Reaching out for help

The subject above says it all.

Whether you have a question about Twitter strategies or Facebook page creation or generating business with Yelp–or anything in between–I am confident every person reading this sentence has at least one question about social media or online marketing that is dying to be asked. Since I’m no expert, it can’t hurt to get my take, can it?

How can I help you today?

Leave a comment below and I’ll either reply in kind or, if appropriate, I’ll write a longer in-depth blog post about you and your question. Every question will be answered.

Thanks. Have a happy day!

Photo credit: assbach

Google announced their intent last night to build a new operating system for netbooks and mobile devices. Set for release in 2010, pundits wonder if Microsoft, Apple, and Linux will survive.

Many people are sharing information about the news. But they’re saying the same thing.

Bloggers are echoing each other. Twitter’s no better.

Echo chamber of Google operating system announcement

Without dissing freedom of expression and sharing the news in your own words, does there come a point when another blog post (in long form or in short Twitter form) about an issue is one too many?

If companies treated customers as humans, would advertising exist?

Such is a question posed by Ross Popoff-Walker in a fascinating article at TalentZoo.com. He argues advertising needs reform–through user experience design.

For decades we’ve been saturated with marketing messages from all angles and channels. Messaging that is surface-y rather than cerebral, comical rather than emotional, and usually based on popular cultural symbols, rather than deeper human truths. What we really long for as individuals are meaningful connections — emotional, personal, and significant moments.

Imagine I like to buy widgets and you sell them.

Forget about social media. Despite everything your marketing directors and IT consultants told you about creating a Facebook page or listening to Twitter chatter or building websites, you’ll never find me since I don’t use those channels.

How will you find me so you can sell me those widgets I want to buy?

Do you advertise? I don’t mean the Yellow Pages or municipal tourism brochures. I don’t even refer to the very successful counter-top business directories seen at diners and local grease spoons that the kitchen plate might be served on.

How about billboard ads? And, no, I don’t mean those mammoth highway signs that I whiz past at 70 miles an hour. I refer to relevant advertising, like what I wrote about last fall regarding television.

One example you could use to sell me your widgets is straight out of Singapore, where scientists are developing gender-tracking software for merchandise panels. (Think of an LCD screen that rotates advertisements in Times Square, but something you’d see in a supermarket or an indoor mall.)

The idea is a panel could be outfitted with a camera that detects facial pixels and, depending on the gender looking at the panel, presents relevant ads. If you’re Procter and Gamble and want to sell men’s deodorant and women’s body soap to the respective genders, you now can.

It’s the same stuff I wrote five months ago about camera-outfitted merchandise panels:

The next time you enter a mall, health club, gym, or supermarket, pay attention to LCD screens with ads, which may be using technology called face-based audience measurement to track your gender with an accuracy of 90 percent.

Imagine selected items in your cart are also seen by the hidden camera. Eeriness aside, if you’re a woman and you always buy milk, eggs, and butter by certain manufacturers, wouldn’t it be effective merchandising on behalf of the company to save you time and stock gender-friendly items in the same place?

If the concept of smart billboard advertising is familiar to you, National Public Radio’s Laura Sydell reported in 2002 about a California advertising program that tracked automobile “antenna leakage” and displayed relevant ads on adjacent billboards. (I can’t find links about the program today, so if you know something I don’t, please leave a comment below.)

I’m happy with smart advertising if it is relevant to me. If you’re a company and you send me pieces of direct mail, I’ll glance at it for 30 seconds and toss it in my recycling bin. I rarely watch TV commercials. And web banners are losing eyeballs. But meaningful advertisements, such as turning on a TV or walking through a mall or driving past a billboard and seeing something that based on xyz criteria, may attract my attention and lead me to buy (or blog about liking).

Treat me as a number and I 99% guarantee I won’t buy from you. Treat me as a name and I’m halfway there. Make me relevant to your ad campaign and you have my vote of confidence.

Guy Kawasaki, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist (and widely known for marketing the Macintosh computer in 1984), responded to me last year when I asked him to explain the difference between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0:

Guy may as well compare Web 2.0 and Government 2.0–or Enterprise 2.0 and Government 2.0. Or any version with any other version.

To Steve Radick’s credit, I agree there is a difference between implementing social media for business and for government, but the forms of social media used in both so-called Enterprise 2.0 and Government 2.0 communities are the same. We’re still talking about Facebook pages for organizations and agencies. We’re still talking about networking on LinkedIn and collaborating on Twitter. Even the GovLoop community has members of the business community–and there are groups therein that meld both sectors.

If we agree there is a paradigm shift occurring in business and government, why create versions? Why confuse the populace? If I walk down to the local playground and randomly ask parents how they’d define Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and Government 2.0, what would they say? I can guess.

What if I asked the parents to differentiate Business to Business, Business to Consumer, Government to Government, and Government to Citizen? I’ll hazard another guess.

John Geraci at O’Reilly Radar inspired this blog post. He writes about four processes that ensure government transparency–Government to Citizen, Citizen to Government, Government to Government, and Citizen to Citizen.

I wonder if he’s sauteeing bull shiitake.

Jared Spool wrote about design similarities between business and consumer communities in August 2006:

One of the great myths of the web is there is a difference between business-to-consumer (B2C) sites and business-to-business (B2B) sites. But, having looked into this for the last ten years, we can conclusively say you won’t find any difference in how people behave on one site or the other.

This is because, whether interacting with B2C or B2B, it’s still an individual person doing the interacting. And people are people. They don’t change their behaviors when they are doing something work-related than when they are doing something personal.

If John agrees that government and business operate similarly online (after all, Government 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are but pretty buzzwords with the same definitions of Web 2.0), look at Francois Gossieaux’ perspective from May 2009 why B2B and B2C remain communities about people:

When it comes to communities – especially successful ones – there is no difference between the two. The main interactions in communities do not happen between businesses and other businesses, or between businesses and consumers – they happen between humans and other humans. And that is no different in B2B than in B2C environments.

Francois could have written about G2G and G2C.

With the four pillars of a civic system “properly developed and engaged,” John writes government leaders would see “increases in efficiency, greater innovation and rate of change, better adaptability, and greater resilience.”

I argue agencies and citizens are already ensuring government transparency and will continue to create–and demand–government change. When Jared, Francois, and Guy agree differentiating the terminology is a crock, why is O’Reilly Radar suggesting we need more?

John’s on the money by describing how civic society will flourish–but it will flourish regardless how we define it, so why not keep things simple? Let’s stop creating new definitions and defining new processes. Let’s stop the spin.

I don’t need to tell you why Barack Obama won the 41st United States presidency. But are you aware of the unique ways his campaign team commandeered the victory?

If you participated on my.barackobama.com, you helped the team be responsible for:

• Sending over 1 billion emails to over 13 million email addresses
• Signing up over 1 million SMS subscribers
• Planning over 200,000 offline events via the web
• Organizing 35,000 volunteer groups
• Viewing 14.5 million hours of YouTube content
• Raising $770 million in funds

As the second part of yesterday’s blog post to boost your business, I share with you six tips for success gleaned from President Obama at the Enterprise 2.0 conference I attended last month.

While Obama wasn’t there, Jascha Franklin-Hodge was. He’s the chief technology officer and founding partner of Blue State Digital, the web agency responsible for designing my.barackobama.com and future website iterations after his election.

With credit to Ben Kepes who summarized the notes I scribbled, here are six business lessons the President would tell you:

1. Drive Action – be true to medium, think about the use case
2. Be Authentic – don’t do press release to email, send email from a person within the organisation, ensure a consistent voice
3. Create Ownership – turn users into advocates, crucial to turn people into active rather than passive participants, connect people with each other, solicit ideas from the community
4. Be Relevant
5. Create a Strong, Open brand – consistent, professional, polished
6. Measure Everything – emails, online advertising, engagement, fundraising

Chad Capellman elaborates with quotes and reflections.

Of note, do you remember Sarah Palin’s Republican National Committee speech? After two hours, the campaign team emailed their network with a call for contributions. Within 24 hours, $11 million was raised, indicating the relevance of quick responsiveness.

If you’re a business, how quickly do you respond to actions undertaken by your competition? Shall I remind you of the Motrin campaign gone wrong? Did Advil have nothing to say?

Photo credit: Alex Dunne

The advent of social technologies and web tools are transforming the business landscape.

It used to be that business leaders assembled in conference rooms at 9 a.m. to talk about their competition and decide how to develop and design the next product. Today’s business leaders, cognizant they can’t generate sales leads without customers–many of whom are complaining and offering suggestions 24/7–are engaging with their audiences and creating social software tools and online communities to crowdsource and improve upon.

Perusing Wikipedia’s definition of Enterprise 2.0, that’s clunky.

As I indicated two weeks ago, if Government 2.0 involves involves using social media and the real-time web to make a smarter and informed government, then Enterprise 2.0 illustrates why corporate missions are in a state of flux. Namely, E2.0 describes the processes that Forrester Research’s George Colony has argued for years: business technology needs to be the new face of entrepreneurialism.

By means of a case study, here’s Dominique Hind’s presentation on Dell’s Ideastorm:

Techweb granted me a media badge to attend last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference. I met many fascinating people who I previously knew electronically only–from Comcast’s digital director Frank Eliason to Allysis’ president Ethan Yarbrough (see his guest post here)–but I didn’t learn much.

Gil Yehuda is writing a great series about his learning experience at the conference–here’s his first part–and while I scribbled an assortment of quotes and phrases to take away and expand upon, I found many of the presenters either repeated each other or spoke at length about their companies and little about their industries.

Whether I attend a conference as a speaker or blogger, I like to learn something in person that I can’t learn by stringing keywords together in a search engine. Yet the latter is what I experienced. My notes will be the subject of tomorrow’s blog post…

Lady Liberty is tweeting today.

From the laptop of whom I assume is a National Park Service ranger stationed at the Statue of Liberty National Monument, I see tweets in the form of broadcast messages, replies, and links to Flickr-hosted photos in celebration of the first visitors to the crown since 9/11.

From the Crown

Katelyn Sabochik, the new media director for the U.S. Department of the Interior, wrote on the White House blog yesterday and announced today’s activities.

She pointed us to the Statue of Liberty on Twitter, where the Lady’s rangers are live-tweeting the celebration and sharing thoughts from her visitors.

From the Crown

From the Crown

I think this is a wonderful way to celebrate Independence Day–and it led me to inquire about other ways to learn about and celebrate America’s heritage.

Two clicks later, I discovered I could sign the Declaration of Independence. Check out my signature in the bottom left:

Declaration of Independence

Seth Godin doesn’t want gifts on his birthday. He wants you to make a difference.

On my birthday, it would make me really happy if people started a project, launched an idea or engaged in a difficult interaction that made something good happen.

On America’s birthday, I think every parent with access to a computer should invite their children to do what I did and sign the 1776 document. I think you should, too.

If the framers of the Constitution were alive today, I don’t think they’d want me to watch fireworks and eat a hamburger. That is, I can’t envision them doing it. I think they’d want me to celebrate Independence Day by making a difference, like what the NPS is doing with Twitter at Liberty Island.