Dan Soschin

Job Alert: I’m hiring a paid search coordinator

I have an open position available for immediate hire at American Public University System in Manassas, Virginia. For more details on this position, please review the job posting.

To apply, please follow the directions in the posting. Once you have applied, please drop me a line and connect via LinkedIn.
Google+ Adoption Continues to Accelerate

It appears that adoption of Google+ continues to accelerate despite critics and nay-sayers who continue to dismiss its relevancy. Of course adoption is simply a count of the number of registered users and doesn’t necessarily correlate to similar numbers for engagement and time on site. But, with Google dominating search, and inserting G+ results into your standard results set, more and more Google+ content is being highlighted to internet users and the +1 buttons are undeniably everywhere. Marketers of content don’t want to be “left out”, so they have rushed to include the +1 button on virtually everything. This has created a massive amount of branding and awareness of the social network. However, it remains to be seen if Google+ can replicate the social success of its target rival, Facebook in terms of engagement and time on site.

And, can the two social networks ultimately co-exist? Not if they serve the same purpose… as who would want to post and engage twice every time they go online? G+ must continue to differentiate itself which becomes a difficult task when your rival can easily mimic your successes.
The Government is Listening to Your Conversations, DUH!

Anyone who thinks their social media profiles and conversations are private or secure is naive.

Years ago, to combat terrorism, protect the homeland, and fight crime, the government realized it could download web pages, parse the information into vast data warehouses, and then develop reports based upon algorithms to identify (flag) potential conversations for human review.

In a nut shell, the government was basically downloading the entire internet. This was no easy feat, considering the expanse of the world wide web and its rate of growth. But downloading information is easy. And, so is parsing it. So this really wasn’t rocket science.

A few years later, those contractors that developed these systems realized the same concepts could be used to help corporations listen to conversations about their companies — and their competitors. And thus ushered in the current era of social media monitoring tools.

Is the government still listening? Yes. This blog post probably just got flagged. However, your competitors are listening too.

And soon, social media monitoring software will become so pervasive it will penetrate the holy grail – B2C – and you’ll be able to monitor and listen to yourself and your friends. Oh wait, you already can! That’s right, if a company wanted to know what their employees were doing or saying, they can easily do that now, for free – Google Alerts… or they can leverage the same software the enterprise uses.

So remember, nothing is private.
Apple & Textbooks

In higher education, we all know that the cost of text books is significant. These days at American Public University, we estimate that on average, course materials will run between $125 and $175 per course. With a typical bachelor’s degree requiring 120 credits, that’s about 40 courses or about $5,000 to $7,000! The University realized early on that this can be quite a burden, so the school provides a Book Grant to degree-seeking undergrads which picks up most course material costs. Other students, including those in graduate programs can take advantage of purchasing books from discounters such as Chegg.com and Amazon.com, and can also purchases used books and sell their books back to various vendors when they complete courses.

However, there is innovation in the textbook industry, and it is coming mostly from outside the publishers.

There is a rumor that Apple will be hosting an event related to the publishing industry (possible textbooks) in New York in January 2012. Could it center around electronic editions of textbooks? Could it be new software for the iPad that makes etextbooks more like printed books? Could it be a sub-$100 text book ereader? Could it be related to iTunesU and making more texts available for purchase?

There’s certainly a lot of speculation, and you can read more about it here.

Only time will tell. One thing is for sure, with the heavy market adoption of ereaders and tablets, the migration of textbooks from the print to electronic will be sooner than we think. The impact will most certainly be greater than we imagined on the economy, industry, how we use and interact with texts and how we use tablets for our studies.
Oops, You Screwed Up, Now What?
I’ve written a few bits about handling negative buzz and developing a crisis response plan when it comes to gaffs and complaints, but what about dealing with your mistakes?
1. Act quickly to correct the error
2. Post the correct and an explanation of what happened
3. Be honest, humble and transparent
4. Acknowledge that you will have disappointed customers
5. For retail, understand that some customers would only have been your customers because of the error (offering a tablet for $10 instead of $100). These people would never have come to your site to purchase the product if it was $100. They were only interested in a $10 one. So focus on your important customers first and don’t take the complaints personally.
What you need to do, is avoid ignoring people and don’t be rude (even if people are rude to you).

Here’s a great article about this topic that I recommend from Denise Keller at MarketingProfs.com.
More on Measuring the Impact of Social Media
In my first post of 2012, I’d like to start by congratulating myself. I know that is a bit self-serving, but I managed to get 239 posts in during 2011 which beat my goal of four per week! Since I am not in sales and don’t like quotas, the good news is that I don’t have to raise it on myself for 2012. So I will stick to four per week (208) in 2012, and hopefully some of those will provide value.

So, for post 240, I’d like to revisit a topic very near and dear to my heart: measuring the value of social media for your business.

For the three people who read my blog besides my wife, you might recall that this is a topic I have spoken at conferences about:

At System Alliance’s Site Executive annual user conference in Baltimore, MD, I joined John Moore to present on “The Value of a Like”. This presentation looked at how to identify what you should measure, tools for monitoring and measuring (especially those juicy freebies such as HootSuite, Google Analytics, and Facebook Insights), and capped it off by showcasing some simple ways to create reports to share the results.

You can view my presentation here:

Importance_of_a_Like_V4

Additionally, I will be presenting this topic in February in two locations:
- Social Media Strategies Summit (Las Vegas, NV) – Feb 8th, 2012
- DC Social Media Week (Manassas, VA) – Feb 15th, 2012
In the mean time, here’s another great post by Nick Cifuentes at ClickZ on social media measurement that is a great place to start for understanding how to get started: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2134500/measure-social-media-results-suite
Facebook Introduces Consumer to Business Direct Messaging

Facebook rolled out a new feature to it’s Asian-based users whereby fans of a business page and initiate “private” communication threads with the page admins that do not appear in the “public” feeds. I use quotes hear as everyone familiar with Facebook and the web should understand that nothing you do online on a social media site is necessarily fully private and secure.

Regardless, this new feature enables users to send semi-private messages to the admins. The reason this is important is that prior to this point, if you wanted to have a conversation, you had to do so primarily through the wall (there are Facebook apps and other things that provide alternatives, but the wall is the main area). If your comments or messages were not particularly relevant to the community, you may have decided to not post your thoughts; or the community might have been distracted from your thoughts. Therefore, this alternative method for posting might come in handy – especially regarding customer service.

If you wanted to engage a retailer about the details of your order, do you need 25,000 other fans on the page to see the details of your order and the conversation? Probably not; but now you have a channel for doing so.

One interesting side effect of this is that it may reduce the volume of comments on the page, making it appear that the admins and community don’t engage regularly. It could also prevent the company from showcasing its excellent customer service. Though, on the contrary, if the company runs into several issues that are all handled privately, that might actually be a good thing!

Here’s an article by Jon Russell at www.thenextweb.com on this new feature.
Spruce up the workplace walls with employee art

We moved into some new administrative offices here at American Public University System in Manassas, Virginia (Washington DC metro region). About 40 of us had been staring at blank (off-white) walls and then a few months ago we decided to invite employees to submit photos they had taken over the years. A small group of staff sorted through the submissions and picked two dozen photos to be enlarged, matted and framed. The end result is fantastic! While I might be biased (a few of my photos were chosen, and now employees are calling it the Dan Soschin art gallery), I will say it was an inexpensive and diversely captivating way of decorating our office. It also has a bit of an academic element, which is extremely appropriate given that we are a university.

During this project, which was incorporated into our other buildings as well, we happen to come across this article which is extremely relevant to the project.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-we-work/201112/the-power-workplace-do-it-yourself

Have you thought about updating the decor at your office? Maybe employee art is the way to go. You might be surprised at how talented some of your staff can be outside the office.
Behavioral targeting – When will it go too far?

Sundeep Kapur for ClickZ just released a great article on the creepiness of tracking consumers.

An excerpt:

You just checked into a hotel; they tracked your smartphone and watched you walk in from the parking lot. Your check-in folio was ready for you. That is awesome service. You proceed to your room. They now watch your every move; they know what you’re watching on TV, they know what you ordered from room service, and they know what sites you visited on the web. They know you because of your past stays, and now they are tracking your every move to try and personalize your experiences even more.

Is this creepy? Maybe! But I can tell you, its already starting to take shape.

This happens now on the web. Go to any retailer’s website and visit a few product pages, or add a few items to your shopping cart. Almost instantly as you travel around the net visiting other sites, you’ll start seeing banner ads and text ads championing the very products of the site you were just at. It’s called “retargeting” or “remarketing” and it works very well based upon the presence that you are likely to return to a site you previously visited. Advertisers know this works so well, they pay a premium for it. It’s a big business too – there are entire companies based upon behavioral targeting and retargeting.

Okay, so this is not quite as extreme as in Sundeep’s article.y However, the technology exists, more or less, to do everything he describes. It’s no big deal until this information is used to harm you. And that’s the very problem. How do you enable these services but protect consumers?

Remember that most technology and most inventions aren’t created to cause harm; they are simply exploited by others to do so, after the fact.
Value of Facebook Engagement

As you all know, I’ve reported and spoken on the topic of Facebook engagement and calculating its ROI for your business. Recently, I came across this article by Janette Speyer and Alison Brown that provides data from a survey by SocialCode. Some really interesting data that reaffirms the importance of ensuring you have a highly engaged Facebook audience. I’ve asked them if they could share some additional data and findings; if so, I will re-post here.

Plus, it has a cool infographic, and I just love those things.