Whatever happened to social media?

When I started out as a social media pro I did so with a belief that social delivered something extra and different that media didn't. This was a world of The Arab Spring and of the post-riot, self-organised clean-up of London's streets.

Social promised a way of building relationships - bringing people together who shared the same purpose, to not just talk about things, but to find that they cared enough about the same purpose that the would choose to DO something to make things better.

It offered an open and two-way door to the customer. It offered a platform to bring together people of shared purpose to create things that mattered to them - meeting their needs with a new level of accuracy and fidelity. It was potentially transformative for the way not just marketing was done, but for product, service and experience design with the customer genuinely at the heart.

I pushed the 'customer-led' vs customer-centric agenda - arguing that to be customer-led was to build a relationship of trust in which each partner had the other's best interests at heart. Customer-Led became one of the 10 Principles of Open Business defined in my book.

I suggested to our clients that it would not be long before there would be a Director of Social Media in every boardroom - driving the customer-led agenda, pouring insight into every business decision, shaping products and services to be the co-created near-perfect fit with end-user need.

I summed it up the additional value of social media over traditional media in diagrams like this from 2009:

and this:

From my article 'The social media bum steer' in 2010.

So why is professional social media so far distant from that promise today? It seems to me the focus has been too great on 'media' to the detriment of 'social'. I've seen the organisations in which the CEO has sat down with Zuckerberg and colluded on achieving 1m Likes! Vanity metrics have taken over from value metrics. Social Media has become just another place to broadcast your message in. A channel.

It has drifted too hard and fast towards being just another ad. And ads, by their nature, are about convincing people they need something, when the focus should be on connecting people to make something.

Perhaps the 'Director of Social Media' role on the board has been taken by the Director of CX?

The value in social comes from understanding that it:

• Delivers insight for not only CX, but also for product and service design. 
• Makes insight interactive and ongoing - providing a relationship-building dialogue with customers.
• Offers a platform for purpose-inspired connection and co-creation aligning directly to end user need
• Provides P2P opportunities to communicate via authentic relationships.
• Is the connection with customers that every successful company needs.

Our buying our way to eyeballs and the platforms ongoing refusalto be anything more than (increasingly monopolistic) media companies doesn't up.

But we can reclaim the value social media always promised if we remember - It's social first. Media second. 

It's time social media grew up and started delivering on all the human-centred extra value we have always known it can create.

One last image from more than a decade ago...

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

2015: The Year of Micro Private Networks - and a new threat to mass comms

Snapchat has just been valued at $12bn. PRISM and other forms of state surveillance of our social communications are driving a retreat to privacy.

The omnipresence of brands in our social streams is pushing some folk to do the equivalent of hitting the mute button when the ads are on TV – they are looking for ways NOT to be interrupted - not to be targeted or otherwise 'engaged' by ham-fisted, dads-dancing-at-weddings brands.

This preference for the private, for the small social groups of communication – six-person social networks, sms-based one-to-few interactions, all of these is piling on the agony for mass communication.

How does an advertiser slap banner ads into our private conversations – by their very nature we want to switch off anything that might reveal our preferences (key word matching of ad to content of conversation, in the style of G-mail or twitter ads, for example, even this will be unwanted by those headed for the small-private-network future).

It’s a fear-led place. It’s not something I want to see. But (and I say this is an As-Well rather than Instead Of scenario, it may be the dawning of a cultural lock-down. Sharing for some folk is less caring, more scaring.

Facebook active use is actually down at the end of this year (by 0.5% over all granted, though much more pronounced among younger segments) The way people are using it is changing too – much more voyeurism, much less sharing of their own input (images, video etc).

And the problem for mass comms?  How to get your message into those private conversations when they don’t want you to  know anything about them.

Relationship marketing remains the key. Create an easy and ‘right’ experience and the result isn’t a banner ad – it’s a heart won and a mind  made up.  We may want to switch off anything that would give an advertiser a clue when we go micro-social, but try as we might we won’t switch our beliefs off when we make our private connections.

You’ll recommend based on your experience just as heartily in private (perhaps more so) than you would have done in public.

This of course means the building of advocacy is even more important. It’s pretty much all that can work in this emerging micro-social world.

The challenge facing digital marketers now then is, how can you apply the rules of advocacy creation to any marketing activities beyond that delivered by their one-to-one- social media activities. And if you can't, where should you focus your spend instead?

This charge to privacy is, in my view, a road bump on the journey to Open (as in The 10 Principles of Open Business) which I think we will come to look back on as the time when a lot of people came to the realisation that they didn't NEED control from the centre.

It's an important learning, but something of a cul-de-sac in my view unless the outputs for all improve (and that is a road that always leads us back to collaboration, an Open road).

But for all that - it is happening - and marketeers must adapt to cope.

Getting advocacy on to the balance sheet

If you've read many of my previous posts you'll know of my views about the role and value of social media - its effectiveness as an exercise in relationship building and therefore its value as a one-to-one relationship marketing tool (which you'll find emphasised in my book The 10 Principles of Open Business).

Its job is to create advocates. But what does advocacy mean on the spreadsheet?

To make such a calculation you need five things:

1. A clear and measurable definition of advocacy
2. A behaviour change which can reasonably be defined as identifying a shift from standard customer to advocate.
3. A cash value which can be reasonably attributed to that behaviour change
4. A robust 'number of friends' each of us could influence.
5. A mathematically robust formulation of transmission of positive influence in networks.

Let's tackle the difficult one first. Number 5. How do we calculate pass-on in networks. Well, it happens that there are some very clever people with massive brains and even larger computers who have been working on this exact problem for many years. And they've come up with their 42 (look up Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy if that's confused you).

Dr Martin Nowak - himself a professor of maths, biology and evolutionary science at Harvard - quotes a very useful ratio (in his book Super-Cooperators) discovered by Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego. It suggests we are swayed by the good mood of not only friends, but of those indirectly related - through second and third degree iterations.

In the first generation the chance of them displaying a positive response is 34% . In the second (friends of friends) it is 10%. And in the third (friends of friends of friends) it is 6%.

It turns out this is a function of the structure of human social networks - not of the nodes within them... And it dries right up after the third iteration. This seems to me a very reasonable proxy for advocacy. You have to be happy with what you've been provided with in order to advocate it to your friends. Very happy.

This is very useful indeed.

It means that if we know the value of the behaviour change (X) and the number of friends (Y) we can use the transmission formula to understand the network effect - in real cash terms - of creating one advocate. We can put a price on the value of over-delivery - of creating happiness...

Here's the formula:
Pass on to friends (F) = Y * .34 * X
Pass on to friends of friends (FF) = Y * .1 * X
Pass on to friends of friends of friends (FFF) = Y * .06 * X

Add them together (F+FF+FFF) = Value of advocacy in a network.

Still with me?

Now we have to start reducing the number of variables. The most important is the value of Y: number of friends.

Again, we are indebted to the canon on peer-to-peer relationships. The number of friends who could typically be called 'close tie' at each iteration is just six. It's the typical number of people you text, for example; Facebook offers you 'six friends' when looking at someone's profile - based on close ties; in Britain only six friends will last your whole life through. Philosopher's of friendship think you can only maintain 6-12 friends at a time.

Six may sound low when you look at the number of twitter followers and facebook friends you have - but it turns out about right if you take a closer look at the number of people you maintain daily contact with. Remember - we aren't trying to make a case for reach here but for the ability to create behavioural change through advocacy.

Let's bring this to life with an example.

Let's say we can track the value of a group of customers. Let's call them group A.
On average they spend £300 with us. But we take a subset of these, group B, and provide them with exceptional customer service.

We find that group B end up spending £100 more on an average transaction with us than with their peers in group A.

The additional spend is the behaviour change we have identified as a marker of someone who is happy enough with us to advocate us to their peers.

This £100 then is the financial representation of a behaviour change which illustrates someone has changed status from customer to advocate.

Just to be clear, it doesn't matter how many times this person spends more money with us - that isn't their advocacy value, that's repeat business. In other words another impact of treating a customer well may be a rise in that customer's lifetime value, but that's not what we are calculating here; that increase in total spend will be recorded directly in your sales figures.

What we are seeking here is the impact of that person's "happiness with us" on others - their close tie friends, their friends of friends, and their friends of friends of friends.

Ok - so - if you will indulge me - we have numbers 5-2 on my list covered. How will we define advocacy in a way it can be identified and measured?

Advocacy is the act of publishing (posting/tweeting) about a positive customer experience.

Those of you thinking a few steps ahead will already have noted that the formula for calculating the amplifying effect of advocacy in networks must be a consistent number.

We'll work through a simple example taking our formula and using real numbers (in which £100 uplift in spend is the value ascribed to the behaviour change which indicates shift from customer to advocate) to illustrate why:

Here's the formula:
Pass on to friends (F) = (6) * .34 * £100 = 204
Pass on to friends of friends (FF) = (6*6) * .1 * £100 = 360
Pass on to friends of friends of friends (FFF) = (6*6*6) * .06 * £100 = £1296

Add them together (F+FF+FFF) = £1860.

And if we divide by the base behaviour change figure (£100) we end up with 18.6.

So - if you know the value you can ascribe to a behaviour change which indicates a shift from customer to advocate (such as an increase in the amount they are spending with you) you can simply multiply by 18.6 to give you the advocacy value of an advocate.

Calculate the number of instances (as defined by someone publishing their positive experience) and you are able to put a very reasonable number on the value of inspiring advocacy. In my view at least.

I'd be interested in your views on the methodology I've used.

I believe I have erred on the side of conservative assumptions. But they seem reasonable. If I rave to six of my friends about a great customer experience I had with X, the assumption is that the next time (at any time in the next five years) these guys have an option on which brand to choose a third will recall my positivity about X and give it a try... and so on to 2nd and 3rd generation ties.

This is less that perfect I'll grant, but for every challenge that can lower the output (will a third of your peers buy or just think nice thoughts?), there's another to consider to raise it (is six really a big enough number of friends to consider at each iteration?, what about all the advocacy that happens face to face but not online).

My response is this is the best I've got to so far, it ploughs a reasonable and conservative middle course, and it is based on the summation of much of the best of thinking, theory and testing in network science.

Using it allows me to set realistic and accountable KPIs and steer social media and social content strategy in the right direction.

The two killer apps of 21st Century marketing

Image via  http://www.alchemyofchange.net/

Neither of the two killer apps of marketing in the 21st century is part of most marcomms plans or marketeers skill sets.
How so?

A quick reminder on where I stand on how consumers make choices today:
1. Brand: Makes the promise
2. Marcomms: Brings the promise to life
3. Social Media: Is where we turn for proof of the promise (in the experience of our peers, the Google ZMOT if you will).

This is driven of course by who we trust. If we trusted brands and marcomms we'd accept their promises. Sadly its a rare brand which can command that level of trust today. Mostly we ask each other for the proof. This means of course that much more spend and focus should be on number 3 versus 1 & 2.

It also begs the question: how do you inspire people to publish the good experiences (the proofs of the promise) they have had.
First, of course, you must prove that promise.
Over delivering seems to do the trick. Go beyond the normal and I'm likely to post a positive review or comment.

Our ability to generate “wow” moments worth sharing with peers (reviews included) come down to what we are prepared to GIVE over and above normal service. Primarily the give is great customer service (delivered by a human) or an upgrade of some kind ( a cost).

This is bottom-up proof that the brand has our best interests at heart (the true measure of trust). That's killer app one.

Scaling this is tough and relies on peer-to-peer discovery and pass on. Often this can appear too slow to a brand with a broken connection to its promise they are desperate to fix. They may not have the will or capacity to deliver the small moments of wow which have made google, amazon, spotify etc more trust-worthy than long established rivals. They use your data to deliver things to you in a way that makes us feel they have our best interests at heart. We can rationalise and note that they have a business imperative. But actually, us consumers aren't very rational at all when making decisions. How we feel is most often more powerful than what we know. (Read Mark Earls Herd for a primer on that if you aren't convinced from your own experience).

With what brands can learn from your data, we can deliver the feeling that the brand concerned has our best interests at heart: Top Down - killer app two.

The magic, the wow, is not now in what we are given by way of over delivery of goods or services, but in the surprise and delighting we do by showing we know our customer's needs so well that they feel we really do have their best interests at heart (the foundation of building brand trust in a world of relationship marketing (as discussed in my book The 10 Principles of Open Business).
My guess is that we will continue to need BOTH top down and bottom up.
Trust in the brand can be built at scale via the top down approach, but to deliver the TripAdvisor-topping reviews and publication of peer recommendations we will need to continue to GIVE more than expected, not just fit need exceptionally well.
After all, when was the last time you tweeted about how well Amazon made you a recommendation?

My appearance on CrossTalk on Jan 17, 2014

Today the CrossTalk show I'm on is being broadcast four times on the RT channel.
But if you don't catch it, here's a YouTube version you can watch at your leisure.
All comments very welcome.
Glad to be intro'd as the author of The 10 Principles of Open Business - naturally.

CrossTalk: Join the debate on social media and the news

I'm taking part in the latest recording of CrossTalk today - Russia Today's flarogram.
For those unfamiliar, RT (as it's now know) is an English language rolling news channel. In fact its the third most viewed rolling news channel in the UK (after the BBC and Sky) with around 2.5m viewers in the second half of last year.

The show I'm joining brings together "politicians, journalists, scientists and decision-makers of all sorts – anyone who influences the decisions changing our world or plays a key role in forming public opinion" for American journalist Peter Lavelle to challenge with the days hard questions.

The theme (I'm told) is social media and the news agenda - and is likely to look at the challenge of validation in a world in which we all get to publish.
It's a challenge we also consider in The 10 Principles of Open Business in an interview with the editor of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger.

So this should prove timely since the book is due out in just a few days now (January 28, 2014).
If you're interested in watching, you'll find RT on Freeview, Sky and BT Vision (in the UK).

It is currently due for broadcast on FRIDAY 17 January 2014 at UK times) 7:30am, 1:30pm, 7:30pm and 10:30pm .

This link will tell you where to watch where-ever you are in the world: http://rt.com/where-to-watch/
I'll also have video links to share once its been broadcast. Hope you'll try to catch it and join in the discussion after either here or by commenting on the RT.com site.

Brands can't live on a promise

Performance is essential in social media. Nothing moves in a peer-to-peer environment unless a behaviour is impacted.

No matter what you may say your brand is - through deeply-thought positioning, emotionally charged TV advertising or carefully crafted copy, what your brand actually is, is what other people say it is.

And what other people say it is, is what people experience it is: How it performs and how they say it performs.

Image via cuddlycomments.com

That's the message you'll find in Chapter 10 - Trust, in my forthcoming book (Palgrave-Macmillan, January 2014) -The 10 Principles of Open Business.

It's the same position arrived at by Google and Brian Solis in their work on The Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) and - more recently - Brian's Ultimate Moment of Truth (UMOT).

ZMOT asserts we start our path to purchase in our perception of the expression of experience of others in our social circle. We hear good things. We hear bad things. We act accordingly.

Our own research (at The Social Partners) supports the idea that social media (which can almost wholly be defined as the expression of shared experience by our peers and people like us, as viewed from a variety of individual perspectives ) is THE place we turn to for evidence of performance: Advertising makes the promise, social delivers the truth.

Brian's UMOT is a neat expression of a concept I have been applying to my own work in social media strategy:  Building trust through performance at the level of the one-to-one relationship.

Since the brand is what people say it is, having experienced it, how do we encourage people to express their joy? What we do know is that people don't express their meh! So-so performance, mediocrity, blandness - of these we have nothing to report to our peers through social. The technical barrier remains that little bit too high. We don't tweet 'coffee in Starbucks was, you know, ok '. We do tweet 'awesome service in Starbucks today' or 'Starbucks was super sucky this morning'.

We go to the effort to report the out-of-the-ordinary, not (yet) the ordinary.

Brian's response is to encourage expression (reporting the out-of-the-ordinary) we must engage them - by which he means do something to make them love you (and that is most assuredly NOT clicking the Like button or browsing over your centre-out messaging content).

My own work in relationship marketing suggests similar (indeed the whole concept of Open Business shared in The 10 Principles of Open Business is about taking customer engagement to a whole new level by making partners of customers in everything you do).

Engagement, Brian argues, is about emotion.

Again, agreed. And here's the thing to guard against: Social Media is not good at broadcasting emotion - just as it can't broadcast trust.

Emotion resides in the individual and in their interaction with their peers.  Winding up a John Lewis Christmas TV ad and setting it off among your targets won't do the job.

You have to provide the out-of-the-ordinary. You have to build trust in your performance, You have to build the relationships, one person at a time.

This may sound expensive but we are already finding methodologies to track the effectiveness of this over-

delivery, of how far and for how long the emotional impact of feeling a little bit of love resonates.

My belief - one for which I am busy gathering evidence (and there are many anecdotal examples) is that being 'insanely great', as Steve Jobs put it, pays massive dividends.

At the end of the day since the aggregate output of what other people say is what your brand is, then this is where you should be focusing your  brand budget.

All the rest is just a promise.

If you can't be at our Open Business panel - watch here live

I'm hoping I will see many of the regular readers of this blog at one or more of the events I'm involved with for Social Media Week London - kicking off on Monday (September 23).
For details of all The Social Partners events (all at The Johnson Building, 77 Hatton Garden, London) follow this link
On it you'll find descriptions of each of our events along with availability. And if you find a sell-out (and there aren't many seats left for any of the events now) you'll note a little video camera icon against the events on Monday. That's because they will all be live-streamed.
These include my panel on Open Business with its all-star line-up (I'm not kidding, go take a look) and the premier of the results of in-depth research on the impact of social and digital on WOM and emerging behaviours,'Big Conversationalists'.
So if you can't be there in person, join us by the flickering light of your PC.

You can watch the Open Business Panel right here:

Truth and Trust in Social Media - report from the SMWLDN panel

Social Media Week London kicked off (for me at least) at 8:30am on Monday morning. That's when I joined with fellow panelists Jenny Afia – Schillings, Guy Stephens – CapGemini, Euan Semple  and Benjamin Ellis - Redcatco / Socialoptics at Like Minds opening event.
The topic at hand (to which I was afforded the luxury of providing the introductory scene and context setter) was Truth and Trust and why what you do matters in social media.
Thanks to all those who joined in from outside the room via the #smwldn or #likeminds hashtags on twitter.
I'm back at the same venue (Adam Street Club - just off the Strand in London) on Friday at 4pm for the final Like Minds event of the week on the future of being social.
In the meantime it's good to see Monday's early morning session was covered by way of a live blog - so if you missed it you can catch the summary here.

Related articles

• Social Media Week London #SMWLdn
• Social Media Week London: Truth, trust and the future of being social
• Social Media Week London 2012: The Full Story
• Win 2 Tickets to the #SMWClosing Party in London!

Who wins with your social solution?

Domino's have become quite famous for their 'social'. Nice apps. Happy twitter campaigns, gathering Facebook fans.
Which is why I'm so surprised at the weakness of its latest work in Australia.
In short, they are crowd-sourcing the next pizza to go on the menu with Facebook fans.
Which sounds on the face of it ok... until you dig into the benefits for the end user.

This from the blog of Online PR/Social outfit Simply Zesty (it's not them that's the blame, they are just reporting on it):

Now in Australia, they’re ... creating ‘the social pizza’ which will harness their 488,000 Facebook fans in creating the pizza they want to see. Starting March 19th and spanning the next seven days, fans will be able to vote on a wide range of factors such as the type of base used, the sauces used, the toppings and even its name.  the most popular choices will be then added onto the new pizza which will be added onto Domino’s.
It’s almost like being able to custom make your own pizza to your taste… no wait… it’s exactly like that except you have to go along with the lowest common denominator verdict.

Hell – at least I’ll feel like it’s my pizza in a way I wouldn’t have done if I’d made all the decisions myself… no wait…

This mass crowd-sourcing only ever delivers a mass production outcome ticking the lowest common denominator boxes.

Individuals are already innovating better-fit solutions each time they customise their toppings and crust choices. The long tail solution already exists. Do it with a friend? That's a half-and-half then.

This social solution smacks of an old broadcast model being forced into a network. Always an uncomfortable fit.

It seems to me more to me about the PR message this will generate and less about a best-fit outcome.

If you're treating customers as partners, would this be the best solution for them? An Open Business approach would ask exactly that. An Open Business approach would ask those partners if this was actually the solution they seek before foisting it on them.

I'm thinking the principles of Open Business did not apply here.

A reminder of those principles:

1. It's not about the tools - it is about Behaviours:
Often social business conversations focus on implementing software. Open Business urges you to think Behaviours first. What are people doing, what can and will they do? If you are starting with tools you'll likely starting in the wrong place.

2. Think less about messages and more about products. Open Business urges you to consider ways of making things with the people for whom they are intended; for the best possible fit with real need; for efficiency; for results people care about. Messages are an outcome of this process - not its purpose. Talk 'social' and all roads will lead you back to messages.

3. Ditch the customer.
No, really. Stop thinking about customers. Customers are people you intend to do things to. Open Business urges you to think about the long-suffering customer as partners to work with instead. It pushes those people deep into the production process - right to the start, to join with and be supported by the org in delivering the things all parties want - all partners want. 

In a nutshell, Open Business is the art of making partners of customers.

There is no insight button

I really worry about the turn-key, one-size-fits-all tech and tool solutions for social media being churned out by software and SAAS vendors for baffled brands and companies right now.

For example, this from a press release I saw on Thursday January 19:

“[Brand X’s] enterprise marketing technology allows global brands and agencies to easily activate social audiences and impact consumer actions on all major social media ecosystems simultaneously.”

My  translation: With one button you can broadcast at anyone fool enough to have followed you so far. If they happen to have stayed around since you bought them, that is.

Job done then?

What worries me is that hassled execs will take the magic bullet being offered – we all like to make ‘life simplifying’ decisions. It’s very seductive to sign up for a one-stop solution because it’s easier than understanding what they really need to. It’s unlikely to be more cost-effective though.

As I wrote previously for a piece with Ninety10 Group CEOJamie Burke (note and disclosure, we co-founded that international business consultancy together.)

Business as usual wants a set of turn-key tools to make everything all right. But the future isn't about tools. It is about behaviours - understanding changes, learning from them and responding to meet those changed needs.

Business as usual wants ever-more efficient ways to exploit customers. But the most efficient way of meeting need is delivered by a shift in mind-set not in technologies; a shift that thinks of customers as your partner in producing what matters to both of you.

Business as usual wants to exploit channels to deliver messages. Click to deploy. But the future resides in better understanding why people would want to share 'your message' - getting to grips with the idea that marketing isn't done to people, it is done with people.

A tool or set of tools won't - of themselves - deliver the change you need to shift out of business as usual. And unless you take the holistic view, unless you go through the culture shift, the organisational change that is required, the tools will lead you back to square one.

As Ninety10group Head of Innovation Steffen Huck points out “There is no ‘insight’ button on any dashboard.

There is no ‘Cultural Change’ button, either.

Ditch the customer if you want to transform business

At FT Innovate in Londom this week much of the conversation was about the role of social media in innovation.
Martha Lane Fox advocated business leaders get themselves involved in social media in her keynote.
But it was clear that for most the best this means is the opportunity to get an ever-better understanding of the customer.
Which sounds on the face of it a very excellent thing - a step up from social as 'earned media' or attempting to use people as your choice of broadcast channel.
But there's something missing. And the missing bit is one of the three quick indicators of the difference between what gets referred to as 'social business' and what I urge you to consider instead, Open Business.
Open Businesses are purpose-led platform-thinking organisations. They use their available resources to discover people who care about the same things the org does, bringing them together to surface their concerns and working with them to support them in resolving those concerns. It means outcomes which are a better fit with the real needs of those for whom they are intended.
There's little wrong with social business and much that is good. But it rarely inspires business leaders. In fact I know a very senior business journalist who has never even heard the term.
And when I was invited in to IBM to talk about Social Business in London last week I made the point that few CEOs will feel comfortable with turning their business into a social one. The term creates unhelpful mental blocks. IBM folk reported similar concerns.
Why make life more difficult when what we all want is change for the better?
So what's the difference between Social and Open Business?
Here's three distinctions I see:

1. It's not about the tools - it is about Behaviours:
Often social business conversations focus on implementing software. Open Business urges you to think Behaviours first. What are people doing, what can and will they do? If you are starting with tools you'll likely starting in the wrong place.

2. Think less about messages and more about products. Open Business urges you to consider ways of making things with the people for whom they are intended; for the best possible fit with real need; for efficiency; for results people care about. Messages are an outcome of this process - not its purpose. Talk 'social' and all roads will lead you back to messages.

3. Ditch the customer.
No, really. Stop thinking about customers. Customers are people you intend to do things to. Open Business urges you to think about the long-suffering customer as partners to work with instead. It pushes those people deep into the production process - right to the start, to join with and be supported by the org in delivering the things all parties want - all partners want.

Tools/Behaviours
Messages/Products
Customers/Partners

There are differences: Critical ones in transforming how business is done.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Related articles

• Understanding social media for businesses (marketing.yell.com)
• 11 Ways To Explain Social Business Benefits - The BrainYard - InformationWeek (informationweek.com)
• The cost of sharing and the risk of the wrong rewards (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)

The march to open business is inevitable - so why aren't you acting?

A shipload of Inevitable being delivered right now...

One of the first questions we should ask ourselves when considering any strategy is the one about inevitability.

If a thing becomes inevitable – even at some distance in the future – it’s kind of dumb not to start planning for it – preparing to adapt to it.

It’s part of the risk assessment phase. There it becomes ‘how inevitable is this?

If you score its inevitability at even 50% then there is significant risk that this outcome is going to have a huge impact on the way you conduct your business, where and who with.

One macro example: Is it inevitable that Greece or a.n.other Eurozone country defaults? What percentage score are you going to give that? What level of risk does that then level at your org? What do you need to prepare to change as a result?

Ok.

Now ask yourself what score you are going to give the inevitability of the voice of your customers impacting your marketplace – just as it has taken down Governments in the Arab Spring and killed Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper? Is the social media genie going back in the bottle - or is it going to continue to spread its game-changing impact through more of the media, through all kinds of government, through education, the law - and every kind of business? How inevitable is this march towards the need to be open, to engage, to make productive partners of customers and clients?

How inevitable? 50%?

It’s more isn’t it?

What level of risk does that then level at your org? What do you need to prepare to change as a result?

And isn’t it time you started?

Related articles

• George Soros: Greek Default Might Be 'Inevitable' (huffingtonpost.com)
• Can paywalls be sociable? David Cushman on social media in news publishing (briefingmedia.wordpress.com)

The purpose of messages is to connect us - not to persuade us

I am continually amazed by the number of people who still seem to think 'social media' is all about content and the distribution of messaging.
Their end game is to persuade you, via the gift of influence, to do stuff. This is the exact same model as old school PR and Advertising: Pay us money, we'll persuade folk to do what you want them to do.
Social Media is not a 'do to' medium. It is a 'do with' medium.
Yet few in the persuasion camp will even open the door to allowing their campaign of doing to to be done with the people for whom it is intended. The lip service to peer to peer participation usually paid is simply to use you and I as a channel to distribute.
This is to treat the peer to peer networked environment as if it were simply another broadcast medium - which is to  misunderstand the difference between a network of nodes and a centre-out broadcast mechanic.
The web creates greatest value when it is understood as the best available way for groups (communities of purpose) to self form. Our sharing of messages, perhaps better understood as our expression of metadata, is our way of reaching out to connect with other people who want to solve the same problems we do, right now.
Bringing together people who care about the same things, self forming into groups, is how the energy to make change is generated.
Bring together people who really care about something and they will help you improve it, making it a better fit for themselves. They'll help you make products and services which work better for them, because they matter to them. They'll do with... you.
It's social, its participatory, it's niche, and it's where the purpose of messages (metadata) is to connect us rather than to persuade us.

Related articles

• Facebook to the Rescue! (time.com)
• Information Literacy The Assistant Librarians' Information Literacy Group. " Blog Archive " Social Media - re-conceptualising information literacy (library.hud.ac.uk)

Thoughts on Morgan Stanley's social media strategy

I've been asked to join the Financial Times Judgment Call panel - a group of people who, on occasion, get asked to contribute their judgment/advice on burning business issues of the day.
Those of you who have a subscription to the FT (and it's the one paid-for to which I do subscribe) will be able to read Judgment Call in the Business Life section of the website.
Those who don't could have read this in last Wednesday's paper. If you missed it I have scanned it below. I know - not really meant to - but I'm hoping since it's now almost a week old, and the quality of jpg ain't uber great - no one should be unduly upset (click on the pics for larger images).
The article is about Morgan Stanley's toe-dipping exercise re social media.
Morgan Stanley - like all financial institutions - have quite a heavy set of responsibilities to add to all the usual ones. Their response to this is to check every staff member's tweets before allowing them to hit the web.
Which makes for a stilted 'conversation' to say the least.
But let's not be too harsh. It's a start. And every journey needs one.

Related articles

• Morgan Stanley Gets Social Media Wrong and Risks Everyone's Reputation. (richandco.wordpress.com)
• Morgan Stanley brokers get OK to tweet, should they? (loiclemeur.com)

Your network is at No3 among UK Power Players of Social Media

We all love a list... when we're near the top. And this one has 'me' at Number 3. 'PR Week Power Players of Social Media' is curated by @andismit, of PR outfit Escherman.
The 'PR Week' referred to in the title of this Peer Index listing is a UK publication for the PR industry. The listing was based on one originally compiled by PR Week and has since been augmented by Andrew (@andismit)
Here's how the scores are calculated.
Usual thanks are due of course to the network I am part of - everyone I interact with, everyone who responds to my posts, tweets with me, gives me the time of day... that's what gets an individual climbing a list like this.
I am merely one representative node of the success of the network we share. So well done all of us. Thank you.
To see the latest live listing of this particular peer index visit http://www.peerindex.net/andismit/group/pr_week_power_players_of_social_media

Related articles

• Are you a Power Player of Social Media? (72point.com)

A challenge for the way sentiment is measured

It occurred to me when watching my twitter stream fly by (I follow close to 3000 people) that I rarely see anyone share that they have been at an 'unawesome' event - or had the bad fortune to spend time with really dull people.

When we say we've had a good experience we are showing off a bit - "look at me - aren't I good at making the right decisions". We don't like to be seen to be making the wrong decisions. It's part of us retro-fitting a model of rationality on to our more likely Herd behaviour.

Which I think is one of the reasons we tend to be more positive about the choices we make compared to those imposed upon us. No need to post-rationalise when the decision wasn't ours. (image courtesy niznoz)

Of course, my friend Mark Earls would argue most decisions aren't ours, they are more driven by physical context and those around us than we'd like to admit. But the kind of 'not my choice' I'm thinking of is more in line with being negative about the train service you have little choice about taking, the utility or bank etc where the cost of switching appears high (in effort terms at least).

Which is all a long way of saying we big-up what we choose for ourselves and more easily criticise what we don't. There's a lesson in there for building positive sentiment about brands and products and change for the better. And also a challenge for the way sentiment is measured and valued.

Sentiment isn't a standalone value or a necessary consequence of product, positioning or recommendation alone. Good product does not (always) = good sentiment. Good product + 'I chose it myself' may ampifly the positive. Good product - 'someone chose it for me' may dampen it.

For me this is another example of the questionable value of sentiment analysis in and of itself. It cannot be a stand alone value, it has to be measured in the context of a number of complex factors - the purchase cycle, the relationship of 'peers' in the distribution of recommendation. And then its measurement must be put in the context of what a shift in sentiment here or there results in elsewhere. Folk being a bit happier about your product means nothing on its own. That playing out in rising sales, more engagement in co-creative processes (both active and passive) etc (in other words things that deliver real value) is where the bang for the buck resides.

And I haven't seen a tool yet which does even half of that.

The world is full of data. Always has been. We get access to more of it than ever before - thanks to digitisation of thought, emotion and opinion through the likes of blogs, forums, texts, emails, twitter and facebook.

Making useful, innovative efficiency driving sense of it is the key. And that remains a very human art.

Related articles

• With sentiment analysis, context always matters (radar.oreilly.com)
• Twitter moods match money moves (geeksaresexy.net)
• What are the most challenging issues in Sentiment Analysis(opinion mining)? (consultramy.wordpress.com)
• Measuring Social Sentiment: Part Art, Part Science (visibletechnologies.com)
• Are You a Happy Tweeter or a Gloomy One? (billives.typepad.com)
• Twitter & DataSift launch live social data services for under £1 (useful) (onlinejournalismblog.com)
• #Firestarters At Google (neilperkin.typepad.com)
• How the Pros Measure Social Media Marketing Success (mashable.com)

The fool walks into the swamp with eyes shut

The fool walks into the swamp with eyes shut. The wise man takes a map - and a stick.

So stop. Stand still. Pause. Every organisation and business engaged in any form of social media activity... halt! The swamp is undiscovered territory. Fraught with risk for the ill-prepared. Stand still for a moment.

There are few areas of business life where we go to tactics - plunge headlong into the swamp - without knowing the strategic landscape.

Fewer still where we buy a map only to find we don't understand what it tells us - and carry on buying the updates without complaint.

Yet when it comes to social media it seems firms are happy to go tactical before they think strategic. And it's costing them millions and casting a shadow of fail over the social landscape. (Image courtesy jstephenconn )
"I stepped into the swamp and sank/got bit". Really? Who's surprised here?

They may conclude the swamp is somewhere they should never go again: Which is a little like giving up on attempts to find The New World because a fishing boat went down off the coast of Portugal - to mix my exploration metaphors.

Worse still, there are those who provide (and charge for) heaps and heaps of social monitoring data - without insight. It's the equivalent of the surveying guys with the theodolites giving you their scribbled latitude and longitude notes but failing to draw you a map.

"Ah - so this bit here is 29°16' N, 94°49' W. Er. Ok. So where do I go next?" you may well ask.

It's time the approach to social media strategy grew up.

And that means mapping the community landscape as it applies to you (understanding who is talking about what's relevant to you, where, how, who is influencing who in those conversations, where they sit in your purchase cycle even). That gives you the strategic landscape on which to deploy tactics.

And it also means auditing for and understanding the opportunities and blockages presented by your own organisation, your customers and other key stakeholders. From this you will develop a strategy and tactical plan for creating best value from social.

Do all this and I guarantee your action plan won't start and end at Start a Facebook Page.

It will deliver the transformational improvements required to make the org and its products and services the best (read most efficient and effective) fit with the networked world - with its customers and their needs.

Related articles

• 2011: The Year of Social Media Reckoning (markevanstech.com)
• Strategy vs. Tactics: Facebook and Twitter are not social media strategies (jaredhouser.com)
• Company Wide Social Media Engagement: A Bridge Too Far (socialmediatoday.com)
• Social Media Workflows Part 1: Awareness and Capture (chrisbrogan.com)
• Traits of an exceptional social media manager (holykaw.alltop.com)
• How To Map Out Your Social Business Strategy (customerthink.com)

12 years left to adapt or die

Disruptive technologies generally take 20 years to make their broad society-wide impact felt.
The first commercially available mobile phone network opened in Japan in 1979. 20 years later everyone and their mother had a mobile phone.

in 1900 London the horse was still king of the road. 20 years later the motor car had become ubiquitous.

Social networks - and the technologies of social media, have only really been with us in user friendly form since around 2003. I pick that since that was the year MySpace was founded. (Image courtesy PetruzzoPhoto)

Yes there were social technologies before MySpace - just as there were cars before 1900 and mobile phones before 1979. But in all three cases using them (be it social technologies, cars or huge cellphones) was relatively cumbersome and/or time consuming, complex and expensive. MySpace made the peer to peer connectivity of the internet something everyone could do. On a global scale. Easily.

And by 2008 it was pretty well on the way to making the concept of social networking ubiquitous. Facebook built on that. And today as the race for 1bn users advances at a high rate of knots, it's hard to avoid the impact of this user-friendly driver of self organisation - whether it be for customer complaints or armed insurrection.

The ease with which groups of purpose can organise in social networks is something that wasn't so easily enabled on forums and in newsgroups of emails. And not as many (and perhaps not enough) people understood or were driven to understand what they could do with the web - until the nice easy interface of the social network showed the way.

When new tools become truly ubiquitous then, and only then does their full impact on society become clear. In this case I'm suggesting the new tool wasn't simply the internet, it has been the refinement of social networks to the point at which they are delivering self-organising groups of purpose on a global scale.

The process of using social networks has educated a new and huge generation in the value of real-time synchronous communication which is the guts of the formation of communities of purpose.

The future is not digital - it is self organised. That is what social networks reveal.

Everywhere this process touches it disrupts. The media industry lays witness. Others will, of course, follow. Most dramatically throughout the Arab world currently, the disruption is to centralised control. Every where there is centralised control, every where there is mediation - so adhoc self-forming communities of purpose have the power to disrupt.

Given the standard 20-year life cycle of a technological revolution, and my assertion that 2003 is the year zero for this revolution, then we can expect the complete impact to have been wrought by 2023.

In two years time we will be half way through. Half way.

The old ways have 12 years to transform or die.

Related articles

• 5 Failed Social Networks Even Worse Than MySpace (huffingtonpost.com)
• MySpace for sale, News Corp has given up (downloadsquad.switched.com)

Two new jobs at 90:10 Group

London-based social business consultancy 90:10 Group (UK) is seeking to recruit both an Executive and an Associate to help us change the world - niche by niche. Both roles are based in London, UK.

EXECUTIVE
The Executive role is a first step on an exciting career path for someone with a passion for the tools and techniques of social media and the desire and ambition to join a vibrant, fast-growing organisation in a sector bursting with innovation and opportunity.
During your first year you'll receive exceptional training and guidance, preparing you for promotion within 12 short months. We recruit into this role with your long term development very much front of mind.
We expect the successful applicant to be capable of becoming a share-holding partner within three short years and a director of their own arm of the business within 5-6. On joining you will have a clear career development path mapped out with rewards and incentives marking the way.
Our career structure is designed to recognise and reward the work and experience our employees gain at 90:10 and give each member of the team more to inspire and aspire to.


The role:
The Executive role functions as the one-year entry point into the 90:10 Group business.
The Location:
Our London office at 88 Kingsway, Holborn.
Function: You will provide vital day-to-day support to the London office and its team while gaining an understanding of how the office / business operates. You will gain hands-on experience in community culture - the 90:10 platform approach to delivering business efficiencies through social technologies and techniques of co-creation.
You will be trained in the best online community auditing/monitoring and data processing tools and techniques with expert leadership. You will also be supported in responding to day-to-day client management issues.
You will be required from time to time (with any necessary training) to update our own web resources, take notes in meetings and support the senior team in a variety of administrative roles.


Essential: Excellent written and communication skills in English. Computer and web literacy. Business and client focus. Excellent eye for detail and accuracy. Must have the right to work in the UK (you will be based at our office in Holborn, London, right next to the tube).
Advantageous: Knowledge of/experience in social media monitoring technologies. As a multinational, multilingual business, additional languages are also clear advantage as is evidence of effective personal participation in social media. A qualification in Research or Communications OR equivalent working experience will make you stand out, too.

ASSOCIATE 
THE ROLE:
The role of associate is a client-facing role which requires a year’s experience within 90:10 Group or equivalent skill sets. We expect the successful applicant to be capable of becoming a share-holding partner within two short years and a director of their own arm of the business within 4-5. On joining you will have a clear career development path mapped out with rewards and incentives marking the way.
It is a continuing development role in which you will perform the following functions and develop the following skills: 
Functions: Support the Group and the London office in the following ways:

• Create report documents, coordinate meetings and provide clients day-to-day service. 
• Manage the delivery of social media monitoring reports, audits and local accounts.
• Attend presentations to clients
• Interpret industry news for your local office.
• Develop hands on experience in community engagement (outreach etc)
• Perform Data processing/Social media monitoring
• Support executives in their training in data processing/social media monitoring
• Identify and share best practice both in London and throughout the group.
• Monitor development of social media activity in relevant markets 
• Monitor developments in the brands and orgs we work for with specific focus on accounts you are responsible for.
• Identify and share, and where directed, pursue new business opportunities

Demonstrate and develop an interest in and understanding of :

• Managing large local and / or multi-regional accounts.
• Leading all listening and audit presentations to clients and their agencies
• Using audit and listening outcomes in marcomms planning processes, idea creation and strategic support.
• Co-creation initiatives and workshops through all their phases.
• Creating and sharing slide-decks and demonstrating strategic capability.
• Costing of projects and invoicing of clients.

Further your interest in and understanding of :

• Ninety10's approach, products and services
• The businesses, brands and organisations we work with
• Your blogging and other areas of expertise to demonstrate thought leadership in social media.
• All aspects of our social media monitoring processes - from commissioning to delivery - including technical and client-relationship aspects.
• Business transformation through social technologies

Essential: Experience in and off social media monitoring and reporting is essential for this particular Associate role. Must have the right to work in the UK (you will be based at our office in Holborn, London, right next to the tube) and have excellent communication skills in English.


Advantageous: As a multinational, multilingual business, additional languages are a clear advantage as is evidence of effective personal participation in social media. A qualification in Research or Communications OR equivalent working experience will make you stand out, too.
 
We intend to appoint to these roles immediately - there is work waiting to be done! If you or anyone you know would like to discuss these rare opportunities please email me david@ninety10group.com with your CV, current salary details and availability today.





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• Head of Research at 90:10 Group (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
• Secrets of a social-media headhunter (smartblogs.com)
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• The social media skills and credentials (successnetwork.wordpress.com)