Breakdown: 3 Ways Brands Are Earning –and Buying– Followers on Twitter

Categories: MicroMedia, Social MediaPosted on July 3rd, 2009

Companies who don’t have iconic brands with millions of adoring fans, often have to resort to other ways to get the attention of the market. This isn’t evil, nor is it uncommon, it’s just business, and was here before the web, and will be afterwards. Don’t get mad or emotional about it, let’s break it down to understand how it’s going to work, if you’re a concerned user, use this post to figure out how to beat it. If you’re a marketer, figure out what works –and throw away what doesn’t.

Breakdown: How Brands Are Buying –and Earning– Followers on Twitter
As a result, we’re seeing some of the same method applied to the web and email as to the social space. Here’s three examples (again in outline form) that I saw this week.

1) The Sweepstakes Giveaway: Moonfruit becomes a Trending Topic

Summary: This giveaway contest spurs word of mouth –results in opt-in “registration”
How they did it: Moonfruit offers website building services, and is offering a new computer to those that tweet about the contest (see their official contest page), the only way to receive a product is if you follow their account (opt-in). Of course, this means the members are subject to future messages.
This is the same as: Contests, WOM marketing, tell-a-friend.
Benefits: Rapid word of mouth about a brand driving awareness and opt-in as people follow the account, likely a percentage of followers will convert and buy the service.
Risks: This doesn’t build long term engagement with a brand, and it’s likely many will unfollow after the contest is over.
Costs: 10 Macbook Pro (13″) which is $1500 each for a total of $15,000. If the follower count retains at 10k a day (it’s day 3 today) for 10 days resulting in 100,000 followers, that’s about $6.66 a follower, not including marketing efforts.
Results: Big wins. Moonfruit is a trending topic 3 days after the contest landed, there are thousands of retweets and tweets about the brand, as well as an increase in followers of about 10,000 a day (graph).
My take: A natural extension of other marketing forms to Twitter. The giveaway prize matches well with the type of clientele the brand wants, and it’s certainly generating a high degree of discussion for at least 10 days. This really isn’t a new model, and we should expect more brands to offer these types of sweepstakes, however to make it better, the tweets should be more inline with the brand promise, such as asking the followers to tweet about “what website they love, or would build”

2) Buying Customer Matching Lists: uSocial Promises Relevant Followers

Summary: Service called uSocial offers brand cost per action (CPA) advertising resulting in customer match
How they do it: uSocial matches brands with suggest followers that have similar affinities, keywords, or profile information, BBC has the story. It looks like they will find matches, and suggest to twitter users that you follow that brand, (likely through an automated spammy system) till the reserve is met.
This is the same as: What’s new is old again. This is very similar to direct marketers buying email lists of prospects that have similar demographic or affinity information. Martin agrees. Kevin Marks makes a good point that it’s not like email, as you can’t make folks follow them on Twitter. I suggest it’s the same, as you can’t get a user to open a spammy email.
Benefits: They promise lots of followers within a few days, a very low cost.
Risks: Brand damage. If the market finds out (it should be easy) that a brand isn’t earning their followers, they risk backlash and people unfollowing, or even worse, unfollowing.
Costs: The lowest package (there are others) is $87 for 1000 followers–it breaks down to 8 cents a follower. If you buy the 100,000 follower package it drops down to 3 cents a follower.
Results: I’ve not heard if this works, I’m sure someone will report back to me.
My Take: Use as a last resort: If it looks to good to be true, it probaly is. The uSocial site looks like a ‘get rich quick’ site, the design comes across really spammy themselves. It’s likely brands that do buy this will likely act in a similar way, and I wouldn’t expect followers to stick around if they behave in a similar way. It’s likely a brand that goes for the quick hit doesn’t have a long term strategy to interact with their public market, and will use Twitter as a distribution point. However, brands that do have a community strategy, and have developed relationships using Twitter, could certainly benefit from the increased awareness to likely prospects –the only risk is that it may come across as spammy as uSocial makes recommendations.

3) Product Discounts or Specials: Dell Offers Followers Specials

Summary: Some brands are generating followers by providing special deals to followers.
How they do it: For some time, Dell is offering reduced priced or refurbed products on their Dell Outlets Twitter account.
This is the same as: signing up for emails to receive discounts.
Benefits: A low cost channel to sell products to an opt-in crowd, avoiding excess inventory.
Risks: Can’t think of any, leave a comment if you have one.
Costs: Inexpensive. It appears there is a community manager responding and answering questions, so the cost of this part time employee, or contractor, must be accounted for.
Results: Dell has made the claims they’ve generated over $3 million in revenues from this single account. Of course, that’s a drop in the bucket for this tech giant.
My Take: Replicate. This is a great use of using the medium to obtain more interested followers that are requesting to be customers. The downside is that not every company has products to offer on a discount, nor the brand appeal. Brands should find ways to offer special deals to this highly viral community, offsetting the costs by weighing in the benefits of WOM and press coverage.

Hope this breakdown is helpful, it’s important to look under the covers and analyze. Of course, I’ve not discussed the organic way of brands providing helpful content, interacting, or supporting customers, but that’s been written to death by the many social media bloggers.

12 Comments »

Facebook’s Awkward Adolescence

Categories: Facebook Strategy, Privacy, Web IndustryPosted on July 2nd, 2009

Facebook is undergoing pubescenct changes in the next few years –from a private pre-teen to a public facing member of society –that’s what I told USA Today. Facebook initially made it’s promise to be a private community, but realizes it must now be more public to compete with the open web. Expect more awkwardness for the social network and it’s users’ over the coming years.

What are the indicators that Facebook wants to grow up and be public?

Previous settings allow members to allow their profile page to be public and therefore findable by search engines.
Facebook launched Beacon in late 2007 that was it’s first gangly moment that resulted in public backlash as customer data was shared without users’ consent.
Facebook already has thousands of sites with Facebook Connect, which allows users to login with their Facebook ID to a site (making registration pages less relevant), and exposing limited amounts of profile information –expect this to expand as it’s successful.
A few weeks ago, Facebook allowed a mad rush to create vanity URLs for profile names and fan pages. Yesterday, Facebook announced it’s going to turn on new features that allow many types of content to be public from individual posts, as well as a set of permissions by your different groups of contacts.
As Facebook crosses this chasm they are buffering with the right staff, and have hired lobbyist Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, who not only deals with internal programs and policy, but also government groups.

Why Facebook’s Strategy Must be Public

Data that is public has more opportunity to be seen by the public, thereby increasing opportunities for advertising and marketing revenues.
Secondly, this is a trend of the open web as Twitter and other public social networks take hold.
Thirdly, take a look at Generation Y, my observation is that they appear more open about what they want to share, at least for now.
Lastly, Facebook’s play is to be an identiy hub, therefore its Facebook Connect features will let our Facebook logins spread the web, as a result, Facebook will aggregate the data back to it’s homepage, making it the centralized place we go to get information.

Expect More Social Awkwardness Over Next Few Years
As Facebook continues it’s global domination as the world’s largest non email social network (you do know that email is the largest social network, right?) expect to see more focus on privacy as they slowly change their value statement of being a private safe place with your real friends to be more of a public online discussion with the open web.

The key Facebook challenge is they have to convince, enable, and encourage its users to be public and open –they can’t turn on these features without breaking user trust.

14 Comments »

As Brands Continue to ‘Pollinate’ the Social Web, Expect Corporate Websites to Aggregate

Categories: Aggregation, Future of Social Web, Pollination, Social MediaPosted on July 1st, 2009

Brands are pollinating the social web with easy-to-share features like Sharethis. As conversations splinter across the web, brands must prepare to aggregate those same conversations on their corporate website. As a result, the trusted conversations will centralize back on product pages.

[Trusted conversations have fragmented to the social web --shifting the balance of power to communities]

Social Pollination: Brands Currently Spreading to Communities

Why: Brands are trying to let their corporate and social content spread to many different communities in Facebook, Twitter, Email and others.
Examples: Any blog post, press release, or product page that encourages readers to share the content to other locations. Any brand created Facebook fan page, flickr account, or Twitter account.
Risks: Letting content spread to other locations causes some angst, as brand managers now must monitor content and discussions elsewhere on the web. The command+control mentality of “our corporate website is central” no longer holds true as people can share content using browser features like social bookmarking tool Delicious, or sharing links in Facebook.
Vendors: A variety of tools have appeared such as sharethis, addtoany, addthis and others. Incumbent players include: email, Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious that encourage content to be shared within those communities.

[To regain trust, corporate websites will look more like a collection of real-time customer discussions --not just product pitches]

Social Aggregation: Corporate Websites to Centralize Discussions

Why: Conversations and content have fragmented and distributed on the web, as a result, corporate websites are generally irrelevant. Expect brands to start to centralize these discussions on or near their corporate website in order to bring trust and relevance back to the corporate website.
Early Examples: There’s a few examples that we can start to analyze, they include:
- Any corporate blog that frequently discusses recent topics or industry news is a manual version of this.
- Early examples include Sun aggregating technorati blog mentions of any product to their product pages –even if it’s negative. I’m having a hard time find that example now, they may have removed that from their website.
- IBM’s hosted thousands of developers at a conference called Impact. They aggregated event tweets in this twitterfall.
- Zappos aggregates all Twitter mentions of it’s brand on this aggregation page.
- Perhaps the most mature example is Kinaxis, a supply chain management software company, has aggregated news of it’s industry at Manufacturing Central.
Future Deployments: Expect brands to at first create a lightly branded version of these discussions, on the topics of industry, or around mentions of any product.
- Data and Content: The aggregation will need to pull in data and either sort by recency or relevancy or other prioritization pattern like Techmeme.
- Location: Brands will likely create a seperate site or microsite for events or products that does this, as they get bolder, expect them to aggregate direct on product pages.
- Branding: At first this will be lightly branded, but then will soon integrate directly with look and feeld or corporate site as this mainstreams.
Risks: Brands will have a difficult time finding all the relevant content. Secondly, while it makes sense to filter out off-topic, spam, and hate speech, the natural tendency will be to filter out negative reviews. Expect there to be customer backlash as their complaints are not publicly aggregated on the corporate web pages. Internally, expect social advocates to battle with brand preservationists who don’t want negative reviews on product pages.
Vendors: A variety of vendors will appear to serve this need:
- The toolsets have not yet emerged, however we should expect a series of startups to appear that offer this or spinoffs from Friendfeed (a logical first mover) and eventually a form of a Facebook embed.
- A second set of players could be any of the aforementioned pollinators (sharethis) and potentially listening vendors like Radian6, Buzzlogic, or any data house like Technorati, Delicious or Get Glue (read my take).
- Community platform vendors and CMS vendors like Vignette, Interwoven, Documentum with social features will likely launch modules or features that provide these aggregation pieces, or partner with the above.
- Expect innovative agencies like Federated Media who conducted ’sponsored aggregation’ of “Exectweets” for Microsoft to pioneer this with brands and technology partners. Update: CrispinPorterBogusky is already experimenting

Takeaways
Today, brands are trying to keep up with consumers as they self-connect to each other on social sites. Clearly, many companies aren’t even ready to participate with communities where they already exist, so only a few sophisticated companies will be prepared for this next future evolution of corporate websites. Don’t expect aggregation in the advanced forms I suggested to happen till brands are mature in the era of social colonization (read more about the future of the social web), so expect some time for true case examples to occur.

(Also, I’m trying out a new writing style, this time in outline form to break out a set of ideas. Was this helpful?)

43 Comments »

Is Blogging Evolving Into Life Streams?

Categories: Social MediaPosted on June 26th, 2009

Top Bloggers Spend Less Time Blogging
I’ve noticed a gradual change in what we know as blogs when Scoble and Shel wrote the book on Naked Conversations. Both of them are now focused on micromedia: Shel has an upcoming book on Twitterville, and Scoble spends more time promoting Friendfeed than his own blog. Secondly, I just learned that Edelman’s top blogger Steve Rubel has retired his traditional blog, and it’s now a life stream, which aggregates content from any source. Of course, I don’t need to mention that many of the top 100 blogs all look like mainstream media, with a team of writers, photographers, and editors.

It seems as if blogging is becoming old hat, or at least evolving into something smaller, faster, and more portable. I’m with Louis Gray, (who has finally blogged his stance –great graphics) I’m not going to give up my blog, instead, I think of it as the hub of content, and the rest of the information I aggregate (notice the Twitter bar up top and the Friendfeed integration below). To me, joining the conversation is certainly important, but it doesn’t mean the hub (or corporate website) goes away.

More Lifestreams Mean More Noise
As more and more people create content on microchannels, we experience more ambient intimacy, but also a lot more data. For example, Scoble pointed out on our panel last night with Mark Silva and Kevin Marks that the iPhone has resulted in 400% increase in uploads to YouTube. I assure you, we have no time to consume all the content created just from our immediate friends and family –the hours in the day stay fixed.

Steve Rubel’s switch to using Posterous (the tool that fuels his lifestreaming) makes sense for him. Why? he’s slowed down on blogging and increased his activity in Twitter and Friendfeed. But what’s going to work for him may be a detriment for others, this increased volume of smaller content the need for analysis and journalism matters even more. When you look at Steve’s new stream, it’s actually heavily on target with the same content as he’s had on his blog, it’s just published faster and quicker.

Opportunity For Those That Can Distill Noise to Signal
Yes, you should certainly socially pollinate your corporate or blog content to other communities, using tools like sharethis, however these should also be hooks for people to find your content. For me, I’m going to respect the needs of my community, and keep on blogging to distill what I think is important.

Key Takeaways

The trend for people to create more content is afoot, as a result aggregation tools like lifestreams, activity streams, and newsfeeds (and a new form of a social/email inbox) will take center stage.
You should certainly join the conversations where they exist, but this doesn’t mean your base of quality content should erode, there are long term branding and search benefits.
As a result, we’ll start to see new tools emerge that help to find the signal –not noise. Those who can filter out what’s important will matter more:, by using a: blog, delicious, or tweets to let your community know what’s important.
Expect the same heavy pieces on this blog, but feel free to spiral with me on Twitter and Friendfeed and whatever tool comes next. I’m going to leave the choice to you. I want to keep the signal high for my business minded community. Needles –not hay.

Update: I gave Scoble crap last night in person over beers for not keeping his blog up. He takes my challenge and rebuts me in Friendfeed. This proves my point he’s losing his thought leadership, his voice is lost in the noise –what do you think? Update (A few days later): Scoble has come to his senses, and is putting focus on his blog now.

Steve has responded from his blog –in paragraph form, so really, he’s actually still blogging, although aggregating other interesting info in his “journal notepad”, I prefer his method over Scoble’s –he’s also retaining his brand from his own domain/URL –although he made his readers re-subscribe to RSS.

To be clear, I admire and respect both of these guys for leading the next movement.

55 Comments »

Report: Companies Should Organize For Social Media in a “Hub and Spoke” model

Categories: Forrester, Social Media, Web StrategyPosted on June 25th, 2009

I often get asked by brands: “How should we organize our company for social media?” or “Which roles do we need”, or “Which department is in charge”. So for our latest report (clients can access all the details) answers just that, it has data and graphs about spending, brand maturity in the social space, which department ‘owns’ the program, and how companies are organizing.

Companies organize in three distinct models
For this post, let’s focus in on how companies are organizing. There are three basic models that I’ve observed and surveyed brands:

The Tire (Distributed): Where each business unit or group may create its own social media programs without a centralized approach. We call this approach the “tire,” as it originates at the edges of the company.

The Tower (Centralized): We refer to this centralization as the “tower” — a standalone group within a company that’s responsible for social media programs, often within corporate marketing or corporate communicaitons.

The Hub and Spoke (Cross Functional): Like the hub on a bicycle wheel, a cross-functional group that represents multiple stakeholders across the company assembles in the middle of the organization. The hub facilitates resource sharing and cross-functional communications (via the “spokes” in the wheel) to those at the edge of the organization (or the “tire”)

The above graphic shows how brands we surveyed are organized

Which way should companies organize?
We believe the most sophisticated and effecient way is the Hub and Spoke, which provides centralized resources that can support business units. The business units still have the freedom and flexibility to dialog with the market –and should be in alignment with what other spokes are doing. Social doesn’t impact one department –but impacts marketing, pr, product, services, support, and development –every customer touchpoint.

Remember: 80% is Strategy only 20% is Technology
On a related note, thanks to heavy collaboration with colleague Zach Hofer-Shall we’ve also published a report for clients on a community launch checklist. This checklist reminds brands that 80% of their success is dependent on understanding their customers, defining an objective, and assembling the right strategy that encompasses: plans, roles, process, budgets, measurement, and training –not a focus on technology.

The faster brands can realize that approaching social marketing and collaboration isn’t about technology, but about process and change management the better off they are. You’ll find simliar thoughts from David Armano –who’s scoping out different models within their framework of social business design.

Love to hear from you: Which way is your brand organized? In a tire? tower? or hub and spoke. In my experience, I often ask stakeholders in companies to vote by raising their hands on which model they think they are –most often, not everyone agrees –but most want to evolve to hub and spoke. Try polling your internal teams to start a lively discussion.

Update: David Armano responds, and points out there can be multiple hubs and spokes in a single corporation. We’ve found this in large CPG and Tech titans, this model can work well.

38 Comments »

Where Your Facebook Pictures and Friends are Featured, “Prototype Experience” Provides A Social, Contextual Video Trailer

Categories: Advertising, Social MediaPosted on June 22nd, 2009

Remember early Jib Jab cartoons where you’d manually upload your own photo and that of your friends? Now, it’s much easier with just a few clicks to Facebook Connect.

Last week, I had dinner with Chris Pan (linkedin, twitter), Head of Brand Solutions at Facebook, who pointed me to a new social interactive marketing advertisement for a video game called “Prototype”. Upon accessing the site, Prototype Experience, (try it for yourself) you’ll be prompted to login with your Facebook account. After a rather lengthy loading period (it’s worth it, hang tight) you’ll watch a short teaser trailer.

This isn’t a normal trailer, as it uses your own social information in Facebook from your profile picture, your profile information, and photos from your friends. Here’s what I saw, see screenshots below.

What’s going on here? This is an example of more contextual ads based off social profiles, which is a trend as you can see my coverage of VW’s Twitter and Facebook campaign). These are early examples of the era of Social Context, where content, media, and ads will be personalized in the future based off your social information, learn more about this in the future of the social web.

User Experience: Screenshot Storyline
Here’s the blow by blow, with my thoughts.

Above Image: First, users are encouraged to login with Facebook Connect –a few clicks. If you’re already logged into Facebook, it’s just a few clicks –all without entering a password. Expect more people to interact as there’s less commitment and up front investment than finding photos and uploading them –Facebook already has the inventory you need.

Above Image: Promo video includes my profile pictures –making things a bit more interesting and personalized. As this evolves, imagine how your face and profile info will populate other experiences and content –we’re instinctively drawn to look at ourselves.

Above Image: “Is that me?” Yes it is, this promo video includes information from my profile –I’m right in the game. In consideration of my friends, I didn’t include their photos –which you’ll see in your own trailer video. Expect future ads where friends ‘promote’ or even sponsor content –some opt-in, some not.

Above Image: Participants are ‘hooked’ into the registration form in order to win in the sweetstakes, a good example of gathering leads from an engaged audience. Facebook isn’t a great way to generate leads, while you can get users to be ‘fans’ of your Facebook page, getting their true identity and email is often limited –as dictated by their Terms of Service.

Above Image: The participants are encouraged to share the campaign with their Facebook or Twitter friends, thus staring a “Viral Loop”. It spreads.

Key Takeaways

This is clearly a trend, expect many interactive and digital agencies to offer this social campaign to their clients.
Consumers will initially ‘freak out’ and be concerned that big brother is watching them –then will accept this as mainstream media over the next few years.
At some point, nearly every campaign will have social content influencing the content –hitting a saturation point that disinterests users
Expect site wide Facebook Connect initiatives to happen, allowing all of the media, content, and ads to be socially contextual. Expect media sites and eCommerce sites to launch this first.
Expect recommended products and ads to appear from your friends and those connected to you in your social network.

15 Comments »

Three Years

Categories: RuminationsPosted on June 19th, 2009

I’m all smiles today, as I reflect on three years of blogging at web-strategist.com.

Although I’ve been blogging about web strategy previously on Blogspot, Yahoo 360 for a few years prior, things really started to get serious when I launched this domain.

Over the three years, the technorati rank of this blog has settled around the 500 range (the lower the better) and it’s unlikely it will drop lower as I’m not a news breaking site, or have a team of writers like many of the top 100.

What’s worked for me? Pay yourself first. I put in a lot of passion, and read and blog nearly every morning (It’s 3:51am right now) before I check any email (which is paying someone else), have an editorial calendar, and am slowly writing drafts (there are 413 of them right now) each day as I collect little bits of information, or get ideas. I’ve learned to integrate the blog into many of my communications as a central hub, then use the social tools to pollinate and let the blog disperse to other locations.

Perhaps the best thing is that this has become more of a collaboration between us because we as a community are learning from each other. Although I’ve written 2,292 posts in these three years, yet there have been 42,694 comments and trackbacks, nearly 20 voices to my one. I still read every single comment, and skim most blog incoming blog posts, I learn a lot –especially when you don’t agree, or put me in check.

I really look forward to the next few years, thank you for being here with me and talking and learning with me. Thanks you for making this a fun project that turned into a career for me, let’s continue to share both ways.

38 Comments »

Contextual Ads Based Off Social Network Profile: Twitter and Facebook

Categories: Advertising, Future of Social Web, Social MediaPosted on June 18th, 2009

Things are moving very quickly now, in fact I was pleased to learn about these contextual ads from my new friend Cory O’Brien in SF yesterday.

In my latest report “The Future of the Social Web” we pointed that in the near future we’ll start to see web pages dynamically created based on user profile ID in social networks. Essentially, your corporate, media, or ecommerce site could provide contextual media, content, and advertisement based on users’ info before they login.

[In the Future, The Era of Social Context Will Serve Personalized Content, Media, and Ads to Users based on their Social Networking Information]

Here’s an early example of a contextualized advertising campaign from VW (by agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, read more about the modernist campaign) that’s intended to help prospects find the right model based on their preferences. Please note this isn’t yet the full entry into the era of social functionality as users have to manually submit their login info or user name (like this Twitter example below) and just examines recent tweets. When the era of social context matures, it will look beyond just profile info, but also behavioral data, friend data, location, and content analysis of explicit and implicit data.

Type 1: Context Ad based off of opt-in Twitter profile.

Above Ad: Enter your Twitter name to see a product recommendation

Type 2: Contextual Ad based off of Facebook profile.
Corey also pointed me in the direction of a second “Meet the VWs” Facebook app that asks users to opt in to analyze their profile and then recommends products based off simple profile info. Read the pros and cons from the smart folks at the Future of Ads of this Facebook advertising effort.

Above image: Facebook recommended these products to me on the VW fan page

Future Expectations:
Expect social context to impact not just ads, but many websites in the future. Also, expect the accuracy to increase as social and behavioral data starts to merge.

Facebook, Twitter, have a tremendous amount of explicit and more importantly, implicit data that could serve up information about users, yet we should expect years of refinement for these engines to truly be accurate. Interestingly, the Twitter ad suggested I’d like the Jetta, yet the Facebook app suggested a Rabbit and Beetle, which I find funny as I’d never drive a Beetle, that’s really not me at all.

In the future, these ads, media, or recommendations should be more intelligent and also find friends with similar cars, or people with similar traits to me that I don’t know and suggest products. As user ID start to federate and connect with other such as Open ID and Facebook Connect, we should expect a higher degree of accuracy.

Then, users may choose to opt-in to expose parts of their identity as they surf the web on trusted sites to receive a contextual experience. For example, I may trust Amazon, eBay and Google search to expose my identity in exchange for a more personalized experience.

We should also expect a rash of privacy concerns and user backlashes to happen, even if they opt in, we’re just scratching the surface here. I have so much more to write on the topic of social context, but it’s 3am and I need to go back to bed, so I’ll save it for a future blog post.

Key Takeaways

The above ads are simple experiments of how context can be served up through social data

Expect this contextual content not to be limited to just ads, but also on media sites, ecommerce, corporate sites, and TV

Expect digital content to be contextual –even without express content of the users

During the early years, expect privacy concerns to overwhelm brands, causing them to rethink this approach

Although it will take years to perfect, expect context to increase CTR, and therefore the cost of ads

What did the Twitter ad and Facebook page recommend to you? Were they accurate recommendations?

26 Comments »

Trends: Impacts Of The Era of Social Colonization –Every Webpage to be Social

Categories: Future of Social Web, Social CRM, Social MediaPosted on June 16th, 2009

One of the key findings from the very popular report The Future of the Social Web (which has been translated into over a dozen languages by the community) is that identity technologies like Facebook Connect, OpenID, as well as existing identities will soon colonize the web, making every webpage a social experience –even if they don’t choose to participate.

[Soon, every product page and webpage will be a social experience –even if brands don’t choose to participate]

Although the identity space is still in it’s adolescence, many of the vendors agree on the direction to head, but not exactly how to get there. Secondly, there’s many different groups coming together from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and the third party OpenID foundation that are trying to make their specific requirements work with each other.

Once the different parties representing the identity systems agree on the specifics and start to implement we’ll still need to see a transport method that will allow these identities to appear on any webpage:

How Every Page Could Be a Social Experience

• Connective APIs. Expect to at the highest level technologies like Facebook Connect and OpenStack to allow third party sites to connect with websites –without users having to give up their login credentials or personal information –essentially bypassing the annoying registration page.
• Social inlays and overlays. At the next level, expect social networks to create ‘overlay’ experiences so their social experience will traverse every webpage. If you currently click on a link within Facebook to a third party site it will open inside the Facebook experience. We also see this with Digg, with it’s “Digg Bar” experience.
• Browsers to add social functionality. Expect every browser to provide a social experience. Finally, at the next level, expect pervasive technologies like browsers to start to become social. Expect Google’s Chrome to allow your Gmail contacts to share their experiences on every webpage and product you visit. In fact, startups like GetGlue are already experimenting with aggregating reviews from a person’s network using Firefox plugins.
• Birth of the Social Inbox. In the most radical future, content will start to appear on a new type of aggregation webpage that resembles both email and newspages. I’m watching vendors like Friendfeed to aggregate public and some private data, expect Facebook and Google Wave to present unique new experiences we’ve not seen yet. As people interact socially with others on the internet, expect social networks to aggregate the colonization creating a new type of ‘Social Inbox’ (more on that soon). Expect to see Microsoft Live, Yahoo Mail, Gmail/Google Wave start to merge with social networks, birthing a new type of communication and collaboration platform. Why does this matter? because fragments of the corporate websites will be aggregated into these platforms, in a social context.

[As a result, people will lean on the opinions and experiences of their trusted network –diminishing traditional marketing efforts]

Key Impact: A Shift to Customer Opinion Over Corporate Messaging
More importantly, this means that your customers will be able to rely on their immediate friends and trusted network to make decisions –not just nameless customer reviews like on Amazon from folks you don’t know. This means they will also start to rely more on each other for reviews –not the marketing created by brands. This also applies to the real world –not just online, as people can access digital devices on mobile social networks to find out which stores, restaurants and activities their trusted network prefers.

Power continues to shift to the participants, and away from irrelevant corporate websites.

If this post was helpful, please tweet it by copying and pasting into Twitter:

Trends: Impacts Of The Era of Social Colonization –Every Webpage to be Social http://bit.ly/aAJ9c by @jowyang

31 Comments »

People on the Move in the Social Media Industry: June 15, 2009

Categories: Career, On the movePosted on June 15th, 2009

Despite there being many layoffs in the startup space. I’ve started this post series (see archives) to recognize and congratulate folks who get promoted, move, or accept new exciting positions. Please help me congratulate the following folks:

John Yamasaki @jyamasaki on Twitter joned the Seesmic team as a Community Evangelist. Congratz Yama!

Stepahnie Agresta joins Porter Novelli as the EVP and Global Director of Digital Strategy and Social Media. Big congrats, and glad she made her blog post about the topic ‘human‘. I’ve known her for a few years now, and am happy to congratulate such a warm, intelligent, and fantastic professional to such a key role. Wishing her the best.

This one is a shocker, Steve Bendt who lead some of the innovative social media efforts at retailer Best Buy has decided to join Microsoft, (Catholic guilt and all) his new title will be Social Media Marketing Manager on the Windows team. He’ll be starting in Redmond in early July and I’m sure they’re glad to have such an innovative professional.

The Super Rewards team is happy to announce that Julie Craft, has recently joined the team as the Vice President of Marketing and Publisher Relations.

I can’t say enough good things about Adam Singer, who is a talented electronica muscian (I’m a fan of his) has decided to TopRank as an Account Manager to serve clients. Congrats on Top Rank who hired a very creative professional that will take them to the next level. Adam be sure to keep up the music!

Ripple 6 makes two key hires with Paul DePinto assumes the position of Vice President of Sales East.and Mike Tracy was promoted to Vice President of Sales West.

Anthony Cerreta is the Lead Interactive Producer for matrixx. Their recent projects include campaigns for Johnsonville, Schlotzsky’s, and Dippin’ Dots Facebook Fan Page, find him on Twitter, and his blog.

InfoGroup hired Bryan Jennewein is now Director of Social Media, find him on LinkedIn too.

Jonathan Georger joined the PR Agency, Backbone Media, as Online Brand Manager. congrats

Gavin Baker has been appointed to Social Media Manager at Ruby Tuesday, Inc, he’s also on Twitter and says his role splits straight down the characteristics between strategist and community manager. (Sorry Gavin, I forgot to include in first update)

Did you submit but it’s not showing here? That’s because I need a URL to link to as final confirmation.

How to connect with others (or get a job):
Several people have been hired because of this blog post series, here’s how:

Submit an announcement
If you know folks that are moving up in the social media industry, leave a comment below, or if you’re feeling shy (it’s cool to self-nominate) send me an email. Please include a link to your announcement, and ensure you’re really living and breathing in the social media world –this is not a small aspect of your role.

Seeking Social Media Professionals?
If you’re seeking to connect with community advocates and community managers there are few resources

List of Enterprise Social Media Professionals
This list, which started with just 8 names continues to grow as folks submit to it. List of Social Computing Strategists and Community Managers for Enterprise Corporations 2008 –Social Media Professionals.

See Web Strategy Jobs powered by Job o Matic (Post a job there and be seen by these blog readers, these affiliate fees pay for my hosting)

Learn from those that were recently hired, read these survey results

Read Write Web also has job announcements in Jobwire, although at a broader scope than my announcements

Connect with others in the community manager group in Facebook

Jake McKee’s community portal for jobs

Chris Heuer’s Social Media Jobs

SimplyHired aggregates job listings, as does Indeed

ForumOne Jobs for Social Media and Community

Teresa has a few jobs, some around community

New Media hire has an extensive job database

Social Media Headhunter

Social media jobs

Jobs in social media

Altimeter Group’s list of social media consultants and agencies

Hiring? Leave a comment
If you’re seeking candidates in the social media industry, many of them are within arms reach, feel free to leave a link to a job description (but not the whole job description, or I’ll delete it)

I’m seeking folks that are related to full time hands on social media strategy and community managers, to be on this list, so let me know if you see these folks, and please submit them –try to include links to announcements on blogs or on the wire. Also, I probably will not include executive management changes on this list at social media companies, as the list would go on and on, but you can feel free to express yourself in the comments!

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Looking Behind the Curtains on the Social Media Stage: Humans Don’t Scale

Categories: Challenges, Social MediaPosted on June 13th, 2009

I’ve been watching this space for a few years now, and I’ve started to notice that the people (often those that we think of that are at the upper echelons) are not able to scale, as a result here’s what they’re doing to compensate:

Many social media bloggers don’t even manage their own accounts, they often hire virtual assistants to do their Facebook and Twitter follows and replies.

Quite of few of those top social media bloggers don’t even answer their own emails, they have a virtual assistant that reviews them, sorts them, and sometimes responds on their behalf.

Many of the top social media news blogs are on a race to see who can publish the fastest, why? whoever gets the earliest time stamp often gets the credit and links from other blogs, and will risest fastest on the techmeme tower or google news gauge. As a result, many of these blogs will publish the headline, then adjust, edit, format, punctuate, and add links to the post in real time.

A few authors that have published one of the thousands of social media books outsource their content to ghost writers who create the majority of the content. Although it’s the headlining author’s name that drives book sales, in many cases they don’t actually write the content.

Many of the top celebrities or top social media names don’t even write their own blog posts and tweets, they may outsource it to others.

So what does this mean? It means the social media space is starting to look like just about every other industry that starts to get mainstream. Social media is often the premise built on 1:1 relationships, and even with technology, that clearly doesn’t scale, and I can relate.

What about me? I’m asked every few days “How do you do it all” my answer is “I don’t, the wheels are falling off” Well you’ve probably noticed I’ve not been blogging much, nor tweeting lately, I’ve been under heavy travel and projects (that I’m behind on). Every blog post and tweet that you see is me, including all the errors and typos that come along with them. I will admit that sometimes, I even updated blog posts after they publish, to polish it up. I skim all my emails, read many, but if I answer, I promise you that’s always me. I may not be good at scaling my social efforts, but I assure you, I’m authentic, warts and all.

I can relate to those who don’t scale well. If you’ve ever met me at an event this last year, you may have noticed dark circles under my eyes, and somewhat of a flustered appearance. I recently had a long talk with a good friend yesterday, when I’m tired from traveling nearly every week, you may notice that I actually draw my strength from within or being online, not always from others. So if I’ve ever came across as a bit messy and sapped, I certainly don’t intend to, I’m just stretched to the limit at times.

So what happened to transparency and authenticity? Maybe it’s the econony, with less resources, and more pressure, we’re all being stretched to the limits. Or maybe, this is the evoluation of every industry, music, art, and film started out simple and pure, then became institutionalized. Or maybe, I just never bothered to look close enough.

Update: Chris Saad, who inspired me to write this, has responsed from his own blog. Paid content highlights the challenges. This post has generated a lot of discussion from my friends as I meet them in person, interesting.

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Hotels: Don’t Charge Us For Internet Use

Categories: FeedbackPosted on June 8th, 2009

I stayed at the Hilton hotel in San Diego this weekend, and overall a great experience. However there was a 10 dollar charge for internet for 24 hours usage at the property, and since I wasn’t on business, I wouldn’t be able to expense it.

Charging guests for internet access is like charging for water or the lights, and hotels that charge are missing a few business opportunities. Like what? Here’s a few suggestions, and then I’ll open it up to commenters to share their ideas:

Providing free WiFi (like coffee shops have figured out) means I’m more likely to stay on property and spend more time and money on your hotel. It means I’m more likely to have business meetings in your restaurant or lounge and invite others to come and do business. We have expense reports and are likely to buy food and drink. We’ll access our web enabled devices at the pool, in the lounge, keeping our kids busy, and keeping us connected.
Savvy hotels will create or foster location based social networks, that will encourage guests to rate and rank which restaurants, attractions, and self-support each other. As we rate and rank nearby attractions in the context of being a guest at your hotel, that centralizes our experiences with your brand –we’ll tell our network about the great we had our experience in and around as guests at your property.
Develop a virtual concierge that will be a helpful guide to your guests, consider using twitter like the four seasons does, they even do this for their Palo Alto hotel, near my house. You can provide us a better experience if we’re connected to each other –and to you.
Maybe we’ll spend more times learning from your leadership teams, like Bill Marriot’s blog. Hotels put a lot of marketing and service products in our hotel rooms like menus, spa treatments and concierge treatments, allow us to see these things online, not just in paper, giving us more opportunity to buy more.

I’m not picking on Hilton alone, as I’m told it varies on property per property basis, and there are many other hotels that charge for internet, but as a general rule of thumb, provide a better experience to guests so you can connect with other –and you. When I travel on personal trips, I’m going to consider free internet access as a major factor to my decision on where to stay.

Update: Here’s a handy guide of which hotels charge who have internet access and how much they charge. About 22 of the 44 hotel chains charge for internet, and some don’t even offer it (motel 6). Many of you expressed agreement with my post (and a ton more in Twitter) so I hope this helps in your decision making.

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Seeking Case Studies of How Brands Reach Gen X Using Social Media

Categories: Generations, Social Media, TechnographicsPosted on June 6th, 2009

I’m wrapping up my report on “How companies should organize for social media” in a few weeks, and collaborating on a report with Zach Hofer-Shall (a digital device aficionado) on a “Comprehensive community checklist” and am going to start work on a research report exploring the social behaviors of Generation X, and how brands are reaching them using social media. (see my body of research)

I’m probably the youngest of the Gen X generation (people define the age groups differently, but the behavioral traits and beliefs are perhaps the most telling) and we’ve a unique way of growing up with Transformers, GIJoe, My Little Pony, Reading Rainbow, Regan’s Just Say No, and of course Michael Jackson (when he was black). We also grew up with technology: Nintendo games and “↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A”, boomboxes, Sony Walkmen and of course MTV and VH1 –or, at least that’s all that comes to my mind during my growing up experience.

Fast forward to 2009, we’re establishing ourselves in the workplace, becoming the successful professionals as we enter the early or mid-career phase of our lives. Yet with maturity comes the big “R” of responsibility: family, kids, the access to disposable income. As this generation, my generation, moves into the prime light, brands are also recognizing the importance to reach us, so I’m seeking your help to submit information.

Seeking Case Studies of How Brands Reach Gen X Using Social Media
I’m seeking examples from brands or agencies that have case studies of how brands have reached Generation X (my Generation) by using social media. This doesn’t have to be a formal PDF, but it’s most helpful if you include URLs or screenshots, a problem definition, a goal, and then measurable quantitative results. I’m seeking these within the next two weeks so by June 15th will be the last day to email me at jowyang at forrester.com.

For Discussion: How Would Gen X Behave If We Grew Up With Social Media
Oh, and to kick off a conversation, how would Gen Xers behave if we had the internet when we grew up, rather than in just the last decade and half? From turntables, cable tv, to compact discs, we mainly grew up as consumers of technology and media –not creators. We grew up with technology as consumer products, yet in many cases, these devices were not connected, not networked, and not tied together through the internet or wireless technology (we were often ‘nodes’ not networked). Do you think Gen Xers would use it differently than Gen Y? Would we be as willing to share all parts of our personal and social lives as some of our younger counterparts? You can learn more about how different generations around the globe access social technologies using our social technographics profile tool, love to hear your thoughts.

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Breakdown: Digg Allows Community To Choose Advertisements

Categories: Social MediaPosted on June 4th, 2009

Left: This screenshot, provided by Digg shows how an EA Sims ad is embedded in main body editorial as sponsored, as well as in upper right bug.

Digg Launches Community Voted Advertising: “Digg Ads”
Digg, who was formerly partnered with Microsoft for advertising, announced that they will be launching a new type of advertising unit that allows Digg members to vote up (digg) or down (bury) ads that appear in the editorial stream. As a result, the ads that are voted up will cost less to the advertiser. Nodding to the power of the community isn’t new for Digg, in the past the Digg community actually has more control than the management team, so turning over the advertising power to them strategically makes sense. After engaging in a discussion on Twitter last night about this, I gave it a good night’s think, here’s my take:

Social Ads Not New:

Interactive Ads aren’t new, Facebook launched ‘Engagement Ads’ (analysis) nearly a year ago, and community vendor Pluck and agency Razorfish followed suit, in similiar vein community platform Kickapps launched WidgeADs.
Pricing based on ad performance isn’t anything new, we’ve seen this with demand and supply of ads for years with cost per action.

Requirements for Success:

Homogeneous : Community ranked ads will likely work better in homogeneous communities where there’s a common interest or demographic, rather than a large broad community where consensus won’t be found. In the case of Digg, I’d make a guess from watching the community that it’s a lot of Gen X and Y males that are technology optimistic, and liberal. Having spent time at the live Diggnation event (the super fanboys, photo by Brian Solis) it could be a representative sample.
Engaged: Community ranked ads make sense for the Digg community as they are already highly engaged in voting for stories, as well as the very active comment (over 100 comments is norm per article on front page).
Transparency: Dislcosing in the editorial stream that the ad is sponsored.

Risks:

Gaming: Expect gaming of the site, not from marketers, but from fan boys, perhaps those that love Apple products will bury Microsoft ads. Since you must have a registered ID to vote on items in Digg, the chances of the advertiser influencing the ad price will be limited.
Unusual engagement: Expect that most users are more likely to bury ads, not engage with them and promote them. However, if a user buries an ad they don’t like, this cost per action is still an engagement, which is higher than not paying attention to them at all.

Forward Thinking:

If this works, Digg or it’s partners could replicate this product and extend to other sites. Interactive advertisers like Federated Media would do well to open discussions with Pluck and Kickapps, who have a strong media focus.
For brands and advertisers this is a great way to find out why an ad may not work for a particular community, rather than make guesses based on CTR performance. Advertisers that analyze or even engage in the dialog may benefit their next generation effort.
In the most ideal sense, community preferred ads become information and content –not invasive content.

Takeaway: If Anyone Can Pull This Off, It Will Be The Digg Community
Digg is a very unique case study, and if these ads work here, it will be hard to replicate on other communities, a unique mix of a very engaged community that is somewhat homogeneous will be required to make this work. Let’s see how it unfold.

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Is Your Website SNOWED? (Stakeholders’ Needs Overwhelm Web Experience Design)

Categories: User ExperiencePosted on June 2nd, 2009

Having too many stakeholders on your website results in forcing your users to trudge through a confusing experience, where each laborious step results in frustration then abandonment. Like poor Jack N on the left, you have frozen your own users, your website is SNOWED.

Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen Result in Mush
I’m sure you’ve seen it, websites where there’s such a jumbled mess of content on a webpage, you know it’s a battle from internal stakeholders. Typically, you see this jumble of information on large corporate websites, in particular, large tech companies with HW and SW products. (I know this as I used to do it)

Being SNOWED is far worse than Avinash’s acronym of HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). At least with a HiPPO there will be at least some direction where the website is headed.

What’s worse is having too many masters too serve, resulting in serving none. I created this little acronym which I encourage you to share with your stakeholders, hopefully your website won’t be SNOWED in either.

[Is your website SNOWED? Stakeholders' Needs Overwhelm Web Experience Design]

Case Study: American Airlines Website Afflicted by 200 Stakeholders
Take for example the American Airlines website, which was so frustrating to users that designer Dustin Curtis decided to mock up an improvement and write this open letter. One of the designers from AA responded, saying there were over 200 stakeholders involved in the final output of the product, resulting in the jumbled mess of a corporate webpage. Reminds me of this self-created video from Microsoft showing what would happen if they designed the iPod package.

Solution: Have an Empowered Web Strategist
Yes, we know that putting the needs of your users is key to a successful webpage, but it should also be coupled with the needs of the business. This is where the Web Strategist comes into play, who balances this with technology to deliver the right experience. This diagram of the three spheres of web strategy should come in handy, a great diagram to print out and put on the desk.

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How Can I Improve?

Categories: Feedback, RuminationsPosted on June 1st, 2009

This is the hardest post to write, but perhaps the most important.

I enjoy meeting people in real life, and if they tell me they enjoy reading my blog or tweets, I thank them, and then ask them “What should I improve on?” I realize I don’t do this enough online, where I’m located most of the time, and would love to hear from you.

Yesterday, a contemporary I respect gave me some feedback on an area I should improve on, and while it stung for a second, I know deep down he’s right. He reminded me that successful professional and companies know how to listen, take in feedback, and then improve. I’m not an expert on this, and make my fair share of mistakes, but I should certainly practice what I preach, so here goes:

I’ll leave the topic very open, love to hear what you think, so how can I improve?

Feel free to leave a comment, but If you don’t feel comfortable saying it in public, feel free to email me at jeremiah_owyang @yahoo dot com, or if you want to submit to uservoice (an embracing technology), that’s fine too, as it helps with prioritization. It really doesn’t matter which method you choose, I look forward to hearing from you.

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Switching to Media Temple as my host

Categories: RuminationsPosted on June 1st, 2009

After being with Dreamhost since I launched this blog, I realized it was time to move on after my site would be down at least once a week, nor could it handle a large influx of Twitter users at a single time. To Dreamhosts credit they were very responsive to my support tickets, but I really never saw things improve as far as uptime goes, and that’s what matters.

Mitch Canter, my web designer is handling the migration as I move over to Media Temple, but there’s a few recent blog posts that are missing, but we’ll get it ironed out in short order. It’s interesting that Robert Scoble called me as soon as he noticed my site was down last week, reminding me that he works at Rackspace, but I’ve already started the migration plan.

Looking forward to good experience at Media Temple, I’ll keep this post updated as I learn more about the service.

Update: Some of my blog posts in the last few days are still being migrated, and I may have lost some of the comments, we’re working on retrieving those now. Hang tight till we get this all sorted out.

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What Brands Want From A Twitter Client

Categories: MicroMediaPosted on May 31st, 2009

After chatting with Loic today of Seesmic, we discussed what brands may want from Twitter. It’s true, I’m getting more client calls from the world’s top brands about how to use tools like Twitter as a collective team. Based upon my discussions with them, here’s what I see are some key needs in:

What Brands Want In a Twitter Client:

Listening:

Ability to quickly scan what is being said about the brand, products, services, employees and competitors. Although difficult expect sentiment tools to appear that help brands with thousands of mentions manage the discussion.

Ability to understand who is saying what, and understand their influence.

Management:

Manage multiple accounts (Dell has about 35 seperate accounts) from a central team.

Enable employees to tweet from their account: BestBuy created a custom CMS systems that allows approved employees to tweet to the main BestBuy account with a specific hashtag

Workflow:

Triage incoming requests and topics to the appropriate teams for followup, much like a CRM system

Tag and flag these requests, denote and track who responded to what, when and what are the end results.

Integration:

These point solutions should integrate with other system such as brand monitoring, CRM systems

The savvy companies will aggregate the discussion in Twitter about their products on their corporate website, making them more relevant. Zappos was an early adopter, yet Skittles went too far.

Conversing:

Enable multiple employees to post to single Twitter accounts (like a CMS system) some may have approval systems.

Keep track of which employee tweeted and when, build in workflow as global teams will need to work together to respond to customers.

Update: A few folks in the comments have requested a publishing timer, where folks could preschedule tweets.

Reporting:

Brands must be accountable of corporate resources, every resource is an investment and reports about time-to response, number of followers, number of mentions and sentiment will matter.

Be able to benchmark all of the above and deliver time based reports.

There’s a few companies that are emerging that can do bits and pieces of this, but I’ve yet to see anyone vendor meet this. From the brand monitoring side, Radian 6 and to some degree Scoutlabs can do listening and workflow. CoTweet and Hootsuite are often discussed in the corporate context, yet many personal usage is tied between Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop (formerly Twirl) and Peoplebrowser.

Want more business case studies, I’ve read the proof of Twiterville by Shel Israel, it’s loaded with business case studies and written in a great story telling format, it’s going to be a desktop reference for me once it publishes.

Although it’s Sunday, I’m on way up to San Francisco to the Twtrcon conference on the closing debate panel, where I’ll be arguing a contrarian position in Kara Swisher’s panel, I’ll make the case that Twitter doesn’t matter: instead we should focus on trends, and that Twitter is overhyped, I said the same thing at my 140TC keynote last week, Joe has the details. Should be fun.

Are you managing a corporate Twitter account? Leave a comment
Enough from me, what features to corporations want in Twitter clients, please leave your thoughts and needs below.

If this post was helpful, please copy and paste this into Twitter:

What Brands Want From A Twitter Client http://bit.ly/FWd7T

26 Comments »

Video: The Future of Facebook, an Interview on Bloomberg TV

Categories: Social MediaPosted on May 30th, 2009

Left: To watch this 5 minute video, click on image, then click on “Video” tab then the “Watch” icon.

This week, Facebook raised $200 million injection of capital from a relatively unknown Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies (DST), which has a few related properties. This investment is an exchange for preferred stock, representing a 1.96 percent equity stake at a $10 billion valuation, according to a Facebook press release.

I often get asked how Facebook could monetize, my take is that they are first focused on global growth they have aprox 200 million registered users (keep in mind that’s not the same as active) and need to perhaps double that amount to reach the population of larger websites (stats here).

I went to the SF Bloomberg TV studios for a live 5:45am pacific broadcast to accommodate the east coast market, to discuss my take, which you can watch. To watch the video, click to this page (or on the image above), then go to “Video” tab then the “Watch” icon.

Although I’ve been on many video podcast, this was my first interview on life TV, and as you can tell, I’m a bit awkward and very nervous. Being in a TV studio is so different than doing an in person interview as there’s no one in the room, I can hear the anchor via a small earpiece, there’s a very slight delay, I can’t read her body language, I didn’t know what she looked like till I saw the replay at home, and the only thing I can see is a little red dot engulfed by bright white lights. To overcome my nervousness, I wrote down my talking points the night before and rehearsed many times, a few awkward sentence here and there, but hey, it was a good experience, and I hope to do it again.

Back to the topic: Facebook’s future. I’d love to hear from you, what do you think they’ll do with this new funding, and how do you think Facebook will ultimately monetize?

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