Social Strategy & Design by @KarlLong

I’ve been talking about Social Media for some time and believe it is going to have a huge impact on culture, society and business over the next 5 to 10 years. Anyway, I thought I’d dig up all my favorite posts about the topic and try to expose some of the chronology of what i’ve been learning. In many ways since I started this blog 6 years ago I’m documenting a long learning curve that I’ve gone through since starting my MBA program back then. Kind of interesting as Experience Curve is a term that actually relates to how organizations learn and become more efficient with new technology. Anyway, lots of these are old, written without the benefit of hindsight, but I found them very interesting to explore. If you have old articles on social media please link to them in the comments or write up your own post and send me a track back, i’ll gather other links in updates at the end of the post.

Supernova Conference Co-Creation TitBits
Jun 24, 2006 - From what I can tell this is the first time I mention social media as a descriptor, although I was still enamored with the term “co-creation” which was my particular focus in 2006. I even started a podcast called The Co-Creative Business Show (not supported, has probably been hacked, not responsible for content) and I put out 5 decent episodes but the production overhead was too much. Great experience though and talked to some great people about some seriously interesting topics.

The Audience Is Dead But The Show Must Go On
Jul 7, 2006 - I think this is one of my fav blog titles, bummer no one commented and I linked to some other bloggers

Die Web2.0 Die Die Die Fucking Die or the Social Media Manifesto
Jul 19, 2006 - I think this was a post that lost Scott Karp as a potential internet friend who write’s Publishing.20, sorry Scott, I did have a smiley face which I thought would cover a multitude of sins. Oooh, and I also take a jab at rocketboom, i’m sure they didn’t notice.

Why Social Media Kills The Competition - Yelp.com Case
Aug 1, 2006 - This is hands down one of my favorite case studies that I wrote from participating in a community, yelp is an extraordinary example of a social media business model. If they fail it will not be due to a lack of a powerful business model, it will be a lack of executing and scaling that business model.

3 Rules For Managing Viral Marketing - What Every CMO Needs To Know
Aug 11, 2006 - Another post I really like and I’ve got great feedback on, really looks at how to manage creative projects differently in a social media environment.

Beyond Viral Marketing - Engagement, Narrative, & Passion
Sep 12, 2006 - This is my first post about “big games” or “alternate reality games”, I have a great belief in these being powerful examples of motivated user generated experiences (I still can’t think of a term to sum this up, but the power of these games to inspire participation are extraordinary). Check out Area/Code, a company specializing in big games. It’s also something that Nokia has pioneered with it’s Nokia Games that it’s been doing since 1999

Book: Outside Innovation - How Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future
Sep 28, 2006 - What this book is about is what social media is good for and enables. It enables you to engage customers in your innovation process. Amazingly to me, and a wonderful example of eating your own dog food, 3 years on the blog that Patricia started to talk about this book is still going strong.

What’s The Role Of Social Media In The Next Election?
Sep 29, 2006 - Wow, this is still 2006, another one with no comments, wow, I was relentless.

Putting the Fun In Functional - Game Mechanics and Social Media
Dec 18, 2006 - This is a critical presentation to look at if you need to do any work with social networks. Basically it lays out the game mechanics that are built into social networks that drive behavior, this is the heart of what makes social networks tickle the very reptilian area of the brain and can make them very addictive.

Social Media Is Dead - So Says Steve Rubel
Dec 28, 2006 - Well this one got some comments I actually tagged some people in the post that I wanted to respond to the post, I should do that more.

What is Social Media
Feb 19, 2007 - Well this seems like an ideal post to end this post on, as this is my first blog interaction with Stowe Boyd, who I have actually recently come to know as a friend, and who continues to blog at /message about social computing and at /ground on issues of localism and sustainability.

What is Web 2.0 Feb 20th, 2007

Ning.com - Roll Your Own Social Network - The Rise Of The Social Niche-Work Mar 2, 2007

In this fascinating interview on Charlie Rose, Lawrence Lessig provides some interesting comments about “hybrid economies” where companies co-create value with their customers. As he says some companies, mostly new and small, are already adopting this hybrid economic model, but bigger companies in the future will be transformed by this.

Most companies look at what consumers create, co-create, and share with the world as some kind of free resource to be exploited in what ever way they can, but the winners in the future will be the companies that can create ecosystems in which all the participants are valued, rewarded, promoted, and empowered. Companies are going to increasingly have to treat their customers as contributers and stakeholders in their business, and the concept of where a company begins and ends will blur.

Social Media is the engine behind this massive and slow moving change and for most companies change is not something that can be avoided. Anyone who thinks that social media is about influence, popularity, or an audience is sorely mistaken and business models built on that will be shaky at best. Social media provides the tools to empower and lead a legion of people who believe in your vision, be they customers, employees, partners or competitors, the opportunity right now for all companies is to be a change agent for your industry, are you up for the challenge.

BTW this was the topic of a recent talk/presentation I gave at Inverge and the Social Media Marketing summit, it was titled “Employing Your Customers For Fun and Profit”, I hope to have video of that soon. I’ve had some companies express an interest in having me come in and do the presentation for them and I’m happy to share it, time permitting.

Anyway, don’t just take mine and Lawrence Lessig’s word for it, check out these books if you are interested in this transformation of business.

The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers by Prahalad & Ramaswamy

“web-empowered consumers will usher in “a new industrial system” characterized by “co-creating value through personalized experiences unique to the individual consumer.” Under the new regime, headstrong consumers will “seek to exercise their influence in every part of the business system,” and companies will accommodate them by, for example, allowing them to design their own individualized cosmetics and houseboats (an innovation whose benefits include “emotional bonding with… the company” and “a greater degree of self-esteem”).”

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig and it’s associated blog page here

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Also watch this video of Clay at the web 2.0 expo where he puts into describes the massive cognitive surplus that enables huge projects like Wikipedia to be created, and how much of it is available

Related: Kaplak Blog has an excellent write up of the Rose/Lessig interview as well, worth reading.

Also follow Lawrence on twitter.com/lessig Clay Shirky at twitter.com/cshirky and me if you like at twitter.com/karllong.

There are a lot of interesting things happening on twitter, and amazing connections being made. I’m connecting with CEO’s, entrepreneurs, authors, producers and adventurers, when I started following Richard Branson he only had 400 followers and he followed me right back. The opportunity, as I see it, is to connect with people who inspire me, and to try and provide some kind of value back to the people that follow me. Anyway, I’ve been thinking for a while that some of my tweets (maybe of others as well) are worth capturing on my blog, nuggets that I would like to discuss further, seeds of ideas if you like. I was thinking I’ll just pick my fav 10 or so in a week and post them as a tweet digest. I’ve avoided the auto posting of tweets as most of them, to be quite honest are probably totally irrelevant.

The genius of google, it connected people with ads when they were searching, the genius of twitter is it connects people when they are ready

(BTW that is exactly 140 charicters with no extra spaces or punctuation)

#Advertising - TVB predicts National TV Spot ad spend declining by 11.5% to 15.5% in 2009 http://cli.gs/mEbMvZ

“RT: @don_draper [out of character]: Wanted to tell you all first - I’m officially done tweeting as Don will be handing the account to AMC.”

(RT is twitter short hand for ‘retweeting’ or quoting someone else’s post or tweet)

“The story behind the Mad Men twitter experiment http://cli.gs/s2EGA4 thanks @don_draper “

“if you watch poker or bbc america on TV in the US you will have access to some of the worst advertising ever experienced by a human being”

” @stoweboyd LOL just read the headline “Karl Long Batters The Economist” http://cli.gs/YhZ4aL “

“Ha ‘Despite a lack of expertise, more than 67% report they will increase their social media advertising budget in 2009′ http://cli.gs/X4bbvT “

This is a wonderful video presentation on YouTube that focuses the anthropology, the behavior, and the culture that YouTube is enabling. This is a wonderful video from an educational standpoint and I plan to use it in the upcoming course on social media I will be teaching in the fall at the Academy of Arts University in San Francisco.

Lots of people have been talking about the right metrics for blogs and other kinds of social media for a couple of years now. It is in fact a desperate need in the blogging community because apart from the obvious ego-surfing, feedback and benchmarkeing is absolutely critical to managing and growing a blog. Also for anyone running a corporate blog, how do you show ROI and how do you show growth, progress, results? More to the point if you are managing a blog how do you provide the right metrics in place to drive the right behavior on the blog. The old adage of you can’t manage what you can’t measure holds true, as does the idea that you only get what you measure, so you’d better be measuring the right thing

Most of the metrics thus far have been based upon typical web-site metrics, unique visitors, page views, incoming links etc. which are fine measures if you are only interested in popularity. Now this is fine if your business is pleasing advertisers because of course they are still obsessed (however misguidedly) on eyeballs. But popularity is a very misleading measure if your aim is something other than popularity, and is especially meaningless when you compare part time blogs, to professional with a whole editorial staff.

Many folks have compiled lists of blogs ranking them using various publicly available information. Mack Collier’s Top 25 Marketing Blogs (recently expanded to include Social Media blogs) uses Technorati Authority to rank these blog, and the Ad Age Power 150 uses a multi-metric including Technorati, RSS subscribers, Google Page Rank and others, but IMHO still essentially measures of popularity. Seth Godin’s blog is at the number 1 spot on the Top 25 marketing blog and the Ad Age Power 150.

Now in comes Aide RSS a company that aims to provide measures of “engagement” (see Mark Ghuneim on Measuring Engagement). Now engagement has been a watchword in the marketing and advertising community for a couple of years now and I think there is a great deal of consensus that customer engagement is a more meaningful measure in the world of social media than measures of popularity. Beyond Social Media it is becoming clear that it is engagement over time that is one of the secrets behind building great brands in the web2.0/social media space, I really like the work David Armano is doing on Micro Interactions and Direct Engagement, it is those Micro Interactions which form the basis to measuring engagement.

Anyway, Aide Rss has been doing some engagement measurement using their soon to be released API and they used Mack Colliers Top 25 Marketing blogs as a baseline for that test. They published their results as an image, so I took the liberty of transferring it to a table and calculated the relative gains and losses of these blogs. I think the results are pretty interesting and there are some big moves in what for the last year has been a pretty static list. In the table I’ve got the Top 25 marketing blog standings based upon technorati rank and then on the right the Aide Rss Engagement rankings, and in the last column a +/- for where the blog has moved.

Here’s how they calculated engagement:

(BTW no idea why the table looks so bad, I guess k2 is overriding everything)

I think this is a pretty fascinating experiment and I for one am very excited for when Aide RSS release this API. The one thing that I think is interesting here is the number of blogs who I consider very authoritative (and personal favorites) like Jaffe Juice, Brand Autopsy, and Church of the Customer, that had quite significant drops on the engagement scale. Obviously this is just after a cursory glance at the results and doesn’t take into account blog design or other factors, but I wonder if the more popular a blog gets the less conversational it becomes?

Anyway, I coded all this by hand so there may be errors, especially in recording gains and losses so please let me know if there are any problems.

I’ve often wondered how to add an external mic to my N95, as i think it would make a killer podcast recording device. Anyway, looks like someone figured it out and put an instructional video on Qik.

I had a blog post brainstorm a while ago on what a “social media phone” would look like, check it out and feel free to continue adding ideas.

I think many of us intuitively know how important Creative Commons is in supporting the co-creativity, like mashups and many kinds of consumer generated content. Now we don’t have to rely on our intuition and Creative Commons have created a database of case studies of it’s use around the world.

If you want to know more about Creative Commons check out this video here:

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Your mileage may vary but some of the themes in this slideshow “happiness as your business model” resonate so deeply with me it literally brought tears to my eyes. In the deck Tara (author of HorsePigCow and founder of Citizen Agency) connects so succinctly Maslows hierarchy of needs and the concepts of autonomy and relatedness it just blew me away. Funny because i’ve been trying to connect the same things for the last five or six years with limited success, so you would imagine it would make me feel quite inept seeing how well Tara has done it here, but that’s not the case at all, i feel like it’s a huge confirmation and an opportunity for me to go back and see how I can build on it.

I wrote an article way back in 2003 where I tried to connect a concept called the “hierarchy of customer experience” to loyalty, which was heavily inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy and Hertzbergs two factor theory of motivation which included “Trust > Competence > Autonomy > Creativity/Relatedness”

Here’s another look at an earlier attempt:

I’m quite convinced that a model like this is the secret behind the real success (and real failure) of web 2.0/social media type companies. Increasingly it will be the secret behind the real success (and real failure) of all companies and organizations.

Well that is Bill Hicks ripping marketing a new one, heard about this via Johnnie Moore’s weblog where he also mention he’s starting a new collaborative blog. The the new blog is called Marketing 2.0 in which some very respectable marketing bloggers are getting together to post on how marketing is changing.

I rather like Johnnie’s inaugural post where he even questions the validity of marketing 2.0, I mean, doesn’t marketing just go away if it’s built into the DNA of products and experiences?

Reminds me very much of victor papanek’s sentement from his seminal book from the 70’s called Design for the Real World

Now, both me and Johnnie do have one other thing in common and that is we are from England, which I think gives us a somewhat different view of marketing, because to be quite honest America is a nation that has been marketing better than any other nation in history. What we often refer to with slight disdain as that American razzmatazz is in fact the American marketing machine revving up into high gear.

That being said advertising is becoming less effective, customers are becoming more aware of the impact of their consumption, are holding companies to higher standards, and are seeking more meaning out of the products and services they buy. As post war marketing theory, segments, demographics, focus groups, monolithic ad networks and the mass market are becoming increasingly irrelevant companies have to look for new ways to engage.

So Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester and author of the Web Strategist blog just said this on twitter:

And then this happened:

Damn, there goes inbox zero

When twitter is actually working i’m here