The trust and influence around brands, products has moved to discussions around communities’ lifestyles, often in blogs, social networks and other locations ‘off’ the corporate domain. A new class of measurement tools have emerged, that measure the impact of social media, among them is the BuzzLogic group out of SF.

What’s interesting is they look at who’s being influenced by what data node, and who the influencers are in any given topic area. For example, Scoble may have influence in the early adopter technology space, but has little credibility in the alpha moms space. This is important, as leaning on an universal wide measurement system (like Technorati) isn’t relevant as we create more niches around topics and markets.

This video talks to the employees, as well as showcases a demo of their products. If you’re seeking a segmentation and rating and ranking of the buzz monitoring space, colleague Peter Kim has done a Wave Report, which is also available on the Forrester site.

Have you used BuzzLogic? What did you think?

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On my last night of official ‘work’ before going offline, I was able to meetup with Hawaii’s top bloggers, access this post directly (if you’re seeing this in a feedreader) to watch video.

Whenever I travel to a new city for business, I try to meet the local bloggers at a community dinner, I’ve now friends all over the world, and we connect on twitter, blogs, and social networks to keep track of each other. Ryan Ozawa (who has the only Hawaii licence plate “Blog”, see pic below), the community leader and early technology adopter helped organize this dinner of Oahu’s top bloggers. About 15 of us assembled at a local joint (I was the only tourist) and we had authentic food –minus the luau, dancing, or fire spinning. Believe me, this was a real treat for me. I’m not even going to link to the restaurant website as I don’t want to spoil it for the locals, but if you’re a smart web hunter, you’ll figure it out.

I spent some time with Welton, who lives in Waikiki, he took me to some local bars after dinner, (Ryan’s) and gave me the low down of life in Honolulu from a local’s perspective. Some of the guys were live streaming the dinner from their phone, a bit grainy, but you can follow in from this player. Check out the coverage from Ryan Ozawa.

Truly one of the most friendliest groups I have ever met, the Aloha spirit was really there, including receiving a gorgeous flower lei from Xapa.

The one thing I noticed is that when I’ve visited HK, Singapore, Portland, and now Hawaii for blogger dinners, the local tech community doesn’t get together as much in real life, they often need someone to trigger it forward. I certainly hope that this Oahu group can start meeting more frequently, and to grow their community. (Ryan Ozawa left a comment with more color around this, please read that below)

Ryan left his thoughts on his blog, and took a roll call of those who attended:

Burt Lum (@bytemarks)

Cathy

Chris (@techustle)

Dave Zuls (@hawaiiseo)

Ian Kitajima (@ikitajima)

Jennifer Ozawa (@kilinahe)

Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang)

Joe Philipson (@jphilipson)

Jonathan Wong (@hawyn316)

Kara Baker (@xapa)

Lianne Kitajima (@lkitajima)

Neenz Faleafine (@infinitypro)

Roberto (@88hawaii)

Ryan Ozawa (@hawaii)

Welton (@welton)

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If you’re in need of a vacation, take this roller coaster ride with Shel Israel, who’s on a mission to explore social media when it comes to companies, a topic I’m focused on as a researcher. Sea World worked with Kami Huyse to “move the needle” to reach out to an influence community called “American Coaster Enthusiasts” to reach them using social media tools.

They used YouTube, Flickr to publish their media and encouraged the community to use the videos (creative commons rights) and were encouraging content to be created. You’ll learn that this six week campaign reaches specific downloads and activity, some were downloaded 100,000 times.

What about this makes a good strategy? Sea World found their passion community (many brands have one) figured out how to have a discussion with them using their tools, let go of their own content for it to spread and be used by that community, and resulted in positive increase in product (park visits) usage.

What could they do better? Sea World should involve the coaster enthusiasts to help design, build, and promote the next generation coaster. Sea World could also sponsor their site, hold and event for them, and figure out other ways to make them brand ambassadors.

Towards the end of the video, they make some pretty incredible findings on how people found out about the real-world park through the web.

Also, I recommend you follow Shel’s Israel’s blog, or his Twitter account to learn more the impact of social media on culture.

Is it just me, or did the opening remind you of an older (ok a lot older) version of Johnny Knoxville?

Update: Kami gives an summation of the whole campaign, over a year later. For counterpoint, econsultancy raises important questions about metrics and measurement.

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Teresa Valdez Klein (Blog, Twitter, Facebook) delivers a great how to video, describing ‘how to use Facebook’s privacy features’. Apparently, the controls are non-intuitive and requires someone from the community to walk through it.

This is an important feature, especially for my three younger kid sisters who are mainly used to sharing their lives online –two of which don’t realize the impact it will have on their professional lives as they get older. (and unwanted attention)

I’m sending them this video, along with encouragement to protect themselves, I encourage you to send this to your Generation Y family members and friends.

They should:

-Create permission groups, one for family, ‘real’ friends, online acquittance, classmates, and colleagues
-Personal pics, content, involving parties, unruly or sensual photos should only be seen by those who were present (often friends)
-Be careful about the content that is left on wallposts, it’s not an IM tool, and should be used as a public blog, this area is very telling of what someone does offline.
-Remember that college and company recruiters now look at social networking sites to see what you’re made out of, so if you’ve not received that phonecall back, this could be one of the reasons.

Related Posts

-”I only use email to communicate with old people”
- Crises Management Template: Child Relations for Social Networks (Facebook)

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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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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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If you’re reading this in email or a feedreader, come visit this post to watch the embedded video.

I was lucky to be at the very first BlogHaus at SXSW in Jan 2007, and was really pleased to return to yet another version at SXSW this week. Stephanie Agresta interviewed me, and we talked about SXSW, and what I’m watching as an important technology.

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How could one person create 20% of work for the legal department? Watch or Listen this video to find out.

The Conversation Group recently hosted an event celebrating 10 years of the Cluetrain Manifesto. What’s interesting is that only in the last couple of years has the train really started to build up stream. Jake McKee former social media practitioner at Lego tells his story on how he challenged and changed the culture within the organization to build relationships with customers, share proprietary information, and how customers were in line with employees.

This video is easy to consume, just put it on play, and listen in while you do your work.

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Etsy created this “electronic press release” to show how hand made products are created, shared, sold, and discussed on their community site.

All of the products are hand made and are unique, unlike the mass produced commercial products are sold. Think back a few years, this wasn’t possible, hand made items would be generally limited in distribution to local stores, craft shows, or maybe some type of catalog.

How is Esty different? While Craigslist is more impersonal, Etsy focuses on building community, relationships and even online events (like a virtual craft show). Ebay, which certainly has similar features, doesn’t cater to only these unique handmade items.

Now, the web provides access for anyone to share unique items, and benefit from a global storefront. Expect more of smaller, individual, and customized goods to be created, traded, and sold due to the web.

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I was able to meet with Esther Lim, Principle of Interactive Services at Crimson Consulting Group in SF. She’s been working with social media before that term existed, (or Tim O’reilly) and I had the chance to ask her how things have changed. I often say that we’re in year 3 of 10 years of growth for this industry, although in certain areas saturation and normalization of these new communications styles occur faster.

What You’ll Learn

Find out how online discussions happened before that term social media existed

Moving forward to 2008, she discusses how companies have changed their attitudes, and what’s driving adoption

Terms that she thinks are over hyped

Typical pitfalls that companies fall for

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I interviewed Maria and Aaron Contente, who are both native Spanish speakers from Mexico, educated, and are successful professionals in Silicon Valley. Maria Contente manages many of the relationships with our clients at Forrester in Silicon Valley and Aaron is an engineer at a large industrial company.

After enjoying a home cooked Mexican meal (and a spicy cocktail), I asked them for their honest feedback on Facebook’s recent Spanish release. Watch the video to find out that the new version reads awkward.

Apparently, Facebook outsourced some of the translations to the members, in a crowdsourcing effort of 1500 members, but in some cases there’s no substitute for having a professional translator. Apparently, a French version will soon be released, let’s hope the translation fares better than this Spanish one.

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Stephanie connected with her long lost uncle through the comments in this very blog, watch to learn how.

This is a special video, but it has nothing to do with web strategy or corporate social media. Stephanie Agresta connected with her long lost uncle through the comments in this very blog you’re reading. It was based off a post I did last 4th of July about my family history as a 5th generation Chinese American.

They reconnected through social media, a story more powerful than any CEO blog, customer community, or tech podcast. Thanks Stephanie for sharing, and best wishes to you and your family.

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In my role, I get briefed by companies that I cover in my space (social networks, widgets, and related products). If I feel the speaker is strong, and can deliver a succinct message that’s helpful to my audience, I’ll do a video. Ro Choy of RockYou (warning: auto playing music) clearly meets these requirements.

If you’re not familiar, RockYou is one of the leaders in what I call the widget network category. They create hundreds of widgets that were initially launched on blogs, then moved to Facebook, and will now be deployed on other social networks that allow development (Bebo, MySpace, etc). Between RockYou and their competitor Slide, they account for 8/10 top applications on Facebook (as I learned from Ren last night)

In this video, you’ll learn about his methodology (which I even discussed last night at the panel as a best practice). He discusses how web strategists should approach widget creation.

How the Web Strategist should approach Widgets

Level 1: Branding: Applications, like Microsites
Level 2: Interaction: Include the brand as part of the experience
Level 3: Custom: Build your own application
Pitfalls to watch out for

They’ve an office location that I’m familiar with, in downtown San Mateo across from central park where I used to play as a very young web strategist. (map)

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Which department should take leadership of your corporate web strategy? Earlier this week, I flew out to Vegas to speak on a panel with Alastair Duncan is Chief Executive of MRM, at Intel’s sales and marketing event.

I was really impressed by his nuggets, that I got him on video in the Sands conference center to talk about ownership and governance of web programs within corporations. Alastair’s blog is located Participation Marketing.

What you’ll learn?

Who really is in charge of web strategy programs? Which department (listen to his insightful answer)

How to avoid making your website an irrelevant ‘picture on the wall’

How can Marketing and IT actually get along?

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I was just at Intel’s Sales and Marketing event on Tuesday, and was really glad to meet Intel’s EMEA Web Strategist (which is what I call decision makers), Taj Peyton. He’s responsible for understanding each of the unique needs of cultures in his European market and developing localized versions of the corporate Intel site –no easy undertaking.

Watch this video and you’ll learn

-Why you should or should not localize
-What you research
-Other than language, how are regionalized sites are different than corporate website
-How to get started
-Management is a nightmare, what tools to use?

I ran out of memory, so the interview got cut short a few seconds, but there’s a lot of meat in his presentation. If you’re planning on localizing you website, be sure to really understand the demographics (who are they), physhographics (how they think/feel), and technographics (how they use technology) before deploying, otherwise you may have just wasted your resources.

And yes, that’s the Wynn in the background, one of Vegas’s newest hotels. Intel put me up at the brand new Venetian extention, the Palazzo, each room is a suite (3 HD flatscreens), it’s opulent. I’m pretty sure I was the first person to every stay in the room as they just opened up last week, why do I think that? I had to plug in a lot of the appliances, I’m sure that’ll never happen again

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In the above video, I met up with Carter at the famous Buck’s at Woodside, a famous restaurant where VCs from nearby Sand Hill road meetup with prospective investors, and entrepreneurs from the tech community. Many a deals have been brokered here.

When I first heard of Carter Lusher, it was when I ran into his fiery blog post when he was the head of analyst relations at HP (read all the comments too). That’s a pretty heavy duty job, as this means that he’s responsible for ‘infuencing the influencers’ and a tech company this is especially important.

Although he’s moved on to start his own gig at SageCircle, he continues to focus in on social media + analyst industry, and how it’s disruption will cause some analyst firms to be less relevant, and those that participate to be more relevant.

I’ve not heard of any analysts that directly get paid to blog, we do it because it’s fun, or we know the benefits, if I stopped blogging, I would still get my paycheck, although it’s very clear that my influence would be less. (Besides what else would I do for two hours before the rest of the world wakes up?).

In one of his most recent and relevant posts, Carter has some excellent advice (read my comments) why analysts reject briefing requests from startups.

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I met up with CEO Jennifer Cooper of Mixercast (Widget mashup platform) last week in San Mateo (where several new startups are starting to call home, one was YouTube). We chatted over wine about the different phases of the web, and she broke it down to three succinct levels. We both agreed that the future of web strategy is distributed, and brands will need to create small applications that can travel the web to wherever communities form. Keep in mind that widgets are only one component of your web marketing strategy, the full list is here.

[As we evolve to each new phase on the web, one group gains prominance while the other becomes irrelevant, which side are you on?]

In each of the phases one group becomes irrelevant, the first phase, ‘Analog content’, the second phase, newspapers and mainstream media who didn’t adopt, and finally, the portals and aggregators and curators become irrelevant.

Like a smart fisherman (or fisherwoman) you should ‘fish where the fish are’, rather than constantly baiting your customers to return to your static website. Communities have formed elsewhere on the web where trusted decisions are being made by affinities and groups.

As a result, widgets are the new cell: it will travel, spread, and grow on different sites, and be a way for brands to ‘let go’ and let them proliferate.

Related Resources

Video of Marcia Kadanoff “The Future of the Web is Distributed” (2:42)

The Beginnings of a Distributed Web Strategy

The Four Pillars of a Distributed Web Strategy

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If you can’t see the above video (perhaps you’re in a feedreader, or one of my email subscribers, please access the post directly)

While in Barcelona recently, I got a chance to interview folks from the local blogging community, there were quite a few ex-pats, such as Lennert de Rijk Managing Director Spain, who focuses on Marketing in Spain. He shares his views on online marketing, how the culture and demographics are different in Spain compared to the UK, and other insights. You can find Leonard at this Spanish site called OnetoMarket, or this English version.

What you’ll learn from this video

Find out why companies fail when trying to market in Spain.

Discover which age is still considered “young” (not the same as US)

Learn how search is used differently, and how your SEM campaigns must change

Thanks for bearing with me, the lighting was a bit dark, yet the focus should be on the content.

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Tristan Nitot, (his blog on open source in French) CEO of Mozilla Europe talks about how Firefox spread mainly through word of mouth and people just sharing it and advocating it to others. He suggests that the open source initiative first resonated with people, thus spurring word of mouth. They encouraged users to have the software loaded on a portable thumbnail flash drive, and install it wherever they went. Blogs were a big component of how it spread, as well as local communities that would be passionate about their region, self-supporting each other, and spreading the word.

Un traditional web strategies
As you may know, Mozilla hasn’t done a lot of traditional marketing or advertising (except for at least one full page add in NYTs with the launch of Firefox 1.0) and is really relying on social media to spread the tools. Exactly how fanatic is it’s customer base? So fanatic that some users created an actual crop circle and it’s featured all over google images searches, as well as in Google Earth! Or they’ve leaned on the community to create and submit videos (30 second commercials) with Firefoxflicks, some of which actually went on major TV networks, sans production costs.

If you’re looking for stats, you’ll find that Firefox is the second most used browser in the world, and it’s primarily spread through grass roots adoption, against a Microsoft product that comes embedded on many platforms. Users have to go out of their way to download the software, let alone spread it to others.

This is fascinating, if I substitute the word ‘Firefox’ and insert the name of ‘any religion’, it still makes sense. For many, it’s almost as if Firefox is gospel.

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Connie Benson is a community advocate, and is the community manager at ACDsee photo management software that I’ve used when I was a UI designer. Aside from that, she helps me co-moderate the Community Manager group in Facebook, and has been a big contributor in my research, defining the four tenets of community managers, and is becoming a great friend.

I asked Connie what to do when detractors criticize your company, brand, or products, we also talk about dealing with an overwhelming negative community or forum.

I also recommend setting up a process in advanced that helps to identify what type of detractor you’re dealing with, as some should be responded to quickly, and some should never be responded to (ongoing trolls). Develop a plan on what to do, as you’re going to have to deal with different personalities throughout your community program.

Update: Nicholas Butler says in twitter that Connie’s direct actions helped him give the ACDsee products another try, talk about understanding the value of having a community advocate like Connie.

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