Chicken = Involved, Pig = Committed. Hey, it’s great to be connected online and even better to connect in person. I’ll be participating in two Social Media Breakfasts in the upcoming weeks and we can socialize about social media if you’re around. – In Austin, Tuesday October 7th at 7:30 am, Rudy’s "Country Store" & …
Author Archives: Peter Kim
Panopticons and social behavior
"Work Makes You Free." Taken at Dachau, Germany by Pete Kim. In the 18th century, English architect Jeremy Bentham designed the panopticon, a prison structure that allowed guards to watch prisoners without knowing when they were being observed – so that prisoners felt that they might be under watch at all times. Two centuries later, …
What is community?
I posted some thoughts over on the MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog about community – and a response has me thinking about community. Lewis Green commented, "Question: Don’t mean to spark controversy (yes I do) but I am troubled by women (or men) only groups. I think exclusion hurts everyone, including members of the exclusive group." …
Ego Trap: Industry Awards
I’ve been thinking about how ego traps operate in social media – which could also be called hero marketing (credit Seth Godin for suggesting the term). Essentially, social media focuses on individuals and ego traps help promote individuals, not necessarily at the expense of helping/promoting others. I don’t think ego traps are inherently "bad." However, …
My Day With The C200
I wanted to share a pretty cool experience from this week with you. On Friday, I had the honor of participating in Committee of 200’s (C200) Annual Conference. Have you ever heard of C200? They are a fairly low-key and extremely high-powered group. Membership is invitation only for women who either own businesses over $15 …
A List of Social Media Marketing Examples
324 social media marketing examples, as well as links to social business ROI examples and additional case studies.
Social media marketing’s scalability problem
I’d like your thoughts on what I see as one of the biggest problems I see for using social media in marketing: scalability. In theory, using social media for marketing should scale elegantly. Most advisors and evangelists tell a story that plays out something like this: once a marketer gets up enough courage to push …
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How to set an ego trap
I’ve been thinking lately about what I call the social media ego trap. In a nutshell, social technologies use game mechanics to get users hooked on participation. People often get addicted to ego-stroking system feedback, until they can temper their usage (addiction?) in terms of utility vs. serendipity. But what if you’ve got something to …
The known, knowable, and the unknown
When I was in business school, my strategy professor Jeanne Liedtka introduced a framework for strategic thinking that I use quite often, based on Fitch’s paradox of knowability: any issue can be broken into three distinct parts: the known, knowable, and unknown. This may seem like a simple framework, so let’s apply it to something …
Applying game mechanics to social media
In my last post, I talked about falling into the ego trap. So what happened? I got caught up in watching the numbers, becoming a full participant in the game mechanics underlying social media. Everyone likes games – your preference might be for the simple, like Solitare, or complex, like World of Warcraft. If you …