Web Social Architecture

On Blogging

2011-04-05T15:57:59-07:00

After nearly a year at Razorfish, I’m resuscitating my blog. Why? Because blogging gets me out of the weeds and makes me smarter. In a way, I kind of think blogs are dead. Or more realistically, they’re just not as important as they were 6 or 7 years ago, when self-publishing was a transformative facet of the online experience. But for me, the practice of blogging is so very useful—it wakes me up to the interest and meaning of day-to-day things, and not doing it for the past year has made me dumber and less happy.

Here are a couple tidbits about how I approach blogging in a way that really works for me:

Never mind the audience.

If you’re trying to get famous blogging, you’re wasting your time. 99% of famous bloggers didn’t get famous by blogging—they have popular blogs because they’re famous, not the other way around. So don’t write for your audience. Write for yourself!

Nobody’s going to care. But more importantly, writing for yourself means no apologies and no excuses. You’re accountable to yourself alone for the quality of your thinking and for deciding what’s interesting and valuable to pay attention to. You’re the one who decides what matters—avoid trying to be popular and you’ll avoid the echo-chamber.

I’m not saying disrespect your audience! Don’t publish junk. Take pride in what you write, but take pride in how your thinking represents you, not in how much ephemeral attention or “popularity” your posts generate.

Always be blogging.

I’ll typically have a few dozen posts in draft mode at any given time. Every time I hear something interesting or have an idea I want to remember, I start a new post. (I use Windows Live Writer, which I think is still the best authoring tool out there.) Maybe a quarter of my draft posts ever get finished. So I essentially keep a long running list of things I’m thinking about, and whenever the ideas develop a bit I spend 5 or 10 minutes adding to the post.

Who cares if I waste time on posts I don’t end up publishing? The point, for me, is to keep thinking about stuff, not to finish anything. And because I’m not writing for a nonexistent audience that isn’t waiting with bated breath for my next post or who will stop loving me if my next post isn’t for another month, there’s really no pressure to finish posts. Writing for myself sure is less stressful!

Don’t try to “keep up.”

Forget about linking to other bloggers, cruising the web looking for relevant places to comment, etc—all the conventional wisdom from 5 years ago about how to build a following for your blog is less than unhelpful—it’s counterproductive to the development of original ideas.

And creating commentary on the hamster wheel of industry news is a waste of time. I actually think there’s a new kind of domain knowledge these days, and it’s less about collecting the full set of information, the traditional way of looking at mastery, and more about knowing what amidst all the noise you need to pay attention to because it matters. Filtering, not accumulation.

Don’t try to keep up. Instead, think hard about the stuff that sticks.

When I interview people, I always ask what they think the brave new world will look like. This is my way of understanding how well candidates can filter out the noise and tell a clear story about what really matters. And blogging is the way I get there, personally—which means not trying to be an industry commentator, but trying to be bigger than the industry, being about culture not news.

Anyway, if you’re reading this, I look forward to your feedback. And in return I promise to start actually blogging again!

My New Adventure

2010-05-26T14:02:46-07:00

Tomorrow I start a new job at Razorfish, helping with social media in the western region. I'm making a really challenging move from another great agency, a difficult decision that was ultimately really easy.

Three things Razorfish people I talked with said to me that got me excited:

"Media is creative."
"You dream it, we have people who can build it, and clients who are ready to take it big."
"We measure success in patents, not awards."

Razorfish has the talent to help shape the digital future, and I am excited to be a part of that. I believe the digital future is human, not technological, and it's going to take humans to build a future we want to live. Marketing is a strange business, companies selling stuff to people. But I'm an optimist, and I believe people want meaningful stuff more than they want to defray meaning in favor of stuff.

So marketing should follow suit, especially in social. We're entering an era of opt-in marketing, where the onus is on brands to create stuff people will seek out and want to be a part of--we, marketers, are the audiences' captives.

It's going to be fun.

Adios to the Big Z

2010-05-19T10:05:38-07:00

Today is my last day at one of the best interactive agencies on earth, and to be honest I have mixed feelings about it. Naturally I’m excited about my next move, but that’s for a different post.

Today I’m celebrating the people and culture that make ZAAZ a special place to work. Three-quarters of my friends work at ZAAZ, which is not to say I have so few friends but to say the relationships I’ve built through the past 5 years are special.

We’ve done some unbelievable work, taken clients to new places, innovated, struggled, suffered losses, won big, partied hard. Above all else, it’s been the passion and intelligence of my peers that’s brought me to work excited every day, and I credit visionary leadership for the creation of an environment that attracts such tremendous talent and inspires it to push the boundaries.

If you’re on the job market, try to work at ZAAZ.

If you’re looking for an agency, consider ZAAZ.

I’m off to new horizons, but I’ll take a bit of Z-Swagguh with me, and apply it wherever things get boring.

St. Paddys Happy Hour at ZAAZ: RSVP

2010-03-15T10:46:34-07:00

Join the ZAAZ Social Media Team for beer and snacks this Wednesday. Invitation / RSVP here: http://zbar.eventbrite.com/

Beannachtam na Feile Padraig!

ZAAZ Hiring Community Managers

2009-12-10T13:16:03-08:00

We are looking for community managers / moderators with broad experience interacting with customers online on behalf of brands. Above all else, we need brand-savvy, social media literate, agency-experienced doers. Detailed job description below:

COMMUNITY MANAGER

We are looking for a candidate that can thrive in a creative environment where collaboration, innovation and passion for the web are a must. This position will start out on a contract basis and has the potential to move into a full time position.

This position is located in Seattle at ZAAZ World Headquarters (no relocation).

Responsibilities:

Manage online communities, including both hosted communities like forums and blogs; and distributed communities across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc. Enact brand campaigns in social media. Publish branded content and manage conversations across media sharing venues. Promote content across social bookmarking and collaborative filtration engines.

Required Skills:

2-3 years community management, online customer service, or related.

Experience interacting with customers through social media on behalf of brands.

Broad and deep familiarity with social software and online community tools, including forums, discussion, blogs, ratings & reviews, IM, etc.

Immersed in and opinionated about best practices.

Constant personal and professional use of a mix of social media tools, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Flickr, etc. Extra points for Vimeo, Blip.tv, Tumblr, Posterous, etc.

Conversant in SEO/SEM, web analytics, web technology, mobile campaigns, community, creative/brand.

Ability to integrate with virtual teams across agency and client organizations. Collaborative. Communicative.

Superlative and prolific writing. High emotional intelligence and online social skills.

Likes fun.

Additional Desired Skills:

Top candidates will have all the above, and also agency experience.

About ZAAZ

ZAAZ is a premier interactive agency serving some of the world’s most enduring and recognizable brands. Few interactive agencies understand how to utilize web analytics in delivering rich, creative and thoughtfully designed brand experiences optimized for measurable results. Strategically positioned at the intersection of Logic and Creative, ZAAZ is the leader in providing performance-driven digital marketing across all channels and industries. We value a healthy work-life balance and committed individuals who are continually seeking to grow in their professions. Founded in 1998, ZAAZ is headquartered in Seattle and is part of the Wunderman/WPP group of companies. For more information and current open positions, visit www.zaaz.com

Have a question? Someone else is probably wondering the same thing. Ask in the comment thread.

Crafting a Great Community / Social Media Policy

2009-11-21T10:23:33-08:00

I've said before that there are three crucial elements of online community policy: Legality, appropriateness, and relevance. I'm now thinking that there's actually a "hierarchy of needs" among those three, and that taken together and put into practice, they are much more than a set of rules for what's ok to do in the community. They’re more like a social contract, a creator of quality and value.

Legality isn’t exactly black and white, as you’d sort of want it to be. But it is quite straightforward in that you basically need to do what your lawyers tell you. In many cases there’s some education and negotiation, but there’s also a reason lawyers get paid a lot. In the end, you do what they say.

Likewise, appropriateness is pretty easy. You generally rule out profanity and abuse. From there you can dial the politeness requirements up or down to suit your needs. In fantasy football, for example, smack talk is part of the fun; in a forum for survivors of childhood sexual abuse, behavioral standards are much higher.

But deciding what's relevant and what isn't is a very different story. I consulted, for example, with REI on their online community strategy and governance, and there are a few great examples from that exercise of how challenging relevance is to define:

It’s tempting for an outdoor retailer with a merchandising focus to align community discussions with its product taxonomy. But REI doesn’t sell photography stuff, and photography is a huge part of many people’s outdoor experience. They want to talk about it. So, this one isn’t too tough, right? How about:

Would it be ok to talk about snowmobiling? To post photos and videos of snowmobiling? What about heli-skiing? REI’s focus on stewardship and sustainable enjoyment of the outdoors makes this tough, because most cross-country skiers despise snowmobiles, and heli-skiing is accessible only to the well-off. And then there’s the whole snowmobiles in Yellowstone thing. Yikes. But wait:

In regions like Texas, among the outdoor activities most enjoyed by REI customers are hunting and fishing. Would it be ok on an REI web site to post a photo of yourself posing with the elk you just shot? The poor barefoot hikers in Portland would pass out! But the folks in Plano, or Missoula, would get it. So maybe the elk feels like an extreme example. What about a photo of your six-year-old proudly displaying the day’s catch of bluegill?

The thing is, these are brand questions. And when you involve customers in content creation, you expose yourself to all the variety of your customers’ senses of what your brand is all about, from regional variation to variation in taste and preference.

It’s messy. And yes, you have to exercise control. But a degree of openness is also critical, and not only because people won’t participate in a system they perceive as restricting their self-expression. Online community and social media represent a tremendous opportunity to give customers an emotional stake in the brand, a sense of ownership that will increase value at the far end of the funnel—increasing loyalty and generating word of mouth advocacy.

Craft your policies—both outward-facing in community settings and inward-facing for managing your own company’s social media activity—not with the mindset that you need to restrict activity or restrain creative self-expression, but with the mindset that you need to enable creativity and empower participants. I think of it as analogous to sports: The rules are there to make the game safe, fair, and fun—not to keep people from playing.

Where to Start? 20 Questions for Corporate Social Media

2009-11-19T15:48:33-08:00

Our social media engagements typically start with some kind of assessment, with varying degrees of formality and scope. We have an internal list of questions we use to plan these assessments, some of which are more relevant and important for a given engagement than others. Here they are:

1. Have you formalized the goals, KPIs, and reporting for your social media activities?

This gives us a sense of the degree to which social media efforts are aligned with the business, as well as the current state of listening, analysis, and reporting.

2. Do you know who’s talking about you online, what they’re saying, and the scope of their influence?

Most (though not all) companies I’ve worked with have a general sense of what’s being said about them online. Typically, the past year, this sense is mainly anecdotal. In the next year I expect to see much more systematic, sophisticated, and analytical listening. But if you’re not there yet, you’re not alone.

3. How effectively are you able to respond?

Yes, this begs the question of whether a business is responding at all. For those who are, the question of degree of effectiveness can be a stumper. The real question here is: How do you know how effective you are (see #1)?

4. What technology tools are you using to monitor social media activity around your brand / product / service?

People really are surprisingly resourceful when it comes to using free tools to listen online. Even for businesses without a sophisticated listening platform in place, a conversation about the tools they’re using tells us a lot about what they care about and are (or aren’t yet) able to measure.

5. Which groups and individuals are informally involved in social media activities?

Once you start walking around asking people, the variety here can be surprising. Typically corporate social media efforts emerge out of PR, Marketing, or Customer Service. But ad hoc efforts are very common, and there’s usually something important driving them. Building out a strong program requires accommodating, supporting, and enabling ad hoc efforts.

6. Whose job description includes it, and who has overall responsibility?

As you might guess, the answer here last year was very often “nobody.” Next year we’ll see a shift toward the guerilla social media people formalizing their roles and management recognizing the need for coordination and leadership. And yes, this question can set off turf wars. Tread lightly.

7. Have you defined a corporate policy for engaging with customers through social media?

If not, better get on it. Talking early to legal / brand / compliance, especially in regulated industries, always saves frustration later.

8. In what third-party venues do you have a presence?

This always yields surprises. “None…. Well, oh yeah, I guess we do have the Facebook thingie. And someone in marketing has been posting our ads to YouTube.” Or: “Marketing is in charge of our Twitter accounts. Except for the ones they use in customer service. And Dale down in R&D is a total Twitter fanatic.”

9. How well are those efforts coordinated?

Yes, more question-begging. Most often, efforts across social networks, blogs, and media sharing sites are not coordinated. Maybe, just maybe, they should be.

10. What is your brand’s online personality?

This one is a great conversation starter. It’s really about understanding how to show up in social media (hint: not with offers, and not with campaign messages). This topic is really about starting to think about how the people representing the brand should show up in social settings—authentically, as people, but as people not only representing but also enacting the brand and its character. I like to use the example of our client NAU. They make sustainably-developed clothing, and they blog not about their clothing products but about sustainability, outdoor recreation, and social action—the passions that are at the emotional core of their brand. A while back they posted, for example, a video of people moving an entire Portland, OR household by bicycle. Awesome. You want to subscribe, to follow, to befriend them.

11. How consistently do your social media efforts embody the character of the brand?

This is really a question about governance. How organized are you? Do you have a system in place to manage customer interaction across touch points? Is the system in use?

12. Where do your customers spend time online? What content do they create?

Market research typically tells us a lot about where customers spend time online. What it typically doesn’t tell us is very much about what they’re doing—So 40% of your customers check Facebook daily. That’s good to know, but to really drive action, you need to understand whether they’re there socially, professionally, or both. Whether they’re using it to market their services, keep in touch with Granny (oh yes, Granny is definitely on there), or what. They’re on Twitter, good—but what are they talking about? Whom are they following?

13. What are their preferred information sources, and how do they consume them?

What’s the information ecosystem your customers tap? Who are the influencers? What do they read? Blogs, newspapers, Digg? Are they looking at web pages, RSS feeds? Are they reading on mobile? Are they sharing things they find? Which things? With whom?

14. Where are their relationships?

Whom do your customers interact with online? Through what channels—IM, email, blog post commentary, Flickr photostreams? On social networks? Twitter? Do they use different channels for different kinds of relationships? Which ones, and what kinds?

15. What are you doing to enable customer participation on your own properties?

Do you have an email contact form buried in your footer? Or a p2p support forum? Corporate blogs? Can customers comment? Review? Rate? Can they interact with each other? Create content and add it? Suggest or vet ideas? Do they have a stake in your next version? What value can they create for each other, and how can you enable it?

16. How does your organization interact with customers online?

Can your customers contact you? How? Simply being reachable is a great first step. The next step is to proactively engage customers who need support, to reach out to your customers for feedback and ideas, and to create opportunities for customer collective intelligence to create business intelligence.

17. How do you capture business intelligence from those conversations?

Social media listening has a major difference from behavioral web analytics: It’s a two-way conversation, and it’s not just about what people do. It’s also about what they say, and how they feel.

18. What is the process for making your business intelligence actionable?

Intelligence is useless without action. But the challenges in actionablizing (ha!) business intelligence are often really substantial. How do you get the right bits and pieces to the people who can take action? This question is really about escalation, delegation, roles and responsibilities, and workflow. To make the most of what you know, you need definition around how you’re going to do something about it, who’s responsible, and how success gets measured and reported.

19. Have you monetized the value of your social media efforts?

I’ll be honest. The answer here is always no. Social media ROI is one thing, and monetized estimates of the impact of social media activities are another. ROI is great, and showing ROI in social media is absolutely possible to do. The problem is that a large portion of the payoff in social media happens over the long term and is measured in, for example, lifetime customer value and word of mouth—neither of which show up on your quarterly balance sheets.

20. Estimated the financial impact on lifetime customer value or word of mouth?

We do have a very advanced approach to this, but it’s a subject for another post. Essentially the idea is to be really smart about some monetized estimates of the value of certain measurable activities, then validate and refine those estimates over time.

Naturally, we don’t typically get these questions answered by sitting down with the marketing people for an hour and just asking. We basically never ask these questions in these words. A huge part of the assessment is getting time in conversation with the right people in the first place, and talking with them about their jobs, their goals, satisfactions, and frustrations. We use a combination of interviewing approaches including contextual inquiry and appreciative inquiry, and a fair amount of intuition and sneaking around. In other words, it’s not a mechanical process.

But I hope you (you few who’ve read all the way to the bottom of this post) find this list useful, and I’d really love to hear your thoughts about it. Anything missing? Anything off the mark?

Where to Start? 20 Questions for Corporate Social Media

2009-11-19T15:44:18-08:00

1. Have you formalized the goals, KPIs, and reporting for your social media activities?

This gives us a sense of the degree to which social media efforts are aligned with the business, as well as the current state of listening, analysis, and reporting.

2. Do you know who’s talking about you online, what they’re saying, and the scope of their influence?

3. How effectively are you able to respond?

4. What technology tools are you using to monitor social media activity around your brand / product / service?

5. Which groups and individuals are informally involved in social media activities?

6. Whose job description includes it, and who has overall responsibility?

7. Have you defined a corporate policy for engaging with customers through social media?

If not, better get on it. Talking early to legal / brand / compliance, especially in regulated industries, always saves frustration later.

8. In what third-party venues do you have a presence?

9. How well are those efforts coordinated?

Yes, more question-begging. Most often, efforts across social networks, blogs, and media sharing sites are not coordinated. Maybe, just maybe, they should be.

10. What is your brand’s online personality?

11. How consistently do your social media efforts embody the character of the brand?

This is really a question about governance. How organized are you? Do you have a system in place to manage customer interaction across touch points? Is the system in use?

12. Where do your customers spend time online? What content do they create?

13. What are their preferred information sources, and how do they consume them?

14. Where are their relationships?

15. What are you doing to enable customer participation on your own properties?

16. How does your organization interact with customers online?

17. How do you capture business intelligence from those conversations?

18. What is the process for making your business intelligence actionable?

19. Have you monetized the value of your social media efforts?

20. Estimated the financial impact on lifetime customer value or word of mouth?

But I hope you (you few who’ve read all the way to the bottom of this post) find this list useful, and I’d really love to hear your thoughts about it. Anything missing? Anything off the mark?

ZAAZ Needs a Senior Social Media Strategist

2009-11-10T14:40:05-08:00

Updated: Now recruiting for FTE as well as freelancers.

SENIOR SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIST

This position is located in Seattle at ZAAZ World Headquarters (no relocation).

Responsibilities:

Help define and execute overall social media strategy, including onsite communities, brand campaigns in social media, product and service concepts, and more. Develop plans for the social media marketing mix. Consult on new media developments. Collaborate with account teams to identify opportunities for clients in social media and with creative directors to conceive and execute creative ideas. Marketing mentality a must. Collaboration crucial. Passionate + pragmatic = perfect. A challenging role for a thought-leading visionary who wants to help redefine how businesses use the online channel.

Required Skills:

5-7 years online strategic planning, product management, and/or marketing experience.

Experience implementing online community/web 2.0/social media efforts on behalf of brands, ideation through execution.

Familiarity with social media tools, listening platforms, internal operations and community management.

Conversant in SEO/SEM, web analytics, web technology, mobile campaigns, community, creative/brand.

User-centric thinker.

Experience being client facing.

Good communication skills, both verbal and written and comfortable presenting.

Likes fun.

Additional Desired Skills:

Agency experience

About ZAAZ

Have a question? Someone else is probably wondering the same thing. Ask in the comment thread.

Too Much Marketing

2009-11-06T16:35:49-08:00

I really like David Armano’s Conversation Starter post from earlier this week with predicted trends in social media for next year. In particular, his first point hits on exactly what I think is going to be the key to success for marketers in social media:

1. Social media begins to look less social
With groups, lists and niche networks becoming more popular, networks could begin to feel more "exclusive." Not everyone can fit on someone's newly created Twitter list and as networks begin to fill with noise, it's likely that user behavior such as "hiding" the hyperactive updaters that appear in your Facebook news feed may become more common. Perhaps it's not actually less social, but it might seem that way as we all come to terms with getting value out of our networks — while filtering out the clutter.

OK, I actually think the header on Armano’s paragraph is, as he hints, actually the opposite of the truth—the way I’d say it is that “social media begins to look less anti-social!”

But the real point Armano is making is spot on. Social channels are too noisy, and as more and more marketers start to proactively reach out to consumers online next year, and as listening technologies are more widely adopted, we’ll see a dramatic increase in, well, spam.

I made a joke on Twitter recently about going to back to grad school. I was, I think, really obviously joking. But in minutes, I had four @replies from universities plugging their Master’s programs. Yikes!

We are fast approaching a time when public online social venues are saturated with listening marketers, responding to every mention of everything related to their brands, products, and services. It’s easy to anticipate Twitter’s @ channel, for example, becoming essentially useless.

Armano is right to predict an increase in user behaviors that enable them to filter the noise. But I also think we’ll see a rise in demand for and sophistication of privacy controls (and even products—like the “social router” I once pitched to Nancy White after her talk here at ZAAZ), as well as an increase in the importance of private networks and communities.

What’s a marketer to do?

Create value, that’s what. Next year will be a year for opt-in marketing—the focus will be on creating content and services people want to use. Heads up, folks, people don’t want you to “engage them” in “conversation.”