Thanks to a few new connections over the past month, I’ve been able to get an interesting view of what apparently happens when you leave Gaylord, Michigan – YOU NEVER GO BACK! OK so diaspora is a little much, but it is passover-ish, so I get a little leeway. So here is a representational drawing of the distribution of 19 connections:
Remember the title….
1. Manufactured Market?
There is so much noise about the market opportunity and the necessity to fund community initiatives for enterprises but little has materialize in respect to direct revenue and meaningful metrics. This is a challenge for traditional marketers on many levels and the type of topics I suspect are being at the Forrester Marketing conference. There is a after the show workshop that asserts the following which might be close to revenue:
Experiments with rich media, blogging, RSS, and social networks show how dynamic marketing techniques can touch on buyers’ emotions, educate and persuade them, measure interactions more effectively, and generate additional business.
2. Perpetual Social Markets
Shel’s interviews of Jeremiah Owang and the Sea World folks are both emblematic of the challenges of linking social media investments to a return. How can you effectively measure and manage social media as a growth engine? Examples exist where a specific event or a series of inferences can be leveraged to assume the impact of social media, as evidenced in the description of Sea World video at Fast Company:
Measuring social media is one of the pain spots for the enterprise. As Kami Huyse, says in this clip of her client SeaWorld San Antonio. “It all depends on what you measure.” …
What to measure indeed – hits, downloads….. Ultimately most businesses measure revenue from Marketers, so perhaps Sea World is an anomaly and most businesses know how to convert the social media marketing budget to revenue and understand how to successfully deploy/develop a community. Let’s see if this is the case from Shel’s interview of Jeremiah, you probably only need to listen for say, the whole thing:
3. Social Media as Infrastructure
With the metric challenges and elusiveness of revenue is social media a function of retention more so than demand? If marketers are unable to deliver/verify incremental new revenues base on investment, should the metric hunt move to revenue retention and customer satisfaction?
Cool technology should never be relegated to the “post-transactional” budget fight…..
4. Platforms as Markets
Is Twitter a market? Facebook? Myspace? With increasing platforms for exchange more and more opportunity appears to emerge as populations flock to platforms. Where people gather transactions happen right? There are many example of this in the physical space – Burning Man, dead shows and in the parking lots of panic shows. So if people are gathering, there has to be transactions to be had – right?
Information as currency and messaging as a service continues to be the key commodities being exchanged on social media platforms….
5. Community as a Commoditizer
The transactional efficiencies of social computing by it’s very nature puts downward cost pressure on goods. Ease of comparison, ease of purchase and ease of access to other consumers/product customers. Ease of discovery. Product differentiation through a cost center represents…
Maybe the title should have been 5 Incoherent Thoughts…
~cheers!
Spatially Relevant (SR), a Top 333,000 blog, is the leading Geography, Marketing, Product Management, Social Media and Live Music (GeoMaPMSMLM) blog. SR is seeing amazing flatness in our growth and seeking a little assistance in taking the SR experience to the next level.
The rapidly growing GeoMaPMSMLM segment represents a great opportunity for the successful candidate to rise to almost internet famous. Think about it – there are 980,000,000 people on the planet who profess an interest in one or more of these topics according to IDC. With only 1% market penetration you could still be reasonably obscure outside of the internet. The culture at Spatially Relevant is eclectic and unfocused, so you will have an opportunity change the conversation and stimulate new topics and editorial themes. The search for Social Media Antagonist is international and cross-network. A key focus of this position is to open new channels for SR in emerging markets and platforms, such Orkut and Xing. In short, the successful candidate must be platform and social network promiscuous.
The role of Social Media Antagonist is seen as a strategic investment by the Spatially Relevant board of directors and appropriate love and care will be provided by the whole organization to ensure success. It is as of yet undecided if the antagonist will be more of a frienemy or a straight up antagonist, this will be determined collaboratively during the conversational interview process.
Qualifications
The PERFECT Candidate must be willing support the following internet personality attribute constraints:
Education
So if you think you have the right level of medicority for this position just post your qaulifications via the following options.
Please note: All submissions will potentially be leveraged for future follow up posts, tweets or other interactions to see if you have the right stuff and are not just “paper qualified”. Be sure to include your @twittername, blog URL and favorite band in your submission for consideration.
Thanks in advance for your quality submissions.
Compensation: Commensurate with effort
Position Type: Temp to Perm, while seen as strategic, could easily be abandoned
While not a big milestone, I figured I wouldn’t let it go the automated postalicous bookmark importer and share it with the folks I read.
There are so many others, but this hopefully introduces you to some new folks. Check out the blogroll too.
