Courtesy www.PeggyDuncan.com

This morning, I became acquainted with what Jay Deragon has been writing on social media and suddenly the light came on.  As he said:

There is Friendfeed, Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and a host of other platforms and tools for social conversations and user generated content. To say the least the space is very confusing and crowded if not overwhelming for those just entering and trying to figure out what to do and how to do it. While all these conversations stir interest, few focus on the critical elements required to effectively leverage the art and science of social media for specific gains.

That passage is taken from his article, Is Social Media An Art?  He goes on to say that the four driving factors are:

1. Attention: Businesses and individuals are using the tools of the social web to garner attention from specific consumer markets of interest to the audience and the business.
2. Attraction: To keep people’s attention a focus on design, content and utility are the elements which create stickiness which indicates attractiveness.
3. Affinity: Content, design and community are the attributes of creating affinity to the proposition and the users of the online community. Unless the conversations related to the user’s needs or interest the attraction is lost because the users find little affinity to the conversations.
4. Audience: Once 1, 2 & 3 are accomplished then you have an audience to provide continuous value propositions in order to reinforce 1, 2 & 3.

He summarizes that in another article, Is SM ROI Really Important? which is when the light bulb moment occurred. 

The more business people I talk to about all this social stuff the consistent response I get is “Show me how to make money with it”.

Any good sales person will tell you their number one objective is building relationships over time. Yet few if any company bothers to measure the cost of building relationships rather they measure the results of relationships. Measuring the results doesn’t tell you “how to build effective relations” or “which methods create the best relations.”

Relationships come from human experiences, not corporate spin and hyped promises. Human relationships are measured by trust, sincerity and common values. If you want a return on social media, then focus on conversations that build lasting relationships based on value exchanged and create great experiences.

There you have the crux of the matter.  Your company should measure how well it is working with social media by evaluating the relationships the company is creating with its customers and its prospects.  Unless worthwhile relationships are created, then efforts in social media will be ineffective and may even be without value.

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That is from the 1970’s when Fabergé Organics was using this idea in promoting Honey & Wheat Germ Shampoo.  It was Fabergé and not Breck, as many people think, that was responsible for that famous phrase, "she told two friends".

I strongly believe that it is better to call this type of marketing exponential marketing rather than viral marketing.  That is the approach that eWORDofMOUTH offers to its customers in claiming that Word of Mouth Marketing Meets the Power of the Internet.  They claim to do this by combining Customer Referral Programs with Viral Email Marketing to grow the Customer Base EXPONENTIALLY (their capitals rather than mine).  However I believe their approach is sound.

Social media are clearly powerful vehicles for such exponential marketing.  You will often see the share icon shown at the left at the foot of a blog post or a video.  As the Share Icon Project web page suggests:
The Share Icon is becoming the de facto standard visual representation for sharing content from any source to multiple destinations: over email, to bookmark or memetracker sites, to your friends on social networks, and more every day.

It is certainly encouraging to see its wide acceptance.  Visually it reminds you to pass it to two people rather than just passing it to a single friend.  However I think they were perhaps too influenced by Fabergé.

Remember we are talking exponential marketing here.  Exponential marketing can have explosive results if you do it right.  You may have forgotten about the power of the exponent from your school days but this little table may remind you.

This shows the number of friends who get the message if it has been passed on five times and each friend tells it to 2, 3, 4 or 5 friends in every case.  Of course not everyone will tell the maximum number but the results will be proportionate.  In other words if you encourage everyone to tell 5 friends, the message will reach almost 100 times more people than if you told them to pass it on to 2 friends.

I think everyone should be encouraged to pass on good news to more than two friends and perhaps the icon at the left is a better reminder.  Of course it cannot be called the share icon since that is already taken. Perhaps a better name would be the buzz icon.  I encourage you to use it on your posts and videos. Below you will find smaller versions of the image so you can use whichever is most appropriate.

If you do find the arguments persuasive and do use the icon, then please tell everyone you got it here.  .. and do not forget to call it exponential marketing.  It is powerful stuff.  Can you hear the buzz?

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Yahoo Buzz is a site where you can vote in a similar way to Digg, although it is likely that there will be more editorial control.

As Darren Rowse explains, Yahoo Buzz will appeal to a certain type of audience and reader and will therefore present different opportunities to different publishers.

The burgeoning expansion of social media websites is almost head spinning. Another popular website with some similarities is del.icio.us or as it has recently been transformed into delicious.com. The delicious blog provides some explanations:

Oh happy day — the new Delicious is here

The new Delicious
Over the past few days we’ve been transitioning Delicious over to our new platform, quietly starting with RSS feeds and APIs. Today we’re taking the final step and flipping the switch on the new web site: delicious.com.

The new Delicious is just like the old del.icio.us, only faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more delightful to use and to look at.

It’s even more head spinning when you realize that both Yahoo Buzz and delicious are owned by Yahoo. As Michael Porter so wisely said, “Of course strategy is hard - it’s about making tough choices.” If Yahoo cannot make up its mind, how are we, the poor consumers, to do so.

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René Descartes felt that the proof of his existence was that he thought from time to time. Quite a number of people, including Richard Ziade, Richard Buchanan, Charles Rhyne, Graham Chastney among many others, are now confirming their existence by twittering.

It’s been around for some time although some of us were initially reluctant to twitter. Not so for many professionals who apparently have been using twitter extensively for some time. Now over the past few weeks it seems to have entered an explosive growth phase like so many other social media such as Facebook and YouTube.

Twitter is disarmingly simple. You can tweat or receive tweats on your cell phone via instant messaging. 140 characters to tell whoever is listening whatever you feel like telling them. It can be almost like dropping pebbles down a very deep well. Sometimes you hear a splash. Sometimes you don’t. The Twitter FAQ gives a few more details but there is very little more to tell. It’s completely free and there are now a number of widgets (Apps) that simplify the process of twittering.

Twittering is now being used more extensively as an additional channel in Internet marketing. Lee Odden has provided a Guide to Twitter as a Tool for Marketing and PR, while Darren Rowse sets out some Tips for Bloggers. Clearly we’ve only seen the beginning of all this twittering activity.

So what will be the future of this new method of communication. Although it’s free it should not be difficult to monetize Twitter given the huge volume of traffic. The key concern must be whether this will become an increasingly noisy tower of Babel. Will the bandwidth be available to carry all the tweats? Twitter was overloaded apparently when Steve Jobs gave the keynote address at MacWorld 2008. It was again down this morning for a time. Twitter means instant communication. It can only work if instant always means instant.

Related:
35 Twitter Tips from 35 Twitter Users
26 Reasons Why I Love Twitter - Plus 27 More just in Case

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Wal-mart Sees The Light.

Wal-mart has changed its mindset. Andy Sernovitz sees it as a landmark moment for consumer empowerment and word of mouth. Whichever way you look at it, something very dramatic has happened.

A Mindset can put blinkers on how you see the world. The Internet is having such a disruptive effect on societies, economies and markets that it is important to be aware of all the implications. To be highly effective now it is important to have an Internet Mindset. That involves many factors but one of the most important is to realize that power has shifted from entities like agencies and companies to individuals.

Many will remember that Wal-mart clearly showed its pre-Internet mindset when its PR consultant, Edelman, encouraged the use of blogs that appeared to be created by members of the general public. These were supposed to show Wal-mart in a good light and attempt to reverse some of the adverse publicity that Wal-mart gets from time to time. When the truth came out that these were in fact Wal-mart blogs, Edelman had to do some fast back-pedalling but the damage was done.

Now it would appear that Wal-mart has seen the light. The blinkers have been removed. It is demonstrating that, in the places that matter, an Internet Mindset prevails. Wal-mart has opened up a new website, walmart.com, that actively encourages true dialogue with consumers. After all, you can either be the object of discussion or take part in the discussion. Wal-mart is now providing the infrastructure to support the discussion.

Hopefully when other entities see that even the mightiest acknowledge the new order of things with the Internet, they too will abandon coercive power plays. They are becoming less and less effective and may even blow up in the faces of the perpetrators. The message is clear: Go with the (Internet) Flow!

Related:
For Wal-Mart, PR = Public Revelations
Do You Have An Internet Mindset?

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Li Evans tagged me in a meme on what magazines I read. Like many others I really don’t get involved in memes, but here I am again. It got me thinking on memes and why they don’t die almost as soon as they’re born.

In some ways, a meme is a small-scale simulation of the bigger social media such as Digg or Reddit or Myspace or Facebook. If the group involved or who might become involved looks interesting, then you decide to invest the time to become part of it. A meme has to have a slightly greater USP since it clearly is of limited life. However someone you know asked you to be part of it so there’s a slightly greater incentive to join. However we all know we’re far too busy for this so that person shouldn’t be too upset if they don’t hear any response when they drop the stone down the wishing well.

In this case, it was Andy Beal who started the Meme with his question: What Magazines Do You Read? Li was tagged by Andy and now I carry the baton. If I do tag five people, this will be a pure example of sociability since by now I read very few print magazines that are not online. Instead I fly at hyperlink speed through the RSS news feeds looking for headlines that point to something that intrigues me. The only physical ones I read are for pure enjoyment where I can’t find a satisfactory online substitute. I guess I’m part of the way the world is evolving. So here in no particular order are the few I read:

1. National Geographic
2. Canadian Geographic
3. PME - a French magazine for Quebec entrepreneurs
4. Search Marketing standard

Reading for pleasure usually involves books but those aren’t included in this meme.

So will I/won’t I help this meme to continue. It’s touch and go but social pressures are sometimes insidious and difficult to resist. So I pass on the batons to:

1. William Slawski
2. Donna Fontenot
3. Ev Nucci
4. Jim Hedger
5. Darren Moloney

Don’t worry, there’s no pressure. I won’t mind either way.

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The name is one of the most apt I’ve seen. The Dictionary tells us that twitter means uttering successive chirping noises, talking in a chattering fashion or trembling with agitation. It’s most often seen in birds. Twitter now is a software whereby you can tell whoever wants to know exactly what you’re doing at this very moment. To some that’s a big yawn: to others apparently it’s almost addictive.

Kathy Sierra back in December 2006 highlighted the potential problems with her Asymptotic Twitter Curve. That clearly in no way slowed down the explosive growth. Mitch Joel echoed the thoughts of many others in saying that Twitter Is To Blogging What Post-It Notes Are To Notebooks. More recently he has again affirmed his support in asking whether you can apply Twitter in your Company or your Podcast.

Kathy Sierra now seems to be getting to the heart of the matter with her recent post, Is Twitter TOO good? Twitter is perhaps a singularly addictive example of the social media that everyone is talking about. It may have similarities to that other powerful and time-consuming ‘world’, Second Life. In both cases, if you really want to make your involvement useful and rich, then you’ll have to devote significant time to it. For many like me, there’s enough to do in the First Life without trying to cyber-exist elsewhere.

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It’s all very human and the normal rules of human behaviour apply. Regrettably people are often drawn to check out an accident or a fire. In the same way, bad news travels much faster than good news.

If proof were needed, a small case in the last two days illustrates the strength of this factor. Lee Odden of TopRankBlog ran a poll on the Best Forums for Search Marketing Tips. The blog post would undoubtedly have drawn a certain amount of traffic. However inadvertently Lee omitted from the poll one of the more popular forums, Cre8asite Forums (of which I am a moderator).

The Cre8asite Forums have their own special character. When Forum members heard of the omission, they headed across in droves to add their comments and show their support for Cre8asite Forums. Undoubtedly the blog post has seen much more traffic than it otherwise would have seed.

Both the Blog and Cre8asite Forums have probably benefited significantly from this glitch. Lee has acknowledged that he had inadvertently omitted Cre8asite Forums from the list. It clearly was not intended as link-bait. Yet the final result is that it is more successful than it otherwise would have been.

[For those interested, at the time of writing Cre8asite Forums with 25 write-in votes in the Comments almost pipped the front runner in the poll, High Rankings Forum, which has 27 votes.]

It almost makes you wonder whether it is better to include some intriguing mistakes in blog posts rather than seeking perfection. That would be a distressing moral to draw from such incidents.

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When Strategic Marketing Montreal (SMM) came on the scene in 2002, there was very little confusing competition for that acronym, SMM. There was indeed the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM), the international SMM Fair covering shipbuilding, machinery & marine technology, the Society for Marine Mammalogy (SMM), the Solar Maximum Mission (SMM), the American Shrine to Music Museum (SMM) and a few others. All that was bearable. However over the last year SMM has taken on another meaning that is fittingly spreading like wildfire. It’s SMM for Social Media Marketing.

Wikipedia has a good definition of Social Media.

Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. A few prominent examples of social media applications are Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), YouTube (video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Digg (news sharing), Flickr (photo sharing) and Miniclip (game sharing). These sites typically use technologies such as blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs to allow users to interact.

Robert Scoble the pre-eminent blogger also has a useful description of social media. You can get an idea of the importance of this SMM when you remember that Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in October 2006.

The latest news today is that Cre8asite Forums is opening a new Forum on Social Media and Tagging. It will be moderated by two new moderators, Liana Evans and Chris Winfield. Both are well known in the SMM world and given the incredible buzz around this whole area, we should all be in for an exciting journey of discovery.

For Strategic Marketing Montreal or SMM, this increased name competition could be seen as a downer. However if folk come to us assuming that SMM stands for Social Media Marketing, then I’m sure it will be mutually beneficial.

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You could get the impression that the Blogosphere is now the only cyber-space that’s involved in peer-to-peer communication. The Blogosphere is certainly very powerful, particularly given the search engine visibility of blog posts and the instant visibility of new blog posts through news feeds. .. and yes it does encourage horizontal communications. However let’s not forget the traditional Web and regular business websites. Somehow the two have got to interconnect and interrelate. Whether you call it slogging or some other name, you won’t get the right answer unless you consider both.

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PR is often used as a shorthand for Public Relations. Public Relations attempts to manage how an individual or company will appear in the media. If the company has good news then the PR people work to get the media to showcase it. Conversely if the company has some difficult stories to handle, then the PR people try to ensure that as little damage as possible is done to the corporate image. With the traditional media, that was a reasonable objective for the PR group. However now the Internet has changed the rules of the game. Much more transparency is required in company activities since the Internet radar screens are much more active and effective.

This was clearly illustrated by the furore that developed around a PR activity that Edelman and Wal-Mart did. Wal-Mart’s PR counsellors at Edelman created a blog ostensibly authored by a couple traveling across America in their RV and spending nights parked in Wal-Mart parking lots. Edelman wanted to make consumers think that Wal-Mart is a great place to use as the anchor point for a road trip. When it became clear that this was a fake blog, as it quickly did, everyone jumped on Edelman. Blogging heavyweights, such as Shel Holtz, Scott Karp and Robert Scoble, pointed out the manifest deception of such an approach. This was particularly heinous from a company like Edelman that has made much of the benefits of social media efforts. It took a few days for Richard Edelman to fess up and acknowledge what he called an error in failing to be transparent.

Given that the Internet exists, there is need for absolute transparency and sincerity. Not least because the chances of being caught out are very high. Edelman pointed out his support for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association Code of Ethics.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Code of Ethics.
(The “WOMMA Code”)
Summary
1. Consumer protection and respect are paramount
2. The Honesty ROI: Honesty of Relationship, Opinion, and Identity
3. We respect the rules of the venue
4. We manage relationships with minors responsibly
5. We promote honest downstream communications
6. We protect privacy and permission

Code of Ethics sounds like something worthwhile that you should strive to honour. That really sets the bar too low. To ensure the best corporate image, you’ve really got to regard that Code of Ethics as an absolute minimum of good corporate behaviour. In that way, you can be reasonably sure that your PR (Public Revelations) will not do damage to your corporate image.

Related: Is The Wal-Mart Blog Coming Soon?
Follow-up: Wal-mart Adopts An Internet Mindset

Tags: Wal-Mart, Edelman, PR

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It describes how Nokia Corp. released its camera smart phone last fall. The marketing campaign cut back on news releases and flashy ads. Instead, the company sent sample products to 50 tech-savvy amateur bloggers with a passion for mobile phones. Word spread online about the N-series phone, driving up sales and contributing to a 43 percent profit boost for Nokia last quarter.

“So many blogs picked it up that it blew out our server twice,” said Andy Abramson of Comunicano Inc., who developed the blogging program for Nokia. “We were getting thousands of hits per second.”

Marketing firms are suggesting communicating with bloggers rather than simply pitching a product and giving away free samples. By following the blogs carefully and joining in the dialogue when it’s appropriate, a great quantity of text content and links can be generated about the new products. That’s the way to substantially increase a company’s keyword search ranking. Guerilla Marketing move over, here come’s Blog Marketing.

Tags: Blog Marketing

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The Long Tail is the easier concept to understand. It’s a term developed by Chris Anderson and his book explaining it all will be on sale within 10 days. His theme is that many markets are not mass markets with everyone having somewhat similar needs and wants. Instead a good part of a given market may be made up of people with very dissimilar tastes. What seems like a single market may be made up of a multitude of micro niches with very different people seeking very different things. The beauty of the Internet is that a person in such a micro niche can still possibly find a supplier given the way search engines such as Google work. Very different searches can still wind up at the same place, where the supplier is. So the Internet can be seen as a space where connections can be made.

Open Space would seem to be very different. It was an approach invented by Harrison Owen in 1985. A large group of people meet at a physical location and with the minimum of structure try to explore complex issues and see what develops. Others are now providing help for this process. For example OpenSpaceWorld.org offers the following:

Open Space Technology is a simple way to run productive meetings, for five to 2000+ people, and is a powerful way to lead any kind of organization, in everyday practice and ongoing change.

You can even meet up with other practitioners in particular fields and use the Open Space approach. For example Identity Open Space will take place on July 20/21 in Vancouver to explore the notion of Internet Identity. If you all prefer not to travel to the same physical location, then Change Facilitator Gabriela Ender and her team from Germany has developed an Internet real-time methodology OpenSpace-Online®, which they say promotes autonomous, responsible, respectful, and results-oriented collaboration, while overcoming the limitations of time and space, and at the same time saving on travel costs. That seems to be the way the concept is going with software to provide technological support. One powerful technique here is the use of a Wiki, which can allow a group to develop and refine a body of knowledge.

That would seem to be moving away from the simplicity of the original Open Space approach. It was really very low-tech and relied on the natural tendency of people to get together with others with similar interests and see what emerges. In an Open Space process, a subgroup may wander together that wants to handle a particular aspect of the problem and away the discussion goes. Others see the subgroup and wander over to see what it’s all about. Perhaps it’s not for them so they wander on to another subgroup until they find something that strikes their fancy.

A new kind of very simple support for that ‘getting together’ process is now available. It allows different people in the long tail to come together and see where it goes. For example microbreweries or craft beers are often quoted as very typical examples of long tail products. Zimbio is a network of public portals that have been created by whoever wishes to do so. So one has sprung up on craft beer for example. A similar framework for creating and sharing platforms for social groups is grou.ps. These platforms are very appropriate in applying the original Open Space concept. If you’re dealing with long tail products, you may well want to consider how these new-style Open Space online groups may help in the diffusion of ideas process.

Tags: The Long Tail, Open space

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How then do you get folk in these micro-niches to be aware that you have the product just for them? Well, search engines such as Google and Yahoo! do a pretty good job of finding very specific items if you’re careful in how you phrase your searches. Google has even been described as one of the prime examples of a Long Tail company.

Unfortunately waiting for the Long Tail to find you may mean your company goes bankrupt in the interim. More proactive marketing is required. That’s where Word of Mouth Marketing comes in and it even has its own Association now. Other names that are used are buzz marketing or viral marketing. Spreading the word whichever way you can. If you have something really gossip-worthy then this can be easy. So try trading up from a paper clip to a house, or try selling a million small images on a web page and you’ll be appearing in all the media.

The rest of us have got to work a little harder. However it’s not a bad idea to try to work the other media. It’s a very powerful way of creating or reinforcing the buzz, of spreading the viral message. As the Internet becomes main stream, then the other media become parallel ways of creating the links. So for example, here in Montreal last week a film opened on Craigslist. Craigslist, a type of online community bulletin board / classified ads system is now appearing in a number of cities around the world.

Radio can be another medium where you can try to spread the word and magnify the buzz. Again in Montreal tomorrow, Radio Station 940 Montreal will be featuring a Round Table Discussion on the Internet. It’s hosted by the Women’s Entrepreneurial Networking System and Barry Welford of SMM will be one of the participants.

A third example is almost a counter-example since here the Internet will be the way the viral message is spread about a traditional pre-Internet product. It’s a magazine about (and here’s the surprise .. ) Search Engine Marketing. That’s right, Search Engine Marketing on the Internet. The magazine is called The Search Marketing Standard. It will be a quality magazine with glossy ads and will appear four times a year. It’s free to subscribers for the first year in the US and $20 per year for those outside the US, largely to cover shipping and handling costs.

It’s already attracting a good deal of interest, which is not surprising. In some ways it seems counter-intuitive to need to use a non-Internet vehicle to give advice on how to perform best on the Internet. However that’s entertainment and it’s just the way to get the buzz going, isn’t it. Pass it on.

Tag: viral marketing, search engine

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Someone else piped up, “What about SEO?” A number of us are into websites and all that stuff and some even offer to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization). However it’s a word that’s come to have some very bad publicity. The conversation went on as follows.

“Could we do something to improve its reputation?”
“Perhaps that world poverty issue is easier.”
“No, seriously, I know people are talking SEM instead but that’s not having any easier time.”
(SEM is Search Engine Marketing for those not familiar with these terms.)
“Well most website owners have heard of SEO and I think we could try some PR to improve the reputation.”
… that produced one of those embarrassing silences again.

“What about some brainstorming?”
” well OK but we don’t have to wear those silly coloured hats, do we?”
“Let’s try to think about positive things related to SEO.”
… that produced one of those embarrassing silences again.

“OK what about just throwing out word associations and see whether that triggers any ideas.”
“SEO - Mamma Mia”
“SEW - a needle pulling thread”
“.. I think that one’s been done”
“SEO and SEX”
“We might pull in the wrong crowd.”
… that produced one of those embarrassing silences again.

“What about SEO and SEA? The Sea is associated with the open air, freshness. How could that possibly go wrong?:
A few thought there might be something in that idea. Well one or two of the lads had to leave so we decided to take up the conversation again tonight when we’re all together again.

Then I spotted that someone else has already pinched the idea. Bill Slawski and Loren Baker are running an event called SEO By The Sea. It’s coming up in August and looks to be a great idea. So we can forget that. The lads will be disappointed. I guess we’ll have to go back to tackling world poverty.

Tags: SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Associations.

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