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Ok, Brian, so my first question is:
You have predicted that in 2011 there would be an explosion of content curation
and of various tools about it. So what do you think, what did you notice,
what impressed you about these tools and the figure of the content curator,
and do you see further developments for content curation?
Content curation has experienced tremendous adoption this year,
and will continue to do so in 2012 as the tools become easier,
and also, what's the right word, more glamourous to use,
where they actually present data in a very readable format
for people who are following those people who are curating.
The other thing that I have noticed is that it's taken away
from proactive content creation because it is so easy to take
the content of others and just put or wrap your words around it.
But to what extent that has had an impact, I'm not sure,
but it is profound, because it does allow, for example, the formation of
not just curation based conversations or engagement,
but curation based interest graphs, so for example you and I
have interests in technology, maybe new media, mobile media
and the content that I curate and that I put my impressions upon
might have interest to you, so therefore our relationship grows stronger
based on the content that I'm packaging to share with you.
Extremely clear.
I will thank Giuseppe Mauriello for that question. Thank you, Giuseppe!
And I'm going to go on with the following one, which is by Fabrizio Faraco,
and he asks: "There are many services that measure influence,
but what is, in Brian's opinion, influence?"
None of these tools measure influence at all, they measure social capital
as it relates to how someone might interact in Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin,
but it does not measure influence. Influence is not a word that can be manipulated
by new media or technology, influence is very clear in how it's defined.
It is the ability to cause effect or change behavior.
Klout, PeerIndex, mBlast, you name it.
The track sort of a standing based on their own proprietary algorythms,
so you and me and a particular network, and even to that extent,
some could argue that that social capital algorythm is incorrect.
Because social capital is something that's earned and it's also spent,
as you interact not only in digital networks, but in real life.
The true measure of influence is to test those numbers.
So for example we see a lot of brands that are giving away products and experiences
to consumers who have a score of 50 or higher, for example.
What does that mean?
Well, as a brand you can test that, you could say: "We have 60% unawareness
in the marketplace and we would like to increase awareness,
so we will do these things, and we will change behavior."
Or it could be as simple as: "We will cause the effect of people recommending
our products, or people buying our products."
Those have outcomes, but the true measure of influence is going to be
the person at the end measuring what happened after the campaign.
A further question by Francesca Ferrara is about new publishing tools.
So, the question is: "The publishing startups that regard the birth of new
online newspapers - what are the errors that you think they should not do,
and how could they enhance their business model?"
That sounds like I could solve a lot of problems in one answer.
I can tell you that I've talked to a good number of new media properties
that are asking these very questions, because they are taking
quite traditional business models and packaging them in a new format.
And also not just a new format, but in terms of how they structure their employees.
I'm actually asked this question quite a bit, and I've worked with a lot of
new media properties to help them solve business model questions and problems
for the future. It's ironic that many of them actually begin with traditional
business models in terms of how they monetize their properties,
but what is noticeably different is how they're structuring their employee framework,
and the types of monetization strategies that they are considering
It's really interesting how content becomes a play here,
where original series, engaging types of experiences become monetizable.
So you don't necessarily have to sit there and watch a pre or post-roll ad
on a particular content, or have some really horrible island come floating over
the content as you experience it, so you have to be forced to go through this advertisement.
There are ways to create an experience that people will enjoy.
It just takes - I don't wanna just say creativity - but it also takes a way to
make people feel like it's worthy of engaging.
So let me put out a challenge to anybody creating a new media property.
We live in an era where people can skip ads. Whether it's on television,
whether it's online, if you look at any heat map study when the eyeballs
are focused on the screen, it's never on the advertisement, it's always on the content.
So what if you made the ad worthy of engagement?
What if you made the advertisement something that was so compelling,
something that was so fascinating that it not only sucked you in,
but also made you share it.
That's what the future of this is all about, it's not just about consuming,
it's about sharing. And we live in a world where sharing is actually taken for granted.
We have the ability to share content and we don't appreciate the ability.
This goes back to our question about curation earlier.
We don't appreciate the ability to actually package these things
and share them with others in ways that actually improve our dialogue.
Advertisement, monetization, these are all things that can be part of it,
we're just not thinking about it that way.
OldSpice did a great job in terms of making commercials that were so fascinating,
so funny that it was worthy of sharing. Evian Roller Babies!
And these are just two classic examples of what are basically advertisements,
but what if you made original series out of them, what if you made them
something that I had to share with you because it was so fascinating?
It's a difference in methodology and a difference in philosophy,
but those can be monetizable, those can be packaged and sold.
Ok, so I have a few further questions from other readers,
one is Roberto Favini, who has quite a few questions for you.
So the first one is: which skill or role is now lacking in media companies?
How must the organizing level of a media company change to be able to
manage contemporarily old and new media?
And when you ask about media company, are we referring to a newspaper
or a publication, or television?
It's not specified, but I think he intends all of these.
Well, if you think about it, they are amongst what I call digital darwinism,
they are the greatest threatened types of industries, in digital darwinism.
And digital darwinism is when consumer behavior, technology,
when all of these things start to evolve faster than your ability to adapt.
And as we saw with digital, especially web 1.0 and now in web 2.0 in social media,
media was greatly threatened because it was democratized, the ability to create content and distribute content.
That's why we see so many individuals now who have sort of risen above
even the most sacred of brands out there.
However, it's also an opportunity for a Renaissance, for these properties.
To recognize that they can plug in to what I call the human network.
You and me are connections that we share all of these interests.
We can take really fascinating stories, or experiences that we see on television,
because we'll take our devices with us everywhere we go, or you and I on this notebook.
It's very easy for me to take content and push it.
We live in a society where it's easier to share content than it is honestly
to create it, no matter how easy it is to create a blog, or create a Tumbl account.
The reality is that it's easier to take something and just push it out.
So whereas we're a curator, we're also a publisher, but really
what we're doing is sharing very interesting content.
CNN in America has shared some very intersting stats that I don't have in front of me,
but it was to what extent their stories were shared on Twitter,
it was something astounding, like 1 story every second from CNN.com was shared on Twitter,
and if you think about the social effect of that, it now has the ability
to bring people that they couldn't reach anymore, or that they couldn't reach in general,
because they're now relying on people to bring their social graphs in to things that are related to them.
And I wanna also introduce you to a different concept, and that is the concept of
the end of the destination web: you and I probably don't spend as much time
going to [URL]
We probably land on it because we saw it in our Twitter stream,
or Facebook Status, or somebody emailed it to us, so our attention is now focusing on these streams.
Any media company can realize that that's a tremendous opportunity:
how do you make people share something? Well, first of all you have to make it incredibly easy.
How hard is for you to comment on a traditional media site today?
It's ridiculously impossible. Proprietary networks, registering, I have 65 accounts!
And 65 different media companies when I could just click Facebook or Twitter,
or something that I use today to make it a lot easier.
This is something, again, that has to start from the top, that we recognize
that this is a new opportunity into what extent that we embraced
new technology that not just stops digital darwinism, but also gives us an opportunity
to embrace new business models. This has everything to do with the people running
these companies not actually using any of these new technologies themselves.
I believe leadership is something that has to be earned,
and I hope that we'll see a great revolution in leadership before we see the
demise of some of these great media companies.
One further question is the following: In 2012, will we see co-creation as the
evolution of social CRM?
That's a very interesting way to phrase that question.
No. Social CRM is a series of processes, technologies, and methodologies
for managing customer relationships.
Infact, if we had to disect that, more companies will place emphasis on the M
for management, than they will on the R for relationships.
Co-creation is an act, meaning that people, regardless of whether you want them to or not,
are going to share their experiences about your company within their human networks.
You have an ability to shape and steer those experiences, but many companies
don't necessarily realize that they have that opportunity before them.
So for example, I've done these studies with airlines, for example,
where you could see - if I were a - I call them connected customers,
people who are connected to one another through mobile devices, social networks,
that will not go to Google to make a decision, they'll go to their social network
before they make a decision. And they will ask: "What should I fly?
Which airline do you love?" And the answers that come back say everything.
And I take those answers and I create a wordcloud to show what happens if I say
this particular airline, what are people saying about it right now?
And it's astounding what you will find. And those businesses don't even recognize
that that is their brand in the connected consumer world.
So I take the website of that airline and I compare it to the word cloud
of what people are saying about the airline and they're vastly different, right?
On one side you might have horrible experiences, on this side it's great, wonderful,
innovative, leading, friendly. That's not co-creation.
Co-creation first starts with the recognition of this world and trying to
disect or understand what is causing these experiences. And then starting
to do something that fixes those experiences. That's co-creation.
CRM one day might recognize that this is something for not just understanding,
but collaboration, but right now it's about a process.
You have a problem, we're trying to sell to you, these are the things we know
you've liked or that you've purchased before, they're not right now on a path
for collision. Right now they are on separate paths, and it's the work of people
like me and others who are really trying to educate decision makers that this is a new
world of which we're trying to compete, and it actually takes a whole new approach.
What are the most common mistakes in doing social media monitoring?
Wow, I could spend hours with you, couldn't I? You have some great questions!
The biggest mistake in social media monitoring is that we just monitor our brand mentions,
and the sentiment, and that we maybe even compare them to competitor mentions and competitor sentiment.
And then we take these reports and we say: "Here's how many times we were mentioned
vs our competitors and the positive sentiment vs negative sentiment, look how
wonderful we're doing, look at how this has progressed day over day, we get into
this report cycle, we give it to Management, Management says: "This is wonderful,
this is exactly why we're getting in social media, what can we do to increase those mentions"
and then we get caught up on a threadmill or a weel of meaningless data.
It's not about what people are saying, it's about what people are not saying.
It's not about how many mentions you have, it's about how many mentions you don't have.
It's not about how many likes or comments or tweets or followers you have,
it's about how many you don't have.
See, we're at the beginning of all of this, and we're building infrastructure around what is
vs what isn't. And what isn't is the bigger opportunity, that's where
the future business lies. Social media monitoring by default creates a reactive
business model, meaning somebody says something, we do something.
You have a problem, we react. Co-creation is about being proactive, meaning
we don't have enough conversations about positive experiences, we don't have enough
people saying how much they love us, we don't have a high enough net promoter score,
so what are we going to do to drive increases of volumes and amplification around that?
That's what this is about, social media monitoring is reactive - maybe even
administrative level process - when we need to actually be a lot more strategic
and causing the things that we want to measure, so that administrators of
the social media monitoring side will have some great things to process and report.
By the way, there's a difference also between social media monitoring and intelligence,
and it is intelligence where I think the future business lies.
For example, I could tell you that - and you could look at two reports I wrote -
when is the Starbucks and the interest craft report, which you could Google
to say not how many follow Starbucks, it's about what is important to the people who follow Starbucks
and how you can gleam intelligence from what people are saying, what people are doing
even outside of the mentions of the product name.
What's important to them, what do they love, what are they sharing.
All of that data is there and those insights should inform greater strategies
that by the way will be met with resounding applause because you took the time
to figure out what mattered to people.
Ok, so one last question by Stefano Mizzella is:
"What are in your opinion the ingredients, the fundamental ingredients to go from
a social media strategy to a social business strategy?
And what are the obstacles that, based on your experience, block many companies long this way?"
That is a great question.
It's a great question because it demonstrates that we're thinking in the right way.
Right now most businesses who are using social media are actually social brands.
One stat to share with you is that social media is actually already in the silo
in most organizations, by that I mean Marketing, Marketing Communications and PR
are the top 1, 2 and 3 divisions that actually own it.
Customer service, sales, HR, finance, they're at the bottom, if at all on the list.
That already says that we are not on a path for social business, because it's
already in one division, it's locked in one division, which means all you're gonna see
on Facebook and Twitter are contests, promotions, links.
The social business assumes that number 1 - the departments are talking to each other
I have an article coming out in a little bit that talks about what I call the horseshoe
of customer experiences, where if you have a problem with customer service,
you look at social media today.
On one day is customer service traditional, and on the other end is social media.
And sometimes, if you have a problem, the company will say:
"Oh, we see your problem, if you tweeted it on Twitter for example,
we see your problem, but we're only Marketing, we don't necessarily know how to fix that problem.
so here's our phone number, or here's our email address or here's our website
to report your problem, try to get you out of the picture.
Or they'll ignore it, because they're just not qualified to respond it.
That creates a big gap between here and here, demonstrating the lack of social
business infrastructure. I actually don't believe the future of this is about
social business at all, I actually believe it's about what I call an adaptive business.
A social business assumes too much great power in social media, when in fact social
media is just one part of this evolution. It's like saying:
Are you an email business? Well, yeah. I suppose, sales uses email, HR uses email.
social media are just channels. They're channels that are wonderful because
it gives you direct access to your customers, your stakeholders, your influencers,
but it's what you put in those channels that matters, it's how you work
with the departments that say "We have this person that has this problem
or that needs this resolution", and how we work together to use those channels
to improve experiences.
The thing that's missing in most businesses today is an adaptable infrastructure,
or a culture customer centricity or a culture of one, and I say one because we don't
act as one company, we act as different business functions and silos, and that's ok
that's worked for 100 years, but now the future of all of this is an adaptive
business model where we can recognize trends and emerging opportunities and changes
in consumer behavior, where we can change or bring about change within the organizations
so that people who haven't worked together will work together to build better customer experiences.
Then social media can be one of the ways that those customer experiences are
fortified. I will say this, it's what my whole book is about right now
it's called The End of Business as Usual - the first half says:
I think actually the first words are: "This is not a book about social media,
this is about how consumer behavior is changing and how consumers are changing how
they make decisions. And more importantly, how they influence and are influenced
by one another. Do you know what I found?
Is that there isn't any one type of consumer anymore, there are several classes
of consumers, being this idea of the connected consumer.
Businesses are good at trying to reach everybody, but how a connected consumer,
how you and I make decisions is not about how our parents make decisions,
it's not about how our aunts and uncles make decisions, so why would a business
try to reach us all the same way?
The idea is that, here's to what extent connected customers are impacting your business,
the second half is, here's how you bring about change in the organization,
cause that's the hardest part. You can't win with any executive with the social media
conversation, I can't tell you -
Twitter is huge, Facebook is huge, you have to believe me, we need to change our business,
they're gonna say - Are you kidding me? I don't use Facebook, my kids use Facebook.
What we have to do is just demonstrate by data, by trends, this is to what extent
all of this is changing, and here's what we need to do about it,
here's how to build the change management team, here's how change within
the organizations' gonna be great, here's how it's going to work for employees.
So it's a bigger struggle, and it's not a struggle that's going to be won with social media,
it's gonna be won because we understand who our connected customer are and how
they impact the bottomline and what we need to do about it.
My last question, which is my favourite question actually, is:
What is the question that nobody ever asks you, but you think is really relevant at the moment?
I don't even know how to answer that question, that might be the question that nobody ever asks me!
I will say this, though: I am asked all the time about social media.
I really believe that if you care about the future of business or customer relationships
or just connectivity, and relationships in general, we have to look beyond social media.
So I'm always asked about social media, I'm never asked what does this mean for
the greater impact on culture, society, business, governments.
Those are the conversations that I have, that's what inspires all of my writing, by the way.
It's this bigger impact, not right here in social media.
I often tell people, people who are very passionate about social media,
I don't want them to not be passionate, it's passion that is actually driving
innovation and conversation right now. What I would love to talk to people about
is to look at life right now, is this:
we're at a crossroads, and on one path you can continue to be a social media champion,
you can look at the impact of Facebook and Twitter and emerging networks on your business,
and how to improve relationships with your customers, stakeholders, employees,
using social networks. Somebody has to lead that charge, but it is going to be
just one of the channels that a business is going to use.
On the other path, that's the change agent, that's somebody who recognizes
that all of this stuff, all of the lessons that we're getting from this side
is so important, so profound, that is going to bring about greater change within the organization,
but we're not ready for it. That change agent has to go and work with executives,
has to work with stakeholders and has to do all of the things that bring about change.
It's a distinct path on to itself.
Both are important, which path are you on?
I started on social media path, I have moved over to the change agent path
because that, to me, is where we are really going to have an impact on how
businesses view customers, how governments view constituents or voters,
it's how we just build better relationships that improve the experiences for everybody.
Brian, I thank you very much for being with us today!