In the coming weeks, I’ll be publishing the much anticipated Future of the Social Web Report, based on research conducted with the leading social networking companies and organizations in the industry. This post is just a riff off one of the sub-bullets and is intended for those that are already well versed in the social web.
In one research interview, I spent time with the insightful Chris Messina who is an active member and on the board of the Open ID foundation. After speaking to him, he brought forth insight on how portable IDs will empower people (he uses the term citizen) to traverse the web and reduce their need to constantly register to sites, and login. He’s *finally* posted on the topic after my prodding, I wanted to wait on publishing this so he gets the proper attribution.
[Technology will shift the power from brands to people as they are able to control their own identity. As a result, the Social Contract between people and brands will evolve]
In a previous post, I highlighted how this simple technology will shift the power from marketers to customers, and as a result registrations pages will go extinct. How will this happen? Because people will be able to control their identity, and can choose to expose as much or as little information as they want to brands and websites, they are now in control.
The Social Contract: Today vs Tomorrow
In order to gain control back, marketers will need to reinvent the digital social contract as we know it. Here’s how it’s going to go down:
Today, the social contract puts brands in control
Prospects who want more information about a product, access to a white paper, attend an event, or get product support will often have to register on a website. As a result, they give information, and thus power to brands for them to bug them, and bug them more efficiently. While customers can choose to unsubscribe or choose not to be contacted, they’ve given the ‘required fields’ over to the brand…forever locked up in CRM systems.
Tomorrow, the social contract puts customers in charge.
As customers can elect how much information they want to share, they are now in charge. Prospects (not customers yet) can share very minimal amounts of information, giving the brand limited ability to bug them. As the prospect becomes more interested, sarah will choose to give more information to the brand in exchange for additional value.
Use Case: How the Social Contract Between Customer and Brand May Work
To illustrate my point, here’s how this new model could evolve with Sarah, our fictional customer, at the top is the start of her journey (someone not even remotely interested) to her becoming a vocal advocate(satisfied and willing to tell others):
Sarah’s not interested in the brand. As a result, she doesn’t have to give any information as she visits a brand site, she’s just browsing and she’ll choose not to expose any information.
Sarah sees a product that attracts her eye, and requires more information, but doesn’t want to expose her personal information or register to the site. She will allow the brand to send her information perhaps in her Facebook inbox, but she won’t have to give any information about her at all.
Sarah’ starting to compare this product to others, she’s in the consideration phase, as trust is instilled, she will choose to allow her demographic information exposed, and in return receives information related to what she is likely to want, reducing her need to navigate a large website. While her demographic information may be disclosed to the brand, they may never know her actual name or email address.
Sarah is getting ready to commit to purchase, as a result, the brand offers her greater incentives such as additional services or discounts if she shares her psychographic information to the brand. As a result, the brand will be able to offer her additional related products, or engage in an actual dialog.
Sarah has purchased the product, and the brand offers her a deeper discount to her friends, if she chooses to pass along information to her trusted peers that she’s purchased the product, or her review. This word of mouth is what customers trust the most, and brands will attempt to tap into this by offering group discounts if several buy.
Sarah, who is thoroughly satisfied with the product, chooses to be public about her purchase. Although you can’t expect every customer to self-express, she will knowingly stand behind the products and brands that represent her, and become a willing endorser of the brand. This isn’t that far fetched, we currently see this with many luxury or passion products, but now the brand will encourage this, by rewarding her with recognition or other forms of social currency.
Now some of you may say this contract already exists in some forms, and I’ll have to agree. However we haven’t seen formal systems and technology emerge pan-industry that can support this. It’s even possible people can experience this all within social networks without ever formally going to a corporate website.
Although fictional, this use case could very well come to life, and I’m sure some vendors will leave some comments on how they’re already experimenting with this. As this simple technology enables customers to control their own identities, brand will have to reshape how they’ll get customers attention and ability to register.
This topic of the social contract is only one small node in the upcoming report, we’re excited to share it with you in the coming weeks.
Best Buy has innovated social beyond most traditional retailers. We’re quickly learning that social media success is often hinged on having an internal culture that’s ready to accept and learn.
Yesterday, I had the chance to visit the Best Buy HQ in friendly Minneapolis and met with Barry Judge (twitter, blog) the CMO, and several members of the social media team including Steve Bendt, Gary Koelling, and Ben Hedrington and the web teams.
They know that many of their Gen Y employees, known as Blue Shirts, are active in social technologies, in fact, this data tools shows that 18-24 year olds in US are joiners at 74% adoption rate, nearly twice the adoption of the US average. As I strolled through the amazingly large college-like campus, it became clear that social was a part of the corporate culture as folks milled about, meeting, collaborated and talking –it’s clear that social technologies will be needed to keep over 155,000 employees in sync.
Later, I’ll do a deeper dive into the various projects that they’re working on in a follow-up post, but first wanted to focus on the internal aspects of how they’re using technology to change the internal culture –social success derives from within.
My parting words to Barry were that I’ve started to notice that top marketing executives that use social tools in their daily life tend to foster cultures that allow for innovation and acceptance to ‘fail fast‘. I referenced VP Paula Drum at H&R Block, VP Sandy Carter at IBM SOA, and VP Ed Terpening at Wells Fargo.
I’ve never traveled more than I do in my current role. Although it comes in spurts, I’m currently traveling 4 out of 5 weeks. While it can certainly take a toll on loved ones and your own body, I’m starting to get more comfortable with traveling a bit more efficiently.
I won’t say I’ve got it down right, but here’s a few things I’ve learned, my hopes are that you’ll chime in and add your tips below in the comments, alright let’s get started:
Tips From a Road Warrior:
Flying a lot? Get a Travel Agent
I’ve a travel agent, Carlson Wagonlit (thank you Ron!), that helps me coordinate my often multiple city destinations, they use my frequently flyer numbers and really help coordinate flights, hotel, and rental cars. This saves me valuable time from doing research to find out flights, nearby hotels, and keeps me focused on what matters. I’m pretty sure this is what Tim Ferris would do.
Print out your itinerary
Despite being a digital guy, I always print out my itinerary that has my flight numbers, hotels, and other contact information. You can’t count on technology to work when you’re on the go, dead batteries, the hassle of looking things up, or the ability to rapidly pull out a piece of paper is invaluable.
Get the right luggage and bags
Watch airline staff. These guys and guys are the pros. If you look how they travel, they have small suitcase with wheels, and then a second satchel or bag with personal items, and then if a lady a purse. They make the items stackable so you can put the personal bag (perhaps a suitcase or laptop bag) on top so it can easily roll. I use a backpack, never a messenger bag as you want to keep your back in alignment as much as possible. For long walks, I’ll affix my backpack on my suitcase to relieve the weight.
Learn how to pack right
First of all, if you’re a business traveler, you’ve likely got a carry on bag, checking in and picking up luggage is a major time sink, let alone the risk of them losing the bags. The trick here is to pack your clothes so you don’t have to iron them later. I use the ol’ roll your clothes like a towel trick. As a gent, I put the largest items out on the end such as shirts, and then items that you don’t care if they get wrinkled in the middle. For example lay your coats down on your bed first, followed by suits, then shirts, pants, then tshirts and other undergarments. Then roll them up like a burrito, and put into your carry on suitcase. On the sides you can put your shoes in plastic bags (so they don’t scuff) and toiletries. Ah, stuff your shoes with your clean socks or undergarments to save space, and ensure they maintain their shape.
Steam your clothes in the bathroom
This is one of my favorite tricks. As soon as you get to your hotel room, un-roll that rolled set of clothes I just mentioned. Then, get those shirts, suits, and slacks on a hangers and put in the bathroom –not the closet. When you take your next shower, the steam will naturally get many of the wrinkles out minimizing any time spent ironing.
Have doubles of toiletries for a quick reload
If you’re on the road a lot, it helps to have a backup toilitiries bag so you don’t constantly have to move items in and out. Buy everything in duplicates so you have duplicate toothbrushes, toothpaste, floss, hair products. These little efforts make reloading a breeze.
Learn to traverse the airport
Don’t wear a belt, wear slip off shoes that don’t require a lot of tying, and put your watch, wallet, and other items in your backpack as you exit the car. I bought a Clear card a few months ago, which let’s you breeze past security, but there really isn’t a need for it in a down turned economy (also, I feel a bit like a jerk when they move me to the front of the line) I won’t likely renew my clear card in this economy. I always sit in the aisle when possible so I can get to the restroom without hassling that sleeping guy next to you, and to quickly get my bag and exit faster. Before you enter the security lines, before you choose which aisle to go down, avoid being behind people that are wearing a lot of jewelery or big families, they end to slow down the line. Side note: TSA is much friendlier in the midwest then on the coasts.
Bring the right in-flight gear
I have a spare battery for those long flights for my laptop extending my work time on the plane (one of the few places I can concentrate). Secondly I have an iPod and noise canceling headphones that really turn a confined environment more into a sanctuary. Also, I snagged earplugs and eye masks from previous long distance flights and keep in my backpack, those help. Oh and ahem, please bring mints or gum so you don’t annoy your fellow travelers.
Long trip? Go business class –but not first class
Traveling inter continental is a real time sink, west to east coast can be over 5 hours of downtime, but it’s great for catching up on sleep, writing those pesky reports, (my biggest struggle) or your latest blog post. The problem with many airlines is that the seats are so crammed together it’s nearly impossible to open your laptop and expect to extend your arms. If you’re working, upgrade to the business class, which provides more foot room, or get into the exit aisle or bulkhead. I don’t have the disposable income nor the miles to upgrade to first –maybe someday when I become an executive.
Text message yourself your parking spot
Ever forget where you parked at the airport? Yeah I feel you. Sometimes I get home late at night, bleary eyed, confused, perhaps a bit dazed from a conference party, the last thing I’ll be able to do is remember where my car is at the massive SFO parking lot. The good thing is that I always text message my parking spot to myself on my phone when I first park. Text message your parking spot to yourself, saving you time, frustration, and the embarrassing situation of thinking your car may have been stolen.
That’s enough tips for me, I’d love to hear from you, what do you do to make your travel efficient? Let’s collectively learn, I know there’s a lot of busy professionals that are part of my community. Do tell.
Written from a hotel in welcoming Minneapolis, 140am.
Although I want to map out all the social media services companies, it’s too early to take on such a herculean task –there are too many players and many of them will merge or go away as the recession water recede.
Often, people ask me what the services market is going to look like in a few years, and here’s my take: after some consolidation, it will probably look a lot like other digital agencies exist like search, email, advertising, or interactive –despite the approach is often radically different (and sometimes the exact same).
Three Categories of Service Offerings
We will be able to bucket the services groups into three main categories:
1) Large agencies that are now offering social media services, but in addition to other core services like interactive, PR, search, or strategy (like Organic, Razorfish, Ogilvy, Edelman)
2) Pure play Social Media Shops (like Conversation Group, Federated Media, Chris Brogan’s group, and to some degree, Shift communications)
3) A variety of personal consultants that offer social media services.
A Crowded Space
For the Community Platform wave, we narrowed down to 9 vendors out of over 100, I would expect for this market of services to be in the thousands. Maybe tens of thousands in a few years. Mapping them out has been a task, Charlene started with a wiki with five categories (I think I could collapse into my three), but maintaining it will be a beast.
Packaged Offerings Start to Emerge
Perhaps rather than watch all the different players emerge, it may be more fruitful to monitor the type of offerings, the ever vocal Derek Showerman launched Social Media Services Group that is a spin off from several groups offers a menu of services, including some suggested packages including analytics packages. This is one of the first menus I’ve seen that offers both À la carte and family meals, and I expect to see more.
Specialization in a Nascent Market
While you could easily apply the traditional filter of verticals like tech, healthcare or finance, we’re already seeing specialization in social media services, some breakdown by vertical community folks (Forum One, Ant’s eye view) vs Web Video (Variety of agencies) vs Sponsored Conversations (Federated Media, Edelman). Even within the growing community market there’s specialists that could focus in on strategy, kick starting, community management, analytics, or research.
Impacts of the Recession
I currently see an influx of social media consultants, in part due to the recession, and secondly due to personal usage being translated to a market offering. I expect this third band of individual consultants to decrease as we move out of the recession and folks move on to other careers (perhaps one that’s not saturated). It’s important to not confuse personal passions for a new medium vs professional expertise –see next bullet.
Considerations before hiring
If I was asked “how do you find the right consultant” I almost always say to look at track record. In this space, experience matters a great deal, as they’ve had to experiment with new media that doesn’t fit well with traditional methods. The key thing when finding social media services is to not just to look for successful deployments, but also find out about what they’ve done wrong. If they haven’t messed up something, their not pushing the edge hard enough, and may not do that for you, as their client. Messing up is one thing, but as a result, find out what the lessons learned were, I think that’s most important. Some may say that this is such a young market, how can you gauge experience? If you look closely, there are some practitioners that have been doing this for 5 years or longer. Similarly, experience shouldn’t be limited to social media alone, did they successfully latch on to other movements in digital before the world of blogs and tweets?
Leave comment: what criteria do you look for?
I could list out a whole series of bullets of what to look for and what not to, but that’s been done before. So let me turn it over to you, what criteria are you seeking when hiring social media services? Like this space, I expect –and hope– to see a wide range of answers.
Written from a hotel in friendly Minneapolis, 530am.
The social web is moving beyond just asynchonus relationships to real time information passing.
Take last week, while I was on the phone with my dentist in San Jose and I was in the Peninsula and an earthquake occurred. It originated in San Jose, and the excited office manager told me she’d just experienced an earthquake. 5 seconds later, I felt the aftershock in my own house, and then tweeted out “just felt an earthquake”. Seconds later, I opened the Twitter search tool and tracked all the earthquake mentions, and there were hundreds within 30 seconds. As Steve Gillmor suggests, we could eventually track the origination and speed of an event, from the epicenter to the resulting waves for earthquakes and other events. Oh, and Twitter was faster in tracking than the government’s Geological Survey Earthquake site.
When you think about it, information travels faster on Twitter around the globe faster than the speed of sound. This is also very scary.
Today, Friendfeed launched it’s much anticipated redesign, and it resembles a real time flow of information. It resembles twitter like input screens, then social objects flow down the stream, with commenters chiming in around each object. It’s very hard to keep track.
Challenges to Navigating the “River of News”
As the web continues to move faster and faster towards real-time (we see this in Twitter and elements of Facebook), it creates several challenges:
If you’re not watching all the time, you’ll miss something
An incredible amount of hay is created with very few needles
Managing these feeds take effort, you have to setup filters, lists, groups, and manage it.
You’re going to get less work done if you watch, and participate in the real-time web.
New Social Tools and Processes to Emerge
If the social web is a ‘river of news’ then we’re going to need new sea-faring technologies to manage it:
Anchors We need more anchors to slow it down and make sense of it, Friendfeed offers a ‘pause’ button that actually freezes the stream, allowing users to navigate the content.
Dams and Distibutaries Dams will stop the flow of content (users will unsubscrbe) and distributary are rivers that split off from the main river, as a result you’ll see a need to use filters and lists to group people in smaller categories.
Maps and Compasses are needed to help guide us to what’s important. Expect digests, analysis, and those who boil down what matters to matter more than ever. Traditional reporters will help make sense of thousands of opinions.
The big challenge: with many of us creating our own rivers of news, who has time to drink it all in?
I’m respecting your limited time by publishing this weekly digest on the Social Networking space, which I cover as an industry analyst. By creating this digest (I started this over a year ago) it really helps me to stay on top of the space I cover.
I’ve created a new category called Digest (view archives). Start with the Web Strategy Summary, then quickly scan the succinct and categorized headlines, read text for my take, and click link to dive in for more.
Subscribe to this blog in your feedreader, or use the email subscription box in the right column. Or you can subscribe to this digest tag only and not receive my other posts.
Web Strategy Summary
This has been one busy week, between the many announcements stemming from Web 2.0 Expo, to the toll of the recession, there’s a lot to keep track of, here’s what matters: Twitter is starting to monetize through a few different trial directions, from working with Federated Media to do sponsored aggregation, advertising with Google, and in preliminary talks with Google that don’t prove to be much of anything. MySpace and Microsoft team up, also on a similar vein Facebook and Adobe. It’s becoming increasingly more difficult to track everything that’s going on in this space, so if you see I missed anything, leave a comment.
Advertisements: Google and Twitter Google offers Ads using Tweets, seem odd? Intuit is the first to take this on by: “…Intuit, whose TurboTax brand is trying to boost its Twitter followers. Intuit used several of the measures available for any AdSense campaign to target the ads, which are running on sites such as Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace and Alltop.” I guess it goes to show, if you can’t earn ‘em, buy ‘em.
Launch: MySpace runs after Yelp
This article states is succinctly that: “MySpace announced Tuesday that it is adding local business ratings tools to its social network. As with Yelp, MySpace users will soon be able to look up phone numbers and addresses for local restaurants and bars on the site and post comments about their customer experiences.”
Viewpoint: CMS vs Community vs LMS
Clark Quinn compares the product direction of LMS systems, CMS systems and Community Platform systems and discusses how each approach is different. Decoupled vs coupled, or distributed or centralized? Clark then poses some questions on which direction you think these vendors should head.
Strategy: Facebook Analysis Ravit writes an excellent strategy breakdown of Facebook, and gives some very practical advice to Facebook, the top three tips include: Start thinking like the large company you are becoming, Choose an identity and stick with it, finally, Listen to your users
Layoffs: Hi5 Reduces Staff
This fast growing network doesn’t appear to be trending well. Despite their rapid growth that we’ve outlined in previous digests, they’ve not been able to monetize this traffic, with the change in the economic weather, they’re now dealing with downsizing.
Digg launches DiggBar
This portable bar is an ‘overlay’ to visiting other websites (sure a simple frame) but when you add social features to it, the Digg army travels with you as you surf the web.
Submit: I’m listening. If you’re a social network, or widget company, I want to know of your news, send me an email, or leave a comment below. Help me stay up to date but first, read how to score your announcements.
Hungry For Social Networking Stats? Then you should see my collection of Social Networks Stats for 2008 and 2009. Bookmark them, then share it with others as I continue to update it.
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:
Hutch Carpenter joins Spigit, who offers idea management software for the enterprise, as the Director of Marketing and Online Communications.
Robert Scoble and Rocky Barbanica my former colleagues have now been reunited and are joining Rackspace. They will be building a community –and videos –for the small business and web companies.
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
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!
Well, A lot of things. I was invited to join a panel designed by Peter Kim (he used his blog to gather feedback) at the Web 2.0 expo to explore just those topics. We managed to get Charlene Li, and it was like a mini-reunion. Over dinner the preceding night, we decided to focus on four key challenges that we see across the social media marketing industry.
The Four Major Challenges of Social Media Today
1. How to get culture to adopt & get executives to buy in?
2. How to make social media “campaigns” work?
3. How do you measure social media?
4. Does social media even matter?
Folks who blogged the session:
There were a handful of folks who live blogged or reported the sessions (a rarity these days, thank you) and rather than I rehash what we said, I’d rather let you go see what they wrote:
For additional information, we made the session interactive and encouraged everyone to write back their thoughts and solutions using the #smfail tag. I’ve looked through the hundreds of tweets, and there weren’t a lot of solutions but mainly retweets and folks tweeting what was said on the panel. It was great to be with my former colleagues, if you get the opportunity to work with them now, I consider you very fortunate.
