Table of contents for Keys to Implementing Social Media series

1. Implementing social media: the adoption matrix
2. Implementing social media: brand monitoring

tl;dr: So you’ve been tasked with “tackling” social media for your organization: now what? At the EyeForPharma eMarketing Summit 2010 in Berlin, I presented “5 Keys to Implementing Social Media,” a framework to help you define your organization’s social media activity. This post summarizes the first key, monitoring your brand online. As a disclaimer, I am the co-founder of a brand monitoring service for the life sciences industry.

If markets are conversations …

“Any savvy party goer knows to listen before jumping into a conversation at a cocktail party.” -Jeremiah Owyang, Partner, Altimeter Group

“There’s no tagline” to conversations, according to the Cluetrain Manifesto: “For thousands of years, we knew exactly what markets were: conversations between people who sought out others who shared the same interests. Buyers had as much to say as sellers. They spoke directly to each other without the filter of media, the artifice of positioning statements, the arrogance of advertising, or the shading of public relations.”

All sellers and brands may not be fully aware yet (see the social media adoption matrix) but their consumers sure are talking about them. Whether you believe these interactions should be called “conversations” or “self-publishing,” research by Penn State University found that “20 percent of all tweets—or one out of every five updates—mention specific brand names or products.” As for the value of these tweets? “There’s room to glean qualitative analysis about brand perception and affinity from them, at least.” -Jim Jansen, Penn State (and some “Companies court tweeters and bloggers”).

A large proportion of these conversations are related to health. According to Pew Internet, 61% of American adults look online for health information (June 2009).

Fully 42% of all adults, or 60% of e-patients, say they or someone they know has been helped by following medical advice or health information found on the internet.

In Germany alone, “there are more than 100 health-related search queries per second,” according to Jens Monsees from Google, citing 2010 search stats at EyeForPharma in Berlin.

… are you listening?

According to Jeremiah Owyang, “In the social media communications lifecycle [pictured above], companies often fail to listen .… One of the biggest problems for [online] communicators today, just like a real conversation, is learning to listen.”

For example, do you know:

• Whether your clients and consumers are mentioning your brands, products, and service experiences?
• What are physicians discussing online, and who’s becoming influential?
• How do patients feel about your brand?
• Is the medical content accurate?
• Is your promotional activity effective?
• In what context are your brands mentioned?

By becoming aware of your online mentions throughout social media sites and platforms (see the conversation prism), you will effectively and quickly gain new insights, to:

• Understand your customers and your community
• See how and where your brands are mentioned
• Pinpoint customer satisfaction issues
• Find out what really concerns physicians and patients
• What and where is the false information?
• How are competing brands perceived?

Social media monitoring tools help keep your team organized and on top of market trends. For example, like a canary in the coal mine, online mentions of Avandia were clearly multiplying preceding the announcement of the drug’s recall. On a more positive note, the buzz on Herceptin increased five folds following publication in Europe’s Lancet about positive results clinical trials for Herceptin, a part of the chemotherapy regimen for HER2 protein positive breast cancer (The Lancet, 2002). However, some physicians and patients had allegedly been using Herceptin treatment before chemotherapy, to reduce the size of lumps in HER-2 positive patients, and sharing their experiences online. After recent clinical trials were performed, these proved the drug did indeed improve progression-free survival before starting the chemotherapy regimen (The Lancet, January 2010).

That’s all very well, but how does one keep track of online mentions?

Brand monitoring platforms

There’s a growing category of Software as a Service called brand monitoring, with a number of systems that work to collect and analyze the online buzz about your brand and the key words that matter to you. Rather than conducting daily manual searches through blog search engines, these systems are convenient when you need to perform the following activities:

1. Pull mentions from blogs, videos, medical resources and forums, patient and physician social networks;
2. Track specific topics, drugs, disease, therapeutic areas;
3. Graphically display daily mentions, rolling averages;
4. Conduct sentiment analysis and other types of data mining;
5. Create automatic alerts for unusual or increased online mentions activity;
6. Filter out low-value or irrelevant mentions;
7. Delegate mentions for further action by your team;
8. Ticket mentions to keep track of issue resolution and problem solving;
9. Annotate and archive mentions for record keeping and future retrieval;
10. Export weekly, monthly, or quarterly internal reports;
11. Post responses on social sites like Twitter;
12. and more.

Your social media business case and resource allocation

When considering social media for your organization, there are few steps as important as understanding where you fit in the conversation online. Social media monitoring allows you to more effectively manage your reputation, track your competitors, and monitor market trends. As a side benefit, what you find out in terms of the quality, volume, and scope of mentions online regarding your key terms will help you create the business case for social media adoption (or not) by your organization, and determine the resources you will require.

If you are interested in the “5 Keys to Social Media Implementation” and the “Social Media Adoption Matrix”, please see the full deck on Slideshare:

social media, brand monitoring, strategy, implementation, marketing, online mentions, pharmaceutical, pharma, herceptin, avandia

Table of contents for Keys to Implementing Social Media series

1. Implementing social media: the adoption matrix
2. Implementing social media: brand monitoring

tl;dr: First post in a series summarizing the “5 Keys to Implementing Social Media” presentation, starting with “The Social Media Adoption Matrix“

Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, and the pharma industry

The recent EyeForPharma eMarketing Summit 2010 was held in Berlin, a fitting place to talk about social media for the pharmaceutical industry. The Mauer Museum at Checkpoint Charlie exhibits the many ways civilians and soldiers attempted to escape from East Berlin. By air, land and sea, people tried to cross the border by every conceivable method, including light aircraft, balloons, ziplines, hidden compartments in cars, underwater propulsion, and so on. Their imaginations were limitless in breaking down that great barrier to communication, the Berlin Wall.

This was my second visit to Berlin; I love the energy and creativity with which the city reinvents itself, as it distances itself from the past. Pharmaceutical firms and regulatory agencies must also reinvent their communications practices as quicker and easier to use tools allow physicians and patients to publish to vast audiences online.

The Social Media Adoption Matrix

At the EyeForPharma conference, I presented “5 Keys to Implementing Social Media.” If you’ve been tasked with looking into social media for your company, this is a suggested framework to help you define the business case and strategy, determine resource requirements and allocation, and set internal controls and performance metrics.

Let’s start with the adoption matrix. In short, it’s a representation on how active your company and your customers are in conversations online. The horizontal axis plots how engaged your customers are about your company and related products and services; the vertical axis plots how aware your company is of the social media activity surrounding your brand, products, services, competitors, and industry. In other words, are people talking, and where do you fit in the conversation?

First quadrant: The Marketing Neanderthal

Neanderthals and modern humans were contemporaneous species, co-existing with Cro-Magnon in Europe for about 10,000 years. Despite their larger physical size and brains, Neanderthals are believed to have expired due to behavioral and cultural traits not shared by their more successful rivals.

Are your company’s marketing efforts floundering while your competitors achieve milestones online? Are you aware of your customer’s online conversations about you, if they exist? If your community is not active, do you understand the trade offs you’re making?

Most hospitals (some exceptions here: Hospital Social Network List) and educational institutions fit in this quadrant, with neither the interest nor resources to devote to researching how to develop and connect with their community online. However, they are meaningful spaces which are potentially rich with conversations.

Second quadrant: The Wise Monkeys

So you suspect your customers are engaged in conversations about your brand, products, services, or customer service online, but you’d rather turn a blind eye? Maybe only Apple can get away with that, and only while their products rock. At least they no longer sue leakers. But Internet bastions Google and Amazon paid their dues recently. Motrin too.

What about Nestlé, who was absent from the conversation, and then showed snark? Here’s a summary, from imediaconnection:

Now, by all accounts it was Greenpeace that “started it” – with the creation of a snarky viral video (more on that in a moment).  Then, enter Nestle legal claiming trademark infringement and asking that the video be taken down.  This resulted in a fairly coordinated protest (some have called it attack) on Nestle’s Fan Page.   Then, Nestle certainly didn’t do itself any favors – with a few ham fisted responses.  Helpful Safety Tip to every corporate PR / Social Media Manager: deleting comments, or whipping out the “copyright/intellectual property” justifications are the social media equivalent of “let them eat cake”.

But, here’s the interesting part, whether you believe them or not, Nestle did respond to the Greenpeace report by “assuring” everyone that they will not use Palm Oil produced by the vendor that Greenpeace is asserting.  Why they aren’t doing this more vociferously on their Facebook Fan Page is something of a mystery.  Greenpeace then responded that their concessions “don’t go nearly far enough”.

Their conclusion is stunning:

But I wonder if, after a few more of these types of storms, we won’t see corporate brands tighten up and kill off some of the social media channels.   One thing I do know (and I’m not saying this about the Nestle case in particular) is that as practitioners we are going to have to start to call bullshit on the mob as often as we do the mobbed.  Just because they’re outside some company’s walls with pitchforks doesn’t mean they’re right.  Or does it?

You guessed it: corporate Wise Monkeys see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. Check off quadrant two of the social media adoption matrix.

Third quadrant: The Prisoner; The Thinker

Ok, so you know there’s something going on, and that you might tap into the potential of finding or developing or connecting with your community online. Unfortunately, you’re held in check, a Prisoner to your company’s restrictive policies, perhaps set in place by an overzealous legal department.

For instance, how many institutions block everyone from Facebook, like the high school I graduated from (many eons ago)? Not even the school’s administration is allowed access the platform that their students are so obviously using during the schoolday on their iPhones. Or what about Lehman Toyota, where I had my car serviced last weekend? I had many hours to spare while I waited, so I brought my laptop. The dealer had three locked wi-fi systems and informed me and another customer that access was indeed restricted. Graciously, a manager offered to hook us into landlines.

To their credit, AstraZeneca is trying out different social media platforms. The Nexium Facebook page and their AZHelps Twitter account are still a far cry from community management. Of course, part of the blame sits with the FDA (see this), which has not set out social media policies for the pharmaceutical industry.

“Thank you for all the recent comments! We are in the process of reviewing and posting them. We’ll have some new discussion topics shortly and in the coming weeks.” -Nexium on Facebook

The Thinker, on the other hand, suffers from paralysis by analysis, reading a lot about social media and attending conferences, yet not taking actionnable steps. 5 Keys to Social Media outlines a clear roadmap for implementation. Which companies are over-rationalizing social media? Here’s an interesting post comparing Ford (which “gets it”) with Chrysler. There’s a lot of room for improvement, there.

Fourth quadrant: The Pioneer

Many brands across many industries are actively engaging their community online. Kudos for taking the lead and showing the way for others to follow, and case studies abound highlighting emergent best practices. Mashable and ReadWriteWeb are good places to start for regular coverage of social media successes and failures by big brands and small.

Where does your organization fit on the adoption matrix? And where do you fit?

A warm word of thanks to Brett Petersel for retweeting (@brett) this presentation many times, driving it to thousands of views in under a week. The full deck is on Slideshare:

social media, adoption matrix, implementation, strategy, business, marketing, process, berlin, pharma, pharmaceutical

This is a live post from a SXSW roundtable on ER 2.0, March 14th, 2010

Hospitals and health care providers are slowly but surely using new media and social networking software for some of their primary objectives–treatment, research, education and outreach, and patient-provider communication. This presentation will feature best practices from case studies and prescribe future uses of new media in public health.

Ed Bennett University of Maryland Medical Center Ed Bennett manages web operations at the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS).He has over fifteen years experience working on the Internet, and has worn many hats ’ programmer, designer, consultant, information architect, start-up participant, etc. Since 1999 he has led the Medical System Web program building out large, content-rich websites designed to educate and attract new patients. His current focus is the growing use of Social Media and its potential impact on health care. Ed maintains the Hospital Social Network List, which tracks the social media activities of over 500 U.S. Hospitals.

Aimee Roundtree University of Houston-Downtown

Also panelling is Jen McCabe of Contagion Health.

How does this technology complicate HIPAA compliance?

There’s a saying: “Don’t say no, just say HIPAA.” There’s a lot of fear and trepidation around what might happen, but best practices are emerging from those providers who are experimenting first. For example, some have written commenting policies that protect them, and so on.

The involvement in physicians in the social space is disappointing. They have a disinclination toward transparency because of the traditional patient — physician relationship that has been ingrained since medical school.

Why are hospitals so slow to adopt social media?

Crossing into the space where patients have direct online interaction with their physician is still a long way away, because of security issues. However, when dealing with hospitals, it is a matter of showing them how much good is possible by using social technologies. We don’t remunerate doctors for interacting with patients in this way. Also, we are legally bound by regulatory bodies, and these social channels must comply with regulations as well. Twitter feeds are admissible in court.

One of the heaviest “things” to move is human resources. For example, the question of who is the person or people who are going to address “the tidal wave” of coming complaints.

The real-world experience is that 99% of comments are positive or neutral, and there are very few complaints: “the unexpected outcomes of social media for hospitals will be positive, because we’ve anticipated all the negatives” — Lee Aase, Mayo Clinic. Monitoring is the first step to understand how much is negative, how much is positive, where are the reported variances, and who is doing the talking. One of the most efficient means of communicating is to attach a face to an institution, and to add 10% to 20% personal tweeting into these accounts. Examples are Scott Monty of Ford and Frank Eliason of Comcast. By the way, it’s great to get negative feedback, because that highlights what needs to be changed. Liability poisons the environment, but fewer lawsuits arise when people treat people like people, rather than withholding information.

What are victim’s rights online?

The place to start for patient advocates is with systemic advocacy for patient rights in general, so people start to trust you over time on a case by case basis.

What are the agents of change in hospitals and who should we work with?

Understand who holds the budgets and who is involved with patient care. Understand their community engagement strategies in the real world and show them parallels online. However, understand also that it is too early to prove that social media changes behavior, so it’s challenging to legitimize these tools.

What about compatibility with hospital systems?

Hospitals use lots of systems that don’t talk to each other. Some hospitals are blocking Facebook access, for instance, whereas patients are using Facebook to talk about the hospital. The implementation of EMR is addressing this to an extent and driving a change in behavior. Vendors need to adopt open source standards and look at innovations like microsyntax and HL7 from MIT.

What about communicating with patients through mobile devices, particularly for improving the customer service experience? By the way, hospitals provide the most opaque and worst customer service experiences.

Some hospitals and surgeons are using Twitter to provide updates during an operation, after waivers are signed. This way patients’ families can be kept up to date during the hours of waiting. It’s a small but important step in customer satisfaction.

In Africa and the Philippines, social media adoption is increasing because social tools are the most inexpensive to use for communications, compared to legacy or traditional systems.

The developing world is driving innovation out of need. Maybe the answer in developed nations is to identify organizations like freelancer’s union, irobot, and others, that have an incentive to disrupt the healthcare system. Just build really awesome stuff and you will start to see behavior change and integration.

We already have  a well developed social media strategy, but our challenge now is to get the physicians engaged. Is this even possible?

Hire for that. Find physicians that are already blogging. Find a leader that sets the example. Find someone that others will follow.

What about crisis communications?

If as an institution you start to communicate and to tweet, then you start to become the source of truth (rather than the media or someone else). Go through @swhealthcare’s Twitter account to understand how they responded to crisis.

One of the best ways to drive change is to demand it as the healthcare consumers we all are.

One big trend is curation of health information, which is growing at an astronomical rate. Demand will never match supply, so curation is absolutely key.

er20, sxsw, sxswi, social media, health20, health, hospitals, healthcare providers, social networks

This is a live post from a SXSW panel about StoryCorps, March 14th , 2010

	Suneel Gupta Kahani Movement
	Dr Sanjay Gupta Kahani Movement

“Story”: a narration of the events in the life of a person or the existence of a thing.

Saneel and Sanjay are brothers. The panel starts off with a clip showing an family in India and the Kahani Movement: “Some stories are never told … because no one asks.”

Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The ingredients of a story include a central character or a hero and this project itself has a hero. StoryCorp’s hero is Louis “Studs” Terkel, the “premier chronicler of American life,” according to John Stewart. Ordinary people have extraordinary stories to tell. More importantly, if you don’t capture these stories, there is a time limit and the stories disappear. The Guptas are taking this mission to the web. The word Kahani means story in Indian. Every community has stories worth preserving.

If technology is a catalytic, what would Studs do?

1. Chronicle the story by shifting the conversation from the studio to the living room
2. Expand from audio conversations to film, photos, and writings
3. Everyone is a Storyteller, so they are creating a network of storytellers who are collaborating, connecting, and sharing each others’ stories — to tell one common story
4. We’ve made it approachable — give clips a sense of optimism and hope. Steven Spielberg is advising Kahani Movement with the experience he garnered from his work with the Shoah project, where he captured many stories before they expired.
5. We’ve made it focused. The focus is Indian Immigration to the United States from the 1960’s to the 1970’s. Creating a community around a central topic

So, where is this project headed?

As happens with any population of people, there’s a tendency to paint that people with one broad brush stroke. A project like this adds heterogeneity to a population. Things that surprise are already starting to emerge. For example, because the immigrants were not fleeing persecution or prosecution, there was no galvanizing force to tie the people together. So what helped created the community?

Technology allows for deeper engagement for each member.

Remix. Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons license. A lot of derivative works are being posted and shared on the site.

Studs passed away in 2008, so the Guptas have been doing a lot of homework to understand what he was thinking and what was driving him. “People are ready to say ‘Yes, we are part of a world’.” This could lead to broadening out Kahani, to create more Kahani’s, by archiving and spinning out other initiatives. There could be a long tail of Kahani Movements. Our call to action to you today is start, and start soon, because time is limited.

Questions:

What about controversial or sensitive stories, like about abortion?

The Kahani Movement or StoryCorps are great opportunities to share intimate and difficult conversations by recording conversations within families, as family members interview each other.

What incentives are there for people to be involved in online communities if they don’t live online?

What Kahani is trying to achieve is online but much of it happens offline, around family living room tables. Some of the gaming panels at SXSW are interesting, because some of the motivational aspects around gaming could be applied.

Are the guidelines for storytelling, particularly around the questions to ask and also about how to use technology to accumulate stories?

Skype has been a good tool. One of the most powerful tools is to pull out a picture and ask: “tell me about this photo.“

How does the social network work?

It starts with the profile and with the visual and textual elements you are sharing with others. That’s when the connections start to happen between people. Collaboration ensues from connections, which are based on shared interests.

Is there a structure or best practices about how to capture an entire lifespan? What about technical best practices? For example, my parents are not comfortable in front of a camera, so how do I capture their stories?

The top priority is the story, not the technology. As far as best practices, it traces back to you and your own comfort. Ultimately, we are comprised of moments of life, so let’s go back and explore thoroughly the moments that mattered.

Note to self: An important aspect is the creation of social capital by building credibility through mutual verification of stories.

The following is paraphrased from a presentation made by Allison Cerra, Chief Marketing Officer, Americas Region — Alcatel-Lucent, at the Social Networking Conference 2010 in Miami, FL.

Consider the following identified marketing challenges in the current online social media ecosystem:

1. Service providers are constrained: Today, just 20 households consume more broadband than the entire bandwidth used in 1995
2. Developer community aren’t making money: They need to launch and maintain services that end-users want for free
3. End-users are frugal: How to get users to pay for things when they are accustomed to having things for free?
4. Marketers are strapped: Very few in the marketing space have figured out how to monetize things

The common thread above is that current business models aren’t stable in today’s social media ecosystem.

However, research indicates that conditions can be created to market services better online. Based on a survey and focus group sessions with over 1,000 social networkers, three key points stand out:

• Social networkers are not that social

A recurring theme in the study was: “I have a lot of relationships I try to maintain, but I don’t have time to develop deep substantive relationships.”

Also, social networking is all about the users: their social networking experience “validates” them. For example, being tagged in a photo is an egocentric pleasure: to the user, it means “I am important”.

In contrast, MMORPG players are not introverts at all, quite the opposite. These people love the network, not the game. It’s about sharing a passion so intimately with a small group of people, that the relationship becomes more important than the game.

• Social networkers can be convinced to pay

People online are used to having things for free. But what if you know your friend’s status at any time, regardless of the device you’re using? What if you know where your friends are at any time? How would this change the social networking experience?

Let’s think about an “advanced friend finder” application: I land in Miami and I can know where you are and what places you recommend and whether you are free to meet or not, based on your location data, your presence, your history of geolocation, and your shared calendar. If this type of ecosystem of services is put together, would you pay for this type of  information?

Another example is, what if you meet someone at a conference and two weeks later they call you and you don’t remember them well anymore? But how about if when they call you, their LinkedIn profile pops up automatically? Would you pay for this type of information, if services were integrated in this way?

Research show that social networkers are willing to pay for these types of value-added services. (Also, they are not as averse to advertising as we might like to think.)

• Privacy is a concern … or is it?

If I’m going to give you my presence and location, isn’t that too much info? In focus groups, people are not comfortable with sharing information. However, in practice, people do share this information when the following three conditions are met:

1. You allow  users to opt-in (rather than opt-out) — the user must remain in control
2. Social networkers are more concerned about when information about them is released, than who has access to it
3. Social networkers overwhelmingly trust service providers more than social app developers with their sensitive information

Conclusion:

The above suggests that when privacy concerns are addressed and social applications are combined with service providers, new conditions can be created to develop an ecosystem that is more conducive to marketing and monetizing online services.

snc2010, social media, business, models, marketing, umcnj595, monetization

University of Miami — School of Communication
CNJ595: Web 2.0: Social Media: Communication, Community, and Literacy
Spring Semester 2010

SYLLABUS

COURSE DESCRIPTION AND PURPOSE:

In a few short years, social media has profoundly changed the online communication landscape. With the advent of new tools and platforms, more and more people are publishing and participating in conversations online. Mass adoption of social computing technologies has led to new types of mediated interaction as people maintain more relationships than any time prior.

As former members of the audience become the creators of content, corporations and media organizations lose control of their marketing message and individuals face new challenges in terms of privacy, identity, and the maintenance of virtual relationships.

After an overview of how we got here, this course explores these opportunities and challenges across a number of disciplines and technologies.

This course is grounded in practice, and you will be required to participate in social networks, forums, blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, and more. Class discussions, presentations by students, readings, and examples of emerging technologies and media will bring us greater understanding of the issues, evolution, and practice of social media. We will also learn from case studies, invited speakers, and our own learning journals, new effective strategies and applications of these platforms.

The class is highly participatory both offline and online. Between the weekly scheduled class meetings, this course’s discussion continues in a variety of online and virtual environments. Those who complete this course will know how to use social media productively, and have a framework for understanding and evaluating new tools and platforms.

ASSIGNMENTS/COURSEWORK:

We will be using a shared wiki, individual blogs, a bookmarking service, and individual twitter accounts as the web platforms for this course.

The wiki functions as the central space for collaboration, where assignments and readings will be posted and discussions will be held. The wiki will also have the required reading list, which may change during the course according to our progress.

The online requirements serve both to familiarize you with new web communication technologies and to continue the discussion beyond the confines of the campus.

• Wiki – 5% of final grade. The first requirement is to use the wiki as directed in the class assignments or to add to the discussion or common pages.

• Blog — 25% of final grade. The second is to publish a minimum of two blog posts each week on topics relevant to the class discussion, as described in the syllabus and context of the readings. Each blog post should link to relevant resources on the web. The blog will be evaluated on the quality of engagement with themes of the class, the clarity of expression, and the cultivation of community through regular posts and comments. Each blog post must include the tag “S10CNJ595”.

• Microblog – 10% of final grade. The third will involve maintaining a Twitter account active with at minimum one posting every 24hrs. Twitter is a free micro-blogging service and community where a post is 140 characters or less. Twitter posts will be evaluated on the cultivation of community through friending, retweets (and being retweeted), and general engagement through @replies.

• Social Bookmarking – 5% of final grade. The fourth is to bookmark websites that are of interest to the course, using the free service delicious ( http://del.icio.us/ or http://delicious.com ). Students will be expected to complete 40 bookmarks relevant to class topics throughout the semester, at least 20 of which should be done by mid-term. Each bookmark must also include the tag “S10CNJ595”.

• Topical Presentation and Discussion – 25% of final grade. You will be expected to deliver a presentation during the course.You may choose to research and present an existing relational technology (a social network or a social media tool), covering the following aspects: what is the history of the technology or platform? What are the relational aspects and functionalities? How is identity developed? What types of activities created digital traces? How are relationships created and displayed? How are communities formed and managed? How does the social discovery of information, news, and events occur? How does the platform or technology integrate with external web services?

  Alternatively, you may choose to interview a recognized thought-leader or entrepreneur in social media, including: how did they get started with social media? What is their field of expertise or strength in social media? What were the milestones in their own online development? What do they consider to be historical milestones in social media (case studies, new technologies, etc.)? What challenges have they faced and what battles have they fought along the way (anecdotes are important)? What is the future of social media?Presentations should be 20 minutes in length with accompanying visuals.

Participation — 20% of final grade. Class participation is required. Students are expected to do all the required readings for the course, to attend classes regularly, to have completed the reading in advance of classes, and to participate actively in class discussion. Students will facilitate discussion, together with one other student, on selected syllabus readings. Each reading will be presented by this team of two students, who will coordinate among themselves and come to class prepared to summarize the material, develop additional themes for further discussion and facilitate broad discussion, working from questions submitted by students. Students will be graded on the clarity of presentation and the level of understanding of the readings under discussion.

Final Exam — 10% of final grade. The final exam will evaluate your familiarity with social media concepts, case studies, and vocabulary.

COURSE TOPICS OUTLINE

Session 1 January 20, 2010 — Meet the social web

Class introductions: who are we and what are our interests; what do we expect and want out of this class?

Instructor and students introduce themselves, instructor explains objectives, assignments and expectations.

Course introduction: what has changed online, how and why we got here:

* Overview of social media and Web 2.0

*  Differences between traditional media and social media

*  Introduction to wikis, including PBwiki and MediaWiki

Session 2 January 27, 2010 — Blogging concepts, ethics, terms, tools, and techniques

*  Blogging culture: authenticity, transparency, authority, influence, ethics, and credibility

*  Writing for the web: how do people read and browse online?

*  Newspapers text vs. online text: similarities and contrasts

*  Corporate blogging

*  Hosting your own blog vs. using hosted blog platforms

*  Creation of a web site using WordPress content management system

*  Basics of HTML and CSS to get you out of a jam

*  Trackbacks, links, tags, sidebars, blogrolls, widgets, and feeds

*  Principal search engines for blogs

Session 3 February 3, 2010 — RSS feeds and feedreaders: techniques in distribution, productivity, and monitoring.

All you wanted to know about RSS but were afraid to ask:

*  Feed readers: manage your information overload and save time.

*  Google Reader and Feedly

*  Google Shared Items

*  Publishing and distributing your media online; syndicating your media and content to your communities through RSS

*  Monitoring your reputation, your brands and your keywords

*  Setting up feeds and alerts for the information that matters to you

*  Feedburner

*  Facebook feeds, Tumblr, Jaiku, FriendFeed and SocialThing

*  Blog and social network widgets

Session 4 February 10, 2010 — Social networks, identity, and your brand

*  Your life online: considerations when setting up an account

*  Your online CV: business networking with LinkedIn

*  Social Graph: 6 degrees of separation, in theory and practice

*  Online communities and social networks: becoming an active member and participating

*  Rapid cognition online

*  Social networking for promoting people, products, and services

*  How does social network design and architecture affect participation? What else affects participation?

Invited guest: Facebook app expert

* Comparing the platforms: LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, and more

*  Facebook apps and Open Social

*  Whose data is it? Closed gardens and network data portability

Session 5 February 17, 2010 — Additional concepts, platforms, and techniques

*  It’s all social. How people connect: framework for understanding and analysis

*  Social object: friend-based sociality and object-centered sociality

*  The social media starfish

*  OpenID

*  Photography on the web: what’s Flickr and how does it fit in?

*  Copyright and Creative Commons

*  Harnessing collective intelligence: social bookmarks, folksonomies, collaborative and active filtering

*  Google and Google News search hacks

Invited speaker: web analytics and SEO expert

*  How online robots and spiders index and crawl through your content

*  Metrics, measurement and analytics

*  Search engine optimization (SEO), search marketing, and social media optimization (SMO)

Session 6 February 24, 2010 — Video and audio distribution and sharing

* Mediasnacks. Filming, editing, and publishing a short video online

*  Recording an audio interview, editing, and uploading it

*  Use of images, graphs, and maps to illustrate texts

*  Creating Soundslides with photos and audio

*  Using Bittorrent for uploading and downloading large files

*  Conversational video: Seesmic is to YouTube what Twitter is to Blogger

Session 7 March 3, 2010 — Your identity online and offline.

Behavior affects credibility, authority, and influence.

What about privacy, security, and ethics?

Special guests: local bloggers are invited to class for a roundtable discussion on their experiences, over pizza and soft drinks

Session 8 March 10, 2010 — Virtual worlds, Second Life, and World of Warcraft

Virtual worlds exist in many forms, and many more are sure to be created. We first look at World of Warcraft, and then explore SecondLife, the immersive virtual world. We’ll look at ways to bridge the virtual and physical world in SecondLife.

Session 9 March 17, 2010 — SPRING RECESS / INTERCESSION

Required Readings: please consult the course wiki

Session 10 March 24, 2010 — Getting things done online, collective action, and sharing economies

What can be done alone? What can be done collectively? How do individuals build up social capital?  How can self-interest be leveraged to create public goods? How do people organize online into groups for cooperation, collaboration, and collective action? What are the relationships between collective action, community, and democracy? What mechanisms facilitate collective action and community? Do social networks allow for new forms of production (ie., “non-market peer production”)?

Session 11 March 31, 2010 — Cloud computing, SaaS, open source, browsers, and standards

Overview of open source culture and software. What factors lead to success? What motivates contributors?

Does most of your data reside on your hard drive, or in the cloud? Which data is where? Why? Which factors lead to greater migration of data online?

Does the desktop matter anymore? How does the browser continue to change, and why? What about new desktop (and mobile) clients? Also, we take a look at browser extensions.

Overview of software as a service providers and platforms, for private, personal business, and corporate use. What are the business models?

Session 12 April 7, 2010 — The changing role of PR and marketing

How has online participation in social media affected brand, positioning, advertising, and public relations? What role for community?

We explore case studies of successes and failure in social media communications by brands. Are companies having a hard time adjusting, and if so, why?

Guest speaker: PR 2.0 guru / expert

Session 13 April 14, 2010 — Citizen journalism

What are the models for journalism online? How do they leverage the community? What are the elements of citizen journalism sites? How is the information structured? In which ways do readers and the community participate? How to maintain relevance and quality? If you could build a citizen journalism site, what would it look like?

Session 14 April 21, 2010 — Citizen journalism, part II

What are the models for journalism online? How do they leverage the community? What are the elements of citizen journalism sites? How is the information structured? In which ways do readers and the community participate? How to maintain relevance and quality? If you could build a citizen journalism site, what would it look like?

Possible guest speaker: director of a citizen journalism website

Session 15 April 28, 2010 — Social media and real life

How do our online social activities affect our lives personally and professionally? What control do we maintain, and what have we given up? What further changes might we expect?

How might this course work better?

Session 16 May 5, 2010 — FINAL EXAM

Panel on Rebuilding the World with Free Everything, with:

• Doc Searls — Linux Journal
• Katherine Druckman — Linux Journal
• William Hurley — evil genius project
• Chris Anderson — Wired Magazine
• Dave Taylor — filmBUZZ

“Free” is the future of business. Steve Larsen says the world has more than 500,000 open source code bases now — all free. That’s a tall challenge for a huge pile of building material. Linux Journal presents a panel of creative hackers and business crafters to discuss constructing the future.

Free as in freedom and free as in beer. Freedom gave us the internet. Free is the title of Chris Anderson’s book.

By giving away content for free, it means more eyeballs. One model for magazines is to lock up content for a time period, say, 30 days; another model is to open up the content immediately, recognizing that a certain percentage of people will like to subscribe to the long form magazine content.

Starbuck’s should give out free iPhone cases with their logo on it. This is a huge marketing opportunity.

There are things that become common knowledge as they evolve. For example, server monitoring has become a free service. Companies in this area are giving away the 90% to concentrate on the 10% of stuff that requires consulting and is profitable.

Was there a connection between “The Long Tail” and “Free”? Definitely. Free is enabled by infinite shelf space. The near-zero marginal cost of an extra Amazon listing enables the “free”. The fascination was in researching the history of a very misunderstood word, which is becoming an economic model and defining business for the next era.

The internet is our biggest marketplace, but we’re just getting our sea legs now and understanding how it works. There is this enormous invisible energy and building materials that are making the surface we’re walking around on. But this is how things work: you invent the medium frst and then figure out how to monetize it later.

Wired Magazine pays among the highest rates in the world: about $3 a word. So an exclusively online publication of Wired would still cost about 50% of a paper publication, because of the human costs.

It’s hard to think about what the premium product should be and what people will pay for. But you can get around this by building the product with the community … and they will give you the business model. Most people understand there is economic reality and that you need to make money: they will accept that the monetization is there. If you build a community first, you build trust and people will be ready to pay money for services.

The patronage model may not work well and is where the “starving artist” comes from. It violates economic principles. In fact, you want the opposite, which is for the market to figure out how much something is worth.

If you’re in a nosedive, “free” is not the problem. The problem is the underlying paper, product or service. Whether it’s free or not is irrelevant.

Not everything has to be a profit center in your business; some things can be loss leaders in order to make money elsewhere.

Reddit accounts for 20M uniques and 40M pages view per month … and costs nothing. This is user-generated content that costs Wired nothing. So Wired has the mass audience with the magazine, and the very specific and granular with Reddit.

In the coming years, as bandwidth increases, there will be a complete breakdown of the movie distribution model.

The monetization of free is difficult. For example, someone needs to click on adwords in order to make some money. But this is just a problem of content. If you have nice content that’s updated consistently, you should be getting good CPM rates. Google sinks or swims based on their abilty to match ads to content.

How to combat misconception that just because the software is free, the services are not? The answer is to disappoint people and to say no.

It is factually true that micro-payments have failed to date. One of the reasons is that the process of paying is so high. If the transaction were less difficult, there would be more micropayments.

How can free apply to products with a very high cost base? There is a company that gives away electric cars and sells you the electricity. There are a lot of monetization opportunities in services as well.

Open question: would the iTunes store make more money if Apple just gave away iPods for free?

Another model is to give away free derivatives of work. The problem will be distribution for the free stuff. How do you incentivize distributors?

Keynote session at SXSW, with:

• Chris Anderson — Wired Magazine
• Guy Kawasaki — Alltop

In 2006, Chris Anderson introduced the concept of the Long Tail. His soon-to-be released book will talk about the power of free. Will his theories stand up to the tough questions of venture Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki?

If you want to create a freemium product, where do you set the bar? You don’t want to cripple the service, but you don’t want to set the bar too high to the extent no one will feel compelled to subscribe to the premium product? Twitter has crippled the product too much, to the point where it’s easy for Facebook to replicate the service and potentially catch up.

Free is the best way to maximize your reach because it lowers peoples’ barriers to entry. Converting 5% of a big number is the business model of free. The marginal cost of distributing a book is zero, so it should be free, since the optimal method of reading a book is still in paper.

Each one of us is our own platform and we each need to figure out how to convert our reputation and brand into money. That’s all of our jobs: build our audience the right way and give them something of value that keeps them there.

The problem is that our publishers are not making money from authors’ keynotes. For example, the music industry is perfectly fine except for one part of it: distribution and sale. The issue is, authors and musicians are now misaligned with their publishers and record labels. The question is, can labels and publishers represent bands adequately in social media?

What if someone follows me and I send them a direct message with a link to a free pdf? Is this a good model? “My test for spam: if I do it, it’s clever marketing. If someone does it to me, it’s spam.” –Guy Kawasaki

The word “free” is one of the most misunderstood words. Free is a word that’s laden with meaning. And the meaning has changed over time. Twentieth Century free is where products had a real cost, so you had to pay back the free quickly. Today, everything costs less to nothing, particularly digital media. Freemium is the inversion of the free sample model. Here, you give 95% of your product free and charge for 5%. Virtual worlds are experimenting with every possible way to charge and 5% of the population seems to be a good model. But people misunderstand how hard it is to convert 5% of people.

China and Brazil are the future of “free”. We have the first true truly competitive market, which is one where marginal costs are low. If you do not make your product for free, the market will do it for you by pirating your stuff. People then use piracy to cause celebrity, and celebrity to create cash.

Could Starbuck’s give away free coffee to attract and retain customers? Absolutely: it would be easy for them to do that.

The word free has a powerful meening in english, where we take the best part of the words (ie., freedom) and apply these associations to sell products. Imagine a flag in your head which pops up every time you hear a price and it raises barriers to you purchase. There is no correlation between free ad cheap. Utility comes first, price second. People now expect two levels from almost product: a simple, free version and a premium version.

Are people more motivated by something they lost, or by not getting something they could? Things that you don’t have and want loom large; that ‘s what tradtional marketing has done. Some information wants to be free and some wants to be expensive. You can have Guy for free on Twitter, or his customized version for thousands as a speaker.

On YouTube, the quality of video is not as important as the relevance. Same thing with companies: nowadays, you can start a company for almost no cost.

Open-source is free as in kittens: you have to look after them. A lot of the free stuff we have is because we support it communally.

Panel on “Appfrica: How Web Applications Are Helping Emerging Markets Grow” with:

• Jonathan Gosier — Appfrica
• Erik Hersman — Ushahidi / Afrigadget / WhiteAfrican.com
• David Kobia — Ushahidi
• Rose Shuman — Open Mind — Question Box
• TMS Ruge — Project Diaspora

Everything we thought we knew about Africa is wrong. Technology is leading growth, developmental aid is hurting it. The continent is incredibly rich while the people remain poor. How is technology (specifically the web and mobile devices) changing the narrative of sustainable economic growth in the African diaspora?

Aid organizations have not yet figured out how to use tools that have been there for years. For example, they’re just getting on the mobile bandwagon now.

In terms of trade versus aid, there are more trade-based initiatives. There are more opportunities to invest, rather than to just write a check. It’s not an attitude of anit-development aid, but rather to say: “give Africa a chance to find its own solutions.” If things are never being built up from the ground, nations will continue to remain dependent on development aid.

It is a must to have developers who live in Africa. You might as well not do it, if you’re bringing in developers from outside Africa. You need people with experience on the ground, people who are familiar with the issues. A western turn-key solution will not work.

Some of the exciting initiatives include:

• The Kamusi Project — online translations
• Ushahidi — mobile news reporting
• Project Diaspora - Mobile banking

Open source is playing a huge role in Africa, where anyone in the continent can contribute. Ushahidi is an example.

Africa is a very oral place, so ideas spread through word of mouth. Some of this is happening digitally now through text messaging, but most of it happens in a village context.

A wish of the panelist is to conduct more collaborative conversations with the West, rather than what too often occurs: the West talking down to Africans regarding technology.

Google and Grameen Bank are some of the larger companies with enough foresight to think about and invest in Africa right now.

Mobile has 30% penetration in Africa, which works out to about 300M people. Only 5% have access to the web, which is about 50M people. SMS is the one big communication technology in Africa. The fastest growing areas are Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Egypt. However, what’s more important than carving things out regionally is to think about rural vs. urban or rich vs. poor. Also, develop for what exists now: broadband is not there yet; people keep their cell phones for seven or eight years; etc.

“This technology will make you better is not a good argument, because ‘better’ is a questionable paradigm to strive for. Better for whom?“

A challenge is made: the panelist needs a laptop to take back to Uganda, by Tuesday evening.

sxsw, sxswi, sxsw09, sxswi09, afridev

Panel on “Breaking Boundaries: Mobile Web Access in Emerging Economies,” with:

• G Kofi Annan — Annansi LLC
• Charles McCathieNevile — Opera Software
• Matt Womer — World Wide Web Consortium
• David Rogers — OMTP Ltd

In many regions, the mobile phone is the primary tool for Web access. As mobile Web connections increase in developing nations the impact will be significant. This panel examines the differences between mobile Web access in developing and developed regions and how the mobile Web can affect social development.

Why is the mobile web interesting in the developing world? More people have access to a mobile phone than to clean, running water. More people have a mobile phone than a computer. About 80% of the world has some sort of mobile coverage, so it’s obvious to say that mobile should be a point of online access. People in the developing don’t use mobile phones just for mobility. They are using it to access the internet with browsers like Opera Mini.

The uniqueness of the emerging economies is that mobile products must be adapted to how these economies are growing, so you need to analyze usage patterns, get feedback, and iterate often. Closed systems will not work because the barrier is too high; you need to be using open source software. Open source is also good because it avoids duplication of efforts.

In developing markets, the top applications are Facebook, MySpace. People are using this for entertainment and for connecting socially. There are many local sites that are big in their respective countries as well. Some examples of leading-edge applications in emerging economies include mobile banking, health care apps, and agriculture.

There’s a tendency to think that what we have in the West is what developing countries should aspire to. But if text is working, then that’s what should be used. There are a lot more options with text at this point and that’s what should be explored. What matters are the design challenges of “being local”, as you attempt to cater to locals and travellers. For example, the mobile capacity inside Australia matches demand (actually, you only really get about 2/3 of what is advertised). Because of the congestion of international lines, you only get about 10% when you travel outside of Australia.

Emerging markets are often in physically hostile environments. There is a unique opportunity now to provide a platform for the government or humanitarian organization to create a network that would constantly monitor the environment and give an early warning of impending natural disasters.

In developing markets, there is demand for either the most expensive smartphones, or the cheapes phones. There is not much demand in the middle: you can either afford the most expensive gear … or you can’t.