social media practitioner survey

12 Aug, 2009 • posts i've written • 3 comments

We at Undercurrent have put together a survey for social media practitioners I’d like to share. (and hope you’ll share, too)

http://bit.ly/socialmediasurvey
* please use the bit.ly link when sharing
** and how about the hashtag #smsurvey when tweeting

The objective of this survey is to gain a greater understanding of how social media is put in practice by agencies and clients, including: how objectives are defined, how results are measured, who is doing the work, the level of compensation, and what resources are most popular among practitioners.

Who should take the survey? Anyone that handles social media strategy, manages a social media team (internal or external), or conducts social media outreach on behalf of or within a brand.

It’s important to get a wide variety of data, so please share and spread this survey. We’ll keep the survey open during the month of August.

The survey should only take about 10 minutes of your time.

What are we doing with this data? We plan on releasing a free report (probably slideshare) on our findings, along with a free download of the full dataset. We’re hoping that what we collect will be beneficial for the entire industry. When you’re done with the survey, you’ll see a link to follow to request the report and dataset.

You may remember an earlier post of mine where I solicited feedback for the survey. Thanks to everyone for chiming in. Also a big thanks to Heather LeFevre, author of the Planner Survey, of which I drew great inspiration.

I can’t stress enough how much I need your help in spreading the survey to social media groups you may be a member of, to your industry friends, to your clients (this could lead to some very compelling insights), and to your co-workers.

If you have any issues at all with the survey, I’m your man, so please leave a comment below.

Also, after taking the survey, I invite you to leave a comment back here to let me know any data in particular you’re interested in seeing charted. (like average salary, or seniority)

eyes on your neighbor’s work

11 Jun, 2009 • posts i've written • 8 comments

I’ve been jotting notes in the margins of late on the subject of this whole social media phenom and its actual use among brands and agencies.

Like the planner survey, I’m putting together a medium sized survey to pass around the web to take the pulse of the what, why, where, and what the hell for social media (specifically the being social part) and its uses. I plan on wrapping up a concise report to share along with the full data set.

But I need YOUR help.

I need people to care about taking and spreading the survey.

Which means people need to be invested in learning what the survey could possibly answer.

Which means I need to know what YOU care about learning.

Here are topics I’m already considering:

- Who’s doing the actual social outreach: the brands, the agencies, the PR firms, the interns?
- What are the resources being allocated by brands: size of their own teams, budgets, and more?
- What are the typical job titles and salaries for the people doing the work?
- What are the most used mechanisms for social outreach: email, phone, twitter, facebook pages… ?
- What are the business objectives, and how is social media being measured and reported?
- How are learnings from interaction with your customers affecting the actual production of your products?
- I’m interested in success stories beyond the usual suspects

And I’d like to segment this data by industry, company type (brand, agency, PR firm, etc), size, country/region…

In the comment box below, please help answer: what am I missing, what specifically should I be asking, has another survey already accomplished this, do you give a shit?

on branded accounts

26 May, 2009 • posts i've written • 10 comments

At Undercurrent we like to experiment. We try out new products, new ideas, and new behaviors and see what’s worth keeping around and what’s worth tossing out.

In that spirit, last February we created a Twitter account for the whole brand.

And then, about a month ago, we collectively decided to kill the account. It just didn’t fit our DNA or our needs. Undercurrent is, and should always remain, a bit of an enigma. We don’t talk about fight club – with anyone. And moreover, we don’t have the need for a strictly homogeneous mouth piece. Our strength lies in our people, who just happen to be some of the most visible people on the web for what they do (see @juliaroy and @joshspear). And it helps that I happen to work with generally brilliant human beings. Why would you want to distill and dumb that down into some corporate-ish vehicle? Even at its most humorous, or useful, the whole never equaled the sum of its parts.

It’s a bit of a misuse of Twitter, anyhow. It may make sense for a giant brand to need one single account for people to turn to for customer service, but a think-tank? a small think-tank? You can just follow those of us you’re interested in following (check out Undercurrent.com to find us all quickly). One could argue that it is better to appear more often in someone’s twitter stream, and with around 17 of us, if we all earn your follow, then we’re having a much more dramatic impact than that single account ever could.

I’m blogging about this because I’ve seen some conversation here and there about the topic. There is no single right answer. You need to ask yourself what needs you have, and how a branded account could help or hinder those needs. And I would also let this choice fuel some thought about your point of view – such in, do you have one? If you ask someone to follow a brand, what besides a logo are you offering? What’s your reason for being?

For a company like Undercurrent, our main objective should be continually leveraging the independent and generally brilliant voices within our walls.

digital media isn’t mass media for cheap

09 Mar, 2009 • posts i've written • 2 comments

The truth is, most brands use the web in superficial ways. And our favorite place is becoming littered with pointless Facebook apps, ‘viral’ videos and widgets (whatever those are). Brands chase hits because they fundamentally ‘misunderestimate’ the power of this medium. They look for whatever sounds popular, hoping for rapid and mass adoption; the kind of curve they’re used to seeing through TV advertising.

Please drop me a comment below so I can discuss it in more detail.

And really, this deck is just an appetizer for Mike’s latest thoughts on desire paths. Give em both a read.