I meant to write this up earlier in the week, but have been overwhelmed by the great response we have received from the latest Social Media Club announcements. There have been quite a few anniversaries lately, only one of which really got any attention, which was my first wedding anniversary with Kristie Wells-Heuer on July 7, 2008. Love you honey….

It was also the 2nd anniversary of the Social Media Club blog on Thursday July 10, 2008 and the 3rd anniversary of this blog on June 23, 2008 (though my official first post goes back to May 13, 2002 on a Movable Type install setup by my old friend David Pruitt - thanks buddy, if only I realized back then how cool this thing really way).

So I want to take a moment and revisit those first posts and a few others from early on, just to share some of the early thinking and writing with you to see if any of it has changed a bit…

• We, together, have a dream… May 13, 2002
• How I got here June 23, 2005 (on my way to Gnomedex, which I am missing this year for the first time since then
• Introduction: The Customer Strategy June 23, 2005 (repub of 200 article)
• Why I blog June 27, 2005 (interesting)
• The First Rule of Social Media Club is… July 10, 2006 (first SMC post)
• Building the Social Media Clubhouse July 12, 2006 (our goals/mission - not much has changed here really)
• Reading wRiting, aRithmetic and RSS - The 4 R’s July 18, 2006 (a first pass at media literacy)

Well, what do you think, anything interesting to note there, other than the fact that there are no comments on those posts?

After reading The problem with ‘conversational marketing’ I was inspired to express my views on the importance of conversation and the evolution of marketing.

Let’s be clear, the real problem with conversational marketing (other than the God awful term itself) is the ‘marketing’, not the conversation. The human problem with many traditional marketing practices is that they are exploitative in nature, selling/hyping goods and services in the market that are of dubious value, and only benefit those doing the selling. Of course this is not the case with the majority of marketing or marketers, but the extent to which a few bad intentioned actors can create a stereotype that is harmful to an entire group of people is quite stunning.

The gist of the article is correct that product and experience are the most important aspects of the business by providing goods and services to the market that create profits and satisfaction. I wrote about this after our awesome SxSW panel earlier this year in a post called The Golden Rules of Marketing. If you are more interested in the importance of great products as the first step to great marketing, listen to the podcast of the Self Replicating Awesomness session.

My problem is with the article’s dismissal of the importance of conversation over messaging to create understanding. It demonstrates how badly a few buzzword spewing charlatans can hurt the efforts towards transformation across an industry (communications in this case).

As I have demonstrated in unplanned exchanges in numerous workshops I have facilitated over the past year, it is very easy for people to mean the same thing, use different words to describe it and have an argument resulting from their different viewpoints. Conversation in this case, creates understanding, bridging cultures and differences in the use of language - something that a simple published statement or headline (aka message) can not do if no one is able to be engaged, listening and responding.

When those of us who understand what is happening say the words ‘listen and respond’, we are not limiting ourselves to the words we say back to someone after listening. We are talking about what we DO as a result of HEARING them as well as what we say. By listening, and truly hearing what is said, we are also showing that we are paying attention - it speaks volumes about the true intentions of our actions in the market place.

The post’s author sees the biggest proof of the failure of conversational marketing in a 2007 study from 9 months prior to their post:

According to the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index, Dell was at the bottom of the pack in 2007 and actually lost 5 percentage points from the previous year

The author is correct in noting that it is much more difficult to provide a product that meets the market’s needs/expectations then it is to talk with them. Duh! The point isn’t so much that they are talking together, but what they do as a result. To expect conversations between representatives of a company and the market to turn around the culture and operational systems of that company within a matter of hours or days is of course impractical. These things take time. We are all human, people misunderstand, and of course, people make new mistakes which need to be understood and corrected all the time.

The article goes on to further state:

As such, companies should invest first and foremost in making sure that they do a good job of providing consumers with the products and services they want and need.

But of course, in order to understand what products they want, the companies need to listen to them FIRST, deliver the goods, listen to them again, change, deliver the goods again with improvements and so on. This quote shows how backwards the thinking is - companies need to do more up front to understand the needs of the market (traditionally thought of as research, which is of course a form of a conversation) before they invest in producing the goods.

The post goes on to say:

I would also point out what may seem counterintuitive to conversationalists - the fact that sometimes silence is the best indicator of consumer satisfaction.

Apparently, the author - Drama 2.0 - hasn’t read one of Kathy Sierra’s best blog posts called Be Brave or Go Home, which explains why customer silence is not golden if your company lives in the zone of mediocrity. Nor have they read Ken Blanchards book called Raving Fans, nor do they understand the importance and impact of Word of Mouth.

The thing is, that if I buy a computer from Dell (and I am a Mac guy, so the chances are slim), I hope I don’t have to talk to Richard Binhammer about a problem, but he hopes I talk to him about how much I love it. Either way, because I know that they are listening, as humans do to one another, I know that he will help to fix any problems. I know that their intentions are to serve us with better products and that sometimes shit happens. If the intention is made clear that they are not a faceless corporation here to take my money and harm me by selling me bad products/services, I would rather buy from them then anyone else.

This is our philosophy at The Conversation Group, and the main purpose we came together as an agency - to help more companies embrace the spirit of conversation with markets and to move beyond marketing by discovering, engaging and serving their markets in a more respectful and effective way.

Thanks to Rebecca Caroe from Creative Agency Secrets who pointed out this article called The problem with ‘conversational marketing’. (disclosure: two of the subjects of that post, Richard Binhammer and Shel Israel are friends) This is something I was writing about last summer in the post entitled, Stop the Insanity, Don’t Call it Conversational Marketing, and more recently in response to a Doc Searls post (keep getting better Doc, we’re with you) called Clues vs. Trains.

Technorati Tags: social media, conversational marketing, marketing, conversation, media, communications,

I won’t bother with an in-depth comparison right now, but it is seemingly obvious how Friend Feed Rooms replace mailing lists.

We can have them

• public or private
• open or closed (members invite other members or not)
• we can message each other
• we can share links
• we can let people know what we like
• we can have a comment thread
• we get to have it on the Web instead of locked in our email inbox
• it has RSS feed so I can access it in my Google Reader

This is the first real step that I have seen towards what I originally wanted to do with Insytes back in 2005… it still has a long way to go to get that full potential, but maybe I can get a consulting gig with them, or some options or something and I can help them really build it all out as the best communications and collaboration tool on the Web.

For now though, join us in the Social Media Club Friend Feed Room and lets start sharing and learning from each other as it was originally intended

Odd question isn’t it?

I mean, surely Social Media is doing a lot for the cause, helping people spread the word via blogs, organize efforts and make everyone aware of our global climate crisis. Sarah Perez (love her stuff) even has a great post just today on How to Use Social Media for Social Change. Of course I agree, as evidenced by my early post on the Importance of Social Media and Amanda Chapel’s constant attacks against me (which I gleefully laugh at as he continues to give me more attention).

So what made me stop trying to fight my insomnia and get out of bed to write such a seemingly silly blog post at 430am this morning?

During the course of the work I have been doing with Intel lately, I have been researching the enterprise IT market and learning a lot about what they have been doing to reduce power consumption while maintaining performance across all there product lines. This CIO survey from March has some interesting details on “The Greening of IT”. It’s a very big and important topic for the industry and each of us. My friend Bill Kircos from Intel tells me that Intel is the largest buyer of reusable/renewable energy as ranked by the EPA (story on Treehugger.com). They are also extending their Greening Efforts across their operations in other important ways such as removing lead from their chips. Even my wife (Kristie Wells) is researching carbon offsets for her company Joyent.

At the same time, I have been thinking a lot about the big data portability issue (which I fully support) and whether or not the recent Facebook/Google challenge over Friend Connect might mean that we are seeing “The Twilight of the Open Web” (a topic of discussion for next months Social Media Club meeting in San Francisco - details to come).

In talking with some folks at the Executing Social Media conference last night, I mentioned this event idea and Nathan Gilliatt remarked we will always have some walled gardens and I replied with my standard “we can’t have walls, we need semi-permeable membranes”, meaning there needs to be some trust filter to keep the bad actors out and the good actors safe - which is the role Facebook claims to be playing in safegauding its users privacy from Friend Connect sites.

This is similar to the debate around Flickr and Zoomr and an open API for user portability which was basically about (paraphrasing) not allowing people to have all their data and photos transferred to a site where they may not be able to take it somewhere else in the future. As Stuart Butterfield said “we definitely should approve requests from direct competitors as long as they do the same … fair’s fair”. Or as Marc Canter infamously said at BloggerCon IV, “If you’re gonna suck, you gotta spit“.

Now look at the great and hugely popular service that FriendFeed and SocialThing are providing, a true value for sure, but it is duplicating, and in some cases tripling the amount of storage used for the same content.

Was also thinking about TubeMogul, which Tim Street mentioned during a session yesterday and which I also happen to love. It allows you to send your video to any and all of the video sharing sites you want all at once, saving us a great deal of time in distributing our video. Of course, there are also the people who take copies of it and upload it to other servers and other sites…

So these thoughts and discussions lead to me wondering about the impact that all of this data duplication we are creating with our Social Media is creating. Multiple hard drives, redundant systems, ultimately needing to head to a landfill or get partially recycled and replaced. Perhaps it is merely distributing the consumption we would have had anyway, but I have over 8,000 photos on Flickr and if I put them on Zoomr too that would be (@3MB each) 24 GB of extra storage space I am taking up on primary systems, plus backups - then the electricity to run it all.

Jake McKee talks about how he and his wife upload the same photos to their different Flickr accounts, what if they switched and then switched again. Of course, we also have a ton of different equipment we are using for creating and consuming media. Just today I had my M-Audio podcast rig, my Flip video camera, my phone and my iPod sitting in front of me next to my 3rd iBook/MacBook. The impact of manufacturing and disposal and power consumption of all this stuff we are using is just huge.

Of course, this is, most importantly, the method through which the whole of our society is improving, growing smarter and becoming more connected.

It’s obviously ok for the storage folks bottom lines and the power company and even me as a Social Media evangelist, but is Social Media bad for the environment? Shouldn’t we all be thinking more about Storage Conservation instead of Duplication?

It looks like we are going to have a good turn out on Thursday morning for the Social Media Breakfast, but we would love to see you there too. Jeff Pulver will be in town as our host / guest / leader which makes this quite a special event.  If you didn’t see it, there was this great article on the event and Jeff’s Social Networking Toolkit in Fortune a few weeks ago called “Geography, social media and breakfast.”  Of course, Jeff has done a great job further expanding on an idea Bryan Person started last August in Boston.

Please do register for the Social Media Breakfast on Eventbrite if you are planning on coming so we can have a decent head count.  Breakfast is at the “world famous” Sears Diner by Union Square in San Francisco, where we will be meeting downstairs…  A big thanks to Cathryn Hrudicka of Creative Sage for helping to put this together with Jeff, and for being such a strong supporter in our community.

This is exactly the sort of thing we want to promote more of through Social Media Club, and was one of the community events we spoke about bringing into what we called the “Coalition of the Willing” at SxSW last week (more on that soon).

A few weeks ago I got an offer for one of the domains I own, socialmediajobs.com/ then I got another, and another. Since they were all through brokers, except for one, I never really had a conversation with any of them to see what they might really be willing to pay, but I did realize I need to start doing something with all the domains I own. So I decided I should just go ahead and finally launch it myself rather than accepting the offer, which was around $1,000.

Fortunately, I remembered talking with JobThreads a year ago, which has since made their service much easier to use and much more friendlier to launch in this way. At the moment, and for the next month, job postings will be free, but after that I hope to start charging some fair fee. So that’s where you come in. What’s fair for a job posting site? Is the $75 Craigslist charges fair?

In the meantime, check it out and let me know what you think I should do to make it better…

Please take this survey www.contentconnections.com/socialmedia2007 to help me with my book - keep reading to find out why…
There is a lot going on these days and a lot of different books being written about what’s happening, with an apparent emphasis on social media, communities and user generated content. As the founder of Social Media Club, it should be obvious that I am writing a book focused on the rise and importance of social media - to a large extent, I am writing that book, but as Doc Searls says, there is something of greater significance happening beneath the meme.
While I am still torn on the title of my book, it is now being envisioned as “The Social Media Playbook.” The goal for me is to help people understand the era we are now entering and enable professionals to maximize the effectiveness of their participation on behalf of the organizations they represent. For me, this is best seen through the framework of Look, Listen, Join, Lead. In that it is as much art as it is science though, the book will be peppered with PURPOSE - or rather, illustrating the answer to WHY through metaphor and real world stories.  Ultimately, social media is the spark that has ignited the movement towards the HUMANIZATION OF THE ENTERPRISE, which I will illuminate better over the coming weeks.
There is quite a bit to get done in the next 3 months, which is not a lot of time for 60,000 words - especially considering the problems I have with Repetitive Stress Injury, but it will be done. I will be revealing more details of the book very soon (within the week) along with my plans for leveraging the best practices of “social publishing” I have been researching, but I am torn on a few decisions we need to make, so would love to hear what you think is the most effective way to leverage social media in creating the book here in the comments, or even call me 408.834.0884
More urgently though, I am participating in a survey put together by David Brake of Content Connection together with entrepreneur extraordinaire Lon Safko to determine what you really know about Social Media and what you would like to understand more deeply. Receiving the gift of your time to take the survey, and better still, to pass it forward to others, would be a huge help in getting the right information into the book. There are a few iPod nano’s being given away as prizes, your responses/personal information will be kept private and your participation will be recognized appropriately.

Please take the survey here www.contentconnections.com/socialmedia2007. Please note that Lon is a friend, but not a co-author of my book - he is writing his own book on the subject from a different angle. It is an interesting situation, to be collaborating in this way on market research, but to essentially be competing for attention in the market once the books are published - I think of it as an experiment in co-creation and co-opetition, which in and of itself makes for an interesting case study…  Then again, this is just a more explicit expression of support similar to what I have been giving to others such as Paul Gillen, Geoff Livingston, David Meerman Scott, Shel Israel/Robert Scoble, David Weinbergber and Debie Weil.  I expect I will be doing the same with Charlene Li and Tara Hunt’s upcoming books - each of whom has a valuable perspective to be considered that helps us all move along in the right direction, which is my ultimate goal - to help make the world a better place by sharing what we know.
More to come very soon…

Wow - can’t believe how long this has been in draft mode - I am all over the place over the coming months - hopefully we can catch up at some point in person and chat over some chai tea perhaps?

Today and Tomorrow, I am in San Diego on a social networking panel with Geoff Livingston, author of Now is Gone. We are doing a podcast from my room overlooking the ocean very shortly… the panel is tomorrow morning for the CEA Industry Forum.

Next week I am in New York City from October 22-24. On Tuesday night (October 23) I am doing a Social Media Club talk on “Business is Personal (Again)” with Howard Greenstein and on Wednesday I am doing a short interactive session at the Social Media Summit. This is going to be one heckuva trip east. I will also be heading out to New York again the following week for a little networking shindig we are doing on Monday October 29 and will be available in the afternoon/evening for some quick meetings on Tuesday October 30.

I am also going to be down in Austin on November 5 & 6. We will be hosting a Social Media Club conversation on Monday November 5 and then hosting a paid Social Media Workshop all day on Tuesday November 6 sponsored by the great folks from Dell. If you are interested in attending the workshop, use my promo code CHRIS so that I can prove to the other great workshop leaders (Shel Israel, Connie Reece and Kami Huyse) that people actually read my blog! From Austin, I need to leave a few minutes early and head to the airport for an early morning speech with Marshall Kirkpatrick at BlogWorld & New Media Expo on November 7.

I am then attending the Society for New Communications Research Annual Symposium in Boston on December 5-6… Heading into next year, thanks to a recommendation from our good friend Shel Israel, I am speaking at Frost & Sullivan’s Sales and Marketing Mind Exchange.

By this time tomorrow morning I will be on a plane on my way to Portland, then Seattle on Wednesday and Vancouver on Thursday - just about a day in each city before flying back on Friday afternoon just in time for Chris and Kristie’s Wine-a-palooza Holiday Extravaganza. I have a few time slots to sit and chat if you are interested in saying hi. I am looking forward to seeing many of you on the road and many more here at my house later in the week…  More details are in this post I wrote over at Social Media Club on the NW Round Tables.

I am just so tired at the moment from the past two 14+ hour days here in DC, its hard to even write this short post.  Things are just hopping though, and I could not be happier - though I also reminded my big brother Zez tonight that we all need to be careful what we wish for, because sometime we get it.  In this case, it is all good, but there is not a lot of room for downtime or relaxation.

Last night there was just under 40 people at the Social Media Club DC Round Table - this was out of 40+ registrations and a few walk ins who were not on the list (thanks to everyone who let me know they could not make it.  As with most of these events, I got very few photos and we have one hour and forty five minutes of audio. Better still, about half the group went out to Buffalo Billiards by Dupont Circle afterwards where we continued the conversation over beers and some cheap good food.

I have so many links to post to the people I met, but I gotta get some sleep… Will write something more in depth tomorrow on the Social Media Club blog.