BlogWell, DoGood
WOM pal Michael Rubin asked me to pass along a really cool thing that he and Andy Sernovitz are doing in support of their upcoming conference BlogWell, How Big Companies Use Social Media. They are auctioning off tickets to BlogWell on Ebay and 100% of the proceeds go to charity, a different charity each week.
This week the National MS Society will be the beneficiary of the auction proceeds. And if you win, you will be the beneficiary of wisdom from a 4 star line up of corporations such as Home Depot, Wells Fargo, Intel, Cisco, Graco, UPS, Kaiser Permanente, and WalMart. Check out the first auction now.
So learn to blog well and do good all at the same time.
| Starts | Charity | Bidding | Ends |
| 10/1 | National Multiple Sclerosis Society | See this auction! | 10/8 |
| 10/5 | Heifer international | Auction Coming Soon | 10/12 |
| 10/9 | AmeriCares | Auction Coming Soon | 10/16 |
| 10/13 | Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Jimmy Fund | Auction Coming Soon | 10/20 |
| 10/17 | MusiCares | Auction Coming Soon | 10/24 |
Inter:PLAY 2008
It was lots of fun. Thanks to Dave Gray, Bill Streeter and Melody Meiners for making the panel, Branding Yourself On-Line, work so well. And Dana, Melody you two did an amazing job making it happen!
If you missed it, you can still catch a part of it here.
Mack Changes Stats: A Visit to the Viral Garden
Mack Collier, social media curator extraordinaire, changed the stats this week on which he bases his Viral Garden Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs from my blogging nemesis Technorati to Feedburner, specifically Feedburner subscribers. (Thanks to Toby for the heads up!) For me, this switch produced several ironies….(not in order of importance)
Irony #1
I referred to Technorati as my nemesis because from the time that I began my blog in May 2005 until the moment (unrecorded) that I stopped looking or caring I have had issues with Technorati in the way that they indexed, ranked and provided inadequate tech support.
Feedburner, on the other hand, has been nothing but helpful even in trying to solve issues with Technorati.
This past April I noticed that my Feedburner subscribers seemed to have dropped precipitously….as in they were “0″, none. I immediately panicked and clicked on “help” only to find that since they had been acquired by Google, “help” was now at Google and a bit less accessible than my panicked state required.
Dick Costolo, founder of Feedburner (who had been so responsive in trying to solve earlier Technorati issues), is a Facebook friend so I messaged him there. He quickly provided the email addresses at Google that could address my problem. It turned out to be a feed re-direction issue and although some subscribers were lost, the issue has been resolved.
Irony #2
Just a few days ago I had my trustee developer Chris Talkington change my Word Press theme and upgrade to WordPress 2.6.1. He added the Feedburner subscriber widget…..the one that Mack used to base his Top 25 on for the past week. Thank you, Chris….how fortuitous for me.
Gavin Heaton, in response to Mack’s change, asked great questions about the public display of stats…and his commenters responded on this topic as well as the merits of lists in general.
I wholeheartedly agree with Gavin’s statement that, “I think the only way to build links, for the long term anyway, is to create quality content and engage with your community of readers.” Presumably, one’s content is initially “found” by a reader because it has achieved enough Google juice to be visible on a topic search or because of a link from another blog. Ideally this is the result of “quality content” and/or engaging with a community of readers through either your blog or through other social venues, Twitter, Facebook etc.
Therefore, I suppose, the display of stats is not necessary to build readership….on the other hand, truly, most people don’t really like to be the first one to arrive at a party or go into a restaurant where there are no other diners. So maybe there is some comfort in a display of subscriber stats that says the content here is good enough that others want to know when there is more.
I would like to believe that people read my blog/subscribe to my blog because they like the content…..and this leads to irony #3.
Irony #3
There hasn’t been much content, good or bad, on my blog for quite some time. For the first part of “some time” it was mostly about My Unforgettable Mom….and then after she passed away in May it just became about, well…. everything. Even wondering just what it was that I should start back writing about.
So, THIS weekend, knowing that my kids were both going to be away I had decided would be a good time to put all my excuses aside, fire up the procrastinator’s clock and write. But again, what to write?
Thanks to Mack, Toby, and Chris at least for today that is solved.
Must Read: Groundswell (Con’t)
So, back to Groundswell and the reasons why I said, “must read.”
Groundswell is well researched (Forrester research data from around the world, 65 corporate examples and 25 full case studies), written by two great, knowledgeable writers and fellow particpants, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, and is exceptionally readable at the same time.
Readability in a business book is of course a relative measure, but for me it relevance and time=value.
“Has value” means it is relevant to my work in real time (applicable right now, today; not 15 minutes ago) and therefore is a good (another relative measure and highly contextual) use of my time because yes, I have time deficit disorder that seems to never disappear regardless of which Circa or Hipster PDA strategy I deploy.
This translates into usefulness: I can use the information to support a recommendation to a client, add to a presentation, and/or as a catalyst for an idea or concept. Maybe even to write a blog post.
At the moment, I am writing a proposal for a client and using the social technographics ladder to support a recommended target for a program and to demonstrate how users will become involved and participate. Charlene and Josh have made this tool available on line.
I am also using their POST method as a framework for the strategy I am recommending. I find that for whatever reason, marketers seem to think that social media doesn’t need a strategy or a well defined target and is driven by technology. POST which stands for People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technology…in that order, please, really puts this perspective.
I have a client company whose marketing folks have been setting up Facebook pages. So, of course there is no cost other than their time for doing this. It seems to make them feel like social media participants. We are on Facebook, they say. They friend each other and their agencies and consultants. Add several wall posts and away they go. But where are they going?
And then of course there is ROI. Yes, Virginia, there is an ROI for social media. Remember the objectives and strategy? A recruiting blog? How many applications did you get? A private community? What was the value for that new product idea? Start there. Add out of pocket costs (platform, creative, moderation etc).
Speaking of ROI, buy the Groundswell. Buy a copy for your clients. Buy a copy for your prospects. It will provide many returns.
Forrester Marketing Forum 2008
In the world of marketing, there are only a few things that I believe are predictable with absolute certainty and one of them is that a Forrester Marketing Forum (or Consumer Forum) will exceed my expectations; and with each conference I attend my expectations increase.
Okay, so the evidence for my unabashed enthusiasm?
My collection of Forrester spiral notebooks: Forrester typically includes a spiral notebook for note taking with their conference package. When I leave, the notebook is usually full; filled with notes taken during the presentations and sessions as well as thoughts that I add during and after. In other words, a Forrester conference really stimulates thought and ideas and the spiral notebook becomes an ongoing useful archive for future reference. The conferences that keep on giving.
What else do I know for sure? The Forrester speakers include an outstanding lineup including Peter Kim, Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff, and Brian Haven. The non-Forrester speakers, panelists and moderators always include people and companies that I would include if I were making a wish list. This has included Henry Jenkins, David Armano, Ze Frank, Nicholas Negroponte, Andy Sernovitz, Karl Long, Sylvia Reynolds, Fed Ex, Dell, P&G, and many others.
The conference next week includes: Casey Jones, VP Global Marketing from Dell, Nancy MacIntyre, EVP Product, Innovation and Marketing at LeapFrog, Cathy Halligan CMO Wal-Mart, Emmanuel Brown, Director of Digital and Content at Nike’s Jordan Brand, Gary Skidmore from Harte-Hanks and Patrick W Jordan author of How to Make Brilliant Stuff that People Love.
Also, IT’S {A}Live, In a sense, going to a Forrester Conference is a life imitating art imitating life experience or in other words, when we talk and write about participatory media to our clients who sometimes seem not to “get it”, this is where it all comes together. So while we are listening to Charlene Li and/or Josh Bernoff talk about a Groundswell, we are right in the center participating in that transformed world of live blogging, twittering, photos, videos….just check out the Co-Brandit videos or the Critical Mass Beta Cam from past Forrester events.
And speaking of Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff and Groundswell you can now buy their book and they have an awesome site
and a really cool tool to profile your own customer’s social computing profile and then use to chart a social technology strategy.
Jeremiah Owyang posted that all conference attendees will be getting a copy of this awesome book. I will be posting a review shortly….so far it’s great!
So, I am looking forward to the Forum and joining Jeremiah in the “bloggers bullpen”. I am also hoping to catch up with Peter Kim! More to follow next week.
Open Social Kumbaya: Pass the API, please
Well honestly, the name Open Social sounds a bit more 1962 than web2.0…I am thinking church social and maybe Aunt Bee serving up the Kool-Aid and announcing in simple to understand terms, “everyone that joins our social will share the same hymnal .”
The announcement from MySpace for the Open Social went like this:” Our partnership with Google allows developers to gain massive distribution without unnecessary specialized development for every platform,” said Chris DeWolfe, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of MySpace. “This is about helping the start-up spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding it for every social network. We’re pleased to collaborate with Google to establish a landmark standard for social applications.”
Or, said another way, the folks that write the programs for all those fun applications that you might be familiar with from say Facebook, can write them once and they can then run on any site that is openly social. This compares to the days before the Open Social when every social network had its own markup language.
As B.L. Ochman notes, “OpenSocial will let developers use Javascript and html code to write applications which are essentially widgets that will work on any website that chooses to implement OpenSocial. These applications will be able to access user profile data, friend lists, and friend-related notifications. And they can broadcast content across a wide number of sites simultaneously.”
OK, this is definitely not 1962.
Bad example though, because Facebook at this moment in time is not singing Kumbaya and according to Brandee Barker, Director of corporate communications at Facebook as quoted on TechCrunch:
“Despite reports, Facebook has still not been briefed on OpenSocial. When we have had a chance to understand the technology, then Facebook will evaluate participation relative to the benefits to its 50 million users and 100,000 platform developers.”
Along with Google and MySpace, Bebo, Ning, LinkedIn, SixApart and a vast collection of other social networking sites and developers are all signed onto Open Social. B.L. also highlights the importance of the fact that “every marketer who wants to stay relevant will need to start taking social networks very seriously indeed.”
One big question seems to be, will Facebook join Google’s attempt to out Facebook Facebook? Or as the New York Times puts it, “Google and Friends Gang up on Facebook.”
Charlene Li writes,” Facebook isn’t threatened — for now. Application developers are going to go to where the heat is, and that heat is red hot at Facebook…. Add on the third leg of the social app stool — monetization, which Facebook is set to announce Nov. 6th — and you have a developer’s dream. Any developer worth his/her salt is developing on the Facebook platform, trying to figure what works, what doesn’t. And because of this head start, developers will still develop for Facebook FIRST before developing for OpenSocial.”
So, take that Google. Or, at least for today. Of course Peter Kafka at Silcon Alley Insider does raise a good questions also: will any of this change the user dynamics? He writes, “Most people are on Facebook because their friends are on Facebook; not because they can throw sheep, turn people into zombies, etc. If you weren’t using Orkut, Ning or Friendster before, will a new set of apps make you use it now?”
Tags: Google, Open Social, Facebook, B.L. Ochman, Charlene Li, Forrester, Media2.0, Peter Kafka, LinkedIn, Bebo, Ning, SixApart, Steve Rubel, TechCrunch, MySpace, Mashable
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