Member-to-Member

Who Says You Must Blog to Protect Your Good Name? A Case Study

In recent weeks, I've noticed a new theme amongst the social media digerati that goes something like "how do we get the rest of the world to understand the promise of social media? How do we get all those laggard companies blogging and tweeting with us?" I've always cautioned my clients not to jump too far ahead of their customers and stakeholders in adopting any technology, and though I do believe that all companies should factor social media into their outreach and marketing strategies, it is far from appropriate for every company in every situation to use social media as a primary tool. Here's an example of where caution is warranted: the situation facing CACI in their response to allegations that their employees were involved in the Abu Ghraib torture scandals in 2004.

Last week I attended an Executive Biz book signing for the book Our Good Name which documents CACI's response to what Chairman of CACI's Board, Jack London, insists are false accusations against the defense contractor. The book is voluminous and detailed and London's defense at the event was impassioned.Shashi Bellamkonda from Network Solutions was there also and blogged about it. Check out his video from the event (note: I took the picture of him with Dr. London).

Explaining the situation in 2004 when the story first broke, Dr. London portrayed the company as on the defense against a media juggernaut that forced them into a public relations response strategy he characterizes in the book as "Whack-a-Mole". Four years after the fact, despite the book and the company's PR defense strategy to prove its innocence, legal and media allegations persist.

At the book signing several of us asked Dr. London about the company's decision in '04-'05 to pursue a traditional PR strategy of defending the company, specifically their decision not to blog about it or confront bloggers in public fora, opting for private communications which attempted to set the record straight. Dr. London's response was insightful. In essence he said that the company chose not to engage in public (including social media) dialog because it did not want to legitimize bloggers and journalists who it perceived were jumping on the attention-getting bandwagon of a hot story based on incorrect information.

(Un)usability: The Social Web's Dirty Little Secret

I promised myself I wouldn't rant, but I will admit to being frustrated. I finally have to admit that "this social networking stuff" is not so easy to use.

While I try to design and build the functionality for my own social network site, B2B Expert's Forum, I find myself explaining almost daily the advantages of blogging and SNing to my friends and associates. And as I explain it to them I'm forced to confront the fact that lost between nonstandard functionality and the sheer newness of concepts like 'tweets' and 'trackbacks' lies the still unrealized promise of the social web. I'm not the only one, even Charlene and Josh have noticed it.

Why do I call these ancient (in web years) concepts new? Because in my general social media evangelism, client work and social network building I am committed to finding ways to bring the rest of the population into productive uses of this technology, uses that facilitate their day jobs instead of eating up their sleep time. In my very unscientific analysis, this means the 83% of the "mostly mature" population with whom the social web has yet to entrench itself. And to these people, who I think of as the "Unsocialized Web," tweets, trackbacks, friends lists, tags, RSS readers and ganks really are new.

In calling out the Unsocialized Web population I'm referring to the 35+ year olds who currently run the majority of our society. Though unscientific, my identification of this market segment is based on both personal experience in my real world business and social circles cross referenced with a liberal interpretation of Groundswell Technographics Profile data. According to Groundswell, only 17% of the 35-44 year old U.S. population are considered Creators. In the social web context - especially if applied to their productive work life - I would argue that becoming a Creator indicates an individual's true adoption of the social web (I accept that this argument is open for debate and am happy to elaborate if people are interested). Even fewer individuals in the 45+ age bracket fall into the Creator adoption category. At best, then, this age bracket of my 35+ year old peers* has just begun to move out of the 15% Innovator and Early Adopter population, which is the percentage of people who need to have adopted a new technology in order for that technology to start to ramp up to general adoption levels (i.e., Early Majority).

In other words, when us old folks buy into it, the social web goes mainstream.

Organizational Identity in the Age of Social Media

I’m very late in picking up a conversational thread with Ben Martin that I dropped in Feb(!) about how organizations can and should participate in the social web. I need to set the record straight if nothing else that Ben and I are in strong agreement on the problem – if not the solution.  

In short, Ben and I agree that, as he says so eloquently, organizations are becoming "conversationally impotent in today's marketplace" to the extent that they don't let their employees and customers champion them in personal and individual ways from within the social web (and in the real world as well). Where Ben and I may not be in agreement is that I do not think the solution is to send these employees and customers forth unprepared, unmonitored and unchecked to shape the public image of the organization according to their own personality because there are very real downsides to the organization in doing this, and because some of the potential upside may be missed as well.

This fundamental dilemma - how to enable an organization's broader audience to carry forth its identity while still maintaining some level of control over the dialog and "company line" is the essential challenge for strategic marketers in the days, months and years ahead; and how we handle it will render us either essential or irrelevant to our organizations' success in the marketplace. Personally, I plan to be on the side of "essential."

It's the Community...

I have a good friend who I give marketing assistance on a pro bono basis. I've convinced her to blog, set up the blog for her and turned over the keys and she's blogging, but we still get into discussions about "why do people do this social media thing?" Recently, she helped me rediscover an obvious truth as we discussed why some social media is just not worth participating in.

"It's the community, Stupid." (My words, not hers.)

As I prepare to set up the B2B Expert's Forum, it's something I need to pay attention to all over again.

Yes, I'm still here....

I've been scarce on the subject of social media lately, but I have a good excuse! I'm launching a new business commercializing my work as an adjunct professor of Marketing at George Mason University's School of Management, Technology Management Program. My partner, Marybeth Fraser, and I have launched B2B Marketing Excellence - a professional development resource for career marketers in the B2B and B2G space. We're offering training courses (first one on Corporate Brand Strategy, May 8, 2008 in Arlington, VA), a B2B marketing blog, and a social networking community called B2B Expert's Forum. If you're a B2B or B2G marketer, come join us!

Bottom line is that I'm going to be running my own social network for professional marketers soon, so I should have lots of insight into the ins and outs of setting it up. I'll probably blog on the "behind the scenes" stuff here for those who like to hear how sausage is made. I'm just getting my toes wet on the technology we've chosen (a .NET nuke module) and can already see many challenges and custom development in my future.

Wish me luck, and send any of your B2B/B2G marketing friends our way too.

And just for fun, I took this unofficial quiz to plot myself on the Forrester/Groundswell Social Technographic segmentation scale. I think it pegged me - unofficially, of course. I do quibble with one conclusion it draws about my personality, which is that I'm a good target for social media marketers. I'm so busy "creating" I don't have time to read/view/absorb nearly as much as I'd like to - which includes ads and marketing aimed at me. Oh well, can't have everything.

Discover Your Groundswell Social Technographics Profile Your Result: Creator   With all the blogging and video making you do, I'm surprised you had time to take this quiz.  Whether podcasting or maintaining a website, the amount of content you create makes your Groundswell Social Technographic group a valuable target for social media marketers.  As a creator, you join an elite 18% of the US online population. Now turn off the computer, your family misses you.
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Discover Your Groundswell Social Technographics Profile See All Our Quizzes

I do encourage anyone interested in the Intellectual Property issues associated with social media to read Josh Bernoff's post and to follow this discussion about this quiz.

Web 2.0 Goes Mainstream

Looks like the "new is old" yet again. How do we know the rush is over? Social media's demograhics are starting to look more like the regular web (did you know almost 40% of social network users on Facebook, MySpace and Friendster are between 35 and 54 according to Comscore?) and investment is predicted to slow (after stunning growth last year, it should be pointed out.)

Frankly, I think this is great news because it means that we'll get down to really figuring out how to integrate this wonderful new technology into our economy more fully, explore real revenue models and probe the essence of why it's valuable to people. This 'big shift' in influence from top-down to around-and-around that we all talk about, fear and welcome will begin to become real on a broader scale as well. Already I hear more "buzz" about Web 2.0 in the product development meetings than just the marcom meetings, and that tells me companies are looking more seriously at social media as revenue generating instead of simply a froth machine.

All that said, I still like a little froth on my cappuccino. With social media's ability to give voice to the 'common wacko' and to the independent expert alike, I doubt seriously we're in for a bare-topped cup.

Influencers - Dynamics Thereof & Whether We're Learning Anything New

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for once again highlighting research being done into the dynamics of influencers in his blog post today. There is this debate out there in the blogsphere about who really counts - the highly connected influencer or the regular guy or gal who knows a bunch of people and talks to them on a regular basis? New research, by Duncan Watts and now CNET, is challenging the "traditional view" that a few highly connected influencers hold the key to market opinion. The research seems to show that there's more to it than that.

Hello? Duh.

Social Media Press Release - Why stop there?

I wrote at the end of January about the Social Media Press Release (SMPR) and how it provided a vehicle to exert some amount of "control" over a fundamentally uncontrollable business asset - our marketing messages - in the highly transparent Web 2.0 world. Since then I've been thinking about the SMPR and trying to connect it to some other dots in my mind about the role of social media commentators, including "A-List bloggers," a debate about which was spun up on Guy Kawasaki's blog a while back. In the end, I've come to the conclusion that the SMPR's potential goes far beyond the press release, or even public relations. Some dialog from Geoff Livingston on The Buzz Bin has begun to confirm my thinking. The bottom line is that I think Social Media Group (SMG) and others out there developing these social media communications formats have really stumbled into a new kind of promotional web site. Jeff Falls calls it the Social Media Resource (SMR), and I think he's on the right track, though I prefer "Source" to "Resource."

A Social Media Source Site (SMSS) would be different from an SMPR in that it would be designed to go beyond mostly one-way multimedia presentation and engage the A-List commentators directly with The Subject. An SMSS would become The Source Site - on behalf of The Subject (i.e., a brand, a product or an abstract concept like an advocacy agenda or campaign) for official information and relevant unofficial dialog. Because it contains both the official story and the most relevant unofficial dialog, it has the potential to become the (implied, single) "Source," instead of a (implied, one of many) "Resource," on behalf of the Subject.

As the Source for everything about The Subject, an SMSS should do extremely well in watching and interacting with A-List commentators as well showing up high in Google rankings, guaranteeing ongoing exposure with the people most interested in what The Subject is all about. A boon to Word of Mouth in Social Media (or, WOMiSoM), an SMSS could be the next generation web site, particularly well suited to big ideas and campaigns.

So read on for thoughts on how the SMPR could become the SMSS and why I think it's important to engage A-Listers in a similar way we do journalists.

Web 2.0 - So 2004?

I wanted to respond to John Redmond's post and comment on last week's post about my use of the term "Web 2.0" and "how 2004" that is. He's right of course, that the term that sounded so hip four years ago is now four years old - decrepit in Internet years. Plus, it has been a questionable phrase since inception as it refers more to a trend in perception than an actual thing (as the name itself would imply.)

All that being said, is it my imagination or are we just resigned to use "Web 2.0" now because it's:

• more broadly understood by the non-digerati (also an outdated term) to mean "all that social media and new technology stuff I don't get but know I should be able to talk about;" and

• a simple shorthand word+number combo, which is easier to write/say than actually trying to describe what is fundamentally a sea change in technology architecture, human interaction and cultural power share?

Maybe I'm lazy, but I'm not a good enough writer to weave all that actual and implied meaning into every sentence that references that new fangled technology and sea change. As a result, "Web 2.0" works for me until someone invents some other shorthand term.

Thanks, John, for the comment. Gave me a chance to think about it and decide that if I'm ever going to lead a revolution, it won't be to overthrow the term "Web 2.0."

Social Media Press Release - "Controlling" the Message in a Web 2.0 World

I hear it all the time when the subject of social media marketing comes up with executives, particularly in the B2B (business-to-business) space, "but how do we control what people say about us?" The answer is, "You don't, but you can influence what they say if you're smart and play by the same rules your audience is playing by." Of course, i usually don't have a nice pithy comeback when queried on just what "rules" I'm referring to - Web 2.0 being hardly about rules at all - but now I have an actual example I can point to to explain what I mean!

A new tool called the Social Media Press Release demonstrates a sophisticated way to shape what others say about you without controlling anything. I suppose some would argue it's not that new (first introduced in 2006 by Shift Communications and now updated by Social Media Group's Digital Snippets), and perhaps not all that revolutionary (being primarily a web page not unlike PR Web's press release format) but the concept of the SMPR provides insight into how marketing in the era of social media and networking is evolving.