Web Business by Ken Burbary

Social media thoughts of the day

To be an effective community professional, you need to walk the talk and use the tools

Google is not a search engine, it’s a reputation tracker

Sean scored high on search engine results for Microsoft Support after a bad story was on Digg.com

Admits there are many buzzwords, yet many forget to look at the bigger picture

Rather than focusing on the Techcrunch/Scoble “Shiny Diamond” to develop a social media strategy

The 5 P’s of Social Media: People, Places, Process, Platform, Patterns

Process is potentially the most important P –but often overlooked

There are more smarter people about your product outside of your company

It’s good and horrible news that it’s easy to publish. Many fractures due to lack of strategy.

Google is the enemy of brand loyalty, if I can find the answer to a question not on your corporate property

Most advocates and influencers are not
helping to help a brand, they are helping other users.

“Pay it forward” a good model and metaphor how a community works

Participation:

Impacts to busienss: Customer Service and Support, Sales and Marketing, Innovation and Product Development

You can’t own the message and the audience is going to change it on their own

Word of Mouth has been a key driver why people buy what they buy, now with access to information through social tools greatly impacts this

Engagement is about brand inclusion, making sure people have their voiced involved

We’ve all seen ugly babies but never had one. We’ve strong attraction to our own products. Uses a MS open source as a case study

Beta is not early enough to get your community involved

If you want raving fans, get affinity, talks about Harley Davidson

Influencer Framework in Web 1.0: Envision and develop, test and release, and sell and support

Suggests that social aspect of employees were only in sell and support aspect, not other areas

Sean had an executive champion, Steve Ballmer

Social graph: as a business strategy we should think about it as\

Notes from SAP Salon: Social Media and Online Communities

2008 Digital Outlook Excerpts

A modest proposal: Before a project starts, the creative team needs to go into a room—their literal Black Box—and close the door. They need to write these four questions up on a whiteboard and then do some soul-searching. If “no” is the answer to any, they should put the brakes on, and everyone—the account team, the client, and project management—should head back to the drawing board. Here are those scary questions:

1. Are we aiming high enough? What is truly new-to-the-world about what we’re doing? Is the thing we’re about to advertise or design truly meeting a customer’s unmet need, or are we just designing an “also-ran” or putting lipstick on a pig?

2. Are the right people in the game? Is our concepting team genuinely multidisciplinary? Does it include profound input from industry experts, brand strategists, consumer insight specialists, technology wizards, information architects, and copywriters?
3. Are we willing to fail—quickly? Are we prepared to be wrong a few times before we are right? To be really, really uncomfortable? Are we willing to throw out our tried-and-true process and all of our favorite creative tricks—even though they work—in order to create a real breakthrough?

4. Is there a story here? Are we designing a page or an experience? What is the beginning, the middle, and the end of the brand story we are creating? Does it move—and are people moved by it?

Creative people will always represent something of a Black Box within their agency or for their clients, because anagement is overwhelmingly left-brained, analytical, and linear in its approach to problems. And creatives are, well, the opposite. This is not a bad thing, but it goes a long way toward explaining some of the blank stares that both sides give one another when they are talking to each other. The point—now more than ever before—is not that creatives have to be more assimilated, or learn how to use a spreadsheet, or care less about perfection. It’s just that it might be time to put some new furniture in the Black Box and then invite people to come inside for a visit.

Clipped from From Avenue A / Razorfish, Digital Outlook Report 2008 (Download full report here)

The POST method to Social Media Strategy