Archive for Social media

Building Your Brand with Web 2.0 Tools

March 14, 2009  |  Social media  |  View Comments

Panel on Build­ing Your Brand with Web 2.0 Tools, with:

  • CC Chap­man — The Advance Guard
  • Dave Delaney — Grif­fin Technology
  • Saul Colt — FreshBooks
  • Loic Le Meur — Seesmic
  • Chris Bro­gan — New Mar­ket­ing Labs

Get­ting atten­tion for your brand (per­sonal or com­pany) is eas­ier than ever thanks to the ole’ inter­web but doing it with “zing” is still key to build­ing a fol­low­ing. Learn and ask ques­tion from the peo­ple who have built brands and careers by doing it with “zing”

Build­ing a brand is eas­ier than ever before thanks to the inter­net. It’s like broad­cast TV, except every­one has their own show if they want it. The way you com­mu­ni­cate online will tell peo­ple more about you than your resume ever will.

Ques­tion: How should peo­ple man­age and bal­ance per­sonal vs pro­fes­sional life as you brand your­self on Face­book and other plat­forms?

Answer: This ques­tion is most often asked by GenY as they post their col­lege pic­tures online and tran­si­tion to job hunt­ing. Gen­er­ally, you should be “you” online and remain authen­tic and true to yourself.

Ques­tion: What’s the story of how you all started? Did you start from zero?

Answer:

  • Mostly every­body starts out from zero. I started blog­ging … because I wanted to start blog­ging. Just be your­self and do it. If you’re build­ing a brand, you have to fig­ure out what’s right for the brand. For exam­ple, Twit­ter is not right for some brands. It’s a ‘weird, scary feel­ing’ when peo­ple start lis­ten­ing to you … but it’s nice and proves you’re doing some­thing right. Keep doing it.” –CC Chapman
  • When some­one crit­i­cized me, I actu­ally thanked them, say­ing I had learned a lot from the crit­i­cism. We later became friends” –Loic Le Meur
  • You can never ever have the last word on the Inter­net.” –Saul Colt
  • Some brands are just not ready to talk to the con­sumer. They’re just not … and they will fail if they try.” — CC Chapman
  • Be help­ful. Don’t talk about your­self, rather, be help­ful to oth­ers.” –Chris Brogan


Ques­tion: How involved do you get into your clients’ social media strat­egy? Will you tweet on their behalf?

Answer: “Clients need to learn how to do this for them­selves, although they need hand hold­ing and train­ing in the begin­ning. They need to under­stand what a troll is and how to deal with them. But ulti­mately, a client needs to drive their own car.” –CC Chapman

Ques­tion: Where should I focus my energies?

Answer:
“Spend a lit­tle bit of time every­where and fig­ure out what works best for you, and then spend your time there.” –Saul Colt
“If you use Ping.fm, you can broad­cast to many ser­vices at once.” –Loic Le Meur
“If you do the mul­ti­ple one to many thing with Ping.fm, you’re not gen­er­at­ing con­ver­sa­tion.” –Chris Bro­gan

Ques­tion: A lot of star­tups focus on stealth mode. Should they do this? And should star­tups have a dou­ble “O”, like Google?

Answer: “Don’t fear com­pe­ti­tion, share as much as you can, and track the feed­back and online con­ver­sa­tion.” –Loic Le Meur

Ques­tion: (unintelligible)

Answer: “Social media is a mar­ket­ing chan­nel. But we never approached Twit­ter as a mar­ket­ing chan­nel. We see it as a rela­tion­ship chan­nel. Frankly, talk­ing about online invoic­ing is bor­ing, so we talk about other stuff, like movies.” –Saul Colt

Ques­tion: How about build­ing brands in local com­mu­ni­ties, rather than on a national or inter­na­tional level?

Answer:

  • One of the things you can do is to orga­nize local events, like Pod­Camps and Bar­Camps and Geek Break­fasts, to bring peo­ple together and build a com­mu­nity. ” –Dave Delaney
  • Use Twit­ter to have small con­ver­sa­tions and to reach out locally. Twit­ter is like a box of Legos: you build some­thing one piece at a time.” –Chris Brogan
  • If you start speak­ing with peo­ple, they will buy at *your* store … just because they’ve spo­ken with you” –CC Chapman

Ques­tion: What about “re-branding” in an open and trans­par­ent soci­ety, for exam­ple, when a prod­uct sucks?

Answer:

  • Please remem­ber that your legal team is your legal coun­sel: they are not your company’s oper­at­ing offi­cials.” –Chris Brogan
  • Never crit­i­cize your com­peti­tors. Never do it as an indi­vid­ual either.” –Loic Le Meur

Ques­tion: Most of our clients’ bud­gets are dry­ing up, so they are turn­ing to new media. We have two types of clients: those with ideas that suck, and those with no ideas at all. What oppor­tu­ni­ties are there 

Answer: “Seek out Beth Kanter”

Ques­tion: (missed it)

Answer: “Read Shel Holz’s book ‘Tac­ti­cal Trans­parency’” –Chris Bro­gan

Ques­tion: Busi­ness don’t expose who the indi­vid­u­als who are blog­ging or twit­ter­ing on their behalf. What’s the best practice?

Answer:
“Your com­pet­i­tive advan­tage is your per­son­al­ity” –Saul Colt
“The slip­pery slope is con­nect­ing with the per­son and not the brand. What hap­pens when that per­son leaves? For exam­ple, when Scoble left Microsoft — what have they done since then?” –CC Chap­man
“Dell is han­dling it well, with @RichardatDell, @LionelatDell, etc.” –Chris Brogan

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Try making yourself more interesting

March 13, 2009  |  Social media  |  View Comments
Brian Oberkirch mod­er­ated a panel on “Try mak­ing your­self more inter­est­ing,” by pan­elists (this is a para­phrased live blog post):
  • DL Byron — Bike Hugger
  • Amit Gupta — Photojojo
  • David Rees — mnftiu.cc
  • Kristina Halvor­son — Brain Traffic

There are no cheat codes for com­mu­nity. No Charles Atlas short­cuts to make your pet project the one to rule them all. Want peo­ple to think you’re awe­some? Be awe­some. This panel promises a bullshit-free look at how you might tune out the jib­ber jab­ber, tune in to those who mat­ter, put your head down and make your online ser­vice a lit­tle bit more epic each day. We’ll dis­sect Bike Hug­ger, Pho­to­jojo, Metafil­ter, and other exam­ples of Web charm for what *you* can do. Today, and tomor­row. And the day after. Which is how you will become what you want to be.

Accord­ing to Oberkirch:

Mar­keters get into this mind­frame, this thing, of look­ing for the lat­est “tac­tic”. As we know, this doesn’t work. Instead, “Do Epic Shit”. One of the com­pa­nies that “Does Epic Shit” really well is Threadless.

Here are some tips on how to be more awesome:

  • Appren­tice your­self to great work. Draw inspi­ra­tion and learn from what oth­ers are doing.
  • Give side projects some front & cen­ter time. This will become your future, after all.
  • Focus on deli­cious details. Growth is about doing small things right. There are huge pay­offs from tweak­ing small things.
  • Go long. We have no atten­tion spans. But things take time. This is one to one … get into a long time horizon.
  • Share. Gen­er­ate more value than you capture.
  • Iron­i­cally, it takes courage to do the things you love.

In short, don’t treat peo­ple like you’re just inter­ested in sell­ing some­thing to them. Talk to them like they’re human beings. Mar­keters are using to talk­ing AT peo­ple; now, learn to engage them in a conversation.

Finally, model the behav­ior in your orga­ni­za­tion. Show peo­ple what works. Show them new things.

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The ecosystem of news

March 13, 2009  |  Social media  |  View Comments

Steven John­son of outside.in talks about “The Ecosys­tem of News” and “old growth media”. This live blog post is mostly para­phrased:

It is now con­ven­tional wis­dom that the news­pa­per as we have come to know it for last cen­tury is over, or will be in a mat­ter of years. The ques­tion is whether we’re going to spend our time griev­ing over the loss, or whether we’re going to use this moment as an oppor­tu­nity to invent some­thing even bet­ter. We’re inevitably mov­ing from the “paper of record” model to a some­thing more dis­trib­uted, a news ecosys­tem, but that doesn’t mean we can’t con­sciously define the shape of that sys­tem. So let’s fig­ure out what val­ues we want to pre­serve from the older news­pa­per par­a­digm, and what val­ues we want to improve upon — and then let’s go build it!

To under­stand the future of news, you need to look at the past. If you wanted to find out news about the Mac in the 80’s and 90’s, you read Mac­World; only break­ing news would make it to the New York Times. In the early 90’s, the chan­nels started to widen, and a few years later, the web arrived. New Apple sites started pop­ping up and later Apple brought out its own offi­cial web­sites. Nowa­days, there is a huge diver­sity of infor­ma­tion about Apple … and the lag to get new infor­ma­tion is sec­onds. The level of sophis­ti­ca­tion of blog posts also far exceed what any news­pa­per would even attempt.

The metaphors we’ve used for the changes in media tell us a lot about the changes going on. Ecosys­tem is a good metaphor: it’s com­plex and dif­fer­ent from an assem­bly line. Yesterday’s ecosys­tem is a bar­ren desert and today’s is a thriv­ing jun­gle. This is a good indi­ca­tor of the future of the news information.

Peo­ple are pan­ick­ing about two things:  1) news orga­ni­za­tions are going to dis­ap­pear and 2) impor­tant bits of infor­ma­tion, ie., “news”, will dis­ap­pear as well. Peo­ple decry the alleged demise of war report­ing and of inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism: blog­gers are not likely to get out of their paja­mas to report on these things. The web doesn’t have an intrin­sic abil­ity to cover news bet­ter; it just cov­ers news faster.

But now think about the ecosys­tem of polit­i­cal news dur­ing the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion: polit­i­cal blogs like Dai­lyKos to YouTube, Twit­ter, Face­book and the can­di­dates’ own web­sites, all the news was well cov­ered … and in fact, thrived online. There are more per­spec­tive, depth, and sur­face now.

Really, we now real­ize we were liv­ing in a desert dis­guised as a rainforest!

When you pick up the New York Times, there are only a few sto­ries you are inter­ested in. But when you walk in your neigh­bor­hood, there are dozens of sto­ries you would like to know bet­ter … and that will never be cov­ered in the NYT. This is the long tail and the Times will never even attempt this. And this is what the best can do. In fact, the Times itself is now launch­ing local Brook­lyn blogs.

We have grown from read­ing Mac­World to expect­ing to see an instant keynote of Steve Jobs. We take it for granted that we can do things like geo­t­ag­ging news … but the old growth media did not bring this to us.

It is pos­si­ble that inves­tiga­tive report­ing will not thrive. On the other hand, the new ecosys­tem may free up tra­di­tional media to do what they do best: war report­ing and muckracking.

There is an objec­tion to the ecosys­tem of news model: it is com­plex and there is more noise than ever before. Can we expect the gen­eral pub­lic to nav­i­gate the new ecosys­tem with the same skill and dis­cre­tion (and dig­i­tal lit­er­acy) as we can?

The funny thing about the news­pa­per today is that their online audi­ence is grow­ing faster than their print cir­cu­la­tion is shrink­ing. Mea­sured by pure audi­ence inter­est, news­pa­pers have never been more relevant.

The implied model of every news orga­ni­za­tion is “all the news that’s fit to link”.

The ecosys­tem of news model pre­dicts we will have a layer of “NEWS”:

  • Pro­fes­sional journalists
  • Pro­fes­sional bloggers
  • Non-profit jour­nal­ists
  • Ama­teur bloggers
  • Direct events
  • Pub­lic data — API’s (every local gov­ern­ment will have an API to its own data)

and a layer of “COMMENTARY”:

  • Pun­dits / Columnists
  • Blog­gers
  • Schol­ars

and a layer of “CURATION(ie., of decid­ing what’s good or not):

  • Social Media
  • Pro­fes­sional Editors
  • Aggre­ga­tors
  • Group fil­ters

and a layer of “DISTRIBUTION”:

  • Tra­di­tional media
  • Aggre­ga­tors
  • Viral word of mouth

The tragedy now is that the finan­cial melt­down and some over lever­ag­ing by news orga­ni­za­tions is cram­ming what should have been a decade-long tran­si­tion into the space of just a few years. This is a tragedy for two rea­sons. First, it inflicts a lot of stress and dam­age on news pro­fes­sion­als who are doing excel­lent work. Also, it dis­tracts us from build­ing the new model by attempt­ing to shore up the failed model of the old growth media.

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Everything you know about web design is wrong!

March 13, 2009  |  Social media  |   |  View Comments

Dan Willis from Sapi­ent talks about how “Every­thing you know about web design is wrong” (this post is live-blogged and mostly paraphrased):

Just as early film­mak­ers strug­gled to break free from the con­ven­tions of live the­ater, after 10+ years Web design­ers are still trapped in the struc­tures of the past. For­get pages, lin­ear text and other archaic ves­tiges of design’s print ances­try; the sep­a­ra­tion of con­tent from pre­sen­ta­tion has already changed everything.”

In essence,

  • Every­thing we know about web design is what we know about print design; many web­sites are just print mag­a­zine in disguise
  • They rely on the head­line for­mat and then become a text experience
  • The film indus­try evolved dra­mat­i­cally into a new art form: “one plus one equals three”

We don’t know what tran­scen­dent web design will look like yet, but here are some leads into it (this is part of the new gram­mar of web design):

  • Ran­dom voyeurism: an exam­ple is Flickrvision
  • Self-aware (but uncon­trol­lable) con­tent: data is get­ting smarter and smarter all the time with meta­data and the seman­tic web; as the medium tran­scends, you will see more and more self-aware data
  • User-created con­text: con­text mat­ters — it is every­thing; print pub­lish­ers con­trol the con­text, but this doesn’t hap­pen online; the web is about the sin­gle user and the choices they make. Fight­ing the user and con­trol­ling their data will fail gloriously.
  • Ambi­ent aware­ness: (ie., “periph­eral vision”); Mozart has been described at the same time as both triv­ial and pro­found: same thing with Twit­ter. Indi­vid­ual updates are insignif­i­cant; taken together, there’s some­thing pro­found going on. It’s not a flash in the pan, because it’s some­thing that deals with human beings. Each update is a dot in a pointil­list paint­ing … and it will lead to some­thing. This is some­thing going on right now and we will dis­cover what that some­thing is soon. And then some­one will try to mon­e­tize that ;)
  • Expe­ri­en­tial con­tent: the expe­ri­ence of a roller­coaster itself is the con­tent; it’s impos­si­ble to describe the expe­ri­ence unless you ride the roller­coaster your­self. Same with mmporgs. In a theme park you design where the rides are and you put the ele­ments in place, but then the user becomes the author and designer of her expe­ri­ence. The web designer needs to share space with the user, who become an author, craft­ing their own experience.

So, take chunks of con­tent and relate them by meta­data, so the user can nav­i­gate this. The user dri­ves the con­text and the news­room becomes the engine for con­tent. The news­room no longer con­trols the expe­ri­ence, but facil­i­tates it.

Look and feel is no longer help­ful for design­ers or for peo­ple out­side of design. Visual design dis­guises lots of flaws … and wins awards. But design is not an end, it’s a means to an end. Design solves prob­lems. Design­ers need to step up and define the prob­lem … and then solve them.

This is a dis­rup­tion. Will design­ers step up? Do they have the skills? Do they have the inter­est? Design is mov­ing and design­ers will have to change as well.

Think about the TV dinnner. Design today is like that tray: don’t let your peas touch your steak or your pota­toes. Inter­ac­tion, info, visual, and infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture are all com­parte­men­tal­ized today. But for the 21st cen­tury, the model is not TV din­ner, it’s jam­bal­aya. So many ingre­di­ents and vari­a­tions of spices go into jam­bal­aya. You can iden­tify exactly what those ingre­di­ents are before they go into the pot … but once it’s cooked, you can no longer sep­a­rate out the ingre­di­ents. And good jam­bal­aya is life-changing stuff.

Tips for tran­scen­dent web design:

  • Orga­nize cross-discipline teams; exploit and pro­tect expertise
  • Design for spe­cific users and their spe­cific needs
  • Embrace your ignorance
  • Don’t be dis­tracted by busi­ness mod­els that don’t beg­ing and end with the user
  • Don’t be dis­tracted by technology

Arti­cle: http://www.dswillis.com/sxsw/everything.pdf

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Course Syllabus on Social Media Communication, Community, and Literacy

I’ve pub­lished a cur­ricu­lum for social media lit­er­acy at the col­lege and grad­u­ate level.

This is based on my expe­ri­ence teach­ing the sub­ject at the Uni­ver­sity of Miami School of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and on the pre­sen­ta­tions and work­shops I’ve given. The course­work and some of the top­ics are also inspired by Howard Rheingold’s class on Vir­tual Worlds / Social Media:

In a few short years, the Web 2.0 has pro­foundly changed the com­mu­ni­ca­tion land­scape. With the advent of new social media tools, more and more peo­ple are par­tic­i­pat­ing and engag­ing in the con­ver­sa­tion online. As for­mer mem­bers of the audi­ence become the cre­ators of con­tent, cor­po­ra­tions and media orga­ni­za­tions lose con­trol of the mes­sage. After an overview of how and why we got here, this course will guide you through what works with social net­works, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, media shar­ing, lifestreams, tag­ging and other social media tools. Since these tools and ser­vices are so new and con­tin­u­ally chang­ing, stu­dents’ degree of knowl­edge about the inter­net is not rel­e­vant. For con­tin­ued effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion, using these tools is not optional, it’s required.

The course will explore the new media land­scape in terms of online expres­sion, social net­work­ing, iden­tity man­age­ment, com­mu­nity build­ing, and cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism. How is social media chang­ing the way you work and live? What are the impli­ca­tions for you and for the orga­ni­za­tions you will work with? What oppor­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges do indi­vid­u­als, news orga­ni­za­tions, and busi­nesses face regard­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion, identity/brand man­age­ment, and com­mu­nity build­ing? How do we under­stand, par­tic­i­pate in, and lever­age com­mu­ni­ties in our cur­rent age of many-to-many media?

This course is grounded in prac­tice, and stu­dents will be required to par­tic­i­pate in social net­works, forums, blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, folk­sonomies, and vir­tual worlds. Class dis­cus­sions, pre­sen­ta­tions by stu­dents, read­ings, and exam­ples of emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies and media will bring us greater under­stand­ing of the issues 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 blogs, tags, wikis, social net­works, Twit­ter and Flickr pro­duc­tively, and have a frame­work for under­stand­ing and eval­u­at­ing new social media tools and platforms.

The full syl­labus includ­ing the course top­ics and course­work is on the wiki. This syl­labus is dis­trib­uted under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.

You, the online brand

We had another great meetup at Refresh­Mi­ami last night at Yahoo! His­panic Amer­i­cas. Adam Singer pre­sented a “Cof­fee 2.0″ social media case study, Michael Mont­gomery spoke about micro­for­mats, I pre­sented “You, the online brand”, attached below, and Davide Di Cillo pre­sented his new Twit­ter social foot­ball ser­vice, Twoot­ball:

Just why did Davide cre­ate Twoot­ball? He says:

I was in an unfor­tu­nate bind: I am Ital­ian and I love soc­cer. Of course, I wanted to cre­ate a Twit­ter appli­ca­tion about soccer.

But then I real­ized that no one in Italy uses Twit­ter, and no one here watches soccer!

So I had to make a Twit­ter appli­ca­tion about Amer­i­can football …

LOL!

The pre­sen­ta­tions were great and it was fun to catch up with every­one after­wards at Novecento’s.

“You, the online brand”

View SlideShare pre­sen­ta­tion or Upload your own. (tags: brand social)

Social Media Club forms interim board

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

Social media framework for discussion

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.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

May 7, 2008  |  Social media  |  , , , ,  |  View Comments

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Social object and the object-centered environment

Table of con­tents for object-centered social­ity series

  1. The use of social objects as arte­facts for iden­tity management
  2. Social objects and the observer’s paradox
  3. Social object and the object-centered environment

Sergeant Jalo­nen must have spent his child­hood in a con­crete sandbox

After I grad­u­ated from col­lege, I com­pleted manda­tory mil­i­tary ser­vice in the Finnish Army. The year-long expe­ri­ence yielded intense expe­ri­ences, life­long friend­ships and lots of sto­ries. One of them comes to mind: Jalo­nen and I were the first two sol­diers from our com­pany to be pro­moted to the rank of Sergeant. While I was pro­moted for tech­ni­cal skills in field oper­a­tions, Jalo­nen was cho­sen because he was a strict dis­ci­pli­nar­ian, as tough as nails. So tough was he, that our company’s sol­diers con­cluded among them­selves that he must have spent his child­hood in a con­crete sandbox!

Sur­round­ings and sit­u­a­tions affect your behavior

I never gave this story much thought except to joke about it with my friends.  Aside from the humor, how­ever, the sug­ges­tion is that a child­hood spent play­ing in con­crete sand­box will toughen you up. Were they too quick to judge? What part of Jalonen’s per­son­al­ity is attrib­ut­able to a dif­fi­cult child­hood, and what part is attrib­ut­able to the sit­u­a­tion of being in the army?

In “Blink,” Mal­colm Glad­well describes how peo­ple tend to over-emphasize personality-based expla­na­tions for behav­iors and dis­re­gard sit­u­a­tional ones (see fun­da­men­tal attri­bu­tion error). For instance, it’s tempt­ing to stereo­type a work col­league by say­ing “she’s tough nego­tia­tor.” How­ever, that same per­son may be seen dif­fer­ently by friends and fam­ily, who might describe the same per­son by aspects not nec­es­sar­ily shown at work: “fun-loving, car­ing, gen­er­ous, etc.” Uni­ver­sity of Oslo pro­fes­sor Ole Hanseth fur­ther explains,

You do not go about doing your busi­ness in a total vac­uum but rather under the influ­ence of a wide range of sur­round­ing fac­tors. The act you are car­ry­ing out and all of these influ­enc­ing fac­tors should be con­sid­ered together. This is exactly what the term actor net­work accom­plishes. An actor net­work, then, is the act linked together with all of its influ­enc­ing fac­tors (which again are linked), pro­duc­ing a network.

Can your phys­i­cal sur­round­ings act as an influ­enc­ing fac­tor on your behav­ior? Social Sci­en­tist Roger Barker exten­sively researched see Archi­tec­tural Psy­chol­ogy and found that, quite obvi­ously, “In a store, peo­ple assume their roles as cus­tomers; in school and church, proper behav­ior some­how already resides coded in the place”.

The object-centered environment

Cidade Negra
Aldo's Wedding
Boxed In
Verdi's Il Trovatore

France X Cyprus Worldcup Qualifier
Copa Fireworks
Santini and Velloso
john edwards

A store and a wed­ding are social objects (because they’re con­ver­sa­tion starters and top­ics for peo­ple). They are also object-centered envi­ron­ments. You step into a sit­u­a­tion that struc­tures your behav­ior. Both phys­i­cal struc­tures like stores, churches and pub­lic parks and sit­u­a­tional events like wed­dings, soc­cer games and flash­mobs con­di­tion the par­tic­i­pants’ behav­ior to per­form a cer­tain objec­tive col­lec­tively with like-minded others.

Work is a com­mon form of social object as well as an object-centered envi­ron­ment. When you go to work, you “plug-in” to an envi­ron­ment where you then social­ize with your col­leagues and cus­tomers, because you work at the same place. If you telecom­mute, you’re still “plugged in” to the work you do with your col­leagues. For instance, traders around the world plug in to finan­cial mar­kets. Such envi­ron­ments are rich social objects, both pos­i­tively and neg­a­tively. Think about the num­ber of var­ied work-related con­ver­sa­tions you’ve had over the years!

Mould­ing your environment

In Roger Barker’s research, the places were clearly iden­ti­fied with a set loca­tion and pur­pose, like a hard­ware store, a high school, a denom­i­na­tional church or a finan­cial mar­ket, like the Chicago Board of Trade (see Karin Knorr-Cetina’s paper on “The Mar­ket as an Object of Attach­ment”). But what about when you per­form a dif­fer­ent activ­ity in a loca­tion gen­er­ally meant for some­thing else? For exam­ple, a wed­ding may be per­formed nearly any­where. In Hawaii, Florida and the many other coastal areas, wed­dings may be car­ried out on a beach. In this case, the wed­ding super­sedes the beach-going activ­ity and con­di­tions the guests’ behav­ior. The wed­ding rit­ual is gen­er­ally stan­dard within cul­tures, and every­one knows what to expect: gath­er­ing, union, bless­ing, and cel­e­bra­tion. Other exam­ples include a birth­day party in a play­ground, pub­lic man­i­fes­ta­tions in city streets, flash­mobs in a store, doing work inside a Starbuck’s, Tup­per­Ware din­ners in someone’s liv­ing room, street soc­cer games, rock con­certs inside Sec­ond Life, clas­si­cal con­certs inside a church and a Bar­Camp in a con­cert hall. Each of these activ­i­ties bring peo­ple together around a shared object or objec­tive, they include their own rit­u­als, and they are per­formed in a cer­tain way. The objec­tive of the gath­er­ing super­sedes the pur­pose of the loca­tion and the envi­ron­ment is molded to suit the gathering’s pur­pose. Chairs are placed, tables are setup, goal­posts are erected in a field, and so on (see “Place­mak­ing, the way in which all human beings trans­form the places they find them­selves into the places where they live”).

Bernard Hunt, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of HTA Archi­tects Ltd, talks about life in phys­i­cal spaces:

The phys­i­cal form of a place is only one side [of the coin]. The way life is lived in it, and the com­mon pur­pose around which that life revolves, is the other. And from cave dwellers to loft liv­ers human beings have always used places to achieve their com­mon pur­pose .… Some­how things were eas­ier when that pur­pose was pro­tec­tion against the ele­ments, defence from attack and con­trol of dis­ease. Suc­cess­ful place­mak­ing seemed to hap­pen when what was built was in direct response to imper­a­tives like defence and topog­ra­phy and also when it was done unself­con­sciously by dif­fer­ent peo­ple at dif­fer­ent times.

Barry Smith, Depart­ment of Phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­sity of Buf­falo, writes:

A physical-behavioural unit such as a reli­gious meet­ing, a ten­nis cham­pi­onship or a sea bat­tle is an intri­cate com­plex of times, places, actions, and things. Its con­stituents can include both man-made ele­ments (build­ings, streets, cricket fields, books, pianos, libraries, the bridges and engine-rooms of bat­tle­ships) and also nat­ural fea­tures (hills, lakes, waves, par­tic­u­lar cli­matic fea­tures, pat­terns of light and sound). These fea­tures and ele­ments may be fur­ther restricted to a highly spe­cific com­bi­na­tion of, say, a par­tic­u­lar room in a par­tic­u­lar build­ing at a par­tic­u­lar time with par­tic­u­lar per­sons and par­tic­u­lar objects dis­trib­uted in a par­tic­u­lar pat­tern. In gen­eral, how­ever, it is a form of generic depen­dence which pre­vails in the realm of physical-behavioural units; a judge must hear and decide the case, but it need not be this judge; the cap­i­tal city must be located some­where, but it need not be located in this spot (and in time of war it may be relocated).

So whether the sit­u­a­tion is dic­tated by the pur­pose of the loca­tion or the pur­pose of the gath­er­ing, you behave accord­ing to the appro­pri­ate cul­tur­ally estab­lished rules you’ve learned. You have learned how to behave in a store and how to behave in a wed­ding.

What role for space in online com­mu­nity building?

In a dis­cus­sion thread in Jere­miah Owyang’s Com­mu­nity Strate­gists group in Face­book, Jonathan Trenn men­tions:

“I think this is an excel­lent ques­tion, but what con­cerns me is that we are not talk­ing about com­mu­ni­ties here…we’re talk­ing com­mu­nity plat­forms. Impor­tant distinction.”

This begs the ques­tion: to what extent is the plat­form an inte­gral part of the com­mu­nity? To what extent does the plat­form fos­ter or con­di­tion com­mu­nity behav­ior? Offline, a bas­ket­ball court may be an inte­gral part of a local com­mu­nity, just like a bingo hall, church, com­mu­nity cen­ter, gro­cery store, etc. If you take away such spaces, you would expect the com­mu­nity to change, because you would restrict the dif­fer­ent areas and rea­sons for peo­ple to find each other and inter­act based on their shared inter­ests. Does this same dynamic play online? To what degree does the archi­tec­ture, fea­tures and tools of the com­mu­nity spaces you pro­vide fos­ter or restrict com­mu­nity inter­ac­tion? (see Karin Knorr-Cetina’s work on “The Mar­ket as an Object of Attach­ment” is worth fur­ther read­ing for the notions of “wants and lacks”, “attach­ment” and “embed­ded­ness” in community.)

The way the online space is designed has wide rang­ing impli­ca­tions for com­mu­nity inter­ac­tion. “Social Design” deci­sions include whether to allow peo­ple to cre­ate a pro­file page, upload a pic­ture, write a bio, tag their con­tent, add book­marks on con­tent and peo­ple, com­ment on oth­ers’ cre­ations, add friends, deter­mine pri­vacy set­tings, invite friends, pub­lish to other plat­forms, cre­ate and mod­er­ate groups, browse pro­files and con­tent, “pivot” from one page to another, have per­son­al­ized URLs, receive email noti­fi­ca­tions of activ­ity, vote and rate con­tent, engage in phatic com­mu­ni­ca­tion, receive a mini-feed of friends’ activ­ity after login, clas­sify friends, par­tic­i­pate in pub­lic forums, and so on. These design deci­sions affect space, because each of these actions and activ­i­ties have a place­holder on the website.

Unlike a media like TV, mag­a­zines and other tra­di­tional media, social media is highly par­tic­i­pa­tory and cre­ated through the active con­tri­bu­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion of peo­ple inter­act­ing with each other. Each design deci­sion and how it is expressed on the web­site, leads to far-reaching impli­ca­tions for the com­mu­nity. And if these deci­sions are not made and cer­tain fea­tures are not pro­vided, the com­mu­nity will find a way to either adapt their space or to find other spaces where they may engage in con­ver­sa­tion and activity.

Back to Jalonen’s con­crete sandbox

To tell you the truth, mil­i­tary ser­vice is not such a pleas­ant expe­ri­ence. There are thou­sands of con­straints on space, time and pri­vacy. Your iden­tity is formed daily in front of oth­ers through your behav­ior and actions. Hero­ics are per­formed and tiny hacks are found to break the rigid­ity. We found a way to build friend­ships and com­mu­nity, regard­less of the hard­ships. Over­all, how­ever, rel­a­tively few cher­ish the envi­ron­ment enough to want to make a career of it. It is not so much that Jalonen’s youth was spent in a con­crete sand­box, but that the army sit­u­a­tion itself was a fig­u­ra­tive con­crete sandbox.

Are your service’s users stuck in a con­crete sand­box? How do your website’s fea­tures fos­ter or hin­der iden­tity for­ma­tion, per­sonal expres­sion, pro­file dis­cov­ery, and com­mu­nity inter­ac­tion between peo­ple? Can the com­mu­nity appro­pri­ate and form the space to fit their needs? How might dif­fer­ent cul­tures appro­pri­ate the same website?

This post high­lights the impor­tance of design deci­sions in online com­mu­nity build­ing. Answer­ing these and sim­i­lar ques­tions with an eye to community-building, and before the first trace is drawn, deter­mines to a large extent the community-building and word-of-mouth poten­tial of your web service.