DISQUS

According to Sun Tzy: "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." So both are needed and the checkbook must recognize that or they'll be throwing money out the window. I think when it comes to SM, the proper thinking needs to take place ahead of time such as assessing where a company's customer socializes on line, then start doing things and iterate, be agile, learn, put back the knowledge into the strategy to refine until the winning formula has been designed.

"not just in how to embrace social media, but how important it is to know the community you want to build around".
Very true and doable now that all the conversations allow one to map communities of like minded folks and listen to them. And you mention 'put an impressive effort into research'. Very important point. To often I see social media initiatives that have no strategy, no targeting (identifying the community that's relevant to them) and don't understand it takes time.

Chris
I assume you refer to customer communications..may be not..oh well, I will take that spin.
The challenge I see comes from the big bang in the marketplace driven by an acceleration of pace, an increase in customization, the explosion of communities, channels, the hyper- competition and abundance of choices which also dilutes perceived value.
The marketplace has become an incredibly complex world and if companies want to embrace this complexity, they have no choice but to throw all their best resources at it and empower them with the best technology/data about market and customers: Employees. Everything is about patterns...the repetition of small things.
So for communication, have employees go in the marketplace, make them take many small communication steps and all those small actions as they repeat will transform in something big.

Adrian
You do a very good job creating great content and opening the discussion+following up on comments.
L

Adrian
Nice presentation. Thought provoking. I like!
A brand is a bond. A bond is something that holds together. What holds together are beliefs, trust, experience, relationships... which is built and maintained through communications which is the act of sharing (opinions, ideas, thoughts). I still think modern brands are built with communications. What has changed is that it used to be through controlled, polished, sanitized, one sided message & image through medias..to...the communication of shared experiences.
Laurent

There's indeed an increase level of conversation on the theme of SM experts for the very reason you described. see my post http://blog.ecairn.com/2009/04/07/social-media-...
I think it's because the stake is rising and the players that are in place today (the new ones and the old ones) are starting to fight for the $.

You're right, knowledge doesn't fit in 140 characters ;-)
It's almost like knowledge is hard to separate from the knower who uses experience, intent and judgement to produce his knowledge in fine. As a famous chinese proverb says: I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I forget. The key is in the do...So may be there isn't one place, it's all scattered in blog posts and so on and the only way to make it part of your daily experience is to do what you read, learn from the experience and feedback to others.

What you call timeless information looks like what is called knowledge. Forget SM and look at how you learn. Information is acquired through our senses then processed by the nervous system to be stored (or not) in memory where it's constantly re-evaluated as more information flows in. At the end, it produces knowledge. I see SM as functioning the same way. Communities absorbs tons of info and act a bit like the nervous system to process all that and ultimately create knowledge. Tons of the real time info is forgotten because forgetting is a necessary function in memory or we would run out of storage space ;-).

They could also have used you real name ;-).
Because it makes you conclude it's an automated email. So much for the human side.

Great story!
What if companies and customers were sitting at the table together and the food is the solutions to the cause they want to fight or the opportunity they see to improve their world (of course they wouldn't be one table but zillion of tables because they all have different taste of course). And so companies would feed their customers with good products, good service, good knowledge, good thoughts...and customers would feed companies with good feedback, good referrals...

Well, I see advertiser becoming very aggressive (on some sites, I mouse over an ad without paying attention going from point A to point B and the ad takes 2/3 of my screen). I get angree and the brand in the ad gets a piece of that.
So no no inline advertising. Around is ok (if it's not too much).

Jason
Keep it without advertising. My mailbox, my personal email box, my daily musing of online media is filled with advertising. I think ads may be a necessary evil for consumer brands where there's not much to say about the product (cleaning supply, dog food ....lol). But your blog is fairly technical thus an ad wouldn't fit in its style.
Just my humble feedback as I stop by.
L

Very true. When I talk about social media, I always meet folks that put technology first because the buzz is there: facebook, twitter, and so on. So I ask them "what's social media". MMMM (usually not good answer). So I say: it's people and content (story). And after comes the technology they use to communicate what they have to say.

Very good points.
I'm one of the founder of a 'small brand name' and we leave and breathe in social media so what you said is true. I actually think that small brands may have one advantage against big ones: They fit well in social media.
Social media is made of many many niches. By nature they're small as in 'small brands'. And they have 'passion' for what they do which includes the cause they support, the customers, the product/service...sometimes big brands lack that tremendously.
Laurent

It's not hard and it's hard...Tricking is part of human nature like lying and deceiving. And it works on masses (or has worked and may still work with most of us) or there wouldn't be all this tricking around.
I go to the grocery store close to my house and all the products are on sale. 30% off on this bottle of wine, 28% on this over one. Ouch..what do they think? That we're stupid? mmm I venture to say we are..not as individual but as mass market.
Companies have been in a mass market paradigm and studied have told them: Here are all the ways to trick and manipulate the mass with its herd mentality (which wouldn't work so well with individuals)..such as they love % down so up your price and give them that rebate.
The herd is such that you barely know people in the herd next to you, you just go with them, don't talk to them. But things have changed. No more herd, it's people, communities, they connect, they share, the trust eachother. And companies need to change that herd perception of us.
But moving from the herd to the people mentality is a big change and change is hard, very hard...

Social media being a big change for marketers, I'm not surprise to see those reasons in the order they are ;-). 'people' reasons are always the biggest hindrance to any change unless you're a change agent which makes only a small % of the overall worker population. But as you pointed out, what's particular (and dangerous) is that people think they are knowledgeable and they're not. I would agree with that based on my own experience working with the marketers I meet who think because they have a linkedin and facebook account they know social media....though they've never tried to 'engage' with like-minded people in their space.

John,
wow. we think alike ;-)! I have a few suggestions to offer:
1)Graphically speaking, shouldn't the manage piece be vertical because in my opinion it crosses all the layers.
2) I know you wanted to use the Maslow analogy but may be the social engagement process is better represented by a wheel where plan and manage are in the center and listen/join/engage/network/build forms a circle of steps.
3)May be manage could be replaced by 'influence' -> you've built relationship and you are now in a position to influence them.

I like your chart!
Business need information and champions. More than ever.
In today's open internet world, where the 'market' is better equipped in technology than businesses (most are debating the ROI of social software when people are just adopting it for their own sake and thus are more efficient and faster at managing issues like it happened for Motrin or Ford Ranger..), businesses risk loosing growth and corp sustainability if they don't adopt the two way symmetrical model.
I don't think they have much choice the same way they have no choice back 10 years ago on the website issue. As Andy Grove said at that time (not sure about the exact quote) "every company is an internet company". The same applies today.

Jason,
Great list! I'm convinced there're more than 150 blogs on edu ;-)
In general, when there's a community of bloggers (networked, active and so on), on such a popular topic, you'll find 500+ blogs.
I agree that you've got to compile such list manually. i've done it but I use our application in which i can mix search (semi automated), bookmarking and scrapping, thus I'm able to create list of 100s in day. For example just created one on computer security with 700+ blogs. Then we have an algo to rank them so I know which one are the top.
May be, time permitting, I'll take your opml, find 500 edu blogs and rank them, then see if we get similar results.

Like #1. The internet is becoming social...that means communities...a community is typically small and niche oriented. It will force companies to break the one size fits all campaign into many smaller ones that fits into each community dynamics and style. And as you pointed out later in your post, it will require people. Because only people can do that (technology is here to help them but can't do it on their behalf or it will lead to spam). Besides, behind social lies the concept of 'people'.

After reading the interview I tend to agree with what is said about social media marketing.
Bottom line social media marketing is more about communication than any other online marketing techniques (one could argue that advertising is a form of commm ..ok..a low-key one). I remember a blogger, unfortunately not his/her name, who said: I'm not a click, I'm not a keyword, I'm a person. I think that sums it up well for me. Engaging in the right context with the right content in the right communities is all about good communication in my mind

laurent's last blog post..Find your tribe(s).

Interesting and I tend to agree with you especially with the info overload of those days. Crowds tend to be just huge echo chambers and you don't get much out of it that you don't already know (besides the case described by the previous commenter). Transposing what you said to the enterprise, I see the need for the same wisdom (though there may be as many 'my crowds' as they're individual groups in a given enterprise) So then, why are 'social media monitoring' tools so much in favor nowadays? All they give is the wisdow of crowds...

I'm a small biz owner (startup in high tech) and the few of us in the co have to spread our time on so many things (build/market/sell/support our product and the occasional daily strategic thinking). We believe social media is about relationship and any kind of automation breaks the paradigm as you said so well. To quote a blogger whom name escapes my old memory: I'm not a click, I'm not a keyword, I'm a person.
I think what can scale is building relationships (and not reacting everywhere as you said because it's just impossible).
As you said 'just participating when you can shows your audience you’re there. And often times that is enough', so what we think is that if you're a small co or a marketing group in a big co, you should do an inventory of the relevant online places where you should engage, then participate as a group for the scaling effect and if you do it well, consistently (it has to be a top priority), you'll start to establish relationships. Automation will just leave you outside the network when you want to be inside as YOU!
To be more real, we follow ~800 bloggers in our field of expertise and, while starting from zero middle of 2008, we have built relationships with about 40 of those 800 bloggers and the number is growing. The key also is that it takes time (elapsed time) between when you start participating and when you start to have some relationships: months, years...not days.

Not sure baaad advertising will disappear because of the hit its taking with this recession...it will disappear when we will have truly moved from a flat virtual world where you find things with keywords to a niche-network/community world where information is transmitted through people. 'Google organizes the world info' is pointless as communities will organize the communities info by themselves. Advertisers (oops...) will just have to engage/participate in them, of course where they're relevant and can provide good info to the community.

It's so true, I had a meeting with a client that told me she had a list of 'fashion' blogs - her list was ~25, and my client considered them as influences. In a few hour, I found ~350 using my application and showed her that her influencers weren't all at the top, far from that.
Do you use some tool to find long list of blogs?