Yahoo clearly wants to buy its way into the social media elite.  In December 2005, Yahoo bought social bookmarking site Delicious, but it later sold it in 2011 to the founders of YouTube.  In September 2006, it offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion, but Facebook walked away.

And Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is clearly looking for the deal of her career.

Yahoo buying Tumblr makes sense. Tumblr is only big, cool, newish social platform that Yahoo can afford.

— Henry Blodget (@hblodget) May 17, 2013

Tumblr’s resistance to pursuing a business model should cause Yahoo’s investors some alarm.  Though Tumblr claims 117 million unique users, the company collected only $13 million in advertising revenue last year.  The $1.1 billion selling price is most likely based on Tumblr’s valuation of $800 million via its VC investors.

Tumblr couldn’t even afford to pay its 3 editors working on Storyboard, its bold move into publishing original content — laying them off last month.

With more resources put into Flickr last year, Yahoo could bundle Tumblr and Flickr into a photo publishing-blogging powerhouse — doing battle with Instagram, and a way to Trojan-horse itself into Facebook.  This would make sense, as Instagram currently allows its users to cross-publish photos to both their Flickr and Tumblr accounts.

Tumblr photos can also be made more prominent when a user performs a Yahoo search — much in the same way that the thumbnails of YouTube videos appear near the top of Google searches.

Additionally, and perhaps the most obvious, Yahoo’s ad network should start to become more apparent through Tumblr, which may unfuriate Tumblr CEO David Karp but given his payout, all will be OK.

While this may make economic sense and address a task that needs to get done, companies will find that there aren’t any more inquiries or sales leads.

This is because content is only one part of the job; content marketing and distribution is the second and more important component.  You can’t have one without the other.

When an employee or consultant writes a blogpost, and disseminates it to his or her internal and external networks, thousands of potential endpoints are being missed.

However, if even TWO different employees or consultants write blogposts and disseminate, the reach is at least doubled.

Sure, it’s a numbers game, but the other unstated benefit is that different viewpoints are presented (make sure a social media policy and guidelines are in place) and the dreaded writer’s block is eliminated.

Newsgathering organizations have learned this the hard way.  Reducing headcount and hiring freelancers saves money, but only recently have media companies realized that each reporter is himself or herself a distribution engine, a mechanism for spreading and amplifying content — and advertisements.

Indeed, if I was an advertiser, I would want to know exactly which reporters are tweeting or Facebook posting their stories, and the size of their networks and followers, to make sure I’m getting the most bang for my buck.  Social network Muck Rack has helped journalists to amplify their presence on Twitter and other social networks — apart from the efforts of their employers.

Taken to the enterprise, an army of even 20 regular, trained corporate bloggers could yield thousands of impressions and generate dozens of conversations.  The next step of course is to capture and measure these results in a CRM and collaboration system.

As such, one lone blogger simply cannot be expected to do it all.

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Oh, and the company has also poached Stu Ogwa, former VP of business intelligence of Yahoo, to join Marketwire as EVP of product and technology, according to TechCrunch.

“The press release part of the business, the newswire distribution, is very important to what we do,” said Marketwire COO Jim Delaney to TechCrunch in an interview.

Marketwire was quietly humming along, even in the dot com era, when it used to be called Internet Wire, and was always considered third-place behind PR Newswire and BusinessWire.

Things changed dramatically for the company when they bought social media analytics company Sysomos in 2010.  Terms weren’t disclosed but several analysts, including myself, placed the figure at the time at roughly $50 million.

I can’t bash Marketwire too, too much — after all, I started in the PR biz in the late 1990s and the press release was our stock-in-trade.  But with the rise of social media and more importantly, social media engagement platforms that help former PR people like myself make sense of the noise and clutter and help us do our jobs better, the tools and skillsets changed dramatically — almost overnight — and the noble press release started to quickly lose its relevance.

Social media engagement platforms caught the interest of PR practitioners, as it allowed us to not only efficiently conduct social media marketing but also monitor and measure what we could rather painlessly.  One early provider that stood out is Vancouver-based HootSuite, which, together with Twitter-owned Tweetdeck, essentially created the category of social media engagement tools.

(Disclaimer:  I am a paid user of HootSuite Pro, and often make recommendations to companies on the choice of social media engagement or monitoring platform.)

I’ve written on HootSuite before, and I believe that it has the technology and resources (i.e., audience and client list) in place to do some really big things — or at the very least, work well with other software companies to increase an organization’s experience on the social web.  No doubt, the management and investors in the company have big plans ahead.

Another curious piece of information:  both Marketwired and HootSuite are both portfolio companies of the same investor, OMERS Private Equity, one of Canada’s largest pension funds, with in excess of $60.8 billion of assets.

As such, I think the writing on the wall is clear:  at some point in time, perhaps two years down the road, Marketwire and HootSuite will merge.  (It’s anyone’s guess what the name of the company will be.)  This will make my job, as well as that of other social media analysts and consultants, a bit easier, when we advise organizations on the choice of software or tools needed to manage social media.

Whether this rebranding will work remains to be seen.  Up next:  whether PR Newswire, the longstanding 800-pound gorilla in the press release game, which is itself a division of UK-based media conglomerate UBM, will change its name to PR Newswired.

Yet few admit to wishing to perpetuate its existence.  Talk of ‘social advertising’ usually means buying ads on Facebook, Promoted Trends on Twitter, or even the new SlideShare ads — complete with inline lead capture — on LinkedIn.

A few companies have been hard at work at transforming the banner ad into a richer experience.  A richer experience of course transfers into engagement — the hoped-for, hyped metric that seems to have eluded the banner ad about 10 years ago.

Chicago-based NowSpots, recipient of a Knight Foundation grant and a Y Combinator alum, launched in order to create banner ads wherein an advertiser can include Facebook content, tweets, or Pinterest photos directly in the ad unit.  Brilliant.  I tried to catch up with founder Brad Flora but I have reason to believe that NowSpots has pivoted and is now offering another digital service (the Twitterfeed hasn’t been updated in one year).

Though NowSpots’s ad units conform to Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standards and can be distributed through Google’s Doubleclick network, the risk for advertisers is huge, as live social content is difficult to control and measure.  Advertisers take painstaking steps to measure the effectiveness of one ad creative vs. another, and with the living nature of social content, an advertiser cannot be sure of the exact content which delivered the clickthroughs.

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Organic, social content in paid advertising is ‘hugely important now in brand strategy,’ explains industry colleague and social brand strategy consultant Michael Leis.  ‘People want to be validated and amplified by brands, not aspire to them.’

Other companies — even large incumbent players — continue the effort to socialize the humble banner ad.

Last month, Microsoft announced a bold move to socialize banner ads served in its advertising network.  For starters, Microsoft is partnering with social commerce company Bazaarvoice to supply user-generated product reviews and ratings which will be delivered right inside the ad unit.

Microsoft partners with Bazaarvoice to create review-generated advertising content.

Other partners will be announced shortly, and I’m excited to witness these developments.  Let’s face it:  no one clicks on banners, and if advertising is to continue to be a revenue source for thousands of publishers, it will need to perform in order to fund the growing media industry.

Indeed, according to a Harvard Business School and IAB study, the ad-supported Internet contributed 5.1 million U.S. jobs and $530 billion to the U.S. economy in 2011.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram may hold our attention — while we are on their sites and apps — but why shouldn’t that exciting content be ported to other sites?  Thanks to APIs provided by the social networks, this can be a reality, and can create an interdependent ecosystem of relevant, valuable, engaging ads that continue to fuel an industry that charges us a price we can all agree on:  free.

‘Everything needs to be evocative with a behavioral goal,’ adds Leis.

Basically, the software encourages any employee to engage in social media activity outside the four walls of a company, and tracks which content — and which employee — has been influential and responsible for the intended engagement (prospects, leads, job candidates, etc.).

HootSuite, TweetDeck, and other engagement platforms are limited in this regard because only designated employees — usually the members of the social media team — are permissioned to edit and distribute corporate social media content externally.

Yammer, Chatter, and other enterprise social platforms are limited because the intention is for employee-only social media-like communications — short messaging, sharing documents, and the like.  Extending Yammer conversations outside of Yammer is not encouraged — in fact, senior management like Yammer precisely because conversations are kept confidential to the company.

These approaches alienate employees who tweet and update Facebook and LinkedIn on their own.  Such employees may be happy and proud to carry out social media on their own dime — but their activity is not monitored, and there is no guidance as to if they are actually doing what would be most helpful to the company. (Only when they mess up does a senior manager find out.)

Enter Addvocate, Dynamic Signal, Expion and others, who are marrying the best of both worlds.  These platforms include identity mechanisms and security which can finally effectively carry out an inside sales strategy that coordinates and optimizes employee social media accounts — the holy grail of ‘social sales.’  Employees can have others inside an organization see the real results of their efforts, and not have to resort to taking screen shots or creating email chains with ‘Look who commented on my LinkedIn update!’

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Why HootSuite and Yammer haven’t ventured into these areas is perhaps due to pricing:  premium versions are paid on a monthly, per-seat basis, and most companies do not see the value in paying to facilitate and measure the social media activity of non-social media professionals.

To address the pricing issue, Addvocate has instituted a Kickstarter-like pricing scheme:  pay what you want and order 100 licenses within the first 30 days. The deal is good for six months.  (This clearly disrupts the traditional enterprise software pricing model, and I sincerely hope that Addvocate receives enough attention for this pricing model to spread to other companies.)

Techcrunch has published a few interesting pieces on this category, most notably about vendors Addvocate and Dynamic Signal.

I’m also going to be on the lookout for some advances in the platforms of the incumbent engagement and enterprise players.

For most companies, large and small, that want to collect or keep track of employee activity on Twitter, the social media manager usually creates a List on Twitter.  This is problematic primarily because all of the adding and removing of employees needs to be done manually, such as when employees join or leave the company.

Additionally, the larger the company, the more likely that company Twitterers are working in different divisions on different products, so a single company Twitter List just won’t make sense.  I suppose you can create multiple employee Twitter lists — but again, it’s all a manual, labor-intensive process.

And wouldn’t it be great if Twitter automatically searched keywords and hashtags of those employees, and organized tweets according to such criteria?

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I’ve written on the issues of Twitter list management before.  Personally, I think list management is a golden opportunity for Twitter — whether for individual or enterprise use — a tool that not only organizes information automatically and intuitively but also creates stronger relationships between users and followers.  (TweetDeck, the social media engagement tool it bought in May 2011, doesn’t cut it.)

Twitter, of course, is leaving money on the table, by not developing and selling this premium product, which could also feature targeted, relevant advertising — but I digress.

My ears pricked up and my eyes widened yesterday afternoon when I visited the onsite IBM Innovation Lab at IBM Connect 2013, featuring projects underway from the IBM Research Center for Social Business.  One particular project IBMersWhoTweet — the name said it all — intrigued me.

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According to the photocopied brochure,

IBMersWhoTweet is a crowdsourced solution that invites employees to match Twitter accounts to the employees who own them.  Over 500 IBMers have helped classify 7,000 Twitter accounts, and we have studied different ways to increase participation.

A fantastic solution to the labor-intensive curation needed to manage and view employee activity on Twitter, I could totally see the enterprise potential of such a product.

I had a chance to speak with the IBM researcher on the product, Casey Dugan, about IBMersWhoTweet.  I asked if IBM paid for access to the Twitter firehose — indeed, only 4 companies pay for access to the entire Twitter firehose, one of which is Salesforce.com’s Radian6, now part of the MarketingCloud.  Casey was unaware of the other major social media monitoring companies (‘I’m not in product management,’ she explained) which I suppose is a good thing:  wouldn’t it be great to create something in this world without first thinking about the competition?

Casey explained that the product was created relatively painlessly, using Twitter’s REST and Streaming APIs. (As we all know, the public Streaming APIs cap the number of messages to a small fraction of the total volume of tweets, so for now, IBMersWhoTweet isn’t delivering a total view, especially for prolific Twitterers.)

Of course, an enterprise Twitter solution only works well at scale, when there are at least a couple dozen company Twitterers, with enough conversations that merit the tracking of different hashtags and topics.

Peering into the future, a product like this can also allow for non-company outsiders, such as suppliers or vendors, or even clients, to be brought in for additional Twitter fun.

There was also no discussion of a mobile version, or if the version was optimized for mobile devices.

Below, a screenshot of IBMersWhoTweet.

IBMersWhoTweet

The final issue of course is:  will anyone buy it?

Twitter and other social profile management tools are, for the most part, free.  The next step up after the free version of HootSuite costs $5.99 per month.

At issue is whether IBM will sell this as a standalone product — and if so, at what price point — or if they would fold this into another collaboration product, like Connections.

Is your organization on Twitter?  Do you use an enterprise social media tool?  I’d love to hear from you.

Perhaps what’s most telling about this year’s event is the name change:  Lotusphere is now Connect.

While IBM is normally never referenced in TechCrunch or AllThingsD articles featuring the hottest tech, mobile, or social startups, we all need IBM to keep up the good work and to continue spreading the good word about social to companies and businesses that do not read TechCrunch or AllThingsD.

Through its install base of tens of thousands of customers who over the past 25+ years have purchased (and still use) Lotus Notes office productivity software, IBM is in the enviable position of converting people who are actually already paying for collaboration software.

Indeed, IBM’s vast footprint as the incumbent provider of basic office software kicks the door down for people who still do not believe in the power of social.

(Today’s newbie social networks still rely on a freemium model to survive — if they can make it.)

Alistair Rennie, General Manager of IBM Social Business, put it aptly this morning:

We are at the start of this journey.  And we can change the world.

Stay tuned for more blogposts from this conference.

Apparently, the National Labor Relations Board continues to inform private-sector companies that workers have a right to discuss work conditions freely and without fear of retribution — whether those discussions take place at the office or on Facebook.

Such guidelines set by the National Labor Relations Board, are designed, of course, to encourage workers to communicate freely with one another with the aim of improving wages, benefits, or working conditions.  Many companies find this to be a holdover from the industrial era, when employees were encouraged to unionize and communicate any questionable workplace situations.

Yet most social media policies in place today chiefly revolve around the possibility of the employee painting his or her employer in a negative, disparaging light — and presenting a challenge to the corporation’s brand, products, or services.

At issue, is that many employees may be unaware that what they are posting to Facebook or tweeting may position their employer negatively.  Employees generally want to do the right thing — and hold on to their jobs.

As such, training is needed to ensure that whatever the social media policy a company has in place, that employees are trained to exercise sound judgment when engaging on social networks.  According to Charlene Li of Altimeter Group, this is the biggest challenge facing social media policy drafting and its related employee training:  how do you train for judgment?

It’s often difficult to determine the percentage of companies with formal, written social media policies in place — you know, the kind that you have to sign on your first day of work — because a lot of companies have folded social media compliance into their existing Media Relations and Information Technology Usage policies.

A juicy tidbit I found online:  an online database of 219 social media policies, compiled by Chris Boudreaux.

When policies are more supportive rather than punitive, providing examples and hand-holding, employees can share all of the positive experiences of the workplace, and their employer receives innumerable benefits.

Are you struggling with designing a social media policy for your organization, or are you concerned with adherence or compliance?  Contact me, I’d love to hear from you.

I’m continually asked by clients about the point to blogging.  I also continue to hear excuses as to why they aren’t blogging.

‘I don’t know how to write effectively.’

‘How frequently should I blog?’

‘I’m not that creative.’

‘What if I write something and no one reads it?’

…and the list of excuses goes on and on.

True, blogposts are original content pages that continually keep your site refreshed and up-to-date — which the search engines love.

But blogposts are also marketing pieces to communicate your thought leadership, knowledge base, and expert opinion — even when you think no one is reading.

The best blogs and bloggers find their own comfort and frequency level.  While not attempting to be a ‘How-To’ or exhaustive list of Blogging Best Practices, here are a few things to consider to ease the blogging pain:

Ask a colleague, client, supplier, partner, or industry thought leader to contribute a guest blog.  They’ll be flattered you did. (And, you might also have to reciprocate and write a blogpost for them, too — hey, turnaround is fair play.)

Syndicate your blog on a blog metasite, or a site that accepts submissions of blogposts that may have already been published elsewhere.  Two of such metasites that come to mind are Social Media Today and Business 2 Community.  This way, your hard work won’t just appear on your site, but will appear — and be read, tweeted, shared, and commented on — on other sites.

In addition to links, try embed codes.  Embed codes pointing to rich content posted elsewhere serve two purposes:  you get instant graphics and images (without having to save, edit and upload) and the original publisher gets notified that you have (properly) shared his or her content.  SlideShare, Scribd, Pinterest, Flickr, Curate.us, and, of course, YouTube and Vimeo offer embed codes to save you time and make your blog look pretty. (If you aren’t familiar with embed codes, please contact me and I will be happy to explain.)

Always be thinking of your industry’s influencers.  I admit:  we all get writer’s block.  While I generally like to blog and write when there is a ‘news peg’ — an announcement by a key industry player or major company — we can’t sit and wait for those to happen.  Instead, think about ways you can discuss and/or position the handful of companies and luminaries in your industry with intuitive, fresh perspectives.  Then, when your blogpost gets published — and you do your requisite sharing on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn — they will find you and (hopefully) share and respond.

If you do not know who your industry influencers are, there are some pretty nifty tools out there to help.  One of them is Google (or Bing).    Another is a product by Copyblogger, called Scribe, which includes a mechanism whereby a blogger can discover the most influential individuals, companies, and news organizations, and reach out and network.

Blogging frequency.  Inbound marketing giant HubSpot claims that 20 blogposts per month should be sufficient, but we all know that that might be impossible — even if you’re hiring social media marketing consultants (like me).  After all, you don’t want to publish crap, no matter what the industry guidance tells you to do.  Get your feet wet, get comfortable, see what’s working and what’s not, and get yourself into a blogging groove where you can create regularity and consistency.

Are you promoting?  What is also annoying about blogging is hitting the ‘Publish’ button, seeing your post go live — and getting zero hits or responses.  Use a combination of RSS, email newsletters, Twitter, Facebook,  and LinkedIn (your Profile and any Groups you are a member of — though tread lightly, I think that people have been using Groups as a dumping ground lately) to make sure that your blogpost gets read.

Even one person reading it and providing comments feels good — and makes blogging feel less lonely.

Have you found a blogging tool or ‘killer app’ that you swear by?  I’m all ears.  Contact me with info.

My social media brethren often feel the same.  Many of us came from corporate communications or PR roles, where we didn’t necessarily need a certain degree or professional designation in order to get or keep a job.  As social has proliferated across industries and companies large and small — and with it the ability to start a Facebook Page or Twitterfeed for free — everyone suddenly could become a social media ‘expert.’

But that’s all about to change.

Several organizations, companies, and groups have begun in earnest to create professional designations and certification programs.  These allow social media practitioners to have the bragging rights and ownership of a cert to call their own (‘Take that, MCSD’s and MCSE’s!”), and companies could be sure that they are getting an experienced, fully vetted professional to add to their staff or hire as a consultant.

Below, a review of a few of such programs, present and future.

Social Media Security Professional

http://certification.comptia.org/getCertified/certifications/smsp.aspx

This is a new certification offered by IT training and credentialing giant CompTIA.  It is not yet fully live, and is being administered by a partner organization, Ultimate Knowledge Institute (UKI).  Via Twitter, UKI informed me that the program will be available soon.

@jakewengroff Hi Jake. SMSP is in beta at this time. Expected to be public in early 2013. We can put you in touch with our infosec students

— Ultimate Knowledge (@UKI_SM) December 27, 2012

I like the fact that CompTIA has elected to explore a social media cert.  One of the largest credentialing organizations — over 900,000 IT professionals claim the basic, ‘entry-level’ A+ cert — this group could really make a mark on spreading the concept of social media professionals gaining visibility, credibility, and additional job opportunities via a cert.

HootSuite University

http://learn.hootsuite.com

One of the largest social media marketing and engagement platforms, HootSuite began to offer a social media certification more than two years ago.  As a full disclaimer, I went through the certification process, which included watching on-demand videos and taking multiple quizzes.  (Additionally, one must pay a monthly fee during the certification process and beyond.)

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

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