Below was the first message I saw early this morning. I didn’t realize that I was a half day late seeing the initial email message. The first blog post was this:

We have four new ads which are either on the air, or ready to go on the air. The ads have been “cleared” by every network… except for NBC which has refused to clear a :15 second ad about Iran.

Right when I was about to post this, I circled back to the site and saw a more recent blog post that updated the situation.

On Wednesday the Pickens Plan Army engaged in a battle against NBC. The network had refused to run our 15-second ad talking about how Iran–IRAN–is moving quickly to CNG-powered vehicles so they can free up their oil to sell it to us at $120 per barrel.Guess what: We won the battle!By Wednesday evening, NBC had re-examined its position and told us they WOULD allow our ad to run in its original form.

There’s no questioning the web’s impact on things like this. Call it social media, citizen journalism or what have you, the fact remains we’re in the midst of some big shifts around traditional media. The winds of change are here.

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The social media stuff is probably the most important thing we do today, from a marketing standpoint. A lot of the other elements of our marketing mix has sort of become more and more transactional and more and more tactical in nature. The social media stuff is much more strategic… It’s about how to use social media to power the fundamentals of the business. That’s what we’re focused on.

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What’s The Platform’s Sweet Spot?

Does the vendor’s strength play unevenly towards certain elements of social computing. In other words, did they start out as a blog provider and magically reinvent themselves as as a platform play?

Can They Play Inside and Outside the Firewall?

The lines between external and internal communities are becoming increasingly blurred. If your vendor doesn’t have an answer for playing nicely with SharePoint and can’t turn that around and go external, move on.

What Are Their Social Media Credentials?

You can quantify this pretty easily. Do they blog? Are they good at involving customers in the conversation? If they haven’t synchronized their own communications, there’s a good chance they can’t do it for you.

Is The Platform Geared For Particular Verticals?

Did the vendor grow up in a particular industry? If so, you might find the product cluttered with unnecessary or thin layers of specific applications you don’t need. You’d be surprised how much big paychecks from certain clients influence a product roadmap.

A good sign of a platform’s maturity is how many partners have latched on. The key here is to let the solution providers, integrators and digital agencies make the platform hum. While most of the time you can find a good contingency of subject matter experts (SMEs) on the vendor side, the channel is the ecosystem that makes things tick.

Have They Worked With Agencies Before? 

What About 3rd Party Alliances?

This is critical as you expand your online efforts. Whether it’s a CRM integration,or an e-commerce application, the odds are you’ll want to extend your social computing platform as your community grows. Take a close look at who the vendor goes to market with and how they leverage each other.

Send me your questions, I’m putting together a second version now.

First posted on the Telligent blog.

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So how do you 2.0-ify your approach to do doing business inside the firewall?

* Start with clear-cut business objectives

This is one you’ll hear us harp on. Too many times we see businesses rush towards technology and tool sets before ensuring there’s a comprehensive look at what the business really expects to gain from an enterprise 2.0 project. A lot of times it can be simple objectives like cutting down on the number of weekly meetings or reducing the amount of emails sent. For every departmental batch of emails you show me, I can give you plenty of ways to move that information into a more conversational and interactive channel with things like blogs, forums, or a wiki.

* Educate and inform

This is your chance to use enterprise 2.0 techniques to socialize your goals internally.Don’t push out an email and cross your fingers you’ll get responses. Create a blog and show the skeptics how easy it is to create content and receive that content automatically through RSS.

* Find the right people

One of our recent webinars with BtoB Magazine included a poll question that asked more than 1000 attendees about their biggest challenge related to creating an online community. Almost 30% said personnel and staffing is the biggest roadblock they’re facing as they develop an enterprise social media strategy. As you put together you’re plan of attack,do an analysis of your colleagues and map their skills back to a social media task or activity. If Jane in corporate communications is almost too good at articulating her thoughts in long emails, there’s a good chance she could lead some of your blog efforts. Let’s call it the social computing “skills audit”.

* Focus on the low-hanging fruit

This one’s about looking at your business processes and figuring out simple ways to incorporate some collaboration and conversation. Marketing, sales and corporate communications are good candidates to get on the enterprise 2.0 bandwagon because the flow of information tends to be fast and furious and collaboration is essential. As you begin socializing enterprise 2.0, make sure you quickly identify the pain points of each group. Try not focus on the technology too much until you have things teed up and can demonstrate how processes will be improved.

* Think of your vendor as a long-term partner. It’s about more than technology.

As you develop your enterprise 2.0 approach, there’s no doubt you’ll need to supplement your talent pool with things like professional services or strategy. The vendors (like us) are often times the best source of readily accessible horsepower. Look beyond vendor roadmaps and dig for subject matter experts (SMEs). These are the folks that have been in the trenches and can quickly identify and uncover industry standards and common practices to build a strategy around.

What else would you add?

Technorati Tags: community+server,social networking,community+server+evolution,enterprise+2.0,web+2.0,telligent

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I’m also presenting tomorrow on "Choosing A White Label Social Network", and will be blogging some of that content here later today.  The CoverItLive Widget below will have my updates over the next few days, so send me some comments or let me know if you have any questions. Hope to meet some of you in Chicago.

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I thought WPP chieftain Martin Sorrell covered all the bases as he described his firm’s motivation:

“Growth is being driven by continuous pressure on clients to raise
their like-for-like revenue growth and to optimise their investment
against a backdrop of changing demographics, decreasing product
differentiation, intensifying global competition, the fragmentation of
the media and the impact of digital development.”

The forces at work here are disruptive to say the least. The big agencies are getting pressure from clients to move away from costly print and TV ads and move to more conversational forms of marketing and advertising. It’s not enough to just deploy a microsite and track page views. Customers want real-time information and they’re demanding it on their terms.

If I were a mid-market or large brand, I’d cut down on the one-off microsites and email-based newsletters and move the conversation to more interactive environments. Many companies have figured out that tapping the collective wisdom of their customer base provides huge value. Evidence of this is the large number of customer-driven communities and B2B networks getting sponsorship deals from consumer brands and software companies. It’s likely these communities are where your customers are lurking anyway or they’re building their own versions. Why not engage with them on their terms and in their environments?

I’m not calling for the death of traditional marketing techniques - unless there’s no infusion of 21st Century smarts.

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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.

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This is a smart move by MediaNews Group, if for nothing else than realizing that the 1.0 stickiness so enviable at one time has now taken the form of socially-driven content, which brings a whole new meaning to the term pageviews. I think future iterations of the (web 3.0,etc) will revolve around the quality of the content being produced and delivered — or niche content if you like. And the big media companies are realizing that their newspapers alone just ain’t gonna pay the bills. In today’s media landscape, MediaNews can’t be satisfied with simply reaching your doorstep with yesterday’s news printed on dead trees.

They have to know you’re a pregnant mother on the north side of Dallas that’s interested not only in oil prices but bio-degradable diapers. I’ve heard the term hyper-local used on occasion and I think that says it all. The more targeted content MediaNews (and others) can deliver, and the more it can empower its users to deliver, the longer they’ll stay relevant. TauMed is a step in that direction.

You can see a few of the sites below.
http://connpost.taumed.com
http://chicoer.taumed.com
http://greenwichtime.taumed.com
http://stamfordadvocate.taumed.com

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I caught up with Oracle VP and enterprise 2.0 evangelist Vince Casarez recently to get the scoop on how the world’s largest software company is ideally positioned to help customers transition to enterprise 2.0, a term describing the tools and processes companies are adopting to drive better collaboration among finicky knowledge workers. He says that while the enterprise 2.0 space is maturing rapidly, companies are figuring out that enterprise 1.0 fundamentals still apply.

“We think it makes more sense to inject best-of-breed Web 2.0 capabilities into your enterprise application environments,” said Casarez.

He says knowledge workers are more likely to adopt new ways of sharing information when they have a sense of familiarity or connectedness to existing applications or workflows. He’s got a point. An overused example of that comes from Oracle’s arch rival Microsoft. Think of all the applications that have lived and died by the Microsoft Outlook sword. Fact is, if you can thrive in the ecosystem of an existing enterprise application, you’ll get a chance to live, or be adopted, as the saying goes in software.

With Oracle’s line of business (LOB) applications so prevalent, does that mean all of its customers will adopt its software to join the e2.0 ranks? Of course not. There will always be customers that gravitate to the start-ups, hoping to get a few months of added capability tacked on to spur time-to-market and and potentially cut costs. After the best-of-breed sparkle fades however, most companies will come to the realization that enterprise 1.0 never really left us.

Things like IT governance, compliance pressures and vendor viability will rear their collective heads just as they always do. Couple that with the fact that CIOs are now realizing they can look to existing infrastructure to satisfy enterprise 2.0 requirements and you have a compelling business case to look to an Oracle.

“Large enterprises have invested millions of dollars in existing applications, not to mention the training that goes along with having to ensure large-scale adoption of that infrastructure,” added Casarez.

I also asked Casarez about the enterprise 2.0 activity within its channel of solution providers and integrators.

“We’re seeing some very sophisticated enterprise 2.0 use cases start to emerge from our channel partners.It’s clear our customers have moved past the experimental phases of enterprise 2.0,” he said.

If you’ve followed any of Oracles’ web 2.0 moves over the last year, you know that customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation are two areas ripe with current pilots and early implementations.On the CRM front, its move to create more social CRM capabilities has drawn some praise from industry observers and it (CRM) seems to a breeding ground for a lot of enterprise 2.0 pure plays.

Its dThree implementation has been a showcase for Oracle on the marketing services front. I spoke to dThree a while back and saw what the right web  2.0 “injection”, as Casarez says, can do to sometimes stale marketing platforms. dThree layered just the right amount of social computing features to its marketing platform, built from the ground up using things like Oracle WebCenter and Fusion middleware.

Who says the enterprise software guys are just enterprise 2.0 window dressing.

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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.

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A vendor I covered recently and one that’s in the in the middle of Mashup mania is MindTouch, makers of Deki Wiki, Web 2.0 middleware that’s part content management system (CMS) and part Mashup maker.

Part of my inclination to cover MindTouch’s recent announcement was the results I was able to achieve on my own using Deki Wiki. Pointing and clicking through a hosted instance of its Pro version was a breeze recently. I was able to build a pretty extensive site with multiple pages, widgets and several other web services extensions in less than 30 minutes. Once you navigate through your own instance, you quickly get the sense of what all the fuss is about.

Apparently its latest “Jay Cooke” v8.05 release was good enough to turn the heads of  Mozilla, which selected MindTouch for the upcoming re-launch of its Developer Community. In a prepared statement, Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s Chief Evangelist, said the platform’s ease of use, architecture and feature set drove the decision after a lengthy evaluation.

One of the features MindTouch told InformationWeek about was what it touts as the first polyglot application on the Web.

That new capability is helping Mozilla host all languages as a single site, allowing Deki Wiki’s user interface to adapt to the particular requirements of each page. That’s big, especially if you’re like Mozilla, who previously had to managed 16 distinct multi-lingual sites before partnering up with MindTouch. 

You can see a quick demo of its polyglot feature below:

Similar to last week’s story on Alfresco and its vision of mashups, MindTouch is sometimes hard to pin down. But that’s also the beauty of what both companies do so well: they give the power of the platform back to the users.

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“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.

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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.

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• Facilitates content distribution. (remember when you had to send content to webmasters and the IT bottleneck?)
• Ensures brand integrity. It’s the easiest digital billboard you’ll ever create.
• Highly portable and mobile-friendly. Great newsletter and email marketing add-ins.
• Feeds users’ habits of consuming bite-size chunks of micro-content.
• Zero maintenance as content is automatically updated via XML and RSS feeds.
• Drives blog and RSS subscribers.
• Social Network (SoNet) ready content that’s easy to integrate and publish to.
• They’re a poor man’s enterprise mash-up.
• You don’t need a “Dummy’s Guide to Widgets” to create them.

                       

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Whether you say “media is the new creative” (like AdWeek) or simply think the marketing landscape has been turned on its head, the message is the same. Adapt or get left behind.

Laurie Petersen, executive editor of MediaPost, had details recently about a new study (”Marketing & Media Ecosystem 2010″) from the Association of National Advertisers and management consultants Booz Allen Hamilton that confirmed just that.

And for the record, I really like the “communications integrator” term. Dissect what you do as a marketer and you’ll find a large portion of your time is spent mapping out how to integrate everything. After all that’s marketing nirvana right? Everyone wants an integrated approach.

What do you think about the five trends below?

Marketing as Conversation:

It’s less about sending a message and more about conversing. More than half the marketers say they plan to increase their PR budgets to help in this regard.

Insight into Foresight:

Technology enhances targeting capability and 80% of marketers surveyed place a high importance on behavioral targeting.

Media is the New Creative:

Distribution and context rivals creative execution in importance. A new role of “communications integrator” is emerging that bridges the gap between media, creative and brand strategy. More than 80% of participants say communications planning capabilities will be critical moving forward.

Marketing + Math + Technology:

Data quality, quantity and accessibility mean that math is everywhere. Leaders are more likely to have the metrics and capabilities to judge the effects of new media.

The Network Effect:

Digital media requires a far higher level of collaboration and coordination across all players. Nearly 60% of survey respondents believe creative, strategic and media capabilities should be rebundled–but there is no consensus as to which type of agency should lead.

—————————————————————————————–

Technorati tags: marketing, marketing+2.0, media, social+media, brand, integrated+marketing, PR, communications+integrator

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Other companies, including Dell and the NYTimes, also use  use Twitter to push out all sorts of content, from product updates and discounts to industry information and news. And isn’t it a bit ironic that the NY Times is so prolific on Twitter? They came across as a skeptic back in April.

So know that we know there’s some real-world scenarios for this stuff, the question becomes how to best incorporate these communication tools into an integrated and cohesive marketing strategy? I’d suggest start by stripping away all the Web 2.0 monikers and buzzwords and boil it down to content and communication. From there think about what everyone else is thinking about. How do I come up with creative ways to distribute my content? After that, think about how to be a facilitator. Once a brand becomes a trusted information source or content provider, conversations happen. Tools like Twitter and Jaiku can drive those conversations.  And conversations build brand.

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And it seems simple, but his recommendation about a highly tailored pitch is dead on. The deeper you dig while uncovering the needs of the business, the more diverse those requirements tend to be.

A well-crafted marketing plan will target each constituency and use its interests to drive value and revenues..

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