A business case usually relies on numbers.  Numbers to justify the investment, numbers to project the return on investment, and numbers to compare against other investment opportunities.  Numbers that matter, matter differently dependent on the view of the person you talk to.  Certainly social media, or social software, numbers rely on us to know our boss and know their need and understand what their need for numbers is to evaluate success.

Recently I went to Google for a social media metrics search and came across a good article to share for 2 reasons.  But, context really, my search was spurred from a discussion with someone who asked what metrics do I need to make a business case for social media success to my C-level?

I had not been asked to make a data-driven business case for social media for more than 2 years, so I just did a quick Google search to see if about the most recent case studies I could update my holster with.

I came to an article Tying Social Software to Business Metrics that Matter.  The 1st reason I like the article was the sober view the authors, John Hagel and John Seely Brown of Chief Executive.net [obviously the target for the article are executives] present about the environment of need we must respond to.  I paraphrase:

In this era of near-constant business disruption where non-routine issues are becoming the norm, your capacity to solve them swiftly, using the unique capabilities of social software makes its measured use important for profitability and growth.

and

Most senior executives are either deeply skeptical of social software because they don’t understand its potential impact on business performance or they have adopted a “check the box” approach — they feel they have to deploy it because other companies are adopting it, but they are not sure what it does or why it matters.

Hagel and Brown understand the world I live in and the expectations I have to deal with.  And that is fair for me, because if I want to impact an executive, I need to think about the executive’s need, not mine.

However a 2nd great point about this article, in truth is not a social media or software issue at, but a great reminder for metrics that matter to the audience:

… tying social software deployment to metrics that matter for your firm and triggering cascades of adoption and sustained usage based on clear and measurable operating impact. Social software can have a significant impact on the performance of the firm but its deployment needs to be guided by a methodology that targets the greatest opportunities for performance impact.

But here’s the problem. The metrics that matter differ at different levels of the organization. Given this, it is vital to focus on a performance funnel that specifically targets metrics that matter at each level of the organization.

Within the 6 pages of this article is a lot of great insight:

• What is the executive level interested in?
• Why is it different, and should be different, to the operational level?
• What is the link between financial, operational, and, what the author’s call, front-line metrics?

I’ll leave with the last article teaser:

Stepping back from all of this, it becomes clear why CEOs are natural and necessary leaders for these software deployment initiatives. Effectively targeting metrics that matter requires a broad overview of the economics of the business and an ability to drill down quickly into whatever part of the operating processes that might be most helpful in driving key financial metrics.

I say, “here, here, next round on me”!

Some other good nuggets leap out when I read this full article, but I do not want to steal the thunder of a timely and relevant read that is important to anyone who cares about staying at the executive table.

Without an understanding of their need for numbers to evaluate success we can get too easily drawn in to people’s personal bias or fear of change.  I am not keen on dealing with a personal agenda that trumps a business need for change.  I can build change management into organization development, but to convince someone in fear of change for their personal reasons, that is a far taller task, and one’s fear does not help the organization.

Chief Executive.net.  It’s a good read.

Enjoy the article and share your thoughts.

If you want an idea of your organization’s culture there is no simpler place for this insight than your organization’s social media strategy.  Companies who view social media only as a marketing vehicle miss far more than an opportunity to engage.  It is as likely these companies have lost their employee’s motivation in similar fashion well before.

Is your organization:

• Theory X?
• Paternal?
• Hierarchical?
• Siloed?

Not sure?  Well, does your social media strategy seem restrictive, bureaucratic, controlled or ghost-written,  blogs, no place available for user comments, no RSS feeds or other calls to action, agencies that write content, or site metrics that are not shared?

Or is your organization:

• Theory Y?
• Flat?
• Open?
• Matrixed?
• Transparent?

Not sure?  Well, does your social media strategy use social media press releases, provide internal access to social media sites, post blogs penned and written by who it says wrote them, have internal departments writing their own web content, and openly share site data and metrics?

I wrote in a prior the similarities between social media and organization development the strength of the best organization cultures rely on a work environment that includes:

• Involvement,
• Communication,
• Listening,
• Collaboration

Your organization can not have an open social media strategy if your current organization does not have faith with involvement, communication, listening, collaboration, or the final trump card:  transparency.

The best social media companies rely on transparency for other’s to easily find and share information about your company’s goods and services.

The best social media companies only edit their site comments for fear of spam not for fear of negative comments.

Good social media companies already leverage transparency and involvement of others to provide feedback and gauge the relevance of the company’s message.

Mature social media company policy shows, documents, and leverages open trust for internal employee access to sites while at work.  Access based on a level of trust, not a level of distrust.  The best company’s know they hired, trained, and communicate with their employees the expectation for web access and company information.

The laggard companies that continue to manage in a pre-World War II management philosophy set social media policies because they are certain if their employees have access they will screw up, so the company protects them from themselves; how very paternalistic of them.

Strong cultures base their policies on trust and the strong management expectation to communicate, educate, and train direct reports on what is expected, not why management knows employees can not be trusted.

If web 1.0 brought about the concept content is king, the maturity to a web 2.0 and social media environment are only achieved when living the concept that community is king.

Without community you can’t have motivation.  How can you develop a community unless you are a transparent part of a community?  How do you seek to understand community without spending time invested in a community?  Well, as these hold true to an individual the same holds true for an organization.

Marketing 2.0, web 2.0, and social media present a revolution many companies continue to barricade their citadel gates against.  Is your company leadership and marketing cowering behind the gates hoping to outlast the pagan horde?  Does social media embody the best your organization culture has to offer?  I will look at this in a second, follow-up, post.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

Though coming for a while, there was no sign of bitterness from the advertiser when his consumer finally walks out and abandons the clearly, lopsided relationship:

Which side of the table is your seat?

In a prior blog Marketing 2.0 — You Better Free Your Mind Instead I recapped: Lose control, provide content, make it easy to share content, provide tools for people to congregate, and help them celebrate their passion.

Marketing 1.0: the distribution is the value; command and control.

Marketing 2.0: the content is the value; contribute and collaborate.

A 1-way conversation is not communication.

As a professional statistician, I help doctoral students design quantitative research studies, and analyze and interpret their data, for their dissertation.  It occurred to me that some aspects of a doctoral dissertation could be applied to social media communications to make information and conversations more rigorous and tractable.

If all you have is a hammer, is every problem a nail?  My answer:  No.

If all you have is a hammer, it simply means you are only going to be able to solve problems that involve driving nails.

My point is this, as a professional statistician, I help doctoral students design quantitative research studies, and analyze and interpret their data, for their dissertation.  Thus, I tend to think about research problems from a quantitative perspective.

Although many research problems cannot be studied quantitatively (e.g. we may not yet know how to quantify the constructs of interest), many of them can.

When a problem can be discussed from a quantitative perspective, why not discuss it in a format like a miniature dissertation?

I have read thousands of doctoral dissertations, and I have personally helped hundreds of doctoral students with the statistical aspects of their dissertation.  So, my perspective might be a little like the hammer and nail analogy.

I’m used to studying research problems in a dissertation format, and maybe I think that will work well in other areas, like in social networking dialogs, when in fact, I am just seeing the problem (quality of communication in social networking mediums) as a nail that my hammer will work on. But, let me throw this out there and you decide.

The typical dissertation I work on has five chapters:

1. Introduction;
2. Literature review;
3. Methodology;
4. Results, and;
5. Discussion

So, how might we apply this to a post? Let’s pick the one titled Project Communication and Social Networking.  Toby made a comment that produced some interesting dialog and debate about project management success rates.  Toby claimed: “the majority (65% – 90%) of all projects fail – organizations don’t know how to scope and manage projects”.  Another blogger disagreed with that statistic.  How might Toby have made his case in a brief dissertation format? Let me take a shot at it…

Introduction
Project failure could be defined a number of ways, such as failure to complete the project at all, failure to complete the project on time, or failure to complete the project within budget. Project failures rates can be attributed to factors relating to strategy and/or project management.

Literature Review
According to source 31% of projects are cancelled before they are completed and 53% of projects come in at 189% of the original budget.  Several other studies on that web site show that Information Technology project failure rates vary from 36% to 80%.

Methods
A Google search was conducted in an effort to identify published statistics on project failure rates.  The following search term was used for the search: Standish Project Failure
Google returned over 19,000 search results. Only the first two were inspected.

Results
Based upon a very limited Google search, and very limited time spent reading articles on project failure rates, there is some evidence to suggest project failure rates in the Information Technology industry may be somewhere between 36% and 61%.

Discussion
Based upon this very limited study, there is some evidence to suggest Toby’s estimates are accurate.

Further study might include:

1. Spend more time reading the articles listed on the web site in the Literature review section;
2. Read more of the search results produced by Google for the search phrase: Standish Project Failure;
3. Check the validity of the oft-cited Standish Report (.pdf link);
4. Choose other search phrases to identify more articles on project failure rates;
5. Perform similar searches using academic journal databases.

This is not a perfect example by any means, but I thought it would be worth shooting this out there to see what others think.  I guess the point I am making is, the quality of communication in social networking may improve if writers will make a mini dissertation out of their post.  Give the reader a brief background about the subject; cover the lay of the land so to speak.

The background identifies some problem that has social implications and your post sets out to say something about it.  You would like others to take you seriously so that you can get some interesting feedback, so:

1. Back up your claims with some reputable sources;
2. Discuss the limitations of your perspective and supporting documentation, and
3. Make recommendations for how to better address the problem.

Today’s guest blog was written by Steve Creech of Statistically Significant Consulting.  Steve specializes in handling all of the statistical aspects of doctoral dissertation research, from developing their research questions, hypotheses, survey design, data analysis plan, power analysis and sample size justification, and performing the statistical analysis of their data.

I am happy to welcome Steve’s thoughts and experience as a guest contributor. Please find more insight and thoughts from Steve through his professional biography, web site, or on Twitter @StatisticsLLC

A recap on my series of blogs around communication in the age of saturation.

Preamble:  Marketing 2.0 – You better free your mind instead

The printing press brought us Marketing 1.0.  Marketing 1.0, however, did not bring information to all equally.  Information really relied on distribution and distribution relied on money.  Marketing 1.0 was owned by those with the money buying channels to blast our their information.  We built walls, the marketer sought new interruptions.

1. Communication in the age of saturation, part 1

Effective communication requires you know your audience more than ever to avoid the barriers and filters they’ve erected to block out noise.  To know your audience means you know the barriers, channels, and filters in place to block out mass marketing.

2. Communication in the age of saturation, part 2

“Buy in” is a dead concept.  Your communication strategy should be based on what customers want, not what you think they need.  Moving from interruption to engagement provides a view as valued marketing communications.  Stop telling and start engaging.

3. Communication in the age of saturation, part 3 visual

Conversation Prism provides a strategic tool to maximize your effort to cut through the clutter.  Note the importance of feedback throughout the Communication Prism.  Without feedback you are .

Prologue: Marketing interruption still trumps engagement, really?

Social media does not address consumer needs or address what consumers need to know, but may not have asked for.  Brands have always managed consumer needs through their conversations, conversations delivered most strongly through broadcast TV.  Really?

Last week I posted Marketing interruption still trumps engagement, really? I quoted global brand strategist Jonathan Salem Baskin’s Advertising Age blog where he presents his case that brands have always had it correct:

Brands always had conversations with consumers, whether via broadcast TV or chiseled on clay tablets. The rules have also been consistent over time: Tell the truth and tell it with relevance, immediacy and meaning. That’s why ads that interrupted with sales messages worked so effectively for so long; making the content worth consumers’ time meant that brands could risk asking for the sale. It’s not a new idea, and today’s consumers aren’t a new breed of human being. Yet we’ve assumed that the old rules no longer apply. Delivering engagement and its metrics of time spent and forwards clicked trumps the historic measures of interruption, all of which got to a sales result pretty quickly.

I’d choose effective interruption over pointless engagement anytime. Why wouldn’t you?

I did not see Mr. Baskin made a case and this week still do not see Mr. Baskin has come close to make his case.

Today I came across a post that makes a nice bookend:  Why Do So Many Companies Suck at Social Media? Lee Oden, the writer, presents a nice view.

To me, the issue isn’t about sucking at social media, it’s about failing.  Companies should not fear taking risks and trying new, creative ways to connect with their customers. Some of those efforts will succeed and many will suck.  Failing at social media is more about choosing NOT to:

• Listen – Social media monitoring.
• Create – Content that customers actually want.
• Engage – There is no substitute for direct participation with customers in social communities.
• Be open – Stop deciding what’s best for your customer and be open to letting them show you how they’d like to engage.
• Be brave – Show leadership in your social participation.
• Test - Moving corporate mountains is tough, so try proof of concept campaigns, run business case examples and get your feet wet.
• Change – Organizations can only be social if leadership buys in and a commitment to change is made.
• Make money – Don’t be fooled into thinking social media is all about kumbaya with customers. It’s about creating opportunities to connect and influence sales: indirectly and in some cases, directly.

Mr. Oden ends his post by mentioning a time when he sucked at social media and invites the reader to share moments they may have sucked:

Have you “sucked” at social media? What did you learn from it? How have you turned your social media failures into successes?

The takeaway in social media:  don’t be afraid to suck.

That lesson, in itself, may not resonate with multi-billion dollar brands and multi-million dollar agency accounts.

It’s time to move past debates about traditional media co-existing with social media. Madison Avenue should see social media as a wonderful, if not disruptive, gift. It should run hard to catch up with the consumer, let go of legacy business models and build something better.

This above quote comes from Hank Wasiak’s post last month, How Social Media Radically Altered Advertising.  His post is a great buffer between Mr. Baskin’s rather weak platform and Mr. Oden’s call to “suck”.

Mr. Wasiak offers great perspective from an advertising career that began in 1965 and includes a gang of Emmy’s.  Mr. Wasiak, like I did in Communication in the age of saturation, mentions Brian Solis’ conversation prism, as great conversation atlas.

So, 3 keys I takeaway from these 3 posts and my experience, thus far:

1. embrace the opportunity to suck at social media;
2. learn the art of conversation; and
3. don’t place your bets on dinosaurs (Madison Avenue)

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

Great post on Advertising Age website titled:  Why Interruption Still Trumps Engagement [click for .pdf to avoid onerous login].

The key to the blog is the closing and I think it is worth your read because it gives yet another view of social media’s critics.

The author, Mr. Jonathan Salem Baskin, states the social-media revolution is based on 3 assumptions:

1. ads aren’t credible so they can’t play a meaningful role in our conversations with consumers
2. consumers don’t want to be bothered or intruded
3. entertainment is an alternative to selling

The premise he revisits is that social media delivers what consumers truly want:  to engage with customers, instead of get interrupted by advertisers and brands.

Mr. Baskin believes social media does not address consumer needs.  Namely, what consumers need to know, but may not have asked for, such as:

• relevance
• immediacy
• meaning

He goes on to state that brands have always managed consumer needs through their conversations, conversations delivered most strongly through broadcast TV.

He ends the blog with this:  ”I’d choose effective interruption over pointless engagement anytime. Why wouldn’t you?”

That’s a weak closing argument.  There is very little compelling point to make when you rest your premise with “pointless engagement is not effective”.

Of course any strategy that relies on manipulation and half-truths, whether brand marketing’s traditional channels or social media’s channels, should never indict the tool, but indict the manipulator.

To me, he has not come close to make a case that interruption marketing does, indeed, trump engagement marketing models of social media.

Lastly, always consider the source.  In this case the source of this blog is Advertising Age and guess who benefits with the whole social media is a farce argument:  deep pocket brands and channels struggling to provide value?  Who do you think Advertising Age reader demographic are?

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Have I engaged you?  What are your thoughts?

Mr. Baskin has really.  Is his case clearly made?  Well, you give it a once-over…

The lines are drawn:  charge for content, give content for free.

In Media’s two tribes The Economist breaks down the thought of charging for premium content over giving content away.  In this article from The Economist, read about what 2 UK media outlets weigh in their chosen strategy as well a look at some of the film industry’s battles for a business model.

It just might be for the survival of the media industry itself, from Netflix, Hulu, Disney, and Apple.

There are also strategies in-between, as The Atlantic points out in Closing the Digital Frontier:

But now, it seems, things are changing all over again. The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995.*

There are companies getting people to pay for digital content, interestingly content that is easily available for free.  The model is driven by product:  iPad, Kindle, and smart phones like the iPhone or Droid.  The move is really a move from content available on a browser to content available on an app, as in application.

So, is content driving the revenue model or product app driving the revenue model?  And if it is product, is it product convenience.  Then we come back to the razor/razor blade marketing strategy, with a distinct twist:  you are not giving away the razor, but making the razor (iPad or Kindle) high-priced, exclusive, and trendy and meanwhile the razor blades, the apps, become a continued steady revenue stream.

Image Credit: Jason Schneider

On a more conceptual level, the move from the browser model to the app model (where content is more likely to be accessed via smartly curated “stores” like iTunes, Amazon, or Netflix) signals the first real taming of the Wild Digital West.*

So, pay-per-peek or fully free access may be dependent on your ticket to access.  If you view through your computer browser:  free; if you view through your iPhone:  paid.

It may come down to the world according to Apple or the world according to Google, affectionately known as Apple vs. Google.  What is your idea of a frontier:  a white picket fence or wide-open spaces?

And if you are one of the people who believe Google and the Internet are ruining the newspaper industry, turn your TV off and ponder this:  In 1947, each 100 U.S. households bought an average of about 140 newspapers daily. Now they buy fewer than 50.**

And if you believe Google is ruining the news industry, they’re trying to save it, for anyone interested in professional news-gathering:

The deeper differences involve Google’s assumptions about what the news business will have to do to “engage” readers again—that is, make them willing to spend time with its printed, online, or on-air products, however much they cost. One Google employee who asked not to be named mentioned another report on journalism’s future and pointed out a section called “Focus on the User.” “They just mean, ‘Get money out of the user,’” he said. “Nowhere do they talk about how to create something people actually want to read and engage with and use.” On the topic of engaging modern users, Google feels very confident right now, and the news business feels very nervous. Apart from anything else, that certainty gap makes Google important to the future of the news.**

News, as compared to citizen journalism, blogging, and “crowdsourcing“, can not die, but news needs to be reborn to be valuable.

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas. Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

Sources:

• The Economist:  Charging for content
• The Economist:  The strange survival of ink
• *The Atlantic:  The Closing of the Digital Frontier
• BusinessWeek:  Apple vs. Google
• Newsweek:  It’s Apple vs. Google in the New Phone Fight
• **The Atlantic:  How to Save the News

Those early market adopters, the techno-weenies that stood in line for Apple’s iPhone 4, they represent only about 13.5% of the potential market.  It seems many consumer and technology products look for the big splash that Apple seems to land as a sign their company and their product are cool, hip, and successful.

Early adopters are people who play on the what is called the “bleeding edge” of technology.  These players, the early adopters, are who marketers target in the belief that these early adopters will talk up the gizmo and act as mavens and influence others.

Illustration Jean Julien - click to article

However, there’s a saying, “if you want to play on the bleeding edge, be prepared to bleed”.  In that rush to make a splash everyone talks about are you risking performance, public relations, and/or long-term growth.  What is the cost of going after the early adopters?  Well, in the Apple iPhone 4 case (actually case antennae) we are only beginning to find out.

But I digress.

This great article by Clive Thompson on Why Gadget Makers Should Target Late Adopters gives a great view of the market laggards offer, well, what about 16%?  Versus 13.5% of early adopters, laggards, or those that refuse to buy, have a 16% market share.  What about targeting laggards over early adopters?

Just a perspective:  think about those Walkman owners for a moment.  The laggards sat out the MiniDisc [incidentally, I loved the MiniDisc player and still use mine], waited for the initial slash in MP3s, then jumped in:  iPod anyone.

Success is, in the consumer tech world, may be fleeting indeed, as this roundup of opinion on Apple’s bizarre apology to their iPhone4 buyers. Incidentally, there’s a moral to the bleeding edge somewhere in there.

The laggards made the iPod, iTunes, and Apple a great success.

Now think on that…

Incidentally, since you are less worried about the early-adopter mavens you now have the time.

A couple recent articles around author Nicholas Carr’s writings and thoughts present a negative symptom of hyperlinks, mainly, reduced reader comprehension.  Too many hyperlinks or links negatively affect our ability to process and understand.  Mr. Carr’s call?  Delinkification.

Is hyperlinking a hyper waste?  Search engine optimization (SEO) aside, for the moment, the whole goal of communication is to be understood.  I find Carr’s thoughts on what hyperlinks are doing relevant to social media communication and marketing.  Well the recent Wired article is subtly title:  The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains that title will grab your attention – for a second or 2.  The premise: too many links reduce reader attention, lower reader comprehension.

I often get befuddled when I think about the page I’m on and how I got there?  What was the original article or link?  Worse yet, what did I came looking for or was intrigued by, to find myself here, and now, where am I?  Apologies to Lewis Carroll, I do often find myself down a rabbit hole …

Back in the 1980s…there was much enthusiasm about the apparent advantages of digital documents over paper ones. Many educators were convinced that introducing hyperlinks into text displayed on monitors would be a boon to learning. Hypertext would strengthen critical thinking, the argument went, by enabling students to switch easily between different viewpoints. Freed from the lockstep reading demanded by printed pages, readers would make all sorts of new intellectual connections between diverse works. The hyperlink would be a technology of liberation.

By the end of the decade, the enthusiasm was turning to skepticism. Research was painting a fuller, very different picture of the cognitive effects of hypertext. Navigating linked documents, it turned out, entails a lot of mental calisthenics—evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats—that are extraneous to the process of reading. Because it disrupts concentration, such activity weakens comprehension. A 1989 study showed that readers tended just to click around aimlessly when reading something that included hypertext links to other selected pieces of information. A 1990 experiment revealed that some “could not remember what they had and had not read.”

However, the web’s hyperlink [strangely, the word hyper seems an all-too-accurate explanation of our attention span] system does seem to increase certain functions, but this is at the decrease of other, important functions.

The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. There’s the problem of hypertext and the many different kinds of media coming at us simultaneously. There’s also the fact that numerous studies—including one that tracked eye movement, one that surveyed people, and even one that examined the habits displayed by users of two academic databases—show that we start to read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online.

A 2009 review of more than 40 studies looked at the effects of various types of media on intelligence and learning ability concluded “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.”

Plus, the Internet has a hundred ways of distracting us from our onscreen reading. Most email applications check automatically for new messages every five or 10 minutes, and people routinely click the Check for New Mail button even more frequently. Office workers often glance at their inbox 30 to 40 times an hour. Since each glance breaks our concentration and burdens our working memory, the cognitive penalty can be severe.

While I might make an argument that SEO hyperlink strategies might get you exposed to a larger audience of potential readers, if those readers don’t get what you are presenting or writing, what is that value?  What is the value of half understood blogs?  Half read public relations articles?  Half read news releases?

The ultimate trump to hyperlinks is compelling content, always.  But you can not provide compelling content [and I am guilty of this] when you have a bunch of hyperlinks buzzing around people’s head distracting more than contributing.

A solution to this might be to use more end notes or references at the end of the post?  That might let a reader read without interruption:  the old research paper method.

And on Rough Type, Nicholas Carr’s own blog, that seems to be his alternative, with reason:

Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read. Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.

The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It’s also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What’s good about a link – its propulsive force – is also what’s bad about it.

I don’t want to overstate the cognitive penalty produced by the hyperlink (or understate the link’s allure and usefulness), but the penalty seems to be real, and we should be aware of it.

But is this progress from the paper-based world?  I’m not sure we need to push the envelope on everything.  Again, what is your goal?  My goal is to be understood, not just to blast out blog posts no one reads or understands in the name of good SEO.

We’ve seen spammers since the 90s try creating flashy, and flashing, web-based neon signs to get our attention, let’s take a pause from multi-tasking, from communication saturation for single-tasking and for comprehension.

Let’s not call this a new issue, I found a blog post using hyperlinks as an engine optimization tool from 2004 bringing up many of the same points?  Perhaps I missed it before, any guesses why?

No doubt I got some things wrong, or left out some important ideas.  Please let me know what you think and suggestions you have for me to add value.

The Shallows:  What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

Every person connected to your organization is in sales and marketing.  Each interaction anyone connected to your company, your government agency, your non-profit, or your university has with the anyone is an interaction with your brand.

Every interaction with a vendor, supplier, or competitor is as important as an interaction with a potential customer.  At each touch point, your organization sells your organization’s values; each and every time.

But what does this have to do with human resources?  Traditionally?  Nothing.  But today, everything.  And to bring this into a more clear picture, think on this:  every job applicant or potential employee your organization deals represents a potential customer or potential former customer.

If you believe this, then your entire candidate tracking program should be treated as importantly as your sales people treat their sales pipeline or customer relationship management.

A recent article from the United Kingdom Poor treatment of failed job applicants ‘hurts consumer brand’.  Here are some highlights:

HR departments that fail to respond to every job applicant could be hurting their organisation by alienating potential customers, experts have warned.

Half of UK jobseekers have been left with a negative impression of an organisation following an unsuccessful job application, while a fifth have stopped buying their products as a result, according to a survey from talent assessment specialists SHL.

SHL warned that although many organisations were now inundated by applications, they risked alienating customers and damaging business performance by failing to realise the link between the employer brand and customer brand.

David Leigh, CEO of SHL, said: ‘It can be easy to dismiss applicants who aren’t suitable, but employers must remember that unsuccessful job applicants are also potential customers and ignoring them could impact the bottom line. A bad recruitment experience can be at least as damaging as a bad customer experience in-store.’

Cultivate your recruiting as another sales channel.  Even if you can not hire every great candidate you can certainly treat every candidate with respect and decency and keep them as an advocate.

Here are 5 reasons to make every candidate feel like an important customer:

1. Your candidate is a customer, can be your customer or just as easily your competitor’s;
2. A candidate with a positive feeling continues to believe in and advocate for your organization;
3. Your candidate might make a great fit in another position;
4. Your candidate might make a great fit at another time;
5. Your candidate might recommend someone as a better fit (we all know why we value employee recommendations)

As a human resource professional you are either making a business case and driving sales or you are simply a staff function.

You are either improving financial performance or you are a cost center.

As we have seen the last few years, if you are a cost center you are not a core competency – get a seat at the table with a candidate relationship management system.

Make the business case for your entire organization to treat interviewing and recruiting as a sales call.  After all, that is your job.

This article, Tech Edge: Hollow Point | Fast Company, offers a view on the latest, greatest–stop me if you’ve heard this before–social media phenomenon around “checking in” through Foursquare.

I have to agree with this article that “checking in can be fun, useful, and even indispensable, but only in certain contexts”.

However, I’m not sure checkin in as fun as being part of where you are, instead of your face buried into your smart phone, why not look up, look around, and engage in the other people who are not only geo-co-located, but may not be running for Mayor of the North Pole or trying to unlock a “foodie” badge or any of the other Foursquare badges.

Also of interest might be From Addiction to Apathy:  The Five Stages of Foursquare Use:

Stage One:  Curiosity

Stage Two:  Addiction

Stage Three:  Socialization

Stage Four:  Greed

Stage Five:  Apathy

Sounds like a political race.

No doubt Foursquare and geolocation is drawing a lot of commercial activity, but I’m not sure if it is fad, a blip, or business, marketers, and the old-world media making damn sure not to miss a trend as both try to co-opt social media and marketing 2.0 to earn money.

And here comes the latest news as of May 28th:  Foursquare nearing 1 million checkins a day.

Here’s to sanity; I hear it’s making a comeback…

Tired of trying to reach a critical mass with your blogs? Tired of sitting in front of the blank compute screen trying to channel your Ernest Hemingway?  What about podcasting?  Podcasting is one great alternative to reach millions.

“Podcasting?” You say?  ”To reach more people than my written blog?” You say?  It is true.  And here are some other reasons to podcast:

• Gives your voice, well, a voice
• User convenience to listen to where and when
• Can be delivered on many platforms
• Gets someone away from the computer or smart phone screen
• Don’t have to spell check
• Credibility
• Provides an ability to tell a story more directly than words
• It’s inexpensive

What about this humble podcast?  Can you make money?  What do you need before your start?  Who else is doing it?  Is it a fad?  Well there are a couple of “yes’s” to those questions, but only your inquisitive nature will tell you which.

Like all good business, success is measured in revenue, with a serious eye towards costs. But can you generate revenue with your podcast?  Well, you’ll need to pay attention to networks and distribution for some cues and fortunately this was covered nicely in an April, 2010 edition of Fast Company, “A Look at the Ever-Expanding Podcast Universe”. Here is an excerpt from the article with and I’ve added direct links to the sources.

Networks – The middlemen for most podcasts, networks broker ad deals and manage distribution via their servers. Revenue is usually split 50-50 with their members.

• Wizzard Media – “Not everyone who goes into iTunes looks in the podcasts section,” says Rob Walch, VP of podcaster relations, explaining Wizzard Media’s turnkey iPhone app. Such shows as Yogamazing ($2.99) and Learn Adobe Creative Suite With Terry White ($1.99) sell the app to extend their reach.
• Ace Broadcasting Network – In the ramp-up to the network’s late-March launch, Adam Carolla added a weekly CarCast; a sportscast, starring former NBA star John Salley; and a parenting show featuring his wife, Lynette, and his former radio sidekick Teresa Strasser.
• Mevio – Founded by MTV VJ Adam Curry, Mevio hosts more than 70 podcasts, such as Cali Lewis’s GeekBrief.TV, a video roundup of “shiny, happy tech news. [one of my favorites] “Podcasting is my full-time job,” Lewis says. “Mevio helped turn a hobby into a business.”

Distribution

1. iTunes – The No. 1 way people get podcasts; iTunes has a commanding 75% market share. Apple reports that there are more than 150,000 podcasts available.
   1. iPhone App – Live streaming to your cell phone is nascent now but expected to take off once data speeds and battery life improve to support it. When they do, live streaming is podcasting’s best bet to topple radio.
   2. NPR News – A free app that gives listeners access to NPR and NPR member-station programming has been downloaded more than 1 million times, driving 13 million monthly page views.
   3. ESPN Radio – Its app ($2.99) delivers live Web broadcasts of ESPN radio shows around the country plus more than 35 podcasts such as The B.S. Report, with Bill Simmons. ESPN says it’s accessed more than 1 million times monthly.
2. YouTube – [incidentally the 2nd biggest search engine, pretty compelling business case right there] Singles out notable video podcasts, such as IGN Daily Fix (video-game news), as “series.”YouTube sells ads against the shows and splits the revenue.

Revenue

1. Ads/Sponsorships – Hosts read live commercials. Almost all ads have a promo code to track response. Ads on a popular show (2 million monthly downloads) command $25 to $35 per 1,000 impressions. “There are advertisers who spend more than $100,000 a month on one show,” says Mark McCrery, CEO of Podtrac.
   • MommyCast – Dixie paper products has sponsored Gretchen Vogelzang and Paige Heninger’s show since 2005, paying more than $100,000 annually. It says podcast listeners are 40% more likely to pass on content than other digital moms.
2. Donations (The NPR Model) – Podcasters have often asked listeners to help defray costs by chipping in, but they’ve become increasingly sophisticated as to how. That means pledge drives, premiums, and recurring monthly donations rather than just one-time gifts.
3. Live Shows – Live podcast taping are increasingly a staple of a popular show, offering the opportunity to create a stronger bond with fans and generate additional revenue through ticket sales and merchandise.
   • Adam Carolla Podcast Live at the Improv Weekly events at comedy clubs and small theaters in Southern California routinely sell out at $25 a ticket. In February, Carolla decided to sell one of the two shows he tapes each night for $2.99.
   • Jim Rome
   • Rush Limbaugh
   • Ricky Gervais
4. Subscriptions – Name-brand acts, particularly radio stars, can sell on-the-go access.

source: FastCompany

Other resources:

• How To Start a Podcast - Wired Journalists
• Get a great listing of Podcasts over at Blog Talk Radio
• My lifeline Steinar Knutsen on how to start a podcast quickly, easily, and without spending a fortune

2 final thoughts:

1. Think about keeping your podcasts between 60 to 90 seconds – this keeps your content fresh and is a great opportunity for busy people to squeeze you into their busy schedules
2. As always, content is king.  That means the more you know your audience the better you can deliver valued content that might turn a stranger into a buyer

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

New to the world of Social Media?  Take a look at my recent blog How to Launch and Manage your Social Media Identity that includes a List of Best and Worst Practices for Designing a High Traffic Website to download and presentation:

Last Thursday night I gave a presentation to the Massachusetts Bay Organization Development Learning Group on how to grab hold of the marketing world that’s spinning around us and get a tangible handle on how to launch and manage a social media identity. Both the deck presentation and some recommended resources are available above and below. However, I wanted to just give a bit of context – short of having to rewrite the entire deck to fill in for my missing voice track.

Bloggers with consistently good blogs to learn the art from – more further down:

• Seth Godin
• Chris Brogan

Sources to accelerate your learning curve – more further down:

• SEO
• Inbound Marketing

Twitter – more further down:

• @SEOmoz
• @socialmediaclub
• @jblossom
• @darylmather

[You can leap over the next few paragraphs of background to get to the deck and group of links to recommended resources]

I came into social media in the past 2 years and can never claim to be an expert. I am still a student as I discovered the 2008 marketing world is a whole new game than the 2002 marketing world I learned was just completing as part of my dual marketing/finance major from my MBA School. I discovered what I had learned in 2002 was not only out-dated, but out of touch. I earnestly feel up to 80% of the marketing world, or marketing 1.0, is irrelevant in marketing 2.0, 3.0, or social media world (aka today’s marketing reality); the speed of change happening in marketing was no fault of the university.

Spending most of this decade in strategy consulting I looked forward to return to marketing. I love marketing. To me, marketing is about motivation, and strategy and organization development relies heavily on motivation and communication – made me believe the return to marketing would be smooth. My marketing experience was not chump change, I worked in marketing at Fortune 500 companies, a record company, and a host of highly visible and diverse marketing roles. Yes, well, the reality: I was not prepared.

Moving to Boston was part of the change to facilitate a return to marketing. My first goal was to look at some current writing on marketing, I discovered, The New Rules of Marketing and PR - recommended below. Great title for someone like me interested in a challenge to the norm. This book overwhelmed me at how much had change. I restarted the book with a pad of paper to take notes. From the book I began to peel back the onion of change social media brought to marketing. So, the presentation within this blog is for people who may feel a bit overwhelmed or unsure if it is even worth it. It is.

What’s great is this new marketing world is so collaborative, it’s easy to see the change relies on involvement. Let’s not pretend companies out there don’t try to co-opt social media or viral marketing to the marketing world the knew, but the transparency is obvious and so many companies know how to do it right.

Get the deck through this link or click on the picture below:

Here are recommendations:

Bloggers with consistently good blogs to learn the art from:

• Seth Godin
• Mike Volpe
• Corvida Raven
• Chris Brogan

Sources to accelerate your learning curve:

• SEO
• Inbound Marketing
• Marketing 2.0/Social Media in Practice
• Marketing 2.0/Social Media with Case Studies

Books to own:

• New Rules of Marketing and PR - David Meerman Scott
• Inbound Marketing - Brian Halligan and Darmesh Shah
• Trust Agents – Chris Brogan
• Free: the Future of a Radical Price – Chris Anderson

Recommendations of people to follow on Twitter and their direct link:

@hubspot	@incentintel	@socialmedia247	@socialmedia630	@mktgexperiments
@pistachio	@jblossom	@steinarknutsen	@socialmediaclub	@darylmather

A great reference for your online effort is this List of Best and Worst Practices for Designing a High Traffic Website* .pdf download – helpful as a quality check for getting found when writing your blog or website.

Please share the deck, the blog, or any of the recommendations with anyone you think would find value from them; that’s how I learned.

I welcome your thoughts and comments, oh, and here’s my a link to my Twitter account @TobyElwin
*source: webconfs.com

I have not heard a more savaged social media tool than the negative comments I hear about Twitter.

What do I hear time and again about Twitter? “I don’t want to hear that someone is waiting in line for coffee. I don’t care”. My response: if you have boring friends, you have boring conversations. Twitter is opt-in on who follow and who can follow you, just as LinkedIn and Facebook, are also opt-in. You choose who to follow and receive Tweets from, you don’t have to follow anyone’s Tweets. Who you associate with in your social media circle may be why you feel Twitter is a waste of time.

There is also a belief in the neophyte Twitter and social media world that the higher the quantity of followers you have correlates to you as an online maven or social media success. It is both shallow and incorrect to believe the amount of followers or the size of your network is a measure of success.

Your reputation and your organization’s reputation is built on the quality of your network: customers, suppliers, rivals, and peers. It is the power of your network, not the size. Communication in the age of saturation is quality, not quantity.

I believe Twitter, at this moment, is the most powerful social networking tool for you and your organization. You have 140 characters to make a valuable statement, introduce a valuable idea, move a conversation along, recommend a video, highlight a comment in a book or article. If you can’t say it in 140 characters, then don’t believe you can in a brochure, a presentation, or any other conversation?

I look at Twitter as a radio station: My Twitter feed is on receive mode 24 hours a day, just like a radio station broadcasts 24 hours a day. I don’t read my Twitter feed 24 hours a day, but like a radio station when I tune in I want to hear a cool new song the DJ recommends or a song I already like. If I tune in to a radio station and never hear a song I like, I don’t go back. Similarly, when I check in on my Twitter feed I want to see something valuable within a quick scan.

If you don’t like the results, prune your network, here are other options:

1. Use Twitter’s search feature to build an interesting feed of challenging sources and check in on your feed for a quick update on topics;
2. Comment, forward, and re-Tweet those of interest;
3. Make your Tweets interactive, not just consumable, like great music, turn others onto your discovery and you will become a source;
4. Another great tool for Twitter is the new list option, sort your feed into topics and then scan for ideas. What a great way to categorize important thoughts and trends, within 140 characters;
5. Post a question and watch the power of your network, alternatively discover the fizzle of your network when no one cares to respond

Twitter is a great option to keep people aware of your thoughts, what you have to say, and what your value is. It is not about how much, it is about how valued: Casio sells watches, Rolex sells watches. Both tell time. The profit per Casio watch is far less than the profit for each Rolex. Casio relies on lower grade, never confused with low quality, but a large number of sales to cumulatively drive revenue and profit. Rolex relies on high grade and high per watch profits to meet their target. Both Casio and Rolex deliver value to their user, but use a value model from two sides of the spectrum.

Does your social media metric rely on a motley mass with low quality or smaller amount with high quality?

How do you invest in your social media and what do you bring to their lives?

If you don’t understand Twitter, perhaps you don’t understand social media marketing. Don’t act like the old guard who wish Twitter and social media would go away so they can get back to selling and pushing and controlling content?

You won’t outlive the dinosaur.

• Check in on my business and talent development Twitter page @telwin
• Check in on my music and entertainment Twitter page @berklee251
• Look for the new Massachusetts Bay Organization Development Learning Group Twitter page @MassBayODLG and find out more about what the group has to offer through their LinkedIn Group page

On my last blog I received a comment I thought deserved a longer response than should be posted within the comment section. So, I decided to pick up the comment and carry it onto a new post.

The blog comment david_becker: I disagree with this article as this is a “contest” and not a viral campaign. Before positioning himself as a expert I reccomend [sic] that the author should get some Marketing 101 lessons.

My comment [now expanded]: David – thank you for the suggestion that Adecco sponsored a contest and not a viral campaign with their Labor Day offer.

Earlier, as close as 5 years ago, marketing meant: tell a compelling story about a service or product. Meanwhile, public relations meant: get media to tell a story that includes your service, product, or company.

I believe, contest or campaign, that Adecco did have a goal for this project. I assume measuring activity was important to that goal, not to just give away $500. A $500 giveaway would hardly pay for the “Help Adecco Recognize American Workers” YouTube video or the layout and copy?

As with tradition pieces of their marketing mix, fortunately, Adecco can measure their “American Workers”, web-based campaign. They use 3 common ways to track social media activity “@” to measures tweets, a “bit.ly” url to measure clicks, and YouTube’s ability measure views

I speculate, and can only speculate, Adecco’s contest had one of 3 goals:

1. reinforce Adecco’s brand through awareness
2. increase Adecco’s brand through awareness
3. increase Adecco’s market size

If I were Adecco, I would not have celebrated The American worker, Labor Day, current and potential clients, and Adecco contractors and employees with a contest, but a slightly different marketing strategy:

If asked to reinforce the Adecco brand through awareness, I would advocate Adecco send an email to the current employee and contractor database with key messages that:

• celebrate the hard work of Adecco’s employees and customers,
• acknowledge the shared dedication to excellence through current challenges, and
• reinforce the partnership of Adecco and their clients to make a difference

This email would include plenty of “calls to action” and would accomplish reinforcing Adecco’s brand. A call to action would include: forward, reply, or post to social media sites [ShareThis is a great example].

If asked to increase Adecco’s brand through awareness, I would advocate Adecco send the same copy from the email above to Adecco employees and contractors. However, I would send a second, different email to current Adecco clients and include contacts on Adecco’s leads and sales pipeline. This second email would celebrate client efforts this Labor Day and acknowledge the shared dedication to excellence that both they and Adecco have in these current challenges.

A subtle difference in the employee email would be a call to action invitation for all Adecco employees and contractors to view the client-related, email and to share the acknowledgment of the role they have helping Adecco’s clients and their employees meet the challenges in their work. This reinforces the importance all Adecco employees are to Adecco’s success.

The goals for both first and second strategy would include:

• The recognition and acknowledgment* current Adecco employees and contractors are in Adecco’s success,
• reinforce how important clients are, and
• plant a positive seed to current clients and potential clients to reach out to Adecco for further personnel strategy as Adecco shares the commitment to success

If I was asked to increase Adecco’s market size, I would advocate Adecco send the email from the second example to all Adecco employees. However, I would further customize the client email with a call to action for anyone who wants to talk about current challenges or learn more about how Adecco has helped deliver solutions to clients. The “contact us” would link to a landing page with a brief video collage of real employees and contractors as well as real client testimonials and then have a call to action to contact an Adecco representative. The key to the video is strong testimonials and further video options that show client testimonials on how Adecco understands and meets their challenges.

The goals to increase market size would also build upon the first and second strategies above as well as:

• offer client-focused, solutions-based information with a focused perspective on client’s needs,
• no mention of Adecco in the voice-over,
• no mention of Adecco statistics, and
• calls to action to share openly with others

All 3 [briefly outlined] strategies I propose would focus on stakeholder [current employees and clients] solutions. These strategies focus the message on the voice of customer/stakeholder and recognize, celebrate, and build community with Adecco; from the view of the worker, client, or community.

In the follow-up from the Marketing 101 text [incidentally, I took Marketing 101 in 2001] content that is valued becomes a story people are happy to tell. The message resonates because it solves a problem or clarifies a challenge. Building single-click call-to-actions throughout the message or story makes it easy to shared with others.

However, in Adecco’s contest, Adecco kept the focus on Adecco, to include carefully scripted conditions for cash prize eligibility. I believe either Adecco’s contest or viral marketing campaign would have been more effective if they took the customer-focused response, and if both their message and video were compelling. Adecco needs more faith in themselves to tell a story someone is energized by. If they can tell this story someone would have posted the video to YouTube, without prompt. People also would have retweeted, without a cash incentive. Perhaps less people than the contest campaign, but those that would have are the people who believe in the message and in Adecco.

Here is an example of a successful social media marketing campaign known as Will It Blend. The measurement of success: one YouTube had 7,000,000 views, yes, seven million views and sales increased 700%, yes seven hundred percent; all without a single contest offer for cash.

Postscript 1: I live in Cambridge and enjoy walking the streets of this creative, vibrant, eclectic city. When someone comes up and interrupts meet to ask if I have time to take a survey or to answer a question, whether I have the time or not, I most likely will not give them my time, even if I know the topic up front – and I do, I do care about the whales… Marketing 101 is the strategy of interruption.

Postscript 2: My reporter and journalist friends tell me when they get an assignment, the first place they go to research is Google. As a former press coordinator for both a record company and a life sciences company this interests me. Why is this interesting? Well, the first place I go for research on a product, person, company, or news story is Google too. The public relations side of Marketing 101 is to interrupt media with a controlled message.

The Marketing 2.0 objective:  if it is remarkable, people will talk about it

*Frederick Herzberg’s brilliant study “Motivation to Work“ applies here.

Viral marketing happens when a story or idea takes off and spreads. The story is spread, like a virus, from one person to another through Twitter, the blog world, email, and YouTube – to name a few.

In the online community being the object of the viral campaign can bring instant fame, for free, but can you buy viral? If you or your company are being talked about, linked to, tweeted, and blogged about, then other people are telling your story.

Being viral is like being cool, but can you buy cool? Can a company spend money and resources to convince the world they are cool? Can you plot, build, and release a viral marketing campaign? Is it really viral when money is offered as a reward to Tweet or forward their message?

It seems some companies want to leap over appealing, interesting content and buy their way into the viral marketing game by enticing others to build buzz. This is the attempt of one company:

	Help Adecco Group NA recognize American workers this Labor Day – you could win $100!
	Adecco Group NA needs your help to recognize all American workers this Labor Day. By helping us, you’ll do your part to thank hard-working Americans for their contributions and you’ll also have a chance to win a $100 American Express gift card! Here’s how: Follow @AdeccoGroup on Twitter. Don’t tweet? Join the revolution at twitter.com. On your Twitter page, simply tweet “Just entered to win $100 by helping Adecco Group honor American workers. Follow @AdeccoGroup and retweet http://bit.ly/QEuCe“* Contest ends September 8, 2009 at 11:59pm EST. Good luck and thanks! Five winners will be selected at random. Remember, every time you retweet the link to our Labor Day video before September 8, 2009 you’ll have another chance to win the $100. Thanks for following us on Twitter, good luck and enjoy your Labor Day weekend! *Maximum tweets per day is 5.

©2009 AdeccoGroup NA

If you do not wish to receive any further emails from Adecco, please click here.

Adecco
175 Broadhollow Road
Melville, NY 11747

This entire campaign is an attempt to be viral:

• the offer for us to help the company recognize American workers
• the offer to win $100
• the call for help, a second time, to recognize American workers
• a third call to help them, but this time calling us out to do our part to thank hard-working Americans
• the offer of $100 as a company thank you for helping the company help American workers
• the request to follow their company on Twitter [who does this benefit?]
• the request that once we join Twitter, we retweet their exact message, that includes their link to a YouTube video
• a link to their YouTube video created to honor the American worker, but is really a commercial for their services as a temporary job placement agency – they will tell you statistics as they salute their role and their people
• their use of bit.ly and YouTube and @AdeccoGroup to track responses

In our marketing 2.0 world you have to provide relevant content. If your goal is to create content you hope will create buzz, this is retrofitting a marketing 1.0 strategy and strains credibility.

Understand your audience and write or present appealing, interesting content. If your message is valued for content and providing solutions people find valuable your goal is achieved. Download David Meerman Scott’s brilliant Viral Marketing ebook that includes many case studies and actionable tips.

After all, viral marketing should not make others sick.

Appendix: two days after I posted this, an illuminating article The Truth About Labor Day ran in the Boston Sunday Globe, Ideas Section.

See follow-up Viral marketing and Twitter gone right

Marketing 2.0 is about revolution, not evolution. Where marketing and public relations (PR) of the 1.0 world relied on distribution control, Marketing 2.0 relies on free distribution and the creative commons. This is less evolution and more revolution.

The printing press was the key to unlock information. The printing press broke down the carefully regulated information gate. With the printing press, information was produced and replicated faster than ever. However, information remained unavailable to all. Information was still regulated by those who controlled distribution.

Information relied on distribution. Distribution relied on money.  So those with the money could tell people what to buy, what to read, what to wear, what to eat, what was good, what was bad. People found this information easing into more prominent places: leaflets, flyers, billboards, newspapers, magazines, books, radio, and television. The printing press gave birth to Marketing 1.0.

The constant shotgun blast of information made the public grow weary. The marketer had to find new distribution channels. The business of distribution (marketing) found new vehicles to spread information, to assault, and to interrupt without permission:

• when we ignore the black & white advertisement, they try color;
• when we tire of color, they try the full-page add;
• when we tire of the full-page, they assault our mailbox;
• when we throw away their mail, they ring our telephone;
• when we stop answering our phone during dinner, they increase radio advertisements;
• when we tire of more commercials than songs, they increase TV commercials;
• when we tire of TV commercials, they SPAM our…on and on.

Constant assault and ever louder, obnoxious efforts to overcome TiVo, the VCR, our iPod, and our Internet to gain our attention. We are tired. We cope, with filters. We cope, by blocking their information. We stop reading, we are tired of your marketing and public relations hype everywhere we turn throughout our day. And since they hijacked our entertainment by thinking it is a new source for their distribution, we have are now permanently skeptical of all advertisement and public relations and the snake oil salesmen who write and speak this way.

The Internet was the key to unlock distribution. The Internet broke down the distribution gate. The Internet sped information distribution to the speed of thought. The Internet gave birth to Marketing 2.0.

We are now connected beyond wires and beyond borders. We now own distribution. We have taken Facebook and Twitter and MySpace, and blogs, and we now come to rely on each other to recommend what we could read, eat, listen to, buy, or try. More than ever our connection allows us to recommend what and who to avoid. Two industries acutely effected from the loss of distribution control are the publishing industry and the music industry; there is a new business model for each, out there somewhere. Today distribution control is no longer in either the publishing or music industry’s containment business model.

We have the power to reach millions of people faster then a multi-billion dollar, corporate, press release. We have the power and our social network believes we are more important than your press release. This is no longer 1.0, we are firmly in 2.0 and I bring you the rules:

1. understand your audience has the same distribution as you do, they can blog and Tweet faster than you or your hierarchy can edit and control spin;
2. understand who your audience is, don’t try to own your audience provide value to your audience;
3. understand what your audience values, not the features or benefits you want to sell;
4. lose control (a); if you want us to sign up, we move on;
5. lose control (b), stop asking for a wall of information that you want to build your leads database; if you provide valued content and there is a link and contact information, people will find and recommend you [would you rather have 100 leads of dubious quality or 10,000 downloads and 50 responses? Know what Google search engines value];
6. think like a publisher and make all content valuable for every flavor of your customer;
7. make sure it is easy for us to forward your information, if we find it valuable, we will distribute it for you, when it is really valued we even recommend it;
8. make sure there are always links back to a source or call to action, always make it easy for us to dig deeper;
9. stop spamming press releases, journalists Google you, they don’t look at a stack of your jargon-filled press releases;
10. post all your news and press releases on your website, that’s where we go for your news and that is where Google goes to index your information;
11. go where your audience is or provide all the tools for your audience to build their own happening;
12. stop co-opting Twitter, You Tube, and Facebook, we are faster than you;
13. when you provide content you build organically: become the source for information and problem solving and you and your company will become known;
14. ask permission;
15. forget about your viral campaign, provide value and we make your content viral;
16. we don’t care about you or your product, we care about how you or your product makes our life better – so get to the point without jargon, better yet, if you come recommended, I will find you

Twitter is not your marketing 2.0 weapon to retrofit marketing 1.0 theory. Those that try to retrofit Twitter and Facebook to 1.0 marketing are closest to extinction. Those that treat white papers and webinars like a virtual trade show booth to collect business leads are closest to extinction. And if you smother us on Twitter, we’ll move on and it will take you months of market data and research to find us again.

Lose control, provide content, make it easy to share content, provide tools for people to congregate, and help them celebrate their passion.

Marketing 1.0: the distribution is the value; command and control.

Marketing 2.0: the content is the value; contribute and collaborate.

Marketing is dead, long live the creative commons marketing world.

*Marketing heretics I follow:

• Seth Godin
• Laura Fitton
• David Meerman Scott
• HubSpot and HubSpot’s Mike Volpe
• Chris Brogan

As a follow-up to my Twitter is a waste of time blog, I provide a 4th example about the application of Twitter and social media communication:

Late night, July 4, Sarah Palin uses Twitter to threaten to sue the entire Internet.

Sarah Palin’s lawsuit tweets:

• AKGovSarahPalin To see full text of the letter from my attorney on baseless allegations of past 24hrs check http://ktuu.images.worldnow.com/images/incoming/Release_for_7-4-09-1.pdf [link broken, here is an updated link]
• AKGovSarahPalin See letter from my attorney on baseless allegations of past 24hrs via http://gretawire.blogs.foxnews.com/2009/07/04/from-palins-lawyer/ [link broken]

Politics Twitter-style.

Sarah Palin’s lawyer wrote that “we will be exploring legal options this week to address such defamation”. Sarah Palin has singled out blogger Shannyn Moore and any of those who re-publish “this defamation”, such as Huffington Post, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

Sarah Palin’s lawyer continues, the Palins will not allow them [Shannyn More, Huffington Post, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post] to propagate defamatory material without answering to this in a court of law.

Though the New York Times and Washington Post have yet to write anything about this, Van Flein said he believed they were asking questions. What I’ve been informed is that they’ve been interviewing people in Wasilla about this, and have tried to interview the governor’s parents about it, Van Flein said.

Here is a report from Anchorage Daily News Palin attorney decries ‘defamatory’ rumors.

Here is the Palin v. Moore defamation brief.

Attacking media assures one thing:  keeping your name in the media.

I have a question, should she give up the @AKGov part of her Twitter name?  Update:  she has.

Sarah Palin proves even within Twitter’s 140 characters you can effectively communicate.

Twitter has changed the way people communicate. The marketing world, as it was known, has been carpet bombed. The rules have changed. The roles have changed.

In a series of earlier blogs I talk about communication in the age of saturation, so I won’t repeat those points. However, I will revisit one reality: people don’t trust marketing and public relations any longer. Firstly, people want a clear value proposition articulated to their point of view, not from yours. The features or benefits you believe are not the features and benefits they may believe. Secondly, the most powerful motivator in today’s purchase decision is a recommendation.

Do you have a Twitter strategy? Does your Twitter strategy consist of ignoring Twitter or proclaiming, I don’t get what the big deal is?

Twitter is free to join and you can set up with an account in a matter of just a few minutes. Improper use of Twitter is a costly mistake to you and to your business. There are many ways to find trouble within 140-character messages,140 being the maximum amount of characters per Tweet.

Here are some ways Twitter [and other social media] can be used:

• Provide a community experience
• Provide expertise and show your authority in a niche
• Make yourself the center of happenings
• Drive interest to your blogs and websites
• Brand yourself
• Connect direct with your stakeholders
• Provide your stakeholders a reason to advocate for you

No business discussion* should advanced without some proposed measure or goal. Return on investment (ROI) is a very popular business driver and deserves its place in the evaluation of any business discussion. Executives may demand a Twitter ROI. This is an attempt to derail or discount Twitter, not an attempt to learn and leverage a Twitter strategy.

I respect ROI. I believe what you can’t measure, you can’t change. Today, however, many social media and web 2.0 strategies use new kinds of measures and new business metrics. Like charting new territory, try new measures, monitor the results and let the data drive business discussions, not punishments.

Instead of ROI to define Return on Investment, consider ROI to mean Return on Inclusion. Return on inclusion measures every click on a link you provide. It was clicked because there was a promise of payoff for that person. Did you payoff their effort? The more information you provide, the more informed a customer is to either make a decision or to recommend your service, that is why you Tweet.

When you include people, you rely on their ability to reach their network for you. Let their words tell a story of your good or service. Twitter leverages ratings, filters, and recommendations as some of the most important marketing advances the Internet provides. The amount of Twitter followers, the amount of re-Tweets, the amount of #s all can provide business professionals with measures.

Those who remain skeptical should keep in mind the points above and then look at 3 ways Twitter was used:

1. Restaurants Find Twitter a Cheap Effective Marketing Tool
2. Dell Computer Uses Twitter to Drive $3,000,000 Sales
3. Musician Amanda Palmer makes $19,000 in 10 hours ***adult language

I invite you and your team to revisit Twitter. With both research and an open mind you might find Twitter can enable your marketing communications goals. Social media and web 2.0 provide a bucket of opportunities, but don’t let the technology drive your decision, let your strategy decision identify technology. Having a social media presence should be a goal, objective, or action from strategy.

I would love to hear from you to talk further about your strategic plans and how Twitter or other options could help. You can find my Twitter account through this link Toby’s Twitter account.

After I initially posted, Kevin Liebl reminded me how important listening is in today’s marketing as well as another Twitter twist. Read Mr. Liebl’s blog here: How Businesses can Leverage Twitter and tell him I sent you.

*The difference between a business decision and a personality-based decision is that a business decision advocated with quantitative and qualitative data, not ego.

In 2 prior blogs, Communication in the age of saturation, part 1 and part 2, I attempt to outline our communication challenge to break through filters and biases people set up to manage their information overload.

In the spirit of Henry David Thoreau’s quote, what I began by reading, I must finish by acting. I want to present a powerful display that might help in your communication assessment and planning effort:

The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas

The Conversation Prism 1900 X 1200 [also available in other file sizes through this link for Conversation Prism].

Since money and time are both finite resources we all struggle to manage, this Conversation Prism visual may provide a strategic tool to maximize your effort. When you look at this visual representation think through:

• What vehicles do you currently us?
• Do you use current communication vehicles or options in their best context?
• What communication vehicles might provide better results?
• How might limited resources maximize your options?

Also, note the importance of feedback in communication.

My humble thanks to Brian Solis and JESS3. Please visit their site at: http://theconversationprism.com/

Of course if you can’t frame your communication to provide value, please go directly to jail and do not pass go…

Is your communication effort designed to interrupt people?

Think of the filters you put up around your world to manage the saturation of information and decisions you have to make. What percentage of today’s decisions do you make from a telemarketer, billboard, or yellow pages? Conversely, what decisions do you make from a friend’s recommendation, a web page, or a Google search. How can you expect others to not weed your effort through filters?

Even an effective multi-tasker is flooded with tweets, social media messages (Facebook), RSS feeds, emails, phone calls, and text messages. Your message can not be about what you think they need to know. Our challenge as communicators is to get our message delivered through the deluge of information and communication. People don’t care what you are selling. People want to know what makes their life better.

To cope with marketing communication saturation, people use filters to weed messages out. Google is a filter. RSS feed subscriptions are opt-in filters. The filter cuts out noise. People also rely on recommendations to decide what to trust. Websites that use “if you bought this you would like this”, or tools similar to Zagat’s ratings filter information. A trusted friend’s recommendation is a filter.

Your communication strategy should be based on what customers want, not what you think they need. They certainly don’t care what makes your strategy a success – whether you are a CEO or a brand manager, don’t delude yourself thinking otherwise. How do you find out what customers need? Listen and ask and provide vehicles for feedback. As you look through the below communication life cycle, think back to a leader or marketing strategy you executed, did they include all these choices:

• Listen
• Research
• Form relationships with folks
• Conduct outreach and response
• Decide on information channels
• Decide on communication channels
• Measure or collect responses
• Report
• Repeat at least once and modify without ego

Stop telling (selling/yelling) and start engaging. Think of your communication as if you were a publisher not a marketer. Moving from interruption to engagement provides a view as valued marketing communications. Start this by thinking about magazines, environments, and sources that you trust for information? You only go back to those sources as long as they provide value and keep your interest. You move on when they are no longer relevant.

Buy in is a dead concept. Write, speak, and communicate to impress potential stakeholders with creative, relevant content. Respect your stakeholder”s attention and time. Your stakeholders filter, evaluate, and decide to act on your message in their degree of commitment. Evaluate your communication strategy from interruption to anticipation or championed communication.

Better still: invite your stakeholders to advocate for you.

The goal of communication is to be understood.

Typically, the first piece of communication advice is: know your audience. When you know your audience – their interests, their lingo, their needs – you better relate to their communication style. When you know their style you can write and speak in a way that they understand. Of course once your audience understands they can then act.

In this age of communication saturation your employees, customers, and other stakeholders are under the same constant communication barrage as we are. To know your audience means you know the barriers, channels, and filters in place that block communication.

If received, people further filter communication by how it will:

• make their life better or worse;
• hurt or help what they need to do;
• help them gain or lose;
• make their job harder or easier;
• answer how much or how little it costs (value), and
• positively or negatively affect their ego

Our connected world [interestingly, when wireless we are still connected] has not altered the advice to know your audience. We know today your audience not only sits at their desk in your office or company, but may sit or stand or walk or run any where in the world.

You also have to expect your audience and management will filter your message through their wants, values, needs, and emotions. Expect your audience and managers to editorialize as they deliver their version of your message. When you step to a podium to give a presentation expect an audience armed with the technology to tweet as you speak. They are editorializing before you have an opportunity to finish.

Anything you write or speak about rarely translates as you expected. Your communication has to be strategically aligned to avoid serious barriers between your communication and an expected call to action.

A sound communication strategy should provide the difference between getting something done and getting something accomplished.