Jon Burg's Future Visions

being present doesn't mean showing up, it means being there

2009-12-02T06:13:39-05:00

I don't care if you are a parent, a spouse, a family member, a colleague, a marketer or a social brand. Showing up is not enough. Being a dad that pushes his kids on the swing while listening to a podcast is not being there, and it will not be fulfilling as a dad. Being in a meeting with your head knee-deep in your blackberry doesn't qualify as contributing, you know it and everyone in the room knows it. Being in social as a brand and only talking about your needs versus those of the customer won't create relationships unless people have a need or desire to learn more about your brand.

There is an old rule of thumb in relationships: you feel connected to the extent that you give to the other person.

If you are only half present, you are only half there, and at best you will only get half results. So please, make the time to do it right. Multi-tasking will never make you feel complete. And trust me, the other people you are only half paying attention to know the difference.

ikea makes social business happen through one person... and a lot of giveaways

2009-11-30T04:35:23-05:00

Is this a great case study?

Ikea was launching a new location and wanted to generate lots of attention. Their store manager uploaded pictures of twelve showrooms and puts them all on his profile page. People tag items they want as themselves, and they win those items. First come first served. Over time, the manager (or agency behind him) uploads additional photos of showrooms and lots more people come and tag themselves to win free items.

This is a fairly innovative use a less than marketing-centric function on Facebook, photo-tagging. By focussing on tagging, Ikea drove all social interactions to the tagger's Wall, driving much stronger exposure to the social action. Very strategic.

But there's a catch. First of all, Ikea leveraged their manager's personal page, not a Brand Page. While I'm sure Ikea worked out the legal ramifications in regards to Facebook's Terms of Service, this may limit the long term value of the page. The social equity resides on a personal, not a brand domain. If the manager leaves the store, good bye fans. If the store wants to advertise on Facebook, good luck. If the store wants to build an ad cluter on Facebook for later retargeting, good luck. Additionally, as with any giveaway the value of the fans collected is questionable.

Overall, this campaign was successful at two things: generating local attention for a new local store, and putting a local face on the brand, bringing a person and his personality to the table. Great campaign, but I'm still on the fence as to whether or not this was a sound launching point for a long term strategy.

Case Study Video Below

yet another video of social numbers - success focused

2009-11-24T17:29:13-05:00

Interesting to see the focus of the latest social video numbers shift from the traditional stats focus to success stories. Great to see the focus on results.

yahoo speaks to creatives

2009-11-24T17:13:04-05:00

Cute video, just not sure it reflects my clients. I love you guys and after seeing this, I really appreciate all of you. You really are the best. Thanks for never doing this to me.

"Listening" is in it's infancy, where is it going?

2009-11-23T10:55:50-05:00

Over the past 3 years, we have seen an explosion in the social "listening" space. The potential to tap into the world's largest focus group is just too large to ignore. And for social marketers, comms professionals, PR, metrics gurus, measurement dweebs, biz dev geniuses, business intel folks and even R&D, the authentic, real time feedback available in the conversation is a very bright and shiny object. And it may even have real business value!

But with about 100 firms offering varying levels of "listening" solutions, I thought we could all benefit from some perspective. Not all offerings are created equal, and the market leaders today could easily get lost in the middle of the pack 12 months down the road. So let's take a look at where we were, where we are and where I think we may be going.

Infancy

1. Discovery

Do you remember the first time you searched for your brand name on Technorati? Or the first time you setup an RSS feed of a search from a social engine for your name or brand? It was exciting! Suddenly there were dozens of posts and conversations about your brand at your fingertips! There was more data than we knew what to do with, but it was exciting, new and instantly valuable.

2. Counting and Trending

As the conversation grew, the market realized that there was some real business value in this conversation, but we needed perspective. Our RSS Readers flooded, and there was no way we could read and have valuable perspective on all of the content coming in. Counting and trending gave us our first taste of Share of Voice and basic social indeces. But we really didn't know what these numbers meant. And uptick in conversation was considered "performance" without understanding any real conversational impact.

Learning to Walk

3. Sentiment/Understanding

It didn't take long for marketers to learn that not all conversation is good conversation. While early sentiment solutions focused on basic NLP or fully manual solutions, more robust, adaptable and far more accurate technologies and systems are continuing to emerge and evolve. For the first time in the history of marketing, brands are beginning to gather understand sizable degrees of conversation around the brand. With the rise of sentiment based scoring, we are also beginning to see some early attempts at social behavioral modeling. But gross sentiment is not the key social metric, nor is it highly actionable.

4. Granularity

Just because people are happy when they discuss vacation travel, doesn't mean that they like your airline. Just because people love your new website or promotion, doesn't meant they like your customer service. And just because you launched a new website doesn't mean that it was responsible for the positive conversation shift.
As social listening begins to become a real business practice, this deeper, more granular/focused level of understanding becomes an absolute necessity. Granular scoring is beginning to lead to a multi-dimensional understanding of the content of a conversation. Single lines of data are becoming multiple lines, and charts are becoming spiders graphs. Really savvy listening vendors are doing a great job creating stunning visuals that make the technology capabilities pop. But with pretty visuals and massive reports, many brands continue to struggle to learn the all important "and now what?"

Learning to Talk

5. Scaled Response/Participation

Whereas early blogging, facebook and twitter efforts focused on one or two personalities, brand growth in social clearly demands touchpoints across multiple teams. Early response solutions have by large been add-ons to social intel platforms. More robust, scaled response and participation solutions are enabling deep, granular managed work-flow. This will at times require flexible APIs that can work in tandem with customer support and CRM databases and dashboards. This will require an organizational shift to bring multiple departments and responsibilities together under a unified voice. There is no call tree in social. There are few departmental lines. The customer buys a product, not a department.
However, the relative lack of understanding around and tracking of ROI and business impact and efficiency will continue to hold-up many big brands from making a serious commitment to scaled social business or business redesign.

6. Author ID - Age/Sex/Location +

Just because people are talking and Google is indexing, doesn't mean that this is really impacting our target customers. If we are a breakfast brand targeting moms, the conversation among college students around cereal probably shouldn't be a strong area of focus in an initial listening solution. But keyword based solutions treat all sources equally. For a US brand, a discussion about cookies in English in Paris should not be treated as equal to a discussion comparing cookie brands among moms in Kentucky. Additionally, a blogger on her blog and on twitter is still only one woman. These accounts and personalities need to be linked. A small group of ardent fans can easily skew a social research study. An understanding of conversation dispersion requires a solid Author ID solution.

Losing Egocentricity, Integrating with the Business

7. Content and Author Context

Keyword based solutions tend to focus on the post and maybe the author, but they don't have context beyond the post they are reading. What are this blogger's interests? What do they generally blog about? Who are they? What makes them tick? Who do they generally link to? Where else are they online? How does their Twitter account mirror or contrast their blog? What does their social graph look like and how does this differ by platform? This depth transforms numbers into people, and people (at scale) into communities.

8. Advanced Statistical Modeling

Predictive modeling is a holy grail, and we aren't even close. ROI is going to be part of these advanced metrics, but it's also going to be about understanding why, and being able to understand why using statistical modeling. This will require setting a sustainable model, a model than can be proven accurate when used more than once. This is less about discovery and more about systematic, scaled real business. This will impact nearly every aspect of the marketing journey, delivering information that maps to business needs and works in tandem with business as usual structure, roles and responsibilities. This evolutionary step will be as much about technology capabilities as it is about business readiness.

9. Becoming a Member of the Tribe/Welcome to Reality

One can participate by launching assets that people engage with, by commenting on user content, by providing a vehicle for user engagement, by running a promotion or providing customer service. There is a blog, a Facebook presence, a community, a twitter account, a promotion, a contest, a sponsored playlist on imeem... the list goes on. But few brands are linking their cross-platform messaging pillars to create a consistent brand story, and fewer are mapping this to the customer types, needs and conversations.
Becoming a member of the tribe is about having the tools to engage based on listening data, and most importantly, being able to map and track your engagements across multiple social environments. This is about cross platform management, understanding and marketing to users as individuals, at scale, across multiple environments. It's about understanding the people behind the clicks, and building relationships and affinities with them as people. This is beyond ad tracking or cookie-ing, it's about mapping all of your customer relationships to people. The end result is that the brand is not just a participant or a talking face, but a member of people's tribes, or their communities, of their circles of trust. The metrics and learnings behind this multi-dimensional data hold tremendous potential.

The Elusive Conclusion.

At the end of the day, there is no final point 10. I played with it, and I can't honestly say that there is a point of arrival beyond multi-dimensional touchpoints, management and metrics. When push comes to shove, this about shifting from monotone speeches to rich customer interactions. If television introduced site, sound and motion, social reminded us that we are all people after all.

Imagine how different television would be if they could hear you shouting at the screen!

learning some humility

2009-11-09T12:23:06-05:00

There is an inherent flaw in living in the online fishbowl. You begin to think that your opinion is informed.

There is a gaping chasm between those who do, those who have done and those who talk.

Take this morning's news about Rupert Murdock not allowing Google to index his content. The web laughs. Bloggers and tweeters scorn this decision. And while many of those sharing their opinions are smart, Rupert Murdoch has a track record. The guy has built a media empire. I didn't. You didn't. He did.

We can have an informed discussion around the technical feasibility of "turning off Google." We can debate the business strategy, and whether or not this will help in the long run. But before we talk, remember - he has built a media empire. He has amassed massive personal wealth. He has done what many have said all along was impossible. I can't say the same.