Grounded In Reality

It seems Web 2.0 services are appearing all the time, and it is often difficult to take note of them all.  Jumpchart is one service that has caught my attention.  If you plan or develop Web sites, you know how lengthy the mapping process can be.  After creating the initial structure (“wireframes”) and sitemap, there are usually multiple rounds of revisions and adjustments before the architecture is agreed upon and finalized.  It seems I always end up spending more time than I should making revisions.

Until now, I have yet to find a tool that makes developing wireframes simple.  Jumpchart seeks to make the process quick and painless.  With Jumpchart, you can create website navigation with the click of a mouse.  Content can be added by copying and pasting.  A client can actually click through the proposed website, rather than trying to visualize it on paper.  Based on the level of access they are given, clients can view, make comments, or even change content.  I get excited when I find new tools that improve efficiency and make my work easier.  Jumpchart is definitely a winner in a slew of Web 2.0 wannabes.

Over the past week, Dell has been the topic of many conversations in the blogosphere, spurred by a Forrester Groundswell Award and BusinessWeek article discussing the company’s transformation from digital bystander to leader.  In reading these posts, I am incredibly proud of the GCI team that helped make this happen. (NOTE: Dell is a GCI client)

Below are a few highlights from the blogosphere:

• BusinessWeek: Dell Learns to Listen: Jeff Jarvis takes a guest columnist role to discuss his two-year relationship with Dell and an overview of Dell’s social media initiatives. The online version is complete with a 25-minute video of an interview with Michael Dell (also available on Jeff’s blog: BuzzMachine).   He also posted the un-edited version, which notes a very measurable impact of Dell’s programs:

“Thanks to this new relationship, the company learns about issues online before they do in the press or sometimes in-house. They are stanching the flow of bad buzz. By their measure, negative word of mouth in blogs has dropped from 49 to 22 percent. And my Dell Hell posts, which used to come up third on a Google search for the company, are now relegated to second-page search-engine Siberia. ‘That change in perception just doesn’t happen with a press release,’ Menchaca says.”

• Direct2Dell - Dell’s Blog: Lionel Manchaca did an interview with Jeff near the end of the day and posted the vlog that resulted on Direct2Dell.

• Forrester’s Groundswell blog also mentions Dell’s transformation when referencing the Forrester Groundswell Awards that were given out last week.

Company transformation. Dell.
We created this new category to capture the powerful changes happening across all functions at Dell. The Dell Customer Advocate program, which pursues fast resolution of support problems, decreased the negative share of online comments about Dell by 25%. Direct2Dell, Dell’s frank and informative blog, generates 3.5 million page views per month. Ideastorm, Dell’s innovation community, tallied 500,000 votes for over 7,000 ideas and generated a new product, Dell PC’s with Linux pre-installed. And Employee Storm, an internal idea community, has generated 2,700 ideas and seen visits from 22% of Dell’s employees.

• From Geoff Livingston at The Buzz Bin:

Relationships and RELATIONS are about being human — not God. Together as humans we experience life and grow together. Mistakes happen, and good PR can overcome this. Consider Dell’s incredible lesson in admitting wrongs, listening and changing. This week’s BusinessWeek story is a celebration of relations.

• Our own Paul Walker mentioned that he is “really proud of the people and programs mentioned in the article. Thanks, Dell, for letting us be a part of it.” 

On behalf of GCI, I want to give the entire team a big pat on the back! The consistent creativity and innovation in new media waters is something to be extremely proud of.

We’re wrapping up day two at Forrester’s Consumer Forum, and it’s just about time to head back to the airport. Unfortunately, I still haven’t seen much of the city, but it’s been a good two days. Sightseeing will have to wait until the next trip.

We heard another round of great speakers and panelists today. The highlights for me were Josh Bernoff, Vice President of Forrester Research; Christina Norman, President of MTV Networks; and Henry Jenkins, Co-Director of MIT Comparative Media Studies and author of the book Convergence Culture (a good read). A few highlights…

1) Josh Bernoff’s presentation was a nice bookend to Charlene Li’s presentation yesterday. He discussed business strategies to succeed in the groundswell, reinforcing the point that objectives, not technology, should drive your strategy. He described 5 ways to turn the groundswell to your advantage:

• Listening: learning from what your customers are saying
• Talking: two-way conversation, not just shouting
• Energizing: helping your best customers to recruit others
• Supporting: enabling your best customers to help each other
• Embracing: involving your customers in your product development

While the language is a little different, this is very similar to the World Class Digital Media approach we talk about at GCI (Listen, Influence, Engage, Community). Importantly, a good digital media program has to start with listening and knowing your audience. The technology piece comes last.

2) Christina Norman shared four truths MTV lives by:

• It’s not the medium, but the content that matters most.
• You need to build an emotional connection with your audience based on the foundation of that creative content they want to invest in.
• You need to give the audience the means to find each other.
• You have to let your audience help you shape your brand.

Christina shared many great examples of MTV communities and entertainment platforms, but I was really excited by a new one called Think MTV, which she described as the largest online activist community ever. The community unites passionate young people around a variety of issues ranging from discrimination and poverty to the environment, faith and human rights. It’s a social network that allows people to submit, rate, bookmark and share content on these issues; connect with people like them to mobilize action; and actually get rewarded for taking action. I was skeptical of the rewards piece at first, but MTV makes a good case for it here. They’re creating a badge system that puts the “reward back in rewarding” by offering not only recognition among peers, but a variety of cool prizes.

We work with several non-profit organizations, as well as cause-minded corporations, and this seems like a great place for them to get involved to engage and mobilize a Gen Y/Gen X audience.

3) Lastly, Henry Jenkins gave an entertaining presentation on convergence and participatory culture. He defines convergence as a cultural, rather than a technological process, and says “we now live in a world where every story, image, sound, idea, brand and relationship will play itself out across all possible media platforms.” Generally, this happens organically - within a passionate fan community - from the ground up. But if a company really listens and understands its audience, it can help enable this kind of “trans-media storytelling” from the top down.

Jenkins challenges companies to ask themselves: What communities are out there that feel a deep connection to your brand or products? And what are they doing now that may be hard to do, that you can make it easier for them to do? For example, if customers are finding your ads or creative content online and creating their own mash-ups, don’t resist this. Give them the assets they need to do more. In many cases, this means giving up some control, but the rewards in this participatory culture can be great to marketers who understand and embrace it.

Thanks to the Forrester team for a great conference. Off to the airport!

I’m here in Chicago for Forrester’s Consumer Forum 2007, where the theme of the two-day conference is “Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.” It’s my first time in Chicago, and I’m sad to say I’ve only seen the airport, hotel and one restaurant so far. But on the bright side, Forrester has a phenomenal line-up of speakers and topics like Charlene Li, VP and Principal Analyst for Forrester Research in the social computing space; Christie Hefner, Chairman and CEP of Playboy Enterprises; and Robbie Bach, President of the Entertainment & Devices Devision for Microsoft. And that’s just day one.

My head is spinning with ideas, but I wanted to share a few key insights from day one:

1) Word of the day: “groundswell.” A central theme of the conference, Forrrester defines groundswell as a “social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.” Check out the winners of Forrester’s Groundswell awards here for great examples of organizations using social media to achieve their business goals.

2) When developing a social media strategy, technology should be the last part of the equation. Charlene Li recommends a four-step approach that can be remembered as “POST,” which stands for People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology. Start by assessing the social technographic profile of your customers (see below). Then list your objectives. Next, determine a strategy for achieving those objectives. And lastly, identify the right technology. So next time a planning session begins with, “We need to be in MySpace” or “We want to blog,” take a step back and think hard about the audience first, their current behaviors and the relationship you wish to build with them.

3) Christie Hefner reminded us that while technology is evolving, basic human instincts - to meet someone, to be liked, to laugh - are eternal and universal. A good digital strategy should still tap into these instincts. She also commented that the term “brand” is overused, and I tend to agree. Not every product name is a brand; a brand represents a point of view, attitude and lifestyle that can move from one platform to another.

4) Manish Mehta from Dell (a GCI client) and Stan Joosten at Procter & Gamble teamed up for an interesting panel moderated by David Armano at Critical Mass. The topic: “Always in Beta: How Big Business Can Benefit from ‘Little’ Innovation.” The key messages: approach marketing as an R&D lab, experiment with new marketing techniques, don’t worry so much about ROI if it’s the right thing to do, and give employees permission to fail… as long as they learn something. This really resonated with me, as I frequently find myself having the “ROI of social media” discussion. The thing is - you don’t have to spend a lot of money to dip your toe in the water with social media, and small risks - or “incremental experiments,” as Stan would say - can truly transform a company.

More to come on day two…

An interesting new crowd-sourcing site appeared recently, still in Beta, of course, from The Nielsen Company and is (not-so-cleverly) called: Hey! Nielsen.   The site requires that you register to participate and share your opinion, but without registration, you can search through the results of other folks recommendations.  Feels to me like a mix of Digg, IdeaStorm (for Dell, a GCI client), and TV Guide.

There are a couple of things to look at on the site:

• Opinions
  In topics labeled TV, Movies, Music, Personalities, and Internet, members can post opinions about current shows, bands, songs, people, Web sites, etc.  Then the crowd gets to agree or disagree and add additional comments.
• Rankings
  “Each topic (TV show, Movie, etc.) earns a Hey! Nielsen Score, determined by user opinions, comments, and ratings. Calculated daily, the Hey! Nielsen Score also factors in internet buzz via BlogPulse.com.  There is currenlty about a 7-hour avg for updating statistics information.”
• Calendars
  Soon enough this will be the “TV Guide with opinions”…but it will have to launch first.
• Members
  Looking similar to other social networking profiles…and very similar to Digg’s latest ‘profile’ launch, you will be able to click on a member to see which shows, music, etc they like and dont like.  The earlist member date I saw was in May for NatGuy who claims “I’m one of the folks involved in helping to build this site.”  Nielsen lists how many recommendations they have made and lists all their posts.
• Widgets
  What would a site be if you couldnt see if scrolling on your blog? :)  Therefore, they have created a nice scrolling widget for you to keep up with the latest and greatest recommendations on the site.  Hopefully this will become customizable.

Naturally, if you are related to the entertainment industry, this would be an ideal place to gather consumer insights and responses to your content.  However, it would not be an ideal place to promote your entertainment client unless you are extremely open and transparent in your role.

Eventually, Nielsen sees using the information as statistical evidence in each catagory, but personally I think you will need to let the site live for a good amount of time before you can qualify the information collected as valid.  I am also still stuck on the problem of the ‘online demographic’ setting the opinions of a whole set of humans.  I still feel like it is skewed unless mixed with other forms of information collection.

I am interested to see how others respond to the site and the use of the information as statisical analysis.  Would you believe what they say, just because its Nielsen?

Wikipedia, the so called “in-flux” or “open-source” encyclopedia, has become one of the most interesting phenomena in the short and robust history of online media.  Wikipedia is a “.org” and refers to itself loftily as a “project.”  With over 2 million articles in English alone, it is 20 times larger than most traditional encyclopedias and can be found in “approximately 250 languages,” according to the site’s own estimates.  It is by far the biggest and baddest of all wikis out there.

Wikipedia is an example of “collective intelligence” and sometimes also given as an example of Web 2.0.  It has become THE starting point for information on everything from the “John F. Kennedy assassination” to “Cancer” to “Copenhagen.”

Whatsmore, the open nature of the “project” doesn’t seem to have detracted from its credibility.  Studies have shown Wikipedia’s accuracy to be relatively close to that of professionally edited encyclopedias.  But an encyclopedia it is not.  Not in the traditional sense.  Consumers are also increasingly relying on Wikipedia (or are “Googled” towards it) for information on products, brands and services.

This is presenting some serious and interesting challenges for the way companies manage their overall corporate identity.

Case in point: An article in Wired magazine last week profiled a new addition called Wikipedia Scanner. The Wikipedia Scanner allows users to trace the IP addresses of those who make anonymous edits to Wikipedia articles. This salacious little tool is just the kind of thing that can give communications managers nightmares – and in several cases it already has.

The article reported that in a search of 34.4 million anonymous edits on the site, 2.6 million organizations were found to be directly linked to edits related to their own company.  The edits run the gamut - from benign press releases to deletions of entire sections of unflattering material.  The latter has led to the involved companies suddenly being named alongside the CIA and the Vatican (rumors abound about how those two organizations have made heavy edits to their own Wikipedia articles).

In these times where corporate social responsibility and transparency are not only considered important but essential to a company’s good image, it seems natural that the same principles in communications should follow suit.  Wikipedia Scanner is another sign that if companies do not address Web 2.0 media outlets with the same vigilance – and ethics - as other media, that their reputations stand to suffer.

So when you think about “upgrading” your communications strategy, don’t forget to “mind the wiki.”

———-

Brian Woodward
Senior Consultant
GCI Mannov

From being a site virtually nobody had heard about six months ago, Facebook has exploded into everyday life in Norway.

Popularity

For a country with a mere 4.5 million citizens, 300,000 members in the “Norway” network is nothing less than impressive.  As a comparison, the “Denmark” network has 13,000 members and the “Sweden” network has 79,000 members, countries with a population of 5.4 million and 9 million respectively.

In fact, the “Norway” network ranks fourth overall on Facebook, after the Toronto, London, and Vancouver networks, according to a story on Gridskipper July 10th.  Since this data was released, the network has grown with another 20,000 members.

Facebook has grown by some 2,700 percent in Norway over the last few months and keeps growing.  Granted, it has been the rainiest summer ever, but the main reason for Facebook’s popularity is probably the hype and media attention.  A news search on the Norwegian search engine Sesam (http://www.sesam.no/) shows that 1,779 stories have mentioned the phenomena, and although the first story was back in 2005, all but two are from the last year, and a majority of these are from the last four or five months.

In addition, Norwegians are both tech savvy and blessed with good infrastructure. The country had 3.14 million internet users in 2006, according to the CIA World Factbook, a number that is still increasing.  Most of these internet users are on a broadband connection and 98.3 percent of Norwegian households have access to broadband services.

Waterwar outlawed

The Facebook group “Vannkrig 2007″ (translation: Waterwar) was started in March, and urged people to show up in the Vigeland Park in Oslo bringing water guns on July 28. After 12,000 people joined the group, and several thousand stated their intent to show up, the group applied for a permit from the county, which was denied.  Apparently, a wedding the same day does not go well with super-soakers. Still, the group plans to show up, considering it is a public park, which again has prompted reactions from the county.  Security guards and an increased police presence is likely to be in place at the end of the month, in addition to one nervous bride.

So is Facebook here to stay? For now it is…perhaps until the next big thing comes along.

Fredrik Johnsen
GCI Oslo

With automobiles being such a community driven and brand loyal product, it’s encouraging to see a car manufacturer finally jumping at the chance to offer a digital media hub for its enthusiasts.

Chevrolet launched a comprehensive social media campaign with the release of Chevynation.com. The site features user-generated as well as branded videos, links to MySpace pages of fellow Chevy owners and six distinct channels of content aimed at different segments of Chevy drivers—all compliments of the Warren, Michigan-based agency, Campbell-Ewald.

OMMA magazine interviewed three digital creative managers about Chevynation.com in their July issue. The trio consisted of Agency.com’s Mat Zucker, Mick O’Brien of Digitas and Atmosphere BBDO’s Arturo Aranda. The results were positive for Chevrolet.

Here are some notable excerpts:
OMMA: What are your initial thoughts?
O’Brien: It’s got a really cool vibe – the feel is almost one of nostalgia. This isn’t the right reference, but it almost has this American Graffiti feel to it where cars are king, and your car is an extension of yourself.
OMMA: Each channel offers a link to a MySpace page. Is this the best vehicle for community, or should Chevy have built a community of its own?
Zucker: I think it’s smart for brands to integrate with existing communities rather than create their own. The Web is an open, interconnected network of communities, and brands are smart to connect. The more you do that, the more successful you’re going to be.
OMMA: Do you see potential for this site to grow and evolve?
O’Brien: Definitely. What’s interesting about the city metaphor is you can put up a new building and take one down. Cities are living, breathing things.
Aranda: Yeah, that’s what’s great about building this idea of community, embodied within a city – it’s modular, you can keep on updating areas and nobody is going to question if a whole building or a whole storefront starts to shift or evolve.

Not only did Campbell-Ewald create a community atmosphere, they did it with such amazing graphics and attention to detail that it would make any true car lover grasp their shamee in delight.

Christy Leger
Austin, Tx

InformationWeek wrote an interesting article this week about the latest generation of college grads entering the workforce and what technology they expect to be made available while on the job.

I can vouch that there have been times I was not allowed to access technology  necessary for me to be fully capable of doing my job…with a Google Toolbar being the simpliest of things.

IDC research numbers show(ing) that 45% of companies have workers blogging, 43% use RSS feeds, and 35% of companies have employees using wikis.

What’s interesting about that, according to Susan Feldman, VP of content technologies at IDC, is that the study also showed that IT managers and executives largely didn’t know any of this was going on.

It is understandable that a company would have progam downloading banned from users, but there should be a policy in place for requesting access to relevant sites/downloads.

She (Susan Feldman) told InformationWeek that with Web 2.0 technologies increasingly becoming part of people’s social lives, they will demand that it be part of their work lives, as well. And a lot of companies may have this new technology inside their firewalls that they simply don’t know about.

“We’ll have to deal with the reality of people coming in and using tools that aren’t in the firewall,” said De Beer. “Web 2.0 empowers users beyond creating content. It’s about how we interact. For the next generation, it will be about mass collaboration, using social networking.”

In my opinion, things will morph.  Just as companies had to create ‘blogging policies,’ they will also have to create other Web 2.0 poilicies. 

Check out “The complete Web 2.0 directory”

The site can help you to get an overall view of the different Web 2.0 tools and survey the scene of online communities.  Maybe you know the directory, maybe you don’t – but I think it’s impressive.  Remember to use the tags!

Kristian Levring Madsen
GCI Mannov, Copenhagen