Telling social media stories: what I'm trying to do here

Hi, I’m John Mark Troyer. I think I’ve built up enough momentum here on this new blog to stop a moment, say thanks (it is Thanksgiving, after all), and explain what I’m trying to do, and the kind of stories I want to tell you.

Geek and Poke: Consultant's Dilemma

Stories deeply resonate with who we are. We learn and remember through stories. We use stories, even when they aren’t quite right, to make sense of the world (q.v., narrative fallacy in The Black Swan). Stories told by our friends help us make decisions. Customer case studies (aka “success stories”) are one of the best ways to sell complex products. After all, if Bill is getting a 200% ROI and increased SLAs, I should be able to do that, too, right?

I’ve been surveying the social media conversation on social media marketing lately. I’ve noticed that people were writing a lot about big picture strategy and principles, and a lot about low-level tactics and how-to’s, but few real experiences and success stories were being shared, and mostly the same ones over and over again. Having never been a SM consultant, I can only guess that this is a common issue – you can’t normally share project details, but when something works big, you flog it for all it’s worth.

So here’s my story. I joined the communities group at VMware four years ago as “the blogger guy.” My job was to take all the goodness we were experiencing in our community forum — a wildly successful community of IT practitioners who were helping each other be successful using our products — and translate that into other venues. I had been involved with online community back through the days of Usenet, but I had never built a corporate blogging program. My plan, coming off a few nascent startup projects, was to swoop in, create some results, and jump out again to my next startup.

Since then, the community site has continued to grow exponentially (it contributes some ridiculous percentage of our web traffic), the blogs grew from a few posts here and there to a network of practitioners, all talking amongst themselves, and we headed to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. We built an advocacy program, a conference blogging program, and a weekly community podcast.  Most of the organization is either working with us or feeding information into our channels. I’ve alternated between tool builder, blogger, community manager, PR guy to the bloggers, and internal social media consultant. I’ve really grown to love the people in the community around our products and the challenges of the job. So much for the original plan of jumping in and out quickly! I’ve stuck around this long and at some point I realized I’ve had the best job in the company, and I think we have a great social media program. Our experiences as we grew will inspire some of the stories I’ll be telling here.

The challenges going forward for us are the same ones you see talked about elsewhere as programs grow: How do we deepen the connections between our social media programs and our other marketing efforts? What are the implications of every single part of the organization being able to talk, publicly, with their stakeholders outside the company? How do we reach out to new audiences and how do we scale? Can a product marketing manager ever find time to write their own blog? These are a few of the mysteries of the universe that we discuss in our current internal conversations, and are some of topics I’ll be telling stories about here as well.

Until now, I’ve been primarily focusing my attention inward, towards our community. Now I’ll be spending some of my time in the greater marketing conversation around social media and online communities. I want to share what we’ve done and what we’ve learned. I also want to learn from you. Thus this new blog talking about Social Media Stories and you here reading it.

Up at the top of this post, I poked a little at  consultants not being able to say anything meaningful, but for me to tell stories about our social media programs while we are actually running the program in real-time… well, that’s actually a tricky proposition. The competitive issues aren’t too bad — pretty much everything I do is out in the open — but I have to be careful to avoid negatively influencing ongoing projects, and I have to talk about how we’re learning and making mistakes without looking stupid. Added to that, some of the virtualization folks I work with every day are already reading this blog. (Hi guys)! While everybody knows I occasionally commit acts of marketing, I don’t want the gang to feel like I’m marketing “at” them when we’re hanging out together, and talking about how there’s a strategy behind what I do feels like explaining the punchline of a joke, which is always the death of the funny.

About the name of this blog: We’ve gone over the “Stories” part. I’m not in love with the term “Social Media” at this point, but I don’t see anything better on the horizon. I definitely don’t like being lumped in with affiliate marketing, MLM, and black hat SEO. I do like some of the terms I’m hearing like “social business” (although often confused with “socially-conscious business,” which is the same problem when you start using “community marketing”), and I guess we can always fall back to some sort of generic “integrated” or “digital” marketing. But mostly, I want people to be able to find me and talk to me, so “social media” it is. The site is also a marketing vehicle for me, so I apologize in advance for plastering my face everywhere.

Eight things I promise will never be on this blog

I’m not saying these things are bad, they just aren’t where my interests lie these days.

1. 5 ways to supercharge your business with Facebook! You’re starting in the wrong place.
2. Attend my seminar and buy my DVD series! To all the legit consultants, no offense intended; I’m trying to make fun of the scammers and gurus here.
   
3. 5 obvious keys to success: be smart, figure out something hard, impress people, love your work, sell some things. Listicles with no examples and a lot of ‘what’ but no ‘how’ didn’t work for the Underpants Gnomes, and they don’t make for a very actionable as a blog post.
4. You can succeed in social media! For self-help advice, I recommend checking some books out of the library or seeing a therapist.
5. Buy this blog template! Templates are pretty far down the priority list for me. I’m using a free one.
6. 10 Twitter tools that won’t be around next year. Get those from Mashable.
7. A video tutorial on how to do turn on a setting in a web page. I have faith that you can figure it out.
8. Make Money Fast With Your Blog! Oh please.

And since it’s Thanksgiving here in the US, I’ll end by noting I’m grateful for my lovely wife, my rewarding job, and the amazing folks I work with both inside and outside the company. I am grateful to live in a beautiful place like the San Mateo Coastside on Planet Earth, and I’m grateful to you for coming by. Thanks! If you’re celebrating, have a great day, a lot to eat, and focus on gratitude! I’d also like everybody to be aware of Native American Heritage Day on Friday.

–John Mark

tl;dr VMware social media guy starts a blog. Not a social media douchebag. Welcome & thanks!