This week in New Orleans kicks off an important conversation about Tribe Building. TribeCon will be held October 29-30 in New Orleans, Louisiana in partnership with the Voodoo Experience. The conference will feature inspiring and educational presentations by world-renown panelists. All panels will focus around building community online and offline, and leveraging communities to accomplish amazing things.
The lineup includes conversations about failure and community, microcontent communities, how to Rawk a new community, community across contexts (both online and offline themes) and many others. Sounds like a lot of fascinating topics. As an added benefit, the conference is co-located with the Voodoo Experience - a New Orleans Music Fest featuring top tier talent.
I'll be watching @TribeCon on Twitter, but I've been able to watch Chris Schultz and TIffany Starnes, co-founders of TribeCon create a community to help them build this conversation. They've done a remarkable job.
I'll also be using this as a kickoff to my series on conversations about community building. I've asked some of the best community builders to answer five questions about community building. As a guy who keeps trying to get the community building formula right, these are some of the insights I'm hoping Tribecon will help answer this week!
1) How would you characterize successful communities you've helped to build?
2) what are hallmarks of building a "strong community"?
3) what are some of your community building best practices?
4) what roles need to be filled early during a communities growth?
5) what helps sustain a community over time?
Before I start blogging the community builder responses I received, I'd love to hear your thoughts on community building. Do you have answers to any of these questions? What other questions would you ask community builders?
We reviewed some of the basics, but also discussed why a person in the technical field should care. Granted, many of these technologists are already "hip" to social technology. Some have embraced the tools and are harnessing social technology to build
& nurture relationships and share/collaborate with other
technologists.
Quite frankly, it's refreshing that Chariot is "leading the charge" (pun intended!) and encouraging their employees to participate in social media. It's really a no-brainer; in some cases, employees of small and medium sized companies can be the best content generators and evangelists of the company brand. Of course, mileage will vary depending on your industry, how many employees you have, etc. I'll save that for another "brand & reputation management" post, though.
Anyways, we had a lot to cover in the session since it was only an hour long, but we revealed some easy things technologists can integrate into their daily routines to participate in the company's social media efforts. Most of these things can take 20 minutes or less a day to do!
Share your Google Reader with other employees. If you're already using Google Reader to read the latest news and blog posts from the technological world - why not SHARE interesting links/info with your fellow employees?
Use Twitter to connect & share with your co-workers as well as RT (re-tweet) company news (if they have a corporate Twitter account). If you're creating a professional account, consider including your company name or area of specialty in your Twitter account. For example: "OpenSourceFrank"
Find and join groups on LinkedIn. Try to focus on those related to your technology niche. For example, if you're an open source developer, start your search with "open source" or "open source development". Use keywords related to your specialty to find those relevant groups.
Utilize social bookmarking sites (for example: Dzone - which is like Digg, but for developers) to share news articles, blog posts, and interesting videos. Google Reader offers easy social sharing functionality. Many websites, blogs, and social networking platforms also have this social sharing functionality built-in as well. It's easy to use, you just need an account on the social bookmarking sites.
Comment on your company's blog. Seriously. Your blog comment doesn't have to be a dissertation. It can be simply agreeing with and supporting what the blog post is about. Naturally, we also encourage regular commenting on other, industry blogs. Do so as time permits.
There's many other things technologists can do to participate in the company's social media, of course. Knowing what your company's social media strategy, though, is key. If they don't have one, it's time for them to step up & create one. But we'll leave that for another blog post.
What are some of YOUR social media tips for technologists?
One of the organizations that I'm active in is called Integral Philly. Part of our mission at Integral Philly is to explore complex and dynamic topics using the Integral Theory lens called AQAL. At our last meeting, we decided to apply the AQAL Lens to the rapidly changing Internet. (Ken Wilber is the originator of the AQAL model.)
The conversation quickly jumped into a discussion of Network Theory and Six Degrees of Separation. It seems that this idea is particularly important in the social networks we are creating and propagating across the Web.
However, the conversation quickly ran through a gamut of topics which I captured in the Quadrant breakdown shown below. For those of you not familiar with AQAL, the quadrants are:
- upper left. the interior of the person. Think of our consciousness.
- upper right. the exterior/measureable elements of the person. Skills, demographics, behaviors
- lower left. the interior of the group. This represents our culture.
- lower right. the exterior of the group. The formal organizations we use.
In the diagram below, the four quadrants capture single phrases around a wide range of topics. However, some of the key takeaways and discussions were captured as links between quadrants. A brief recap includes:
1) Remember that Technology runs ahead of Morality (Blue Line). One of the saddest moments of my career as a technologist came when I realized how a cool technology like a video camera built into a cell phone could be turned into a cyber-bulllying tool. Imagine a boy or girl being humiliated on a playground by one or more bullies. A 12 year old girl, thinking its funny, whips out her phone and records the whole scene on video. The bullying video is posted to YouTube. The next day, the bullied child with low self-esteem, now the laughing stock of the entire school, does the unthinkable.
We are blessed daily with new technologies. But those of us who use them, or who put new technologies in the hands of children, are obligated to recognize that morals and ethics for these devices often have not been established by our culture. We have the responsibility of using vigilance in personally monitoring ourselves and others for moral and ethical violations that emerge from using these technologies.
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. - Martin Luther King Jr.
2) Different Internet Communication Channels provide different levels of Context. An interesting discussion started with a conversation about email and how so much can be taken out of context. Indeed, it seems that proper etiquette in email should be required education in our classrooms today. That said, what is the difference between the context provided by Twitter - at 140 characters of text - and live online video? Quite a bit, I'd say. But its interesting to think about the differences of context provided by the various Internet channels. Live networking or "Pressing the flesh" may always be the most intimate way to interact with someone. This item opened up an entire range of new topics for me related to mapping Internet Marketing Channels. More on that in an upcoming blog post.
3) Working at Home has a crucial side-effect of more isolation. Okay. I admit it. I often communicate with my wife by email... even when she is 20 feet away from me. I instant message co-workers who are in the same room. How pathetic is that?
We are becoming increasingly isolated even as we become more connected.
4) Disembodied Surfing needs to be more present. Have you ever zoned out while surfing the Web? I have... plenty. A random meditation bell software program that rings periodically, without warning, helps to bring me back to reality. I can take a deep breath... appreciate my surroundings and begin surfing again with more presence.
Some of the topics discussed during our Integral Philly Meetup are shown below.
I hope you get the idea that, during the talk, we covered a wide range of topics. One of the final areas of discussion before we ran out of time was the role that generation is playing in how people interact with the Web. One hot topic was how Millenials relate differently to the world in particular. Millenials are the first full-fledged Internet generation from just-about cradle and on.
Apparently, this hasn't gone un-noticed by a number of authors. Some books mentioned during the conversation included:
I know there’s a lot of talk about Twitter these days. According
to a Nielsen survey, it’s the fastest growing social networking site on the
Internet today. Individuals, businesses, and celebrities alike are using it to
communicate and connect with others. Back in June, I participated in a workshop
called Twitter
for Business 101 (sponsored by Team and a Dream).I explained the benefits
of signing up, basic usage, and covered some Twitter etiquette (what and when
to “tweet”).
A big part of my presentation was about searching for people
to follow on Twitter. I focused a good bit on how to qualify the best people to
follow. Knowing your target audience is a good first step in figuring out whom
to follow. Know the topics and issues that they are interested in and ensure
they align with your own. Use that as a foundation in order to start a conversation and build
a relationship with them.
Note: it’s important to read people’s Bios as well as scan
their most recent tweets before following them. Take this extra qualifying
step so you’re not just randomly following people. It will also
assure you that their tweets are of value to you. Are they frequently sharing
news, links or other information that interests you? Are they actively engaging
in conversation with others?
5 Twitter Follow Tips
1. Finding People on Twitter – Twitter
allows you to search for people you already know or based on keywords. You can
also invite people to Twitter. http://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_twitter
2.Real Time Twitter Search – this seems
like a no-brainer.Write down a list of
keywords that you’re interested in or that describes your business. Plug those
words into Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com/) and
you will immediately get real-time results of people who are using those exact
words in their tweets.Real Time Search
also includes trending topics which are the hot topics at any given time.
3.Friend Followers/Following – Scan your
friends’ following/followers from time to time. It never hurts to see who they
are following or who is following them. Chances are you will find a common
thread in which to start a conversation.
4.Twitter Directories – Directories are
like Yellow Pages on the web. On most Twitter directories, you can submit
yourself to the directory listing that's most relevant to you – usually you will
be grouped by categories/keywords or interests.Great Twitter directories to get listed on and find people are Twellow, WeFollow,
and TwitterGroups.
5.Tweet Alerts – set up a tweet alert on
your keywords so you can have conversations emailed to you. It is essentially
like Google Alerts for Twitter. Good examples of online tools that can do this
are Tweetscan and TweetBeep.
Let us know how you find and follow people on Twitter!
I had the opportunity to attend a remarkable meeting about "Social Media for Social Good" sponsored by the Social Media Club Philadelphia. The first hour included a panel discussion featuring speakers from 3 local causes. The last hour, attendees were encouraged to brainstorm a broad range of Social Media strategies and tactics for a non-profit benefitting children and their families.
Northern Home for Children (@NorthernHomeFC) is the nation's oldest orphanage and child support non-profit. Annie Heckenberger (@anniemal), of Philadelphia-based ad agency Red Tettemer, raised them to the group's attention. She wanted to brainstorm on ways that Northern Homes could better utilize Social Media. Annie wrote the first idea down and stood at the whiteboard, marker ready. She was not disappointed.
The flurry of ideas did not end for a full hour. The moderator Gloria Bell (@gloriabell) did a wonderful job directing the chaos. There were still four hands in the air with fresh ideas when she reluctantly called an end to the brainstorming.
As a result of this impromptu brainstorming, they have already shown remarkable results. When the SMC-Philly meeting started, @NorthernHomeFC had 3 followers. Today, just five days later, they are up to 126 followers. Mary Fran of Northern Home tweets for them. She reported that they have already exceeded their first Twitter challenge of 100 uniforms in 100 hours (@anniemal contributed this first idea).
While it was my first meeting, my colleague Marilyn Moran (@PhillyMarketing) is a veteran and member of the @SMCPhilly operating board. Marilyn confirmed that what happened on Tuesday night was indeed unique.
The range of ideas ran the gamut of tactics to strategy including: platforms, audiences, content, memes, talking points, comparable non-profits to study, strategies and campaigns.
While the results that came out of this particular brainstorming would take a small e-book to fully capture, here were five of my favorites:
The 100 uniforms in 100 hours was a call to action that was easy to get behind. Targeted, focused and with an interesting story behind it. It turns out that many kids in economically distressed situations can't attend public schools because they don't have the $20 for the required uniform! It sounds crazy, but this is exactly the kind of plight Northern Homes is struggling to overcome.
Follow Journalists on Twitter. Susan Jacobson (@susanjacobson), Professor at Temple University's School of Journalism, reported that journalists are quickly moving to Twitter. They are publishing their editorial calendar. Christine Cavalier (@PurpleCar) layered on that the Journalists can be easily monitored as a group using a tool like TweetDeck or Seesmic desktop.
But what if the staff at Northern Home doesn't have the time to write relevant articles for the journalists? "Consider crowdsourcing!" one SMC Member exclaimed. "Just ask your followers if someone could help with an article on a topic by a certain date." What a great way for someone to make a contribution if they aren't able to help financially!
Collecting money online? Consider using the Chipin Widget. These widgets can be customized to your needs and embedded on the web site.
Finally, taking inspiration from @headmutha Rocky Turner, the organization called Mothers Fighting for Others was highlighted by one group member as a successful Twitter fund-raiser. A quick check of Rocky's Twitter stream revealed what seemed to be a globe-trotting, world-changing mother hoping to just "pay it forward".
Now, a lot of this content needs to be organized, prioritized and otherwise scrubbed before Mary Fran has a full-blown Social Media Strategy. But I'm betting she saved weeks or months of time learning the hard way. Furthermore, the collective wisdom she tapped into was far beyond what any single agency could provide. Hats off to @anniemal for pulling the wisdom of the crowd around this one pressing need.
Got me wondering if any of you are using crowdsourcing to help with aspects of your marketing campaign strategies? We've used a variant of this approach by have the public provide usability and aesthetic feedback client Web sites through usertesting.com. I've also seen a number of people crowdsource their logo at 99designs or similar sites.
This blog post covers crowdsourcing for a social media strategy. What other areas could benefit? In what ways have you used crowdsourcing to help your team or your clients? What problems might you see with crowdsourcing a marketing strategy?
Also: if you were at at the SMC-Philly meeting, what are your thoughts? What did you like or not like about the impromptu brainstorming? Did you find it worthwhile? Did you learn something from it? What are other ways you can crowdsource social media strategy?
Please drop us a comment and let us know what you think about crowdsourcing your marketing?
I again had the pleasure of being a guest blogger for the Small business Blog at HP Logoworks. This month's post was on Social Media marketing and how to use Other People's Content for creating your Social Media content. In that post, I talk about some of the new jobs you can try out. In today's Whacky Wide Web, we all have to get used to wearing different hats.
Here are some new jobs that you can fill while creating your next Social Media post using Other People's Content.
1) The researcher. You can aggregate content around a specific topic to create a new Blog Post. A little research, organization and some commentary to bring it together can go a long way.
2) The commentator. Read an online report and deliver some useful summary points. Ask insightful questions. Take a Point of View relative to the report and become a new generation commentator.
3) The evangelist. Find someone's perspective that you like and promote it. No one likes a cheerleader who is cheering for themselves - but we all look for good tips on who we should follow. Help your favorite online personalities promote their message with your platform.
What new jobs are you creating for yourself in today's citizen-publisher economy?
In 1906, a creative business owner might be able to come up with 5 ways through which he could reach his market.
- Newspaper
- Signage
- Word of mouth
- branding/packaging
and...
hmm...
I came up with four. As I said, a creative business owner could do a little, but not much, better.
In 1920, the first commercial radio broadcast took place and, during that decade, Madison Avenue became synonymous with Advertising. The age of Mass Communication had taken place. Slick guys and gals in Manhattan could help a business navigate the multitude of options that emerged alongside the growth industries of Television, Radio, Film, Recording, Mass Transit and, eventually, personalization technology (think transitor radio, walkmans, boom-boxes).
In the past 15 years, dozens of communication channels quickly grew into hundreds, thousands and ultimately millions of options for a growing business. Millions? Is that really how many options a business has to navigate? When you consider that the options can be combined into new generation campaigns, then you see the power of today's media.
Consider the Grasshopper.com viral marketing campaign which combined direct mail, video, social media, mass media and viral marketing techniques to get the word out about their new brand (formerly gotvmail). The campaign got them noticed - and broke them out of a holding pattern they had been in for some time.
This was not a radio campaign, or a direct mail campaign, or a social media campaign. It was a hybrid that the creative genius of the GoToVmail cum Grasshopper CEO and team devised.
Do you agree that exploding complexity is a critical roadblock for today's businesses? How are you working through that complexity?
What kinds of creative campaigns have you seen used in this age of "5 Million" channels?
Have you taken advantage of any new creative outlets like contests or online community building? We'd love to hear about them... did they work? what did you learn from them?
Small businesses are being lured by the bright shiny object called Social Media Marketing. To be sure, this is an important development. One way to look at this phenomena is as a collection of tools that you can add to your SMB marketing toolkit.
A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter-and getting smarter faster than most companies.
In a recent Keynote address called “Andy Hunt on Pragmatic Thinking and Learning“, author Andy Hunt relays the story of a man who was trained to see using just his tongue attached to an electronic imaging device. The man became so adept he could navigate a car through a parking lot with only his tongue for vision.
This bizarre repurposing of the use of our tongue serves to illustrate something we humans have been doing for millions of years. We build stuff that enables us to dig deeper than with our bare hands, fight more lethally than kicking or punching, and travel farther and longer than running. Man, the tool-maker.
Person to person communication is one of the most vigorous areas of human tool-building. Starting with extenders like the written word, the trained courier-bird and smoke signals, our ambition to communicate faster farther with more people has driven innovation upon innovation. The printing press marked the advent of mass communication, extending our voice to thousands of ears. With electronic communications our voice-extending spree exploded across phone, radio, TV, satellite and so much more. From Gutenberg’s wonder to the Internet, mass communication has only been around for a handful of centuries.
And then it really got crazy…
Internet Marketing is the art of optimizing Internet-based conversations to promote a specific Point of View (POV) with a specific audience. After all, the internet (little i) is just the plumbing for a whole host of voice and conversation tools. Cyberspace is made up of a fleet of different modes of communication. “Markets are Conversations.” Is the first thesis of the 1999 manifesto that illuminates the future of a global, human conversation...
Flying blind just isn't as much fun as it used to be.
Recently, eMarketer published results from a recent study (Q1, 2009) of marketing organizations. The marketing organizations are having trouble collecting and correlating information from multiple channels, with diverse vendor-partners managing those channels.
eMarketer writes:
Unfortunately, the necessary data is currently scattered across organizations. Data formats are inconsistent and so is terminology. Until these problems are solved, marketers attempting to integrate traditional and digital advertising channels will continue flying blind.
I think the problem is bigger than that, though. True... finding, collecting and integrating the data is difficult in most organizations today.
But that hides the real question.
What should you be measuring? With multiple marketing channels, there could be hundreds (thousands?) of variables you could watch... Which metrics are the right metrics? Internet market and web analytics have led to an explosion of quantitative data that can be leveraged. Offline analytics are getting better as well through improved survey techniques, in-store kiosks, video monitoring, etc.
Should you pay attention to num of widgets sold? avg sales price? num of clients? num of visitors? landing page bounce rates? ...
which leads to:
that depends on your objectives.
What are your objectives?
Do you seek to increase the number of customers or visitors? Maybe you wish to emphasize a specific product mix? Are you hoping to find customers who become loyal and longtime members of your community?
Your objectives depend further on your business Goals, Vision and Strategy. Do you hope capture new markets? Deepen customer intimacy? Improve brand recognition?
Choosing the right metrics (or Key Performance Indicators, KPIs) based on your business strategy can help to both simplify the measurement process and improve the effectiveness of conversations around KPIs.
I imagine a lot of organizations don't spend time on metrics because when they do, they are overwhelming. Instead, a few, well-placed, well-segmented KPIs can go a long way towards streamlining the understanding of how well your marketing engines are running. Good KPIs should be simple and easy to understand. A one page dashboard that ties the KPIs into the specific business objectives can go a long way towards improving your marketing effectiveness.
It means you can move with nimbleness. You can react weekly... even daily to what is happening. Yet all of those actions are aligned with your big picture strategy.
Strategy can take a lot of different forms. What it really means is that you are taking a comprehensive and integral perspective on the challenge of marketing a product and company.
So... my question, which apparently was NOT on the survey, is:
How many of you employ a strategically-focused marketing approach - one driven by specific goals that are supported by measurable results?
Do you think such an approach is preferable? Is it practical? Why or why not?
This simple framework encourages you to follow the three simple marketing steps towards mastery of "See it, Say it and Be it". By walking up each step of the pyramid, you can ensure that you have all the elements in place for a successful marketing effort. It can also help you to answer questions like, "When am I ready for a Blog?" or "Can Social Media really help my company?". If you haven't done the necessary preparatory work, then your premature marketing efforts can be wasted.
Furthermore, the framework sets the stage for the successful measurement of marketing efforts. A marketing metrics dashboard is a key component to ensure that you stay on the path to Market Mastery once you've started your journey. The framework is discussed in more detail on a recent article at the HP Logoworks Blog article "See it. Say it. Be it. Multi-Channel Marketing in a Web 2.0 World" by Skip Shuda.
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