Using Facebook to Drive Traffic

My firm assumption is that marketers are using Facebook to accomplish something, and hopefully they are clear about precisely what that is—good objectives! I’ve had several questions lately that have caused me to think about how marketers are using their Facebook Wall pages (assuming the wall is the most trafficked) and what they are using for landing pages.

So I did a small and totally unscientific survey of some of the sites I follow. Some of it is food for thought; all is interesting. In the interest of disclosure, all my entry points came from searching ‘name facebook.’ Am I the only one who can’t find anything on Facebook itself?

I’ve written about Coke’s social media strategy.
Wall Page. Their main link leads me to a big happy Coke logo; when I click through it invites me to be a fan. No thank you; closing that out leads me to the main Coke page. Easy to get from there to wall page. Took me several clicks but interesting, so I’m not annoyed. Wall is completely fan posts; see nothing from Coke at the moment. You might find it worth reading their House Rules.
Landing Page. None on wall at the moment because they are fan posts. Feeds page has lots of Twitter from the UK at the moment that take you to an offer page on the Diet Coke UK website. The Coke page seems to be the main page for corporate links; see for example their recycling page on the Living Positively site. There’s much going on here; all seems to be well thought out.

I’ve also written about the Pepsi Refresh program, which seems to be Pepsi’s sole communications focus at the moment.
Wall Page. The main link takes you to the Pepsi Refresh Project page. This is a marketing campaign, not a corporate site per se. On the Wall page(s) they have covered all the bases; Pepsi Only, Fans Only, Pepsi + Fans. I’m a bit slow to catch on; I’ve looked several times before understanding this option for corporate fan pages. Try it out and see what I mean. Interesting!
Landing Page. On the Pepsi Only Wall page, most of the current posts go to either to an update message on the Refresh Everything site or to a YouTube video. Some link back to the Pepsi Refresh Project page on Facebook—think about that!

Intuit has a lot of web savvy.
Wall Page. Actually, they have several Facebook pages. I choose the Small Business Spot because I like what they’re doing with it. They have a small business grants program—interesting. When I looked at that wall page it was a mix of Intuit posts, a warning from a user about incompatibility with Chrome, and some user questions. Interestingly enough, the same coffee-drinking user who warned about Chrome compatibility is answering other user question(s). Nice! Lots of questions about taxes; Intuit seems to be responding. One frustrated user says customer service on Facebook is better than in the telephone call center. All in all, a lot that Intuit can learn here and people seem to be getting their issues resolved.
Landing Page. Links from Intuit posts go to their blog, their community, their Kiva page and probably more, depending on the message. This was the first corporate page where I saw wall posts all post linking to the corporate Facebook page, in this case the Small Business Spot page on Facebook. Offers and links there take visitors to the Intuit small business website.

I’ve written about Legal Zoom also.
Wall Page. Can a bunch of lawyers carry on a good conversation? This site says they can! The main link takes me to their Notes page. I find that uninspiring, but they have a reason; pushing Start-A-Business month. Their wall page is a nice mix of LegalZoom and fan posts. Many fan posts are quite complimentary—amazing! Also some cute lawyer-related stuff like a link to a Hollywood Reporter article about the lawyer stationed backstage at the Oscars. Great content strategy!
Landing Page. As you might guess, their content strategy results in links to many sites. Some, like Inc magazine, appear to be partners in support of small business. Let’s hear is for these lawyers—they are being positive, supportive and interesting!

The San Diego Zoo is one of my all-time favorites in many ways. Its website ranks up there with the best of corporate sites.
Wall Page. The main link takes you to their wall pages. They use the same Zoo Only, Zoo + Fans and Fans Only set of pages.They have a lot of happy visitors and lots of adorable baby animals to talk about. What's not to like? The Zoo uses a polar bear as their icon for administrator posts. Wonder if they are thinking about that after SeaWorld?
Landing Pages. Their links go everywhere—pages, blogs, live webcams; they have great content. How can fans not like a baby panda or a little tapir? Their website is engaging and using Facebook the way they do creates more engagement as well as driving a great deal of traffic to the website. The zoo has had a family of blogs for quite awhile. They are, of course, on Twitter, Tweeting away with happy visitors and about zoo animals. There is a link on the Twitter page to the Live Panda Cam. They have a platform and are making excellent use of it. Look at how they cross post on blogs.

I started this with a misperception, and I just left it there. It’s not necessarily a wall page; it can be a series of wall pages. It is not a landing page. A vibrant content strategy leads to many links to many kinds of content both on the corporate site and to related content on other sites. All keep the fan base growing and engaged.

The major take away is that there is no one right way of using a Facebook fan page. It depends on your strategy and the way you want to interact with fans and visitors. Whether it’s baby animals or lawyers being amiable, it’s all about 2-way communication and dealing with customer questions and issues. The five above have all gotten the message!

Collaborating with Customers - B2C and B2B

Step 1 - Listen
Step 2 - Respond
Step 3 - Engage

I’m ready to write a post about the 4th step in the revised social media strategy development model. The old model called it CoCreate. This one uses the term Collaborate. Collaborate maybe sounds a little less formidable, a little easier to do. The more I’ve thought about that, the more I’ve realized it’s just not so. It’s really hard. Sometimes it seems impossible. I’m going to explain why by using recent data on Forrester’s Social Technographics data and add some insights I’ve derived, virtually all from mistakes I’ve made.

I’ve written about the Technographics ladder before, because it’s a real asset to understanding what’s going on in this space. With the 2009 data, they’ve added a new rung on the ladder. It’s called “Conversationalists” and it primarily reflects the influence of Twitter on the social media scene. Obviously these categories are not mutually exclusive; most of us fall into one category at some point, or in connection with some brand, and into another category in a different situation. That’s life. But what is key to understanding the difficulty of encouraging collaboration--of getting customers to create content-- is the size of the Spectators segment; 70% of consumers fall into that segment at least part of the time. Add to that the next step on the ladder. Joiners aren’t cocreators; they have a profile, but beyond that they are consumers, just like Spectators. In fact, it’s not until you get up to the Critics and the new Conversationalists that you get content creation, from ratings to status updates to Tweets. Those are fine and increasingly important to marketers. However, it’s only a small part of the online population that creates content that generally goes beyond 140 characters!

Looking at the total population is, of course, useful. But it’s not your target market. I found a good example in the B2B space. I used Forrester’s profile tool (which doesn’t yet have the Conversationalists), just set for the entire B2B market. I got a profile that’s not hugely different from the consumer population profile, which isn’t particularly surprising because these activities carry over from our private lives to our business lives—and vice versa.

Josh Berman fortunately published a more detailed example in early 09, also based on their survey of business buyers. I’m including the chart with his commentary, which just deals with the “overall” and “for business purposes” categories on the right. Virtually everyone in the B2B space falls into the Spectator category—that’s a critical insight. 69% of them are doing so for business purposes, and in the blue bars you’ll notice that is not really different for IT managers and managers in a line of business who make technology decisions. A few more of these business decision makers fall into the active categories of Critics and Creators. That gives them an opportunity to be influentials in their business discipline.

And that begins to get to my points. I would suggest that:
• It’s really hard for a brand to get people to contribute if they already do not. You can—and should work on it—invite people to write reviews, for example. In the consumer space, it’s relatively easy to reward people for doing it; loyalty points are an interesting consideration. Incentives are always useful, and you may be able to find useful incentives in B2B as well as B2C.
• Once you identify customers who are taking the “baby steps” of, say, writing reviews, can you encourage them to do more? Whether it’s a blog comment or a wiki contribution, it’s a good step. Business customers love to give their opinions and ideas as sites like Dell’s IdeaStorm demonstrate, so it may be easier to give them an opportunity and let them go to it.
• All the chicklets that are encouraging us to Tweet or Digg content items are trying to get people to be more active in the conversation arena, and it’s worth making it easy to do. I’m not sure how much it contributes to a feeling of collaboration, but it’s great additional visibility. It might even create a customer perception of supporting the brand over time.
• Can you encourage customers to become Creators? All the B2C video contests like “Help Flo” are an example that you can. And those will probably continue to work well in the B2C space as long as you have a creative campaign.
B2B seems to offer a lot of opportunities to help customers become thought leaders. It’s the standard “speak at the conference” appeal. Now that can be expanded to blogs and other content repositories. That clearly leads to a feeling of being valued and I don’t see how it can do anything but strengthen the relationship between brand and customer.

I see two key take-aways in this. First, you can’t easily get people to participate in activities they aren’t already familiar with. If you have a target audience that’s pretty much Spectator-only, don’t try to make them Creators overnight. It’s just not going to happen.

Second, the marketing practice of trying to locate the opinion leaders (influentials) has come into its own. Customers are self-identifying by their blogs and other online creations. Find them and reach out to them. The case of the Coke fan page has become the classic case of doing just that. Your outreach may not always have such spectacular results, but it will be worthwhile. It just takes the patience and persistence that’s mandatory in the social media space!

Cisco Engages B2B Customers in Idea Generation

In my early days writing about the web, I remember my editor saying that I just had to read a book entitled Net Ready that focused on Cisco Systems’ thoughtful use of the web, especially connecting its customers to provide support to one another. That was easily a decade ago but the title well describes Cisco’s continuing innovation of Internet marketing programs.


Cisco recently launched a promotion for its WebEx conferencing system that makes good use of both social media and cause-related marketing. Called Pass the Ball, it asks people to submit ideas that can help change the world and to rate the ideas of others. Each time an idea is submitted or rated, Cisco makes a donation to Teachers without Borders.

I count 10 categories of ideas ranging from Education/Innovation with 117 ideas currently to Sports/Entertainment with 26. (What does it say about their target audience that Arts/Culture has more ideas than Sports at 36? Some of the other categories have a predictably high level of activity, but that comparison is fascinating!)

They are working the promo aggressively with activity on Facebook and Twitter, especially. The Twitter “ad” on this page appears to be a live feed instead of a “safe” static capture as is sometimes done.

In looking for information, I ran across their recent Connected Life campaign. It had a different scope (it didn’t seem to focus on a specific brand, but instead on their corporate theme) and it attracted over 600 entries from a selected set of countries. I don’t know what their success metrics are, but 600 entries looks pretty good to me. The implication is that Cisco knows how to involve and engage their totally B2B audience, and it seems reasonable to assume this benefits their brands like WebEx.

It also suggests another issue. I read somewhere recently that one social media practitioner disputed the idea that there are social media programs/campaigns (I use the 2 terms interchangeably). The argument was that social media involvement is an ongoing process, not a campaign with a beginning and end. The Cisco programs seem to illustrate the issue.

Corporate social media involvement has to be an ongoing process; you just can’t turn it on and off, you have to stay involved. Equally important, corporate marketing departments have to learn from each social media foray and practice continuous improvement. At the same time, there can be individual programs like these two from Cisco that have distinct beginnings and endings. The skill then becomes integrating these promotions into an overall, long-term social media strategy.

Another important integration issue—interesting, isn’t it?

McKinsey on Web 2.0 Success

For a long time I’ve worked with McKinsey consultants on a non-profit board. I admire their work and I admire the content of the McKinsey Quarterly. When I first started reading it, you

either had to be a customer or to know someone in order to get access to it. It has interested me to watch as they moved onto the web and gradually made more valuable content available there. I get their emails so I don’t miss anything.

Several days ago I got a newsletter and was immediately attracted to “Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.” The article is a summary of what they’ve learned from numerous surveys of middle and top level managers who are finding their way into the Web 2.0 economy. They make six main points about how to make Web 2.0 initiatives work in your organization and, in the article itself, they give examples of each. They are worth reading. Here are the six rules for success:

1. The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.
2. The best uses come from users—but they require help to scale.
3. What’s in the workflow is what gets used.
4. Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs—not just their wallets.
5. The right solution comes from the right participants.
6. Balance the top-down and self-management of risk.


Their focus is mostly on internal and B2B uses in this article, although the admonitions fit B2C environments as well. The B2B evolution from automation to collaboration is highlighted in this chart. The focus is on workflow and improving productivity, and that’s very important.

What’s also fun to watch is that McKinsey is following the advice it gives. The next day I got another email from McKinsey. It encouraged me to participate in their Web 2.0 initiatives. As I’ve often pointed out, Web 2.0 initiatives are not “build it and they will come.” They have to be nurtured and promoted, both of which take effort from employees.


They also understand the importance of using multiple channels and making their content visible. When you go to the site to read the article, notice a widget you can download to put McKinsey headlines onto your website or blog. That not only provides additional fresh content to your visitors, it allies you with a respected brand. What’s not to like?

Look again at the six success factors above. They are all management—not technological—factors. In fact, the article makes the point that Web 2.0 tools often represent “a relatively high overlay” in terms of technological investment.

This article represents yet another call for managers to encourage strategic Web 2.0 initiatives and to manage in ways that offer opportunities for success. Without management commitment, Web 2.0 initiatives are doomed to failure!

The One with the Twitterview

Writing in Ad Age last week, Pete Blackshaw reported on his first “Twitterview.” The content was fascinating; I’ve reproduced one segment below in case it has gone subscription-only by the time you read this. Can you believe the federal government, aka HHS, is replying to concerns about peanut butter and salmonella via Twitter? That responsiveness alone is grounds for total shock.

How it came about is also interesting. Pete Blackshaw wrote a post on his blog in January suggesting that the government should use social media to respond to the entirely valid concerns of citizens about the outbreak. According to Blackshaw, “Shortly thereafter, some ostensibly random dude named Andrew P. Wilson pinged me on Twitter with a heads-up that the Department of Health and Human Services is making headway on that very issue. Not only that, he said that on that very day, HHS started a social-media team.”
Then he goes on to report the Twitterview he conducted with Wilson a few days later. Here’s a snippet. He has another piece of the interview on a succeeding blog post, so you can get the idea. (Note that on that post there’s also a good chart on brand credibility, which ties into yesterday’s post.)

This is clearly a new subject—Twitterview, I mean. Even Google didn’t recognize it; kept asking me if I was looking for “twitter view.” But in spite of that, I found an interesting post from Dennis Stevenson who conducted his first Twitterview back in the summer. His process was interesting. He wanted to interview an artist about creativity. He sent out a tweet to his network; he knew some artists were members. One replied in short order, they set up the parameters of the interview by email and phone, and the interview was conducted and transcribed. There are lots of links on the blog post if you want to follow in more detail.

However, the basic point is clear. Andrew P. Wilson was following something that uncovered Pete Blackshaw’s blog post—a Google Alert on some key words perhaps? I’d like to have learned more, but the one dead end I ran into was looking for Wilson’s personal blog. Searching by blog owner is pretty unproductive, unfortunately. But Blackshaw blogged, Wilson was alerted to his interest in social media in government, got in touch, and the rest is Twitterview history.

Stevenson’s process was different. He looked within his own Twitter network for someone to interview on a particular subject. He got together with an appropriate person and communicated via Twitter.

So this is another productivity tool—a useful interview without travel, conducted on a free platform. It may not be appropriate in all circumstances but it looks like it could be useful in many cases.

Does it also bring up a broader issue? What other existing platforms can we—we being primarily business people—use to create new productivity tools? Creativity in the use of existing platforms—and perhaps the creation of new ones—is in order. Watch for--and share--bulletins from that front!

B2B Use of Social Media

This is hardly a new subject. In the past I’ve suggested that business customers often have strong motivations for participating in communities and that corporations can dip their toes in the social media waters with internal applications.

When a newsletter from IBM crossed my desk this morning I was reminded of this chart from Marketing Sherpa a couple of weeks ago. They surveyed mid-sized and up B2B marketers about their plans for 2009. Identifying new audiences/quality lists had the highest priority, developing social media and integrating it into their marketing efforts was considered hardest, and the most common activity was developing traditional content. All of it makes sense, but clearly all of it is pretty traditional, quite the opposite of an interesting article in today’s iMedia Connection, which argues that all media is becoming social. Schumacher’s examples are mostly of consumer brands, but all his arguments apply to B2B also.
Pursuing one of the many links in the newsletter I came across an IBM white paper. It looks as if it is from late 2007, but the points it makes are relevant and still need attention from B2B marketers. This quote particularly caught my eye:

(Web 2.0 technologies) can enable large companies to more efficiently and effectively market to small customer segments that have specific interests or requirements. Without Web 2.0 approaches, cost constraints may force these companies to broaden their marketing message to appeal to the widest possible audience.

Isn’t that exactly what you see in the Marketing Sherpa chart; we need more lists with better names. Even if those lists are out there, and they often aren’t, isn’t this the higher cost approach IMB speculates about?

In the eyes of Big Blue, which is clearly interested in pushing its own social media technologies, what should enterprises do? They should:

• Harness the collective intelligence of your people.
• Discover and tap into specific communities of interest.
• Connect people to one another and to relevant information more efficiently.

None of that sounds radical or dangerous. Is it as hard as B2B marketers think it is?

Look at the technologies IBM recommends and their definitions:

• Wikis—Collective authoring environments that enable people to easily populate and edit a Web site based on project or community needs. Wiki is derived from the Hawaiian term for fast.
• Mash-ups—Applications that combine content from more than one source to create a new service.
• Blogs--Web pages where users can keep a personal diary or share information with teams, a social network, the company or the world, helping businesses to drive new viewpoints and harness the wisdom of crowds.
• Tagging—A method of tracking online items that can help you discover
related items and help improve searches and expertise location.
• Folksonomy—The categorization system that emerges from tagging.

Folksonomy—did IBM make that up??? Turns out they didn’t; I missed something else. Here’s an interesting brief description with a good link to some academic work. It’s the difference between a formal taxonomy and the categories that emerge from user tagging. The idea is appealing and reminds me of techniques from quality management that I’ve applied to website content to develop user-centered groupings. It works and user input has merit.

A new term aside, none of this is radical or even particularly difficult. IBM’s arguments about the value of collaboration—throughout the value chain—for increasing speed and improving business processes are hard to refute.

I add the argument that this allows the B2B enterprise to become familiar—maybe even comfortable—with these collaborative technologies. Letting customers participate is the next step. Customer engagement and true community is the result.

Isn’t it worth the effort?

Essentials of Web 2.0 Community

I’ve found myself writing a lot about community lately, and I have several other things I want to cover in days to come. This material has gotten me thinking and I’d like to suggest a couple of ideas.

The basic one is that “community” in the broadest sense, seems to be the uniting theme of the social web. That’s true in both B2C markets, where it’s easy to see, and also in B2B markets, where there is strong motivation for community building and participation.

If community is the uniting theme, what are the special elements of the social web in each marketspace? In the B2B space it seems obvious that collaboration—again broadly speaking--is the key benefit of focused social networks. For example, while I was writing this I got an update from LinkedIn guiding me to the activity of the Social Media group where people are asking questions, passing along information and looking for jobs and business. That’s a public network; the collaboration that goes on inside corporate firewalls on shared documents, wikis, and so forth is a major productivity enhancement, especially for global corporations.

In the B2C space the key element doesn’t seem—to me at least—to be as clear. I’ve called it User-Focused Communications, to include both relevant marketer-initiated communications as well as user-generated content. Do you have a better/another idea?

Whatever terms you use, I would argue that community is the common thread. What should we be thinking about in terms of “community strategy” if there is such a thing. A concept that has been circulating on the web for several months is the 4C’s of Community. They are:

• Content
• Context
• Connectivity
• Continuity.

Think about those and read this Ad Age article. Content, context and continuity are all things that require organizational commitment and resources. In the way it’s used here, connectivity is more than just the technology, and therefore it becomes an organizational issue also. More about that tomorrow.

There’s a lot of fun technology out there, and I enjoy that as much as anyone else. More important to marketers, though, will be the emergence of a strategic framework for thinking about the social web. Your comments on this broad-brush strategic concept are welcome!

Monitoring Community

For those of us who work in social media environments where the traffic is manageable (that probably can be translated that we wish it were higher!) monitoring is an ongoing but not huge job. Yes, it’s labor-intensive, but we know the issues and the values involved. Judgments can be made and unacceptable contributions can be removed or banned.

However, when you have a large vision and are willing to invest resources, you need more structure. All firms—large or small, experienced social media user or newbie—can learn from best practices of organizations that monitor their communities for the greater good.

I’ve written before about the Pickens Plan. It was launched in late summer and, in the run-up to the inauguration, is aiming for 2 million members. The plan wants them to be active, and that’s a lot of participation to monitor. My sense is that their district leaders are volunteers, but as I’ve noted before, Pickens and his people are not forthcoming about organizational details. But the leader in my district is an activist and has said some interesting things about the community lately.

What piqued my interest was an email in late November. It hit the right tone as a “friendly reminder.” It directed the reader to a blog post and that, in turn, to the Pickens Community Guidelines. If you follow links there, you see that the community is hosted on Ning and uses its terms of service but the guidelines seem to be specific to the Pickens Plan.

The guidelines are long but very much worth reading and thinking about. Let me highlight a few issues of interest:

• “Be Polite” is the first rule, and it has specifics.

• There are a lot of rules, all of which make sense to me, about proper use of the individual’s account on the Pickens Plan

• There are many rules that can be summarized as “no commercial activities”

• There are fraudulent or unethical activities that will result in account suspension.

and finally, to quote directly:

• We welcome constructive feedback, but will not tolerate excessive public posts criticizing Pickens Plan staff (including Site Administrators and Regional Leaders).

• Public posts debating these rules and/or moderators' enforcement of such will be removed without comment. We do encourage feedback and invite you to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

So there’s a lot of effort here. I get the sense that they may be using some filtering software also, but again they aren’t forthcoming (in this case quite understandable) about tools and techniques.

Ok, so this is a huge public effort. What about large corporations, especially on the B2B side? I looked at IBM and easily found a values statement and a set of guidelines for a community of current and former IBMers. There may be other communities and sets of guidelines. This particular one is hosted on Xing, a global networking service, with its own guidelines. IBM added guidelines for its own employees on top of those.

Adobe makes a big effort to get customers to offer content that will be helpful to other customers. The guidelines for the Adobe Forums are specific to that purpose and, again, make a lot of sense.

What are the key take-aways on monitoring communities? I’d suggest:

1. Communities must be monitored in terms of acceptability and relevance.
2. They need rules of the road. The rules need to be tailored to the nature of the community.
3. The rules must be enforced. That requires individual judgment and action, and that is fine. If moderators don’t perform effectively—whether it’s an employee, a PR agency, or a volunteer—the organization should replace them, quickly and decisively.

This is a conversation. If it’s not civil, there will be many of us who do not wish to take part. Those who want to form a community should carefully think through its objectives and the guidelines and activities that will be necessary in moving toward those objectives.

Twitter for Marketers

Here’s another new service for businesses that are using Twitter. Remember that I wrote about Zappos not long ago, their “twittering” CEO and the fact that they encourage employees to “tweet” whether it’s work-related or not?

BrightKit seems to have gone live about mid-November. Their website only seems to have two pages but it seems to be enough to get you started. And they do have a blog where they’ve been posting since mid-November. Question is, why would you need a Twitter management system?

Someone at Zappos was quoted in Marketing Vox as pointing out that they had a lot of log-ins and were wasting a lot of time. "We also disliked having to sign in and out of the correct profile each time we created a new tweet." Ok, even as a non-tweeter I can understand that.

The BizReport blog gives a number of other uses for those who are Twitter-literate:
- Promote deals and discount codes.
- Monitor and respond to product queries/information requests.
- Extend customer service support.
- Break news about products/services.
- Provide real-time event coverage.
- Generate brand buzz.
- Alert to new posts/articles on blogs.


That still begs the question of whether it’s all worth it. The BrightKit blog posted this video from venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki about why he uses Twitter but not Facebook or MySpace. For a person with global contacts and the need to stay in touch, what he says makes sense. Think mobile chat room!

So if this is all beginning to make sense to you and you are Twittering for business purposes, you might want to try out BrightKit. They are so new they haven’t even figured out a pricing policy, so this seems to be a good time to get in on the action. Or perhaps better said, to organize your Twitter action!

Want to Wiki?

A few days ago I noticed a reference to an article by Scott Cook, CEO of Intuit, in the October issue of the Harvard Business Review. He’s a thoughtful observer of the business scene, so I wanted to read “The Contribution Revolution.” In spite of the fact that I teach at Harvard, I can’t get access to their educators site (read that “free for review” stuff), so I looked around hoping I’d find a summary somewhere.

I found something much more interesting! Cook has posted the article, complete with an incredible number of links to examples and resources, on a PBwiki. (This page has the article enhanced with links, the one originally published in HBR, and a podcast with Scott Cook.)I was familiar with the PBwiki service through a friend, who decided to try it out by posting a resumé there. It look fine, but I think he took it down when I pointed out that it could be edited by others! So I remembered it as an interesting free service (for a wiki with 3 or fewer users) but I hadn’t gotten around to really checking it out.

First, the article by Scott Cook. You simply have to read it—for the content, for the resources, and for the interesting use of the wiki technology. He has a concept of user contribution systems that is useful and that is borne out by the success of Intuit’s Tax Almanac and the TurboTax Live Community. The community is reached on the TurboTax Support page where there’s also a blog written by TurboTax employees. Not all their UGC efforts have been successful though, and that’s another piece of learning that you’ll take away from reading the article.



I was also intrigued by the fact that he put the article up as a wiki, so I joined. I’m now getting emails when users make an entry. I’m underwhelmed by that, but if it were my wiki, I’d want to know. Cook has implemented a number of features on the Contribution Revolution wiki. There’s a sandbox where the inexperienced like me can practice before we try to edit. When I publish this post, I’m going to upload it to the "Company Examples of USG folder". That will be my first contribution, but I have a feeling I’m going to be coming back to this wiki often for both its resources and its content.

PBwiki offers services for businesses, academic users and individuals. A superficial look doesn’t show any differences between the wiki features available to each group. It looks to me as if they’re using that as a way to point out the ways in which each group can use wiki technology. That’s fine, because the knowledge of most of us is probably limited to reading Wikipedia! There seems to be growing sentiment that wikis are going to be most useful for business applications as an important type of collaborative technology. PBwiki has a number of white papers; if you’re new to the area, check out “How Wikis Enable Enterprise Collaboration.”

I wrote about the GM wiki, on which they’re trying to get the public to help write the history of GM, a few months ago. I haven’t checked recently, but when I looked at visitor stats on Compete.com, it had a large initial spike and then very little traffic. I wonder if many people are interested in contributing to a history of GM, especially in the current economic situation. I’m not a member of that wiki, so I can’t get inside to see whether there is noticeable activity. Control of who can edit is a feature of all wikis I’ve seen.

Scott Cook’s Contribution Revolution wiki is a fascinating example of wiki technology in action. It also provides a wonderful opportunity to first observe and then participate in a non-threatening environment. There are plenty of opportunities to comment, just like a blog. That’s an easy first step.

None of us will understand the potential of various social media techniques for our own organization until we participate in each one. That will mean some stops and starts, because some sites you join, some technologies you investigate, will turn out to be not relevant. That’s fine. But you won’t find the relevant ones unless and until you become active in the space. Scott Cook is only one CEO setting a good example of participation in the social media space!

The Dawning Mobile Age

It’s not news that Americans are increasing their use of mobile technologies. That’s after years of being behind the mobile curve when compared to Japan and Western Europe. There are two recent studies that shed a lot of light on what US mobile users and are doing and how marketers might react.

Today’s eMarketer newsletter (October 21, 2008) references a recently released report on household mobile use from the Pew Foundation. (Download the household report from this page; there is also a September report on mobile use by workers that might interest you.)

We should have already killed the early Internet myth that the computer was going to make users into social isolates. The Pew report not only shows that people say that the Internet and cell phone have increased closeness with family and friends (pages 25 – 27) but that there is no observable difference in real-world socialization between heavy and light internet users (pages 18, 19). The chart from eMarketer highlights the importance of the Internet and mobile phones to families with children. These families are heavy owners of all the technologies covered in the study. The study doesn’t ask about motives, although staying in touch with friends and family is obviously important to the study respondents. What I read into other answers is the desire to support the educational activities of their children. They say they use the Internet and cell phones at work as well as at home. The earlier report points out that this is a two-edged sword; more connectivity and more productivity but also more work time and stress. Not much surprising there!

Another recent study, this one by mobile services supplier Azuki, sheds more light on what mobile users do. The chart gives overall time use. There are differences by age group:

• Voice services. The youngest survey respondents talked the most (another big surprise!).
Text messaging. Again, the youngest users text most.
• Email. Here age plays differently; users 35-44 email from their mobile phones most.
• The Internet. Here again, the 34-44s are the heaviest users.
• Rich media. 25% of the respondents access rich media, but no age group spends a great deal of time doing so. It’s still too hard to do.

Given the amount of mobile usage, it’s not surprising that many have or plan to have a smart phone. The move toward smart phones is largest among users in the 45 to 60 age groups. There is also smart phone interest in younger groups; the report expects many 20 and 30-somethings to trade in their iPhone for a smart phone when they enter the corporate world. Planned smart phone adoption is definitely not linear by age group.

Do you see the influences of use for work purposes vs. use for entertainment and communications here? I think the differences are evident in the variations in amount and type of use by age. Food for marketer thought!

There are three recent white papers from Azuki. The market study points out that rich media is still difficult to find, takes too long to download or simply isn’t available on the phones of many users. Their technology, which they describe as a “media mashup” presents a solution, basically a common platform for distribution of various kinds of mobile media. Two white papers give more detail (download all three reports from this page).

After a lot of fits and starts, the age of mobile is coming to the US. It presents one more challenge to the marketer trying to reach people wherever they are, whatever they are doing. These data, taken together, suggest that this is one place where demographics do make a difference—in this case specifically age and household composition. Underlying the demographics is the importance of understanding why/for what purposes various audiences are using mobile technologies.

These resources give some starting points for thinking about and researching your own actual or potential mobile audience!

Succeeding in the Blogosphere

There are a number of recent reports that shed light on what’s going on in the blogosphere and how to succeed there, especially for business bloggers. Time to take a look and try to bring some of them together.

Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 surveyed bloggers themselves as well as analyzing its own stats. The stats on the number of blogs make it clear that the blogosphere is huge and active. A lot of blogging is personal, but business blogs are quickly assuming a prominent role in the communications strategies of companies large and small. This chart shows some of the downsides for the business blogger, but the outcomes are generally positive and include industry and enterprise visibility. That should encourage employees to blog.

The report also makes it clear that products and brands are important subjects of posts for both personal and business bloggers. The degree to which bloggers consider blogs an important and valid source of information is striking. Ok, they are biased, and you do have to consider the source of your information before deciding to trust it. People are, for better or for worse, placing considerable trust in the information they acquire. More about that tomorrow. The report has a lot of information; it’s worth a read.

How do businesses make the blogosphere work for them? Two recent studies from Compendium Blogware provide strong recommendations.

The first is a whitepaper about blogging for search. The rules for making your blog posts visible in search results (organic results are the most effective, good news for those who can’t afford a lot of PPC) are the same as they are for web sites. You just have more control over how you do it on a blog. The basic rules are to use keywords in post titles and content. Links can be helpful. Keeping content current, while not eliminating the old, is an advantage of blogs over websites. Blogs need to be active and they need clear focus. I’d add that tagging can be very useful in bringing in traffic through search.

Why is that traffic so important? It’s the best acquisition method, bar none. It brings unique new visitors to the blog and site. The other whitepaper uses Marketing Sherpa data to look at the critical relationship between blogging—to acquire new potential customer contacts—and email for ROI—read that conversion. That relationship alone is enough to encourage corporate blogs, although it’s important to note that acquisition of potential customer contact information doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be carefully designed into the overall communications program. The report points out that there’s also a benefit in terms of content. The business has to produce a lot of content for its blog. Using content wisely between blogs, email, and dynamic site content can leverage the value of that content.

The value and credibility of traditional advertising approaches seems to be on an irreversible downward slide. The value, credibility and consumption of user or employer-generated content are all on the rise. What marketer doesn’t want to take advantage of a more cost-effective channel of communications that has greater credibility with the target audience? That’s the value of business blogging in a nutshell.

DIY Webcasting

Outreach to bloggers continues! Last week I received an email from the PR firm for webcasting firm BrightTalk. It just launched a Web 2.0 platform that makes webcasting a more interactive activity with continuity that is missing from the typical webcasting activity. According to their website, “brighttalk.com is our simple to use live audio webcast platform, built using web 2.0 principles, where business professionals can create and view webcasts through BrightTALK™ Channels.” This platform adds to their existing Conferences and Webcasting product lines.

In my experience, webcasts are essentially stand-alone entities. You do a webcast, publicize it in many ways, and essentially use it as lead generation, for your products, and for future webcasts. I think most B2B marketers who’ve used them regard them as a valuable lead generation and customer support tool. That said, they can get pretty expensive.

The BrightTALK platform offers a couple of interesting alternatives to the traditional webcasting platform. First is the free starter channel. There are other free offerings; for example webcasts can be hosted on YouTube. However, the BrightTALK platform offers a more comprehensive marketing solution. You can make your webcasts as simply as developing and narrating slides, which you can do on other platforms also. BrightTalk promotes your webcasts in addition to your own advertising and promotion. The webcast is hosted and archived and participants who come directly from the presenter’s own website or by direct link from presenter promotion are identified to the presenter.


There are three levels of channels, with the paid channels obviously giving more bandwidth and more detailed reporting. There is also a content management service that enterprises with multiple webcasting programs would find useful.

The webcast channel can be embedded on the firm’s website, blog or whatever. The value of having informational video promotions on one’s site seems pretty obvious. In fact, you might want to watch BrightTalk’s own how-to video.

One of the things Web 2.0 does is to bring interactive tools within the reach of smaller businesses and non-profits. Wouldn’t it be interesting if local and state governmental agencies used tools like this to make life easier for all of us and perhaps to discuss policy questions? There seem to be a lot of options, all of which would lead to better informed—and presumably happier—customers and citizens.

More leveling of the business playing field! The good news is that the platform is free, at least for small volume users. The bad news is that it takes good content and considerable effort to develop a meaningful webcast that will hold users to its conclusion. It is effort worth taking for businesses of all kinds!

Online Content Sharing - The New WOM

The company responsible for the ubiquitous ShareThis icon (see the bottom of this post) has just released a study called “The Ins and Outs of Online Sharing.” The study, conducted by Forrester, provides some fascinating insights into content sharing on the web. Let me give you some of the study highlights.


Who Shares?

A majority of Internet users do share. Interestingly, more adults share email. Not surprisingly, youth (13 to 17) do more sharing of other media types. Are you using videos, wikis (that one surprises me; are there wikis that reach young people, or is it just Wikipedia?), and walls/discussion boards to reach young people?


What Do They Share?
Just read down the list. They share a lot of things! And the only content area where there’s a large difference between adults and young people is the entertainment category. That’s not surprising; how similar adults and youth are in the sharing of other types of content is. Are you providing the kinds of content that your audience most desires?

How Do They Share? Adults mostly use email. Young people share through IM, mobile, and their social networks. That’s hardly a revelation. But marketers need to think about their audience and how they want to share information. Are you making it easy for your audience to share content?


Why Do They Share? Read this one carefully—people share because they want to help others. (I’ve seen/heard that before, especially in discussions of travel sites where you can share experiences.) It’s an overriding motivation, and it doesn’t differ much between adults and youth. Users also share because they’ve found shared information useful, to share information about product quality, and just simply to show their enthusiasm. Wow—the top 4 reasons are positive. Dissatisfaction is number 5 and the incidence is much lower. Are you making it easy for customers to share their experiences with your product?

Is It Easy to Share? The good news is that it’s generally pretty easy. The number is well under 50% for most types of sharing. Youth experience more problems. That’s not surprising; they are sharing various types of media and that makes them more likely to run into problems. Are you removing obstacles that inhibit your audience from sharing?

The study also identified an intriguing segment—the Power Sharers. Power sharers use technology other than email to share content at least once a week. They also:

• Share with more people, regardless of the channel they are using
• Share different types of content more frequently
• Share for additional reasons. They are more likely to be motivated by community and by what the report characterizes as “self-expression.”
• Face more obstacles to sharing, especially lack of relevant contact information.

Pure and simple, these are opinion leaders. They’ve always existed and they’ve always been powerful. The Internet lets them exercise their particular expertise and passions in ways never before possible. It gives them the potential to reach more people than ever before.

Are you trying to identify opinion leaders and harness their enthusiasm in the service of your community?

Take another look at the Pickens Plan. I got an email from two individuals as soon as I joined; one was the regional coordinator. He’s being very quiet about how this now-sizeable community is being run, but I assume these people are volunteers. If I’m right, it’s an impressive harnessing of the enthusiasm and outreach of opinion leaders.

The report is lengthy and well interpreted. You can request a copy from Jeremy Bock at ShareThis.

These data remind me that Web 2.0 isn’t about technology. While Web 1.0 was about communication, Web 2.0 is coalescing around the concept of community. This study goes one step further in suggesting that we have to build those communities around (multi-media) content that is relevant to people’s lives (B2C) or work (B2B) and make it easy for people to interact around that content. People are voting with their Send, Forward, and ShareThis commands.

Are you letting them vote for your brand?

What It Takes To Build Community

While I took some lovely end-of-August time off, there’s been buzz about the Deloitte & Touche/Beeline Labs/Awareness Networks study with the provocative title “Tribalization of Business.” It has some worthwhile findings to which I’d like to add my two cents. You can access the entire presentation on Slideshare.

I’ve written before about successful community building, especially in the B2B space. Whether you believe that “communities will transform most business processes” (slide 23) or whether you have more modest expectations, most of us are interested in what makes communities work and why they fail. The study has some interesting data on those two subjects.

Talking about the dynamics of communities they point out that the more content you have the more members you will attract and the more members you attract the more content you will get. That’s a really virtuous circle! To be more specific they identified the three most powerful forces for success as the “ability to connect with like-minded people, the ability to help others, and community [that is] focused around a hot topic/issue". Of those, connecting stands out, and I’ve found that there’s no substitute for hard, continuous work to make those connections—no build-it-and-they-will-come mentality allowed. Everything from one-to-one contacts “thanks for the great content I just linked to” to formal email campaigns that build awareness and traffic can be useful. Above all, integrate your communications, so they all lead into your community. But don’t make the mistake of assuming it’s all about traffic. It’s about measurable increases in awareness and the new ideas that you get (slide 14). Connie Bensen encourages managers to think about “Return on Interaction.”

Don’t overlook the importance of people helping other people. I keep running across that issue as people talk about product and experience ratings. They really want to tell others about wonderful products or services and to keep them from making mistakes they’ve made. Harness that desire to help! I’d also point out that there are two sides to that coin. A hot issue draws a lot of attention and it may be hard to make yourself heard. When I first started a green building blog, there wasn’t a lot of Web 2.0 type of activity. In three years, that’s changed and you have to be really clear about where you can make a contribution and where you need to leave it to the experts. That’s fine; you just need to understand your own role.

The other side of the coin, of course, is what causes communities to fail. Note that lack of awareness isn’t number one, although it’s important. Number one is “getting people to engage.” Boy, is it ever! Some audiences—as we know, particularly the young—just engage all over the place, although it may not be around the subjects we marketers are interested in. Other audiences don’t engage much, no matter how hard you try. That’s obviously the older, less web-savvy. Do all you can; ask questions, run contests, add a poll to your content from time to time—anything you can think of that’s relevant and meaningful. Silly or obvious doesn’t work; it has to be significant to the visitor. Number two is “finding time to manage the community.” It takes nurturing, it takes oversight. If you don’t have the person power to give a community effort the attention it deserves, don’t do it. Especially don’t make the mistake of trying to substitute technology for human talent (slide 23).

Dion Hinchcliffe has some compelling thoughts on what makes communities work on his ZDNet blog. He starts with keeping the needs of the community (not the marketer!) paramount—surprise, surprise—and continues with other good insights. If you want more thoughts on strategy, check out the best practices slideshow posted by Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester back in the spring.

And remember, there’s no technological substitute for thoughtful and skilled human attention!

Video Calling Anyone?

When I noticed that a startup called TokBox (pronounce it “talk box”) had received a new round of venture funding, I decided to investigate this space. It’s not one of my favorites. The concept of video calling always conjures up the 60s ad (which shows up on PBS and other reports from time to time). The whole point of the really insulting ad was that a woman would have to do her hair and makeup before answering the phone. I can’t find the ad on the Net, although I’ll bet it’s archived somewhere. I did find a piece of interesting history on the Picturephone though, suggesting reasons for its expensive failure.

Fast forward to the present. Skype now offers video calling; I also found a firm called SightSpeed that seems to emphasize the business uses of its service. TokBox offers a video calling service that doesn’t require either party to download special software, and that seems to be its primary benefit. I was also interested to note that they have a feedback tab (expanded here) on every page of the site—good idea. Not surprisingly, they have a Facebook app. That seems to open up a huge network.

Back to the 60s. Do home users really want to be seen when one of their friends initiates a chat session? Answer that for yourself! I have my own strongly-felt answer to that one!! Seriously, I really do think it’s an issue.

CNBC has a video interview with one of the venture capitalists supporting TokBox. It focuses on the business uses of the technology, which once again seem the most compelling to me.
View the video here.

This space will likely continue to generate new entrants and new applications for the large social networks. Given the stress on collaborative work, and as CNBC points out the growing cost of business travel, there seems to be a lot of room for business applications. In the meantime, for sure some dedicated personal users like the fans on TokBox’s Facebook page, will continue to have a lot of fun with it.

Use of Web 2.0 Tools

Back in the spring Forrester released a report that predicted that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow to $4.6 billion by 2013. Since they estimate $764 million in 2008, that’s a high rate of growth! That alone is interesting, but what I thought was especially interesting was the fact that they find enterprises currently spending more on internal uses of Web 2.0 tools than on customer-facing uses. Forrester expects that trend to reverse by next year, with customer-facing uses taking precedence and growing faster over the next five years. You'll find more detail here.

McKinsey has just released a study that sheds more light on what’s going on. They also find companies using Web 2.0 tools more for internal purposes than for external. Web services leads the way because this collective set of tools makes it easier to exchange information and conduct transactions; the importance of both being obvious. Nevertheless, the lowest rate of usage is with partners and suppliers where both information sharing and ease of transactions are key to smoothly-functioning supply chains.

The McKinsey study also finds differences in satisfaction with results of using Web 2.0 tools, with only 21% extremely or very satisfied with their experiences with both internal and external uses. There are also substantial global differences in the use of tools (enterprises in the US are more likely to use social networks, for example). They note that the list of tools was expanded for this study; I wonder if that will be an annual occurrence! The entire report can be accessed on the McKinsey Quarterly site (free registration required).

One of the breakdowns by satisfaction level concerns the barriers to successful deployment of Web 2.0 tools. None of them are surprising--except maybe that 25% say there are no barriers. Only 15% of respondents say that the leadership of their companies doesn’t encourage the use of Web 2.0 technologies, but 49% of respondents who are not satisfied with their Web 2.0 results say that. Why does that not surprise me!

I see two major take-aways from these two important studies:

1. Internal use of Web 2.0 technologies provides important benefits to the enterprise. Improving business operations in a variety of ways is the obvious one. Making the enterprise comfortable with the technologies and the changes they require—in management and in dealing with customers—is less obvious but perhaps more important in the long run.

2. The leadership of top management is needed to facilitate the adoption of Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise. Without it, there will be less use of important new technologies and the uses that are implemented will have less satisfactory results.

Important lessons about marketing in the Web 2.0 world have been reinforced once again!

The Growing Importance of Cocreation

I recently wrote about DoubleClick’s effort to get users to help design their new site. That’s an application of what is often called cocreation. The current edition of the McKinsey Quarterly has an interesting article on the subject (note related articles listed on the sidebar).

Their thesis is that cocreation is in its early days and companies are trying to determine how best to take advantage of the collective wisdom of their customers. Amen to that! According to the article,

Our research suggests that 25 percent of Western Europe’s Internet users now post comments and reviews about consumer products of all kinds (exhibit). User-generated media sites are growing in numbers of visitors and participants by 100 percent a year, traditional sites by perhaps 20 to 30 percent. (p 6)

This chart also once again illustrates the importance of word of mouth as well as the importance of soliciting consumer feedback, especially by outbound phone calling. The growing number of customers who are willing to interact with companies online is obviously of great importance.

Their research into uses of Second Life suggest that 1 in 10 members is already cocreating with companies, mostly helping to design new products and services. They go on to say that most of their respondents didn’t know that was a possibility and, when informed, 60% would be willing to interact with corporate entities. I’d add ones that they trust and in situations where they see benefit from the interaction.

If you have any doubt that the same phenomenon applies in the US, download the “User Reviews a Must” whitepaper from PowerReviews. In it PetCo VP of E-Commerce, John Lazarchic says:

“No matter how many reviews they receive customers continue to add their voice. A product may already have a rating of 4.9/5 but someone will still write another positive review.”

Wow!

The McKinsey article also identifies issues that need to be dealt with in creating community to participate in cocreation. They are:

•Attracting and motivating cocreators
•Structuring problems for participation
•Governance mechanisms to facilitate cocreation
•Maintaining quality

I’ve frequently pointed out that not all audiences are willing to participate (think older consumers) while some are eager to take part in collaborative efforts (think members of B2B vertical markets).

Looking around the web to see who else was talking about cocreation, I came across Cisco’s Executive Thought Leadership page and an interview with Prof. Thomas Malone of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. He points out that, as a result of the ability to share information at low cost, businesses can enjoy the economic benefits of large scale coupled with the human benefits of small scale which include flexibility and decision-making power. It’s a video worth watching. As you can see, there are other interesting ones on the site.

Is focused cocreation perceived to have some of the same dangers to the brand—mainly that people will say bad things—that opening to comments and ratings has? Maybe. However, good cocreation, as McKinsey suggests, directs the collective energy to making positive suggestions for the future. I’m confident it also leads to further bonding with the brand. Why not? The customer now has a stake in resulting products and services. That’s two highly desirable outcomes!