Global Neighbourhoods

Cluetrain, Naked Conversations & Groundswell

--3 Points in a Revolutionary Bitstream


[Charlene Li (l) with Shirley Owyang at Silicon Valley Party. Photo by Shel]

David Weinberger, Charlene LI and I were keynoters at Community 2.0 . It's a bit daunting to follow those two but I think I was pretty well-received anyway. At the break, we were asked to sign books and we were pretty much surprised by a long line that waited patiently to have us sign our works. For any author I've talked with it is always a kick to sign a book, but to do it with David and Charlene made me feel pretty proud.

Someone in the line said, "Wow, the authors of the three seminal social media books in one place at one time." It was a comment that resonated with me. At first I wanted to discount it as overly flattering, But after a few days, I've come to think:

• Cluetrain ignited the fire that caused the revolution. People did not just want to be message targets. They wanted to talk back. We who followed Cluetrain were the insurectionaries generally ignored by the keepers of corporate power.
• Naked Conversations, written in 2005, gave a compelling case for why businesses should use social media. It's followers took the revolution inside the enterprise walls, where small bands of zealots have been spreading the word often with mixed results and great frustration.
• Groundswell presents an understanding of the processes that will normalize social media, taking it to the point beyond conflict and controversy. It is the least revolutionary in tone, but just might be the book that finished the coup the Cluetrain started and Naked spread.

I never quite saw this so clearly until someone made that comment and I feel good about it. I hope sometime the three of us get to speak again, perhaps on the dais at the same time.

GNTV: Dell's Richard Binhammer

What a difference two years makes in social media.

In 2006, Dell was scorned by bloggers who accused it of shoddy support and products. I was among them.

Dell today is praised by many of the same people as one of the companies that most “gets it.” The company’s social media activities are a key component to a turnaround-in-progress.

Dell uses a whole lot of social media tools in some innovative ways. It is the first, and perhaps only public company to have an investor relations blog. It uses Twitter as a clearinghouse for closeout products. It has a site for customers who have good ideas the company can transform into products.

Dell is certainly more trusted today than it was two years ago, and has the stats to prove it. But it has not overtaken H-P as the #1 computer company. And last quarters results disappointed Wall Street.

So why does Dell do it? I asked Richard Binhammer, the Dell Communications officer most involved in social media, whether social media was increasing sales and market share.
Binhammer, known best in social media circles as RichardatDell replied flatly: “That not what we use it for. We use it to listen to customers and respond to what they want from us.”
He said a great deal more in this far-ranging interview.

5 New Social Media Turn-ons for me.

Ever since Naked Conversations, I've been following social media wherever it takes me. In the SAP Global Survey on Social Media, Culture & Business, it has taken me into conversations with people in 34 countries and in an amazing diversity of situations. Most recently, with GNTV, my focus has centered on enterprise-related social media issues.

While I remain interested in all aspects of social media, the subject has become vast and diverse. One could dedicate a fulltime effort to following it in education, training, politics, tools, religion, government, and so on. There are few institutions in the modern world that are not being transformed today by social media.

I remain interested in the impact on business and culture, with perhaps, a slightly greater focus, in the coming months on business. That's because I feel the enterprise is currently where the front line of social media is being shaped. While business is retinting the picture that Scoble and I pained in our 2005 book, in fact the enterprise that has succeeded most with social media have stayed relatively true to the spirit of Naked Conversations.

In that light, there are five  new avenues that are increasingly interesting to me. There is more going on than I currently know about and I am hoping to learn a good deal more about them. All of them will be the subjects of my writing and video interviews, or at east, I hope they will be:

• Internet-enhanced productivity. A great deal has been written about social media tools. I'm more interested these days in how those tools make people, organizations, customers or partners more productive. Twio examples are how GM and Ford Motors use Virtual Reality to prototype, design and manufacture cars at reduced cost and higher speed.

• Traditional media getting it right. After nearly a decade of denial, dismissal and anger, a smattering of Big Media companies are starting to see social media as a way out of their downward spirals. Instead of competing, I am a proponent of traditional and new media braiding together. Each sides has what the other needs and I'm looking for stories of attempts and successes in this area.

• Social Media behind the firewall. Someone recently speculated to me that last year, the were more entrpise social media projects started behind the firewall than in front of it. I don't know if that's true or even how to investigate that part. What is clear is that a great deal is going on behind the firewll. I want t know more. I have no desire to break and company secrets, but I'd like to understand how social media is being used so that other companies, struggling with similar issues, might consider embarking on a similar course.

• Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). I attended a major portion of a 15-person, four-hour roundtable on CSR last week at SAPphire08. Co-chaired by Steve Rochlin, head of Accountability, North America and James Farrar, SAP VP of Corporate Citizenship, this meeting got me juiced on the passion and collective knowledge of the participants. I also see a significant role for social media in convertin CSR from a lip-service to a global human service, which can often be profitabe for corporate participants.

• Community ROI. I keep going back to something Peter Reiser said during my GNTV interview with him. As Sun's Community CTO, Peter was instrumental in building a behind-the-firewall community of 9000 engineers. He talked about communities working because  of the value given and the value perceived byparticipants. Then he said the ROI for Sun is "real-time knowledge management." This is not mnetary, but it is measurable. Im not far along on my thinking here, but I want to lear more about what companies get from communities that can be measured.

Got a story for me in any of these areas? Please let me know. Just have a useful or interesting factoid? Please send it my way. Tweet me or send me an old-fashioned email.Got a story for me in any of these areas? Please let me know. Just have a useful or interesting factoid? Please send it my way. Tweet me or send me an old-fashioned email.

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GNTV: Measurement Part 3: Radian6 Counts it All

Perhaps this interview with Marcel LeBrun,co-founder of Radian6 should have been our first in this series, because most measurement processes start with monitoring, and a growing number of companies find Radian6 the best available software for finding every time you or your company is mentioned in social media.

The Montreal-based start up used a go-to-market strategy of approaching large PR agencies whose client demands for finding everything being said about them in the social media has been accelerating at an exponential rate.

Radian6 does precisely this and apparently it does it quite well. It also supplies lots of graphics to soothe the analytically starved PR agency clients. Here's a brief video we shot a little later that shows you how it works: But, monitoring is not interpretation. Radian6 gives you what you need to measure. It shows you relevant trends and that is essential to meeting analytical needs.

But Radian 6 does not interpret this data. That is the job of several companies such BuzzLogic who we interviewed in our previous measurement segment. Nor can it tell you the ROI of your own social media campaign. We showed how SeaWorld accomplished that in our initial segment. In our fourth and final segment, we'll show you how one consultant is approaching what is often the most overlooked of all part of social media measurement: the human element.

GNTV: How BuzzLogic Calculates Influence

In our first segment of what will be at least a four-part GNTV series, Sea World San Antonio explained how they measured the ROI of a social media campaign designed to get roller coaster enthusiasts to try a new ride over a two week end period. What I liked was that this was a simple, straightforward measurement designed to see a monetary return on a hard dollar investment.

But, much of social media's goals is less tangible. A great many programs are designed to get closer to people who influence their markets. But measuring influence is more complex and less tangible than measuring dollars. No one has yet figured out how exactly to do that.

A company that seems closer than most is BuzzLogic, a three-year-old, San Francisco-based company. In this segment, co-founder Todd Parsons explains how his company's software can measure influence by topic at any point in time.

       

                             

                               

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