Kandace Hudspeth // FitLife Coach. Athlete. Strategist.

Be sure to read David’s Logic+Emotion article today “5 Challenges Social Business Will Face”. Check it here http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2009/08/sbd.html  

Make sure to read the comments.
Here is mine…..
Great article, it always helps to frame the challenges so that we are prepared and mindful as we evolve. The one category you should consider adding is education. You wrote something a few days back around, “ learning to be small again”. I absolutely love this concept. Not an easy process, although reverse engineering never really is. Education will be critical for relearning openness, optimal communication methods, creative writing, ideation, staying on top of trends, and leveraging trends to spot opportunity. Not to mention the how reliant integration, governance, culture, and measurement are on education. It’s strange to me how little companies invest in this category. Agency and client side alike. Social business success is people driven- placing the power in the hands of all employees at all levels- a responsibility that should be taken incredibly seriously!

 Today vs. Tomorrow……

1. Aggregation not destination!
   • Today’s web-the trend is becoming more and more prevalent , especially with social networks. Instead of searching disparate communities or sites I can go to a single source to find what I am looking for, it helps me organize and simplify my social networking experience.
   • Tomorrow’s web- I won’t have to go to a topical destination or provide any context to experience this, the web will auto aggregate content that meets my needs and wants across all categories and provide the necessary filters for me to quickly and easily access relevant content.
2. Auto Identification systems will replace registration.
   • Today’s web- I must log-in and tell the web who I am
   • Tomorrow’s web- the  web will know who I am and I won’t have to tell it anything
3. Targeted experiences will be delivered from implicit social  data and behaviors.
   • Today’s web- I  must tell the web my interests and likes or how I want to customize my experience
   • Tomorrow’s web- The web will anticipate my needs, expectations, and desires
4. Personal CPM will measure influence and form a business model.
   • Today’s web-  I can leverage my network to gather or distribute information
   • Tomorrow’s web- I will be rewarded for my network quality, size, and the influence I have on that network
5. Social commerce will change how people shop. They will rely on each other’s real-time opinions when making their purchase decisions.
   • Today’s web-  I can review product ratings and reviews, I can see  positive and negative associations but they are not from my circle of trust and therefore not as meaningful
   • Tomorrow’s web- I will be able to leverage the opinion of my network real-time as I decide on a purchase
6. Social CRM will drive transparent and authentic collaboration between
   the company and its customer, forcing a mutually beneficial relationship, and enabling co-creation of products and services.
   • Today’s web-  I have disconnected touch points and interactions with a brand and its potential customer base.
   • Tomorrow’s web- I will see the value I bring to a brand in my everyday digital experiences

In a recent tweet, I asked, the question why is there so much confusion about how to measure social media? Social media is trackable, it requires some action to be taken. Actions or interactions like posting, reviewing, rating, commenting, sharing, connecting, etc.

Engagement is the big picture, the summary of all trackable actions. Engagement = Time spent+ action taken+ brand takeaway? Web analytics professionals feel that  engagement is a metric is a function of a visitors lifetime of visits and actions taken on a particular site. There seems to me much confusion about how exactly to standardize the actual  engagement equation. This is probably because it will need to be customized to comprehend brand objectives. The equation may look different for depending on business and brand objectives. The following link http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/19896.asp includes a video of industry representatives as they discuss “engagement” and how best to measure it.

Forrester Research has written a lot about this topic. Back in 2007 a Forrester analyst proposed what he calls the four components of engagement. They include involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. These components are measured both online (web analytics, log files, brand monitoring services) and offline (surveys, focus groups, etc). The goal is to try to provide a 360 view of customers actions. According to Forrester the four components of engagement  can be measured in several ways. The involvement component will paint the picture of how often a visitor comes to your site, how long they stay, and the amount of content they consume. The interaction component uncovers many of the social actions a visitor can take,  conversions, and possible purchases. The third component may take some human interaction to interpret and is not as easily captured by raw numbers. Intimacy can be understood by monitoring and analyzing the things people say about a brand or the tonality (positive, negative, neutral) of a blog post. The fourth component is influence. I am sure you are aware of the overwhelming affect of word of mouth. Influence is a loyalty metric, it will uncover how likely someone is to recommend your brand, product, or service.  To read more on the Forrester components of engagement check out the Forrester blog http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/2007/08/new-research-on.html

What do you think about measuring engagement? Do you feel it is am online metric or does it stretch beyond and capture the holistic picture of customer interactions? A 360 view sure would be nice! Any thoughts?

Another wonderful day in the groundswell!!! If you didn’t attend the Twebinar, you missed  on a fine example of how the participatory culture operates.

Today I attended the CrossTech Media / Radian6 twebinar  Game Changing Moves - Doing Business with Social Media. This is part one of  a three part series, part two titled “Who really owns your brand” (Thursday, July 22) and part three “The importance of listening” (Tuesday, Aug 19).

The event was hosted by Chris Brogan and included interviews with over 30 of today’s big players in social media. The interviewees discussed how they are currently using tools like social communities, blogs, wikis, and podcasts to start conversations and engage audiences in ways.  Of course the key point in regards to how to enter the social space are… LISTEN to you customers!  This point is critical to successful entry into doing business with social media and is highlighted in Groundswell, a book by two Forrester Research analysts (I recommend you read it!)

Earlier this week MediaPost reported on Ogilvy’s big three social media strategies for 2008. Guess what number one was? Give up?

• Number 1- listening
• Number 2-  working with partners who enable marketers to engage in a series of conversations about their brands
• Number 3-  unlocking and unleashing of content

Ok back to the twebinar, over 1000 people registered for the first session. If you are following @twebinars you can see comments from other social media activist and even do a little networking.  According to @chrisbrogran companies like Microsoft, AT&T, IBM, Weber Shandwick, Fleischman Hillard registered for the Twebinar. This is great news!

Go to www.summize.com and search twebinar  or #tweb to get a plus on the conversation.

Check out-  http://twebinar.com

Follow on Twiter- @twebinars, @chrisbrogan, @davidalston and speakers from our twebinar (you can find the speakers Twitter addresses on the site)

What does it really take to win in today’s search landscape? SEO is much bigger than just onsite optimization. But what does the search landscape look like today? In a recent search illustrated release, Elliance depicts the many components of today’s search landscape. The infographic shows the almost 50/50 split of the importance placed on components of websites (i.e. site content, articles, blogs, news, images, video, RSS) and the workings of social communities (i.e. social bookmarking, networking, shopping, social sites) to achieve top rankings on the SERPS.

Social communities have created an powerful distribution channel. Today’s social communities are full of people like you and me. We rely on a participatory culture to find, sort , and share information. We share text, images, audio, and video by passing along links to friends within our social network. Links within the content that is being shared within communities are crawled by search engines to drive valuable traffic to your site. Now, it is important to mention that this concept is reliant upon the creation of useful and interesting content. Boring or non-engaging content does not have a viral effect. The important thing about social media is that it provides the arena to for sharing and creates an opportunity for building link popularity. This does not mean that it is ok to forget about onsite optimization! So make sure you remember the more traditional elements of search engine optimization when building your site and developing your useful and engaging content to be shared via social communities.

Check out search illustrated info-graphic from SearchEngineLand: Search World 2007- http://searchengineland.com/080610-082238.php

Ice Cream could possibly be my biggest weakness. It is the downfall of any diet, the treat you hate to love or love to hate? If you follow my tweets you would know how hard I have been working out lately. I am on a mission to get back into shape. Maybe even back into competition shape (we will see)? Anyway, I have been staying far away from ice cream but not social media!! Social media and ice cream- who would have guessed they had so much in common? Have you ever had to explain what you do to your mom or maybe your grandparents? If you need to keep it simple- Common Craft- in Plain English videos are an excellent tool! So watch the video and see what social media has in common with ice cream- you know you love ice cream!!!

Watch Social Media in Plain English- http://www.commoncraft.com/socialmedia

PS- If you don’t know what tweets are, you may want to watch the Twitter in Plain English video also lol. Here is the link- http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter

Check out Common Craft- http://www.commoncraft.com

A few days ago I came across the BusinessWeek-Rapleaf study on the social media gender gap, no surprises here- girls rule and boys drool. The study found that although both men and women are active on social sites, the women dominate. Key findings include….

• Behavioral trends stating that women’s online social interactions are relationship driven and men’s are transaction oriented
• Married men stay away for social sites (with the exception of LinkedIn) and married women are flocking to them
• Women are casual gamers and spend a lot of time beautifying their profiles and sharing family photos
• Men spend more time playing first person action games and are likely to leave social sites after getting married

The Rapleaf study recommends the next big web2.0 sites should target women and it looks like Forbes agrees. Forbs.com will be launching a new social networking site for women, called the Executive Women’s Network. The site will enable women to connect, share knowledge, create profiles, and take in targeted content. This is the second social initiative in recent months, early this year Forbes launched a social site for C level executives called the AnswerNetwork.
The coolest thing about this study and Forbes new social site is that is recognizes the need for more women leaders in advertising and social media. The web is social and women are social creatures, seems like a no brainier to me!!!

Check out the BusinessWeek-Rapleaf study http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2008/tc20080516_580743_page_2.htm

When I moved to NYC a few years back I had to do a lot of purging of personal belongings, I have to admit I found it to be a cleansing experience. I even cut my shoe collection in half, which was very hard for me to do! One of the hardest things for me to let go of was my new Lexus IS, I loved that car. I mentioned in a previous post that my current assignment has me spending a lot of time in Phoenix and you definitely need a car in Phoenix. Anyway I never pictured myself owning a VW Jetta, it just didn’t feel like me. I knew I need to be practical and not go crazy (if you knew my shopping habits, you would know this is not normal behavior) so I decided to get it. I have had the car now for about two months and I can honestly say that I have never received better service. The car is even growing on me. Ok that was a really long intro , now to the point of this post…

VW’s “what people really want” interactive billboard and microsite- VW is using the 3,685-square-foot ABC Super Sign to connect with the active community. The billboard is an extension of the “what people want“campaign that includes a microsite- vw.com/whatthepeoplewant, online banners, tv spots, and other OOH executions. The foundation of the campaign is a national polling effort that collects user generated votes via mocrosite or mobile devise and then distributes the results across multiple platforms. As reported in ADWEEK the campaign is a success “At press time, there have been a total of 977,983 votes and 77,113 polls collected. Up to 500 poll questions run live at any one time.” Pretty cool stuff, you should check it out!!! http://www.vw.com/vwhype/whatthepeoplewant/en/us/

Read the ADWEEK Article http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/creative/features/e3idda2f1661c03a55f9e59920b711d756f