ExpoTV recently ran a research study to determine how do consumers relate to each other. While this isn’t Forrester Research, so I will not defend, nor explain their methodology. It’s rare that analysts point to research other than their own, if I put your interests first, you’ll continue to come back to me.

Blog ExpoTV found that:

55% of customers in their survey want to have an ongoing discussion brands

Respondents were most anxious to talk to the product design (49%) department, followed by customer support (14%), marketing (14%) and pricing (13%)

89% said they felt more loyal if they knew the brand was listening through a feedback group (attention insight community vendors)

WOM: Sixty-one percent of survey respondents said that they told at least 10 people about the last brand they liked.

WOM: Eighty-one percent of respondents will tell at least five people.

Despite this evidence, it’s interesting to note that a recent WSJ Article that Most Corporate Blogs Are Unimaginative Failures featuring a Forrester report shows that many corporate blogs (a common way companies talk to customers) isn’t going that well. One common mis-step is that corporate blogs are focused on pushing their own agenda, not that of the readers/customers.

A rather sad paradox, where fear has overtaken an opportunity to improve relationships with patients and clients. While this may not hold true for every pharmaceutical company, I recently met one who had banned it’s employees from monitoring blogs, social media and the online conversation.

Responding to every customer can be very, very costly, considering how many people may be talking about medicines, often anonymously in online forums.

We saw similar fear a few years ago as Finance and Insurance companies were afraid to toe-dip into the conversation due to strict government regulations, although were seeing companies like Wells Fargo launch blogs and virtual worlds, aimed at the ‘lifestyle’ discussion, rather than specifics on your checking account, or CD.

Despite this troubling limitations set on the pharma industry has resulted in low adoption, at least two brands have joined the conversation, Johnson and Johnson’s ‘Connect‘, an interactive media site, and Glaxo Smith Klein’s ‘Alliconnect‘ Blog according to Mark Senard.

While it’s easy to outline the risks, let’s quickly talk about the opportunities: Pharma companies can improve their customer insight from an ongoing focus group, reduce time to market for new drugs by understanding risks faster and more quickly, and have a stronger connection to customers, making marketing more efficient.

If you know of any pharma companies that have turned a blind eye, or have embraced the conversation, please leave a comment below.

Update: I added “Some” pharma companies as the new title in the post.

Click To Play

I did a quick video interview (hear what he says about Facebook) with Aaron at the plush St Regis hotel at Office 2.0, if you can’t see the video (feedreader or email) go directly to this post.

Aaron Strout, Citizen Marketer, is doing some interesting stuff, he handed me a copy of his book “We are smarter than me” which was written by the community using social computing tools. He had me on his audio podcast, so if you want to hear us, access the 10 minute interview.

If you haven’t noticed, I’m doing these short 2 minute interviews with interesting folks I run into. I keep the format fast and try to respect your time. I find that video is such a great way to see the human side of folks, and it’s so easy to do with my digital camera. Leave a comment a comment if you’ve any thoughts.

Delicious is a social bookmarking tool. It empowers anyone the ability to tag, label, and share with others web pages. For the Web Strategist, it’s a great tool to understand how people think (or don’t think) of your brand. Those who tag your website are more engaged than passive readers, and are sharing your content with others, so pay attention.

How to use?
How do you use it? Go to Delicious, in the search bar, type in the name of your brand, website, or name, and review results. You’ll see some pink highlighed words “Saved by X People”, click on that, and it’ll take you to that page where you can see details of comments, a sorted tag listing, and a history.

Here are the top 5 tags on my index page:

76 tagged the site “blog”
74 tagged the site “strategy”
73 tagged the site “web2.0″
58 tagged the site “marketing”
52 tagged the site “web”

Analysis
Interesting, I don’t consider myself a Marketing blogger, or a Web 2.0 blogger (I don’t even have a keyword category for that term), to me those are just sub-sets of what Web Strategy is about. It’s amazing the the tags that I use for my own posts are slightly different than readers perceived it. I could even get more granular and look at specific posts that were tagged, try sifting on your own pages.

Digging Deeper
I did a Delicious search on my Facebook Strategy post, and discovered that the post had been tagged 186 times, I could then drill down and find out what they said (such as Peter He), and what else they tagged –that’s intelligence. What’s amazing is there is far more activity in Delicious than in the comments of the same post.

I did the same for Jennifer Jones’s Marketing Voices, Scoble’s blog,

Learn more
If you want to learn more about how to use Folksonomies to build a better website, I wrote this post a while back. You should be using these keywords to help you uncover what people are classifying your content as, and as a result should factor into your SEO strategy.

Ian from Conversation Marketing has a great video and “how to” on understanding what users want on your website.

What could you do with this data? Find out what users content they want, how they phrase their terms, what content is missing. Also analyze from where and when they used the search bar, it could provide some clues on what they’re looking for.

[Analyzing search logs right on one’s site is a an easy way to understand what users are looking for]

Yes another way to evaluate the user experience. Louis Rosenfeld has a speech, research, and a book on the same topic.

I often ask my audience at my presentations if they’re familiar with Techmeme. I always bring this tool up when the conversation shifts to “us vs them” regarding mainstream media and bloggers. The tech industry is one of the first for bloggers and mainstream to get along and merge into something new. (In fact you should be checking out Techcrunch’s business model, they’re making 200k in advertising every month)

Techmeme is great, it’s a tab that I have open all the time (since late 2005) to gauge what’s happening in the technology industry. It’s a combination of mainstream articles and bloggers that comment and feed off each other. I know mainstream journalists watch it to see what the buzz is, and bloggers comments off the articles and vice versa. It’s interesting to see the different points of every discussion, and some bloggers are SO predictable (take Nicholas Carr for example). I see some bloggers that copy every article and title and make it a blog post so they become part of the breaking news and also benefit from lots of content in search engines.

Gabe Rivera and I have had discussions on what Techmeme is, he calls it a “News” tool, but I say it’s a “Conversation tracker”. To me I can clearly see different points of views going back and forth on the site. I can see people responding to each other in threaded discussions and cross-linking. Also, the Techmeme isn’t always news in the sense that that we’re used to, sometimes the content can have personal information, or product reviews –it’s not always news. At one point, Gabe and I agreed that it’s a tool that tracks different points of view.

So how do you describe Techmeme to others?
I say it’s a Conversation Tracker.

(Left: Mario Sundar and Jeremiah Owyang)

LinkedIn, a social networking contact website is demonstrating how important customers are to them, as they’ve recently hired a Customer Evangelist. This role is appearing in many companies, I had such a role at Hitachi. Mario Sundar, a well-known Marketing blogger and thought leader has accepted the role.

What’s his mission? watch his video
I informally interviewed Mario on video, you can watch as he explains his purpose as a Customer Evangelist, Congrats Mario and congratulations LinkedIn, you’ll now have a better connection with customers, communicate more effectively and continue to put a human face on your company, you couldn’t have picked anyone more friendly and genuine than Mario.

I met with Lionel of Dell yesterday at SXSW (I even had the opportunity to interview him for my video show “Web Strategy, which will be published soon). He told me that Dell is getting around to actually listen to the large request for Linux from the IdeaStorm community, and has launched a survey.

I’ve updated the the Social Media Saga continues as Dell Corporation yearns for “Dell Swell” post, check it out if you want the whole story.

Social Media isn’t always pretty. Sometimes things happen in the news, that hit social networks and spread at rapid pace. So fast that it forces corporations to wake up and pay attention to how the internet is connecting people at a rapid pace. I’ve noticed a pattern today in my feedreading, and although I don’t have a lot of time, I wanted to highlight what I’m seeing as a Web Strategist.

This week, KFC is is the news as this bad press hits YouTube. The president promptly responded, and even did an online video, good job Gregg and KFC. View video remarks from KFC President Gregg Dedrick (although they need a direct link to the video, I had to splice this code together in order to link to it directly). I hope they keep this open transparent dialogue going, have you read my Web Strategy on Why Online Video is good for your Corporate Executives and How to Deploy?

Brand Hijacking is when customers and the marketplace take your brand and create their own messages, experiences, and share with others. For most corporate marketers, this is scary stuff. This WalMart Watch blog is taking on Walmart Corporation as well as Edelman. They’re calling for video submissions to support their cause. Even Wikipedia has an extensive section focused on some public shortcomings.

Related: Sean’s added a comment below that really should be elevated, he’s provided some coverage of Jet Blue’s execs humble and sincere video apologies and customer bill of rights.

I’ve some other examples of some videos that were created on YouTube against Starbucks. Today, I find it interesting that Dave Winer is calling out some recent online activities. It’s disappointing to some that Dell is saying to Linux users: Not so fast. I was hoping they were on to something, the saga is still not over.

Update: I’ve had my eye on this book, Citizen Marketers I hope to get a chance to read it in the near future. They’re doing a book tour, and will be at the Customer Reference forum, where I’ll be presenting.

Chronicling the Dell Social Media Saga
I’ve been watching this Dell story for quite a while, even been on a panel with blog expert Shel Israel, author of Naked Conversations discussing it.

Gone to Hell, Cursed, and Exploded
Dell’s taken a freaking beating in the past years due to social media bloggers. you can do a search on Dell Hell, and at one time, if you did a Google Search on the term “Dell Support” bloggers not happy with their support come up. (Today’s Google results show it’s still on the first results page)

Joining the Conversation, Cautiously, then with Gusto
Dell launched their One to One blog, which was met with mixed feedback. While some didn’t think they did an authentic job at joining the conversation, others supported them for the effort. A few weeks after the initial launch, Dell started to publically recognize their faults. At CES, I had the pleasure to hang with Michael Dell himself, (thanks to Lionel) where Dell said they were going to start embracing Social Media, watch the video yourself.

Turning it up with Customer Collaboration
Just a few days ago, I helped to announce IdeaStorm, the idea was for Dell to create a Customer Feedback/Collaboration web tools that will let customers and employees create products together. Marshall Kirkpatrick at Techcrunch, wasn’t sure if I was completely right that employees were fully onboard. Engadget cleverly modifies the tagline as they state that Dell Wants You to Make It Suck Less with Digg Clone.

Acknowledging the Voice of the People
Well it appears that Dell corporate (which I hope includes some employees) that they are on board and that they are taking IdeaStorm seriously. On this summary list, Dell demonstrates they are listening to what customers have been saying. A very strong meme is leaning towards open platforms (or none at all). It’s even moved it’s way up Digg, a popular user voting site. Not sure if the solution is worked out, as the costs may be even higher to get a wiped hardware machine.

Saga Timeline

Blindsided from ignorance
Learned how to listen
Built tools to join the conversation
Learned the right way to interact
Reached to community
Acknowledged customer requests

Next Step (and most important) For Dell:
This is the most important part, the final leg of this cyclical journey is to get Dell to give the products that the people ask for.

Document and Measure
It will be very interesting to see if there’s a reduction in Product Research costs from these tools. Could be a very insightful case study on Social Media ROI for corporations, I hope Dell shares this info with me. Keep at it Lionel Menchaca (the Community Manager), Michael Dell and the rest of the Dellions. By the way, if this whole concept is very new to you, I recommend you read the Cluetrain Manifesto.

Update March 2: The saga continues with IdeaStorm injures scores at Dell — “sounded like a freight train”. Apparently, Dell will not be building what the people asked for in IdeaStorm. Ars Technica speculates the many reasons why it doesn’t make sense for Dell. For what it’s worth, either way, the market knows what the market wants, and it’s documented, in addition for great buzz for Dell.

Update March 13th:
Dell has made an announcement that it plans to offer Linux to customers, the flavors will depend on how users answer the survey. I met with Lionel yesterday, and knew about this in advance. I was able to interview him for my video Web Strategy Show, he’ll be up soon.

Update March 29th:
After reviewing over 100,000 survey submissions, Dell is now offering it’s Linux flavored offerings. The company is listening.

Update April 3rd, 2007:
Lionel Menchaca visits in person with Jeff Jarvis, who first coined the business blogging case study “Dell Hell”. This community relations in real life was a success.

Update May 24th, 2007
Ubutu, a flavor of Linux is finally released as a product. Lionel uses video to tell his story.

Update June 16th 2007
The consumerist releases an ex-employees 22 tips on how to buy the best computer, although Dell demands a retraction. Jeff Jarvis sympathizes with Poor Dell, Lionel of Dell responds from the Dell one to one blog.

Update October 18, 2007
Dell’s continued push to reach to customers has paid off, relationships, communication and conversations are starting to be the very fabric of their company. Business Week runs this story, praising Dell for all that they have done. A few times people have told me they are tired of hearing about Dell as the case study of success, the problem is, few or no other companies have moved this far in such a short time. The deserve our applause.

A few weeks ago I interviewed Angela Vargo for PodTech about the Southwest group blog. If you know anything about Southwest their logo has a heart (and apparently their website reflects this too). Today on valentine’s day, the blog is showing candied hearts, rather than the usual nuts. I learned this from their design firm RD2 (and one talented designer) who’s done an amazing job helping to make a corporate blog interesting and clever.

I’ve captured this screenshot, since I don’t know how long it’ll be up.

Update: I just heard from someone at Southwest that this graphic was a ‘gift’ from RD2, wow. Now that’s a firm that I would want to hire. A group that cares about it’s client, willing to go the extra mile.

I really like this piece from Jupiter’s Michael Gartenberg who gives some practical Lessons for Analyst Relations. For many corporate marketers, having excellent reviews and research done by Analyst firms helps the decision making process, especially with complex products and solutions that span multiple groups.

In the last few years, a new role has emerged in the decision making process, bloggers (often normal customers or prospects that have an opinion about your product) can influence the decision and buying process.

At Hitachi Data Systems as the Online Community Manager, I had an informal role to be responsible for Blogger Relations, I’ve reached out, built relationships, and even met them in real life. Microsoft IE team treats me like a blogger/analyst and has invited me to cover their beta and final release of their product. Now, at PodTech, I consult our Fortune 1000 clients on how to deploy Social Media. Here’s a crash course on Blogger Relations.

Here’s a few tips to help you as you reach out to bloggers in your industry.

1) Blogger Relations is often the role of many people in the company, a previous term we all know could be called customer relations. Same customer love, just some new tools a few rules.

2) Bloggers may have first hand experience with your product, and may be more trusted than Analysts, Press, and your Marketers. Bloggers that talk about your products may be a customer or someone that has experience using your product. Sometime this could be different from Analysts who are not using your product. In the level of trust, it’s possible that prospects may trust someone who has first had experience very high. An Analyst may have authority in a particular subject. In many industries, this role is merging as bloggers become so knowable they become authorities. This is the case of Blogger/Podcast Martin McKeay in the security industry.

3) Know your bloggers and know them well. I’m echoing Michael here, as you should really spend time reading a blogger in your industry before making contact, and especially before pitching to one. How do you pitch to a blogger? You don’t. It’s a very different approach. I get pitched several times a week, it’s easy to spot who reads me and who doesn’t, guess who gets the welcome.

4) Provide multiple points of contact. As a Community Advocate/Manager (here’s some resources on becoming a Community Manager), your job is to listen to the market and line up the conversations with the right people in your company. You’re more of a traffic cop rather than a person can answer all the questions. Besides, it’s likely that you’re not an expert at every technical aspect of your product, find those that know and teach them to interact with bloggers in your industry using the same tools, or some of these responses that Nathan recommends.

If you’ve anything to add, or any questions, please leave a comment or contact me, I’m here to help.

Summary
Last night, Factiva hosted a group of Social Media Practitioners, Bloggers, Corporate Program Managers, PR consultants, room in Palo Alto to try to make sense of Social Media Measurement. Most agreed measurement is important, After last night, we’re a little bit closer, the details of the findings are below.

Background Information

• I’m a former customer of Factiva, I suggested they progress their offerings to better measure CGM/Social/New Media, this event is a response to that discussion.
• Those that attended already are thought and practice leaders the audience was not the uninitiated.
• Metrics of last era to don’t apply to Social Media, I believe that a new way of measuring will come about.
• Social Media is complex, complicated, and filled with nuances, as it mirrors or extends ‘real’ life, we will never be able to fully measure and categorize, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
• It’s important to note the following:
• 1) Social Media is about people. People connecting to other people to build better relationships, fostering communities and increasing collective knowledge. (I enjoy Brian’s blast at SMO tactics losing focus)
• 2) Measurement and Metrics are one way to help to tell the story of Social Media

Observations

• It was assumed the folks in the room all ‘get’ social media, we were not here to answer “Why” or “What” but extending the conversation to how.
• A healthy cross section of our ecosystem was present: Social Media practitioners, Folks at Corporations that actually deal/deploy/monitor Social Media, PR companies that ‘get it’, Bloggers, Social Media Consultants (like myself), and Factiva who is a vendor that measures media. We separated this into three distinctions: Companies, Consultants and Vendor
• Most people thought measurement was important to some degree, although one noble corporate blogger is just focused on reaching and connecting to customers to build better products.
• I quoted the meme by Steve Rubel (I incorrectly thought it was Winer) that Page Views are dead.
• Although I suspect we were all thinking the same thing, It was very difficult for us to verbally agree to terms that would encompass the attributes we wanted to measure.
• Measurement depends on what the business goals are. Some folks tied measurement back to hard ROI: (Does Social Media shorten the sales cycle/reduce cost, and does it increase revenues). For other companies, business blogging is about thought leadership, or building better products, how could you apply these models to the Wells Fargo blogs, that are designed at reaching out to communities?
• Zibibo in Palo Alto was a fine venue, the food was amazing, the atmosphere perfect for conversation.
• Some may questions should we measure at all? Corporations need to measure.
• People place different values on attributes. We allowed guests to prioritize their measurement needs, we separated the voting by Business Corporation vs Consultants/Bloggers vs Vendor. The results are here
• Glenn conducted some breakout sessions, a variety of findings from groups emerged, I’m hoping they, or scriber Jeremy Pepper will publish their findings.
• Criticisms: One PR consultant privately pulled me aside and had just concerns that if a company does create such an index it should not be hoarded for raw corporate profit, it should be a community resource, perhaps open source.

Exercise: What attributes should be measured, and which are the most important

Left: The group exercise yielded this prioritized list of Social Media Attributes to be measured.

I leveraged this exercise from former colleague Mary Eileen, it’s also an Information Architecture exercise. I’ve performed similar card sorting exercises before to help determine content priorities for websites.

Attendees were encouraged to voice attributes that were important to measure, they were then grouped and refined.

Roles were broken down into three segments Corporation, (blue dots) Consultant (red dots) and Vendor (yellow dots) and then asked to vote by placing dots on attributes. (see this voting on this page and this page)

There were more Consultants than any other group, followed by Corporations, and Vendor category only had two voters

Each attendee was given three dots of the same color and then voted.

Findings
Although not fully scientific, the thought leaders present voted on which attributes should be measured and then prioritized, in priority it yielded the following list:

• 1) Participation and Engagement (Voted 14 times)
• Corporate folks voted for this as the most important
• They wanted to know how are marketers interacting with them, is this quality?
• 2) Influential Ideas: Memes, and their intensity over time (Voted 11 times)
• Consultants voted this as the most important to them
• This could make sense as PR is traditionally hired because of ability to spread message, is this mass?
• 3) Relevance (Voted 8 times)
• Does this mean the long tail matters?
• 4) Sentiment/Tone/Opinion/Favorability/Emotion (Voted 8 times)
• Factiva product team this the most important to them
• 5) Content (Voted 6 times)
• 6) Relationships and Connections (Voted 5 times)
• 7) Analytics and Activity (Voted 4 times)
• Whoa, this is way down on the list, thereby showing old measurements are not relevant to Social Media
• Community Activation or Call to Action (Voted 3 times)
• 9) Reach (Voted 2 times)
• Does this mean a-listers are less relevant?
• 10) Tied: Conversation Index/Engagement (Voted 1 times)
• 10) Tied: Demographic/Who (Voted 1 times)
• Some were surprised the “Who” was not voted as high. Does this mean that if anyone is engaged in the conversation then they are influential and part of the market? Cluetrain supports this as anyone conversing is in your market. Thereby, those that participate matter.

More Background info of Social Media Measurement
Factiva is a company owned by Dow Jones, and does a great job at measuring EGM/Traditional/Old/Oneway/Broadcast media. Like most measurement companies, they’re making advances to learn about Social Media. Clients are asking more and more about what is it, (although it varies in understanding) measuring the impacts of blogs, wikis, social sites, podcasts and whatever comes next will be needed. At the time when this discussion started, I was a customer of their product. It didn’t meet my full needs in measuring CGM. Since leaving my previous company and joining Podtech as a Social Media consultant this quest to understand Social Media Measurement is perhaps even more important

Factiva listens
Daniela Barbosa, a Factiva employee has really been reaching out to this new medium at a pretty traditional company. She really deserves the praise of her colleagues, the social media community and most importantly, customers. As a former customer of Factiva, Daniela would read my blog daily, and responded in comments, her blog and even using YouTube. Additional Kudos should be delivered to the product team, Glenn, Saurabh for reaching back, listening and trying to understand this new market to build a better product. For those within Factiva and Dow Jones, please learn from what this team has done. Factiva, is a company that listens to the market and to it’s customers.

Additional Resources

• Other Event Bloggers
• Jeremy Pepper has extensive and detailed notes (added Dec 6th)
• Chris Kenton (interesting suggestions to ‘breathe’, read his insightful comments)
• Daneila (Factiva) wraps up, see Video from Glenn the product manager
• Glenn Fannick (Factiva) realizes how much more additional analysis is required
• The event wiki for the Rountable
• Daniela blogs about the event
• Glenn’s partial list of attendees
• I started a list of Companies that Measure Social Media, Influence, and Brand
• The list was expanded on the New PR Wiki
• Things your company should be monitoring
• The difference between Web, Internet, and Social Media Strategies
• Podcast Interview: Brand Intel on Marketing Voices, a Podtech Show
• Podcast Interview: Nielsen Buzz Metrics on Marketing Voices, a Podtech Show

Disclosure of some sorts
As a Web Strategist this is a passion topic to me, my participation was voluntary and unpaid/ They did treat me to a few wonderful meals, and presented me and other guests with an iPod shuffle (which ended up going to the wife anyways). It’s likely I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned with Podtech customers, but I also blog my findings to better the community.

This is just the start
By no means is this the definite answer, and the methodology and process was not scientific. This is just one data point in a fast changing, amorphous, barely defined medium, more on this soon.

Business Blogging guru Shel Israel told me that some of the best business blogs come from Product Managers, his changes the communication game.

Traditionally, the Product Marketing Manager is responsible for the ‘outbound’, getting requirements from the marketplace, delivering to Product Management, and then communicating to the world. Traditionally, the Product Manager is responsible for building the product and meeting the objectives and timelines, more of an ‘internally focused’ role.

Back in August, I was making some observations on how customer requirements can be gathered between Product Managers, Product Marketing Managers, and Community Managers (my previous role). Be sure to read the comments section for additional insight.

Last night at the Factiva Event, one Product Manager attendee was expressing his unsatisifaction with the Marketing at his Company. Although he doesn’t take credit for coming up with this phrase this really resonated with me:

“Product Managers are the guys on the inside of the box, and Product Marketing folks are the guys on the outside of the box.”

Even the Factiva bloggers (which range from sales to product management) manage personal blogs, but are encouraged to provide disclosure they work for Factiva.

Questions to Answer:

• If Product Managers are now using social media to reach out to customers, are they now doing Product Marketing in an outbound role?
• And let’s not forget the important dynamic that customers are organizing, and self-volunteering feedback to product teams. With requirements and feature requests using social media, how does this change the roles?

The Change: Social Media changes the roles of Product Managers/Marketers/Customers.  The lines of communication easily connect between all of the parties, information flows. Everyone can be inbound/outbound, including customers.

Dell is first corporation to step up to Word of Mouth Ethics Agreement.

I’m very glad to see all the resources that WOMMA has been offering to companies and organizations. This is becoming more important for agencies, studios, and corporations that want to use Social Media to connect with customers.

Trust is so important when it comes to using social media, if someone looks behind the curtain and sees something unauthentic, a corporations brand, trust and ability to get close to customers has just been blown, and yes, this can impact the bottom line.

Dell a company known for being a bit naive when it comes to listening and responding to social media (blogging in particular, followed by exploding laptop videos) has stepped up to the plate to embrace an Ethics promise in regards to Social Media.

I’m pleased Dell is heading the right direction, but agreeing to the policy vs adoption will take some time, I wish both orginzations luck. Now for Edelman and Walmart…

Last night, someone asked “What is Social Media”, I was about to get into my usual speech but was cut a tad short.  Here’s a few responses I hope is read for those that don’t yet know:

• Social Media is the medium that people are using to communicate, it includes tools like blogs, podcasts, wikis, social sites, and whatever is next.
• Social Media is not new, ‘Traditional’ tools include; Email, IM, phone, and the human voice.  The new tools (combined with Google) just make the voices louder and easier to find.
• As customers talk to each other, it makes companies less relevant, companies need to learn what, why and how to participate (Yes, and understand ALL of the tools out there).
• I call this “Community Marketing”.  It’s also been called Social Marketing, Pinko Marketing, and Blog Marketing.
• Gaining TRUST is so important in using these tools, to me, this is one of the underpinnings of nearly every best practice.
• Womma, Blog Business Summit, and other Social Media groups teach how to do this.

This is a disturbing and sickening video, watch at your own risk. Listen to the screams of the student being tortured while detained because he didn’t have a library card. Is this how to treat customers?

UCLA responded with this thoughtful response.

Date: November 15, 2006
Contact: Office of Media Relations ( media@support.ucla.edu )
Phone: 310-825-2585

Statement from UCLA Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams About Incident at Powell Library

University police are investigating an incident late last night in which police took a student into custody at Powell Library. Investigators are reviewing the incident and the officers’ actions. The investigation and review will be thorough, vigorous and fair.

The safety of our campus community is of paramount importance to me. Routinely checking student identification after 11 p.m. at the campus library, which is open 24 hours, is a policy posted in the library that was enacted for the protection of our students. Compliance is critical for the safety and well-being of everyone.

-UCLA-

Good folks in groups like the Blog Business Summit and Womma could consider helping out Federal, Government, and Educational groups. They may be at more risk than businesses. Awareness and adoption is probably even slower.

Citizen journalism is everywhere, many people have on board cameras and video recording abilities on most cell phones. Social Media uncovers many secrets.

Note to self: Always carry library card.

Whoa, just got this email, I didn’t ask for this, but I guess they know I’m a business blogger. This is an example of a complete brand hijack detractor blog that is aimed at the Walmart Brand. Walmart has been under quite a bit of fire lately for ethical reasons being a giant corporation, the failed myspace clone, and the whole fake blog Edelman scandle.

I normally don’t publish emails in their entierity, but it’s obvious this Walmart watch group is trying to get the word out, below is their email to my personal email address.

Hello,

In December 2005 Wal-Mart launched “Working Families for Wal-Mart” to much fanfare. They retained one of the fanciest PR firms around — Edelman — to make sure that the site was a success and content on the site has been developed by Edelman employees since then.

I’ll give them credit: it’s a pretty daunting task to pull off a so-called grassroots campaign to claim working families are super-pumped about a company that keeps nearly half of its employees’ children off of health insurance and pays an average of $14,000 a year — $1,000 below the poverty line for a family of three. But they needed to please the client, I guess.

Too bad they forgot to register the domain name.

http://workingfamiliesforwalmart.com

Behind the satire, you’ll find something at this new site that you won’t find at Edelman’s forwalmart.com: the truth about Wal-Mart and working families.

Thanks,

Russ Fagaly
Wal-Mart Watch
www.walmartwatch.com

Whoa! Not to many folks are linking to the working for walmart spoof, but there are over 1000 links to the walmartwatch.com site according to technorati.com

Factiva and I have been engaged in a conversation around Social Media measuring and will be hosting a private roundtable on Dec 5th in the Bay Area. I’ve had fantastic conversations with Daniela, and Glen Fannick.

If your job is to listen to customers that use blogs or other social media tools please contact Daniela as she suggests on her blog post.

To date, there is no single tool that can measure social media for companies, and provide accurate benchmarking. There are several things to measure such as blog resonation, as well as determining “WHO” is creating and consuming social media. In fact, that will be a question nearly impossible to completely ever answer.

I was invited as a panelist at the Blog Business Summit from Maryam, but my current schedule is just too busy, I can tell that I missed a great event.

For starters, the relevant conversation of Blog Audience Measurement at the Blog Business Summit with Tris and Andru is exactly the conversation I need to get involved with. Check out Joe’s breakdown from the discussion, he brings forth some of the tactics discussed.

We know that we can measure some parts of blogs, read my thoughts on Signs of a Healthy Blog: Resonation: 1) Analytics 2) Trackbacks 3) Comments 4) Benchmark changes 5) Qualitative evaluation.

Just yesterday, I had a conversation with some Silicon Valley Marketing Managers around Social Media and using in a Community Marketing Strategy. I gave examples of what different companies are doing, how the tools have been used, and provided strategic assistance and tactical examples of the specific strengths and weaknesses of each tool. They get it, understand the concepts and are ready to deploy

The one questions that I could not ask was: WHO is reading blogs, WHO is listening to podcasts, and WHO is in Secondlife.

While we can all agree that it may likely skew towards early adopters or tech savvy folks, (awareness and tool barriers may keep it like that) we don’t know their demographic information. How old are they, where do they work, what do they do, etc.

Other than putting up a survey (like Guy Kawasaki did for his advertiser Federated Media) would it be even feasible or even accurate to apply this to other consumers bloggers, podcasts, Secondlife?

As an industry, and as a Community Manager myself, we’ll need to answer the “Who” question.

Covering the IE Release Party
I was just discussing how we had a great time at the Microsoft IE party. Martin McKeay (Industry Security Expert, he has a career blog, security podcast series and a blog on ComputerWorld) and I had the opportunity to interview the product team and community For me as a Web Strategist/Manager, understanding the tools that vehicles and tools that users will use to access your website is important.

Community Driven Research
In an effort to represent the community we polled questions from the community on my blog and Martin’s. We asked developers, IT managers, designers, security experts and the average web user to field questions for us to ask the team. Of course, we added in a few key questions we thought would add to the conversation.

Listen to the Podcast
Big big thanks to Martin for all his pro gear and cutting the file, he’s really become a podcasting guru as I’ve gotten to know him. His notes are available here.

Questions from the Community
We weren’t able to ask all of the questions, but here’s what came from the community. Listen to the Podcast to hear all the details from the IE team. Please note that questions may have been asked in a different order depending on who we had on the show.

“Ask them why I should give up FireFox.” (IT Consultant, Dennis McDonald)

“This is one of the most talked about and questioned aspects of the browser, how is Microsoft improving security for this release? What safeguards does IE7 have in place to prevent malicious RSS feed?” (Most asked this question such as CD-Man on Martin’s blog)

“The only thing that I would question is why do all the buttons consist of unlabeled icons (as of the beta…not sure about now). It makes for a frustrating experience as the icons aren’t intuitive. It looks like they were trying to save on localization costs. Also what’s up with “shortcut” instead of hyperlink? If its a shortcut, what’s the long cut?” (Software Engineer, San Jose)

“How does IE make Microsoft money, and if it doesn’t, why does Microsoft spend so much on it? Strategy. Why are they still in the browser biz?” (Martin)

“Will IE 7 be pushed to the enterprise?” There are numerous concerns from contacts about Microsoft forcing the browser as an auto install”. (Paraphrased, Enterprise IT Strategist, Neville Byford).

“There are some major applications that are not compatible, what are the plans to correct, apparently some Groove features do not work (A Microsoft product) as a concern”. (Paraphrased, Enterprise IT, Neville Byford)

“Can IE 6 and 7 co-exist for migration, having an ‘and’ option is better than an ‘one or the other’.” Good points from a Web Developer/Design test perspective.” (Web Developer, Brian Stephens)

“With all the features coming in this release of IE7, could this be a chief feedreader player?, or could offer a host of features that could replace such social tools like delicious?” (Jeremiah)

“When is the timeline for IE8 to come out? Is Microsoft going to wait for another browser to push them again?” (Martin and Jeremiah)

“What were the lessons learned in IE7?” (Martin)

“Now with the major release, what will you do next?” (Martin)

“Ask them how they’re dealing with backward CSS compatability. For example, what about sites that use IE-only CSS hacks (universal selector, etc.) to work around bugs that are fixed in IE7, causing the hacks to mess up the layout.” (Web Designer, Meredith Dodge)

“The refresh button put back on the left side of URL bar. I’ve used IE7 for some time now and am amazed at how many sites aren’t compliant with it at this late date - what is the plan to help accelerate that process?” (Mobile Technology Thought Leader, David Dalka)

Show Notes
Thanks to all the great submissions above, we were able to record the podcast, I’ve jotted down some quick show notes. We structured the questeions determined by role. This felt very natural way to engage, bottom driven questions by the community made a lot of sense.

• Welcome by Martin and Jeremiah
• Gary Schare Director of Product Management
• The browser is the most common used application, this is where the modern individual lives, Microsoft cares about this experience.
• Will it be an application?
• The experience is likely the webpage that they’re on, the browser helps the experience
• Projections on IE8?
• Too early to tell what to call it, but looking at product features now. Recognize need to analyze security,
• Chris Wilson, Platform Architect (going forward)
• Will call temporarily call it IE Next until a formal name is applied.
• Security Features in IE vs Vista
• Some features will be available in both.
• RSS Feeds Security could be an issue
• Sanitize the RSS feed before it hits the browser
• What will he be focusing on in future?
• Will be working on next version, already starting to focus.
• What’s coming in IE next?
• No comments yet, however openness will be important. Working with web developer
• Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the IE 7 team
• The partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft
• Why should I switch from Firefox
• Browsers are a personal choice, choice is important, many options for windows.
• Questions about the IE7 Push
• Will be available as a high security update, it’s an optional update, although the version is pre-downloaded. There is a blocker available for automatic updates.
• Side by Side running of IE7 and IE6
• You can run both together by using virtualization software.
• How is IE7 working with CSS standards and compliances?
• The most standards compliant version ever produced. See the IE7 blog to learn more.
• Check out the web developer tool bar and online resources on the wiki on Channel 9.
• Questions about Groove and ability to run on IE7
• Some earlier beta versions issues, however it’s going to be resolved.
• Questions about iconology.
• Buttons were configured due to research
• IE7 toolbar, compliancy issues
• 5 betas were released over the past months, Dave personally did many Technorati searches to find compatibility issue sites. They issued a toolkit. Looked at financial services websites to do research. Community needs to help identify and educate websites to evolve to latest standards
• Gerald Si, Chief of Staff for Chief Product Officer (Yahoo Liason)
• Helped the IE team with the partnership.
• The standard customization package provides two install versions around IE7 some focused on Yahoo as the homepage and a second portal select.
• Opportunities for Yahoo, and strengths in the partnership
• Strong partnership between Yahoo and IE for about 18 months. Many Yahoo sites are compliant with IE7.
• John Obeto II, event guest,
• Security and Interface is improved. It’s available at no cost. One word of caution to deselect the auto download. Favorite feature is the tabs and quicktabs. Recommend to upgrade
• Niall Kennedy, Web Guru (Former Technorati and Microsoft Employee)
• Upgrade Release cycle matches given consumer base
• Niall likes the open search integration built into the chrome, search is second most thing used after email.
• RSS chicklet will light up, folks will understand how to subscribe.
• How does this affect your life?
• Uses a Mac, but sees the impact for a dominant IE world.
• Firefox 2.0 is coming next week
• They happen to be ready, and will be adding ‘places’ in Firefox 3, and looking at Javascript upgrades. Built in spell check and tab bootup features.