Being Peter Kim

Social Media Predictions 2009

Community and collaboration are wonderful things.

Fourteen great minds on social media have shared thoughts on what 2009 may have in store for us.  Here's some of what they're thinking:

• "Although it is now cheaper to launch an initiative leveraging Web 2.0 technology - it requires qualified and passionate people to make them successful." - David Armano
• "You may not always start the year as a leader, but you can certainly finish it that way." - Rohit Bhargava  
• "Intimacy touches emotion; emotion powers conversation." - Pete Blackshaw
• "Doors are going to close all over the social web. Why? Because the money didn't come the way people thought it would." - Chris Brogan 
• "The tipping point has not only *not* been reached, but could still tilt *away* from Social Media." - Todd Defren
• "There's a lot of fixing that needs to be done." - Jason Falls 
• "Dwindling budgets suddenly make low-cost social media look like the pretty girl at the ball." - Ann Handley 
• "We're going to develop a set of better metrics to help guide, direct and validate 'commitment'." - Joseph Jaffe 
• "The movement is rooted in a desire to have quality, not quantity, as people cocoon in the face of the economic crisis." - Charlene Li 
• "After a pre-qualifying wrestling match..." - Ben McConnell
• "These will be cumulative events and interactions that will build brand loyalty for the companies that pay attention to them." - Scott Monty  
• "The recession will force revenue results out of social technologies." - Jeremiah Owyang
• "Companies that focus on earning love will thrive during hard times, and kick ass when good times return." - Andy Sernovitz
• "Suddenly, being Facebook friends with your mom will seem less ridiculous than following 4,000 strangers on Twitter." - Greg Verdino  

Everyone's thoughts have been assembled in this PDF. You can also read the document in-line below.

Your feedback is appreciated and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

BTW - can you suggest a place to publish these ideas for them to be commented and voted on?  As you think through the contributions, I'd love for everyone to have a way of seeing what resonates most with the community and also contribute their own ideas.  Kind of like a personal Digg or My Starbucks Idea.  If you know of a technology, please comment below or message me on Twitter @peterkim. Thanks!

UPDATE:  These are now posted on Slinkset, where you can vote on your favorites and submit your own.

A Wiki of Social Media Marketing Examples

Over the weekend, I created a framework to port A List of Social Media Marketing Examples into a wiki.  I also invited the 166 people who've left comments on that post to become the initial collaborators in the new effort. (At least I tried to...Google Sites seems to have had a delivery problem. If you think you should have a login, try your existing email address - it may already be setup.)

Soon after inception, several people asked about turning the list into a wiki, which is a natural container for this type of information.  However, I delayed doing this immediately for many reasons.

One of the benefits of doing so manifests in the framework, which allows users to sort information by different categories.  In an early experiment, I had created an alphabetical directory by company name, with 26 pages.  Continuing with that approach would've meant replicating efforts to relist examples by channel, industry, or geography.

Let me say thanks again to everyone who's contributed to help create

A Wiki of Social Media Marketing Examples

I'm looking forward to collaborating on this new community resource with you.

Social Media Marketing's New Clothes

Lewis writes, "Don't Say ROI Unless You Mean It."  Agreed.  I see a lot of bloggers wading into unfamiliar territory, starting to spew opinions on measuring return on investment (ROI).  It's easy for anyone with an understanding of business finance to see the shallowness of these analyses.  But don't be surprised - has not knowing anything about a subject ever stopped a blogger from writing about it?

There is one correct approach to calculate ROI.  The result is a financial ratio.

To get to the root of the problem, we first need to go back to school.  Marketing has historically been a right-brain discipline, reflected in academic coursework.  Left-brained marketers end up focusing on direct and/or B2B - staying far away from social media.

Fast forward to the top of the food chain.  CMOs have a shorter tenure than other executive roles.  Why?  According to Spencer Stuart, the firm that publishes the most widely cited statistics on the subject, CEO and CMO agendas are misaligned.  CEOs want to see business results - I'd say now more than ever.  Marketers can't counter with, "well, I can't give you a number, but there sure are a lot of people talking nice about us."

Social media is easy to use.  If you can type in a box and click a button, you can blog.  Click the button that looks like "play" and sure enough the video starts rolling.  There is no secret to using Twitter.  Being a social media user meant that you were an expert...five years ago.  Not today.

Do you know the story about The Emperor's New Clothes?  Let's pick it up near the end:

And so the Emperor set off under the high canopy, at the head of the great procession. It was a great success. All the people standing by and at the windows cheered and cried, "Oh, how splendid are the Emperor's new clothes. What a magnificent train! How well the clothes fit!" No one dared to admit that he couldn't see anything, for who would want it to be known that he was either stupid or unfit for his post?

We know the Emperor should've just used some common sense.  Calculating ROI from social media efforts is no different.

If ROI doesn't apply to social media marketing, then social media should not be used for marketing.

Slicing and Dicing A List of Social Media Marketing Examples

Since starting a list of social media marketing examples, I've seen some great work to frame content for specific uses:

By technology/media type

• I posted a framework on Mashable called The 22 Step Social Media Marketing Plan
• Ray Schiel has listed almost all the examples by category

By country

• Australia: former colleague Steven Noble has bookmarked many examples
• Canada: David Jones has set up a wiki
• Germany:  Benedikt Köhler has blogged a list
• Malaysia:  A table at GreyReview
• United Kingdom:  John Welsh has blogged a list

By industry

• Haven't seen any yet...

If you are maintaining or know of a segmented list, please let me know and I'll link to you here.

Copy-and-paste your social media marketing plan

This is a truncated cross-post that was published over on Mashable.

As you may know, I've been curating a list of social media marketing examples on this blog over the past couple of months.  The community could probably come up with 3,000 examples instead of 300 - but the current set already gives us a pretty good sample to think about.  Namely: it's time to master the last big thing now.

For a framework of 22 tools to consider, with notable brand examples, please visit the original post at Mashable.

Thinking Through Twitter

What's the matter here?

I've written a handful of posts about Twitter over the past year, published a syndicated research report, and have been interviewed by traditional and social media on the service.

Despite service outages that grew quite awful at some points, Twitter's site traffic grew 422% from August 2007 - August 2008, according to Mashable/Nielsen Online.  People aren't requesting that Twitter turn into a public alert system anymore, not when it can't even supply content to a web widget.  But with many more people participating, conversations can become much more diverse and interesting.

That's why I changed the way I use Twitter recently.  This year, I've fluctuated from following about 100 people to 400 to 1,000, then down to 200, eventually 90...and last month, I added everyone back...over 1,500 people.

Here's why.

I think paying 100% attention to Twitter for any length of time results in waste.  You may be interested in social media chatter, but what about travel gripes?  Baseball commentary?  Political opinions?  Watching a "raw" twitter stream - even from people who mainly focus on your primary interest - will end up as irrelevant as a typical TV ad break.

But tools help drive relevance by filtering noise.  Here are the ones that I find most helpful:

1. Twitter Search.  I'm reading as many tweets today via RSS to Google Reader as I am at Twitter.com.  How?  By searching for relevant topics and subscribing to the feeds.
2. Tweetdeck.  Useful for segmenting people - and companies - into groups, e.g. Bostonians, Austinites, Personal Friends, etc.
3. Mobile alerts.  Direct messages act like text messages and you can get alerts pushed to you whenever important people update.
4. Twinkle.  Provides proximity search for mobile and crashes less than Twitterific.
5. Twitter Karma.  Only tool I know that lets you manage relationships in bulk.

Other tools like TwitterCounter and Twitter Grader provide statistics, but aren't incredibly helpful...unlike utilities, I see these going the way of Tweeterboard.

By following more people, I'm hearing more chatter, geting answers to the most random questions, and feedback on social media topics.

I'm on Twitter as @peterkim.

234 Social Media Marketing Examples

234 examples, visualized. Created using http://wordle.net/

A month ago, I published a list of social media marketing examples.  At the time, the list started with 131 brands that were involved in social media to some extent.  (Sometimes not by their own choice.)

A month later, the list has added over 100 new brands due to the contributions of 81 community members.

Some interesting things happened along the way.  Dion Hincliffe from Social Computing Magazine requested permission to republish the list, no problem.  Almost 200 other bloggers have found the list helpful and I hope you do as well.  Unfortunately, I also stumbled across a few cases of plagiarism - two that were coincidentally blamed on "assistants" blogging whose work had not been checked.  (Really?  Maybe I need to get a blogging assistant, too.  But I'll be sure to equip that person with a copy of the MLA.)

As my way of saying thanks, here's a search engine shout-out to give credit where credit is due to everyone who has contributed to the list (either directly or through prior art):

Jeremiah Owyang, Mashable, Forrester, Mack Collier, Social Brand Index, Gavin Heaton, Philippe Deltenre, zeroinfluencer, Bruce Eric Anderson, Nick Ayres, Jeff Glasson, Luke, Mike, Robin Seidner, Tom Shea, Ed Nicholson, Stefan Halley, Tom Hoehn, Debbie Weil,  Marta Kagan, Paull Young, Kevin, Paul Fabretti, Nick Huhn, dominic, Michael Pranikoff, Kyle Flaherty, Ed Terpenning, Chi-chi Ekweozor, Lisa, David Bressler, C.B. Whittemore, Torley, David Jones, Keith De La Rue, Sean Lew, Tom Cummings, Donna Tocci, Adam Singer, Yianni Garcia, Matt Cronin, Stephen Manning, Jim Dietzel, Clayton, Mike, Kira Wampler, Woody Meachum, Lee Aase, Toby Bloomberg, Adam Denison, Colleen Gatlin, Davezilla, Gina, Marcos Fargas, Marianne Richmond, Kevin Barenblat, Dan Entin, Bruce Ertmann, Sean Moffitt, Elana Bowman, Dan, Andrew, James O'Connor, Herve Kabla, Sachin Agarwal, Lou Cuming, Danny Urguia, Kathrin Lohmann, Rafa, John Galpin, Ken Kaplan, Kathy Mandelstein, BJ Cook, John Welsh, Nils Koenig, James Finnen, Miko, Yvonne DiVita, Juny Lee, Massimo Cavazzini, and Gunther Lie.

But seriously...234.  Do you think that's it?

Everything old is new again

My colleague Brian Haven wants you to know that all media is social.

"If you think about all of the social tools and behaviors happening today, in almost every case there is an equivalent comparison to activities in the past."

The same old behaviors - sharing, connecting, opining, broadcasting, and creating seem new because of

• Reach
• Accessibility
• Usability
• Transparency and
• Recency.

So everything old suddenly seems new again.  For more detail, read Brian's post.

A framework for measuring social media

Do you think it's tough to measure social media?  It might be simpler than you think.

I've blogged before about how game mechanics describe social media participation. Games have scores.  Scores track progress, which results in success or failure.

Although social media channels seem to be mostly qualitative in nature, user activities can be easily quantified.  Although users interact with channels in different ways, four common factors quantify social media success:  Attention, Participation, Authority, and Influence.

Here's a framework for measuring social media:

1. Attention.  The amount of traffic to your content for a given period of time.  Similar to the standard web metrics of site visits and page/video views.
2. Participation.  The extent to which users engage with your content in a channel.  Think blog comments, Facebook wall posts, YouTube ratings, or widget interactions.
3. Authority.  Ala Technorati, the inbound links to your content - like trackbacks and inbound links to a blog post or sites linking to a YouTube video.
4. Influence.  The size of the user base subscribed to your content.  For blogs, feed or email subscribers; followers on Twitter or Friendfeed; or fans of your Facebook page.

There's an "x-factor" that comes into play well:  sentiment.  The spirit driving user participation matters.  The net result of these adds up to a score for social media engagement.

So what's the monetary value of a visit, comment, link, or friend?  Well, the only honest answer is "it depends."  Only you know how much these interactions matter to your brand, regardless of industry, channel, or competitive results.

Now...was that so tough?

Critical observations of 204 social media marketing examples

Last week, I shared a list of about 120 companies using and/or being used by social media marketing.  Less than a week later, that list has almost doubled solely based on community contributions.  Thank you for sharing.

The list seems big enough to support some analysis.  What do you think about these three major criticisms?

1. Big companies are lagging indicators.

• Although C.B. notes: "It's amazing to realize how many organizations now have a presence [when they didn't not very long ago] and also across several different platforms."
• Alfonso responds: "Keep your eye on the big boys to get an idea of what the me-too crowd does. No doubt they do it bigger and louder, but they have to: they're playing catch-up."
• Robert agrees: "I think we all have the tendency to gravitate to the household names to illustrate social media examples, but these companies often are laggards."

2. Are these examples really social?

• Dan points out: "There's a difference between participating in social media and marketing via social media."
• Tony takes this further: "Some of these examples feel a little more like social network digital advertising rather than social media."

3. Stuff is missing.

• Tim asks: "Where are the 'internal' employee/partner examples?"
• Philipp asks: "Are there more examples from Europe or the German speaking regions?"
• Antje says: "Next list should be smaller companies without huge budgets."

Your thoughts, reactions, and observations are appreciated.

• Should we really be watching SMBs instead?
• Is this conversation or lecturing?
• Why are we seeing these gaps?