Brian Solis' Engage and how to use it

by Josh Bernoff

Here's what I think about Brian Solis' book Engage.  You should buy it. And you shouldn't necessarily read it start to finish. But you'll find yourself diving in again and again when you need help with . . . just about anything social.

To be fair, I was intimidated. I had promised Brian a review, but the thing is 382 pages long. And Brian has made some unfortunate choices -- Chapters 3 through 14 (of 25 total) have the titles "The New Media University: Social Media 101," "The New Media University: Social Media 201" and so on. It doesn't exactly invite you in.

And yet, it turns out this book is going to be one of the most useful things out there for anyone social.

Start with the theme. Brian's manifesto is "Engage or Die." This is what drives him to write, and it's a good start. It's a good twist on a theme that's been embraced, in one form or another, by the wide variety of people out there who are trying to build social applications.

This is followed by what may be the most comprehensive, believable book on social media available anywhere. Starting with the social media statistics (Chapter 2) and continuing with the "101, 201, ..." chapters I mentioned earlier, this book hits everything, and I mean everything, that there is to know about social applications. There's a complete list of tools and technologies. There are not one, but two definitions of Social Media, of which I prefer the shorter:

Social media is any tool or service that uses the Internet to facilitate conversations.

There's a list of the top 10 monetization trends for social media and microcommunities. There's a nice discussion of how to separate (or blend) your personal self from your corporate self. In fact, whatever you're looking for, it's here. Not one, but several complete sets of social media guidelines from the likes of Intel and IBM, plus a template for your own.

Brian is not shy about quoting others. For example, the Forrester/Groundswell Social Technographics Profile gets a full writeup here, along with other competing systems.

It's a little difficult to get a read on Brian's position on some issues, since he typically quotes both (or all) sides of an argument. But there is no better way than bone up for that argument than with this book.

So, here's what you should do.

If you're new to social media, I'm a bit surprised you're showing up at this blog, but in any case, read this book cover to cover. It will be worth it.

If you're experienced, buy this book and go back into it when you need help. Use the index, the glossary, and the other tools in this book to find what you're looking for. Because whatever it is you're looking for, it's here. When you're preparing that presentation, looking for that example, or trying to convince your boss, you'll find yourself looking in this book for help.

If you're a professor teaching social media, recommend this for your students.

Brian, thanks for putting this all together, it must have been quite an effort. We appreciate it.

Predictions for the Groundswell in 2010 -- Twitter gets serious or gets bought

by Josh Bernoff

Emily Riley and our whole Groundswell team have just published our predictions for 2010. We serve interactive marketers, so these are marketing focused predictions. They are:

1. Companies' use of social councils will attain budgets and power.
2. Listening Platform insights will go mainstream.
3. Marketers will focus less son fuzzy social media metrics and more on real marketing metrics.
4. Twitter will become profitable or get acquired.
5. Facebook will get more hands-on to protect users' -- and its own -- interests.
6. Incompatible mobile devices and siloed social applications will shatter the social experience.

If there is one overarching theme, it's that social technology is now a mainstream part of what marketers do. Items like using Listening Platforms (e.g. Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Radian6) and a focus on metrics that matter to marketers are signs of this shift.

I'd also like to draw attention to the Twitter prediction. Twitter has been fiddling around, growing like mad without a business model, for years now. But in in 2010, growth is not sufficient. One of two things will happen. Either Twitter will have a business generating $100 million at an annualized rate by the end of 2010, or it's going to get bought by the likes of Google, Facebook, or Microsoft. I don't believe it can continue as a huge force that has no visible means of support. Do you?

Advertising will change forever

by Josh Bernoff

Here's one of the things we do at Forrester Research: we interview as many marketers as we can about their plans, identify trends and project future likely conditions, and then we put together some numbers to make a projection. If you've ever seen a Forrester projection, it comes from a process like this.

This means that inside every projection is an idea or ten about the future. Those ideas can be powerful, and they come from research with marketers and consumers.

My colleague at Forrester, Shar Van Boskirk, just published our five-year interactive marketing forecast. The idea inside it is the real kicker.

In this recession, marketers have learned that interactive marketing is more effective, and advertising less effective, per dollar spent. While budgets for online have decreased, they decreased less than other budgets. Six out of ten marketers we surveyed agreed with the statement "we will increase budget for interactive by shifting money away from traditional marketing." Only 7% said "we have no plans to increase our marketing budget."

Unlike the last recession, digital marketing is no longer experimental. Now it looks more like advertising is inefficient, relative to digital. More than half of the marketers we surveyed said that effectiveness of direct mail, television, magazines, outdoor, newspapers, and radio would stay the same or decrease within three years. In contrast, well over 70% expected the effectiveness of channels like created social media, online video, and mobile marketing to increase.

The result is that digital, which will be about 12% of overall advertising spend in 2009, is likely to grow to about 21% in five years. Along the way overall advertising budgets will decline.

This is huge.

It means we are all digital marketers now, since digital is at the center of many campaigns anyway.

It means media is in trouble, or at least in the middle of a transformation. For example, online video ads, which will be about $870 million this year, will grow to over $3 billion in 2014. What will this do to networks plans to put more of their shows online in places like Hulu. How will it accelerate some newspapers plans to become more and more centered around online?

And it means that social "media", which will account for $716 million this year between social network campaigns and agency fees, will generate $3 billion in five years. And this doesn't even count displays ads on social networks (which are in the display ads category.) Of all the parts of digital marketing, social network marketing one is poised for the most explosive growth.

Pundits have been declaring the end of mass media and advertising for years now. From my 14 years of experience analyzing this stuff, I've learned that things die very slowly, but there are real trends you can see. If you're in advertising, you'd better learn to speak digital, because that's the way the world is going.

Note (7/22): This was reprinted at the Ad Age site, where there are over 50 additional comments from marketers.

Social technology for health care: check out the imc² point of view

Amber Benson, a strategist at digital marketing agency imc², has also been researching use of social technologies in health care. Since her perspective comes from within the company that developed marketing programs including the groundbreaking alli circles campaign, it's well worth checking out.

You can download the imc² paper "Is Social Media Right For Your Healthcare Brand" from their site. We interviewed Amber and her team for our own pharma research, and her thinking influenced mine, as you'll see from reviewing the paper. We agree that carefully examining the conditions to be treated along dimensions of use and involvement is crucial. For instance, I like their criteria for evaluating the level of investment a community is likely to get from people with a given condition:

Outcome investment represents a patient’s relationship to a condition, a combination of several factors, which include severity of symptoms, visibility of symptoms, social impact of condition, and potential morbidity. Outcome investment answers two key questions:

• How much does someone have to gain by actively seeking a resolution to symptoms or a
treatment for the condition?

• Are the benefits of resolution greater than the potential downside for identifying with this
condition or brand?

Any health care company pursuing a social strategy should give these ideas a thorough review.

Social Strategy for Exciting (and Boring) Brands

By Josh Bernoff

(From my Marketing News column.)

There are two kinds of brands in the world. If you are a marketer, you know what I mean. There are brands people like to talk about, and brands they don’t.

Brands of the first kind – the brands that marketing thinker Rohit Bhargava calls “talkable” – are uncommon. Apple’s iPhone is a talkable brand. So is Harley-Davidson. If you market a talkable brand, you have the luxury of tapping into customers who love you, but you’ll have to be careful – those customers have already decided what the brand stands for, and woe unto you if you go against their wishes.

Brands that people don’t like to talk about – I’ll call them “boring” brands – are everywhere. If, like most marketers, you market a boring brand, then you’re really earning your living as a marketer. That’s because you are trying to get people interested in something they don’t really care about.

I’ve been analyzing social strategies for both kinds of brands, and they form an interesting contrast.

 

Let’s start with the talkable brands. In a recent survey [Forrester report "The Social Tools Consumers Want From Their Favorite Brands"], we asked online consumers whether they’d like to interact with various forms of social application with their favorite brands. Forty-two percent said they would, but the types of interactions they preferred were varied. About one in four consumers would interact with these brands in a discussion forum, one in five would watch videos, and one in six would be interested in connecting with them through a social network profile, like a Facebook page. Only 12% want to read a blog about the brand, which reinforced the earlier research we’d done, showing that blogs are the least trusted form of communication between companies and customers.

What does this mean for the marketer? It means connecting with those enthusiasts is going to be more than a full-time job. First, examine the applications they’ve already set up on their own – their discussion forums, their blogs, their own videos and social network groups. Figure out what you want to join up with, and what you want to create. And you’ll have to create multiple applications, because as this research shows, your customers don’t agree with each other about where they’d prefer to connect with you.

As a result, you’ll probably have make sure they all to those social network profiles, communities, and videos connect with one another, and with the sites your fans already have. We recently worked with a B2B company that faces this exact problem – its customers use its products, love them, and have already set up user groups online. The good news: whatever the company does, it will have active participation. The challenge is not messing up the relationships already percolating in the existing user group.

The boring brands have different problem, but social applications can help them, too. [Forrester Report: "Social Technology Strategies for 'Boring' Consumer Brands".] The key with boring brands is to get people talking about their problems, since they won’t talk about your brand. In advertising, you can force messages on people watching other things. In a social context, this fails miserably.

Applications that talk about customers problems create “borrowed relevance,” since you generate talk they care about, then make yourself a part of it. American Express (credit cards are boring, face it) created the Members’ Project, a contest to choose deserving charities, since it realized that charity would generate more passion than credit cards. And in perhaps the most dramatic example, Procter & Gamble knew girls wouldn’t talk about tampons, but would talk about music, cliques, and school, so it created beinggirl.com as a vehicle to deliver (very quietly) the occasional feminine care products message.

Borrowed relevance is a versatile strategy. Liberty Mutual (in another boring category, insurance) wrapped itself in relevance by creating The Responsibility Project, a community about moral decisions. Johnson & Johnson built a Facebook page for mothers of ADHD kids – because, as with all medications, its ADHD drug is boring but its sufferers generate interesting problems. Doritos invited its customers to make ads in the 2007 Superbowl, since an ad contest is more exciting – and more social – than a corn chip.

Regardless of whether your brand is talkable or boring, as you launch these social applications, you’ll generate something very valuable – people who care about your brand, or at least the problems it solves. I’ve begun to ask brand marketers a question: who are your most engaged customers? I don’t want an answer like “women 25 to 34 with at least one child.” I want an answer like “Emily DiBernardo, she lives in Kansas and she just can’t stop talking about us.” With social applications, you’ll find Emily.

If your brand is talkable, your social efforts will surface the brand enthusiasts who have the most influence. If it’s boring, your social applications will help you find your rare but valuable brand enthusiasts, or even generate a few. Pay attention to these people. Because as advertising clutter rises and word of mouth becomes more important, they’re about to become some of your most important corporate assets.

How to create a social application for life sciences without getting fired

by Josh Bernoff

That's the title of my latest report, and it's not a joke. All your social application instincts here will get you in trouble. In the topsy-turvy world of regulated medical products and devices, the FDA calls the shots -- and it hasn't made clear what's allowed. In fact, one person I interviewed for this report called back extremely worried about getting fired if I spoke about the company's application, even though it's right out there on the Internet for everyone to see. The level of concern and paranoia here is breathtaking.

To conduct this report I conducted 25 interviews, including 10 pharma companies. All the pharma company interviews were confidential for obvious reasons. (As usual, the report is available for clients only or for a fee. Or you can get the slides from my presentation at HealthCampBoston for free.)

Because of the regulation, I structured the report around risk. Since every company in the pharma industry tells me "we are the most conservative company in the pharma industry", I decided to focus on who has the most to gain from social applications. Because if you don't have a lot to gain, the regulatory issues mean you may have a lot at risk, and it's not worth it. Among the important risks are companies violating rules on adverse events reporting, off-label usage, and fair balance.

This led me to the following chart:

In this chart we plot all the medical conditions we analyze on two scales. On the horizontal scale we locate points based on the question "Do the people with this condition participate in social media?" On the vertical, we use our judgment on how much those people could benefit from social applications.

For example, Depression is in the upper right quadrant ("Misery Loves Company") because it has socially active sufferers and because those people can benefit from helping each other out with support and information. At the other extreme, people with osteoporosis don't participate much (because they're older) and wouldn't get all that much out of it if they did.

The report lays out strategies based on which quadrant you're in. Upper right quadrant, you want to look at less conservative, more effective strategies like pre-moderated communities, like alli circles and sponsored communities like the type 1 diabetes community Juvenation, sponsored by Novo Nordisk.

If you're in "Connectors Who Don't Care" or "Lonely Fellow Sufferers," consider more conservative strategies like restricting open text fields, as AstraZeneca did with its Celebration Chain application for Arimidex, or vetted contests, like Fight HIV Your Way for BMS' Reyataz.

The safest strategies, like Listening Platforms, Communispace private communities, or working with the doctor community Sermo, are appropriate for all life sciences companies.

There's lot of other advice, but probably the most important is to involve the regulatory staff in your company early. Otherwise they'll shut you down before you launch. Get 'em in on the planning.

Looking forward to your reactions. And it sure would be great if the FDA would set some clear policies on this.

Why Social Media Sucks

by Josh Bernoff

(Republished from my Ad Age Digital Next contribution.)

Terminology matters.

As I speak with companies that want to engage with their customers in the online, social world, I continually find people confused -- as soon as they begin talking about "social media." The reason is the baggage that comes along with the word "media."

Media is something that media companies control, and media is overwhelmingly one-way. The online social world is about as two-way, multi-way, any-way as it can be. Nobody controls it, not even Facebook, which found it can't even change its own terms of service.

Media is something you can advertise in, in most cases. While you can advertise in social networks, that is the least interesting use for them.

Media is something people spend time with. So are online social interactions. That's a pretty tenuous reason to call it media.

Here are some words you can use to think more clearly.

If you want to refer to the whole world of people connecting and drawing strength from each other online, you can call it the Social Web, or the Social Internet. (Or you can call it the groundswell, if you wish.) This would include huge sites like MySpace, communities, YouTube, the blogosphere, and so on. (You could call the whole thing Web 2.0, but people often see this as referring to a set of technologies -- not the best way for advertisers to focus -- and doesn't get directly at the people-to-people aspects. The same applies to "social computing.")

If you want to build an environment where consumers or other customers connect with you and each other, call it a social application. This could include a community, a user-generated content site, or even adding ratings and reviews to your site. By calling these applications, you remind yourself that (1) it's going to take some effort to build it right, and (2) people will interact with it. And you may even remind yourself that (3) it could last a long time, rather than coming and going quickly as advertising campaigns and media do.

If you're going to participate in a big social site (Facebook, MySpace, even Twitter and YouTube fit this definition), call it a social network site (or just a social network, for short.) And you're often better off with a channel, or a profile, or an identity, than an ad in this environment, rather than an ad.

But no matter what you do, the sooner you stop thinking of the Social Web as media, the better off you are.

Should you email participants in your social applications?

by Josh Bernoff

A question is lurking in the back of many of my conversations with marketers who are pursuing social applications. In light of recent conversations, now's the time to ask.

Imagine for a moment that you are creating a community, a blog, or some other forum of social application for your customers and other people interested in your products. Being intelligent, you've set this up to best serve the needs of those people, and are hoping that it will benefit you.

Which statement would you agree with?

A. I should create an opportunity for them to opt in to my email lists, perhaps even during their registration. They're here because they're interested in my company, so they will potentially be interested in newsletters or product updates. And that's one of the ways I can prove this social application is worthwhile for the business.

B. The groundswell is about productive social interactions, not email! Running an application just as a feeder to the email list is missing the point. The application is this new marketing, not just a way to get emails.

Have at it, folks. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Social technology marketers bullish in face of recession

by Josh Bernoff

In February we published research based on our expectation that interactive marketers should continue their investments in social applications with a recession potentially coming.

Today we published the results of new research that shows that many interactive marketers actually plan increases in the face of recession. (Forrester clients will be able to see the whole report, others will see a summary when clicking on the link.) We asked this question:

Assuming the economy is in a recession in the next six months, how would you change your investment in interactive marketing overall?

Of 333 interactive marketers surveyed, 26% plan to increase their interactive marketing investments, and 46% will maintain them at current levels. (13% plan a decrease and 15% aren't sure.)

Where is that money going? Here's a chart from the report.

Social networks will get the largest number of increases, over 40% of those using it, along with user-generated content, blogs, and that old standby, email marketing. Every single form of online marketing we surveyed had at least half the marketers increasing or maintaining their investment (online display ads fared the worst; based on this sample it could see more decreases than increases.)

Note that the variation in N reflects the varying number of people familiar with or using each type of marketing. But for all the major technologies we got more than 100 responses.

Are these typical of marketers in general? Remember, the respondents are interactive marketers at large and medium-sized companies and ad agencies, so you can expect a little more optimism. But I believe these results reflect a real commitment to the power of interactive marketing over traditional advertising, which always suffers in a recession.

This is also evidence that in contrast to the bubble of 2001/2002, this housing-driven downturn hasn't spread to depress all investment in new ideas. People are recognizing that in a recession, social application investments are relatively cheap and deliver measurable results, despite their newness.

Our advice to marketers, as describe in the report, is this: measure what you do, so you can justify it when the axe comes. And build assets, not campaigns, it's a better use of your money.

Marketers reading this -- do you agree with what our panel said?

Why do people participate in social applications?

by Josh Bernoff

We continually get asked by our corporate clients: why do people participate in social activity online? What drives them?

In Groundswell we tried to collect as many reasons as we could, to reflect the diversity that drives all this participation. In this post I'll list as many as I can. But this is just a start -- participation is as varied as the people who participate.

• Keeping up friendships. Facebook is about connecting with people you know, to find out what's going on with them.
• Making new friends. We’ve all heard stories of people hooking up on social networks. According to Forrester's consumer surveys, one in five online singles has viewed or participated in online dating in the past year.
• Succumbing to social pressure from existing friends. People in the groundswell want their friends there, too. Your friends, your daughter, or your golf buddies are emailing you right now, asking you to join them.
• Paying it forward. Having seen that a site is useful, you may be moved to contribute.
• The altruistic impulse. This is Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake's "culture of generosity." It's what made Wikipedia possible. People just want to help.
• The prurient impulse. People are sexy, entertaining, and stupid. All that is on display in an endless parade of exhibitionism.
• The creative impulse. If you're a photographer, a writer, or a videographer, the Web is the perfect place to show your work.
• The validation impulse. People who post information on Yahoo! Answers, for example, would like to be seen as knowledgeable experts.
• The affinity impulse. If your bowling league, your PTA, or your fellow Red Sox fans have connected online, you can join and connect with people who share your interests.

Respect this diversity. Keep it in mind as you set up your social applications. Assuming everyone wants the same thing as you do -- or as each other -- is a big mistake.