How many of you know what a neighborhood watch is? It’s an old school idea – neighbors keep an eye out in the neighborhood for suspicious activity and report it to the police. It’s especially effective when neighbors know each other and are happy to look out for each others’ interests.
How many people know their physical neighbors well?
You should.
If you don’t, make friends, and soon. Why? Simple.
The economy is spawning more crime. The numbers estimated by the University of Arizona suggest that a 1% increase in unemployment correlates to a 1% increase in crime rates. Crimes begin casually, with opportunity crimes, and worsen from there if unchecked.
Kicking it up a notch
A basic neighborhood watch is effective, but now add in the capabilities of social media, of new media to the mix. If you have several social media aware folks in your neighborhood (or you can train them easily), when you meet with your police department’s crime prevention officer (CPO, the officer assigned to instruct Neighborhood Watch programs), introduce him or her to Twitter. Get your neighbors who are Twitter-savvy to create a hashtag for your neighborhood like #54&Pine or #7Gables and have members report mildly suspicious activity there (“scruffy kid, about 5’6″ with black backpack walking around block 5th time this hour”). Show your CPO how to use Twitter Search so that real-time updates can be casually viewed at the station.
Got a camera on your data-enabled mobile phone? You have an awesome crime deterrence tool. Use services like TwitPic to take instant shots of suspicious activity and upload them immediately to your neighborhood watch Twitterstream.
Own a digital camera with a decent lens and low light ability? Take photos and load them up to sites like Flickr so that your neighbors and CPO can inspect in detail things that you find suspicious.
Know someone talented at using Google Docs and Google Maps? Help your local police department geographically map crimes in your area and look for trends using freely available Google tools.
What other new media/social media tools can you think of to empower ordinary citizens to help local law enforcement prevent crime?
Note: in no way do I advocate unnecessarily putting yourself in harm’s way or taking the law into your own hands. As with all community-based initiatives, the idea is to work WITH your local police, not compete with them.
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Get rich quick! Quit your day job! Money while you sleep! All claims made of social media and virtually every other new technology, idea, or movement since mankind first created money itself. Can you make money in social media? Should you make it an aim?
To answer this question, we have to dig into the history and concept of money itself.
What is money?
Ask any child and most adults, and no one will have a coherent answer to this question. People know money by what it can do, but not what it is. The classical definition of money is a medium of exchange, a measure of account, and store of value. For the purposes of this discussion, we’re going to focus on a medium of exchange and a store of value.
A Medium of Exchange
Before money, we had barter. Let’s say I raised chickens and you raised cows. If I wanted some beef and you wanted some chicken, we’d get together and trade. We’d negotiate how many chickens equaled a cow, and vice versa. If all went well, I went home with some beef for my family and you went home with some chicken.
But… what if you didn’t want chicken? You had beef, and I wanted beef, but you didn’t want chicken? Suddenly, I have a problem. We couldn’t trade. No amount of chicken I had would be helpful to me if you didn’t want chicken. I’d have to find someone who wanted chicken and see what they had to trade. Maybe they had seashells, and you wanted seashells, so I’d have to trade chicken for seashells first, then find you and trade seashells for beef.
This got really inefficient around Greek and Roman times, which is when currency got invented. Suddenly, we have a neutral intermediary. I think chicken is worth 5 copper coins, and you think cow is worth 250 copper coins. Now, if I have chicken and you have beef, but you still don’t want chicken, that’s fine. I’ll find someone who wants chicken and trade with them for copper coins. Then I’ll come back to you and buy as much cow as I can with the same copper coins.
This is one of the core roles of money – instead of having to barter everything, you can trade in a generally accepted medium of exchange.
A Store of Value
Here’s another problem with barter. Let’s say instead of chicken, I have wheat. You have cows. During harvest season, we can trade. I’ll trade you a few bales of wheat in exchange for a cow. Everyone’s happy.
What about in the winter, though? I have no wheat. All my wheat either got milled into flour, sold, consumed, or… spoiled. Wheat is transitory. Wheat spoils, rots, molds, etc. if you don’t use it within a certain period of time. In fact, most consumables eventually spoil.
Here’s where money comes in again. I go to the market and trade my wheat to someone who wants it. I get copper coins. Unlike wheat, these don’t spoil, decay, or rot. (yes, they do oxidize, but that’s a different conversation) If I sell enough wheat, I amass a large pile of coins and throughout the non-harvest season, I have copper coins to buy things with.
This is money’s role as a store of value. It takes the fruits of my labors – wheat – and stores it in a form that’s less subject to spoilage. Also, it’s a lot easier to carry around a pile of coins than a bale of wheat.
What does any of this have to do with new media and social media?
If you are a social media practitioner interested in earning money for your skills, you have to deeply understand money first.
First, money is a medium of exchange for other goods and services. Money doesn’t solve the value equation – that is, what you do must have value to someone. Money only makes trading value easier. If what you do is of no value to anyone, then like the farmer facing no demand for chicken, no matter how skilled you are, no one will trade with you. As a social media practitioner, your work has to have value.
The most successful social media practitioners recognize that social media in and of itself is of relatively little value. It’s a communications channel. What is of value is what you deliver to your audience. I deliver, for example, financial aid information on my Financial Aid Podcast. The fact that it’s a podcast has no inherent value; what has value is the quality of the information.
If you’re considering offering up your services to someone else as a social media practitioner, make sure that they have something of value to offer their customers, or both you and your client will fail to generate any business. Your own track record must demonstrate that you understand underlying value and how to present it in a social media context.
If you’re considering engaging the services of a social media practitioner inside your company, look to see how adept they are at understanding value. Forget how many friends they have or how often they blog – look to see if they can communicate their own value and the value of their clients’ goods and services to others. Examine their other work and see if it conveys well the value of the client’s goods and services. Most important, recognize that a truly skilled social media practitioner will decline to do business with you if your offering has no value.
Second, money as a store of value is vitally important to social media practitioners. Like all industries, social media, new media, online media, etc. all have trends. There’s a new shiny object every day, and that presents new opportunities for you to demonstrate your skills and earn some money in doing so. You have to not only capitalize on trends, but sock those earnings away. You have to be able to store the value of a trend so that when it cools – and it always does – you have a strong base of capital to operate with.
Equally important is your ability to recognize value and trends ahead of time so that as a platform matures – as blogging has – you’re ahead of the curve and in new spaces. This is the often referenced blue ocean strategy, where there’s virtually no competition in any vertical in a new area. Blue ocean was podcasting in 2005, blogging in 1997, Twitter in 2006, Facebook in 2004 and so forth. As a social media practitioner looking to earn a living at your craft, you need to be able to spot new blue oceans and move in long before others do, while recognizing that it will be some time before that space is highly desired by a large population.
For companies looking at social media, recognize that the store of value means you need operating capital and strong revenue streams today from your social media efforts, but you need to be investing for the future as well. Your internal financial health will dictate how you prioritize investing for the future vs. banking on what’s hot today.
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In reading the latest “controversy” in social media about Burger King’s ad agency tweeting on behalf of the client and the furor over authenticity and transparency, I came to this conclusion:
Burger King needs a new agency.
If you haven’t been following along, here’s the very short summary. CP+B is the agency in question tweeting as the fictional King character for Burger King on Twitter. Some social media folks object to a lack of disclosure by the agency, a lack of authenticity.
Here’s a different perspective on the issue: ROI. What in the world was CP+B thinking? I’d love to see even a back of the envelope ROI argument for creating a Twitter account for a fictional character to sell sandwiches, which is the whole point of Burger King.
Forget about transparency, authenticity, and whether or not an agency should tweet as a client. What in the world is the ROI or even apparent value of this initiative?
Here’s how I would have handled a client’s request to be engaged on Twitter: create a Twitter bot that you can message with your current location. It returns the three nearest Burger Kings so that you can get something to EAT, since the whole point of Burger King is to provide something for me to eat. I’d use it in a heartbeat when I travel. If Burger King and CP+B approached Twitter or social media in general from the perspective of being USEFUL, they’d get more sales and a measurable ROI.
It’s absolutely true that you can’t get precise ROI on social media. My work for the Student Loan Network means that ROI gets fuzzy, but the business connections, enhanced distribution of things like eBooks, inbound links, and other measurable activities are all improved by Twitter and social media. Can I put an exact dollar amount on it? No. Can I say that Twitter has improved the bottom line? Yes. Have I helped folks on Twitter get financial aid questions answered? Yes.
Be useful in your social media experiments. Don’t just do something in social media because it’s what the cool kids are doing. Do something that is useful, that serves a need, and your social media experiment will be a success.
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Social media for business is unquestionably a hot topic in the current environment. Lots of folks want to know how it can help their business, make them some money, or reduce costs, and to a degree, social media can do all that. That said, a real stealth play for social media is using its shiny object status to effect change in an organization.
Consider Fizzcrank Corporation. It’s been doing okay for the past few years with traditional marketing, from brochures to trade shows, but it’s feeling a little stagnant. Products aren’t revving quite as quickly, and buyers aren’t buying Fizzcranks at the same levels they did two years ago. Bob the marketing manager has been wanting to do more field work to see what customers want, but management isn’t willing to step outside its comfort zone. What does Bob do?
Leverage the power of the shiny object! Bob brings shiny objects like Twitter, Google Reader, and Facebook to the table and says that for no money and just some time and effort, Fizzcrank Corporation can become a leader in the Fizzcrank industry. Management is bedazzled by the shiny objects and says that as long as the no money part is true, Bob can do whatever he wants with social media. The CMO gets all excited and has a press release written (that is ignored) to announce Fizzcrank Corporation’s thought leadership in the Fizzcrank vertical.
Now the real work begins – Bob sets up his listening post tools, tying Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a bunch of other networks together. (see my Twitter eBook for more details on how) He sets up monitoring for keywords, starts listening for Fizzcrank in global searches, and before long finds out that customers would really like to be able to use a Overcharged Capacitor with their Fizzcrank. Bob takes the idea back to the engineering gnomes who inform him that matching up an Overcharged Capacitor with a Fizzcrank is not only simple, but a really good idea, and Fizzcrank OC is born.
Fast forward three months. Fizzcrank Corporation now dominates the Fizzcrank industry with Fizzcrank OC. Products are selling better than ever, and Bob now talks to customers regularly. Management is happy with profits. Bob is happy to be talking to real people instead of writing press releases and billboards. Customers are happy because Fizzcrank is creating products they actually need and want.
The lesson in this fictional account is that social media can be a way to introduce a cultural change in your company, away from broadcast marketing and toward listening to what your customers are saying. If you work at a company that has not developed a culture of listening, see if you can use social media as a stealth play to begin the practice – after all, your customers likely know better than you do exactly what they want out of your products or services.
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Much has been made of 2009 being a year of frugality for marketing departments and social media becoming the new darling for budget constrained companies. That said, I want to throw a contrary viewpoint out there: social media marketing is not necessarily cheaper than other forms of marketing.
What social media marketing achieves is a trade of time for cash. If you’re capital constrained, you’re going to be trading big cash spend for big time spend. If you’re okay with that, if you have the personnel resources to spare, then social media marketing is going to work well for you.
Social media requires a hefty investment of time, and even in the best of times has a squishy ROI. You can’t load up a social media marketing plan like you can an email marketing plan and say that if we post this item to Facebook or we Twitter this web page, it will result in 354 clicks to our product page and 14 purchases. You can do that with reasonable confidence with email marketing – you know what your open rates are, you know what your clicks are, and you know the revenue behind a click. There is no such formula or set of statistics for social media.
One of the catches in tough economic times is a stronger demand for ROI – making sure scarce resources are well-allocated. How do you calculate social media’s ROI?
We do know the market value of some items in social media; an inbound link from a certain class of web site carries a market value (in terms of what it’d cost to buy that link) so if you can get one for free, then that inbound link’s value can be directly attributed to social media’s ROI if the link couldn’t be obtained any other way. I know that if Chris Brogantwitters this blog post, there’s an audience of 26,566 that will briefly see it in their Twitterstream; on a CPM basis, I know that I would have to pay a certain amount for access to the same size audience. If he went a step further and asked you to link to it from your web site, then I’d have additional hard ROI I could build into my numbers.
Even with that, the ROI is tough to crunch. I wouldn’t necessarily make a business decision for social media based on those numbers, would you?
If you’re looking to get impact out of social media marketing, take a hard look at what you’re doing right now inside your company using more expensive channels and see where social media marketing might make a difference. For example, in my own work at the Student Loan Network, we’re always looking for great partners to work with; having a prominent LinkedIn network (cspenn at gmail dot com, all requests accepted!) is a great, low-cost way to find new partners to work with. Twitter has transformed from a big chat room to an honest-to-goodness source of lead generation and link building. Blogging is pure SEO food, podcasting has built the name of the company in the industry far beyond what should rationally be possible without massive ad spend, and the connections made through events like PodCamp, Podcasters Across Borders, and other conferences have driven incredible business connections.
I would argue that social media marketing isn’t cheaper per se. What I would argue is that it opens new, different doors and gives you opportunities you might not otherwise be able to generate without far more cash resources than you have access to, and therein lies its true value.
If you’re in marketing, how are you presenting why social media marketing is right for your company? Comment below! (comments are moderated but will be approved pretty fast)
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I’m very happy that Barack Obama won the presidency of the United States.
Here’s what I wonder. His campaign amassed millions of emails and addresses. Just his campaign for announcing Senator Biden as his Vice President brought in millions of SMS numbers. His campaign brought out millions of supporters to canvas for him, to put him in office.
I hope and wonder if he can continue to use those assets, that massive database. To keep the mailing list active as President of the United States, to text us when he needs to engage us. To drop a line on Twitter in addition to a White House Press Secretary. To podcast the radio address and blog from the Oval Office.
Most important, I wonder what an America would look like if the Obama campaign’s supporters become the Obama presidency’s volunteer corps, millions of Americans being directed and taking guidance from the White House as they were from campaign headquarters, cleaning up rivers instead of canvassing for votes, feeding the hungry at soup lines instead of voting lines.
I’m more than willing to continue hearing from President Obama on Twitter, on my phone, and in my inbox. I’m more than willing to join up and volunteer, too.
Perhaps this is the start, as Gradon Tripp put it, of a Digital New Deal. Count me in.
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I went to the polls yesterday with my mind set on who I would vote for (President-Elect Barack Obama) and a Nikon D40 with an SB600 speed flash. As I’ve mentioned before many times, perception is everything. Lugging around a DSLR with a speed flash and a long lens instantly creates the perception among many people that you’re a photographer in some official capacity. No fewer than 8 times waiting to vote, I was asked by fellow voters and election officials if I was a reporter.
In the 2004 elections, the answer would have been no.
In 2006, the answer would have been I don’t know. Blogging, podcasting, new media was still so new that no one really had a feel for what they were doing, for what kind of power they had.
Yesterday, I quietly and confidently said yes. Yes, I am a reporter. I may not be to the caliber that will ever put a Pulitzer Prize in my office, but I fulfill the role of a journalist by finding and presenting news to an audience, whether it’s for the Financial Aid Podcast, Marketing Over Coffee, or my blog here. I am a journalist, even more so than the “traditional” media in my hometown, which couldn’t even get a photographer to one of our largest polling sites until late morning, and the photos I’d taken were up on Flickr and CNN iReport shortly after they were taken as polls opened.
More important, you are a reporter, too. If you have a blog, if you have a media production like a podcast, if you have anywhere you publish online, you are a reporter. You are a member of the media, and that carries great opportunities and great responsibilities.
As we open a new chapter on America after the election, we legitimize all of new media for playing a role in the outcome of the election and for President-Elect Obama’s judicious use of new and old media combined to engineer a victory.
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The ninja clans of old were fundamentally a mix of esoteric practitioners of mind sciences mixed with samurai who were on the losing sides of battles and didn’t feel like killing themselves for their overlord’s strategic screw-ups. Many were just young kids – Daisuke Nishina, the founder of the Togakure Ryu lineage, started out life as a ninja at the ripe old age of 16, having been enlisted in an army that lost to a neighboring overlord.
As such, ninja battle strategies focused a lot on influence, stopping problems before they became problems (because you didn’t have the resources to wage all-out war), stealth, espionage, influence and persuasion from afar, using force multipliers, and above all else, an emphasis on the practical. Much of this is still transmitted in the essence of the ninja martial arts taught today by students of Hatsumi sensei’s Bujinkan method, especially those who are students of Stephen K. Hayes.
One of the timeless lessons learned very early on is this:
You will probably only get one shot.
Whatever your strategy is, whatever your goal or game plan is, the world is changing too fast. It’s a moving target. You can’t waver or hesitate, because in the time it takes you to make a decision and stick to it, you’ll get run over by your competition in business, and you’ll lose your life in battle.
Think about it for a second. If you’re facing someone else, both of you have three foot razor blades, and both of you want to go home. In all likelihood, one of you probably won’t. If you’re especially unlucky, neither will. You have just one shot, because in sword fighting, there’s not a whole lot of parrying or dueling. A sword fight between skilled swordsmen lasts a fraction of a second.
So commit. Pick one of the strategies that Chris mentioned, or one of the many other plans or strategies you’ve got out there, set out your battle plan, and then do it. Don’t walk into your office or your boss’ office in a week with completely different plans or whatever the fad of the day is, because that’s the equivalent of trying to change up as your opponent’s blade is headed for your neck. Waver, hesitate, question yourself, fail to commit, and your opponent wins, in swordfighting and in business.
Trivia: did you know there actually were ninja pirates? It’s true.
Shameless plug. If you’re in the Boston area, and want to try your hand at learning actual ninjutsu, visit:
It has become depressingly apparent that no leadership, no guidance, no inspiration will be forthcoming from any of the traditional sources in our society. Our politicians are locked in partisan bickering with each other, fighting like junkyard dogs over scraps. Our financial leaders are in a tailspin. Our heroes are largely fictional now at best.
This creates a void and sets our society adrift. There is, however, a new source of leadership, of wisdom, of inspiration.
How many of you have blogs?
Podcasts?
MySpace & Facebook accounts and groups?
Twitter accounts?
How many of you have at least 10 listeners/followers/fans?
100?
1,000?
If you have reach that exceeds 10 people, then you can step up to lead. If you have reach that exceeds 100 people, then you may be asked to lead. If you have thousands who follow you and call you a leader whether or not you feel like one, then you must, here and now, accept that mantle of leadership. You must don the cape and boots even if you feel as though they were made for someone else.
You have been called.
Here is what your followers need of you. They need not only to be pushed away, but to be pulled towards.
It’s not enough to say what to avoid; you have to provide your followers with something to do. A mission. A calling. A focus that will let them in their passion and intensity drown out the voices of panic around them so that they can generate momentum with you. Pick your cause, pick your battle, and engage your followers.
Direct them towards a mission, towards a goal, towards something that provides tangible benefit so that they can get the ball rolling in their homes, neighborhoods, and communities. Give your followers missions and tasks towards the goal you are united for, and you will help them to realign themselves away from chaos and panic towards growth, progress, and even prosperity. Ask them to give and give double what they do. Lead through example.
Despair thrives in confusion and inaction.
Despair withers under the heat and light of passion. Despair dies in the face of confident leadership.
You have the following. You have the crowd. Your community and the people who respect you need you now more than ever.
Step up.
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A basic neighborhood watch is effective, but now add in the capabilities of social media, of new media to the mix. If you have several social media aware folks in your neighborhood (or you can train them easily), when you meet with your police department’s crime prevention officer (CPO, the officer assigned to instruct Neighborhood Watch programs), introduce him or her to Twitter. Get your neighbors who are Twitter-savvy to create a hashtag for your neighborhood like #54&Pine or #7Gables and have members report mildly suspicious activity there (“scruffy kid, about 5’6″ with black backpack walking around block 5th time this hour”). Show your CPO how to use Twitter Search so that real-time updates can be casually viewed at the station.
Here’s what I wonder. His campaign amassed millions of emails and addresses. Just his campaign for announcing Senator Biden as his Vice President brought in millions of SMS numbers. His campaign brought out millions of supporters to canvas for him, to put him in office.
This creates a void and sets our society adrift. There is, however, a new source of leadership, of wisdom, of inspiration.