MarCom

Giovanni and whurley have a new site, called MarCom, a place to aggregate news and information about the marketing world. Good writeup in TechCrunch (with a few comments complaining about the site, which appears to be built on Drupal). Since I like Drupal, I think the site itself is fine, and it’s a pretty rich resource for people who want to think and talk about contemporary marketing, which is very broken and changing fast.

Social media, identity, and civility

In today’s Austin American-Statesman, Michael Barnes says “second generation social media” - referring to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. - “encourage civility, congeniality and respect.”

Increasingly, I’m encountering just that sort of social chemistry at openings, parties and clubs. And this brand of socialilzing often begins with announcements such as “Hey, I follow your tweets!” or “Oh yeah, I know you from Facebook! How did that heart surgery go.”

Yes, indeed - the line between social media and socializing face-to-face seems blurred - because it doesn’t really have to exist. Increasingly people are building positive and productive networks of relationship online that reflect and enhance their offline social networks, and that’s really not new, but it’s new for many people, and we’re getting away from some issues that Barnes addresses, with some inaccuracy, in today’s column:

First-generation social media - e-mail, discussion boards, chat rooms - often spread social poison. The main reasons are obvious: anonymity and pseudonymity. One could “flame” with impunity as long as nobody knew who you really were. Combine that with an inability to ascertain precise emotional tones in digital exchanges, and one could be forgiven for avoiding all chat rooms and keeping e-mail conversations short and to the point.

I say this is inaccurate for a couple of reasons. First of all, the online anonymity/pseudonymity Barnes refers to here was not necessarily the rule. For example, the WELL, a seminal online community that has existed since 1985, has always verified the identity of community members and insisted that they make their real names available (though they also have pseudonyms by which they’re commonly known within the community).

Second, pseudonymous presences can establish clear and persistent identities even where identity isn’t published, and completely civil communities can exist where “real identities” are masked. It is better to require some kind of identity verification, if only clear association with a verifiable email address, to establish at least the possibility of accountability and reference, but you don’t necessarily have to share that with other users. Some have found the ability to create and play with alternative identities in online social spaces very powerful and helpful.

In systems like the WELL, where identity is verified and shared, you still see massive flame wars, just as you see, in physical networks and communities, minor and major arguments and wars. And while I acknowledge that it’s easier to “‘flame’ with impunity” in a context where no one connects your online identity with the identity you and most people think is real - the one you use “in real life” - anonymous flames have little weight. They’re no big deal. Those of us who’ve been online for years have learned to ignore them, just as we ignore traffic noise, smog, billboards (an early version of spam) and other forms of pollution.

All that said, it is interesting to see the effect of mainstreaming on social media, and the concurrent commitment to work out best social practices so that online experiences are most fruitful and productive, and minimally stressful and bothersome. We all have an interest in promoting civility and sane communication. It’s insightful for Barnes to note that this is being reflected in all of our communications and gatherings, online and off. Maybe this Internet thing will lead to a better world, after all?

Viral ain’t necessarily marketing

Seth Godin defines viral marketing… not everything viral is marketing. Common sense? Many folks don’t get it.

Something being viral is not, in an of itself, viral marketing. Who cares that 32,000,000 people saw your stupid video? It didn’t market you or your business in a tangible, useful way.

Marketers are obsessed with free media, and, as is often the case, we blow it in our rush to get our share. We create content that is hampered or selfish or boring. Or we create something completely viral that doesn’t do any marketing at all.

To be successful at marketing online, you have to lose all your traditional marketing baggage, that’s one thing. Then you have to make sure you didn’t also lose the mission. I just looked it up, Webster’s has a succinct definition of marketing: to expose for sale in a market.

Viral marketing, Godin says, “is getting a bad name, largely from clueless marketing agencies and clueless marketers.”

Here’s what they do: they get a lame product, or a semi-lame product, and they don’t have enough time or money to run a nationwide ad campaign. So, instead, they slap some goofy viral thing on top of it and wait for it to spread. And if it doesn’t spread, they create a faux controversy or engage a PR firm or some bloggers and then it still doesn’t work.

(Thanks to the Person who tweeted the Godin piece.)

The Evolution of the Web

My latest post at Worldchanging is about the future of the web.

All business is moving to the web - not just sales and marketing, but all business processes. Many businesses will drop expensive internal IT in favor of cloud solutions, and they’ll focus more on cultivating internal value networks or knowledge networks. They’ll start thinking more about how to assess the value of intangibles - knowledge transactions - and how to leverage and demonstrate that value. They’ll use social technologies to find efficiencies and control costs, not just for sales. Those of us who do web consulting will be challenged to produce strategy and results for the whole business, not just sales and marketing.

Social media for breakfast

Peter Kim, who describes himself as a traditional marketing professional, gave an interesting talk at this morning’s Social Media Breakfast. He says at his site that he’s working on an enterprise social technology company, along with Kate Niederhoffer, who was also at the SMB, and my pal Doug Rushkoff, who’s “not from around here.” I’m mulling this over: he says he’s a traditional marketer but he’s helping build a social tech company, so there might be a contradiction here, especially given his talk, wherein he questioned whether social media really works for marketing. Actually, he led by questioning whether negative social media experiences (like fake blogs) had any impact on companies like Wal-Mart and Comcast… it’s not like their stock went south based on blogosphere or videosphere bad buzz. I pointed out, though, that the companies had done far worse without taking a huge hit. It’s a complicated world, and social media makes it even more so.

Another question Kim was asking was whether companies could scale their use of social media so that it could make a difference for them in a positive way, as part of their marketing efforts. Why are companies still spending three million on superbowl ads if social media can be effective? As always happens with new forms of media, at least early on the new doesn’t replace the old, it’s just another way of communicating. I think most of us who’ve been at this for quite a while suspect we’re seeing a revolution, the new converged media will be truly transformative, more and more so over time. I suspect Peter Kim sees that more clearly than he let on.

The talk got me thinking. Social media is complex, it’s niche, it’s political, it involves all sorts of personalities and personal quirks; user generated content requires monitoring or moderation or some kind of oversight, so there’s very real and possibly expensive social overhead. Some companies are jumping in and others are interested, but a social web strategy requires a lot of thought, and perception from new angles, flexing new brain muscles you didn’t know you had as you think your way into it. And you can’t own it in the same way you could own a top-down marketing campaign. In a sense, it owns you, and requires that you be authentic…

My friend Mike Chapman said at one point that “there are no rules. When you try to put rules around it, you break it.”

Tech Crunching the grassroots in Austin

Friday I tweeted advice to the TechCrunchies after their ill-advised attempt at a “grassroots” panel:

1) 20 people is not a panel, it’s a mob.
2) There are women in this industry, too. (They only had one on the panel, and she was there because Lori Hawkins raised the issue in the Statesman.)
3) Make sure your panelists know not to mention that their companies bought their slot on the panel.
4) A bunch of CEOs and marketing guys do not a grassroots panel make. That mislabeling of the event was just silly.

There were also distracting ads flashing behind the panel, but worst of all was that the audience – at least everyone I spoke to who showed up – found the talk boring. I wasn’t bored, though… I was truly interested in hearing the perspective of people who are relatively new to the web and have only ever known it as a business platform. The conversation, and the afterparty, were very much like late 90s web events, but the conversations suggest a business environment that’s grown far more complex.

A few of my notes:

Is word of mouth marketing (WOMMA) the same as “grassroots”? (Later someone came up with a definition of grassroots as “grown from teh soils of the people’s hard necessity.”)

Greg Lee of the Lance Armstrong Foundation notes today’s high rate of web adoption and says that “passion drives revenue.” Focus on passion and awareness first, and the dollars follow. Advocacy is stronger than satisfaction in driving decisions about brands.

Kip McLanahan of OnNetworks said “this is a conversat4ion about consumer control. The consumer is in control now more than ever.”

Matt Corey of Golfsmith says they’ll still keep bad user-contributed product reviews on the site as long as there’s no profanity. I’m thinking there shouldn’t be a question whether you’d keep those reviews, if you wanted to have authentic customer conversation.

In the music industry, each band is a grassroots marketing machine. They’re selling concert events, which is where the money’s made these days - presumably recorded music in digital format is so easily ripped and traded that it’s become, not the product in itself, but advertising for the product delivered live, and demand is increasing for live performance.

Andrew Busey: a grassroots campaign has a prerequisite, which he referred to as the seed, using Obama as an example.

Acknowledgement that things that suck also spread virally.

Brett Hurt: brands can listen in ways that they coudln’t listen before, and they have to respond in ways that they haven’t responded before. LL Bean says the product knowledge lifecycle has decreased from thee months to three days. (Reference to knowledge about how consumers are responding to a product.)

How do VCs evaluate a product’s possibility to become viral?

In marketing, we’re having to change messaging from interrupt to something that drives engagement, and creates a dialog.

The need for efficiency of customer acquisition varies.

Here’s one that David Armistead and I found relevant, because it’s about what we do: Businesses are not geared up for listening, and they’re not prepared to be facilitators of dialog. They need help. Customers are clearly up for dialog, and marketers are getting there.

Greg Lee asks about the call to action: when is the right time to ask for engagement?

Another note relevant to SWS: How many companies are ready, when the firestorm occurs, to change the core of the company. What’s the firestorm? It might be a situation where the values of the company clearly don’t match customers’ (or stakeholders’) expectations.

Matt Corey: core values are supposed to stand the test of time. (Well, yes, but paradigms are shifting hard.)

Principles to take away. Are people, realizing that the balance of power has shifted, playing offense, or defense? Brett Hurt: the best brands have always played offense. Social media is a reflection of the physicality that has always been there. Now we have tools to speak for them and tools to listen for you.

Ambient Awareness and Social Evolution

Twitter, Facebook, and other evolving social systems feed into our “ambient awareness,” which is, according to Clive Thompson in the New York Times Magazine, “very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does - body language, sighs, stray comments - out of the corner of your eye.” Thompson’s written a clueful article about computer-mediated sociality and its impact on self- and other-perception. Read his article, and you’ll “get” Twitter and, beyond that, begin to understand that the social web is transforming communications in a way that oddly restores the kinds of social relationships that existed before we had to “would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor - a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties.” Now we have a way to sustain social ties, almost aggressively, and we have another adjustment to make - to a world where privacy is limited and our actions online form a persistent and somewhat inescapable sense of who we are. Thompson concludes on a positive note - we begin to know ourselves better:

It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another - quite different - result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site - “What are you doing?” - can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.

More on Twitter here:

Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang posts how he uses Twitter (my list would be similar, how about yours?).

Owyang (on Twitter, naturally) points to a Business Week article by Shel Israel, “Getting Intimate (with Customers) on Twitter,” which talks about Ricardo Guerrero’s success using Twitter for Dell.

Lacy’s Gnomedex conversation and the state of social media

Interesting account of Sarah Lacy’s presentation at Gnomedex - not really a conversation at all, but a conversation with the audience about blogging. I wouldn’t have assigned much credibility to Lacy after her smarmy public interaction with Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW Interactive, but her approach with the Gnomedex crowd about “the growing blogosphere angst” evidently worked to engage the audience and produce a kind of creative tension - wish I’d been there.

From the account linked above, oddly appearing in CNet’s Gaming and Culture blog:

Her theme was that because of that co-opting, blogging as a medium has become less and less distinguishable from technology journalism, as bloggers and traditional reporters alike find themselves too worried about pumping out content to focus on meeting people and finding good stories.

My perspective is that the blogosphere has become an intensely competitive space for some, especially those who hope to make real money with their blogs. Blogs are truly “social media” with a low entry barrier. Anyone can play. There are so many articulate people with stories to share, and so many of them are blogging away. Because there are so many compelling sources of content, rather than the relatively smaller number of periodicals and newspapers (and television and radio channels) we had in the old media world, mindshare is fragmented, it’s hard to build a sustained audience. There’s a huge strain if you’re trying to monetize attention in this environment.

There’s also confusion about “blogging” as a medium: “while the architecture of blogging is fairly standard, what people do with it can be quite different: Some may write a small personal blog and TechCrunch may be a large media company, but both use similar tools and are therefore lumped together to the detriment of the terminology.” “Blog” is a format, not a kind of content, and not a kind of operation. We probably need new a new terminology (or a retooling of old terminology) to speak clearly about the new world of media. And we should get away from old-media models of thinking - that seems obvious, yet it’s not happening, partly because the PR world has within the last couple of years embraced social media, and the initial embrace is smothering.

In this conversation that Lacy structured, Robert Scoble - who’s been very successful, partly because he picked up a large audience as Microsoft’s blogger but mainly because he’s a good guy, smart, and articulate - “said that working with an ever-increasing number of unprofessional PR people has turned him off.” The operative word there, I think, is unprofessional. I’m not sure what Robert was thinking (because the post I’ve linked doesn’t expand on it), but it’s important to think about the impact of social media scale and character, the fact that professionals and “amateurs” are all stewing in the same juices, and the line between them - as well as the line between the publisher and the audience, is a razor-thin blur. This is clearly true in content production, but it’s also the case in PR. True PR professionals, like journalists, sit on a foundation of study and professional standard that informs their work. We see more and more folks who lack that foundation but are more or less serious players, because they’ve managed to get and leverage attention on the social web. I suspect those are the people Scoble’s talking about. I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing, but it’s the world we’re in and we have to make sense of it. How we do that will shape the future of social media, which feels like a frontier at the moment.

Best practices for online customer communities

Dion Hinchcliffe has taken traditional online community best practices as a foundation, and created a list of a dozen best practices for customer online communities. Will online communities help your business?

Numerous studies over the years have underscored the benefits of customer communities, ranging from the 2001 McKinsey-Jupiter Media Metrix showing that “customers of web community features generate two-thirds of sales despite accounting for only one-third of a site’s visitors” to the brand new Deloitte study recently highlighted by the Wall Street Journal that showed that over a quarter of community initiatives increased sales even while most business-sponsored customer communities struggled to achieve critical mass in terms of users.

Hinchcliffe goes on to say that “it’s clear from a number of sources that business are beginning to get community religion en masse,” pointing to Deloitte’s Tribalization of Business customer community study.

(Thanks to Charles Knickerbocker for sending a link to Hinchcliffe’s clueful article.)

“Why most online communities fail”

Just before I spoke at SEM for SMB last week, Bijoy Goswami sent me a link to a Wall Street Journal piece, “Why Most Online Communities Fail.” I referred to it in my presentation because it reinforced points I was making (I was presenting on the subject of online business communities).

Businesses launching online communities repeat a series of blunders. First, they have a tendency to get seduced by bells and whistles and blow their online-community budget on technology. Moran suggests that businesses spend resources identifying and reaching out to potential community members instead of investing in software that makes predictions, or even social-networking technology.

Moran also recommends that businesses put someone who has experience running an online community in charge of the project. This doesn’t sound particularly earth-shattering, but consider that about 30% of the businesses Deloitte studied have only one part-time worker in charge of their communities. Most other businesses put a single marketing pro in charge of their sites.

The article goes on to question community metrics: “Businesses say that their primary objectives are generating word-of-mouth marketing and increasing customer loyalty. Yet the metric that businesses use most often to measure success is the number of visits to the site.” The lack of clarity about metrics reflects inattention to strategy. Many companies have an idea why they want community, but they haven’t taken time for detailed discussion. It’s more “add this and see if it works” without sufficient investment of time, money and energy to ensure that community does, in fact, make sense and “work” to achieve well-considered goals. Prototyping is not a bad idea, but adding community as an experiment is pointless if there’s no commitment to the experiment’s success.

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