Conversations

Bridging the Enterprise Gap for a new level of literacy —

An email was sent to a bunch of leads the other day about the progress of our new document management server.

At the end of the email it said to pass this information on to our teams.

Need to Know - Scattered and Slow - Private by default

The way I see it each lead will send a version of this email to their teams, and then they will all have silo’d conversations.

Then certain leads will want clarification or have a question to ask, but will not include all the other leads on that email.

Then back to their teams again….

Back and forth, back and forth…the same topic being conversed in different groups…the scattered and slow approach.

On some occasions some of the leads will not pass on the message, or maybe the lead didn’t get one of the emails, and maybe the lead will slip passing on your feedback…and if they do you may not be attributed.

Then one day the change comes and people say why wasn’t I communicated about this…this initiative doesn’t even factor in how we work…if they consulted us the change could at least reflect to make the way we work easier and more productive. They don’t have a clue about ground zero. This is the enterprise gap!

Worker: Resist…ignore new process, use my backdoor workaround.

Manager: How come this change is being resisted…email the change management guy we need to "push" this.

Yuck, the word "push"…anyway this shows how a lack of visibility, co-creation, and bottlenecks that managers have the potential to be, lead to ineffectiveness…need a KM Flow Doctor!

Actually this takes me back to my corporate plot post.

Good to Know - Contained and Quick - Public by default

Here’s how I would have done it.

Believe it or not we actually have a Community of Practice (CoP) for this initiative.

I would have written a blog post instead of an email

• Our blogs have an email address, so we can publish a post by emailing the blog
• Since not all these people may subscribe to the blog I would have emailed these people the link to the blog post
• In the email I would mention to them to leave a comment on the blog if they had any queries
• I would also mention in the email for them to subscribe to the blog to get further comments (unfortunately our platform doesn’t have post level subscriptions like a "Watchlist")
• When you are subscribed you get emailed new posts and comments, and can use the email reply button to have comments conversations
• Basically you don’t even have to visit the blog itself to read and interact

Now each of these people can just pass on the link to the people in their teams.

Subscribers and browsers to the blog will also be informed.

And everyone can have ONE conversation in the ONE spot.

Inbox 2.0

Basically email becomes the vehicle for having the conversation, but yet no-one is personally sent an email; instead every email is sent to the blog object (social object), which people subscribe to ("pull" approach).

And at the end the blog object also stores the information.

Naturally we begin to think that the whole idea of the email client needs to be evolved…something like Tweetdeck, but more of an email client look, hello Lotus Notes, the "business inbox". Fuser and others have being doing this on the consumer web for years.

What results from using social tools

1. Transparency (communicating progress in the open…"public" by default)
2. Less distorted message (no interpretations, straight from the source, less gossip/rumors, access to raw facts allows you to re-mix and re-frame content)
3. Workers can offer feedback in discussions they normally would not be a part of (co-creation helps make the initiative more relevant to people who will actually use it…therefore less need for change management)
4. Diverse input (people not involved in either end of the change initiative may come across the conversation and add valuable input)
5. Workers feel engaged that they are included in discussions (happy workplace, build an influence by reputation)
6. Everyone is informed of the "know-why" (rather than just reading a report, they now know of, and can take part in the raw conversations…all the decisions that led to the final product)

This will help solve the fundamental issue that all organisations seem to face…the silo syndrome, communication and awareness breakdown, scattered and slow dialogue.

NOTE: Silos are natural and strong, and we need them. It’s just that each silo is not the enterprise, so to be effective we need to be aware and collaborate across silos…so we bridge silos, not smash them.

A support tool, a new literacy

Social computing (or KM) is not a strategy, it’s a support tool, a sense-making tool, a way of being…just like the phone, email, IM…

We can use these tools to improve sales, improve brand awareness, improve customer service, fix a problem, fix a process, etc…are these strategies/tactics, or simply using tools to achieve (support) your job tasks…difference to the past is that these tools (there use) can have a cultural impact in a deeper way…they challenge the dynamics of relationships, openness, power, routines, habits.

You could say we could use new social tools for everything, that’s why we see HR 2.0, Sales 2.0, Marketing 2.0, etc…that’s why existing products are starting to get features like blogs, social networks. So really it’s a way of being or a literacy, rather than a strategy. But yes, to get buy-in you may go the strategy route; but that’s just to get your foot in the door, and it’s also to help the blank faces when they are given tools that aren’t designed to do a specific thing…and what it takes to get adoption (the difference between transactional and interactional).

Obstacles

Visibility, connectedness (not just a horizontal slice of the org, but a network), and conversations are key.

What’s stopping this at the actioning or "doing" level (in relation to the anecdote I shared at the start of this post):

1. Design (have to visit the blog, rather than quickly shoot an email…but the blog does have it’s own email address, just need to remember to put it in your email contacts, and if you subscribe you can get new posts emailed and replying will publish a comment)

2. Habit and routine (this needs to be facilitated…rinse and repeat)

3. The message may want to be filtered for the masses (in this case the message was quite general)

4. Us and them syndrome (I have worked up my way in the hierarchy to be privy to these types of conversations…part of my status is to pass messages up and down the chain)

Going even more deeper the mass use of these tools could lead to a transformation that companies don’t see appropriate, not ready for, feel as a threat…the list goes on.

Subject Matter Networks

Another way of looking at the sense-making perspective is saying that we are moving from Subject Matter Experts to Subject Matter Networks. In the sense that it’s not about in-house gurus, it’s about people connecting in the network to do their work…much more normal, practical and resilient.

Mark Oehlert on this:

"…we needed to be thinking differently…if we just used social media to build more ways to get to SMEs, then we wouldn’t fix what was broken…our ability to access the expertise that we need, when we need it - either in order to answer a question, provide input into a course design or for some other purpose - we didn’t need better access to Subject-Matter Experts…we needed access to Subject-Matter Networks. (SMNs)

Eric Davidove shares the details:

"Some key conclusions from the research: Activities and interactions that occur in blogs, wikis and social networks naturally provide the cues that are missing from current expert locator systems. A search engine that mines internal blogs, for example, where workers post updates and field queries about their work, will help searchers judge for themselves who is an expert in a given field. Wiki sites, because they involve collaborative work, will suggest not only how much each contributor knows, but also how eager they are to share that knowledge and how well they work with others. Tags and keywords, which are posted by employees and serve as flags for search engines, can reveal qualities in an expert that are far from transparent in any database or directory. I like this study because it demonstrates the hidden value of blogs and wikis. This study also helps us further understand that the formal organizational chart and company designated experts are not necessarily the best “maps” for finding expertise or the most qualified experts in the company. Social media such as blogs and wikis will help us to identify the established and emerging experts and to go beyond the “usual suspects.”

And I like Simon Bostock’s touch:

"The reasons that other people approach those experts has as much to do with approachability, generosity and perspicacity as it does with expertise."

Rex Lee talks about removing barriers:

"Enterprise 1.0, would suggest that only specialized, trained individuals with the resources knew how to find pearls… Enterprise 2.0 suggests that we can simplify and remove some of the "specialization" barriers to enable more people to search for pearls

Tune processes of engagement

Just to quickly go off on a small tangent (which relates to my previous post on ad-hoc processes). Rex suggests that the tools are not enough, in that we need to tune processes and attitudes. He gave the example of sales people using a wiki rather than Marketing, as the Sales people were more agile on this type of information. But existing processes are not going to bring fruit to this good idea; why would sales people contribute when hoarding gets them ahead, when it means less time spent selling.

I asked similar questions in my post, I don’t want to share, that’s counter to meeting my objectives…and reward!! (hehehehe, just noticed I quoted Rex in that post)

Rex says:

"Without social engineering and modifying processes, models, policies and education, the initiative was doomed to fail before it even started. There seems to be a belief that by just letting all conversation flow in blogs, tweets, forums, wiki’s, etc…, that corporations will find great nuggets of insight, that people will connect and come up with great ideas, that agility and holistic understanding will be natural outcomes. Although this may be true, we don’t need to leave it at that. Proper social engineering in leveraging social technologies can enable organization to focus the potential of their employees & business partners to drive specific business value of higher quality and in shorter time frames. This requires and understanding the engagement factors (motivation, opportunity, capability) and taking initiative to design and facilitate within the environment."

Resulting in:

"Enterprise 2.1 would suggest that rather than "serendipitously" finding pearls, that we coordinate our efforts to actually create pearl farms."

Let’s finish off

Simon Bostock gets to the reality of it (just substitute KM for social computing/networks):

"At some point, when a skill becomes so important, it ceases to be somebody’s job but becomes a literacy. We no longer have scriveners (or many secretaries for that matter) because we’re all expected to write. At what point will we face up to the fact that Knowledge Management is no longer a respectable job (or PR or HR or marketing?) but a literacy?"

PostRank Activity Streams: FriendFeed for your content! —

Knowing how and where your readers are engaging with your content is critical to the success of any publisher today. With so much activity happening off the authors site, discovering the fragmented conversations, connecting with the audience, and growing your presence on all the social hubs has been an incredibly manual and a time-intensive task. That is, until today, because we are rolling out a new beta feature on PostRank Analytics: Activity Streams for your content!

Think of it as FriendFeed, but for your content. PostRank aggregates over 10 million daily activities from over 20 different social hubs, which means that we see every tweet, bookmark, vote, and comment about your stories. PostRank already knows about all the content you publish (zero setup, just specify your RSS feed), which means that we can scan the millions of activities, and pull out just the conversations and actions which mention your content! Nothing to setup, just login into your PostRank Analytics account and you’re ready to go. A picture is worth a thousand words:

Did someone just vote on your story on Reddit, or Digg? Did someone mention your story on Facebook or MySpace, or maybe they shared it with their friends on Google Reader? Well, now you can find answers to all of those questions by logging in, or signing up for a PostRank Analytics account.

Oh, and the beta part is there for a reason – we’re just getting started with the activity stream, so stay tuned!

Apple's Biggest News: An Open Standard for Video Calls —

Shared by Jesse Stay
Open? H.264 is not open.

The presentation by Steve Jobs opening Apple's developer conference today was packed full of details large and small about the company's hardware and software, but the one detail that could have the biggest long-term impact well beyond Apple itself was the introduction of Apple's new video calling system, FaceTime. Jobs said on stage that the system was based on extensive use of open technical standards, and that the company intends to work hard to make FaceTime an open industry standard itself.

Live mobile video, interoperable across different phones and carriers, could be a force for major changes in the way we experience the Web and the world. It could be one of Apple's most important contributions to the future.

Sponsor

Mobile Video Calling is Coming & It's Going to Be Big

Analyst Alfred Poor estimates in research released today from GigaOm Pro that approximately 3.2 million consumers will have access to mobile video chat in 2010. Poor believes that number will grow almost 50-fold in the next five years, to an estimated 142 million consumers. "The first few years of the market will see fairly small numbers with the main adoptees being early adopters," he writes, "but by 2012 the market will reach beyond the enthusiast audience to a more mainstream audience, and we'll see adoption rates similar to that of SMS and other messaging formats as illustrated in the middle of the last decade."

"The power of video communications," Poor argues, "lies in the ability of the participants to detect subtle emotional nuances during conversations." (Report: The Consumer Video Chat Market, 2010-2015 Subscription required.)

Video communication isn't just about experiencing face-to-face-style interactions remotely, though. It has the potential to enable new forms of cultural experience all together.

As Jake Dunagan and Mike Liebhold wrote in a Skype-sponsored report by the Institute for the Future last fall:

"We've seen throughout history that each new medium comes with its own possibilities and limitations, impacting individuals and the social order in profound ways. The printing press democratized communication and made a literate (and revolutionary) civil society possible. Ubiquitous and accessible communication applications are now allowing more people to join the growing global symphony of text, voice, and video conversations, with vibrant new cultures and practices emerging. We all have the potential to use video-enabled networked devices to communicate in modes and manners we never have before. As Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine wrote, we are witnessing the birth of a new culture around video communication - we are in the midst of becoming 'people of the screen.'"

The Future of Real-Time Video Communication (PDF)

Barriers to the Future

Live mobile video consumption, creation and chat and calling have been held back by a number of factors. Mobile computer processing power has been a big limitation and the iPhone 4's ability to pull it off pushes the envelope. This is presumably a substantial part of why the iPhone 4's FaceTime implementation is only able to call other iPhone 4s at launch. (Note that Nokia phones have supported video conferencing for years, though.)

Bandwidth is another major limitation, and one that Apple is avoiding for now by limiting FaceTime calls to Wi-Fi connections. Jobs said today that the feature is limited to Wi-Fi in 2010, but the company is "working with the cellular providers to get things ready." Note the use of the word providers, plural.

Cries for more and cheaper bandwidth, and more efficient ways to use what is available, will be a defining issue for the near-term future of software development, tech political policy and user experience. See Stacey Higginbotham's excellent write-up of AT&T's new 3G data cap last week for more details.

Interoperability has been another major challenge. Mobile phone users can make voice calls across networks (AT&T to Sprint, for example) and email users can email across networks, but mobile video calling across networks still requires a technical standard that is agreed upon and implemented widely.

That's what Apple aims to do with the introduction of FaceTime. The awkwardly named protocol could be implemented by all major handset manufacturers so that consumers could perform video calls as easily as we perform voice calls today.

Will other companies adopt Apple's proposed standard? If Apple maintains its dominance in desirable markets, they may.

Cross-network calling would make the market explode, as long as carriers can build out capacity fast enough. Unfortunately, there is some doubt that all parties will see big increases in consumer use of their products as a good thing. Some carriers are liable to prefer less use for more pay, and if they can spit in your eye as part of the deal - all the better.

Nothing can be taken for granted, but if Apple can help advance a cross-network standard for real-time mobile video communication - that could become one of the company's most important contributions to the world.

Discuss

Edge Theory Conversations: Android & EVO vs. iPhone — On Friday, the HTC EVO, powered by Google's Android operating system, finally went on sale. As you know, I have been using the device, courtesy of Google I/O for the last few weeks. First I started using it exclusively, and later, I reported on my experience.

Tonight, Chris Saad (@chrissaad) and I talked about how the mobile landscape is changing with the rise of Android and the near-term arrival of iPhone OS 4 and a new iPhone device from Apple at the Worldwide Developers' Conference this week. Chris, seeing many mixed reviews of the EVO in particular, especially when it came to battery life, has not yet made the plunge, but I promised that if he did, he wouldn't regret it. In fact, I am having a hard time seeing myself return to the iPhone platform - barring something amazing. This probably violates my Apple fanboy contract, but that's what's happening.

This and all other EdgeTheory conversations can be found on the dedicated ET Conversations site.

Listen to the full recording below:

Gold vs Real Assets —

If you’ve been following me on Google Buzz or on Twitter you can skip this, but it’s useful to wrap up some of the conversations we’ve been having online. Last night I got together with my friends Luke Kilpatrick and John Poore. Between the three of us we have nearly every cool smartphone known to mankind. Palm. Apple. HTC. All that.

Anyway, we met just to see if there were any more pros or cons we could add to the list between Android and iPhone that I started a few days ago on Google Buzz. This is the most complete back and forth I’ve seen so far on the topic.

Living without the iPhone has been a lot easier than I expect, here I show you the devices I’m using and talk about what the advantages are to both iPhone and Android (the video plays here, while on my computer the embed doesn’t play well).

Would you keep a daily diary on Twitter? Or use it to decide what to wear? Or use it to bypass text-messages charges in international countries?

The possibilities for Twitter are about to get a lot richer with the ability to add annotations to any tweet. A handful of developers got the opportunity to play with the new application programming interface over the weekend at a company hackfest in San Francisco.

Annotations, which launched in April at Twitter’s first developer conference and will go live sometime later this year, are a way of marking up tweets with additional data. Instead of having a simple 140-character tweet, you could make a note that the tweet is about the weather or a movie. Other apps will be able to interpret this and display display or interpret the tweet in a different way. It has the potential to make the experience of the microblogging network feel a lot more media rich and powerful. (We suggested a few possibilities for “Annotations” here based on conversations with different Twitter developers.)

A dozen or so developers showed off a few works in progress at the company’s headquarters yesterday. (Note: These aren’t finished products, just ideas people have hacked together in a few days).

Fab or Drab, developed by engineers at San Francisco-based Crowdflower, helps people decide what to wear through an iPhone app. You take and upload pictures that friends can vote “Fab” or “Drab” on. (In typical fashion, Crowdflower, which specializes in farming out microtasks that computers can’t solve to thousands of people, says it can also pay strangers tiny amounts of money to judge your photos too.) Another app, Tazpic, brings some classic Facebook functionality to Twitter with photo tagging. 5Slices lets people keep a daily journal of their lives through Twitter by recording five words a day that describe how they’re feeling. Another developer built an Android to SMS gateway that basically lets people text each other in international countries without incurring expensive charges. You can see all of the projects here.

Twitter also revealed a few more details about “Annotations.” The biggest foreseeable problem with them was whether different developers would agree on a taxonomy or structure for the annotations. If one developer decided to mark up movies one way, and another developer decided to do it a different way, none of their respective features would work properly because other applications wouldn’t be able to interpret them.

So Twitter’s actually giving suggested structures for annotations. They include annotations for reviews, songs, movies, books, products, stocks and more. The full list is here. The new guidelines should prevent a huge mess from developers having different standards.

Watch live video from abrahamwilliams on Justin.tv

Tags: Annotations

Companies: Twitter

Q&A: Is One-Way Communication an Oxymoron? —

Every now and then, I’m asked to answer questions for other blogs and media outlets – more so lately due in part to the recent release of Engage!

The conversations that always ensue trigger new insights, ideas, or perspectives and sometimes, I believe that the discussion is worth sharing with you, here. This is one such discussion hosted by my friend in Belgium, Jean-Paul De Clerck.

#Engage!

1) A thought: Social networks are merely a technological extension of our human nature to connect, be part of something and communicate, and ultimately people are the social networks. What is your reaction?

Social Networks are hubs for the contextual connection of people around ideas, interests, and passions. But at the same time, while social networks serve as the enabling technology to communicate, the relationships that people forge within these networks are more reminiscent of relations rather than relationships. These short-form engagements actually strengthen connections with each exchange. And it’s the act of causing or earning responses that seduces users toward a bottomless cycle of acting and inciting reactions.

Over time, what’s truly fascinating about social networking, is the creation of a human network, a grid of relationships that link social graphs from network to network. One day soon, we’ll have the ability to effectively engage and interact with our contacts from one dashboard across multiple networks.

2) The days of broadcasting are over in marketing communication. I never understood the one-way communication mentality in businesses since in the word communication is derived from the the Latin word “communis.” Why do you think it has taken businesses so long to understand that it’s about relationships?

One-way communication is often cited as an oxymoron in Social Media.

Social Media purists indeed believe that communication is a two-way street, and for many, it is. However, when you review the definition of communication, you might actually be surprised.

Communication is defined as a transmission or a statement, essentially implying one-way messaging. Depending on the dictionary we use, words such as relations, socializing, and conversation emerge. While we may crave communication through two-way interaction, what I believe we are truly vocalizing is the need to be heard by those attempting to communicate to or with us. Let’s not mistake the value in communication or one-way communication though. It is necessary to share activity, updates, direction, and intentions and in these cases, one-to-many dissemination is more than reasonable, in fact, it’s necessary and useful as well.

Some businesses believe that when they speak at audiences and markets that they are communicating through correspondence or conversation. Others believe that one-to-many transmissions offered some semblance of control and falsely assumed or underestimated that any potential dissent would rarely earn the public spotlight. Now with the socialization of media and the rise of new influencers, prominence is earned through not only listening, but established through attentiveness and the corresponding actions that inspire connection and adaptation.

3) What, according to you, is the role of content in social media marketing?

Content speaks to the mission and purpose of a business optimized for the framework of the medium and always with the unique and varying audiences in mind. Content is critical towards establishing a effective inbound marketing initiative as it represents the brand when the brand representative is not present. This is why brands must become media. Strategically placing content in the networks where stakeholders, customers, and prospects are actively seeking information amplifies the findability of our value proposition, differentiation, and intentions. This is why possessing a genuine understanding of the wants, needs, challenges, and options of our markets and also where, when, and how they seek direction proves effectual. And when combined with social media optimization (SMO), our content rises to the top of keyword searches within social networks, addressing the specific needs of consumers based on how and where they search.

Content is easy to commoditize. Meaningful content rooted in empathy and value is precious and as such, dramatically increases the promise of connecting to those they’re intended to affect.

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google Buzz, Facebook
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Please consider reading my brand new book, Engage!

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Get Putting the Public Back in Public Relations and The Conversation Prism:

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Image Credit: Shutterstock

Social Media Strategy from A to Z —

Social media might be old. It might even be a dead buzzword. That’s why you need to paint a picture that’s more meaningful and encompasses what “social media” as a label really is.

Some of us have been thrust into social media simply because the online landscape showed potential for online conversations. Others have been there for over a decade. Regardless of the many years of experience you have in the online space, the ideas behind social media and social media marketing are applicable to everyone. Let’s take a look at some lessons, takeaways, and tips.

Always be Listening. Social media rocks because it’s one of the most amazing tools for “free” market research. Your investment is merely that of time. Take the time to hear what people are saying about your business. If you’re the frugal type, take advantage of the free alerts from Google, YackTrack, Social Mention, BackType (which gives you alerts from blog/article comments, which other services do not include), and Trackur.

Blogging. Who said that blogging was dead? Perhaps 140 character streams have replaced regular blogging, but I’ve been blogging more than ever lately. Blogging helps you build community (especially via comments), establish thought leadership, bring links to your website (both internally, perhaps to products or to other articles on your blog, and externally, when people like what you say and opt to link to you), and get you some nice traffic. If you can blog, you should. And read these tips on how to become a great blogger.

Customer Service. The letter “C” could be a lot of things, like “content,” “consistency,” and “community,” but customer service is a big part of the evolution of social media. This shift is becoming increasingly more obvious. The role of customer service online is becoming equivalent to social media marketing. If you use the online space to offer customer service, you are essentially marketing yourself. Showing a public interest in your customers and genuinely offering help helps nurture a positive perception of your brand.

Drive Leads through LinkedIn. Lead generation and client acquisition can be had on LinkedIn, especially in the B2B space, just as long as you’re active and engaging. Linkedin lead generation requires commitment to answering and asking questions on Groups/Answers, taking advantage of the deep searches, and connecting directly with those around you in your network. Effective use means more business.

Engagement. It’s not enough to broadcast. “Look at this! Twitter! Let me port my RSS feed to it and be done with it!” Nope, that’s the wrong approach. Engagement requires regular interaction between you and others. These are conversations, not broadcasts. You may not want to do it super frequently, but you should do it everyday. Be responsive. Offer value. Give to your community.

Friendships. Thought I was going to say “Facebook?” Sorry. The best types of social media marketing arise from genuine concern as if your customers are true friends. How many of you have made true friends from merely engaging in this space? Exactly. There’s so much to gain from being networked, and you’ll find that there’s a real reward in finding out that these relationships turn into something much more.

Goals. You shouldn’t jump into social media just because “everyone else is doing it.” There’s a lot of potential, of course, and it looks mighty appealing, but setting goals is advisable as well. You might want to consider the SMART formula for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely goals. Whatever goal methodology you adopt, don’t jump into social media without having something you want to gain from it.

Human Business. Social media marketing is what you might call “human business.” I often use explain it as follows: “social media marketing is all about ‘leveraging’ the social through its media to market to your constituents.” “Leverage” may sound a tad too exploitative, because the idea is to build genuine relationships that put the customers first before promoting your own agenda. As such, it’s important never to lose sight of the “human” in the business. Social media marketing recognizes the fact that this online space allows millions of people to congregate and to communicate with one another, and it’s not much different than sitting in a real room talking to real people. Never lose sight that the online space is a human medium.

Influence. Social media gives you an opportunity to exert influence onto customers and prospects. If you’re active in any particular medium, you become influential. That influence often translates to interest; people want to hear what you have to say. Here are tips on becoming an influential blogger.

Kirtsy and Other Niche Social Networks. Did you know there’s a social news website catered to women called Kirtsy? There is. For any interest in the world, there’s an online community for it. You just need to look. Kirtsy is a social news network; there are also forums and even Yahoo! Groups. It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with these communities and not to focus merely on the big players. Your target market might be hiding in a niche forum somewhere out there. Start digging and maybe you’ll reap some serious rewards.

Location. People always ask me what the “future” of social media is. I think that where we are will continue to evolve, but we’re seeing that face-to-face connections have a role in social media marketing as well. FourSquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and other location-aware services are social networks, unifying real connections. Beyond that, though, there’s the potential for businesses to run with special promotions, bringing more people to a business location and maybe even cultivating new friendships as well.

Marketing Beyond the Social. This is a blog post intended to address social media strategy, but social media marketing is not a panacea. It alone is not the only marketing solution. There’s display advertising, print/TV ads, SEO, PPC, email marketing, snail mail, etc etc. Focusing solely on social media might be nice, but your marketing reach should be a little more extensive than focusing on Twitter and Facebook. That said, marketing beyond the standard mediums (see letter K) should also be a given. I’m going to bet that 99% of you have not tapped into some the most powerful online communities that can serve you or your own clients.

Nurture Perception. Sure, people don’t want to lose control of the conversation. That’s one of the biggest reasons for companies not to engage in social media at all. They like dictating and broadcasting, and they’re afraid of a two-way conversation and the potential negative impacts of engaging. They’re especially worried when people are already saying negative things about them. That’s where you as a business, one that genuinely cares about building true relationships, can shine. You may not be able to change perceptions overnight, but you can certainly nurture those perceptions and give customers reasons to give you a chance in the future.

Opt-in, not out. Using social media is a privilege, but someone friending you on a social network doesn’t mean they agree to receive unsolicited messaging. This explicitly references the LinkedIn or Facebook connections that give you access to a person’s precious “commodity,” his email address. Just because you have access to it doesn’t mean he wants your newsletter. A relationship is not a newsletter opt-in, and quite frankly, it’s spammy. If I give you my phone number at a dinner party, it’s probably because I want to know about you, but I’m not inviting you to start hounding me with sales calls. Don’t opt someone into communications just because they’re your newest LinkedIn contact. Do it because they want to be a subscriber and explicitly opted in first.

Participation is Marketing. This term was coined by Chris Heuer five years ago and still rings true. The idea is that when businesses participate in social media (and do so because they want to actually be members, not marketers), their sheer presence and activity on the service translates to marketing. What does that mean for you? By engaging, being yourself, being altruistic (and coming bearing gifts, looking to offer value and not to receive), you’ll gain some followers and fans, and maybe even customers.

Queen. That’s what marketing is, according to Gary Vaynerchuk. Content is king, but marketing is the queen, he said. (I even have the shirt.) Content alone is not enough. Blogging is wonderful, but if you’re not going to market those blog posts, you might as well not be blogging at all. With billions of pages of content and yottabytes of data, marketing is how you’ll get people to see what you have to offer to the world.

Reputation Management. If you’ve seen a negative search result for your business name, social media marketing might be able to help. By creating social media profiles, updating content regularly, and actively participating on social media networks, you may be able to successfully push down those negative mentions of your business name.

Simplifying with Tools. One of my favorite things about social media marketing is simply the many tools that make your life so much easier. Tools that especially help consolidate the actions across social networks in one single location are quite helpful. Social media doesn’t have to be a challenge thanks to tools that help you track measurement, assess the reach of campaigns, give you updates when someone talks about you, and more. I’ll go into some tools in future posts (and we’ve seen some great listening tools under the letter A), but it becomes obvious that those of us involved in the social media space are quite fortunate; our jobs are made much easier thanks to so many software applications out there. Of course, never forget that this is human business, and the tools aren’t supposed to replace relationships.

Time. Want to be an “overnight success?” Sorry, that’s not something you can do in social media marketing. Sure, you can have viral campaigns that truly rock, but at the end of the day, it’s all a substantial time investment. I’ve said it before; social media is not a silver bullet. While some campaigns are formulated to broadcast and promote on social channels quickly, true social media marketing relates to building relationships with customers and constituents. That takes time. It won’t happen overnight and you shouldn’t expect it to happen in one month’s time either. If you’re in it to win it, you better be doing it for the long haul.

Understanding Your Community. Three years ago, I wrote that owning your community requires understanding of who they are. People love the prospect of submitting to Digg, for example, and some immediately submit the spammiest articles to the service. I’ve seen press releases, non-English releases, and everything else in between. Before you jump in, you need to actually observe and understand the culture on these services. Learn the rules, the language, and the things that make them tick. You can’t succeed in social media without understanding the community.

Value. Your success as a blogger and promoter really comes from offering value to your audience. It’s not about regurgitating content through twitterfeed, and it’s not about summarizing a post from Mashable without giving additional insights. Value-add comes from injecting your own thoughts, opinions, and feelings. It’s about giving someone else an education and/or leaving them with something to think about.

Word of mouth marketing. Social media is a big part of word of mouth marketing. After all, you’re using social media to talk, but hopefully you’re also working harder to get people to talk about you. People listen to their friends’ recommendations. In fact, are you surprised that Google now takes advantage of this in the form of social search?

Xperiment. Okay, that’s not a word. But experimenting is critical for success. You won’t know until you try. You can always run with some tests, get some feedback, and see if you can run with it full scale. Use the feedback others give you to improve or to go ahead with it. And don’t be afraid if you fail. Just consider that an opportunity to grow and do better the next time around. If you as a newcomer to the space see social media marketing as an experimental pilot program and use any feedback you receive as input for tweaks, you’ll consistently see improvements.

YouTube. YouTube now has 2 billion views per day. It’d be silly to ignore YouTube as a potential medium for marketing your business. It would also be silly to limit distribution of video by preventing them from being embedded onto other websites. That’s how the message spreads. If you’re considering video, do something creative; look for the traits of the most successful videos and do it better. And of course, don’t only focus on YouTube; there are other video syndication sites that you can spread your message to.

Zealous. Let’s put it this way: the most successful social media marketers are both passionate about what they represent and the act of marketing. They don’t shy away from putting their best foot forward — they know that the fact that your favorite search engine does not forget means you need to be on your best behavior always. This doesn’t get to them; they’re still offering service with a smile.

Sure, this only scratches the surface of social media marketing, and there are only 26 takeaways, but hopefully these tips, tricks, and tools will be able to get you thinking. What other social media ideas would you add to the list?

Photos by Shutterstock..

[ Social Media Strategy from A to Z is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

Reshare Your Favorites on Google Buzz —

Reshare Your Favorites on Google Buzz is a post from Chris Pirillo

Our brains are already programmed to hit that Retweet button on Twitter. Now, Google is making it simple for us to do the same thing from within Buzz. The new Reshare button will be rolling out to all users during the next several days. It works much the same as the RT feature does, so users will feel comfortable using it immediately. There’s nothing to configure or install. Just click Reshare any time you come across a post you want your followers to see as well.

Choose whether you want to share a post with all of your followers or just with those you select. This feature only works with public posts, and will not work for those that are private. You’ll find the new button down between “Like” and “Email” at the bottom of your Buzz items. Click to share it out and start new conversations within your group. Add your own comments to the item if you wish. Keep in mind, though, that you will not have the ability to edit the original Buzz item. It’s cool to note that you are no longer restricted to 140 characters, so you don’t need to hack away at a reshared item in order to make it “fit.”

One of the cooler portions of the Reshare feature is the way the items are handled after you click that button. Mashable describes it as: “Once you reshare an item, it will be posted to your own timeline with attribution to the author and a link to the original post (this is the opposite of how the retweet function works on Twitter). Once an item as been reshared, it will update to highlight each of the Buzz users who have shared it publicly and outline the chain of reshares.”

This feature has been much in demand from users, and is already being met with much approval. If you’ve used it already, what are your thoughts? Are you happy with the way they set everything up?

• Social Media Questions and Answers
• Do You Follow the Right People on Twitter?
• Edit Photos Online for Free
• Is Google Buzz Invading Your Privacy?
• The Buzz About Google
• Can a Tweet Get You Grounded for Life?
• Twitter Becomes Profitable
• Thumbs Up on New Seesmic App for the iPhone
• Twitter Expanding Short URLs – Accessible via Search
• Twitter Threats Can Result in a Criminal Record

You Vote, We Go: Startup Alley Twitter Challenge —

If you’re watching our livestream of Techcrunch Disrupt, you’re getting every minute of every keynote, panel and Startup Battlefield presentation, but you’re missing out on the dozens of companies in Startup Alley. We’re trying to fix that. Yesterday, we did a quick tour of the Alley during lunch, for day 2 we plan to do the same but take it up a notch. Instead of a random path, we would like you guys to tell us where to go– we’ll be livestreaming this at 1pm. Vote in the comments or send a tweet to @EvelynRusli, and we’ll go to the startups with the most votes. If you want me to ask a specific question, include that as well. List of today’s Startup Alley companies (with company provided descriptions):

Assistly- Enterprise-class customer support made smarter, easier and more affordable.

Aviga Systems Inc.- Aviga provides a cloud-based, white-label service for media companies and content aggregators that adds the Aviga voice-activated table of contents to their mobile applications running on broadband-connected mobile devices which enables their users to just ask for what they want.

BetterMe- BetterMe provides an anonymous, private way to give constructive feedback.

Burning Sky Software- Sky’s ThingWorx™ platform extends the social graph to devices and services, accelerating the development of “internet of things” applications.

byMK Fashion Social Network- byMK is the biggest Fashion Social Network in Brazil that allows users to make compositions using fashion items available from the Internet and from offline stores – items that users can actually buy – in a very interactive and vibrant way

Cubicl Inc.- Cubicl is a new social media platform where people can create and participate in real-time, interest-based conversations.

Delfigo Security- Delfigo Security is the developer of DSGatewayTM, a strong authentication platform that utilizes multiple authentication factors, including keystroke and machine identification, to assign each user a Confidence Factor (CF) and transparently provide the appropriate level of system access.

eEvent- eEvent is a mobile application that enables users to quickly search, locate, check-in and broadcast events in real-time while giving event organizers mobile access to create, manage and promote their events.

eVenues- eVenues introduces the first public marketplace for unique spaces. We help market and promote your space on the web, manage the bookings, and pay you!

FareShare Inc.- Fare/Share is a mobile app that helps New Yorkers share taxis on the go. It features one-click ride requests, fare calculations, identification by photo or apparel, Paypal integration and a feedback system. Socialize your ride!

Favit- FAVIT, a European tech company, is pioneering a powerful and innovative content streamer that allows users to receive all their relevant content on one place in the web, to collaborate on its curation and interact with it across multiple networks.

Feedback.com- People want to give feedback that is honest and constructive. Businesses want to hear what consumers have to say. Feedback.com is the place to share and solicit feedback and take control your online reputation. Feedback.com is an Idealab company.

Feedtrace- Feedtrace provides filters for real time streams. Our filters perform ranking of shared links based on attributes like time, popularity, categories, domains, languages and social graphs. We will be launching two products: instantPulp, which is destination site to enjoy real time celebrity gossip, and Buzztrace, which provides real time analytics for shared links (a Compete for passed links).

Firefly- Firefly is a photo check-in service for Twitter.

Get Smart Content- Smart Content is a web service that enables website publishers to easily serve content that is targeted to their individual site visitors by location based audience segments.

GOSO- An automotive social media management system with a complete suite of tools for car dealers to manage their brand reputation.

HelloExpert.com- HelloExpert provides free & personalized expert help, anytime anywhere!

Hivetrader- Hivetrader is a free social trading platform that helps you discover, connect, and trade with the world’s best stock and options traders. Our service combines web based trading with social networking, messaging, and news to maximize returns for traders worldwide.

HomeFree.com INC- HomeFree.com links home buyers and sellers, guiding each party to the goal of a complete sales transaction………absolutely free. Who needs Realtor? You’ve got the internet.

homingCloud- homingCloud is a real estate social networking site where home buyers, sellers, landlords and renters search for one another, view suggested matches and connect privately, directly and onsite, for free, without brokers.

i.TV- At i.TV we are not content with just being the top TV and movie app for the iPhone. This summer i.TV will reinvent how people watch television and engage with their favorite TV shows, celebrities, advertisers and other viewers.

iCoolhunt- iCoolhunt is the first location based social networking game for coolhunters. An addictive social game that brings real time and location-based information on cutting edge trends directly to the iPhone.

iorad- Easiest way to create step-by-step application instructions

IVPL- InvestmentPal (IVPL) is an online service which enables quality contributors and content to be found by tapping into one’s social networks. Focused on the finance vertical, its target users include investors, financial bloggers and professionals.

JungleCents- Jungle Cents helps consumers find deals at their favorite new online retailers by inverting the affiliate model in a fun and exciting way.

Kabbage- Kabbage provides financing to millions of businesses that sell products over marketplaces like eBay and Amazon. We leverage robust, real-time data about these sellers to augment credit scores and allow them to obtain the capital necessary to grow their businesses.

Knocking- Knocking is like having a live mobile phone web cam. LIVE VIDEO anywhere 3G or Wifi Phone to Phone

LIBOX- Libox lets you sync, share and play all of your HD media across all of your devices – for free. The Libox alpha product is in stealth and will launch to beta on June 15.

Medizzle- Medizzle by Collaborative Health Solutions is an advanced and secure information sharing platform that connects users with highly targeted referenced medical knowledge, care providers, mathmatically similar patients, products or services.

MightyMeeting Inc- MightyMeeting is a mobile collaboration and social publishing company. Users can manage a cloud-based library of presentations. They can access this library anywhere from mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android, and others. They can join or start mobile web meetings directly from their smart phones and tablets in real-time and anytime.

mTouch- The mTouch is an affordable fully interactive multi-touch table capable of object recognition, enhancements via our App Store, and the ability to allow multiple users to simultaneously interact with virtual objects using their fingers.

NearVerse- LoKast is an iPhone app that allows users to create a digital identity of themselves and discover and exchange media in proximity to one another.

OliveWoo- Zynga and Yelp mated, OliveWoo is the dating site their grown-up child would use. OliveWoo combines matchmaking and social games, which fosters a community of users passionate about creating, reviewing, and sharing date ideas for both singles and couples.

OrganizedWisdom- OrganizedWisdom® is the first realtime, health and wellness discovery engine powered by health experts.

Plantly- Plantly is an online investment advice service that helps people find a better place for their hard-earned cash. It’s part of a new trend of financial services that come to fix Wall Street with higher standards and a straightforward approach.

RankAbove- RankAbove SEO technology Drive(TM) is an automated platform for SEO Professionals. Drive offers the ability to easily see more data; dramatically reduces the time spent on SEO tasks; and gives unprecedented ability to predict the results of SEO work.

RealUp.com- RealUp is the revolutionary commercial real estate website offering free recent sales data, free property listings, free searching and free memberships. RealUp is committed to providing real estate professionals with up-to-date listings, information and exposure at the best value – free.

Runkeeper- RunKeeper by FitnessKeeper, Inc. is a mobile fitness platform that enables runners and other fitness enthusiasts to track, measure, and improve their fitness.

Snap Shop- Visualize furniture in your own living room – using your iPhone

sProphet Network- sProphet is an exciting social gaming platform that offers users a new way to share, participate and make predictions about real sporting events.

Stagename.com- Stagename is a music gaming network, providing a platform for artists to better monetize music, while empowering consumers to become active participants in the creation, publishing and discovery of new music.

stiqr.com- With just one line of code, Stiqr changes web-development in a way the world has never seen.

TaskUs TaskUs is a startup focused on helping other startups.

Think Eight- Think Eight takes web and mobile app ideas, molds them into sustainable businesses, and then drives them to successful exits. Our process of building businesses enables us to launch sustainable businesses on web and mobile platforms in a matter of weeks.

Tradepal, Inc- Tradepal is a marketplace that connects communities of friends and enables them to buy, sell, and trade online.

Tripping- Tripping is a hospitality network where travelers meet locals for tips, shared cups of coffee and even home stays. Recently launched and built on a social networking platform, Tripping already has thousands of members from over 80 countries.

Trybe, LLC- Trybe is a personalization service that uses proprietary matching technology to recommend people, content and products.

Verishow- VeriShow is a customer support SaaS based collaboration platform that requires no download or installation

Vertical Acuity- Vertical Acuity is revolutionizing how content is discovered and delivered online. We aggregate content across a vast network of sites and dynamically syndicate full page content based on real time network analytics and consumer behavior.

WayConnected- With WayConnected a single, worldwide, unique word represents all you personal, public and sharable information. WayConnected reduces all your hundreds of pieces of personal, public and sharable contact information to just ONE WORD… your wayID (™).

Zizio- Zizio aim to disrupt shopping experience via deep leverage of social behavior

MoreIdeas-MoreIdeas unlocks image content with its proprietary computational vision applications.

Are you looking to understand how to be effective with Internet marketing? Do you feel like you’re using the tools, you’ve joined the conversation, but you’re still not sure what it’s getting you? Have you seen people doing scammy marketing that makes your skin crawl, or ineffective “let’s all just hug it out” marketing that makes you wonder how anyone’s going to eat? We’ve created a third alternative with Third Tribe Marketing. (not an affiliate link, but I’m co-founder)

When I say “we,” Third Tribe was founded by Brian Clark of Copyblogger, Darren Rowse of Problogger, Sonia Simone of Remarkable Communications, and me (Chris Brogan). We did it to provide the most effective Internet marketing information we knew, not just from us, but from people we think exemplify the Third Tribe mindset (not too spammy, not too soft).

Plenty of Useful Content

Most people who join come for the useful seminar content, with transcripts and other materials. That’s cool. There are some great interviews in there, and in each, you get an understanding that goes beyond any canned speech. We get in deep and dig. We look to bring out the best possible solutions for you and your business.

The Best Part is the Forums

Frankly, I’m all about the forums. We do website reviews, content tuning, email marketing advice, landing page information, SEO conversations, new venture ideas, and all kinds of interaction. There are hundreds of threads and all kinds of information being shared around inside the forums, by all kinds of experienced professionals with lots of execution-minded advice. If you’ve already joined, but stopped logging in after you consumed the great content, you’re missing the best part: the forums.

Who Should Join Third Tribe?

The folks who seem to be getting the most out of Third Tribe are people who are either running a smaller business or are working on the execution level at a medium- or larger-sized business. If you’re CMO of a bigger company, this might not be the place. But if you run a mom & pop store, or if you’re someone who has a website about franchising or pilates or soap, for instance, then Third Tribe is for you.

Get In Before The Price Changes

If you’re a member of Third Tribe Marketing already, your price will stay the same. But if you’re still deciding whether or not this is worth it for you to join, you can join for $47 USD for the next little while. After June 1st, 2010, the price goes up to $97 a month for new subscribers. As the value of the content behind the wall has grown over the last several months, we’re still priced within what’s typical for quality online content communities and forums, but hey: if you could pay $47 instead of $97, wouldn’t that make more sense?

And you can cancel whenever. It’s okay. Sometimes, you need to dip in, get some information, and then go off to do your own things. We understand. But if you haven’t joined, I’d recommend popping in now at the $47 rate, instead of waiting and getting in at the $97 rate.

I Hope You Consider Joining

What I’m loving about the experience is that it feels like I’m at a nonstop conference. I get ideas every day that are helpful to my new business projects. I also like that everyone’s so supportive and willing to give a little time to each other’s projects, to lend a few ideas, and sometimes, just to validate that we’re on the right path. I’m proud of all we’ve accomplished, and am thrilled with all the testimonials we see both inside and outside of the site.

If you need to work on effective Internet marketing, I think Third Tribe Marketing is a great resource.

One of the best benefits of sifting through hundreds of new RSS items each day in Google Reader and selecting the best ones to share has been the ensuing conversations that have developed as a result. It used to be that these conversations were limited to networks like Socialmedian and FriendFeed, but they later took place within Google Reader itself, for all friends I had hand approved, and later, in Google Buzz, assuming I had given people permission. Now, the Reader team has removed the hassle of picking who was enabled to comment or not - making shares have the option to be public to the world for conversation. This highly anticipated move is a big reason I have continued to be so bullish about sharing Reader items and participating where they land on Buzz.

If you have not already seen the prompt, the next time you enter Google Reader, you will see the option to "Keep my shared items public" or to "Make my shared items protected". Hit "Save" to keep comments public, or choose to keep the shares open to only contacts in your friend list.


This move is incredibly simple, when contrasted to the labyrinth of privacy settings required at Facebook to determine where your content is being displayed, and it protects those who have previously opted to make their Reader shares private, as explained in the company's blog post announcing the changes this afternoon.


The ability for the world to comment on Google Reader shares should be a big boost to Buzz, as even more places are open for discussion. As mentioned in April, statistics show Reader shares as the 2nd-highest source for conversations on the network. This should bring that percentage up a great deal.

Want to see my shared items? You can find them here, or we can get connected on Buzz.

Warning: Long post ahead. If you just want the trailer, it’s this – “Everything is changing. Again.”

Tomorrow morning we’ll kick off our most ambitious event to date, TechCrunch Disrupt, in New York. The event is sold out, but we’ll have tens of thousands of people also tuning in to the livestream of the three day event. If you’re not attending, watch that livestream from the comfort of your office, living room or wherever it is that you people spend your time. There are some things happening at the event that you don’t want to miss.

We’ve called the event TechCrunch Disrupt, but we weren’t thinking about the name as a theme for this particular event. It’s our go forward brand name for our three-times-a-year launch and tech conferences.

And yet, as I have conversations with the launching startups and the amazing speakers lined to to talk at Disrupt, it’s become clear to me that we are indeed in a massively disruptive moment. And by moment I’m not talking about a generation or a decade. I’m talking about things happening right this moment in time.

These conversations are why, for the first time, I am extremely nervous to go on stage tomorrow morning.

Until the last few days it hasn’t crystalized for me. It’s sort like when you’re getting the flu and you feel the symptoms come one by one. Stomach ache, no problem. Headache, ouch. Cold sweat – uh oh, I’ve caught something.

The “symptoms” I’ve noticed are only there because I’ve been sitting down with these people – leading entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and others – and just listening to what they have to say. Putting it all together in my head. Discounting for bias. And after all that, what they are saying is making a lot of sense to me.

You are going to hear a lot over the next three days about how our world is changing in a fundamental way. It’s easy to think about what’s happening now as just a further evolution of the Internet era. But the disruption from this change is more profound than that.

Before I dive deeper, here’s a taste of what I’m talking about. Venture capitalist John Doerr, who is arguably the most successful venture capitalist of all time, told me this during our briefing call for Disrupt:

Zynga is the fastest growing business Kleiner Perkins has ever invested in.

That was said by a man who’s firm has invested in Google. And Amazon. And AOL, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Flextronics, Genentech, Intuit, Lotus Development, LSI Logic, Macromedia, Netscape, Quantum, Segway, Sun Microsystems, and Tandem, among many, many others.

Zynga. The fastest growing business Kleiner Perkins has ever invested in.

First thing tomorrow John Doerr is going to outline why he thinks that is happening. He’ll talk about the Third Wave.

The First Wave was personal computers and the wave of disruption that caused. The second wave was the Internet, ditto. We are now, says Doerr, in the Third Wave.

What exactly is the Third Wave? It’s the tectonic shifts we’re seeing in mobile platforms (read his post here about the iPad), the social graph (particularly Facebook), and online commerce. All of these things are related and being accelerated by each other (Facebook is the largest mobile application, Zynga leverages Facebook and also stokes Facebook growth, Groupon is social/flash commerce, etc.).

Yuri Milner, who is second on deck on tomorrow morning’s agenda after John Doerr, made sense of all this to me over lunch yesterday.

Milner is investing in the fastest growing consumer Internet companies, and he’s doing it more aggressively than anyone else. He has stakes in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. His method is fascinating and we’ll be diving deeper into it tomorrow.

But what shocked me into realizing that Doerr is very, very right and that real disruption is happening right now wasn’t the how he invests, but why he invests, and in who. Why is he so confidently investing hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in companies at multi-billion dollar valuations?

The Internet was a tremendous business accelerator, he says, but Facebook is another accelerator on top of that. Zynga’s Farmville grew to 75 million users just a few months after launching last year, and the company went from near zero revenue a year ago to hundreds of millions of dollars today.

It wasn’t that Zynga invented the killer game (every single Zynga game was copied from someone else, in fact). It’s that CEO Mark Pincus understood better than anyone else how to leverage that Facebook accelerator and ride that tsumani.

And when I asked him what Groupon, his third U.S. investment, has to do with the Facebook accelerator effect? He says that they grew so incredibly fast simply by advertising on Facebook.

Groupon tweaked and tweaked their model endlessly until they got it right – they felt real traction. Then they turned on the advertising. And what worked wasn’t television spots or Google ads. It was Facebook.

That must be freaking Google out right about now. It’s also the cornerstone of my belief that we are entering into the Age of Facebook. At no point in history has such a large number of people interacted so intimately with anything. Facebook’s half a billion monthly visitors is probably far more meaningful (although not yet as lucrative), as the nearly 1 billion people who visit Google each month.

The depth of interaction with Facebook is unprecedented. And it explains a lot of the privacy hysteria we’re all going through with them right now.

Ok, Back To Earth

The Third Wave is happening, but that doesn’t mean that Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, Twitter and a few others are the only winners, or even the biggest winners. Facebook may have created a monster that it simply cannot control, for example. The social graph, over time, may well become more of a federated model with many players. Listen closely to what both Milner, a Facebook investor, and Doerr, who isn’t, have to say about that tomorrow.

But those are just the historical details about who wins and who loses. The shift is happening right now. Groupon is blowing away Amazon’s early revenue and profit milestones by a scary factor, for example. Don’t think Amazon isn’t looking at Groupon with the same wary eye Google uses on Facebook.

And when you look at the world in this way – a Third Wave – it becomes easier to understand the strategic moves by the incumbents from the Second Wave. Yahoo is fleeing, looking for a warm place to hide. AOL is BFFing Facebook. Facebook is trying to set up the chess board so that they win all of this in the long run. And Google is standing toe to toe with Facebook and will not be backing down any time soon.

Meanwhile, the only mobile platforms that matter even a smidgen right now are the iPhone and Android. And that war looks too much like the Windows/Apple wars in the 80s over dominance of the personal computer.

There is so much creation going on around us. With that comes destruction, too. Nobody dies quietly in an all out war.

Why Your Company Needs to Embrace Social CRM —

Maria Ogneva is the Director of Social Media at Attensity, a social media engagement and voice-of-customer platform that helps the social enterprise serve and collaborate with the social customer. You can follow her on Twitter at @themaria or @attensity360, or find her musings on her personal blog and her company’s blog.

If you have been tracking conversations around social media for business, you have undoubtedly come across people talking about Social CRM. If you are anything like me, the first time you heard it, you probably rolled your eyes and said, “Ugh, another social media buzzword!” And while I do take issue with the jargon itself (and will discuss that later), Social CRM is a central concept that businesses need to understand deeply and integrate fully, in order to serve the social customer.

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Who Is the Social Customer?

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• The social customer consumes information in a different way, and learns about breaking news through Twitter and Facebook, favoring what her network has curated and surfaced as important information.
• The social customer learns about new products and brands through social channels and trusts her social network to provide honest feedback about it, as opposed to a brand’s one-way advertising message.
• The social customer is savvy, doesn’t respond well to unsolicited SPAM in her social networks or overly promotional tweets, but is open to relevant information that meets her needs at that particular moment.
• The social customer expects brands to be present and active in the same social venues where she hangs out, listening to her feedback, whether it’s negative or positive.
• The social customer expects you to listen and engage with her, not only when it coincides with an e-mail blast or new feature release, but rather when she needs you. And you better respond fast, in real-time, or she will either move on to a competitor, or tell her friends about her bad experiences.
• Because the social customer can talk to a brand through many channels at the same time, she expects everyone she talks to from your company to have the same background on her issue. For example, if I complain about an airline on Twitter, I want the representative who engages me there to know my itinerary and the full history of our interaction through various channels.

Bottom line: The social customer owns the relationship, and you need to earn her trust.

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What is Social CRM?

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Paul Greenberg, and author and leading authority on SCRM, stated that Social CRM is “…designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide a mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company response to the customer’s owning of the relationship.”

Another great definition was put forward by Michael Fauschette: “Social CRM is the tools and processes that encourage better, more effective customer interaction and leverage the collective intelligence of the broader customer community with the intended result of increasing intimacy between an organization and its prospects and customers. The goal is to make the relationship with the customer more intimate and tied to the company by building a public ecosystem to better understand what they want and how they interact with the various company touchpoints like sales, customer service etc…”

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what you call Social CRM or how you define it, as long as you understand it and know how to apply it to your organization. It’s all about the execution. At Attensity, for example, we developed the “LARA” framework, which addresses the end-to-end process of Social CRM:

• Listen to customer conversations
• Analyze those conversations
• Relate this information to existing information within your enterprise
• Act on those customer conversations

Jacob Morgan of Chess Media has developed this pretty comprehensive diagram that I like to refer to:

As mentioned above, I don’t necessarily agree that Social CRM is the best name for this kind of process because CRM has typically enabled one-way conversations with customers, with a disproportionate focus on technology. The name CRM stands for “customer relationship management,” which is a misnomer because the company no longer controls or manages the relationship –- the customer does.

In one of my favorite quotes about Social CRM, Mitch Lieberman states that “Social CRM is about bringing “me” [the social customer] into the ecosystem… It is not about the technology, it is about the people, process and cultural shifts necessary to support and grow a business.” This is a very important notion to understand in order to avoid coming down with a case of “analysis paralysis.” We all have a tendency to over complicate things, and while SCRM is a big concept that takes a lot of savvy and planning to get right, it’s really very simple at its core. Companies that successfully execute on the Social CRM process share the following characteristics:

— Social engagement must be enterprise-wide. To achieve this goal, you need to “socialize” the organization. The larger and more entrenched your organization is in traditional ways of handling customer interactions (inbound or outbound), the more difficult this task will be.

How do you socialize the organization? Through proper training, alignment of objectives (the quintessential question of “what’s in it for me?”), and providing leadership and mentoring. Marketers within your organization need to understand that a brand is no longer what you tell your customers it is –- it is now what they say it is. Make sure the salespeople know how to use Twitter to build relationships without spamming their networks. Empower customer service to help, and product teams to gather and act on feedback.

Overall, the toughest task of “socialization” is conveying the notion that the more the brand lets go of its desire to control the message, the more they will be able to shape it collaboratively with its customers. This is where a social media director/manager becomes a crucial hire, because she will provide direction for the entire organization.

— To truly provide a “mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment,” per Paul Greenberg, the organization must be irrevocably oriented towards transparency and customer service. Why are companies like Zappos so successful, while others’ attempts at helping on Twitter resemble a “me too” strategy? Because transparency, taking risks, and providing a “no-matter-what-it-takes” kind of service are part of their corporate DNA.

If you don’t have the guts to truly commit to transparency and service, and if you don’t empower your people to act on behalf of the company (which will inevitably lead to some unintentional mistakes), you won’t get very far. You must embrace experimentation, take smart risks, and “fail fast.”

— I can’t stress enough the importance of putting the right processes in place to truly listen and engage. Because the sheer volume of social media conversations is staggering, you need a plan to triage, prioritize and activate the right people in the organization to engage properly. After you socialize the organization, take the time to figure out who the right internal resources are in at least these areas of the organization: Customer service, PR, marketing, sales, and product feedback.

Develop a process by which a social media message gets routed to one of the above groups and activate the right resources for an immediate response. There must also be a robust crowdsourcing component, which will empower customers to provide direct product feedback, and the organization to ensure that the feedback is heard and acted upon (UserVoice is a terrific platform for this).

The social customer may go to Twitter with a question, a user forum with a customer service query, Facebook with a compliment, or Yelp with a complaint. The processes you establish will largely determine your ability to respond quickly and with the relevant information, while uniting all of these interactions under one customer record.

At the end of the day, you must ask yourself if the steps above help you enrich the two-way relationship between the social customer and your social business.

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Use the Right Tools

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Even though Social CRM is mostly about people and processes, you do need the right tools to help you achieve the following:

• A 360 degree view of the customer must include not only the relevant interactions between your company and the customer across the networks where they originated, but also internal data from your own CRM system. This data must be rich and actionable, and the system must also retain all these interactions as part of the customer record. This is a win for the customer because she gets a personalized experience and never has to tell her story to three different reps, and a win for the company which now becomes more efficient.
• The ability for everyone to engage and be in alignment: Social media is not a silo, and no one department owns it. There must be a process in place by which each message gets automatically routed to the right person, classifying it by type (question, complaint or compliment), content (what it actually said), sentiment, action needed, and influence. This helps automate the triage process, which until now has been mostly manual.
• Sophisticated workflow tools will ensure that information created by the 360 degree view of the customer is accessible to everyone in the organization in the same way, creating a context for each interaction and enabling the rich, intimate relationship with the social customer. Each person involved with the customer record receives a set of prioritized tasks and reminders. The ability to engage right from the app creates a virtual paper trail of the conversation.

Are you ready for enterprise-wide engagement? Can your organization support Social CRM? What are some of the steps you have taken to build a rich relationship with your social customer?

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More business resources from Mashable:

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- How Companies Can Use Sentiment Analysis to Improve Their Business
- How Venture Capitalists are Using Social Media for Real Results
- Why Co-Working Makes Sense for Small Businesses
- HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Offline Networking Events
- 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Leverage LinkedIn’s New Features

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, iqoncept

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Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, iStockphoto

Tags: business, customer service, enterprise, facebook, List, Lists, small business, social media, social media marketing, SocialCRM, twitter

One of the most interesting conversations I’ve had about the open social web lately is with Laurent Eschenauer, arcitect on OneSocialWeb.

We have a long conversation about why you want to help build a federated open social network.

Is he your savior?

Based on conversations people are having over on Google Buzz about this video, yes.

A Bill of Privacy Rights for Social Network Users —

Social network service providers today are in a unique position. They are intermediaries and hosts to our communications, conversations and connections with loved ones, family, friends and colleagues. They have access to extremely sensitive information, including data gathered over time and from many different individuals.

Here at EFF, we've been thinking a lot recently about what specific rights a responsible social network service should provide to its users. Social network services must ensure that users have ongoing privacy and control over personal information stored with the service. Users are not just a commodity, and their rights must be respected. Innovation in social network services is important, but it must remain consistent with, rather than undermine, user privacy and control. Based on what we see today, therefore, we suggest three basic privacy-protective principles that social network users should demand:

#1: The Right to Informed Decision-Making

Users should have the right to a clear user interface that allows them to make informed choices about who sees their data and how it is used.

Users should be able to see readily who is entitled to access any particular piece of information about them, including other people, government officials, websites, applications, advertisers and advertising networks and services.

Whenever possible, a social network service should give users notice when the government or a private party uses legal or administrative processes to seek information about them, so that users have a meaningful opportunity to respond.

#2: The Right to Control

Social network services must ensure that users retain control over the use and disclosure of their data. A social network service should take only a limited license to use data for the purpose for which it was originally given to the provider. When the service wants to make a secondary use of the data, it must obtain explicit opt-in permission from the user. The right to control includes users' right to decide whether their friends may authorize the service to disclose their personal information to third-party websites and applications.

Social network services must ask their users' permission before making any change that could share new data about users, share users' data with new categories of people, or use that data in a new way. Changes like this should be "opt-in" by default, not "opt-out," meaning that users' data is not shared unless a user makes an informed decision to share it. If a social network service is adding some functionality that its users really want, then it should not have to resort to unclear or misleading interfaces to get people to use it.

#3: The Right to Leave

Users giveth, and users should have the right to taketh away.

One of the most basic ways that users can protect their privacy is by leaving a social network service that does not sufficiently protect it. Therefore, a user should have the right to delete data or her entire account from a social network service. And we mean really delete. It is not enough for a service to disable access to data while continuing to store or use it. It should be permanently eliminated from the service's servers.

Furthermore, if users decide to leave a social network service, they should be able to easily, efficiently and freely take their uploaded information away from that service and move it to a different one in a usable format. This concept, known as "data portability" or "data liberation," is fundamental to promote competition and ensure that users truly maintains control over their information, even if they sever their relationship with a particular service.