Here are "The Pillars of Social Media Marketing". Who Knew?

As declarations go, this one is interesting. A search for "Social Media Marketing" came up with this post from October of 2006...

this is what I define as the Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing.

The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing

Any and all forms of Social Media Marketing tactics fall under at least one of these five forms of action. Often the same channel will incorporate two or more of these:

1. Declaration of Identity
2. Identity through Association
3. User-initiated Conversation
4. Provider-initiated Conversation
5. In-Person Interaction

Ok, this is a post that is a little misleading since it is really about marketing "social media" like MySpace, FaceBook, etc. But the list is solid marketing and could look like this...

1. Declaration What You Do and What You Offer
2. We Will Know You Best By The Company You Keep
3. Let Your Clients Find a Path to Talk and You Should Listen
4. Find A Way to Talk to Your Clients and Potential Markets and Find a Way
to Listen
5. Handshakes are Still Needed

Yep, that makes sense.

Anyways, the fact is marketing is marketing and don't substitute tools for ideas and practices!

Social Media = Production of Amateur Ad Agents or Community Members?

Nothing new to those who market, but marketing is not the same as advertising. Many of us would argue that adverts are a subset of marketing and, well, so much more is involved in communicating your market vision to your prospective and existing clients. But if you have an online conversation with your clients that results in an online video (see Obama Girl) is that an advertisement, is it a conversation, does it matter? And, no, I am not talking about viral marketing. I am really talking about a loud, somewhat public conversation. Take a look at this article on social media and marketing in yesterday's Arizona Republic:

The line between consumer and marketer is getting increasingly blurry thanks to blogs, video-sharing sites and social networks.

These and other "social media" tools not only allow consumers to filter messages coming from companies and their marketers, but also let them create, shape and spread their own messages.

"Consumers and amateurs are really making their place in the (marketing) world as much as ad agencies," said Sheila Kloefkorn, president of the American Marketing Association's Phoenix chapter.

Ok, nothing new here, but let's take a further look...

Companies have been using "viral marketing" for the past several years, creating street armies of citizen marketers who distribute their messages for them.

Now, though, corporations large and small are trying to grab greater control of these tools.

A lot is at stake. Companies that fail, marketing experts warn, will miss out on reaching target audiences and give up what little control they still have over their image.

"Most advertisers have been conditioned for many, many years to totally control their message," said Dan Santy, president of Tempe-based marketing firm Santy. "The Web takes all that control away."

Using social-media tools at least gives firms a way to direct where their messages go.

Ok, this is an extension then of directing messages to an audience. But here is the key: you need to get them engaged in with what you do and make your self meaningful:

Cynthia Drasler, the founder of Organic Excellence, said she used to become frustrated as a guest on radio shows because she was never fully able to explain why she felt it was important for people to use chemical-free personal-care products.

So she decided to take matters into her own hands by starting her own online radio show in May 2006.

The show, Chemical Free Living, airs once a week on an Internet radio station at contacttalkradio.com. Listeners can download podcasts of the shows after they air.

On the show, Drasler discusses topics that interest her target customers, and not necessarily Organic Excellence's products.

Even though she does not promote her products during the show, she said the show is helpful in building a brand.

"By having a weekly radio show and having certain shows where I do all the talking for the whole hour, people get to know me," Drasler said. "I become a real person to them, and I think when people know you and if they get to like you, then they go and pay attention to what you're saying."

Crafting honest messages is one key to successfully using social-media tools to shape marketing content, said Francine Hardaway, a local business consultant who helped form the Phoenix chapter of the Social Media Club.

The national organization has branches in cities around the country where members meet to discuss how blogs, podcasts and social networking can affect business.

"I don't think any consultant should ever sell a blog as a way to boost sales," Hardaway said. "It's really a way to brand you're company. It's a way to give out information. It's a way to get feedback from your customers and your suppliers" [emphasis mine].

Hardaway gets it: It's about making yourself meaningful. Driving sales is hard under all circumstances and many external factors affect this. Meaning creation, though, is different. Honestly, we need to pay more attention to meaning making and this involves a number of community-oriented actions and engagement. It is the "community" that, then, is the issue at hand and it is one that is intriguing... more on it later.

LA Times On "Second Life and Marketing..." It is Overrated

I am kind of underwhelmed by Second Life as a gaming reality, but that's a personal preference. I tried it, didn't like it, moved on. Like many I have a number of friends who meet up virtually both here and in World of Warcraft and they tend to love it. Me, well, it's not my cup of tea. My biggest problem was time. But clearly many others love it and, as one of my friends says about World of Warcraft is that there is always something to do and, unlike real life, it is a fairer meritocracy, i.e. you work harder and better you actually get promoted!.

One of the things about these spaces is that because so many people are spending their time engaged many marketers have decided to colonize the space and sell whatever they have to sell. I am certain you can do it effectively, but many marketers are having "second thoughts about Second Life" according to the Los Angeles Times

[It] turns out that plugging products is as problematic in the virtual world as it is anywhere else.

At http://www.secondlife.com — where the cost is $6 a month for premium citizenship — shopping, at least for real-world products, isn't a main activity. Four years after Second Life debuted, some marketers are second-guessing the money and time they've put into it.

"There's not a compelling reason to stay," said Brian McGuinness, vice president of Aloft, a brand of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. that is closing its Second Life shop and donating its virtual land to the nonprofit social-networking group TakingITGlobal.

Linden Lab, the San Francisco firm that created Second Life, sells companies and people pieces of the landscape where they can build stores, conference halls and gardens. Individuals create avatars, or virtual representations of themselves, that travel around this online society, exploring and schmoozing with other avatars. Land developed by users, rather than real-world companies, is among the most popular places in Second Life.

But the sites of many of the companies remaining in Second Life are empty. During a recent in-world visit, Best Buy Co.'s Geek Squad Island was devoid of visitors and the virtual staff that was supposed to be online.

The schedule of events on Sun Microsystems Inc.'s site was blank, and the green landscape of Dell Island was deserted. Signs posted on the window of the empty American Apparel store said it had closed up shop.

McGuinness said Starwood's venture into Second Life did accomplish something. Feedback from denizens gave Aloft ideas for its physical hotels.

The suggestions included putting radios in showers and painting the lobbies in earth tones rather than primary colors. But now that the design initiative is over, he said, it's difficult to attract people to the virtual hotel to help build the real-world brand.

Ok, let's quickly evaluate this... what did the majority of these companies do in Second Life? Well, they simply put their "real world" services and stores in this world where you can fly and build things you could not build today. Mistake number one: Not matching the creative potential of your available space and the desires of the audience. Notice how the hotel chain benefited? Well, they got creative suggestions. In the real world we are all too often limited by our creative potentials. In virtual and fantasy worlds, we want to get beyond restrictions of class, gender and physical abilities. In other words, do something different and more creative in your virtual worlds when you are marketing, please.

Let's look further at the article...

For some advertisers, the problem is that Second Life is a fantasyland, and the representations of the people who play in it don't have human needs. Food and drink aren't necessary, teleporting is the easiest way to get around and clothing is optional. In fact, the human form itself is optional.

Avatars can play games, build beach huts, dress up like furry animals, flirt with strangers — sometimes all at once.

Their interests seem to tend toward the risque. Ian Schafer, chief executive of online marketing firm Deep Focus, which advises clients about entering virtual worlds, said he recently toured Second Life. He started at the Aloft hotel and found it empty. He moved on to casinos, brothels and strip clubs, and they were packed. Schafer said he found in his research that "one of the most frequently purchased items in Second Life is genitalia."

Another problem for some is that Second Life doesn't have enough active residents.

On its website, Second Life says the number of total residents is more than 8 million. But that counts people who signed in once and never returned, as well as multiple avatars for individual residents. Even at peak times, only about 30,000 to 40,000 users are logged on, said Brian Haven, an analyst with Forrester Research.

"You're talking about a much smaller audience than advertisers are used to reaching," Haven said.

Some in the audience don't want to be reached. After marketers began entering Second Life, an avatar named Urizenus Sklar — in the real world, University of Toronto philosophy professor Peter Ludlow — wrote in the public-relations blog Strumpette that the community was "being invaded by an army of old world meat-space corporations."

He and other residents accused companies of lacking creativity by setting up traditional-looking stores that didn't fit in. His column was reproduced in the Second Life Herald.

Nissan Motor Co., a subject of such protests, has since transformed its presence in Second Life from a car vending machine to an "automotive amusement park," where avatars can test gravity-defying vehicles and ride hamster balls. Sun Micro has made its participation more interactive and fanciful, Chief Gaming Officer Chris Melissinos said.

Ludlow isn't impressed. He said most firms were more interested in the publicity they received from their ties with Second Life than in the digital world itself. "It was a way to brand themselves as being leading-edge," he said.

Angry avatars have taken virtual action. Reebok weathered a nuclear bomb attack and customers were shot outside the American Apparel store. Avatars are creating fantasy knockoffs of brand-name products too.

Ok, so they don't have enough residents and the residents that are their can often resent the intrusion of the marketing world that they are probably hoping avoid altogether. Again, please, if you are going to market, be creative, do something different and understand your medium and who are audience is, which is kind of like marketing in the real world.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0 marketing, second life, LA Times, web 2.0

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K.I.S.S Lesson - Let's Begin with a Calendar

First of all let's get this straight: Web 2.0 technologies will never ever replace a handshake, a smile and a business card. There is a simple reason for this: to paraphrase the famous Philosopher, Daniel Dennett, no matter how wonderful our communication techs get, the technology of evolution is smarter than we are. We communicate through our bodies and as much as I like distance communication, I will always choose the hug of a friend and the hand clap of my associates.

The reason I mention this is that I mentioned that I was making a Google Calendar for a group and he said, "We'll, if they get this then they may not come to our meetings." I should note, this is a meeting about "networking" and the need to actually meet people is stressed, so physical communication is key. Still, I was upset. Not because he was wrong. He wasn't. But I think I was upset because this online tool is as much a communication tool as pencil and paper, which are also man made communication technologies. By the way, so are the modern Alphabet and Arabic numerals. These are all technologies and they all help us convey ideas and network with each other.

The beauty of Web 2.0 techs, like Google Calendar is it allows you to make portions of your life much more visible to whomever you wish to have in your community. This transparency allows groups to make better decisions and its members can better decide the value of your goods and services.

By the way, if you are in a service industry of any kind, I cannot state how important it is to consider making a Google Calendar for your business or community. Here's how you go about doing it.

1) First, if you do not have a Google Account, go get one. They are free and Google is the best, most effective place to begin. Once you get one then it will allow you to get a number of services. Some of these are fairly easy to figure out (i.e. Gmail,Talk, etc.) but others are not as simple. Don't worry. Get your account and click on Calendar. It will bring you to a page that looks like something like the image below where you will confirm your name, location and time zone...

2) After you finish your confirmation you will get a blank calendar that looks like the image below...

The calendar will have "day", "week", "month", "next 4 days" and "agenda" options. For this exercise make certain you click on the week option.

3) Now you are ready to go and this is where the fun begins. Just take your mouse and find a calendar period you would like to work with. Left click your mouse and drag. You will see it shade the period and when you release a bubble will appear that points to the shaded area. It looks like the image below. At this point in time you can, if you want, simply write what you want in the "what" space that is ready for text and click "Create Event", which is in the bubble, and you will have created an event. However, we want to click on the blue text, "edit event details".

4) After you click on "edit event details", your page will change and look like the image below.

There are a number of spaces here to fill in the details and you should take advantage of them, particularly everything in the green section of the page. The text you place here will be vital for your patrons to find the event, understand what you are doing and, well, simply plan for it. After you fill out the green portion of the page, go immediately below to the gray section that is headlined as "options". This is a space where you can set a reminder for yourself, which will be sent to your email at a time you designate, and it is a place to make your event private or public. What's the difference? Well, this is what Google says...

Using the "Privacy" option, you can control the visibility of individual events on your calendar. If you share a calendar with someone, that person will see all your events by default. To make a particular event private (so that only you and other calendar owners can see it), just click on "Private." If your calendar isn't currently shared, but you'd like to make a single event public (so that anyone in the world can see it), just click on "Public."

So it's up to you and depending on your objectives you will need to decide.

Finally, if you look to the right hand side of the quote, you will see a space where you can directly invite guests. This is a convenient space to invite a few people, but it could be cumbersome to invite everyone one by one. You may wish to enter a guest list, which is something that can be developed in multiple manners. More on that last point later. Now, you are ready to save your event. Click on the "save" button on the top of the page.

5) Great, now you should have an event that looks like this...

6) Ok, you are not quite done. Now you need to define your calendar. You can have many calendars and subscribe to many more. For example, I have four calendars, one for my business, one for my exercise, one for my personal events and one for my medical events. Also, I subscribe to my lovely fiance's calendar so that I know what I will really be doing, a calendar for my dad, a calendar for my favorite sports teams and one for major US Holidays. These are a variety of different types of calendars, some private and some public. The great thing is you don't have to look at all of them at once. You can. But if you are like me you just get confused. One of the things that will help you clarify your situation is you can assign any color you wish to your calendars. How do you do that? Well, you go to the left hand side of the page and you look at "My Calendars". Next to your calendar will be a small button of similar color that has an arrow that points down. Click on it. Once you do this you will see something that looks like this...

You can choose another color, but I want you to click on "Calendar settings". Once you do this you will see another page that looks like this...

Now, here you can name your calendar, put in a general description of what the calendar is (i.e. "a calendar of local beanie baby events", etc.), a location that it is centered around (i.e. the Columbus OH Metro Area). Fill it out and it will look something like this...

. Start making your calendars and sharing them with fiends. And if you want them downloaded onto iCal and Outlook programs, you can do that too... in fact you can publish your calendar in an HTML format. All of these options are on the same page and if you wish to play around with these you can. Also, Google can help you with these in the help section of it's Google Calendar service. But you have done a lot, I suggest you click on the "save" button on the lower left-hand portion of the page and begin to fill in your calendar. Don't be shy and remember, you can't break it and you can always edit and fix your mistakes. And remember, this doesn't replace the handshake.

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Good advice on the Two-Street that is Marketing on the Social Web

We here at Two-Way Street didn't just stumble upon this name... It's the best way to describe
advertising on the social web today

social media encompass older Internet offerings, such as e-mail discussion lists, Usenet newsgroups, Web communities and product review sites, as well as newer offerings, such as blogs, wikis and podcasts.

The key difference between Internet advertising media and traditional advertising media is that the latter are interruptive––advertisers interrupt your message to bring you theirs––while the former are participative––advertisers can join in with your marketing efforts. Evans recommends choosing advertising in which others can participate.

“You need to get the support of vocal user communities,” Evans says. “Through those, individuals can credibly spread the word about your products or services.” In the Internet age, “to truly persuade, you must engage,” he says.

You can't engage people within a social network without disturbing the network itself, Evans acknowledges. In doing that, you could wind up coming across as manipulative––if you're not careful.

The classic case of a new media marketing backfiring involved Sony Ericsson. When it launched a new camera/cell phone in 2002, the company hired actors to pretend they were foreign tourists in New York City. To help spread the word about the new gadgets, the actors, fake accents and all, asked New Yorkers to take a picture of them with the device. Once the truth surfaced, people were indignant. The backlash became larger than campaign itself, and the brand took a knock.

Though the Internet didn't play a direct role here, it does make it easy for individuals and companies alike to mask their identity. Avoid the temptation. Given the connected nature of consumers today, it’s just a matter of time before any disguised marketing effort will be widely exposed.

“Be 110 percent transparent,” Evans recommends. “Tell people who you are, what you're selling, and why you're trying to sell it to them.”

The classic way to market products or services through participative technologies is to establish yourself as an expert and provide objective content that has value beyond your specific products or services. To sell via the Internet, you first must be useful. The more useful you are, the more you'll persuade people to visit your Web site and check into your products or services.

It's all about transparency and, in many ways, back to the days of door-to-door salesmanship and client visits... except this time with an AJAX browser.


Technorati Tags: web 2.0 marketing, transparency, Sony Ericsson

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Social Networking Getting Another Facelift? Ask Google and See Socialstream

The online magazine, Social Computing, had this interesting little report about how The Google Empire is supporting a project to 'Rethink and Reinvent Social Networking'

The initial mission was to help improve the online community orkut, but the project's scope was not to simply redesign the interface. The team at Carnegie Mellon considered how online social networking could bring greater value to users, especially for ages above twenty.

After initial brainstorming and research, the team - comprising three designers, four computer scientists, two mathematicians, a social scientist, a businesswoman, and a pair of philosophers - chose to focus on the effects of a new model for online social networking: a unified social network that, as a service, provides social data to many other applications.

Their user research examined needs related to online as well as offline social networking and considered how they related to a unified social network service model. Through this user research they identified a set of archetypes that represent common behavior patterns that existed across multiple study participants and also formulated a summarized list of their high level needs.

The solution the team came up with, Socialstream, is "a system where users can seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks."

It is the result of a rigorous user-centered design process that involved formal research and evaluation with over 35 participants and weekly critiques from clients and colleagues.

Nice to see this type of research that focuses on a non-Millenial demo. One of the items that we here at Two Way believe is that social computing is only going to work if everyone can work it. Simply put, you can't reap the greatest benefits of the social network without the entire set of social possibilities. Digital natives are, of course, important. But so is the 45 year old down the street who has never though about Facebook or Myspace. We'll see what comes of this.

What Google's research is baring is Socialstream. In this cas you would get a social site aggregator that, much like blogs and webpages are RSSed, this would do much the same. If you have two or three profiles on separate sites, this allows you to keep all of them while accessing their content on one page. It will be interesting to see how this really works. But for me the most important item read in their study was the Literature Review (I am such an academic!).

In addition to general reading on social networking, we explored the Pew and HomeNet Projects, a series of studies of Internet usage in the home. Some important trends include:

* Gender: Men prefer entertainment while women prefer to focus on connections.
* Age: Older users want something productive while younger users want something social.
* Strength of Online Relationships: The Internet supports acquaintance relationships much better than close friendships.

Social Networking Theory
Based on readings and seminar discussions from a social networking class, several important theories emerged:

* Similarity and interests become more important online than physical proximity
* Social network usage is contagious. People join on a single suggestion, but require more motivation to continue use.
* The connections listed in any single online service are incomplete.
* Simple connections do not mirror the complex nature of real relationships.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Socialstream, Carnegie Mellon, Google

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What is "Two Way Street Research and Consultation" About?

The term Web 2.0 is thrown about a lot these days and much of it is confusing. Let's make this clear. It is unclear because,

1) These technologies are proliferating quicker than dandelions in May -- Everywhere you look there is a new social network, a new blog, a new chat service, and so on. Frankly, it's too much for any one person with a job to keep up with. Heck, it may even be too much for someone who loves this stuff to keep up with!

2) Most of us never really got Web 1.0 -- Ok, some of us took the time to learn HTML or what CSS was, but most of us didn't. Let's face it, when the web became the flavor of the 1990s it was so acronym-driven that most of us simply couldn't penetrate the technicalese because we felt dumb when someone explained to us in a condescending tone that Java and JavaScript were not the same. Shouldn't Web 2.0, an upgrade, be even more difficult? To program... yes. But to use by normal people like yourself, no. Simply put, the average non computer person can put content up on the web and you need not know the difference between an AJAX capable browser and the stuff you keep under your kitchen sink.

However you should understand that the if you can write in any major language and if you can define your needs to connect to people, organizations, clients and customers then you can use Web 2.0 technologies. This website and I am here to help you do exactly that. Because these tools are in their relative infancy and solid metrics on their market influence are difficult to ascertain, you need to be judicious and clever with what tools you want to work with and what you want to achieve. Indeed, just like traditional marketing and communication, you need a strategy. That's what this blog and my services will provide you. The blog gives you a clearinghouse of my thoughts, links, and relevant stories. My services, well, just write! I am available at tim.twowaystreet@gmail.com.

Expect more posts later. But for now, let's talk!

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Technorati Tags: web 2.0, web 2.0 consulting