Social media creates a mountainous pile of data on a daily basis.  How do you handle this data of followers, subscribers, friends, views and more?  While there are a ton of great tools including Radian6, Techrigy and Crimson Hexigon – I wanted to talk more about overall goals.

So let’s break down the path from a single piece of data as it makes its way to what will hopefully become wisdom within your gray matter.

Data: The straight facts.  These are in and of themselves pretty useless.  I have 3,233 followers on Twitter.  3,000 people read my RSS feed, etc.  So what?  How can these data points really help you?  They can’t, move on.

Information: When you process data, such as putting it in the context of time-lines or relation to competitors, it becomes information.  Now I know that I have 30% more followers or my RSS subscribers have increased by 40%.  This gives perspective and when combined with knowing what new actions that I did to make this happen.  Information enables you to see what is happening around you and make sense of your actions.

Knowledge: Building on these information patterns and applying them to new products and situations takes knowledge.  Knowledge is the the building and understanding of the information over time.  For example; if campaign x increased twitter followers by Y and blog RSS readers by Z, then you have the knowledge to predict likely outcomes of campaigns for new products.

Wisdom:

“Never mistake knowledge for wisdom; one helps you make a living, the other helps you make a life.”

- Sandra Carey

Wisdom, the accumulation of knowledge over time- this is what will set you and your organization apart.   The wisdom that you have – your collection of knowledge- is unique in the entire universe, no other single being has the same collection.  Your solutions and ideas are based on a set of wisdom that is completely unique and valuable on this planet.  How are you using your wisdom, your collection of life experiences to push things to the next level for you and your organization?

I am writing this because I think that social media often gets caught up in the tools.  Wisdom and success is not about the tools.  Tools help us to process the data and information to build knowledge and can accelerate wisdom.  I intentionally used a picture of Data, the humanoid robot from Star Trek.  He knew the most on the ship, but was he the wisest?

How are you leveraging your wisdom to succeed today?

/colin

Community Engagement Model

The core concept of the model is pretty simple.  People need to build their trust and loyalty with a community before they will actively engage and care about it.  This model proceeds through phases building on trust where interactions gradually increase in their threshold of interactivity.

The five stages of the community engagement model are:

Launch: Starting well is critical.  Seeding the community with starter content that provides that social proof to incentivize participation is critically important at the beginning.

Awareness: How is your target market hearing of your community?  On a daily basis, I am working on outreach programs for clients to influential bloggers, or connecting via  Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn to individuals in target markets to let them know about community initiatives.  This can also be as simple as ensuring that it is easy to subscribe to your community – either through RSS or e-mail.  These are just a few of many techniques to get your market aware of your community.

Interaction: Once members are aware of a community, you want to ease them into participation; provide many options for how they can contribute.  For many, contributing a unique post that your peers will all be reading (and judging/critiquing) is a threatening thing.  By providing simple and guided ways for visitors to interact with the site such as ratings, polls, or even answers to simple survey questions; participation is limited and not free-form, less threatening, and more inviting.

Participation: When participants are ready to contribute fully, provide a wide range of options while rewarding their behavior appropriately with levels or points.  Ranges of participation options include ideasharing, video/photo uploads, profile building, friending and more.  Acts of participation that you want to encourage in your community should be rewarded with an appropriate recognition system so that members are encouraged to repeat the behaviour (post again) and that others see their recognition and are also encouraged.

Advocates: Advocates in a community help to promote your site and can even help you to manage the community.  Advocate behavior can be encouraged through providing badges that can be displayed on blogs, connections to Facebook pages and other ways for members to connect to external communities.  As with Participation, these are behaviors that should be rewarded through a recognition system.

Moving a community from general awareness through to advocacy is challenging and complex – I have simplified this and in posts over the next few weeks I will review each component.  I also encourage you to read Rachel Happe’s Community Maturity model to think of this in a broader perspective within the organization.

So what has helped you in engaging communities and moving from a group of individuals to true advocates?  I look forward to your comments.

Special thanks to LaSandra Brill for redesigning my model for me! It looks a million times better after she got through with it.

/colin

The principle that I think that everyone can gain value from is social proof.  At a very high level social proof is simple fact that we all look for cues from others on how to participate within a community (or any environment).  The book gives great examples with actual figures to measure how social proof actual impacts people’s behavior.  The obvious example that we can all relate to is that people will laugh longer to jokes when prompted by a canned laugh track.  Think of other places where you may see this – ever notice that bartenders always that have tip jars out – always start them with a dollar or two?  Its a social cue for everyone else’s behavior.

How does social proof apply to social media?

• For new communities: social proof demonstrates the need for the seeding of content and the participation of moderators to initiate conversations.  These new communities need this social proof from others to demonstrate that the community is a safe location where other smart members can contribute.
• Existing communities: Once a community is up and running – you have data – think of that information as the social proof or ‘laugh tracks’ that can guide your community on how and where to participate.  Highlighting most active and recent topics are great ways to create the cues for members on how to participate.  These are also great cues to broadcast on Facebook, Twitter, or other broad communities to promote your community.

Social proof was one of many concepts that I loved in Cialdini’s book – a very fast read (less than 2 days for me).  Again, not a social media book, but you will be inspired!

/colin

First, a quick definition of terms. Now this may be tricky and open to much debate because both terms ‘documentary’ and ‘web 2.0′ have been somewhat open to interpretation, but here is my take:

Documentary: The sharing of an opinion through the presentation of the un-manipulated facts. (see Wikipedia for more info).

Web 2.0: The use of the internet as a platform to enable collaboration, development, and contribution.  There is lots written on this – and distilling it to a Tweet-sized statement may not do the term justice, but I do try to be pithy – you can always read more here.

So we have defined terms, what happens when we put Documentaries and Wed 2.0 together?

Documentary 2.0: A web-based presentation of a issue or opinion where the audience and presenters interact freely during the course of the presentation.

Ideally, the audience is no longer passively consuming the content, but an active participant – engaging with the producers and posing questions to the subject of the documentary as well.

To make a Documentary 2.0 possible involves a range of techniques:

• Real-time Audience Interaction: Twitter enables the documentary crew to update and interact with the audience and even allow the viewers to ask questions.  Twitter even more powerfully draws the audience into the experience when combined with other technologies such as TwitPics for instant image uploads.
• Qik or UStream live video: The audience is really with you live and can actually see what the producers see live – the phone becomes the camera.  While the quality is lower, the gain is in immediacy and transparency.
• Audio Comments: Technologies such as Utterli get the voice of the producers or their subjects available immediately.
• Photographs: A picture is always worth 1,000 words and by uploading the Documentary 2.0 images to a public images gallery such as Flickr the topic will have greater exposure and the audience will have a greater opportunity to interact and contribute.
• Blogs: Yes, the tried and true with 133 million and counting.  However as a Documentary 2.0 blog it is focused experience with the audience on a particular topic.  The blog then becomes the central repository for all of the documentary 2.0 material; all audio, video, photos, tweets, text can be showcased here.
• Other technologies & techniques: the above is not a complete list, nor do I think (or hope) that there will ever be a complete list.  I am now looking at the best ways to incorporate Facebook Fan Pages, YouTube Channels, and much more.

Interaction is key: the key component to any ‘2.0′ platform is interaction and Documentary 2.0 is no different.  The audience is central and must be included in the conversation.  In a prior post, I have discussed the Fifth Passenger concept on the Innovators’ Road Trip – indeed the audience should be thought of as an additional member of the team on all documentary 2.0 projects.  In my opinion, technologies are abused by many who just use Twitter to broadcast and not engage and have a dialog with their audience.  The same can be said for blog comments.  Social technologies provide so many great techniques for interaction and engagement, the power of using them is really incredible.

Documentary 2.0 as a concept allows a more focused effort on conveying a message in a new, exciting way, where the audience can get involved if they choose.

I am eager to hear from you – how would you define documentary 2.0?  What techniques would you use?

/colin

At a high level, the project did nothing dramatically new.  People have been using blogs, twitter, video, podcasts, Utters, Seesmic live video to share information for a while.  What was different was the focus on a single topic, by 4 individuals for a focused period of time.  This focused use of the array of social media tools at our disposal was far more powerful than I had estimated.

Our communication goal: We used every communication tool at our disposal to share our experience with those that were listening.  If you followed us, you knew where we were (we could tell you on Twitter), saw what we saw (uploaded through Twitpicts or Seesmic) and listen to us (Utterli).  After our interviews we would compose more formal posts for the trip blog as well.  We engaged with our audience and tried to draw them into our conversation – breaking the ‘4th wall’ to use a theater metaphor.

Speaking as one of the four in the Ford Escape on the #iRoadTrip – we never felt like it was just the four of us.  Our continual conversation with the wonderful people that shared our adventure online, was just that – a shared experience.  These conversations created a virtual fifth passenger; our audience, who was with us throughout our adventure.  In our Ford Escape we had Scott Monty, Chris Brogan, Chris Kieff, Aaron Strout, Bryan Person, Jim Hunt, and many, many others in this fifth passenger seat.

On behalf of Jeff, John, Jim, and myself; thank you to those that listened and joined us.  We are planning three more trips this year and we hope that you will join us as the fifth passenger on those too.

If you were one of the fifth passengers, we are eager to hear what you would like to see on the next trip.  Please let us know in the comments below.

/colin

First, Chris Brogan, one of the more popular bloggers, recent actually had to request his readers to visit his blog at http://www.chrisbrogan.com and not just read the RSS feed so he could get feedback on a re-design (BTW, drop by and let him know what you think).  Chris, a smart blogger, recognizes that most of his followers read his posts through feed readers and not through regularly visiting Chrisbrogan.com.

Second, the Obama campaign did an incredible job with the my.barackobama.com site.  However, the reach was even more powerful though participation on Facebook, Twitter, iPhone apps, text messages.  The Obama campaign was smart and deliberate about going to where their supporters were, not forcing them to come to the campaign site.  I think the result is clear here.

Finally, Paula Drum, VP of Marketing at H&R Block has taken a similar strategy where she is directly meeting the customer where they are most comfortable.  H&R Block has a active presence on Twitter, Facebook, and even Second Life (see this Podtech video for more info on how Drum is going beyond the H&R Block domain to reach customers).

I think this is a huge topic, but I would like to open it up to your comments.  How are you leveraging social media to meet customers where they are now online?  How is this impacting your web site’s strategy?

I look forward to comments!

- Cross posted on my blog at Mzinga.com

/Colin

/cb

So it is your turn. What do you think?  Is there an accurate ROI on social media marketing?  What is the leading issue?

/Colin

Image via Wikipedia

I started my career in the great city of London where I would spend my Sunday mornings at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park.  For someone with little money, it was great, free entertainment to listen to the array of speakers stand on their soapboxes, some with great skill and interesting topics, and others without either.  Equally entertaining was the audience that was comprised of ‘professional hecklers’ and the occasional infuriated tourist that would exchange barbs with the speakers and other audience members.

The analogy to today’s world of social media is an interesting one and I think one that we can learn from.  Similar to Speakers Corner, social media can provide a platform for discourse and also a format for audiences to provide feedback though ratings and comments.  Speakers’ Corner is also a perfect reflection of online community behavior with most of the audience just watching and a few participating and one or two who can’t be quiet. However, what really kept me returning to Speakers’ Corner was the back and forth between the ‘speaker’ and audience members, where good ideas were defended well and the audience would crowd around to see what would happen next.  

Similar to the Speakers on milk crates at Speaker’s Corner, bloggers have a powerful platform.  Over the past year, an array of technologies have enabled the audience to engage bloggers in more powerful ways.  Friendfeed, Twitter and others allow audiences an opportunity to shout back or agree – even if there are no comments allowed on the blog.  If used well, these can help a blogger achieve greater visibility and capture a wider audience. Bloggers to follow for best practices: Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang and Robert Scoble

 - Colin

Every good philosophy student, and even the really bad ones like me, remember Plato’s allegory of the cave. Man is chained, looking at a wall where shadows from a puppet are the only reality they know. One man (the philosopher-king) breaks his chains and discovers the true reality of puppets and the real light.

Like the cave, the distinction between reality and illusion in social media is being called into question more and more and typically not for good reasons. Whether it is network news quoting false blog reports such as the recent MSNBC incident, sexual predators, or Whole Foods CEO posing as someone else or an uproar over LonleyGirl15 being a fake, there are many incidents where individuals or organizations have used created false profiles at various social media sites.

While in no way would I ever condone or support using social media for anything illegal, what I am very excited about is creating personas like Lonleygirl15 to entertain or promote in new and clever ways. Though there was an uproar when people found out that Lonleygirl15 was not real, people were still hooked and watched to the last episode. I think that it is in our human nature to want these surprises that make us question what is real and what is not. There are many other examples in a variety of media from Hitchcock’s original War of the Worlds broadcast, to the Blair Witch Project, to Borat.

As I have posted before, social media marketing is a diverse field of several disciplines and many opportunities for marketers. Leveraging profiles is a largely untapped entertainment and marketing opportunity. To illustrate my point – imagine the Blair Witch Project redone, but online -using all the social media tools at their disposal. The filmmakers could all creating their profiles on MySpace, and in fact talk about their ‘upcoming project’ there to add an air of legitimacy they could create LinkedIn profiles and add their resumes to Monster for all to see. Obviously, they could post post videos to YouTube and do other clever things like enter other message boards to discuss issues – for example the female lead could post on iVillage about her concerns about camping with two men and then one of the others could post on MarthaStewarts’ or Fine Cooking’s message boards about simple foods to make while camping. As their adventure in the woods starts, they can post to blogs and post an occasional video and/or audio file.

As you may imagine, marketers or entertainers that head into this territory will have to do so carefully and ensure that in the end the audience does know what is real and what is a shadow on the wall.

- Colin