If you are interested in social media and community management, you probably read Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy on a regular basis – and if you don’t, subscribe now! Jeremiah, an industry analyst and founding partner of the Altimeter Group, has been analyzing social media trends and technologies, as well as their impact on corporate marketing strategies, since 2007 when he joined Forrester. How do you become one of the most knowledgeable people in the field in three years or so? By combining a long-nurtured passion with long working hours: Jeremiah did not jump into the field overnight. His immersion into social media dates back from the time he joined Hitachi (2005) and became their blog program manager and blog evangelist.

Perform, Inform, Transform: That might well be Jeremiah’s motto. Perform in all senses of the terms, actually. Jeremiah comes from a musical background: he started to play the piano at age four and graduated in music performance from San Jose State. “I realized that wasn’t my calling and there were other ways of fulfilling my desire to perform,” he says. So he went for bachelors in business administration, market research, and Internet marketing at San Francisco State University School of Business, and decided to perform on a different type of keyboard, the computer keys.

Music performers draw their energy from the combination of an inner strength and their ability to connect with an audience. So do high quality social media performers. “I draw my energy from interactions online or in the real world,” Jeremiah says. This energy is itself supported by an enormous amount of foundational work. Three years ago, he was tracking a handful of companies; now in many of the social media categories he has created, he sometimes has over a hundred companies to track. Two researchers help him out, of course, but most of the legwork he does himself before sunrise, and he takes about three to four hundred formal briefings per year – and this does not include the continuous informal briefings he gets at all times, in social media conferences and meetings of all kinds. That’s a lot of diffuse energy to manage and absorb, for sure, yet one of Jeremiah’s most remarkable treat is his calm – as well as his exquisite politeness.

Jeremiah’s heedfulness is a major reason for his ability to distinguish trends from fads, separate the wheat from the chaff and provide meaningful market categorizations and advice for entrepreneurs and companies alike. So don’t expect him to endorse your company just because you believe it’s cutting-edge or groundbreaking. If it really is, he won’t forget you at the right time. His blog is definitely one of the most detailed ones in the social media industry and I haven’t seen him miss anything of value – even better, when he does, he graciously addresses any lapse. Because his purpose is clear: to inform, provide insight to make a difference, and ultimately help companies transform the way they communicate with their customers.

Living by Objectives: When I was thinking of this post, I was considering something around the idea of “Jeremiah Owyang unscripted” only to realize that it didn’t really make sense, for Jeremiah doesn’t follow a prepared script in the first place, and therefore doesn’t have to stray away from any. You can’t really split Jeremiah into a public persona on the one hand, and a private one on the other with a different character. He isn’t a split individual. It’s as simple as that. Such personal unity shows a lot of strength and courage – starting with the guts to do something you really like! His life gravitates around his job — and he did choose what he does: “I was tired of working at Corporate for other people. There is no such thing as a career path. When you take a look at a career path and you compare to an org chart you know what you notice? The org chart gets smaller at the top; so if everybody is given a career path, that means that most of them stop.”

And Jeremiah wasn’t going to let his destiny fizzle out: “You are your own CEO. You are in charge of your destiny and career; you are responsible for educating yourself, marketing yourself, supporting yourself, training yourself, leading yourself and protecting yourself financially. Even if you make 30K a year you’re still your own CFO, you should be protecting your monetary assets. Your time is very valuable and the way you use it to grow yourself. That’s my belief.” By doing so you can include into your professional life everything that might otherwise be called “leisure time.” That’s the purpose of the Operation Blue Water. “It’s a personal goal,” he explains, “not tied to any organization. Here is how I see how to work and fun. A lot of people work all their lives and when they retire they want to go to the beach or travel the world. My point is: if that’s your goal, integrate it into your life now. Make that part of your job. Don’t wait! Whatever your passion is. I love Hawaii and I want to be there 30 days a year. The trick here is this should be net positive, meaning I am not paying to be there. I told everybody about my goals and people got very excited, and a few of them hired me. The interested thing about personal goals is that you may not always hit them, but at least you did more than the year before. I am always going to do one or two weeks out of the 4 weeks. It’s a start. I love traveling and get paid to travel.”

Leadership outside starts with leadership inside. With Jeremiah, what you see is what you get: focus and an authentic kindness. Careful, however: kind and focused people hate to waste their time – That’s what the culture of performance is about!

Incidental note: We all know that the Silicon Valley is a melting pot of nations thriving on an earthquake bedrock. Very few people have deep roots here, but Jeremiah does. He is a 5th generation Chinese American Bay Area. His grand-father’s grandfather was the Chinese Consul General in San Francisco between 1890 and 1913. His great grandmother, Faith Sai So Leong, was the first Chinese woman dentist in the country.

The purpose of Social Media Metrics, subtitled “How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment,” by Jim Sterne is not to convince companies about the importance of social media: “If you’re still not sure whether social media is important or is important to your company, save this book for later.”  I’d love every company to read this statement as a litotes of sorts and realize that understanding what social media metrics is about is precisely an excellent pathway to understanding how important social media is. And there is a lot to do there! Jason Falls from Social Media Today reports interesting findings from a survey by City bank asking 550 small business owners across America about Internet and social media use for their companies: 81 percent don’t use social media! It’s hard to believe that these companies exclusively address people that live only offline when 71% of the total population is online (according to a recent eMarketer report). It’s safer to assume that many businesses have been deterred by the noise around social media, preventing them from understanding that the purpose of getting involved in social media is to build up metrics-driven marketing campaigns. To make a long story short: yes, this book addresses any business owner or marketer and gives them reasons to buy into social media.

The book starts with the 100 ways to measure social media in November 2009 by David Berkowitz, and once you know that, you must identify your goals and define the KPIs that indicate how efficiently such goals are met – and get inspired by Katie Delahaye Paine’s measurement standards. When your goals are clear, you want to get attention and know if your message is reaching the right people, and the nature and the scope of their influence (that Jim Sterne designates through a neologism “influencity”. Ultimately you want to identify your actual amplifiers, i.e. the people who expand the impact of your message, making sure they stay engaged – and sit high on the “engagement food chain.” However, winning people’s hearts and minds also requires a real and continuous commitment from marketers to listen methodically, as recommended by Jeremiah Owyang in his Eight Stages of Listening, participating in the conversation and eventually anticipating followers’ expectations, and by doing so, driving and accelerating favorable business outcomes. Now convince your boss or your colleagues, and do so by showing to them that social media is not a touchy-feely story, but an end-to-end metrics-driven process!

What I like about the book:

- It’s an action-oriented framework with minimal blah blah. 

- Jim Sterne doesn’t try to reinvent it all, and refers oecumenically (and relevantly) to a variety of authors, consultants, and practitioners.

Although the book offers an appendix of important resources, marketers who are new to social media metrics would benefit from a summary bibliography and linkography.

“Perhaps the biggest mistakes committed by businesses, personalities, and brands in social media occur when people jump into social networks blindly without establishing guidelines, a plan of action, a sense of what people are seeking and how and why they communicated, an understanding of where people are congregating, a definition of what they represent and how they will personify the brand online, and the goals, objectives, and metrics associated with participation.” Albeit fairly late in the book, this sentence sums up the purpose of Brian Solis in Engage! One more book about Social Media, sure; but this one is one of the best written. It’s almost reassuring to read sentences that exceed 140 characters (or twenty words), and, while you can find all the trendy buzzwords and expressions on virtually every page, the author authentically tries to assist social media managers as they transition from the broadcasting age to the intricacies of a new form of netcasting architecture where both users and corporations exchange “social objects.” How well or efficiently can they do so? This book provides social media managers with the background knowledge and practical notions that they can leverage to design a consistent strategy. 

The first half of the book surveys the world of social media in general, describing all the aspects of social interactions and their impact on corporate marketing and communication, as well as customer service departments. Traditional marketing schemas have irreversibly imploded under the pressure of a crowd represented in a “conversation prism” that factors in behavioral guidelines implicitly or explicitly set by the multiple socialization channels. So marketers must listen. What can they do with so much information? “Instead of inhibiting the pace and breadth of information flow, we must channel relevant details and data,” a task that does not only require “attention” (nice reference to Linda Stone’s Continuous Partial Attention), but also some understanding of applied social sciences or researchers’ and analysts’ categorizations (such as Charlene Li’s and Jeremiah Owyang’s Socialgraphics). Achieving a state of the art “unmarketing” to use a time-stamped word by Scott Stratten – i.e. rebuilding a marketing strategy from the bottom up – entails, for many companies, a serious reassessment of some entrenched marketing habits. Hence the resolutely didactic approach of the two parts of the book: “The New Reality of Marketing and Creating Customer Service” and “Forever Students of New Media.”

The second half of the book comprises four parts that detail the new responsibilities that come up with the potential of social media, and focuses more specifically on what a “new marketing” approach may look like. One of the most remarkable sections is related to “defining the rules of engagement.” It unambiguously shows to the skeptics that the social media revolution is not a passing phenomenon spurred on or controlled by influencers, but the reality of today’s computing, one of the incarnations of the social Web, and that it is set to transform every single company from the inside. The examples of IBM’s and Intel’s guide-lines (and its digital IQ Program) do not only demonstrate the forward-thinking intelligence of people like Bryan Rhoads or Ken Kaplan (also see my post about him earlier last year), but also the proactive approach of highly regarded companies as they define new roles and responsibilities to adapt to a new world. Digital intelligence is not simply the prerogative of a handful of gurus appointed to task forces or advisory boards, it will also be part of the job description of most employees in the close future if they want to be up to par with educated customers. The scope of the book stops here, but it’s clear that the social media revolution will lead to the reassessment of corporate cultures, employee empowerment methodologies, and linguistic and artistic skills. “Unmarketing” just like any vibrant “marketing” starts from within. Corporate stonewalling doesn’t have too much future.

End result: a serious book that gathers the Zeitgeist (and will bring many people up to speed with trends and idioms). Somewhat voluble, yet kindly extroverted and definitely useful if you want to create a social media plan.

While the media may have found Twitter, only 5% of Americans are currently using it, according to a research performed by Harris Interactive in April. This doesn’t mean that Twitter is a fad. The adoption of new behaviors is generally a much longer process than is usually anticipated by innovators and early adopters. The truth of the matter is Twitter is still very new – and significantly enough, TWTRCON SF09 that took place on May 31, 2009, was the first conference focusing on Twitter as a business tool for marketing, customer service, PR, or to make money. Quite a few companies explained how they already use Twitter today. The conference was very well organized, very well attended and had great speakers and panelists. Here are some of the highlights for me (for a more complete survey, you may want to check http://search.twitter.com/search?q=TWTRCON).

Operation Smile: Let’s start with a NPO. A great sign (albeit rare) is when a business conference starts with an inaugural party to help a humanitarian cause and provides updates on the money raised throughout the day. Presented as a live case study of a twitter-centric marketing initiative, Operation Smile launched a Twitter 140 Smiles with the goal of raising money to help fund 140 reconstructive surgeries to repair childhood facial deformities, including cleft lips and cleft palates. Check out http://www.140smiles.org and http://twitter.com/operationsmile! Twitter is not just an American thing! It helps change the life of people thousands miles away from the Silicon Valley.

Navigate inside and through this zoomorama (you can zoom-in/out the pictures as well as see them in full screen). 

Great speakers: The main characteristic of the major individual speakers was their authentic spontaneity.  

Laura Fitton started with a pre-conference keynote, Twitter for Business 101. The first time I heard about Laura Fitton was when I read Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us . In less than two years, she has become a real social media guru (although she views herself more as a “Twitter student” than an expert), and her company, Pistachio Consulting (http://pistachioconsulting.com) focuses on ways to connect businesses to new ideas and innovations using microsharing platforms. So, find the right followers, leverage this huge opportunity to connect to customers, and integrate Twitter into your operations – just as Salesforce is integrating Twitter. Her book Twitter For Dummies  (coauthored with Michael Gruen and Leslie Poston, to be published in July) will certainly convince even the most skeptical.

Twitlebrity is not the point. Efficiency is. Guy Kawasaki is a most famous twitterer, not for the sake of fame, but for business. His interview by Gina Smith was a great moment of humor and honesty. “I’m not on Twitter to make friends,” he acknowledged unambiguously, “but to promote Alltop.” View this as spam (but, you willingly subscribed!) but do not forget that Spam is a delicacy for Hawaiians. And what is perceived as ghostwriting by twittering lone-riders is teamwork potency in business. We knew that already: Kawasaki is no macho. His team: four women who have real names and are real people.

Shel Israel announced his future book, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods, to be published in September. His speech featured the stories of like-minded people, who assemble through Twitter, build personal global neighborhoods – in other words, a diverse Twitterville population, ranging from business folks to Janis Krums, who sent an image of the US Airways plane moments after it plunged landed on the Hudson River. “If the Pulitzer judges don’t consider an iPhone photo next year,” he comments, “I’ll eat my hat.”

The last individual speaker was Steve Rubel. He created a life chart using Mind Note, a mind mapping program, of where Twitter stands in the industry ecosystem and the directions the product might possibly take as a social OS that enables to a site to make social or a marketing OS. The diagram, inspired by Brian Solis’s Twitterverse, is now published at http://www.micropersuasion.com. Here below is a zoomable version of it:

Steve Rubel was definitely more exciting than the conversation with Anamitra Banerji, from the Twitter Product Management team, who rehashed that Twitter’s corporate motto is “We don’t know” for about 30 minutes. I truly wondered if I was watching the Silicon Valley aesthetization of cluelessness, a repeat of the “no-business model” snobbishness of the Internet bubble – only adapted to social media, or the elaborate staging of a revolution-to-come. Strange when there were a number of companies eager to discuss the viability of Twitter for their businesses.

Great panelists: The various representatives from large corporations were significantly more eloquent and enthusiastic about Twitter than the Twitter representative that appeared. What some of them do is already quite remarkable. Virgin America, Intuit, Phoenix Suns, PR Newswire, Boingo Wireless, Well Fargo, Comcast, Carl’s Jr,. Kogi BBQ, Dell Outlet, eBay, Cisco, and FutureWorks see Twitter as a platform: companies can strengthen their brand by engaging with their customers in real time, inform and support them better, create user communities, and generate more revenue. In doing so, each of them insisted on the necessity of defining clear strategies and measure actual results using different methodologies and various products (Radian6 was the most frequently mentioned), define rules of engagement and ways to personalize their brands, and eventually manage potential liabilities (while taking into account that the Twitter universe already has its own codes of conduct and is in many respects governed by its members — as is the case for most social tools). Even though many of these efforts are still at a fairly early stage, it is obvious to them that Twitter has the potential to drive real business, as was clear from the remarks of Stefanie Nelson at Dell, or Beth Mansfield, from Carl’s Jr. Beth has a real strategy on when is best time to tweet (the tweetspot), and she made a few people smile when she described herself as “a chubby 42-year-old wife and mother” interacting with her followers, “18-35 young hungry males.”

They are also all aware that “Twitter is dramatically changing the era of top-down management of corporate communications in real time,” as Brian Solis said at some point, and that if Twitter is a great environment to turn customers into evangelists, it also enables them to scream when they are unhappy — which turns out not to be such a big deal, as it enables marketing to better escalade problems and solve them faster. Forward-looking companies understand that the era of hidden dirty secrets is over, anyway. With platforms such as Twitter, customer-centricity is more than the one-to-one deal of the 1990’s and early 2000’s. It’s a public commitment in a world that has morphed into a public tribunal: When a first class passenger on Virgin writes a tweet to say that he is hungry, you have to feed him!

Most of these companies are also looking at leveraging Twitter within a global social media perspective and working at the its integration with not only their Web sites using products such as Hootsuite, but their overall operations and IT environment. (We can only hope that Twitter will be able to hire the right folks to address their reliability and availability problems).

On the lighter business use side, “Your Brand is a Person,” I can’t help mentioning MC Hammer on the stage with Stefanie Michaels (http://www.adventuregirl.com). While agents try shield to shield entertainers and athletes and build their mystery persona, the life of celebrities is so exposed in the media and sometimes beyond recognition, that MC Hammer doesn’t see the risk he tales. “There was socializing before there was a platform,” MC Hammer said plainly; “embarrassing yourself on Twitter is not a new risk.”

Let’s Cut to the Chase: This was the title of the last topic of the day. The Twitter concept is here to last one way or the other. How big will Twitter is going to be? That’s everybody’s guess. I believe that Jeremiah Owyang (http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/) could be quite right in assuming that the approach will turn into a universal protocol that will make it normal stuff. As far I am concerned, I tend to believe that the company’s somewhat complacent procrastination about defining its business model (even if it’s to find out the best practices nuggets, which is often absurd in a startup) may accelerate the commoditization of the concept. I hope this does not jeopardize the business prospects of the multiple — and often bootstrapped — companies that have created beautiful, interesting and useful products around Twitter. Here are some of the ones featured at the Conference: ObjectiveMarketer, PeopleBrowsr, UserVoice, ThumbFight, Jobaba.com, or Twitfunnel.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis ( http://twitter.com/mddelphis)

Ken Kaplan is the Broadband and New Media Manager in the Consumer and Social Media Team, which is part of the Global Communication Group of Intel. He embodies a new generation of PR: “Today, PR is not about messages, although they are in there. It’s about telling stories that connect to trends and that are helpful to people,” Ken says. “You tend to want a better laptop next time you want to buy one. At that point, we want to be there when you need it. We want to help you.” As I was listening to Ken telling me how passionately he loves his job during breakfast at Il Fornaio, I couldn’t help thinking that thanks to employees like him, Intel is more than “Intel inside,” it’s also “outside.” His charisma brings back the great words of one of the most amazing fathers of the Silicon Valley, Robert Noyce, who co-founded Intel in 1968 (after co-founding Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957): the focus of a great company is not “How do you relate to the rest of the world,” it is “How does the world relate to you.” How can you best do this? By having employees who are born media producers, of whatever kind this media may be – as is the case of Ken. 

“Follow your inner moonlight…” Ken majored in philosophy, “almost by accident,” he says. He accumulated classes until he realized that he had enough credits to graduate. But he took writing too, and journalism, and mythology, and basically followed his heart, until he settled for his one and only goal, living in San Francisco, or more precisely, in North Beach to get into the Beat Culture, in search of both lost time and novelty. He wrote for North Beach Magazine for free – “but I was getting free books about Beat poetry,” he remembers fondly, and interned in 1991 at KRON, then affiliated with NBC, for 5$ per day. He was to stay at KRON for nine years; in his second year, he became their first publicist. “The experience I got there is invaluable. I was exposed to local news, documentaries, cable channel and, later, to the newspaper’s online component. I got to see all of that grow and, after a few years being dismantled, and I grew a lot from seeing that. I was able to work inside the newsroom, inside the cable channel and go downstairs to sit with the Web folks. I got serious know-how, especially I learned how to edit video, story-telling, how to write succinctly and I also understood real teamwork by learning how to deal with many different editors on your work.” All of this ended the day he received a call from a former executive producer at KRON, Larry Bozman, who had moved to Intel.

2000: Ken’s leap year: Ken’s life changed completely – or rather, everything he liked was restaged with a wholly different backdrop. He joined Intel and got married (with a beautiful Italian, Gabriella Bruni, currently a Ph.D. student in Classics at Berkeley) and was soon to have two children (Damian and Selene). Ken was not into technology and Intel was not looking for yet another technologist, but the computer chip company was looking for somebody who had good communications and relationship building skills, somebody who knew how the media works from the inside. “This was an exhilarating time that is so close and yet seems so far away,” Ken reflects. “The heydays of technology on television. In the late 1990s, CNBC was all over in the Valley. Local affiliates were reporting on technology every day.  ZDTV had debuted in 1998 and became TechTV. In 2000, when I joined Intel, TechTV and CNET we’re covering technology as a lifestyle. We were very busy with broadcast media relaitons.  Everybody wanted to cover technology.” Then, the bubble deflated: “Technology became not as important and was no longer leading the news. The local guys weren’t coming and doing live shots a couple times a week like they had done for the years prior, but something else was happening at the same time and it was big!”

A glimpse at Ken’s worlds: you can navigate inside and through as well as zoom-in/out the pictures and videos – and also in full screen.

Video, audioblogging, all-out blogging… and the PR metamorphose: “Everything was moving online and the big thing was video. So we started to put our B roll online, and here again, my background served me well. It was a new opportunity for creativity.” Then, podcasting came around. Although he was not a technologist (and maybe because he was not a technologist), Ken was on the lookout for anything that would serve his passion for helping people to tell their story. He had never met Dave Winer, but he knew instantly what audioblogging would bring even before the term “podcasting” was officially coined. “I had been doing work with radio; trying to get folks on radio, you have to get a story and help them to be good at telling that story. Podcasting was taking us into another realm – almost like TiVo. You get it when you want to. You can save it. Now, we could create stories that weren’t just for today, or this week, but something more evergreen. So we started using podcasting to give life to interesting stories from inside Intel and sharing them. First, we would just turn on the mike and turn it off and then we really started real production, often editing and making these podcasts better for the audience.”

New media, and even more importantly, new delivery channels have changed the style and even the nature of PR. It’s not about shoving information into the head of journalists or people. “Of course, we still write press releases, but press releases have a simple core purpose: here is what happens, how it happens, here is where you get more information. PR becomes interesting for both PR people and its audience, when everybody can engage in the story. “Now, we all get the real voices. It’s awesome to hear the story from the person that experienced it. So if we have an engineer who was really key and instrumental in shrinking a transistor and all the challenges they went through – it’s geeky, but hearing it from the guy who really struggled and did it with hundreds of people around the world, that’s fascinating.”

Getting people to edge of the company: Since 2005, Ken has been an advocate for “getting people to the edge of the company,” to use an expression he first heard from his friend Jeremiah Owyang, who is now at Forrester. PR pros who are control freaks are becoming a thing of the past: “The old PR school was all about having only specific people on the edge. It wanted to control the message. In a world where everybody can get any information about virtually anything, what does “control” really mean? Nothing. Today, PR are not simply people whose job it is to regulate information. Our job is to evangelize our company as well as we can. The more well-informed experts we get to edge of the company, sharing their passion for Intel and real-life experiences, the better. Also, and as importantly, our job is to listen to people.  That’s why engaging with them is what we do. We are not working with IT experts or OEMs only, but also with everyday people who are using our technology. They can be a source of inspiration when they share interesting ways they’re using technology and even hearing what they’d like their computers to do better. Today’s social media is a two-way street. We all are participants.” Ken is well aware that corporate blogging has its challenges, that putting too many microphones out there can also generate some noise, but he is also confident that solutions can always be found when needed, especially when there is a culture of trust and openness inside a company. 

Contrary to common belief, many large corporations such as Intel, and through employees such as Ken, are extremely well versed in all media and social media and have embraced them wholeheartedly – and often more sincerely than multiple mid-sized companies or even start-ups. The reason for their ability to soak up innovation so quickly and so efficiently? The quality and the strength of their internal corporate culture enable them to trust their employees and leverage their skills, creativity, humor and their kindness.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis