Trends in social media marketing

Much of what is currently going on in the European market tends to confirm many of the trends in the presentation below. What remains to be seen is which models of marketing through social media will actually be adopted and which will simply collapse for lack of relevance, consistency or impact.

22 Social Media Trends

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The wise learn from other people's experience

"The wise learn from other people's mistakes and fools from their own." So goes an ancient proverb that some say was first written in Aramaic. As far as I'm concerned, I have been more often a fool than a wise person. That may be because I prefer experimentation to inertia, feeling that Randy Pausch was so right when he said in the Last Lecture that in life "experience is what you get when you you didn't get what you wanted". This post is about experience sharing and it was prompted by a visit to Genaro Bardy's recent post on a presentation made by Kevin Rose.

Few things are more valuable for entrepreneurs and venture investors than getting the account of some real-life experience, whether it speaks of "success" or "failure" is completely irrelevant so long as the content is genuine and the analysis honest. When speaking to customers during workshops, trainings or coaching sessions I often encourage them to examine cases of other entrepreneurs they might know. I also advise them to cut through the crap of accounts entrepreneurial successes and  failures:

• in the former crap is neat logical explanations of how the successful entrepreneurs identified and captured an opportunity (i.e. they knew what they were doing from day one, had a definite plan and eventually ended up exactly where they'd wanted to be) and 


• in the latter crap is justifications and excuses pertaining to everything but the entrepreneurs themselves (i.e. they did everything right but someone else messed everything up or the circumstances caused them to fail despite their "perfect" plan).

In this post, I'd like to comment a bit further on this matter of sharing experience and use a presentation made by Kevin Rose as an example of the practice of honest and factual sharing of experience gained through different entrepreneurial initiatives.

Accounts of how entrepreneurial ventures unfolded are interesting insofar as they allow us to see how a given entrepreneur acted, both successfully and unsuccessfully, through expected results and unexpected twists and turns of the economy, in the context of a specific industry.

In such accounts there are elements that are very peculiar to the industry or to the entrepreneur and could not possibly be replicated. For example, Steve Jobs has very peculiar ways of doing things and much of his ways cannot be replicated even if we try to immerse ourselves Inside Steve's Brain (very interesting book) and in the business of social marketing there are practices that work very well but could not possibly be applied to financial services where regulatory constraints set clear limits on the nature of open community driven interactions. On the other hand, entrepreneurs' account offer elements that can be replicated and can be used in other contexts, in other industries, by different people. Very often these elements are good practices, activities, initiatives and sets of assumptions about the business. For example, Jamendo's founders could teach volumes about their initial assumption that open sharing of content under Creative Commons licensing would pave the way for new forms of distribution of and interaction on music. Their input would be valid for other forms of content and could be used to examine the impact of social media on traditional media or to carry out an analysis of the current war between Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, Google and Bing.

One great example of such account is Kevin Rose's presentation in which he shares his experience of practices that worked well at Digg, Twitter or WeFollow. His low key approach is great as he is giving us a perspective on what worked and what did not, to tell us how to go with the flow and listen to users in shaping a service and to honestly state he is on constant experimentation. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect in Kevin Rose's presentation lies in his relentless drive to speak of practice and not to preach for a theory or abstract construct. Practices can be replicated elsewhere giving due consideration to the peculiar aspects of a given business or industry.

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose

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Coherence essential to leveraging "social media"

Today I spent some time going through the "WTF is social media - one year later" presentation, which I find excellent. It's embedded below for your convenience and below are some of my thoughts on the matter.

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

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The WTF material is really good stuff full of common sense, good thinking and it provides a sobering view of what this thing called social media could be used for. Focusing on fundamentals of business and on phenomena we've been able to observe over the past few months and years, the authors actually help business people who are a bit lost with all the chatter about social media and collaborative workspace. Observations and statements of what "social media" (for lack of a better word) could be used for are excellent and it's a pitty there is only little content about concrete ways in which to leverage the different aspects of social media... but of course who wouldn't understand that the authors would gladly provide that as part of their services at Brand Infiltration ;)

Now the presentation is also excellent food for thought and here are a couple of those that emerged going through the slides:

1. I am not entirely sure the method you use is what drives business value: I mean that whether you go for high tech "social online super dooper media"  or low tech "true caring for customers" the method will not built rapport let alone create a "mystique" for your brand. Look at Cirque du Soleil and how they went from a "spectacle de rue" in Québec to an amazing global business running over 15 shows on all continents and generating over 700 million USD in turnover by creating unique, magical, immersive and truly memorable experiences for their customers. Did they need social media to do that?


2. this whole issue of genuine engagement of prospects and customers
   starts within and that modern tools and practices simply make an
   organization more transparent and more porous therefore exposing both
   what is coherent and beautiful about its way of dealing with customers
   and what is slightly less desirable which could be hidden from view in
   the old world. From that perspective tackling brand building, community
   management, customer acquisition and engagement or even intelligence
   gathering simply from the angle of tools and practices is futile. You
   need to achieve deeper transformation of cultures and that's quite
   another challenge that requires capabilities and authority no CMO has
   on her own today. It takes the whole corporate leadership team to
   commit to a radically different way of running the business... And I don't think it's about unleashing complete chaos but rather about combining opposites, transcending old discipline and including it in new forms of managerial practices, pretty much like the Obama
   presidential campaign did: central control of all mission critical
   aspects and complete delegation of authority for everything else,
   taking care to project an image of collaboration & participation.


3. the mere fact that spending time on social media is one of the favorite online activities of Internet users today is not enough to demonstrate that from a business perspective you can actually do something useful in that space at an economically acceptable cost. It might only be a biased observation but, it does seem to me that:

• people gladly engage when there's a worthy cause for which there could not possibly be the slightest suspicion of commercial manipulation or commercial


• the rejection of initiatives that seem to be "remote-controlled" by major brands is almost immediate in many cases


• when a space is new like for example the blogosphere a few years ago or Twitter a couple of months ago, the signal / noise ratio is good enough to derive value out of that space with spectacular returns on investment whereas things become much more difficult when more people bring more content and more potential interactions


• the possibility of interactions does not means that there will be interactions, let alone true conversations where people actually listen to other people and truly seek to understand what they mean by what they say, an effort that requires focus of attention and that can be tedious enough to require far more time than is allowed by the culture of the immediate, fast and short of social media


• interactions don't mean transactions let alone economically useful or even profitable transactions

So social media is probably an excellent phenomenon for specific businesses and for a whole range of purposes and not only marcoms as rightly pointed out by the authors of the presentation... But it's only a tool and as such it's only as good and relevant as the skill with which it's applied to the pursuit of coherent objectives by congruent organizations who will make more than half-hearted committments to the new world of open participation. And that may not be a world for everyone, so expect to see more established organizations die as their environment changes to the point of transforming some long established practices into deadly sins.