Tag Archives: social media

Coca-Cola-verses-BUZZ

FIRST GLANCE: Coca-Cola gets “buzz”

Coca-Cola’s disclosure that it found limited short-term value from online buzz raises some good questions about information perception and the relative value of Real-Time-Marketing (RTM).

Takeaway: RTM (Real-Time-Marketing) isn’t about 15 minutes of fame – it needs to be part of an integrated long-term brand communications strategy. Continue reading

peoples_oil

Why being frictionless is good business

Being social takes work. Communicating across any social network brings with it a level of overhead, both in terms of time and learning. It doesn’t matter if that social network involves flying across the country to meet with somebody or sending out an “I’ve arrived” ping on FourSquare when you land half a world away. They all have overhead. You need to learn how to use the medium efficiently. And you need to learn how to deal with the increased number of social contacts that increased “efficiency” will bring with it.

While social communications channels can greatly expand our ability to reach an ever-increasing number of people, they can also, through their added overhead, bring with them the wrong type of friction and limit the number of networks that we can actually leverage to our advantage. In fact, it can become a very limiting factor in the number of social communications channels that we participate in at any given time.

OVERHEAD EQUALS FRICTION

Consider this. If I use a single social channel to regularly interact with 5 people (assuming they don’t know each other), the level of “channel” overhead is relatively low. I learn how to use the channel and I communicate.

But if those 5 people are all on different communications channels, I have to learn – and keep up with – 5 different channels to keep up with them. That’s overhead – especially if each of those 5 different communications channels has their own social conventions, unique “media-rich” value or medium-based communications limitations.

At the end of the day, the more social communications channels that I utilize (and I’ll toss in email, SMS, my mobile phone and even that occasional hand-written letter – yes, I still write those), the fewer true intimate and personal relationships I can maintain. Overhead equates to unwanted friction.

FRICTION CAN BECOME MORE FRICTIONLESS

As social communications channels grow in number and user adoption (yes, I know, I’m avoiding using the phrase “social media” because this isn’t about “social media”), my ability to reach an ever-expanding number of diverse people increases. And I consider this a good thing.

With reduced friction, I can reach out more fluidly

to a larger number of people

But to make it a great thing, I must overcome the learning curve of a new communications channel and decrease its overhead. Less overhead means the channel becomes increasingly frictionless. With reduced friction, I can reach out more fluidly to a larger number of people. Reducing friction requires one of two things: a user experience that is fundamentally intuitive (with an equally compelling/intuitive use case) or time to figure out how a system works. I prefer the former, but usually settle for the latter. I’m willing to do that because the more I can make a communications channel frictionless, the more likely I am to use it to explore the worlds around me.

FRICTIONLESS COMMUNICATIONS OPENS NEW WORLDS

As I reach out to a larger number of people, the number of diverse perspectives I have access to is amazing. With each perspective comes a unique experience and story. And with each unique story comes a new world of ideas and concepts upon which I can build, and expand, my own world. Over time, my world begins to look a lot less like my world, and a lot more like a melding of those that I touch. In return, the worlds that I touch begin to look a bit like me.

Every world that I look into won’t necessarily fit my perspective, or the rules which define it. There are many that don’t. But for each world that doesn’t mesh, I still learn a bit, and there are an almost endless (well, 7B and counting) number of perspectives that I can look at. And many of those will mesh, or connect, in some way with mine.

“The less friction there is to a communications channel into these worlds,

the greater the exchange of ideas”

The melding of perspectives, experiences, stories and ideas from these worlds is mutually beneficial. The less friction there is to a communications channel into these worlds, the greater the exchange of ideas. In fact, some of my best conversations are not only frictionless within a communications channel, they transcend multiple channels in a single conversation.

It’s not uncommon for a conversation to start with a text message, move to a call on my mobile, shift to a video session (with a few other people tossed in for fun), then shift from a continuous form of communications to a discontinuous form (such as email) only to revive up again on yet another channel. I often respond to a text message with a Skype message, which is frequently responded to by a Direct Message on Twitter which leads to a shared post on Facebook.

THE VALUE OF FRICTIONLESS

Let’s shift our perspective here just a bit. Nothing today is truly frictionless. Friction and overhead still exist, and there is, in fact, value in a certain amount of friction as a filtering mechanism. But friction caused by overhead is usually a negative. Now, let’s apply that to you, your business, your professional life. Have you eliminated unnecessary friction in your communications? Do you even have a strategy to become as close to a frictionless state as possible? Some key steps to consider:

  • Don’t be afraid to use a variety of social channels to meet new people or new customers. You can’t afford to ignore the chance to at least sample what new social channels have to offer.
  • Not only seek out channels with inherently low friction (overhead), but take the time to learn about, and respect, new communications channels, and find ways to deal with their overhead/friction. If the overhead friction is too high, take a step back and move on. If the friction doesn’t decrease on its own, it probably won’t be a viable channel for others either.
  • Open your world to others, in exchange for a view into their world. Remember to accept their ideas and needs as readily as you are willing to push your ideas and products to them – being frictionless in your sharing and communications is a two-way street.
  • Be willing to take the conversation, be it collaboration, sales or customer support, from one social channel to another, as your mutual relationship grows, or your need to communicate changes, and
  • Be willing to take the effort to move from relationships to friendships, from customers to trusted clients.

While we always need a bit of good friction in our lives, seeking to eliminate bad friction, and being as frictionless as possible – especially in our social communications – can be very rewarding.

Image “Peoples Special Motor Oil” by Steve Snodgrass, Licensed under Creative Commons

ZeroKlout2

Klout, Big Data and the Meaning of “Opt Out”

Is it possible to have a Klout Score of Zero (K = 0)?

Why, you might ask, would anybody want to have such a score in the gamified realm of influence measurement, where higher scores indicate a higher level of perceived online influence?

The answer may lie in the way that Klout profiles you, branding you a Specialist, an Observer, or a Broadcaster. The answer may also lie in how people relate to Big Data, vaguely defined ranking algorithms, and the increased tendency of offline organizations to make some big, and potentially misleading, assumptions about the role of online influence in an offline world.

“Klout calculates billions of data points across over 100 million influencers every day.” ~ Klout.com

Whatever the reason, there are people who simply want out.  But opting out, and driving your score to a meaningless Zero, is apparently a bit more difficult in the Klout dimension than one might imagine.

I PRESENT TO YOU MR. SAM FIORELLA

Mr. Fiorella was recently referenced in a Wired.com article (What your Klout Score really means) that delved into an experience he had a while back with a potential employer, who eliminated Sam (and possibly others) from the list of candidates based on his perceived “sub-par” Klout Score. As listed on the Klout.com website…

It’s not the first time something in the online world has impacted a decision in the offline world, and it definitely won’t be the last (see Jeremiah Owyang’s post “How ‘Social Profiling’ Will Work In The Real World“).

Sam ultimately did improve his Klout Score (into the 70’s) but was never happy with the idea of being ranked (or branded) by an algorithm for online OR offline purposes. So when Klout offered an “opt out” option at the beginning of November, 2011, he promptly did just that. He opted out and initiated the deletion of his Klout profile, per the language on the Klout site:

Klout Opt Out

As far as Sam was concerned, he was satisfied that after opting out nobody would be able to view his Klout Score moving forward and that only trace data would remain in the system (for 180 days, after which it would be removed).

He also understood that Klout would continue track his activities on the public broadcast social site Twitter. 

Note: I wouldn’t be surprised if Klout NEEDS to track Sam privately in order to accurately determine the Klout Scores of others within his Twitter social graph. In essence, influencers who are not tracked become dark matter, or invisible thought leaders. They mess with what we perceive by influencing behavior in unseen ways. 

But there was also a level of expectation that the information gathered on Twitter (and his resulting private Klout Score) would to be kept private and OFF the Klout.com site.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.

I PRESENT TO YOU MR. SAM FIORELLA’S GHOST

In the name of full disclosure, I know Sam personally and I am a registered Klout user. I was also aware when he, and others, opted out of Klout last year. So when I read the Wired article, and the various other articles and posts that it spawned, the analyst in me was just a bit curious to see if Sam had in fact been removed from the site. So I search Klout.com and found no public profile or information on him.

But I did come across the profile of a friend of mine, and attached to that profile, in their Influencers list, was the smiling face of Sam Fiorella. On the site, exactly where it should not have been.

Apparently, the phrase “you will be removed from Klout.com within 24-48 hours” – as mentioned in the Klout opt out statement – may not mean what you think it means.

Sam opted out from Klout almost 6 months ago. Could this possibly be the “trace data” mentioned in the Klout “opt out” statement?  I don’t believe so, as his current Twitter avatar is on display along with an assumingly current Klout Score of 52 (which sounds plausible since Klout appears to be pulling his data only from Twitter, not the complete list of social sites that Sam previously had linked to his Klout account, and it increased to 53 last night).

But wait, there’s more (thank you Ron Popeil). While I did pass on the option to invite Sam back to Klout (he wouldn’t have accepted anyway), I couldn’t resist the chance to test the software and see if it would allow me to give him a +K in Blogging. It did:

I’m not sure the +K stuck (even though it does now show me a greyed out +K button for Sam and Blogging, it apparently didn’t decrement my +K counter).

But the mere fact that it allowed me to go through the action, give me a success notification and offer the option to Tweet the +K out, was more than just a bit interesting – it was a challenge to figure out what had gone wrong, how it might be corrected and to think strategically a bit about some of the larger (beyond Klout) implications it might have.

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

From a social perspective, you cannot deny that influence exists – marketing, advertising and sales people have been trying to identify and target influential consumers for years. Nor can we deny that our online and offline lives are colliding extremely fast, and influence in one medium can, and will, transcend to another.

From an online influence measurement perspective, there is a defined need to look for insights in online behavior (served by Klout and other firms such as PeerIndex, Twitalyzer, TweetLevel, etc.), and the people at Klout have been very honest and open with me, and others, about how and why they are undertaking this task. 

But there is a disconnect when a phrase like “removed” appears to mean “erased a bit” – not quite how I would interpret it.

CAN WE ACHIEVE ZERO?

When Sam opted out of Klout, he assumed that he would still have a Klout Score, but that his information would no longer be shared or visible to others – in essence giving him a public null Klout Score (K = 0) that he sought. While the data would still exist, and be interpreted by Klout, they would not share their interpretations with others.

So why is Sam Fiorella still appearing on Klout? Perhaps there is an issue that weaves around Klout’s interpretation of words, and the managing of expectations from a contractual Terms of Service (TOS) perspective. Or perhaps it has to do with the massive amounts of Big Data that we are crunching on an ongoing basis, with technology evolving at such a rapid pace that glitches and ghosts, while unacceptable, are going to occur. Either way, there is a flaw somewhere in the system, and Mr. Fiorella has become its poster child.

PRIVACY AND PERVASIVE COMMUNICATIONS

Sam’s issue with Klout is bigger than either Sam or Klout. Not to diminish what Sam is going through, neither Sam nor Klout are alone in facing issues regarding personal data, big data, privacy or changing technology. If anything, his dilemma is indicative of a much larger series of questions and issues that we face.

We live in an age of technology-enabled Pervasive Communications. Our ability to communicate with almost anyone, anywhere at any time, over a multitude of communications channels, is allowing us to unleash our DNA-driven need to create, share and consume content and information with others.

As we do this, our public actions are increasingly tracked, tagged, shared and mined by people and companies that we’ve never met. They’re sifting through piles of Big Data looking for patterns, for trends, for clues regarding what influences our decisions, and how our decisions influence – if at all – the decisions of others. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when this activity lacks true transparency of both intent and use, the user is increasingly, and unknowingly, giving away far more than they are receiving in return.

“There is nothing in the dark that isn’t there when the lights are on.”

~ Rod Serling

The data is out there and it’s not going away. It may lose some of its relevance, but it will still be out there and is increasingly being linked with other data to create “new” data. The questions of who really owns our data (both pre and post-processing), how and when it can be shared and reused, and how much light (transparency) should be shined upon it, will likely be argued (and should be) for many years to come.

While many individuals may argue that they want their data out there (in an effort to achieve a richer, more engaging online experience), I do believe that there are different times and places for private and public, and, as individuals, businesses and governments, we need to continually ask ourselves:

  • What should the ground-rules be for how Terms of Service and ownership of data are defined?
  • How will we let these definitions and rules evolve and adapt to technology and human behavior patterns that don’t yet exist or have yet to be defined?
  • How can we provide true transparency (in simple terms) to online users regarding their data and its linkages with other data (there’s a business out there if you can create that infograph, BTW)? And,
  • How we are going play together in an ever shrinking sandbox where transparency has become a buzz-word and personal privacy continues to become increasingly elusive?

I also believe that when an “opt out” option is offered, as it was with Klout, it should be just that – a way for you to take yourself, and your data, OUT of the system. If not for your actions, the data wouldn’t exist in the first place.

 

 Note: Images adapted from Klout.com

Kony 2012

The unintended consequences of going #viral

Kony 2012When you craft a message, you generally have a target, or audience, in mind. You probably also have an agenda, or goal, that you wish to achieve, such as awareness, education or a call to action. And both the message and the agenda are typically driven by both your own ideas and those embraced by your target audience. Your message must match your audience, or it’s difficult for them to embrace it.

If all works well, your message is received by your audience and your agenda and goals met by their actions and response. But we live in the age of pervasive communications where your message has the ability to go viral, to spread like wildfire around the globe – not just through one medium, but through many. It may be shared on dozens of different “new media” social networking sites, it may be emailed around the world, it may even be featured (or the viral spread of it) in traditional media (broadcast, print) or their online hybrid counterparts (tra-digital media).

Reaching an audience beyond your intended audience has consequences

In the end, your carefully crafted message goes well beyond your target market and reaches a much larger group of people that you never intended to be part of your audience. If you are trying to build/energize a community, you may find yourself with a mob, on a global scale.

#KONY2012

Take the case of the Kony 2012 campaign. It’s a documentary film about Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Liberation Army (if you haven’t seen it, you should). Starting in Northern Uganda, Kony (a man  indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court) has, over a period close to 30 years, maimed, killed and enslaved children (some put the estimate at 66,000) into military service to support his cause. His reign of terror has moved well beyond the Ugandan borders into the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, and the South Sudan.

 

The documentary was created by the Invisible Children organization with what appears to be all the right intent, including a humanitarian agenda, a desire to raise awareness of, and funding for, those who suffered at Kony’s hands, and to ensure (from the Kony 2012 website):

  • “That Joseph Kony is known as the World’s Worst War Criminal” and
  • “That U.S. and international efforts to stop Kony are bolstered with a more comprehensive strategy for disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR).”

The target audience of the documentary, as evidenced by both the narrative and the logo (featuring the U.S. Republican and Democrat symbols), are centered in the U.S. and the political arena. And within that target, it had its desired result. But it didn’t end there.

IT’S CALLED VIRAL FOR A REASON

This documentary, and the horrific crimes it highlighted, hit such a sensitive nerve with people (within its intended audience) that they leveraged pervasive communications to do what humans have always done since the beginning of time: THEY SHARED!

What started as a focused, but relatively unknown movement, went viral as the Kony 2012 documentary began to spread throughout the U.S. and the world. The Twitter hashtag #kony2012, for example, became a top trending item on Twitter at the peak of the viral distribution while Facebook showed an equally amazing number of shares and likes for the documentary (not to mention the publicity and momentum it gathered when national and international traditional media outlets began reporting on the viral spread of the documentary). In the process, it gained a level of global fame well beyond the producer’s original expectation as well as a global audience that didn’t fit the “target profile” of its original audience.

The result? A response that the producers were unprepared to handle (or at least well beyond what they expected to have to deal with). With increased awareness came both massive support (good) and increased scrutiny and negative pressure (bad). They also faced a global audience that was viewing a documentary film that wasn’t intended for them in the first place (including those in Northern Uganda). Yes, it was intended to help them, but culturally, it wasn’t intended for them to consume.

 WHEN MESSAGES MEET THE WRONG PEOPLE

The western-oriented message simply didn’t fit the various non-western cultures that had access to the Kony 2012 campaign through its viral spread. While it has done a tremendous job at raising both awareness and funds to help Kony/LRA victims, it also became, for many, the wrong message for the wrong people, leading to questions about intent, accuracy and a resulting impact that was very different from the original, anticipated goal.300px-Ugandan_districts_affected_by_Lords_Resistance_Army

What started as a unified U.S. base of positive support has also led (through increased scrutiny) to those (and it is their right) who claim it oversimplifies a very complex issue, and takes mind-share away from other, more pressing problems that Ugandans, and others in Africa, face today, such as the debilitating nodding disease that is striking an alarming number of children in Uganda and the ongoing slave trade in Mauritania.  

It has also had a direct, non-desirable, impact, and intrusion, into the personal lives of those involved in the creation of the documentary.

THE IMPACT OF PERVASIVE COMMUNICATIONS

This phenomenon will likely become increasingly common – especially when the primary means of distribution is social media – a content distribution & sharing medium that by its definition and role in pervasive communications knows no borders. None.

Content no longer knows or respects borders

If an idea, a documentary, or a story has the ability to generate a massive emotional response (either positive or negative), pervasive communications allows it to spread – to go viral -and there isn’t any way to stop it (again, this includes traditional mainstream media, digital/social media and tra-digital media). If the consequences of this viral spread are unanticipated, what begins as a proactive messaging activity can quickly become a reactive damage control operation.

What does this mean for cause-based content in the future? Ultimately, it places a much greater responsibility on choosing the “right” channel(s) within our pervasive communications network, as well as crafting messages that are either by their nature self-limiting or have universal appeal. The case could also be made for non-cause (i.e., commercial) content as well – pervasive communications doesn’t discriminate in its ability to impact a message, regardless of media.

Either way, what the Kony 2012 phenomenon has shown us is that the rules of content distribution that applied only a few short years ago no longer apply. It is a different world that we live in today, and we’re only just now beginning to understand the rules.

 

 

 

 

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googlewave

Google Wave: Intentional Failure?

Given the way that Google (who can often seem to do no wrong) has pulled the plug on their Wave product, I expect that there will be a flood of Wave-related blogs, editorials and posts – most with cute word-plays in the title. So I’ll get to the point and keep this one short.

I remember the first time I waved goodbye to Google Wave – about 2 days after getting my “invite” access to Google’s latest and greatest social tool. Why? Despite the fact that I was extremely impressed (from an analytical perspective) by the elegance and sophistication of Wave, there was a practical side of me that looked at Wave and simply had to wonder “who in the world is actually going to use this?” If Wave were a wine, you could describe it as “complex, with a hidden sophistication and an alluring bouquet”. Unfortunately, it would also be undrinkable.

As a result, I never expected Wave to amount to much – the design was too complex, the competition too stiff, the user interface somewhat non-intuitive, the integration with other Google tools almost non-existent and the marketing roll-out almost embarrassing. Rather, I viewed Wave as an experiment – an experiment that reveals quite a bit about Google and their internal mindset.

From a practical perspective, there are many products that Google offers that are extremely impressive, well-embraced by the user community and add significantly to the Google aura. G-Mail is a great example, as is Google Maps/Earth, Google News, Chrome, Docs, etc. Almost none of these, however, generate significant (if any) revenue for Google. In fact, the majority of their $6.77 billion in revenue for the quarter ended March 31, 2010 came from their core capability: Google Search and advertising-related sub-businesses – not from all the nifty gadgets and tools that give Google it’s extra edge. That’s an interesting stat for an IT company in an industry where the viability of almost every product is viewed in termed of its profitability. Loss-leaders are not the norm.

But Google is different, and has been from the beginning, such as their 20% free-time idea to help foster innovation within the firm – allowing their own employees to use 20% of their work-week to go wild with whatever crazy (or not so crazy) idea that floated through their extremely creative craniums. By anybody’s logic, this is the ultimate R&D experience of a lifetime, and a great example of why Google has no problem launching (or no problem with a lack of) “experiments” like Wave (which, by the way, is far from dead as they have now tossed it into the public domain and will very likely find a way to use some of the core development breakthroughs in both current and future products).

When Google launched Wave, I doubt they had any expectation of significant revenue generation, nor did they necessarily view it as core to their search/advertising/content business model. Rather, I believe it was a calculated experiment – one that clearly pushed the boundaries of real-time collaborative social networking, but was always considered just another cutting edge experiment. So don’t view Wave as a failed product, but rather view it as a successful experiment that yielded Google some very interesting, and valuable, data about user technology adoption, coding and development concepts, and the value/need for product co-operation in certain product areas.

Most importantly, I think that Google clearly recognizes the value of both advertising revenue and content that social sites can bring to the brand (Google Blog is a decent example). Social Media – true “social media” – is one of the few areas that can bring both (well beyond what Google Blog could ever generate). With Wave out of the way, don’t be surprised if they take the same step in advertising and content creation as they did with YouTube and video content, buy their way in. On the other hand, they could have another project in the pipeline to dominate the still nascent social media market, but I wouldn’t count on it.

For an interesting alternative/in-depth perspective, check out this ars technica article by Ryan Paul – a very good read.

shaq

10 Great/Funny/Odd Celebrity Tweets

I guess the first rule of social media is that you are going to occasionally post things that just don’t make sense to the rest of the world. Here are 10 of my favorite [and unedited] celebrity posts pulled from a recent online search.

1. Shaq O’Neal @THE_REAL_SHAQ – May 24th from TwitterBerry
“The san diego wildlife parks sucks, u pay all this money and u cnt evn see the dam animals, Lions , tigers, and bears no way Uaaaw gag …”


2. Jimmy Fallon – @jimmyfallon – May 19th from Tweetie
“It still works. I just slice my fingers open everytime I enlarge something.”


3. John Mayer – @johncmayer – May 21st from TwitterBerry
“$oku”


4. John Mayer – @johncmayer – May 21st from TwitterBerry
[sent immediately after #3] “Just realized I’ve been sending tweets from my pants. In related news, I am naming my penis $oku.”


5. Lance Armstrong – @lancearmstrong – May 28th from UberTwitter
“Hanging out in my hotel room listening to Elvis. Elvis Perkins that is.”


6. Tony Hawk – @tonyhawk – May 27th from web
“wow, and I just realized she took a picture of her pants and posted it. That’s the last time I leave my phone unattended next to her.”


7. Dave Mathews – @DaveJMatthews – May 21st from Twitterrific
“Originally ‘squirm’ was ‘skworm’ but then I wrote the lyrics and thought if I kept it ‘skworm’ people would think I couldn’t spell ‘squirm'”.


8. Dr. Drew – @drdrew – Apr 27th from TweetDeck
“BTW those who post complex questions…I can’t distill a year of treatment in to 140 characters. I wish I could. So sorry….”


9. Penn Jillette – @pennjillette – May 8th from web
“Flew next to Frank Luntz. He introduced himself as we landed. I screamed “F*** you, Frank” repeatedly. We got along great.”


10. David Gregory – @davidgregory – May 28th from web


“I’m at Princeton U for my wife’s 25th reunion and searching for Judge Sotomayor’s paper trail. I’ll probably find the beer tent first.”

John Mayer is by far my favorite. Got a favorite of yours or one that’s better?