The Net-Savvy Executive

I came across two posts today about corporate culture issues that can limit a company's success with social media. The interesting thing is that similar issues arise whether your work is internally or externally focused. Benefitting from social media in a business requires more than a technology deployment and a single, clued-in group.

Josh Hallett writes about the risks of customer-facing blogs setting high expectations that the rest of the company can't meet:

Company A (think cell phone company) has a really great, personable blogger that really connects with customers online. However Company A also has about 1000 call center reps and 20,000 associates in the field. The majority of them have the traditional corporate attitude, i.e. "Not my department" - "I can't help you, call customer support" etc...

If I were able to magically snap my fingers and have a world-class social media platform in place, I don't believe that it would go anywhere, at least not immediately, in a fundamentally authoritarian culture.

Large-scale adoption of the architectures of participation would represent a revolutionary change in organizational dynamics because—by giving lots of individuals a voice and audience through a networked platform—they force decisionmaking to be more transparent, democratic and consensus-based.

Rather than going all-out for the revolutionary applications of electronic collaboration, look for areas where new technologies can help people do their current jobs more effectively and efficiently. It doesn't have to be dangerous.

Tags: social media blogging enterprise

Surveys keep telling us that younger generations are more likely to use new communications channels—though to someone who came of age after its introduction, it's not new technology, is it? Adults over 40 are less likely to use blogs and social networking, while the under-25 set is assumed to live in MySpace, Facebook, IM, and text and probably thinks of email as a way to communicate with old people. Whether you buy the stereotypes or not, young adults have another advantage: some of them are learning about how social media affect marketing in class.

Faculty teaching social media
Toby Bloomberg writes about the Information Technology Marketing class at the University of Delaware, where her blog is on the assigned reading list. In addition to reading the required blogs, students will create their own blogs, blog the class, use Bloglines, and contribute to Wikipedia articles. Instructor Alex Brown also posted the course outline, which features many of the usual topics in marketing and social media.

Walter Carl uses blogs in his Word-of-Mouth, Buzz, and Viral Marketing Communication and Advanced Organizational Communication classes at Northeastern. I'm sure a few minutes with the blog search tools would uncover more class blogs. The point here is not so much that faculty have adopted these tools for their class, though. They're bringing topics that generate so many blog posts in the working world into the classroom. For their students, there's no conflict between what they learned in marketing class and today's environment.

Students filling the gaps
Over at Syracuse University, the Newhouse New Media Series started this week (via Toni Muzi Falconi). In an independent study project, student Eric Hansen has organized discussions of social media and PR, including some high-profile guest speakers. The series blog includes handouts, links, and—coming soon—recordings of the sessions. The series also has its own Facebook group—because a student organized it, perhaps?

Jeffrey Treem put together a discussion and a wiki on blog writing for PR while he was a grad student at USC Annenberg. The interesting part of this one is that Jeffrey solicited contributions to the wiki from bloggers and practitioners in advance of his talk, so the outline became an example of the benefits of social media.

Digital natives at work
Youth doesn't automatically make today's students net-savvy, but they do have the advantage of being in school after the effects of social media have appeared. Graduates of these programs aren't going to view social media as a new challenge when they go to work; it's just the way things are, and they will have used the tools since they were in school.

Tags: PR social media

Ethics is such a fun subject, or perhaps it keeps coming up because we're not quite sure which rules apply. Mom's rules (be honest, be nice) don't seem adequate in the commercial sphere, and so we have ethics guidelines. Lots to choose from, actually, depending on who you are and what you're up to. As it turns out, even reading blogs can have ethical implications.

The ethics of writing
Usually when people talk about ethics and social media, they're talking about writing, or creating, online content. Around the time that flog entered the lexicon as a contraction of fake blog, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) came out with their ethical blogger contact guidelines, and we all talked about ethics for a while. Last month, the UK's Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) published their own social media guidelines—more wordy than WOMMA list and with a different slant, but another good source. Flogs, by the way, are still on the naughty list.

Bloggers may or may not have ethical standards, too, depending on who you ask. Reach back in time, and you'll find the CyberJournalist Bloggers' Code of Ethics (2003), although it's clear that not all bloggers are journalists. Caveat lector is the general rule, though some bloggers spell out their own personal codes of conduct.

The Occasionally Wild West of the online universe inspired the discussion on PR ethics and Wikipedia. The guidelines may be a little vague, and the enforcement uneven, but the warning signs are clear.

The ethics of listening
Listening to social media is one of my pet themes, because I'm convinced of the value that people and companies can find online. Listening online, like speaking online, takes many forms, from simple web browsing to high-end social media analysis. What they have in common is that you can collect useful information for a variety of purposes from open sources.

As it turns out, listening has ethical boundaries, too. Maybe.

Katie Paine reported some of Don Wright and Michelle Hinson's research from the Summit on Measurement, including this challenging bit:

While in 2005 79% thought employee blog monitoring was ethical, in 2007 only 27% saw it as ethical.

In talking with a social media analysis vendor today, I was reminded that the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) has a code of ethics, which can come into play when companies use data mining for competitive intelligence. But that brief code provides no direct guidance on the limits on intelligence gathering from open sources. A CIPR-style note would be useful.

It seems appropriate that some information really shouldn't be collected, even if it is readily available online. Because listening to social media works in multiple functional roles, we're going to see different standards—or at least different standards keepers—for those groups. Marketing and PR have some ideas. HR is thinking about it. Is CI next? Who else needs to update their standards for the new tools?

Update: Here's a legal view from the US.

Tags: social media ethics competitive intelligence recruitment WOMMA CIPR SCIP

What do you get when you combine the scale and elusive nature of a distributed denial of service attack, the purposeful approach of social media spam, and the rapid spread of a viral marketing campaign? I don't have a word for it, but we have a real-world example, and a lot of people are going to see the results tomorrow.

Bum Rush the Charts is an effort to put an indie band at the top of the iTunes charts—tomorrow. Eric Eggertson writes about it as a case study in word-of-mouth promotion. The details are worth considering, as is Eric's comment:

Note the blatant manipulation of the various voting sites, to create a huge bump in links and attention for the Black Flag song Mine Again.

Now, take those tactics and apply them to an election campaign, a word of mouth marketing campaign, a WTO protest—you name it.

So, what is this? Consumer-generated spam? Distributed social media marketing? Viral activism? It's not just word-of-mouth marketing, because of the goal of gaming the ranking systems.

This is a slick idea, and I agree that others will try it. And while I've used the language of some very undesirable behavior to understand it, I don't see anything particularly wrong with it. BRTC may be manipulating outcomes, but they're going in through the front door.

It's just that tomorrow, the rankings will show what happens when a group of people get together to demonstrate their numbers and purchasing power.

Tags: black lab bumrushthecharts itunes wom viral marketing smo

Boy, talk about Internet time. A couple of hours after I read a recent paper on strategies for media companies in the world of user-generated content and open distribution, one of the predictions starts to play out. If you're interested in media business models, you have some assigned reading for the weekend.

"Navigating the media divide" (PDF), arrived via Paul Gillin in the morning feedstorm yesterday. This paper from the IBM Institute for Business Value looks at the strategic challenges that new content sources and distribution channels pose for companies in the existing content and distribution businesses. In addition to useful background and strategy suggestions, the paper includes a series of questions that should be helpful for starting internal discussions.

Here's a key excerpt on their predicted strategies for media incumbents:

Content owners will be increasingly interested in new open distribution channels that lead to greater licensing volume and potential disintermediation. Media distributors will want to incorporate community content experiences to strengthen subscriber loyalty, lower content acquisition cost and combat competition from new platform aggregator entrants.

If you're in or near a media business, get the IBM paper and read it this weekend. It raises serious issues that companies will have to consider, as well as some strategy ideas that may form the core of future success.

media business strategy social media

Part of the fun of social media is the way it touches so many disciplines—or, for you corporate types, so many functional silos. Word-of-mouth and all the forms of online media challenge the traditional divisions, so we get to see how different specialties approach them. An article in PRWeek discusses the view from public relations (via Sally Falkow):

While appraising and evaluating social media is often complex, it has impacted the profession in three specific ways (in order of increasing importance): it has added a new medium and hundreds of thousands of new outlets PR pros must ponder when pitching; it has provided companies and their agencies an inexpensive way to push their unfiltered message out into the increasingly cluttered media space online; and it has opened up a heretofore unimagined conduit of conversation between corporation and customer.

Given the likelihood that clients are becoming increasingly interested in the space, agencies from multiple disciplines are competing for digital and social media accounts. PR agency executives say that since they are increasingly included in pitches that also feature pure interactive and advertising shops, the industry, as a whole, needs to evangelize about why PR is the best discipline to handle the social media space.

Tags: social media, PR

You can tell the future marketers in kindergarten—they're the ones who stutter as they get to P when they recite the alphabet. So, in the fine tradition of forced alliteration in mnemonics, I present my 4 Ps for social media to add to your collection.

If your alphabet drawer is overstocked with Ps, these writers have other collections of letters you might find interesting (and useful, all):

• 4 Cs of blogging (David Armano)
  
• 4 As of blogging (Valeria Maltoni)
  
• 4 Ps of blog marketing (Steve Rubel)
  
• 4 Fs of citizen marketing (Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba)
  
• 4 Ms of social media marketing (Simon McDermott)
  
• 5 Es of marketing (John Dodds)
  
• 3 Cs of Search (Gord Hotchkiss)
  

Perceive
Pay attention to what's happening online and understand what it means to your business. Learn your way around the online environment (or hire a native guide). Know where people are talking about you—and your competitors—and listen to what they're saying (this has tactical and strategic applications). Notice when something new appears, and don't be caught off guard when someone else asks you about it.

Protect
Be prepared to react to events in social media. Customers complain; help them. If they point out product problems or areas for improvement, get that information to your product group. When critics gripe or point out your flaws, be prepared to respond—if not to the critics, to the mainstream media who might also read their complaints.

Participate
Join in relevant online discussions. Comment on blogs, join online communities. Understand and follow online norms and policies, avoid the Streisand Effect, and don't try to subvert the medium (by, for example, using a fake identity). Be appropriate, and you can be a constructive part of the conversation.

Project
Once your listening skills are solid and you understand the new online environment, it's ok to use them yourself! Blogs, media sharing and social networking sites can be useful for promoting your business (just avoid the activities that lead to active opposition). Social media are also good for projecting your personal brand. As you speak, just remember to keep listening. This is a world of two-way communication, and listening will tell you how your speaking is going over.

Next: the 4 Bs and a P of Raspberries.

Tags: social media, marketing, 4Ps

You say you want all the information overload without loading up on individual subscriptions? There's a trend to build aggregator sites from the feeds of individual blogs, especially in the social media/web 2.0 headspace. I usually prefer to subscribe to the individual blogs, but the aggregators can be useful for finding the individual bloggers who write on a topic.

Here are a few I know of. Even this short list generates a lot to read, until you get practiced at skimming titles.

1. Enterprise Irregulars
   
2. Media 2.0 Workgroup
   
3. Planet Social Media Research
   
4. Planet Web 2.0
   
5. Social Media Today
   

Tags: social media blogging

Edit your company's entry on Wikipedia, and you may rouse the vengeful spirits of Wiki enforcement. Post boosterish comments using a false name on the Yahoo Finance stock boards, and you risk provoking the Feds. Because the Whole Foods story needed—just needed—a social media angle. But wasn't this lesson too obvious to need teaching?

From tomorrow's Wall Street Journal, page one: "Whole Foods Is Hot, Wild Oats a Dud—So Said 'Rahodeb'"

For about eight years until last August, the company confirms, [the Whole Foods CEO John] Mackey posted numerous messages on Yahoo Finance stock forums as Rahodeb. It's an anagram of Deborah, Mr. Mackey's wife's name. Rahodeb cheered Whole Foods' financial results, trumpeted his gains on the stock and bashed Wild Oats. Rahodeb even defended Mr. Mackey's haircut when another user poked fun at a photo in the annual report. "I like Mackey's haircut," Rahodeb said. "I think he looks cute!"

Lesson #1 in business career management: Don't say or do anything that you wouldn't be comfortable having plastered on the Front Page of the Wall Street Journal.

Yeesh. When I worked for a publicly traded company, our Yahoo stock board was (sadly) one of my better sources of what was going on in the company. I never would have dreamed of posting anything—anything!—there. The exposure of Rahodeb means that Mackey's comments are now retroactively on the record for all—and particularly for the SEC—to see.

Update: Mackey's apology.

Tags: duh ceo Whole Foods

A little SEO-related reading will temper any naiveté you may harbor about how social media will make marketing everywhere all clean and shiny. While the advocates promote transparent, honest, personal new ways, someone else is figuring out how to game the system. Rand Fishkin just introduced a new term for a very distasteful idea (which he doesn't endorse): social media poisoning.

The practice involves proactively generating spammy comments, posts, links, etc. from a competitor's domain in order to make bloggers, social media contributors, forum owners, journalists, etc. view that brand in a negative light.

Dirty pool meets social media marketing... What's next, crude suggestions and URLs in truck stop rest rooms?

Tags: seo smo reputation

Pop quiz: Is Facebook the new place to build your professional network and interact with your business contacts? Robert Scoble says yes. Scott Karp says no. And although Robert has the larger audience, Facebook's reaction to one recruiter's mass connection request suggests that they agree with Scott.

Import your contacts, but not too many
Marketing Headhunter Harry Joiner was summarily kicked out when he tried to import his Gmail contacts (which FB explicitly supports). He tripped over an unmarked threshold and was automatically banned. The response he got when he tried to address the problem with Facebook wasn't encouraging:

Abusing the features of the site to spam other people is not
permitted. In addition, it is a violation of our Terms of Use to use one's account for advertising or promotional puroses [sic]. I'm sorry, but you will no longer be able to use Facebook. This decision is final.

Beer or business?
Jim Durbin summarizes the challenge to Facebook as they decide how to reconcile the interests of their student/social base with the adult/professional crowd that has fueled recent growth (and see his new campaign for FB, too):

I wonder how many of those 30 million members signed up because they wanted to make money, and heard Facebook was the next big thing? If we can't use it, we'll leave. And if we leave, the Facebook bubble pops, and returns to a social website for teens and college kids. That's over half the users. Yep—over half of Facebook Users are over the age of 25. We're not on it to arrange parties or meet people.

The CBC is directing its journalists to avoid adding sources or contacts as “Facebook friends,” and to not post their political leanings on their profile.

One parting thought from Harry:

Note to Facebook: Wall St. is watching how you manage recruiters and recruiting researches. We are happy to keep our business on LinkedIn, who seems perfectly happy to cash my fat checks each year.

Tags: Facebook

I spent Saturday at BarCampRDU. It was a nice change of pace to do something here, since I usually just read about interesting-sounding events a long way away. If it's your first BarCamp, you must present, so I ad-libbed a session on social media measurement. It must have gone reasonably well, because people stayed and we filled the hour easily.

I started with the premise of sorting out social media measurement: the term is being used to refer to (at least) four different activities, and it's important to be clear about what information you're looking for and why. I mostly focused on the PR and market research angles, and we talked about the distinction between monitoring and measuring. We had a good conversation about the place of free tools for monitoring, human vs. machine analysis and Wal-Mart t-shirts (I learned today that the t-shirt story continues).

With about a dozen people in the room, it was one of the smaller sessions at the technologist-centric day, but participation was high, and I got to meet some smart people. Calvin Powers also writes about the session.

Based on some hallway conversations, I think we might put together a local conference on social media/Web 2.0 for marketers. It would focus on useful information for marketers who want/need to figure things out, with a mix of strategy and how-to sessions. Details are very much TBD. If you want to be part of starting something, let me know.

Tags: BarCampRDU social media measurement

Did you hear? Social media almost went away. From Wikipedia, that is. The entry for social media was nominated for deletion for being "a marketing buzzword of limited currency." I found a few sources to contribute to the discussion, and the entry survived the process, but only by default. It still needs a solid definition that's based on more than a blog post.

The basic problem is that social media is so often described by example or anecdote (see Lee White's new presentation for a good example). A list of technologies and venues and talk about how people use them are helpful for communicating the challenge and opportunity, but they don't lead to a rigorous definition.

It doesn't help that we have social media, social computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and who knows how many other variations, all with similar meanings. Yeah, I know they're not exactly the same, but there's a lot of overlap and hand waving going on.

I know it when I see it
We tend to get close to a definition, assume the rest and move on to the fun part. Take the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. The definitions of social media and social media analysis are implicit in the papers presented, but where's the definition? (However, the existence of peer-reviewed technical papers from ICWSM with social media in the title did help support the argument in favor of keeping the Wikipedia entry.)

Do you know of a good discussion of the term? I'd like to improve the Wikipedia entry, but I'll need more sources first. Published sources are best. Marketing materials are mostly worthless, and blogs aren't much better. As usual with Wikipedia, association with an interested party diminishes the value of a source.

The perception of social media as a term—at least by some Wikipedians—is that it's a marketing buzzword coined by companies who want to sell social media services. The right sources will put that concern to rest and shift the discussion to the parts that we all find more interesting.

So, who has sources?

Oh, yeah
A word on transparency: You probably know that the Wikipedia community can be sensitive about who edits entries. I joined in the discussion of social media using my real name, and my profile page describes my business interests. That's why I'm not just writing my own definition to incorporate into the entry.

Tags: social media wikipedia

When Jeremiah announced that he's joining Forrester, it got me thinking about how few analyst firms are writing about social media. You can't turn around with bumping into Forrester, and Jupiter is doing some work, but the other big firms are nearly invisible in this space. So I asked around to see who else might be doing something interesting.

So far, the impression that Forrester and Jupiter are most interested in social media is holding up. They certainly have the most analysts who not only cover the space but also participate in it.

And, of course, you're already reading the blog from Social Target. I don't have the throw weight of a publicly-traded company, but interesting things are in the works.

For a broader view of analyst bloggers, see Technobabble's Top 100 analyst blogs.

Tags: social media social computing 2.0 industry analyst

If you don't like the results, pick a different survey. So, how do you think people feel about consumer-generated product reviews on web commerce sites?

• CPG Consumers Trust Online Reviews (eMarketer)
  A Deloitte & Touche consumer survey found that virtually all shoppers trust online product reviews.

• Influencers Wary of Fakes (AdWeek)
  In a Burson-Marsteller survey of 1,000 influential consumers, about 30 percent said that fake reviews or positive comments left by corporations are a big problem.
  

Or is this an early indication of an emerging distrust of online reviews among the broader population? After all, the influencers in Burson's study are "more likely to share opinions and experiences with others." Suspicion of shilling in the reviews is one of the opinions they may share.

Whether customers trust them or not, it's still important to read your own reviews. Someone is writing them, and you might just learn something.

Tags: CGM product reviews influencers

Heard (or possibly said) in the vicinity of an open bar—or on a blog. Is there a difference?

• A-list bloggers saying traffic doesn't matter.
  You can't converse with them if they never find you.

• Hypesters decrying hype.
  Early mainstream adoption is, apparently, boring to early adopters.

• Experts saying there's no such thing as an expert.
  Who's to say?

• Wikipedians questioning the existence of social media.
  That's right, you're part of a trend that has no name.

Welcome, new readers! If you recently discovered the Net-Savvy Executive, you may find some of these older posts helpful or interesting. Jump in anywhere with comments; your participation is definitely encouraged here.

    - Nathan

Lists

• Monitoring Social Media Before You Have a Budget
  Free versions, free entry-level accounts, and free trials of commercial social media analysis tools

• Social Media Analysis for Workgroups
  Software platforms designed to support in-house social media teams in corporate and agency environments

• Mining the Internet for Investment Insights
  Companies analyzing social media activity or content to discover investing signals.

• Blog monitoring the election
  Election analysis (not just US) by social media analysis companies.
  

• "Listen" means more than you may think
  Every social media strategy starts with "listen," and if you do it right, you'll learn a lot more than today's headlines.

• Five Conversations You Should Care About
  "What are people saying about us" is a good starting point, but it's only one of the questions you should ask.

• 10 easy ways to embarrass your company in social media
  Perfect for learning by counterexample.

• Customer service is marketing
  PR alone can't fix a problem that the operation created.

• Corporate social media specialists and Defining social media relations
  How do you organize to engage effectively with your markets through social media?

• Crash course on Wikipedia
  Look, but be careful about how you touch.
  

• Forms of social media analysis
  6 categories of service offered by social media analysis companies.

• Listening Platforms and Professional Services
  4 categories of services that you may want to go along with your social media analysis platform.

• Human vs. machine analysis
  A major source of disagreement, but posing the question in absolute terms is misleading.

• Visual text analysis
  Quick examples of different ways of visually summarizing text.

• The Role of IT in Social Media Analysis
  Sooner or later, social media needs to integrate with other processes, which will require IT involvement.

• The ethics of listening and Ethics, open sources and CI
  Some people have ethical concerns about monitoring social media, but the law (US) appears to allow it.

• Copyright and social media monitoring
  Is it legal to aggregate social media content for commercial purposes?

• Social Media Analysis
  My weekly news posts about the companies in this space grew into their own site.
  

• Sorting out social media measurement
  Before insisting on standard metrics, understand what you want to learn by measuring.

• Derivatives in media measurement
  Thinking about math and trend analysis.
  

• RSS Tricks for Non-Programmers
  
• Using Delicious to Find, Save and Publish Content
  
• IBM talks 2.0
  
• BuzzMonitor—open-source blog monitoring

So, you want to embarrass your company with your efforts in social media, and you don't have a lot of time. You could invent an original way to screw up and let everyone else learn from your mistakes, but that would require effort. Instead, you want something easy that you know will work. What you need are best practices identified by early adopters. Follow their examples, and you can have your very own blogstorm.

10 easy ways to embarrass your company in social media

1. Create a fake blog. Nobody will notice, and even if they do, they won't remember.

2. Dare bloggers to complain about you. Because, you know, nobody reads blogs.

3. Broadcast your press releases to bloggers. They love that.

4. Flame a blogger critic in email, because that way it will stay between you and the blogger.

5. Impersonate someone else in blog comments. That transparency stuff is overrated.

6. In any dispute, lead with the lawyers. They can take care of everything for you.

7. If you want good reviews of your expensive product, send free samples to bloggers. You don't need to mention anything about disclosure.

8. Oh, heck, just review your own products. You know them better than anyone else, anyway.

9. Make improvements to your company's Wikipedia entry. After all, it's the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, right?

10. Tout your company's stock on the message boards. If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.

All we ask is that you let us be the first to blog about it when you invent a new one.

In the last few days, I've read two interesting articles about news and its audience. In very different ways, the articles look at how traditional media favor the predictable stories. Today, as I watched the Scoble/Facebook/Plaxo mini-maelstrom spin up before turning into an interesting discussion of privacy / data portability / contracts (pick a theme, any theme), I thought about what becomes the lead story online. Celebrity scandal, it seems, sells online, too.

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
- Henry Mencken

They misunderestimated me.
- George W. Bush

The most–e-mailed lists... were a rich stew of global affairs, provocative insight, hot-button issues, pop culture, compelling narrative, and enlightened localism. In short, they were interesting.

The notion of a user-selected front page is an interesting thought, but we know from Digg and Techmeme that the democratized approach has its own issues. Imagine the fun if "optimizers" found a way to game the front page of the New York Times...

No, I'd rather see editors and producers get serious with the journalism stuff. Compete with YouTube on the celebrity noise if you must, but remember the audience that is attracted to quality content and that will share what it finds interesting.

Social media headlines
So, anyway, I'm indulging my Twitter habit today, and suddenly everyone in the bubble is talking about Scoble and his little tiff with Facebook. Eventually, everyone blogged their opinions, and it took over Techmeme. The Wall Street Journal has $100 oil; we get a screen-scraping scandal.

Once the story hit the blogs, it got picked up by the memetrackers, but if you really wanted to keep up, you had to follow Twitter—a huge time sink, and impossible to read it all. What if someone were to build a memetracker that summarized Twitter discussions in near-real time? Not just stats, popularity or visualization, but an actual summary? Then everyone could be in on the 30-second news cycle that is the social media echosphere.

Yeah, I know, it has all sorts of challenges. If it were easy, I'd do it myself.

Update: Enter Tweetmeme. Will this do the trick?

Tags: journalism twitter

Rather than tag one of his posts for the second time in a week, let me just recommend that you check out Jim Durbin's new blog, Social Media Headhunter. More companies are creating social media specialist positions (whatever the title), and Jim's combining his experience in both recruiting and social media in a way that promises to be valuable. It's something we're going to see more of.

Today's post is a list of social media interview questions for employers to ask. It reminds me of John Bell's social media score from a little over a year ago, but with a new set of questions that assume a clue. I won't steal Jim's thunder by copying them here, but question #3 made me pause—it's definitely not one of the usual suspects:

Name two social media sites/softwares/tools that have no business value.

Two reminders in one day
On the same day, I get an alert that one of my posts is in Jim Stroud's list of articles on social media recruiting. If you haven't thought about how recruiters may view and use social media in their work, there's good material there.

Using social media for intelligence gathering in my job search is how I got into this stuff, and I used to keep up with the recruitosphere. I've known that some recruiters use social media. As more companies start looking for people to run their own social media programs, it shouldn't be a surprise that the same recruiters would take the lead on helping clients find their own social media people.

Speaking of recruiting
My schedule doesn't permit me to attend ICWSM, but I did join the network, and I have to say, there are a bunch of researchers affiliated with universities attending. If I were looking for research staff for a social media analysis company, I think I'd send my CTO to Seattle at the end of the month to meet people.

Rival armies terrorized bystanders when a playground war broke out in Club Penguin after school Thursday. Pink, blue and orange penguins fled as green and black armies exchanged snowballs and trash talk in a series of battles on the popular children's site... Somewhere in there is a worthwhile insight, and while I'm looking for it, you can enjoy these images from the scene.

If you're the right age—and the little big boy in my house is right there—Club Penguin is a fun site that combines games and social features in a virtual world. Word on the playground is that CP has better games and inter-user interactions than WebKinz, though the plush WebKinz can be really cute, and the in-world accessories in WebKinz are more interesting. The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) liked Club Penguin, too, buying it last year for up to $700 million.

Part of what makes CP fun is the interaction among members via their penguin avatars. The entire experience is based in the virtual world, where kids can see and interact with other members. Many of the games are competitive (inner tube races down ski slopes, for example), and kids can type messages that are visible to others in the same area. (Site moderators watch to avoid the kinds of problems that make parents worry about their kids on the Internet.)

Oh, and they can throw snowballs any time they want. That part turns out to be relevant to today's events.

Virtual world, real social dynamics
In the course of some routine after-school research, my Junior Associate reported that CP wasn't fun today, because a bunch of kids had formed armies and were fighting a war. Usually, CP is populated with penguins of every color and accessory milling about, chatting (text) and playing games. Today, semi-organized groups of black and green penguins had a "war" (their term, not mine) that took over parts of the world. The usual, innocent chatter was mostly missing.

Everywhere Junior Associate went on the island, he found the war, and he didn't like it. He didn't like seeing all the snowballs being thrown, and he didn't like the trash talk. It was just like a real playground—the kids had self-organized around an activity that excluded some of the kids (possibly the younger kids?).

Of course, there are no real consequences when virtual snowballs are thrown. All that happens is that users see a lot of snowballs flying, but the kids know what those snowballs represent. My son's reaction wasn't too far from what you might expect from a real brawl. He reported some kids for bad language, and he wanted the "war" to stop. It's interesting that the virtual play-fight had virtually the same effect on him as a real one (yeah, I worked on that sentence).

So we had a fun little chat about online vs. real world, and then we had a little fun looking for a good picture of the action. Naturally, the big battle ended before I thought to grab an image, kind of like the perfect comeback line that pops into your head once the opportunity has passed.

Kids will be kids
Oh, wait, I promised some sort of insight, but all I'm coming up with is this: If you want to understand how people will interact online, first look at how they interact in the real world. True, online is different, and it's important to understand the differences. But human nature is the same. Group dynamics and behaviors from the real world shouldn't be a surprise when they show up online. Whether it's a play-fight in Club Penguin, in-crowd politics on Wikipedia or hateful gossip on Juicy Campus, you've seen it all before.

"Listen" is a cliché of social media—perhaps the cliché of social media. If you've been exposed to any Social Media 101 discussion, you've heard about listening. There's a reason for that: everyone who's thought about it concluded that listening is fundamental to success in social media. But what does it mean? More than you probably think.

First, listen.
Listening is a metaphor, of course. We're usually talking about reading, along with watching a little video and—maybe—some actual listening. But listen goes along with the Cluetrain-inspired conversation metaphor that's also ubiquitous in the field, so listen it is. But what do you listen for?

The obvious answer is that you listen for discussion of your company and its markets. You pay attention in case someone says something that's relevant to your business, and then you can act on it. That's where a lot of talk about listening ends.

There's more.
But listening is more than the simple gathering of facts from online sources. Listening is the beginning of social media strategy, because it's how you learn—not just facts, but the landscape. It's the continuing foundation of strategy, because it's how you detect changes in the environment. Listening is learning from the market. If you do it right, you can learn a lot.

Listen to your market
Following conversations about your market—what people are saying about your company, its products and its people—should be your first step in social media. Before you try to engage your market in social media, find out what is already happening. Then, don't stop. You need to know...

• Who is talking about you, and who is paying attention to them? You must understand the people.

• What are they saying (You knew this one)? Individually and collectively, what are they talking about?

• Where do the conversations happen? Is it in blogs? Communities or social networks? Product reviews? Which sites, specifically? What are the norms on those sites? What else is happening there?

• How do they talk about you? What's the tone of the conversation?

• Why are they talking? Based on what you learn about the people, what motivates them? If there's a complaint, is it someone looking for help, or is it just a rant from a critic who will not be satisfied? Can you tell the difference?

Learn the environment
Listening before speaking gives you time to learn the social media environment before you begin to participate in visible ways. During the initial information-gathering phase, take the time to develop the skills and understanding that will serve you later.

• Learn the tools. Social media is not primarily about technology, but there are some required tools. You wouldn't expect to monitor television without a TV, and you need a basic skill level to participate online. Fortunately, it's not that hard to figure out—all you need at the beginning is your web browser.

• Learn the rules, written and unwritten. They vary by online neighborhood, and if you want to participate, it helps to know them. Online communities can be rough on newcomers who barge in to sell; it's better to join in on their terms. Focus on the specific environments you discover when you ask where relevant conversations are happening.

• Find the experts in your own function, and read what they say. Whether it's marketing, PR or something else, someone has put real effort into figuring out useful lessons for you.

• Learn from the experience of others, both positive and negative. Pioneers have already tried things that might work for you, and they've certainly discovered some that won't. There's no excuse for repeating well-publicized blunders in an environment where everything is saved, discussed and searchable. If you're going to fail, at least have the creativity to discover a new way.

When you think about it, that's not so different from what you've always known. It's just that so much of the activity is on the Internet, and everyone in the world can share their opinions with everyone in the world now.

And that's my version of Listening 101. From there, it gets into the management layer of social media—organization, processes, tools and practices.

Let's say you want to follow someone on Twitter without letting them know. Maybe it's a competitor, and you're interested in what they have to say, but maybe they don't yet know you're competing with them. How can you follow them without broadcasting your interest? If they're protecting their tweets, you can't. But in most cases, it's easy. All you need is social media's universal solvent: RSS.

If you want to be stealthy, you can't just click follow, because that sends a notification to the person you're following. Not stealthy. Instead, load up the Twitter page of the person you want to track, and look for the link to the RSS feed at the bottom. Subscribe to the feed, and you'll see the person's tweets without notifying them.

Seeing both sides
If you want to see the other side of your target's conversations, set up a search feed on Tweet Scan. Search for the target's handle in the first box to see public responses to that user, and then subscribe to the feed for that search. (It's not a bad idea to subscribe to that search on your own account, in case you miss an @ reply.)

Not community-approved
Using RSS like this means you lose some of the communications benefits of following and being followed, and it's not really in keeping with the community vibe on Twitter. In most cases, it's better to follow the people who interest you and be a part of the community. But if want to see what someone says without announcing your presence, or if you really don't want to use a separate client for monitoring Twitter, RSS does the trick.

If you tolerate the lower signal:noise of Twitter and want to follow me, I'm @gilliatt. Original, I know.

It's Twitter's fault. No, it's Facebook, or email, or—wait, social media is about people, so it's our fault. There's just too much to keep up with these days, and more people are pointing it out. Rubel crashed. Scoble cried uncle. Calcanis went bankrupt. And everyone is talking about signal-to-noise ratio. As in, if you want to get the good stuff (the signal) in social media, you have to pick it out of a lot of junk (the noise). They're right, but that's just the start.

Yes, words are useless. Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble! Too much of it, darling. Too much! That is why I show you my work. That is why you are here.
Edna Mode, The Incredibles

(RSS subscribers, click through for the video.)

The signal-to-noise metaphor is all about source selection and filtering—finding the information you care about amid all the other stuff. The chocolate factory is about scaling processing capabilities—what you do with the signal once you've separated it from the noise.

Bodies or tools
Improving S/N is crucial, but it's only the first step. As the total volume of relevant, useful information increases, you have to increase your capabilities to keep up. Your options are the usual suspects: bodies and tools. Adding bodies is easy to understand, if a bit unworkable on an individual level. Even the most diligent worker can't work more than about 28 hours a day.

Which leaves tools. On an individual level, that includes email automation and using RSS to bring information to you. The new lifestream aggregators, such as FriendFeed may fit this description, though honestly, I've been too busy to try them.

In organizations, you get to choose between bodies and tools, but you're still limited by that 28-hour day thing. Do you add people or invest in better tools to know what's going on (or do you declare market intelligence bankruptcy in the face of the overwhelming riches of available data)? Do you hire an outside company to track it for you? How do they answer the bodies vs. tools question, and what does that mean to you?

(If it's all too much, these questions go to the heart of the research and consulting that I offer.)

What do you do?
This topic is perilously close to the human vs. computer analysis question, which we'll come back to soon. For now, what tools do you use to keep up with the growing flood (at the individual or organizational level)? Is it still about improving signal-to-noise for you, or have you reached the point where the signal itself is too much to handle with your current methods?

An article in this week's BusinessWeek is stirring up a good discussion about social media and ethics in China. People aren't thrilled with the unfortunate choice of metaphor in the title, either: Inside the War Against China's Blogs. Since I linked to the original article, it seems only fair to point out some of the thoughtful responses.

• Sam Flemming, Thoughts on recent Business Week article on IWOM in China
  
• Will Moss, Is it "war" against Chinese blogs?
  
• Paul Denlinger, The PR Problem for Chinese Online Public Relations Firms
  
• David Wolf, China's war for the soul of online corporate communications
  
• China Web2.0 Review, The PR Problems of China’s Social Media

Bloggers who complain about their bad experiences with airlines: outspoken but unrepresentative, or the tip of the iceberg? When one blogger details the kind of travel day we all hope to avoid, what purpose is served? Is any airline learning anything from all this, or is it just the new way to escalate a customer complaint?

It's been almost 18 months since stranded passengers incidents started making headlines (and passengers started organizing online). Since then, the conventional wisdom has accepted that the U.S. airline industry is broken. The new standard is to be thankful if the airline can get you to Point B, never mind on time or with a smile.

David Ignatius writes about the problems in his column in today's Washington Post. He included an amazing quote from Robert Crandall, the retired chairman/CEO of American Airlines:

Our airlines, once world leaders, are now laggards in every category, including fleet age, service quality and international reputation. Fewer and fewer flights are on time. Airport congestion has become a staple of late-night comedy shows. ... Airline service, by any standard, has become unacceptable.
—Robert Crandall, 10 June 2008

• Joseph Jaffe had a bad day with Delta Airlines.
  
• Continental didn't do any better for Boris Evelson.

Why complain?
Aside from the interesting reading about the bad luck of others—and face it, it's painfully fascinating stuff—what's the purpose of the complaint post? What are the benefits of complaining, in general as well as specifically about airlines?

1. Escalation. One possibility (explicitly stated in Jaffe's post) is that the blogger is still looking for a resolution of the complaint after the failure of normal methods. A side effect of company listening is that blogs can become an alternative channel for customer service, which bloggers now know. Delta noticed Jaffe's post; so far, there's no sign that Continental saw Evelson's.

2. Warning others. It's hard to think of a U.S. airline that doesn't have similar examples recently, but in less challenged industries, complaint posts can warn others of potential problems. From the blogger's perspective, it can be a valuable contribution to a community.

3. Ulterior motives. Commenters on Jaffe's post make an issue of his work on behalf of American Airlines, which he discloses in the post. I don't question his motives (nor do I care), but it does raise the point that some may complain because of an interest in a competitor.

4. Craziness. Complaints aren't always rational (not implying anything about the example posts!). Some people make a hobby of it and don't necessarily have a valid complaint.

5. Venting. Sometimes, you just have to let it out at the end of a bad day. A blog provides a public spot for a very visible primal scream.
   

1. Customer satisfaction. If customers are blogging in an attempt to receive service (escalation), companies need to decide whether and how to respond. Companies in the computer industry are answering this with formal links between customer service and social media monitoring activities. However, as David Churbuck points out, listening for customer service has side effects worth considering.

2. Insight. Complainers have been known to have a valid point. Monitoring and analysis of online discussions can identify issues (or opportunities) that you're not aware of. While you're busy defending yourself, don't miss the opportunity to extract the insights that are available in both quantitative and qualitative forms.

3. Online reputation management. After dealing with customer complaints and extracting insights, what's left is managing the fallout. Online reputation management combines a variety of strategies aimed at influencing search engine results, online conversations and, generally, opinions in the company's favor. This post is already too long to go into the details, but ignoring online complaints is not usually the recommended strategy.

As for the airlines, I think we're past the point of worrying about the reputation of any individual U.S. airline. The anecdotes cover too many companies. Now, the whole industry is the before picture in a turnaround story.

Research vendors: Is anyone working on an analysis of online discussions and airlines? I would think it could make a good source for the next industry-in-distress article in your favorite business publication.

If we haven't talked lately, you might not have heard about the theme I've been developing. Last year, I was calling it "the management layer of social media," but I knew that was too geeky. So I refined it to "managing social media." While so much of the talk is about the big ideas and cultural changes surrounding social media adoption, this is all about how to make it work in large organizations. I expect to spend a major piece of the next few years on managing social media.

You can't manage social media!
If this were another post on how companies should listen and participate in social media, I'd be prepared to agree with the standard objection about loss of control. But I'm not talking about control. This is about what companies do internally to manage their social media activities. Just Do It is a great ad campaign, but it's not how things happen in medium or large companies.

Today, I'm sharing the general framework. It doesn't spell anything, but it can be fun to pronounce—especially if you pronounce both Ps...

Organization
Policy
Process
Technology

Connecting listening to business processes
The first topic is something from the process column, which I've heard as an issue from multiple sources: how to connect social media listening and engagement to business processes. I've encountered at least four different organizational approaches so far, all of which seem to work. I'm lining up the case studies for a report; if you know of a good example of a company that's doing it well, I'd like to know about it. (Yes, I know about Dell. We all know about Dell.)

Sorry, no punch line. I'm sharing the news of Jim Tobin's new book, Social Media is a Cocktail Party (Why You Already Know the Rules of Social Media Marketing). It's a good effort to condense much of the current wisdom into a quick, readable introduction for those who need a quick ride up the learning curve. (If I were a copywriter, I'd probably say something here about reading on for a special offer.)

Cocktail Party is Social Media 101 for marketers. It lacks the depth of other recent books on my pile, but it serves up most of the big ideas with a casual, readable tone. At 178 pages, it's about right for a flight, in both length and weight.

Jim's a friend, so of course I'm plugging his book. But this looks like an introduction that will help a lot of people who are just getting started.

Step right up
To kick things off, Jim is making a donation to Make-A-Wish Foundation for every copy of Cocktail Party sold today (20 November).

But wait, there's more! :-) Yesterday, Jim gave me three copies to give away. To ensure fairness (and because it'll be fun), I'm going to let my 8-year-old Junior Associate pick the winners. Just tell him that you'd like a free copy in the comments below, and I'll announce the winners tomorrow.

As Triangle Tweetup, our local gathering of Twitter fans, was getting started last night, I noticed a series of great points coming out of the social media discussion at IABC Toronto at the same time. Surrounded by over a hundred energetic Twitter users, I wondered how associations like IABC, AMA, PRSA, CIPR, and CPRS—forgive me for not knowing all of them around the world—could tap into the energy of local social media communities. Once the initial culture shock wore off, I think they would find huge benefits from a total immersion experience.

I promise this won't become one of those overdone "Twitter's so cool!" posts, but let me point out what happened within the span of, oh, 30 seconds last night:

• The quick presentations at Triangle Tweetup started (good stuff).

• I got a direct message (DM) through Twitter about a possible speaking opportunity (very good stuff).

• I started seeing very good points being made in a panel discussion 700 miles away (#iabcto). Sorry I couldn't be there, but the distance... (and there was a tweetup I needed to attend).

Hmmm...
For the association folks whose members want (need) to learn their way around social media: What would happen if...

• your association sponsored a gathering of the local social media crowd and promoted the (free) event to your membership?

• your association teamed up with the social media crowd for a cobranded event?

• your chapter leaders explored the local social media scene to discover local speakers for meetings?

• your members figured out how much they can learn when they discover tweetups, Social Media Club, or Social Media Breakfast?
  

The only question is, can old-school marketers and communicators handle the unfiltered social media experience? We don't want any heads to explode.

Most of the continuing saga of Facebook's updated terms of service (TOS) has focused on the implications for personal privacy and ownership of personal information and content. I have a different question: how many companies are considering the TOS implications when they use Facebook for marketing campaigns? Are they casually handing over rights to their intellectual property, too?

I group online TOS "agreements" with the shrink-wrap end-user license agreements (EULA) that come with commercial software. They may technically be contracts, but most customers don't read them and don't really agree to them. It's not really possible to read all the agreements that come our way, and in any case, they're not negotiable. When interesting or useful online services offer take-it-or-leave-it terms, most of us take it.

Usually, things work out. In real life—not the world described in TOS and EULA legalese—we are able to function because terms aren't enforced to the limit. Company statements, such as those coming from Facebook this week, tacitly acknowledge that rational management doesn't enforce every right that Legal tosses into license terms. So while it may be possible for Facebook to assert ownership of users' content, they're smart enough to realize that wouldn't be a good idea.

Yes, but...
Commercial contracts, though, should be different. Companies really shouldn't agree to unpleasant terms just because they're hard to read (you have professionals for that task, right?). If the standard TOS makes claims on company content that go too far, they should be negotiated. The question is, are companies really doing that, or are they clicking "accept" and moving along, just like most individual users?

I don't have the answers on this one. I suspect that big brands are negotiating real contracts with Facebook and others, while smaller companies accept the TOS. My parting thought for you is that if your company is getting into social media, your legal folks should pay attention to the terms. If something's not right, fix it before you start. If it can't be fixed—what other ideas were you working on?

Although my wife and I cross out publicity waivers in our child's permission forms, I am not a lawyer. Anything that looks like legal advice here is just my personal opinion.

One of the more interesting sessions at BarCamp Charlotte was on using social media for social change. We didn't make much progress for the non-profits in attendance; mostly we learned that they need to connect with people who would like to help them. The session did, however, prime me to notice when two different programs focused on truly global issues wandered across my awareness the same day. What started as a discussion about building word of mouth for a fundraiser shifted to something much more ambitious.

zyOzy
I learned about zyOzy (zee-Oh-zee) when @zyOzyfounder followed me on Twitter. For me, at least, that still gets some attention. zyOzy applies a mix of events, social media and entrepreneurship to support efforts to end extreme poverty in Africa and India.

In addition to their blog, the site links to an extended online presence that includes Squidoo, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and a wiki. Who says you need a budget for an integrated media campaign?

Ushahidi
An old friend who now works in the NGO world pointed me toward Ushahidi, a platform for crowdsourcing crisis information. Ushahidi's original project compiled and mapped incident reports in Kenya during its 2008 post-election crisis. Reports were collected from citizen reporters using mobile phones.

The underlying technology is now being developed into an open-source platform that will be available for public and private monitoring of active situations anywhere. While in private beta, Ushahidi is being used for current projects focusing on Gaza, Congo, and South Africa, as well as a follow-up Kenya project.

What can you do with almost no budget?
"Social media are free" is the first myth to be busted—especially in a corporate marketing context—but most of the costs are driven by the need to spend time building social media programs. Free social media tools and open-source platforms, such as Ushahidi or the BuzzMonitor, put a lot of capability in the hands of NGOs that are more likely to have time and volunteers than a big budget.

I'm starting to think that matrix management is a critical skill for corporate social media efforts. That's not to suggest that companies have to start with their reorg boots on, but the combination of low budgets and cross-functional impacts suggests that a little matrix thinking could be constructive. For companies where the social media team taps the resources of multiple functional groups, you're already there.

Two data points in today's information flood reminded me of the ad hoc approach I've seen before:

• Forrester (via RWW) found that three quarters of marketers in their recent survey have $100,000 or less budgeted for social media.

• During today's Blogwell recap call, Lizzie Schreier of Allstate answered a question about team size by saying, "The social media team is Marcia." Others are involved, but it's not a full-time assignment.

It makes sense, really. The challenges—and benefits—of social media touch the company across functional silos, and no one group is likely to own responsibility for all of it. If you shift from an ownership mindset to a leadership mindset, you start creating a form of matrix management, working with people who aren't assigned to the project full-time.

Look at these matrix management challenges and decide if any of them sound familiar. It strikes me as another opportunity to apply lessons learned from earlier experiences.

Update: The Allstate call is now available as a free audio download. I recommend it.

Is listening creepy? I'm seeing that word more lately. As much as we tell companies that The Right Way to do social media is to listen and engage, some people just don't want to hear back from companies they talk about. Somehow, they've developed an expectation of privacy in public communication channels.

They're mistaken. But it's in your company's interest to avoid creeping out the customers, anyway.

The party metaphor for social media describes a social approach to entering existing conversations, but partygoers need to remember that we don't have loud music or quiet corners here. Unless they pick a private spot, their conversation is public, and modern search tools make it available to everyone. Conversations about a company—especially complaints—are going to catch the company's attention.

Think of the executive who overhears a conversation about his company at the party. He'd listen and find a way to enter the conversation if needed.

Avoid the trench coat
Companies can do everything right, and some people will find it creepy, anyway. They're not thinking about what it means when companies don't pay attention. We have plenty of examples where the lack of a response (or an insufficiently speedy response—*cough* Motrin) becomes the basis for a new round of complaints—I don't have to convince you that silence is not usually the best response, do I?

So what can we do to minimize the creep factor?

• Don't stalk everyone who casually mentions your business. We've all had to shake a hungry salesman, and nobody likes it. Twitter follows may be especially likely to trigger a shudder.

• Work on your approach; avoid language that falls on the floor like a bad pickup line. Clear, open and helpful are a good start.

• When you respond publicly to a public complaint, offer to take the follow-up discussion to a private channel, such as email or phone. Expect anything you say or do in the private channel to become public, because it might.

• Be very careful about using everything you know about a customer when you respond. People probably aren't ready to learn that you can map their social media activity to their account at your company (with all of their personal contact information). Give them time.

• Expect some people to react badly to the most well-intentioned contact. Apologize, recover and move along. You can't win 'em all.
  

Tales from the trenches?
What are you doing to avoid that uncomfortable response to your online engagement? How's it working for you? Has anyone called you creepy for responding to them yet?

If teenagers think Twitter is creepy, they're not going to like company responses in Twitter, either.

Photo by byungkyupark.

Talking with a friend who is smart but outside of the bubble, I was surprised that one of my usual comments surprised her. If you really want to find all of the insights on social media that might be relevant to your business, you need to track down some closely related buzzwords: Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, community, and WOM.

These buzzwords aren't synonyms, but they're very closely related. Serious discussions of one tend to bring up the others. The catch is this: events, organizations, suppliers, and thought leaders tend to be aligned with one of them, so it's easy to miss significant contributions to the discussion if you focus on only one.

For those just learning social media, I usually recommend looking up some of these other topics. Here's why:

• Web 2.0
  This buzzword has dropped off the hype charts, but before social media caught on, people were thinking about many of the same trends under the Web 2.0 banner. Web 2.0 lives on in the 2.0 appended to so many buzzwords, such as...

• Enterprise 2.0
  Social media inside the firewall—that's E 2.0 in a nutshell. I realize the vision is a bit different, but the tools are the same, and those who start thinking about using social media inside their companies should know that a different group of thinkers is already on the case. We're seeing the realization that doing social media well (in business) and applying E 2.0 principles are closely related; Dachis Group's social business design construct is an early example of linking the trends.

• Community
  Who you're trying to connect with through social media. Emphasizes the strategy of connecting with people instead of the tools. Can you really talk about social media for more than ten minutes without using the word community?

• Word of Mouth
  What the marketer wants to encourage through social media. Go to a WOMMA meeting, and much of the talk is about WOM in social media.

Rather than debating the merits of a label or limiting ourselves to label-induced intellectual silos, let's focus on figuring out the concepts and making them work. The whole is way more interesting than the sum of the parts.

All together, now: "Companies should listen to social media." We all know the advice, but do you have the impression that listening is a purely defensive strategy? It's not. You just have to move beyond the common, but limited, interpretation of listening.

How often does your defense score?
In a recent survey of management, marketing and HR executives in the US, Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law found a strong defensive leaning in respondents' current use of social media. The top reasons they use social media?

1. Read what customers may be saying about our company (52%)
   
2. Monitor a competitor's use of social media (47%)
   
3. See what current employees may be sharing (36%)
   
4. Check the background of a prospective employee (25%)
   
5. None/personal use only (16%)
   

Put your listening on offense
Think about my earlier list of conversations you should care about, and let's come up with some things you can do with the information you find. Defensive ideas are easy (and rampant). Let's focus on putting some points on the board. I'll start:

• Spot sales leads where prospects ask questions or contact you through public channels.

• Figure out a competitor's plans from their public statements and personnel changes.

• Figure out a customer's plans (and needs) from their public statements.

• Identify a competitor's weakness in online complaints; launch a product or program to exploit it.

• Identify a product or service opportunity in online discussions; fill the gap before competitors notice it.

Listening can be defensive—and if you're not monitoring for customer complaints and other problems, start. But don't stop with defense; think about how to apply it to advantage, too. Although it sounds passive, listening doesn't have to be either passive or defensive. Don't be satisfied until you find the path to profit for your business.

Thanks to Deni Kasrel and Bill Ives for pointing out the report and the defensive tone of responses to the question.

Everyone says that listening is central to social media success, but over time, we've fallen into a too-narrow interpretation of the metaphor. Think about it: if listening means monitoring, then we have too many words. Fortunately, they don't need to mean the same thing. We just need to expand the way we think about listening.

Here's the definition of listening implied by many posts and presentations:

Defensive keyword monitoring of social media for customer problems and complaints that need a communications or customer service response.

How can we expand the definition of listening?

• From a defensive posture to developing valuable market intelligence.

• From keyword monitoring to applying all of the technologies available to discover and analyze relevant online content and activity.

• From monitoring to metrics, mining, and interpretation. It's a metaphor, so there's no reason to be stuck with the word's literal meaning.

• From social media to all media and customer communications.

• From a focus on problems and complaints to an interest in all relevant conversations.

• From PR, marketing, and customer service to anywhere the information has value to the business.

• By collaborating across measurement silos to find the right methodology for the task.