Nonlinear Thinking

David Armano on the Micro-Sociology of Networks

Just more good content from one of the very best at articulating the emerging social business design environment.  David Armano seems to have a real knack for sifting and synthesizing the many strands of content and context with regard to the broadening social media/network/business universe.  And, as always, he is visually very entertaining.

The Micro-Sociology of Networks

Online Reputation Management

The rapid and pervasive advent of social media and it's aggregated impact on marketing has generated an entire sub-strata of emerging marketing strategies, programs and campaigns.  Concurrently, there is also an emerging need for disciplined management of the enterprise's brand and reputation in an environment where user-generated commentary can have unintended and negative impacts.

This short overview on Reputation Management from VizEdu sets a pretty nice baseline for how to deal with such an eventuality.

Unconventional Marketing

David Armano is the VP Experience Design for Critical Mass.  His writing has been tremendously influential on the topic of social media’s impact on marketing.  

In a short article published this week in Advertising Age, he discussed the impact his blog has had on marketing himself and, more specifically, how blogging and other social media would suffer as marketing initiatives were they to be subject to a conventional marketing process.

I've been thinking about this for a while because after having some exposure to large organizations, it occurred to me that there is a desire to do more "unconventional marketing" but the machine that's in place is actually "conventional" -- all the things that have been done in the past. For example, it's common and understandable for the "What's the ROI?" question to be raised during an unconventional marketing initiative, but that question could derail the entire effort before it has a chance to ever get off the ground. Sometimes the ROI is simply insights and lessons that are gleaned from actually doing the initiative. Other times, the direction of the initiative changes midway through in unexpected ways that could not have been predicted. Many times for the better -- let's not forget that Twitter was never meant to be what it ended up being today. 

This terrific visual David created outlines the contrast between the conventional and the unconventional.

You can read (and see) more by David here and here.

More On Social Media and the New Marketing

We do try to present both sides of the argument on topics discussed on this blog, but my bias towards the game changing impact of social media on marketing tends to be a tad transparent.  Came across this post on B-to-B Magazine that is just one more nice articulation of where I think this is going and the impact it is having on traditional marketing.

A few years ago, people disseminated information to their contacts through a one-way process of dialing the phone and sending e-mail. Today, they edit a profile, upload a photo or post an invitation to their social network, and everyone they know is immediately in the loop. Then they use the network to touch base frequently with contacts via information captured in that member's profile

Smart marketers are using this power to transform their profession. They're tapping in to their contact lists to enable discussions between people who might otherwise never have met. They're introducing media contacts and business partners to each other and, in the process, demonstrating that they're connected, relevant and valuable. And they're doing it at very little cost.

Social networks can raise marketers' visibility and prestige. Marketing has always been about managing human relationships, and today's online tools make that task far more efficient than it has ever been. In the old days, marketers delivered messages. Today, they can enable discussions. Which role do you think has more value?

For Enterprises Today, Blogging May Not Be Bliss

For any enterprise today, launching and maintaining a blog as a matter of course is a poor investment of resources.  If conversational marketing is to become the coin of the realm for business development success, enterprises necessarily must become adept at starting conversations and listening to conversations in their target markets.  Blogging is one tool for effecting conversations but it cannot be disconnected from the raison d'être of the organization.  How to achieve value from investments in blogging, as well as other social media, is a question that remains in search of an answer for may companies.

Forrester Research recently released a study entitled “How to Derive Value from B2B Blogging,” containing many containing many valuable insights into the state of B2B blogging and its adoption today.

Some key findings from the report include:

• While adoption of corporate blogging has been growing over the past few years, the number of new blogs established in 2007 declined versus 2006
• Corporate bloggers can’t seem to keep the conversation going.  The challenge for many B2B marketers seems to be that writing for a blog is often more conversational, while many B2B marketers have been trained to write with a strictly business or technical focus
• Because B2B marketers aren’t trained to write for blogs, many blogs read like press releases and that is no way to start a conversation.
• Many blog users experiences are poor.

B2B marketers are struggling to integrate online and traditional marketing tactics in a marketing mix that results in more robust pipelines and improved brand recognition. To realize any sustainable success in this new environment , marketers must abandon time-worn broadcasting strategies and adopt community-focused marketing. Community marketing replaces traditional offer-response strategies with communications that foster dialogue; embrace community issues and values; and position brands, vendor experts, and products as valuable community resources.

Social Media and the Revolution in Marketing

Every single company I have spoken to in the past six months has simply not understood social media and the implications for their business.  More distressing is the failure of the marketing organizations I have spoken with to realize how fundamentally social media is changing the rules of their game.

Francois Gossieaux has thought about the problem as well and posts on his blog, emergence marketing, that social media is more than just another channel. 

Unlike email, which was a new channel of communication with customers, social media is not a new channel. Social media is what transformed the rules of marketing. By providing a platform of participation to your employees, customers and prospects, social media has changed the fundamental pillars of the marketing game. Not only have the rules of game changed, so have the players, the scope, the tactics and the added values - to use the game theory elements of the game.

So the end goal of marketing has not changed - it still is to create a customer. It is everything in between to get to that goal that has changed! And you will not get there by monitoring the new social media channel. The only way you will get there is if you understand the new rules, the new players and all the other elements of the marketing game.

The understanding and, more importantly, the application of social media in the "new" marketing mix possesses all the characteristics of a game change.  If you are a marketing professional, you need to make yourself one with this new media and here is a primer, courtesy of smashLAB, to get you started

The Strength of Weak Ties

In my efforts to explore in greater detail the value of the social network phenomena to the enterprise, I came across this post from Andrew McAfee, of the Harvard Business School, in which he had already analyzed and discussed the topic at length.

As I’ve written before, social networks let users build a network of friends, keep abreast of what that network is up to, and even exploit it by doing things like posting a question that all friends will see. All of these activities, especially the latter two, seem like they’d be highly valuable within a company, especially a large and/or geographically distributed one where you can’t access all colleagues just by bumping into them in the hallway.

In a key part of his thesis, McAfee cites work by Mark Granovetter, a sociologist now at Stanford who, in 1973 wrote "The Strength of Weak Ties", a seminal article that’s been cited an incredible 5111 times according to Google Scholar.

Companies that rely heavily on innovation have always spent a great deal of time, money, and effort on ways to help knowledge workers interact better with their close colleagues. They assemble cross-functional teams and try to make sure that these groups have enough of the right kinds of diversity (whatever that is). They hold brainstorming sessions and off-sites where coworkers can interact with the same set of colleagues, but differently.

Granovetter’s great insight in "The Strength of Weak Ties" and later work was that these activities help strengthen already strong ties, but that weak ties might actually be the more important ones for innovation and knowledge sharing. Strong ties and weak ties are exactly what they sound like. Strong ties between people arise from long-term, frequent, and sustained interactions; weak ties from infrequent and more casual ones. The ‘problem’ with strong ties is that if persons A and B have a strong tie, they’re also likely to be strongly tied to all members of each other’s networks. In other words, there’s likely to be a lot of overlap in their friendship circles.

This might be a good thing in many ways, but it’s bad news if A needs a piece of knowledge that she can’t find inside her own friendship circle. Because of the overlap, B’s circle is likely to be redundant with A’s, and so unhelpful to her. In other words, her tie to B does her little good in her search for knowledge. If A and C have a weak tie, however, many of C’s friends are likely to be strangers to A, and so are good resources as she looks to inform herself.

A tidy summary of Granovetter’s conclusion is that strong ties are unlikely to be bridges between networks, while weak ties are good bridges. Bridges help solve problems, gather information, and import unfamiliar ideas. They help get work done quicker and better. The ideal network for a knowledge worker probably consists of a core of strong ties and a large periphery of weak ones. Because weak ties by definition don’t require a lot of effort to maintain, there’s no reason not to form a lot of them (as long as they don’t come at the expense of strong ties).

The implication for social network applications is obvious: Facebook and its peers should be highly valuable for businesses because they’re tools for increasing the density of weak ties within a company, as well as outside it. 

Top U.S. Social Networking Sites

According to Nielsen Online, the top US social networking site is MySpace.com, whose audience was up 3% in April compared to a year earlier.  However, second-place Facebook's audience was up 56% from a year earlier.

The big story continues to be LinkedIn, which continued its stellar growth, increasing its unique audience by 361% from a year earlier, reaching nearly 8.7 million in April, compared with less than 1.9 million a year earlier.  The performance helped the professional networking site retain its no. 4 position, having unseated Windows Live Spaces in March to move up from 5th.

Social Networking in the Enterprise

According to a new study from IDC, enterprise social networking is growing much faster than expected.  With most large organizations still struggling with how to manage social networking within the construct of the traditional enterprise, it is heartening to see such rapid growth in 2007 (191%).

Additional IDC observations from the study include:

• The surfacing of new competitors in the form of established information access and content management vendors that build social features into their solutions.
• As an emergent market, the growth rate is high and spread unevenly between a variety of small vendors and a few larger vendors who represent a relatively large percentage of the market today. While 2007 saw some consolidation, IDC expects that 2008 will see even more.
• There is considerable functional adoption as companies deployed social networking solutions to address a wide variety of specific business challenges spanning HR, marketing/sales, engineering, channel management, and customer service functions.
• The emergence of social intelligence solutions that combine elements of web analytics, brand monitoring, and information access in order to provide management dashboards of social networks both internal and external to corporate firewalls.
• Social networking market growth will be moderated by cultural and resource limitations. Many companies will deploy social networking applications and see few benefits because of the lack of understanding or comfort with the openness required for social networking to be successful.

The use of social networking inside the walls of the enterprise would appear to be a fait accompli.  Beyond the challenge of monitoring and regulating employee utilization of the technologies, the value that can be realized in an environment of fragmented media and marketing channels, consumer adoption of social networking applications (blogs, Wikis) and the very real opportunity to use communities to engage and retain customers, is just too robust to ignore.

So, Fortune 1000 enterprises, ignore at your peril.