Social Media - Servant of Chaos

What Does Listening Sound Like?

Let me take you back for a moment … You are there at your bedroom door. You are what? Six? Seven? Eight years old?

The voices down the hall are muffled, barely audible. But they are familiar. Something stands out for you. Your name.

There is laughing.

Actually, there must be more people there than you imagined. Maybe it is a party. Didn’t they invite you?

Disappointment settles in. You do love a party!

And there it is again – your name. This time, no laughter. It’s quiet. Much quieter now – but the whispers wind their way down the hall.

You crack the door and feel the cool night air brush your face. The whispers rush past you, tickle the hairs in your nose like a torrent of pixies.

These conversations rush around you. They build. It sounds like excitement. It sounds like you are part of something. It’s strangely invigorating. You reach out – speak – say hello.

And then it happens. A pinch. A sting that reverberates across your nervous system. Why did they do that? What happened?

Social media isn’t child’s play

While social media has a playful aspect – it is anything but simple. It can be volatile, unpredictable and move with incredible speed. It is a space that has been colonised by consumers – and it is clearly the consumers who are in control of whatever conversation is taking place. Brands, in this analogy, are children – learning their way, soaking up experiences and making mistakes.

The unfamiliar familiars

The thing to remember with social media is that while you are AT the party, it’s not a party that is FOR you. Everything is familiar – but slightly displaced:

Your friends are not friends
Your followers are not necessarily interested in you or your brand
You are essentially eavesdropping which means you need to orchestrate a way in to the conversations taking place – don’t just arrive empty handed
People may be talking ABOUT you, not TO you

The temptation to launch into a conversation may be tantalising – but to do so without preparation, without some planning and without some goals or measurements in mind can be disastrous.

To help you get a sense of what goals and measurements you may want to consider, I have included Amber Naslund’s excellent presentation on listening, learning, social media and metrics.

Make sure you listen before you leap!

Listen and Learn: New Media, New Metrics

View more presentations from Amber Naslund.

Why Social Media is More Popular than Sex

Guest Bloggers, Social Media

This is a guest post by Dennis Price. He does not profess to know much about social media but does, however, know quite a bit about how businesses get real results at the retail coalface. He is the CEO of Ganador Management Solutions, and you can find his RetailSmart blog there too.

I watched a fascinating documentary (National Geographic) on Stress. Worth watching if you have an hour, but let me summarise:

Stress has a major physical impact on our bodies in ways we are only beginning to understand:

It ossifies your arteries, making it less likely to cope with (physical) pressure caused by expansion etc and this eventually leads to increased risk of heart of attacks.
It makes people fatter; in the worst possible place (around your belly) and with the worst kind of fat.
It actually leads to the fraying of the end caps on your chromosomes – the medical implications not being clear (to me).
It kills your brain cells, making you dumber. (And I am not exaggerating.)

Stress is truly a killer.

The documentary also drew from some interesting research to identify some of the more unexpected stressors (causal factors) in our lives. The research was impressive, with longitudinal studies on baboon tribes and humans spanning over 30 years.

The insight du jour was:

Your position in the hierarchy is a cause for stress.

The lower you are down the proverbial food chain, the more stressed you are. For humans the obvious hierarchy is our place of work.

Obviously we are part of many hierarchies in our lives and each of those structures is an opportunity to be more or less stressed. (Which is why volunteering to be the soccer coach is a great act of balancing your life; you get to be in charge of running a squad of 10-year olds, which makes a nice change from the cubicle farm.)

The reason your hierarchical position causes stress is because the lower you are down the food chain, the less control you have.

It seems that the old bumper sticker philosopher was right when he mused about the boss:

I don’t get stressed, I give stress.

And that is when I the apple fell on my head.

The popularity of social media platforms, which are usually asynchronous by nature, is a rare instance where relationships are less hierarchical. And where the participants are actually in control of the interaction.

Peter Steine saw it clearly in his (1993) cartoon – On the Internet Nobody Knows You’re a Dog.

Social ME-dia is ostensibly all about relationships.

If you have been around for awhile, you no doubt would have read posts or publications that guide you about the appropriate behaviour and manner in which to engage.

These guidelines seemingly govern the etiquette of these digital relationships and typically exhort participants to: Listen first. Ask many questions. Don’t make it about you. Give freely and good things will come to you.

And a host of other like platitudes. This advice is nothing but common courtesy reinvented for the web.

But this does not hold true for all relationships on the web. Relationships evolve and relationships may belong to different categories. In each instance there is a different context and a different set of rules that apply.

1. Typically, when someone initially embraces the internet as a social medium, they will start off with a core group op their ‘real’ friends. [With this I mean physical relationships in the sense that it is person to person and not necessarily intimate. I use ‘real’ to describe these relationships simply because you know what I mean, and I don’t mean that digital relationships are not real.] Your first email was probably sent to someone you know. Your first friend on Facebook was probably your wife.

2. Depending on the purpose and the personality of the individual, new digital relationships are formed. Digits link across the ether and new relationships are formed. These ‘digital relationships’ then can (a) remain digital, or (b) evolve into ‘real’ relationships.

3. Digital friends that become real depends on a host of things, not the least being geography. (This may explain the popularity of apps/games like Foursquare – which I may add, was my pick in Jan 2010 as the next big thing. Time will tell.) It is for THIS category of relationship that old those grandfatherly rules apply that bloggers so kindly dish up.

People want to convert these relationships, because that would be only human. Once you find people with a common interest you would consequently want to create/ belong to that tribe.

BUT.

4. The fourth category of relationship is the own that really interests me. The digital friends that remain so.

What percentage of digital friends become ‘real’ friends? I would suspect, given the constraints and given the numbers, it would be a fraction – certainly less than 1%. (There is a question for you Mr Solis.) It would probably be slightly different for your personal Facebook page, and maybe less so for LinkedIn. But for sites like Foursquare, Twitter, Blogs etc, I would be surprised if many of those relationships become ‘real’.

On Facebook, with the exception of a few early mistakes, I know almost everybody. And then I know about 2 or 3 times that number in the real world (clients, acquaintances) whom are not necessarily friends.

But the numbers on Twitter (600) and the Blog (thousands), for instance, are not much more than avatar.

If my assumption is true, then none of those pesky rules that the bloggers dish out apply.

And more importantly, the latter type types of relationships are the type where I AM IN CONTROL.

You are in control because you:

Listen to what you want. Ignore what you want.
Friend. Unfriend. Follow. Unfollow.
Profile 1. Profile 2.

And that means we have a relationship – human interaction – without any of the associated stress.

Does this go some way towards explaining why social media (ambient intimacy) has exploded as it has – apparently overtaking porn as the number one use of the internet?

Our desire to have relationships without the stress (caused by the hierarchy) is bigger than sex, and it makes evolutionary sense too. Stress was originally a mechanism for survival, which is stronger than the urge to procreate.

If something is more important than sex, then it has to be pretty big – no pun intended.

Age of Conversation 3: From Social Media Theory to Social Media Practice

Age of Conversation, Books, Collaborations, Social Media

We have seen an incredible shift in the role of social media over the past three years. It has moved from an outlier in the marketing mix to one of the strategic pillars of any corporate marketing or branding exercise:
— Drew McLellan.

Three years ago, I began a conversation with Drew McLellan on the topic of social media and crowdsourcing. Thousands of book sales and downloads, two editions and hundreds of collaborators later, we are pleased to announce that the Age of Conversation 3 is now available.

It all started when Drew blogged about a similar collaborative book effort and I suggested we get a few fellow bloggers to produce a marketing book in the same vain. Three emails later, and we had named the book and set what we thought would be an impossible goal: 100 bloggers. Within seven days we had commitments from 103 authors from over a dozen countries.

Back then, the marketing industry was abuzz about how citizen marketers were changing the landscape, whereas the second two editions have revolved primarily around the growing field of social media and how its methodologies have affected marketing as a whole. What all three books have in common is that they each capture a uniquely global vantage point.

The first Age of Conversation raised nearly $15,000 for Variety, the international children's charity, and the Age of Conversation 2 raised a further $10,000 for Variety. This year’s proceeds will be donated to an international children’s charity of the authors’ choosing.

It’s available in a sexy hardcover, softcover and even a Kindle version.

As the many authors of this new book explain, the focus may be on conversation, but you can’t participate in a conversation from the sidelines. It’s all about participation. And this book provides you with 171 lessons in this new art.

Get the inside running on how you turn social media theory into practice with the Age of Conversation 3 – it’s essential reading.

Pulling a Facebook Swifty

Activism, Social Media

The folks who designed the language around Facebook have been very clever. When you think of Facebook, you think “like”. You think “friend”. It’s warm and fuzzy. It is comforting. You trust them (the faceless, but trustworthy them).

But over the last couple of weeks there have been some big changes at Facebook. Most of these changes won’t really be noticed by folks like you and I – the surface pretty much remaining the surface. The one visible change you may notice is the appearance of a Like button on your favourite sites. But deeper down is where it gets interesting and these changes will radically change the experience that we we once thought of as being our own.

The Graph API – a programming interface that allows computer applications and other computer systems to access the underlying business logic and data held within Facebook now turns our likes, relationships, status updates and interests into readily identifiable (and marketable) information.

This is great news for publishers (anyone with a website that wants to harvest/take advantage of the targeting, behavioural and segmentation data), bad news for Facebook’s competitors (and yes, I mean Twitter and Google) – and worse news for us – the chump users. Take a good read through this article by Alex Iskold at Read Write Web on the Facebook Open Graph – then see what this means in reality by reading the account of Kim Krause Berg:

Your personal profile is now a list of links. They link your content at their own discretion. So for example, I have the phrase “I am very proud of her”, referring to my daughter, in my profile. Facebook decided to link that to this Facebook page they created, without my permission.

Then – if you dare – use this tool to find out what Facebook knows (and shares) about you. You might be surprised. You might be horrified. You might be rubbing your hands together with glee.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great article that tracks Facebook’s eroding privacy policy over time. They sum up as follows:

Viewed together, the successive policies tell a clear story. Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it’s slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users’ information, while limiting the users’ options to control their own information.

Clearly this is a long process. There has not been the outcry that accompanied Facebook’s last change in their terms of service. Maybe they learned their lesson and made the mechanisms far less visible on purpose. But whatever their motive, I’m reviewing my settings. There really are some things I want to share only with my friends.

Performing Ourselves: Why Social Media is 25% Larger than Life

Co-creation, Performing Social Media, Social Media

I have always been drawn to acoustic performance. I love the authentic, stripped back timbre of a singer’s voice. I like the fact that you can’t hide behind the volume or be disguised by the electronic mixing. Perhaps this is why I ended up studying theatre for years.

And my study of theatre took me to unexpected places. I went from the mainstream deep into the avante garde of the early 20th Century – spending time immersed in the dark, imaginative worlds of Frank Wedekind, Antonin Artaud and Heiner Muller. I emerged, later, in the powerfully vibrant theatres of Howard Barker, Penny Arcade and Robert Wilson – where words, identity and action burned the scripts, bounced off the walls and scarred or transformed not just the audiences, but the performers too.

I learned over the years the difference between intuition and imagination, between intelligence and understanding, and that was is written is not always what is performed. The gap between text and performance excited me. Why, for example, is one performer’s version better or worse than another’s? No matter the song, it can only be a matter of words, right?

But there is an intangible sense that comes with performance. It’s about purpose and intent, and the need to step beyond what we say. We need to inhabit the very limits of who we are – physically and emotionally. In the theatre, Etienne Decroux – a physical theatre practitioner – created a grammar for the bodily articulation of movement. He discovered that to appear REAL to an audience, performers had to appear 25 percent larger than they are. Yes, they needed to be larger than life.

In social media we see this everyday. A predominantly text based form, social media in various guises requires that we write ourselves into existence. It requires us to write as a performance. And those participants who appear REAL are larger than the words that they use, their ideas magnified through the lens of Twitter, Facebook or blogs. Look at any one of the individuals you are drawn to in social media and ask yourself how much of this person do you know? How much is real and how much is performance? Are they 25% larger than life?

In the social media world of micro-celebrity, there is much we can learn from “real” celebrities – from performers who have mastered the art of celebrity as performance.

Over the coming weeks I will be sharing my thoughts on various performers and what we can learn from them as social media participants – and what it means for brands and businesses wanting beginning or already engaged in their social media performance.

The iPad Welcomes the None Percenters

Audience 2.0, None Percenters, Social Media

For the last couple of years marketers have been chasing a dream. The great promise, the Holy Grail of social media, is user generated content – the marketing that is produced by the advocates of your brand. In a utopian world, this user generated marketing “goes viral” – registering millions of impressions/plays/hits on sites like YouTube or Facebook. But I am here to tell you this – we’ve been chasing our tails. We’ve been focusing on the wrong thing – and the iPad is going to prove it.

In social media, we struggle with the immutable 90-9-1 rule. Basically, we have found that when it comes to user participation, only 1% of our social group will CREATE content. Jakob Nielsen calls this participation inequality. Ben O’Connell and Jackie Huba evangelised these one percenters – the citizen marketer and changed the way that we thought about our audience. But even Wikipedia – the great user generated content success story of the Social Web – butts up against the 1% participation rate.

And yet, we constantly search for ways to overcome this barrier – to drive up participation. If we could double our productive audience, then imagine the power and the crowdsourced creativity! We could unleash Clay Shirky’s cognitive surplus. We could transform the world. Now, there are undoubtedly ways to improve participation (you can get significantly higher participation in internal enterprise transformation projects for example), but the real revolution is not in the creation of user generated content, but in its consumption.

One of the things that I have been interested in recently is the principle that EASE OF USE drives CONSUMPTION. I discussed some of my work in this area with Christina Kerley for a B2B case study (subscription required, but hey, it’s MarketingProfs and totally worth it). By removing the barriers to use – of your website, your product or service etc, you are actually able to quickly and demonstrably drive its use. Not only that, by changing the pattern of usage you are also changing the buyer behaviours associated with your brands and products, and this in turn changes the way that your brand or product is perceived.

And this is where the iPad comes in.

With almost zero functionality for content creators, Apple is turning its back on the the one percenters: the creative classes who have evangelised their products for years. The focus now is on CREATIVE CONSUMPTION, making the mass of user generated and branded content more easily accessible, more relevant and useful and bringing it to an audience who – in my opinion – have yet to openly adopt web technologies and the promise of the Social Web.

This will challenge agencies and brands alike. Some are responding already – like the work that BBH are doing with Cool Hunter and Cadillac. But this is just the beginning. The iPad app store is bound to explode in the same way that the iPhone app store did. Importantly, I expect this to open NEW markets – with non-computer users such as my parents and grandparents to finally begin participating in online markets.

But this is a whole new market. The focus is no longer on the early adopters – the one percenters – but on those who have NO INTEREST in content creation. Our ongoing focus will need to be on the NONE PERCENTERS – those new audiences attracted by the ease of use and social cachet attached to the iPad. Perhaps, for the first time, marketing attention will fall on the zeros – those who sit outside our 90-9-1 demographics – and I have a feeling they will prove far more valuable than the 100% who have dominated our lives more recently.

Are you and your brand ready to deal with the zeros?

Introducing the Age of Conversation 3 Authors

Books, Community, Social Media

It has taken some time to come together, but the new book, Age of Conversation 3: It’s time to get busy!, is in its final stages. Very soon you will be able to purchase it directly from Amazon or a number of other online book stores. The new cover, as you can see on the left, was designed by Chris Wilson. And our new site, was designed and built by Craig Wilson and the hard working team at Sticky Advertising.

We’re excited to be at this stage of the process. The quality of thinking throughout the book is of the highest calibre – as would be expected from such an illustrious group. The authors who have contributed to this year’s edition are:

Adam Joseph	Priyanka Sachar	Mark Earls
Cory Coley-Christakos	Stefan Erschwendner	Paul Hebert
Jeff De Cagna	Thomas Clifford	Phil Gerbyshak
Jon Burg	Toby Bloomberg	Shambhu Neil Vineberg
Joseph Jaffe	Uwe Hook	Steve Roesler
Michael E. Rubin	anibal casso	Steve Woodruff
Steve Sponder	Becky Carroll	Tim Tyler
Chris Wilson	Beth Harte	Tinu Abayomi-Paul
Dan Schawbel	Carol Bodensteiner	Trey Pennington
David Weinfeld	Dan Sitter	Vanessa DiMauro
Ed Brenegar	David Zinger	Brett T. T. Macfarlane
Efrain Mendicuti	Deb Brown	Brian Reich
Gaurav Mishra	Dennis Deery	C.B. Whittemore
Gordon Whitehead	Heather Rast	Cam Beck
Hajj E. Flemings	Joan Endicott	Cathryn Hrudicka
Jeroen Verkroost	Karen D. Swim	Christopher Morris
Joe Pulizzi	Leah Otto	Corentin Monot
Karalee Evans	Leigh Durst	David Berkowitz
Kevin Jessop	Lesley Lambert	Duane Brown
Peter Korchnak	Mark Price	Dustin Jacobsen
Piet Wulleman	Mike Maddaloni	Ernie Mosteller
Scott Townsend	Nick Burcher	Frank Stiefler
Steve Olenski	Rich Nadworny	John Rosen
Tim Jackson	Suzanne Hull	Len Kendall
Amber Naslund	Wayne Buckhanan	Mark McGuinness
Caroline Melberg	Andy Drish	Oleksandr Skorokhod
Claire Grinton	Angela Maiers	Paul Williams
Gary Cohen	Armando Alves	Sam Ismail
Gautam Ramdurai	B.J. Smith	Tamera Kremer
Eaon Pritchard	Brendan Tripp	Adelino de Almeida
Jacob Morgan	Casey Hibbard	Andy Hunter
Julian Cole	Debra Helwig	Anjali Ramachandran
Jye Smith	Drew McLellan	Craig Wilson
Karin Hermans	Emily Reed	David Petherick
Katie Harris	Gavin Heaton	Dennis Price
Mark Levy	George Jenkins	Doug Mitchell
Mark W. Schaefer	Helge Tenno	Douglas Hanna
Marshall Sponder	James Stevens	Ian Lurie
Ryan Hanser	Jenny Meade	Jeff Larche
Sacha Tueni and Katherine Maher	David Svet	Jessica Hagy
Simon Payn	Joanne Austin-Olsen	Mark Avnet
Stanley Johnson	Marilyn Pratt	Mark Hancock
Steve Kellogg	Michelle Beckham-Corbin	Michelle Chmielewski
Amy Mengel	Veronique Rabuteau	Peter Komendowski
Andrea Vascellari	Timothy L Johnson	Phil Osborne
Beth Wampler	Amy Jussel	Rick Liebling
Eric Brody	Arun Rajagopal	Dr Letitia Wright
Hugh de Winton	David Koopmans	Aki Spicer
Jeff Wallace	Don Frederiksen	Charles Sipe
Katie McIntyre	James G Lindberg & Sandra Renshaw	David Reich
Lynae Johnson	Jasmin Tragas	Deborah Chaddock Brown
Mike O’Toole	Jeanne Dininni	Iqbal Mohammed
Morriss M. Partee	Katie Chatfield	Jeff Cutler
Pete Jones	Riku Vassinen	Jeff Garrison
Kevin Dugan	Tiphereth Gloria	Mike Sansone
Lori Magno	Valerie Simon	Nettie Hartsock
Mark Goren		Peter Salvitti

Resonance Agents

Influence, Social Judgement, Social Media

I am working on a project at the moment which has influence at the very centre of its strategy. But as soon as we mention the word “influence” it brings a whole hierarchy of associations along for the ride. For example, I’m sure that you, reading this, have already leaped ahead 10 steps – and that is the challenge. Many of you will have read Gladwell’s Tipping Point and will, no doubt, be thinking about the way that a small number of influencers can create the kind of network effect that drives consumer behaviour. But as I have written previously, when it comes to social or digital strategy (in particular), we can’t just focus on reaching the tipping point. We need to go well beyond this – to impact behaviour, create lasting and beneficial change and deliver against business and organisational objectives.

Yet, in doing so, we have no choice but to work with “influencers” – after all, we are working with people, not numbers. I was reminded of this great post, Curating Resonant Agents, by Katie Chatfield on the work of Duncan Watts, and the presentation that came along with it. Take a read, it provides a context for the type of thinking you will need to undertake to be able to apply the concept of influence to your business or brand.

iCitizen 2008: Duncan Watts

View more presentations from Resource Interactive.

So, where does this leave us? I like Katie’s focus on resonance. When Stanford’s Eric Sun conducted research into Facebook “dispersion chains” – the length of connections through which a message/story would travel across a cluster of connections – he found that resonance and resonance agents are important. More important than sheer numbers. Influence, it seems, does not accrue to a particular person or even a particular group of people – certainly not, at least, when you are focusing on changing behaviour. Influence accrues to those resonance agents willing, able and (perhaps) predisposed towards sharing that message/story.

Where do you find them? Clearly they are not the people with the loudest voices. They are those individuals who facilitate the “weak links” between clusters. They are the connectors. And they sit in the cubicle next to you. They are often, as non-descript as a face in the crowd. How do you find them? You just have to listen.