Today, we’re pleased to announce our June release with the following new and improved features:

• Manage (save, export, import) blogs’ personal information such as name, email, phone, country and so on.
• Redesigned blog card with additional information for improved profiling.
• Support for multiple projects access in one browser window.

Watch this quick video if you want to know more:

Social media or Social platform?

This question has been bugging me the last few weeks.
Whenever I talk about what can be done with social media from an enterprise standpoint, it pops up in my mind.
I see so many scenarios, almost endless possibilities and the term media doesn’t fit anymore.

Bottom line I prefer Social Platform.

The debate would deserve a long analysis but, instead, I’ll pick one example amongst many: LinkedIn.

In a previous post, I wrote that IBM is the company with the highest number of employees in LinkedIn (>180k).

That made me think a bit about the kind of asset LinkedIn has created for IBM, IBMers and businesses which gravitate around the IBM’s ecosystem.

1) Case One: LinkedIn is the IBM employee database

Not so long ago, I used to work in big corporations and it was always a struggle to have a well organized, descriptive database of employees skills, experiences and interests.
Any tentative to create such an asset were always poorly deployed. There was not enough incentive for employees to enter and maintain their information.
Came LinkedIn which is where everyone (almost) personal brand leaves now and is available to the open world. It contains up to date information about most of IBMers skills, experiences, interests. It’s the database corporations tried so hard to create.

Why did LinkedIn succeed where other efforts have failed?

Because:

• it’s social,
• it’s not bounded by the walls of one corporation
• there’s an unquestionable ’soft’ ROI for each of us so we don’t think twice about keeping our data up to date.

2) Case Two: The social graph of the IBMers in LinkedIn probably maps close to the entire IT community.

Assuming that each IBMers on LinkedIn has or will soon have 200 connections.
That would make the overall connections to 36 millions.
Eliminate the connections between IBMers, the connections to the same person, may be you get to 5-10 millions unique connections (i.e: unique people outside of IBM that are connected to an IBMer through LinkedIn).
And may be if you look at those 5-10 millions connections, you’ll find out that 50% are in IT, 30% in the US and so on. I’m sure the result would be such that a very significant portion of the IT people in America are linked at least to one IBMer.

Slice that a bit and it means that may be 50 IBMers are linked to 50 different IT people working for the same IBM customer across the globe. And those 50 people are probably on social networks, may be blogging, twitting,…..which means that IBM could have a stream of information coming from their customers and those 50 pair of ears always connected to their 50 friends.

3) Case Three: Suppliers can quickly find and profile the right IBMers.

A simple search on LinkedIn will bring back the relevant person(s) in IBM for a particular level, function, geography or a combination of those. Identification is easy.  Strategy for access can then be chosen by looking on other social networks for ways to enter in contact, which isn’t always possible but often is.

4) Case Four: Recreate from the outside the IBM’s org chart …..no comment. Easy if APIs were there (public ones).

I’m sure more cases can be built.

Bottom line, for individuals the expression Social Media is ok. But for business, I think of it more as Social Platform an, to quote a conversation I had recently with Francois, all business processes need to be made social to survive

On Wednesday this week, I had the pleasure to attend part of IBM’s Social Media Summit. It was well put together by Pauline Ores (@pauline0) and Delphine Remy-Boutang (@delphRB).
The IBMers and others were and are still tweeting about it there.
Slides will be posted at some point and I guess you can fetch them though twitter by monitoring #smm09.

To me, this event is the proof, if one was needed anymore, that big corporations are getting serious about social media.  As a matter of fact, B2B magazine ran a survey recently pointing toward an increase of social media budgets (+35%)  for the 2nd half of 2009. Not bad.

Here’re a couple of notes I took when I was not chatting with the wonderful people that were watching the event with me:

• Peter Kim – High level pitch on SM and what it changes for business
  • Every employee is a marketer (reminds me of a preso from Sun Micro which has 4000 bloggers – now don’t tell them they’re marketers )
  • Liked the concept of Social business design which is possible thanks to:
    • Ecosystem
    • Hivemind
    • Signals (trigger based on business rules applied to conv)
    • Filter (compartementalize & parse conversations to pinpoint the relevant ones)

• Jeremy Woolf (Text 100 – VP AP & Global SM practice)
  • AP: Each country different (Japan is hot on mo-blogging, HK on forums, China has its own youtube faster then youtube)
    • Facebook/myspace outpaced plentyful by local network: mixi in jpn, qq inchina, cyworld
  • AP is 41% of intenet user now
  • China
    • 162 millions bloggers
    • 1/2 millions BBS -> SM in china means forums and bbs has to be considered
    • mentioned the 57 army .  300k gov people who engage in propaganda and monitor when something is said on social media about policy, Tien an men etc…everything that’s could undermine the government.
  • About bloggers:
    • 90% want to hear from mktg
    • mean of contact 1) email 2) face to face 3) comments
    • type of content interesting 1) research, insight, comment, opinion….last) corporate PR
    • recommends the use of the social media press release
    • 36% of bloggers in AP spend more than 9hrs /wk blogging (vs 95% in the US)
• Virginia Miracle (Ogilvy pr)
  • Ogilvy’s SM model around something like:
    • Listening
      • Conversational map
      • Post reading
      • Crisis monitoring
    • Planning
      • Influencer maps
      • Engagement plan
      • Visibility plan
    • Engage
  • Examples of how SM can help spread a story/cause and supporting brands can benefit from it: Lenovo for the 2008 Pekin olympics and Livestrong for the Giro 2009 (biking race which is very fun to watch..say the biker fanatic in me)
• Mark McMaster @ Google
  • Linkedin growing faster than facebook
  • C-suite decision making: 92% use internet (more than TV, news paper, own people),
  • Majority of under -40 execs use Web 2.0 according to Forbes. Drops off some in the 40-50 range and drops off a cliff above 50 yo; 50% CEO -40yrs old blog weekly (Very much the case in IT)
  • SMB blog usage growing faster (reading)
  • Google sees more search around blog i.e: “playstation blog”
• Dale Durret @ Linkedin
  • Look at past implementation experience when you buy enterprise sw. LinkedIn used LinkedIn to compare the expertise of 3 implementation teams proposed by CRM’s vendor wanting their business.
  • Groups: 98 cloud computing groups! 168 SOA groups! wow seems like the ning networks (by the way most social networks powered by Ning are dead.
  • The bar, the backyard BBQ and the office stands for MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. ahh!
  • IBM has the largest number of employee on LinkedIn (+180k out of  ~350k).
    – I’d be curious to know which company wins in term of penetration #employees on Linkedin/total # employees)

I foresee more events of the same kind in big companies in the coming future to help spread the culture, value and capabilities that can transform organizations willing to embrace social media for business.

We’ll be at the next SFSV  Social Media Club on June 25th for an expert panel discussing where and how influence happens today. Look at the list of participants! Should be a fun discussion and a packed room.

It’s with great pleasure that eCairn will sponsor the event. It makes perfect sense because influence is one of the core building block of our platform and where we think we have our uniqueness.
Eastwick communications is this month’s host. They’re wonderful people whom we’ve been working with lately.

There is not much involved in joining.  There are no fees if you’re already a social media club member, $10 if you’re not. It’s well worth the money if you’re into social media and looking for insights from others (and of course share yours).  Just show up on the third Thursday of each month. We all buy our own lunch and have a great discussion.

Semantic web has different meanings for different people – isn’t it funny in itself- and these mainly fall in two categories:

- The data web , enabling to connect data from various applications and databases
- The Meaning web, an uber-categorisation of content so that machines and humans can search better,  connect the dots,  and overall understand better.

There is no question that the data web is on its way and will provide huge benefits.

When it comes to meaning, well, that’s a different story which brings me back to the title of this post: lolcat

Lolcat is an amazing phenomena. It’s being invented by the cat owners community (kudos for being the most creative community on the web). Members of the community started to exchange pictures of their cat along with funny catch phrases in broken English and in the process of doing this, the community just invented a new language, referred to as lolspeak. The flag web site is icanhascheesburger. Bear with me, this is something:  1M unique visitors a month,  top 2500 in Alexa, i.e more popular than ford.com and in the same ball park as intuit.com.

Not all communities are that creative and this is very instructive.

In the old days, web 1.0, people wrote for the general public. They wanted to be understood by as many people as possible and appeal to a broad audience. Time has changed; the web is now fragmented in a myriad of communities who have different agendas.

I don’t know about you but I can barely read my kids msn messages. It’s not that they are lazy (at least I hope), they just want to build their own virtual gated community. People initially used different infrastructures for this (myspace for musicians, facebook for college students) but as infrastructures grow,  open, interconnect  (social data in the cloud, isn’t that scary ?) what’s left is language.  Kids can’t hide on Facebook anymore. .

This is as old as mankind and reminds me of a story I read on the origin of Hiragana and Katakana explaining that in the old Japan, women and men were writing with different characters. How sophisticated !

So the rise of communities is driving people to write no longer (just) to be understood, but to be differentiated and build some form of new cultures.

Bottom line is that the English dictionary is obsolete and this is a major challenge for the semantic web ( meaning flavor).

As a conclusion, one last message to brands marketers in the pet industry:

if u herrz me, u shud buy keywurdz frum adwurdz. teh cats shur wuld lov it.

]]> http://blog.ecairn.com/2009/06/18/semantic-web-lolcat-and-japan/feed/ 2 domlah Yet_another_lolcat http://blog.ecairn.com/2009/06/12/top-150-seo-sem-blogs/ http://blog.ecairn.com/2009/06/12/top-150-seo-sem-blogs/#comments Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:34:41 +0000 ecairn http://blog.ecairn.com/?p=1282 ]]>

Here is an updated list of the Top150 blogs for SEO.

Lists are always  subjective,  even when created automatically.  In our case the use of machine learning carry this  subjectivity.

Just that this subjectivity is systematic. We could use a similar wording to define strategy: subjectivity made systematic hence actionable … and definitions are always subjective too.

Anyway, one interesting thing about this list is that, in contrast with the Top 150 for social marketing, the top blogs are not written by individuals or when they are, these individuals are not strongly “branded” personally.

Here is a list with previous ranking on the right, enjoy !

Once upon a time, there was One world wide web where corporations and brands were talking to public, using a polished corporate language, reviewed by professional writers… and then came communities, each of them developing its own style, code and language.

Doesn’t it sound like the Tower of Babel ?

I actually find some insights from the analogy and recommend that brands approach communities as if these communities were speaking a foreign language.

It may be extreme, but taking this very conservative spin brings up 3 key learnings:

1. you have to figure out who are these people speaking this “new language” and identify the ones that have taught the language to others.  In other words, unless you can find the communities and influencers it’s like you would be mixing Japanese and French trying to learn both concurrently… or mixing a financial analyst and a 12 years old conversations on the bailout.
2. you have to spend significant time learning. There is no magic trick, no machine that will do it for you (I will come down to this in a future post; community languages are so dynamic that their context and semantic cannot be captured in a static dictionary). That’s why the industry-accepted figures on the minimal effort for any decent program in Social Media is one hour a day.
3. you have to capitalize as you learn. Understanding your target communities, trust, relations within these communities is an asset, not a program.

Often, we meet agencies and clients that ask us: “there has to be another way”, “we just can’t spend that time in participating in communities, reading blogs, twitter, youtube,  facebook and whatelse…”.

Sometimes they turn to “one click magic box” but this ends up providing poor substitute for learning.  The more graphs they produce, the less knowledge.

Sometimes they challenge : “where is the return, the ROI” and although ROI can be set for some programs, most of it will stay as fuzzy as the ROI of an MBA, or of a friendship or a rollodex (the MBA example in the link is an interesting one; it does not value better decision making because of the MBA training and just the salary increase).

But the reality is: there is no shortcut.

If you want to know you have to learn and if you want to learn you have to spend the time studying. Doesn’t that sound familiar? I had the same dream when I started German. Now,  you can try to be productive at learning but this is another story.

One of my favorite sentence in social media comes from Anthony van der Hoek,  Director of Strategy and Business Solutions, The Coca-Cola Company:  “It takes years, not weeks to embed consumer conversations in an organization. Companies need to address this now or it will be a huge challenge to catch up.”.

Sounds like a reality check.

Influence is a growing topic nowadays and influencer marketing one key strategy for reaching business objectives in this tough economy (see Scott Pearson’s post).

So, we’ve witnessed “lists of influential people” (including our list of Top 150 Social Media Marketers) popping up all over the place as if the world could be drawn with a bunch of influential graphs.

Not that easy… and here is a couple of things marketers should think about when approaching influence.

Let’s pick a practical example. You’re launching a new designer shoe and you’re planning to do a blogger outreach campaign to spread the word about the cool features this new “social shoe” has.

Obviously  you would start by identifying the top blogs in your target.
First problem you’ll experience is that most of so called “blog search” are actually post search engines. Techcrunch, for instance, may have covered the Zappos web site recently; it is certainly a very influential blog in Technology and Business but its influence is very low when it comes to fashion or shoes.

# 1: Unless you can address relevance, influence is pointless.

Let’s say then that you’ve been able to identify all the relevant people in fashion, i.e your target community. What we have measured is that some influencers tend to be more influential on the long tail (should be that called popularity ?) , other looked more influential on their peers.

# 2: Influence means influence over a group of people, not only on a topic

Some also seem to reach out more people in the community with “light” binding, whereas others will be the center of small cohesive sub nets.

# 3: Influence is a multi-dimensional variable with at a minimum “reach” and “depth” attributes

At this point you may have a pretty good view of what your target is and for instance, which blogger you can send samples to get reviews.

You still have to maximize your chances of the free pair of shoes not to be thrown in the trash! The thing is you may be completely unknown in that market and sending just another sample to people on the top of the list may be… useless.

So you decide to start influencing the magic middle and to build your way up to key influencers over time. That way, you have a pretty good chance to get coverage within 3 months. More on this from Dave Fleet.

# 4: Influence is a strategy and a process, what works for Zappos may not work for yetanothernewbrandintown.

OK. You’re still with me and are not giving up that easily. Let’s end with a positive note. Chances are high you’re already a member of that same community you want to influence (if not: start blogging now). Why don’t you leverage your existing trust and relationship and start reaching out your immediate network?

# 5: Influence is a process you’re a part of. That’s what we call actionable influence ™.

Have fun !

I had the pleasure to attend to the SVAMA Event yesterday in Palo Alto and listen to Charlene Li presentation and here are a few notes:

Before jumping in  … some data point about Charlene:

Charlene Li:

• one of the top blogger in social media (rank # 114 today in our top 1000 list)
• her share of voice in the Social Media Marketing community  is:  0.4 % ( which is quite good)
• the trends for her brand is here
• her best “days”  in the period came from  “2009 Social Media predictions” (Dec 15th 3%) , followed by “Future of Social Networks” (March 20th 1.36%)
• the turnaround of her blog is 7K , page rank is 5
• her frequency of posting is … variable ( two posts  in April)
• the people that refer the most to  Charlene’s name and brand are:

1. J Owyang ( the Forester network)
2. B Kanter ( the Women network ?)
3. K Hawe
4. G Livingston ( the “Strategy first” network ? )

My notes from the conference – SVAMA – ( Some of the slides:Convince The Curmudgeon ).

Charlene started with a very funny video: Advertiser versus consumer: The Break-Up

Key points

• Need to start with the corporate goals, aligned with the marketing strategy
• On the ROI question: Come back to marketing goals and dive into how social media marketing can contribute to these goals.
• Focus on Net Promoter Score and Customer Lifetime Value.
• Learn, then Dialog, Help and Innovate.
• Pyramid of where to find help ( from agencies to PR  to social media boutiques).
• Company can make some small changes like making it easy for  consumer to bookmark and promote their content (delicious, twitter, digg). This can have significant impact.
• Recently met a company that just wanted to dialog with 5 bloggers! Programs have to be more ambitious.
• Company should try, understand and accept mistakes and retry until they get it. Great example is Walmart that just got a success with its checkout blog initiative.
• Provided typical profiles from enthusiast to curmudgeon ( I’ve improved my English last night   ) and tactics to bring them on board.
• Sells 700 copies  of Groundswell a week.
• From the panel, noteworthy that the 3 panelists (Joel Nathanson from Wells Fargo ,  Larry Nelson from HP and  Scott Wilder from Intuit) mentioned advertising on social media is something they are walking away from and gave lots of great insights on how Social Media makes its way into  Corporations.

Wow. I got a glimpse of social media wisdom on the least expecting support!

As seen and read on a Safeway grocery bag:

“Connect together.
Families sharing time together during meals and other activities gives everyone the opportunity to talk and listen to one another.
It cultivates trust, honesty and understanding. It encourages learning, laughing and facing challenges together. It allows families to become great support systems and sources for self esteem.”

Let’s replace the following:

• ‘Families’ by ‘brands and customers’
• ‘Meals and other activities’ by ‘the course of doing business’

What I really like is the sequence: Time -> Listen/Talk -> Trust, honesty, understanding

Sounds familiar? Isn’t this applicable to social media or in general to ‘relationship marketing’?

Thanks Safeway.

Adding the link to the safeway blog which Gunther pointed out to me.

“Conversations: Ingredients for business”