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It was a hectic June and I’m finally starting to distill some of my conversations and briefings. I was in Boston a few weeks back for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference and while I definitely came back energized, the best part was the old-fashioned version of social networking — pressing the flesh as the saying goes.

I was there as media and while I would’ve liked to have blogged more about the show, I did manage to get some microblogging in courtesy of CoverItLive’s service. I realized early that I’d be attending a bunch of sessions with a crappy Wi-Fi connection in the backdrop, so I figured I’d cut my losses and get as much micro content in place as possible.

The widget below is the snapshot of my ad hoc meetings, session tracks, and a few hallway and bar conversations. Some of the latter were definitely the more interesting as I had several instances where I connected with folks I’d blogged with and collaborated with through Twitter and other channels.

I ran the CoveritLive widget on the Content Management Connection and ECM Blog after the show and noticed it had about 500 unique views over the course of a few days. How much of that had to do with the novelty of the service remains to be seen. Janet Lee Johnson thought it was cool enough to blog about it, and I noticed it had enough lift to light up Twitter with a few Tweets.

I spoke with Matthew Greeley, CEO of Brightidea.com, recently and came away impressed with its approach to delivering real value with Web 2.0 sizzle. It just released WebStorm 5.0, which uses social networking elements to capture information that companies can use to drive innovation.

You could think of it as a Facebook-like application with just the right amount of administrative flexibility to keep the IT guys happy.

A marquee client for BrightIdea.com is Cisco, which uses the platform to create custom portals that spark collaboration with customers, employees, or partners. According to Greeley, Cisco has seen impressive results using the platform, generating more than 700 ideas from almost 1,500 members in 100 countries. Try to do that with some Web-based surveys and polling widgets.

Greeley told me that many companies lack business focus when deploying a social computing strategy.

“Deploying generic social networks without a specific business objective is like putting up playgrounds at the office; it may be fun for a while, but don’t expect it to improve the bottom line,” said Greeley.

What I really like about Brightidea is how it has honed in on a particular business driver. By looking at how a company can manage innovation, Brightidea takes the best-of-breed approach instead of trying to be all things to all people. Greeley says once it perfects that piece, it can move on, driving deeper into the enterprise and affecting other more traditional areas of collaboration.

That focus should certainly give WebStorm 5.0 a leg up in the battles to provide social computing infrastructure to large corporations over the next few years.

Companies are finally realizing the more you can apply the fundamentals of Web 2.0 to specific business objectives, the better the chance at ROI.

I read this PCWorld story and I couldn’t help but think how indicative it is of of the typical command and control mentality within enterprises. I know there’s a balance between fighting the external social network (SoNet) effect and creating a corporate one of your own. With all the technology horsepower and APIs gone wild, shouldn’t we be able to figure out how to create some harmony between the two? The quote from one of the Gap’s web engineers sums it up pretty well:

“Do you really want Facebook to manage it for you in the outside world, or do you want to do it yourself so you have control?”

Control. It’s a word I hear over and over: How will we maintain control of what’s being said by the community?

I’ve talked to more companies than I can count about social publishing, social media, and setting up communities. The enterprises that typically lead the charge tend to be the ones that want to sell software or services to setup the community. But like communities in the real world, who wants to pay for the roads that others will use? When we talk to the brands in the community cross hairs, well that’s when you see the cold sweat start to break out.

The big brands hire in teams of marketing folk from the best B-schools to manage their content. They pay the most expensive consultants to determine what color has which meaning for their brand; what word has which association in middle America vs. big cities; heck how does this kid think vs. that adult. It’s been done this way for years, decades, and now, that level of tight brand control is showing cracks.

For the last decade or more, people with passion for products are expressing their views over the web - the enterprise fear originates when the views aren’t all that rosy. With all of their collective experience, too many companies still have the fear of shelling out big bucks to develop a social publishing strategy. Do they really want to give the rest of the world a forum to say what they’re really thinking?

The bus has already left the station folks; the negative views are already finding their ways through other sites and locations. I try to encourage brands to embrace both the negative and positive discussions their consumers have, preaching that it’s important to learn from the negative and leverage the positive. 

But for all of those brands who don’t want to build the roads that provide more interaction with their consumers: your consumers are taking other roads already available. Enable them to speak freely with and about you.

That’s social publishing.

Several months ago a content management vendor told me that the oncoming recession was causing it problems with revenue generation. I said perhaps, but it’s also possible its problems were related to the fact that its customers were really angry and really vocal. It’s too easy to blame market conditions without taking a hard look in the mirror sometimes.

For this top 5 list I won’t name any names, but I encourage everyone to try to clean their own closets occasionally. Maybe these items will add up to survival in either a recession or peak market conditions. The top reasons a content management company will go out of business:

No. 5: You forgot to eat your own dog food. I’m amazed at the number of companies that offer content management options while their own Web content and marketing materials haven’t been updated since 1997. If you have the teams that can deliver for your customers, let them practice on your real estate first. Would you buy a suit from a man wearing rags? Maybe, but many people wouldn’t.

No. 4: Your customers hate you. The best technology in the world won’t save you if your own customers tell everyone that you’re a jerk. Please don’t ever tell your customers that it’s their fault if they can’t figure out how to use your products. Yes, content management is not rocket science, and yes, some people are amazingly nontechnical. That doesn’t excuse elitism, and if the words “The customer is just stupid” have ever come out of your mouth, you may deserve to go out of business. It sounds like I’m making this up. I’m not.

No. 3: You try to develop everything in-house. The market is moving fast, your R&D teams can’t always keep up. This isn’t necessarily a weakness — sometimes you need to pick your differentiators and source the other items. If you find that you’re missing release deadlines again and again on items readily available from other vendors or as open source, please evaluate your business model. You’re burning cash for fun, not profit.

No. 2: You disregard trends. I’ll say it again. The market moves fast and what’s on the horizon sometimes seems just plain silly at first. But we’ve all heard the famous miscalculation that the world only has need for about five computers — the smartest people have made mistakes. For those who have told me that “Green is just a fad” and “Blogs are overrated,” (both of those are direct, recent quotes) be careful of what you dismiss. Don’t fall behind your competitors because you personally drive a Hummer and wear polar bear fur earmuffs (that’s a green reference, people). Fads and trends have a way of catching on, becoming important, and filling real business needs. Be open to change, and maybe your revenue will grow.

No. 1: Your employees turn over faster than the toilet paper is changed in the corporate restroom. Whether the job market is tight or technology workers seem a dime a dozen, employees are the face of your company. If they’re leaving in droves, or you’re replacing them quarterly, it’s a morale killer and your customers sense it.

Send me your reasons for part two and we’ll post them next week.

Cross-posted on InformationWeek’s Content Management Blog.

If you’re into content management, or in a broader sense, information management, I hope you’ll pop in occasionally at one of my new homes on the web. (RSS feed here)

I’m part of Information Week’s blog crew and recently started covering all things related to content and information management. And what the heck isn’t related to managing content these days? It’s such a broad topic I know, but my goal is to bring a business person’s voice to it all.

If you’re a vendor, make your PR pros earn their money by sending along story ideas and vendor news. If you’re a client and want to get some pub on how you’ve mastered the content beast, you can also drop me a line.

Here’s some of my latest posts..and as always, thanks for reading.

• Top 5 Content Management Trends For 2008
  
• Oracle’s BEA Acquisition Makes Things Interesting
  
• Oracle Captures A Key Component To Its ECM Strategy
  
• Clickability Clicks On All Cylinders
  
• How Web 2.0 Affects Content Management
  
• IBM Hints At FileNet 2.0
  
• Open Source Funding Signals CMS Shakeup
  
• Engineering Content Management For A Web 2.0 World
  
• Are Enterprises Finally Waking Up To RSS?
  
• SaaS Trendwatching With Clickability

Explore The Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Network (a FeedBurner Network)

A while back I attended a PRWeek and Waggener Edstrom event at the posh  Hotel Palomar here in Big D. The event was titled Campaigns in the 21st Century: Measuring Perceptions. Dan Gallagher delivered an interesting look at how they analyzed content being created on the web related to the Presidential candidates. The analysis was done back in Sept. 2007 and was accomplished using the Narrative Network, a toolset they created using some pretty nifty algorithms. You can download Dan’s presentation here. (if it doesn’t work. lemme know) And here’s the movie.

In short, it’s text mining and brand mapping that creates a visual map of how the media perceives a particular brand or topic. That’s pretty hot stuff these days with all the attention on social media measurement or brand monitoring. Smart companies and agencies are finally figuring out that social media measurement is just another layer in a well-integrated approach to digital marketing and public relations.

I’m still a little baffled when clients don’t want to budget for stuff like this. It really gives new meaning to the “intel” connotation.

Everyday there’s hundreds of instances where the rise of social media is impacting the way we think, share ideas, and bring about change. The latest incarnation comes from a 23 year-old graphic designer from Pennsylvania. iJustine, as she’s known, filmed herself opening up her iPhone bill from AT&T and sparked enough of a viral trend to surpass 300K views on YouTube so far.

I can hear it now.

Have you seen that video on YouTube?! Makes us look like a bunch of idiots I tell you.

Technorati Tags: AT&T, youtube, social+media, video, iPhone, environmental+awareness

If you’re not, take a look at a recent document I received from Scott Niesen, head marketer at Attensa. If you don’t know Attensa, you’re in for a treat. Their new feedreader tool sits nicely inside Outlook and brings a unique spin to feed reading via their “River of News” view and AttentionStreamâ„¢ technology. 

Through ongoing analysis of AttentionStreamâ„¢ data, including the time and frequency that feeds are accessed and articles read, deleted and ignored, Attensa displays feeds in a prioritized list based on the likelihood that they will be of interest to the reader. Subscriptions can be displayed in a “River of News” view that simulates a single news feed, regardless of how many RSS feeds

And Scott and I had a good exchange about sharing some of Attensa’s inner RSS workings. When I told him I should just blog the whole document, he quickly fired back that “marketing is all about experiments and a little risk.”

Well said.

 
Attensa Screenshot

I got a call from a PR firm the other day looking for an “online communicator” to perform various Web 2.0 tasks for some of their clients. Looked like a cool gig until you get toward the bottom of the listing. Note to PR firms..bloggers are not going away. They’ll continue to a key element in driving brand discussions - good or bad.

This post has been marinating for a while in my Live Writer queue. It’s one of those “take a step back and quickly observe” posts. You know, when you realize there’s knowledge to be gleaned from some of your web creations. And with some recent developments in the internet advertising space, I thought it was a good time to resurrect some quick observations. In this case, I’m referencing Google’s AdSense, but I run ads from the other usual suspects as well — namely MSFT, Yahoo, and FeedBurner.

Before you call me a sell out, hear me out on some coffee-shop observations

—————————————————————————————–

1. Competitive Intelligence

This is an easy one. Once you get rid of your paranoia and turn off Google’s competitive ad filter, your competition will be at your blog’s doorstep shortly.

2. Marketing and Advertising insight

Take a quick look at the kind of ads your site serves. Once your content  settles and gets indexed, an aggregate theme begins to develop as you look at the ads. Many times this helps me understand if my content is providing the right context for you, my user.

3. Product discovery and selection

My colleagues and I joke about this one. Anytime we have some downtime and get in an exploratory mode for new webby tools and services, we just take a quick spin through 5 or 10 pages and voila!

4. Business Development

This one’s also terribly apparent. You’re a digital agency and you provide email marketing services. I probably shouldn’t admit this and open source my email marketing strategy, but one of the solutions we’re using for a few of our clients is IntelliContact. How’d we find them? Yep, the ad running on my blog.

5. Brand and Community Building

As you begin to develop consistency in your content, you’ll notice the ads begin to tell your story. WOW Feed has a lot of Web 2.0, social media, and agency-oriented content. If you look around you’ll usually notice some very targeted Ads on at least a few of those topics. Users, in turn, get a quick sense of what the site’s all about..a sense of what conversations are taking place.

Social Media Today is live.
Stop what you’re doing, grab the RSS feed and thank me later.
I’m ecstatic to be a part of such an impressive group. Man, I thought I was a prolific blogger

Marketing Sherpa has just released their â€œMarketing Wisdom” report for 2007. These are always packed with tips from marketers coast-to-coast and as you might expect, this year’s version includes a lot of social media discussion. From blogs and RSS to search engine optimization (SEO) and email marketing, you can see what the best and brightest have to say.  

Download the PDF here.

A quick search on “enterprise content” yielded an interesting result recently. My other blog, “The Enterprise Content Management Blog” is (at the time of writing this) now the number eleven (11) website that’s found out of more than 300 million results. And who’s ahead of me? Wikipedia and some of the largest enterprise software companies on the planet. Priceless.

The buzz around social media is everywhere, this time popping up in a segment from CBS News as they interviewed the authors of Citizen Marketers, a book that dissects how new media has given a new (and louder)voice to the consumer. I saw it first on David Armano’s Logic+Emotion blog. And I won’t say it again. Um, actually I will. If you ignore this stuff and don’t dive into the conversation, you’ll absolutely regret it. Start planning your social media strategy now.

On the heels of Shift Communications’ social media news release, Edelman just announced their own fancy press release creator. 

And there’s already pundits griping about Edelman’s Shift-like effort, calling it nothing new and copycat-like. But c’mon, how many ways can you really repurpose Digg links and RSS icons to look any different?

The content required to compile social releases is the same — podcasts, blogs, images, technorati, trackbacks — all the usual web 2.0 stuff. The only thing any different is the underlying technology that handles the publishing, things like managing digital assets and rendering HTML. Otherwise nada.

Perhaps Edelman would be better served striking a deal with an open source content management provider and making it (StoryCrafter) available to other agencies.

Shift is ahead here as well.

I’m impressed the Dallas Morning News had such an in-depth article on the business benefits of blogging. It seems like they could’ve found a few companies closer to home to interview though. New Jersey? I’m thinking of a Pace picante sauce slogan.

Seriously though, if there was ever a market in need of the push-button publishing capabilities of a blog, it’s real estate. Now if real estate marketers would get just get rid of their archaic email newsletters and move to blogs and RSS we’d all get a better bang for our real estate buck.  

Chalk this up in the “how not to do social media” category. Apparently Wal-Mart and their big-dog PR firm (Edelman) have been outed in a high-profile fake blog incident. The timing is particularly scathing, as top Chinese importer Wal-Mart recently took a punch in the gut after having to close its failed social networking site “The Hub” after less than three months.

Didn’t anyone from Edelman see this coming? Pioneer Thinking 2.0 needs a new media makeover.

You bet. In fact, I told a new client yesterday we might opt for an A or B-list blogger push to promote his upcoming book. I can tell you first hand (not that I’m an A-List blogger), how I’ve been approached by analysts, PR firms, buzz agencies, etc, about their client’s interest in getting a blog post or two. Let’s face it, when you get a few eyeballs on your blog, your reputation and credibility as a market influencer starts to increase.

John “CZ” Czwartacki, Verizon’s executive director of external communications, expertly did just that.

CZ cleverly announced the launch of the blog by leaving a comment on Edelman senior VP Steve Rubel’s widely-read Micro Persuasion blog. Haven’t seen a press release or other old-media announcement. This is considered *best practices* these days for how to quietly launch a corporate blog.

I’m not advocating you ban PRNewswire, BusinessWire and the like from your PR strategy, but ignoring the new media aspects (blogs, for one) of generating visibility for your client would be a disservice.

OK, this is a little creepy, but the marketing strategy is clever. The ad below appeared on WOW Feed within 30 minutes of blogging about a CNET article that urged you and me to gripe when we can’t get free Wi-Fi. The writer mentioned Starbucks and of course I tagged it Starbucks, for obvious reasons, other than the irony of being at a Starbucks while I’m writing this. Usually it takes a while for blog content to get indexed, allowing AdSense to serve up another set, but in this case it took minutes. You can see what a mini-campaign like this can do from a viral and grassroots perspective. It’s obvious the folks at The Business Blog Summit aren’t relying on Anne Saunders to read WOW Feed and call’em up for blog services. What they are banking on is that bloggers like me will do exactly what I’m doing now.

 

tags: starbucks, viral+marketing, guerrilla+marketing, grass+roots+marketing, online+advertising, google, google+adsense, blogs, business+blogs