Small businesses have a few advantages over larges businesses and one of them is the ability to market to individuals.  This is important because this form of marketing is the most successful.  Think about it, the marketing that gets to you makes you feel like it is directed for you and only you.  It begs the question-how did they know?  


Social Networks can return this advantage back to big business.  It allows the client to access customized content aligned with their interests and it provides empowerment.  The client feels like they have a voice about the relationship with the company.  A voice that is accorded the same respect as if the client was talking to the owner of a small business. 

Treat your social networks as if they are 1 on 1 conversations with your clients and you should see the client value of this resource increase dramatically.

How companies interact with clients is changing and I think it is for the better.  These changes are taking place both on the sales side and the support side of business.    


Bob Garfield’s Chaos Scenario article (http://adage.com/article?articulated=115712), does an in depth breakdown of how advertising and marketing might change due to innovation on the internet.  This article covers a lot of information but one thing that struck me was his assertion of consumer control over exposure to information. 


Garfield explains that mass media and mass marketing have had a “perfect symbiotic relationship” resulting in advertising underwriting content while content delivers an audience and audiences patronize the advertisers.  Although, this relationship between mass media and mass marketing has been around for 50 years or so, it has not been the most efficient.


In Garfield’s article, he writes about Proctor and Gamble finding a way to change their marketing.  Proctor and Gamble are not looking at finding a different place to  “amass 30 million people at a time so we can tell them not to squeeze the Charmin.”  What they are looking for is a different way to build relationships with the client.

The newest trends driven by consumers is about tapping into media that the consumer is voluntarily engaging with.  The key here is voluntarily.  This is why the online communities and social networks are so powerful.  The consumer is choosing to engage.   

From a marketing point of view, I can’t imagine a better audience.

Just wanted to introduce our new blogger Deepak Murthy – will update later with a photo,

He is an expert on developer communities having worked at companies like Sun Microsystems and Network Appliance. He has a MBA from UC Berkeley and a Masters in Computer Science from SUNY Buffalo. Overall one of the smartest guys I have known in my career and a very contagious sense of humor.

He posted What makes communities tick. Let us know what you think.

Mukund Mohan’s blogs at http://www.bestengagingcommunities.com/ offer an insight into the reasons that make an online community successful. Lets review some of them here.

1) An effective community manager. He is one who listens, responds well and facilitates discussions/participation among community members.

2) The growth of cross-organizational communities within a corporation.
This results in the sharing of ideas, thoughts, solutions and contributes to the benefit of the entire community.

3) Great questions asked by community members.
This is a key metric for measuring the success of a community and results in great discussions as well as increased participation.

4) The need for people to connect and feel connected.
This has resulted in an explosion of successful online communities.

5) The growth of the personal social index as an accepted measure of a person’s true indicator of
wealth. This is increasingly a measure of a participant’s self-esteem with his peers and takes into consideration factors such as
• which communities you are a part of
• how often do you blog
• do you say anything that’s useful

6) Branding of products using online communities by consumers.
This is a way for companies to increase brand loyalty and attract new customers.

Kari of Go Wholesale asks:

How do you get people to talk? Our trouble seems to be that despite our
open-ended posts to try and get discussions going, no one is participating. We
have member registrations galore, but no one wants to talk. Should we ask them
for feedback re: what they want to see?

Here is what we have seen things that work. Please try these and feel free to let us know what worked for you.

1. Make the connection first BEFORE you ask for participation. There are NO shortcuts unfortunately. For e.g. if you walked into a party and asked some open ended questions of people would you get responses? Probably not. What you have to do is to first INTRODUCE yourself, then find some easy lay up questions to get them comfortable. Dont hesitate to make an offline (email, phone) connection with your community also. This helps a lot to get them comfortable.

2. Target the frequenters first and make hero / examples of them to participate. For e.g. Once you make the connection, then post a question one of them asked to them, and their 2-3 peers. Once people start to see that a question from one of “them” is being asked by “one of them” versus the community manager, things get easier and more comfortable.

3. Ask the easy questions first then go to the questions that might get a lot of debate. Every person in the community likes the question – “Here’s what we are thinking, what would you advice?” OR “Here are 3 options to increase our pricing that we are considering, which do you think causes the least interruption?” Just open questions help when you made most of the participants comfortable enough that they consider it their community.

4. Offer examples that pertain to their lives instead of just trying to get information from them. E.g. If all your questions are about things your company or sponsor of the community wants to hear from the community, that quickly dilutes the dicussion. Most participants have a lot other things going on in their lives / work than just the community. Find out how to help them with  other issues related to that and you will get more participation.

5. Think really like the user. Make it their discussions, their forums, their community. I went to your site Kari and its catalog driven discussions based on “your” thinking of the type and category of questions that you think are important. But users firedog2ks  and arbutus are asking questions not related to your categories in the forum.
Setup the categories for your threads minimally first and then revisit frequently.

Jeremiah Owyang posts on the things that make a good technology evangelist and community manager.

        1) Community First

Puts the community or the customers as a priority over the company.
This person is an advocate for the customers, and will often go ‘join’
the community, rather than try to build it. (I learned this from Tara)

2) An Educator, two-ways
Teaches the community about the company and it’s products, often in a non-invasive manner.

3) Uses the tools and communication style of the community
In 2007, this is primarily blogs, online pictures. I see this moving to Video, Twitter, and a vast array of emerging tools.

4) Puts a Human Face on the company
This person actually shows their real face, both online and at events.
Forget those stock images of the pretty Asian woman at the computer,
and use a real person, who can relate to the community.

5) Not just a Marketing Role
This is not just a PR or marketing role, this role actually extends to:
Customer Support
Product Marketing and Engineering

6) Knows when to get out of the way
Sometimes this role is to connect the right people in the
company (who know more about the product details) with the right
customers. Also this role will connect prospects with customers, in a
new form of “customer references”.

7) Pushes the “Membrane”
Scoble told me about this in 2005, he pushed the corporate membrane at
Microsoft, which is a pliable movable invisible wall. Once he felt he
pushed it, and was just about to poke through, he would back off. If
Corporate Comms and Management gets uncomfortable with the community
manager, then you’re doing the job right.”

Some other things I have seen from other good community managers:

1. Understands and communicates back to the company (that sponsored the community) the value of the community.

2. Facilitates discussions among community members / participants so
they can feel free to discuss issues outside of the community.

Customer of ours wanted to get to 112,000 community users and adopted many techniques to get there including buying lists of competitor developer networks, getting on competitor community to learn who the key influencers are, “spamming some of these lists”. They made the number with about 1 month to spare.

Nate had a good question on Future of communities.
“Take Facebook for example. They spammed the students at their
university over and over again to get a userbase. What you do with that
userbase once it’s there is related to the question above. But how you
get them there in the first place? Now that’s a question I’d like to
see an ethical answer to (that works).”

Do you think they did whatever it took to get to the goal? They did not do anything illegal, but then again.

<img src="/images/64360-56413/iwLogo2_2006.gif”>

The blogging world is abuzz about San Francisco Chronicle and InfoWorld troubles.

InfoWorld is apparently shutting down their print magazine to focus on events and online.

Now if I were the head of InfoWorld I would prefer to have a “spin” on this entire “episode” instead of being defined by the blogging community. Some EVIL ideas (I admit these are evil but they would work is my sense).

1. I would have partnered with Go Green Initiative and said – “We are trying to use less paper, so we can do our bit to help the world use less of our natural resources”. Then make sure that for a whole week my entire staff only used mass transit to make a point. Trust me it’ll get a lot of press, especially from the tree hugging crowd.

2. Make a big deal about the online IT Exec Connect at InfoWorld section highlighting the social network and social media as TAKING over the IT news business. Showcase 3-4 key participants who can blog about how they prefer the online services offered by InfoWorld to the print (which they never read anyway).

3. Work with Nick Carr and come up with a changing trends of the IT industry that favors niche providers like themselves and others rather than generalists like Information Week.

So, why did they not do any of this, but rather let Rafat Ali and few other very influential bloggers “spread the news” before the news?

McKinsey surveyed 2800 executives on their adoption of Web 2.0. You have to register to get access to the report (Its free).

What is web2.0 according to McKinsey?

A) blogs, crowdsourcing, social networking, podcasts, RSS, peer to peer networking, web services (mashups) and wikis.

Here are some highlights:

1. More than half of the executives surveyed say they are pleased with the
results of their investments in Internet technologies over the past
five years, and nearly three-quarters say that their companies plan to
maintain or increase investments in Web 2.0 technologies in coming
years.

2. Most popular web 2.0 investments are: 1. Web services 2. Collective Intelligence (crowdsourcing) and 3) Social Networks

3. Investments interest in web 2.0 is highest in India, followed by Asia-Pacific in general, Europe, China and #5 is North America.

4. Retail and High Technology are the sectors with the highest interest.

Interesting Question: Why are India and China higher than US in interest an adoption of Web 2.0?

1) Because of their services based economies?
2) Because they feel they missed out on web 1.0?
3) Because their N American counterparts are just jaded from previous “cool technology” efforts so they are not getting on the band wagon  yet?

What do you think?

There is no blogger that does not have their own top 10 list. In fact most cases this post of the top 10 list is the most popular (also for link baiting) and the post with the most views.

Why are they so popular? Several reasons exist, but most particularly they are easy to digest and some actually are real value.

So if you a community manager and see a host of discussion on a single topic, its almost an automatic that you can create a top 10 list, and most likely that will stir debate, commentary and be the one with the most number of page views.

If you are however reading a top 10 list on anything and want to review it to use some of the suggestions (e.g: top 10 ways to improve comments to your site or 10 steps to get more visitors to your site. Here is what I have found works:

1. Try upto 3 (not more since you want to measure the effect) of the items recommended. E.g. If the best way to get comments in your blog post recommended is to ask an open question then try that with your next post.

2. Tag or save it with a reminder to go back and read it in 2 weeks. What did you learn from the 3 items of the 10 you adopted? Is it time to try 3 more and leave 1 away? Yes, some items in the top 10 DONT work – I have personally adopted many top 10 suggestions to improve my blog and I have learned again and again that the audience matters most when implementing anything new.

3. See if you can make your own list of 10 by putting together the best things that worked so you can have your personalize list to share.

What are the best top 10 lists that you have liked so far?