Blueprint D Mind Mapping Results

I had the opportunity to facilitate the final session for the Detroit Regional Chamber's Young Professionals' (YP) Organization called Fusion at the Mackinac Policy Conference on Saturday May 31, 2008 at the Grand Hotel.

I utilized a mind map to facilitate the session, utilizing an open source mind mapping tool called FreeMind.

I received a number of requests from attendess for copies of the mind map that was created during the session, so I created this blog posts with downloadable versions of the map. The map can be downloaded in one of two formats below: 1. PDF, 2. JPEG. Note, I could not get the FreeMind format to download properly from the web, so if you want a copy of this version please email me.

• Download FreeMind
  
• PDF Format
• JPEG Format

10 Advantages you'll gain through Social Media

Even though Social Media sites have been around for a couple of years, they are now hitting the mainstream in a big way. Often, it takes time for people to understand a new phenomenon and those who are late to the game often miss out on the biggest gains. If you're on the fence on Social Media, there are a number of great reasons you and your organization should be using them.

According to Wikipedia, Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other.

Companies, organizations, corporations--even the military are starting to realize the benefits of Social Media. Below are the top 10 advantages you'll gain through Social Media:

1. Gain intimate information about your customers and competitors
Social Media has an unprecedented ability to connect you to your customers in a very intimate fashion. If your customers feel that respected by their Social Media experience, they will speak openly and helpfully about what works and doesn't work well. And, not only will they speak openly about you have to offer, but they'll also share what they like and dislike about your competition. Organizations pay a tremendous amount of money for focus groups, test marketing, pilot programs, etc., but Social Media can offer similar results if you listen carefully to what you're being told. Generally speaking, in my opinion, most people want to help--let them help you to improve your company and your products.

2. Share information with those who are REALLY interested
The Internet has offered unprecedented opportunity for people with highly-specialized interests to find a forum, share their thoughts, and interact with others who share interest. If your Social Media efforts are well-placed, you can get your message to the exact group(s) that will sign-up, purchase, donate, contribute, share, or work with you on whatever your goal. Tread gently--be humble--and genuine because chances are high that the people you're interacting with may have far more experience on the subject than you.

3. Raw communication from your customers and potential customers
There are few better, faster, or cheaper opportunities to gain raw insight than from Social Media. The anonymity of the Internet offers some the needed "boost" to speak candidly about what you have to offer. They may be more inclined to write a post about something good or bad if they don't have to be concerned with hurting the feelings of your customer service representative or salesperson. That being said, be sure to *read* customer posts "in the best light". That is, posts or blog entries lack the tone or body language that would accompany a phone call, focus group, or other human-to-human interaction so it's easy to misunderstand the intent, agitation, or enthusiasm of the writer. When in doubt, assume that the person meant the post to be helpful and constructive, and respond accordingly.

4. Customers feel connected to "insiders" in your company
We've all felt it... that connection felt when an employee reveals something about an upcoming product or change in the organization or company. That knowledge has a certain "value" to it. You might call your friend, your mom, sometimes--anyone that will listen--and share it with them. When employees understand what they can share, and use that information strategically, it can benefit the company and the customer. In some cases, customers will develop a heartfelt bond simply by learning a little detail about the company, your products, or anything that strikes an emotional interest in them. For example, learning a little-known story that Ben & Jerry's named its newest flavor after comedian Stephen Colbert might mean something to a serious Colbert fan. It's hard to anticipate those connections, but it's not impossible.

5. Blazing-fast information sharing
Many people start their day by checking their favorite Social Media sites. When they do, they can be the best purveyors of information throughout the Internet. What used to be shared by phone, is now shared by hotlinks to postings and articles of interest. If you want to share something new--Social Media can make it happen at lightning speed.

6. Inexpensive public relations, advertising, and marketing
Compared to the cost of traditional print--even websites--you can't beat Social Media for spreading your message. A website may have a certain following of people, but a true Social Media network, wherein people share information and interact, and feel part of an online community can spread the message much less expensively, more successfully, and to the desired group better than any other media.

7. Customers feel like they're being heard
When customers see that members of your organization are responding in forums, comments, and posts, they know that their message has been heard. People want to be heard and know that their opinion is respected. That's not to say that you have to react or agree with their thoughts--in many cases--you've probably already heard their idea somewhere else. However, a kind response of "That's similar to something that we've explored in the past that we might have to reconsider." will go a long way to cementing a helpful bond with your customer.

8. Employees and organization members love to use Social Media amongst themselves
Social Media is also helpful to learn insight about products, employees, and other members of organizations. When employees feel comfortable sharing personal information about their hobbies, pets, experiences, aspirations, and interests, with other members of the organization, a lot can be gained. When a CEO blogs about upcoming challenges facing the company, and employees share information, i.e. Delta Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald's, Whole Foods, or Starbucks, everyone benefits.

9. Support your other marketing/media efforts
Social Media can [and should be] be an integral part of your overall marketing efforts. Connect to your customers on a personal level while supporting that connection through traditional media. Integrating the two can be a powerful combination. Consider launching blogs with specific topics in mind and, if necessary, with a limited lifetime.

10. Social Media can radically change your organization
Adopting Social Media strategies and techniques can develop entirely new directions within your organization. Sharing and interacting with your customers and employees can enable you to move faster with less-expense, and react more quickly to changes. IBM launched a new exploration of Social Media called Beehive and, in just nine months, they've reached 30,000 users. If some of those 30,000 users become IBM customers as a result of their new direction, you can be sure that other companies will pick up on the trend.

Social Media can help you spread your message quickly, inexpensively, and surgically-right to the people you want to hear it.

How to get good PR for yourself in the blogosphere.

Great article about how to do PR in the age of social media.

Go where the bloggers are. A few months before his book debuted in April 2007, Ferriss wrote the names of a few dozen bloggers on his whiteboard and said to himself, "I want to get to know them." He then attended BlogHaus at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, where 700 bloggers and journalists hung out for a week. There, he made dinner plans with bloggers he had targeted. I attended one such dinner hosted by Teresa Rodriguez Williamson -- the author of Tango Diva, a blog for women who like traveling -- where Ferriss regaled us with fun stories about his travels.

Want to know where to find bloggers? Look at Upcoming.org's event calendars frequently. You can figure out which events a preponderance of bloggers say they're attending and keep track of them through the service.

• Go where the bloggers are.
• Read the blogs of the people you want to cover you.
• Send bloggers interesting stories
• Start blogging.
• Don't send press releases.

Freecycle turns trash to treasure

It is nice to see that Freecycle (www.freecycle.com) is finally getting some press. I read this article from the AP yesterday and smiled (Freecycle turns trash to treasure).

Perhaps the world is really getting a little greener?

Freecycle is a global recycling phenomenon. Since it started in Arizona in May 2003, it has grown to more than 4 million members in more than 4,100 cities, from Istanbul to Inwood. It boasts of keeping more than 300 million tons of
trash out of landfills every day and has inspired imitators.

The Power of Social Networking

The Power of Social Networking
By Jonathan Smith, EO Detroit

I keep getting stumped with questions that I cannot answer, and it frustrates me. I am a guy, and, as many women can attest to, guys are better at solving problems than they are at listening.

My girlfriend had some questions about how we should handle certain situations in our life. Being the guy that I am, I immediately tried to find the right answer. When I answered with a positive spin, she would play devil’s advocate and give me all the reasons why the negative answer was more plausible, and vice versa. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

This conversation was not going as well as I would have liked, so I went to my fall-back plan: the Internet and the world of social networking. I suggested that she consider posing these questions to a greater audience, and maybe we would gain some wisdom that we could not come up with on our own.

She is pretty innovative and open to new ideas, so she immediately went online to Yahoo! Answers and started tapping into the network. Within 30 minutes of asking her first round of questions, she had 16 answers. Twenty-five percent of the answers were very helpful, 50 percent were neutral and twenty-five percent were not helpful. After reviewing the answers to the first question, she realized that she needed to refine her question in order to dig deeper into the wisdom of this online community. The answers she received helped us come up with a mutually agreeable plan of action, and they ultimately saved us hundreds of dollars in counseling fees!

Of course, Yahoo! Answers isn’t an infallible source of infinite wisdom. But, as legendary American football coach Vince Lombardi said, a group effort usually leads to better, and more well-rounded, results.

The beauty of social networking is that the tools are right at our fingertips. We just need to be aware of them and their potential applications and be willing to experiment with them to create outstanding results.

Dealing with Negative Buzz - Thought of the Day

You'll never be able to control the blogosphere conversation. Don't even try. You'll never be able to manage your blog coverage like you manage the press. Don't even try. But what you can do is participate, earn respect, and tell your story. Jump in, join the conversation, and be a part of it.

Andy Sernovitz, Former CEO of WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association

Two separate clients have approached me in the past weeks to discuss how to manage negative online buzz. Both groups were concerned, frustrated and confused about how to respond.

The conversations went something like this:

• Denial – Can I ignore this? No, the negative buzz is showing up on the first page of Google
• Anger – Well let’s just flame these guys! (emotional response)
• Acceptance – Let’s create a plan to appease the negative poster and mitigate the damage
  

Dealing with negative word of mouth (social media) conversation is going to become a more regular, if not daily, occurrence. Managing negative buzz will become a key component of Crisis Management PR.

We need to be proactive in counseling and managing our clients’ online reputations. Below is an outline of the process that we should consider:

• Monitor online footprint
• Build online reputation, now, before you need it (i.e. become part of the conversation)
• Respond quickly, authoritatively, and factually...Bottom line: tell the truth

The water cooler conversation has moved from the office into cyberspace. It is our job to ensure that our clients are counseled about this colossal shift and are in a position to respond when someone invariably tries to tarnish their reputation.

Make it a great Wednesday, and Holiday weekend!

Jonathan

Open-Source Spying

http://www.nytimes.com/
By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: December 3, 2006

Excerpt from "Open-Source Spying"

. . . Intelligence heads wanted to try to find some new answers to this problem. So the C.I.A. set up a competition, later taken over by the D.N.I., called the Galileo Awards: any employee at any intelligence agency could submit an essay describing a new idea to improve information sharing, and the best ones would win a prize. The first essay selected was by Calvin Andrus, chief technology officer of the Center for Mission Innovation at the C.I.A. In his essay, “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community,” Andrus posed a deceptively simple question: How did the Internet become so useful in helping people find information?

Andrus argued that the real power of the Internet comes from the boom in self-publishing: everyday people surging online to impart their thoughts and views. He was particularly intrigued by Wikipedia, the “reader-authored” encyclopedia, where anyone can edit an entry or create a new one without seeking permission from Wikipedia’s owners. This open-door policy, as Andrus noted, allows Wikipedia to cover new subjects quickly. The day of the London terrorist bombings, Andrus visited Wikipedia and noticed that barely minutes after the attacks, someone had posted a page describing them. Over the next hour, other contributors — some physically in London, with access to on-the-spot details — began adding more information and correcting inaccurate news reports. “You could just sit there and hit refresh, refresh, refresh, and get a sort of ticker-tape experience,” Andrus told me. What most impressed Andrus was Wikipedia’s self-governing nature. No central editor decreed what subjects would be covered. Individuals simply wrote pages on subjects that interested them — and then like-minded readers would add new facts or fix errors. Blogs, Andrus noted, had the same effect: they leveraged the wisdom of the crowd. When a blogger finds an interesting tidbit of news, he posts a link to it, along with a bit of commentary. Then other bloggers find that link and, if they agree it’s an interesting news item, post their own links pointing to it. This produces a cascade effect. Whatever the first blogger pointed toward can quickly amass so many links pointing in its direction that it rockets to worldwide notoriety in a matter of hours.

Spies, Andrus theorized, could take advantage of these rapid, self-organizing effects. If analysts and agents were encouraged to post personal blogs and wikis on Intelink — linking to their favorite analyst reports or the news bulletins they considered important — then mob intelligence would take over. In the traditional cold-war spy bureaucracy, an analyst’s report lived or died by the whims of the hierarchy. If he was in the right place on the totem pole, his report on Soviet missiles could be pushed up higher; if a supervisor chose to ignore it, the report essentially vanished. Blogs and wikis, in contrast, work democratically. Pieces of intel would receive attention merely because other analysts found them interesting. This grass-roots process, Andrus argued, suited the modern intelligence challenge of sifting through thousands of disparate clues: if a fact or observation struck a chord with enough analysts, it would snowball into popularity, no matter what their supervisors thought.

A profusion of spy blogs and wikis would have another, perhaps even more beneficial impact. It would drastically improve the search engines of Intelink. In a paper that won an honorable mention in the Galileo Awards, Matthew Burton — the young former D.I.A. analyst — made this case. He pointed out that the best Internet search engines, including Google, all use “link analysis” to measure the authority of documents. When you type the search “Afghanistan” into Google, it finds every page that includes that word. Then it ranks the pages in part by how many links point to the page — based on the idea that if many bloggers and sites have linked to a page, it must be more useful than others. To do its job well, Google relies on the links that millions of individuals post online every day.

This, Burton pointed out, is precisely the problem with Intelink. It has no links, no social information to help sort out which intel is significant and which isn’t. When an analyst’s report is posted online, it does not include links to other reports, even ones it cites. There’s no easy way for agents to link to a report or post a comment about it. Searching Intelink thus resembles searching the Internet before blogs and Google came along — a lot of disconnected information, hard to sort through. If spies were encouraged to blog on Intelink, Burton reasoned, their profuse linking could mend that situation. “

Imagine having tools that could spot emerging patterns for you and guide you to documents that might be the missing pieces of evidence you’re looking for,” Burton wrote in his Galileo paper. “Analytical puzzles, like terror plots, are often too piecemeal for individual brains to put together. Having our documents aware of each other would be like hooking several brains up in a line, so that each one knows what the others know, making the puzzle much easier to solve.”

With Andrus and Burton’s vision in mind, you can almost imagine how 9/11 might have played out differently. In Phoenix, the F.B.I. agent Kenneth Williams might have blogged his memo noting that Al Qaeda members were engaging in flight-training activity. The agents observing a Qaeda planning conference in Malaysia could have mentioned the attendance of a Saudi named Khalid al-Midhar; another agent might have added that he held a multi-entry American visa. The F.B.I. agents who snared Zacarias Moussaoui in Minnesota might have written about their arrest of a flight student with violent tendencies. Other agents and analysts who were regular readers of these blogs would have found the material interesting, linked to it, pointed out connections or perhaps entered snippets of it into a wiki page discussing this new trend of young men from the Middle East enrolling in pilot training.

Full Story

Logged In and Sharing Gossip, er, Intelligence

http://www.nytimes.com/

By SCOTT SHANE
Published: September 2, 2007

AMERICA’S spies, like America’s teenagers, are secretive, talk in code and get in trouble if they’re not watched closely.
It’s hard to imagine spies logging on and exchanging “whuddups” with strangers, though. They’re just not wired that way. If networking is lifeblood to the teenager, it’s viewed with deep suspicion by the spy.

The intelligence agencies have something like networking in mind, though, as they scramble to adopt Web technologies that young people have already mastered in the millions. The idea is to try to solve the information-sharing problems inherent in the spy world — and blamed, most spectacularly, for the failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.

In December, officials say, the agencies will introduce A-Space, a top-secret variant of the social networking Web sites MySpace and Facebook. The “A” stands for “analyst,” and where Facebook users swap snapshots, homework tips and gossip, intelligence analysts will be able to compare notes on satellite photos of North Korean nuclear sites, Iraqi insurgents and Chinese missiles.

A-Space will join Intellipedia, the spooks’ Wikipedia, where intelligence officers from all 16 American spy agencies pool their knowledge. Sixteen months after its creation, officials say, the top-secret version of Intellipedia has 29,255 articles, with an average of 114 new articles and more than 4,800 edits to articles added each workday.

A separate online Library of National Intelligence is to include all official intelligence reports sent out by each agency, offering Amazon.com-style suggestions: if you liked that piece on Venezuela’s oil reserves, how about this one on Russia’s? And blogs, accessible only to other spies, are proliferating behind the security fences.

Full Story

"The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts. "

~ Malcolm Gladwell, “The Law of a Few," The Tipping Point

Activating a Social Media campaign requires more than the mere creation of a blog, making a post to a message board, or uploading a video on YouTube.Reputation lies at the crux of any successful word-of-mouth campaign, in Social Media or mainstream media.

Many would like to believe that we merely have to “post it on the Internet” and our messages will be magically delivered to our targeted audience. ROFL (Rolling on Floor Laughing). I only wish this were the case, but if it were true we might all be out of a job.

The reality is that any Social Media outreach campaign requires many of the same elements that are required for a successful mainstream media PR campaign:

• Research to determine the most appropriate media targets
• Solid pitch
• Strong ongoing Media Relations strategy

We have a lot of experience pitching and executing Media Relations, but have beenlimited in our knowledge of how to select the right Social Media outlets.

You'll be happy to know that we now have a process in place that is much more sophisticated than "just go out there and post." Our methodology includes collaborating with the Client Service Teams to target appropriate segments, selecting sites with the best online reputation within that target, developing the most strategic way to contact online influencers, and deciding whether we want to coordinate with existing programs/efforts. As you can see, we're taking great care to put the "U" before the "C" in our Social Media efforts, and online reputation plays a huge role in how we determine what sites to pitch. We need to be able to find the people with the “rare set of social gifts” that Gladwell discusses in today's quote.

It is interesting to note that there are a number of objective measures for online reputation. For example:

• http://www.technorati.com/ has an Authority Rating for blogs(Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.)
• http://www.google.com/ invented PageRank™ for websites(PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".)
• http://www.myspace.com/ measures it via the number of Friends(The User's Friends Space contains a count of a user's friends.)
• http://www.ebay.com/ used a Feedback score(Feedback represents your permanent reputation as an eBay member. It’s made up of comments and ratings left by other eBay members you've bought from and sold to. These comments and ratings, along with your overall Feedback Score, are available in your Feedback Profile.)
• http://www.alexa.com/ developed a Traffic Ranking(Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users.)

The point is: We understand that to be successful in the Social Media realm, we need to think about how we are going to tap into the key influencers who are in the best position to help us tell our stories. We've already had some success with this. And, in order to further our success, everyone needs to be thinking about how a Social Media component might enhance their client programs, so that we can work together and make it happen!

So, what will be the next "social epidemic"? Who knows... But, if we stick to our process and aggressively pursue fitting opportunities, we may very well be the "infectors"! Make it a great Friday and weekend,

Jonathan

Way Beyond Sneakers

Know your product Wade is an athlete, so the marketing he does off court has to be tied to his success on court. In his Lincoln auto ads, Wade helps kids who play ball, though he doesn’t play in the spot.

Convey core traits Wade’s managers aim to position him as a competitive, contemporary, humble winner. In an upcoming Gatorade ad, Will to Win, Wade mentally runs through the obstacles that face him on the court.

Identify the target market For Wade it’s young adults, age 16 to 24. That’s why he’s partnering with T-Mobile on a new mobile device popular with youth.

Align authentically A big brand is not always best. Wade’s team chose T-Mobile over AT&T and Converse over bigger shoe companies because they fit his persona and what he uses himself.

Integrate marketing programs T-Mobile is an ideal partner because it’s also an NBA sponsor, allowing its ads to feature him in trademarked NBA gear.

Leverage Digital Media Wade is engaging Web giant Google to help create an online community with exclusive content via blogs, Webisodes, and podcasts.

With IT budgets slack, delivering business value is paramount

Platt, who has been doing some stellar thinking recently about this new way of looking an software architecture, goes on to note that:
The interesting use of Web 2.0 in business is in CRM or more specifically Customer

Lifecycle Management. Typically CLM is too expensive and long drawn out to be
able to do effectively so organizations have tried to do a cheap version which
fails. With the use of Web 2.0 social and community techniques however now CLM
can be done effectively and efficiently. This is where Web 2.0 will impact
organizations the most.

And use of Web 2.0 techniques to service customers is part of where a lot of thinking is currently aligning, around business value across efficiency, revenue generation, deep automation, and execution. And in my opinion, this is subtantially the subtext of the Gartner discussion on initiatives for sustaining IT:

• Control is moving to the business. No longer content or able to wait for IT to solve problems, business units are increasingly comfortable in self-service IT techniques. This is particularly true given a new wave of younger workers who expect more personal control over their IT systems and have both connection to the business and are generally highly tech-savvy.
  
• Smaller investments allow new problems to be solved. An business problem that was solvable using older, heavyweight IT techniques for $1M could only solve problems where the return on investment would be greater than $1M. If that problem can solved for $10K today using Web 2.0-style architectures, it opens up a whole new wave of IT value. I sometimes refer to this The Long Tail of IT Value. The mass self-service of these often untapped micromarkets within a business are potentially large.
  
• Relentless Transactional Automation. Rote business processes should be and will be automated extensively over the next few years, freeing up employees to be inserted into the most high-value processes that require human intelligence.
  
• Increasing Dynamic Decentralization of Execution. The new social, collaborative tools allow ad-hoc and emergent teams to network, form, and execute business processes as needed. This leads to the increased invovlement of people at the key points in the process, something Gartner emphasizes as well.
  
• Tacit Customer Relationship Management. Automated customer self-service is as critical for transactional business processes as ever, but this has been done in a relatively tone deaf fashion up to this point and it’s been an all-or-nothing process for the most part up until now. Traditional CRM and CLM hasn’t been responsive or malleable enough and often prematurely optimizes the process, fixing automation or personal interaction at the wrong places. Tacit CRM means being able to provider personal, effective customer solutions in a cost-effective way using a combination of automation and systems. Getting it right means getting or keeping the customer. Getting it wrong means handing your customers to your competitor. I’ve written recently about transactional vs. tacit business processes, and it’s one of the most important parts of Web 2.0 in the Enterprise.

Long Tail PR: how to do publicity without a press release (or the press)

I've been following the debate started by Brian Solis about "social media press releases" and other forms of doing PR in a way that both works in a conversational medium and doesn't demean and insult the intelligence of everyone involved. As far as traditional media goes, I suspect none of this matters much--most journalists have long ago figured how to quickly decide if they have any interest in a press release and how best to extract whatever value is in it. The system is no more or less broken than it's always been.

But what about the Long Tail of media--all those new influentials, from the micromedia of Techcrunch and Gizmodo to individual bloggers? And the social news aggregators like Digg and our own Reddit? They're where the most powerful sort of marketing--word of mouth--starts, but most of them don't want to hear from a PR person at all. Blogging is all about authenticity and the individual voice, not paid spin. Many bloggers seem just impedance mismatched with the preternaturally positive PR professionals, and woe to the flack who's busted trying to game Digg without revealing that they're paid to do so.

So now imagine that you're one of those PR professionals. What do you do? Stick with the world you know, and continue calling and emailing releases to the traditional press (trying not to notice that their ranks are shrinking and influence waning)? Start spamming bloggers, too, and hope for the best? Or just treat alpha bloggers like traditional press and shower them with love, while ignoring the rest?

I've seen all three of those paths taken, some of them even with modest success. Despite the culture mismatch, there certainly are plenty of bloggers who actually don't mind hearing from a PR person, as long as it's in the form of a personal email or comment that reflects that the flack actually reads the blog and gets what it's about. And companies such as Microsoft and Sun are now shifting their PR strategy to give special attention to influential bloggers, inviting them to private briefings and giving them early looks at new products.

But fundamentally social media is a peer-to-peer medium; bloggers would rather hear from someone doing something cool than from the paid promotional representative for that person. The problem is that the people doing that cool stuff are busy, which is why they pay PR people to do the outreach for them in the first place.

I wonder whether the solution to this is to evolve the role of PR from external relations to internal relations, from communications to coaching employees on how to effectively do the outreach themselves. Take Microsoft's 3,000 bloggers who are, for many of us, a welcome substitute for Microsoft PR. Internal project managers like Major Nelson of the Xbox 360 team are a trusted and timely source of information, and have largely replaced the formal press release with blog posts. He and other Microsoft bloggers like him are part of a transparency movement that grew out of the company's developer relations team, but it could have just as easily been driven by an enlightened PR team.

Here's a start at a curriculum for such in-house social media coaching:

Who's influential in our space (and how we know)
What/who influences them
How to get Digged
Effective blogging
Using beta-test invite lists as marketing
The art of begging for links
Stunts, contests, gimmicks, memes and other link bait.
Sharing versus oversharing. How to know when what you're doing is ready to talk about.
(cliched image of perky PR chick emailing some hapless reporter taken from Brian Solis' original post; crude rejection sign added by me)

Will Social Networks Replace the Water Cooler?

Will the 'Tail' Kill the Water Cooler?
Increasingly, we're eschewing blockbuster trends to pursue our own quirky interests.
By Steven Levy
Newsweek

July 17, 2006 issue - It used to be that taking a break from work to fill up our Dixie Cups at the water cooler was a ritual accompanied by harmless conversation about a predictably limited number of pop-culture subjects. We had access to only a few television stations. We listened to the same songs on Top 40 radio. We all read the local newspaper. So there was always something obvious to talk about. Now some people are saying that water-cooler talk is impoverished—or even endangered. Because the digital age lets us indulge our individual passions, the argument goes, we're losing the shared experience that fuels workplace chatter.

The Internet in particular has transformed a world from one of bounded choices to one where we can get anything imaginable. Increasingly, we're eschewing the blockbusters to pursue our own quirky interests. A good percentage of the vast inventory on e-commerce sites like Amazon, iTunes and Netflix isn't popular enough to be offered in brick-and-mortar stores. But online costs are low. In the aggregate, selling one or two units of many obscure items can reap big bucks. Example: the music service Rhapsody offers subscribers more than 2 million songs; in any given month, users stream 90 percent of the tunes. And a third of Amazon's book sales consist of tomes that you won't find on the shelves of even the biggest real-world superstore.

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, has dubbed this phenomenon "The Long Tail," in honor of the shape given to the curve resulting from a graph plotted by sales on these sites. (There's a huge bulge at the "head," representing best-selling products, and an extended, tapering tail at the end, wherein lie many niche products that are suddenly easy to find via search engines, blogs and filters.) In his new book, "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More," Anderson makes a cogent case for how this new model encourages diversity, expands choice and strikes a blow against the megahit mentality. "There will always be hits, but the hits will be smaller," he said to me when we spoke by phone recently. (Disclosure: I sometimes contribute to Wired.)

Full Story

Teaching The Press Release A New Trick

Who knows better than a marketer that the medium is the message? A midsize Boston PR agency, SHIFT Communications, has developed a press release made especially for the Internet. The impetus for this invention: Web 2.0, that second-generation wave of Net services that let people create content and exchange information online. To encourage PR folks to use these Web tools to get the attention of journalists and bloggers, SHIFT has developed a model for a "social media press release." The Microsoft (MSFT ) Word-based format, a free download, mixes elements from traditional releases (pre-approved quotes, for instance) with technology-rich features. Press releases created from the template can incorporate company logos, video, and links to blog posts and traditional media coverage on the product being flogged. With a click, a PR exec can also send the finished press release to the popular consumer-generated news site DIGG. And a reporter or blogger getting the release can click through to a dedicated Web page that collects mentions of the product in question. "This gives journalists everything in one place," says Todd Defren, who developed the format at SHIFT.

About 3,500 copies of the template have been downloaded since May 23, Defren says, and at least one company, media analyst Cymfony, has used the template to plug its e-book about today's media landscape. Journalists, he adds, "will catch on to it, and the more they see it, the more they'll like it." (Advice from a former Financial Times journalist, Tom Foremski, inspired some of the format.) PR heavyweight Edelman plans to unveil its Web 2.0 press release, with similar features, this summer.By Elizabeth Woyke

Navigating the Waters of "Social Computing"

It turns out that all that talk in the early days of the Internet about an electronically driven "free market of ideas" wasn't just a lot of bunk.

Nothing exemplifies the new idea marketplace better than two Web-based innovations that have gained headway in the last couple of years: blogs and wikis. Blogs are Web sites designed to let people post communication about events and other information, usually in chronological order. Wikis are sites that allow users to add and edit content on a given set of subjects.

Businesses shouldn't feel obligated to deploy blogs or wikis, but if they ignore them—and the trends they represent—they do so at their peril. And companies can, in fact, use blogs and wikis to their advantage. But not without risks.

As Forrester Research explained in a February paper on the blog and wiki phenomenon—which it calls "social computing"—individuals are increasingly taking their cues from one another online rather than from "institutional sources like corporations, media outlets, religions and political bodies." Inexpensive hardware, modular content and shared computing resources are making connections between people easier. The changes those connections bring are having an impact on both larger society and the business marketplace itself.

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Tags: blog wiki corporate blogging

Craigslist - The Power of Word of Mouth

Craigslist carries no corporate adverts on its site, there is no fee for registration, and most users would never know that it charges for anything. The company makes all its money by charging employers in three cities a fee for listing jobs: $75 in San Francisco, $25 in New York and Los Angeles. They even feel uncomfortable with this: Buckmaster is quick to justify the charge by saying it improves the level of jobs offered, and so improves the service Craigslist offers.

The company employs just 20 people, spends no money on ads, relying on word of mouth, and has been profitable since 1999. Craigslist doesn’t disclose how much money it makes, but industry estimates put 2005 revenues around $20m, and costs at no more than $5m. The site’s devoted users provide all the content for free.

It’s a business that has Silicon Valley venture capitalists and Wall Street bankers salivating. With its huge and loyal customer base expanding rapidly, so much more money could be made by adding adverts or by charging fees for other parts of the site. Every large media organisation has run the rule over Craigslist. Plenty have offered cash. They have all had the same reply: “No.”

(Craig) Newmark drives a Prius, a petrol-saving hybrid car. Buckmaster has never owned a car. They both take the bus to work in the morning. “I don’t really want a Rolls-Royce or a huge, fancy house,” says Buckmaster. “Money is important until you have enough of it to be comfortable with. Beyond that, I think it’s a very mixed bag.”

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Tags: word-of-mouth network-centric

Talk it up

The web turns up the volume on the consumer voice. Brands and retailers better listen.

All the places marketers need to keep an eye on

“Consumers have a range of tools at their disposal today that allow them to let their voice be heard through consumer-generated media,” says Dana VanDen Huevel, director of new business development at Pheedo, an online advertising platform that delivers contextually relevant ads along with subscribed content such as blogs to consumers’ RSS readers. Among the tools he notes:

• Blogs: Customers that write blogs can be evangelists, vigilantes or both. Whatever side of the fence they’re on, it pays to get to know them and read their blogs.

• RSS: Subscriptions to the blogs and web sites of sources that consumers trust give them a constant flow of information on products, services and experiences from across the web.

• Opinion and review sites: Statements about marketers’ products and services are scattered throughout the web. Places like Amazon.com, complaints.com and epinions.com have thousands of customer reviews that are worth mining for insight.

• eBay: Some companies are using eBay as a pricing research tool because the potential consumer data is immense, especially for second-hand and grey-market products.

• Testimonial sites: Web sites and services like KudosWorks are making it easy for customers to offer testimonials on a brand’s or retailer’s products, and those of their competitors.

• Newsgroups: While blogs get most of the attention these days, newsgroups and USENET are still alive and well. Searching groups.google.com can yield insights from engaged customers.

• Flickr and BuzzNet: Online photo sharing sites where customers take pictures of the products they use in their daily lives can yield a treasure trove of data that would never be found in a focus group

• Tagging: The words consumers use to describe or refer to a product or brand may be different from the words used by the brand or product manufacturer itself. Using sites such as Technorati.com to search on a product’s associated keywords can unearth blog posts and photos that customers have tagged in this way.

The Power of Us

Business Week Online
6/20/05
By Robert D. Hof

Mass collaboration on the Internet is shaking up business
Collective Clamor


Behold the power of us. It's the force behind the collective clamor of Weblogs that felled CBS (VIA ) anchorman Dan Rather and rocked the media establishment. Global crowds of open-source Linux programmers are giving even mighty Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) fits. Virtual supercomputers, stitched together from millions of volunteers' PCs, are helping predict global climate change, analyze genetic diseases, and find new planets and stars. One investment-management firm, Marketocracy Inc., even runs a sort of stock market rotisserie league for 70,000 virtual traders. It skims the cream of the best-performing portfolios to buy and sell real stocks for its $60 million mutual fund.

Although tech companies may be leading the way, their efforts are shaking up other industries, including entertainment, publishing, and advertising. Hollywood is under full-scale assault by 100 million people sharing songs and movies online via programs such as Kazaa and BitTorrent. The situation is the same with ad-supported media: Google Inc.'s (GOOG ) ace search engine essentially polls the collective judgments of millions of Web page creators to determine the most relevant search results. In the process, it has created a multibillion-dollar market for supertargeted ads that's drawing money from magazine display ads and newspaper classifieds.

Most telling, traditional companies, from Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) to Dow Chemical Co., are beginning to flock to the virtual commons, too. The potential benefits are enormous. If companies can open themselves up to contributions from enthusiastic customers and partners, that should help them create products and services faster, with fewer duds -- and at far lower cost, with far less risk. LEGO Group uses the Net to identify and rally its most enthusiastic customers to help it design and market more effectively. Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY ), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP ), and others are running "prediction markets" that extract collective wisdom from online crowds, which help gauge whether the government will approve a drug or how well a product will sell.

At the same time, peer power presents difficult challenges for anyone invested in the status quo. Corporations, those citadels of command-and-control, may be in for the biggest jolt. Increasingly, they will have to contend with ad hoc groups of customers who have the power to join forces online to get what they want. Indeed, customers are creating what they want themselves -- designing their own software with colleagues, for instance, and declaring their opinions via blogs instead of waiting for newspapers to print their letters. "It's the democratization of industry," says C.K. Prahalad, a University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business professor and co-author of the 2004 book The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers. "We are seeing the emergence of an economy of the people, by the people, for the people."

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