Under CC licensse: Horial Varlan

I’ve taken some time off from blogging this winter to have a Big Think.

It’s been 4 years since I left my job and started my consultancy. A few years prior to leaving my employer, I’d immersed myself into the world of social media, learning everything that I could, convinced it would revolutionize the marketing profession. I remember pitching the VP of Sales on the value of producing a podcast. That was December 2004. The first Canadian podcasts only began in October of that same year. Needless to say, my timing was a little early and my pitch was not accepted.

In the spring of 2007, Twitter was only one year old and Facebook was not nearly as mainstream as it is now. There were few social media practitioners and agencies and we educated clients about the need to “join the conversation”,  a much-overused expression. Back then, we taught people how to use tools and why applying old-style marketing techniques to social media was the wrong approach.

Factions broke out. There were the Zealots – those who held themselves and everyone else to a moral high ground, insisting you couldn’t participate in social media unless you were utterly transparent and that every CEO should blog for their company – often a naïve and unrealistic blanket approach. And, there were and the Capitalists, who applied standard issue make-money-on-the-internet, secrets-of-success, increase-your-followers-for-$109 approaches.

Somewhere in between, I knew that I could help people understand and use social media to transform their businesses. I knew that I could use my  20-years of marketing experience and pair it with my knowledge of social media to make a difference and make a living.

As more agencies started popping up, and the large agencies started to train their people in social media and take the plunge themselves, larger clients didn’t need to use a specialty consultant like me. They could just stay with the agency they used for PR, for web, for advertising.

As social media has become mainstream, the number of people offering “social media strategy” has exploded. My specialty is now a commodity and I am lumped in with those who happen to know how to build a Facebook page.

Take this story for example:

Recently, at SXSW while waiting with a group of strangers, one person turned to another and asked, “What do you do?” The other replied, “I’m in IT consulting. We primarily did email consulting, but as that’s all moving to the cloud, we’re repositioning to offer social media marketing and strategy instead.”

It seems everyone thinks they can do it.

While at SXSW, I got to chatting with the old timers of Twitter; people I’ve known since 2007 and whom I met at SXSW in 2008 who are also social media practitioners. I must have heard something like this 6 times: the market is too crowded and if you didn’t become a super A-lister  early on or get swallowed up by a big agency, it’s time to either get out or become very narrowly focused to survive.

The industry has evolved. As we’ve been saying for 2 years, Twitter and Facebook are as common as the telephone and email. The shift moved us from teaching the tools to developing strategy, defending ROI, and conversation monitoring for business intelligence and lead generation. This sector is constantly refining and in flux, racing to keep pace with the frenetic pace of technology development.

Now, beginning my 5th year on my own, I’ve been thinking a lot about where the industry is going and wondering about my place in it. There are new things for me on the horizon, but it’s a little too early to talk about them right now.

But, just in case: Does anyone out there have a spare crystal ball they could lend me?

This photo is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic

My research on digital legacy issues over the last 18-months has led me to explore the area of content ownership, copyright, data portability and that dry, dusty thing that everything online has: Terms of Service.

When was the last time you read the TOS of Twitter, Gmail or Facebook (whose TOS has more words than the U.S. Constitution)?

Chances are very good that you’ve never read the legalese that is buried in the bowels of the least-frequented pages of a service. These backwaters are often filled with paragraphs in ALL CAPS, a contractual practice that predates the connotation of yelling online, yet still makes me think a lawyer is vigourously wagging a finger at me.

Let me save you some moments of your life that you’ll never get back. Here’s the gist of what most TOS contain:

You’ve just signed away the exclusive rights to your content.

You may still own the copyright. You may still own the intellectual property. But, that service where you just clicked “I Agree” upon sign up can likely do what they want with your stuff, without compensation, in perpetuity.

Will they actually use it?  Will they profit from it? Will they use it in a way that is not how you wish it to be represented?

Maybe not. But, you need to be aware that they now have the legal right to.

What does it mean for business and marketing?

Let’s talk photo sharing for a moment. Say you are a professional photographer and you use Flickr because you know you can set the level of copyright from All Rights Reserved to a very open and flexible Creative Commons license, depending on your needs and intent.

Did you know that by simply sharing a link to your photo on Twitter its content now falls under their TOS, regardless of the TOS of the service your photo resides? And that they can sub-license it?

Neither did I. Until I read this post.

This means you can no longer legally sell exclusive rights to anything you link to on Twitter.

Is Twitter Evil?

If they are, then so are thousands of other online services. I don’t believe that someone at Twitter is masterminding profiting from your linked content. It’s simply a case of services needing to cover their digital behinds. In comparison to analog printed works, where the process itself made content scarce, and therefore, containable, the flow of data is raging torrent that’s out of control.

Without this type of TOS, would Twitter be open to rights infringement simply by displaying the link to your content? What if your tweet, and its associated content on Twitpic or Flickr, were featured on CNN? Without the right to sub-license it, is it conceivable that you could sue Twitter? Possibly.

The letter of the law has not caught up with the sharing frenzy that is inherent to web 2.0. My feeling is that it will take nothing short of a revolution to change the status quo so that we control exclusive rights to our data.

Call me a cynic, but, more likely exclusivity is lost. Revolutions take passion and ignorance is bliss.

[Companies must integrate customers behavior on social networks to their corporate website
to increase relevancy, word of mouth, and trust]

Jeremiah then lays out eight functions, from sharing to cross-publishing and social context, that Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter each have that can bring life back to your corporate website. The idea is that by engaging social networks you can connect with both your customers and prospects.

I completely agree that static websites offer little in the way of interaction and by integrating social networks into your site, either by pulling in or pushing out, you have more opportunities to connect to people. Social sharing and other components of the matrix that Jeremiah presented are key to connecting existing customers to prospects and influencing new business.

“While many have used community platforms to allow customers to connect to each other on branded domains, this strategy works for loyal customers and often may not reach prospects. “

This is where I see tremendous opportunity for companies with the right company culture and excellent customer service and I’ve asked Jeremiah to expand his matrix to include those community platforms.

Imagine that you have an active forum of involved brand champions, or a Ning, Google or Yahoo Group of customers who feel a sense of pride and ownership in your brand. And perhaps you use a customer service and feedback platform like Get Satisfaction to quickly resolve questions and requests. How could you leverage that positive customer relationship to reach prospects? By integrating them into your site in an open way and connecting them to social networks. In the comments of Jeremiah’s post, I said:

“Using these platforms to strengthen existing customer relations with an open window to a great company culture that supports its clientele, and the confidence to show it off, would be a persuasive way to win new prospects – no matter how they came to the corporate web site.”

According to Jeremiah, the goal of integrating social networks into corporate web sites is to “increase relevancy, word of mouth, and trust.” What better way to do that than to make it easy for your happy customers to tell their friends how great you are? Bringing together community platforms with social networks and incorporating them into your site could provide a very powerful way to spread the good word about your company and products.

But, for this to work, you’d better have excellent customer service. Because any less, and this exercise will backfire. This takes a company culture that supports the customer from the C-level right down the food chain to the people who have first line of contact, be it face-to-face, on the telephone or on the web.

Take, for example, the recent experience of Jim Long (@newmediajim), NBC network cameraman, Twitter early adopter and social media enthusiast. Jim has a substantial reach in his social networks, so when he encountered  problems with Sears customer service with the repair of his dryer, in frustration (like many) he turned to Twitter.

As is the case with many brands, Sears has a listening post on Twitter (@MySears) and a Social Engagement Manager (@scottfmurphy) who was helpful in trying to resolve the issue. However, it was the on-the-ground service component of this story that repeatedly failed to deliver on customer satisfaction.

In Jim’s post, he sums up his frustration with this culture split by saying,

“Once a customer service complaint has reached the Twitters, your customer service team has likely failed.  It’s the online equivalent of  ‘I will not leave this store and I will stand here shouting at the cash register until I speak to the manager!’”

He’s got a good point.

So, before you use social media for customer service, before you link social media to your corporate web site, and before you integrate your community platforms into an open window to your customers, take a long, hard look at the importance of customer service quality throughout your ranks. And then ask yourself, is your company culture nurturing or poisoning  your customers’ ability to sing your praises, not only on social networks, but in the world at large?

Photo: Jerome Paradis

Last week, I spoke at webcom Montreal 09 along with Shel Holtz, Sean Moffitt and a host of other great speakers. This bi-annual conference features topics aimed at decision-makers and professionals in marketing, internal and external communications and those who want to understand and master the Internet.

I delivered my session, Twitter Tools for Strategic Marketing, with the aim of helping marketers who represent brands to get more out of their Twitter experience. It highlighted which 3rd party applications they could use to add real value and market intelligence to their Twitter efforts.

Because having the right tools to do your job is essential to success, I presented applications that were a selection of what is available to help manage corporate tweets, analyze sentiment, track opinions, conduct market research, find influencers, monitor brand mentions, track trends in real-time and more.

Shel Holtz gave the keynote Tactical Transparency: The Value of Access to Information and then followed up with a second  session on how Your Employees are Your Brand. Here’s a brief excerpt (apologies for the itty bitty jiggy cam):

One of my favourite sessions of the day was Sylvain Grand’Maison’s rapid-fire presentation The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Traditional Media’s Web Experience. In it, he highlighted how francophone mainstream media in Quebec are failing to deliver a good online experience.

Another highlight of the day was discovering WebCamp. In its 4th year, it was held upstairs from web  com and got back to basics. The concept of Praized co-founder, and well-known Montreal developer, Sylvain Carle, the un-conference was a circle discussion of issues important to the community. I was only able to stay for a short time but was excited by a concept that Sylvain had – a networking event similar to speed dating, but for Marketers and business people to meet developers and programmers. (Coincidentally, I’d had this very thought several days earlier!) This led into a discussion about self-branding for techies and IdentityCamp. I’m always impressed with the level of creativity and commitment to innovation that the Montreal development community has. If you want to view some of the discussions (mostly in French), they are here on Laurent Lasalle’s Qik. <link to Laurent’s Qik>

My thanks to Claude Malaison for inviting me to speak at webcom 09 and congratulations to him for holding another successful conference.

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Unfortunately, if you are not part of the Beta roll out, Twitter will not allow you to see the URLs of lists, even if they’ve been tagged as public. For the benefit of everyone, I will include screen shots, where practical, in addition to the link.

WHY DID TWITTER LISTS LEAVE DEVELOPERS OUT?

In the September 30th blog announcement. Nick Kallen, the project lead on Lists stated on the Twitter blog that there will be a Lists API. “This will allow developers to add support for Lists into your favorite Twitter apps.”

It seems that developers were an afterthought on this Twitter Feature. Normally, developers are notified of major feature roll outs such as this well in advance and are afforded the opportunity to work with the API in before the launch. However, the development community weren’t even informed that Twitter Lists was on the development roadmap until September 30th, likely well after Twitter would have started working on it.

When the feature was released yesterday, the vast majority of developers (but interestingly, not all) didn’t even have access to the Lists API documentation until last night. When users like Robert Scoble started building lists and tweeting about them, the dev community cried foul and a draft of the API documentation was quickly made available, sending developers scrambling to integrate Lists into their offerings throughout the wee hours of last night.

HOW WILL TWITTER LISTS IMPACT DESKTOP CLIENTS?

Many original users of TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop were drawn to the services because of the list/group functionality that they offered. Those services have now evolved to offer a host of additional features, but, for many the list/group function remains the primary benefit. With the Lists API, TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop will face a whole slew of Twitter client competition who didn’t previously have a lists or a grouping function.

Now you may be thinking, yes, but I use TweetDeck/Seesmic and so using Twitter Lists doesn’t bring me any extra value. Consider that TweetDeck’s groups are confined to TweetDeck . Twitter Lists, once the developers set to work on it, will start popping up in all sorts of different apps and locations that have been built specifically to add value to the user experience. Twitter Lists will not be confined to the client that you’re running. And that reality will surely cut into established client applications’ market share.

WHAT WILL TWITTER LISTS DO TO “FOLLOW” DIRECTORIES?

The inclusion of a Lists API will threaten recommendation applications like WeFollow, Twellow, Mr. Tweet or Twibes. The categorization of people on these types of services are usually self-submitted, or in some cases, chosen by an algorithm. The resulting recommendations may not always be vetted according to your personal standards. And let’s face it, following people based on their own self-categorization is just not the same as having a personal recommendation from someone you know. Personal referrals are the preferred way that people make purchasing decisions and deciding who to invest your time with on Twitter is not much different.

Rather than taking random recommendations from Follow Directories, you could easily visit the profile of someone who’s opinion you trust and select from their lists. Let’s say you want to learn more about the players in venture capital. By clicking on his lists counter from the profile page, I can examine which lists that Guy Kawasaki has been included on. This netted me a great starter list from Christine Lu: http://twitter.com/christinelu/vc-and-angels.

As it’s possible to subscribe to lists without actually following each individual in the group, I can simply click “Follow List” from the main list page and follow the tweets of a great subset of Twitter, chosen by someone I know.

Twitter Lists also goes head-to-head with other applications which allow you to follow groups with a single click. Take TweepML for example. The developers launched their one-click group app on September 9th, exactly 3 weeks before Twitter announced Lists. Had the developers known what laid ahead on the Twitter features road map,  I wonder if they’d have developed the same product. As it stands, TweepML was quick off the mark and explained on their blog last night that it was easy to import your Twitter Lists to their service.

Thousands of applications currently exist that work with the Twitter API, from desktop and mobile clients to statistics and search properties. Smart developers should follow the lead of TweepML and integrate Twitter Lists into their products. By finding ways to use Twitter Lists to add value to existing applications, they’ll be in a better position to survive the inevitable surge of new offerings that have surely sprouted in the last 16 days.

Next up: Part 3: Popularity

Read Part 1: What Are Twitter Lists?

Part 4 will look at the opportunities that brands will have with Twitter Lists.

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Technically Women comprises a group of women from all walks of business. This blog presents our unique views on how technology is shifting our world. The women are business owners, marketers, evangelists and leaders. The idea for Technically Women stemmed from a “women and leadership” piece penned by Dennis Howlett, which brought several of these women together to share their unique views on the current state of business. We decided to keep the conversation going and bring in some additional voices.

The participating women are amazing and accomplished, and I’m humbled to be in their company:

Cathy Brooks (@CathyBrooks)
Laura Fitton (@Pistachio)
Maggie Fox (@MaggieFox)
Rachel Happe (@rhappe)
Jennifer Leggio (@mediaphyter)
Francine McKenna (@retheauditors)
Anne Kathrine Petterøe (@yojibee)
Marilyn Pratt (@MarilynPratt)
Susan Scrupski (@ITSinsider)

Here’s an excerpt from in my inaugural post entitled The Gender Card, which looks at my how I came to my approach toward the topic of  women in technology and business.

Let me state right from the start, I do not like playing the gender card. Sweeping generalizations about how men and women “are” make me bristle. I do not consciously frame myself in this world as a woman first. I am a person. I am unique. I happen to be female in gender. And in part, because of that, I often resist believing that there are any barriers to entry in positions or fields.

I encourage  you to explore the diverse viewpoints in Technically Women, offer up your feedback and, if you feel so inclined, follow @Tech_Women on Twitter to keep up to date.

Thanks.

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With it’s rise in popularity, so many businesses are hopping on the Facebook bandwagon In addition, many companies striking out into this new world don’t realize that there are fundamental differences in functionality between creating a group and creating a fan page. (Check Jason Falls‘ excellent post on Facebook Group and Brand Pages Best Practices for the breakdown.)

If you start a group and you manage to get people to join it, then what? What will members be able to do there, and how will you encourage them to participate?

As most who’ve joined Facebook groups know, the vast majority of the time there is no follow-up by the group owner. With no outbound communication, it’s easy for the member to forget about the group and never return.

However, there are some groups that go overboard with emails, becoming an annoyance in inboxes and inciting members to unsubscribe. The trick is to strike a balance and have a plan.

Before launching your Facebook group, determine your outbound communication strategy. How often will you send the group messages? What will you say in the message? Will you offer group members any incentives to come back to the group page? Will members have any special benefits? And ultimately, how will you make your group so good that your members will invite their friends to join?

You may find that, after consideration, starting a Facebook group isn’t the right tactic to meet your strategic goals. Thinking through all of these considerations before diving in, will help you to be more focused in your efforts, increasing your chances for success, no matter which social network(s), if any, you settle on.

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Founded by David Sacks, former COO of PayPal and currently CEO of Geni.com, the management team is filled from the ranks of PayPal, eBay, eGroups and Tribe. Sacks wanted an enterprise version of Twitter to keep his company connected, but it didn’t exist. So they built Yammer and launched it at TechCrunch 50 on September 8, 2008. As of the morning of the 10th, over 2,000 companies and 10,000 users were registered with Yammer.

Why would a company need this type of service? Well, aside from increasing communications between employees, Yammer claims it can reduce email by doing away with “email inboxes overflowing with unwanted messages.”

Anyone in a company can be the first to start a Yammer network for free and answer the question “What are you working on?” They just need a valid company email address and then begin inviting others from the enterprise to join the network. They say this means that “Yammer can spread virally through a company like a consumer social network.” For some company cultures, this may represent lack of control over internal communications and be seen as a threat if it is not initiated from the top-down. Yammer would likely be a hard sell to be endorsed by management in those types of enterprises.

There is no need for an enterprise-wide IT software installation as the service is hosted by Yammer. However, employees wishing to use the Yammer desktop application will have to download the app and have Adobe AIR installed, leaving the possibility for a spike in IT support calls. Users can also send and receive messages using an iPhone application, blackberry application, IM, SMS or email. You can also subscribe to email daily digests of network activity.

Yammer’s business model is built upon administrative control. Although accounts are free, optional admin tools are available for $1 per month per member of your company’s network, charged to a credit card after a 3-month free trial. These admin tools allow you to:

• delete messages and remove members
• set password length and complexity
• require email confirmation on new browser sessions
• restrict access to Yammer to your office network or VPN using an IP range
• brand your network with your company logo
• give additional admin privileges to users on your network

Many of Yammer’s features function similarly to Twitter. There are some great improvements and a few misses.

Firstly, Yammer’s enterprise networks are established using the domain extension of the person’s company email address used to register the account. This could become complicated for organizations that use multiple domains over their divisions, as only those with the same extensions would be grouped into a network, making collaboration on Yammer between divisions impossible.

The profile information on Yammer is more robust than Twitter, showing your messages, list of people and tags that you follow, your contact information, and your place in the organizational chart, which maps relationships through the network.

The familiar tabs of All, Following, Received and Sent are used in the interface. Unlike Twitter, there is no public timeline, or as Yammer calls them, feeds. The All tab represents everyone in your organization using Yammer and there is no access to feeds of other organizations.

A great feature is the ability to follow people or tags. Working on a project? Following its #tag will put all associated updates in your Follow tab. In the message body, typing # produces a drop down list of previously used tags to simplify and reduce redundancy, with an auto-suggest function. You can also view tags in your network by tag cloud.

You reply to a message using the provided reply link or with “re:name” at the beginning of your message. For those used to the Twitter-style @name reply, this could be confusing. By clicking on the “In Reply To” link, you can view the entire threaded conversation.

The feed can be shown in “message view” or “threaded view”, giving the number of replies and people in thread via a “disclosure triangle” that expands and collapses.

Messages contain tag, member and reply links, in addition to a link to forward the message to your email address or view the message within the context of the threaded conversation. I was unable to determine if there was a character limit on updates.

Use @name to address someone directly anywhere in your update. Typing @ gives you a dropdown list with auto-suggest as you type, a feature that I wish Twitter would offer.

Another useful feature is a links directory which shows every link posted in messages, complete with who posted it, when, its title and any related tags. You can also view links by tag or member making it easy to pinpoint information related to a project.

Search for people, tags or words and phrases in messages. Again, there’s the handy auto-suggest function and linked shortcuts. Searching on a word or phrase gives results in 3 tabs: messages with the result; members whose name matches the word; tags that match the word.

Yammer has gone to lengths to explain and describe how its service works and to engage its community with a help center FAQ, a user forum, an extensive How To Guide, a video tour and a blog, as well as a prominent Feedback Form side tab. These measures will go a long way to adoption, especially in enterprises whose employees are not likely to be familiar with Twitter.

You can customize how you want updates to appear, whether to show full names instead of user names and employ absolute time stamps for enterprises operating across multiple time zones. It is possible to upload the company logo to appear on each page in your network, but at this point it is not possible to skin the interface to match your brand’s look and feel.

I was surprised that Yammer has not employed RSS, nor is there the ability to send a file through the system, as you can with Pownce.

In the future, I can see that there will be demand for a white label solution that can be internally hosted, giving enterprises ultimate control over their own data and security.

Overall, I give Yammer high marks for building in some great features that clearly shows knowledge of the needs and challenges of enterprise users.

What remains to be seen is how readily enterprises will embrace Yammer as part of their company culture. Do you think that enterprise is ready for Yammer? Let me know what you think.

See Yammer’s pitch at TechCrunch 50.
See Yammer win at TechCrunch 50.

UPDATE: Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting gave me the heads up that moments after Yammer won the TechCrunch 50 prize, Oracle announced it’s new enterprise microblogging plaftorm, OraTweet. Her post on OraTweet is here.