I’m starting 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:

Patricia Mayo has moved from being an editor at MasterNewMedia.org to a Social Media Strategist with NowSourcing, congrats! Her duties will include: handle their twittering, and do quite a bit of SMO blogging and SEO / PPC.

Vanina Delobelle (who I interviewed in a recent post) is the Product Director Social Media by Monster, she recently earned her PhD in Social Media.

Marina Martin is the the Community Evangelist for Elastic Lab, and is seeking out filmmakers of all levels to network for film projects.

Annie Heckenberger has moved on from being the Social Media Director for Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp and joined ad agency Red Tettemer (, yep, that’s me on the homepage!) in mid-March. Her title is Community Trailblazer.

Laurie Buczek has recently moved into the role of Enterprise Social Media Program Manager at Intel. She moved from the external social media efforts into driving the strategy and implementation of social media internally.

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How to Connect with others:

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.

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

See Web Strategy Jobs powered by Job o Matic (There are three new jobs posted this month of May)

Connect with others in the community manager group in Facebook

Check out Jake McKee’s community portal for jobs

See Chris Heuer’s Social Media Jobs

SimplyHired aggregates job listings, as does Indeed

ForumOne Jobs for Social Media and Community

Jason Falls is hiring

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. 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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Left Image: Vanina Delobelle, graduates from Université de Corse Pascal Paoli PhD, Management, Area of research: Social Media and online communities for Marketing in the internet space (with honors) - March 2008.

Vanina Delobelle contacted me regarding my recent On the Move series for the social media space, and I was pleasantly surprised to find finally meet a PhD in Social Media. I offered Vanina a guest post, and she’s offered her perspective on why and how the process went for her. Aside from being an academic, she’s deploying her learnings as Global Product Director in charge of social media at Monster based in United States and you can see she’s already conducting research on social media’s impact on job searches.

Vanina, how’d you get into social media?

I started to blog in 2003 and lived the emergence of social media. Behaviours were very different, tools were enabling to engage people better and this new wave was very exciting. At that time I was running a marketing consultancy company targeting SMB and I realized that these new tools could be adopted very easily for low cost strategies. I was feeling as well that social media will be more and more important in companies’ strategies. In contrary to what happened in the past, social media were emerging from SMB and could be extended to large companies. The market was very new and still a lot of people did not see the power of social media and I wanted to convince them. This new world was so exciting that I wanted to study further these new trends and I decided to take the opportunity to turn this into a graduation. I already have a Master International Business Administration from a French Top Business School but no other graduation than a PhD could help me get an intensive knowledge in such an area.

Regarding your PhD in social media, what were your goals, what were you hoping to prove?

My research was very innovative, there were not many people working in this space at that time. It has been hard to find scientific researches that could help me. This trend was mainly driven by business. I wanted to prove academically these new behaviours. I started my PhD in 2004 in France. I started to analyze how start ups were behaving with the social media and then I wanted to show the interest of both entrepreneurs and consumers in using this interactivity.

What were your findings?

Consumers want to take part of conversations happening with companies, they want to be involved, they want to share and this is the company’s interest to do the same with the market. My research was a scientific validation of Pinko marketing and social media use for companies. We could also define some kind of new marketing model for a web 2.0 company. Today we can see that companies can get so many benefits from setting up a social media strategy. I would even say that it is not even possible for a company not to consider it as the market has changed and they have to change as well to survive. They need to open their windows, they need to share, they need to communicate differently. Blogs, forums, social networks, wikis, microblogging…are tools they have at their disposal and that users are using extensively so they have to do the same. Social media are changing the company externally and internally and the benefits companies get by using these tools is huge.

How will you apply this to your day job, what’s next?

This research has been a first step as the market is changing every day. I keep on updating my knowledge in this area. I think also that the big next step for social media is going to be social shopping in the consumer area. If you simply look at the Maslow Pyramid, once you managed to build a network, the next step is to use it. I have extended my research these last months in this area in merging social media and e-business…this is for my personal life. Professionally I am working for Monster and after my PhD got the opportunity to join their HQ based in Boston in order to take the responsibility of Global Product Director Social Media. I am very happy with this new challenge and seeing that companies start to realize how important Social Media are. Social Media strategies are starting and there are great opportunities in this space.

Where can we find you online? I’m sure folks will have questions for you.

Slideshare: Presentation about Social Media Strategy:
My Blog: http://www.vaninadelobelle.com
My Twitter: http://twitter.com/vanina
My slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/vaninadelobelle

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If you know someone that’s focusing on social media in college as a major, please leave a comment, I want to know.

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Jennifer Jones, who hosts one of the top ongoing social media marketing podcasts, interviews Emmanuel Brown of Nike Jordan. I saw Emmanuel at the last Marketing Forum in L.A. he told us that employees are encouraged to work out a couple of hours every day. Actually, it’s more than encouraged, it’s mandatory. He discusses their Breakfast Club interactive program, which helps customers track and improve their daily sports routine, and recently won a Groundswell award for their efforts.

They aren’t the only sports brand leaning on social media to reach customers. New Balance has a ’studio’ type site, and Nike has launched an online community platform.

Update: Forrester has published a video of Emmanuel Brown at his recent presentation at the Marketing Forum, including other videos. (a quick registration is required)

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I’ve started a new series, called Social Media Frequently Asked Questions. It’s a collection of the top asked questions I hear over and over. I’m putting them here on my blog is a great place to help everyone quickly get educated, convince their boss, or be able to help their clients get over these hurdles, so please, pass them around.

If you’re seeking advanced topics, cruise through the web strategy posts (it goes back pages and pages)

Social Media FAQ #5: How Do I Talk to my Executives about Social Media?

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I enjoy feedback, but was surprised to see a few votes come into my uservoice page, one suggesting I help convince management on how to deal with social media.

Your job: To convince your peers, stakeholders and executives that don’t use social media (or don’t believe in) on why social media may be important to your business.

I’ve actually written about this before, so I’ll highlight some of the previous posts that I feel are helpful:

Start with Technographics
First, obtain the technographics of your market segment (we’ve made a sample free), if your customers are using social media tools, then you’ve a strong business case. Secondly, we’ve already concluded that decisions are based on trust, and trust is highest among peers, not from marketers. This disruptive change is enough to kick start the thinking gears of your executive.

Ascertain if this is right for your company
It’s important to note that social media may NOT be the best for your market or company, if the inactives are a significant amount of your technographics, or you’re in a very conservative industry, you may be ready to deploy a listening program, but may not want to participate. I really believe that social media isn’t for every company, and you’ll have to do an internal reality check to see if this is the case for you.

Focus on value, not technology
Next, don’t focus on tools, instead focus on the end result: value. How To: Effectively Talk to Execs and Clients about Social Media. This post teaches you how to talk about the end results of what’s expected, ever lead with “we want to start a blog”

Learn how to talk to immigrants about natives
Getting Your Digital Immigrant Executives to Understand the World of Digital NativesFrequently, the decision makers, are my parents age, and often their technographics usage is very low. I’ve found talking about Generation X and Y as the new workforce a quick way to open their eyes about the changes in communication.

Be prepared for the business questions
Lastly, before you go to your execs, be prepared to answer the tough questions, the one Legal, the CFO, the COO will ask. Be prepared.

Hope this is helpful, if you’ve other suggestions, please leave them below.

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Left Image: An impoverished Darfur child is shown holding an LV-like purse, image sold as a T-shirt from artist, now being sued, see Hi-Res version.

Thanks to Søren Storm Hansen for bringing this to my attention.

It could have been your brand
It could have been Rolex, Lexus, Gucci, or even your brand, sadly for LV, it was theirs.

A 26 year old artist named Nadia Plesner has been sued by Louis Vuitton for brand jacking their famous purses in a anti-genocide campaign.

The artist was trying to make a point that the media cares more for Paris Hilton extravaganza’s more than the genocide in the nation of Darfur.

Nadia states her intentions for the grass roots campaign:

“My illustration Simple Living is an idea inspired by the medias constant cover of completely meaningless things.

My thought was: Since doing nothing but wearing designerbags and small ugly dogs appearantly is enough to get you on a magasine cover, maybe it is worth a try for people who actually deserves and needs attention.

When we’re presented with the same images in the media over and over again, we might start to believe that they’re important.

As I was reading the book ”Not on our watch” by Don Cheadle and John Prendergast this summer, I felt horrified by the fact that even with the genocide and other ongoing atrocities in Darfur, Paris Hilton was the one getting all the attention. Is it possible that show business have outruled common sense?

If you can’t beat them, join them. This is why I have chosen to mix the cruel reality with showbiz elements in my drawing.”

LV: “Cease and Desist”
Luxury brands certainly have teams of brand police within Marketing to ensure their products aren’t being misplaced or improperly positioned, and have taken action by first sending a cease and desist letter (notice they “applaud the efforts) PDF.

Nadia: “Free Speech”
Nadia then sent a return note, stating this was her ability to self-express and claimed the logo was not referring to LV in particular (PDF).

LV files lawsuit
The letter was not met well, and LV has now filled suit against Nadia, claiming damages of over $20,000 a day, each day the campaign is continued.

The Groundswell begins
Since then the Darfur has grown in awareness, having now been on Digg, a Facebook group formed, spread in the news, and hundreds of blogs pointing to her site.

LV has two a few options
Here’s my take, from what I can tell, Louis Vuitton (and the dog) have nothing to do with Darfur, and their brand is being dragged through the African mud. Their response is pretty standard and expected, to protect the image and brand that they’ve been working to build. I’m sympathetic to them getting brand jacked, as they’ve not done anything to occur this unwanted attention.

Option 1: Continue legal path: Continue this path and settle with Nadia, given the many lawyers they have access to and resources, they will likely win a copyright infringement for the design being on another paid product.

Option 2: Join the campaign: They could drop the suit, and work with the Save Dafur organization to help raise funds by doing events, creating a specific product, or help promote the cause. This too has it’s downsides, the brand will be brought into the human rights spotlight, and if they have any dirt in this arena (perhaps oversees manufacturing) they’ll be in turn scrutinized. Secondly, this would be a nod to activitists everywhere to brand jack major brands in order to get support –and funding, the cycle will continue.

Option 3: Redirect focus on issues: Submitted by John Bell. I enjoyed John’s option so much, that I’ve embedded it here on the post as an update. “What they could do is work with Nadia and other artists to host discussions about media focus. They could partner with a neutral party like my friends at ifocos.org to steward the conversation. Keep the discussion away from luxury brands (which is not Nadia’s point anyhow). LV can become part of teh solution without taking on the brunt of an issue they do not own.”

Option 4: Walk away: Submitted by Alison Byrne Fields: “Drop the suit. Walk away and wait for the dust to settle. This little hullabaloo will have no long term negative impact on their brand.”

I’m weighing both options here for LV, there’s really not a great way out of it for them. I believe they are collateral damage, having done no wrong to invoke this groundswell, yet this is a nod to what could easily happen to other brands.

I asked my Twitter community to voice their opinion, on the topic, here’s what was said in public

ronbailey: - why not just donate a few bucks to the cause in exchange for her NOT using LV products in her campaign?

Dan Lewis: legalities aside, I’d be mighty upset if my name were wrongly associated with genocide. the artist is morally wrong here, no doubt

Alberto Nardelli: besides LV point being morally disturbing, IP case doesn’t stand: would be like campbells suing warhol

Kim Pearson: I’m a former PR person, not a lawyer, but I’d argue that LV is doing itself more harm by its response, not protecting its brand.

Ed Saipetch: ironically in the same vain, I heard the (RED) campaign benefits retailers and product producers much much more than the AIDS fight

Rainne: I say not, b/c the artist did not use the vuitton pattern, she simply invoked its similarity.

mlogan: They turned this into a big story and managed to put themselves on the wrong side of a humanitarian crisis. Smooth

bethdunn: it’s another case of a company doing more harm than good to their brand by trying to halt something they can’t control

ronbailey: how has LV been harmed by Nadia’s campaign? - She was poking fun at celebrity culture in general, not LV in particular

ronbailey: They could have easily turned a blind eye to the whole episode.

Ok, you weigh in, If you were the CMO, what should LV do?

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A list of companies that were blind-sided by the internet, they didn’t understand the impacts of the power shift to the participants, or how fast information would spread, or were just plain ignorant.

Criteria of “Punk’d” includes a situation where the story would have not been told if social media was not available, or if social media enhanced the situation.

This doesn’t include fake blogs, companies who deliberately tried to cheat the system get their own honorable mention.

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2008

Louis Vuitton gets Brand-Jacked in Anti-Genocide Campaign
Artist creates and sells T-shirt demonstrating how the media turns a deaf ear to real world tradgeies such as genocide in Dafur, infringing on LV logo. LV fires back, with lawsuit, a groundswell begins. Submitted by Søren Storm Hansen

Burger King exec trash talks using daughter’s email
Not sure why he didn’t just create a new email address, that would have been a lot safer. Submitted by Hilker.

Johnson and Johnson to bloggers: Hurry up and get dis-invited
Sounds like a mis-coordination, bad timing, and not a well thought through process that ended up getting scobleized, and Maryamized.

Anonymous Unmasks Church of Scientology
The church of Scientology has been criticized by an anonymous group, a faceless mass that has created videos, staged marches and protests, and is subvert the Church from around the internet.

2007

Target’s Rounders program “This is our secret game”
Target encouraged it’s premier members in the rounders program to pump up it’s brand in a Facebook group, sadly, the covert operation ended up on blogs and then mainstream media

HD DVD Decoded by Digg, unDugg, then Dugg again
Digg users publish HD code, industry freaks out, Digg maintains stance.

Wholefoods CEO caught being a troll
Whole Foods CEO, was anonymously trashing competitors and pumping company up on Yahoo finance boards.

Apple’s dirty little secret plastered over NYC
Apparently, 18 months is all the iPod will run before you’ll need to buy a new one, says this video, where street teams went around defacing ads. Submitted by David Churbuck (I got his name right this time)

Delta holds customers hostage
What’s worse than being held prisoner on Delta’s dirty plane? (Video), watching the crew getting off da plane. Oh, and no food, crying babies, but one talented videographer.

Taco Bell’s infestation crawls into YouTube
A minor rat problem moved it’s way to YouTube, spreading faster and farther than expected, a total of more than one million views for all videos. Submitted by Graham Hill

2006

Data storage blogger posts industry price lists, sales reps cry f#ck!
Robin Harris, one of the most well known of the data storage blogosphere posts price lists that were received from various customers.

Dell Laptop Explodes, news at 11 –on YouTube
More bad news for Dell, as laptops explode in Japan, all can see online.

Comcast suffers from Narcolepsy
Sleepy Techician caught on YouTube, then fired. Also see Comcast must die blog, submitted by Jeff Jarvis.

Hitachi Hell gets the finger
Angry customer gets bad service, writes long experience, and flips off HQ in picture, he’s also an influencer in the gaming community

The naked NOKA chocolate uncovered
A premium chocolatier (Noka) had a tremendous markup ($309- $2,080 per pound) of their secretly re-packaged chocolate, was exposed as a fraud and spread on blogs. And their google results is really painful. Submitted by Whitney.

AOL gets canceled –how to get get on my nerves
This guy really bothers me, I can see why Vincent Ferrari was miffed. It’s clear, he was dealing with the customer retention department. Nothing worse than the feeling of being held hostage. Submitted by David Alston.

Airplane fiasco’s spread online: JetBlue
There are so many examples, such as a YouTube testimonial about JetBlue’s 8+ hours stranded in terminal. Related: JetBlue’s CEO responds after flights are cut months later due to storm.

Starbucks Brandjacked by YouTube Video
Who wants a tasty frappuccino when there are kids starving? This was one of the first cases of brandjacking we saw.

2005

Why we Dwell on Dell Hell
Jeff Jarvis launches blog post that sends a flurry of PR negativty at Dell’s poor service, it’s since been improved.

2004

Kryptonite unlocked
Locks were disabled using a simple bic pen cap, spread on forums and blogs, one of the earliest examples that got mainstream attention.

2003

The Barbera Streisand Effect
Singer star tries to remove content from internet, it all goes downhill from there. I actually learned about this from reading my colleagues Groundswell book

Also see: 8 Groundswell Examples: News, Education, Religion, Cops, Restaurants, Music, Conferences, and Analysts

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I know I’m missing others, please leave a comment, and I’ll credit you

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Embrace your Customers
At Forrester, we use the term Embracing as a social strategy where customers and employees work together using social tools to build next-generation products. Quite a change for the strong headed product manager, who now has to set the roadmap, while in collaboration with customers.

Popular Examples: Dell and Starbucks
We’re all familiar with the popular Dell “Idea Storm” website that let customers vote for which features and products they wanted to be bore to the marketplace. In Dell’s case, the linux community asked for a UBUNTU box, which was created and launched and sold. I wish I was a fly on the wall when Dell’s strategic partners at Microsoft found out about this.

Recently, Starbucks has launched My Starbucks Ideas, where customers are voting for improved services or products in each of the stores. Looking at the site, the request for free wireless or ‘punchcards’ for frequent customers is under consideration or has been improved.

Both powered by SalesForce
Both of these sites are powered by Salesforce’s product, Ideas. Move on over, there’s a new player in town called UserVoice that offers the same features right on their site.

UserVoice, a new kid on the block
I’ve played around with UserVoice and even created a version for my own Web Strategy blog, the simple features made it easy to setup and let others submit ideas. I’ve not stress tested this service to see if it can withstand enterprise activity like SalesForce can, but it’s a nod to a common feature (voting) that we should start to expect to see in white label social networks. (in fact, I know of a few that are going to launch this)

Reporting, Query features, and easy to setup
Other UserVoice features to include Google Analytics, and the ability to collect demographic information and let owners know of suggestions. Owners of voting sites can also segment their customers by different purchasing sizes, in order to help prioritize. Also, polling features will help to put color around suggestions from users, and other conduits to improve the connectivity between employees and customers.

For example, I created this own Web Strategy UserVoice page where you can go and make suggestions on how I can improve this website.

Recommendations
If you’re a small company or individual blogger, or run a niche product, I encourage you to try out UserVoice, test to see how it scales, and come back and leave comments on your experience on this post. If you’re from a large company that has thousands or millions of customers, start with SalesForce and also trial UserVoice. Anyone that wants a fully custom user experience should start with SalesForce.

Update: I’ve received some tweets and comments also suggesting IdeaScale (which I think is the same as this product of the same name), I’ve not looked at it, please leave a comment if you’ve a review. Also, passionate CEO Matt from BrightIdea left a comment about his enterprise class competitor to SalesForce, I look forward to a formal Forrester briefing from him, let’s take a closer look at this growing segment.

What to Expect
UserVoice would make for a good partner for any of those white label social networks, and could even be an acquisition target for a vendor that’s not up to speed in this emerging feature set.

Expect other White Label Social Networking vendors to offer this feature, soon it will be on the ‘checklist’, of features. Customer voting? “Yup we got that.”

They aren’t the only ones to watch, Get Satisfaction, a support site for any product, anywhere, (no reason to go to that irrelvant corporate website) has launched, and customers are self-supporting each other, and some savvy companies have their employees there participating. Without surprise, I’m there representing Forrester, although there’s been no activity. Satisfaction is still very startup focused, I hope to see some Fortune 1000 companies appear on their site.

Lastly, UserVoice itself is, “eating their own dog food” so to speak, using their own service to improve their product, there’s already a small flurry of votes happening.

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Yesterday, I spoke the executive team and business unit leads at a very large insurance company. It was a long 4-hour session, where I gave a Groundswell presentation, discussed technographics, and gave specific case examples of their insurance industry and financial industry. It’s not my job to evangelize social media, but to tell them about the benefits and risks, and how it impacts their business, or if it doesn’t.

As you’ve seen from my recent post, there are few successes in the insurance industry. While every company must listen, the return on participating may not be right for every company and industry.

I’ve been doing these types of presentations since 2005, so I’m pretty used to the hurdle questions, and am always pleased to meet COO and CFO folks that have a solid business mind, and need to know how social media impacts business.

While many industries like tech, media and some consumer product companies have embraced this movement, many industries. If you’re going to be presenting to your executive staff or to clients, be prepared to answer the following questions, and back them up with data, examples, and insight, not just opinion:

Is this a fad?
What’s the future of these tools?
What are the costs and resources needed to do this?
Does every employee need to participate?
What’s the legal ramifications?
What happens if we do nothing?
What are the risks if we engage?
How do we measure success?
Does this hurt or help customers?
How does this increase revenues or reduce costs?

Simply put, the primary goal of business is about making money, so if you’re proposing a shift in resources, you better be able to back it up. It’s absolutely important that someone in the org challenges you, so you’ll need to be prepared. Lastly, for what’s it’s worth, despite the tough questions, the COO mentioned to me during the break the workshop was going well, and he told me he was actually a techie too, I can’t wait to get a beer with him next time, smart guy.

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I’m meeting more and more corporate marketers who understand the value of social media, but don’t know how to use it. I’m seeing a trend of at least 3 different adoption strategies, listed out below.

Often they want to repurpose their corporate marketing brochures, videos, and pass them on to social channels –without understand that content, often has to change. Corporate “top-down” content doesn’t do well on YouTube, brochures and press releases don’t do well on blogs, and a marcom’s product announcement on a podcast is going to have limited traction.

Corporations are adopting at least one of the three styles of Social Media Marketing:

Locked in the Castle
Keeping the good stuff close to your domain.

Example: Creating videos, audio, and blog posts, but keeping them behind registration, or for clients only.

I’m seeing a handful of corporations in the past year, require registration for videos and podcasts that limit people from accessing them. The risks include: limiting the organic spread of your hard earned content, and not benefiting by the natural word of mouth network. Of course, the flip side is that those that do register are truly hungry for the content, and self-selecting themselves further down the funnel.

Building roads to Towns
Reach adjacent towns by enticing them with content, and provide them with links (roads) back to your land.

Example: Creating brand related images, publishing in flickr, and providing a link in the image notes back to the corporate domain

Some marketers are realizing that they can put a great deal of product and company content on social media tools for free, but by providing links back to the corproate site in comments, in the post-roll of a video, or mentioning a call to action at the end of a podcast extends their reach. By providing these ‘hooks’ to content, you can hope to entice people, who will embed, share, or consume your content, and then eventually click on the links to move closer to your corporate website.

Traveling Missionaries
Missionaries spread to new communities.

Example: Creating campaigns in social networks (like Facebook) where communities already exist, but with no links back to the corporate domain, and no blatant advertising.

The truly savvy marketers are learning to find communities where they exist, becoming that community, and not worry about ‘driving traffic’ back to the corporate website as a measure of success. I’ve a few clients that have figured out how to experiment with ‘off domain’ success. There are risks too, this strategy could give up complete control to the members, and could result in a brand backlash or few people caring about a brand’s products.

When it comes to social media marketing, which style is your corporation going to adopt? each has a strength –and weakness –so it’s best you understand the elements and benefits of each.

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I’m doing research for a client, to find out any examples of insurance companies using social media to connect with it’s customers. I’ve done some scanning over a 48 period of time, and asked my twitter (a social computer) followers, who gave a tremendous amount of helpful links. Since I’ve received many links from the community, I won’t hoard my findings, but share them in public. I’m thankful for those that help me, and I try to give back on this blog.

Overall, without surprise, this industry has not adopted these tools, as one would expect. Whether they should or not should start with by answering these questions:

Are their respective decision makers using social tools to find answers about products and services?

If so, which tools are they using, and how are they connecting?

Would insurance customers benefit from asking and answering questions directly to each other?

I did find a few examples, yet just small blossoms in the field, no clear wins that would make a case study of complete success or failure, among them include:

Pick Your Advisor, India
This website allows users to select a financial or insurance advisor using a friendly personable interactive selector. Each of the advisors has a picture asscoiate with them, and a psuedo blog. As I looked closer, most of the blog data was not being used, or was being used like a chat room.

Allstate Community Forum
It appears this forum (code suggests it’s powered by lithium software, see the whole list) which launched in late 07 is a great example of a company embracing it’s customers using community software. Sadly, there’s very few messages and discussions. The forum is segmented by role (singles, couples, parents) and you can start to see some Q&A occurring. In my recent report on Online Community Best Practices, I found that companies must have a kick start plan to get their communities going.

esurance fan opportunity
Esurance’s aggressive online advertising of it’s cartoon like superhero “Erin Esurance” is causing some fandom, and some are dressing up like her. Mack questions if esurance should embrace some of these fans, but I’m not so sure. Is the goal of the cartoon campaign to drive awareness, or involve in a discussion about insurance. Some have mixed reactions on interacting with fake personas, so perhaps a different strategy would be needed.

Embrace Pet Insurance, Facebook
For those of us who have pets, care can often be expensive for family members, as a result, embrace pet insurance launched this Facebook group. There are 83 members in the Facebook group, few discussions, a handful of wall posts and no applications.

Various Blogs
Perhaps the most interesting insurance related blog is Singapore’s Tan Kin Lian, a former CEO who is “I write this blog to educate the public about insurance, finance and current affairs in Singapore”. The archives go back to 2005, and there are a handful of comments on many of the recent posts. He posts frequently, and is using it in a Q&A type format. On the other hand, there are new blogs appearing, such as this one from Golden State Life Insurance (only 3 posts)

Enterprise Collaboration
In a recent Forrester report, Oliver Young’s case study highlights how Northwestern Mutual benefits from internal collaboration using the Awareness platform. I’m sure there are many other examples, but this industry is often not forth coming. Shel Holtz has additional commentary.

Rehashing of Commercials on YouTube
Liberty Mutual launched a TV commercial series called “Pay it forward” that was published on YouTube (it doesn’t appear to be sanctioned from the brand), with 150,000 views. They could easily take this campaign to the people by creating a campaign letting the community share their stories view text and video. Interestingly, a few folks decided to take the time to parody the video.

Active Forums
Perhaps the most vibrant examples are these various forums. Insurance is likely not a daily activity, and members may prefer to ask questions anonymously to each other. In this forum for insurance agents, called Insurance Forums (top thread has over 60,000 views and 1000 responses regarding a convention). AM/PM insurance has a thriving community, appears to be a customer community. Kiplinger an financial analysis resource has a forum for general insurance discussions.

Geico’s Caveman
This isn’t a great example of social media, but Geico’s caveman has interactive marketing elements where you can visit his “crib”, also the character appeared in real life at a recent SXSW party I attended.

Zuzzid, Norwhich Union’s Community Ratings
To me, this is the perhaps the promising program, a website where community members can speak out about, rate, and rank insurance agencies. Sadly, this community has had little traction, just a few postings, and if you read the bottom line it’s created by an insurance agency, UK’s Norwich Union (which coincidently has the highest rating) for this to work, it’ll have to be from an independent source.

Findings
There really isn’t much activity happening in the insurance industry to use social media, and where it may be successful, it could likely be behind the firewall, impervious to public viewing. Update: Jeff Jarvis is also on the hunt for industries that are somewhat impervious to social media, I’ll agree, social media isn’t great for everything, let’s use our heads, not everything is a nail..

Lastly, I’ve received half a dozen emails and tweets in total saying they are working with a client on social media, but can’t disclose the details, or will ask the client, or the project has ended. A very quiet industry, indeed.

In general, most financial and insurance industries are going to fall just behind the curve of mainstream adoption when it comes to social media tools, they rightfully will wait and vet out what works and what doesn’t.

If you see any other examples of insurance companies solving real business problems using social tools (I’m not as interested in toe-dipping), please leave a comment.

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Our research indicates that 2/3rds of US online Youth (ages 12-17) use social networks at least monthly, and 20% of teens use them daily. (Q4, 2007) There’s no indication that I’ve seen that the adoption will decrease as they enter the workforce.

David Churbuck (whose name I finally got right) is a web strategist at Lenonvo computers, and writes a compelling piece Does Your Company Have a Blogging Policy? This is a question I hear to often from the Fortune 5000 who are toe dipping, or just down right scared of employee blogs.

I often defer the conversation a step higher, to discuss how they’ve (hopefully) hired smart people that they trust, and that they are willing and to empower and trust them to make the right decisions both online, and offline. In many cases, some of these companies have over-arching ethics policies that span behavior not just on blogs and social networks, but also at corporate functions, or even when wearing he company shirt at a bar.

Sadly, more than one company has expressed to me they didn’t trust their employees, as either they were an “unruly” group (many of their employees in the field may not have much formal education) or were uncomfortable with how much of their personal lives they shared due to their age (Gen Y shares quite a bit in MySpace and Facebook).

At a more traditional and larger brand, this company wanted to attract more Generation Y and X employees, as over 40% of their workforce (Boomers) are starting to retire in the next 5 years. The fat pensions they’ve been building for the employees has made it quite affordable to retire early –taking their knowledge and networks with them. So to them, they had to be friendly to social media when it came to attracting this younger crowd, and they softened up on their corporate social media policy. Recent research by Deloitte confirms that Gen Y seeks to give back to their community, often in the form of social networking.

So how are companies stringing together these policies? Most commonly, the ethics policy is already in place, and corporations can lean and amend that one. A few have adopted a specific blogging policy, often with the help of the actual bloggers, while a majority may be too decentralized –or not have anyone focusing on it — to create such a policy.

Share with others, if your company has a public blogging or social media policy, please leave a link to it below, and tell us how your company came into agreement for this policy.

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Just a few minor things:

I read all your comments and tweets
Firstly, when I meet blog readers, I often ask for feedback, to me the constant feedback reinforces what I’m doing right, and what I can improve and grow on. Today, one reader suggested that I make sure to close the feedback loop when it comes to comments. While we both agreed that it’s impossible for me to respond to each comment, I want you to all know that I read each and every comment. Why? it makes me smarter around topics that I’ve initiated, so thank you all for that. If you can’t tell, I try really hard to listen, I just can’t always respond to all messages.

I’m not adding any more new Twitter followers
Secondly, I won’t be adding many new followers on Twitter. I’ve noticed a massive influx of new Twitter users (perhaps due to SXSW) and will no longer be following those who are following me. I can’t click on that many emails, and It’s not offering me any additional value as my message stream is already very large. It matters little as you can still @jowyang and I’ll see your message. Sam Lawrence did analysis on my Twitter behavior (even on a Sunday) and noticed that about half of my tweets are @replying to others.

How can I scale?
The trend here is that I’m having a hard time scaling, but I’ve nearly completed my clone in my bio-vat in the garage, so there will be another Jeremiah appearing soon, well, I wish. I’m trying ways to stay efficient, I’ve reduced the amount of time I spend answering non-essential email, and downloaded Xobni with limited satisfaction.

At some point, I may have to follow Tim Ferris’s advice (although I’m a big skeptic) and start outsourcing some of my life, see his video. I’d start with email, then editing some of my reports for grammar.

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Combining both third party plus member data, LinkedIn can reveal a persona –and social capital– of our companies

LinkedIn announces it’s ‘company’ pages (your company is likely there) that displays both status updates of content created by members, as well as pulling in third party data about companies in this unique mashup. The center column displays people in your network, new hires, promotions, and the most viewed profiles.

While I see this as a minor new feature release, it could pave the way to some interesting models on how the intranet is now in public. There are plenty of opportunities to compare across companies, to help both current management of companies understand their workforce, new employees making decisions on which company they want to work at, and ‘outbound’ professionals to scope out prospects.

The sample size
First, remember that the data is only of those who are participating on LinkedIn, don’t assume it’s your entire workforce. What’s interesting is that for many employees, this is the first time they’ve ever been able to see the majority of job titles on LinkedIn, tenure, and other data that is typically held tight (or non-existent) by HR.

Retention Rate (at tech companies)
People leaving too soon can quickly add up to major costs. It’s safe to say that those that are active on LinkedIn are highly networked, have high social connections, and are more likely to be mobile

Regarding tenure, or really, ‘retention rate’ of the employees I found the following interesting

Hitachi, 3.5 years
Oracle 3 years
IBM 3 years
Microsoft 2.5 years
Yahoo 2 years
Apple 2 years
Google, 1.5 years
Facebook, 1 year

Update: Louis Gray has taken this to another level, I planned on doing this, but didn’t have the time, great job.

Roles and Education
It was interesting (yet not surprising) to confirm that a majority of Facebook’s employees on LinkedIn were engineers: 26% and 10% are from Stanford, and 6% from Berkeley, with a medium age of a mere 27.

At Google, which prides itself in it’s marketing prowess also has 23% SW engineers, with a medium ripe age of 29

Expand on this Platform: My Wishlist
Some interesting features I’d like to see from this company directory could include:

Creating job satisfaction ratings for previous and current jobs (help determine who likes to work where)

How connected is the average company? A more connected company is likely to have more relationships, clients, and partners

Creating a company directory, at least at the executive level (consumer created org charts)

Show which one of the employees is the most connected (interesting for sales and recruiters)

Average years of working experience per employee per company (determine maturity or youth of company)

What’s the average connections per employee per company (help determine social capital)

Industry comparisons between highest educated, longest tenure, etc.

Create a heat map that shows where employees are located

Which companies hired the most per college rate (example: Stanford students has strong affinity to Facebook, etc)

There’s an opportunity here for this platform to expand and offer more data about a companies persona, and how it relates to the rest of the market. I look forward to future iterations and improvements.

Update: thanks Brian Keith for the typo alert

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The first time we saw this implemented in public was the Dell’s Ideastorm website, where the customers were able to submit their feature and product requests. This ultimately resulted in a Linux box being produced, a pretty drastic change from their long term relationship with Microsoft.

[The future of corporate websites enable customers to submit, define, and vote for next-generation products in collaboration with product teams]

Starbucks has seen the benefits that Dell had, and appears to be using the same Sales Force feature that allows customers to submit, discuss and vote for features, see My Starbucks Ideas.

You can:

See the top rated ideas (punch cards, wifi, are among the top)

Or submit your own idea, I just suggested that ‘rent an office’ be available at select stores

See which ideas get taken up and become products on their blog (FYI: Turn on comments)

What should we expect? A few of these ideas to be put into action, with great fanfare. An increased dialog between company and marketplace, and expect white label social networking sites to start offering these same features. (email me when you see one)

This is just the start folks, where social computing (where individuals who participate socially to build something greater) work together to craft better products, services and experiences for companies. To me, this is one of the ultimate goals of web strategy, as we move away from the irrelevant corporate website.

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Shel Israel has launched a new video show with Fast Company entitled Global Neighbourhoods TV. Being one of the early mavens to watch this scene and cover it from his book and blog, he’s now bringing us interviews up close and personal on video.

In his first debut episodes, he’s interviewed Intel’s CEO on blog culture, and you’ll see Intel’s social media strategist Ken Kaplan also interviewed.

Next Shel moves over to Sun to interview the product lead for Sun’s community strategist. What they call CE 2.0

What I enjoy about Shel’s videos are the tight editing, keeping the dead space to a minimum, and how he offers his insights, thoughts, and reviews.

Next, the ever entertaining and unexpected Hugh Macleod discusses how Social Gestures beget Social Objects.

Lastly, the camera gets turned on me, and I discuss online communities, and what it means to companies.

I encourage you to subscribe to Shel’s show, (there’s an iTunes link on the page) and really commit to watching this show for ongoing education. He also blogs, and is on Twitter.

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Key Hinkley the CEO of Somewhere does a technical analysis on the Mark Zuckerberg and Sarah Lacy interview, he brings forth frequency charts by keyword, new users sign ups, and provides some analysis and predictions.

What’s interesting isn’t so much the interview itself but how social media has spread among the crowd, it’s a cross between sociology , technology adoption, and psychology.

I know the drama of the discussion has already been talked about by many bloggers, so I’ll leave my opinions off the table, I’m more interested in the impact this has to future conferences. At least two conference organizers have come to me asking for guidance, there is some concern over social media revolts.

A few days ago, I reported the keynote wasn’t the only session where the audience asserted control.

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Spending time with large corporations and getting to understand how they adopt social media is fascinating, recently, I’ve noticed a trend, not on public use, but on internal organization.

Unlikes Advertising (which is often controlled by a single group) Social Media is being adopted by many business groups across the enterprise, from marketing, product teams, sales, to support. While not uncommon, social media tends to be a grassroots movement that comes from the edges (where customers are) of the company, where individual users, vertical marketers, and client facing teams exist.

At least three models of social media orginization within a large corporation, which loosely resemble a tire, a tower, or a spoke model.

The Tire
Common to grassroots movements within corporations, adoption happens at the lowest levels at the company, rather than from a centralized group. You’ll see individual business units define their own strategy, pick their own tools, engage their own vendors, and communicate with the market on their own terms.

Common to companies that haven’t put a strategy in place, depending on culture, this could be detrimental as resources are not used efficiently, data is spread on multiple systems, and the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.

The Tower
Common in organizations where power is centralized, we may see a central team formed to organize social media. This team defines the policy, best practices, vendors, and tools. This team which will commonly found in corporate communications and supported by PR will often dictate the direction of social media. Expect a dedicated role or sub-group to appear either experiential marketing, new media, or interactive media to eventually be born out of the group, where social media is centralized.

Social media is a grassroots movement, so common dangers can be gagging the natural voice of conversations of product experts with customers using these tools, so a centralized team needs to be more of a support organization to the enterprise, not a controller.

The Wheel
This coordinated model has a central organizational unit that provides best practices, sets policy, supports infrastructure but encourages conversations at the edges of the company. More about empowering business groups to partake in natural social media discussions without hindering, this group will be more of a coordinator, and less of a controller. Expect to see this model to occur as social media infiltrates every nook and cranny of a business, and at a certain point, a company as an enterprise can’t ignore the raging groundswell.

Cautions to this model, as overly coordinated programs will be difficult to achieve, and may be ineffective to different unique markets that a large company may have. Like the tower, having a centralized group at a large enterprise is always going to slow down natural conversations so focus on empowerment, rather than control.

What styles of adoption are you noticing from large companies?

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Len Devanna is a Web Strategist at EMC I was able to get his precious time in SF recently, and he shared with me how to get organizations to adopt social media.

Learn how to change and move a large culture, how to demonstrate there is value (vs being a time waster) and convincing management.

Listen in at the very end, Len shares his one bit of advice (from being in the trenches) on what to always remember.

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I’m starting a new series, called Social Media Frequently Asked Questions. It’s a collection of the top asked questions I hear over and over. I’m putting them here on my blog is a great place to help everyone quickly get educated, convince their boss, or be able to help their clients get over these hurdles, so please, pass them around.

If you’re seeking advanced topics, cruise through the web strategy posts (it goes back pages and pages)

Social Media FAQ #4: How Do I Launch My Social Media Program?

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Companies unsure how to launch
Most companies are used to announcing products or initiatives using press releases, advertising, media influence, and even analyst influence. While many companies are toe dipping in the social media waters (The majority still have not, I’ve seen some adoption data from work) so there’s still many questions on what to do once you launch your blog, community site, podcast, etc.

Unlike Traditional Marketing
First of all, the term “launch” is the wrong way to think about this. Launch implies a single effort, getting a program in the air, and letting go, social media efforts are long term, and require a different approach, here’s how to approach it: think grassroots, not big bang.

The first thing to do is to remember this is unlike traditional marketing efforts. Remember that trust is highest between customers-to-prospect, not marketer-to-prospect. The next time you buy an item, think about who you trust more, a friend who has the product, or a marketer from that company. Therefore, the most effective way to announce your social media program is to get those in your community to announce it for you.

Tactics vary
In many cases, companies experiment internally with tools, and then launch a public social media program quietly, and let it build up momentum through natural word of mouth spread.

When a company wants to boost it’s presence, there’s quite a few ways to do this: 1) Link to the blogs, communities in your marketplace, add value from your own social media properties. 2) Join existing communities by leaving comments that add value, be an ongoing member of the community you’re trying to reach 3) For the sophisticated, provide special access to influencers in your market to announce, join, or co-create your social media programs.

Objectives
The goal for this exercise is simple, your employees, using social media tools, is to engage your community by interacting with them, being relevant, and adding valuable content to them (which is often, not marketing content) to your community. The objective is for them to respond to you, and sing your praises on your behalf. We’ll explore more advanced goals in future posts.

While I think good things are going to come out of ebay’s social media effort, to some, going the route of mainstream media to announce a groundswell effort seems counterintuitive.

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Many companies and individuals using social media are struggling with the balance of supporting one’s employer, while maintaining their individuality online through blogs, social networks, and whatever comes next. Research indicates that the adoption of social media tools is here, and will continue to normalize, just take a look at Generation Y to see this is native to them.

The Social Media Rift between Employees and Companies

Public Disclosure Policy
I remember at the Blog Business Summit in 2005, the high talk of this budding industry was for “every company to adopt a blogging policy”. Fast forward 4 years later, not every company has a blogging policy. In fact, it’s not really needed in many cases as the scope is too limited.

I remember one seasoned marketer at HDS, who lead the ethics policy, this was shared among every employee, and a printed booklet landed on every desk. I don’t recall the exact words, but it stated that employees should be mindful of their communication regardless whether they were online, in person, and using blogs.

Individual and Collective Brands
The next challenge is for the many personal and career brands that are developing using social media tools. More and more bloggers are self-branding themselves beyond their first and last name, much like this ‘web strategy blog’. There’s an opportunity for both the individual blogger and the company to benefit each other, although the balance has to be found.

With the human faces coming forward due to social media tools, the opportunity for employees to build real human relationships with others can be the most natural bridges for prospects to become customers.

For example, to me, the Oracle brand was pretty much just a logo and a series of large towers in Redwood Shores. Lately, I’ve been interacting with the many Oracle employees on Twitter (mainly OracleJulio, yes his twitter screen name) who has done a great job of getting to know me, sharing with me, and sometimes challenging me as he should. It’s fascinating that he didn’t just create a twitter account called “Oracle” or one called “Julio”, instead he’s merged the best of both, and exemplifies the best behavior of both. It’s working.

Hiring trusted employees, and trusting them too
On the podcast interview yesterday with Shel Holtz, we discussed how transparency within the corporate environment could lead to customers and employees working together to create next-generation products, and why employees, who are experts at their craft, may often be called to discuss these in public.

In the end, it really policies and guidelines are only as strong as the people behind it. In the case of IBM, (as I recall) the blogging policy was created on an internal wiki, vetted by the employees, then given a quick review, edit and approval from legal. The thing about most employees is that they may enjoy working for their company, feel a sense of ownership, and when trusted, feel empowered to do the right thing.

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So in the end, reasonable policies and guidelines are often a good thing, they set the lines of acceptability and protect both the company and individual, yet despite any amount of rules we put in place, there will always be areas of objection and questionably. Expect there to be changes and modifications made to any policy on a case by case basis, but learn to trust your employees, who when feel like owners and empowered, will often do what’s right for them and the company.

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