Marketing Influence & Thought Leadership

Is the Social Media Bubble Bursting, or Will The Tsunami Continue?

According to Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media lab,  the social media bubble is about to burst, here is an excerpt from his post on HBR March 23, 2010, “I'd like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn't connecting us as much as we think it is. It's largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.” You can read the full editorial and it is actually quite an interesting myopic look at the new world of Internet communications: http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2010/03/the_social_media_bubble.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-WEEKLY_HOTLIST-_-MAR_2010-_-HOTLIST0329&referral=00202

What is most fascinating about this post is that he tries to draw a connection in the form of a metaphor on the subprime loan business? Quite bizarre indeed if you think about it, the subprime loan scenario evolved from the perfect storm of:

·         Giving anyone a loan that could fog a mirror.

·         A spectacle of American greed where banks and investors were not and are not being held accountable even today, so much for Sarbanes Oxley.

·         Digitization of mortgage loan origination systems where loan processing leveraged business process management software to take loan processing time down from months to less than several days.

(There were business rules engines in the BPM systems that could easily kick out those with low credit scores, but somehow they were tweaked to let those less worthy in.)

I simply don’t get this metaphor, do you?

Trust Enters the Global Social Media Landscape

All right lets attack this hypothesis. The customer is king and has just been given a new pen that moves at Internet business velocity and the only thing slowing down the social customer’s influence (word of mouth marketing) are time zones. One of the issues that Mr. Haque argues is that social media sites lack trust, well that may be the case for some sites that are blurring the lines between our personal and professional lives, but they are not creating fake thin relationships in my world. In fact we decide to enter into them and they are bringing us closer to our friends, past friends and relatives that we still want to know more than any other platform. In the business world we know exactly how social media helps to bring us closer to our customers and how they are leveraging the platforms to drive change.

One of the key findings from our SNCR research last year was that professionals do trust information and relationships on social media sites. This is key for any business and for many companies it’s all about influence because trust is the foundation of influence on the social media planet influence flows like water, it’s everywhere. This is why I always say that social media is the new word of mouth marketing. In several of my previous posts I have demonstrated how P&G, Indium, Kodak, SAP and others are gaining competitive advantage through social media. Is your company leveraging social media to their greatest advantage?

Why the Internet is the Greatest Innovation of Our Time

When Proctor and Gamble decided to build a social network of more than six hundred thousand mothers, do you think they were worried about trust? Probably not, but what they did was build and leverage a social network to build their brand and get competitive advantage. This is a story best told by the most social customer of us all Paul Greenberg, the inventor of Social CRM. The Internet has not only connected us in ways that are innovative and great but from an anthropological standpoint it is melding the cultures of the world.

As a member of the WWW conferences I had the pleasure of working with many early Internet pioneers who would have never predicted the social media tsunami. At the time we were still babbling about how a protocol standard called TCP/IP had just created a global area network called the Internet and debating the nuisances of stateless vs. stateful protocol streams. Remember that this was just sixteen years ago. For those of us that have gray hair we remember how Microsoft fought the Internet and would not endorse this routable protocol even though theirs wasn’t routable. Wow times sure have changed, but guess what, now I am a social customer, author, participant and B2B marketer.

·         I don’t think my relationship with the hundreds of people that read my blogs each week is weak or fake.

·         I don’t think that sites like YouTube are a fad.

·         When I don’t like something in a business I go Yelp about it.

·         When I need information I do a search.

·         Before I buy a product I do a search.

·         My sales friends are using Facebook and LinkedIn to do “digital hard rock mining.”

·         When I need to find old friends and relatives I go to Facebook and most of them are there and I don’t think my relationships are weak.

·         When I join a professional group I go to LinkedIn.

·         When I watch baseball now it’s on the IPhone with MLB.com.

·         And today I did not join 304,059,724 against Obama's Healthcare takeover.

·         I would really like to know how the Havas Media lab positions itself as a platform for a new kind of strategic advisor that helps investors, entrepreneurs and firms experiment with, craft and drive radical management business models and strategic innovation.

 

Net/Net:

The Internet has rapidly expanded to become a global network of seamlessly connected computers and devices that has revolutionized information sharing and communications, challenged governments, broken down cultural barriers and driven innovation and business velocity to levels never before imagined. One of the most important successes of the Internet is how it is enabling globalization and more importantly business model innovation. Today’s most successful companies are driving product and business model innovation from outside their own walls by leveraging the Internet as a collaborative community building platform. This platform has allowed organizations to harness the innovation power of the community and not just individual innovation.

There are many that would argue that many of the enabling technologies that drive the Internet and Web 2.0 today have been around for some time. The reality is that we are finally leveraging their potential in new and exciting ways, there is more to come, because the Internet is all about innovation. 

Is the Social Media Bubble Bursting, or Will The Tsunami Continue?

 According to Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media lab,  the social media bubble is about to burst, here is an excerpt from his post on HBR March 23, 2010, “I'd like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn't connecting us as much as we think it is. It's largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.” You can read the full editorial and it is actually quite an interesting myopic look at the new world of Internet communications: http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2010/03/the_social_media_bubble.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-WEEKLY_HOTLIST-_-MAR_2010-_-HOTLIST0329&referral=00202

What is most fascinating about this post is that he tries to draw a connection in the form of a metaphor on the subprime loan business? Quite bizarre indeed if you think about it, the subprime loan scenario evolved from the perfect storm of:

·         Giving anyone a loan that could fog a mirror.

·         A spectacle of American greed where banks and investors were not and are not being held accountable even today, so much for Sarbanes Oxley.

·         Digitization of mortgage loan origination systems where loan processing leveraged business process management software to take loan processing time down from months to less than several days.

(There were business rules engines in the BPM systems that could easily kick out those with low credit scores, but somehow they were tweaked to let those less worthy in.)

I simply don’t get this metaphor, do you?

Trust Enters the Global Social Media Landscape

All right lets attack this hypothesis. The customer is king and has just been given a new pen that moves at Internet business velocity and the only thing slowing down the social customer’s influence (word of mouth marketing) are time zones. One of the issues that Mr. Haque argues is that social media sites lack trust, well that may be the case for some sites that are blurring the lines between our personal and professional lives, but they are not creating fake thin relationships in my world. In fact we decide to enter into them and they are bringing us closer to our friends, past friends and relatives that we still want to know more than any other platform. In the business world we know exactly how social media helps to bring us closer to our customers and how they are leveraging the platforms to drive change.

One of the key findings from our SNCR research last year was that professionals do trust information and relationships on social media sites. This is key for any business and for many companies it’s all about influence because trust is the foundation of influence on the social media planet influence flows like water, it’s everywhere. This is why I always say that social media is the new word of mouth marketing. In several of my previous posts I have demonstrated how P&G, Indium, Kodak, SAP and others are gaining competitive advantage through social media. Is your company leveraging social media to their greatest advantage?

Why the Internet is the Greatest Innovation of Our Time

When Proctor and Gamble decided to build a social network of more than six hundred thousand mothers, do you think they were worried about trust? Probably not, but what they did was build and leverage a social network to build their brand and get competitive advantage. This is a story best told by the most social customer of us all Paul Greenberg, the inventor of Social CRM. The Internet has not only connected us in ways that are innovative and great but from an anthropological standpoint it is melding the cultures of the world.

As a member of the WWW conferences I had the pleasure of working with many early Internet pioneers who would have never predicted the social media tsunami. At the time we were still babbling about how a protocol standard called TCP/IP had just created a global area network called the Internet and debating the nuisances of stateless vs. stateful protocol streams. Remember that this was just sixteen years ago. For those of us that have gray hair we remember how Microsoft fought the Internet and would not endorse this routable protocol even though theirs wasn’t routable. Wow times sure have changed, but guess what, now I am a social customer, author, participant and B2B marketer.

·         I don’t think my relationship with the hundreds of people that read my blogs each week is weak or fake.

·         I don’t think that sites like YouTube are a fad.

·         When I don’t like something in a business I go Yelp about it.

·         When I need information I do a search.

·         Before I buy a product I do a search.

·         My sales friends are using Facebook and LinkedIn to do “digital hard rock mining.”

·         When I need to find old friends and relatives I go to Facebook and most of them are there and I don’t think my relationships are weak.

·         When I join a professional group I go to LinkedIn.

·         When I watch baseball now it’s on the IPhone with MLB.com.

·         And today I did not join 304,059,724 against Obama's Healthcare takeover.

·         I would really like to know how the Havas Media lab positions itself as a platform for a new kind of strategic advisor that helps investors, entrepreneurs and firms experiment with, craft and drive radical management business models and strategic innovation.

 

Net/Net:

The Internet has rapidly expanded to become a global network of seamlessly connected computers and devices that has revolutionized information sharing and communications, challenged governments, broken down cultural barriers and driven innovation and business velocity to levels never before imagined. One of the most important successes of the Internet is how it is enabling globalization and more importantly business model innovation. Today’s most successful companies are driving product and business model innovation from outside their own walls by leveraging the Internet as a collaborative community building platform. This platform has allowed organizations to harness the innovation power of the community and not just individual innovation.

There are many that would argue that many of the enabling technologies that drive the Internet and Web 2.0 today have been around for some time. The reality is that we are finally leveraging their potential in new and exciting ways, there is more to come, because the Internet is all about innovation. 

The B2B Social Media Olympics, Sponsored by Penn State’s ISBM & a Chance Meeting with George Bush Senior

Pennsylvania State University’s Institute for the Studies of Business Markets (ISBM http://isbm.smeal.psu.edu/ and part of the SMEAL College of Business) is another example of academic thought leaders who are working directly with industry to understand and capture competitive advantage in B2B marketing. Ralph Oliva, the Executive Director is what I call a “cosmic bondini” in that he connects the dots between what industry needs, and addresses those needs by building his network and foundation on rocks called research and B2P networking. Ralph, brother of my friend Vinnie Oliva at Gartner, assembled one of the first ever B2B conferences focused on social media. This ISBM conference was genius in the sense that it not only presented research that clearly shows where social media is going; but also provided speakers and practitioners that are actually doing it! HELLO!

Those practitioners included myself and Robin Carey of Social Media Today, Rick Short of Indium, Jeff Hayzlett of Kodak (see him on YouTube) and Cisco’s Doug Webster, in addition to several consulting organizations. One particular consultant/social media guru, had the audacity to actually get on stage and admit that they don’t even blog, wow are u kidding! This conference is one of the first I have ever seen that provides insights into how to execute a B2B social media strategy that addresses the bottom line, sales.

For background reading on thought leadership see Thought Leadership is Key to Marketing Communications Today at: http://www.thesocialcustomer.com/blog/PeterAuditore1/site/posts/

Net/Net: The Barrier to Executing B2B Social Media Strategy= Company & Org Culture

As Drucker always said “there is no strategy without execution,” and after spending last week with 100 marketing CMOs, directors and managers from more than fifty companies and organizations, I can tell you that most of them are far from executing any social media. Although many of the companies were from the manufacturing and the services industries they don’t get that B2B social media is simply another way of getting closer to their customers, partners and suppliers. Their company cultures are stuck in the mud of the antiquated four Ps of marketing, intellectual property protection discussions, and are threatened by the change of represented in the social media landscape that is downright scary to them.  This again harkens back to what I said multiple times last year about how social media can drive competitive advantage and most importantly sales. Get it!

I had the pleasure of keynoting this conference at the Houstonian hotel last week with my partner in crime Robin Carey. We presented SNCR research on how social media peer groups are rapidly becoming trusted decision support tools, and discussed the development of our famous MyVenturePad best practices in social media marketing case study. Here is a quick overview of the most important presentation that hit the spot.

Best Conference Presentation: Rick Short of Indium

Imagine if you were the marketing guru for a company that makes solder and solder paste how would you leverage social media?  Well Rick has been doing it for nearly five years now, Rick and I presented last year at the BMA conference and his formula for success with social media can be summed up in what he calls the three Cs and I love this:

• CONTENT        2          CONTACT        2          CASH

Rick’s story is indeed a best practice in B2B social media and he provided a roadmap to executing it. Rick has now convinced seventy of his company’s engineers to blog regularly on their areas of expertise and they are driving revenue from the people that read their blogs. He used one specific example of how an engineer was blogging on an obscure metallurgy topic and as a result the potential customer came to them because Indium has more content on the Internet about this area through blogging than any competitor, so they were viewed as an expert. In spite of the fact that Rick Short was there to tell them just how his company, Indium, makes money from social media, many conference attendees still did not get it, amazing.

A Chance Meeting with George Bush Senior

It is not often that I meet a President and have a conversation with one, but it was indeed fun to meet President Bush one of our kinder and gentler Presidents in Houston. While sitting out front of the hotel having my afternoon cigar, I noticed two secret service people open the door to the veranda I was sitting on, and out of a side door to my surprise emerged George Bush and his cane. For an older guy he looked great and vibrant and as I arose to shake his hand as he approached me and said “hi I am Peter from California, nice to meet you President Bush.” He looked at me and said, “You are enjoying a cigar” and I said “yes my grandfather told me that the man who smokes the big cigar has his life and plans well in hand.” (That is because usually when you light up a cigar everyone around you that does not smoke exitsJ)  George laughed and said “nice,” and then I said “we need to change this Cuban situation.” ‘George said why? George W likes cigars what should I tell him?’ I said “tell George W this, “Cuban cigars smoke up to twice as long as others, and they often taste like chocolate, nutmeg and other wonderful flavors and they are really smooth.” President Bush said, “I will, nice to meet you Peter.”

There is an awful lot more I could tell you about this conference but the net/net is most companies even today don’t understand the value of social media and don’t know how to use it, their competitors will. Until next time I wish you great marketing and selling in the millennium.

 

 

 

Today We Need a Professional Bloggers Code: And Pirate Code

The power of the pen has never been more important than in the millennium.  Bloggers are everywhere and their influence is growing daily at the speed of the Internet. Think about this for a minute, the new Harry Potter theme park was announced through a secret mid night introduction to a handful of the world’s most popular Harry Potter bloggers. Somewhere around 20 million people learned about the new park through their social media peer groups and ecosystems, amazing.

These days it seems like everyone in certain demographic groups thinks they are a blogger, I would fathom to say in some cases they are not. Many companies have assembled swat teams of “brand protectors” that watch and engage with rogue bloggers that attack their company, products, and services and even in some cases employees. There are also many excellent bloggers that regularly share views and analysis that reflect great depth and knowledge of their areas, but blogging is just on channel of their voice. These are the bloggers to follow they only speak in one voice.

The Element of Trust

The ultimate question is does the blogger you are following really have the depth of knowledge and experience in their industry, and more importantly can you trust it? Trust is the foundation of value in all groups of people and without it there is no sustainability to the group or its information. Thought leadership is built on the hallmark of trusting that the information is accurate, the vision practical and the source credible and this in enforced in the academic world. What surprises me is the lack of academic professor’s blogging and the limitations put on traditional analysts by their parent firms and the inability of financial analysts to share information is highly regulated by the GOV. Many financial analysts simply can’t blog because of regulation.  

One of the few academics, who has built his house on a rock and also blogs is Andrew McAfee of MIT, Andrew, along with myself are great Red Sox fans. What I like about his research is that it is built on a solid rock of data and in my view he has proven beyond a doubt the IT matters.

The Business Impact of IT

http://www.duchamphotel.com/hotel_site/index.htm

Let’s take a look at blogging code today for example, we now have so called “expert bloggers and expert blogging communities,” check out this headline from Fast Company: Carbon Accounting Software Market Experiencing Huge Period of Growth BY FC EXPERT BLOGGER TRACEY DE MORSELLA Today This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert's views alone.

In this scenario the expert blogging community is established by a media channel, Fast Company, my question to you is can we trust a media channel, magazine or whatever you want to call it, to select and manage a blogging community that delivers trustworthy information?

On Wikipedia I found what I would call a primitive Bloggers Code, I don’t know what trolls are, I never keep my sources private, I think once and post, I take action against attacks and I always take responsibility for my own words, actions. This all seems very immature to me in many ways, what do you think?

Create your own code by selecting the modules you want:

1.     Responsibility for our own words

2.     Nothing we wouldn't say in person

3.     Connect privately first

4.     Take action against attacks

5.     a) No anonymous comments OR b) No pseudonymous comments

6.     Ignore the trolls

7.     Encourage enforcement of terms of service

8.     Keep our sources private

9.     Discretion to delete comments

10. Do no harm

11. Think twice - post once

 

I follow these guidelines which were created last weekend, I wish more blogger do.

A Professional Bloggers Code

1.      Bloggers have a duty to provide valuable insights into the current affairs of their ecosystem.

2.      Bloggers will not create spectrums of negativity and hate amongst the social media peer groups they influence and reward everyone fairly.

3.      Bloggers will not gamble with a person, organization or company’s brand by unfairly interfering in the business of business and damage the reputation of others, organizations, companies and their products and services.

4.      Bloggers know when it is time to move on, avoid obsolete information, their mantra is to obsolete information.

5.      Bloggers are not self appointed gurus, their ship is built on a foundation of experience, intelligence, honesty and integrity and they keep their mind sharp.

6.      Bloggers know who they are and not everyone is a blogger.

7.      Bloggers stick to their guns and don’t waver in their analysis.

8.      Bloggers don’t attack other bloggers with unfounded and inaccurate information and analysis.

9.      Bloggers know the challenge is the next blog and accept the creativity and innovation required to command respect.

10.  Bloggers know how to share the prize.

Bloggers blow their horns in many ways and blogging is just one channel of influence.

Those of us that have studied pirate history know that the “Pirate code” was a prevailing wind of justice in their society, on board vessels and land. I have been a big fan of Pirates and studying their history has been fascinating indeed.  Today I present to you the Pirate Code and my reference is Angus Konstam’s wonderful new book The World Atlas of Pirates, from page 173:

1.      Every man has a vote in the affairs of the moment.

2.      Every man to be called fairly in rum.

3.      No person to game at cards for dice and money.

4.      The lights and candles to be put out a eight o’clock at night.

5.      To keep their piece, pistols and cutlass clean.

6.      No boy or woman to be allowed amongst them.

7.      To desert their ship or quarters in battle.

8.      No striking another on board.

9.      No man to talk of breaking up their way of living.

10.  The captain and quartermaster to receive two share of the prize.

11.  The musicians have to rest on the day of the Sabbath.

 

I hope you enjoy this month’s post as I have been thinking about it for some time, and until next time I wish you great selling and marketing in the millennium.