Sometimes I have to admit it is hard to keep up with all the new advances in Social technologies. And when I hear the buzz about certain technologies getting louder and louder it often times prompts me to seek out the help of a trusted source.

Enter Jesse Stay – Facebook developer and guru, a recent author of FBML essentials, blogger of Stay-n-Alive and social media junkie like myself.

I sought Jesse’s help in further understanding how he was using FriendFeed for tracking and commenting on all the conversations that were happening at the recent F8, Facebook developer conference.

Here his thoughts and excuse my ignorance on any of these topics for those of you more social advanced.

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About Jesse

Jesse is a Social Media technologies expert. He specializes in Facebook and other technologies that enable you as a business to better reach your customers in a viral manner, leading to more targeted ad and marketing positions, leading to faster adaptation of your brand through the social networks.

Through his company, Stay N’ Alive Productions, he has firm experience developing and providing quality applications that have already had strong successes. He has both developed and consulted for successful social networking applications, some of those which currently have over a million users (the top 90 on Facebook!).

 

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So, I got asked this question on a call today with a fellow social media expert and I just had to blog about the ensuing conversation.

In reality if you look at the Latin origins of the word social it would most likely have a definition akin to the free give and take of conversation and collaboration amongst multiple parties. Slap on the word media and that ensures it is some form of digital media these days.

So with this as a backdrop the answer would logically be – NO!

A podcast is a new media. A podcast is a new channel. But it is still at the end of the day a one way dialog – you listen to one or two people having a conversation. If you were listening to two people having a conversation at a party are you being social? I think not – its only when you get involved in the conversation does it become social.

So just how social are podcasts?

Take it from me, I have personally recorded and handed edited over 100 podcasts for this blog and other purposes and I can safely say they don’t get the level of interactivity (read comments) like my regular old blog posts do. Yes there is that element of “portability” meaning you can take a podcast anywhere and listen to it any time – but do people really do that?? The answer there is also NO. I find my listeners tend to consume the media right when they find it. Which is why I go through the trouble of tagging my podcasts with Veotag so folks can listen to only the relevant question or 2, get in – get out and on to the next thing. People are busy and you can read faster than you can listen!

So does that spell the end of podcasts?

No way, I got a little nervous when I saw PodTech get sold for $500,000 but think podcasts can be very useful in delivering messages – just realize going in you aren’t really doing social media by doing a bunch of podcasts. Does this mean I will stop my podcast series? – no, I enjoy it too much to stop!

So what’s your view – is podcasting social media to you?

When it comes to Social Media there has been tons of talk about those few influencers who are able to spread your message like wild fire. But finding those few influencers has been the proverbial challenge.

Several good books have been written about this topic by some really smart people. But when doing some data mining on my blog using a new tool called SM2 from Techrigy (special thanks to them for helping me get trained on this tool), I noted that the far reaching impact of my blog is found in the proverbial Long Tail. (see graphic below)

What this says is that the conversation about topics on my blog and where they are occurring is coming from the long tail (dang it, that Chris Anderson is right again!)

So what I think this means is that exclusively looking for reach with your social media initiatives by targeting a selected few influencers is a flawed concept (sorry Ed Keller from WOMMA). To me this graph says it needs to also contain a component that delivers adoption (ie Reach) through the Long Tail of bloggers out there.

The bottom line is Social Media is fluid so you might as well go with the flow!

Sitting in on a PR meeting last week I was pondering the thought of my internal consulting teams starting to blog and participate in social media when someone from across the room said Social Media is more relative to the younger demographics we have in our organization.

Of course the more seasoned veterans of my team all pointed to me as the NON example of Social Media being age related (don’t go asking me my age now). When I remarked – “Social media isn’t an age thing it’s a lifestyle.”

And I do believe that is true – I think the adoption or lack thereof in some companies is because the more senior folks have now adopted the internet and social media rather than growing up IN the internet with social media all around them.

What’s your view and how is the adoption of social media going in your organization? I would love to hear about it.

B2B marketers with highly complex products and services have been given a gift in the last few years in the form of Social Media.

In my opinion, Social Media doesn’t easily equate to Lead Generation for the complex sale. For example a prospect reading a blog entry doesn’t mean they want to buy anything, but it does mean they have engaged with your brand. In fact the stats show that certain forms of Social Media even out perform more traditional ones when it comes to awareness and recall. For example, unaided awareness from podcasts were 68%, compared with 21% for streaming video and 10% for television. Now that’s great recall!

B2B marketers need to set aside collecting metrics like page views, clicks, conversion rates and start nurturing individual leads by using the gift of social media they were given. Social Media is great for consideration so why not use it that way? Don’t measure your teams on page views generated from a campaign. Measure them on how engaged they can get your leads with your content and turn them into sales.

Sales generated from your lead nurturing program are the only real measure of engagement with your campaigns!