As you’ve probably heard, Scoble and the rest of the social media elite are at Davos# once again this year. Despite the fact that some mainstream media – including the folks at Fortune – have told me it’s trendy not to go in 2009.
Unfortunately, earlier today in the Swiss Alps, Scoble had to face the reality that the whole world is not on Twitter, Qik or Kyte – let alone FriendFeed.
Sounding off via his FriendFeed account, after a presentation to 30 top (non technology) executives from around the world, Scoble noted:
“I just gave a talk to about 30 top executives around the world (non tech) and almost none knew about Twitter, Qik, Kyte.”
It’s easy to understand how this could surprise Robert. When I spent the day driving him around Cambridge and Boston last fall I was taken back by how submerged he had become in FriendFeed. He was borderline obsessed and didn’t seem to mind that he was missing out on all that was transpiring beyond the walls of the tight-knit but relatively small digital community.
While the lack of mainstream adoption of these digital communication technologies may be sobering news to Robert, it points to a huge opportunity for digital media strategists and consultants. Perhaps they could even advise Mr. Putin on his digital media relations strategy?
Of course the big tech-related news out of Davos was Mr. Putin’s run-in with Michael Dell (video below). However, after hearing Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook compare Putin to a “CEO of a big oil company” I wonder if more sinister Putin-related news is about to break out of Davos.
Let’s say Putin was one of those “top 30 executives” that was in attendance for Scoble’s rant on social media (I’m sure there was a few oil execs in attendance) …
If that’s the case, then I may be following a Vladimir imposter on Twitter, which means someone is risking being locked up in the Kremlin and “Pootie-Poot” may be looking for some social media counsel.
When I first decided to write The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008, I had no idea it would attract over 10,000 downloads in 100 days. And why does it continue to be downloaded 1,000 times a month? In hindsight, the reasons are plain:
Listening to and learning from all our stakeholders is a widely and keenly felt desire
Acquiring a grasp of the reputation our company and brands have notched up must constitute a key organisational performance metric for anyone
Understanding how our interaction and dialogue with our stakeholders contributes to the achievement of our marketing and communications objectives helps us quantify how well we are meeting those objectives.
If I was looking for one word to sum up these needs and their focus then I’d borrow from our Chairman Larry Weber’s gravitation to the word INFLUENCE.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun “influence” as:
the power or ability to affect someone’s beliefs or actions
a person or thing with such ability or power
the power arising out of status, contacts, or wealth
the power to produce a physical change.
And we’re interested in four flows of influence:
our own influence with our stakeholders
our stakeholders influence with us
our stakeholders’ influence with each other
our competitors’ influence with our stakeholders.
(I define stakeholders simply as any and every party with whom we have or would like to have a relationship and interaction for our organisational success. And I define competitors here loosely as any party whose organisational objectives for influence are at odds with our own.)
So really understanding influence is pivotal to organisational performance management, and Social Web Analytics (SWA) is a critical component in understanding influence.
Organisational Performance Management
The days of assessing organisational performance solely with financial quantities are long gone. Financial reports, such as the ‘profit & loss’, look backwards. They are, in the language of performance measurement, lagging indicators that foretell little if anything of an organisation’s ability to meet objectives going forward.
This stuff is often referred to as business performance management (BPM), but I’ve opted here for the wider definition of “Organisational” over “Business” so we can include charitable and governmental organisations for example.
Modern approaches to performance measurement, such as Kaplan’s and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard, augment financial measures with leading indicators. In the case of the Balanced Scorecard, the measures can be considered in four perspectives:
Financial perspective
Customer perspective
Internal process perspective
Innovation and learning perspective.
From my experience of putting the Balanced Scorecard into operation, defining and understanding influence contributes to two of these perspectives. Obviously one of these is the customer perspective, but as you may know if you have read the SWA ebook, I also believe influence, and therefore SWA, should feed directly into product development and innovation. Now that’s a new role for public relations consultants!
The Influence Scorecard Meeting
All this exciting stuff has compelled me to host a meeting of those thought leaders from around the world who are defining the measurement of influence for organisational performance management in the 21st Century. The meeting is fuelled by the following two observations.
Firstly, debate about this issue is often narrow and isolated from the organisational performance management informing the board’s assessment and decision making processes, and this is plainly sub-optimal.
Secondly, now that SWA has been in development for a few years, we should be modelling and forging consistent structures and taxonomies of influence data, its translation into operational indices and its application to overall organisational performance management; the Influence Scorecard if you will.
Who should be there to contribute to the debate and set the approach to the Influence Scorecard?
I’d like your help in identifying the 100 people to invite. I’ve started to list organisations and individuals below, but any and all ideas welcome (if you’re up for it personally, please put your name down with appropriate link). The list includes SWA vendor companies, social web experts, and performance management experts.
And I’ll keep you posted here on the plans: venue, date, speakers, panels, workshops etc. etc.
I hope you’ll agree this is a timely and important meeting that will leave a legacy, albeit one that will prompt yearly reviews no doubt, and we should have some fun too. I’m looking forward to cracking it with you…
Michael Arrington has been a Web 2.0 lightning rod over the past year, announcing he plans to break every embargo he wants, attacking PR people and even banning the Associated Press. To his credit, he’s dealt with a lot of people willing to do almost anything to appear in TechCrunch, but from an outside perspective, it seemed like he always enjoyed the fight.
Apparently Arrington has had enough. While at a conference somone walked over to him and spit in his face, which was his sign that he (finally) needed to take a vacation. Arrington will be writing stories through this week, then plans to take a vacation to a beach without his iPhone to determine what he will do next:
I’ve decided the right thing to do is take some time off and get a better perspective on what I’m spending my life doing. I’ll be taking most of February off from writing, and decide what the best future for me is while sitting on a beach somewhere far away from my iPhone and laptop. I’ll be continuing to write this week and cover news from the World Economic Forum in Davos, then I’ll take time off starting next week.
When the TheBigMoney.com launched last year, amid some of the worst days in Wall Street history, James Ledbetter promoted how they would embrace video. One of the ways he told us they would do that was through a feature called “YouTube BrandWatch,” which assesses what corporate-made videos are succeeding viraly by influencing perception of the brand. The star brand on the viral video watch through January?
Well that would be Heineken with the below Dutch-language “beer fridge” ad. According to the TheBigMoney.com’s analysis, the ad:
“Posted to YouTube in the final days of December, (it`s been posted over 60 times) has already generated over 2 million viewings and over 1,400 comments. The one we include here has collected almost 1.5 million views and over 1,200 text comments.”
In my mind BusinessWeek is light years ahead of its business magazine counterparts (Forbes, Fortune, The Economist, Portfolio, etc) in integrating its online efforts with its print magazine. However, as Sam Whitmore reminded me recently, ”they are really only the fastest ship in a slow moving convoy.”
With all this going for them, you would think the folks within the McGraw-Hill Building in Midtown Manhattan would be optimistic. However, in my two recent trips to their offices within the last couple months, Mr. Whitmore’s aforementioned reality that BW is really just a fast moving ship in a slow moving envoy – seems to be sinking in. In fact, in-terms of generated ad revenue, the folks at BusinessWeek may see themselves as the slowest moving ship in a slow convoy.
It’s hard to have a conversation with anyone in the media right now without addressing the severe drop in ad pages, which the economic climate is expediting. However, the folks at BusinessWeek seem specially attuned to the dire industry conditions. As we know, now is not a “great” time for business, and it’s an absolutely horrible time to be a magazine ad sales person looking to pry ad dollars from financial, auto and technology conglomerates. In hearing statements like “We’d take any advertiser right now,” from folks at BW, I understood that they were battling some tough times. How tough?
Douglas McIntyre shed some light on that this morning in a post on BloggingStocks. According to his analysis, within the first three weeks of the new year (not accounting for the inauguration issue on newsstands now), BusinessWeek’s ad pages are down 31%. The decline must be tough to handle for all of BusinessWeek’s staffers and especially its top brass after they watched ad pages decline 16% in 2008. That signified the sharpest decline in the business magazine category for 08′, as Forbes fell 14%, Fortune was flat and The Economist managed to increase ad pages by 4%.
The real question appears to be is “Can BusinessWeek and McGraw-Hill make up the difference with an increase in online ad sales?” Byrne and others at BW continue to promote the user engagement they are seeing as a result of their online initiatives – but is it wooing online advertisers? With the New York Times Co. and other media companies reporting a decline in online advertising for Q4 it would be hard to bet on BusinessWeek.com being any different.
I’ve been asked at least a dozen times why The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 refers to the “Social Web” and not “Social Media”. In fact, the terms appear to have attracted similar usage according to a quick Google search count today:
“social web analytics” – Google estimates 18,600 results
“social media analytics” – Google estimates 20,100 results
Interestingly, however, the term “social media” attracts more than twice the search count estimate as “social web”:
“social web” – Google estimates 8,250,000 results
“social media” – Google estimates 19,700,000 results
So what’s going on? What is social media?
Social media is a subset of the social web. Social media is a term that describes all the media that isn’t industrial media, and by industrial media I refer to what some call “traditional” and others call “mass” media. Stuff that’s designed, procured and waved under your nose by a company aiming to meet a consumer need (and, usually, flog some space to advertisers along the way).
So social media enables consumers to be producers. Or more precisely, it’s media where the company that facilitates the media gets out of the way, allowing the public to interact with one another, pivoting around relationships, points of view and / or content (excepting of course where the company flogs some space to advertisers along the way). So what else goes alongside social media in constituting the social web?
3. Services (such as geolocation feeds, social search from Google for the desktop and Taptu for the mobile, and social aggregators such as FriendFeed, although aspects of the latter fall under the definition of social media)
4. The network of Internet connected devices (PCs, phones and netbooks, and soon just about any electronic device from which a participant on the social web can contribute or draw information).
That’s about the broadest definition of the social web, and not one you’ll see everywhere. But it’s the one that interests me, and the definition I expect the social web analytics space will embrace in the long run.
So there’s your answer.
But just as we think we’ve got a definition, others find an associated but different use for the term. Interestingly, well possibly just for geeks anyway, the term “social web” has also been adopted by those seeking to make the network social at a lower level in the stack. In other words, it represents a new protocol layer (called XDI – Extensible Resource Identifiers Data Interchange if you please) which sits on top of the World Wide Web (HTTP) layer which in turn sits on top of the Internet (TCP/IP) layer. This could be really really interesting indeed, but maybe not quite yet
Are you truly friends with every person on your Facebook friend list? If you can spare 10 friends, you can cash in those peripheral acquaintances in exchange for Burger King’s newest addition to their menu: the Angry Whopper.
What stands between you and Angry Whopper deliciousness? Just one click of your mouse. A click we like to call, the Whopper Sacrifice.
Simply download the Whopper Sacrifice application, select the “friends” you can live without, and Burger King will ask for your address and mail you a coupon for a free Angry Whopper.
If you’re shy about whom you’ve chosen to eliminate, think again. The good people of Whopper Sacrifice send a notification to your cast off letting him know you’ve traded his friendship for a burger that costs $3.69. That’s right, he has a Facebook worth of 37 cents.
How many people are willing to trade their friends for burgers? According to Jenna Wortham’s recent New York Times article, since the application’s launch in late December, 75,000 Facebook users have taken advantage of the chance to chow down for free.
There is no question as to why the fast food chain wanted to market their newest product on Facebook, but consumers and marketing industry professionals alike are wondering – why such an extreme measure?
Brian Gies, Burger King’s vice president of marketing, said to the New York Times:
“…the company had been eyeing Facebook as a marketing platform but wanted to use it in a way that was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. “Facebook is an amazing way to keep current with your friends, but it’s becoming more of a popularity contest with how many friends you have as the barometer,” said Mr. Gies. “We wanted to be part of its momentum and growth, but in an inverse way.”
The Whopper Sacrifice promotion is capped at 25,000 burgers (translation – 250,000 friendships severed). If you’re feeling hungry, and the new Whopper is the only thing that will do, its time to start making some cuts!
When Barack Obama is sworn in as President on January 20, CNN & Facebook will be turning the event social, allowing Facebook users to see a live news feed of their friend’s ’status updates’ while watching the event.
Facebook members will be able to update their status directly from CNN.com Live Player, which will be catagorized in the Facebook news feed as ‘via CNN.com Live.’ The news feed will appear on the right side of the CNN.com Live Player page, allowing viewers to see both the video and news feed simultainously, somewhat similar to Rick Sanchez’s Twitter based show.
I never thought I’d see this, but Twitter is now being used for marriage proposals. This may be the closest thing to a proposal at a baseball game, just for techies instead of diehard sports fans.
Google’s Eric Schmidt doesn’t own the “news” yet, nor is he America’s CTO, yet; but like Rupert, he would like to save the newspaper industry
Are newspapers vital to America’s future? If you answer yes, would Eric Schmidt be better suited in his current role as Google’s CEO or as America’s first CTO- to better assist the newspaper industry in integrating with the Web?
It’s an interesting question to raise, and although Adam Lashinsky didn’t ask Eric (Google’s PR folks wouldn’t let that fly), when he recently sat down with him , he did get some interesting answers from the Google CEO on why he and Google want newspapers to survive.
In fact, this specific quote he got from Schmidt, illustrates how important he views the newspaper industry in terms of maintaining democracy in the states and abroad:
Fortune: What if the newspaper industry does go down?
Eric Schmidt: To me this presents a real tragedy in the sense that journalism is a central part of democracy. And if it can’t be funded because of these business problems, then that’s a real loss in terms of voices and diversity.
