Emergence Marketing: technology enablement Archives

November 5, 2007

Facebook vs. OpenSocial API

It is interesting to read about the new Google OpenSocial API. Jeremiah Owyang had a great article on his blog about it last week - titled: Explaining OpenSocial to your Executives. The mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon trying to explain things.

But my favorite analysis comes from Don Dodge - 50M Facebook users don't care about OpenSocial APIs. Sure, he comes to the discussion with a Microsoft bias - but who in their right mind thinks that non-geeks will abandon Facebook and flock to OpenSocial apps? Is OpenSocial likely to drive new traffic to MySpace? Would I want to be listed as a friend of someone I "friended" (amazing how things tend to become verbs) on LinkedIn who has a personal profile on MySpace?

[Tags: OpenSocial social media facebook don dodge marketing 2.0]

October 1, 2007

Comparing Wal-Mart and Target on Facebook

Both Target and Wal-Mart have sponsored groups on Facebook - both of which are targeted at college kids.

Target has over 7,000 members and mostly positive comments in a vibrant set of discussions. The Wal-Mart group on the other hand has a little over 1,200 members, no discussions are allowed, and the wall postings are mostly negative.

What is the difference do you think, except for the fact that a large portion of the population believes that one of the two companies is truly evil?

The Wal-Mart home page looks like another interactive ad.. The Target home page is more inviting and enlists the help of users to co-create the experience. Any other differences that you can think of that would result in such a difference in membership and tone of conversation?

We can take the discussion to Facebook - in fact I started a thread on the subject in the Marketing 2.0 group, where we now have more members than the Wal-Mart Facebook group.

[Tags: marketing social networking facebook wal-mart target]

September 20, 2007

What is the marketing potential of LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace

Reveries.com conducted a survey on the potential of social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Myspace as media for marketing activities (pdf download of survey summary results and analysis are here). The main finding seems to be that marketers are in the very early stages of truly understanding the potential of these new networks - with only 18% of the respondents calling the potential of online social networks as a medium for marketing "huge".

Other interesting tidbits from the survey include the fact that marketers see "word of mouth" as the most promising aspect of social networking sites, and that many pointed out that marketers should participate in the conversations that take place on those sites without interrupting them.

Unfortunately, the reality is that many spammers have already invaded Facebook, Myspace and other similar sites. Go check the walls of the most popular interest groups in Facebook to see for yourself - many are littered with posts that are total sales pitches or with information that is totally irrelevant to the group's conversation.

[Tags: marketing social networking conversational marketing social media facebook myspace linkedin]

August 24, 2007

50% of employees blocked from accessing Facebook at work

According to recent research from Sophos, 50% of employees are blocked from accessing Facebook at work...

I guess most companies do not get it :)

August 1, 2007

US is #15 in broadband subscribers worldwide

According to a new commentary released by the Pew Internet Project, It will be hard to close the broadband divide in the US (pdf here).

We now rank # 15 among countries worldwide in terms of broadband subscribers (19.6 subscribers per 100 inhabitants compared to 31.9 for Denmark and 29.1 for Korea).

May 23, 2007

Enterprise 2.0 adoption issues - different from collaboration adoption issues?

Yesterday I was fortunate to be the host of a really enlightening conversation on adoption issues related to enterprise 2.0 projects with Andrew McAfee, Euan Semple, Jenny Ambrozek, Jerry Bowles, and Jim McGee (you can listen to a replay of the event here). We had another session on Monday - but since we had some technical difficulties during that session the audio needs editing. I will write about that one when the audio is available.

One of the questions that crossed my mind is whether enterprise 2.0 tools (web 2.0 tools deployed within an enterprise environment) have the same barriers to adoption as traditional collaboration tools. One of the main barriers to adoption with collaboration tools is to not be able to get everyone who is working on a project to use the tools. This can happen for a variety of reasons - i.e., "the blank screen" syndrome, which happens when people do not quite know how to use the tools or organize their work within those tools, and revert back to email, face-to-face and phone instead of working within the specialized collaborative environment, or for cultural/political reasons, when people do not like the way the project is organized and boycott the use of the collaborative tools. In all those instances the value of the collaboration environment goes down to zero for all the other team members who want to use it. If some part of the work or the project lives outside of the project collaboration environment, then that environment has no more value than a person's inbox - it is not complete.

Enterprise 2.0 tools on the other hand are less project-centric and a little more individual-people-centric, meaning that even if I am the only one who is using tagging or blogging on a project, that still has value to me. I am not sure that holds true for wikis, which are true collaborative environments.

Note that we also set up a Ning social networking group for Enterprise 2.0 Ravers - feel free to join and engage in that conversation as well.

[Tags: enterprise 2.0 web 2.0 adoption ]

May 8, 2007

What is the state of the market for Enterprise 2.0 Tools?

Are you in the process of deploying Enterprise 2.0 Tools or thinking of doing it? Who in your organization is involved? What do you anticipate the biggest barriers to adoption to be? How will you measure success? Which process will you start with?

If you are interested in participating in a project in which we collectively come to an answer for these and other questions, then take a few minutes to fill out the Enterprise 2.0 Market Readiness Survey. We will share all the results with everyone who's interested.

And of course feel free to post it on your blog for your audiences to fill in and participate (just point them to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=937203810006).

April 12, 2007

Artificially creating barriers to adoption...

I have been looking for a group "to-do" list for a long time, and never really found what I was looking for. Most to-do lists are for individual usage - which is not what I am looking for. And unless you are Google, I do not even get why people bother developing those apps as there are a ton of applications on people's desktop that already have that service integrated - for free.

But as far as a simple group task list for truly distributed teams....there isn't much available. I finally found a solution that looked promising....integrating/synchronizing with Google calendar, etc. - all for $15. So I bought it thinking that would solve my problem. Except that when I tried to invite one of my closest associates, it required that he too buy that same application. That was almost a week ago, and of course that has not happened yet.

How can people do that? Group applications already have plenty of barriers to adoption to overcome - so why a company would artificially add one extra barrier in the mix is a mystery to me. I bet you that most "potential" users of this app would use it with teams of 2-3 people. So if that is the case, charge the buyer of the app $30-50 instead of trying to get $15 from all the users. That way you may end up with some real users instead of frustrated buyers.

Elementary...my dear Watson...

[Tags: barrier to adoption group application]

January 23, 2007

Wiki's work, but team collaboration adoption is still a problem...

According to a new survey, Wiki's in the Enterprise seem to deliver real results and appear to be sustainable (via Headshift). All that being said, team collaboration adoption in general is still something that 40% of companies give up on as they run into too much resistance.

January 10, 2007

The "Inter" Personal Enterprise

As part of a client project I ran across a set speeches that former Oracle COO Ray Lane has been making on the "inter" Personal Enterprise (you can find a slide deck used at a Sandhill conference here).

In his recorded keynote presentation, which can be found at IT conversations, Lane reminds us that eighty percent of the enterprise software industry profits currently go to just three companies, while seven thousand companies fight over the remainder. In order to succeed in this environment, he recommends that enterprise software vendors focus on ease of adoption, instantaneous value and a minimum IT footprint. He also says that "...vendors need to make it easy for users to get started and provide real value to the customer before she is required to pay. The user experience should be personalized and contextualized and the product should spread through the enterprise organically, via user recommendation, rather than by management edict."

That is in fact how we built eRoom Technology to become a profitable $40M company in the early 2000's. We provided easy ways for individuals and small teams to get started after which the solution would spread organically throughout the enterprise through user recommendations. By the time the CIO at KPMG decided to standardize on eRoom as their collaboration platform, there were already over 2,000 happy eRoom users in the company. We then tried to scale the ease of adoption process by releasing an ASP version of the product. While I still believe that was a good idea, that strategy was not widely successful as the ASP offering never fully got embraced by our "enterprise" sales force. The shift from big upfront payments and fat commission checks to a more predictable pay-as-you go scheme was just too much of a culture shock.

In a lot of ways, that is also what is happening with Enterprise 2.0 tools - the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise. But as Harvard Business Professor Andrew McAfee, who coined the Enterprise 2.0 term, predicts, most Enterprise 2.0 tools will remain confined to geek-heavy groups, companies or industries, or at best they may find spotty mainstream penetration.

Part of the reason here is that while the tools do spread organically, they still have a long way to go in terms of user friendliness, depth of features, and seamless integration. Without those aspects, non-geeky users and innovators will have a hard time finding value in the tools.

[Tags: web 2.0 enterprise 2.0 innovation technology adoption]

December 5, 2006

Social media 2.0: empowering communities to solve problems

In a recent interview for the BBC, Tony Blair's outgoing strategy advisor brings up a few good points on how the Internet is fueling a crisis between politicians and its citizenry. Many of his points are actually valid for the world of business as well.

Too often he says, the web is "used to encourage the "shrill discourse of demands"." What he would rather see is "more needs to be done by the web community in general to encourage people to use the Internet to "solve problems" rather than simply abuse politicians or make "incommensurate" demands on them." Talking about the immaturity of the whole environment he said ""We have a citizenry which can be caricatured as being increasingly unwilling to be governed but not yet capable of self-government," and further comparing the citizenry to teenagers he said "Like "teenagers", people were demanding, but "conflicted" about what they actually wanted, he argued."

Social media empowers people to "speak up" and "make demands." It can also be used to leverage collective intelligence to "solve problems." Yet the tendency at this stage is for people to whine more than to collaborate on constructive problem solving. This can perhaps be explained by the fact that the dominating tool in the new social media toolkit is the blog, which works better as a single person or small group mouth/shout piece than as a true collaborative environment. Sure, blogs are well suited for conversations or raging debates, but that is not how one typically solves problems. Wiki's are more appropriate, but still limited to a very small segment of the population - too insignificant to truly act as an empowering environment for community based problem solving and self-governance.

So maybe that is what we could expect from social media 2.0 - a set of rich and intuitive collaborative environments that enables groups of people to spontaneously congregate and collaborate on helping others to solve problems, whether they'd be socio-political problems or problems related to their favorite brands.

Some interesting experiments in developing collective problem solving environments are already underway - such as the Community Wiki, where Keith Hopper discussed the same BBC interview and suggests a few actual projects projects to tackle as a group.

[Tags: collective intelligence social media self governance self organization]

November 15, 2006

Did the "wisdom of crowds" fail this election?

According to Reason, the wisdom-of-crowds-based prediction markets failed for the Senate race this last election. Most prediction markets were putting the likelihood that the Republicans would keep a majority in the Senate at 75-80%.

Does it really mean a failure of the system? If the probability that most people in the "crowd" would predict that the democrats would win 6 out of 7 tight races in order to win a majority in the senate is less than 50%, then the wisdom of crowds would only reinforce that - at least that is what the Condorcet jury theorem says. Besides, predicting that there is a 20% chance that the dems would win those races and thus take control of the Senate is not a negligible chance. In fact, it probably is somewhat higher than the straight probability that pollsters would have come up with.

What do you think?

[Tags: wisdom of crowds prediction markets forecasting]

November 10, 2006

Email marketing delivers best ROI - but do you buy that?

According to a new study by the Direct Marketing Association, and as reported in DIRECT, email marketing delivers the highest ROI of all media available to marketers. Having just finished reading a pre-release version of WOMMA president Andy Sernovitz' new book - Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking - he would probably argue that word of mouth marketing would have the highest ROI as you can get that going with no investments.

The DMA research shows that the return on email marketing in 2005 was $57.25 for every dollar spent, compared to $7.09 for catalog marketing and $22.52 for non-email Internet marketing. The study also projects that all the ROI's for the different media marketing options are headed down-ward.

The same research also estimates that the commercial email market in the US was $16.5B in 2005, while the direct marketing-driven sales hit $1.806 trillion in 2005 - projected to hit $2.627 trillion in 2011!

Ouch...that sounds like a lot of wasted dollars...there should be better ways to reach people. And no matter what Set Godin says about messaging frequency vs. "being full ," there ought to be better solutions out there to resolve the ambient findability problem in marketing!

The DIRECT article did not mention anything about the methodology used by DMA - but it is assumed that the study looked at investments vs. "new" customers and "new" revenues - which is a really bad transaction-based metric in marketing.

A more interesting metric would have been to understand how email direct marketing impacts long term customer-relationship-based revenue streams for companies. Isn't that where the real profitability lies?

MARKETING - it's not the transaction anymore, it's the relationship, dummy!

[Tags: direct marketing ambient findability marketing innovation email marketing word of mouth marketing WOM]

November 9, 2006

Peer pressure in Social Media

Giovanni Rodriguez found that the business benefits of social media are becoming quite apparent, but the pressure to stand out -- and do something different -- is mounting (disclosure - I am on the advisory board of Hubbub PR). He starts his excellent post by saying that: “There’s no question – the early success of peer-driven, social-media programs will put pressure on businesses to both adapt and adopt. But, for some leaders, there’s another question: in a world where everyone participates, what does it mean to lead?”

In their rush to stand out, companies and people will screw it up - let's just hope that they don't break it for the rest of us.

October 31, 2006

Customer communities do pay off!

The most recent Harvard Business Review reports on a study (requires subscription) that was done on the impact of customer communities on customer behavior at eBay in Germany (disclosure - I have an active interest in this topic as I have agreed to chair a conference on the business of communities - Community 2.0 - but more on that later).

The numbers are quite interesting. The experiment involved 140,120 eBay customers who had bought or sold on eBay but who had not participated in the eBay customer communities before. 79.242 were invited to join the online customer community, while the remaining 60,878 were used as a control group. Of the people who were asked to join the community, 3,299 became active participants and 11,242 became lurkers. Over the course of a year they compared the behavior of the active participants and lurkers to that of the control group and found that:

Lurkers and active participants won up to 25% more auctions

Lurkers and participants paid prices that were as much as 24% higher

Lurkers and participants spent up to 54% more money in total

Active participants listed up to 4 times as many items

Active participants earned up up 6 times as much monthly sales revenue

For first time sellers who were lurkers and participants, 10 times as many of them started selling on eBay after joining the community

All in all the activities of the lurkers and participants resulted in 56% more sales during the year of the study - bringing in millions of additional dollars into eBay's bottom line.

So can the results of this experiment be replicated in more traditional businesses?

Some people clearly think so, while others who used to be very enthusiastic about the business of communities are starting to become very skeptical.

Communities require a certain critical mass to get going - and not all companies have a large enough customer base to get to that point. They also require a lot more work and resources than most companies are willing to invest - to set up the infrastructure, to nurture the communities, to acquire content, etc.

Active communities of employees, customers and partners are clearly powerful management instruments that can dramatically improve core business processes like innovation, product development and marketing & sales. They can also backfire and have very negative impact if they are not managed properly, or set up wrongly. Before embarking on this path, companies have to truly understand the dynamics as well as the pros and cons of communities. They also need to find out if they have the resources and wherewithal to create their own communities or whether they should play in someone else's sandbox.

Unfortunately, many will start the process by throwing technology at the problem - let's just hope that those ignorants won't destroy the market for the rest of us like email spammers destroyed email marketing and (un)ethical zealots are slowly destroying word of mouth marketing.

[Tags: community management customer community community marketing wom word of mouth marketing]

October 27, 2006

Authority, popularity, expert-ness - how to set your filter to get the right content?

Marry Hodder, CEO at Dabble, made a good point yesterday at the business blogging summit here in Seattle when she said that the Technorati rankings for authority are not really a measure of authority but a measure of popularity - and that measuring authority is not something that should be conceded to a web service but something that gets determined by the end user.

At one point or another everyone is struggling with how to filter content to find the relevant pieces of information. Some people believe that popularity may be the right filter. Others believe that you can only trust "real" journalists and should use that as your filter to get the right content. Some others still cling to the belief that only academic credentials, with publications and peer review, can result in the "experts" worth listening to.

The reality is that no one filter can work for all topics and at any point in time. If I am looking for customer feedback on a new product, I may not want the voice of the expert, and certainly have learned not to trust the voice of the "journalist" reviewer. If I am looking for information on cutting edge cancer treatments on the other hand, I may only trust academic types. And if I need information on a more popular topic, then popularity may well be the right filter - or ratio of blog posts to comments and trackbacks, or some other metric that determine how well a person is read, quoted, etc.

Now, another person may look at this in a whole different way. The bottom line is that the "right" filter is content-specific as well as reader-specific.

Making things even more complicated - the right filter is also time sensitive. If I have time to cull through a large amount of information then my filter may not be set as narrowly as when I am in a time-crunch.

So in a way, everybody has a personal profile that determines the right filters based on subject and moment in time. If somehow we could have web services that would match their results to my personal profile, then we would have a real cool solution.

It's really simple when you think about it...well...maybe not :)

[Tags: content filtering authority popularity experts]

September 28, 2006

Thriving on the edge of chaos

ants small.jpg Fortune's most recent issue has a number of articles on the increasing chaos in markets, technologies customer behavior, and products. Business models that sustained companies for decades no longer work. Companies can now enter and leave markets at a moment's notice. Market disruptions happen faster and faster.

According to the article, the way to manage chaos is not by retraining managers, it's by changing people's mindset and assumptions about business, management, and most economic principles we grew up with. Successful companies are meeting the challenges of a chaotic environment with chaos - by loosening controls, getting rid of hierarchies & titles, providing full transparency into all aspects of the business and more.

What causes all this change? For starters, the fact that companies can now operate free of physical assets makes them both more flexible and vulnerable at the same time. Next is the fact that with the advent of the Internet we have witnessed a dramatic power-shift towards the consumer. Information about products and services, which used to be controlled by the seller - giving them an unfair advantage - is not only widely available, it is complemented with free flowing consumer generated content that gives the consumer the upper hand in the power play.

And the chaos is here to stay. As the article points out "the forecast for most companies is continued chaos with a chance of disaster."

The only way to survive is to allow your company to operate at the edge of chaos - something that nature knows all to well how to do. Perhaps the best training for company executives and employees will not come from business schools but from science departments who are studying complexity theory and how self-organized systems can thrive in nature -even in the worst of circumstances.

If you are starting a new company it may be easy for you to inject that right kind of culture in your company's DNA. For existing companies the only answer is change, dramatic change that is - and as scientists have found, change hurts, and people naturally resist it.

So should we get ready to see many corporate icons dissapear in the near future?

[Tags: business models chaos complexity theory edge of chaos]

September 26, 2006

The future of the Internet

The Pew Internet & American life Project just released a new report on the Internet Evolution - The Future of the Internet II (download full pdf here)..

Major predictions by 2020 include:

A low-cost global network will be thriving and creating new opportunities in a “flattening” world.

Humans will remain in charge of technology, even as more activity is automated and “smart agents” proliferate. However, a significant 42% of survey respondents were pessimistic about humans’ ability to control the technology in the future. This significant majority agreed that dangers and dependencies will grow beyond our ability to stay in charge of technology. This was one of the major surprises in the survey.

Virtual reality will be compelling enough to enhance worker productivity and also spawn new addiction problems.

Tech “refuseniks” will emerge as a cultural group characterized by their choice to live off the network. Some will do this as a benign way to limit information overload, while others will commit acts of violence and terror against technology-inspired change.

People will wittingly and unwittingly disclose more about themselves, gaining some benefits in the process even as they lose some privacy.

English will be a universal language of global communications, but other languages will not be displaced. Indeed, many felt other languages such as Mandarin, would grow in prominence.

Some of those predictions seem like they are already upon us and not 14 years out into the future.

It is especially great to see that 56% of the people who were surveyed believed in this scenario: "By 2020, this free flow of information will completely blur current national boundaries as they are replaced by city-states, corporation-based cultural groupings and/or other geographically diverse and reconfigured human organizations
tied together by global networks."

Unfortunately, many still believe that "governments and corporations will not necessarily embrace policies that will allow the network to spread to under-served populations; that serious social inequalities will persist." And according to the report "The experts and analysts also split evenly on a central question of whether the world will be a better place in 2020 due to the greater transparency of people and institutions afforded by the internet: 46% agreed that the benefits of greater transparency of organizations and individuals would outweigh the privacy costs and 49% disagreed.The experts and analysts also split evenly on a central question of whether the world will be a better place in 2020 due to the greater transparency of people and institutions afforded by the internet: 46% agreed that the benefits of greater transparency of organizations and individuals would outweigh the privacy costs and 49% disagreed."

[Tags: pew future of internet predictions privacy]

September 22, 2006

Crowdsourcing vs. community outsourcing

Crowdsourcing has been a popular term ever since it appeared in a Wired Magazine article earlier this summer. This past week, Business Week jumped on the crowdsourcing bandwagon with an article in their second issue of Inside Innovation (may require subscription - but you can find a good description of the article by Renee Hopkins Callahan over at IdeaFlow).

What is confusing about the "crowdsourcing" terminology in both articles is that they use "crowd" to refer to the "wisdom of crowds" - a term introduced a few years back by James Surowiecki to describe the fairly simple idea that large groups of people are smarter than an elite few. Many of the crowdsourcing examples used in both articles, however, like the use of iStockphoto to source images cheaply, do not rely on wisdom of crowds at all. Getting your images from iStockphoto instead of from a professional photographer is like outsourcing your photography to the public - where everyone can be a semi-pro with high end cameras below $1,000 these days. In the end you still buy your images from individual photographers. There may be a crowd, but there is no wisdom of crowds involved here.

When a company like John Fluevog Boots & Shoes asks its fans to submit and vote on new shoe designs - that is a model based on the wisdom of crowds. The wisdom of the mass is more likely to identify a winner than a select few (see also related post on when wisdom of crowds does not work).

The Business Week article spells out four rules for successful crowdsourcing - or should it be to outsource your task/process to an outside community.

First, be focused and provide clear guidelines to what you want to have done. Not really all that different from any outsourced project. If you give vague guidelines you will likely get something back that you did not expect.

Second - get your filters right. Since by outsourcing a task to a large set of people you will get a large number of ideas, you need to filter all those ideas so that you can find the gems. But why not use the wisdom of the crowd to do the filtering? IBM solicits ideas from customers and employees during two day innovation jams - which led to 37,000 ideas the last time around. They then use their own employee "crowd" to filter those ideas. As most companies do not have 140,000 employees to draw upon, they could use their fans and customers to select the best ideas. An idea could be emailed to a randomly selected set of active people for voting, rating or ranking.

The third is to tap the right crowd. Pretty obvious when you think about it. Just like you would not outsource a complex engineering problem to a company of 14 year old summer students, you need to be picky about the community you outsource your task to.

Lastly is to build your community into social networks. While this may be key to success in getting certain communities to function in the long run, enabling networks or teams to form within your community goes against the principle of the wisdom of crowds - adding to the terminology confusion.

Renee adds two more rules in her post - find ways to feed the ideas into your company's existing processes and fund the process - as incentives fuel creativity.

In the end, successfully outsourcing product innovation and other processes to outside communities comes down to a deep understanding of two factors:

understanding of the traditional keys to success for that particular process
understanding of the fundamentals to successfully create (if needed), manage and interact with communities - virtual or otherwise

[Tags: crowdsourcing community community management outsourcing]

September 21, 2006

Commercial buddies and friends on MySpace

ClickZ Experts has an interesting article on Social Network Marketing by Sean Carton. In it he lists some of the profiles of advertisers on MySpace.

Helga - for Volkswagen, a 25 year old female from Germany has 9144 friends

The Original MySpace Burger King King - male, 52yo - has 3255 friends (he's probably too old for MySpace)

Smart - the Wendy's Square - a 28 yo single male (and with an unsure orientation) - has 79,840 friends

It all looks pretty cheesy - surely there must be better ways to promote products to the youth market.

[Tags: social networking myspace advertising online advertising]

September 7, 2006

Social marketing vs. social marketing

As you probably will have noticed, the "social marketing" terminology has been popping up left and right lately.

Nedra Weinreich from Spare Change and others, who had been using "social marketing" for decades to refer to the use of marketing to address health and social issues, took issue with the new usage of the terminology - especially when Forrester launched a "Social Marketing Bootcamp" and Jupiter launched a "Social Marketing" practice. Forrester backed down and renamed their bootcamp "Social Computing Boot Camp," while Jupiter refused to rename it's practice - fueling the ongoing feud over the use of the terminology.

While it is unclear to me how good a term "social marketing" is to refer to the marketing of social issues - I disliked the new usage of the terminology from the get go.

Using "social marketing" as a catch-all category for the (not-so-new) marketing techniques which include viral marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, community marketing, consumer-generated-content-based marketing, and other social media-based marketing "techniques," not only "hypes up" the value of those methods unnecessarily - it also engenders the danger for misuse, abuse and the ultimate destruction of those marketing techniques for everyone.

Many clueless and panicky marketers, who have witnessed the decline of marketing programs like email marketing and other interrupt-based marketing methods - which incidentally they destroyed in the first place - will now jump on this latest craze and screw it all up! As usual, they will throw dollars and especially technology at the issue without understanding the underlying fundamentals and ethical considerations that allow those methods work in the first place.

You don't believe it? By now, the value of word-of-mouth marketing is being threatened by the lack of disclosure by very large and respected marketers like P&G and others. And with so much "fake" consumer-generated content going around, some people are already asking for some sort of "organic labeling" before it is too late. When it comes to "community marketing," the jury is still out as it is one of the younger hot new marketing memes - but history shows that it will only take time for some clueless marketers to latch on to that one as well and potentially spoil it for the rest of us.

I really hope that Jupiter and other industry analysts and industry associations will show leadership in this space and try to create some sort of self-governance amongst their clients and members - but somehow, and based on the descriptions of those new services, I am not so sure that is part of the agenda.

Hopefully I am wrong!

[Tags: social marketing marketing word of mouth wom cgm community marketing]

August 28, 2006

Why wisdom of crowds does not always work

crowds sm.jpg The most current issue of the Harvard Business Review has an interesting article in which they marry the wisdom of crowds "theory" with the Condorcet jury theorem - which was developed by a Frenchman in 1785 (requires subscription).

To understand how the theorem works, imagine that a number of people are answering the same question and that there are two possible answers - one correct and one incorrect. Assuming that the chances that an individual will answer correctly is more than 50%, the theorem proves that the probability that a majority of the group will answer correctly increases towards 100% as the group size increases.

That explains why the wisdom of crowds works well for consumer product testing, or to predict well documented political races. It also explains why it failed in other areas, like predicting whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. With little information available, individuals had a higher likelihood of picking the wrong answer, making the chance that a majority would predict correctly close to 0% as the size of the group increased.

[Tags: wisdom of crowds crowds predicting markets large groups ]

August 21, 2006

BlogBridge Library - a cool way to manage libaries of important content

As part of a potential client project, I finally got a chance to take a real close look at the BlogBridge Library (disclosure - I am an advisor to this open source project).

It is a very cool and powerful application, which enables you to create and manage a central library of feeds, blogs, reading lists, podcasts and more. Different sub-sections of the library can be managed by different people, and with full opml support, it is really easy for you to share the library or parts of the library with other people in your team or company.

The BlogBridge Library can be installed behind your firewall and while it will work with any RSS reader, there are additional features within BlogBridge (my favorite) that will enable you to manage your library straight from within the reader instead of having to go through the web UI.

One obvious application is for Marketing teams and their PR agencies to coordinate rapidly changing lists of social media movers and shakers in their space.

[Tags: blogbridge opml support library rss reader ]

August 19, 2006

Prevent further "participation gap" between have's and have not's

DOPA, or the "Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006", would limit access from public places to all sorts of social networking and social media sites by minors, including libraries and schools. If you have not heard of DOPA - check out this excellent article about this horrible piece of legislation at the MIT Technology Review.

Once you've read it, you will probably want to sign this petition to stop those morons from continuing to screw with this new digital medium which many legislators do not understand and most likely fear.

If you are interested in more reading on this - check out MIT Henry Jenkins post on "What DOPA Means for Education", as well as social network guru danah boyd's writings on the subject.

[Tags: DOPA Deleting Online Predators Act teens myspace ]

August 16, 2006

Advertisers on social networking sites

Nellie Lide over at New Persuasion has the following to say about advertisers on social networking sites (via social customer manifesto):

I think brands will have to go beyond a conversation - though that's a good start - they have to be willing to develop and maintain a relationship/friendship with their customers over the long-term. And I think companies are looking at these sites all wrong. Advertisers, marketers, product-makers are trying to figure out how to exploit and use all the people on these sites - when they should be studying what these folks are doing and try to figure out how they can help these social sites be better for their users. Not more cluttered with their ads. If your product and brand don't really fit in - stay out. Know your customer and respect your customer - that's it.

Amen

At the risk of being repetitive - marketing is not about interrupting or intercepting people, it's about assisting them!

[Tags: marketing advertising brands social networking ]

August 7, 2006

End-user vs. author tagging...

I wonder why we have to choose between services that only allow the author to tag posts and feed - like technorati - or services that mostly allow the reader to tag posts - like del.icio.us.

If those services use tags to add information related to the "aboutness" of the posts or blogs, then they should allow tagging by everyone - much as Flickr. And they should also allow users to suggest "related" tags.

When using a service like Technorati to alert people about stuff you wrote, the current setup works. Once you start using it to search for stuff, the limitations of having author-only tags and (I assume) system-only "related tags" become somewhat obvious.

[Tags: tagging technorati delicious flickr]

August 1, 2006

Mastering the new marketing practices

One of the great sessions at last month's CMO summit, which was organized by Corante and the Center on Global Brand Leadership, was moderated by Johh Hagel. While the session has been summarized in a variety of places, John now summarized his points on his own blog. At the risk of being somewhat repetitive I will summarize/paraphrase the post here as it has a ton of great insight...

So where does John think marketing is going?

For starters, he thinks that the current shift in the economics of business will force major changes in marketing. With attention being the new scarcity and customer acquisition and retention costs being on the rise - business will have to start focusing on economies of scope instead of economies of scale. In customer relationships it will come down to getting the largest share of wallet of any single customer rather than a fix share of wallet across a large number of customers. This whole trend is reinforced by the fact that the cost of interaction and the ability for customers to find information about vendors and products is steadily declining as well.

According to John, this all leads to the need for fundamental changes in the areas of marketing strategy, branding and performance metrics.

In the area of marketing strategy, we need to move from the 3I's (intercept, Inhibit, isolate) to the 3A's (attract, assist, and affiliate). Another way of looking at it is that we have to move from a "one to one" marketing to a "many to one" marketing mindset.

From a brand promise point of view - we need to move from a "buy this product because I am great" mindset to one closer to "buy this product because I know you and you can trust that I will configure it properly for you."

As for the new metrics, try these on for a change: average life time value of the customer (customer service execs - are you listening!), 80/20 segmentation of customers based on profitability, ROA (return on attention), ROI (return on information).

And so what are vendors doing?

As John says, they are...well...acting like vendors!

In response to attention being the new scarcity - they are bombarding us with intrusive ads on animals, in urinals, in the sky, and with other desperate moves to "grab" our attention. John has it right when he says "Rather than just focusing on how to get attention, vendors might also want to consider how they can help their customers receive attention that is important to them and not just from the vendor, but from others that matter to the customers."

And as is typical with any new wave of tools, they are also jumping on the new social media technology bandwagon - deploying blogs, communities, wikis and other network-enabled marketing tools without really asking themselves how this will help the customer, or how "it will increase return of information for customers."

John finishes his article with some recommended actions for CMO's to take: affiliate with partners to create more useful solutions for your best customers, change organizational roles so execs are in charge of the total customer experience, and adopt performance metrics that measure and reward the increase of the lifetime value of the customer.

As usual - a post chock-full of great insights for marketers.

July 27, 2006

Whatever marketing becomes...

marketing brain sm.jpg Doc replied to those who disagreed with him on

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