Web 4.0: R U Ready?

The one hour joke

Jean-François — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 01:32:12 +0000

I tend to title my jokes, and there’s one that I call “the one hour joke”. I call it that for the simple reason that it takes an hour to tell, and I feel that people need to be warned before I start. If they decide to listen to this joke, they need to know that they’re making a big time commitment. To hear a joke. You’d think that would be enough to scare anyone away.

But it isn’t.

You see, the really funny thing about this joke is this: people – people who barely know me – have asked me to tell it upon hearing of its existence. Usually this happens after a drink or two, and in almost every instance there’s been a campfire nearby. Somehow, long stories just seem right around a campfire.

As I start the joke, everyone becomes silent, and simply listens to my words coming out of the darkness as they imagine the adventure I’m narrating. There are scary bits, funny bits, stupid bits and bits that focus on clearly irrelevant details – yet people never hurry me along or cut in or leave. They just listen. And when the lame punch line finally comes, rather than beat me up, they usually ask for more.

Why?

Because people love hearing stories. It’s that simple. We’re hardwired to (but that’s another blog entry for another day).

More than that, I think that we humans are all pretty good storytellers. We tell our spouses about our days, make up tales for children, and tell friends about our vacations – and when we do those things, we display a sense of narrative. We know what to emphasize and what to leave out. We know where the story begins and ends. We know what elements of character need to be portrayed.

Yet when we do presentations for work … well … we forget all that – and despite the fact that humans have a long tradition of listening to (and enjoying) long tales, we somehow manage to put them to sleep.

Why?

I think it’s because we forget that we’re supposed to be telling stories. We think that presentations are about facts, and are under the illusion that facts speak for themselves. They don’t. We have to speak for them, and make them relevant and interesting … and that’s all about story.

I made the video below as a little reminder of things we all intuitively know about good stories, yet seem to forget when we’re asked to present. Frankly, it’s not as good as the one hour joke, but hopefully you’ll find it useful when planning that next presentation.

…and Twitter doesn’t cause cancer

Jean-François — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 10:34:13 +0000

Once upon a time, I was a smoker. I will move to the next paragraph as I let your horror and my shame sink in.

Now, admittedly, there are very few good things one can say about smoking. It is a strange and pointless thing to do. It stinks. It makes you unpopular. It increases the odds of every disease known to man, with the possible exception of athlete’s foot fungus. It kills you. But, despite all that, I did discover one good thing about it at the time, and it happened like this:

One day, I walked into a meeting with my boss, saw a buddy of mine and said, “Hi Brian.” Brian, not to be outdone said – and I quote – “Hi Jean-François.” Then I sat down casually, as if all this was normal, as my boss stared at me with a look of wonder. You could have knocked him over with a feather.

From my perspective, of course, it was normal. Our office had just become a non-smoking environment the year before, and I had seen Brian a couple of times a day practically every day since – down in the smoking pit we were all forced to descend into to indulge in a habit that was quickly being demonized. Brian and I kidded and chatted about not much on a daily basis. We even talked about our business, the railroad, now and then.

From my boss’ perspective, however, the situation was incomprehensible: I was a lowly pion, and Brian was a VP. Yet we were friends. More than that: I’d had the benefit of his input before we walked into the room to get his approval — and everything went eerily smoothly that day. My boss’ world, on some level, had just been turned upside down.

* * *

Fast forward 15 years, and another seemingly strange and pointless thing came into my life: Twitter. All the cool kids were doing it, so I tried it. You would think I would know better. One night after dinner, and maybe a little too much wine, I got a twitter account. I tweeted my first tweet. I started following people who I was convinced would be interesting, like the once-Captain of the Federation Star Ship Enterprise. It is thus that I entered a new world.

Within a few days, though, I noticed something: I had nothing interesting to say. The people I was following had nothing interesting to say. And I quickly concluded that this habit wasn’t for me, and felt just a little ashamed that my lame tweets would live on the Internet forever. I hadn’t even used a pseudonym.

For a week, I couldn’t even watch Star Trek.

Yet oddly, six months later, I find myself micro-blogging on Lotus Connections somewhat regularly, and actually paying a lot of attention to the “tweets” of other people in my network. I’ve even reached out to a few of them, as they have to me, as the result of our micro-blogs. Like smoking in the pit, it provides a forum in which to hang out with other people across the organization informally, to learn more about who they are and what they do, and to form relationships — and it doesn’t even cause cancer.

The thing that is important to keep in mind as we sell this feature internally and externally though, is that many people have a jaded view of Twitter and micro-blogging. They think it is a complete and utter waste of time. I think the video below (not mine) sums up why very nicely (and humorously) — and it’s well worth the watch. It’s also worthwhile to think about why the enterprise micro-blogging experience is different from the experience of Twitter described in the video, and I suspect a lot of it comes down to this: context. When micro-blogging happens in an environment like Lotus Connections, there is a built in context. The audience consists of other people in the same organization, and micro-blogging happens on a profile page that gives access to other information about the author, and to his or her work products and interactions. In this context, casual interactions can easily lead to new connections being made, and productive collaboration.

Social media and the web 3.0 frontier

Bonnie Lee — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:49:29 +0000

On 24 September, the Los Angeles chapter of the Public Relations Society of American hosted a half-day workshop on social media. It was an informative day, full of creative ways to incorporate digital technology into marketing and public relations campaigns.

Emanuel Rosen gave the first address. He stressed ways that social media helps word-of-mouth campaigns. Serena Ehrlich’s provided participants with a toolbox of resources and tactics for launching an online campaign, and Peter Shankman made it all personal and relevant over a lunch discussion.

Thank you very much to the workshop’s organizers, Keith Pillow and Bianca Dickerson-Williams, as well as to Rita Tateel (PRSA-LA, President) and Barbara Shore (PRSA-LA, Executive Director).

Public relations goes underground with digitally enhanced guerilla tactics

Bonnie Lee — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:48:13 +0000

Breakout session: Social media basics & core training

Serena Ehrlich, Social Programs/Viral Weaponry Leader at Startup Army

Serena’s interactive presentation style made this session of the PRSA-LA workshop on social media highly informative, but difficult to document. Thankfully, she uploaded her slides to docstoc.com, so you can see for yourself what she talked about.

Getting a feel for the buzz

To get a bird’s eye view of on-line gossip and chatter go to sights that aggregate this information. Serena recommended two: socialmention and peoplebrowsr. I hit on Filtrbox while tinkering with Twitter, and I am sure there are others out there.

Be sure to understand how these sites measure and gather data before using the data to inform a strategy. Serena suggested using only one at a time and being consistent, so you are measuring results on a consistent platform.

She also referred participants to KD Paine’s blog on PR measurement.

Building connections and networks on-line

Participants most wanted to know how to bringing traffic to a blog, capture email addresses, and expand network members. Serena suggested they broadcast everywhere, and she meant exactly that.

Once a blog is posted on the blog site, repost it on LinkedIn and submit it to other document repository sites like DocStoc and SlideShare.
List blogs on blog directories (a 2007 blog entry lists the 20 most essential, but it may need to be updated).
Repurpose content from old newsletters and files to populate sites.
Write or produce content for ezine, e-how, and similar sites. (Her example was a video on how to take a Bayer Aspirin for e-how.) These are services that can be sponsored by the client and generate good PR.
Partner with others (i.e., Whrrl, 43 Things). You would be surprised at how open they are to collaboration that creates a win-win.
Be geo-specific. Being local helps.

Other gems that were dropped, intermittently throughout this session included:

For non-profits, contact Beth Cantor and peruse her blog about non-profit promotion.
Create a gmail account for each client and use this account to create all other social media accounts.
Use fan pages on Facebook for businesses.
Develop an editorial calendar for a blog.
Include the word “downloadable” with a link on ALL news releases.
Familiarise yourself with Alexa and Technorati.

Thanks for the brain dump, Serena!

It’s all personal. And personal is very public: Four tips for better online outreach

Bonnie Lee — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:46:56 +0000

“It’s not web 2.0. It’s not web 3.0. It’s simply life.”

Peter Shankman, Social Media Expert

At the PRSA-LA Social Media Workshop, Peter Shankman returned to themes first introduced by Emanuel Rosen. Throughout his entertaining stories, he repeatedly illustrated the foothold the individual is gaining over traditional marketing and public relations efforts thanks to the developments in technology. Celebrated reviewers of services, restaurants, media, and other such venues are increasingly less effective and credible.

Moreover, each our personal networks is fluid and changing. The relevance of connections fluctuates throughout the day. Those seeking to use social media effectively for branding or influencing will need to work within established but changing communities.

To be effective, we need to remember the basic tenets of good PR–these have not changed.

Be Transparent.
Be Relevant.
Write well!!!
Know who you are reaching out to–it’s about them, not you stupid.

But, Shankman also said we need to be multi-platformed, since it is good to see how others do things. “Change happens after all, get over it.”

Grassroot PR: Everyone loves the soapbox

Bonnie Lee — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:45:57 +0000

“The anatomy of buzz revisited: Lessons in word-of-mouth marketing”

Emanuel Rosen, Social Media Expert

No matter how many reviews we read, when we make purchasing decisions these are not the resources that tip the balance. More often than not, our friends and family influence our personal choices about what to buy, where to eat, or what to read. Emanuel Rosen believes that stimulating those conversations and using personal, face-to-face referrals to create buzz is the key to successful promotion. During his one-hour presentation, he showed why.

We all like to to be helpful, contribute meaningfully and participate in conversation. The problem is, most of us lack the gift of relevant gab. Buzz, says Rosen, fills this gap by giving us the opportunity to tell stories and be creative.

EXAMPLE: Soul City

Frustrated by the lack of success other efforts had in educating South Africans about health concerns, two frustrated health care practitioners created a soap opera. Not only was the television show a hit, it successfully helped change public behaviour and understanding about HIV, domestic abuse, and other health and social concerns.

But wait! Television is mass media, not social media, how is this relevant? It is not the tool that should determine the mode of transmission, but the goal. The point is that the show started conversations.

The power of social media is not in where you plant your seeds, but in how the next generation of seeds is dispersed. Creativity helps but so does knowing how a community is held together. (Besides, who among us has not texted a friend to gossip about a TV show?)

With each example Rosen shared, a pattern for stimulating buzz became clear. Start by identifying who in a community has the largest reach and strongest influence (they may not be the same individual). Give them opportunities to tell stories or talk about your subject. Provide opportunities for individuals to be creative and show off what they have done.

Oh, and remember that buzz has a life cycle. It is essential to keep the topic, well, topical. Advertising and creativity still play a important roles here.

(And just to drive the point home: By blogging about Rosen’s talk, I have blown a few seeds into the air. But am I a sufficiently large and pleasant bag of wind?)

Book Review: Marketing to the Social Web

Bonnie Lee — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 20:29:51 +0000

BOOK REVIEW

Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business.

By Larry Weber, 2009: John Wiley & Sons

IBSN: 978-0470-41097-4

Take Away Message:

The digital consumer is not content to be a passive receiver of marketing messages. Therefore, marketers need to think about ways to use social media tools to become aggregators of content that serves the immediate information needs of each digital consumer.

REVIEW

Unlike other books on the subject, this one is not saying that the professions of marketing and public relations are undergoing a radical transformation. No. Larry Weber’s objective in his book, Marketing to the Social Web, is to provide a sketch of a specific market segment: the digital consumer.

Marketing: The next generation

In fact, Weber illustrates how the principles that shaped traditional methods for reach potential consumers still hold. Effective marketing speaks directly to the needs of the consumer, solves their problems. Good public relations influences opinions and shapes conversations. The goals have not really changed for marketing or public relations professions.

The only difference is that mass marketing is no longer likely to lead to a sale. More than ever, it is essential for the marketer to understand not just their niche, but the exact position the product offering has taken in that niche.

He refers to this as the next generation of marketing. The child of spin has a digital vision that sees value-add in befriending and collaborating with the consumer. This generation seeks dialogue, two-way give-and-take communication to help them make informed choices and provide meaningful feedback that makes future choices easier. This generation’s credos:

Credibility

Community

Future Building

Who is the medium!?

Early on in the book, Weber says every wired individual is not just a content producer and a consumer. Each of us is the medium. Each of us is a channel. The web’s reach may be global, but the audience is diverse and fickle. They can, and often do, share their opinions about products and experiences.

Those hoping to build relationships with their online customers, Weber argues, need to respect each individual’s willingness to exercise their freedom of expression digitally. They also need to understand that chatter will influence a brand’s image. Static branding is a thing of the past.

The How-to

Weber outlines seven steps to start marketing to the social web. These steps are similar to those outlined in Marketing 101 classes…think Tupperware and Avon and you can see how these same processes were successfully incorporated before the Internet became a commodity.

1. 1. Do your research. Observe how your brand/product is represented online and by whom. Know your goals and target audience and then identify the key influencers in the digital realm (map this realm, digital geographical demographics are as varied as the real ones.)
  2. Seek out supporters and recruit them into your strategy for developing or working with an online community.
  3. Determine which of the communication platforms (blogs, reputation aggregators like yelp.com, e-communities, and social networks) are best aligned with stated goals and available resources. While making absolute distinctions between these platforms is not possible, they differ in terms of degree of engagement and content output.
  4. Build your community and engage with its people.
  5. Determine the metrics that will be used to measure the value-add of engagement.
  6. Promote the community.
  7. Evaluate and adapt, all things on the internet are iterative.

In the last part of the book, Weber goes a little deeper into the four social web platforms listed in step 3 above before talking about professional uses for Facebook and concluding with a prediction about the direction media will go as we all become more acclimated to digital communication.

Weber’s book starts strong. I found myself agreeing with much of what he said early on. But I can’t help feeling that he defeats his own argument about the role of social media in marketing on pages 105 and 106. He writes, “Once the novelty of the social web wears off, people will become more selective.” The solution he puts forth is to shape web engagement the same way editors shape their content policies for print magazines. Does he really think that this old model, one that is neither communicative nor interactive, is the right foundation on which to connect with and engage digital communities in the long run?

Going viral inside the firewall

Jean-François — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:07:31 +0000

Despite the obvious impact of social media on the Internet and on how people interact, there is still a lot of resistance to the idea that these tools have any value in an enterprise context. When I do presentations on using web 2.0 tools inside the firewall, I am often met with skepticism. Some believe that these tools are inherently social, a waste of time, and cannot be used for real work; others, who see the potential benefit of the broader collaboration these tools enable, feel that using them would lead to additional work… work that they simply don’t have time for.

The reality, however, is that well designed Web 2.0 tools are productivity enhancing, and allow people to interact more efficiently. This is the point I was trying to make in the following video (The man who should have used Lotus Connections 1), which I posted on IBM’s internal instance of Lotus Connections in late August:

Whether or not the video is effective I leave for you to decide, but the reaction to the video certainly has demonstrated many of the points I try to make in my sessions on Enterprise Web 2.0. Within a couple of days, the video was the most recommended file in Lotus Connections, and a month later it has been downloaded over 1000 times, has 29 recommendations, and has been shared with over 300 people.

What’s more, the video has been posted on YouTube by a colleague in marketing – and used by our education teams, on sales calls and by business partners in their presentations. All this has led to the expansion of my personal network, the opportunity to address a few teams, and several collaborations between me and IBMers in other parts of the company.

But here is the key point: all I did was upload the video to a public space, and forward the link to a couple of people for their opinion. This was certainly no more work on my part than e-mailing the video to those two people would have been, and yet the impact has been far, far greater. And the impact was not just a few laughs… it was a deliverable which has been widely used to help get sales and drive adoption.

So, the upshot is that by simply by using Lotus Connections rather than e-mail to share a file, my work has led to greater benefits than it would have… which is good for me, and good for IBM.

Book review: The New Rules of Marketing & PR

Bonnie Lee — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 03:59:54 +0000

The New Rules of Marketing & PR

By David Meerman Scott

ISBN: (978-0-470-37928-8) This revised edition was published 2009 by John Wiley & Sons.

Take Away Message:

The Web allows real-time, many-to-many interactions between the public and the organization. Therefore, marketers need to think like PR pros and PR pros need to think like facilitators who engage the public in an ongoing dialogue.

REVIEW

Rules are tricky things. I tend to see rules as fixed, unchanging and rigid. So any book about rules, especially one about rules for marketing or PR where success usually comes by bending or breaking the rules is immediately suspect. But David Meerman Scott likes the rules he outlines in The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

Since the old rules, listed on page 12, guiding marketing and public relations are now obsolete thanks to the Internet, new ones are needed. I think for Scott, rules are designed to shape fair play. Since the game board has moved from analogue to digital, the rules of fair play must also change (and he presents new rules on page 25). Yet, rules have no meaning without authoritative enforcement, and the web remains a lawless frontier despite efforts to regulate and police online activity.

So why pretend? Scott needs rules to frame a more meaningful argument: that the professions of marketing (i.e. sales and branding) and public relations (i.e. image development and protection) are no longer distinct. Tactics that worked when television and magazines held sway are not going to be effective in the digital age. Scott’s rules serve to guide PR and marketing professionals through a new domain—he is a tour guide trying to explain the Wild West to Japanese tourists.

In Scott’s Western frontier, blogs are taverns were gossip and local wisdom are tapped. In addition to tending their bar, professionals should be dropping by other bars and sampling the local brew. News releases are “Wanted” posters sent to the sheriff’s office and posted for all to see. They should be drafted to attract the attention of passersby, not the local law enforcement. Podcasts, or sermons, preached from pulpits and soapboxes by local pastors and traveling salesmen. Forums and wikis? County fairs, barn raising and other events were information is exchanged and evaluated by professionals and lay experts.

After writing at length about why and how to directly target messages to buyers, Scott provides guidelines about strategy, planning and writing style. In these pages, he discusses how Marketing and PR teams typically focus on the tools and meaningless metrics (number of press releases issues, speaking engagements, and such) rather than on the buyer/end user and their needs. According to Scott, organizations typically fail to consider how its goals fill real needs.

And this is not a new problem, nor is it one that the Internet solves. In the last half of the book, Scott outlines a familiar process one that guides every good writer, marketer, and media specialist. Successful planning and execution of communication starts and ends by knowing your target audience and connecting with them meaningfully. All the technology does is make it easier to engage that audience and respond to them.

While I think do not believe there can be rules guiding outreach and communication in the digital age, I do not believe the internet is an unruly frontier that needs taming. I do not think Scott does either, but I think he fails to reveal the true value of engaging the online community in an organization’s goals.

By incorporating the needs and concerns of the buyer directly with the goals and outputs of the organization, both become part of a community process. That sense of community builds collaboration and loyalty. Online promotion is about the process, then the content. Sales and messages, those are so last century.

Revisiting an origin story

Bonnie Lee — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:33:42 +0000

Ten years ago, Neal Stephenson published an essay about the evolution of computer operating systems from a cultural perspective. The literati of the computer world consider this treatise, titled In the beginning there was the command line, essential reading. It is also a good starting place to think about the evolution of social media and collaboration tools, which are now as ubiquitous as operating systems. These tools may also be as poorly understood.

Stephenson’s argument: the open-source model to software development generates more reliable products. Why? The collaboration process that drives Linux, for example, is transparent, iterative and immediate.

At the midpoint of the essay, Stephenson compares Windows, Mac OS, and Linux to power drills. While the first two are Black & Decker and Stanley drills that serve most D.I.Y. types, Linux is a professional’s drill that is as ugly as it is stupid. The Linux user needs know the end goal and be skilled enough to maneuver the tool efficiently toward that point. Where we can be sloppy with our Goggle search terms and in our use of Windows or Mac OS, Linux needs precision.

But what makes the precision valuable is the spirit of community that builds and improves the software—the database of bugs complete with status updates. Any user can see the history of crashes and fixes, and learn from that documented history. Closed, proprietary systems have a hard time admitting they are not quite perfect.

Tools like those that enabled hackers around the world to create and improve Linux are now starting to shape non-tech activities.

Like Linux, these tools are powerful but unforgiving. Using any one of these media requires an understanding of the tool’s properties and limits. The user must be respectful, precise, and responsive. Any feedback generated by the device requires an immediate, open response. Sloppiness, carelessness, secrecy, duplicity and haste are not forgiven. Cooperation is rewarded and that collaboration brings transparency.

Wikis, blogs and microblogs are community driven spaces. They are not simply new media tools to be exploited by PR and Marketing professionals. Each tool has its own cultural assumptions. To use any of these tools effectively, one only needs become an observant, respectful expatriate. It’s culture, not technology, that determines use and adoption.