May 11th - Relevant Links
Sunday, May 11th, 2008Sharing the links for the day:
April 27th - Relevant Links
Monday, April 28th, 2008Sharing the links for the day:
It’s official! I suck
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008That’s right - honesty is the best policy. So in full disclose this is Just a traffic update, yesterday was the worst traffic this blog has had since I’ve been paying attention! (Nov. 07). That’s right, celebrate the little things, because it appears y’all are transitioning to rss readers. Thanks team!
Maybe it is that no one is searching of relevant terms for what I’m writing about, so let’s highlight the top 10 search items, since we have analytics.
- bob’s ichthyosaur - A Great book and apparently the top search term.
- what is scientific management - High school students everywhere are googling.
- twing - Very cool, cool people
- mbifm - A made up acronynm, which apparently means Member of the British Institute of Facilities Management.
- calculating gross margin
- danielle pribbernow - Chick on the Check out blog, wonder if it’s just her searching on herself? Way too much traffic for a Wal-Mart employee. No I mean WAY TOO MUCH.
- dijouri - I made up this name for my second son, 12 years old. I think this IS my son searching on himself or people trying to figure out if I made up his name or people looking for movie made in 2003.
- things i am thankful - This is encouraging.
- afro - Right on.
- giggly quotes - Who searches on giggly quotes?
So if you don’t find anything interesting above interesting, perhaps one of the top 10 “trafficked” pieces, mainly produced via keywords - which you will notice via the relationships between keywords above and titles below. That being said,I REALLY am partial to the Stuck in the Middle series — and — I like the Mosaic piece the most, mainly because it plays well in my head. Yup, I’ve sucked you into a replay post, but a replay of posts everyone else seemed to like too, or at least this is 10 most visited posts here.
- Lessons Learned: What is scientific management
- 100 Things I am thankful for… – A thanksgiving post
- Spatially Relative: A community’s place… - A piece about a book I read
- About – Self-explanatory
- 5 Ways YOU can launch a Twitter stream remediation program – geeky thing I wrote and scoble called it geeky, that scoble effect is a real thing.
- Lessons Learned: How to calculate Gross Margin
- 10 Themes and concepts for YOU to blog on
- 10 Tips for dealing with the fact that you will never leave your Job
- WANTED: Social Media Antagonist
- The Death of Marketing? Mix it up.
Hopefully the new folks that have added me to your reader find some of these interesting. Cheers!
Influence Networks?
Sunday, April 13th, 2008A little too much time on my hands and just a little bit of data, armed with just that I went to thinking. I was able to get a front row seat for influence in action yesterday by random happenstance and journaled it. Networks are interesting things, Andrew Baron is selling his twitter account. Could be a new market and what is the value?
What is the value of a social network? Depends on the influence, Andrew’s account is currently >$1000. Wonder what Scoble’s would be worth?
5 Incomplete Thoughts on Social Media
Friday, April 11th, 2008Remember the title….
1. Manufactured Market?
There is so much noise about the market opportunity and the necessity to fund community initiatives for enterprises but little has materialize in respect to direct revenue and meaningful metrics. This is a challenge for traditional marketers on many levels and the type of topics I suspect are being at the Forrester Marketing conference. There is a after the show workshop that asserts the following which might be close to revenue:
Experiments with rich media, blogging, RSS, and social networks show how dynamic marketing techniques can touch on buyers’ emotions, educate and persuade them, measure interactions more effectively, and generate additional business.
2. Perpetual Social Markets
Shel’s interviews of Jeremiah Owang and the Sea World folks are both emblematic of the challenges of linking social media investments to a return. How can you effectively measure and manage social media as a growth engine? Examples exist where a specific event or a series of inferences can be leveraged to assume the impact of social media, as evidenced in the description of Sea World video at Fast Company:
Measuring social media is one of the pain spots for the enterprise. As Kami Huyse, says in this clip of her client SeaWorld San Antonio. “It all depends on what you measure.” …
What to measure indeed - hits, downloads….. Ultimately most businesses measure revenue from Marketers, so perhaps Sea World is an anomaly and most businesses know how to convert the social media marketing budget to revenue and understand how to successfully deploy/develop a community. Let’s see if this is the case from Shel’s interview of Jeremiah, you probably only need to listen for say, the whole thing:
3. Social Media as Infrastructure
With the metric challenges and elusiveness of revenue is social media a function of retention more so than demand? If marketers are unable to deliver/verify incremental new revenues base on investment, should the metric hunt move to revenue retention and customer satisfaction?
Cool technology should never be relegated to the “post-transactional” budget fight…..
4. Platforms as Markets
Is Twitter a market? Facebook? Myspace? With increasing platforms for exchange more and more opportunity appears to emerge as populations flock to platforms. Where people gather transactions happen right? There are many example of this in the physical space - Burning Man, dead shows and in the parking lots of panic shows. So if people are gathering, there has to be transactions to be had - right?
Information as currency and messaging as a service continues to be the key commodities being exchanged on social media platforms….
5. Community as a Commoditizer
The transactional efficiencies of social computing by it’s very nature puts downward cost pressure on goods. Ease of comparison, ease of purchase and ease of access to other consumers/product customers. Ease of discovery. Product differentiation through a cost center represents…
Maybe the title should have been 5 Incoherent Thoughts…
~cheers!
Social Evolution: Access & Developing Relationships
Monday, April 7th, 2008
I’ve been spending a great deal of time thinking about relationships lately due to a great week I had with my whole family over spring break. It was one of those classic vacations where all of us - Kevren, Dijouri, Prescott, Hadrian and Emily were able to revitalize ourselves and develop even closer bonds. I also missed the opportunity this week to catch up with couple of folks who I only see a couple of times a year and missed an introduction to another - so this week was just chock full of relationship stuff.
With near misses and great successes this week, I thought I would jot down some concepts which I have been bouncing around the evolution of a given social relationship.
Not all social relationships are created equal and neither are all interactions.
Yup, Captain Obvious is back! While a fairly simple observation, it was punctuated with some great social content which found me this week thanks to the great folks that I follow, share and interact with. This week had escalating Shel v. Loren action, Sarah’s FAQ, Christina’s milkshake and @rabeidoh’s five levels of social media relationships - each of these folks demonstrated varying levels of investment for evolving active social relationships. The key takeaway this week from my network for me is that each person has different expectations and these change over time based on your interactions, for good or ill.
While I really don’t want a Social Media Antagonist or think that anything such as a social media Ninja exists, I do think we are ALL attempting to generate meaningful relationships which evolve towards their natural end state, what ever that is. Ultimately whether you are just a feed voyeur, a follower or a personal friend you will ultimately find the shared value equilibrium in each social relationship you engage in.
The Interaction Evolution
We all bring our own quirks and expectations with us when we start building social relationships, this includes or preferential biases for communication. I use different tools, mediums and response requirements based on where I am with a specific relationship or topic I am covering. Think about it - What access do you provide to a twitter random? Who get’s your REAL email? Who get’s your phone number? Who gets added on twitter?
No simple feat to qualify a mutual connection for mutual investment and evolutionary access. Mutual contribution and participation will ultimately determine what level of interaction happens and access is provided. Dopp’s recent post demonstrates how access expectations vary and what qualifies as a valuable interaction via email for her as an individual:
If you have my phone number, the best way to get my attention is a text message. If I’m following you on Twitter, you can have the same effect with a direct message. Email is the next best thing, and “info at sarahdopp dot com” will get you past my spam filters if you’re not already in my address book. I read every email I receive but I’m not always the best at responding, so please follow up if you’re not getting what you need from me. (Tip: I tend to respond to short emails faster than I respond to long emails.)
Appears to be an expectation gap in some of Sarah’s relationships, but now everyone has the ground rules which is a good thing. It is something to build on. What are you going to GIVE your connections to build on?
The Evolution of Social Relationships
We all have to start somewhere and any given social relationship hopefully will evolve towards greater access, trust and value over time or it won’t and you are 1 click away from something else. No specific state of a social relationship is any less rewarding or beneficial for the participants, just different exceptations, access and interactions. It sorta has a “deal-with-it” undertone, but facts are facts. To go even further cliche on this - you get what you give from a social relationship.
The Connection: Sharing and Learning
Some of the most rewarding social connections I have are centered on the sharing of information and experiences of people I have no other connection to than a random twitter add. Most social relationships start with an innocuous add and may ultimately stay a voyuer for both parties, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a valuable relationship. When you are sharing ideas and time with your network you are investing in the relationship which provides for new opportunities and interactions with your connections.
Your Social Colleagues
Over time and with work, you will be able to identify folks you interact with who you would consider a colleague. You meet at conferences, grab coffee and catch up at other geek social events, but you probably just show up at their house in 20 minutes. This is however where your investment continues to evolve and provides initial returns for both folks through shared experiences and increased trust.
Social Friendship
There are plenty of business colleagues I interact with which represent some of the most rewarding relationships I have which are steeped in shared successes and interests, but don’t evolve into “friendship”. Just like in business, social relationship can develop to become personal relationships that transcend your typical business relationship - mutual respect, mutual learning and continued investment in share goals and values, but it requires more than just shared experiences. Shared goals, ideals and investment are central to developing and maintaining social friendship.
Social friends are definitely good stuff when you can find it and the social relationship is now just a just a primordial hop out of the sea to borrowing tools or going into their refrigerator uninvited.
A Personal Friend
This should be self-explanatory, you have real friends right? Yup, you can borrow stuff now. This is also the part in which any relationship becomes wonderfully unpredictable, interactive and enjoyable. This is the “best of luck” part of the evolution, as from this point on it’s not 140 characters or dodged voicemails - they are showing up at your house uninvited and eating your food. Time to food theft varies by person, but it’s worth the wait and the effort.
The Homo Sapien Complexity
Social relationships evolve very much the same as any other relationship. The main anomaly is the candidate pool is so much bigger for finding cool folks that you can’t possibly develop each and every connection to the same level at the same time. Even though you have exponentially more access, it doesn’t mean you have exponential time or value to add, so do what you gotta do to evolve the right relationships.
No matter the path a given social relationships takes, each interaction provides the opportunity to drive shared value and extend/change what the evolutionary equilibrium is.
To that end… @shelisrael go ahead and block….. @Film_Girl I have my fingers crossed! And don’t be that guy…
WANTED: Social Media Antagonist
Saturday, April 5th, 2008Spatially Relevant (SR), a Top 333,000 blog, is the leading Geography, Marketing, Product Management, Social Media and Live Music (GeoMaPMSMLM) blog. SR is seeing amazing flatness in our growth and seeking a little assistance in taking the SR experience to the next level.
The rapidly growing GeoMaPMSMLM segment represents a great opportunity for the successful candidate to rise to almost internet famous. Think about it - there are 980,000,000 people on the planet who profess an interest in one or more of these topics according to IDC. With only 1% market penetration you could still be reasonably obscure outside of the internet. The culture at Spatially Relevant is eclectic and unfocused, so you will have an opportunity change the conversation and stimulate new topics and editorial themes. The search for Social Media Antagonist is international and cross-network. A key focus of this position is to open new channels for SR in emerging markets and platforms, such Orkut and Xing. In short, the successful candidate must be platform and social network promiscuous.
The role of Social Media Antagonist is seen as a strategic investment by the Spatially Relevant board of directors and appropriate love and care will be provided by the whole organization to ensure success. It is as of yet undecided if the antagonist will be more of a frienemy or a straight up antagonist, this will be determined collaboratively during the conversational interview process.
Qualifications
- Will need to be a follower on twitter of @spatially prior to throwing your hat in the ring
- Should have more the 750 followers on twitter. It’s ok if they are only “internet friends”
- Should have YOUR own blog with a technorati rank of <333,000, bonus if your blog is on dungeons and dragons, science or star trek.
- Should have modest command of the English language, think reasonable grammar, but limited vocabulary.
- Should be reasonably patient for me to respond to not so witty barbs on week days, since I have a job and this is like 4th on my priority list.
- Should have a completely superficial understanding of GeoMaPSMLM topics and concepts
- Prefer that you are more emotional than logical in your social media efforts
The PERFECT Candidate must be willing support the following internet personality attribute constraints:
- Should not be mean or creative
- Prefer you NOT remind me of my grandfather or be a puppet
- Belligerent and not well thought out tweets are fine, but keep it clean - I can’t stand cussing.
- Would prefer you not do podcast or video, I just don’t have the time or talent.
- Should not be a Democrat since I would like to have an edge in empathy, awareness, logic and creativity.
- Would not have your own T-Shirt already, since I’ve got a really cool tagline I’ve been working on which would be SWEET on a t-shirt. (I even have an antagonist version/anti-tagline for the successful candidate)
- Should not be trying to make the world a better place with your social media efforts
Education
- BA in Liberal Arts, bonus points will be awared for Children’s Literature, Children’s Theatre or Public Administration majors. Non-Degree holders will be considered providing you have verifiable street cred when it comes to online antagonism.
- Degrees from Tier 4/5 University preferred (Think MAC10, regional private school or SEC)
So if you think you have the right level of medicority for this position just post your qaulifications via the following options.
- comment below
- post your response on your blog with the following Tag: SMASR
- via an email to publisher -AT- spatiallyrelevant -DOT- org, with your CV attached.
Please note: All submissions will potentially be leveraged for future follow up posts, tweets or other interactions to see if you have the right stuff and are not just “paper qualified”. Be sure to include your @twittername, blog URL and favorite band in your submission for consideration.
Thanks in advance for your quality submissions.
Compensation: Commensurate with effort
Position Type: Temp to Perm, while seen as strategic, could easily be abandoned
What is social bookmarking and why don’t YOU use it?
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008So I continue to get amazed with the valuable information I receive from stumbling around folks links, browsing my network on Del.icio.us or just digging around. But then I realized that a great deal of folks don’t actually share their links, they more so browse. Why is that? Just in case you get the urge to share, he’s a reminder of why you have an account on mixx or propeller.
Thanks for the video Lee! Odd question have we all replaced social bookmarking with Twitter?
