The Teckki Says

I come from a large family on my mother's side, and I have dozens of first cousins. When we have a family reunion, the matriarchs have a meeting, make some decisions, tell all of the kids (us), and upwards of a hundred people come together and have a great time. But what if your family is not blood related, but part of an organization with members all over the country?

Kimberly Ransom, Director of Collegiate Scholars Program (CSP) at the University of Chicago, faced such a challenge. She is planning a reunion of alumni of the program, which is an academic enrichment program for Chicago Public School high school students. The program will soon experience its first graduating class finishing four years of college. A reunion involving this group will be a powerful experience for those who are in the early stages of the program. Ransom turned to Facebook for the challenge, with spectacular results.

Since Facebook was created for college students by college students, this medium was a natural fit. Collegiate Scholars is able to reach out to alumni across the country, 195 alums, explains Ransom. "[It was] the best way to contact [alumni] and cross-market our efforts," she says.

In building up for the event, which will take place this June, she posted memorable pictures, such as some of the students' eight-grade pictures, and communicated with confirmed attendees to get others to become friends of CSP, among other things. This helped build momentum for the event. It also builds a national network of alumni – ambassadors for CSP, those who are already in college, to be contacts and mentors, both for those in the CSP program, or face-to-face for those who attend colleges CSP alums are currently there. Current alumni at Yale University are building a Collegiate Scholars at Yale fan page. Efforts like this "will allow our alumni in seventy-one colleges across the country, seventy-one sites, to make connections", says Ransom.

When asked why she chose Facebook over other ways to advertise, she noted that an alumni reunion would be "much more difficult to do without Facebook." It saves on postal expenses, and can "quickly update a mass group at one time." She also noted distinctions over using email. The email recipient knows that they will attend, but with Facebook, everyone knows who's going to attend, and this builds momentum. This does not make her solely dependent on Facebook for marketing, however. CSP will be sending out "Save the Date cards - must use more than one medium" to advertise, she says.

While she is highly enthusiastic regarding Facebook, it did not come without its challenges. She is one of the earliest non-college student users of Facebook, just when it began to open up to users outside of the college community. CSP’s Facebook page started on Ransom's personal page, and students in the program communicated on her behalf. As Facebook developed more tools to recognize non-collegiate groups, she was able to move CSP to a fan page, and place levels of viewership and security that were not possible on her personal page, allowing her to deal with the issues of personal expression and organizational appropriateness. The amount of communication is now at a level where she foresees the need to have a person with social media skills.

For those who may be looking to use Facebook professionally, Ransom gives the following advice: "Jump in!" She notes that she did not read the manual for it, but started slow, and learned. "It is an incredible medium for social networking - building social capital. [It] builds awareness around any issue or interest. It is a level playing field. You don't have to be Oprah to reach millions."

You can learn more about the Collegiate Scholars Program at the University of Chicago on their website http://collegiatescholars.uchicago.edu.

Editor's note: Too often, I have heard failure stories of organizations using Facebook to invite fans to events, usually sales presentations, and few if any actually attend. This article gives insight why this event appears to have more success than many. Relationships were established and fostered, and momentum is built further by continual communication and the relationships between the attendees. I believe that this article should be a model for those looking to use Facebook as a tool to facilitate events.

Over the years businesses and organizations have flirted or experimented with a number of social networking sites. From bulletin boards and chat rooms to Facebook and Twitter, electronic networking has evolved from the technical proficient to the what-did-we-do-without-it world. I've been to many packed seminars where excited evangelists preach the benefits as if they were holding tent rallies. "This will revolutionize your business and increase your sales," or "this is how you reach the next generation," they bark. With audiences filled with first-time entrepreneurs, continuing technophobes, and outright Luddites, messages like these resonate. With less cash and more work as the result of flattened organizations, many of us are looking for anything, a spark, gold nuggets, any lead that will get us to the next day and beyond.

Is social media our savior?

The quick answer is no.

The long answer is that is probably part of the solution.

I, like many of you, have dabbled if not delved head first into social media, with varying degrees of success. Some mediums, like email marketing and blogging, I am a devotee. Others are still in various degrees of experimentation, amusement and outright indifference. Some will eventually be integrated, others ignored. Still others presumably have potential, but it is not yet obvious from a business sense to me. To the preachers in those churches, I continue to sit in the pews, appreciating the message, but I remain firmly among the unconverted.

This does you no good.

In following posts, I will present articles with interviews of people from businesses and organizations who are using social media to enhance their communication and marketing efforts. I know that most of you have tried or want to try some or all of the various social networking media, and many of you have experienced many varying degrees of success or failure. Some of you have found it a huge boost to your efforts. Others have quit too soon.

Over the next several months, I will cover social mediums of main concern - Facebook, Constant Contact, Linked-In, YouTube, Flickr and others. Some of these stories will come from people just like you. Others will come from you.

I invite your questions, comments and thoughts. In many cases, you are more of an expert than you think. Most of us don’t have the zeal of an evangelist and we tend to fence-sit rather than become part of the flock. However, an enthusiastic congregant is someone we can relate to, the person who can help us make the choice by being an example we can relate to. You can be the witness someone needs to walk down the aisle and commit their lives to the conversion.

Then the real work begins. Enjoy the articles.

In a series of articles exploring the use of social media for businesses and organizations, this first one will cover Facebook.

Have you used or are you using Facebook for business?

I interviewed a couple of business persons who I knew used Facebook in their businesses. While I’ve heard the stories we’ve all heard of successfully lucrative connections and the potential to reach millions, the stories I am hearing from many main street businesses is a mixed bag of results. Are businesses better for trying and using social networking media? Yes, and I say that emphatically. Are they better off? While the recession has been obscuring the picture somewhat, many whom I talk to always wish for better results.

Darryl Crawford, owner of Kimbark Coin Laundry in Chicago, has been using Facebook since the Fall of 2009, and has over 150 fans on Kimbark Coin Laundry’s fan page. He has found that the experience has been mixed. "You have to go out and do other things. You have to drive people to your website, then hit them with product [sales. Facebook is] still used for social," says Crawford. Although he’s not sure how much business it has brought in, he realizes that his venture with Facebook has a long way to go, "We're like pioneers trying to figure it out," he says.

Sid Barsuk, of Barsuk Group, Inc, has been a Facebook user for about a year. While he is not actively promoting his business on Facebook, he has had remarkable results. He began his experiences into social networking as purely social, starting out with Classmates.com, connecting with old friends. He eventually to migrated to Facebook. About a year ago, he was contacted by a former student of his Facebook regarding a project.

Barsuk, who is active in the Chicago Southland Chamber of Commerce, pursued this as a chamber project at first. At some point, Barsuk and his former student discussed other areas in they could collaborate, and a contact was drawn up. He's been working on the project since mid-August. If it goes forward, it will mean significant business for Barsuk Group, Inc.

Barsuk is obviously enthusiastic about Facebook. "What do you have to lose? It doesn't cost anything but time and effort - it's one more avenue of getting out there," he says.

Crawford puts a perspective on all media that is worth taking note, "Your website should be the centerpiece," he says. He states that all other pieces, email marketing, Facebook, blogs and twitter, should draw people to it. It is a perspective typical of the way most marketing efforts work, traditional or digital. "Facebook will get people's attention. It won't do what many people expect," he says.

Last week I attended two seminars, one that had a panelist on social networking, the other was about social networking. This topic seems to be dominating the business community right now. My thoughts? This will die down at some point.

Anything that has a huge audience mass and astronomical growth rates is going to attract businesses willing to exploit the numbers. However, social media seems to be built for two reasons:

1. To actually be social - Who would have thought it? I can share with a group of people my thoughts, pictures and videos, and get back a response. I can be a part of a conversation. I can make friends around the globe. This is great. Since I am in front of a computer for much of the day, this is a nice diversion. Since I’m on the phone the other part of the day, I can keep up with those diversions. I can continue my social life with the help of these tools.
2. To make the founders rich - Some of the college-aged kids who created this stuff quickly realized that they could become billionaires before they matriculated. At that point, does matriculation matter? Now, in addition to doing something they did for fun or creativity, they can hang out with the stars.

Here are two things that Social Media hasn’t done:

1. Make money – the ultimate investors, like Fox who purchased MySpace, and Google who purchased YouTube, have yet to make money from their investments. MySpace in particular is suffering the ultimate blow – a mass migration from it, it has suffered spectacular losses, and has fallen out of favor to Facebook. YouTube, while still popular, is still a financial sinkhole, and Google is still trying to get the ad revenue to work out. I personally give them more hope since their founders are only a decade removed from their college careers, but time is running out before they become what Microsoft has become to this generation – an old school company that young talent would rather seek employment elsewhere.
2. Turned into major advertising mediums - Actually, this point should be first, because it better explains why they are not making money. Why haven’t they turned? Could it be that people want to be social? I look forward to videos, pictures and messages, but only from the people I want them from. We might want to take a lesson from email here. While still popular, laws eventually had to be created to regulate advertising via email. It was too easy and cheap to send millions of messages to people who did not want them and could not turn them off.

I think that we forget why radio, TV and print are still effective – because people choose to use those mediums, and accept that they will be marketed to. Like cell phones and email addresses, social media are much more personal, and by that very nature, much more filtered.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that any medium can be viable under the right circumstances. As cliché-ish as that sounds, I believe that social media is personal media, not a bunch of people out there waiting to buy something we are selling. Blogs, email, websites and other old 'hotties' have not gone away, but they have found a place and purpose that lets them thrive beyond the hype.