Everyone's Doing It

You Still Can't Cross a Chasm in Two Small Steps

This is a guest post by author David Svet at spurspectives.com.

I love this quote, or at least this half of it by David Lloyd George. The entire quote is, “Don’t be afraid to take a big step. You can’t cross a chasm in two small steps.” No one knows this better than Wile E. Coyote. I think it has a lot to say about the current state of the social media marketing frontier. This reminds me of the early days of the Internet when there was radical change happening at a maddening pace. Social media seems to be in the same boat today and the fallout is beginning.

I’m talking about Geoffrey Moore’s book, Crossing the Chasm, and the wonderful little graph he co-opted to explain the adoption of technology products and services by the public. It divides the market into five groups along a time line that shows when people adopt a certain technology. The most interesting part of the curve is the chasm between stages two and three. This is where most technologies fail to develop into a full product with a fully supportive company behind them and they die, unlike Wile E. Coyote.

The plethora of social media products and services currently available is mind boggling, to say the least. They won’t all make it. They can’t. The market isn’t big enough. Yesterday’s announcement that one of the larger services, Pownce, a competitor to Twitter, is shuttering its site and merging with SixApart highlights one of the first social innovations to make it to the chasm, and fall in. There will be more. The questions that remain are who will they be and what do you do about it?

If I could answer the first question, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post. I’d be deciding if I wanted to have lunch with Warren Buffett, again. Suffice it to say that things will change, companies come and go, life goes on, so hedge your bets. That answers the second question. Hedge your bets. Here’s what I mean:

• Don’t freeze. Staying out of social media is a mistake as big as when your uncle Gilbert said the Internet is a fad.
• Don’t try to use ALL of the available social media outlets and tools. Have you seen what’s available? You’ll end up divorced and spend the rest of your life in therapy.
• Do look carefully at your target market. Who are they? How old are they? How do they communicate with one another?
• Do match your selection of social media channels to the needs and habits of your target market. Note that “channels” is plural. You need a multi-channel approach.
• Do watch what is happening with the adoption of your selections and the maturation of the companies that developed them. Be prepared for change.
• Do have a plan should one of your channel selections become no longer viable.

So, don’t stay out of social media altogether and don’t try everything all at once. Rather, put together a plan with a well-rounded selection of social media services at various stages of maturity that match your target market’s needs and interaction habits. A multi-channel approach hedges your bet that one might fail/merge/transform/get expensive/etc. It also enables you to interact with your community at multiple touch points. Furthermore it allows you to interact with people using both pull and push marketing tactics. Then you can listen, record, respond, suggest, and have a real relationship with your constituency.

It also helps to realize that loads of products and services are born and continue to exist for their entire product life in the first two segments of Moore’s hill. I think this is particularly true for non-consumer products or specialty products — products where the market is niche and limited to not include the possibility of mass adoption. So if you match your mix to your target base, monitor the results, and keep an eye on the horizon, you will end up watching the Coyote leap off the cliff instead of following him. Meep-meep.

The Twitter From My Front Porch

This is a guest post by author David Svet at spurspectives.com

There’s a small coastal village on Lake Erie in Vermillion, Ohio that is the best explanation I can find to answer the question: Why does social media matter? This takes a pretty big leap, so please indulge me for a few paragraphs.

This beautiful little village was built at the last turn of the century as a summer gathering place for a church community. The houses are cottages, all white clapboard and shake, with ornate front porches. They are built very close to one another with a strip of flowerbed for a front yard bordered by narrow sidewalks and streets that might let two Model T’s pass without scraping fenders. In a word it’s cozy.

Life in the village is quiet and slow — a throwback in time. People sit on their front porches along tree lined streets. Children and parents casually walk to the beach, playground, general store, or church. People greet passers by from their porch. Some stop by for a chat, others simply wave and comment on the beautiful weather.

My grandparents lived in nearby Cleveland. They had small clapboard and shake houses with nice front porches too. Their houses were newer and weren’t as close to one another. They had front yards, albeit modest ones, and detached garages. The streets were wide enough for normal traffic and on-street parking. When I was little I remember sitting on the porches and talking to neighbors as they passed by, but not when I got older.

My house is bigger than both of my grandparents houses combined. It is skinned in cedar shake but that was done as a retro touch. It has a two-car attached garage that serves as our front door — we enter and leave the house in a car. We don’t have sidewalks. Yards average an acre or more in our neighborhood. We wave to the neighbors and they wave back. It’s a sterile existence. So, my wife and I did something a little crazy. We built a porch — a great big wrap around front porch with seating, lighting, tables, and flowers. Now we see our neighbors. They stop by the porch. We talk. We laugh. Sometimes we just wave and comment on the weather.

That’s when I figured out why social media is so hot Social media gives everyone the capability to interact in the way we used to do on the front porch. Social media is a virtual front porch.

Think about it. Why did we stop hanging out on Grandma’s front porch? Because of central air conditioning. It sealed up the house and made it more comfortable than the porch. We sat inside and watched TV. Pretty soon houses weren’t built with porches and garages became attached to the house. Yards got bigger and houses got farther apart. Suburban sprawl, AC, TV, and McMansions killed spontaneous social interaction. As neighborhoods changed so did our sense of community.

So what is the result? New urbanism and social media. We are building physical and virtual communities that are a throwback to the village on the shore of Lake Erie. Why? Because it is innate human nature to want to interact with other people on a social level. We crave it. There is a market for it because demand drives markets.

New urbanism is easy to understand as an answer to the desire for a sense of community. But social media and virtual communities seem to be a real stretch, don’t they? Not really. Look at Twitter — the machine gun prattle of 140 character conversations between virtual strangers. On the surface it seems nuts, or annoying at best. To understand it, record a conversation in the office the next time a group gathers to look at a silly YouTube video. Then transcribe the conversation and attribute comments to the people who spoke them. It looks just like a Twitter conversation — there’s a link to a video followed by snickers, OMG, LOL, and individual sentences of friends bantering about the video, then it stops and everyone goes back to work. This is the same kind of social interaction that used to take place among friends on front porches. That’s why social media works. It gives us a place to connect to people and banter about the things that interest us. So, stop by my porch and say hi: http://www.twitter.com/spurdave

Advertising

Funny and pointed video that has a lot to say about the benefits of a sound social media strategy.

iPhone Developers Raking It In

Apparently iPhone developers are in great demand. While the rest of the world is trying to find a job doing just about anything, those with the the skills to blow out iPhone code are raking it in. Stanford even has a course called iPhone 101: Application Development. And while I've been calling for an SDK (software developers kit) for banking applications, the iPhone folks are minting money one dollar at a time. And if that doesn't make you chuckle then nothing will.

Many of the companies that write iPhone software offer both a free version and a Pro version. The freeware version of software is what get's people hooked and cheering about your application until they're so addicted they simply must have the enhanced version with more features.

The entire Apple SDK and App Store is a miracle for the independent software developer. Because iTunes and the App Store offer one central hub to search for and purchase the software; because your billing info is already entered in iTunes; because the applications usually only cost a buck or so; and because you just gained a potential client base of millions of users without spending a dime on advertising, your potential to make some serious dough is significant. There are people making $5,000-$10,000 a day selling addictive little games.

So, if you know how to write software and you're not exactly rolling in the dough you need to fund the black hole you call your 401K plan, get busy!

As always, you da man Steve Jobs! 

Take a look at what Wired has to say.

    

The POST Method from Forrester

I read a succinct article by Forrester's Josh Bernoff about a method for formulating strategy for using social networking as a marketing tool. POST is an acronym crafted by Forrester which describes how to go about properly accomplishing your goals through the use of social media. As Josh says, it's pretty commonsensical and could be applied to nearly any go-to-market strategy.

I wonder if most companies do in-fact go about their social strategies backwards, starting first with the thought, "we need a blog" or "we need a [blank]" (insert whatever social networking tool you want) without first understanding what the objective is. You'll notice that Technology is the last item in the POST methodology. 

I suspect this backwards approach could lead to some companies abandoning their social media efforts. They might not get the results they want because they had no idea what results they were trying to accomplish in the first place and in most cases had no clearly defined method for measuring those results had they defined clear goals.

Read more from Josh here: Forrester Research: The POST Method

Is Social Networking a Viable Business Model? (Part 2)

In Part 1 I discussed the different types of social networking sites and the viability of marketing on those sites. In Part 2 we'll discuss very viable (for now) businesses that exist to supply the technology surrounding the creation and management of content and marketing management for social networking sites. These companies inherently rely on the self-perpetuating success of social media in general as you'll see. 

Infrastructure
You might think that each company that has some social networking component on it's site has built their application from scratch. While many have built their own custom code, plenty of companies (NFL, Microsoft, HBO, even MySpace) utilize commercial social networking platforms available for purchase. The following are some examples of a few companies offering platforms for creating entire social networking sites, or social networking components that can be incorporated into an existing site.

• telligent - Community Server
• KickApps - KA Platform
• lithium - Support Communities
• Jive Software - clearspace
• Ning

As mentioned in Part 1, I think it's a real stretch these days to refer to a forum as social networking. Back in the day a forum was called... a forum. If I sold such software, I suppose the marketeer in me would hook my wagon to social networking too. Hey, why not. It's what's hot!

My primary question though, as a marketeer, is: how do we measure or track the value social networking is adding to my brand? For that matter, how do we track and measure how each particular social media strategy is affecting our brand? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the practical thinker in all leaders wants to know what the ROI is. If you can't measure it, how do you know it's working? And that leads to the fundamental challenge in social media strategies: how do we measure success in this touchy-feely, grassroots environment? Everyone knows they have to have it, but once it's up and running do we have any way of knowing how it's adding value to our brand?

Is Social Networking a Viable Business Model? (Part 1)

Have you noticed that the term "social networking" is the most overused term in the Internet/web lexicon? The term was intended to describe sites like MySpace and Facebook but is now generically used to describe literally ANY site that has a forum or other type of one-to-many, many-to-many or one-to-one communication - which covers nearly any website. Which begs the question: what is social networking? Is Amazon a social networking site? How about YouTube or Flickr? What about Yahoo Groups and Google Forums?

Most would agree that a "social network" is some sort of website where the content is largely created, edited and managed by it's users. I would go on to say that there are two primary types of social networking. The first type are the sites that actually coined the term social networking where the "product" is the social environment itself and revenues are derived by advertising. MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr all fit into that category. The other type are sites created by companies selling a product or service where there is simply a social networking component to it. Within the category of "true" social networking sites there are those that could be further defined as horizontal social networking sites (such as Facebook, Myspace, Bebo and Hi5) and there are those that could be defined as vertical (Flickr, YouTube) in that they have a specific vertical focus - sharing photos or sharing videos in this case.

The question I'm hoping to answer relates to the long term commercial viability of the horizontal social networking sites in light of this fact: people using horizontally focused, general purpose social networking sites DON'T want to be advertised to. Statistics show that traditional online advertising simply does not work in the social networking environment. The click-throughs aren't there. Vertically focused social networking sites don't suffer quite the same challenge. One could easily surmise that folks using Flickr are into photography, or those using YouTube are into television or video editing, etc. The problem with horizontal sites is that those users did not come to the site looking for any particular product. They came to look for a social environment - to find people, to find friends, to make connections, etc. That's very different from users visiting Google where you can easily target advertising based on their search criteria.

Digital Video Recorder Operating System Patches - Policies & Recommendations - Part 4 - Recommendations

In this final installment of our four part series we will look at a few other real-world risks and finally we'll make some recommendations.  Our goal throughout this series is to educate you on the actual hazards, their likelihood of actually happening, the impact in the event that one of these "breaches" actually did happen contrasted with the impact of inadvertently downing your DVR by applying untested or unnecessary patches. Our hope is that with this information you can make informed choices on how to manage operating system patches on your network of DVRs and that you may use this information to work with your examiner to provide thoughtful, educated answers to the questions or requests they may make of you during an examination.

The popular media likes to glorify the work of computer hackers and their exploits with the result being sometimes unrealistic expectations and knee-jerk responses. While all of these risks are in-fact real, we must weigh the actual threat and then prioritize our responses. We believe there are some threats that are real and pertinent and that deserve our attention and dollars, while others are the stuff of Hollywood films - completely unlikely, cost a fortune to fix, and where the fix may carry the far-worse risk of not having video coverage for hours, days or weeks.