Being Wrong in Public

What does it take for a brand to successfully ‘socialize’? Anyone who has ventured into this line of inquiry knows that there is a lot of noise out there, and very little signal. I spent the better part of the last two weeks reading, talking, and thinking about brands and the social web, and I thought it would be helpful (definitely for the writer, and hopefully for the reader) to distill my learnings into a few choice nuggets.

1. Listen more than speak

Use brand monitoring tools like Radian6 to listen to what customers and prospects are saying. Engage with a human voice that is more interested in conversation and support than sales.

2. Provide a platform that enables your customers to be your advocates

Brand and promote those customers who use social media most effectively to engage with your company. Rewarding these leaders will signal to others that there is a very public benefit associated with engagement.

3. Leverage social-savvy employees

Make your employees famous. Chances are, they are already engaging successfully in this space. Create a human face for your brand by including them in the conversation and encouraging them to build thought leadership. It’s much harder for a critic to attack real people than a faceless corporation.

4. Consumers of content visit your site with expectations for basic social features

Sharing, liking, commenting, RSS, retweeting. A content site without this functionality looks ancient in the eyes of a social web user (i.e. 400 million people). Any YouTube regular will fear comments, and rightfully so. Reward good behavior and ignore bad behavior. Reward thoughtful comments with a response, or a link, or points, or moderator privileges. Ignore the flamers and allow your thoughtful commenters to manage them on your behalf. See Fred Wilson’s blog for a great example.

Overall:

Any company that is serious about leveraging the social web to further its corporate objectives must come to terms with the crucial reality that authenticity is a requirement. And yes, being authentic means being wrong in public. Being authentic means giving your employees a megaphone and allowing them to speak on your behalf. Being authentic means hosting a comment on your site that may better belong below a YouTube video.

There is certain risk in authenticity, but the failure of a social media strategy that does not engage with an authentic voice is just as certain.

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I highly recommend the following blogs:

• Web Strategy - @jowyang
• Being Peter Kim - @peterkim

These companies are doing a great job:

• Zappos: twitter.zappos.com & blogs.zappos.com
• Microsoft MVPs
• Walmart ElevenMoms
• BestBuy’s Twelpforce

Boycott the Button (Why I Refuse to Click on Facebook Connect)

It’s getting a little scary. I’m at the point where I would rather spend 5 minutes filling out a new profile than log into a third party site using Facebook Connect. Don’t get me wrong, Facebook Connect is a great tool (for Facebook) and I appreciate the gesture of interoperability, but I can’t help but see it as the single greatest threat to the future of the social web.

First, here’s what Facebook connect does well: If I were to click on the button, I would find it incredibly easy to share profile data with any site on the web; I would find it incredibly easy to send my activities back to Facebook where all my friends could take a look; and when I return to that site, I would be so happy to learn that I don’t have to remember yet another user name and password. And therein lies the problem…

Facebook does these things so well that publishers might not feel the need to integrate their sites with other social networks. They will be tempted to conclude that they’ve found the one-size-fits-all easy mac solution to that whole “social media” thing.

For many publishers this reasoning makes sense. With Facebook nearing 400 million members, it’s likely that any existing users of the site already have Facebook accounts. Why force them to create a new profile for the site? Users win because they don’t have to spend time creating an entirely new profile and re-connecting with all of their friends. Publishers win because any friction in the sign-up process is reduced to a mere click.

I believe that in the long run, everyone loses.

When a user logs into a site with Facebook Connect, that user’s activity is shared with Facebook and Facebook alone. This will be enough for some people. But what if I want to share my activity with LinkedIn? What if I want to share my activity with Ning? What if I want to share my activity with an innovative startup that is just beginning to build it’s user base? What if I want to represent a different side of my online personality to the site I’m visiting? Two possible answers: 1) The publisher takes the time and resources to develop an additional ‘Connection’ for each and every additional social service, or 2) I can’t.

#1 is inefficient, #2 is anticompetitive. Both alternatives are bad for users, bad for business, and bad for future of the social web.

The barriers to entry for the small innovative startup will be nearly insurmountable in a world where every site is content with Facebook’s ease of use. Joe the job seeker who wants to engage with other readers of a career advice blog will be forced to represent himself as Joe of Facebook instead of Joe of LinkedIn (when we’re at work, do we act as we do among friends and family? See this post for more). Simply put, Facebook Connect is a lock-in play.

My guess is that the right product will match Facebook’s ease of use but provide ‘plug and play’ functionality so that sites can easily integrate multiple social web services (yes, like OpenID).

Let’s not pretend that all the innovation in the social space has happened. Instead, let’s make room for the next generation of Zuckerbergs.

Boycott the Button.

New Blog: things.jakerlevine.com

I’ve decided to start posting my audio, video, and photo goodies at things.jakerlevine.com. It’s very much a work in progress, but check it out.

Meaning Is The New Brand

I was privy to a very interesting discussion yesterday at a Wesleyan University Communications round-table. The conversation focused primarily on Wesleyan’s brand strategy and its use of social media.

The consensus around the table, from industry experts to web wannabe’s (read: me), was that the old process of developing a singular brand, targeting a specific audience, and shouting that brand through those channels that most efficiently reach that audience, is no longer relevant.

In a world where content creation is fully distributed and costs nothing, the notion that brands should try to ‘control the conversation’ - to the degree that it was ever truly possible - has become utterly unrealistic. Maintaining a one-size-fits-all brand is no longer possible - but more than that, it does not take full advantage of the strengths of the social web. Marketers have always known that word of mouth is the best form of advertising. The web has enabled word of mouth to an extent never before imagined!

Trying to find authenticity in a one-size-fits-all message is an oxymoronic exercise. For a place like Wesleyan, which prides itself on a liberal arts education that prepares its students for EVERYTHING, there should be no doubt about the fact that its brand means different things to different people.

Build an architecture for the conversation: enable your best thinkers, speakers and writers to engage with your prospective audience in their own way. Spend the time usually spent on ‘brand management’ interacting with your audience, solving problems, and debating what matters. I think we’ll find that the ‘authentic’ identity of Wesleyan will emerge along and above these myriad conversations.