Social media allowed the social to scale beyond anything that we’ve ever seen before. To succeed in leveraging social media and the inevitable invasion of the social in everything we do, we need some new management thinking…

So to a list of reasons why, in no particular order:

1. Because competiitors are already using it to drive up profits.

2. Because it’s cheaper than traditional media.

3. Because you can create lasting relationship with your most precious ‘commodity’, customers.

4. Because you can learn about what your customers want, rather than telling them what you think they need.

5. Because you’ll end up using web 2.0 in a  defensive way if you don’t proactively learn to use the tools positively.

6. Because it’s a great way to establish your reputation as an organisation, and in thought leadership within your industry.

7. Because you want to hear what your employees have to say.

8. Because you want to feedback to employees on what’s happening with their suggestions for improvement and products.

9. Because your peers are already online and it’s time to join the party.

10. Because in 5 years time you’ll be ahead of your competitors in the web 2.0 use of tools for marketing, customer relationship management, and PR if you start now.

Q: Any more? Maybe to help prepare the ground before seeking VC funding?

Say your product currently already has a product site which has tons of great information about the product. Without too much time/effort the information could be lifted for pages to sit on a new blog. Product information would included along with independent sources such as the Mayo Clinic to ensure all medical issues and good practice is covered to help establish the blog’s credibility.

The marketing aim of this customer-centric blog would be to engage customers into giving reviews of the product, a well-documented highly trusted source of product information for customers. Your existing product video on YouTube would be embedded on a blog post, with a link from the current YouTube comments section to the blog. The idea would be for the UK-centric blog to have a mixture of customer video testimonials, and expert content on the proper use of your product. The RSS feeds off this blog could then be syndicated to websites and blogs to help bring in traffic and raise page rank.

Key is the fact that customers can post questions and queries in the comments, and see them answered by a moderator. They would also be encourage to post their own testimonial videos, pending approval of course.

This blog would then include the clear opportunity to social bookmark pieces to Digg, Stumble, and Twitter from each post, which would help SMO for the site.

To track conversations use Twitter search engine and pick up the RSS feed, to keep an eye on relevant key word terms and collect these in your RSS aggregator. This would also collect Google blog/news/Technorati conversations. These would then feed blogs to target as appropriate for link swops/rss syndication/comments/forum discussion involvement. You might also establish a twitter account such as twitter.com/myproduct to also take part in discussions with customers too, and invite them to the blog and Facebook Group via this route.

More importantly there would be a clear banner link through to a Facebook Group branded as per the blog, which would also include much of the same content as the blog (you can use the api which allows blog post to be posted automatically into Facebook for example).

The Facebook Group would nicely serve as a parallel marketing arm, seeded with group members, who in turn on joining would auto-alert their friends to the group’s benefits. Initially this would involve a search for existing UK Facebook Groups currently focusing on your product, and an appeal to their members to join. The Facebook Group would also include a clear banner link back to the blog. Facebook works via linking through profiles to make network marketing success, blogs work through conversations. This neatly divides the two arms of the campaign, though obviously there is cross-over.

I would start looking to see what’s listed as links for your healthcare product on a key public site such as NHS Choices, and therefore likely to be gaining significant traffic. Clearly those sites with discussion forums are most useful.

As stated above very quickly other blog & sites would be identified for involvement in discussion.

Plus a PPC/online advertising strategy could be considered for Facebook and Google Adwords based on identified ‘hotspots’ for likely customers. To back this up there’s this remark from Headshift’s Cybersoc from the new media event in Dubai via Twitter: “The guy from Microsoft advertising seems to be recommending advertising on Facebook. Odd. Probably true though.” On the other side of the debate check this out, though it does say Facebook CPM is cheaper than Google, there’s a reason for that: essentially that Google users are on a specific search page for a search-related reason, whereas for Facebook the prime reason is visiting a friend:

“Facebook impressions run 13 to 16 cents CPM. For comparison, our clients in aggregate pay $10 eCPM on Google, and $6 eCPM on Yahoo. The fact FB can’t command higher CPMs speaks volumes to how advertisers value those impressions.” Also see Bryant Urstadt’s Tech Review piece (Social Networking Is Not a Business*) from which this insight is taken from on the challenge of turning a profit from social network sites.

In the longer term would look to contact patients support societies to ensure factual info on your product plus web links are included in their ‘patient pack’.

IT people get the technology but making that pay in the web 2.0 world is a lot tougher, partly because traditionally IT culture is often ‘object-orientated’ rather than user-centred. Online community development requires the skills of IT management, but crucially the very best people possess a different mindset. This is because it involves working *with* customers at every level in a fully collaborative approach, so that the end web 2.0 product achieves the user-centric result aligned fully with business objectives. Matching means to ends to achieved the desired results requires this end-to-end understanding. And it is something I’ve worked hard to achieve myself.

A basic two-by-two matrix can be the key to quantifying the risks and opportunities that are bundled together under the banner of web 2.0, says David Bowen.

At a conference for corporate web managers a few months back delegate after delegate muttered that they were thoroughly fed up with web 2.0. It may (does) contain many fascinating concepts, but if it makes people in charge of the world’s biggest web presences yawn, it has a problem.

I have a suggestion that might get them fired up again. Stop talking about web 2.0. Extract the useful concepts, classify them in a way non-technical managers understand, and explain how they can be exploited, managed and controlled.

The individual concepts are indeed powerful. Blogs can spread good news or bad at the speed of a working Large Hadron Collider. Wikipedia is a brilliantly useful idea that is absolutely terrifying for any reputation-conscious organisation. YouTube has been a star of the US presidential race. Facebook makes us all into little web publishers.

But they should not be bundled: catch-all expressions such as web 2.0 mean that the benefits and risks are thrown together like a dodgy mortgage-backed security. It’s not surprising they are viewed with suspicion.

Order form

Let’s take the techniques and give them some order. As a consultant I have an obligation to use a two-by-two matrix; fortunately, that is just what I need.

It makes no sense to include only ‘the new’ – websites themselves have to be part of the mix, so do established techniques such as forums and on-site video. And it is helpful to more traditional managers if we add offline communication techniques, to put the online world in a familiar context.

To download, click here [PDF file]

The matrix is largely about risk management, something every manager understands. The x-axis is to do with territory: on the left are the things you control, essentially those that sit on your own servers. Call this the ‘home web’. On the right is the ‘extended web’: YouTube, other people’s sites, other people’s blogs, social media sites. Here you are tiptoeing on someone else’s turf – huge opportunities, but do take care.

The y-axis is about a different form of control. Traditional communication is one way – make an announcement, send out an annual report, place an advertisement. Websites are still essentially one-way channels, as are some of the new devices such as YouTube (there is some interactivity, but it is marginal). This is the ‘vertical web’, contrasting with the ‘horizontal web’, which is where you let your customers, or anyone else, talk back. The horizontal web provides great opportunities – any sales person will tell you a conversation is better than a pitch. But it is tricky to get right and brings, obviously, greater risks.

What the matrix shows

First, you cannot neatly divide the old from the new. Podcasts may be new and fashionable, but they are an old-fashioned concept: one-way communication you control. Forums, by contrast, have been around for a long time yet they are true conversations on sites you do not control, and need to be handled as subtly as any blog.

Second, what the web has done is to multiply risks to corporates. The top right square is populated with scary online concepts, but relatively few offline ideas. Syngenta, the Swiss-based agribusiness, found that out when protestors occupied a GM (genetic modification) test site it ran in Brazil, and two people were killed. By that evening stories associating Syngenta with the killing has been spread by blogs and were thoroughly entrenched on the web. Wikipedia, which is written and edited by its readers, is also a potential threat to reputation. By contrast, how often has your company’s reputation been scarred by a television discussion or a town hall meeting?

Third, vertical content remains powerful. Your website will always be the most important online property, because it is the official voice of your organisation. Indeed, its importance will increase as stories and rumours fly around the extended web, and people want to know what the company is saying for itself.

Finally, individual concepts need to be unbundled. You can post your own YouTube videos (which puts you in the bottom right square) or other people can make videos about you (top right). The former are likely to help, the latter can be deeply damaging. Because they are on the extended web both can be proliferated with alarming ease, but it is important to avoid deciding that YouTube is good or bad, without considering ‘which YouTube?’.

‘Which blogs?’ is a more complex question, because they can roost in any of three squares. At top left we have a typical corporate blog – put on the site in the hope that some sort of conversation will build up. It rarely does, though if you have the right mix of good subject and good blogger, it can work. IT companies find it easiest (for example, Dell’s Direct2Dell), but GM (General Motor)’s FastLane Blog also works because it lets car buffs chat with the big car buff, vice-chairman Bob Lutz.

It is noticeable that Mr Lutz’s posts get many more comments than others – ‘Comments: 0’ is a common sign-off on most corporate blog posts. Does that matter? Not if it’s a ‘bottom left’ blog. These have nothing to do with creating a dialogue, but act instead as a dressdown version of the website and allow the company to say things it would never think of doing formally.

The best example I know is not a company, but the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Have a careful look at the blog from the diplomats in Zimbabwe, and consider that this is on an official British government site; it works, it’s powerful, because it’s a blog.

Top right blogs are the ones that give blogging a risky reputation – this is the Wild West of the internet, where people can write what they want without any checks. It is the square that got Syngenta into trouble and is also where companies have to be scrupulously careful. Put a foot wrong, and they will be exposed and abused. But with great subtlety this is also the type of blog that will do you most good, because it allows for third-party endorsement as well as abuse to spread at neutron speed.

“What do you think? What is acceptable? Frankly I try to limit my time into blocks built around the work day and even at home. But I can see where one could spend endless amounts of time building and maintaining social media personas from here to BFE and back. The question is. What is your ultimate plan or goal with social media? As a layperson and as a professional, do you have an end game result in mind? Do you have a plan?”

Personally, speaking as a relative outside to the mainstream of the web 2.0 world I would say I don’t want to follow the mainstream and think the more you out in the more you get out, though for most people that’s obviously true. Business like, I want to do the minimum to get the maximum return. How to do that of course requires a great deal of work and learning. Or to use the old quote about a guy’s struggle to get out of the ghetto: “It’s a long way to the bottom.”

OK, pretty interesting intellectual take on the impact of web 2.0, even on the mini-screen of my K800i. But ‘ Hypermimesis’? Hmm, kind of feels more like it’s applicable to business world, rather than the world out large. I could be wrong but I’ve at least done some thinking on this myself when it comes to empowerment.

Cheers,

Stuart

HYPERPOLITICS (AMERICAN STYLE)
A Talk By Mark Pesce

Introduction

In his well-received talk at this year’s Personal Democracy Forum (organized by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry), “digital ethnologist” Mark Pesce makes the point that “we have a drive to connect and socialize: this drive has now been accelerated and amplified as comprehensively as the steam engine amplified human strength two hundred and fifty years ago. Just as the steam engine initiated the transformation of the natural landscape into man-made artifice, the ‘hyperconnectivity’ engendered by these new toys is transforming the human landscape of social relations.This time around, fifty thousand years of cultural development will collapse into about twenty.

In presenting his ideas on “the human network” Pesce references the work of archeologist Colin Renfrew, that “we may have had great hardware, but it took a long, long time for humans to develop software which made full use of it”; and Jared Diamond’s ideas in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that “where sharing had been a local and generational project for fifty thousand years, it suddenly became a geographical project across nearly half the diameter of the planet”.

In the 21st century, it’s time to “Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for a rapid descent into the Bellum omnia contra omnes, Thomas Hobbes’ “war of all against all.” A hyperconnected polity—whether composed of a hundred individuals or a hundred thousand—has resources at its disposal which exponentially amplify its capabilities. Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment. After the arms race comes the war.”

To understand this new kind of mob rule, it’s necessary to realize that “Sharing is the threat. Not just a threat. It is the whole of the thing. A photo taken on a mobile now becomes instantaneously and pervasively visible on Flickr or other sharing websites. This act of sharing voids “any pretensions to control, or limitation, or the exercise of power”.

Pesce concludes that “the power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and ‘rebooting’ them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.”

Read on.

—JB

MARK PESCE is an expert in social media, best known for his work blending VR with the Web to create VRML, the distant ancestor of Second Life. Pesce is an author, teacher, inventor, and well-known media personality in Australia. For the last four years has practiced “digital ethnology,” studying the behavioral, cultural and political changes wrought by the new technologies of sharing and communication.

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http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge252.html#pesce