I often refer to the Forrester Social Technographic ladder to understand how a company or organization can relate to its customers through social media. Different approaches and media need to be considered depending on how engaged your customer is. Forrester has provided a good widget to look at how participation varies demographically. Click through on the links to find out more about this model.
Forrester Social Technographics
October 28th, 2010 by Steve Nelson
Internet Emergent Property #42b: Improve Perception or Communication
October 27th, 2010 by Steve Nelson2,460,000 ways to improve your perception or communication skills.
Social media and legal issues – two resources
October 27th, 2010 by Steve NelsonFormer colleague Peter Hoefs from Nixon Peabody spoke at our Branding and Social Media seminar at Bishop Ranch last week on the topic of "Social Media and the Workplace: What Every Employer Should Know". He forwarded a link to this article by Jessica Braverman that appeared in the Contra Costa County Bar Association: “Legal Land Mines of Social Media in Employment Issues”. Braverman covers issues of privacy, notice and monitoring, defamation, harassment, and communications. It will be interesting to see how these issues play out as corporate intranets start to mirror external social networks.
Another resource is FaceTime's "FINRA: Compliance Guide Social Networks, Web 2.0 and Unified Communications" that covers new rules in place for regulated financial institutions. Even the use of something as innocuous as a registered representative's use of a Facebook "like" can get an institution in hot water. The FaceTime white paper is available here, and you can see a presentation on the topic here.
Internet Emergent Property #42a: Instant Opportunity Generator
October 24th, 2010 by Steve NelsonOnce again the Internet provides a rich lode of emergent properties. Here with one click you can generate about 6,240,000 opportunities for a new product or service:
Internet Instant Opportunity Generator
AP42 to Host Branding and Social Media Seminar, Bishop Ranch – San Ramon
October 14th, 2010 by Steve NelsonBranding & Social Media Seminar
October 19, noon – 1 p.m.
Bishop Ranch Conference Center
2623 Camino Ramon, Suite 175 (BR3) (see map)
San Ramon, CA
Free, including light lunch
How do you create a social media presence? What can employees legally share about their company via sites like Twitter, Facebook or YouTube? The social media opportunities are exciting, but clearly, there’s a lot to consider.
In this follow-up to its presentation in April, AP42, a company located in Bishop Ranch 11, will present "Practical Steps and Legal Issues in Social Media Marketing." Topics will include the following:
* How to sign up for social media accounts and establish your presence
* How to create a playbook, including the who, what and when of maintaining your presence
* The Top 5 opportunities for success
* The Top 5 pitfalls to avoid
* How social media and your company’s legal department can peacefully co-exist
Call Tenant Services to sign up at 925.543.0100.
An (emergent) working definition of “brand” with thousands of examples
October 8th, 2010 by Steve NelsonRoger Ehrenberg's post "Brands: Authenticity and Pattern Recognition" comments on Doc Searls's "Brands are Bull" (which followed his "Brands are Boring") by pointing out that whether or not you believe that brands should make a difference, they do. Much of the contempt for the use of the word "brand" is based on poor definition of the term, or underlying concept. Or lack of consensus going in as to what people mean when they use the word. (Much like religious disagreements that arise when everyone assumes they are working from the same definition of the word "God".)
Maybe the branding of "brand" has some problems.
I like the way that Roger characterizes a brand as an "organizing principle", and a facilitator of "pattern recognition". This comes closer to me than "a brand is a conversation", which, though I get where that's coming from, doesn't capture its essence.
I think a brand is something that is simultaneously designed and emerges. I'm as interested in the latter, especially as it helps with the former. Brand as an emergent property of people forming and sharing their ideas of products, people, companies, etc. influences how people will ultimately relate to those products, people and companies. Organizing principles emerge, patterns are recognized out of a mass of information.
I've been considering a definition of "brand" that fits my own working model. But rather than just writing it out, I'll first give the world's largest corpus a chance to define it through emergence, with thousands of examples:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22whenever+I+think+of%22+-you (with a few thousand more here.)
This is based on my (work in progress) personal definition:
A brand is
the representative projection of
the essential nature of
(companies | organizations | products | people | places)
in people's minds
that is achieved through intelligent design
or emerges through natural selection.
(Funny how the analogy once again arises.)
The two stories of a successful presentation
October 6th, 2010 by Steve NelsonIn his blog post "Set a theme before drafting your presentation", Mike Consol emphasizes the value of setting a theme for your presentation, which acts as a relevant framework around which you can tell the story, make your case, keep your audience's attention, and further your objectives for presenting in the first place. It helps your presentation become a good story.
Good presentations actually require two good stories. The first one, the inner story, is told within the presentation itself, and may or may not include a visual component such as a PowerPoint or Keynote slide show. It may be built around a theme, as Mike suggests. It should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and a best practice is to tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.
But a good presentation also has an important outer story, and that needs to be crafted clearly as well. That's the meta-story of why you are meeting in the first place. You need to be able to articulate it, at least to your own team, and you will use this story as your primary communications frame. You need to tell part of the story to those you're meeting with both in the informal give-and-take before the presentation, in setting the context for your presentation, transitioning to the presentation itself, and then transitioning from the wrapup of the presentation to the wrapup of the meeting.
What is the metastory? "We are here because…" "What we learned today is…" "What we could do next…" are all lines from the outer story. Does it need a theme? Ideally, for the same reasons Mike sets out in his post, you may weave the presentation's theme into your story that surrounds your presentation. That gives both continuity and amplification, and will lead to a more effective presentation.
