Eric Schwartzman

EmployeeScreen (acquired by Sterling) celebrated its 10th anniversary last August, making it a grandfather in the hotly contested market for employee screening services. 

The landscape is dotted with more than 1,000 employee screening companies, many of them specialized boutiques, according to Nick Fishman, chief marketing officer and executive vice president.

EmployeeScreen has thrived in that environment in part due to a diversified set of social media programs that deliver education and insight that draws more than 3,000 visitors to its website each week.  

It was almost an accident three years ago that EmployeeScreen began to develop its social media presence.  An early experiment with search engine optimization yielded a huge lift in traffic, which emboldened EmployeeScreen to go further. 

Today, its EmployeeScreen University draws thousands of human resources professionals each month to a slate of articles and audio/ video podcasts, with about one in four visitors clicking through to EmployeeScreen’s main website. 

Its active blog helps sustain its position near the top of search engine results. The success has enabled EmployeeScreen to reduce its dependence on advertising and to engage with prospects at a deeper level.  It's also demonstrated a greater truth, says Fishman. “One small guy can make very big waves.”  

This episode is hosted by Paul Gillin (@pgillin) of Paul Gillin Communications.   

Employee Monitoring and Workplace Privacy

1:45 Why using social networks to conduct employee background checks is a potential workplace privacy violation.

5:15 How EmployeeScreen got into social media monitoring of employees by accident and the surprising early success the company had

7:30 The launch of EmployeeScreen University, a learning destination for HR professionals to learn all about background checks

9:30 Visitors grew to 5,000 to 7,000 per month, with 25% clicking to the corporate site

10:15 The move into social networks; HR people were early adopters of LinkedIn

11:00 Why Twitter hasn’t been a big business contributor

13:15 About EmployeeScreen’s all-time most popular blog entry

15:10 About adapting content for a b-to-b audience

16:15 Traffic to the blog averages about 3,000 visitors a week

17:05 How podcasts fit into the mix

17:30 Thematic programming: This Week in Background Checks; other uses for the podcast series

20:05 Which metrics matter most

20:45 How social media has reduced the need to advertise

21:15 Maintaining an early competitive lead; how search engine optimization keeps the site strong

22:15 Why you shouldn’t try to game search engines

23:00 Trying to keep up with social media evolution

24:15 How Nick and EmployeeScreen got into social media marketing

26:15 The need to stay on top of changing trends in Internet marketing

26:55 Landmarks in EmployeeScreen’s social media experience

27:50 “WordPress has been a godsend”  

Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash

Business benefits, audio and video production techniques, search engine optimization, a discussion of the latest gear and the future of podcasting in a world of attention deficits with Steve Lubetkin of Professional Podcasts.

01:35 -- Steve Lubetkin talks about his introduction to podcasting and his background using technology as a business communicator professional.

03:32 -- Eric mentions that this podcasts reaches almost as many listeners through the show blog as it does via RSS, and asks Steve if the same is true for him.

05:05 -- Steve Lubetkin builds a business case for RSS, by pointing out the many benefits of distributing XML with enclosures.

06:28 -- For Steve Lubetkin, the ultimate goal in producing and distributing podcasts from is to get his clients noticed, and for that reason, he prefers automated solutions that minimize his time investment in achieving that result.

07:13 -- Using podcasts to get clients noticed via search engines.

08:24 -- The distinction between HTML and XML measurement, and the importance of securing a measurement solution that records both.

09:02 -- The importance of parking your feed on iTunes, from a client satisfaction perspective and listener satisfaction standpoint.

10:06 -- B2B podcasting is, for the most part, not about reaching large audiences. It's about content marketing to individuals with an immediate need for the marketers product or service. So instead of getting in front of thousands of people who may or may not have a need, podcasting is about automating the awareness, consideration, research and evaluation phases of general buying cycles.

11:31 --  Steve Lubetkin discusses the benefits of communicating via audio and video, in both short and long formats.

14:17 --  Instead of producing original content, Eric and Steve Lubetkin discuss using podcasts to extend the reach of business and other corporate events that are occurring already.

17:29 --  The advantage of shooting events in video is that you can always use only the audio if you prefer, but you still get the ability to use the video as well. 

20:33 -- Steve Lubetkin gives his tips on the best gear for producing business oriented podcasts today and talks about the importance of recording good audio versus good video.

23:49 -- Steve Lubetkin and Eric talk about mixing audio, HD and the flip.

35:23 -- A discussion of business-to-business podcasts it is the use of podcasts for internal communications.

38:12 -- integrating podcasts into corporate communications campaigns.

42:15 -- Ron Ploof's new book "Read This First," which was featured on Marketing Over Coffee.

43:47 -- A discussion of Steve Rubel's (who has been featured in a previous episode of this podcast) life streaming experiments on Posterous, which he covered with Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson on For Immediate Release, and how podcasting might adapt to attention deficits.

47:03 -- Eric talks about Andy Lark's keynote at the first NewComm Forum, at which Andy showed EPIC 2014 to the crowd and proceeded to blow everyone's mind with his presentation about social media.

48:07 -- News at Seven, the dynamically generated news program, which featured avatars posting an online news program edited by fact stripping robots.

49:17 -- The importance of text to the future of content marketing and in dealing with attention deficits if we move into a change of partial content consumption.

50:32 -- Unleashing the archival value of content through search engine optimized text notes.

53:13 -- You can find Steve online at https://www.lubetkin.net/blog and www.ProfessionalPodcasts.com

Photo by Jonathan Farber on Unsplash

Despite the term's first appearance in George Orwell's prolific novel 1984 decades ago, the use of "doublespeak" is on the rise in the US.  

Whether it's euphemism, jargon, gobbledygook or inflated language, doublespeak is being used regularly by public affairs agencies, candidates, government agencies and businesses to distance you from the truth.    

William Lutz on CSPAN

In this episode, American linguist William Lutz, co-author of the SEC's Plain English Handbook, author of Doublespeak and 16 other books on writing in clear language and professor emeritus at Rutgers University explains why doublespeak is counterproductive to democracy, why we need to stop being passive consumers of deceptive language and what we can do to fight back.

The Details on Doublespeak

01:28 -- "Clear language is essential so that both parties understand what they are agreeing to. In any contract that you enter into, you have to understand what your obligations and rights are under the terms of that contract," says Mr. Lutz.  

If a company writes a contract in such a way that consumers think they understand what their obligations are but in reality, don't, they may agree to something they don't understand, and ultimately cannot fulfill.  

When marketing companies use anything other than straightforward clear language to describe the terms of an offer, they're not dealing honestly in the marketplace. They are setting up consumers to fail.

02:47 -- After a career focused on the use of doublespeak -- a term coined by George Orwell in his book 1984, first published in 1949 -- Lutz says this practice is on the rise for the very same reason Orwell predicted in his book, which is that "You can get away with a lot of things in language.  

We talk about spin, and it's all right to be a spin doctor. But what are we really saying about a spin doctor?  A spin doctor sits there and says, "Oh no, no, no, you didn't hear what you thought you heard.

Let me tell you what you really heard, and proceed to put a spin on. And the spin turns out to be something entirely different than what was said or what was written or whatever.  

This has now become a profession. If you can get away with things using just words, why not?  And it's become, unfortunately, something of a growth industry," says Mr. Lutz.

04:12 -- Doublespeak poses a threat to the United States because it creates a buffer between what organizations are saying and what people are hearing.  If you're entering into a credit card contract, or buying a home, and you're understanding of your obligation is not based on reality, that's problematic.

The housing bubble was exacerbated by the fact that people thought they understood the mortgages they were getting, only to find out that they were in over their heads.  

In a democracy, we decide what policies and candidates to back by listening to the public discourse.  If the discussion is carried out in doublespeak, organizations deliberately mislead the people so they don't really know what's going on, and we wind up making decisions of social importance on the wrong basis.

05:41 -- "Doublespeak is a matter of intent. You can identify doublespeak by looking at who is saying what to whom, under what conditions and circumstances, with what intent and what result.

If a politician stands up and speaks to you and says, "I am giving you exactly what I believe, and then turns around and does the opposite, then you've got a pretty good yardstick. She was pretending to tell me something, and it turns out it wasn't what she meant at all. She meant something different," says Mr. Lutz, in his doublespeak litmus test.

06:43 --  The first type of doublespeak is the euphemism.  "We want to talk about something, but because of social conventions, we don't use direct language; we use indirect language. You don't walk up to someone and say I'm sorry your mother died.

You say I'm sorry for your loss, or I'm sorry she passed away. But no one is being misled.  In fact, it's a mark of your concern for the other person that you use that euphemism.  

However when you start using a euphemism because you want to avoid the harsh reality, then you're engaged in doublespeak. For example, the State Department invented the euphemistic doublespeak term "unlawful, arbitrary detention" or "unlawful, arbitrary deprivation of life," says Mr. Lutz.  

"It basically means that the government was busy killing its own citizens without benefit of trial or any other legal niceties, so [that's an example of where] euphemism moves into doublespeak."

07:46 -- The second kind of doublespeak is jargon, which usually centers around a particular industry or area of specialized knowledge.  In the workplace, by the workers, jargon is fine because everyone understands it.  But when you use it to mislead or obscure someone who does not know that jargon, then you've crossed the line into doublespeak.  

For example, "involuntary conversion" is a legal term that means the loss of use of your property due to fire, theft, or public condemnation.  

If your car is stolen, legally, that's an involuntary conversion of your property.  

However, when you talk, as one airline did, about the involuntary conversion of a 737, meaning that the plane crashed, then we've moved into using jargon is doublespeak.

08:57 -- The third kind of doublespeak is bureaucratese or gobbledygook, where we just pile words upon words that nobody can figure out. " I think the classic master of that was Alan Greenspan.

I used to listen to his testimony before Congress just so impressed with his use of economic jargon, doublespeak, gobbledygook and it all sounded so impressive, didn't it?  But it didn't mean anything that anybody could figure out," says Mr. Lutz.

09:29 -- The fourth kind of doublespeak is inflated language, which tries to make something impressive or important that really isn't.  For example, "used cars" are now "pre-owned" or even "experienced."  We have "previewed DVDs" meaning they're "used."  

The doorman on a building is the "access controller."   And William's all-time favorite, the "predawn vertical insertion," which was used by Pentagon Public Affairs, described the invasion of Grenada.

11:15 --  People are very good at recognizing doublespeak.  The constant use of doublespeak has a hardening effect in that we come to expect it, which is unfortunate because we shouldn't.

As an analogy, Lutz uses air quality. As long as the air quality is good, no one is concerned or pays much attention." But as soon as the air quality becomes bad, suddenly everyone's up in arms. He believes we should have the same concerns about the quality of language that is used in public discourse. He says that we need to voice our concerns to politicians who use doublespeak much as we would to manufacturers of malfunctioning products.

We'd return the product for a refund and should do the same when we hear doublespeak by stopping being passive consumers of language and demanding those who use doublespeak to rephrase themselves.

14:13 -- Using Enron as an example, Eric asks William whether or not the use of clear language can actually help investors detect fraud because organizations can just lie in plain English. It's difficult to lie in plain English cause it's easier for people to catch you.  

In the case of Enron, William explains that they used footnotes that were so cryptic they were incomprehensible and that both journalists and analysts covering the stock could not find a single Enron representative who could explain them.

It was not written in plain English. It was written in financial, economic jargon, bureaucratese, and gobbledygook and it was done, to deliberately mislead and hide what was going on because if they wrote it in plain English, so that it was even moderately understandable, and people read it, they were going to ask questions.  

And they probably would have figured out that instead of running a profit, they were running a multibillion-dollar loss.  And the other thing that's happened now is that if you've lie, the government can now prosecute you for fraud.  

So the folks at Enron had to write language that allowed them to pretend like it was all disclosed, but people just didn't understand it.  So you see, "mandating plain language, that is plain enough so that any reasonably intelligent investor can understand it, puts a strong legal restriction on people who try to attempt fraud," says Lutz.

18:02 --  The direct-mail business, which counts on a 1% return rate for its sustenance, is a perfect opportunity for consumers to fight back against doublespeak by simply ripping up misleading or unclear offers and sending them back to the solicitor in the pre-paid envelope so that they pay postage, without netting a return.  

If just 5% of all direct-mail recipients protested this way, direct-mail solicitors would be forced to change their practices.

20:22 --  William addresses in inherent conflict of corporate social media policies. He takes a very conservative view from a legal perspective, given the prospect of legal harm.  

But, on the other hand, he recognizes that you can't stop these sharing technologies that are overwhelming us, acknowledging that organizations simply have to figure out a way to work with it.  

"It is interesting to note that even the Security and Exchange Commission in Washington DC does, now, have policies in place for Twittering, blogging, etc.," says Mr. Lutz.  When he was there, Chairman Cox held a press conference where he fielded questions via Twitter.  

It's a recognition that organizations need social media policies.  "But you have to make a clear distinction and explain to employees that when they tweet from work or home if there's any suggestion that they are speaking as employees of the company,

I know.  You've heard it a million times.  The social web is not a vanity press.  It's a place to develop relationships, where give and take rules and conversations thrive.  

Sounds great, right?    

But how does that work in practice?  Just because you have a way to introduce yourself, doesn't mean people are going respond.  

What's the right way to use online social networks to get someones attention?    If you've ever wondered, "What do I do when my @replies and emails go unanswered?" then this episode is for you.  

I originally thought it was going to be pretty much just about the real time web, and the first half is, but you're going to hear some very useful, practical tips about how to actually break through and start conversations with people you may want to know -- even the ones who are so popular they're literally inundated with requests -- through social networks.  

You're going to learn about leveraging preferred communication channels, how to cross-pollinate social networks, where the VoIP industry is headed, whether or not government regulators should be looking beyond net neutrality to search neutrality and what it all means to a 15-year old.  

It's the Social Networking Jedi Training episode with the father of the VoIP industry, Jeff Pulver (@jeffpulver) of jeffpulver.com and the 140 Character Conference.   

SHOW NOTES

01:00 -- In the financial markets, brokers and investors base their buying and selling decisions on real-time information, and in some ways, the real-time web offers us the same fast, breaking information, and its new found availability, thanks to Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz and Google Wave, has a flattening effect on competitive markets, by democratizing information, giving everyone access to information at the same time.  T

he archival web gave everyone greater access to information, but some people were still at an advantage because they got it first.  But it is the real-time web, where individuals echo one another's voices, which has had a leveling effect, in the transfer of power from the few to the many.  

04:46 -- The 140 Characters Conference, its purpose and the rise of Twitter among individuals in the mainstream media, politics, entertainment and advertising.  

05:15 -- Using the analogy of financial markets once again, Jeff Pulver uses the gap in time between an earthquake that occurred in Northern California and amount of time it took for that information to surface on Google as representative of an information arbitrage opportunity, reminding us that just as a 5-second advance on world events can and does constitute a significant trading advantage, the real-time web may afford us advantages in business, politics and culture that not all entirely known.  

7:01 -- Tim Street (@1timstreet) asks via Twitter how Jeff manages his database of personal contacts, which is mentioned in the book "Trust Agents" by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, though not in enough detail to be actionable.  

11:48 -- Eric reads Jeff the following line from "Trust Agents" which says "The lesson Pulver told Chris at the time, was that one's personal database is an asset as valuable as gold, if nurtured and maintained" and then asks him specifically how one nurtures his personal database, which Jeff says is based on tailoring the message to the individuals preferred media channel.  

"If I understand that someones communication device is a Blackberry, then I make sure my subject of my e-mail is less than 16 characters.  Some people, who will never respond to an e-mail, will respond immediately to a tweet.

Some people who ignore e-mail, will respond to a direct message. There are people, who for some reason, will only respond to Facebook messages."  Our default communications channels are different.  The future of direct marketing rests in the marketer's ability to identify, remember and connect with each individual through their preferred communication channel, whatever that may be.   

16:26 -- Jeff also says time of day when that person individual is active on a particular channel is also a determination.  

For example, if he is soliciting speakers for a conference, and he's unable to get a referral from someone, he may just contact that person on twitter.  But before he dies, he'll go to their Twitter page and see if there's a time they're typically active, and contact them then.  

16:46 -- if Jeff Pulver were designing a CRM tool today, the information he would record on each customer card would be: cell phone number, corporate e-mail, personal e-mail (Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail), Facebook ID, Twitter ID and preferred method of contact.  

19:11 -- Eric tells Jeff about one of his favorite podcasts, Marketing Over Coffee by John Wall and Christopher Penn, and recalls a discussion in which they explained how to use a Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail e-mail account address book to synchronize contacts in Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Flickr and other social networks, and asks whether or not Jeff has ever used this method.

20:46 -- The role of e-mail in promoting conferences hasn't really changed, according to Jeff, other than the fact that e-mail is no longer everyone's preferred communication channel. So effectively leveraging e-mail means knowing who prefers it and who doesn't.  

But when Jeff wants to build a list of current contacts, he'll start by exporting his Linkedin contacts, next export his Plaxo contacts and his Gmail contacts and put it all together in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.  He'll also go on to Facebook and Twitter and promotional publish links to his events and conferences, noting that this is where your number of followers is valuable.  

He also creates Facebook events and groups and direct markets those who RSVP and join.  

24:27 -- One of the primary reasons Jeff Pulver uses Microsoft Excel to build his lists is the issue of data portability, or the concern that if he is forced to rely solely on Facebook or Twitter to access his social network, it's possible those services might someday lock him out, restrict access because of a terms of service violation or even change to the terms of service someday and limit the number of contacts a user can maintain.  

26:22 --  Eric recommends Shel Israel, featured in a previous episode of this podcast about Twitter Strategy, humanizing brands and building loyalty, as a speaker at Jeff's upcoming 140 Characters Conference.  

26:56 -- Freedom Voice marketing communications manager John Lincoln asks via Twitter about the latest VoIP phones with video conference abilities, and what's on the horizon.  And Jeff says what's next is high-definition voice, since currently, our voices are so filtered and under-sampled that we are required to spell out our names phonetically, and often struggle to understand speakers with heavy accents or small children, which is a direct result of poor quality audio.  

29:17 -- Why VoIP conversations often have audio dropout or interference, what, if anything, individuals can do about it and why net neutrality is a key component to the future of VoIP.   31:16 -- Eric reads Jeff an excerpt from a guest column titled "Search and You May Not Find" by Adam Raff who runs a company called Foundem, that appeared in the opinion section of the New York Times, suggesting that regulators need to go beyond just net neutrality and insure search neutrality as well.   "The need for search neutrality is particularly pressing because so much market power lies in the hands of one company Google.

With 71% of the united states search market, Google's dominance of both search and search advertising gives it overwhelming control. One way that Google exploits this control is by imposing covert blank penalties that can strike  legitimate and useful websites, removing them entirely from its search results or placing them so far down the rankings that they will in all likelihood never be found. For three years my company is vertical search and price comparison website found them effectively disappeared from the Internet in this way."  

34:30 -- Jeff's 15-year old son Dylan, who Eric saw seated in the background during the interview conducted via Video Skype, shares his perspective on how the social media is changing the world.

38:23 -- End

In this podcast, Rashmi Sinha, CEO of SlideShare talks about B2B lead generation best practices, B2B growth marketing and getting positive user ratings, making sharing beneficial to community members and encouraging meaningful discourse by discouraging anonymity.

These show notes are more complete and narrative than in the past.  I am writing a book with Paul Gillin on B2B marketing and will be incorporating insights from this podcast.    

There seems to be a great deal of interest in understanding how B2C might differ from B2B digital marketing.  

Paul and I are working to articulate those distinctions. 

B2B Lead Generation with SlideShare

00:47 -- Rashmi Sinha's previous appearance on the Supernova Podcast, hosted by Christopher Carfi on Blog Talk Radio, where much of the discussion focused on object-oriented social networking, and what makes these types of services different from more popular social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

01:15 -- As in the real world, and particularly in a business-to-business context, interaction is usually focused around a particular activity, like a meeting, convention or demonstration.  

Popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter, when interaction is not focused around a specific activity, are sometimes awkward because there is no construct for that experience in the real world, where exchanges are organized around actions.

02:07 -- SlideShare branded channels, a new area of the site which allow organizations to establish a custom, micro-site with their own look and feel inside the service, so they can engage with the broader SlideShare community.  

Microsoft and Adobe have established their own branded channels, as has the White House and the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project.  

As part of the launch, SlideShares new branded channels are now open to other organizations and brands by request, which at the time of this podcast can made be submitting a form within that section of the website.

03:09 -- The majority of SlideShare's community members are business decision-makers.

Community members use the service mostly in a business context, since the social network is designed to host, share and promote discussion around PowerPoint presentations, which are used mostly in business to help make a point.  

As a result, SlideShare is primarily a business-to-business social network.  

On Feb. 6, 2010, just days after SlidShare's branded channels launch, there were 11 featured business channels, 2 featured education channels, 4 featured nonprofit channels and 1 featured event channel.

03:54 -- The Slideshare Virtualization Channel, a new, curated channel put together by the B2B social networking service is one of many they intend to add over the coming months, to provide organizations with an opportunity to associate their product, brand or service with premium content appealing to a specific business audience segment by way of a sponsorship.

04:49 --  According to Rashmi, Facebook is a personal social network that has been edging towards business.  Twitter is a social network that has always had a mix of personal and business applications. And Linkedin is a social network that is completely professional, with no room at all for personal interactions.

She calls SlideShare a social network occupying the space between Facebook and Twitter. She acknowledges that SlideShare is very business oriented, but says that because it is such a visually oriented network where the most popular presentations usually incorporate a great deal of personality and flair, the service is conducive to interactions that are more personal than on Linkedin.

05:49 -- SlideShare may be B2B, but the service's real strength is its ability to promote business with personality.

For example, on SlideShare's homepage, the presentations that tend to rank high, combine a great deal of personality with their subject matter, rather than more dry, reference-type presentations, which may be packed with relevant, useful content, but are often suffer from dense copy block, too few images and no real visual punch.

07:12 --  From a user-interface standpoint, there should be no difference between a B2C and B2B social networks, according to Rashmi.  

She reminds us that as is true with all digital marketing tools, ease of use drives adoption.  

And popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are benchmarks for just how easy a social networking service needs to be to lure members.  

We have become accustomed to interacting with others online in a certain way, and if a B2B social network is going to be successful, it should be as user-friendly as popular online social media.

08:21 --  Connecting with perspective business customers in hopes of generating leads is the dominant behavior on SlideShare and Rashmi says her B2B social network is built around that purpose.  Presentations are used to pitch products, brands and services.  

They support more extended, in-depth explanations.  Display ads may work to entice you to click and go somewhere, but they can't walk you through the types of explanations that are typical of more complex products and services.  

It is the explanation that determines the length of a company's sales cycle.  

At this point, presentations are a good consultative sales tool, since they make it easier for marketers to incorporate the various business processes, case studies and best practices decision-makers like to appraise when evaluating business products that could be incorporated into a company's everyday processes.

10:17 -- Currently, from a media monitoring standpoint, Slideshare reports the number of views, embeds, favorites, comments and downloads.  In the future, the company plans to report referrals as well and offer more in-depth reporting capabilities.

11:29 -- People upload their presentations on the site not just to share them with their existing business partners, but to get in front of other members they may not know, but who may have a need for their products and services.  

As is the case with popular networking services, if you see other members there who you want to connect with, it encourages you to join.

So the network effect is just as important in a business-to-business social networking environment, as it is on Facebook and Twitter.

For B2B marketers, niche B2B social networks may also have additional value by aggregating a more targeted, premium audience.

12:20 -- Rashmi reveals the typical pattern by which SlideShare embed codes wind up getting used to display member presentations.  First, members tend to embed their presentations on their own sites Then they tweet it out or share it on Facebook. 

Next, people who find them on SlideShare may embed those presentations on other sites. The owner of the presentation tends to embed it only on their own side. But if it's good content it just takes off. Slide share offers numerous ways to syndicate presentations. But the quality of the presentation, as determined by the SlideShare community, determines how broadly it permeates online.

In some ways, this makes it impossible to game SlideShare to generate leads. "Your content has to be good," says Rashmi. "We provide the tools for sharing, but if your content is getting distributed everywhere, it's because your content is good."

14:31 -- In a business to business social networking environment, the absence of spam is a key component of getting people to comment. The quality of conversation must be high. "People have higher standards for B2B sites than on B2C sites.

They don't want to put up a professional conversation in a place where they might encounter trolls," says Rashmi.   She also points out that not all comments about SlideShare content occur on her company's site.  Those conversations can and do take place on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin as well.

15:42 --  In contrast to the SAP Community Network (featured in a previous episode of this podcast about B2B social networks), SlideShare manages their community by hosting a forum for discourse, with ease-of-use as a core focus.

16:28 -- Rashmi estimates that while only about 20% of the presentations posted on SlideShare get comments, 60% of all presentations draw either comments, embeds, favorites or downloads.

16:55 -- Rashmi Sinha has mixed feelings about user ratings as a feature, so SlideShare opted not support that option.  She references a Sept. 22, 2009 YouTube blog post which reveals that site users, generally, are more inclined to grant YouTube videos five stars than any other rating.  

In some cases, if they really dislike a video, they'll give it one star.  But people seldom rate videos two, three or four stars. On the blog Social Commerce Today, a Jan. 21, 2010 post titled "YouTube & The Death of User Ratings" by Paul Marsden offers the following interpretation: "Psychologically, it's far less taxing on the brain to give feedback in simple binary liked is like form, and binary feedback is arguably easier to turn into a useful format to inform choices.

And culturally, binary feedback is less open to cultural bias, as anyone who has done a balanced scorecard review will know.  Americans overrate, Germans under rate." Marsden argues that when it comes to online social networking, liked is like ratings are more valuable than star ratings. He prefers to, "... leave ratings to professional reviewers -- it's what they're trained to do...."

As a side note, this opinion is in stark contrast to Mark Yoltan's, who says that on the SAP Community Network, a B2B social network recognized as one of the most successful in the world, user ratings actually improve our performance, because poor user ratings in a public environment serve as a wake up call to either improve the product or encourage those who like it to rate it highly.

Of all my guests, I'm particularly excited about this one, who last appeared on this podcast in a joint interview with Robert Scoble.

One of the best books I read in 2009 was Twitterville by Shel Israel.

I found it so riveting and packed with helpful information that I simply couldn't read it without a highlighter.

If you like this podcast, you'll love this book.  

For a preview, listen to this in-depth, one-on-one discussion with Shel Israel about how organizations can use social media to sustain customer loyalty when things go wrong, human interaction as a replacement for the false image branding often conveys and the future prospects of Twitter as a company and a service.

SHOW NOTES

01:30 -- Shel Israel agrees to let Eric Schwartzman publish his "Twitterville" book notes, the author's feelings about the book and whether the title sells it short.

04:45 -- Employees are often encouraged to stay in their lane at big organizations. From an operational standpoint, how does someone like Frank Eliason of @ComcastCares get the cable repair truck to show up on time, or get modifications made to someone's cable bill?  Achieving buy in for social media customer service programs enterprise-wide.

09:37 -- A discussion of the Motrin Moms backlash on Twitter prompted by Jessica Gottlieb in response to a commercial she found to be insensitive and whether or not organizations are sometimes too quick to capitulate and rollover in response to customer protests, regardless of whether or not they believe the protests are reasonable.  

13:06 -- The herd or pack mentality often pervasive when and where people congregate online, how it relates to individual and organizational behavior and what Motrin's real failure was in how they dealt with the #motrinmoms incident.

14:47 -- Frank Rose's article in Wired Magazine titled "Commercial Break" about the consumer-generated advertising campaign for Chevy Tahoe, which is often hailed among social media pundits as a case study for what not to do, but which resulted in increased sales, market share, and shorter sales cycles.  

19:17 -- Why and how the way organizations like @WholeFoods and @Starbucks approach to Twitter is more in line with the Land of Oz than with reinforcing and underscoring a commitment to transparency and authenticity.  

21:17 -- Reconciling Julian Smith and Chris Brogan's claim in their book Trust Agents that organizations should "never leave an empty, unused account anywhere because it's as much an indicator of neglect as a dirty desk" against the belief that logo Twitter accounts are, generally speaking, not as effective as individual accounts because who wants to talk to a Coke can?

22:31 -- Branding is a creative, false image that companies manufacture to try to convince you that their products, brands, and services are something they're not. Twitter presents organizations with an opportunity to replace that model with a more authentic, legitimate experience based on human interaction.

25:08 -- Identifying the friction between subjective and objective Tweets and whether or not some sort of distinction between the two could suggest a practical, reasonable governance policy for organizations that are on the fence about whether to Tweet under branded or individual accounts.

27:45 -- If organizations embrace a Twitter strategy that encourages employees to use their individual accounts, how can those organizations preserve the relationships employees establish on their behalf after they exit the company?

29:07 --  Shel Israel's experience working with MCI, which at the time was engaged in an aggressive telemarketing campaign, to explain why the effectiveness of organizational communications cannot be measured by raw data alone and the notion that social media may, for the first time, present organizations with a more fiscally-responsible channel for expanding market share.

32:18 -- Customer service as the new PR and solving problems via social media in full view of everyone.

33:00 --  A discussion of how automaker Toyota has set up and organized their Twitter presence under a branded logo account @Toyota, but with the employees tweeting on the companies listed in the sidebar are custom background JPEG.

34:29 -- Using Andrew Sinkov, who tweets @evernote and Apple Computer as a backdrop, a discussion about the importance of good conversation versus product performance.

35:31 -- While superior product performance and qualified employees may render social media less important, sustaining customer loyalty when things break will be much more difficult for opaque, secretive organizations with no goodwill in the online community.

38:08 --  The prospects for Twitter as a company, micro-blogging as a communications channel and concerns about Twitter as a single point of failure.

42:45 -- Shel Israel's new book about the software company SAP, which he is co-writing with Mark Yoltan, SVP of the SAP community network.  

45:56 -- End

How do you use B2B social networks to support complex sales?

In all my research, I found very few B2B companies with social media programs anywhere near as sophisticated and effective as the shared marketing program as the SAP Community Network.

In fact, it may the greatest B2B social networking case studies of all time. It's that good. And they have the strategy and stats to prove it.

If you're responsible for B2B growth marketing, B2B lead generation, SEO for B2B or prospecting marketing qualified leads for SaaS, CRM or ERP software, you've come to the right place.   

B2B Social Media Strategy

I reached out to Mark Yolton, Sr. V.P. of SAP Community Network to discuss b2b opportunities in social networking and this is a summary and audio transcript of our call.

He told me everything you need to know about leveraging a B2B social network to drive demand, generate leads, close new business and circumvent churn.

And he's a genius. Clear, concise, articulate.

This is a case study about SAP's private B2B social network, the cornerstone of their B2B social media strategy.

Member posts from the SAP Community Network.

B2B Social Media ROI Stats

The SAP Community Network -- a B2B social networking initiative nearly 2,000,000 members strong and growing at a monthly pace of 30,000 new members spanning 200 countries and territories worldwide -- has been recognized by the Altimeter Group and SiteIQ as one of the most successful business-to-business social networking sites in the world.  

Yoltan reveals SAP's winning B2B online social networking formula that has resulted in 6000 posts per day, 1 million unique visitors per month and 200,000 contributions by celebrating imperfection, profiting from surrender, improving product performance through user ratings and building deeper professional relationships through personal interactions.   

B2B Social Media Marketing Topics Discussed 

01:42 -- Using a social network to deliver value to different stakeholder groups including customers, partners, the sponsoring company and individuals.  

03:54 -- Building brand loyalty through social networks and more compelling business benefits of sponsoring a social network.  

04:20 -- Why customer-to-customer communications is a significant benefit of social networks for business-to-business applications and the key to stimulating peer-to-peer activity.  

06:34 -- How to determine what type of information is appropriate for sharing within a B2B social network without compromising the sponsoring company's competitive edge.  

08:42 -- Why a corporate social media policy tailored to the sophistication of the employee base is a critical component of effective business-to-business social networking. SAP has published their Forum Rules of Engagement and Blog/Community Guidelines.  

11:21 -- Using a wiki to include employees in the development of a corporate social media policy.  

12:24 -- The strategic criteria by which SAP decided between establishing a branded B2B social networking community versus a public B2B social networking community.

15:35 -- Deepening business relationships through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and B2B social networks as adjunct to a core, branded, B2B social networking site.  

16:25 -- The advantages of branded communities over Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and which companies are not candidates for managing their own branded, B2B social networking community.  

19:04 -- The types of roles or job functions within the organization and generations predisposed to participating in a social networking B2B environment.  

21:10 -- How to decide which sections of a B2B social networking site should be public, and which areas should be private.  

24:33 -- Conducting edge work through mentors, who are nominated by the community and do not work for SAP. The use of exclusive access and private areas to seed information within the community through influential community members.  

28:38 -- How active contributors benefit from participating in the SAP B2B social networking site through lead generation and reputation management.  

30:28 -- The business benefits of relinquishing control of the conversation to your customers and exactly what it takes to drive active discussion amongst customers, resellers, partners, and other channel sales participants in a social networking B2B environment.  

32:06 -- The intangible benefits of online social networking to B2B online social networking community members.  

36:33 -- The use of friends or contacts in an online social network to filter important, relevant information through recommendations.  

37:58 -- Staffing requirements for managing, weeding and farming B2B social networking sites.  

40:29 -- Using star ratings and user reviews inside B2B social networking site to promote sales and improve product performance.  

41:25 -- The specific skills that make for on exceptional B2B social networking community manager.  

44:41 -- The relationship between a B2B social networking site community manager's willingness to reveal at least some aspects of their personal lives with their business colleagues, their effectiveness at shepherding conversations within a social networking B2B environment and why imperfections and human flaws are essential to driving conversations.  

45:39 -- The use of Facebook, Twitter and object-oriented social networking sites to deepen personal relationships, which are sustained primarily in a branded, B2B social networking environment.  

47:06 -- The relationship between user ratings and product sales within a B2B social networking site, why perfect ratings are not usually good for sales and how low ratings can be used to improve product performance.  

50:03 -- Integrating proprietary and open source software to power a B2B social network initiative and dealing with potential tension between open-source platforms and licensed proprietary software.  

55:39 -- End 

Photo by Proxyclick Visitor Management System on Unsplash

Rob Key, CEO and founder of Converseon talks about becoming a listening organization, social CRM and mining actionable business intelligence with social media monitoring platforms at the PRSA International Conference in San Diego.                                            

01:09 -- Listening to social media through conversation mining, and working with clients from a management consulting perspective to help them reorganize their operations to take advantage of actual customer feedback collected on the web.  

02:10 -- Changing the marketing and public relations model to recognize how social media is causing organizations to integrate all areas of the company into the conversation.  

02:44 -- The delineation between conversation mining and news media or social media monitoring or raw pipes versus versus intent modeling, sentiment and  geo-data.  

04:31 -- The different types of listening solutions organizations use and how the very based on the specific needs of the customer.  

05:08 -- Translating raw data into meaningful business intelligence through Converseon's proprietary listening platform.  

06:20 -- How to become a listening organization for sustainable business advantage.  

07:08 -- The three components of listening: what yo what the was thoroughly legal service infusing the value of social across the entire enterprise for sustainable differentiation, securing the right technology listening platform.  

NOTE: According to Key, HP has says that listening integrated into customer service has saved them $10 million in call center costs, and P&G says that through social media and listening, over 50% of its innovation is coming from outside of the company.  

09:01 --Using work flow software with pre-configured rules to manage the distribution of information mind on social networks to the appropriate departments within the organization through social media analytics software.  

10:02 -- The benefits of capturing outcomes from a legal perspective so that legal and regulatory compliance are satisfied.  

11:01 -- The importance of securing a persistence listening platform to support ongoing conversation mining throughout the enterprise.  

12:17 --The organizational and business change components required to ensure discoveries and insights surfaced through listening are delivered to the appropriate departments to increase customer satisfaction and improve performance.  

13:01 -- Work flow integration with CRM tools and social media training.  

14:14 -- importing existing measurement from legacy systems to preserve prior findings through platform migration.  

15:00 -- The real challenge of listening from a technology perspective, capturing conversations and cleansing content for relevance.  

15:51 -- The seven layer hierarchical pyramid of data: Raw Data, Cleansed Data, Baseline Analytics, Black Box Analytics, Human Analysis, Internal Customer Data Integrated with External Data (social CRM), and Business Intelligence.                                                          

21:01 -- Whether or not businesses can use social graphs to determine the importance of conversations and participants.  

22:02 -- Why influence and sentiment need to happen at a customer and a vertical business level.  

24:24 -- Determining the social impact of US Pres. Barack Obama this Cairo speech on global issues, Hezbollah's defeat in Lebanon and the electoral protests in Iran.  

27:07 -- How the Obama administration is evaluating and applying the merits of conversation mining to achieve its broad objectives.   27:36 -- Implicit the importance of explicit, metaphor, neologism, images, dialects in conversation mining, and qualifying conversation participants by the choice of term they employ.    

30:17 -- Key responds to a comment made by Mark Wiener in a previous episode, in which he said computers can't tell the difference between I love Toyota and I love anything but Toyota.  

30:42 -- Why we are still 10 years away from accurate artificial intelligence, why humans are an essential part of listening and why you should beware of any listening provider that claims 90% accuracy.  

33:55 -- End 

Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash

Mike Smith (@smittypa), Smith Green PR, talks about his work on the Obama Campaign and the months leading up to US presidential election at PRSA international Conference in San Diego.

01:01 -- How citizen journalism and viral communications worked to advance the Obama Campaign. A discussion of the boot camps which were held by the Obama campaign to energize the base, communciate the message and the campaign trail from Iowa to Virginia.

O2:07 -- His experience canvassing door-to-door in freezing cold weather in Iowa. The single biggest lesson this 27-year-old public relations person learned from the campaign and the importance of putting the voter first.

02:56 -- Sacrificing the niceties of PR and creating bonds with voters based on a working knowledge of each voter's background.

03:29 -- Rather than focus on communicating directly with everyone, the Obama campaign's strategy, which identified and focused on the influencers within their communities, and leveraged their support to achieve broader outreach.

04:33 -- Why the Iowa caucus is so significant in US presidential elections.

06:14 -- How the Obama campaign was able to attract and organize so many volunteers, and why the Des Moines Register was more important than The New York Times.

07:24 -- Working with field organizers and how the Obama strategy focused on getting college students back from Christmas break in time to vote.

08:24 -- Fifty million in one month was an all time record for fund-raising on the Internet, and since it came from mostly $100 donations, the campaigns populist message was drawn from the micro-payments story.

Special video excerpt from this audio podcast interview with Mike Smith. 

09:26 -- The role of Blue State Digital and the Web team on the Obama Campaign, and how they mobilized the enthusiasm of their social media followers.

10:16 -- Learning to Tweet from Craig Newmark (featured in a previous episode of this podcast) and integrating Twitter into the Obama Campaign.

11:04 -- Craig Newmark's advice on determining who to follow, and a little know fact about Craig's political allegiance.

13:13 -- Self-identification on social networks with respect to political affiliations and whether or not that is or is not a good idea from a professional standpoint for public relations and public affairs practitioner.

14:05 -- Determining how and when to disclose one's political preferences in an online social environment. Where does my life end and the corporate life begin?

15:11 -- Wrestling with how much disclosure and transparency is appropriate on the Internet with social networking tools. 

Photo by History in HD on Unsplash

Rich Teplitsky, Director of Public Relations for KGB Texas in San Antonio, discusses social media communications policies and governance inside organizations at the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) International Conference in San Diego.

Teplitsky is chair-elect of the PRSA Technology Section and has served in senior roles at Alcatel-Lucent and Monster.com

01:14 -- Social media policy extends an organization's professional code of conduct.

03:46 -- Establishing the rules of social media engagement, the rules of self-identification and the importance of transparency.

05:11 -- The demographics and expectations of participation of today's workforce and how that impacts corporate policy.

06:13 -- How our expectations of privacy have changed as a result of social media and the responsibility of employees to limit their participation in activities that could result in digital images and other social media objects.

07:08 -- The regulatory challenges of corporate communications in the Conversational Era and how it impacts public relations firms.

08:17 -- Dealing with issues such as competitiveness and rudeness of social media interaction in a corporate social media policy.

10:17 -- The importance of stakeholder relations, and ensuring that the right stakeholders have a seat at the table prior to the development of a social media policy.

11:27 -- Constantin Basturea's New PR Wiki as a resource for examining the social computing guidelines and blogging policies of a variety of organizations.

12:16 -- The PRSA Technology Section's Ning site as a resource for networking with other public relations professionals tasked with developing social media policies.

Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash