Social Networking for Your Chromosones!
April 10, 2008 | 1 Comment
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Sure, you can join Facebook, you can put up a MySpace page, you can follow your friends on Twitter. You can pick your friends based on mutual interests or, gasp, actual friendship. I just joined a new social network today called “InSocialMedia.”
But you know what’s been missing (until now), don’t you? I mean, you feel it deep down. Really deep down. Like, in your DNA.
What if I could join a social network based on aligning myself with folks that have similar DNA? Now that would be something. Imagine the wall posts: “Hey, you’ve got the same congenital disorder of glycosylation type Id (CDG-Id)! Do you think that’s caused by homozygous mutation in the ALG3 gene, you know, a de novo mutation in combination with a segmental maternal uniparental isodisomy? Mine sure is!”
Yes, that giggly opportunity is now a reality if you join 23andMe. MIT Technology Review covers the social networking for the genome opportunity. All you have to do is fork over $999 for the genetic test and, poof, they throw in the social networking tools free! (Wait, social networking tools are usually free anyway… But I digress.)
While I make fun of it (because, well, it’s mostly dumb), I do see one potentially serious and very helpful application of this. People with genetic markers for certain serious diseases could find each other and share relevant science. That could be helpful. But I imagine that would take a lot of $999 investments to get to scale where that would really help. And that would mostly benefit 23andMe.
Tip of the hat to Bolaji Oyejide for pointing it out to me.
Quantifying the Impact of Social Media: Where the Edelman White Paper Got it Right, Got it Wrong and What We Should Do Next
January 31, 2008 | 23 Comments
Earlier this month, Jonny Bentwood of Edelman published “Distributed Influence: Quantifying the Impact of Social Media.” Edelman gets picked on a lot (often deservedly so) for the highly visible mistakes they’ve made in the social media space, but there’s no question that they are both deeply involved and pretty darn thoughtful on the topic. This white paper fits the latter; it was a thoughtful analysis by some major players in the game on how you measure online influence.
What they got right:
1. This white paper builds on the concept of a Social Media Index, which is an effort to get all of us in this space to think about a standard way of measuring of influence. The index is not perfect (as they openly admit), but it is thought provoking. It’s a good starting point and a must read.
2. They gave some additional insight into how meme’s get started, concluding that there are:
- meme starters,
- meme spreaders,
- meme adapters,
- meme commentators, and
- meme readers.
This is analogous to Forrester’s Social Technographics Ladder, which measures web participation from low to high as:
- Inactives (52%) –>
- Spectators (33%) –>
- Joiners (19%) –>
- Collectors (15%) –>
- Critics (19%) –>
- Creators (13%).
3. They begin an interesting discussion that influence as measured by the power of an individual isn’t the way to go, but by the power of the idea and how much it actively moves within the space. Credit to Jeff Jarvis for that thinking, which I think is 100% right. This is similar to what Radian6 does in their monitoring tool when they allow you to search content by the activity surrounding it (i.e., total comments, unique commenters, etc.). I firmly believe that this is likely to be more useful than chasing an amorphous, ever-changing group of influencers for reasons I explain below.
What they got wrong:
Early on Bentwood acknowledges that this white paper doesn’t even try to be the definitive answer we’ve all been looking for, but another piece of the conversation. It’s a valuable one at that. These “got it wrong” statements are meant in the same way: to contribute another series of thoughts to this conversation, not to criticize even in a small way. So here goes:
1. For the bulk of this white paper, the roundtable seems to conclude that influencers are influencers by their very nature. I don’t believe this is true.
Relationships (both online and off) are contextual. A powerful influencer in one situation is a meek influencee (or someone who simply doesn’t care) in another situation. Steve Rubel has influence in social media conversations, but likely has no influence in conversations regarding women’s shoes, vitamins, Bollywood, etc. (Steve, if you are, in fact, a player in the women’s shoe world, more power to you, but hopefully the point is well made.
2. Social networks and trend starters are too complicated to ever be identified in advance.
That “influencers” exist and “do their thing” is the premise of the Tipping Point, a favorite book of mine. But we all know (or hopefully should know) that the world is vastly more complicated than that. Duncan Watts of Yahoo has done some groundbreaking research on social network behavior that suggests that the power of the idea is in the context of the moment, and the influencer on a given idea varies widely and unpredictably. As a result, we should not be trying to pin down the “powerful people” as some fixed set (n=what?), but rather build better systems to help us quickly identify powerful people by topic.
3. Personality-type is not the horse we should be betting on.
According to Bentwood, the roundtable concluded that “a system equivalent to Myers Briggs was needed for micro-communications. This would enable people to be able to map target media, meme creation, consumption and sharing habits.” In my view, that sort of effort would miss the boat entirely and be of dubious value. As someone who works in a multi-client social media agency, I have to work within conversations by topic. I believe that people’s passions and influence are not innate qualities of the individual that make them either an influencer or an influencible, but rather vary widely based on their comfort in and knowledge of a particular topic relative to others in the discussion. (Think of the bossy know-it-all around the office who is meek and mild when his big brother is around.)
Whether they ever choose to participate may relate to their personality type, but among those willing to participate, influence-level is not fixed. Max Kalehoff’s statement in the white paper that, “You don’t go for the most influential but the most easily influenced” is interesting, but misdirected and sounds suspiciously like targeting 1.0. (I acknowledge that I don’t know the context of Max’s statement, so I may have missed some nuance he injected.)
What we should do about it:
Based on all this, what do we do about it? What’s the ideal situation for moving forward? Here are my thoughts to add to the conversation:
1) To move the social media index forward, we’ll need a system that serves as the white pages of social media with RSS.
In other words, one of us needs to build an open directory into which people can voluntarily put their various online personas (blog, Facebook ID, Flickr account, LinkedIn, Twitter name, Utterz account, etc. etc. etc.). There’s no question that everyone would not do this, but social media types are openly creating online personalities and want to be found, so active “creators” users would. While Naymz and a few others do something similar to this, the utility comes not from just a “look-up” feature, but the ability to use this data to analyze contribution levels. (The social media index is interesting, but to make it work in the long-tail we have to be able to both automate it and use it as a tool within a monitoring platform.) So we’ve got to be able to allow folks to query this data in an automated fashion as part of our monitoring.
2) With the dataset we’ve created in Step 1, we will be able to improve our online monitoring so can identify both the most virulent ideas that are percolating within each conversation (measured by the activity around the idea including comments, photo tags, unique commentors, length of the comment, etc.) and cross reference it with the most active contributors in each conversation (by volume of contribution, across multiple platforms and media type).
3. If we then build an algorithm that weights the activity around contributions (audience receptivity to a contributor as measured by their engaging with that contribution) with volume of contributions (across multiple media like blogs, Tweets, Flickr tags, etc.), we’ll have a useable, ever-changing snapshot of which individuals are controlling and guiding a particular topic at a particular time. Ideally, this system would allow you to adjust weights like a graphic equalizer to get different outcomes depending on exactly what you’re trying to learn with your search.
Summary
When you work for a social media agency, you end up participating with the “true believers” in the world (like the folks on this roundtable), but you also participate with the openly skeptical and the cautiously optimistic. They neither know nor care who Robert Scoble is and their universe (online or off) is unlikely to intersect with his. But I firmly believe that there are billions of interesting conversations taking place out there, being steered (intentionally and unintentionally) by hundreds of millions of micro-influencers. To chase them all as somehow wired differently than us is not the way to go. To have better tools by which to find them within the conversations just as you need to is the way to go.
With that, I’d like to tag Jeremiah Owyang for his thoughts on the concept of context-based influence versus personality-based influence. I’d also like to tag Duncan Watts for his thoughts (although I can’t seem to find his actual blog, so doubt he’ll see this). I’ve likely bastardized and twisted his brilliant thinking into something he’ll barely recognize. I’m always curious as to what Geoff Livingston thinks. And, finally, of course, since I’m contributing to a roundtable that I did not attend, I’d love to hear from the actual participants, including Jonny Bentwood, Max Kalehoff, Sarah Petersen (who is either too shy to blog or needs some SEO help), Henry Copeland, Jeff Jarvis, Steve Rubel, Keith O’Brien, Richard Edelman, Rick Murray (another hidden/nonexistent blog–irony noted), David Dunne, Peter Kim, Charlene Li, and Dr. Walter Carl (congrats on the baby by the way–she’s very cute).
Now, who wants to build this tool I described? I’d certainly pay to subscribe to it… Heck maybe we’ll build it, who knows…
Comparing Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn and More
January 18, 2008 | 1 Comment
Ok, it’s Friday. I’m busy. Grabbing lunch now and decided to search “funny social media” to see if I could find some Friday fun to share. Found Lee Hopkins Wiki, on which he had placed this image from a Wired Geekipedia page.
A little Friday fun for everyone. If you’ve ever really wondered the best uses for Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter, here it is…
Finish the week strong. Have a good weekend.
~Jim
Social Media is a Waste of Time, Part I
January 4, 2008 | 11 Comments
Social media is a waste of time. There, I said it. Yesterday, I read a long blog post by a guy I’ve never actually met. Then I read all the comments. Then I left a comment, offering advice he asked for.
It made me no money. It gave me no leads. It helped me cross nothing off my to do list. I fell a few minutes “further behind.”
I sometimes spend 30-40 seconds glancing at new Tweets that add absolutely no value to my day. I played a Facebook brain teaser game to learn that Gene’s brain is bigger than mine (damn).
Social media is a distraction. Social media is a time waster. Social media is unproductive.
There, I said it. And I’ll admit it can all be true. Now, let’s ponder this for a moment. In Part I, let’s think about why that doesn’t matter even if it’s true. In Part II, let’s think about why that is only partly true.
The nattering naysayers want to talk about being productive in marketing and they are right to do so. Let’s compare social media marketing, which is what Ignite does as a social media agency, to other forms of marketing for a second.
- Watching television is (more often than not) a waste of time.
- Reading (most) websites is a waste of time.
- Listening to the radio is a waste of time.
- Reading magazines is (more often than not) a waste of time.
- Almost everything in your mail pile is a waste of time.
- Talking to your friends is a waste of time.
Only rarely do any of the above lead to new business growth, lead to income for you or lead to crossing something off your to do list. But marketers still try to reach us when we do all of these things:
- TV advertising
- Web advertising
- Radio advertising
- Magazine ads
- Direct mail
- Logo shirts, WOMMA, influencer marketing, etc. etc.
Let’s accept your (spurious) assumption that social media is nothing more than a waste of time. Even if that were 100% true, as a marketer don’t you want to engage people when they are wasting time? Particularly if it’s LOTS of them wasting it. 
We’ve got 72 million active social network users in the U.S. right now, and that’s growing about 40% this year. (And that’s just the social network stuff.)
As a marketer, you should want to figure out the best way to reach these people. (FYI, if someone is being REALLY productive, you CANNOT reach them through most marketing anyway.)
The best way to reach people engaging in social media is by engaging back, on their terms. You can call it amateur to amateur if it makes you feel superior, but I prefer to call it person-to-person. And if you can figure out how to do social media marketing (or let us figure it out for you), there’s nothing more powerful.
And that post that I talked about at the top? Reading that and leaving my comment gave me pretty much the same feeling as talking in person to a friend or co-worker about a problem for a few minutes. And that’s part of the good stuff in life.
Now, sorry if you wasted your time reading this. 
But now that it’s gone, invest 90 second more in the comment field, and tell me your reaction.
Backlash Against Facebook’s “Beacon” Begins
November 27, 2007 | 3 Comments
It’s the holiday’s right? A time for merrily buying Christmas gifts, Hanukkah gifts, Kwanzaa gifts (and, if you’re wondering, time for buying MY birthday present–the 29th of December, write it down…).
Imagine this scenario. A Facebook member, you buy a nice pair of leather gloves from Overstock.com for your boyfriend for Hanukkah. A while later, **poof**, your choice is sent out in your news feed–a feed that broadcasts to all your friends, including er, um, that boyfriend. Dang!
That’s exactly what happened to Matthew Helfgott’s girlfriend, he says. Another couple had their choice of movie broadcast on their feed because they bought the tickets at Fandango. This was ok, they said, because they were seeing “No Country for Old Men.” But here’s the best line of the article:
“What if I was seeing ‘Fred Claus‘? That would have been much more embarrassing. At least this was a prestigious movie.”
While his reaction is funny, people are starting to see why Facebook’s new advertising platform is named “Beacon” (see definition of beacon if you don’t get that). Many bloggers are unhappy about it. Link 1. Link 2. Link 3. And it can send news about things you do away from Facebook to your Facebook friends.
“Add 3 lines of code and reach millions of users,” Facebook says.
As someone who runs a social media agency, I love this idea. What an opportunity to market on a social media platform. What a great way to let the confidence of a friend influence buying decisions. This should be powerful stuff.
But as someone who believes that social media marketing is more than being about a new place to run ads, I think this solution was a little too easy for Facebook. I believe they rushed it out to capitalize on their otherwise great momentum and to prove to people that they could monetize their success.
What this backlash may be showing, however, is just how hard it will be for Facebook to ever monetize their success to the point that they can justify their current valuation. They may yet figure it out, as they’ve done a lot right. But if the Beacon backlash continues, it could be seriously brand damaging for Facebook. I think this is the first of many mainstream articles about unintended consequences.
Here’s a prediction: A boss somewhere is going to notice on a news feed some purchases by his co-worker that align with times he was supposed to be working. Watch for that article. Just like that intern who got Facebook-busted for the Halloween party, and he didn’t have a Beacon shouting about it…
What do you think? Is Beacon the opening that social media agencies and social media marketers have been looking for? Or is a fairly significant mistake by Facebook that needs to be tweaked?
Apple Doesn’t Get Social Media? Them’s Fightin’ Words
November 19, 2007 | 3 Comments
Andy Beal committed heresy. He dared suggest that Apple doesn’t really get social media and that they will need to figure it out sooner or later if they want to continue to thrive. While it’s not surprising that Apple fans defended Apple, what is surprising is how many intelligent people showed by their comments that they didn’t get social media.
Like Andy, I’m an Apple fan. I love my iMac. Hate my PC. Like my iPod. Love the new iPod Touch.
But Andy’s right. Apple doesn’t get social media the way Dell does. They are not taking maximum advantage of communicating with their customers and prospects. And their market share, while growing, is under 4%, so they certainly have room for improvement that will positively impact their bottom line.
Here’s what’s interesting about the commenters on Andy’s post (and they got so heated that Andy had to shut them off):
1. People equated social media with corporate blogging. Done properly, it’s much more (or much else, as corporate blogging is not a requirement of “getting” social media).
2. People equated social media with social networking. Apple does have Facebook groups and other types of social networking tools. I don’t think they should create a niche Apple social network, and I don’t think Andy does either.
“Getting social media” means finding ways to talk with customers. It shows up in product development, it shows up in customer support, it shows up in a variety of ways.
Yes, Apple is hot right now in product development (and again, I love their products). But what Andy’s post shows is how people who “get” social media are so far speaking a different language than those who don’t. That’s a tremendous opportunity for those companies that show the way to connecting on a deeper level. And it’s a shame that Dell makes Windows-based products (because Vista is h-o-r-r-i-b-l-e!!!), because they really are doing some great stuff in terms of two-way customer communications.
Hang in there Andy. While you got skewered by some, your fundamental point was correct. That so many missed it just shows how far we have to go in this business…
Half of the Most Popular Websites Are Social Media
October 31, 2007 | Leave a Comment
E-marketer is reporting today on the most popular websites in the world, ranked by page views. This is from September 2007. Half of the most popular websites are social media. The other half are search-centric (if you count MSN.com as search… Microsoft probably does. I do not.)
Some quick comments on the 8 most popular websites in the world:
1) Yahoo: Search. They stay at number one by combining a lot of elements into one. News, email, search… Works for them. Not a good strategy to try to replicate for others though.
2) MySpace: Social media. Still the number one social network in terms of page views and in terms of income, although Facebook continues its surge. Look for MySpace to shake up the game in the next 60-90 days.
3) Google: Search. 60% market share in searches. Buying the rest of the e-world (except Facebook). Not much more to say.
4) Facebook: Social media. Continues to grow. Now that Microsoft owns 1.6%, that’ll probably kill it. (kidding). Here’s my page.
5) Orkut: Social media. Google’s social networking play. They’ve grown much more overseas than in the U.S., at least so far.
6) Live.com: Search. Look, Microsoft search looks like Google, about 6 years too late. This site would never make the top 10 if Microsoft didn’t have a zillion properties to link to it.
7) MSN.com: Search/Content. For some reason, this is one of my 4 home pages. A good mix of content and a search engine I personally avoid like the plague.
YouTube.com: Social media. Love those videos. So does everyone else.
More proof that people are expecting to engage with content, not just read it.
Using StumbleUpon for More than A Quick Break
October 29, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I’ve been using StumbleUpon for a while now and thought of it only really for two things:
1. A fun way to take a quick 5-minute break and laugh, learn something or give a thumbs down to a clumsy marketing effort; and
2. An interesting way to drive traffic to our site.
Now, thanks to a great post by Caroline Middlebrook, I realize that StumbleUpon is much more than that. You can use SU to connect with like-minded people if you just spend a little more attention to the StumbleUpon toolbar than I’ve been doing so far.
Here’s Caroline’s process, in a nutshell:
1. StumbleUpon a particular channel that interests you, or Stumble by keywords;
2. Pay attention to who submitted the Stumble’s that are of interest to you and check out their profile.
3. Look at their tag clouds to see how interested they are in the topic you’ve found.
4. Connect with those who are most interesting, keeping in mind SU’s 200-friend limit.
The above is my SU tag cloud. Apparently I like bizarre, and advertising and marketing and internet tools. Interesting.
There’s lots in Caroline’s post, even if you don’t want to build a big SU friends network. For one, Stumbling by keyword or channel is a great idea when you’re looking for that next blog post.
Have you used StumbleUpon in any unique ways like this?
Amie Street “Gets” Social Media Value Proposition
October 12, 2007 | Leave a Comment
In my previous post about the value proposition of social media, I discussed that successful applications give value back to your customer.
In light of this, I stumbled across an article in the Alley Insider that introduced a new Facebook application that I think accomplishes this quite well. The gives a basic overview:
“Long Island City-based music site Amie Street — freshly funded by Amazon — is rolling out a Facebook app that lets you set up a fantasy record label based on its mostly-indie music catalog. Your “label score” goes up and down as songs get more or less popular. The better you do, the more credits you can earn toward mp3 downloads.”
A useful and valuable Facebook app is a rarity these days, but taking a further look at their website (which operates as a social networking site) it is clear that Amie Street understands how to apply value there as well.
In fact, the site articulates this value proposition to both of its niche audiences (emerging artists and music enthusiasts) in the following statements:
“Amie Street gives fans the incentive to discover and purchase your music through our unique pricing model. All songs on Amie Street start free and rise in price up to 98 cents based on the number of times they are bought. The first several downloads of your songs are free because this encourages fans to experiment with your music even if they haven’t heard of you. “
“Amie Street gives fans incentive to spread the word about your music to their friends through our innovative recommendation system. For example, if a fan recommends your song when it’s free, and the price your song rises to 98 cents, we give that fan 98 cents worth of credit to buy more music.”
This is a great example of a company that “gets” the value proposition. I’ll be watching this one to see how it catches on.
Did Target Steal Our Social Media Marketing Playbook?
October 11, 2007 | 3 Comments
Back in August, we wrote a post about how Wal-mart’s latest social media marketing campaign was inherently flawed. We predicted that it would, once again, blow up in the retail giant’s face. (Note to the folks in Bentonville: Let Edelman focus on the traditional PR. Give us a call on the social media marketing stuff, k?)
Here’s what we said then, in a nutshell: This campaign won’t work because Wal-mart is talking “style” when they are known for “practical.” The campaign should focus on the utility of trying to move to a dorm. Alas, it was too late for them to listen.
But Target, on the other hand, did listen. (Note: Check with legal, Do they owe us royalties?)
As it happens, while Wal-mart was prattling on about something they don’t understand, Target was listening! (See Listening is Social Media Step One on how important that is.) They began to understand the flow of the conversation among incoming freshman. They began to understand the Facebook platform and how conversations occur there. They wisely noted:
“We aren’t there so much to tell a story, but to put on a party, giving the students a platform for social interaction.” Any content provided by a marketer in such a setting “needs to work as social currency. … Whatever story there is, it’s mostly told by the users, not by the brand.”
Their Facebook page was about dorm room survival. They had practical tips, they had photos, they (gasp) let users upload their own photos in place of the ones they carefully designed first.
They made the marketing very subtle and were rewarded by posts from people saying how much they love Target (See that: brand evangelists doing the marketing work for you, if you (a) deserve it and (b) give them the platform on which to do it.)
Wal-mart, on the other hand, had vicious wall posts slamming their corporate practices, for example.
“Wal-Mart is toxic to communities and livelihoods.”
There’s so much right with what Target did and so much wrong with what Wal-mart did, I could go on for days (maybe I have already), but here’s 5 points to take away from this (different than our earlier 5 Steps to Rolling Out a Social Media Campaign):
- Listen first. Social media marketing is cocktail party dialogue. When you enter a new group, you listen politely first.
- Talk on your prospects’ terms. Back to the cocktail party analogy. Incoming freshman were talking about their fear of being properly prepared for dorm life. Wal-mart said, “Let’s talk style!” Target said, “Let’s talk survival.”
- Understand the value you bring. There are a lot of people who hate Wal-mart. This doesn’t preclude Wal-mart from participating in social media, but they ignore this truth repeatedly and get slammed for it. They don’t understand the value they bring. Target, on the other hand, doesn’t have that baggage, and played their “we’re the place you can get cool, functional stuff pretty cheap” card beautifully.
- Social media campaigns can cost a fair amount. Target budgeted $500,000 for their campaign. Facebook’s media kit talks about minimum investments of $50,000 per month. People think of social media as “free” and it can be. But you’ve still got to budget for time, at a minimum, and if you want to buy you’re way onto a media platform like Facebook or MySpace, you still need a budget of some kind.
- ROI measurements are different, and not very evolved. Target had 7,176 members of their group by September 31. That’s great, right. If you calculate a CPM (cost per thousand) relative to members, the CPM is over $69,000. Of course, CPM is more traditionally applied to “impressions” which were no doubt higher. But the point is, the value of over 7,000 people engaging with your brand in a positive way is much, much higher than 7,000 people being exposed to an ad. The ROI calculations, however, are still being fleshed out.
Kudos to Target for getting it. That will pay dividends now and in the future.
Oh, and their campaign started July. I guess they don’t owe us royalties… Dang…