BrianSolis

Blame It on the Youth

If you want to know where the future is headed, sometimes telling clues reside in how the youth of the world interact and share with one another.

With the rise of the Golden Triangle of technology, mobile, social, and real-time, technology is not just for the geeks, technology is part of our lifestyle…it is part of who we are. However, as we are all coming to learn, it’s not in what we have, it’s in how we use it that says everything about us.  In the way we use technology, whether it’s hardware or social networks for example, the differences are are striking.

But something disruptive, this way comes. And the truth is, it’s been a long time coming. How we consume information is moving away from the paper we hold in our hands and also the inner sanctum of family, the living rooms where we huddle around televisions. In fact, Forrester Research recently published a report that documented, for the first time, we spend as much time online as we do in front of a television. Indeed the battle for your attention will materialize across the four screens, TV, PC, mobile, and tablets.

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Social Media ROI: ROI Doesn’t Stand for Return on Ignorance

My good friend Olivier Blanchard recently released his new book, Social Media ROI, Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization. As he was nearing its completion, he asked if I would write the foreword and to be honest, I was flattered. I agreed to do so under one condition, that I get the opportunity to share the foreword with you here. Long story short, here we are. The book is extremely helpful and carries the endorsements of those I also respect including Chris Brogan, Jay Baer, Geoff Livingston, and Kyle Lacy.

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How do you increase social influence? Don’t think about the score

Influence: The capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself.

Digital influence is a controversial topic. At the heart of the matter is this idea of influence and it raises questions and doubts as to whether or not the ability to cause effect or change behavior is truly measurable. Regardless of the answer, we are introduced to a new reality of social networking, an era where our actions and words in Facebook, Twitter et al. are used for and against us.

One day we awoke to find a number attached to our digital persona. And in this new awakening is a fascinating new twist in social media, the association between scores and avatars and the new digital socioeconomic factors that are introduced. We are now ranked and what was once a peer-to-peer network is now tiered, creating a social hierarchy where a score defines your place within it.

We didn’t opt in, we can’t opt out, but we can shape it.

Welcome to the EGOsystem.

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The Dilemma’s Innovator: Innovation and Change as the New Pillars of Business

If necessity is the mother of invention, then perhaps imagination is the source of innovation.

In December 2010, I was given the opportunity to write the cover story for Entrepreneur Magazine. The article, “Change: Lessons on What’s Next,” explored the innovation behind three (well four) companies — Foursquare, Square + Twitter, and Zappos. Throughout the years, I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with Dennis Crowley, Jack Dorsey and Tony Hsieh. And over that time, I’ve observed inherent traits that I believe represent the future of business and how companies engage with customers to create a more adaptive and connected infrastructure to compete for the future.

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Guy Kawasaki on the Art of Enchantment

Guy Kawasaki is nothing less than enchanting. His vision and experience come to life through an inspired art of storytelling that is, well, inspiring. Guy possesses a truly unique and special talent to captivate your heart, mind, and attention.

I first followed Guy when he was chief evangelist at Apple. He introduced businesses to an entirely new art form marketing through engagement and empowerment. Over the years, I’ve also followed his work in Silicon Valley spanning from Garage.com to Alltop as well as pored over every book he’s written. I’m proud to call Guy Kawasaki a personal friend and I’m excited to share with you the latest episode of Revolution.

Guy stopped by the studio to discuss the release of his new book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. It’s a lively discussion that takes us on a journey that focuses on the importance of engagement, enchantment, and delivering “magical experiences.”

Brian Solis

Originally posted on BrianSolis.com

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook

The Future of Broadcast is More Than Integrating Tweets into Programming




The future of broadcast is literally at our fingertips…

The living room is the epicenter of family, the hub of the household. Perhaps more so than the dining table, the living room hosts hours upon hours of family attention and interaction every week. Whether we were gripped by the music and voices emitting from radios or entranced by the moving images illuminating our televisions, we celebrated everything from togetherness to relaxation around a common centerpiece.

This once mighty magnet of attention, through its iterative forms, is learning to share its powers of attraction forever changing the idea of the family cornerstone. Now attention is a battlefield and the laws of attraction are distributed.

Like passing ships in the night, the TV and the Internet have yet to intimately embrace one another. Instead, each are vying to become your center of attention. In reality however, you and I know that they’re already co-existing as people increasingly bring their laptops and iPads into the living room. When Forrester Research published a report that, for the first time, marked the equalization of time spent between TVs and the internet, it was and wasn’t a surprise. Indeed, it was inevitable. Depending on where you reside in the adoption bell curve, this news is either overdue or early. Either way, it’s both a culture shift and shock.  If for but a moment, these two ships are frozen, floating across from each other without obstructing the respective course. However, the wakes cast through each journey to this point are felt on both sides.

Change lies ahead and how it looks and what it means are unclear and debatable. But, what’s not in question is its importance and consequence.

If you are in the business of trying to reach consumers to earn attention, your world no longer rotates on its previous axis. Progressive brands are already experimenting with media and corresponding budgets to capture attention where and when it’s focused. For example, Proctor & Gamble is moving spend away from TV soaps and daytime dramas toward digital and social channels. This move signals the beginning of the end of an era and also the beginning of the end of business as usual.

This is None of Your Business…So Make It Your Business

Forrester surveyed over 40,000 people and if for nothing else, the findings serve as evidence necessary to turn our wheel and change course. Three short years ago, only one-third of Americans shopped online. Now, two-thirds rely on e-commerce to shop. Comparatively, 35 percent of respondents visit social networks today, up from 15 percent in 2007. Like e-commerce, we can make an educated guess as to where that number will climb three years from now.

The proliferation of the Internet is far more disruptive than we realize. It seems as though decades and in some cases centuries of media production and consumption are becoming obsolete overnight. As a good friend of mine said in reaction to Forrester’s controversial report, “I knew this would happen, but so soon…?”

Suddenly traditional media properties including newspapers, broadcast radio and TV, magazines, et al, were caught off guard when the new media revolution hit. Suddenly everyone is turning to Facebook, Twitter, GoogleTV and the iPad as the savior for the future of all traditional media. But this revolution didn’t happen over night. For many years a quiet riot assembled until whispers amplified into cries for change. And when their pleas went unacknowledged or unaddressed, they, we, embraced the democracy of social media to ensure that our voices were heard.

For businesses and media properties, I’m sorry to say, social media, geo-location, and tablets aren’t going to save you. Thoughtfulness and empathy are the keys to unlock the gates that will lead you onto a new path of awareness. It’s the steps you take that reveal how to earn relevance within each medium that captivates your consumers.

I Want My Web TV

Sound familiar? The promise of a convergence between TVs and the Internet is ambiguous at best. New media isn’t going away. It’s always new and that’s the point. What’s clear is that for the time being, attention is equally divided between TVs and the internet.

Culturally, we already see the coalescence of these two activities. But, attention might not prove to be what it was. Continuous partial attention, while disputed, is something that is in play for the Twitterati, those highly dexterous individuals who can watch TV, live tweet the experience, and discuss it with friends in real-time. What if the living room becomes virtual, connected through individuals connected by a platform, time, and common interests. It’s no longer a matter of what if…this is the new reality TV and we are inserting ourselves into the production through live commentary viewable and searchable by those audiences who have willfully connected to us.

The water cooler is already moving to the PC and social is emerging as the long fabled catalyst for the overdue convergence of the TV and internet.

The future of broadcast is social. At the same time, the future of the internet is linked by shared experiences. As such, consumers will bring their mobile phones, tablets, and laptops to the digital living room to watch and share experiences and create a greater conversation and sense of belonging.

Producers will now increasingly create content that includes us in the event and the storyline. Architects of social and hardware platforms will need to rethink how TVs and the internet converge to foster consumption and engagement. And, those brands who subsidize content production, will have to transcend the practice of following attention to captivating it through innovation and experimentation.

The audience is not the audience of old. It’s now an audience with an audience of audiences. And I guess that’s where everything begins now. The people who used to sit in front of a television and talk about their experiences to friends, family and co-workers are now empowered to do so right here, right now. Perhaps more important however, people are building full-fledged networks around them, creating a distribution channel of audiences with audiences and their reach is as influential as it is infinite.

How will you steer experiences in the future?

Brian Solis

Originally posted on BrianSolis.com

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook

Social Media and the Need for New Business Models

Who owns social media? Is it marketing, customer service, public relations?

Looking at a recent study conducted by the Pivot Conference, the top four departments where social media is currently run are as follows:

1. Marketing
2. Public Relations
3. Sales
4. Customer Service

Perhaps, it’s the wrong question to ask however. It’s not unlike asking who owns email. But, here’s another question and as we think about it, let’s broaden our perspective as the answer may not appear immediately.

Who owns the customer relationship?

The short answer is everyone.

If that is the case, then examining how social media is run today is not at all how businesses should think about it tomorrow. A not so long answer to the original question is “any person or department affected by outside activity where public interaction impacts decisions.”

Businesses tend to have a single or narrow view of the customer and as we’re learning, they’re connecting with one another and sharing experiences that transform their roles from prospect to advocate to adversary to influencer and everything in between.

Social media is not about conversations on Twitter and Facebook nor check-ins on Foursquare or Places, or flipped videos on YouTube. It’s about using this opportunity to build bridges to a new genre of customers and the people who influence their decisions. Our mission now is to pave paths to future relevance. The reality is that we are as much competing for the future as we are for the moment. And as a result, we are perpetually competing for relevance.

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The Interest Graph on Twitter is Alive: Studying Starbucks Top Followers

Social media is maturing as are the people embracing its most engaging tools and networks. Perhaps most notably, is the maturation of relationships and how we are expanding our horizons when it comes to connecting to one another. What started as the social graph, the network of people we knew and connected to in social networks, is now spawning new branches that resemble how we interact in real life.

This is the era of the interest graph – the expansion and contraction of social networks around common interests and events. Interest graphs represent a potential goldmine for brands seeking insight and inspiration to design more meaningful products and services as well as new marketing campaigns that better target potential stakeholders.

While many companies are learning to listen to the conversations related to their brands and competitors, many are simply documenting activity and mentions as a reporting function and in some cases, as part of conversational workflow. However, there’s more to Twitter intelligence than tracking conversations.

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Checking-in to the State of Foursquare

Last year at SXSW, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley joined Frank Eliason (previously @comcastcares), Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang and me on stage to discuss the shifting landscape of social engagement. While I focused on the sociology of engagement and the impact it is having on culture and society, I also sought to balance the conversation by demonstrating the impact of digital actions and interaction between people and businesses.

Whether intentional or not, Crowley and team unlocked the elusive gates that separated the last mile of engagement between local businesses and their customers and prospective patrons. The rising generation of social consumers embraced geo-location services to share physical experiences, connect with their social graph in the real world and also earn rewards for their check-ins, which is rapidly becoming a powerful form of peer-to-peer endorsements and recommendations. Crowley, quite literally gamed the system that was once solely controlled by giants such as the Yellow Pages,  Google and Yelp. The Foursquare team bridged the gap between people and places both online and offline.

Later in the year, we caught up again for a cover story I wrote for Entrepreneur magazine.

We discussed how Foursquare redefined the role of the patron and the relationship between businesses and customers.

“The network started to take on a life of its own,” Crowley said in the interview for Entrepreneur. “Foursquare gave everyday people, venues and local merchants a voice. It opened the doors for businesses to see a whole new way of seeing their customer.”

In the Game of Foursquare, What’s the Score?

Foursquare’s rapid rise from New York startup to media darling is quite remarkable. If you judge the service by its badge, or shall we say badges, you might miss the bigger picture. The essence of Foursquare is powered by its community. In this mobile Utopia, people earn positions of prominence by exploring and improving the experiences of other explorers. It’s a form of social hierarchy that’s alluring and rewarding. For a more recent example, it’s not unlike the fledgling blog darling Quora.  The ties that bind its users are woven through social ties and recognition that’s earned through participation and contribution.

Foursquare continues to evolve and the team recently released an infographic that visualized collective achievements and user behavior. To make it easier to consume and also appreciate its progress, let’s review some key milestones.

In 2010, Foursquare experienced 3,400-percent growth over 2009, reaching 6,000,000 users to date.

This year, Foursquare received over 380 million check-ins.

The largest swarm to date is the Rally to Restore Sanity, which saw over 35,000 check-ins on October 30th, 2010.

A Day in the Life

The team also revealed a “day in the life” of the typical Foursquare user.

Most people check-in to eateries, gaining momentum at 8 a.m. every day and thinning out just after midnight.

Check-ins to work or the office also follow a similar pattern. Work days typically seem to see the greatest volume of check-ins between 7 – 8 a.m. continuing to midnight.

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From Community Management to Command Centers

In early 2007, Chris Heuer, Shel Israel, Deb Schultz, Giovanni Rodriguez, and I explored the evolution of social media within the enterprise at an intimate business event in Palo Alto. One of the more memorable discussions focused on the rise of an official role within business to listen to social discourse and channel inbound questions and comments as well as official responses. The question eventually arose, how do we classify this new role within the organization? The designation of “Community Manager” earned the greatest support that day, but it did so with a caveat, “communities, by organic design, could not be managed.”

Fast forward several years, the community manager has evolved into an industry standard position within the social media value chain; it is also the beneficiary of its own appreciation day.

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