Susan Bratton: This is Susan Bratton and you’re listening to Community Powered at South By Southwest. I’m live here in the hallways with Dave Taylor, one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter. Dave is, he runs a really good website called askdavetaylor.com, and he also has a site called filmbuzz.org, so he’s, you are the perfect South By Southwest guy here with your combination Dave. Welcome to the show.

Podcast Here and Transcript Below

Susan Bratton & Dave Taylor

Dave Taylor: Thanks Susan. I am apparently the perfect person in terms of both interactive and film, but I haven’t done much in the music space. But I listen to music, so I guess that makes me qualified for all three.

Susan Bratton: There you go, exactly. You’ve got the triumverate, huh? Well one of the things that I wanted to do with you Dave, you and I worked together on the Aloha Social Media Summit, and you are an absolute font of information at the most granular detail. You really are deep in the weeds on so much in the social media space. I appreciate that about you.

Dave Taylor: Well thank you, and I have a feeling many people would say that I’m deep in the weeds actually.

Susan Bratton: Well the first thing that I wanted to talk to you about, because you have an opinion on this that counts, is when brands are thinking about the prospect of or the possibility of creating or integrating or participating in community, what advice do you have for them?

Dave Taylor: I think the first thing is that brands really need to think about what the message is, and I think that I probably am a little different to a lot of people in this space in that I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that they need to have a champion or a person with great personality in the company. I think that there’re a lot of companies that you don’t really know who’s behind it, but they’re still doing a good job of getting their toe wet. For example, Starbucks. You know, I think it’s very fun that sometimes I’ll Twitter about something to do with Starbucks and Starbucks will respond. We actually went back and forth some like two weeks ago where they were asking me to stop by and pick up a cup of coffee for them on the way into the office…

Susan Bratton: That’s a funny one.

Dave Taylor: which, you know, was great fun. You know, who is that person? Is it Mike Smith at Starbucks or is it Susan Smith over at their PR agency? I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. But having said that, I think that it is important to have some sort of personality. I think having any sort of social media identity that’s just sort of the corporate speak or, you know, according to our corporate policy this is how we do service or how we do customer returns or, you know, our warranty or such. That’s not going to work because people want a personality. But I think like I said, I don’t think it necessarily needs to be an actual individual. And for a lot of companies, that’s actually a liability, because if it is Mike Smith who’s representing Starbucks, what happens when Mike Smith moves on? So now Starbucks no longer has a social media presence? That would be a very dangerous proposition for them as a corporation.

Susan Bratton: So having a brand persona with multiple people contributing to it with some slight variations based on who they are as human beings is a perfectly acceptable thing that you would encourage brands to consider. It’s also a sharing of the responsibility because if you are going to Twitter, you have to kind of stay with it and build your followers and keep delivering, so that… Are there any enterprise solutions for Twitter that you’re aware of or anything in that space?

Dave Taylor: There’s a variety of different solutions, but pretty much everything I’m aware of is cobbled together. So for example for my Film Buzz Twitter Channel, I have a movie trivia, you know, who directed this film in 1957, that kind of stuff, and I rolled it all myself, you know. And it wasn’t incredibly difficult to do, but it definitely wasn’t something that someone who didn’t have technical chops could do.

Susan Bratton: Would you be willing to share what you rolled together?

Dave Taylor: It’s really not a commercial package, its, but…

Susan Bratton: That’s okay. It’s interesting to see how you’ve mashed up some things.

Dave Taylor: Yeah, I mean you and I could probably work something out…

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Dave Taylor: But, you know, my point is is that a lot of the technologies, especially with open API’s and such, aren’t that difficult to build. But again, you know, even if we have something automated, you still have to have the commitment to being engaged with your community. And, you know, I think an interesting example of where this becomes a danger is what happened to Microsoft’s social media presence when Robert Scobel left. It’s like all of a sudden there was a void because it wasn’t a group of people that were really interested in how Microsoft presents and markets itself, it was Robert Scobel. And then when Robert left it was just like, umm quick, name three people that blog on behalf of Microsoft or are Microsoft employees who are blogging or doing podcasts or any social media at all, and it’s kind of a big blank, even though I know, you know, in the abstract there are hundreds and hundreds of people at Microsoft that are engaged in the social media space.

Susan Bratton: If you’re a corporate communications person at a company, the social media conversation probably rests on your shoulders. Say you’re just at a mid-sized company, there’s very limited budgets to do things, you have to run all of corporate communications, you’re worried about investor relations, public relations, whatever it might be, you’re very strapped but you want to be in the conversation, and I’d say that’s probably, probably descriptive of a huge part of the marketplace. There’s not community manager open rack or anything like that…

Dave Taylor: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: What’s the advice that you would give someone in that particular case if they’re torn about what they might do, what recommendation do you think would be, if you only have a tiny bit of time, what would you do that would make the biggest impact and potentially be the most interesting to your customers and the best for the bottom line of your company?

Dave Taylor: Right. I think first off a classic question that I hear from a lot of companies is, “You waste so much time with all this social media stuff, when do you ever market  your company?” And the answer is actually all of this is marketing…

Susan Bratton: Do people say that?

Dave Taylor: Yeah, you know…

Susan Bratton: People are hearing that still?

Dave Taylor: Yeah, you know, and the answer is, “No actually, all of this stuff is marketing.” So, you know, first off when you think about how your allocate your time to promote your corporation or even your personal company or start-up or your brand, this is marketing. You know, when you’re on Twitter and you’re saying, “I’m at South By Southwest. Just went to this session, it was excellent”, you’re marketing yourself to a community at might only be starting at maybe a hundred or two hundred people, but has the potential to grow to be thousands or tens of thousands. And then if you do have a very small amount of time, I would say the two biggest bangs for your buck are Twitter and answering and leaving comments on other people’s blogs.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, we’ve kind of forgotten about the whole blogosphere and our, you know, lust for Face Book and Twitter, right?

Dave Taylor: Right, and I will say that like this morning, you know, I woke up this morning in a hotel room and the first thing I did was I went and I searched to see, I have some searches automatically running to look for certain key words and key phrases, and I went and actually went ahead and added comments on other people’s blogs, you know… And they might be blogs that weren’t even that highly visible, but it’s just like I feel like I need to get my voice in their conversations, not just, you know, perhaps arrogantly say, “Well, you know, I’ll just do it on my blog and then people will come and find me, and if they don’t find me then it’s not interesting.” You know, I mean there’s a whole world out there, there are lots of conversations. And then similarly I’ll say with Twitter it’s the same thing, is that, you know, find people that are popular on Twitter, and it’s not necessarily the number of followers they have, but the people that actually seem to have the voice that people listen to, and you can see that with like people Tweeting them or people quoting them. You know, I look in like the New York Times and the Wallstreet Journal and say, “Who are they quoting”, ‘cause those are the people that are the ones with influence. And they don’t always, in fact rarely do they have the most followers. But those are the ones where it’s just like, “Okay, let me watch what they’re saying, and when they talk about something that’s relevant to my company, let me engage.” And one of the things that I know everyone that I’ve talked to on Twitter has the experience of, is if someone with a lot of followers engages in a conversation with you on Twitter, you pick up followers because their followers say, “Oh, who’s this person they’re talking to?” So it’s perhaps a little bit of a stealth way, but I think that it’s really important to recognize that you don’t need to build your own. You don’t need to launch your own café to be able to get a good cup of coffee. You just need to say, “Where are these things happening and how can I get engaged with what’s already there?”

Susan Bratton: Dave what technology or system do you use to track the online conversation about the key words of your domain?

Dave Taylor: Yeah, the two things I use is I use search.twitter.com…

Susan Bratton: Yup.

Dave Taylor: And I have just a bookmark, you know, you have the little…

Susan Bratton: Tabs, mm hmm.

Dave Taylor: bookmark menu on the top of your web browser, and I have one where I click on it and it just, all my Twitter handles and my website URL’s and everything, I just have a very complicated search that’s just canned. And so even if someone says, “Oh well, you know, of all the stupid websites, don’t ever go to this Dave Taylor one”, well boom, I can see it and I can decide whether I want to respond or not. Now thankfully I don’t see that kind of thing too often, but if it did come up even without the at sign, even with spaces and all this sort of stuff, I’d still know it’s there, which is I think, you know, the biggest and most important part is to know what people are saying about you. And then in terms of the blogosphere and stuff, I use filtrbox, f-i-l-t-r-b-o-x, I guess they couldn’t afford all the vowels from Venna, so, you know, it’s web two point something. And that gives me the ability to not only get a second chance at seeing what’s happening on Twitter, but mostly that gives me the blogosphere. So if people, you know, have blog entries or even in comments, if the leave comments on other people’s blogs that reference something that’s specifically of interest to me, I’ll be aware of it and then I’ll go and read it and then choose to respond or not. And then it give you, you know, the great ability, and I think this is something that you experience too, that someone who might be a newbie who this is like their third blog entry ever and they only have 17 readers and they write about you and you see it and you can leave a comment, and they’re like, “Oh wow, you’re omniscient, you’re omnipresent. How do you know?” And the answer is, “Cause I’m using the tools.”

Susan Bratton: Filtrbox makes me omniscient. Blog etiquette, last question here. Blog etiquette, when you go leave posts on people’s blogs, are you putting the link to your blog or anything like that in it or are you just commenting? How are you getting kind of the traffic or the visibility back to yourself for that effort?

Dave Taylor: Right, I would say that they vast majority of the times when I leave a comment on someone else’s blog that I don’t include an explicit link. I just put my, you know, URL in the little form at the top…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Dave Taylor: where it’s name, email address, URL. And then I try to leave comments that are sufficiently interesting and informed, that someone will hopefully say, “Oh, who’s this person? Where are they coming from?”, click, and now they’re on my site.

Susan Bratton: Got it. That’s great advice. Any last gems that you want to impart with us?

Dave Taylor: No, see I always hate this sort of question…

Susan Bratton: That’s an open ended question…

Dave Taylor: ‘cause now it’s just like uh, uh, uh, uh…

Susan Bratton: No problem at all. I just wanted to make sure that I asked you everything that you wanted to talk about, ‘cause I did kind of ask you some, you know, little techy dweeby things that I’ve always wanted to know. I’d love to see your search algarhythm string for Twitter, that’d be to see how you set that up. Is that anything that you ever expose, so we can kind of copy the way you do it so we don’t have to keep typing in the same stuff over and over?

Dave Taylor: Yeah, it’s actually pretty easy. What, go to search.twitter.com…

Susan Bratton: Yeah?

Dave Taylor: and use quotes around each of the words or phrases you want, and then use capital O, capital R to, as an ‘or’ statement, you have to use it in CAPS. Unfortunately if you use it in lower case, they think it’s a word you’re searching for…

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Dave Taylor: And then bookmark the search results. And then when you go back to that bookmark it’ll actually update it so it’ll be always the most recent. And I just find that that’s such an easy way to be able to do things like for example track people that are leaving Twitter comments about a session, at something like South By Southwest, or of course to be talking about your competitors or if there’s a place you’re going to go on holiday, maybe you can start tracking what people are saying about that for a couple of weeks to find out the really cool places to go visit. I mean there’s a lot of possibilities because it is such an interesting space. And even if there’s only a comment once a week, if every couple of weeks you remember to click on that bookmark, then you are always up to date.

Susan Bratton: That is fantastic advice and exactly the kind of thing that you’re so good at. You’ve gotten a little taste of Dave Taylor, and you can find out tons more great tips and techniques because he really does get into those good weeds that I love at askdavetaylor.com. And also if you’re a film lover of any kind, you can go to filmbuzz.org. Thanks Dave.

Dave Taylor: Oh, thank you Susan. It’s been fun.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, it has. And I’m your host, Susan Bratton. Thank for tuning in to this Powered Community, Community Powered, I have to say it both ways ‘cause every time I say it wrong. It’s been great to talk to you. Thanks for listening in. Bye-bye.