I think on the topic of social media becoming a wasteland of corporate shills, spambots and boring bloggers, I’m actually optimistic (unlike the rest of my outlooks). I agree with the comment on Shel’s post from Lewis Green…we are more in charge today than ever before, that is what Social Media is all about. Just last week I went through and removed dozens of folks from my Twitter feed, my RSS feed and FriendFeed. Next week I’ll add a bunch. I control who I listen to, who I talk with, who I stop from attacking me and ultimately what I get out of all of these social media/network/tool/widgets.

The fact that some bloggers are hanging up their keyboards or becoming pessimistic about the conversation is a really good sign, as is Shel’s questioning about it all. This is a sign of a healthy dialog that makes social media thrive because it is a great example of ‘owner/operated’. I don’t NEED to blog to take part in social media. I don’t HAVE to Twitter to be involved in social media. I CHOOSE how to participate, when to participate and why I participate.

Traditional mediums are similar in that you always have the power to turn off the television or the radio. Cancel your newspaper and magazine subscriptions. Today you can do the same thing PLUS tell folks why and perhaps have them change your mind over time…or not, it’s up to you. Perhaps my outlook on this all is simplistic, but for me that has always been the allure of social media; the simplicity of conversation.

–Kyle F. Flaherty

(PLEASE NOTE: I’m not going to give this site any sort of publicity at any point in this post and refet to it instead as xxxxx.com. If you want I’m sure you can find it using the Google.)

It was with this in mind that I received an email pitch with the subject line “We just launched xxxxx.COM and wanted to share this news with you.”. I read the email because it touted a new way of pitching stories, something I have touted on this blog many times and I still believe that the first PR agency to become pitchless will win the war. The email went on for several paragraphs, in a variety of different colors to tell me about how this new service: “…is a business utility that lets Brands and Agencies “Make the Right Connect” globally.”

I’m not going to bother complaining that the pitch had zero personalization, numerous grammatical errors, was not targeted at me in a specific way (as a blogger, former agency, current corporate comms) and in fact listed all the ways to use the service no matter what my role. Irony is when an online pitching service touts a new form of pitching and does it by making all the traditional mistakes.

But, here folks is what they call “the kicker”:

No part of this email may be reproduced on a website/ blog etc. without prior written permission.

The italics are mine, but the language is that of this PR person. So let me get this right…you pitched me about a service, presumably your client, I’m guessing in the hopes that I’m going to write about the service on my blog or if I was a journalist on my website (you wouldn’t know because you did no research before you shipped out your pitch). Now what if I’m interested in writing about your service, even if I got past all the mistakes, I need to contact you for permission??

Not only do we have irony, we have idiocy. Guess I broke the rule, wonder if they are gearing up the lawyers.

Anyone else receive this pitch?

–Kyle F. Flaherty

I put together a quick video to try and show how I feel…it is a bit personal so those of you who are here simply for the PR/Marketing/Social Media banter can certainly ignore.  Just remember, if you’re in Austin visiting look us up!

What I’ll Miss About Boston from Kyle Flaherty on Vimeo.

With our goals outlines and a limited amount of knowledge concerning our community we set about reworking the way in which we communicated with the outside world.  Blogging and Twitter dominated our activities the past three months, but we’ve also been sure to be interactive with Vimeo (after realizing YouTube simply provides poorer quality), Flickr and to gather information at places like FriendFeed, Facebook, Squidoo and Ning.

In this part of the case study I simply want to share some data from the folks who have come to our community and our web site from our different social media venues:

Twitter

Twitter is the 12th most popular source for unique visitors to our web site. Twitter visitors stay on our site 86% more than the average user, visiting for an average of 5 minutes and looking at an average of 7.5 pages.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn comes in right after Twitter at #13 for attracting folks to our site. LinkedIn folks were on the site for 307% more time than the average folks, this means 11 minutes and 14.58 pages.

Facebook

Facebook is way behind the others at #51, but Facebook visitors spent more than 7 minutes on the site, 162% more than the average user and these folks visited 14 pages on average.

YouTube/Vimeo

This is a bit tougher to measure since we have videos embedded all over the place, but overall it looks like folks who came in through our video channels are on the site for well over 11 minutes per trip while visiting 13.20 pages.

Ning/Squidoo/Flickr

We have received ZERO visitors from Ning, Squidoo or Flickr. Now that does not mean failure per say because Squidoo has been helpful for folks to keep up on news, Flickr for internal folks to check out event pics and of course there are SEO benefits.

Finally for today, let’s look at some blog stats.

Blog Comments

Since we relaunched the blog we’ve seen a small trickle of comments, a bit disapointing, but I often wonder if that is more about our audience or perhaps about the direction of blogging?

Blog Readers

The blog has attracted thousands of readers and is the clear second favorite destination behind the homepage attributing for more than 10% of total pageviews on the site.  The RSS feed has grown at a steady clip of about 10% per month.

Blog Link-Love

This, of course, is one of those strange measuring sticks because you are never really sure how effective it is beyond SEO.  Either way we have seen a total of 58 inbound links to the blog, however we have nearly 500 for the main site…many of these coming from other prominent bloggers.

In Part III I’m going to dive into what these numbers mean for us, what we are doing based on them and some next steps.  My hope is that this becomes about a ten-part case study series that takes you through, nearly in real-time, our efforts in enhancing our B2B marketing with social media.

–Kyle Flaherty

Company Name: BreakingPoint Systems

Product: We help network equipment manufacturers and service providers test network devices before they are deployed in live networks. You know; servers, routers, firewalls, ISPs, UTMs, etc. Our testing platform is the only one designed to test these devices with actual application traffic at realistic speeds of 10 gigabit per second and upwards. This has become critical since these network devices don’t simply push traffic from place to place anymore, instead they can recognize the traffic (aka “Content-Aware) and make decisions based on business needs.

Audience: Network engineers working in R&D and QA labs.

Goals: From a qualitative standpoint our goal is to obviously engage with our community, learn from what they are doing and ultimately create an open dialog with our users, prospects, partners and industry folks. Quantitatively this has meant a few things in terms of measuring success, which I won’t share in detail here, but numbers have been attached to:

1. Web visitors
2. Blog comments
3. Inbound links to our blog
4. Comments to the blog
5. Sales leads

Not surprisingly I looked to many of you for inspiration, posted several questions on Twitter and obviously used much of what Forrester has been detailing, specifically Jeremiah Owyang and Peter Kim. I really took to heart the sub head of Jeremiah’s report “Online Community Best Practices” which read:

“Communities Are A Powerful Tool, As Long As You Put Members’ Needs First”

Thus we embarked on our own community building in mid-May with the launch of our new website, blog and more.  I created a four-phased plan that would take me through “Finding where my audience was”, “Determining what they were discussing”, “Concluding how to best engage in a conversation” and finally “Maintain the community to optimize the conversation”. I would say that today we are probably done with the first phase (although I believe that probably runs throughout the lifetime of the community), earnestly involved in #2 and figuring out #3.

Brass Tacks

During phase one we used a blanket approach, mainly because our audience is truly everywhere online and this was the best way to see where action would create benefit. Remember, our goal was to find out where our audience was hanging out online because nobody had really done this before in our industry. This meant setting up:

BreakingPoint Labs
RSS Feeds
Twitter
Facebook
Ning
Squidoo
LinkedIn
Flickr
Vimeo
YouTube

In Part II I’ll dive into the results that we saw from these activities in all of their glory (or in some cases, gory) and then take a look at what we did internally to use social media as a sales information tool.

–Kyle Flaherty