Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Book Review: Open Leadership by Charlene Li

 

At South by Southwest, one of my many serendipitous reactions was with Charlene Li, who I knew well when she was with Forrester. This was perhaps the first time I saw her in person since she foudned the Altimeter Group, and she had a present for me: a galley of her forthcoming book Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead.

For those who've been to SXSW or anything remotely like it, needing to carry a book around all night where I was likely to hit another three bars or clubs in the subsequent five hours or so would normally be a chore. But these is Charlene, coauthor of Groundswell, which I called in 2008 "the best book on social media I've ever read." Groundswell still is, and few others have made it to my recommendation list. So when Charlene handed me a sneak preview, I unflinchingly accepted. Note that my comments below are all based on the galley, an uncorrected proof that's subject to change, so accept that some of the quotes may be fine-tuned between now and the book's release.

Now, I'll be totally honest. Her new book, Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead, is not Groundswell. It's as well written and structured - you can Charlene out of Forrester but you can't take the Forrester out of Charlene. Yet Groundswell had something going for it that few other books do: universality. Groundswell's a book I still give or lend to people when they're just starting to get into the social media field, and I recommend it to people who are experienced practioners (though most in the latter camp have already read it). It's a data and case study driven field manual for social media.

Open Leadership is something else - no worse, just more focused. If you're not leading a business, a lot of the book won't apply to you. If you're aspiring to be in such a leadership position, it will be fairly relevant. If that's not your focus or won't be some time, you can skip over the better part of the book without regret.

Those leading organizations, however, will find a lot of ways to be inspired by the book. It's no manifesto for openness. In her Organizational Models for Openness, she describes several approaches:

• Organic: developing without much direction and often without oversight
• Centralized: top-down from executive management
• Coordinated: starts with some kind of executive direction but then takes its own forms at the department level on down

She also describes four types of decision-making: Centralized, Democratic, Consensus, and Distributed. What's telling is that she's not judging what's the best approach for every organization. Different forms of openness will benefit different companies and structures in different ways.

She does pass judgment on the traits of open leaders themselves, noting which are more effective. For instance, she writes, "The Realist Optimist is the most powerful and effective of the open leader archetypes, somebody who can see the benefits of being open but also understands the barriers." She constrasts this archetype with others such as the Transparent Archetype, "optimitic and individualistic," a believer "in the ability of new technologies to transform people and organizations," and yet "they don't understand who technology needs to be coordinated or collaborated inside the organization to make things happen effectively."

One of my favorite axioms in the book is one of those paradoxes that constantly fascinates me: "The reason to get proactive about giving up control is that by doing so you can actually regain some semblance of control." It speaks to a classic fear many marketers have with social media. But yet the only way to get any control over how your brand or organization plays in the conversations and sharing that are happening is to have your own stake in it and get your own voice out.

The section on measurement is also one of my favorites, and one of the more broadly useful for marketers. I've already been quoting one line on the book regarding the return on investment concerns. In my favorite metaphor of the book, she writes, "As you try to measure the benefits and 'ROI' of a deeper dialog and relationship with customers, you must realize that you can't even begin to calculate the benefit of protecting your organization in a real time communication world. Another way to frame the issue is to ask what is the ROI on your fire insruance policy? Going without can't even be contemplated!"

There's plenty more to say on this one, and I still have to make sense of all of my notes on it. You can read more at Charlene's site on Open Leadership, If enough of this seems relevant to you and you wind up picking up a copy, share your thoughts in the comments. 

The iPad: A Few Weeks Later

 

Now that the iPad's been out for a bit, I thought I'd share a few quick takes on my experience with it now that the novelty is wearing off.

Where it excels

It's amazing for gaming. Any time I show someone Real Racing HD, they look for the nearest Apple store (or search engine). I brought up some of the social gaming uses in an earlier column; Scrabble's brilliant. I'm a sucker for We Rule (username "berkowitz" if you play).

Video's beautiful. If I'm on a plane and want to watch one of my own movies, I'll do so - though I usually read when I'm not working in-flight.

It's not bad for checking email, especially if I don't want to boot up my computer. I'll get some of my news fix on there too - the screen is perfect for news articles.

Where it lags

My least favorite activity on it is reading. The glare is awful, and the backlit screen is nowhere nearly as easy to read as e-ink on the Kindle. I tried to read a full book on the iPad and gave up less than halfway through. Fortunately I bought the book through Amazon and read it on the Kindle iPad app. I switched over to my first generation Kindle, where I'm progressing through it, and enjoying the experience so much more even without the fancy page animations and easier navigation the iPad offers.

I also don't like the magazine apps I've tried on the iPad, such as GQ and Popular Science. They seemed to try too hard to produce an iPad-friendly experience when they likely would be much more readable just offering a digital version of the magazine. Maybe someone else will get the design right in time, though as noted above, I wouldn't want to read something cover to cover on there.

It's also not the best productivity device. I'm sure some tools will get better for blog posts and that sort of thing, but multitasking is so much easier on a PC, and typing's much faster and much more accurate on a PC. You can't touch-type on the iPad.

So where does that leave it?

It's a hybrid device.

If I was a college student, maybe I'd like it more, or as a parent with young children, it might be a great device to share with them.

It's very good at a lot of things, but not as useful as a computer or a mobile device for most others.

A nice to have? Definitely? It's fun, fast, and beautiful.

A need to have? Hardly. It will probably be gathering dust before long.

Opening the Facebook Open Graph Mailbag

Originally published in MediaPost; image courtesy of Facebook

 

Opening the Facebook Open Graph Mailbag

Congrats, Facebook. You've made every media pundit sound like the female leads in "Clueless," forcing us to use the word "like" every fourth word: "So, like, now you can like every webpage, and then like it on Facebook, and then like Facebook pages, and you can like what your friends like, and it's, like, awesome."

A lot of questions have been coming up about Facebook's updates from last week, and this is a great forum to answer them. I want to thank some Twitter friends (who were, ironically, more responsive than my Facebook friends) for contributing some questions that are answered to varying degrees below: Kevin Planovsky, Ellis Reid, Joey Redmond, and Gavin Thomas. Let's open up the mailbag.

Can you sum up the debate on Facebook's openness?

Sure. Pundits are taking sides on how "open" Facebook is at its influence spreads across the web. The debate's fairly silly, as it only exists because Facebook named its new protocol the Open Graph. If Facebook called it the Facebook Graph or the We Control the Web and You Don't Graph, the whole debate would be moot, and we'd still be debating about whether Chatroulette is better for porn or marketing.

Open Graph allows any website to have the same functionality of a Facebook page, minus the tabs that no one uses. For instance, Pandora will show you the artists and customized radio stations your Facebook friends are listening to. There are a lot of winners here -- Pandora, its users, and Facebook -- but this remains a closed environment. Facebook's in control.

There are genuine attempts to make the web more open, such as with OpenLike. The idea is that no one service will own the sharing and rating data; it will be available to all who take part. It's too soon to tell how well these open protocols will work and if they'll get any traction.

Should I get Facebook's Insights for Your Domain on my site?

Probably. At facebook.com/insights, there's a green box on the upper right called "Insights for Your Domain." Facebook will give you a line of code to add to your site, and you can connect this to any of the Facebook pages you own. This will specifically show you information on Facebook users who visit your site and share content back on Facebook. Data available includes: daily likes, daily shares, feedback per share, reshare rate, most shared links, gender, age, country, city, and language.

Most marketers and site owners probably aren't tracking this information, and you can compare Facebook's data to what you already track. You can also get a better sense of how the audience of your Facebook page compares with the Facebook users who visit your site.

How much should I care about privacy?

A lot. Let's go back to the Pandora example. My Facebook friends may be okay with me knowing their musical interests; after all, most friends list their interests in their profile. But my friend who says she likes Phish and the Black Eyed Peas on Facebook may not want to broadcast that she's listening to the Spice Girls on Pandora. Actually, I found a friend listening to the Spice Girls on Pandora, and she's not even showing me her musical preferences on Facebook, nor is she a declared fan (or connection) of any musical artist. I'd imagine she'd prefer to remain anonymous here, and I'll leave her name out of it because she didn't opt in. Facebook and Pandora are not giving her the same courtesy.

If you're implementing Open Graph or any of Facebook's social plugins, keep the consumer perspective in mind. Some of the consumers who care the most may never realize what you're revealing, and they may never figure out how to adjust their privacy settings on Facebook. They're the ones whose perspectives you'll have to keep in mind.

Is search dead? Namely, is Google dead?

No. First of all, marketers will always want to reach consumers explicitly seeking their products and services. As long as marketers are appropriately measuring its value and budgeting accordingly, search engine marketing will continue to thrive.

Much bigger advertising and marketing budgets are spent trying to reach consumers who aren't explicitly saying what they want. Google has a stake here too, thanks in large part to acquisitions such as DoubleClick, YouTube, and Pyra Labs (Blogger). Consumers tend to be targeted demographically, contextually, or behaviorally, but there's an emerging field targeting consumers based on their social graphs, or whom they're connected to.

We're just starting to learn the value of social graph ad targeting. There are a number of companies pushing this emerging field forward, including 33 Across, Lotame, Media 6 Degrees, and Socialmedia.com. If Facebook turns the Open Graph into an ad model, it will instantly be the biggest player in the space, but the web and the social web are far bigger than Facebook.

I'm worried about how much information I'm sharing. How do I change my privacy settings on Facebook?

I'll spare reiterating all the details, since GigaOm and Mashable both did this so well. The short version is that while logged in to Facebook, click Account in the upper right corner and then go to Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > Instant Personalization and uncheck the box. You'll want to visit those other links for more information.

What if I have more questions, or answers?

Share them in the comments and we'll keep the conversation going.

A Framework for Social Marketing Analytics

Sorry, folks - I got a copy of this great report a day early and I'm a few days late in getting it to you. But you'll soon see why. When you get a 20-page report in your inbox with meat on (mostly) every page, you want to take some time before reading it, let alone sharing it.

John Lovett at Web Analytics Demystified (who I had the pleasure of joining on a panel recently) and Jeremiah Owyang at Altimeter Group (who's been a friend for years now) released an overview for how to think about finding the right vendor for measuring any of your social media programs.

The report starts in earnest, as far as what really grabbed me, on page 9 in the PDF from Web Analytics Demystified, or on page 10 in the version from Jeremiah below, which I grabbed via his blog

Here, you start to get the four business objectives four measuring social marketing, their key performance indicators, and the vendors to watch. The rest, as they say, is commentary.

This is a area I focus on quite a bit, and it's refreshing to see the objectives so clearly stated here. They're worth enumerating:

1. Foster dialog
2. Promote advocacy
3. Facilitate support
4. Spur innovation

These are all defined in as much detail as anyone should need in the following pages.

The vendors to watch should be taken with a grain of salt. I've looked into most of the vendors listed here, and quite a few that aren't on the list. The report's not meant to be a vendor guide, and it isn't. Some of the best vendors out there aren't included at all in the list, while some mentioned have a long way to go. There's also a big difference often in vendors that can work with large brands vs small businesses.

That shouldn't detract from the real value of the report - understanding social business objectives and how you measure them.

Altimeter Report: Social Marketing Analytics

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

Six Steps For An Epic Promoted Tweet Fail

Today's Social Media Insider column, originally published in MediaPost

  

Marketers, if you're looking for tips on how to make the most of Twitter's new ad platform, skip this and harass your favorite Twitter guru. Heck, my cohort Cathy Taylor already gave a good taste of what's new about the ad model. There's enough sound advice out there.

Instead, here are six simple steps you can take to fail miserably with Promoted Tweets:

1) Treat it like any other media buy. If Twitter's calling it an ad platform, then just hand it over to your media buyers and they'll take care of everything. So what if Twitter's own executives glossed over all of the basic elements of what goes into a media buy? They barely discussed what Promoted Tweets costs, how you'll determine the reach of the keywords, and what targeting options will be available beyond the keyword itself. It's still an ad platform, so how hard can it be? Your media buyer will find a way to spend your money.

2) Write ad copy to run as promoted tweets. If you want to make sure to alienate as many Twitter users as possible in a short amount of time, make sure every tweet is talking at consumers, even yelling at them, ordering them to do your bidding. You have only 140 characters, so why beat around the bush with this fluffy relationship building and conversation stuff? Why respond to your customers when you know more than they do, anyway? This is your chance to promote, so don't blow it.

3) Invest as little time and energy as possible in the actual tweeting. One of the problems with Twitter is that it's a lot of work coming up with something interesting every single day, or even multiple times a day. Real marketers come up with one tagline and say it over and over again -- it's so easy, even a caveman can do it. Stop worrying about manning your Twitter account and turn all of your attention to promoting tweets. That's how you'll get rich off of Twitter.

4) Join Twitter just to use Promoted Tweets. You need to run your ads everywhere that'll accept them, and you can't possibly miss a social marketing opportunity. By running Promoted Tweets, you'll be able to cross another site off your checklist and show your boss how forward-thinking you are. It doesn't matter if you know anything about Twitter. If you've forgotten to do the Twitter thing already, now's the perfect time to jump on the bandwagon.

5) Stay laser-focused on the one account you manage. Sure, there may be other people tweeting across your organization, and even across your office. Ignore every single one of them. You've got a job to do, and it's not about following them when you have the chance to promote your tweets above everyone else's. That may mean you'll be bidding against others within your company. It may also mean you'll miss opportunities to cross-promote each other and gain visibility for multiple accounts at once. Your own blissful ignorance is worth it.

6) Plan the owned media and paid media elements separately. Hypothetically, say you acknowledge that multiple disciplines are at work with Promoted Tweets, where someone (or a whole team) manages the Twitter account or accounts, and then someone with media buying expertise manages the promotion. Don't let those groups talk to each other. They might start figuring out how to best include the kind of content that would work well as a promotion. Or they might learn from the resonance scores of the ads to make the day-to-day content more engaging. You'll be much better off keeping everyone totally separate to ensure no learning and optimization take place.

Be sure to let me know if you follow all of my advice, as you could earn a feature in a future column so thousands of marketers can learn from you. You'll undoubtedly be an #epic sensation.

What the iPad Means for Social Media

Image by josh.liba via Flickr

My poor editors. I don't get to thank them enough (that means you, Phyllis), but when writing a column about the iPad while using an iPad, I'm out of my element. Without multitasking, I can't readily fact-check. I'm less prone to make major revisions. And I may miss a few autocorrections that guess the wrong spelling.

Then again, do you know how many times I am checking Facebook, Twitter, and Digg while writing this? Zero. Score one for the iPad, at the expense of social media.

It's a fitting segue, as social media isn't one of the best-use cases for the iPad. In the few days since I got it, I've come to pick up the iPad for quick email checks early and late in the day, and while my PC boots up at work. I loved watching "Lost" and "Flash Forward" with ABC's media player. Reading news has been great, and reading books has been enjoyable, though I still prefer the glare-free Kindle for the latter. Gaming has proved especially fun, ever since I downloaded Real Racing HD (though I had to exit this document app, Apple's Pages, to look up the name).

Real Racing wound up being a very social game, and it started to make me aware of the social possibilities for the iPad. Anyone who has come by my office over the past week has had to take a turn playing Real Racing, with my COO so far the only one to place first. I also joined racing leagues to compete against others, and I can compete with anyone live when we're on the same Wi-Fi network.

Another new favorite is the game We Rule, which isn't too far from Farmville in principle, though it's more about growing your medieval turf, and farming is just a part of it. We Rule can search your iPad contacts and find friends, and you can interact with their feudal territories. I can blame my colleague Matt Wurst for introducing me to that one; if there's ever a way to pillage someone's castle, please pillage his first and tell him I sent you.

Scrabble is another social favorite, thanks to one innovation. You download the $10 game on the iPad and then get the free Tile Rack app for your iPhone or iPod Touch. When turning on Bluetooth, up to four people with Tile Rack can compete in the same iPad game. Each can keep their tiles on their smaller devices, shuffling tiles and even looking up words. Then, when a player is ready, he just flicks the tiles from his own rack on to the "board." Cool? Hell yes. Better than the board game? It's far more portable, and you'll never lose your tiles -- unless you lose your device.

That's a taste of how social gaming works today on the iPad. It's going to get far more interesting when Apple debuts its Operating System 4.0 this summer. It will include Game Center, which will have built-in features such as friend lists, leaderboards, and a matchmaking engine to pair similar gamers with each other. This could transform social gaming on the iPad and iPhone from games with a few social features to games that are inherently social.

It's not just gaming that's social on the iPad, but it does have the most potential. Most mobile social media as we tend to think of it (mobile social networks, photo sharing, check-in services, etc., etc.) will still happen on pocket-sized devices, not tablets. Yes, you can check in to Foursquare on the iPad, but why, especially if you're mostly using the iPad at home? Loopt has an iPad app, but it looks more like a city guide and less like a mobile social tool.

It has only been days since the iPad has been out. By the time it stars in a "South Park" episode we'll have a better sense of what it can do, socially and otherwise. Don't expect it to transform social media, but it will transform your office if you get a few people to download the Tile Rack.

Google Lets You Create Your Own Search Story Super Bowl Ad

Did you love Google's Super Bowl ad?

Do them one better. Create your own.

I couldn't resist - mine's below. Hat tip to TechCrunch.

And then I couldn't resist - created one more:

Early Thoughts on iPad and iAd Marketing in Ad Age

Image via CrunchBase

I was able to get a few thoughts in Ad Age on what both the iPad and then Apple's iAd platform mean for marketers. You can read the full article there; I'm not resposting it here.

A couple other random thoughts relating to it:

I did, as noted in the piece, write the whole article on my iPad. It wasn't that hard. Actually, the hardest part was writing it initially while waiting for takeout at a local Vietnamese restaurant, as people coming in the restaurant wanted to talk to me about it. The food also came way too quickly. Typing felt fairly natural, even if I wouldn't normally use it over a keyboard. I did separately get a wireless keyboard for it, along with a dock, so I have more flexibility. The case I got right from the Apple store doubles as a stand.

One thing the iPad of course doesn't allow for is multitasking. In light of that, when I wrote my first draft of the column in the default iPad email client, I couldn't easily surf the Web and look up stuff - like, oh, the official name of the ad platform. Normally I do a ton of lookups while I write, whether or not it shows in the final product. Fittingly, I technically got the name wrong - it's really iAd, not iAds, as I called it in Ad Age. Hardly a huge deal, but it's funny that my mistake would have been easily corrected if I wrote the post as I wrote all the others.

Also, this went through a few drafts and all the revisions were done on a PC in Word. I'm not THAT much of a purist. My colleagues at 360i had some very welcome suggestions for the piece. One idea I had that didn't work was to reframe the Apple vs Google issue as Apple vs Agencies. The problem was I was cramming too many ideas into one: first that the Apple-Google rivalry is overblown (Google could cede the whole app ad market and still be in an amazing position in mobile thanks to a combo of Android proliferation, mobile search, mobile web display, deals with other handsets/carriers, etc), and secondly that the extra hurdles Apple's introducing into advertising makes them antagonize marketers and agencies in a way. There may be something to the idea, but there were too many ideas in a post running a few hundred words, and my colleagues were totally right in strongly encouraging me to shift angles. And really, I didn't need much convincing. They just saved Ad Age's editorial team, among the best I've worked with, the hassle of reworking the post when they got it.

Again, the full article's at Ad Age: http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=143206 .