My response:
I’ve seen similar situations with some fairly large clients – the scale might be different but fundamentally the lessons and approach are pretty similar.

Broadly speaking it’s better to respond in a positive and proactive manner (*not* defensively or aggressively) than to just it back and take it. Silence allows those with the grudge to completely define and drive the story, something that if unanswered can do significant long-term harm to your organization’s brand and reputation. The issue is how you can respond, and a lot of that depends on the tools and channels you have at your disposal:

Do you have any sort of established presence across social networks? A company blog, a Twitter handle, Facebook page, etc.? It’s an old bit of advice, that if you don’t have a presence may be moot, but one of the best defenses against a negative critic campaign is to have been actively establishing a presence, a voice, and credibility. It gives you the platform to respond. It is extremely hard to spin something up only when the crisis hits – ask BP PR. You can, and should if possible, engage them and respond positively where the criticism is taking place – in the forum they posted, in their blog’s comments, on their Facebook post thread (just remember you are their guest in that situation…).

Whether you have a presence or not, by all means respond but do so in a positive, proactive manner. Take the high road. The path to ruin in social is to respond defensively, with threats or aggression, etc. In almost every case, unless the facts are obviously and dramatically on your side, the sentiment lies with the little guy (the non-profit), and a poor response from you could make the issue snowball into something very, very negative. Without knowing much about your specific situation, some quick thoughts:

• Acknowledge their concern positively, but lay out the facts to the extent that you can reasonably disclose.
• Invite them in to a face to face discussion of their concerns, and how or why their was a disconnect in terms of understanding. Make this invite publicly and repeatedly if not acknowledged, on your own blog/twitter/etc and also where they are raising a stink (comments on their FB thread…) so the community knows you are reaching out.
• If possible, assuming you are standing your ground, see if you can offer them some help or connections with other properties in the area. Show you are willing to go above and beyond to help them succeed in finding a new home.
• Overall – be as publicly and ridiculously reasonable as possible, even while holding firm in your position. Assuming you are confident the facts are on your side, your reasonable replies, if not met with a similarly reasonable response, will paint a stark contrast to their criticism and complaints.

The post Responding to Negative Attacks via Social Media (Quora) appeared first on Social Mallard | Marketing and social media by Kevin Briody.

The idea – expressed by Smoky – and the reality – demonstrated by the vacation fund for Ms. Klein – are intoxicatingly powerful: Using crowdfunding sites and donation platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, causes, both worthy and merely buzzworthy, can leverage massive scale and momentum through social networks such as Twitter to raise huge sums of money in very short times. Echoing the swell in grassroots political donations that took off in the last US presidential election, these efforts will enable and rely on a very large number of people each making relatively tiny donations – $1 here, $5 there.

Amplified by mainstream news, celebrities with huge follower counts, or just plain old social spread, these “cause swarms” have the potential to be incredibly powerful tools for good. Or evil of course, once the scammers start to perfect the new model.

Kickstarter is already proving that entire companies, with significant capital needs, can get off the ground by going around the traditional funding sources and appealing directly. to future fans and customers (Pebble watch, anyone?). In those cases, people give both for the explicit “get” – the watch, the exclusive offers, etc – and the emotional thrill of supporting a great idea or someone’s amazing passion. In charitable giving you have the added benefit of self-fulfillment, the “it just makes ME feel good” effect.

Combining all those feelings with the now-proven platforms that make crowdsourced giving possible, mixed in with the massive swarm-like effect of Internet memes and rabid celebrity followers, and you have one incredibly powerful model. Whether it’s used for good or evil in the long run – and whether the inevitable examples of evil end up souring people on the overall concept – it’s going to be an interesting trend to watch in the coming months and years.

The post How “Crowd Swarms” are the Future of Online Giving appeared first on Social Mallard | Marketing and social media by Kevin Briody.

“The edge of chaos. Where a frozen order and an ethereal disorder meet in a fluid equilibrium. Where life is in endless flux. Where a system is so adaptive that it is only a breath away from spinning out of control.”

This quote was used over a decade ago to describe the Linux development community (Linux: A Bazaar at the Edge of Chaos). Because it paints such a vivid, even gripping mental image, it’s a line I’ve been enamored with for over a decade* and used in countless presentations.

The term “edge of chaos,” and this quote in particular, beautifully and perfectly describes the world I work in: that chaotic realm where traditional marketing intersects with the social media and online communities. It’s where traditional corporate messaging norms centered on control and proscription run headlong into the wild, free-thinking, uncontrollable and unpredictable whims of the massive online community made up of all types of customers, employees, fans and foes.

For anyone working in social media marketing, the edge of chaos likely describes your daily existence, and possibly conjures up something negative: A world where well-crafted campaigns or perfectly “on strategy” posts routinely get lampooned or even slaughtered. Where a single dumb tweet or a community manager in a sarcastic mood can trigger a massive firestorm of protests that does real and lasting damage to your company, in time measured in minutes and hours rather than the weeks or even months of just a few years ago. 

However it also describes a remarkably positive and inspiring side of chaos: A highly fluid, radically adaptive reality that can see a few simple seeds (of an idea, a comment, a campaign) quickly grow and evolve in amazing and unpredictable new directions. 

To survive in the former and thrive in the latter requires a mindset – and a skill set and organization – that is highly adaptive itself and sees fit to embrace the loss of control it requires. Unfortunately so much of the social media management industry (the term itself a false promise, really) is focused on trying to control that chaos, to restore a semblance of order to a community that naturally resists or even actively defies it.

As people and brands of all kind have discovered, often the hard way, is that operating on the edge of chaos – which all companies now do regardless of whether they think they are “doing” social media or not – requires a active willingness to embrace the chaos and its crazy, organic, uncontrollable community-driven creative process.

It’s an exciting time to be in this business, doing everything we all can to focus on the opportunity inherent in the chaos – however uncontrollable and unpredictable – without running in terror from the risk.

“Where a system is so adaptive that it is only a breath away from spinning out of control.”

Photo via CC License by Cory Doctorow

The post Marketing at the Edge of Chaos appeared first on Social Mallard | Marketing and social media by Kevin Briody.

Originally posted Fall 2006, when I was still at Microsoft. Reposted today as I still think this applies to any project I might be working on and I’m looking for a bit of inspiration (note the Blackberry reference…old school):

We had a meeting today where we debated some of the key goals for an upcoming community initiative, including the usual suspects:

Building loyalty
Reducing support costs
Boosting net satisfaction
Acquiring new users
etc.

Ken Levy was there – he cut through that and locked on to the real manna: “We’re trying to build passion.” Wistful thoughts of Kathy Sierra immediately passed around my head. [2012 update: Kathy later blogged about this post here]

But that got me thinking – what does “passion” boil down to? Where do you begin? Kathy and Dan have many more eloquent and well constructed thoughts on this on this, so I figured I would bring it down a notch on the maturity level, away from any hint of intellectual discourse towards a raw, gut feeling:

F**king cool!

That’€™s where passion begins. Those are the words I want every user of my product to utter. Ideally followed up by something like:

€œDude, you have to check this out. It’s so f**king cool!

I don’€™t want their reaction to be a measured, rational, dispassionate analysis of why the product is better than the alternatives, how the cost is more reasonable, feature set more complete, UI more AJAXified. I don’t want them to pause to study the boring feature comparison chart on the back of the box.

I want f**king cool! Period.

I want that pure sense of wonder, that kid-at-airshow-seeing-an-F16-€“on-afterburners-rip-by-so-close-it-makes-your-soul-shake reaction, that caress-the-new-Blackberry-until-your-friends-start-to-question-your-sanity experience. I want an irrational level of sheer, unfiltered, borderline delusional joy. [2012 update: I'd like to think I predicted here the emotional reactions that Apple would inspire from 2007 onward…The iPhone after all was just a few months in the future]

That is where passion for a product starts. Yes, it only gets you so far, and then actual product quality, support, stickiness, strong community, etc come into play. But true passion begins with the two most wonderful words a marketer can hear a customer say:

F**king cool.

The post Passion Starts With Two Simple Words appeared first on Social Mallard | Marketing and social media by Kevin Briody.

This debate is one example of why I don’t buy into the idea that any “golden era” of tech blogging is coming to an end just because a bunch of media companies are changing hands and their employees are moving around a bit.

Because that’s what most of the “blogs” Jeremiah holds up as examples of the Golden Era – TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOm, Gizmodo, etc. – haven’t been anything but media companies for a long, long while. Yes they are blogs by most technical definitions – they use blog software, allow comments, publish an RSS feed, post in reverse chronological order, etc. – but I think for these ad- and scoop-driven behemoths of the tech media “blog” vs “media” ceased being a useful or realistic distinction several years ago.

Look at the top 3 categories of Jeremiah’s proposed taxonomy:

The most notable common elements? Ad-driven business models, editorial that relies on the time-tested mix of scoops, reviews, and opinion, and paid (some more so than others) professional writers and editors sharing the workload. Every one of them is, first and foremost, a media company. The Verge is a classic startup, whereas TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb are startups who made successful exits. They just so happen to publish in blog format.

I’m making this somewhat nitpicky argument as I think the true “golden era” of tech blogging has never been driven by these aspiring media companies, but rather by the groups of blogs farther down Jeremiah’s taxonomy – emerging and individual bloggers. It’s their hyper-opinionated voices, wildly varied posting styles, and sheer style and creativity that have always struck me as the truly interesting and passionate side of tech blogging, and if anything their opportunities to be heard are accelerating as short-format social media (Google+, Twitter) exponentially increases the reach and impact of the great content they create.

(Incidentally I consider Jeremiah’s own great blog as part of his “Career Individual Bloggers” category, and is an excellent example of the kind of tech blog I’m referring to above)

TechCrunch was wildly more entertaining, and endless source of gold you might say, when it was basically just “Mike’s blog” – and became significantly less so when it hired a CEO and a fleet of writers, no matter how opinionated they might have been. When Mashable was Pete and a couple others digging into social media, and not a 60+ person group covering the broader tech lifestyle, it was a must read for those in the industry. Now it’s something with occasional gold nuggets, too often hidden in an avalanche of press releases and guest posts.

I don’t begrudge companies like that their success at all, but I bring them up to make the point that for me at least, the “golden era” of tech blogging has always been less defined by a timeframe and more by a type of blogger. The real gold in tech blogging is now, and has always been, driven by the small guys who are less concerned about traffic volume and ad revenue and more about starting amazing debates and conversations – like the one Jeremiah managed to kick off with a heck of a headline.

The post The Real Gold in Tech Blogging Has Always Been the Little Guys appeared first on Social Mallard | Marketing and social media by Kevin Briody.

That’s the gist of a presentation I gave to a couple student classes and groups at Elon University in Burlington, North Carolina two weeks ago. A short version is available on Slideshare, and is embedded immediately below.

The basic idea behind the collision is this: as the media world radically shifts thanks to the rise in digital and in particular the emergence of social media as a consumer-driven force, smart marketers are starting to shift their budgets to align with the new reality. Agencies of all stripes – from advertising and creative to PR, Media, Digital, DM and on – are in turn chasing those dollars.

As a result we find PR agencies with fully baked in-house digital shops, and formerly TV-heavy ad agencies with more full-time social media strategists than the largest digital group. We find a surge in acquisitions of speciality social media agencies, who find themselves by foresight or happy accident sitting square in the most lucrative sweet spot.

From a client-side marketer’s perspective, things are both wildly confusing – “why is my PR agency pitching their HTML5 expertise again?” – and loaded with choice, variety, and cost pressures working in their favor. They might put out an RFP for a social media campaign, and wind up with a final pitch group consisting of a niche social agency, a full-service (and large) digital agency, and a global PR agency’s digital group squaring off against their own current advertising agency-of-record.

What’s stressful for the agency new biz guys is heaven for the clients.

All this is radically reshaping the agency world, as traditional lines between agency specialities are blurring. For smart, digitally- and socially-savvy aspiring employees like those I met with at Elon, the opportunities this chaos creates are endless. The market for their skills has grown dramatically, and no longer are they locked into traditional career paths (“oh, she’s an ad creative”).

Their expertise, as it grows, has the potential to be attractive to every type of agency that’s chasing those digital and social client budgets. Which is to say, every agency that intends to survive past the next 5 years or so.

The next 12-24 months in my view will see this collision in the digital and social center accelerate, amplifying both the confusion and opportunity I mentioned above. Should be fun.

The post The Great Agency Digital and Social Collision appeared first on Social Mallard | Marketing and social media by Kevin Briody.

As long-overdue as this feature is, and as much hype as it is getting, it’s a follower acquisition tactic and just a step along the way to the real goal of getting people to opt-in to your content stream. Just like with Facebook spotlight tabs, beyond the first-visit experience by a non-fan/follower the Twitter brand page itself has limited utility. The real value, as I stated a few months ago, is in the content stream. That’s where the engagement happens, where the social spread of your ideas and content occurs, and where the ultimate ROI – measured however you prefer – will be realized.

Let’s go back to Facebook for a moment. We know from experience that the majority of traffic to most brand Facebook brand pages tends to cluster in two places – the Wall, where current fans land, and the default landing (or “spotlight”) tab, where non-fans land. One is a home for engagement and interaction, the other serves to quickly grab a visitor’s attention and entice them to become a fan and opt-in to all that wonderful engagement.

As designed, Twitter’s new brand pages are roughly equivalent to a mashup of the Facebook Wall + landing tab, limited to non-followers. For current followers, chances are they will never see the shiny new brand page, just like fans of a brand on Facebook will likely never glimpse the often-amazing landing tabs (or any of a brand’s tabs, really). Follower attention, rightly, will be focused on the content stream and the engagement it inspires, which they will most likely be consuming through 3rd-party apps and sites accessing the Twitter API.

Helping expose that content stream, in ways that add tremendous value to other types of brand content (blog posts, web pages, etc.), is why I’m so excited about Twitter’s other big announcement around Embedded Tweets, but that’s for another post.

Twitter Brand Pages Are All About Acquisition, Not Engagement – tinyurl.com/74644rs #in #fb

— Kevin Briody (@kevinbriody) December 14, 2011

The long-term value of social media is in the engagement centered on the content stream, whether it lives through your Facebook updates, blog posts, videos, or Tweets. The majority of your focus should be around making that stream as rich (in terms of great content) and rewarding (in terms of great interaction and discussion) as possible. To get people to opt-in to that stream is of course critical, and that’s the role Twitter Brand Pages – just like Facebook landing tabs – will play: follower acquisition.

With all the buzz and focus around these new pages, and the many beautiful or innovative designs I’m sure we’ll see in the coming weeks and months, just keep that in mind. Twitter brand pages are follower acquisition tools, and are not destinations for existing followers to find anything of much value. For established brands on Twitter, are focused on engagement with their already large/mature follower bases, the brand page is less of a necessity.

The post Twitter Brand Pages Are All About Acquisition, Not Engagement appeared first on Social Mallard | Marketing and social media by Kevin Briody.

As a presenter, there are a number of ways you can quickly find yourself at the wheel of a train wreck, from technical problems to a combative or skeptical audience. A presentation can wreck quickly, such as when you realize you brought the wrong slides or the audio goes completely dead, or in agonizing slow motion such as when you come to the dreaded realization that the content or your presentation style is going over with the audience like a ton of lead.

Regardless of why or how, your job as the presenter is to grab the wheel and will the train back on the tracks. You owe it to the people who took time out of their day to give you the privilege of their attention to make it work.

Which is exactly what I did not do in one particular presentation. My particular train wreck involved having prepared content that ended up being a complete mismatch with the interests and background of the audience. That become glaringly evident right from the start, but rather than toss the deck and adapt on the fly, I forged ahead in the hope that somewhere in the slides I’d find some common ground with the group arrayed in front of me.

The end result was a disinterested audience who asked just a couple of cursory questions at the end. While I hope they took away something positive – some insights or understandings they didn’t have before – I doubt many walked out eagerly waiting to hear when and where I might be speaking next.

The kicker is I because the mismatch was clear early on – I asked some hand-raiser questions like usual at the outset to gauge their skills and interests – I had an opportunity to toss the deck and just talk to their interests. To do that takes both some guts and a load of confidence, and while I feel pretty good about where I stand on both fronts, I still didn’t take that plunge.

What lessons did I learn that I’ll take into every presentation from now on?

• Do your audience homework: This is where my presentation initially failed. I thought I had done the homework, but a combination of errors led me to prepare to speak to an audience that looked very little like the one I found sitting in front of me. Be crystal clear with the conference organizers on the background of those attending. Get a list in advance with names, companies, and job titles at the least. See if you can do a pre-conference informal survey on Twitter, through the organizer’s blog or e-newsletter, etc. Understand the context surrounding your presentation – is it part of a larger conference? What’s the focus? Who else is presenting, and is there any overlap with your proposed content?
• Ask the audience questions up front: Before you launch into your opening story, pause and ask a few questions to validate the results of your homework. Find out who they are, what they do, how familiar they already are with your subject, and gauge what they might want to hear or learn in the time allotted. After all it’s better to know up front, than a week later in a horrible post-event survey. In my case, I actually did ask these questions, but the results surprised me to such an extent that they threw me off and I failed to properly react.
• Most critically – Be willing the dump the deck, and always have a backup plan: What if you find yourself in my situation, where you quickly discover that the presentation you’re ready to give is not at all what the audience is interested in hearing? Have a plan – or at least a broad sense of some options – for what you would do. Can you cherry pick a subset of slides that would make for an interesting – if different than planned – presentation? Have you mentally prepped which slides you might pick? If not, do you have the knowledge and confidence to go completely off-script and have an engaging, no-slide talk with the audience?

By all means rock your slides (I highly recommend reading Garr Reynolds’ blog and books), but the most beautiful and informative slides in the world are useless if they don’t convey information the audience is interested in hearing.

Obviously do your audience homework in advance, which is pretty much standard advice for presenting to a group of any size. But if you find yourself in my situation, where your audience still isn’t the one you were expecting, get ready to do toss the script out the window, be flexible, and focus on creating an interesting and positive experience for everyone in the room. Do everything you can to keep that presentation train on the rails.

The post Salvaging a Presentation Train Wreck appeared first on Social Mallard | Marketing and social media by Kevin Briody.

A bit of news on the personal front: Today is my last day as Director of Strategic Innovation with Ignite Social Media. As of next Tuesday, November 1st, I’ll be joining the team at Pace Communications (@PaceComm) as Director of Digital Strategy.

Working at Ignite for the past two years has been incredible, both in terms of the daily experience and the insane growth and change the agency has gone through – such as growing 4x in staff count and picking up ridiculously cool clients like Samsung, Microsoft and Chrysler, among many others. I have no doubt that their already impressive client list will become even more enviable as time goes on.

I also had the privilege of working with insanely smart and funny people and getting a crash course on how social media marketing for large brands is *supposed* to work. Throw in all the behind-the-scenes stuff that truly makes Ignite Ignite - like Mystery Trips (Jamaica anyone?), Nerf wars, sarcastic Yammer threads, pups in the office, out-of-context quotes, inspirational and occasionally disturbing brainstorms – and it all adds up to not so much a job as a slightly crazy and very inspirational home away from home.

All of it has been wonderful, and all of it will be missed.

Sometimes however a great opportunity pops up that you just can’t pass by, and that’s the case with Pace. It’s a combination of the right team, role, timing and circumstances that’s making this move happen, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to get started.

Content drives conversation, offline as well as on, and as a content marketing agency Pace is in a unique spot to help companies spark and nurture conversations around their brands, products, experiences, and communities. I get to help drive and shape those efforts across both digital and social – all in all, it’s a pretty cool challenge.

As a bonus, Pace is located just a few minutes from my house, shrinking my daily roundtrip commute from nearly 3 hours to less than 20 minutes. My wonderful, and very patient, wife and kids will get to see a whole lot more of me in the near future (ready or not!).

I’ll share more here and on Twitter (@kevinbriody) as I settle in. Thanks again to everyone at Ignite, and to my future colleague at Pace I’ll see you next week!

Photo by delphwynd via Flickr an CC License

The post Making A Change: Leaving Ignite, Joining Pace appeared first on Social Mallard | Marketing and social media by Kevin Briody.

I’m not revisiting those here. Rather, this post is about two arguments I’m still seeing pop up time and again from speakers, marketers, columnists, and strategists alike. Arguments that will get you exactly nowhere when it comes time to fight for, and justify, your social media budget.

What are they?

• The Opportunity Cost Argument aka “What’s the ROI for social media? Well, what’s the ROI on picking up the phone? What’s the ROI on your secretary?” This line of reasoning uses fear to scare managers into investing in social media efforts, in effect saying that your customer expect it, and if you’re not active, not listening or engaging, there is a risk for huge customer dissatisfaction.
• The Aspirational Argument aka “Those who really know social media aren’t talking about ROI.” This relies variously on the appeal of the shiny and new mixed with the fear of being left behind as a company or professional.

Don’t get me wrong, buried in both arguments are grains of truth and worthy sentiments, particularly around opportunity cost. Depending on your industry, yes, your customers might be very active on social media and your lack of monitoring and engagement could result in both lost opportunities or worse, a disconnect with the needs and interests of your customers.

But acknowledging that doesn’t excuse you from taking steps to quantify what kind of ROI you could reasonable expect for taking the social media plunge – whether it’s a concrete metric like new sales generated or a more indirect, proxy ROI metric like higher customer satisfaction. Your job as a business professional is in part to understand what your company stands to get for money you propose investing – relying on fear and generalities unsupported by numbers is just not going to cut it.

I have less sympathy for the aspirational argument, which seems to be flung around by people who have never run a serious budget, are making their living on the speaking circuit where you aren’t generally accountable for actual results, or simply can’t be bothered to do the hard math. Supporters of this argument fall back on the “cool kids” line of thinking, making others feel dumb or like anti-social luddites just for daring to ask smart business questions.

Social media is rapidly maturing as an element in the marketing and communications mix, and just like the other elements – email, direct mail, TV, PR, digital, etc. – it is reasonable and necessary to try to calculate what you get out of the resources invested.

Don’t make the mistake of falling back on either of these two arguments if you expect to get your next social media initiative funded in the real world.

The post Two Insanely Bad Social Media ROI Arguments appeared first on Social Mallard | Marketing and social media by Kevin Briody.