Slides: Four Social Media Trends for Business in 2010

Categories: Web StrategyPosted on January 22nd, 2010

Companies Must Approach Social Programs In A Coordinated Effort
Many companies are enthralled by the opportunity to use social technologies to connect with customers, yet many lack a plan or coordinated effort. Additionally, things are going to get more difficult as they don’t realize that as consumers and employees rapidly adopt these tools the level of complexity increases across the organization. While it’s easy to get caught up on the specific new technologies that are constantly emerging, companies should focused on business trends and themes in 2010. In particular, companies must develop a business strategy based on customer understanding, put the baseline resources in place to get your company ready, deliver a holistic experience to customers –and build advocacy programs and anticipate customer need.

Social Media Trends for 2010

View more presentations from Jeremiah Owyang.

Open Research: You can download the slides from slideshare, and use with attribution for non-commercial reasons.

To Be Successful, Companies Should Focus On Four Key Trends
While there are many themes in 2010 for companies, II focused in on the four key themes companies must focus on:

1) Don’t fondle the hammer. Understand customers, focus on objectives, not develop strategies based on ever-changing tools. Companies really need to understand their customers first, see our recorded webinar to learn more.
2) Live the 80% rule. This is a movement: get your company ready. 80% of success is getting the right organizational model, roles, processes, stakeholders, and teams assembled –only 20% should be focused on technology.
3) Customers don’t care what department you’re in. Customers just want their problem fixed, they don’t care what department you’re in. Yet, now, nearly every department can have a direct relationship with your customers using social tools. As a result, provide customers with a holistic experience Start to investigate how brand monitoring, community tools and CRM systems are merging.
4) Real time is *not* fast enough. Companies cannot scale when it comes to social media, for most companies, you cannot hire enough people to monitor and respond to the conversation, As a result, lean on advocates, by building unpaid armies, and anticipate customer needs through advanced listening techniques.

This event was hosted last night at the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association nice redesign, and hosted by Adobe (disclosure: an Altimeter client). I was later joined by Jeannette Gibson, social media executive of global marketing at Cisco, Ed Terpening, VP of Social Media at Wells Fargo, Maria Povermo, leading Social Media in Marketing at Adobe, and Rob Fuggetta of Zuberance to have a lively panel on how they are using these technologies. The event was recorded, I’ll add a link as soon as it becomes available.

Translations
Text translations now in Japanese

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Matrix: Social Technology Adoption Curve Benefits –and Downsides

Categories: Analysis, Matrix, Social Media, Web StrategyPosted on January 3rd, 2010

Know The Upsides –And Downsides Of Your Adoption Behavior
Individuals and companies should be deliberate in their adoption strategy, there are benefits and risks to each category. It’s been interesting watching different group adopt social technologies over the past few years, I can see who benefits from being first –and the pains to be a thought leader of both individuals and companies.

Above, this is the standard Rogers Adoption Curve, it’s important to point out that my matrix below only is in context of social technologies, it will vary from technology to technology. I found this take on the adoption stages of social technologies helpful in framing how I thought about the following matrix. I built this following matrix in the context of social technologies and adoption by both individuals and mixed in with organizations and industries.

Matrix: Social Technology Adoption Curve Benefits –and Downsides

Categories	Description	Benefits	Downsides
Innovators	These brave souls take on new technologies, trial them, then will often evangelize them. I’d put those that adopted Twitter in 2006. or any entrepreneurs that creates new technologies fitting into these categories. From a corporate perspective, Dell was forced into this arena, and has benefited.	Glory for being first, a thought and practice leader.. Will have learned from their mistakes, and have far more experience than any others. Will always be able to tout they were first.	Very costly in terms of time, effort to find new technologies that are often flawed. Additionally, since innovation becomes cheaper and more accessible, this becomes more difficult as more entrants to the market launch products. Lastly, while these folks may be first for some technologies, they are often wrong for the many other technologies that did not take off.
Early Adopters	This behavior is exhibited by those that try out new technologies in a careful way, often thought leaders. Some analyst firms like Forrester adopted early, and the Tech industry deployed social. Agencies like Edelman, Razorfish have helped their clients.	Learn from the failures of innovators, they reduce risk. Often they have the opportunity to explain how it works to others. Become the case studies that other groups follow	Never first, and have to write the playbooks. They may adopt, but at higher costs than the majorities as the technology has not matured. Tech companies adopted social in 2005-2007 as an early industry, but a lack of measurement, and rapid tool change required great effort to stay current.
Early Majority	Although thoughtful in their deployment, they adopt faster than the mainstream. in 2009, we saw industries like consumer packaged goods, finance, and healthcare adopt social technologies. I think of when mainstream Oprah joining Twitter as a defining moment as she was ahead of most celebrities and media.	Technology starts to mature, reducing risk and costs. Standards emerge, although this group gets to help define mainstream adoption.	Some of the cool factor leaves, and brands start to move in on social technologies, scaring off some innovators.
Late Majority	This skeptical group only adopts when the mainstream does. Industries that only got on board with social when Obama, mainstream press, or celebrity adoption occurred fit here. Companies adopting in 2009 and beyond.	Reduced risk from learning from who’s done it right and wrong, as well as benefits from standard proccesses, and consolidation of vendors.	Not seen as thought leaders and don’t benefit from the residual buzz from being ‘cool’, instead come across as a ‘me too’./td>
Laggards	Still cautions in deployment, even after the technology has become mainstream. These folks will adopt social technologies in 2010 or later.	Cookie cutter deployment from standardization and very little risk. Deployment may actually be faster and with less effort than those above.	In balance with lower risk, lower opportunity for reward. No thought leadership, and little additional reputation or buzz value from the intended investment.

Matrix: Be Deliberate In Your Adoption Strategy
Each category has specific benefits and risks, but rather than just behaving in a way that comes natural, I encourage you in your personal and work adoption to be deliberate in your actions.

Examine your organizations adoption patterns. First, define how quickly your organization responds and adopts to technologies, and factor into your considerations.
Be a Category Ahead Of Your Company. If you’re responsible for new technologies at your company, your personal adoption should be a level or two ahead of the organizations adoption, as you cannot effectively deploy for your company if you don’t personally understand the impacts of the new technologies.
Track The Category Ahead Of You. Find an individual that’s above your adoption category (the early adopter watches the innovator) and be sure to watch their behaviors and learn from them. Adopters are often blazing their own trail, and may not ever follow anyone.

My Strategy: Early Adopter –But Not Innovator
One thing is clear, being first doesn’t mean you’re right, in fact, the Innovators have a difficult time dealing with early and late majority, paving roads of opportunity for analysis, agencies, and consultants. As a result, I make a distinct effort to be an early adopter of new social technologies, but not the innovator, as I find I’d rather be more often right, and expend less energy trying to be first.

Leave a Comment. Share Your Adoption Strategy
Let’s learn from each other, I’d like to know about your adoption behavior and that of your company. Were you deliberate in choosing your adoption strategy? How does it hurt or help your company?

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How Local Businesses Can Benefit From Mobile Social Networks

Categories: Mobile, Social Media, Web StrategyPosted on October 19th, 2009

Local Businesses Can Benefit From Mobile Social Networks
The nearly mainstream social web is now evolving and graduating to mobile devices. This emerging space of mobile-based social networks are empowering customers to find the best venues and prices, and offering savvy companies unique ways to cater to this new medium. Yet, despite the emergence of applications like FourSquare, Yelp, and recently launched GoWalla, there are risks as customers talk directly to each other and opportunities for businesses who harness the tools. Local businesses should approach the mobile social networking space by first listening to their customers, responding to commenters, provide special offers to advocates, and prepare for pricing to be impacted.

Mobile Social Network Offers Discounts Based On Location
Using FourSquare, a location based social network, I ‘checked in’ to the movie theatre indicator to my friends my location. Immediately after the application identified my approximate location it offered a ’special nearby’ which I clicked. The Savvy Cellar Wine Bar offered me 50% off a wine flight to a store 2 blocks away. Using both my general location using 3GS on the iPhone and my explicit checkin to the location, it was able to serve up advertisements based on my physical location. We should expect FourSquare to evolve and eventually offer advertisements based on your friends interests “John, Amy, and Allen all like Los Taqaritors, invite them now for a 20% off discount”. Location based ads will soon connect with social information.

Catering To “Top” Customers Spur Word Of Mouth
The opportunities aren’t just focused on location based, but also provide opportunity for developing an unpaid army of advocates. Take for example Foursquare’s point system, those who ‘check in’ the most to a location can become the ‘mayor’ of their particular store, indicating they’re the top customer. Some savvy restaurants provide free drinks or other services to the mayor, who will continue to spread their affinity for a restaurant using social networks. A few weeks ago, I spent time with Yelp’s marketing team and their community manager Connie who oversees many of the community facing events. I learned that many local restaurants cater to Yelp Elite, and will likely provide them with quality service above and beyond, in fact, Yelp has launched a program for restaurants to offer a prix fixe menus for Yelp users. Expect to see Yelp’s mobile application advertise these special deals for Yelpers as they search for restaurants online using mobile devices.

Empowered Customers Check Prices In Real Time –Impacting Buying Behavior
Even if you don’t have a physical store, but offer a consumer good, consider RedLaser, which is a real-time bar code scanner that allows any phone to scan UPC codes and find them cheaper online. This means that retailers with higher priced products may miss out as consumers can quickly buy it from a competitive store down the street or find it online. If this trend continues, manufactures may shift their supply away from high-priced retailers to compensate for the change in demand. (Thanks Andrew Hyde for the tip)

Innovative Market Dependent On Adoption
Despite the innovation, location based marketing and advertising has its limitations as it’s dependent on: total number of consumers with mobile devices, adoption of mobile social networks, and their desire to find location-based offers.

Key Takeaways For Local Businesses:
Local businesses should approach these mobile social networks in a four part strategy –not simply reacting without a plan. Companies should approach this space by:

Listening In For Free Research. Local businesses should immediatly montior their brands on mobile social networks like Yelp and FourSquare. Use this information as free research: find out the perception of customers opinions both good –and bad to learn about their market.
Responding To Reviewers. Use negative information as a way to improve products and services and let your community know you’re listening to their feedback. Although there are always two-sides to any complaint use these same tools to respond to customers in public, but be sure to abide by the terms of service.
Rewarding Top Customers. Customers that frequently patron your store and tell others on these mobile social networks should be rewarded. Build both in person and online relationships with them so they’ll continue to advertise and market on your behalf. Free drinks anyone?
Preparing for pricing impacts and positioning. With disruptive tools like RedLaser appearing, customers can quickly find pricing of products and find them at nearby retailers. Retailers like CVS, Walmart, Target, BestBuy, Safeway should take heed as consumers continue to become empowered through instant information. Companies will need to respond by: making product pricing more competitive, or offering other deals such as bundling, speed, time, or other value-based offerings.

Update: Here’s some screenshots, I learned how to take screenshots with your iPhone by holding the main button and power button.

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Companies Must Plan Holistically For Social –Beyond Marketing

Categories: Social Media, Web StrategyPosted on October 1st, 2009

Having just returned from vacation, (hence the break from blogging) I had the distinct pleasure of keynoting Silicon Valley AMA last night at Cisco’s Telepresence suites in Santa Clara. In my opening keynote, I had a specific message to marketing leaders in the valley to think holistic about social. I outlined some of the major impacts to other departments beyond marketing.

Companies Must Plan Holistically For Social –Beyond Marketing

PR and Communication: The first business unit to be impacted by social, these organizations realized and have adopted the rise of blogs as early as 2005, and in response, many have launched their own blogs, or are sophisticated in blogger outreach. Additionally, AR professionals are just starting to recognize the impacts of social as analysts are able to bypass traditional gatekeepers and talk directly to product teams using these tools.

Marketing: Whether it be corporate or field marketing, the impacts are far reaching to marketing. Marketing has had to become an enabler as anyone who participates in the company with social is now acting on behalf of the company. There’s been several instances of support mishaps that have become the domain of marketing.

Events: Whether it’s virtual or physical, events need to develop a strategy around social. Event teams need a pre, during, and post strategy, and need to join communities where they exist. I’ve outlined how events need to harness social into their strategy in this informative post.

Sales and Field: Sales teams have always been social, now these tools amplify their relationships and communications. Marketing must be a resource and educate sales teams how to appropriately use these teams, including teaching them how to listen, engage, and act professionally as they would in real life.

Sales Operations: Systems that organize customer data need to quickly ramp up and include social data. Information found in LinkedIn, and other social networks can be aggregated into customer databases such as CRM systems.

Partners and Channel Marketing: The opportunity to allow your customer and partner channel to learn from each other, syndicate your product content, or to quickly educate them is at hand. See how channel marketing can benefit from social.

Human Resources: Now, with websites like Glassdoor.com employees can rate their experience at an employer, and even gauge the quality of leadership. HR professionals know they must build internal communities to allow and encourage employees to connect to each other. They also should extend existing behavior guidelines or disclosure policies to include the social domain before a crisis emerges. Recruiters have been using social tools to find candidates such as LinkedIn, Google Searches, and scanning blogs.

Product Development: Engineering, R&D, and other product or service creation teams recognize that customers are talking about their products and making suggestions in websites such as UserVoice, or Linkedin or Yahoo answers and need to envelope customer feedback and factor into the product lifecycle.

Support: Client service teams must reach customers where they are (like BestBuy or Comcast in Twitter) to support customers, as well as use social tools within their own companies to provide an opportunity for customers to self-support each other, or develop a collaborative knowledge base that can be shared between customers and support teams. Support teams should fix their existing support issues –not just respond in Twitter as it teaches customers bad habits.

Executives: Often the job of great leaders is to listen and communicate. These tools amplify each of these behaviors and can be used to listen to employee and market insight, as well as communicate back to them. John Chambers, Cisco’s CEO has an internal blog in which he communicates to employees on a regular basis.

I certainly didn’t get every department and look to you to fill in the gaps for the opportunities and risks for those that I listed above or those I missed. A few years ago, I created this diagram of how social can impact the product lifecycle, it’s finally become relevant.

Leave a comment below of some departments that I missed, and the opportunities and risks to each.

Update: Kirsti attending the event, and has more notes from the presentation. She notes the changes that companies must prepare for: disparate websites, internal rebellions, and developing long-term plans.

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The Three Spheres of Web Strategy –Updated for 2009

Categories: Career, Web StrategyPosted on September 14th, 2009

I hope this is one of those resources you print out pin to your desk, and share with others. This is the core theme of this blog, the balance needed for successful web endeavors in organizations.

I originally posted this diagram in 2006, then updated it in 2007, and it’s time to revisit the core structure of the goals and challenges of a Web Strategist, especially as I reset as I change roles.

Who’s a Web Strategist? In a company, they often are responsible for the long term vision of corporate web properties. At a web company where their product is on the web, they’re often the product manager or CTO. Regardless of role, the responsibilities are the same, they need to balance all three of these spheres, and make sure their efforts are in the middle of all three.

1) Community Sphere
To be successful, the Web Strategist must understand (by using a variety of techniques and tactics) what customers and prospects want. Stemming from, ethnography, analytics, brand monitoring and primary and secondary research the end result should be a web experience profile and mental model.

Specific skills needed: Ability to understand and implement research, strong understanding of user experience which would include usability, information architecture. Ability to synthesize content from a variety of real time locations such as web analytics, customer feedback from support and surveys and communities, and an ability to be empathetic to customers. Above all, this strategist should be able to predict where customers will be in coming years –not just understanding of previous or current states.

Key Recommendations for 2009-2010: Focus on brand monitoring of customers in the social space. We’ve seen an increase in consumer adoption of social technologies which has caused a shift in where customers make decisions (not just on your corporate website). This is an opportunity to quickly identify who they are, what they want (and don’t want) and understand the language they use in order to reach them.

2) Business Sphere
Yet understanding customers alone isn’t sufficient, the Web Strategist must be able to achieve measurable business objectives. This leader must be able to first identify key stakeholders within an organization, capture their needs, prioritize, and balance into a plan that meets both their needs and the community. This delicate dance requires the strategist to balance the needs of a variety of internal teams, offset daily fire drills, yet meet the needs of the company. Many Web Strategists fall short here, they meet the goals and objectives of internal stakeholders yet fail to balance the needs of the community. The end result? A website where users rarely visit, and go elsewhere to make trusted decisions.

Specific skills needed: Ability to communicate within a company, understand and prioritize emphatically the needs of multiple business stakeholders and prioritize. This leader will also need to be a mediator and must defuse the assertive business stakeholders will cool logic and business acumen, as well as ensure the web team operates in an efficient operation. Management skills are critical here: project management, human relations, communication, and the ability to define clear concise goals based on dates for content and technical teams. Lastly, the core of the role includes skills in marketing leadership, advertising, media, product management and marketing.

Key Recommendations for 2009-2010: In many cases, the recession has clamped budgets down to operations with budgets coming from campaigns and business units to innovate. Where budgets are limited, learn how to use inexpensive technologies like community software, blogging, or status update tools internally –yet have a long term plan for how they work. On the external front, provide guidelines and resources to internal teams to use social before it cascades to many areas of the company without common framework –fragmenting the customer experience and wasting business resources.

3) Technology Sphere
Lastly, the Web Strategist should be an expert in their own realm of internet technologies. They’ll need to know the capabilities and deficiencies of their current arsenal of tools as well as adopt new technologies that are ever emerging. Leaders in this space often become complacent configuring current systems and forget to plan into the immediate roadmap new technologies that widen the breadth and width of what can be done. If the Web Strategist is performing the Community sphere correctly, they are already watching how the use of customers technology adoption is changing.

Specific skills needed: Ability to understand the workings of web architecture in the internet field. While they are not technical experts they should be able to understand the impacts of these technologies to the business and community. They should also be watching for emerging technologies and devote a percentage of resources to research and development for new technologies –never falling behind. The strategist should demonstrate skills of innovation, and experiment and practice with new technologies as they emerge first hand –but by keeping a focus on long term business objectives.

Key Recommendations for 2009-2010: Web Strategists need to prepare for a new set of connected devices that are quickly emerging. While social caught most companies off guard, mobile technologies within and outside of your company will impact how information is quickly shared. Start by analyzing related applications and mobile social networks in rich mobile devices such as Blackberry, iPhone, and Palm Pre.

To be successful, the Web Strategist must balance all three of these spheres. Becoming a master in each of these spheres requires incredible dedication, so the leader must rely on their team for input, actively seek out education, attend workshops, and read books on the various subjects. Also, if this helps to shape your career, or you’re a hiring manager for this role, I hope it helped to define what to look for.

Translations
The community sometimes translates my posts, I’m thankful and am happy to highlight them here:
French
Serbian
Italian
Czech

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Web Strategy: How To Integrate Social Technologies with Virtual Events

Categories: Social Media, Virtual Events, Web StrategyPosted on August 11th, 2009

I’ve participated in dozens of online and virtual events, including created my own, below is a playbook to think about virtual events as they intersect with the social web. While the scope of this article is focused on online virtual events, many of these tips can be used in real world events and the like.

[To be successful, virtual --and real world events must have a strategy that integrates social technologies, before, during, and after]

Traditional Online Events Vendors Recognize Impacts of Social
My focus on social technologies continues to spread to many verticals, industries, and experience. Virtual events, where companies host attendees through a digital online experience, continue to captivate marketers. It’s good for attendees, as they can experience a virtual online event event during an economic downturn, and continue to rely on virtual events for making decisions. Currently, I’ve been briefed by On24, Unisfair, InXpo, Webex, and have had conversations with GPJohnson (I lean on Kenny) a company that fouses on physical and digital events. As virtual events continue to grow, expect them to tightly integrate social technologies.

Three Principles Of Modern Events
To be successful, virtual –and real world– event planners must abide by the following principles:

Events should integrate with existing communities and social networks where they exist.
Events should have a strategy that includes the before and after –not just during.
The audience can assert control over the event, so encourage audience participation and know when to get out of the way.

Planners must develop a Pre, During, and Post strategy that integrates social.
Today, event planners only think of the fixed event that occurs in a day, they often overlook that a community talks, discusses, and chatters before, during and after an event. They should:

Have a “before’ strategy. Use social tools before an event to increase signups by first locating where their target community is, and use social tools to reach them. Encourage members to tweet and share an event before it occurs, they should create events in Facebook so it triggers updates on the newsfeed. Assign a hashtag so that excited attendees can interact with all tweets, blog posts, tags, photos, and videos can be easily found, tracked, and then measured. Savvy organizers will source questions and topics from the crowd before the event occurs, both to increase the relevancy of the content and spur word of mouth. Truly advanced organizers will allow members to connect to each other before an event by allowing users to connect in an online community, or login using existing social network profiles to ‘find their friends’.

Integrate existing social tools during an event, thereby increasing interaction. During the event, organizers should be monitoring the social web and chat rooms to see how the crowd is reacting –be ready to react in real time. Make it clear what the assigned hash tag is, and source questions in real time from audience members as appropriate. Integrate chat features and tweets live into the event, centralizing the fragmented discussion in your event. Take for example, virtual events company InXpo already provides Twitter integration to experiences and offers some best practices, see how Cisco has coupled their physical events with online events.

Follow up using social tools to aggregate and identify opportunities. Event planners shouldn’t quit once the event is over, the opportunity to further relationships is at hand. Event planners should immediately launch a survey to gauge quality and experience, and ask if there are follow-on opportunities. They should aggregate all created content (remember the hashtag) and create blog posts that highlight the top reactions. Advanced events will have a community where attendees are ushered to and can continue the conversation on after the event continues on. Finally, a brand should respond using the same tools as attendees in Facebook, Twitter, or leave comments on blogs and continue the dialog. There re more best practices available to study.

In the Future, Virtual Events Must Integrate Social

Virtual events will integrate with existing social networks. Brands need to fish where the fish are, and find communities where the exist. Virtual events will need to deploy in Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, and Twitter communities, allowing them to login and register with their accounts on those platforms –and then message on these platforms. See how Gigya’s Socialize product has helped Turner Broadcasting with the online event for the NBA finals.

Virtual Events won’t be a limited duration, but will become a persistent experience. Today, virtual events are often a limited duration experience (2-6 hours on average, perhaps longer for global events). We should expect them to be persistent longer term experiences that span days, weeks, and in some cases be permanent fixtures.

Integrate with existing corporate communities. Expect virtual event vendors to develop partnerships with community platform vendors, InXpo has staked a claim in early integration.. The first folks they should talk to? Leverage Software (who already has a strong community event module) Jive, Telligent, Awareness, Mzinga, Lithium, Neighborhood America, all cater to the corporate B2B market. These vendors provide long term community experiences for brands, and virtual events should integrate with the identity of existing customers, and foster experiences before and after the virtual event.

Event planners will need to measure their influence on the social web. Assign team members to monitor and track occurrence to a spreadsheet using Twitter search tools or Technorati, or hire a brand monitoring vendor that will provide a report.

Certainly, this isn’t a comprehensive guide, please provide your tips as social and online events integrate.

If you found this helpful, please share it with others, kindly tweet: “Web Strategy: How To Integrate Social Technologies with Virtual Events http://bit.ly/Y6xmP via @jowyang”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The above graphic shows how brands we surveyed are organized

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

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

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

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

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

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The Future of the Social Web: In Five Eras

Categories: Forrester, Future of Social Web, Social Media, Web StrategyPosted on April 27th, 2009

Expect the Groundswell to continue, in which people connect to each other –rather than institutions. Consumer adoption of social networks is increasing a rapid pace, brands are adopting even during a recession, so expect the space to rapidly innovate to match this trend. Clients can access this report, but to summarize what we found, in the executive summary we state:

Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience. Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. Socially connected consumers will strengthen communities and shift power away from brands and CRM systems; eventually this will result in empowered communities defining the next generation of products.

We found that technologies trigger changes in consumer adoption, and brands will follow, resulting in five distinct waves, they consist of:

The Five Eras of the Social Web:

1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share
2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system
3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social
4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content
5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and services

Update: CRM Magazine has more about the five eras, focus in on the graphic.

Timing of the Five Overlapping Eras:
It’s important to note that these eras aren’t sequential, but instead are overlapping. We’ve already entered and have seen maturity for the era of social relationships, have entered social functionality but haven’t seen true utility, and are starting to see threads of social colonization with early technologies like Facebook connect. Soon these federated identities will empower people to enter the era of social context with personalized and social content. The following diagram demonstrates how we should expect to see the eras play out in the future –with social commerce the furthest out.

Interviews with 24 of the top Social Companies:
Research isn’t done in a vacuum, that’s why we conducted qualitative research to find out what we should come to expect. We came to these conclusions based on interviews with executives, product managers, and strategists at the following 24 companies: Appirio, Cisco Eos, Dell, Facebook, Federated Media Publishing, Flock, Gigya, Google (Open Social/stack team), Graphing Social Patterns (Dave McClure), IBM (SOA Team), Intel (social media marketing team), KickApps, LinkedIn, Meebo, Microsoft (Live team), MySpace, OpenID Foundation (Chris Messina), Plaxo, Pluck, Razorfish, ReadWriteWeb, salesforce.com, Six Apart, and Twitter.

How Brands Should Prepare
What’s interesting isn’t this vision for the future, but what it holds in store for brands, as a result, companies should prepare by:

Don’t Hesitate: These changes are coming at a rapid pace, and we’re in three of these eras by end of year. Brands should prepare by factoring in these eras into their near term plans. Don’t be left behind and let competitors connect with your community before you do.

Prepare For Transparency: People will be able to surf the web with their friends, as a result you must have a plan. Prepare for every webpage and product to be reviewed by your customers and seen by prospects –even if you choose not to participate.

Connect with Advocates: Focus on customer advocates, they will sway over prospects, and could defend against detractors. Their opinion is trusted more than yours, and when the power shifts to community, and they start to define what products should be, they become more important than ever.

Evolve your Enterprise Systems: Your enterprise systems will need to connect to the social web. Social networks and their partners are quickly becoming a source of customer information and lead generation beyond your CRM system. CMS systems will need to inherit social features –pressure your vendors to offer this, or find a community platform.

Shatter your Corporate Website: In the most radical future, content will come to consumers –rather than them chasing it– prepare to fragment your corporate website and let it distribute to the social web. Let the most important information go and spread to communities where they exist; fish where the fish are.

Translations
If you translate this blog post, I’ll add your link here and credit you.

Dutch: Marketing Facts Team, Bas van de Haterd

Spanish: Estategia Digital by Pablo Melchor

Danish: Social Media Marketing by Peter Ulstrup Hansen

Danish: dSeneste by Søren Storm Hansen

Polish: Marketing Technologies by Dawid Pacha

Italian: Digital Ingrediants by Stefano Maggi

Russian: Shchepotin by Denis Shchepotin

Czech: Vlad Hrouda

French: We are Social by Sandrine Plasseraud

Korean: by Jamie Park

Hebrew: Blink by Israel Blechman

Indonesian: Wib’s Web World, by Wibisono Sastrodiwiryo

German: The Social Media Soapbox, by Stephen Rothman

Portuguese: Live from Sao Paulo, Brazil, by Dax

Swedish: JMW, by Brit Stakston

Norwegian: Cruena by Harald, Creuna

Arabic: Technoemedia, by Mohamed Hassan

Chinese: Seaberry, by Sylvia

Japanese: MinoriG Translation, by Minori Goto

Romanian: Blog de Comert Electronic by Adriana Iordan

Persian: Lameei, iclub.ir

Want to translate it into your language? I’ll be happy to add you, read these suggestions.

This project took a team effort, and I’d like to thank Josh Bernoff a guiding force in my career, Emily Bowen who kept the project going, Cynthia Pflaum for the quantitative data, Megan Chromik in our editing team for the polish, and Jon Symons in our PR team for the media outreach.

This is also cross posted on the Forrester blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals. Thanks to Matt Savarino for catching a small typo.

Tags: Future of Social Web, Future of the Social Web
Posted in Forrester, Future of Social Web, Social Media, Web Strategy | Comments

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8 Principles for the Modern Blog …at least for 2009

Categories: Social Media, Web StrategyPosted on April 13th, 2009

A few years ago, Julio Garcia suggested I redesigned my blog, I should have listened, he was right. Yesterday, I finally took his advice and launched a new blog design, in which I contracted Web Designer and Developer Mitch Canter to complete.

We involved the community in the iterations of the design, and frequently asked for feedback. I even used controversial crowdSPRING to crowdsource my banner design, (thanks to Dragos Mirica, see his site)based on Mitch’s wireframe and logo creation. In the end, a majority of it came from my vision, a great deal from Mitch, and the rest from the community.

Although this blog redesign process has taken a few months (I’ve been very busy, as has he) I’ve come to learn there’s a few principles that have changed since I started my blog back in 2005. (BTW: Here’s the old version, if you want to jog your memory) Here’s what I think are appropriate for 2009, yet I expect this list to change in just a few years as new technologies and the media landscape shifts.

8 Principles for the Modern Blog …at least for 2009

1) Baseline: Have Valuable Content
This one isn’t anything new. You have to have relevant content that’s either helpful or interesting to your audience, or you can forget the rest of the principles. Content still rules the royal court, and without it, you can’t move forward. Ideas, insights, perspectives aligned with an appropriate publishing frequency to your market is baseline. Don’t read ahead ’till you do that.

2) Know your Audience
If you’re just writing for yourself, this principle doesn’t matter. A few years ago, blogging didn’t have a strong business objective, but now we see many companies involved in blogging, so it must impact company in a positive way. So, if you want your blog to grow and spread your ideas and knowledge, then you likely have an objective. In order to be successful for your ideas to be effective, you should first know what your readers want. I know through a formal survey that most of my readers are interactive marketers, so I’m attempting to give them what they want through content and website experience.

3) Distribute the Content…
In the end, I believe web destinations are irrelevant, as we should fish where the fish are. The goal of a thought leadership blog, is often to get your ideas to spread to other locations. In the most extreme example, take Jason Calcanis, who temporarily stopped blogging and shifted to a dedicated email newsletter, it worked, as people ended up blogging his content for him. I’ve highlighted email subscription, and a host of tools at the bottom of each post that enable you to share the content elsewhere.

4) ..Yet Aggregate the Conversation
If you’re successful because of the two principles above, your content will start to spread to other locations on the web. It’ll be discussed on Twitter, tagged in Delicious, rehashed in Friendfeed, talked about in Facebook, and maybe event submitted to Digg. As a response to content distributing (Principle 3) then as a response to help to re-centralize your thoughts, you’ll need to aggregate your social content. This builds a reef for the fish to centralize around. As a result this accomplishes three things: 1) Helps people to find opinions in a single place 2) Helps you to manage the conversation 3) Provides a social reward to those who spread the content.

5) Highlight Community Conversation
While I know that in Principle 1 it’s about the content, for some blogs, highlighting the community around you is key. For example, in this blog redesign, we’ve given nearly equal attention to the comments and conversation. We’ve aggregated Friendfeed conversation (and soon Facebook), as well as given each commenter the ability to show their icon. (sign up to Gravatar if you want your smiling picture to appear in the comments), you’ll even notice the prominent comment bubbles next to each blog title. If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that the collective commenters say some really brilliant stuff –let’s focus on the collective voices.

6) Reflect a Personal Brand
Whether you like the concept or term, expect the desire and need for personal brands to increase during a global recession. As people become sensitive that they may be positioned against a dozen other candidates, demonstrating thought leadership to be found, a built in audience, or a living resume of their knowledge and how they interact with others is key. We’ve provided a variety of ways for people to connect with me via email, social networking sites, and even an embedded Twitter ticker tape below the header. This means that having a visually aligned personal brand with your goal is important, why? The way you represent yourself is an indicator of how you’ll represent your employer and clients.

7) Get Serious, Hire a Pro
This project was more ambitious than I could have taken on in my busy schedule or antiquated UI design background. Therefore it’s important to hire someone who knows what they’re doing, in fact read Mitch’s behind the scenes guest post, there’s only 7 images on the blog design, in an attempt to optimize the site. Mitch does this professionally, and it was worth the money to hire him to lead this project. I don’t have the time to learn it, nor do I want to risk messing up the blog.

8] Got an Principle to Share? Leave a Comment
I won’t profess to knowing all the principles, so I’m leaving this one open to the community. What principles for the modern web blog need to be factored in?

By the way, I’ll be working on the popular posts section, making it a quick reference guide to those that quickly need the most helpful content. Stay tuned.

Posted in Social Media, Web Strategy | Comments

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Social CRM: When Registration Pages Go Extinct

Categories: Social CRM, Social Media, Web StrategyPosted on March 6th, 2009

This post is a bit dense, I’m not writing for my general business audience, but for those that really are advanced social technology thinkers. If you’re seeking starter info, read my FAQs.

I’m working on a report called the “Future of the Social Web” and I interviewed quite a few companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Lotus, RWW, Federated Media, Plaxo, Dell, Cisco EOS, Flock, Meebo, Gigya, Intel, Razorfish, Six Apart, and a bunch more to find out the trends in this industry. There’s probably less than 10 people in the world that have access to all these teams, executives and thought leaders, and I’m taking advantage of it. I just met with Appirio, which is a San Mateo company that birthed out of the SalesForce incubation process and I think they’re one of the first generation vendors that’s connecting social networks to CRM systems. They’re not alone, see the other apps in SalesForce AppXchange that connect with Facebook. Update: Rapleaf is in this space, I need to meet with them soon.

[Marketers Use Registration Forms For Only Two Reasons: 1) To Be Able To Bug People 2) To Be Able Bug Them More Effectively]

Most marketers don’t know why they want prospects to fill out registration pages, they’ve been doing it for so long, they’ve forgotten why. I’ll remind you, there’s only two reasons: 1) To get their contact information so they can bug them. 2) To get demographic and other data so they can bug them more effectively (target marketing). That’s it.

One of the calls I’m making in my report is that registration pages go away. Why? CRM systems and Social Networks will start to connect, and share information in a two way manner. Of course, the trick is to make it all opt in so the user community can control what part of their information can be shared and with who. Appirio does just that, they have built a Facebook application that can be rebranded for a marketing campaign, it can then be used to share information, recommend information to peers, and used for other purposes such as recruiting, word of mouth, and other typical social network activities. As information gets shared, it can be passed to a landing page where users can submit information in a web form –then passed over to SalesForce.

[The Future Of The Social Web Makes Registration Pages Extinct]

While they haven’t built out a system that can remove registration pages all together, I know the second generation Social CRM systems will be able to do this. How? A technology will emerge that will allow users to pass only as much of their social networking profile information as they want over to a CRM system, how much? It’s up to the user. A new social contract will appear that will encourage users to give as much information as t hey want, and in return the brand will reciprocate. The more information the user ~~gets~~ gives, the more the brand will give back in return, I call this a “Social web contract”. Since the data will come from the profile information within a social network, there won’t be a need to have a collection web form, instead information will be passed through connective tissues.

Obviously this flips a marketers world upside down as they are ultimately measured in most cases on generating leads and conversions, there’s a pretty radical mental shift that will need to take place, I’ll have to talk about this later. Oh, and I’ll have to tell you what this means to email marketing –that’s going to change too.

That’s all I can explain right now, as I’m still putting together dozens of interviews and over 20 pages of notes, I gotta get a draft to Josh Bernoff, my rather tough editor. Just remember, the power has shifted to the community, so the tools, approach, and ideology has to meet the needs of the users.

If you’re involved with connecting social networks and CRM systems, I want to talk. Also, Appirio needs marketing agencies to be truly successful, you may want to contact them, or just email me and I’ll connect you.

Posted in Social CRM, Social Media, Web Strategy | Comments

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Corporate Internet Executive Research Study by Internet Strategy Forum

Categories: Web StrategyPosted on February 5th, 2009

I’ll be a keynote speaker at the Internet Strategy Forum Summit in Portland in July 23rd, I attended this conference of corporate web decision makers two years ago –and have attended some local meetings here in the bay area.

The ISF has conducted a survey and has made data available about corporate web decision makers, this brief (I’ve read the full version, which is available for purchase) gives information on how web strategists are organized, their concerns, and even compensation. The highlights of this research will be presented at the Summit, along with other informative speeches and case studies.

A free four page summary of the brief is available below, or you can download on the site.

2009 ISF Corporate Internet Executive Research 4-Page Sample Brief

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Business & Legal internet executive r

I will always promote and point to research that’s good, even if it’s not mine, thanks to Steve Gehlen (he’s on twitter) for making this possible, see you in July!

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Web Strategy: The Evolution of Brands on Twitter

Categories: MicroMedia, Social Media, Web StrategyPosted on August 18th, 2008

Last week, I listed out 9 reasons Why Brands Are Unsuccessful In Twitter, and other microblogging technologies. Companies are caught between the minutia of the discussions and their willingness to be human or add value to the conversations. Although a one-sided view of what’s going wrong, now let’s focus on what’s going right.

I’m watching –and talking– to many brands that are choosing to engage with this seemingly endless stream of personal thoughts, updates, and conversations within Twitter.

Web Strategy: The Evolution of Brands on Twitter

Babysteps:

First, identifying if this is the right marketplace
Brands need to first evaluate if the community members within Twitter are the audience they’re trying to reach. Although we’ve yet to see any formal survey produced from Obvious corporation, most could identify these members are technology early adopters, media fiends, social media practitioners, and those interested in future communications.

Next: Listening to glean insight
Some brands are using the somewhat accurate search tools formerly known as Summize, or even Twitscoop to track graphing of potential terms, or to find influencers. Companies like Visible Technologies are mapping out the discussion in Twitter for tech giants like Dell –they’re likely going to provide a list of influencers and detractors in order to determine who’s the best way to approach them. In the case of the New York Times, Twitter is yet another opportunity to source stories, and potentially find out about breaking news or emergencies. Not only is this key for determining what’s being said by customers, prospects, and competitors, but to ensure rogue employees aren’t speaking on your behalf and potentially causing brand damage.

Registering the namesake
Once a company has figured out the conversation in their marketplace (assuming this is one for them) they should next secure the key domains related to their brand. There has been some impromptu indexes that show that many companies don’t have ownership over their individual brand on Twitter. Since registration is limited to one account per real email address, and companies will never be able to register every potential variant, the process is still limiting.

Walking:

Decide on persona: corporate and/or individual
Brands will next need to decide on their online personas, and how they want to be perceived to the world. There are only a few variations and among them include: 1) A branded approach, void of personal interactions. In many cases, brands are unsure how to approach this conversation and most speak on behalf of the company, void of a personal reference of the publisher. Companies like Popeye’s chicken don’t readily indicate who’s behind the account, although they are very engaging conversing with others. 2) Some brands indicate who the user is, and go so far as to encourage individuals to represent the brand, RichardatDell takes this on with ease, as he both engages in personal interests as well as evangelizes and defends the Dell brand. See the NYT’s Communication department as they list out the personal contacts right on their twitter page. It’s assumed that brands that have engaged in option 2, also have corporate accounts listed in type 1.

Decide on method of engagement
Next comes the interesting part, how brands will actually publish, interact and communicate with others. There are three major options that brands can use: 1) Publish content in a ‘push’ style. Marketers, corp comm, PR folks and media companies can choose to use Twitter as a publishing system, as those who opt-in to follow can now receive updates from the latest story, press release or update. 2) Dialog: Some employees engage in relationship building with community members by responding, answering, and asking questions of those around them, see this large list of Oracle employees who are using these tools. or the ‘classic’ case example of Comcast Cares and Zappos shoes interacting and supporting customers 3) As we’ve indicate above, some may use these tools to glean insight –mainly listening rather than talking.

Examine the digital communications policy
Often known as ethics policies, blogging policies, or communications policies, the world of online publications continues to grow and brands must be prepared for these changes. Brands that have employees using social media (that would be just about all) must ratify their communications policy to: 1) Define what’s an official representation or have acceptance in the gray area of online communications 2) Define what the difference is between someone who is a company spokesperson and someone who’s acting and represents the company. Last week, at a client meeting, some employees at a enterprise IT networking company expressed concerns of employees who were on Twitter would talk about their personal beliefs around politics, culture, or preferences. Potentially some of these expressions would negatively impact other partners or customers in other regions or cultures, and didn’t know where the definitive line was between work and personal was.

Running:

Integration with other tools
Seeminly rare, most brands don’t integrate these tools with their other social media or even traditional website. With the recent case of brands being brandjacked by twitter domain registrars a new need came up of brands wanting to validate their twitter accounts. In fact, some have sent me emails from their corporate account asking me to confirm they are ‘real’ accounts. Of course, the most effective way to overcome validation from third parties and to enhance other tools is to cross link from various web properties, which Tyson foods has recently done. Take for example Dell, which has listed out many of their twitter accounts on their corporate website, now segmented out by verticals, products and regions. Brands should cross link their twitter account from their corporate blogs, traditionally websites, and vice versa.

Aggregation and joining conversations
The next step in this evolution is to watch how the conversations will fragment, spread, and be aggregated on different websites. The conversation isn’t going to be limited to Twitter, it’s search clients, but will start to aggregate on other websites. Take for example Get Satisifaction a ‘universal’ support site that is aggregating twitter conversations on their page, in this instance, Comcast. The conversation about the brand has now spread off the site, and will sputter off new threads of discussions on other websites. Brands like Dell will aggregate those same conversations right on their mainstream site –bringing the engaged audience closer to their site.

What’s next
Although we’re still far from seeing this implement, I expect to see a tie with location aware devices that will integrate twitter with marketing, communication, and support. For example, as one approaches a product, or store where that product is, alerts, the ability to ask questions or receive special offers could automatically trigger to a customers account (most will be opt in, savvy marketers will figure around it). Expect savvy companies to further monitor discussions and respond to support or help questions using these micromedia tools.

While there are many variations and some companies skip from step to step, these are the major evolutionary phases of how I see companies adopting micromedia tools like Twitter. I’d love to hear your feedback on what you’re seeing, and where it’s all headed.

Update: Dawn Foster has a great actionable plan for brands on Twitter, as does Tara Hunt, read, and bookmark both.

Posted in MicroMedia, Social Media, Web Strategy | Comments

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Ongoing List of Social Media Strategies from Enterprise Corporations

Categories: Industry Index, Social Media, Web StrategyPosted on July 7th, 2008

Ongoing List of Social Media Strategies
A social media strategy is a long term plan utilizing all of the resources at hand using two way social tools. In the early days of 2005-2007, developing sophisticated strategies were limited to just a handful of tools such as blogs, forums, and online video. Now with so many resources being available from Twitter, Upcoming, Facebook, Widgets, and more, the opportunities –and level of coordination will vary. This post will be an ongoing list of enterprise size companies (over 1000 employees) that share their social media strategies, plans, online –hopefully in slideshare, as it’s easier to communicate.

I expect contention
What’s interesting is how the language of corporate folks describing these tools is often very different than the language purists use. I expect some contention from this, and this will make for healthy discussion below. I too understand the need to meet business needs, but at the same the needs of customers, do leave your opinions below, or on the blogs or slideshares.

Why would a brand publish their social media strategy?
Well, for a few reasons. These programs are designed to reach customers, partners, and colleagues in an open and transparent way, why not share with them in public? Secondly, by showing these companies are sophisticated in their approach, they demonstrate thought leadership. Lastly, by opening up for a public dialog, there’s so much to learn, gain, and grow from the larger community.

Requirements for this list
If you want to share (this could potentially be useful for Forrester reports) please leave a comment. Your blog post, slideshare, video or podcast should explain what your enterprise company is doing in the social media realm, thinking both long term, and considering the many resources and tools available to you.

Sun Microsystems: Social Media is for Everyone
Lou Ordorica and Linsa Skyrocki
June 2008

Access the slideshare directly, use full screen mode

| View | Upload your own

While I enjoy the holsitic view of the multi-departmental opportunities, it’s important to note that social media is not for everyone, as if you look at our technographic data, you’ll find inactive in nearly every demographic cut. I’m pretty sure they are suggesting that it’s for each department, so if that’s the case, then the statement is correct.

Cisco: Building a Community with Social Media and Web 2.0
LaSandra Brill, Manager, SP Web and Social Media
July 2008
Access the slideshare directly, use full screen mode

| View | Upload your own

I reviewed and provided feedback to LaSandra to this prior version, I enjoyed her lessons learned.

Social Media at IBM – Beyond Blogging

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: e20 e2)

IBM’s Adam Christensen shares this slide deck of IBM’s approach on social media. I’ll be meeting with him to discuss it in early Oct 2008.

Intel: Intel Forming “The Insiders” Social Media Advisory Team
Ken Kaplan, Broadcast and New Media Manager, Global Communications Group at Intel Corporation
June 2008

In this blog post, Intel calls for a board of advisors to reach and assist to them for their social media efforts. If you’re not aware, Intel is already doing a lot in this space, much with success. I give them a tremendous amount of credit for taking risks, quickly learning, and then making iterative changes.

EMC: Applying Personal Social Media Techniques to Corporate EMC
Dan Schwabel, Social Media Specialist at EMC Corporation
June 2008
In this post, Dan Schwabel shares the many different tools that are used at EMC and how they related to the overall change in personal and corporate branding. He examines events, CEO activity, and the many different social technologies used in their approach.

SAS: Online communities for SAS users and SAS professionals
Alison Bolen, sascom magazine’s Editor-in-Chief
July 2008
In this post, Alison lists out the many ways that customers can communicate with each other.

Your Company
Leave a comment below with URL and description.

Related Posts:

See this list of full time Social Media Strategists and Online Community Managers at enterprise companies

Applying a Social Computing strategy to your entire product lifecycle

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How Brands Will Use FriendFeed

Categories: MicroMeme, Social Media, Web StrategyPosted on June 10th, 2008

While I’m not a Friendfeed zealot like respected Steve Rubel, I’m seeing an opportunity for Friendfeed to help corporations further their social media efforts.

If you’re not familiar with the Social Media Press Release (SMPR), it’s a process/document that helps press releases to not only carry the traditional content (who what when where why and how) of a company announcement, but it also provides links and assets to social media: blogs, images, videos, tags, etc.

[Currently, Social Media is disparate and fragmented, making the conversation difficult to track, find, and use. Although too early for it's time, the Social Media Press Release, will reincarnate as Friendfeed]

Alone, the social media press release isn’t an effective use of being in the spirit of social media, it’s somewhat devoid of the humanness and resulting conversation that many expect. However, full-blown announcements that contain quit a bit of images, blog posts, videos, and social networking campaigns require an ability to organize, and keep track of the disparate conversation.

SMPR too early
I’m the recipient of dozens of press releases every week, so I’m very familiar with what to expect, and frankly, haven’t seen a single SMPR since I’ve been an analyst since Oct, 07 submitted to me. You can however view Ford’s Social Media Press Release room called “Digital Snippets“, as one interpretation. Update: Inventor Todd has a small, but growing list on his site.

The good news for the pioneers of the SMPR (smart folks like Todd Defren, Brian Solis, Chris Heuer) of the Social Media Press Release is that they were way ahead of the curve, they really had foresight to how corporate communications were going to change. The bad news is they were too early, and adoption hasn’t yet happened.

[Brands will use Friendfeed like a Social Media Press Release, to aggregate their social assets, and then to spur on a conversation]

How it could look
Fortunately, there’s good news at hand, with social aggregation tools at hand, such as FriendFeed, a brand can create a Friendfeed account and easily consolidate all the assets from one location. What would this look like? A brand like Ford could create a Friendfeed account, submit to the various social services (Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, Delicious, and over 30 others), then encourage fans of Ford to either follow that public Friendfeed page, or to become actual ‘friends’. The end result? All the social media assets will be viewed from one location, searchable, findable, with the ability to comment, without using a SMPR.

Many brands will get it wrong, it’s not just publishing
The one caveat is that brands will need to be part of the discussion that happens among these social tools, as what’s really important is the people that are talking, debating, and discussing what your company is announcing. For those that get it wrong, no one will subscribe, no one will talk about it, no one will ‘like’ it and spread it to their network. So be active in the comments, conversations, and an open manner.

I’ve not seen a single brand do this, but it’s what I expect to see in the coming months, let’s see if my prediction will come true.

Related Resources on Friendfeed:

You can find me on Friendfeed, “Jowyang”

Start Here: What Friendfeed’s “MicroMeme” Means For You, Brands, and The Web

TrendWatch: Comparing MicroMemes (Friendfeed), Network Feeds, and MacroMemes

Update: Todd has responded from his blog, although disagrees on adoption.

Update 2: Ford has adopted Friendfeed as a form of the SMPR

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The Five Questions Companies Ask About Social Media

Categories: Web Strategy, Web TheoryPosted on June 6th, 2008

I just visited a client who had several groups in their company doing quite a bit around social media (they are trying to answer the 4th and 5th question). They were what I call “walking” and were on the verge of “running”. Often, when I meet companies for the first time, I try to find out which of the following questions that they are answering, as it determines their level of sophistication.

As one might expect, brands in tech, media, and some consumer goods are more advanced, and finance, insurance, and sometimes government are trying to answer the first questions.

Five questions companies ask about social media:

What is Social Media?
For many folks, corporations, the question to answer was “What is a BloB”. Blogging was the primary tool that we saw in the marketplace, for some, it wasn’t taken seriously, for the savvy, they quickly adopted. We saw scare tactics from the threatened mainstream media, such as “Attack of the Blogs” and light of amateurisms, angry customers and crazies were painted. For many, we wanted to know what are these tools, how to they work, and what’s the impact. Early on, this impacted corporate communications, PR, and mainstream media.

Why does it matter?
As we’ve evolved, many were realizing the impact of exploding batteries, brand hijacking, and blog evangelism. Savvy companies were starting to adopt these tools, a few provided integrated communities that were scrapped together or built from existing platforms. For the majority, trying to understand why these tools matter to a business. In addition to corporate communications, PR, we started to see other marketing and business units being impacted by these tools, as well as adoption.

What does it mean to my business?
We’re here now. This is the year of ROI, measurement, and experimentation. Many corporations have deployed resources, headcounts and budgets. Corporations are afraid to make mistakes, so plans are created, and measurement is critical to help manage and prove the worth of new programs. ROI was proven, new social media measurement attributes were defined, and many new tools were deployed, I did what I could to further this industry (see all posts). In addition to Corporate Communications and PR, business units are starting to experiment with these tools, often out of the PR budget. A new role started to appear more frequently, the digital marketing manager, the community manager, the social media strategist.

How do I do it right?
Now that experimentation is done, and business units are starting to apply these tools, like advertising, PR, field marketing, and customer references, companies will want to do it right. Frameworks will be developed, consultants will offer packages, and a loosely developed process will be used. For companies that don’t have enough internal resources to listen, manage, and deploy, consultants will be a very sought after service. Nearly every brand will start to have an ongoing budget for social media, the new role to manage these tools will appear. IT departments will start to deploy enterprise 2.0 tools.

How do I integrate across the Enterprise
Normalization is happening, A checkbox for ’social media’ on every announcement, product launch, product development and support will be using these tools. Social media tools to listen, converse, collect knowledge, and build new products will integrate across the customer cycle. It’s not just external, intranets will start to deploy suites for collaboration, such as blog accounts issued to many internal and external employees. Product Teams, IT departments, HR, Finance, Executives, and of course Marketing will be using these tools.

This post, for the most part is a rehash of what I’ve posted nearly a year ago, but I think it holds merit to discuss again

Update: June 10th. I’ve scheduled 52 inquiry calls with clients since April 2008. Inquiry calls are 30 minute discussions with clients that want to pick our brains, and I tell them everything I know that will help them meet their business objective. While the range of questions wily varies, most are asking questions 3, 4, 5.

What question is your company, or your clients trying to answer, this is often a good post to send to your internal teams and try to trigger a discussion.

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What is a Web Strategist?

Categories: Career, Web Industry, Web Strategy, Web TeamPosted on May 17th, 2008

My long time friend Martin McKeay (Network Security A-Lister) asked a curious question when I tweeted about Len Devanna, EMC’s Web Strategist. Martin asks: “I saw your tweet about EMC, saw that Len’s role is Director of Web Strategy. Better question would be what does that really mean?”

What is a Web Strategist?

Definition:
The web strategist is responsible for the long term planning and ongoing programs for a website, at least one exists at every corporation.

Scope:
A web strategist (this isn’t just a term I made up for my blog) is a REAL job title typically found in large corporations where the web is a necessary communication channel, or a title used by internet consultants who provide high level advice. Most often the web strategist is in marketing, but this role can appeal to the intranet or extranet. They are responsible for balancing the three spheres of web strategy (See graphic).

They manage budget, and ultimately are key decision makers for which vendors are hired.

Questions they have to answer:
How do we align our website with our corporate objectives?
How do we spend our resources?
How do we measure our return on investment?
How do our customers think of our website?
How do I prioritize our projects?
What future technologies do I need to be aware of?

Rank:
They are often at Director level, VP level, and on occasion, when the website is mission-critical, they are at C level (Chief Internet Officer, or some variation), at eCommerce companies this may be the web product manager. They often report to a senior rank in marketing, or sometimes engineering or IT.

Background:
Web Strategists are business people first, tech people second. They understand the direction and strategy of the company, and know how to use the web to meet those needs. They do have a background working in web, often from 5-10 years, and they know which of the many forms of web marketing they need to use to meet their business objective.

Duties:
A Web Strategist is actually a program manager, this means they manage ongoing projects, teams, and resources, to understand the difference between tasks, projects and programs, read this guide. They manage a profit and loss, and often responsible to other business units, manage budgets, and measure ROI.

Team:
Often, they act as a director to project managers, web managers. Those teams assemble the technical teams, as well as technical teams reporting directly to the Web Strategist.

Who they interact with:
Aside from managing their own team, they deal with the many internal business stakeholders, their management, and spend time managing relationships and deliveries from vendors. See this list of the many external constituents.

Salary:
They are paid as director or VP level. In the SF bay area, and experienced web strategist who’s responsible for the public website of a large corporation should be paid at director level or above. I would expect that to be 80-120k, and in the rare case be 120-300, esp if it’s a large web or eCommerce company. This varies greatly, so do not refer to that example as doctrine, as I’ve not done formal research to back it up.

Notable Professionals
Here’s a few people that are doing good work, many I’ve worked with in the past, do note the title isn’t as important as the responsibility and duties.

Michele Frost, Director, Web Marketing, Forrester Research (current colleague)

Peter S. Group Director, Enterprise Web Strategy (my former boss)

Lisa D. Director of Online Marketing at Joie de Vivre Hospitality (former colleague)

Olivier N. Director, Global Web Marketing, Hitachi Data Systems (briefly, my former manager)

James Spanfeller President, Chief Executive Officer, Forbes.com

Dave Churbuck, Vice-President of Global Web Marketing

Bryan Rhoads, Senior Internet strategist, social media and online community specialist, Intel

Where to find them:
If you’re trying to hire a senior web strategist, they can be found already working at another company (you’ll likely have to poach) or they are members of my Facebook Web Strategy Group, or attend regional meetings at the Internet Strategy Forum, a group I’ve been involved with for years. In 2006 they published research based upon a member survey.

If you’re a recruiter, you can advertise a job opening on the Web Strategy Job board, powered by Job-o-matic.

I’ve video interviewed Len before, if you want to know him better. You can follow me on Twitter, my handle is jowyang.

Posted in Career, Web Industry, Web Strategy, Web Team | Comments

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How to Deal with Internal Stakeholders

Categories: Web Strategy, Web TeamPosted on April 1st, 2008

The Web Strategist deals with many internal customers
A Web Strategist is an web decision maker, in context of this blog, they are often within large corporations. They have internal customers that range from marketing, product teams, product marketing, support, PR, advertising, IT, and a plethora of external vendors. For many web strategists’ much of your effort won’t be dealing with users or your web team of developers and designers but with internal stakeholders. I’ve seen a lot of this when I was corporate web manager, and I’d guess that over 50% of my time was spent dealing with requests, problems, prioritization of internal stakeholders. (I managed an enterprise intranet, extranet, and aligned a disparate enterprise intranet)

Your internal customer: the stakeholder
What’s a stakeholder? someone who stands to benefit or lose from your direct actions, as a result, they are your internal customers. Stakeholders can make your life heaven or hell, from their requests, or to they way they give feedback to your management chain.

Think of yourself as a chaperone
The way to manage stakeholders is to think of yourself as a chaperone, for your stakeholders, you oversee them, guide them, and direct them where they need to go. This is somewhat of a challenge, as if you’re overbearing and deny them their requests, they’ll escalate to their management (their parents), who will talk to your management (your parents), causing unnecessary headache. It can go the other way as well, if you bend to their will, they will dominate your time, and the user experience (your external customers) of the site could suffer if your put business needs first –rather than balancing the user with business needs.

How to Deal with Internal Stakeholders:

Develop great relations with your internal stakeholders
Make yourself accessible to these teams, and build relationships to understand their business needs and drivers and try to get ahead of their requests, learn to ancipate their needs.

Establish clear roles
Sadly, stakeholders will often grab the first person in the web team they see to make a request, either a small web update or a project with scope creep. Assign someone on your team to facilitate requests, and a role to properly scope projects so you’re always setting expectations.

Make the process very clear
Tasks, Projects and Programs all have different life cycles, roles, processes and requirements, you’ll need to spell out very clearly to your stakeholders how each of those are different, and set expectations.

Develop a ticketing and project system
Deploy a system that will both accept incoming requests, this will help free up team resources, help see all the requests from one view, and help to keep track of many requests. This system will eventually be a great way to report to your management team of your fulfillment, and great for customer satisfaction reporting. Thanks to Adam for the submission in the comments.

Lead the prioritization, but involve stakeholders
You’re always going to have more requests than resources, unless of course your company is headed the wrong way. Make it clear what your current resource threshold is and prioritize projects. As new requests come in, you can have stakeholders work with you to move budgeted resources around –forcing them to prioritize their own requests. Of course, you’ve the final say, and should be empowered by your management to lead this forward with conviction

Train stakeholders
Depending on how your website is setup, some of your stakeholders may be encouraged to publish directly to the website, you’ll need to educate them on how to use tools, analytics, and other know hows to be successful. Train stakeholders on how to understand web analytics and web reports –empower them to take ownership over the content they have on their site. Teach them to fill out a requirements and scoping document, saving your team time and ensuring they’ve fully thought out the request.

Make your schedule and reports available
Let all stakeholders know of what your team is working on, establish an internal calendar with project definitions available, including web analytics reports so business stakeholders can work with them

I could go on and on with other recommendations for success, but instead, I encourage you to leave nuggets in the comments. I’ll add great ones to this list and fully credit you.

Related Resources

The many Web Strategy Constituents: The external forces that shape your website

The Three Web Activities: Task, Project, and Business Programs

A Complete List of the Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008

Video: Alastair Duncan on Corporate Website Leadership (3:30)

Posted in Web Strategy, Web Team | Comments

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An Initial Analysis of the Fast Company Community

Categories: Community Marketing, Feedback, Social Networking, Web StrategyPosted on February 9th, 2008

As an analyst, I watch the online community space very closely, and am always interested in seeing how traditional institutions and organizations approach, adapt, succeed or fail in adopting social tools.

Fast Company, a forward thinking business publication has revamped it’s corporate website to now be an online community. Their initial three page announcement written by Edward Sussman: “The Media is Social”

[Fast Company, a traditional publication, has featured community as it's primary focus. But success isn't guaranteed as: innovating without a clear objective is dangerous, the bottom-up approach must cascade to the whole organization, and they must rapidly make course corrections]

Opportunity
Fast Company is the first, but certainly not last, mainstream publication to integrate the majority of their site as a social community. The starting page of their website isn’t the magazine, or it’s articles, but is the community site. Traditional media is under fire from social media, the power has shifted to the participants, so in return Fast Company is participating: hiring bloggers and video bloggers (Robert Scoble and Shel Israel) and are integrating within their site. In many other cases, websites have bolted on social forums around content, this is clearly a full replacement of community over Fast Company content.

Objectives
Fast Company is attempting to involve readers and the market to be involved in creating content. We’ve listed out there are five major social computing objectives, (listening, talking, energizing, supporting, embracing) and this one could fall under embracing, where customers and employees collaborate to build next generation products and services.

Challenges
Once the initial buzz wears off, we’ll have to see who will remain leading the and joining in the conversations. Will the lines between professional created editorial and community continue to be blurred? How will high quality content be elevated so usefulness is found? Most importantly, with the many reports showing that advertising on social networks is ineffective, how will Fast Company monetize?

What they deployed
Fast Company deployed a community platform using Drupal, and hired experts to implement, it contains a variety of features from profile building, forums, user created blogs, media rooms, event calendars, and many other features. They have made this the primary experience from the homepage of Fast Company, and have a control navigation bar at the top of each page.

Initial Analysis of the Community, Fast Company should:

Determine a Goal
Being creative for the sake of innovation isn’t enough. It’s great to see that they are trying something new, but what is the end goal? How will they measure results? Does the team know what success looks like?

Quickly Squash Bugs
I noticed a few hiccups that aren’t uncommon on a launch. 1) Site error: the site was not available for some time, Chris Brogan has screenshots 2) I tried to message Edward, but it got stuck in an endless loop of clicks to add him as a contact before messaging him, confusing. While all excusable the first week, this needs to quickly be resolved.

Focus on fewer features
The community site launched with too many features, as a result, the initial interface is overwhelming. I encourage clients to launch with only three major features, (such as a profile, forum, blog, media, q&a, etc), unfortunately, Fast Company launched without all of those

Elevate Fast Company Editorial
The professionally created content that we seek from Fast Company is hidden, which is too bad, as that’s why we come to them in the first place. There’s currently a saturation of online communities on every given subject on Ning, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo and Google groups. How is this different? I think the order is backwards: Lead with the editorial, attach the social features second, the social features should orbit (in context) the articles.

Clean up the Interface
The interface is crowded and unclear, resembling enterprise software, there are too many options and tools. I’m not the only one, I received feedback from some of my 3000 followers in twitter: “@jowyang I agree, the site was bewildering at first” The deployment looks like the features were determined by the developers and not a user experience designer. Let tools be hidden, and show more on a mouse over or let them cascade out. It’s confusing to understand what the top categories are compared to the control bar, then the many features on every page. Think Zen: articles first, social second, features and tools third.

Start with a tour
Develop a quick and dirty walk through video or animation that highlights how the website will serve the users, and how they can be involved and contribute. Highlight at the lead in video, and have your top bloggers post quickly.

Make community a core ethos of company
Being first has it’s advangtes, you get the buzz, but there’s also disadvantages: the path has not been cleared before, and innovators must quickly course correct when mistakes happen. Editors, writers, journalists, management and support must all be involved in the community, taking input, talking, and discussing. For success, Fast Company will need to involve a social way of thinking in everything they do, this can’t simply be a flash or wine thrown in the pan by management.

The Big Picture:

Can a business publication blend journalism and online community to create something better than either by itself? This is the ‘fast’ question posed in the community, and there were a myriad of responses, most positive. My response was the following:

“Yes it can, and it can also learn more from it’s audience, fuel research, ideas, and stories. The successful business will learn how to get the community to be part of the content creation, and how to monetize on top of this.”

The Future
Expect this to be a success for Fast Company, but they’ll need to act on the previous recommendations. Expect other business publications to quickly launch similar communities, and soon the industry will be inundated with ‘me toos’. The savvy publications will still realize that the web is distributed and won’t limit their community efforts to their corporate domains, but will also spread to where the people are. The savvy fishermen, fish where the fish are.

Conclusions: Being innovative doesn’t guarantee success
Fast Company has launched an innovative community site, unseen by most mainstream publications. When the shinyness wears off, the company will need to involve community in every aspect of it’s strategy for it to thrive. This is certainly a website and community to watch, I’ll post additional analysis in a few months, and hope to get some numbers from the team.

Posted in Community Marketing, Feedback, Social Networking, Web Strategy | Comments

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Case Study: How Sony Leveraged A Popular “Vampire” Facebook Widget To Reach It’s Community

Categories: Case Study, Facebook Strategy, Web Strategy, Widget StrategyPosted on January 29th, 2008

A Widget Case Study
Yesterday, I gave a teleconference on Facebook as a ready-made marketing program. I gave a few examples of success, and the audience was hungry for success metrics and numbers. One of the case examples was about rebranding an application/widget in this case, Rock You’s vampire application.

Sony rebrands popular Vampires Widget with 30 Days Night, upcoming Vampire movie
Vampires, which you may already know as the RPG where members bite each other to receive points (and duel) was already popular with over 3 million installs in Facebook.

Sony pictures, the parent company of the very scary 30 Days Night vampire horror film rebranded the existing application, and launched a sweepstakes contest to generate registrations and glean intelligence. The grand prizes? 4 wheel ATVs and $1500.

Specifically, they placed banner ads on the rebranded vampire applications which promoted the movie (one could assume that those who opt-in for the vampires application would also like a vampire movie) promoting the sweekstakes.

The measurable results?
The campaign was only live for 3 weeks, and there were 59,100 sweepstakes entries. (success was deemed at 10k, this clearly moved beyond that)
The visits (I don’t know if they were unique or repeated) were 11,642,051 for the bite page, and 17,652,567 for the stats page (I believe these are part of the interactive experience of the game.
Sony was happy, it exceeded expectations, and users of the application weren’t over branded.

RockYou asked me to keep the price confidential, but based upon the results they told me, I suggested they double the rates, this is despite what Mashable reports on.

What worked?

Fishing where the fish are: Sony figured out where the already existing community was (remember to fish where the fish are) and rather than trying to rebuild something completely by scratch, they leveraged an existing successful application.

Rely on specialists for new arenas: In my many briefings with vendors and clients, specialized firms often provide something a general interactive firm or corporate web marketing team can’t. They have experience, know their area, and in this case, they knew to rely on someone that already knew Facebook.

Compliment the existing user experience: Sony didn’t beat the 3 million existing users with heavy advertising (and I’m sure RockYou wouldn’t have let them) over the head, instead offered value by giving away prizes, and tied in a movie that already existed.

What could have been better?
In my opinion, it would be great if:

The campaign lasted longer than 3 weeks.

Rather than simply embedded, Sony could sponsor elements from the movie and integrate within the game. (vampires could fight at different scenes from the movie, key characters from the movie could become non-player characters, etc). They already have a multi-player game that could have tied in.

A spin off game could have emerged just around the game, where members could give virtual gifts to each relating to the movie, then cross-selling other sony products and merchandise.

Also realize there are very few applications in Facebook that are this popular, don’t expect these type of results to occur every time.

Widget Network Developers
Looking bigger, RockYou isn’t the only vendor doing this type of work, also see Slide, Clearspring, Gigya, and a bunch of others. If you’re in the space, feel free to leave a comment below adding to the conversation.

For those Forrester clients who attended the webinar, I hope that clears up the question (as I promised to find the answer), and thanks to Ro Choy and team of Rock You for the details. If you need to know more, read this weekly digest of the social network industry, or see all posts tagged Facebook.

Posted in Case Study, Facebook Strategy, Web Strategy, Widget Strategy | Comments

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What Facebook’s Developer Announcement means: How Community can be Portable

Categories: Facebook Strategy, Social Graph, Social Networking, Web Strategy, Web TheoryPosted on January 27th, 2008

Update: Several have suggested that this announcement is nothing new, (See initial announcement in 2006) and upon further investigation (and a quick email exchange with the Facebook team) confirms this to be right. What’s new is that it’s now easier to do than before. Regardless, the awareness of this feature is low within the marketplace, and everything I write in the following still stands true. Consider this awareness raising, and more of these types of distributed web tactics to continue in 2008.

My goal is to simply tech speak and boil it down to what it means for you, a web strategist. I’ll update this post as I learn more information.

What Facebook wrote
In their most recent announcement they gave a very technical explanation regarding the announcement:

“This JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook applications. Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported. The exceptions are:”

Web Strategists’ Translation
This means that web owners can now embed existing Facebook applications easier than before. Now, in addition to being able to create an application/widget that will sit on Facebook alone, you can now easily embed it on your own website (in addition to leveraging the social features that Facebook offers).

[You can start to bring the Facebook community to your own corporate website, rather than directly developing on Facebook alone. This is a step towards the community now leaving the social network and moving to other locations]

This is really making the social features and widgets of Facebook portable. This is important as your web strategy is now distributed in many locations. For corporate web strategists, you’ll need to expand the scope of your plan to include how some of these widgets and applications could be embedded on your own microsites and corporate websites. This also means this is a ‘bridge’ to get active Facebook users closer to your corporate website.

Impacts to Google’s Open Social
If you’re not familiar, I’ve outlined what Open Social Means to your executives, read this first. Essentially, Google and it’s many partners wants to make it easy for widgets to move from one social network to another with little re-coding: portable and re-usable widgets. Unfortuantly, this has yet to be seen, and Facebook’s announcement allows widgets to be more portable, somewhat creeping in on Open Social’s intentions. In the long run, expect all of these companies to be working together, sharing API data, as those that don’t will be left out.

What you need to do:

Action: Do nothing at this point, let’s wait to see some case studies of how this is being implemented.

Plan: This doesn’t keep you from correctly planning, so continue to make your web strategy a distributed one, where content, applications, and people move from social network to social network, and to your own corporate website. Talk with your interactive agency, web developers, and social media gurus on what some of these possibilities could mean. Have weekly 30 minute brainstorming parties and see how this could be implemented and integrated within your current activities.

How to think of this: Plan on adding social features to your own corporate website so that visitors will interact with your own content, re-sort it, edit it, and mash it however they want. The future of content is amorphous and ubiquitous. (I’ve been saying this since 2005 and now we’re finally starting to see it happen)

Posted in Facebook Strategy, Social Graph, Social Networking, Web Strategy, Web Theory | Comments