But I have a different perspective, and believe that many brands (and companies) can succeed on Twitter without necessarily engaging in conversations, or being particularly active. Not only that, but I believe the hypothesis that customers necessarily want to be engaged in conversations with brands needs to be challenged, as I don’t think it’s true as a blanket statement.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on this recently, but today I’ll just provide a few different Twitter accounts that appear to be doing very well, in terms of followers, without engaging in conversations (or doing any of the other things most people are recommending they “should” do on Twitter).

@woot:  A quick glance at their Twitter page reveals they typically post once a day (occasionally 2 or 3 times). This post is a link to a daily deal. There is simply no conversation or two-way engagement. They have over 1.6 million followers (#90 overall, between Biz Stone and Penn Gillette), and have been listed 7,000 + times. This makes woot one of the most popular brand accounts on Twitter (out of companies that actually sell stuff).

@zappos: this account is operated by CEO Tony Hsieh, and Zappos is frequently mentioned as one of the leading companies in delivering compelling customer experiences, and engaging in social media. But if you look at his actual activity, there are few signs of conversation to be found. It’s mostly some quotes he finds interesting, a few links, and some seemingly random thoughts. He also doesn’t post that often – less than once a day. He has over 1.7 million followers (#72 overall, between inStyle and Serena Williams), and has been listed almost 10,000 times.

@mashable: Mashable is the online guide to social media. If anyone was to be using Twitter “correctly”, you think it would be them – and this account is run by Pete Cashmore, the CEO. It is popular – @mashable has over 2 million followers (#45 overall, between Pete Wentz and Mandy Moore), and has been listed almost 50,000 times. But again, just look at the activity – a continuous series of links to various articles. More active then the two examples above, yes – but conversational, absolutely not.

You might think I just cherry picked these examples, and that they are the exception to the rule. But I didn’t – there are many more examples where these came from. And as for the rule, well, I think the rule is wrong.

That social media can be used to engage in conversations is absolutely true, and many people and companies are doing that effectively. I don’t dispute that. But somewhere along the way, there seems to have been a near consensus emerge that:

a) two-way conversations is the only way to use Twitter.

b) two-way conversations is what every customer wants on Twitter.

I don’t believe it. The fact that so many people seem to be interested in so many accounts that do the exact opposite is rather telling on this front. And as more and more people engage on Twitter (and other platforms), and create more and more connections, with the potential for more and more messages, I truly believe we’re going to see more and more people realize that “conversations” isn’t what it’s all about.

My first issue is with the word now. From my perspective, the customer has always been in control – the fate of companies providing products and services in a capitalist economy is ultimately determined by what customers choose to buy. In turn, the analysis shifts towards social media somehow giving customers slightly more control than they had before – a small, but important, distinction.

The typical argument is that as customers have connected with each other through platforms like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, the opinions they share amongst themselves have increased in importance, while the typical “broadcast marketing” approaches have decreased in effectiveness. While I do believe there is some truth to this, there is another way to look at what’s happening.

For starters, if customers only wanted to hear each other’s opinions, they could do so without engaging companies at all – either in somewhat self-organizing fashion through Facebook and Twitter, or “neutral” services like Yelp. But many, many customers are also opting to directly connect with companies – liking, following, lurking in communities, etc. – through these very same platforms. In doing so, many are effectively asking companies to engage with them.

Second, being “in control” takes time and effort. I would argue that many customers may want to “take control” in relation to certain product and service decisions, for many others they are happy to be passive recipients of messages (and offers) from their preferred brands. For example, the #2 reason given for becoming a Facebook fan (based on a survey earlier this year) was to receive coupons. And while I don’t have time to go into it here, one of the consistent findings from my research is that customers like being “broadcast” to on social media more than many people think.

On a related point, I believe that many customers are being overwhelmed by all the brand-related conversations taking place. For example, many brands on Twitter now commonly send 30+ messages a day, responding to specific people. Many consider this to be engaging. But if you follow (say) 30 such brands, that’s over 900 messages a day – most of which will be of absolutely no interest to you. Perhaps the method will persist for many more years, but perhaps not.

Finally (at least for today), as “word of mouth” marketing has moved online, and more and more data is generated, it’s becoming ever easier for brands to monitor exactly what people are saying, thinking and feeling about various things. I personally believe that all this information points towards a world where many brands can be far more “in control” than they’ve ever been before.

Tying it all together, I’ve taken to asking what someone like Don Draper – the lead character on Mad Men – would think about the rise of social media if he was ported into 2010. Would he look at all the new tools and behaviors and say “wow, I can’t control anything here!” Or would he say “wow, I can influence, monitor and control things more than ever before!”

My sense is that it would be the latter – and many companies would be well served by taking a similar line of thinking. After all, to be in control implies having power; it is commonly said that knowledge is power; and all this information is giving companies more knowledge than ever before.

In some cases, there may be benefits such as using an iPhone for interactive kid’s games, or using cell phones to keep track of older children on-the-go. In other cases, the activities raise new issues and question about appropriateness such as creating digital identities for children the moment they are born, or using Google and other online sites to diagnose children and chronicle their development. The New York Times last week published an article titled “R U Here Mom?” or “The Risks of Parenting While Plugged In” for the online edition. The article profiles work done by child development researchers looking at how parental addiction to technology affects communication with children and early childhood learning. Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self has done extensive research on the topic for over five years, including 300 interviews. As quoted in the NYT article, she says:

“Over and over, kids raised the same three examples of feeling hurt and not wanting to show it when their mom or dad would be on their devices instead of paying attention to them: at meals, during pickup after either school or an extracurricular activity, and during sports events.

There’s something that’s so engrossing about the kind of interactions people do with screens that they wall out the world. I’ve talked to children who try to get their parents to stop texting while driving and they get resistance, ‘Oh, just one, just one more quick one, honey.’ It’s like ‘one more drink.’ ”

(Additional insights can be found in the comments section of the article where Dr. Turkle is very active.)

The NYT article also profiles an informal test conducted by Dr. Dana Suskind from the University of Chicago which looked at the effect of smart phone use on verbal interactions between parents and children. In most case, verbal communication dropped when devices were present. This is an important indicator because verbal communication is seen as a key indicator of how well children develop language skills and vocabulary.

Source: New York Times, June 9, 2010

As we look to the future generation of parents, the trend is a bit troubling. And, lest I get accused of throwing rocks at glass houses, I will admit my own faults as well: While certainly not the worst offender, I count myself among those guilty parents that sometimes tune-out to technology.

My last post was about social media addiction and highlighted how young people, as well as older people exhibit signs of technology addiction, including messaging during meals (49% for those under 25), while in the bathroom (24%), or even during sex (11%). “While feeding my child,” “while my child plays,” or “while taking a child to daycare” were not options in the Retrevo survey, but I’m sure there would be a substantial percentage of those people as well. I would also expect the numbers to get higher in the future. A recent report from Pew Internet and American Life Project found that one-in-three American teens sends in excess of 100 text messages per day (more than 3,000 per month). The typical (median) teen sends and receives about 50 text messages a day (30 per day for boys and 80 per day for girls), although the average (mean) is much higher at 112 messages per day. A quarter of all American teens ages 16-17 text while driving. And while texting is certainly the worst offender with respect to device-immersion, other activities are also contributing to teen technology use for communication versus face-to-face communication.

 Do we expect this type of device-oriented behaviour to stop in adulthood? Or, left unchecked, will it simply get worse with added work-related responsibilities (i.e. the “Crackberry” trap) and the proliferation of screens, communication channels, entertainment gadgets, and social media?

 What are the signs of addiction? According to Mayo Clinic, “As your drug use increases, you may find that it becomes increasingly difficult to go without the drug. Stopping may cause intense cravings and make you feel physically ill (withdrawal symptoms).” I’m guessing that includes ‘taking’ fist thing in the morning, or even in the middle of the night.

In fact, nGenera’s Net Generation study from a couple of years ago backs up what the Retrevo study is implying. We asked teenagers to depict visually how they would feel if technology was taken away from them for a month. The results are what you might expect. If not addicted, young people (and I imagine people of all ages) are certainly dependent on technology for entertainment, inclusion, belonging, and sense-making:

In a related study on parenting and social media, Retrevo finds that the vast majority of parents—over 70%—allow their kids to text during family meals. Personally, this is a problem for me, but then again I came from a generation of kids that was told to ignore the phone (the corded one attached to the wall) during mealtime and ask to be excused from the table after dinner. Still, if you think social media addiction is bad now, this type of behaviour means it’s probably just going to get worse from here on in.

For more stats and info-graphics, check out Retrevo Gadgetology and Retrevo Pulse.

Most marketers try to understand this collaboration space through sentiment analysis. This gives you a snapshot – are people positive or negative about my brand, product or company. I recently wrote this about sentiment analysis on my own blog:

“The problem of sentiment analysis has generally been something like this – people create double negatives such as not unkind, to mean a positive. And then there is the general sense that people are ambiguous in how they express what they mean.

My problem with sentiment analysis is neither of these. It’s the fact that companies need to connect with people in different ways rather than through a scaled up focus group or opinion survey; and that people are extremely granular in their sentiments. Companies need to know people’s ideas and beliefs at the granular level not at a polarized level.”

Clearly I erred here because sentiment analysis does not yield as much information as a focus group or opinion survey – in both those cases there is granularity, though in  my view the results are too easily manipulated or geared by the interviewer.

For example – and anyone in marketing can answer this: how often are brand recognition surveys consciously or unconsciously biased because the company paying for that work needs to show improvement?

What the web offers is a way to get at volunteered opinion and attitudes.

To that end I and a couple of colleagues have spent the past year developing the global attitudes project, which I hope to share with members of the nGenera/Wikinomics community over the coming weeks.

To do good web analysis means we really have to accept the validity of what people are saying, and accept the web as a bona fide collaboration space where people collectively give meaning to life in the 21st century -  an unparalleled exercise in meaning creation.

In the past meaning creation has been the job of intermediaries – philosophers, trades unions, politicians, writers, teachers, academics, and of course market researchers. But now we’re doing that for ourselves.

Look at it this way – how many studies do you know where researchers have interpolated meaning for us? Most trend studies and projections do this – telling us we are becoming more individualistic or more short term in our actions, or more multitasking, etc. Actually on the web people are telling us what they are and what they believe.

I think the narrative accompanying this new description of what people are about is something like: we still believe in human progress; we don’t necessarily believe society as it is now organized is a vehicle for that progress; we believe in individual betterment but we also believe we are part of an organic “world ecology” with life cycles that rise and fall. We might be in the fall phase so we need to work harder at renewing our human ecology.

I can’t present all the evidence for that in a short blog post but what I want to do is give a small evidence base for one term and one term only.

Before I do that – why is it important? The answer is the Web provides us with deep insights into how people are thinking. You have to care about that if you are in business. You can short circuit that understanding by using sentiment analysis – but be aware it is a short cut and lacks essential insights.

So: Throughout the recession people online have been making increasing use of the term betterment. We know that through a variety of data collections we’ve executed.

We analyzed the use of that term semantically, i.e. asking what meaning are people attaching to it. Here’s a graph:

The graph actually shows you the terms people attach to the term “life” when you use an evidence base made up of blog posts referring to the term betterment. Why does it show “life” at the core?

Because that is the term most used in a selection of blog posts that top the Google blog search returns for the term betterment (as of Mid May 2010).

Sorry if that is confusing. This is an early result and we may yet refine the technique, data, analysis and visualization. I wanted to share it as an example of what can be learned from the web when you go beyond sentiment and polarity.

What it means is that when they discuss betterment, many people in this sample use the term “life” at least once. They use “life” more than they use any other term (there is a refinement to rule out the possibility that people always shoot the breeze about “life” and that rather than betterment is a driver).

And when you look at the semantic family of terms around “life” you see the graph above. It’s mainly constructed of terms that evoke relationships.

What is not on here because the terms are not present enough are terms like God, i.e. people attribute more to the core human temporal aspects of life than they do to religion.

We began this whole area of study with a review of about 20,000 comments on “recession and recovery”. In that study we discovered that people in blog comments tended to interpret recovery and recession in terms that evoked the human side – i.e. by referring to people. In parallel we collected data on how the financial press reported recovery and recession and found, by and large, they focused on institutions.

I make that extra point because the two examples taken together probably tell us we need to retune how we speak about marketing, the web, social media and analytics. Once we look at the world from the vantage point of this constantly emerging philosophy we have to put people and realtionships first.  Marketers need to engage with this non-polarized way people express themselves. More at a later date!

The reason I believe this is fairly simple. When I think of the word “control”, I immediately think of the word “power”. When I think of “power”, I think of “knowledge” (as in the latter is the former). When I think of “knowledge”, I think of “information”. And when I think through what social media enables, from a marketing perspective, time and again I see better information, more knowledge, and more power. In turn, that looks like more control to me – rather than less.

I have more thoughts on this, but wanted to stop there and see if anyone believes this “customer is in control” argument, in relation to social media, might be wrong. And if you want to hear a few more of thoughts on these (and related) marketing subjects, check out my webinar on Tuesday.

Here is a how the site describes itself:

“What is Unvarnished?

“Unvarnished is an online resource for building, managing, and researching professional reputation, using community-contributed, professional reviews.

“Unvarnished reviews help you get the inside scoop on other business professionals, providing candid assessments of coworkers, potential hires, business partners, and more.

“By contributing Unvarnished reviews, you can share your knowledge of other professionals, giving credit where credit is due, and valuable feedback where needed.

“Lastly, your own Unvarnished profile, which you may create yourself or claim one that has been created for you, helps you take control of and build your own professional reputation. Get recognition for your accomplishments and actively manage your career growth.”

Here are a couple of phrases that jumped off the “About” page for me (emphasis added):

• “To help reviewers be honest and candid in their reviews, Unvarnished obscures the identity of review authors. This lets reviewers share their true, nuanced opinions without fear of repercussions.” (I have to wonder how nuanced anonymous reviews will be.)
• “An Unvarnished profile can be created either by an individual for themselves or, alternatively, by an individual for another professional, in order to review them.” (The ability for an anonymous person to set up a profile of a colleague or former colleague to contribute a review seems disingenuous. If I have something positive to say about a colleague, I’d want to put it on LinkedIn or another public site with my name attached so the other person would benefit.)

Unvarnished presents itself as a way “professionals can take control of and build their professional reputation. Profile owners can manage and build their reputation, by receiving notifications of new reviews, requesting reviews from trusted colleagues, adding resume details, and responding to reviews.”

IMO: It sounds a bit like LinkedIn, with a dark side: the potential for bullying and retaliation. I cannot see a reason why I’d want to set up a new profile for myself for anyone to “review” me anonymously. I cannot see a why a reputable potential employer would trust anonymous reviews, good or bad or in-between, more than reviews by people willing to give their names. Other reviews of the site can be found here, here, here, and here, but there seem to be dozens.

Unvarnished does have a Reviewer Authority scoring mechanism: “the quality of an individual revewer’s (sic) submissions, as rated by other Unvarnished users, contributes to a Reviewer Authority score, a badge for which is attached to each review by a given reviewer.” Personally, I don’t see why anonymous reviewers’ ratings of one another can create an “authority” score. How can one establish credibility as an anonymous reviewer?

Unvarnished, to me, is an inevitability of social media. It seems only logical that someone would formalize the process of anonymous “reviewing” of colleagues, present and former, for business. And my guess is, like morals, this kind of entrepreneurial approach to making a business out of bad manners cannot be legislated away. I can’t say how it will turn out, who will use it – I am not a likely user regardless of whether I might get trashed or praised there – and whether employers will tap into the unsubstantiated and anonymous reviews to make employment decisions. Most bad ideas for online sites die from lack of attention or nourishment – i.e., no traffic. But gossip (that’s what I think this will turn into) tends to have a strong pull.

My first take: People may feel forced to check up on themselves. Employers may feel tempted to see whether what they saw and heard from candidates with their own eyes and ears is accurate, but then that says more about their own skill at hiring than about the candidate.

I wonder whether writing this will prompt someone to open a profile for me. Guess that tells you more about me than Unvarnished, huh?

While Twitter is a stand-alone company, the value of the service is heavily dependent on the large ecosystem of developers innovating on top of their API. Like Twitter itself, most of these developers took a “build the customer base first, worry about business models later” approach. “Later” is now here. As  everyone involved starts scrambling to try to make money, everyone almost invariably stumbles onto the word “advertising” as the solution. But no one’s quite sure how big the advertising pie will be, and Twitter itself needs to grab a pretty big piece of it. This is going to make it tricky to hold the ecosystem together.

While there were many signs of this coming through 2009, two particularly big ones popped up late in the year. The first was changes taking place with StockTwits, which described itself as “real investors providing real ideas in real time“, and had grown to become one of the most popular Twitter applications. As a TechCrunch article in September explained, StockTwits was evolving to create an entire back end independent of Twitter itself – “Yes, StockTwits is slowly breaking away from the service that inspired its name.” In turn, it would be reasonable for Twitter to think that an important partner might become a competitor, and others might follow.

The second was that Twitter itself was (finally) starting to innovate on top of their own platform. “Lists”, which were launched as a “great way to organize the people you follow and discover new and interesting accounts“, was one such example. Instead of just enabling people to share information, the company seemed to be making baby steps towards making it easier to sort through. If they continued down that path, it could eventually put them in direct competition with services like TweetDeck.

I was reminded of this when reading the recent Economist article called “Up for promotion – Twitter decides to sell advertising.” In paragraph seven, the issues I was pointing towards in #2 are made clear – it opens with the sentence “A few of these may compete with offerings from developers.” It mentions how people at Chirp (Twitter’s first developer conference) were a little upset about Twitter’s purchase of Atebits (the maker of Tweeties), and that “makers of rival programs complain that Twitter is now competing with them.” A developer is quoted saying that “the way they have done this is scary” – and many would argue he has a right to be scared. A New York Times article on the same subject hit on the same themes and arguments.

However, as #1 pointed to, Twitter needs to be a little scared itself, as developers might just shift their attention away from the platform (particularly if they feel threatened), perhaps taking current users, and ideas for new innovations, with them. More to the point, they need to make strategic choices about what should be created on the platform, and what should be left to the ecosystem – a message Twitter’s CEO is clearly sending to developers now. With quotes like “(there are also) features built for Twitter that maybe only exist in client applications, and we’re going to build them in because they should be there“, it’s pretty clear some nifty innovators are going to be put out of business by the platform they innovated on top of, as Twitter tries to find find the appropriate balance.

Such challenges are not new in the competitive collaborative platform space. Companies like YouTube and Ning have had similar issues pop up now and again, and we expect to see such tensions arise far more in the future. How exactly it will play out is anybody’s guess. But as more and more companies move to platform-driven models to derive competitive advantage, what happens here is worth paying attention to.

One of the more important lessons may end up being that the owner of a given platform (or, say, community) that has a clear business model from the outset, and allows ecosystem partners to innovate around it, instead of plugging holes in the core offering, is more likely to build a sustainable ecosystem model. In addition to the quotes above, Fred Wilson, a long-time Twitter Board Member, had a recent blog post that highlights the need for Twitter to (belatedly) move in this direction. In the future, companies that, you know, already make money, might be in a better position to create competitive collaborative platform strategies than those starting from scratch.

On the flip side, perhaps a “winner takes all” model will take hold here – where the best innovators are acquired (maintaining the incentive for developers to engage) and integrated into the main platform, and the rest wither away and die. We see more and more of this type of rewards distribution popping up all over the web, and while it may not seem “fair” to everyone, I think it’s a definite possibility. I don’t know – but with pressure on to find a business model that validates all the venture capital money that has flowed in, I have a feeling Twitter will soon find out.

Either way, there’s actually another interesting lesson in here worth repeating. Many people are expressing “surprise” and “shock” at these latest Twitter developments. They shouldn’t be. Everyone knew Twitter had to eventually find a business model, and little signs have been popping up to point in this direction for quite some time. If you looked carefully at what Twitter (and key partners) were doing, and thought about the challenges they were facing, you didn’t have to wait for the CEO to tell you this was coming.

This one is worth it: “What is the value of your brand?” by Uwe Hook, co-founder and CEO of BatesHook. He makes so much sense so often, I just kept nodding my head. The essence for me is this: A company’s values motivate, energize, engage, and reward the people that work there. A mismatch of an employee’s and the company’s values make work “work.” People who do something they love every day are not working; they are living. I particularly like these thoughts from Uwe:

“After the multitude of bubbles have burst, shareholder value and making money for the sake of money doesn’t feel that good anymore. And consumers are craving institutions that care and give back. This and the age of product parity lead to an avalanche of brands that suddenly care, that support businesses in making positive change, try to rebrand themselves as green or just transform communities around the world (right after they almost destroyed the whole financial system).

“Most of this comes across as advertising, not as a commitment. Because it’s not rooted in real values, we are starting to deal with caring parity: Suddenly everybody cares for the wrong reason. (emphasis mine) Consumers want us to care, let’s care. Brands purely jumping on the caring bandwagon are missing out on a huge opportunity: Stand for something. Have values. And express yourself as an organization based on these values.”

I can’t help but think of the swarming now to social media by companies not really committed to the value of the relationship with the customer. I read an interesting interview with Magic Johnson, head of Magic Johnson Enterprises, in Knowledge @ Emory. This quote from Johnson stuck with me: “You have to know your customer and you have to speak to that customer every day.” Social media are an excellent way to accomplish this, but, when customers get the sense they are being used or sold to more than listened to, social media are also an excellent way to turn conversations into sales pitches and turn customers and prospects into former customers and disinterested prospects. Johnson’s Magic Johnson Enterprises web site repeats a mantra for the company on the home page: “We Are The Communities We Serve.” The first part of the message is clear; the last word is the message. If social media serve the customer, the company wins.

OKCupid gathers personal information based on community-submitted questions that users answer. This allows the company to better match couples based on the unique values of each person. Their slogan is: “We do math to get you dates,” which includes going so far as to create decision charts that visualize the formulas leading to love (or at least a date) for various individuals. With their data, OKCupid reveals information about the effectiveness of various romantic approaches, male and female attitudes and biases, insights on what behaviors result in conversations, behavioral changes based on age, and a variety of other findings.

From a research perspective, OKCupid is a fascinating subject. I’ve references them before in a post about labor incentives. Today’s post is about the potential for data-enabled business models and new markets for user data. Even more insightful than some of the racier findings from OKCupid (such as the sexual appetite of the average 40-year-old Floridian woman), user activity on this site generates a tremendous amount of data that extends beyond the realm of dating and could be useful to other groups and industries.

For example, OKCupid is able to generate detailed demographic and geographic data about political views, social issues, and public opinion on issues ranging from contraception to First Amendment rights to acceptable means of protest.

What OKCupid is doing not unique—often the collection of data can yield new insights and provide additional contexts beyond its intended purpose. As more and more customer and user processes become digitized, what we’re going to see over the next few years will be the growth of data-driven strategies that gather, interpret, and present data for new uses and new audiences. The abundance of data and relative scarcity of reliable sense-making information will create a flourishing market for data and analytics. In a recent nGenera survey we found that already over 40% of respondents say that data from external sources leads to competitive advantage.

Two years ago I wrote about how the idea that online social networks will make money selling eyeballs (advertising) or products is missing the entire value proposition of a social network. The real opportunity is in harnessing the rich data that is created by those participating in conversations and interacting with each other. Companies that have social platforms are increasingly seeing a business model around providing free services and aggregating anonymized customer and user data for sale.

OKCupid has a very open approach to data, but it’s easy to imagine a variety of groups—lobbyists, politicians, economists, sociologists, and so on—that might be interested enough in this type of information to pay for it, especially if presented in interactive charts that let the user filter based on factors such as age, race, gender, employment, and so on. If you think about the possibilities available when data extends beyond the realm of online dating, you see that companies in a variety of industries could use customer-generated interaction and polling data to gain a deep understanding of what drives purchasing behavior, brand loyalty, and even the desire for new products.

To provide some context, one of the big research projects we’re working on in our Marketing program is called The incredibly shrinking marcom expense line. The basic idea is that by enabling, among other things, ambient intimacy, social media is pointing towards a future where marketers can shrink their marcom costs, while at least maintaining current levels of impact. Facebook fan pages, twitter, online communities, and newer services like Yelp all play a hand in this.

In the Nokia presentation, slide 28 starts out by outlining three different ways to optimize your presence in the ecosystem – SEO, SEM, and SMO (search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and social media optimization). It then quickly points out that less than 30% of this is “bought media” – the SEM part. 70% of engagement comes from the other two – 40% SEO, 30% SMO. The first is what they call “own media”; the second is “earned media”.

I really like this idea of “earned media” – and how it’s distinguished from the paid part of ecosystem presence strategies in particular. As referenced earlier, I disagree with the blanket statement that “earned media” is all about conversations – in my mind, it’s all about earning the right to be within an individual person’s ambient network, which is based on offering them what they want (which may or may not be conversations). But the visual presented on slide 39 – where “bought media” shrinks, and “earned media” dramatically increases in the future – is the right message.

Once people start thinking this way, I believe my explanation of why “nothing is holding social network advertising back” becomes clearer. The conversation about approaches to marketing has long been dominated by a spend-centric point of view (i.e. if you don’t spend much on social media, it must not matter). In this world of “earned media”, marcom spend can indeed be low – and many things have no direct costs associated with them. But, the impact can be great – if you earn the right to make the proper connections.

As I’m sure you already know, there are many companies doing things like creating collaborative workplaces for their employees, partners and/or customers, but finding those that are actually measuring the results AND have some interesting outcomes are very hard to find. All in all I ended up highlighting a little over a dozen examples in a paper last November. They range from companies using social media tools and developing collaborative relationships to drive a marketing campaign, to companies using a webspace to innovate new product and service ideas.

Later this month, March 23rd, my colleague Tim Bevins and I will be sharing some of these findings in a webinar called Real Collaboration – Real World Examples for Successful ROI. We will discuss some of the collaborative activities companies are undertaking and how they are being measured, lessons learned from leading-edge companies, recommendations and next steps for developing successful collaborative initiatives and what ROI top companies are recognizing from collaborative initiatives. Click on the link above or  register here. I look forward to an interesting discussion and hope you are able to join us.

The first clue that something is off comes from the chart they provided. True, when asked whom do you trust as a credible source of information about a company, friends / peers dropped from 45% to 25% (from 2008 to 2010). However, trust in other sources – TV news, radio news, and newspapers – dropped by almost the exact same proportion, from almost the exact same base (i.e. newspapers appear to have dropped from 46% to 26%, for example). The article gets around to mentioning this, but not until the main message they are trying to send has been established.

This indicates two things to me. One, the article deliberately chose to focus on the one part of the story that seemed most provocative – always suspicious. Two, that the question being used does not appear particularly good at distinguishing trust levels between different channels, in terms of marketing. Setting the 2010 data to the side, there is a lot of data out there indicating that tells a very different story than the 2008 baseline (and interpretation) presented. Commenter Kevin pointed towards one such study, from Nielsen, that showed 90% of online customers either completely or somewhat trusted recommendations from people they know. The importance of “recommend to a friend” has been well established, and validated, for many years. But I’ll come back to that in a minute.

A second clue was the interpretation of the quote provided by Richard Edelman himself – that “the lesson for marketers is consumers have to see and hear things in five different places before they believe it.” That type of message could be viewed as great news for people in the advertising business, who can tell clients they need to spend money everywhere to get a message through (cha-ching!). I don’t buy it. My main interpretation of the chart is that it’s very, very likely that many, many customers indicated they didn’t trust any source, in relation to the given question. Hitting these people with messages from many sources they deem uncredible, and expecting that to turn into a message that they trust, is a bit of a stretch.

A third clue is that the chart provided is primarily focused on news sources (i.e. it’s “radio news”, not “radio”), while the discussion is primarily marketing focused. I think there’s a major disconnect there, which ties into some of the discussion above.

I then thought a bit about how I would respond to the given question – and I realized I’d probably fall in the “not trusting any source” camp. But it’s not because I don’t trust opinions and recommendations from friends and peers – it’s because the question is too generic, and notably I don’t really associate it with marketing and purchasing decisions. The reason is simple – while I may know a fair number of people, most of them are fairly busy. If I want “information on a company”  – a very generic request – that I pick out of thin air, I can’t exactly expect them to have it. It’s also likely that what they know, or could find, would come from the company itself (directly or indirectly). In my opinion, the link between this question, and what marketers should be thinking about, is relatively weak.

This led me to a couple more thoughts that I think need to be taken into account here – from a marketing perspective.

First, let’s start from a different question – Who knows you the best? - and provide the same list of options. I would bet my retirement fund on friends / peers winning this contest, and that if someone chose “radio” it’s unlikely you’d let them in your house. I’d also be willing to assert, with a high degree of confidence, that there are many situations where people trust messages, and recommendations, from this group of people over ads on TV, radio, and newspapers – even though this article would have you think differently. I know that seems like a very simple and obvious point, but it seems like it needs to be made here.

Second, take a context specific approach – and think about a question that more closely ties to influence in relation to marketing, or a specific purchasing decision. For example, “who do you trust to help pick a movie?”, or “who do you trust to help you find new fashions?”. It’s very likely that for any question that ties to personal taste, style, etc., the influence of peer recommendations is important. In other words, I many not trust them as a source of information “on a company” , but I will trust them as a source of information for a specific product or service, in a specific context, in relation to me.

Third, such questions need to account for different platforms that are emerging to influence purchasing decisions – particularly the ones that consolidate numerous different opinions (think Flikster, Yelp, etc.). I might not trust any single individual on there (and thus claim not to trust them in response to a generic question), but I may trust their collective opinion if the sample size is large enough, or even a specific individual’s opinion if (say) their reputation score is high enough. Very hard to tease out of a survey – but very important.

I could go on, but I’ll stop there. Overall, I think there are quite a few issues with what this article presents, and how it is interpreted. Did I miss any big ones – or do you think I’m wrong?

In other words, the company takes a mixture of structured and unstructured data (including 150,000 + stories a day), applies an algorithm to it, and comes up with a single score that ranks the potential of each start-up they look at (40,000 and counting).

I have no clue how good it actually is right now (if anyone could let me know that would be great), but at minimum I think it’s a very cool idea. And I’m particularly intrigued by the idea that such an approach could be applied within a big enterprise to assess the potential of various ongoing projects.

Think about it: companies have (or should have) far more structured data about their own employees than YouNoodle has on start-ups; the unstructured data on the web is open to them as well. Now imagine if a company was using all the collaborative platform tools that are potentially at their disposal in order to know what people are working on, have worked on, how they’re connected together, etc. Might there be a way to take all of that information, and use it to come up with a per-project “YouNoodle Score”? And if there was, could you imagine how valuable that might be?

A couple of years ago the Forum’s founder, Klaus Schwab, launched, to say the least, a rather bold undertaking to use the Internet to turn Davos into a 365-day experience.  Not unthinkable I say.  After all hundreds of millions of people collaborate on social networks, wikis, blogs and brainstorms to do everything from making friends to creating encyclopedias, writing disruptive software projects and helping a devastated Caribbean island recover from a horrific earthquake.  So why couldn’t such tools be used to fix what’s wrong with the world on a year round basis?

Call it a Digital Davos.

But WELCOM (stands for World Electronic Community) got off to a slow start.

There were numerous technical challenges in getting the right companies assembled to  do the work: there was no integration between WELCOM and the system of information kiosks at that Davos attendees use to sign up for sessions and communicate with each other;  the project was viewed by some as elitist – restricted to the few thousand world leaders that might attend Davos; and there were enormous challenges getting CEOs, politicians and leaders of the civil society to actually use the platform and change their behavior to solve problems on networks.

But it looks like this year these issues have been addressed and WELCOM might actually be ready for prime time.

To begin, the technology is now first rate.  After a false start, WELCOM now has a group of partners, companies like Accenture (ACN), Adobe Systems (ADBE), BT Group (BT) and TIBCO that are putting some real muscle into the work, primarily on a pro bono basis.  The platform has good basic functionality and The Forum has a good team figuring out how the system should evolve and improve.  It’s not just another Facebook. Users can videoconference, exchange documents and video and audio files, store material online, co-edit documents, brainstorm and more.

Second, Accenture has fully integrated WELCOM and the onsite Kiosks, so you can sign up for sessions from laptop or Blackberry, reducing the Kiosk lineups.  There is a wealth of material online about the topic being discussed and the delegates in attendance.

Third, one charge frequently made against the Forum is that it is elitist, but the Forum has made great strides in making its work and proceeding open to the public. Linked to WELCOM is a Social Media Outreach designed to engage the broader world.  For example, one of the sessions I’m helping to lead deals with social networks.

But check out the description and the twist:

The World Economic Forum will explore the growing influence of social networks in a workshop at the start of the Annual Meeting 2010 in Davos. The discussion is moderated by Loïc Le Meur, Founder of Seesmic and will include, among others Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning, George Colony, CEO, Forrester Research, Don Tapscott, NGenera, Reid Hoffman, Founder, LinkedIn, Owen Van Natta CEO, MySpace.com and Evan Williams, CEO, Twitter.

Given the topic of the workshop it was natural to open it to input from the different social networks. We want to hear from you:

1.   “How are social networks changing society?” 2.   “What are the most important implications and risks for society?” 3.   “What should individuals and institutions do to leverage the power of social networks and improve society?”

 You can join the discussion on a number of social networks and platforms.

1) Leave a comment on the Forum blog

2) Become a Fan of the Forum on Facebook

3) Join the Forum group on LinkedIn

4) Befriend the Forum on MySpace

5) Join the Forum network on Ning

6) Reply to @Davos on Twitter

7) Record and upload a video on YouTube

With initiatives like this, the 2010 meeting promises to be the most broadly inclusive ever.

Finally, The Forum has a sophisticated user engagement plan. Rather than trying to convince Barack Obama to be on WELCOM chatting up a storm with Nicolas Sarkozy and Ban Ki-moon they are beginning with the participants most likely to use networks to solve problems.  First up are wonks like me – members of the  Global Agenda Council’s that I wrote about in my last post.  This includes constituencies such as academics, scientists, journalists and other who love to discuss and communicate ideas.

They also appear to be focusing on young people who are more likely to turn to networks to collaborate.  In 2005 the Forum has established the community of Young Global Leaders, consisting of hundreds of leaders under the age of 40 from around the world and myriad occupations and sectors.   These young adults are recognized for their professional accomplishments, commitment to society and potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world.  With many of them being part of the Net Generation, they understandably will fully exploit the tremendous potential a system such as WELCOM has to offer.

The Kiosk integration is also a nifty way of drawing attendees into WELCOM.  Everyone at Davos needs the Kiosks to sign up for activities and communicate.  Now they need WELCOM.

I’ve been using WELCOM for the past year and it’s a solid step forward.  But the Forum is still in the early days of curating the behavioral changes needed for the collaboration at Davos to be extended all year long.

But enough of this, I’ve got to get signing up for some sessions.

So at a high level, the major difference between the two is simple. The core of Yelp’s competitive advantage is it’s community of contributors; the core of Milo’s competitive advantage is driven by it’s inventory data. Both, of course, help people find products or services to purchase in their local area. My question to wikinomics readers is simple – given the option, which of the two would you prefer to own – and why? I’ve got a few of my own ideas on this, but would like to hear what other people think first…

Twitter and Facebook specifically are proving to be valuable tools for organizations soliciting donations. One of the more popular options ties together the huge adoption of social networking tools with everyone’s favorite communication device, your cell phone. The Red Cross developed a text option, so when the word “Haiti” is sent to a specific number, $10 is donated to the Haitian relief effort. The $10 charge shows up on your cell phone bill, so no need to worry about exchanging credit card information, or even visiting a web site. As one of my colleague’s posted “it’s easy peasy!” Within my relatively small network I’ve already seen the message about this option posted on no less than 100 status updates or Twitter posts. Last night The American Red Cross posted this on its Facebook page:

American Red Cross is confirming that you have donated $5 million by texting “Haiti” to 90999. You are amazing.

Pretty impressive for less than 2 full days work!

Of course, as with most outreach efforts there are always losers out there looking to make a quick buck with donation scams. On Wednesday the FBI actually released a fraud alert about donation scams.  Unfortunately social media tools become an attractive option for these criminals given the speed at which communications can reach critical mass. Thankfully the channel also allows for the revealing of frauds relatively quickly as well. I’ve seen a few posts pointing people to places where they can find lists of legitimate charities. This includes sites like –  the washingtonpost.com, NBC’s Boston affiliate WHDH, and most other local television news sites.

I could go on about the lessons that other organizations could learn from The Red Cross and other’s use of social media channels. However, today I think it’s more appropriate for us all to pause for just a minute, count our blessings and send thoughts and prayers to all of the families affected by the Haiti earthquake.

There are a lot of reasons for this success – but the one I want to focus on today is around the strategic use of purchasing thresholds. Like Woot.com, Groupon.com applies a maximum threshold to create urgency for customers – buy now before it’s too late! But the more interesting thing Groupon does is use minimum thresholds - the offer is only valid if enough people sign up.

There are two things that make this interesting. The first, and more obvious, ties to viral marketing. It’s typically hard for a company to “make” a marketing message, or sales offer, go viral. But by putting a minimum threshold on the offer (i.e. only valid if 50 people sign up), Groupon creates a natural incentive for interested customers to promote the offer through Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, and other channels.

The second ties to the ability to test price discrimination strategies. In these early days, Groupon members represent new customers for most merchants using the platform. In a typical case, if a company wants to test offering a discount to draw in new customers, they do so rather blindly. If (say) only 2 people take you up on the offer, it probably wasn’t worth the effort – let alone the cost if you have to communicate the message through traditional media channels. The minimum threshold gets around this – merchants can select whatever price / quantity combination makes sense for them, and walk away (without paying a penny) if the threshold isn’t met.

There are many other interesting aspects of the Groupon story I’ve been following in our research (you can read about a couple of other companies I’ve been watching closely here), as well as interesting challenges and opportunities the company will soon have to deal with. Given that Groupon has been so successful in using the Web 2.0 to create business around collective buying (while hardly being the first to have tried), they are definitely worth paying attention to.

The first answer I usually get is in relation to Twitter itself. It tends to go something like “Well duh, if you’ve only got 140 characters to create a message in, a service to shorten URLs helps save you space.”

But wouldn’t something like a hyperlink be better for that? Think about it – most people know what hyperlinks are (and if you don’t, click on that underlined thing to both experience one and read about it). Anyone that’s ever written on a blog knows exactly how easy they are to create – press that little button that looks like the link in a chain, put in the URL, press a button and the text on the screen (usually) turns blue with a line under it. And if my math is correct, that process takes up exactly zero characters. So aren’t URL shorteners a step backwards in terms of saving space?

This question has bounced around in my head for awhile. I was reminded of it when I read the TechCrunch article about Bit.ly getting Fu.kd (yup, I was right – zero characters). Everyone’s getting in the game. The winner will be the one with the most unified view of all the data behind the links. But the question still nibbles in my mind – isn’t there a way to get all this data, and send all these tweets and other messages, using some kind of hyperlink?

I’m assuming that I’m just missing something here. What is it exactly? Something around data transmission? Certain technology interfaces?

This is obviously another indicator of popularity – the more lists you are on, the more popular you probably are. In turn, one would guess that in most cases there is a high correlation between how many followers an account has, and how many lists they are on. While I don’t have the numbers to back it up, overall I think this is generally true. But I found one particularly interesting anomaly that I wanted to highlight.

The bio for @Agent_M is “editor for Marvel.com. Writer, blogger, loves tacos, tattoos, comics…”. The bio for @Marvel is “the official Twitter for Marvel Comics, Movies, Games and More.” So one account is thoughts from a Marvel editor, while the other is generally content from Marvel itself. Here are the relevant follower and list numbers (as of last week):

@Agent_M: 1.4 million followers, 1,234 lists

@Marvel: 43,000 followers, 1,467 lists

So if you look at straight follower counts, @Agent_M (the editor) is roughly 30 times more popular than @Marvel – an interesting story unto itself. But if you look at the number of times listed, @Marvel is actually a bit more popular. Looking at it another way, divide lists Marvel is on by total followers you get 3.4%; for Agent_M you get 0.1%.

That’s a huge difference. The question I have for Wikinomics readers is why is that – and what does it mean?

Each category around the “wheel” represents a different type of conversation. By implication, each type of conversation serves a distinctive business purpose. Solis and JESS3 did the hard work. For each type of conversation they mapped the appropriate collections of social media tools. According to the “Prism”, Facebook and Linked-in serve different types of conversations. Facebook, MySpace and Friendster are Social Networks. Linked-In, Plaxo, Ning and others are Interest and Curated Networks. Most of us lump all of them into the same category.

As one moves around the wheel, other helpful distinctions become apparent. Forums, Reviews and Ratings (e.g. yelp, Epinions, Amazon), SMS/Voice, Lifestreams, Twitter Ecosystems, Micromedia (e.g. Twitter, Yammer), Blog Communities, Blog Platforms, Blogs/Conversations, Crowdsourced Content, etc serve different objectives and different types of conversations. Each conversation has a different collection of social media tools. One readily gets the idea. It immediately makes sense. Each of the twenty-four different types of conversation requires a different type of social media.

The taxonomy also marks a key milestone in the evolution of social media. A key indicator of the maturity of a discipline is the ability to create a meaningful typology. While the creators developed the Conversation Prism from a marketing perspective, the taxonomy applies to many other disciplines and contexts.

Here are some thoughts on how to use The Conversation Prism:

Marketing. Everyone is interested in getting more customer mindshare, establishing meaningful conversations and developing hot communities around products. But how? Distinguishing among the different types of conversations and tools helps to focus effort. Sean Moffitt, one of the key thought leaders in nGenera’s Marketing 2.0 program notes that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flikr are key conversation forums, but one has to also match the conversation to the marketing objectives and the product or service. The Conversation Prism provides a way to rethink which types of conversation reach the best audience and achieve the right message and customer experience.

Enterprise Strategy. I’ve lost count of the many conversation with executives who simply dismiss social media as an irrelevant pastime or an “Extra-curricular” activity. Many think Facebook and MySpace are the sum total of social media when they are not. And often, social media is dismissed out of hand, to the detriment of an organization’s strategy, because everything is lumped together. The Conversation Prism cuts through the clutter and buzz and assigns the role and place of various types of social media. Use this taxonomy liberally for internal business strategy discussions, social media strategy, and most importantly, our soapbox – collaborative enterprise management.

Finance. Yes, finance. What does social media have to do with finance? Take a look at the wheel again. Armed with the taxonomy, the CFO or the controller for that matter can begin to think about where various tools might add value in conveying and explaining financial concepts, policies and performance. For example, quick relay of confidential financial information to small group would use a different set of social media than information disseminated to institutional investors, or retail investors. What type of conversation provides the best result for each constituency?

Information Technology. Increasingly, various groups expect the IT organization to recommend the right social media tool for the right problem. On what basis should these decisions be made? The Conversation Prism enables IT professional to understand the landscape and make recommendations based on desired business outcomes, not simply technical features. Bandwidth, storage, API’s, architectures, apps, widgets, gadgets and price vary by social media type. Some tools require internal infrastructure, other operate as SaaS in the Cloud.

Human Resources. Conversations and social media involve people. Duh. However, employees should understand appropriate use. Often, social media gets a bad name, or experiments fail, because the wrong tool is applied to the wrong circumstance. Ever consider using a text message for a performance review. Some have. Use “the wheel” to teach appropriate use.

The Conversation Prism provides a welcome tool as social media moves into its second stage of development. It surveys and maps the social media landscape. Perhaps other destinations will be added. However, in the mean time, The Conversation Prism, a simple framework, provides self-evident guidance to those who wish to profit from the social media revolution.

Stemming from other posts and discussions about this very issue, I put forth the following list of simple guiding principles that I think can provide a starting point for organizations entering this sphere of communication.

Although, there is no one single, policy structure that can fit all situations and organizations, the one thing I do take a strong stance on, is the need to keep the rule simple to understand and relatable, which is the reason I chose to use the rule of the road as my reference point.

Most Importantly, Don’t drink and Drive…well that’s just good advice

My point in putting up this list is to mainly drive discussion around the subject of, what constitutes ‘good’ social policy? Hopefully this provides a springboard from which to launch this much needed debate.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle for social media classifies Social CRM (i.e. the integration of social media into CRM systems) as a transformational technology that is two-to-five years away from mainstream adoption in customer service applications and five-to-ten years away from adoption in community marketing. While I agree that Social CRM will be transformational, I think the adoption will (and must) happen more quickly. Specifically, our research at nGenera has uncovered new data, new tools, new channels, and a new mindset that are accelerating the trend towards Social CRM.

Data: The data that is included in traditional CRM is limited to very basic identity and transactional information about customers. It does not typically include the type of rich digital profile information contained in places like Facebook and LinkedIn.  Customer feedback is collected through surveys, a method of data collection that is expensive, time-consuming, temporal, and often annoying for customers. But this is all changing. Customer data can be gathered from many sources, some old – such as the contact center – and some new. With respect to the contact center, the amount of unused customer data that is generated is astounding. One interviewee recently confided that his contact center writes the equivalent of a book every day – a book that nobody reads.  A first basic step is to generate organizational learning from contact centers. Once you’ve mastered this, you’re ready to move on to new sources of data. In this case, I’m thinking about reality mining, social networks, forums, blogs, and other digital venues where customers are engaging in behaviors that affect the company’s brand.

Tools: Listening platforms and sentiment analysis tools allow companies to capture customer preferences, complaints, feedback, and queries expressed online, while social network analysis can provide insight into the connections between individuals and identify key influencers. Companies can also track prosumer activity across branded communities and company-sponsored networks. When integrated with CRM databases, this information helps create accurate, up-to-date, and meaningful customer records. Although the CRM systems that currently offer applications to incorporate social media data only include data from a limited number of social networking sites – of which Twitter is the most common – this will likely change. Data will eventually be collected from all public online discussions as the concept of Social CRM becomes more accepted and companies develop strategies to deal with larger volumes of data. Once customer conversations have been successfully captured and incorporated into CRM databases, one can imagine a future where companies will be able to capture other forms of rich data, such as emotional data, photos, voice, and even video content (i.e. not just video metadata). According to a vendor I interviewed, companies can already correctly identify individuals online using available profile data with up to 90% accuracy.  This allows comapanies to find existing and potential customers online and gather new data about them. The contact center of the future will have a much richer digital picture of customers, allowing companies to personalizing product and service offerings, engage customers in meaningful conversations, and generate sophisticated trend data.

Channels: Many contact centers, such as those at Best Buy and Comcast now support social media channels and have dedicated teams devoted to responding to customers and prospects in public and branded digital venues. The question of whether or not to use social media as a listening platform or a contact center channel is major one for organizations as it affects the number of touchpoints that need to be managed and the complexity of customer support operations. However, as sentiment analysis tools get better, and integrate more readily with CRM, we expect this distinction to become less and less of a concern. In the future, the new sources of data (inputs) will be the same as the channels for customer interaction (output). As these channels mature, I fully expect the data and analytics to help “close the loop” with respect to customer engagement metrics – directly connecting social media investments with customer sales information. In this way, companies will be able to measure the value of customer intention and calculate the ROI of social media interactions.

Mindset: The notion of ‘relationship management’ brings with it a particular bias that data is controlled by the party that is doing the managing, rather than ownership of the data by the individual. So, in the case of CRM, it is assumed that the company is managing customer relationships by controlling the data about them and their interactions. New notions of relationship management seem to embrace the idea that ownership of both identity information and the customer-vendor relationship should reside with individuals, not companies.  Exchange of information should be based a two-way value proposition in which individuals selectively share aspects of their rich digital profiles, as well as their discretionary effort in exchange for useful and targeted messages, promotions, and reputation.  Paul Greenberg from ZDNet discusses this in more depth and notes, “Co-creation and mutually derived value, is at the core of Social CRM.” As an example, The Internet Identity Workshop and Project VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) at Harvard is exploring a highly customer-centric view of identity information where the customer controls their data and manages relationships with various vendors.

I’ve heard the argument that traditional CRM “is dead,” but this is far from the truth. In fact, as Brian notes, Social CRM does not replace transactional CRM systems, rather it augments them. What CRM is in desperate need of is new data sources and tools that help integrate and analyze this data. The future vision of CRM also requires that companies get involved in new channels and cede a certain amount of control to the customer – it’s less about management and more about engagement.

The first piece that planted a seed of doubt about the universality of social media was “Understanding Users of Social Networks,” written by Sean Silverthorne in Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. Silverthorne discussed research by Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski on how men and women use social networks differently and how Twitter use is different from either Facebook or MySpace use. What really stuck with me was his analysis of the differences in the populations of Facebook and MySpace, specifically their geographic bases. Pikorski’s analysis of a dataset of 100,000 MySpace users shows that they live mostly in smaller cities and communities in the south and central parts of the country, including “Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Florida. . . not anywhere near the media hubs (except Atlanta) and far away from those elite opinion-makers in coastal urban areas.” It still boasts some 70 million members, so my conclusion is that claims that MySpace is “dead,” it seems, may be coming mostly from the media hubs where Facebook rules.

In the second piece, “a rough, unedited crib” of danah boyd‘s talk to the Personal Democracy Forum on June 30, 2009, titled “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online,” Boyd asks her audience to do her a favor during her presentation: “I want you to step away from the techno-hyperbole for just a moment and think about issues of inequality and social stratification with me. I want you to think about the ways in which technology is not equally available or equally transformative.”

boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, discusses some results of her research into differences between teenage Facebook and MySpace users and some of the reasons teens use one or the other. Boyd comments, “Choice isn’t about features of functionality. It’s about the social categories in which we live. It’s about choosing sites online that reflect ‘people like me.’ And it’s about seeing the ‘other’ site as the place where the ‘other’ people go.” She also notes the “condescending” attitude of teens who use Facebook towards teens who use MySpace: “Teens who use MySpace may lament teen Facebook users as ‘stuck-up’ or ‘goodie two-shoes’ or the ‘good kids.’ But they’re not nearly as harsh in their language as Facebook users are of those who use MySpace.”

boyd discusses some explanations for the “divide” between the two groups as well, which I won’t do justice to in this short post, but strongly recommend that you read the entire piece for those. (Note the explanatory material at the top, clarifying the audience for this talk, and keep it in mind when reading it.) Summing up some takeaways, Boyd says: “Social media does not magically eradicate inequality. Rather, it mirrors what is happening in everyday life and makes social divisions visible. What we see online is not the property of these specific sites, but the pattern of adoption and development that emerged as people embraced them. People brought their biases with them to these sites and they got baked in.”

Finally, a conversation with my friend, who’s deep into and fluent in social media and Enterprise 2.0, got into who’s left out of social media and Enterprise 2.0 – actually, I guess I am talking about Life 2.0. Do the most interested parties, who know the most about and are most invested in Life 2.0 include a broad social strata of the U.S.? My sense – I lack any data so this entire post may be dismissed – is no, they do not. (Developing such data might be an interesting research project, IMO; if anyone knows of such research, please point me to it.) My belief is that they should.

And for me, the key to getting people involved in the power and potential of Life 2.0 lies in education. The more exposure young people have to life outside their social groups and their environment, the better for them and for us. If we believe in collaboration as a good way to tap into the best of everyone, it won’t do if “everyone” is just “people like us.”

If you look at the last few years, one of the most important developments is that various social media tools are allowing brands to connect with customers directly, for free – and that many customers want them to do just that. Unlike traditional mediums, brands can know exactly who they are connecting with, and as pervasive personal identity continues to evolve this will only become more true. It’s ever easier to measure impact directly. Toss in the benefits of location-based information, the evolution of the intention economy (where customers directly express what they want, allowing brands – and others – to respond), pay-for-performance campaigns, the ease at which messages go viral, the proliferation of ways to make customer connections, and the benefits of having “prosumers” do everything from provide information to each other make commercials on the cheap – to me, it all looks like it’s pointing to a structural decline in ad spend.

But that doesn’t necessarily meaning that the impact of advertising will diminish anytime soon. If anything, I expect that it will probably increase - but companies, on aggregate, won’t have to pay as much for it. That’s a winning combination. But there is a counteracting trend as well – tied to the end of the Pepsi statement of “doesn’t get caught up in trying to make everyone like it.” As all these tools evolve, transparency increases – and the truth matters ever more. If a company is not good at what they do, they will likely be in more trouble than ever – but if they are good at what they do, they’ll be better off then ever before. Because in most cases, you can’t make people say they like it – they either like it or they don’t.

One particularly interesting area to watch on this will be in relation to private label goods in retail stores. As the recession took hold, there was the predictable increase in demand for cheaper, private label goods – and in fairness many of them have been rapidly increasing in quality as well. While I can’t find the link, it was this challenge that was featured in an Economist article about P&G about a month ago, as they sought to counteract the private label trend.

One part of this was revisiting selling directly over the Internet – a now “old” strategy that I also think will become “new” again for many manufacturers that have avoided it up until now. But if you look at their use of Innocentive (improved efficiency AND innovation for their R&D), and perhaps a structural decline in advertising spend, there’s a reasonable case to be made that much of the price advantage that private label goods have can be eroded. And from my experience, and I think this isn’t just an advertising-brainwashed brain speaking, most branded products remain superior to their private label counterparts. So long as that is true, social media (et all) should help that message get out – much cheaper than before. And for a company that spends over $3.5 billion a year on advertising while banking about $11 billion in profit annually, that (again) could be a great thing…