Virgin America tackles cross-identity marketing

I just took a flight on Virgin America from San Francisco to Toronto. With the holidays, Google Chrome and Virgin America have teamed up to provide inflight WiFi for free, so I was more productive on the flight than any flight I have taken before. I’ve become a big fan of Virgin America as they seem to be innovating quite a bit on the inflight experience. At the same time, an interesting thing happened that caught my attention and made me wonder about their innovations in the marketing realm also. While it might have been a coincidence, I suspect that it was not and they are pushing the frontiers of cross-identity marketing.

I purchased a meal on the flight (seat-back TV with touch-screen food ordering, nice.), and as part of that I asked for a receipt, and typed in my email address. I’m always a fan of seeing what various companies do with their marketing, so I provided permission to include me in their marketing database. Sure enough, within 30 minutes, Twitter notified me that Virgin America was following me. As I had just engaged with them, this was not something I saw as intrusive, so I of course followed back. Now they have opened up a new channel of interaction with me.



Technologically, I’m guessing this was fully automated. Their follow notification says they use Sprinklr, which may offer this capability, I’m not sure. Regardless of the exact technology used by Virgin America in this case, the concept is simple. All that is needed is to recognize the match between different identities (my email address and my Twitter handle), and then follow.

The point, however, is interesting. People today exist, and communicate across many different identities. The role of marketing is essentially one of communicating based on understanding of a person and their identity. If you, as a marketer, in B2B or B2C are not doing your best to jump on opportunities to identify different identities, and then take the needed steps to engage, you may be missing a significant opportunity to broaden your engagement with your buyers throughout the overall revenue engine.

Are you, as a B2B marketer, exploring techniques similar to this? Do you identify and engage with your buyers across a broader set of identities than you did before? Is it working for you? Read More...

The Results: Is B2B Content "Likeable"

A few months back, with Facebook’s announcement of a “Like” button for the web, I decided to run a quick, highly unscientific experiment to see if B2B content was “likeable”. Put more simply, is B2B content as likely to be shared in the social atmosphere of Facebook as it is to be shared in the more hybrid social/business atmosphere of Twitter.

While I will admit that I personally am more active on Twitter than on Facebook, I gave the “like” button a more prominent position at the top of the post to hopefully even the score a little bit. The results are dramatic – mentions of the content of this blog on Twitter generally fall around 20 or so mentions per post. Facebook, however, is lucky to get one or two likes or shares per post.

While many factors may explain this discrepancy, I suspect that the most reasonable explanation is the differences in social context between the two networks. Content must fit the context of the environment or it feels out of place and awkward, even if the participants are similar.



(as part of this post, I should mention that HubSpot's Blog Grader does a wonderful job of tallying all the Tweets/Shares/Likes for a blog)

Does this match with your experience of B2B content on Facebook? Read More...

Social Media Buzz at a Live Event

We just finished up Eloqua Experience 2009, which was a spectacular event all around. Marketers from around the world came to celebrate success, and we filled three days with great discussions, fabulous speakers, and new connections among the best marketers in the world. One of the aspects of the event that we were most excited about this year, however, was the concurrent online conversation and tremendous buzz that the event generated in social media. I was asked many times what we did to have that much social media buzz at a live event.




Of course there is no way to “manufacture” social media buzz at a live event, you have to have great content and things that people will talk about, but there are a few things you can do to facilitate and encourage the buzz.

In planning for the social media aspects of the event, our team used a 6 element framework:

Pre-Event Awareness

In order to ensure that everyone was ready to participate in the social media discussions at the event, we ensured that the pre-event communications began to seed awareness that there would be a strong online conversation. A Twitter hashtag (#EE09) was agreed upon by the events team over a month in advance, and was used consistently in any discussions of the event or tweets about it.

In order to ensure that the people most actively engaged in social media were well aware of the event’s social media elements, we spurred discussion of it in all relevant social media properties. A competition on the Eloqua Facebook page was created, with a Kindle as a prize, and that competition was then blogged and tweeted about, reinforcing the hashtag, and building awareness of the social media elements at the event itself.


Enablement

At the event itself, every effort was made to ensure that participants were able to join in the social conversation, and felt very comfortable doing so. As an obvious step, wireless access was available to all. However, often it is the more subtle social cues that help the most. Having a few of your own team with their laptops very visibly open and active at the keynotes and in track sessions communicates the message that it is okay to have laptops and cell phones out during the sessions.

For bloggers, a simple step is to have all relevant material that they might possibly need in order to blog about anything they saw at the sessions readily available to them. A blogger marketing resource site is a great way to do this, and we made the URL known through distributing business cards at registration with the URL clearly visible.


Encouragement and Bridges

The next step was to encourage people to participate and build a bridge between the conversation happening face to face at the event and the conversation happening online. In the main campground area, a large screen (the Tweetboard) was created that showed a continuous rolling feed of the online conversation and built a "bridge" between the online and offline conversations. Anyone nearby could immediately see the conversation that was happening and was encouraged to join in. (we'll be coming out with detailed instructions for how the Tweetboard was built very soon)

Each keynote then included references to the online conversation – the opening session with Eloqua CMO, Brian Kardon even presented the hashtag in letters over 8ft tall so there was no confusion. Subsequent day sessions each attempted to include a reference to a comment or observation that had been picked up online, continuing to drive awareness and participation.





Destinations and Discussions

Beyond the session content itself, the team worked to build a number of relevant destinations and discussions in order to keep the online conversation vibrant and flowing. These spanned many major social media properties including Facebook, YouTube, Blogs, and Twitter, and ranged from video channels to online contests. Each social media property then referenced the others, ensuring a continuously self-reinforcing cycle of discovery and engagement.

The vibrant Eloqua partner community was also engaged, and a number of contest, giveaways, and events added to the buzz and topics of conversation. As a few examples, a RockBand competition accentuated the “Rock Star” track theme, and contributed a lot of photos, and a creative Bingo game all done via a combination of marketing automation and text messages drove a lot of excitement and engagement.


Seeding

Even with that, ensuring that every track session was covered and not left out of the online conversation led to a careful “seeding” strategy whereby staff members were present in each session and would capture at least one or two salient points or quotes from the speaker if there appeared to be fewer active social media people in that session than expected. In most cases this turned out unnecessary, but formed a good starting point and fall-back strategy.


Post-Event Engagement

Ensuring that the rich social media buzz and engagement was not limited to the event itself, a series of post-event social media communications was planned to keep the engagement level high. Winners from the 2009 Markie Awards were first posted to this blog, pictures from the event will be streamed to Facebook, and videos from the event will continue to be presented on the YouTube channel.





Of course nothing is more important than interesting, cutting edge, and engaging content, but this 6 element framework helped us create one of the most talked about Marketing events of the year. 1000s of tweets, photos, videos, and new connections drove the community’s engagement and excitement higher than it would have been for those at the event, and allowed those not able to participate to have a better sense of the event without being there.

I hope this framework is helpful in planning your events, and if there are techniques you used to drive even more interest and engagement please do share in the comments below. Read More...

Marketing Automation Weekly Wrap-up - 2009/10/2

I was thrilled to see an extremely kind accolade from Pete Jakob on his B2B Marketing blog about these updates, so hopefully this week's selections don't disappoint. The pressure is on now, I realize.

A few of this week's best posts tackled topics around word-of-mouth marketing. Who is most likely to be influenced to recommend you, and some new technology announcements that will change how we have to think about word of mouth, comments, and influencers.



Jim Novo on the Marketing Productivity Blog had an interesting post with some counter-intuitive thoughts on who in your audience can actually be positively influenced to recommend you more. It might have some significant implications for B2B marketers thinking about social media and influence:
http://blog.jimnovo.com/2009/09/23/awareness-versus-persuasion/


Interleado, on their company blog, wrote a good article on the importance of internal links (within your own web properties) to how the search engines see and rank you. Worth considering, as it is very much in your control:
http://www.interleado.com/blog/index.php/2009/10/01/internal-links-why-are-they-important-5-tips-for-improvement/


Louis Gray looked at Twitter's recent announcement on their Lists capability. This will likely have some significant implications to understanding who people *really* follow vs just having in thier follower list. Very interesting implications to understanding true influence:
http://www.louisgray.com/live/2009/09/twitter-readying-public-lists-extending.html


C. Edward Brice at Marketing Gimbal looks at Google’s new SideWiki and its ability to bring the social element and word of mouth to any web page. A wake up call for marketers to engage with SideWiki, if nothing else but to understand it and listen to the conversation:
http://marketinggimbal.typepad.com/marketinggimbal/2009/09/marketers-wake-up-googles-sidewiki-brings-new-social-dimensions-to-your-companies-digital-doorstep.html


Scott Gillum from MarketBridge looks at some good techniques for embedding social media discussions into a live B2B event. Admittedly, this was a social media event, but the ideas are good for borrowing:
http://b2bknowledgesharing.blogspot.com/2009/09/insights-and-epiphanies-from-recent-b2b.html


Josh Stailey at the Pursuit Group takes on the myth of sales velocity. The buying process is slow and steady. You can influence it but not push it. A very cutting analogy with car manufacturers' deep discount policy and how it stole from future demand drives the point home:
http://blog.thepursuitgroup.com/Blog/bid/10631/The-myth-of-sales-velocity


Michele Linn at Savvy B2B talks about the SEO effects of FAQ pages (and other benefits), which makes a great starting point in thinknig about content marketing and SEO:
http://savvyb2bmarketing.com/blog/entry/279141/5-reasons-to-include-faqs-in-your-content-marketing-strategy


Dennis Dayman on Deliverability.com looks at privacy policies, fine print, and disclosure; where the letter of the law may not be enough. In today's world, any disconnect between your brand promise, and what your brand delivers, will be quickly exposed, both legally and socially. Fine print will not make up for that:
http://blog.deliverability.com/2009/09/privacy-policy-not-.html


Mike Damphousse on Smashmouth Marketing publishes some interesting data on the best time to call – not at lunch time – in continuation of last week's theme of the resurgence of the strategic relevance of the inside sales function:
http://www.damphousse.org/2009/09/lead-generation-tip-take-3-hour-lunches.html



Another great week, with lots of interesting posts. I hope you enjoy this week's selection of the best from B2B marketing and marketing automation writers. Read More...

Market Relationships, Social Relationships, and B2B Marketing in Social Media

I just wrapped up a great book – Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely – that discussed, among many other things, the different relationship types we have between people; especially market relationships and social relationships. Dan’s example was a great one for capturing the essence of the challenge; you have a great Thanksgiving dinner with the family at your mother-in-law’s place, and everyone has enjoyed the great food, drinks, and conversation. The meal ends and you pull out your wallet to pay your mother-in-law for the great meal she has provided. Obviously a very awkward moment, and entirely the wrong thing to do.

Essentially, the situation becomes very awkward because you have flipped the relationship from one form (a social relationship) to another form (a market relationship). Neither type of relationship, by itself, is problematic. We provide and receive dinners based on our social relationships frequently, and we receive dinners based on market relationships each time we eat at a restaurant. However, it’s the flipping between the two that causes that feeling of awkwardness.

Social media, for all its promise, does not change the nature of the way we categorize relationships. It just makes those relationships more visible. One of the most common questions that comes up in discussions of B2B marketing is how social media can be used to drive revenue. It can, and there are many great examples of ways in which social media can be used to drive revenue, but none that I have heard of ignore the ways in which humans categorize relationships.

What I mean by that is that each of our presences on social media needs to fit neatly into a relationship category, or it will seem awkward. If we want to use social media to connect with friends, exchange photos, and share stories, great. If we want to use social media to educate, inform, and guide buyer behavior, that’s equally great. However, it is when we attempt to merge the two that awkwardness can result.

I’m not in any way saying that if you’re in a market relationship, you cannot be fun, engaging, and interested in a person’s family and personal life. You can, and it’s a great way to connect with people; in the same way that a waiter or waitress can be gregarious, social, and interesting. However, the relationship category is clear.

Many of the known successes in social media are clear market relationships. The team at Dell, ComcastCares, Chris Brogan, and the Kado Barbeque Truck are all clearly engaging us in market relationships within social media. They may be engaging, personable, and friendly, but there’s no awkwardness when they try to educate or guide our buying behavior, as we know from the start that it is a market relationship, and an ultimate goal is business.

If a social media strategy, however, relies on this boundary being crossed, it may face more of a challenge than you anticipate. Social media can be a great environment for ideas to spread virally. However, if those ideas would appear to change the relationship type, they will likely not spread. We forward viral videos to our friends that are funny, cute, inspiring, or provocative. These fit within a social relationship. We generally don’t forward videos that appear to be selling anything or promoting a product or company too strongly. This steps over the line into a market relationship.

Relationship types form an interesting framework to understand what allows certain messages to be forwarded and others to fail miserably. We have each seen examples of enthusiastic PR teams suggesting that we try to get everyone we know to pass along a great press release to their friends on Facebook. It does not work, as it is asking for a relationship (social) to flip to a different type (market). An interesting example, is the viral success that is seen in forwarding “friends and family only” discount coupons in retail scenarios. The sense that it is an internal only offer, rather than a sales promotion, allows people to pass it on in the context of a social relationship. Promotions that are just as strong economically, but do not have the “inside scoop” angle generally do not see the same level of success among groups in social media who mainly share a social relationship.

However, not all social media platforms are based on purely social relationships. People who connect on LinkedIn, for example, likely are sharing a market relationship, and may be more likely to share, discuss, and engage in pure business conversations. Twitter forms an interesting hybrid environment where both types of relationships exist.

Thinking about the relationships our initiatives are resting on allows us a new perspective on our social media campaigns. If the campaign relies on a social relationship becoming a market relationship, chances are it will not work. This transition is fraught with awkwardness and established etiquette, as much in the realm of social media as it is at Thanksgiving dinner at your mother-in-law’s.

Read More...

Social Media in B2B Marketing: The Importance of the Periphery

The rising interest in social media in B2B marketing leads to an interesting and challenging question; what is the role of social media in lead scoring? We’ve talked a lot about lead scoring and how to approach it successfully, but the relevance of social media should be addressed. The challenging aspect of leveraging social media in your lead scoring is that you do not control the main sites of social media, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. This makes it impossible to track the Digital Body Language of your buyers on those sites.

However, it is important not to underestimate the periphery – the point at which a person in the realm of social media enters a web property within your web presence.

This point of handoff, the referring URL, has been trackable for a long time, and can be seen in most web analysis tools. Its relevance in understanding your buyer’s digital body language though, needs to be fully understood. The referring URL shows you exactly where a person came from when they came to your site. Importantly, it includes valuable information on the context of why they ended up on your web site. There are three key aspects to look at in understanding the context of their visit:


- What site they came from
- What other information can be gleaned from the URL
- Where they landed

The first of these is the easiest. Understanding whether they came in to your site from Google, LinkedIn, a community support portal, an industry Blog, or Twitter can give you some context as to why they are on your site and what they are looking for. For example if they are visiting your site from an industry blog, the themes of that site will likely relate to the interest of the visitor. For example, blogs focusing on advances in mathematical modeling, insurance in the pharmaceutical industry, or employment opportunities in the Dallas area may all refer visitors to an insurance company’s site, but with very different contexts for their visit.

With certain sites the more relevant information is contained within other aspects of the URL. Search is the best example of this, as the exact phrase that was used is presented in the query string of the referring URL. Knowing the search query can give you very relevant and actionable insight into where in their buying process a visitor is, as we saw with Sourcefire’s use of query strings to understand buying cycle stage.

The third important piece of information to be gleaned from the periphery is the page to which the visitor was referred. If this page is not the main home page this destination URL can provide extremely valuable insights into what the context of the link was. If, for example, the visitor followed a link to your site shared on Twitter that led to a deeply technical specifications page, that is more likely to be a technical buyer who followed a link from Twitter to a case study.

Understanding what this periphery can tell us about why the visitor found something interesting in the realm of social media, and has chosen to visit our site is key in guiding our communication with them from that point forward. As we score them as a lead, or begin to nurture them over time, this insight is extremely valuable in understanding them as a buyer. Read More...

A Logo is Not a Brand: B2B Marketing and Social Media

I’ve been part of the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) tour this summer, and it has given me a great chance to interact with a lot of marketers about the challenges they are facing. One recurring topic, as you would expect, is social media and the role it plays in marketing and sales. A common focus has been on the potential for using social media for demand generation and direct connection with sales. I would argue instead, that social media is best thought of in the context of an organization’s brand.

Wikipedia defines “brand” as “A brand is a collection of experiences and associations connected with a service, a person or any other entity.” Other definitions exist, but the concept of a brand being the associations that we have with our overall experience of a service or entity is common to most of them.

B2B Marketing has always had an interesting relationship with the concept of “brand”. Perhaps dominated by impressions of what it means to be a strong brand that came from the consumer space, we’ve been hesitant to think that brand plays a strong role in B2B purchases. However, I would argue that the opposite may be true. Each aspect of a buying decision in a B2B purchase cycle is heavily influenced by reputation, and hence brand.

The following questions, which your prospects may be asking themselves, represent various perceptions (or misperceptions) of your brand:

- What companies have solutions to this problem?
- Which solution provider has better service?
- Which product is best in my industry or for my company size?
- Which product is the “cheap and cheerful” of the industry? Which is “robust and full-featured”?
- Which product is the most or least expensive?
- What are the key factors in deciding on a solution to this problem?
- Which company is going to be innovating more as we move forward?
- Which solution is more reliable? More stable? More scalable?

Although each of these decision aspects can be researched independently, more often than not, we all rely on general industry reputations to provide us with at least a good sense of the answer. I have spoken with many marketers who are frustrated by situations in which the general reputation they have in the industry on certain questions, such as the above, does not match with reality. This, in many ways, is a brand question.

Social media has one of the best opportunities to influence this brand reputation of any marketing approach I have seen in recent years. Each discussion in social media that concerns these questions is an opportunity to adjust the brand perception of your solutions. If you have a reputation for being the expensive provider in the industry, but in fact have a very competitively priced entry product, you have an opportunity to correct that misperception. If you have a reputation for poor service, addressing each individual with a complaint, as Frank Eliason did with ComcastCares on Twitter, allows you to reverse that reputation. If decisions are being made that overlook key factors that lead to success, you have an opportunity to educate the market one conversation at a time.

A good framework for thinking about these challenges is provided by looking at the challenges that buyers face in a buying process. Each challenge, whether it is a Flying Car, Wallflower, or Red-headed Stepchild challenge can be addressed by looking at the reasons potential buyers choose not to include your organization at each stage. Social media provides an excellent means to address each of these challenges.

The rise of social media has given us B2B marketers a unique opportunity to address and improve their organization’s brand in the marketplace. However, to do so, we need to think of brand beyond the logo. The entire experience, from market education through purchase to service quality and the customer experience affect our brand. Read More...

Framingham Heart Study has lessons for Twitter

In 1948, the National Heart Institute embarked on an ambitious study of the causes of heart disease. By studying 5,209 men and women between the ages of 30 and 62, who lived in the town of Framingham, Massachussetts, and who had not yet developed overt symptoms of heart disease, researchers were able to learn about the underlying causes and symptoms of one of the leading causes of death and serious illness.

The Framingham study was groundbreaking in its contribution of knowledge about heart disease, and has become the foundation of medical diagnosis, practice, and treatment in the area throughout North America and Europe. It has led to over 1200 articles in medical journals in the past half century.

However, in recent years, there have been questions of its ability to correctly model the risk factors on certain patients, especially those of South Asian and African descent. The population of Framingham, Mass, when the study was conducted, was predominantly caucasian, and thus the guidelines it produced have been cause for question in today's multi-cultural world.

Quite simply, as populations change, rules and guidelines built before the change may need to be re-examined for their applicability after the change.

So, what does this have to do with Twitter? Twitter too, has guidelines, practices, and approaches that work. The vanguard of Twitter, folks like @guykawasaki, @chrisbrogan, @armano, and @conversationage have communicated these guidelines and practices, and in doing so have made Twitter into a very effective and very popular tool for communication.

But in becoming so effective and popular, the population on
Twitter has fundamentally changed.

Now, Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears, and Oprah are avid Twitterers, colleagues who had not heard of Twitter 6 months ago are joining to "see what it's about", every politician is borrowing a page from Obama and joining the fray, and radio stations seem to mention their Twitter handle more frequently than their web address. @MackCollier has already recently written about the changing population.

Plenty of people are debating whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. I think that debate is moot. The population of Twitter has changed and is changing, and the change will continue to be interesting.

The real question is, much like the Framingham Heart Study, does a change in the population on Twitter mean a change in the guidelines?

It's difficult to believe that Ashton and Britney are following the "rules" that were tacitly understood prior to their arrival, and in fact I don't think it would make sense for them to. They bring a different persona to the population, and in doing so, change the landscape a small amount.

I don't profess to know how the guidelines of Twitter will evolve with a new, larger, more mainstream population in place, but I do have some questions:

- will it be accepted for celebrity Twitterers to be "outbound" only, rather than interactive?
- will we accept that many Twittering celebrities will be ghost written? Or will we insist on authenticity?
- will Twitter become the defacto standard for news distribution for outlets like radio stations and news publishers?
- how does our organization of Twitter communication evolve beyond Tweetdeck filters and the like when there are "updates" from celebrities or news outlets and "communication" from individuals to manage?
- what measures of influence will evolve to indicate the most influential writers?


What are your thoughts? How will the norms of communication on Twitter look 12 months from now, as the population continues to change?

Read More...

We ALL Use Twitter - Short Term Memory, Long Term Memory, and the Consciousness of the Internet

We all use Twitter. So do all our prospects and customers.

I made that argument to our CFO and CEO the other day and was met with a rousing chorus of guffaws and comments about teenagers and people with too much time on their hands.

But it turns out, that is the critical importance of Twitter, we are all users, just not in the way you might think.

First, let’s look at how Twitter is used by those who use it directly. To be honest, the main users (in my limited sampling) seem to be lots of journalists, PR people, Twitteratti, and bloggers. Ideas are discussed and commented on, links are shared and re-tweeted, and relationships are built. Anything that is more than a day old is extremely outdated news on Twitter.

Twitter functions, in many ways, as the short term memory of the Internet.

However, what happens on Twitter does not stay on Twitter. A significant segment of the audience on Twitter is in the segment that Nielson identifies as the heaviest content contributors. Based on their 90/9/1 rule, only 1% of the audience are heavy content contributors, responsible for around 90% of the content.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

This contribution of content is not limited to Twitter, much of it is contributions of content on blogs, journals, and discussions. The relationships, links, topics, and opinions that were formed and shared on Twitter are written down in longer form and discussed on these blogs and other online sites, which remain relevant for many months, or even years in some cases.

Blogs, and similar forums, form the long term memory of the Internet, and due to Participation Inequality, much of the input to this long
term memory comes from the short term memory of Twitter.

Then, as any of us involved in SEO are familiar with, Google indexes and ranks all of this content, pushing to the top the ideas and discussions that are most popular with, and linked by, the rest of the audience. This is where the vast majority of internet users interact with Twitter; through their Google search box. They are not aware that behind the scenes, the ideas shared on Twitter, and blogged about by the 1% who are active content contributors have formed a major factor in the selection of results they see, but it is nonetheless critical.

Google, as the consciousness of the Internet, indexes the long term memory, and ranks results based on their popularity in that forum. This is where the largest audience becomes exposed to those ideas.

If, as execs, we discount Twitter as unimportant because its direct users are not our peers, or our prospects, we are missing the point. We are all users of Twitter, either directly or indirectly, and if our marketing strategies discount that fact we do so at our own peril. Read More...

Twitter, Evolution and the Cambrian Explosion

I’ve always been a fan of the history of early evolution. Seeing the way that life adapts to drastic changes in its environment is fascinating. Often a significant change in the environment can trigger a wave of adaptations and a wave of extinctions, and the resulting effect is an ecosystem that is substantially transformed from what it had been previously.

So what on earth does that have to do with Twitter? Bear with me for a second.

I recently read a book called “In the Blink of an Eye” by Andrew Parker that talks about light, sight, and the Cambrian explosion of biodiversity. The Cambrian explosion is the term for the rapid appearance of most complex animals in the fossil record about 530 million years ago. Whereas there had been mainly simple organisms prior, there was a sudden appearance of most major groups of complex organisms in this period. The theory proposed in the book was that this diversity corresponded with the advent of the ability to see, albeit in very basic form.

Once organisms were able to see, a back and forth cycle of predation, defense, and consumption mechanisms exploded through the animal and plant kingdoms:

Predation: Organisms that were better able to see and better able to capitalize on that site through becoming predators did extremely well in the defenseless environment of the time

Defense: Organisms that were able to defend themselves through shells, or through rapid escape (again aided by sight) survived, and those that were not so lucky perished

Consumption: Organisms who used their sight to identify resources (water, shelter, food) were at an advantage over organism who felt for these same resources blindly.

The development of teeth and shells in this explosion of diversity also meant that there was something to fossilize, and lead to the sudden appearance of a broad fossil record.

This one simple capability - sight - resulted in the most significant acceleration of evolution ever seen.

Twitter, and social media in general, may result in an equally similar acceleration in the evolution of how we all do business.

It’s that simple. With Twitter and social media, you can now see conversations happening among customers, prospects, influencers, and your competitor’s customers. In the same way that the advent of eyesight enabled a broad range of new evolutionary strategies, social media enables a broad range of customer engagement strategies. In the same way that species unable to adapt to the new environment did not survive past the Cambrian era, businesses who do not adapt to this reality will be challenged over the next decade.

Similarly, this new vision can be used for today’s business equivalents of predation, defense, or consumption:

Predation: Okay, it's a harsher word than we'd like to use, but companies are able to see your customers conversations. If your customers are dissatisfied, you can be sure that your competition will not hesitate in connecting with them.

Defense: Companies are actively putting the processes in place to defend their customer base by ensuring maximum satisfaction. Unsatisfied customers are now visible, and without the processes to quickly rectify this situation, your biggest asset is left defenseless against aggressive competitors

Consumption: Companies are listening, understanding, and seeing where prospect gather, what they are looking for, and how they acquire their information. This insight makes them significantly wiser as they work to acquire new business. Organizations who are not listening to the conversations are like those organisms still feeling blindly for resources – likely to be outmaneuvered at every step.

Social media, and tools like Twitter have made a drastic change in our business environment. Where business evolves to in the next 5 or 10 years is anybody’s guess, but the only safe bet is that it won’t be the same as it is today and that following a script is more dangerous than improvising. Now is our chance to recognize the changes in the environment and consciously and quickly adapt to them. If we don’t we may share a similar fate to the pre-Cambrian organisms who saw the early versions of eyesight as “just a neat little toy that teenagers play with”.

Read More...

Twitter, Chris Brogan, and Black Swans

Chris Brogan asked an interesting question the other day on Twitter, and it got me thinking. He asked "Why do you try to acquire followers? Meaning vs just building relationships?" It's a great question because we've all seen people on Twitter aggressively trying to acquire new followers. Why? Past about 500, it's virtually impossible to have a meaningful relationship.

Peter Kim wrote a great piece on this a while ago, that describes it as an "Ego Trap". The piece was brilliant, and a fun read, and it describes the various social tools "counting" mechanisms, and the trap we all fall into to have the most followers/friends/etc.

http://www.beingpeterkim.com/2008/11/ego-trap-social-media-ranking-tools.html

But then, the underlying question is; why does that even work. We are all smart enough to know that these numbers are not meaningful in themselves.

I just finished reading "The Black Swan" from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and he has an interesting theory that might apply. He calls it "preferential attachment", and the idea is that for some systems, the dynamic is such that the more of X there is, the more of X there is likely to be. Think of things like personal wealth, the population of a city, bacteria populations, and project overruns. It's an interesting dynamic with interesting effects.

I was curious, so I pulled some data off of Twitterholic that looks at the 1000 Twitterers with the most followers to see whether the Twitter follower counts followed a pattern that would suggest they obey that dynamic. The raw data is above, and you can see an interesting Long Tail on it. Think about things that don't follow this pattern to realize how this is interesting. Things like human heights and weights would fall off extremely rapidly after about 7 feet, and there are none over 12 feet.

Looking at the data another way, the chart on the right shows the number of users who have more than a certain number of followers. With 35,812 followers, there are 25 people out there who have as many followers as Chris Brogan or more. Guy Kawasaki at 51,506 is among only 10 peers, and Barack Obama caps the list at 144,000.

This gets very interesting, because follower counts are what is called "scale invariant". The chance of someone having twice as many followers as someone else follows the same ratio whether the two users being compared are in the low follower counts or the high follower counts.

If we look at some of the ratios, you'll see what I mean. If we compare the number of people who have more than 5k followers with the number who have more than 10k (a 2x ratio), there is a 3.1x reduction in the number of users. If we compare the users with 10k and 20k followers (again, a 2x ratio), it is a 3.0x reduction in numbers. Between 20k and 40k, and between 75k and 140k, the numbers are again very similar at only a 4x reduction in user counts.

(*Note that this data is ONLY the absolute top end of the scale - just the top 1000 - but I would be willing to bet that the same trend is followed throughout the population.)

But so what? Well, to get back to Chris's original question, why do we all try for followers? Because followers attract more followers according to the theory of preferential attachment. That's why the big names on Twitter become even bigger names on Twitter. That's why Chris Brogan and Guy Kawasaki are who they are.

I'm absolutely not saying that (a) content and integrity have nothing to do with it, and (b) the mighty cannot fall. Similarly, great cities can crumble if they neglect the things that make them great, the wealthy can become poor if they do not invest wisely, and large bacteria populations can die off for a multitude of reasons. However, the dynamics of the system are such that all else being equal, having more followers will lead to having even more followers.

**Data from Twitterholic - http://www.twitterholic.com/ - January 22, 2009**

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Proactive Service, Twitter, and Brand

I said that yesterday's was my last post, but the folks at TripIt gave me a reason to write another one. There's a lot of debate going on with regards to how social media can be used in B2B, and here's one example of a great way.

TripIt is a service that organizes your travel - you forward your itinerary to an email address, it parses it, organizes it, gives you maps, directions, etc. It even tells you when people you know are in the area. I travel a lot and it's a great service.

But I don't like their calendar synch. It's not that it's broken, it just does things in a way that I don't like. I would never actually call into their support desk because it's not a big enough deal to bother. I did a tiny bit of looking around to see if I could make it work the way I wanted to, and I couldn't - I wasn't sure whether it was me or the service, and I will admit, I didn't really put that much effort into it. I just went about my day as a mildly grumbly TripIt user.

And then I Twittered about it, part happy, part grumbly.

Within a short period of time, I got a tweet back from Kristin at TripIt, asking me to connect with her offline.

I did, and it turns out that I wasn't missing anything in the calendar synch, but they know about the issue I was complaining about and are working on it.

So now I'm a happier TripIt user. Interestingly, the problem I had did not change. I still don't like their calendar synch, but the proactive nature of their service made me significantly more happy.

A few points from this experience for any companies who are not on Twitter yet:

1. Get out there and listen. You'll be amazed what you hear that you wouldn't hear from any other channel (in this case they knew it already, but in many cases, you may not).
2. Don't fool yourself into thinking that if you have a great support desk, you don't have to listen on Twitter, there are a LOT of issues with any product, service, or company, that are annoying enough to stop someone referring you, but not significant enough (or the type of issue) that one would pick up the phone to call a support desk about.
3. Proactive service, even if the problem isn't resolved, is very helpful for customer satisfaction. In this case, I at least now know (a) my problem is not currently solvable, and (b) the folks at TripIt know about it and are working on a solution. That makes me feel a lot better.

If you're not actively listening on Twitter, on blogs, on all forms of social media, you should be.

Here's my prediction:

In a few years, we'll all be laughing at service organizations that "wait for
unsatisfied users to actually pick up the phone to reach out to THEM."

Merry Christmas to all, have a great holiday season. Read More...