Mediameme

Steve Rubel, Brian Solis, David Armano, Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, Scott Monty, Dave Winer, Ann Handley, Ken Burbary, Leo LaPorte, Guy Kawasaki + Greg Verdino all do it.

It may be the only thing Loic LeMeur & Chris Brogan agree upon.

I rock one too.

Is Posterizing right for you?

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.

Every week, I get asked some variation of the question, “HOW do I get started building a social media strategy”. So here is my recipe that I’m happy to share.

To get started, building a social media strategy requires focused thinking sustained over a few days. Not the multi-tasking mayhem that most managers find their daily lives to be, but the kind of focused thinking done in preparation for a major test or when writing a thesis.

Instead of looking for the proverbial silver bullet, block off a few hours for the entire week. Start on a Monday, spend 3 hours alone in a closed door conference room. Immerse yourself in facts and data. Study the market. 2 hours on Tuesday. Study your competitors. 3 hours on Wednesday. Study your customers — both loyal and one-hit wonders to see what might be the difference between them. 4 hours on Thursday to see where they are online and what conversations they are having. And invest 4 hours on Friday to focus your thinking and organize your buckets of findings into hypotheses.

Here is a list of 10 checkpoints to keep the social media strategy development process focused:

1. Keep your objectives tight and reasonable. Don’t try to solve overpopulation when all you need is to neuter your dog. Just talk with likely users and help them to understand how your product or service fits into their life. And DON’T talk to me about demographics. If you are truly embedded within a community (because that’s what social media is), I can guarantee you that the group has not organized around some arbitrary labeling (w:25-54) or income or geography. It’s more likely to be lifestyle-oriented or significant moments in life.

2. Make the social media strategy EASY (because you’ve done all the thinking work, remember). Sharp and succinct like a short story. One of my favorite (CEO) clients used to challenge me with the opening line: I’ve got a new 30 days. What can you help me do to make a difference to my business? That litmus test gets you to clarity very quickly. Same thing with social media strategy. One page, tops.

3. Create the perfect storm between prioritizing what your customers want with your product / service, picking the top 10 places where your customers socialize (check the incoming pages to your web site for some guidance as to where they might be found), and setting the metrics goals for communication.

4. Clearly state your business objective. What do you want customers to DO? Are you looking for prospects or for regular users to put one more item into their cart or make one more trip to your store. And don’t say both because the more you dilute your social media strategy, the less effective it will be. Singular focus and discipline will produce spectacular results.

5. Get engaged with your customers and target audience. Birds of a feather flock together. Learn from them what they want and build a better product or service.

6. Be trustworthy. Approach communities with honesty and respect. Underpromise and overdeliver rather 6han the other way round. Answer the eternal question: why should anyone believe you?

7. Go extreme. Being distinctive is more important than ever when you are engaging within social communities. Read Purple Cow by Seth Godin. Pick out what is important to customers and make it unique.

8. Fail to plan = plan to fail. One of my favorite phrases of all time (it works better with 9 year old girls than 43 year old husbands, BTW). Be first, but more importantly, be the best. Socialmedialand is filled with ‘firsts’ who failed to plan and improve upon their initial business model. Friendster should have been Facebook. Yahoo is imploding while Google is cloud computing.

9. Don’t change your strategy. I cannot emphasize this point enough. Basically — let it ride. In any change bell-curve, people start off excited but then quickly get scared (especially if there is any kind of setback like lowered sales) and want to go back to ‘the old way’. Don’t do it. Declining sales have less to do with the fact you moved your media investment from traditional to social media and probably much more to do with a fickle audience or a new competitor.

10. Review, rinse, repeat. Socialize your product and strategy so frequently that people can lampoon you. The community will LOL with you (not at you) and as long as you can enjoy the fun, your company will benefit (as will your personal reputation).

Remember: strategy is only half the picture. Implementation is the other half which I will address in an upcoming post.

Well, hello there! We’re ANOTHER CLUELESS MEDIA COMPANY. You may already know us and even if you don’t, we think you’ll enjoy a peek at our YouTube videos. So, we sent you the enclosed DVD for your viewing pleasure. We pulled a few of our favorites, where we talk about things such as alligators, the environment and, ok, a little about ourselves. Enjoy!

Seriously? Ok, first –who the heck sends a DVD through the MAIL of their YouTube work? Were they afraid I wouldn’t have access to the WORLD WIDE web? I mean, I work at an interactive agency for goodness’ sake!

The clueless media company spent a pretty penny on the snazzy tin case and yet the cover note (copy referenced above) was pasted onto red construction paper that was hand cut on three sides and machine cut on the fourth. Frankly my Kindergartener could have done a better art job.

Second, the copy stinks. I don’t really care about you, or alligators or what you think about the environment. And I’ve yet to see a YouTube video that I ‘enjoy’. Want to know what your business can do for me. Preferably in a minute or less. Save the other stuff for your spouse, your children and your mother.

Finally, don’t mix your channels. If someone calls you, do you email them back? Well, don’t do it with your marketing either. Taking videos that you’ve posed on YouTube and now showing them as glorified screen grabs seems bizarre at best and more than a little self-serving/attention-seeking.

I’m not naming this firm because, clearly, they are struggling enough as it is. But honestly, if you are an entrepreneur and even *think* that something like this would be a good idea, please PLEASE think again. As for the clueless media company, the survival of the fittest applies to more than species.

What ARE they teaching kids these days?

I thought I’d start with the education parents pay the most cash for their offspring to attend: Ivy League schools.  Harvard Law School has an ‘ever-evolving’ course called The Web Difference with the key themes: socialization of knowledge, economics of peer production, web as medium, morality, citizenship and democracy. Any course that includes required reading from Courtney Love, Hobbes and Shakespearean Sonnets on Wikipedia is worth taking a look at their syllabus which, in this case, is a blog.

Brown offers a digital Art course with a great summary line: What would Andy Warhol’s Facebook page look like? What would John Cage have done with an iPod? The course is production-oriented, examining art and digital technology. Judging by their recent Curator project, these young people are ones to watch as future thought leaders and artists.

UC Berkeley is offering a well-designed sociology class on virtual communities being taught by Howard Rheingold (who, for the Boomers in the house is the equivalent of a 20th Century American Literature being taught by Ernest Hemingway). The course is designed for active learning. The students are required to blog, comment and post on a secured wiki in addition to reading the theories and engage in discussion.

My degree is in film & media studies, so I wanted to see how much the curriculum has evolved with web 2.0. Another Ca-school, The University of San Francisco has an honors-level seminar called Digital Literacy being facilitated by David Silver, who is half of the partnership behind The September Project, a grass-roots initiative designed to interconnect libraries around the world. Aside from Silver’s blog format that is very user-friendly, I liked that he required a Flickr Pro account as part of the course resources. It made me realize how much value is generated from a Flickr Pro account versus buying <another useless> textbook that will be out-of-date the minute it is published.

Universities are the ultimate curators of knowledge.  Fascinating to contemplate what effect this will have on the workplace as these graduates flood the market in the coming years.  More to come on this important series.

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