The ability to criticize, critique and respond to something is only a tweet away. You don’t need comments turned on to do this.

Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText and board member for SlideShare has an interesting post responding to criticism placed on Pfizer mostly for turning off comments on the their newly launched SlideShare account.

It’s encouraging to see regulated companies like Pfizer move further and further into the social space, even if it’s baby steps.

Ross points out the additional difficulties that a regulated business has, but something he didn’t reference was that Pfizer is not the first to take a no comments allowed approach. Several big companies with corporate blogs don’t allow comments including Google and Microsoft. Apple doesn’t even have a blog to turn comments off of.

The trade off of turning comments off is the obvious lack of engagement which makes it more difficult to build readership and reach.

Regulations aside, managing comments can reach a point of diminishing returns (depending on your goals).

Seth Godin was the first person I remember to turn on comments (when they had been off), decided he didn’t like it, found it too distracting and then turned them back off. People got upset but then everything returned to normal.

Years ago the highly popular blog, Boing Boing had to disable comments because the amount of traffic they were getting was crashing their site. Once they could afford better more reliable hosting they turned them back on. Recently the major tech blog, Engadget turned off comments earlier this year because of reader unruliness and then turned them back on when they implemented a more moderated system.

When I start a YouTube account for clients, depending on the nature of the channel, I often recommend clients to default to comments off because YouTube can attract some of the worst trolls out there and YouTube’s moderating system is horrible.

If your goals are reach and awareness of your messaging, turning off comments can stunt the growth of that channel but I believe is can be an acceptable approach.

But if your goals are to build a community and engage with your readers comments are an important part of that.

Disclosure, Microsoft is a client.

Photo credit By Balakov

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It’s an honest question I hear a lot from social media practitioners. We see and experience so many great things everyday we feel bad for people that don’t actively participate and frustrated when clients don’t jump in with both feet.

But much like we need to stop hating late adopters and stop worrying about critics, we also need to understand and accept our own fear.

We are social animals. We have evolved as a society because of our cohesion and our need to be accepted. In ancient societies the worst thing you could do to someone was to exile them. Cast them out of the tribe. It’s in our DNA not to stand out.

The one that stands out has to face the lions; either as the leader or as lunch.

That’s a big bet to make. But a legitimate one to ask. Do you or your company want to be a leader or lunch?

We are hard wired to not stand out. That fear has kept our race alive. But now it get’s in the way of people being involved. Your fear or the collective fear of your company is stopping you from being a leader.

Here’s what I can promise you if you’re willing to be a leader:

• You will stand out.
• People will criticize you.
• Some people will hate you.
• You will become a target.

But:

• You will stand out.
• More people will praise you.
• More people will love you.
• You will become someone worth following.

Leaders don’t become lunch. Being a follower makes you more likely to be lunch. We need more leaders.

New Comm Biz is always looking for guest posts and regular contributors: Blog With Us.

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Amazon sells Audio Books Amazon has a great MP3 Music Download Store.

I know the E-Ink technology won’t support it but they even have a Video On Demand store that competes with Netflix, Hulu Plus and iTunes.

But to me, music seems like a no brainer. When I read a book I listen to music. Always. I almost can’t read a book unless I’m listening to music. Plus there’s the whole audio book cross over.

The Kindle already has Text-to-Speech reading capability how much harder would adding a music player be?

I realize that this becomes a slippery slope that effects the purity of the single function device but I’ve already questioned the long term value of single function devices. Of course I’m finally ready to buy one so maybe single function devices still have some life left in them.

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I’m kidding of course. Instead Jason Falls decided to wage war against the social media purists.

I will make the qualifying statement that this is really my interpretation of  Jason’s presentation so I’m probably getting some stuff wrong.

Move The Needle: Social Media For The Bottom Line

• Social Media is not a World of Happy Little Trees
• Social media by itself doesn’t ring the cash register.
• Your job is to move the needle.

I will now share with you a bunch of random tweetable talking points from Jason’s presentation:

Example: Eric Brown of Urbane Apartments started letting the tenants blog. They blogged about the neighborhood and he started renting more apartments.

• Social Media Purists don’t move the needle.
• Joining the conversation, talking with us not at us, engagement only takes the ball half way.
• Those are important things to do but you still have to move the needle.
• 81% of marketers plan to link annual revenues to social media.
• Traditional marketing (advertising, direct marketing, email marketing) still works, if it’s relevant.
• You can sell through social media.
• But remember soft metrics have merit. Branding and awareness has value. Traffic, comments, friends, etc, etc. They give you a metric of success but in and of themselves they don’t equate to ROI.

Most people who ask the ROI question are asking out of fear because they don’t understand what it does. Remember what it does do:

• Aides in branding and awareness
• Builds community
• Provides customer service opp
• Allows for research development collaboration
• Protects company’s reputation
• Offers direct sales opportunities

But despite all the huffing and puffing Jason still advocates to –  Be a Purists:

• Be customer centric
• Participate
• Provide value
• Build relationships and trust.

How do we do that?

• Plan for Success
• Establish singular goals.
• Set measurable objectives goals to achieve
• Then tactics

Q&A

What’s the best tool for measuring the ROI of social media? Your brain. No one can measure your ROI if they don’t know the objectives and the strategy of your business.

What’s the biggest mistake people make in social media? Not doing anything with the community that they have built.

Bonus: Jason’s example of what will happen to social media gurus

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Is social media making personal moments less personal? This is a question that comes up a lot. I love these kinds of discussions and watching the ways that technology affects our everyday lives.

Yesterday was my birthday. Like most people *nearing* <cough> 40 <cough> I don’t think too much of my own birthday’s anymore.

I did get this cool card from my wife and kids. The card (pictured on the left) reads:

Cover: I sincerely hope you have a fantastic birthday.

Inside: If I weren’t sincere, I probably would have just written on your Facebook wall.

Are the messages left on my Facebook wall insincere well wishes? I don’t think so.

I received about 4 dozen birthday wishes on Facebook (a couple of people just liked other people’s posts), a few texts, a few emails, half a dozen tweets, 3 or 4 phone calls and 2 cards. Obviously much more online activity than offline activity. From personal experience I don’t get many more calls or cards than that. I don’t make a very big deal about my birthday.

Facebook’s easy because Facebook reminds us that our friends are having birthday’s but I don’t think it actually replaced any of the cards or calls I get. I’ve noticed a steady decline in the number of calls and cards I get as I get older but this year I noticed a serious spike in electronic messages. With the built in reminders on social networks and the ability to leave a simple note does increase the overall messages I received. Many of them from people I haven’t spoken to in years. It was nice, I didn’t find it insincere at all.

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There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t receive some level of resistance at work from clients, account teams, managers or reports. You only make progress through resistance. This manifests in everything from: “There’s no way we can do that” to the more common “yes but…”

I consider most days a success if I get 2 out of 3 asks and often have to comprise for 1 out of 3 assuming I get anything at all. If I get all 3 I probably wasn’t pushing hard enough.

There are a lot of articles and books and blogs on how to drive change within your organization but there are very few that tell you how to deal personally with the resistance you face.

I found this entire article very helpful Dealing with resistance: the 4 + 2 method, but I especially liked these 6 points:

Photo credit By Balakov

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None Found

Social CRM is a topic that comes up a lot and I get frequent questions about. If you’re still grappling with what exactly Social CRM is, I hope these posts will give you some of the needed background to wrap your head around it properly.

1) Social CRM Deloitte Slideshare

Social CRM

2) Social CRM YouTube Video

John Perez has several great videos on his YouTube channel. Here’s a good primer:

3)Altimeter Report: The 18 Use Cases of Social CRM, The New Rules of Relationship Management

Companies are unable to scale to keep up with the social phenomenon
We know that customers are using these social technologies to share their voices, and companies are having a very difficult time to keep up.

• For companies, real time is not fast enough. Companies need to be able to anticipate what customers are doing to say and do, in order to keep up. Although Motrin responded to angry mom’s within 24 hours –it was too slow.
• Companies are unable to scale to meet the needs of social. No matter how many community managers Dell and ComcastCares hires to support, they’ll never be able to match the number of customers happening.  They need tools, and they need them now.
• Customers don’t care what department you’re in they just want their problem fixed.Dooce’s support problem with Maytag quickly became a PR nightmare –had the support group known she was an influencer (and what it means), they could have serviced her better.

4) Social CRM is the First Step Towards Social Business and World Domination

What is Social CRM? Is it a sales tool? Is it a support tool? The answer depends on your company and your business objectives. I can tell you this, Social CRM is not a Twitter key word search juxtaposed next to CRM data. (Sorry, personal rant.) And if you’re wondering about the title, everything with me is about World Domination (more at the end of the post).

5) Is Social Media Distracting to Core Business Functions?

More and more companies are using social media for customer service. Social media isn’t just the domain of marketing. It has huge value for product development, customer support and CRM/sales. To keep these tools valuable, you need to use them properly and set up the right infrastructure to manage them. For example, a good monitoring system with a decision tree and ticketing to flag comments and determine what part of the company they should be routed to and then assign them to a specific individual who can address appropriately.

6) Social CRM: A recycled buzzword or a sustainable business strategy

I am on a quest to understand Social CRM. Not so I can be an early pundit shouting “to dos” at companies or pointing out their mistakes; but so I can really understand the value proposition it can bring to an organization, their constituents and ultimately my clients. I even joined the Social CRM Pioneers Google group to start marinating in what influencers are talking about and it’s been good, real good.

I have read several excellent definitions of social CRM but I am yet to be satisfied. I often try and put myself in my client’s shoes and evaluate whether a given definition (program or strategy) makes sense for the business. So far, a lot of what I have read is either fluff or so high level that it’s not actionable.  And from my experience working in the enterprise, a strategy that is not actionable is usually just someone’s really good idea that will never get implemented.

7) R-Buttons and the Open Marketplace

Three things happen in a marketplace. One is transaction, another is conversationand the third is relationship. Let’s talk about what you, as a customer (not just aconsumer), can do with each.

Transaction

Let’s start with price. Here in the industrialized world, price has been something that sellers have set, and buyers have paid, ever since John Wanamaker invented the price tag in the late 1800s. In some cases buyers have had room to haggle (such as with buying a horse or a car), but on the whole we customers pay what sellers ask. Or we move on.

8 ) How Insurance Companies Will Influence Rates Based On Your Tweets: Social Insurance Rates

Expect insurance and wellness companies to monitor social data, then reward –and penalize member actions.

Companies Want Accurate Customer Data and Social Data Promises a Gold Mine
In our recent research report on Social CRM, we studied how companies will use social data to amend existing customer databases. We mapped out which use cases are ready now, and which ones we expect to see in the future. We expect in the future that companies will give customers an improved customer experience, or improve innovation of products and services by using customer data. (SCRM use cases: CX1, 2 and I1). Just as companies use previous purchasing behavior, demographics, psychographics and other studies, we expect companies to take advantage of the social data that customers are providing to the public, in order to make better decisions.

9) Jive Named Leader By Gartner In Social CRM Quadrant

Jive Software is one of the fastest growing Social Business Software companies in the world. Communication has been drastically altered with the advent of the social web, rendering traditional corporate communication, both internal and external, archaic. Social Business is a concept that has risen out of the emergence of the social web and indoctrinates new ways to engage employees, customers and others out in the turbulent waters of the social web. Helping manage these processes are social software providers, with Jive coming out on top  according to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social CRM, 2010. Read more after the jump.

10) Weekly Poll: Is Salesforce.com Chatter Really That Unique? Does it Matter?

It all sounds good when Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff is on stage like he was today, stirring the faithful with his rousing presence. If you ever get the chance, go see Benioff present. He has a style that’s part P.T. Barnum, part passionate geek.

With Chatter, Salesforce.com is embracing the concept of the activity stream. And customers do seem to like the flow that comes with a river of news. Geeks have been shouting about this style of receiving news for years. RSS initiated many of us to the way data can flow into our aggregarors. We first heard Dave Winer talk about the concept. It has since become a foundation element in the user experience for a line of apps such as Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed.

Photo credit By Balakov

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With the increasing popularity in sites containing user-generated content (UGC), questions of validity arise. UGC includes any site where the site’s users and visitors can write and publish content, whether it is video content, blog posts, advice websites, and the like. But as sites filled with user generated content flourish in the sprawling, entangling contents of the web, questions of validity arise.

For the purposes of this post, I am going to focus on two types of sites that solely rely on UGC: editable-Encyclopedia sites (such as: Wikipedia), and question and answer (Q&A) sites, my experience coming from running my site, FunAdvice. Are these sites valid, reliable sources of information?

“The NO side”

Many college professors and lecturers are saying “no”.  Plenty of students are habitually finding their college professors and lecturers not accepting sites with user generated content as reference material in papers and essays. According to this view, since the floor is open to anyone with an Internet connection, articles and answers can be chopped and changed by just about anyone- sometimes making a seemingly legitimate article or answer full of inconsistencies and misinformation.

I have previously identified two “negatives” to UGC sites, both of them related to validity:

• Credibility: Who are these people generating this content, and what makes them experts? How much wrong, dangerous, and purely unintelligent information are they disseminating to the world through their encyclopedia edits and social Q&A answers? This is where the professor-syndrome comes in. Who knows where people are getting this information?
• Bias: Neither types of website (encyclopedia or social Q&A) are specifically-stated political party sites. Besides a few minor sections, such as certain pages on Encyclopedia sites—or categories on Q&A sites— bias isn’t explicitly stated throughout the entire website. It’s up to the reader to gauge which information doesn’t hold bias. And many people aren’t capable of this determination.

“YES”

However, the other side of the argument is that user generated content can be considered valid sources of information. Where is the argument here?

• Moderation: Naturally, encyclopedia websites try to prevent users abusing the power to modify articles by keeping a (seemingly) close eye on modifications to articles, and locking pages if they are modified in a way that makes the content false or abusive. Social Q&A sites often use a similar system- volunteers ‘ who can monitor threads for false information or abusive behavior, temporary delete such content and alert the administrators, who are able to disable or delete accounts of repeat offenders, and permanently remove the incorrect or harmful content posted.
• Sources: Throughout every Wikipedia article, you’ll see tiny blue numbers, leading to a source at the bottom of the page (think: footnotes in a term paper or dissertation). If a page lacks sources, readers are alerted at the very top of the page that it needs “cleaning up” or “additional sources”.  Most social Q&A sites allow external links, so users can link to outside sites to back up the answers they give.

How do I determine if information is valid on a UGC site?

Author Mohammad Ali Abbasi of Arizona State University’s “Data Mining and Machine Learning Lab” (2009), created a slideshow titled “Learning to Recognize Reliable Users and Content in Social Media with Coupled Mutual Reinforcement”. His thesis is that by recognizing valid sources (covered in the bullet point above) and valuable users on UGC sites will lead you to the most reliable information.

Here is his model for finding valuable users on social Q&A sites and how the sites usually work.

Answers that aren’t chosen as best answer are not locked on every Q&A site, so view that ending as a variable, (my site leaves questions open, which enables new (and possibly helpful) answers to be added later). However, in addition to users having the ability to vote on a best answer, there are also points on most social Q&A sites, FA, Yahoo Answers! and the like –therefore, users with the most points for having highest voted answers, according to Abbasi’s theory, would be considered “most valuable users”. For example, User A with 500+ points for highly-voted answers would be considered a “valuable user”, compared to User B, who has 39 points. If both users answered the same question, the assumption is that User A would be considered a “valuable user”, and therefore provide more legitimate, valid content, using Abbasi’s theory.

Final thoughts

Stated simply, use your brain when discerning whether sites like Wikipedia and social Q&A sites are valid and accurate sources of information. Consider both sides: the “no” side, which states that users writing on these sites have no credibility and possible bias.  Then consider the “yes” side, which says that moderation and the use of sources can make these sites surprisingly accurate and credible. If you decide to use a site with UGC, remember how to discern whether the information is of high value or not: on Wikipedia, check out the sources list at the bottom of the page. On social Q&A sites, look for supporting sources / photos / videos in answers, and look at users’ points and high-rated answers, applying Abbasi’s theory.  Above all else, keep your wits about you—and remember: don’t believe everything you read.

Today’s post was submitted by Dara Solomon, Community Manager at FunAdvice.com

Image Source: Abbasi, Mohammad Ali: “Learning to Recognize Reliable Users and Content in Social Media with Coupled Mutual Reinforcement”. 2009

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Is Capitalism Failing Us? Or Are We Failing Capitalism? Capitalism Needs to Get Social.

The Relationship Between Social, Human and Financial Capital

Some of the content will be obviously leveraged from previous posts bit that’s part of the process for me. If you haven’t been following along and the posts don’t make total sense please see a few of the previous posts under The Book category.

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The Grand Unifying Theory of Economics

By looking at Capital and Capitalism more broadly than we do today I think we can explain the changes in the World around us and more to the point what’s happening with social media.

If we look at all three types of Capital; Social Capital, Human Capital and Financial Capital all as real Capital then we should be able to apply the theory of Capitalism to them. But if we take one more step back then it stands to reason that all of these types of capital should already be effected by the forces of Capitalism.

Instead of just hypothesizing about how we could use them better, shouldn’t we first be able to see their effects by looking at what has already happened historically? I think so. Let’s give it a try shall we? Let’s start by breaking down the markets cycles of boom, bust and recovery.

What drives a market boom? It’s typically some sort of advancement in technology or process innovation. These advances typically replace some of the costs associated with Human capital. From the assembly line to the IT revolution to the Internet, these advancements allow us to “do more with less.” (A favorite phrase in corporate America meaning, do more work with less people.)

This automation of human output allows us to focus on higher function outputs. Meaning we do more white collar jobs and less blue collar jobs. The rise of knowledge workers has required us to specialize. We are no longer generalists with a lot of experience an a specific industry, we have become experts in a type of job and can apply it across almost any industry.

This specialization fragments our interests. We start going to specific universities with even more specialized programs. Even as professionals we attend specialized workshops and highly specialized professional organizations. These more costly universities and specialized trainings allow us to earn a higher income but it also costs more to maintain which causes us to work harder to maintain.

These advances in technology create new products which stimulates demand in the market. As the financial markets grow corporations require more Human Capital, usually in the form of knowledge, to keep up with demand. Remember when we previously discussed the issue of scale in corporations? The only way large companies currently have to “efficiently” extract knowledge from its workforce is through email and meetings. We have created a system that extracts Human Capital without creating any Social Capital. This may be efficient for the corporation but it’s exhausting for the individual.

We have been producing workers who are financially better off than they were but emotionally and mentally drained. With their increase in finances (and usually with credit against that increase) they move further out of the city and buy houses where they don’t know their neighbors. Because they come home from work taxed of their Social Capital yet too tired to invest in more they have increasingly been indulging in the social equivalent of high fructose corn syrup laden candy; broadcast media, namely television.

TV gives the illusion of interaction and entertains us without taxing us. Along with the brain candy we get commercials which continues to spur our spending habits. All of this increased spending pushes us to work harder for that next raise or promotion.

Living in the suburbs and only interacting with people who share our now highly specialized interests our Social Capital now lacks diversity. It turns out that diversity in Social Capital is incredibly important to the quality of our Human Capital as we’ll see.  With depleted Social Capital and lower quality Human Capital workers produce lower quality output, forcing us to work longer hours, increasing our dissatisfaction at work furthering our lack of Social Capital creating a vicious cycle that increases the odds we will change jobs or the strain on our family lives also increases our chance of divorce or other disruptive ends.

With a market now severely depleted of Social Capital and a significantly lower quality of Human Capital the market continues to desperately push forward which usually results in poor financial decisions across the entire market. Just look at the insane dotcom IPO investments or the more recent bloated housing market loans. Eventually this vicious cycle always ends in a “market adjustment.” Sometimes very drastically.

These adjustments release huge amounts of Human Capital onto the market. This now unemployed workforce turns to fill the void of Social Capital in the market. People begin networking again, spending more time with family and catching up with friends. It is any surprise that the largest growth in online social networking activities like Facebook and Twitter happened during the period of the largest unemployment in over a decade?

Along with an investment in Social Capital comes a diversification of Social Capital. People move to new locations for new jobs or old locations, like back home because of a loss of job. People start going back to school and making new relationships. Even in the extreme case of divorce, people are often forced to make new friends.

This increase and diversity in Social Capital starts to create an increase in the amount and quality of Human Capital. People learn new things and are exposed to new ideas. This creates a virtuous cycle that eventually leads to new advancements in technology.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Photo credit By ntr23

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