While I was only able to catch three sessions, each would have been worth the trip on it’s own. All three were led by dynamic, engaging, even charismatic presenters who clearly know their stuff and know the Podcamp audience.

First up was Dave Wieneke (@usefularts) on the “Seven Sins of Digital Innovation,” aka “Stuff that F*#@s up your work, and what the hell can be done about it.”

Dave invited the assembled crowd to co-present, opening up a discussion about how projects go wrong, how to manage change in organizations, how to build buy-in, the dreaded ROI, and how to build sustainable digital strategies. Lots of great quotable moments here, many can be found in Dave’s own Storify recap).

Universidad de Morón (from Wikipedia entry, cc-by-sa license)

Second, was Chris Brogan on Google+ (with guest assistance from Christopher S. Penn running the laptop). I’d just seen Chris talk about why folks should be on Google+ during the Inbound Marketing summit a few weeks back in Boston, so many of the themes in this talk were the same. Why are so many in digital marketing / social media collectively whining about having to learn a new network? Did they really forget orkut, friendster, and myspace? Are they still rocking an @aol.com email address, and a compuserve dial up account?

Chris has become a superstar but still manages to make himself so accessible that everyone thinks he’s their good friend – that’s a skill. (And I don’t mean that as a criticism – he’s authentically interested in everyone he meets in a way that seems entirely natural to him – and he listens, and remembers things you’ve said).

Finally (before I ran off to lunch) I caught Tamsen McMahon‘s (@tamadear) talk about standing out in a bell curve world.

While “personal branding” topics can devolve into hokey admonitions to “be yourself,” McMahon was funny, compelling, and insightful. She used real, understandable, and approachable examples, including reality tv for humor and local social media celebs for color and context. She’s used labels for herself like “intellectual magpie” and “personal cartography“: simple, clear, suggestive, but also entirely unique. (Almost feels like personal branding via google bomb, but those were generally meaningless phrases where hers actually make sense and suggest what she does and is).

I left Podcamp feeling energized, enthusiastic, and smarter than I’d gone in. Not bad for 3 hours on a Saturday morning.

Here’s the schedule (which they haven’t yet published except as a google doc):

My friend Dave Wieneke will be presenting Saturday am on “The 7 Deadly Sins of Business Innovation” and again Sunday afternoon on “Applying Digital Strategy Across your Business.”

As though that weren’t enough reason to attend, other speakers will include Chris Brogan and Christopher S. Penn (the original founders of Podcamp Boston) as well as a who’s who of Boston’s digerati.

Will I see you there?

I’ve also taken the audio from that video and converted the SlideShares slides into a screencast, which syncing the audio to the slides:

It’s much more useful this way than just the slides were.

Curator's Hand, by Marinmuseum, cc-by-nd, http://www.flickr.com/photos/marinmuseum/5345449107/

Many of today’s popular deal-a-day sites claim to be creating “curated” experiences for their audiences. Many social media publishers focus on “curating” the stream of blog posts, tweets, and other content objects on specific topics. But what does that curation really mean? What’s the point of view behind the curator’s decisions about what to include and what not to include?

My friend and former colleague Margot Bloomstein presented earlier this week at SXSW on the topic of Creation, Curation, and the Ethics of Content Strategy, drawing on interviews with museum curators about their craft, and arguing that true curation requires:

• Scope and Perspective: Determining what to include and what to exclude
• Cultivation, Aggregation, and Editing: The (often difficult) work of gathering the items to be part of the collection, which may be in private collections, other museums, or buried deep in archives
• Building the Story for the Target Audience: The curator focuses on specific audiences, in both the catalog (which appeals more to the serious collector/scholar) and the exhibit itself (which must address the specialist but also a general interest audience) and on telling those audiences a story. The curator hopes to add a new understanding of the subject for each audience, not just re-present what they believe they already know.
• Organization, Juxtaposition, Hierarchy, Emphasis: These are tools of the curator in telling that story. It isn’t just about deciding what is in or out of the collection but about how those items are contextualized, placed, arranged, and edited.
• Bias: A curator has a point of view, and deliberately foregrounds that point of view, often in a curator’s statement.

In other words, curation is not easy work. It is not something done by algorithms and automated software filters. Adding a twitter feed or rss import to your site which pulls in all mentions of your topic keywords does not make you a curator, any more than your word processing programs’ ability to string words together makes you a writer. (I’m reminded of Truman Capote’s dismissal of Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”).

Truly curated experiences bear the mark of the curator’s hand (or curators’ hands).

What point-of-view is Groupon, or Living Social, or Gilt hoping to cultivate in the world? (The value of spas, manicures, and pedicures? The importance of cultural experiences like theater, whale watching, and the symphony? Whiter teeth? Exercise? ) Do they really cultivate and source rare experiences, or is it just a platform for aggregating deals together for presentation to an audience?

When you consider “curation” as one of your brand or company’s goals, can you define what your intent is in that creation? What kind of point-of-view you hope to expect?

If you aggregating blog posts and tweets on a given subject, but not exercising editorial control or influence, let’s just call that content aggregation. If you’re putting serious effort, vision, perspective, and consistency into choosing, arranging, and expressing a point of view through the act of assembling the collection, you just might be doing real curation.

(From ICanHazCheezburger)

Sounds a bit like a lead-in to a joke, doesn’t it? Like the difference between you and a media company is that you haven’t laid off half your staff, or the difference is that the media company has likeable characters, or . . .

Actually it’s a great blog post by Joe Pulizzi – The Difference Between You and a Media Company:

The only difference . . . is that a media company leverages content in order to sell paid content and sponsorships . . . A non-media company needs to create that same type of content, but they do not get paid content or sponsorships — they do it to sell products and services

(His title also reminds me of one of my all-time favorite album titles: The Difference Between Me and You Is That I’m Not on Fire, brought to you by the same folks who also released My Pain and Sadness is More Sad and Painful Than Yours).

Pulizzi also points to eMarketer’s – 2011 Trends: Content Marketing is Critical – in which Geoff Ramsey writes:

Marketers should base their magnetic content ideas on well-researched customer behaviors, attitudes and lifestyles. This entails altering your emphasis in marketing from “selling product” to identifying and solving a consumer need or want that transcends or complements the physical product or service you are selling. Ask yourself this critical question: Besides your product, what can you do for the consumer?

Content produced by retailers must drive awareness and ultimately sales, but in order to do so it is important not to lose sight of the fact that it is still content and must be interesting, helpful, fun, appropriate, and engaging.

Maybe at the end of the day the difference between you and a media company is less significant than you think, given that media companies are also increasingly finding that subscription and sponsorship revenue is not enough . . .

Photo by Chris Sternal-Johnson, http://www.flickr.com/photos/ceejayoz/371137761/

This is all a bit anti-climactic given that if you were an actual Chat Catcher user, you’ve known that the system was going away since at least October 20th, but the final day has come and gone.

Shannon Whitley, the creator of the Chat Catcher service, wrote in an email to all the users:

While it was fun to create multiple Twitter applications in 2008, Twitter’s extreme growth has made it tough for a single developer to manage this type of software project. Hosting, storage, and ongoing support costs are just too high to justify the continuation of a free service.

I really liked Chat Catcher, which I first discovered as a combination WordPress plugin and service back in 2008 – liked it so much I built a Drupal module for it.

The core value of Chat Catcher was that it turned tweets referencing URLs in your domain into trackbacks, essentially – by pinging you (via a defined web hook) whenever your domain was mentioned in a tweet, even if that URL had been run through a URL shortener.

While I know BackType has an API you can use to *request* all the tweets mentioning a given URL, that requires you to be constantly polling: much less efficient.

That said, what are the alternatives? Kris Buytaert started an issue on the Drupal module page looking for alternatives, and I mentioned a few WordPress plugins there – but I don’t think there are any external services which proactively reach out to your site rather than requiring you to constantly search twitter for your URLs.

Know of any?

B2B Buzz - New Community for Small Businesses from Hoovers Online

(Via MediaPost) Hoovers and several business cosponsors have launched a new “social community” for small business users called B2B Buzz. The site’s focus is primarily content:

The voice of the social community will guide the direction for a portal and business consortium that Hoover’s and contributors Outsell, Selling Power, and Shore Communications plan to launch Tuesday. For the first six months the group will focus on building and sharing its collective expertise on marketing and sales, along with a variety of business topics for entrepreneurs.

In essence there’s a “self-assessment” and a blog (the site is on WordPress) for each of their three primary audiences: Sales, Marketing, and Small Business. The assessments walk you through 10 questions designed to determine how effectively your business is leveraging information – and end with an “enter your email address to get your results” style capture form (which gives no indication as to what happens to the email address you provide – shouldn’t a best practices site do a better job of explaining the privacy policy at the point of email capture?).

The Assessment ends in email address capture form

The site also links to a Twitter account (@b2bbuzz) and a LinkedIn Group though these links aren’t specific to the sub-audience but cross the three user types.

So is it a community? (Nevermind a “social community” which was MediaPost’s redundant term – the site merely bills itself as “a community of business information experts”).

Users can comment on blog posts, of course, and interact with the site authors via Twitter. According to the contributors page, “Experts from across the industry are invited to join our contributor ranks,” though the site’s beginning with five (including 2 from Hoovers and 1 from co-sponsor SellingPower). There isn’t, however, anything to register for – no user profiles, discussion forums, or call for user-contributed ideas and stories. Even the comments form is a simple name, email, and (optional) website link.

Given the recent Forrester report on the “plateau” of content creation, is this a smart strategic move to focus on where the companies involved can add value, or is it just the first step in the direction of a more robust community to come? (Or, I suppose, both?). Or has “community” become the new default generic term for “site,” displacing “portal,” “destination,” and “blog” itself?

Photo by Alun Salt - http://www.flickr.com/photos/alun/253596595/

Last week Forrester Research published an update to their popular (and useful) Social Technographics report which showed that- depending on which pronouncements you read- seemed to indicate that online social activity had reached a plateau, or was even shrinking. Just a quick sample:

• PCWorld said: “This year, a smaller percentage of U.S. Internet users are contributing to social media sites” and argued that “companies need to find ways to re-engage those U.S. Internet users who have stopped participating on their social media sites”
• CNN reported that “the report . . . says people joining online social networks aren’t uploading videos, posting status updates and engaging in conversations like those before them”
• Raymond Nuez at the Huffington Post went so far as to title his piece “Where have all the content creators gone?”
• VerticalLeap in the UK went with “content generation activity fading among social network users“
• ReadWriteWeb summarized it as “Social networking users are creating less content” and followed Forrester’s Jacqueline Anderson in suggesting that this is cause for concern because (their subhead) “Fewer Creators Mean Fewer Ideas”

Arguably all the fuss has its origin in a blog post on Forrester’s site announcing the new report, which notes:

many groups in the US market plateaued. Creators, the group that is actually adding content to the Internet, are one example of this lack of growth.

(Though she does note they still represent 41 million US online adults). She goes on to conclude:

The story behind the data is pretty clear. The initial wave of consumers using social technologies in the US has halted. Companies will now need to devise strategies to extend social applications past the early adopters.

Looking at the numbers in the actual report, though, shows a much more muted story. Yes, the percentage of US Online Adults identified as creators did change from 24% to 23% between the 2009 survey and the 2010 survey. This is the core data point folks latched on to (this plus a change in critics from 37% to 33%, and a rise of inactives from 18% to 19%). But does this mean we’re all fresh out of new ideas? Nothing new being created on the web? No more activity from “the group that is actually adding content to the internet” (as opposed to merely commenting, repeating, critiquing, consuming, and lurking around)?

Forrester Social Technographics Ladder - click through for original

It helps to look at how the data is gathered and how users are categorized.

The data comes from an online survey of 26,913 US Adults. Given that (and a weighted sample size of 26,749), I’d argue that the difference between 2009 and 2010 is really quite minimal. In the methodology section of the report, Forrester notes:

For results based on a randomly chosen sample of this size (N = 26,913), there is 95% confidence that
the results have a statistical precision of plus or minus 1.4% of what they would be if the entire
population of US online individuals ages 18 and older had been surveyed.

The percentages of users in each category are created based on their response to a sequence of questions in the survey instrument which ask the users what activities they engage in on a regular basis. For example, (I believe this is the question used to determine the percentage of users who are “creators”):

74. ?There are many ways to put your own opinions, videos, music, and photos on the Internet. Which of the following activities do you do AT LEAST MONTHLY? (X ALL That Apply)

1. Publish, maintain, or update a blog
2. Upload video you created to a public Web site (e.g., YouTube, MySpace)
3. Upload audio/music you created to a public Web site
4. Post to photo-sharing sites (e.g., Snapfish, Flickr)
5. Publish or update your own Web pages
6. Write articles, stories, poems etc. and post them online (e.g., Gather, Helium)
7. None of these

But notice how the question carves out what creation means. Also introduced between the 2009 survey and the 2010 survey was the category of “conversationalists” which is captured in this question, which immediately preceeded the one above:

73. There are also many ways to converse with others on the Internet. Which of the following activities do you do AT LEAST WEEKLY? (X ALL That Apply)

1. Update your status on a social networking site (e.g., MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn)
2. Post updates on Twitter
3. None of these

That group, which was not measured in 2009, is 33% of US Online Adults in the survey. But that’s not content creation, and doesn’t result in any new ideas in the internet pool? What about posting photos to Twitter (through TwitPic for example) or Facebook, as part of a status update? Is that conversation or creation? All those tweets don’t add up to enough new ideas or original content to equal a 1% shrink in the number of folks who maintain a regular blog?

It isn’t that the survey is a bad idea – I love the notion of tracking over time in a broad sense how people think of their participation in/on/throughout the internet – but that overgeneralizing about the results leads to bad conclusions. There may be a general shift away from traditional, stand-alone blogs (like this one) and in the direction of lighter-weight activity (status updates, microblogs, and tweets). Anyone who’s been active in any community (online or off) for a significant period of time recognizes that much of the work is done by few of the members, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that not all internet users want to, have time to, or feel comfortable creating “original content” that fits a specific definition.

Should we expect 1 in 4 online US adults to maintain a regular stream of content creation? 1 in 5? 1 in 10? Even if 1 in 100 did so, would that mean that social activity and participation has ceased, or just changed forms (again)?

The Fail Whale in Legos - Photo by Bjarne Panduro Tveskov - http://www.flickr.com/photos/tveskov/3387394098/

The 140 Characters Conference in Boston yesterday started off with three strikes against it, in my mind:

1. No coffee. I’ve greatly cut back on my own caffeine addiction, but who starts a conference at 9am on a Tuesday and doesn’t serve coffee?
2. No wifi. Well, there was Wifi, but I couldn’t ever get on any of the available networks.
3. No power. Well, there was power in the building, but the power cops facilities people from the venue would not allow attendees to plug in to the wall outlets, as the cords crossing the aisle represented some kind of hazard.

That’s a steep uphill climb for any conference to overcome, but it turned out to be well worth it. The saving grace was not just Boston’s always active, engaging, welcoming, and supportive social media community (as embodied in folks like @pistachio, Chris Brogan, C.C. Chapman, CS Penn, and way too many more to name them all) but also excellent editorial curation and content pacing.

Favorite panels for me included “Investing in the real-time web” with @bijan, @leaddog99, and @ScottKirsner – which got best quote of the day:

(This was from an article quoting a “Silicon Valley Investor type” – and got the best laugh of the day, despite the fact that the whole conference was witness to the strength of the “Real Time Web” broadly and the tremendous impact of Twitter in particular – including local startup oneforty ).

Also excellent were panels on the “real time news” phenomenon (@universalhub, @dabeard, @mleccese, @kordmiller, and @tmcenroe – with counterpoint later from Jeff Cutler on the difference between “citizen journalism” and “citizen reporting”), a panel on the impact of real-time and social on Health, and a music panel matching @amandapalmer with @matthewebel, @spinaltap, and @cyberpr. Although no music was planned, an impromptu version of the Sesame Street theme on iPad did occur, taking advantage of the talent on the panel.

Christopher S. Penn happily scrapped the talk listed on the schedule – a likely valuable but a bit sleepy “How To Measure Internet Marketing ROI in the era of the Real-Time Web” – and instead geeked out on comic superheros, arguing that the real time web gives all of us super powers and reminding us all that “with great power comes great responsibility.”

The crowd also heard @dewittn‘s story of being one of the disappeared children of El Salvador, and the story of @andydixn, YouthTurns.com, and social media barn raising in Nashville.

Ultimately it felt a bit like Twitter itself: sipping from a fire hose, sampling from a veritable flood of interesting talented people driven by both mission and entrepreneurial spirit to leverage the tools the internet provides (including but not limited to Twitter) to make their mark on the world. The trick being to connect with those folks and carry the conversation on beyond the conference, beyond the twitter-stream and into real projects. (But isn’t that the real trick of any conference?).

Check out the full schedule and as expected tons of coverage via twitter under the hashtag #140conf.

WPBook

So for a while I’ve been working on and beta testing the next version of WPBook. Tonight I’ve just tagged it for release, so it will be available for download shortly. (I’ve already been running it here for a while and testing it on a few other test blogs).

The main improvement in WPBook 1.5 is that it now knows how to use stream.publish, meaning that it will automatically post to your wall in Facebook when you publish a post in WordPress. Your friends should see that notification as well in their streams. (We’re not, however, sending application updates or tracking all users’ user id’s – instead you enter your own userid into the settings and it uses that to post to your wall). Included are attachments (first image attached to the post is used) and excerpts (if you hand craft excerpts they will be used in the wall post).

The other main improvement is that WPBook now requires PHP5, and as such can wrap Facebook calls in Try/Catch blocks. For the non-programmer, this means those awful, dramatic “fatal uncaught exception” error screens are gone. WPBook isn’t doing anything terribly meaningful with those errors yet – still working on that- but at least it traps them.

In this release:

• WPBook now requires PHP 5
• Enables user to post to stream, including to pages. (Must be pages for which you are the admin, to which you have added the app, and which have granted stream.publish permission – link provided in the admin to grant permissions.
• Catches exceptions thrown by the Facebook client. (Doesn’t yet surface those in good error messages, but at least they are caught)
• Fixed, I hope, issue with comments inside Facebook for some users
• Clean up of some admin styles (resized gravatar images as well as some basic hierarchy on options)
• Added Page Options as their own section
• Allow user to select pages to be excluded
• Added option to allow a menu of parent pages at top of the app below the title
• Fixed “Facebok” typo in line line 182 of theme/index.php
• Option to turn on and off page list under content (independent of menu)
• Option to turn on/off recent post under content
• Allow user to set the amount of recent post to show under content (default 10)
• Cleaned up custom header/footer now only one function instead of two (no reason to have two functions)
• Added %tag_links% and %category_links% to custom header footer as well as made archive pages work.
• Set smart default for when Blog Title isn’t set

Next steps?

• Better error handling code – do something with the messages Facebook returns when an exception is thrown
• User selectable theme directory – for users who’ve taken the time to customize their theme
• Threaded comments – likely means requiring WP 2.7, though for error handling (and just simplicity) I’m thinking of jumping right to WordPress 2.8
• Cross-Posting to a commenter’s wall when they comment inside Facebook. (Because it is in response to a user action, I understand they don’t even have to grant stream.publish permission).

What else would you like to see?

Update: Closing comments on this post. For troubleshooting please use the support forums instead.

It’s truly a must-read if you’re interested in how large brands are engaging their customers through social media. In the Introduction, Ben Elowitz (of WetPaint) and Charlene Li (of Altimeter) claim:

While much has been written questioning the value of social media, this landmark study has found that the most valuable brands in the world are experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement. The relationship is apparent and significant: socially engaged companies are in fact more financially successful.

So now we know it pays to be social, but it is important to note that by “social,” we’re talking about deep engagement, not merely having a presence.

But there’s an interesting rhetorical slip there – in the space between “a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement” and “it pays to be social” we’ve crossed the gap between correlation and causation.

First, the correlation, which is well encapsulated in this set of graphs:

Correlation of Social Media Engagement and Financial Performance, from The ENGAGEMENTdb Report

So it certainly seems that among their sample at least, the companies which are the most engaged – the Mavens and the Butterflies – are experiencing consistently better financial performance (as revenue and as gross margin) than the least engaged – the Wallflowers and Selectives.

Photo by avlxyz, cc-by license

But does this mean that “it pays to be social”? Are the most engaged brands financially successful as a result of their engagement in social media? Are the most financially successful brands more likely to engage in social media (perhaps because they’ve got money to spend or at least less downward pressure on related budgets)? Or, perhaps, are high degrees of social media engagement and positive financial results BOTH correlated to some third variable not identified, like superior services and products, strategic leadership, corporate cultures of openness, or something else?

The reality is that based on the data presented in the study, we don’t know.

It may help to recall your first-year statistics class in college, and the correlation between ice cream sales and murder rates. Murder rates rise and fall in concert with ice cream sales, but that hasn’t lead to urban ice cream bans (at least not that i know of). Instead, the general theory is that both murder rates and ice cream sales are positively correlated with warmer weather. (Good summary here).

Am I suggesting that the Altimeter Group and WetPaint need to go back to first-year stats? No – they’re smart researchers and clearly understand the distinction, writing in the body of the report (page 7):

While these findings do not necessarily imply a causal relationship, they still hold powerful implications. Social media engagement and financial success work together to perpetuate a healthy business cycle: a customer oriented mindset stemming from deep social interaction allows a company to identify and meet customer needs in the marketplace, generating superior profits. The financial success of the company, in turn, allows further investment in engagement to build even better customer knowledge, thereby creating even more profits — and the cycle continues.

This suggests a more nuanced reading at once more accurate and less surprising. Companies taking the approach of ignoring customer feedback, and producing products and services without a deep understanding of what the market wants, are less likely to be successful. Similarly, and at the same time, companies who take some portion of the profits and invest in ongoing relationship with customers are more likely to continue to produce successful products.

Which, in fact, is exaclty what makes the report truly useful. The qualitative, best practices section, which covers Starbucks, Toyota, SAP, and Dell, is where the real value is.

Figuring out how your enterprise can leverage social media for business success is a process which requires significant customization to your industry, markets, products and services, brand legacy (or lack thereof), competitive landscape, financial state, and broader business strategy, but looking at the examples of highly engaged companies (who are also financially successful) is a good place to start.

The goal of the presentation- a sanitized (client references removed) version of one given to a client this week – was to talk about:

• Social Media (and specifically how to get started with it)
• Facebook (and other social network applications)
• The iPhone (and other mobile platforms)

It certainly loses a bit in not having the voice over – sorry I couldn’t record it but much of the discussion was really client specific and less useful outside their context – if I get time maybe I’ll do a walk through and record a voiceover.

I tried to place the requested agenda items in the context of what we’ve been calling “The Assembled Web” for the past couple of years, connecting the specific social computing initiatives in a broader framework, one which involves:

1. The convergence of content, commerce, and community – as they grow out of the previous web eras
2. The notion of the Digital Footprint – taking your brand presence (across all three Cs) to where users are, and engaging them throughout the Internet

I hope you find it useful – please do comment here or on SlideShare.

Now BarCamp Boston 4 is coming up this April 25th and 26th at the Stata Center at MIT. Although ultimately the topics discussed are determined by who shows up, odds are that free and open source software, social media, voting, government transparency, robotics, hardware and software hacking, startups, and all kinds of topics related to openness, the web, and business will be common.

BarCamp Boston 4

I definitely plan to be there and I’d encourage you to register and attend, whether you’re a veteran or a n00b to the unconference world. It’s a fantastic opportunity to have a real conversation, in the absence of hugely expensive registration fees or overbearing sponsors.

If you’re not familiar with Coulton, two quick gems. First, Code Monkey:

Second, his great cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Baby Got Back:

In the interview (transcript here if you prefer reading to listening – I’m quoting from the transcript), Coulton talks about his use of social media to create direct relationships with his audience, and why some approaches have been more effective than others:

Facebook and Myspace are essentially duplications of my blog and my email which I already have a blog and email so you know, I don’t, I sort of don’t understand why bands use something like Myspace unless the answer is they can’t, they don’t know how to make their own website

Guess it helped that Coulton was originally a software developer. More to the point, Coulton identifies the risk of closed social networks and cloud platforms:

I was always suspicious of Myspace because for the very simple reason that you don’t have direct access to your network, you only have it through Myspace. If Myspace ever goes away your network winks out of existence, you don’t have your emails you don’t have any way of getting in touch with them. You are completely dependent on Myspace.

And you know you look at what happened with Friendster you know, guess what social networks rise and fall pretty quickly. That what happened with Friendster and it’s sort of what’s happening with Myspace I guess and no matter how great and eternal you think a social network platform is it’s an illusion it’s going to go away. And so to spend all your time building up this Myspace network is I think has the potential to turn out not so well.

Well put. I also really liked his point about creative commons licensing, which he leveraged very effectively early in his (recent) career and continues to use:

. . . you know it was kind of a scary thing but I really just rationalised the thing, well let’s just get the attention now and worry about making the money later, and you know, if the worst thing that happens is a million people get one of my songs for free, like you know, that’s okay, that something I can build on. And I would rather have that happen than make $15 from my friends who buy it and nobody else can hear it, you know.

The interview also touches on Eventful, rickrolling, Wil Wheaton, Ze Frank, podcasting in general, YouTube, and (of course) Twitter.

Well worth a listen, especially but not exclusively if you’re and independent musician or wanna-be independent musician.

(Photo from Marc Amos via BrightKite)

You can find her own recap here (with slides). Here’s some random notes I jotted (on my phone to evernote) I found interesting:

Don’t try to actively manage identities / profiles / updates on the 600+ sites out there. Don’t let your profiles rule your life.

Instead, choose just three: she chose Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Why? Those are the ones which seem most useful to her for locating clients, getting key news updates, and keeping in touch with friends. Your three may vary.

[I feel a need for closer to ten: Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, BrightKite, Dopplr, TripIt, Last.fm, and Identi.ca. I guess if I were to choose between Linked In and Xing, between Dopplr and TripIt, and between Twitter and Identi.ca, I'd be down to seven. Still can't quite get to three. That also leaves out project specific ones like Drupal.org or WordPress.org where I have an account/profile associated with a specific community, or broad aggregators like Chi.mp, Strands, and FriendFeed, not to mention my own johneckman.com - but then I don't update those directly, they copy content from other places.]

Half of her clients (as a social media consultant) she advises not to focus on Twitter. For example, law firms or regulated industries which have significant privacy concerns – even with “protected” accounts it has happened that Twitter has inadvertently exposed private messages. That said, though, one of her clients – La Casa De Las Vides winery in Valencia – founder her on twitter as she was tweeting with someone in Spanish. (They’re having a Boston Blogger Wine Tasting this week).

This doesn’t mean, though, that you should ignore the sites you aren’t going to keep as your primary networks. You should regularly claim your name: get your logo, picture, link up. This is important to prevent others from claiming your name and acting as you.

She uses repeater services like ping.fm to post to her secondary networks once or twice a day – just so the accounts don’t fall dormant – but doesn’t push all updates everywhere as that gets too spammy.

Her social toolbox includes:

• Evernote (great notetaking client for Mac, Windows, Linux, and many phones)
• Shareaholic
• Ubiquity / Firefox 3.x
• Ping.fm
• Twhirl / Tweetdeck
• Textexpander [see Texter for Windows]
• Quicksilver
• Google Tools: Mail, Calendar, Docs, Analytics, etc

She also includes as a tool her phone: HTC Mogul (Windows Smartphone) running iCal and SyncMate for Mac.

She also discussed FriendFeed, Strands, SocialMedian, SocialThing, Yammer, and SocialCast, as well as TweetBeep.

Are you able to limit your activity and profile management to just three sites?

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?

He’s currently running a survey, which you should take 10 minutes or so to fill out:

What’s in it for you?:

Respondents who complete the survey will be eligible to win $400 (a random email address will be drawn from all responses to the survey). All respondents will also receive a full copy of the results at no cost. Please provide your contact information in order to receive the survey results.

Only totals and summary statistics will be published. Your personal information and answers will be held confidential, and will not be shared with any outside partner or company.

I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for the results.

I’ve noticed in the last 3-4 months a major resurgence of interest in intranets – though they might be more properly called extranets, since they are password-protected rather than “behind the firewall.” We often begin talking to a prospect about content management and collaboration issues with respect to external audiences – customers, partners, suppliers – and come to find out that the core of the issue is the lack of an effective corporate-wide intranet in the first place.

Maybe “Enterprise 2.0″ is finally mature, when we no longer call it that and just call it the Intranet?

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.

• Joshua Porter on the Bungee Line Podcast
• Chris Brogan’s Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points
• Forrester Report from Jeremiah Owyang on Online Community Best Practices

Joshua Porter of Bokardo, has a book coming out: Design Social Applications (Voices That Matter). He was also recently interviewed by Alex Barnett and Ted Haeger for The Bungee Line podcast: Social Design with Joshua Porter. It’s a great interview, ~45 minutes, covering many of the themes covered at Bokardo: social software as modeling the real world, personal value before social value, and data driven design. I look forward to the book.

Chris Brogan also recently published Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points, a quick, concise, eBook focused on how companies can get started in the world of social media, especially with the concept of encouraging employees to blog or otherwise connect with online audiences. Key takeway: don’t obsess about “corporate blog policy” – take your corporate email / web terms or policy you already have (don’t reveal corporate or client secrets, don’t post pornography or copyrighted material, etc) and treat your employees as adults.

Finally, Jeremiah Owyang‘s first Forrester Report (Online Community Best Practices) is out and it’s a good sign of things to come. Unfortunately this one isn’t free, unless you have access to a Forrester subscription. (If you do, get the report from the Forrester site). The report doesn’t exactly break new ground – as the “best practices” in the title suggests, it synthesis and summarizes the core ideas enterprises need to hear as they think about creating online communities. As I read it, I found myself nodding vigorously, and recognizing mistakes people make that result directly from skipping some of these best practices.

My favorite part is the section on “A Taxonomy of Detractors” which lists these types:

• Legitimate complainer
• Competitor
• Engaged critic
• Flamer
• Troublemaker

And then describes ways of dealing with those detractors, ranging from “engage rationally” to “remove from community.” I like that it doesn’t oversell the fear of bad actors in a community (which can scare companies away from engaging in social media) but also doesn’t ignore it – just notes that there are clear ways of handling such problems.

Like an arranged marriage of members of distant royal families, they are talking about a union that will bring together very different worlds. The Web companies expect to become rich as advertisers pay more to reach an audience that can be sorted and selected on any set of attributes. Advertisers and their agencies are drooling that they will deliver highly targeted advertising messages that audiences will find more relevant, producing better results than they’ve seen in the mass media. The big question is what does the consumer, the commoner, think of this proposed royal wedding?

In other words, we’ve evolved from a scenario in which traditional and new media (or offline vs. online media) mistrusted each other and battled for the consumer’s attention into one in which they cooperate in their attempts to reach users – but this hasn’t made the situation any better for the end user – the one whose attention the ad buyers seek.

It’s a very good description of what I increasingly see as a major problem. Advertising, as advertising, is an annoying interference for most web users, just as it always has been for TV viewers and radio listeners. (Dougherty uses the metaphor of a tax – a relatively minor annoyance we put up with in order to enjoy the subsidized content).

So what’s an advertiser to do?

What’s a developer of a web property (media site, social network, community – the distinctions are getting less clear all the time) to do, since they rely on the advertising dollar to fuel their growth?

It’s starting to look less like an arranged marriage and more like some delusional, co-dependent pas de deux. It creates a world in which you have, on the one hand, AdBlock Plus, and on the other Facebook Beacon spamming your friends with what you bought in the vague hope that you might buy one too. (Is it just me who thinks it is wrong that I can become a “fan” of major brands in Facebook but I can’t become, well, whatever the opposite of a fan should be called in the context of a social network. This is a conversation in which you can only say good things – double plus ungood).

The most common strategies focus on dissolving the distinction between “advertising” and “content” – just like all those Dorritos product placements in Survivor (or on the Colbert Report), the idea is to make the brand’s presence Tivo-proof. (The YouTube inline ads have a similar function – you can’t skip them without also missing content).

But aren’t these just new ways of trying to push to the user a bit of content they didn’t want along with some content they did?

Dougherty also discusses the challenges that social networks like MySpace and Facebook face as they introducing increasingly obvious commercials into the fabric of their sites:

If sites or services become too commercialized, or as users catch on that the content is really a commercial in disguise, then they can choose to go elsewhere. They can shift their attention to a new site. I hope the threat of user migration is enough to keep Web 2.0 sites honest, and counteract the aggressive tendencies of advertisers. This is the risk that MySpace and Facebook are confronted with as they increase the amount of commercial activity on their sites. If advertisers increase the level of annoyance, even worse than strangers asking to be friends, then people will look for new sites that get it right. It’s a bit like FM radio. Get the balance between songs and commercial chatter wrong and people will flee to a new alternative.

How do we get beyond the dialectic of the users’ desire to avoid advertising and the advertisers’ desire to reach more users?

To put it another way, how do we make “relevant messages” really mean something?

There are certain brands from whom I’m happy to receive communication – eMusic’s updates on what albums are new in my favorite genres, for example – but those are rare moments in a sea of noise. Far too many companies can’t even track the basics, like all the direct mail pieces I get from credit card companies for cards I already have, magazines to which I already subscribe, and newspaper subscriptions I’ve already turned down three times this week.

I might even pay, at this point, to belong to a social network in which no advertising was allowed, if such a thing were even possible. Where my actual friends could tell me about things they like, but the actual makers of those things could not influence, encourage, support, market, or seed such activity. It’d be like an all organic, Astroturf free, commercial-message-free zone. Kind of like Usenet was before Canter & Siegal.