Be on the stamp that everybody wants to find! The book is structured around an easy-to-remember acrostic. “Stamp” stands for the five habits of digital leadership:

• SIMPLE: success is the result of simplification and process
• TRUE: be true to your passion
• ACT: nothing happens without action—take the first step
• MAP: goals and visions are needed to get where you want to be.
• PEOPLE: success doesn’t happen in a vacuum

Each of the chapters provides examples and anecdotes illustrating the topic at hand. Most of them are taken from the analog world on purpose: You don’t need to be a digital native to become a digital leader. A leader is a leader, and anybody can become a digital leader. Social media is not some form of black magic that obliges you to become somebody you are not or do not want to become. Rather, it is an environment that invites you to find the quintessence of who you are and what you want to say in order to be understood and interesting. Make technology work for you! The content of leadership may not intrinsically be different from what it is in the physical world, except that you must make your messages even more zen in order to render them more effective as well as more universal (and show a heightened sensitivity to the diversity of the people that constitute your digital friends or followers). Leaders, whether analog or digital, define their goals, pick their fight, shape their paths in order to shape the path of others.

Your true personality is just a camera phone away from being discovered… Do digital citizens lose some of their identity or betray their passions as they clean up their act and expurgate their texts of sarcasm or any form of nastiness? Maybe. Maybe not, if social media is more than an outlet for your random stream of conscience. The world of social media is undergoing the same evolution as the early days of blogging that progressively went from a public psychoanalytic “Say everything” craze to a consummate art of edited spontaneity. “The digital revolution has connected our integrity and reputation in a way never seen before.” No need to lament and dream of a golden era when we could separate our personal and professional lives and fancy ourselves as healthy Jekylls and Hydes. “Your true personality is just a camera phone away from being discovered,” Qualman reminds us, echoing the Zuckerberg’s statement in The Facebook Effect: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of lack of integrity.” While it’s true that in the digital era, “someone is watching us all the time,” it’s also true it gives us the ability to work on our personal unity and confidence, “recreate” ourselves — to take leadership over own lives — while easily accessing a wide audience, connecting and engaging with people. We lead by empowering others and “grow as they grow.”

One of the remarkable qualities of the book is that it dispels the threat that social media still signify to many people. Qualman is not lecturing you into becoming social media addicts to survive. Instead, his tone is inviting: “Digital Leaders are Made—Not Born.” Any individual can thrive in the digital era by creating output that unites people instead of dividing them. A very good book! Very human.

*I wrote a post about Socialnomics at the end of 2009.

I loved the book when it came out. A few things annoyed me back then, especially the rhetorical artifice of numbering the key messages after Luther’s 95 theses, a cultural reference that I knew from the history books, but was not part of my intellectual makeup. Why associate a fundamental societal evolution, I wondered, with a religious movement – however transformative it may have been? The idea sounded to me like a positioning trick that was ultimately weakening a powerful vision – I should say the strong “claim” that the Web is the property of the people. Incidentally, I forgot about my reticence when I later discovered John Dvorak’s scathing critique in PC Magazine, stating that it was “an odd vision of an idealistic human-oriented internetworked new world/new economy [marching] forward.” Dvorak wrote this in 2002, just before the emergence of the social networks that are now part of our lives: Friendster and Meetup were created in 2002, MySpace, Linkedin, Rize, and many others in 2003, and Facebook was to receive its first investment from Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal (June 2004). Sometimes even great minds miss the train, and yes, we are in a “human-oriented internetworked new world/new economy.” Maybe not quite the way the authors anticipated it, as they could not really factor in the notion of social networks, but it’s true that markets are conversations, and that even though not all conversations are markets, something that the Cluetrain Manifesto does not say, it’s also clear that conversations are the bedrock of multiple markets – providing this invaluable “data” that all the Web estancias want to leverage to better target customers.

As this young entrepreneur was telling me that the Cluetrain Manifesto should be renamed, I realized that I would like to have a sequel of sorts to that book, focusing on the economic rules that govern social living on the Internet from the user’s standpoint– in other terms, a “socialnomics.” Erik Qualman with Socialnomics, an interesting book about which I wrote a post in September, is actually one of the few authors who has tried to tackle the topic. People contribute to the Web, and get back a lot from it. Could they get more? Qualman shows “how customers [could] get paid for their search efforts,” comparing the current search model with a socialnomic model. A few companies have tried to look into this early on (especially All-Advantage, in 1999 and whose slogan was “Get Paid to Surf the Web”). The most recent and prominent is Microsoft, by offering its Live Search Cashback in 2008 and its Bing model this year. As people feed search engines, a real fast and cheap – even free – Internet to users should also be on the table: that’s what Google is doing by subsidizing free wireless network access in 47 airports until January 15. But why not longer and everywhere? No matter how loud we claim to live in a world of free and how passionately pundits try to forget about the wallet of the average Joe, Web usage remains costly – yet, all the Web estancias do need the average Joes to keep on searching, bookmarking, surfing and talking!

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Earlier this week, I had the privilege of delivering an introductory speech for a great product, ObjectiveMarketer, in front of remarkable executives and CIOs from the European Institutions hosted by Cisco Systems. It’s always a challenge to speak to an extraordinarily knowledgeable audience that is well versed in both technologies and trends, but it is also a rewarding experience. Below is a summary of my presentation.

I focused on the fact that social media are the very essence of the Internet, and in many ways, its revenge. The expression “Social Media” was coined by Chris Shipley fairly recently, in 2004 (BlogOn 2004), when she announced a conference designed to explore the rising business opportunities in blogging and social networking to be held in July at Berkeley’s Haas Business School. Blogging that had started in the mid-1990’s was blooming left and right, and social networks were becoming the talk of the town. Friendster and Meetup had been created in 2002, MySpace, Linkedin, Rize, and many others in 2003, and Facebook (albeit still unknown) was to receive its first investment of US$500,000 from Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal (June 2004). As we all know, since that time, the number of social networks has increased considerably. There are hundreds of them. The short list of the major ones provided by Wikipedia includes about 160 sites. When you add up the number of members of the seven biggest social networks, you easily pass the one billion users. The number of social networks users is way higher than the number of Internet users (approximately 1.67 billion people worldwide), which is not surprising as each individual can have several social network personas.

While such massive emergence of social networks comes right after the dotcom bust, it’s by no means a comparable phenomenon. It’s the expression of what Internet was from day one, a place where people wanted to express themselves whose voices were somewhat hijacked by the dotcom hysteria — and only waiting to break loose. In short, social media as we know them today are the revenge of the Internet.

Social networking was the raison d’être of the Internet – and actually predated it. In the early eighties, multiple efforts to optimize the interconnection of computer networks (initially started by RAND Corporation in the fifties to facilitate cooperation between its research teams in Pennsylvania and California) came to fruition, and the need to unify communication protocols led to the adoption of TCP/IP in 1982 — along with the definition of the word “Internet.” However, Internet or not, technology-enabled interconnections of geographically dispersed people had already started to expand beyond research organizations, reaching sundry university groups. The first real structured social networks appeared with the first NewsGroups: Usenet was conceived in 1979 by two students from Duke University. Discussion groups multiplied: in 1981, Ira Fuchs created BITNET (acronym of “Because It’s Time Network”) for liberal arts professors, and by 1984, it was connecting over 150 campuses. In 1986, Eric Thomas, then a student at l’Ecole centrale de Paris, invented LISTSERV, an automated mailing list manager that enabled users to join a list without the need for human administration; this introduced the concept of a list owner.

Throughout the eighties, services proliferated. User forums sprang left and right on CompuServe, and in the course of the nineties, everybody progressively adopted the Word Wide Web, a system of interlinked documents using TCP/IP, that Tim Berners-Lee and Roger Cailliau had set up in 1989/1990 to enable researchers at the CERN to share information. The increase of Internet users expanded and modernized the concept of NewsGroups. That’s the key to the success of companies such as eGroups, started in 1997: eGroups had 18 millions users when they were acquired by Yahoo! in August 2000 and integrated within Yahoo! Groups — itself launched in 1998. The eGroups phenomenon prefaced the explosion of social networks that we know today. The Internet is “the human voice rediscovered,” as The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual summarized ten years ago. The renewed interest in Social Media is the opportunity to re-read another important book, The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary where Eric Raymond expanded on his remarks at the Linux Kongress in Würzburg in 1997. These two books are echoed and updated in multiple interesting recent books, such as Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods, and Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business (1).

Social media are not a fad. Nobody will ever stop billions of voices. The July 2009 Ruder Finn Intent Index (1) provides interesting statistics: 76% of Internet users go online to discuss. When, on the other hand, you see that 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations and that only 14% trust advertisements, it’s clear that we have entered an era that will mandate a radical transformation of the way companies do business. While the majority of companies still cling to a top-down communication model with their potential customers, consumers trust the opinion of their extended families, their networks. Therefore companies now have to start learning how to reach the heart and mind of an increasingly hard-to-categorize “consumer,” an individual whose identity is spread across multiple personas. The rules are changing. We are quickly moving away from a world where access to companies by people is filtered by marketing departments and PR, to a world where this access is filtered by social networks. As a result, companies face serious challenges.

Twelve years ago IT departments didn’t want to hear about transactional websites. Therefore, e-commerce ended up in the lap of marketing departments. Today, social networks challenge marketers. They have to find qualified social media professionals to help out, which may not be easy when departments are stuck with antiquated criteria. They may hire consultants, but even the best consultants on the planet will have limited impact if corporate habits don’t change at the same time: the reality is that social media mandates that it becomes part of the company’s culture to empower and trust employees (how could unhappy employees safely converse with customers?). Marketing must start inside; every employee must turn into a potential evangelist. This may give a few headaches to traditional marketers, but the example of a few forward-thinking companies shows that the current trend is irreversible.

To scale their efforts, these companies need novel supportive technologies. Currently, numerous personal productivity tools are available. We are starting to see a few enterprise products capable of “listening to” customers. Yet, what is also critically needed is the ability to structure the way to talk to customers, as well as to measure the relevancy and the impact of the way you address them. This is precisely what ObjectiveMarketer, founded by Amita Paul, was designed to do. I am happy to work with her as an advisor — along with a friend of mine, Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of the most extraordinary online magazine rack, Alltop. Amita presented ObjectiveMarketer and I can only encourage you to try this remarkable product! (3)

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

(1) Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Mattersby Scott Rosenberg, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods,by Shel Israel and Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do busines by Erik Qualman are three books that I discussed in earlier posts. 

(2) http://www.ruderfinn.com/rfrelate/intent/intent-index.html

(3) More about ObjectiveMarketer. The product will be presented at BlogWorld on the Alltop booth (October 15-17, http://www.blogworldexpo.com)

It took about ten years for Brick-and-Mortars to figure out how they could best exist within the Web 1.0. They will have far less time to understand that marketing is turning into a completely new social and linguistic genre. Erik Qualman’s book, Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business is an effective wake-up call for corporations and marketers, and is written by a sincere and authentic practitioner.

Amazon, Qualman reminds us, did a stellar job when it introduced the concept of affinity marketing, but as efficient as it was, it had its shortcomings, especially if buying My Little Pony for your niece was a one-time thing. Going a step further, Amazon started to showcase other books that people who bought the same book as the one you are looking at, also bought. The social media approach is a next era and shows that in the “people-driven economy,” effective affinity marketing is a contagious recommendation process operating within affinity groups. Instead of being told what people in general are interested in, we want to know what people in our network, people we appreciate, would advise based on their experience – an experience to which we tend to pay attention because we generally trust our friends.  “People referring products and services via social media are the new king. It is the world’s largest referral program in history.” This is a new world that Qualman calls “the world of socialnomics.”

A few years ago, the very notion of “socialnomics” would have sounded like an odd linguistic construct, and, in the end, simply meant “management/rules of what is social,” just as economics originally designates the management/rules of a household. In many respects, the term “socionomics,” coined by Prechter in 1999, could have also been used, as it is the “study of social mood and its results in social actions.” However, through the word “socialnomics,” Qualman wants to emphasize the idea of an economy governed – I should say “mediated” — by social media as it leads to the creation of innumerable communities and tribes. This “social-media mediation” is perceived by individuals as a form of disintermediation and deliverance, shielding them from the marketing litanies imposed upon them by impersonal marketing machines. What we hear in our social media world comes from people we have chosen to listen to. The intermediaries are not mercenary message-carriers (or so we hope), they are peers of sorts and therefore, are not perceived as middlemen (even when there can be a bit of a sandwich man about them). This is why the world of “socialnomics” is not felt as yet another form of social pressure. We have the freedom to select the circles to which we belong, ensure that they mirror our needs and tastes, exchange points of views and ask questions with the hope of getting a candid response.

The eight chapters of the books analyze the new challenges and opportunities that the social media re-segmentation and restructuring of the market will present to businesses. Are customers going to reduce their reliance on the results they get from search engines? It is most likely. “I care more about what my neighbor thinks than what Google thinks,” if I want to buy a baby seat. It is also obvious that customers expect companies to converse with them in “open, two-way conversations” and that customer “services” are poised to become the customers’ voice and, consequently, a central part of marketing departments. Therefore, “businesses need to fully transform to properly address the impact and demands of social media.” And companies that fear to venture into the open, display their customers in the social media fora, will atrophy much faster than they think. Installed bases are joining the “Glass House Generation” at a fast pace, and follow its lifestyle — hang out anywhere and at all times in public view. Qualman indicates that “by 2012, eMarketer projects that more than 800 million users worldwide will participate in social networks via their mobile device, up from 82 million in 2007.” Meeting these new challenges as well as leveraging these new opportunities will definitely require new skills and new tools! 

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis  

More about the word “socionomics”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socionomics