Seven Questions to Ask About Your Website

/0 Comments/in /by

People usually call me for help setting up and optimizing their social marketing programs, but in the early stages of our engagement the conversation almost always takes another turn.

In about two out of three cases, in fact, we wind up focusing first on the client’s website because so many basic issues still need attention. Clients are sometimes frustrated by this. After all, they want to get started with the cool new tools and usher new business in the door. But if the most important source of new business – the website – isn’t doing the job for them, the new tools are a waste of time. After all, why would you want to bring new visitors to a site that does a poor job of telling your story?

Websites are developed by people who work at the company and who are very knowledgeable about the business. It’s natural for them to assume more knowledge on the part of the visitor than the typical visitor actually has. Messages are often focused on selling a solution rather than solving a problem, but people don’t care about your product; they care about what’s troubling them right now. That’s a fine distinction, but it’s critical to conveying an effective message.

A well-crafted message communicates understanding of the visitor’s needs and frames the solution in the context of relieving pain or creating opportunity. Focus on results rather than process. Here are some questions that can help you determine whether your website is hitting the mark:

Is the message clear and succinct? Ask a few people who are familiar with your industry but not with your company to spend exactly one minute on your website. That’s about the amount of time an average visitor will grant you. Then ask them to tell you what your company does, what problems you address and who the target customer is. If they can’t answer those three questions after one minute, then your message isn’t clear enough.

Are you optimized for search? Navigate through your website and look at the page titles at the top of your browser. Do they include the keywords that customers use to find you? Do some of your pages have generic titles such as “About” or “Services?” How about PDF documents? Are the titles and meta-tags clear or do they still have gibberish file names that machines generate? Are your images and videos tagged? These are simple things that mean a lot to search engines.

Does your message communicate understanding of the visitor’s problem? Put yourself in the shoes of a typical prospect visiting your website. Think about the problem that person is trying to solve. Does your message demonstrate that your solution was designed with that problem in mind? Or are you selling aspirin when you should be selling headache relief? Does your choice of words show that you’re committed to easing the visitor’s pain?

Are you using all the available tools? Many business websites are heavy on text, which may have been all that was available when the site was built. But 65% of people are classified as visual learners. If you’re not using all the media you can, you’re under-serving your audience. I’m not talking about stock photography but rather about illustrations that clarify and explain. Today it’s cheap and easy to point a camera at a product manager or engineer and ask the person to explain a product. Voice-annotated screen shows or PowerPoint slidecasts are also inexpensive ways to illustrate complex concepts.

Is it easy to join your list? Every page of your website should have an invitation for visitors to become prospects. These can be in the form of newsletter sign-ups, white paper downloads, requests for more information or invitations to view a webcast. Why would you want to miss any chance to turn an interested passerby into a lead?

Are your pages easy to share? Every page should also have embedded widgets that make it easy for visitors to e-mail, bookmark, tweet or otherwise share your content. In most cases, these are easy to add to a template and there’s no downside to having them.

Do you humanize your company? This is particularly important for b-to-b companies, which establish long-term relationships with their customers. Does your site include faces, biographies and personal messages? What do you do to create personal connections that increase a visitor’s comfort level with the people behind the product? Does your website have personality or does it read like a research paper? If you’re interested in social marketing, start with the social part. Let your people go.

I’m sure I’ve missed some things, so let me know your own thoughts in the comments section. What makes a business website work for you? (Valerie Everett graphic)

B-to-B Social Marketing Innovators

As Eric Schwartzman and I research our forthcoming b-to-b book, Social Marketing to the Business Customer, we’ve been recording many of our interviews with experts. Here’s a sample of new podcasts that have resulted:

Tip of the Week: Buying Collaboratives

We’ve written before about Woot!, a site that sells overstock and surplus merchandise at amazing savings. Now you can add to that BuyWithMe.com, a regional service that offers big savings on everyday services using an arbitrage model that guarantees the merchant a certain number of responses in return for the discount but changes the terms if enough people don’t apply. You have nothing to lose by checking it out, so please do so and tell us what you think.

Just for Fun: How Dogs Talk

Is a dog really happy when it wags its tail? It depends. Wagging to the right is a sign of positive feelings, but wagging to the left means Spot is feeling blue. This is just one of the fascinating insights I gained from this short article called The Secret Language of Dogs. I’ve owned pups since I was five and never knew that a paw slap is equivalent to a pat on the back or that barking really does have a language of its own. While you’re there, check out Why Dogs Do Strange Things.

Gain Control By Giving It Up

/0 Comments/in , /by

Open Leadership coverCharlene Li’s new book will be out in a few weeks, and if you’re interested in how social media is transforming the way business gets done, you’ll want to pick up a copy.

The book is called Open Leadership, and I would classify it as the first of the post-social media books. By that I mean that it looks at the consequences democratized communications rather than at the media itself. Expect to see wave of similar books in the coming years. This one is a very good first entry. Open Leadership will make a lot of people uncomfortable because it proposes that the only way to govern effectively in a transparent business world is to give up control and trust people to do the right thing. Li makes a persuasive case by citing many examples of companies that have done exactly that with great success.

Li is a former Forrester Research analyst, founder of Altimeter Group and co-author of Groundswell, the breakthrough 2008 book that provided the first demographic profiles of social media users as well as a rigorous methodology for evaluating the ROI of social programs. In Open Leadership, she builds on some of the economic models first presented in Groundswell, but the new book is more of a call to action than a financial exercise.

The premise is encapsulated in the title of Chapter 1: “Why Giving up Control Is Inevitable.” Li asserts that today’s business world is too complex and competitive to permit organizations to continue to manage the way they have since the Industrial Revolution. That top-down philosophy assumes that people who can’t accomplish tasks without instructions, rigid rules and constant oversight are idiots. That worked okay when companies had some control over their environment, but today too many factors are out of their hands. So one man’s story of how an airline broke his guitar and refused to fix it becomes a cultural sensation while the airline stands by helplessly and fumes.

Charlene LiLi (left) asserts that the only way to gain any level of control over today’s turbo-charged business environment is to give up as much control as possible. New business leaders set examples, demonstrate confidence and create cultures that tolerate intelligent, well-intentioned failure. And guess what? It turns out that when smart people are given the latitude to make decisions, they tend to make better ones than if someone else makes decisions for them.

Open Leadership provides some refreshing new examples of how this new management philosophy is working:

  • Meetup.com replaced a top-down approach to project management with one that requires stakeholders to persuade engineers to spend time on their projects. Productivity exploded;
  • BestBuy outlasted competitors in the brutal electronics retailing business in part by developing a culture that lets its employees guide customers toward the best decision, even if that means buying from a competitor;
  • Electronics distributor Premier Farnell distributed low-cost digital video cameras to every employee in the company so that they could document their best practices and share them on an internal network. Employees are more empowered and the quality of information is better.

Li is particularly inspired by John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, which has undertaken a massive program to drive decision-making down to local levels. Chambers says the idea unnerved him at first, but that Cisco is now a faster, more responsive and more innovative company as a result. And he’s working fewer hours. Chambers provides critical support for the concepts outlined in Open Leadership; he has the unwavering support of Cisco’s board of directors, which enables him to talk honestly about his own reservations and the mistakes he has made.

It is on the issue of mistakes that the author is most emphatic. Li stresses that businesses can only be innovative if they learn to accept the fact that failure is a necessary by-product of risk-taking. Companies that successfully practice open leadership evaluate decisions based upon the thought that goes into them rather than the results. Failure is an opportunity to learn and try again, and the only unpardonable sin is making the same mistake twice.

Most businesses do a lousy job of this. They publicly declare a commitment to innovation, but privately punish employees whose ideas don’t succeed. Tolerance for failure is sometimes cited as the most important reason that Silicon Valley has outclassed every other region of the U.S. in technology innovation. Reading Open Leadership, I get the impression that such tolerance is the only option for businesses that hope to lead in uncertain markets.

B-to-B Social Marketing — Really!

My new presentation on social marketing for b-to-b companies drew a nice audience at NewComm Forum last week, and many people have asked about the slides. The presentation, entitled “B-to-B Social Media – Really!” cites numerous examples of businesses that have applied all sorts of new communication tools to building brand, generating leads and improving customer support. It’s available on SlideShare, along with all my other past presentations, and you are free to download it and use it as you wish. As always, I appreciate attribution. I’d appreciate even more a chance to present my findings to your company or professional association.

Tip of the Week: OffiSync

I love Google Documents, the suite of office applications that lets people collaborate on text files, spreadsheets and presentations without worrying about version control or synchronization. Dana and I wrote Joy of Geocaching on Google Docs and found it to be a godsend when we weren’t at home but still needed to access each other’s files.

Google Docs has shortcomings, however. The apps aren’t nearly as feature-rich as Microsoft Office, so fancy formats and off-beat fonts aren’t nearly as easy to use. Also, applications delivered online run more slowly than those that run on a fast PC. I’d say I’m twice as productive with Word as I am with Google’s rudimentary word processor.

OffiSync is finding a middle ground. This hot startup has come up with a cool utility that runs inside Microsoft Office and automatically connects to Google Docs as a back-end. You can load and save Docs files as if they were on your local hard drive. The tool also integrates Google search and real-time collaboration, meaning that is two or more people are working on a file simultaneously, their changes are synchronized every time they save to the server.

These high-end features are only available in the paid version of the product, which sells for a modest $12 annual fee, but the free version does a good job of managing the back-end interaction with the server. Your creativity is limited by the least common denominator or Google Docs support, but if you want to enjoy the power of local Word apps while shortcutting the tedious process of sending files to and from the server, this tool is pretty sweet. Here’s the download link.

Just for Fun: Those Nutty Skydivers

Skydivers in formationSkydiving looks like fun. And if it wasn’t for pesky things like responsibility and the fact that they can’t guarantee I’d live through it, I would have done it years ago. So I respect people all the more who not only skydive, but do so on a regular basis and attempt to set records. Woman’s Day collected 10 pictures of phenomenal feats of people flinging themselves from mountaintops and airplanes. We just hope all of them made it safely to the ground!

How to Conduct a Great Interview, Part 2

/0 Comments/in /by

Last week I talked about the art of the interview, an essential skill in creating content that generates traffic and visibility. (Be sure to read the advice of others who contributed comments to the blog entry). The first part of this two-part entry talked about preparing for an interview. Now let’s look at what to do when you sit down with your subject or begin the phone call.

Be Conscious Of Time – I almost always ask interview subjects how much time they have. This helps me plan the pace of the questions and also makes sure that I get to the critical ones. If you’re expecting an hour and your subject has only 15 minutes, you need to adjust quickly. If you need extra time, ask for it up front. If the subject turns you down, ask again later in the interview when he or she is hopefully more invigorated about the conversation.

Ask About the Subject’s Background – People like to talk about themselves, so indulge them with a question that they are happy to answer. I’ve found that the simple question, “Tell me about yourself” is a great conversation-starter.

Avoid Yes/No Answers – Instead of asking, “Are you satisfied with your progress this year?” use “Tell me how your progress this year compares to your expectations.” Avoid questions beginning with “do,” “will,” “are,” “and “should,” and instead use questions beginning with “what,” “how,” “why” and “describe.” Asking someone to “Tell me about…” gives them no choice but to share an experience.

Invite Stories – I once heard former Wall Street Journal feature writer Bill Blundell give advice I’ll never forget: “Write in pictures.” In other words, tell stories that readers can visualize in their minds. Storytelling is the most powerful form of human expression. Stories turn abstract ideas into useful examples. Ask the subject to make the topic real by citing examples or personal experiences.

Don’t Be Afraid To Ask The Same Question Twice – This is particularly true in an interview that concerns a controversial subject. Executives are media-trained to answer the questions they want to answer rather than the questions they’re asked. If your subject is evasive, ask the same question a different way. Sometimes you can coax someone into answering a difficult question by feigning ignorance: “I’m sorry, I didn’t follow that. Can you dumb it down a bit for someone like me?”

Control the Interview– You need to dictate the pace and topic of the interview. If the subject rambles or goes off course, cut her off gently whenever you can get a word in. Even if you back off a bit to let her finish the thought, you’ve sent a subtle message that it’s time to move on.

Be Empathetic – Chances are your subject is pretty passionate about the topic you’re discussing. Let your behavior reflect that interest. Smile when she smiles and shake your head when she relates a tale of woe. This isn’t misleading; it’s simply reflecting back a person’s feelings in a way that helps to draw them out. People like to talk to responsive listeners.

Ask For Closing Thoughts – The longer people talk, the more comfortable they are. This is why the best quotes often come at the end of the interview. When you finish your questions, give your subject a chance to summarize her thoughts or restate an important point. One good tactic is simply to ask, “Is there anything I missed?”

Here are thoughts on a few common questions:

Should You Use A Tape Recorder? These days, the answer is increasingly yes because you want the latitude to publish the interview as a video or audio podcast. That said, recording devices can put a damper on a conversation. Once you start recording, put the gadget aside and don’t look at it. You want your subject to forget about it as quickly as possible. Also, most states require that a person audibly consent to be recorded. Be sure you get that permission on tape.

Should You Go Off the Record? This question is complicated by the fact that “off the record” means different things to different people. Technically, “off the record” means the information can’t be used under any circumstances, which makes it of little value to you. However, people often use this term when they really mean “not for attribution.” I rarely agree to off-the-record terms but I will go on background if the information is important. It often turns out that you can negotiate the use of background comments if you paraphrase them appropriately.

Should You Grant Approvals? Many people ask to approve an article before it’s published. I let the context be my guide. Very often, both interviewer and subject have the common goal of making the speaker look good. In that case, I see no problem with letting someone review their comments for accuracy. However, if the topic is controversial or if the speaker is a celebrity or public official, no way. Those people know the rules. In any circumstance, I advise against giving full editing access. Confine the subject’s revisions to statements of fact.

Those are some of my best practices. What are yours?

A Couple of Great Giveaways for You

I’ve got a couple of new giveaway promotions to entice you to take my survey on multiplatform social media practices:

Entrepreneurship guru Evan Carmichael has created collectible trading cards featuring prominent entrepreneurs. There are 33 business greats featured in the series and Carmichael is donating all the profits to Kiva, an organization that loans small amounts of money to business owners in Third World countries.

But you don’t have to pay to get a prize; simply take the survey and get a limited edition Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak card in a Lucite case. Only 1,000 copies of each of these cards will be made, so they might be valuable one day. And even if they aren’t, they’ll still impress the Mac out of the Apple fanatics in your life.

Or you can get a free copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People, the landmark book by Dale Carnegie that has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. This is being offered in connection with a promotion for a new application for the iPhone and iPod touch.

The rules are the same for both promotions: You must be a marketer or business owner and must fill out my survey on multiplatform social media practices. The survey takes about 10 minutes to complete and the results will be used in a research report about best practices in multiplatform deployment. Participants will also get an early copy of the results.

By way of full disclosure, I’m not receiving any financial compensation for either of these promotions. My only reward is survey responses and being included in an influencer relations campaign. I’m a big fan of that concept.

Recently Published

Paul & Dana Gillin interviewed on the Geocaching Podcast, Apr 13, 2010

Putting the ‘social’ in social media – BtoB magazine, Apr 12, 2010

B-to-b firmly in social media – BtoB magazine, Apr 12, 2010

5 tips for b-to-b social media marketing – BtoB magazine, Apr 12, 2010

We Got Social… With Paul Gillin – JSH&A Living Room, Apr 9, 2010

Paul Gillin on Communities – InMagic, Apr 8, 2010

“Cloud Chasers” Radio pilot from Novell, hosted by Paul Gillin, Apr 1, 2010

Five Rules of Brand Ambassadorship – PRSA Comprehension, Mar 22, 2010

Just For Fun: The Lying Down Game

This is one of the more ridiculous flash mobs I’ve ever seen, but I have to admit it’s weirdly amusing. The Lying Down Game challenges players to find the oddest place to have their pictures taken lying down. There are only two rules: hands must be flat against the sides and toes must be pointing at the ground. Like any simple idea that catches on, people have brought some wonderful innovation to the task. The game has more than 90,000 fans on Facebook.

How to Conduct a Great Interview

/0 Comments/in /by

My last couple of entries have been pretty high-level, so I thought I would come back to earth and devote the next couple of issues to something a little more practical: how to conduct a successful interview.

I’ve probably conducted 4,000 to 5,000 interviews in my 30 years as a journalist and have learned a few tips for making them go smoothly. For many people, interviews are intimidating and scary, but they don’t have to be.

Interviews are one of the most popular ways to generate content for a blog and they have the secondary benefit of establishing relationships with people who can raise visibility and awareness.

When you interview prominent people, they often link back to your site and provide a nice little boost in traffic. Interviews are a great way to get a social media effort off the ground. Here’s how to get started.

Be Prepared –- This is interviewing 101. Preparation has several beneficial effects. Not only does it enable you to ask better questions, but it’s a sign of courtesy and respect for the guest. Spend 15 minutes on a relevant website to come up to speed on your subject. It really shouldn’t take longer than that for a basic interview. Then integrate the information you find there into your questions. Your guest will be more cooperative and forthcoming as a result; I guarantee it.

Learn Something Personal -– The Web is a wonderful tool for researching people as well as companies. Between public profiles and Twitter feeds, you can learn all kinds of interesting things about a person’s hobbies, history and passions. Use this information as an icebreaker: “I understand you backpacked across America. I’ve always wanted to do that.” This gets people talking about something that really invigorates them. The rest of the session will be more relaxed as a result.

Flatter Your Subject — There’s no faster way to get a subject to warm to you than to share a statement like “I absolutely loved your book.” If the setting is somewhat confrontational, a little compliment at the front can diffuse the tension. You don’t need to be disingenuous; chances are you can find something to admire even if you don’t agree with the person.

You Don’t Have To Read the Whole Book -– Authors are popular interview subjects because they’re willing and available. You should make it a point to read at least some of their work, but there’s no reason you have to read it all. I find that scanning the table of contents, reading the introduction and skimming the first couple of chapters will usually tell you most of what you need to know about a business book. That should take you no more than a half-hour. Business books tend to be repetitive, anyway, so the good stuff is usually at the front.

Prepare Questions But Be Ready To Discard Them -– We’ve all heard those painful interviews in which a novice questioner insists on reading through a list of prepared questions regardless of what the subject says. This creates a disjointed and awkward conversation. You should absolutely prepare questions, but use them as notes to make sure you hit on important subjects or use them to restart the conversation when you hit a dead end. Mark the ones that you absolutely need to ask, but don’t make the questions a goal. Following up, redirecting and exploring new paths are the essence of good conversation. The same goes for an interview.

One question that stirs some debate is whether subjects should be allowed to see questions before an interview. If the meeting isn’t confrontational and the speaker is uncomfortable, I say sure. However, public figures and experienced executives shouldn’t need this nicety. If you do provide questions in advance, be sure to note that you intend to take the conversation in whatever direction you need. Never promise to stick only to the prepared list.

Be Interested -– This is the most important bit of advice I can offer. The person you’re interviewing is probably passionate about the subject matter. The more you can channel that interest, the more forthcoming your subject will be. Even if the topic doesn’t rivet you, pretend it does. Lean forward in your chair, look the subject in the eye and nod occasionally to show that you are following the conversation. Laugh or show pain at appropriate points in the discussion. If conducting the interview by phone, an occasional “Mmm-hmmm” confirms that you’re there and engaged.

Restate and Confirm –- If you’ve ever taken a course in active listening, you know the value of this technique. Tell the person what you believe you just heard him say. This shows that you’re listening and avoids problems that stem from misinterpretation. If you can restate the message more succinctly than your subject, ask if you can attribute your words to him. Usually, people are happy to be edited in this way.

Lob A Few Softballs -– if you dive right into the heavy stuff, you risk putting your subject on the defensive and derailing the interview. Start off with some easy questions: “Tell me about your background,” or “How did you get into this line of work to begin with?” Small talk works in social settings and the same goes for formal interviews.

In my next entry, I’ll go into more details about how to guide the course of an interview and handle problems. Meanwhile, share your advice for how to prepare and start an interview below. If you can link to some particularly well structured interviews that you or others have published, so much the better.

Meanwhile, if you want to see how badly an interview can go, check out the video clip on my blog that goes with the photo below. It’s from an old Bob Newhart show and it’s one of my favorites.

A Personal Plea to Support the NewComm Forum

The New Communications Forum is the one social media event I attend every single year. That’s because the speakers at this conference, which is now in its sixth year, are predictably incredible. I’m not talking about me; I’m referring to people like Kami Huyse, Geoff Livingston, Shel Holtz, Shel Israel, Maggie Fox, Katie Paine, Jackie Huba, Francois Gossieaux, Geno Church, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Solis and many others. These are, quite simply, the people I most respect and listen to in the social media realm.


NewComm Forum takes place the week after next in San Mateo, CA. The keynote presentation on Thursday, April 22 is by Scott Monty, whose accomplishments at socializing the Ford Motor Company’s marketing programs are deserving of a lifetime achievement award. People told me that last fall’s presentation on The Hyper-Social Organization by Gossieaux and Ed Moran of Deloitte Services actually changed their lives. I know it had a huge impact on me. You can hear an updated version on Wednesday, April 21.

I’ve asked you to support the Forum before, but I’m doing so now with new urgency. Registrations are down this year, whether because of the economy or the flood of new competition or something else. The Forum has always existed on a shoestring budget and I worry about its future if it doesn’t meet attendance goals this year. Believe me when I say that no other event will send you home with as many new insights, ideas and action items as this one.

The organizers have made $500 speaker discounts available if you register with the code NCF500. They’ve also added a one-day pass for $395 if you register with code NCF1D. If you happen to be in the Silicon Valley area, the latter option is a no-brainer. Please support this valuable event and assure its health into the future. Tweet it to your followers using hashtag #ncf2010. And thanks for listening to this final plea from me.

New Slides for Your Viewing Pleasure

I recently developed a three-hour presentation on Blogging Basics that features a brand new slide deck. This presentation is much heavier on tips and tactics than any I’ve given before. It includes dozens of ideas for overcoming writer’s block, creating headlines and promoting content through multiple social media channels. I hope you find it useful. Contact me if you want a version customized for your audience.

Speaking of multiple channels, last week I presented the interim findings of my research on multi-channel social media deployment, called “Social
Marketing Goes Multiplatform.” The webinar was hosted by my principal sponsor, Awareness Networks, and you can download the slide deck about the research and several case studies at the link above.

Tip of the Week: AVS Video Converter

If you do presentations with video clips, you know what a hassle it can be to embed videos from YouTube and other sites into PowerPoint. In fact, PowerPoint doesn’t support the popular Flash FLV format natively, meaning that you must convert downloaded videos into WMV, AVI or some other standard. There are various tools you can buy to do this, but several Firefox plug-ins have recently emerged that make the whole process free and easy.

The one I’ve been using is called AVS Video Converter. The plug-in becomes part of your Firefox toolbar and with one click you can download videos from YouTube and about 200 other sites to your local hard drive. With another click, you can convert them to other popular formats. Then just embed them in PowerPoint and you’re ready to go. Open source is a wonderful thing!


Just For Fun Twofer

We don’t have a killer Just For Fun this week, so we’ll give you two mini-gems to choose from. The first is this video of a performance of The Nutcracker somewhere in Russia. If you’ve ever been a member of the ensemble at a play, you’ll appreciate the antics of the person dressed as a tiger at the back left. He steals the show from the two principal dancers. We can also assume he got his walking papers immediately after exiting the stage, but not before creating a memorable swan song.

The second treat is this collection of behind-the-scenes photos of Disney’s River Country water park. Shuttered in 2001, the park doesn’t appear on any Disney maps or signs, but it’s still alive if not exactly kicking. We love Disney and always marvel at the pristine perfection of its resorts, which is what makes the broken down wreck of the dilapidated River Country all the more incongruous.

A New Kind of Search Engine

/0 Comments/in /by

Andrew McAfeeBetween South by Southwest and the Cognizant Community 2010 Conference, I’ve heard some fascinating presentations over the last couple of weeks. I want to tell you about one in particular, though, because it introduced me to whole new ideas about how we acquire information.

The speaker was Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School, fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center and author of Enterprise 2.0. McAfee specializes in the application of advanced Internet technologies to corporate communications, and his observations about the impact of Twitter and Facebook on the way we find information raise the possibility that a new kind of search is emerging.

Speaking at the Cognizant conference earlier this week in Scottsdale, McAfee described how much the process of finding information has changed in just the last 15 years. As recently as 1995, the most common reference source we had was a library where professional human curators made decisions about what we needed to know. Information was not only scarce but constrained by space and the limitations of indexing systems that forced information into uncomfortable categories (David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous describes this brilliantly).

When the Internet went mainstream, we initially tried to recreate the curated model online. Remember that Yahoo started as a structured taxonomy designed by humans that organized the Web into categories. There is some value to that, but few people access information that way today.

Instead, we discovered that search engines are faster and bring us directly to the information we’re seeking. It’s amazing how quickly people have discarded the library metaphor that dominated our thinking just a decade ago in favor of search. In December, people conducted more than 4.7 billion searches worldwide every day.

A New Approach to Search
Now there may be a new kind of search taking shape based upon the ask-and-answer principles introduced by social networking. Twitter users understand this well. Let’s say I’m in Chicago looking for a place to take business colleagues to dinner. I can search the Web for restaurant reviews, but I can also ask a question of my followers: “Recommend a good restaurant within 10 minutes of McCormick Place?” Both actions yield useful information, but the Twitter inquiry may actually provide superior value because the response comes in real time from people I know and trust.

I’ve already noticed my behavior changing as a result of this network effect, and perhaps you have, too. When I’m about to make a major purchase decision, I often ask my Twitter followers for advice. In effect, I’m conducting a search against a database of unpublished information that’s stored in people’s memories.

If we can unlock and share this untapped resource, we can potentially open a treasure trove of new information. In McAfee’s words, “Your ignorance makes everyone smarter.”

Organizations that are experimenting with Web 2.0 tools behind the firewall are discovering that this is a remarkably powerful idea. For 20 years, we’ve tried to capture knowledge by interviewing veteran employees and storing what they told us in databases. That’s never worked very well because it’s an unnatural knowledge-transfer mechanism.

It turns out that people are more generous and spontaneous with expertise when they answer ad hoc questions from peers. Some organizations are beginning to scrap the old tools in favor of this free-form exchange.

The trick is to preserve, organize and rank this wisdom. You can bet that Google and others are trying to figure that out right now. I was a little mystified last month when Google acquired Aardvark, a “social search engine,” for a pricey sum of $50 million. Aardvark is sort of a structured Twitter; its members can ask questions of others who have a self-declared area of expertise.

Having listened to Andrew McAfee’s insights, I now understand better what Google executives were thinking. This doesn’t mean that today’s search engines will become irrelevant. Social search is an extension of an already-powerful metaphor, and it has some very exciting implications.

What do you think? Are there scenarios in which social search could replace the ubiquitous Google query box?

Free Webinar This Week, Then Meet Me In Chicago

Just a reminder that next Thursday I’ll conduct a free seminar from Awareness discussing the interim findings of some research I’ve been doing into business use of multiple social media platforms. This research indicates that there’s been a striking increase in just the last couple of years in the number of platforms social media platforms that businesses are using. Click on the link to sign up.

On April 8, I’ll be in Chicago for a luncheon that the local Business Marketing Association is sponsoring on how to do business marketing on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. Each speaker will cover a different platform, and I was lucky enough to draw the Twitter card. Hope to see you there!

Tip of the Week: Dlvr.it

Dlvr.it entered public beta test this week, and it’s a tool worth looking at if you’re interested in getting more mileage out of your publishing activities. Dlvr.it distributes information from your RSS feeds to Twitter and Facebook without user intervention. Other services will be added soon. So you don’t have to tweet the stuff you publish; dlvr.it does it for you.

The real power of the service, though, is on the back end. For each syndicated item, whether it be an article or a single tweet, you can see who retweeted the item, how many times it was distributed and how many clicks it received. There’s a metric called “direct reach” that measures the follower count of people who re-post an item. There’s also a calculated metric called “extended reach” that figures out how many people have tweeted your content using other URL shortening services. You would have no other way of knowing about this activity other than through by looking at server logs for referring URLs.
The service still needs some work on the user interface side, but the back-end metrics appear solid. I’ve seen a noticeable uptick in retweets of my blog entries since I started using it.

Just For Fun: OK Go’s This Too Shall Pass

You might be familiar with OK Go, a band that is known for its inventive and intricate music videos. They’ve outdone themselves with their latest effort, a four-minute celebration called This Too Shall Pass that features some of the most innovative ideas I’ve ever seen in a Rube Goldberg machine. It ends with paint guns being fired at the band members. Considering the amount of paint the the band members are wearing at the beginning of the video, it no doubt involved many takes. But the results — nearly 10,000,000 downloads so far — are probably worth it.

OK Go's This Too Shall Pass

New Media Demands New Leadership

/0 Comments/in /by

I don’t go to the South by Southwest conference for the sessions as much as for the people. The most interesting conversations usually happen outside of the conference rooms. One discussion that stuck with me this week occurred after a presentation by MIT’s Andrew McAfee entitled “What Does Corporate America Think of 2.0?”

While I was waiting in line to introduce myself to Mr. McAfee, I eavesdropped on a conversation he was having with the young woman in front of me. She gave her age as 28 and said she had recently been hired to coordinate social media at a real estate company where her bosses were mostly in their 50s. She was clearly demoralized and frustrated.

The young woman had been brought on board to get the realty company up to speed in the new Web technologies. She understood that conversational marketing requires a culture change, but her management wasn’t interested. Her bosses, she explained, saw social technology as simply another way to distribute the same information.

For example, she had been ordered to post press releases as blog entries and to use Twitter strictly for promotional messages. She had been told to get the company on Facebook but not to interact with anyone on its fan page.Her communications with the outside world were to be limited to platitudes approved by management.

I felt bad for this young lady and also for her bosses, who will no doubt lose her in short order. I suspect they hired a social media director in the belief that she could create new channels for them, but they didn’t understand the behavioral change that was required on their part.

Open Leadership

A couple of nights earlier, I attended a dinner given by Altimeter Group, whose founder, Charlene Li, co-authored the ground-breaking book Groundswell. Charlene was handing out galley copies of her forthcoming book called Open Leadership. In it, she suggests that management strategies must fundamentally change in the age of democratized information. I’ve only read a third of the book so far, but I can already tell that it will cause considerable discomfort in corporate board rooms.

In the opening chapter, Charlene notes that “to be open, you need to let go of the need to be in control… you need to develop the confidence… that when you let go of control, the people to whom you pass the power will act responsibly.” This notion of leadership replacing management will shake many of our institutions to the core.

The traditional role of management has been to control and communicate: Managers pass orders down from above to the rank-and-file who are expected to do what they are told.

In the future, communication will increasingly be enabled by technology. Employees will be empowered with information and given guidelines and authority to do the right thing. Middle managers won’t be needed nearly as much as they are today. Organizations will become flatter, more nimble and more responsive because information won’t have to pass up and down a chain of command before being acted upon. This will result in huge productivity gains, but progress will only be achieved when top executives learn to let go of the need to control and to accept the uncertainties of empowered constituents.

No Pain, No Gain
The real estate company’s mistake was in believing that it could participate in a new culture without changing its behavior. It saw social media as a no-lose proposition; distribute the same material through new channels but don’t accommodate the reality that constituents can now talk back. Any company that takes this approach will fail to realize the benefits of the media. Once its customers realize that their opinions don’t count, they will stop engaging with the company. That doesn’t mean they won’t do business with the company any more, but the benefits of using the new media will be lost.

I have never advocated that all companies adopt social media. Each business has a different culture, and some adapt more readily to open leadership than others. If employee empowerment and institutional humility don’t fit with your style, then social media is probably not for you. You may do just fine for several years without changing your practices. But if you choose to play in the freewheeling markets enabled by customer conversations, then you’d better be willing to let go of control.

Over time, I believe all companies will have to give up the belief that they can control their markets, because interconnected customers are an unstoppable force. In the short-term, however, businesses need to do what feels right for them. If you work for a company that can’t adapt itself to the concept of open leadership, then start circulating your resume. These days, there are plenty of businesses that are eager to change.

Free Webinar: Multiplatform Social Media Strategies

You might recall from a couple of newsletters ago that I recently released an interim report on some research I’ve been doing into business use of multiple social media platforms. This research, which will be ongoing through the first half of 2010, documents the extent to which businesses of all sizes are adopting multi-platform social media strategies, assesses satisfaction with this diversified approach and records best practices and metrics that are emerging from their early experiences.

In addition to quantitative research, I’ve conducted in-depth interviews with companies like Ford, Coca-Cola, Cisco and Sodexo that have yielded incredible insight into how these companies are changing their practices in developing their social media programs. On April 1, I’ll be presenting the interim findings of this research and discussing what I’ve learned in a free seminar from Awareness. Just click on the link to sign up, and no, this is no April Fool’s joke!

Quick Survey: How Do You “Sell” Social Media?

As part of the research for a business-to-business social marketing book that Eric Schwartzman and I are co-authoring (Wiley, late 2010), I’d like to ask you to take this quick survey about how you “sell” social marketing to your internal stakeholders. It’s four questions and won’t take three minutes. Promise. Thanks so much!

Tip of the Week: Google “Create a Document”

If you use Gmail, you might have noticed this new link that’s popped up in the right-hand sidebar:

It turns out that this is a very useful feature.Google can now make a document out of any e-mail message. So if you’re tired of copying and pasting the contents of a message into a Word file, click that link and you immediately have a Google Document that can be saved, edited, shared and even downloaded in Word format.

Just For Fun: Free Games

The US computer gaming industry is bigger than the US movie industry, which isn’t surprising when you consider how many people shell out $50 or more for a new game every month. But not all games are expensive. Gizmo’s Freeware has assembled an amazing collection of 70 free and open source computer games you can download. We’re not talking Pong here. These games feature 3-D graphics and simulations you’d expect to find in expensive commercial packages. If the recession has cut into your gaming budget, give it a look.

What Geocaching Taught Me About Social Networks

/0 Comments/in /by

The Joy Of Geocaching, a labor of love that my wife Dana and I have been working on seemingly since the Reagan administration, arrived at the publisher’s warehouse this week. This project began in July, 2008 and proceeded through many twists and turns – including the demise of our first publisher – before reaching the finish line.

Publication of a book is a good time to reflect on what you’ve learned and I realize now how much I learned about social networking from this project.

If you’re not familiar with geocaching, it’s an outdoor game played by three to four million mostly adults worldwide. Players hunt for hidden containers using global positioning receivers. The geographic coordinates of the containers – which can range in size from the tip of a pencil eraser to, in one case, a Nissan Pathfinder – are published at Geocaching.com. The photo shows an example of a particularly clever container.

All containers must contain a paper log, but nothing more is required. The joy of geocaching is in the hunt and the reward of finding a geocache is nothing more than satisfaction. Geocaching.com recorded its one millionth active geocache placement early this week.

Sounds simple and maybe a little weird, right? I certainly thought so at first. But as Dana and I began to geocache and then talk to people who love the game, we found that an enormous social network had developed around it. People were forming new relationships, repairing old ones, improving their health and re-connecting with nature in ways that would have been impossible without technology.

Passion for Cachin’
We met people who have logged more than 35,000 finds over the last eight years. One small circle of friends drove 12,000 miles – and flew another 10,000 – in a mad dash to find a geocache in all 50 states in 10 days. Another team spent weeks planning a speed run that netted a record 413 finds in 24 hours. Their record was broken just five months later.

We met an elite group of “extreme geocachers” who pursue containers hidden under water, on abandoned railroad trestles, deep in mine shafts and at the top of 100-foot sheer rock cliffs. Then there are the people who hide caches. Some of them spend days constructing elaborate themed networks consisting of dozens of containers. Others concoct puzzles so devious that we didn’t know where even to begin to solve them.

The social network that ties this community together is a quirky website run by a rather reclusive profit organization in Seattle called Groundspeak. The Geocaching.com website is basically a database with a few HTML pages and some query forms. It has almost none of the trappings of Web 2.0, not even photo tags. The only means users have to create content is its rigidly formatted description pages and comment forms.

Human Ingenuity

Yet despite those limitations, the geocaching community has done some wonderfully inventive things. Geocaching has its own language. More than 100 clubs and associations have sprung up in all 50 states and overseas. Geocachers arrange community cleanups, stage fund-raising events and help each other in times of need. They created “event caches” long before the concept of the unconference caught on. And they’ve done this without any prompting from above, using a simple website built around a simple game.

Here are some lessons I’ve learned:
There Is No Substitute For Passion. Groundspeak does almost nothing to market the game. It provides an online meeting place, a newsletter and some basic services in exchange for a $30 annual fee. Geocaching has spread to an audience of more than three million players entirely by word of mouth. The one million records in its database have each been meticulously reviewed by a team of volunteers.

It’s Not About Technology. The Geocaching.com website is five years behind the technology curve. It has some rudimentary Web 2.0 features, but few members use them. The website really does only one thing well, but that’s all its users ask it to do. Too much technology would actually complicate the experience.

People Basically Want To Do The Right Thing. Every community has its petty rivalries, but in interviews with more than 60 enthusiasts and casual conversations with many more, we encountered only one case in which a dispute resulted in the destruction of personal property (a geocache). In contrast, we heard dozens of stories about geocachers putting their personal safety in the hands of total strangers simply because the person was another geocacher.

Peer Recognition Matters. One of Groundspeak’s early innovations was to keep a running tally on its website of each member’s total hides and finds. This is a source of a constant friendly rivalry among players. Top geocachers not only know their own tallies but also the totals of those nearest to them in the hierarchy.The drive to be visible is an incredible motivator.

Simple Succeeds. I noted in a column last year the irony that Twitter, with its stripped-down simplicity, has been a social media mega-hit while the technically elegant but byzantine Second Life has faded into a niche. In the same ways, geocaching succeeds because it keeps the rules simple. This has enabled players to develop an incredibly rich variety of variations, and Groundspeak has commendably remained open to letting them take the game where they wish.

The Joy of Geocaching coverThere’s so much more I could say (224 pages worth, in fact!) about this remarkable community, and I’m hoping to develop a presentation around this topic for business audiences. It will include lots of funny, scary and touching stories that we learned in our research and show how online connections can contribute to more meaningful real-world relationships.

I need a sponsor, though, so if your company or group is interested in bringing me in for an entertaining and instructive one-hour session on how an online network can drive millions of people into the woods to reconnect with nature, please drop me a line.

Last Call: Early-Bird Discount at NewComm Forum

The NewComm Forum, April 20-23 in San Mateo, CA, if one of the best-kept new-media conference secrets. Just have a look at the speakers and sessions. This is an essential conference if you want to know what’s coming in this rapidly developing field. My newsletter subscribers get a special discount on top of the early-bird rate by using discount code NCF118, but hurry, because today is the last day for early-bird savings!

Quick Survey: How Do You “Sell” Social Media?

As part of the research for a business-to-business social marketing book that Eric Schwartzman and I are co-authoring (Wiley, late 2010), I’d like to ask you to take this quick survey about how you “sell” social marketing to your internal stakeholders. It’s four questions and won’t take three minutes. Promise. Thanks so much!

Tip of the Week: Geocaching Swiss Army Knife

I’ve got geocaching on the brain this week, so if you’re into the game, or planning to give it a try, be aware of the most powerful software tool available to serious geocachers.

It’s called Geocaching Swiss Army Knife (GSAK), and every serious geocacher I know uses it. Created by an Australian former IT manager, GSAK is a powerful database manager for geocaches. You can use it to store details about thousands of caches and select your targets with a high degree of precision. So if you want an easy day of caching with a few simple targets within walking distance of your hotel, a simple query will give you a list you can load into your GPS receiver and go. You can also annotate cache listings with your own notes, create a list of caches along a route, store queries for later use and see the caches you’ve selected displayed on a map.

GSAK is a free download, but a nag screen kicks in after a few weeks. Most serious users opt to pay the modest $25 fee for a lifetime license.

Just For Fun: Probably Bad News

The folks who brought you the wonderful Fail Blog have aggregated some of their best media miscues into Probably Bad News, a site whose tagline is “News Fails, because journalism isn’t dying fast enough.” You can upload your own favorite typos, double entendres and acts of sheer stupidity for others to vote upon. Many of the examples involve computers gone haywire, which lack the sheer hilarity of printed mistakes, in my view. But there’s some good stuff there, anyway.

Curation’s Growing Value

/0 Comments/in /by

Like many people, I was glued to my computer and smart phone much of last Saturday monitoring news of the massive earthquake in Chile and awaiting, with morbid anticipation, the possibility that it could trigger deadly tidal waves in other parts of the world.

As the predicted 4 PM arrival of the first tsunami on Hawaii’s shores approached, I turned my attention mainly to Twitter. Three years ago, it probably would have been CNN or the New York Times, but Twitter brought a dimension to the coverage that I couldn’t get anywhere else: thousands of perspectives from around the world.

A tsunami is a visual event, a fact made grimly clear to us more than five years ago when videos of the tragic waves that swept across Indonesia were posted on YouTube (see photo above). News junkie that I am, I wanted to see the events in Hawaii in as close to real time as possible.

Instead of clicking around to various websites or hunkering down with one and hoping for the best, I was able to monitor a constant stream of advice from people pointing their followers to webcams, live news coverage and reports from observers at the site. Most of these sources would have been unknown to me if it weren’t for Twitter. It was like having 1,000 eyes watching the media for me. Thankfully, the fears turned out to be unfounded.

No media organization would have delivered this kind of value. In fact, media organizations are hard-wired to do the opposite; an NBC affiliate would no sooner send viewers to a CBS station than a Ford dealer would send a prospective customer to buy a Toyota. But when the collective eyes of a geographically dispersed crowd are put to work without a competitive agenda, they can deliver a tapestry of views unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

Curative Value

This story dramatized to me one of the realities of the new media landscape that I think will have huge implications in the future: Curation is an increasingly important part of the information value chain. Wiktionary defines curation as “the act of organizing and maintaining a collection of artworks or artifacts,” but today the term applies equally well to information.

Think of it: A decade ago we had relatively few sources of news about what was going on in the world. Even in the first decade of the Internet, we still relied mainly on traditional media for the story.

Today, three billion people carry around pocket-sized devices with built-in cameras, many of them capable of capturing full motion video. Some of these smart phones can even upload videos in minutes to a server. It won’t be long before wireless live webcams are ubiquitous. No longer is our problem lack of information; it’s that we’re drowning in information.

That’s why curation is so important. Trusted curators who point us to the most valuable sources of information for our interests will become the new power brokers. Matt Drudge figured this out many years ago and a host of popular aggregators like BoingBoing.net, Digg.com, Metafilter and Fark.com have been building upon it with great success for more than five years. Twitter adds a new dimension because it introduces so many additional voices to the process. But Twitter is also imperfect; its great shortcoming is that no one can possibly keep up with it all. Another opportunity for curation.

Marketers should take this trend into account. Creating new content is important, but an equally valuable service is curating content from other sources. This demands a whole different set of skills as well as a new delivery channel. It also means ditching the “not invented here” mindset that prevents content creators from acknowledging those sources.

In a cacophony of voices, the leader is the one who can make sense of the din. That’s a role that any editor — or business — can play.

Meet Me At South by Southwest

My schedule at the big South by Southwest conference next week is packed tighter than a Tokyo subway car at rush hour, but if you’re in the area and you want to connect, drop me a line. I can always find time to meet with good friends. Here’s a link to the lineup of sessions I’ll be attending. That doesn’t include several evening events that aren’t on the formal schedule.

Author Seeks B-to-B Insight

I’m looking for insights and experiences in the following areas for the book about business-to-business social marketing that I’m co-authoring with Eric Schwartzman (Wiley, late 2010). If you have advice to share and would like to be interviewed for the book, please contact me. I’m particularly interested in case studies and field experience.

  • Market research
  • Gaining buy-in from stakeholders
  • Organizing marketing or the company around social marketing
  • Social media policies
  • Lead generation
  • “Social CRM” (customer care and sopport)
  • Best practices for measuring ROI

Tip of the Week: TweepML

Twitter Lists are one of the most popular new features of the micro-blogging service. Introduced late last year, they enable members to group like-minded folks into themed lists that others can follow. For example, you can follow Time magazine’s list of funny people or a list of NFL players on Twitter.
The problem (or benefit, depending on your perspective) with Twitter Lists is that you can’t follow every person on the list, only the list itself. The tweets of individuals on a list aren’t added to your main stream. That’s where TweepML comes in. This curated service gives visitors the ability to follow every individual on a list. So if you want to follow all 18 members of this list of b-to-b marketing thought leaders, you can do so with a single click.

The benefit of TweepML is being able to bulk up your principle tweet stream with people who share your interests. If you’re interested in simply driving up your follower counts, check out the lists of people who follow back. You can add a couple of thousand followers to your count almost overnight this way, although I’m not sure why you’d want to. Numbers for numbers’ sake is a pointless exercise.

Just For Fun: Those Wild and Crazy Goats

What? You’ve never seen a goat in a tree before? Turns out the evergreen argan tree is a favorite among Moroccan mountain goats because of its tree olive-like fruit. But trees aren’t the only thing these nutty animals can climb. How about sheer rock cliffs? Yup. Cars? Yup. Mama goats? Of course. These pictures will make you realize how very specific Nature is in designing animals for their environment.

Businesses Go Multi-Platform

/0 Comments/in /by

Chinese plate jugglersBusinesses are spreading their social media wings in a big way, creating lots of new opportunity but also questions about how to manage their suddenly overflowing baskets of online goodies.

Recent research I’ve been conducting into business adoption of multiple social media platforms is turning up some striking results.  The 53 respondents to a survey I posted in December report that their organizations are using an average of eight social media platforms today, compared to less than one in 2006. They also report nearly unanimous satisfaction with these platforms in the area of value for the dollar and performance against expectations.

These results are only preliminary and are based upon a small sample base. We’ll continue to seek responses to the survey and sponsors for the project as we move toward a goal of 150 total responses. People who take the survey get an early look at the numbers with a preliminary report to be released at South by Southwest in Austin next month.

While I can’t share any numbers at this point (you’ll have to take the survey to get those), here are some general observations.

  • Marketers are having really, really good experiences with social media so far;
  • The metrics they use are all over the map, though some consensus is beginning to emerge on what matters;
  • Few organizations are taking a disciplined approach to measuring ROI at this point. That may come later, but they’re busy with governance issues right now;
  • Marketers say Twitter is the killer app;
  • The next big challenge is to get procedures and organizations in place to integrate social media into other communication programs.

In-depth interviews with 10 organizations, including some very big brands like Coca-Cola and Ford, indicate that a federated approach to social media adoption is emerging. In other words, large businesses are developing centers of excellence at the corporate level to share tools and best practices but are leading implementation to individual business units. On Facebook, however, some companies are looking at the example set by Honda, which has taken a disciplined approach by building separate fan pages for each of its brands around a consistent set of guidelines and aggregating those communities on a corporate fan page.

The report on the first stage of the research will be available in about three weeks and I’ll let you know where to get it. If you’re in the social media tools business and are interested in co-sponsoring the research, please let me know.

Twitter for Business

When my friends at International Data Group asked me to prepare a seminar on Twitter, I didn’t know realize engrossing the project would be. After more than 20 hours of research and PowerPoint immersion, I came up with this 45-slide overview of how to apply Twitter to business. Among the topics covered are:

  • Creating a Twitter presence;
  • Building a follower base;
  • Building visibility;
  • Business uses of Twitter;
  • The future of Twitter in the enterprise.

I relied upon my own experience as well as helpful advice posted by Sirona Consulting, Small Business Trends, the Twitter Fan Wiki and Richard Caelius for the material.  In the Web 2.0 spirit, I’m distributing the presentation on a Creative Commons Attribution license for you to download and share. I can also prepare a customized version of this presentation for delivery as a webcast or on-site seminar. Contact me if that interests you.

Tip of the Week: PDF-XChange Viewer

Adobe gave us a great gift with Acrobat, but it also created new frustrations in the process. The free Acrobat viewer that Adobe distributes offers few tools to annotate PDF documents. For that, Adobe would like us to upgrade to one of its advanced products for prices beginning at $99.
If all you want to do is mark up and share Acrobat documents, though, there are a number of free alternatives. And the best one I’ve found is PDF-XChange Viewer from Tracker Software Products. The basic version of this free utility offers a lot of power, including the ability to attach sticky notes, highlight sections of the document and add drawings and pencil notes. Since Google now supports uploads of any document type, you can now collaborate on Acrobat documents without paying for a license or monthly fee.

Just for Fun: Best National Geographic Pictures of the Year

Even as the magazine industry craters, National Geographic seems to hold its own. The secret is perhaps its incredible photographs, which have a splendor on paper that computer screens have yet to reproduce. Here’s a roundup of some great recent photos. I don’t know who christened these the best, or even what year the title refers to, but it doesn’t really matter.  They’re just a pleasure to admire.

What Makes B-to-B Communities Unique

/0 Comments/in /by

Eric Schwartzman and I are deep into the research for our forthcoming book on business-to-business social media and lately we’ve been learning what makes communities tick. Online gathering places for business professionals actually predate the commercial Internet by more than a decade, having established themselves as an effective form of peer support back in the days of Compuserve and Usenet. With the addition of profiling, friending and other features of modern social networks, there are more opportunities than ever to use communities to bind customers closer to your company.

Communities have a lot of value outside of support. They can be used to test new product ideas, generate feedback, spread a message and enlist new customers. I’ve recently spoken to people who administer such successful b-to-b social networks as Spiceworks, element 14, AuntMinnie, the SAP Developer Network and others to learn what works with business professionals. In the process, I’ve learned to understand the difference between consumer and business communities. Here are some highlights.

B-to-b customers are motivated by professional, rather than personal interests. This may seem obvious, but when you think about it, there are big implications for the way you approach a community. The essence of many consumer social networks is playfulness, chitchat and commentary on popular topics in the news. Much of this content doesn’t play well in a b-to-b environment. While some community administrators report that political and even sports topics spur conversation, by and large the membership has problems to solve and little time to waste. Keep the navigation simple and the gimmickry to a minimum. I’ve always liked LinkedIn’s look and feel because it reflects its utility so well. LinkedIn’s look is almost aggressively boring, but the message is that it’s a place to get work done, not to mess around.

Engagement is difficult. The term “engagement” has become almost cliché in its role as the Holy Grail of social media marketing. Facebook is an engagement machine.  The company claims the average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on the site. That’s great for Facebook, but most businesses would fire an employee who did that.

Business professionals are focused on solving problems, and that makes their social network behavior quite different from consumers’. In its “Social Technographics of Business Buyers” study published about a year ago, Forrester Research observed that “buyers will participate socially when they need to solve problems or evaluate progress; otherwise they are off running their  companies.” In other words, a network that has a high “time spent on site” number may be attracting the wrong people (or may just be difficult to navigate). When building a b-to-b community, accept the fact that a lot of people may register once and never come back. Factors such as search engine performance and unique visitor growth may be more important than time spent reading because they indicate that your community is providing content that other people are discovering and finding valuable.

It’s all about the job. Back in my tech publishing days, I used to joke that when a CIO approached us offering to author an article, it almost invariably meant he was looking for a job. That observation was later validated by prominent business magazine (I think it was Fortune) that suggested that the acronym CIO actually stood for “Career Is Over.” I would later learn that CIOs were in almost constant job search mode. They were in visible and pressurized situations and frequently took the fall when things went wrong.

Today, a lot more people are in that boat. Layoffs are everyday occurrences and unforgiving markets have made job security a joke. Forget allegiance to one’s employer. Business professionals today are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to network, showcase their stuff and be ready when the ax falls. Keep this in mind and give people ample opportunity to connect with each other. Which is one of the reasons you should…

Enable people to build personal brands. Nearly every successful professional social network I’ve encountered has some kind of a points system or other tool for elevating the status of individual members. In extreme cases, such as that of TopCoder, the most innovative and productive members of the community can win cash prizes. However, it’s remarkable how much people will contribute to the collective simply for the visibility.  As Tabrez Syed, director of products at the 800,000-member Spiceworks community said, “It’s amazing how much people are willing to give back.”

Part of this is human nature, I suppose, but there’s a practical element as well. Visible contributors gain status that leads to jobs and consulting assignments. A few years ago, it was almost impossible to build one’s reputation this way, but social networks have created a way to build status based solely on a person’s contributions. SAP, which has one of the most impressive communities programs I’ve seen, recognizes its most valuable members at annual conferences. These people are rock stars, which has all kinds of benefits to them.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be talking to owners of successful communities aimed at doctors, human resources professionals and food service managers. I’m sure there’ll be more to report.

Upcoming and Ongoing

My new 65-slide mega-presentation entitled “B-to-B Social Media: A Quiet Giant” is now available on SlideShare. Feel free to borrow from it. I only ask for attribution. This presentation was briefly the most tweeted slide deck on SlideShare early this week, but fell off the home page a couple of hours later. Fame is so fleeting :-).

If you’re a member of the Public Relations Society of America, consider tuning in for my March 2 webcast on Consumer-Generated Advertising. This is an interesting topic that I’ve enjoyed researching. A lot of brands are experimenting with CGA these days and many are experiencing disappointment. I think you have to go in with your eyes wide open and be ready to kiss a lot of frogs before finding your prince.

Tip of the Week: Giveaway of the Day

Everyone likes something for nothing, right? It turns out giveaways can be good business, too. Software companies are increasingly promoting their products through limited-time giveaways in which visitors can download full-featured versions absolutely free. Promotions typically last anywhere from 24 hours to a couple of weeks. The idea is that paid upgrades and word-of-mouth marketing will spread the word better than expensive advertising. Giveaway of the Day is my new discovery. Subscribe to its newsletter or RSS feed to get a daily notification of a new limited-time download. There’s a parallel site for games. And don’t forget to bookmark my favorite free software site, Gizmo’s Freeware. Started by a retired IT manager in Australia, it offers a massive collection of full-function freeware that can address about 95% of the average PC user’s needs. A volunteer staff of reviewers provides guidance and insight.

Just For Fun: Ruminations

Aaron Karo, creator of Ruminations“There is nothing more frustrating than having a perfect comment for a conversation the two strangers in front of you are having.”

“It’s never more important to me to look my best than when I’m gonna be around someone I can’t stand.”

“I don’t understand the purpose of the line, ‘I don’t need to drink to have fun.’ No one does. But why start a fire with flint and sticks when they’ve invented the lighter?”

Those are just three of the gems from Ruminations, a website that accepts short, funny, original observations or anecdotes and then encourages its members to vote them up or down the popularity scale. Reading Ruminations is like listening to a nonstop Steven Wright standup routine. Many of the contributions are hilarious, but some of them make you ponder the odd, illogical and bizarre things that humans do. “How many times is it appropriate to say ‘What?’ before you just nod and smile because you still didn’t hear what they said?” asks one contributor. The site was started by author and comedian Aaron Karo (above), who has a newsletter by the same name.