The Brand is What You Make It

Brands in control? According to Noah Brier's latest experiment, brands are what consumers make them, and ultimately it is the consumer that controls the brand. I've been playing with Brand Tags-- its amusing and fun and some of the tag clouds are hilarious...obviously just for fun, but still very interesting nonetheless (I happen to agree with Brier's position, its just that the dataset collected by Brand Tags is more for novelty purposes than for hard core analysis...love it all the same)

On the site, you are presented with a series of brand logos to which you are to write the first tags that come to mind....no surprise that MySpace's tags read like a bathroom stall..."slut," "garbage," "trash" LOL!

Have a go at it here

Why Not Indeed! LAFD on Social Media

This is awesome…I was commenting on Lee Odden’s blog (TopRankBlog.com) this morning (David Alston of Radian6 guest-posted) and one of the recent comments to the post on the need for social media monitoring was one I wouldn’t have expected!

Original Post

Brian Humphrey of the LAFD’s comment:


Lee,

David's guest post is but one of the many features that keep us coming back to your blog.

In an era where too many organizations descibe on-line dialogue about them as 'why us?', the Los Angeles Fire Department is pleased to be among the increasing number of brands saying 'why not us?'.

While our efforts are difficult to quantify as a typical return-on-investment, the qualifying effect on safety, health, productivity - and overall public trust is far beyond metrics.

Our thanks to David and you for helping and keeping us thinking outside the norm!

Respectfully Yours in Safety and Service,

Brian Humphrey
Firefighter/Specialist
Public Service Officer
Los Angeles Fire Department

LAFD Blog


Um, that is cool.

Change

I have been extremely riled the past few days...and my posts and Tweets I think have been a bit more pessimistic than usual. The bottom line is that much has to change in the marketing industry as a whole, and the ramifications of those very high level philosophical changes will eventually have an impact on practice and process for sure. But like everything, it will take time. Time! The very thing the digital landscape eats for breakfast. That marketing as an industry, and agencies as its constituents, needs to adapt is well-known...but the process can be slow and murky and its an interesting time to be in the mix of it all.

So, on a more positive note-- I do believe change will happen, that the paradigm shift in marketing's attitude towards consumers, in particular the "digital consumer" (an already semi-redundant term) will occur...but not without growing pains. And instead of griping about how idiotic agencies can be, I suppose now I'll turn my energies to being part of the solution. OMG. Yes, I just said that..."part of the solution." LOL....but seriously!

And someday, it'll all be digital ash in a digital urn anyway (oh puke, she made a Bright Eyes reference). :)

Social Media Wars Update: I Was Wrong

I was wrong. Yep, I admit it. I was wrong on this one when I said digital agencies would win social media. First, there is the whole issue about pigeon-holing "social media" as an offering versus recognizing it as the state of the web and therefore altering your offerings and position as a digital agency all together. But that isn't the point of this post (as that is a whole other issue about agencies in general).

While it initially seems that the digital agency should win out the battle for social media strategy-- indeed they have all the right ingredients with creative, dev teams, search & market research insight, etc to stand poised as leaders in this space-- there is a fundamental and pervasive lack of understanding of the current state of the internet today in the industry. Mention social media and they get excited. Talk about "dialogue" or "engagement" and you'll get a blank stare. You see?

This issue, however, is more fundamental to agencies and the inherent problems with their organizational structure and standard offerings (and standard way of approaching/understanding the internet) that is to blame and not any one company.

And really the question is not so much "who will win social media?" but really one that is much bigger and scarier than any digital agency is willing to admit...the question is "who will win the internet?"

Correction: as Eric Weaver points out more specifically..."WHO WILL WIN THE DIGITAL COSNUMER?"

My new take: companies not steeped in stagnant agency traditions of structure, who understand the current state of the internet, the culture shaping it, and the future of the digital consumers' lives that acquire talent with varying talents in communications/PR/WOM, creative, user/design experience, web development, and content development/publishing.....these stealth firms will be the one's to watch..and the ones to win the future of the web.

Super Tool!

Ok, so Super Tool doesn't exist, but certainly analysts can dream, can't they? @JolieODell asked me "K, so if you could imagine a real doozie of a social measurement tool, what would it do?" And so this is the start of my wishlist (I'm sure I'll be adding more as I ponder it tonight at 3am):



• Sentiment analysis: Conversation by Tonality
• Conversation by Influencer-weighted Tonality
Sentiment by topic/sentiment by topic/influencer
• Distribution: Conversation by source (and lets expand sources from Blogs, News, and Forums to social nets and media utilities as well)
• Influencer Distribution view: Conversations weighted by Influencer source
• Conversation Share of Voice competitive analysis

• Include aggregation of all UGC/media tagged with tracked keywords

• Weight data by Influencer and Type

• Expand “Types” to include (in addition to Blogs, News, Forums):
– Video/ video by Influencers (I= views, link, and embed analysis)
– Photo/ photos by Influencers (I= views, link analysis)


• Influencer Identification – authority is niche-specific, not authority in general; based on frequency/relevancy to topic/keyword/industry/brand

• Site Authority/Credibility established by post to post link analysis or site to post vs. Page Rank site to site analysis for topical relevancy/authority
– Page Rank’s power law makes it difficult to see emerging influencers around given niches/topic areas and would prefer a tool whose algorithm does not base Authority solely on Page Rank
– Ability to track emerging Influencers based on frequency/topical relevance/posting frequency/comment and/or traffic velocity to post

• Influence differentiation between authors from same site/blog: Author Tracking

• Manual exports of raw data to CSV; automated and timed exports; email alerts
– Automated graph generation would be nice too—then I don’t have to do it!

• And if we’re really talking tool wishlists then a visualization tool leveraging the comprehensive API’s of popular social utilities such as Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Google Maps etc for better data visualization would be really cool…and then there is also Goog’s Social Graph API that could turn up some really interesting data for Influencer Viz (like Facebook’s Nexus only for all of the social nets that make their data public)



And please! Add what you think you would want in a Super Tool in the comments...interested to see what people think.

Note, I've demoed/used a lot of tools in this space, and all are lacking in some capacity or other, either in feature (above is really a list of desired features with a bit on the data) or the datasets are lacking or there is a lot of indexing and analysis latency....

Also, important to note that needs are based largely on objectives. I use these tools to draw up prescriptive analysis for engagement strategies...this is different that say, someone who is in search and interested in traffic source and user journey analysis.

ITS THE INTERNET!

I know I've been on my soapbox about this...but it is seriously mind-blowing that digital agencies can call themselves as such when they apparently have no idea whats going on with the internet. Sure, they know about "those blog" things and Facebook, and they know they have to track "the conversation" in social media (but ask someone what that means and I'll bet you get a blank stare). And while these agencies are awake to the idea that they need to embrace social media, and put services and products against it...the major flaw in that thinking is treating social media as something that is merely a part of the internet...IT IS THE INTERNET. Social technologies have re-shaped what the internet is and means. The web is moving through iterations of connectivity and usefulness just has it has done previously.

Remember "Web 2.0?" that annoying epithet that Tim O'Reilly stole and coined for himself? Annoying (and so 2006) as the term might be, it does a much better job of summing up the current state of affairs than "social media." I think "social media" was a term that marketing adopted (over "Web 2.0") because "social media" is an idea they can (sort of) wrap their heads around-- but a different kind of webosphere? Too scary, to transformative-- to much work to adjust and adapt to the new web paradigm.

Ok, I may be a bit hyperbolic today (and granted, I realize there can be many deliberations and disputes over the differences between "Web 2.0" and "social media" but the terms have been used so interchangably, and for this argument I'm simply pointing out that for lexical, and therefore psychological, reasons the digital marketing industry adopted "social media" over the much bigger concept of a whole new web-- "Web 2.0") BUT digital marketing agencies are in a critical state if they continue to fail to understand what is happening with the internets.

Now, my head is about to explode so I'll simply leave you with this: :)

Nexus! Influence Imagined

If you're like me you've had Facebook app fatigue long before Scrabulous. But in my recent hunt for nifty third-party apps (not necessarily for Facebook...check out www.summize.com, a much better way to Twitter search than via Tweetscan.com) I stumbled upon (no pun intended) Nexus. Nexus is a "friend grapher" app which visualizes your personal network. Ok, so it may be only mildly interesting and just more social media navel gazing-- unless of course you use Nexus for that branded Business Page your client has that you wish you had more data on.

Well, by analyzing (note: this is strictly a visualization and it doesn't provide any actual metrics) your Fan base through Nexus, Influencer Nodes can begin to be identified. These Influencer Nodes would we be those Fans who have a high degree of connectivity (friends) and reach (networks). You can also see the relational influence of Fans, and even who is "most like you" based on profile keyword analysis.

For those working in a space (social media) where CPM, click-through rates, and other traditional digital metrics fail to provide a total picture of consumer interaction, involvement, and intimacy--you know that constantly seeking out new data and new ways of looking at that data are critical to understanding and quantifying the qualitative.

And, if nothing else, its a nifty enough tool to occupy my cognitive surplus for a few hours analyzing my personal network of influence--or lack there of :)

(note: if this post seems less "Socialized" than normal its because I originally wrote it for the iCrossing blog and needed to temper the vitriol)

Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo '08