The Constructing Social team has been hard at work for the past four years to come up with a good social media knock-knock joke. After hundreds of hours of exhaustive research and testing, we have come to the shocking conclusion: there is no funny social media knock-knock joke.

The Constructing Social Lab sheepishly presents our attempts at social media knock-knock jokes:

Knock – Knock
Who’s There?
Sacha
Sacha who?
Sacha fuss over these green Twitter avatars!

Knock – Knock
Who’s there?
Aaron
Aaron who?
Aaron you going to make a @aaronstrout joke? (feel free to replace with @jowyang or @chrisbrogan)

Knock – Knock
Who’s there?
Sabina
Sabina who?
Sabina long time since you updated your blog!

Knock – Knock
Who’s there?
Usher
Usher who?
Usher wish you would follow me back on Twitter

Knock – Knock
Who’s there?
Value
Value who?
Value be my Facebook friend?

Knock – Knock
Who’s there?
Veal Chop
Veal Chop who?
Veal Chop around on Craig’s List and eBay for good deals

Knock – Knock
Who’s there?
Venice
Venice who?
Venice Google going to aquire Twitter?

Happy Friday all!  Please feel free to add funny social media knock-knocks in the comments!

/Colin

Social media creates a mountainous pile of data on a daily basis.  How do you handle this data of followers, subscribers, friends, views and more?  While there are a ton of great tools including Radian6, Techrigy and Crimson Hexigon – I wanted to talk more about overall goals.

So let’s break down the path from a single piece of data as it makes its way to what will hopefully become wisdom within your gray matter.

Data: The straight facts.  These are in and of themselves pretty useless.  I have 3,233 followers on Twitter.  3,000 people read my RSS feed, etc.  So what?  How can these data points really help you?  They can’t, move on.

Information: When you process data, such as putting it in the context of time-lines or relation to competitors, it becomes information.  Now I know that I have 30% more followers or my RSS subscribers have increased by 40%.  This gives perspective and when combined with knowing what new actions that I did to make this happen.  Information enables you to see what is happening around you and make sense of your actions.

Knowledge: Building on these information patterns and applying them to new products and situations takes knowledge.  Knowledge is the the building and understanding of the information over time.  For example; if campaign x increased twitter followers by Y and blog RSS readers by Z, then you have the knowledge to predict likely outcomes of campaigns for new products.

Wisdom:

“Never mistake knowledge for wisdom; one helps you make a living, the other helps you make a life.”

- Sandra Carey

Wisdom, the accumulation of knowledge over time- this is what will set you and your organization apart.   The wisdom that you have – your collection of knowledge- is unique in the entire universe, no other single being has the same collection.  Your solutions and ideas are based on a set of wisdom that is completely unique and valuable on this planet.  How are you using your wisdom, your collection of life experiences to push things to the next level for you and your organization?

I am writing this because I think that social media often gets caught up in the tools.  Wisdom and success is not about the tools.  Tools help us to process the data and information to build knowledge and can accelerate wisdom.  I intentionally used a picture of Data, the humanoid robot from Star Trek.  He knew the most on the ship, but was he the wisest?

How are you leveraging your wisdom to succeed today?

/colin

Draw Chris!

Do you think you have what it takes to become a social media expert?  Do you long for people only knowing your Twitter handle and not your name? Does your family bore you and are you longing for the more exciting world of Facebook, Twitter and blogging?  Were you often the last one picked on teams at school? Our simple test will quickly determine if you have what it takes to be a social media rock star!

Grab a pencil and paper now and see if you can draw Tippy (AKA Chris Brogan).  If you can, you probably have exactly what we are looking for.  Simpley try your best to copy our model expert and place your drawing in an envelope with your name, address and $50 check for processing made out to Constructing Social Institute.  The team at Constructing Social will then carefully review to see if you have the social media right stuff.

What are we looking for in our social media experts?  First: $5o.  Second: gullibility Third: what we call a wonderfully sheepish mentality.

Graduates of our program have gone on to great things such as the Boxborough, MA Fairgrounds Asst. Director of Social Media and most recently the head of social media at the Tunis-Ellicks House in New Vernon, NJ.

Happy Friday,

/colin

In a Constructing Social exclusive, we have received word from our Kentucky affiliate that Senator Al Gore has filed for trademark protection of the term ‘Internet’.  Following this week’s announcement that Twitter(TM)’s co-founder’s Biz Stone is trademarking the term Tweet, the former  Presidential candidate and well known founder of the Internet is capitalizing on what is sure to be a growing trend throughout the high technology industry.

Spokesperson for Mr. Gore’s technology initiatives, Jon O’Heard provided the following detail:

Senator Gore’s contribution to the infrastructure that we all take for granted every day should be more broadly recognized.  While we have no intention of going after companies that are using our term, frankly, we are very excited by the revenue prospects of suing their pants off!  Similar to Twitter, we have been searching for a source of revenue and this seems like an easy goldmine!

While details of Senator Gore’s plans are still emerging reported conversations with all major PC manufactures, Apple, and Microsoft have already begun.

Happy Friday!

-colin

Over the past 4 years I have been thinking about how to get individuals involved with and participating within a community. It is not an easy thing to get a group of individuals comfortable with your site and each other to the point of participating and caring when they become a true community. While I will continue to learn, I wanted to share what I see as the phases to the development into a community and their participation.

Community Engagement Model

The core concept of the model is pretty simple.  People need to build their trust and loyalty with a community before they will actively engage and care about it.  This model proceeds through phases building on trust where interactions gradually increase in their threshold of interactivity.

The five stages of the community engagement model are:

Launch: Starting well is critical.  Seeding the community with starter content that provides that social proof to incentivize participation is critically important at the beginning.

Awareness: How is your target market hearing of your community?  On a daily basis, I am working on outreach programs for clients to influential bloggers, or connecting via  Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn to individuals in target markets to let them know about community initiatives.  This can also be as simple as ensuring that it is easy to subscribe to your community – either through RSS or e-mail.  These are just a few of many techniques to get your market aware of your community.

Interaction: Once members are aware of a community, you want to ease them into participation; provide many options for how they can contribute.  For many, contributing a unique post that your peers will all be reading (and judging/critiquing) is a threatening thing.  By providing simple and guided ways for visitors to interact with the site such as ratings, polls, or even answers to simple survey questions; participation is limited and not free-form, less threatening, and more inviting.

Participation: When participants are ready to contribute fully, provide a wide range of options while rewarding their behavior appropriately with levels or points.  Ranges of participation options include ideasharing, video/photo uploads, profile building, friending and more.  Acts of participation that you want to encourage in your community should be rewarded with an appropriate recognition system so that members are encouraged to repeat the behaviour (post again) and that others see their recognition and are also encouraged.

Advocates: Advocates in a community help to promote your site and can even help you to manage the community.  Advocate behavior can be encouraged through providing badges that can be displayed on blogs, connections to Facebook pages and other ways for members to connect to external communities.  As with Participation, these are behaviors that should be rewarded through a recognition system.

Moving a community from general awareness through to advocacy is challenging and complex – I have simplified this and in posts over the next few weeks I will review each component.  I also encourage you to read Rachel Happe’s Community Maturity model to think of this in a broader perspective within the organization.

So what has helped you in engaging communities and moving from a group of individuals to true advocates?  I look forward to your comments.

Special thanks to LaSandra Brill for redesigning my model for me! It looks a million times better after she got through with it.

/colin

June 26th, 2009: In a Constructing Social exclusive, we have blown the covers off of the silent passage late Monday of the Future America Re-Investment in Technology Act (FART).  In an extreme abuse of power, several large and powerful congressmen pushed FART through late at night.  The nocturnal passage was alarming and not a single major media outlet detected the Act or its potentially deadly and overpowering impact across America.

Constructing Social is the only news source to ask the American public about the passage or FART and its impact – here is what several had to say:

You will note from the interviews that great social media technologies such as Radian6 and Awareness Networks can help us to not only prevent Acts like FART from passing silently but enable broader discussion of causes and enable us to accurately attribute blame.

Constructing Social encourages you to not sit and let these large congressmen pass FART: call, email or Tweet your local representative today and demand that these congressmen who passed FART be exposed!

Happy Friday Funnies!

/colin

If you enjoyed this – please wish Doug Haslam a Happy Birthday this weekend by supporting his fund raising efforts for Cancer research and cures in the PasMass challenge.

On the planning tab above I keep an active list of great resources for anyone that needs to additional information to justify a new marketing or social media program or for general research purposes. I have made some new updates to the list that I think are pretty interesting:

SOCIAL MEDIA ROI RESOURCES

• Dell’s $3million on Twitter and other Twitter ROI Examples: Great specific examples on Twitter ROI from Dell, Cisco, Pandora – focus on sales and customer support (Read Write Web June 2009)
• Using Cost Per Click For Social Media ROI: Interesting model to calculate some hard numbers for your project – take a hard look at this one! (The Page Wonders, June 2009)

GENERAL SOCIAL MEDIA STATS

• Twitter Just a Blip So Far: Great data from Harris Interactive on Twitter adoption and usage by gender and age (5/2009)
• Women and Social Media Study: Incredibly detailed study on all social media activity of women across all ages – great data on attitudes and motivations.  (BlogHer / Compass April 2009)
• Pew Internet Project Data Memo: Great data on social networking usage by age category (1/2009)
• General Social Media Stats: Nice, clear compilation of stats across blogosphere, Twitter, google and more (Adam Singer, 1/2009)
• Lithium Open vs Closed Community: Great post with stats on participation rates of open vs. closed community (Lithium, 1/2009)
• Jeremiah Owyang’s Stat Collection: Jeremiah does a good job compiling data resources here – great for general use (1/2009)

Again, these are just the recent updates – for the whole list please go to the Planning tab.

/colin

Canton, MA:  Chris Brogan’s New Marketing Lab’s (NML) officially announced today the details of its long rumoured Extreme Social Makeover program.  The program capitalizes on the new vanity trend that Facebook reinforced last week with its vanity URL program.  The NML Extreme Social Makeover program reports to take this make over to an entire new level.

Monty Before Makeover

The Extreme Social Makeover program is designed for individuals that need far more than a vanity URL to entice others into accepting their friend requests.  While many are enjoying the new vanity URLs of Facebook, others can’t take advantage of social networks because their bad looks and general lack of intelligence prevent others from wanting to associate with them in any way.

The NML Extreme Social Makeover team works with these friendless, pathetic individuals and takes over their Facebook, Twitter and other profiles.  The ugly and friendless have the Extreme Social team replace their actual pictures and updates with photographs and updates designed to attract others.  Once an individual has completed a Makover they  suddenly look better and make  dramatically more intelligent statements- thereby boosting friends and followers.

Monty After Makeover

Ford’s Scott Monty spoke of his experience in the Makeover program. “Before the Extreme Social Makeover, I was a Facebook nobody.  It was just like real life, everyone avoided me and didn’t talk to me.  After the makeover, I have have online friends and followers – they may be disappointed when they meet me in person, but it is a start!”  Monty went on to credit the Makeover program with his recent nomination to the Hottest Men on Twitter (congrats Mr. October).

NML reports the following details of the program:

• Replacement of all natural images of your ‘natural’ face with either photoshop enhancements or a model stand-in.
• Updates to all of your Facebook and twitter comments to remove all the dull, pointless messages and replace them with witty and fun comments
• Twitter and Facebook intercepts: NMLs partnership with Facebook and Twitter ensures protects you from comments like:

@scottmonty you look completely different in real life – what’s up with that?

replaced with:

@scottmonty: lookin’ sharp – you been working out?

The service has already been successfully implemented on Justin Levy and Chris Brogan of NML.

Happy Friday!

/colin

I confess, blogging has been an irregular activity for me. While I enjoy it, like most people, it has not been my top priority and I simply can’t produce the volume of Chris Brogan.

A few weeks back I was thinking of a way that I could commit to 2 posts a week and really stick to it.  That was how I came up with the Friday Funnies.  Now, every Friday -I  write (or attempt to) a funny post that pokes fun of social media.  It is a regular weekly theme that I feel comfortable with and that I enjoy.  What really surprised me was the real power of having a regular theme like this can do for both bloggers and readers.  Here is what I have seen so far:

Blogging side:

• Writers block gone: I know what I am going to write about every week.  I have a week to think about every post and I am enjoying it!
• More posts: I don’t want my blog dominated by Friday Funnies so I am forced into making time for at least one additional post per week.
• Enjoying it: this is the best part  - I found a theme that I really enjoy and while I have to force my family to look at it, I am having a blast!

Reader side:

• Repeatable pattern: readers know what to expect on my blog on Fridays.  I have established a pattern.
• Increased readership: because I have a regular pattern traffic which was starting to slump off is now back on the climb!
• Outreach patterns: I can spread this regularly through Twitter and Facebook and have people expect to see it there as well

Summary: If you or your company have a case of blogging constipation – choose a theme that you are passionate about as your blog bran to keep your posting regular!  Both you and your readers will be happy for it!

/colin

Cambridge, MA: Hubspot this week released their state of the Twittersphere report. While the information was eagerly awaited by many, the data analytics team of Constructing Social quickly went to work and overlayed our complex demographic and pyschographic map.

The results are startling: Twitter’s meteoric rise has been caused by ghosts that are trying to communicate with our world.  The graph at the left shows some of our key findings.  While indeed there are many live humans on Twitter, much of the traffic is made of of ghosts and paranormal activity.

Our intense research was supported by following key data points from Hubspot:

• # 75.86% of users have not entered a bio in their profile
• # 68.68% have not specified a location
• # 55.50% are not following anyone
• # 54.88% have never tweeted
• # 52.71% have no followers

The only logical explanation is that these accounts are run by ghosts.

While conducting research, the Constructing Social team was repeatedly interrupted with messages from @realghost.  After some back and forth we were able to have a conversation with @realghost who revealed that Twitter is home to many ghosts because they feel so safe in places that are completely without substance.

Both @god and @satan could not be reached for additional comments to verify these findings.

Happy Friday.

/colin