So many colliding streams, I’m nearly ready for social channel surfing.

I blogged earlier about the one feature I really wish Facebook would address.  I’ve friended about 500 people in Facebook.  As I described in the earlier post, I’d like the ability to create, manage and publish to a variety of "friend populations" that I control.  Not all friends are the same, nor do I want to share the same media and or content with all my friends - and frankly, many of them likely could care less about much of what I share.  The current model sets up a lowest common denominator experience or shotgun approach when what I really want is to create and follow social channels.

So, not only would I like to be able to create and manage discreet channels of friends, I’d like to be able to toggle through and or subscribe differently to these different groups.  For example, maybe I have one group I want mobile updates for what they are doing, but others I only want to view on-demand.  Ok, this adds complexity and the use case may be at the margins today for how people are using FB, but it doesn’t seem that big a stretch for where this stuff needs to go.

Would love to know how others are handling this.  Heck, maybe there’s a slick way to do this in FB today and I just don’t know it!  Fill me in, quick!

Sean

Popularity: 39% [?]

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Sharing another in a series of slides I’m using in talks this fall:

I generally can’t get through this slide without some reference to Maslow’s hierarchy and the role the age of individualism is having on the portability of talent - more and more people operating at the level of self actualization. This also interplays nicely with Friedman’s notion of a Flat World and my own expected emergence of flattened companies.

Input, ideas and additions welcome.

Sean

Popularity: 36% [?]

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You never know how you will come out after a 20 minute interview for a few comments in a story, but I think this came together ok and overall it’s a good piece.  Have a read of Helping Customers Help Each Other Online in Inc. Technology online.

There’s also worthwhile reference in the story to a company called Get Satisfaction that is worth exploring.

Sean

Popularity: 26% [?]

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I’ve been doing a number of presentations as of late on social media and I thought I’d share a slide I’ve been using that I call the "5 P’s of Social Media."  I figured posting here might be a good place to get some feedback to make this even better.

The marketers out there will remember the 4 P’s of marketing popularized by E. Jerome McCarthy:  Product, Pricing, Promotion and Placement.

In the 2001 book High Intensity Marketing by Idris Mootee, the author proposed a new set of 4 P’s for the Internet age: Personalization, Participation, Peer-to-Peer, and Predictive Modeling.  Overall, I like this model and had never seen it before doing some research in prep for writing this blog post (I’ll have to get the book).  While social media has matured a great deal in the 6 years since this book came out, I think the model applies very well.

What I was looking for was a prescriptive and informative model for describing the various forms of social media as well as the underlying components required for describing a social media strategy.  Here’s what I came up with:

note:  It’s a build slide that starts with People and builds clockwise.

In fairness, it probably needs to be 6 P’s by adding "Purpose" - but for me, purpose is the overall talking point for the slide, therefore, you don’t see it here.  And 6 P’s? - Getting carried away!!

Here’s a short summary of definitions (though this is made more real by using examples that are relevant to the audience).

• People:  The talkers, authors, contributors - empowerment of the individual.
• Places:  All the diverse venues the conversations can take place in.
• Process:  What collaboration (and moderation) you enable, how you entitle contributor types and how you integrate with existing systems.
• Platform:  Where and how you tie together the places, processes, people (identity/privacy) and privileges.
• Patterns:  Presenting, tracking, filtering, measuring, monitoring and decision support.

That’s it…let me know what you think, what I missed and what examples you might use.

Thanks,

sean

Popularity: 40% [?]

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In any given week I have the opportunity to talk with both the web 2.0 savvy and those that are still asking the fundamental question of "what is it?"  There’s no shortage of resources for answering this question, but as I’ve said before, the same explanation doesn’t resonate with everyone.

So, I thought I’d add another explanation that has been very useful to me as of late.

It goes something like this.  Most web users arrive on web pages via search - ultimately they are looking for something or have a question.  The problem with most web sites is they are lonely, closed experiences.  Visit any given web site and there could be 10s, 100s, 1000s, 10000s of other users on the site at the same time (depending on the size/popularity of the site) - but their presence on the site is invisible to you.  If you don’t find what you’re looking for, what do you do?  Back to search.

What web 2.0 does is it exposes the presence and activities of all these other users.  It turns a static experience into a social experience.  Better yet, it gives you access to the collective knowledge of all those other users.  And perhaps, most importantly it gives the users social proof that this is a "good" place to be.

Imagine you are in an unfamiliar city looking for a place to eat.  You see two restaurants.  The first one has no other customers in it…and the second one is crowded.  Which one do you want to eat at?  What if there’s a 15 minute wait at the crowded one?  If you’re like me you will go to the busy place.  All that visible evidence tells you a great deal about the restaurant that reassures you this is the place to be.

Now, it could be that other restaurant just opened and actually has better food, but perception, comfort and risk aversion naturally pushes you to the busy place.

It’s easy enough to pull this analogy apart and describe all sorts of web 2.0 sites that don’t really fit this example perfectly - that’s not the point.  The point is finding ways to describe this evolution that resonate with the broadest set of people possible.  If you want to be a web 2.0 evangelist to your friends, your mom, your legal department, your IT department or your executives, but they don’t seem to get it, who has the problem?  Not them, you’re the evangelist.  It’s your job to continue to find the right way to tell the story until you see that oh so sweet "ah ha!" moment.

Sean

Popularity: 22% [?]

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Some time back I asked in a blog post if "Google is stealing equity from your brand?"  It struck me that brands don’t really consider what shows up "next to them" in their search results with the same discipline and care as they consider the issue at retail in traditional brick and mortar environments.

Today’s headline regarding American Airlines suing Google, reminded me of this post.  I don’t know all  the merits of the case, but none the less, it is an issue for brand managers and web strategists - and on the surface seems wrong to me.  In this case, AA keywords like "AAdvantage" are returning AA competitor results next to American’s paid result.

Google stands by the actions in the article:

Google spokesperson says: … confident that our trademark policy strikes a proper balance between trademark owners’ interests and consumer choice, and that our position has been validated by decisions in previous trademark cases."

But interestingly when I tried this search in Google this morning I saw only one sponsored link result - and it was for American.  Here’s the view I got:

And Live Search for sake of equity (nothing by AA here):

I wonder what’s up with the apparent change in the search results this morning?  And more importantly, I wonder how much brand managers are thinking through these issues.  Having competitors appear with your keywords is perhaps troubling…but there are far more disturbing links that could show up next to your brand!

Sean

Popularity: 15% [?]

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In The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman explores the impact of globalization on economics, business and competitive marketplaces.  It’s a worthwhile read that has been reviewed by many bloggers - so I won’t here.  In the book, Friedman outline’s the 10 drivers of flattening and the more recent convergence of these flatteners driving even more rapid change in the industry.

This whole line of thinking has had me thinking about issues of governance, decision making and innovation velocity.  The principles of a flat world can give you strategic advantage, but "flat companies" will WIN in the flat world. 

So, what are the signs of an organization that is not flat?

• How many people between the "front line" and the CEO (span of control and org depth)?
• How close are executives to customer listening systems - and how accountable are they held for the results?
• How difficult is cross functional collaboration? (test:  "us or them" speak vs "we" speak)
• How fast (if at all) do ideas flow from the front line to the decision makers (CXOs)? 
• How many people need to be in a room to make a decision?
• How quickly can you respond to competitive pressures and or changes in the marketplace?

I’m sure this is not comprehensive and would love to see you add to the list.

Keep in mind, a flat organization is not a democracy - success is still dependent on strong and empowered leadership.  I think the question is how quickly and accurately leaders are provided with the inputs necessary to make decisions.  And once made, how efficiently do those decisions flow back out and turn into action at the front line.

Sean

Popularity: 42% [?]

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ok, I’m hardly the first to comment on this.  While I really like what FB has done, I don’t like that nothing inside FB is discoverable without having a Facebook account and logging in.  One of the issues that most troubles me is the proliferation of speciality groups with tons of people joining and then nothing happening in them.  Here’s what I see (and have done personally)…

1)  Person creates well intentioned group with a good topic.

2)  (oops several other semi-related groups already exist).

3)  Person posts to their groups Wall and starts a few questions with a discussion board.

4)  People join the group and early arrivals say something on the wall or in the discussion board.

5)  Nothing.

6)  I now belong to a bunch of groups where very little is going on.  hmmm.

What do you think?  Have you seen the same thing?  Am I just in the wrong groups!!  I feel like this is tightly related to the walled garden issue and community landscape that is continuing to fracture and specialize without really addressing the core issues of discoverability and usability for the masses.

Sean

Popularity: 21% [?]

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If you’ve read my blog for awhile (or heard me talk), you’ll know I’m a big fan of social bookmarking.  A few months ago, I talked about the notion of Tag Drafting.

Well, the good folks at Common Craft have pulled together another in their "Plain English" series…this one called, Social Bookmarking in Plain English.  Check it out, I highly recommend it.  Great work Lee and Sachi!

Sean

Popularity: 13% [?]

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I thought that statement in-and-of-itself worthy of a blog post…I played quite a lot with Facebook today (adding friends, trying out apps, joining groups, etc).  I have to say, I’m impressed.  Opening up FB to developers has created a wealth of apps (a few quality issues not withstanding) that are interesting from a social connections and commerce standpoint.  My favorite of the day:  iLike.  There also seems to be a huge # of what look like pretty useless apps, but the long tail is emerging and it’s fairly easy to let democracy (and your friends) before you help you find the better apps.

Get with it…if you aren’t using it already, now’s a good time to give it a try.

sean

Popularity: 14% [?]

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