Social Media - Servant of Chaos

Social Media Saturation Sees the Rise of the Business Designer

Community, Enterprise Social, FutureVisions, Innovation, Social Media, Web 2.0

While we continue to see cycle after cycle of new applications and services arrive in the Web 2.0 space, it seems for the most part that we are seeing incremental innovation. This type of innovation builds a new step on top of an existing innovation.

We are also reaching a certain maturity in the way that marketers work with social media. There are now case studies on the effectiveness of social media, there are tools that help us measure and react to conversations and there are an increasing number of corporate roles for "community managers" or even "directors of social media".

So where does innovation go?

In this environment, the focus is no longer on learning the tools, but on refining the way that we interact with them. It is about bringing social media into our businesses, integrating it with our other marketing efforts and focusing efforts in a way that deliver business results. This will see ongoing debates about "where" social media belongs — PR, corporate communications, marketing, customer support, innovation etc — as well as a scramble amongst agencies to deliver "social media services" to clients.

It will also see a rise in the importance of the "Business Designer".

The Business Designer does not sit in a creative studio. Rather, she operates across business units — touching marketing, customer service and new product design. The BD has a finger on the pulse of finance and lives cheek-by-jowl with the legal team. There is the touch of the management consultant in the way that the BD navigates the org chart — but also the fervour of the evangelist. She may be T-shaped. She may be a green egg. But above all, she is an experienced business professional. That’s right — she knows how to get things done.

Social media saturation is not going to kill innovation in the Web 2.0 world. It is simply going to commence the heavy lifting required to move social media with all its benefits, some of its quirks and much of its energy into the "enterprise space". The BD will perform the important role of "change manager" or perhaps "transformation manager" — for the domino-like changes that will occur in every facet of a business will change the nature of the enterprise. What has been rough and ready in the consumer space will become refined and repeatable in the business world for the BD will select and orchestrate the practices, tools and approaches that correspond with a company’s business strategy. Of course, this will breed a whole new round of innovation in the technology space — we have already begun to see this with Yammer, the business version of Twitter.

And there will be a corresponding transformation in the process of business, and the goals and approaches of groups charged with managing brand touch points. This goes without saying.

But by far, the most radical transformation will be the one thrust upon us by the generational change that is now under way. With 60 million baby boomers about to be replaced by 60 million Millennials, the workplace will never be the same again. Managing the "knowledge transfer" that needs to take place over the next 5-10 years will be a fundamental responsibility of the Business Designer.

The Ryder Cup of Word of Mouth, Buzz and Viral

Blogging, Smart Bloggers, Social Media, Weblogs

The Ryder Cup is a fascinating contest. Based on prestige rather than prize money, it pits the best golfers in the USA against the best from other parts of the world. And while there was a time some years ago when I could not see the value in "hitting a ball and walking after it", I have now developed a much greater appreciation and interest in golf — both as a player and an observer. Interestingly, there are quite a few parallels between golf and social media:

Participation — from the outside looking in, golf can appear boring. When you start to participate you realise there is much more to it than meets the eye.
Frustration — like golf, not everything you "try" in social media works. Often your best efforts will still end up "in the pond".
Competition — while it is easy to get caught up in all different rankings and measurements, like social media, you only ever play golf against yourself. The quality of your work comes down to the nuance, effort and creativity you inject into it — and the results follow accordingly.

In the spirit of the Ryder Cup, Sean Moffitt has compiled a list of what he considers to be the top 36 US blogs on word of mouth, viral, buzz, influence and the engaging brand. Against this he lists 36 international blogs. I am particularly pleased to be listed after reading Sean’s reasoning:

Unlike some of the social media- and tech dedicated marketing and media bloggers, these broad-minded bloggers and company heads (below) have distinguished themselves by helping visitors understand how ideas spread, online and offline, through a range of different strategies and tactics and each recognizes the importance of having brands getting noticed, talked about and advocated in a 2.0 world.

In my opinion, they are much closer to explaining the purpose and benefits of a range of new media, web 2.0, co-creation, social networks and other web, cultural and social phenomenon.

And in the best interest of co-creation, Sean has left a number of open slots on each team. So tell me, who would you include? Here is the list so far:

The USA Team

1. Jackie Huba/Ben McConnell – Church of the Customer (Austin, Texas)
2. Andy Sernovitz – Damn! I Wish I Thought of That! (Chicago, Illinois)
3. Pete Blackshaw – CGM (Cincinnati, Ohio)
4. Jim Nail – Influence 2.0 (Boston, Massachusetts)
5. Idil Cakim – dot WOM (New York, New York)
6. Jeremiah Owyang – Web Strategist (San Francisco, Calfornia)
7. Rohit Bhargava – Influential Marketing (Washington, D.C.)
8. Owen Mack – CoBrandIt (Boston, Massechussetts)
9. Walter Karl – WOM Study (Boston, Massachusetts)
10. Fred Reichheld – Net Promoter – (Boston, Massachusetts)
11. Max Kalehoff – Attention Max (New York, New York)
12. Olivier Blanchard – The Brand Builder (Greenville, South Carolina)
13. Charlene Li – Charlene Li (San Francisco, California)
14. Sam Decker – Bazaar Blog and Decker Marketing (Austin, Texas)
15. Joseph Jaffe – Jaffe Juice (New York, New York)
16. John Moore – Brand Autopsy (Austin, Texas)
17. Peter Kim – Being Peter Kim (Austin, Texas)
18. Mack Collier – The Viral Garden (Florence, Alabama)
19. Spike Jones – Brains on Fire (Greenville, South Carolina)
20. Ron McDaniel – Buzzoodle (Cleveland, Ohio)
21.John Jantsch – Duct Tape Marketing (Kansas City, Missouri)
22. Kim Proctor – How to Create Powerful Customer Experiences (Los Angeles, California)
23. Rob Walker – Murketing (Savannah, Georgia)
24. Lois Kelly – Foghound (Providence, Rhode Island)
25. Ann Handley – MarketingProfs (Boston, Massachusetts)
26. Shiv Singh – Going Social Now (New York, New York)
27. Laurent Flores – Customer Listening Blog (New York, New York)
28. Tom Asacker – A Clear Eye (Manchester, New Hampshire)
29. Francois Gossieaux – Emergence Marketing (Boston, Massachusetts)
30. Geoff Livingston – The Buzz Bin (Washington, B.C.)
31. Dave Balter – BzzAgent (Boston, Massachussetts)
32. John Bell – Digital Influence Mapping Project (Washington, D.C.)
33. Todd Tweedy – Word Spreads Quickly (Charlottesville, Virginia)
34. Marta Kagan – the Secret Diary of a Bonafide Marketing Genius (Boston, Massachusetts)
35. Greg Stielstra – Pyromarketing (Nashville, Tennessee)
36. Willow Baum Lundgren – Small Planet (Kansas City, Missouri)
37. Amber Naslund – The Brand Box (Chicago, Illinois)
38. Greg Verdino – GregVerdino.com (New York, New York)
39. Paul Chaney – Conversational Media Marketing (Lafayette, Louisiana)
40. August Ray – Experience – The Blog (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)
41-42??? Your Turn

The International Team

1. Frederick Herrman – Netszkobold (Germany)
2. Emmanuel Vivier – Culture-Buzz (Luxembourg)
3. Sean Moffitt – Buzz Canuck (Canada)
4. Rachel Clarke – Behind the Buzz (England)
5. Gavin Heaton – Servant of Chaos (Australia)
6. Sam Flemming – SeeISee.com (China)
7. Ian McKee – The Power of Influence (Singapore)
8. Mirko Pollera/Alex Giordano – Ninja Marketing (Italy)
9. Russell Davies – Russell Davies (England)
10. Simon McDermott – Attentio (Belgium)
11. Andy Lark – Andy Lark (New Zealand)
12. Max Lenderman – Experience the Message (Canada)
13. Paul Marsden – Viral Culture (England)
14. Laurent Valembert – Marketing Alternatif (France)
15. Mike Rowe – 1000 heads (UK)
16. Par Thunstrom – Buzzador (Sweden)
17. CLeber Martins – Blog de Guerrilha (Brazil)
18 Willem Sodderland – Buzzer (Netherlands)
19. Jean Nasr – Alt-Buzz (France)
20. Igor Beuker – Viral Tracker (Netherlands)
21. Grant McCracken – This Blog Sits At...(Canada)
22. Mitch Joel – Six Pixels of Separation (Canada)
23. Justin Kirby – DMC (U.K.)
24. Sebastian Provencher – Praized (Canada)
25. Alan Moore/Tomi Ahonen – Communities Dominate Brands (England/Hong Kong)
26. Anna Farmery – The Engaging Brand (UK)
27. Neil Perkin – Only Dead Fish (UK)
28. Johnnie Moore – Johnny Moore’s Werblog (UK)
29. Joanna Kocieba – BuzzReporter (Poland)
30. Hjortur Smarason – Marketing Safari (Iceland)
31. Krishna De – Biz Growth News (Ireland)
32. Fred Cavazza – FredCavazza.net (France)
33. Bart van Der Aa – Icemedia (Netherlands)
34. Gianluca Artesano – Frozen Frogs (Italy)
35. Ivo Laurin – Outbreak (Czech)
36. Chris Abraham – Chris Abraham (Germany)
37. Mark Earls – Herd (U.K.)
38. David Eicher – Brainwash (Germany)
39. Pepe Wietholz – Buzz People(Germany)
40 Christian Wilfer/Carolina Schulz – Viralmarketing.de (Germany)
41. Dean Hunt – DeanHunt.com – (UK)
41-42??? Your Turn

What’s Your Strategy?

Creativity, Digital Strategy, Social Media, Strategy

One of the most effective methods of getting an answer is to ask a question. Makes sense … but what happens when you receive an answer? Do you hear what you are hoping for? Do you hear something else? Or more importantly, is your question ANSWERED? And when it comes to strategy, not only do you need to ask the right questions, you need to listen for the real answers.

What do I mean?

No matter whether you work for a large or a small company, or whether you work on the agency side, any strategy work that you do will require input from various stakeholders. That means creativity, innovation, collaboration … and of course, compromise. But, perhaps more than anything else, you will get STRATEGIC FOG.

The strategic fog creeps up slowly, spreading uncertainty and confusion. It looks harmless, but consumes all insight, process and creativity in its path. Unfortunately, we can all fall prey to this fog. It seduces us with its questions. It suggests that responsibility can be passed. The role of the strategist, however, is to hold your line of questioning and to pursue a path of inquiry.

A strategic fog normally takes two shapes:

Tactics masquerading as strategy
Unfounded solutions answering non-strategic problems

You know when you are dealing with strategic fog when you ask a simple question — "what’s your strategy?". This one, single question is like a grenade. You throw it and wait. In the wake of its detonation you will get one of two things — the clarity of a bell or the steady onslaught of fog.

Things to remember. A strategy …

Is not a solution — you leave that to execution
Can be supported by multiple tactics
Should not be set in stone, but respond to your changing business conditions
Will serve as a basis for action and decision-making
Sounds simple, raw even, but resonates with the energy of your brand
Is nothing without insight

Have you ever experienced the strategic fog? Did you find your way out?

A Shakeup in the Top 25 Marketing and Social Media Blogs

Measurement, Smart Bloggers, Social Media

Last week, Mack Collier explained that he was switching his measurement for the Top 25 Marketing and Social Media blogs away from Technorati to Feedburner subscriber numbers. This has seen a big change in the blogs that make up the Top 25 — I am guessing this is mostly to do with the fact that many blogs don’t publish their subscriber numbers (or perhaps don’t even use Feedburner).

Now, I don’t actually publish my subscriber numbers — but it has not been a hard and fast decision. What do you think? Should I? What does it mean to you? Does a subscriber count influence your decision to read/subscribe? Does it influence the way you feel about a blog?

For the record, one of the reasons for not publishing is that I had setup three feeds very early on. I was able to consolidate down to two, and now have both running about neck and neck (about 600 each). And while I have tried to consolidate the feeds, I can’t quite get it to work. All new subscribers, please use this feed.

Mack’s list for week 120 is as follows. Congratulations to all on it!

1 – Duct Tape Marketing – 220,000 (LW – 6)
2 – Church of the Customer – 209,000 (LW – 8)
3 – CopyBlogger – 42,780 (LW – 2)
4 – Search Engine Guide – 12,173 (LW – 4)
5 – Chris Brogan – 8,319 (LW – 3)
6 – Influential Marketing – 6,985 (+12)(LW – 7)
7 – Logic + Emotion – 3,564 (LW – 5)
8 – Converstations – 3,219 (LW – 20)
9 – Drew’s Marketing Minute – 3,203 (LW – 15)
10 – The Viral Garden – 3,063 (LW – 25)
11 – Experience Curve – 2,775 (LW – UR)
12 – Conversation Agent – 2,713 (LW – 12)
13 – Techipedia – 2,300 (LW – 13)
14 – The Social Media Marketing Blog – 2,079 (LW – 19)
15 – Emergence Marketing – 1,829 (LW – UR)
16 – The Social Customer Manifesto – 1,672 (LW – UR)
17 – Techno Marketer – 1,367 (LW – 23)
18 – Social Media Explorer – 1,332 (LW – 18)
19 – Movie Marketing Madness – 1,231 (LW – UR)
20 – Daily Fix – 1,111 (LW – 10)
21 – Customers Rock! – 849 (LW – UR)
22 – Shotgun Marketing – 721 (LW – UR)
23 – Biz Solutions Plus – 541 (LW – UR)
24 – Resonance Partnership Blog – 301 (LW – UR)
25 – MediaPhyter – 116 (LW – UR)

How Sociable are You

Measurement, Social Media

When we think of the “top blogs” or the most effective social media / digital projects we fundamentally think of measurement. Underlying any rating system, from Mack Collier’s Top 25 Marketing and Social Media Blogs through the AdAge Power 150 to Meg Tsiamis’ local Top 100 Australian Blogs or Julian Cole’s Australian Marketing Pioneer Blogs, at play is a form of measurement. These rely on a whole range of (mostly) publicly available data.

For example, Mack’s list used to rely on Technorati rankings but is about to shift to Feedburner subscriber counts. Technorati requires the registration of your blog and Feedburner requires that your blog reader numbers be published. Meg’s ranking relies on a combination of the Technorati ranking and the Alexa traffic ranking (which in itself requires the installation of the Alexa toolbar to track and submit user data). AdAge uses a range of data as well as a personal ranking from Todd Andrlik, the index’s inventor — and Julian has employed the same approach, with a subjective “pioneer score”.

But no matter how many elements you combine to measure the impact of your blog, your branding, your product launch etc, the challenge is finding a way to simply aggregate the scores and balance them in a way that makes sense for the large brands that dominate our consciousness as well as those who happily make waves in the long tail.

Ari Herzog points out a tool that may actually give us some relief — focusing on the conversational power of your brand. How Sociable allows you to track your brand across 22 different metrics to produce a visibility score. This score draws upon quite a range of data from Technorati, Google, Facebook, Upcoming, Vimeo, Flickr, YouTube, Bebo, Twitter, Magnolia and Delicious, Photobucket, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Ning and MySpace — and no doubt this will expand as uptake continues. The thinking behind the visibility score is:

We took a set of benchmark results using one globally recognised traditional brand and gave it a score of 1000. To ensure that even small, local brands would register we made it a sliding scale.

Unfortunately, in terms of ranking blogs, it does not include subscriber numbers which do actually provide a consistent form of readership. However, adding subscription numbers via a formula could provide a real sense of the spread of your social media footprint.

Perhaps, more importantly, for marketers, How Sociable could provide a much needed (and free, for the moment) method for measuring the success of your social media outreach program. Why don’t you give it a try? Drop your name, your blog or your company name into the box and see what comes back.

For the record, “gavin heaton” returned a score of 42, just slightly below the 44 achieved by “servantofchaos”. How sociable are you?

Does Social Media Scale?

Branding, Old Media, Smart Bloggers, Social Media, Strategy

Over the past week or so there have been a series of ideas coming together in my mind. I had been struggling to pull them together into a coherent framework until I saw this post by Peter Kim. He asks some difficult questions around the benefit of social media, but goes further — suggesting that social media does not scale:

One-ninth of the WORLD’s population watched the 2006 FIFA World Cup final. Social media vs. Television for marketing purposes just doesn’t match up.

But in my view, this is looking only at potential reach around a single, fixed-in-time event. And surely the predominant global brand on display during the match was the FIFA World Cup — all the rest of the advertising space would have been segmented to maximise the returns available in each broadcaster’s market. This fragmentation of ad space is exactly the domain and power of the long tail — where social media can provide a resonance and relevance to niche audiences.

Having said this, there is an issue around the human resources required to activate a social media program. As Peter says:

I do believe social media can help sell. Social content has started integrating into traditional tactics like banners and emails. I have a better opinion of Comcast after Frank helped me with my cable modem and will resist Verizon FIOS for a while longer. From my last post asking if social media matters, the commenting consensus seems to agree, with its impact in awareness, consideration, and preference.

But if social media marketing matters, then does it scale?

I don’t think so. I think the technologies scale. But the programs – especially those with a labor-intensive component – don’t.

The labour intensiveness of an active social media program can become a bottleneck. There simply are not enough Richard@DELL’s around to help every person with an issue. However, the aim — or certainly the aims I normally have in mind when constructing a social media or digital strategy — is to foster the growth of a community in such a way that “external participants” begin to play an active role. So rather than taking a broadcast view of social media, the aim is to facilitate a range of participatory action/activities. Effectively this means using social MEDIA to activate social NETWORKS.

In doing so you have to manage the constraints — COST, SCALE or CONTROL. Any change you make to one will impact both the others. The more you activate the social network, the less control you will have of your brand, your messaging and your story. Yet this is the cost-benefit paradox — for while you release your brand, your services and maybe even your support into the wilds of the social media landscape, you find, perhaps, a more authentic brand story coming to life — a story borne out of a participatory experience between your evangelists and your everyday or casual consumers.

Understanding Facebook for Marketers

Smart Bloggers, Social Media

I remember years ago hearing about Facebook. It was early days, very focused on student profiles — and MySpace was clearly in the ascendency. As part of my daily routine I would randomly click through profiles, looking at my own, my connections and the friends on the periphery of our intersecting lives.

When asked by my family about my work, I would struggle to explain the hours I would spend navigating through bad profile after bad profile online. They could not understand that this was research, immersion and about understanding a new form of business. From the outside looking in, it probably bordered on voyeurism.

What was clear to me, even then, was a sense of performance. Here in words and image (and atrocious formatting) were people from all walks of life … fretting and strutting their hour on a new global stage. It was fascinating to see (and sometimes hear) what people would share — what they were comfortable with, who they would claim as “friends” and how the lines between “friend” and “acquaintance” held no sway for this connected mass of individuals.

Years later, Facebook is a media monster. Not only do they have millions of registered participants who have linked, connected, profiled and segmented themselves, they also have a sway of marketers keen to leap in and mine, message and measure them all to within an inch of their digital existence.

Is this bad? Or is it the quid pro quo for free access?

Whenever I hear talk about reaching a young audience, or “digital strategy”, it is inevitably followed up with the muttered words “viral” or “Facebook”. It seems like a default response that is devoid of any real understanding of the population of Facebook. Matt Dickman has single-handedly decided to remedy this situation, producing a FREE ebook, The Face of Facebook. And while it is focused on the US population, it provides a primer for all marketers considering their first forays into social networks.

Please read it.