Sometimes being productive requires taking a step back, or in our case turning out the lights. With social media running wild over the last year and everyone jumping on the bandwagon, it’s hard not to get swept up in the euphoria.

But at Park&Co we pride ourselves on Word of Mouth based on strategy. So when we took a hard look and realized our agency Facebook page wasn’t generating any Word of Mouth we decided to go dark. At least until we can give people a reason to talk about us.

Until then, we replaced the usual self-aggrandizing agency drivel with something far more valuable – fishing bloopers! Take a look.

I recently returned from a whirlwind trip following U2 on the West Coast swing of their latest tour. The trip took me to three different cities in the span of a week where I saw the show from a variety of different perspectives and vantage points. The last stop was in Pasadena at the famed Rose Bowl.

As many of you probably know that Rose Bowl show was noteworthy for a few reasons. First, 100,000 people occupied the stadium making it one of the largest concert events in the history of California. Also, U2 used the performance to record their latest concert DVD and they streamed the concert live via YouTube. The statistics that followed the live broadcast were staggering. Ten million streams from 188 countries across the world made this the largest streaming event in YouTube’s history.

A friend who knew I would be attending the Rose Bowl concert sent me the following email before the show, “Aren’t you a sucker? Now, I can have the same experience free while still laying on my sofa.” In a sense he has a point. Thanks to social media he saw the same show, but he hardly had the same experience. Not even close. And this is as big a commentary on the effectiveness of social media vs. in-person Word of Mouth as there ever was.

What I experienced in the span of a week led to countless stories and memories that I’ll cherish and share for a lifetime. It was by definition the ultimate Word of Mouth experience. He didn’t experience the camaraderie that comes with spending an entire day in the General Admission line and the subsequent loss of humanity in the stampede that follows when the gates finally open. He didn’t experience haggling and begging our way back to the Vegas strip among 20,000 other stranded cab seekers. And of course, he didn’t experience the magic that is a live U2 event.

He may have been comfortable and it certainly was free to watch the Rose Bowl show on his laptop. But as I was there smashed between fans from London on my left, Hawaii on my right and Canada to my back, I was part of something bigger. I was part of something 100,000 strong in fact. A community of passionate people that if only for three hours of our lives were connected to each other. Social media is great. It has the ability to extend real life situations, but make no mistake, it will never replace those situations and experiences.

My friend may have sung along to “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” from the comfort of his own couch, but I sang the same song at the top of my lungs with 100,000 others. And as I glanced around and the band fell silent it was clear that we shared something too. An overwhelming moment that only those within those walls can truly remember. I will never forget the looks on the faces of the people surrounding me. Those looks can never be defined by any social media application. Once again, U2 taught me a lesson, and once again, I’m better for it.

In this age of high tech social marketing tactics like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr to help engage the customer, it seems like face-to-face customer service tactics can get a bit lost. Well, I was fortunate to see that for some, old-fashioned customer service is still a priority. I recently experienced first-rate treatment at, believe it or not, an auto repair center.

I had been taking my truck to The Car Repair Company for routine maintenance and occasional repairs, but I hadn’t been in for a couple of years. Well, one day the maintenance light in my truck went on and so I took it to The Car Repair Company. They still had me on record and told me come on in and they’d take care of it.

Now here are the three things that I felt exemplified above normal customer service:

1. Like everyone in the car business, The Car Repair Company has had some challenges, but Jim Atkinson, the owner, was very upbeat when I came in. They normally will give you a lift to your work when you drop off your car. I thought with business being tight and all, that I would have get my own ride. But Jim, yes the owner, said that he would still take me to my office if I needed a lift, and he did.
2. They informed me that one of the repairs would take overnight, but I told them that I had no other transportation at my disposal, so I would bring in my truck in the morning. Jim felt that the repair on the lower ball joints should be done for safety reasons and offered to rent me a car and deduct the cost of the rental from the price of the repair. Not too many places would offer that.
3. I had one glitch on my transmission service, but I didn’t come back to The Car Repair Company for few weeks to get it checked out. Instead of saying it had been too long, Jim told me to just bring it in. A minor inspection and minor adjustment was done while I waited and at no cost to me.

I’ve always liked the Car Repair Company, but this one experience demonstrated a commitment to customer service that wasn’t just lip service. It solidified my loyalty to them over other service centers. Most importantly, it reminded me that as an agency, Park&Co needs to keep doing the most for our clients at every opportunity in order to keep their loyalty. Like The Car Repair Company, it’s what we demonstrate above the norm that makes the biggest and most lasting impressions on our clients.

Here’s the thing about numbers – they suck. They cloud people’s judgment. They associate meaning to things that are meaningless and often take away from what really matters.

Take sports. Let’s compare A-Rod’s statistics to Scott Brosious’s, the man who stood at third base just a few years prior to A-Rod in New York. Scott Brosious, who retired in 2001, is a career .257 hitter with a total of 141 home runs. A-Rod is a career .306 hitter with 553 home runs. Over his entire decade-plus career, Scott Brosious didn’t make nearly the sum of money that A-Rod will this year alone at $28,000,000. Yet if they each strolled down Broadway, New Yorkers would heap praise upon Mr. Brosious in a way A-Rod could only dream.

Why? Because beyond all the numbers that A-Rod’s accumulated he hasn’t provided moments or built relationships the way Scott Brosious has. The clutch hitting and late-inning dramatics that Brosious provided is the equity that has made him a Yankee legend despite his pedestrian numbers. So what does this mean? It means that if you’re spending time worrying about accumulating more Twitter followers and monitoring your blog traffic your missing opportunities to build moments and share experiences that naturally make you more valuable.

I’m done trying to poke holes in social media outlets. They aren’t the problem. Twitter is a perfectly effective and maybe even revolutionary medium. The bigger problem is the people who use social media and their infatuation with building numbers instead of meaningful relationships.

We’re so concerned with numbers and having to measure something that we associate false values so we can rationalize our own existence. Right PR people? Height + Width X ad rate X 3 = PR value? Following that formula in PR makes us devalue the real target audience because we’re always searching for the biggest. It’s the same as building a social media campaign around accumulating followers instead of cultivating relationships. You neglect those that really matter.

“Our goal is to accumulate 10,000 followers by the end of this effort.” What happens if you achieve your goal? Now you’ve got 10,000 people who on the other end are just happy that you increased their numbers for them. How often do you actually go through and read what your followers have to say? Probably not often because you’re just happy to see that number on the right side of the page grow. Here’s a news flash – so is the person on the other end. They don’t really care about you either.

The sad part is we seem to be ok with that. As long as we see numbers grow or have something quantitative to shoot for we feel like we’re striving towards something. And the truth is, we are. It’s just that we’re striving towards something completely meaningless.

In a perfect world we’d say, “Screw numbers, they’ll come if we do our job right.” If we work to provide value to others and establish relationships the numbers will come in greater force than they ever could have otherwise. But it doesn’t work that way because it’s too damn hard. How do we measure if someone feels connected to our brand and how do we know if they feel compelled to share what we have to say with others? I sure don’t have the answer. But I do know that strategies built on numbers mislead and misrepresent. Ask A-Rod. Ask Scott Brosious.

What’s Happening in Vegas Isn’t Staying in Vegas

If you’re anywhere near Las Vegas Friday morning, and your interested in how to use online social media for water conservation, stop by the Southpoint Hotel and Conference Center for the WaterSmart Innovation Conference. I’m presenting my fishing analogy for deploying social media at 9 am.

The Water - Use It Wisely conservation campaign was one of the first in the water-saving business to have a focused, comprehensive strategy for online social media to share its 100+ ways to save water.

Here’s how we go fishing using social media:

1. We consider the Water - Use It Wisely website as our wharf where we process the fish we catch. In this case, the process is to offer a wealth of conservation information to consumers thirsty for content, including 100+ water-saving tips.
2. To get them to the wharf, we go trolling in the sea of prospects with our blog. We lure in folks with timely information on how they can start saving water and money now.
3. To reach as many people with our blog as possible, we cast the content through a number of social media fishing lines, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. And we make our content easy to share by including links to Digg, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, MySpace and more.

You can review my entire fishing analogy social media presentation on SlideShare.

I am also looking forward to tailoring this presentation for the Texas Regional Water Conference in Fort Worth on Tuesday, November 11. For those of you attending that workshop, feel free to review my landing page, Sustainable Social Media 101, and send me any questions you have prior to the event. That way I can focus my presentation to your needs.

And whether you’re in Vegas or Fort Worth, be sure to stop by a say hello.

Remember a couple of years back when a bunch of us took up this new social media thing and subsequently threw our noses up in the air at the PR world? Basically, we said why send out a press release or focus on media relations when there is this great new way to reach people? Remember how we spewed out statistics about how readership was dwindling and the press release was dead? Remember how we all thought those ignoring “social media” were behind the times or lazy? Remember?

Most likely you do. After all, it was just a couple of years ago. But isn’t it funny that despite the short amount of time that has passed, we’ve failed to realize that social media is breeding laziness. And worse, it’s turning us all into that species of fat, immobile blobs as seen in Wall-E. But hey, at least we’re fat, immobile experts right?

Here’s the problem. We started hounding PR hacks because they implemented tactics simply because “that’s how it’s always been done.” There was no strategy. We couldn’t believe someone would simply publish a press release without regard for whether or not there was a better way to reach people. The real reason (and I feel like I can say this because I was as guilty as anyone else) we continued to blindly do things like this was because we were lazy. Our clients paid us, we could follow a formula and be done without much thought. Now we find ourselves in exactly the same trap with social media.

The root of the problem is that we lost site of what social media is – a tactic. Plain and simple, that’s it. It’s not a strategy. Once we figured out we could make a little money we began to duplicate the same press release formula from a couple years back – jump on the bandwagon, figure out the minimum I have to do, call myself an expert and attach a rate to it. Once complete, we were ready to spout our knowledge on “Re-Tweets” and Facebook Groups.

But even the laziest of people can’t possibly ignore facts forever right? Like the FACT that 72.7% of people recommend a product face-to-face. Like the FACT that when asked how they communicate after a purchase, 63% said face-to-face with a family member, friend or peer versus three in ten who communicated via website and less than one in ten who communicated via online social network. Like the FACT that nearly 90% of word of mouth buzz is generated offline.

Social media is a great way to extend a message to an audience that lives online. It’s a tactic that works amazingly well when used strategically as part of a larger Word of Mouth Marketing strategy. So the next time a social media expert comes to you with a grandiose strategy, say, “Thanks a lot. This looks great. But what pray tell do you have planned for the other 90%.” And if they stare at you blankly, respond with, “That’s ok. After all, you’re just a social media expert.”

 Manny Ramirez got busted for steroids last week and I should have been a lot happier about it. My two favorite teams are the Angels and DBacks, each benefiting differently from Manny’s stupidity. But instead of relishing in the moment, I was annoyed because that long-haired moron and his decision to ignore the hard work of his peers reminds me of what’s going on in the Word of Mouth and Social Media space right now. 

This week alone I’ve either seen or received four separate announcements about new social media companies. I’m all for entrepreneurship, and at first glance it seems like this uptick in recognition is a good thing, until you look at the fact that most of these new “businesses” are full of people looking to capitalize on the latest “fad.” 

The real crime in what Manny Ramirez did is that he spit in the face of all of the hard work his peers put in to get where they are.  Same goes for these “social media practices.” Anyone can buy a domain and call themselves an expert, but what about those people out there dedicated to the practice of actually applying strategy to social media? And what of those people who understand it doesn’t begin and end with social media? That, instead, social media is simply one tactic in the complicated and inarguably effective Word of Mouth Marketing space. What about them?

What’s happening is, when you call yourself an expert and recommend a Facebook and Twitter page to an eager client, you’re doing a disservice to yourself, your client, and the industry. You might get a few followers and you might even generate some conversation, but eventually that conversation will stop and the results will prove that you took a shortcut.  Happens every time. Worse, the folks out there truly dedicated to doing it the right way are now competing with the “short cutters” and everyone’s work is suffering. Why come up with a comprehensive Word of Mouth plan when you can just slap up a Facebook page? 

We’re in an era of noise. Say enough crap as loudly as possible and eventually some of it will get through. Months ago I argued this point about Twitter. My point at that time was that the useful medium had turned into a marketing wasteland with “experts” all racing to post the latest links hoping to elevate their personal or organizational stature. While my position has hardly changed, I now have an even greater concern. The same practice of hasty thinking and disregard for peers that continues to haunt Twitter and led to “Man-Ram’s” downfall is quickly flowing into the Word of Mouth space. 

This might sound like sour grapes to some, and I’m sorry that you feel that way. In the face of today’s social media barrage, I think it’s more important than ever to fight for the integrity of Word of Mouth Marketing. But instead of calling people out or speculating about their intentions, I’ll do my best to practice Word of Mouth the best I can, never calling myself an expert and waiting for those around me to break down or fail the test.

According to research done in December 2008 by Pew Internet & American Life Project, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter that allowed them to share updates about themselves with others.

With this growing popularity in mind, I recently tried to make Twitter part of my daily routine. I signed up, gave myself a Twitter name, and got a bunch of people to follow me.  However, I ran into couple of problems: I’m never on Twitter long enough to really follow anyone, and when I did “tweet,” none of my followers tweeted back. It seemed as though one constantly has to be online with Twitter to really keep up, and since I’m working most of the day, I don’t know how that’s possible.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t totally disagree with the concept behind Twitter, but unless you’re a celebrity or have a profound love of a specific topic or person, does anyone really want or have time to read or write 20 tweet updates a day?  My conclusion: if you’re really going to be a Twitter fan, you’ll need to be very committed or it just doesn’t seem like fun. It should be fun, shouldn’t it?

This video crystalizes my thoughts on Twitter in a nutshell:

Admittedly, I have been mostly absent from the Twitter conversation to this point. But with its ever-growing popularity, I figured I’d give it another shot, fully engage and see if I can find the real value.  Turns out what I’ve really found after a couple weeks of participation is that a conversation between good and evil seems to be taking place on my shoulders.

On one side is the angel, happy with the fact that I’ve made a few connections, talked with people that I otherwise wouldn’t have and shared some information. Mostly, these connections have been an exchange of pleasantries, but I get the idea. Having someone acknowledge you (and you them) is fulfilling. 

On the other side though is the devil. And I have to admit, he’s talking a whole lot louder than the angel. What I honestly see on Twitter is a bunch of people calling themselves experts who post links from various sites that usually have little to no connection with themselves. To put it bluntly, many seem to have an RSS feed set up to provide them information on a given topic that they then post to Twitter. Does posting a link make you an expert?

I’m a marketing guy. I get why people are doing this, especially marketing people (who seem to occupy much of the Twitter conversation). Positioning yourself as an expert is akin to finding the holy grail of marketing. It’s what we’re all after. But for me, the ultimate benefit of Twitter is that it has shown me just how few experts are truly out there.

Anyone can set up an RSS to capture links, then race to post them on Twitter in an effort to get out ahead of the countless others undoubtedly posting the same material. My problem with Twitter is that no one has really figured out how to use it. How do you really use Twitter to position yourself as an expert?  More disturbing is the fact that there are a lot of real experts out there engaging with Twitter whose insights I really do value. But their information is being devalued by the many who are saturating the medium with useless or repetitive information. It’s a race to take credit and, unfortunately, I think we’re all losing. I know what you’re saying, “Then don’t follow all the link posters.” The trouble is, Twitter has made it almost impossible to distinguish expert from “poster.”

I’m going to continue my Twitter odyssey in hopes that I’ll stumble onto its benefits any day now.  But I’m even more hopeful that the real experts show their expertise by navigating through the Twitter landscape and finding a way to truly maximize the benefits of a potentially revolutionary tool.   

But until then, I could use your help. Am I right? Totally wrong? Does Twitter work for you? What are the main benefits to you? How do you use it?

Help me! Thanks,

@ryanlarosa