10 people to learn about social media from

I got asked yesterday for people who it would be good to follow if you wanted to learn about social media.

This is a list that could be 1000s long for me. Everyone I follow, am a friend of, read, link to, talk to... everyone teaches me about social media.

But I was asked for a list of 10. Not wishing to disappoint, here they are, completely as they fall from my fingers and onto the keyboard). I'd love to see yours shared as a list in the comments below. More people we can learn from.

Seems appropriate for a #FollowFriday on twitter... (Picture shows Euan and Stowe in London last week...)

1. Clay Shirky (@Cshirky on twitter) - Doesn't blog and tweet often, but when he does...
2. David Armano (@armano) - Brilliant for those of us who need diagrams.
   
3. Hugh McLeod (@gapingvoid) - Social marketing with menaces. Built on Purpose.
4. Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) - Operating manual for the social revolution. With a beard.
5. JP Rangaswami (@jobsworth) - Warm, open and real.
6. Mark Earls (@herdmeister) - Anti-brandist, Purpose personified.
7. Euan Semple (@euan) - Clue-ridden and blessed with the gift of KISS
8. Neil Perkin (@neilperkin) - Marketing strategy with chickens.
   
9. Tony (@Zappos) CEO of Zappos - A case study in the value of being human on a moment by moment basis.
10. Alan and Tomi (@alansmlxl @tomiahonen) Seminal communitarians.
    

Just realised the only people on that list I haven't met are Hugh and Tony. Must fix that.

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A shared model of social media strategy

Tom Nixon (he of Nixon McInness) has been working up a diagram to act as a model for social media strategy. It's going to be a creative commons project and Tom has already reached out to myself (at Brando-Digital.com - site going live any moment now!) and others to sense-check his initial proposals. The outcome of this initial tinkering is seen below.

What I've seen so far has been a remarkably detailed and deep reaching description of the Power of the Network and one I have very few quibbles with.

It has started life on the Nixon-McInness blog but, as we discussed off camera (you'll see a video below) we feel it's going to be wise to widgetise - and make the ideas and concept as portable as possible.

I'm already thinking about how we could create a truly interactive version of the diagram Tom has started us all off with. Something the team at Brando-Digital.com (my lot) could contribute, I'm thinking.

And I wonder if Dave Armano might consider throwing his considerable talents into the co-creation mix on this one? And with purpose core in the model, we're going to need Mark Earls, too. How about it fellas?

Tom and I met on Tuesday to talk about the project. And I shot this quick video of him elaborating on it.

I hope you will take up his offer to join in.

I'll be sharing this at the P2PR community, too.



Enjoy the street sounds :-)

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Best Practice in Social Media? Best practice being human

The estimable Neil Perkin just tagged me as part of a 'Best Practice in Social Media' meme.
Trouble is Neil has said much of what I would have.

Actually, that's not a problem - it's a great thing that so many of us are converging around similar conclusions: Seth Godin, David Armano, Mark Earls, Jackie Danicki, Alan Moore, Euan Semple and seminally Doc Searls and the rest of the Cluetrain gang, to name but a few...

So yes I'll agree with Neil, once again, that human interactions are critical. (Image by dotbenjamin via flickr)

They are exemplified in notions such as P2PR, Lean-Too Marketing, The Intention Economy (which Doc was referring to more than two years ago, so I'm a late comer on that!) and summed up as best as I know how in this slidedeck:

Adapting Brands To The Networked World

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: internet network)

If you want a case study; try this. The slidedeck above also refers to some great examples of the use of social media.

Quick guide? Well I wrote this for 'how to blog'. Seems much of it is appropriate to all social media.


Time to tag: I nominate: Neville, Christopher, David, Mark and Jonathan
Dan was already tagged by Neil! This meme was started by Mitch.

Seth Godin joins the call for human interaction

Fantastic. Seth Godin says what David Armano, Mark Earls, Jackie Danicki and myself have been banging on about for not a little while.

(Seth Godin, the first law of mass media)

One by one, the mass marketers have insisted on robocalling, spamming, jingling and lying their way into our lives. The pronoun morphs from "you" to "me" to "us" to "the corporation" ...

The public works tirelessly to flee to actual interactions between real people, and our organizations work even more diligently (and with more leverage) to corporatize and anonymize the interactions.

The irony, of course, is that an organization with guts can go in the opposite direction and win. Image by Steam Talks via flickr

It's that last line that should be getting your action hands twitching.

• Here's what you should do.
• Here's how you can think about it.

Take a fresh look at your 'resources' (read human beings)

Dave Armano has another corking post at Logic + Emotion
He describes the growing impact of quality real-live human interactions as effective marketing in mediums such as twitter.
One line really rang my bells:

"We’ve become so starved for authentic live human contact that when it’s offered up to us we are all too happy to rejoice and tell the world."

I commented on Dave's blog, but I wanted to expland a little here.

Real live human one-to-one (or many-to-many in a community setting) interaction has a really positive impact on us. And then we take that and have really positive impacts on each other (we do the marketing). Just look at my experience with Qik for example.

This need for the human voice and human interaction is often kind of understood by senior company types. But the response I most often hear is:

"But how can we afford to have all the people this would take?"

That kind of misses the point. It assumes you have to have specialised team who 'do' customer service.

But human interaction is much more than customer service. Human interaction should be what we all do. Hell, it IS what we all do.

So instead of thinking about the cost of additional people in additional new silos, think about unleashing the staff - the humans - you already have.

Marketing, advertising, customer service, promotions, new product development, M&A etc etc it can all come spilling out of its silos and beyond the company firewall where people can interact with people. And as Dave points out digital stuff helps make this more effective than ever.

Too often we make helping customers some 'ones' responsibility, or some department's, - By sealing that responsibility into a specialised department we sign it off as 'job done'. The impact is to either explictly or implicitly make everyone else ignore and 'get on with their day jobs'.

It's a side effect of the specialisation mass production forced on us - together with an unhealthy dose of scientific management techniques.

But as we rediscover that humans aren't made more efficient by being made more machine-like, the silo walls will dissolve and we'll be allowed to get on with being human. More forward thinking management techniques and companies are already applying them.

And, as Dave points out, being human makes an awful lot of sense when you want to sell to other humans.

Lean-too marketing: Interesting products + interested people

There are some companies that impress me. Some ways of doing business that any company can do, but most don't.

We're familiar that there's a raging battle for attention going on (or as I prefer to think of it, a battle for intention).In short, there's so much stuff to choose from we, as a default, lean away from it all.

Occasionally, very occasionally, something comes along which is interesting enough for us to lean towards. We shuffle forward on our seats and peer a little closer.

Ooooh! That looks interesting...

And then we make the effort to find out more.VodPod was one such for me. Qik is my current squeeze.

In both cases my attention (hard enough to grab) turned to intention (I'm going to stop peering at it and start acting) through one simple thing. The company leaned forward, too, towards me. Lean-too marketing.

In the case of vodpod it happened like this.Qik is now getting the big up for similar reasons!

I mentioned a hold-up in the sign-up process in a tweet on twitter. I didn't complain to the company. In fact, I'd have probably given it up as a bad job... if it wasn't for the fact that Qik is listening.

More importantly, the human beings who make up Qik are listening.

This is the bit all companies are capable of. Anyone can search summize, for example and see what people are saying about them on twitter (with other conversations to be added soon, according to their site).

But listening isn't enough. As this encounter with a Toyota youth marketer amply illustrates. Be sure to read the comments!

No, the clever (read blindingly obvious) bit is to actually respond to the act of listening - that is to take part in the conversation. To make like a social critter.

Small, very human, interactions make all the difference. Mark Earls at Herd understands this. David Armano at Logic + Emotion is working towards it (see his post describing how one act of kindness by a Disney employee earned that company $100,000).

Jackie Danicki gets this, too. It's why, in her role as Director of Marketing at Qik, she's not only monitoring what people are saying about Qik, she's reacting to it and responding to it.

She saw I was having problems and took the time and trouble to track down my gmail address (available on this blog and other places, but certainly not in that tweet!)

She got an sms sent out to me with the relevant link.

Would you or your company do as much? Are your employees empowered to make judgements for themselves on the right thing to do? The kind of small, human, right-things-to-do that earned Disney $100,000?

Here's the killer: The Qik download didn't work (I've been pointed at another member of the team to try to work out why - they haven't given up on me yet, so I'm not giving up on them!).

So what am I raving about Qik for? It can't be for the quality of the product - because I haven't actually experienced it yet.

It's for the quality of the people.

I therefore, personally blind to the product itself (though I have heard good things from people I trust), commend to you, Qik.

Tell your friends...

Image by Stephen Poff

Media Transformative and other presentations from day 1 at Widget Web Expo

I spoke at WidgetWebExpo in Brooklyn, New York, yesterday. Michael Leis was good enough to be live blogging as I did so.
So here's a link to his writing about my presentation.
The slide deck that went with it is below:

| View | Upload your own

I'm also delighted to have found some very nice tweets from the conference floor as I spoke:

mleis @davidcushman rocked the house with "the media transformative" http://snurl.com/2j92i #wwx

Armano @davidcushman just wrapped up a nice preso. I liked his POV that effective marketing happens in the mind of the individual. No hard sell.

stoweboyd @davidcushman is smart. Among other things, he quoted me! #wwexpo

Gentlemen, very flattering - and many thanks.

Fred Wilson is doing the keynote today (June 17) and I'm very much looking forward to that. Fred sent me a link to a preview which I'm happy to share.

Will be adding more links to this the moment I get a chance!

Here's a summary of some of the many great speakers at yesterday's day one of widget web expo.

Ivan Pope opened the event suggesting widgets are a fundamental change in how we engage with online and noting that June 16 was the 2^nd anniversary of the time he first coined the phrase widgetsphere.

Keynote on day one was clearspring ceo Hooman Radfar.

Some highlights:

Widgets are the building block for the social web: they have become the new web page, but they are intrinsically off domain.

When building you have to consider your experience in someone else's web space.

Advertisers are seeing them as a new kind of rich media. Entertainment industry is seeing them as a mechanism to promote their content with a higher engagement factor.

148mm us widget viewers

95% of facebook users add apps

massive adoption rate

Now they must be a standard part of online strategy.

“I don't know of any media company that doesn't have a widget strategy from the smallest to Disney.”

Widgets are not a fad, they are here to stay.

They catalyze the change of the web into more than a platform.

Kinds of widgets:

Phase one youtube and photobucket found what's missing. Youtube realised myspace didn't have a good video service and they found a way for users to add video - as widgets.

This is widgets attacking – appearing on myspace whether myspace wanted them or not.

Myspace got sniffy and battled with the widget makers. Meanwhile facebook accepted them - and open up the facebook platform.

Developers suddenly became welcomed on social networks and opened the door to the open-everything world.

Facebook let us add apps. They called us back if things broke, they allowed linking out! They opened the social context -

1. developers had access to profile

2. access to the network of people around them

3. access to the activity stream, the newsfeed shared widget apps.

opportunity is to create end to end experience, you can visit me on my site which is synched with other social networks... you the url.

Important elements for social context:

1. you need username and password consistent – open id?

2. profile – helps everyone tailor app to you. but you are a function of the people around you. (the social graph). this is what facebook is aiming to do – be the centre of it.

3. Presence ; what you are doing. everytime you do something on the web you are being tracked, you are generating data – so the value is in leveraging the derived data in the network.

Social context: all services on the web will leverage share of social graph. knowing who you are and that you are connected is powerful.

Layered on top of this are derivative services: video, pictures etc – how do you expose your services?

Widgets are emerging as a huge channel to deliver massive services overnight.

Hints and tips:

Think BIG act small: make widgets fast.

widgets are a building block, not a building. so think cross channel.

Need effective seeding processes; really direct people to your widget to increase your grab rates. think about your entire strategy. treat widgets like a first class citizen.

Data-driven focus on user – measure everything then you'll discover how the widget functions in different environment – measure the experience people are having. set goals and try to maximse against them. eg get people to take a quiz. focus everything around achieving that.

Iterate fast.

Repeat different cross promotion, see if you can find the viral loop, the point at which you get more inbound requests.

Study people who have been really successful, comscore200 etc. You'll see common trends so go with what works. Be rigorous about A/B testing. See if adding an image in a newsfeed makes a difference, for example. these are the things that make the difference. study the data.

cross promotion: Make sure everywhere you can you get cross promotion.

Lift your head up, ask are you really creating value. the data is a guide but human intellect is better at spotting the real value – know your user.

Be ready to fail. don't be afraid, assume you are wrong and ready to try new stuff and try it real fast.

social networks have helped us communicate better – this is just another channel, users haven't changed.

widgets have become a fantastic building block, they catalyze open social context, web is the platform. the web is becoming the centre of everything. Think big act small.

Ivan Pope: toward a long term web strategy.

When facebook launched its open thing overnight people only asked for facebook solutions.

But you don't have to second guess where your audience is and when. Widgets can do the work for you.

Widgets carry the ability to replicate themselves.

Widget strategy should look at what your biz objectives are be built to align with those.

We can use the potential of widgets to push marketing into social networks.

Widgets are mirror image of social networks, a vehicle you can use to enter those spaces, rather than an end in themselves.

Why use widgets at all?

alternatives: buying ad campaigns, building big websites, doing destination deals. widgets route around these solutions – diy solutions to carry your network into social networks.

Widgets work because:

1. organic communication:

2. viral intelligence; LEVERAGES the intelligence of the crowd

3. infinite reach: they can go on forever, mutating, growing and unstoppable!

Long piece of string: you can have a piece of string to each and every widget no matter where it has gone.

Ally widgets to other strategies, don't just 'do widgets' don't build in isolation. experiment within a framework.

METRICS: what tools to use?

INTEGRATED planning: cross market,

SEO: and widgets,a huge win for people who get this right – using google juice!

AFFILIATE MARKETING: not just a crude sell this and you get x. Rather by distributing value through a chain that splits and moves on.

BBC Radio people wanted to give producers a tool kit to make widgets to add to their website BUT they have issues over control and management and re brand control, legal issues about what the bbc can do, image issues. The thought of allowing official widgets to go off where they like is difficult for them.

But we need solutions for control and lack of control to be developed at the same time.

Let them go, but always have some control. What happens when things go wrong and we want to turn widgets off. What happens when the BNP has BBC-branded widget on their website?

We needed political cover for management!

We wrap the building toolkit into a set of feedback tools which gave a lot of control points so we could know who do what with what.

1. legal/brand/admin control given: sign off for adding the content to a widget in first place.

2. Templates to control the branded bit, the image issue. The org can sign off the identity of the widget.

3. Getting data back about widgets, giving people access to crunch that data and to use that to .

In publishing companies, lots of people do their own marketing, widget control can devolve that power throughout an organisation or open that control to external orgs with the neccesary controls.

Marc Canter spoke on How to build the open mesh.

We can all be a web celeb. you can promote yourself. plurk is an example of a swarming effect – couldn't invite friends from facebook en masse.

Brad's thoughts: a whitepaper about the social graph. Unless we have a way to centralise the social graph has to be rebuilt each time a new service emerges.

A new kind of server can assemble the open mesh. an 'our data server' implementation of a shared social graph. we have shared data.

Facebook wants to maintain privacy against/data portability.

I own my data.

everything will be/is a url, every person, event, etc

We need to build our own open mesh, there isn't going to be one standard, or one platform, but we need to control our data.

TOOLS:

1. Liveweb: real-time communicaton, conversation, presence, microblogging, streaming, eg twitter, meebo, im, vid conf

2. Watch: Your friends and content sources – rss, newsfeed etc

3. Express: yourself via txt media links – publish, upload, comment, rate, bookmark, blog podcast etc

4. Media Gallery: your media stored somewhere – upload, share, tag.

You are what's important – user centric id

no one vendor

resusable components

two-way api.

PANEL:

Dave Armano chairs and asks his panel to define widgets:

steph agresta, internetgeekgirl, consults in social media pr and affiliate marketting: widgets are microcontent, interacting with consumers that's not a full site.

Ian Schafer: Deep Focus: focused on distributable sharable experiences. widget is a portable exp that lives on a particular platform. web-based apps?

Steve Rubel: edelman digital. “I study internet trends and advise teams, advise clients and counsel them, alk to industry at large. When i think about widgets I think they are the beginnng of the end of something, end of the website (death of the url) web content isn't going to die, but you now have a giant iceberg that's breaking up into thousands of pieces. You have to be able to go where consumers go.

Matt Dickman, fleishman hillard, pr agency. i came from a digital shop. every type of agency is trying to reinvent itself. widget is a portable brand gateway.

David Malouf, motorola. “I also teach interaction design and rich internet apps. Widget is not accidental, its a metaphor for small components that are interchangeable and portable across various systems.”

David Armano: Critical Mass.

Q”: to david malouf – what are some of the similarities and differences you see.

A: mobile interfaces are about interruption mostly, they are interruption from what you are doing, they are moments of tangent. I design apps that aren't interuptive but are on mobile devices.

Armano: I wonder if widgets are ready for prime time, do devices like the iphone help.

Dave ixd: widgets have been around for a while. i think what is different is a richness. now there is an understanding of the information density too.

Ian Schafer, done a lot of work in myspace – re content distribution. Networks are filled with people who want to be connected, so a lot of what we do plays on that community context.

You can wield influence with your friends, we create things that help people ID themselves as influencers, and then reach them. Clients want response fast. we are trying to change that.

Steve Rubel – what's the role of the brand in the community? web2.0 is made out of people, the brand has got to get the peeps from behind the gates. if the brands are going to create their communities they have to be participate.

Rubel: i study the internet for four hours a night and read and obsess, its an education process. you have a lot of people in their 30s, 40s and 50s who are different from the generation that grew up with the net, they want to do an old way of business and apply it to what is new and different.

armano asks matt dickman in the context of micromedia what is the relevance of an aggregator like friendfeed.

Many people are only just understanding blogs let alone twitter etc. We have to teach them how to listen online. friendfeed allows you to aggregage (looks like my typing made up a new word here, but I kind of like it so I'm going to leave it) all of these things in one place.

Armano, back to companies listening. ff is aggregation and distribution. Can we use portable formats to listen as well.

Rubel: listening and talking is a means to an end. distributed content works where brands and users have a shared outcome. trust in peers is ever rising. ff and services that will follow after allows you to see what your trusted circle is saying. if you can find that it's huge.

Steph: what is the role of people building reputations online

“I'm always impressed by someone like zappos, a company, top down from ceo, they are using it for customer service. a lot of it is about personal brand building. Tony goes to a lot of events, they are fuel for the social media world. this trusted group of friends is built stronger.

I don't just do twitter, I still do facebook and flickr.

Rubel I suffer from shiney object syndrome. it's very easy for the clients to come in with a notion that they want to focus on one site or one tech only.

Get Me One Of Those! We hear a lot of that.

Look at the trends and look where they are in your audience. 6-20% is creating content online. Take a look at mahalo.com social layer on top of search, then you are into big things.

Steph: I do think there are certain personalities that do better in an environment. you have to have a good product.

Matt D: I live in cleveland ohio, 10 years ago what would be the opportunity for us to meet. I've known these people online – that level of brand building is through the content you are creating.

rubel: don't think too much about the tech or tools. secondlife was web2.0's vietnam.

don't think of it as widgets and social networks and aggregation and video, its how they all connect up.

in five years you won't buy from amazon, you'll buy from which ever site you happen to be on and pop open the relevant widget along with recommendations, chat with friends about them and make the purchase.

Panel ends

Michael Leis:
Emerge Digital

For agencies, frequency's the thing.

widgets are all about little ways to make your life easier.

Clients get back insight, the metrics show you who people are and what their lives are like.

Associating the brand with the moments that make a difference – lots of little pings to audience.

What do agencies get? Ownership of an entire channel! at the heart of where the brand and users connect in real time. essentially its own network.

We think of it as the brand as a platform, todays most popular sites are all platforms, the website sits on that, blogs, widgets and mobile all feed off the same base.

The risk is the possibilities are endless -loads of great ideas which require loads and loads of budget and then they run screaming.

So keep it simple and start with a one-way comms model.

give core users promotional tools , they are early adopters and give them a way to share your brand. it empowers them, the people who really like your content can do something with it.

service

utility

fun

means to branch out

who are the people we want to reach?

what content can we use to reach out with them?

you learn when core users are online, what channels they are using, and how often they use computers...

GoGo, bringing wifi to aeroplanes:
we thought our audience for the game to promote this would be in facebook but our biggest engagement was in hi5 and friendster. You find out the metrics after launch. the goal is to get the metrics.

University of Illinois (Chicago) 8000uu and 22mins/users a month and all sponsored.

In version 2 we then try to take those points that have pain and stop insisting they visit our site. widgets are new ways to reach out to them. conversion, registration, sweepstakes, online tools.

artefacts of personality traits:

widgets can show what you are. virtual gifts, mini-apps on social networks. apply new coding and new places...

eg Miller; platform for bartender education: videos and quizzes with prizes. we rewarded them with a facebook trophy that can live on their profile. this pivots the social graph that already exists. Viral without having to constantly refresh content.

Darkhunter facebook app – a quiz, how much do you know about dark hunter. in 6hrs we had 4000 users. In 2 hrs the amazon book rank for pre-sales rocketed. we gave a context and they came together and set up their own groups, too.

Level 3:

utility: how can you make it work for your audience in the context of your brand; integrate with existing apps; browser communicaton, outlook and appointments, PDAs (good on the enterprise side).

service: with this tech you can bring audiences new experiences they wouldn't otherwise get.

fill the need that isn't being met for my audience – how can I program for it; itunes. itunes took a simple thing to catelogue and play mp3s. ecommerce version looks just like it.

eg Nike ID system; they looked at what their users do: they run with ipods, graphs your run.

Widgets can then inform your other channels, you now know more about the exact preferences and behaviours of your audience. you can zero in on where your people are really at. creatives get their scripts written by the audience – by the audience' behaviour.

WidgetWebExpo: Meet up and pitch me!

WidgetWebExpo (NYC, June 16-17) organiser Ivan Pope is calling together speakers, conference goers and anyone else interested in the widgety world for either a widgety breakfast and/or evening get together on Sunday June 15 in New York.

I'll be adding a link for updates (locations, timings etc) to this asap. In the meantime tell Ivan Pope you'd like to join in. If you're particularly interested in hooking up with me; gmail me: davidpcushman AT gmail DOT com.

I'm speaking at WidgetWebExpo (I' ve sneaked in alongside a stellar line-up including Stephanie Agresta, David Armano, Josh Bernoff, Stowe Boyd, Marc Canter, Chris Cunningham Kris Loux, David Malouf, Ivan himself, Hooman Radfar, Steve Rubel, Ian Schafer, Fred Wilson... frankly too many to name here (so go here for the full list)

While I'm in NYC for the conference, I'm also particularly interested in meeting you if you've got widgets/application proposals or pitches you think might work with the brands I work with.

My particular focus is on our specialist media brands, but if you have a stunner for any other parts of the business I want to hear from you, too.

And if you just want to say hi, that's fine too.

I'm arriving Saturday (June 14) late afternoon and leaving right after the conference closes on the Tuesday June 17.

In between I'll be staying at the conference venue - so come get me!
Contact stuff is on this blog.

The value of a brand is in its conversations

It didn't take long. Twitter accounts are now going up for sale. Via Jonathan Macdonald and David Armano.
AndrewBaron is up for sale on eBay. Last time I looked bidding had reached $1125! @andrewbaron has just 1400 followers.
This phenomenom isn't particularly new - but it is new to twitter. MySpace accounts have sold on eBay before.
This essentially treats user accounts as media properties. Think about that for a moment. A user creating an account on someone else's platform is creating value (in real live dollars) simply from using themselves as a media property.
The fact that bidding has risen so high so fast for AndrewBaron indicates there are those who see the value of highly focused niche communities of interest.
However, the risk is that they are also seeing this as a way of purchasing some eyeballs. And eyeballs, no matter how focused and dedicated, are of less value than ears and mouths. In other words, by purchasing someone else's account you have access to audience, not access to conversation. The dynamic changes. Have you bought the conversation? Do you own it now?
That's contrary to the distributed micro-blogging nature of twitter. The conversation can and does start from anywhere within your self-formed group.
Note, it is a self-formed group. It isn't owned by AndrewBaron, he has no control over it.
All you have bought is access to audience - an audience who, by the way, are more like a community and may disappear if you broadcast at it.
Of course there are plenty of companies and commercial concerns moving into twitter in the hope of extending reach by broadcasting into a niche. Most fail to understand that the value derives from the conversations - not from the broadcast of the message.

And this I believe reveals a truth about how brand values and the value in a brand are now created. The value of a brand comes from conversation about it and with it.

Shoe firm zappo have understood this. @zappos is active in twitter, at least its CEO Tony is (ie a human being rather than 'a brand'.
Tony doesn't just use it to create a buzz (with regular prizes for random followers) he is careful to follow everyone who follows him - enabling the conversation (you have to be matched to see eachothers tweets in twitter).

Tony doesn't just tweet about zappo promotions, he reveals his life and his personality to you in every tweet. He presents a very human face of a company - and he does it in a way that is open to real live human conversation. Marketing without the fog.

I'd never heard of zappo before I found the fuzzy edge of their self-forming group on twitter. Now I have and so have you. And I for one have a warm feeling about it. The value of the brand and the brand's values are being created right before your very eyes - and shaped by your interactions with it.

Insight in a Columbo-stylee

| View | Upload your own
Big thanks to David Armano for pointing us to his colleague's work via twitter

Jaffe in person: Turning social networks into social reality

Who's that man? Joseph Jaffe who I had the pleasure of spending much of yesterday with. Joe was the keynote at the Digital Marketing Briefing, and I was there to present a couple of sessions, too (Power of the Network and why we should be more than witnesses to it).
Joe and I twittered and emailed beforehand - I'm one of the marketing team for his latest book (in that I've reviewed it).
And thanks to twitter we organised a tweet-up for other followers immediately after the DMB finished at 6pm.
I'm using twitter more and more. It's not only a fabulous multi-dimensional means of microblogging, it's also proving itself to be the most effective way of turning digital social media into social reality.
For example, none of the parties who came together for the tweet-up had met before. This kind of gathering is easy to organise on the fly with twitter (particularly if you're a mobile twitter user, too). Somehow twitter manages this more effectively than facebook.

During the morning I presented one session. In the afternoon I had another. In between I followed David Armano's mostly micky-taking tweets from the Adage conference in New York. And I took one of the examples he witnessed into my afternoon presentation. All of this achieved without a pc.

ie: I got relevant news to me filtered by a source I trust, faster than any other way I know.

The example that amused me, by the way, was of kiosks in Bloomingdales in which you can try on new clothes and send images of you in them to friends to get their view on which you should buy - kind of a changing room with cameras I guess...
Of course, that could just be a mobile app. Who needs a kiosk when you have a mobile phone... except perhaps you need someone to take the snap for you, but that really shouldn't be so tough. Social shopping is the big buzz at AdAge, apparently. Makes sense: social networks plus intent to buy - the missing link!

And talking of mobile. If you're interested in why it's going to be THE hot ad medium, Tomi Ahonen does a great job of pulling together the themes of permission, segmentation, co-created advertising, the whole ad-as-content thing. Enjoy it.

Why I love twitter right now...

Another genius illustration from David Armano (via JaffeJuice)

Where does your personal facebook curve intersect your twitter one?

Perhaps the 'what was I thinking' timeline can be extended the more you enable the conversation.

I drew a picture of that. Not pretty, but a picture all the same...

How Fuzzy R U?

Just came across the following (from David Armano's blog Logic + Emotion, see links, left) which speaks just fine for itself.

It's about breaking down internal and external silos and being prepared to change. Find more of David's writing (and often brilliant illustrations) here.

The Fuzzy Tail

From: darmano, 3 months ago

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The Fuzzy Tail is a play on Chris Anderson's Long Tail—but that's where the similarities end. Being "fuzzy" means unlearning the way we've always done things and moving away from rigidity toward adaptability. The first draft of this presentation will be presented to employees of Critical Mass, a digital experience consultancy based out of Calgary, Canada.

SlideShare Link

I'll be adding this to the resources section you'll find low down the left column of this blog.