Being: Peter Kim

Why fail fast is bad advice

Every now and then, we all get involved in a conversation that's already in progress. Most people will listen and ask questions to establish context and meaning. Without comprehension, remarks can be misconstrued and advice misapplied.

A popular piece of advice in social media is "fail fast." Or even extended to "fail fast, fail forward, fail better."

Don't believe it.

This advice makes a lot of sense to the research & development function. These are the people tasked with product innovation, experimentation, and helping bring concepts to commercialization. A great example is Sir James Dyson, an inventor who recently wrote In Praise Of Failure.

This advice doesn't make much sense in the marketing function. Why? Because these people are tasked with building customer relationships. Failure for these professionals – particularly in social media – means:

Being company-centric not customer-centric
Dishonest and disengaged communication
Inability to meet campaign targets and sales goals
Wasting resources – budget and time, in addition to opportunity cost

Marketers who fail usually get fired. This isn't some structural injustice that needs to change – it means that poor performance gets what it deserves.

Does this mean companies shouldn't experiment with emerging technology and new opportunities? Not at all. Smart marketers plan investments similar to financial asset allocation, where growth opportunities are strategically layered into a strategic plan.

Here's what fail fast really means, as written by venture capitalist Mark Suster:

Fail fast = quit and give up easy = spaghetti against the wall = no clear strategy going into your business = no ability / willingness to try and pivot as market conditions change = easy way out = today’s management mantra that will be laughed at in 10 years.

Fail fast if you want – but just be aware of who's recommending it. Personally, I prefer helping brands succeed instead.

Aggregate or be aggregated

The clearest path to maximum value capture within an industry lies ahead of companies that own a space. The more you dominate, the more money you make, and the less you want someone else siphoning off your eyeballs, affiliate clicks, or active users. So services establish barriers, API limits, etc. – and they ultimately end up as walled gardens, valuable only to those who don't eat apples and are content to frolic inside.

In the long run information may want to be free – but in the near term it's looking for funding via advertising and maybe a freemium business model. Content-based companies must fight to preserve value and most end up living and dying by a simple premise:

aggregate or be aggregated

This concept has roots in the portal wars of the mid-1990s. At the time every internet company's obsession was eyeballs. AOL, Excite, Yahoo!, Lycos, et al. were busy fighting to become your browser's default web page by aggregating the best content.

Then with the rise of e-commerce, comparison shopping engines like MySimon and Froogle fought for attention as one-stop product information aggregators.

These days, social networks have become presence and relationship aggregators. Most sites allow users to cross-publish content and status to other platforms; you can publish Twitter to blogs, blogs to LinkedIn, Foursquare to Facebook, and so on. I believe that while Google may currently be losing at "social" it still holds an envious position over other sites as master aggregator, given its lead in search.

The aggregation battle is shifting to tools, with news coming that Twitter will buy TweetDeck for $40+ million. Tools put aggregation into the hands of users, while providers gain more opportunities to monetize, e.g. place ads around content.

Aggregate or be aggregated. Keep this in mind as you encounter new opportunities to publish and collect your content – and consider how it's being monetized by the company that's helping you out.

Is email social media?

Facebook is social. Twitter is social. Discussion and message boards are social. But more people would say that email is not.

Gartner makes two important distinctions as to why email isn’t social media:

E-mail is a distribution mechanism and social media is a collective mechanism
Mass communication is different from mass collaboration

Email isn’t social media. In fact it’s a communications tool that users shouldn’t employ for media consumption at all. However by some accounts email marketing is a $10 billion industry – not that size makes right.

During the Internet’s Democratization Era, my former Forrester colleague Charlene Li guided companies to a simple and powerful distinction when thinking about tools: email is to-do, RSS is to know. Users approach their inboxes with an obligation mindset, which is fine. They just need to keep in mind that oftentimes the problems they create are their own.

Making email work requires that internally, companies train their users on how to make use of an expanded communications toolkit. Externally, email integrates with social media, orchestrated for reach and frequency.

Social Business Predictions 2011

It’s that time of year again. Lots of people can make predictions, but insight and experience help ensure that they’re worth close consideration. This year I’ve reached out to some of the top minds I follow in social media to ask what they see in store for the market over the coming year. I’ve grouped them by theme. Enjoy!

Leadership

Social strategy will move into the C-suite, where it will become an important component of an organization’s overall strategy. Rather than languish as uncoordinated dabbling by disparate departments, companies make customer and employee engagement the centerpiece of their competitive strategy. This is the year that companies that deploy social media strategically will pull ahead of their competition. (Charlene Li)
Leaders will turn to empowering their workforce to interface with the outside world as the only way to really scale social at this point. This puts a premium on building a positive culture as the driver of competitive advantage. (Joshua-Michéle Ross)
2011 will be the year of the social IPO. Leaders who can navigate these waters successfully will be few and far between. My money is on the ones who have done it before. (Peter Kim)

Consumer Engagement

Super-Serve Your Social Nicheworks: It’s easy to be impressed by Facebook’s half-a-billion member count, when the reality is now and has always been Facebook isn’t one single network with 500 million members; it’s 500 million distinct, personal, niche networks – defined differently for each individual member based on the people (and to some extent the companies) in your circle of connections. In other words, if you’re into fly fishing, and your closest friends spend their weekends fly fishing by your side, and your favorite brands offer great fly fishing products, the odds are high that your Facebook social graph looks less like a general interest network and more like a highly focused fly fishing community. With the introduction of Groups in late 2010, Facebook made it even easier for these types of niche networks to come together and interact. Or why limit yourself to Facebook – maybe the fly fishermen among you are connecting on TroutPad.com or AnglingMasters.com. With hundreds upon hundreds of highly focused social nicheworks, the real action may not be with the big boys but with the small sites that super-serve the specialized interests of highly passionate communities – especially if you want to promote your products to these audiences. And while we’re on the topic of niche, let’s not limit ourselves to the wired web. Look for niche networks to go mobile, as everyone from bargain shoppers (shopkick), foodies (Foodspotting), nightlife trendsetters (Playboy, La Societe Stella Artois) and maybe even fly fishermen get location services to call their very own. (Greg Verdino)
A handful more marketers in 2011 will give up trying to inject people with viruses and will abandon the idea that there are five or six voices in a community who, if “converted,” can automatically bring a flock of sheep to a brand. These professionals will quit trying to find new ways to make the “broadcast mentality” work in conversational spaces, but the vast majority of brands and agencies will still make “activating audiences” sound like some magic device that marketers can engineer. (Sam Ford)
Most smart marketers have embraced content as a cornerstone of social media/social business. They understand that they need to be publishing content to both attract and educate customers. Of course, not any old content will fit the bill. Rather, the content a company produces must be valuable, relevant, interesting, enjoyable, and sometimes a little fun. It’s a challenge to produce the right kind of content that will resonate best with your customers, and 2011 will be the year that businesses meet that challenge, and focus on producing content that… well, rules. (Ann Handley)

Workforce Engagement

Organizations will start realizing that there’s more to listening than hearing: that simply acknowledging and capturing that someone has said something isn’t doing a company much good if there’s not genuine effort to do something with what they have heard. Those companies who dedicate themselves to listening will realize that the future is in paying attention to what customers have to say (where marketing and customer service meet) and in what the culture around us can tell us (the cultural patterns that brands need to know). (Sam Ford)
Expect training and staffing to be a top priority in 2011 as companies gear up for social business. Our research found that 37% of corporations listed their second highest goal of internal education and training be an important priority. Expect education to come in the forms of internal sharing programs, communities appended to the intranet, and external experts providing guidance, as well as the increase in social business conference attendance. (Jeremiah Owyang)

Social Architecture

Leading brands in social media will begin consolidating their fragmented Facebook and Twitter domains into something that begins to resemble a decentralized (but linked) website across these platforms. Social media site mapping will become a discipline among the consulting set. (Joshua-Michéle Ross)
Integration: Expect social media not to be a standalone effort yet infused into other digital touch points. Altimeter Group’s recent research to 140 corporations gleaned that 46% of respondents listed “Website Integration” of social media as the top priority for external deployments. Expect this to happen in a few levels, from simple linking to social media accounts, to integrating conversations right onto the corporate website with strangers –and then your actual friends by using the social graph from social networks. (Jeremiah Owyang)
Kill All Your Microsites: There isn’t much micro about the microsite, with the possible exception of its effectiveness. Companies invest big budgets to build them, then bigger budgets to drive consumers to visit them – all to support a short term campaign before going dark just a few weeks later. In the coming year we’ll see more and more marketers ditching their microsites and turning to custom Facebook tabs, YouTube channels, purpose-built Twitter accounts and other social hubs as their primary online points-of-presence for content and conversation related to current campaigns, rather than as window dressing for their increasingly ineffective bloated-build-plus-banners tradigital efforts. (Greg Verdino)
Got APIs? Businesses that have never considered their information as an ecosystem asset wake up to emergent uses and possibilities from sharing. B2B brings sexy back in 2011. (Peter Kim)

Location Based Services

Location-based services will grow in adoption by mainstream users, but will thus be defined by their inherent value: coupons and deals. The services that survive the acquisition push as LBS grows will be the ones that evolve to focus on giving customers financial incentive to “check in” and LBS platforms will become the Sunday newspaper clippings for the 21st century. (Jason Falls)
Deliver Just-In-Time Deals: This time last year, I issued a series of predictions for 2010, and highlighted location-based mobile social services as a key opportunity. While services like Foursquare, Gowalla and SCVNGR haven’t quite become mainstream just yet, 2010 certainly saw quite a few companies experimenting with these platforms to deliver offers and incentives to customers who “checked in” to retail locations in their cities and towns. Now, as the rollout of Facebook Places brings the notion of check-ins to the mainstream masses and Facebook Deals lets companies piggyback on top of those check-ins with relevant local offers and interactions. A far cry from the Sunday circular and clip-and-save coupons that – let’s be honest – as often as not collect dust in drawers, this is all about one-to-one delivery of the right offer to drive individual purchase behavior at exactly the right place and time. But don’t think of this one as just another location-based services prediction. We’ll see a wider array of technologies – from QR codes to digital out-of-home to RFID to augmented reality – factor into schemes that serve up exactly the right offer (or content or information) at the right time, place and point-of-purchase. (Greg Verdino)
While location-based services like Loopt, Foursquare and Britekite have been around for a few years now, it’s only been over the last 6-12 months that these tools have started to take off. According to Forrester Research’s Melissa Parrish, only 4% of US online adults have ever used a location-based service. However, this number is growing rapidly and tends to skew toward affluent males who over-index in the influence category. Simultaneously, location-based services have also caught the attention of a number of major brands such as Disney, BestBuy, Pepsi, USA Today and The Gap. In 2011, I firmly believe that location-based services will catch on with the the general consumer for three reasons: 1) As the number of smart phones and tablets increase, so do the number of devices that are geo-aware. 2) Thanks to Facebook and its 540 million members, a large portion of those members are now asked every time they consider making a status update if they want to check into Facebook Places. 3) Businesses are starting to understand that location-based services is a great way to gather data and deepen loyalty with their customers. As a result, they are making available richer and more attractive offers for customers that check in. While we don’t know who the winner in the location-based space will be, we can absolutely expect a number of new players to enter the market while many existing location players consolidate or get subsumed by the larger players like Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Probably the biggest shift we will see in the location space is a move from active (user conscientiously takes an action) to passive checkins. Either way, I’m convinced that we’ll see a lot of exciting activity in the location-based marketing space in 2011. (Aaron Strout)
Game over for LBS businesses based on game mechanics. Facebook Places adoption will rise dramatically as integration with the social graph drives greater positive feedback for users from check-ins. Users tire in their pursuit of badges and digital paraphernalia, opting for engagement with their friends instead. (Peter Kim)

Peer-to-peer relationships

Many more people online will be looking for quality connections and information through anonymity. As much as people will post, share and connect through Social Media, we’ll see a burgeoning desire for people to also have a (credible) anonymous profile as well. This trend will lead to a ‘wisdom of crowds’ scenario, where it won’t matter if an individual is identifying themselves online, but rather in the value of the what is being said.” (Mitch Joel)
As social networking becomes the foundation for more and more decision-making, people will find that their closest friends really aren’t the best source of expertise. We’ll see the rise of interest-based networks where your reputation as the most knowledgable badminton racket buyer is more important — and far more lucrative from an advertising perspective. In the long tail of expertise, scale matters so look for these networks to rise on the backs of large profile and activity social graphs — like Facebook’s. (Charlene Li)

Metrics and measurement

Businesses everywhere, regardless of size, will continue their trend to demanding metrics, measures and direct connections to business drivers from social media marketing. This will continue to separate the “gurus” from the practitioners and carve out a more defined marketplace for those knowledgeable in the field while holding that group to high standards of excellence. As a result, social media executions will become more strategy-driven and businesses will benefit, strengthening social media marketing’s place in the business marketer’s tool bag. (Jason Falls)
Brands will quit worrying most about what can be measured and put the focus instead into what would be most useful for the audiences they want to reach. Rather than devoting resources foremost on finding destinations the brand can own so it can poke and prod people in as many ways as possible, more companies will think about how to put their messages in motion through giving their audiences access to share and react to material for the purposes those audiences most see fit. (Sam Ford)

About the authors

Jason Falls is a digital marketing strategist, professional speaker and social media practitioner and thinker based in Louisville, Kentucky.
Sam Ford is Director of Digital Strategy at Peppercom Strategic Communications, a research affiliate of the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, and a lecturer in Popular Culture Studies at Western Kentucky University.
Ann Handley is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs (www.marketingprofs.com) and the co-author of the brand-new book with the longest title in the world: Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business (Wiley, 2011)
Mitch Joel is President of Twist Image – an award-winning Digital Marketing agency. He is also the author of the business bestseller, Six Pixels of Separation (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette), named after his Blog and Podcast of the same name.
Charlene Li is author of the bestseller “Open Leadership”, Co-author of “Groundswell”, and Founder of Altimeter Group.
Jeremiah Owyang is Partner of Customer Strategy at Altimeter Group, a strategy consulting firm that provides thought leadership, research, and consulting on digital strategies.
Joshua-Michéle Ross runs digital strategy for Fleishman-Hillard in Europe.
Aaron Strout is the CMO of social media Agency, Powered Inc and co-author of soon-to-be published Location Based Marketing for Dummies.
Greg Verdino is VP of Strategy & Planning at Powered, Inc. and the author of microMARKETING: Get Big Results by Thinking and Acting Small.

Best wishes on closing out 2010 with a bang and starting 2011 like a rocket. I know Dachis Group will.

Who’s on first? Key problems today with location-based services

Abbott: “Who’s on first.“

It’s a classic comedy routine by Abbott & Costello. And it’s the first thing that came to my mind while watching the launch of Gap’s free jeans promotion on Facebook Deals. Location-based services are hot right now – wildly promising but wholly experimental. With only 4% of online Americans using LBS, brands are paying an oversized amount of attention to opportunities in the space.

I see three key challenges today’s brands face before LBS can work:

Users aren’t always as savvy as we assume they are. No marketer wants to make the mistake of assuming that all customers are the same or that the marketing department reflects the customer base. So while your team fights for mayorship of the office, recognize that your customers aren’t yet doing the same with your stores. Here’s an example of users “checking in” during the giveaway:
Privacy is a sleeping dragon. Most users don’t know about advanced privacy controls, but it’s dangerous to assume they don’t care. There was no mass exodus after the WSJ reported on Facebook privacy leaks. When I look at my Twitter stream, most users have location turned off – it’s disabled by default now, but don’t be surprised if that changes to support growth in the ad business. If that happens, then we’ll hear about how much users really do care. Because they do. Deeply.
You can’t handle the traffic. Early brand interaction surprised and delighted customers. As more consumers became active, we saw front line breakdowns with social media middlemen. This has since been solved with promos utilizing existing POS systems. But that’s just couponing, which has existed for 124 years – not 21st century location-based services. Today’s organizations aren’t ready to respond en masse at scale in real time.

LBS have lots of promise and some real challenges to solve. Today we only have a hint at what’s on second and I don’t know on third.

Must be the money

Social media is finally coming to a critical inflection point and make no mistake – it’s all about the money.

When I started blogging five years ago – early, but by no means among the earliest – the prevailing inclination among bloggers was to share and connect on an individual basis. Bloggers shared their content and built each other up by linking to each other in posts, creating blogrolls containing links to friend lists, even commented on blogs of individuals who worked for industry competitors. Corporations had presence through individuals; Bob Lutz at GM and Randy Baseler at Boeing were like the Columbus and Magellan of corporate social media.

Between 2005 – 2008, consumer adoption of social media shot up at a rapid pace. According to Forrester Social Technographics data, US online adults active in social media increased rapidly from just under 50% to 75%. Naturally, brands began to follow consumers into the medium. Early adopters were not happy. Debates between “purists” and “corporatists” began to emerge. What they didn’t realize is what Mark Cuban had called out years earlier – the social internet is a long tail ghetto where no content creator wants to be stuck.

In 2008, I left Forrester to start Dachis Group, because early on Jeff, Kate, Ellen, and I saw the potential for companies to go far beyond what had been imagined possible using social media to date – the thinking eventually crystallized as social business design. We knew that there was money to be made in “social media marketing” and “Enterprise 2.0” – and we weren’t alone.

I’ve been observing these trends emerge as social business evolves:

The nature of “social” has become much less social over the past three years. It’s now increasingly private and profit driven. The bloggers I followed in the early days write blog posts much less frequently today, if at all. However, they’re still writing and thinking about the industry – they’re just doing it behind the firewall and delivering value to paying customers. Smaller, private virtual salons have cropped up to host and monetize conversations – for example, Third Tribe Marketing, the Social Media Business Council, or the 2.0 Adoption Council. You think #Angelgate is only about Silicon Valley and startup money? Think again – similarly, there are private communities thriving today that keep thought leaders connected to one another and others, out. The exception to this trend are public community organizers like Mack Collier who coordinates #blogchat. Enjoy them while they last.
Companies are cashing out, performing their final tricks off of Cuban’s hypothetical vert ramp. From following the brand monitoring space, we’ve seen Cymfony, Umbria, Techrigy, and Scout Labs sell off. You’re probably more familiar with TechCrunch’s recent sale to AOL or Six Apart sold to VideoEgg. From what I hear on some of the tech deals, the companies may not be shaking the glitter off their clothes as much as pawning off whatever usable parts they’ve got left after crashing and burning.
Free social media sites are moving to monetize. Ning moved early and very direct. As any MBA could see, penetration pricing strategy, duh. Free doesn’t last forever, but its spectre does sell books. Dick Costolo is Twitter’s new CEO and he has one mission – to make money. You think Facebook Places is useless? Think again – the future of advertising is relevance and Facebook has it in spades: location-based services + social graph + user generated content.
Executives are migrating to small, socially-oriented businesses. This time around it’s not limited to traditional-to-dot-com; the similarity is from public to private. Talent is leaving Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft and heading to Twitter, Zynga, and Facebook. In a more old-school way, Erin Nelson is moving from CMO of Dell to CMO of Bazaarvoice. (BTW Dachis Group is hiring.) It’s not Shaheen from Andersen to Webvan or Dobbs from CNN to Space.com…yet.

Perhaps if the global economy didn’t crash in 2008, social media could’ve floated on in its cordial state indefinitely. But now we’ve seen more than enough proof of the concept that social media and technology drive tangible results for companies. That’s why Dachis Group calls it “social business” – we started using the phrase in January 2009 and have seen many others adopt it since.

Anyone in business knows you need to eventually capture the value you create. That time has come for social business.

Are you slowing down or speeding up the game?

In [American] football, when players move from one level to another (e.g. high school to college or college to pro), commentators often talk about game speed. You’ll hear phrases like “the game is a lot faster at this level.” In order to succeed, players must quickly adapt to game flow and apply their skills in context.

Conversely, skilled players like Tom Brady can use what’s known as a “hurry up” offense to act quickly and catch their opponents off guard. Great players can speed up game flow to create competitive advantage and achieve success.

We all have been at this game of social business/media/computing for a little over five years now. Brands are getting involved and many are scoring points – some in dramatic fashion – while others have committed fouls along the way. One fact has become clear: there’s serious money in social business. But to compete effectively, brands need to invest in assembling the right roster to play.

Early on, a handful of brands had a social media “rockstar” on board to champion their cause. These were lone rangers who were questioned regarding their commitment to themselves vs. their commitment to their employers. Today, a more effective corporate approach lies in the team concept, most apparent in social servicing presences like @TeamTurboTax, @DeltaAssist, @ATTCustomerCare, and @TWCableHelp. These brands first educated their teams (slowing down the game) then activated their teams (speeding things up).

Although the social business game evolves continuously, I sense that the pace of change has slowed a bit. Successful brands should be using the opportunity to speed things up vis-a-vis their competition – or getting up to speed if things are still moving too fast.

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