Category Archives: social_media

An impressive meetup for The Strategy Paradox

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You know social media is mainstream when the big accounting firms get on the bandwagon.

This evening I attended a meetup for Michael E. Raynor, author of the new book, The Strategy Paradox. I learned of it from HeyLetsGo, a regional social network. I wanted to meet Raynor since he co-authored one of my favorite business books, The Innovator’s Dilemma and his new topic sounded like it might make interesting fodder for a blog I write on innovation.

It turned out, though, that the social-media aspect of the meetup was as interesting as the author. The event was an experiment for Deloitte. Held in a small upscale restaurant in downtown Boston, it had no guest list. Anyone who showed up was free to attend (and with open bar and a fine selection of hors d’oeuvres, it was a bounty for those who did). Promotion was through an announcement on PBWiki and news of the event spread entirely through word of mouth. Mark Doerschlag posted the notice on his MarksGuide.com, a blog devoted to professional networking, posted the notice on HeyLetsGo, which is how I learned of it. Anyone could have come: in that respect, it was quite different from the tightly controlled press events of yesteryear.

Deloitte reps delivered a short presentation highlighting the experimental nature of the event. There were no attempts to sell the company’s services. Everyone got a free copy of the book. I’d say there were about 30-40 people there.

I found the audience to be of surprisingly high quality, given the lack of restrictions on attendance. In addition to spending some quality time with the author, I spoke with several other attendees whom I had never met before. All were business professionals with a strong interest in social media and in the strategy-focused topic of the book. It happened that nearly everyone I spoke to was self-employed. Several appeared interested in the networking aspects of the event. All were bright and inquisitive and the type of people who will probably blog about the book.

I don’t know if this meetup will ultimately prove successful in promoting the book, but I was impressed with both the attendees and the discussion. I’ll certainly be looking at applying this idea to marketing my own book, which is due next month. For an event with so few restrictions, I thought it was a notable success and a testament to the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

Wikibon is a great idea

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David Vellante has some ideas about revolutionizing IT market research. A former senior vice president at research firm International Data Corp., Dave’s been running Barometrix, a successful startup focused on ROI measurement for several years. But here’s the new idea: a couple of months ago, Barometrix spun out Wikibon, a company that’s trying to apply wiki technology to market research.

The idea is to develop a rich research resource based upon contributions from knowledgeable people that are assembled and edited in a wiki. the first topic is information storage, but the goal is to apply this idea to other IT markets as well.

What makes this very Web 2.0-ish the idea of building a research product from content that is contributed for free. Research companies have always placed a premium on their ideas, and charged handsomely for it. Wikibon assumes that there are a lot of smart people out there who would be grateful just for the recognition. That is a fundamental Web 2.0: the assumption that good information doesn’t have to be expensive.

Dave’s competitors will no doubt hate this experiment, because they dislike anything that undermines their value proposition. But I think this is a heckuva good idea, and I’ll be eager to see how it turns out.

Author Jackie Huba on Citizen Marketers

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Citizen marketers: respect them, engage with them and make them your fans because they’re defining the message about your company and your products.

That was the message from Jackie Huba, co-author of Citizen Marketers and Church of the Customer Blog, who addressed the Social Media Cluster of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council this morning.

Jackie offered lots of examples of how individuals are influencing markets through blogs and online video. Here are my lightly edited notes from the meeting.

Who are citizen marketers? The content they create is actually branding for the companies they talk about. One reason we use this term “citizen” is that we see a link between this new media and the Bill of Rights. There’s a freedom to speak and a freedom to assemble.

Fernando Sosa and Thomas Hilditch of Chicago met at Second City because they were aspiring comedians. Their funky McNuggets video. “McDonald’s Nuggets by Fernando and Thomas” has been a viral hit. The funny thing about this was this was almost an accidental citizen marketer thing. They were going to perform one night and came up with this rap. The friends thought it was so funny that they recorded it, uploaded it and it got over 100,000 views. If you’re McDonald’s, that’s fabulous publicity.

Cell Block Tango is a homebrew video that’s had over four million views.

The MyBarackObama.com blog came out when Obama announced his presidential candidacy and 70,000 people signed up in a week. There are 2,400 self-selected groups but it was created by people, not the campaign.

Podcasting is another phenomenon that not taking off as quickly, but research is finding that heavy radio listeners are listening to traditional radio less. NPR gets over 2 million downloads a week. With podcasts, there can be comment around the content. Now people can collaborate around the content and have a discussion. You can’t do that with radio.

George Masters – in November, 2004 he was a vocational school teacher in Southern California but very interested in graphic animation tools. He created an animation about his iPod. Wired magazine picked it up and starting writing about a home-brewed iPod ad, saying it looked professional. The New York Times picked it up from there and then CNBC. It changed George’s life: he got an offer from a graphics animation firm and that’s what he does today.

Brian Finkelstein posted a video of a sleeping Comcast tech on YouTube and six days later, the Times picked it up. The Comcast tech was fired, but the big question for Comcast is why was the guy on hold for 90 minutes in the first place?. Go to Google today and type “Comcast technician” and the entire first results page is about the video.

Let the seller beware. If you have a bad product or service, the consumer has the microphone.

Mike Kaltschnee of HackingNetflix.com tried to get on Netflix’s press list and received a brush-off response, which he posted on his blog. When Netflix realized how influential he was, the company did a 180 and how treats him as it would a member of the mainstream media.

Jim Romanesco runs StarbucksGossip.com (subtitle: Monitoring American’s favorite drug dealer). He’s a Poynter institute journalist who does a lot of work at Starbucks. He’s actually scooping the media on some things. When Starbucks recently had some bad earnings, the company blamed it on new products that were increasing wait times. He posted about this and store managers began to contact him to say they had told the company eight months ago that this was going to happen.

Jackie spoke about a category of publishers she calls “the fanatics:”

SlaveToTarget.com is a blog by a 28-year-old mother all about Target. She writes about great new products and generates sales. People actually go out and buy the products that she recommends. Target ignores her. Why?

Rabid fans of the soft drink Surge launched a website called SaveSurge.org to try to rally support for a campaign to bring back Surge. They called themselves soda activists. They weren’t successful, but Coke did start to test a product called Vault. People were contacting the authors saying that Vault was a lot like Surge, so the group started VaultKicks.com to encourage Coke to go national. Coke eventually complied. Today, if you type “vault soda” in Google, nearly all of the links are to SaveSurge and VaultKicks fan sites.

There’s another category she calls “the facilitators:”

Paul Mullett runs mini2.com, a site for Cooper Mini enthusiasts. Last July, a mystery ad started running, inviting people to visit the site at midnight on a certain date. It turned out that BMW had given the site operators and a few other journalists a preview of the 2007 minis. At midnight, the site posted photos of the new mini to an enthusiastic crowd.

So who are these people?

We found that these people perceive these activities as “productive leisure.” For them, it’s a fun outlet to communicate with other people who love what they love. It’s a bridge from what they do in real life to their passion.

You might think that this is a lot of content. But there’s something we call the 1% rule: most of the content is created by only 1% of the visitors.

Microsoft’s Channel 9 is mostly created by people within Microsoft. They have 4.5 million visitors a month and only 11,000 contributors.

QuickBooks community has 100,000 monthly visitors but only 900 people who create any content.

It may be only 1%, but that 1% is very powerful.

How do you take advantage of this trend?

Reach out to your fans. Last week, TurboTax partnered with Vanilla Ice to get people to create raps about taxes. People are actually doing it!

Another successful example is Converse, which asked people to create videos about their Chucks sneakers and upload them to

conversegallery.com. They got 1,800 submissions and Web traffic rose 66%. Sales doubled in the months after the videos ran.

She cites the Chevy Apprentice campaign as an example of a viral campaign that didn’t work. Environmentalists hijacked the campaign and it spread into mainstream media. GM’s problem was that they didn’t reach out to people who loved the product. They just enabled people to be nasty. Reach out to your evangelists, the people who love what you do. Try the contest.

Invite co-creation. When Shakira’s latest album didn’t sell well, her record company took one of the songs – Hips Don’t Lie – and asked people on her fan site to contribute videos of themselves dancing to the song. They got thousands of submissions and the song became a hit. Was the video the reason? Probably not, but it was a great marketing campaign to use fans to be part of what was going on.

Create communities. Discovery Channel has a little-known division called Discovery Education that targets professional educators. You can download images and video to bring a PowerPoint to life. Teachers love it and Discovery Education has 70% market penetration in schools. But awareness among teachers was low. So Discovery Channel decided to invite educators to join a program – the Discovery Education Network – that gave teachers the opportunity to come to a program to learn more about how to educate with these tools.

Discovery also launched the Discovery Educator Network where anyone could register, get a blog, join a discussion group, exchange presentations and materials. They’re attracting people who love what they’re doing.

Q&A

Any comment on Viacom’s decision to sue YouTube/Google?

These clips are the new 30-second ads. CBS is one of the top channels on YouTube. Some big media companies get it and others don’t. CBS gets it.

There seems to be a total breakdown in use and abuse of a brand. What are the implications?

There are some rules that protect consumers from using brands, such as parodies. iPodMyBaby had to change their name to iPopMyBaby. If you go to my blog, you’ll find some brands who are sending cease-and-desist letters to fans. One movie company got the bloggers to actually take down a blog. It’s a confusing time right now.

How did you write a book with your significant other?

Ben has a journalism background and I have a marketing background, so it worked great. He did a lot of the background and I interviewed a lot of the citizen marketers.

What do you do if you’re a regulated company?

A lot of this hasn’t been sorted out. I was talking to a company last week whose lawyers were very concerned about starting a blog. One side argued that the blog was a personal opinion but others were saying it was company communications. There are a lot of CEO bloggers but can’t think of any in regulated industries.

How about ROI?

A lot of it has to do with word of mouth. Fred Reichheld has done a lot of work to say what percentage of a customer base would recommend the product to others. He comes up with a score he calls the net promoter score that measures the value of loyal customers. A lot of people are doing this just because they need to learn about it. I would measure subscribers to your content, people who want to hear about you every day.

How do you get the budget?

We’re seeing a lot of companies not budgeting for this. That’s one reason we see so much interest in contests; the money comes from the promotions budget. A lot of companies are discovering that the value of the campaigns is traffic to their websites.

What’s the next big thing?

I have no idea! How do you predict the next YouTube? All I can say is that the next big thing will relate to participation.

Why most viral video is stupid

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Bulldog Reporter‘s Daily Dog has an exceptionally thoughtful and well-informed article on the viral video craze that lambastes marketers for trying to add in viral buzz after a campaign has already been created. Author Andrew Foote’s point is that anything that doesn’t look genuine will be savaged by the community – and rightly so. He cites some excellent examples. If you’re a marketer trying to get a handle on the viral phenomenon, read it.

Dan Rather underwhelms

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I didn’t expect much out of Dan Rather’s appearance at South by Southwest and so wasn’t very disappointed that it didn’t deliver. It was a missed opportunity, though. There was the chance to question Rather about all sorts of things that the audience cared about, including the relevance of mainstream media in market with millions of voices, the low public perception of the media in general, the future of citizen journalism and the relationship between social and new media.

Instead, the moderator, Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake, opened the one-hour session with a question about Rather’s confrontation with Richard Nixon more than 30 years ago. That was an event that I suspect scarcely 10% of the audience even remembers, much less cares about, and it got the session off to a bad start. The rest of the hour proceeded through a short series of relatively tame questions about the state of journalism, along with rambling answers by the newsman (this may not be the moderator’s fault; sometimes interview subjects put restrictions on topics they’ll address). Rather had some good messages for journalists, but they weren’t his audience. The issues that I believe the audience really cares about weren’t even raised until a brief Q&A.

The highlight was Rather’s pointed criticism of what he called “access journalism,” or a style of reporting that trades off aggressive reporting for access to inside sources. Journalists too often protect their sources in order to become part of the inner circle, he said, and political and business figures willingly exploit this weakness. He blamed this trend, in part, on the decline of media competition as media ownership consolidates and the increasing distance between news operations and their parent companies.

“Very often the source is using the reporter and the reporter is using the source, but when the source begins to believe that the reporter can be part of the team, that’s when things get dangerous,” he said.

Rather said that journalism needs a “spine transplant,” a return to its role as an independent advocacy for truth and disclosure. The role of the journalist is as a watchdog, he said. A watchdog barks when it suspects danger but doesn’t lie down or attack. It’s a warning system that keeps those in power on their toes.

“Do we still believe that the documents of government belong to the people and not the people in power?” he asked. “The president is not a descendant of the Sun God. This person is elected by the people and part of what [journalists are] expected to do is check on them.”

Rather’s message was a welcome call for a return to the values of Edward R. Murrow, whose name he invoked twice. But I think the audience was interested in hearing more about social media. Rather’s own knowledge deficit in that area – he didn’t mention YouTube or podcasts once and appeared awkward using “Google” as a verb – was painfully evident. As someone whose CBS career was arguably brought down by bloggers in the Rathergate incident, you’d think he would have more to say. But the question about Rathergate, like so many others, never came up.

Why there'll be no social media bubble

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South by Southwest is my seventh social media conference in about a year (the others were Syndicate, Gnomedex, BlogHer, Podcast Academy and New Communications Forums in Boston and Las Vegas) and I’m again impressed with one thing: the lack of interest in financial rewards or profit motives on the part of the participants.

That fact was driven home to me again this evening, in a panel session called “Production Companies 2.0: Taking Online Video to the Next Level,” which featured some of the early winners in video blogging. In contrast to the industry panels of a decade ago, which were all about creating huge new brands and reaping rich rewards for the founders, this session focused on issues of artistic control, voice, independence and freedom from the pressure of commercial interests.

Ryanne Hodson of RyanIsHungry.com spoke about the importance of not signing away control over content to investors, while Andrew Baron of Rocketboom boasted about new features on his site that enhance social networking features and make it more useful to viewers. “The vast majority of our discussions about Rocketboom are about how to make it better for the audience,” he said.

Where money was discussed, it was always in the context of how video bloggers could manage to make a living from their craft. Rock-star blogger Robert Scoble actually drew oohs and ahs from the audience for mentioning that he had signed a sponsorship deal for his video blog totaling $300,000. A decade ago, such a small amount would have prompted snickers.

As a veteran of forward-looking industry conferences going back more than 20 years, I find this spirit remarkable – and refreshing. Ten years ago, the tony Internet industry confabs attracted swarms of bankers and venture capitalists looking for the next billion-dollar company. Entrepreneurs who played the game successfully at the time were rewarded with billion-dollar payouts. In contrast, Jason Calacanis, arguably the most successful social media entrepreneur to date, sold out to AOL for $25 million. That’s nothing to sniff at, but it’s a far cry from the payouts awarded to the founders of Yahoo, Lycos and Broadcast.com.

Last September, I wrote a column in BtoB magazine (the original doesn’t appear t be online since BtoB revamped its website) arguing against the probability of a social media bubble. “Bubbles need air supply in the form of venture capital and inflated expectations for investors. They also need a payoff. Almost none exists in this market,” I wrote at the time. I still hold firm to that position. Perhaps the big money is still waiting on the sidelines for a viable business model to emerge, but I think they’ll be waiting a very long time. The Internet bubble of the late 90s was driven by investors’ misguided assumptions that the Internet was a channel for big media and big brands to emerge.

In fact, the opposite is true. Social media is fulfilling the Internet’s promise to make it possible for millions of small communities to form around very specific areas of interest. People now have the tools to share and comment upon information that’s compelling to very small groups – and to do it at almost no cost. Political super-blogger Glenn Reynolds calls this phenomenon An Army of Davids and the terminology is apt. The Internet is all about specificity, not generality. It just took us a decade to realize that.

More Tagging Insights

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An interesting panel on tagging explored some of the applications and the social and commercial implications of tagging as these tools mature.

One angle that interested me is that groups develop their own syntax for tags and the characteristics of those tag lists are different as a result. One panelist pointed out that “social.network,” “social_network” and “socialnetwork” have different meanings on different sites and in different communities because the groups who agree on these syntaxes are using them to tag different kinds of content. On del.icio.us, people tagging “design” are referring to visual design while on Magnolia they’re referring to software design. Same tag, different groups, different meanings.

I was also interested in some interesting applications of tagging to more traditional collecting. Some libraries are making it possible for their visitor to tag books in their collections. This makes it possible for libraries to build super-catalogs that are much richer than traditional card catalogs. Some museum curators are finding that visitors to their collections have very different descriptions of what’s in them than the curators themselves. Tagging enables them to unlock that consensus of critical opinion.

One panelist pointed out that tagging serves a hierarchy of needs and as you advance in the hierarchy, it becomes more important to tune in to the syntax that others are using. At its most basic level, tagging is a way to save information. As you move into community applications, it’s important to understand and adapt to standards used by others. It’s also important to become more thorough in tag selection so that you help refine content descriptions for others.

Tags can affect traffic to your own content. One panelist noted that his sister’s photos tagged “voyeur” get more traffic than any other photos, clearly because they appeal to a base human instinct.

They’re also a way to find out what groups are thinking. Look at these tags for an album by Kevin Federline. Does this tell you something about this artist? Incidentally, Amazon has moved into tagging in a big way as a means to help customers find products that interest them. In this application, Amazon is relying on other customers to recommend products through their tags, without the intervention of professional editors or retail professionals.

Weinberger NCF keynote: users take back power

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Popular blogger and Cluetrain Manifesto co-author David Weinberger gave an enlightening and funny keynote presentation to the New Communications Forum in Las Vegas this morning. Here are my notes:

For the last 100 years, broadcast has dominated our communications and our democracy. Broadcast is now being put in its place. Many-to-many communications will become more important than broadcast.

It’s not about the content. We’re able to get past broadcast because we’re able to escape reality. Broadcast works because it’s constrained by the limitations of reality.

You can’t be in two places at the time, so everything has to have its own place. It’s a terrible limitation that the digital world escapes.

In mainstream media, there’s a limited amount of space. So only a few things get to appear and only a few people get to right. It’s the same order of information for everyone. Take away those constraints and now everybody can talk. We decide what’s interesting to us.

The authority system is changing. This goes back to the basic assumptions of our culture. The base assumption is that the larger the project, the more control you need. If you want to build something big, you need managers and managers to manage the managers.

The Web is the largest collection of human intellect we’ve ever built. It’s also the most usable and reliable. The Web is a permission-free zone.

Most of our institutions are built around the urge to control. But now the walls are down. A business isn’t the best sort of information about its products. You want to find other users. If you want to know how it is to drive a Mini Cooper in Boston in the winter, you’re not going to get the best information from the Mini Cooper website.

Broadcast gives the same message to everybody to drive down the cost of marketing. The only issue with this is that there’s no market for messages. Nobody likes being messaged. So we’re engaged in war with our customers, trying to make them listen to something they don’t want to hear.

Whole notion of markets has been affected by the notion of messages. Actual markets consist of customers and they’re talking all the time. We do it in discussion sites, mailing lists and consumer rating sites.

What is more boring than classified ads? They’re boring. But on Craigslist, we talk about what we’re posting in classified ads. And we do it through tags. We are so social that we even make bookmarks into a social activity.

Marketing, business and media are all about fake, phony voices. Conversations are open and honest.

What weblogs aren’t. They’re not about cats. They’re not about people in their pajamas writing about cats. They’re about things that we care about.

Encyclopedia Britannica has 65,000 important topics. Wikipedia has 1.5 million topics, including the deep-fried Mars bar and the heavy metal umlaut. Britannica is constrained by the physical because 65,000 topics fill 32 volumes.

Blogs aren’t journalism. They’re blank pieces of paper. The fact that they’ve been judged in the context of journalism is because the media can’t get past itself.

Journalists define their value in terms of their judgment. That has passed into the hands of readers. Since people first began exchanging news articles by e-mail, judgment passed into the hands of users. That’s our front page, what we recommend to each other. The Web is a recommendation engine and it has been since the beginning. A good example of how this plays out is Digg.

This week, USAToday introduced a bunch of conversational components, including Digg-like recommendations. But there’s only a thumbs-up, not a thumbs-down. This misses a key characteristic of readers, which is we want revenge. USAToday also introduced bloggers on its site. This is a titanic change, also links to things outside of USAToday.

We’ve been telling businesses for a couple of decades that information is important and businesses want to control important things. It turns out that NOT controlling the information actually makes it better.

Blogs aren’t professional. They are written sub-optimally. You don’t have time to ponder and polish. We give them pre-emptive forgiveness. There is an acknowledgement of human fallibility, the very thing that marketing messages don’t have. Marketing messages are perfect and we hate that. Humans are fallible. They make us human in ways that marketers won’t permit.

Bloggers with just a few people linking to them are little knots of community. Every blogroll link is a little act of selflessness. The Web was built out of these little acts of generosity.

Home page of NY Times: Every link on the home page links back to the New York Times, except those that link to ads. This is narcissism.

Blogs aren’t simple: Good marketing is supposed to be boiling things down to a few memorable words. But ideas aren’t simple. A Bush position paper 2,500 words long generated more than 2,500 links from bloggers. We take things that appear simple and make them complex. We’ve been living under this regime of broadcast simplicity. We’ve been spoken to as morons for years but we don’t speak to each other that way.

Blogs aren’t content – Content is really important, but it’s not just the content. If you go into a store and take a shopping cart and take all the clothing that fits you and nothing else and put it in a pile, they’ll throw you out. That’s because they own the organization. But if you put up a website where people can’t find what they want, they’ll throw you out. People want to own the organization.

You shouldn’t believe what you read in Wikipedia. That doesn’t mean it isn’t credible. If you read an article on something you know about, you’ll probably find errors. You look at how heavily it’s been edited. Look at the discussion pages, which have amazing learned discussions. What makes Wikipedia credible is that it puts up notices about articles that are suspect. There are more than 100 warnings available and you can create your own.

The presence of these warnings saying that this article isn’t perfect makes Wikipedia more credible. It’s more interested in informing us that speaking as the voice of God. It’s more interested in having us come to informed beliefs. You’ll never see these notices in the NY Times, Britannica or marketing materials.

The attempt to be infallible drives out credibility and makes us look like assholes.

Peer-to-peer is about us making the communication world ours again. Wikipedia is for us. It’s ours. It cares first and foremost about us. Craigslist is ours. People fall in love and get married on Craigslist.

YouTube is ours. It enables us to organize content the way that we want to, the way no TV channel ever could. It feels like ours. It exists for us.

Google feels like ours. That simple home page feels personal. If marketers saw that home page, they’d want to throw all kinds of ads around it.