• Developing a baseline program – Specify a structured program built on proven social media strategies, like blogging, that will deliver measurable value. Program definition includes infrastructure, business processes, and staff training.
• Campaign support – Assist the rest of the marketing team to support campaigns using the baseline program. Develop strategies to support camapaigns outside of the baseline program using knowledge and experience gained through R&D.
• Research and Development – Systematic evaluation of new tools, services, and networks to vet new strategies for application in the baseline program, campaigns, and further R&D.
• Subject Matter Expert – Assist management with the development of policies, tools, materials, and training for the global organization. Provide Subject Matter Expert support to consulting services, engineering, and product teams on social media mechanics.

We discussed the job description and title for quite a bit before selecting Senior Manager Social Media Marketing. At the end of the day, I work for the marketing department so my success is measured in terms of branding and lead generation. I was reluctant to use Social Media Marketing because there are so many people out there giving that title a bad name. It’s got a bit of a smarmy reputation for overly aggressive sales tactics and Big Brother style stalking of customers. We considered the title Community Manager, but that role is really about caring for a community owned by the company, such as a developer’s forum or a support community. So, we decided to call a spade a spade because trying to call the position anything else felt like an attempt to skirt around the negative connotations.

Social media marketing is in it’s infancy and struggling with reputation problems akin to the early days of email marketing and direct marketing before that. My goal is to help bring respect to the title by demonstrating that companies and customers can have a harmonious interaction through social media that helps both parties happily exchange value (fair money for desired products/services). My lofty goal is to show that social media is currently the best venue to achieve and scale truly consensual value exchanges. My experience tells me that informed consent is the most sustainable business model. I believe that consensual value exchange is the result of good communication and that it provides the optimal outcome for both parties.

I’m super excited to take on this challenge along side an energized Webtrends team. Wish us luck!

In case you don’t know, I’m a very social guy and love Portland, so it was tough for me to work remotely. I also want to focus on a single client to really see what kind of a program and results I’m capable of. So it’s time for the next chapter in my life. I don’t have any announcements just yet on what I’ll be doing next, but I have some discussions going that should lead to an announcement next week. I can say that one thing I’m really looking forward to is spending more time at local events supporting the groups my friends organize.

Lifestream

As I have become more integrated with communities locally and afar, the types of interaction I have are much more diverse than blog posts. Over the Holidays, I set up Sweetcron to aggregate my online activity into my lifestream.

Blogging

I’ve learned a ton about how and why I blog since I set up my first blog. When I started, I owned my own company and I was blogging about topics that I thought would increase traffic for landing new business; in other words for marketing. Well, I don’t own my own business anymore and I help a ton of people with blogging these days, so I’m not feeling passionate about writing blog posts to be link bait for potential customers anymore. That doesn’t mean I’m not still interested in blogging about my industry, in fact I’m going to write those posts for the business I support now, Voce Nation. On this blog, I’m going to talk more about the things I care about like Portland, the Ducks, RC helicopters, tequila and such.

Home page

I am planning to make my home page more of a gateway to my online presence—links to the various places I have accounts online, my lifestream feed, and some basic “about me” info. I’m planning to move my blog to http://www.justinkistner.com/blog/ as blogging becomes a part of my activity rather than all of my activity.

Beer & Blog

I ended up pulling out of the Legion of Tech elections for their Board of Directors to focus more on Beer and Blog. I didn’t feel like I was going to be able to give them the time commitment they deserve to get from someone else. LoT rocks and I will still help them get sponsorships, attend their events, and help in every way I can because I think what they are doing for Portland is unique and special. I attribute them with the reawakening of the Portland tech scene!

Beer and Blog is hoping to bring that same DIY community spirit to more cities throughout 2009. We’re also planning to do more workshops to bring additional people into the community.

What I am looking at is how far can a person go in automating his social media. Obviously whatever I come up with while interesting in a geeky way is only going to be a shadow of the real me. However I hope to make him quite fun.

I believe social interaction could have rule engines. Etiquette is programmable.

via Ethan

“Sen. Obama is a classic liberal with an outdated economic agenda. We should take that agenda on in a robust manner. As a party we should not and must not stand by as the small amount of haters in our society question whether he is as American as the rest of us. Shame on them and shame on us if we allow this to take hold.”

via Politico.com

During my WordCamp presentation, I shared that the WordPress bookmarklet, called Press This, was the Jesus. I use it for two primary reasons:

1. To quickly create microposts, and
2. To reblog from one blog to another.

I use password-protected WordPress installs to coordinate blogging activity with other people. I recently converted Press This for use in a theme so we can easily reblog anything shared in that back channel. The bookmarklet works by passing data through the URL. So, to add Press This to a theme, you simply a link to your theme formatted like the URLs spit out by the bookmarklet, but using WordPress template tags to populate the content. The receiving WordPress install will process the link created by both the bookmarklet and the reblog link exactly the same, which is to spawn your blog’s admin in a new window with the content prepopulated. Now, you have a chance to remove any sensitive content, add context, and any other edits you need to complete your reblog.

See, I told you Press This was the Jesus

via birdahonk

Evidence that the party is coming to a close:

• Yahoo! merger
• Kleiner-Perkins announcing they won’t invest in 2.0 any longer
• Failed economy pushing for tech that will maximize productivity

The rise of meta data and the birth of context

Web 1.0 connected people to content. Web 2.0 connected people to each other. Web 3.0 will push contextualized content to people. Some are calling it the semantic web. It has to do with distribution like RSS, SaaS, and APIs. Application architecture is overtaking the idea of a “page” as the basic building block of the web.

The economic impact of this is the loss in inventory as pages disappear in favor of applications, dashboards, and aggregators. The coming wave of Web 2.0 failures is due to their dependence on ad supported business models. Ad revenue models only makes sense if you can get people to spend time on your site. Unfortunately for 2.0 companies, decreased ad spending by businesses hurt by the economic downturn will accelerate the distribution of 3.0 technology. So now comes service based business models. Subscription models replace desktop EULAs and they are billed from API usage, SaaS subscription dues, and so forth.

What the world needs now is context

The logical next question is what services do people need? We don’t need help creating content. We don’t need help connecting with other people. In a word, we need help with context. More specifically, we need help with the following:

• Data portability and system interoperability
• Information overload
• Identity and reputation management
• Help spotting and acting on emergent value that comes from the network effect

The last bullet is a really hot space for innovation. Just today, Gil Yehuda wrote on the new ZD Net Forrester blog:

“Although Web 2.0 tools present information, their use becomes increasingly more interesting when we look at the network of people who generate and care about the information.”

Man, ain’t that the truth! The more people interact in a networked fashion, the more meta data that is available to help automate contextualization and spot emerging trends. We need that intelligence piped to users so they can quickly, and easily take action on it—preferably from a mobile device and with automated management. And, since we can’t remove people from the picture, we need etiquette built in. Someone is going to make a killing from an etiquette engine with a good API.

Services that provide and aid in the management of social intelligence will be of strong value to the Enterprises, which is who has the money to pay for said innovation. The tech developed during this period will eventually trickle down to SMBs and the rest of the market much in the same way mainframe tech from 20 years ago, like virtualization, is doing today.

• Rambling thought dumps
• The “FYI” atop a monster string of replys
• The CYA email that the sender incorrectly assessed needed to be CCed to you
• Noisy DLs

So, if unstructured email is a distraction, what’s the solution?

Ultimately email is just a way to communicate. It’s not the one to blame. It is the lack of structure that allows people to ramble off topic, play “I didn’t get that email” games, and forward long conversations. IBM and its clients have known this for years, which is why they’ve earned and defended market share with their Lotus software. Lotus added much of the structure around email that was needed to make it productive.

But, mail, electronic or otherwise, isn’t a silver communication bullet. Sometimes you need to IM someone. Sometimes you want to share something, but not with a particular person. Sometimes you want to have a group discussion that is easier to follow than a chain of “reply all” emails.

Consumer social media burst into businesses to fill these other communication needs. To those of us used to consumer social media, we saw a ton of potential applications and value in bringing these tools to work. But, wise naysayers kept pressing for a better explanation. They wanted to know how these communication tools were going to serve a purpose. They didn’t want to invite another distraction inside the firewall.

What’s the fear of microblogging in the enterprise? That it will be a distraction.

What’s the fear of social networking within the enterprise? That people will be goofing off instead of working, ergo distracted.

Slowly, the reality has set it for me. They are right to be concerned! If Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t help a business structure their communication, they can’t help workers be less distracted. If we introduce a bevy of content management tools (social or not) without some context and attention management, we’re just trading seats on the Titanic.

What can we do about our distractedness?

There are some tools available today that can help a person reduce their distraction. Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that today, it requires a ton of elbow grease to manage your attention and to stay on top of your communication. The current wave of communication innovation started in the consumer sector, and has only recently spread to businesses. Unfortunately, the communication needs for a business are different than that of a social scene. Vendors have popped up to meet the unique needs of a business, but it’s taking a few years because their needs are different than consumers—both drastically (needs lots of development time) and subtly (hard to recognize).

Individuals need an unstructured, flat playground in order to pursue life, liberty, and property, which seems to make people happy. Businesses, on the other hand, have a mission that requires some structure in order be a productive, which seems to make them money and that makes them happy. So, when flat, unstructured tools emerged unplanned within businesses, it caused some commotion from the needs disconnect.

Collaboration vendors have been busy focusing on interoperability and integration for the past couple of years, which is necessary because the innovation we really need requires this foundation to be in place. At the moment, we can buy many tools to create and receive content, but little to nothing to help make sense of it, much less automation assistance. However, that is changing.

2009 is going to be an interesting year for attention management tools in the enterprise. Socialtext is working on some innovative stuff with Signals, which provides automated context updates. Several vendors offer dashboards now, which allows workers to focus on the info that helps them do their jobs. Platform players are separating from the crowded pack of point solutions, and it will be interesting to see how the market shapes up by the end of ‘09. There’s also a divergence starting between vendors focusing on internal communication and the ones focusing on external communication needs. I think we’ll see the ones working on the consumer social media loose ground to the ones working on meeting the unique needs of a business. Copying and pasting consumer social media inside the firewall won’t a market leader create in the coming year.

So what?

What if we weren’t so distracted? What if our we had more time to be productive? What if we had that 28% of our day back? Imagine what we could do with that time! Can you think of something else that we could solve that would give nearly everyone a quarter to a third more time everyday?