Yesterday I joined Steve Lamb, Neville Hobson and a host of speakers at Dell’s B2B Social Media Huddle event. It’s always a bit nerve wracking taking to the stage after Neville and Steve, but good for getting the mental juices going – this time about making the business case for social media.

Business cases discussions seem to have narrowed down to ROI these days. The ROI of social media is a particularly hot topic – often accompanied by lots of hot air too. I like Trey Pennington’s take on the issue and personally I’m not sure that ROI is the right question – it’s far too easy to manipulate - Opportunity cost is a bigger factor in most business cases.

Not all cows produce milk

Donning a cow costume does not make you a cow. Think about it. Getting a traditional agency to do digital marketing via social media is not the same as doing social media marketing. You’ll get results, but no social media juice.

One of the advantages of executing your first social media project as part of an existing campaign is that it helps to make the distinction clear – just ensure you can identify the contribution of the social media component.

The upside of social media is huge, but hard to predict - @radiokate’s fox (mentioned during my presentation) has now been viewed over 50,000 times: http://twitpic.com/sebvd – and it just jumped from social media to mainstream media. Could you have predicted that?

Which takes me neatly to my final points: Social media shouldn’t be viewed as an island. Without exception, every social media success story I have been involved in has worked exactly because in was integrated into a broader marketing and communication plan, and because it had a knock on impact into other channels.

‘Doing social media’ isn’t a case of walking through the blue door, never to see the old world again, it is a matter of organically building new skills and extending traditional marketing activities. See it as a gradual transition to a different way of engaging with customers, suppliers and prospects, one step at a time.

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Every so often something happens to bring a moment of clarity. Having literally just returned from New York (see The Digital Mission Blog), I headed to Coventry on Monday to the UKTI-organised Technology World 09 event. Aside from meeting UK and overseas delegates, I was there to speak on the keynote panel at the end of the day: “How can businesses use social media to create value.”

Far from the empty room I was expecting at the end of the day, the theatre was almost full. For a number of reasons the discussion was distinctly different than social media events I have spoken at recently: The audience were predominately business owners and investors, generally new to social media, and very focused on the business to business context.

The panel brought a very balanced tone, with views from both traditional and mobile agency perspectives, as well as more social media focused opinion. There were good questions from the floor – both via microphone and an SMS-based twitter wall behind us [thanks to mashup]  (which was very well behaved, with only one mention of my Movember tache). Topics included what social media actually is, how to get started, what the risks of social media are, what sort of returns a business should expect, and who should execute the strategy.

Pretty much the only bone of contention was about timing: When should a business get into social media? I am very much at the “Start now” end of the spectrum – the barriers are low and things are still at the stage where you can experiment and learn. Toby Constantine stuck a more cautious note: “Don’t feel that you have to rush in to it”. The UK Technology Live blog has a nice summary.

My closing remark was a suggestion for a three point “social media strategy” – I’ll expand on it just a little here – three things to get you started

1. Find your community

Building a community from scratch is hard, expensive and a long journey. It is better to find where the relevant community for you is already gathered, regardless of what platform they are on. Be there. Be it Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing or a Ning group. And when you arrive, remember: you are a guest in someone else’s space. Act accordingly. They say good manners cost nothing, but bad manners will cost you your reputation.

2. Add value

To paraphrase Flickr’s terms and conditions – you know that irritating person at networking events? Don’t be them! Rather than pushing your product or service, show that interacting with you is a pleasant and useful thing to do. Without showing off, answering questions and helping will demonstrate that you know your onions. Share your knowledge, ask about things you are genuinely interested in, provide pointers to useful resources and listen to responses. You’ll learn, and you’ll become a valued and valuable member of the community. Business will follow, I can almost guarantee it.

3. Make it part of your workflow

Leverage what you are already doing, and do it every day. For me it is mostly about Twitter these days, although I really must get back to more blogging. “Lightweight” activities that are not overly time consuming, provide a good return on effort and are enjoyable. If “doing social media” for your business is a chore, then you’re doing it wrong (the ‘it’ there might be your business or your social media)! Simply posting an observation, thought for the day, or the most interesting thing that you learnt that day is a great starting point, or maybe something you read reminded you of a related resource or tip – share it.

Let me know how you get on!

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This post was inspired by a paper by Jonathan MacDonald (of fluid world / JMA) ”The first 6 Macro Trends of the 21st Century” – it’s a reasonably straight forward read. It set me off pondering a different track. What do the six trends he lists mean for business, and business-to-business marketing, IT and communication?

1. Corporate Technology in the hands of Citizens

2. Physical is increasingly Virtual

3. It’s about Distribution not Destination

4. Mass Niche not Mass Groups

5. Broadcast Control is now Self Scheduled

6. C2C is more powerful than B2C Communication

I’ll tackle them one by one, together with liberal use of quotations from Jonathan’s paper:

1. Corporate Technology in the hands of Citizens

“The commoditisation of technology has enabled many of us to access, use and develop upon tools and resources that once were reserved only for large organisations – or those with deep pockets… …Creating trust and value is far different than raising money to spend on marketing. The skill sets required are rarely seen in standard business… …It signals a redefinition of products, services, marketing and advertising communication.”

Back at the start of the decade, when I held the strategic marketing role in a large IT company, I remember frequent discussions about the future consumerisation of corporate IT. Well, it has happened. Consumer technology is now far ahead of most business IT today. The users have stormed the castle, and they are now informed consumers.

2. Physical is increasingly virtual

“Now we have the tools to express, purchase and discover things without physical entities being necessary, we increasingly do so.”

The key here is the disappearance of “place” – a theme from “The Future of the Workplace“. Businesses, unconsciously, are built around “place” – employees meet together. They go to meet customers. They go to visit other employees. The implicit design of most businesses is based on staff “in the office”. This is in the same businesses that are turning workers into remote workers in droves. It is in the same companies where a huge chunk of the work force don’t even have a desk in the office anymore. “Place”? It’s dead.

Redesign your business so that it works regardless of place, before it becomes an island. Enabling remote working is only the first phase. The more important and challenging task is replacing the things that “place” used to give to staff. VPN technology, email blast communication and a shiny laptop alone do not provide it. If you believe they do, you are missing the way that informal communications glue your business together today.

“Technological advances in augmented and virtual reality will fundamentally redefine what our future generations perceive as ‘real’.”

3. Its about distribution not destination

I differ with some of Jonathan’s thoughts here. AOL and others existed because Google did not, at the time. In those days people needed an on-ramp to the Internet, a starting place. Today Google serves that purpose. There is a hideous phrase from my Business Technology 1.0 Days: “end-to-end.” Everyone was offering “end-to-end” solutions. I once joked, with my CEO present, that “end-to-end” seemed to mean “all the things that we make, and none of the things that we don’t”. His wry smile told he already knew how empty the phrase was. The reality is nothing is “end-to-end” in the business world. Anything that is, is a dead-end. Obvious, right? Less flippantly, money moves around. Create flows, not buckets, build ecosystems…

4. Mass niche not mass groups

“Individuals can be in numerous communities of interest – but the ‘age, gender and location profile’ may differ substantially.”

The marketing of the future is about psychographics, not demographics. That’s one of the main reasons I spend most of my time studying psychology these days. The future is more about groups and communities, than individuals. Marketing courses don’t teach marketeers and communicators the skills they need to deal with ecosystems, rather than people, at least none that I’m aware of.

“Any level of assumption when dealing in personality based communication will lead to negative experience which is damaging to all involved.”

The traditional marketing tone of voice is increasingly irrelevant, patronising, misdirected and little believed. That people write in a style they would be unhappy to be addressed in speaks to something very broken in business communications today, both internally and externally. It’s time to move on. We’re not running a TV station, and that’s probably just as well.

“The media that society is connected with – or social media as it is called – is a new science involving the inter-relationships of real people who are not a number or a demographic subset.”

5. Broadcast control is now self-scheduled

Broadcast is dead, or at least it will be significantly less dominant, especially if it doesn’t figure out a new business model. It was funded by interruption marketing (advertising 1.0), which can’t afford to support it anymore (thanks to Google and the on-line world), and is being strangled by technology (TiVo, Sky+, V+ and anything that looks like a PVR). The revolution won’t be televised, it will be time shifted.

“…the government of Singapore banned TiVo, citing the potential adverse impact on the local media industry if usage were to increase. Which it did. The Singapore government faced extreme difficulty in regulating the use of TiVo, as individuals were bringing in sets from overseas, over-joyed at the ability to finally control their own experiences.”

Deputy MD of Fox International Channels, Jason Thorp, said at the time: “There are a whole host of issues that broadcasters and advertisers are currently facing, and about to face, that are going to irrevocably change the business. A creative response will be the only solution to all of them.”

The result? Culture will simultaneously fragment and aggregate. Broadcast TV has created shared experiences and meaning for the post-war generations. The way it does this for the next generation will be different. In a world without broadcast, shared experiences will become an increasingly important part of people’s lives. Smart brands get this already (Magners UK, I’m looking at you).

“Forcible relationships are never productive. The see-saw of control is never healthy if heavily stacked against one side.”

If your business is, in anyway shape or form, dependent on broadcast (internal or external), redesign it now. The people of the future will not stand around to be shouted at. You have to earn their attention, and then keep it.

6. C2C is more powerful than B2C communication

Read Jonathan’s piece, especially what he has to say about “buzz marketing”. There’s a herd of people out there doing untold damage to themselves, their brand and their customers. In the Broadcast Anomaly I attempted to articulate that the current changes are not about something emerging after the broadcast era, they are about things re-emerging, that have been suppressed. As Jonathan puts it:

“At the time of writing, the buzz-phrase ‘word of mouth’ is being lauded as an incredible new invention. The term ‘conversation’ is a very ‘2.0? thing, apparently. It’s almost like personal interaction is a new thing, whereas it pre-dates everything else.”

Person-to-person communication outweighs business-to-consumer communication by an order of magnitude, on any number of measures. In the media age, businesses have evolved their communications channels to be narrow, highly controlled funnels. In doing so they have left themselves ill prepared to deal with the skills and scale required to get  to grips with what many call “the conversation.”

For businesses to survive, they must get to grips with the fact that everyone is in PR now. Everyone is in Marketing. The fastest growing business I have worked for understood that, at the time. It was one of the factors that lead them to be the most valuable company on the planet, for a moment. If you haven’t already, check out Zappos and how they interact with customers.

“To accelerate communication power, businesses must learn from the way that citizens interact most effectively… …When we build relationships, we learn about each other. This is a two-way process… …Many of the practices I see heralded at conferences, are analogistic to hiding in the bushes outside someone’s house, breathing heavily and scribbling down notes on a pad for later use. When we best learn about each other, we find common ground. We look for areas in which we can be valuable to each other.”

The writing isn’t on the wall, it’s on the web, and from there, everyone can see it. Read it wisely.

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It seems an age since posting about Habitat UK’s mis-steps into Twitter. Since that post, Habit have apologised – although not yet on the place where the deed was done: Their @habitatuk twitter account.

One of the big differences between “traditional” media and social media is the almost infinite bandwidth of the later. Whilst mainstream stories come and go at high velocity, with only a fleeting moment in the spot light, in the social media world they linger and roll on, and on… And so it is with the Habitat story. While big media is on to the next story, Twitter users and bloggers of the world are still talking about “Doing a Habitat”.

The latest communications have laid the blame firmly at the foot of a mysterious intern who is ‘no longer associated with Habitat’. Who is this mysterious intern, and how did they get it so wrong? Enter Daren Forsyth (@DarenBBC), who has been campaigning (search #habitatintern on Twitter and see) to track down and help out the intern concerned, complete with the offer of a replacement internship and some training on using social media. That’s quite an offer, given Darren’s profile on Twitter – over 3,800 followers and growing, and more importantly he’s been a productive member of the community, connecting all manner of initiatives.

It makes more sense for me to let Daren explain the thinking behind #habitatintern, so here he is, caught on camera by my good self yesterday in London:

As I left him, he was awaiting a call from Habit’s PR team. Meanwhile there is still much for Habitat to do to get back on the right foot in the Twitter world. The story continues…

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The Campaign That Went Oops…

The @habitatuk Twitter account looks all nice and shiny today, but that isn’t how it started out for the UK retailer. Last week an account in their name started spewing messages about their Spring/Summer collection, but tagged with random keywords from Twitter’s trending topics items.

It isn’t a great mental leap to work out that the connection between the Habitat’s new furnishings collection and things like the #iranelection, #iran and #Mousavi is at best tenuous, and at worst a blatant bit of opportunism. Here’s some of the “re-printable bits” from the Twitter stream:

First Break all the Rules

After that it started to turn very ugly. Habitat UK broke almost every rule in the Twitter book.

• Don’t abuse hash tags to try and drive traffic. It doesn’t work. This isn’t search engine optimization. It is social media.
• Don’t retweet the same thing over and over. People heard you the first time, and they can always see your last tweet. It makes following your Twitter stream very unattractive. How long would you stay with someone at a party if they repeated themselves over and over?
• Don’t just jump in. Listen, learn, then join in the conversation. You’re not advertising. You’ve been invited into someone’s web browser. You are just one click away from leaving it.

On Twitter, if no-one is following you, no-one hears you – that spam goes into dead-air. It is why I rate Twitter above email. Twitter has a visible feedback mechanism – people can follow or unfollow. Spamming hash tags is a desperate way to get people who aren’t following you to read your messages. It is the Twitter equivalent of nuisance calling or public vandalism, it isn’t going to make you any friends.

Putting Things Right

Over the weekend, the error of their ways obviously came to the attention of the grown ups at Habitat. They wiped the Tweets and started over, just as if nothing had ever happened. Huge error. The legacy of their mistake is all there to be seen in Twitter search – something that any power Twitter user is aware of: When you delete tweets, they disappear from the Twitter timeline, but they remain, stubbornly, in search results. It’s one of those curiosities of the Twitter platform.

As The NextWeb and the Social Media Today posts point out, deleting the messages and making as if nothing had happened is very much the wrong approach:

Habitat would probably have come out of this a lot better if they had admitted the problem and apologised before moving on. By deleting the tweets and starting afresh they haven’t ‘cleared the air’ with those upset about their actions.

And today it got Habitat on to the front page of the Sky News – “UK Firm’s Mistweetment Of Iran Is PR Disaster”

A spokesman for Habitat told Sky News Online: “This was a mistake and it is important to us that we always listen, take on board observations and welcome constructive criticism. We will do our utmost to ensure any mistakes are never repeated.”

That really isn’t much of a response. @habitatuk only had a few followers when they started spamming. Somewhat ironically the account now has about 1,000, all waiting to see what Habitat will do next.

This is the age of saying sorry, and the Habitat UK Twitter account is the perfect place to do that. Whoever was operating the account has shamed Habitat in front of tens of thousands of people (by spamming some of the most monitored hash tags on Twitter – as well as the account’s own followers).

“You can’t talk your way out of a problem you behaved your way into!” — Stephen R. Covey

Mistakes in social media aren’t like mistakes with the traditional press. Putting them right requires a sustained engagement with the community. Dominos Pizza didn’t make a mistake with social media, but they had a couple of employees who did. They recognised where the harm had been done, and engaged in the relevant places to put it right. It would have been better if they had been there beforehand, but regardless, they didn’t do a bad job.

Companies like IBM are reaping the benefits of their employees using platforms like Twitter everyday – Andy Standford-Clark was on Radio Five Live this morning and will be was on the BBC news this evening with his @andy_house project. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is heading towards a million people following him on Twitter. It is possible to make a big impact, but you need to be there to add value and engage with your customers, not to shout 20% discounts at them.

Don’t leave your social media strategy in the hands of an agency that doesn’t have expertise in it. I’ve said what I’m going to say about Social Media Expertise, for now it is a very specialist area. I am seeing more and more activity from Search Engine Optimisation players edging in to social media. SEO is about engaging with machines. Social Media is about engaging with people. They are very different things.

I’ll leave you that cartoon from Jim Anning again…

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Yes, it’s a YouTube video. But do watch it, it’s a 3 minute 6 second lesson in launching a product or building a community. Filmed during the Sasquatch music festival last weekend, the character in this video danced his way to a following. However, the lesson isn’t about him, it is about the crowd. Here’s a graph of the number of dancers over time (as best as I can do from the clip and a couple of other videos of the event):

Time

It’s a type of graph I use in lots of training session. Now I can explain the same things in three minutes, without saying a word. Perfect. The video shows what happens to most products from their launch, and to most on-line communities during their introduction and growth phases. It is a classic view of the Rodgers bell curve.

The Innovators

For the first 20 seconds of the video there is just the person we shall refer to from here on in as “the Sasquatch Dancing Man” – or SDM for short. SDM is a little different from the rest of the crowd. If you are unconvinced just check out some of the footage in the related videos at the end of the clip. That’s all I’m saying on the matter!

After those first twenty seconds he isn’t alone, but it is still a small group of people, prepared to do ’something different’ – they certainly aren’t the crowd – They are the anti-crowd.

Everett Rogers, in his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations, suggests that innovators make up less than 2.5% of the population. You aren’t going to make a mass market or a huge community out of them, but they certainly get the party started!

The Early Adopters

These folks would like to be the innovators, and probably think of themselves as such. However, they don’t have the appetite to be first with something unproven, but they are happy to be ahead of the crowd. For me, these people are the critical glue in the process, I’ll explain why in a moment.

You see the early adopters kick in at about 80 seconds, just a few at a time. Rogers puts them at 13.5% of the population. They were in the crowd, but only loosely. Now they are out of it, they are with SDM in an elite group of their very own. Hang on, what’s this next?

The Early Majority

There’s a sudden burst. So many new people it’s hard to count. It seems there are  more people dancing than not. There’s little social risk in standing up and dancing now. The early majority make up about 34%, so here come…

The Late Majority

They’ve been sitting on the floor, but now they are in danger of being in the social outcrowd, rather than the incrowd. So, up and dance they get. You can see oa tipping point – a term made famous my Malcolm Gladwell’s eponymous book, but pre-dated by much social theory - see Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior - 25 years later, in 2005, he won a Nobel prize. So, suddenly everyone wants to dance. The movement has reached critical mass.

Many, if not most, products and communities never get to reach their tipping point. The transitions from innovators to early adopters to the majority are hard ones to make. The innovators are all about not being in the majority. The majority are all about not being innovators. Bring the right people to the party at the wrong time, and it’s all over.

The challenge of moving between the groups was codified in Geoffrey Moore’s 1991 book “Crossing the Chasm“. A book that I despise, not because of it’s amazingly long title: “Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers” but because the concept was badly applied by so many product and marketing managers. If you don’t know your innovators from your adopters and the majority, then it is far too easy to end up thinking you are on a different side of the chasm than you really are. The result? #fail as they say on the interwebs.

So, back to SDM. Paul Johnston has a nice take in his post how to start a movement:

1. Go somewhere people can see you
2. Start Dancing
3. Hope that (or invite) 1, 2 and 3 others to join in with your dance… start small – if they’re as crazy as you, don’t worry!
4. Attract and invite other small groups to join in
5. Make room for growth
6. Keep engaging with your new movement even if the music stops

The knack is helping “the crazies” and the growth (the majority) to co-exist with each other, at least for a while. That is why early adopters are so important. They form a kind of neutral glue between the innovators and the majority, transforming “the crazies” into “the crowd” – without them growth is almost impossible.

A side note on point 3 and SDM: I don’t know for sure, but from watching the video I would say the first few dancers knew SDM. You need a few innovators, even just to get started, so don’t ignore them or leave them standing alone.

Although this dance was a one off, products and communities aren’t one shot events. In real-life (if you can call marketing that), the very thing that causes the majority to join, will cause the innovators to leave and go to dance with someone else: The innovators came to be different, while the majority came to be the same. When you’ve cracked that paradox, you’re ready to cross the chasm.

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The post on Three Reasons Free Will Eat Itself drew a fair bit of attention. To be clear, I’m not anti-free by any means – I think it can be a great marketing tool – it’s just that it is a very slippery one.

For your business (or even yourself) to stand out, you need to be noticeably different from the rest of the crowd, in a way that is sustainable. Your strategy needs to be based on defensible differentiators, things that you can maintain and that others can’t copy. At least, not easily.

It turns out the free is easy to copy, and that means it doesn’t make for a sustainable differentiator. Even worse, people get used to it. As Seth puts it in Too much free:

If you want to know who’s a newbie on a film set, just watch what happens at lunch. Major films have huge buffets laid out for cast and crew, and the newcomers can’t resist. It’s FREE! Over time, of course, the old-timers come to the conclusion that it’s just lunch, and the crew gets a bit more jaded and learns some self-restraint as well.

Seth goes on to argue that the next logical step on from the offer of “it is free” is “I’ll pay you to try it” – I’d say that is arguably happening already, with the way that some companies and social media agencies are engaging with bloggers and the digerati. It might be a great short-term tactic, but it isn’t one that is sustainable in the long-term. That isn’t in the best interests of either the businesses or  users. What’s that? Gmail went down again? Where do I send my Paypal details?

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I wouldn’t normally blog about a Pizza chain, but this week Dominos have turned themselves into an example of why businesses need to get to grips with social media, and why employee engagement really matters.

The best place to start, if you’ve missed the story so far, is with the blog post on The Consumerist - Domino’s Rogue Employees Do Disgusting Things To The Food, Put It On YouTube. If your stomach is a little delicate, then let me summarise it like this for you: Some (now very ex) Domino’s employees do some pretty unspeakably unhygienic things to food during its preparation. We’d know nothing about this, and they wouldn’t be world-famous if they hadn’t, for good measure, posted a video of them doing said activities on to YouTube.

Whin a couple of hours of Consumerist publishing the blog post, reader’s had tracked down the branch and the offending employees. They are now claiming that this was a prank, and the food was never served to anyone. Meanwhile, six thousand views on the video is gradually turning into over 500,000 views.

Domino’s responded on the original blog, but by then the story had propagated and the video was already embedded in dozens of blogs, and in people’s Twitter streams and Facebook status updates. The company issued a statement, somewhat slowly, and in a very quiet corner of their site “update to our valued customers” it said.

While the employees have been terminated, and the franchise is looking to file a criminal complaint against them, it is too late. The damage has been done. The nature of the blogosphere is that it is disperate, and doing what Domino’s did (responding on the original blog) simply isn’t enough. Stories propagate from blog to blog and you can’t get to all of them during this sort of incident. Twitter accelerates the process even further – the pace of micro-blogging makes traditional blogging look positively sedentary. 

Whatever your view of Twitter, for now it is where the news stories are made and fed – it’s where PRs and Journalists live alongside millions of people who do “other things”.  It is also where the Domino’s Pizza story took off . Shel Holtz has a great set of thoughts on the handling of the incident  ”Domino’s needs to get out in front of this situation.” he says. I’d agree with that. The only way to do it is to create a focus for the response, and a place for it to be heard. It’s also the time to mobilise customers who are  passionate about your band to respond too. You have got customers like that, haven’t you?

A corporate blog and a twitter account would have provided that focal place for a response, but instead information is turning into out of date misinformation and spreading over the blogosphere, oh, and that video of the employees doing unspeakable things? It is well on its way to 1,000,000 views. Of course it might get taken down, but that would simply remove a focal point for getting information out (the video now carries a sub-title to the effect that the employees have been terminated) or it might just  result in the video being reposted.

This isn’t the first saga in the fastfood chain to hit social media. Kentucky Fried Chicken staff showed employee innovation at work, by turning a deep fat fryer sink into a hot tub. Similarly, Amazon suffered a Twitter-fuelled backlash at the start of this week over a “cataloging error” which resulted in a number of books being de-listed and cries of a censorship-foul.

This why I am so focussed on building brilliant businesses, with communities around them. Businesses need ‘friends’ looking out for them on-line. Businesses also need a strong sense of internal community. Employees who are passionate about the business and its reputation will work to preserve it. Someone, rather unkindly, referred to fast food establisments’ staffing policies as “hire on a heart beat.” I’m sure that isn’t true, but businesses need to think differently about hiring in a world were every employee is now working in PR.

PR is no longer about a few staff managing relationships with some journalists. PR is about every member of staff looking after relationships with the “Public” – the sea of people who are customers, prospects, suppliers, partners, potential future employees and friends and friends of friends of all of those. One company that really seems to get that is Zappos. Not so familiar in Europe, but growing massively in the US, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has built a company that seems perfect for these times. ReadWriteWeb has a recent interview with him, by Loic Le Meur:  Zappos CEO Talks Culture Fit and the Importance of Creating a ‘Wow’ Experience. Staff don’t have scripts to interact with customers, but they do get Employees get substantial initial training, and are hired and fired based on the company’s core values.

“Any idiot with a webcam and an Internet connection can attempt to undo all that’s right about the brand. In the course of one three-minute video, two idiots can attempt to unravel all of that.” Domino’s Spokesperson Tim McIntyre in Ad Age.

He’s right, and the only way to prevent it is to have a strong employee and customer communities, who are passionate about the business and united around a common set of values. That way, even if one employee does turn rogue, the rest of the community will bring things into line. Businesses must be ready to engage with social media, to know how to handle it, and to have the staff who are up to the task. You don’t want to be starting to figure it out at the same time as dealing with a crisis. Start to build the skills now.

Businesses need to build effective communication channels with employees. They need to understand that everyone in the business is in public relations, and companies’ values need to be demonstrated in living communications – not just pinned to a wall.

If ‘rank and file’ employees don’t have a feedback channel to management, malcontent can quickly turn into misbehaviour, and these days that puts you three clicks away from being on the front page for all the wrong reasons.

Listen to Tony Hsieh’s opening remarks at SXSWi. – one of the highlights of SXSWi for me – you might want to skip in a little to get past the intro. It’s a very different sort of business, embracing many of the tenants of social media into the heart of the business. You can pitch up any day and take a tour. The staff use Twitter and are active in the community. Somewhat ironically, Tony ran a Pizza business at college. I bet that was a very different sort of pizza business.

UPDATE (24 hours on): Just after this post was written, a Domino’s Pizza Twitter account was set up: DPZINFO. They are disseminating updates and engaging with the Twitter community via the account. A little stilted, and a brutal start, but good on them. I’d noticed a couple of Twitter ID’s starting with DPZ. The story has jumped to the mainstream media (USA Today, the BBC and Sky News). The apology on the Domino’s page has been updated. The store has been shut and Patrick Doyle, Domino’s CEO, says that they will re-examine their hiring practices. The original video has been taken down (at the request of Kristy, who featured in the video) and The following video posted by Domino’s:

Neville has posted a follow up on the incident, if you would like to read more. The comments on the video are the usually YouTube class act. As I write this, that video has had less than 20 thousand views, showing another asymmetry in social media: It makes a better tool for opposition than it does for defence. Alan puts it well in a post today, “Now! Big! Risk! Fear!” spread fast. That’s why social media calls for a very different approach to traditional PR, one that reaches deep inside the company.

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It’s the meme that wouldn’t die, but die it should… Last week I attended the Chinwag Live ‘Freeconomics’ session in London, and not long before that I listened to Guy Kawasaki interviewing Chris Anderson at South by South West. While Chris dodged Guy’s low-ball questions out at SXSWi, and focussed on promoting his new book (which may or may not be free), the Chinwag Live panel got a bit more stuck in.

The whole ‘free’ thing is worth wrapping your head around. It is probably worth starting with Chris Anderson’s article from last year, but then reversing out a bit with Alan Patricks two great posts on Freeconomics: PART I and PART II and his notes from the panel: CHINWAGGING or the podcast). You can read a journal of the panel session on the Bluedoor blog, where Abigail has blogged her tweetage, as it were, and there is a full write up at Brandrepublic.

You see, ‘free’ isn’t really free at all. It’s been funded by the VCs and selling data, and the VCs aren’t playing anymore. The concept of Anderson’s free is that transactional costs (the price of ‘doing things’) tends to zero on-line and at scale. However, transactional costs tending to zero is very different then them being zero see… Someone’s got to pick up the tab, see Nic Brisbourne’s post, and I quote:

The other takeaway that I hadn’t considered fully is that for many services in reality the marginal cost of delivery is not zero.  This was made most forcefully by panelist Alan Patrick, but also by panelist Bruce Daisely of YouTube who made the point that the worlds favourite video service now accounts for 10% of total bandwidth consumption – which I’m sure costs Google a lot of money.  This point knocks a sizeable whole in the ‘free’ argument, although ‘free’ fans would argue that these costs are going down all the time.

So, I threw in a question at the end, on the basis of these three forces “Won’t free end up eating itself?”

1. Free Attracts The Freeloaders.

If you advertise your service as free, hoping to up sell people to a paying service later (the freemium model), you may well be attracting the wrong crowd. I don’t mean in the sense of bad people, but rather the people that want something for free. That leaves those who want to pay as potential customers for a competitor. More importantly, you have probably attracted ‘customers’ that choose on price (free), rather than features. I put the word customers in quotes there very deliberately. Since they aren’t paying you anything, they aren’t really customers. They are prospects. And that is where ‘free’ is interesting: As a marketing ploy. It is a good one. But wait up…

2. Free Drives Value Out of the Market.

Imagine there’s a nice bar. A really nice bar. They charge £10 per drink, but it’s nice and you like it there, so you pay your £10. Now, someone opens up a bar next door. The drinks are free. I mean £0 free. You’re going to check it out aren’t you? Seriously. At least once? The £10 bar is going to loose at least some revenue, if not customers. You’re running the £10 bar. What will you do? Drop prices? A buy-one-get-one-free offer?

Markets are elastic. If someone enters the market with a lower priced offer, it drags prices down. It’s called competition, and it’s generally a good thing. As customers, we like it. However, when someone enters the market at ‘free’ it isn’t the usual ‘more efficient competitor’ entering. No, it’s a value destroying monster. Value will disappear from the market. That inevitably means that companies will too, which will reduce competition in the long run – and that isn’t good. And the competition that’s left? Oh, it’s bad…

3. Free Spreads Across Markets.

Traditional competition focusses on price. As marketers, we try and combat price competition by introducing features that (in our minds at least) create value and preserve the price. Some choose to build more efficient businesses, so that they can compete on price, but maintain margins. In the world of ‘free’ you can’t compete on price. You have to compete on features (or quality, which I’d argue is a feature anyway). That means wherever two players are in the same market with a ‘free’ offer, the temptation, if not the action, will be to gradually add more and more features. Think about the value for the market. More and more of what was revenue, ends up as ‘free’. Remember those ‘freemium’ businesses, giving you free stuff, hoping to upgrade you? There is less and less to upgrade you to that isn’t free.

Free is a Short-Term Win and a Long-Term Lose

‘Free’ feels good, but it is really an inevitable race to the bottom, ensuring that markets are destroyed by low price expectations and poor (service) quality. Watch the providers of ‘free’ – as advertising revenues (and tolerance for advertising) falls, and VC money dries up, expect them to come asking for money or to start selling your data to the highest bidder. The end of ‘free’ might well come from the strangest of places: mobile e-commerce. The latest iPhone software let’s you make payments within iPhone apps themselves. That’s iPhone apps that you probably paid for in the first place too! Nokia, Microsoft and a host of others are planning similar offers.

The Way out of Free is Utility

As much as product marketers bang on about the latest much have feature, one thing that we do pay for is utility. I can make a local phone call very cheaply, if not for free – depending on where I am. That same phone call costs significantly more on a mobile/cell phone, and yet the technology took off. People were paying for utility: being able to make calls from anywhere, not just when they were stuck in the house or the office. It made great sense as people became more and more mobile. And, as the technology took off, people got more and more mobile in their work and social lives, driving the technology even faster.

So far, the Internet is just catching up with the whole mobility thing. Web browsers are improving in leaps and bounds, as is the provision of mobile-friendly websites and improved screens on phones. Mobile Internet is taking off. And do you know what? It probably isn’t going to be ‘free’.

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South by South West Interteractive was even more of a whirlwind than I imagined it would be, and I had imagined it being frenetic. The event brings together people from the film, music and digital interactive spaces, which provides a rich context in which to talk about the future of marketing.

In between the Digital Mission events I caught a few panels, and (in true SXSW style) had lots of corridor conversations with industry verterans. For me, one of the highlights was meeting with Hugh MacLeod, aka GapingVoid. Hugh was one of the first bloggers I started to read, and I’ve been a long-time admirer of his cartoons (a warning: some strong language). I think it would be fair to describe him as an accidental artist – in fact I’m sure those are his words not mine. I have come up through an engineering and technology route to the marketing world, or as Hugh put it, I’m a “geek.” Hugh started in the marketing agency domain, before arriving into the technology world via blogging, back at the beginning of the century. That gives him a unique perspective on both the old and new marketing worlds.

As we sat in a favourite SXSWi watering hole, the Ginger Man, I quizzed him about where he saw marketing going and listened to his stories. I also sat in on the blog to book panel towards the end of SXSWi, but more of that later – and on Hugh’s upcoming book Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity (sample excerpts  and pre-review)

Over the last year I’ve come to the conclusion that it is best to interpret broadcast media, and the broadcast marketing that comes with it, as an anomoly. Since the invention of radio and TV advertising, marketers have been able to “buy” our attention by inserting adverts into content that we choose to consume. I distinguish radio and TV from earlier billboard and poster advertising, since they are media that already have our attention before the advert. With poster ads, marketers had to win our attention; with broadcast ads marketers simply need to make sure that they don’t loose our attention.

Arguably, broadcast media has laid waste to innovative marketing and made marketers lazy. Big brands have lived off of the program-ad-program sandwich “bait and switch” format for a generation, but we aren’t playing the attention game anymore. About the time that our second child was born we got a large screen TV. Not for us – the TV is hardly ever on when we are home – but for our baby sitters. Having a big screen TV made us an attractive employer for sitters.

Times have changed. Just before I headed over to the US for SXSW, our baby sitters arrived. They didn’t ask for the TV remote, they asked for the WiFi password so they could surf the web on their laptops. The younger generation is increasingly switching from watching TV to surfing the Internet. The older generations are too. The story is just by way of example, the broader trend is supported by industry statistics too.

Along with the switch from the big screen to the “small screen” we’ve become increasingly immune to advertising. Experiments that monitor eye-scanning patterns of web surfers show that they quickly learn where ads are placed in the page, and avoid looking at them. Our attention can no longer be so easily bought. The web doesn’t support bait and switch. If people (and the brands that employ them) want to get our attention, then they are going to have to be much smarter than they have been in the past. They either have to get better and better at grabbing attention, or to switch from interuption-based marketing, to conversational marketing.

In parallel, the growing domination of web search as the means of information gathering has changed the way that people look for products. Marketing is increasingly about discovery, rather than broadcast. A transition from from push (broadcast) to pull (discovery) seems increasingly inevitable.

Of course, we know all this, but old marketing habits die hard. The short term answer has been for companies to do more and more (broadcast) advertising, aided by the falling cost of media. That has simply exasperated the problem, saturating audiences and diluting attention. There is no point carrying on with the old model and hoping that it will still work. It won’t, at least not unless you have a huge budget. You can compensate for efficiency by pushing harder, but eventually things will still break.

The future of marketing lies in its the past. Companies have to switch back to authentic conversations with customers, building communities and finding the influencers and amplifiers within them.

Some shots from the Ginger Man and out and about in Austin.

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This is the second post on Clay Shirky’s talk at LSE, looking at some of the same issues raised, but in the context of decision making and crowd sourced wisdom. I hinted at some of my thoughts in the previous post (Mass Collaboration Snow Joke), and JP has also blogged about it, based on Clay Shirky’s talk at the ICA the day after. 

In his post JP shares some thoughts about systems for decision making. The ideas are interesting (and have been debated in other contexts). It is worth remembering that government’s influence on our lives goes far beyond spending from the state wallet. Government sets policy and makes laws too. Thinking about recent anti-terror and surveillance legislation, along with proposals in the Digital Britain report, arguably, policy and law affect our lives the most.

It is possible to build an on-line voting system to provide access to every policy decision, but as Clay noted in his talk, the results aren’t always the utopian ideal we would hope for. Controlling policy directly may not be a good thing. It becomes easy for a well organised minority to ‘out-influence’ a quieter, less galvanised majority. To avoid that problem would require compulsory voting, but do you want people forced to vote on issues they don’t care about or that don’t affect them? 

The same issues exist for social decision making tools used in an organisational context. While “Voting” has become popular for making some decisions, generally we don’t run companies as democracies. Why not? Because we (or more specifically the business owners) prize expert decision making. Some of the larger companies I have worked with do have town hall meetings. These are loose approximations to the early Greek ideas of democracy, soliciting feedback and dialogue, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Businesses are, at least notionally, meritocracies. People gain authority based on their ability to make good decisions and to use authority well.

Several times in his talk, Shirky made the point that the democratic franchise grew up based on the ideal of one person one vote – actually one man one vote, but that’s another issue. Democracy requires a strong grip on identity. I must be sure of who you are before you vote, in order to enforce one person one vote. However, the voter’s opinion itself is afforded anonymity. I know who you are, but not how you voted. In the UK, more so than in US culture, most people’s voting intention is an intensely private matter, expressed in an intensely private ballot. 

The Internet grew up as a very different type of franchise. Via NFSnet and FIDOnet (and communities like The Well) anonymity was accidentally implicit, if not deliberately and explicitly so. The systems had no way of knowing who someone was, in the sense that we would understand identity management. People frequently used synonyms, and even when they used a ‘real name’, verifying they were actually that person was a non-trivial exercise. As a side note, Twitter has been experiencing the same fun and games recently, with people grabbing Twitter accounts and masquerading as celebrities (from Tony Benn to the Dalai Lama).

Back to votes and opinions for a moment. In the on-line world we often know a lot about what someone thinks. There is anonymity of identity, but not of opinion. A mirror to the democratic franchise. Interestingly, from my own work with Wikis and from other academic studies, I have noticed that sites where people can post completely anonymously get significantly more contributions that those that don’t.

So, how can we make companies more democratic, and how can we make government more participative, in the social media sense? The answers come not from technology, but from understanding the nature of democracy itself. The art of an effective democratic system is to defend factions from each other. Tony Benn, articulates it well in this clip from “Big Ideas That Changed The World”, you might not agree with his views, but his argument is an informative one, if you are new to the concepts:

Incidentally, the video is also a good counter to Shirky’s statement that Democracy started in the UK with the Magna Carta, signed just up the road from where I am sitting right now now, in a a field in Runnymede. Democracy has evolved mechanisms to deal with working at scale. I can exchange a little information with a lot of people, or a lot of information with a few people. Information exchange doesn’t scale to both ends at once. Democracy tackles that problem by the use of elected, professional representatives as intermediaries. A vote is a small piece of information from a lot of people. A consultation process is a lot of information exchanged within a smaller group of people. Familiar mechanisms that tackle the problem.

What came before democracy was tribalism, which JP’s post alludes to with the description of the open source community. Projects are often run by a ‘tribal leader’ and rings of followers creating a social structure supporting them (see Dunbar and other anthropological studies). That structure does not work with anonymity of opinions. Visibility of allegiances is required to allow the structure to sustain itself.

Here is an apparent paradox: Anonymity promotes extremes of views, by taking away the moderating effect of social influence. We are compliant creatures by nature, and social pressure pushes us towards moderate, or normative, views. We adapt our views, based on our perception of other people’s views. It is a socially useful behaviour, since it makes it easier to form coherent groups. Johnnie Moore and Mark Earls, author of Herd, gave some great demonstrations of this during their session on social influence at NESTA yesterday, and Mark’s book is probably a good place to study it more.

In designing social decision making systems, one must take account of identity, anonymity and accountability. Systems must also balance the desire to have everyone participate, with the need for informed expert opinion. During the NESTA session, Johnnie Moore made an astute observation about organisational design: business design is about balance the need for efficiency, and the desire for full participation.

These are all thorny issues. In a representational democracy we vote for someone we believe is able to represent us. At least we should. In the workplace this is expressed in the form employee councils and so on. Can we place these things with social software? An old IT/programming adage springs to mind: Don’t mess with something unless you understand why it was that way in the first place. We need to apply new technology, with the benefit of understanding old ideas. Yet another thing to add to the list of important, but non-trivial tasks.

There are usually trade-offs and compromises to be made. No system is perfect. However, experience shows, from systems to products, that it doesn’t take perfection to win. In the early days of Cisco Systems, a group of consulting engineers got in to terrible trouble for having a T-shirt printed that said “Cisco – We suck less”. The positioning goes a little against the grain of modern marketing techniques, but it rings true. As Darwin would have put it, survival of the ones that are the best (least bad) fit for their environment.

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We want to change things, it is in our very nature to want change. But change isn’t an easy thing. Managing change is so complex that you can take whole degree courses in it. That said, there are some fundamental principles that unlock it.

Argue to The New from The Old

Too often change makers expect people to jump from A to B on the basis that “B is better for all of these reasons about B”. From marketing materials to social innovators, from business managers to parents, that’s what you see. Here’s the thing: That kind of approach is highly unlikely to create change.

Switching to the new approach requires starting from the existing one. Many of the social media advocates I meet and debate with describe a wonderful utopia of conversation and information flow, based on its use. It’s great. However I don’t know of a single business that can “jump” to that spot. Whilst social media will definitely change the way that businesses interact with customers, and even how intellectual property is managed, businesses have to operate within today’s legal frameworks. As the old joke goes, ”Well, if I was going to there, I wouldn’t be starting from here.”

You Must Get There From Here

I’m absolutely not saying that new methods shouldn’t be persued. Quite the opposite. They have to be, but within today’s frameworks. That means the transition isn’t always smooth. Ask David Schlesinger of Reuters. Recently he broke a news story via the Twitter service, posting it before it had hit the Reuter’s wire (see the story on Silicon Alley Insider - although David’s own post explains more):

I’ve been tweeting from the World Economic Forum, using the microblogging platform Twitter to discuss the mundane (describing crepuscular darkness of the Swiss Alps at 5 a.m.) or the interesting (live tweeting from presentations). Is it journalism? Is it dangerous? Is it embarrassing that my tweets even beat the Reuters newswire? Am I destroying Reuters standards by encouraging tweeting or blogging?

(These aren’t rhetorical questions – I’ve been challenged by many people who would answer those questions as No, Yes, Yes, and Yes! I answer them as Yes, Potentially, No and No.)

Although the example is based on twitter and journalism, it applies across many domains, and David illustrates it well. Effective change pushes at the barriers of the existing system. It doesn’t ignore them. It tests them, validates them, and then expands them where they are found wanting.

That kind of change is adaptive. It promotes growth. If you aren’t adaptating and changing, growing, then be sure that others are. Very soon you’ll be left behind. As David puts it:

If I don’t beat the Reuters wire with a live tweet because I deliberately hold back, someone else will. If I don’t beat the Reuters wire because I’m slow or inattentive, someone else will.

Taking No Risks Is The Best Way to Guarantee Failure 

Several times a week I have conversations with businesses terrified about using social media, “what happens if we let something out via a blog by accident?” It’s a valid concern, especially for a listed business (if you are in any doubt read the  SEC rules on Selective Disclosure - nothing like a multi-million dollar fine to focus the mind). Business do have to operate within today’s legal frameworks. However, many of the “barriers” that traditional businesses market and communicate under are not really barriers at all. If they are tested, they will be found wanting. The old rule was: “Appear great.” The new rule is: “Be great.” Actually, it isn’t a new rule, it is just one which mass media allowed to be bent for a while. Social media (generally) makes things more transparent. Are you ready for people to see inside?

The Best Way to Look Great is to Be Great – One Step at a Time

Here is the rub: This applies at the personal level too. Let’s say I want to be fantastically fit and wonderfully organised. It’s easy to see the benefits of the new system. The “position B” looks like a great place to be. I read the fitness books. I read the books on being organised. And what happens? Well, nothing of course. That’s not how you change from A to B. Start with A, find the boundaries and push them.

Maybe you don’t feel you can be organised? find a place where you almost are – a routine that exists already – and build from that. Every Saturday morning I drive the kids to a class, where I wait for them to finish. It was the perfect place to plan in a weekly review, looking back at my diary and planning the next week. I was there already, I just needed to push. I know I’m not going to make it out to a gym, but I know that I can choose to walk. Walk up the stairs. Get off the train a stop early (see this lovely post on the London Underground Tube Diary). Then I might even be ready to run too.

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FOAF? What’s it all about then? Technology is terrible for having interesting things buried in acronyms or abbreviations. FOAF is one of those gems and I’ve been intending to write about it for a long while. Thank you to Dave Terrar (and  weaverluke) for the nudge.

These days we are all a bit social on-line. We have always been social creatures, but now we have technology to help us manage those connections, from well-known sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Digg, to photo sharing sites like Flickr , even virtual world applications such as Second Life.

Computer technology means we can start to map out the relationships an individual has. Certainly we could have done this in the past with paper and pen, but applications like Twitter, Linked-In and Facebook mean that a vast swathe of the population are now submitting details of their relationships into databases, where they can be graphed and modelled by computer. This idea of a social graph – a map of relationships that individuals have with each other – has applications in both business and consumer marketing.

In the early days of the Internet it was joked that “on The Internet nobody knows you are a dog”. However, on today’s Internet we do know who you are, what you do, and the relationships that you have. Depending on your privacy settings, this information is available to a narrower or broader set of people – but it is, nonetheless, available.

One of the most interesting things about making a graph of the relationships is looking at the connections of our connections. Taking an obvious example: I know a few people, those people know other people. With a social graph (or with social media applications) I can see that two of my friends don’t know each other, but they do know a third mutual acquaintance. That creates new ways of introducing people to each other, and strengthening relationships with mutual contacts (see the Dunbar’s Number – Groups, Language and Social Media post with reference to tribes and clans in this context).

In some ways there’s nothing new there. Social people have been doing this sort of thing for millenia, but what is new is that people can use computer technology to identify friends or contacts that might be relevant with information that might previously have been missed or unnoticed. I have two friends who live at the opposite ends of the country, who I’ve never seen at the same time, and I assumed never knew each other. It wasn’t until Facebook came on the scene that I realised they went to the same school as children. A detail that might not (and in fact did not) come up in years of conversation.

This idea is codified in the concept of friends of a friend or “FOAF“. It was an early attempt to capture a person’s social graph and publish it on the web. The idea is that I could embed a list people that I know on my web site, so that you can see who you know too – that way you can see if you are a friend of a friend. One hop away on the social graph. By identifying those mutual contacts it provides a way for us to come to know each other. That is the concept that business social networking site LinkedIn is based upon.

So how does FOAF work? It uses something called RDF – Resource Description Framework – to express metadata, that is information about information. In the case of FOAF that is information about people and their interests, relationships and actitivites.

FOAF uses RDF to express metadata about people, and their interests, relationships and activities. Founded by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, FOAF is an open community-lead initiative which is tackling head-on the wider Semantic Web goal of creating a machine processable web of data.

Semantic web overlays data about data on the Internet so that computers can make sense of it. Because FOAF information is machine readable, computer applications can read it and process it to present information or bring things to our attention. So a very simple and idealistic view might be you come to my website or my page on Facebook and the web brouser automatically picks up that FOAF information and is able to notifiy you that there are some people we know in common. The idea is to build that information into all sorts of web pages so that many applications become, as it were, social or at least socially aware.

So FOAF, in the technical sense, is a very simple text structure, based on an XML format, which is machine and human readable – although not too pretty for a human. It is very easy to write applications to use it. A FOAF entry might include information such as my name, gender, title, what my preferred nickname is, separate out my family name, point to my home page or my blog, and include similar information for my contacts. It is a very simple piece of data, but we can add details about the nature of the relationships. It isn’t as complex as it probably sounds, it is flat text, which might look a bit like this:

<foaf:Person>
   <foaf:name>Benjamin Ellis</foaf:name>
   <foaf:gender>Male</foaf:gender>
   <foaf:title>Mr</foaf:title>
   <foaf:givenname>Benjamin</foaf:givenname>
   <foaf:family_name>Ellis</foaf:family_name>
   <foaf:nick >jamin</foaf:nick>
   <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>...(inverse functional property)...</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
   <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://www.benjaminellis.co.uk"/>
   <foaf:weblog rdf:resource="http://www.redcatco.com/blog/"/>
   <foaf:workplacehomepage rdf:resource="http://redcatco.com/" />
   <foaf:depiction
           rdf:resource="http://benjaminellis/images/bmje.jpg" />
   <foaf:knows>
       <foaf:Person>
         <foaf:name>Joe Blogs</foaf:name>
       </foaf:Person>   
   </foaf:knows>
 </foaf:Person>

What does all this technology do? It give us opportunities to introduce people to other people, or to find people via mutual contacts. It might be computer-based, but the end goal is human to human social interaction. The power of my social graph, the map of my relationships, is not just in the releationsips I have, but also in that friend of a friend information – The relationships my contacts have, and they or I might have as a result of them.

People’s social graphs are exceptionally complicated. The FOAF proposal is a long way from providing even the beginnings of being able to express the relationships we have. I’ve played in a band with someone across the street, who baby sits for us on occasion. Are they my neighbour? A fellow musician? My baby sitter? Computers struggle with such vagaries, some people thrive on them. A social graph is not a simple star with me in the middle and people around the outside. It is actually a complex mixture of more and less connected individuals.

In using social networking platforms for marketing, agencies often seek out the person with the most ‘connections’ or ‘friends’. That is an error. Who is going to be more effective in propagating a message – someone with 350 contacts, or someone with 20? It depends as much on the second and third degrees of their social graph (ie out to the friend of a friend level) as on the direct contacts in the first.

One person might know 100 contacts, another might know 10. For the person who knows 100 contacts each of those people might know 100 or they might know a 1,000. Some of them may be very well connected , some may have a few tightly formed relationships, that are heavily meshed –  where all their contacts and mutual friends are related. Others may be outliers, or bridgers as I like to call them, sitting across different communities. They might only have a few relationships. but they bridge between large communities.

Social software, even in its current form, is effective in the ‘discovery’ phase of relationships. One of the reasons that Twitter is so popular with many is that it makes it easy to find new people, based on their interests or experience, and start exchanges with them. Browsers like Flock aim to integrate the social and data aspects of web surfing. The area certainly has a lot of potential, for example knowing that a web site is written by a friend of a trusted friend might have me interpret the information as more trusted than that of a total stranger (for better or for worse). There are applications that generate FOAF from your Facebook page , Firefox includes a built in FOAF browser.

FOAF also has the potential to act as a format for porting our social graphs from one social networking platform to another (as long as the platforms stop banning people for running export scripts). A number of platforms (at last a dozen at last count) already allow exporting data as FOAF information. The approach might also be useful in the Enterprise 2.0 context, where social graphs might need to be used across applications.

All of this is, of course, still in a nascent stage. Be it FOAF, or a functionally equivalent standard, we will be seeing a lot more activity around the portability and interpretation of social graph data in the coming year. In the mean time, don’t forget that it is all about connecting with people!

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Last night saw me at the TechCrunch Pitch! event and in a camera happy mood (see Techcrunch pitch photos on Flickr), you’ll find some videos on techcrunch moblog  (I Qik’ed Mike Butcher’s intro here). The pitches were of a high standard, and I’ll be checking out a some of the companies.

Mike gave the companies a specific list of questions to work to. That isn’t completely unusual for a pitching situation, although I think it vexed a few of the speakers. Doug Richard, from BBC’s Dragon’s Den, did an excellent job of playing bad-cop.

On the way home, my thoughts turned to “what makes a good pitch?” Over the years I’ve been on both sides of the table, prepping the pitches and pitching businesses for funding, but also listening to company pitches with a view to investment or acquisition. As I was describing these to my ever astute COO, she said “That sounds like the seven habits of highly effective pitchers”, so here they are:

1. Know the audience, but don’t take them for granted.

What are their motives for being at the pitch? Who are they? These days there is little excuse for not having good background. Linkedin, Xing, Google and Blogs (if they blog) are useful tools. Obviously, don’t end up being a social media stalker, but be aware of the background. One last obvious point, don’t take everything you read as gospel, or make the mistake of believing you actually understand the audience.

2. Know the ideal outcome and shoot for it.

What is it that you want to happen as a result of the pitch? Have a very clear and specific idea of what it is, and make sure the pitch actually works towards it. If you are pitching to investors for cash, they are going to be more interested in how much you want, how good you’ll be with it and why. Not in how hot your Ruby-on-rails coding skillz are. 

3. Know the weakness(es) and head them off.

You suck. You genuinely do. There are things that you are not great at. There are areas where your company is exposed. Know what they are. What are the most common objections you get in the context of this pitch? You don’t want to sow seeds of doubt, but you do want to concrete over any ground where they might spring up.

4. Describe the value from a customer perspective.

What is it that you enable? In specific, quantifiable terms, how does it make things faster or cheaper for customers. For any business product it must do one, if not both, of these or there isn’t a proposition. If you are a consumer offering, then you have the luxury of grasping at being outrageously, additively fun. Don’t miss it.

5. Woo and wow, rather than beat and demand. 

Don’t sell to me, woo me – win me over. People (I include myself there) dislike being sold too. Get me on your side. Don’t tell me you rock, tell me about someone else who says that you rock. Appeal to my judgment, experience and objectives (see 1).

6. Know your time limit; stick to it.

Not over or under. When I first started running a Toastmasters club, I found one of the rules very harsh: If you run over time, you are out of the competition. It is a good discipline. The only way you can know if you are going to be in the time limit is to do a full talk-through. Do it and time it. Rinse and repeat. The audience, and you, will appreciate it. Failing to stick to time and being pulled off stage dents the impression you leave behind.

7. Tell stories.

Stories have narrative. They flow. Their linked structure (this, then this, then this…) make them memorable and easy to follow. Stories have colour and detail, which makes them engaging. People love stories, and if they are good they retell them – that is a marketing secret weapon.

And remember, good stories have a beginning, middle and end. Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them. Then tell them what you told them. That’s the seven habits of highly effective pitchers.

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