Calling all bloggers! I’m excited to let you know that Overblog, BlogWorld & New Media Expo and Social Media Explorer are partnering to collect and then present new research on blogging at this year’s BlogWorld New York, June 4-7. But in order to have great insights to share, we need more bloggers to participate in our survey.

If you blog, whether personally or professionally, please take about 10 minutes to participate in this survey which asks some interesting questions not yet posed by other similar efforts. I’ll co-present the results with the Overblog team at BlogWorld & New Media Expo on June 7. You can have the results emailed to you if you choose to share your email address with us. (We won’t abuse that privilege.)

Start Your Survey Here

Image via CrunchBase

I just finished taking the survey myself. It’s not necessarily “short” by most survey estimations, but shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. Get a fresh cup of coffee and spare us a few moments, please? The more people who participate the better the data is and the more relevant insights we can share with you at BlogWorld!

And do share with your fellow bloggers! We want the information to be represent all industries, niches and levels of blogging.

And while you’re thinking about it, please enjoy Overblog’s 10% off discount to BlogWorld & New Media Expo in New York! I’ll be speaking along with dozens of other smart folks. We’d love to have you there. Just register for BlogWorld and use the discount code OVBVIP.

For the record, Overblog is a client. I’ll be helping them introduce a new blogging platform to the U.S. market at BlogWorld and beyond. To get in on the early peek beta, register at their invite site.

Disruption. If one word exemplifies what’s happening to the world of business today, that’s it. The high-speed pace of technological change, with its ability to disrupt business models and pricing has made disruption an everyday reality.  This point came home to me when I heard Ray Kurzweil speak at a Shop.org conference on how the rate of change is doubling every year and what that means for the future.  When you see the trajectory of change, and what it means to the not-too-distant future, you can’t help but feel a powerful sense of urgency about keeping pace. The only way to avoid being eliminated from the game in this environment is to disrupt yourself.

Clinging to the status quo is a recipe for extinction. I say this from the perspective of someone who works for a 134-year-old brand. You can never get complacent. You have to constantly reinvent your business.

Just look at the industries that have been disrupted by technology.  Publishing. Printing. Retail. Education. Banking. Music. Entertainment.  The businesses within these industries that survive have been the disruptors.

But, how do you dare to disrupt your own business? How do you move beyond the status quo?  Here are 6 trends that point the way and a reading that can help.

Entrepreneurship

You don’t have to found a tech start-up to be an entrepreneur.  You just have to have an entrepreneurial approach to every aspect of your business.  Act small.  If you find you are unable to have mini-start-ups in your company because your procedures are too cumbersome, your infrastructure too complex, or your hierarchy too structured take note. These are red flags that tell you, you’ve moved outside the realm of being an entrepreneur.

Failure

Failure is “in” because it’s a sign that you have taken risks and innovated.  The option—the  safe route based on best-practices and “the way it’s always been done” is a path to extinction.  Failure is the price you pay for being open to new ideas and for taking risks.  Learning to take calculated risks and get comfortable with failure is a requirement for entrepreneurial ventures.

Creativity

Creativity is a key factor in being able to disrupt the status quo.  And, creativity isn’t just for “creatives.”  There’s no reason why salespeople or shopkeepers should stay in a self-imposed ghetto of mundane thinkers. Several of the books on this list teach how creativity works and how creativity can become a discipline, rather than an unreliable and mystical resource. Taking the kind of leaps that are necessary to keep up with the marketplace means learning to be fearless and embracing creativity.

The Power of Fringe

The safe, middle-of-the-road, something-for-everyone business is not so safe.  When businesses were largely local, it only mattered that you stood out from a small number of competitors. When information was scarce, any source of information was valuable. Now standing out is more important.  Just check Google for generic terms related to your business if you’re uncomfortable with being different. Learning to be different–meaningfully and significantly different–is more important than ever.

Radical Simplicity

Cumbersome and complex businesses and products are ripe for disruption.  Simplicity (or at least solutions that appear simple) reduce the friction that comes between a person and an action or purchase.  Simplicity allows for the speed that goes hand-in-hand with disruptive technologies. Businesses like Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Square and Dropbox are examples of businesses that are simple to use and simple to understand.

Thinking Small

This trend is a subset of Radical Simplicity. As organizations get bigger, they tend to get more complex and slow down. Speed is one of the requirements of successful disruption and small has the potential to move faster and sell faster in the world of short attention spans.  People don’t have the patience to read long pieces of content, even in print.  People who are used to paying $1.99 for an app are going to think five times before paying $199 for a downloadable product. While this doesn’t require firing people or cheapening your output, it does mean rethinking your internal processes to be nimble and redefining the size of a piece of content.

The Reading List

Here are a list of books that address these trends. Some of them can fit into more than one category.

• The Lean Start-up: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
• The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business by Clayton Christenson
• Zen Habits: Handbook for Life by Leo Babauta
• Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works by Ash Maurya
• The Power of Unpopular: A Guide to Building Your Brand for the Audience Who Will Love You (and why no one else matters) by Erika Napoletano
• We Are All Weird by Seth Godin
• Different: Escaping the Competitive Heard by Youngme Moon
• Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer
• Do The Work and the War of Art by Stephen Pressfield
• The Accidental Creative: How to be Brilliant at a Moment’s Notice by Todd Henry
• Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon
• Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance by Jonathan Fields

Have You Registered For Explore Minneapolis?

Don’t miss two days of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Join SME’s Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly, The Now Revolution co-author Jay Baer, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Neil Patel of Kissmetrics and more at one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, August 16-17 in Minneapolis, Minn. DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!

Let’s just get straight to the point… social media sucks. Plain and simple. For years it’s been “business as usual” and then suddenly everyone is bouncing around words like “social”, “engage”, “community” and all kinds of other blather. Some of the biggest companies in the world such as Ford, Starbucks, Dell, American Express and many others have fallen for the trap. I’m here to warn you before you do anything stupid. Social media sucks and here’s a few reasons why …

1. Social media shifts the limelight from brands to the customers. It was fine when brands were the stars. They spoke and customers listened. Now customers are the ones who speak and expect to be heard. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook allow them to easily share their opinions. Ecommerce sites even encourage the most vocal folks to leave customer reviews directly next to each product. Of course it’s all bad when you allow a negative review to slip by.
2. Social media forces companies to learn new tools. Never mind that it’s easier than ever to measure customer sentiment, track sales conversions, identify qualified sales leads and decrease customer service costs. The phone email and fax are the only toolset you need. In fact, the growth of smart phone owners last year increased by 10% to a total of 46% of American adults making it even easier to cold call folks wherever they may be, right? Besides, what could any respectable sales person do with social media besides tweet about their lunch and play Farmville? (hint)
3. Social media has changed the direction of marketing and sales from outbound to inbound. Companies are becoming more like publishers and distributers of content.  An average of 60% of B2B respondents to a recent content marketing survey say they intend to increase their content marketing budgets over the next 12 months.
4. Social media provides lots of ways for customers to get information. Why can’t customers simply trust corporate web sites or call their helpful sales reps?  Instead they actively share buying experiences and solicit opinions from friends and followers. Remember the increase in smartphone ownership I mentioned previously? Well it looks like some folks are using their smartphone for a bit more than just phone calls and Angry Birds.
5. Social media forces companies to be more human. No more do layers of automated customer support systems, grinning celebrity endorsements, slick promotional campaigns and PR spin guard me from facing my customer at the end of the day. They know that behind every business is a group of human beings just like them. They expect a reasonable touch of empathy in their interaction with a brand. Traditional marketing only takes you so far without that empathy. Even great companies have felt the sting of forgetting this key ingredient. Communications, customer service, sales, product development and marketing are all places where empathy should exist. Brands need to be walking in a pair of their customer’s shoes at all times if they hope to keep pace with the today’s connected customer.

Well there you have it. A handful of reasons why social media sucks for businesses. As you might have noticed by now I’m being facetious, but there are still plenty of business owners and C-level folks who think of social media as a flash in the pan or all fun and games. The bottom line is that it’s a reality. Applying social media to business takes effort, time, commitment and empathy. To those that continue to dismiss social media before doing their due diligence, social media is going to continue to suck.

Have You Registered For Explore Minneapolis?

Don’t miss two days of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Join SME’s Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly, The Now Revolution co-author Jay Baer, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Neil Patel of Kissmetrics and more at one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, August 16-17 in Minneapolis, Minn. DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is of the guest variety and offered up by my friends Gini Dietrich and Geoff Livingston. Their new book, Marketing in the Round, is out and available. They are smart. It is good. Pay attention.

The world of marketing in small and large businesses is a siloed one. Companies have ad campaigns, PR plans, social media strategies, and websites built independently and bolted together in a haphazard manner. It’s surprising how rarely these disciplines work together to achieve corporate objectives like establishing a second vertical for a product, or increasing website sales by 30 percent year-over-year.

Multichannel strategy revolves around choosing and weaving tactics across media type to achieve these objectives. Our new book Marketing in the Round provides means and methods to do that in the current of era of widespread corporate social media adoption.

Here’s a sneak preview on method.

Tactical choices begin with objectives. Strong marketing programs begin by setting corporate objectives and goals. From there marketers examine the resources at hand, competitive positioning, and the general market landscape. This research allows them to determine a primary market approach, which is usually led by one of the disciplines, direct marketing, PR, advertising, or social media/interactive.

Once an approach is selected, that’s where the ball drops. But understanding how cross disciplinary tactics support the overarching approaches empowers strong collaboration across marketing programs to achieve goals. Individual disciplines can determine which tactics to use to help out.

Let’s use social as an example.

When a primary approach is selected it’s usually because of the resources at hand. But a company often has multiple sources of resources. If a public relations campaign blends a launch event and PR to market a new product, why not use the company’s normal social media resources that week to provide a live stream of the event, and direct customer interactions on social network sites?

Perhaps you can give special access to the influential voices who are active within your community. An infographic can be released on your blog to help make the cases. Special research or additional content can be developed and released. Or you can crowdsource pictures and other content from customers who first get their hands on the product, and share them across your network.

Nikon recently released their much anticipated D4 DSLR camera to the professional photography marketplace. In addition to its conventional top-down PR campaign, Nikon continued its tradition of giving new DSLRs to influential bloggers to shoot photographs with and review. Further, the company disseminated early photos with the camera to give bloggers something to talk about when the camera was released. The launch was received with widespread conversation online.

There are so many ways to creatively weave social media into a PR campaign, it makes no sense not to do it in the planning phase. You are limited only by resources and imagination.

Weaving social media into other primary approaches is equally easy. Consider a company that interacts directly with customers as their primary focus. Social media is the ideal medium to have one on one conversations with them. That includes the usual Twitter/Facebook/Pinterest (or other network) customer responses, loyalist programs in small crowdsourcing or private communities, niche-oriented content, and more.

Five Guys is a great example of a company that built its brand through great product (if you’re into burgers) and customer service programs. The company spends very little money on public relations and advertising, but it does invest in social media. Five Guys sees its participation online as a primary way to continue providing excellent customer service and interactions.

It all gets back to the strategy session and making sure everyone sits at the table and weighs in on how they can help achieve overarching goals. If you are a solo marketer – as is the case with many small businesses – go beyond independent programs. Assume your customer sees more than one type of communication from you, and see how you can use social to drive deeper engagement, loyalty and sales from them.

During that strategy session you should have goals that drive every decision you make. In the selection of approach and then tactics, it’s important to build SMARTER goals into your program. How will social help increase sales? By adding a social media virtual event product launch, we will increase our traditional new product lead generation during the first week by 30 percent. Having clear attainable goals let’s you manage the campaign in process, and takes the mystery out of social media ROI and outcomes.

Geoff Livingston (geofflivingston.com) is an author and marketing strategist, and serves as VP, Strategic Partnerships for Razoo. A former journalist, Livingston continues to write, and most recently he co-authored Marketing in the Round, and authored the social media primer Welcome to the Fifth Estate.

Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, a Chicago-based integrated marketing communication firm. She also is the founder of the professional development site for PR and marketing pros, Spin Sucks Pro and co-author of Marketing in the Round.

Editor’s Note: In light of our recent affirmation that forums and message boards are a bountiful home for consumer interaction and engagement around brands and products, I thought it appropriate to invite some solid expertise here to help advise us on how to proceed in exploring online forums for marketing purposes. Today’s guest post is by the person I regard as the foremost expert on managing online forums in the U.S., if not the world, Patrick O’Keefe.

I regularly find myself in the position of having to defend online forums, without actually wanting to be put into that position.

It’s kind of awkward and strange because forums don’t need defending. They don’t need me. They don’t need anyone. Forums were around before you got into “social” (professionally) and they’ll be around after you make your exit.

Yet, I regularly run across people who compartmentalize them in a way that is odd and unfair. It usually goes something along the lines of: forums are old, dying, outdated, no one uses them and they never evolve. These thoughts are incorrect. When these comments are made, most of the time, the person just doesn’t understand forums and needs to make a bold statement to appear confident.

Example forum view, from PhpBB. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For some reason, some people choose to look at different tools and different platforms in an adversarial way. As if convincing themselves that it is “Facebook vs. Forums” makes their lives easier or more manageable. I don’t understand this.

I started in “social” (or, as I like to call it, online community management) in 2000. For a year or two before that, I had done some forum moderation. If you could see the tools we had at our disposal 12 years ago and compare them to the tools that we have now, you wouldn’t be thinking in an adversarial way. You’d be thinking in a grateful way, amazed and appreciative of the choices that we now have available to us, when it comes to all of the tools and platforms.

I may have written a book about managing online forums, but I use and love Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, SlideShare and other platforms. It is never an either/or scenario. It is a matter of choice and using what will work best for you. In this post, I’ll be discussing how you can get the most out of a forum you don’t own or operate, as a brand representative of some sort, whether that be agency or in-house.

The Power of Forums

When you type a question into Google, there is a fair chance that you will end up at a forum. And I literally mean a question about anything. Electronics, cooking, car repair, vacations, taxes – anything. Why is this? Is it because forums game the search engines better than anyone else?

No, actually, it’s sort of the opposite. Search engines are finding where real knowledge is shared and exchanged and it is bubbling to the top of their results.

Pick a topic. It doesn’t matter what. There are online forums dedicated to that topic where people are engaging in a meaningful, passionate way right at this second. In many cases, this also extends to products, companies, celebrities and more. If you are trying to reach people interested in that topic, this is the place you need to be.

What is true of most generic platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, is that people use them to share their thoughts on anything and to engage with individuals. If you want to check up on your friend from college, you use Facebook. If you want to share a random thought that popped into your head, you use Facebook or Twitter. But, if you want to discuss the martial arts with other passionate martial artists, you go to a martial arts forum.

In the entire social web, generally speaking and with plenty of exceptions, forums are where the deepest, most engaging conversation around specific topics and interests occurs.

When Jason told me that 90% of the discussions occurring online around banks and bank products were in forums, I was a little surprised. Not because I didn’t think that a lot of it occurred there, but just because I thought there might be a broader mix. But, it makes sense. If you want to ask questions about banks and discuss bank products, where do you go? To your Facebook friends? Or to an online community dedicated to finance, banking and/or investment? (And yes, if you have a friend who is uniquely qualified to offer expertise, you’d probably go to them, as well).

Forums Are a Different Beast

I run into people who use Facebook and Twitter and then are perplexed that they weren’t allowed to post a link on a forum. They think they should be able to do what they do on Twitter on my forums and when they can’t, they think that I am being difficult. When, in reality, they are guilty of thinking they are entitled to something, which is ugly.

You have to consider the nature of online forums and structured online communities. On Twitter, I have to opt-in to you. I have to click the “Follow” button to see what you say. The same is true on Facebook. You don’t enter my stream unless I explicitly opt-in. These are your profiles. This is not the case on forums where everyone can see everything. It is a community space and not your space. As such, the guidelines for the forum must be respected at all times.

You have to think of each forum like its own country. One forum will have totally different guidelines and social norms from another. Many countries subscribe to similar standards of law, but even in those cases, there can be local laws and slight differences than what you are used to.

Failing to understand this can lead to backlash and can end up with you being rightfully tarred as a spammer. Do you think that it is easier to ask for permission, than forgiveness? Not on forums. It’s hard to ask for forgiveness when you’ve already been banned. Initially, joining in a forum may seem scary. But, it’s really not that bad once you have the proper handle on it.

Understanding How to Engage on Forums

It is easy enough to locate a forum that has an audience you’d like to reach. Perhaps they are already talking about your company or product. Or you did a Google search for “<insert your topic here> forums” or “<topic> community” (without the quotes) and found a forum that you can identify with. Generally speaking, you only want to join forums where the level of conversation is one that you and your company can comfortably be associated with.

When you join a forum, you are joining to contribute to that forum. Not to take advantage of it and not to siphon people off to your website. I recently had someone join a forum that I manage and they started a thread to link people to a blog post they had written. This was removed and I sent the member a nice, polite message to let them know. In his response, the member said that he didn’t have time to post replies on my forums or any forums, only to link to his blog, because “life is too short.”

That’s great. Just don’t expect to be welcome on many forums. You have to want to be there. If you don’t, it shows and people will pick up on it. If you are actually interested in contributing, let’s talk about how you can get started on the right foot. An individual forum may allow you to go further than what I describe below, but to understand that, you must become better acquainted with the community and, perhaps, talk with the staff. What I lay out here will give you a good foundational basis for that.

The Guidelines Are Your Friend

Pretty much every forum worth engaging in has posted policies of some kind. Read these closely. Some brand representatives see this and think they are the enemy and that your job is to find a way around them to push a message or advertise something. This is a bad way to look at them.

The guidelines are actually your best friend. They serve as a vision statement for the community, discussing what is allowed, what isn’t and what sort of people will be attracted to the forums. For you, they are a cheat sheet. They give you a leg up on what you can expect.

You should always respect the guidelines. Never bend them, let alone break them.

Observe the Norms

Before you jump in, take a look around. See how others contribute and how top posters and especially staff members share. Like the guidelines, this will help you to feel comfortable and to participate in a manner that respects the community. Get the lay of the land, like you would in any environment that you are new to.

Your Signature is Where You Link and Identify Yourself

If the community allows you to have a signature and include links in it (check those guidelines), that is where you can include a link to your stuff.

Just as important, depending on whom you are and who you work for, is the need to identify yourself, in the interests of full disclosure. It is vital that people know of the relationships that you may have to companies and interests discussed on the forum so that they can view your words accordingly and trust your perspective.

To try to hide these affiliations is ethically and, perhaps, legally wrong. If you share thoughts that relate to the company you represent and people find out that you are affiliated with them, you are dead. If you share thoughts that relate to competitors of your company and people learn of your affiliation, you are dead. If you comment on interests and initiatives that may, in some way, help or harm your company and people learn of your affiliation, again, you are dead. Always, always disclose.

If you are stupid and slimy enough not to disclose, you better be lucky enough to get away with it because a small enough company can be killed by the resulting attention. Many of the people who try to deceive members of a community are eventually caught because they did it for too long and got too greedy. It just takes one minor detail and then you are exposed and your name is dirt.

One last note on signatures and identification. On a forum, a person posts – not a company. For example, “Social Media Explorer” doesn’t create posts. Instead, Jason Falls, the CEO of Social Media Explorer is the one who posts and this is clearly identified. A person at the company contributes to a forum, not the company itself. It’s a small, but important distinction.

Contribute ON the Community

You participate in a forum to contribute to the forum. Not to send people elsewhere. The one exception to this might be the case of, for example, a software company that has a substantial knowledgebase and FAQ. If you join a forum you don’t run and answer questions by simply linking to your FAQ over and over again, that might come across as a bit spammy.

Instead, your job is to add value to the forums themselves, not to send people in a million different directions. Even if it means copying and pasting answers from your own FAQ, rather than linking to it. It may be OK for you to link to an FAQ conservatively, but run that by the staff first.

That sort of example aside, answer questions in the forums and provide answers in the forums themselves. Not as links to articles or blog posts that you’ve written. When you provide value and when you provide good answers, that is where you see the real value of forums. People respect your knowledge and look to you for your expertise. They look at your signature, visit your website and you are top of mind for them when they think of that particular topic. Forums are a tremendous way to demonstrate genuine expertise.

This is tricky because it isn’t the cleanest thing to measure and the people who think you can measure everything will be disappointed. As my friend Ted Sindzinski said recently in an article on social ROI, “as good as metrics are, they only tell you the story of how to grow those metrics and that isn’t always a part of the greater tale of what’s making you succeed.”

Contribute Good Stuff

It’s important to contribute good stuff for the reasons we just discussed, but also because posts on forums can live on “forever.” You need to be aware of what you contribute and ensure that you are adding value and representing yourself and your brand in a positive manner. Many large forums have outlived many of the buzz social media platforms that have come, gone and are no longer accessible.

When you make a post, count on it being accessible for a very long time. On forums, you can’t just delete a message or close an account, like you might delete a tweet or close your Twitter account. When you contribute to a forum, your contribution is linked to the contributions of others and removing those contributions damages what others have added by removing the context. For this very good reason, many forums will not allow for the mass removal of posts.

Don’t (Be the First) to Mention Your Stuff!

A great guideline to follow is to never be the first to mention your company, product or services. Don’t be the first to introduce your commercial interests into a thread. If someone brings it up, excellent, you can probably thank them or answer their questions on the forum.

But, you don’t want to start a thread to say “hey, my company exists!” You don’t want to be the first person to mention your new product. You don’t (obviously, I hope) want to post press releases. You are here to offer value, not mention your company. I suspect that some of you reading this may say, “well, then I’ll just befriend a veteran member and persuade/pay him or her to mention my stuff.” No. Stop. Don’t do that, either. That falls into the whole disclosure issue I described and, frankly, is sad. You’ll get caught and you’ll pay for it. As someone who has caught people and made them pay, trust me when I say you will pay.

There may be dedicated sections in a forum where it is OK to mention your stuff. Make sure that you understand the particular guidelines for participating in those sections and that you participate in an exemplary manner.

If You Are Ever in Doubt, Ask the Staff

Finally, if you ever have any question as to whether or not something is OK, ask a staff member. Usually you can do so privately, which is ideal, but sometimes you might have to do it in a dedicated forum. It’s amazing to me how many people miss this step and assume it is OK to post that message advertising something that I then have to remove. By then, they’ve already got a strike against them and we have a negative relationship.

When you ask a staff member, you are giving yourself complete confidence in posting. Generally speaking, the staff will appreciate that you asked first, rather than doing something that was inappropriate and led to them having to spend time cleaning it up. Plus, you will also be building a respectful relationship with them, which can help you down the road if you have any ideas for a partnership or more traditional advertising campaign.

Conclusion

The social web is a big place. It’s always funny to me when I meet people who think it primarily consists of Facebook and Twitter. If you believe that, you really are missing a majority of the social web. It’s a lot bigger and more diverse than that.

Forums and structured, focused communities offer a great deal of value, representing a concentrated audience of the people that you probably want to reach. They are engaging now, around your company, your products and your industry. I’m not saying everyone should join a forum and start contributing, just that you should be aware of them as a legitimate, powerful platform. Engaging with individual forums should be a strategic option you consider, right alongside engaging with people on Facebook and Twitter. They are worth your consideration.

Patrick O’Keefe is the founder of the iFroggy Network and has been managing online forums and communities since 2000. He authored the book “Managing Online Forums,” blogs at ManagingCommunities.com and can be found on Twitter @iFroggy.

We have been working on a couple of interesting start-up ideas at Urbane Media that have mushroomed into companies. The idea stage is much safer, in that we can vacillate for hours on end about this and that. It makes us feel good. It is exciting to talk about our ideas. Actually launching your idea is a bit scarier because the stakes are higher. It is no longer just verbal masturbation, you have likely plunked down some dough to get started, either yours or someone else’s.

Must Do

One of our Must Do Exercises with our companies that we own and operate is to create a new value curve. We spend a lot of time on the following four questions:

A New Value Curve

1. Reduce - Which factors should be reduced well below the industry standard
2. Create - Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered
3. Raise - Which factors should be raised well above the industry standard
4. Eliminate - Which of the factors that the industry take for granted should be eliminated

Create Your Niche

Question mark (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Getting really clear with the above four questions has helped us carve out niche businesses. Many times the things that separate one company or business from another are not large single items, but a series of small, but radically different, things. A great place to start is your policy and procedure manual. It is likely slam full of stuff that no longer applies or never worked well from the get-go.

Have You Answered Why?

This is a tricky one, we tend to race to What we do. That is much easier to identify. We gravitate to How we do it. The question of Why we do it only gets answered by the remarkable brands. If we reverse the order, and start with why we are doing this and keep that at the core center of our culture, we are heads above the rest.

Why People Buy

People buy from companies because of why they do, not what they do. That is one of the explanations as to why great brands exponentially lead the pack. Many times their competitors actually have a better product. Many times the competition is better capitalized. Yet the company who best identifies what motivates them, and why they are doing what they are doing run circles around the pack.

We suggest that you take some time to identify the Why, way before you get to the What and the How. Your result will be diametrically different.

For more inspiration on the same topic, check out Simon Sinek’s awesome TED Talk:

John Jantsch is flat brilliant. This time, he’s developed a webinar series that solves a major problem we all have with learning new ideas in the marketing world. He’s developed a webinar series that forces you to commit to act on what you’ve learned. It’s even called Commit2Act.

I’m speaking in the webinar series (so it’s virtual) along with Ann Handley, Chris Brogan, Brian Clark, David Meerman Scott, Guy Kawasaki, Amy Porterfield, Lee Odden and Jeff Walker. We’re charged with giving you five actionable ideas each month that you then commit to trying, testing and reporting back on.

The series would be free, but John wants to make sure you’re committed to do it, so it’s going to cost you $5 to join. Five whole dollars! But that holds you accountable for showing up and doing the work, right? It commits you. Told you John was brilliant.

You can still join, though the first two webinars are completed. Don’t fret! There are recordings.

You’re going to get great ideas that you can implement in your marketing almost right away. Then you try them and report back. Rest assured, you’re going to walk away having done something to improve your marketing.

My talk is Tuesday (again, it’ll be archived) and I’m sharing five things you can do to get more out of your social media marketing. They’re not meant to be deep changes or ideas, but little things that can make you more productive and profitable. It’ll be a lot of fun talking shop with John. You should certainly join us!

Go ahead. Make the Commitment! Commit2Act.

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Social networking and the marketing and technology world’s response to it is quite amusing. To network socially is to connect with people of like mind and interest to have a group of individuals you can relate to when you choose. It’s about having a group of buds to watch the game with or girlfriends to meet for lunch … in a manner of speaking.

While Internet-based social networks are built for scale, people are not. Dunbar’s number says we can’t maintain more than 150 stable relationships at once. Hence the appeal of applications like Path — I don’t want to friend everybody. I want to “friend” the people that are my friends. Sure, many of us can stretch that 150 to a few more, but let’s be realistic. If you’ve got 500 people in your friends circle on a given social network, you aren’t really maintaining a relationship with them. You’re just catching a random update from time to time. That’s far from personal. It’s also far from social.

But because marketers, technologists and gamers were at the helm of many social networks, it became a game: How many friends can I get? Every social network I’ve ever joined as immediately told me I needed to add friends and then slapped a big badge on my profile telling me, and sometimes the world, how many people like me enough. This gamification trigger made people want to add more friends.

A social network diagram (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Suddenly, it was a race to 10,000 on Twitter, then 25,000 and so-on. LinkedIn developed the LION designation for people who had lots of connections and were open to connecting with anyone, even those they don’t know. From a marketing, gaming or ego perspective, it made sense: Whoever has the most friends wins.

But from a human social capacity perspective, it’s just plain dumb.

I have 50,000+ followers on Twitter. I probably average around 175 public “@” replies on a slow weekday. Mind you, I don’t sit on Twitter all day. If I have time to look, I look. If I’m busy, I’m busy. Yet, I’ve been accosted by people THAT I KNOW for not responding to a public tweet — One that I didn’t even see. (I know, first world problem. But it’s easier to reply to every message when you have significantly less of them. And keep in mind, that’s Twitter … not primary communications like emails, phone calls, meetings, etc.)

Yet, we still think more is better. We have to have more Twitter followers, more Facebook fans, more LinkedIn connections, more people have to circle us on Google+ … the list goes on.

Complicating matters is the emerging world of online influence measurement. Klout, Kred and the like are starting to have serious implications for mainstream consumers. Even if it is just perks and coupons, when the Sunday ad-clipping nutters figure out they can game Twitter to get followers which then gives them free stuff from Klout … watch out!

Whether you’re building online influence as an individual or as a business, there are way too many reasons to aim for more, rather than less, followers. But what we marketers need to consider as we try to communicate our messages to all the other users on social networks is that they just might not be like us. They may not want 3 bazillion followers. They may just want to chat with their friends, stalk their ex or see pictures of their family from time-to-time.

You may not be able to market to those people here. And by those people, I mean most people.

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Social media has been around long enough to start evaluating how effective your strategy is at delivering on the goal. This is important. But the big question is do you have the right players on the field? Have you established the right frame work for success? Or does your social media strategy resemble a 5-year-old’s soccer game?

Soccer seems to be that entry-level sport for many kids. Both of my boys played soccer when they were five and I remember watching the games while hysterically laughing on the sidelines. The kids are running around the field, unsure of why they are there and so easily distracted. One of my sons was the kid who scored every time he got the ball, but in between he would sit down and play with the grass. My other son was a force to be reckoned with, even that young. He had focus and determination on getting the ball to the goal. But he would also survey the field and pass to his team mates when they were open. As I started thinking about where we are in the social media adoption scale, it seemed that a 5-year-old’s soccer game would be a good analogy that we can have a little fun with. So here it goes.

To get started think about the players you have on your social media team. Are any of these kids your social media strategist?

The kid who eats the grass

This is the kid that is sitting at the end of the field, clueless to all that is happening around him. He’s eating the grass, filling his hand full of dirt, and watching the game on the next field. His parents are yelling at him to pay attention, but he’s focused on anything but the game. One of my sons was this way. He was only interested in the game if he had the ball, if not, he was perfectly happy to sit and play in the grass until it was “his turn” again.

In social media, this is the strategist who doesn’t understand anything about business, but understands social media channels. It may be your Twitter expert who can rock out an awesome tweet and sit and talk with your followers all day, but the minute you start to talk about being strategic her eyes gloss over. It’s probably someone that was selected because she had an enthusiasm for social media that helped you get the job done faster. She feels like a leader because she helped create the presence you have, but as your social media presence grows you are realizing that she isn’t the right person to drive the strategy.

She is a great community manager, but will never understand that social media isn’t only about tweeting on the fly. If this person is your “social media strategist,” you will find yourself battling about whether her efforts are delivering any return to the business over … and over … and over. She can’t develop strategies that will deliver a return because she doesn’t understand business. She understands Twitter. Remember, just because someone developed a successful personal blog, or has a lot of followers on Twitter, or fans on Facebook won’t mean they understand how to apply their success to business.

The kid who chases the pretty girl in short shorts

My kids played on co-ed teams and there was one kid who was fascinated by the girls. He was also oblivious to the game; his only focus was that pretty girl at the other end of the field. At one point this girl had the ball and was going down the field for an awesome score. At this age anything that looks coordinated is a success! As she reached the goal and wound her foot back to get the game winning score, BAM, he tackled her.  He stood up laughing because he was just playing a game. But the girl was crying. For her, they weren’t playing chase and she didn’t sign up for football for a reason.

In social media, this is the strategist who gets distracted by shiny things. They are the true early adopters who have tried every social media platform, they have the latest technology, and they have a need, a true need to fit your company into every social media network that exists … because it’s cool. They stand in line for the new iPad, even though they have the two versions before it. This is an important person to have in your arsenal because they are going to find the next Twitter or Facebook long before anyone else does. However, you will have to balance their need to discover with your need to focus on the channels that have potential today. If this person is developing your social media strategy, you probably don’t have a social media strategy. Rather, you keep hearing that social media is moving too quickly to develop a strategy. It’s true, it is tough to develop a strategy if you are busy trying to keep up with 12 social networks. Unfortunately, only 2 of them may have relevance to your business, right now.

The kid who is focused on the goal and scores every time

This kid is probably your star player. His skills are far more advanced than his other team mates. He gets the ball and he takes it down field and scores … every time. The parents are thrilled because this kid literally wins every game for them. But eventually, they start to get angry because he never passes the ball. He only knows how to do one thing: score.

In social media, this is the strategist who looks at social media in the context of social media. They are great at developing a strategy for Twitter to grow followers or to grow fans on Facebook; however they are disconnected from the rest of the organization and other departmental goals. They tend to develop strategies that other teams can’t get behind because they were never involved. Their strategies are singular in focus and many times the focus is misaligned with what the business is trying to achieve. Growing fans and followers can be useless if your company’s goal was to generate more leads and the strategist hasn’t provided a way for them to convert from the social channel.

This can be the phase when social media is seen as being only a marketing channel, rather than having the ability to change the way business is done throughout the organization. It’s the difference between someone who can develop a singular social media strategy and those who can affect change to transform the organization into a social business. Sometimes this is more about the organization than the strategist. However, many strategists have a difficult time envisioning where social fits into the entire organization.

The kid who understands the field, where his team mates are, when to go for the goal and when to pass

You know this kid. She’s the one that the parents are in awe of. She is only five but she is an orchestrator on the field. She understands the game. She scans the field as she’s bringing the ball down. She tells other kids where to be and when. She sets your kid up to score, and he does. When the other team is all over her, she somehow manages to keep the ball and take it down for the tough score the other kids couldn’t get. All of the parents talk about how she is probably going to be a pro player when she grows up, because she just gets it.

In social media, this is the strategist who has a view of the entire organization and understands where social media fits. She understands where it can be the most successful today and where she is growing it to be successful tomorrow. She has the entire executive team on board because she can clearly demonstrate where the return on her strategy is and has even been able to grow the budget to levels you thought were impossible. Her strategies are completely integrated with other departments’ goals and supporting marketing channels. She views social media as a tool that can be used to accomplish what the business has always tried to accomplish. It’s a tool in her tool belt and she knows how to use it. She is transforming your organization into a social business one initiative at a time.

So back to the question, does your social media strategist play like a 5-year-old soccer player?

Would she be able to recognize it if she did play like a 5-year-old? Probably not, unfortunately this is something that every single person will say: She will be the last to “get” it. But as a business owner or business executive you have to be able to look at your team and know whether or not you have the right players. This doesn’t mean you fire your social media managers or strategists if they are one the first four types of players. Those profiles are important to have represented on your team. But it may mean you need to take a look at who is driving the ship, because that’s the most important position.

What do you think? Does your team have the right players on the team? Are the players aligned with the right positions? Let us know about your team and what you think of our analogies in the comments.

Have You Registered For Explore Minneapolis?

Don’t miss two days of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Join SME’s Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly, The Now Revolution co-author Jay Baer, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Neil Patel of Kissmetrics and more at one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, August 16-17 in Minneapolis, Minn. DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!

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Social Media Explorer is gearing up to launch our first-ever research report called The Conversation. For the first edition of this new approach to market research, we’ll be focusing on the banking industry. You’ll want to make sure you subscribe to updates about our Industry Reports if you haven’t already to find out about the report as it’s released, though we’ll certainly blog about it more here.

For this new product, we’re taking the industry in question and looking at what consumers are saying about it in the online conversational marketplace. Whether it’s on blogs, news sites, social networks, microblogs and more, we’re trying to find the conversations around a given industry and dissect them to better understand what the customer is saying and thinking in an unfiltered, unadulterated environment like the social web. No one is asking these people survey questions while holding a clipboard. We’re finding the conversations, not the people.

One insight that emerged from our deep dive into the banking industry is that the majority, actually the vast majority, of conversations about banks and bank products online are held not on blogs or social networks, but on forums and message boards. The old school social media channels account for 90 percent of the conversations we discovered about banks and bank products.

Top sources for online banking conversations. Data and graph courtesy of NetBase.

Which brings to mind the question, “Where is your forum strategy?”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you have to have one. And yes, I’m well aware there’s some trendy, smart-ass meme going around claiming that Twitter, Facebook, blogs and even social media itself aren’t mediums that need strategies. If it makes you nit-pickers feel better, let me rephrase: Where are forums in your plans?

The answer for most marketers is, “they’re not.” This is likely because marketers don’t realize how much of the online conversation takes place in the consumers-gone-wild world of threaded conversations. But it could also be because marketers are petrified of them. Why? Because marketers typically aren’t welcome there. Most forum administrators are quick to thwart link droppers and promotional banner wavers. You can’t blame them. The users come there for … wait for it … conversations.

And as we’ve talked about already this week, marketers don’t know how to participate in those.

While The Conversation: What Consumers Are Saying About Banking will have advice for bank marketers and the agencies that serve them on how to combat the challenges we uncover, we’re going to do our part here to discuss how to approach forums and message boards, should they offer fertile conversational ground for your brand.

In the meantime, you should get a copy of Patrick O’Keefe’s Managing Online Forums or check out his thoughts on marketing in forums and message boards in one of his presentations on the subject.

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Don’t miss two days of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Join SME’s Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly, The Now Revolution co-author Jay Baer, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Neil Patel of Kissmetrics and more at one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, August 16-17 in Minneapolis, Minn. DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!

Apparently, my little tome on Engagement Monday worked a few folks up. From some questioning my credibility because I used a swear word a few times in the post (Have you seen my book? Heh.) to some really intelligent discourse and discussion, the comments and even the ensuing back-and-forth with folks on Twitter was a nice stroll down memory lane. It’s neat to see a blog post spark real conversation again. It seems like few do these days (mine or otherwise).

Rachel Kay even went so far as to use the topic to inspire her own reaction in which she declared that conversation wasn’t enough for paying clients who want metrics. (I love it when smart people add layers of perspective to my blog posts.)

Rachel said her clients, “want to see subscriptions, referrals, reviews, sales, etc. You know, engagement.” Her point of disagreement with me was that if I defined engagement as conversation, then it wasn’t a result.

While her argument was sound, I think there’s some reason to better define some of the nuances here. The metrics her clients want to see aren’t engagement, per say. They’re the measurable outcomes of calls-to-action. Dell Outlet can spit out links to discounted products all day, never really engaging their audience (other than the brief moment of attention paid to the Tweet in question … more on engagement in a moment), and drive sales. While these measures of marketing success can certainly result from high levels of engagement, they alone are not.

Conversation is engagement, but engagement isn’t solely defined by conversation. Rachel challenged me to better define engagement, so here goes:

Engagement is communicating well enough that the audience pays attention.

This is inclusive of the calls-to-action which drive the metrics Rachel’s (and all of our) clients covet. If I Tweet or post or email a 10% off coupon to my audience, that communication engages those who see the information and pause to click or print, then trade it in for their discount.

This definition allows for a passive audience member who simply watches, reads, learns and occupies their mind with our blog posts, Facebook statuses and Tweets, even if just for a moment, then moving on. It also accounts for those who take that engagement further and comment, Like, +1 or share.

This definition certainly accounts for the conversation. The audience is paying so much attention they’re actually participating in the exchange of ideas as a result.

To engage an audience is to hold their attention. It doesn’t require a reaction from them, though certainly that spells a greater level of engagement.

Rachel was caught up on my statement that engagement isn’t a goal, it’s a result. By result, she thought I meant that’s what you measure. I was actually speaking philosophically about how brands approach engagement. It’s become apparent to me that many are looking at engagement as a goal. So they manufacture lists of posts to make that will hopefully get more likes and shares so they can produce metrics of more likes and shares for their bosses or clients. Their goal is to drive more metrics, which they look at collectively and call “engagement.”

My argument is they shouldn’t focus on engagement as if it’s some sort of task on a check list. They should actually have conversations, ask questions and present ideas that the audiences will find interesting and react to. If they do that, rather than checking off the tasks they’ve invented to create “engagement” … or better said “engagement metrics,” then the metrics happen naturally and probably at higher rates of success than the other approach. And yes, you can mix in your calls-to-action and even sales opportunities in your conversations. I’m not advocating chit-chat for chit-chat’s sake.

The difference between thinking of engagement as a goal (bad) and a result (good) is subtle easy to blur. Sometimes the checklist presents results you can live with. But if you just approach the audience as people you want to inform and entertain with your content, even so much so they respond, rather than meeting your Tweet-per-day quota, you don’t have to wonder if the results are satisfactory. They will be.

It’s like the difference in pressing forward with your right foot, then your left foot, turning the wheel at a slight angle to rotate your position from a current position to a perpendicular position 45 feet ahead … and riding a bike around the corner. Sometimes you just need to ride a bike. You’re still going to get around the corner. You can still measure the distance you rode. But why clutter your brain with all the motions and miss the scenery?

What do you think about engagement? Is my definition too simple? To vague? The comments, as always, are yours.