When I first started this list, there were about 8 names on it, just about every day, I continue to add more names, and I’ve thus had to segment the list out by verticals. What is this list? It’s a list of full time social media professionals at Enterprise size companies.

As noted in my recent research report, there are two main roles that are appearing, the social computing/media strategist (I count 54 folks on my list), and the community manager (I count 47 folks). When I wrote the report it was focused on interactive marketers, so it didn’t include an R&D viewpoint, as such, I’ve now added a third category to the list of product managers that create social media products (no surprise they are all in the tech industry)

So what does this mean? What we’re starting to see is that companies are putting actual resources (headcount, programs, budget) around social media programs, it’s no longer a toe-dipping exercise that someone does part time in their role.

A while back Steve Rubel suggested that these skills will fold into everyone’s role, and there will be no need for these single specific roles. In the long run, yes, he’s right. We should note that there are currently web marketing managers, (web strategists) email marketing managers (called direct marketers), and advertising managers –all of which are focused on being efficient in their mediums. So unless those specific roles go away, there is no indicator that these full time social media roles will go away.

So, if you’re trying to indicate to your management or client that this movement is indeed happening, forward that list to them, and let them see the trending for themselves. Do note that many in the non tech industry will discount this as mainly as a tech industry ‘thing’, I’ve heard from multiple clients that when tech companies adopt new technologies, traditional companies like consumer goods, finance, will often retort “yeah, but that’s the tech industry, it’s not reflective of our space”. Quite possible indeed, but you should watch the tech industry in order to anticipate early adoption of technologies, and as it moves up the curve, you should be prepared to adopt.

Also, if you plan to submit, please carefully read the requirements, I screen each submission for accuracy, description, to ensure a solid, defensible list. Frankly, a wiki, just wouldn’t result in the same vetting quality.

I’m in the unique position as a blogger who interacts with journalists, popular ‘A-list’ blogs, and PR firms who present new stories and I’ve observed a trend that Popular Blogs and Mainstream Media appear the same I first started this discussion on Friendfeed, and now it continues here.

In 2005-2006 the discussion around blogs was it’s potential threat to ‘kill’ mainstream media, newspapers, and magazines. As a result, mainstream media responded back, sometimes with negative attacks like ‘attack of the blogs‘. Segregation was impossible and eventually groups within mainstream media outlets started to create blogs on their own, often covering the technology sector or political arena, and many were used as a ‘personal column’ or a place to get more millage out of stories that were cut from editorial.

Taking a closer look at the bloggers themselves, while there is certainly a longer tail of content (specific and niche blogs that will barely get a mention in niche magazines) yet the top blogs (A-listers) resemble the same editorial structure as mainstream medium or an editorial columnist. For example, some of the top tech blogs have a team of journalists/bloggers who cover different areas, there’s often a senior editor who reviews, shapes, or verbally let’s the authors know the direction of the site.

See for yourself according toTechnorati’s top 100 blogs, you’ll notice that a majority of them are written by teams. Only a few are written by individuals, for example, out of the first 50, I only recognize Seth Godin, Robert Scoble, and Heather Armstrong’s Dooce.

Godin, Scoble, and Armstrong’s publishing styles really that unique, as for decades, mainstream media has had editorial columns ‘opinions’ from senior editors, to write rambunctious, irreverent articles. Why? Unique opinion drives controversy –or at least new perspective– that attracts eyeballs. In many cases, the top blogs (either by team or individual) reflect that same editorial slant, in this case, we just call it “opinion”.

Taking a look at the Public Relations industry, who are often asked to help influence coverage of their clients announcements, many times, they build relationships and interact with the top blogs just as they would SF Chronicle, the Mercury, or NYTimes.

So what’s the difference between today’s mainstream press and a-list blogger ‘teams’? Is it quality? Not always. Is it timeliness? It varies. Is it the ability to leave comments? both styles have comments available. Is it personality? It depends.

Perhaps the primary difference is the difference in niche (long tail) content written from first hand sources, and secondly, who will respond and leave comments on this post, I’ll be it’ll be primarily bloggers, not mainstream media folks.

I prescribe to the believe that this evolution is natural, a new medium has been born, and with it comes a shift in power –human traits to organize and band together stem from our earliest tribal instincts. Not much has changed

Peter Kim connects the dots in the comments, and notes that the blog PaidContent was just purchased by the mainstream media group Guardian for a cool $30MM.

My CEO, George Colony lists out a few products and services that have ‘disappeared’ due to technology in his latest blog post. He lists out encyclopedias, classifies, records, actors and even trans-continental flights. He asks what could disappear next. I’ll throw out some hypothetical situations that could cause some of the following dissipate:

Support for products could be transplanted by peer to peer support tools like GetSatisfaction where passionate customers self-support each other bypassing corporations

“Outside” Sales teams could be replaced by Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) s where customers define what they want, companies respond.

Printed photos/photo centers, at least in the eyes of Generation Y are already falling by the wayside

Physical printed maps are already being replaced by digital GPS systems in many cars

Restaurant review companies like Fodors and Zagat, instead replaced by peer review sites like Yelp.

Digital book readers, like the Kindle, although still in early generations could replace distribution of printed books

Keyboard and mice, what a slow and archaic way of input, which needs to evolve from voice/eye recognition

Movie Theaters can go away as home entertainment systems get bigger screens in HD, with great audio at lower costs. Coupled with streaming data, HD movies can be piped directly into the home

Gasoline powered cars

Leave a comment with your prediction –or refute mine

Thanks to Carter Lusher who spurred on this discussion.

A few days ago, I ran a contest for two winners to receive free tickets to the Internet Strategy Forum Summit in Portland. The winning responses, based on insight, ability to back up their predictions and being succinct were Christopher Smith and Kristie.

I’ve selected the two winners, here’s their submissions:

Kristie Connor, a Marketing Consultant, submits on the concept of ‘fluidity’. I like this concept as the corporate website won’t be the only container of brand and product content but also this content will spread to wherever the conversations flow on the web: Social networks, blogs, friendfeed and wherever else. She writes the following:

“Corporate websites of the future will be less about canned content and more about fluidity. Meaning, the consumer will demand websites that are connected to the ‘users’ and ‘consumers’ personal networks which will promote and instill word of mouth as a best practice for business development and ultimately sales. The infrastructure will be designed in a way that company developed case studies, webinars and such will be replaced by real consumers leaving messages and user created video’s. The back-end will be light and built to accommodate the interactivity of users and social networks. Customer generated content will be ranked higher in search engines and push the website owner to move in the direction to capture mind share.”

Additionally, this evolution will put the consumer in the driver’s seat which will drive accountability from outside in.

Christopher Smith, VP of Digital Media Marketing and the Creative Director at MediaTrust submits an excellent piece highlighting that people, real humans will be front and center, rather than the stock photo and corporate happy talk, I couldn’t hope and agree more. Perhaps the future holds a ‘customized’ social network where people you actually know that work at the company are front and center on the website, or customers that are connected to you on your social graph:

“Jeremiah, in response to your contest I submit the following:

I actually believe in 5 years the “corporate website” as we now it will no longer exist. Gone will be the days of the static brochure site, supported by a “dynamic” sub-branded social community. There will no longer be the “self-service” document download centers, or the video case study hiding the infomercial inside.

I see the corporate website as hub of individuals that become your first point of contact, and guide you through your search for products, service or support. Consider the example of the Apple Retail Store experience and extend that to the web. You are going to the corporate site for a reason. Even casual browsers to a corporate site have a passive agenda. Virtual corporate ambassadors will assist you in your interaction with the company, blurring the lines of sales, CRM, and support, with the use of chat, video feed, guided browsing, VoIP… the list goes on.

How will this happen in 5 years? I have already begun this work for my company’s new site, and have begun working with our customer experience team from the tech side to insure that we begin building the opportunity today and defining the process in design and test.

And yes, I already have the date in my calendar, and plan on attending as much of the conference as I can. The downside of winning your contest will be that I am required to visit my mother in law if I am Portland.”

Doh! Have fun with your mother in law Chris. For additional reference, do read my post on the Irrelevant Corporate Website, and how to evolve it. Although over a year old, we’re just starting to see websites evolve.

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.

I’ve seen the social media community run from tool to technology quicker than you can say “shiny object”. I’ve seen us run from blogs > Facebook > Twitter > Pownce > Jaiku > Justin TV > Ustream > Digg > Delicious > Upcoming > Flickr > YouTube > SecondLife > Widgets > Utterz > Zooomr > Friendfeed > Plurk > and who knows what’s next.

Go to Techcrunch to see lists and lists of more products, in our industry, the barriers to entry require just a few thousand (ask Guy Kawasaki) to build and launch an application. Sadly, only some of these tools we end up adopting for the long run, in most cases, we end up wasting our time.

The key to adopting the right social media tools is to first figure out which persona you are. Next, you need to identify which persona your friends are, lastly understand how you can best observe, and learn from others.

Pioneers
Obsessed and enamored with the technology, this individual is always adopting the latest social technologies. This individual is fickle with tools, won’t establish loyalty to websites, may move when they see colonists adopt the tool.

Example: Often experimenting with products in their beta stage, this person will quickly move on to the next tool as fast as adopting the second.

Settlers
These second generation adopters look for key market or network indicators before adopting a new technology. This person is less enamored with the new technology, and more interested in the value that it provides.

Example: They may trial tools after seeing several people in their network mention or trial the tool, and may adopt after a beta or trial period is over.

Colonists
Colonists are the mainstream adopters, they are often our parents, non-techies, and the everyday people we meet. They adopt these tools due not because of an internal desire to stay cutting edge, but often because several people around them make it an attractive destination and the they see the utility to the communication. They are not late adopters.

Example:
Joins Facebook because colleagues, family, and friends are using it.

You can tell who the early adopters are on this video, pioneers sit in line, settlers come talk, but will by that week, colonists wait a few weeks/months/

So in the comments, answer the following:

1) Identify which persona you are
2) Identify two or more of your peers are the other roles.

I’ll start, read my first comment:

(Written on a plane flying out to Cambridge from SF)

Yesterday, Paul Greenberg asked on Twitter:

“Can anyone give me names of leading social media/social network analyst besides @jowyang, of course. Big or small firms or soloists okay”.

I’m not sure what he was looking for, or why I wasn’t included in his query (update he responded below in comments), but I quickly responded:

“@pgreenbe try Oliver Young (Forr), @monkchips (redmonk) @gartenberg (Jupiter) @yarmis (AMR Research). Did I just refer to my competitors?yea”.

It should have been @jyarmis I had it wrong

While I’m started, he should also check out eMarketer, Hitwise, Compete, and Gartner, you’ll find plenty of resources from those analyst firms. Need even more resources? I created a list of resources for those seeking analysts.

The natural instinct for most companies is to pull customers as close as they can, so why in the heck would I sent someone away from me? Well first of all, it was clear that he was seeking an alternative voice, so whatever I can do to help him on his quest may lead him back to me.

The thing about people is that if you send them away, when thinking about their best interests, the hope is that they’ll come back with friends, good luck Paul! For another perspective on this same discussion, see what colleague Josh Bernoff thinks about talking about your competitors.

Also, yesterday at the 10th Aniv of the Cluetrain we talked about when some customers are too costly to do deal with, and expelling them (firing your own customers) was a good idea. Apparently, Royal Caribbean cruises banned a vocal customer for life from their ships, I somehow think there are two sides of the stories, but you be the judge.

Tell me a time when you or your client sent customers away, maybe it was to help them, maybe it was to get rid of them.

When would you send away prospects or fire your own customers?

The battle between Marketers and Engineers has been going on for a while, Engineers claim that building the best product is enough to succeed, and Marketers claim that understand the external forces (competitors, customers, needs) is the solution.

Update: saw an interesting tweet from tomob: “@jowyang - the engineer’s pipe dream = product so good we don’t need sales or marketing”

We’ve seen cases of heavy engineering companies like Google, with little marketing efforts become the most well known brand online. On the other hand, companies like Coke spends a major portion of their corporate budget on Marketing, to become the top brand in the world.

Or, take Apple, which has great products (although it was debated that Sony had a superior MP3 player –but didn’t know how to market it) also does sophisticated brand and emotional branding aimed at a be different lifestyle.

To add color, andrewparadies tweets: “@jowyang I’d argue that it takes a pretty strong combination of both to succeed. Apple has great marketing, but they also make solid product”

Now add social computing, where we companies are using blogs to market their companies, or SalesForce’s Ideas or Uservoice to let customers define how engineering will focus, things start to mix up, the lines blur. In the end, marketers need engineers, and engineers need marketers, but the balance will vary.

With social media, how will your company improve it’s marketing or engineering? Or do things stay the same.

As an analyst, we undergo training then are put to the test to stand by our calls, and back it up with data, insight, experience, or facts. I found this diagram published by the create debate blog, and by using the creative commons license they have on their blog, am sharing it with you. The graphic is spurred by the essay written by Paul Graham How to Disagree, start there.

Since I tie just about everything back to internet strategy, let’s take this fictional example of one of your colleagues who has spent significant budget on advertising popups on a C rated media site in your market. You, the social media strategist at your company, is less than thrilled to see this, but you need to think about different ways to approach this

Using Graham’s Hierarchy, here’s some fictional arguments you could use to persuade your colleague with the advertising-popup plan:

Refuting the Central Point: Regarding your advertising-popup tactic, we should refocus our core strategy on using marketing channels that allow us not only tell our message, but leave prospects with a positive brand impression, and the desire to take the next step with us. (notice that I focused on the objective, without even criticizing the popups, nor the person)

Refutation: I’d like you to reconsider your advertising-popup tactic, as most users don’t like them, in fact Treester Research shows that 26% of those who see popups actually have a negative brand impression.

Counterargument: Advertising-popups are a bad idea, research indicates most users don’t like them

Contradiction: Everyone knows advertising-popups are a bad idea

Responding to Tone: It sounds like you’re frustrated and don’t know what to do

Ad Hominem: So typical of you people to do something stupid

Name-Calling: Your advertising-popup strategy sucks buttocks, ass hat

Caveat: I’m not slamming the pop-up marketing industry, this is just an example, I could have used blogs too.

I remember as a child, the school yard arguments were often at the bottom. Sadly, some bloggers and tweeters are still there. When you talk to executives, I recommend you focus on the end objectives and end results, never on the tools, which moves lower and lower on the pyramid.

So, back to you, what point on the pyramid do you insert your arguments? Be honest, and talk about how you can improve or give an example.

(for what it matters, I quickly fall down the pyramid when I’m dealing with my loved ones, I’m certainly a guilty ass hat)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Traveling Missionaries
Missionaries spread to new communities.

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

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

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

Last night, at the Blogger dinner in SF (see pics tagged ‘groundswell’), there were several discussions among the attendees from Josh, Shel, Debbie and others around their ideology and stance when it comes to the impacts of social media to companies.

Josh created a scale to help identify where peoples beliefs are, he describes it from his post as:

EXTREME PURIST

10 = The groundswell is such a powerful force, the people in it will always prevail. All companies can do is watch and listen. Their employees can participate, but only as independent people. Corporate efforts are doomed to fail.

9 =

8 =

7 = The groundswell is powerful, but companies have a role in it. Groups of people inside of enterprises can get together and make themselves heard. Even so, the groundswell will always prevail over their interests.

6 =

5 = Companies belong in the groundswell. They have interests just as the people do. They will set up corporate efforts — presences in places like Facebook or their own corporate blogs — and connect with their customers. They can’t shut down or co-opt people in the groundswell, but they can form meaningful relationships with them. And they can accomplish goals like marketing or collaborative innovation, if they respect that they’re not in charge.

4 =

3 =

2 = Corporations and other major institutions are powerful and will always be powerful. This so-called “groundswell” is similar to any other medium — people are there consuming it, and corporations can reach them within that medium. Flare-ups of negative publicity can be contained or at least “handled” so they cause minimal damage.

1 =

0 = Corporations have power because they have money. This groundswell thing is a flash in the pan and it doesn’t matter. If it gets too far out of hand we’ll buy it and make sure we control it.

EXTREME CORPORATIST

To me, the industry shifts over time: there was a lot of purist talk from 2005-2006, books, presentations and blogs came in with strong cluetrain values. Then, we started to see monetization of social media, social media optimization, and agencies, pr, and marketers getting on board.

I fall in the 5-7 range, you’ll often hear me say that companies need to let go to gain more, and that the power (trust) is in the hands of the participants, so employees should participate.

How about you? But really think it through and explain why this is your belief.

Josh has responded to some of the comments he’s already received.

I advise some of the top brands in the world about how to use social media tools to connect with customers. While many are getting it right, many will get it wrong –with great embarrassment to their brand, and personal careers.

Shel Israel write a very compelling piece on why many corporations are going to get social media wrong. The best possible use case of social media is customers talking with employees of a company in an open and transparent way. Not hiring Mr. T in a “Viral Video” to show how you think you can relate to CIOs.

I’ve told several executives that the most important –yet most difficult –conversations they can have are the following:

The 3 Impossible Conversations for Corporations

#1: Asking for Feedback
It’s so hard for companies to ask for feedback. Take a look around, how many ‘corporate’ blogs ask for raw, unfiltered product feedback. It’s scary for a few reasons: 1) Most companies want to talk about how great they are, not expose themselves to weaknesses. 2) Most companies don’t have the appetite to listen to the feedback, then do anything with it. 3) Most companies don’t know how to respond to the feedback, they don’t want to promise it will happen, nor acknowledge a weakness.

#2: Saying positive things about your competitors
Customers aren’t stupid. In fact, they know who your competition is, and they talk about amongst each other. Yet, for some reason, this is very, very difficult for companies to swallow. There’s some unwritten law that companies shouldn’t talk about their competition (unless you’re criticizing them), it’s welded deeply into nearly every corporate culture. The thing is, customers and prospects talk about your competition, and they will often be analyzing you, and them, and not everything said will be negatives. Companies that recognize that their worthy competition has some strengths have the hardest time admitting it in public –yet those that do, become more relevant, trusted, and authentic than ever before.

#3: Admitting you were wrong
Corporations should always show their happiest face to the market –at least that’s what corporate communications team tells us. Yet in reality, no company, (none, nil, zilch) are perfect. Why pretend to be the absolute best in everything that you do when the rest of the market (including those who are buying and deciding on services) know better. Companies have a hard time admitting they’re wrong, instead, choose to spin, redirect, or ignore what most are saying.

Sure these conversations are difficult to have, but they are the same conversations your customer are having with your prospects –so why the veil? Here’s a few ways to think about these challenging conversations because in reality, these aren’t that “impossible”.

It really isn’t that hard to ask for feedback, say nice things about the competition, or to admit your wrong. #1 will come even if you don’t try, that’s life. #2 Will happen at every conference, online chatroom, or social network in your industry. And hey, #3, well if you’ve ever been married, you should already be an expert at admitting you’re wrong. Being married to the most wonderful person in the world is the same as loving your customers. So learn how to say “Sorry honey, will you please forgive me?” I do, just about every day.

Some folks are more advanced than most I deal with, such as David who says this post is stating the obvious. He provides some good analysis, be sure to read him.

This was the quote I heard last night from someone I know, his impression was that the role of Marketers was: “to get people to buy stuff that they don’t need”. Partially, he is right. The reputation of marketers is often negative, where marketers are considered to be involved with trickery, deceit, and mass consumerism.

In business school, we learned that the classical definition of Marketing was to connect customers with products, yet the defintion never included tricks, lying, or manipulation. If you’ve read Seth’s book that All Marketers are Liars, you’ll quickly realize that the premise of the book suggests that marketers actually tell consumers the stories that they want to hear. I know most marketers will feel better about their profession after reading this book.

Let’s be honest with ourselves, while many may despise marketing, great products without great marketing often don’t get to customers. Ok products (or crappy ones) may get sold to consumers due to great marketing.

Here’s where social media counts, as it levels the playing field between marketers and consumers. The promise of social media is great, consumers an directly share their opinions with each other, leaving marketers in the wake.

Question: Many consumers loathe marketers, now consumers can bypass marketers with social media tools, the power has shifted to the participants, how do marketers stay relevant?

Answer: Marketers must participate, or let consumers participate on their behalf, it’s a new world.

I’ve been speaking to a few folks from Fortune 5000 companies that don’t understand the social web, this post is intended to propel them forward, I’ll be as succinct as possible.

The goals of the traditional web marketing program is to create a ‘funnel’ and throw out lures, like search campaigns or microsites to get prospects to come to the corporate website.

While luring prospects to your corporate website doesn’t ever go away, strategists need to consider that communities are organically forming on the social web. In these communities, real relationships form and grow, therefore trust is higher than the irrelevant corporate website.

A migration has occurred, so like the savvy fisherman, the marketer should fish where the fish are. The one caveat being, in this case, the fish are certainly in charge, so be sure to listen, understand, then be prepared to participate for the long term.

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)

So, you’re going to launch a social media campaign huh? You’ve got all the tools, resources, and processes together, but did you remember to set some goals?

I get to meet and talk to many companies that are adopting social media from a variety of levels of sophistication: unsure, scared, excited, embracing, overly ecstatic. One of the biggest challenges they have is forgetting to visualize what success looks like. In many cases, they are overly focused on fondling the hammer, that they forget about the overall goal.

Even if a company is doing a trial project (externally, internally, whatever) part of the expectations of the project should include a page, slide, or document that indicates what success will look like –even if they know that it may not be reached, here’s a few example to get you started:

A few examples of what success could look like for you:

We were able to learn something about customers we’ve never know before

We were able to tell our story to customers and they shared it with others

A blogging program where there are more customers talking back in comments than posts

An online community where customers are self-supporting each other and costs are reduced

We learn a lot from this experimental program, and pave the way for future projects, that could still be a success metric

We gain experience with a new way of two-way communication

We connect with a handful of customers like never before as they talk back and we listen

We learned something from customers that we didn’t know before

As you prepare your plans (you’ve got one right?) to use social media, don’t forget to include a section on “what does success look like”, and visualize and aim for you goals. Oh, and guess what, your goals can change over time, and they should.

Experimentation with these are important, these are radically different ways for companies to communicate with customers, so be sure to indicate to your management how this is experiment, and you’ll need a bit of wiggle room and latitude for the unexpected. It’s their job to empower and trust you, knowing the risks that could happen as you learn to let go to gain more.

It’s important to setup expectations for yourself, your management, and your customers (feel free to let them know why you are doing this) in order to give yourself a purpose as you embark on connecting in new ways.

Why Web Strategists should consider widgets
Expect widgets to act like a network, the span over many different containers like social networks, websites, and blogs. Since widgets are opt-in by the publisher or social network member, it’s a great way to track who’s actually interested in the content. As a result, the opportunity for more sophisticated marketing and advertising moves from carpet bombing to opt-in nearly GPS radar-like accuracy.

First, understand the distributed web strategy
Need to get up to speed on this, start with my primer on web marketing is distributed, not on two domains alone, followed up by a former CMOs perspective on the distributed web. Getting users to come to your corporate website is not the only goal, savvy fisherman fish where the fish are.

New players as widget networks emerge
I’m closely watching the widget industry with colleague Charlene Li. This time last year, there were no widgets in Facebook, and now there are over 13,000. I recognize that this is a growth market Widget ad revenue was estimated at about $20 million in 2007, or about one-thousandth of Internet advertising as a whole. According to the new comScore data for November, Slide claimed almost 144 million unique viewers, for a 16% market share, and RockYou claimed a 11.7% share, with 104 million individual viewers. In July, Slide had 130 million individual users, or a 15% share, while RockYou boasted 96 million users, or 11.1% of the total. (stats via MSNBC)

Spending low, but expect growth
According to the data (from Comscore) that 6% of internet advertising dollars were being spent on social networks, and only a fraction currently is spent on widgets. Expect that to grow in both camps. Widget networks aren’t limited to social networks alone, in many cases, they can be repurposed for mobile devices as well as standalone embeds on websites and blogs.

Measurement key as dollars shift
The article states that some of the growth is capped due to lack of measurement (a good reason why I created this list of widget measurement companies). You’ll need to measure to show success, as well as make in-flight course corrections in near real time.

Expectations in 2008
So, expect widget networks like Slide, Rockyou, Widgetbox, Watercooler, and many many others, to become like syndicated networks, offer self-serve advertising, begin to offer metrics, and offer unique co-branded, and co-sponsored marketing campaigns to brands. Two of these networks will likely be acquired by large media or internet companies in the next 11 months.

Case Study: Forbes Widgets
Here’s a case of a company letting go to the distributed web, I just ran into the Forbes site, and saw they had a full page devoted to widgets, that let it’s content, and brand spread of it’s site. Interesting that it’s sponsor, in this case Visa, goes with it.

What you should do
First, determine if your community and marketplace is using widgets, do research. If so, seek one of those widget networks, and trail an advertising campaign that will match to your right community. Don’t try to recreate a widget, leave it to the experts, and likely, your interactive firm won’t do it well, these are very specialized products. Rather than have the widget network vendor recreate a new widget, leverage an existing one by sponsorship, rebranding, or integrating with a unique marketing campaign.

Recently, I met a developer who was frustrated. This web developer had been programming and developing websites for nearly 10 years, but admitted he was having a very hard time keeping up with the younger faster developers that knew the new languages.

It’s not really about age, but about the ability to constantly learn new languages and skills in order to stay competitive in the environment. The last thing he wanted to do as a web developer is get stuck doing production work, or maintaining a system someone else had already built for him.

I suggested that he should probably look at expanding his business skills, to grow beyond being a ‘code monkey’ which would lead him beyond tech lead, into program management and eventually strategy.

What specific steps did I tell him to take?

Start reading books on web management and process management

Understand how the software fits into the greater scheme of the business, department, or company

Expand and learn more about user experience research

Grow a network by adopting social media to learn, discuss, and market oneself

Lead projects: develop needs, do research, develop plans, create feature function reports, and feasibility reports, learn cost/benefit analysis

Lead programs: manage a business program (where software is the core) and manage it like a profit and loss, become an integrated part of the business.

Practice presentation to business managers and stakeholders

Engage business teams in meetings, training, and lunch

Ultimately, he should be able to move into a more business role, where business and customer needs are always present (and hopefully, with greater compensation and opportunities). Since strategy is always needed, and armed with a strong technology background, he should be able to move into a position that requires less time to re-invent a new language every other year.

Do you have suggestions for him? What should he do to avoid the developer recycle shuffle and move up the food chain?

Yesterday, I spoke on a panel to over 100 of Cisco’s global marketing professionals with Jennifer Jones of the famed Marketing Voices podcast, and Nancy Bhagat of Intel’s integrated marketing department. Jennifer who is known for assembling the greatest social media marketers on her podcast is now doing a great job coordinating real world panels with some of those same folks. Nancy, who has increased her integrated marketing budget 40% to online (that’s amazing!) shared a fantastic case study of how Intel is embracing customers using social media, while meeting their objectives, or learning from mistakes.

“So, who owns social media?”
One member of the Cisco global audience asked a question around the concept of social media ownership. Although he didn’t ask the following questions specifically, many corporations are having a hard time answering who manages the tools, who manages the relationships, what do you do it analyst blog, press blogs, or customers blogs, and who controls the budget and headcount.

Past: Marketing as the Controller
In the past, marketing has been much of a controller; responsible for direction one-way communications through advertising and press releases, this is how it was safe. The books Cluetrain and Naked Conversations tell this story well. During this time, there was a very thick membrane around the sides of the company that prevented employees that were not in this central group to openly talk to customers and the market. That’s all going away.

Future: Marketing as the Enabler
One of the concepts that I enjoyed from Nancy was her perspective and approach, how marketing is now an enabler. That solid communication membrane is now blurred, as adoption of social media tools (Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, are really going to drive this, esp at the younger generation) and in order to do their job, many employees must interface with others using these tools. Marketing becomes a group that enables other groups in the company through leadership, education, setting up social media workshops, and letting go a great deal of control to product teams, support, sales teams, and other client groups that will start to use these tools to communicate.

Many challenges
Of course there are some real challenges: real-world (positive and negative) conversations (two-way, not one-way) will be decentralized (most off the corporate website), so marketers need to take leadership to understand the many different community discussions and respond. Now don’t get me wrong, marketers still have power, I continue to express that the power has shifted to the participants, so in addition to enabling, marketers must participate. For some marketers this will be a challenge, but by doing this, they will become more relevant.

In my research, I’ve found that successful companies have at least two new roles, the Community Manager (focuses on interactions with the community) and the Social Media Strategist, who helps to work internally to drive adoption, evangelize, and prove value. More on that as I dive into that research.

To preface this post, be very clear that the participants are the owners of the community. I write this in context of who within an organization is spearheading and leading the community business program. This post is really aimed at those in the corporations who are leading the social media program from within and have to wrestle with confused management, doubtful colleagues, and the majority who want to keep status quo.

I’ve served in web teams in both IT and on the Business side, so I find this topic interesting.

IT or Business
Yesterday I had a call with a client who was leading the social media/community charge at his IT related company. Nothing unusual for me, but in this case, he was in IT. Most of the time, when we hear of customer facing community programs or social media programs they are being lead by Marketing. In any case, I’ve got to applaud him for taking the challenge, as for customer facing community programs they usually require a business sponsor.

Business Sponsors help things go smoother
Why is a business sponsor needed for community program today? At least two reasons:

1) A business champion makes it easier: Evangelizing a community program and launching it within an enterprise requires interface with many business units. Marketing, Product Development, Product Support, Communications, PR, and other client groups are often impacted. Having a business champion (that will convince each of these groups) that will address the business objectives, mitigate risks, and define how it’s aligning with the corporate objectives are key.

2) They often control a bucket of money: Most of the time, business units have the budget issued to them from the budget committee, which will fuel the spend for development with either a vendor or with IT. This is not to suggest that IT departments don’t have budget, but when dealing with a customer program like community, the plan will need to gather requirements from the business who understands customers.

The ‘relationship ownership’ plague
Everyone wants to feel protected and safe, and in many corporations, the ‘ownership of relationships’ are present to keep things organized and also to assert some control. PR ‘owns’ the relationship with the influencers like press, media, and analysts, support ‘owns’ the relationship with customers, and sales ‘owns’ the relationship with prospects. So who ‘owns’ the relationship of a community that consists of all of the above constituents?

What really matters
In the end, it doesn’t matter who runs the social media program (IT or a Business unit) what really matters is that the program is customer centric and designed around delivering an experience that lets customers self-support each other, or communicate with the company and other members. Not to forget to mention that the most sophisticated IT departments have become business units, not ‘technology support’.

When these tools normalize, the walls drop
Looking to the future, the argument of ‘community ownership’ will be moot, just as email has normalized as a communication tool present everywhere in the enterprise, the same will be true of the social media tools. just take a look at the youngest graduating class to see how ubiquitous these tools already are.