Walter Adamson

| 09.11.08 | My weekly ramble in social spaces and places

Where I've been this week in the social web's places and spaces:

• Keen to get a quick update on Social Media Tools sign up for the Social Media Tools Week, starting November 16.
• Very level-headed article worth reading "the customer is the customer" and not necessarily always right.
• TeemingPod allows you to - share PPTs and collaborate around it - get user comments on each slide - tag slides with relevant keywords - recommend useful slides - through a "pod" or widget on your website.
• Linkedin Discussion: great case study from Australia "Zero to 40,000 fans. How Mudo built the largest and most engaged branded Facebook page in Australia" pdf.
• Cosmetics for a $1 - through a series of social media pushes and at home parties, cosmetic company e.l.f.'s business has exploded over the last few years.
• Mozy (online backup) won a social media award for their Twitter support and customer interaction - best business use of Twitter.
• Huffington Post - Andrew Cherwenka - The Problem With Social Media Agencies good comments.
• In a blog post, Twitter says it has started an experiment that will "show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful".

http://xeesm.com/walter

Qwest has their social media launch lived up to the hype?

In a recent article Forbes talks with Pieter Poll, chief technology officer at Qwest Communications, about the future of social networking technologies in the enterprise.

Besides being interested in his comment that "voice is now an application" the article didn't give too much insight into social media. "We still are at the tip of the iceberg, if you will, in terms of what the potential for social networking will be for businesses."

He stated what we often find when talking to large companies about social media especially if the technology people are involved - "When a business starts to think about social networking, they, first of all, are concerned about control and security types of issues".

As Poll says, it's when companies move on to ask "how do I use social networking with respect to my customer base that's out there?" that things become interesting and potentially valuable.

One thing we've done that's very interesting is we've started to interact with a lot of our end users, our ultimate customers, using technologies like Twitter to give our customers different ways of basically interacting with Qwest, said Poll.

That's kind of old news, and it's about there where the Forbes interview stops. That raises the question, how much progress has Qwest made, and how about the controversy around their "social media portal"?

TalkToQwest was launched with quite a bit of fanfare, the Qwest leaders behind it being Margaret Fogarty and Michael Crowley, of Qwest, supported by James Clark, of Boulder-based Room 214.

The accompanying site is certainly dull - "it sounds like a bunch of 'old guys in suits' trying to be cool" as one commentator said - or is it "simply support the authenticity of those [social media] efforts" as a Qwest spokesman said?

On face value it looks like the critique of Qwest's "social media site" made by WideFoc.us's Eric Elkins in April 2009 has largely turned out to be true although no doubt Qwest's Twitter experience and management is constantly improving.

See this report on 1 October:

The early success of this program is contributing to Qwest’s slow-but-sure rise in customer satisfaction surveys, where it has long hovered near the bottom rung. However, the program now faces a new challenge — how can they scale-up a program that relies so heavily on relatively scarce senior employees with above-average expertise and dedication?

It's beyond Twitter where it is hard to find results. MediaRoom supplied a more social media enabled platform to support Qwest's media relations. In the press release MediaRoom state that Qwest were very social media aware and have "aggressive social media initiatives".

Anyone with experience of what else is happening with Qwest?

| 09.10.25 | My weekly ramble in social spaces and places

Where I've been this week in the social web's places and spaces:

• Linkedin Discussion Is The Enterprise Ready For Social Media? - think strategy, culture, capability.
• Social network sites are “rapidly evolving into serious business tools", says the Trucking Industry.
• Gartner - Why your Twitter and Social CRM efforts will fail - eye-grabbing headline but really says if you don't care much about your customers now then social media won't help you.
• Don't get all hung up on your own brand's transparency; you're not that interesting.
• Facebook updated Groups and the new features are creating a wall of controversy with software intern Knot Pipatsrisawat coping a lot of flak, which was probably the least of his expectations.
• Businesses that don't monitor social media could find themselves out of business within a month.
• This is useful - Facebook News Feed vs Live Feed Changes Explained by Mari Smith.
• eConsultancy does quality work including Social media: the best and worst of 2009.
• And another from Henry Elliss guest blogger at eConsultancy, Social Media - Don't put your most junior person on it.
• Did you know that four out of five Twitter conversations are about a brand or product?

http://xeesm.com/walter

Facebook @-referencing - status-tagging - much more than @ twitter

Clara Shih is the Facebook guru - she really understands the Facebook ecosystem and its power for business.

On September 11 Facebook added active tagging to posts, which are activated by the @ character:

When you are writing a status update and want to add a friend's name to something you are posting, just include the "@" symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. You can also tag friends from applications as well.

While @ reminds everyone of Twitter, the first and most obvious way Facebook tagging is not like Twitter is that the "@" symbol is not displayed in the published status update or post after you've added your tags.

I'm calling it "active tagging" as this encapsulates the most significant differences to Twitter. Firstly, on a basic level even the active search which results in the drop-down selection while typing in the @+tag is very different to Twitter as it brings up a whole range of difference classes of objects e.g. groups, events people. And as Clara Shih says:

It is their decision to bring @-referencing not just to people (been there, done that with Twitter) but also to these social objects that makes this announcement so exciting and game-changing.

Secondly friends you tag in your status updates will receive a notification and a Wall post linking them to your post. They also will have the option to remove tags of themselves from your posts.

Facebook's idea is that tagging your status updates and others' posts from the comment area will enable you to share in a more meaningful and engaging way, and connect with even more people.

I'm sure that's true as this form of active connection provides a platform to enable greater participation from each contribution.

Clara Shih particularly makes the point that Facebook will be able to add to its explicit semantic web of connections of friends, with an implicit web arising from tagging posts and conversations.

Previously objects such as photos could reference people, but now people can also reference objects from their posts. Given the rich data which Facebook has about us, and our collections of interests and objects, this makes for a powerful many to many social graph, with huge yet unknown potential for Facebook as a platform and a social semantic web.

- read Shih's Facebook Notes post to see her ideas of the possibilities.

Keep in mind, as you read of new features or announcements from Facebook, how they might tie together with status-tagging to develop new social capital opportunities.

Twitter captures emotion of sports grand final AFL

When I tracked the twitter-stream of the AFL Grand Final in Melbourne yesterday I was surprised how much it captured and even added to the feelings of the game. 

If you were outside the ground and listening to the standard commentary the the twitter-stream added much more character and emotion.  You can see - I captured the stream, plus some twitpics and put it on YouTube.

Actually, the emotion and value of Twitter at this type of event surprised me, and the way it joined people internationally isn't available in other mediums. The instant scores also beat all the other mediums.

If you want to relive the game through tweets take a look:

AFL Grand Final 2009 Twitter Stream

To make the video I used TwitterTime on the iPhone and captured screen shots, then uploaded into Picasa to edit and make the video, then uploaded to YouTube and added the sound track.

Here's a photo album on Flickr for those who don't know the game.

A Follower isn't a Duckling

When I watched @thebrandbuilder Olivier Blanchard's vid Everyone on Twitter is a community manager it really opened my eyes to the meaning of follower.

Olivier has reframed the perception of followers, and also what a great concept that "everyone is a community manager" - that in itself causes reflection on the current mental models we have of ourselves and others in social media.

Anyway you can watch the vid and get the whole story.

My version, is that the word "follower" is a misnomer, and are not "things to collect", nor your ducklings following blindly on instinct. In fact followers have made some choice and usually it is not about looking for a cult leader either.

Other than those using an automatic follower-generator tool the folk who choose to follow you are actively creating their own Twitter experience, based on what matters to them.

So what a Follower truly is, is a patron and a potential advisor/and or promoter.

In this sense followers are very important social assets.

Viewing them in this way helps frame thinking about social media strategies, and how to treat these connections in the right way and how to communicate with them in the right language and with the right respect.

If you follow the Network Contribution Participation (NCP) model of social media analysis this new viewpoint adds to the network analysis phase of your thinking.

In summary, think of everyone as a community manager, and followers as patrons.

Thanks @thebrandbuilder.

McKinsey scores in social media - revolution in interaction

I was vaguely tracking the Future of Influence #foi09 conference and thinking about influence in the social media, and interactions, when from Linkedin I received notice that a new News Discussion had been posted by Mike Dubrall (a fellow Certified Social Media Consultant from the Social Media Academy). In the Channels of the Future Group, Mike had posted reference to this McKinsey study - A Revolution in Interaction.

The link took me into the Strategic Thinking section of the McKinsey Quarterly online edition, to the article, but it was only available to Premium Members.

Upgrade to Premium Membership to read this article

So I thought OK I will appeal in the social media, not for a pirate copy but for an opinion or summary or connection with someone who had read the article.

Here's the result:

You can see that I twittered at 8:50am Sydney time, McKinsey McKQuarterly responded at 10:50 exactly 2 hours later, and I paid them the courtesy of an RT "thank you" at 11:32am.

I now did indeed have a guest pass to the article, and it is very insightful. More to come on that when I condense and align my views with other things happening in "interaction", "influence", and "social media".

Thanks McKinsey, you obviously have a well-oiled monitoring and response system. While many companies have an outbound "broadcast" twitter presence, few that I have tested actually listen and respond. 

There's a saying: if you are present in the social media then people expect that you are listening!

Why social media strategy unaffected by Facebook exodus

The New York Times ran a piece headed boldly FACEBOOK EXODUS. Oh my, chicken little is running around and the sky is falling in on Facebook and by association social media. After all isn't Facebook the most successful social media property in the world - and people are stampeding to leave!

Leif Harmsen, once a Facebook user, now crusades against it. Having dismissed his mother’s snap judgment of the site (“Facebook is the devil”), Harmsen now passionately agrees

Julie Klam, a writer and prolific and eloquent Facebook updater, said in her own e-mail message, "I have noticed the exodus, and I kind of feel like it’s kids getting tired of a new toy." Klam, who still posts updates to Facebook but now prefers Twitter for professional networking, added, “Facebook is good for finding people, but by now the novelty of that has worn off, and everyone’s been found.” As of a few months ago, she told me, Facebook "felt dead."

OK, so we count up the "quitters" in the article, after all Virginia Heffernan, the journalist, "asked around" and she came up with 5 quitters, one of whom "disappeared without a word" (from Facebook we presume).

I didn't read the cascade of comments, 85 as I wrote this, but the point is that the rise or demise, the ebb and flow of Facebook members is irrelevant if you have in place a proper social media strategy.

By proper I mean that you at least know in which social web places and spaces your customers / brands / products / services / competitors are being discussion, and in which they are participating.

Now surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly) most social media activities by most companies are not business-like planned strategies - they are campaigns, and focused on where they think things "might take off" like Facebook. If you have that approach to social media then you should be worried about any decline of Facebook.

But for those who have a proper business-like strategic approach, and the monitoring, assessing, and continuous improvement of their strategy, the demise of any particular tool is neither here nor there, even it is Facebook, or Twitter for that matter.

Social media brown cows win real work

Here's a nice little post about how the brown cows of social media make hay - as opposed to the super stars and purple cows (thanks to @lukegrange).

Searching for a wire service, Mary Ellen Miller gave up on her first choice of a major provider and drifted into the helpful advice of a twitter follower, and made a buying decision.

It nicely illustrates one of the core opening discussions when we from the Social Media Academy meet corporate managers who say that their companies aren't ready for the social media.  I ask if it is important to them to be in the same places and spaces as their customers when those customers are making buying decisions.

They usually say yes, unless they are being super stubborn and can sense what is coming!

So if I said "your customers are in the social media now, in places and spaces in the social media, making buying decisions" would that mean that you should also be there?

Yes they say, but they then most often follow with the killer qualifier - but our customers aren't in the social media - Twitter and all that stuff.

So now we get to negotiation - if I can show you that your customers are there, then will you take social media and social media education seriously?

So starts the journey towards their education, and towards a proper social media assessment.

And the little stories, like Mary Ellen's buying decision, help amplify the importance.

Bad idea - how not to use Twitter

On SmartCompany Paul Wallbank said, in an article called "The real value of Twitter", that:

The beauty of Dell's $US3 million in revenues from Twitter sales is that the Twitter account has cost them nothing but the time of one of their marketing people.

Twitter isn't going to replace Facebook or Google any more than it's going to replace direct mail or the local classifieds. It's simply a different channel to get your message across.

With which I found myself disagreeing.

I replied as follows:

Actually I don't agree with most of this post and in particular the various conclusions.

1. Marketers approaching Twitter "as simply a different channel to get your message across" are going to do a disservice if not great damage to their brands and reputation. The #1 message for marketers should be that social media such as Twitter are not just another push channel.

2. To imply that Dell used Twitter this way, and it was the cause of their "success" is just completely wrong and conveys the wrong ideas to those wishing to learn from Dell.  

Dell took a very well thought out approach to engaging with their customers through social media. Their goal with Twitter and other social media sites is to gain share of mind and branding with influencers - not to push a message through a "channel". They set about creating conversations with consumers that were important from a branding perspective. That starts out by listening - not by pushing out marketing messages.

3. The notion that it "cost them nothing" is also misleading as unless you think though the consequences of beginning such engagement, say through Twitter, then it can cost you a lot more than you are prepared to give. How will you engage? What will be to dialog topics?  How will you manage and respond to people who respond? Which parts of the organisation will need to be aligned with this initiative and how will that be socialised and supported? Dell thought this through, and then tacked it on at marginal cost to an already well-oiled machine. This well-oiled machine does not exists in most organisations.

Engaging with social media is changing the whole marketing and sales world, and it can be tried in incremental steps and improved and refined as we learn. But like most things a short sharp plan and realistic expectations are the key to its business success.

Do you agree or disagree?