Building an Online Personality

When it comes to building an online personality we can all learn from the success of Amanda Congdon. This 'badass white girl' has her own daily 3-minute web-based newscast with an audience of more than 300K visitors per day (that's more viewers than some cable TV shows)!

How does she do it? I think the secret is a little bit of humor, a willingness to be edgy but most importantly, a candor that is more Daily Show than 20/20. This takes me back to the bible of social marketing where you can find validation here, “learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about 'listening to customers.' They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf."

This is where the younger generation trumps the older - they haven't been brainwashed with corporate talk and forced to go through an 'approval' process before anything leaves the corporate walls. Up until now we have all been trained to keep a zipped lip when it comes to any flaw or inaccuracy in our messaging but in a transparent world that simply doesn't work. The truth is coming out whether we want it to or not – better to be in that conversation than outside of it.


Adjusting to this new culture won't happen overnight but it will is happening. Denise Caruso, author of Intervention and speaker at Supernova says it best - 'social media is risky but it's riskier not to try.'

Who let the engineers out?

Going back to the Sun / Java FX example shared at Supernova where the product wasn't all that it was promised to be in the eyes of the developer community, Sun handled it right by letting the engineers join these conversations. They were able to admit that they agreed the product wasn't where it needed to be and were able to also share their roadmap and explain positioning. It soon went from a conversation between angry customers and a shifty vendor to a conversation between two people and miraculously the conversation became civil again - wow this stuff really works.

Do you think the rest of the corporate world can learn from that example and let loose like Sun did? I am still hopeful...

The Supernova Blogroll

As you can tell by the date of my first blog I am fairly new to the blogosphere and this is my first event blog. I quickly realized as I was working on my first post that the many bloggers in the room were much more experienced than I was as they were putting out posts one after another in real time. I tried to keep up but realized I'm just not that good yet - so rather than putting out crap I saved all my posts until I had a little more time to put some structure around them (hence all the posts within the last 10-minutes). In any case my point is that there are a lot of experienced bloggers at this event with really great insights on this stuff so check them out:

VirginBrain
Mamamusings
Raph Koster
Abstractioneer
ZapMeals
POP! PR Jots
Walden News & Views
blogTV.com
P2P Information
Ustream.TV
Bag and Baggage
Wonderland
Jason P. DeFillippo
Supernova Conversation Hub

Sorry if I left anyone out - if you're blogging at Supernova feel free to add your blog my adding a comment.

Web Tools

In this session JP Rangaswami and Jeremy Ruston share their story of transitioning BT to an Open Source company. Rather than try to anticipate the fast changing needs of their customers they are asking them, and letting them create their own tools and applications that can run on BT's all-IP network. JP explains that innovation takes place at the edge of the network but that in order for that to happen people need the tools to innovate. Jeremy created TiddlyWiki (which is a really, really cool open source Wiki platform that can be stored locally as well as on a shared folder or web server) - JT explains the three main points:

1. Output can be used anywhere else – no one owns it, any one can use it, anyone can improve it (you only bring it back to BT if you want to use their network).

2. The tools allow the innovation to take place in the consumers hands
3. They don't dictate the information allowing each person to make their own translation of what to do with it

When asked how to monetize this idea, JT uses American idol as an example. Fox could have charged to entry into the contest and made voting free but no one would have joined. "It's important to keep the barriers of entry low," he explains. You can go into it locking people in trying to figure out how to make money from it. He then offers a few examples of how they can build a business care around support, services, hosting or consulting among other things. But more importantly he notes "what we know it that we see more innovation and faster growth by opening it up to the users than we can ever see inside."

Going open source is definitely a hot trend these days - I believe it was the tipping point for Facebook making them the #1 social networking site. But is there a breaking point? How many companies can turn to open source before people stop paying attention or will that ever happen?

Research and Relationships

Session 3 panelists included: Max Kalehoff (Nielsen), Aaron Coldiron (Microsoft), Amy Shenkan (McKinsey), and Ellen Konar (Google)

Max Kalehoff started the session sharing a Nike 'Brand Association Map' which is used to visually gauge the temperature of the Internet - what's the theme, brand identity, reputation by looking at what's posted on blogs, forums and other user generated media.

He then shares his 'Top 10 Disruptions in Measurement':

1. Rise of online and digital (basically that there is a new way to collect data)
2. Attention erosion, research aversion-engagement (people don't want to be interrupted)
3. Speed of measurement increases
4. Data commoditizing and democratizing
5. Passive behavioral and attention measurement (where are people going and for how long?)
6. Measurement and analysis of unstructured data
7. Consumer centric measurement and planning
8. Qualitative comeback
9. Data integration comes of age
10. Attention-data ownership (who owns what?)


The viral component of the Internet is not always positive. An example of the Kryptonite Lock was mentioned - when a rumor that had been known for some time hit Internet and spread like wildfire in a viral video crumbling their brand and their credibility. The thing that makes this interesting is that they had the opportunity to prevent this - that had learned of the security flaw two years prior but chose to ignore it - had the pulled from the shelves then and corrected the problem they could have saved a lot of heartaches.

Ellen Konar from Google shared some interesting insights on what she explains as a 'peer-to-peer network' inside their firewall. People just find what what they are looking for "using search, duh." The information is unstructured and simply made available and if it's good enough to travel, it will. I think generally this works and for the next generation it will probably work just fine since grew up searching and know how to do it. It ties in perfectly with my belief that we are all in information overload putting us in 'just in time learning' mode - when I need to know I know it's out there and I will find it. There are two problems with this thinking - the first is one that I think will correct itself over time and that is that there are still a lot of people who don't know how to search; and two, we don't know what we don't know so there still needs to be some level of outward communication.

Amy Shenkan says 'The hardest thing to do is make sense of all the data.' It's all out there - digital breadcrumbs everywhere but what do we do with this information? Ellen Konar points us to Google Trends as a way to see what's hot at the moment and explains that they are looking at better ways to break up the data to make it more useful. But it's not just data anymore - we need to measure the stories and conversations that are happening and somehow quantify the valuable insights we are gaining from these conversations.

A woman sitting behind me silenced the crowd with her question about the privacy a user has when surfing the Web. For those who don't already know a lot of websites are passively collecting' information about you including where you came from, what you clicked, how long you stayed (or if you are on their site now). Did you opt in to that? Well there is that little privacy policy link on the bottom of most website.

Surveys - valuable or not? Ellen wasn't satisfied with the number of responses she got back from a Google Happiness Survey so they decided to start sharing the results - not just with those who took the survey but with everyone who was invited to take the survey whether they responded or not. This simple sharing of information makes the uses feel like they are getting something in return making them more likely to participate next time (what's in it for me?).

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…

Relationships Aren't Everything

'The Relationship Economy' session lead to someone in the audience making this statement (sorry I didn't catch the name). With all the hype of starting conversation and building relationships with customers it was grounding to hear this statement. It reminded me of the movie 'You've Got Mail' where even though the corner bookstore knew their customers and had a more intimate relationship people still jumped ship to the big superstore when it came around. Sometimes it's about making things easier for the customers and with the internet what we have the ability to simplify is access of information and using that information in increase the speed of learning - that is what customers are valuing.



The lesson for me: Make sure you understand the basis of your relationship with your customers and the value you are offering them so that you can react if/when that changes.