Las Vegas Web Design

Hat tip to PSFK for surfacing the video below of venture capitalist Fred Wilson speaking at Google as part of its Marketing Talks series. Wilson breaks down the “capital efficiencies” that give many startups a competitive advantage and analyzes how certain industries that can be digitized are especially ripe for disruption.

And in the video below Wilson makes the argument that everything is a channel and the next layer of the “social media stack” will be aggregation and filtering capabilities. He mentions TweetDeck  as a sort of social dashboard, and while it is, that’s really a rudimentary example. It seems FriendFeed is the closest to pulling together the various services needed to filter and aggregate effectively. And I saw a Tweet recently from Steve Rubel that mentioned how FriendFeed is really the only service that can search your friends’ content. At least on the consumer side.

FriendFeed-like services behind the firewall is a little different story. The things you’ll see in Telligent’s upcoming release will validate that only a few collaboration vendors have a vision for what the real-time web looks like in a corporate setting.

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Most legendary bad boys (think James Dean) will say that rules are made to be broken. When it comes to not watching too much TV, not staying up late to finish that last video game level, or not swimming 2 minutes after I eat, I have to side with the bad boys. When it comes to starting your business down the online collaboration path, however, you may want to follow the example of Mr. Dion Hinchcliffe.

1. Social businesses are made of people.
   1. One of these days, the machines will say differently, right Terminator?
      
2. The right tools and infrastructure naturally enable good social business.
   1. Agreed. Emphasis on the word “right.”
      
3. Foster conversations with your customers, partners, employees, and everyone else that’s interested.
   1. Community Server, Community Server again, Community Server Evolution, Inside Sales team. Maybe I was patting myself on the back a bit much on that last part.
      
4. Popular social channels and services are important but are the smaller part of the social business story.
   1. Having one place where those types of functionalities come together is undoubtedly a great start.
      
5. Put the community first.
   1. A must. You have invested in it, now focus on it. Telligent gives you the tools to thrive; you still need to be the advocate to do so.
      
6. Add a social dimension to your business processes.
   1. Simply going out and saying… “Ok, collaborate”, most likely won’t do much good.
      
7. Rethink your views on intellectual property in a highly social world.
   1. Ideas will come from anywhere and everywhere. Listen to the old and the young, ideas don’t necessarily come from experience.
       
8. You manage to what you measure; use a social yardstick.
   1. Got that taken care of: Harvest!
       
9. Do not use social channels for traditional push communication.
   1. Agreed.
      
10. Censorship kills participation.
    1. Obviously Telligent adheres to non-censorship, they let me blog! But seriously, every company is going to need to face the piper at some point.
       
11. If you’re not sure where your organization ends and the network begins, you’re doing it right.
    1. Seamless integration, core business units talking to outsiders.
       
12. Healthy social businesses explicitly extract value from the network.
    1. Why would a business want to be social if they don’t find value from their network?
        

What are your rules for bringing collaboration to your business?

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If you consider yourself a marketing maven, take a step back and review your current campaigns.  Are you marketing to the ever-growing digital crowd? According to Marketers Moving to Digital Media, you probably are. If you’re not, you’re probably looking at options to make you successful at positioning your brand in the online world.

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Kate Niederhoffer and I presented a combined view of social media from the perspectives of social psychology and sociology.  Kate applies a linguistic background to analyze the content of social media while I bring social network analysis to bear on the structures created by connections created by links and replies.

Slides:

We got some great questions from the attendees about how they can apply these approaches to their social media investments.  Tools like NodeXL can be helpful for people interested in structural data analysis.  Kate has built tools for performing semantic analysis of social media content over time.

Video:

Beyond Buzz: On Measuring a Conversation (Web 2.0 Expo 2009 - Katie Niederhoffer & Marc Smith) from Steffan Antonas on Vimeo

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As I was catching up on some reading this morning, I stumbled upon an article by Scott Hornstein, President of Marketing for Hornstein Associates. The title caught my eye: “Direct marketing is the new black.” In it, Mr. Hornstein starts off by saying,

“These are the times that try marketers’ souls. On the other hand, this is not the time to hide or be timid. It is the time to be effective, and to redeploy the majority of what’s left of your marketing budget into direct marketing for one very good reason: The strategy is, at its core, measurable and ROI-driven.”

1. Integrate the media mix.
2. Integrate a healthy dose of customer care.
3. Invest in database quality.
4. Account for everything, but report only key metrics.
5. Measure performance.
6. Measure the ratio of expense to revenue.

I couldn’t help but think about the impact that digital marketing has on direct marketing. There’s a correlation here, yes?

With the rapid adoption of collaborative online communities for the consumer, information is being democratized, search is now a daily activity, and email is only part of the connective tissue. Seems to me that companies big and small are beginning to realize that customers remain loyal when there is a community connection point geared towards collaboration and engagement.

Mr. Hornstein definitely makes an interesting case for direct marketing, but I believe we can take that a step further by looking at the rapid adoption of digital marketing strategies.

Click here to read his article. Then peruse our library to download free, informative white papers.

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Here’s a timely interview with Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee that amplifies some of the differences between the consumer and business side of 2.0.

Hat tip to Andrea Baker’s blog post on The Social Computing Journal.

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If you missed BlogWell Chicago back in January, you’re not completely out of luck.Blog Council has started posting the presentations on its blog over the last few weeks.

One of the recent uploads is “Mayo Clinic’s Natural Progression to Social Media,” from the clinic’s social media director Lee Aase. (video below)

I like to point to Mayo because a lot of people scratch their head when they think of a hospital or clinic using social media.  They have they same challenges, however, as other brands or commercial corporations when it comes to competing for media attention or capturing new customers — or patients in this context.

In that vein, Lee discusses how Mayo Clinic uses social media to build brand visibility, kick-start word-of-mouth conversations, and generate media coverage.

And BTW, the next BlogWell is in New York on April 29. It’s one of the best run shows I’ve been to in a while. The beauty is the format. Each company get 15 minutes to tell its social media story and there’s usually a few minutes left for Q&A. That keeps the sessions moving and the audience on its toes. Not sure I’m heading to NYC, but there’s a good chance. Use “friendoftelligent” when you register and get $50 off.

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I’m really liking ZDNet’s video portfolio, especially coming out of last week’s  Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
This segment’s from Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division, explaining how Microsoft helps companies use Web 2.0 inside the firewall.

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Image by George Dearing via Flickr

It’s tough to have  a business conversation these days without someone mentioning  social media and its impact on business.

Many of us that work within the confines of social computing are too often distracted by all the technology around us. We tend to assume that everyone knows why they should have an internal social network or how an external community can drive sales reach. Here’s a big news flash folks – it’s still very early and most of us, like it or not, are figuring out all this stuff together.

If you’re still allowed to travel and have attended any recent social media or interactive marketing conferences, you’ve probably heard the cries and seen the blank stares.

“We think our marketing group needs a Wiki but we’re not sure”

”Our VP said we need a community platform and he thinks we should start an initiative ASAP”

”The CEO says he’s tired of hearing about Facebook and says we should do social networking internally.”

The problem with quotes above is there’s no specific objective tied to any of them. While more sophisticated users can quickly spell out how to apply a wiki to the way they work, others are continually pulled into the tech quicksand, unable to discern between a wiki or a beefed-up HTML page.

So let’s try those quotes again.

“Our marketing group needs a better way to communicate its strategy internally and wants other ways to share information other than email”

“Our VP wants our company to have a handle on what our customers are doing with our products. He’s confident we’ll see a sales and marketing lift if we get our customer talking about us.

“We want to make sure we’re capturing the knowledge within our organization. It’s imperative that we  move our communication into a more real-time mode.

Now that you’ve honed in on what challenges lie ahead, shouldn’t you be able to quickly find a vendor to help? Clients I’ve spoken to say the process still requires way too much work aligning with someone that clearly demonstrates an understanding of their business. Something that makes them say, “Yeah, that’s us, that maps to our business.”

That last part is something we (Telligent) work very hard at. Give us a shot, we’ll show you.

Related articles

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[Update: The title for this blog entry should be renamed to "using topic clouds to reveal order from complexity" since chaos by definition cannot have order. Thanks to @erobillard for pointing that out.]

As the amount of digital and social media content continues to increase exponentially, it’s becoming very difficult to find the signals within all the noise. Inspired by Clay Shirky’s "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags" article about what I’d call "emergent categorization of unstructured content," I’ve recently started to look into ways of revealing discernable order from the chaos. For instance, I follow over 1600 people on Twitter and subscribe to about 100 blog feeds. No matter how hard I try, I just can’t read everything. Hence, I would love to be able to see a "topic clouds" for all those tweetstreams and blog posts within the last month or the previous month, so I can quickly scan the map for topics that I’m interested in but had missed. I have not yet found a tool (or set of tools) that would generate such a topic cloud, but I’ve used Wordle to create word clouds (shown below) for my own tweets and blog posts to give you an idea of what I’m after. These word clouds don’t really solve the noise problem, but they do reveal the most frequently occurring words in the content. Let me know what you think of these - whether or not they help you get a better sense for the topics I’ve recently posted about.

Wordle for my tweets during January, 2009:

Wordle for my tweets during December, 2008:

Wordle for my blog posts (not including this one) since I joined Telligent in October, 2008:

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