DISQUS

I like the succinct point you put on it at the end. If people have opted to receive our messages, we don't have to beat them over the head trying to convince them.

Provide value rather than spending all your time trying to convince people that you ~will~ provide value in the future. They're ready for it, give it to them.

I'm of the opinion that the 'self' in 'self-publishing' defeats articles like the one in Wired before they're even written. It's my expression and I can decide where I want to do it.

Now, if all I'm looking for is a chance to get Internet Famous then, yes, I'd better be out in front of the crowd. But if I'm looking for a chance to have interesting discussions with people then I'll choose the medium that best facilitates that according to my needs.

I wrote about the effect of social media on parasocial relationships too. I think it's a real phenomenon.

I recognize that this is a frustration. It's one that I fight against myself.

And, to peer behind the curtain a little bit, let me just say that your two schools of thought may not be entirely accurate.

Now, I'm not trying to defend poor marketing practices but the assumptions in your 2nd point include a marketing process that is tracking people with some granularity. In an ideal world, it's true that marketers would have a clear picture of who their new leads are, what information they were interested in on their initial contact, and how they want to be approached in future contacts.

Sadly, most of the time you are going to be tossed into the database with everyone else. Pulling you back out for specific messages will likely be done based on demographic information, or potentially your initial lead source.

But factors like recency, frequency of communication, or interest in the topic are likely to be overlooked.

With all those factors in place, it leaves marketers with the lone choice of sending a big, fat email and hoping it has enough content in it to be relevant to the wide swath of people receiving it.

This is why the trend towards data capture and analysis are so important to marketing. The better we can understand customers behavior and expressed interests, the more we can narrow the segments and provide relevant messages.

I'm hopeful that as customers continue to apply the kind of pressure that you're applying, marketing will speed up their move towards a better system.

I like that Yolanda picked where she was going to focus her attention. That's one of the biggest initial hurdles when facing social media is that there are so many directions you can get pulled into.

By focusing on what was not only relevant, but potentially beneficial to her business, she really did make good use of the social media tools available and her time with them.

Nice post Chris.

Welcome to Austin. Sounds like you really did make the most of the trip. Glad you made it here safely and good luck finding a place.

Congratulations. That's certainly going to be an adventure.

Seems like moving out of Boston is the thing to do this summer. I hope Michigan treats you well.

I'm not sure that your 2 step process is ideal. If the PR person has done their homework, and is writing to you about something relevant, then requiring you to write back before getting any news might be seen as inconvenient.

Your first assessment is what I'd stick with. He did a great job understanding what you'd be interested in and gave you an easy bulleted list of ways to get more information for yourself.

You're in control. You can choose to respond to the PR person, or not. Check out the links to the news, or not. Read the articles already published, or not.

He's given up control. And it looks like it worked.

Chris wrote:
"The tools are cheap and free. But the skills? Now that’s what they should be paying you for, right?"

As the tools make 'doing' the work easier, the competition for jobs is going to be finding people that can do it well. If you want to stay employed in this industry, you can't blame your own ignorance. The resources are available to learn at least the basics.

This goes far beyond PR, though they have some of the most visible failures.

I'm going to come at this from a different angle.

Providing this survey may not elicit a response from anyone that's had a good or even mundane experience. But, it might be a good way for the hotel to capture complaints. People who want to complain don't necessarily need the same reward that you are looking for.

Regarding the CEO signature, it's the intersection of marketing and customer service. The CEO signature is meant to reflect this mentality is present throughout the company. It's symbolic. And the survey is part of a larger branding initiative ("We care about you") even if Florence is the person who actually receives it.

I think you're justified in noticing that this particular message doesn't apply to you. But it's not necessarily that the content is incorrect, rather the targeting of something like this is difficult to get right.

Chris, you bring up an excellent reminder that privacy isn't really private anymore.

I agree that someone buying the Twitter account could get value from it by analyzing the conversations that have happened, the @s and the DMs. There is definitely information that would be useful to an advertiser.

To me, that feels like it would be a breach of the social contract. There are only 2 things that Twitter doesn't make publicly available, your DMs and your Followers. (With the obvious exception of protecting your account.) You can data-mine the tweets, searching for keywords and @s to specific people. There's a rich source of information that can already be gleaned from Twitter.

Chris Brogan (besides starting this interesting debate) wrote his eBook on the Trust Economy. If selling any kind of social networking account becomes a trend, I think we are going to see the currency of trust rise in value. Right now it's easy for people to make connections, often with people they don't know. This can be a good source of discovery for people looking to network. But, if the default assumption becomes that people are looking to build large networks so they can 'monetize' them by selling the account, then making connections with people is going to diminish.

This may be a symptom of the walled-garden networks that exist today and will disappear if social networking becomes like air.
Or it may have the effect of killing off conversational spaces like Twitter. That would be very disappointing.

My 2 cents. I just didn't like the way he framed it in his eBay posting. He states that he's selling his following of over 1,000 people.
To me, that shows that he wasn't interested in using Twitter to connect to people but to build up another audience willing to consume his content. While there is room for that on Twitter, I don't see it transferring well through just some random eBay auction.

He does have a disclaimer at the bottom that people may unfollow but his intention to sell his followers seems shallow.

The 100 posts series is part of what encouraged me to finally plunge into blogging myself.

I've been trying to make more of a commitment that if I take the time to read an entire post, I 'pay' the blogger with a comment. Something that let's them know their time was worthwhile.

It's amazing how the act of producing, rather than consuming really does change your perspective. Even if all you produce is a comment.

This was a good post, it helped clarify for me how to end a post that I've been writing on similar topics.
http://originalcomment.blogspot.com/2008/02/blo...

Writing is not easy work. And writing on a blog, which goes beyond just putting words on the page, is even more difficult. I think your advice on how to keep the fires burning is important. The people in social media for the long-haul are going to reach the point where they have to ask if it's worth all the work they put into it. Those that can't keep the fires going will drop out, and losing those voices means there are fewer people to talk to and fewer things to talk about.

I wanted to go the recent Podcamp Boston but wasn't able to make it. But, here is my take on rule 1.

You can only get so far by listening. Participating is where you refine your own experience. While Dave Taylor may feel that as a new podcaster he can't 'compete' with bigger names, he knows more than the thousands of people who only listen to podcasts, or the millions that don't even do that.

I have respect for anyone that raises their hand and gets involved. And, I especially respect the people that are new in a field who are willing to voice their own thoughts.

Innovation is key, especially with social media being relatively new still. And innovation is not limited to big names. Maybe I'm just egotistical but I feel that I, as a virtual (ok, not virtual, actual) unknown can still have original thoughts on using social media tools in the context of communities, business, life, the universe, and everything.

Part of the value to me of being able to connect with so many people (either at a conference or through online communities) is the opportunity to get a diverse range of views. The more input I can get, the more I'll have to draw from when I raise my hand, stand up, and participate myself.

The reason that I think advertising fails on many blogs is because it shifts the communities impression of their value to the writer. Rather than feeling valued as part of a group that engages about interesting ideas, it's easy to feel that you're being counted as traffic to determine CPM, or viewed as a potential 'clicker'.

I've seen it happen that when the community feels their primary purpose is to generate revenue for the site, things go sour quickly.

That said, I could potentially see the value in some affiliate ads. If you were recommending a book, site, or some other product and had an affiliate link to get it on your site, that's going to give you control over what you promote. That could be a reasonable compromise.

I'm not against anyone making money off their blog. I know that lots of hard work goes into them. But, you need to make sure your community understands what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how it will affect them.

Nice perspective. Here's what I would add.

The chasm for online communities is (obviously) going to be around the kick-start phase where the growth curve starts getting steep.
The early adopters are going to find your site through TechCrunch or their other early adopter friends. Getting mainstream exposure can be more difficult, especially if your site is a 'me too.'

However, in Web2.0 popularity begets popularity. People will join a community if other people are joining it. Once you get that cycle going, you can ramp up the growth curve.

Where I agree with you that the chart may be too optimistic is in the on-going growth. Communities in the growth phase do generate a lot of new users because people see a visible activity happening (i.e. joining the community) but once that growth slows down, so does the activity. If users aren't seeing activity, they are going to drift away. They may not delete their account but will effectively abandon the site.

The chart doesn't seem to reflect users that stop participating in a community. I think that most communities would have a down-curve after the growth period until they reach an equilibrium of 'core' users that keep up their activity on the site. With the ongoing growth continuing slowly (to account for community turn-over even among active users) upwards.

Both.

I would elaborate, but I'm solving the problem of getting my son to sleep.

What if he doesn't...

Chris, isn't advertising and marketing about making you need things you didn't know you wanted ;)

If you gave a profile of what you're interested in, I think that you would either be overwhelmed by advertisers in those niches, or your profile would be ignored as incomplete by other advertisers.

It's a bold plan but I'm not sure the advertisers would buy into the concept.

"While it may be too soon to judge, it still looks as though the formula for success in social networking will continue to be: step one: set up a social network. Step two: some magic happens. Step three: profit."

I used much the same analogy back in Nov. when a MediaPost started up their social networking site.

There still seems to be a magical aura around the idea of starting a social network. Unfortunately, just as it takes work for the users to get involved in them, it takes more work for the provider to make use of the data.

I'm going to both agree and disagree with Charlie.

I agree that much of the intention of social media channels are for user-to-user communications. The majority of people in any social media channel probably aren't using it to connect with companies.

Where I disagree is that marketing has no value in social media. To Chris' point about advertising and spam on social networks, that is indicative of marketers still trying to use interruption marketing in a space that doesn't need it. Interruption marketing online is about CPMs. Getting the most people to move their eyeballs over your message.

I listened to a relevant podcast this morning, Jaffe Juice (1/30/08 episode), that highlighted a this dichotomy. A room of marketers was asked if they would rather have 5 million impressions or 10 solid relationships. Only 1 person stood up for the relationships. (He admits the numbers may need tweaking.)

The point he went on to make, is that those 10 relationships, through social media working as intended user-to-user, could end up generating just as many 'impressions' as the message spreads. But most marketers don't see it from that angle.

In the end, I have to vote that social media is neither a marketing nor a PR tool. We are inviting customers to come talk to us, or we are requesting their permission to join their conversations. If you try to interrupt what they are doing, it won't generate the relationships you ultimately need to be successful.

@Pistachio This is a great question about authority, especially in the context of social media.

I think that the social media crowd has a slanted view of this issue. Many of us are content creators, we go out on our own, away from the group and put ourselves out there. We make our own decisions frequently and don't want to give that up.

But, not everyone wants to take the risks of going blazing a new trail. Authority does have a useful purpose. And, in the modern Internet landscape where it's easy to ignore authority, I agree with your quote that no one should let themselves feel inferior through social media.

I posted about this a bit earlier this afternoon.

Actually, I think that TwitterPacks lowers the barrier to entry on Twitter. Twitter is human-driven. That makes it complex and messy. It actually takes some courage to get going in the Twitterverse and I admire all of the people that have done it.

http://originalcomment.blogspot.com/2008/01/seg...

I've been involved in gaming communities for about 9 years. Mostly as a player but in the last 2 I've shifted to creating content.
It's been a great way to learn how to navigate online communications. I've gotten savvy in forums, IRC, wikis, virtual worlds, and various UIs from playing games.

Also, working on a creation team has helped me learn how to work with distributed teams, community relations, being more of a futz, and plenty of other skills I now bring to work with me.

My thought is that if you want to get some real hands-on experience with engaged communities, gaming is a great place to start.

I was just thinking about writing a post on the tools that I use. I probably still will, even though it's pretty much everything on your list.

The only other thing that I use not on your list is CoComment.