NLabNetworks 1 of 5
1 Opening
David Asch, DVC at DMU, asked about how social networking affects the “credence rules” of a purchase and particular to the purchase of services and experiences.
My question: Can we monitor our reputation in different communities? Can we revolutionize our industry landscape through our relationships with our communites (aided and abetted by IT).
2 Social Networking for Small Businesses
Steve Clayton of Microsoft UK is talking about building relationships with customers (some my wording and some his)
- to develop empathy and avoid the cold-blunt sell
- to increase word-of-mouth recommendations from people we trust (including blogs)
- to capitalize on serendipity when trust and interest create a tipping point and an advert goes viral (complete with 1000 consumer mashups)
Does your website convey your personality? Does it connect? Does it allow a two-way conversation?
The internet has allowed the long tail to take part. The challenge in the long tail is to get your voice out. The advantage of being in a niche, is that you can have a clear voice and a conversation about your product.
How do you have people connect to you to get up the list on Google search - have a conversation.
- Contact details!
- Update weekly not monthly (use a blog?)
- Story of “English Cut Savile Row” - a suit was swapped for a blog about fabric, tayloring, cloth and the minutiae of suits - things took off after a year - Thomas doesn’t try to sell you a suit.
How can big businesses created trusted relationships?
- Microsoft Outlook manager is contactable via his blog
And he is talking up “commoncraft” - they do incredibly cool videos!
3 Are Online Social Networks the New Cities”
Roland Harwood of NESTA (Roland - think I called him something else last time - sorry) says 700 people registered for a breakout session on this title at a NESTA meeting. He works on virtual clusters through NESTA.
Thesis: social networks are beginning to fulfill some of the functions of cities.
The essence of cities:
In cars you are isolated, in cities and pavements you have serendipity. Cities themselves can be serendipitous with neighborhoods of like-minded people emerging on their own.
Social networks are more interesting to do with people you don’t know well (the people outside your 100 person tribe), the ‘weak ties’, the periphery. They allow us to build relationships before we meet them. They allow us to build trust.
Cities have ‘organizational memory’ - example of the textile are of Venice.
Diversity drives innovation. Leicester is a diverse city. We need to create space to cross fertilize ideas.
My question: To what extent is it important to understand the “purpose” of a community or network (wicked questions and boundaries - see Wirearchy of yesterday).
NLabNetworks
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I am going up to Leicester for NLabNetworks big showcase day. I am looking forward to Toby Moores after dinner speech - he always has something fresh to say.
The line up is pretty packed: Steve Clayton from Microsoft Cambridge (I never really expect them to be here), Roland Harwood from Nesta, Andrea Saveri from the Institute for the Future (stateside), Ken Thompson of Bioteams from northern Ireland, Jim Benson the colloboration guru from Seattle, and 8 workshops running in parallel.
CJ will be there, I think. And Shani Lee, too.
The big question for me is whether the social media world is ready to ’schematize’ a heuristic. How do we embed the tough questions in a step-wise approach to understanding communities without oversimplifying things.
I’ll twitter a bit from Leicester (that’s Leicester Cathedral in the picture in case you wondered) and blog over the weekend.
Marketing SM in the Unis
Undoubtedly, the social is as important as the media in social media. Like all marketing, knowing the punter is as important as knowing the product. Just because of where I will be next week, I am thinking about social media services and universities.
Social Media School
I am still interested in social media school. It promises a good bread-and-butter line for many people. It is self-contained - you can see where it starts and finishes. It is scalable across clients. It allows self-development. There is nothing like teaching to get your ideas organized. We complement each other which is great value for clients. We can also have redundant teams. If someone has to go off to do something more lucrative, more fun, or more urgent, someone else can probably step in at short notice without much damage.
At the moment, I am thinking about social media schools and the university outreach programs. Not academia - that is a different ball game. I am talking about straight training. People who want to know and want you to show them how to do it.
What I need to know from you:
- What you could show people how to do.
- Any constraints you have timing, geography and price. Conflicts of interest too. Maybe you have already got a market and your comment is “not here please!”
Another marketing idea for unis
I am comfortable in the university world. British unis have constraints that are slightly different from other countries. All academics though are under pressure to publish research. All Vice Chancellors are under pressure to make money from research.
This is what we could do: Tout ourselves in universities to organize the social media for a research project.
- Work with the academics to establish
- who should be reading their work
- milestones they will reach reliably
- feedback that will make their work easier
- competition from other centers and reactions to their efforts (every action has a reaction)
- Extract funding out of Deputy Vice Chancellors for Research. The first year we may have to approach quite a few until they routinely make budgets for social media (then we will see an upsurge in competition - so we must be ready for that)
- Do the work
- The community work - who, what, when and day-to-day maintenance (these are academics - they don’t do reliable)
- The marketing - marketers think in terms of rewards, glitz, glamor - bring it on
- The creative (I need help - I have the style of MK railway station)
- The technical (I will have my hands full herding cats)
- Website (have you seen some of the local unis and looked at their Alexa rankings - quick, easy, participative, editable)
- Blogging campaign
- Twittering
- What else?
- What else? Here’s a link to the process.
I am comfortable around academics. I understand the pressures on them. And I understand why they swing from arrogance to shyness. I am happy to handle finding research units we can work with and then finding people among us more familiar with the discipline to help communicate.
I also think that this could be a good market. The academic world is dominated by US journals who are dominated by Americans for reasons that are obvious to anyone who understands communities. Content is not key. Conversation is key. It could be fun to work with unis to lift the rank of a research unit just by helping them manage their conversations. Because the academic world is international, this is exportable too!
Anyone?
feedback, feedback, feedback
Image via Wikipedia
Is all the talk about ROI, talk about “Close the loop”?
Generally we don’t like open feedback loops very much (unless we are ducking and diving). We like to see how we are doing. And if we can’t see immediately, we want an interim signal, or reassurances from an expert who knows what delays to expect.
I think the brilliance of social media is not so much that it creates sales. Its brilliance is that it allows feedback. And feedback is in both directions.
- We can hear what people are saying.
- And we can tell them what we have done.
Moreover, social media is a conversation not a head count.
- It is more sensitive and responsive to the nuances of what is said.
- People relate to neighbors rather than to a big impersonal organization - so it is closer, more frequent and more personal.
Social media allows us to continually reinforce the network. As far as we know, we have to do that or the links just fade away.
Sci-fi time
Imagine call centers organized around communities.
The number of calls taken would be irrelevant. After all, like police & crime, doing more work could mean things are going right or going wrong.
The first measure would be feeding insights about the community “upwards”, “ease” of making sales in the neighborhood, the balance of traffic (value added over problem fixing). I am sure we could think of a few more.
The second measure would be the ease with which changes in the business are communicated to the community. Have people been informed? How quickly? How well? Obama’s campaign is credited with telling people where their money was being spent - and he spent a lot $85m on ads - almost as much as the Republican Party and Clinton combined. When people see that we are responding to them, we reinforce our relationship.
Glocal, in other words. Global businesses built around local communities.
ROI
I’ve found it interesting to hear the emphasis on ROI in marketing. There isn’t the same emphasis on HR. Personally, having worked in a joint department of Marketing, HR, Management Science and Strategy, I think this is a lot to do with the feeling that Marketing guys have too much of a good time. So my cynical mind would suggest a two fold strategy:
- Go slow with the slower functions.
- Make sure they enjoy the party too.
Get them to do the numbers, organize the surveys, define the objectives! Put them to work in other words.
Also turn the ROI around. Help people envisage the community we are trying to create. We often don’t want one that is massive or overly enthusiastic. Do I want the whole village discussing their health for example? Do I want everyone at my coffee shop? We can also measure our social media about being clear where to stop. That will reassure the other functions who find marketing too “unconstrained”
Feedback. Close the loop. Well I am a psychologist. We know we hate being deprived of sensation, company, and recognition.
Can we raise the levels of contact, companionship, involvement? Do people feel that they belong? Do they feel they “own” us? Are we “theirs”?
Who wants to collaborate in Social Media School?
Greek school, Hebrew School . . . who would like to co-operate in social media school?
This is what I am thinking.
Social media requires us to think about our identity much earlier than, well, when I was growing up.
I think youngsters hitting the job market need a portfolio. I no longer want to see what exams they wrote, and which university they want, or who they studied with, or who examined them. I am not going trawling for party pics on Facebook either.
I want to see what they have done. I want to see how they have explored the world. I want to see how they have organized their ideas. I want to see who they worked with, and why.
In the past, if dad was rich, kids would go to the ‘right school’ and the ‘right university’ and have the ‘right summer experience’ - well certainly having a rich dad helped to to get the right building blocks in place.
Now, I can see what the kid himself or herself has done - partly because on line portfolios are so easy - but mainly because social media allows us much greater freedom to expand our horizons.
Kids want to set their own frontiers. Since the 60’s at least, adolescents have obsessed about their identity: will I be allowed to be “me as I am, not who you want me to be”. And periodically, we revisit the same panic. English corporate poet, David Whyte, quotes Dante on the mid-life crisis: “In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in the dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.”
It is scary too.
Hence the need for a school: attitudes, skills, knowledge, support.
- I would be interested in doing the psychology part: how do I organize my thinking about who I am and what decisions I make?
- People also need content production skills - writing, photography, etc.
- Basic website, programming and hardware skills make life quicker and snappier.
- Social media marketing skills are key to developing an on line identity measured by the feed back loops (have I just solved the metrics conundrum?).
- Project management skills - getting it done through others preferably.
- And networking skills with some basic economics, sociology, law, etc. etc. Some street smarts.
Where are expectations going?
Does anyone think the same way?
Would there be a market for a social media school?
And what is a psychologist doing in social media?
Image by lounger via Flickr
At the moment, finding my way around here. Will be back later.
Jo
