Corporate messaging has been under fire for a long time from many a PR 2.0/social media/web 2.0 pundit, including me. I’ve been a loud defender of the Cluetrain principle that there’s no market for messages. But while I still feel that one dimensional messaging from a traditional corporate communications standpoint fails utterly on the social web, there is a role for more evolved messaging: The role of the conversation starter (conversation starter image by shadow traveller).

A good message for the social web serves a different role than drilling home a sales proposition, or highlighting a brand attribute, or controlling public perception. Instead it inspires a great conversation amongst a community. It’s a conversational lead, something that provokes raw dialogue about a relevant issue to not only the organization providing the starter, but also the community participating in the discussion.

In that sense the modern message isn’t controlled. It’s actually architected with the hope of sparking a wildfire of uncontrolled word of mouth. That means giving people something worthwhile to talk about.

So a message actually becomes Socratic in nature. It poses a question and/or causes other parties to actually think about a topic, as opposed to trying to force ideas into their head. Rather than deliver finite ideas, social web messages start the conversation, but may not end them.

In fact the community conversation may take the message and turn it upside down (AT&T iPhone pricing, Dominoes, Motrin Moms, etc., etc.). In such cases, an organization needs to be responsive to and flexible with its community. In that sense that’s where letting loose of the reigns and actively participating in dialogue really comes into play. If the message serves the community with informative conversation, than the organization who started the chat should understand that it may need to shift its position.

I need to give a hat tip to Jeremy Pepper on this post, as the outspoken PR blogger was adamant in a phone conversation with me, maybe two years ago, that in fact messaging still had its place. It took me a long time to come around to that point of view, but I agree.

Today’s lackluster iPhone announcement at the Apple WorldWide Developers Conference left rabid online fanatics disappointed and wanting more. The letdown has to leave many customers, potential buyers and investors wondering now that Jobs is gone as CEO, “Is this the beginning of the end?”

Perhaps what made today so disappointing was the incredible tension and excitement built up before the iPhone announcement. Instead of a great new iPhone, Apple delivered 3G S. 3G S adds some functionality, but is really the same device with a few new features.

In essence, Apple took a card out of the automobile manufacturer promo catalog between major model revisions. Say it’s new for 2009 by providing a minor feature upgrade! Heck even put a new letter on the end of the name.

So instead of fulfillment, Apple/AT&T users got a dud, and one that would cost $500 to upgrade to the maximum 3G S unit. Not the most advisable tactic for a company that wants to keep its brand evangelists happy.

When Jobs left in the 90s, Apple crashed. Many have argued the current executives are a stronger bunch, that a succession plan was in place to replace the mad genius.

First indicators show that Apple may be in for a tough road in the post Jobs era (assuming the mad genius doesn’t return). And while the WWDC was not a complete disaster, it’s going to take more than 1.0 megapixel upgrade or a price drop to keep the Nokia, Palms, Dells and HPs of the world from capitalizing on Jobs’ absence. PR is more than an announcement. It requires substantive actions that back up the hype.

Facebook Causes is oft criticized for its ability to build causes with tens of thousands of followers yet relatively few donations. But is it really the fault of the program, or the tendency for organizations deploying Causes (as well as a wide variety of social media tools across the Internet)? Isn’t the problem that we’re relying on tools instead of interacting with key stakeholders in communities?

To that point, it’s people that drive social media, not tools.  And so while an app can get people to join, it can’t make the right kind of ask for donations that an influential member of a network could.  A network of 100 influentials with strong connections can make a much bigger impact than 100,000 passive followers with no vested interest in the cause (brand, company, effort, etc.).

To demonstrate this point, I decided to use my birthday as a fundraising mechanism to raise money for the Clean Energy Coalition.  It seemed like a natural fit for this purpose, 70k members in the organization’s cause page and $996 in donations as of May 15th.  With a decent, but certainly not the largest Facebook network of more than 1500, I embarked on my birthday cause campaign to raise at least an initial goal $500 for the cause, if not tripling the funds to date.

As of 7 p.m. today, the eve of my birthday, I had raised $452. I had increased the amount of financial donations by almost 50% in just two weeks.  Imagine what 100 of me could do. $50,000? $100,000? 

The evidence is obvious.  Facebook Causes isn’t really the issue. The Cause application is just a tool that works best when people use it to fundraise, for their birthday or in general. Social media that involves commitments works best when people drive the initiatives as opposed to software programs.

P.S.

Thank you to everyone who donated to the Clean Energy Coalition on my behalf.  I really appreciate it.  My interest in the Coalition, Live Earth and other green efforts is a sincere one.

As I said in the original citation, for me the environmental crisis is the challenge of our generation. While we are focused on the current economic issue, it’s apparent that the ecological changes we are all facing continue to accelerate. We need to collectively ban together and change our lifestyles and habits to save energy, water and other precious resources while reducing our carbon footprint.

If you’d like to donate, my birthday cause page is here.

“It might not be intuitively clear to non-participants that a company representative’s consistent high-quality engagement in community is necessary to reap the benefits of community, but for community managers, the relationships they are building make it very clear. Those relationships would go cold without consistent engagement.”

I really enjoyed the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Community Management. Under Marshall Kirkpatrick’s gifted hand, this savvy report delivers the basics for any CxO or CMO considering developing their own social media community. In particular, I love the focus on hiring or appointing a community manager to start.

Most companies want to start with a campaign or an initiative, and that’s the wrong focus. Community Management quickly and aptly points out that social is not about PR per say, more about networking, thus the need for a continued outbound presence. A face of the company, if you would. Without a community manager, companies can fail to harness the many benefits organized social media can offer.

There were several aspects of the report that really seemed to be of service to the marketer trying to figure this out (I assume that most people reading this will be marketers). There’s a heavy focus on the confluence of the many outbound customer functions from PR and marketing to customer service in the report. It’s essential to understand that no one traditional skill set will do the job. Further, social is about engagement versus advertising. There’s a great discussion here on the topic.

There’s a heavy focus on measurement, which is great. I don’t know how many times I hear that you can’t measure social media, and while the report admits to the ambiguity of measurement, I wholeheartedly agree when it says, “Community managers should establish methods to measure their own impact on other departments’ bottom lines.” Frankly, if you can’t determine measurement, then you have no strategy. Strategies are to achieve objectives, and objectives are measurable.

Finally, there’s a great discussion on what makes a good community manager, including statistics and personality type. This is very helpful for organizations trying to hire or identify this role within the company. Guidelines are given for how to participate within and manage the community, too.

I did have a few nitpicks with the report, and for the sake of balance I will offer them. First, the report does say right off the bat that Twitter is a place any company should be and Facebook more than likely could be difficult, but that group pages can work. In the beginning, the report also highlights a blog as a must have, yet we know most blogs fail. Given that, should blogging be so openly embraced?

For the record, I question Twitter’s value sometimes. While I see how Virgin America can be happy with 15K followers, I question whether this kind of reach has any real marketing impact for the company. Straight up truth: Twitter is dynamic and fast, but it’s not a broadcast medium for consumer companies. However, it is a great place to organize and interact with your die hard community members and influencers. Twitter has good uses (See Buzz Bin Twitter primer) and bad uses, so look beyond Shiny Object Syndrome before drinking the Kool Aid in full.

The other nitpick was the personal brand conundrum. While the report acknowledges having a singular voice does not scale, it does not dive in deep on how to handle this issue. It’s a quality problem derived from success, but it would be helpful for companies to see the value of scaling on a team level.

Overall, I highly recommend this report. Any company considering a community management strategy should by the ReadWriteWeb guide as it will give them great insights into this growing professional discipline.

Issues happen. Mistakes are made.  Reputations become tarnished.  This is the way of the world, particularly when an error occurs after a company brand achieves leadership or a human being becomes famous. Sometimes gaffes or human nature takes precedence, and depending on how a company or person handles it, brands and reputations lag.

As we’ve seen time and time again, like any crisis situation, when the problem is avoided the blemish becomes more pronounced. But when it’s embraced reputation damage can be stopped, and in some cases, even improved. 

Social media can be a great delivery mechanism in these situations, from blogs to videos.  It can help reputation management with search, and defuse angry customers or perturbed fans.

Perhaps the most storied example of this is Dell’s magnificent use of its blog when laptop batteries were blowing up.  By embracing the issue, Dell went a long way to resolving the matter and diffused a lot of anger pointed at the brand.  In 2007, Steve Jobs accomplished a similar diffusion of brand angst when he acknowledged the iPhone price drop may have been an error with an open letter.

More recently, have you seen the now almost passe Lindsay Lohan video yet?  A perfect example of someone whose reputation became tarnished and is now being rehabilitated through a humorous embracing of public mishaps.  Lohan will never recover the sheen of her early stardom, but she can have an evolved reputation that takes her rough edges and wears them smooth with this kind of dialogue. Robert Downey, Jr. and MC Hammer are a great example of stars who recovered their reputations post crash.

Kami Huyse co-created this post’s thesis.

Is the Ashton Kutcher/Orpha Winfrey rush to dominate Twitter really a good or bad thing as so many are want to discuss? Is it the ultimate demonstration of the end of Twitter or America’s bad taste? Or is it none of the above? Or any of these topics relevant for an opt-in service, where individuals can chose who graces/pollutes their Twitter stream. The real lesson for communicators is not any of these grand media topics: Instead, it’s about fame.

Suddenly those who are clamoring to reach the pinnacle of bizarre and vain personal value — 1K, 5k, 10k or 25k followers — have been force fed an epiphany: Real fame is not created from a manicured and cultivated personal brand on Twitter. Real fame creates hundreds of thousands, even millions of “followers” in a matter of weeks. The stars have arrived and the nano-famous suddenly find themselves in the midst of an identity crisis. Isn’t it ironic that this drama occurred the week after Me 2.0 launched?

Those that decry the loss of Twitter’s innocence have a very clear option. Stop crying about the presence of real stars in social media, and start looking at what you are doing online.

On the content side, it’s a two-way medium. There are no victims from the Ashton Kutcher Twitterathon. Everyone has an option with such events. Unsubscribe. Or join the Kutcher party. Your community is as valuable or vapid as the people you follow and participate with in conversations.

More importantly from a communicators standpoint, this can be a great moment. We can finally look at this media and say, “What’s more important?” That we become as famous, even more famous than our clients and organizations who we represent? Somehow I don’t think Kutcher’s publicist has what it takes.

Or should we stop this nonsense and return to basic counselor values? It used to be that promoting clients came first, that the famous in our business we’re often the owners of businesses, true thought leaders and winners of award-worthy campaigns. Moving back to basics… Isn’t it more important that we understand the medium, how to communicate through it, and guide our organizations through the transition to two-way media and the phenomenal dynamic nature of this toolset? And if we are successful, naturally become recognized by our peers rather than seizing fame?

A Word to the Nano-Famous

A final word for the crushed nano-famous: Self esteem is created by doing esteemable things. Thus winning becomes a very subjective, personal valuation. Famous people are often winners caught in the act of doing great things (Denis Waitley, Psychology of Winning). That is to say they achieve notoriety by doing noteworthy things. Companies and people that are featured in the media have often done something unusual, hopefully for the betterment of our society.

Some keep their fame, some lose it. Some maintain it by continuing to do great things, others do it by manufacturing stunts that are deemed attention worthy by mass and now social media. Some just move on and go back to achieving their next goal.

Many times our society deems what is worthy of notoriety by pop standards. But tell me a mother (or father) who successfully raises her children, goes to graduate school and maintains a full-time job is not successful, or a winner. So what’s more important: Nano-fame with thousands of followers or achieving noteworthy, meaningful things in life, quietly, yet confidently.

P.S. If you hate me for this post, join my Facebook antifan page and write something nasty on the wall.

Image by blprnt_van

This continues our ongoing discussion on enterprise social media adoption started with “The Cultural Challenge to Integration” and “Moving from Siloes to Hives.”

To successfully adapt, CxOs should examine department, division, and/or enterprise missions and explore natural directions for improvement. This leads to a measurable social media result, something achievable: Time management, improved processes, outbound marketing communications, better customer relations, product marketing/development, return on investment (ROI) or another organizational improvement.

While marketing communications is the most talked about enterprise use of these tools, there are many. But because it’s the one that involves customers, potential increased revenues, new sources of revenue and increased loyalty, marketing communications has oft been the first focus of enterprise innovation and adoption in social media.

But even upon identifying a desired outcome, allocating the necessary time and resources, and authorizing a project, many social media projects fail. And that in large part occurs because of the siloed culture that deploys it.

Whether it’s controlling the conversation, publishing public statements (and associated processes), legal issues, or performance measurements, many processes stop people from using social media tools within the enterprise. I know one consultancy where they tell everyone to use social media, but then ask the workers why their billable time is down.

Audit HR and workflow processes to enable social media participation versus punishing people. Let people use the tools to talk to each other. Lower the firewall enough to let external stakeholders participate.

Remember, old industrial processes seek to close silos in an effort to compete and protect. Those old defense mechanisms don’t necessarily work anymore. Each process should be vetted in comparison to the potential gain: Does the risk this seeks to avoid really outweigh what we can achieve? Adjust accordingly.

Using the marketing communications model, here are some examples:

It’s all about empowering the front line and associated stakeholders; more people power vs. less control. But still, don’t relinquish quality checks. The reality is while more brain power is good, there are still dangers to crowdsourcing and idea markets.

In essence, beehives still have queens. And organizations, while evolving to more open, information friendly architectures will naturally change the way they communicate, still need management. Great decision making, while informed by more and different sources, still runs companies. Vetting information sources intelligently becomes a critical component to enabling leaders to make strong decisions.

It is apparent from online and offline discussion that there are still great challenges to social media adoption. Regardless of cause – control, forcing one-way communication models into conversational media, lack of participation, time, or fear – companies and organizations find themselves stubbing their metaphorical toes quite a bit.  Their cultures prevent them from succeeding (Image: Bangkok Art and Culture Centre 9 by honou).

There’s no greater example of this than the enormous challenges the Obama Administration is facing in getting the government into the web 2.0 era. No one questions whether the mighty O and company get social media. But a prohibitive federal culture is designed to enforce privacy and security regulation, and protect agencies from getting lambasted publicly.

Quite frankly, as Allison Fine puts it, organizational silos prevent people from empowering their edge.  And many companies attempt social media with a trial balloon or a beach-head approach.  While this can be successful and in my book, represents a great way to introduce the power of social media, this short-term approach does not build an organization that can truly engage.

If an organization needs to become social media friendly –  from PR firms and nonprofits to enterprises and government agencies – then  a serious gut check needs to occur. Will our culture allow us to embrace these new tools? And more importantly, can we change the way we interact to allow more of our community into our business?

In the end, management must make a conscious decision to bring more voices to the table. This does not mean crowdsourcing your finances and trade secrets. It does acknowledge that real conversations involve more stakeholders than just the people inside the walls of the department/division/organization/enterprise. And that those people expect a genuine relationship with the organization using these tools.

That means the old ways of communicating won’t work. Publishing a Twitter feed, a blog, a Facebook group, a “viral” video is not the answer.  Instead change the way relational communications are approached throughout the organization. And to achieve that organizations will have to move a lot of folks’ cheese, so to speak, and spend some money.

If you are afraid of what will happen, here’s a few thoughts for you.

• Competitors will read your conversations. They will see what you are doing. And in most cases their efforts to emulate you will fail. Because they are not you, and while you are open, your core offering is your very special people and processes.
• Customers and partners will want to suggest that products/services/programs to be run differently. And you know what, a couple of their ideas will actually be improvements.
• The integrity of the company and internal relationships will not be drained. You will not lose power. Instead you will only strengthen relationships and add more human capital and equity to the equation (hat tip: Allison Fine).

There are so many case studies and books now about the power of social media, and the results it can achieve.  No, now it’s really a question of whether the C-suite is willing to embrace the painful change to become a socialprise. The C-suite needs to take responsibility for moving the cultural bar towards openness.

But a decision means nothing without the ensuing action. From a CxO perspective, how does one move an organization into the social, collaborative web? More coming soon.

What are your thoughts on all of this?

I recently read a post that dubbed me a pioneer, something that made me uncomfortable as I have only been blogging now for three years (original photo taken this weekend at the Cherry Blossom Festival). There were many that came before me that are still doing it… True pioneers. Let’s highlight some of these bright communicators in what can only be called a very subjective list.

Toby Bloomberg (on Twitter):  The Diva marketing blogger was the first major blogger to shed some light on this blog.  She served as a blog mentor of sorts when I was getting started, and still delivers great content and insights five years into her effort.

Brian Solis (on Twitter): Brian is at the forefront of the PR 2.0 movement and can only be deemed an A-Lister these days.  But back before he hit it big time, he helped me out with a great interview and Now Is Gone.  Brian still writes great blog posts regularly!

Kami Huyse (on Twitter): A no nonsense communicator, Kami keeps it real, always focused on the profession of communicating, and then how these tools may impact us.  Kami is one sharp cookie, and she’s a mom of three, and she practices, too. A true winner in my book (and a great friend), Kami started when I did, but was influential for me right out of the gate.

John Moore (on Twitter): I finally met Brand Autopsy author John Moore at SxSW. I’ve been reading him for years now, and he’s just darn brilliant.  Always a good read, quirky, and definitely an old-school blogger. Lot’s of great insights and takes on marketing here.

Liz Strauss (on Twitter): Talk about an original blogger, does it get any more original than Liz Strauss, author of the Successful Outstanding Blog and founder of SOBCON. I think not. Again, another blogger who still stands and delivers, and in Liz’s case, more than most.

Richard Becker (on Twitter): This man is a great conversationalist, a great communicator, and quite frankly is not into the popularity game we see online. What I like about Richard is his challenging blog. He makes you think, he pushes the envelope, and like Kami, gets down to the business of communicating.

OK, there are many more, but you get the point.  There are many great bloggers who have been around for a long time – some popular, some not – all of them great in their own right, pioneering and shaping this blogger’s mind and outlook. My thanks to all of them for shining in their own special ways.

“I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half.” - John Wanamaker

One of the more common questions I get is how do we justify funding social media? Increasingly, my response is how long do you keep funding marking communications in media that isn’t working (image: balance by Meagansphotos)?

It’s not that you have to grow the pie bigger. Instead, think about which half of the pie is working and which isn’t. More importantly, which forms of media are your stakeholders using that you are failing to address? My advise is to take stock of your marketing approach and reallocate resources appropriately.

Consider what people are using today for information:

So how much longer can people keep justifying the same kind of spends on traditional PR and advertising in the face of these trends and in this economy? And how much longer are people going to get away with passing social media off as experimental as opposed to simply adopting it as part of the larger communications fold.

Does anyone really think social media and Internet marketing in general are going to become less important? Consider all of the newspapers going bankrupt right now.

What do you think?