Conversation Agent

Evolutionary Hierarchy of Communication Networks

I've come across a fascinating evolutionary hierarchy of things by the Bordalier Intitute. It shows communication networks developing from cosmic networks. The diagram did make me think about Matryoshkus Russian dolls.

[image of product by Art Lebedev Studio. Hat tip to Laughing Squid]

The image I am using makes sense also in another respect. It represents a hierarchy in order of bit, byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte & terabyte. All it's missing is petabytes. According to Wired magazine, these are stored in the cloud.

If we take the opposite approach, from the outside in, for communication networks we have:

1. Chemical bonds in protolife (Gaia)
2. Cellular energy in prokaryote (Biosphere)
3. Genetic in eucariote (Biotope)
4. Central nervous system (Ecosystem)
5. Semiotic (Social Community)
6. Food Web or trophic Web in vertebrates or quadriopodes (Biotop)
7. Ritual verbal symbolic in religion (Culture)
8. Mechanical Tools (Engineering)
9. Written verbal (History)
10. Formal symbolic (Science)
11. Binary (Computer Systems)
12. Hypertext in the World Wide Web (Internet)
13. Computer to computer (Web Services)

This sequence or evolution seems to follow the path outlined in the article, where science (causation) is superseded by correlation (data analysis without hypotheses of what it might show). Is the evolution of communication networks taking us towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents as conversation agents? 

Fascinating theory or potential reality?

Jobs Have Evolved, Shouldn't Job Search?

"...the workplace has evolved – people expect more control; seek more perspective; crave more enrichment. And so we’ve evolved. We’ve broadened our lens to be more than just a marketplace for jobs. [...]

A better job is a better experience; an experience that leads to better possibilities, better opportunities, better relationships, better perspectives – all working together to improve life along the way. So, simply put, our mission is to inspire people to improve their lives."

[from The Monster Promise]

I buy that. For many of us work is an important part of our lives. Not so much as to sustain us and our families - that, too, of course - more broadly because many of us derive meaning and joy from accomplishing. And we accomplish through work.

Work is 2.0

The other day I remarked how the prevalence of online conversations centers around what we are working on. Sharing details about our projects, requesting help on research and even development have become par for the course. And an accelerated course at that, where everyone ends up learning as much as they are teaching. Learning how others approach problem solving, think through questions, and their preferences in communication style is included.

We are getting more things done with the assistance of others. What we output is also improving thanks to the feedback and rapid beta cycles we are immersed in. The results are better, and so is the satisfaction of being part of a team, even when it is a virtual one.

Will you remember those individuals who have a certain set of skills and approach them to become part of your team when the opportunity arises? You bet. We are working in teams online - building off each other's ideas, borrowing concepts and testing them in our context, going viral on marketing and word of mouth when we find a product and service that lights us up.

Is Job Search?

If we as peers can hear and see so much about each other online, why can't recruiters and companies? In checking the Web sites of Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, and TheLadders.com, as examples of well-known and used career sites, I see no evidence of Web 2.0 efforts. The 2007 annual report of Monster.com referenced above, page 41 [hat tip to Marshall Sponder]:

"...We have been able to build on Monster's brand and create worldwide awareness by offering online recruiting solutions that we believe are redefining the way employers and job seekers connect."

"We also operate a network of websites within our Internet Advertising & Fees segment that connect companies to highly targeted audiences at critical stages in their life. Our goal is to offer compelling online services for the users through personalization, community features and enhanced content. We believe that there are significant opportunities to monetize this web traffic through lead generation, display advertising and other consumer related products. We believe that these properties are appealing to advertisers and other third parties as they deliver certain discrete demographics entirely online."

Yet, I find no community portal on the site. What the company labels community is part of their corporate social responsibility program. To be fair, Marc Cenedella does have a newsletter he sends out to everyone who becomes a member of TheLadders.com. I have found many useful articles there, too. My friend Jason Alba was even quoted there recently. Yet, it is still one way, from Marc to my mail box. The only time I wrote back to TheLadders.com providing feedback about my experience as a subscriber I received no response.

A Better Question Might Be

Does your business use a social media strategy to attract and select talent?

I asked this question recently on LinkedIn. Expanding upon it: We live in an environment where you need a team that can hit the ground running (this means hands-on attitude). And despite the impression that there are plenty of options for your business to cherry pick candidates in the current economic climate, talent acquisition and retention continues to be a challenge.

You can get to know how someone thinks, problem solves, and markets and sells their ideas through blogs and other social media. Are you taking advantage of those options? I asked the question because the hardest part of job search is that of screening. Shifting through piles of resumes to find the right candidate is a demanding chore. Mostly because thanks to career advisers, most resumes look exactly the same. Yet because your company culture is different, so is your job opening.

Fit comes together from thinking in ways that are appreciated and understood inside a particular culture. Fit is also part of a company's brand experience.

What is Your Answer?

Bryan Person, who organizes a Hiring/Getting Hired in a Web 2.0 World Social Media Breakfast in Boston, does some work with Web 2.0 tools.

From the answers on LinkedIn, Adrian Shooter, who is currently working (the site is in flash) with Vodafone, remarked:

"My ultimate insight is that talented individuals are no longer seeking out specific industries or even specific functions to work for. I am uncovering that more and more individuals are simply looking to join organisations that share their values, behaviours, vision and essence. This is because talented people know they can be successful in a variety of circumstances.

With this in mind I am helping organisations not so much market their business but simply providing platforms in social environments where those from baby boomers to generation Y can get a taste of their culture. Talent is smart, sophisticated and use trusted networks to make choices.

I am working with everything from wiki's, blogs, social networks, vodcats, mobile and a few new technology areas. People need an opportunity to engage with your employer brand in a variety of settings."

I chose his answer as "best of" because he provided insight into why it makes sense to use social media as part of the recruiting efforts.

Another very good response came from Bob Lenthart, who provided some insight about how looking for a feel of candidates helps tremendously. He also volunteered that all of their employees are active and the company puts no restrictions on who they start their base with: friends, family, former colleagues, etc. Through a conversation with another recruiter who replied to my question, I observed that recommendations from friends and colleagues may also backfire. There may be no fit in the current company culture.

Matching a personality to a company's culture matters a great deal to the long term success of candidate and company both. As personality comes across more easily from the digital marketing of a personal brand, it would make sense to employ some form of social media in your hiring practices.

Remember that however you recruit is very much part of how your company brand comes across in the marketplace. How individuals experience it may influence them in their buying decisions as customers. Do you use social media to recruit? If so, how? If not, why not?

New Opportunities in Media

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Jeff Jarvis gave this presentation at CUNY on the new architecture of media that is quite fascinating [hat tip to Robin Hamman]. He concludes by sharing a list of new opportunities available in the world of media, with some elaboration of my own:

• Curator - the ability to edit the world. This is a very versatile title, I think it applies to communities as well. We discussed how we need editors in new media.
• Collaborative, networked, pro-am reporting - a result of the hyper-connected journalist. New media does influence journalists.
• Mobilizer of the public to report - a result of the connected citizen. We talked about citizen journalism and responsibility.
• Networks as an opportunity to support journalism - new media will re-imagine journalism, we just do not know how and when yet.
  
• Do what we do best, link to the rest - specialized, niche work. We are seeing that in new media publications like GigaOM.
• Being in any and all media - there is a future in we media.
• Live (the mojo) - new media is about participation.
  
• Data as news - this is intriguing, especially in view of the fact that digital marketing is also moving in that direction, so would this be purely analysis?

What new opportunities do you see in media?

Marketing Jobs of the Future

I was having a conversation with my friend Marshall Sponder the other day about marketing jobs being cut from marketing groups in a lot of places. These functions are being consolidated and, in many cases, outsourced to agencies.

[data provided by SimplyHired, a search engine for jobs.]

Many companies think they can do more with less - resources (including budgets) and people (including those who really get your business). We've been over that in a couple of economic cycles already. Yet, I think this cycle is different for a variety of reasons.

Marketing Itself is Changing

It's not going away, how could it? Instead, thanks in part to the changing expectations and preferences (especially communications) of customers, it's evolving into something very different. You know, when you talk about data that is vital to your business, so that you stay in business and keep your customers, you talk about continuous data replication (disclosure: this is one of the many things my company does).

With marketing, we need to shift our thinking to continuous customer conversation (listening is a big part of conversation). A flow of constant awareness about where your customers are in their preference cycle, and where you stand in the permission spectrum. Do you have the keys to the cellar or only the foyer? That affects your ability to talk about what else you've got that they may need - and buy - from you.

The biggest question of course is, do you know your customers? I am amazed at the number of companies, even reputable ones, that do not know the answer to that question. If you're planning a flavor of social media involvement, start there.

How can you go to a stranger and introduce yourself with a straight face when you are a stranger to the people you've already gotten on board? Answer that question and you can begin to think about the community/forum/social network layer in your online presence - it could be your web site, transformed.

This is beyond going from mass push to personalized mass push. It's first class pull. For that you need to begin to understand (listen for) what people are looking for, what is sticky in your site, and learn to respond to their needs in real time. The biggest advantage a small business with a blog has over you with a big site, is that the marketer at the blog can adjust the content to the needs of the readers on a dime.

To extrapolate:

• Changing customer expectations lead to the need for continuous customer conversation.
• Customer conversations lead to better understanding of what they buy and why.
• Control in the hands of customers leads to a better view into what you have that is sticky.

Analytics is Marketing

We've been moving in that direction for a number of years. Analysts in the analytics groups are not being touched in this economic cycle. That's because they are being seen as those who hold the answers to the questions companies are asking - actionable analytics that are directly tied into the way a business is run.

That is great news for people who already possess those skills and interesting information for those who are looking into a career in marketing. With a caveat. You still need those people who understand your business, how you make money.

At the other end of the table sit marketers who have been producing lovely diagrams filled with information that is currently hard to measure, or unmeasurable. Then there is also a bit of shiny object syndrome - we tend to become enamored with new technologies and tools for the sake of it, and not necessarily as tied to a business strategy.

We need to link these two groups together to open the door into actionable information. A lot of what happens today is lost in translation between form and function. Part of it is due to the fact that we don't speak the same language. It's everyone's responsibility - and advantage - to begin to acquire that fluency. I see marketing jobs of the future migrating in the hybrid direction.

To extrapolate:

• Seeing what is sticky won't help you if you do not know what it means.
• Measuring starts with the right things - business-driven and concrete.
• Actionable intelligence is not a crystal ball, but a hybrid of marketing and analytics.

Where Do I Find the Right People?

The next logical question is how do I hire the right people? This is applicable across the board, with an emphasis on versatility towards using new technologies and tools to hold customer conversations. As well, you may look into those who are able to facilitate - communities, blogs, editorial calendars, internal processes - and have an understanding of SEO and SEM.

Job search engines are not very good both on the employer and the job seeker side. If you've been looking to hire through them, you know what I'm saying here. On the employer side, you have a lot of resumes from candidates that don't lead to hires for a variety of reasons. On the seeker side, you don't get enough information about companies and visibility into their culture.

Culture matters a great deal for what we call fit. If you are to be successful in retaining staff - and get your training time and cost worth on the employer side; your time, effort and talent/skill worth on the candidate side - fit is vital.

Social media has a way of cutting through a lot of that. Yet, none of the major job search engines is currently using social media intelligently. And we're back to the semantic search. Referrals now have the potential to go to a whole new level. From deliberate and requested to third party mentions and testimonials picked up in the greater online conversation.

To extrapolate:

• Data matters in relationship to intelligence - what you are looking to do.
• People who look good on their resume may not be the right fit for your company.
• Semantic job search may bridge the gap on fit/attitude for the candidate and culture/authority for the company.

I will reserve another post for the conversation around jobs migrating to agencies. You can look forward to a healthy debate on that one. In the here and now, this is what I'm seeing as a developing trend. With marketing shifting to the digital space, it will be more important to be fluent in the language of analytics. The fluency on business has always been a pre-requisite.

How are you hiring? Who are you partnering with? Do skill sets match this trend?

[Check out what Aaron Strout, VP of New Media at Mzinga says about hiring through social media]

1/3, 1/3, 1/3 - Web Presence of the Future

I've been doing some research around the Web presence of the future. In my current capacity, I'm working on a complete rewrite and redesign of a corporate Web site, my fifth major effort for a company. Each project was both exciting and challenging for a variety of reasons.

The content varied depending on the industry - risk management consulting, financial services, Web technology, chemical products, and regulatory. Each time I learned the business cycles, language, and context of an industry to be able to articulate clearly what the conversation was about. My current project is probably the most complex and interesting for a number of reasons - what the organization does spans the gamut of services that are critical to the needs of every business, it is highly technical and lives in a context that changes constantly.

Every one of these projects involved a full user requirements study for the construction of Web architecture and usability that was focused on specific publics, a radical redesign that expanded and in many cases re-posioned the company's brand(s), and a complete rewrite. The tone, the language, the organization of content - everything. This blog is a walk (bare feet) in the park in comparison.

However, I did come to realize that there are many parallels between those Web sites and this blog. The main one, the one I will go into details about in our "how to" session at the Marketing Profs B2B Forum, is that both are organized in thirds:

• 1/3 editorial impact - what the Poetae Novae called labor limae, making the content efficient while still effective; saying enough and not too much, talking about the customer and what they think (or worry) about and offering paths forward to action
  
• 1/3 community building - what in social media we have come to refer to as conversation, engagement, creating the connection; before it does that, it needs to be a space where someone knows our name (outside of Cheers)
• 1/3 marketing principles - the value-based bread and butter of why we buy and how we sell; I could call this positioning, except for there is a lot more to it than that

Digging a bit deeper into the organization in thirds, we are writing the content as a marketing conversation. It starts with you, the customer, and your need, what you are looking for. The structure of the page(s) is build around three simple questions:

• why - what's in it for you, why do you care? This is based upon what the customer has said she wants and needs
• what - exactly what are the technical specifications and details of the information the customer is looking for
• how - this talks to the service (or product) and how it is delivered, what it feels like to go through the process for the customer

It's taking the benefits and making them work really hard on behalf of your customers. This was not invented here, it has been part of the marketing conversation for ages - it may date back to the bazaars, if you ask me. Same principles, different tools.

Yet, many Web sites are still organized around a company's capabilities. Many presentations and proposals revolve around what a company does and how it does it. It is about what the company does as long as it is in relationship to what your customer wants and needs.

If you have a great product, then the customer wants to play with it, learn about what it does, how it does what it does. In the case of an iMac, your customer may be content to just look at it, at how it's built, for example. If that is the case, if that is the sex appeal, what the customer wants, what works, put it front and center.

The Web site of the future may be organized completely in thirds without needing to separate them in a blog, a forum, a customer idea space, and the corporate brochure-ware. Part editorial, part community, and part marketing weaved throughout the site. This is how we do business - through relationships and connections.

[image of the Seven Churches of Santo Stefano, Bologna, one built inside and as an extension of the other]

Be a Renaissance Woman: we Are Back to the Middle Ages

Lists don't do it

Not really - even the ones created with the best of intentions can have unintended consequences. Lists don't tell a story, they are merely a compilation of different things grouped with the specific intent of cataloging.

When the list is hierarchical, it highlights at best one characteristic of the items in question thus potentially reducing the intrinsic value or worth (to you) of each to that item's relationship to the others. What happens when there is really no equivalence? You get lost in compilation.

Statistics don't do it

Even though there are more women than men online and women are well on their way in the career realm, women are still under represented everywhere. The truth is that women are catching up to men in school and from there on in most fields.

I look at Gen Y representatives, even at people much younger than that like my niece, who is turning 18 this year, and what I see is the deliberate practice and pursuit of interests as wide ranging as music, chemistry, medicine, jurisprudence, and research. What happens when you consider only the tip of the iceberg? You find that what is and what you believe is are two wildly different realities.

Stories don't do it

The ones with the vested interest in keeping the usual suspects front and center keep things that way. We cannot worry about those. This kind of propagation is akin to taking statements such as "that's the way we do things here," "that has never been tried" at face value. What happens when you take what you think you know as the norm? You miss the future.

We are back to the Middle Ages, when chaos and change where the norm. What we thought we knew is being challenged regularly today. And that is good. From the Middle Ages blossomed the Renaissance, a period of tremendous growth and cultural change. This is a Renaissance were all individuals can find opportunity and meet their possibility, when we let them.

It is in periods of tremendous transformation that old assumptions are challenged. I smile at the thought that it was heresy to put the earth at the center of the universe. Yet, if we do not do that today, if we do not put the earth at the center of our universe, we are in for a surprise and it may not be a good one at that.

Today's polymaths, the individuals who are well educated and excel in a number of fields, those who can do all things they put their mind to, those who understand the textured and interactive process built in modern learning, those who thrive on the human connections that new media tools afford to develop knowledge, physical and mental fitness, social accomplishment and the arts are increasingly women.

Mothers and earth have always had a special connection. Society was matriarchal at some point as a consequence of that connection. Today we do not discount men - we celebrate women. For all they have given and done and all they have still been untapped to do, for we can accomplish much more and we will. Happy Mother's Day.

Citizen Journalists and Responsibility

"Having a platform means that you have some responsibilities, and responsibilities are the opposite of rights." [Michael Tomasky, Editor, Guardian America]

Jeff Jarvis and Michael Tomansky recently debated whether the Internet's new breed of citizen journalists should have the responsibilities of journalists or the rights of citizens. [hat tip to Robin Hamman] Jay Rosen himself participates to the conversation. I think this kind of debate is good to have to promote awareness of the issues and potential conflicts of interest we may bump into.

More and more we find our roles overlap - blogger, employee, stockholder, customer, etc. Do the rules of engagement overlap? Where do we stand on ethics and responsibility? My hunch is that at this stage it is a personal question we ask ourselves. Certainly there are always consequences to how we answer it. Let's start with a definition of citizen journalist. Directly from Wikipedia:

Citizen journalism, also known as public or participatory journalism, is the act of citizens "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information," according to the seminal report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information, by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis. They say, "The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires."

Does citizen journalist equal blogger? In some instances it might. We call people who help spread the word on companies and their products Citizen Marketers and we call people who help disseminate and discuss the news Citizen Journalists. In both cases, people are the message. Here's what happens when we are the message, though - it is up to you to figure out where your responsibility falls.

As Andrew Tyndall says in the comments to Jarvis' post:

In an instance when one is invited to listen to something that is private and is told that it is so, surely one is bound not to repeat it, however newsworthy it might happen to be, and being a journalist — or calling oneself a journalist — is no license to violate that understanding and make such speech public.

That point does not fall under “rules for bloggers.” It falls under rules for human beings.

Agree/disagree? Why?

 

Corporate Social Media Evangelists

Social media is reaching a tipping point inside corporate America. That is as much the product of the wider adoption by individuals who, whether you're in B2B or B2C, end up being your customers or prospective customers, as it is of the tireless work of a new breed of conversationalists. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb called them the New Robert Scobles.

It is easy to recognize among the the names listed, those who are doing their work very publicly. I am sure you recognize the names of Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester and Sam Lawrence of Jive Software. Owyang manages to be everywhere and Lawrence manages to be provocative and forceful. I was quite pleased to discover the names of less known evangelists who by all descriptions have earned the right to be called corporate social media evangelists.

New Voices

Daniela Barbosa

Meet Daniela Barbosa - how could I not like someone with an Italian name? You know me too well to think that is the only reason why I would call her out. Having worked for many years in the financial services industry, I am intimately familiar with the conservative nature of that environment. Daniela works at at Synaptica, a division of Dow Jones Client Solutions, as Business Development Manager.

What does Synaptica do? We are all drawing in information and we're all stretched to the max with no time to figure out how that information and our collective knowledge can help us solve problems for our customers - that is especially true inside organizations. Synaptica (perhaps from synapses?) helps you manage all that so it makes sense and can be used intelligently. It looks like Daniela is working with her colleagues from marketing and product to make what the company does more transparent through social media and thus easier to understand.

Information delivery is important. I often say that inside organizations we do not have a communication problem, we have an information problem. Nice to meet you, Daniela.

Linda Skrocki

At Sun Microsystems, Linda Skrocki manages the community venues, that means blogs, forums, media and RSS. External organizations with whom they've shared their experiences include the United Nations (in preparation for their Youth Summit), the DoD, and other tech companies.  I am impressed by Sun because they are a large organization and I suspect that they face many of the issues and challenges of cultural scalability that large companies face.

A recent post on her blog about when to use a wiki caught my attention. She writes:

The thing I love about the online community space is you never really know how people are going to leverage the tools placed in front of them -- especially when the tool is as cross-functional as a wiki. Sure, there are the easy to predict use cases that come to fruition and the easy to predict grey use cases, but observing how contributers approach the grey areas, in addition to the unpredictable super clever user cases, is what interests me.

It was through this post that I discovered some very good advice by Stewart Mader on when using a wiki is appropriate. Many organizations are starting to use wikis as collaborative tools for employees. As a connector, I like the function of cross-pollinating ideas from Web sites and other tools with a collaboration layer. I'll be learning more from Linda, I'm sure.

Which Brings me to Blog Council

The announcement was received by many with mixed reviews. Duncan Reily at TechCrunch asked if it was a bad or inspired idea. Ryan Paul at ArsTechnica said that the new corporate Blog Council misses the point of blogging. Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine put his finger on it, the reaction was mostly caused by the name. It's not the blog, he wrote, it's the conversation.

Jarvis puts forth some excellent advice on naming. I've said it in many places here, words matter. It is about listening, it is about customers, and it is about seeing things from their perspective. What my colleague Lionel Menchaca from Dell says (as reported by Jarvis) bears repeating:

It’s also not about control. For me at least, that has been decided—companies don’t control the message, customers do. I hope that Dell (and other companies in the council that have made the leap into digital media) can work together to move companies past the false notion that we are still in control. I’ve talked to folks from other large companies and that reality scares the heck out of them. I think that’s the primary reason why less than 10% of Fortune 500 companies have a blog. That fear makes it a non-starter for many companies. . . .

Good corporate blogs force companies to look at things from a customer’s point of view. That’s why I want more large corporations to blog, and I want them to do it the right way. That means letting real people have real conversations just like individual blogs do. But it’s a bit different from a corporate perspective. Transparency is still key, but the reality for large corporations is that there are some things we can’t discuss. It’s a balancing act, and sometimes it’s a difficult one. But worth the risk? You bet it is.

I also read a very interesting post by Dave Taylor at Intuitive.com on how the business world yawns to Blog Council. I find myself nodding to the challenges - real and perceived - that large organizations face with this initiative and social media in general. I worked in highly hierarchical and regulated industries my whole career. That did not seem to take the passion for conversation out of me, did it?

I find some narrative fallacy in Taylor's post:

Indeed, as has been demonstrated time and again, it's Madison Avenue, specifically the small, nimble, edgy marketing and PR agencies that are really the only hope that large corporations have of getting involved in modern social media and the blogosphere in any meaningful -- and interesting -- manner. These agencies might stumble occasionally (as I have written about many times) but they're trying new things and they can afford to take risks in a way that larger corporations, publicly traded entities, simply cannot.

Should I mention some of my recent conversations with said award-winning agencies who were found wanting on execution and advice? Where is the list of bloggers and social media "experts" from those agencies? 

On a more conciliatory side, Shel Holtz and Josh Hallet shared their perspectives on the council as well. What seems to have drawn the ire of social media pundits, in addition to the council's name, is the nature of the council's site. It's not a blog, they write, It's filled with marketing speak, It talks at us, etc.

If you take a look at the list of member companies, you may notice that the name of the company where I spend most of my time, SunGard, was added to the list recently. We were welcomed warmly by our colleagues at Dell, for starters.

An Insider's View

In the comments section of Taylor's post (that is where I tend to spend my time when I read posts, BTW), Jon writes something fabulous. Something that is a tonic, music to my ears. "Marketing needs to grow up," he says. Amen to that. He continues:

Consumers are maturing, and we don't respond well to the run-of-the-mill schlock our parents once did. I deal with executives in several reasonably large companies. I actually hear them say things like "We're in business to be in business." By which they mean, "We're in business to make money."

They are missing the point, and a chance at greater earnings. Soon they will be left behind by those companies who are in business to provide something useful to the customer.

I'm confused by the last statement, Jon. Help me out. Is Blog Council missing the point or are large corporations? Never mind, as you said in your latest post, that we connect at all is a miracle - your poetry is a gift, Jon, and it did not go unnoticed.

This past week I participated, as a listener, to the first show and tell and I was blown away by the candor and transparency of my colleagues in corporate America. Many of them have been using social media inside their organizations for years. That takes stamina, poise and the ability to risk your life - your professional life that is - many times a year, possibly a month or a week.

But this is not the point of this post. This post is about corporate social media evangelists. We need more of them, not less. We need the help of the community, all of you, to replenish our resolve and on some days validate that what we do is useful. By far the toughest job a corporate social media evangelist has is inside the organization.

There will be a time when social media is a natural part of the work marketing communications professionals do. Not today. Today they steal time away from the expectations of the many customers they serve - they include outside customers and customer service of course, sales groups, product teams, technical teams, the HR group, legal council, where applicable the regulatory group, the management team, and anyone else in between.

Why You Need to Keep an Open Mind

I need to do that, too. Sometimes it pays to be empathetic and to provide a giving hand. Last weekend at Blogger Social I had a conversation with Marilyn Pratt that was not connective. I was distracted and not feeling well. She was picking a moment that was not ideal for me to put forth the weighty issue of community responsibility and the question of how do you keep things separate? You can't, I should have answered simply, but sometimes you do it anyway.

Marilyn is Community Evangelist at SAP Labs, a Blog Council member. The irony of life had Andy (Sernovitz) introduce us by work email this past week as part of the council's services to help members meet each other. How is that for instant feedback loop or karma?

CK said it best, I don't care that you promote me, I care that you promote the right message. I'm an explorer, just like many of you. I have a day job I am passionate about. You may or may not see the results of my work there immediately. There is much to do and fewer resources to do it with. That does not dampen our resolve to do what's right. It may just take more time. You did not see behind - or should I say beyond? - the Blog Council site and terminology, will you see the individuals who are working on behalf of these companies' customers and communities?

Thank you for listening. My turn now.

Who Are We? We Get to Choose.

In my early twenties I worked to serve brain-injured children. Those have been the most rewarding, tireless, and frightening six years of my life. Many vivid images are still seared in my mind from those days. Some things you just never forget - those that touch you personally become woven into the fabric of your being.

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another. Her 2008 TED talk [running time 18:44] is an experience worth having.

So who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are -- I am -- the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me.

Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.

This is the kind of content worth spreading. It has not escaped my notice that BMW is sponsoring it.

Digital Marketing Ecosystem

AdAge recently polled a few of the bloggers on the Power150 to ask about the future of digital marketing. The answers ranged from Web video to micro blogging to social networks.

I agree with most of my colleagues cited in the article with one caveat - content works best within context. As our lives look and feel very busy, now more than ever, randomness and chance will favor the prepared marketer.

Context matters in viral marketing, and it matters in concert with content. Your customers are time starved, it's your job to join the conversations they are already having and to help them connect the dots with you. Not for you, it's not about you - it never was. Integration does not mean that your tactics are matching each other, it means they are matching your customers' world view and needs - where and when they fit her lifestyle.

Some homework for marketers who wish to drive the changes occurring in digital marketing towards an ecosystem - not merely to understand and exploit them:

• Participate with short and to the point content that manages to be relevant and contextual to the existing conversations - micro-platforms like Twitter and Tumblr are following in the footsteps of convenience created by IM. Peter Imbres of Point Oh! explains that: "It's less a question of how they [marketers] can directly apply this technology than how they need to understand collective conversations."
   
• Develop permission-based portable conversations - stop talking about your customers as targets, and start getting to know them. I've been reading that mobile advertising may be on the rise, especially as the mobile Web gets better. Marketers beware, as you collect more information about people, make sure you are reaching out to them on their terms. Back in October I wrote a post outlining 5 easy ways to add value.
   
• Offer compelling content on a consistent basis - it's the hardest thing to do especially in industries and companies that have gotten used to charging a premium for it. Ideas should be free, it's the execution that makes all the difference anyway. Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 says it best: "the content marketing movement is the philosophy of marketing services not by traditional methods, but by delivering valuable, relevant and compelling content to customers and prospects on a consistent basis."
   
• Facilitate the growth of online streaming video - increasingly, your customers are either streaming or watching video content online. Given the recent dispute of Comcast Corp. and BitTorrent Inc. over congested nodes because of alleged bandwidth hogging, there is opportunity here. Time Warner Cable is planning to experiment with consumption-based or metered pricing for broadband in Beaumont, Texas. How about helping sponsor some of that broadband? Paul Chaney of Conversational Marketing cites consumer-driven use of video: "ooVoo, seesmic, Revver, Jumpcut ... the list goes on and on. Oh, and FastCompany.TV that Scoble just inaugurated. Add to that the fact that people are scurrying to their computers to watch television programs on sites like Hulu, Netflix or DailyMotion."

The conversation around keywords and language deserves its own post. Bret Swanson and George Gilder of the Discovery Institute, a nonpartisan public-policy think tank based in Seattle, project the Internet will grow by 50 times in 2015. These are the early days. Although we already saw a big move in marketing spending online in recent years, the answer for marketers cannot be delivering the same push message through different media.

Digital marketing has enormous potential not merely to help you demonstrate ROI. It has the opportunity to become a true ecosystem. Will you let customers stay in the driver seat long enough to learn from them not just about them?