The Consistency of Being Inconsistent in Digital

Posted on June 9, 2011 by marc meyer

The only constant in life is change-François de la Rochefoucauld

Sometimes I think the toughest part of my job is trying to stay current. And I’m supposed to be a thought leader? Ha! So if I’m thinking that, what does that mean for you or the CMO, the CTO or the Director of social, or digital marketing or marketing? It means we’re all in the same boat. It means we don’t have a lot of time to learn something, prove something, sell something, justify something and then run it up the food chain to the C-suite and back then back down. What’s more, let’s add the pressure of 3 concrete tenets in the digital space:

Is what you’re doing making the company money?
Is what you’re doing saving the company money?
Is what you’re doing driving or building equity for the company?

If what you’re doing, does not concretely answer in the positive one of the above 3 questions, the clock is ticking. Digital is moving so fast, that it is really hard for a lot of digital leaders, or social media managers to show the results that are required from their C-suite counterparts.

Therefore, the one way to break through the light speed pace of digital is to know these five thnigs.

Anticipate that things will change
Be agile enough to change
Be open to change
Be inclusive
You can’t manage digital if you don’t measure digital-but know what metrics matter.

Some things do remain constant besides change in digital though. It’s up to you to figure out what works for your organization and to build out from there, but always keeping an eye on what’s next. Be agile.

The Age of Digital Enamorment

Posted on June 8, 2011 by marc meyer

I wasn’t the best history student but I do know that we’ve had these periods in our history where there were just huge shifts and advancements in the way things were done. We had The Stone Age, The Bronze age, etc. etc., Each bigger and better than their predecessor; and then there was The Age of Enlightenment which was pretty cool since it was a movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe who were all about trying to reform society and advance knowledge. Kind of an ongoing and consistent theme even up to now don’t you think?

But you know what though? You know what has been consistent throughout all of these “Ages”? They all ended. Everyone moved on, everyone advanced.

Let’s fast forward to the year 2000. That’s when the Dot-Com Age came to an end. And now lets fast forward 11 years later to the “Age of Digital Enamorment”. Or is it the social media bubble? Depends on who you talk to, right? Simply put, we are in a period of time (which will end) that has us so completely fixated on all things digital, all things communications related, all things portable, and all things computer powered, and cloud driven etc.,etc.,, that seeing a 6 year old with a tablet raises nary an eyebrow.

Most will openly admit that they they’re not sure what they would do without a computer, a laptop, a tablet, a cell phone, Facebook or Twitter-They would be helpless and sadly I might be one of them, though it is my job, so maybe that is a slight pass. For others it has, this age of “Digital Enamorment”, weaved it’s way into the fabric of our daily lives, our private lives, out passions, our relationships, our problems, our past and our future so pervasively, that we really don’t know how we could live without them. I saw this term used in a post I had read recently that pretty much sums it up nicely, it’s called Pervasive Connectivity.

Perhaps a better way of looking at is that we live in the age of “Always On“.

And yet, we want more. We want it smaller and we demand it faster. In fact manufacturers and platform providers can’t work any faster in trying to roll out V2, V3, V4 and so on and so forth of their products and services. We will reach a maturation point that is preceded by a saturation point.

Still the question remains though-What will move us from the Age of Digital Enamorment?

We can point to a few things looming on the horizon, but the fact of the matter is, we are in a world that is still moving at light speed towards all digital, all web based, all mobile in nature, all social, and going global in desire and reach. The next movement won’t be us getting away from digital, no there’s going to be a point where we reach a level of intimacy with digital. I already see it happening. It’s that maturation after saturation.

Look no further than calling it the age of “Digital Intimacy”.

We’ll move here because we will have become so accustomed to our devices and our digital lives that we will desire a level of intimacy with these products and platforms that pushes us towards more of a return to the age of the conversation, the age of the relationship and an age of reclaiming our privacy.

Face to Face relationships will be the new black.

What are You Supposed to Measure in Social Media?

Posted on June 7, 2011 by marc meyer

My graph is not totally untrue for those of you that play in the space, but I was reading a post by Tom Webster today titled, The Uneasy Relationship between Twitter and Social Media Measurement and I knew exactly where he was going with it. My above graphic doesn’t really completely delve into what the point of his post was, but it does help me highlight two things about social media measurement-one of which he does highlight in his post.

One, there is a lot of useless “social” content to sift through and Two, if the majority of people are not using Twitter and everyone is using Facebook, then why do we make brand assumptions based on a Twitter stream? Here is your answer from Tom’s post:

Most of Facebook’s user data (and, even worse, an indeterminate amount of Facebook’s user data) is not exposed to sites and services that measure sentiment, buzz and influence. So all of the new crop of sites and services that measure these things, from Klout to Crimson Hexagon to Radian6, rely heavily on Twitter, the Internet’s great easy button, as their most easily accessible source of unstructured social media data.

Ok, so again I was having a bit of fun here but I’m curious to hear what some of the social media data aficionados think. Yes there is a lot of unstructured social data out there, and yes a lot of it is bad, and thus I’m wondering; Because we cannot get behind the firewall of Facebook, are we relying on Twitter for a lot of our brand assumptions because it’s giving us the largest unfiltered swath of the social media landscape? If the answer is yes, this troubles me.

Is Being Too Social Ruining Social Media?

Posted on June 2, 2011 by marc meyer

I was reading an article on MSNBC recently about Groupon and the tag line to the piece was the following:

“When everything’s social, nothing is.”

Which gave me pause to think. What happens when you have so many options to do something or buy something or say something or share something in social? Is there a tipping point looming here where eventually everyone tires of being so social?

I actually think so.

It’s not going to happen yet, but as I was made aware in a comment on a post I wrote about social media bubbles-“there is a bubble, it’s just different”. So with that assumptive comment in hand, which in hindsight I now agree with. I think it is safe to say that eventually we as a social world will tire of being so social with each other. There’s just too many choices and it’s not decreasing anytime soon.

There will come a time where we just won’t want to share, chat, upload, download, friend, follow, or like from a social standpoint, a mobile standpoint, and a mobile social standpoint. It’s inevitable. If we produce too much of something (i.e. social networks) then demand goes down right? We’re going to burn ourselves out. Let’s look at this another way.

Being social on the web is not a utility, but a lot of us use the social web from a utilitarian standpoint. They are two distinct things. But when they start to bleed into each other, that requires more time, and for most of us, time is still a commodity.

When social first came on the scene, the amount of networks were few and far between. Eventually more and more copycat type of networks emerged as the boom spread far and wide. The Big boys i.e. the Facebooks, the Youtubes, The Twitters and even the Myspace’s of the world enjoyed the rush. But as we head toward 800 million users on Facebook and we see stuff like this graph from Ken Burbary, we realize that we truly are in an age of “digital enamorment”.

Eventually there will be a correction where we pare down our networks and we start to refine who our connections are with, and what they stand for. Right now we’re too enamored with social to see that. As things progress we’ll soon realize that there is indeed a bit of truth to Dunbar’s number about limits to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships with. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. The number sits at 150 and ironically Dunbar did not figure online social networks into the mix.

Your goal? Develop and refine the networks you’re in and remember Facebook isn’t your network, it’s your platform. Who you are connected to within Facebook is your network.

The Assumptive Close of Facebook App Registrations

Posted on May 19, 2011 by marc meyer

There needs to be a better way. I wanted to download a report that was on Scribd but I needed to Login/Signup. My options? Use Facebook or standard email addy. But upon further investigation of signing up via Facebook, I see that Scribd will access the following data below.

What if I don’t want Scribd to send me emails, post to my wall, access my networks, my user ID and a list of all my friends? It seems a little bit excessive don’t you think? There has got to be a better way for Scribd and it’s users to derive mutual value from each other through Facebook registrations. This just isn’t it. Am I wrong? And yes I know they are not the only one’s doing this…People need to understand the value of their data. Their social currency is gold to others and they need to leverage it as such.

Social Media Conundrum #34-You Hired Them but Don’t Trust Them

Posted on May 17, 2011 by marc meyer

Why is it that social has created a whole new set of problems in the workplace? You know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the employee with the new found voice, the social employee. I think it’s an interesting dichotomy nowadays in which we have interviewed, poked and prodded this person before we have hired them, and yet we do not trust them to use social tools and platforms- Essentially, we have scared ourselves into thinking that every trusted employee that has been hire to be a part of the family and the culture is a social media risk. Which begs a few questions:

How is it you hired someone you might not trust? Where is the disconnect? or better yet, why is there a disconnect? How can we ease the tension of the employer when it comes to the social employee?

Two words.

Manage Expectations.

The long form answer is that it starts with guidelines that include internal and external social policies, rules and guidelines that everyone can live by like what Cisco has done and it extends to adult like socially acceptable behavior. Social Media gives you the privledge of having conversations with anyone about anything but it does not give you the right to use it to run roughshod over the people that trust you and pay you to do a good job. At the end of the day it’s a two way street in which you both have to meet at the intersection of expectations and understand what is expected of each other.

Need more examples of social media policies and guidelines? Here’s a database with 174 examples.