Do You Have Room for One More Network?

If you count yourself among the members of the social tribe (MOST), then inevitably you are facing some degree of social media fatigue. Even those of us who make a living in social media find the challenges of listening, responding, creating and tracking content on multiple platforms overwhelming at times. Kirsten Gronberg, community manager at start-up CMP.LY, admitted in a Yogi Berra-like fashion that all her job related tweeting, checking-in, liking and blogging was actually “getting in the way of work.”

Writer Corey Guilbault relates his social fatigue to the “abundance of noise from a bazillion broadcasters making it hard to hear anything.” Valerie Romley of Moving Target Research is even more fed up, exclaiming, “I’m totally over any and all social networking which is a huge time suck.” That said, Romley does admit that LinkedIn remains a great source for finding “referrals to qualified partners and vendors.”

Oh no, not another network!
Which begs the question, have we reached a saturation point that limits if not dooms the opportunity for new networks to blossom? Valerie Grubb, who runs a bustling real estate consultancy and actively reaps benefits from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter proclaimed, “I just don’t need ONE MORE SITE.” Mia Malm, an SF-based PR consultant echoed these thoughts concluding, “I think most people have at this point established what networks they want to be in and those networks have a critical mass.”

A week ago I would have agreed with these prognostications but having experienced two new network enablers, Referral Key and MixTent, now I’m not so sure. Both of these new services have a fighting chance of catching on, addressing areas of business social networking not fully covered by LinkedIn and certainly not addressed by Facebook while taking full advantage of the connections you already have on these networks.

Referral Key is a viral juggernaut
Of the two, Referral Key may be the most profoundly viral application since Twitter came on the scene in 2006. Like its name implies, Referral Key, is designed to enable peer-to-peer referrals among small businesses, finding strength in the simplicity of its offering. Once you sign up for Referral Key, you can then solicit all or selected peers on LinkedIn to send you referrals, offering the referrers any kind of reward you desire including cash.

Thus far, the secret to Referral Key’s virality is the most compelling email subject line I’ve ever seen: “Are you taking on any new clients?” To gauge the power of this line and interest in yet another network, I used Referral Key’s system to send about 100 invitations to selected colleagues culled from my larger LinkedIn database. Within 72 hours, an astonishing 70 of the 100 had joined Referral Key. Another 10 responded to my email politely declining but reinforcing the undeniable power of a “killer” email subject line.

Sure Referral Key got our attention, but will we use it?
Of course, responding to an email and delivering referrals is hardly the same thing, and it remains to be seen if Referral Key will end up being the useful source of leads for small businesses that it promises to be. Stephan Paschalides, co-founder of NowPlusOne, a research and innovation agency, wonders if Referral Key will really catch on. Explained Paschalides, who is certainly open to the idea, “I invited a bunch of people, but none of them invited other colleagues yet–maybe there are too many work/networking-related sites out there.”

MixTent, another new entry in the B2B networking world, takes a completely different approach from Referral Key: It asks users to rate colleagues already in their LinkedIn networks. The rating process has a fun, game-like component, in which users choose from a pair of colleagues, based on the question, “which would you to prefer to work with?” in a particular category (in my case, Marketing, Consulting, Writing, Social Media, etc.)

MixTent gets mixed reviews but there are great lessons here
After rating 25 pairs, MixTent asks if you would like to share your positive ratings with your preferred associates. This triggers a potential email with the subject line, “Hi, I just voted for you on MixTent.” MixTent encourages you to share this email, which in theory attracts more people to the “tent” and unlocks more aspects of the service to the user. Based on the limited response to the emails to 35 peers for whom I voted, it’s a bit too early for me to declare MixTent a viral peer to Referral Key.

Whether or not Referral Key or MixTent becomes the next big thing in social media, there are two important lessons here. First, email is still among the most powerful weapons in marketing, assuming you write compelling subject lines. Second, there are still unmet needs out there that the social media giants will either ignore or be unable to address. These chinks in the armor will create opportunities for highly focused start-ups that can work around or better yet within the giant ecosystems created by the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn, overcoming the social fatigue that will hold the less viral ones at bay.  (If this article seemed familiar, that’s because you read it already on MediaPost.com)

 

Six Questions to Start the New Year

1. Does your target Digg your ads?

If zapping tv spots wasn’t bad enough, now Digg is allowing their readers to essentially vote ads “off the island” while promoting the ones they like to star status. For the undug, Digg is the highly popular tech-focused news site where the stories are chosen by the users—the more Diggs a story gets, the higher it ranks on the site. And now that ads can be Digged or Buried, marketers will get real time feedback on the relative appeal of their ads to this highly influential target. If you’re targeting techies, this could be the cheapest copy test you ever tried, as well as the most eye opening.

2. Is your marketing worth retweeting?

While the joys of tweeting may still escape you personally, the phenomenal reach of Twitter is undeniable. In addition to the 20 million or so global users, tweets now appear as status updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo and other social networks, extending Twitter’s influence to just about everyone marketers might want to reach. This isn’t kid stuff either. Professionals between 35–49 are the biggest tweeters of them all. So, if you create marketing worth tweeting about, the world will find out about it faster than you can say, “Wow that’s tweet.”

3. Do interns handle your social media?

This is not a trick question. We’ve been asked this a lot in the last month and it is a reflection of a naive belief that it is okay to put a brand’s social media campaign in the hands of novices. One senior marketer even told us that his company uses interns for all of their social media and then shrugs off the lost intellectual capital when the interns move on. As social media advances from the experimental phase to the front lines of customer relationship management, building and maintaining expertise is essential to optimizing results and avoiding PR nightmares. After all, would you ever put an intern on the phone with the press or your top customers?

4. How many customer “love letters” do you get a week?

It is a simple fact—beloved brands do better. Becoming beloved requires achieving customer satisfaction on the basics (product quality) and somehow exceeding expectations via service. Zappos calls this delivering “wow” and does this wherever they can. The Apple Store does this with its amazingly knowledgeable squad of orange-shirted concierges. Others use Marketing as Service to foster brand love, as HSBC does with the BankCab, whose riders send at least one love letter every week. So ask yourself, what could your marketing be doing (versus saying) to generate this kind of passion?

5. Do you have an app yet?

2009 was the year of the app rush for marketers. Everyone from Blockbuster to ZipCar, Betty Crocker to Starbucks, and Fandango to The Food Network cooked up mobile apps for their prospects and customers. In fact, well over a hundred brands joined the fun, some with pragmatic extensions of their service offering (like FedEx mobile) and others with engaging entertainment to enhance their brand perceptions (like Scion’s AV Radio). Given the low development costs of mobile apps and the millions of smart phone users, there is still time to get app happy. And while you’re at it, check out the newly launched CALL THE SHOTS iPhone app that Renegade developed for HARLEM, the new ice cold shot drink imported from Holland. It’s fun, it’s free and it’ll answer the question—how lucky are you really?

6. Did you know Renegade moved?

Back in September we said goodbye to Chelsea Market, our home for 10 years and moved to our new digs in the heart of Greenwich Village, just south of Bowlmor Lanes and north of Patsy’s Pizza. It seems that a few of you might not have our new address so here it is: 41 E 11th Street, 3F, NY, NY 10003-4602. Our phone numbers haven’t changed and we look forward to seeing you soon.

Happy New Year!