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• Marketing: True Efficiency Requires More Than Cutting Costs – Advertising Age – CMO Strategy
  "Marketers must also determine whether, in terms of generating ideas and strategy, it would be helpful to include external partners. For example, P&G drives a significant amount of new-product innovations by third parties. And many marketers partner with marketing-mix-modeling firms to better understand the right marketing mix."
  (tags: CMO business+strategy marketing innovation technology)

  

• Texas A&M Takes an Active Approach to Social Media Marketing [Campus Technology]
  "Diane McDonald, associate director of marketing at Texas A&M University, explained that reaching these prospects via social media takes more than a static institutional Facebook page; it takes an active approach to engage them."
  (tags: universities social+media marketing facebook social+networking)

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• FT.com / UK – Sun Valley set to consider paid content
  "Newspapers gave away their best product online a decade ago, but are now struggling with the issue of charging readers. The question of how best to avoid similar difficulties over monetising content has polarised the media groups which will be represented in Sun Valley this week."
  (tags: paid+content media newspapers television hulu twitter youtube)

  

• Twitter: 25 More Media People You Should Follow [AdAge]
  Good list of media and ad execs from AdAge.
  (tags: media twitter advertising communications adage follow socialmedia resources)

  

• Advertising – 20 Questions, an Exercise the Ad Agencies Dread – NYTimes.com
  "Does Microsoft get a refund if one of its television commercials showing a computer buyer choosing a PC over a Macintosh is followed by a commercial for Applebee’s?
  (tags: advertising media brands agencies)

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• Web 2.0 Collaboration Tools for Next Generation of Public Service
  "the framework provides an important way for public-service executives to evaluate Web 2.0 technologies."
  (tags: web2.0 tools media 2.0 Accenture gov2.0 government2.0)
• Information Overload? Relax – WSJ.com
  But there’s a more optimistic way to think about the issue. Humans adapt, so we’ll learn how to live with information overabundance. Young people growing up multitasking are already less anxious about using technology and may well cope better than those of us in older generations. They have no choice but to get more sophisticated at separating the important from the unimportant and the authoritative from the unreliable, even while sampling from among many new kinds of information tools.
  (tags: information+management content intelligence WSJ information+age)

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• Spinning the Web – P.R. in Silicon Valley – NYTimes.com
  Gone are the days when snaring attention for start-ups in the Valley meant mentions in print and on television, or even spotlights on technology Web sites and blogs. Now P.R. gurus court influential voices on the social Web to endorse new companies, Web sites or gadgets — a transformation that analysts and practitioners say is likely to permanently change the role of P.R. in the business world, and particularly in Silicon Valley.
  (tags: pr2.0 startups silicon+valley marketing)

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• How FriendFeed Could Become the Ultimate Social Media Tracking Service
  I’m becoming a FriendFeed fan boy.
  (tags: friendfeed aggregator smart+filtering web+portal social+technology)

• Murdoch Talks Media | TheStreet.com
  Interesting to hear his views on Twitter,Facebook and other new media.
  (tags: rupert+mordoch media facebook twitter wall+street+journal new+media paid+content)

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So, looking at a short term ROI when assessing the value of social media is antithetical to the emerging reputation and gift economy that operates there. You need to take a longer- term view. Brands need to pay it forward in social spaces.

Be Nice Or Leave

View more documents from Faris Yakob.

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This isn’t a post about marketing, social media, or technology. Ok, maybe it’s a bit about social media and a sprinkling of technology, but it’s mostly about people and passion.

Those two things shone bright last month during a food drop at the North Texas Food Bank in Dallas. It was the first time I’d really been behind the scenes to see how things really come together.

I was encouraged by the NTFB’s vigor and dedication to helping feed its surrounding communities, certainly a challenge for an area as large as the North Texas region.

It didn’t take long to realize the NTFB is a well-oiled machine, legitimately concerned with things like “doing more with less” and increasing operational efficiency across the organization. On a related note, there was recent data showing that the first question on many people’s mind before investing in charities concerned “overhead.” Other organizations take note; That perception is apparently engrained in the psyche of your customer so we should all be thinking about how to change that.

After an emotionally-charged press conference, I was stopped by someone on the marketing team who asked if I had any recommendations for how they could use  social media.

My advice? Tell your story as openly and honestly as possible. And enable others to the same. That’s one of the key lessons I’ve learned from another one of Telligent’s clients, The National Breast Cancer Foundation. NBCF’s marketing head Kevin Williams has made that mantra part of everything NBCF does. In Williams words, "make it easy for people to tell your story."

Those two things are the bookends to a larger communication strategy, but it’s becoming clear that communities want radical transparency and want their own voices to be heard as loudly as the cause, brand, or sponsor.

The positives for the organizations when done right are many, but seeing social media diminish as a thinly-veiled discipline and become operationalized is one of the most important byproducts. 

The other thing we chatted about was how to use the web to raise the awareness of current campaigns and increase membership. I was fortunate enough to present on just that at the recent DigitalNow Conference in Orlando. My slides featured NBCF’s social media strategy and were a part of a larger deck that can be found on Slideshare here.

But again, the fundamentals aren’t terribly complex. Do your Facebook thing, establish your Flickr page and staff up who’s planning to respond and jump in the conversations. And as some of us are acutely aware, it  gets a bit more difficult when you have to figure out how to engage with people after they actually start showing up to your social media pit stops.

Lastly, I’d do all the people who really pulled this event off an injustice if I didn’t mention the corporate horsepower behind this Herculean effort.
Telligent, Tyson Foods, Wal-Mart and cause marketers MediaSauce were some of the corporate backers, with MediaSauce managing a lot of the logistics and planning.

If you’re curious about the timeline and events that lead up to the Dallas stop, make sure to visit the Hunger Pledge site.

I can’t say enough about the experience and what I learned. It’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done.  I pledge to do more.

————————————————————————

Interview with NTFB CMO Colleen Brinkmann

Interview with Scott Henderson of MediaSauce.

Flickr photo set of North Texas Food Bank Tour.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

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• TI’s Web 2.0 Success Story: Better Customer Service – CIO.com
  "TI built the platform on technology from Telligent, a company that makes Web 2.0 technologies for the enterprise (often called Enterprise 2.0 apps). The Telligent platform allows customers to interact with the company hosting the forum, and each other, to solve problems."
  (tags: telligent Texas+Instruments online+communities web2.0 online+forums enterprise2.0)

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• Cisco Touts $277M In Savings Due To Telecommuting
  "Cisco has revealed it has garnered more than $277 million in productivity savings by letting employees work from home using the company’s own virtual office technology."
  (tags: productivity internet telecommuting technology work cisco green collaboration)

  

• How Many Facebook Users Will Go Public? – BusinessWeek
  "..when "everyone" is chosen, third-party companies are working on software that can analyze the information to see what products or services Facebook members might be interested in. And Facebook is modifying its search engine to look for these real-time feeds as well.."
  (tags: internet facebook marketing)

  

• AOL Cracks Web Publishing — Sans Time Warner – AdAge
  "The notion of thin-staffed online publications is sweeping the industry." {AOL’s view on web publishing}
  (tags: media AOL niche+networks micro-communities publishing digital+strategy)

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MinnPost – Introducing MinnPost.com Real-Time Ads

"They (publishers) can automatically feed us the messages they’re already creating on Twitter or their own blogs. If you are publishing content frequently and pushing it out through an RSS feed, you can be up and running on MinnPost.com Real-Time Ads in minutes."

(tags: advertising newspapers media RSS blogs widgets new+media)

 How to Kick Off an Innovation Project – BusinessWeek

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• When Your Business Has Nowhere to Hide – Leading Green – HarvardBusiness.org
  "They (consumers) won’t actually have to go out of their way (at least, not much) with easy-to-use product rating websites, green shopping iPhone apps, and — the next wave — eco-ratings on price tags themselves. And shoppers will like ratings that can help protect them and their families from feared toxic chemicals, not just help polar bears survive. These information systems are disruptive technologies, game-changers the past does little to predict."
  (tags: sustainability eco-conscious consumers transparency green)

  

• Real-time search: more contenders flood the field | VentureBeat
  Surchur and XLHit are new to me.
  (tags: realtime search twitter)

  

• Microsoft Defends Its Empire – BusinessWeek
  2010 will be a telling year for Redmond’s online strategy. Just a matter of time before whole Office suite is SaaS.
  (tags: microsoft marketing technology saas office business+week)

  

• Businesses use Twitter to communicate with customers – USATODAY
  These stories will seem silly next year..things like Twitter will be commonplace for interacting with customers.
  (tags: usatoday twitter socialmedia social+networks customer+service)
• Aggregate, Curate, Publish To Create Local Media
  Everyone should be thinking like a media company.
  (tags: media content publishing journalism online aggregator business avc local)
• Where to find journalists on Twitter
  Good list of niche sites and industry-oriented directories.
  (tags: journalism media twitter publishing social+networks)

  

• The end of mobile isolation?
  "There’s a huge untapped opportunity here to move beyond PC to genuinely new forms of collaboration that leverage the unique features of the mobile device such as its portability and ubiquity."
  (tags: gartner technology mobile+computing collaboration voice+apps)

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I’m heading to Boston (here now) as I write this and wanted to share a few things I’ve thought about over the last few weeks.  Lately, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet with customers with large-scale collaboration deployments either already underway or still being incubated. While all of these initiatives can easily take on a Web 2.0 or Enterprise tagline for what they’re trying to accomplish, the biggest challenge has less to do with the technology and tools and more to do with fighting perceptions and change. That’s no surprise to you in the echo chamber, but while many of realize this, I still see a fast-moving industry getting blind-sided by business fundamentals. 

My point, with emphasis, is that we all need to a better job of understanding how our customers operate.  Everyone needs to tell product managers that customers don’t care about your widget unless it can be tied to something larger that can transform business. It’s the classic technology silo. If your widget isn’t tied to a larger architecture that can be used to reconstruct a process, it’s just a widget that will rest on a digital shelf instead of a wooden one. (for you shrink-wrap folks)

I can back that up with multiple customer situations where we’ve discussed the desire to integrate the tools and unify them enough to roll out capabilities consistently and precisely.  When all of us understand the sum of the parts (2.0 tools)  and how its whole (platform) is more powerful, it’s much easier to paint a vision your client will understand. In other words, don’t lead with what a wiki or microblogging app can do. Tell the story of how you used Twitter to respond to a potential customer in a real-time environment, outside of email. And more importantly, always think about how that translates to a business outcome. Who knows? Perhaps you just just shortened the sales cycle with that touch point, and that’s something that’ll perk up your VP of  Sales.

That’s a bit of segue into an other one of the other trends I’m seeing from enterprise 2.0 companies; a focus on the big picture.  I like to reference Microsoft’s Stephen Elop, when he says, “Don’t tell me about what SharePoint will do for me, tell me how Microsoft can make me more productive.” Whether it’s innovation, sales 2.0, or things like knowledge networks, companies are making significant investments in the necessary resources to make sure collaboration is a part of their DNA. When vendors press for big picture questions early, they quickly have an opportunity to  brand themselves as strategic instead of the tool company.

I’d argue one of the other challenges for the toolset vendors at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference is addressing product development cycles. If you haven’t noticed what’s happening over at Apple’s AppStore and the implications for what it means to software companies and developers, you’ll also soon be a part of the blindsided crowd. The software companies that will thrive will be the ones that have the leadership to recognize the market can also contribute to your roadmap not just your advisory board and senior management. Moreover,  you’ll need the people, processes and tools to respond and react as fast as your competition.

The reason I brought up the AppStore example is because I’m continually fascinated by how easy it is to purchase and use software at a second’s notice. You can go from research to pilot to deployment to customer review in literally minutes. I think we’re all mistaken if we think that model won’t continue to creep into the enterprise. Granted the security and governance models are different, but the speed of communications and the agility required to adapt is no different inside or outside the firewall.

So I challenge vendors and I’m challenging myself to get better at understanding the dynamics of our clients’ needs. It’s surprising that we have such glaring omissions when the reason we build roadmaps is because of our customers. Let’s hit the collective alarm clock and wake up.

As I spend the next 3 days in Boston, what I plan to do is look at enterprise 2.o not from a toolset lens but from my customer’s lens.  The disparity between the two is what frustrates me. I’ve seen some of the best technology around with a bunch of folks sitting around a table unable to produce more than one use case for the how it can impact the business.   If you can’t do that, you might be working on the wrong stuff. And worse, you’re not listening to your customers.

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• Ease of Purchase: The Key To The Paid Web [MediaPost]
  "Quality content combined with ease of purchase is already a real business online not only for Apple, but for the MLB and Netflix. With iTunes, the App Store and AppleTV, is Apple showing us what the future will look like for the paid Web?
  (tags: apple paid+content barry+diller IAC media)

• Why 1.5 Is Greater Than 2.0 – Tom Davenport – HarvardBusiness.org
  "The key word is "augment," not "replace." 1.5 is greater than either 1.0 or 2.0."
  (tags: enterprise2.0 2.0 web2.0 harvard+business+review tools)

  

• Google/DoubleClick Develop Unified Display Ad Exchange Platform
  "..both systems will be integrated, improving the ad buying experience. And with more pricing and bid control, Google is encouraging web publishers to avail more space to their exchange."
  (tags: advertising google doubleclick)

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• Novartis: Radically Remaking Its Drug Business – BusinessWeek

  "Vasella’s vow to break with the status quo has won plaudits from management gurus who marvel at the inefficiencies in the drug sector. "He is not a prisoner of the existing paradigm. Instead, he is trying to change it," says Ram Charan, a leading consultant and author. "Vasella is able to anticipate and visualize radical change much the same way Steve Jobs did at Apple."
  (tags: pharma novartis business+week business+strategy)

  

• Digital Marketing: Twitter Posts From Display Ads – Advertising Age – Digital

  The next step should include a strategy to incorporate hashtags and other metadata closer to the purchase path.
  (tags: ROI social+media ecommerce twitter ad+tracking advertising)

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I saw Andy Brudtkuhl’s post on friendfeed a few days ago where he pointed out how simple it is to embed friendfeed content into a more traditional blog post. (see below) The result, as many people pointed out, is a much richer experience that brings the discussion front and center. I like that Andy pointed out how to complement each piece of content too.

By crafting an introduction piece, you easily preface the rest of the story, perhaps the pictures or quotes you’re writing about. Conversely, you might also quickly surface the friendfeed embed at the beginning of your post to pull your audience in. The latter scenario is one of the reasons I really like friendfeed. When peppered with visuals, it aesthetically outflanks Twitter every time. When you take into account a seemingly no-limit cap on the length of comments, you’ve got everything you need to keep the real-time conversation flowing.

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• Op-Ed Columnist – The American Press on Suicide Watch – NYTimes.com
  "The real question is for the public, not journalists: Does it want to pony up for news, whatever the media that prevail? {The other real question is who’s gonna nail the right combo that makes it compelling}
  (tags: newspapers media internet NYT)

• Overview of US Platforms & Social Networking (Startonomics Tokyo, June 2009)
  Slide #4 in "Overview of US Platforms & SoNets" -Successful platforms have 3 things- 1.Features 2.Users 3.Money (http://tinyurl.com/mj2nq6)
  (tags: socialnetworking social+networking social+computing web2.0)

• 8 Ways to Create Paperless Business Cards
  Still need to try BeamMePro.
  (tags: sms paperless twitter networking digital jobs businesscards)

  

• Sharp Ties Major League Baseball to Brand / Product Portal
  Like the incorporation of MLB players..big $$ though.
  (tags: brand+communities sharp MLB online+communities interactive)

• [Media Post] The Value of Web Relationships
  "Giving consumers a great personalized product to fit their life creates a complete customer experience. Only with this level of brand ownership is the bond of a true consumer relationship cemented."
  (tags: brands online+communities customer+experience)

• Smartphone Roulette for App Makers – BusinessWeek
  While more people are using smartphones, developers can’t afford to create different versions of their applications for every kind
  (tags: smartphones iphone mobile+computing)

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