Building an All-Star Social Media / Web 2.0 Team

If you could only bring 6 Social Media Pros to an island to start a Web 2.0 Marketing Department, who would they be?

Making it on Jeremiah's list of 'Social Computing Stategists' got me thinking about my team, what we do, what we want to do and what's next. My team is fairly new and we've been at it for about 9-months now and the various disciplines and skill sets of our team was built trial and error over the past few months. As we plan for the next fiscal year I can't help but think big so I started creating a list of all of the things a 'Social Media and Web 2.0' team should focus on (leaving out the boundaries of resources). Here's what I've come up with:

Social Media Strategist - In 'Alice in Wonderland', Lewis Carroll wrote "if you don't know where you want to be, it hardly matters which direction you take". At the core of every good team there’s a good plan. This is the person who pulls everything together. They build the Social Media Marketing plan and determine what the objective of the campaign is and therefore what tools should be utilized and how.

Community Manager – There are currently two communities that we have an active presence on - Facebook and NetPro having someone actively facilitate conversations in these communities would really take things to the next level.

Social Site Management – The great thing about engaging your customers in social media is that you can tweak your message depending on the audience. The tough thing about engaging your customers in social media is that your message could end up looking different for every audience. At the core of any marketing strategy lies a common message. We now have a presence on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Depending on the campaign we may leverage one or more of these channels and having someone to manage the communications and having it centrally executed is critical.

Blogging (including Micro-blogging) – Blogging is made up of two basic parts: content creation and content distribution. You could be channeling Shakespeare in your daily journal but if nobody knows about it, it won’t ever matter. Offering assistance to our bloggers to help optimize their posts for the search engines helping with suggestions on key or hot topics or sending out Twitters when new posts are live can make all the difference in the world.

Monitoring – If a tree falls in your community and you didn’t hear about it; WHAT ON EARTH WERE YOU DOING THAT WAS SO IMPORTANT?!? Whether it's with Google Alerts, Nielson BuzzMetrics or TruCast, it's important to have an ear on what conversations are happening about our solutions so that we can actively participate in those conversations.

Web Innovations – This involves looking at the technolgoy our web pages use and determining if there are new capabilities available to better communicate or present something on our website. For example behavioral targetting, implementing widgets, or something as simple as adding Lightbox treatments can give your entire website a 'web 2.0' feel.

What do you think? What additional superpowers should a Social Media / Web 2.0 all-star team stock up on?

Pulse on the Blogosphere

Here are a few recent posts that I think are worth sharing:

• Matt Dickerson tells you everything you need to know about personas in his post "Developing Personas for Marketing Strategy" - Cisco's Martin Hardee's gives a inside look at Cisco's approach to personas in this post "How we Design for Cisco.com"
  Charlene Li has an awesome post that every company should read about how to transition your traditional marketing group to a social media marketing group in her post "Turning radicals into revolutionaries: the key to kick-starting your social strategy"
• Tamar Weinberg has a collection of upcoming web 2.0 events on a single post - very useful - "Mashable’s Guide to Upcoming Web 2.0 Conferences and Events" (BTW - I plan on attending the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco April 22-25)
• Greg Verdino has a nice post "An Orgy of Infographics" which great visuals and interesting stats worth checking out.
• Jeremiah Owyang tells outlines his 'Essential Twitter Tools" - a must read for any Twitterer.

The Dog & Pony Show is Over

Cluetrain Rule #16: Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.

Unfortunately, at least in my experience this is a rule that many marketers often break. It goes against everything we've learned in school - we've been trained to spin, position and drop plenty of buzzwords. Now it's time to unlearn these skills. I know it's easier said than done but if you're looking for ways to hint to your marketers that this no longer works and you think little humor will work try sending them this IBM video:

Conversational Marketing Summit – Day Two

Day two was four days ago now but it took a little longer than expected to catch up from being out of the office for a couple of days. Anyhow, here's my highlights from the summit - day two:

Case Studies: Virgin America & Dove

These were presented at different times of the day but I had an epiphany after the second case study. Although these are clearly B2C case studies I realized the rules of Social Marketing for B2B companies are essentially the same. Here’s how Johnny Vulkan of Anomaly put it:

1. Leaning into the Frame – you need to insert yourself into conversations, no room for wallflowers.
2. Branding Utility – make brands useful in peoples lives, if there’s no point in remember your company name, they won’t.
3. Fundamental Goodness – products you deliver need to be good, people have more reach than ever. They won’t tell 7 people if they’re unhappy, they’ll tell 700.

This is all starting to sound like a broken record. However I was particularly moved by the second point ‘Branding Utility.’ The power of an emotional connection and the ability to make a brand useful in people’s lives is strongly tied to its ability to be social.

Dove in particular has done this very well –it’s not just soap, it’s about real women and real beauty. I was particularly moved by their pro-age (as opposed to anti-age) and self-esteem videos shown below:

The ability to make an emotional connection is no easy feat. Luckily for me Cisco’s Human Network campaign took care of the hard part, now I just need to ensure that connection is communicated in everything we do. Hmmm, can you see me thinking between the lines…

Can Big Brands Change their Approach?

This sessions started with a strong statement from Tina Sharkey of BabyCenter, “Change is about re-staffing the organization.” I’m not sure I think it needs to be this dramatic - I think change within the organization can happen if the right leadership and support exists. Although there will always be nay-sayers, I think “re-staffing the organization” may be a bit dramatic.

Richard Tobaccowala of Denou nails the biggest challenge when he said ‘you need to make today’s numbers but be relevant tomorrow.’

Tina then talks about how Johnson & Johnson acquired the talent they were missing when they purchased BabyCenter. Although they own the site they manage it as a separate un-biased community where they own no more than 15% of voice.

The CMO is being replaced by the CFO

Richard says we need to start self marketing. Marketing as we know (knew) it has become outsourced to customers and the role of the CMO is no longer needed – we need to shift to the CFO ‘Chief Facilitator Officer’ role. When it comes to budget allocation spend more on making what you make better and integrate search into everything you do.

Marketing in Social Networks

I was particularly inspired by JP Morgan Chase and how they leveraged Facebook as the platform to initiate a conversation with its customers. In fact, they created a special credit card to promote solely on Facebook and they gave people a reason to talk to each other by allowing people in the group to come together and pool award points and buy things together. But Own Van Natta warns us that some of these conversations have no end so we need to be prepared to commit for a very long time.

Conversational Marketing Summit Recap

I spent yesterday afternoon at the Conversational Marketing Summit and here were my key takeaways:

The Creative Destruction of Advertising

• Chris Peterson of Chautauqua Communications explains that we need to rethink our entire process for marketing focusing more on content.
• The new process includes: product + marketplace + audience - with that you create a content strategy which is then deployed through your media plan, distribution channels and creative.
• Eric Vidal of WebEx (a Cisco Company), shared some of the content types that worked for WebEx including product placements, videos, web seminars, reports, podcasts and radio/TV. Here are some of their lessons learned:
• Integrating the content was key in their execution.
• Podcasts need to be short (7 min or less)
• You can't stage user generated content - customers need instant gratification
• Sometimess pretty doesn't work - plain text driven banners on blogs worked better as they were seen more as integrated versus interruptive
• Customer videos were popular - when they were less than 4 minutes they had a 90% watch to completion rate
• Don't script customer videos - it needs to be more natural (but you can call then and seed them with ideas)

The Conversation Economy - the Third Wave of the Interface Culture

• John Battelle, CEO, Federated Media talks about the three interfaces of information:
  
1. Back Office (c:/) - this is when interoffice conversations started happening
2. Front & Back Office (the Internet) - where employees are 'messaging' to customer on the web
3. Talk with Customers (search) - where customers go to get information
4. I would add a 4th interface where we have just scratched the surface (social networks) - allowing customers to talk to each other


• John talked about how much search engines love conversation - he brought up a search page for a car as an example and only 2 of the 6 links on the first page led you to the company site -- all others were 'conversation' sites including blogs and forums. This made me think that if you do a few searches like this on your keywords it's a good way to find out what conversations you should be joining in on.
• Packaged vs. Conversation Media

• 'We Suck Less Campaign' -- John had a great idea for the cell phone provider who's ready to be transparent. No one is happy with their cell phone carrier for one reason or another but cell phone carriers are still trying to send us messages "fewest dropped calls" "largest network" -- either way the real story is being told by the consumers. John's challenge to a service provider is to come up with a map that allows users to pinpoint dead spots then to have the provider start to fix the spots that are most complained about -- and if they can't be fixed due to city regulations they can explain this and can empower the customers to help by telling them who they need to reach out to. I think it's genius! But as Sarah Fay from Carat and Isobar later said, "the ability to execute ideas is severely lacking."

A Conversation with Scott Cook

• Scott Cook, the Founder and Chairman of the Executive Committee, Intuit stated the obvious - focus on your customers. However Intuit has an interesting way of doing this - they actually recruit from their customer service organization to be part of the development team each year since these people are closest to the customer and have the best understanding of their challenges.
• Scott brings things into reality when he says "the best way to kill a brand is to drive people to a bad experience" - he talks about BeingGirl and Tax Almanac as good examples where
  the user experience that fits the target audience.

Reinventing the Audience

• Sarah points out that one of the differences between digital media is that you may be starting something that may never end - it's like planting a tree and letting it live and grow. This also means "trusting the conversation to play out as it would in the offline world."
• Has Yahoo been listening after all? Jeff Weiner, EVP at Yahoo! talks about their plans to integrate their sites to provide more value to their users. He also talks about interesting ways they have monetized some of their sites through product integration. For example Nikon sponsored a 'Stunning Gallery for Flickr users and Yahoo Answers allows companies to become 'experts' in particular topic areas through sponsorship (I think they beat LinkedIn Answers to this one).

Meet the Ninjas
I can't say I understand these guys but apparently they created a video blog that has been wildly successful. This video pretty much sums up their presence at the event:

More to come ...

Sometimes Apple Thinks Too Different - Don't Fall into the Same Trap

The Techno Marketer blog had a great post about changing the rules of the game. In his case he talks about how the remodeled Apple store no longer has a checkout stand - but since they didn't communicate this change customers wrongfully formed in front of the 'Genius Bar' instead. Too different, too fast, and without communication - not good.

Although this is clearly a B2C example I think similar mistakes can be made by B2B companies with all of the hype around Web 2.0. We are still in a transition phase and while RSS is hot and growing it's not a substitute for email (at least not yet). Blog readership is exploding but the global uptake is still lagging. Podcast usage is growing 'tenfold' according to Forrester but they have a ways to go before they can be considered mainstream. The rules of marketing are changing but I’m wary of getting caught up in the hype and abandoning traditional mediums that have served me well. Another reminder that a hybrid approach of old and new approaches is usually the best way to go.

To Mobile or Not to Mobile

20 years ago the idea of using a multimedia marketing campaign over the wireless network would have been difficult to grasp. For a number of reasons, marketing to mobile phones, especially for a business to business campaign, has been a non-starter. Le Grand Roadblock has always been that unlike the phone or email at work, mobile phones are personal domain. You wouldn’t want to market to someone’s mobile phone for the same reason you wouldn’t want to call them at night at home: it’s their personal space and they’re more likely to resent you for the intrusion than thank you for the valuable information or idea you’re marketing.

But more than that, mobile phones up until now haven’t been universally adopted as web clients, and using them as such requires a pretty big leap of faith from a demographic and adoption standpoint. Take the case of mobile email for example. In my social network they’re ubiquitous, but Gartner Group tells us that only 2% of email accounts are wireless and even by 2010, a light year in Web2.0 time, only 20% of email accounts will be accessed on mobile devices.

Although the multi-billion dollar B2C revenue projections for mobile devices seem impressive, most of that is what could be considered “mobile accessories” like wallpapers, music, graphics, ring tones, etc. That’s not going to convince me to dump ad dollars into a campaign for a non-wireless product.

In the US, where 85% of the people have cellphones, Telephia and comScore claim that 30 million people in the US are using the mobile web. If that’s true, that’s a pretty significant adoption rate – especially if it’s growing as quickly as they claim.

I’m excited for the prospects of Mobikade and will be tracking its progress as it tries to get a foothold in a market where PCs are more prevalent than in its native Japan. Also Mozes seems like an interesting test for the tolerance of frequent and unsolicited text messages, but even when explaining those concepts people are careful to point out that they’d be less receptive to the same interaction with corporations.

Even with all these questions about market size and adoption, I still think there are opportunities that corporate marketers can take advantage of to accommodate the mobile workforce.

According to Gartner Group, there will be three billion mobile subscribers in the world by 2010 – that’s just under half of well, everybody.

My mobile strategy will consider those with smart phone functionality as well as those still getting by with just dial tone. After doing some homework, I think this strategy will be broken down into three areas of focus:

1. Mobile Campaigns - This is a one-off approach that involves creating a way for mobile users to participate in your marketing campaign efforts. Here are a few examples:

Audio Entries - The "My WebEx Moment" campaign is a good example of focusing on mobile users. The 'My WebEx Moment' campaign is a way for users to submit interesting stories of ways that WebEx transforms their lives. Mobile users can call in and submit an audio entry.

Text Entries- Although this is not a B2B example, American Idol (and most other reality shows that require user participation) does this well by allowing voters to text their votes - this same process can be used for surveys.

Mobile Ads/Videos - I don't plan on spending too much time here if any since only a small percentage of phones are web and video-enabled but for the right campaign it might make sense.

Mobile Coupons - Although this is more for a B2C marketer, B2B marketers can still use mobile coupons as incentives for mobile participants in their campaigns.

Mobile Extras - Other fun stuff to consider is offering mobile wall paper,
downloadable ring tones or mobile games.

2. Mobilize Your Content: Voice publish your content with audio casts - and I'm not just talking podcasts. Unwired Nation allows you to turn your web content into an audio file. I always wondered why more companies don't convert their white papers into audio casts - it seems like a natural transition from audio books. I haven't tried it myself but it's on my 'to-do-list' for FY08.

3. Mobile Web: This is the biggest commitment. This involves optimizing your website (or a subset of your website) for smart phones. Cisco was nominated for the Webby Awards for it's mobile web which involved recreating a subset of Cisco.com for mobile devices.

The mobile marketing space is uncharted grounds for me so I would love to hear about any good or bad experiences any of you have had when trying to tap into this market.

A Social Networking Experiment: Cisco’s Connected Life Contest

Merry Christmas
Ever hear that you should be careful what you ask for because you just might get it? Well, Christmas came early for me this year. I was challenged with applying some of this crazy Marketing 2.0/social networking/new paradigm stuff I’m always talking about to help boost the exposure of a program to promote Cisco’s Connected Life Contest.

The idea behind Cisco’s Connected Life Contest is to generate innovative ideas for a connected life (for example: using your cell phone to pay for your Starbuck's coffee). Cisco is awarding a grand prize of $10,000 for the best idea and ten runner-up prizes of $1,000.

Your Mission, should you choose to accept it . . .
Most of the focus around Marketing 2.0 in my current role is about strengthening ties with current customers. This is a different animal. For this project, I won’t be using Marketing 2.0 techniques to improve the quality of customer conversations but rather to dramatically increase the quantity of conversations we’re having. Whereas most of my marketing focus is on building brand, reinforcing message, and enabling better communication – this is straight up promotion.

What took this from being just another cool marketing project to being a real life Apprentice-style jam session is the lofty objectives, short timelines, and limited resources. We’re working with a very limited budget, a very small (yet obsessively dedicated) team, and 51 days to reach a record setting goal (internal bragging rights only), measured in contest entries.


Ray Hopewood, meet Joe ConnectedLife
We’re relying heavily on social networking to create and sustain buzz for Joe, the central character to the Connected Life Contest. An important early task was to build our online presence for the campaign. “Joe ConnectedLife,” has a profile on Facebook and MySpace, communities on YouTube, Ning and LiveVideo, profiles on 40+ other video sharing sites, and you can tag the Connected Life Contest page with digg or del.icio.us.

Shameless Plug & Cry for Help
In addition to all of the social networking I’m doing to build Joe ConnectedLife’s online presence I’m hoping to inspire my audience to take action. Submit your idea (did I mention there’s a $10,000 Grand Prize!), write about it in your blog, befriend Joe ConnectedLife share the landing page through digg, del.icio.us, or whatever other social bookmarking tool you use – or send me your ideas on what else we can be doing to spread the word.

Marketing 2.0: "The Less We Sell, The More People Want Us"

I thought the first podcast was good but the second one was even better - Marketing 2.0: Creative Destruction of Advertising - Part 2. Again Eric Vidal, advertising and new media leader at WebEx, talks with Chris Peterson, president and CEO of Chautauqua about Marketing 2.0. Here are my highlights:

Eric starts with his sound bite, "Marketing 2.0 is a shift that has dramatic implications on how Marketing get created, distributed, consumed and responded to."

Chris explains that these implications change the process, skill set and deliverables for marketers. For example there is a shift from a single message to many messages, copywriting to editorial writing and print media to innovative custom packages which he explains as "variations of advertorials."

The most valuable part of the podcast to me were the examples they provided:

• WebEx changed their online banner ads to lead with content including white papers, 3rd party content, videos and podcasts. This resulted in more clicks, more interaction - for longer and ultimately more leads. What they learned from this is, "the less we sell, the more people want us."
  
• A family entertainment park in Austin, TX wanted to increate their number of visitors. They created a 2-3 minute documentary about the park and had employees and customers talk about how much fun they have working and being there.The video was then used on their website as well as new content areas on local family entertainment sites. The friendly, open and honest format is really what got more traction.


• Microsoft took a key business white paper on hosted email services and turned it into a Wiki. They then hired a professional technology journalist (with full exposure) and went to IT message boards and blogs and invited people to edit it and ultimately help shape how Microsoft talked about services. Thousands of people came to the site and participated.

Final thoughts were about getting around naysayers and Chris' advice is, "'just do it and beg for forgiveness later." I have to admit that's been working for me!

Marketing 2.0 - Another Perspective

To continue on my first post of defining Marketing 2.0, Eric Vidal, Director of Marketing Communications at WebEx and Chris Peterson, president and CEO of Chautaugua created this insightful podcast "Marketing 2.0: Creative Destruction of Advertising."

This 15-minute podcast is time well spent. It starts off defining Marketing 2.0 and explaining why it's more than "Social Media Marketing." Eric explains, "Marketing 2.0 is a shift with dramatic implications about how marketing gets created, distributed, consumed and responded to."

Chris added, "We've lost control over the marketing conversation. People used to use marketing as a source of information for new products and services but now they are turning towards friends, family, strangers - people all over the world and ignoring traditional marketing output."

Eric then provided examples of what this has meant to WebEx’ marketing mix and their move towards "informing rather than forcing a message." WebEx does this through more podcasts, web seminars (on the WebEx platform of course), white papers and third party reports which are more credible.

Chris explains how these shifts require a "fundamental re-tooling of what marketing has been doing" and that rather than focusing on a single compelling message we need to focus on what content types will appeal to our customer base.

Eric ends the event by reading the Marketing 2.0 Wikipedia entry which I’ve posted to and asks other marketers to participate by further defining this term.

There's a part two to this series which I'll write about tomorrow...

PR Redux

The onslaught continues! It seems no bastion of the traditional marketing world is safe from progressive thinking! The unassuming "press release", the workhorse of public relations since time immemorial, is the latest to fall victim to the influence of the subversive seduction of the two-dot-oh world. I was recently hit with the term Social Media Releases (SMRs) from Brian Solis' post 'Social Media Release - 'Everything you ever Wanted to (or Should) Know' . As far as I can tell, this meme was coined a year ago by Todd Defren of Shift Communications.

Basically it's press release and blog post mashup - it lies somewhere in the middle. SMRs provide a way to package a story so that other people (publishers and bloggers) can take it and make it their own. SMRs leverage social tools like digg, del.icio.us and Technorati and can allow comments like a blog post so readers can respond. Here's a great example of how HP is packaging their SMRs - you can also download a template from Shift Communications here.

This was interesting to me for a few reasons:

- First: It continues on the trend of pull content (vs. push). With SMRs you just put it out there and leave it up to your audience to find it and use it (rather than try to sell them or 'pitch' them the content).
- Second: As a marketer, I'm always looking for the medium to fit the message and this gives me a brand new option. With some focused testing, it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out which messages are best for traditional PR and which can benefit most from SMR.
- Third: Used correctly, this is far more likely than your vanilla press release to create a viral effect. Giving people the power of taking your most timely 411 a-la-carte will make it easier for them to consume, process, and re-distribute.

I'm no expert in SMRs by any means but I am going to work with my PR team to make sure they start considering it for future announcements.

The Changing Forces in Advertising

'The Changing Forces in Advertising' panelists included Deborah Schultz (DRS Solutions), Leszek Izdebski (Cisco), Peter Hirshberg (Technorati), Dick Costolo (Feedburner) Peter Merholz (Adaptive Path), and Evan WIlliams, (Obvious Corp AKA Twitter)

The Marketing Beating Continues

The session continued along the trend that marketers and this time they threw in ad agencies still don't get it 'most of the time.' It was later corrected, or softened to say they do get it but they don't know what to do about it. Instead of understanding that the internet is a different animal they are simply moving traditional advertising concepts online. I have to agree that in my experience I see a lot of that but I also think we are at the beginning of this trend and that a lot of us are clamoring to learn as quickly as possible.

Which leads to the next point, marketers need to be willing to experiment and learn. This is new to all of us and we won't have all of the answers right away. Even Evan Williams of Twitter admits they don't know all of the answers and are still trying to figure out how to monetize it through creative advertising. Leszek Izdebski brings up digital media and one way Cisco is delivering ads by looking at RFID information.

How do you deal with negativity in the market?

When Sun Microsystems launched Java FX they ran banner ads on numerous sites. These ads were negatively received in the community through numerous blog posts because the developer community felt the added features didn't warrant the hype the ads were giving them. Behind the scenes the developers who worked on the product were saying the same thing before the product launched - but rather than being quiet about it they were given free reign to join the conversation. They explained their strategy, shared their roadmap and even asked for feedback. This changed the tone and attitude back to a positive one for Sun. I think more companies can learn from this example and loosen those internal reigns…

Marketers Don't Know How to Blog

That was the general message of the Supernova session I attended today on 'The Relationship Economy.' As I was squirming in my chair trying to hide the marketing title from my badge - I looked to the person next to me who is working on his blog post 'Marketing is bullshit.' Then he asks me (already knowing I'm a marketer) - what do you think? Sadly I had to agree. Marketers have been dragged into the blogosphere by engineers and even in the real world it's isn't marketers who are having conversations with customers, it's Sales. So do marketers even know how to have that conversation?

I think the lesson here is that if your role hasn't been having conversations with customers don't look at the shift on the web as a chance to interrupt that conversation by jumping in. If you want to join the conversation start by listening to what is already being said and try participating that way first - and make sure you have something to say. Or better yet you can continue facilitating the conversation between sales (and now engineers) by helping them move their conversations online.

Dell Breaks the Social Media Laws (Cluetrain Laws #53-55)

A blog post at NewsBlog on CNET by Declan McCullough this morning told an all too familiar story that highlights a common transgression in a Marketing 2.0 world. A former Dell Sales Manager posted on his blog at Consumerist.com with tips on how to buy from Dell. Dell responded aggressively with a legal threat asking that it be taken down because it included confidential, blah blah blah. Well . . . that went over like Google at the eBay party. Here’s a quote from McCullough’s blogpost:

“That legal threat might have worked a decade ago, but not today. The correspondence was Dugg; it was Slashdotted; it was generally dissected and discussed at length by increasingly irate customers (and potential customers) until Dell was forced to turn tail and apologize.

That happened in a "we goofed" post on Saturday by Lionel Menchaca, Dell's digital media manager. He said: "We blew it... Instead of trying to control information that was made public, we should have simply corrected anything that was inaccurate. We didn't do that, and now we're paying for it." (Dell also offers a community forum.)”

I feel like Dell could have avoided all this had they only taken time to really understand the nature of information now that we’ve come up with all these interesting ways of distributing it. Did they really think they were going to put the cap on information once it was in the Social Media Web? You can’t respond faster than a blog post, you can’t shout louder than a forum, and you can’t kill a conversation you didn’t start. Let’s hope others are learning from Dell’s embarrassing example of how NOT to participate in someone else’s conversation.

From Cluetrain:

53. “There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One with the market. In most cases, neither conversation is going very well.”
54. “Almost invariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete notions of command and control.”
55. “As policy, these notions are poisonous. As tools, they are broken. Command and control are met with hostility by intranetworked knowledge workers and generate distrust in internetworked markets.”

Newsletter gone cold? Warm it up in the Web 2.0 Oven!

I have to admit, I love newsletters. As a "traditional" communication medium, you could do far worse. One of the problems with traditional newsletters though is that they're sent out in the format I need to send them in, regardless of what my customer wants. That just changed with a new Web 2.0 technology called FeedBlitz. With a recent announcement they are turning up the heat by claiming to not only send my newsletter via email but they also enable delivery via Skype, AIM, Twitter, RSS - and my favorite, an audio podcast!

This service has only been out a week so I can't give it a personal endorsement yet but I'm working on changing that. If you have a chance to try it please let me know what you think.

Stop Playing Charades with Your Customers

Playing the guessing game to figure out what your customers want is the old way of doing things. Yes you can use market research and surveys then spend hours on end translating that information into a product strategy you think meets your customer’s needs.

Or – you can just ask. That's what Cisco is doing - they want to know "What new experiences do you want in your Connected Life?" Customers are encouraged to submit stories or videos on how they would like technology innovations to help in their everyday lives – at home, at work, or on the move. And as if having your idea become a reality wasn’t an award in and of itself, they are offering a grand prize of $10,000 to the most innovative idea. So what are you waiting for, join the conversation, submit your idea!

I think this is a pretty cool example of Marketing 2.0 in action (and not just because I’m involved with this project). In future posts I’ll provide progress reports on the success of this campaign. In the meantime I hope you're thinking about your connected life idea...

Has Marketing 2.0 Crossed the Chasm?

Taking the Red Pill – Not for everybody

Part of what I love about the opportunity of Web 2.0 is that it’s forcing me and my team to think about marketing in non-traditional ways. We’re literally breaking down the paradigm of pushing content in favor of Web 2.0-enabled interactive tools built to facilitate mutual conversation. At the risk of sounding too dramatic, that’s a significant change in how big marketing organizations do business. It affects everything from the topline of campaigns and events down to the skill sets you look for in new hires. For all its upside, change is still a disruptive, violent process that is embraced much more easily by some than others. I’m assuming that anybody reading this post has searched for this content and by definition is comfortable with taking the red pill without the comfort of knowing how far down this rabbit hole actually goes.

But that’s not going to be true of everybody. At the end of the day, this shift might still be a zero sum game. For every person who takes full advantage of this new technology and creates value for their company and their customers there are going to be people who have a vested interest in maintaining status quo. On the one hand, these are the people who maintained that automobiles were devil’s work and stocked up on buggy whip stock. On the other hand, they’re probably the same people that argued against investing in a B2C company whose stock was trading at 200 times earnings in early 2000. As with everything, wisdom probably lies somewhere in the middle.

And that may be, but I’ve already taken the red pill, fallen down the rabbit hole and am now running taxi service with a Widget Wagon. To paraphrase The Godfather of Soul, “(Mama’s) got a brand new bag”.
As such, part of my focus is on taking the rest of the marketing world with me. No easy task to be sure, but thankfully there is a gentleman named Geoffrey Moore (maybe you’ve heard of him?) who gave us a framework for understanding the challenge that lies ahead.

In Geoffrey A. Moore's book, Crossing the Chasm, he identified five categories of customers based on where they are during a product lifecycle. I think these same categories can be applied to identify the cycle of Marketing Professionals’ adoption of Marketing 2.0. These groups can be defined as follows:

Innovators - The Steve Jobs

Remember when you read your first blog? The person who wrote it might have been an innovator. How did all that stuff get onto Wiki? Who were the first 20 people to get onto LinkedIn? For these folks, the Widgets I’m using are soooo '2006'. They aren't talking to their customers; they’ve already been blogging with them for two plus years and are now collaborating on customizable micro-apps to facilitate real time conversation about supporting the new virtual sales office in Timbuktu.

Early Adopters - The Opportunists

This is where I sit. Blog? Check. Wiki entry? Check. iPhone on order? Check. Figuring out how to capitalize on the brilliant work of the people behind the nuts and bolts is classic Silicon Valley style. You need three things to be a good Opportunist: a willingness to start putting it together before you see the instruction manual; you have to be OK with rolling the dice and losing, sometimes consistently before getting snake eyes; and have the technical wherewithal and imagination to take someone’s lemons and make lemonade.

Early Majority - The Pragmatists

If Opportunists are about taking someone’s lemons and making lemonade, these people are about copying your lemonade stand and franchising it. To win these people over, I’m going to work on eliminating risk by building out systems that use consistent results. By the time that happens, we’ll be way past the point of coolness and heading into the realm of cold hard commercial profitability.

Late Majority - Walmart

By the time these people start getting into Marketing 2.0 the innovators will be on to something new. These people wait until it's a time tested and proven standard before they start jumping into the mix. One day you’re going to be able to buy a box of widgets at Walmart. Using the web as an accelerator, widgets might get main-streamed faster than firefox.

Laggards - The CEO of the Last Buggy Whip Company

These people don't know the difference between RSS and RFP and Wiki and Bliki. They still believe in print advertising and direct mail and that's where all their marketing budget goes. They spend their time trying to 'convince' people to buy their product rather than trying to talk to them about it. The day will come when they realize that the job they thought they had looks so different now that they no longer know what they are doing. Unfortunately, this is where new, cool, and not yet proven meets old, boring, and exceedingly profitable. The reason people hold on to stuff that works is because, well, it works. The problem with that is that nothing works forever. Some of these people will get it and move, but the others are going to miss the boat entirely.

Moore identified "the chasm" as the point where things shift from Early Adopters to Early Majority. I think we are at the cusp of that point right now. One of the early steps I’ve taken where I work is to use PageFlake to create a My Company Flake for my co-workers. This does two things: first it demonstrates the value of RSS and how it's a quicker way to get information; and second because I created a page on Marketing 2.0 it serves as a educational boost to help people learn and understand what it means to Market in a Web 2.0 World. I think a lot of my activity around Web 2.0 in the near term is going to be in the area of encouraging adoption. As I come across new and non-disruptive ways to do this, I’ll be sure to post them here.

Are you voting for Ray Hopewood?

Of course not, he doesn’t exist – he’s a fictional character at the center of a viral marketing campaign that according to SF Gate has “served 45,000 videos in the first couple of weeks, 15,000 page views, and (has stickiness of) 1 minute and 40 seconds (per visit).”

Ray Hopewood may be a fictional character in the real world but in the virtual world he has a profile on MySpace, Facebook, and flickr. He's got his own blog, an ecommerce site, and banner ads on various other sites.

So how much gold is there at the end of the Social Media Marketing rainbow? I think that depends on the execution. My team’s Marketing 2.0 / Social Media Marketing plan is built around these execution strategies:

1. Understand the Rules of the Game – There is no ‘control and command’ when it comes to Social Media Marketing – you need to be willing to let go and trust that your product or service can withstand the truth. As the twelfth rule from The Cluetrain Manifesto, the original Bible of Social Marketing, states: “There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone."
   
2. Exploit Social Networking Sites – Spend time driving traffic to your site or campaign using new media sites. David Wilson has done an interesting study that shows which social sites are likely to provide the highest returns.
   
3. You don’t have to start a conversation to have one – Go where your customers are – Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, or wherever it might be. Go there, sign up, connect and start typing. Starting a conversation is a lot more work than jumping into one.
   
4. Don’t forget the Basics – Content is still king. Whatever you have to say make sure it’s worth saying.
   
5. Learn as you go – No risk, no reward. We are all treading in new waters here – don’t be afraid to go out on a limb and see what happens – it worked for Ray!

NBC Jumped on the Widget Wagon

I recently submitted a post about CBS, and as predicted NBC has jumped on the Widget Wagon with this annoucement that will allow bloggers to post television shows on their site.

Now think B2B marketing. We deliver rich content in a similar medium with webcasts and video-on-demand's. How hard would it be to create a widget to do the same thing? I don't know the answer to that but I'm going to start working on a pitch to my marketing team now...

B2B Marketing 2.0 – Conversation Enablers

Someone at work asked me how to 'leverage the power of Web 2.0' and what I have done to take advantage of some of the new technologies. I responded by saying that Web 2.0 technologies are useful for creating conversations with my customers, not just for pushing content (why pushing content isn’t good enough anymore is a post of it’s own). Then I was asked what training wheels I would suggest for someone looking to get started. I came up with this list of things I started with and would love suggestions from expert readers on others:

Blogging: Corporate blogs are becoming more common with companies like Cisco, HP, NetApp and Boeing which already active participants in the blogosphere. The common platforms for business or corporate blogs are WordPress, Movable Type and Leverage Software which goes beyond blogging to create communities.

Wiki's: Corporate wiki’s are collaborative websites which rely on a community of users to generate content and build pages. Wiki’s can be used in so many ways here are some example that come to mind –improve internal communications and expand the reach of your internal knowledgebase, use it to build a community within your customer base to create user generated documentation, use it with partners to co-create proposals. Some examples of external corporate wiki’s sites are: Linux Questions, IBM and Adobe. Three popular corporate Wiki platforms that come to mind are Confluence, SocialText and TWiki.

Social Networking: There are many social networking sites and although most of the one’s I’ve come across are personal in nature they do touch on certain business topics and can be exploited to reach a community that shows interest in topics related to your business. This site lists a few of the more popular social networking sites.

Second Life: Second Life is a ‘3-D virtual world’ – it offers a platform that can be used to host online events and collaborate with a broad audience in addition to just starting a hallway conversation with other avatars online. Notable companies on Second Life are Cisco, Reuters, Sun Microsystems and IBM.

LinkedIn: An online community of business professionals – this site can be exploited to build an expert within your company on a specific topic by taking advantage of the ‘Answers’ area of the site. It can be a good place to find potential clients and partners – and of course it’s more obvious use is finding potential job candidates.

I have limited this list to ‘conversation enablers’ – I'll be working on a follow up post around widgets and which ones are most likely to have “business value” which I think is even more interesting.