Mediameme

Just got back from a great summer road trip with my family. It was quick, memorable and fun. As we drove home, the parallels between planning an outstanding road trip and creating a successful social media program are very striking. Here’s an easy to remember approach:

Where Are We Headed?
Select a place that everyone is excited about and make sure everyone is on board.  If the social media program is designed for inspiring facebook fans of the brand, but it’s not a unanimous decision, keep talking. One dissenter can lead to indifference or worse, impatience, when things go wrong.

Take your Time
In addition to the major destination, plan lots of pit stops leveraging influential long-tail communities to pick up new fans and meet enthusiasts. The pit stops should be based on the insights derived from a listening platform but also peppered with opportunities to connect with brandividuals — brand influencers who are well-connected via social media. It’s also helpful to take bathroom breaks once in awhile and check your online research with people in real life at the rest stop.

Make sure your plan is flexible enough to accommodate new insights without torturing your team or brand fans.  A road trip and social media are both as much about the experience as getting to the destination. If your priority is getting there quickly, be prepared to spend lots of money.

Do Your Homework

Just as  your car needs to be serviced and running well, so does your social media team. If  your plan rests on a popular site, already be woven into their social community so when you reach out to their sales folks, you can focus on your destination instead of spray and pray (spray your messages all over the map and pray it all works).

Be sure to keep all the members of your team — not just those on the same payroll as you — on the same page via collaboration tools. Check in with the team regularly — at least daily.  Just like you would secure your home before the trip, have a scenario planning meeting or two with folks who are responsible for the product or service at the heart of your program. If you’re uncertain about what may happen when the program launches or some of the places you may find your content being posted, familiarize yourself with the horror stories, including how the brand or company recovered.

Pack Smart
Pack with your brain, and your heart. Most brand managers and marketers are tempted to throw everything ‘out there’, but that only creates more noise and confusion. Less is more.  Don’t force your brand fans to sit between a cooler and a tent — let them pack the proverbial car through content they love to create. Remember — you’re the driver and navigator.

Bring Music, Video, Games and More
Don’t forget the entertainment!  Stop ‘selling’ and start entertaining with games, video, and music. Let the community create a ‘road trip’ soundtrack or movie for your brand.

Road trips, like social media programs, are a lot of fun when they’re rockin’, but they are also a lot of detail-oriented, roll-up-your-sleeves, “thinking and doing” kinds of hard work.With big payoffs for people and the companies they work for.  Instead of telling a travel agent (agency) to ‘book the flight and a car’, travelers do the heavy lifting themselves. The road trippers have to participate in social media communities to understand how they work and know what kinds of sites and tools are better for which kinds of tasks. There’s much more upfront planning time and people needed.

The payoff?

1. Social media programs cost a lot less hard cash in total (than paid media programs, for example, when a new product is launched),

2. The company gains access to and education from a variety of people with different skills and life experiences

3. Cross-functional employees get to know each other and customers a lot better.

4. Deeper loyalty from brandvocates

And just like a real road trip: those involved in the social media program share the memories and experience of the adventure together. Forever.

Flickr Credits: chartno3; Usonian; mahalie; Torri 479; eyetwist

Maslow is dead. Long live Gramsci. Oh, he’s dead too. In the literal sense. But he’s going to become a lot more well-known thanks to a new President Obama and savvy marketers searching for social media models.

Who? Antonio Gramsci, a Socialist – Marxist scholar who proposed that capitalism maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically through a hegemonic culture.

A What? Hegemony means that a diverse culture can be ruled or dominated by one group or class, that everyday practices and shared beliefs provide the foundation for complex systems of domination.

In a hegemonic culture, according to Gramsci, the values of the bourgeoisie become the defacto values of the society. For example, in last century the rise of traditional media in America has been dominated by college-educated liberal arts majors whose perspective of life is very different than, say the working class (in Gramsci’s Marxist terms). Yet, his theory goes that the working-class will define their own values, ignoring the bourgeoisie thus evolving American society into a consensus culture where the murky middle reigns.

Nowhere is the murky middle more evident than during elections. Obama won the clear majority of electoral votes (364) yet he only managed slightly more than half the popular vote (53%). Or, his brand did not convince 46% of Americans. We arrived at a consensus, driven by the aforementioned traditional media rather than voting for someone who we individually felt represented us.

Maslow’s sharp focus on individual needs worked for the ‘me’ generation of 20th century Americans who, for the most part, had grown up in a world where their basic needs (food, water, shelter) had been met but their ‘self-esteem’ needs of belonging, recognition and appreciation could be manipulated by marketers and exploited by HR departments.

Gramsci’s philosophy works better than Maslow for understanding the intrinsic motivations for the Millenial Generation, formerly known as Gen Y. Community-minded, they love to collaborate and are using social media to blur the boundaries between work and play.  With 80 million Millenials out there, most with Twitter accounts, Facebook, Flickr, iphones and IM, they are (re)creating our culture, political legacy and values.

I posted a couple of months ago about friendfeed — the killer app that lets you be a voyeur on steroids. Now there is a site called Grouply that lets you aggregate all your Yahoo Groups AND Google Groups communications in one message or in one place.

It also has a calendar feature so you can see all the dates being posted by the community — helpful for networking groups. AND like all good social media, it offers connectivity to people who share similar interests.

Sounds great, right? I was hooked right up to the point I saw the big red box asking about the rumors I might have heard…and then when they asked for the Yahoo ID and Password.

<double-take> Whaaaat?

One click search told me who was behind the site and if the TechCrunch and TrustE badges were for real. They are; however, I’m not the first to question their credentials.

The Grouply business model seems to rely on trust — go on, give them your password that may also be the key to the credit card information you keep on your Yahoo ID to access their stores, any finance information if you use Yahoo to watch/trade stocks or funds, your personal contacts, possibly your flickr images and community…the list goes on and on. I’m posting this to also highlight the dark side of social media that often gets buried.

Benefit: all your groups nicely organized in one place.

Risk: spambait and compromised identity.

I’m thinking the risks outweigh the benefits on this one.

Influencers.

Chris Anderson’s Long Tail is a foundational theory for digital marketing. Perhaps you’ve heard the term and vaguely understand what The Long Tail means, but why is it important and how does it change marketing and business?

See where the dinosaur’s head is located?  Those are the generic places online that capture a wide cross-section of audience: Facebook, Google, YouTube, eBay, etc.  The tail refers to the more niche sites, for instance within social networking it may be bookworms who want recommendations by friends or cyberfriends they trust at Goodreads, so if you are in the publishing business, joining the conversation both at the head (e.g. Facebook — create a bookswap group) as well as a niche site like Goodreads means you are working both the folks who might have a more casual interest in your brand as well as the influencers who can catapult masses of people into your brand with a few lines in a post or comment.

Where do you find the long tail communities like Goodread? Mashable posted this great list of 350 social networks by interest, which is a good starting point. From there you may find people who blog on more specialized subjects. You’ll also find links to forums and other information in users’ profiles once you join the networks that are closely aligned to your brand.

Happy Hunting!

<image of the Long Tail for this post comes from Left Click, a NZ-based SEO and usability firm>

Having just seen Expelled: The Movie, the theory of biological evolution has been on my mind this week. Particularly as it relates to memes. Because I get asked the question constantly: what is mediameme? What does it mean?

The Theory of Biological Evolution states

• the basic unit of biological information is the gene
• the gene could store, duplicate and transmit data
• as well as mutate
• mutations can produce new or altered traits, leading to their spread across populations

The Theory of Cultural Evolution (aka Memetics) states

• the world is full of loose ideas
• ideas that propagate from one mind to the next in a Jungian way
• tunes, beliefs, trends, technology, art, etc.
• the basic unit of cultural information is known as a meme (rhymes with gene)
• groups of memes form together into memoplexes that form the basis of systems, beliefs, communities, societies
• conversation, syndication, feedback and groups facilitate the propagation of memes
• some say the internet is a giant meme-machine

Survival of the Fittest

some memes only have 15-minutes of fame

other memes, what I would term mediamemes reweave the fabric of our collective culture and potentially, the future of our race.