Todd Biske is an enterprise architect, a prolific blogger on SOA and other IT issues, and one smart dude. In a Dec 1st post on his blog he makes a great case for Facebook -- or something like it -- as an enterprise collaboration tool.
"In my opinion, viewing Facebook solely as a marketing/customer support channel is seriously limiting its use to an enterprise. The conversation should begin with an analysis of the communities that can be supported. Guess what? There’s a looming community with a very complicated social structure that exists within the walls of the company. Why can’t tools that are designed for enhancing communication and interaction between the social structures of society be applied within the walls of the enterprise?"
"I used to talk about manipulation," said Bob Cargill, creative director for Nowspeed Marketing. "Now I preach the truth and nothing but the truth. That's a big shift."
The short answer to book publishers is: don’t act like the music labels and turn your companies into a disruptive force that comes between readers and the real product—writing and writers.
In an article in SeekingAlpha, Can the TV Business Avoid the Music Industry’s Fate?, Ashkan Karbasfrooshan makes several interesting points about the evolution of traditional media in the Internet Age. He cites Magna Insights data that illustrates the impact of online video on traditional video:
Regular readers know that I don’t think anything will “kill” television outright, but [the data suggests] that online video will shrink traditional video, as was the case in music. There is a rationale to support this argument:- if the traditional media companies don’t legally make their content available online, then there is the threat of piracy. Think of music labels.
If they do publish their content online, then they shrink their businesses via the threat of cannibalization. This is what happened to print companies, the more aggressive ones actually shrunk much quicker than those who weren’t very aggressive (think NYTimes (NYT), or the Chronicle).
Writing in The Groundswell of Social Media Backl, ZDNet columnist Oliver Marks hits on an important issue regarding the evolution of social media and the hype surrounding its use in marketing:
The awkward ‘brought to you by‘ conversational tone of past generations of TV is increasingly being mirrored by ‘trying to hard’ social media mavens butting into conversations within social media technologies. I’m not even going to address the nonsense being peddled under the rubric ‘branding’ recently.
I've written about the what passes for "conversational tone" in this blog and elsewhere (see The Catalyst for Connection), so I wholeheartedly agree with Marks' point and his criticism elsewhere in the column about the army of social media "consultants" that has swarmed like ants over the landscape, especially since Twitter's launch in the spring of 2006. From what I've seen, far too many of those consultants are nothing more than marketing hacks trying to foist the same old crap on people using these new tools. That just won't work.
The term social media has emerged to provide a broad categorization for a collection of unique, Web-based tools for personal expression and communication, including blogs, podcasts, video and photo sharing sites, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, and the latest social media juggernaut, Twitter.
The rapid evolution and extraordinary popularity of these technologies has not gone unnoticed by marketing professionals. However, the challenge for marketers who wish to make effective use of social media is in recognizing that these technologies do not constitute yet another channel for the same tired message. (Every time I see a press release disguised as a blog post I want to stab myself in the brain with a pencil.)
What makes social media so uniquely powerful as a marketing tool has far less to do with the technology than it does with an entirely different approach to connecting with an audience. That connection is defined by its one-to-one-to-one nature, a cascade of individual, personal connections that stands in contrast to previous perceptions and definitions audience engagement.
Stop Selling – Start Talking
The problem — well, my problem — with “traditional” marketing communication is that it’s so obviously fluffy and phoney and too often absent any signs of humanity. Yet in my experience so many marketing people seem to think that the audience won't notice. The audience notices. The audience has always noticed.
Despite its startling violence, that routine from comedian and social critic Bill Hicks elicited enthusiastic applause in performances in the early Nineties. At about the same time the World Wide Web launched on a trajectory that would do for long-established business and communication models what a very large comet is believed to have done for the dinosaurs.
A few years later the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto brought into sharp focus the nature of the dysfunctional relationship that had emerged between business and the newly networked consumer in the early days of the Web.
Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked...Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do. - From The Cluetrain Manifesto, 1999
In 2009, despite the explosion in social media, how many businesses have evolved beyond communication that is official, artificial, and superficial? What those business fail to understand is that businesses don’t communicate, people communicate. The use of social media makes old-school faceless, sanitized, “official” communication obsolete. And the issue isn't just about what's being said -- it's about who's doing the talking.
Be a Mensch
A business is a collection of individual people, a kind of techno-organic network within the larger global network. The use of social media tools allows individuals within one network to engage with individuals in other networks on a more personal, and thereby more effective level.
For a business, the power in social media centers on the ability to allow individual audience members to tap into the thought processes of the individual people behind the products or services a company provides. For that reason the conversation that connects a person from within the business to members of the customer community must be a genuine reflection of the legitimate interests and passions of the individuals involved. The pursuit of those interests and passions rarely follows a straight line, and the creative spark that triggers innovation might be wildly off-topic. That's the nature of human conversation. The challenge for the business is to get out of the way of that conversation in order to allow a genuine human connection to form, a connection based on mutual value to the individuals.
Look at these two equations and let me know which one has the most benefit to you? 1. Message 1,000,000 to possibly reach 100 2. Personally reach 100 who influence 1,000 who influence 10,000 who influence 1,000,000. From Redefining Reach: The New Marketing Equation, by Matt Dickman, 2008
That connection is unlikely to form if the people representing the business in the conversation behave like an under-quota insurance salesman at a cocktail party. You wouldn't want to get stuck talking to that guy, so don't be that guy. Talk shop, talk about projects you're involved in. Share your insight and expertise, but don't abuse your connections, and never, never, never resort to fluff.
Each of us is an individual node in an ever-expanding global network. Social media tools allow us to create and manage our own connections. The level and extent of that personal interconnection is unique in human history, That's a tectonic shift in the business environment, but businesses can survive the resulting tremor if they learn to unleash — and trust — the individual voices within and learn to participate in, rather than attempt to control, the conversation that is the catalyst for that connection.
The argument Nicholas Carr makes on the difference between printed books and their digital counterparts (see Clutter) rests on the idea that "A change in form is always...a change in content."
There is no question that the experience of reading a printed book is significantly different from the experience of reading an ebook, regardless of the device used in the process. But is the experience of reading an ebook or any long-form online content inherently distracting? Or is the problem simply our failure to adapt to the new reading environment?
A reader is under no obligation to click a hypertext link that appears in the middle of a sentence. Nothing prevents a reader who wants to concentrate on an ebook or long online article from shutting down email and messaging applications and taking other measures to create an environment conducive to reading and concentration.
Distraction is distraction, digital or otherwise. So isn't the issue really about getting better at tuning out -- or turning off -- the distractions? Is reading a book on a crowded bus, train, or plane, with the various stimuli and distractions associated with those environments, so much less challenging than reading online?
There is indeed a great deal of information clutter in our lives, and Mr. Carr's concerns certainly have merit. But blaming the inability to concentrate or a deterioration of intellectual or cognitive abilities on the availability of information is like blaming obesity on food. Cheeseburgers and pizza are incapable of forcing themselves down your throat. Information is similarly constrained. The selection of what, when, and how much information we consume is a matter of making healthy choices based on the individual ability to metabolize that information.
Mr. Carr closes his post with the following comment on software writer Tim Bray's plans to digitize all of his books:
When Tim Bray throws out his books, he may well have a neater, less dusty home. But he will not have reduced the clutter in his life, at least not in the life of his mind. He will have simply exchanged the physical clutter of books for the mental clutter of the web. He may discover, when he's carried that last armload of books to the dumpster, that he's emptied more than his walls.
Swapping a collection of books for a digitized, networked library is a matter of storage and interior decoration. And while such decisions can affect one's quality of life, they are a reflection of one's taste, not of one's capacity for critical thinking or intellectual prowess. Mr. Carr appears to assume that Mr. Bray's decision will render him incapable of the levels of concentration and discrimination necessary to take advantage of an all-digital, on-demand library. That's just unfair.
Writing in his Enterprise Architecture blog, James McGovern makes an interesting and disappointing observation about the state of blogging.
Recently, I have noticed much of my stimulus has changed. The blogosphere is moving away from conversations and towards simply using it as a platform to communicate thinly veiled media relations sanitized press releases where all forms of communications are void of conversation.
I have no problem with marketing people adopting blogging and other social media tools. But it drives me up the freakin' wall when I see exactly what James McGovern describes. Ultimately, those who treat social media as a collection of new tools for the same old crap will fail. Good riddance.
In a post on her small business blog, Rochell Paul admits to not yet using Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, and that's fine -- though I have to admit that I'm surprised that a small business blogger would be entering into the SM game this late. But that's not what I want to talk about.
What I want to talk about is this quote from her post:
We all need to understand that a major part of Social Media is transparency. Honesty. The idea that we are open and honest about our role, and intentions.
Of course, I agree completely with that statement. Who wouldn't? But I guess I'm just a bit flummoxed that this honesty and transparency business is treated as such a strange new idea in Web marketing. The Cluetrain Manifesto raised this issue a decade ago. I don't mean to single out Rochell in this; the information she presents in her post is worthwhile, and she is very upfront in her admission of social media newbie-osity. And she's certainly not the only blogger to address the issue.
But the big, obvious question is: why do honesty and transparency attract so much attention in the currently relentless discussion about social media? Why are honesty and transparency treated as innovative marketing concepts? Why do some people and some organizations struggle with those ideas? What does this say about "conventional" marketing practice?
Of course, Twitter and Facebook and other social media tools aren't immune to the kind of dishonesty and opacity that can make conventional marketing so annoying. So maybe posts like Rochell's deserve more credit than I'm giving them. Human nature being what it is, maybe we need to be reminded again and again that honesty is good marketing practice, that it's good, period.
What is the most effective use of Social Media as a marketing tool? With regard to your list of friends, does size matter?
A recent article in The Economist (see Primates on Facebook) offers some interesting insight into Facebook usage and its correlation to the Dunbar Number, which suggests that the human brain is capable of maintaining connections to at most 150 people.
In the Economist article, Facebook sociologist Dr. Cameron Marlow offers some interesting statistics on the number and nature of the connections people make on the wildly popular social networking site:
Dr. Marlow found that the average number of "friends" in a Facebook network is 120, consistent with Dr Dunbar's hypothesis, and that women tend to have somewhat more than men. But the range is large, and some people have networks numbering more than 500, so the hypothesis cannot yet be regarded as proven.
What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual's friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more "active" or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.
Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual's photos, status messages or "wall". An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.
After reading this I could not help but think, yet again, about Matt Dickman's insightful explanation of the difference between conventional Web marketing and effective Social Media marketing.
In Redefining reach; the new marketing equation, Matt describes conventional Web marketing as a process that relies on sending a message (let's call it what it is: spam) to 1 million people in the hopes of reaching 1000. Effective Social Media marketing is about personally reaching out to "100 who influence 1,000 who influence 10,000 who influence 1,000,000."
Matt Dickman's equation, Dr. Marlow's statistics, and the Dunbar Number add up to a something significant, a powerful message to those who see Social Media as nothing more than a new flavor of the same old process. We're on to something new, something that requires a real, personal connection to real, individual people, not just a big list of anonymous targets.
So the bottom line is that the size of your friends list isn't important. It's all about the quality of the connections you make, and what you do to maintain those connections. It's very definitely not business-as-usual.
Amid all the recent coverage of financial troubles at various newspapers, WSJ columnist L. Gordon Crovitz offers this:
One reason most media companies suspended normal business practices online, such as seeking subscription revenues, was a misinterpretation of one of the most powerful observations of the Information Age. When author Stewart Brand coined the expression "Information wants to be free," he focused on how technology makes it cheap and easy to communicate and share knowledge. But the rest of his quote is rarely noticed. This says, "Information also wants to be expensive." The right information in today's complex economy and society can make a huge difference in our professional and personal lives. Not having this information can also make a big difference, especially if someone else does have it. And for valuable information, online is a great new way for it to be valued.
I have subscriptions to the print editions of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, though I most often read them online. My belief in and support of grassroots, social media-style journalism notwithstanding, newspapers still have a vital role to play, and I will happily pay for information that has value in my life.
Like any other business, however, newspapers must constantly strive for innovation in how they address the needs of their customers. If newspapers meet those needs, they should charge for that service. Their slice of the pie may be smaller, a factor that has already reshaped the industry and will continue to do so. But in age when we are awash in information, much of it of little consequence, the value of good information is at a premium, a premium that I'll happily pay.
In a recent post about Twitter's inevitable infiltration into enterprise IT, RIA Developer's Journal blogger @strukoff hits on what has been my longstanding soapbox issue regarding the corporate use of social media:
But as with blogs, Twitter is now part of the enterprise IT discussion as well. Sure, most corporations blog about as creatively and effectively as members of the National People's Congress or the NCAA. But don't blame the medium, blame those who use it ineffectively.
We said: These [music subscription] services that are out there now are going to fail. Music Net's gonna fail, Press Play's gonna fail. Here's why: People don't want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45's; then they bought LP's; then they bought cassettes; then they bought 8-tracks; then they bought CD's. They're going to want to buy downloads. People want to own their music. You don't want to rent your music -- and then, one day, if you stop paying, all your music goes away.
After reading that I couldn't help but wonder if the huge success of the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and similar devices, not to mention the not-so-coincidentally concurrent interest in cloud computing, will change how people think about buying, organizing, and managing music.
I find myself using the iPhone/Touch apps for Pandora and Last.fm a great deal. Toss in Simplify Media's streaming music app, which allows me to stream music from my iTunes library and the shared libraries of friends, and it starts to look like we're taking a significant step toward an entirely different model for music consumption. Yes, I "own" the music in that library, but if I can access, as I can through Pandora, a nearly limitless selection of music any time I want, do I really need to own the songs -- in the traditional sense?
That traditional music consumption model is based entirely the idea of access to the music you want, whenever you want it. The reason you buy a song from iTunes or Amazon, or buy a CD from Walmart (you Luddite!) is to insure access to the music. So what happens to that model if you have assured 24/7 access to the music you want to hear -- without having to physically store the music on your device(s)?
True, calling up a specific song on Pandora or Last.fm isn't as easy as doing so on my Touch or my Nano, assuming the song I want has been loaded onto the device. But there are limitations to the number of songs I can carry on either device.
An even bigger issue, literally and figuratively, is that my music library is already huge. It takes up most of my hard drive space, plus space on an external drive. So the more music I own, the more hardware I need to by.
In contrast, an iPhone or a Touch or a similar device can provide access to customized play lists on Pandora or Last.fm (assuming the necessary apps and network connection). So even if my control over those playlists is limited, I have access to far more music than I could store on the device -- or even on my desktop machine's hard drive.
As wifi becomes more ubiquitous (it'll be interesting to see what happens with WiMax and some of the community efforts to blanket entire neighborhoods with free wifi) the need to store music on my device becomes far less important. The storage space I save on my Touch or iPhone can be used for more and increasingly sophisticated applications.
When I eventually replace my home computer, the need for a massive hard drive or even an entertainment server will come into question in the face of alternatives. If I have to store my music and other files in fee-based cloud services (rumors today of the pending debut of Google's G-Drive), a competitively priced subscription music service that can provide 24/7 access to any song I want, from any device I own, starts to look anything but dead.
A few days ago social media guru Chris Brogan posted an interesting video blog (read my comment) on how the effective business use of social media requires an honest, personal voice, a departure from the typical business voice. (Why does the idea of putting on a business voice for social media communication remind me of Jane Jetson in curlers holding a perfectly-coiffed Jane Jetson mask in front of her face when she's using the videophone?)
From personal YouTube videos to particularly poignant and honest presentations or direct and true sales pitches, the humility, freshness and transparency that comes with an honest performance might actually be better than what a professional could do. Harvey Milk was an amateur politician, not a pro. If you're the only person on earth who could have done what you just did, then you're a proud amateur...You can't skate by when you refuse to mimic a professional. You must connect in a personal, lasting way that matters. That's difficult, but the professionals have no chance to compete with you.
Mr. Godin's post never mentions social media, but his message is highly, obviously relevant. Social media's ultimate impact on marketing has everything to do with the honesty, transparency and freshness that Mr. Brogan and Mr. Godin refer to in there respective posts. That certainly doesn't mean that any of those qualities can't be faked. But I have to believe that eventually that Jane Jetson mask will become far too heavy to hold up under the weight of community scrutiny. After all, the key difference between a marketing strategy based on the effective use of social media and a more traditional strategy is all about the difference between a community and an audience.
Among his predictions of 10 Things That WON'T Happen In 2009, Information Week's Digital Life blogger Fredric Paul says that blogging isn't ready to go the way of the dodo:
DON'T expect blogging to be replaced by Twitter and Facebook and Flickr. There was a lot of talk in late 2008 about how blogging had become bloated, passe, corporate, and overrun with flame wars and spam. (True enough, I guess, except for this blog.) And that Facebook and Twitter and the like are faster, more direct and more personal. Also true enough, at least in some cases. But reports of blogging's death have been greatly exaggerated. If anything, 2009 will see even more blogging than 2008, even as alternative platforms grow even faster. The death of blogging will have to wait.
I use Twitter, and I have Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube accounts, each of which is, to varying degrees, an important resource in both my professional and personal lives. But blogging is the cornerstone of my Social Media practice, so Mr. Paul will get no argument from me. Blogging isn't ready for a toe tag.
In fact, one could argue that blogging is the process one engages in when using any of those tools. Twitter is a mini blog. Flickr is photo blog, and YouTube a video blog. Facebook, in addition to being a kind of hybrid blog/IM platform, is also an aggregator for the content generated by or hosted on any of the other tools. So the blogging process is certainly evolving, but it's unlikely to fall victim to techno-Darwinism any time soon.
An excellent example of truly enlightened Social Media marketing. Seriously, this is brilliant stuff:
The funniest part: The "sacrifices" show up in your activity feed. So it'll say, for example, "Caroline sacrificed Josh Lowensohn for a free Whopper." Unfortunately, you can't delete your whole friends list and eat free (however unhealthily) for a week. The promotion is limited to one coupon per Facebook account.
The concept, trumpeted for years, only now appears to be making inroads. ABC, according to Ms. Sweeney, is pursuing the technology in several ways. With a Lost widget, ABC could perhaps feed fans extra clues about the mysterious storyline as they watch the series finale next year. A cooking segment on Good Morning America could be enhanced with step-by-step instructions that can be viewed onscreen via a widget.
And here's my question:
Aside from baby boomers, more and more people are viewing television programs over the Web, on some network sites, and Hulu and similar services. Those viewers, I suspect, are more technically savvy and adept at using various Web 2.0 tools to simultaneously access multiple content streams -- using Twitter while watching favorite programs, for example.
So while the TV widgets idea sounds cool, is it really going to matter if people aren't using their TVs anyway?
And with services like Twitter, and devices like the iPhone and iPod Touch, why but the widget in the TV?
This idea has some merit in its potential to transform the TV viewing experience to make it as customizable and interactive as the personal computer. But it may be too little too late.
Of course, if people are willing to trample each other to save a few bucks on a flat-screen TV, maybe TV as we know still has a chance at avoiding the tar pit.
As a "cloudworker" I've learned just how isolated one can feel when your daily commute is the few steps from the bedroom to the home office, and your colleagues typically manifest themselves as lines of text in an email or IM or, at best, disembodied voices on your cellphone.
So while I was a bit surprised that IW columnist Andrew Conry-Murray had only recently started using Twitter, I have to agree completely with his assessment of Twitter's role in keeping me connected to the world beyond my walls.
Murray writes:
Enter Twitter. I started using it before the holidays, and suddenly I don't feel so trollish any more. Via Twitter you can swap jokes with co-workers, get updates on their personal lives, and dip into a steady stream of industry gossip.
But for me Twitter is far more than a gossip channel. It's a powerful tool I use throughout the day to communicate with a growing network of people who are members of the community that is the focus of my work. At this point, my job would be so much more difficult without Twitter.
I am frequently asked for advice on blogging and the use of other social media tools in a corporate marketing environment. Time and again I find myself either quoting Matt Dickman or referring people to his blog or presentations on SlideShare.
Matt's recent post on social media contradictions will certainly become one of those resources I suggest to people who need help in learning to use these new tools.
Matt writes:
What's fast to build, slow to grow and needs constant attention? No, not a Chia Pet. It's social media! I've given this post a lot of thought over the past couple of months as I talk with executives and marketers who are discussing their entry into the social media space. Some are skeptical, others are passionate. Most have incorrect pre-conceived notions that are contradictory to the way things actually are. Ironically, most of these contradictions have been used as selling points in the early days of the space.
