Accidentally on Purpose Blog

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!

UPDATE:  Due to an unexpected illness — I won’t be presenting or attending.  Sorry!  I won’t be traveling for the next 8 or so weeks.

• Corporate Social Media Usage
• Will spam kill Twitter?
• Listening is not enough 

Twitter is one of those things that I CAN see the value in it but, candidly, I’m still having a bit of difficulty extracting that value. You see I’m new to Twitter and while I don’t “tweet” a lot at the moment, I am lurking and learning with the hope and expectation that at some point I’ll be as productive as others — like James Governor for instance.   Last week I was explaining my problem to Susan Getgood and she told me that my problem was normal and that I shouldn’t be discouraged.   You see, Susan believes that the value of Twitter starts to really become apparent once you approach the 120/150 range of following/followers.

Laura Fitton wrote a great post on twitter where she too reaffirmed Susan’s point:

How does Twitter shift from idiotic to amazing? It takes a village - a critical mass of interesting people - to read and write to. When my brain started to connect with the brains (and hearts) of others, it got really, REALLY cool for me. You may be looking for like minds, or you may want to be totally shaken up by new ideas. Both work. One day I suddenly realized this was, for me, tribe-finding. For arguably the first time in my life I didn’t feel as weird and different.

Everyone connects to a different array of tweets and tweeters, so there aren’t discrete villages per se. But, the degrees of separation and connection create layers around each individual that hint at a very sketchy (and Twitter-specific) “social map.” (Often highly removed from who you actually know).

I know I’m not alone in this — I’ve heard countless times “I tried it but I just didn’t get it” or conversely “its the single greatest social network.”  I You can follow me on twitter here, perhaps someday soon Twitter will be my village too.

I’m really very interested in your thoughts:  What makes Twitter so valuable for you?

A happy and healthy New Year to all!

Well after two plus weeks of vacation plus a week of getting caught up on work and some traveling — things are finally getting  back to “normal.”   I haven’t had the opportunity to post like I had planned despite a well intentioned New Year’s resolution.  Mostly because there are so many things going on that I haven’t had the ability to focus on any one thing long enough to complete it.   Things are finally getting better as these past few days it’s all started coming together!  

Last Thursday I was in Boston at the invitation of Laura Fitton (aka Pistachio) to be a part of the Boston SMC/PRSA event at Bentley College.  As you could imagine, I was on a panel discussion about post 2.0 communications.   With me on the panel were Laura, Ian Lamont of COMPUTERWORLD, Lois Kelly of Foghound Communication and our moderator C.C.Chapman.

After the panel we held “break outs” on various topics like Twitter, Social Networking, Podcasting, blogging and blogger relations, etc.  The audience was incredibly participative and they asked a lot of good questions.   You gotta love that!  Plus the best part of the event was that I made some great new friends in the process –  Susan Getgood of GetGood Strategic Marketing &  Doug Haslum & Todd Van Hoosear of Topaz Partners.

I want to thank everyone from the Boston chapter of the Social Media Club and the Boston PRSA for making me feel so welcome and including me in your program.   Thank You!

Nat Torkington posted on a topic that I’m sure is going to get more and more attention in the coming year:  the human limits of social media.  There are many benefits for folks who know how to use blogs, wikis, social networks, Twitter (I’m still grappling with this one), etc.  But it all comes at a price.

… the more we use these things, the more overwhelming the pressure to maintain the network feels. I had blog burnout eighteen months ago, with an enormous subscription list that was consuming all my time. I just went twelve months without using an RSS reader, I simply used delicious network, TechMeme, and Digg to get what my friends were reading, what the tech bloggers were saying, and what the masses were thinking. I wish I could say that I used the extra time to develop a brilliant piece of software, but actually I spent it detoxing from Silicon Valley by fishing. Regardless of how you would spend the extra time, though, most people feel like they need more time even though they have all these high-scaling low-transaction-cost methods of communication.

In a conversation with Giovanni Rodriguez he was telling me that this strange predicament might have been foretold by Marshall McLuhan, the so-called father of post-modern media theory and author of the phrases “the global village” and “the medium is the message.”  McLuhan argued that all new technologies have the potential (1) to enhance, (2) to obsolesce, (3) to retrieve something that previously had been obsolesced, (4) and, if used to excess, to reverse the effect that was intended.  In the context of social media, the danger to those who overuse the tools is that they will get the opposite of what they intend.  Instead of efficiencies, they get inefficiency, inertia, burnout.  A warning to people who are “always on”:  you may soon turn off.

The SF Chronicle — a newspaper that has long been rumored to be suffering from the myriad challenges facing the newspaper industry — weighs in with a close look at blogger economics.  Business reporter Sam Zuckerman zooms in most closely on TechCrunch, the Silicon Valley-based tech blog that most industry watchers regard as the bellwether for commercial blogs.

TechCrunch illustrates the new blogging math. It sells sponsorships that allow advertisers to display on the home page at $10,000 per month. It also uses Federated Media to sell display ads, keeping 60 percent of the revenue. And it charges $200 to list in its Cool Jobs section, getting about five or six want ads per day. Parties and conferences add another income source. Last month, TechCrunch organized a two-day event at the Palace Hotel that gave 40 startups a platform to tout their wares.

And, as far as spending goes, “our costs are only headcount,” Arrington said.

Let’s assume that newspapers need to study blogger economics in order to get ahead, or even keep up (btw, that’s a big assumption, because despite the success of TechCrunch, GigaOm, and other popular commercial blogs, the top line is not there for many others).  One lesson for newspapers has got to be depressing:  the overhead of running a commercial publishing enterprise has plummeted to a level where almost anyone can jump in.  But note that Michael Arrington and others are spending on “headcount.”  By that, of course, he means writers, and that’s not-so-bad news for journalists.  The new publishing world continues to drive the demand for good content.  Only question is, who’s hiring?

This is interesting, and it’s a nice follow-up to the recent NYTimes article I posted about last week. Prospero, a social-media vendor, has posted a study which shows that social-media spending is on the rise. Quoting MarketingVox, here are the key takeaways from the study:

Prospero’s 2007 Social Media Survey found 30 percent of online marketers who use social media plan to spend significantly more on social-media applications in 2008, while an additional 58 percent also plan to increase spending, though not “significantly.”

Some 59 percent of respondents reported that social media performance in 2007 met or exceeded their marketing objectives.

Survey participants were from leading brand organizations from a variety of industries, including Media, Education, Financial Services, Health, and Sports and Gaming.

Asked about social media return on investment (ROI), 35 percent reported positive ROI and 41 percent said that ROI was “unknown.”

What’s most interesting, to me, is that the report claims that marketing pros are not so interested in “ROI.” Why this matters: marketing folks of course care whether social media is effective. They wouldn’t approve bigger budgets if they thought otherwise. But I would bet that many marketing pros recognize that an investment in social media is a “must have” — regardless of the proven models for measurement because the entire business world is moving in that direction, and they cannot afford to be left behind.

Technorati Tags: Social Media Spending, ROI

The AP’s Rachel Konrad filed a story about eBay’s new social-networking project called “neighborhoods.”  But before you laugh, this isn’t a trivial, me-too exercise by a company that has been criticized for being too slow to warm to web 2.0.  Neighborhoods is part of a broader reorganization strategy for eBay.

“The move is one result of a broad reorganization strategy started in late 2006, when the San Jose-based e-commerce leader’s scorching growth rate began to slow.

“Individuals listed 480 million items on eBay in the second quarter, down 6 percent from the first quarter and down 2 percent from a year earlier. The number of listings by “power sellers” who operated eBay stores was 79.1 million — unchanged from the previous quarter but down 25 percent from a year earlier.

“Many users complain that the site’s size — it listed 559.1 million items worth $14.46 billion in the second quarter — can make it tough to find and purchase a specific product quickly. Users are turning to rivals such as Seattle-based Amazon.com, Salt Lake City-based Overstock.com Inc. and Chicago-based uBid Inc.

“‘We knew we had to change things internally because we couldn’t innovate with the effectiveness or speed we needed’, spokesman Hani Durzy said Tuesday.”

For me, the “neighborhoods,” metaphor works.  eBay is attempting to break down its once unstoppable but now imposing marketplace into smaller communities of interest — Beatles, coffee lovers, gadgets, etc.  That’s always been the promise of social media for businesses — making information available and helping people find it –  eBay seems to have finally figured that out, again. 

I wonder how Shel feels when reading about the eBay experiment.  I believe it was Shel — a consultant to my team at SAP — who coined the term “global neighborhoods” to describe a phenomenon that has implications far beyond the enterprise.  Shel, I think its time to write that next book! 

Fascinating article in the Sunday New York Times about the recent shift in ad dollars.  We’ve heard lots of anecdotal evidence about this — the decline in ad dollars going to traditional media – but the Times article spells bad news for the ad industry and media companies as a whole.

… many large marketers are taking huge chunks of money out of their budgets for traditional media and using the funds to develop new, more direct interactions with consumers — not only on the Internet, but also through in-person events.

Adventurous companies like Nike have been experimenting with these alternatives since the 1990s. But now, even the most conventional marketers are making these alternatives a permanent — and ever bigger — part of their advertising budgets.

Last year, Johnson & Johnson decided to boycott the so-called upfronts, an annual event when advertisers get together with television executives to negotiate for commercial time. In August, General Motors said that 2008 would be the last year for its longtime sponsorship of the Olympics. In May, A. G. Lafley, the chief executive of Procter & Gamble, told financial analysts that the company would spend less on traditional media and more on its Web site, in-store advertising and promotional events.

“If you step back and look at our mix across most of the major brands,” Mr. Lafley said, “it is clearly shifting.”

Add it up, and the money flowing out of the traditional media is huge — even at a time when ad budgets in general are growing, advertising research shows. The 25 companies that spent the most on advertising over the last five years cut their spending last year in traditional media by about $767 million, according to Advertising Age and TNS Media Intelligence. And in the first half of this year, those companies decreased their media spending an additional 3 percent, or $446 million, to $14.53 billion, according to TNS Media Intelligence.

I took the opportunity to ask SAP’s Costanza Tedesco, vice president of global advertising and branding for her take on the NYT’s story.  This is what she had to say:

It’s not that “traditional” media is no longer relevant… those channels are still a very important part of our media mix.  We have detailed campaign performance data that tells us we get the greatest impact from campaigns when there is an integrated mix of multiple “traditional” and “new” interactive media channels.

But now that we have more choice of relevant media vehicles, and a greater ability to assess the performance of each, we are shifting the mix of our media investment.

In 2003, we had basically 100% of our media investment in “traditional” vehicles. Now, we have more than 25% of our media investment in interactive media.  And the percentage will continue to grow.

Where are the dollars going?  Well, it’s no surprise that some of the money is going to social media (e.g., communities).  But the overall trend — which transcends social media, as we know it – is direct-to-consumer marketing.  That’s a trend worth watching for all communicators, whether they are in advertising, PR, or other any other discipline. 

I caught this very interesting ZDNet Asia article in which Eileen Yu interviews Ovum analyst Steve Hodgkinson on the benefits of Enterprise 2.0.  Eileen summarizes Steve’s “top five reasons why businesses in Asia should deploy Web 2.0 tools”:

1. To encourage a culture of information-sharing and collaboration between staff.
2. To appeal to the creative energy of social networking behavior in the Net generation, or young tech-savvy “Generation X and Y” employees.
3. To provide a forum that spotlights workers who contribute to cross-organization discussions.
4. To stimulate innovation and leverage knowledge across the organization.
5. To create transparent “corporate memory”, or establish dialog of rationale behind important policy and strategy decisions.

I agree with Steve’s observations, we have been doing these things at SAP, and the benefits are clear.  With regard to some of the risks of web 2.0, many of the items Steve mentions are real; however, there were and still are risks with more mainstream technologies like email and USB sticks.  While the security issues will be sorted out — they’re certainly not deal breakers!  The one comment that Steve made that really struck me was:

Companies that are more closed, or “anti-social” in nature, have legitimate needs to manage their operational risks, and restrict information flows to protect sensitive data, business processes and intellectual property, he noted.

These organizations typically need a higher degree of efficiency and predictability in their business, rather than have tools that enable innovation.

I don’t believe that any company has the option of not being innovative nor do I believe that being “anti-social” should at any level be tolerable.  Web 2.0 tools have as much a place behind the firewall  for business productivity gains as they do outside the firewall for knowledge transfer/sharing.  While companies must manage operational risk and protect sensitive data, these needs don’t negate the use or the value of Web 2.0 tools. 

Is this Enterprise 2.0 Asia Style?   I think not — Enterprise 2.0 is global!