Fast.Fwd.Innov@tion

Web 2.0 + Developers + Power users = Crowdsourcing as the next level challenge

Romain Péchard — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:36:24 +0000

Crowsourcing has risen thanks to Open Source programming and volunteers who work in their spare time. This process has taken some time to reach the business level but now some big names have chosen to use that path to implement features and grow their business, this would become a big trend for the year to come. Mass market companies are trying hard to use social media as a marketing tool, but crowdsourcing as part of social media would be their path to success if they can well understand how the successful companies have turned it as their competitive advantage.

Making people work for the company is the basic of social media marketing (influence, recommendation, reputation, or brand image are all based on that) and also the basic of crowdsourcing. The difference stands as the crowdsourcing process leaves to people the ability to create and to get rewarded for it by the other users while putting aside the brand to keep the focus on the user experience and what’s being developed, when social media marketing focuses on the brand or the product while not talking to people nor trying to reach an objective, but to spread a message.

And that’s from that point the social media marketing is going wrong and the crowdsourcing driving more social media reputation and visibility, then generating more engagement and product purchase. Because crowdsourcing is based on engagement and reward, because it’s aiming for a clear objective that is creating a product that can answer a need and not trying to keep the status-quo. And that’s why people engage themselves with the brand, because it’s giving the opportunity to create something new.

As we all go on Facebook to look for something new and engaging, third-part application companies have understood that they would be able to generate benefits from that social network because people are there to engage with each others and are looking for things that can entertain themselves and their friends if shared. And that’s the same for other crowdsourcing-like business, like the Apple iPhone AppStore: Apple has opened the application creation to anybody and then is letting people who are working on it doing their marketing, making the AppStore more and more interesting with interesting and crappy applications, but above all marketing the AppStore and then the iPhone by sharing the applications and revealing all the potential of the iPhone without having to be involved in any non core application development. The same can be said for Nike and it’s running movement that has been generated by the Nike+ kit.

Without having to push too far the communication on the Nike+ running community, they support it once in a while so that the whole community is rewarded because the worldwide company is talking about them to the rest of the world, and engaging them more with the brand (eventually leading to more sales). Nike keeps focusing on running communication, and providing tools to runners to get together under their brand banner, not asking for any reward but to show the community members are having more fun running together.

Focusing on user experience enhancement, ability to deliver the right service to the people using your product, that’s what would really leverage the social media marketing. Innovation and innovation spreading are the next level of marketing, consumer centric marketing is the key, crowdsourcing a key I believe in, and community management the lever to get your company to the next level.

Photo Credit : okszigen 

To read more on that topic:

Age of conversation: a book to read

Romain Péchard — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 11:39:41 +0000

Written by a lot of really interesting bloggers, Age of Conversation seems to be a really interesting book to buy to complete your knowledge on social media communication. You should get your hand on this book. Here are some interesting thoughts about social media marketing from the book.

Age Of Conversation (second edition)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: conversation age)

To read more on that topic:

Community + Advocates = How to detect advocates and what to expect from them?

Romain Péchard — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:51:45 +0000

Advocates in the web space are the breed of users any company is looking for. Because they’re a salesforce you don’t pay, because they’re a salesforce that generate more confidence in your company and in your products, because they’re experts who would provide you with end users needs and desires, those people can become your trump card to speed up your business growth and build your reputation. To be able to follow the same growth FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threadless, 37Signals, and many other companies (as well as many artists and music groups) have generated, the point is to be able to detect those advocates and to know what to expect from them.

Somes simple steps can manage your company to detect within and out of your user community who are the advocates you should rely on, feed with information, and engage with them to make your brand and your products better (I mean fit to interest users needs):

Pitch, pitch, pitch, and listen to what’s been understood by your users: spreading the word would generate feedbacks, listen to them carefully and adjust your product and your pitch to appeal people. Never underestimate feedback, they’re your raw material to get notice of interest from people for your product, and your first filter to classify your community members (community meaning here anybody who’s taking time to share time with you).
Adjust your communication and categorize your community members: adjust your pitch according to what’s been highlighted in your community members’ feedback and be sure to use the right pitch from your pitch deck regarding the point of interest the person you’re speaking with. That’s how you can engage with this person: don’t take time to explain about what she didn’t notice but focus on what she underlined and on her expertise field. It’s the second filter to classify your community members.
Gather people who provided feedback and who are experts: make those people your first target of any upcoming communication: the small community of interested people you’ve managed to identify is now the pool of advocates where you would have to fish to get your advocate taskforce.

That pool would be the first destination of communication and you have to stick with that, while adding in it any new person willing to get involved (directly or not). Adjust your product and your communication to be sure they would keep on speaking about your company. The more you make these people happy and proud of what you’re delivering, the more they would have reasons to broader speak about you.

Now the identification is done, you have to understand what you can expect from your advocates. Depending of their word of mouth ability (blog traffic of their websites, forum and wiki curators, basic user level, …) you would be able to send them specific message, always according to their point of interest and their ability to deal with the information you’re sharing with them. Never mass email, always target communication: you don’t detail marketing action plan to your engineer, don’t mess with your advocates with global information if they don’t want to hear of it (if they do, they would ask for it).

Robert Scoble was the one who turned sped up FriendFeed adoption, as well as he was a Twitter power user and help the company community to grow. Louis Grey also collaborated to the growth of many companies by providing more than review of products but a location where many ideas on those products were shared. The value of the advocates is more on their ability to generate discussion and then ideas than in their ability to drive new customers to your product, then providing you the time to create a relationship with them and to turn them into customers (and maybe advocates).

Photo Credit: Gjik

To read more on that topic:

Review of the Internet news of the day

Romain Péchard — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:25:00 +0000

From the relation between what’s been watched on TV and what’s talked about on the Internet, a report from Razorfish on consumer experience, a study on blog influence, to a quiz to check if you’re in the right company in this “bad time” (not so sure we’re in a bad time but only in a rationalization session), some ideas to work with bloggers and influent bloggers, and a presentation of the new company Bill Gates has started. Here are the links.

The Most Watched TV Shows Are Not The Most Talked About Online: Measuring viewer “engagement” on TV is simple. You count how many people tune into a given show. It stands to reason that the most popular shows would also be the most popular ones on social networks. But that is not exactly the case. Networked Insights, a company that measures brand engagement on social networks, compared the top ten TV shows for the week of September 22 to 28, as measured by Nielsens, to the most talked about TV shows on social networks, as measured by which ones were most commented on, linked to, shared, or rated… Read more on TechCrunch.

Announcing FEED: The Razorfish Consumer Experience Report: Are widgets the TV sets of the future? Does social media impact consumer purchasing? Do people really use Twitter? These are just some of the questions we are answering with FEED: The Razorfish Consumer Experience Report, which we are releasing today as a PDF download and an interactive flash experience at feed.razorfish.com… Read more on Digital Design Blog.

Study: Blogs Beat Social Networks on Purchase Influence: So much for peer pressure. Consumer purchases are more likely to be influenced by bloggers’ recommendations than what friends or other members of their social networks tout, a new study found. BuzzLogic, a social media analysis company and ad network, sponsored the study (which was conducted by JupiterResearch, a Forrester research company)… Read more on Adotas.

How to Tell If Your CEO Is Clueless: Pontificating, theorizing, and terrorizing abounds these days in tech startups. Here is a simple test to help you figure out if the startup you work for is in trouble. All you have to do is listen to your CEO talk to people for a week and determine if she uses these lines… Read more on Guy Kawasaki’s blog.

Working With WOM Influencers: Last month, WOMMA quietly released their Influencer Handbook which offers guidelines on best practices and ethics for engaging influencers - online and offline - in WOM programs. A council of members put the handbook together. This is one of several useful initiatives that WOMMA members are spearheading right now… Read more on Digital Influence Mapping Project.

Bill Gates Has Started a New Company, bgC3: Bill Gates has started a mysterious new company, called bgC3, possibly to be focused on creating catalyst business ideas to spin off to Microsoft, the Gates Foundation or elsewhere. Little is known about the company, which doesn’t appear to have a public web page, but a fair number of details have been ferreted out by the Seattle area tech reporters Todd Bishop, Eric Engleman and John Cook… Read more on ReadWriteWeb.

To read more:

Review of the Internet News of the Day

Romain Péchard — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:20:51 +0000

It’s been a while I didn’t write on this blog. The excuse? Working for my company to create a new kind of indicator on community management and the launch of the French Chapter of ReadWriteWeb. Topics that needed all my attention for the last weeks. Now the rush away for a while, I can spend time on this blog. And to start here are the links for today, from Social Media as the new Knowledge Management, the PR issues are all related to those dinosaurs who are leading the PR market, the Twitter communication strategy ~~reviewed~~ listed by Ogilvy, the business status between Apple and Microsoft (seems like Apple is the new Microsoft in terms of business growth and revenue), to Intel’s community management, and a great thought of Seth Godin on “Your brand is not your logo”.

Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War: You’d think Knowledge Management (KM), that venerable IT-based social engineering discipline which came up with evocative phrases like “community of practice,” “expertise locater,” and “knowledge capture,” would be in the vanguard of the 2.0 revolution. You’d be wrong. Inside organizations and at industry fora today, every other conversation around social media (SM) and Enterprise 2.0 seems to turn into a thinly-veiled skirmish within an industry-wide KM-SM shadow war… Read More on Entreprise 2.0 Blog.

PR Industry Leaders Put Their Feet in Their Mouths at Critical Issues Forum: I was one of the people interviewed in a video (below) shown at a Council of PR Firms Critical Issues Forum at the Yale Club last week. The topic of the meeting was the future of public relations.” And some pretty dangerous ideas came out of the mouths of people who really should know better - like the CEOs and Sr VPs of some of the biggest PR firms in the world… Read More on What’s Next Blog.

The Twitter Strategy Blog Series: Post #1, Customer Relations: Over the past few months, there have been a multitude of posts around Twitter, specific case studies and best practices for using Twitter in a business sense. An informal poll created on Twitwall shows that over half of the respondents joined Twitter to start new relationships or build upon existing relationships. Of that, 34% of those polled were joining Twitter to start and maintain business relationships with colleagues, industry leaders and customers… Read more on Ogilvy PR Blog.

Graphic: How Apple is gaining on Microsoft: Here’s a chart that should keep Steve Ballmer up at night. It compares Microsoft’s (MSFT) market share, revenue, net profit and growth rate to Apple’s (AAPL), using the numbers from each company’s most recent quarterly report… Read more on Fortune.

Intel’s Community Marketing: Fishing Where The Fish Are: Intel is known for trying out a variety of social media efforts, for better or for worse. They experiment, and continue to learn and iterate, I give them continual credit and reference them in presentations. One particular activity of note is what I learned from David Veneski, he tackled the join vs build question and made the call to join… Read more on Web Strategist.

Your brand is not your logo: Freshfuel and the Dieline point to some new logos from big players. Cluelessness on the half shell. Smart marketers understand that a new logo can’t possibly increase your market share, and they know that an expensive logo doesn’t defeat a cheap logo. They realize that the logo is like a first name, it’s an identifier… Read more on Seth Godin’s Blog.

To read more on that topic:

Review of the Internet news of the Day

Romain Péchard — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:19:34 +0000

From news on the market fall, technologies that can change the world (at least their market), why gamers matter, to an opinion about whether designers are or not Marketers, a discussion with Youtube co-founder, a post on why relationships are core to marketing, and 6 business books you should read. Here are the links:

Must Read Analysis: Why Markets Are Still Falling . . . The Shadow Financial Systems: I’m fortunate to be a member of the ACTA Open, which provides great analysis of today’s complex financial markets. Here is an excellent analysis by DK Matai, chairman of the ATCA Open. (I’m reprinting it because it is a member only organization - see description at end - but the information should be more widely distributed, imho.)… Read more on Silicon Valley Watcher.

5 Early Recommendation Technologies That Could Shake Up Their Niches: International recommendation technology provider Strands has announced the five finalists in the Strands $100K Call for Recommender Start-Ups. From music to video to pharmaceutical drug development recommendations, these plucky startups from all around the world will now present at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Recommender Systems 2008 conference in Switzerland and one will be offered a $100k investment from Strands… Read more on ReadWriteWeb.

Are Designers also Marketers?: Kathy Sierra says we’re all marketers: “In this new open-source/cluetrain world, I am a marketer. And so are you. If you’re interested in creating passionate users, or keeping your job, or breathing life into a startup, or getting others to contribute to your open source project, or getting your significant other to agree to the vacation you want to go on… congratulations. You’re in marketing.” … Read more on Bokardo.

Study: Gamers Social, Influential, Moneyed: Gamers aren’t lazy loners after all, contradicting long-held stereotype, new research reveals. In fact, they’re more likely than non-gamers to influence their friends on pop culture and technology buys, IGN Entertainment and Ipsos Media CT found in their study, called “Are You Game?”The study found that 37% of gamers said friends and family relied upon them to stay up-to-date about movies, TV shows and the latest entertainment news, compared to only 22% for non-gamers… Read more on Adotas.

YouTube Founder Compares Online Video To Nascent TV Market: YouTube Cofounder Chad Hurley spoke at the MIPCOM Conference in Cannes, France yesterday. In the talk, which is transcribed below, Hurley compares the current state of online video to the nascent years of television. In 1941, he says, “CBS has just launched its new television network amidst cries that it means the death of radio.” Advertisers were hard to come by. Content owners were afraid of alienating their existing audiences… Read more on TechCrunch.

Relationships, The Most Important Thing in Marketing: First of all, exciting news. I was selected to contribute to Online Marketing Connect, which is a site for marketing experts to share their ideas and knowledge. As the site puts it: “Online marketing for marketers is a new destination that brings together the very best minds in marketing to contribute news, ideas, strategies, commentary, insights, research and more.”… Read more on Jacob Morgan’s blog.

6 Brilliant Business Books That Are Highly Underrated: Not all of the best business books make it to the best-seller’s list. There are gems that have sold a little (and some that have sold a lot more) that never make it to any list… until now. Last week, the Six Pixels of Separation Blog post, Books You Need To Read To Succeed In Business, garnered a bunch of great comments and suggestions for business books you must read to be successful… Read more on Six Pixels of Separation Blog.

To read more on that topic:

Review of the Internet news of the Day

Romain Péchard — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:10:00 +0000

From MySpace new advertising service, Social Media Marketing viewed by Peter Kim, to the Eyealike pitch on advertising, the G-1 android mobile becoming a real competitor for Apple iPhone, the question about PR in the coming new era, some tips to create unconventional marketing, and the Creative Commons day from Social Media Club. Here are the links for today:

MySpace MyAds: Target Ads to “Drinking” and “Partying”: When in doubt, follow the leader. That’s what MySpace seems to be doing with the release of MySpace MyAds, a service that - on the surface - appears to have a great deal in common with another successful ad model, Google AdWords. Like Google’s ad platform, the new MySpace ad platform allows anyone to establish an account and begin targeting ads to a particular demographic. Unlike Google, however, MySpace allows users to build image-based ads on the fly. What’s more, advertisers will find the targeting options get exceptionally “granular.”… Read more on ReadWriteWeb.

Defining Social Media Marketing: I don’t like the Wikipedia definition of social media marketing, because it focuses too much on search and does not touch on corporate marketing or integration. So let’s try a new definition by thinking through the phrase “social media marketing,” backwards:… Read more on Being Peter Kim.

Eyealike Sets Its Image Recognition Technology On A New Target: Advertising: Eyealike, the startup that lets you use photo recognition to help find your ideal mate, is expanding to apply its image processing technology to a new market: advertising. The company says that the new system will allow businesses to place highly targeted advertising alongside photographs that appear on their site (which have long been difficult to monetize)… Read more on TechCrunch.

1.5 Million G1 Mobile Phones Pre-Sold: Apple may want to be keep a close eye on the sales of T-Mobile’s G1 device. The G1 will be the first mobile phone to hit the market running Google’s Android mobile OS. This may also be the mobile phone that puts a serious dent in Apple’s iPhone sales. The G1 won’t officially be available until October 22. Apparently no one wants to experience the same shortage and chaos as those who anxiously waited to get their hands on the iPhone 3G. Reports are in that up to 1.5 million G1 devices have been pre-sold and you can bet that more will be coming in… Read more on ReadWriteWeb.

Can Public Relations Save the News (New) Media?: New Media News I know, this is quite a concept. Yet, if public relations professionals inside organizations and in a consulting capacity can specialize in some core competencies, everyone wins. Why? Because when a connected company, as Kami Huyse writes, is … Read more on Conversation Agent.

Unconventional Marketing: As an individual, this blog is one of the most effective manifestations of “marketing” I could have produced for myself. I have a respectable audience that comes back as opposed to visiting it once, never to return again. People participate in through comments and the content is distributable. But imagine if I started it the same way many large organizations launch conventional marketing initiatives. What would that have looked like?… Read more on Logical + Emotional.

Be Common on October 15, 2008: Ever since the original launch of the interim board, the group has actively been working to move the goals forward for the Social Media Club, it’s members and the industry. As part of the outreach to the community, members of the Social Media Club have engaged numerous groups to see if there are opportunities to align activities and initiatives to encourage best practices social media… Read more on Social Media Club.

To read more on that topic:

Review of the Internet news of the Day

Romain Péchard — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:35:52 +0000

From community focused communication on traditional media, Ning joining the Google OpenSocial network, to the explanation about how you have to generate attention when dealing with crowdsourcing, and Comcast’s social media policy. Here are the links for today.

Traditional media is spreading community messages: Online community reviews and comments are increasingly being used in (and by) traditional media. In the last 24 hours I was struck by four examples of traditional media using comments from online communities or social networks. The user-generated content from social networks was showcased in TV (Sky News), Newspaper (Financial Times) and on two adverts (one TV and one outdoor)… Read more on FreshNetworks blog.

Ning Adds OpenSocial Support: Social networking platform Ning announced support for the OpenSocial standard today. Thanks to this, developers can now easily create applications for the Ning platform. At this time, Ning already features 30 applications that users can embed into their profile pages, including support for file sharing with Box.net and poll creation from Polldaddy. One of the highlights of Ning’s implementation of OpenSocial is that the widgets automatically adapt themselves to the branding and design of the individual networks… Read more on ReadWriteWeb.

Attention Is The Currency Of Crowdsourcing: We used to live in a world where few people produced content and most people consumed it. Thanks to the Web, nearly every digitally connected person creates some sort of content and nobody can consume it all. This has enabled a new phenomenon of content contribution that’s changing the world: crowdsourcing… Read more on AttentionMax.

Comcast’s Actual Social Media Policy No One Knew About: One of the most useful panels at Blogworld Expo a few weeks ago was one featuring two of the most powerful customer service success stories using social media, and the characters behind them. Tony Hseih from Zappos (featured on The Personality Project several months ago) and Frank Eliason, the Comcast customer service manager behind the @comcastcares Twitter account. During the panel discussion, Frank shared something about Comcast’s social media policy that was fairly surprising - they have a completely open policy and have had it for years… Read more on Influential Marketing’s blog.

To read more:

Review of the Internet news of the Day

Romain Péchard — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:59:06 +0000

From the Avis blog case study, the book must read list to succeed in business, the required skills of the future PRs, and the use of banking 2.0 services, to Sequoia Venture ringing the bubble burst alarm, the Twitter-like strategy of Best Buy, and why smart strategists are focusing on experience and its optimization. Here are the links for the Internet news review of the day:

Company Blog Checkup: Avis: On the Avis-UK blog, the company claims that it is “the first car rental company to start a blog”. Ok I believe them, as I can’t recall another competitor that has one (please leave a comment if you do know of a car rental company besides Avis that’s blogging)… Read more on The Viral Garden.

Books You Need To Read To Succeed In Business: It’s not all about Blogs and Digital Readers. Picking up a great business book will give you focus, new perspective and help you grow as a Marketer. Did you happen to catch the Raise-a-Reader fundraising day that was run by Canwest (parent company of the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun) on Oct. 3? I was driving into Ottawa that day and noticed several volunteers on the busy streets collecting money and building awareness for this very important cause… Read More on 6 pixels of separation.

Future PR Skills 2008: Identify and Engage Influencers Online and Off: We need to rethink who we consider influential and how we assess that influence. There are a lot of new influencers out there whose voices are amplified by technology. Understanding how that all works is critical for the communication pro of tomorrow. My graduate class at Johns Hopkins has just been exploring influence from theory to practice. We re-read Cialidini’s book on Influence… Read more on Digital Influence Mapping Project.

Sequoia Rings the Alarm Bell: Silicon Valley Is in Trouble: The fund organized a meeting yesterday where it invited entreprenuers/CEOs from its portfolio companies. The attendees were greeted by a cute image of a Grave Stone, with a message: R.I.P.: Good Times, my sources tell me… Read more on GigaOM.

Who Really Uses Mint.com (And Other Banking 2.0) Services Anyway?: Given the U.S. economic crisis, people are looking for new and better ways to get a handle on their personal finances. We recently profiled 10 money management web applications that promise to do everything from analyzing your spending behavior to saving you money by negotiating lower rates on credit cards… Read more on ReadWriteWeb.

Why smart strategists focus on experience and optimization:Creating a positive customer experience and translating it into a solid optimization strategy is more attainable than ever — if you have an open mind and a forward-looking strategy on hand… Read more on iMedia.

Best Buy’s “Enterprise Twitter”: IBM’s got BlueTwit. Oracle’s testing OraTweets. SAP’s experiments include ESME, SAP Talk (laconi.ca), ShoutIt and apparently others. Yammer has an ad-hoc base at thousands of companies. But so far, no large corporation has rolled out microsharing company-wide… Read more on ReadWriteWeb.

To read more on that topic:

Web 2.0 + Best Practices = Connecting and creating value

Romain Péchard — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 21:22:23 +0000

Since 2005 and the rise of the “Web 2.0″ term from O’Reilly, technology has been leading the Internet with new opportunities with companies charging into content streaming and download (Youtube, Joost, FFWD, iTunes, Vuze for example) and social networks (Bebo, FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Second Life, Habbo Hotel, …). But for about 1 year another groundswell has started. Thanks to or due to, the fact is social media has kicked off a new way of thinking for the Internet, and more globally has set up a new way of working for companies. Stepping back a moment to get the big picture, here are some takeaways from the web 2.0 thing for marketing and communication.

Join the conversation: things said and done, companies don’t own the content creation on the Internet. They have then to join the conversation where they occur instead of trying to make people move into brand platform since those people won’t come. Companies should better sponsor the platforms supporting conversation they’re interested in to generate brand image.
Share: the Internet is about give and take; you need information, provide some before you ask. Consumers are using the Internet for that purpose, if you want them to find you, share.
Add value: sharing without adding value is pointless, you’d turn your efforts into an activity that would generate a negative brand image. Instead, use company interesting content (from research to video interviews or partnership with other great companies) and share with people to get recognized and noticed.
Calculate ROI: TV, Radio, Billboards can’t be as efficient in ROI calculation as the Internet can. Using the right metrics would help your company create an online efficiency dashboard to make frequent reality check and relevancy of actions.
Create a community: crowdsourcing has made the Open Source business model a proof of success and a successful way to create value, speed up innovation, and stickiness with products. Companies start to think of it and community building is for sure a way to do so and cut through costs.
It’s all about CRM: the Internet is about searching and sharing, creating and joining a conversation. Nothing more than CRM then. Don’t focus on acquisition online but on loyalty, that’s what Internet users are looking for.
Engage a relationship: once your company has joined the conversation, it’s easy to scan people who are actively collaborating and taking the floor, getting in touch with them and engage with them into a unique relationship according to their own level of advocacy with your brand. They’d then become part of your taskforce.
Be agile and go fast: new online communication channels give more chances to target people and share quicly content. Moreover they’re really cheap, when not free; trying new communications plan regarding service users profile is then worth time spending.
Create a user experience: users want to get entertained and reach fast what they’re looking for; they’re intelligently lazy. Added to the 1-click away concept of the Internet, if you want to interest people and avoid any leak of your customers to your competitors, you should think about creating a relevant user experience.
Word of mouth matters: whatever companies say, word of mouth is what makes people buy one product more than another. The concept of “online Friends” is important, they’re the influential people and salesmen of today.

Any other?