Something I often discuss with my collegues is a goal for social media to amplify the voice of the individual over the institution. This is because the institutional voice has lost relevance. It is less trusted.

Research has shown that 90% of the audience to a social site is not interested in participating, but keenly interested in the content. They are interested in this content because 1-10% that is responsible for authoring the content is preferred over the singular voice of an institution.

The voice of the 1% contributors come off as more authentic, especially if that voice doesn’t sound like a marketing drone. Instead the 1% is opinionated, often with bias and often inaccurate. However it is real, and with its flaws it is valued over the voice of the institution.

But how can that 1% voice be a voice you can trust to discuss your brand. How can it be a voice that will help carry influence to make your brand relevant? After all you cannot control it… or can you.

I believe the answer is aggregation. Although you cannot control the conversation you can control what topics you make available to the 90% who are keenly interested in the dialogue. Consider your brand’s attributes, features, and capabilities. Then find, foster, enable and amplify discussions on those brand attributes. By playing host and rounding up that dialogue you are encouraging the 90% to go deeper and identify more strongly with the value proposition of your brand.

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Recently I was chatting with Josh Hilliker who is the Community Manager of the vPro Expert Center, and I believe Josh is an example of someone who has figured out how to be successful by not over thinking his community.  Josh manages a site that revolves around an IT product. And to be frank it is a product that few understand and who’s value has yet to reach mass appeal.  Now here’s the odd thing, Josh’s community kick but over our other communities based on broader appealing products.  All logic says his community should reside in the shadow of these communities.

So what’s the deal?  What’s Josh got going on the other communities don’t?  Simply put Josh just does it.  He doesn’t slow down to think whether or not his next idea to engage the community is the right idea.  He doesn’t pause on whether he should or should not step out to another site and engage.  Josh runs on instinct and expertise that is not encumbered by a need to analyze or perfect what he is doing before he does it.

However it’s not all full speed in every direction.  Josh does his research and is grounded in his deep knowledge of his audience and community.  He knows where they are online.  He knows the conversations that are happening. He also knows that he must often quickly fail before he can succeed.  And ultimately he focuses on opportunities not on barriers.

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The following is a repost (with slight changes/modifications) of something I wrote earlier this year. Still relevant and I wanted to share with all of you.

The following happens all the time.

I just had an experience with your brand. Was it good, bad, ugly, what? Nonetheless, it was such an experience that I twittered my entire network all the juicy details; and guess what? I have over 400 followers. Additionally, all my Tweets get pulled into several other social networks that I actively participate in (Friendfeed, Facebook to name a few) as well as my blog. So you can be sure that my message – whatever it may be – will be shared everyone, everywhere I participate.

Also, that experience had such and impact on me that I am going to write a review on YELP. I really hope for your sake, the experience was a positive one.

Then, if I am feeling up to it, I am going to document my experience in my blog; and I do get substantial traffic via RSS (close to 400 subscribers or so) and from natural search.

I may even submit my post to Digg and then bookmark it in StumbleUpon. Then, I’ll go to my favorite search engine and search for your brand name. I wonder if anyone else had a similar experience. I am beginning to get curios; and may even chime in if I feel the need.

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After recent chatter about chips vs. cheese in our blogs and discussions, I decided to try an experiment. I wondered if companies who are hiring for social media and community manager positions actually look for someone who is employing conversational marketing methods–the chips in the chips-to-cheese ratio–to market themselves. I don’t have results just yet but I’ll pass those along when I do.

Before I get down to the details of my test, I thought I might revisit exactly what “conversational marketing and storytelling” looks like. Wikipedia has a lengthy entry on it with several books and blog links. The entry includes an excerpt from PR Social Media personality Shel Isreal that summarizes it to a degree:

“(Conversational marketing is) the concept that people respond better to lowered voices spoken in credible tones than they do to the aggressive in-your-face marketing speak as is evidences in everything from TV ads to the pap-lingo of so many websites….All too often professional marketers lose their credibility by hyperbole, hubris and amplification.”

I think conversational marketing actually goes one step further, incorporating the human or personal touch required to often make deeper connections with people (after all, aren’t customers people?). In his new book Personality Not Included, Rohit Bhargava discusses how marketing and communications from companies has become homogenous and bland. And by allowing their employees to express themselves and their personalities more freely–in addition to cultivating a corporate personality–companies will discover deeper connections with their customers.

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Good thing I drink Pepsi because according to Dr. Ralph Walton as pointed out by John McManamy, “Don’t Drink the Diet Coke,” there may be a correlation to depression and bipolar disorder to aspartame - the sweetener used in Diet Coke. What does this have to do with marketing? Well, as Brian Morrissey points out in Dell’s Hearing Test, try typing ‘Diet Coke’ in Google and see what comes up. Two of the top 5 search results are pointing to articles about how Diet Coke is associated to depression. I would hate to be in their PR department right now.

This claim is based off of a single research study that was done 15 years ago and now because a blogger picked up on it it’s resurfaced and is a top search result. It been up there since June 5th and there’s no response from Diet Coke. Are they even listening to the conversations happening on the social web? Do they even know that post is out there and spreading further each day? Maybe they overdosed on Mentos…

My colleague Brian Ellefritz points out that this is great example of why corporations need to be monitoring (and participating) in conversations about their brand. Consumer generated media is not something that can/should be ignored. I think Mark Jarvis, CMO at Dell says it best, “Your home page is Google.” From a B2B perspective we can all learn from Sun’s blogging strategy in how to jump in and join the conversation and ultimately improve the sentiment of what gets communicated online. You can bet that Sun keeps a close eye on what new conversations about their brand emerge from the social web and if this happened to them I can’t imagine they’d go this long without noticing. Keep reading »

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Here are two videos I captured of Jeremiah presenting the POST method. It was received quite well from the audience; and was perfect for the Cluetrain Manifesto 10 year Anniversary Conference. I wanted to get video of all the speakers but I was having some technical difficulties.

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Let me admit up front that this is a blog post about a blog post. Apoligies in advance if that is too post-modern for you. But I think I have good reason to blog about a blog: I need your help.

Yesterday I wrote a post on Intel’s corporate community site asking if community members thought the site was too commercial. The site itself–called Open Port–and some of our community managers had received recent feedback that their focus was too marketing in nature. This is weird given all the community managers for the site are serious tech dudes who just happen to have a passion for the space they manage.

The Nacho Analogy

To help the community frame the discussion, I used my colleague Bob Duffy’s nacho analogy. He theorizes that nearly every restaurant carries nachos on their menu. Yet not all nachos are created equal. Some are better than others and Bob contends that it’s the cheese-to-chip ratio that counts. Too much cheese drowns the chips and too little cheese makes the chips dry and difficult to swallow.

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Social media marketing is more than just adding social bookmarks on your site in hopes that your content spreads like a virus. It’s more than seeding your content in sites like Digg; and/or trying to game their voting algorithm. It’s more than creating multiple profiles and/or adding a multitude of friends in all the social networking sites; and then blasting out bulletin messages. And, while optimizing your site for social media is important, there is still much to consider.

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Hi all. I need your help.  I have been invited to moderate a panel on social media next week in Chicago.  The panelists include marketing and sales professionals from Myspace, Bebo, Facebook and CafeMom.    I am super excited to attend the event and meet some of the panelists, especially since Andew Shue (co-founder of CafeMom) will be sitting on the panel. In case you don’t know, Andrew is a pretty awesome actor and was “Billy” on Melrose Place.  He is also the brother of Elizabeth Shue, an actress who gained her popularity playing Daniel’s girlfriend in the Karate Kid (and yes, like most boys my age … I did have a crush on her and I did sign up for karate lessons). Okay, back to the topic at hand.

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About a week ago I became famous. Well, ok–famous inside the company where I work. But since that company (Intel) employs around 85,000 people, I’m going to do a happy dance for this proverbial five minutes of fame as they may be all I get. How did this come about? Recently the team of company journalists who publish our intranet found my internal company blog on social media and decided to link to it on the front page of the intranet website. This sparked an amazing dialogue, with nearly 9,000 views and 50 comments. And it was interesting to see the reactions of folks from a company like Intel–where it’s not unusual to run into colleagues who have worked at the company for 30+ years. (Intel is celebrating its 40th year this year).

My blog post, and the subsequent discussion, focused on whether employees should be encoraged to participate in social media externally. (Internally we already encourage the use of blogs, the Intelpedia wiki, and other collaboration tools). And I was surprised to see how widely people’s sentiment of social media varied. From extreme “be very afraid” to “keep up the good work,” many of these comments asked for the same thing: show me why.

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