Social Strategy & Design by @KarlLong

I’ve been talking about Social Media for some time and believe it is going to have a huge impact on culture, society and business over the next 5 to 10 years. Anyway, I thought I’d dig up all my favorite posts about the topic and try to expose some of the chronology of what i’ve been learning. In many ways since I started this blog 6 years ago I’m documenting a long learning curve that I’ve gone through since starting my MBA program back then. Kind of interesting as Experience Curve is a term that actually relates to how organizations learn and become more efficient with new technology. Anyway, lots of these are old, written without the benefit of hindsight, but I found them very interesting to explore. If you have old articles on social media please link to them in the comments or write up your own post and send me a track back, i’ll gather other links in updates at the end of the post.

Supernova Conference Co-Creation TitBits
Jun 24, 2006 - From what I can tell this is the first time I mention social media as a descriptor, although I was still enamored with the term “co-creation” which was my particular focus in 2006. I even started a podcast called The Co-Creative Business Show (not supported, has probably been hacked, not responsible for content) and I put out 5 decent episodes but the production overhead was too much. Great experience though and talked to some great people about some seriously interesting topics.

The Audience Is Dead But The Show Must Go On
Jul 7, 2006 - I think this is one of my fav blog titles, bummer no one commented and I linked to some other bloggers

Die Web2.0 Die Die Die Fucking Die or the Social Media Manifesto
Jul 19, 2006 - I think this was a post that lost Scott Karp as a potential internet friend who write’s Publishing.20, sorry Scott, I did have a smiley face which I thought would cover a multitude of sins. Oooh, and I also take a jab at rocketboom, i’m sure they didn’t notice.

Why Social Media Kills The Competition - Yelp.com Case
Aug 1, 2006 - This is hands down one of my favorite case studies that I wrote from participating in a community, yelp is an extraordinary example of a social media business model. If they fail it will not be due to a lack of a powerful business model, it will be a lack of executing and scaling that business model.

3 Rules For Managing Viral Marketing - What Every CMO Needs To Know
Aug 11, 2006 - Another post I really like and I’ve got great feedback on, really looks at how to manage creative projects differently in a social media environment.

Beyond Viral Marketing - Engagement, Narrative, & Passion
Sep 12, 2006 - This is my first post about “big games” or “alternate reality games”, I have a great belief in these being powerful examples of motivated user generated experiences (I still can’t think of a term to sum this up, but the power of these games to inspire participation are extraordinary). Check out Area/Code, a company specializing in big games. It’s also something that Nokia has pioneered with it’s Nokia Games that it’s been doing since 1999

Book: Outside Innovation - How Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future
Sep 28, 2006 - What this book is about is what social media is good for and enables. It enables you to engage customers in your innovation process. Amazingly to me, and a wonderful example of eating your own dog food, 3 years on the blog that Patricia started to talk about this book is still going strong.

What’s The Role Of Social Media In The Next Election?
Sep 29, 2006 - Wow, this is still 2006, another one with no comments, wow, I was relentless.

Putting the Fun In Functional - Game Mechanics and Social Media
Dec 18, 2006 - This is a critical presentation to look at if you need to do any work with social networks. Basically it lays out the game mechanics that are built into social networks that drive behavior, this is the heart of what makes social networks tickle the very reptilian area of the brain and can make them very addictive.

Social Media Is Dead - So Says Steve Rubel
Dec 28, 2006 - Well this one got some comments I actually tagged some people in the post that I wanted to respond to the post, I should do that more.

What is Social Media
Feb 19, 2007 - Well this seems like an ideal post to end this post on, as this is my first blog interaction with Stowe Boyd, who I have actually recently come to know as a friend, and who continues to blog at /message about social computing and at /ground on issues of localism and sustainability.

What is Web 2.0 Feb 20th, 2007

Ning.com - Roll Your Own Social Network - The Rise Of The Social Niche-Work Mar 2, 2007

In this fascinating interview on Charlie Rose, Lawrence Lessig provides some interesting comments about “hybrid economies” where companies co-create value with their customers. As he says some companies, mostly new and small, are already adopting this hybrid economic model, but bigger companies in the future will be transformed by this.

Most companies look at what consumers create, co-create, and share with the world as some kind of free resource to be exploited in what ever way they can, but the winners in the future will be the companies that can create ecosystems in which all the participants are valued, rewarded, promoted, and empowered. Companies are going to increasingly have to treat their customers as contributers and stakeholders in their business, and the concept of where a company begins and ends will blur.

Social Media is the engine behind this massive and slow moving change and for most companies change is not something that can be avoided. Anyone who thinks that social media is about influence, popularity, or an audience is sorely mistaken and business models built on that will be shaky at best. Social media provides the tools to empower and lead a legion of people who believe in your vision, be they customers, employees, partners or competitors, the opportunity right now for all companies is to be a change agent for your industry, are you up for the challenge.

BTW this was the topic of a recent talk/presentation I gave at Inverge and the Social Media Marketing summit, it was titled “Employing Your Customers For Fun and Profit”, I hope to have video of that soon. I’ve had some companies express an interest in having me come in and do the presentation for them and I’m happy to share it, time permitting.

Anyway, don’t just take mine and Lawrence Lessig’s word for it, check out these books if you are interested in this transformation of business.

The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers by Prahalad & Ramaswamy

“web-empowered consumers will usher in “a new industrial system” characterized by “co-creating value through personalized experiences unique to the individual consumer.” Under the new regime, headstrong consumers will “seek to exercise their influence in every part of the business system,” and companies will accommodate them by, for example, allowing them to design their own individualized cosmetics and houseboats (an innovation whose benefits include “emotional bonding with… the company” and “a greater degree of self-esteem”).”

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig and it’s associated blog page here

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Also watch this video of Clay at the web 2.0 expo where he puts into describes the massive cognitive surplus that enables huge projects like Wikipedia to be created, and how much of it is available

Related: Kaplak Blog has an excellent write up of the Rose/Lessig interview as well, worth reading.

Also follow Lawrence on twitter.com/lessig Clay Shirky at twitter.com/cshirky and me if you like at twitter.com/karllong.

In the recent Marketing Vox report Marketers Still Face Steep Web 2.0 Learning Curve several quotes jumped out at me, indicating that companies are still very unclear about the value of social media. Quotes like:

“Despite a lack of expertise, more than 67% report they will increase their Social Media advertising budget in 09″

“More than 87% of respondents are not regularly measuring the ROI of their social media marketing efforts.”

“While many marketers are worried they’re missing the boat, in reality even the Fortune 500 companies don’t feel they’ve mastered social media just yet.”

All these quotes indicate to me that top management are generally not engaged with Social Media related activities and their people are out there trying to figure it out, with mixed results. I think one of the major problems is that Social Media is almost entirely grass roots and some of the most interesting and powerful stuff is hiding just bellow the surface. I believe that Social Media will have very limited impact in most companies until top leadership starts making it a priority. The biggest failure IMHO is the failure of social media consultants to quantify the value for leaders in fortune 500 companies above and beyond participation. If your talking to a CEO/CMO and your advice is “blog” “twitter” and “join the conversation” I think their eyes will roll back in their head, most of them are not interested in conversation, they are interested in leading a team of people to create value. Until you can connect social media directly to value creation you will not hold an executives interest.

Now on the other hand, if you tell a CEO that through social media he could inspire thousands or tens of thousands of people both inside and outside his company to add significant value to his company, you may have the beginnings of an argument for them to personally participatein blogs, twitter etc.

If you are a fortune 500 senior executive there are potentially thousands of people waiting to be led by you, you define what value you want to create, and you lead that massive virtual team to create that value. Now is the time, because in 5 years time you will be wondering how you got left behind.

The Economist published an article called “Blogging: Oh, grow up” and they get it so wrong I’m almost lost for words. They focus on Jason Calacanis’s famous retirement from blogging (oh but 38K people follow him on twitter, some retirement) as some indication that blogging has lost it’s revolutionary zeal. Nothing could be further from the truth, the power of blogging is the ability to DOMINATE a global niche, just ask Gary Vaynerchuk who built a media empire around wine over the course of 17 MONTHS.

Here’s a quote from the article which you can read in full here:

Gone, in other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of its pioneers. Confirmed, however, is the idea that blogging is useful and versatile. In essence, it is a straightforward content-management system that posts updates in reverse-chronological order and allows comments and other social interactions. Viewed as such, blogging may “die” in much the same way that personal-digital assistants (PDAs) have died. A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone.

And here’s the response I left on the Economist web site:

I’m afraid the problem with this article is it assumes the ‘blogsphere’ to be some kind of monolithic cloud and somehow that is being dominated by the mainstream media. What has happened is that mainstream topics like news, politics, and gossip are being dominated by blogs that act and look like mainstream media. But that as they say is the tip of the iceberg. The blogsphere is actually comprised of hundreds of thousands of topical blogospheres that are like communities of interests for their own particular topics. Lots of these are career type blogs, if you want to know about marketing, there is probably someone blogging about it.

I started blogging in 2003 and that has turned into a career blog which has become more important than my resume. It’s got me speaking engagements, was instrumental in me getting my current job and will likely be critical in getting my next job (if I decide to work for someone else).

I also, in my spare time, write the number 1 T-shirt blog on the internet at http://tcritic.com and have been writing it for two years. There are over 150 T-shirt blogs, and numerous T-shirt search engines. I get about 65,000 unique visitors a month, and monetize it through advertising and starting up my own line of T-shirts. This is never going to be visible at a mainstream media level, but there are thousands of blogs like this that are building small empires around niche topics.

Saying that the subversive and revolutionary aspects of blogging have somehow disappeared now the mainstream media is dominating the top stories is erroneous. The power of blogs and social media in general is the ability to dominate a niche and connect with people who can help you create value. Just ask Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV.

UPDATE: a couple of people have pointed out the similarity between the Economist article and Paul Boutin’s article in Wired magazine, which I agree there are similarities. Both Nick Carr and Jeffery Zeldman wrote responses to that piece. I guess i’m just used to that sort of hyperbole coming out of Wired, but not the Economist. I think I care more about The Economist.

Here’s a quote that I particularly like from Zeldman:

Paul, when do we stop talking about web content exclusively in terms of narrow platforms and shallow, self-interested goals? When do we stop saying x makes y irrelevant? When do we stop reducing the web to a vulgar and trivial competition between head boys, and start appreciating it as a maturing medium for real thought and expression?

Also Kevin Marks has written an article about this and brings up some great points about how the tools are changing, and I think he’s got a point. The tools like twitter, britekite, tumblr, friendfeed, google reader ’sharing’, even facebook etc. are under the radar of mainstream media, as are the networks and value they are creating.

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Your mileage may vary but some of the themes in this slideshow “happiness as your business model” resonate so deeply with me it literally brought tears to my eyes. In the deck Tara (author of HorsePigCow and founder of Citizen Agency) connects so succinctly Maslows hierarchy of needs and the concepts of autonomy and relatedness it just blew me away. Funny because i’ve been trying to connect the same things for the last five or six years with limited success, so you would imagine it would make me feel quite inept seeing how well Tara has done it here, but that’s not the case at all, i feel like it’s a huge confirmation and an opportunity for me to go back and see how I can build on it.

I wrote an article way back in 2003 where I tried to connect a concept called the “hierarchy of customer experience” to loyalty, which was heavily inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy and Hertzbergs two factor theory of motivation which included “Trust > Competence > Autonomy > Creativity/Relatedness”

Here’s another look at an earlier attempt:

I’m quite convinced that a model like this is the secret behind the real success (and real failure) of web 2.0/social media type companies. Increasingly it will be the secret behind the real success (and real failure) of all companies and organizations.

Dealmaker Media have an upcoming Under The Radar event that aims to connect emerging innovative companies with VC’s and larger companies. You can register here and get $100 off. I went to the last one of these and met some really great people like Pete Cashmore from Mashable, Ted Rheingold founder of Dogster, some folks from Betaworks, Deborah Schultz and a lot of VC’s.

Social Media and Entertainment
June 3, 2008 | 8:00am – 6:00pm
Microsoft Campus | Mountain View, CA

Just Announced! The Fireside Chat…
Breaking Down the Door to Madison Avenue - Hear from R/GA, JWT, AKQA and GLAM MEDIA

PRESENTING COMPANIES:
33Across - Identifies influential online users
Animoto - Create personalized, professional-quality videos from images and music, offering a new alternative to traditional online photo slideshows
AudioMicro - Stock music and sound effects licensing platform
Aviary -Suite of web-based applications for people who create and a marketplace to sell that content
BigStage - Animate yourself with cutting-edge virtualization technology
Comedy.com - aggregated comedy entertainment site
CrowdSPRING - crowdsourcing of creative talent.
Curse - MMO gamer community.
Dizzywood - A virtual world that allows kids to dress up 3D avatars, play games, explore worlds and meet new friends in a safe environment
ffwd - Organized, multi-platform, video content delivered via a browser, with social network awareness, and predictive recommendations.
GumGum - A licensing and distribution platform for online content
Hollywood Interactive Group - A mass casual mmo based on reality TV concepts and Hollywood stardom.
Jacked - Browser-based “second screen” for TV viewers, which provides synchronized content and a real-time interactive experience that complements what they’re watching on TV
Jygy - Mobile social networking with SMS
Keibi - Moderation and classification of user generated content (UGC)
Kontagent - Next gen social analytics
Kosmix - Categorization engine that crawls billions of Web pages in a unique manner to create algo-generated home pages
Lil’Grams - Tracking your babies memories in real time.
Loomia - Social recommendations bridging established social networking sites with media websites
Loud3r - Aggregating and publishing semantically searched content
MediaForge - We’ve got widgets comin’ out our ads
Mochi Media - Provides independent game developers with analytics, distribution, tools and monetization while providing advertisers with turnkey opportunities to reach the one in three Internet users who play online games.
MovieSet - Platform that brings behind-the-scenes filmmaking online, giving fans authentic access through its proprietary toolkit for Producers.
Mytopia -Social gaming community for Web, Mobile, Smartphone and TV
Nesting - Organizing family activities; scheduling, networking and more
Overlay.tv - video commerce platform that overlays contextual information directly onto online video content
Pikum - A new kind of betting game
PluggedIn - Enjoy stunning, broadcast-quality music videos from your browser
PutPlace - Media storage all the way from Ireland
SocialMedia Networks - enables developers of social media applications to monetize their traffic
Sometrics - Social Analytics and Social Ad Platform
Verismo Networks – High quality video over broadband without a pc.
Vivaty - Brings together your friends, photos and videos into a personal virtual scene, in your browser
Vusion - HD Quality Video over the internet
Wetpaint - Wiki powered websites
Xumii - Take all your contacts from your social networks with you — on your phone!

Hyperbole? I don’t think so. I believe that social media is reshaping the business landscape and is changing, or requiring change from every aspect of the business, from business strategy, to product development, to marketing, to human resources (hey, even Microsoft is taking notice see this FT article “A revolution is taking shape”).

The Newcomreview.com just posted on a report from TNS media intelligence/Cymfony that found 50% of Marketing Executives Believe Social Media Is a “Vital Component” of Corporate Communications, that’s a pretty huge shift if is really representative of marketers across the board.

I really like the way they seperated between “wait and see” folks who are just dipping their toe in with social media and and “revolutionaries” who have embraced the change.

and even more fascinating and how do they approach marketing differently?

In other words the wait and see folks are still hooked into the “campaign” big bang fire and forget model, and the revolutionaries are “participating in the conversation” and building deeper relationships with their customers. Hmm, I wonder what has a better ROI.

So which one are you? Wait and see? or a revolutionary?

I’m really looking forward to this panel next week at the Commonwealth Club, it’s called Conscious Capitalism and it is covering topics that I often find myself thinking about and discussing. There must be something in the air as even Bill Gates recently called for kinder capitalism.

The panel is next wednesday (january 30th), it’ll be interesting to meet Nathan as we’ve corresponded over the years but have never met

T-shirt All Tied Up From Full Bleed via tcritic

Having read this on a post at LinuxWorld it got me thinking:

So when the cost of deciding to do something becomes much more expensive than doing something, what do you do? Here are a few ideas:

• Empower teams to launch experiments
• Develop a process for manageing projects as a portfolio of experiments
• Evaluate projects regularly
• Killing projects should be as easy as starting projects and everyone needs to understand that, and the criteria
• Start cheaply
• Get ready to fail faster
• Prepare to fail in public and be ok with that
• Create a “beta” culture
• Put basic legal boilerplate frameworks in place that minimize risk, don’t reinvent it each time

Those are just some rough ideas, any more? Anyone facing this issue?