Web 2.0 Marketing 101

Earlier this month I gave a webinar on the fundamentals of online, social, and Web 2.0 marketing to a group in Texas. The client wanted the basics for an audience who was hearing the buzz about the potential of Web 2.0 but had operated primarily in the offline sphere until now. They wanted pointers on how to get started and where to focus initial efforts.

Increasingly, I'm running into organizations in this situation, as the Web 2.0 mentality trickles into the mainstream. It's exciting to see so much interest in these strategies and tactics. The Obama campaign's high-profile use of social marketing to organize and raise money attracted lots of attention.

Ultimately Web 2.0 will drive profound structural changes in the media, advertising, marketing, and PR industries. Old barriers and hierarchies will fall and new opportunities will emerge. It will take awhile to overcome the inertia of the status quo, but every company that adopts a Web 2.0 approach moves all of us a step closer to the new order.

Meanwhile, a lot of businesses are looking for help taking those first steps. My presentation was very basic, but not everyone lives and breathes Web 2.0 the way we do in Silicon Valley. If you want to review fundamentals or know someone who does, here are the slides:

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View SlideShare presentation. (tags: social marketing)

"Yanked by Yelp": When Social Media Goes Bad

In retrospect it seems inevitable: email spawned spam; search engines engendered "black hat" SEO, now it's time for Spam 2.0, when spam enters the domain of user-generated content. An article last week in the San Francisco Chronicle tells the story: a network of mutual back-scratchers--primarily small businesses--exchanged favorable reviews on the locally powerful Yelp review site. When Yelp discovered the spam scam it deleted most of the offenders' reviews, prompting outrage and talk of a class-action lawsuit from those "yanked by Yelp."

Yelp defends the decision as vital to protecting the integrity of the brand, much as major search engines must be diligent about demoting or purging irrelevant or falsely inflated links. Companies hosting email and search services spend significant resources trying (not entirely successfully) to purge spam. The Yelp case gives notice to Web 2.0 businesses that it's their turn now to mount big cleanup efforts. Chances are that, as with other forms of spam, Spam 2.0 will remain a fixture on these sites for the foreseeable future. Spammers will get smarter and the effort required to keep them at bay will only increase. Over the longer term, Spam 2.0 will be a bigger problem for social media than current headaches such as inappropriate content or language.

Perversely, the rise of Spam 2.0 is a positive indicator for Web 2.0. Spam only afflicts the largest and most successful web apps with the greatest commercial potential: email, search...you see the pattern. The rise of social spam is a strong rebuttal to doubts about the popularity, credibility, sustainability, growth prospects, and revenue opportunities of community-oriented Web 2.0 models.

Yelp took the right approach: they acknowledged companies' need for a role in the conversation and started Yelp for Business Owners, which encourages owners to "claim" their businesses on the site, communicate openly through a structured channel, and use customer comments to improve operations instead of being too quick to refute negative information. The good guys will be glad for the opportunity; but Spam 2.0 is probably here to stay.

Interesting Mobile-Related Web Sites

I've been increasingly involved with mobile projects lately, as this platform rapidly matures into a full-featured medium for social interaction, information, and commerce. That's led to a couple of interesting web sites that throw light on where mobile technology is headed. If they're not already on your radar, they're worth checking out:

1) Nokia's MOSH: Nokia started this very Web 2.0 content sharing site specifically for mobile content--audio, video, text, games, software, and images. The good news: it's not limited to content for Nokia handsets; the aim is to facilitate sharing content on all mobile devices. I like the focus on content across media types, as well as the assumption that mobile is a central platform for consuming as wide a variety of content as the PC. Added to Nokia's acquisiton of Mobile OS company Symbian, the MOSH initiative makes it clear Nokia wants to provide much more than handsets in the mobile future.

2) Alcatel-Lucent's Teen Lab blog: Telecom giant Alcatel-Lucent spends a significant amount each year studying the global youth market for mobile technology, in an effort to uncover and understand important trends. The Teen Lab team summarizes findings and links to interesting related content in their official blog. In addition to the mobile-specific observations, the site is interesting for its insights into the behavior and preferences of teens, the "market of the future." Alcatel-Lucent knows research; the company is the current owner of the historic Bell Labs research facility.

In Special-Purpose Communities Steak Trumps Sizzle

A consulting project I'm working on includes helping a global brand optimize and grow a special-purpose professional networking community. After the community had been in place a couple of months the client wanted to ask members what new features they'd like to see. Normally I'm all about putting the customer first, but in this case I thought it was the wrong approach. When you're building a social network in a niche market the steak should come first: get the fundamentals right. Leave the sizzle for later.

First, it's important not to set expectations you can't fulfill. In this case, the client is using a hosted solution built around a template with a limited feature set. Giving community members an open-ended invitation to suggest features the client can't deliver has a high probability of disappointment. They're likely to start listing fun or flashy applications that caught their eye on Facebook...the type of thing that builds engagement once you're a loyal member but may not correlate to establishing the core value that motivates someone to join and return in the first place.

In the early going it's smarter to concentrate on a straightforward presentation (think Google) of basic activities that create value, such as sharing questions and information and facilitating connections between people who want to find each other. Discussion groups, blogs, wikis, ratings, Q&A, and some type of personal matching engine are a good start. Early on, focus marketing efforts on building usage of essential features rather than on proliferating functionality. If the underlying concept of your community is on target, people will sign up and return with or without the extra bells and whistles. After it reaches critical mass and is yielding a positive ROI you can invest in sizzle to generate more usage and time on site.

Furthermore, while it never hurts to open communication channels and invite people to talk back, when you're operating online you don't need surveys to reveal the activities people like best. With recall more perfect than any questionnaire responses, your web analytics disclose what features people do and don't use, where they spend the most time, when they visit, and the paths they take through your site. To understand how your community is working, dive into site stats.

Here's a great example of how, in the world of special-purpose online communities, steak trumps sizzle. Just this week some former colleagues in Brazil launched a community for IT and telecom professionals, CW Connect. To get the community up and running quickly they chose a US vendor's hosted solution. In some cases, page templates unavoidably and a bit awkwardly mix English and Portuguese. But instead of stressing over imperfections, my friends focused on the opportunity of launching the first professional networking site in their market in Brazil. Instead of Facebook "feature envy" they kept it simple. The plan paid off: Brazilian IT and telecom professionals who haven't had a venue for making connections and sharing solutions are flocking to CW Connect. CW Connect is starting with a good steak, which means there will be opportunities for lots more sizzle in the future.

Bypassing Media: Is PR the New Advertising?

It’s hardly news that the internet is leading to big changes for the advertising business, a transformation that has important consequences for online media companies that monetize with ad revenue. But in a Web 2.0 world where social media complicates the landscape and yesterday’s hierarchical models of content presentation give way to the audience’s collective wisdom, will brands start shifting resources from advertising to PR? If so, what does that mean for online media businesses?

Advertising and PR exist side by side, as complementary strategies for shaping opinion and motivating behavior. Traditionally, advertising has been a more direct investment in an anticipated outcome, where the advertiser has lots of control of the message and presentation—and pays for the privilege. PR, on the other hand, is about more subtle influence that attempts to work its way through the audience’s network of influencers and authority figures. It’s the network idea that makes PR an interesting option in the social media environment.

In classic PR, the “PR man” (or woman), either at an agency or a company, has a powerful file of media contacts to leverage when it’s time to get the word out. That model is endangered as change roils the media industry: there’s rapid turnover in newsrooms, and in any case, audiences now rely less on the voice of big media to tell them how to think. In a world where social networking and Web 2.0 put the “me” in media, people are more likely to depend on their favorite blogs, discussion groups, RSS feeds, wikis, online Q&A, and direct online networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, or Twitter. For an old-school PR traditionalist that could be a challenge; for a PR 2.0 professional, it’s a big opportunity.

That’s because PR’s classic strength of developing opinion-influencing messaging, and its intuitive grasp of how to navigate the web of persuasion, map well to Web 2.0’s proliferating content channels and network-based communication structure. The savvy PR professional can insert himself or his brand directly into the network without having to rely on a third-party introduction from a journalist—not via subterfuge, but by establishing the client brand as a valuable information resource. Then, through strategies such as tagging, RSS, voting, and old-fashioned hyperlinking, the content is disseminated virally.

The viral uptake model is also coveted by online advertisers, who look to social media to drive deeper engagement with products and brands. To be sure social media has many benefits for advertisers, especially in uncovering preferences, needs, and affinities that can provide better targeting, higher conversions, and an advertising experience that feels less intrusive. But the fundamental quid pro quo of the advertising value proposition can only go so far in social media. There’s a point where efforts cross the line into PR. That might mean companies will shift some budgets from advertising to PR as social media gains traction, cutting media sites out of the revenue stream.

The online medium constantly challenges us to rethink assumptions about boundaries between business categories. Advertising and PR will continue to exist as the conjoined twins of the persuasion industry. But in this new world we’re creating online, don’t be surprised if the bright line that used to divide them begins to blur around the edges.

Life After Facebook: Alternative Futures for Social Networking

I had an interesting discussion today about the future of social networking. It got me thinking that this functionality is being applied in two opposite directions. One you might call the Facebook-style umbrella approach. The other is more a la carte.

Sites such as Facebook are aggregating every social connection and sharing feature they can think of under one roof. Everything you’d want to do with your friends, relatives, business contacts, and other acquaintances—or even people who aren’t yet acquaintances but whom you’d probably like to know—is facilitated or enabled under a single social networking brand. It’s very efficient: create one profile, upload photos and videos to one place, enter one friend list, etc. More important from the business perspective, the brand gains tremendous insight into each network member, information that can then be used to target advertising or in other monetization schemes.

In the Facebook scenario there are only a few winners and many losers—similar to how EBay is on top with online auctions, Google wins web search, and Amazon corners the market for online book sales.

At the same time, though, there’s an alternative trend with many winners. These are the sites that are picking and choosing social networking features to enhance businesses across the spectrum of online services: media, e-commerce, financial services, games, informational sites, and all the rest. They aren’t Facebook rivals; they just want to harvest some of the engagement, loyalty, content creation, cost savings, insight into user preferences, and other benefits that various social strategies have to offer.

Sites that use these features well will enhance their businesses. Also, there are significant opportunities for third parties to provide software-as-a-service functionality to customers who lack the technical proficiency to develop applications themselves. While the universe of possible interactions online expands, the user experience paradigms converge. Business opportunities multiply. Sometimes the sum of the parts exceeds the whole.

Social Networking the Next Generation: Kids' Sites

I've been checking out social networking sites for kids. Although the idea seems like a natural it's a more challenging market than for adults because of extra concerns about safety, privacy, and marketing. From the business perspective these add cost and complexity that can slow the growth rate and concern investors.

I haven't covered the full spectrum of options yet, but so far it seems like this is one area of the web where the US is in second place. From what I've seen the Japanese site Sanriotown--populated with the wildly popular Sanrio characters such as Hello Kitty--is the leader, with the most full-featured, fun, and not overly commercial features that include the requisite games as well as blogging, polls, discussion groups, videos, and more.

US sites are more specialized. Imbee is an independent site with a strong content creation platform, including blogs, audio, video, photos, and trading cards. Disney's Club Penguin (purchased from the founders last year for $350 million) focuses on games and chat and touts the fact that it's ad-free...but there's a prominent shopping link. Disney also maintains the Virtual Magic Kingdom (VMK) site, which offers gaming and a tie-in to the theme parks. Webkinz has an unabashed tie-in to the stuffed animals sold by its parent, Ganz. They offer games and chat. Nickelodeon's Nicktropolis is connected to the parent TV network, offering lots of Nickelodeon video plus games. Mattel's Barbiegirls also has games and chat, plus a "design fashions" feature. Most of the sites with gaming also offer the opportunity to create and decorate a personal space, or "room."

Interestingly, the kids' social networking sites are adopting more gaming-derived virtual world technologies than their adult counterparts. This seems to validate the vision that some day (perhaps when these kids grow up!) many web interactions that now occur in static media such as text will migrate to a 3-D virtual reality format along the lines of the Second Life platform.

Just as with social networking for adults, the kids version is attractive for its powerful engagement and loyalty attributes, as well as highly scalable model of user-generated content.

Because of the somewhat higher barrier to entry there's currently less competition among kids social networks than in the comparable adult space. As clear winners emerge on the adult side, expect competition to pick up significantly in the kids arena. Looking at the products currently on the market, there's lots of room for innovation and better quality before this niche is mature.

Hello Kitty Online: virtual (sur)reality integrated into online social networking:

A Growing Role for Social Media

A recent blog post by Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang on his report “Online Community Best Practices” has generated an interesting comment thread that not only contains the sorts of tips teased in the title, but also highlights current thinking about communities as platforms for both media and marketing.

The post is primarily an ad for the full report, which is only available to Forrester clients (I haven’t read it). That document is based on interviews with 17 community leaders and aims to uncover commonalities in successful online communities. However, Owyang shares a few high-level tips for free. “Above all,” he advises, “remember that control is in the hands of the members, so put their needs first, build trust, and become an active part of the community.” The most successful communities were created by people who “acted more like a host, rather than a policeman,” Owyang observes.

Once they launch a community many companies face hurdles making it grow, he continues. Owyang recommends thinking of a community as a product in development. To build and grow it you need to define the objective, create a roadmap, assemble the right team, and be prepared to adjust plans as needed. To maximize the chances of success launch the community with backing from its most enthusiastic members and stay engaged as it grows, he advises.

The blog also shares a slide from the full report that correlates various stages in the community’s lifecycle to different growth rates. In the early strategy and research phases growth is slow. Member activity ramps up steeply beginning with launch and proceeding through kick-start, growth, and ongoing management—what Owyang calls the community’s “adolescence.” After a time, following the classic “S-curve” of product adoption, the community reaches “maturity,” when increases in activity are only incremental. At this point the sponsor’s role shifts to ongoing management and continual improvements, Owyang says.

As enlightening as Owyang’s brief summary of the report are some of the comments it generated. Among the highlights:

• Unrealistic expectations can doom a community project. It’s important to get everyone on board with achievable expectations early in the process
  
• Focus on engaging, useful content instead of pushing your brand objectives too hard
  
• Get management on board with a community by demonstrating ROI
  
• Communities are about people first; the underlying products or services aren’t really important
  
• Successful communities don’t succeed on their own, they require planning, management and marketing commitment
  
• Community growth may not always be a smooth curve; often there are big spikes that correlate with, for example, new product releases or marketing initiatives. It’s important to anticipate spikes and be prepared to deal with the issues they create, such as site performance, moderation and support needs, and spam.

Both Owyang and his readers also share insights into the future direction and value of the social media movement. Owyang foresees it becoming a core business function, almost like email. At some point, he says, “online social communities will just normalize, and everyone will say ‘duh’ this is no-brainer, improving communication with customers is a core function of every company.” A commenter agrees, “online communities are simply the next iteration of customer communications,” one that empowers members to interact directly to one another, in addition to dialogue with the community host. Another reader ventures that communities are “the future of marketing for many companies.”

Having both started and managed online communities I agree with these insights and am glad to see more high-level thought and discussion around community dynamics. Above all, anyone contemplating using a community for marketing or content generation needs to do so not reactively--because it’s a fad or because a competitor has one—but as a thoughtful and purposeful attempt to solve specific business problems, such as the cost or content or brand engagement. Communities both large and small are rapidly rising features in the online landscape; social networking is joining ecommerce and media as a true wealth-making “killer app” of the digital age. For those of us making it happen it’s exciting to join the discussion about the big picture and help frame the vision of how best to channel this powerful force for change.

Next-Gen Advertising: Technology vs. Business

You may have seen the recent comments by Wenda Millard dissing both Yahoo's and Google's huge, ongoing efforts to reinvent advertising for Web 2.0 and beyond. Wenda used to head Yahoo's ad sales efforts and is now president of media at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. She chided both Yahoo and Google for a one-dimensional view of the future of advertising that's too focused on technology, at the expense of advertisers' business needs.

Advertising, she observed, is "not a business only of science. With the Google/DoubleClick combination, and the potential Microsoft/Yahoo combination, it’s like the scientific community is taking over the advertising business--and the ad business is not about algorithms.”

Google and Yahoo are key to the future of online advertising because they command such huge chunks of the online audience. Although many others are interested in evolving the advertising model, most lack the scale to get much traction in an industry where the changes they advocate will require a large redeployment of resources (MySpace could be an interesting exception).

In the last several weeks I've talked to some of the folks at both Google and Yahoo who are working on "Advertising 2.0" projects, so I can verify first-hand that both companies are taking the technology-first approach to their initiatives. The role of business people who understand the advertiser-agency dependency and bigger-picture brand advertising needs varies, but seems a bit higher profile in the Yahoo effort. Both companies, but especially Google, identify as technology businesses and want to present technology solutions.

In advertising this is an especially tricky aspiration. If the problem were straightforward to solve, online advertising advances would have kept pace with those of content and UI...yet they haven't. Online, technology is the sine qua non of innovation, but all the amazing technical possibilities need to be channeled into productive problem-solving and business models to bear fruit.

Part of the complexity comes from the necessary role of ad agencies. Looking at the industry from the 50,000 foot level, agencies seem ripe for disintermediation by more efficient technical solutions. But in reality, they have a vital role in the ecosystem. For media properties they simplify penetration; for advertisers, they open the door to technologies and products that many individual clients are too unsophisticated to utilize on their own. Agencies allow advertisers to outsource many technical complexities, and therefore are more valuable--not less--in the world of Advertising 2.0.

Also, a lot of activities occur under the "advertising" umbrella. Some, such as the straightforward lead generation represented by programs such as AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing, are spectacularly suited to technology innovations. Others are trickier. Certainly technology can help with the accountability and measurability advertisers demand, but what about engagement? Are these new programs truly seeking to uncover and solve merchants' deepest needs from the media community, or are they aiming to optimize products that are actually flawed vestiges of a prior-day mindset--such as banner ads. The people I met with at Google and Yahoo seemed reluctant to innovate deeply enough. That's one reason I'm wondering whether MySpace and Facebook may end up eclipsing today's moonshot-level efforts to build the ultimate buggywhip.

Another New Skill: SMO

In the last few years search engine optimization (SEO) has become an important function for every online business. Now get ready for the next wave: social media optimization (SMO).

Part of the challenge of working in an emerging new industry is that rules, to the extent they exist at all, are written in sand, not stone. Tomorrow's critical skillset may not have existed six months ago. To succeed, you need an open attitude and an eagerness to learn. Complacent satisfaction in past accomplishments won't take you very far.

Less than ten years ago, web site owners increasingly noticed how great performance in search engines could drive a tremendous increase in business, and the SEO industry was born. As search technologies have evolved rapidly, SEO techniques continue to change and search engine marketing (SEM)--where advertisers choose where they want to appear in search results and pay for the privilege--has matured as a complementary strategy.

In the last couple of years social media has ramped up exponentially. Now companies looking for greater online visibility see tremendous potential in tapping into that popularity with techniques such as RSS feeds and links into sites such as Digg that can drive lots of traffic. Effective capture of social media opportunities has become so valuable and complex that, like SEO and SEM, SMO is being offered as a professional service by specialist firms.

Affirming the importance of SMO, it even has its own Wikipedia entry. However, the definition presented here isn't complete--for example, it doesn't touch on the important ability to utilize tools such as FaceBook widgets to gain more exposure.

So brush up on your SMO skills or hire a professional; it's today's hot online marketing tool and one that's likely to remain important for the foreseeable future.