I had the chance to sit in briefly on the “Why Social Media Marketing Fails” panel featuring Peter Kim, Charlene Li, and Jeremiah Owyang.  The discussion centered around the measurement of social media marketing efforts and the growing need for better accountability.

At one point, Charlene asked the audience to members to raise their hands if they were meaningfully measuring their social media efforts – a small sample went up.  The follow-up question, when asked how many were engaging in social media marketing in general, showed quite a bit more hands from the packed audience.  Her point was simple and spot on – start measuring your efforts or your budgets will be capped or cut.

Peter made an interesting point as well and brought back into focus the need to keep track of the bottom line. As he reminded us all, the marketing department has often escaped the traditional modes of accountability within the organization.  While there have been many successful measures taken to add structure to internal processes, the default position of marketing has been “we’ll make it up in brand equity” (love that one).

Jeremiah added some interesting insight into another aspect of failure – engagement.  He pointed to an example of a financial services client that they advised to not pursue a social media strategy.  The main reason behind the guidance was the internal protocols that prevented employees from actually engaging with customers via the social tools.  If there aren’t any real people at the helm, how social can it really be?

Jeremiah followed up with another take at the engagement model.  Citing Wells Fargo, he showed that engaging customers via their lifestyle or workstyle could actually be a very successful mode.  As he mentioned, Wells Fargo created their Guided By History blog which actually connected them with exactly the right kind of customer.

Tags: #w2e

For the last two weeks, Brian Solis and I have been discussing events and the role that blogging has had on them. We’ve done this largely as we actively engaged in the process at a variety of events in the Bay Area. More than a year ago, my life with syncPEOPLE was dedicated to the study of the role that social media can and would play in the event/conference business. It was a difficult process filled with fear and uncertainty. I’m happy to hear that there has been quite a sea change and the tide is moving in the right direction.

One of the major trends I have been observing is the migration to media. Almost every event organizer wants to hold onto the audience they have and to grow it in as many ways as possible. Remember this simple fact, sponsorship can’t grow without growth in attendance (up to the point of saturation, that is). It is this understanding of the world that has driven a lot of the experimentation in the conference industry. The truth, of course, is that there is not much room to not embrace new media and methods. Attendees have ever-changing needs and event organizers must adapt to new models.

In the last 2 weeks alone, I’ve been approached by no less than 4 events to assist in integrating social media into the attendee experience. I think it is a definite sign that more and more, everyone is looking back to the social dimension of events. It’s quite amazing how unsatisfying many events seem now when this is not properly planned and accounted for – after all, conferences are really about the contacts more so than the content.

This post was inspired by some discussion flowing today regarding the Nielson BuzzMetric client-only conference. The official word from the organizer was that the event was intended for its clients and that there were presentations of case studies from a variety of clients. Steve Rubel’s poses a broader question in response, “Should conferences ban blogging?” My simple answer: it depends.

While there are a number of reasons that organizers should consider integrating blogging and other social media into their event experience, I can undertand that under certain circumstances they might seek some privacy – though I do beg they consider it very carefully. In this case, it was a private event and there is no requirement for transparency. Naturally, asking people not to do something is often more like demanding they do the opposite – potentially undoing any attempt to “contain” the content.

Ultimately, I think we need to be more constructive in our criticism (Scott Karp agrees). While we all are empowered with our new suite of media tools, entitlement is still something quite different.

The Social Media Club is getting things rolling quickly with their first workshop. Brian Solis published the press release today. I’ll definitely be in attendance.

PALO ALTO, CALIF. 10/17/06 – Social Media Club today announced its first workshop for high tech communications professionals. On October 23rd, From Social Media to Corporate Media (SM2CM), will offer an interactive workshop for high tech communications, PR, and advertising professionals to better understand Social Media. SM2CM will be held in SAPs conference center in Palo Alto from 1 to 6 p.m.This workshop is a unique hybrid of a traditional conference and an unconference. During the course of the afternoon on, attendees will hear short talks from leading Social Media practitioners and engage in conversations with other Silicon Valley professionals, leaving the workshop with an understanding of how their company can benefit from producing Corporate Media using Social Media tools.

PR 2.0

technorati tags:socialmediaclub, chris+heuer, kristie+wells, brian+solis

The Social Capital blog points to Paul Resnick’s interesting analysis of a paper titled “When is Reputation is Bad?“. Paul summarizes some of the key points as follows, referencing his example of a car mechanic:

1. Information about a player is revealed only when other players are willing to engage with that player, so that getting a sufficiently bad reputation is a black hole that you can’t escape from.
2. There are “friendly” actions; a high probability of friendly actions is what causes partners to we willing to play. (In the mechanics example, honesty is the friendly action.)
3. There are bad “signals” or outcomes that occur more frequently with unfriendly actions but occur sometimes even with friendly actions. It is these signals/outcomes that will be made publicly visible in a reputation system. (In the mechanics example, the bad outcome is recommending an engine replacement.)
4. There are “temptations”, unfriendly actions that reduce the probability of bad “signals” and increase the probability of all the good signals. (In the mechanics example, the temptation is reporting the signal “tuneup” even when the car needs an engine replacement.)
5. The proportion of player types who are committed to the friendly action regardless of its consequences is not too large. (These would be mechanics who would never say “tuneup” when you needed an “engine”, even if it meant closing their business tomorrow.

presnick: When Reputation Systems Are Worse Than Useless

This analysis seems incredibly appropriate in light of the discussion we’re seeing swirl around not only PayPerPost (1,2,3) but also the related sorties surrounding “blogging vs journalism” and “Edelman vs blogging“.

So let’s relate Paul’s points to our universe:

1. We’ve seen the problem with bad reputations becoming as persistent as toilet paper on your shoe in the blogosphere. Specifically, we know that it is extremely difficult (read near impossible) to recover once you have lost your trust
2. Friendly actions in the post-media universe often hangs under the banner of disclosure (you know, the italicized text usually surrounded by parenthesis)
3. Bad signals are quite easy to spot in the blogosphere, and online in general. PayPerPost provides us two cues: first the text provided by the advertiser is a natural cue and second, the quite manual beacon that call’s home (note: it would take about 10 minutes to whip up a greasemonkey script to highlight the “bullshit” if you were so inclined). However, we should not overlook the best tool of all – blogger’s own innate desire to call bullshit on just about anything.
4. Tempations come in the form of link love, technorati rank, and x-list status. Ultimately, we’re more than likely too obsessed already with our standing in the universal scoreboard that we feel less and less incentivized to put the game in play. We don’t want to run the risk of getting caught with our hand in the cookie jar, right?
5. The proportionality of good vs. evil is what has the big minds in the space all worried. Today, the proportion of good players outnumbers bad players (haha, that’s probably not even true relatively speaking).

Which leaves us, yet again, in the same position I’ve been considering. The equation seems as if it will balance itself over time. The notion of balance still seems overrated, if not far-fetched. Perhaps the real worry is that we’re already past the point of equilibrium.

technorati tags:blogging, payperpost, reputation, monetization

CNN Money, by way of Business 2.0, has a lengthy look at the “Blogging for Dollars” movement. While the piece does quite a bit of research, it won’t be of much help to those of us not at the top of the blogging game – not that it’s not worth a read.The one thing that seems most salient, regardless of the size of your readership, is the nature of the relationship you have with them as compared to the traditional media outlets. Don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s meaningless – you’ve got something many, many large corporations with all sorts of money can’t muster all that easily on their own.

At the same time, advertisers–shunning old-line media in favor of the Web–are discovering the unique power of blogs. Blogs offer a personal touch in the mediascape; small sites have become our guides to a content-saturated world. As such, their recommendations are highly valued by readers–which naturally has made advertisers take notice. In recent months, big-name companies like Banana Republic and Coca-Cola (Charts) have for the first time run campaigns on blogs, in the belief that blog communities often consist of concentrated numbers of the passionate and influential people all marketers want to reach. Intel bought its first blog ad in March; now all its ads run on blogs as well as traditional outlets. Says Thom Campbell, head of media strategy for Intel (Charts), “The audience on blogs is the cream of the crop.”

Business 2.0: Blogging for Dollars – September 1, 2006

technorati tags:blogging, monetization

Over the last 6 months or so I have been quite engrossed speaking with alll sorts of people who decidedly don’t consider themselves bloggers. I often follow-up their immediate gut-reaction with a question, “What’s a blogger?” It seems that there’s an image problem with blogging, and not from the credibility side.

The problem, actually, is with the profile of blogging activity and the mindset of the blogger. For many looking in from the “outside” – drawn to the fences by mainstream and trade coverage of the wonders and merits of this thing called blogging, they’re completely baffled “how to do it”. There’s no easy answer, but presumably lots of “wrong” ones. Should there not be an on-ramp? Don’t we need time to let groups and organizations find their voice. We’re all born with one as individuals – that’s harder to coordinate inside an organization.

I came across this post on the 6apart site the other day:

Busy CEOs don’t always have time to do all the homework and writing for a blog all by themselves. If you acknowledge the team that helps write a blog post, just like you’d acknowledge people who help do research for a presentation or a business meeting, it’s completely okay to have people contribute to a blog that’s “by” a CEO.

Six Apart – Movable Type News – Another Sacred Cow Debunked: You Don’t Have to Write All Your Posts

It got me to thinking how much we, the people inside, tend to segment ourselves from them, the people outside. It happens everywhere and in everything, so it’s no surprise. But perhaps we’re setting ourselves up for a resounding thump – trying to carry a handful of water across a desert.

What would the next generation of blogging look like without our encouragement and guidance? What will it look like with it?

Update: Ironically enough, I had this tab open and didn’t read it.  This seems to drive at what I’m wondering about:

The powerful have a greater stake in the perpetuation of an innocent fraud than do the powerless. Long after the powerless have suspended their suspension of disbelief, the powerful will continue to hold tightly to the fraud, repeating it endlessly amongst themselves in an echo chamber that provides a false ring of truth.

Nick Carr, “The Great Unread”

technorati tags:blogging, business, mentality

The BloggerCon IV schedule has been announced. There are some interesting topics listed, but one caught my eye: How to Make Money led by John Palfrey. He’s written his introductory post which is worth a read. In it he states:

If you are a blogger, how do you go about making some money from your work? One obvious answer is the classic approach of throwing BlogAds or Google ads or whathaveyou ads on your blog. That works for some people, but it generates more than beer money only for a select few at the left-hand side of that famous power law distribution.

…

I trust that we’ll kick around these ideas, but also get into some new possibilities: shouldn’t really simple syndication allow for some new thinking around getting people to pay for the content you create? And are there ways for bloggers themselves to get on the bandwagon of making some of the money that the venture guys are planning to make? How could that work, exactly? Put another away: lots of people have spent lots of digital ink (sound and images too) on the general problem of “how do you monetize the long tail?”

Source: John Palfrey, “The ‘How to Make Money” Session at Bloggercon”

Naturally, I’m planning to attend this session. If anyone’s tried to figure out how to make money from blogging it’s certainly me – I’m building an entire company that helps bloggers make money.

At the same time, though, I’m somewhat conflicted. I seem to recall some time ago, at a previous BloggerCon, that Dave Winer openly told someone (Chris Nolan I believe), that she didn’t want to make money from her blog, she wanted to make it from the various things that come from having a blog (consulting, gigs, jobs – hey, aren’t those all the same?).  But I could be wrong.

It also strikes me as odd that, considering there are people trying to develop solutions in this arena (many more than just me)  that their knowledge and a dialogue with those audiences might be extremely relevent.  Aren’t the folks that go to BloggerCon largely the people at the top of the game (present company excluded) or otherwise already monetizing in some way?

Just a bit confusing – but I’m glad to see it regardless.

Podcasting can help you in more ways than you think. Adding to the stack, I recently learned about the Podcasting Elevator Pitch” (via Business Opportunities Weblog) and I think it’s a wonderful idea.

The technique calls on several unique opportunities that exist today:

• A VC that’s able to be reached via Podcast. Although there are likely a few, there’s one that’s enabled this, Fred Wilson.

• An open bookmarking system that provides a method for adding to a feed, a la tagging. Enter del.icio.us. It turns out that Mr. Wilson has setup a special tag, fred’selevatorpitch, that let’s people tag their audio as an elevator pitch.

• Stir in some RSS reading, and more specifically, some Podcatching software.

• For extra punch, stir in the new del.icio.us

Podcasting can help you in more ways than you think. Adding to the stack, I recently learned about the Podcasting Elevator Pitch” (via Business Opportunities Weblog) and I think it’s a wonderful idea.

The technique calls on several unique opportunities that exist today:

• A VC that’s able to be reached via Podcast. Although there are likely a few, there’s one that’s enabled this, Fred Wilson.

• An open bookmarking system that provides a method for adding to a feed, a la tagging. Enter del.icio.us. It turns out that Mr. Wilson has setup a special tag, fred’selevatorpitch, that let’s people tag their audio as an elevator pitch.

• Stir in some RSS reading, and more specifically, some Podcatching software.

• For extra punch, stir in the new del.icio.us

Podcasting can help you in more ways than you think. Adding to the stack, I recently learned about the Podcasting Elevator Pitch” (via Business Opportunities Weblog) and I think it’s a wonderful idea.

The technique calls on several unique opportunities that exist today:

• A VC that’s able to be reached via Podcast. Although there are likely a few, there’s one that’s enabled this, Fred Wilson.

• An open bookmarking system that provides a method for adding to a feed, a la tagging. Enter del.icio.us. It turns out that Mr. Wilson has setup a special tag, fred’selevatorpitch, that let’s people tag their audio as an elevator pitch.

• Stir in some RSS reading, and more specifically, some Podcatching software.

• For extra punch, stir in the new del.icio.us