Social Media... What a Place to Be!(?)

For companies today, hopefully it’s “Social Media… What a place to be!”

Occasionally instead it’s “Social Media… What a place to be?”

More often than not, though it’s “Social Media… What? A place to be.”


Punctuation isn’t usually given much gravitas today (except of course for fans of the Lynne Truss bestseller) but it can make a large difference in some things, Social Media being one.

The hot business buzzword topic has gone from unknown to the “it idea” in the span of a few short years… and was the topic of the recent BusinessWeek feature story “Beware Social Media Snake Oil.” As companies large and small figure out what if anything to do around the Social Media space, mistakes are easy to make. These can of course be in the execution of Social Media strategies and tactics, but can also be back in the all-important deciding what to do phase.

Back to the three statements above:

Social Media… What a place to be! – Something felt a company invested in Social Media and pleased as punch with the results.

Social Media… What a place to be? – Something felt by a company invested in Social Media and that hasn’t gotten what they expected. Also could be felt by a company slammed by others via Social Media communication.

Social Media… What? A place to be. – Something felt by… most everyone else. Companies (and the people in them) don’t want to be left out, but are trying to figure out the best approach to take around Social Media. This “what to do?” is the big question to be asked up front and the companies that put the most thought into it are likely going to be the ones who are happy with their experience around Social Media. As is detailed below, this figuring out process needs to include not just what a company might say via Social Media, but what's said about it.

Social Media Background

It’s been already stated here that Social Media is a new concept, but to understand it, one needs to look at where it lies on a communication (note that the word technology isn’t used here) continuum.

Prior to the wacky worldly-wide interweb-net, people communicated with one other largely via the telephone, letters and meeting in person. Conversely, companies communicated with people via the telephone, print ads, in person interaction and television.

Now with the internet enmeshed in our lives, people communicate with one another via… the telephone (including text messages), letters (including e-mails) and meeting in person as well as oh yeah, via the internet. People and companies communicate with one another (person to person and company to person) in many of the same ways as before. In terms of company to person communication, television hasn’t gone away, nor has direct mail, sponsorship or cold-calling over the phone.

With the internet (and specifically Social Media via the internet) added, though, there’s a new method of company to person communication, but probably even more important (and new to the scene via Social Media) person to person communication about companies.

Social Media Vehicles

In looking at Social Media, one has to keep in mind there’s widely different forms out there and from his book about blogging, Scott Rosenberg gives both the history of that particular Social Media vehicle and how it relates to some of the even newer Social Media vehicles.

Rosenberg's theory is that MySpace, Facebook and Twitter don't signal the end of blogs as the intent and execution of them is so different than that of blogging. He writes of how these sites can be considering a telephone type communication in that they're short form contact and blogging is about a longer form publishing of thoughts.

Regardless, all of these communication vehicles along with YouTube and even texting should be considered Social Media in that they deal with the idea of information disseminating… whether that be directly from a company or from people passing along communication themselves about a company. As a result, companies considering Social Media should look at Social Media from both perspectives… what and how they want to communicate with people and what’s being said by others.

Company to Person via Social Media

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs among other Social Media vehicles are all new methods of communication, but frankly, they’re still just communication vehicles. A company has a target audience, figures out where to reach them and then crafts a message. That isn’t necessarily different than the typical 30 second ad buy on network television… which still can definitely have its place in a world that includes Social Media. What is new, though, is how Social Media as an original communication vehicle (or vehicles) can be used to string together and supplement other forms of messaging to customers. Result is that any company working in the Social Media space needs make sure that via either in-house or outside experts, they understand how to best use the tools. It's in a way akin to how if a company is going to pay for the aforementioned 30 second network TV buy, they want to nail the message.

Person to Person about Companies via Social Media

In terms of Social Media, here’s where things get really interesting. The biggest difference between traditional communication for companies and today’s communication including Social Media is control. Previously the company controlled the message and could target, filter and adjust it to the audience.

Today, however, Social Media enables a message to be passed along virally outside the control of a company so it becomes crucial to influence that as much as possible. How to influence? Well...

You’ve got to both get it right the first time in your messaging, have people who are paid to monitor person to person communication about your firm and then be responsive when you need to be. In terms of the response, it doesn’t help to know that everyone in Social Media is talking negatively about you if valid complaints are not then acted on. Once they are out there, it then becomes a case of both action and communication of that action... hopefully through the same Social Media channel that the complaints came in on.

These would appear to be things that any company (whether they’re employing Social Media or not) needs to do, but the moral of the story is that whether you’re doing things yourself or not, you’re active in Social Media. Really, it's a way to propagate information, whether you’re doing it as a company or people are doing it for you.

Hence the need to try to set up the framework to be able to thrive (say powerful things as a company, but more importantly have powerful, and good, things said about you) in this Social Media space.

Book Review - "Trust Agents" by Chris Brogan & Julien Smith

Finished reading "Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust" and found it to be a solid read with lots of things to check out.



It's written by Julien Smith and Chris Brogan (who is probably the more well known of the two as a result of his blog and associated Social Media evangelism). I heard about the book from the Dec 2009 BusinessWeek story "Beware Social Media Snake Oil" and found him to have a lot of interesting things to say.

Social Media as a category is a fascinating growth area (for both business and interpersonal communication) and I've written about and linked to a good amount of content on it... much of that consolidated into this blog post from a few weeks ago. Linked within there was four or five magazine articles and three different books that deal at least a bit with Social Media... one by Jeff Jarvis, one Sarah Lacy and one Scott Rosenberg.

Back to "Trust Agents" itself, though... having already said that it's a good read for someone interesting in Social Media, there's probably also value is detailing the things I found of most interest and websites from the book I want to check out.

So... stuff of note (you know, to me, so some of this is straight out of the book and some my ideas as a result of content in the book):

Intro - The aforementioned Chris Brogan blog.

Chapter One: Trust, Social Capital, and Media
- Idea of a Trust Agent building a portfolio of themselves through their online interactions... a very real and complete resume of sorts.
- Things to consider around blogging... usage of Word Press as a hosting service a step above Blogger, usage of Copy Blogger for writing and both LinkedIn Answers & LinkedIn Reading List for Social Media content, commenting on other blogs.

Chapter Two: Make Your Own Game
- The Four Hour Workweek blog by Tim Ferriss and how he both wrote a bestselling book of the same name and basically created the category of Lifestyle Design from scratch.
- Links and comments are basically a form of currency is building a personal brand on the web.
- The Guy Kawasaki blog.
- Hacking as a way of doing something different... and better. Much easier to hack work when at a small firm than large corporation.
- Affiliate Marketing site Commission Junction.

Chapter Three: One of Us
- Quality of website / blog gives a powerful impression of someone.
- Importance of being human in online communications.
- the Guy Kawasaki website Alltop... featuring tons and tons of content in different areas.
- Concept of searching the web (possibly using Technorati or Google Blogsearch) for groups interested in the things you're interesting in.
- Yet again, the idea of comments on other's blogs as a valuable form of currency. Site to check out around comments is BackType.

Chapter Four: Archimedes Effect
- Chapter is about the idea of leverage... in both time utilization and accomplishment.
- Idea of RSS Reader usage, such as Google Reader.
- The seemingly non-profit focused website Drupal as well as the Chris Brogan launched parenting site Dad-O-Matic.

Chapter Five: Agent Zero
- No, not a Gilbert Arenas (he of the Agent Zero nickname) reference.
- The idea seems to be a restating of the Trust Agent concept... someone who uses the web to make connections, between people, companies and ideas.
- Links, links, links and... links.
- Dynamic usage of LinkedIn.

Chapter Six: Human Artist
- As stated before, have to be human on the web.
- If hoping for a response from someone you're reaching out to... first make a connection, then look at being a part of their world by commenting, then perhaps reach out in a short manner with your specific question.
- Keep your connections live by regular touches.

Chapter Seven: Build an Army & Chapter Eight: The Trust Agent
- Getting into summarizing the prior chapters, but still valuable... thinking about the idea of Make Your Own Game and what future businesses (and categories of business) are to be built.
- If it's important to you, there's value in it... and probably others as well. Good principle to think about when looking at where to invest time and energy.

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Intent in this blog post wasn't to provide a Cliff Notes version of the book, but rather to create a record of what I felt of import from it and the links it pointed to. Really an interesting topic this Social Media thing and quite frankly, someone else would likely have different ideas that stand out to them from reading the book.

Highly recommend to anyone interested in the topic.

Social Media Blog Posts

Earlier this week I did a post that listed out the business topics most frequently covered in this blog... and which tackled the blog topic area of touch-screen technology. For the purpose of this post, I want to start looking at another large business topic... that of Social Media.

The area deserves attention it's become ubiquitous from a person to person communication perspective through mediums like blogs, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook among others. Arguably even more important, though, is the corporate perspective as companies attempt to use many of these same channels to reach consumers.


From either approach, Social Media is a big deal that I've written about and linked to quite a bit here. With this post I want to bring together some of those posts and links...


Books & Associated Content

Back in Sept 2008 I did a post titled "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good" by Sarah Lacy which was about... yep, Sarah Lacy's book on Web 2.0 companies. It was an interesting read in that the book looks at the newest web entries with particular focus on platform companies such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. The post above also links to a BusinessWeek excerpt from the Lacy book which focuses on the platform company Ning.

In Feb 2009 I did a blog post linking to another BusinessWeek excerpt... this time from the Jeff Jarvis book "What Would Google Do?" As to the book itself, I found it an extremely interesting read and wrote a review of it here. While it's true that the book isn't about Social Media, Jarvis is a prolific writer on web topics (often via his website BuzzMachine) and his writing deserves mention in any discussion of web or "new internet" stuff.

The last "Social Media as a topic" book I posted on was "Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters" by Scott Rosenberg which I reviewed here. An excellent book which looks at blogs and their import... as both an ongoing medium and the precursor of other Social Media mediums like Facebook and MySpace (among others).


Magazine Pieces

The most in-depth Social Media magazine writing referenced in this blog was probably in a June 2009 post titled All Around the Social Networking Mulberry Bush. Linked to within was a Time Magazine cover story on Twitter and BusinessWeek cover story about online relationships.

Also deserving of mention here, though, are three additional blog posts done. The first was an Apr 2009 post which referenced the Jarvis book along with the concept of the how relatively easy it is to launch an internet company today. The other two posts had various and sundry articles on Social Media companies and concepts linked... with the first including Facebook and LinkedIn and the second Amazon, Facebook and mobile commerce.

Lots of writing out there about a big topic... which will only get more important as both person to person and company to consumer communication moves forward. Fun times for those who understand and work in this area.

"Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters" by Scott Rosenberg

I first heard about Scott Rosenberg's "Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters" from a BusinessWeek review of the book and found it to be an excellent book on a few different levels.

Book Content

The beginning of the book details some of the early blogging from people like Justin Hall... along with his "dark night" blogging sign-off video. From this point, Rosenberg goes into the "warblog" movement out of 9/11 and rise of political blogs. The influence of these has been significant ranging from the blog Little Green Footballs helping call into question the "60 Minutes" piece on George W Bush and his National Guard record to Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo blog helping both fight off the Bush plan to kill social security & bringing to light the Alberto Gonzalez scandal around firing Justice Department lawyers.

Also featured in the book is the blog Dooce from Heather Armstrong. Sitting firmly in the "narrative life story" blog category, this blog author became famous for being fired from a job due to her blogging about it. From that point, she's written some very personal stuff that's at the same time very funny (and it's cool that "getting dooced" has since become the descriptive phrase for someone getting fired as a result of their blogging.

From this same influential blogger category, I found interesting mention of Robert Scoble and his video on how to scan through 600+ RSS Feeds daily.

Additionally, there's detail given by Rosenberg as to some mechanics that have helped blogging become so successful. The range from the “last in first out” (or "stacking") principle of blog postings to features such as Permalink, Trackback (or Backlinks in Google Blogger) and RSS Feeds (which were of course mentioned above).

Another area that's touched on towards the end of the book is around the introduction and subsequent popularization of Social Media sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. Rosenberg's theory (which seems sound to me) is that these sites don't signal the end of blogs as the intent and execution of them is so different than that of blogging. The new Social Media forms can almost be considering a telephone type communication in that they're about short form communication and contact with others. Blogging on the other hand is about a longer form publishing of thoughts. There is of course some blend between blogging and Social Media in each direction, but also differences.


What It Meant to Me

Everything above describes the book and it's contents... good things for sure to have in any review of a book. Below, though, I want to touch on some of the things that struck me while reading and I "may very well" carry forward.

The basic concept I took is that there's so much that could be done with a blog. There could be important political discourse, could be insightful and profound narrative, or could simply be thoughts and ideas about things of import that a blog author wants to pass on.

I particularly enjoyed mention from Rosenberg's book about the blog Boing Boing. The statement of the blog is "A Directory of Wonderful Things" and Rosenberg's discussion is around how the four blog authors really enjoy doing the site. At the end of the day, that should be the reason that someone writes a blog and whether it "becomes a hit" isn't as important (and especially isn't as controllable).

I also was fascinated by the personal narrative quality of Dooce. I'll have to see what direction my writing takes me, but am interested in spending time on and exploring this "personal narrative" writing. As long as it's done with the best quality I can muster (after all, a blog is a written record (or "resume" in work terms) and I'm enjoying writing it, things should work out just fine like.

Finally, back to the book... solid read and further details can be found on Rosenberg's blog and his "Say Everything..." book website.