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Planning: A content audit (slacking: 2 of 3)

With the first in the series, Recycling: A Mid-Summers Night’s Writers Block (aka Strategic Planning) – 1 of 3 out of the way, I have continued to sift through content and metrics to see what was of interest and what wasn’t.  Sorta a Win-Loss analysis for content.

Analyzing Context and Content

There are lot’s of things to look at – content and links which was the main focus of my effort until a couple of days ago was actual posts – keywords, visitors and page views.  The main reason I started a comment review was to understand what conversations were where from a content perspective, since a recent comment from Marty Thompson was on a boring event post, which I wouldn’t have thought would get a comment.

Prior to Marty‘s comment a couple of days ago I wouldn’t have thought about reviewing comments.  Spinning through the comments ended up being a fun as part of the work so far, some really good feedback from a bunch of people including, but not limited to, the following:

Looking at conversations and content proved to be not just fun, but informative.  Not sure I have any conclusions, at least I have some data points, like the Duomo post which caused a conversation in real life today, a question on Facebook and a comment from Tessa – another cool person you should read.    The other thing I’ve found thanks to auditing comments is that there is a significant variety of content over the past two years – like random content.

Random Content Rules!

Maybe not, but oddly enough random posts are among the top post here.  The best example of  random content is still my first thanksgiving post which gets a good deal of random traffic on terms like “Funny things to be Thankful For“, most of these people appear to load at 1 other page – I think.   My biggest bounce page is on Geographic Topics for blogging, none of the topics which I think anyone posted on, but it does garner the most amount of spam comments for some reason.   The remaining top 5 terms in search are:

While the top five keyword pages here are randoms, Product Management and Marketing is creeping up with both PM & Social Media and Brands in the top 10.   It’s movement of product management content and brand into the search terms which is nice to see, since this one the strategic roadmap theme over the last year – focus more.

Corner Cases: Content of Interest

After looking at all the content, nearly 500 posts, I find that the content I like writing is not always the most interesting to others and the comments, page views and links prove this out.   While the data recommends otherwise, music and setlists are still going to be randoming into the blog, plus  leadership and career oriented content since these are things I like and have appeared to be sustainable.  Here are examples of some leadership and career posts:

Net-Net

Blogging for the past two years has been an interesting meander and after reviewing the convesations I have a significantly different view on what is valuable and what is not.     I really think everyone with a blog should invest some time looking at the progress, content and conversations over time and put a plan in place based on what you learned.

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July 21, 2009 by
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You wouldn’t understand, it’s a cultural thing: I want my MTV!

The first images shown on MTV were a montage o...
Image via Wikipedia

Cultural change is the most challenging for individuals and organization alike.  I’m currently reeling on my twins inability to spell anything close to dictionary version and their sheer abusive use of punctuation, but it is just a cultural gap, that I’m either going to get or or not.  Pop culture influences change – good and bad.  In my generation it was MTV.

Video ultimately didn’t kill the radio star, but 3 minute videos broadcast 24 hours forever was the initial promise of MTV and their innovative approach to delivering content over cable probably was the reason for the mass adoption of the word “edgy”.    MTV was delivering on the needs of an  extremely focused early adopter segment of young folks who were musically inclined or folks who just wanted some background noise – a new cultural phenomenon.  Social Media not dis-similar to the cultural change seen time and time again in society only, this one is changing how people work and how they WANT to work.

IT, management and corporations in general are always looking for new ways to improve productivity or how to limit access to content or activities which reduce productivity.  The emerging social productivity tools at the edge of adoption in the enterprise don’t have consensus on how they impact productivity.   Users or better put – workers needs are changing and how they work is transforming by their personal use of these tools and the benefits of thier networks.  This isn’t by any stretch of the imagination the majority, just a small segment today, since as a user sorta have to “get it” and the organization sorta has to be ready to accept/embrace these workers preferred engagement models.

Everybody Has an Opinion or a Functional Diagram

Productivity in the workplace leveraging social tools continues to get A-List street cred with McKinsey’s latest email of the Top 10 articles of the Quarter, which starts out with Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work, a top ten article I apparently missed.  I actually missed all of them – odd, I thought I had read a bunch of McKinsey stuff last quarter.

Interesting piece, it is written I suspect by a non-Kool-Aid Drinker and from a “big company” approach when the reality most companies are BIG and could use a little innovation and productivity lift, but it is an ok piece.  Their adoption graphic acknowledges the adoption curve has begun for social technologies, but as with most articles there aren’t metrics, just anecdotes.   This application landscape change is more about HOW folks WANT to work, than the benefits or metrics which can be tracked via social media tools.

It is often the PERSON who makes the tools productive.  How a person uses them, who is in their network and how THEIR network uses the tools.   I find that Facebook responses from business partners, industry collegues and coworkers are quicker than email and typically include an example link or hand off to another expert in their network.   What ever moniker is applied to this phase it is essentially corporate IT’s movement from machines to people.   The majority of the first generation investments were in delivering “systems”, databases, application integration and transaction management platforms – now it is people platforms which are looking for homes in the enterprise and promise productivity lifts for business.

adoption

(just guessing, but probably not to scale)

While I get the diagram below, it misses some of the high level B2B use cases, which is really all I care about as a B2B Product Marketing type, specifically Thought Leadership and Service.  Social media can increase personal, corporate and product visibility in the marketplace and improve service levels/customer satisfaction.   Perhaps the author rolled them under some of the other concepts, but the purpose of each should be a standalone set of metrics, goals and users.  With metrics as a challenge, the more you segment the use cases and owners of a use case the better you can gauge effectiveness of your social media efforts.

morphology

The artical did get the one thing really close to right:

The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.

It is cultural, but it doesn’t involve the organization, it involves the emerging requirements of the workforce.   While today’s “I want my Facebook”, Bebo or Twitter in the workplace pleas seem somewhat trivial to some execs, these platforms are rapidly becoming the preferred collaboration tools for workers.  Risk considerations are often cited by many since these tools leverage not just internal expertise of an organization, but the networks of their employee and contractors.

It’s All About Risk

There is a time to embrace social media and a time to not, but I suspect the good outweighs the bad in the risk equation.  Risks: Perceived IP exposure, network security concerns or just plain slackerdom risk for some don’t outweigh the benefits, but the other choice for social workers is to use their personal iPhones or other PDA’s to accomplish the same tasks, only on slower connections and with less functionality.   What a drag, productivity drag that is…..for many folks social platform use is just HOW they work.

Access to answers, innovation and customers are just a click away, but only if your organization has a culture that provides access and encourages participation.

Now look at them yo-yo's, that's the way you do it
You play the guitar on that MTV
That ain't workin', that's the way you do it
Money for nothin' and your chicks for free
Now that ain't workin', that's the way you do it
Lemme tell ya, them guys ain't dumb
Maybe get a blister on your little finger
Maybe get a blister on your thumb
                                 -Dire Straits
April 11, 2009 by
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Social Productivity: Working in a social world

I’ve recently found that Facebook is quicker than email for contacting numerous business contacts, Twitter can help with competitive intelligence and email is just a little too slow and formal, so I can relate with how companies need to embrace social technologies more.

Ross Mayfield’s Web 2.0 Expo presentation on Putting Web 2.0 to Work is a very fair assessment of the situation, even if it appears to be a thinly veiled “you really need some of this technology now” pitch with the Social Text logo throughout.

Putting Web 2.0 to Work

View more presentations from ross.

Ok, not so thinly veiled with the free trial at the end. Come on Ross, was it a sponsored session?

April 5, 2009 by
(1)

What Color is Your Kool-Aid?

After looking around and trying just to figure out the value and metrics for many social marketers last set of projects,  I’ve come to 2 conclusions that everyone’s a social media expert or a life coach and I’m unable to validate if they are any good at what they do.  As an aside, it also appears that neither of which appear to generate significant cash outside of the typical Ketchum global account, which didn’t really work out for 1 particular expert.

Is social media a sustainable niche for marketing consultants?   Is it a hype market?   Is social media a market about a concept, rather than a problem or unmet need? Is it just another channel in the promotional mix?

The central concept around why you might need to have a social media expert on the payroll is plausible:  Things are changing thanks to the internet and you need smart people to help you out who “get it”.

The real change in the marketplace is that anyone can be anything online and anything can happen. The good, the bad and the ugly.  Social Media’s core value thread is effectively chaos management as it relates to online content and interactions for brands/products.  Noble goal, definitely a big problem – almost too big.  Too much room around the edges and way too many corner cases.

Wanted Social Media Expert

So when do you need this social media thing and who can help?  Just about anyone apparently.  There are like hundreds of experts on LinkedIn and Google returns over 45,000 pages on “social media strategist“.  The good news is there are folks out there doing good things for the industry in the industry like the Social Media Club who try to educate and connect folks to learn and do good.

What specifically qualifies you as a social media strategist?  Just what is the social media benchmark?   “Authority”, followers, the number of stickers of cool start ups with lame business models on your financed MacAir and other social media “validation” metrics are interesting components of how folks decision who is important and who is not, but it doesn’t seem to have any direct relationship to a persons ability to build strategies and execute.

Buzzwords and Platforms

Well – if they know about Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed then they have to be an expert.  The curious thing is how folks people equate social media with tool usage and understanding.  TechWag thinks you should inquire on the following when looking for a social media guru:

Are they using the tools, ask them to show you their blog, their twitter, their LinkedIn , their Facebook, their friend feed, their social median, their digg, and all the other systems they tie into. Ask them in-depth questions about how well this worked for them, what they learned, how that differed from their expectations. If they are not using the tools, or they do not know how they work, or have no personal or at least empirical information about what has been successful and what has not been successful based on their own experience, then it is time to move along now.

To drawn on a personal parallel: I know how to use MSFT Access and use the query builder thingy, but you do NOT want me running your production Oracle instance.

Tool awareness does appear to be an important check box in the “is someone qualified process”, but it shouldn’t be the decision criteria.  Maybe it a better way is to understand if they are in on the trends and have a futurist view on things.  That’s hard too, since there a a bunch of reasonable researchers and writers out there, which are important skills, but may not be deliver results.   Take Matt Rhodes, which demonstrates that sometimes just making assertions and predictions on tools and social media might make you an expert :

But in 2009 I think we will see the total number of people using Twitter, and the number of networks that go with this, increase quite dramatically. I think we will start to see prime time television using Twitter as a means of getting audience feedback or even running competitions; and newspapers taking comment through Twitter into print.

I guess he didn’t know about Hack the Debate, since I sorta think this is already happening – Rick Sanchez, the Denver plane crash, Israel and Gaza and a host of others leverage social content.  The point is – Matt’s statements can easily be seen as authoritative, futuristic and thought leading by the uninitiated, when it may actually just be a series of assertions based on already happening activities.  This guy might even interview well on some podcast somewhere, but might not actually be a guru.

The thing is, if you think you are, then maybe you are.  I think I can, I think I can…  chug, chug, chug.  I’ve always been an attitude is everything kinda person, but these Zen-like qualifications for being a social media expert is super intriguing to me.

Blogs, microblogging, social networks and buzzwords are important too, as you may have notice with them littered throughout this point.  What is the right mix, I mean blogging is out right?   Experts have blogs and use twitter and have conversations online line. No really – see below and pick the expert:

picthexpert

In theory one could assert each is an expert – they know the tools, one was interviewed on web 2.0 and the other apparently knows something about blogging per his tweet.  Your content as your proof points is an interesting social media dynamic. Your posts, your links and your interactions are your qualifications in social media.  So if you Tweet well, you do well.

Remix and Replay

Social media appears to remix news, manufacture thought leaders and generally allow for content generation without validation.  The limited ability to validate isn’t just part of the challenge when looking for “experts”, but it also impacts the overall marketplace.  There is however no doubt social media is a legitimate discipline, the doubt/challenge lies instead how do you qualify to consider yourself a social media expert/guru/strategist.  It could be that once you know the tools, then it’s all about managing the marketing mix and the brand which are skills which are reasonably verifiable, right?

Drink the Kool-Aid

So it appears that social marketer may be plagued with the same soft qualifications as the traditional marketer segment.  So how can you differentiate?  Go to conferences, Tweetups and other social events where other social media folks gather to increase your understanding.  Street cred appears also to be directly associated with the number of air miles logged to attend industry events.   So as you can see once you immerse yourself in the industry, there are clearly some social media metrics to track outside of followers, which could help qualify yourself to be a social media person.  If you don’t have metrics, use someone else’s metrics who is commonly held as an expert.

If we keep participating in social media event, staying on top of the tools and collaborate with other social media leaders, then may be social media will save the planet.    Think about it, social media experts recycle content from other social media-ites, use anecdotal examples from Fortune 500 companies or “a client of mine” statements to bolster expertise.  Vague client references are also a rant at Techwag:

Watch out for people who have generic case studies. I have seen this one far too many times in the last few months. People talking about case studies, but not understanding the dynamics behind them. Dell didn’t just throw together their social networking system, they thought it out, they figured out who was doing what, and took what worked for them. Anyone who says “well Dell does it”, but does not understand how Dell did it probably cannot help you very much in the social networking space.

I have no idea how Dell does it, but that is consistently the quality of use cases which are out there from a bunch of folks.  Social media content production and trends are be propagated by those that stand to make the most from it – content creators and “expert” consultants.  It’s sorta like Amway without structure, metrics and precious gem status goals.

In the end, I wonder if everyone isn’t drinking their own kool-aid in this mad dash for social media expertise.  I wonder how many followers Jim Jones would have on Twitter and fans on Facebook?  If traditional authority metrics continue to be used rather than traditional metrics, then just about anything can happen.

Maybe Carvalho has it right when trying to find a person to help you with social media:

You need to find somebody (who) believes in the product, maybe somebody that’s an evangelist, and really help that person get the job done online,” Carvalho said. “You can’t expect a person (who) knows the tools to also be able to genuinely go into a community and ignite people to start talking.”

Maybe it isn’t about metrics, evangelism, references and case studies, perhaps the tastiness of one’s Kool-aid is all that matters to be an expert.

January 24, 2009 by
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