Media'ZBiz!

I’m still amazed to see that social media still can’t get enough respect in the workplace… and still many multinationals don’t get it.

They always invoke the same reasons:

- security

- performance & ROI

- not a priority

- for young consumers

- for B2C, we are in B2B.

While it’s certain that most companies’ executives I’ve met think they should do something about it…most, don’t have enough arguments to push it internally and make it happen. Here are some:

SECURITY

Paul Proctor, a Gartner VP argued:

Computing security, too, is changing. IT security staff should think carefully before exercising a reflex to prevent employees from communicating with Facebook’s e-mail or Skype’s Internet telephony.

You cannot protect yourself from everything. You must learn to balance risk and performance. The cloud and software as a service have appeal, but they introduce a huge shift in how technology is managed and controlled. Software for intrusion detection, antivirus, and firewall protection is still essential, but there are limits to what’s practical.

China’s incoming firewall revealed that while it’s possible to block some incoming information, it’s not practical to block the widespread outbound flow of information.

Don’t try to shut down the two-way flow of information, because you can’t stop it. Transparency is in.

What I generally recommend is for companies to educate users on the risks and responsibilities of online reputation management and to tell employees that corporate conduct rules apply online, too!

The following presentation about ‘The Future of Work’ is interesting, as gives us some insight about how some foresee work in few years from now.

Another good article I recommend to read is Enterprises Must Get Control of Their Avatars.

PERFORMANCE & ROI

Businesses are increasingly using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter for marketing purposes, but those same companies don’t want employees logging on during work hours. For a majority of companies still, an employee wasting time on social media is a performance problem.

Productive employees are too busy with their work to spend lots of time in social media having personal conversations. Instead, they use social media as a mean to get their work done. This is true in any sector of the company, being marketing, PR, HR, R&D, NPD or CRM. Although social media channels seem to be mostly qualitative in nature, employee and users activities can be easily quantified.

Watch this video and read my blog post on ‘How To: Calculate Social Media ROI‘.

In fact, business has not changed. Social Media has just shifted the way business is done. Hard and
 Soft Metrics still apply. Hard metrics for the financial impact: Cost Reduction and Revenue Generation. Soft metrics, the transactional precursors: Brand & Product Mentions, View & Click throughs
 and Traffic
 Impressions.

NOT A PRIORITY

While I might possibly agree that for small companies, with very local business, social media is not their immediate priority, it cannot be the case for companies with consumers spread across markets in one or several continents.

FOR YOUNG CONSUMERS

Let’s take a look at some of the numbers behind the top social networks in order to get a clearer picture of network engagement and user demographics. As Brian Solis had added:

Remember, it’s how you interpret these numbers combined with an understanding of the real world needs and experiences of the people you’re attempting to engage that determines the success or failure of your social media program.

Those numbers clearly show that the 25 – 54 age range represent an average of 42% of total social networks users.

Having said that, what really matters is that with social media, people of all ages are more than ever ‘connected’. They search, discover, comment, dialog, discuss, blog, create, and share all these on social media. At 90:10 Group, which I head for France and Italy, we say ‘a business that operates without a comment box, operates broken’. So get ready.

For B2C, we are in B2B

Traditional B2B marketers resist social media because it doesn’t work when they use it as another outbound marketing channel. They will often say: “We’re a B2B operation! We don’t have social-savvy customers like B2C companies.”

Instead of thinking B2B vs B2C, just think “human” said Chris Brogan.

I can recommend reading B2C vs B2B Social Media – any difference?, as well as The Business of Social Media: B2B and B2C Engagement by the Numbers by Brian Solis.

To conclude, I recommend business to start looking ahead and transform their enterprise into an ‘Enterprise 2.0‘, for efficient collaboration and knowledge exchange, even if this mean ‘chaos’ for most managers. Enterprise 2.0 changes the traditional structured information flow and order. Information flows laterally as well as up and down, cutting the chains that hold back collaboration in a traditional office environment. But when done right, this chaos boosts overall productivity.

B2C versus B2B – is there really any difference when comes to using social media?

It’s a question we hear a lot. And for good reason: either way, you’re still marketing to a human being – right? That’s the advice given:  Instead of thinking B2B vs B2C, just think “human” said Chris Brogan.

In B2C social media marketing, companies are advertising to and ultimately selling to the end-users.  The user makes the buy/no-buy decision based on whatever criteria the business has determined. The smart marketer will understand these decision factors, and position the business product appropriately. For B2B, the purchaser is rarely the end-user.

Traditional B2B marketers resist social media because it doesn’t work when they use it as another outbound marketing channel. They will often say: “We’re a B2B operation! We don’t have social-savvy customers like B2C companies.”

In the latest research report from Business.com, Business Social Media Benchmarking Study (an online survey conducted between August 11th and September 4th, 2009) results show that among both B2B and B2C companies managing a company or branded profile on at least one social media site, Facebook is the most popular site.

B2B companies, however, manage profiles across a greater number of social media sites than do B2C companies and are much more likely to manage one or more Twitter accounts or LinkedIn Groups, manage their company listing on LinkedIn and have a presence on YouTube.

The report shows as well that companies can use a wide variety of tools to monitor company, brand and/or competitor mentions across blogs and other social media sites. Among B2B companies, Twitter Search, Google Search and Google Alerts are the most popular choices, and B2B companies are significantly more likely than B2C companies to use Twitter Search and Google Alerts for monitoring online mentions of their company or brands. B2B companies are significantly less likely to use Yahoo! Search than B2C companies.

No question, social media grew out of the consumer space, and B2C examples of social media success are easy to find. But, as shown in the report above, B2B companies have since acted the value they can get out from social media, which if we look at it closely is not specific for B2B or B2C companies. Benefits any marketers benefits from social media is, listening, reach and nurturing, as explained on the Bubspot blog:

Listening — Every company needs to listen. Doesn’t matter if you sell solder paste, CRM software or fencing supplies. You need to listen to your competitors, your customers, your prospects — your community. Social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook make this easier.

Reach — Reach is important to any marketer. It’s the number of people you can communicate with directly via email, telephone, or any other channel. You need this whether you’re selling to consumers or businesses. Social media tools media it easier to build.

Nurturing — Nurturing is another critical marketing task for all companies. Regardless of what you sell, you need to build trust with potential customers and educate them about your company and your products. Social media facilitates the development of personal relationships at scale. This makes it an ideal tool for nurturing in any business.

Today, whether you are a B2C or B2B company, with the advent of social technologies, you can now enjoy direct and real-time relationships with the consumer throughout the whole supply process.

The 10:90 ratio is flipped on its head.

Now the willing consumer can join in with ideas, provide feedback through out their development and help market the end product to his peers.

This can deliver a never-ending feedback loop of improvement, innovation and efficiency.

In 2009 we saw exponential growth of social media. Americans have nearly tripled the amount of time they spend at social networking and blog sites such as Facebook and MySpace from a year ago, according to Nielsen.  In August 2009, 17 percent of all time spent on the Internet was at social networking sites. European are not that different. According to a report “Europeans Have Adopted Social Computing Differently” by Forrester Research, 60% of European online consumers are taking part in Social Computing activities such as reading or writing blogs, listening to podcasts, setting up RSS feeds, reading and writing online customer reviews, or taking part in social networking sites.

But is this enough for businesses to embrace social media?

Survey results from a recent Deloitte study (2009 Tribalization of Business Study), point to some key challenges that businesses are facing as they move toward integrating online communities into their social media strategy. The three areas they have identified as obstacles are:

Keeping visitors engaged:  30%
Getting people to join:  24%
Encouraging return visits to the online community:  21%

In addition, they agreed that the following are key business outcomes for their online communities:

Increase word-of-mouth:  38%
Increase customer loyalty:  34%
Increase brand awareness:  30%

Liana Evans is her last post starts by saying rightly:

If your online marketing agency has advised you to have a blog, a Facebook fan page, or a Twitter account so that you can get more content just to attain additional search engine rankings, you might want to stop and ask why.

What You Deem Valuable Could be Worthless to Your Audience

You may think that PDF spec sheet of the 10 best of features for your product or service is the best marketing slick ever. You’ve spent hours designing the marketing look and feel around it, you want to make sure that it’s on your Web site and it’s put into every sales packet. You believe this is the most valuable piece of content there is to sell your product.

Listening to your audience talk about what the best features are of your product in social media communities should give you insight into how to provide them with valuable content. It can also help you improve your marketing efforts to reach and engage more people. Utilizing this kind of knowledge can help your marketing efforts in social media reach new engagement levels.

Unfortunately, you aren’t thinking from the end user’s perspective.

A list of specs of features doesn’t do the end user a bit of good if they can’t even figure out how to use your products or services. Many times, companies mistakenly believe that adding more bells and whistles to their products is what customers find valuable. Customers use the product the way it gives them value. Most of the time, the bells and whistles don’t give the value.

How we share ideas and connect with one another has dramatically changed. Previously media was limited to one-size-fits-all broadcast messaging sent out from the center. Businesses had to follow the same model in their communication with both employees and consumers. Social technologies – from forum to Facebook and Twitter to text messaging, means now things can improve.

Now everyone can and does join the conversation.

This explosion of these new communication methods bring people together in  an instant around any interest or passion – no matter how niche. In order to capitalise on these opportunities businesses must prepare to recalibrate with new  thinking and processes. The prize is greater efficiency and innovation.

“The enterprise is waking up to the fact that it needs to listen and that it needs business intelligence” for the communities, said Ed Moran, director of product innovation for consultancy at and one of the study authors.

This is what we offer at 90:10 Group.

Businesses have long had to close a gap between themselves and their consumers with a number of activities that are  inefficient and wasteful. These processes are dependent on  a series of expensive mediators: media owners, advertising agencies, marketing, PR and research companies.

90% of the energy to move from concept to sale is input by the business and its mediators. The consumer gets to join in for the last 10% – the purchase decision.

With the advent of social technologies you can now enjoy direct and real-time relationships with the consumer throughout the whole supply process.

The 10:90 ratio is flipped on its head.

Now the willing consumer can join in with ideas, provide feedback through out their development and help market them the end product to their peers. This can deliver a never-ending feedback loop of improvement , innovation and  efficiency.

Many examples show that consumers are increasingly demanding participation. They expect the ability to co-create and lead innovation, and their volubility has forced companies to devise creative solutions to be competitive in a new bottom-up age. Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Dell, Best Buy and Nike have all created digital platforms that allow customers to help them create new products and messages. Starbucks received over 17,000 coffee ideas in the first 14 months since the launch of its proprietary online forum, mystarbucksidea.com.

Forrester recognizes that the past five years of social media evolution have focused on growth and adoption. It predicts the era of social commerce.

Brian Solis thinks that

The Social Web is distributing influence beyond the customer landscape, allocating authority amongst stakeholders, prospects, advocates, decision makers, and peers. SRM recognizes that whether someone recommended a product, purchased a product, or simply recognized it publicly, in the end, each makes an impact on behavior at varying levels.

Therefore customers are now merely part of a larger equation that also balances vendors, experts, partners, and other authorities. In the realm of SRM, influence is distributed and it is recognizes wherever and however it takes shape.

John Winsor in his article Business Week said:

There’s a delicate balance between encouraging participation and maintaining clarity of overall business objectives. As with any good conversation, a give-and-take dialogue is necessary, and every company will develop its own way of handling that debate. Most excitingly, new forms of social editing will emerge that allow customers, experts, and brand advocates to curate crowd-created ideas to sort through the ideas and stay on strategy. For now, the most important thing is to jump in and try.

What’s Twitter’s business model and how do they plan to make money? Haven’t you heard that before?

As we all know, Twitter is good for a lot of things, including sharing information and links, listening to the thoughts and announcement of people you respect, and as an organic, user-driven source of breaking news. But is this enough to make it a profitable business?

“A fast growing amount of information is coursing through Twitter very quickly, and we want there to be many ways to access that information,” co-founder Evan Williams posted to the company blog. “As part of that effort, we’ve partnered with Google to index the entire world of public tweets as fast as possible and present them to their users in an organized and relevant fashion.”

From the cache of documents leaked to TechCrunch earlier this year by an anonymous hacker, we know that every big player in online media, including Google and Microsoft, has been knocking on Twitter’s doors, seeking a deal (which have been announced very recently). This is no surprise: Twitter is the hottest thing in digital media since the advent of the world wide web.

BusinessWeek last week have started their article as such:

It has become a popular game, even among investors who should know better, to dismiss Twitter based on lack of a business model. But there is a difference between not generating income and lack of a business model. I believe that, in just a few short months, Twitter will show the world that not only do they have a business model, but that theirs is the most sophisticated around.

Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, has to defend over and over why his three-year-old company isn’t making money yet, despite having raised more than $150 million in venture capital. He recently spoke on camera at Twitter’s offices with Adam Lashinsky for Fortune. Here is a video extract. Full article here.

Though, Twitter have many supporters and believers.

In a fascinating interiew with Business Week’s talented editor John Byrne published in May 2009, the excellent blog Social Nerdia extracted this insightful quote:

“I greatly enjoy Twitter. It’s a technology that permits more immediate and spontaneous communication with people. And for us, it’s a great way to collaborate with others and gain deeper and more meaningful engagement with readers on everything we do. There’s nothing that is more important to a media brand today than engagement. We’re all trying to achieve relationships with our users to induce loyalty, to increase repeat visits, and to encourage valuable editorial contributions from readers. Twitter is an essential tool to make that happen.”

Back in May, David Weir from BNET after reading “The Ten Ways Twitter Will Permanently Change American Business” by Douglas A, McIntyre, has derived & reoriented his post to focus on the media industry specifically. Here are an extract of his ‘12 ways Twitter will transform the Media Business’:

Jeff Pulver asked lately Loic Lemeur to think about the future of Twitter and even though he has no crystal ball (as he says), he gathered some predictions and put them into the following video.

Olivier Coudert thinks that:

The most obvious sources of revenue; advertising and premium features, are still to be developed. Advertising will not come before next year at best, and premium features for businesses are still looking for their foothold (like detailed analytics, insight in the retweeting dynamics, reports on followers and their behavior, trusted accounts, ROI measurements, etc).

Conclusion …

The last question is how Twitter will increase the number and the loyalty of its users, hoping this will also increase the quality and relevance of the tweets (90% of the traffic is generated by 10%  of the users, and a quarter of the tweets is spambot generated). Twitter has been refraining from providing utilities to manage tweets and followers, and that led to a proliferation of small startups. It will come a time –the sooner the better—where some consolidation happens in that ecosystem, bringing more automation and getting more people to sign up to the service. Twitter’s decision to support French, Italian, German, and Spanish languages will also make it less US/UK centric and more international.

by Olivier Coudert.

As many of us, more and more we are relying on Twitter as our source of news and article links. A new site, The Twitter Times had the idea of filtering all those news and links from tweets of the many people you’re following and have put them in an easy-to-digest newspaper-style form. Watch their video. Their service is currently in beta.

Basically, The Twitter Times looks at all the people you follow on Twitter, finds their tweets with links in them, and creates a custom newspaper for you based on those links. But it’s not just a straight stream of stories based on how recent they are, instead the service looks at how many people have linked to the article, both in your social circle and outside of it.

I found this great little Flash App (which is in constant development) on Gary Hayes‘ blog, showing how active & dynamic the Social Web is.

The social web has exploded in the last year and below are some of the key data points that the ‘Gary’s Social Media Count’  is based on (many will be updated!).

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
• Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
• iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)
• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
• YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
• UPDATE: YouTube 1Billion watched per day SMH (2009)- counter updated!
• Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

Several days ago, Stephen Nold on LinkedIn posed the question “Social media is ________? (fill in the blank)”.
Roger Harris, an independent social communications consultant has reviewed the 68 answers posted on LinkedIn and came up with the following results:

A word cloud of the 68 responses reflects the business orientation of most LinkedIn users. From the cloud of responses, social media looks to be “marketing communications that reach people as individuals.”

he continues by saying:

‘But the LinkedIn respondents show no evident consensus on defining social media. Moreover, what about social media that is not about marketing? This got me thinking. Do we need to define social media? If so, can we agree on a definition?

Social media seems a simple enough idea. But it can be hard to sell to colleagues and C-suites who see it as just a fad, something that teens do. So maybe we do need a definition.’

David Cushman who last Friday was giving a conference Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Social Media But Were Afraid to Ask defines social media as:

Roger Harris in his post continues his analysis:

‘So how about Wikipedia? Surely the world’s largest online reference source would have something meaningful to say. The closest it comes to a definition is: “Social media are media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques.” Um, okay. But how do you convey that to execs? But the article seems to cover the basics. Let’s take it as a starting point.

A word cloud of the 382 words from Wikipedia’s page (excluding references and the words “social” and “media”) shows the four commonest words are (1) community, (2) information, (3) sharing and (4) technologies. These strung together make a straightforward definition “Community information sharing technologies.” (Note: the prominence of the word “industrial” results from considerable space being devoted to distinguishing social media from traditional media such as print, television and radio.)

In her updated presentation ‘One year later – What the F**K is Social Media’, Marta Kagan gives the following definition for Social Media:

• Public Relation
• Customer Service
• Loyalty-building
• Collaboration
• Networking
• Thought Leadership
• and Customer Acquisition

But she says, ‘don’t assume Social Media is the Answer to Everything.’

David Cushman’s sees Social Media as Social + Media, where:

Social = Group, people, us, what we choose to do together.

Media = Content, distribution, them, what they would seek to do to us.

Roger Harris has a succinct oneliner definition for socila media: “community information sharing technologies.”

My definition …  social media enables you to share content created by you or others using set of highly accessible and scalable (publishing) technologies transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many),  replacing broadcast networks into (powerful) conversation communities.

What is your definition of social media?

As we all know, people increasingly use technology to get what they need from each other, instead of relying on companies and businesses.

“Customers are writing about your products on blogs and recutting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you in social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon — the groundswell — that has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works. Most companies see it as a threat. You can see it as an opportunity.” In Groundswell, two of Forrester Research’s top analysts, Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li, show you how to turn the force of customers connecting to your own advantage.

Social media gives a voice to buyers who can now describe their experience and disappointment to a global audience. And, wow, are they saying a lot.
This is a social trend accelerated by technology, not the other way around.

Companies are more stretched than ever on staff that delivers products and services, as well as support for them. At the same time, due to the fragmentation of media and customer interests, their marketing dollars are not going as far as they used to when broadcasting was considered the way to go.

The good news is that businesses can reach customers where they are, and take advantage of the very same tools to not only satisfy their requests, but to gain insights about their buying habits – something that in the past could be done only with expensive research.

Forrester surveyed more than 1,200 business technology buyers and found that they exceed all previous benchmarks for social participation.

Social participation data for other countries are also available. Try their profile tool here.

Forrester’s Social Technographics classifies consumers into six overlapping levels of participation.

Forrester isn’t the only one diving in to research in the social space. Brightkite, which bills itself as a social discovery network and GFK also did some research lately. The ‘big’ insight wasn’t really big at all. It appears 87% of people prefer face-to-face interactions than spending time online and would rather talk in person at a rate 44 times more than through online means. An interesting article by Jason Falls analyses this for us.

In conclusion, social media, this is where consumers are and thus where marketing is going.