MetzMash

December 2007: The Month In Business Social

One of my favorite strategy bloggers, Jeremiah Owyang, has been writing some excellent digest posts lately, and it's got me thinking. Some marketing managers simply lack the time to read weekly updates, so I'm going to package developments that impact the B2B and B2C social graph in a monthly roundup format.

Every day, while I commute, I read my feeds on my trusty iPhone, and jot down notes on my notepad. I'm gunning to figure out which ones will likely have a big impact for marketing managers and CMOs over the course of the next year. These roundups are going to come out once a month, generally near the end of the month.

Development #1: Advertising agency McKinney, eschewing the conventional corporate holiday card mailing, "incarerates" 24-year-old production coordinator Ben  Eckerson in a snowglobe. (12/13)

Why It Matters: The snowglobe was one of the most innovative B2B viral marketing campaigns ever. In addition to creating a solid social media-optimized campaign (live video feed, Facebook page, MySpace page, blog, social bookmark links, online store) McKinney leveraged the opportunity to create an HR bonanza, linking to "Jobs At McKinney" on every page. In its third day, CBS' Early Show picked up on the story.

Business Value: By using a lot of creativity and an even measure of social media to optimize a seemingly mundane corporate communications platform, the holiday card, McKinney made national news, dozens of blogs, and likely netted a few really creative young hires. I'll check in with them in 60 days to see if that part worked.

Actionable: In addition to reviewing the environmental impact of your company's holiday communications platform, brainstorm about how this social initiative can be more social media-ready. Could the spring company picnic invite be an internal viral video instead of 500 flyers in peoples' mailboxes?

Development #2: Worklight releases a secure Facebook application, Workbook. (12/18)

Why It Matters: It's one of the first Facebook SAAS (software-as-a-service) offerings, and for $10 per person (less volume discounts), it's probably the priciest Facebook application. It ties in the the Worklight 2.0 platform that's being used by Global 500 companies to the Facebook social networking platform.   

Business Value: Although many enterprise businesses see social networking as a time-sink and incompatible with their corporate culture, a growing number are beginning to see the light, no pun intended.  ZDNet's Dan Farber has the scoop on most of the features, and most of it looks like a cross between Spigit and a really hip-looking intranet. The key difference: many younger employees are already very comfortable working in the Facebook platform.

Actionable: Find out just how many of your employees are on Facebook. A departmental sample will do. Find out how many of them would be willing to use a secure intranet-linked application in Facebook, if they were certain that it would not use their personal information. You could also prepare a brief presentation on enterprise applications that live outside the firewall in social networks (Worklight) or prepare a discussion on whether the Google-led Open Social initiative will be compatible with enterprise networks.

Development #3: IBM launches a maven detector with the Lotus Notes application, called IBM Atlas. (12/18)

Why It Matters: Lotus Notes has one of the largest installed user bases of any integrated desktop client, and was the first already-installed enterprise app to integrate wikis, blogs and RSS. The bad news is that the platform has steadily been losing market share to Microsoft for the last four years.

Business Value: Companies can find out who the key expert is on a given topic (whether it's the CEO or the janitor) using an already-installed platform.

Actionable: Find out who within your company (if your company uses Lotus Notes) makes the collaboration decisions. Find out what they know about the informal network or the Valdis Krebs. If it's relevant, write a proposal that your brand evaluate Atlas. This recent article by Elizabeth Bennett could also be helpful background material. [Thanks to Paul Gillin for the last one!]

Development #4: Pligg prepares the launch of Fraxi, a product that allows people to set up quick Digg-like social news aggregators, much like Ning allows users to set up social networks in minutes. (12/19)

Business Value: Brands that aren't very tech-savvy will be able to set up vertical specific news-sites and enable community interaction, without overhauling their entire website.

Actionable: Talk to your team about how current conversational portals are doing on your site, in terms of engagement, and see if installing something like Fraxi could increase that level of engagement.

Development #5: Pew releases a Teens and Social Media study, updating their 2005 teen content creators study and releasing technographics data that will have a big impact.  (12/27)

Why It Matters: Nearly 2/3 of all online teens in 2007 engage in content creation, and that number is up from 57% in 2004. The study also highlights some key gender differences (girls are 14% more likely to blog than boys, and also 14% more likely to post online photos)

Business Value: While this news is not exactly earth-shattering, given the proliferation of YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and related content platforms, seeing the numbers behind the hunches makes tactical decisions easier for marketers.

Actionable: Tailor marketing programs that touch teen stakeholders to be in line with this technographic data.

Development #6: A huge uptick in the usage and amount of municipal social networks in medium-sized cities like Philadelphia and Albuquerque.

Why It Matters: As newspapers continue to fold and media continues a trend towards consolidation, small social networks are stepping in to fill the gap. The people who go to these networks are not "eyeballs." They are people engaging in conversation.

Business Value: These are highly visible conversations about and within a highly segmented local market. These social networks are a marketer's paradise, because the audience is highly engaged.

Actionable: If you work for a Convention and Visitors Bureau, make a case to start a social network, now. If you work for a newspaper, find out what steps your publication (or corporate parent) has taken to allow social collaboration and conversations on your web property. Because if it isn't happening on your site, it's happening somewhere else.

Thanks for taking the time to wade through the whole list. Please leave me comments if you think there were any big hits from December that I may have missed.

Sundeep Still Needs Your Help

I just received an email from Sundeep Ahuja, who I interviewed last week. It's lousy news. Sameer has relapsed, and he's going to need a bone marrow donor. This especially applies to any readers who are Indian-American or whose family members have come from the subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Maldives, Bhutan, Sri Lanka). If you can simply go and get a cheek swab and get registered as a potential bone marrow donor,you could be saving a life.

Also, If you're looking to help someone you know (and love) by setting up a bone marrow drive, the link to the document that carefully explains how to do that is here.

The Kind of Stuff To Show Legal When They Ask About UGC

My client Gretchen (at Mediazone) had the opportunity to check out a really cool talk given by Kaye Scholer last week in L.A.: Web 2.0: Social Networking, User Generated Content and Digital Advertising - Evolving Legal Issues. She loaned me the reader from the event, and, inside it, I happened upon a really cool piece by Alan Friel, which led me back to the legal technology section of law.com.

Finally, some comprehensive and clear stuff to show the legal department when they ask about UGC! Alan, welcome to the blogroll.

How Social Media Saves Lives: An Interview with Sundeep Ahuja

It was an all-too-familiar story to me; a young person, Sameer Bhatia, is diagnosed with AML (acute myelogenous leukemia). The same thing happened to one of my students three years ago, back when I was a high school English teacher by day (social media guru by night).

It's a life-and-death situation, and if you're member of a minority ethnic group (African-American, Indian-American), it's a hell of a lot harder to find bone marrow donors.

When I heard Sundeep Ahuja (also a Kiva board member) talking about his efforts to save the lives of his friends Sameer and Vinay at the >Play Conference at UC-Berkeley back in November, I knew I had to get an interview to see how he used social media as part of the effort to find bone marrow donors for his friends.

Ahuja's not taking all of the credit here; he gives an huge hats-off to Vinay's best friend, Priti Radhakrishnan, the driving force behind Team Vinay, and her partner-in-philanthropy, Robert Chatwani (Sameer's best friend). The team's actions in creating these two life-saving  campaigns are sure to have a ripple effect throughout the entire Indian-American community, as thousands more people are registered in bone marrow registries.

Hopefully, this interview can serve as a social media and PR template for people looking to emulate their efforts, and start saving lives on a low budget.

Is there a strategic document for persons wanting to emulate you in doing
non-profit (life-saving) type outreach?

Great question.  Though I haven't looked, I have to imagine that a document like this is somewhere out there on the web.  The Team did develop a short playbook on how to launch and manage corporate bone marrow registration drives, and this guide has been very helpful in getting programs launched within companies (particularly in Silicon Valley).   More generally speaking, I wrote a small post some time ago on the power of "empowerment marketing" and how we leveraged that at Kiva.org as well as for this campaign;  it can be read here. 

In your work with Priti Radhakrishnan, Robert Chatwani and others to find marrow donors for Sameer and Vinay, do you feel that social media really enabled your outreach, or that this could have been done as well in a Web 1.0 (circa 1997) kind of environment?

First off, I have to give credit where credit is due: Team Vinay and Team Sameer were both sizable operations of family and friends that mobilized their friends and eventually a whole community to drive bone marrow donor registrations to save the lives of Vinay Chakravarthy and Sameer Bhatia, both of whom had been diagnosed with Leukemia.  Vinay and Sameer, as South Asians, each had a 1 in 20,000 chance of finding a donor match given the relatively small number of registered bone marrow donors in the community.  The amazing efforts of Teams Vinay and Sameer have driven over 25,000 registrations since the summer -- one of which was a match for Vinay, and another for Sameer, and they are both doing well post-transplant (and at least three other patients have found matches as well!) 

As one of the folks working specifically on the communications side through the summer, I can say that the "social media" effort played a sizable (though fragmented, as much of it was decentralized) role in driving these registrations, largely because social pressure from friends (implicit and explicit) was a strong motivator.  Interestingly, though, given that the action was an off-line event (a cheek swab) usually held at specific times/places (registration drives), the helpvinay.org website, eVites, and emails drove more registrations than "Web 2.0" social networking groups and profiles.  The one unique "Web 2.0" contributor worth mentioning was a collaborative video application powered by RapOuts which was used to distribute messages from celebrities and community supporters alike encouraging registration and participation (disclaimer: I've since become an Advisor to RapOuts). I guess the best way to summarize is that "Web 1.0" (and pre-web technologies like the phone!) drove action, and "Web 2.0" supported with awareness.

How much did conventional press releases help in the outreach?

I don't believe there were any conventional press releases, per se, but we did engage a couple of individuals at PR agencies to help us get radio announcements, local televsion coverage, newspaper mentions, and the like.  Again, given the off-line nature of the action it's tough to quantify how much the PR actually motivated people to type in HelpVinay.org or HelpSameer.org, find a drive, and get registered -- but as a motivator for the Teams and the community, and as a method of raising general awareness, PR was quite helpful.

Do you feel that these press releases had a direct link to people of South Asian descent joining the bone marrow registry?

Though the outreach efforts described above were more broad stroke across neighborhoods and cities of varying ethnic makeup (even if targeted at neighborhoods and cities with large South Asian populations), there were also more focused outreach efforts to the South Asian community through community blogs, newsletters, and popular South Asian websites.  It's probably worth noting here that the biggest source of registrations were drives set up at community events, religious establishments, and workplaces; on location at these places with large South Asian populations, drive teams were able to tell people as they walked by about Vinay and Sameer, and then get them registered right there.

Was YouTube central in your project's outreach, or was it merely parenthetical?

Though a few of the videos were uploaded to YouTube and somewhat promoted, the Teams primarily leveraged the RapOuts platform for its video efforts, largely because it's built to power campaigns such as ours.

Have any similar drives been organized in your wake?

Though there are several patients I'm aware of currently in need of transplants--and so if you're reading this, are South Asian and are still not registered, please visit samarinfo.org/drives  to find a drive near you--I'm only aware of one other team that's coming together in a Team Vinay/Team Sameer type fashion; you can learn more at swab4bevin.com .

In the last week, some of the core folks involved with Team Vinay and Team Sameer soft-launched a campaign called "I-Believe".  At its core, the message of the campaign is that everyone has the power to save a life--the question is do you believe, and the answer is of course "I-Believe". 

The campaign is primarily targeted at college students and there are representatives on several campuses raising awareness for the campaign in an effort to drive Bone Marrow Donor registrations.  Core to the campaign is a video featuring several prominent and relevant South Asians, viewable at helpvinay.org and on Facebook as part of the "Help Vinay" application.  Earlier this week Sameer blogged about the need to continue the campaign for Bone Marrow Donor registrations in the South Asian community; you can read his post at helpsameer.org.

Thanks for this opportunity, Adam!   

I recognize that this is a "social media" blog; according to Wikipedia, " social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other." 

That definition encompasses Web 1.0 tools such as the helpvinay.org  website, making it very safe to say that social media played a PIVOTAL role in the Help Vinay and Help Sameer campaigns--and so in saving lives.   As Web 2.0 tools come into maturity over the next couple of years I hope they'll help in not only spreading awareness but in driving action, making similar campaigns in the future that much more effective!

When Showing Up Isn't Enough

About three years ago, I was a teacher at a small charter school in San Carlos, California. One of my 14-year-old students was diagnosed with leukemia. Her family's battle to find bone marrow donors was really gut-wrenching. A few weeks ago, local tech events guru Christian Perry wrote a posting on this blog about how to get people to show up at events. Well, if it's just a party or a networking event, then showing up is good enough.

But sometimes, people and organizations need to use social media to do really important things, like save lives. As profiled in Now Is Gone, the Red Cross has been using social media for nearly a year now to do this. And we have a special interview on Thursday with an individual in San Francisco who  used social media to do just that - to help save the lives of two friends, one of whom invented something that many of our readers use every day. Stay tuned. It's a busy week on MetzMash.

Facebook Pages Making Significant Traction For Major Label Myspace Musicians (But Indie MySpace Bands Are Hitting A Wall)

Facebook's Pages feature, which debuted only five weeks ago, is beginning to gain significant traction on  MySpace's four-year-old music platform,  with some interesting results.

Based on a sample of MySpace artist Top Tens in three categories (Unsigned, Indie and Major-Label),major-label bands that have engaged fans in  Facebook are seeing the greatest success in building a Facebook fan base, followed by independent label bands and unsigned bands.

For example, even though Alicia Keys and Nine Inch Nails (currently an unsigned artist) have similar-sized MySpace fan bases (Keys' 400k to Nails' 528K), Nine Inch Nails are only able to cultivate a fan base half the size of Keys' on Facebook, proportionately speaking. Tila Tequila, another MySpace phenomenon (#1 in the Unsigned category with 2.4M fans) is also only about half as able, proportionately, as #1 MySpace major-label artist Chris Brown to build out a Facebook fan base.

The trend is fairly clear across the categories: mainstream, major-label artists are, proportionately, 2.75 times more able to draw fans on Facebook, proportionate to their MySpace fan bases.

50% of the current MySpace Top Ten artists in each category now have a Facebook Artist Page. A few artists, like Hawthorne Heights, invented pages posing as people on Facebook, to get their bands on Facebook before the Facebook Pages feature debuted last month. I was unable to assess those numbers because Facebook won't reveal them unless you're the artist's "friend". Even if I were to use those stats, the fan metric would have been unequal to how the other artists were measured.

I was initially interested in investigating Facebook's traction in the music space because my new band, Reds, lacks a MySpace page. Even back in 2003, when I first joined MySpace, I was very ambivalent about the platform, mainly because I wasn't wild about the look of the musician web pages - the bric-a-brac HTML was a little much for me. I can't see a huge advantage, personally, to creating a MySpace page currently, but my 21-year-old drummer disagrees with me. Probably because a lot of his buddies are still using MySpace.

If my own Myspace Vs. Facebook musical orientation is in question, I wrote this post listening to Styx, Rush and Peter Gabriel-era Genesis on Pandora.

[One note about methodology, I had to estimate MySpace fan amounts for Kanye West and Yo Gotti (which I pencilled in at 1M and 100K, respectively) because they did not post this number on their MySpace pages. I estimated this based on the comment/fans ratio that held constant for similar Top Ten artists (same genre, same silo).]

Missing Marc Orchant

It's pretty eerie - MetzMash has only been in existence for about two months, and here we are, writing our second obit. Maybe it's just a sign that I'm getting older, but when two people that you know pass away at the ages of 40 and 50 within one month, it really makes you notice.

Marc Orchant, author of Blognation (and former writer at ZDNet, OfficeZealot.net, and Weblogs Inc.) passed away yesterday afternoon, after suffering a massive heart attack about one week ago. Marc was also a great friend to MetzMash, helping us "get out of the garage." His link in Blognation to our post a few weeks ago by Tac Anderson gave this blog its first significant spike. In addition to his excellent blogging work, he wrote some killer productivity and software books, including The Unofficial Guide to Outlook 2007 and the excellent Marc's Outlook on Productivity blog.

We only met once, at the DEMO conference in San Diego, back in late September, but we had a good long chat about our shared passion for David Allen and Getting Things Done, which definitely inspired a bit of Marc's writing.

To quote the sad truth of a lyrics from Marc's favorite band, The Grateful Dead:
"The night comes so quiet and it's close on the heels of the day".

I just want to wish sincere condolences to Marc's business partner, Oliver Starr and his wife Sue.
He was a great guy and a great writer, and he will be sorely missed.