Social Media & Networks

Social Media Club forms interim board

9 July, 2008 Posted by User ImageAlex de Carvalho As Social Media & Networks (4) Comment

I’m honored to be counted among the people invited to give new impetus to the Social Media Club. Through conversations with companies, organizations, local universities, and interactive agencies, I’ve experienced the growing interest in social media and the increased demand for industry practitioners. By bringing together those who have an interest in seeing the industry improve and evolve, SMC provides the much needed forum for sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy. 1

The interim board will establish the guidelines of this association, to create the necessary framework before the SMC grows further on a national and global level. Once the framework is agreed on, local boards will be established with interested corporate and non-corporate members. Please read the full press release if you’d like to know more.

As we collaborate on on organizing SMC for the future, Chris Heuer, founder of Social Media Club and Partner at The Conversation Group, acknowledges that:

“Our core mission will remain the same: promotion of media literacy; support of industry standards efforts such as Creative Commons licensing, Microformats, Data Portability and OpenID; discussion and promotion of ethical behavior; and sharing our knowledge among our members and the industry community at large.”

The newly named members of the interim board, some of whom are friends and others who I look forward to meeting, include:

  1. We are in the process of relaunching Social Media Club in South Florida ↩

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Categories : Social Media & Networks

Social media framework for discussion

17 June, 2008 Posted by User ImageAlex de Carvalho As Social Media & Networks (18) Comment

I’ve had countless conversations with companies and interactive agencies on the significance of social media and the impact it will have on businesses’ marketing, PR and product development activities and processes. From these conversations and from my own experience using, teaching, consulting and working with companies and non-profits on social media initiatives and programs, I’ve developed an approach to frame the conversation, as described below. Please see footnotes for credit to Tara Hunt and Yvette Ferry. 1 2

The Premise for Social Media

An increasing number of companies are now dipping their toes into social media, but many are still unsure what it is and how to implement it for their customer base and profitability.

Social media sets itself apart from previous types of media in terms of the engagement and commitment of people. In mainstream media and advertising, people were relegated to the role of an anonymous and passive audience. This paradigm is no longer working. Today, the community is everything, and more and more companies are recognizing their need to change with the times.

In a social media setting, people become active and interactive by expressing their opinion on what they’re viewing, by having the ability to alter content, and by creating their own content to be viewed by others. The means of production, distribution, and story-telling are multiplied while costs are lowered, granting millions of people the possibility to produce their own individualistic content. The result is a new, more engaged type of user. This engagement is further increased when the user may create an identity and make explicit their social connections. All of this translates into increased efficiency, use and, ultimately, volume of business for appropriately engaged companies.

A Framework for Social Media Integration

Integrating new media into companies’ business practices and culture involves concentrating on three areas: communication, user experience, and product development. In large part, each area depends upon the others for resonance, coherence and reinforcement. You can increase conversion and retention from advertising and marketing (and viral) campaigns by developing and enhancing your communications, website usability, and product features, by selecting and integrating the appropriate social media for your markets and by optimizing the use of these media.

Communication

Effective communication entails developing a holistic marketing approach that works with and not against community-building efforts. Successful online companies are generally those that listen and respond to their customers, a simple premise that can be remarkably difficult to execute. Most companies struggle to listen to and “hear” what their customers are saying, and this unintentional deafness affects their bottom lines. You can create communication strategies for user engagement, as well as internal communication and implementation processes that both reflect and impact community and product development. In addition, you can develop social-network outreach strategies, integrate new media into corporate outreach efforts and optimize search-engine results in order to be more findable by your customer base. This effort involves developing an outreach strategy to identify and establish relationships with your users and also to create spaces in which your communities may interact, using new media.

User Experience

The ways in which your company interacts with your website users is critical to their experience. The cohesiveness of the community you build is largely dependent on the quality of the interaction your users have at your websites, and the community management resources you make available. This means creating websites with social attributes and affordances that encourage users to come back, because they can interact with your company and also with each other. It also implies creating dashboards, business processes and empowering (or hiring) employees to perform community management, ombudsman and relationship-building activities. You can lay the foundation for growth and optimize the results from advertising, direct marketing, and viral campaigns by developing optimized user experiences, using new media and social networks.

Product Development

Product development entails creating services and products based on the use and desires of users and customers. Using specific metrics and baselines for measuring user engagement and growth, you can hear what your customers are saying and assess the ways in which they are using your products, services and websites. You can use data and develop internal business processes to prototype, test and create products and services that are responsive to the stated and implicit needs of your customers and user bases.

Finally, monitoring your products, brands and reputations is important to your own ongoing success and you can track and manage the reputation of companies, brands, and products, using new media.

Overall, you may find that social media is more timely, efficient, and cost-effective than other approaches.

What do you think? How do you approach social media issues with your company or clients? What frameworks do you use for discussion?

  1. Credit is due to Tara Hunt, who seeded my thinking on this, although this post is not necessarily reflective of her views. Please read her excellent blog for more on Social Media Strategy and community management. ↩
  2. Yvette Ferry deserves credit for helping me organize these thoughts and motivating me to put pen to paper. She is a freelance writer you should consider hiring for your projects. ↩

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Categories : Social Media & Networks

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

7 May, 2008 Posted by User ImageAlex de Carvalho As Social Media & Networks (2) Comment

20080507-ppsa3n7eyttxet8mu78g6hjfj6 Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Blogging about not blogging …

So I haven’t blogged in a while … or rather I’ve been on Twitter alot.  As it turns out, to rephrase Hugh MacLeod, "Blogging Tweeting is a great way to make things happen indirectlydirectly."

David Berkowitz blogged how Twitter makes blogging better … and in one way worse:

"One prominent blogger, who I won’t call out here, includes a daily summary of his Twitter posts on his blog. Very few of those posts are worth syndicating. They only make sense if you follow him. I find myself reading his blog less now because of it."

I’m not the "prominent" blogger in question ;)  but as those of you reading the feed know, I’m equally guilty of reposting daily tweets here. The postings were archived and did not show up on the front page of this blog, but were regularly shipped out on the feed. This served a few purposes, including:

  • Using the blog as a journaling and archiving system so that years from now I could look back and find what I was doing on any particular day, through the archived daily tweets here. Twitter has no archiving mechanism and it’s currently very difficult to find your tweets from any single day: you have to scroll back in your twitterstream to do so.

  • Posting daily tweets to my blog helped keep this blog going at a time when I’ve been particularly busy and haven’t found the time to blog. The last three months have been very hectic, starting from before organizing  BarCampMiami, to leaving Scrapblog, to the various things I’m doing today and which I’ll describe in upcoming posts.

  • In addition to keeping the blog alive with content, the daily postings kept Google’s spiders crawling and indexing this site for these past few months.

However, daily postings of tweets are difficult and/or boring to read and as David points out, they only make sense if you’re following them on Twitter as they occur, in which case it’s redundant to see them on Twitter, on the blog and aggregated with my other activity on socialthing! and FriendFeed.

I’ve been active elsewhere

Speaking of which, I’ve been active on many other services as well. I’ve added the social networks and sharing services I use most to my blog’s navigation and sidebar and have thus reclaimed my blog as a central identity hub from which to find me online. These services are listed under my picture on the sidebar, and are reposted below. If you’d like to connect on any of these services, please leave a brief comment describing how we know each other or why you’d like to be connected (see note below*):

Twitter Updates on Twitter
Facebook Facebook profile
Flickr Flickr photos
LinkedIn LinkedIn profile
del.icio.us del.icio.us links
Upcoming Upcoming events
LinkedIn Tumblr lifestream
Dopplr Trips on Dopplr
Digg Dugg items
Google shared items Shared on Google Reader
LastFM LastFM radio
Jaiku Jaiku lifestream
Skitch Skitch screenshots
Slideshare Presentations on Slideshare
MyBlogLog MyBlogLog communities
Friendfeed Friendfeed lifestream
Technorati Technorati profile
ClaimID ClaimID identity
Netvibes Netvibes universe

*Note: I accept most friend requests, although I connect mostly with people I already know or have met on Facebook, Dopplr, Tumblr, Jaiku Google Reader, NetVibes, ClaimID, LastFM, SlideShare, del.icio.us and Upcoming. I’m more open with connections on Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed and Flickr, although I reserve the right to not connect for whatever reason - please don’t take it personally if I don’t reciprocate a connection request.

Having said all that …

… I’m blogging again ;)

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Categories : Social Media & Networks

Frank Warren of PostSecret.com

10 March, 2008 Posted by User ImageAlex de Carvalho As Social Media & Networks (1) Comment

frank warren of postsecret.com

Secrets are powerful social objects: they connect and bind people in a unique way. Monday’s keynote at SXSW featured Frank Warren of PostSecret, who gave insights into the "unity we share, but often forget". During this presentation, a person walked on stage and proposed to his girlfriend.

"With postsecret, Frank Warren pioneered the idea that a website can serve as a an anonymous online confessional. Listen to his moving story about the trust his readers put in him, as well as his thoughts about how technology can help us overcome some of our darkest fears."

"There are two types of secrets, those we hyde from others, and those we hide from ourselves" - Frank

Has received over 200,000 secrets in three years. Has received secrets in all types of formats, including one on each side of a mixed-up Rubik’s Cube. Also on a Starbuck’s cup, that read "I serve decaf to customers who are rude to me":

- "My boyfriend is deaf and when we have sex I scream my ex’s name"
- "I put lipstick on my bosses shirt so his wife thinks we’re having an affair even if we’re not. This sounds crazy even to me"
- "I know my child is not mine, but I love her anyways"
- "You called me an idiot so I sent your bags to a wrong destination. Opps, I guess you were right!"
- Favorite one: "Dear Frank, when I wrote down my secret to send to you, I felt horrible reading it, and at that moment I decided I will no longer be that person who carries this secret inside for the rest of my life."
- "You told me your darkest secret, and my heart ached because I realized I could not possible love you ever more"
- "I’ve gone through dark periods in my life and I’ve learned to have patience, because hope does not always come on the time schedule we would like"
- "I know how to fix my life, I just chose not to"
- "He’s been in jail for something I did 10 years, 5 more to go"
- "The secret I mailed in last week was true when I mailed it, but it’s no longer true now"

SXSW secrets:

- "All these web celebs have never worked with clients"
- "Work paid for me to come here, but I actually came here to find another job"
- "My company, a large one, has sent me here to steal ideas from startups. I’m posing as a freelancer"

wedding proposal on stage

Presentation, discussion and question and answer

Three years ago printed and handed out 3,000 postcards with instructions on sharing a secret to an art project. "Hi, my name is Frank and I’m collecting secrets." The people who say they don’t have any, have the best ones. Secrets started pouring in, from all over the world and in many languages. So he started sharing these on a blog.

PostSecret is an online community that organizes itself as it develops. There are 10,000 or 100,000 other ideas like PostSecret out there waiting to be started. Projects that make us realize the greater unity that we all share, but that we often forget.

A rock band made a music video using secrets, and the project also evolved into a book. The project has also been used to raise money to support (and save) a suicide prevention hotline.

His father did not understand the project initially, but one day told Frank a secret that changed their relationship.

Frank had to grow up quickly when he was young and develop a rich interior life … and thought that everyone else also has a rich interior life that’s important to share. He also found the process of sharing a secret very therapeutic.

People are sharing secrets, but the truth is that similar secrets are shared, even by people sitting in the same room.

There is an intimacy revolution, an authenticity revolution going on. We post pictures on Facebook our employers shouldn’t see. Social media tools are driving this type of revolution and many new forms of authenticity will emerge.

There are secrets occurring in virtual worlds, too.

People share secrets about sexual identity, about abuse … When Frank gets difficult and emotional ones, he channels the emotion to support the suicide prevention hotline.

He thinks of the postcards as works of art.

It’s a false dichotomy to think secrets are either true or false.

"Free your secrets and become who you are"- Frank (to a standing ovation)

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Categories : Social Media & Networks

Self Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing panel at SXSW

10 March, 2008 Posted by User ImageAlex de Carvalho As Social Media & Networks (3) Comment

tara hunt, hugh macleod, david parmet at sxsw

Here’s a transcription on community building by a panel of top social media consultants and bloggers. Since it’s transcribed, please excuse the grammar and run on sentences.

Chris Heuer, Partner, The Conversation Group

Tara Hunt, Co-Founder, Citizen Agency

Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester

Deborah Schultz, Founder/Chief Catalyst, deborahschultz.com

David Parmet   Owner, Marketing Begins At Home LLC

Hugh MacLeod   Grand Pooh-Bah, gapingvoid.com

"’Conversation’ & ‘community’, yes, yes. Of course. Given. But how, exactly? Do you want people to find out about and play with your awesome Web stuff without being skeevy about it? Serious about including your users in the long-term creation and evolution of your products? Together, we’ll divine the best ways to unmarket and create self-replicating awesomeness."

How can you uses social media to build communities around your projects?

Deb Schultz: None of this is about tools or technology, it’s about understanding your customers and bringing them into the fold.

Chris Heuer: What makes a community are the interpersonal connections within it. Social media fundamentally changes the way we interact with each other. It takes a shift to think about participation in a different way. We need to change people’s mindset from selling to people, to helping people buy. You need to have a genuine spirit of wanting to do good, or people will notice the "fakeness".

Jeremiah Owyang: Conducts research and most recently interviewed 17 companies on best practices for community building and management.

Tara Hunt: "Marketing is the price you pay for creating mediocre products." Tara found that the more she gave away, the more business she got. The more time she donates to the community, the more opportunities open up to her. Read Cory Doctorow’s "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." The book talks about if you do good things for the world, you get more "woofys" (ie., Karma).

Hugh MacLeod

Was unemployed 5 years ago and started drawing cartoons on the back of business cards and posted them to his website. This led to a gig with a small South African winery, Stormhoek, which was selling 50,000 cases per year at the time. Hugh then started talking about Stormhoek and sending free bottles to bloggers, without asking them to blog about it. Hugh then noticed geek dinners happening and offered to send a case of wine to these events. The only condition was to ask people to post pictures to Flickr. The result is that in a year and a half, Stormhoek went from 50k cases per year to 250k cases per year! Hugh and Jason [Korman, of Stormhoek] noticed that the wine was a social object. In fact, it was becoming a social marker, because it took territory and demarcated the conversation.

Discussion

If you are at a small startup and have some control over your marketing budget, get out of the ivory tower. Get a community manager or evangelist and go meet your customers. Go to conferences and start "weaving". Don’t put names on things, like "viral marketing".

Jeremiah mentions that he makes a lot of people at his own company nervous, because he gives out a lot of his knowledge for free.

However, by sharing your knowledge, people will understand that you have knowledge and this becomes your calling card.

Traditional marketing is about throwing the net out wide and hope you catch as many people as possible. What Hugh realized is that you can provide good service to small groups and the word will spread. "Blue Ocean Strategies" is a good book about these principles.

Question and Answer

How to find brand advocates? It’s pretty easy to find them by searching. You can also use paid services that will mine the net and find influencers.

What is Kula and what is the latest one? Kula are shells that people trade in South Sea islands. Islanders would paddle great distances to gift Kula to others. It’s not about the shell, it’s that people are wearing them and it creates a bond, an obligation, a conversation, an interaction. It’s all about people.

It’s ok to give away the little things, but what about giving away big stuff? For example, Audi is giving away dry cleaning, spa treatments and so on. Find related things that people you interact with will value. Also, break things down into smaller segments and go local. Start from the bottom up. Russel Davies said big brands don’t have big ideas, they have lots of small ideas. Starbuck’s is about the small things. Apple stores also. When you add lots and lots of little things done well, these add up. As a community manager for Hitachi, that sells products worth millions of dollars, Jeremiah set up a wiki that became a valued space for customers and represented a huge cultural shift for the company.

How to market a film? Start a blog and get people from the community to start telling their stories. The brands with the best storytellers win. Empower people and help them tell their stories.

What’s the rebuttal to the 1.0 Marketing pushback? There’s no such thing as viral marketing. Why not go right to the customers themselves, rather than going for yet another ad buy. Sometimes you shouldn’t give your products away, but it’s those things around it, the social gestures you make. For example, the Honda dealer has wifi, has bagels, has playground for kids … so some independent consultants go there to work! It’s not just about giving away stuff, it’s about creating relationships with the people you’re giving stuff to.

What’s the takeaway, the soundbite? Social objects are the future of marketing. Build social capital and find your higher purpose. Passion for people, put passion into product. Technology changes, human behavior doesn’t, don’t get lost in the shiny bling, don’t get lost in the ivory tower, nothing replaces listening. People are people.

What about nonprofits, what is free is the message … is pitching the message annoying or wrong or unethical? What you’re giving is a connection to a higher purpose, a sense of belonging. Cultivate this feeling, rather than sending a message to people. Find how to connect with people. When do you connect with people? Is it just on your own terms. Do you sell tupperware when you invite people to dinner? That’s a turn off. If you only talk to them when you need them, you will lose them. It’s more about the quality of the connections, one person at a time.

What if these tactics don’t work? How long does it take? Traditional execs want immediate results. They care about levers, not people. A lot of it has to do with people not getting it. It’s not campaigns, it’s programs. Get qualitative results, get the videos of the kids in the playgrounds and tell their stories.

Is this a fad or does it need to be done? Jeremiah believes there is a purpose to marketing. But marketing has become associated with sales, rather than associating the product with the value people get from them. For Deborah, it is a personal mission, not a fad. She considers herself a customer advocate, not a marketer. She loves bringing tools to people and enabling people to do cool stuff with it. It’s significant that everybody has a voice today. It boils down to, what’s your intention? People will notice fakeness.

Wrap-up: A story without love is not worth telling.

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Categories : Social Media & Networks
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