Marketing 2.0 with Visual Networking

Visual Networking is yet another web 2.0 marketing tool I’ve added to my virtual briefcase. Visual Networking is a mash-up of digital video and social networking capabilities. The video aspect offers an interactive and engaging way to tell my story while the social networking capabilities allow the viewers to collaborate, comment and share ideas on what they've seen. Here are a few B2B examples I'm aware of, all of which involve creating a persona to demonstrate a point:

Cisco's Disconnected Life Webisode Series - Don and Rhoda Delay's network and communication problems have led them to marriage counseling as they illustrate the 'disconnected life' that I know I couldn't bare. Where's the social networking? Well thanks to YouTube it's in the ability to comment on each of the videos (and keep delivery costs low).



Blue Coat's Bob Kent Stories - Bob Kent represents the bad employee in every company who misuses the Internet at everyone else's expense. The exaggerated stories are ones that anyone in an office environment can relate to. Looking for a way to collaborate? Participate in the monthly contest by submitting your story and you may just get a Nintendo Wii out of it!

Tibco's Greg the Architect - Greg represents the hero that every techy wants to be and no challenge is too small. There's no social networking aspect that I can see so maybe this is just straight video but it's still pretty creative and adding the social component would be easy to do.

Any other examples you think should be added to this list? Feel free to share.

Coffee's for Closers

Go viral or go home
Since 1996 Tim Draper of Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson has claimed he invented “viral” marketing when his portfolio company, Hotmail, included a line on the bottom of each email that said "Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com/."

Although viral marketing as we now know it was used by companies much earlier, the Hotmail example perfectly illustrates why marketers chase “viral” as if it were the cure to stopping spam. After getting the right message, the biggest challenges facing marketers are message distribution and authentication. If someone doesn’t see your message, you lose. If they don’t think it’s legitimate or don’t trust its source, you lose. Viral campaigns solve both those problems; accelerating propagation faster than we could ever do ourselves and authenticating the message by having it delivered by a trusted source. It’s marketing Nirvana. Forget visions of sugar plums dancing through my head - when I sleep I see social networks acting as Force Multipliers; delivering my carefully packaged message to receptive and qualified customers.

Easier said than done
But hey if it were that easy everybody would be doing it. There are many perils on the long winding road up the peak to Marketer’s Paradise not the least of which is crafting the perfect message. But let’s say you get through that, how on earth do you build a messaging vehicle that has the potential to go viral? And even after you do that what’s really the benefit of doing so? Is there any way to measure the effectiveness of viral effectiveness on buying decisions? I mean, even if the message is right and its delivered by a trusted source in a reasonable time frame is it more effective than a billboard in Times Square?

We’re still very early in our understanding of how effective social media and other 2.0ish technologies will be in helping plain Jane campaigns achieve “viral” status, but the returns so far are encouraging.

One thing that’s much harder to measure however is the effect of networks on individual behavioral (buying) decisions. We know that message reception and retention will be higher when coming from “the network”, but how influential is “the network” on decisions overall?

Viral messaging or networked buying?
New research out of Harvard Medical School indicates that social networks may have more to do with individual buying decisions than we thought. When coupled with Social Media Marketing campaigns this can be much more powerful than just a more effective message delivery campaign. Instead of just permeating an effective message, a “tuned” network could theoretically process a message and if followed up with positive product purchase experiences, directly influence the purchasing decisions of others in the network. This makes the “message spreading” potential of viral marketing seem downright anemic. Traditional viral marketing still relies on the effectiveness of my message to be effective. But if this research holds true for Social Media networks, then there might be a more compelling and cost effective way to harness “the network” in marketing campaigns that transcend traditional message delivery.

When thinking strategically, its easy to get caught up in thinking that marketing is about messaging and message delivery. But its not. Its about selling product. Too often I think we’re content with getting qualified buyers to the table. What if we could more directly influence actual buying?

Certain markets are already operating in this paradigm and as I consider new campaigns in the future I will certainly be looking closer at “network influence on buying behavior” campaigns rather than the traditional “network influence on message delivery” projects that have worked for us in the past.

Children of Flickr: Making the Massively Multiplayer Social Web

This was the last morning session and ended up being my favorite. This session was moderated by Justin Hall from GameLayers with three panelists: Rajat Paharia from Bunchball, Christopher Chapman from Areae and Gabe Zichermann from rmbr.

The theme of this session - Everything can be a Game.

This session focused on game dynamics and how game psychology can drive engagement, interaction and loyalty on your website, traditionally a non-gaming environment.

Gabe was clearly passionate about the gaming concept and explains it as "the only force that exists without the threat of violence that makes people do irrational things."

Here's a few key takeaways I walked away with:

• The definition of a game is changing and what people really want is to do something they like, something they consider fun, and/or something that makes them feel like they accomplished something.
• There are three basic things to make something fun: Challenges, Leaderboards and Points - when added to any experience it changes peoples behavior.
  Advice is to think about how to make an experience fun from day 1. If you’re not in a situation to do that you can still go through the experience and layer in gaming mechanics to et more engagement and interaction from your existing community.
• Game mechanics involve rewarding people along their journey. You can have different metrics for success to make them feel like they are 'winning'; for example slice and dice the data - different activities can have different leaderboards and that data can be grouped by network or time.
• Gaming Essentials from Gabe: It needs to be overly simple (no instructions required); you need to be able to play with one hand; you need to be able to start/stop playing at any time; and it needs to be infinitely playable.
• Interesting stats - woman who are 35+ are not thought to be traditional 'gamers' however they are the demographic that drives a big portion of the gaming industry including Yahoo Games.
• Gabe dropped an interesting bomb about how women don’t respond as well to 3D environments and the fact that they are not well liked by a lot of people because they are confrontational. He recommends sticking to a 2D environment like the world we live itn. He says 2D environments are easier to navigate and ultimately more flexible.

Bringing Web 2.0 to your Enterprise

This was a vendor driven session presented by David Carter, CTO of Awareness. Awareness helps companies build web 2.0 communities for internal or external use.

David started off the session stating that the challenges we faced in 1988 haven't changed within an enterprise. I thought this was interesting because as much as things changed they also stay the same. We are still trying to improve collaboration, trying to connect the right people and trying to make information easier to find (that's always fun). And these challenges only get harder as the organization grows.

David continued to talk about why this is a problem internally and that "the" collaboration tool within the enterprise is still EMAIL. Why is that a problem? Well, when people leave the organization so does all of that intellectual property. Common sense for most of my readers but it's still a problem most enterprises haven't solved. There's still a need to figure out what content to pull out of email and into collaboration tools like blogs, wiki's and discussion forums.

In the case of McDonald’s, Awareness was looking for creative ways to engage people and get them to share ideas. They did this during an event registration process which simultaneously built a person's online profile and with an optional question at the end. Hundreds of people were contributing content that was then made public and shared with the rest of the organization. By doing this they removed the barrier of entry and made it very easy and convenient for people to contribute. This was one of my favorite examples and I think it can be leveraged in multiple ways to kick start a new community.

Social Networking Gets a Suit and Tie

It's no secret that Social Networking is growing. In 2006 over half of B2B technology buyers visited social networking sites (2006 comScore World Metrix). The top business players in the space are LinkedIn and Plaxo and they are driving demand by delivering consistent product enhancements:

LinkedIn's Half Open Platform
LinkedIn will be opening their nework to "allow developers to build applications that run inside your LinkedIn account (via OpenSocial) and the far more useful and interesting part — ways to pull your LinkedIn data out and use it elsewhere."

What I like about their approach is that they are sticking to their roots. They are a 'professional network' so rather than taking the Facebook 'apps gone wild' approach, LinkedIn will be keeping tabs on the applications it allows on its network. What does this mean? You won't have to worry about hamburger fights and karate-chops.

Plaxo vs. Flock
I wrote about Flock in an earlier post - you know, the Social Media Web Browser. Well Plaxo (with it's Plaxo Pulse feed aggregator feature) has a different approach to keep you connected to all of your social networks. They've announced a new Outlook connector - being that Outlook is primarily a business application you can guess who this is built for (yet more proof point that Social Networking is not just for friends and teenagers). What's cool is that it's embedded into the what is still the primary communication tool in business - email. Enabling you to 'get a pulse' on your contact before sending them an email will make your message more meaningful therefore deepening your relationship with that contact. Are you ready to give your Outlook a pulse?

Marketing with Facebook

Still not convinced about the uptake of social networking? According to Alexa metrics, half of the top 10 sites in the world are social networking sites including YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Hi5 and Orkut.

I think Facebook offers a huge potential when it come to marketing. One out of 7 web visitors went to Facebook in the month of August. Some companies already see the value of Facebook and use it as a way to communicate to customers (like a new kind of email). However this seems to make the most sense for B2C customers - this is what I'm told. Although I agree that B2C companies have the most to gain I don't think it's a channel that B2B customers want to rule out.

First off, let's get over the myth that Facebook is for college kids. Not anymore! Over half (56%) of Facebook users are over 25 and 45% of those are over 35! They are likely to be college educated and employed with mid-level management positions. They may not be your decision makers but they certainly are influencers. Therefore shouldn't you be talking to these people? With such a low barrier to entry (free account set-up) - what do you have to lose, besides a little time being social?

Okay, so if you're ready to take the red pill, this presentation from Charlene Li of Forrester provides additional demographics, case studies and best practices for marketers.

View Upload your own

Wal-Mart's Social Media Marketing Transgressions

When it comes to Social Media Marketing there are few failure examples to learn from. Mainly because it's so new but also because many failures get quietly swept under the rug. Unfortunately for Wal-Mart, their mistakes are in the limelight but that gives us the opportunity to learn from them. Here are some pitfalls they could have avoided:

False Transparency - They got caught red-handed for staging thier blog (Wal-Marting Across America) leaving their readers feeling cheated and lied to. The couple who was RVing across the US turned out to be a PR stunt.

Build it and They Will Come Mentality - Last summer Wal-Mart built their own social networking site for teens. Did they really think they could compete head-to-head with MySpace? With more than 3% of their traffic coming from MySpace at that time, why not optimize that relationship and go where the community already exists? Doh! After just 10-weeks the site was taken down...

Obsessed with Control

• Their recent Facebook campaign is anything but open and genuine. If you're going to leverage a social media platform like Facebook you have to be willing to open the kimono. Instead they decided to keep a lock down on comments and disabled the forum feature leaving visitors irritated and upset.
  
• They are now threatening their customers from posting Black Friday ad posts. Why would they go to such extremes - they should be rewarding people who want to talk about them - especially since it's not threatening to their business. Reward your customers for having a voice - don't reprimand them.

This realm of Marketing 2.0 is new for all of us and there will certainly be a trial-and-error period but I think these mistakes could have been avoided with a little research and education. I gotta give Wal-Mart credit for not giving up and at least one attempt has worked - reviews and ratings - let's just hope they can handle the negative reviews. It’s clear though that at this point, they’re not getting it. Marketing 2.0 is about enabling conversations and they don’t seem to be interested in that. Quite the opposite in fact. They’re still acting like it’s a different kind of radio.

IDC's Take on Social Networking

In my efforts to learn more about Social Networking I also attended IDC's event, "The Hype and Reality of Social Networking" last week with analysts Karsten Weide, and Rachel Happe.

Karsten kicked off the event and had 3 main takeaways:

1. Lots of people are using Social Networks

• 37% of people use social networks (not including children)
• Include blogs, social bookmarking and video sharing usage goes up to 77%
• Add wiki's, reviews and classifieds and it increases to 87%
• 20% of business users actively contribute - which illustrates the importance of champions

2. Social Networks can make your business more successful

• Product Research - being able to listen to what is and is not working.
• eCommerce - Which products are good for me? User reviews allow for what?
• Marketing - but Karsten warns 'be careful, don't overdue it'
• Product Support - allow customers to help each other find work arounds and fix bugs
• Product Development
• Advertising - because there's a lot of inventory, there's a big revenue opportunity
• PR - If you're willing to open the kimono you'll gain credibility but if you start censoring, it won't work

3. The Time to Act is Now - Here are six golden rules to get started:

1. There are first mover advantages - act now!
2. Target young demographics, grow from there (consumer demographic is 25 and younger)
3. Foster champions for viral content and marketing. Reward them publicly - even if you just give them a title.
4. Utility - enable user generated content, interaction, productivity. Give people something to do and focus on making their lives easier.
5. Leverage distribution, marketing, PR and brand
6. Leverage mobile technology - mobile access to enhance richness of social networks and the immediacy of information.

Here are the 3 takeaways from Rachel's presentation:

1. As content and information increases social networks become more valuable

• Complexity drives adoption - 30-35% of business users are consuming content in Social Networks and 20% of business users are contributing content
• Utility is Key - users need to get more out of it than they put in
• Gathering implicit data to build a reputation over time by using explicit data through linking various profiles can increase value

2. Know and understand the type and objective of the Social Network

• Enterprise - this is a directed network with a focus on collaboration. When starting an entrprise forum start with forums, then blogs - then add other communications like chat, wiki, and shared project plans. Allow the community to mature before introducing new collaborative features.
• Self Service (ie. Ning) - marketing campaign and advertisement driven
• Brand-Centric - conversation is specifically around the brand and sharing of content

3. There are inhibitors of Social Networks that enterprises need to address

• Lack of Standards - no federated user access
• Lack of Clear Member Value - do they get more out of it than they put in?
• Enterprise Risk Aversion - perceived lack of control; legal concern
• Unclear Information Policies - unclear guidelines for users; poor reaction from users to management decisions
• Poor Understanding of Social Dynamics - low uptake due to lack of compelling value; poor or delayed reaction to community generated concerns

Overall it was a great event with good statistics to support the Social Networking rabbit hole.

The Future of Social Networking

This months WebGuild meeting was focused on the Future of Social Networking. There were three panelists - Jai Shen, CTO of Rock You, Sundeep Ahuja, Founder Appfuel and Jonathan Abrams, Founder & CEO of Socialzr (or more notably the founder of Friendster).

For a pretty good play-by-play check out the Innovation Creators blog. Here I will capture my key take-aways:

• According to Sundeep, Social Networking is going to become more implicit vs. explicit. This will allow us to take personalization to a new level with behavior adaptation. For example, you may have 100 friends but only 20 are 'real' friends who you interact with regularly - your network will be able to pick up on that behavior pattern and personalize your experience based on that data.


• Jai makes a good point about how Social Networks need to evolve with people as they transition to different stages of their lives. He uses Friendster as an example where it was popular with high school and college students, then, everyone got married...


• Sundeep's insights on monetizing things brings up the shift we're seeing throughout the web in that interaction and engagement is an increasingly important factor of measurement. Jonathan points out that while people are spending a lot of time in Social Networking sites, their intent is not to buy as it might be when they are searching for something on Google.


• Forget about mobility - Jai bring us back to reality as he talks about how behind the US is when it comes to mobility. The fact that text messaging is just taking off is a sign and if that's not enough, the iPhone doesn't even support MMS


• According to Jai, only 1% of Facebook apps succeed (measured by 1M users or more). Statistics like that one highlight legitimate questions about how attractive these types of applications are (or are not) as a marketing channel.

I'll be adding insights from the IDC Social Networking event that I attending this morning in my next post....

Social Networking - Web 1.0 or Web 2.0?

I was talking with Richard Bennion, President CEO of Broadchoice about social networks and I was reminded of the USENET days. The ability to join groups and participate in discussion forums goes back to "Web 1.0" days. Users would subscribe to groups and when online their computer would upload articles to the servers they were subscribed to - of course this is back when everyone was on dial-up so there wasn't exactly instant gratification but it worked. People connected to people. Now, over 20 years later history repeats itself but this time we're calling it "Web 2.0" and it's enabled by Facebook. So can social networking really be considered "Web 2.0?"

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.

Why Marketers Should Leverage Facebook

The American Chronicle gives us eight reasons and although I agree with Scott that that the viral nature of Facebook should be further down on the list of compelling reasons to use Facebook I do think the list hits the main points:

1. The very nature of Facebook is viral.
2. Facebook is the ultimate in social presence marketing.
3. Your target market tells you exactly what it wants, and they’re easy to find.
4. Over half of the people using it, use it daily.
5. Better, stronger online connections.
6. Hard core marketing is out of vogue and declining in effectiveness.
7. Your clients — and your competition’s clients — may already be on Facebook.
8. Facebook friends are willing to continue the conversation.

First on the list should be what they are calling "social presence marketing" which isn't even in Wikipedia but is defined in the article as, "the activity of promoting by participating in the pre-existing conversation around your target market, in a way that enhances and uplifts the dialogue, rather than intruding upon it."

This is what social media is really about - being social and joining the conversation. In some ways this has brought us back to a time when the marketplace was a gathering of local villagers who would all talk with each other and share their experiences. Now that same interaction is enabled in an online marketplace – the benefit to marketers is the ability to communicate directly with our customers. But it also means we can't hide behind corporate speak and those who try will suffer. As the sixteenth rule from The Cluetrain Manifesto, the original Bible of Social Marketing, states: "companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone"

Yahoo Faces Off with LinkedIn

Well, they’re thinking about it according to this article. This caught my attention for a few reasons:

1. Although most companies these days are content to purchase these kinds of networks, the limited inventory (who else besides LinkedIn?) led Yahoo to start from scratch. It will be interesting to see how fast Yahoo can grow this artificially vs, LinkedIn's self-propelled viral strategy.
2. Its not branded "Yahoo!", instead they choose to go with "Y! KICKSTART" - do they feel the "Yahoo!" brand would take away from the legitimacy or coolness of their new offering for business professionals?
3. One thing I don’t like about Yahoo is there inability to connect their communities. Where’s the integration strategy with HotJobs and Answers?
4. Where is Google? Are they working on a professional social networking site too? It’s not too often these days that you see Yahoo ahead of Google when it comes to innovation.

As a dedicated LinkedIn user, I hope they’re taking notes because Yahoo! has some pretty cool features planned and I’d hate to have to manage yet another social network if this thing takes off.

The Original Rules of the Game Still Apply

The power of social networking prevailed when customers started an online petition on Facebook to keep their favorite chocolate bar, Wispa on the market - and it worked!

However one quote in the CNET news article particularly stood out for me: "Clearly, you want to listen to consumers," said Karl Heiselman, chief executive of Wolff Olins, a brand-consulting firm. "But I think we have to be careful about relying on them to do our jobs."

Isn't our job to meet the needs of our customers? And who knows better what our customers want than the customers themselves right? Peter Drucker reminds us that although a company's primary responsibility is to serve its customers, profit is an essential condition for the company's continued existence.

The fact of the matter is that the decision to take Wispa off the market was made after listening to their customers - or the lack of customers in this case, represented in sales. Ultimately, giving our customers a voice doesn't mean letting them run our business. It's great that Web 2.0 has given our customers such a powerful voice, but it's up to us marketers to interpret that voice to help drive everything from pricing to product strategy.

On a side note Cadbury Schweppes - makers of Wispa, are working on a campaign to reintroduce the product to the market. Don't you think they should turn to the same customers who revived the product to come up with ideas on how to bring it back to market? Seems like a no-brainer to me...

Casting the Social Networking Net

Napoleon Bonaparte once said that only fear and interest unite men. Well, I have about a million customers with very common interests and now I’m tasked with bringing them together.

You may remember a couple of weeks back when I wrote about Business 2.0’s struggle to stay alive and the revelation that they had a thriving, active community of people willing to band together to save the site from impending doom. As remarkable as it was, it surprised and concerned me that they had such a healthy community that never actually interacted.

I started thinking about the very question I asked 'do you have a secret community that needs to be unleashed?' The answer for me is yes. We have a program with over 20,000 members who are only able to communicate with each other once a year at an event that we host for them. The $64,000 question of course is: what else should be doing? How do we tactfully and effectively encourage interaction amongst this community? Try to talk them all into joining our Facebook page? Probably not.

The Business 2.0 situation is somewhat unique. Their users were compelled to pull together and take action to serve a common self interest. So, short of faking a business closure, what compelling events could unite a bunch of users whose only common interest is my product?

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.

Sign the Business 2.0 Facebook Petition

If a community exists for 7 years without any interaction, did it really exist? Not until someone puts it on Facebook!
Business 2.0 is at risk of closing its doors. But with the help of Facebook, readers have a voice and we’re not letting it fold without a fight. The dedicated readers of Business 2.0 created a Facebook Group that is essentially acting as an online petition to keep the publication alive. I’m a reader of Business 2.0 so I didn’t hesitate to become a member but only after 1450 other people beat me to it.

The story here for fans of Facebook and Business 2.0 is that one can play an instrumental role in saving the other. And how fitting considering the role Business 2.0 has played in chronicling innovative tech since its inception in 2000.

But for a corporate marketer like me, the story is that a community of people, (to use Josh’s words: “bright-eyed geniuses, every one of them, with big brains and enormous disposable incomes”) hadn’t yet adopted any of the technologies in the Web 2.0 toolkit to give their community a voice.

This is bad news/good news. Bad news because it’s a reminder that as useful as Web 2.0 can be to help me better interact with my customers, it’s still not adopted enough to be as pervasive as I need it to be. Good news because, well, just look at it’s potential. Do your part and sign up to save Business 2.0. Do it for a great magazine. And do it to help show those who aren’t yet on board the potential of giving a community a voice.

On Josh’s blog, he comments, “We should have turned Business 2.0 into a real social network long ago. Who knew that, secretly, that it already was one.”

I think this is an interesting comment to consider – do you have a secret community that needs to be unleashed?

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.”

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!