By any other name...Can you label yourself?

Last night, an aunt of mine told me she had been reviewing my "web site" -- did she mean my blog, my Twitter profile, my Facebook profile? I am still at a loss for which online presence to which she was referring. Regardless, she had one problem with my bio. After 30 minutes of discussion about what countries I have been to in 2009 and which ones I plan to fly out to in 2010, she said "Erin, you simply cannot call yourself a 'jet-setter.'" She informed me that it was perfectly acceptable and - in fact - honorable to be called a jet-setter by others, but to label one's self such a thing was a bit - I don't know, pretentious? I don't recall her exact adjective. I think, in fact, she avoided telling me that self-labeling was anything in particular. She simply implied that it was a massive faux-pas.

It immediately reminded me of how we are all falling into the same trap when we call ourselves a "social media guru" or "social media expert." How much can we label ourselves and get away with it? I used to be able to call myself an online marketing specialist or "online marketing consultant" and all was well. Now that I'm getting more specific with things, is there a threshold of, say, speaking appearances or consulting gigs I must land before I can call myself an expert in social media marketing? Is there a certain number of miles I must obtain - a la George Clooney in "Up in the Air" - before I can call myself a "jet setter?" Is being Platinum on American Airlines' Advantage program enough?

Is it really faux pas to label one's self? Where do we draw the lines?

How to deal with negative social media sentiment

At the Integrated Marketing Summit last week in downtown St. Louis, I attended a session called "Twitter Basics and Beyond Workshop" in which Mark Aaron Murnahan spoke about how to use Twitter to monitor brand mentions and engage followers. He did a pretty good job and took questions at the end.

One of my favorite moments of any marketing conference occurred at this point. An attendee raised her hand and asked: "What should we do if we're seeing a lot of negative comments about our product?"

Mark paused. He recommended that she take a customer service approach and reach out to each individual to see how she can help to improve their experience. Great response, except that...well...

"We can't," she responded. "We don't really have any control over the product. We can't make it...better," she said reluctantly. Everyone in the room had a puzzled face and turned to pay more attention to where this was going.

Mark asked her to tell us more about the product.

"Well..." she hesitated, "It's the St. Louis Rams."

While the room of attendees muffled their giggles, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. Having attended quite a few home games this year, I know just how bad the "product" really is. She later called the team the "on field product" -- an important distinction actually, given that the brand consists of much more than just the current team's stats, which will be something to keep in mind later in this post.

So, Mark seemed a little stumped. I'm going to be honest. It could've been that he felt a little bit out of place being from the Kansas City area and now needing to address someone about St. Louis sports, but he's much more savvy than that. I think he was preparing his response when I jumped in with a thought. Raising my hand, I offered her a little bit of advice, and I'll elaborate on that point here.

She is right. There is nothing that she can do to make the on-field product better. When we take on roles in social media or marketing, we choose the product we're willing to promote day in and day out on the day we accept the job offer. Sometimes that product changes - getting a lot worse (St. Louis Rams) or a lot better (like MonsterCommerce, the online shopping cart software and its related services did from 2004 - 2007 while I worked there.) We take that risk.

Now, as marketers or public relations professionals (note: I believe social media marketing is turning a lot of "marketers" into PR folks by nature of the beast, but that's another post for another day), we are now responsible for monitoring brand mentions across all social media sites. And we now sleep even less than we did before because complaints, spur of the moment business opportunities, demands and customer needs can come flying across Twitter at any moment of the day. If your organization hasn't split social media roles into "customer service" and "marketing", then you have to be both reactive and proactive, taking care of customers on every whim as well as putting out great content, promotions and personality that compels and engages - building brand loyalty and affinity over time (not to mention leading to sales/leads).

This is our challenge. Working in social media for the Rams simply compounds the difficulty.

Often, reacting to negative sentiment such as what you see in this screen capture of a few tweets after the December 13th loss can risk adding fuel to the fire.

Instead, my primary recommendation is to find and focus on the positive influencers across Twitter for your brand. If your brand or product is popular enough to have a lot of people tweeting about how terrible it is, there have got to be some who like it. In the case of the St. Louis Rams, you have a sports team with an esteemed history of super bowl wins, all-star players like Kurt Warner, and a city that is not made up solely of fair-weather fans. St. Louis sports fans are pretty notorious for their loyalty to their teams. So, it didn't take me long to find someone on Twitter who not only created a St. Louis Rams "UNOFFICIAL" account on Twitter, decked out with a pretty solid-looking background. On top of that, this Twitter user seeks out any sports article with a positive spin about the Rams and polls his followers on their favorite players on the team.

He/she also has almost 3,000 followers, and the account owner engages with their followers regularly with @ mentions! That's a pretty significant and decently engaged voice in social media. Unfortunately, this person has not tweeted anything since November 29th, and yet the Rams have lost something like two games since then. Dear Rams Social Media Manager: It's time to get this person tweeting again by reaching out to them, find others just like this one (Another fan here is tweeting daily and has almost 5,000 followers), and get the positive conversations going. It doesn't mean you're going to keep people from tweeting "Rams suck" after each loss, but I firmly believe that in light of your lack of ability to change the product, empowering your fans to remain active is the only thing you can do. You can continue to tweet positive messages from the official Rams account, but we all know that third party endorsements are more effective.

I also recommend finding other "products" affiliated with the on-field product (the team) that will drive attendance, participation and positive brand sentiment (assuming those are some of the KPIs by which your job performance is measured). Examples would include talking about the awesome suites available at the Edward Jones dome, videos and content about the experience of attending the games - from the nice facility to the food and drink available to the kids entertainment and nearby restaurants. Essentially, you are event marketing - selling the experience (aside from the disappointment that inevitably comes at the end of the games). Also, find places online where people are talking about the charity involvement, past player awards, commemoratives, memorials, special pre-game events - anything at all that the organization is, in fact, investing their time and money in. Give these items a little boost with social media as well.

Twitter lists: Like link popularity, they help gauge relevance and popularity

I attended the Integrated Marketing Summit in St. Louis last week. I hung around afterward a while talking with David Siteman Garland (@TheRiseToTheTop)of The Rise to the Top fame, as well as quite a few other St. Louisans passionate about Social Media. The summit, although designed to address the integration of all channels and media in marketing, instead largely focused on Twitter and social media strategy. This makes sense given the current popularity of the industry but more importantly, from my perspective, the relative lack of understanding about how to leverage social media for business benefit.

My background is in SEO, so to understand the emerging rise in popularity of social media, I am often taken back to my early days in SEO. I consulted small businesses on "What SEO is" and what it takes to get top search engine rankings. At the time, explaining link popularity was one of the most complex concepts to address, but it was such a critical piece of SEO success. In order to show the search engines that your site is important and should be ranked highly for your desired search terms, you need to focus on obtaining as many links to your site as possible (quantity) as well as ensure that these sites are also as popular and as relevant to your industry as possible (quality). The more links you have, the more popular your site will be in the search engines.

In a very similar way, you can use lists to which Twitter users belong in order to determine the popularity, relevance and legitimacy of someone before you follow them, or when looking across your Twitter network to identify experts and influencers - for any purpose. Take, for example, David's Twitter account. He has been included on 215 lists! If I click on "listed" in the right column of any user's profile, I can see what those lists are, and Twitter even bolds the list title so that I can get an idea of what David is all about. As I browse just the first 15 or 20 list names, I can tell David is a "social media marketing" guy who knows "business finances" and is either a "entrepreneur" or works with entrepreneurs (both!). He is a "small business blogger" who "Tweets" and also lives in "St. Louis, MO". Oh, and if you've ever met David, you'd already know he's quite the "conversationalist!"

While a large portion of Twitter users continue to spam their way to as many followers as possible in order to look important, the rest of us might consider shifting our attention on the one thing that is more difficult to spam: Lists. You can add as many followers as possible to your account and assume a reasonable % will follow you back, but you can't as easily ask hundreds of people to add you to their lists. It's a much more natural gauge of popularity. Plus, it's a new enough feature on Twitter that I am certain this insight will change as the features, functionality and ever-organic and evolving use of Twitter by its users grows. Lists are something to keep your eye on.

Big thanks to @TheRisetotheTop for contributing to these insights about Twitter lists.

See also: How to Use Twitter Lists (Mashable)