Advertising vs. Word of web

     Fairfax Cone, one of the great men of advertising, said his craft was nothing more than "what you do when you can’t go see somebody." This simple distinction draws a perfect line between TV and the Web. TV is the best medium ever created for advertising. The Web is the best medium ever created for sales. The Web, like the telephone, is a way you can go see somebody, a way to talk with them, show your wares, answer their questions, offer referrals, and make it easy for them to buy whatever they want. Why get someone to look at an ad on the Web when, with exactly the same amount of wrist power, you can get them into your electronic storefront itself?

     Sure, you can advertise on the Web, and many Internet companies say advertising is how they are going to make their money. And the sum of advertising on the Web keeps going up. Why not? Just liquidate a few percent of those moon-high stock valuations and buy a few billion dollars more Web advertising. Forrester Research reports that "despite cries that online ads don’t work, spending for Internet advertising will continue to grow at a furious pace." They say spending will explode from $2.8 billion in 1999 to $33 billion in 2004.

     But Web advertising is already an inside joke. Most of the banner ads you see at the tops of pages are trades and sponsorships, not paid advertising. And everybody knows that having your page turn up in the top ten results when someone goes hunting at a major search site is far more effective than buying ads on Web sites. (This, predictably, has sparked the buying of ads on search sites.)

     There’s no denying that a saturation ad campaign that puts your company’s name in tens of millions of banner ads will buy you some name recognition. But that recognition counts for little against the tidal wave of word-of-Web. Look at how this already works in today’s Web conversation. You want to buy a new camera. You go to the sites of the three camera makers you’re considering. You hastily click through the brochureware the vendors paid thousands to have designed, and you finally find a page that actually gives straightforward factual information. Now you go to a Usenet discussion group, or you find an e-mail list on the topic. You read what real customers have to say. You see what questions are being asked and you’re impressed with how well other buyers -- strangers from around the world -- have answered them. You learn that the model you’re interested in doesn’t really work as well in low light as the manufacturer’s page says. You make a decision. A year later, some stranger in a discussion group asks how reliable the model you bought is. You answer. You tell the truth.

     Compare that to the feeble sputtering of an ad. "SuperDooper Glue -- Holds Anything!" says your ad. "Unless you flick it sideways -- as I found out with the handle of my favorite cup," says a little voice in the market. "BigDisk Hard Drives -- Lifetime Guarantee!" says the ad. "As long as you can prove you oiled it three times a week," says another little voice in the market. What these little voices used to say to a single friend is now accessible to the world. No number of ads will undo the words of the market. How long does it take until the market conversation punctures the exaggerations made in an ad? An hour? A day? The speed of word of mouth is now limited only by how fast people can type. Word of Web will trump word of hype, every time.

     Ads may still have hypnotic, subliminal effects, like those tunes we can’t get out of our heads (a legacy of the old advertising industry adage "if you have nothing to say, sing it"), but we now have the world’s largest support group encouraging us to take that first step: we acknowledge that there is a power greater than ourselves, and it’s not some freaking banner ad or a cola company whacking our head with a jingle. It’s the conversation that is the Web.

     Source: The Cluetrain Manifesto: The end of business as usual (Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger) e-book

Is social media simply today’s hot thing?

     Think you can sit the social networking craze out? Consider the following statistics.

• According to the online competitive intelligence service Compete.com, social media growth continues to skyrocket.
• The top three social networks—Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn—collectively received more than 2.5 billion visits in the month of September 2009 alone. Twitter grew by more than 600% in 2009, while Facebook grew by 210% and LinkedIn by 85%.
• As of this writing, Google and Yahoo are the only websites that receive more daily traffic than Facebook. Current trends suggest that may not last much longer.
• In fact, if Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s fourth largest.
• The most recent count of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 133 million. The same report also revealed that, on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period.
• It’s been reported that YouTube is likely to serve more than 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during 2009.
• The online photo sharing site Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.
• The online bookmarking service Delicious has more than 5 million users and more than 150 million unique bookmarked URLs.

     So, you see, perhaps this social media thing is going to catch on after all.

     Source: Let’s talk, Social Media for small busniess, version two (John Jantsch) e-book

Keeping a community alive and growing it

     I saved the hardest part for last. In that old Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams, the tagline/hook of the movie was a ghostly voice in the cornfields saying, "If you build it, they will come." Nothing is farther from the truth.

     People's attention spans are frayed to their very edges. Work stresses are equally ramped up. The "shiny new thing" quotient on the web is at its highest right now. So the odds of making a full, fat, rich robust community that swells into the hundreds of thousands overnight is fairly slim. For every "overnight" success like Club Penguin for kids or Facebook for everyone else, there are tons of digital ghost towns out there. I'm not about to say that I know what the secret ingredient is, because if I did, I'd make my own network, and get Microsoft and Google to bid me up to the billions and retire to Newfoundland.

     Here, instead, are some thoughts.

• Communities that have "something to do" do better. Want an example? Amazon. You can go there and review books, write comments, build wikis, and do a million other things around products you love. Another? Flickr. Go there and look at other people's photos, join groups, tag and comment and make notes. Facebook? You could get lost in all the time wasting applications, or get deeply involved in all the groups there. Make sure there's something to do.
• Go outside the borders often. New communities grow by gently encouraging new immigrants. For example, if you're active on Twitter, you can occasionally point to posts on your new community. Not always. That gets boring quick. You can comment on other blogs that are similar to your group's intent, and where you populate your URL (in most blogs, you enter your name, email, and URL). Folks click on the URL of comments that seem interesting. (Don't spam!)
• Encourage more than you stifle. You want to see a community turn on their keepers? When sites go astray of their community-minded goals, bad things happen. Look at what happened when social news site Digg changed their algorithm a bit. It wasn't pretty. So be wary of how you interact with the community.
• Make it worth it for the community. If you're going to build a place for people to collaborate and share ideas and build content, be on the lookout for ways to give something to your community for their efforts.
• Administrators are not community managers. Community managers exist out there who know all the great ways to engage people. Connie Bensen, Jake McKee, Jeremiah Owyang, and a host of other great people are community types to their very bones. They know how to energize a community. Seek out a community manager to run the environment, and make it their primary role. This is worth TONS in the long run.

    Source: Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points (Chris Brogan) e-book

How to qualify leads for your sales team

     Are the sales people in your organization not following up on the leads you are providing? This is a common challenge for many marketers. But it’s important to recognize that customer acquisition is a process shaped by both marketing and sales.

     A number of reasons can contribute to sales not taking the leads you are producing seriously. In this section we discuss how you can approach this multifaceted challenge.

Improve Lead Quality

     “It was the quality of the leads that closed deals that I paid attention to,” says David about his experience as a sales person. As many sales people share this sentiment, marketing needs to develop a solid lead scoring system that highlights the quality of the leads.

     Here are a couple of ways in which you can accomplish this:

• Ask Qualifying Questions: The forms on your landing pages are there for a reason. Don’t just collect contact information. Use this opportunity to gather some insights about your leads. For instance, on HubSpot’s forms we try to identify the biggest challenge our leads have.
• Design a Mix of Ofers: Sometimes sales might point out your general offers as the root problem for poor lead quality. Maybe you focus on mainstream pop culture icons rather than industry terminology? Or perhaps your ebooks are too broad and not product-specific enough? Well, that is why you have secondary calls-to-action, such as “Request a Free Quote” or “Sign Up for a Free Trial.” Try to maintain a balanced mix of offers that can help you both expand your top of the funnel and deliver a strong middle of the funnel.

Develop a Scientific Approach

     Even if you have one lead that closes, David says, “use that as your poster child of success.” Talk to sales people about it. “Understand deeply why this one closed and the other ones didn’t,” he adds. That will help you develop a more scientific approach to capturing good leads.

     Source: The ultimate how to marketing guide (HubSpot and David Meerman Scott) e-book

Entering the conversation

     The chapters on PR, ads, marcom, pricing, positioning -- hell, all of them -- in The Marketing-as Usual Manual of Strategy and Tactics need to be redone. It’s not because the war has shifted from the air to the ground, or because now we’re fighting guerrillas instead of massed troops. No, marketing-as-usual thinks it’s fighting a war when in fact the "enemy" is having a party: "Hey, dude, put on this Hawaiian shirt, grab some chips and dip, and join in. But first you gotta loosen your grip on that assault weapon."

     Here’s some advice on entering the conversation: Loosen up. Lighten up. And shut up for a while. Listen for a change. Marketing-as-usual used to be able to insert its messages into the mind of the masses with one swing of its mighty axe. Now messages get exploded within minutes. "Spin" gets noticed and scorned. Parodies spread ad campaigns faster than any multimillion-dollar advertising blitz. In short: the Internet routes around a-holes.

So, enter the conversation and do it right.

     Source: The Cluetrain Manifesto: The end of business as usual (Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger) e-book

How to get more blog comments

     One of the best reasons to blog is to open up an interaction channel with your customers, prospects, and contacts. The fact that your readers can comment and add relevant content to your site via blog comments is a major breakthrough in the communication process. It’s why everyone is talking about social media these days. Blog commenting was one of the first mass, one-to-one conversation starters, and made people hungry for even more advanced forms of social interaction.

     Active commenting is one of the first signs that a blog has some real life—with it comes more readers, so put in the work it takes to grow this important tool.

     Small business owners can easily take advantage of this tool now that so many people know what it is and know how to interact, but…you can do a few things to stimulate this interaction and draw more conversation.

• Ask for comments. Sometimes just creating a post and inviting your readers to add comments can be just what you need to get them flowing. Commenting is a habit that you need to help build in your readership.
• Ask questions and seek opinions. From time to time, ask your readers what they think of something or what they have done that works or how they have addressed a particularly challenging situation. You don’t need to have all the answers.
• Comment on comments. When readers comment, you can encourage additional conversation by responding and showing that comments are welcome, even if the comment calls something you said into question. I’m guilty of ignoring this far too often. I’ll get better, I swear!
• Show some humanness. No matter what your blog topic is, readers like to know that the author is a human being. It’s OK to let that show and to add personal thoughts. Only you can determine how far to go with this, but I know that your readers will connect the more they know your story
• Stir the pot from time to time. You don’t have to be a celebrity gossip blogger to stir up a little controversy. Often some of my best interactions come from topics that people are decidedly passionate about. 
• Make comment participation a game. Keep score and reward your most active commentators. I have installed the WP Top Commentators plug-in that keeps track of how many comments a particular reader makes and rewards them with a link. You can see it in the left sidebar.
• Make sure commenting is easy. Publish your comment feed and consider adding a Subscribe to Comments plug-in so that people get a notice when someone else comments on a post they are active on.

     Source: Let’s talk, Social Media for small busniess, version two (John Jantsch) e-book

5 tips for getting more from social media marketing

     I think it’s helpful to finish the overview section of this guide with a few tips on using social media strategically. But don’t worry, we’ll get to the tactics as well.

• Integrate: Don’t treat your social media activity as something separate from your other marketing initiatives. Feature links to your social media profiles in your email signature, on your business cards, in your ads, and as a standard block of copy in your weekly HTML email newsletter. In addition, make sure that links to your educational content are featured prominently in your social media profiles and that Facebook fan page visitors and blog subscribers are offered the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter and attend your online and offline events. Make your social media profiles a part of your address copy block and you will soon see adding them to all that you do as an automatic action.
• Amplify: Use your social media activity to create awareness for and amplify your content housed in other places. This can go for teasing some aspect of your latest blog post on Twitter or in your Facebook status, creating full-blown events on Eventful or Meetup, or pointing to mentions of your firm in the media. If you publish a biweekly newsletter, in addition to sending it to your subscribers, archive it online and Tweet about it too. You can also add social features to your newsletter to make it very easy for others to retweet (tweetmeme button) and share on social bookmark sites such as Delicious and digg. I would also add that filtering other people’s great content and pointing this out to your followers, fans, and subscribers fits into this category, as it builds your overall reputation for good content sharing and helps to buffer the notion that you are simply broadcasting your announcements. Quality over quantity always wins in social media marketing.
• Repurpose: Taking content that appears in one form and twisting it in ways that make it more available in another, or to another audience, is one of the secrets to success in the hyper info-driven marketing world in which we find ourselves. When you hold an event to present information, you can promote the event in various social media networks and then capture that event and post the audio to your podcast, slides to SlideShare, and transcript (I use CastingWords for this) as a free report for download. You can string five blog posts together and make them available as a workshop handout or a bonus for your LinkedIn group. Never look at any content as a single use, single medium, single act.
• Generate leads: So many people want to generate leads in the wide world of social media, but can’t seem to understand how or have met with downright hostile reactions when trying. Effectively generating leads from social media marketing is really no different than effectively generating leads anywhere—it’s just that the care you must take to do it right is amplified by the “no selling allowed” culture. No one likes to be sold to in any environment—the trick is to let them buy—and this is even more important in social media marketing. So what this means is that your activity, much of what I’ve mentioned above, needs to focus on creating awareness of your valuable, education-based content, housed on your main hub site. You can gain permission to market to your social media network and contacts when you can build a level of trust through content sharing and engagement. It’s really the ultimate two-step advertising, only perhaps now it’s threestep— meet and engage in social media, lead to content elsewhere, content elsewhere presents the opportunity to buy. To generate leads through social media marketing, you need to view your activity on social sites like an effective headline for an ad—the purpose of the headline is not to sell, but to engage and build, know, like, and trust. It’s the ultimate permission-based play when done correctly. One glaring exception to this softer approach for some folks is Twitter search. I believe you can use Twitter search to locate people in your area who are asking for solutions and complaining about problems you can solve and reach out to them directly with a bit of a solution pitch. People who are talking publicly about needing something are offering a form of permission and can be approached as more of a warmed lead. The same can also be said for LinkedIn Answers. If someone asks if “anyone knows a good WordPress designer,” I think you can move to convincing them that you are indeed a great WordPress designer.
• Learn: One of the hangups I frequently encounter from people just trying to get started in social media marketing is the paralysis formed when they stare blankly at Twitter, wondering what in the world to say. The pressure to fill the silence can be so overwhelming that they eventually succumb and tweet what they had for lunch. If you find yourself in this camp, I’m going to let you off the hook—you don’t have to say anything to get tremendous benefit from social media participation. If I did nothing more than listen and occasionally respond when directly engaged, I would derive tremendous benefit from that level of participation. In fact, if you are just getting started, this is what you should do before you ever open your 140-character mouth. Set up an RSS reader and subscribe to blogs, visit social bookmarking sites such as BizSugar, and Delicious and read what’s popular. Create custom Twitter searches for your brand, your competitors, and your industry, and closely follow people on Twitter who have a reputation for putting out great content. And then just listen and learn. If you do only this, you will be much smarter about your business and industry than most and you may eventually gain the knowledge and confidence to tap the full range of what’s possible in the wild and wacky world of social media marketing.

     Source: Let’s talk, Social Media for small busniess, version two (John Jantsch) e-book

How exactly do you define social media? What’s changed?

    Well, that’s a good question. And the complete answer could fill pages without really delivering the clarity that a small-business marketer might desire.

     So here’s the simple definition for the purpose of this document. Social media is the use of technology to co-create, know, like, and trust.

     Social media, and by that I’m lumping together blogs, social search, social networking, and bookmarking, presents the marketer with a rich set of new tools to help in the effort to generate new business.

     If you studied marketing in the textbook world, you likely covered the 4 Ps of marketing—you simply created a product, figured out how to price it, got it placed in the market, and promoted the heck out it.

     Today’s approach to marketing, the approach infused with social media, leans much more heavily on the 4 Cs of marketing. Tons of relevant, education-based, and perhaps user generated content that is filtered, aggregated, and delivered in a context that makes it useful for people who are starving to make connections with people, products, and brands they can build a community around.

     Content + Context + Connection + Community = Social Media Marketing

     Source: Let’s talk, Social Media for small busniess, version two (John Jantsch) e-book

How to optimize your press release

     Press releases are like vitamins for people: we either obsess over them or don’t take full advantage of them. What if you are looking for a happy balance between these two extremes?

Why Submit Your Press Release to Distribution Services?

     Think about Google News and Yahoo! News as different search engines, says David. In order to get your content to be indexed in these places, you need to submit your press release to one of the recognized press release distribution services.

Where to Submit Your Press Release?

     The five big ones are: PRWeb, PR Newswire, Business Wire, Marketwire and PrimeNewswire. There are other less popular ones, plus free services you may be able to use. While we encourage you to experiment with ditribution, make sure you know what you are getting. All services you use should have access to the main search engines and should give you the capability to hyperlink from the press release to your site.

The # 1 Critical Element in Press Releases

     Including hyperlinks in your press releases is critical. Make sure to hyperlink relevant words directing to targeted pages (which sometimes can even be landing pages). For instance, if your press release is about a new product launch, you should hyperlink the most important phrases and send people to your website pages corresponding to these phrases. This is essential for search engine optimization.

Don’t Forget to Publish on Your Site

     In addition to sending the press release to reputable distribution services, you should also publish it on your own website. Add it to your Media page, on your blog or wherever you think is appropriate. “If you put it on your site, it is going to get indexed by the main part of Google,” explains David.

     Source: The ultimate how to marketing guide (HubSpot and David Meerman Scott) e-book

How to choose images for your website

     Using images throughout your business’ web presence—in blog posts, on Facebook, in online presentations, etc.—presents a great marketing opportunity to capture people’s attention and create brand awareness. But how do you choose the right images?

     If you’ve spent more than ten minutes on the web, you’ve probably seen photos of multicultural people pointing at a computer and laughing together. Or after clicking on a company’s Contact Us link, you must have seen some stock photo model with a headset on, representing the customer service department. These practices are widely used and, frankly, a little bit absurd.

Don’t Use Stock Photos to Represent You

     “When companies use photographs of happy, smiley models to represent

either their clients or themselves, it’s just silly,” says David. “It’s almost like telling a lie about your company.” The stock photo models are soulless—they seem plastic and fake. Would you like your visitors to make such associations about your company? Do you really think that using a picture of a lady in a suit will convey professionalism and trust?

     While we don’t advise you to use stock photos to represent your employees or customers, there are actually other more appropriate uses for these images.

You can place them in presentations to make a point or use them to tell a story in a Facebook album, for instance.

Use Authentic Images

     So what images should you incorporate into your business’ web pages? Take pictures of your own employees and use them on your website instead. Launch a brief survey, and find out which people from your company are willing to participate in a professional photo shoot. (The chances are, many will raise their hands.) In general, consider using more authentic pictures that will draw creative associations in the visitor’s mind. For instance, you can add an image of a vintage telephone on your Contact Us page. Or place a photo of a typewriter on your Press Releases page. For such purposes, we at HubSpot like to use Creative Commons-licensed images from Flickr.

     Source: The ultimate how to marketing guide (HubSpot and David Meerman Scott) e-book

Assume the position

     Public relations, advertising, and marcom all reflect the company’s "position." Positioning is darned important, then. Strategic, even. And if you’re a marketing consultant, positioning is where the big bucks are. You’re right there at the top of the marketing totem pole.

     Positioning is not only lucrative for its practitioners, it’s also fun, since it’s usually done on a blank piece of paper. "Who do we want to be?" asks the positioning expert. "Are we the maker of the world’s finest timepieces? No, maybe we’re the people who keep business on time. Ooh, maybe we’re the company that’s making punctuality into a fashion accessory!" Undoubtedly, someone will trump these suggestions by saying, "We’re not really about watches at all," and then, in a solemn voice: "We’re the Time Company."

     Often, "positioning exercises" become expensive sojourns into corporate psychology. The consultant gets to spend time with one group leader after another, performing the role of corporate shrink. The resulting data is impossible to connect, but that doesn’t matter, because the goal is only to come up with a "statement." And all that statement has to be is marginally different from every other company’s faked-up statement. Never mind that nobody in the marketplace gives a damn about any company’s positioning statement. It only matters that this statement will "drive the strategy," which will be yet another advertising and PR bombing campaign.

     Can it get more arrogant? Well, actually, yes.

     Positioning wasn’t even an issue until 1972, when Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote a series of articles for Advertising Age and then authored one of the top-selling business books of all time, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. The goal of positioning, Trout says, is to own one word in your customer’s mind. For evidence, you don’t even need to leave your own skull. Take a look: you’ll find Fedex in the "overnight" position, Crest in the "cavities" position, and Volvo in the "safety" position, even if you never buy those products. In the battlefield of your mind, those companies are entrenched in those positions.

     Why one word? Because to Trout and Ries, the human mind is as closed as a clam and just as roomy. Witness Jack Trout’s "five basic principles of the mind," from The New Positioning:

• Minds are limited.
• Minds hate confusion.
• Minds are insecure.
• Minds don’t change.
• Minds lose focus.

     In short, minds are so pathetic that they desperately need help, even if it comes in the form of an axe. That’s what positioning is for.

     Too bad, because positioning actually is about something much more important, something that gets trivialized by those who reduce it to generating a catchy tagline. Positioning is about discovering who you, as a business, are -- discovering your identity, not inventing a new one willy-nilly. Positioning should help a company become what it is, not something it’s not (no matter how cool it would be).

     A company can certainly try to be what it’s not. But the market conversation will expose the fakery. One clue is any attempt by a company to deny its history, because history is one of those things that just can’t be changed. GM will always be the product of Alfred Sloan’s preference for implementation over innovation, Apple will always come from Steve Jobs’s artistic temperament, Hewlett-Packard will always come from its founders’ obsession with quality products for niche technical markets, Nordstrom will always come from the family’s original shoe business.

     Of course companies and products can change their identities (and even their natures) over time. Volkswagen no longer bears (for most of us) the history stated in its very name: Hitler’s car for the proud German people. Kellogg’s Razzle Dazzle Rice Krispies no longer bear much connection to the obsessive health concerns of the company’s founder. But such changes generally are gradual and often painful. In fact, if they are too rapid and too easy, the market conversation will be merciless in exposing the phoniness it sniffs.

     There are other clues that a company is having an identity crisis:

• Is there a spark of life in its marketing materials? Do they smack of focus groups and the safety of the lowest common denominator, or do they take the risk of being as interesting as its best customers?
• Do its marketing programs keep people out or invite them in? Do they help customers and prospects make connections to the relevant employees?
• Is the company able to admit a mistake? Can employees admit they disagree with management decisions or the latest marketing mantra? Or must they always explain why everything is perfect in this, the best of all possible companies?
• Is the company so jealous of its "image" that it has surgically implanted a lawyer where its sense of humor used to be?
• Does it drill its employees on the corporate catechism, or can the workers tell stories that for them capture the essence of what the company is about?
• Do the employees routinely sign their e-mail "Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the management"?

     These indicators have a common theme. Each points to a gap between who your company is and what it says it is. The gap is where inauthenticity lives, and the exposure of the gap constitutes corporate embarrassment. Much of marketing is devoted to papering over that gap. Deming gave the deathless advice: "Drive out fear." We might add: and drive out shame.

     But how can a business be authentic? Authenticity describes whether someone truly owns up to what she or he actually is. Since corporations and businesses aren’t individuals, ultimately their authenticity is rooted in the employees. If the company is posing, then the people who are the company will have to pose as well. If, on the other hand, the company is comfortable living up to what it is, then an enormous cramp in the corporate body language goes away. The marketing people won’t create throwaway lines that are clever but false. The sales folk will walk away from the "sales opportunities" that the company is better off losing than having to support. The product developers won’t propose features that look good on paper but do their customers no real good.

     None of this has to do with one-word positioning statements, press release boilerplate, or pledging allegiance to corporate goals before every company meeting. It has to be learned in the heart, not by rote. What we learn through memorization affords us no spontaneity. We can recite the right words, but they’re not our own -- we can’t riff on them. The market conversation can spot marketing recitatives within two syllables because the Web thrives on spontaneity. We are all so tuned to the sound of the real human voice that, given a chance to interact, we can’t be fooled... at least not for long.

     And if a company is genuinely confused about what it is, there’s an easy way to find out: listen to what your market says you are. If it’s not to your liking, think long and hard before assuming that the market is wrong, composed of a lot of people who just are too dumb or blind to understand the Inner You. If you’ve been claiming to be the Time Company for two years but the market still thinks of you as the Overpriced Executive Trophy Watchmaker, then, sorry, but that’s your position. If you don’t like what you’re hearing, the marketing task is not to change the market’s idea of who you are but actually to change who you are. And that can take a generation: look at Volkswagen.

     Source: The Cluetrain Manifesto: The end of business as usual (Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger) e-book

How content comunities work

     Content communities look a bit like social networks – you have to register, you get a home page and you can make connections with friends. However, they are focussed on sharing a particular type of content.

     For example, Flickr is based around sharing photography and is the most popular service of its kind in the UK. Members upload their photos to the site and choose whether to make them public or just share with family and friends in their network.

     Thousands of groups have formed on Flickr around areas of common interest. There are groups dedicated to particular graffiti artists, towns, sports and animals. If you work for a reasonably well-known brand it is worth taking a look to see if there is a Flickr group about you – there are groups for motorbike brands, consumer electronics brands and even the cult notebook brand Moleskine. As testament to its enormous success, Flickr was bought by Yahoo! in 2005 for an estimated US $30 million.

     YouTube is the world’s largest video sharing service, with over 100 million videos viewed every day. Members of YouTube can upload videos or create their own “channels” of favourite videos. The viral nature of YouTube videos is enhanced by a feature that makes it easy for people to cut and paste videos hosted by YouTube directly into their blogs.

As well as thousands of short films from people’s own video cameras, webcams

and camera phones, there are many clips from TV shows and movies hosted on the service. Some people also use the service to record video blogs.

YouTube started as a small private company, but was bought by Google for $1.65 billion in October 2006.

     Digg is a news and content community. Members submit links to news stories that they think will be of interest and these are voted on by other members. Once a story has garnered about a critical number of votes (the number varies according to how busy the site is) it will be moved to the front page where it will receive wider attention from members as well as more casual visitors to the site.   

     Digg claims to receive 20 million unique visitors every month, and certainly the volume of traffic via popular links from the service is so great that it can cause smaller companies’ servers to crash.

     As with other social media platforms, rumours of acquisition deals and massive valuations for the service are flying around, but it remains independent and relatively small in terms of the number of employees (around 40).

     Source: What is Social Media? (Antony Mayfield, iCrossing) e-book

How forums work

    Internet forums are the longest established form of online media. They most commonly exist around specific topics and interests, for example cars or music. Each discussion in a forum is known as a thread, and many different threads can be active simultaneously.

     This makes forums good places to find and engage in a variety of detailed discussions. They are often built into websites as an added feature, but some exist as stand-alone entities. Forums can be places for lively, vociferous debate, for seeking advice on a subject, for sharing news, for flirting, or simply for whiling away time with idle chat. In other words, their huge variety reflects that of face-to-face conversations.

     The sites are moderated by an administrator, whose role it is to remove unsuitable posts or spam. However, a moderator will not lead or guide the discussion. This is a major difference between forums and blogs. Blogs have a clear owner, whereas a forum’s threads are started by its members.

     Forums have a strong sense of community. Some are very enclosed, existing as ‘islands’ of online social activity with little or no connection to other forms of social media. This may be because forums were around long before the term ‘social media’ was coined, and in advance of any of the other types of community we associate with the term.

     In any event, they remain hugely popular, often with membership in the hundreds of thousands. Forum search engine BoardTracker monitors over 61 million conversation threads across almost 40,000 forums8, and it is by no means a comprehensive index.

     Source: What is Social Media? (Antony Mayfield, iCrossing) e-book

How podcasts work

     Podcasts are audio or video files that are published on the internet and that users can subscribe to. Sometimes ‘vodcast’ is used to specifically describe video services.

     It is the subscription feature that makes a podcast so powerful as a form of social media. People have long been able to upload audio content to the web, but the subscription feature means that people can build regular audiences and communities around their shows. It effectively puts private individuals or brands on a level playing field with traditional media organisations when it comes to competing for people’s attention with AV content online.

     Podcasts, like personal video recorders (PVRs), are part of a shift in media consumption patterns, which increasingly sees people watching or listening to

content when and where it suits them. This is sometimes known as time-shifting.

     When a new podcast is posted to the web, all the subscribers’ podcast services (such as iTunes) are automatically notified and download the programme to their computer’s hard drive. The podcast can then be either listened to on the computer or downloaded onto an MP3 player, such as an iPod.

     Naturally the advent of the podcast has also meant that media brands have been able to invade one another’s traditional territory. Many national newspapers in the UK have started effectively producing their own radio-style programmes and distributing them via their previously text-and-picture based websites. Channel 4 has also launched its own audio/podcasting brand, 4Radio.

     If you already have an iPod and use iTunes you can click on the Podcast icon in the left-hand toolbar to access podcasts and subscribe to them.

     Other good places to find and start listening to podcasts are Podcast Alley and Yahoo! Podcasts

     If you fancy trying your hand at creating your own podcast, download the free audio editing tool Audacity or have a look at the ‘how to’ guide at wikiHow.

     Source: What is Social Media? (Antony Mayfield, iCrossing) e-book

How to talk

     We’re all learning to talk anew. We’re all going to get it right and get it wrong. Two events in the fall of 1994 still serve as good cases in point for crisis management. In one case, resolute Ivory Tower isolation caused a major disaster. In the other, real conversation among concerned individuals saved the day.

     First, an anatomy of a disaster. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, Compuserve hosted many of the best online forums. One of these professional salons was the EETimes Forum, hosted by Electronic Engineering Times, the top magazine for the people who design and work with computer chips. It’s a safe bet that most of the participants used Intel-based computers, and engineered computers with "Intel Inside." Yet when news of a bug in an early Pentium chip was first found and posted on the forum, nobody seemed to take it too seriously. They joked about it a bit, but took it in stride. After all, bugs in chips are nothing new. But all of them clearly were looking for Intel to jump in and talk about it.

     However, there was radio silence from Intel until Alex Wolfe, an EETimes reporter, wrote about the bug in his magazine. Soon the major media picked up the story and all hell broke loose.

     To deal with this crisis, Intel CEO Andy Grove posted something on the forum that read like a papal encyclical on how Intel works. This included a description of a caste system that drew a line between those who should be concerned about such a bug and those who should not, and offered to replace the defective chips for the first group. This didn’t sit well with anybody, but the forum members were tolerant at first. They wanted to get to the bottom of this thing, so they attempted to engage Grove on the matter. After all, he had showed up. He must have been willing to talk. But it quickly became obvious that Grove was just posting a notice -- the big guy was not going to take part in a conversation.

     So, when Intel got shellacked in the press, little help came from what should have been company friends in the engineering community. After all, these were Intel’s real customers. They understood how bugs happen. They were articulate and authoritative. But they were just as silent for Grove as Grove had been for them. Intel was publicly embarrassed into recalling every one of the defective chips, and estimates for reputation damage ran into many millions.

     Meanwhile, over in Compuserve’s Travel Forum, another bad PR event was taking shape. This one involved United Airlines, which was experiencing a bumpy take-off with its new Shuttle By United service. Like the EETimes Forum, the Travel Forum had serious participants: high-mileage fliers, pilots, air traffic controllers, travel agents, and airline personnel from every level.

If you could hook up a meter to the forum and measure good will, the needle reading for Shuttle By United at take-off was way over on the negative side. Luggage was being lost (three times for one passenger). Passenger loading was chaotic. Customers were unhappy.

     Then one United worker (one of those "owners" United’s ads talked about so much at the time) jumped in and simply started to help out. The response was remarkable. Here are a few examples:

• "Good to see someone at United interested!"
• "Nice to have a UAL person to chat with... thanks."
• "As a 100k flier, I’m glad to see one of you online here."
• "I am a pilot for United and I thank you for taking the time to answer all of these questions about the Shuttle."
• "Nice to see a UA employee on and participating instead of just lurking."
• "As a UA 1K FF [top-grade frequent flyer] and a PassPlus holder I appreciate your time and interest in the forum."
• "Don’t leave United. You’re important to us. Your comments are helpful. You make a difference."

     This kind of conversation moved the meter all the way over to the positive side, just because one company guy took on the burden of talking with customers and trying to solve their problems. One guy.

     Then one day the same UA employee posted a notice that said, "Due to a conflict with corporate communication policies at United Airlines of employees responding to issues of any nature without the explicit direction of the Communications Division, I will not be participating any longer. I hope this situation changes in the future. Until then, direct any concerns to the Consumer Affairs department at United’s World Headquarters."

     You can imagine what followed. United got flamed royally by their employee’s new friends on the forum.

     But, unlike Intel, United stayed in the conversation. A United higher-up jumped in and quickly communicated United’s willingness to learn this new form of market relations. The original United correspondent and the higher-up both stayed in the conversation and started to work things out. The needle went back over to the positive side. And nobody ever heard bad news about the Shuttle by United bug.

     Lessons learned? The party’s already started. You can join or not. If you don’t, your silence will be taken as arrogance, stupidity, meanness, or all three. If you’re going to join, don’t do it as a legal entity or wearing your cloak of officialdom. Join it as a person with a name, a point of view, a sense of humor, and passion.

     Source: The Cluetrain Manifesto: The end of business as usual (Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger) e-book

How wikis work

     Wikis are websites that allow people to contribute or edit content on them. They are great for collaborative working, for instance creating a large document or project plan with a team in several offices. A wiki can be as private or as open as the people who create it want it to be.

     Wikipedia: The most famous wiki is of course Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia that was started in 2001. It now has over 2.5 million articles in English alone6 and over a million members.

     In 2005 the respected scientific journal Nature conducted a study7 into the reliability of the scientific entries in Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. No one was surprised that Encyclopaedia Britannica was the more reliable of the two – what was remarkable was that it was only marginally more accurate. The Encyclopedia Britannica team issued a 20-page rebuttal of the study a few months later. Others observed that while Encyclopaedia Britannica had no entries for wiki, Wikipedia has a 2,500 word article on Encyclopaedia Britannica, its history and methodology. But Wikipedia is more than a reference source. During a major breaking news story, especially one which affects large numbers of people directly, such a natural disaster or political crisis, Wikipedia acts as a collective reporting function.

     Everyone knows Wikipedia, here are some other examples of large wiki projects that you can take a look at and even participate in:

•  Wikia: A community of wikis on different subjects
• WikiHow: A practical ‘how to’ manual for everything from making coffee to writing business plans
• Wikinews: Wikipedia’s news project

     You can start your own public wiki in the Wikia community, or look at the technology’s possibilities for team working by trying out the services from companies like JotSpot and Socialtext.

     Source: What is Social Media? (Antony Mayfield, iCrossing) e-book

Reading blogs

     The easiest way to read blogs is to subscribe to ones you find interesting using the Bloglines, Google Reader or Newsgator newsreader services. A newsreader is a website or piece of software where you can go to read a newsfeed that you are subscribed to via RSS. All blogs and most news websites have RSS feeds attached to them.

     You can find blogs on topics that you’re interested in by using search engines like Technorati or Google Blog Search. If you find a blog which is particularly interesting or relevant to you, have a look for its ‘blogroll’ (list of recommended blogs) – it’s a great way of exploring the networks of blogs.

     Source: What is Social Media? (Antony Mayfield, iCrossing) e-book

A sample blogging policy

    If I were launching a social media program at a company, I'd hold a quick meeting in person. I'd mention the following.

• We're opening up blogging to the organization. Every one here is now invited to use our new blogging platform. Why do this? Because we think you're creative, intelligent people, and we want to give you a chance to share your ideas with a larger audience, inside and outside the organization.
• As this is public, just remember that we can't talk about company secrets, upcoming projects that aren't yet public, or anything that could impact our company's stock value.
• Within reason, you can say what you will about our publicly released products and services. If you're critical of something, recommend solutions. Offer examples of improvements. We'd prefer it to be constructive. Use your judgment.
• When posting pictures or movies or music, understand that some materials may be copyrighted. For instance, just because you can see a picture on a Google Image Search or find it in Flickr, that doesn't mean you have rights to post it on your blog. We'll talk more about Creative Commons and some other resources later.
• It's fine to post "off-topic." We don't expect every single post to be about the organization. We hope you'll talk about us from time to time, as our goal is showing our customers, vendors, and other stakeholders, as well as the community at large, that you are what makes our company amazing.
• Mentioning our competitors is fine. The world doesn't revolve around us (okay, we pretend it does!), and we know that some people do some aspects of what we do better. Don't rub our noses in it, but we get it.
• Deleting blog posts is considered bad etiquette on the web. We won't do it here, unless something violates our privacy policies, and/or our ethics policies. Posting hotties probably won't fly, but the occasional cute picture of your cat in a cowboy hat is okay. You're a real human, not a robot.
• It's considered good etiquette to link to other great posts you read, and to comment on other blogs written by people you admire or want to engage in conversation.
• As for how often or how much is too much, and things like that, around here, we measure you on your results at your primary function. If your work starts suffering on your way to the A list of bloggers, we'll have to adjust your expectations a little bit. Otherwise, use your judgment.

     Source: Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points (Chris Brogan) e-book