Kendall Square, Inbound (Photo by Eric Kilby, cc-by-sa license)

For those not from around here, in Boston the mass transit system trains run by the MBTA, and popularly called the “T,” are generally marked with inbound (going towards downtown Boston) and outbound (going away from downtown). The exception is four stations in the middle of downtown Boston, where the concept of Inbound and Outbound gets a bit tricky, since (and this is very much a Bostonian perspective) you’re already at the center of the universe, so everything is outbound.

Heart of the System (Photo by Eric Kilby, cc-by-sa license)

What does this have to do with marketing? I’m getting there.

Inbound marketing is defined in opposition to outbound marketing, most clearly in this post on the hubspot blog:

When I talk with most marketers today about how they generate leads and fill the top of their sales funnel, most say trade shows, seminar series, email blasts to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and advertising. I call these methods “outbound marketing” where a marketer pushes his message out far and wide hoping that it resonates with that needle in the haystack.

[. . . ]

Rather than do outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out, I advocate doing “inbound marketing” where you help yourself “get found” by people already learning about and shopping in your industry. In order to do this, you need to set your website up like a “hub” for your industry that attracts visitors naturally through the search engines, through the blogosphere, and through the social media sites. I believe most marketers today spend 90% of their efforts on outbound marketing and 10% on inbound marketing and I advocate that those ratios flip.

While there was lots of great content at day one of the summit, it felt to me like there was a natural tension between those who still think of the job of marketing as being to spread professionally crafted messages – to shape the market by getting your brands’ story out there before or more loudly than anyone else’s – and those who have started to think of the job of marketing as being to humanize, to listen, to engage with communities.

A great example of the latter – listening to and engaging with communities in a real human voice, was Kodak’s Chief Blogger (@kodakCB), who talked about Kodak’s expanding social media programs, how they leverage content created by their customers, and their current initiative to create a “chief listener” to supplement their other efforts. Similarly, Justin Rasmussen (@thisisjustin) talked specifically about humanizing technology and many folks spoke about the need to maintain relationships and the important of human thinking (and empathy) over the importance of platforms.

At the same time, other sessions seemed overly focused on shaping, defining, and dominating the conversation through outbout techniques. This included a session on PR as a way of “getting the word out” (which focused on sending out press releases, and “social media releases,” but also noted that PR has to move away from essentially doing interruption marketing to the press on behalf of brands) and email marketing (isn’t email by definition outbound? I guess one does opt-in, but it still feels very outbound to me). The final session of the day, from Tim Street (@1timstreet) was focused on “how to make your videos viral,” and focused on spectacle, story, emotion – and the need to hire a pro to create video for you.

I really don’t mean to pick on individuals or categories – and I’ve worked with some very smart PR folks, email service providers, and video artists who totally “get” the value of listening to customers – but it felt to me like these sessions represented the outbound meme: craft professional content and push it out as a way of reinforcing your message.

While Chris Brogan‘s “Listening is the new black” was my favorite tweet, and the concept of dropping the “engine” from SEO my favorite concept, the #ims09 stream was quickly polluted by a variety of spam from the explicit and pornographic to the more subtle “we’re here at #ims09, come talk to us about our products” kind (which I think is still marginally spam – certainly “interruption marketing”). Twitter as a conversational, inbound marketing tool was being turned into an interruption based, outbound, spam engine.

It will be interesting to see the contrast between the ProjectVRM summit at the Berkman Center next week and the Inbound Marketing Summit. If Doc Searls, founder of ProjectVRM and one of the co-authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, can be said to represent former marketers who abdicated from marketing on behalf of the customer, does the Inbound Marketing Summit represent marketers who stayed in marketing but are nevertheless learning from Cluetrain how to be better marketers?

If markets are conversations, is the job of marketing to “own” and “define” that conversation by pushing out messages, or to listen to that conversation and help companies make better offerings more closely aligned to the needs of the customer?

What should the balance of “inbound” and “outbound” be in your marketing programs?

Outbound Platform (Photo by Andrés Monroy-Hernández, cc-by-sa license)

Maybe a better way to think about it is that there are good and bad ways of doing both inbound and outbound marketing. Email newsletters can be a great way to reach interested customers who’ve chosen that as their communication preference, and applying the lessons of professional storytelling (and the 100+ year history of film craft) to your company’s videos is a great way to improve their quality and potential relevance to users. At the same time, setting up “listening” channels in social media doesn’t necessarily mean a company actually plans to hear what users are saying in those channels.

Ultimately it comes down to finding the appropriate balance and sincere intent. Marketing has become humanized, and the voices of real people inside and outside the organization need to play a role in the conversation. If your intent is to dominate rather than participate, perhaps in the end it doesn’t matter whether you’re using outbound or inbound techniques to get there.

Like the original, it’s long (9:21 in this case) and as Kawaja said in presenting it, lends itself to the elegiac mode – he wouldn’t quite say media is dead but it’s hard to write a catchy lyric about the era in which large mainstream media companies faced downward revenue pressure:

Interesting video for the luncheon keynote at a conference on online media, marketing, and advertising – but it hits on much of the industry’s current malaise.

The good news, such as it is, is that John Battelle challenged Kawaja to write an upbeat song on the state of the media – send your suggestions to @tkawaja.

See Also: Wall Street Journal coverage of the song

Bruce Perens (co-founder of the Open Source Initiative) and Shane Coughlan (from FSF Europe):

Perens essentially calls the exclusion or downplaying of Richard Stallman a critical mistake made at the point of split between the “Open Source” and “Free Software” camps. They go on to discuss what the current challenges are in terms of helping people understand the core concepts of freedom underlying both approaches.

At risk of inciting a comments flame war, are “open source” and “free software” just two different names for the same thing, as Perens argues (even if you believe one name to be better than the other)?

It’s got some interesting stats, though I’d wonder if the self-selecting audience of folks who tried Twitter Grader isn’t a bigger problem in terms of the basis of the analysis.

More charts in the report itself, but here are two I found interesting – histograms of twitterers by number of followers and number following:

That puts me in a pretty small minority in both cases. Does that make me?:

a) Weird
b) Extraordinarily prescient
c) Just Plain Nuts
d) ______

Key question: What do you, dear reader, think about cross-posting to multiple blogs as a solution to the challenge of maintaining both a personal and a corporate presence?

Chris’s post focuses on “trust agents” who have a personal presence in a given community but also represent a company, and raises the issue of what happens when they move on to another company. Some folks blog on the corporate site, with the company for which they work providing the platform. His own situation?:

My own blog has been mine since day one. When I worked with Jeff Pulver, it was still my blog. With CrossTech Media, this is my blog. They might ask me to be mindful of our company and occasionally post information germane to my business, but that’s expected. I’m their guy. Why wouldn’t they want that of me? And I love writing about the work we’re doing, like the New Marketing Summit (plug plug).

But the blog is mine. It’s my shingle. It’s where I conduct my business. Most of this business is on behalf of my organization. I’m grateful to have a company to work with, and both CrossTech Media now and Pulvermedia before supported this stance.

At Optaros, we’ve always tried to encourage consultants to maintain a presence in various communities on their own, independent of the corporate platform. We’ve never wanted to project a kind of “corporate voice” that is impersonal and anonymous, and having people speak in their own voices on their own platforms helps project a more authentic, created-by-real-people-working set of voices in the communities with which we interact.

In addition to encouraging external blogs, we also started supporting blogging on the corporate site when it relaunched in early 2008 and on the Enterprise Open Source Directory, which Optaros sponsors.

It’s an extension of the same logic – kill the bland, anonymous corporate voice in favor of real personalities who write in their own voice about subjects with which they have deep experience – with a minor change in that we’re using the corporate platform. Optaros’ VP of Marketing Marc Osofsky describes the approach in a blog post: What is a Web 2.0 Corporate Website?.

(We did consider simply aggregating content from the external blogs of Optaros employees, but providing our own platform creates new opportunities for employees who don’t maintain external blogs, and creating quality content directly seemed a better long term strategy than simple aggregation).

I’m a big believer and supporter of both these positions: supporting employees who have an interest in maintaining an external blog as well as allowing employees blogging on the corporate site. But what happens when you’re writing a blog post that really applies in both places?

Do you:

1. Post it (exactly the same content) in both places, maybe even using an XML-RPC client to automate that process.
2. Post it to your personal blog, and refer to it from the corporate blog?
3. Post it to the corporate blog, and refer to it from the personal blog?

Sometimes I’ve posted the same content to both places – most recently my review of Groundswell – and I’ve done the “post once and reference elsewhere” approach as well.

In an ideal world I’d have time enough to craft (frequently) meaningful personalized messages for each appropriate channel – valuable content for each audience, uniquely tailored to that audience – but I’m not sure that’s ever going to be realistic. It also gets complicated by the additional presence of the Enterprise Open Source directory blogs – which means some posts I write (focused on open source software platforms, frameworks, and projects) could have three “venues” in which they make sense.

(I also bring all three together by reference at JohnEckman.com which is an aggregated lifestream – but that’s likely too much me for anyone to really subscribe to).

The easiest solution is to just cross-post, but somehow, honestly, that just feels not-quite-right to me, at least as a constant stream. Not everything I write on Open Parenthesis makes sense on Optaros.com, and vice-versa. Maybe the only real solution is to continue to muddle along, choosing each time based on what I’m writing about whether it belongs on my Optaros.com blog, here on Open Parenthesis, and/or on the Enterprise Open Source Directory blog, and whether full copies or references make sense.

Who would you hold up as successful examples of blogging on and off the corporate domain?

To start with the positive: This is a really solid business book, which sets out a clear methodology (including the Social Technographics Profile and the POST method with which Forrester clients / subscribers are already familiar), walks through a broad range of well explained case studies, and situates the business benefits of the different approaches.

Bernoff and Li have clearly done their research here, talking to a wide variety of companies in different industries about their experiences with “social technologies,” and they do a very astute job of avoiding oversimplification (never suggesting, for example, that every business should follow a simple formula) while also not falling back on the consultant’s refrain (“it depends”) or failing to give real, useful, pragmatic, and actionable advice.

The book is laid out into three key sections (you can see the whole table of contents online):

1. Understanding the Groundswell – in which they lay out the basic context of what has changed and why businesses need new approaches, as well as the social technographics profiles
2. Tapping the Groundswell – in which they lay out the POST method, and walk through all the ways companies can benefit from / leverage this new world
3. The Groundswell Transforms – in which they extend the argument to include how this new set of conditions can transform the enterprise.

Each section is supported by a handful of specific case studies and other examples, which are drawn from a wide variety of industries. There are indices by company and by strategy at the end of the book, so you can quickly find examples from your own vertical or place on the adoption curve.

Li and Bernoff are at their rhetorical best when they are describing the veritable sea change that the groundswell represents:

You cannot ignore this trend. You cannot sit this one out. Unless you are retiring in the next six months, it’s too late to quite and let somebody else handle it. The groundswell trend is unstoppable, and your customers are there. You may go a little slower or a little faster, but you have to move forward. There is no going back.

They also offer solid, sound advice to those looking to manage the cultural change required within an enterprise to successfully pull of “Groundswell thinking”:

• First, start small.
• Second, educate your executives.
• Third, get the right people to run your strategy.
• Fourth, get your agency and technology partners in sync.
• Fifth, plan for the next step and for the long term.

Not exactly radical or wholly original advice, but wrapped in the context of real business decisions made by people facing the issues, and informed by real experiences.

In short, I’d say the book is a must read for anyone from a traditional (by which I mean anything existing before the web) business looking to adapt to the internet age, anyone trying to convince their more traditional colleagues or bosses to adopt new strategies, and anyone hoping to sell such folks consulting and technology services.

Having said all of that, there are some minor blemishes – for example, when did del.icio.us become “a simple downloadable application”? Are they talking about the bookmarklets (javascript buttons for your browser to submit things to del.icio.us)? But that is really an exception in an otherwise well researched and well documented book.

Rather more difficult to ignore is the almost complete absence of Free and Open Source Software from a discussion of “Social Technologies.” There is a section titled “people collaborating: wikis and open source” (the lack of title capitalization is in the original – even the book title is in all lower case), but it really should be called “people collaborating: wikis.” Granted, Bernoff and Li aren’t technology analysts per se – in the sense of analyzing development approaches and platforms – and in the POST methodology technology is the last element. But I’d argue that it is critical to understand the context of mass collaboration rising out of open source communities in order to better understand the mechanisms by which communities are created and sustained, thrive or fail, and interact with each other in an online world.

Instead, the whole of the analysis of this phenomenon comes to a paragraph in which we learn:

The same sort of cooperation [as that which drives wikipedia and other wikis] drives other forms of online collaboration, including open-source software products like Linux (a version of the Unix operating system), Apache (a Web server), and Firefox (a Web browser). In open source, technically adept developers combine their efforts to build, test, and improve software products, and the code is available for all to see. Before you scoff at this form of development, recognize that Linux now underpins many Web servers and consumer electronics devices, including TiVo; Apache is the dominant Web server software on the Internet, and Firefox has gone from zero to over 25 percent market share in less than two years.

That’s it, basically, for open source. No analysis of the massive collaboration efforts behind those projects, or how they are managed, arise, die, become businesses, become communities, etc. No analysis of how these and other open source projects provide either models or anti-patterns to be avoided. Not even any analysis of how the open source development methodology and licensing practices have influenced other cultural practices through things like creative commons licensing, open access, and challenges to many fundamental corporate notions of intellectual property.

Bernoff and Li seem to assume that their reader has no familiarity with and no interest in development – which may be accurate – and don’t seem to have much interest themselves in the impact open source can and has had.

(Readers interested in these issues would do well to check out Chris Kelty’s Two Bits and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody – the former on the cultural significance of free software, the latter on how technology changes have enabled and facilitated changes in social organization – both of which I hope to write more about in the future).

What ultimately left me dissatisfied with the book, however – and here we return to the question of whether this reveals more about me as a reviewer than the text – is that it never steps outside its tightly constructed frame, which essentially comes down to “how do I use this to improve my business”?

It isn’t that I expected, or even wanted, Li and Bernoff to craft a revolutionary manifesto – a sort of Cluetrain II or Wealth of Networks for the MBA set – but that the tone is so relentless in its focus it can begin to feel like the only valid reason for the Internet’s existence (and the only valid use of it now that it exists) is to sell more widgets, make people feel better about the widgets they’ve bought, and maybe help a few companies make better widgets.

It ended up reminding me of one of my favorite 80s movie scenes, from Say Anything, when John Cusack is asked what he wants to do with his life, and answers:

I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.

Again, to be fair, I’ve got no problem with businesses trying to understand how to adapt to the changing environment the Internet and social media represent, or even with helping businesses figure out how to leverage these new approaches to generate profit or awareness – in fact, that’s a fair description of what I do at Optaros, and what Optaros does more broadly.

It’s just that in the middle of the focus on tapping, listening to, talking with, energizing, embracing, and connecting with the Groundswell (every single chapter title involves doing something with the groundswell or enabling it to do something to your company), there’s precious little exploration of what is driving the Groundswell in the first place, or what it means more broadly as a social and historical phenomenon. Why the groundswell now? What impact is it having on us as a culture, other than just what toothpaste we think is cool?

(Yes, there is a section in the opening chapter on what the groundswell is and why it is happening now – but it is reduced to this level of causality: “These three trends – people’s desire to connect new interactive technologies, and online economics – have created a new era.”)

Ultimately, Groundswell presents “the groundswell” as something which is happening to us – something we are not creating but either passively suffering from or being carried by, like a surfer on a wave. It seems almost a force of a nature – an inevitable technology tsunami – rather than a collective project in which we are all engaged in actively constructing a specific historical reality.

So is it fair to critique Groundswell for staying within its own well-defined purpose? To criticize it for not being The Wealth of Networks?

If what you’re looking for is an eminently readable, well researched, pragmatic guide to business strategies for dealing with this set of social changes, Groundswell delivers. But in doing so, I wish it had taken more time to step outside the framing of this social change as a kind of natural consequence of the inevitable march of technology and understand the set of changes themselves in greater detail.

Disclosures: Forrester sent me a review copy of the book, as they did to a number of bloggers. Optaros co-sponsored a webinar with Josh Bernoff earlier this year on the topic of open innovation. Several of the companies discussed as case studies are or have been Optaros clients, though Optaros was not involved in any of the specific projects described. Swisscom Mobile Labs, an Optaros client project, was a finalist in the groundswell awards. Optaros is a Forrester client. I know a number of people who work there or have worked there.

I got in late yesterday due to some flight issues, but managed to catch three good presentations.

First was Michael Silverman of Duo Consulting (who co-manage the conference along with The Content Wrangler). He spoke on the “new rules of marketing”:

| View | Upload your own

Although this was, to be honest, a pretty well known story for me, Silverman’s presentation wraps it up nicely into some actionable rules. (It probably didn’t help that I’m reading Groundswell at the moment – review to come – and know most of the books and articles Silverman draws on pretty well).

Then I saw Darren Barefoot do “29 Web 2.0 Tools” session. No slides for this, just a highly interactive session. Barefoot put the names of 29 tools up on a clothesline, and basically let the audience drive the discussion, talking about each tool as it came up.

It’s actually a very effective format – might have been good to have someone working with him who had an internet connection and projected the sites on the screen as he discussed them – wouldn’t want it to detract from or compete with the discussion but it would help the audience visualize. I don’t know if it si a good sign or makes me a new media douchebag, but I was familiar with all 29 tools.

Finally, Seth Gottlieb presented on the Open Source, Java-based CMS market:

| View | Upload your own

Seth’s slides don’t really adequately cover the value in his talk – much of which is in the color commentary he offers live. If you haven’t already, you should check out his report as well.

I’m presenting later today – will post those slides here as well.

The video below is from the “There’s a New Conversation” event in NY on Feb. 13th this year, which was put on by The Conversatin Group. It’s Jake McKee, formerly Global Community Relations Specialist for Lego, talking about how Lego learned to engage with its adult fan community during his time there.

It’s a great case study of how he overcame internal resistance and convinced Lego to connect with and benefit from fan communities rather than trying to control them or shut them down. If it were up to me this would be mandatory viewing for all marketing teams and legal teams at consumer goods companies. Of course much of it applies outside consumer goods too.

If you use Miro (and you should), use this url to add The Conversation Group’s channel: http://tcg.blip.tv/rss

Registration (free) is required.

Description:

February 27, 2008 2–3pm – Are Your Products Open or Closed? How to Respond to the New Openness– at Online

Overview: Companies in many industries are struggling to determine how best to deal with the power that social computing gives their customers as an open forum to share how they feel about products with millions of fellow consumers. This newfound power in the hands of customers is creating an openness of information (positive and negative) that is having a dramatic impact on the success of new products and overall company revenues.

Join Josh Bernoff, Forrester Vice President, Principal Analyst and co-author of “Groundswell,” along with Colby Dyess, Product Manager from Endeca for this live TechRepublic Webcast to hear how leading companies such as Endeca and Swisscom Mobile are engaging with their customers to drive new product innovation through the “new openness”.

Tags: open innovation open source community marketing product development social computing customers groundswell forrester Josh Bernoff Colby Dyess Endeca Optaros

This hCalendar event brought to you by the hCalendar Creator.

This Webcast will address these important topics followed by interactive Q&A:

• ROI of Engaging with Your Customers for New Product Innovation
• What You Should Do to Tap Into Your Customers for Innovation
• Case Study: Building an Online Customer Community–Endeca’s Developer Network “EDeN”

I first requested one about a year ago and recently re-requested it.

We’ve got an Optaros group, and I know we could set up a page for people to become fans of Optaros, but what I really want is for us to be a network.

Can anyone who has successfully created a network share any tips on what they did?

Panelists:

• Bruce Leichtman, Leichtman Research Group
• Stacey Lynn Schulman, Turner Broadcasting
• Maury Giles, GSD&M Idea City
• Jim Nail, Cymfony

Description:

As media companies have come to recognize the value of participatory audiences, they have searched for matrixes by which to measure engagement with their properties. A model based on impressions is giving way to new models which seek to account for the range of different ways consumers engage with entertainment content. But nobody is quite clear how you can “count” engaged consumers or how you can account for various forms and qualities of engagement. Over the past several years, a range of different companies have proposed alternative systems for measuring engagement. What are the strengths and limits of these competing models? What aspects of audience activity do they account for? What value do they place on different forms of engagement?

—
Notes:

Jim Nail – Cymfony is a brand monitoring company – tell enterprises what users are saying about them.

Maury Giles – GSD&M Idea City – ad agency / interactive agency in Austin. Background in political campaigns, where measurement is paramount.

Stacey Lynn Schulman – new to Turner. Previously at Interpublic group – consumer experience practice. Measurement in the old media are well understood and stable. Walks through history of shifts in measurement – movement into multi-network world (cable), move to “people meters” in households, etc.

Bruce Leichtman – based in Duram NH. Boutique analyst firm focused on future of entertainment. To understand the future we need to begin with the present. Talked about needing to avoid the sample of one problem. We don’t represent the masses – need to focus on quantitative research across broad audiences.

—

SF – Place to start. The Writers’ Strike.

BL – The writer’s strike over the 4.6 billion in revenue that could occur – but the hockey stick curves aren’t real yet.

SLS – We don’t know how big the pie will be – but that doesn’t mean that writers should have a piece of the pie. We have difficulty really quantifying this stuff – especially when it comes to fusing samples across media. People starting online then watching tv, rewatching things they downloaded, etc – we don’t have any way to capture this information reliably across channels.

MG – For me it comes down to how you measure success. Are we going to stick with eyeballs, audience size, etc., or can we adjust to a different way of measuring to understand the control users have. The old paradigm, based on eyeballs, is falling apart – rather than tracking the diffusion of media throughout channels, we focus on what is enabled by all these niche audiences. If we focus on the impact of content on niche audiences rather than mass media – it’s not about how many people we reach as opposed to our impact on niche markets.

JN – the challenge is that those hockey stick graphs are just opinions expressed in numeric form – the real discussion should be not about the size of the chart, but about what assumptions are made to generate them and what direction they indicate things are changing. But we cannot forget about the consumer and how rapidly they change, which is a slowing effect on change, no matter how much the technology changes. This has to come down to the number of times something is viewed, downloaded, etc – not a flat fee since we don’t know how much revenue this will generate.

—

SF – Is it someone’s fault that their isn’t a viable revenue stream?

JN – The networks have been in control for 50+ years. As their control and revenue stream erodes, they are struggling. It isn’t anyone’s fault it is just a fact of life.

BL – 6 minutes of video/day is the mean number in terms of what users are viewing. People talk alot about the YouTube phenomenon, but not much about “Don’t Forget The Lyrics” – but that is still something which got more eyeball time than YouTube did. It’s more about evolution than revolution.

SLS – When I was on the agency side, clients just wanted to be on the next big shiny object.

JN – I call that the GMOOT – get me one of those.

SLS – What happens is that the industry gets this sense that everybody is in these spaces and that they have to be in these spaces. But that’s because 80% of their mindshare is on that big shiny object. But the reality is that 80% of their dollars are in that traditional media, because thats where the audience is. They want to see these new bright shiny objects expressed in terms they understand – which means they want the market numbers they get for traditional media.

JN – During the bust, people were pointing at companies which spent money online going out of business failing and saying see – online advertising doesn’t work. At the same time, however, the % of time people spend online keeps increasing – the percentage of consumers media consumption online outpaces the marketing spend.

SLS – the flipside of the bright shiny objects crowd is the lean back arms crossed posture – the marketing folks who don’t even believe anything new is important or signficant. Yeah, but everytime I put that commercial in old media I sell X amount of Y.

BL – but as we see these things evolving, old media is not dead. We just saw the largest cable event ever in history – high school musical 2. Audience segmentation is important, and we can’t think that we are the audience.

JN – Appointment TV isn’t dead – it is just that the user is setting the appointment.

–

SF – Jericho / CBS. Fans rallying for a show. But also fans saying we’re watching, how come our eyeballs don’t count?

SLS – Engagement is the beginning of that. Trying to determine how much people like a show based on how much they talk about it. When Lost first was being talked about, everyone thought it wasn’t going to work – but our analysis of buzz said that it was going to work. In that case it turned out to be right. But there are also small, highly engaged audiences in some cases – Veronica Mars, The Office, Friday Night Lights – these are shows which ranked very high in buzz, but small in audience. The small engaged fan cultures are something we should be looking at. We also can’t forget that consumers are themselves channels – they are distributing content as well.

MG – The content seller has a need to validate the value of the content. What we’re trying to do is measure engagement in a context – what role that engagement has in the decision cycle of the consumer. Is it having an impact on how they purchase?

BL – if it doesn’t sell, today, tomorrow, or at some later point, it isn’t worth it for the agency.

JN – but branding does work. People deny it, but we’ve seen it time and time again – they may see an ad on toilet paper, and then later they pick that brand in the store – without even knowing it.

—

JN – people don’t like to talk about advertising. But they do talk about what is important to them, and how they talk about what’s important to them, it helps you figure out how to engage with them and how to position your products and where to position your products. Criticism is a useful metric because users who are critical of your product they tell you that because they want you to get better. Engagement is about also listening – you have to let go of that total control and develop a relationship with consumers where they help create.

SLS – We need to question this notion that as a marketer you have a portfolio of brands. What if we thought instead about having sets of consumers whose needs were meeting. What we have, what our asset is, is the consumers we are serving, not this portfolio of products we’re trying to sell.

JN – the control marketers or advertisers ever had was always a myth. We never had the control we classically thought we did. Now we can see that co-creation of meaning happening in much clearer ways. You cannot just surround people with integrated marketing messages and think that we control the conversation.

BL – Between DVR and On-Demand, about 5% is when the user wants it – the other 95% is viewed on the schedule created by the networks. Even that push is due to it being pushed by providers (cable box integration, dish integration) not end consumer demand (stand alone TiVo box). Even as the number of DVR’s grow, the % of viewing which is time shifted, it will still be only 15% of all viewing time even when we have 50 million DVRs in households.

—

Audience questions:

Q: When you make predictions about audiences over time, how do you account for the aging of the audience over time as well?

BL – My forecasts are based on demand and supply – in a 3-5 year time frame those issues don’t impact as much.

SLS – But it isn’t always about studying a single generation across time – the millenials have an impact across time, but when you project their teenage behavior over time, don’t assume they don’t change.

JN – it’s valuable for how to connect to them now, not what they will be like in 30 years or even 10.

—-

Q: What about the kids market? What kind of research are you doing in terms of how to reach that audience?

SLS – More difficult because there are restrictions and regulations about doing research with children, especially in the context of trying to sell them stuff.

—

Q: What about users recommending things to each other and how you can track that?

SLS – recommending products is something being enabled in facebook. It isn’t about the reach of one distribution mechanism but the reaggregation of all the various sums.

JN – 80% of word of mouth is still offline, so even measuring online word of mouth is only a proxy for the recommendations people make. If you think about the never ending friending report about MySpace, the revelation in that report to me was the importance of the widgets and portability – people putting that widget in their profile is so much more important than having your own brand page or banner ads.

MY – You also have to be very careful about that “facilitate” role – if you’re actually creating it and pretending people popularly / virally created it you’ve got a problem. I love the Nike/Apple iPod integration example – if we can provide a real service that happens to also be branded that is the loyalty solution. Facilitating the experience in order to drive to real results. The goal of the campaign is to have a specific impact on consumer behavior and that behavior might include telling friends about something, subscribing to a feed, etc.

SLS – Mass media isn’t going anywhere, even as we hear alot about fragmentation.

BL – We hear about how cable is beating broadcast – well, there are 4 broadcast networks and 100 cable channels – shouldn’t cable beat broadcast? Those 4 channels are still very dominant and that reflects something about human nature and centrality of shared experiences.

—

Q: Other than word of mouth, what other engagement metrics do you see.

MG – Some of the softer, traditional metrics from branding and advertising – it’s about what makes people think, feel, and act – and thinking and feeling are hard to measure, especially when the “act” comes much later.

JN – It’s about return on marketing objective. The right measurements are different in different places – growing awareness, repositioning a product when it relaunches, etc – those are valid metrics in different cases. It isn’t alwyas about specific ROI – there are things you do in marketing which lead to future sales, which you should do, and you have to do them whether they can be directly tied to sales or not.

MG – The thing that fascinates me currently is using complex scientific approaches to create virtual environments and test in them based on metrics tracked over time – you create virtual agents and introduce different stimulous and then see what emerges. Basically become predictive, rather than reactive – it isn’t just about measureing how effective this last campaign was, but predicting how effective the next one will be.

—

Q: What about an open, transparent approach to measurement? It is frustrating that we (users) have no access to how things are measured?

Great idea, but unlikely to happen – lots and lots of money in this space and lots of investment in how it is done today.

–

Q: Consumers as a channel for us to think about – what about Bebo Channels? Couldn’t the revenue in that space be shared with the writers? (Back to the WGA strike).

SLS – In terms of the writers strike, it is very layered here. It is just more complicated than simply saying because ads are there it is therefore profitable. It’s all too all over the place at this point to know what we can and can’t support from a cost/revenue perspective. Even the sites the networks are building have a hard time competing with bittorrent, file sharing, and other mechanisms out there which provide more control – so they are having a hard enough time creating the ability to actually get online distribution they control rather than the distribution users control, let alone worrying about paying more to be able to do it.

BL – but it also isn’t necessarily all incremental revenue – is this in place of other syndication later? Does the value of the show in broadcast, in rerun, in syndication, diminish as it is spread more broadly online?

—

Q: Are there any specific metrics you’ve seen advertisers believe which demonstrates people paying attention to ads?

SLS – IAG and the rewards tv model – there is a measurement here in which the user needs to recall copy points, but is the expectation it is setting real? This is an example of a metric the industry has accepted largely accepted because there is nothing better.

MG – What we’re trying to do is connect to the metric which really matters – incremental improvement in revenue. Skin in the game, tying marketing/advertising to how the company actually does – if we fail to have a positive impact on your revenue that puts us in a different position to worry about these other intermediate metrics which ultimately connect to improved company performance.

—

Q: What about online versus offline: we tend to think of offline as about brand awareness and online about direct action – but online can also be used to build brand awareness, can’t it?

MG – the interactivity of being online can still be a brand building experience – so the actions users take (click here, send this to a friend, whatever behaviors you offer) *are* part of building awareness and brand recall.

JN – TV is still very influential. What online can ad is reach to the lite tv viewer once you pass the point of inefficiency in tv.

SLS – Although TV is seen as the reach medium, remember that things are changing. In an on demand environment more options are available – TV may be growing into a medium which offers more interactivity . . .

JN . . . and those studies were all done on banner ads – as we get more online video, so both are evolving toward each other in terms of capabilities.

–

Q: Any case studies which surprised you about the impact of various kinds of media? Times where what happened was unexpected?

BL – High School Musical. The mass still does exist. How Disney was able to move that across media – an album, a show, a skating tour, etc.

JN – I’ll give you three: MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook. All of these really took the world of tracking influence by storm as places for people to express how they feel about various products and ads. A fourth is the people talking about their ads in advance of the superbowl – the tradition was to keep things quiet and try to make this big surprise. Instead, as folks were sharing info about their ads in advance of the big show – but we found that they still had the same influence.

BL – AppleTV as a great case study. 2 million by the end of the year? Now they won’t talk about it. Now it is Steve Jobs hobby – the case study was already written – people don’t want a standalone box.

—

Q: Any other outside examples in terms of measuring engagement, which didn’t originate in media but come from other fields?

SLS – check out a company called Neuro focus. Measureing brain waves to measure engagement.

MG – swarm theory, chaos theory – these worlds are increasingly relevant. Studies of complex biological systems and how they evolve – marketing is increasing like an organic system.

—

Q: Problem established. Tell us how you are addressing it

BL – not my problem. I’m trying to help understand the consumer and clearly define where we actually are not just where we are going.

SLS – our biggest challenge is trying to figure out how to keep commercial minutes relavant to content minutes. (New ways to get advertisers involved in the content, new ways to keep consumers engaged and get them to see messages from advertisers without interrupting your primary reason to be there).

MG – we’re focused on studying how the consumer engages with the product. Dynamics, triggers, stages of decision making – looking in depth at what “reachable moments” exist to influence that behavior.

JN – one of my notes from this panel has been SLS on the reaggregation of meaningful sums. In the future it isnt going to be who is the audience of this tv show – at the end of the day it is about reach and impact, regardless of the channel or mechanism. Advertisers want to reach a certain number of certain kinds of people in a certain timeframe with a message – they don’t care what *channel* is used – so maybe again it is aggregation from a lot of smaller more passionate audiences.

In the August issue of WIRED, Frank Rose is pretty down on the opportunities in Second Life for consumer brands in the US trying to create interest. But the fact that some (even many) have failed to create interesting experiences shouldn’t prove that no one can.

Rose’s argument, in “How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life” (which in the print magazine carried the headline “Lonely Planet – Second Life: It’s So Popular No One Goes There Anymore”), is that marketers are basically spending out of fear: fear of missing out on the next big thing, fear that traditional marketing and advertising methods are dying and nothing has yet come about to replace them. He writes near the beginning of the article:

Adrift in the uncharted sea that is Web 2.0 — YouTube, MySpace, social networking, user-generated content, virtual worlds — corporate marketers look at Second Life and see something to grab onto. At least 50 major companies have ventured into the virtual world to date, spending millions in the process. IBM has created a massive complex of adjoining islands dedicated to recruitment, employee training, and in-world business meetings. Coldwell Banker has opened a virtual real estate office. Brands like Adidas, H&R Block, and Sears have set up shop. CNET and Reuters have opened virtual bureaus there. It’s as if the moon suddenly had oxygen. Nobody wants to miss out.

And again towards the end:

What’s behind this stampede is not that hard to divine. “A terror has gripped corporate America,” says Joseph Plummer, chief research officer at the Advertising Research Foundation, an industry think tank. Plummer has been around Madison Avenue since the early ’60s, when modern advertising techniques materialized. “The simple model they all grew up with” — the 30-second spot, delivered through the mass reach of television — “is no longer working. And there are two types of people out there: a small group that’s experimenting thoughtfully, and a large group that’s trying the next thing to come through the door.” Second Life appeals to the latter — the ones who are afraid of missing out, who don’t consider half a million dollars to be a lot of money, and who haven’t figured out (or don’t want to admit) that Second Life is less than the bold new frontier it appears to be.

Marshall Sponder, in a blog post responding to Rose’s article, concedes that “the Second Life platform is immature in that it can’t handle large numbers of visitors on any spot, the grid is down way too often and the interface is still clunky,” but argues that “getting businesses to fail in Second Life is businesses copying their physical store in a Virtual World, rather than really coming up with something creative (even though more of the brands who have entered Second Life think they are being creative, they aren’t).”

In other words, it’s the rush to have a presence in Second Life, without really thinking about what it makes possible, that is leading to failure. This is analagous to companies rushing now to have a presence on Facebook, so convinced that they need to have an application (any old application will do) that they don’t think through the real potential of the platform(s) and risk being complete ignored, or worse.

Second Life shouldn’t be ingored by large brands, but they should start by being users first – something I suspect many fail to do – and talking to other users second. If you can’t find people (who you haven’t paid to say so) who think the idea is exciting and interesting, don’t bother.

Unfortunately, no such luck (cue the “No soup for you!” clip from Seinfeld):

Was the problem that I was running Firefox rather then Netscape (Netscape? Really?), or that I was running Linux?

I clicked through, to find:

My SHC Community currently supports the following operating systems and browsers:
Operating Systems:

• Windows 2000
• Windows XP
• Windows Vista

Browsers:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 5.0 and higher
• Netscape 7.0 and higher
• AOL 5.0 and higher
• Firefox 1.0 and higher

If your browser or operating system is not supported by My SHC Community, we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

In this day and age, no Mac support, no Linux support? Why?

Is there some elaborate MS Silverlight functionality in this community? Some kind of Adobe AIR based application to install?

I assume there’s just some overzealous javascript useragent detection at work here, but won’t know until I find time to boot up my Windows virtual machine and check it out on IE on Windows XP. (You can actually click around on the site, but I don’t see anyone to join the community without the right brower user-agent. I suppose it might be faster to just spoof my user-agent, I know I used to have a plugin for firefox which would make it pretend to be on Windows).

Then I’ll likely never go back. Welcome to community!

I finally got time to watch it on the train on the way to New York last week. It was well worth the wait, and I’d really encourage you to go watch it if you’re interested in social networks or youth culture in the U.S. Danah got a lot of press earlier this year for her post/essay on social class issues in MySpace and Facebook, to some of which she’s also written a response.

Fast forward through all the room introductions (sorry to those who were in the room, but I don’t think that makes for interesting viewing to one who wasn’t there) and get to the core of the discussion.

Here are my quick notes on the bits I found most interesting – these are really more like raw search engine terms that will hopefully connect people to the video than cohesive notes (see also Ethan Zuckerman’s much more complete notes):
–

What Web 2.0 is really about is the shift from a sociality organized around topics toward a sociality organized around friendships / relationships – people who I know.

Early adopters of social network sites were self-defined geeks, freaks, and queers. Tech savvy youth, alternative youth seeking places to gather without prejudice.

Friendster became more mainstream quickly – which drove out fringe users. Friendster went about trying to make people behave by canceling accounts. But not all the users wanted to play by the rules – fakesters existed for good reason – ie, the Harvard U fakester (this was before you could identify groups — the Harvard U fakester profile was used to connect people in an ad hoc group). They killed people who were playing around, but in the process they killed lots of good profiles too.

MySpace – planned as a Friendster clone, but more loose with rules. Indie Rock folks were targeted as an audience, in part because they had been kicked off Friendster. Some of the key features that are still on MySpace came from this era – the individual profile URL for example. http://myspace.com/bandname. The first set of users were musically inclined – tracking bands. First emergence of code in MySpace forums – MySpace knew within 24hrs of it occuring that people were pasting html and javascript in the forums but chose to allow it. “Copy/paste literacy” – someone else’s term. Leads to some interesting stuff, since people didn’t really know what they were copying and pasting.

danah’s using “social network” site as opposed to “social networking” – focus on a place where people write into being their social network – not use it to meet new people.

Basic characteristics of Social Network sites:

• -Profile (inherited from dating sites)
• Friends (not the same as friends in the offline world)
• Public comments (saying things very publically about other people) – started as testimonials on Friendster but got turned into communicative space. (Table salt and pepper fakesters writing to each other). (66% of comments on Facebook are on the wall, not via private messages)

How are network publics different than the kinds of publics “we” grew up with:

1. They’re Persistent. They stick around.
2. They’re Searchable. You can find things. So can your parents.
3. They Offer Replicability – copy and paste from one space to another. Negroponte’s digital bits come to life. This is one of the best ways to bully – copy and paste conversation from IM and edit.
4. They Have Invisible audiences – you don’t know who is watching. These are mediated spaces.

It’s a question of context. Context sets expectations (formal and informal). Context used to come from topic – socialization on usenet of what is ontopic and offtopic. Example alt.tasteless and cat recipes, cat shaving, cat skinning, etc. By the time the boom was over, there is no more “like minds effect” on the internet and conflict is certain.

Joshua M – No Sense of Place – Stoky Carmichael and the issue of how to go on TV – how could he speak a neutral voice? He chose, and ever since we think of black power as anti-white.

This generation in growing up with celebrity style publics – where everyone can be famous among 15 people, but now know which 15.

Depression era – Labor Unions, Compulsory education at High School level (14-18) gets created, in part as a way of keeping laborers out of the workplace. Keep kids away from labor organizers and out of the workplace – leads to age segregation. This is also where a new kind of bullying occurs because of the lack of older folk. “Teenager” itself is a 1941 creation.

(In some ways the whole pedophilia issue is about the anxiety of teenagers knowing adults – why is this such a megatopic right now?)

Children’s Society in Britain is tracking this issue of fear – no real correspondence in the US.

Playdates – one version of the kind of control now being exercised.

Young People are turning to these network publics in part because they have no actual public to go to.

Why do people write public comments? In large part because the defaults are public. But also because there is a visibility issue – you need to be seen commenting, you get replies, etc.

On MySpace, to get rid of comments, they just delete the person, which deletes their comments.

The difference between the profile with 30 friends versus 900 friends is a question of what imagined audience is. Facebook’s “private” setting means just my friends – which is not admissions officers and law enforcement.

There are two audiences youth don’t want:

1. People with direct power over them.
2. People who want to prey on them – the more realistic fear here is less sexual predators than spammers and marketers.

How do they avoid them?

• - Artificial walls / lies.
• Demand the way the world should be – get out. No mom’s allowed, etc. This is where the “public” gets difficult – we want to be public but only to people like us, not to parents or teachers.
• Ostrich. Pretend that if we can’t see the invisible audience they don’t exist.

This is the way they have to socialize – it isn’t necessarily the most optimal way, but often the only accessible way.

Cellphones – totally locked down – this is interesting because users prefer the online social network because those aren’t locked down. Email is for talking to parents.

One of the reasons social networks outside the US are more profile oriented – because here we pay to recieve SMS – elsewhere people use SMS to communicate and the network just for the profile.

—

Ethan – one of the analogies you use is the Mall – which is part public but also very private – which makes them interesting legal cases. But all these social network sites are similarly partially public and owned by private companies. Do the youth your studying care? Are they aware of that commercialization?

db – I wish. It’s actually very accepted. “If its got ads on it it will be free forever” They are so used to being blasted by ads they don’t think twice about it.

Class dynamics on MySpace/Facebook – working class, marginalized kids (freaks, music kids, etc) are on mysapce – college-bound, “good” kids are on Facebook – this plays out in part between different schools, between different neighborhoods in schools, etc. The military banned MySpace but not Facebook – they banned what soldiers are using not what officers are using. REcruitment is done via myspace – and youth talking bad abotu the war may be what’s behind that block.

Cultural aesthetics – facebook seems less commercial because it looks modern and controlled, as opposed to myspace’s wackiness. MySpace is still about bling – and it is ok for the ads to match that aesthetic.

The difference between having Tommy Hilfinger written across it and knowing what a Prada bag is.

The youth don’t know a public that is not commercial.

—

What is this evolving into?

db – the tech industry is obsessed with Web 3.0, and immersion, and 2nd life and WOW.

I think the next level will be mobile. I think the question is can we do it – given the way mobile is structured in the US.

Growth and fragmentation cycle – investors require infinite growth but that doesn’t necessarily match what is best for the community.

Facebook is gaining the older audience but losing the younger audience. They ran into this even when college students were upset that they added high school students.

Cluster effects – you need entire groups to participate. Not everyone created their own sites – people share passwords and check each others messages, and play with each other – they don’t want secure “my site, my password” stuff. People create profiles for their friends who can’t or don’t.

–

What about youth subcultures who *are* reacting negatively to the commercialism of the culture? What about networks that are using these technologies to organize against this? Other possibilities exist.

I’ve been working on this as well – on the edges – in order to look at what is next you need to look at the edges not the center.

db – I’m just not seeing it among high school students – I wish that I was, but I’m not.

What about the possibilities of temporary autonomous zones – there is power in these.

db – but people build social cues into these environments. WoW is one of the few exceptions where guilds for example are age diverse. Otherwise people are signaling their age / class / gender / race in all kinds of ways.

The challenge is that what is at teh edges is not what becomes mainstream – things get modified on their way to the mainstream and lose imuch of their edge in the process.

Kids are told that all adult strangers are bad and evil. Kids are afaird to talk to me, even though I’ve got berkely.edu all over. I don’t know how to break that in the online world.

—

The adults are just not doing a good job navigating the future for you – you need to become the navigators for them. Hawaiin political movement – charting hawaii’s future.

–

What about Gender?

db – It’s amazing how many of the boy’s profiles were created by their girlfiends in part in order to be the first in the top eight. None of it is really surprising which is why I haven’t written much of it up.

Boys are much more likely to collect strangers, more likely to friend porn divas, etc.

Homophilly? (Birds of a feather stick together) – Homophilia? It is clear that people are more likely to meet people that are like them – the more you have in common the more likely you are to become better friends.

Interaction with people unlike you – social network sites are helping reinforce this, but it is the absence of real public experiementation in the first place. We’re losing that across the board not just in social networks. In fact social networks *may* enable more interaction in unexpected ways.

Pew research – the 7% who are not online, 75% of them don’t want to be online.

—

Parent info sharing – this is really being driven by 30s parents having kids later. I’m not seeing real activity among teen parents that is different than other teens use. Not really seeing a teen parents group rising up.

—

So what do we do?

db – well, for one thing there is the defensive – bills to ban these sites in congress in various forms.

Education – help people get literate about how to use these sites and how to manage them. Innuit morality play – how would you feel it? Why do x rather than y?

In terms of law, the number one request is to stay away – so much of the legal intervention is around sexual predators – if we’re going to do something let’s actually enforce the laws about sexual predators rather than talking about the danger.

We need digital street outreach – the equivalent of clean needles and condoms distributed to youth.

IT would be great to have a street outreach online – people just hanging out talking to kids at risk looking for attention (but this runs up against the stranger danger problem in that youth won’t talk to adults).

Ethan – the bingo for today is Paris Hilton, Needle exchange, and Jerry Fallwell.

–

danah’s also become a Berkman Fellow for the 2007/2008 school year, so hopefully we’ll get more opportunities to follow her research.

It ought to be required reading for every marketing exec or entrepreneur thinking of starting a “myspace for _____” or “facebook for _______.” (OK, maybe not fair to pick on marketing there – any exec thinking of doing such a thing).

Key questions he provides:

1. What business problem are you trying to fix? What’s broken? What does success look like (without mentioning features)
2. There are different tools for different problems, Are you sure a Social Networking site will fix this?
3. Where are your community/market/users currently?
4. Not sure? Then look again, don’t proceed farther until you find them.
5. Have you considered joining that community before creating your own? You know of the Walmart 10 week fiasco right? Trying to recreate MySpace doesn’t make sense because it already exists.
6. How open/closed to you want your community? Think about long term, does it scale?
7. What incentive are you creating with this SoNet that will drive users to your site and share?
8. How do you plan to kick start your community, you know that just because you build it, doesn’t mean they’ll come
9. Consider joining the Web Strategy Group in Facebook to meet other web decision makers, you’ll be able to ask questions in the forum.
10. Leave a comment below if you’ve suggestions.

OK, so numbers 4, 9, and 10 aren’t really questions, but 1-3 and 5-8 are dead on.

A few I’d add:

11. What is your plan to manage / moderate the community’s activities assuming a large community arises? What terms of service / acceptable behavior guidelines will you rely on, and how will they be enforced / cultivated?
12. How will you involve people outside your organization but from within the target community? What will you do to actively recruit, encourage, and even potentially incent “good” user behavior from your target community?
13. Consider assembling the community on a platform of open source software rather than licensing a commercial package or renting a service. You’ll get the rapid time to market of buying or renting but also the ability to customize in order to create a differentiated experience.

Ok, maybe the last one’s a bit of a pitch . . .

Deborah Weil has been around the block a couple of times and she must have known when GlaxoSmithKline’s agency approached her to consult on a new flog for its Alli weight-loss product that it was a dishonest, insincere attempt to cash in on the social media craze and that the parameters set for it doomed it to failure.

He’s referring to Weil’s post where she requested of her readers:

head on over to GlaxoSmithKline’s official corporate blog for alli, the first FDA approved, OTC (over the counter) weight loss product. Take a peek and, if you’re inspired, leave a Comment.

She also, to be clear, disclosed the relationship:

Full disclosure: I’m working with GSK on the blog. And this was my idea to ask for Comments.

However, as Kevin Dugan points out in the comments, the email version of the post included the sentence “No need
to say that you know me, of course.” See also Weil’s followup post: Using the backchannel of email to invite Comments on your blog.

While I’m not sure that Bowles’ personal attacks at Weil and her “inexplicably popular” blog help his argument, and alliconnect doesn’t fit my definition of a flog (since it declares directly it is written by GSK folks), the core of the issue is the extent to which traditional PR and Marketing techniques are conflicting with next generation Internet conversations. On this, I think Bowles is right on:

Many companies still don’t get it. To them, social media represent just one more set of marketing tools to sell more stuff. They believe they can have it both ways–control the message AND build relationships of trust with potential customers. They are wrong and, when engaged to provide advice, communications professionals who understand the new realities have a obligation to tell them so.

Echoing the question Weil asked, is it acceptable to use email (what Weil calls the backchannel of the blogosphere) to suggest to people you know that they visit your own blog, or the blog of a client, and leave comments?

I’ve certainly emailed folks I know and asked them to check out the Optaros Enterprise Open Source Directory – and encouraged them to leave feedback. When I’ve written a blog post or a white paper I’m proud of, I’ve emailed popular sites and asked them to check it out – for example, when Ajaxian.com “picked up” this post, that was at least in part because I had emailed them directly, telling them about the post.

I’d argue that part of the launch campaign for any new service or site these days should include a “market to the influencers” component, which includes plans for how to get influential bloggers early access to the invite-only beta.

Is the difference that Weil was encouraging traffic to a corporate blog. rather than her own? Is it that she suggested, albeit lightly, that they not disclose their relationship to her, despite the fact that she consulted with GSK on the blog?

(See for example Dennis Howlett’s Holy Crap!, which cites the product itself as one of the issues, and Weil’s suggestion not to disclose as another).

Is the real problem the fact that GSK is abusing the blog concept? Bowles argues:

You can’t have a successful conversation when personal anecdotes and negative comments are banned and the few comments that are left are so obviously scripted and uninspiring.

What if Weil had suggested explicitly that people visit the Alli blog and leave comments positive or negative? What if she had suggested that they disclose directly that there were doing so in response to her invitation for comments? What if that invitation for comments had been posted directly on the blog in question?

(In addition to disclosing the relationship on her blog, she is listed as a contributor on the Alli blog)

If I posted on the EOS Blog and then came here and asked you all to comment on it, would that be a conflict of interest, or effective marketing?

Ultimately, I’m as concerned about astroturf and bad corporate-pr-blogs as anyone else, but the issue comes down to whether authentic and transparent conversation is being had at the site in question, not whether people were encouraged to go there.

(For some real, unfiltered, and clear feedback about Alli check out: alli: miracle diet pill with teeny tiny side effect and Laugh? I nearly shit my pants. I wonder if the Angry Aussie has tried posting comments on the alli blog).

A corporation is by definition an artificial person, or a legal entity which can act like a person. (Among other things, sue and be sued, make money, enter into contracts, and so on.) If you’re really interested in the legal concept, check out the Wikipedia entry on the notion of a juristic person, especially the section on creation and history of the doctrine.

I’m more interested in the modern, Web 2.0 application of the concept, in which Corporations have profiles on social networking sites.

Delta Airlines, for example, made quite a splash twittering a few months back. I added the twitter Delta Airlines as my “friend” – trusting that Northwest, Jet Blue, and United wouldn’t get jealous – but haven’t heard much from him/her/it recently. In fact, deltaairlines’ last tweet was 1 month ago – “switching on the Nintendo DS download stations at Terminals 2 & 3 in JFK.” His/her/its 103 followers and 93 friends must be sorely disappointed.

Lots of companies show up on myspace – seems to have started with the notion that a band could have a myspace page, which then evolved to the point where a band doesn’t exist until it has a myspace page. Then record companies – smaller ones first, bigger ones when they sensed interest – started to have myspace profiles. And radio stations – kexp is one of my top friends. Then Borat came along, and he had a myspace page.

This weekend, Forrester published a new research report “How Consumers Use Social Networking Sites.” In it, they discuss “friending”:

The most common approach [to marketing to MySpace and Facebook users] is to set up a profile on these sites that members can then join, or “friend”; for example, the movie “X-Men: The Last Stand” has more than 2 million MySpace users as friends.

In fact, this idea is one of the three core recommendations, as noted in the executive summary (which Charlene Li also posted to her blog):

Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have seen tremendous growth over the past two years, attracting a young and engaged audience. Frequent users of these social networking sites not only engage in more activities and have a more positive attitude about these sites, but they are also far more interested in profiles from their favorite companies. Marketers interested in reaching their audiences on social networking sites should: 1) dispense with traditional Web marketing tactics, 2) encourage “friending,” and 3) regularly refresh content.

They’re right that marketers should pick up on this opportunity. But I also think we need a new category for these kinds of relationships – a new class of user within the system who isn’t just a regular person. Having a “friend” named Delta Airlines wouldn’t bother me if it let me whitelist messages from that friend to let me know when a flight is late / cancelled, for example. If it is just going to offer new opportunities for spam, I can always uninvite them from my network.

I remember companies doing this in the era of IM as well – creating personas you could add to your buddy list who were really just little branded communication channels.

Will we see users scrambling to create shell profiles in their company name just to prevent someone else from doing it first?

How many of the “friends” in your buddy list, on IM, or in a social networking site, are juristic persons?

If Apple wanted to be my friend, could I accept that friendship or would Kubuntu get upset?

Update July 5:
Just came across Paul Dunay’s excellent Measuring Effects of Social Networks, which uses the example of Adidas Soccer:

Adidas agency Carat Fusion knew Adidas Soccer was popular: Its year-old MySpace profile has 80,000 friends who downloaded wallpaper and adopted the persona of one of the company’s shoe styles.

What the agency didn’t know was whether that popularity translated into real value. But thanks to a new study it conducted, the agency now knows that the consumer-powered campaign increased purchase intent 78%, brand image 71%, and likelihood to recommend 57%!

Update July 6th:
Also check out the report commissioned by the folks at Fox Interactive Media, Isobar, and CaratUSA: Never Ending Friending,
which quotes Rob from Los Angeles saying: “I don’t want companies to advertise to me. I want them to be my friend,” and argues that “Friending is the new Advertising.”

Update: July 8th:
See “News Corp’s Nightmare Scenario: Achieving ‘Never-Ending Friending’” for a more negative take on the fictitious friends scenario, which concludes:

the mass adoption of these methods and, more important, the subsequent mass “gaming” of the marketing methods outlined by this report, will destroy the most valuable social media property of the digital generation.

It’s well worth a read, even if you’re not in the PR world.

At first I was concerned it was going to be all too Dr. Pangloss (or Pollyanna, to make the same reference in a different register):

The public relations industry finds itself at an historic juncture. It always has been about social influence – i.e., “relating to the public.” Now that the rules of social influence are gaining precedence over other approaches, public relations looms larger than ever. Working together, internal public relations departments and agencies can better serve their organizations while resetting the mandate and direction for an entire industry.

I was worried this was going to be the story of a “difficulty” turned into an “opporunity” – rather than becoming irrelevant, PR is more important than ever!

But it’s really a very measured and methodical paper – they later write that:

social media must become part of the way public relations practitioners do business or they will become obsolete

and

public relations practitioners . . . should recognize that defining, or redefining the role they will play in this changing communications landscape is critical

In other words, things are changing, and PR either needs to get with the changing climate or risk becoming irrelevant.

Other useful notes:

84% of participating firms they surveyed were “employing blogs on behalf of clients” – that’s an even higher number than I expected. (For the record, no PR firm employs this blog – I write it).

They also lay out changes in skill sets, personnel, and business models agencies and PR firms will need to go through.

Marketing 2.0 – the Beauty comes from the inside

Someone else was going to speak this am, but we were asked to do this session via twitter this morning. So if you have thought twitter didn’t have value – it can.

Some broad thoughts to begin the conversation:

- If you love your customers, set them free – ask them for as little information as possible, and let them engage when they want to. Red Hat example – webinars without forced registration – participants went up dramatically and so did leads! Don’t make people register at all if you can.

- Assume that they are as smart as you think you are. It is ok to give customers lots of choices.

- Transparency: Be honest, open, straightforward. The more the better. CoreMedia tracks their bugs in an open format. Contrasts Sun versus Cisco in terms of how difficult it is for employees to blog – not saying one is right and the other wrong, but the aggressive nature of Sun’s approach (anyone can blog – all you need to do is register and check a box which says you’ve read the policy) is very interesting.

- Self-service – let customers find what they can, without having to call you.

- Anti-marketing – be willing to live with less customer information – the information people willingly give when they contact you is so much more valuable than whatever you require.

- Websites – Your website should assume your customers are smarter than you think, and you put yourself in their shoes, you can make your site more relevant.

Dr. Willms Buhse:

Focus on authentic, personal messages – not a careful honed marketing message.

Be open for feedback – participate in the dialogue.

Change your role as VP of Marketing into Artist Management – your employees are the artists and your role is to help them to be popular.

Whatever perception your customers have – say thank you. Even if you disagree!

Collaboration in Marketing = Gather Feedback

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Discussion:
The closer you can get the customer to the people who actually build/manufacture/design whatever it is you do the better. You want to get customers to the subject matter experts.

Get employees involved, get customers closer to the experts, use PR for more formal official announcements.

Audience questions:
Collaborating with our customers – should we be incenting customers to participate – tshirts, ipods, whatever.

Can be a good idea – the main currency to use is reputation – let other users rate content contributed, gather their contributions in a profile, etc – reputation is the primary currency that matters in many of these contexts.

Audience comment – this isn’t marketing 2.0 but unmarketing. How do you help a marketing team understand the value of this, if your marketing team isn’t aligned with this vision. (Resembles the challenges in bottom up emergent collaboration in a top down command and control environment).

Audience Question: What about transparency in a professional services firm versus confidentiality or concerns about proprietary methodology, etc.

The most important thing is reputation for execution – ability to do good work consistently. Transparency will help you with that.

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