Social Strategy & Design by @KarlLong

I found this great video from German Ad agency Scholz & Friends via twitter friend Gabriel Rossi. In the video they lay out a very accessible history of advertising with some lovely animation and music. What I do like at the end is the question they ask of their fictitious Brand X “Don’t you have something interesting to say”. It seems that after years of “crafting messages” to appeal to the faceless mass consumer market many brands have lost their ability to do or say anything interesting. Exceptions of course are companies that stand for things more meaningful than just promoting the consumption of their products. See my related post Is Advertising Worth Saving.

Scholz & Friends: “Dramatic shift in marketing reality” from Michael Reissinger on Vimeo.

On a related note I put a presentation together a year or so ago to present to some Industrial Design students on the topic of branding. I took a similar, historical approach calling it “A Brief History of Branding” which i’ve shared on SlideShare.

If you are interested in this kind of stuff you should follow me on Twitter where I share a lot of this sort of thing

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.

There are a lot of interesting things happening on twitter, and amazing connections being made. I’m connecting with CEO’s, entrepreneurs, authors, producers and adventurers, when I started following Richard Branson he only had 400 followers and he followed me right back. The opportunity, as I see it, is to connect with people who inspire me, and to try and provide some kind of value back to the people that follow me. Anyway, I’ve been thinking for a while that some of my tweets (maybe of others as well) are worth capturing on my blog, nuggets that I would like to discuss further, seeds of ideas if you like. I was thinking I’ll just pick my fav 10 or so in a week and post them as a tweet digest. I’ve avoided the auto posting of tweets as most of them, to be quite honest are probably totally irrelevant.

The genius of google, it connected people with ads when they were searching, the genius of twitter is it connects people when they are ready

(BTW that is exactly 140 charicters with no extra spaces or punctuation)

#Advertising - TVB predicts National TV Spot ad spend declining by 11.5% to 15.5% in 2009 http://cli.gs/mEbMvZ

“RT: @don_draper [out of character]: Wanted to tell you all first - I’m officially done tweeting as Don will be handing the account to AMC.”

(RT is twitter short hand for ‘retweeting’ or quoting someone else’s post or tweet)

“The story behind the Mad Men twitter experiment http://cli.gs/s2EGA4 thanks @don_draper “

“if you watch poker or bbc america on TV in the US you will have access to some of the worst advertising ever experienced by a human being”

” @stoweboyd LOL just read the headline “Karl Long Batters The Economist” http://cli.gs/YhZ4aL “

“Ha ‘Despite a lack of expertise, more than 67% report they will increase their social media advertising budget in 2009′ http://cli.gs/X4bbvT “

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.

Funny as this is, it’s almost analogous to how lost some companies are in approaching social media. I love it when Ben Stiller is whispering to his cousin “let me in, what is it makes you tick”. Brilliant.

Mashable asked last week if Social Media Jobs Here To Stay? That in many ways is like saying in 1999 are these web jobs here to stay, there is no doubt that social media in the broader sense is here to stay, some tools and social networks will disappear, but IMHO pandoras box is open, and no one will be able to close it. Anyway, the point being is that big companies are “getting” in, and even if they don’t have “social media” in the title more and more job descriptions are going to include “must be familiar with blogging” “facebook experience a plus” etc. Check out Jeremiah Owyang’s long list of Social Media Strategists. Anyway, case in point is this executive search that Wert & co. is doing:

Wert & Company, Inc
an international recruitment and consulting firm, conducting executive, senior searches for dynamic companies and organizations across a range of disciplines and industries, specializing in marketing, brand strategy, design and innovation.

Wert & Company is seeking Digital Marketing Manager on behalf of one of the most celebrated, global design centric brands—to plan, develop and implement the effective (next stage) use of web-based technologies in support of their global business and marketing requirements. As the primary director, creator and evaluator of public-facing web channels, this person will bring new energy and perspectives to an already well established brand—to broaden the consultancy’s online presence, and foster more meaningful digital connections worldwide. As a member of the marketing communications team, this individual will collaborate with a small team of content generators to build a cohesive future-facing plan for the firm’s corporate websites as well as commerce sites and content portals.

Candidates must be champions of great design!

Lots of people have been talking about the right metrics for blogs and other kinds of social media for a couple of years now. It is in fact a desperate need in the blogging community because apart from the obvious ego-surfing, feedback and benchmarkeing is absolutely critical to managing and growing a blog. Also for anyone running a corporate blog, how do you show ROI and how do you show growth, progress, results? More to the point if you are managing a blog how do you provide the right metrics in place to drive the right behavior on the blog. The old adage of you can’t manage what you can’t measure holds true, as does the idea that you only get what you measure, so you’d better be measuring the right thing

Most of the metrics thus far have been based upon typical web-site metrics, unique visitors, page views, incoming links etc. which are fine measures if you are only interested in popularity. Now this is fine if your business is pleasing advertisers because of course they are still obsessed (however misguidedly) on eyeballs. But popularity is a very misleading measure if your aim is something other than popularity, and is especially meaningless when you compare part time blogs, to professional with a whole editorial staff.

Many folks have compiled lists of blogs ranking them using various publicly available information. Mack Collier’s Top 25 Marketing Blogs (recently expanded to include Social Media blogs) uses Technorati Authority to rank these blog, and the Ad Age Power 150 uses a multi-metric including Technorati, RSS subscribers, Google Page Rank and others, but IMHO still essentially measures of popularity. Seth Godin’s blog is at the number 1 spot on the Top 25 marketing blog and the Ad Age Power 150.

Now in comes Aide RSS a company that aims to provide measures of “engagement” (see Mark Ghuneim on Measuring Engagement). Now engagement has been a watchword in the marketing and advertising community for a couple of years now and I think there is a great deal of consensus that customer engagement is a more meaningful measure in the world of social media than measures of popularity. Beyond Social Media it is becoming clear that it is engagement over time that is one of the secrets behind building great brands in the web2.0/social media space, I really like the work David Armano is doing on Micro Interactions and Direct Engagement, it is those Micro Interactions which form the basis to measuring engagement.

Anyway, Aide Rss has been doing some engagement measurement using their soon to be released API and they used Mack Colliers Top 25 Marketing blogs as a baseline for that test. They published their results as an image, so I took the liberty of transferring it to a table and calculated the relative gains and losses of these blogs. I think the results are pretty interesting and there are some big moves in what for the last year has been a pretty static list. In the table I’ve got the Top 25 marketing blog standings based upon technorati rank and then on the right the Aide Rss Engagement rankings, and in the last column a +/- for where the blog has moved.

Here’s how they calculated engagement:

(BTW no idea why the table looks so bad, I guess k2 is overriding everything)

I think this is a pretty fascinating experiment and I for one am very excited for when Aide RSS release this API. The one thing that I think is interesting here is the number of blogs who I consider very authoritative (and personal favorites) like Jaffe Juice, Brand Autopsy, and Church of the Customer, that had quite significant drops on the engagement scale. Obviously this is just after a cursory glance at the results and doesn’t take into account blog design or other factors, but I wonder if the more popular a blog gets the less conversational it becomes?

Anyway, I coded all this by hand so there may be errors, especially in recording gains and losses so please let me know if there are any problems.

Where is Chris Cocker when you need him, anyway, next time you are on the verge of another jibe at Twitters expense you should bare this in mind. We are the early adopters and some of us are also some of the heaviest users of twitter, some people have literally 10’s of thousands of followers. Some, who are weblebreties, post tweets that attract 30 to 40 responses to every 140 character gem of wisdom is dropped. From what I understand it is the number of @ messages that are makes Twitter a difficult technology to scale. When I see the Fail Whale I just come back later, like others i’ve become rather fond of it.

Being a mega early adopter means having to accept that sometimes things won’t run right. The guys at Twitter are building a technology that has never existed before, and they are doing it while everyone is using it. Talk about building a plane while flying it and transporting passengers, I wish them the best of luck.

Love the fail whale, check out the t-shirts.