JoelFoner.com

Google Buzz Hands-On Workshop

Please join our global discussion group
every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Feb 16th, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

Google Buzz Hands-On Workshop

There’s been a lot of buzz about Google Buzz this week. We’ve all probably heard about various security concerns, and rather than re-hashing that, I thought we would do something a bit different. This week we’ll have a hands-on workshop focused on two goals:

1) Develop a list of best practices with what we know so far about Google Buzz in “public mode.”

Public posting is the most common mode so far, as people experiment to see how Buzz is, or is not, like the other social networking services that we already know. Some things take a little practice and tinkering, and already there are some key things to know about interacting with Buzz. Let’s find out what we know as a group!

2) Get some hands-on experience using Google Buzz in “private discussion mode.”

Private Google Buzz posting is a feature that has received relatively little coverage that I’ve seen. I think this is potentially one of the “killer app” parts of Buzz, and suspect it will be the usage mode that gets Buzz to be a go-to tool for team coordination of projects and other not-so-public discussions.

I’m going to try to have a web conferencing rig running for this week, so we can have a live shared browser view while working through what we know and what we can figure out.

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

The debates about Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) appear to be continuing unabated. Integrated Marketing Communications, if you haven’t run in to this phrase before, is a set of strategies that remove the traditional boundaries between public relations, marketing, advertising and other corporate messaging, in both the online and offline spaces, to create an environment where all efforts are coordinated in a synchronized way.

These debates repeatedly raise a few questions. Is IMC a winning strategy? Is it the future? Is it the right thing to do? Can it be implemented in an old-school organization? … and others.

Recently I’ve been attending #IMCChat,  a great weekly Twitter Group Chat hosted by Beth Harte (@BethHarte on Twitter) and Anna Barcelos (@abarcelos on Twitter), and after these sessions and a number of side discussions decided that it’s time for me to weigh in.

Many of the arguments for and against separation of advertising, marketing, product management, branding and public relations are internally focused. Questions abound as to the merits of having silos, or silos with communication, or no silos at all, with discussion focused on whether these approaches work for the organization.

Inward-Facing Analysis is Fundamentally Flawed

I believe that any inward-based analysis is fundamentally flawed, that the battle was already fought in public on the social web, and has essentially nothing to do with the “view from inside the castle.”

Why do I feel comfortable making such a bald proclamation? The answer lies in the social media era itself, which I think of as starting around the time of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which was published ten years ago and recently revised. The words of each of the 95 theses seem to be just as powerful today as they were ten years ago, and perhaps even more so.

Three Reasons IMC has Already Won Read more…

What is a Twitter Group Chat?

When you first start out with Twitter, you find that you can post status updates, and your followers will (may?) see them. Then you learn that putting an “@” sign before someone’s Twitter name creates a reply. Conversations with more than a couple of people get pretty awkward with only these tools.

Luckily, some folks figured out that by adding a “hashtag” (#), you create a unique phrase that is easy for Twitter Search to find. This is what enables Twitter Group Chats to work. For instance, searching for #hockey will find an on-going stream of Tweets about hockey.

It didn’t take long for people to realize that you could organize a group chats with hashtags. Twitter Group Chats are highly socially viral. They encourage lots of social interaction, and spread quickly, assuming the topic is interesting.

Twitter Group Chats are socially viral in a big way, and here are the six reasons they spread so quickly!

1) Starting a Twitter Group Chat is “Too Easy” Read more…

We thought we knew the world of public presentations. We developed material, practiced the craft and delivered an experience to our audiences. Our craft was to entertain, to inform, to provide an experience. The audience’s role was to sit, absorb the experience, be quiet, and wait until some lucky few have had their chance to stand and ask a question or make a comment.

Then things started to change rapidly. Technology-enabled societal shifts started moving the ground under our feet.

The Rise of the Networked Audience

Through global communication technologies, people of all types now have access to each other and access to information at any point in time or space. They’ve gotten used to the idea that they can and should be able to discuss, rate, rank, prioritize, link and create conversations in text with anyone, at any time. They comment on and rate everything—movies, web sites, blog posts, music, videos, books, vendors, manufacturers… and you… and me. Social media everywhere has made this hyper-connectedness a part of everyday life.

They expect to do these things with the premise that everybody gains. That it’s their right. That sharing information and opinions is a duty, a core ethos of society. It gives us all the ability to help mold the world by collectively indicating what we think is good, and what isn’t so good. It’s a way to help other people make choices. It’s a new way of looking at the world. It is a new sort of collaboration.

This kind of communication can be terrifying because everybody in the room and around the globe can now Read more…

“I don’t want to hear about your stupid breakfast!” is loudly proclaimed as a-priori proof that status updates, using Twitter, and in some cases blogging in general are a waste of time. Could it be that this apparent nonsense, including Tweets that explain why you woke up late, status updates that shout that a movie is stupid, and comments that some person is a dork, are actually a sign of something good?

Much of the content on the web is far from trivial. It is published in blog, status update and long form, and continues to grow in depth and breadth. I believe these apparently trivial and self-focused uses of social media are side effect of the fast and constant influx of new users of these technologies, and not a sign of a problem of any sort. Large numbers of new people continue to start along a developmental path that leads from triviality to personal learning, synthesis, creativity and personal development.

Lots of people publish status updates and blog posts to share personal “what’s happening to me this minute” thoughts. Over time, people start publishing different kinds of material, and end up in a very different place than the one in which they started.

Based on study of the public output of others, many discussions and personal experience, I believe that there are consistent phases of personal development that mark growth through levels of personal publishing facility, capability and goals. It would be interesting to see statistically significant study results in this area – but lacking that, here’s my shot in the dark. What do you think? Does this match your experience? Does it match what you see in the experience of other people?

The 7 Developmental Phases Of Personal Publishing (continued below the fold…) Read more…

I often see calculations showing the total number of people involved with social media, MMOs and virtual worlds. These calculations have been making me more uncomfortable of late, as the statistics seem only partially valid to me. I think it’s time to stop gaming the size of the universe. What does this mean, anyway? It means playing with statistics to overstate the number of people involved in social media, MMOs and virtual worlds.

Here is the standard playbook for gaming the size of the universe:

1) Make a list of companies and systems in the space of interest (Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, MySpace etc for social media, World Of Warcraft, Lord Of the Rings Online, Second Life, Blue Mars, IMVU etc for massively multiplayer games and virtual worlds)

2) Compile a list of the number of users on each system

3) Add up the numbers from each system to create a total

4) Proclaim that the total people involved is the total number of users of that category of system

The number sounds nice. Unfortunately the result is likely to be significantly overstated.

Why is this not a legitimate way to calculate the size of the social media or MMO/virtual world universe? In a word, duplication.

In my experience, people who are active in social media, MMO’s and virtual worlds tend to be involved in many systems. As far as I can tell, a significant percent of people who are active in social media, MMOs and virtual worlds will create an account on multiple (in some cases all known) new systems to check them out.

I do not have access to the information that it would take to de-duplicate the lists, and there is essentially no incentive nor ability given privacy and competitive concerns for these disparate companies to share their user lists. I think it would, however be interesting to see a fully de-duplicated count — a count de-duplicated both within each system (person who operates multiple accounts would then count as “1″) and across systems (person who has accounts on multiple systems counts as “1″).

The other little hitch is the definition of a “user.” How do you define user to count active users, and to disregard accounts that may have been created and abandoned? Do the various companies involved have any consistent definition for this statistic?

Until we somehow see that result, can we all see our way to not claiming that the universe is Twitter + Facebook + LinkedIn + … or World of Warcraft + Lord of the Rings Online + Second Life + Blue Mars + IMVU…  ?

My hunch is that it’s much closer to the size of the largest of the systems, rather than a sum of the separate ones, but that remains to be proven somehow, someday, once there is a universal common login (now I’m completely dreaming!)

Thanks for reading… all comments welcomed!

“Part 2—Working Measures Of Virtual World Engagement and ROI”

Please join us for a discussion every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Dec 29th, we will be at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

Part 2—Working Measures Of Virtual World Engagement and ROI (Return On Investment)

In our last session, we attempted to arrive at key measures to determine “The ROI” and “Virtual World Engagement” for virtual world and social media projects. I say “attempted” because we ended up with a variety of different positions and views on what constitutes the value center for engagement and ROI. Ultimately we decided that there is no single measure of value or ROI (other than dollars at the end game for business projects which could be measured in multiple ways, and measurable improvement of some sort for educational and social action projects.)

At the close of the discussion there was strong consensus that we needed another session on this topic. Actually it was closer to “we are going to continue this,” and so we will!

We decided that the path to metrics is to build a catalog of prototypical goals for various project scenarios in business, education and social action, with the premise that this will lead to some specific measures.

Please bring Read more…

I have had the privilege of working with Nelson de Witt to help him develop concepts and project strategy for his newest cross-cultural project that will result in a book called “Ana’s Miracle”.  In Nelson’s words, “Ana’s Miracle is the story of how our family was separated during the Civil War in El Salvador, by death and adoption, and our journey to reunite.”
http://www.anasmiracle.com/ is the info site for the project. See “The Story” for Nelson in a live interview about his background a bit of his history.

Sunday night at 3:30pm Pacific / 6:30pm Eastern Nelson is hosting a live video chat with his family to talk in person about their family’s history, to connect in a new way for the holidays, and chat with anyone who joins in!

Please join us live at the Facebook Event page for the event Sunday night at 6:30pm Eastern (live video stream with chat):
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=344675100526

If you’d like to follow the project as it develops, you can Become A Fan of Ana’s Miracle: http://www.facebook.com/anasmiracle or follow Nelson’s Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/dewittn. Please feel free to share and pass this on.

Disclosure: Nelson is a strategy coaching client (and now friend) who has a surprising history and a total commitment to everything he does. I’m helping him to get the word out about his project. This is work that I find fascinating from many angles, his history, his family’s history, and the use of social media across cultures to illustrate and bridge the gaps.

The Way Things Were Yesterday

In the land we’ve known, you could do static search engine optimization (SEO) of on-page elements on your web site or blog, consider strategy for offsite, tinker with it for a while, check the results, and have some confidence that the results you just saw reflected what your potential searchers would see 10 minutes later. Although people with personalization turned on may see different results, the issue of search consistency across users seems to not have been a strong focus for search engine optimization strategies to date.

This Is Today

The world of yesterday is about to vaporize, due to the confluence of three Google announcements.

Personalized Search Without Login

First, the announcement that Google will present personalized search results even if you are not logged in to a Google account. This means that if you do not stay logged in to Google, your laptop search results will likely not match your desktop at work, and will likely not match your home computer, because their search history will all be different.

Now extend this to other people on the web. Their search history will likewise be different, and their work Google login may not match their personal login, if they log in at all.

All of a sudden the simplistic “one set of search results per search query” assumption is completely gone, even for users who are not logged in to a Google account.

Real-Time Search Results

Delivery of real-time search results changes the game in obvious and subtle ways. Real-time search results provision leads us even farther down the path of creating, and needing to create, time-sensitive SEO strategies.

Real-time search results for all leads to the possibility of “Just In Time SEO” (to use a phrase from the manufacturing industry). Just In Time SEO changes content in real-time in order to reposition search results dynamically, potentially just before some event or strategic initiative where you would want highly placed results.

Another side effect of real-time search results might be a drive the creation of more real-time search engine optimization monitoring services.

Will we see disruptive corporate marketing strategies that at the surface are similar to denial of service attacks? Perhaps a competitor would create a content strategy that would “lie in wait” for the hour before a major event and the dynamically disrupt the SEO positioning of your firm just in time to intercept your positioning for the event, and then disappear from view after the fact? How many other ways could dynamic repositioning be used, for good and worse?

Visual Search

Google also announced visual search, in particular on the Android phones, with the idea that you can take a picture of something, Google will analyze it and deliver search results. The “something” might be a store front, or text from a book, or other objects around you. While it is clear that this technology is at the very start of its development cycle, the implications are immense.

Do you now have to generate an SEO strategy for pages in books, or screen captures, or for your brick and mortar stores? Do you have to watch out for signage in your stores, or perhaps parts of your web site, that if captured by a camera might lead to search results pointing to your competitor’s products and services? Will we see print advertising with custom graphics designed to link to specific search results?

The area of visual search raises the concept of “Visual Search Engine Optimization”, leading us to choose graphics and video with an eye (pun only sort of not intended) to whether these images help or hinder visual search optimization.

The potential privacy and policy issues generated by extensions of this technology are extensive, not to mention some potentially wild changes to societal expectations. For instance, what if by pointing a cell camera at a person, and not even taking their picture, you could have their latest blog posts, public profile, Tweets, comments by others about them, all show up on your mobile – without even knowing their name a-priori? This would not be possible with the first release. However it is not a long stretch to mash up the current face-tagging technology with this sort of search to enable such a feature.

This will be interesting.

Introduction

I have been thinking about some of the current approaches to measurement of social network strength, and realized that there were a few specific things that seemed to be missing in these approaches. In this post I review why the complexity of social network behavior far exceeds a single simple metric, and propose a multi-dimensional model to describe social network strength and utility towards a selected objective.

Follower Count: The Simple Metric That Isn’t

Follower counts are generally mistrusted for validity, but still used due to simplicity. Follower counts are, in some ways, a somewhat bizarre way to measure social network strength. General follower count is a “feel good number” that in the end means little in terms of viability of achieving a particular goal.

I keep a few examples in hand to debunk the concept that high follower counts automatically create generic utility. Here is one of my favorites. Sockington (http://twitter.com/sockington) is a Twitter account owned by Jason Scott’s cat (well… take a look and you’ll see what I mean). At the time of this writing, @Sockington is closing in on 1.5M (yes million) followers. If you want to send a message to 1.5M people to entice them to, for instance, buy life insurance, would the reach of Sockington’s network be substantial? Maybe in terms of the old school “impression count,” but that’s probably about all. In the process, if you were persistent about it, you’d also see a pretty high abandonment rate, and I suspect that most people who follow Sockington would ignore such a push message as advertising spam. Certainly if the account and Sockington’s network were used more than a very few times in pursuit of this objective, it would likely fragment and be disrupted as a result. Such a message is not why they follow Sockington, and any other sort of message is both out of character and not their impression of why they follow him. (I’ll resist getting in to the psychology and implications of 1.5M people following a fake cat’s Tweets for now!)

Clearly the raw count of followers isn’t what we’re after. Some have proposed measures of engagement, using reply counts and conversation rates on Twitter, or comment posting rates on blogs.

Simple Event Count-Based Aggregate Network Strength Also Misses The Target

Unfortunately, measurement of social network strength also defies a single numeric count of followers or responders or even conversational length. Various client and personal experiences have led me to develop a concept I’ll call a Follower Interest Graph. A Follower Interest Graph is a multi-dimensional graph of a social network that maps several factors that define the strength of the network for a particular utility and goal. Before talking about what a Follower Interest Graph might look like, let’s look at some assumptions and realities of social network behavior. Read more…