emergencemarketing.com

• More Women Than Men on Social Networks, Have More Friends Than Men Do - MarketingVOX
  Interesting study on men vs.women on social networks
  (tags: socialnetwork socialnetworking)
• In my tribe « Content Ninja’s Weblog
  coverage of the tribalization of business study
  (tags: tribalization community)
• Nothin’ but SocNET: SNCR’s NewComm Forum
  coverage for the tribalization of business study
  (tags: tribalization community)
• a shel of my former self
  coverage for the tribalization of business study
  (tags: tribalization community)

Looks more painful than a NY train trip during rush hour

(click here if you do not see the attachment in your reader)

In my update on the 2008 Tribalization of Business study on business communities that we are doing with Deloitte and The Society for New Communications Research last week - I pointed out how some companies are totally misaligning their measurements of community effectiveness with their goals.

As you will see from the slides, many companies measure effectiveness by looking at page views and time spent on the site. Yet not one company listed ad revenue as a goal for the community - which is what page views and time spent on the site would be good for. Let’s assume that your goal is to have a support community - one in which people can help one another or get help from some your employees. If you could deliver the support in a way that never required people to come to your site, you would still achieve your goals. In fact, if you build your community so that people do not have to come to it, chances are that you will have more people participating in it. There are only so many destinations that a person will visit on a regular basis, and chances that your business community becomes one of them are fairly slim.

Another interesting wrong-headed metric-related finding from the study is that a majority of respondents found that “getting people to engage” was one of the biggest obstacles to making a community work. Now if you have a small community, chances are that you could get a fairly high engagement rate. The larger your community becomes, however, the more its profile will resemble that of large public communities - 1% of hardcore contributors, 10% of active users and 80-90% of lurkers. Now does that mean that the lurkers do not get value from your community? In the case of the customer support community, lurkers who do not contribute could still find the help they need and feel better about you than if they had not found it and also save you the cost of a call into the call center. So measuring community effectiveness by measuring engagement is just not a representative metric of community success.

Now the real issue with all this is that if you have a community development team who is being measured by those wrong-headed metrics, they will invariably develop bad behaviors in order to maximize these metrics. They could in fact develop community features that will stand in the way of success for your communities, or close down communities that are in fact doing really well.

If you missed it, there is a dynamic conversation on managing communities going on right now…Chris Brogan kicked it off and Nancy White wrote some interesting musings and also kept track of many of the other interesting links.

Starting with the premise that advertising is always designed to increase consumer awareness and to persuade users that the brand is superior, a new research study by a team of researchers from by Stanford University tested the impact of advertising on both awareness and perceived quality. What they found is that “advertising has consistently a significant positive effect on brand awareness but no significant effect on perceived quality.”

An interesting side finding from the study is that share-of-voice does not impact brand awareness - in fact, if you outperform your competitors with advertisement it will have a slightly negative impact on your brand awareness.

The research paper also mentions empirical studies that show that advertising lowers price sensitivity - again confirming that pricing may be controlled more by the supply side rather than the demand side.

All that being said, the study confirms that advertising has little effect on sales.

(via Strategy+Business)

• Buzz Canuck: Online & Brand Community Ringleaders - learn from the 31, er 32 Community-Savvy Bloggers
  Best online brand and community blogs - fun to be part of it
  (tags: community)

• IBM’s Webbie World - Forbes.com
  Cool article on how IBM leverages communities and social media tools
  (tags: enterprise2.0, web 2. web2.0, community , socialnetwork)

My 13 year old son, who is an avid snowboarder has been producing a couple of snowboard competition videos recently. As a very biased dad I off course think that they are wonderful.

But what got me most puzzled is by how he went about promoting it - he hired a friend of his to promote both videos. The friend, who is also a snowboarder, goes into snowboard magazine chat rooms and online store chat rooms to promote the heck out of the videos. When the friend gets a good response in a chat room, or when he hits a milestone in terms of views, he calls my son to report back on what happened. All that for $3/video. Another interesting tidbit about the emerging entrepreneurship at my son’s school is the underground banking system. For years my son has had a kid in class who they call the banker. If you do not have enough money for lunch he will loan you $1 and expect $1.50 back the next day. When my son’s payment was due for his marketing hire, and he realized he had no money, a competitor to the original banker emerged. He only charges 33% interest, but he has a $3 minimum on his loans.

Fun to watch those kids…

This is a pretty neat intro to a new book (via David Armano on twitter)

(RSS subscribers who cannot see the video click here)

This is too funny…

(for RSS subscribers who cannot see the video, click here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5hQKFzcvGU)

(Via ExperienceCurve)

We recently launched a new blog on the future of marketing - and called it marketing 2.0 - a term that surely will draw some criticism, but which very well describes the conversation we want to have.

Where is marketing going? Why are the marketing processes that we have grown accustomed to no longer delivering the predictable results that we were used to? What should we change to succeed?

We have assembled a great group of people to lead this conversation - including David Berkowitz, Paul Dunay, Lois Kelly, Valeria Maltoni, David Rogers, and Constantine von Hoffman. You can expect additional contributors to join the group over time.

We hope you will enjoy and join the conversation.