Lately, a few friends of mine are making some moves in their careers, they asked me for my advice, so I decided to give them my observations. I’ll probably refer people to this post, I often use this blog to save me time. One caveat, my experience is within corporate, so if you’re of the entrepreneurial spirit, I don’t have as much insight.

Six Career Tips To Help You Grow

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Learn something new every day
When I was a lowly intern right out of college doing grunt work IT application clean up and light UI design, I asked harassed, my dear colleagues to teach me something every single day. They thought I was bright-eyed, cute, and naive and I ended up learning a little about each of the web developers, system integrators, project managers, web managers, web architects, computer support teams. Although this was clearly outside of the scope of an intern, bit by bit, I soaked in each little morsel about web in the enterprise and it fueled me to learn more. Leo Cheng, Jason Martorano, Oliver Cheng, Dave Giffen, John Perera, Kunal Malik, Jeff Cavano, Aileen Cheng, Robert Cartelli were so good to me, thanks guys.

Often, the fastest way Up is Out
Often, the fastest way up, for those who enjoy working in companies, is out. In most cases, incremental raises are often single digit changes (keeping you above the inflation waterline), and the occasional promotion will be low double digits. For those that I’ve met and move to new job positions, outside of their company they can often expect a 20%-40% increase in salary as they join a new company. It’s interesting to see that firms may value outside talent as more important than inside experience talent, in some cases, a fresh skillset or experience may be what’s needed.

Reverse engineer the job you want
Another useful tip is to reverse engineer the position that you desire to be in. Earlier in my career, I aspired to be a web manager, so I took job descriptions of web strategists and looked at all the skills and experiences needed. I printed out the job description (circled the salary) and taped it to my bathroom mirror, I saw it every morning and night, a double dose of self-reflection. Over time, you start to piece together the projects, programs, and apply new skills to learn how to do this. With time and perseverance, your resume will catch up to where you want to go.

Education matters, but not as much as you thought
For very specialized jobs, where in school training is essential (law, medicine, sometimes programming) this bullet doesn’t apply to you. More and more executives I meet have degrees in something they didn’t study in school for. For most jobs, they hire you because of what you can do for them, not what school you went to. There’s a reason why education falls to the bottom of the resume, and the ‘value statement’ is at the top, quickly followed by real world experience. Don’t get me wrong, education is very important, a bachelor degree is really expected in today’s workplace, but I often lean on the broad, theoretical knowledge I gained as a primer (or glossary) for me to dive in deeper in the business world.

You are a company of one
The other observation I share with my friend (and now you) is that you are a company of one. Even though your paycheck is being delivered through your employer, you are solely responsible for your direction, what you learn, how you perform, and how much you’re paid. I firmly believe that you are paid what you’re worth, so when I hear people complaining “they are underpaid”, in my mind, I translate that as you’ve “undersold yourself”, get skilled, spend time on weekends or early mornings to learn more, and apply new projects, programs and skills –or leave. Therefore, you are your own CEO, CMO, CFO, COO, CTO, you’re in control of your destiny. As you can tell, I don’t believe in fate, you are driving your ship of one.

Develop your plan, and put it in writing
If you’re with me so far, develop your own plan, both short term and long term plans, and set goals on how to reach them. Often, these goals don’t have titles or companies in them, but they describe the environment, or the end outcomes of which you want to reach. Over time these goals will change, and that’s ok, but at least you’re looking forward. I learned this from my buddy’s dad when I was growing up, he had several businesses, and one of his dreams was to have a Ferrari –he achieved it.

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Wishing you all the best! (really) I want to see you succeed. I get emails about once a month, where someone has said they’ve achieved more, party due to this blog, (but the majority due to their ambition of course) If you’ve other tips, please share in the comments.

Update: Connie Benson reminded me to post up my mantra of “pay yourself first” and “Manage your time as you do money“.

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Jennifer Jones, who hosts one of the top ongoing social media marketing podcasts, interviews Emmanuel Brown of Nike Jordan. I saw Emmanuel at the last Marketing Forum in L.A. he told us that employees are encouraged to work out a couple of hours every day. Actually, it’s more than encouraged, it’s mandatory. He discusses their Breakfast Club interactive program, which helps customers track and improve their daily sports routine, and recently won a Groundswell award for their efforts.

They aren’t the only sports brand leaning on social media to reach customers. New Balance has a ’studio’ type site, and Nike has launched an online community platform.

Update: Forrester has published a video of Emmanuel Brown at his recent presentation at the Marketing Forum, including other videos. (a quick registration is required)

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I’ve started a new series, called Social Media Frequently Asked Questions. It’s a collection of the top asked questions I hear over and over. I’m putting them here on my blog is a great place to help everyone quickly get educated, convince their boss, or be able to help their clients get over these hurdles, so please, pass them around.

If you’re seeking advanced topics, cruise through the web strategy posts (it goes back pages and pages)

Social Media FAQ #5: How Do I Talk to my Executives about Social Media?

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I enjoy feedback, but was surprised to see a few votes come into my uservoice page, one suggesting I help convince management on how to deal with social media.

Your job: To convince your peers, stakeholders and executives that don’t use social media (or don’t believe in) on why social media may be important to your business.

I’ve actually written about this before, so I’ll highlight some of the previous posts that I feel are helpful:

Start with Technographics
First, obtain the technographics of your market segment (we’ve made a sample free), if your customers are using social media tools, then you’ve a strong business case. Secondly, we’ve already concluded that decisions are based on trust, and trust is highest among peers, not from marketers. This disruptive change is enough to kick start the thinking gears of your executive.

Ascertain if this is right for your company
It’s important to note that social media may NOT be the best for your market or company, if the inactives are a significant amount of your technographics, or you’re in a very conservative industry, you may be ready to deploy a listening program, but may not want to participate. I really believe that social media isn’t for every company, and you’ll have to do an internal reality check to see if this is the case for you.

Focus on value, not technology
Next, don’t focus on tools, instead focus on the end result: value. How To: Effectively Talk to Execs and Clients about Social Media. This post teaches you how to talk about the end results of what’s expected, ever lead with “we want to start a blog”

Learn how to talk to immigrants about natives
Getting Your Digital Immigrant Executives to Understand the World of Digital NativesFrequently, the decision makers, are my parents age, and often their technographics usage is very low. I’ve found talking about Generation X and Y as the new workforce a quick way to open their eyes about the changes in communication.

Be prepared for the business questions
Lastly, before you go to your execs, be prepared to answer the tough questions, the one Legal, the CFO, the COO will ask. Be prepared.

Hope this is helpful, if you’ve other suggestions, please leave them below.

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The trust and influence around brands, products has moved to discussions around communities’ lifestyles, often in blogs, social networks and other locations ‘off’ the corporate domain. A new class of measurement tools have emerged, that measure the impact of social media, among them is the BuzzLogic group out of SF.

What’s interesting is they look at who’s being influenced by what data node, and who the influencers are in any given topic area. For example, Scoble may have influence in the early adopter technology space, but has little credibility in the alpha moms space. This is important, as leaning on an universal wide measurement system (like Technorati) isn’t relevant as we create more niches around topics and markets.

This video talks to the employees, as well as showcases a demo of their products. If you’re seeking a segmentation and rating and ranking of the buzz monitoring space, colleague Peter Kim has done a Wave Report, which is also available on the Forrester site.

Have you used BuzzLogic? What did you think?

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Social Networks continue to show a strong future of growth.

Two recent Forrester reports published by my colleagues, Josh Bernoff and Oliver Young, both showing the future of social computing for the interactive marketer and for enterprise 2.0 purchasing. A very obvious trend for both of these reports is the growth of budgets by marketers and companies for social networks.

I’m not releasing any new information here, but just highlighting the public data that they both point out:

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Social technology marketers bullish in face of recession

We polled interactive marketers with the following question: “Assuming that the economy is in a recession in the next six months, how would you change your Investments in the following marketing channels?” Over 40% of them indicated that they will increase spending on social networks even in face of a recession during the next 6 months.

Josh writes: “Social networks will get the largest number of increases, over 40% of those using it, along with user-generated content, blogs, and that old standby, email marketing.”

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Forecast: Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Spend By Technology, 2007 To 2013

In Oliver Young’s report on Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013, or read the blog post, and the graph has been published on Read Write Web and ZDnet, Enterprise spending of social computing software (internal and external) his report provided some clear forecasts demonstrating that purchasing in social networking software (like this white label list) will increase, and take the largest segment of the budget.

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Your internal discussion
You should forward these stats to the web strategy teams within your company, and start a discussion answering each of the following questions:

Is your organization of what social networks are (believe me, many aren’t)?

Are you aware of why social networks are so important (talk about trust)?

Is your marketplace using social networks? if so, which ones?

What are you competitors or others in your industry going?

What are people doing in social networking sites in our marketplace?

That’s just the exploratory questions you’ll need to answer, there’s a much large discussion you’ll need to have, after the awareness questions are answered.

I’ve published quite a few posts on social networks, view archives.

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Left Image: An impoverished Darfur child is shown holding an LV-like purse, image sold as a T-shirt from artist, now being sued, see Hi-Res version.

Thanks to Søren Storm Hansen for bringing this to my attention.

It could have been your brand
It could have been Rolex, Lexus, Gucci, or even your brand, sadly for LV, it was theirs.

A 26 year old artist named Nadia Plesner has been sued by Louis Vuitton for brand jacking their famous purses in a anti-genocide campaign.

The artist was trying to make a point that the media cares more for Paris Hilton extravaganza’s more than the genocide in the nation of Darfur.

Nadia states her intentions for the grass roots campaign:

“My illustration Simple Living is an idea inspired by the medias constant cover of completely meaningless things.

My thought was: Since doing nothing but wearing designerbags and small ugly dogs appearantly is enough to get you on a magasine cover, maybe it is worth a try for people who actually deserves and needs attention.

When we’re presented with the same images in the media over and over again, we might start to believe that they’re important.

As I was reading the book ”Not on our watch” by Don Cheadle and John Prendergast this summer, I felt horrified by the fact that even with the genocide and other ongoing atrocities in Darfur, Paris Hilton was the one getting all the attention. Is it possible that show business have outruled common sense?

If you can’t beat them, join them. This is why I have chosen to mix the cruel reality with showbiz elements in my drawing.”

LV: “Cease and Desist”
Luxury brands certainly have teams of brand police within Marketing to ensure their products aren’t being misplaced or improperly positioned, and have taken action by first sending a cease and desist letter (notice they “applaud the efforts) PDF.

Nadia: “Free Speech”
Nadia then sent a return note, stating this was her ability to self-express and claimed the logo was not referring to LV in particular (PDF).

LV files lawsuit
The letter was not met well, and LV has now filled suit against Nadia, claiming damages of over $20,000 a day, each day the campaign is continued.

The Groundswell begins
Since then the Darfur has grown in awareness, having now been on Digg, a Facebook group formed, spread in the news, and hundreds of blogs pointing to her site.

LV has two a few options
Here’s my take, from what I can tell, Louis Vuitton (and the dog) have nothing to do with Darfur, and their brand is being dragged through the African mud. Their response is pretty standard and expected, to protect the image and brand that they’ve been working to build. I’m sympathetic to them getting brand jacked, as they’ve not done anything to occur this unwanted attention.

Option 1: Continue legal path: Continue this path and settle with Nadia, given the many lawyers they have access to and resources, they will likely win a copyright infringement for the design being on another paid product.

Option 2: Join the campaign: They could drop the suit, and work with the Save Dafur organization to help raise funds by doing events, creating a specific product, or help promote the cause. This too has it’s downsides, the brand will be brought into the human rights spotlight, and if they have any dirt in this arena (perhaps oversees manufacturing) they’ll be in turn scrutinized. Secondly, this would be a nod to activitists everywhere to brand jack major brands in order to get support –and funding, the cycle will continue.

Option 3: Redirect focus on issues: Submitted by John Bell. I enjoyed John’s option so much, that I’ve embedded it here on the post as an update. “What they could do is work with Nadia and other artists to host discussions about media focus. They could partner with a neutral party like my friends at ifocos.org to steward the conversation. Keep the discussion away from luxury brands (which is not Nadia’s point anyhow). LV can become part of teh solution without taking on the brunt of an issue they do not own.”

Option 4: Walk away: Submitted by Alison Byrne Fields: “Drop the suit. Walk away and wait for the dust to settle. This little hullabaloo will have no long term negative impact on their brand.”

I’m weighing both options here for LV, there’s really not a great way out of it for them. I believe they are collateral damage, having done no wrong to invoke this groundswell, yet this is a nod to what could easily happen to other brands.

I asked my Twitter community to voice their opinion, on the topic, here’s what was said in public

ronbailey: - why not just donate a few bucks to the cause in exchange for her NOT using LV products in her campaign?

Dan Lewis: legalities aside, I’d be mighty upset if my name were wrongly associated with genocide. the artist is morally wrong here, no doubt

Alberto Nardelli: besides LV point being morally disturbing, IP case doesn’t stand: would be like campbells suing warhol

Kim Pearson: I’m a former PR person, not a lawyer, but I’d argue that LV is doing itself more harm by its response, not protecting its brand.

Ed Saipetch: ironically in the same vain, I heard the (RED) campaign benefits retailers and product producers much much more than the AIDS fight

Rainne: I say not, b/c the artist did not use the vuitton pattern, she simply invoked its similarity.

mlogan: They turned this into a big story and managed to put themselves on the wrong side of a humanitarian crisis. Smooth

bethdunn: it’s another case of a company doing more harm than good to their brand by trying to halt something they can’t control

ronbailey: how has LV been harmed by Nadia’s campaign? - She was poking fun at celebrity culture in general, not LV in particular

ronbailey: They could have easily turned a blind eye to the whole episode.

Ok, you weigh in, If you were the CMO, what should LV do?

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A list of companies that were blind-sided by the internet, they didn’t understand the impacts of the power shift to the participants, or how fast information would spread, or were just plain ignorant.

Criteria of “Punk’d” includes a situation where the story would have not been told if social media was not available, or if social media enhanced the situation.

This doesn’t include fake blogs, companies who deliberately tried to cheat the system get their own honorable mention.

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2008

Louis Vuitton gets Brand-Jacked in Anti-Genocide Campaign
Artist creates and sells T-shirt demonstrating how the media turns a deaf ear to real world tradgeies such as genocide in Dafur, infringing on LV logo. LV fires back, with lawsuit, a groundswell begins. Submitted by Søren Storm Hansen

Burger King exec trash talks using daughter’s email
Not sure why he didn’t just create a new email address, that would have been a lot safer. Submitted by Hilker.

Johnson and Johnson to bloggers: Hurry up and get dis-invited
Sounds like a mis-coordination, bad timing, and not a well thought through process that ended up getting scobleized, and Maryamized.

Anonymous Unmasks Church of Scientology
The church of Scientology has been criticized by an anonymous group, a faceless mass that has created videos, staged marches and protests, and is subvert the Church from around the internet.

2007

Target’s Rounders program “This is our secret game”
Target encouraged it’s premier members in the rounders program to pump up it’s brand in a Facebook group, sadly, the covert operation ended up on blogs and then mainstream media

HD DVD Decoded by Digg, unDugg, then Dugg again
Digg users publish HD code, industry freaks out, Digg maintains stance.

Wholefoods CEO caught being a troll
Whole Foods CEO, was anonymously trashing competitors and pumping company up on Yahoo finance boards.

Apple’s dirty little secret plastered over NYC
Apparently, 18 months is all the iPod will run before you’ll need to buy a new one, says this video, where street teams went around defacing ads. Submitted by David Churbuck (I got his name right this time)

Delta holds customers hostage
What’s worse than being held prisoner on Delta’s dirty plane? (Video), watching the crew getting off da plane. Oh, and no food, crying babies, but one talented videographer.

Taco Bell’s infestation crawls into YouTube
A minor rat problem moved it’s way to YouTube, spreading faster and farther than expected, a total of more than one million views for all videos. Submitted by Graham Hill

2006

Data storage blogger posts industry price lists, sales reps cry f#ck!
Robin Harris, one of the most well known of the data storage blogosphere posts price lists that were received from various customers.

Dell Laptop Explodes, news at 11 –on YouTube
More bad news for Dell, as laptops explode in Japan, all can see online.

Comcast suffers from Narcolepsy
Sleepy Techician caught on YouTube, then fired. Also see Comcast must die blog, submitted by Jeff Jarvis.

Hitachi Hell gets the finger
Angry customer gets bad service, writes long experience, and flips off HQ in picture, he’s also an influencer in the gaming community

The naked NOKA chocolate uncovered
A premium chocolatier (Noka) had a tremendous markup ($309- $2,080 per pound) of their secretly re-packaged chocolate, was exposed as a fraud and spread on blogs. And their google results is really painful. Submitted by Whitney.

AOL gets canceled –how to get get on my nerves
This guy really bothers me, I can see why Vincent Ferrari was miffed. It’s clear, he was dealing with the customer retention department. Nothing worse than the feeling of being held hostage. Submitted by David Alston.

Airplane fiasco’s spread online: JetBlue
There are so many examples, such as a YouTube testimonial about JetBlue’s 8+ hours stranded in terminal. Related: JetBlue’s CEO responds after flights are cut months later due to storm.

Starbucks Brandjacked by YouTube Video
Who wants a tasty frappuccino when there are kids starving? This was one of the first cases of brandjacking we saw.

2005

Why we Dwell on Dell Hell
Jeff Jarvis launches blog post that sends a flurry of PR negativty at Dell’s poor service, it’s since been improved.

2004

Kryptonite unlocked
Locks were disabled using a simple bic pen cap, spread on forums and blogs, one of the earliest examples that got mainstream attention.

2003

The Barbera Streisand Effect
Singer star tries to remove content from internet, it all goes downhill from there. I actually learned about this from reading my colleagues Groundswell book

Also see: 8 Groundswell Examples: News, Education, Religion, Cops, Restaurants, Music, Conferences, and Analysts

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I know I’m missing others, please leave a comment, and I’ll credit you

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Embrace your Customers
At Forrester, we use the term Embracing as a social strategy where customers and employees work together using social tools to build next-generation products. Quite a change for the strong headed product manager, who now has to set the roadmap, while in collaboration with customers.

Popular Examples: Dell and Starbucks
We’re all familiar with the popular Dell “Idea Storm” website that let customers vote for which features and products they wanted to be bore to the marketplace. In Dell’s case, the linux community asked for a UBUNTU box, which was created and launched and sold. I wish I was a fly on the wall when Dell’s strategic partners at Microsoft found out about this.

Recently, Starbucks has launched My Starbucks Ideas, where customers are voting for improved services or products in each of the stores. Looking at the site, the request for free wireless or ‘punchcards’ for frequent customers is under consideration or has been improved.

Both powered by SalesForce
Both of these sites are powered by Salesforce’s product, Ideas. Move on over, there’s a new player in town called UserVoice that offers the same features right on their site.

UserVoice, a new kid on the block
I’ve played around with UserVoice and even created a version for my own Web Strategy blog, the simple features made it easy to setup and let others submit ideas. I’ve not stress tested this service to see if it can withstand enterprise activity like SalesForce can, but it’s a nod to a common feature (voting) that we should start to expect to see in white label social networks. (in fact, I know of a few that are going to launch this)

Reporting, Query features, and easy to setup
Other UserVoice features to include Google Analytics, and the ability to collect demographic information and let owners know of suggestions. Owners of voting sites can also segment their customers by different purchasing sizes, in order to help prioritize. Also, polling features will help to put color around suggestions from users, and other conduits to improve the connectivity between employees and customers.

For example, I created this own Web Strategy UserVoice page where you can go and make suggestions on how I can improve this website.

Recommendations
If you’re a small company or individual blogger, or run a niche product, I encourage you to try out UserVoice, test to see how it scales, and come back and leave comments on your experience on this post. If you’re from a large company that has thousands or millions of customers, start with SalesForce and also trial UserVoice. Anyone that wants a fully custom user experience should start with SalesForce.

Update: I’ve received some tweets and comments also suggesting IdeaScale (which I think is the same as this product of the same name), I’ve not looked at it, please leave a comment if you’ve a review. Also, passionate CEO Matt from BrightIdea left a comment about his enterprise class competitor to SalesForce, I look forward to a formal Forrester briefing from him, let’s take a closer look at this growing segment.

What to Expect
UserVoice would make for a good partner for any of those white label social networks, and could even be an acquisition target for a vendor that’s not up to speed in this emerging feature set.

Expect other White Label Social Networking vendors to offer this feature, soon it will be on the ‘checklist’, of features. Customer voting? “Yup we got that.”

They aren’t the only ones to watch, Get Satisfaction, a support site for any product, anywhere, (no reason to go to that irrelvant corporate website) has launched, and customers are self-supporting each other, and some savvy companies have their employees there participating. Without surprise, I’m there representing Forrester, although there’s been no activity. Satisfaction is still very startup focused, I hope to see some Fortune 1000 companies appear on their site.

Lastly, UserVoice itself is, “eating their own dog food” so to speak, using their own service to improve their product, there’s already a small flurry of votes happening.

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Yesterday, I spoke the executive team and business unit leads at a very large insurance company. It was a long 4-hour session, where I gave a Groundswell presentation, discussed technographics, and gave specific case examples of their insurance industry and financial industry. It’s not my job to evangelize social media, but to tell them about the benefits and risks, and how it impacts their business, or if it doesn’t.

As you’ve seen from my recent post, there are few successes in the insurance industry. While every company must listen, the return on participating may not be right for every company and industry.

I’ve been doing these types of presentations since 2005, so I’m pretty used to the hurdle questions, and am always pleased to meet COO and CFO folks that have a solid business mind, and need to know how social media impacts business.

While many industries like tech, media and some consumer product companies have embraced this movement, many industries. If you’re going to be presenting to your executive staff or to clients, be prepared to answer the following questions, and back them up with data, examples, and insight, not just opinion:

Is this a fad?
What’s the future of these tools?
What are the costs and resources needed to do this?
Does every employee need to participate?
What’s the legal ramifications?
What happens if we do nothing?
What are the risks if we engage?
How do we measure success?
Does this hurt or help customers?
How does this increase revenues or reduce costs?

Simply put, the primary goal of business is about making money, so if you’re proposing a shift in resources, you better be able to back it up. It’s absolutely important that someone in the org challenges you, so you’ll need to be prepared. Lastly, for what’s it’s worth, despite the tough questions, the COO mentioned to me during the break the workshop was going well, and he told me he was actually a techie too, I can’t wait to get a beer with him next time, smart guy.

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Perhaps you’ve read my informal analysis on Target and Wal-Mart’s Facebook campaign that I did last year, well Forrester has asked me to formalize a report in the spirit of a formalized community review scorecard.

I’m seeking examples of Social Network Marketing campaigns (there hundreds, if not thousands of them being deployed) and want to identify those that are successful (and why) and those that are failures (and why).

If you work for a container or ‘organic’ social network like Hi5, Facebook, MySpace, Lindin, CyWorld, Bebo. Or, if you’re a brand or interactive marketer that’s launched a campaign within a social network, or know someone that has, please submit the campaign details to me for this upcoming Forrester report.

I’m looking for URLs, where I can explore the campaign, how it was deployed, and see how the community interacted, or the lack of any real traction. If you know of any campaigns that you weren’t involved with that you thought were a success or failure, you can also let me know.

Leave a comment below, or send me an email at jowyang at forrester.com.

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I’m on a quest to meet and greet bloggers all over the world! When you finally meet someone face to face, the relationship bonds stronger than any trackback, comment, or picture can do. Nothing beats face to face meetups, where you hear their voice, listen to inflections, and get a feel from body language of someone’s real persona.

Last night was no exception, it was great to meet the several Tampa bloggers last night, nearly half of them were professional (mainly full time) bloggers that benefiting from working in a fantastic city, not slaving away in Silicon Valley! I’m starting to meet more and more professional bloggers, that either work for blog networks, or have found their own niche and have been making money from adsense, banner ad sales, or sponsored marketing.

As I visit more and more cities for business, time permitting, I kick off blogger dinners, more often than not, the bloggers in any local city rarely meet up, (despite them interacting online) and often comment; “why does it take someone from out of town, to kick start us to meet”. I’m not sure of the answer, but it’s a great feeling knowing that folks connect, communicate and bond way after the dinner –tis a community thang.

It was interesting to talk to the real estate bloggers, some were realtors and others were helping realtors with marketing, they found their efforts to be profitable, giving a leg up from other realtors in a very competitive market.

Josh, (@SIGEPJEDI)who just bought TampaBloggers.com (after I encouraged him to do a fun project)

David Riseley who runs PCMech (@davidriseley)

Robert Nelson (@robertnelson)

Robert Payne (@rpayne)

Tony Katz (@tonykatz) who is moving out to L.A.

Tara who writes Marketing Artfully (@TARAdactyl)

Sarah Perez, (@sarahintampa) who actually writes for RWW, yet has never met her teammates

Real estate blogger Cyndee Haydon (@cyndeehaydon), notice how she integrates video for customer testimonials, smart.

If I missed anyone, please let me know.

I mistakingly had John Novak @LVRealEstat on the list, he wasn’t there, but we wish he was.

Lastly, I was fortunate not to spot any “Dweeting” at the dinner (Drunk Tweeting), a truly responsible group.

Update: Video captures calamari with Dave, and it was deemed successful.

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I’m meeting more and more corporate marketers who understand the value of social media, but don’t know how to use it. I’m seeing a trend of at least 3 different adoption strategies, listed out below.

Often they want to repurpose their corporate marketing brochures, videos, and pass them on to social channels –without understand that content, often has to change. Corporate “top-down” content doesn’t do well on YouTube, brochures and press releases don’t do well on blogs, and a marcom’s product announcement on a podcast is going to have limited traction.

Corporations are adopting at least one of the three styles of Social Media Marketing:

Locked in the Castle
Keeping the good stuff close to your domain.

Example: Creating videos, audio, and blog posts, but keeping them behind registration, or for clients only.

I’m seeing a handful of corporations in the past year, require registration for videos and podcasts that limit people from accessing them. The risks include: limiting the organic spread of your hard earned content, and not benefiting by the natural word of mouth network. Of course, the flip side is that those that do register are truly hungry for the content, and self-selecting themselves further down the funnel.

Building roads to Towns
Reach adjacent towns by enticing them with content, and provide them with links (roads) back to your land.

Example: Creating brand related images, publishing in flickr, and providing a link in the image notes back to the corporate domain

Some marketers are realizing that they can put a great deal of product and company content on social media tools for free, but by providing links back to the corproate site in comments, in the post-roll of a video, or mentioning a call to action at the end of a podcast extends their reach. By providing these ‘hooks’ to content, you can hope to entice people, who will embed, share, or consume your content, and then eventually click on the links to move closer to your corporate website.

Traveling Missionaries
Missionaries spread to new communities.

Example: Creating campaigns in social networks (like Facebook) where communities already exist, but with no links back to the corporate domain, and no blatant advertising.

The truly savvy marketers are learning to find communities where they exist, becoming that community, and not worry about ‘driving traffic’ back to the corporate website as a measure of success. I’ve a few clients that have figured out how to experiment with ‘off domain’ success. There are risks too, this strategy could give up complete control to the members, and could result in a brand backlash or few people caring about a brand’s products.

When it comes to social media marketing, which style is your corporation going to adopt? each has a strength –and weakness –so it’s best you understand the elements and benefits of each.

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The question many marketers are trying to answer now, is “Who do people trust?”

I’ve been spending more and more time pouring over data, medium usage, behavioral and preference data for clients, and am learning more and more about how humans behave on the web.

So who do people trust? Three research studies indicate it’s peers, or people they know. And social clout from bloggers, or those with a lot of online friends ain’t it.

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1) Forrester Research

What’s interesting is that colleague Josh Bernoff’s weekly post on who do people trust, indicates that people trust their peers the most, and bloggers last. Josh writes:

“What does this mean for your brand? It means that a focus on “influencers” is not enough. You never know who may be reviewing your product, or where. Influencers may touch a lot of people, but so do the masses of reviewers on Yelp, or Amazon.com, or TripAdvisor. And heaven forbid you get people talking about your brand on The Consumerist.”

If people trust the reviews of friend that they know and trust 14% more than your corporate website, what is your web marketing team doing to accommodate this? Are you spending 14% more effort to listen, learn, influence peer reviews? I’ll bet your not, as most brand marketers I know are spending time building microsites, and launching brochure ware on their sites, without think about the impacts of their corporate website becoming irrelevant.

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2) Edelman Trust Barometer

In a confirming correlation, Edelmen’s research from Steve Rubel indicates the exact same findings, despite different phrasing of the questions. Steve writes: “both marketers and publishers - continue to focus on reach, they are missing the big picture. Trust is by far a more important metric, one that clearly rules when it comes to influence.”

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3) Pollara Research

Steve points to a third research report also validating this claim. Research firm Pollara found similar results:

“According to a new study from Canadian research firm Pollara, self-described social media users put far more trust in friends and family online than in popular bloggers, or strangers with 10,000 MySpace “friends.”

Of more than 1,100 adults polled in December, nearly 80% said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by “well-known bloggers.”

“This shows that popularity doesn’t always equate to credibility,” said Robert Hutton, executive vice president and general manager at Pollara. “Marketers might have to reconsider who the real influencers are out there.”

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What you should do
Forward this post back to your marketing team, encourage the team to have an active and open dialog. Should you be focusing in on influencers only in your market space? Or should you start also focusing on ratings and review sites, where customers are critiquing, reading, and making decisions based on each others data.

So what’s this mean for me? Unless you know me, you’ll probably trust your friends or family far more than my opinion.

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So how can I win your trust back? Lately, I’ve been starting to see the cracks in social media, and have started a tag on this blog called Challenges. Social media isn’t perfect, it’s new, and many people and brands are doing it wrong. It’s important to be objective and point out when it works and when it doesn’t.

Update: Am I looking in the rear view mirror? intersting audio podcast debating this post, listen in (around 20 minutes in)

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There are two conferences that I recommend you attend if you read my blog, the topics and presentations are closely aligned to what I’m interested in, and I know both of the organizers –they give good conferences with high value.

The first one is the Internet Strategy Forum Summit, July 17-18 in Portland, managed by my friend Steve Gehlen. He’s even offered a discount for readers of my blog (many web decision makers). Enter in WEBSTRAT as the discount code to get 10% off. I won’t be able to attend this year (I did last year) but Charlene Li will be one of the presenters. enjoy!

Graphing Social Patterns by Dave McClure, is a successful conference on the topic of Social Networks. I was a moderator at the last one in San Diego, and the upcoming one in Washington DC on June 9-11th will be a hit. I’m still trying to work out my schedule so I can attend.

But those are just two of my recommended conferences to attend (Web 2.0 expo, any Forrester Conferences, and SXSW are compulsory, of course) and if you’re in the bay area, there’s plenty of reocurring meetups (see large list).

Update: I attended last year’s community unconference (you control the agenda), and will do so again this year, It’s run by Bill Johnston, who I’ve interviewed for my research report on Online Communities, this is a great event I forgot to mention.

What upcoming conferences would you suggest?

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I’m starting this post series (see archives) to recognize and congratulate folks who get promoted, move, or accept new exciting positions. Please help me congratulate the following folks:

Teresa Valdez Klein moves on to T-Mobile as a product planner, she’s very entrenched in social media, so we can expect her to add to the social media charge at T-Mobile.

Janice Diner heads up Ripple, the new social media division of Sharpe Blackmore Euro RSCG. In her previous role Janice headed up the Facebook communities and application development for TD Canada Trust and PlayStation Canada.

Tony Haenn takes a new role as Executive Community Architect at the Corporate Executive Board, which offers similar services to Forrester.

Petr Olmer moves to Good Data as the Community Evangelist.

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How to Connect with others:

Submit an annoucement
If you know folks that are moving up in the social media industry, leave a comment below, or if you’re feeling shy (it’s cool to self-nominate) send me an email.

Seeking Social Media Professionals?
If you’re seeking to connect with community advocates and community managers there are few resources

See Web Strategy Jobs powered by Job o Matic

Connect with others in the community manager group in Facebook

Check out Jake McKee’s community portal for jobs

See Chris Heuer’s Social Media Jobs

SimplyHired aggregates job listings, as does Indeed

ForumOne Jobs for Social Media and Community

Jason Falls is hiring

Hiring? Leave a commentt
If you’re seeking candidates in the social media industry, many of them are within arms reach, feel free to leave a link to a job description (but not the whole job description, or I’ll delete it.

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I’m doing research for a client, to find out any examples of insurance companies using social media to connect with it’s customers. I’ve done some scanning over a 48 period of time, and asked my twitter (a social computer) followers, who gave a tremendous amount of helpful links. Since I’ve received many links from the community, I won’t hoard my findings, but share them in public. I’m thankful for those that help me, and I try to give back on this blog.

Overall, without surprise, this industry has not adopted these tools, as one would expect. Whether they should or not should start with by answering these questions:

Are their respective decision makers using social tools to find answers about products and services?

If so, which tools are they using, and how are they connecting?

Would insurance customers benefit from asking and answering questions directly to each other?

I did find a few examples, yet just small blossoms in the field, no clear wins that would make a case study of complete success or failure, among them include:

Pick Your Advisor, India
This website allows users to select a financial or insurance advisor using a friendly personable interactive selector. Each of the advisors has a picture asscoiate with them, and a psuedo blog. As I looked closer, most of the blog data was not being used, or was being used like a chat room.

Allstate Community Forum
It appears this forum (code suggests it’s powered by lithium software, see the whole list) which launched in late 07 is a great example of a company embracing it’s customers using community software. Sadly, there’s very few messages and discussions. The forum is segmented by role (singles, couples, parents) and you can start to see some Q&A occurring. In my recent report on Online Community Best Practices, I found that companies must have a kick start plan to get their communities going.

esurance fan opportunity
Esurance’s aggressive online advertising of it’s cartoon like superhero “Erin Esurance” is causing some fandom, and some are dressing up like her. Mack questions if esurance should embrace some of these fans, but I’m not so sure. Is the goal of the cartoon campaign to drive awareness, or involve in a discussion about insurance. Some have mixed reactions on interacting with fake personas, so perhaps a different strategy would be needed.

Embrace Pet Insurance, Facebook
For those of us who have pets, care can often be expensive for family members, as a result, embrace pet insurance launched this Facebook group. There are 83 members in the Facebook group, few discussions, a handful of wall posts and no applications.

Various Blogs
Perhaps the most interesting insurance related blog is Singapore’s Tan Kin Lian, a former CEO who is “I write this blog to educate the public about insurance, finance and current affairs in Singapore”. The archives go back to 2005, and there are a handful of comments on many of the recent posts. He posts frequently, and is using it in a Q&A type format. On the other hand, there are new blogs appearing, such as this one from Golden State Life Insurance (only 3 posts)

Enterprise Collaboration
In a recent Forrester report, Oliver Young’s case study highlights how Northwestern Mutual benefits from internal collaboration using the Awareness platform. I’m sure there are many other examples, but this industry is often not forth coming. Shel Holtz has additional commentary.

Rehashing of Commercials on YouTube
Liberty Mutual launched a TV commercial series called “Pay it forward” that was published on YouTube (it doesn’t appear to be sanctioned from the brand), with 150,000 views. They could easily take this campaign to the people by creating a campaign letting the community share their stories view text and video. Interestingly, a few folks decided to take the time to parody the video.

Active Forums
Perhaps the most vibrant examples are these various forums. Insurance is likely not a daily activity, and members may prefer to ask questions anonymously to each other. In this forum for insurance agents, called Insurance Forums (top thread has over 60,000 views and 1000 responses regarding a convention). AM/PM insurance has a thriving community, appears to be a customer community. Kiplinger an financial analysis resource has a forum for general insurance discussions.

Geico’s Caveman
This isn’t a great example of social media, but Geico’s caveman has interactive marketing elements where you can visit his “crib”, also the character appeared in real life at a recent SXSW party I attended.

Zuzzid, Norwhich Union’s Community Ratings
To me, this is the perhaps the promising program, a website where community members can speak out about, rate, and rank insurance agencies. Sadly, this community has had little traction, just a few postings, and if you read the bottom line it’s created by an insurance agency, UK’s Norwich Union (which coincidently has the highest rating) for this to work, it’ll have to be from an independent source.

Findings
There really isn’t much activity happening in the insurance industry to use social media, and where it may be successful, it could likely be behind the firewall, impervious to public viewing. Update: Jeff Jarvis is also on the hunt for industries that are somewhat impervious to social media, I’ll agree, social media isn’t great for everything, let’s use our heads, not everything is a nail..

Lastly, I’ve received half a dozen emails and tweets in total saying they are working with a client on social media, but can’t disclose the details, or will ask the client, or the project has ended. A very quiet industry, indeed.

In general, most financial and insurance industries are going to fall just behind the curve of mainstream adoption when it comes to social media tools, they rightfully will wait and vet out what works and what doesn’t.

If you see any other examples of insurance companies solving real business problems using social tools (I’m not as interested in toe-dipping), please leave a comment.

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Marketers and individuals know how important it is to track conversations in websites, especially where peers connect to each other (sometimes, where the highest trust occurs). A handful of new tools are starting to emerge that give specific tool based search, which I’ve started to list out below.

This list is specifically for tools that track discussion boards, forums, and communities, for a broader reach, see this list of companies that measures brands on the social web.

How to use these tools? Plugin your company name, product name, executives names, for your own company and your competitors, to see who is saying what about your brand.

Companies that Track Discussions in Forums and Communities:

Boardtracker
“BoardTracker.com, a Pidgin Technologies property, is an innovative forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information quickly and efficiently while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it is posted. Boardtracker brings the most targeted audience closer to the boards, by being a search engine only for boards and by supplying a categorized and highly effective searching and browsing experience to users.”

Linqia
“Linqia creates an independent search for online communities and groups with user ratings and comments. From the biggest and most famous online community to the smallest most hidden group, Linqia surfaces existing online communities and groups which can either be uploaded by our users or just commented and rated according to YOUR opinion and experience.”

Twing
Our goal is for Twing to work perfectly every time, and that you’re quickly and easily able to find exactly the information you’re after. But should you need help, we’re here for you. After all, online communities are about people helping each other, so as a community search engine, we take the same approach.

If you know of any others, please leave a comment, and I’ll add it to this list.

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In 2008, Business Adoption Of Web 2.0 Tools Is Expected To Grow Strongly

Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast
On Monday, colleague Oliver Young (I was involved with the report) published a forward looking report on the growth of Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise entitled Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013. As I mention with every report, you can purchase it directly from the site, or if not satisfied, obtain a refund, as we stand by the quality of our products.

Who should read this report?
Anyone investing in the space such as VCs, leadership at Social Media companies, or those involved in purchasing at corporations for social media tools.

Caveat: Sans services and “organic” sites
It’s important to note that calculations do not include properties such as ‘organic social networks’ like Facebook (which is valued at $15b), nor do they include services (a report I hope to do soon), so the numbers, in our opinion are just a slice of the overall technology sector. For example, in 2008 we project enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technology to account for just 0.2% of the $364bn global corporate spending on software and to barely even register as part of the $1.7 trillion we expect to see spent on technology overall is a useful piece of context. When you think about social media tools for the enterprise, most often, these commodity technologies are cheap, easy to deploy, and often free.

Web 2.0 Expo, a Physical Manifestation
I spent the last two days at the Web 2.0 expo (I was an advisor to the show), where 7000 people from this market assembled into one building. Who are these people? they are the ‘market’;, vendors, clients, analysts, press, media, and users. It was clear to me many mainstream businesses were attending, I’ll take a guess that many early adopters within the enterprise (I was that guy at Hitachi Data Systems) are dragging their boss, and colleagues who were once nay-sayers to the conference to learn. I saw many Fortune 1000 brands there trying to learn and understand how to use these tools for business.

Mainstreaming
To me, last year’s Web 2.0 expo was far different, it was a geek fest, where live streaming was prominent, and there was much more fascination over the tools –rather than the business impact. This year, many of the questions and folks I met were interested in using these tools to improve their business, they weren’t enamored with the latest widget. On the show floor, I spoke to two CEOs who read the report and commented that the numbers looked in par to their expectations.

Technology Infrastructure moves in
SUN (Who’s had the startup essentials program for a few years), HP, NetAPP, EMC were all present on the show room floor. What do they have to do with Web 2.0? In most cases, this is not their core business, but they realize this growing market will need infrastructure and technology to power these websites. I was pushing for this nearly 3 years ago at the data storage level, but I guess I was too early. Another change is the strong presence of an analyst firm, in this case it was Forrester, we were involved with four sessions, hosted a party, and launched a book. I guess this movement really is headed mainstream now.

What others are saying: in agreement and disagreement
Our friends at ZDNet may have misunderstood what we were actually sizing, at first it was assumed it was just “enterprise 2.0″ (internal) purchases, but in reality, this sizing encompasses externally facing (marketing), and is the largest piece of the pie.

The above and following image was posted on many blogs on Monday, where I encourage you to following the conversation and analysis. First, start with Read Write Web (Oilver and I are big fans of this blog), then Andy Beal takes Here’s the Reason Why Small Businesses Won’t Adopt “Enterprise 2.0″, and for a counterpoint, the respected Dennis Howlett The problem with Forrester’s $4.6 billion prediction, I always enjoy Dennis’ contrarion position, it’s needed in the industry. (update: Oliver Young left a comment on his post)

(This post was reviewed by colleague Analyst Oliver Young, who published the report)

Forecast: Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Spend By Technology, 2007 To 2013

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I had near polar experiences on my two panels yesterday, the first one I moderated called Community Building: Good, Bad, and Ugly, and the second as a panelist: Short Attention Span Theater: The Birth of Microblogging & Micromedia.

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A “Boring” panel that shifted to audience questions
Now the first panel had very enterprise technology companies present: Jive Software (Dawn Foster), Intel (Bob Duffy), PC/Mac World (Kellie Parker) and Forrester. We were very pragmatic, informational, and provide best practices information. While the majority of people enjoyed the discussion, I noticed an increase of Fortune 5000 attendees who are craving ‘how to’ information, some found the panel “dry” or “boring”. I tend to agree, the content we provided had lots of nuggets if insight, practical examples.

I was watching twitter in real-time to gauge the audience reaction (a best practice I prescribe in how to moderate a panel) and saw two tweets, in particular this one:

“I agree with @nickionita…community building panel is a snooze”

Like any speaker, when you start to see audience feedback like this your heart flutters and your mind jumps forward to images of SXSW. Quick! what do you do?

I think of the audience members as customers (they’ve paid with time and money) so I acknowledged them in twitter, and let everyone know we would quickly shift to questions, so the audience could drive the agenda. We received over a dozen questions, and I hope the audience was satisfied, lots of good hard questions from many folks on the ground that are trying to solve these problems: getting management to agree, measuring roi, dealing with detractors, etc.

After which, I think we won him over:

“Questions made the panel: Love hearing viewpoints from people with boots on the ground”

Thank you Chrisainsworth and Nickionita for giving me the feedback. The summary of the whole session can be found from this love blog from Lasandra. Update: another summary from Manage to Change. A review came in, 3/5 stars.

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Crowd Sourcing the Agenda to the Audience –Using Twitter
Now, the next panel (Greg Narain, Brian Solis, Stowe Boyd) wasn’t traditional by any sense, it was an experiment, where we crowd-sourced the agenda to the audience –they used Twitter. Greg Narain setup an application where members from the audience could message (@micromedia2) and their tweets (comments, questions, requests, answers, and sometimes jokes made at Scoble’s expense) were seen live on the screen. The focus was less on the panelists and the things we were to say, and more on the discussion between hundreds of people in the room –all from computers and mobile devices.

While certainly very, very entertaining, and very very interesting, the panel offered little insight or value. My colleague Josh Bernoff even tweeted that while it was entertaining, he was waiting for that breakthrough insight. Josh is a uber-analyst, and probably would have benefited from my first panel more than the second, although he enjoyed himself.

I asked for raise of hands at the end of the session, two thought it was ‘ok’, two thought it was a ‘bad’ session, and the majority, over 90% thought it was a good session. The people rule. Later, I talked to the gentleman who thought the session was negative, and his reason was because he was left out, and didn’t know how to get twitter started. I spent a few minutes with him, giving him the basic, and told him how to start an account at twitter, how to tweet, and how to add followers.

The session was far more ‘remarkable’ than the first (we can tell as people actually took the time to blog about it…yes that old thing) and you can read about Examples of how to use Twitter for Business Purposes. Micromedia and Microblogging session capture, and our new friend Shanti from Sun who didn’t get twittering before the panel, decided to give it a try (please welcome her if you’re on twitter). Update: Jacob highlights how the conversation in Twitter went downhill –as it spread around the globe.

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So what does this all mean?
I need to improve my panel skills, make sure we’re entertain while providing value, and also know when letting the crowd control too much results in little value. While agenda setters and panelists certainly lead the presentation, for this audience of tech-minded folks, learning how to listen in real-time, make course corrections, and listen to the audience is key for today’s modern conference.

The audience is now more of participants, literally up on stage –well at least at my panels.

Update: I had my third and final panel (moderator) at Web 2.0 Expo today on Facebook Best Practices (plus I was an advisor to the event), and received the following tweet that made my day:

“Olsen should be monitoring Twitter like Owyang was for his sessions!“

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