twitter follower this week, @knoxhandyman. Sounded like just the trick.  Called him up.  Met him. Hired him.

And he did a great job so I thought I would provide this interview with this hard-working social media entrepreneur:

Mark: How long have you been a repairman, Lance?

Lance:  Well I’m 49 and I’ve been doing this about all my life, so let’s just say a long time.

Mark:  And how long have you been on Twitter?

Lance:  About 5-6 months.

Mark:  How much time do you spend on Twitter?

Lance:  None. My wife handles all that.  She asks me what I’m doing and where I’m going and what customers are saying and then she puts it out there.  I don’t have time for it.  I’m out here working.

Mark:  And do you use anything else beside Twitter?

Lance: Yeah, I get a tremendous amount of work from Craig’s List and she also puts it on Facebook.

Mark: So is Twitter working for you?

Lance: Seems to be. I’ve had a whole let better success there than newspaper advertising, I know that much. Took out a couple of newspaper ads. Zip.

Mark:  And how much of your business is coming from the social media channels?

Lance: I don’t really know.  I don’t keep track of it very well, which drives my wife crazy.  To me, it’s all pretty much word of mouth. It’s a call to my cell phone, that’s all that matters! 

And so I let Lance get back to re-wiring my new outdoor lights, another successful Twitter job completed!

I wanted to share this with you because it represents the REAL world of social media and working people. It’s not necessarily about the corporate world of “Trust Agents” or community managers or sponsored posts.  It’s about hard-working families and small businesses trying to figure out how to make a buck.  Go Lance.

One of the questions I hear frequently is, “Should I have one or two social media accounts for family and business?”

My strong recommendation is that you keep family and business separate.  The information needs of your family are going to be much different that those of your clients, right?  Why clutter customer feed streams with news of family dinners and disclosures about your husband’s snoring?  On the flip side, why bore grandma with re-tweets from the Wall Street Journal?

The argument I’ve heard against this is that you should simply be authentic and talk about whatever is going on in your life.  I’m hoping most social media participants are growing beyond this naieve  and simplistic view of the channel.  Nobody in business really wants you to be “authentic” if that means disclosing every little fact of your life.  I think a more accurate and practical goal is to remain “open and honest” in your communications.

Another argument against the complexity of two ( more) accounts is the risk of confusing accounts and disclosing something personal on a business account when you thought it was a family account.

Still, I’ve found the best strategy is to keep it clean.  Respect business accounts by minimizing the family details. That’s not to say you shouldn’t be personable and refer to family details on a business account, and by all means establish multiple accounts (if you have the time!) and enjoy all that the social web has to offer.

Thinking I’ll have a few arguments about this one?

Illustration: Christy Tanner

I’ve been thinking about lists on Twitter and how they might be used to assess someone’s influence.  I’m about to let you in on my thought process.   Please keep all  hands and feet in the car until it comes to a complete stop. We are entering murky and dangerous waters …

My assumption is that if somebody puts you on a list, they really want to pay attention to you.  They are giving you a vote of confidence. 

By dividing the number of lists a person is on by their total number of followers, I believe this might serve as a quick and dirty rating of relative influence. To me, this is one simple method to answer the question — you have a lot of followers, but how many REALLY listen to you? 

Certainly this is more straight-forward than the mysterious algorithms of Twitter grading apps. Both number of followers and number of lists are public, easily-accessible data points.   Another advantage is that “list” is a relatively new Twitter function.  People have not had time to figure out how to “game” it yet.  If this formula would catch on, people will probably figure out a way to boost their numbers, but in this moment in time, it’s still “pure.”

For your edification and discussion, I came up with a representative list of top social media bloggers (those with more than 10,000 followers) and ran the list formula (# of lists / # of followers = influence rating).   Try it on your own favorite marketing personalities.   Any surprises?

P.S. My own ranking came up as 4.5.  Eat your heart out Brogan.  ;  )

Belem Tower, Portugal

Miss me?  You DID?  Awwww … I missed you too.

Time to get back to work after a spectacular two-week vacation in Europe.  But for fun, I thought I would give you a little insight into my holiday.  Here is my trip by the numbers:

1, 707 — Number of emails in my inbox when I got home.

691 – Number of photos I took on the trip.

75 percent – Drop in readership of my blog when I recycled my “greatest hits” for my vacation.  There’s a lesson there.  Maybe it’s you can’t take a vacation from blogging  : )

45 – Cost (dollars) of a five minute cab ride from hotel to airport in Seville. No kidding.  There’s corruption there somewhere.  By comparison, the cost of a 25-minute cab ride in Lisbon was about $8.

38 – Total number of countries I have visited now that I’ve added Portugal and Morocco to the list.

29 — Number of blog posts Chris Brogan wrote in the 14 days I was away. Dude, that is just ridiculous.

Five – Number of MEANINGFUL emails in my inbox when I got home.

10 — Minutes of rain encountered over 14 days.

1.51 – Five-year record exchange rate that was hit while I was on vacation.  These days, you don’t go to Europe for the bargains.

One – Number of times I got really, really lost on the local roads. This was remarkable because my brand new Garmin GPS system did not work worth a damn.  It kept saying I was driving through a forest.

Zero.  Number of free, public Wi-Fi spots I encountered the entire trip. Perhaps this is a factor in Europe’s relatively slow adoption of social media?

Any way, I’m glad to be home and in dialogue with you again.   One of the things I’ve realized is that the evolution of social media is measured in dog years.  I was only gone two weeks but it seems like 14.  What did I miss?

I’m taking some time off and I’m not one of those super hero types who blog when they are on vacation. I am spending time with my family, not the computer.

However, I’ve set-up some of my favorite blog posts from the past for you to view while I’m gone. If you’re new to {grow} I think you’ll enjoy them and if you’re familiar with the blog, well … you’ll probably be bored quite frankly, but I’m doing my best : )  See ya soon!

One of the points that differentiates me from other bloggers:  I’m old enough to remember when Microsoft was cool. They were the college drop-out geeks who conquered the world.  Then David turned into Goliath. And nobody likes Goliath.

But I just get this sense that Microsoft is recaputuring its mojo. Let’s see if you agree.

1) Those ads.  As a marketer, I loved the ninja move they put on Apple.  Apple’s ad campaign famously defined their competitor as a pasty-faced, clunky slug.  Instead of fighting this deeply embedded image, Microsoft incorporated it into its own ads and flipped the “Apple cart” by highlighting the breadth and depth of the Microsoft user base.  This was simply inspired marketing.

2)  Real service.  The last time I went to an Apple Store with a technical problem, they said “no.”  I never encountered that as a service option before or since.  They would not fix my product and would not even recommend somebody who could.  The only option was “you’ll have to buy a new one.”

I have had enough hair-pulling customer service disasters from both companies to make me repulsed by the thought of a service call. But my last experience with Microsoft was very different.  I got a live person on the first ring, which left me momentarily paralyzed.  The India-based technical leader took control of my computer and solved a debilitating problem in 10 minutes.  But when he sent me back to customer service for a refund on a purchase, I hit a stone wall. The technical leader, who had not abandoned the call, jumped in and asked if I could be put on hold while he addressed the problem. Thirty seconds later he came back on and explained that my money had been refunded.  I was impressed that the technician took accountability for the entire customer service experience and had enough authority to do the right thing on the spot. Well done.

3) The Bing Thing.  The best companies constantly re-invent themselves with Madonna-like regularlity.  But Bing out-Googled Google by upping the ante on search performance features. Consumers rewarded Microsoft’s  innovation by moving to Bing in droves. It’s no easy feat to grab share from a famous and entrenched market leader. Google will respond. Microsoft’s aggressive and innovative market entry will speed the evolution of the platform and benefit us all.

In a few days, Microsoft will release their latest operating system evolution.  Here’s hoping the Big Guy stays on a roll.  We need that.

At long last, I bring to you my valued {grow} folks, a true B2B social media success story that can really be measured by MONEY.  I believe this is the only one in the world.  ; )  And it is GENIUS!

Best of all, the success comes from one of our very own {grow}-er’s, Nathan Dube aka @DubiousMonk, a frequent comment contributor.

Nathan works in the marketing department of Expert Laser Services of  Southbridge, MA.  The company is a managed print services provider and provides printer/copier sales, service and supplies.  Nathan’s challenge was to increase awareness for his company through social media initiatives.

His idea was to let people release their technology angst by finding the most creative ways to destroy their printer — on video.  The “Destroy Your Printer Video Contest” was promoted through the company’s blog,  Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.  The oddball humor of the contest gave it a great buzz and more – web traffic more than doubled and the company gained more than 100 new inbound links. Recycler magazine did an Internet TV special about the contest as well as an article which was the most-read topics on the site for several weeks.

The submissions can be found here and they are hilarious.  The winning entry involves a backhoe (but I think the dynamite should have won: “We’re approaching the target!”).

Momentum for the contest picked up as people fell in love with the crazy ways people destroyed their printers.  One fan was an employee of nearby Telesian Technologies, who called up Expert Laser Services and asked them to be their new service provider.

That’s right.  New business. Money in the bank from a social media victory.

Nathan said getting a new customer was just icing on the cake. “The focus of the contest  was not ‘let’s get customers’,” he said. ” The focus was to drive more traffic to the website, build inbound links, and create good content.  The fact that we landed a new service and repair customer was not our goal, but it happened.”

And to make a happy ending even happier, the winner of the contest, Cottage Revolution of Wales, MA, donated their winning toner cartridges to Catholic Charities.

Welcome to the world’s first hyper-interactive, cross-country, super-charged blog.

My subject today will serve as a case study to be discussed during a Twitter chat (#SM4B) hosted by Steve Farnsworth (@TheRealPRMan) Wednesday, Oct. 7, at noon Eastern time.  I will be his guest. Then on Thursday, Steve will contribute his own perspective in a guest post on {grow}.  I hope you enjoy this post and take advantage of the learning opportunity from every angle.  

______________________________________________

 Here we go again with another lawsuit based on a Facebook and Twitter comment.  And this time it happened right under my nose.

The Pizza Kitchen is a popular landmark in my neighborhood. They have funky Elvis stuff on the walls (It is Tennessee, you know!).  I’m not a frequent visitor but I did get a free meal once when their lasagna came out too soupy.

But that’s beside the point.  They just got slapped with a $2 mm libel lawsuit over comments made on Facebook and Twitter.  Apparently they retained marketing firm Low and Tritt to help them with advertising and promotions in a tough economy.  Business reportedly continued to go down and the restaurant’s owner, Travis Redmon, let the firm go.   A disagreement about fees and licensing rights ensued.

An article in the local paper reported what happened next:

According to the suit, Redmon defamed the marketing firm in two Aug. 17 Facebook entries that said, “Do not EVER use Lowandtritt mktg. firm!” and “CROOKS! – Stolen email list, and have tried to pressure me by threat of lawsuit to sign a ‘license agreement’ to use their mktg materials.”

The following day on Twitter Redmon posted, “Lowentritt mktg firm has done it again…” and “Can you believe that they have not only stolen my email list, but have now hacked Pizza Kitchen’s facebook page taking it offline?”

The posts were published to more than 300 Facebook friends of The Pizza Kitchen and 247 followers on Twitter, according to the suit.

I tried to find the latest legal opinions on libel and Twitter and, as they say in Australia, it’s a dog’s breakfast … a mess.  You could successfully argue both sides and it may take one of these things going to trial to determine a precedent.

However, the legal aspects of the pizza lawsuit seem secondary to the fundamental business issues at hand.

First, is it ever really a good idea to sue your customer?  Pizza Kitchen has one store and 247 followers on Twitter.  Even if the owner was really, really difficult, you just … don’t … sue … customers over something liks this.   Do you??

Low and Tritt’s website boldly claims that their company “foundation” is:  Client First, Always.  Hmmm. 

OK, let’s put aside the messy “client first” thing for a minute.  What would they be trying to prove with a lawsuit like this?  Have they not been reading the papers?  This sort of legal action is so 2008.  This is a recipe for PR disaster.

There was a similar infamous case that went viral in July, as reported by the Chicago Tribune:

A Chicago corporate landlord set the Internet world abuzz by suing a former resident for a seemingly offhand remark on Twitter about her “moldy” apartment.

The libel suit by Horizon Group Management alleged that Amanda Bonnen “maliciously and wrongfully published the false and defamatory tweet, thereby allowing the tweet to be spread throughout the world.”

But Bonnen had only about 20 Twitter followers at the time of her allegedly libelous tweet. By the time the news of the legal fight spread Tuesday around the Web, however, “Horizon Realty” hit as high as No. 3 on Twitter’s list of trending topics and made the front page of Digg.com in which users rate the top news of the day.

One prominent lawyer said that the landlord was “inviting a PR nightmare” and “foolhardy” but the landlord is still pursuing the case.

Which brings me to point two.  These days, “word of mouth” does not take place at the water cooler.  This is an era where everybody has a voice, everybody has a global public platform.  A dissatisfied customer is a terrorist.  And Low and Tritt … seems to be in trouble.

How did the reporter find out about the lawsuit?  Probably from somebody who sympathizes with the restaurant.  So, now it’s in the newspaper.  And on TV.  Both online versions have comment sections providing more fuel to the public perception that Goliath is bullying David. As of this writing, there were 81 comments with stabs such as:

“They should change their name to low and trite.”

“Low & Tritt has conducted a fantastic gonzo marketing campaign advertising what the firm stands for. I wonder if they can sue themselves for stupidity? I’m sure the current clients splashed all over their web site are proud to be associated with such a professional organization.”

“I guess if you can’t make money by providing a quality service to your customers… then you can just hire a snake lawyer, and sue the customers that you FAILED for million$$$$.”

It gets worse. I didn’t hear about this from a newspaper.  I saw a link to the article on Twitter and so did hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others.  Now the news about Low and Tritt is going viral. 

Although crowd reaction might go with the pizza baker, the lawyer for Low and Tritt claims in an interview that anybody with an audience had better be careful:

“The claim is that the posting on the Twitter page that was not accurate about the marketing company,” says Pamela Reeves. Reeves is partner of Reeves, Herbert & Murrian P.A., the office representing Low and Tritt in the case.

“It opens up lots of opportunities for defamation,” she says. Defamation – where a false comment damages the reputation of an individual or business – depends on the comment being untrue.

“If the statements that are made are accurate statements, you’re not defamed. It’s simply making an observation that’s true,” says Reeves. “Obviously our clients feel that that’s not the situation here.”

“Remember you always have the possibility of causing someone serious harm when you make those statements on the web,” says Reeves. “Unless you know you’re fully protecting yourself, you should be careful what you say.”

The Pizza Kitchen is caught in a maelstrom of legal uncertainty but has the benefit of public sentiment. Low and Tritt probably didn’t make the wisest business or PR move but might have the law on their side. Does that matter if their reputation is ruined?

So I hope you can all join Steve Farnsworth and I for the Twitter chat on Wednesday and then tune in for Steve’s blog on Thursday. In the mean time, what are your thoughts on this case?

Illustration: Chicago Decider