Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Marketing In Seven Short Steps
Posted on 25. Apr, 2010 by admin in Ideas
Here’s everything you need to know about social media marketing in seven short steps:
1. The biggest risk with social media is in not engaging in public conversations about your brand. So, do engage yourself and encourage your employees to engage. Ask them not to do things that will embarrass themselves or you, but expect them to. All of us have embarrassed ourselves in public, more than once, so will they. It’s okay.
2. The only solution for negative conversations is more positive conversations. Responding to and resolving negative conversations is table stakes. The only way to win at social is by inspiring your evangelists to start and spread more positive conversations about you. So, put in place a process to track and resolve negative conversations, then focus on energizing your evangelists.
3. So, start by asking: Who are our present and potential evangelists? Who do they talk to? Who talks to them? What else do they talk about? What are their triggers to talk? Why do we want them to talk about us? In effect, you are creating a persona for your evangelists, except that instead of using it to design a website, you would use it to design a web of talkworthy touchpoints.
What Does the Ning Fiasco Mean For the Future of Niche Networks and the Freemium Business Model?
Posted on 16. Apr, 2010 by admin in Ideas
Earlier today, Jason Kincaid at Techcrunch leaked published an internal memo from new Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal in which he announced his decision to phase out Ning’s free “build your own social network” service to focus on premium networks and lay off more than a third of its staff.
The announcement has triggered a number of reactions, around three predominant themes –
1. Et Tu Ning!: By phasing out its free service Ning is betraying its Network Creators who have bought into its promise of “build your own social network for free” and invested time and effort to build their niche communities. Even though some Network Creators could pay for premium accounts, most would move out of Ning, to other free or premium options like Buddypress, Kickapps or even Posterous.
My take: Ning’s about turn does feel like a betrayal and even network creators like myself who are already paying for premium services will like Ning less for it. However, I expect Ning to offer an entry level premium option in the $10 to $20 a month range, and I expect most networks with more than a few hundred members to stay on with Ning, partly because there’s no easy option to transition the networks to another service.
Building Talent Communities for Recruiting and Employment Branding
Posted on 04. Apr, 2010 by Gautam in How To Guides, Ideas
HR and Organizational leaders face two big challenges in the context of two ever-changing realities – as the talent market booms and as job seekers turn from immediate peers to their connections and the collective wisdom of the social web. The two big challenges organizations face in this new reality are:
- How to Build an employment brand that is relevant to the needs of their talent pool and to monitor the conversations on the social web to understand how to join in the conversation
- Understand where the super talent prospective are, what they talk about and how to engage them to attract them to consider you an employer.
It is our belief that organizations will need to move away from building their presence from social networks and integrate them to build online communities for their talent pool – moving away from the existing debate about “passive candidates” or “active job-seekers”
When a person joins a talent community owned/ stewarded by an organization – he or she gives permission to the organization to have a conversation with him/her – and it is up to the organization to either mess it up by “pushing” its message or to take it to the next level by active engagement.
The Social Network Water Cooler Effect: Three Reasons Why Facebook and Twitter Might Save Television
Posted on 28. Mar, 2010 by admin in Ideas
Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) in NYT on how social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are creating a water cooler effect around big events like like Super Bowl, Oscars, Grammys and Winter Olympics–
Remember when the Internet was supposed to kill off television? That hasn’t been the case lately, judging by the record television ratings for big-ticket events… Many television executives are crediting the Internet, in part, for the revival.
Blogs and social Web sites like Facebook and Twitter enable an online water-cooler conversation, encouraging people to split their time between the computer screen and the big-screen TV… If viewers cannot be in the same room, the next best thing is a chat room.
The effect is obviously not limited to television. Online conversations can also help or hinder opening weekends for movies and the ratings for politicians. Recent studies of online social networks have affirmed what researchers have long recognized: people seek to be around and be influenced by like-minded individuals.
If you are a television channel or a film studio, here are three reasons why you should invest in social programs today –
Cultural Change in Organizations and Social Technologies
Posted on 24. Mar, 2010 by Gautam in Ideas, Trends
As an Organizational Behavior person, I believe that Culture trumps strategy. And of course, can derail tactics and events that go against the grain of the culture within no time.
Today, I was talking to a CEO of a professional services firm who was sharing how he had tried to champion a micro-blogging tool within his firm to share information across locations and silos and how the fact they were a hierarchical organization probably killed the tool’s effectiveness.
Yes, technology, even when championed by the CEO can fail if it runs into culture.
Think of culture like the running river, and any initiative like a rock. The rock seems strong. With executive sponsorship, resources, and sometimes external consulting. Eventually the river wins. Not by strength but by persistence.
Lithium Community Study Questions the 1-9-90 Consumer-Curator-Creator Rule
Posted on 23. Mar, 2010 by admin in Ideas
Michalel Wu of Lithium (@mich8elwu) analyzes the behavior of contributors across 143 Lithium communities to understand if the 1:9:90 rule really holds.
I have earlier written about the problem with assuming the 1:9:90 rule (that only 1% of the community members will create most of the content, only 9% will curate it, and the rest will be lurkers) in enterprise communities, and especially employee communities.
Michale Wu ignores the lurkers in his analysis and only looks at creators (hyper-contributors) and curators (occasional contributors) — the 1:9 part of 1:9:90. His findings confirm my hunch.
- The hyper-contributors can contribute anywhere from about 30% to nearly 90% of the community content with an average of 55.95%.
- The hyper-contributors create at least 50% of the content in 65.73% of the communities.
- Turning the problem around, the fraction of contributors who contribute at least 50% of the community ranges from 0.84% to 17.87% with an average of 9.35%.
So, if we define “most of the content” as “more than half the content”, then the 1:9:90 rule does seem to hold on the average, but with a lot of variation.
Three Tips For News and Media Companies on How To Leverage Facebook
Posted on 21. Mar, 2010 by admin in Ideas
Heather Hopkins at Hitwise has been doing some interesting research on how Facebook is becoming an important sources of traffic to news and media websites.
First, she found that Facebook (3.52%) is the #4 upstream source of visits to News and Media sites last week, after Google (17.32%), Yahoo! (7.89%) and msn (4.43%), much ahead of Google News at #9 (1.39%). News and Media is the #11 downstream industry for Facebook, receiving 3.69% of the site’s traffic. This trend will become stronger as Facebook encourages users to subscribe to news pages and create their personalized news channel.
Second, she found that Facebook sends downstream traffic to broadcast media websites like CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, while Google News sends downstream traffic to print media websites like New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Moreover, she didn’t find any correlation between the amount of traffic Facebook sends a site and the number of fans a brand has on its Facebook page. So, it seems that Facebook users are sharing more stories from broadcast media than from print media.
Using Social Tools and Staffing/Recruiting
Posted on 16. Mar, 2010 by Gautam in Case Studies, How To Guides, Ideas, Trends
A friend asked me some questions on doing Recruiting through Social Media. Here’s what I answered:
1. What is the web2.0 (pl explain in the simplest terms!) and which of these can be used by the Staffing team of the company?
Web2.0 is the collective name for a lot of technologies by which people can interact with other people (and organizations) on the web, publicly and in a transparent manner. It can include forums, blogs, twitter, linkedin, facebook, orkut etc.
We believe that Social technologies help people connect around some Core Dynamics – Content Generation, Conversations, Collaborating together, Community Formation and Collective Intelligence. Different functionalities enable users to connect differently
2. How widespread is the use of the web2.0 for finding top talent ? (can you give examples of companies who are doing this?) For instance, are there companies who are using Twitter to keep in touch with the campus crowd?)
The first question the recruiter needs to answer is – who is my top talent and what is he/she interested in? Primarily there are interested in the content and knowledge component of the job. Followed by organizational culture and the mechanics of the job. The recruiting firm needs to reach out to the community where top talent is likely to be present and present the above – by way of blog posts, youtube videos, pictures and discussion forums.
Luis Suarez on Why Employee and Talent Communities are Important
Posted on 16. Mar, 2010 by Gautam in Ideas, Trends
Luis (@elsua) recently left a comment on my blog post Use Cases for Talent and Employee Communities – and I think it deserves to be given prominence as a blog post on its own 
I will surely be blogging plenty more about it on my blog, when things quiet down a bit after this week’s business trip, but just wanted to venture a couple of thoughts on the relevance of this blog post:
- Communities are the major drivers of social software adoption, both inside and outside of the firewall, so every single social computing strategy should always be accompanied by a community building program to get the most out of it all.
- Communities have been there in existence for millions of years, and in the business world for several decades and if there is anything they have help companies with all along is talent retention and reduction of attrition rates. It’s that sense of belonging, of ownership, of connecting with fellow peers that helps communities become so important and crucial in today’s world and as such
- Social software tools are tremendously relevant in this context, because they help those relationships to flourish and nurture themselves much easier, faster and more meaningful than with traditional tools like email. If there is anything out there that social software is good for is social capital, and that’s at the heart of what makes communities healthy and mature at the same time: that people have an opportunity to help build and sustain personal business relationships through those communities.
The 2020 Social Engagement Architecture Framework For Designing Social Platforms
Posted on 15. Mar, 2010 by admin in Ideas
At 2020 Social, we use a simple Engagement Architecture framework for designing social platforms, including online communities. The framework has seven elements —
1. Three types of Social Objects: lifestyles, interests, causes.
2. Five types of Social Dynamics: consumer generated content, conversations, collaboration, community, collective intelligence.
3. Three elements of the Social Graph: profiles, activities, relationships.
4. Seven types of Social Roles (related to profiles): lurker, learner, connector, moderator, organizer, teacher, super-user.
5. Seven levels in the Ladder of Engagement (related to activities): consume content, curate content, create content, connect with others, collaborate with others, try offering, evangelize offering.
6. Four types of Social Contexts (related to relationships): alone, with others, with cohorts, with friends.
7. Three types of Social Intelligence Systems: reputation systems, recommendation systems, reward systems.
Each of these seven elements translate into a set of benchmark features and practices that can be modified to suit different types of users (employees, partners, or customers) and different business contexts (enterprise, business to business, business to consumer).
So far, we have been using the Engagement Architecture framework for designing communities, but haven’t really documented it.
2020 Social builds and nurtures online communities for Indian and international clients, connects their customers, partners and employees, and helps them achieve their business objectives.
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