This is really cool – Social Media Marketing GPS. It’s a book being written entirely on Twitter. Interesting experiment. I’m following the evolution of this Tweet-book #smgps and see valuable comments and questions around many of the Tweets – I wonder whether these will be incorporated into the book too in true crowdsourcing spirit!

From Toby’s introductory post:

I’m writing a book. On social media marketing. But not just a ‘regular’ book. A book written on Twitter. This book will be built on using 140 characters per line. It will be quick ideas but woven together that flows in a consistent book “read.”.

However, it will be “traditionally” formatted with a Foreword, written by Shel Israel @sheliisrael, and chapters. Each chapter will include a one question interview with industry experts who will tag their tweets – #smgps The # allows for easy search for tweet inTwitter search.

If that’s too confusing or if you want to go back and read it at your own pace I’ve created a dedicated blog.  Social Media Marketing – A Twitter-book . #smgps.

My goal is to create a resource for marketers where the social media marketing community can contribute their insights as well. Call it an experiment in crowd sourcing. Can it work?  Wil it work? I don’t know. Some Tweeters have said it will fail in less than 140 seconds; others think it’s cool and has value; others have a wait and show me stance. For me, social media is all about trying new ideas. So I thought why not?

I recently read that shopper marketing strategies are being affected by how customers behave online. From this article, Connect the Dots at the Hub:

Our conversation with consumers and shoppers today is one way; we send them our advertisements and promotions. But we now live in a conversational culture because of the internet and what it’s allowed people to do. If you want to get to know anybody, you have to have a conversation with them. Shoppers and consumers want to have conversations with brands that are relevant to them. Much of this conversation is happening online. That’s where engagement starts. We’ve got to be able to bring that conversation back into the brand experience and back into the brand idea to refine it in a continuous feedback loop.

So, we are now not only witnessing conversations between brands and customers online, but the transference of behaviour from the online medium to the offline.

Jason Falls asks:

When you ask businesses why they are participating in social media, what do they say? If they say, “to make money,” then they will fail because currency in the social web is found in both relationships and content. If they say, “to grow our business,” they’re just saying, “to make money,” in a nicer way. If they say, “to participate in the conversation,” which is the more appropriate reason to be involved in the social web, then why on earth would they not measure success by the value of the conversations they have?

The ROI for social media engagement conversation is an old one that continues. It remains unresolved, as Clients who are accustomed to traditional quantitative measures as “proof” are still questioning the effect of social media efforts. It’s the classic case for Marketing 1.0 – let the statistics rule you! In my 20 years as a qualitative researcher, I’ve often been challenged about how “representative” is the story, insight and recommendation, especially in the early days. That’s now changing thankfully, with Clients often relying on the stories that emerge and anecdotal evidence that allows them to make more incisive decisions around brand strategy.

I see a parallel in how Clients approach social media – they are expecting adaptations of the same old marketing metrics (TRPs, GRPs, RFM, LTV, etc). We’re at the beginning of the curve today with social media. When I meet more traditional marketers, they tell me they are really Web 2.0 savvy and transferred their attention to metrics like clickthrough, cost per lead, customer acquisition cost, lead generation, opt-in, churn rate etc. While these fulfill one need, I do not believe they really aid either an evaluative or predictive model for success.

This is why. The social media space is different, and in understanding this, I’m hoping Clients will value the stories and conversations more. Folks launch products and services in alpha and beta – and often they remain in beta. Products, services and brands come and go and we see a huge plethora of new launches. Even for more traditional brands, there are new options available to explore in the social media space every day. It’s a particularly tricky area, especially when organizations are using free social media tools which do not provide detailed analytics to them – perhaps there is a business model in this

The pace of change is really rapid, both in the behaviour of brands on the web and in terms of customer behaviour. At the intersection of these, are dynamic social media tools which enable forming of a relationship between marketers and target audience; sellers and buyers; producers and customers. And this relationship is expressed as a conversation enabled by social media tools, which themselves are so many, quite complex and confusing and change rapidly (eg. we are seeing a lot of the conversation among a certain group of early adopters moving to Twitter today).

Of course, statistics have their place, and we need to build some common standards and new parameters (eg. is “friend” a metric today?). I’d like to change the discourse to exploring measures for the value of conversations. The challenge is that with the pace of change in all aspects of the relationship, can a “measure” of today’s performance help us predict what’s coming tomorrow? How can we quantify human interaction, imagination and energy? How do we track the feedback loop? How do we measure the value of conversations, that builds this relationship, in such a manner that it delivers not merely evaluative but also predictive insights for marketers?

Wish I had the answers . Some of the tools I use some of the time to track conversations include Google Blog Search, Compete, Google Analytics, Twitter and apps developed around it, Technorati (although it’s not as responsive and accurate as it used to be), searches at Social Networking Sites, Alexa, Digg, Stumbleupon. Trendpedia is cool and allows a comparison with your ‘competition’. There’s quite a lot of discussion in the PR blogworld around metrics and tools of measurements, but I don’t see as much around brand marketing. I can only throw out some suggestions around what needs measuring, based on my experience of more conventional marketing and research, my own explorations into social media, and on assimilating blog posts around the topic I have been reading for a while now:

Participation
where are the conversations around your brand happening? who’s participating? what are people reading, sharing, discussing, critiquing? are you/is your brand situated in these conversations? are you present? are you accessible?
Engagement
have the number of conversations around your brand increased? how are you assessing the quality of these conversations? are people negotiating shared meaning? what elements of your brand or offering are being discussed – are they core or peripheral? what stories are emerging that suggest empathy and relevance of your offering to your target audience? how strongly is your brand anchored or situated in these conversations? would they exist without your brand? are you listening and engaging in these conversations wherever they exist on the web, across different social media tools? are you aggregating them? are you acting upon suggestions and helping solve problems?
Influence
you represent the human face of the brand – what social interactions are you able to influence around your brand or area of expertise? does this enhance your stature in the industry today? are you being talked about more? are you/is your brand or organization being seen as a thought leader? are you being invited into industry conversations? are you or your brand/company just popular or do you have influence with the target audience you most care about? [see these posts on measuring influence and popularity by Shel Israel and Gavin Heaton]
Imagination
has your brand captured the imagination of people? are people riffing on it, playing with it, creating avatars of it that you never imagined possible? what’s the emotional quotient? are they being able to bring their own life positions into building possibilities for your brand? what’s the ‘delight’ quotient that you derive from these conversations? what creative stories are you hearing/seeing/watching about it? what stimulus are you providing them to inspire their imagination? how open are you in these efforts?
Energy
on the one hand, are you able to harness all of the above – participation, engagement, influence and imagination in a manner that keeps your brand alive and vital? what are the conversations around the value your brand is creating in their lives? is your brand able to keep up with the energy of its users or audiences, which shift and morph ever so frequently? what senses – visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, kinesthetic are the more dominant in the conversations – are you aware of what elements of your brand are anchored in these expressions? are you learning something new to help you drive your business forward? are you following/talking to passionate users who are breathing every moment of the direction your brand is taking and helping you evangelize?
Loyalty and stickiness
are your engagements in conversations with your TG a fad or do they sustain and build over time? what is the personal investment your users display in their discussions around your brand? do they enjoy ‘hanging out’ with your brand or you?

Represented as a diagram:

Much has been written and discussed around engagement, influence, participation and loyalty. These measures seem to be evolving – web analytics and cool companies like Radian 6 are doing some of it. However I haven’t seen much discussion around brand conversations that inspire imagination and energy – a little ironic when they form a large portion of conventional marketing wisdom around brand health! These I believe would make for differentiators and unique propositions for your brand. And they are best expressed anecdotally and through stories and perhaps more difficult to quantify.

Organizations need to develop their own benchmarks along parameters that are important to them and against a set of goals so that they are able to track effectiveness of their social media ‘campaigns’ over time.

How would you add to/edit/modify this list? I’d also love to hear about tools or frameworks folks in this space are exploring, using and developing!

Bonus Links:

Rohit Bhargava shares some cool examples on the Softer Side of Measuring Social Media

Measurement Camp is an “open source movement measuring social media” – a nice collection of measurement resources and case studies there.

Manuscrypts has a good analysis of the Obama brand in his post Change 2.0:

But social media, after all is a tool. Yes, a tool which can take the brand to great heights, but only if it has a strong product/brand at its foundation. And there lies the brilliance of brand Obama. Adage has a great article by Al Ries on the attributes that made Obama’s campaign a colossal hit – Simplicity (of the keyword – change), Consistency (create and maintain the positioning of ‘change’ agent, so that the word is associated with him more than others), Relevance (forcing the competitors to fight on your comfort ground). I was also very impressed with this article on afaqs by Vijay Sankaran, which gave 10 lessons that marketers could learn from Obama. Excellent lessons all, i especially liked the one about relinquishing control.

In his short ebook: Fishing Where the Fish Are – Mapping Social Media to the BuyingCycle Chris Brogan offers up some good practical advice on social media approaches, tools and strategies. Relying on stories and examples, it’s a good demonstration of effectively communicating strategies to:

1.) Find the Customer – listening tools, search.

2.) Be There Before the Sale – profiles, presence.

3.) Be (or Empower) the Influencer – blogs, platforms.

4.) Shift Behavior – (this isn’t tool specific. More below.)

5.) Warm Up the Funnel – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

6.) Measure – Hubspot, Radian6, BuzzLogic, More.

Thank you, Chris. You make our life easier!!

Peter Kim has compiled an excellent list of social media marketing examples.

“I’ve been thinking about how social media works.  For example, applying game mechanics to understand participation, thinking about users vs. customers, and deconstructing ego traps in PR campaigns.  This analysis makes me wonder if social media marketing matters and if so, does it scale.

I thought you might benefit from some of my background research on these topics.  And I’d appreciate your help in curating this list by providing more details and submitting additional cases.

>> Last update: 14 September 2008
>> Total brands: 226″

[link via @jerrymichalski who tweeted it. Thanks Jerry!]

On a related note, interesting lists around social media agencies and brands in India:

• Gaurav Mishra has lists of Social Media Agencies in India
• Gaurav again shares this list of Social Media Blogs in India
• Sampad Swain put a lot of effort into ranking Social Media Blogs in India – he’s taken some flak on twitter for ranking a nascent sphere which is in fact collaborating to raise the status of the industry here, rather than competing!
• In August 08, Live Mint had a comprehensive feature on corporates in India that are using social media

Since I began blogging over 6 years ago, I’ve always examine the social web through the lens of conversation. Brian Clark has nicely framed the Five Essential Elements of Effective Social Media Marketing:

• Observing Conversation
• Sparking Conversation
• Conversational Content
• Interactive Conversation
• Conversational Copy

Very Cluetrain!

Kevin Kelly’s New Rules for a New Economy, which Stuart pointed me to the other day, is a brilliant read – he talks of how the Social Web creates the Network Economy. Some of his ‘maxims‘ extracted by Robert Poynton, in the context of Brian Clark’s post on Conversational Marketing:

Because communication—which in the end is what the digital technology and media are all about—is not just a sector of the economy. Communication is the economy.

We are connecting everything to everything.

The great benefits reaped by the new economy in the coming decades will be due in large part to exploring and exploiting the power of decentralized and autonomous networks.

Technology has become our culture, our culture technology.

The migration from ad hoc use to commercialisation cannot be rushed. To reach ubiquity you have to pass through sharing.

In the marketspace of networks, value flows in webs.

When information is plentiful, peers take over. Outsiders act as employees, employees act as outsiders. New relationships blur the roles of employees and customers to the point of unity. They reveal the customer and the company as one.

Privacy is a type of conversation. Firms should view privacy not as some inconvenient obsession of customers that must be snuck around but more as a way to cultivate a genuine relationship.

And here’s Neil Perkin on What’s Next in Media:

Here’s the full presentation:

| View | Upload your own

Thanks to Gavin Heaton for the pointers!

Two really cool presentations on the future of media and advertising. I couldn’t embed both slideshares in one post (anyone knows how to do that on Wordpress?) so I have put them up in two separate posts:

The Future of Advertising and Marketing – Paul Isakson

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Hmmm. Was just chatting with Rajesh of Blogworks about working together on a potential social media project. We were trying to work out areas of competence between his company and ours. He made this observation and used a fine phrase to describe Mosoci – he said it is the Future of Research.

I think I like :). What do you feel about it as a tagline???

vs

Great piece on Social Learning titled Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler. The supercool text illustrations are by Susan E. Haviland.

Some snippets I really enjoyed:

What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.

There is a second, perhaps even more significant, aspect of social learning. Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field.

In a traditional Cartesian educational system, students may spend years learning about a subject; only after amassing sufficient (explicit) knowledge are they expected to start acquiring the (tacit) knowledge or practice of how to be an active practitioner/professional in a field.⁹ But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field. This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.

Although this article has been written in the context of education, there are some great learnings for researchers, ethnographers and for business too. One of the greatest challenges and often a dilemma is how to leverage social tools into research and marketing that would create a shift from a much hyped must-do model based on explicit learning (yeah – lets go build a social network or lets start a Facebook community for our brand) to a more intuitive method grounded in tacit knowledge and real experience.

One reason why we believe researchers experimenting with these tools should immerse themselves in using them first, one reason why we believe all brand managers should build their own social media toolkits through actual experience! One of the problems with this is the time commitments required for these personal explorations, which could then morph into professional insights. I cannot emphasise more the importance of being touched at a personal level for developing a learning-to-be mindset. That’s what good Learning Journeys can accomplish.

…. does this breed exist? I got a call today asking whether I would like to blog on a freelance basis for an Indian software start-up, on their site. They sent me this email when I turned it down, and requested that their name is kept out because “we don’t want to advertise we outsource our blogging”:

“We are looking for someone to maintain our blog. The frequency of articles would be around 2-4 per week. This is not a full-time position and a freelance blogger would be ideal for it. Of course, given that we are in the software industry, it would be ideal if the blogger has a good grasp on technology. So if you know of anyone that could be fit for this position I would highly appreciate you forwarding them to us.”

Let me know if you’re interested …. and I will put you in touch with them.

Am a little uncomfortable with the thought of this sort of freelance corporate blogging. Just yesterday I got a call from a friend who has just taken on a CSR role in a large MNC here – and she asked me whether she should ask her PR Agency to run the company blog. I put her off the thought – while PR Agencies can guide blogging strategies – I don’t think they should be the ones to hold conversations and do the talking.

I feel there’s a lot of potential in there for a corporate blog, but it must be from a person who is really passionate about the area, talking from her or his heart about issues like rural development, green practices (we’re talking of CSR here!) etc,. Unless that happens, it just isn’t going to work. You don’t want a mouthpiece – you want to foster a conversation space. And conversations come from the heart, the best ones are those that reflect your own personal and professional passions and beliefs.

Extending this thought, I’m not suggesting for a moment that it is wrong to do a corporate blog – it is the terms freelance and outsourcing blogging and what’s implicit in them that get me. I think personally it is easier to do it on your blog, and then say I am working with these guys, so when you are talking about their product you are sharing that you have some form of relationship with them. The company then is getting access to my network, my capability to influence and to keep it in a context and balance, that equates to my enthusiasm and general understanding of the category. It’s been done by Robert Scoble with Microsoft, who I am certain got paid for it. It’s been done by Rob Paterson with NPR, although I am certain he wasn’t paid for his blogging – he consulted with them and is truly passionate about the change he wants to affect in the organization.

Encouraging bloggers to build stories for your category is good. If they are just shills for the company then that is no good at all.

Jeff Jarvis talks of the success of a network and a platform in the context of Glam.

Glam, represented by the larger circle on the left, is a network. You’ll see clusters made up of smaller circles, representing their content areas: fashion, beauty, fashion, lifestyle, celebrity, teen. Inside each of those clusters, if you squint, you’ll see a small yellow circle. Those are Glam’s O&O (owned and operated) sites. All the many purple circles around those in each cluster represent outside, independent blogs and sites in Glam’s network. That is the secret to Glam’s quick growth without the cost and risk of doing everything itself.

Glam finds the good blogs and creates a relationship. It features good content from them on Glam and also sells ads on the blogs, sharing revenue with and supporting those bloggers. It now has about 400 publishers creating about 600 sites and Arora said that some make multiple six figures a year. They’ve fired only one.

Now that’s a great example, and shows real ROI on using social media well – the details are in Jeff’s post. The Wall Street Journal reports that even large finance portals from AOL, MSN and Yahoo are falling back on distributed blogs and websites to add more colour and flavour to their portals.  Interestingly, as they say in the article:

The rules of these partnerships are also changing. In the past, the big Internet companies traditionally demanded some window of exclusivity with smaller content providers. Today, the big sites will often not only give the smaller sites a portion of the ad revenue but also allow them to work with other companies.

“The notion of exclusivity is gone,” says David Liu, a senior vice president at Time Warner’s AOL unit. Most of the smaller sites are producing original content for the portals

On a related note, Rob Paterson shares his aha moment on this, and tells us of a possible new newspaper model. Mosoci is working with a media company on their social media strategy and its what we have been saying to them for a while now. One of our recommendations to them:

Rather than thinking of taking your newspaper online, think about creating a platform where anyone can create and customize their own newspaper. Not just one newspaper – but potentially 100’s of newspapers, around different topics of interest. Local city, neighbourhood, corporation, school or any other ‘localized’ community content. You could for eg have different segments for say Bollywood, TV world, Social Causes, Artifacts, Life, Tech sort of things. Check out the Weblogs Inc model – where several blogs were created around specific niche areas – the bloggers were paid for content creation, around specific area of interest and relevance. An eg – Weblogs Inc’s business model was based on Google Adsense and Sponsored links. You already have a media selling network – that’s a huge plus. Add to that customized blogs around certain areas of interest and you have an additional outlet for monetization – google adsense, sponsored links, etc. Build on that language versions and you’ll be the only one doing it.

This example is really neat and am excited to share it with our Client. Thanks Jeff!

I was informed by Twitter that “Saawariya” is following you. Saawariya? Now that’s the new Bollywood movie, yet to be launched! Curious, I went over to their twitter page, and actually found it’s not a spoof (at least I think so) but actually someone involved in marketing the film. They are following 705 folks, but sadly only 34 are following their updates. Small number for a movie-crazy nation. Still, after spending some time following their tweets and responses, what I found is the quality of engagement is pretty good – and they are not just ‘pushing out’ messages but also engaging in two-way conversations with those following them.

So Bollywood is watching Social Media. PR meets community. Marketers holding conversations with their audiences. Embracing social media rather than ‘fearing’ it. Interesting to see how this evolves. – YouTube now has an official Bollywood channel. Kamla Bhatt tells us more on how Bollywood is using blogs, youtube, myspace and even secondlife for marketing their films.

So where’s Om Shanti Om – the other big Bollywood film hitting the screens this Diwali ???

Blogged with Flock

Tags: bollywoodinsocialmedia, omshantiom, saawariya, saawariyaontwitter, twitter, bollywood

Like for Jon Husband, this article by Dion Hinchcliffe really resonates. I’ve always been a huge fan of Dion’s visualizations of models and frameworks – check them out at Flickr – and I couldn’t resist just reposting these two here:

from SLATES:

to FLATNESSES:

Read the full post called The state of Enterprise 2.0 for detailed explanations on how the model’s evolved into one that captures the egalitarian spirit of Enterprise 2.0 . I like these sorts of posts – they make you pause and reflect on learnings, as so many of us all around the world are feeling and feeding the excitement around Enterprise 2.0. And success stories are being told.

Here are a few lessons Dion shares on the State of Enterprise 2.0:

Lesson #1: Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen in your organization with you or without you.

Lesson #2: Effective Enterprise 2.0 seems to involve more than just blogs and wikis.

Lesson #3: Enterprise 2.0 is more a state of mind than a product you can purchase.

Lesson #4: Most businesses still need to educate their workers on the techniques and best practices of Enterprise 2.0 and social media.

Lesson #5: The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 can be dramatic, but only builds steadily over time.

Lesson #6: Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t seem to put older IT systems out of business.

Lesson #7: Your organization will begin to change in new ways because of Enterprise 2.0. Be ready.

Couldn’t agree more with these. The brand operating system is changing, One of the lessons I’ve been learning from my interactions with recent clients is that one of the keys to enable adoption is to teach them the simple things. Brands are in transition and how they are shaped rests more than ever with growing communities of key influencers. These influencers, evangelists and enthusiasts are creating new communities using blogs, wikis, podcasts, videos, and social networking sites. The brand operating system needs upgrading, for real-time, relationships, community, tracking, and transparency without mandated rules. Brand managers need to know what is happening and how to measure it.

And again, I refer to my recent chat with Toby, where she said something that resonated so well – that it is critical for us, as advisors, consultants, project leads, to understand the organization’s motivations for adopting Social Media first, before we can actually make our recommendations and dazzle them with all these technologies – I’ve been guilty of this at times – in my own enthusiasm, I’ve probably ‘blinded’ a manager with too much too soon! Jeremiah Owyang has a great set of questions media companies should be asking themselves, before they set out a corporate media strategy.

Back to Dion’s Lesson #2: I often run into barriers and fears when we talk to our Clients directly about blogs and wikis and widgets and mashups and content-generation – many are wary of stepping in, because they feel they aren’t going to be perfect at it, they don’t know how to, and underlying that is the feeling that ‘gosh, I may have to deal with negative comments and feedback!’ The visibility that these tools enables, even behind an organizational firewall is often threatening.

What seems to work better is when we have shared with them bookmarking and tagging and even refined search features that enable you to listen to real conversations in real time around their brands or products. And they feel more in ‘control’ than if they were out there blogging. It’s probably the first step in enabling adoption of Enterprise 2.0 practices – and seems to work! It also works on the biggest barrier which is a deeper organizational culture issue – the more they begin to see, listen to, feel and experience these transparent real-time conversations, the more it opens them up to participating in them, and trusting their value. Of course, there are fears – but they soon realise, these conversations are here to stay, whether they nurture them or not, participate or not. You cannot ignore them anymore. They begin to realise that the old rules and strategic assumptions about engaging with ‘customers’ are being broken. And begin asking themselves … how adaptive is our system? how can we learn better, quicker? how agile are we? who’s engaged? And then the questions around how to add our voice.

So, in the FLATNESSES model, and in the lessons we are learning, I’d probably play up the role of these social technologies in enabling the ability to listen better, to discover more and to learn faster and more effectively.

Jim Bert, VP of Business Development from Webcrossing took me through a demo of Webcrossing Neighbors the other day. It’s a functional and tested plug-and-play social networking platform that the company provides for groups and enterprises. Reminds me of Facebook in many ways … lots of customizable pages with widgets you can add … see the screenshots below:

Jim Bert’s Homepage:

Cats and Dogs – a discussion group within Webcrossing Neighbours:

According to Jim, Webcrossing Neighbors is a truly white-labelled system with lots of customers round the world. They have added a social networking platform a couple of yrs ago which helps you manage and scale your communities online, and even handle different languages. They deal with two sorts of companies — start-up companies wanting to set up advertising based networks. And the big corporate guys. Their product is primarily geared towards larger communities, with at least 10K members.

Here’s an example of how much customization is possible around their platform – Carspace, which has 86000 members:

They plan to ramp up their video offerings and also focus on gaming widgets for enterprise customers. Other companies they are providing platforms for – Cisco Systems, Intuit, Adobe, The New York Times, WebMd.

So what does all this cost – it starts at 20 cents per member per month — if you start with less than 1000 members. The cost per member goes down when you have a 1000 and it can go down to almost 3 cents a member per month. $995 is the one-time fee. Hourly rate of $175 for customization. You will need someone to do your html and css sheets. They also provide trial sites free of cost – Jim has offered me the use of a private group for one of my research projects.

Support hours are only 12 hours US time – that’s something they need to ramp up, for a global world!

My overall take on this:

It was really encouraging to see this step-up from Webcrossing – I was part of a global team that used their earlier platform for collaboration on a research study a couple of years ago, led by Social Solutions. This was sooo much better than what I had used earlier, and going in the right direction.

While the product itself looks fairly cool, I do believe there’s lots more they can do. From my short exposure to the examples Jim exposed me to, I didn’t hear the words or see very much that suggested to me that this is a true 2.0 platform. While there were blogs and groups and rss, I didn’t see much smart use of tagging, and any widgets that help their communities and clients listen better.

After the conversation, I was left intrigued enough by Jim’s demo to me, to learn more about the company, get reference points and visualise exactly what it can do. And to help me frame it better against other products I am exposed to – like Ning or PeopleAggregator etc. So I starting searching for ‘webcrossing neighbors’ on technorati and google, as I wanted it to lead me to conversations to enable a better understanding of user experiences. I found literally NO mentions about the product in blogs. The only mentions were paid ads for the product.

It left me with the question about why they weren’t encouraging a cross-fertilization of ideas in healthy user and developer communities. There seemed to be no obvious sharing. This becomes even more important when they are targeting smaller start-ups. They aren’t really encouraging conversations and buzz around their product, nor are they engaging with so many bright minds in this space (on blogs for instance), who are so ready to share their excitement over all sorts of products and services, if they see some value in it.

By failing to engage their users in a conversation that spills out into the broader world, it impacts their capability to attract and capture new users to their community. If you’re interested in building your brand today, you must use your users to share in visible conversations. Because there is no visible conversation, it is harder for a new customer to learn. By contrast, if people are sharing and having a conversation about how the community is developing, widgets they are using, even css and hml hacks – a vibrant community is much more attractive to me as a new user.

This reminds me of the difference between Movable Type vs WordPress – MT doesn’t seem to have the visible, transparent conversations in community like WP does. Even if they may have these conversations in the backend in their forums, the fact that this is not visible to a new user searching for solutions.

Just yesterday, Stuart and I had a great conversation with Toby Bloomberg, and one of the challenges we all shared in that call was around how to cut out white noise and provide plug-and-play solutions to our Clients – this product has the potential for it – but it needs to be ‘out there’.

I also spent some time on the product website, and was a little surprised at the lack of visuals and conversations and community feeling. And no blog from their developers or marketing team .

At the end of the day, their page doesn’t reflect their Webcrossing Neighbors community right up front. Especially when so much is being done behind the scenes and hence, not visible.  My advice to them … to re-borrow Jim McGee’s phrase … start living in these social technologies!