May 01 2008
Apr 30 2008
Links for 2008-04-30
Apr 29 2008
Social Media Summit
While SAPPHIRE 08 Orlando is begining next week I wanted to let you know that I will be presenting at the Advanced Learning Institute’s “Social Media Summit: How To Use Blogging, Podcasting & the Latest Web 2.0 Technologies To Engage Your Employees, Reach Your Customers & Build Your Brand,” June 9-12, 2008 in Chicago.
The conference will focus on how to use social media, and leverage the latest interactive tools and techniques to advance your goals. The organizers were nice enough to offer a conference discount so, if your reading this blog and want to attend, you can save $200 by mentioning the code “SPK” when registering.
My session topic will be: “How To Harness The Power Of Social Media Both Internally And Externally. I’ll be discussing real world uses of social media inside SAP from; product development, to market intelligence, to sales, to communications (my favorite), to marketing, and even communities.
For more information or to register click here. Hope to see you in Chicago!
Apr 29 2008
Links for 2008-04-29
Apr 28 2008
Links for 2008-28-04
Apr 25 2008
Links for 2008-04-25
Apr 24 2008
Links for 2008-04-24
Apr 23 2008
Links for 2008-04-23
Mar 18 2008
Viva Elsua
Jerry Bowles posted a great interview with IBM’s Luis Suarez. From his most interesting perch on the Canary Islands, he is perhaps one of the best examples of the social media evangelist trend so many big companies are employing with respect to challenging the status quo.
“I had been playing a very interesting role of evangelist all along, creating lots and lots of demos and tutorials on how to make use of social media in a business environment, including proving its business value and what the corporation gets, as well as what the employees get from all of it,” he says.
Social Media champions inside the enterprise are important agents for change. The savviest practitioners understand this and take great care to build social sense into their programs. For example:
- Ensuring that people with social skills are chosen – or at least allowed to emerge – to lead the projects
- Appealing to both the group and individual needs of the participants
- Where it makes sense, building communities around particular services as a way to scale the population of users.
Forrester’s Charlene Li touched on this subject last week with her presentation at SxSW. You can view her slides via slideshare here.
Feb 27 2008
Don’t Knock Machine-to-Machine Computing. Some of My Best Friends Are Computers
Giovanni Rodriguez, Shel Israel and I had dinner in Palo Alto last week and we were discussing the business applications of social media. In that discussion we touched on a number topics, but how machine-to-machine communications could be considered or at least to some extent deliver on the concepts of social media really piqued my curiosity. By the way, this isn’t an idle question. Machine-to-machine is at the foundation of a little thing called Web 3.0. I was adamant about saying yes it could. We weren’t always in agreement, and to some extent I agreed with the dissent in the conversation as much as I agreed with my own arguments. That conversation lasted about 20 minutes before we moved on to another topic and just when I thought I had forgotten the thread, I read this important announcement from Microsoft and it got me thinking about it all over again.
According to the MSFT press release:
“The ‘last ad clicked’ is an outdated and flawed approach because it essentially ignores all prior interactions the consumer has with a marketer’s message,” said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of the Advertiser & Publisher Solutions (APS) Division at Microsoft. “Our Engagement Mapping approach conveys how each ad exposure — whether display, rich media or search, seen multiple times on multiple sites and across many channels — influenced an eventual purchase. We believe it represents a quantum leap for advertisers and publishers who are seeking to maximize their online spends.”
What really got me rethinking the notion of machine-to-machine social media was reading this post from Josh Catone at the ReadWriteWeb, where MSFT is limiting it’s view of engagement by focusing only on how consumers interact with ads:
This type of engagement mapping tool will become really powerful when it can measure not only ad views that lead to a purchase, but also any other type of online or social interaction. This is probably the end game that Facebook is aiming at with Beacon. Imagine the value advertisers could derive from a tool that looks at how your online activity leads up to a purchase. i.e., did you see a friend talk about the product on a Facebook wall post? Did you read a blogged review? Did you see the product talked about in a YouTube video? Did you look at any ads when all that was happening?
If Microsoft truly wants to map “engagement,” it needs to include in its focus the the ever-expanding “social” networks of people who are helping fellow consumers navigate the commercial Web.
What do you think? Could this be the beginning of the machine-to-machine version of social media?
I suspect that many people will be tuned off by machine-to-machine approaches. But as one Stanford professor notes (Clifford Nass), some of our best friends are computers.
