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

Blog ExpoTV found that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I would love to do some formal research on this on the day job, the following is just highlighting a probabble definition and formula, it certainly doesn’t include any formal methodology or practiced process.

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There’s been a great deal of talk about ‘virality’ or ‘word of mouth’ but when it comes to measurement, we need something just a bit more substantial.

When I was on the vendor side at PodTech as Director of Corporate Social Media Strategy (client facing), I worked closely with Darold Masaro, VP of Sales. We frequently bantered over new ways to improve measurement as this is important improving existing programs and increasing budgets.

For many of those in the social media space, the goal is to ‘let go’ of your message and let it fly all around the web, getting folks to come to your irrelevant corporate website isn’t the goal –fish where the fish are.

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Defining Social Media Velocity: Distance over Time
But how do you measure a distributed web strategy? We looked to one of many attributes called “Velocity”. This is not a new term, in fact, Physicists define this as distance traveled per unit time. As I described to Darold what we should be measuring, he quickly pegged I was seeking the term ‘velocity’, it’s stuck with me ever sense, the credit should go to him. The same applies to the web, and here’s how:

[Velocity, when applied to Social Media, is the measurement of how fast an idea, embed, widget or other like unit spreads over web properties. Benchmarked over time, acceleration and deceleration indicate relevancy]

Distance: As units (text, audio embeds, video embeds, widgets, memes) spread from one website to another you can track the URLs where they spread to.

over

Time: Depending on how fast a unit moves, it can vary from day to week, or less effective, perhaps a month.

Example:

Week One: A widget was installed on 5,000 Facebook profiles within 7 days, resulting in a weekly velocity of 714.

Week Two: A widget was installed on 15,000 Facebook profiles within 7 days, resulting in a weekly velocity of 2142.

Also, you could look at this over time and benchmark, and then look for accelerations and decelerations, in this case, week two accelerated from week one by 300%.

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Now here’s how Darold further explains velocity:

“Velocity is the speed, direction, and size of conversations traveling the Internet around our brands. When I talk about velocity it’s from the perspective of a wave. So in that case we need to answer this question…What do markteers and sailors have in common? They should both be concerned about waves. Marketers should think in terms of conversational waves. Conversations are more effective for building brands than buzz, but this requires keeping the conversation alive.”

I asked Darold for just a definition but I see he couldn’t help but share more, I guess his days of getting an MBA just compelled him to think this through further. What’s interesting is Darold is a sailor, no not the cursing, one-eyed patch sailors with a parrot named jenkins, but pilots sailboats in Santa Cruz bay over wine and cheese.

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He extends the sailing metaphor further, here’s just a portion of his thesis:

“It’s helpful to understand the four key aspects of a wave in order to gain insight into conversations around our brands. Hey I am a sailor and I see the world as a series of nautical metaphors.

Velocity represents both speed AND direction. This is important to point out as most use the common term of velocity which is just speed. I associate speed with what I hear a lot these days … “I want my campaign to go viral.” Where viral represents speed (how quickly, by how many), but we should also look at who is consuming our messages (direction) and sustaining the momentum. So there is more to velocity than speed and direction, and is important to understand if we are to build sustainable conversations around our brands.

We need to understand amplitude which is the size of the wave (this is equivalent to buzz), and frequency. The IceRocket graph below is an example of amplitude and frequency. The size of the wave is easy to understand, but frequency is less clear. In sailing we replace the word frequency with period. That is how long (in seconds) between the crest of one wave to the next. In the world of sailing the amplitude and period of a wave is very important for understanding the sea state. In marketing we have a sea state around our brand. To often the sea is calm, choppy or pounding with large unsustainable waves that come crashing down.”

If you want to reach Darold he can be emailed at darold@podtech.net

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Click To Play

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

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

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

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

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I’m scheduled to meet with the Six Apart team in the near future, I wasn’t able to make it this week as I’m in Barcelona, I did take a look at their recent announcement, here’s my take:

Six Apart has announced they are launching a community platform for brands to use. A company already focused on openness, social graph, opensocial, and OpenID, I’ll expect that brands will have full access to their data, and users will also have control over their information.

Although the press release doesn’t say, I suspect it will be a platform that a customer can rebrand to ‘fit’ on a corporate website. I also want to know if there are ‘widgetized’ components that can embed on a static/irrelevant website. It’s my prediction that websites (corporate ones at that) will become social, with community components being a big part of the experience. Here’s primers on Social Graph and Open Social if you need to get up to speed.

Despite this being a very, very crowded market (see my master list of over 80 companies) Six Apart has three things going for them: 1) Brand recognition: companies that have already deployed a social media program have already looked or used their blogging tools. 2) Experience. With Vox, a form of a more secure social network site previously launched, the hopes are the company has worked out any bugs to extend this tool to brands. 3) Movable Type: Reading between the lines, I suspect this is an ‘upsell’ opportunity for existing MT users, which is a good move for them as they already have a strong footprint with existing customers.

Rafe at webware, who has positioned this story as a solution for forums (I see it as much more than that), suggests that the $10k price tag is steep (not sure if a one time or monthly fee, but I suspect a one time fee as this appears to be a licensed sale). As an analyst, clients are sending me proposals from vendors and I see monthly price tags for these community-in-box solutions comparable or even more per month. Big brands don’t want to deal with infrastructure problems and are willing to pay up that price tag, also Marketers may not want to deal with a confused or slow IT department. Lastly, brands have more important things to worry about, like building a strategy.

I used to be an implementor, and in 2005, I launched a corporate blogging program at a brand you know, we started with Typepad, as it was easy, aimed for corporate, and I could avoid dealing with a long, over-calculated IT department. For these same reasons, white label social networking and community platforms will experience similar adoption patterns in corporations.

Oh, and thank you Jane for writing a press release void of hyperbole, it’s refreshing, and respectful of our time.

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(Above video: this 90 second clip from the folks at MediaSnackers summarize the changing landscape)

What’s a mediasnacker? Folks who consume small bits of information, data or entertainment when, where, and how they want. If you want to be part of their lives you’ve got to respect them. I’d argue that the folks who created this video emphasized too much that mediasnackers are the youth only, because business folks of any age are busy, get information from multiple sources, and need filters.

Here’s how I respect MediaSnackers

I write Digests for my audience, saving them time.

I use MicroMedia, such as Twitter

My 10-15 min Web Strategy Video show was tight and concise, not long and wandering, see premise

I do ’street’ video shows of web personalities and they average just about 2 minutes, and I don’t let them pitch ’till the end

The reports I will write as an Analyst are designed to give decision makers the right information in the most concise medium

What I’m not good at
Keeping my blog posts tight and concise, I need to work on that more, I’m known for excessive writing, and it likely scares people off.
I also publish too frequently, which is also not respecting your time, as I get busier at work, that will naturally change.

Scoble does long videos (although Rocky often creates summary versions), and Chris Pirillo streams for hours a day, does that work? How does that work in today’s new attention economy? We have more inputs but the same number of hours a day.

Talk back, how do you respect MediaSnackers?
What are you doing well, and what do you need to improve on. I’m tagging Francine Hardaway, Chris Brogan, Shel Israel, Connie Benson, and Bill Claxton to respond.

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Great conversation with this WebEx commissioned podcast with John Battelle the founder and CEO of Federated Media. John’s a thought leader, speaker, and author, and luminary. He discusses how the marketing has shifted from broadcast (disruptive yelling) to conversational (exchanges in communities).

What you’ll learn:

Understand the changes between publishing and advertisers
Boing Boing’s rapid growth without spending a dollar on marketing
How the internet flattens the distribution curve
How are traditional marketers adopting conversational marketing?
Why packaged marketing is no longer viable
AOL as a case study
Who gets conversational marketing in the media business

Although we end up at the same ending point, my belief and practice area is on Community Marketing. Conversations are certainly part of the sphere, but I see conversations being a verb that is an output for a community. Lastly, communities can succeed without verbal or text conversations, gestures can indicate interest. In the end, we end up at the same point, just different ways of looking at the same solution.

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Adam “Tay Zonday” Bahner, a PhD candidate in American studies at the University of Minnesota, produced Chocloate Rain. Since it first appeared on YouTube in July it has spread as a ‘meme’ around the web resulting in countless remixes (try seeing related videos on any of the YouTube videos).

If you’ve not seen the Chocolate Rain music video, it’s a simplistic, repetitive theme that has deep focus on society, racism, and inequality. It was highlighted on YouTube’s Featured section:

“Of course, it doesn’t hurt to get a little help from YouTube. The site’s editors have featured several of Zonday’s recent videos on their homepage, where a video can get tens of thousands of hits in an hour. On July 26, “Chocolate Rain” was even featured by YouTube alongside several of its pretenders.”

Hollywood is adopting to the online age, as there are more talent agencies scouring YouTube to find talent. This ties back to corporate life too, I know that many companies are using the web to find passionate users and customers to hire as employees.

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As a child, I was often labeled as disruptive in the classroom, always to my parents dismay. I’m now very disruptive to corporate strategists, but I’m bringing a message that needs to be heard.

A few months ago I spoke at the Customer Reference Forum in the city of Berkeley. My presentation was loosely based around this post: The impacts of social media to customer references.

I opened my presentation with a the recollection of a conversation I had with two of the attendees over lunch. They were talking about which wing to stay at in the hotel that was hosting the conference. One cleverly learned that one side was more desirable, and she learned this from a hotel review website –not the official hotel website!

What’s a customer reference program? It’s a group within a company (often B2B tech companies have this group) that harvest the positive customer mentions and turn them into marketing or sales tool materials. The end goal? To convert prospects by using these filtered and biased customer opinions.

I suggest these great folks that run these programs need to evolve, as prospects can now find customer opinions online. Tools like Yelp, (restaurant rating) blogs (like this one you’re reading now) and the emerging Get Satisfaction (universal product support) product that could be very disruptive to the corporate website.

At the conference, I gave the suggestion that the customer reference teams were to evolve and start being more active in social media. I received push-back from the already startled crowd. (One attendee even called my message scary, but in a positive way). So who’s to manage these ‘unbiased’ and ‘organic’ customer references? Robin Hamilton of reference geeks cares a lot about customers, and would be a great start to learn more.

[Previously, there were dedicated groups that were responsible to harvest the testimonials of customers. Now with the world wide web, these voices appear organically and are easy to find. Now questions of ownership and management rumble from within the enterprise]

So who owns the customer testimonials? Well we all know that they do, but within the organization? We all agree that there’s likely folks who we don’t want talking to customers (and they probably don’t want to either) however I must suggest that everyone who’s a touch point to a customer is actually responsible for customer references. And with many, many employees being on the world wide web, this can include many folks, even those not in sales, marketing, or support.

Additional Resources

The impacts of social media on customer references programs
The support site is no longer on your extranet
Web Strategy: The Air Traffic Tower
Marketing is not on two domains alone
The many Forms of Web Marketing

Shout back: Who should “manage” or “own” the customer references in the modern corporation?

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Sniff, Ha Chooo, cough cough…

Back in Febuary, I was curious to see how people consume content, so I shared my media consumption habits, on this post, and encouraged others to share. I tagged five people, but only a few of them actually did it, and it started to spread. I’m not a black hat SEO and I certainly wasn’t trying to do anything mischievous but the meme spread.

Now, in July, there are over 113 links to that post says Technorati. Marketers and PR folks are fascinated by this and would love to replicate something like this.

What’s my secret? People want to share, people want to talk about what’s important to them, so I just figured out what I wanted to share about and let it spread. Always remember it’s got to be opt-in, so what’s in it for them? What’s going to let them want to blog about it? You’ve got to put yourself in their shoes, that’s how to be viral.

Can someone pass me a tissue?

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I was a speaker at Ad:Tech in SF earlier this year and I’m sick of hearing my Social Media colleagues (who I still respect greatly) complain about why they hate advertising: “It’s intrusive, it’s nasty, it looks horrible, it doesn’t work”

Get over it, it’s not going away
See Social Media folks are marketers at heart, they are conversationalists, communicators, and community advocates. We believe that we can be a better society by getting rid of the blasting of messages from the ivory towers. The funny thing is, on many of these folks websites, I see them have banner advertisements or ad units promoting the next conference they go to –ironic.

Much of the internet’s revenue is from Ads
As I understand it, 85% of Google’s revenue in the past has been from online advertising. Contextual Ad sense is Advertising, sure it’s not the annoying “punch a monkey” type of advertising, but it’s still advertising. I predict Google will start to do this with video in the near future, it’s certainly not going away. Read my predictions about Google and Online Video.

We hate shotguns
Advertising is a shotgun approach, and sadly that means that innocents are subjected to the chaff. Advertising messages are often (or should be) targeted at a specific group or demographic, when we’re subjected to advertising that’s not aimed at us, we often don’t like it or try to screen it out.

We love lasers
When Advertising is focused and hits the right target, not unlike a laser, it hits home and resonates. Advertising becomes part of our culture, and people start to talk about (that’s a conversation) from Budd-wise-er, to Got Milk. We hate advertising when its not for us, but in the rare times that it’s on the mark, it resonates with us, and becomes part of us. This can apply for text ads, mobile, ads, and most importantly, contextual ads.

Even though we don’t like it, advertising works
Advertising works. In business school, we were taught that 11-13 impressions of a brand (often advertising) will cause the prospect to be highly likely to try or purchase the product. This is a deep rooted human, psychological, and sociological instinct that’s difficult to ignore.

The Future
Is it possible for products to be adopted by people without word-of-mouth networks? Absolutely. Is it possible for both to co-exist? Advertising online will become more targated, the advanced media buyers will shift to sponosorships, and technology will allow us to triangulate data online, and using mobile devices like never seen before. If done right, there will be more lasers than shotguns.

Online Advertising will evolve, as will word of mouth, conversations, and communities too. Let’s evolve with it.

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Two interesting pieces out there today, Takahashi from the San Jose Mercury (link via Jennifer Jones) has a article on the “New Influencers”. He highlights what some early bloggers have done, and how being first helped them to become powerful.

He discusses how “Conversation Marketing” is key in the new marketplace:

“To influence the influencers, companies need to have two-way conversations with bloggers, whom Gillin terms “enthusiasts.” Disney courts John Frost, author of the DisneyBlog, for instance, because it knows that his posts can inspire stories on mainstream TV shows and in news publications.

Such “conversation marketing” requires a completely different set of skills than those that marketers typically use. When New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman criticized General Motors for fuel inefficient cars, GM punched back just as hard with a post on its corporate blog, Fastlane. Friedman fired back, and in the ensuing spotlight, GM got its points across to a big online audience.”

In the article, he futher suggest that being early is the only way to become powerful and infuelntial, which is not true. Guy Kawasaki was a late comer to blogging and quickly rose to the top 100.

While I’m not an A-lister, this blog is in the 2000 Technorati rank, which I started less than a year ago. Of course, I did have a previous URL domain, so reputations matter, and that’s really what’s important, not numbers.

To further the influence of word-of-mouth, eMarketer indicates that decision makers rely on first had, or in-person word of mouth above all other forms. It puts technology bloggers at a influence rate of 19%.

In the past, a few former colleagues and friends have teased me about attending so many tech events on weeknights. Well, if it’s not obvious to you, face to face meetings build so much more than any blog could.

Lastly, eMarketer reports that word of mouth only works when a company has solid offerings, without it, word will not travel effectively; “Without satisfied customers, there was nothing for WOM marketers to talk about. ”

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Arrogant A-lister? Succesful Entrepreneur? Or a generous knowledge resource?

Guy is never a short of words as he shares how he became one of the top bloggers so quickly (I’ll admit, I was one who is jealous as he skyrocketed to fame in 3 month). His content is often written as a resource, a “how to” be an evangelist or entrepreneur.

Best quote? “Who give a Shitake” about your personal journal. I was the one that told Jennifer not to throw around that “A-list” term, well she asked Guy right up front, pretty cool. Wow, Guy has a nice estate, what an incredible backyard. His goal is to be ranked in Technorati as the top 10, he’s 14 pegs away. Guy says he doesn’t read any other blogs other than his, well he only has about 40 feeds that he reads.

If you can’t see the embedded file above, access the webpage directly.

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Customer Reference Programs to transform due to Social Media
This post is intended as a resource and a start of a discussion for those that manage Corporate Customer Reference Programs, please forward this post to the right person in your company.

[Social media tools enable customers to share with prospects, creating both disruptions and opportunities for customer reference programs]

This is an important intersection that required some light in a recent Customer Reference conference. Social Media (Blogs, forums, podcasts, social networks and other tools) impact nearly every arena of the corporate organization. I’m not part of the Word of Mouth organization, nor part of the Customer Reference industry, but I am a Social Media consultant looking in.

Value of Customer Opinions
Nielsen Buzz Metrics research indicates that consumers trust other consumers above all others. Other research leans towards word of mouth. Prospects value the opinion of a customer over that of the vendor.

About Customer Reference Programs
As a result of the value of network based customer opinions, Customer Reference programs were born to the corporate enterprise.

Having managed or helped to lead four Enterprise Intranets at large corporations over my web career, I know that deliverables from a Customer Reference program is an invaluable to the Sales Cycle.

The Customer Reference Program Manager is responsible to build a library of examples of how customers have deployed their products across different industries or environments. Often, they obtain these references by providing bonus services to customers, beta testing products or other incentives. Sometimes, sales teams are required to obtain customer references before a compensation check is issued to account teams.

These important references are captured, organized, and republished (from PDF, video interview, a phone reference etc). Many corporate websites make excellent use of these references, here’s a few great examples from EMC, IBM customer videos, Microsoft, SAP Webcasts, and Hitachi Data Systems.

It’s possible to quantify the actual return from customer reference programs.

Diagram 1: Traditional flow of Customer Reference information

Social Media Tools lower boundaries for sharing
The examples above are a good indicator of the path of least resistance for a prospect to find a detailed customer reference was from the corporate vendor. It’s widely known that Customer Reference Programs often filter, adjust, and select the content for the benefit of the company.

Now with easy-to-publish web tools such as blogs, forums, rating site, and social networks, individuals can openly and honestly provide opinions, thoughts and engage in discussions. I, and others like me, do this frequently for products we use. The barriers to entry are internet access and basic tool knowledge.

Social Media empowers anyone to publish their voice and to be easily heard, for negative customer feedback this is a disruption and opportunity, for positive customer feedback, this is an opportunity.

Future generations of workers and decision makers primarily rely on their social networks to communicate, known as the tivo generation, digitally native, and myspace generation.

Diagram 2: Social Media Transforms Communication

Disruptions
Customers and talk directly to prospects bypassing a corporations, marketing and customer reference programs.

1) Customer References Content is selective
Content from customer reference programs (like other Marketing materials) gloss the company in a positive light. When a prospect is evaluating an important decision (such as a tool that could impact their career) they are expected to obtain information to make a logical business decision.

2) Customers can easily publish their customer experiences on Social Media tools.
When I was the Community Manager at Hitachi Data Systems, I experienced how customers were talking about our products, (from evaluation, installation, performance and more) and there was nothing I could do to prevent them from publishing their raw opinions. (example of our flagship product review)

3) Google makes finding opinions easy
We live in a Google world, and blogs score high in search results due to their high degree of linking. Blogs tend to have specific niche content (long tail) which indicate a high results score on search results for specific product name. (example: search results, at one time, this blog was higher in the results than the corporate website)

While an overused example, at one point, Jeremy Zawodny’s post complaining about Dell Support was displayed higher on the Google search results than the actual Dell Support page. (it’s now lower on the results page) Be sure to read the many comments of folks that offered their opinion.

Both of these examples are disruptive to how traditional customer references were captured and share, the first being a positive mention, the second being negative.

3) How Prospects can find Customer Opinions
Here’s some examples of how prospects can easily find opinions of customers using Social Media tools, please note, some of these are as old as the Internet.

Social/Network Ratings: CNET is one of the early adopters when it comes to customer ratings and reviews. Also see epinions, yelp, and other sites.

Blog Search Tools:
Tools such as Technorati, TalkDigger, Sphere, and Google Blog Search.

Sentiment Mining Tools
Robert and I had a discussion on using the terms X sucks to find out customer opinions. Also try tools like “Google Fight”, see Intel vs AMD, HDS vs EMC, Google vs Yahoo, Also see Opinmind: An early version of a sentiment mining tool

Opportunities
Fortunately, there are more opportunities to make a customer reference program strong using these tools, here’s some suggestions to get started:

1) Partner up!
In many companies, a “Community Manager” role or “Social or Digital Media Manager” is starting to appear as a result of the customers talking to each other and talking back. As a Customer Reference Manager you should align with them. If your company has yet to recognize the impact of these tools on your company and brand, see this post on Corporate Blog Evangelism.

2) Start to Monitor and Listen to what Customers are Saying
Learn how to use Technorati, Google Alerts, apply them to your company name, specific product name, executives. Teach Product teams and support to do the same. There’s a lot to learn from the Church of the Customer blog.

3) Engage and Harness Customer Feedback
Customers that praise your products from websites and blogs will make natural candidates for your customer reference database. Reach out to them, and ask them if they’d like to participate. Of course, as you tell prospect about their opinion, you’ll want to indicate that they willingly and voluntarily provided this feedback without your coaching or being incented. Give consideration to using negative customers opinions to win a customer for life.

If you reference customers with blogs, they are already public information, so the process in getting customer feedback is that much faster.

4) Reuse these references in other ways
If you’ve already established a corporate blogging program at your company, encourage your bloggers to link to the positive references of your customers, as well as learn to deal with the negative ones.

5) Best Practices as Social Media
Now that you’ve started to understand how to listen, your company will need to figure out how to respond to raw customer opinions. The worst thing to do is to listen and do nothing. (See what happened to Dell) Learn how to turn negative feedback about your company into a positive. There’s been cases where a customer having problems with a product will publicly blog about it, the company will respond and fix it and the customer will become a brand advocate and defender. This art is a bigger discussion, but I suggest starting with the book Naked Conversations.

Anti-Marketing Marketing emerges. At Microsoft, Robert Scoble (now my colleague) was hired as a technical evangelist for Microsoft products. He became a living customer reference program by linking to bloggers who said positive and negative things about Microsoft. By leveraging both the good and bad feedback from real customers he became a trusted source to find customer and market opinions about Microsoft.

6) Customer Reference Programs to use Social Media
There’s some fantastic tools available at your disposal now. You’re not limited to only creating PDFs on your website. With little resources you could create use social media tools to harvest the voice of the customer, and share with prospects, here’s a few ideas:

A) Organize internally
Create an internal blog at your company that references all the instances of customers talking about your products in public forums, blogs, podcasts, social sites etc. I recommend attending a conference by the Blog Business Summit, New Comm Forum, or Word of Mouth Association.

B) Publicly recognize opinions
Create this an external blog and link to all customer references on blogs, forums or in podcasts in your industry. To build the most audience trust, both negative and positive. If you work at a company with a passion community, it’s likely some customers may have already done this. You’ll be able to save yourself some time by referencing public blog posts (perhaps from your own blog) which could reduce the time to getting customer permission. In some cases, public recognition is incentive for these natural references. Here’s an interesting outcome of a small customer getting the CEO of Sun Microsystems to listen and respond.

See what people say negatively about PodTech, and how we responded. Also learn about this panel I spoke on, the theme was “Negative is the new Positive”

C) Capture and encourage those voices
That lets real customers provide their best practice information, real feedback, and rants and raves about your products. Consider involving your practice groups. For many companies this is a safe approach as you can control which passion customers will be selected to attend this session. Here’s some interesting ways to generate buzz for your program, both internally and externally.

D) Video shares human stories
Customer References shouldn’t be limited to PDF or Audio. Video is a great way to convey the human emotion and display a deeper connection.

The Future
Customer Reference Programs will expand in scope or overlap with other corporate programs:

1) Expanded Scope
There will be an overlap between the Customer Reference Program and Community/Social media programs at many corporations over the next year.

2) Listening Toolset
Customer Reference Programs will use Social Media tools to find customer opinions.

3) Authenticity
Effective Customer Reference programs will integrate negative comments and opinions into it’s program for great trust and authenticity with the market.

4) Conversational Toolset to Publish
Customer Reference Programs will use Social Media tools to help tell the stories. Some companies will benefit from the interactive benefits of these tools.

[Customer reference programs that integrate unfiltered opinions of customers and use social media tools will increase trust and accelerate the word of mouth network]

Diagram 3: Future Customer Reference Information Flow

About
This post stemmed from a discussion with a PodTech client (see right nav for list of clients) whom I serve as a Social Media consultant. I frequently use this blog as a resource for our customers as well as be a resource to the network. I would be interested in sharing additional information at a Customer Reference conference, you can learn more about me on my profile.

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Chris Kenton suggests that iPhone is all hyped up. His Treo can do everything the iPhone can:

“But what does the iPhone bring to mobile phones? Everything the iPhone does, I can already do on my Treo. Sure, the UI looks streamlined and the package is pure Apple sex, but the mobile phone industry isn’t exactly lacking in revolutionary spark–a hot new design from Motorola, Samsung or Nokia comes out, what, every Tuesday? The iPhone won’t even be available until June.”

In the BlogHaus we streamed in the Steve Jobs keynote (yes we’re not just about CES as some folks are complaining) and some compared Apple to a cult with a slick Telemarketing sales guy.

On the other hand, Scoble said he wants one, and Teresa too.

Update: The buzz from this not yet released product hit Digg. People are bidding for a product that does not yet exist. $1550 and up, it appears eBay has removed this faux auction.

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BMW launches a tease flash campaign, a video that morphs and show some very vague products.  Details to be released mid January.  Stylish and engaging, this is attracting the attention.

There is a surge of speculation from the Digg community ranging from pure advertising hype, partnership with Apple’s iPhone, to an aftermarket GPS MP3 player.  Bimmerforums has a thread going, keep an eye out there, forums are a great place to find a passion community.  Either way the BMW advertisers and marketers are drooling over the hype

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Steve Rubel, respected PR Blogger and Social Media expert shares on video Edelman’s new product, Storycrafter.

Steve says it breaks it down and makes it ’social’. Sorry, but no tool can ‘make’ it social. There’s other news using this exact Storycrafter tool, See the Storycraft on Storycraft, it simply collects all the metadata around the event and centralizes it.

Maybe I’m too dense, but I don’t get the whole organized social media press release.

Why are we formalizing the word of mouth network into these clean nice buckets? Isn’t the point of conversations to have them flow nice and easily? Is this a way for Marketers to infiltrate “Social Media” communities from a few clicks and graphics? Where’s the relatinoship building? Where’s the humanity? (insert dramatic pose)

This is not a new stance of mine, just a few weeks ago, I even said I didn’t understand the social media press release either.

I can’t tell for certain, but I suspect Edelman’s version and Social Media Club’s version are different although Chris Heuer welcomes Storycrafter.

I consider all of the people mentioned above as respected friends and peers, I simply am a bit slow on this route, sorry.

Questions for the community:
1) What need is this meeting? What pain is this solving? what is broken?
2) Why we need organized social media press releases?
3) Is the current Word of Mouth Network broken?
4) Why can’t Marketers join the conversation like the rest of us?

(Steve, Oh man, great office by the way of Times Square, at PodTech we’re a humble startup with a decent man made waterfall and some great trees to gaze at…)

Update: A few hours later Steve Rubel Responds to me…see how fast the WOM network is?

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Social Networking (I’m talking about real life) is very important to the teen, young adult, adult, and often professional. By nature we’re social creatures that want to connect and obtain a sense of belongingness. I’m one of ‘em too.

Steve Wilhelm (who’s fascinated by this site Captology) sent me this interesting YouTube clip of an upcoming service called Fake Your Space (Video) that let’s MySpace users that want to look cool (build credibility) by buying fake friends that will leave public messages on one’s MySpace blog. Online life mimics real life, so kids with many contacts will appear cooler than those that don’t.

Hey you, Mr Professional, don’t laugh!

• I know MANY instances of LinkedIn users that try to add every single email address they have to look like their networked, connected, and have a deep rolodex.
• I know of companies that hire Analyst firms to write about them, they want to get in those top right quadrants to look good.
• I know bloggers and social media types that want to get into every picture with every ‘who’s who’ party to be seen with the cool kids, I may do it once in a while too. Hollywood marriages are no different.

All of the above examples, from MySpace to Linkedin. All of the above examples are testament that social networking is a powerful human activity that is mimicked online and offline.

Credibility by association, an old age Marketing tactic.

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Just last week I wrote why I use Pandora.  I often listen to Pandora at home and at work, and it has significantly reduced the amount of money spent on music media down 90%.  Yes, Pandora and Last FM and other internet radio stations are disruptive to companies like Tower Records (who recently went bankrupt).  The Web continues to change the world.

This websites called Pandora Stations has some ‘preset’ stations that let you have a jump start rather than creating your own.

Pandora will be offering ’social’ features that let the community share amongst themselves tonight.  Likely it will pair up users with similar interests for recommendations, that’s been done in Amazon for years and most recently with Stumbleupon.  Thanks Michael Arrington for the story.

Great news to hear when websites develop a Community Strategy to improve their service.

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This report from Yahoo was sent to me from Steve Wilhelm entitled Influential Consumers Can Be Reached Through Search, Social Media and Communication Tools.

It indicates that there is a unique role appearing on the web that influences others. Coincendtly, they are using Social Media tools to influence others.

Who are these advocates?

“Of the 2,297 respondents surveyed for the study, a particular group stood apart attitudinally and behaviorally, considered to be “Brand Advocates.” Brand Advocates are adventurous opinion leaders and social influencers who are slightly younger, more educated and affluent, and spend more time online than non-advocates. They represent approximately 36 percent of the online purchasers surveyed…”

The report also indcates that these influential advocates talk about brands online and they use Social Media tools to transmit their opinions

“…instant messaging, chat, community, photo sites and blogging, Brand Advocates are able to influence their vast online social circle.“

I can’t agree more, as just a few minutes ago I just advocated Pandora. Robert Scoble keeps on driving home the point that the word of mouth network is very efficient. He’s right, as news about events in Paris at Les Blogs exploded online and impacted folks here in California within minutes.

Warning: This article sure shows that these influencers could potentially have a positive impact on one’s brand, but the report fails to mention the horrible and negative impacts that influencers can have. For example do a search on “Dell Support” and for many months, this was the third displayed result, even above the official Dell site. Or check out this IGN editor who decides to give Hitachi (my former employer) a message.

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