Got a beef? Your blog can make a company tremble
tags: social_media_useful
The Haimlton Spectator has a nice writeup of my presentation to a group of local businesses earlier this week.
Daily reading 03/28/2008
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Daily reading 03/26/2008
How del.icio.us is changing academic research
tags: social_media_useful
A Ph.D. student and political activist talks about how she uses social bookmarking services to easily organize her voluminous clip files and to engage in conversations with other people with similar academic interests.
Sears lets Facebook members share dress designs
tags: social_media_useful
Sears may have hit on a good idea for marketing on Facebook: post popular prom dress designs online so girls can solicit feedback from the friends before making a purchase. What I like about this idea is that it leverages the personal relationships that are so important to social networks, adds value to an important decision that members are about to make and doesn’t get the marketer in the middle of a personal conversation.
Reference Pages: How You Can Use Them to Attract Links and Traffic
tags: social_media_useful
DoshDosh has advice on how to reuse content by creating reference pages targeted a specific groups and then promoting those as you would promote new original material. On the Web, remember, publishing is just the beginning. The real fun is mashing up and repackaging what you’ve published to create opportunities for additional promotion.
tags: social_media_useful
This is the single best resource I’ve seen on what’s going on in the world of social media marketing. I get WOMMA’s daily newsletter, and there are always at least two or three items that I want to read in-depth, include the two articles I referenced today. Highly recommended.
tags: social_media_useful
This New York Times piece addresses some of the most frequently asked questions about blogging, including how to choose a topic, how often to post and how to promote a blog. Concise, sensible advice.
Do-It-Yourself Logos for Proud Scion Owners – New York Times
tags: social_media_useful
Toyota will let owners of its Scion cars choose and design their own window sticker logos, based on a palette created by a graffiti artist. I guess this means graffiti has gone mainstream. It’s certainly an innovative use of social networks.
Good quote from the executive creative director of the agency that dreamed up the idea: The ‘wrong way’ to engage in social marketing is to “create an artificial social network and try to draw people to it. You have to walk into the conversation, and if they’re talking about Britney Spears, you can’t say, ‘By the way, do you want to hear about my new car?’ ”
How StumbleUpon Makes Sharing Easy and Fun
From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe by filling in the box to the right.
According to my e-mail service provider’s reports, a lot of subscribers to my newsletter skip my opening essay each week and going directly to a little item called “Just for Fun” that I include in every newsletter. Just For Fun is a link to a funny, offbeat or just plain bizarre item that I find on the Web.
It may look like I spend hours each week looking for source material, but my real secret is StumbleUpon, which is a popular example of the new breed of social bookmarking sites.
Social bookmarking is one of the hottest group activities on the Internet, and it’s capable of driving enormous amounts of traffic if your site is lucky enough to be selected. Over the next couple of issues of my newsletter, I’ll look at some of the more popular bookmarking sites and explain how they work. Although I caution against relying on raw traffic stats as an indicator of success, I recommend you make social bookmarking a staple of your promotion efforts.
Bookmarks have been around since the early stays of the Internet, having been included in the earliest browsers. Bookmarks are an easy way to keep track of information you’ve seen and want to return to, but as a standalone tool, they’re not very interesting.
Where they do get interesting is when you share your bookmarks with others. As I pointed out in an earlier newsletter, social bookmarking is kind of a human-powered search engine. As more and more people bookmark and comment upon the same content, a richer description of the content emerges. Also, web pages with a lot of votes can rise up the popularity stack, making them more prominent and more useful to interested people. Social bookmarking sites aren’t nearly as exhaustive as search engine indexes, but every single entry has been vetted by a person.
StumbleUpon is one of my favorite examples of this genre. Once you become a member, you can install the StumbleUpon toolbar and immediately begin flagging interesting sites. Your selections and descriptions go into a common area where others can see what you chose and why. As others vote for the same sites, those selections rise in the StumbleUpon hierarchy.As a user, you can subscribe to stumbled sites by category. When you click the “Stumble!” button in the toolbar, you automatically go to a random site that has been selected by other members. Sites that have been favorably reviewed more often are more likely to turn up in your random “stumblings.”
It’s perfectly OK to stumble upon your own site. This isn’t gaming the system, because your selection only becomes important if other people vote for you as well. If nobody else finds your page interesting, nothing much will happen, but if you attract enough interest you can draw an astonishing amount of traffic.
I found this out myself recently when I stumbled upon an entry in a blog I maintain called Newspaper Death Watch. Apparently some other people liked my selection. That blog, which normally gets about 100 visitors a day, received more than 1,200 visitors in one day, nearly all of them from StumbleUpon.
Not surprisingly, most of those visitors came and left in just a few seconds. But a few of them did stick around and the site’s average traffic levels increased about 20% after that one incident. This was hardly a make-or-break event, but it’s one indication of how social bookmarking can quickly generate a lot of visibility for your website.
Innovation Through Precision
From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.
Does the following scenario sound familiar to you? An internal customer has come to you with a problem. Her group is consistently missing deadlines because of poor communication. E-mails frequently go unread for days, group members don’t respond to questions in a timely fashion and too many meetings are required to get everybody back on track. The manager read in an airline magazine about wikis, and thinks they are the perfect solution. She wants you to get one up and running as quickly as possible.
What do you do? Experienced project managers will tell you that the last thing would be to install a Wiki. Better solutions may be available, and your job as an IT professional is to analyze the needs the manager has defined and identify the most appropriate solution.
Tony Ulwick and his team at Strategyn would tell you to take one more step back. They’d see all kinds of problems in the needs statement that was just presented. For example, words like “consistently,” ”frequently,” “timely” and “too many” are vague and subjective. Furthermore, the solution that the manager seeks — better performance against deadline — may be far short of the bigger goal of improving group performance. You need to define the problem better before tackling a solution.
Optimizing inputs
Strategyn specializes in helping companies optimize customer inputs to improve innovation. Ulwick, who has published widely on this topic, believes that most projects fail not because customers don’t understand the problem but because the people trying to solve the problem don’t ask the right questions. Strategyn’s methodology starts with helping stakeholders define needs very specifically so that vendors and internal service organizations can innovate from them. That means discarding adjectives and subjective statements, talking about jobs instead of outcomes and using very specific terms.
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Tony Ulwick |
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Lance Bettencourt |
Over the next two blog entries, I’ll present an interview with Tony Ulwick and Lance Bettencourt, a senior adviser at Strategyn. You can also find some helpful free white papers on this subject at the Strategyn website (you need to register to view them).
Q: You say businesses often respond to perceptions of customer need rather than actual defined needs. What are some governance principles you believe internal services organizations can embrace to address these needs? Is a structured approach to needs definition necessary?
Bettencourt: Businesses try to respond to too many customer needs because they don’t know which needs are most unmet, so they hedge their bets. An organization must have a clear understanding of what a need is. Without a clear understanding and a structured approach to needs definition, anything that the customer says can pass for a need.
Many organizations are trying to hit phantom needs targets because they include solutions and specifications in their needs statements, use vague quality descriptors and look for high-level benefits that provide little specific direction for innovation.
Customer needs should relate to the job the customer is trying to get done; they should not include a solution or features. They should not use ambiguous terms. They should be as specific and consistent as possible to what the customer is trying to achieve. It’s important that a diverse body of customers be included in this research because different needs are salient to different customers. The ultimate goal is to capture all possible needs.
Q: Your advice focuses a lot on terminology. At times, you recommendations are as much an English lesson as a prescription for innovation! Why the emphasis on terms?
Ulwick: What distinguishes a good need statement from a bad need statement is not proper English, but precision. If a so-called need statement includes a solution, for example, then it narrows the scope of innovation to something the customer is currently using rather than what the customer is trying to get done.
For example, if a need statement includes ambiguous words such as “reliable,” then it undermines innovation in multiple ways. Different customers won’t agree on what that means when, say, printing a document. Or they won’t agree on what “reliable” means in general. This leads to internal confusion and ultimately to solutions that may not address the actual unmet need. Customer need statements have to be precise and focused if you want to arrive at an innovative solution.
Q: You suggest focusing on the job. What’s the definition of “job” for these purposes?
Ulwick: We mean the goal the customer is trying to accomplish or the problem the customer is trying to solve. A job is an activity or a process, so we always start with an action verb when we’re creating a job statement. Positions can’t be jobs. In fact, there may be multiple distinct jobs associated with a given position. For innovation purposes, “job” is also not restricted to employees. We’re not just talking about people trying to get their work done, but all their daily activities.
The best way to get at a clear definition of the job is to begin with the innovation objectives of the organization or, in your example, the IT department. If the goal is to create new innovations in an area where there are already solutions in place, then the organization should understand what jobs the customer is trying to get done with current solutions. If the goal is to extend the product line into new areas, then the definition should begin by understanding what jobs the customer is trying to do in a different but adjacent space. Defining the job helps the organization to achieve its innovation objectives.
Next week, Tony Ulwick and Lance Bettencourt tells how development organizations can ask the right questions to assess customer needs.
Daily reading 03/24/2008
tags: social_media_useful
This video, which is cited in John Conroy’s iMediaConnection piece, shows the risks of viral video campaign. The producer points out that the same company that brought you the Dove Evolution campaign promoting girls’ self-esteem also produces the sexist campaign for Axe deodorant. You just can’t get away with being a giant corporate conglomerate these days!
Online social networks | Everywhere and nowhere
tags: social_media_useful
The Economist looks at the user-hostile limitations of today’s social networks and concludes that they can’t survive in this form. Having to log on to each service separately and being unable to communicate across them is an unnatural act. The article draws a parallel between Facebook/MySpace/Twitter and Compuserve/Prodigy/AOL. Ultimately, the “walled garden” model fails.
Keep viral video from coming back to haunt you
tags: social_media_useful
Viral campaigns can blow up in unexpected ways. In this example-packed opinion piece, John Conroy talks about how easy it is for companies to become vulnerabile to charges of insincerity and hypocrisy if they don’t consider all dimensions of their public perception before embarking on a viral campaign.
Daily reading 03/23/2008
Shot heard ’round the auto world
tags: advertising, social_media_useful
General Motors will shift half its $3 billion annual advertising budget to digital and one-to-one channels during the next three years. That’s a huge jump from the $197 million it spent online last year. Other auto makers are likely to follow. Hyundai has said it plans to double its online spending. More ominous for traditional media is that a GM executive recently told Ad Age that told Ad Age that the company will try to persuade its regional dealer ad groups to shift their dollars to digital advertising and away from spot TV.
The Experts vs. the Amateurs: A Tug of War over the Future of Media – Knowledge@Wharton
tags: social_media_useful
What’s the difference between user-generated and professional content? It’s becoming harder and harder to tell as bloggers become more professional and some professional publishers put out amateurish bloggers. Experts agree that the business models that have long supported traditional media are decaying, but there is no consensus on what will replace them. In the meantimg, the user-generated content phenomenon is booming, putting more pressure than ever on readers to apply their own filters.
Companies Court Convenience-Food Blogs
tags: social_media_useful
Even though food bloggers don’t get huge traffic, food makers are discovering that their influence can help make or break a new product. Many are reacing out to bloggers as a standard part of their new product evaluation programs.
The Future Will Be Twittered
From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe by filling in the box to the right.
The annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference in Austin, Texas is a showcase for geeks and their new toys, but the event held earlier this month broke new ground in another way. Anyone who runs corporate events or works in a time-dependent business should be fascinated — and maybe a little scared — by what transpired there.
The highlight was the keynote interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg by BusinessWeek’s Sarah Lacy. Evidently, a lot of people in the audience didn’t much care for Lacy’s rather interruptive questioning style or her cozy familiarity with the subject. They were also put off by her failure to involve the audience more directly in the line of questioning.
So they started Twitteringabout it. And as the interview went on, the comments passed between attendees took on a life of their own. By the 50-minute mark, the emboldened audience was actively heckling the moderator. Lacy was a bit flustered, but she finished the interview. When she walked out of the auditorium a short time later, bloggers armed with a video cameras were there to record her reaction to the audience’s behavior. Here’s a video of the entire interview, annotated with audience tweets.
Sarah Lacy is a professional, and she will be just fine. She posted a response on her BusinessWeek blog and noted that the incident was actually good for pre-sales of her forthcoming book. What struck me about this incident is how it portends change in the speed of customer feedback.
The Feedback Conundrum
Veteran conference organizers know that getting audience feedback is like pulling teeth. They’re lucky if 20% of the attendees at an event even fill out evaluation forms, and it can take months to tabulate those results. Events are intimidating to audience members; they don’t control the microphone and they can’t communicate with each other very well. Services like Twitter change that equation.
The reason events at SXSW unfolded as they did is because audience members were able to communicate with each other. That’s the scary part. No speaker likes to think of a scenario in which his or her performance is judged in real-time, although I can certainly think of times when I wished I could pull a speaker off the stage.
The potential upside of this trend, however, is enormous. Imagine if you could stage an event — whether a conference, media campaign, product demo or something else — and get real-time feedback from the people watching. Or what if you could tie promotions to timely responses: “Text this number now in order to receive a 20% discount.” The technology to enable this interaction is here right now. I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface of the possibilities. Twittervision, Tweet Scan to tap into these conversations or to initiate new conversations themselves. All it takes is familiarity and imagination. An excellent list of third-party Twitter applications is available at the Twitter Fan Wiki.
Daily reading 03/20/2008
Eric Schmidt Thinks Microhoo Could “Break the Internet”
tags: social_media_useful
In this Conde Nast interview, The Google CEO also explains why it’s unlikely Google would buy The New York Times, how it manages to hire 100 people a week and why he’s concerned about the mobile market.
Online Advertisers To Spend Through Turbulence
tags: social_media_useful
As bad as the dot-com bust was, the industry that emerged from it was a more potent advertising force. The same effect could happen in this recession. EMarketer sees online ad spending continuing to grow as the economy slows, with online video leading the way.
tags: social_media_useful, social_shopping
One of the hottest new categories of social media is social shopping, a peer-to-peer experience in which buyers exchange information about their favorite products and brands. This piece looks at why social shopping is so popular and what the big sites are doing to monetize their traffic.
Social Network Users Becoming More Affluent Annotated
tags: social_media_useful
The rate of affluent US Internet user participation in online social networks increased dramatically to 60% in January 2008, from 27% in January 2007, according to The Luxury Institute’s latest WealthSurvey “The Wealthy and Web 2.0.”
The rate of affluent US Internet user participation in online social networks increased dramatically to 60% in January 2008, from 27% in January 2007, according to The Luxury Institute‘s latest WealthSurvey “The Wealthy and Web 2.0.”
Further Evidence That Crime Really Does Pay
tags: social_media_useful
The owner of Georgi vodka said he is in talks to put the derriere of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s call girl on the backside of every bus in New York.
Draft Chapters of My New Book Now Available
It wouldn’t be fitting to attempt to write a book about social media without seeking feedback from readers, so I’ve started posting the draft chapters from my forthcoming book, Secrets of Social Media Marketing, online for your review and comment. The introduction and first four chapters are available at www.ssmmbook.com and I would be pleased to have your input! The entire book – consisting of 10 to 11 chapters and about a half-dozen “vignettes,” will be posted during the next three weeks.
I posted drafts of my first book as blog entries, but this time I’ve selected a wiki from Wetpaint.com. With the wiki approach, you can actually edit the text and make changes as you see fit. I’ll consider all contributions for inclusion in the final manuscript, which is due to the publisher on May 1. If you care to make significant contributions, you’ll be credited with a byline or credit line.
The blog approach worked wonders with New Influencers. While I didn’t get a lot of changes, I got plenty of positive feedback that gave me encouragement to forge ahead. Please be brutally honest in your edits. This book will work best if it reflects the wisdom of all of you, which most certainly dwarfs my own.
Daily reading 03/18/2008
Why direct marketing and social media don’t click
tags: social_media_useful
A post on Emerson Direct’s blog suggests that direct marketers are too focused on short-term results to realize the true benefits of social media marketing, which are improved customer relationships. The article suggests that direct marketers should be looking to YouTube to accomplish virally what their direct mail campaigns attempt to accomplish. You can get quick response and a multiplier effect as interested people forward links to interesting content to their friends.