Flashback Friday: How Open Do I Need to Be REALLY? Charlene Li Responds

Social Media and Community 2.0 Strategies is taking place April 4-6, 2011, in Boston, Massachusetts. Fridays leading up to the event, we’ll be recapping one of the sessions from the 2010 Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies Event. For more information on this year's event, download the brochure.

Flashback Friday: How Open Do I Need to Be REALLY? Charlene Li Responds

I've never heard Groundswell author and Altimeter Group founder Charlene Li speak before, and I'm glad I had the chance today. She makes "social" seem less scary; audience members that didn't speak up before are comfortable asking her the questions that most bother them.

The points she made in sum:

- Focus on relationships. This is about having a relationships strategy, not a social media strategy.
- Align social strategy with strategic goals.
- Support your open leaders.
- Plan for failure - there will be many.

Relationships and planning in advance for failure are two themes that keep popping up this week, so it merits taking special note of those.

Here's what Li discussed in more detail.

A recurring question she gets from companies: "How open do I need to be?" The answer: Have confidence and humility to relinquish the need for control, while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals. That's how you stay in command without whipping out the iron fist.

A good rule of thumb if you still feel murky about this "being open" thing: Don't just look at where people are being social; examine to what degree they are being open to one another.

This isn't about complete balls-out openness; this is about cultivating the openness that is appropriate for your strategy. An example she gives is that she walked into a room full of people and bared her soul, it would probably make everyone uncomfortable, and she'd feel weird about it too. But if she's walking into a roomful of her closest friends, it would be okay to do that, and people would get it.

Another nice example is considering Apple: people feel it's incredibly closed, and in a lot of ways it is, but the fact is it would probably hurt more than help if they were more open. When will Apple need to be more open? When it stops designing exceptional products, Li says.

Seven guidelines for moving forward in your relationship strategy:

1. Align openness with strategic goals, say, for 2011. Pick one where "open" and "social" can have impact. Make sure the strategy aligns with one of the five-odd things your CEO truly cares about; if it doesn't, you're toast.



2. Understand value. "We tend to overvalue the things we can measure, and undervalue the things we cannot." - John Hayes, CMO American Express. What's the value of Coca-Cola's five million fans, versus people that are exposed to a Coke ad?

3. Understand how open you need to be.

4. Find and develop open leaders inside your company. You may see four types: worried pessimists, transparent evangelists, cautious testers, realist optimists. Treat and use them accordingly. The higher up the organization you go, the more "worried skeptics" you find. By far, the most effective archetype is the "realist optimist" - they see the problems the company has, but understand the end point and have an idea how to get there.

Cultivate a culture of sharing inside your company, because it's a safe place. If people can't share inside, they won't do it outside. "Mindsets only change if skills and behavior change," says Li.

5. Prepare your organisation. What areas do your frontline people need to be ready for?

6. Organise to meet your goals. Try the social media triage:



7. Embrace failure. Wal-Mart underwent at least three major social media failures before it came up with the Check-Out Blog, which hit the right note: saving people money, no longer fabricating user conversation.

Four goals define your strategy:



Understand that the dialog is important, and you can't get to the "support" and "innovate" parts of that graph without it. Learning to create a dialog teaches you what you need to do to support users; with that, over time, you can innovate.

Finally, manage risk with Sandbox Covenants: define the limits of your company's "comfort" sandbox, so it's clear to all participants. As your relationship strengthens with users, the sandbox will expand organically - yielding not just more openness and comfort with different technologies, but innovations, too.

Don't forget users have sandboxes too; consider them. What do they expect from you? Create mitigation/contingency strategies for what happens when a line is crossed.

Li wrapped with a pretty idea: In the future, social networks will be like air. It'll seem quaint that we had to go to a space like Twitter/Facebook in order to feel connected.

Photo via Logic + Emotion, who in turn found it on Waiting for Dorothy.

Looking back at the past year, has your company embraced openness as part of your social media strategy? What sorts of dialogs have you engaged in?

"Virtual Goods" By Brett Orlanski, Vice President, Business Development, Virtual Greats

Not a day passes without some news about the fantastic growth in the virtual goods business. To the uninitiated, buying a digital nothing for real money seems beyond absurd. News of Zynga's over the top billion dollar valuation, all based on their mastery of virtual goods sales or China's Tencent, the largest global seller of virtual goods doing billions a quarter in sales seems mind boggling. But once you understand the who, what, and why of this industry, the mystery fades and a real business model is revealed.

In an attempt to justify this, much is made to show that many "traditional" digital consumables are virtual goods: movies, downloadable music, even digital news subscriptions. But all these examples fail to understand what we really mean by talking of virtual goods in a gaming sense, and why anyone would buy them. Being above a certain age does not help in seeing the value and purpose, but for arguments sake pretend that you are either a teenage boy whose nexus of entertainment revolves around the immersive games you play, OR you are a 30 something stay at home mom with a little extra time on your hands. In both cases you play games, albeit for different reasons and in different ways, but the games you play are built around a core game mechanic that challenges you to "level up" and enables you to do so faster by buying virtual goods. So fundamental to the game play are these virtual goods, and so cheap, that you dismiss the notion that it’s money for nothing and instead open your wallet. The real game mechanics and sales drivers employed are sophisticated psychological levers that reward you for buying the items and incentivize you to spread the word, through viral channels, to share the “news” of your purchase.

To the buyers of these items, it's not money for nothing. Rather these items are the small price you pay to play the game and advance in the ranks. What's the alternative- look at ads? That’s for dummies. There is a solid, legitimate, and fast growing business in virtual goods. The salivate inducing margins aside, the business of virtual goods has enabled small developers to turn big profits. I predict (along with almost every other analyst) amazing growth over the next 3-5 years and this is just the start.

Let’s get together April 4 to discuss this in greater depth, understand the subset of virtual goods: branded virtual goods, and learn about the underlying business of this new industry.
- Brett Orlanski, Vice President, Business Development, Virtual Greats

Hear more from Brett Orlanski and Virtual Greats at "Branded Virtual Goods: Unlocking Value and Making Real Money from Your IP in a Fast Growing Social Media Marketplace," part of the SOCIAL GAMING track at the Social Media & Communities 2.0 conference on April 4th, 2011. Register now.

SocialC20 Sitdown Sweeps

Attending the Social Media and Communities 2.0 conference in April? Don't miss your chance to win a SocialC20 Sit-Down!

We're giving away a 30-minute social media strategy intensive sit-down at the event with an exclusive panel of experts from Comblu plus others!

The SocialC20 Sit-Down winner will receive immediate feedback on current social media strategy and take-away suggestions for the future. Winner will be chosen from a random drawing on the evening of April 4th, 2011. Sit down will occur during the lunch break at the Social Media and Communities 2.0 conference on April 5th. Tweet @community20 between now and April 4th to enter!

Not registered yet? There's still time. Register here today.

Looking for the most up-to-date details? Make sure you're a part of our crowdvine community.

Flashback Friday: A Conversation with The Top Corporate Twitter Brands: How Can I Unlock the Business Value of Twitter to Innovate, Interact, Inform?

Social Media and Community 2.0 Strategies is taking place April 4-6, 2011, in Boston, Massachusetts. Fridays leading up to the event, we’ll be recapping one of the sessions from the 2010 Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies Event. For more information on this year's event, download the brochure.

A Look Back at SMC2010: A Conversation with The Top Corporate Twitter Brands: How Can I Unlock the Business Value of Twitter to Innovate, Interact, Inform?

Kellie Parker of Sega, Winnie Hsia of Whole Foods and Christi Day of Southwest Air are our panelists at this morning's discussion on how businesses can utilize Twitter to market and to engage with their customers.

How did your brand get into Twitter?

Sega: Twitter was started at Sega about 2yrs ago. They made the decision to have an account for both USA and Europe; but they found that customers were following both Twitter streams so they combined them, providing messaging to all locations.

Whole Foods: Twitter was started at 2008 for the company and now they've provided 2/3 of their stores with their own Twitter. Shoppers want to connect with their store, Whole Foods is actively working for a 100% adoption of Twitter by all of their stores. There is a dedicated person at each store who controls the Twitter communication.

Southwest: Started slowly with Twitter then hit 7,000 new followers per day. Southwest now boasts 3M followers.

In order for the Twitter accounts to be successful, managers must listen and be human with the customers. The focus should never be a "hard sell" it should be a conversation, not a promotion. Finding out your brand advocates and the influentials and work with them, highlight them and make them part of your mission.

There is a customer service component to Twitter, and it helps your customers connect with a real person when they're having difficulties; but what if customers are having a great time with your brand? Christi Day showcased an example for the "Nerd Bird," a flight scheduled from California for Austin, TX for the South By Southwest conference that included a bunch of self-proclaimed "nerds" to the conference. Once Southwest's Twitter team found out about this "Nerd Bird," they were able to schedule a wi-fi plane for the crew - bonus!

What about promotions/coupons?

Sega does "Free Stuff Friday" which works like a radio call-in show, "I've got this t-shirt, the 10th person that DMs us gets it for free." It's worked so well that they've pre-announced the giveaways, blogged about the giveaways and now they've started to videotape the giveaways. It's been a success and now it's a great promotional tool for upcoming games.

Whole Foods does "Twitter Thursdays" and "Facebook Fridays" with giveaways that have included an all expense paid trip. When they give away really cool stuff, something more than gift cards, like a case of peanut butter - it's a success. If people have something that they can really rally around, or they are a fan of something, it matters so much more.

Southwest Air source codes everything that comes from Twitter to the Southwest Air website. By only using their channels, Southwest Air had the largest increase in fare sales in 40 years just by using social media. Before the holidays, Southwest Air gave away 12 gift cards based on the 12 Days of Christmas, asking users to send pictures - the winners won a $1000 gift card for air travel.


Within your Twitter team, it's important to have well-defined roles and a well-defined organizational system. Each member of the team should be able to fill in for one another, to keep the communication and the messaging consistent.

Looking back at the past year, have you incorporated promotions or give-aways into your corporate twitter presence? What other ideas for interaction have you come up with?

What Sets Our Event Apart From The Rest?

Meaningful Case-Studies That Promote Real-World Actionable Takeaways

The first ALL CLIENT SIDE case study based event focused on social
media as a drive of business results

Intimate Networking Opportunities

Join us for the #SocialC20 #tweetup April 4th from 6-7pm at the Lobby Bar. Then continue the social experience at our main conference day cocktail reception on April 5th at 5:30pm.

Senior Level Attendees

Mingle with community experts and business leaders in the social space

Social GUI: The Future of Control Panels

This post is cross-posted with Ubercool.

The quest dates back to the early heyday of the dotcom boom. Online marketers wanted a complete 360-degree view of their customers, optimally displayed in one single screen. To this day the challenge remains. While the data mountain has grown markedly, our reporting interfaces remain a step behind.

But there’s hope. The arrival of HTML 5 will provide developers with the ability to fashion incredibly intuitive and malleable control panels, guaranteed to satisfy all but the most particular social marketer.

This HTML 5 demo gives an inkling of what’s feasible. We see a major market opportunity for a start-up that develops a “lego block kit” analytics front-end that would gain wide industry deployment simply because the challenge of developing a highly pliable reporting front end often outweighs the crux of a program’s core features.

Why is this important? The cost of managing social engagement analytics programs is negatively impacting digital agencies’ operating margins. This trend exacerbates an already well-known factor — overhead costs of digital ad production are significantly higher than that of traditional advertising:

• Overhead costs – Digital agency overhead costs form a significantly higher part of the overall cost of ad production, 45% vs. 12% (PDF; 2009 “Understanding the Economics of Digital Compared to Traditional Advertising and Media Service,” AAAA).
  
  
• Operating income – The top 30 digital agencies increased gross income by 18% in 2010, but their operating margins fell sharply in 2010 from 9.5% to 5.7%. A well-run agency achieves good margins by keeping staff costs to no more than 55% of gross income. In the past year it worsened to 65%.

Clearly, the growing data mountain being produced by social engagement analytics is causing agency staff costs to balloon, which is not sufficiently being offset by heady overall revenue growth. This dictates that next-generation social GUIs be far easier to use and customize.

One company, Kansas City-based Infegy has just released Social Radar 3, which pushes the GUI envelope. Infegy Founder and CEO Justin Graves’ demo of Social Radar 3 last week underscored how easy it is to create customized analytics views on the fly. This is particularly relevant in a market where many marketers still enter queries as strings of Boolean variables.

Social Radar 3 has an elegant interface that uses drag-and-drop technology to enable users to customize their dashboards and reports. Reports can be shared via Excel, PDFs and URLs.

Infegy, founded in 2007, now tracks some 40 million Web sites, including blogs, forums, image sites, news sites like CNN and the BBC, Twitter and more. Says Graves, “[We obtain] essentially any useful content we can get our hands on, but focus principally on consumer-generated content.”

Infegy’s market is growing fast. Marketers are demanding much more accountability. Their struggle to analyze campaign performance from Web sites, Facebook, Twitter, iPhone and Android apps, will lead marketers to more than double investments in Web analytics by 2014, according to a May 2009 Forrester Research report, “US Web Analytics Forecast, 2008 to 2014,” which predicts that U.S. companies will spend $953 million in 2014 to install, license and support for Web analytics services.

Piper Jaffray has a more aggressive view of this marketplace, at least they did in 2007 when they issued a five-year forecast that would have the Web analytics services market reaching $1 billion in 2011, based on a CAGR of 19% (PDF; “The User Revolution,” February 2007). Keep in mind that both these forecasts are umbrella figures, because they include such general analytics players as Coremetrics and Omniture.

A big driver of this spending will be social media. Social engagement marketing not only brings the added dimension of being able to listen in on conversations but also to measure shifting attitudes about brands, an aspect dubbed “sentiment analysis.”

Infegy allows clients to search four years’ worth of online “chatter,” with trend analyses that provide a historical overview of sentiments shifting over time, returned in merely two seconds.


Social Radar 3 is able to filter data in any of 12 languages, by country, positive or negative sentiment and drill down to source type, engagement frequency, time stamp, unique post, and other parameters.

To enable near-instantaneous search results, Social Radar abstracts trends by showing normalized listening volume. A typical chart shows the percentage of Infegy’s content during a set time period, be it day, week or month, that mentions a query.

Explains Graves, “The reason we show this is that it is considerably less effected by long-term change and unrelated events. Social Radar’s database is much larger now and gets considerably more content each day compared to three years ago, so to make a trend over such a long time period useful, we need to normalize the data. Users can also switch to absolute counts if they need them.”

The race is on to improve the display and interpretation of social analytics with every monitoring tool vendor rushing to provide simplified dashboards that are more powerful, yet easier to use.

Remarkably, this social analytics program was written by twentysomething Graves himself. The company say it’s profitable and cites such customers as Novell, Pizza Hut and Sprint.

We hope this type of friendliness becomes an industry standard, so users can focus on developing that 360-degree view of the customer, one that marries online and offline engagement in a single view. It would certainly please those who’ve been wishing for such a system since the pre-historic days of ’99.

CrunchBase Information

Infegy

Information provided by CrunchBase

by Michael Tchong

Hear more from Michael Tchong on Wednesday, April 6th at the Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies Conference.

Flashback Friday: Key Take Aways from Community Pros Panel

Social Media and Community 2.0 Strategies is taking place April 4-6, 2011, in Boston, Massachusetts. Fridays leading up to the event, we’ll be recapping one of the sessions from the 2010 Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies Event. For more information on this year's event, download the brochure.

A Look Back at SMC2010: Monday, May 3, 2010, Key Take Aways from Community Pros Panel

The concluding session of the day at the Social Media & Community 2.0 Conference was a panel of seasoned community managers. The panel addressed questions ranging from stakeholder support to community culture and transparency to recruiting internal evangelists. Key points from the discussion:

• When you launch a community, you’re saying, “We’re willing to listen ... and listen in public.”
• The biggest Do Not Do for a new online community is over promise what the community will provide or do.
• A water cooler is often the number one entry point into a community—it goes a long way toward getting people on board. It’s opinion based ("I like this, I don’t like that"); it's a safe start.
• Determine who the fish are and who the sharks are and structure the community to protect the fish.
• A lot of participation and community work doesn’t appear on the Web site; it's behind the scenes.
• There’s still nothing like getting on the phone or chatting face to face.

Looking forward to a great day tomorrow!

Looking back at the past year, did you incorporate this advice into your community management strategy? What advice would you share moving forward?

The Social Future

BJ Emerson, Social Technology Officer at Tasti-D-Lite, offers insight into how brands must take advantage of opportunities to engage with customers in new ways. The competition is heating up and the bar is being raised as businesses battle for fans, friends and followers throughout this new media frontier.

-Stacy

"The Social Future" by BJ Emerson, Tasti-D-Lite

I’d like to offer 4 things that I believe will separate the winners from the losers:

1. The ability to listen effectively - Understanding these opportunities begins with education and you won’t learn anything with your mouth open.

Looking for examples of this? Perhaps one of the most famous is the @ComcastCares twitter account. Created in 2008 by then director of digital care (and Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies speaker ) Frank Eliason, @ComcastCares actively listens for customer complaints and addresses problems directly. It also helps contain negative groundswell when consumers realize they’re interacting with an individual, not a faceless corporation. Now in 2011 @Comcastcares is piloted by Bill Gerth and is still going strong.

2. The ability to engage creatively – Remember the half-naked man in the Old Spice videos? Of course you do. Get creative. There is no box to think outside of, so go for it.

The humorous voice made famous by Isaiah Mustafa in the series of Old Spice commericals can also be found tweeting @OldSpice and at http://www.facebook.com/OldSpice. By offering unique content on each channel Old Spice continues to creatively engage with its audience and extend the reach of a successful viral video campaign.

3. The ability to execute locally – Be prepared to offer a consistent experience between your online presence and offline activities. Use the technologies that exist to bridge the virtual-physical gap.

Looking for an example? Look to Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies speaker Damien Smith of Yelp. By rewarding Yelp “elite” users with local parties, including free food, drinks or experiences Yelp extends their brand experience offline, keeps their core members engaged and offers additional exposure to their advertising partners.

4. The ability to embrace transparency – Social media gives consumers a glimpse into the culture and people behind those products and services they love. What does that picture look like for your organization?

Kellie Parker, Community Manager at SEGA talks about transparency some in her guest post here on the Community 2.0 blog. By mixing a human aspect with necessary marketing messages you continue to engage your audience and create a fun community that people want to join in on.

Tweetup

Join us for the #SocialC20 #tweetup April 4th from 6-7pm at the Lobby Bar.

Flashback Friday: Which department should own social media?

Social Media and Community 2.0 Strategies is taking place April 4-6, 2011, in Boston, Massachusetts. Fridays leading up to the event, we’ll be recapping one of the sessions from the 2010 Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies Event. For more information on this year's event, download the brochure.

A Look Back at SMC2010: Which department should own social media?

Many presentations from Monday's primer discussed the involvement of various departments in the launch of online communities.

The speakers were community managers who had the benefit of working across departments while staying faithful to the communities they served. They limit marketing messages, engage the proper resources when necessary, set up guidelines and manage the health of the community.

Companies instinctively think that marketing and communications should own social media, largely because it is seen as another channel to convey the marketing message.

However, I heard today that many believe that companies should limit marketing involvement in social media in order to foster the relationship without appearing disingenuous.

If you don’t have the resources for a community manager who do you think is best suited to own and cultivate the user relationship?

Looking back at the past year, has your company reevaluated what department social media should be controlled by? Is social media a branch of marketing in your company currently?

4 Great Reasons Why Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies Should Matter to You

Time is Running Out to Save on the 2011 Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies Conference - Register by This Friday & Save $100 off the standard rate!

We thought that you may be interested in these 4 great reasons why our upcoming Social Media & Community 2.0 Conference should matter to you:

1. A new focus on the Evolution of Social Media.
Why this matters to you? Hear from industry leaders who have already had success with their social media strategies and gain the insights, strategies and experiences needed to make real business impact at your organization. Download the brochure for full details.

2. Concurrent Tracks tailored to your business objectives.
Why this matters to you? You get the flexibility to build your own agenda, focusing in the sessions that help you achieve your specific goals. Choose between concurrent tracks on Strategy, Operation and Results. View the agenda.

3. Over 60+ industry leading corporate practitioners sharing real stories and best practices.
Why this matters to you? Gain one-on-one insights from powerful leaders like AT&T Interactive, Best Buy, Dell, General Motors, MTV & Unilever on setting the setting the strategy, operationalizing it and measuring the results for your business. View the speaking roster.


4. We were here before social media was cool.
Why this matters to you? Our industry expertise dates back 4 years when we first launched our Social Media conference. We've grown and expanded over the past couple of years to meet your needs; by inviting the industry leading gurus sharing insights and results, and creating a program answering all of your social media needs.
Join us next month and find out what's working, what's not and where the future of social media is headed.

We hope to see you in Boston this April! If you have any questions about the agenda, feel free to contact me, Michelle LeBlanc, at MLeBlanc@iirusa.com.

New for 2011!

Attendees of this year’s Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies Conference will have access to our new, exclusive networking platform.

Meet your fellow attendees, set up meetings and create your own custom agenda all before the event. Register today to join the conversation!

If you are already registered for the event, sign into the networking platform today
http://socialmedia20.crowdvine.com