Below is an email I received this very morning. Twitter has just changed its strategy – according to the issuer – and LinkedIn, as a result, will no longer be able to relay your tweets automatically. This is a new battle between the warring factions of social media platforms and this is just a beginning. The various players in the social media space are all trying to keep your clicks and the name of the game is … advertising. Those who had though – benignly – that building a network patiently was a free asset – unless you are rich and wealthy and you have already purchased your “fans” – will now discover that paying for your posts to be read is no longer an option. Facebook has already started that. For instance, Google no longer lets you tweet YouTube videos unless you click quite a few submenus, Facebook took over Instagram in order to undercut Pinterest even before it had time to take off, Picasa will send all your photos to Google+ even before you have had a chance to realise you have pressed the upload button and mostly before you wished you had shared them on Facebook instead. And so on, and so forth … The good old Web 2.0 is well and truly dead by now, we are in a dog eats dog kind of world and the future’s middlename is advertising. What did you say? “Net Neutrality?” … honestly, what are you talking about?!
At least, using LinkedIn’s workaround which requires you probably click on ten more links, you will probably still have a chance to send something through Twitter … Good luck with it!
From LinkedIn Fri Jun 29 18:54:34 2012
Apparently-To: xxxxxxx@yahoo.com via 67.195.8.114
Fri, 29 Jun 2012 18:54:40 –0700
Hi Yann,
LinkedIn and Twitter have worked together since 2009 to enable you to share your professional conversations on both platforms. Twitter recently evolved its strategy and this will result in a change to the way Tweets appear in third-party applications. Starting today Tweets will no longer be displayed on LinkedIn.
We know that sharing updates from LinkedIn to Twitter is a valuable service for our members. Moving forward, you will still be able to share updates with your Twitter audience by posting them on LinkedIn.
How can I continue to share updates on both LinkedIn and Twitter?Simply start your conversation on LinkedIn. Compose your update, check the box with the Twitter icon, and click “Share.” This will automatically push your update to both your LinkedIn connections and your Twitter followers just as before.
What changes can I expect to see on LinkedIn? Any conversation you start on Twitter will no longer be automatically shared with your LinkedIn network, even if you synced your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.
If you would like more information about what this means for your synced LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, please visit our related Help Center topics.
Where is Google+ at nowadays. Barely a year after its launch in Summer 2011, Bradley Horowitz, President product management at Google gave us an overview of where they are at and where they are heading … and evaded a few questions too ! [this post was originally written live from Le Web 12 in London on behalf of the live.orange blog]
“Google search had a very short-lived memory and Google+ has been introduced to change that. Google+ is helping us understand our users betters and provide better services to them” Horowitz said as an introduction. As a proof of how Google wants to improve the user experience of its social media platform, he pointed out that Google Local has been made a part of Google+ for a couple of weeks. “The idea is for Google to improve existing services by enhancing them with the power of sharing”.
“We recognise being late to market”
When pressed with questions by Loic Lemeur, he replied: “We recognise being late to market but this offers opportunities to do things differently and enable users to have different kinds of discussions with different kinds of users”.
[Google’s Bradley Horowitz live on stage at Le Web 12 in London]
The strategy is not to have people wishing happy birthday”. What we have is hangouts. “Every kind of user, from music artists to politicians are using hangouts” he said. This is a differentiator and we are only getting started. A very effective demonstration of a live hangout was delivered introducing participants in a multicast presentation from all around the world (Canada, US, UK and France) and remote users were able to ask questions to Bradley Horowitz who answered them. In essence, this isn’t very different from traditional Web conferencing as it has existed for over 10 years, but the fact that it is linked to a social platform should “change the world for users to interact in the same way that Youtube did” Horowitz added
[a live demo of a Google+ hangout at Le Web 12 in London]
numbers?
“170 million users have upgraded their accounts, have updated their profiles. Getting 200 million users in just eleven month is a real challenge and we will be announcing new numbers soon and they are really good”, Horowitz said. “our best days are ahead of us”. One example of the good things they have introduced are the mobile clients which were launched on IOS and Android, more graphical and much more emotional. This has led to a dramatic increase in mobile usage (but no precise numbers were given despite Loic Lemeur’s insistance). Similarly, the number of actual users wasn’t unveiled by the Google exec.
“We have tried to compress a decade of social networking into 11 months! and now I am “happy to announce that Google is opening to another partner “Flipboard” and it will be opened as soon as it is safe for our users and is debugged” the Google exec added. But “we are admittedly moving cautiously” he added, before taking this to the next level.
Sonia Carter from Kraft Foods explained how they are using Google+: Chocolate is the main subject, but also sponsorships that the brand is involved in, because they realised “that people were already talking about this”. Bonin Bough who runs advertising for Kraft foods explained that the introduction of social media wasn’t about the shifting of budgets but the shifting of mindset.
A little while ago, I published a series of articles about Wikipedia, following a conference which took place last October in Amsterdam. Thanks to the open-site.org website, here is a little illustration of the prominence of the online encyclopaedia. Worthy of note is the fact that, after a long and passionate battle, encyclopaedia Britannica has eventually gone out of print. It is now restricted to its online version(s). All those extraordinary numbers exposed in this infographics should not force us to overlook some of the shortcomings embedded in the online Cyclopaedia, as explained and detailed in my article available at http://bit.ly/waleswm2
On March 29, at Blogwell, I attended that presentation by Pepper Roukas, American Express on the members project campaign
Amex has focused a lot about brand management on social media, but this particular business case is about how to drive business through social media.
Amex actually invented the term “cause marketing” with its restoration programme of the statue of Liberty in 1983 and many others in 93, 2003 an 2007 with the members project.
The questions was how to create a differentiated cause-campaign? The answer to that question was to educate consumers that small steps can make a big difference in their communities and provide the enablement tools.
Fish where the fish are
Facebook was the place where Amex’s fans were, so Amex used it as the main starting point. The focus was on more engagement with members, sharing content and initiate dialogues. Members were encouraged to volunteer and earn membership points and donate them. Amex therefore helped people support their favourite charities.
Donations could be done straight from the card or by transferring membership points.
Wall postings
Wall postings were personalised by members, posting photos (right) but also videos. more videos were used by members than ever before. A number of apps were developed with which people could share their stories. The campaign was carried away in 360 format with on-air TV commercials and charity-themed sweepstakes. A partnership was set up with the Glee TV series.
All other social media channels owned by Amex were used to relay the campaign too.
takeaways
increased brand relevancy and appraisal, namely with young people
I know I shouldn’t get angry, this is not done. Yet, the recent flurry of self-proclaimed “experts” in the Social Media arena is more than getting on my nerves; it is purely and simply making my life – and the lives of my fellow practitioners – impossible and it makes us wonder how much you can get away with in that business? Hold on, it reminds me of something …
So, when my eyes fell – somewhat belatedly – on the following blogpost, I thought I’d like to share that with my readers. Enjoy!
One of my biggest pet peeves is the “social media guru.” You know the type, the person that spends all their time on Twitter retweeting Mashable articles and Chris Brogan’s blog posts and thinks that having 40,000 followers makes them an instant expert in marketing. These people are bad news for many reasons, but what makes them most dangerous is the damage they are doing to the term “social media.”
The aim of this study was not to be comprehensive either. What Sofrecom have wanted to do is to highlight the main trends in social media in emerging countries. Chrystel started with a little sketch (right) defining a “social” network showing how (virtual) networks of people can be intertwined. With user generated content (UGC), content gets published online, and even though you are not a media, there are many chances that some people are going to see your content; your contacts will see it and then your contacts’ contacts etc.
She then replaced Social networks within the slightly larger framework of “social media” (which I had covered before in my presentation). There are different types of tools within Social Media, from blogs to microblogs and wikis and, eventually social networks proper. There are 2 types of social media platforms which make up a first axis: content centric such as youtube of Flickr, and communications centric such as Facebook, Orkut etc. The two are sort of joined at the hip though because they are both about content, but the approach is radically different. Then there are 3 more types on the second axis: collaborative such as wikipedia, community orientated or deal oriented (crowdsourcing, social e-commerce for the latter catregory). Eventually, Chrystel showed us that completed matrix showing how all these tools can be spread out across this two axes (above, click to enlarge).
Twitter is an issue because it can’t really be squeezed into the “social network” box as it is more of a tool than a social network. As to crowdsourcing, there are sites like e-Stockphoto which is reshaping the photo market, as a lot of media are using them now vs. traditional agencies (we could have added fotolia, here’s a link to my page as an example).
Main trends in local services
Different countries have been investigated, it is not meant to be comprehensive though. Commercial Services and Crowdfunding have been zoomed in in the rest of Christelle’s presentation.
Watwet (note: the server was down when I tried it, so here is the cached version) is microblogging focused on Arab populations, it’s open, whatever country you are from. Zoopy is like youtube or Flickr. The service was launched in South Africa. Now we can see that some of the videos are coming from other English-speaking countries. They are both open solutions.
Facebook is not providing any specific value to local countries in these regions. Veepiz for is just like that. They are using the Facebook platform but provide a local service based on top of Facebook and let users be on their own environment. They do that with Twitter as well so that users have the best of both worlds. It’s coopetition. Veepiz integrates other social networks but provides local value.
nov 20, 2010 adendum and clarification by the owners of Veepiz: “Just to clarify, veepiz is not built ontop of facebook platform. its all hand coded and has its own unique platform. for more goto http://www.veepiz.com or our bloghttp://veepiz.wordpress.com“
FrontlineSMS: many services, blogs etc. in Africa are becoming social. FrontlineSMS is a Yammer-like two-way SMS platform which has developed its activity for NGOs. They have created a community. The platform helps NGO employees communicate amongst themselves. The platform is free for NGOs.
Crowdsourcing: this is about making the user at the centre of the service. It’s up to the user to decide whether he wants to collaborate. The idea is not to just let people complain about the service but to let them be part of the improvement of that service. There are 4 domains to which crowdsourcing applies: knowledge sharing, task force, real time information and funding
Kiva is well known and is about micro funding. People go to the web and fund a project. You don’t win anything apart from the pride of being part of something.
iYammobi and Kerawa are examples of knowledge sharing. Kerawa is about small ads; say if you are looking for a flat in Cameroon. It’s working in most sub-saharian countries and enjoying good success in that region.
For small ads, in emerging countries and namely in Sub Saharian regions, ebay cannot provide the right kind of service whereas Kerawa can. There are still many opportunities in the Middle East and Africa for services like this to be provided for local people.
Facts and figures
there are sites on which one can find interesting data about Middle East social media usage:
This past July I met up with Loic Moisand, co-founder of the start-up Synthesio with Thibault Hanin, specialised in web monitoring and analysis of social and online mainstream media. They are a great example of a French start-up that has succeeded, in France as well as abroad. I mentioned them previously in two videos filmed with Trey Pennington, who is in charge of Synthesio’s marketing in the US and the UK (video 1 – video 2). This time I wanted to take a moment with Loic in order to find out more about the creation of Synthesio, on one hand, and about their measurement of influence on the Interneton the other. What I discovered during this interview is a real gem that goes above and beyond a simple market analysis : a very interesting and useful market segmentation that Loic Moisand has created based on his experience in the field that I found to be a fundamental and useful discovery for online marketing experts and branding experts that set their eyes on the web.
I met with Loic in the Cybervillage of Paris at Crimée, the same place where I had met him 1 1/2 years ago ; time enough for the young entrepreneur (28 years old, to be exact) to work hard on developing his start-up. His work has paid off as Synthesio has seen their revenues grow significantly, even if I can’t just yet reveal the exact numbers since the enterprise is private (you’ll just have to trust me when I say – they’re good).
The two Synthesio founders are both graduates of ESSEC (one of Europe’s top business schools), even if Thibault Hanin is the “geek” of the group, having earned his engineering degree beforehand. One worked on the software and the other on case studies, each in their “own little corners” of the school’s campus, according to Loic, before deciding to team up for a bit, just to see. “We worked on a business plan for a month and found that we complimented each other quite nicely”. They were able to raise enough funds rapidly, complete with a student loan, and were off and running. “Our first investors didn’t even look at the details of our businesses plan, they just evaluated who we were and trusted us”. A look at entrepreneurship that is very different from the usual Gaulic jeremiads. “I don’t at all agree with people that say that we can’t invest in France. There are good grants for those that are young innovative enterprise, thanks to the Research Minister,” adds Loic Moisand. Of course the two young entrepreneurs “ate nothing but pasta” for the first year while they developed their offer. But there were numerous surprises…
Business isn’t rational, it’s linked to the entrepreneur’s desires
The story behind Synthesio is interesting in and of itself. Well-positioned today for measuring social media buzz, the start-up began along a completely different route : “We started by creating a sort of Google Alerts,” explains Loic Moisand, but we quickly realized that there was something else going on in social media. Even if we didn’t begin that way”. Founded in 2006, the company took one year to prepare their offer. “I met 400 people, communications directors, research directors, agency directors, etc. during that year” adds Loic Moisand ; and that doesn’t even take into account incidental meetings. Forced to complete an internship abroad for his degree, the entrepreneur chose India for personal reasons, a choice that proved to be incredibly important for what followed in terms of their software operations, which makes the Synthesio co-founder say, “business is not rational and many things are tied to the founders’ desires”. A lesson in humilty and reailty to be taught in business schools, perhaps… “We wanted to visit, have fun, and not make something super French” continues Loic Moisand, and that’s exactly how Synthesio began “with everything in 5 languages from the very start” in order to win – little by little – international accounts that have made a very impressive list of clients: Accor, Orange, Sanofi, Eli Lilly, BNPP, etc. that use Synthesio to measure what is said about them online.
Finding a good brand name
Well-taught marketers know it all too well : finding a good brand name is a fundamental step. The double-team took it upon themselves to create their own algorithm that spit out original names, and Synthesio came out. The domain name was free, so nothing more than to find a logo, which Loic created, partly Ying-Yang, partly a stylized “S” with “the red representing the human, and the gray, the technology” he clarifies.
25 employees in 3 countries and… 30 languages
Synthesio is comprised of 25 employees today working full-time, plus partners that bring that number up to 35, spread out in 3 countries : France, the UK and the US. “But we have people that work for Synthesio everywhere : Morocco, China, India, Russia, Portugal, Spain, etc because the company handles research in 30 languages (the dashboard is available in 6, including Chinese). The multilingual search engine is the cornerstone of their service along with the fact that the analyses are done by humans. The differentiating point is exactly that. The engine is a proprietary development that is partially protected, as only original features and innovations can be patented.
The buzz analysis market : a fusing of 3 stages (+1 or 2 for France that seems to do everything its own way)
The worldwide market is broken down into 3 segments : free, do-it-yourself and upscale, Synthesio belonging to this last group. France is a bit different as it has 2 different types of actors (ami and Digimind) that are editors as well but positioned on different price schemas. This category doesn’t fit – according to Loic Moisand – with Forrester’s and Gartner’s groupings, which would explain their difficulties in positioning themselves internationally, even if the two actors “perform well on French territory”. Digimind has opted, itself, for the third type of positioning in North America. The France, creative as always, also has another example that doesn’t fit with other models : Trendybuzz, a research company with publisher software.
If you haven’t been able to attend the Ragan Social Media summit which took place in San Jose or even online, you can still have a feel of what my presentation was. The pitch was about our work at Orange Business Services with regard to Social Media. Here is the slidecast, inclusive of all comments and please note that this is a downloadable presentation, and that there is no copyright, this is a creative commons presentation (details are included on slide 2).
On June 2 I was part of a team of journalists for an IT press tour in the Silicon Valley. One of our appointments was with Neil Carson from Fusion-io. Here is an account of what was said at that meeting:
What is there in common between the team which produced clash of the Titans, a stock exchange trading company performing high speed electronic trading and Facebook? The answer is that they are all clients of Fusion-io, a 250 employee company which was created 4 years ago, the chief scientist of which is no one else than Steve Wozniak. “Wosniak saw the technology and it called out to him” Neil Carson said and “we brought him to our board”, he is a “very smart guy and it’s good to have him onboard”, he added.
Fusion-io designs SSD cards for storage to be included in servers in order to improve efficiency, data protection, but also server space and power consumption. On June 1, 2010 I was invited with a selection of French journalists to visit that company and we were welcomed by Neil Carson, CTO for that company who gave us a presentation of his iodrives, a new revolutionary SSD (Solid State Drive) technology for servers and also graphic sessions.
Here is a link to a video of our friend Trey Pennington whom I interviewed a few weeks ago regarding the importance of social media monitoring and web intelligence. Trey also delivers first hand information on the status of the International market for such services, in the US and the UK:
Trey Pennington is not your average Web expert, he is one of the most connected persons in the World (11th most connected person on Facebook) and that certainly made him aware of what Web influence means and how to use it. Trey is – apart from being a renowned social media consultant – working on behalf of Synthesio, a French independent software vendor specialised in sentiment analysis and web intelligence, in order to help them develop their business in the US and the UK.
Time and time again, I have heard people say that b2c is better suited to social media than b2b. As a matter of fact, I am not at all sure about that. The fact that there are fewer b2b brands jumping on the bandwagon is probably more due to the maturity of that sector than the fact that the medium is not adapted to b2b.
Indeed, if one wants social media to have an impact, one needs to foster collaboration and create communities, which is generally done through 3 main things: passion, mutual help and common benefit. These 3 common ingredients of collaboration and social media are in fact very commonplace in the b2b arena; communities are often smaller, more specialised, but also very focused on their abilities to deliver and
illustration & maps by Mongabay.com
always ready to debate on technical points, points of view etc.
Besides, business to business is far less exposed than consumer marketing. In the recent Nestlé example, in which the Swiss firm has not quite been able to appraise the situation and deliver appropriate responses, online fighting with Greenpeace and other activists on social network is an unfair battle for b2c brands. The leeway that brands have in such cases to defend themselves is not very significant – and the case made by Greenpeace is a bit overwhelming too (see maps on the right hand side, courtesy of mongabay.com). Indeed, Nestlé uses Palm oil, which is both an issue from an ecological and dietary point of view, granted; but all mass producers of foodstuffs use palm oil because it’s cheaper and plentiful (now we know why). When activists target a company like this one, the result can be terrible, even though I am not at all certain that Facebook will have the best of Nestlé, the effect on brand equity is still very bad at the very least. At the end of the day, the Swiss manufacturer has yielded to pressure, but instead of turning this into a customer benefit, it’s more a matter of acknowledging their “mistake” and trying to catch up with the criticisms.
As far as b2b is concerned, there is less resentment, clients are more prone to negotiate than complain online, and they also know that when complaints are voiced too crudely online, it’s not always good for your own – and your company’s – reputation either. Besides, in b2b it is also easier for clients to make their points directly to sales and/or marketing. I have heard example in the United States of software vendors (I cannot quote brands) having problems with former employees who avenged themselves by becoming trolls (that is to say online detractors on forums ands social media), but in general the b2b environment is more straight-laced and more likely to trigger responsible discussions.
One may argue that you might get fewer comments on b2b social media and blogs in particular (at Orange Business Services we got 1,500 in 2009 only, so it’s not too bad in fact) but when we get some they are a lot better and more interesting than most of the comments that you get in b2c. Most of the time, they are passionate discussions about in-depth subjects, including complex points of views and explanations. How complex can you get on a consumer product? Usually, it doesn’t get very far or it gets round in circle. In b2b, co-creation and co-innovation is already old-hat, so why not use the Internet to pursue the discussion online?
Such discussions and comments enable one to improve one’s products (it happened to us 4 times in 2009), and it can even help us improve our knowledge when an Internet reader remarks on one of our articles, corrects our mistakes and helps us improve our points of view and visions. A little counter intuitively, I would even venture to say that b2b is the future of social media, because it is b2b brands which can actually most benefit from the use of these tools. We established the proof of this with our @orangebusiness twitter account by placing our brand in the top 10 French brands on Twitter, right behind worldwide renowned brands like Louis Vuitton or Yves Saint Laurent (source: [Fr]01 informatique, May 2010) and even above Air France. Yet, being popular on the web with a brand like Air France is a lot easier when you think about it, the competition should even be unfair. No, it is unfair; but such is the passion triggered by what we did collectively that we are on the verge of building what is the nirvana of social marketing: a community (Air France already has one, it was created by one of their fans but it’s hard to admit that you have to relinquish the responsibility for your brand even though this is the right thing to do when a community already exists).
Lastly, it is difficult for a b2b firm to do traditional advertising and namely TV commercials. Often, budgets are tight and TV commercials require vast amounts of money while delivering sometimes variable results. Into the bargain, most b2b players are reluctant to spread the word about niche products on popular TVs networks. Social media, on the contrary, proves an efficient and economical way to market b2b products: in other words, Nestlé less needs Facebook than we need Twitter (mark my word, I didn’t write does not need Facebook).
B2b is really well suited to social media even though this is not what you will find on the headlines because its subjects are more technical and — if taken at face value — less pertinent for consumers. But at the end of the day, this is also what keeps trolls at bay!
And this is also why a lot of b2b marketing budgets are dormant due to the lack of new ideas whereas so much can be done.
openness: is in my eyes one of the essential qualities required for those wanting to use the Social Web for business. It requires that you give away your “secrets”, and share openly. A creative Commons license is key. All the principles explained by Seth Godin in unleashing the ideavirus.
quid pro quo: the social web and collaboration is about exchanges online and also off-line. Collaboration takes place when people share things together.
mutual benefit: lastly, collaboration implies that all contributors benefit from the common work. This is crucial because in the social web, there should be no winners and losers, just winners. If you don’t believe in that, maybe the Social Web is not made for you, and the fact that it’s fashionable isn’t really important (read meatball sundae).
I’m not too certain about the title, I would not like to be perceived as a smug b*****d who thinks he has succeeded and looks at his results, self satisfied and over assertive.
Here is a video clip about my keynote pitch at Likeminds in Exeter, courtesy of Devon Video Production. Their Website mentions that “[they]create exceptional digital video and communication resources” and I must admit that this video is really well produced. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed keynoting at Likeminds.
Don’t miss any of these other videos from Social Media leaders like Chris Brogan, Olivier Blanchard, John Bell, Joanne Jacobs, and Jonathan Akwue. I particularly liked Chris’s point about the fact that Social Media will soon be like a phone, like all these things we use and can’t even remember they are there … almost natual.
Last week, I was invited by Andrew Ellis and Scott Gould to attend the Likeminds 2010 conference in Exeter, Devon. Not only was it my first time at the Likeminds, but it was also my first time in Devon and in Exeter in particular. Scott and Andrew were kind enough to invite me to keynote at Likeminds so as to present what we have done in terms of using social media to backup our Internet strategy and Orange Business Services.
The Likeminds conference was a great success in terms of attendance with more than 350 attendees and that’s without taking into account the fact that some tickets were sold for the morning and afternoon sessions so that we had different kinds of people at both periods of the day; notwithstanding, the room was packed at all times. One of the most amazing things about Likeminds 2010 is that it was organised in less than six months and that’s extraordinary considering the fact that most Britons seem to be unaware of Exeter and its surroundings, which is a shame given the quality of life in this town and the beauty of its surroundings (OK, I’m a Kelt so I am a little biased, it’s true that we in Brittany originate from these areas).
the Lord Mayor of Exeter in his welcome speech to the Likeminds people – Photo Yann Gourvennec
We were lucky enough – courtesy of messieurs Gould and Ellis – to be welcomed by the lord Mayor of Exeter in the chapter room next to the Cathedral (see picture above).
Likeminds-2010-speakers – Photo by Ben Ellis
This in itself, the sheer speed at which Scott and Andrew brought this crowd of like-minded people together for that conference, is enough to show the power of social media, mostly when it comes to organising events. You don’t need to be in New York, London or Paris, to be able to organise a meeting like this. But the quality of Likeminds was not only due to its audience, but mostly to its presenters; here are a few bullet points with things that should be remembered about their presentations:
Jonathan Akwue from Digital Publicmade an astounding presentation demonstrating that “technology does not always make things better” and drawing an analogy between hip-hop and social media, describing the fact that hip-hop sold its soul to business and therefore disappeared in the minds of its supporters. This is a clear warning sent to all those want to jump on the bandwagon, that social media should not lose its soul and sell itself to the devil,
Ogilvy’s John Bell presented the social media practice within the leading US advertising agency and showed the importance of training, by introducing the notion of “belts” as in martial arts, with the “black belts” being the uppermost qualification in social media understanding and mastery. This is similar to what was done for 6 sigma for instance; very clever and much needed too,
Joanne Jacobs, the sole representative of Australia on stage and probably in the audience, made an astounding performance on the subject of augmented reality, and how it can change our lives, and mostly when: Joanne spent quite a bit of time explaining the Gartner hype cycle and how augmented reality fits in, as well as the good old Crossing the chasm diagram. Joanne’s training as an actor actually showed in that amazing performance of hers, which was greatly appreciated by the public,
Olivier Blanchard, who was kind enough to recommend me to Scott and Andrew for this conference, made a great presentation about how and why companies have to shy away from tactics and make a strategic move with regard to their implementation of social media,
Last but not least was Chris Brogan’s pitch. No need to introduce Chris, he is our favourite and I have been a long time admirer of his blog, one of the best in the blogosphere. He didn’t bother to put together a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation (actually I think he is right, we are more and more slaves to these tools and we need to rediscover the human factor) but he delivered a high quality and impressive pitch about why social media has to be human again and he made fun of these people boasting about the number of followers they have on their twitter accounts as if when mobile phones came in people had bragged about how many phone numbers they had in their address books. Chris Brogan’s Likeminds 2010 presentation can be seen and heard at this url.
Bovey Castle interior – Photo by Yann Gourvennec
That’s not all though. The Likeminds conference which took place on a Friday was followed by an amazing and fruitful weekend session entitled the Likeminds Summit on the following Saturday in beautiful Bovey Castle in Dartmoor (in actual fact not really a Castle, but more of a neo-gothic mansion from the early 20th century built by WhSmith’s heir).
Please be aware that the visionary marketing crew is now flying over Exeter and that a few posts on the Feb 25th Likeminds 2010 conference and Feb 26th summit are very likely to be spotted on this very blog. Stay stuned …
OK, “markets are conversations” but keep on reading anyway …
How many times have I heard consultants open their presentations with the ultimate quotation from the 1999 cluetrain manifesto to justify the need to jump on the social media bandwagon: “Markets are conversations”; QED (or so they think).
I have been a long time admirer of the manifesto myself (if we except its pseudo French translation to make it sound international). 95 theses (not just one) such as the one quoted above, make up the manifesto. In this piece, I will take just five of them which I think are most important and should be remembered … at least as much as the obligatory conversation motto.
thesis #3: “conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice”
• in social media, it means that you have to have real people and real life interaction– including behind-the-scenes — when discussions are triggered in tools like twitter for instance. Automated responses will not do.
thesis #7: “hyperlinks subvert hierarchy”
• this doesn’t mean that your boss should be replaced. It means that websites are driven by linkage, not menus and that they aren’t designed like software. Unfortunately, I haven’t witnessed any progress in that direction. Too many discussions – not to say feuds – in businesses are triggered by the relative position of a menu within a home page. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the Web is working and the way that SEO is done.
thesis #24: “Bombastic boasts “we are positioned to be the pre-eminent provider of XYZ”—do not constitute a position
• in social media, what matters is directness, truth, honesty, disclosure, real information from real people, not preformatted pitches in corporate speak.
thesis #26: Public Relations does not relate to the public. Companies are deeply afraid of their markets.
thesis #66: We want access to your corporate information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites chock-a-block with eye candy but lacking any substance.
• clients, ecosystems, visitors at large want information, and they want information that is useful to them, not company brochures which mean nothing. when I see most Corporate websites 16 years after the launch of the first ones I realise how little progress we have made in that direction. this is also because Corporate Websites have become the new bone of contention between entities, the area for which all business units are battling and that most of the time, people lose track of what could be of interest to visitors. At the end of the day, this is also what makes blogs easier to manage than corporate websites, as blogs are real opinions from real people.
The following video is a December 2009 interview of Paul Argenti (Corporate Communications Professor at Tuck University) following the release of his book dedicated to how ”Web 2.0″ (even though the term is a bit outdated). The book describes how Social Media transforms corporate communications. Here are – in a few words – what should be remembered from that interview. As it happens, a lot of what Argenti describes here is similar to what I have written in these columns and elsewhere:
most execs are out of sync: and it’s easy to dismiss what you don’t know as being a fad or meaningless,
yet a true revolution in corporate communications is unfolding with regard to how our corporate relationships are impacted in all areas: press and public relations, investors, analysts, partners and clients, employees and job seekers etc. What is funny, Argenti says, is that despite point 1, none of the interviewed execs denies this fact,
this revolution has less to do with tools than strategy,
Video and Vlogging (video blogging) are transforming everything we do in corporate communications,
Web 2.0 enable proactive vs. reactive communications;
negative feedback is definitely what execs are afraid of, but it is already broadly available beyond social media. Social Media is not the cause of negative feedback or brand disloyalty and cannot be held responsible for the quality of a product or the fact that a service hasn’t been rendered properly.
to point 6 I would also add that often public relations representatives:
have no clue about how to and how not to behave with regard to social media,
misjudge the importance of a sentence or a comment whereas – even more than in the printed press – every word counts in Social Media,
fail to understand the human factor behind crisis management in Social Media and think that fiddling with comments is enough, whereas human conversations work wonders,
minimise the importance of engaging in Social Media as opposed to being present in social media,
talk digital vs. do digital, and don’t understand what the web makes available to all,
fail to count on positive feedback including that which can be generated by internal blogging communities and partnerships,
continued from part one, this article will be published in 10 instalments nine: quantity and flow of information
The collaborative web revolves around content. If you launch a collaborative website which generates only one or two posts and comments you are therefore exposing your company and your brand. Content has to be up to date and plentiful.
ten: when the rubber meets the road
Last but not least, even if you have respected the first 9 rules, all still remains to be done. As always when it comes to implementing information systems, execution is everything. In other words it’s not just a matter of content, it’s mostly a matter of implementation and field practice. Let’s repeat once more that social media is not just about following the rules of the game, it’s a way of life and requires strong company involvement.
to be continued … yes indeed, there is still one more piece of advice I’d like to deliver, so you’ll have to show a little more patience.
On February 25, I will be representing Orange Business Services at Likeminds 2010 in order to present our business case of using social media for brand advocacy. Whether it’s outstanding advocacy is open for debate I guess, as I wouldn’t want to sound too emphatic and remain humble. It’s probably more for others to say I suppose. By way of introduction, the likeminds people have posted a very nice introductory post on my keynote pitch. Here it is:
Keynote: ‘Social Media and B2B: How to Build Outstanding Advocacy’
I love what Yann and his team have done at Orange Business Services. It is a fantastic example of how you can use social media to solve a problem and generate ROI in a B2B environment. It shows how social media is game changing because it allows you to do something that logistically would never have been possible before.
What I like even more about what Yann has done is that he has done it in a way that any business (large or small) could do it. He may not like my Blue Peter analogy, but its like he’s set up a social media cottage industry in the midst of the corporate world where digital sticky back plastic and virtual washing up liquid bottles are employed to build the equivalent of ‘e-advent crowns and electronic desk tidies.’
Here’s one I made earlier
There is one particular story he tells about how his team initially used Windows Media to create and publish heavily produced and edited videos before realising it was blocked by firewalls so none of his corporate clients could see it anyway. They scrapped that and started shooting ‘ one take only’ in house videos with little or no editing on YouTube – and hey presto – thousands of views!
As an open source advocate, this is something that really excites me! I think it gets to the core of what makes social media great. It is just so honest.
note: many thanks to 
Finding a good brand name
What is there in common between the team which produced 
Time and time again, I have heard people say that b2c is better suited to social media than b2b. As a matter of fact, I am not at all sure about that. The fact that there are fewer b2b brands jumping on the bandwagon is probably more due to the maturity of that sector than the fact that the medium is not adapted to b2b.
As far as b2b is concerned, there is less resentment, clients are more prone to negotiate than complain online, and they also know that when complaints are voiced too crudely online, it’s not always good for your own – and your company’s – reputation either. Besides, in b2b it is also easier for clients to make their points directly to sales and/or marketing. I have heard example in the United States of software vendors (I cannot quote brands) having problems with former employees who avenged themselves by becoming 
