Crossposting from the Convo Blog

Blographies add to the conversation! We’ve been using the term “Blography” to help explain how we capture information for clients on longer ethnographic research projects in a real-time immersive and agile way. As all our team members are using blog it was only natural to consider where they fit in a research program today. For the client (reader) it’s a great and transparent way to see how our field work is progressing. A typical project today combines direct inputs from participants; typically forms (mobile or PC enabled) which result in blog posts and updates to the common database. This creates a number of benefits.

Discussions with the client can become real-time. This is particularly important when doing more longitudinal studies. Our client blog-space remains completely private. Which means we can have an ongoing conversation around everything from transcripts, interview summaries, emerging themes, planning and scheduling, to diary updates, questions of the week for participants etc.

There’s a second aspect. Blographies can save money and get greater depth. We find we are using them more and more to screen participants, target further areas for inquiry. We are also using them to set up and get to know participants before running co-creation workshops with them.

It also means – at the end of the job you also get a repository of information that is accessible, searchable, and readily sorted into new categories or tagged to be looked at in different ways. If required we can even turn it into a “book” for you.

Slides from my talk at Startup Saturday Mumbai today.

Not new, but a good reminder through a neat collation of tips on how to deal with a digital business crisis. It is meant for marketers and social media agencies operating in the Enterprise 2.0 space, either for marketing their brands, services or for managing corporate reputation.

Introduction to the Presentation: This is a practical guide for using social media for crisis management. We developed this at Ogilvy within the 360 Digital Influence and Public Afairs teams. It offers 5 trends, a framework to follow and 5 keys to managing a crisis. This was delivered as a live session across Asia in partnership with the Wall Street Journal and support from GoToWebinar

An article titled Social Networking plagues India Inc which is based on a survey conducted by Assocham just goes to show that they’re really sleeping or threatened, while their world’s moving forward!

A recent national survey conducted by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India’s (Assocham) Social Development Foundation revealed that 84% of Indian employees who have access to the world wide web are showing symptoms of internet addiction. They spend more than the “normal’’ amount of time online, and show signs of irritability when they are interrupted from surfing, concludes the study.

With 93% of youngsters saying they were aware of social networking sites, and most averaging an hour a day on MySpace, LinkedIn, Orkut, et al, employers are looking at a productivity loss of nearly 12.5% every day. “The growing use of browsing sites can be dangerous for overall productivity. IT companies have already installed software to restrict use,” said Assocham secretary general D S Rawat said”.

And this, from a psychiatrist and HRD trainer:

“On the other hand, being constantly logged online and indulging in ‘faceless’ communication is detrimental to one’s health,’’ he said. Dr Rajendra Barve, psychiatrist and HRD trainer concurred “This mindset is making people a slave to machines,’’ he said.

India Inc, and Dr. Barve, you must be kidding!!  Build firewalls, and people will find ways across them. Kill their access on their computers, and they will turn to their mobile phones as your study has shown.  How will you block that? They will never stop, because the internet is a way of life, with its own ecology, culture and social behaviours that more often than not, enhance our world. It is a part of my world, and yours, and theirs. It is not a fad that will pass and it’s definitely not about “faceless communication”, nor is it a drug you get addicted to.

You must learn how to embrace it, and use the flows to your advantage in this emerging knowledge economy. Here‘s a start. [picture credit: Gaping Void].

Update: Bonus Link – Can an organization not be ready for Enterprise 2.0? [via @dhinchcliffe]

Digital Strangelove …. the Intention Economy … or WTF Social Media?  David Gillespie,  Account Director at Maclaren McCann, Toronto shares a great presentation (263 slides). There’s a lot that speaks to the fact that all media is social, it is about people not technology, paid vs free, attention vs intention, the need to listen and not just ‘speak’ etc etc – things we’ve been hearing about for years.  I particularly like how he frames it as a new age requiring new stories and new storytellers, where digital is not a ‘thing’ anymore! Take that in a brand context or a journalism context and having observed how social media is being used, I can’t help feeling WTF – this presentation only reinforces the feeling that practitioners of and experts in traditional media are in fact novices in this space, if they are trying to control user-generated content, as many do!  Love this quote he uses from Ralph Waldo Emerson too:

“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”

Description form the author – “This is a collection of thoughts around where we are right now in the history of the Internet. I believe we’re getting ahead of ourselves, confusing the growth of the Internet with it growing up, but I also believe we’re doing some amazing things, and can draw a few lines in the sand, making some solid guesses on where we are going.I hope you enjoy”

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 couldn’t agree more with Katie Allison Granju (Mamapundit):

In other words, if a social media consultant’s only interest in and experience with the field comes as a result of trying to earn a living off of telling other people how to do this thing, well, I would see that as a real weakness. Personal engagement in social media is the boot camp for a good social media “expert.” It’s where you learn the ins and outs and nuances of how online communities grow and contract and evolve over time. It’s how you learn to tactfully negotiate flamewars and deal with trolls. Your personal blog is your laboratory for playing around with what really works in building a readership and following.

I see a lot of social media marketers being “that guy” who barges into preexisting conversations without any sensitivity to the things that make that social media space unique and special. Online communities have personalities and inside jokes and dialects that are highly specific to them. A social media “expert” who has cut his or her teeth with meaningful personal experience knows this intuitively, and thus brings a really big advantage.

Take this – it’s a great start to collecting some good data:

We need your participation:

1. You can take the survey here- open until 24 December 2008 but don’t wait until the last day.

All valid participants get a FREE copy of Summary & Key Points from the “Overview of Blog & Social Media Environment in India”, a report prepared by Blogworks – this will be emailed to you. For it to be a valid entry, you must answer all questions.

Once you have completed your entry, do share your feedback on the questionnaire by writing to survey@blogworks.in.There would be mistakes to learn from & things to do better the next time -we’d appreciate you sharing your thoughts.

Media Partners for the initiative: Impact, Pitch and Exchange4Media.com

Bonus Link: Here’s a list of Indian businesses using Twitter, being compiled by Gaurav.

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

Been meaning to post this video – it was fun talking to Rajiv Dingra and Navneet from the WATShow on Phweet and the Social Media scene in India.

Dina Mehta On Phweet – A Tool That Enables Voice Conversation On Twitter (Via WATShow)

I look forward to Part 2 where I have demo’d how Phweet works.

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:

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Thanks to Gavin Heaton for the pointers!