Listen to social media

July 29, 2008 — ecairn

Someone forwarded me this very good presentation on social media. If, like us, you’re a big believer that business will embrace it sooner or later, it resonates pretty loud. You’ll find plenty of datapoints showing that social media is already big and here to stay.

The truth is that today, most business are unsure yet about what it means to them and what kind of relationships they need to build with the new environment. It’s taking them by surprise and to make it worst, there’s a big cultural gap between what’s happening out there vs what they’re used to inside….control/approval/slow decision making and so on…Bottom line, it’s kind of scary to them.

I particularly like slide 41. Why? Because when facing the unknown, and that’s really what social media looks like to most business today, the best next step is to take action, to make a move toward it. Soon after, it becomes more familiar and we grow more comfortable with it. So I agree: Just F**king get on! Start ‘listening’.

We do it and it really pays off in multiple ways.

Posted in business, buzz. Tags: . No Comments »

Blog Advertising: Some numbers!

July 16, 2008 — ecairn

In a previous post, we looked at how frequently bloggers have their social network profile (badge) on their blog. Given that we’re also capable of detecting automatically if a blogger is part of one or more advertising network, we did a similar analysis for ad networks. By the way, we don’t detect all networks yet, just the major ones (For the record, we’ve seen 100s of them).

As we saw with social network profiles, the numbers are quite different across topics. Here’s the skinny on the topics’ percentages using the same topics as during our previous analysis:

  • At the top is Personal Finance blogs - ~60% - We found quite interesting that this was the ‘worst’ topic in our social network profile analysis but it’s the top one for advertising network. Are personal finance bloggers more eager to monetize their property than others?
  • 2nd is Blogging with aroun 50%.
  • 3rd ex-aequo are Wireless and Gaming with about 40%.
  • 5th is Cosmetology with 29%.
  • Then we got Enterprise Security (~20%), Social Media Marketing (~15%), Enterprise 2.0 (~13%).

Conclusion: It’s clear that advertising is widely present on blogs. What’s truly interesting is that the order above is almost the reverse order that we got when we did the social network profile analysis.

One interpretation is that bloggers that are targeted toward ‘consumers’ have a tendency to try and monetize more than those targeted to ‘business’ but on the other hand put a lower priority on being social network friendly: For example, Personal Finance and Blogging blogs are mostly targeting consumers!

If you’ve read that far, you may ask yourself: So what? Why is that important? Why do I care?

Well, one critical aspect of advertising is relevance. If you advertise on the right blogs, you automatically get relevance assuming you pick those who are related to what you want to advertise. And if you can find a lot of them for your campaign (fyi, we ran a campaign on 900 blogs once), you get the same traffic as you would for a top website. Sweet!

Posted in advertising. Tags: , . No Comments »

Social objects, Opensourced enterprise

July 4, 2008 — ecairn

I had the opportunity to attend the SVASE event: Digital Media: Building a Business with Social Networks and to listen to the great panel from Google, hi5, Jaxstr and Jaiku.

  • One striking comment from Jyri Engestrom: “social business starts with defining a social object”. Photo for Flickr, Video for Youtube, Pet for Dogster, Date, Job  aso… I find this really interesting and this clearly helps organising ideas.
  • Another one from Jyri on G Kawasaki:  to be successful, you need to have an “unfair competitive advantage”. Funny that Jyri mentioned G Kawasaki as THE advantage of Alltop.

Using Jyri’s framework, I reflected that the enterprise world is full of objects ready to become social.  Let’s take a few:

  • new product or service:  this is all the concept of co-design, co-engineering.  Designers love feedback and bloggers and consumers love participation.
  • event, campaign, ads, launch: testing concepts, bouncing ideas, another area with huge potential. Why not transforming an ad into a ” social object”, let’s call it a value ad :-) !
  • new hire: again, wouldn’t this be funny to move to community based hiring process?

Opensource has paved the road for socially developed artefacts that make it to the commercial space. Maybe it’s time for companies to opensource their “product launch”, “advertising campaigns” (already done on the creative side with youtube contest ), “business process”, “innovation process” and maybe (I’d love an analyst prospective into this),  Opensourcing will replace Outsourcing as the next enterprise model.

I asked the presenters about the opportunity for social solutions for businesses that organise the relationship between an enterprise and its target communities. The responses I got varied from very challenging to impossible! except for P Chanezon from Google - Opensocial who was more positive about such opportunites.

What still remains unclear is how to blend “enterprise socialisation” and “intellectual property”, how to socialise processes connexe to commercial transactions, what remains of an enterprise if most of its IP generation processes are opensourced ?

In other word, can enterprise rely less on what they know and own and more on their ability to learn and network?

Well, the net is that we (eCairn) are going after a very challenging objective: social influence solution for the enterprise !  Any (social) help is warmly welcome !


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