Web Ink Now

Mobile phones are the new lighters

Last night I took my teenage daughter to the Orpheum Theatre in Boston to see two of her favorite bands: Breaking Benjamin and Three Days Grace. We had a great time. This was one of the first concerts I've been to recently where the audience was in their teens and twenties. Alas, the bands that I choose to see attract forty-somethings like me.

Last night, half the crowd was holding up mobile phones during the show. Some were snapping photos. Some were shooting videos. And still others wanted to be part of the action by waving around a light source.

When I was my daughter's age in the late 1970s, I went to dozens of concerts. Some highlights: The Clash, The Ramones, The Grateful Dead (25 times), Talking Heads, The Romantics, Muddy Waters, Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley, Frank Zappa… I'll stop naming bands now because this is probably way too much information at this point.

Back in the day we all held up lighters to be a part of the action. Sometimes you'd see thousands of lighters.

Last night there were a thousand mobile phones (and a handful of lighters too).

At rock concerts, mobile phones are the new lighters.

I was thinking how many of the online marketing tactics we use today are really new ways of doing things that have been done for many years.

> Ebooks are the new white papers (but white papers are still important for many audiences)

> Google AdWords are the new Yellow Page ads (but in some local markets the Yellow Pages are still important)

> Wikis are the new print directories (Print directories? Do they still make them?)

> Blogs are the new guy on the barstool who is funny and smart and people listen to (anyone have time for the bar anymore?)

Are your marketing and PR tactics better suited to a previous generation?

Social media style book event with Michael Raynor for The Strategy Paradox

Deloitte Consulting LLP is cleverly hosting a meet up and social media style book launch in Boston on Tuesday, March 27 for Michael Raynor, author of The Strategy Paradox. Raynor will be at Vintage Lounge amid free drinks and snacks, happy to share his thoughts on the book and engage in any conversation participants would like.

I really like the idea of using online media in the form of a Wiki to market a book and offer an offline event as an opportunity for mere mortals to have very casual access to a business guru. What other offline events could be marketed this way?

Unfortunately, I will be speaking at a conference in Scottsdale AZ and unable to attend myself. But if you are in the Boston area, sign-up for the free event on the wiki.

Here is a review of The Strategy Paradox from the Financial Times.

Corporate Wikis as thought leadership

Wikis are started by an organization as thought leadership content because it wants to be seen as an important player in a distinct marketplace.

"You can use Wikis to reach the people you want to reach and help them to organize content," says Ramit Sethi, cofounder and vice president of marketing for PBwiki, a company that provides Wiki software tools. "So if you’re in a company, you can use a Wiki to allow your users to add their own Frequently Asked Questions, and other people can supply answers, which helps everyone. People love being a part of the community, and they really like that a Wiki gives them a way to discuss their interests." Sethi says that the personality and culture of an organization play an important role in the decision to start a company-sponsored Wiki. "Companies that are a little bit fearless about letting people write their opinions make the best candidates for a Wiki," he says. "But the most important thing is that you need to build something that is worth talking about and you need to make it really easy. People don't want to install all kinds of software, they just want to get typing."

In September 2005, Alacra and its CEO, Steve Goldstein, unveiled AlacraWiki an open and collaborative resource for producers and consumers of business information. AlacraWiki brings together in-depth profiles of information sources, companies, and important people in the industry, and much more. The front page, which populates via RSS feeds, is filled with information industry news from the premier analysts and trade publications.

To embrace the power of the Web and the blogosphere requires a different kind of thinking on the part of marketers. We need to learn to give up our command-and-control mentality. It isn’t about "the message." It's about being insightful. The New Rules of Marketing and PR tell us to stop advertising and instead get our ideas out there by understanding buyers and telling them the stories they want to hear. Done well, Web content that delivers authentic thought leadership also brands an organization as one to do business with.

Social Media Club Boston: if you get it, share it

Last night I attended the kick off meeting of the Boston gang (what do I call it? Branch? Chapter?) of the Social Media Club. Funny that online social media people need to occasionally meet offline to make sure we're all real. Check out the proof here.

Todd Van Hoosear and the team at Topaz Partners organized the event and got something like 120 people in the room. Well done guys.

This was a stellar group. Wow. How cool to meet people in the real that I had read on their blogs many times and traded emails with.

I finally met Todd Defren, Principal at Shift Communications who helped pioneer the Social Media Press Release format which I am a big fan of. I had interviewed Todd for my book, and we've traded a bunch of emails.

Bryan Person is a consultant (he does a lot of work with Monster) and is someone who really gets stuff like podcasting and video. I'm hoping Bryan will tell me more about what Monster is up to with social media so I can put it into my book.

Brian Del Vecchio had an interesting insight during the breakout sessions which I quite liked. He said that the media used to be produced only by people who owned the capital to create media (newspaper printing presses) & TV stations for example). Now the capital to publish is virtually zero. Anyone can undermine big media now because it is so easy to do. Blog on.

Scott Monty is an expert in B2B social media, an emerging niche of social media that I like a lot. Scott gets it and works with larger companies to help them get it too.

John Wall from The M Show is a great resource if you need to know the basics of podcasting. He helped me as I was writing the podcasting section of my book.

The Social Media Club is being organized for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media. The Club has come together through the tireless efforts of Chris Heuer, the club's co-founder, and many others. In his opening remarks Chris defined Social Media as the nexus point around which all of the different people (podcasters, bloggers, PR people, etc.) who are communicating online come together.

The Club is the forum where people learning from one another. In his opening remarks, Chris said, "We're all figuring out this stuff together. Nobody has all the answers. The club learns from each other and we share knowledge and help people succeed."

Some ideas of the Social Media Club include: Promotion of media literacy both the understanding of the media and produce media (such as blogs), media ethics, media standards, and sharing best practices (Club motto: "if you get it, share it").

Alacra: Bigger than the biggest competitors

Here's an interesting case study which will appear in my book The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

Alacra creates online technology and services for financial institutions and professional service firms to find, package and present business information. In the crowded field of professional information services, Alacra, a company of about 100 people, competes with much bigger players such as The Thomson Corporation (40,500 employees) and Reid Elsevier (36,500 employees). An important part of Alacra’s marketing and communications strategy has been its early forays into corporate blogs and corporate wikis.

"You are what you publish," says Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra. "It is better to have a reputation than no reputation. Certainly AlacraBlog is valuable for us as a way to get our name out there."

Goldstein was an early CEO blogger, launching AlacraBlog in March 2004. "We didn't know what would happen but we wanted to try it," he says. "The competitors are really big. By blogging I am able to put a face on the company."

Goldstein uses his blog platform as a way to communicate with his clients, prospects, and partners. He uses the blog to tell the community things really quickly without doing a Press Release. "I can highlight interesting aspects of the company like employees and partners that wouldn't go into a more formal press release," he says. "Internally the blog is important too. We have a London office so I use it to communicate to employees."

It's fascinating that there are so few bloggers in the publishing industry. These are publishers for gosh sakes! Why aren't they publishing blogs? Perhaps because publishers are cautious about giving content away for free or maybe because large publishers feel threatened by blogs. But by starting a blog early and keeping the information flowing, Goldstein has positioned Alacra ahead of many huge information companies hundreds of times the size of Alacra. "Many publishers don't know what to do about blogging and very few are doing it," Goldstein says. "For example, there is nobody big at Thomson or Reid Elsevier who blogs."

But Alacra didn't just do a blog. In September 2005, the company unveiled AlacraWiki an open and collaborative resource for producers and consumers of business information. AlacraWiki brings together in depth profiles of information sources and companies, important people in the industry, and much more. The front page is populated by information industry news from the premier analysts and trade publications that populates via RSS feeds. "We had amassed a tremendous amount of valuable information on publishers and databases through our content licensing efforts," Goldstein says. "We thought it would be useful to make this information available on the web and a wiki was clearly the best format."

Goldstein was surprised that at the time AlacraWiki was launched, there was no directory of business information in the market. "We included reference data for the industry in a wiki form as a service to industry," he says. "Again, you are what you publish." The wiki is a collaborative effort where anybody can create and update listings. To start the project, Goldstein hired a summer MBA student intern (a practice that has become an annual project) who built the initial infrastructure and listings in just eight weeks. Although many people have contributed, some people don’t update their personal or company profiles. "It's strange that people don't go in and change it, its so easy," he says.

So how would Goldstein compare the skill sets to create a blog and a wiki? "To be successful at blogging, you need to have something to say," Goldstein says. "You need to have some communications skills to be successful. Over on the wiki side you need to be an expert in something to get it populated to begin with and then the resources to keep it up."

When asked if he would use the AlacraBlog and AlacraWiki names (and URLs) if her were starting all over again, Goldstein says, "Branding is really important. The names helps to tie the AlacraBlog and AlacraWiki in with the other Alacra sites, including the corporate site and AlacraStore."

Are Marketers Scared of the New World?

I'm at the SIIA Content forum in San Francisco. Amazingly my flight from Boston arrived a half hour early, so I'm able to catch all of the afternoon panels today. I'm presenting tomorrow at a session called Search Workshop for Publishers. I'm having fun chatting (and trading the occasional snide comment) with Joe Wikert from Wiley who I'm sitting next to.

Kudos to Larry Schwartz, President of Newstex, for putting together a great panel: "Technology: Transforming the Way Businesses Do Business." Larry produced the panel and recruited the cool speakers covering new content technologies, standards, trends and practices including: Tagging, Blogging, Wikis, Web 2.0, and Mashups.

Charlene Li, Principal Analyst, Devices, Media & Marketing, Forrester Research, Inc. moderated and Panelists included:
Kevin Rose, Founder, Digg.com
Ben Elowitz, Chief Executive Officer, wetpaint.com
Marissa Levinson, Director – Business Development & Sales, Six Apart, Ltd.
Joshua Schachter, Founder, del.icio.us
Bret Taylor, Product Manager – Developer Programs, Google, Inc.

Standing room only for this panel. I’m really interested in the discussions, but I’ll try to capture some of what’s said. Charlene is doing a great job keeping things on time and focused.

Marissa, who works for the company that makes the terrific TypePad blogging system that I use for this blog, talked about blog anatomy. "Blogging is no longer just anti-authoritarian or photos of pets." Blogs are a content management system. Makes people efficient – anyone who’s writing content just pays attention to writing. Publishing happens fast. Blogs for marketing purposes. We're seeing large groups of blogs being deployed by large organizations as content management systems = searchable, easy for users to create. "Blogs are not fads, they will evolve and improve. The ability for people who consume information to find it is here to stay."

Bret talked about Google Maps mashups, the merging of Google Maps APIs with other applications such as Craigs List. He showed a cool mashup that a marathon runner created to show distances in running routes and distances. Interesting that user generated content is also applications, not just content. Besides maps, other popular applications are the homepage API and Google calendar API. Trying to provide easy ways for developers to create applications for Google.

Ben says his company, wetpaint, creates a collaborative platform that merges the best of blogs, wikis, and other social media. He showed WikiFido, a site for dog lovers, as an example. One section: "my dog is cuter than your dog." Users add pages and edit content. Brings people together because it is easy to use. Different than a blog because "it is like a town hall where lots of people participate, rather than a blog which is more like a soapbox for one person."

Joshua founded del.icio.us, a company he says was founded "to make it easy to find things again on the Web." Categorize your content with tags to save your data. "You can discover what people are paying attention to."

Kevin: "Digg is a social news website." Find news online, give it a title and descriptions and categorize it for others. Users digg stories which when they reach thresholds the stories then make it to the front page of the site. Users save their own stories and see what their friends are digging. "What's helped us to break news stories faster than anyone else is News Spy." When stories break, people find them and dig them real time. Every time you digg something, you submit a bit about your interests. Digg can see interesting clusters of what people are doing in aggregate. "Digg will be launching a new version of the site in several months. One new thing = 'friends finder' where you can see who has similar interests as you." Kevin is a cool guy and a great speaker. Digg will go far I'm sure.

Awesome. I could hear these speakers for many more hours (maybe they'll be at the cocktail hour tonight).

What I take away from this panel is a strong confirmation of my feeling that the content world is quickly changing. Instead of hundreds of places to find content (big newspaper sites for example), there are now millions. Everyone can choose what they want to read and how they want to share in exactly the way they want.

Panelists encouraged the audience: "don’t be scared." Get out there and embrace social media. As marketers, we're smart to follow this advice. Sadly many marketers do not – in my opinion because they are scared. Don’t ask permission—just do it.

Blogs and Wikis: Are they enterprise ready?

I spoke at the Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies this past week. There were several interesting panel discussions on the question of blogs and wikis. Basically, everyone wants to know if blogs and wikis are enterprise ready. What whould we make of corporate blogs and corporate wikis?

My personal opinion is YES the enterprise is ready for blogs and wikis. To suggest they are not is like putting your head in the sand. The same questions about "enterprise readiness" was encountered with PCs invading the workplace, then email and the Web. Like chewing gum, once into your hair, you can't get it out – corporate IT departments will have a great deal of difficulty keeping new technology out.

Some quotes from panalests:
Ross Mayfield, CEO of Social Text
"The hardest part of getting rid of corporate controls is beginning to trust people"
"Ease of use has made blogging take off"
"Blogs are better for individual voice and for conversation. Wikis are better for group voice."

David Berlind, executive editor of ZDNet
"Blogs and Wikis are tricking people into becoming HTML authors."
"Watch out for the new generation of employee who has grown up with IM and MySpace. When they enter the workplace, things will change."

Coach Wei, founder & CTO, nexaweb
"Blog and Wiki software is essentially a CMS system which is provided to individuals."

The Alacra Wiki -- Pure Thought Leadership at work

Kudos to the smart marketers at Alacra.

The company launched the Alacra Wiki today which provides a service to the professional information industry. The Alacra Wiki is a hub for industry participants who are responsible for delivering professional content to large organizations to find sources, people, commentary and other information on this fluid and dynamic market. Signs of industry interest are strong—in just a few hours, the Wiki has been added to, edited, and updated by many people.

Alacra found much of the information for the initial content on the Wiki from the Web. Alacra Web Editors (who are all accredited information professionals) update the Industry Spotlights section and anyone can register and update content on other sections.

The concept of an industry Wiki is pure thought leadership. Rather then just the same old, same old product information that most organizations deliver, Alacra management understands that people will gravitate towards valuable content around an industry. Alacra is betting that a strong rub-off effect will put their company into the forefront of the information industry as a result. I think that they are right. Like well-done white papers, speeches at conferences, Webinars, and other valuable thought leadership, people gravitate to the information that they need to do their jobs whatever the source. Alacra will be seen as a leader as a result without resorting to heavy handed product-centric marketing.

Alacra CEO Steve Goldstein was an early blogger and his corporate blog is well trafficked. To push into a new area of Web content is pure genius. This kind of Wiki would be of interest to virtually any industry, but the rules are simple—the Wiki needs to be open and "self policing". The company sponsoring a Wiki needs to let market participants take over and do updates and not resort to one-viewpoint editing to push the sponsors message.

Congratulations to Alacra. It will be fun to revisit this in the months to come.