The Social Web Analytics eBook
Philip Sheldrake of Racepoint Group sums up a variety of tools – both free and paid – that marketers can use to tap in to online conversations. There are some in here that I had never heard of.
I was a guest on a webcast about social software this week (you can watch it here; it’s free) and the question came up about what publications can do to build community. I responded that they can’t do much and they shouldn’t even try because, with few exceptions, readers aren’t a community.
Then I checked my RSS reader the next morning and noticed this item from Content Ninja that makes the very same point: “You cannot build a community around content.”
“Community” is a poorly understood term (just look at the variety of definitions in online reference sources) and, like many buzzwords, it is being overused right now. Mainstream publishers trying to escape their sinking businesses are clinging to the community life raft, hoping that it offers hope for a future. For some it does, but for many general-interest publications, it’s a waste of time.
Newspapers, for example, have historically defined their communities geographically because that’s the business model that worked. While people who share a common space on the planet are technically a community, they’re the least cohesive kind of community. Outside of a shared interest in certain issues like public safety or schools, residents of a city or town have little in common. They may occasionally form strong communities around common interests like a school bond or tax increase, but those groups invariably dissolve as the issue goes away.
There are readership communities that work. Subscribers to a special interest magazine about needlepoint or scuba diving are a type of community. Those people have intense shared interests and they are much more likely to bond together in an online forum that serves those interests. Publishers of special-interest magazines have the best chance of turning their readership into self-sustaining online communities.
General-interest publishers serving broad audiences don’t. Their strength is creating content and their best chance of building community involves giving people a chance to discuss, comment upon and contribute to their content. USA Today does about the best of any major newspaper at encouraging this kind of reader participation. It encourages readers to comment upon and discuss its stories within the the limited confines of non-threaded discussion, but the readers themselves have no means to create groups, initiate their own discussions or contact each other. There’s nothing wrong with that. USA Today doesn’t have the illusion that two million readers are a community. It’s comfortable with its place in the world.
Are virtual worlds old news? TechCrunch begs to differ
A lot of people have been dissing virtual worlds lately, but that hasn’t stopped the inflow of investment. TechCrunch surveys the scene and says that $345 million have been invested in new virtual properties this year – a record. The blog has a list of who’s getting funded and with how much. There are also links to a few of the players.
Has social media lost its luster?
The inevitable disillusionment is setting in with social networks, which has proven to be poor outlets for banner advertising. But anyone who is relying on these outlets to deliver banners is missing the point. As this story states, “The premium inventory on social networks isn’t a highly trafficked page, it’s an individual user.”
I used to share a building with this company. How “fast” the mighty can fall.
MediaPost Publications – Forrester: B2B Blogging Takes Nose Dive – 07/07/2008
Surprise! Corporate b-to-b blogs aren’t a cure-all. Forrester examined 36 companies that touted blogs a year ago and found that only half of them were sustaining the commitment. The problem: topics are boring, the voice is institutional and uninspiring and the authors don’t invite conversation. There are tricks to blogging right, but just yammering about your products and company isn’t going to stimulate conversation.
The Center for Social Media at American University has come up with some fair use guidelines that attempt to preserve copyright-holder rights without infringing on people’s ability to mash up content.
From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.
As the price of gasoline has raced past the once-unthinkable level of $4 a galloon in the US, everyone is trying to come to grips with the implications of this historic event. Boomers like me remember the last time gas prices tripled in the 1970s. It plunged the US into a protracted recession with 18% annual inflation. Such an outcome is unlikely this time – the economy is much more globalized today that it was in those days – but it’s fair to say that the ripple effects of this shock will continue for years.
But times of crisis are also times of opportunity. The energy scare of the 1970s led to a near tripling of automotive fuel efficiency and much broader awareness of tactics for avoiding waste. It also led to shifts in the balance of power in many markets. Small, efficient players seized the opportunity to chop away at the entrenched rivals and make amazing gains. Toyota, which was a bit player in the US in 1970, was a major force a decade later.
The next couple of years are going to be traumatic. The price of everything is going to go up. The market leaders will sigh and say it’s out of their hands, but you don’t have to be so sanguine.
In many markets, new leaders will emerge among companies that can hold the line on prices by making quantum gains in efficiency. IT will be a competitive edge.
Quantum gains don’t come from adjusting the power options on PCs or turning off monitors at night. They come from rethinking entire processes. The gainers will be the companies that can innovate in reducing energy costs in area like these:
Logistics – Moving goods from one place to another as quickly and cheaply as possible will be a competitive differentiator in many industries. The latest modeling and linear programming tools can identify the cheapest and most direct logistics options. Yield management can optimize resources and help companies choose which under-performers to discard.
Workforce management – Airlines have raised fares 21 times this year and that trend will continue as long as fuel prices rise. Business travel is on its way to becoming an expensive luxury. Back in the office, it’s becoming increasingly pointless for businesses to force their employees to commute to work each day just to sit in meetings. A big part of reducing costs in the future will be reducing real estate footprints, commuting costs and dollars burned on air travel. Technology has a huge role to play here and innovative firms that can create truly mobile and virtual workforces will gain a cost edge over the bigger companies, most of whom still barely even offer telecommuting.
Power management – When it comes to reducing power consumption, IT brings a lot to the table. Data centers consume an estimated 3% of electrical power. Moving processing tasks to off-peak hours, virtualizing under-utilized servers, redesigning data centers to lower cooling costs and switching users from desktops to more power-efficient laptops all have benefits.
The bigger opportunity, though, may be to outsource large parts of the IT infrastructure. I recently wrote about the rise of utility computing services that consolidate many customers into one giant data center. These services are so inexpensive that, for many companies, it simply won’t make sense to buy new servers any more. Even the fully amortized costs of in-house IT won’t match those of a cloud computing service.
Outsourcing –Speaking of outsourcing, the energy crisis lends new momentum to this decade-old trend. Faster networks and better software tools will make it possible for businesses to site operations in low-cost locations, including those with lower energy costs. Many corporations already outsource customer service and software development, but any function that can be performed by distributed teams is a candidate. Look at accounting, marketing operations, data analysis and even help desk as candidates. There is a human factor to be considered in moving work cross-country or overseas, of course, but the vitality of the company may be at stake.
What is your IT organization doing to streamline operations and reduce energy costs? Tell us in the comments area below.
Some coffee fans get grim delight in Starbucks woes | U.S. | Reuters
Over-expansion and high prices are no doubt a big part of the coffee shop’s woes, but the persistent tide of negative customer sentiment can’t be ignored. Bloggers have trashed Starbucks for its packaged coolness and its insincere corporate responsibility.The current political incorectness of coffee is probably a factor, too.
The easiest blogging platform in the world?
Online Journalism blog writes about a new service that makes it possible to launch and maintain a blog with just an e-mail message. The downside: limited flexibility.
LoyaltyMatch – Rewarding Yourself
Cool new service that lets frequent travelers barter their loyalty points for goods and services. This may be especially timely as airlines cut back further on reward options and increase fees.
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Businessweek’s Catherine Holahan writes this week about the big lead Barack Obama has built against John McCain in online visibility. While I’m not going to declare a preference for either candidate, I do think it’s worth noting the lessons marketers can learn from the Obama campaign’s success.
Political campaigns have long been about the 30-second television spot. Candidates staked their reputations and their success on a series of carefully crafted (and very expensive) image ads that ran in key markets. The high cost of this approach forced campaigns to bet everything on strategic media buys.
The Obama campaign has challenged this conventional wisdom. While the 30-second spot still has its place, it isn’t with the emerging population of young voters. When young people do watch TV, it’s rarely in prime time and they are usually fast-forwarding through the commercials. Perhaps one reason this group has become so politically disenfranchised in recent elections is that no one is reaching them on their terms.
The Obama campaign, however, has figured it out. Its innovation has been in understanding that mainstream media is no longer the bottleneck of communication. When candidates — or marketers — use all the media channels available, they can create significant impact without relying on traditional media or advertising at all.
The numbers cited by BusinessWeek are impressive. The Obama campaign decided at the outset to leverage every possible channel to reach its audience and to take every possible opportunity to drive home its message. The candidate is essentially broadcasting every waking minute. When Obama gives a speech, a staffer videotapes it and uploads it to YouTube. When the candidate is in the car, aides are delivering messages on Twitter. Between campaign stops, the candidate conducts chats on MySpace or distributes position papers on his own social network.
The cost of these activities is next to nothing and the young audience they reach has been almost completely ignored by other campaigns. Perhaps more importantly, the Obama strategy has centered on frequent repetition, which is a classic marketing best practice. Instead of waiting for the media gods to bestow attention upon the candidate, the candidate chooses to become the media.
What can marketers learn from this? For one thing, you are no longer a prisoner of the media. You can become the media. Secondly, if you choose a strategic combination of channels and then deliver messages consistently and frequently, you can get better results than by renting a half minute on TV once a week.
Finally, the Obama campaign has demonstrated the beauty of small markets. When you aggregate the candidate’s 43,000 Twitter followers, 60,000 YouTube subscribers, 1.1 million Facebook friends, 21,000 MySpace friends and 850,000 members of MyBarackObama.com, you’re quickly over 2 million followers, each of whom has volunteered for that status. If you can convince each one of those people to spread the word to three others, well, you do the math.
Four years ago, the Howard Dean campaign tried to leverage the Internet to run a grass-roots campaign and fell short. There were several reasons for that, but lack of tools was one of them. Today, the problem is how to choose from the bounty of tools that are available. The Obama campaign demonstrates that word-of-mouth campaigns can open a whole new world of possibilities.
Some of the books that have been published about social media over the last couple of years have undermined their own message by yelling at their audience.The authors believe that Web 2.0 is a hammer and every marketing problem is a nail. Marketers who aren’t getting on board with social media are either in denial or stupid.
This attitude ultimately works against these enthusiasts. Social media isn’t a panacea for anything and it isn’t even appropriate for some companies and markets. The challenge for marketers is to figure out what makes sense and how to build social campaigns into broader marketing programs.
Groundswell takes a constructive approach to the task. Written by Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, it’s the first social media book I’ve read that attempts to define an analytical and quantitative approach to evaluating and applying social media . While the authors’ bias is clear, their approach is dispassionate enough to make their message all the more persuasive. In that respect, this is a breakthrough book.
You would expect nothing less than a quality job from two Forrester analysts. Li and Bernoff propose an innovative model for online adult behavior at the outset and apply it consistently throughout. Their “Social Technographics Profile” is a breakdown of US adults into six categories spanning the spectrum of online participation ranging from uninvolved to active creator. The authors apply the profile to a variety of audience segments, demonstrating that not all markets adopt Web 2.0 the same way. They’ve also made a limited version of the profiling tool available on the book’s website.
Importantly, Groundswell takes pains to point out that social media isn’t for everyone. Companies with undifferentiated or commodity products that don’t inspire customer enthusiasm are going to be hard pressed to build word-of-mouth momentum or brand advocacy. For them, a support forum or thought-leadership blog may be the best value they’ll get. It’s all about matching the customer base to the appropriate online behavior profile, and the authors drive home that message again and again. This book is all about understanding Social Technographics.
Groundswell is rich in case studies, many of which were evidently gleaned from client interactions and reflect solid understanding of the business issues at hand. The book also takes the best shot I’ve seen at defining an ROI model for blogs and social networks. The story of how one customre enthusiast has saved Dell more than $1 million in customer support costs is particularly compelling.
I was somewhat chagrined to find that some of the case studies I write about in my forthcoming book, Secrets of Social Media Marketing, are also covered in Groundswell. Fortunately, the two books have very different objectives. Secrets is applied practice while Groundswell is more strategic. The fact that we both landed on so many of the same examples is perhaps proof that this market still has a lot of growing up to do.