If you’ve been following my blog, you already know that I won a free ticket to fly to Toronto thanks to Virgin America’s #VXToronto Twitter campaign.  I’ll write about the “Virgin” experience later.  Right now I want to share with you all what I learned on this trip.

I’ve had many people ask me, “Was the trip worth it?”  My answer, of course, is “Of course!”  Because what I was doing in Toronto is what I do in social media everyday: meet new people, have interesting conversations, share information, and learn a lot of new things, things that help advance my business as well as my career.  What is there not to like about that?

I wanted to share with you all what I learned or confirmed on this trip for your future reference.  It is just one example of what is possible if, when you go on a business trip, you schedule your own tweetup or meetup and go out there and Windmill Network!  All this happened primarily over a 2-hour tweetup, so if you have never gone to a tweetup before, this is a preview of the types of people you could be meeting and conversations you could be having!

1) Partner Up for Successful Windmill Networking

Earlier this year I hosted good Windmill Networking events on business trips to Jacksonville, New York City, and Portland.  But each time I was a lone soldier, doing almost all of the inviting and legwork in finding a venue by myself.  This time I had the help of a local in Toronto, Judy Gombita, someone I had never met before but gotten to know through Twitter.  Judy took on the event as if it were her own, spreading the word through her network and Twitter and helping me secure a venue for the event.  In fact, it was someone who listened in to our Twitter conversation, Candice Best, who ended up partnering with the two of us and executing on the final venue selection and logistics.  From Judy’s and Candice’s efforts we were able to get 40+ people to attend a tweetup at a coffee bar on a Thursday night.  By far my most successful Windmill Networking event…thanks to the help of my partners Judy and Candice!

Advice: When going to another city and trying to organize a networking event, try to find at least one local contact in your network who can help you on the venue selection as well as spreading the word.  Your networking event will be the more successful for it!

2) Twitter Relationships are REAL

As the above illustrates, these two people who partnered with me I met through Twitter.  I had never met them before in real life, and yet they treated me like family going out of there way to make sure that I had a pleasant stay in the “T-dot.”  And it wasn’t just them.  There was @Animal, the famous recruiter who has a raucous, entertaining yet educational Recruiting Animal Internet radio show about recruiters and jobseekers, who I had a chance to meet in real life and get to know over coffee at Tim Horton’s.  There were people seeing my tweets from the Virgin flight who lived in Toronto and came out to meet me the next night.  There were countless other tweeps that I met that were drawn into conversations from Judy on Twitter.  In fact, most of the people that I met in Toronto I had met, not through the 300+ LinkedIn connections I had living in Toronto, but in one way or another through Twitter.  Twitter has helped enrich my life in countless ways, and I realize this even more as I write my 2nd book, which will be on Twitter of course!  Some people give Twitter a bad rap, talking about the automated bots that exist and the Direct Message spam.  If you can look beyond that there is a golden group of real people out there to meet and develop relationships with.

Advice: Part of the problem of starting out on Twitter is not finding relevant people to follow.  Do yourself a favor: go to the Twitter Yellow Pages Twellow as well as the Twitter List Directory Site Listorious, enter some keywords of things you have an interest in or the name of your local city, and look for people that might be interesting to follow.  You’re bound to find someone…and then take it from there!

3) Social Media Events are Not Just about Freebies

Through Candice’s help, we were able to secure not only free coffee tastings from our sponsor Crafted, but also some free beer (Mill Street Brewery), pizza (Pizzeria Libretto), and chocolate (Nestle…in the picture).  But we weren’t able to advertise these things until the last minute.  It had no affect on the turnout.  Those coming to a networking event were coming for the networking and meeting people, not the freebies.  Sure, it was nice to know that local businesses were supporting the event and, don’t get me wrong, the food and drink was awesome and greatly appreciated!  But if you think freebies are enough to draw a large crowd for networking, think again: it’s all about the networking!

Advice: Businesses often think they need to give something away to provide “value” to their social media audience.  While providing free products does get your product talked about in social media and are appreciated by attendees, try going beyond that by thinking outside of the box in terms of other ways of providing value and becoming participants in social media events, which could draw more potential future customers to the event!

4) Businesses are Starting to Realize the Value of Content Curation

Whenever I speak with clients about social media strategy, the subject of content curation always comes up.  Still understood by relatively few, the art of sharing content about your line of business, if done right over time and combined with your own compelling content, can help elevate you to a subject matter expert or even a thought leader status.  Imagine how surprised I was when members of a start-up company from Toronto, ConnectedN, were excitedly talking about their software platform which helps businesses automatically curate and publish content.  Here’s a video of an interview I had at my #VXToronto tweetup with the co-founder, Brad Milne:

Advice: If you want to know how content curation can be utilized as part of a comprehensive social media strategy for your business, please contact me.  If you’re ready to invest in a platform to help automate the content curation process, contact ConnectedN!

5) Think Social Media?  Think Canada!

Whenever I think of areas of the world that foster the growth of social media companies, I always think of the Bay Area.  Think about it: Within a small area of California one can visit the headquarters of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn!  The existence of these companies in close proximity has spurred countless social media startups in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and surrounding areas.  But this trip made me realize how many of the leading social media companies are located in Canada, not the Bay Area:

The leading social media monitoring software company?  Many would say Radian6, and they are located in the beautiful Canadian province of New Brunswick, northeast of Maine.

Up-and-coming social media monitoring software company?  We were blessed by the presence of Sheldon Levine, the community manager for Toronto-based Sysomos, who are apparently working with a lot of big brands and are gaining major traction in the market.

The leading integrated social media client platform?  Look no further than HootSuite, hailing from Vancouver.

Although there are many excellent social media agencies that exist worldwide, one that has gotten recognition as one of the top 15 social media agencies worldwide and is also famous for its relationship with Ford, is the Social Media Group which hails from Toronto.

Advice: Be on the lookout for exciting social media startups to spring up in Canada in the next 6 to 12 months.

6) The Zen of SlideShare

I’ve been talking a lot about SlideShare recently, primarily from a B2B social media marketing perspective.  But there’s another side of SlideShare, something concerning the “Sharing” of content through social media and developing your personal brand.  I always talk about blogging being a great way to share your expertise with the world.  Why not take it one step further and repurpose your content into a Powerpoint presentation and upload it to SlideShare?  If you’ve ever spoken on a subject, why not upload your presentation to SlideShare to share with those that might not have had a chance to hear you speak?  A presentation is a powerful way to package and share something in a format that is easy-to-read and professional looking.  Furthermore the demographic that is active on SlideShare is overwhelmingly professional.

It was a conversation with Sacha Chua, an Enterprise 2.0 consultant working for IBM, tech evangelist, and Toronto rockstar that helped me see the light.  She has uploaded 25+ presentations to her SlideShare account, and she has shared information on topics ranging from “The Shy Connector” to “A Teacher’s Guide to Web 2.0 at School.”  In fact, her most popular presentation, “The Gen Y Guide to Web 2.0 @Work,” has more than 50,000 views!  That is more views than a lot of blogs get in one year!

Here is one of Sacha’s presentation where she has off-the-cuff calculations of the ROI of sharing your content throughout social media:

Pretty powerful, huh?

Advice: Knowledge is not power.  Knowledge is there for you to share with the world, and in doing so display your expertise.  Get on the bandwagon…share…and you shall reap the benefits!

7) Social Networking: No Person Left Behind

My concept about social networking vis a vis hosting events was that the event had to be larger than I was.  In other words, even if I didn’t get a chance to speak to everyone who came, if the people I didn’t speak to were able to meet others and had a good time, I would consider it a successful networking event.  I learned of a totally different perspective on social networking from the Networking Queen of Toronto, Dennie Theodore.  Dennie runs a popular networking group in Toronto called Similar Circles that periodically meets and often has a waiting list in order to attend one of their popular events.  The secret of her networking success?  She personally makes sure that every person that comes to a networking event is meeting new people.  Instead of herself networking at her event, she is looking for people that are not networking or speaking with others.  If she finds them, she will make sure they are not “left behind” and get them socializing with others.  Isn’t that a great idea and refreshing approach, that someone is providing a personal touch in leading the event and ensuring that no person gets left behind?

Advice: If you host networking events and are looking for ways to get people to talk to each other, here’s some advice that Dennie gave me.  Go to a 99 cent store and buy small ornamental objects that you can give out for free at your next event.  When you meet someone, you exchange your unique objects.  In such a way, your “object” should be traveling the room as you and others meet new people.  The catch?  You can’t leave home until you get your “object” back by meeting other people!

Is 6 Degrees of Separation Still Valid?

As we network and meet more people, the world around us becomes smaller.  Sometimes really small.  After chatting with Judy, I don’t remember where, but the fact that I had a Jewish and a Japanese connection came up and Judy had asked me if I had heard of a book called Hana’s Suitcase, which is actually the true story of one Japanese woman’s search for details on the whereabouts of a girl (Hana) who owned a suitcase that was installed at a Holocaust Museum in Tokyo.  Thanks to the efforts of this woman from Japan, the story of Hana, another innocent victim who was all-but-forgotten, was brought to life and now helps children around the world learn about that dark period of history.  Judy had mentioned that the book was written by a Canadian, but both Judy and I were surprised that @40deuce, the Community Manager over at the previously mentioned social media monitoring company Sysomos, was the book author’s 1st cousin!  Coincidence?  Maybe.  But the more I network around the world, both offline and virtually, I am realizing that we are all a lot closer than we think…

Advice: I learned of this magical story just from having a conversation with someone I met on Twitter.  Social media is full of real people that can enrich your life.  They are waiting to engage with you.  It’s not about the tools: it’s about the engagement.  Go for it, and see for yourself how our world is becoming smaller…and how meeting new people can truly enrich your life.

As I consult with companies on their social media strategies, which often means discussing options when considering social media campaigns, I was ecstatic that I was recently chosen for a free flight on Virgin America’s Twitter campaign to help spread the word about their new Los Angeles and San Francisco to Toronto non-stop flights (click here for full disclosure).  I am obviously excited to be able to participate in a social media campaign as a participant so that I can utilize this experience to better advise my clients in the future.  Another plus for me is that it will make me physically inaccessible for awhile while I am in the air, which may help me get caught up on my book writing (yes, I am working on my 2nd book…and don’t even think about Skyping me while I’m flying while utilizing Virgin America’s free WiFi service!).  Plus I get to create a LinkedIn event and network in a new city, physically meeting some great tweeps and LinkedIn connections that I have had various conversations with through social media.

A social media campaign, while seemingly looking like a smart move for any company, can come back to haunt you if your infrastructure is not prepared.  Any campaign advertised through social media will suffer the fate of having its good and potentially not-so-good qualities broadcasted through the same social media channels by the same “Infleuncers.”  Before you embark on that social media campaign, please look your company in the mirror and ask yourself: is your customer service ready for social media?  And do you have a capable social media community manager in place to handle any potential negative issues?

Note:  The purpose of this blog post is by no means to neither advertise nor criticize Virgin America.  The objective is to share my experiences as a social media campaign participant to help educate businesses on the potential risks associated with using social media marketing as well as the importance of having a capable social media community manager in place to help navigate any potential negative issues that arise.

So here’s my story: Virgin America decided to micro-target a select number of people to receive these free tickets in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Toronto.  Rather than open up the campaign to all, they utilized a 3rd party service, Klout, to invite only those people that Virgin America and Klout felt were “Influencers.”  To be honest with you, there was a lot of public outcry on Twitter as to why certain people were picked and others weren’t, an obvious negative side-effect of any such campaign.  But by utilizing a 3rd party service (Klout), Virgin America could shield itself from any potential public outcry, and Klout themselves wrote a blog post clearly explaining the methodology of how Klout picked “Influencers” for the Virgin America campaign to show that they had a logical and impartial system for this.  Case closed, and although there still are some disgruntled tweeps, all in all it was an interesting concept that certainly got the Twitter communities of Toronto, San Francisco and Los Angeles tweeting and blogging about Virgin America!  At this point I give thumbs up to the campaign, as I think using a respected and impartial 3rd party like Klout was a clever idea.  I can see more companies utilizing Klout similarly in the future.

The problem, however, is regarding the logistics of how the campaign works.  Everyone who received the email from Klout congratulating them had to select a link to go to a site where their “campaign code” was revealed.  This promotional code was to be entered on the Virgin America website and tickets bought directly from there online.  Fine.  Since the email said that tickets were available on a first-come first-serve basis, I decided to quickly pick a date in July or August where there was a social media-related event going on in Toronto that I could both learn from and network at.  My favorite source of social media events information at the moment is Mashable’s 25+ Upcoming Social Media & Tech Events, and voila!  There I found the only social media-related event in Toronto in this time period: Cross Media TO.  I decided to pick optimum flights that would allow me to attend this event as well as spend a day Windmill Networking in Toronto.  But although the correct prices displayed on the flights I wanted to choose, I couldn’t choose them.  Strange, I thought.  Better call up Virgin to see what the scoop is.  And this is where the saga begins…  Note, if I was able to successfully book my tickets online at that point in time, my blog post would have ended here…

So I called Virgin America.  Everyone I will be referring to after this I label “customer service representatives,” although internally they may be considered reservations desk employees.  Just like consumers in social media don’t care what internal department a Facebook Page is representing, if a company only has one toll-free number on their corporate website it will be assumed that that is their customer service number.

Just like most American corporate customer service toll-free numbers, it was not easy to get a live person on the phone.  I wanted to buy tickets but I wanted help with my reservation, which I didn’t have yet, so which department should I speak with?  Could an automated system handle my question?  Probably not.  I just kept pressing zero until I found the magical pipe music and then I was in line waiting for the next operator.  Unfortunately, the customer service representative that I spoke with couldn’t help me.  In fact, he thought it was an issue with my browser, as I was using Safari (side note: why are Mac users always picked on…Safari works on 100% of the sites I use!).  So I boot up Firefox and again, I couldn’t choose the specific flights that I wanted.  Strange the operator thought.  He asked me to give him the promotional code, and after he tried it on the Virgin America computers he realized it didn’t work either!  So it wasn’t a browser issue after all.  But because “Headquarters” was closed they would look into the issue and get back to me in the next 24 hours.  He did reserve the seats for me, but here’s the Catch 22:

• Virgin America only allows you to book tickets with a promotional code directly by the consumer entering it online. Customer service representatives could not book these tickets on my behalf.
• The Virgin America website, on the other hand, would not allow me to book the flight that I wanted.

In other words, my promised ticket was out there in no man’s land…

It took a few more phone calls, but finally the situation was rectified.  An interesting side-note is that no customer service representative that I spoke to was familiar with the Twitter campaign to begin with.  This made it more difficult to explain to each person I spoke to why I got this special promotional campaign and why I claimed that the price should be next to free.  After all, how many customer service professionals are on Twitter?

There is no need to go into the details here as to how the situation was rectified, as this could have happened to any company.  But this story took an interesting turn after I dropped a hint to one of my Toronto tweeps on Twitter about the frustration that I was having.  Guess what?  The Virgin America Twitter Account quickly sent me a Direct Message and asked for any feedback that I have.  As I wrote in how to deal with an angry customer on Twitter, just knowing that they were listening and wanted to hear my feedback was sufficient to appease me.

Virgin America was listening, and in fact, it help transformed this blog post into a positive feeling towards Virgin America because of it.  Here’s what happened:

• The Virgin America Twitter account contacted me asking for my feedback in a very humble way.
• They then asked me to give them detailed feedback by providing me the Twitter manager’s email address.  This actually was a very personable approach which made me feel like I was talking to a person, not a company.
• The Twitter representative then became the interface between me and Virgin America.  She took the responsibility to contact individuals spread out across a few departments and get back to me with exactly what happened.  There was ownership and responsibility, and because of the professional communication and excellent response that happened all because of Twitter, I ended up completely revising this post and deleting out the gory details of what happened with customer service.  It just didn’t feel right to do anymore.

In fact, Virgin America told me that it was people like myself who tweeted about our frustration that actually helped them gain visibility into the situation and help resolve this issue quickly.  A great example of how social media can help customer service.

As Americans get more active on social media and both positive and negative customer experiences become more public, companies will realize that any social media marketing activities need to be counter-balanced with fixing the way that they deal with these issues and, at the end of the day, treat their customers.  Any consumer can become an “Influencer” by having a bad experience and having their tweet go viral, so companies need to be prepared for the “social media effect” on the front-end with the organization that deals with customer complaints: Customer Service.  It also helps to have social media community managers who understand their business operations and have access to key management throughout their company to help quickly resolve these issues where the conversations start: in social media.  In fact, in this case study, the positive actions of that social media community manager who managed the Twitter account more than compensated for the negative customer service issues that I faced.

I will continue to blog about the hopefully good as well as the potentially not-so-good regarding this social media campaign so as to make the experience as educational as possible for all, but now that my tickets have been reserved and positive communication has been achieved, I am confident that there won’t be any other surprises going forward.

Have you had similar experiences in social media campaigns or situations where companies tried to engage in social media but their customer service truly wasn’t prepared for whatever reason?  What about experiences where the social media community manager took control and helped you out like I was helped? Please share your experiences, both good and bad, with us!

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As social media begins to envelop every part of a corporate organization, it becomes important that every employee begins to have a certain level of literacy in using social media tools.  This becomes even more important in outward-facing rules where “social business” is changing the way companies engage with present and potential customers over Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogs.  At some point, just as companies emerged that used the Internet as their platform (Amazon, Netflix, etc.), we will see new companies arise that purely use social media as their platform.  And when that happens, it is a natural that they will only be finding and recruiting people over social media, because they only want social media savvy users to work for them.

You think this is way off in the future?  Think again: this is already starting.  Here’s a case study to chew on for thought.

As you know I like to blog about events going on in social media in Japan.  As Twitter is still relatively new there, it is fascinating to see how a different culture starts adopting new technologies in their own way.  And because I speak and read Japanese fluently, I can add value in providing you with information that you may not be able to find anywhere else in English on the Internet.  Enough said.

This blog post is about EC Navi, a Japanese company who’s product and platform is the Internet: They run a price comparison site with links to E-commerce sites similar to PriceGrabber.com.  Think about it: their customers are solely on the Internet and using the Internet to make their purchases.  If everyone on the Internet is starting to spend most of their time on social media, doesn’t it make sense that E-Commerce sites like EC Navi (and PriceGrabber.com as well) will need a social media presence and need employees who understand how to utilize sites like Twitter?  Of course.

So it came as no surprise to me when EC Navi announced that they were only taking college graduate applicants who 1) applied over Twitter and 2) had at least 10 followers.  Only having 10 followers shows that it is not a popularity contest, but proof that you are actually utilizing Twitter and interacting with others.  And applying over Twitter was merely sending an @Reply to the CEO saying that you were interested.  You were then invited to a seminar to learn more about the company, and after that process 10 applicants became future employees of EC Navi.

The CEO of EC Navi, Shinsuke Usami (follow him on Twitter: @usapon), was quoted as saying that he did this as part of an experiment but was extremely pleased by the number and high quality of the candidates. He mentioned that he thought of doing this for two reasons:

1. He recently held an event for college seniors to educate them on the exciting world of the Internet and advertised it only through Twitter.  He was pleased with the number and calibre of candidates who attended this seminar and immediately thought he could take it one step further.
2. He thought it would be a great social media marketing experiment.

In our United States, we may have discriminatory laws that prevent employers from only accepting candidates from a specific Internet site.  But the fact that social media becomes more important to companies is not going to fade away.  And as we all become better and more proficient in our uses of social media, it is only a matter of time before those that use social media have an advantage over those that don’t when looking for a job.

There is also a message here to companies: experimentation is an important component of social media marketing.  Obviously, you need to have some literacy as to the etiquette and best practices of each platform so that you don’t spam social media users like in my recent case study of UCC Coffee.  But if you have an in-house social media strategist or engage with a social media consultant like myself, think up a way of experimenting with an idea and implementing it to see what the outcome is.  You may be pleasantly surprised by the results!

Have you heard of any companies exclusively hiring people over various social media channels?  Has your company attempted a social media marketing experiment that had unexpected results?  Please share!

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Yesterday I wrote about the emergence of OpenNetworker.com and their attempt to utilize their LinkedIn network to help advertise their group and offer a way for people with lots of LinkedIn connections to monetize them.  Later, in the same day, another site, NuLinked.com, announced an extremely similar program.

The way that either program works is similar.  You pay either a monthly or annual fee to be able to have your name and email address placed on a list that will be accessible to thousands (if not tens of thousands) networkers (i.e. members of the respective LinkedIn Groups) looking for people to safely invite in order to grow their networks.

Now both sites are opening new doors by their willingness to pay networkers an affiliate fee if they can convince their LinkedIn contacts to sign up for the program.  This is the first viral marketing program that I know of that is specifically targeting people on LinkedIn and asking them to sell a product to their contacts.  So far, LinkedIn has not made any official announcement regarding this, but I am assuming that both sites are operating in a way that is giving them legal protection.

So what is the difference between the two sites?  OpenNetworker.com, seeing that it is run by the folks at TopLinked.com, is really the pioneer and leader of providing a venue (albeit for a fee) that allows you the opportunity to receive many invites from other open networkers.  Even if you don’t use the paid service, you get access to the Invites List, and I have always had success connecting with other TopLinked.com members.  If I received an IDK, the TopLinked.com Group Manager was always efficient in handling the situation.

NULinked.com is operated by Networkers United.  This LinkedIn Group was not even mentioned on my post last year about growing your network because they did not exist at the time.  That is right.  In just several weeks time, this group has come out of nowhere to claim its spot as a large group for open networkers alongside the traditional LIONs groups and the TopLinked/Invites Welcome/Open Networker triad of groups.  Networkers United was aggressive in having its members attract other members and even when so far as setting up their own social networking platform NUWorldwide.com to provide a truly free environment free of the restrictions that are sometimes found on LinkedIn.

The success of Networkers United is no doubt the result of intelligent and tactical marketing (although some saw this as spamming) and also the realization that there are many people on LinkedIn who want to increase their connections through collaborating on such groups.   I am a member of Networkers United, and I can attest to the fact that the Group Manager is not only always willing to help out in the case of an IDK, but she also goes out of her way to try to make a personal connection with her members and informs them of a lot of behind-the-scenes things that go on in the world of LinkedIn.

Whether or not the monetization that Networkers United and TopLinked hope to do will be successful or not remains to be seen.  But as long as there are LinkedIn members with large numbers of connections looking for monetization opportunities, be prepared to start receiving a lot of emails from both sites.

For more information please visit the following sites (which do not include any affiliate ID as I am not advertising either one) :

OpenNetworker.com

NULinked.com