Las Vegas Web Design

I recently had the opportunity to dialogue with Chief Marketereditor Tim Perry on the subject of digital marketing spend and the value that social computing platforms adds to the mix.

I gave him 3 abbreviated reasons as to why companies should look at where they spend their limited budgets.

Here they are.

More: continued here

Image via Wikipedia

I saw Steve Rubel’s research last week and wanted to chip in with some thoughts.

If you’re wondering about the baby monitor picture to the right, that represents what Edelman’s Wolfgang Luenenbuerger calls the “baby monitor principle.” The notion is that consumer expectations from social media are pretty much in line with how parents react to baby monitors. If you’ve spent any time on Twitter and witnessed the communications or micro-messages being pushed up to the service, well, you understand. Whether it’s a failed router, hapless iPhone or requesting new features, savvy consumers now expect companies to not only listen to them but engage them – and fast. Fact is, if you don’t someone else will. And that someone is usually a competitor.

Now, let’s dissect what’s trending according to Edelman.

Satisfaction Guaranteed - Customer care and PR are blending as consumers use social media to demand service

I touched on this as we looked at the Baby Monitor Principle above, but there’s no question companies are now retrofitting their customer service and delivery approach. I was tweeting earlier about how companies are prepping themselves to better engage with customers after a post from Peter Kim commenting on the lack of awareness within the brand monitoring space. My argument is simple. The technology is available to listen and foster engagement. It’s the mechanics of engagement that makes companies look clumsy. In other words, corporations sometimes aren’t very good at humanizing themselves. Expect smart companies to continue to invest in community managers and digitally-savvy PR firms to run niche outreach and influence programs.

Media Reforestation -  The media is in a constant state of reinvention as it transitions from atoms to bits

The digital train is tearing down the tracks and has no signs of slowing. Every industry is being reshaped by the expectation that everything should be digitized. Add digital hungry consumers with web devices, NetPCs, Kindles and smart gaming consoles and you’ve got a multichannel marketing and distribution train wreck. Look for media and publishing companies to continue to invest in niche sites and technologies that will not only spur innovation but will give a PR lift to old media’s ailing digital reputation.

Less is the New More - Overload takes its toll. Gorging on media is out. Selective ignorance and friends as filters are in

I don’t suspect gorging on media to go out anytime soon for early adopters and those working in high-tech. However, i strongly advocate the filtering principle. In fact, many of you might even say there’s no such thing as information overload because most of us don’t really have the know-how to effectively filter through the noise. In other words there’s no such thing as information overload, just bad filtering. And look no further than the lack of adoption for RSS inside corporate firewalls as an example. If you’ve spent any time inside a feedreader or RSS aggregator you know how utilitarian they are at delivering customized content. The problem is that most companies haven’t really figured out how to incorporate RSS scenarios into day-to-day workflows. In turn, you have a large and essentially untapped segment of users that haven’t been exposed to effective filtering. Thus, I’d expect consumer-driven things like customer reviews and ratings to continue to drive the “friends as filters” notion Rubel describes.

Corporate All-Stars - Workers flock to social media to build their personal brands, yet offer employers an effective and credible way to market in the downturn

The digital set have been fortifying their online reputations for a while now. But things have changed dramatically with the proliferation of social networks, lifestreaming apps and microblog services like Twitter. Employees have quickly figured out that publishing content (blogging) and participating in online communities can give new meaning to the “squeaky wheel gets the grease” saying. With corporate boundaries increasingly blurred around the ownership and distribution of content, smart users have take it upon themselves to become their own media company. While that scares some 1.0 companies, other organizations are taking advantage of the end result: a more human face associated with their brands.

The Power of Pull -  Where push once ruled, it’s now equally important to create digital content that people discover through search

This one’s really easy to dissect. Just focus on the word “create”. Edelman says marketers and PR pros are finally realizing the intricacies of how content should be created. According to a December study by Junta42, more than 50% surveyed  are planning a larger spend on content and search engine marketing (SEM). While that’s music to SEM and SEO firms, it has more to do with prepping your organization to adopt a more holistic approach to media creation and distribution. Very few companies thoroughly analyze the ins and outs of why content should be created in the first place. It’s becoming an opt-in web, so make sure your content is not only findable but ask yourself if it my web content was a magazine or newsletter, would people want to stay subscribed?

More: continued here

I had an interesting discussion with Deborah Grove about the ways social media impacts the costs of computing and the efforts to “green” IT by making servers and networks more power efficient. 

Social media is a growing segment of all the data stored and processed on earth.  But social media has different properties than previous classes of data like transactions and documents.  Some social media is more resource intensive than others (a YouTube video consumes more energy to store, transmit and view than a Twitter tweet) but even light weight social media can cause heavier media types to be suddenly accessed in a high spike of demand, for example when a brief tweet points to a video that then drawn thousands of viewers.

More efficient IT is clearly important as computing consumes a growing slice of our power consumption.  Social media is both a new source of demand for computer resources (and by extension, power) and a possible method for gaining new efficiency as server farms are better tuned and maintained.  I would like to see major resource consuming services like YouTube and Google surface the costs of computing more.  While Google, for example, reports how many fractions of a second it takes for them to return your search results, it would be useful to see how many shot glasses of diesel fuel were needed to power the servers that generated those results.  PCs and server farms do no have tailpipes spewing emissions, but they are not carbon neutral: lots of coal, oil, gas, and uranium (and not nearly as much wind, hydro, and solar) are needed to keep the net alive. 

Making the energy costs of computing more visible would be a good step toward IT conservation.  I know I have too many computers running all the time (short boot up times would help!) and should think more about the energy consumption impact of my own information diet.

Listen to the podcast at the Uptime Institute.

More: continued here

Former Forrester analyst and Groundswell co-author Charlene Li (Altimeter Group)
pitches her take on the evolution of social technologies and networks. She dissects new ad models,the social graph,social commerce and the open stack. Take a few minutes and tell us what you think. Too bleeding edge? Dead-on?

More: continued here

TechCrunch surfaced this look at a story that ran back in 1981 that covered how internet news would someday be delivered. At least watch the last 30 seconds.

The reporter remarks it would take more than 2 hours to deliver the digital text needed to read the "online newspaper." She added the per minute (I think) charge was around $5 and comments about the difficulty the new approach would have when competing with the .20 cent daily.

What’s in store for us over the next 30 years?

More: continued here

A Growing Number of Companies Recognize the Power of Social Media, Including Dell!

More: continued here

Telligent was proud to be one of the sponsors of the
BlogWell conference last week in Chicago. If you missed it,
we blogged four of the sessions below. Let us know if you
have questions, we’re happy to provide additional information.

More: continued here

I’m in Chicago today and plan to cover the BlogWell conference.
Check back here at 1 p.m. Hope you can join us!

More: continued here

Last week I was back to doing what I really love doing – rolling up my sleeves and working with customers. I was pegged to lead a 2-day strategy session with Telligent customer Insurance.com with the goal being to help the client understand not only the technology specifics, but more importantly the ins and outs of making collaboration work inside the firewall. For a lot of us, collaboration has been that elusive fish, the one you and I can’t seem to find the right lure for, much less the right lake to fish in.

While few of us doubt that technology helps us expose some cracks in the collaboration nut, I bet more of us would agree that organizational challenges and cultural dynamics are what keeps us awake at night.

As ironic as it sounds, I spend less time these days discussing the technological implications of an internal collaboration initiative. The real discussions center around adoption, best practices, vertical strategies and sustaining the effort.

Insurance.com is a good example of a customer smart enough to know where to spend time and resources. After day one of our session, in which about half of it was a product refresh, the client team’s tech-related questions were almost non-existent.

Yeah there were the occasional integration threads and feature discussions that surfaced, but collectively the customer realized this had a helluva  lot more to do with some hard decisions they needed to make than whether or not a particular feature was turned on or off. Technology is the enabler I shouted. Ok, maybe I didn’t shout, but I’m certain I got our point across.

A few other things we did to facilitate the session included asking each business unit how they intended to market (socialize) the collaboration effort internally. The question was literally,”What’s Your Pitch On What This Means To The Company?” This helped the group understand everyone else’s perspective and sparked valuable conversation.

It was immediately apparent how distinct the value proposition can vary from one line of business to the other. One of the important things to remember as you hear unique perspectives from your colleagues is to how to identify the recurring themes?

About half way around the room, we all began to agree that we were sitting in too many meaningless meetings, having to weather through too many reply-to-all threads, and generally challenged at finding the information we really need at a moments’ notice. Verbalizing the collaboration pitch also helped those of us leading the charge toward the unfortified battleground owned by ROI. We  challenged each other to look at the business from the inside and agreed we should focus on the low hanging fruit that would provide the highest impact.

That was the segue into the next part of the discussion. an exercise where the line of business managers were asked to identify 2-3 processes they thought could be positively impacted by real-time collaboration and social computing practices. We spent about 15 minutes analyzing responses and listed them to be referenced on the white board as we went around the room.

You might be saying, hey, you’re the vendor, shouldn’t you be providing a few of those things out of the gate? Well yes, and we do. But more importantly, especially in a session like we’ve described, the goal is to get (you) the client thinking about the day-to-day workflows, information exchanges, and ad hoc processes that need reshaping. And it’s not always about being disruptive and eliminating existing processes or tasks, it has more to do with identifying the “gaps”. In our context, I translated “gaps” as the somewhat ambiguous areas within the business where collaboration tools might provide a quick lift — an incremental improvement if you will.

One of the other things we challenged the Insurance.com team on was how they intended to start the process of moving thoughts and interactions into the internal cloud — in this case powered by Telligent’s Evolution platform. Consistent with previous tactics, part of my intention was to get folks thinking about how they create work product, share knowledge or simply interact with colleagues.

The way we broke it down was two-fold. First, we agreed to identify the assets right under our nose, sort of  a personal or line of business content audit. Not surprisingly, we labeled this stuff “existing” content. It ranged from old Word documents that needed new life to an archive of wiki-based content that’s been used on and off to improve employee self-service capabilities.

The point here is to look across the business unit and re-use the assets you already have as a springboard to get some lift from the newer collaborative environment. That doesn’t mean your internal discussion forums should be force fed things that weren’t read in the first place, it just means you can speed along the effort of seeding content where it makes sense.

The preceding sessions took us through most of the morning. Early afternoon we ended the session by recapping the most important decisions the client needed to make over the next few weeks. We also discussed what the transition would entail as we moved Insurance.com through the implementation cycle and how it would begin to engage with Telligent’s professional services team.

So if I had to summarize some of the things after a heads-down session like last week, I’d lay it out like this. Don’t let features drive your business strategy. Don’t try to re-engineer your culture around a toolset. Don’t begin any project until you’ve identified who will be your core group. Call them guinea pigs, a focus group or power users, it doesn’t matter. What matters is being able to tell them why they’ve been chosen to participate and how it helps them do their job more effectively.

As I headed back to Texas, all kinds of thoughts were racing through my head, not the least of which included some of the more thought provoking questions I get asked often, like “Why Telligent”. Honestly, a question like that gets easier and easier to answer every time I get the chance to roll up my sleeves with our customers.

I’d explain it this way.

Our job as a vendor is to make the technology transparent. Remember the notion of technology as the enabler? Well it’s just marketing speak unless you’ve had your knees skinned in the trenches. And Telligent has. In fact, we’ve run out of band-aids, but that’s OK. Remember this as a customer. Vendors should live and die by understanding YOUR needs.

And if they’re worth their salt, they become an extension of your organization, essentially allowing you to stay focused on your objectives.
At the end of the day, it has everything to do with working smarter and using the best of what social computing brings to the enterprise. If that’s too lofty for you, then set your sights on becoming a better collaborator, not just a better user of a vendor’s tool.

More: continued here

“Why?” is the most profound question that anyone can ask about anything. Here are two of my favorite answers to the question, “Why?” from the movie, The Matrix Reloaded:

• The Merovingian answers his rhetorical question to Morpheus, “Do you know why you’re here?”
• The Achitect answers Neo’s question, “Why am I here?”

Oftentimes, the answer to “Why?” may be just as profound, if not more so, than the question itself. Hence, the real challenge about coming up with the answer is to make it succinct and easily comprehensible.

Your challenge–should you choose to accept it–is to answer this question posed by the Wall Street Journal back in July: Why do most online communities fail?

Before you read the answer, here’s a pretty graph that hints at a suitable retort:

More: continued here