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Blippy the latest social media entrant
10 MarNew Zealand Herald - Technology
This is still Year One of the internet Age, and social media is an infant. We are in the midst of a great era of experimentation and unpredictability. At their first investor pitch meetings, the founders of Twitter - who seem... -
For SXSWi, Chevy plugs into social media
9 MarCNET News.com
An ambitious load of marketing initiatives from the General Motors division, which is getting ready to launch its Volt electric car, emphasize that brands increasingly see the digital-culture festival as a place to test out new campaigns that aren't yet r -
Social Media Dorks Get an Anthem [VIDEO]
8 MarMashable!
Remember the Pantless Knights of “I’m on a Mac” fame? Well, they’re back today with a new vid titled “The New Dork,” a parody of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’s “Empire State of Mind” that pays tribute to social media adherents and hipsters alike.
With shoutouts to Zuckerberg, Mashable, Valleywag, Gizmodo, LinkedIn, Twitter and tech nerds camped out in their mothers’ basements, this video is all about using your social media cache to attain new levels of irony-spun hipness.According to these tech-savvy dudes, Internet denizens of today are raking in the cash and models whilst rocking skinny jeans and “steady Jerkin’” (it’s a dance craze, guys — get your mind outta the gutter). As the refrain goes: “Social networks what dream are made of.” Apparently, the “New Dork” is the next hot thing.
That’s cool and everything, but I’m more stoked that the video features a guy wearing jorts.
Check it out below. What do you think of the concept of the “New Dork”? Let us know in the comments.
Tags: humor, pop culture, social media, viral video
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The Trust Veneer Problem in Social Media
6 MarThe Buzz Bin
Yet another trip. Yet another lost bag.
Finding Trust Amid the Crowd
I am increasingly aware of the challenges businesses face in earning real trust, and this week I was left (without a change of clothes) to ponder yet again just what is going wrong in this regard. My airline can’t get me and my luggage to the same place at the same time. My car has a mind of its own about braking and acceleration. My bank sees the issuance of credit cards as an opportunity to get in my pocket for more fees. Can the fall of capitalism be far behind?
I used to feed empowered by Tweeting about such things or writing a letter to the president of the offending company, but I’m just getting weary and resigned to a more old-Soviet-style capitalism (or is that socialism?). You know: learn your bag isn’t where you are; go find ”the line;” trudge up to a counter to be confronted by a disinterested clerk…things we used to poke fun at Eastern Bloc countries about.
So, in a triumph of form over substance via technology, I can now be told that my bag is resting comfortably in a plane’s belly in Chicago (when I am in Phoenix) and that the fix for my accelerator can be made in two months, but I’ll have to make a separate appointment for the fuel line problem that could cause a fire to occur at any time. And wait… the good news is that I can make the appointments online!
Trust is getting lost the deeper we move into the ersatz “connectedness” of the social media world. The importance of the things that can’t be seen from the ticket line when we are conducting our transactions — the intangibles – are even more key to differentiating these days, but peace of mind and confidence and trust and seem to slip farther away for many companies, even as they increase attempts to connect to their audiences.
Edelman’s research for the Trust Barometer seems to disagree with this on the surface, but amidst what the research touted as an increase in trust recently (who could forget 2009?), there was this killer point: 70 percent say that businesses will revert to old, bad habits once the crisis is over. As my grandfather used to say of a neighbor who betrayed trust between outpourings of neighborliness, “I trust that man about as far as I can throw him.”
Here’s the plea (and I’m looking in the mirror on this one). Let’s all of us who are involved in marketing soon get over the shiny object of social media. We have created a way to hear customer feedback, and we have used it to solve problems. We have created communities around products and services. These are only good things if they contribute to genuine, solid change instead of the veneer of change.
The trust veneer has developed some significant dings. People are thinking that we can’t solve the issues we face. They are marching in the streets to protest programs that deliver healthcare to uninsured fellow citizens. They are saying that government should take control of executive salaries. They are worried that their financial advisors are getting rich at their expense. Whether we work for Obama or for Ms. Smith on Main Street, the importance of building and maintaining trust has never been greater.
Matthew May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance – Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing, wrote a good post on the subject recently, offering a roadmap for moving from the rational to the emotional in people with whom we are trying to engage beyond the veneer. He suggests zeroing in on several questions: “Will this waste my money?” (economic); “Will this work reliably well?” (functional); “What will others think of me?” (social); “Will this somehow be painful?” (physical), and ”Will I think poorly of myself?” (emotional).
Putting yourself into the minds of others with these questions (and keeping them in mind for yourself) will go a long way toward improving real trust by true engagement. These are the heartfelt questions not often articulated, but always in mind as people relate to one another. Make it your business to answer them for your customers and others with whom you want trusting relationships.
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American Idol Strips Contestants of Social Media Accounts
4 MarMashable!
This year American Idol made headlines for pushing out individual Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace accounts for each of its 24 finalists. However, the show made a drastic change in strategy last night by consolidating all of them under the AI9Contestants username across sites.Twitter followers of each of the individual contestants were sent the following message, “Thanks so much for following me! All my updates from now on will be on our Official Ai9 Twitter Page, please follow me there @AI9Contestants.” Similar messages were posted to Facebook and MySpace as well.
The contestants individual social media identities were stripped by the show without rhyme or reason, but The Wall Street Journal and USA Today speculate that the move was likely made because of the propensity of social media site follower counts to reveal early favorites, influence voting, and possibly remove the veil of the mystery that clouds American Idol’s typically stealth results.
The logic is sound — a contestant with more Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and MySpace friends is likely to get more votes and thus would have a higher chance of winning the competition. But in making the decision, American Idol has also made it impossible for contestants to develop that now all-important connection with their fan base, which is becoming crucial to the business side of the industry.
We should also note that while Idol’s consolidation efforts may be designed to maintain the mystery of the show’s outcome, there’s no stopping the rest us from turning to social media analytics providers to try and predict the winners and losers based on overall buzz and sentiment breakdown. In fact, we know that Philip Kaplan of Blippy has plans to do just that, indicating that he may try to ruin American Idol with a custom program that will look at who people say they’re voting for in social media channels.
Tags: american idol, social media, tv
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3 Crisis Survival Lessons for the Social Media Age
4 MarMashable!
Dallas Lawrence is Chair of the Social and Digital Media Practice at Levick Strategic Communications, the nation’s top crisis communications firm. He blogs on emerging digital media trends and best practices for social media engagement on Bulletproof Blog. Connect with him on Twitter @dallaslawrence.If there was any doubt before last year as to social media’s ability to exacerbate reputation crises, 2009 settled the debate. In just that one year, Domino’s, United Airlines, and Tiger Woods were but a few of the headlining examples that were variously infected by the viral bug. These global brands made their problems even worse with sloppy responses to online news reports, blog posts, Facebook updates, YouTube videos, and Twitter entries.
With big names such as Toyota and Johnson & Johnson suffering similar ills in just the first two months of 2010, it seems that the second decade of the 21st Century will be as unrelenting as the first on brands that fail to effectively prepare for and respond to crises in the online marketplace.
The good news is that by understanding how online crises can be transformed into trust-building opportunities, companies and high-profile individuals can avoid repeating the grave mistakes of 2009. There continue to be teachable moments in abundance. It’s time to seize on their lessons.
Size Doesn’t Matter
In the age of digital crises, big does not mean savvy. Indeed, the bigger the brand, the harder it often falls. Having worked with dozens of Fortune 1000 companies under digital duress, several salient problems seem glaringly apparent to me. Far too often, for example, corporate marketers have no contact with those entrusted with crisis response. In many cases, the company’s social media wunderkinds are completely walled off –- intentionally –- from those empowered to ensure the survival of the brand itself.
Toyota has particularly suffered the consequences of such balkanization. Toyota boasts more than 81,000 fans on Facebook, yet the company simply failed to utilize that immense resource during the first days of its recalls. To put Toyota’s silence in perspective, Google registered more than 22,000 recall-related blog posts in the first week after the announcement. Rather than engage their tens of thousands of self-identified brand ambassadors who were waiting for information, it seems Toyota simply forgot they existed.
This failure to engage a captive and influential audience represents an utter misunderstanding of the power that online communities wield in crisis. Individuals who align themselves with brands online do so for a reason. If kept informed, these individuals are a willing and enthusiastic first line of defense both online and off. Yet with each passing day of the Toyota recalls, these audiences quickly grew more concerned for themselves and their families than the brand they trusted and treasured. The messages they needed weren’t there for them in the places they look to first.
The internal walls that separate crisis response efforts must come down or more brands will suffer the wrath of real-time communications and the public’s demand for instant access to vital information when it matters most.
What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There
Johnson & Johnson’s response to the Tylenol tampering incident of 1982 is the stuff of legend. After numerous deaths were attributed to cyanide contamination of its marquee pain reliever –- which then represented a large portion of the analgesic market –- J&J initiated a costly nationwide recall, ultimately revolutionizing the industry with tamper-proof packaging that’s now an industry standard.Yet three decades later, when J&J found itself embroiled in new recalls, the rules of the game had changed dramatically. Audiences today want information and solutions in real time. At the decisive moment, J&J did not respond fast enough to reaffirm its brand as a champion of consumer safety.
Of course it isn’t always possible to offer a solution in the first hours of a crisis, but it is essential to at least assuage consumer fears by acknowledging the problem and affirming that all that can be done is being done. Silence only raises more vexatious questions from consumers, the media, regulators, and increasingly, online communities. The lesson here is all the more underscored by contrast to the past: If you are still reading from the pre-social media revolution crisis playbook, you will fail in the digital age, period.
You Can Not Advertise Out of Crisis
There’s no debating the historical success of big brand advertising and marketing programs. As a result of such programs, Toyota’s Camry has long been America’s best-selling car. As recently as January 6, 2010, Bloomberg reported that the company’s market share was greater than Ford’s. But by the end of January, reports showed that the trend had reversed — Ford was outselling Toyota and the Japanese auto maker’s share of the market had fallen to its lowest point since 2006.Oddly, Tiger Woods’ ordeal was similarly patterned. His agents and public relations specialists had built a seemingly bulletproof brand, yet, at the first blush of controversy, those same advisors utterly faltered by leaving key questions unanswered and allowing the online outrage to transform uncertain rumor into outright truth. As we saw on February 19th, months into the controversy, Team Tiger still failed to learn even the most basic lessons of his crisis ordeal. In today’s world, every brand has a plug. When it’s pulled, the balloon can instantaneously deflate.
Traditional advertising and brand/reputation management cannot work in such a galaxy where crisis moves at the speed of light. Today’s consumers do not make decisions based solely (or in many cases even largely) on what they read in print or see on TV. Rather, they are increasingly turning to the experiences of their friends on Facebook and the bloggers they follow. In its 2009 State of the Blogosphere report, Technorati found that 70% of these bloggers actively discuss products and companies.
Meanwhile, no platform has shown more rapid ability to drive the lifecycle of a story than Twitter. Penn State’s College of Information Science and Technology found that 20% of the 27 million tweets posted each day mention brands in one way or another. Yet only 20% of Global Fortune 100 companies have a comprehensive social media plan that includes a presence on each of the major social media hubs, and just over a third still don’t even have Twitter accounts.
Conclusion
In a crisis, consumers need honest answers and they need them fast –- and no messaging vehicle is better suited to meet this demand than those fueling the crisis in the first place. Transparent engagements in the online communities, where your customers already live, provide a credible and direct channel for the answers they need.
As we round the corner of the first quarter of 2010, successful companies will need to embrace the reality that effective crisis management has undergone a fundamental evolution in the Digital Age. Companies that still focus primarily on traditional journalists and broadcasters or messages through paid marketing campaigns do so at their own peril. At bet-the-company moments, open and rapid engagement via blog posts, tweets, viral videos, Facebook updates, and other online venues make the difference between victory and defeat in the Court of Public Opinion.
More business resources from Mashable:
- 5 Ways to Avoid Sabotaging Your Personal Brand Online
- 4 Elements of a Successful Business Web Presence
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- Google Buzz: 5 Opportunities for Small Businesses
- HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROIImage courtesy of iStockphoto, rjzinger
Tags: brand, brand management, business, facebook, pr, small business, social media, tiger woods, Toyota, twitter
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Social Media Marketing – The New Trend
4 MarArticlesBase
The SEO companies provide social media solutions that allow companies to use technology in innovative ways to ignite and cultivate conversations. -
Narus Develops Social Media Sleuth
4 MarSlashdot
maximus1 writes "Narus is developing a new technology code-named Hone that can be used to identify anonymous users of social networks and Internet services. Hone can do some pretty 'scary' things, says Antonio Nucci, chief technology officer with Narus. Hone uses artificial intelligence to analyze e-mails and can link mails to different accounts, doing what Nucci calls topical analysis. 'It's going to go through a set of documents and automatically it's going to organize them in topics — I'm not talking about keywords as is done today, I'm talking about topics,' he said. That can't be done with today's technology, he said. 'If you search for fertilizers on Google ... it's going to come back with 6.5 million pages. Enjoy,' he said. 'If you want to search for non-farmers who are discussing fertilizer ... it's not even searchable.' Nucci will discuss Hone at the RSA Conference in San Francisco Friday."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Social Media 101
3 Marchrisbrogan.com
Should your company be blogging? What’s Twitter going to do for you? Why is Facebook all the rage? I’m happy to report that my new book, Social Media 101 (amazon aff link) is available for purchase.
Here are a few places where you can buy it, should you want it:
Social Media 101 – Amazon KINDLE edition
Social Media 101 – Barnes & Noble
Social Media 101 – Books-a-Million
(I’ll add more as they come about)
**Audiobook coming soon, but not for a bit. Kindle coming soon, but not for a bit.
Who Should Want This Book?
First off, the book is a collection of information that you might have read about here on [chrisbrogan.com]. Most of it comes from blog posts, tidied up to be useful to you. But that’s the point.
This book is for people who are less likely to read my blog. It’s also a way to have my information distilled in a static form so you can refer to bits as you need them. That’s one benefit to it.
Another benefit? You can share this with folks who might not normally read the blog who might need to get what we’re doing here in social media.
Make sense?
It’s Not the NEW Stuff
It’s the basics. It’s the little tricks and ideas. It’s suggestions of what to do next. Is it new and mind-blowing? No, not really. It’s important. Yes, it’s important.
Special Thanks
This book wouldn’t exist without my mom and dad. Steve Brogan and Diane Brogan did tons and tons of work on this book. My wife, Katrina, helped out, as well. Imagine that: a book brought to life by family. Hands-on by people who are NOT social media experts, but who get it. They all use these tools in their own ways, very differently from me. And yet, they use them.
Will you?
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The Problem With Social Media
3 MarWebWorkerDaily
Am I the only one struggling with a consistent and coherent definition for the term “social media?” What is social media, who came up with the term, and who defines it now?In my quest to better understand why and how we use the term “social media,” I began at Wikipedia:
Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.
I can’t say the above definition is wrong, but it seems too narrow to me. The first questions that come to my head when I read that social media is just about publishing and broadcasting is “But what about Web 2.0 technologies? Where do they fit in? Aren’t they a part of social media?”
The Wikipedia definition of social media continues with:
Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.”
The definition continues to focus on content production, and I say that the narrowness of that definition is wrong. I see social media as being more than just publishing and broadcasting, and I think that the word “media” in social media may be misunderstood or misused.
What is Media?
In our haste to label things — in this case the tools we are using for communication and interaction — someone forgot that “media” has multiple meanings, so some of us took the term “social media” to mean one thing, while the rest of us understood it to mean something completely different.
For consistency’s sake, I went back to Wikipedia to check how it defined “media.” Of the multiple definitions, here are the ones that I thought applied to the word “media” in the term “social media”:
In communications: In communication, media (singular medium) are the storage and transmission channels or tools used to store and deliver information or data. It is often referred to as synonymous with mass media or news media, but may refer to a single medium used to communicate any data for any purpose.
A medium (plural media) is a carrier of something. Common things carried by media include information, art, or physical objects. A medium may provide transmission or storage of information or both. The industries which produce news and entertainment content for the mass media are often called “the media” (in much the same way the newspaper industry is called “the press”).
In this light, the limitation of the definition of “social media” to publishing and broadcasting falls apart.
A few years ago, I began using the following diagram to encapsulate the many media — or tools, platforms, channels — that made up social media:
The diagram above reflects the more expansive view of social media; using “media” to mean “the storage and transmission channels or tools used to store and deliver information or data.“
So is this wrong? If you are going by the narrow publishing and broadcast definition, then it might be incorrect to say that Cloud Working (by that I mean producing work using cloud-based SaaS tools), for example, is social media. But then again, to work in the cloud, one must publish something on the web that is consumed — or collaborated on — by others, often producing new forms of the original content, right?
And what about widgets and RSS feeds? These are tools for distributing content produced elsewhere, but they aren’t tools for actually producing new content. One could argue that these tools aren’t social. However, they are the conduits of content from social sources such as social networks and blogs. So are they social media tools or not?
How about a content rating site or bookmarking site? While Digg and Delicious aren’t exactly content production sites, they allow users to rate, comment on and aggregate content in a more “social” interactive environment so, in a sense, they are social media tools because there is “social” and “publishing” involved.
The Evolution of the Term “Social Media”
How did the term “social media” evolve, and how can there be different understandings of this globally-used term? I think part of the problem is that some people believe that social media “replaced” Web 2.0 as a term while others believe that social media is a “subset” of Web 2.0.
For clarification, Wikipedia’s definition of Web 2.0 is:
…web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web.
If one believes that social media is a subset of Web 2.0, like this:
Then social media would be the social tools and channels that fall under the broader Web 2.0 landscape of tools. That would mean that we should probably still be using the term Web 2.0 (annoying as it is) to refer to the “not exactly social” tools we’re using on the web.
Alternatively, one could see social media as an evolution of Web 2.0 tools, like this:
But if social media is an evolution of Web 2.0, then what do we call the “less than social” tools we’re using?
So, which is it?
- Social media is a subset of Web 2.0, so anything “not very social” are still Web 2.0 tools.
- Social media is an evolution of Web 2.0, so its definition includes peripherally social tools or tools ancillary to social tools.
I continue to gravitate away from the definition that social media tools must involve publishing or broadcasting because it is too narrow.
Who Coined the Term “Social Media?”
In 2007, danah m. boyd of the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and Nicole B. Ellison of the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University, published the paper “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” In it, the first mention of “social media” was in this sentence:
Furthermore, as the social media and user-generated content phenomena grew, websites focused on media sharing began implementing SNS features and becoming SNSs themselves. Examples include Flickr (photo sharing), Last.FM (music listening habits), and YouTube (video sharing).
By their definition in this paper, social media was focused initially and primarily on social networks.
In a February 2009 speech, boyd goes on to say this about social media :
Social media is the latest buzzword in a long line of buzzwords. It is often used to describe the collection of software that enables individuals and communities to gather, communicate, share, and in some cases collaborate or play. In tech circles, social media has replaced the earlier fave “social software.” Academics still tend to prefer terms like “computer-mediated communication” or “computer-supported cooperative work” to describe the practices that emerge from these tools and the old skool academics might even categorize these tools as “groupwork” tools. Social media is driven by another buzzword: “user-generated content” or content that is contributed by participants rather than editors.
What is really telling is when boyd explains how we got from “Web 2.0″ to “social media:”
But for the last few years, everyone’s been a-buzz with the idea of “social media.” Right now, those who want VC backing need to bake the “social” into any Web2.0 app they create. There are many new genres of social media that have gained traction here: blogs, wikis, media-sharing sites, social network sites, social bookmarking, virtual worlds, microblogging sites, etc. These tools are part of a broader notion of “Web2.0.” Yet-another-buzzword, Web2.0 means different things to different people.
So perhaps we can blame — or credit — those who wanted VC backing on the convoluted use of “social” in everything that was formerly known as Web 2.0. At least we have an explanation for the (over)use of “social” in social media.
What do you think? How do you define “social media” and what tools do we use that are not social media tools?
Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Social Media in the Enterprise
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Sign up for your free account nowThis week's news on social media.
-
Blippy the latest social media entrant
10 MarNew Zealand Herald - Technology
-
For SXSWi, Chevy plugs into social media
9 MarCNET News.com
-
Social Media Dorks Get an Anthem [VIDEO]
8 MarMashable!
-
The Trust Veneer Problem in Social Media
6 MarThe Buzz Bin
-
American Idol Strips Contestants of Social Media Accounts
4 MarMashable!
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3 Crisis Survival Lessons for the Social Media Age
4 MarMashable!
-
Social Media Marketing – The New Trend
4 MarArticlesBase
-
Narus Develops Social Media Sleuth
4 MarSlashdot
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Social Media 101
3 Marchrisbrogan.com
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The Problem With Social Media
3 MarWebWorkerDaily
