From the uncluttered white spaces Archives | Original Post: July 2009.

Louis Gerstner’s riveting memoir, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, tells how he turned IBM from a mainframe manufacturer heading for the knacker’s yard into a world-class services organisation. In corporate terms, it was the greatest comeback since Lazarus, but Gerstner’s title was misleading; the sad truth is that elephants don’t tango.

Evidence of this is provided daily by the attempts of large corporations to engage with social networking. You can see how the process works. Their CEOs see all this activity going on and are disturbed by it. They read reports in the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal about Facebook having 250 million users, Twitter growing exponentially or the YouTube search engine becoming the prime source of information for teenagers, and think “hey, we’re missing out on this”. So instructions go out to minions to create a corporate presence in this whirlpool of online activity.

Results to date have been unpromising, not to say embarrassing. Sometimes they can be positively damaging, in the sense that they actually alienate the audiences big corporations are hoping to engage. Thus, turning PR handouts into a sequence of Tweets (increasingly the pattern on Twitter) is not a way to enhance your credibility in a socially networked world. Au contraire

The other day a perceptive blogger, Michael Foley, put his finger on the problem: “There are a lot of big brands dedicating resources to social media lately, because it is the new ‘bright shiny thing’. I’m worried that these big brands may feel the need to shut down these social media business experiments if they don’t see results – meaning big revenue – in time for the next quarterly earnings report.

“It takes time to build relationships and develop trust, especially if you’ve been neglecting your customers for a long time – and most brands have. They’re already suspicious of you because you’re selling something. Real relationships aren’t built on the salesman’s need to move product on deadline. They are built on a mutual exchange of value over time. Don’t think of your social media presence as an experiment, but as an investment so that you can obtain social capital in the long term.”

That seems spot on to me. Patience really is a virtue in this context, but it’s the one thing large corporations don’t seem to have. In part, this is a structural problem: public companies are driven by stockmarket expectations – which effectively means short-term exigencies. But corporate impatience to extract revenue juice from the online world in the short term is also a psychological problem. It’s the product of a mindset that has failed to take on board the scale of the changes now under way.

What’s happening is that one of Joseph Schumpeter’s waves of “creative destruction” is sweeping through our economies, laying waste to lots of established businesses and industries, and enabling the rise of hitherto unprecedented ones. And it’s doing so on a timescale of maybe 25 years, which means that the broad outlines of the new economic system won’t be clearly visible for at least a decade. But everywhere one looks, we find corporate moguls wanting answers Right Now. The most spectacular example is Rupert Murdoch, who is on his third demand for an immediate answer to the online question, but virtually every large organisation in the world is driven by the same panicky impatience.

The writer Steven Johnson has suggested an insightful way of thinking about this. Imagine, he says, the effect of a hurricane on an ancient forest. There’s massive destruction, lots of venerable trees are felled, where there was dense foliage there are now clearings and lots of sunlight. And in those clearings lots of interesting things are sprouting. These are the foundations of the new forest which one day will replace what the hurricane destroyed. But, for the time being, they are immature seedlings.

In those terms, big corporations are like exploitative loggers stomping round the clearings, pulling up seedlings and disgustedly discarding them as pathetic, or at least useless for their purposes.

And so they are – at the moment. But that doesn’t mean that one day seedlings like Twitter, FaceBook, Flickr, YouTube et al and the blogosphere might not provide the makings of an impressive – and fantastically profitable – new industrial ecosystem. We just need patience – the one thing stockmarkets don’t have. So the future will belong to corporations that don’t have to march to Wall Street’s drum. Step forward Google and Microsoft – and maybe even Gerstner’s IBM.

About the Author: John Naughton

Social Media Melbourne Meetups

Springwise has curated a list of 5 social networks that take the online idea of networking to an offline meet up in the “real world”. There is a current trend towards meet ups in Australia with some innovative thought leaders bringing together people on a social environment to share ideas such as SOCIAL MELBOURNE. 5 more are listed below.

1. MEETUP EVERYWHERE — Meetup’s new service, Meetup Everywhere, is an open and free platform that helps people build communities based on a common interest. Organisers can map offline gatherings and share announcements and updates through Facebook and Twitter accounts. One recent initiative: ReadyMade magazine partnering with Etsy.com to encourage DIY crafters to host local “craft-ups”.

2. GATSBY — Gatsby is a mobile app that introduces people according to shared interests and locations, usingFoursquare. Users tell Gatsby their Foursquare account details and describe their interests. Gatsby then searches for like-minded people locally and texts them with first names and what they have in common.

3. LOOPT MIX — Loopt Mix is a free iPhone app for finding and chatting to other users nearby. Users identify shared interests by means of tags and preferences on their personal profiles. There’s also a set of search filters for ad hoc link-ups. Favoured contacts can be flagged to provide users with quick access to their core social circle.

4. STREETSPARK — Another iPhone app using location to get people in touch, StreetSpark has a specifically romantic intent. Users describe themselves and the kind of person they hope to meet. The app then informs them when a possible match is nearby. No contact information is divulged automatically; people can chat and choose whether or not to identify themselves.

5. LOVESTRUCK — Also in the match-making business, UK-based Lovestruck is aimed at single professionals. The website and mobile apps use work locations as a base to link potential lovers. Customers can display their availability through status updates, and iPhone owners can also see if other users are in their current vicinity when they’re on the move.

For more examples of MASS MINGLING, read this month’s trend briefing by trendwatching.com >>

Content Via Springwise

The new Facebook Movie  is to be directed by Fight Club director David Fincher and is based upon the book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding Of Facebook which profiles the rise of Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook empire. The movie will star Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg (from The Squid and The Whale,  Zombieland) as well as Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker.

For more Visit the social network-movie . com/

Hand up if you used email today. Yep, me too. What about the teens of today. According to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg speaking at Nielsen’s Consumer 360 conference yesterday, only 11% of teens email daily–clearly, a huge generational drop. Instead, they are increasingly turning to SMS (or Twitter) and social networks for communication.

What most drives the effectiveness of social networks is its authenticity, said Sandberg stating that many join Facebook’s social network because people use their real identities–she also claimed that users join because they entrust the network with personal information (really?).

Regardless, authenticity on the Web certainly means better word-of-mouth communication for brands. Sandberg cited one study which showed that people who receive product recommendations from their friends are 400% more likely to buy that product. On Facebook, this is encapsulated in the site’s “like” feature. The study also revealed that friend-recommended products have 68% better product recognition and 200% greater memory of brand messaging.

With Facebook’s 400 million members and 100 million daily mobile users, the network enables brands to connect with more customers than ever before–or, as Sandberg explains, “On any given day, you can reach twice as many people in the U.S. as watch American Idol–and that only makes up 30% of our global audience.”

Community Participation 3.0

Popularity. You can’t just request it. As companies amass ever-larger collections of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and YouTube audiences, they should ask themselves one question: What are we doing with them? “There is a lot of wasted effort in social media,” says Erich Joachimsthaler, managing director at Vivaldi Partners, an international brand consultancy. “We forget that these programs have to pay into something, a shared value or a social context where the product actually gets used.”

What’s valuable isn’t mere buzz but what Joachimsthaler calls “social currency.” “There’s more to ‘social’ than social media,” he says. A new study by Vivaldi Partners and Lightspeed Research, which fielded the data, examines more than 60 companies and assesses customers’ brand affiliations, advocacy, and sense of community, among other factors, for how they create true value for the companies, no matter whether it’s online or off. The results reveal some surprising insights about the limits of social media. Most notably, smug, stunt-driven apps, games, and videos generate buzz but little else. So what does work? Fast Company combed through Vivaldi’s data to find the most intriguing lessons. Here are the new rules for the game.

1. Advocates Trump Followers

Dunkin’ Donuts has 80% fewer Facebook and Twitter followers than Starbucks. Game over? Hardly. Dunkin’ Donuts fans are 35% more likely to recommend the brand, according to the Vivaldi-Lightspeed study. Whereas Starbucks spends its energy telegraphing its superiority (and by extension, its fans’ good taste) — “If it’s still not perfect, you must not be in a Starbucks” — Dunkin’ takes a more advocacy-driven approach. Its director of interactive and relationship marketing, David Tryder, has just two rules for his online campaigns: make them fun and make them cheap. Promotions are built around turning real people into online celebrities and then endorsers. For instance, a quickie contest for customers to submit pics of themselves drinking iced coffee during the winter was matched with an in-store discount. One-hundred-forty submissions ultimately generated 3.9 million total product plugs through posts and status updates. Dunkin’s online-only create-the-next-doughnut contest drew 290,674 different entries this year and has become an annual event. These initiatives help explain why people are 50% more likely to have heard good things about Dunkin’ than Starbucks. “It’s about all the interesting little things that let fans engage,” Tryder says.

2. Context Matters

What do beer drinkers talk about? Not what brewers think they will, the study concludes. Who cares if a beer is triple-hopped in an ultra-cold bottle? “Product and packaging innovations do not help create relevance in this consumer’s daily life,” Joachimsthaler says. What’s important is the bonding or “social context” during consumption. Anheuser-Busch’s ballyhooed bud.tv, an original Web-video site, tacitly encouraged being a solitary Web potato — and quietly folded last year. Similarly, those Bud Light Lime ads on the Weather Channel’s iPhone app won’t help partiers reach the beach. Bud’s attempt to brand “fan cans” in collegiate colors for tailgating was the right kind of bonding idea, though, sadly for Bud, it failed when colleges feared the cans would encourage underage drinking. Even so, who wouldn’t share the tale of that time their beer was confiscated?

3. Not Every Brand Should be Social

Mass-market brands that are positioned based on functional superiority, such as Gillette, aren’t likely to see much upside in social currency. The shaving brand inspires great loyalty: 96% of respondents in the Vivaldi-Lightspeed study tout Gillette’s good quality and reliability. So what more is there to say? That may be a good thing for the Gillettes of the world. “Conversation might lead to a discussion of downsides such as price and alternative products and brands,” says Markus Zinnbauer, a director at Vivaldi. Yet Gillette has succumbed to the siren song of social tools in a series of supposedly humorous YouTube videos featuring cartoon characters giving tips on how to “manscape” your nether regions. Glib koans such as “When there’s no underbrush, the tree looks taller” prove the point: Social isn’t for everyone.

4. Social Tools are a Means, Not an End

Axe knows how to push the pulse points of hormonal young men, from posting “censored” print ads of sexy women to virtual prank shows worthy of CollegeHumor. But “very few people would say Axe definitely helps me in the mating game,” as Joachimsthaler dryly notes. The Vivaldi-Lightspeed study concludes that Axe’s mastery of the social-media game doesn’t translate as strongly into meaningful talk or an ardent defense when compared with a brand such as Clinique, because the Axe audience knows that it’s all a goof.

By contrast, Clinique’s more instructive approach — for example, YouTube how-to tutorials on applying makeup — has earned it stronger social currency. “Educating and empowering users is part of our process,” says Emily Culp, VP of Clinique global digital. To do that, the company also chooses 20 “insiders” a year, customers who post candid, unedited product demos and critiques. The results more than speak for themselves. “Clinique has moved away from finding a core influencer,” Joachimsthaler says, “to converting anyone into a brand evangelist.”

5. Gimmicks Marginalize Trust

Last year, Wendy’s launched the “You Know When It’s Real” campaign, with commercial spots, online games, and contests highlighting how its never-frozen patties are cooked to order. Burger King created the Whopper Sacrifice, asking its fans to drop 10 friends on Facebook to get a free hamburger, the latest in a long string of Internet-sensation stunts going back to 2003′s Subservient Chicken. Today, BK’s fickle fans have moved on, but customers trust Wendy’s products much more, according to the Vivaldi-Lightspeed study. “We let the product be the hero,” says Wendy’s senior VP of communications Denny Lynch. Wendy’s social tools, created by Kaplan Thaler, all tied into the campaign. A generic frozen patty is the puck in the Web hockey game, and an online competition to encourage bacon fanatics to test the new smoked Applewood burger reached an estimated 250,000 foodies, says Kaplan Thaler’s digital managing director Myles Kleeger. “By using expert opinions, we added value in a way that doesn’t come across like shilling,” he says. Twice as many Wendy’s patrons would pay a premium for its products when compared with the King, says Vivaldi-Lightspeed. BK’s ploys, created by ad stars such as Crispin Porter + Bogusky and the Barbarian Group, may do more for those agencies’ social currency than Burger King’s. “The BK campaign might be funny,” says Joachimsthaler, “but it doesn’t motivate me to have a hamburger at BK today.”

Article via Ben Paynter at Fast Company

The 99% Conference is a gathering put on by the crew at Behance and Cool Hunting aimed at getting creative people to stop coming up with ideas, and start executing them. The idea to turn thought into action. Here are some choice quotes from the day thanks to GOOD:

“Don’t let your ideas stew for too long before moving into action.”—Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter

“Entrepreneurship exists somewhere between madness and genius.”—Fred Wilson, co-founder of Union Square Ventures

“A successful partnership is based on the willingness to share the ownership of ideas.”—Masamichi Udagawa, partner at Antenna Design

“The purpose of a strategy is not to come up with the right answers. It’s to enable you to act.”—Frans Johannson, CEO of the Medici group

“Nobody likes to change. Until not changing hurts more than doing the actual change.”—Jamie Oliver

“Young man, go make money. It will allow you to create what you want.”—Paul Rand (the “Michael Jordan of graphic design”), as remembered by John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design

“Make sure your mother can understand it”—Leslie Koch, president of Governor’s Island Preservation

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”—Fred Wilson, quoting a tweet he recently saw

“We have a strategic plan; it’s called doing things.”—Frans Johannson, quoting Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines.

“We fall in love with ideas, unfortunately we’re not monogamous”—Scott Belsky, founder of Behance and author of Making Ideas Happen.

There’s a more in-depth analysis available here, and you can always retroactively follow the conference tweets by searching Twitter for hashtag #99conf.

uncluttered white spaces through IF has curated a panel of Australia’s leaders in media, marketing, design and strategy to address the ever changing media landscape. The panel will discuss tradtional media, new media, web, social networking and the changing consumer thinking along insights into the future. The panel will address how entrepreneurs, innovators and marketers are changing their approach to business, strategy, marketing and web.

To learn more or book tickets. Click here
We will provide updates and interviews with the panel leading up to the event.

FEATURED SPEAKERS

Twitter CEO Evan Williams just announced at SXSW that his company is taking another step to integrate with the rest of the web with a new platform called @anywhere. Operators of third-party websites will be able to plug in @anywhere to integrate some basic Twitter functionality without requiring their users to navigate away from a page.

When you visit a website that supports @anywhere, you’ll be able to follow any Twitter account associated with that site without navigating away to the profile at Twitter.com. TheTwitter blog suggests that the platform will let you follow a participating journalist from his or her byline. It also suggests that you’ll be able to tweet about a YouTubevideo without interrupting it.

More @anywhere features are planned; Twitter says the above-mentioned items are are “just the beginning.” Integrating with the rest of the web is a wise move. Facebook’s Facebook Connect platform is dominating right now, and while Twitter has a similar login platform, it’s lost its head start when it comes to openness and integration.

The person or organization behind a website can drop some JavaScript in the website to integrate with @anywhere, so there won’t be any arcane Application Programming Interface (API) to learn and implement. Initial partners will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post,Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo, and — as mentioned above — YouTube. Twitter hasn’t said when those sites will begin using @anywhere.

Future announcements regarding the platform will come from the @anywhere Twitter account — you get one guess as to what the username is. Platform/API guru Ryan Sarver promised “lots more details” at the Chirp Twitter developer conference this April 14 and 15.

article via Mashable

Google, like someone arriving late to a party already drunk and boisterous but with a lot of party favors, is trying to grab some of that Web2.0 social glimmer by polishing up Gmail with Google Buzz. The app, which is integrated into Gmail, includes the best features of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and other well-known social media offerings in a way that only Google could pull off. Buzz began rolling out to Gmail inboxes just minutes after a presentation at Google’s headquarters today.

Buzz has its own user interface and leverages the data about you that’s already inside Gmail–for example, it automatically builds a friend list for you to follow by looking at those people you already e-mail and chat with. It also lets you to share pictures, videos and Weblinks–and comment, like or recommend them to friends. You’ll also be able to add Twitter updates, flickr images, and other external offerings (although Facebook was notably absent from the list of available services).

Buzz’s product manager Todd Jackson demonstrated the system, prominently noting that “the inbox is the center” of many people’s online social experience, before running through Buzz’s features. They include:

• The ability to change privacy settings on each piece information that you share.
• Connect to Picasa, Google Reader, Twitter, and flickr.
• Status updates in your Gmail inbox, as well as replies from email.
• Twitter-style @replies.
• A recommendation engine so that you can spread good posts from friends-of-friends.

The Gmail inbox now includes real-time updating feeds from your Buzz friends, extremely similar to the way live Tweet updates get added to the top of key search result windows in Google’s search. It’s also a lot like Friendfeed, crowbarred into Google’s own existing services–which is not wholly surprising since FriendFeed was started by Google employees before it was sold to Facebook in August 2009.

There are plenty of gems in the interface within the Gmail dashboard, like big thumbnail previews instead of tiny ones, different layers of sharing from public to private, and Buzz’s “recommended” list which suggests content you may like that comes from outside your normal friend pool. Fans of social networking will, however, quickly identify that most of these features are simply replicated from other services like Facebook’s email integration and Twitter–the controversial recommended Tweep list, most obviously–and even from inside Twitter’s third-party desktop clients (Tweetie for large thumbnail previews of shared images, for example.)

Will Google Buzz be able to catch up with the social media momentum that is currently led by Twitter and Facebook? Rolling out the service to more than 146 million monthly Gmail users certainly gives Google a running start.

[sent via: Greg Anderson in Seattle (Thanks Greg)]

How Foursquare Helps Consumers and Business Owners

View more presentations from 22squared.

Have you tried Foursquare yet? We jumped onto the platform a little over 3 months ago and it took us some time to really engage with the platform. There are some great elements however we thought we would leave it to slideshare to introduce it in more detail.

Forrester have just released a new version of their famous Social Technographics ladder, which looks at how people use social media.

As you can see it now includes ‘Conversationalists’:

Conversationalists reflects two changes. First, it includes not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn’t much of a conversation.

For now this just includes US data, and is not reflected in their consumer profile tool but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before this changes. And for those of you wondering why the figures don’t add up to 100%:

That’s because the actual data told me that people participate in multiple behaviors, and not everyone at a higher level on the ladder actually does everything in the lower rungs.

[source: bettersocialplatforms.com]