Check out The Buzz!

It's been some time, as I've been settling into a new position. But a recent mail exchange with friend Tim Tyler made my eyes boggle, and set my envy gene rattling. Which makes the fingers itchy ...

Tim was behind a recent initiative that actually asked customers what they wanted via a community site, and then went on to build a new brand based on what he heard. See this blog post for a summary.

It simply amazes me that an insurance company had the courage to do this research, let alone move onto building a new brand based on the results. And while we need to wait to see whether they will be successful, it's a stunning example of what active listening via community sites can do for a - let's face it - fairly commoditized service offering.

What can we learn from this? Three things come to mind - firstly, the wisdom of crowds is a real and powerful tool if companies are prepared to listen. Secondly, people do really want to tell companies what they want from them provided the company doesn't come across all high-handed.

Thirdly, monetizing the feedback from communities is as simple as being prepared to act on what they tell you. The initiative by IAG may or may not be successful, but as a potential customer I can tell you that they get my attention immediately. They want to deliver what I want in my service package.

Thought for the Day: Maybe listening to people is not enough - you've got to have the balls to act on what they tell you.

Of course it's social!

Last week I talked about how the Internet Economy is fundamentally different to the traditional economy. When some people thanked me, the light went on - there are people who really don't "get it", and who need simple explanations. This time, I'd like to explain why social media are both a natural and inevitable development, and a "must-do". I'm using what I call my "Brian" approach, out of deep respect for an old friend of mine who taught me that simple is better than smart(arse).

Step 1: First, you have to accept that the Internet is real. It's not made up, and man really did land on the moon. But the freaky thing is that everyone is connected to everyone else.
Step 2: Next, you have to understand the size of this thing and how connected people are already . See the paragraphs after the Thought for the Day for the math, but trust me ... it's pretty big. Like 500,000,000,000 big!
Step 3: I'll wait while you try to imagine that number of possible conversations in your head ... you can't, can you? Oh, and no, you're not paranoid. They really are talking about you.
Step 4: Accept that you can not manage, let alone control, something this big. You need space in your togetherness with those billions of others.
Step 5: But how do you stay in touch? Only social media solutions make sense. The old one-way mass media models for marketing are like spears compared to lasers.

I like to think of messages in social networks as a bit like a nuclear chain reaction (the maths is very similar). If you get it right, you get a lot of cheap energy over a long period. But when it goes out of control, the damage can be thermonuclear. Assume that each node (person) could re-transmit each message to 1 other - this monster gets pretty wild, pretty quick. It only needs one person to re-transmit one message, and suddenly it's an epidemic (... or is it a pandemic? That means it's infectious...).

Social networks emerge naturally from a heterarchical network like the Internet. And sure enough, once they do people will invent a better mousetrap. So, from the time some-one sent some-one else the first e-mail back in 1965 this whole thing has been inevitable. Social media like FaceBook and Twitter are just more efficient and more multifunctional ways of doing the same thing that ARPANET did 50 years ago.

Thought for the Day: Faced with the fact of the Internet and the looming reality that soon every human could be connected to each other, old-school business models look more like atom bombs than power stations. You need to think about what changes you are going to make before the whole thing goes critical!
*****************************************************
One way to measure the speed of the growth of the Internet is to track the number of devices connected to the network. In 1984, there were 1,000 such devices. We hit 1,000,000 in 1992, blew through 600 million in 2006, and reached 1 BILLION last year. After more than twenty years, growth is still nearly exponential.

Now, Metcalfe’s Law about the value of networks says that the number of possible connections between devices is proportional to the square of the number of connected users. For the really geekie types: The number of nodes n = n(n − 1)/2.

Let me do the math for you - for 1 billion devices the result is about 4.9 x 10^17 – or a little greater than the life of the Universe in seconds. That's a pretty big number. Actually it's a seriously large number ... think of the number of stars in 10 million Milky Ways. And don't sweat the numbers - I don't mind being out by a couple hundred million when we talking these orders of magnitude.

Why is the Internet so diffferent?

Well, I'm finally back from a month's vacation - visiting home (Australia) for Christmas with the family and friends. Someone has got to offer me a job down there soon so I can get home for good!

But it wasn't all beer and skittles, as I've been asked to contribute some chapters to the forthcoming American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ) White Paper on the Internet Economy. It's targeted at Japanese regulators, a notoriously difficult group of stakeholders. I've spent a lot of time trying to develop an easy-to-understand view of the current state of play and future challenges for that audience.

But the biggest challenge has been trying to get people to understand that the Internet is fundamentally a different environment to anything we've experienced before. Here are 10 reasons why:

1. The physical economy is governed by supply and demand, or the economics of scarcity. The Internet works on abundance - the value of content grows with use.
2. In the digital economy, value (price) depends on the amount of embedded information (knowledge) rather than the value of the components (and brand premium).
3. Online, context determines value so identical knowledge can have different value to different people.
4. Because pricing is transparent on the Internet, competitiveness comes from relationship rather than price.
5. The barriers of time and location are essentially removed. The Internet offers global reach, instant response, flexibility, and 24/7 access.
6. Access to information and human capital drives value in the Internet Economy. Access to resources and financial capital drive the physical economy.
7. Success comes from resource aggregation and hierarchy in the physical economy, while knowledge distribution and heterarchy[1] feature in the Internet Economy.
[1] Heterarchy: (math, linguistics) a formal structure, usually represented by a diagram of connected nodes, without any single, permanent, uppermost node. [Collins English Dictionary]
8. Open access to information is fundamental to knowledge flows in the Internet Economy. Restricted access to information often increases value in the physical economy.
9. Physical economy processes are optimized for simplicity, but value-added knowledge transfer and interaction (success) leads to complexity in the Internet Economy.
10. Distribution costs rise with distance and number of nodes in the physical economy, but essentially fall in the Internet Economy.

Thought for the Day: The Internet is fundamentally different to the physical economy. If you're trying to adapt an existing business model to the Internet - or worse, adapt the Internet to your old business model - you're going to fail.

Ammado - Socially responsible

Have you seen ammado.com? This is a cool very-multi-national W2.0+ site from Ireland that "connects nonprofits, socially responsible companies and engaged individuals in an interactive and unique environment. We harness the power of the internet to accelerate communication, awareness and fundraising." Great idea, and one that deserves our support.

I spent a delightful hour today talking to their Japan representative. She showed me a new product - a "donation" gift card that allows the receiver to go online (instructions are on the back of the card), and choose a non-profit to receive the donation. The brilliant upside is that two-way engagement (giver + receiver) becomes three-way (giver + Non-Profit + receiver) or four-way if the giver also participates.

Remember, in network theory the efficiency of the network increases in proportion to the square of the number of nodes [actually, a function of the triangular number n(n − 1)/2) which is proportional to n-squared as the number of nodes increases to infinity].

This is an excellent idea - the donation that keeps on giving, yet also allows for social networking around the most important community: those in need. I can see it working as either an employee engagement or customer engagement tool, or as a splendid way to enable socially-aware rewards schemes. Think and ACT green, for example.

You've got to hand it Ammado - this Irish company has actually proved that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!

Thought for the Day: Joining with customers (employees are internal customers for your brand) to do good will help brands leverage their social credentials - and just might create real engagement! Bravo Ammado!

Why is Google so successful?

Wow! Did you happen to catch this excellent piece of analysis by Fabernovel? Or their White Paper? Staggering stuff ... brilliant insights ... and scary at a number of different levels. Thanks to Digital Ministry and John Lynch for sharing.

I don't give much truck to conspiracy theories, and I'm an enthusiastic fan of Google. Good luck to them, and more power to those who make it easier for us all to connect. So take all of this positively.

But I never imagined there was this much strategic intent behind the various Google "avatars". Or even if it wasn't all Sergey and Larry, the idea that comprehensive analysis like Fabernovel's could divine the strategic elements. It's amazing - so refreshingly simple, so vicariously thrilling, yet overwhelmingly compelling.

For those who can't be bothered to read the presentation or the White Paper, here's the 30 second synopsis:

• Google's success is a result of the successful application of Metcalfe's Law on the utility of networks;
• Their reach (or utility) is not the sum of the people in the networks - it's proportional to the square (!) of the people in the networks.
• Inital value is created through two-sided markets, which morph to polygonic markets through addition of complementary networks;
• That creates geometric growth in value (which coincidentally attracts new networks).

This all creates a space where Google can look at new points of leverage - like browser-based apps, offline advertising. So Google can be Google, and the rest of us can be scared.

Google has posted some pretty big user numbers in Search and other apps. And once you do that, the power comes more from the number of networks rather than the number of participants in each network.

Thought for the Day: Maybe it's time to figure out how to link networks rather than just create new ones.

A social presidency?

Check out this article in the Financial Times. One of the consequences of what could be termed the world's first ever socially-wired election campaign is an expectation by the huge Obama network that they can continue to be involved. Um, that means actually have a say in how they are governed.

That's a fairly radical concept. Not since the Thing of the Norse cultures has there been such an idea (discounting small egalitarian communities and communes). If you think I'm kidding, check out Fix this, Barack or White House 2. Amazing! All with a sense of collegiality and a remarkable goodness-of-fit with Obama's own priorities.

Of course, the challenge for the BO White House is to figure out how to keep the magnificent constituency developed by the campaign connected and committed, in the raw light of day on Capitol Hill. The crushing immediacy of the issues faced by the incoming President will no doubt play havoc with his iPhone and Twitter teams. Analysing 5 days of public feedback received through the White House website is going to take some real heft. But what an opportunity to take back government!

Things (pun intended) are never going to be the same. Oh..., and some-one tell K. Rudd to get a look at this phenomenon - and change that crappy feedback page into something useful!

Thought for the Day: Social media offer the opportunity for people to seize back a say in government policies and priorities. Maybe it's time for politicians to listen.

Anti-Social - Sorry

It's been a while since I posted to this blog - I've been running around Tokyo in the hectic year-end season. Every night another function, hosted by one company or another. What's the point?

Actually, the point is pretty simple and it took a slow lunch with a friend on Sunday to bring it to my attention. Humans are social animals - we delight in the company of others and fret when we're alone. Those are evolutionary traits designed to promote the survival of the species. I hadn't seen this friend for some time, and he's a little down-in the-dumps because of the global financial crisis. Generationally, he's not a social media user so I wasn't aware.

The functions I've been going to are a good example of physical social networks - that's where I caught up with my friend, and then made some time to talk to him about his problems. Digital social networks are a metaphor for "network-ing" events, just not time- or location-limited.

Social networks - and I mean digital social networks - simply replicate existing behaviors. Sure, it's greatly enhanced by technology and we now reach many more people than ever before possible. But the underlying behaviour is identical. Uh-huh, but so what?

Well, if we want to be successful in building social media tools that engage and delight people we must build them around behaviors - not around technologies. More than ever before, successful marketing will depend on our ability to understand what makes people tick rather than what makes them click. For me, understanding the 3 components of an audience (demographics, psychographics, and technographics) and then building a set of personas is as important as ever ... maybe more important.

Thought for the Day: When some-one comes to you with a brilliant idea to utilize a technology, maybe you should ask what social behaviour it models. Otherwise, you'll just be playing with the latest shiny toy.

Occasional Series I - Objectives

The story so far: our company, WSG bank, is looking for a social media proposal around a segment we've identified as "Builders". We've built some personas. Now we're starting to look at objectives as the second step in the POST methodology.

Jeremiah Owyang maps objectives to functional units in the business. I find this useful, because it immediately highlights the right sort of aspirations and metrics that we should be thinking about.

Regardless of industry or maturity, there are 4 things that all companies should be focused on: customer acquisition, customer activation (generating an initial purchase action from a customer who has registered), customer productivity (better thought of as a component of LTV), and customer retention. Anything else can be described as a function of one of these. In our example, let's start with the first one - customer acquisition. Perhaps we'll return to the others down the road, but this is a good place to begin.

So our goal is straightfoward - attract x new customers to our bank from the Builder segment, which we'll measure by a simple count of new accounts via the social media execution. We can model the data we get from our clickstream to get a proxy for total new accounts over all channels (HINT: our demographics and technographics will help us build this algorithm). Which of the Groundswell objectives is going to be useful?

Most people lunge immediately for the "talking" objective - or marketing in the functional lexicon. Trouble is, our Builders are pretty cynical about banks - so in my book, it's odds-on that they're not going to click over to a blatant marketing site. In my view, this is an occasion to reach for "listening". After all, it's the first step in the relationship build phase.

Because this is an fictional case, I'm going to propose we build a "scratching post" for people to tell us what they think about banks. Let's call it allbanksarebastards.com - at least the headline is going to resonate with our target segment. Our goal is to generate a robust discussion around what we're doing that gets under peoples' skin. We're going to ask a simple question - what could we do better? Longer-term, we're going to leverage this by acting on some of the comments and suggestions.

In the next post, I'll get more granular around this idea and start to lay out some of our "strategies" in the POST methodology.

Making the case for Social Media

With considerable apologies to this Champion at Digital Ministry

Most social media people get deeply disappointed when their brilliant proposals don't get funded in the budget process. They're convinced that SM represents the chance to reach out to customers, give them a voice, and let loose the dogs of advocacy. But the CFO and other top team members rarely buy it. Why?

• Language:

Geeks love using jargon because it signifies membership of an elite group of those with the "knowledge", like London taxi drivers or members of some arcane gnostic sect. And social marketers are most often geeks (not technology geeks, but marketing geeks). The words "social media" are a challenge for most people, let alone "blog", "Twitter", "wiki", and "community".

Find other ways to explain yourself - and make maximum effort to do a Dr Dolittle by speaking in languages CEOs, COOs, and CFOs understand. Blogs are a "set of discussions and opinions" that allow customers to respond and present their point of view. A wiki lets "experts contribute information" that is available to all.

A little bit of effort goes a long way - I once explained to a CFO who was an enthusiastic DIY man that "information architecture is a bit like the peg board above your work bench with stencilled places for all your tools". He got it immediately.

• Extending existing functions:

Many people make the mistake of positioning SM as the latest and brightest toy. For decision-makers that's scary because they think that as a "new initiative" it will require steep learning curves and will be littered with mistakes. In reality, all SM does (for companies) is extend your current functional departments' capabilities. You need to position the idea in terms of how it will deliver efficiency [in, say, customer service]; effectiveness [in, say, brand awareness]; and engagement [via, say, purchase intention].

• Surveillance:

Armies and law enforcement agencies spend lots of time gathering intelligence. It is vitally important that you do the same. Use Google Alerts and Twitter Search over a month or so to map the buzz around your company, competitors, and industry. Lay out the results in an idiot-proof manner with both quant and qual metrics. For blogs, I use the terms "volume" (number of mentions), "tone" (positive, negative, neutral) and "noise" (competitor mentions). These terms make sense to anyone who has a home stereo system, and you can position your proposal with familiar metaphors.

• Objectives:

You will need to clearly lay out your goals and some metrics. Look at Jeremiah Owyang's objective mapping - he relates objectives to well-known functions in companies like this:

Listening = Research,

Talking = Marketing,

Energizing = Sales,

Supporting = Customer Support, and

Embracing = R&D (New product development)

If you're thinking the words in bold italics, then this secret decoder key tells you to use the functional descriptors. And once you start using familiar language, the metrics should be self-apparent. So use them.

• Recognize you're changing the culture:

SM requires companies to embrace two-way conversation instead of one-way messaging. That's a huge challenge for most firms, and runs against most corporate cultures. Understand this, and find ways to re-define the change in terms of the words above. You're not going to get full transparency first time around, so get over it.

• Point to Success:

There are long lists of who's doing what in the SM space, and plenty of big companies. Someone told me about Peter Kim's list - it's a great start. Search around for some case studies and press releases about some of these initiatives, and point out a few in your proposal. It's even better if you can find some stuff that your competitors are doing.

Thought for the Day: Your proposal won't get funded unless you figure out how to explain it to decision-makers. Think about that in as much depth as your brilliant idea.

In vino, veritas!

I owe today's post to the ever-observant Mark Ferris at Ascendant. Mark's a great guy, and he pointed out a nice little blog post by the Stormhoek people in South Africa (do they make wine there?). I'm often asked about how businesses can make social media work for them - and the Stormhoek guys provide an excellent example.

The most recent post talks about the way they approach their wine. They recognize that a global, informed conversation has grown up around wine - in a world where lots of people are making good wine, they believe that the worldview about wine has changed. For them, "handcrafted-ness" and terroir are of course important. But with the paradigm shift they described, they believed there was something "far deeper, human and visceral". Sound a little like what I was talking about in this post?

So they decided that they wanted to let people know what making wine meant for them in their view of the world ... and printed it on the back label. For them, wine means:

LOVE
BEING PASSIONATE
DREAMING BIG
BEING SPONTANEOUS
CELEBRATING
CHANGING THE WORLD

Guess what? People loved it.

Stormhoek provides something beyond another marketing channel with their blog. They provide a human, aspirational face. Something that wine lovers all over the world can identify with, and share. Six simple realities about wine that start a million conversations, and inspire customers to engage with the brand. Stormhoek gets it, and gets it big!

I have never bought any of their wine - but you can bet that I am now going to make the effort to track some down. And tell other people about it.

p.s. They also provided some tips on blogging for a friendly rival which I recommend you read.

The C-Suite starts to get it

Here's an interesting post from The Economist Intelligence Unit. Apparently, nearly 80% of companies see social media and user-generated content as an important part of their businesses going forward. Many companies have started experimenting with communities, and blogs and wikis are part of the vocabulary. It seems people think SM can help grow the topline and reduce costs. Yep, shows they read the newspapers.

CFO's are more dubious, and middle management are not as sure. No surprises there either! CFO's are part of the show-me-the-money crowd - and there is little doubt that the metrics side of the social media revolution has been a little slower out of the gate than the enthusiasts. Provided the bean counters focus on the bottom line, I have no problem at all with their approach. That can only provide rigour, meaning better job security for the SM guys and girls.

Middle management - of course they're doubters. Most of us forget that middle managers are hired to ... wait for it ... manage! Manage means maintain the status quo. If these people started to innovate on a serial basis, business would get out of control in a minute.

The surprise for me is the very low knowledge base from where C-suiters are starting. The recent US election showed us one thing very clearly - brands (and Obama is as much a brand as he was a candidate) need to empower people to get involved. It's not only about having customers come up with new product ideas, or about reducing the cost of advertising. It's about thinking about two-way conversations, and about mutual benefits. The executives in the survey are acting as if they are still in sole control of their brands.

I only have bad news for these people - it ain't so, and you better figure out a way to let go. Otherwise, you'll find you're on the express ride to oblivion.

On the positive side, most companies expect SM and UGC to be the biggest factors changing the ways they interacts with customers or employees. They see it "as an opportunity, not a threat". Phew! Now, if we all could only see them as an opportunity rather than a threat.

Thought for the Day: Forget about the CFOs and middle management. Concentrate on the customer experience, let your advocates speak for you, and never forget where you came from.

Marketing Needs a New Job Spec ...

I've been seeing a lot of confused marketers and CEOs running around lately. There seems to be a general question: "How come the stuff we've been doing for 50 years doesn't work anymore?".

It doesn't work because the rules have changed! If you've read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) you'll understand that a paradigm shift is a fundamental change in the basic assumptions underpinning a particular scientific set of knowledge. For Kuhn, the paradigm is not just the current theory, but the world view in which it exists along with essential implications which arise from it.

Communications theorists have been saying for more than a decade that the Internet represents a paradigm shift in communications. Fair enough - arguing otherwise seems pointless, even if we're not quite done with the revolution just yet. And given that it's a technology thing, then it's not too far gone to say it deserves a scientific treatment.

If you use political theory to describe the behavior of large groups of people, then it's fair to suggest that we're still travelling through an anarchical way-point on our way to the final destination. In fact, the Internet allows a more complex form of interaction than any other media channel we've ever experienced.

The rough tools of print, radio, and television allow communication in only one direction. It's easy enough to model message transmission (even if it sometimes ends up garbled like a bizarre form of the pass-the-message game). It's like a sequence of nodes (users) in series. Or translated, it's like talking in some one's ear in the middle of Shibuya Crossing. The most effective and efficient way to transmit a message in this environment is to send it often and and with maximum signal power (loudly).

But social media powered by the Internet is a different game - suddenly you empower each node (user) to communicate with any other node. Everything is connected to everything else, and the number of connections quickly becomes an intractable calculation (meaning you can't find a computer big enough to solve it that fits inside the Universe!). Translation: A million octopuses shaking hands, with a million others. Efficiency and effectiveness come from having a message repeated as often as possible with low signal power (softly). A CSR in a big company connects everyone to each other, and make the whole thing operate smoothly.

The Internet is not a channel - it's a switchboard. Until social media turned the shouting match into a conversation, marketers needed to have a loud voice (lots of media exposure), good lungs (big budgets), and run the 100m in 10 seconds (focus on short-term results). But a good CSR needs empathy (listening to people), angles (interesting ways to interact), and a stack of marathons under the belt (focus on the long-term).

I'd rather be a shaker than a shouter. What about you?

Thought for the Day: Talking loudly with a big stick doesn't work anymore. Maybe you need a new job spec for your marketers that looks more like your Customer Service Representatives'.

Running ahead of the pack

Some people think that social media is all hype. "Show me the money", they say. OK ... how about a stock price that has been steadily rising against the market since mid-2006? [and yes, of course it has suffered in the meltdown, but not to same extent as others].

What has Nike (NKE) done different in that time? Two years ago, it launched Nike+. Essentially, this is a sensor-based technology that stores data via a 2G+ iPod on your exercise, reports back a variety of facts and figures, and can upload the data to a social network website. Millions of people have joined this network - and Nike has created an army of loyal advocates. As an example of the power of that army, more than 800,000 people joined the Human Race on 31 August in 25 places around the world.

The members of the Nike+ community are on track (at more than 1 mile/sec, or faster than any F1 racer) to record 100,000,000 collective miles. Net Advocacy Scores are skyrocketing. Sales of accessories are growing faster than many ever imagined.

While the direct correlation is hard to prove, Nike has grown US market share of running shoes from 48% in 2006 to more than 60% today. Are you prepared to say there's no connection? Not me!

Many consumer goods companies (and others like General Motors!) have tried to use social media to build brand advocacy. The results have been tragic, or so faintly positive that the ROI didn't prove out.

So what's different about Nike's approach? For a start, the community is not built around a brand or product - it's built specifically for a bunch of people with a passion for running. You can put the Nike+ sensor in another company's shoes and still share the buzz. Translation: It's not a marketing campaign. It's shared experiences that inspire people. Nike+ provides the engine for a social activity.

Thought for the Day: If you focus on the people rather than the brand, chances are you may get the chance to ride the tiger of passion!

Occasional Series I - Example Persona

Persona (Pre-Family Male)

Profile
Name: Takuya Kuroda
Prefecture: Fukuoka
Age: 28
Marital status: Single (living on his own)
Occupation: Sales and marketing
Income: 3,700,000 yen
Housing: Rented apartment
Car: Nissan TIIDA
Social Circle: Many friends related to his university and mixi community
Characteristics: Cheerful and active
Hobby: Car and baseball
PC: DELL Notebook
Internet Experience: 10 years
Frequency of Use: Almost every day
Duration of Use: 3 hours per day
SNS: Mixi (mainly from PC)
PC hours: from 10:00p.m.

Daily Schedule
6:50 AM: Wake up and shower
7:30 AM: Check news on PC while having breakfast
8:00 AM: Go to work by train. On the way to work, play games on mobile phone and listen to music on iPod
9:00 AM: Start work
12:00 Lunch. Check e-mail on mobile phone
6:00 PM: Leave office
7:00 PM: Dinner (bento box dinner). Watch baseball game on TV
10:00 PM: Check e-mail, search information on internet about cars and car accessories. Add commentsin mixi community.
1:00 AM: Go to bed

Word Picture: It is 6 years since he joined the company as a sales representative. He is settled in his job but recently he's been considering changing due to his poor relationship with his boss. His friend from university invited him to join a mixi community one and a half years ago. He met many virtual friends in mixi and enjoys his virtual life. But he is not an internet geek. He loves chatting with girls in bars. Ichiro Suzuki is his hero. Whenever he sees him on TV, he feels proud to be Japanese.

Occasional Series I - Personas

A couple of people have asked me about building personas - what do you put in and what do you leave out? The answer - simple ... you put enough in so that most people can say "hey, I know someone like that" and you leave out anything that looks like it's unique to an individual.

Most times, the data you need for building personas is available from secondary or tertiary sources (tertiary data source means you take somebody else's personas holus-bolus). If team members or vendors are telling you that specific research is necessary, then they're ahead of themselves - they're getting focused on "how" rather than "who".

Here's a link to an example persona we built for a social media play: example persona. Notice it has three components:

1. the profile, where we apply some demographics and technographics so we build a picture of the person;
2. the schedule, where we try to provide a context for the profile;
3. the word picture; where we add some comments to "round" out the character and give life to the psychographics.

And please, before any comments, recognize that this is a very stripped down version designed to give you an idea of what might be included. For our Flex build in 2005, we developed eleven of these personas - all from secondary data - which we later informed with UX research. Each was about 1mB.

Why personas? Go back to the methodology - the most important component is understanding who you're building this for. Getting a picture of them that everyone can share is vital.

When your head's in the cloud ...

I had the privilege this morning of spending some time with Peter Cullen and my colleagues from the ACCJ Internet Economy Task Force. Cullen is the GM TwC & Chief Privacy Strategist for the Microsoft Corporation, and he knows his stuff - our 90 minutes together was a fascinating flight through the maze of factors impacting privacy regulation and advocacy around the planet.

Still, it was depressing in a way - unfortunately there are very few people like Cullen who have thought through the potential impact of social media on privacy and security. And I believe there are many serious issues to surface.

For example, does posting some personal information to a social media site constitute a public act? If I want to share my details with my friends, that's one thing. But the world - that's a completely different issue. Or another thought: should there be a "statute of limitations" around personal data released on social media? After all, there is no moral justification for using something a person said as a teenager when they're 30, 40, or 50. It's hearsay.

But my head goes straight to the Cloud, as enterprise computing moves into the SaaS era and data becomes increasingly stratospheric. How does any one country provide its citizens with safeguards over both security and privacy when the app and the data maybe physically located elsewhere, and virtually located everywhere?

One answer may be the social graph. Giving people the right to maintain one version of their personal data, and "permissioning" various companies and agencies to use it (permanently or one-time-only) makes a lot of sense. In this light, people would maintain their personal data as another asset type, like their finances, their legal documents, etc. For people who opted not to have active asset management, set the defaults to super-secure, super-private.

Thought for the Day: Why should people need to keep track of hundreds of profiles and squillions of passwords? Maybe we should all have a unique digital ID that we maintain ourselves.

Community Marketing ... A model for trust?

A recent throw-away line by my friend Chris Beaumont got me to thinking. "I'm thinking about new ways of marketing". Hmm - provocative stuff indeed.

There are plenty of advocates for a sweet blend of anarchy in the new social media world, like the Cluetrain guys who started it all or Seth Godin. But it seems to me that there is room for a little discipline and lots of method. I agree with the Cluetrain guys when they say that a connected market place has more in common with the souk than the post-war mass advertising maelstrom. I agree with Seth when he says that no-one "owns" a community, and right of participation has to be earned.

But I also believe that you can build a disciplined digital community marketing model for brands and people. I suggest that the principles are:

1. real two-way (multi-way?) interaction around the brand premise and promise;
2. no less than 100% transparency;
3. measurable intrinsic and extrinsic benefit for both consumers and brand-owners;
4. ongoing incentive for participation; and
5. commitment by brands to act on the voice of the community.

That sounds really esoteric - but I think that we could build a simple model for this. That model would allow brands to understand what their role should be, yet provide clear imperatives for investment with solid measurement criteria. It could also provide a "bill of rights" for consumers via a code of behavior with which to hold brands accountable. Something beyond WOMMA, something that focused on mutual obligation and benefit.

One key failure of current marketing practise is that it relies on companies selling brands instead of people buying brands. Way too much focus on one party, with a consequent loss of individuality and informality... which gives rise to "over-sell" by one side of the conversation, and cynicism by the other. What if we set that to rights via a new paradigm? What if we restored the value of trust?

I'd be really interested in feedback around this idea. Feels like the start of something...

Thought for the Day: What if brands behaved like people? Maybe there's a way to build a new model for community marketing that depends on trust rather than pitch.

Making sure people are in the forest ...

At a recent Internations event here in Tokyo, I was asked about ways that offline communities can connect online. The environmental group concerned has a lively and engaged constituency for its events, and wanted to take this online.

The group already uses Ning to power its communication out to its members, so my first observation was that it has a core group of permissioned users around which to build its online community. There is already a blog page, although it should be promoted more and needs a celebrity or authority blogger. There is a video links section, and a forum. It's probably a bit much for one person to handle, and the group should consider devolving responsibility for various sections to individuals - after all, the goal is to create social media which means "people".

My other observation was that the group tended to focus on CSR and corporate-level initiatives. Which is probably fine, but for me the creation of community requires a collection of galvanizing reasons-to-believe (RTB) so that people interact with a human voice.

The major "a-ha" moment for me was the potential power that a micro-blogging tool like Twitter could provide this group. See, Twitter is constructed around one very simple question - "what are you doing now?". One of the outcomes it generates is "buzz" - there are lots of small, easily digestible nuggets flying around the Twittersphere, and each tweet (a single post on Twitter) can act as the spur for a different direction for the community.

Imagine a bunch of people all providing each other with seemingly insignificant ideas to do something personal about the environmental crisis. You could end up with something as powerful as Earth Hour, where 50 million people turned off their lights for one hour all around the planet. What a powerful symbol!

Tokyo is apparently one of the most active Twitter spots in the planet, and given the growing convergence between computers and mobile platforms in this market one can imagine it could become very powerful. In this case, driving connections between members of the group could be one way to strengthen the ties that bind them.

Issues like the environment and sustainability require individuals to commit to both personal and group action. The events are providing the genesis of some group activities - but Twitter could provide a way for members to signal personal activities as well, or reach out for support.

Thought for the Day: Many people set up communities that end up being one-person soapboxes. Maybe Twitter is one way to open up the way for tens, hundreds, or thousands of people to participate in a true conversation.

An Election Thought ...

Much will be written about this US Presidential election, and I'm sure the analysis will bore most of us to death. I share the optimism and goodwill that being demonstrated all around the world, but I think that social marketers will take a very significant lesson from both the campaign and the result.

If Howard Dean proved that the Internet reached younger people and "main street" voters when he raised so much money online, then the election of Barack Obama showed the power of social networks, and therefore social media, once and for all.

From the moment the Hilary 1984 video aired on YouTube, with tens of millions of viewers, campaigns should have been on notice that something was different. More content followed, and while some candidates "sorta" posted standard TV clips others realized that this was the year when the power of connectivity was going to help shape opinion.

Blogs proliferated, and suddenly communities began to spring up around Facebook, MySpace, Mixi and other social networking platforms. Obama even took to Twitter like a fish, recognizing that social media provided him with the chance to personalize the campaign in a way never possible before. People wanted to participate, and the social media universe gave them the opportunity to do something, anything. By the way, did you see the Obama-08 iPhone app? Amazing!

Think about this in the context of your brands - in a funny way, they are like candidates in an always-on election with consumers. If you're not actively thinking about enabling conversations, personalizing relationships, and letting people participate - likely you'll finish up as the "other candidate".

Thought for the Day: Maybe it's time to realize that your brands are out there on the hustings in Consumer Land, and that they're likely to need some help reaching out to people.

Occasional Series I - People

So the CMO has agreed that the Problem Statement neatly captures her thinking. She's asked you to come up with a concept proposal.

Reminder: Our bank, WSG, believes there's a group of potential profitable customers among a group we're calling "Builders". But they're very cynical towards banks, tend to churn, and things are tough on the home financial front.

Where do we go next? The methodology I recommend is POST, eloquently explained by Jeremiah Owyang and his colleagues at Forrester. The "P"stands for people.

"Huh? There must be stacks of data on these people" says the CMO.

Well, maybe ... but I'm prepared to bet that no-one's synthesized the 3 elements of demography, psychography, and technography. This is not a cake mix, so there's no set formula on how to do it. But the goal is to come up with between 5 and 10 personas - the number will depend on how you slice and dice the data. Your personas should be broad enough to allow most people to identify with at least one of them, and granular enough for your marketers to immediately start suggesting hooks.

Hint: demographics give you segments, psychographics point at clusters, and technographics suggest network nodes.

I also suggest that once you've developed the personas, you plan to get your executives out on the street on "safari" to identify these people and talk to them. I've seen this done this very successfully here in Tokyo, and it really works. Of course, make sure you do a couple of trial runs yourself!

In the next post in this occasional series, we'll start talking about laying out your objectives.