Member-to-Member

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.
Joiner
Spectator
Critic
Inactive
Collector
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.

I Facebooked Myself

I did it. I set up a Facebook profile for myself.

What possessed me to do this? I was reading Charlene Li's Groundswell Blog about Facebook's potential valuation at $6-10 Billion (up from $1 B last year). This seemed kind of mindboggling to me - as was the calculation that this valuation meant that (at 42 million registered users/members) each Facebook member is worth as much as $138-142 in ad revenue.

This says a lot about the potential for social media sites & applications to keep the advertising model strong as these sites prove themselves both stickier (people staying on the sites longer) and more targeted (able to deliver more individually appropriate ads to viewers who have logged in). Online advertising revenue continues to show healthy growth although the rapid changes in users' behaviors as these new Web 2.0 technologies come online are keeping the ad companies on their toes.

My Facebook experience also demonstrated the power of these social technologies to both engage people with technology and to connect with offline friends through online channels. I initially signed up just to check it out, but w/in a few minutes, I had invited several friends - professional and personal - and they had accepted and - darn it if I wasn't facebooking! I started playing with the applications and found one for promoting causes which I thought was nice. And then I added a few more.

So what's my takeaway from my little Facebook experience?

Let's Talk!

This market is moving so fast that no one could possibly have a corner on all the interesting information and insights. I want to make the Member-to-Member exploration of social media an interactive affair. I encourage trackbacks to my posts, and I will be happy to link to your site or post if you have something interesting I can note in my blog.

Please feel free to comment on any post or email me to engage in dialog, provide information or critique or suggest ways we can help each other expand our networks and engage more fully in the human community.

Why Am I Writing This Blog?

After 20+ years in the business of technology, social media has piqued my interest over its predecessor techno fads and revolutions, because I am making the bold prediction that - more than any other technology wave before it - social media technology ties us each, member-to-member, more tightly into the human community by strengthening our relationships with our existing networks and helping us reach beyond them at the same time. The starting points are our existing, largely off-line, communities - companies, associations and networks of friends and colleagues - and there is no ending point.

Wow. Wouldn't it be cool if people were really that connected? Yes. It would be very cool because when people come together, amazing things happen!

Why should you read this blog? You should read Member-to-Member if you want to understand how and why social media will:

• make organizations more effective in engaging their members to help accomplish their goals (whether membership is formal or informal and goals are commercial or not);
• empower members of organizations to contribute more of themselves to furthering their organizations' goals;
• put people in member-to-member contact, working together to make the world a better place (though beware, their definition of 'better' and yours may differ).

Scope - How broadly will we cast our net? Broadly. I expect all the following kinds of "membership" to be addressed at some point.

People:

• Employees & Workforce - formally tied to an organization by some kind of paycheck.
• Association Members - formally tied to their trade and professional organizations through dues and participation.
• Community Members - informally and formally tied to groups of all kinds through volunterism, activism, shared need, shared goal and shared desire (yes, this is broad but it's intended to cover everyone from the cancer survivor to the political activitst).
• Customers - informally tied to brands, products and each other through shared enthusiasm or dissapointment.

Technologies & applications thereof:

• Blogs, Blog Communities & Blog Directories (e.g., MySpace, Technorati etc.)
• Wikis
• Intereactive Directories (e.g., Linked In, Facebook etc.)
• Meetups, Mashups, Twitters and other interesting social media phenomenon
• Email, List serves and other innovative uses of old staples
• Collaboration software and services

Will we cover membership marketing, Web 2.0 and CRM (both kinds) and other industry buzz words we're all used to seeing? Sure, probably. But here in my blog (as opposed to my consulting practice) I am less interested in the industrial categories and dynamics of dominating them as I am in why they are successful in capturing users, converts and critics. Here I will give myself the luxury of trying to get underneath the dynamics of why this stuff works and what it means for us as managers of organizations and participants in the human community. 

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A note about me: I am a strategic communicator by trade (i.e., marketer, talker, listener) and a technology dabbler by interest and profession as well. Personally, I find the ability to use technology to enhance personal relationships fascinating and sometimes I'll just write about it from a personal point of view. Professionally, I believe that the best marketing happens through interaction that feels personal, even when it's not. I am not an expert's expert, but I do have good experience that gives me interesting insights into interesting things, as do you. I hope you'll come explore this brave new world with me by tracking this blog and commenting so that we can learn together .

After 20+ years in the business of technology, social media has piqued my interest over its predecessor techno fads and revolutions, because I am making the bold prediction that - more than any other technology wave before it - social media technology ties us each, member-to-member, more tightly into the human community by strengthening our relationships with our existing networks and helping us reach beyond them at the same time. The starting points are our existing, largely off-line, communities - companies, associations and networks of friends and colleagues - and there is no ending point.

Wow. Wouldn't it be cool if people were really that connected? Yes. It would be very cool because when people come together, amazing things happen!

Why should you read this blog? You should read Member-to-Member if you want to understand how and why social media will:

• make organizations more effective in engaging their members to help accomplish their goals (whether membership is formal or informal and goals are commercial or not);
• empower members of organizations to contribute more of themselves to furthering their organizations' goals;
• put people in member-to-member contact, working together to make the world a better place (though beware, their definition of 'better' and yours may differ).