Posts Tagged ‘Jason Falls’

CONTEST: Social Business or Social Bullshit?

Posted on: January 3rd, 2012 by Geoff Livingston 56 Comments

bull riding
Image by Emmett Tullos III

The sales pitch for social business (see IBM’s definition) has spread from the technology industry to the social media echo chamber. Social media tools will bring a promised evolution of business, but how much of this buzz is bullshit?

Recently, Jason Falls and I visited Dell’s social media command center. We were both impressed with the company’s deepening commitment towards social as a means to facilitate better relationships across the enterprise. Clearly social-media empowered business can become a reality.

At the same time when you start seeing social media experts across the blogosphere setting up social business shingles, you have to wonder. Am I being sold the real deal or just another dose of unicorn powered super conversation?

In that vein, I’d like to invite you to sound off. Is social business a great thing, or yet another overhyped promise from social media experts looking to break into the enterprise? The best five comments pro or con (as judged by me on Friday afternoon) will win a copy of Jason’s book, No Bullshit Social Media.

No Bullshit Social Media

C.C. Chapman holds a couple copies of No Bullshit Social Media

To get you started, I’ve listed three reasons for and against social business. Good luck!

Three Pros

1) Perhaps the best argument for social business is speed. Watching Dell’s team respond to situations by integrating communications, legal and more was impressive. By empowering and encouraging interactions through process and social technology, businesses can better respond to customers and situations. Speed is a competitive advantage in any market.

2) One of the best comments from the Customer Is Not Your CMO came from Ben Kunz, who noted there are three ways to become a great business. One of them is to become completely customer centric. Social business empowers widespread dialogue across enterprises all the way to customers and other stakeholders. This in turn creates the opportunity to become completely customer centric, from sales to operations.

3) While companies like Walmart are leading the innovation wave amongst traditional consumer enterprises, technology players like Salesforce.com, IBM, Atos and more are acquiring social technology companies, changing their cultures, and moving towards the social business ideal. The technology industry is eating its own dog food and leading by example, just as it did with blogs and other initial social media a decade ago. History is repeating itself.

Three Cons

1) Social media experts are beating this drum loudest, and that triggers a big red flag. Many social media experts don’t know marketing basics, and in some cases refuse (or can’t) to deliver return on investment. Now they are suddenly telling the business world how everything must change. So, someone who knows how to game Twitter suddenly understands how to run a multimillion dollar enterprises? Social business sounds like the pedantic ramblings of middle managers ad consultants trying to justify a bigger piece of the pie.

2) Businesses still struggle to integrate social media into marketing, yet, in large part because they don’t see the value. According to a survey of the CMO Council, 66 percent of marketing organizations are not integrating social media into their full marketing outreach.

Facebook Marketing Q5

Social media’s best chance of becoming a part of the regular business mix is through the auspices of the marketing department. But don’t expect it to change everything and transition the CMO’s office into social marketing. Social will only play its role within the larger multichannel experience.

3) The word social doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s gone the way of other cliched technology and media terms, like “2.0″ and “.com”. So what are we really talking about here? Widespread social media throughout an organization revolutionizing business structures?

Isn’t this the revolution of email and intranets argument again? Sorry, but while those technologies facilitated better communications and workflow, and evolved businesses, silos stayed silos. Why will commenting faster and quicker change power dynamics between departments and people? Will social technology fundamentally change people? It hasn’t so far. This argument lacks substance.

What do you think?

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Reflections on Dell’s Social Media Facility

Posted on: December 9th, 2011 by Geoff Livingston 6 Comments

Dell continues to be one of the most innovative companies out there in social media. Yesterday, on the one year anniversary of its Social Media Listening & Command Center, Jason Falls and I toured the computer giant’s headquarters.

We met with several critical players on the Dell team, from perennial leader Lionel Menchaca to Amy Heiss, program manager for the Command Center. Along the way we learned quite a bit about how Dell evolves with its clients needs, in the United States and globally.

Perhaps the biggest impression made on me was the experimental and open nature of the Dell social team. When I walked into the cavernous room that houses Dell’s social media group, I noted several things:

  • A wide open space with no cubes or barriers
  • The team sitting together is cross disciplinary, ranging from communications and social media to customer service and legal. They literally have no excuse for silos as they all sit within strides of each other.
  • The Command Center (featured above) is the room immediately next to the open office space, readily accessible by all
  • An ambiance that’s generally light, fun and curious

Dell has become a “socialprise”, and is actively experimenting with the best ways to enable fluid business dialogue in the enterprise, critical to its online success. The company clearly understands that empowering departments to interact quickly extends beyond process. The result is increased access through physical space and location.

Data, Training and Falls

Dell's Social Media Listening and Command Center

Dell is listening to its current and potential customers in a very organized fashion across a wide range of data points. For example, the above video details influence tracking, just some of the incredible data the Command Center tracks. The diverse data points range from products to conversations to global regions to all the industry players involved.

In conversation with Rajiv Narang, executive director for social media and marketing innovation at Dell, it became clear how analytical this company is. We’re talking the ultimate data geeks here. Dell sees data, conversations, trends and corresponding behaviors, and deeply analyzes to distill knowledge. Then it mindfully addresses its business direction to serve the market. It’s fantastic.

Another factor that became clear was how incredibly social the company has become. In meeting with many diverse players in Dell, from enterprise sales to sustainability and social good, almost everyone of them had been certified in the company’s social media program. Knowledge and practice ranged, but it was clear that the 5000+ employees who have been trained are interested, and see social as a critical component to the company’s success.

It was great to do this trip with Jason Falls, too, who will add his insights next week. Jason is clearly doing really well, and is at the top of his game with the release of No Bullshit Social Media. Congratulations, Jason. You deserve all of the success as one of the hardest working people in the sector.

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The Long Tail of Media Grows

Posted on: July 8th, 2010 by Geoff Livingston 7 Comments

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When I wrote Now Is Gone, Long Tail theory was prevalent throughout social media conversations. Applied, WIRED Executive Editor Chris Anderson’s economic theory did a great job of visualizing the ascent of new media forms in context with old traditional media. Since that time, social networks and mobile media postings have arisen to assert their place within the world of media.

Just to recap what Long Tail theory that with a large population of customers the selection and buying pattern results in a power law distribution curve (Pareto distribution). A market with a high freedom of choice will create a certain degree of inequality by favoring the upper 20% of the items (“hits” or “head”) against the other 80% (“non-hits” or “long tail”).

Head of the Tail

Let’s go back to the power curve for media now that the dust has settled with the ascendancy of some new media forms. The above chart plots the effectiveness or the weight of various media tactics in the current 2010 media environment.

Red hits have the most impact (top 20%), while the long tail (yellow, 80% of media) still makes up the majority of the media marketplace. This chart defines the marketplace as word of mouth power and readership.

Like my original chart three years ago, this is subjective and various earned media forms have disparate degrees of weight. General classification is the best we can do without the correct measurement tools using a real world full on case-study with all types of earned media opportunities. Further, this assumes PR owns social media within a company. As we know, social media is often divided amongst the larger marketing department.

As you can see at the head of the tail we have the following media forms:

National broadcast – ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX

Major newspapers – New York Times, USA Today, etc.

Top magazines – BusinessWeek, Fortune, WIRED

Major social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare, etc.

Top cable channels – CNN, ESPN, etc.

Top 100 blogs – Huffington Post, Techcrunch, Treehugger, etc. Generally speaking, blog content can vary from print to video.

The Turning Point and the Tail

At the turning point in the tail, roughly the 20 percent mark, you have several other forms of traditional media, which reflects the fall of some media, and the rise of new online and mobile media.

Major trade journals – Obviously, the powerhouse in any industry still holds sway, but the secondary journals have suffered quite a bit

Secondary social networks – For every FourSquare, there’s a Gowalla, not as popular, these secondary networks still drive tons of traffic

Regional newspapers: You don’t hear about the Denver Post much nationally. Still very powerful in the Rock Mountain region.

Secondary cable & TV: A&E, TBS, VH-1, etc.

National radio: ESPNRadio, FOX, etc.

Leading vertical blogs: And the winner here, no question. In PR for example, Brian Solis (who wrote Engage, and the intro to Now Is Gone), will get as many or more reads as a Secondary PR journal.

Major “influencer” profiles: Finally on some of the social networks, you have highly “influential” profiles which either through mass followers or strong engagement can set of tidal wives of action via their profile

After that, you have the long tail, the vast majority of content. From the old world, I think you can list the following: Local TV, local radio, local newspapers, secondary journals, corporate web sites, email newsletters, and press releases. From the newer social media world, you can list: Social network profiles, secondary blogs, videos, photos, maps, and mobile updates & check ins.

The Taxonomy Problem

The issue with this chart is the taxonomy, which seeks to isolate individual media forms and tools and their weight. In reality — given today’s fractured media environment — one hit in any of these areas can trigger successive hits in others. When a word of mouth campaign has actual substance it usually cascades. Smart communicators understand this. That’s why integrated outreach — not just social media or traditional PR & advertising — matters so much.

In Chapter Four of Now Is Gone, we talk about this “ping pong match” between traditional and new media outlets. From the draft material in June of 2007:

One great way to promote your new media initiative remains traditional media, who often use well-respected blogs as sources or even the subject of stories… [Social media attention] drives information into the spotlight forcing traditional media to pay attention – or look like they’ve missed the news, and most importantly the conversation. Blogs [can be] a more effective way of reaching and inspiring traditional media to react than most PR professionals and wire services combined.

Ping pong matches demonstrate that weighting one tool by its actual total community and eyeball impact fails. As Seth Godin said in Meatball Sundae, “It doesn’t matter if the socially generated earned media only gets one percent of the hoped for attention if it’s the right one percent.”

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