It was a pleasure to join Andy for a Podcast with Paul on his well know Buzz Marketing site.  Give a listen here.

sean

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Ok, I’m featured a bit in this as I was interviewed, but even without that built-in bias I think this is one of the better pieces I’ve read.  I particularly appreciate that it articulates a broad set of values across corporate silos to developing and engaging in social media strategies.  Overall the analysis as well as guidance make this a recommended read.

Social Media Monitoring and Analysis:  Generating Consumer Insights from Online Conversation

sean

Popularity: 97% [?]

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Several people sent me this article recently knowing my interest on the topic of influentials and their role in networks.

[Ironically, reading some of the discussion this article has spurred makes me think that the article that de-bunks the influencer model actually re-enforces the influencer effect on the topic of how information flows.]

I haven’t made it a secret that I have my own effort underway to author a book on the topic.  In my role the past 5 years at Microsoft I’ve been a central figure in developing, leading and advocating for the importance of finding, thanking and engaging influentials/mavens/experts/advocates/enthusiasts.  I’m guilty of co-mingling these terms which is, I think, contributing to the hubbub about this topic.  The practical side of me resists the semantic debate of tearing these terms apart and trying to define the parameters of each.  For one thing, it’s been done before and didn’t seem to resolve the debate.  For another, it adds complexity which makes understanding the principles and the actions to be taken more difficult.  Now, I’m not advocating laziness here!  This is a complex topic - the issue is in “making it simple, but not simplistic.”

The article focuses on the seemingly opposite views of experts on either side of the influencer debate…and in all fairness, an article that supported the influencer model would hardly be worth publishing - as the prevailing view, writing in favor would hardly be newsworthy.  The primary focus of the article revolves around a profile of Duncan Watts (recent Yahoo researcher and network-theory scientist on sabbatical from Columbia University).  The net of it (which is overly simplified) is that networks matter, but influencers within the network have at best a random impact on adoption/trend launching.  And giving the choice between trying to target market to influentials vs mass marketing that mass marketing is the right choice.   Duncan provides a fair amount of research and simulations to back up his views and I’d say his research is worth reading and understanding.  Not to mention he is colorful in his disagreement with Gladwell.  Find more on Duncan here.

On the “other side” of the debate, the columnist interviewed Ed Keller of Keller Fay and co-author of The Influentials.  This portion of the article highlights a “heated rebuttal” between Keller and Watt’s that occurred last fall at an ARF event. 

Before I go on…some disclosure:  I was at that ARF event as a panelist who followed Ed and Duncan’s “heated debate.”  I’m not sure how or who characterized this as a heated debate.  I think that was part of the intent of the organizers - but it was hardly heated.  It wasn’t heated by west coast standards, much less for New York!  Further disclosure, I have met and co-presented with Ed a few times and have met and talked with Duncan.  I’m also a co-chair of an influencer council recently started by WOMMA - so I have intersected with these individuals and the topic many times.  I was also interviewed for this article by Clive Thompson, but didn’t make the story - I understand why - I wasn’t talking about marketing.

My panelist response to the debate was essentially that I disagree with both of them (which also means I agree with both on some points).  For those that have read my blog for awhile, none of this will come as a surprise. 

Here’s the deal.  Defining influencer strategy with the narrow end-benefit of driving trends/adoption with push based marketing I think is the wrong thing to do.  Whether that alone will work or not probably depends more on how good the product is than on who or how you target.  This is not what interests me around the topic of influentials and I think constrains the research parameters in ways that generate multiple truths.  For example - in Duncan’s simulations, the assumptions are around what I’ll call untouched consumers (they had no previous interaction with the product).  In this scenario, I think Duncan is right, it is luck if you get something to go viral.  Influencers (even in Duncan’s research) can extend the reach, but can’t guarantee success - there are too many other variables in the system so all you can prove is that success is random.  (Note:  Nothing guarantees success, it’s about increasing probability). 

In Ed’s extensive research, he’s demonstrated (and documented in a recommended read:  The Influentials) that an elite 10% of participants in communities are 2-5 times more likely to engage in advice-giving conversations.  Thus, given limited investment dollars to drive word of mouth, influencer based outreach should be a fundamental part of any thoughtful campaign.  Ed also rightfully reminds us that in business there are no guarantees and that strategies that increase probability are generally good business choices vs research simulations looking to pave the final mile. 

The research I’ve been a part of certainly supports a core part of Ed’s conclusion about the most engaged 10%.  We’ve seen time and again what I’d simplistically describe in the following taxonomy for participation in technical communities (1/9/90):

• <1% of unique participants in a community are essentially “answer people” and contribute in extremely disproportionate quantity (both pure volume and average days active per month).  The side bar here would be that quantity does not always = quality, but again, statistically those that are not contributing quality don’t sustain at this level over time - it is largely self governing and not difficult to parse the noise from the value based contributors.
• ~9% of unique participants demonstrate similar behaviors as the above elite answerers, but at more modest levels.  This correlates reasonably with Ed’s 10%.
• ~90 of unique participants lurk/contribute.
• note:  This taxonomy is admittedly a bit simplified.  I blogged a deeper opinion on taxonomy some months back here.

While the majority of my experience is with tech communities, fellow community managers across many different areas have reported the same general distribution.

This is where I’ll circle back to the trouble with semantics.  What does an influencer influence?  Product awareness/sales?  Product usage?  Product innovation?  An influencer strategy that is designed for maximum benefit has to encompass all of these functions.  As a I wrote earlier, I’m not a fan of the term “influencer marketing” as it generally is used to describe a catalyst for Word of Mouth that assumes information/communication flows in one direction from A to B to C, etc.  This may or may not be the case, but if you want to increase probability (as well as many other business benefits) the flow has to be bi-directional. 

Specific example:  What if your engaged influencers never told anyone about your products, but gave you 10X the feedback on how to improve the quality or relevance of your products.  Is the influencer model wrong?  No - the business goal was different - or at least more complex than one dimension focus on buzz generation.

Net net:  Duncan’s research is interesting and I plan to continue to follow it, but it feels apples to oranges to compare that research to the world of influencer engagement that I support.

Sorry for the long post, I doubt I have yet simplified this topic as of yet…more to consider.

sean

Popularity: 99% [?]

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This was sent to me today:

http://www.mcdonalds.com/contact/contact_us/unsolicited_ideas.html

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This is a nice article about local technical community contributor (and Microsoft MVP) Darren Liu in Chicago - hobby blends with career blends with “flat earth” help and support of users in native China.

Thought I’d share.

Sean

Popularity: 94% [?]

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I went to a lot of conferences last year - this year I’m cutting back (at least I’m planning to).  Rarely do the sessions stand up to the value of connecting with peers.  That’s a big part of why I enjoy unconferences.  Unconferences are built around the concept of Open Space (if you’re new to the idea).  I like this format in that it allows for owning your own level of participation, areas of interest and contributions.  Often, it’s people in the audience that really have the most value to add, but traditional conferences with prescribed agendas can limit the contributions of the expertise that gathers. 

Forum One puts on a number of events throughout the year (see schedule).  I like the smaller venues and intimacy of these discussions.  Unfortunately, this year a calendar conflict means I can’t make it to Santa Fe in April for the Online Community Business Forum - recommended! 

So, having primarily attended West Coast events, I’m heading to New York!  I’ll be attending the Online Community Unconference East in NYC on Feb. 21st.  I’m looking forward to connecting with the east coast crowd I don’t see as often and/or haven’t met yet.  If you’re looking at your calendar and considering conferences, I hope you’ll take a look at this one.

I have discount code for this event as well!  Drop me a message in Facebook, DM me on twitter or email: seanod (at) live (dot) com and I’ll send it along.

Hope to see you,

Sean

Popularity: 64% [?]

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Thanks Aaron Strout over at the We are Smarter than Me blog for hosting a recent podcast.  It went up today, so I thought I’d share the pointer.  Give a listen and let me know your thoughts.

Sean

Popularity: 60% [?]

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A few days ago I blogged about the User Generated Help and How-to Content model.  Part of the challenging is managing the transition from static content forward into more dynamic or user generated content.  Today, this blog post was shared with me. This was written by a Directory Services Support Engineer at Microsoft and posted to the Directory Services team blog.  In this example, the experts behind the support scenes are using their blog as a tool to help organize and improve discoverability of the best knowledgebase content available on their topic. 

Nice, simple idea to start bridging these two content worlds.

Sean

Popularity: 62% [?]

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I had the good fortune to eat Sushi, have some 1:1 discussion and participate in a short video for Jeremiah this past month while he was in Seattle attending the Web Community Forum.  The video gave me a chance to talk a bit more about finding, thanking and engaging influential’s as part of developing a more effective advocacy and user listening strategy.  Ultimately, I like to think of engagement in the following lifecycle:

• Satisfaction is really just "brushing your teeth" - basic hygiene.  You have users who believe what you provide meets their needs.  Nothing more or less.  The barrier to be replaced here is pretty low.  And realistically, few mature companies have large scale customer dissatisfaction issues - they more likely have large scale customer apathy issues.
• Loyalty is obviously a higher achievement.  At this point, you’ve earned users who show up in your Net Promoter scores and exhibit behaviors of likelihood to recommend. 

In my experience, this is where a lot of the measurement ends.  However, this is short of the destination that brands we envy elicit from their customers.  Does loyalty really capture the essence of the Harley Davidson or Four Seasons customers?  It doesn’t capture how I feel about Cookshack! The word "customer" is probably not even the right word in these cases!

• Affinity is an even stronger measure of alignment with a brand, product or service.  What does it look like?  The behavior I look for is "likelihood to defend."  If someone "attacks" your product, service or brand, does someone show up to defend it?  We all know the credibility that the brand itself has in defending its products or services - pretty limited.  I’m not advocating the brand doesn’t participate here, I’m merely making the point that other users are generally more credible advocates. 

Note:  Overly supportive/pushy/argumentative "fanboys" can be counterproductive in this, so take care with the extremes.

A few questions for brand/product managers are:

• What are the drivers that move users across this continuum?
• What is the cost model for the drivers?
• What is a healthy distribution in my relative industry and competitive market?  If I was Marriott, would the same distribution goal make sense as the Four Seasons?  Probably not. 
• What is the my current vs desired state distribution?

Thanks again Jeremiah for taking the time for the video and here’s a link to watch.

Sean

Popularity: 92% [?]

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Occasionally it feels like those of us focused on the social media phenomena live a little bit in a vacuum.  While the circle seems to be growing, there are times where it feels like we are all preaching to the choir - to the already converted.  We read each others blogs, follow each other on Twitter, friend each other in Facebook, attend many of the same conferences, etc.  Most of this is great!  Heck, it is a bit of the theme of how I named this blog - "group therapy."  There’s a lot of value in those of us with common interests and challenges getting together and sharing experiences, ideas and new learning.  I do wonder how we all measure whether we are broadening the circle of those embracing social media.  It struck me at a recent conference (that was great by the way) that everyone in the room was essentially bought in on the topic in a significant way.  This is good in that it gathered really amazing people and inspired focused conversations, and we need that.  It was bad in that it didn’t feel like the circle really grew that day.  Out of that conference, I committed that in 2008, I will focus more of my conference time on industry events where social media is a track, vs THE TRACK - for example, I just committed to speak at SSPA in May. 

What gets missed sometimes in our swarming with each other is capturing the simple examples that help illustrate how the business and user engagement model changes in a web 2.0 world.  Content is one of my favorite illustrations of this.  Many companies spend extraordinary amounts of money on content for their users - for this post, let’s focus on help and support content.  Here are a few examples:

• Microsoft Knowledge Base
• Autodesk KB
• IBM
• Sony FAQ

Once the investment is made in an authoring model (in house or vendor), more money is spent to localize the content - all of which, at best, serves the fat part of the long tail of help and support content needed to really assist the breadth and depth of users.  There’s nothing unique about this model, this has been in place for many years and as we know, changing the model is not simple.  This is obvious ground for community models (Q&A support forums and wikis).  Most are doing this, though in very few cases are these different models integrated - look at the sites and it’s clear these are silo’d efforts.  If your users can draw your org chart just by navigating your web pages - you have an integration problem…ok, opportunity:)  Does a single search crawl both in-house and user generated content?  What about user generated content beyond the bounds of yourcompany.com.  For example, look at this 6 minute video on Youtube of How to Create a Gantt Chart with Excel.  Note the # of views, stars, favorites and the two most recent comments!

How should Microsoft (Disclosure - I work at Microsoft right now) treat this content on Youtube?  What are the processes to discover content like this?  How do you decide what to include or not?  How much risk do you take with dead links to external content that can vanish?  What should be done about the video creator - this is an influencer - probably should thank him at a minimum - but much more should be done (another day, other posts on influencer program development). 

A more radical view of this would be the following question:  When do you stop authoring content in house? (and re-deploy that investment to drive a user generated content model?)

Before I go further, let’s be realistic. You probably can’t just stop authoring content.  There will be some content you may always need to author.  Security content for example - where many users will expect vendor created (and legally indemnified content).  You may also find that this enables a shift in which content you write - more pre-release and deployment/training content and less help and how-to content.  Likewise, there is a business scorecard problem.  Businesses measure results on a monthly/quarterly/annual basis - particularly when we are talking about investments like content.  So, how can you achieve a breakthrough in results from a new, user driven model, when your scorecard is assuming continuous quarter over quarter improvement.  This conflict quickly converts companies from being risk takers to risk averse. 

What would happen if you stopped writing content and converted your entire KB/FAQ process to a wiki?  In the near term?  There’s a high probability the quality of your content would initially go down (at least that is the right expectation to set).  User generated content is not the holy grail, it won’t solve world peace.  This is where the scorecard conflict is key - you need executive patience in longer term goals than quarterly results.  Look at Wikipedia…a few years ago there was plenty of debate about its accuracy - now it is generally accepted (and research has supported) to be as accurate, or more than, commercially published encyclopedias.  In fact, a simple example is to look at how current it is.  When will that old school publishing model be updated with yesterdays assassination of Benazir Bhutto.  Wikipedia took less than 24 hrs and it’s not just in English, but here in French, Spanish, Dutch…and many more. 

The real answer is more about percentage of content authored in-house vs via community - move from 80-90% internal to 80-90% user generated.  While the quality might initially go down, there is little question that ultimately a user generated content model will be more complete (topic and language) and at least  as good (likely far better) than anything that can be done in house.  Depending on your business, you need to forecast how long this transition might take - will it exceed the old model in 6 months, 1 year, 3 years?  What’s the bet?  What’s the tolerance for the duration?  How do you risk mitigate the potential quality dip?  You know you will have resisters who on day 1 will email around links to some user submitted piece that is terrible - are you prepared - is the corporate culture ready to withstand these bumps?

By now you should also be thinking about the revised scorecard.  Why are you doing all this?  To save cost on content?  Deflect calls from your call center?  Reach more users?  Increase satisfaction (users find what they want)?  All valid goals, but with only these elements, it’s likely a richer scorecard than what most organizations have today around help and how-to content.

Practical social media for business.  I like it, wonder what you think?

Sean

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