Less than a year ago, it was all about conversations. Now, the word “conversation” is used with a pinch of salt. People finally admit that Twitter is more of a broadcast channel, as was clear from the extensive analysis (What is Twitter, as Social Networks or a News Media?) provided by Korean researchers, Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, and Sue Moon at the World Wide Web (WWW) in Raleigh NC at the end of April – a study that has been reported by multiple publications since then. At the end of last week, I had an informal meeting with a newly formed social media group in which one man, the skeptic of the gang, had seen the report and asked somewhat provocatively to his colleagues: “What comes next, now that “conversation” is not what we should focus on?”

“You focus on social media itself, and what you want to accomplish,” was my response. “Conversations” may happen, but it’s only one aspect (not the most scalable one) of a broader program, the art of engaging – a much more relevant word that Brian Solis quite conveniently pushed towards the lime-lights with his book Engage! (See my post about it in March).

Engaging encompasses multiple levels and forms of direct or indirect interactions with customers, as well as the ability to facilitate communication of customers among themselves without your direct, heavy-handed participation (more often than not, it’s a better way to really know what’s wrong with your product, what people expect, what they love or hate about you). Twitter is only one of multiple means by which to connect with customers – and it does make sense to take advantage of the fact that it is a broadcast architecture. You can broadcast more often, and, leveraging the talents of a larger number of employees, you can broadcast more human messages. The point is to know what you want to say, whom you empower to tweet and how you train your people to express in their own words what the company’s mission is about, and how well they evangelize customers by expressing something they themselves believe in. So, the more you broadcast, the better! Then, leveraging social media means managing all campaigns end-to-end to know at all times which messages resonate best, and identify your most effective messengers within and without. If what you have to say as a company is interesting, your internal buzz agents will enable their followers to carry out the good word. Why do you think Twitter is doing well on good causes messages? Because good causes create good messages.

 “Most Fortune 100 Companies Don’t Get Twitter” – this statement referring a study published on Mashable intrigued me enough to write this article. This study was conducted by Weber Shandwick and presented a report on how well Fortune 100 companies use Twitter.  The stats led to conclude that a majority of these companies have yet to come up with a consistent methodology to leverage Twitter to its fullest. For example: Fortune 100 Twitter Accounts: 540; Fortune 100 companies on Twitter : 73; Followers:50% had less than 500; Activity / Frequency: 76% posted fewer than 500 tweets; Inactivity: 15% were placeholder / inactive accounts.

Twitter offers a clear opportunity for companies to convert their employees into evangelists. While this is true, there is huge amount of risk involved, if resources are not managed using systematic and coherent processes. This alone may explain why many companies still do not have an active Twitter account. 

To efficiently use Twitter, companies need a centralized platform that provides complete visibility and accountability into the performance, be it of individual resources, functions, or the strategies that have been adopted. At the same time, the platform must allow for easy collaboration, increased productivity and result-orientation in team settings. 

Twitter is a simple communication channel. And the strategies that making effective use of Twitter should be straightforward. Instead of jumping into execution, if companies adopt the simple framework of Plan -> Execute -> Learn -> Optimize, then not only can effectiveness be measured, but the knowledge gathered throughout the process can also be used for repeatable success. 

PLAN: Companies need to determine the purpose of being on Twitter, and define Campaigns that communicate this purpose to their followers.  There should be clear plan on:

1.     Campaign definitions;

2.     Start and end dates of a campaign;

3.     Goals and expected returns from each campaign.

If the purpose is to create brand awareness, a company can create campaigns to send out product updates, webinar announcements and industry news. A campaign should have a related goal that can be measured. In this example, for product updates campaigns, the goals could be to maximize exposure, which can be measured through retweet information. Or for a webinar announcement campaign, the goal could be to increase visits to the registration page, and this can be measured through click-through rates on the URLs that drive traffic to website.

Once, campaigns are identified and goals are set, a company is ready for an effective execution strategy.

EXECUTE: Companies should use solutions that allow them to execute strategies tied closely to the plan. Execution becomes focused and result-oriented, when there is a plan in place and goal in view.

A good execution strategy should allow for the creation of different variations of the messages that bring them close to their goals. For example, if the goal for a campaign is get more traffic to the website, then it is key to share your content with the URL to your website more frequently, and at times when there is more traffic.  Companies should use a solution that provides answers to the following questions before and after any execution:

1.     What channels to use?

2.     Should the message be tweaked for different channels?

3.     What is the right frequency of updates?

4.     Do day/time matter and differ depending on the channel?

5.     What is the right content?

Campaign-based execution should be flexible, and modifiable as there is new learning about the campaign.

LEARN: There are facts, and then there are insights. A good solution should not only provide good visibility into stats but, also actionable insights. For example, a solution should provide the following insights based of just the clicked-through data:

1.     Average click-through per post, for the campaign (so, you can compare two campaigns);

2.     Most and least popular posts in the campaign (so, you see why?);

3.     HeatMap of the best day and time of the day for a campaign (like, Monday 2-4 pm);

4.     Channel wise distribution, and demography information.

And, instead of returning a list when monitoring keywords about brand or a product, a good solution should provide the following insights:

1.     Who are the Influencers or Amplifiers?

2.     Who are the Promoters or Detractors?

3.     What is the Net Promoter Score?

4.     What is the context and sentiment?

Actionable insights are important as they allow for redefining the campaign goals, and also modify execution strategy.

OPTIMIZE:  The most important question that should get answered is “Is my twitter strategy working?” As a result of your campaigns, you may have received a large number of followers, or got significant exposure. But, you need to verify if these are relevant to your business. If they are, you have the winning strategy. If not, use the feedback to identify the gaps, tweak your campaigns and redefine your campaign goals.

With the right strategy and execution plan, companies can indeed brace themselves for a steady growth in their business via social media.  Companies should not be “Twueless”, a word that Guy Kawasaki coined in his take on the study, but rational (“objective”) using a simple strategy that works. And ask this question more often than not: “Is my company effectively using Twitter? “

Amita Paul

Amita is the founder/CEO of ObjectiveMarketer, which is an integrated platform with the above principles inherent in its design.  It is a centralized solution that allows enterprises to implement strategies via campaigns. The product features several innovative solutions for marketers to engage with their audience with elaborate landing pages, and polls integration with the tweets. The architecture of the product allows for multi-tenant participation, with the whole idea of “work less, work effective”. 

Amita can be contacted at info@objectivemarketer.com . To sign up for a 30 day free trial, visit http://objectivemarketer.com

Each culture has its ideal cities, communities, phalanxes, religious, economic or political wonderlands as well as its Fata Morgana kingdoms. We have our own form of utopia, Twitterville. It could have been Twittertown, Twitterburg, Twitterborough or Twitterpolis. No, it’s Twitterville. Shel Israel prefers to use the French suffix ville, derived from the Latin “villa,” an estate on the outskirts of a city, with a ” homey, small-town feel.” Yet, the minute you enter the place, you find out that Twitterville is a kind of sprawling environment, “a global neighborhood” made of an infinity of the smaller neighborhoods that Twitterville citizens select to create for themselves, depending on their business or personal interests. They follow and/or are followed by other citizens from the most diverse vicinities in the comfort of their home. In a way, this Utopia is really what the word actually means: a no-place that is nowhere, but in anyone’s mind, unconstrained by geography. However, instead of emanating from a single thinker, à la Thomas Moore, it sprang out from a wave that Chris Shipley from the Guidewire Group called “social media” in 2004 [1] and “materialized” as it is by a software platform (Twitter), Twitterville is a fully crowdsourced utopia. 

Shel Israel takes us through Twitterville with the fervor of a proud resident and engaged storyteller — eventually adding autobiographical details to enliven his narrative. And here we have in one breath an archeology of Twitterville, the history of its first settlers, famous people, unknown entities or businesses of all sizes, and dozens of Twitter addresses for the reader to try. He takes us though a chronicle of local adventures and mishaps as well as successful interactions between users and notoriously unfriendly providers both on earth and in the skies – and we can only wonder what U-Haul can do to recover from its repeated blunders or Motrin from the headaches that the brand created for itself. For, in Twitterville, bad rap might last just as long as they did in old-time villages. Everybody talks in the megalopolis and news, good or bad, true or false, uncontrollably propagate. Twitterville is all about conversation, i.e. any talk from babble to debate, and as a result, conversational marketing as much about reputation as it is about content.

Twitterville is not simply a marketing manual and is often really entertaining: it is a collection of stories for whomever wants to have a feel of what it is like to live in Twitterville and experience its continuously morphing precincts and innumerable downtowns. The conversational marketing manifesto side of the book comes across as summary rules and principles by which twitterers abide to be part of the community. In many respects, Twitterville is a free-style sequel to Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, a book that Shel Israel wrote with Robert Scoble. However, while Naked Conversations discussed how to talk to people and customers through blogs, Twitterville is more about how to talk with people as you talk to them. “Spinning and targeting are outmoded,” and selling products is not the starting point of a conversation, only the symbol of an established social relationship. Basically Twitterville makes us rediscover the beautiful ambiguity and complexity of the definition of the word “commerce” which refers to 1) a “social intercourse: interchange of ideas, opinions, or sentiments”
 and 2) the “exchange or buying and selling of commodities on a large scale involving transportation from place to place.”[2]

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

[1] http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=105&STORY=/www/story/07-22-2004/0002215949

[2] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/commerce

More about Shel Israel

http://www.redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/information.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shel_Israel

“We invest in people…” is a phrase that entrepreneurs hear often from VCs and employees from corporations. What does it mean? Hard to know – or maybe, the actual content of the sentence depends on who is speaking.

OK, LinkedIn isn’t the whole spiel: For most people, you are your “background” and this “background” boils down to your résumé on LinkedIn. But a résumé is, by definition, limited: it is a summary. If Sergey Brin or Larry Page had sent a résumé to MSN, they would not have been asked to create the search engine of the future right away. Although they both had enrolled in the Stanford Ph.D. program, they were not “proven” yet. Who would have hired Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, or Bill Gates in key positions? The history of these iconic figures reminds us that what most people call “background” is only the foreground, a few degrees and a work experience that jump out to hiring managers and most investors. The end result is what we know: multitudes with “relevant” degrees and tons of “great” recommendations populate companies — small or big – and more often than not, these perfect recruits can’t make much happen beside ensuring business as usual and maintaining the status quo.

We all know that a great employee (or great entrepreneur) is more than a résumé. It’s a human being with a real background, whether you understand the word “background” as the software that is not displayed but is silently operating in the head and the heart of that person, or as the overall implicit or explicit setting or scenery in which a person places himself/herself and the vibes he/she transmits. This part is the fuzzy aspect of interviews — for better or worse, for both the interviewees and the interviewers, no matter how streamlined the interview process in a company may be or how well the interviewee has prepared. But how can people convey who they really are? And how can people know more about you? This takes me to a poll that I recently offered mostly via Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

What do you do if you are asked to bring up your Facebook page during an interview? After fumbling for a few minutes with the wording of my poll, here is what I finally offered: “A male hiring manager asks a woman to show him her Facebook page in an interview. What should she do: Agree; Refuse and see what he says; Ask why and then decide; Walk out of the interview?”

The idea of that poll came from a comment to a post by Renee Weisman, Keeping Your Online Identity Professional (http://www.womenco.com/benefits/articles/3608-keeping-your-online-identity-professional?page=1): “A friend just told me that at the interview, her hiring manager asked her to bring up her facebook page. He wanted to see the types of things she was posting as a way to judge whether she would fit in his organization!” 

Over 95% of the responses came through Twitter and the majority from the United States. After the first 100 votes, I noticed that percentages changed very little. Only a little under 12% of the respondents would immediately agree to bring up their Facebook page. I received multiple personal comments ranging from the right of having a privacy to the fact that our life is so much all over the Internet already that bringing up a Facebook doesn’t make that much of a difference. The poll was anonymous, but based on direct remarks, it is clear that people in their early twenties are the most open. One said: “Anyway, what 99% of people have on their Facebook is what 99% of the rest of the population also has. We have tons of pictures. It’s well known that other folks’ pictures are downright boring. So any hiring manager may be quickly bored as he/she goes through our galleries.” Another said. “My response would be ’sure.’ Can you bring your page too? You want to know whom you will hire, and I want to know more about who is hiring me and for whom I’ll work.”

The fact that over 50% say that they would “ask why and then decide” (they may end up agreeing for fear of losing a job opportunity in a tight job market), that over 25% would refuse and see what the hiring manager says, and that almost 8% would walk out of the interview is all the more striking as employers increasingly screen employees’ Facebook and MySpace pages: “Forty-five percent of employers reported in a recent CareerBuilder survey that they use social networking sites to research job candidates, a big jump from 22 percent last year. Another 11 percent plan to start using social networking sites for screening. More than 2,600 hiring managers participated in the survey, which was completed in June 2009.[1]“

My poll may not be “scientific, but if it is relevant, it’s clear that there could be a real discrepancy between the workforce’s state of mind and the companies’ hiring practices. If people feel forced to comply with corporate practices they do not like from the get-go, they might join companies only because they need a salary, not because they are sincerely motivated by the job – and strengthen a dangerous trend identified a few years ago showing that “less than half of Americans (47%) are satisfied with their jobs, according to a 2006 survey of 5,000 households (2006 survey of 5,000 households released by the Conference Board.[2] ” Economic recoveries are not simply a financial story: employees’ enthusiasm also counts.

Additional information in the CareerBuilder survey may add to people’s reluctance about bringing up their Facebook page: While ”Thirty-five percent of employers indicated that they did find information that caused them not to hire the candidate,” only “eighteen percent of employers reported they have found content on social networking sites that caused them to hire the candidate.” So, screening Facebook and MySpace pages appears to be primarily a way to exclude people. While it’s obvious that an employer will not want to hire people whose Facecebook and MySpace profiles  display inappropriate pictures, drinking, drug use, or badmouthing a previous employer, personal profiles do not seem to have a huge positive influence.

The advice of many career specialists is to encourage people to maintain a squeaky clean “professional” identity. Great, but this raises other questions, such as:

- Should your Facebook profile be a copy of your Linkedin profile with just a very slight personal touch? What is a “professional” family picture? How do you tell your friends to always make sure that they only take “professional” pictures of you?

- What is “unprofessional” besides a few obvious no-nos? Could the word “unprofessional” become a tote bag for all the things that a hiring manager doesn’t like about a candidate – and may say more about a hiring manager’s potential blinkers, culture, personal tastes,or ideology than about the candidate himself/herself? 

A few people asked me why my question was gender specific (A male hiring manager asks a woman to show him her Facebook page). In the poll, I did not ask respondents to indicate if they were men or women (maybe I should have). My response was that it was a real case. So think of this for example: A hiring manager cannot ask a woman if she has children, but can see it on her Facebook and can apply a still very common prejudice that this woman may not be entirely dedicated to her work. While it has become harder to openly discriminate, is it getting easier to do so tacitly?

Social media give a voice to a lot of new people – that’s obvious. Being in the Silicon Valley, I would have responded “Yes” with no hesitation to my own poll. Looking at the results, I had to think of the fact that the virtual world may also become a reproduction of the real world – eventually strengthen its shortcomings, its prejudice, but this time, under cover.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Yesterday, I attended the monthly meeting of the Ethos Roundtable (Cambridge, MA), a discussion group that focuses on initiatives aimed at holding a culture together, improving social connectedness as well as leveraging social capital, and was co-founded by Deborah Finn and Josh Shortlidge. The featured speaker was Peter Deitz, co-founder of a non-profit organization, Social Actions (http://www.socialactions.com) that provides an open, searchable database for actions that you can take on issues that interest you. Instead of checking over the web sites of 50+ foundations, go to Social Actions, type in your key words, and run your search.

When the sense of a mission enables entrepreneurs to build a real company in no time… Quite a few established commercial corporations are now intent upon seizing the field of social entrepreneurship and social actions to enhance their ideological standing or to create new sources of profits given that social causes can also be a huge money-making business. When you hear Peter Deitz speak, though, you are transported into a whole different world that’s by no means an extension of today’s e-commerce Web. His heart-felt sense of being on a mission to become a major orchestrating voice of the social, meaning-oriented, philanthropic Web is unmistakable — so much so that he and his team have been able to bootstrap Social Actions with just a few grants and prizes. In less than two years, Social Actions has become visible player in the field. Started in August 2007, with fiscal sponsorship from Mobilize.org, Social Actions already aggregates over 50 foundations, many of them famous institutions (such as Kiva, PledgeBank, ChangingthePresent, Idealist.org, SixDegrees, VolunteerMatch, Modest Needs, Care2Petition Site,  Change.org, DonorsChoose.org, DemocracyInAction, GlobalGiving, Twitter to name a few), most operating as hubs for smaller organizations; some others initiatives are lesser known and only vetted (as much as they could) by the Social Actions team. For a complete list of these organizations: http://www.socialactions.com/meet-the-platforms

In order to identify the causes that are of interest to you and the actions you can take (everything from volunteer opportunities to micro credit loans), you can make a search and you are presented with the list of the opportunities matching your criteria (in my example, I looked for all the new actions related to teaching children created last week).

Viral Open Source Strategy… Social Actions is all about making it easy to everybody (and not simply rich people) to spread the word, and make a difference. So instead of expecting people to come to their site only, Social Actions is doing everything to go to the people: Social Actions is not simply a destination site, but an Open Source Social Action Platform that any company, nonprofit, social network, blog, news media, or individual can leverage and embed on its site. Building up the Philanthropic Web is all about providing Social Actions capabilities everywhere and offering the ability for people to act where they already are. This year, the company created its own “Change the Web” competition to encourage social tech programmers to develop web applications that distribute the actions stored in the Social Actions database across the blogs, websites, social networks, and mobile phones that millions of people use every day. As you can very well imagine, the Social Actions’ approach is truly in line with all the Open Source strategies aimed at giving the Web back to the people and reinventing its purpose and meaning – i.e. enabling people to collaborate. The company is actively advocating for open standards for publishing and sharing actions, and proposed a format called Open Actions.

More about Peter Deitz… Peter holds a BA in History from McGill University and an MA in History from the University of Toronto. His passion is unambiguously philanthropy and when he landed in a large organization to pursue his dream, he experienced the same frustrations as lots of passionate entrepreneurs watching the inefficiencies of top-down organizations, however well-intentioned they may be. So, he left and went for a grassroots approach — which, in turn, revitalizes large organizations by transparently integrating them into the Philanthropic Web. He is a blogger at Social Actions, of course, and has also written multiple contributions on several other blogs, including Social Edge (http://www.socialedge.org), the Stanford Social Innovation Review (http://www.ssireview.org), or The Pop!Tech Blog (https://poptech.com/blog). A real expert in philanthropy-oriented initiatives and in social media, he also offers highly valued consulting services: “Over the last six months, Social Actions has been involved in a range of innovative consulting projects, trainings, and events. Our most notable paid consulting projects to date are the Social Entrepreneur API (Launching on August, 31, 2009) and Mozilla Service Week (September 14-22, 2009). We’ve also been doing work with Social Capital Markets 2009, The Case Foundation, The Skoll Foundation, TakePart, NABUUR, Music National Service, Consulting Within Reach, and Small Change Fund, ” Peter indicates on the site (http://my.socialactions.com/profiles/blogs/the-future-of-social-actions-1). His low-key style makes him a remarkable public speaker that you simply want to listen to. No need to say that although he officially lives in Montreal, he is all over the place — and a lot in the United States. I haven’t met the rest of the team, but the little I know about them makes me think that they are amazing folks too!

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

For more information:

About the Ethos Roundtable: http://ethosroundtable.blogspot.com

About Social Actions: see their Web site: http://www.socialactions.com

Also: an interesting post by Peter Deitz in June for Social Edge that you may want to read: http://www.socialedge.org/discussions/social-entrepreneurship/collaboration-versus-competition

Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena… Godin rightfully reminds us that the creation of a tribe, and its goals, are independent from technology. Tribes didn’t appear yesterday and did not wait for the Internet era. Many of the examples of tribes selected by Godin can exist without digital support — and generally speaking the definition of a postmodern tribe is pretty close to definitions provided by anthropologists and historians. A tribe is first and foremost a connected group on a mission championed by a chief/leader. Therefore, the best technologies in the world are downright irrelevant if there is no leadership, and proficient facilitators that can be leveraged by a leader. This is where the Internet becomes such a powerful factor: “There are literally thousands of ways to coordinate and connect groups of people that just didn’t exist a generation ago.”

Meanwhile, it so happened that postmodern tribes in music, cities, and fashion (I myself explored the non-aligned looks of the late seventies/early eighties in one of my books of the history of fashion), emerged at the same time as digital tribes, even though there is no correlation between them. In the eighties, tribes are obviously part of the Zeitgeist, and since then, we have all witnessed the growing tie between analog and digital tribes.

Digital tribes have their own history. In the early eighties, 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 digital tribes appeared with the first NewsGroups: Usenet was conceived in 1979 by two American students from Duke University (Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis). 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, or you could favor the Apple route via AppleLink, for example. Then, in the course of the nineties, everybody progressively adopted the Word Wide Web, a system of interlinked hypertext 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 NewsGroup. 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: Friendster and Meetup created in 2002, MySpace, Linkedin, Rize, Tribe.net, Hot or Not, Yafro in 2003, Facebook in 2004. Dozens of others appeared at the same time and more later, from Advogato to Zoo.gr, including Ning, imeem, Last.fm, Classmates, Flixster Twitter, Ning, Odnoklassniki, Orkut, YouKu, Tudou, ou 56.com, Tagged.com, Plaxo, Habbo, BlackPlanet, MyHeritage… the list is nearly infinite.

These days, there are digital tribes for every possible domain of interest, addressing virtually all the aspects of who we are personally and professionally. As Michel Serres said in his lecture at Stanford (May 20, 2009), “our identity is the fuzzy intersection of all the places we belong,” and it is by no means a homogeneous reality – no more than we are an individual in the strict sense of the term, that is, an indivisible entity. Our “identity” is distributed across multiple environments, defined by multiple factors and scattered across multiple activities. The Latin word tribuere (of which the word “tribe” is derived) means to divide, share, assign, allocate (and the Latin “tribe” is the arrangement of people into groups). In short, each of us, to paraphrase Michel Serres, is the fuzzy intersection of tribes. This, by itself, is not new; what is new, though, is that each of us is now able to easily express this multiplicity via the Internet — to choose to belong to several tribes either as leaders or as followers. While it is true that tribes, as well as the motivations that lead us to create or join them do exist outside the digital world, the digital world has allowed people to express themselves more easily and freely (with the added bonus of pseudonyms) and to strengthen connections with peers in real time. Today, the Internet amplifies tribalism in huge proportions.

Part 3: The Convergence of Tribes: The Obama Campaign

Coverage of the situation in Iran may be a significant turning point in the overall recognition of the importance of social media by a larger public. Over the last few months, social media has got a head start for promptness over media networks on several occasions. How many times have we heard that Twitter broadcasted information about the Sichuan earthquake 45 minutes before CNN reported! So, no wonder that “Twitterverse spoke-out in exasperation and opposition against traditional media networks (CNN specifically) and the absence of instantaneous coverage of the Iranian election”, as indicated by Brian Solis in his report of the 140 Character Conference (http://www.140conf.com/) that took place in New York City on June 16/17. Does our love for social media makes us slam traditional media too much (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/17/is-twitter-the-cnn-of-the-new-media-generation)? 

Real-time responsiveness is definitely what we want. Yet, what does failure to show such ability primarily prove? Maybe that TV channels don’t “break news” and that any claim to the contrary is a deceiving form of advertisement. For truth’s sake, traditional media should only speak of “update,” “ongoing coverage,” “developing story,” or whatever. So, they may only get flak for setting wrong expectations — or continuing to hope to get by with a claim that was never really accurate in the first place.

Traditional media cannot compete with social media as far as up-to-minute and continuous information is concerned. How could they? Do we expect large corporations to mobilize as quickly as startups? Can we hope the RedCross to be on site as quickly as locals? On top of this, traditional media produce shows with a specific focus for a defined audience. Sure, it’s kind of odd to zap through channels and come across “Girls in Trouble” on MSNBC when somebody is severely injured on a street in Tehran. But this is the way TV stations were designed to be. In addition, what is pressing news for some isn’t necessarily a priority for them, or even for the entirety of the world. Families with relatives in Afghanistan may also want to have real time coverage about soldiers killed in attack on an Afghan base… Can’t we simply admit that TV is just TV, and be pleased with the fact that if we want something else, we have lots of choices, ranging from buzztrackers to sites whose mission was to reflect “global voices?”

If you want real-time information about anything, use one of the best Twitter search engines, Twazzup! http://iran.twazzup.com provides all the real-time, unfiltered tweets related to Iran? It’s now commonplace to admit that citizen journalism is a reality and that TV channels still have to figure out how to factor in grassroots reporting. It’s also annoying to hear them issue disclaimers about information that they could not “authenticate,” did not “independently verify,” or must be handled with a ‘pinch of salt.” We all know that timeliness does not mean quality, that not all messages are equal, that word-of-mouth can be manipulated by activists and cynical propagandists — and that actual tweets by real eye-witnesses could even become a minority after some time. We all admit that great journalists are first and foremost great investigators. Is all of this the right debate, though?

Even if all TVs had fully mobilized to report on Iran, there would have been no way for them to beat a Twazzup approach. One-third of TV time is advertising. So here is what we should demand:

1) That news feeds be displayed at the bottom of our the screen even during advertising time, and

2) That we have the ability to customize such news feeds with tweet streams of our choice at any time.

Instead of complaining about TV channels and sinking into an irrelevant debate, we should simply request providers to make multi-play a simple and free service — and more than a marketing package to make us buy TV, broadband Internet, telephony and wireless in one subscription. We should ask providers to deliver on their “Grand Slam” claims — and make technological and media convergence part of our daily life.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

The Art of Laconic Marketing: Weigh your Words before and when you say them: Social Media Marketing is not the simple addition of three words Marketing + Media + Social. Marketing and Media Marketing are the art of pushing messages to an audience. It’s a primarily a top-down approach. Social Media Marketing is a more complex game: You start from your message, sure, but real-time interaction does not simply require that you know “about” your “target,” but that you also listen to people (more precisely a collection of individuals) and improve your understanding of them immediately and, eventually, fine-tune the way you address them — and this, in real-time.

And you have 140 characters to do that! You can’t be “conversational” per se. You have to be concise – but not sloganish or buzzwordy, because you will turn off your followers. You have to be laconic like a Spartan, i.e. terse (sometimes witty) and provide an url. Now how can you prepare for message effectiveness and measure the exact impact and performance of your messages in real time, know what works, why, how, and how to optimally schedule your tweets? You need a completely new type of dashboard, an intelligent listening machine that guides your decisions — a control tower of sorts for your campaigns. The core value of ObjectiveMarketer is to provide guidance and analytics for your campaigns.

While Internet marketing focuses on getting visibility in general, effective social marketing focuses on message transportability and repeatability. The purpose is to scale a grassroots marketing approach, i.e. foster the storytellers that will feel like communicating your message to their friends/followers — retweet them — within their various neighborhoods, as well as to understand the actual efficiency of the levers. ObjectiveMarketer provides the statistics, the trends and comparisons across campaigns and channels, i.e. the social insight that enables campaign designers to assess the quality of their messages and the actual impact of their amplifiers. Subtle and thorough measurement is the only way to ensure wide reach.   

More about Amita: Amita is passionate about her product. For a good reason: I believe that there is no similar product today. She launched the private beta and her first users are thrilled. They also like this: she listens to their suggestions and understands what they say right away, because she is both a techie and a sharp marketing brain. As a result, when you suggest a feature, you can see that she is already cogitating on how to best implement it. She is a fast speaker and a fast thinker who grasps that, in marketing, “facts, not speculations and assumptions derived from trends or impressions, are key to success. I love marketing,” she adds. “In my career, I have often felt bad for marketing folks. They never seem to have the right tools to make informed decisions. They have lots of out-and-out marketing applications for brand awareness, promotional offers, and various other programs, but nothing that helps them before something has taken place. In the real-time and personalized engagement economy fostered by social media, they need a platform to pre-empt, strategize and execute — and the ability to gauge results.” 

Amita came to this country at the end of 2005 and worked as a product manager first at StrongMail Systems and then at H5 (http://www.h5.com). She loved every minute of it, demonstrated how skilled and efficient she was — eager as she was to show the high quality of her training in India. She got her Masters in Computer Sciences from the Engineering College in Raipur, which enabled her to work as an analyst at Computer Science Corporation and Seacom Solutions – and then, she went for her MBA at XLRI in Jamshedpur (http://xlri.com). The more she learned at school or in companies, the more she wanted to become an entrepreneur. She is definitely jumping in with the right product at the right time. She works around the clock with her team here and in India. So, I couldn’t help asking if it was hard for her to juggle work and family, knowing that she has a six-month old daughter, Eisha: “Not in the least,” she responded with her bright trustworthy smile. “My baby is a breath of fresh air and my husband is very supportive.” Amita’s husband, Shekhar Yadav, who recently graduated with joint MBA from Columbia Business School and London Business School, works as Director Technology at StrongMail Systems.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

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)