Concept Hub Inc

The Promise of the Internet, Yesterday and Today

2009-07-12T10:19:04-04:00

by Sherry Heyl,

Not long ago a friend of mine shared some responses from a pre-event survey about social media. Some of the responses stated;

[Social Media] is premature

Our audience is not linked in to this new technology

[Social Media] is an untested business model

Many people continue to look at Social Media as a new online trend. However last night as I was stumbling through the Internet, I came across a video from more than a decade ago that might suggest that social media is actually a component of a maturing World Wide Web.

"They communicate across cultures and continents."

"Suddenly your part of a new mesh of people, programs, archives, ideas"

"If feels a bit like human fellowship, but it's bigger and more precise."

This was the promise of the Internet more than a decade ago. These are not new ideas or new trends. What is new are the tools that make these promises a reality.

Adoption of social media is accelerating at such a rapid pace that no one can really keep track of it. The graph below is taken from Pew Internet which shows the adoption of the Internet itself.

I realized a few years ago that being online meant being impacted if not impacting social media. People were reading user reviews and getting their questions answered on online forums. But in a survey these same people would say they were not in MySpace or reading blogs and therefore were not accurately counted as someone adopting social media. I believe the accelerating trend of social media adoption is much steeper than any survey has displayed. I also have observed that the tools and communities that people are joining have more to do with their personalities and personal objectives than their demographics.

The past week I have been delivering customized training sessions on the various Social Bookmarking tools. I can not stress enough that each tool has a different purpose and therefore a different reason to use them. One of my favorite tools has been Delicious. Delicious is a social bookmarking tool that people are using mostly to save their personal links, as opposed to voting a story up or down like in Digg or Reddit. Because the use of Delicious is mostly driven by personal motives, the consumer insights a marketer can get from the community can be much more authentic than what they would glean from other communities where people are choosing to voice their opinion to their community.

Below is a case study of how we used Delicious 2 years ago to gain insights into our client's rapidly growing consumer segment.

Case Study: AutoTrader.com Discovers Women

In 2006 Concept Hub, Inc (at the time What a Concept!) was hired to research the behaviors of car buyers within various social media sites. Although there were many blog posts and forum topics around buying and selling new and used cars, Concept Hub, Inc gained the most beneficial insights from the social bookmarking site Delicious. It seemed that most links related to buying and selling cars were being saved in Delicious, not for the purpose of sharing content with a community, but more for organizational research purposes. Many community members were posting personal notes in their bookmarks. Concept Hub, Inc dug deeper into each users account to discover that the community was made up of mostly women. Concept Hub, Inc crossed referenced this trend with blog posts and forum topics that women were part of and was able to show AutoTrader.com that women were a significant buyer demographic with very specific needs. As a result AutoTrader.com began to develop relationships with influential bloggers in the auto industry such as AskPatty.com and developed campaigns and messaging that was specifically geared to the needs of women car buyers.

As the video above suggests, the promise of the Internet was to enable people to join a mesh of conversations with other people, to share and discover ideas, and to access archives and programs. However too often the Internet has been hijacked for the purpose of being turned into an advertising and marketing channel. I am still amazed at how many brands are setting up Twitter accounts thinking people want to get a stream of marketing messages from them.

Marketers can benefit most by spending a majority of their time listening and getting to know who is online and how they can best add value to the online communities as well as how participation can help a company meet their business objectives. This is the foundation of good business, with or without the web.

A friend of mine claims that social media has caused many people to stop thinking. He sees people looking at social media as the magic silver bullet that will solve all kinds of business challenges or they see social media as a new passing fad. Neither is true. Social Media can help business owners meet their business objectives only if the business has set good core objectives and it has existed for as long as the Internet. Although over the years the tools have evolved, the unfortunate reality is that many poor and inefficient business practices have yet to fade away.

Why Your Social Media Strategy Is Not Working

2009-07-05T13:23:58-04:00

by Sherry Heyl

Over the past few weeks I have had the opportunity to launch a couple of social media initiatives that I will also be managing. That will make 4 social media initiatives I will be solely managing plus managing the consulting side of our business and my own personal and family time. This has forced me to be as efficient as possible with how I spend my time, to focus on the core objectives of each activity and to best leverage the tools that are available.

Because two of these initiatives have a rapid launch date and I have been put in complete control of all aspects of the social media program, I have been able to see things from a new angle and I have some new insights as to why many social media programs are not working.

1. It's About Content Not Conversation.
I know, I know. This goes against everything you have ever read about social media. But think about it, all statistics show that more than 90% of your audience consumes content and less than 10% will contribute. This is like having a conversation with someone who listens but simply refuses to respond...not much of a conversation, huh? But the content is what is keeping them around, they are learning and thinking and will respond in their own way.

2. Personalization Is More Important Than Anything!
Four years ago when I started consulting on social media that #1 concern was reputation management. "What will they say about us?" Most organizations have come to realize that Pandora's box has been opened and people have the ability to say anything they want to say. That makes for a very noisy web. The response I have seen is that more and more organizations are responding by simply adding to the noise. FAIL

The key to an effective social media program is to get the right message to the right people at the right time through the right channel. This is nothing new in the world of communications. What is new is that people have many channels to choose from. Not long ago the choices were print, a few channels on TV and a few channels on radio. Now the choices are unlimited from blogs to text to social networking sites to video sharing sites to Twitter. Our job is to make sure that our audience can get the message the way they want through the channel they choose to get it from. This is what we refer to as optimizing your communications for social media.

3. Social Media Should SAVE You And Your Audience Time.
If you are stressed about how much time social media takes, you are doing it ALL wrong. This past week I instructed my husband on a few techniques where he can efficiently get and share information with his team using social media. The speed of which he was able to get personalized articles delivered to him as opposed to searching through pages and pages of "old media" truly astounded him.

An effective social media program is about personalized channels and strategic data flow of relevant content. This creates value. Add in the ability for your audience to post their questions, insights, and reviews, what you get is conversation and community. The impact is enhanced business intelligence, more effective R&D, more successful marketing programs and increased customer satisfaction. If these are not the results your social media program is delivering, it is not working!

By the People, For the People

2009-06-28T16:17:33-04:00

By Mallory Perkins, Account Manager

I recently finished the book We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the people, for the people. Although the book is a little outdated, there are many key themes Dan Gillmor talks about that are still important today. Some of the topics are: the news should be talked about openly, everyone can and should create news now, and simply the idea that news is changing and everyone must make the decision to change with it, or they will be left behind.

I agreed with Gillmor that openness is one of the most important parts of social media. I think it’s so imperative to include the readers in the news. Having insight from your audience is what makes the story complete. Allowing comments and others to post their ideas and points of views about the topic helps build the full story. Openness highlights honesty, genuineness and accuracy.

“Eric Von Hippel, business professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks businesses should encourage some level of hacker behavior, not shun it… Just as journalists should not be threatened by a more knowledgeable audience, companies should not be threatened by smart customers who care enough to make products better.”

You can learn from your audience so embrace their ideas, talk with them about it and gain more supporters and customers while you’re at it.

“This evolution is also about reinforcing citizenship. The emerging form of bottom-up politics is bringing civic activity back into a culture that has long since given up on politics as anything but a hard-edged game for the wealthy and powerful.”

Gillmor used this quote in We the Media which shows the positive side that the internet can bring to politics. However, according to a lot of other examples in the book, government is actually slowly but surely taking away a lot of the freedom that was promised in the beginning of the internet.

For example, laws on copyright have become more and more strict, giving the copyright holder the ability to decide whether someone gets “fair use” – which is the law allowing people to use a small portion of another’s work as part of a new work. In result, less people are using copyright in the public and therefore, thwarting innovation. This part was very interesting to me. I don’t know a whole lot about how the government has been responding to these issues recently, but I really hope the trend does not continue in this direction of controlling more and more of what we can and cannot use or even see online.

I think one of the biggest evolutions that has developed since this book was published is the huge increase in people using instant-message services like Twitter, of course, but also on sites like Facebook and Tumblr to spread news. This increase is even bigger because of the introduction of Smartphones like the iPhone which have made it easy to use tools like Twitter at any time.

For instance, the most recent example is when the U.S. Airways plane crashed into the Hudson River in New York. The first news break of this event was through Twitter when someone who was on the ferry going to pick up the people in the plane posted a picture on Twitpic. This news spread through the web faster than it got on broadcast news.

Very soon now, there will be even more videos rather than just pictures being distributed around the web since more cell phones are beginning to include that as an easy-to-use feature.

I am interested in how news is going to end up after all this change is organized and understood. It’s going to be so exciting when it’s figured out and I’m going to watch it every step of the way. I just hope it turns out as a more open, honest and interactive news. If we “the people” keep pushing for it, then we will make it happen.

Either way, we know social media is here to stay and like Gillmor said in the beginning of We the Media: “Journalists will use the tools of grassroots journalism or be consigned to history. “

It's Not the Tools, It's the Movement

2009-06-21T11:49:51-04:00

by Sherry Heyl

This week's blog post was going to be a recap of a podcast I participated in with Michelle Batten. The podcast can be found here.

As I sat down to write this week's blog I realized that it would be wrong for me to let this moment in history not go recognized, so I decided to change directions and reflect on what is happening in Iran.

I am not going to claim to know even a small percentage of what is going on in Iran, nor will I get into the politics of who should be doing what. But what I do realize is that this is an important footnote in history.

I call it a footnote because I do believe what we see happening right now is the beginning of a new movement, a new spirit of empowerment.

This is equivalent to the printing press. It has been said that Martin Luther's act of rebellion was not the first act against the Church, but it became an important footnote in history because his act was furthered by the invention of the printing press.

The 95 Theses were quickly translated from Latin into German, printed, and widely copied, making the controversy one of the first in history to be aided by the printing press.^[35] Within two weeks, copies of the theses had spread throughout Germany; within two months throughout Europe

When we look at our own Revolution in America we recognize that support came from the vast distribution of the great writings of our founding fathers.

Benjamin Franklin was a strong defender of the Freedom of Press. He wrote:

ON THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

by: Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

HILE free from Force the Press remains,

Virtue and Freedom chear our Plains,
And Learning Largesses bestows,
And keeps unlicens'd open House.
We to the Nation's publick Mart
Our Works of Wit, and Schemes of Art,
And philosophic Goods, this Way,
Like Water carriage, cheap convey.
This Tree which Knowledge so affords,
Inquisitors with flaming swords
From Lay-Approach with Zeal defend,
Lest their own Paradise should end.

The Press from her fecundous Womb
Brought forth the Arts of Greece and Rome;
Her offspring, skill'd in Logic War,
Truth's Banner wav'd in open Air;
The Monster Superstition fled,
And hid in Shades in Gorgon Head;
And awless Pow'r, the long kept Field,
By Reason quell'd, was forc'd to yield.

This Nurse of Arts, and Freedom's Fence,
To chain, is Treason against Sense:
And Liberty, thy thousand Tongues
None silence who design no Wrongs;
For those who use the Gag's Restraint,
First Rob, before they stop Complaint

Without going into the debate of "Old Media" vs "New Media" what we are witnessing today is that the business of media has restricted our access to a free press. Whether it is political favoritism, pressure from advertisers or the need to stay between the established lines as a means to not look biased, or to not cause trouble - our media is no longer free.

I love the work that most of our reporters are doing and I respect their art and talent and most of all their bravery to get the story to the world, but as we have seen the past few days, there are limits to what they can do.

Those limits exist because there are still those who feel they are in control of the message, much like the Church was in control of the message before the printing press.

Today, we witness people taking control of the message, using "new" media to tell their stories. What amazes me most is the tireless efforts of developers around the world working to help people in Iran to get past the media blocks.

The tools, such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are there to empower this movement, but the movement is the spirit within the people.

Perhaps Twitter will be a footnote in this moment in history just like the printing press is a footnote in the history led by Martin Luther. The Printing Press became a footnote because of what it enabled which grew and changed all of humanity. Just like the printing press, what Twitter has enabled is just a spark, a lesson, of what we as humans are able to overcome and how much we can achieve through the freedom to communicate.

Social Media is Not a Magic Elixer

2009-06-14T09:17:24-04:00

by Sherry Heyl,

In 2005 I launched this agency and was leading the Atlanta Media Bloggers Group. At the time many people were not aware what a blog was, others wondered why they should care about what was written in a blog.

How much can change in just a few years.

If you believe today's hype about Social Media, all you need to do is join LinkedIN and you will have job offers delivered to you, write a blog and get all kinds of sales leads, join Facebook and your message will go viral, launch a new social network and become the next Internet millionaire.

This past week the TAG Enterprise 2.0 society partnered with the the TAG Workplace Learning society to hear how companies are integrating Social Media into their training and development initiatives to improve the speed of delivery, reduce costs, increase collaboration and improve the overall quality of their learning programs. The panel participants were amazing.

The question of ROI of social media came up and it got me to thinking...

What exacty are we expecting from social media?

It should not be all about social media. First we need to know what our overall goals are, then decide on the tools that will help us effectively reach those goals.

Some goals are much harder to measure than others. In the case of some of the benefits of social media that our panel participants discussed, how do you measure the benefits of raising company morale by giving everyone a voice on the project, or by identifying talent for a project who is coming from another department, or the increased trust from the team in the decision making of the organization?

But the technology of social media only enables collaboration, knowledge transfer, and team building. It takes leadership to encourage participation, it takes culture to maintain a productive online environment and it takes action to keep the momentum up.

Social media can not provide the company's goals, social media can not produce good managers and social media can not impart groundbreaking new ideas. What social media can do is provide a stage for those who have good ideas, connect those people with others who can help implement those ideas and provide insight into what is going in the minds and hearts of customers, vendors, and employees.

There have been a number of books and papers written that provide some hard numbers on the ROI of Social Media.

Groundswell provides an analysis of a single high-level executive blog (page 112). Assuming benefits of 7,500 daily page views, 24 press stories driven from blog content, a community of people linking back to the blog , blog content offering enough supportive information to reduce support calls and insights derived from customer participation with the blog, the estimated ROI is $393K in one year!

So, do you think all you need to do is launch a blog to achieve the above scenario? A lot more needs to be in place before the blog is launched. A message strategy that resonates with the community, S.M.A.R.T. goals for what the blog is to achieve and how it will achieve it, a S.W.O.T. analysis of those who are competing for the same mindshare as well as a S.W.O.T analysis on current communication efforts.

Basically you need to know what you are getting into and what you want to get out of your social media strategy.

There have also been several business books written about the value of internal collaboration, flattening organizations and empowering employees to make decisions on the fly. These all are corporate management goals which can be implemented by properly leveraging social media.

So, Got Social Media?

What about a strategy?

A Few of My Reactions to What I Read

2009-06-07T14:44:29-04:00

by Sherry Heyl

Several months ago I was asked how I learned everything I know about social media.

There is no simple answer to that question. I believe that everyone has many varied learning styles. I tend to be a sponge for some information. I can literally scan through the topics that come to me in my Google Alerts and soak up all the key points. The next thing I know I am explaining the latest information about Cloud Computing or what Google is up to now, but I am completely unable to quote any sources. Other information I have to hammer into my head. I do this by taking notes and then transferring those notes to my business plan, which surprise! resides in a wiki. I am able to apply the information to areas where it is most relevant to our business and client work. This enables me to access the information in a timely fashion when I simply cannot think of things I should know, or when someone wants those tedious details like stats and trends.

The most effective way I develop my ideas and knowledge is to "argue" or agree with or even "add to" the information I am reading. This all happens in my head. I rarely take the time to document my thoughts, but they often tend to resurface when I am giving a presentation.

This week as I was going through the many various articles that caught my attention, I thought perhaps I would document my reactions and share them with you.

How Twitter Will Change American Business - Time

As Twitter grows, it will increasingly become a place where companies build brands, do research, send information to customers, conduct e-commerce and create communities for their users. Some industries, like local retail, could be transformed by Twitter — both at one-store operations that cater to customers within a few blocks of their locations and at the individual stores of giant retail operations like Wal-Mart (WMT). In either case, having the opportunity to tell customers about attractive sales and new products can be done at remarkably low cost while providing for greater geographic accuracy.

This is so SIMPLISTIC! This can be written about any social networking platform, Twitter being one of them. Many people including you customers, will never be on Twitter. In social media there is no longer a one size fits all and if you want to be effective you have to look at Twitter as well as many other communities. You have to be able to understand how to integrate the various technologies and platforms to be seamless. I appreciate the article raising awareness, but I fear companies thinking so simplisticly about their social media.

Top Ten Reasons Why Your Company Should not Have a Blog

A very entertaining and on-target post! The thing is that more often than not people/organizations think that blogs HAVE to be part of a social media strategy. That is not the case - especially if you think of social media as really caring about your customers...your strategy would be about them. MOST of the clients I work with never launch a blog, and when a blog is recommended it is usually on the BOTTOM of the to-do list.

Nine worst social media fails of 2009... thus far

First I applaud these brands for taking risks. Many/most of them did not suffer any real PR damage, in fact they gained more PR for launching a risky campign that went viral, if only because it was a failure. We can all learn from failures, and it is better to learn from someone else's mistake than our own.

Some of the things I learn from these mistakes is to make sure your message is clear. I am a fan of House and saw the episode when they killed off actor Kal Penn. At the end I saw a quick memorial and thought he died in real life. It was only later - much later I learn what real happened. (In early 2009, Penn was offered the position of Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Liaison in the Obama administration, which he accepted).

Also let your customers speak for themselves. Motrin's campaign might have been different if they used the real sentiment of the real mom's online.

There are many lessons we can learn from this post.

Starbucks Is Now the Official Joe of ‘Morning Joe’

Everything old is new again. I vaguely remember a time when TV shows were brought to you by a sponsor. Most of my life has been plagued with noisy advertising that I have learned to tune out. However, with so many channels and opportunities to sponsor content, I believe it would be most effective for an advertiser to step away from a crowd and to become official sponsors of content again.

This is something that Daddy-o and I were speaking about the other day. Daddy-o has been in the music business for a very long time. He knows that the old revenue models for the music industry are gone. He expressed to me that artists will become channels, although they always have been, they will be more so now. Think about this for a moment, if you have Starbucks budget you can sponsor "the Morning Joe" but if you are a small nonprofit, perhaps you sponsor the social media activities of a local band with a respectable following.

These are just a few of the thoughts and ideas that flutter through my head as I read through the many various articles that catch my attention. If you want to see which articles catch my attention, check out our delicious account or follow along with us at Twitter.

Also, feel free to send me anything you think I might be interested in.

Content Distribution for the Evolving Web

2009-05-31T07:38:08-04:00

by Sherry Heyl,

Friday I 'Pinged' an observation;

realizing how quickly I grow bored of following ppl who only post about biz. In real life, don't you show some personality? Why not online?

When I 'ping' a thought or observation it is posted as a status update on my personal Twitter page, on Facebook, LinkedIN, Plaxo, MySpace, and Google Talk. Ping.fm actually will update over 40 networks at one time.

I started using ping.fm when it was still in closed beta (meaning only people with an invitation code could use it). Initially I was not sure of it's value. One thing I realized is that with ping.fm I can only update my status, I can't listen to the other conversations happening, I can not respond to what it going on in the community or see who has responded to me. It is simply a tool to broadcast my thoughts throughout my communities.

My other concern was something that my friend Justin Rubner expressed yesterday in response to my update on Facebook;

I also am not a fan of linking all of your updates. To me, what people want to read about on LinkedIn and Twitter are different than want they want to read about on FB.

I thought about that for a couple of hours. It was truly a concern I had when I first started using ping.fm, but that concern faded after one specific post a couple of years ago.

I had just started using Ping.fm and I was not sure if I should have added LinkedIN to the networks that I update with my personal information. Afterall, people expect LinkedIN to be strictly business, right?

That day I posted;

I just made the perfect cappucino!

A very random post indeed. I received three times more responses, casual conversational responses, from my LinkedIN network than I did from any other network. That day I realized that the expectations from LinkedIN were changing and that since we are dealing with people and communities that are constantly evolving, we can never make assumptions about what content is expected or appreciated in the various networks. We actually have to get into the communities and participate to see what works.

For two plus years now I have used ping.fm to update all of my networks and I am often surprised to see which updates gets a reaction from each network. I have also started seeing a new trend which is going to affect how I measure the influence of a blog. When I post a link to my blog on my networks I am noticing that the responses are coming in a variety of forms, not just links to my blog or comments on my blog. People are responding to my blog posts on the status updates that mentioned the blog post.

Back to Justin's concern about linking all of your updates together, which is a concern that I still share.

The other responses that I received from Friday's update helped me see what is happening when it comes to content distribution. Many of the responses express appreciation for my observation and commented that they simply stop following such a person on twitter or block their updates in Facebook. I thought for a few hours about this. I have over 1000 people in my LinkedIN network, my personal policy is that I pretty much keep that network open to anyone who wants to connect with me, I prefer to keep Facebook limited to people I actually know, and on my personal Twitter I only follow people who I would hang out with on a casual basis. However not everyone that I would hang out with on a casual basis is on Twitter, many are connected to me on Facebook and several people I know are not on Facebook yet. So if I limit my updates to specific networks I would miss connecting with people I still want to connect with.

My response to Justin was;

Justin, thank you for the inspiration for what this week's blog post needs to be. As you know I use ping.fm to update all of my networks. There are good reasons for that. However your response made me think about it more. I think that the web is evolving into a very personalized information portal controlled by the end user. What that means is as the messenger you have to be where your audience is and where they want the type of message you are delivering.

Control of what content is consumed and where it is consumed is now in the hands of the consumer. We each have the power to customize our networks. If you follow my updates on Twitter you can block my updates in Facebook.

For those who develop communities this is important to note, you must give the power of personalization to your community members. If you are a content producer you must make sure your content is in various places at one time as well as is distributable so that your fans (and critics) can share your content within their chosen networks.

Why Social Media Matters to EVERYTHING

2009-05-24T10:11:41-04:00

by Sherry Heyl

I have completed many of the most urgent projects that were on my to-do list leaving this last week of May to get to some of the things that are continuously getting pushed down to last priority. This would be a good way to wind down as I prepare for a much needed vacation the first week of June.

However, I think my brain received some sort of mixed message because when I sat down to write my weekly blog post I realized I had nothing. My brain has already gone on vacation.

So, I logged into my bloglines and began seeking inspiration.

I found it in Jeff Hilimire's blog; 3 more questions marketers should ask about social marketing

His blog refers to “The Five Questions Companies Ask About Social Media“. The questions, according to Jeremiah, are:

What is Social Media?
Why does it matter?
What does it mean to my business?
How do I do it right?
How do I integrate across the Enterprise?

My answers to these questions are:
1. Social Media is what the Internet was always meant to be - media that is interactive - a place for multi-directional communication that is available to everyone.

2. Social Media matters because it gives everyone a voice. It matters the same way the printing press mattered. Social Media has disrupted every business model that exist today and is challenging every assumption we have held about what we are capable of.

3. As a person concerned about the bottom line of your business if you are not building and working a social media strategy then you are not tapped into what is happening around you, where your threats and opportunities exist and how you could serve your clients/customers even better. Basically you are doomed to be outdone by the millions of competitors that are able to come into your space with few barriers to entry and quicker response times to your clients/customers needs.

4. To "do it right"...don't make social media about you - make it about your community -Listen. Make it about your team - Collaborate. Make it about new ideas that just might work - Take Risks!.

5. To integrate social media across the enterprise start where the seeds are already starting to sprout. Find out who in your organization has the passion and knowledge to lead the efforts and to help others get involved. Know where your best market opportunities lie for success, and make sure you have a way to measure success.

Jeff mentioned that he prefers social marketing to social media. I understand his perspective, but I will stick with social media. Marketing is one discipline of the online space, customer service is another, research, collaboration, commerce, training, are a few others. All aspects of business is happening online either on the open web or behind company firewalls and social media is having a huge impact on all aspects of business thus drastically changing how business gets done.

Which leads to Jeff's three additional questions:
1. Why are you considering social media? Many people hear that social media is some sort of magic elixer. It's not. It takes a strategy, it takes buy-in from many different departments agreeing on the strategy and agreeing to work together, it takes a measurable goal and it takes an open mind. If your company jumped on Twitter because 140 characters is easily digestable and will help you get more noise on the web about your company, you just might be missing out on some greater, more impactful opportunities.

2. Is your house in order? I love this question! Jeff points to the importance of making sure your other communication efforts are in order before adding social media to the mix. I would add that social media should be seen as an evolution of your communication strategy, not an add-on and therefore you need to look at your current efforts to evaluate what can be dropped and what can be optimized for social media.

Jeff's final question is "Are you ready for this?" Most people/companies will admit they are not. They have not been getting ready for this and they are not sure where to start to get ready for this, and well, they have other things on their to-do list and social media is somewhere on it.

Well ready or not, social media is here, and I can guarantee you it is already having an impact on EVERY aspact of your business.

Premiere of Introduction to Social Media

2009-05-16T21:47:10-04:00

Starring Sherry Heyl
Produced by StudioPlex Studios

What Does Social Media Mean To You?

2009-05-10T21:46:00-04:00

by Sherry Heyl

Ask many people what does social media mean to you and the most typical answer you will hear is conversations. For the longest time that did not seem like enough of an answer to me.

I have even found myself wondering if you can have a social media strategy that has nothing to do with conversations?

I believe you can.

I think about how I use Delicious, a social media utility/social bookmarking site that allows me to save content on to a site that I can access from any computer; a site that provides me numerous ways to categorize my content; a site where I can explore what others using the site are saving as well as subscribe to their bookmarks; a site where I can syndicate my content and share my links to various other sites that I am part of; a site where I can post comments about the links I am saving; a site where I can build my own personal network and share links directly with my contacts.

Delicious is a social media site, but the core focus is not about conversations and even the collaboration aspects of delicious is very passive. However Delicious is a social media site in that it connects people of like minds, it enables people to discover and categorize new content and it is personalized.

If a brand chooses a social media strategy that is to passively read many relevant blogs and tweets and to respond by launching a traditional marketing campaign that will resonate with the sentiment of the online community members, but never participates in those conversations, would that count as a social media strategy?

I have created social media roadmaps for organizations that were not ready to be involved in online conversations but were able to respond to what was being said in the community with messaging that was based on what was being said.

What if an organization creates an online presence where all of their media can be distributed throughout the web and content is organized where their audience can get the exact informaton delivered to them in just the way they want to receive it, whether it is email, RSS, to their mobile device, and so forth, would that be social even though they are not participating in actual online conversations?

A couple of years ago I was on a panel and I recall something one of the panelist said that was very enlightening to me. He said social media means many things to many different people. If you are speaking with a techie they will tell you all about open source and mash-ups, if you are speaking with a communications consultant they will tell you it is about conversations.

I think social media is about personalization. The ability to easily subscribe and discover content that is most relevant to you; the ability to use a variety of tools of your choice and having those tools work well with each other; the ability to receive content when you want to receive it and through the communication channel of your choice. On top of all of that we have the ability to self publish and because each person has the ability to self publish we have the ability to respond to what others have published and therefore conversations are sparked and some will begin to spread. Many people will consume content, fewer will contribute to the content.

But throughout it all we have become part of the content, content that is more or less ordered based on our personalities and the culture of the various online communities. The tools that have emerged on the Internet have helped us create a new virtual society.

a society allows its individual members to achieve individual needs or wishes that they could not fulfill separately by themselves, without the existence of the social group
source Wikipedia

Social Media is about the emergence of an online society, where information is exchanged in many various ways, including through online conversations.

That is what social media means to me. What does social media mean to you?