Conversations and Connections - social media at SAS

Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter Group led a fascinating panel at Blogworld today titled "Where Are We Going? The Future of Social Media & Business." As I did yesterday with Chris Brogan's session, I'm posting my tidied-up notes here. This session was without a doubt a call to action for corporate social media practitioners.

Key topics

1. Social is everywhere
2. Corporate websites are irrelevant
3. Real time is not fast enough
4. Customers don't care what department you're in
5. Social personalization - your marketing efforts will be personalized based on your customers social idenity

Where are we now?

Is social for real or is it a fad? When Obama launched his campaign and won, it became a moot point and the question shifted to how do we get started.

Culture impacts the adoption of social technology. It's very heavy in China but they tend to use online forums and anonymous identities, for instance. Some kids in the US have multiple MySpace profiles: a regular profile and a profile for people they don't really like.

Most brands are not engaging effectively. They're falling behind the curve.

Altimeter recently published a survey of companies that are engaging well with their community. Starbucks, Dell, eBay and Google were at the top of the list.

Social is everywhere. Mainstream media sites are incorporating social features.

The next trend to watch is Google Sidewiki. (People in the audience actually booed at the mention.) This is a great opportunity for customers and the brands who are ready to listen. Customers and competitors can leave comments on your Web pages and there's nothing you can do to stop them. It's a browser plugin for IE and Firefox, so it will take some time for mainstream adoption.

If your company is scared about the social web, it's too late. You can't stop it. One audience member replied, "This is like somebody coming to my house and painting it. This is my site!"

Unfortunately the control doesn't belong to us, Jeremiah said. Another audience member replied, "This isn't on your site, it's on my Web."

Google has launched a "stealth social web" with tools like Google Sidewiki, Google Profiles, Google Wave, Google Chat, etc.

You do not control your brand, but at the same time you could control your competitors' brands. You need to change your reaction from fear to seeing the opportunity.

Corporate Websites - Are they irrelevant?

Research shows you trust your friends' opinions more than that of companies and salespeople. These trusted discussions are happening off of your corporate website. You need to join customers where they are: fish where the fish are. Go to Digg, Slashdot, go to where your customers are and join them. One of Intel's goals was not to link to Intel.com, but go to where the customers are. Fragment your website and put it where your customers are, don't try to get them back to your website. Stop measuring based on leads and how many people you bring back to your site.

In the future your product pages will look like a collection of conversations.

Products he mentioned to make sites more social include Echo and Liveworld's Livebar.

My question: How can we convince people within our company that we shouldn't be trying to drive traffic back to the website?

You need to measure success differently, Jeremiah said. The number of friends or fans, the conversations you're involved in, the mentions of your product. Change the way you measure. Think of it in the continuum of a marketing funnel. Frame it in that way. We may not be ready to bring them to the web site yet, but when we're ready, we can bring them in, when they're farther along in the sales cycle.

Real time is not fast enough.

Motrin Moms is an overused example but still has important lessons for us. It started happening on a Friday evening. By Monday it was mainstream. Johnson & Johnson tried to respond over the weekend but it wasn't enough; they didn't respond fast enough.

What can you do? Have a very robust and active listening program and be ready to respond. Only a few hands went up when up when Jeremiah asked how many in the room had a monitoring program, and even fewer when he asked if we had a social crisis response plan.

8 Objectives when listening, from least to most sophisticated:

1. No objective at all
2. Tracking of brand mentions
3. Identifying market risks and opportunities
4. Improving campaign efficiency
5. Meausring support efforts
6. Responding to customer inquiry
7. Better understand customers
8. Being proactive and anticipating customers

Develop an advocacy program. Understand your top customers and build them a platform to do the word of mouth marketing and support for you. Intel Insiders, WamMart Mom Bloggers and Microsoft MVP program are examples.

The key is to be an empowerer. Teach them how to do these things.

Jason Keath asked how this impacts staffing and resources. These things require staffing and funding. But what's the cost or benefit savings you can get out of this? Jeremiah responded that if you can empower thousands of people without paying them, there's a definite ROI. The business case comes in opportunity cost analysis.

Customers don't care what department you're in

Jeremiah used the Maytag/Whirpool/Dooce example where a prominent blogger (Dooce) had a problem with her machine and blogged and tweeted about it. Dooce didn't care if it was a PR, product development, support or other issue. She just wanted her machine fixed.

It's the concept of social CRM: There's a lot of data happening in the social web. CRM companies are mining that data so the right people can respond.

Many of the monitoring solutions in the industry, according to Jeremiah, are building disparate databases that aren't integrated to all areas of the company. You have to connect all areas and get a holistic view of your customers.

Develop a holistic strategy

"It's coming a lot faster than I thought it would." We call it social personalization. People are creating robust profiles on the Web with better information than they're giving you when they sign up for your site, and it's all connected (Twitter, Facebook Connect, etc.) Web sites can now provide a personalized experience based on the customer's ID. Customers can log in via Facebook Connect and not have to fill out the registration page. Registration pages are annoying to many people and probably not accurate. Customers can give companies access to your Facebook profile and choose how much information to give them. The company can provide you with personalized information relevant to you.

An audience member metnioned a legal issue they had encountered: If you log in with a third party tool your visitors aren't explicitly opting in to your privacy policy. How do you get around that?

Jeremiah repsonded that it's going to take a while to work out those issues.

If you use Facebook Connect or other tools, you do not get their email address. Once again you need to change the way that you measure success. Facebook will kick you off if you try to scrape information. One strategy is to have another page where you gather information.

Jeremiah talked about Layar as an example of augmented reality. You can point your smart phone at the Hilton and get information on your phone about what's happening around you, and personalize that information.

Summary

• The social web is quickly evolving. Develop long-term strategies now. Stop playing the one-off games and think about how this is truly changing your business.
  
  
• You need to integrate social technologies into your corporate Web site or Google will render you irrelevant.
  
  
• Join communities where they exist.
  
  
• Develop a listening and advocacy program.
  
  
• Think holistically: this is not just marketing, it's sales and PR and recruting and support.
  
  
• Prepare for personalized content to come to your web sites.
  

Jeremiah's final slide read, "For slides, send an email to info@altimetergroup.com."

Chris Brogan delivered the closing keynote today at BlogWorld Expo. As usual it was inspiring, often unexpected and a bit profane. I'm posting my notes cleaned up a bit but more or less as I took them.

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This is no rah-rah speech. This is not going to be "hooray, we're the cool kids."

First and foremost, be humble about what you know and stop this "they don't get it" crap. If they don't get it it's because we're not teaching them well enough, or because they don't need to know.

You are the preachers for this new street religion, and you can bring the message if you just stop hanging around with the same people.

You need to go back and embed with the other folks.

You need to talk about everything that you're passionate about, not social media. Please don't write a blog post about me tomorrow, write about somebody who needs the attention.

Some of you are going to die along the way. You're going to get fired because you did something wrong. And if you're not at risk, you're not trying hard enough.

What's next is about how human business works. The term "social media" never sat well with me. We need to learn how this human business is going to change how we do things. I'm sick of talking about things like what avatar to put up.

Stop creating words with "tw" in front of them. We did that a few years ago with "pod." How'd that work out?

Branding has to do with managing the end-to-end experience. Look at Disney. Be all the way 360 who you really are. If you're a bad person, get good or get offline.

Your brand is about the way you communicate, the experience you create. It's not about the tools. Do you want to know how I did what I did? I did it with love. And I do mean love. Love in business means something different than love at the house. It means really respecting your customers and showing them you care. We tell them we love them then we bombard them with stupid stuff that doesn't do them any good (bad email newsletters).

The first thing people look for is the case studies. Case studies are what happened back then. Comcastcares came about because Frank had a Twitter account and started doing something with it.

Don't be a "business card ninja," firing cards at people the moment you meet them. It's like a poke in Facebook, only less interesting. Shake someone's hand, get to know them. If you feel like you want to get to know them, then ask if they want to exchange business cards.

Think about three things:

1. Think about your own business, your own goals.

2. Think about who else this person you're meeting needs to know. That's the best thing I ever do, is be at the elbow of every deal, get people together. If you're the person who gives everybody else the work, you're set for life.

3. Don't ask 'what can I do for you.' Anticipate what you can do. Give an idea of what you're going to do next for people.

Uninstall Farmville. Stop Mafia Wars. I heard two grown adults talk about what it was going to take to get some kind of pig.

We need to drive this stuff to business. The days of kumbayah are over. Love everybody like you mean it, but the salad days are done. It's not time to be all gee whiz with each other anymore. It's time to think how this will affect our business.

Your platform is vital. The reason I got a book deal is because I have a platform: speaking gigs, a blog, a newsletter. The platform is what people are seeking. If someone says they're looking for influential bloggers, they're really looking for the numbers. They don't care if you're actually a good blogger.

You do have to do face-to-face. F2F is alive and well. Get out and meet people. Volunteer as much as you can, but watch out for overvolunteering.

Have flexibility in your schedule. Learn how to say no more.

We have so much more important work to do than convincing companies they need to be blogging. You don't have to save everybody. Do the business. Get it done.

Make it about them. Stop looking at this as a cult of me. It has to be about your customers and your audience. And turn them into a community. The difference between an audience and a community is the way you face the chairs.

The difference between an audience and a community: one will fall on its sword for you and the other will watch you fall.

Get out and start finding the people whose stories are important.

Put it out there for other people. You're all going to die wishing you'd said more about other people. Put it on paper. Help other people understand. Give it all away. We all think we have the best secrets, but we don't. Give away the good stuff.

Friendship with intent. Start seeking out really cool alliances. It's cool to start cool things, but it's really cool if you can do it with people who have the same ideas and are already doing things.

You don't need 26 kinds of conferences, you need conferences that are really well defined.

Give people the tools to start doing this on their own. Give them things like video that they can use to do things, so you can go do other things.

Social media is not a channel, but it's the most amazing set of tools in the world for channel development.

As for your community, start paying attention to how you're going to get business, and it's not always the best idea to make your community your customers. Oprah has an active community. She acts as a ferocious gatekeeper and sells access to the big companies that want to reach them.

Always look to be innovating. Always take the chips from your winnings and move them to the next table.

Make your site your storefront. Whatever you're trying to sell, be more explicit. It's amazing how many people tell me they're trying to consult and I go to their blogs and all I see is reviews of Wii games.

I write about industries that I hope to change, and then they call me. I write about what I think hotels should do, and they call me. I write about what airlines should do, and they call me.

Give stuff away. Bring wine to the picnic. If you show up in these social sites and start pitching, that won't work. But everybody likes something delicious.

Editing is good manners. Be concise. Tell good stories. We don't have time to read Moby Dick anymore. Long form articles in the New Yorker aren't getting read anymore. People want real stories. Take your ideas and make them small, compact and readable and give them "handles" so people can take them with them.

If you're not doing stuff with mobile, put that back on the list.

Build armies. You need to connect with people, equip them, embed and team up. You need to keep making the Super Friends over and over again. The snake oil salesman are here and you have to be better than them.

Flip the mindset. "How can I equip you" should be the way you write every post.

Don't be that guy. Don't be that person pushing your dumb stuff on people all the time. Just because you're so excited about your awesome startup, it's very likely that the rest of us aren't just yet.

Talk about them. It's amazing how few people write stories about other people as much as they write about themselves. It's great to talk about how your experience relates to someone else, but they want to hear things about themselves. Point out the cool people that aren't named you.

Test by doing. There's just a little too much research in what we're doing. Try stuff, and kill the stuff that doesn't work. If your blog isn't getting readers and comments, do something different.

Three things:

Build small, powerful networks. Having a lot of friends on Twitter doesn't matter; having friends you can motivate to rise to a cause when you need them to matters.

Tune your business. Make sure you have products people want.

Focus on integrated, wholistic human business. Social media is not the new PR or marketing, it's the new dial tone. It's the new nerve center of your organization. Even if your bosses don't want to get into it yet, wire it up.