Social Media Marketing and Optimization

I remember Dale Carnegie in his book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, he speaks of recruiting others to form your knowledge base and lever their knowledge by organizing it. Through some incentive provided on your behalf, you can coax others to allow you to coordinate and utilize their knowledge in a mutually beneficial fashion.

A basic facet of economics is the division of labour. Adam Smith declared that as economies grow, people must begin to specialize in certain tasks in order for them to be salable in the market at a rate where the market clears and everyone can access the product (within reason). Given the diversity in today’s workforce, to specialize in every essential profession or industry, it’d take modern man centuries. Clearly this is inefficient and for most folks, impossible.

The productivity boom of 90’s, or the Clinton Administration depending on who you ask, was triggered by a productivity explosion which was fueled by an explosion of fixed asset investment overseas, assisted by technology and low cost/scalable real time communication which has allowed, and is allowing us to utilize the ready pool of both skilled and unskilled labour that exists in nations such as China and India.

So labour initially divides locally and domestically, and then further divides beyond existing borders with the support of fixed asset investment. Multinationals have set up operations overseas to capitalize on the abundance of low cost labor and generous government incentives. Here, both parties win, the company reduces cost and continues to optimize ROI for its shareholders, while the nation gets an economic boost and builds their commercial reputation and the value of their labor force.

Recalling the book, “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”, the democratization of information via email and high speed internet has freed economic activity from domestic borders with the aid of free trade agreements. The new phenomena of mass collaboration is now among us in the form of blogs, social networks, and open source CMS systems such as Joomla.

Where we once could use the web to communicate in real time, we can now utilize it to publish, review and manage complex projects in teams for free in real time. So first capital was freed up with the liberalization of data, and now knowledge is flowing freely with the widespread adoption of online mass collaboration tools such as Wikis, blogs and social networks.

The world is undergoing an economic revolution. The USA is running a large (6%+) current account deficit with developing nations being responsible for the trade imbalance. We consume - they produce - we leverage consumption - we offshore - their economies are bolstered - the investor class in the US prospers yet we’re faced with a large external deficit. Is this good or bad? Although the monetary value of our exports against our imports nets us a large deficit - is the knowledge value, if we could quantify it more precisely eliminating this imbalance? Are we still producing more value in this country? Either way you look at the trade deficit, the parties running a surplus (China for example) in their need to change dollars to RMB and keep their exchange rate fixed, must buy something back from us. It just so happens that we’re in great need of foreign inflows to cover our current national expenditures now. Here’s a great article which is highly accessible as well regarding myths surrounding the trade deficit.

That’s a hotly debated issue and I’ve not done it justice here. But I will venture to say, that as the adoption of mass collaboration tools grows, the value of “knowledge” will become more fluid and no nation will have a monopoly on it. Value today will become commoditized tomorrow are we begin this uncertain march into a new era. What were once salable will soon be a click away and the most important network you belong to may consist of people whom you’ve never met in person or spoken with directly. How will you influence them and where will you begin? This is a profound question…

This post was triggered by some commentary on the rule of 150 as it applies to control during the collaborative process, found on Buzz Marketing for Technology.

current account deficit

global trade

Laws of Wikinomics

online collaboration

Social Networks

web 2.0 tools

Wikinomics

I feel like I’m a little late on the Twitter bandwagon here. Whether it be talking for it, against it, about it.

Twitter is blogging at its finest granularity. Micro-blogging, some have called it. Blogging in real time. As if having open source, easy-to-use blogging software wasn’t easy enough for newbies to self-publish almost instantly, Twitter gives you the ability to ‘blog’ or ‘tweet’ from your computer or even your cell phone.

Personally, I’m a fan of tweeting straight from my phone. I’ve got a Treo, I don’t have to worry about the pesky numeric keypad. I’m not as overinvolved as Scoble, who even manages to carry out conversations via tweets… but I make do. It was especially boredom-alleviating when I was stuck on the side of the highway yesterday morning.

I know that Twitter was all the rage at SXSW some time ago (as I didn’t attend, I don’t have much to add to that conversation). And I know that there have been some detractors from the service, such as people raising the obvious question: why do we need to know about these people real time?

Is it the voyeuristic nature of people? (Which explains the popularity of shows such as Big Brother, Real World, and The Apprentice) Is it the sociological need to feel connected no matter what? (Which explains the appeal and popularity of MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, VIRB…etc…)

See me tweet!

blogging

Social Networks

I had the distinct pleasure of attending the first ever PRSA-NY Career, Internship & Continuing Education Forum this past Saturday. I was especially excited because the keynote speaker was going to be someone from Technorati. Derek Gordon, VP of Marketing at Technorati – to be exact. I confess I had a squee-moment.

Thankfully, he kept the speech short and to the point, since the event coordinators didn’t see it fit to give the attendees chairs (the exhibitors were supplied with chairs). It was a little unsettling, the lack of chairs, since we were instructed to dress in business attire. And to the young to mid-20-something, that means pointy toed heels.

Major physical discomfort aside, it was wonderful to hear him speak on the effects of social media on public relations… and marketing, to a degree, but as it was a PR event, he focused mainly on PR.

He started with a brief survey of the audience. Who uses a social network (MySpace, Facebook)? Who reads blogs? Who blogs? Who uses Twitter? Who is on Second Life? There were a few more questions that he presented, but I think those were the ones that I didn’t raise my hand for (maybe 2-3 total).

Next, he spoke of the current state of affairs. We’re swimming in an ocean of Web 2.0 buzzwords. Most of us know at least 50% of those terms (however, I do know people in the industry who still use Yahoo as their main search engine, rarely to never use Google, and had never heard of blogs or social media beyond MySpace and Facebook up till about 6 weeks ago). We are at the confluence of high speed/low cost/high quality internet service. It is incredibly easy to be your own publisher, your own distributor. It now takes a few clicks in under 5 minutes, not a large amount of effort over several weeks to see your product in others’ hands. Current events, creations, are now being shared in real time. As of April 28, 2007 – Technorati was indexing approximately 75 million blogs and 230 million tagged objects (videos, posts, pictures, and podcasts).

That’s a pretty large number. Two hundred and thirty million? People are talking. People are exchanging information. And we’re doing it all with a few mouse clicks. Who knew that we could have this level of integration 10 years ago?

He also outlined for us the two types of internet users. The first type is my group. The 15-30 yr olds. We grew up on, live with, and live on the web. We have multiple online profiles, and something he called ‘Continuous Partial Attention’. We can do 7 or more things at once, and be reasonably adept at all of them. Second type is the older generation. The late baby boomers, the early adopters, the blogger revolutionaries. Example: Perez Hilton. They can multitask, but to a far lesser degree.

The first hump exemplifies the power of WOM. Not only do we listen to our RL friends, we listen to our online peers too. If we see someone post/comment/IM about a great new service … we are more apt to listen to them, instead of the traditional marketing/advertising (which is still effective, but not to the degree it was in their heyday).

My experiences in PR have taught me to ask a few key questions before entering into a dialogue with anyone: 1) How do I get them to love me? 2) How do I sustain this dialogue (of love)? With all these social networks, these IMs – dialogues are inherent. Derek made it abundantly clear, that as an industry, PR needs to understand and be appealing enough to these social media users. They can’t just focus on the media – because the first type of internet users DOES NOT trust the [traditional] media as much as the generation before.

Communication is not one way. Communication is two way, we develop and sustain [loving] relationships. We have real voices, real personalities, we can differentiate between value and ‘talking points’. We have real feedback. We have real trust issues. Social media is bringing everyone closer together. We have more meaningful relationships (honestly, if anyone ever tells you that online relationships (I’m not talking creepy stalker type) aren’t real… they’re living in the Stone Age) worldwide than we ever had before.

Derek also had a cool anecdote about Germany and their PR agency… but I feel that I’ve been rambling for a bit too long.

Derek, I was so excited to speak with you on Saturday, I forgot to ask you a question that I had prepared: (if you could answer, that’d be great!)

What effect will social networks have on the ability to search? To what extent will Google and Yahoo’s control of information be moderated or reduced?

Public Relations

Social Media Marketing

Social Networks

technorati

First question: Why is VIRB so much cooler than MySpace? Or even that upcoming NBC social network I mentioned in my last post?

For one thing, it has a cool sounding name. viRb. Virrrrrb. Sounds like Verb, something you do.

Another thing is the visual. Clean. Modern. Easy to navigate. See below.

Yes, that’s my (currently) bare bones profile. I signed up a while ago, having found a mention of it on some other blog. Don’t really have a lot of friends on it yet, but I’ve been seeing a recent surge in buzz. Adding other bloggers now.

What else do I like? Customization. They have different modules that you can add/delete/move around. It looks like it’s geared more towards the tech-minded folk. There is a large variety of supported widgets (better than MySpace, which has been banning widgets left and right lately). Even with all this customization, it looks near impossible to make your profile page look like crap, pardon my language. Another great thing? There’s a little button at the top to add/remove customization when you’re viewing someone else’s profile. Meaning your browser doesn’t have a stroke trying to upload.

Ads. Yes, Virb’s got ads, but if you look at the first screenshot — the ads by Google are way at the bottom. No crazy banners messing up your layout. No annoying frogs with ringtones. No phishers.

Virb’s still in its infancy, but I sincerely believe it’s learning from MySpace’s and Facebook’s mistakes (crappy design and introducing new features without telling users) — and it really could be a great thing.

While you’re looking around — add me! I could always use a few more friends.

Do you VIRB? What are your thoughts?

Social Media Marketing

Social Networks

As seen on Random Culture, NBC will launch their own social network.

We already know that FOX owns MySpace. Let’s check out NBC’s social network’s features.

Personalized profiles - Even with the news that MySpace is disabling any non-MySpace approved enhancer… anyone can customize the color scheme of their profile.

Buddies are to NBC as friends are to Friendster, MySpace, Facebook,…etc…

Video galleries - A rather recent addition to MySpace, but you can view artist music videos, self-made videos, viral phenomena already.

Photo galleries -  Since the movie 300 came out, MySpace promoted the ability to add at least 300 pictures on your picture page (I got up to two pages of pictures, I don’t have 300 to post). Pictures have always been an integral part of customizing one’s profile.

Blogs -  I’ve always had something against MySpace blogs.

Groups -  Groups for similar interests, TV shows, movies, bands, cliques, you name it — they’ve got it.

Messageboards - Sites still have these things? There are messageboards on the group profile pages, people have been known to use the comments section of a profile as a makeshift messageboard — especially if you limit your friends list to your group of friends.

Widgets - MySpace has been restricting the use of widgets to those approved by MySpace now. Still, you can have widgets.

Essentially, what is NBC offering that MySpace doesn’t have? This is what will make or break NBC’s network. If you can offer something fun and innovative, people will flock to it. This is what MySpace did. It offered the freedom to customize your profile page — oftentimes, these customizations will crash whatever browser you’re using. This massive freedom to customize is what set it apart from existing networks (Friendster) at the time. Even though it appears that MySpace is cracking down on the freedom — the users don’t care. Why? Because there is always something new and cool to experience. Even though it seems that the usability of the site always leaves something to be desired.

Next review: VIRB

Social Media Marketing

Social Networks