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Jared Roy, The Wah Report
Social Media Demands A Reinvented Agency
Social Media Demands A Reinvented Agency
By Joe Marchese
Traveling during the last 10 days, I have had 26 meetings and two speaking engagements. I have had some amazingly insightful conversations with some of the smartest people about the social media challenge and opportunity, from the media agency, creative agency, marketer, and publisher perspective. One theme kept popping up: It's not that media shops, creative agencies and marketers don't see the potential of social media, it's that agencies, in their traditional role, have developed an organization that does not support the proper activation of social media for brands.
Put simply, Madison Avenue wasn't built to service brands in social media and, more importantly, Madison Avenue is not built to make money from the proper activation of social media for brands. The question is, can the system adapt, or will a new breed of agency be born in the vacuum of effective social media campaigns? Evolution or revolution? I have seen evidence of both.
Activating a brand in social media delivers a variety of benefits. Social media's conversational nature means that a campaign can deliver a lot more than simply message distribution. Social media can give a voice to a brand's customers (or those a brand would love to have as customers).
The effective social media agency will:
Be a long-term partner. There are no "campaigns." People will continue a conversation even though the calendar says you should be moving into a new campaign. Starting and stopping social media campaigns is guaranteed to waste resources and have very poor ROI. All the effort goes into building the social media conversation, and the positive ROI is really achieved once all you have to do maintain the conversation (which requires a lot fewer resources). For this reason, agencies effective in social media will look at multi-year engagements; rather than start and stop social media campaigns, they will work to help direct the conversation to achieve a brand's
Forbes.com - Magazine Article
Why Companies Need Web 2.0
Mike Schaffner 07.07.08, 6:00 AM ET
My youngest daughter is doing a study abroad and an internship in France this summer. Taking advantage of the situation, we decided to travel with her to her destination and have a long overdue family vacation, a week in Paris.
Since she was going to be there for a while, she naturally brought her PC along. After we checked into the hotel, I asked if she had brought her Ethernet cable with her. That's when I got "the look."
All of you fathers know the look I'm talking about. It's the one that tells you've said something incredibly stupid. Despite her look, she politely said, "Why do I need a cable? Don't they have wireless?'" Having spent the last two years in an academic environment, she simply could not comprehend wireless not being available.
Later that day, when we returned from our sightseeing, we asked the hotel desk clerk about wireless. He informed me that, yes, they had wireless, and gave us the login information. I then asked if there was a charge--and that's when I learned that, apparently, French hotel clerks and young American women learn non-verbal communication at the same place. The clerk also gave me "the look," and politely informed me, "It is free." Again, in their worlds, Internet access is always wireless and free.
The point in all this is that there is a new generation of potential employees and customers that are accustomed to a variety of technologies being available, and they expect to see and use them in the corporate world. Whether and how we deploy these technologies likely will have an impact on our ability to attract new talent to our companies and to find and retain customers. Here's a sampling of these technologies:
--RSS (Really Simple Syndication) automatically feeds you information you want.
--Social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace.
--A quick messaging technology, such as Twitter, that lets people know what you are doing.
--Social networking technologies such as FriendFeed, which lets users share Web
Is Micro-Blogging a Fad? - Left The Box.com
Jul 2, 2008
Is Micro-Blogging a Fad?
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The social media buzzword of the moment is micro-blogging and you get to choose from Jaiku, Pownce, twitter, Plurk, or even BrightKite to fulfill all your micro-blogging needs. But what does it all add up to? What can micro-blogging be used to do? Is it an effective Internet Marketing tool that will stick? Or is it just a fad?
Lumping all of the platforms into one, and making a generalization would be wrong, so I’ll consider the three I’m most familiar with; Twitter, Plurk, and BrightKite.
Twitter
Twitter FailWhale
photo credit
I believe that if Twitter fixes it’s capacity issues, it may well have a future. Twitter has the ability to effectively build your brand, because each tweet shows your logo, image, and name. Where Plurk allows you to respond to other Plurks, Twitter’s inability to do that is actually a boon for branding.
By forcing a one way conversation, Twitter allows people to give blog updates, pitch new products, or share media, all the while increasing the brand recognition.
Twitter’s main purpose for an Internet Marketer is simply branding, and the ability to drive traffic from updates.
Plurk
Plurk Time Line
photo credit
Plurk built upon Twitter and added a horizontal time line, and more importantly the ability to respond to people Plurk’s without cluttering the time line.
Much like Twitter, Plurk has the ability to build a brand. Yet it also has the ability to brand your personality. If you’re hoping to build a reputation, and actually converse with colleagues and site readers, Plurk is the best micro-blogging platform to do that.
The biggest downside to Plurk is that because it was a latecomer, many people are hesitant to move from Twitter to Plurk. A lot of the big names in social media are missing on Plurk.
BrightKite
BrightKite
photo credit
BrightKite is the third micro-blogging tool, and the least effective for Internet Marketing. The problem is that BrightKite is mo
3 tactics to make Web 2.0 work - iMediaConnection.com
3 tactics to make Web 2.0 work
By David Armitage
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Web 2.0 is real, raw and can require a scary change of mindset for some brands. With some help from these proven strategies, you can rein in the danger while still engaging consumers.
Let's face it, most marketers are tiring of all the abstract Web 2.0 discussions and the regurgitated manifestos pronouncing how big it is, how it's growing like a weed, how it gives consumers unprecedented control…blah, blah, blah. You know the pitfalls of not getting involved in the fastest-growing piece of the internet. But with so many elements to 2.0, how do you know what's effective and what's hype?
Short answer: there is no definitive answer, but there are strategies that are significantly more conducive to connecting with your customers -- and making the brand more relevant to them -- than others. Yes, it's a tall new order, but it's eminently doable, and actually quite fun.
So, forgoing the impulse to sermonize on the power of Web 2.0, here are a few tactics with proven potential to engage your customers:
Consumer forums/blogs
While everyone's heard the "be a participant, not a bystander" advice, what does that actually entail? And how do you fund this time- and labor-intensive effort to respond to the avalanche of commentary in a world of python-like budget constrictions? Here are some guidelines:
Get executive buy-in. Pull the executive team together and show them the incessant online dialogue going on about their product and how, in the space of minutes, an appropriate response/message can transform hundreds of opinions.
Monitor and respond. Dedicate resources to monitoring blogs and review sites. Be hyper-responsive and unabashedly human when addressing complaints and questions. Consumers don't expect brands to be perfect, but they expect them to be "real" and present.
Draw funds from the research budget. The consumer intelligence you gather from forums and blogs can be far more compelling and actionable than focus
Let the microblogs bloom - RussellBeattie.com
Let the microblogs bloom
Posted Thursday, July 3, 2008 12:35 pm
[image]
I was just about to embark on a post yesterday about my latest obsession which is web-based forums (actually, it's a return of an old obsession) when identi.ca launched with their open source PHP-based Twitter clone, so I just had to try it out. I threw it up on foozik.com if you want to see. It took me a while to get the dependencies working, but it seems pretty cool.
It's a great effort, looks good, and promoted in all the right ways. Evan (the guy behind identi.ca and the laconi.ca code base) did a great job creating a nice little project with some cool features like OpenID, Jabber support and the beginnings of a federation system.
Looking at the code, however, it's doomed.
The core architecture just isn't made to scale, and a day after it launched identi.ca already seems to be paying the price, even after adding a bunch more servers. Here's the the problem in a few lines of code:
$notice = DB_DataObject::factory('notice');
# XXX: chokety and bad
$notice->whereAdd('EXISTS (SELECT subscribed from subscription where subscriber = '.$profile->id.' and subscribed = notice.profile_id)', 'OR');
$notice->whereAdd('profile_id = ' . $profile->id, 'OR');
$notice->orderBy('created DESC');
Even the comments express this is "chokety and bad". Ignoring the use of the PEAR::DB data object stuff (that's adding abstractions on top of your database that you can't afford to have) this code shows that the design of the system is fundamentally flawed. The core problem is the query itself - it's expensive as hell: "Get all the notices (messages) where I am subscribed to the publisher." Oh, man. As the database grows, the indexes will have to get huge, and as there's more subscribers and more subscriptions between subscribers, it's going to be impossible for that query to keep up.
The lesson from Twitter is that microblogs aren't Content Management Systems at all, but are instead Messaging systems, and have to be architected as such. SMTP or EDI are
35 Ways to Stream Your Life - ReadWriteWeb
35 Ways to Stream Your Life
Written by Josh Catone / February 29, 2008 10:49 AM / 41 Comments
It's a pretty good bet that if you're not making a Twitter or Facebook application, you're probably making a lifestreaming application. Okay, so not everyone is into lifestreaming, but it is one of the hottest areas for development out there, and there are an overwhelming amount of services offering a way to aggregate all the little bits of your online life (which, for the purpose of this post, is the definition of lifestreaming that we'll use). Richard MacManus wrote an excellent primer on lifestreaming in January, but we touched on just 5 such services. The purpose of this post, rather than to review, is to just list the various options out there.
Lifestreaming apps generally fall into two categories: those that help you keep track of and display your own lifestream and those that help you keep track of your friend's lifestreams (or both). For the sake of clarity, we've focused mainly on the former for this list.
* Tumblr - Tumblr is a microblogging application that also allows the inclusion of activity streams from other services.
* Onaswarm - Onaswarm, which is in private beta, is a dedicated lifestreaming app that supports a wide variety of other services.
* Jaiku - The chief function of Jaiku, as a presence app similar to Twitter, is enhanced by letting users aggregate activity from outside services.
* Lifestrea.ms - Lifestrea.ms -- in closed beta -- is a dedicated activity stream aggregator that quotes our review in the company line by calling itself a "standards based nerve center."
* Soup.io - Similar to Tumblr, Soup.io is a microblogging application. It also supports outside status updates for 11 services and any RSS feed.
* FriendFeed - Due to being founded by a bunch of ex-Googlers, FriendFeed might hold the crown for most talked about lifestreaming app. It supports nearly 30 web sites.
* MyBlogLog - MyBlogLog, which specializes in creating ad-hoc social networks around blogs, j
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