8 Experts Predict How Web 2.0 Will Evolve In 2009

| posted by Allyson Kapin

2008 was the year that Web 2.0 became more mainstream. More ad agencies, businesses, and non-profits used Web 2.0 tools as a way to build community and relationships, cross promote products and issues, and integrate their online and offline marketing strategies. Some like Zappos were extremely successful and nailed their Web 2.0 strategy while others like the makers of Motrin were burned by mommy bloggers for not doing proper research on their target audience.

With the economy in a slump and budgets being cut in traditional print and TV advertising campaigns many will be looking to the Web 2.0 world to reach their constituents. So what should be on your Web 2.0 radar for 2009? Web 2.0 gurus give you the low down.

Chris Brogan: New Marketing Labs
“2009 sees a few things: site mergers/acquisitions for some of the weaker social network platforms, and a stronger push towards identity portability and friend (social graph) portability. We love our social networks, but why should I suddenly develop amnesia when you and I join a new one? It should know we’re friends and treat us accordingly.”

Chris Brogan’s Website and Blog

Mary Hodder, Founder of Dabble.com and VP of Product Development, Apisphere

“The future of social media is user’s owning their data, deciding who to send it to. Look for more companies that currently host the user’s identity to have less control over that, as things like Open ID take over and more companies try to compete by giving users more control over themselves. Look for ways users can own their own data, and companies that might offer that, sort of like a personal information bank. The changes may seem subtle but I think we’ll see companies now, like Facebook, who try to be everything to you: your bank account for info, your identity, your tools for publishing, and your bar/restaurant for socializing, having to give up some of those roles or hold them less powerfully. And I don’t think it’s natural for one company to hold all that power. It leaves you with very little control over your online self.

Of course, Facebook will fight this to the last, so they won’t be the first to give up some of this control. Others will and eventually to compete Facebook will follow. But they are the great example of the problem.

The other big change will be in companies finally building for revenue in the social and any other space online, as they build for growth in their free or social products.”

Mary Hodder’s Blog

Tara Hunt, Co-Founder Citizen Agency and Citizen Space
“Social Media will cease to be such an ‘experimental’ field in marketing and will start to become part of the main core of good campaigns. Web 2.0 is the participatory web – which means that the power of this time is that we are all producers. In former days of marketing, companies delivered messages and goods and customers were meant to consume them. Not so much any longer. Customers are major players in the arena of marketing – I would argue more so than the marketing professionals themselves now – so it is important to realize that and shift the marketing program to be more about how you interact and empower those customers rather than how you control and spread the message.”

Tara Hunt’s Website
Tara Hunt’s Blog

Charlene Li, Consultant and Blogger
“The biggest innovation will be the opening of social networks so that they can exchange profiles, social relationships, and applications. As such, companies need to think about how they will “open” up their businesses. For example, rather than create your own community, could you leverage a community that already exists on MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn?”

Charlene Li’s Website and Blog

Susan Mernit, Co-Founder, People Software
“I see social media in 2009 becoming more and more accessible to mainstream audiences. Twitter, seesmic, YouTube and other tools we saw as playgrounds for the young have moved into the digerati toolbox and are migrating to the mainstream. This means that everyone will experience what bloggers and gamers learned at least 5 years ago–following people online is a great way to virtually know and screen potential contacts and friends, as well as a tool to maintain connections. As for tech, I’m excited about personal devices–smart phones, integrated devices–I want to see them come down in price and go into wider distribution so people don’t need to rely so much on computers.”

Susan Mernit’s Website
Susan Mernit’s Blog

Rebecca Moore, Director of Outreach, Google Earth
“From a mapping perspective, you can expect to see much richer integration of “location-aware” services with a variety of devices. For example, mobile devices (such as those powered by Android) now commonly include GPS. Of course this can be used for applications like “find pizza places near me”, but also can be used, for example, when a natural disaster hits. Imagine that local people on the ground will be able to easily map and share where bridges are out, roads are closed, or where emergency shelters and medical care are available. Keep in mind that in the developing world, people have far more phones than laptops.

In terms of social media, I think we are just at the beginning of “collaborative mapping” – people working together with friends and colleagues to build shared maps of places they care about. Also, the grassroots environmental organization Appalachian Voices has combined social networking and mapping in an interesting way on their advocacy site to end mountaintop-removal coal mining: here’s a map of all the people referred to the site by actor/activist Woody Harrelson, including their “degree of separation” from Woody. We might be seeing more “social maps” like this in 2009.”

Rebecca Moore’s Website

Nate Ritter: Entrepreneur and Web Developer
“The biggest changes have already started, but we’ll see the tech take shape and make more money in 2009. They’ll make money because they’ll be forced to with the drying up of available VC and angel capital.

(1) Location based services will proliferate and become more useful to the end user.

(2) Aggregation services will change from just “drinking from the fire hose” to become very specific aggregation tools, perhaps with very specific use cases. The amount of data we can consume as humans stays limited, but filtering that data to become useful for specific reasons is not only something that’s doable, it has an incentive… targeted customers. Those customers might be businesses or consumers, but the days of shooting from the hip with a shotgun approach are quickly ending. Shooting from the hip will stay, because it’s fast, easy and cheap (and will get faster, easier, and cheaper) to build web applications. But being fast doesn’t mean you’re being smart.

I truly believe that 2009 is a huge opportunity. The bigger the threat, the bigger the opportunity.”

Nate Ritter’s Website and Blog:

Richard Yoo, Founder of Hush Labs and former CEO of Rackspace Hosting
“I’m not sure that things will evolve the way people have seen in the
past. I predict that it’ll mostly be about trying to figure out what users
really want and what they find most important then fine-tuning things based
on that feedback. The pace of evolution may really slow down by
comparison, but the user experience will be far better.

We’ll also see a shakedown of Web 2.0 companies – some will survive,
but many will just shut down. The ones that survive will have figured
out a revenue model, or are simply critical to their user base’s
day-to-day lives.”

Richard Yoo’s Website:
Richard Yoo’s Blog:

—

Allyson Kapin is the Founding Partner of Rad Campaign and the Founder of Women Who Tech.

By Matthew Lasar | Published: November 19, 2008 – 11:14PM CT

Stuck in the Netscape era

As Ars Technica readers know, the blogosphere is now saturated with guesses as to who President-elect Barack Obama will select as the next chair of the Federal Communications Commission. And there’s no shortage of input about what the FCC’s priorities should be over the next several years: net neutrality, improving U.S. broadband penetration, fixing the Universal Service Fund—everybody’s weighing in with free advice.

Here’s mine: somebody’s got to do something about the FCC’s web site: www.fcc.gov.

Nota bene: the following should not be construed as a dig at the FCC’s dedicated personnel, many of whom I have the pleasure of communicating with on a regular basis. Clearly an enormous amount of work has been put into the site. But this effort has not been accompanied by coordinated planning or design. That’s the fault of management, not staff.

Remember the Internet in the Netscape 3 era? The FCC sure does

Let’s face it, fcc.gov still looks like it was thrown together six weeks after Netscape went public over a decade ago. The result: the only people who can really access it are telecom lawyers, public interest groups with their autoforms, and wonks like me who have dedicated years to exploring its mysteries. The tens of thousands of Americans who want to intelligently participate in the FCC’s many proceedings are almost instantly stymied by the Byzantine nature of the site. Except, of course, if they want to make an indecency complaint.

Clearly, the next FCC needs to blue pencil into its upcoming Congressional budget a request for funding for a serious overhaul of the portal. It’s time to bring in a team of designers, database programmers, and scripting grunts to transfer its data to a good content management system. Short of that, here are four suggestions for making fcc.gov more usable and accessible.

1. Make it easier for the public to comment on proceedings

Want to comment on an important issue facing the FCC like net neutrality or product placement? No problem, just go to this link and upload a statement. Oops. You’ve already been stopped dead in your tracks by field one, right? Field one requires a number for the proceeding associated with the issue. You have no idea what this number is, and, absurdly, when you click the proceeding search link, it requires you to input a proceeding number to look up the proceeding!

Most people who, often for the first time, want to give the FCC some individual feedback on an issue don’t know that every major subject has a docket number. For example, the docket number for net neutrality is 07-52. Without that, you can’t use the FCC’s comment page to file a comment. To be fair, the agency has thrown up a page of popular dockets with quick links, but it’s hard to find, contains only about 20 of the Commission’s proceedings (some of which have expired), and only allows you to send a brief statement.

Would it really be so difficult to attach a link to the main comment form that leads to a page that explains docket numbers and offers a wiki with all current dockets? The FCC should post a link to that form at the top of every proceeding- or order-related news release it publishes in pdf, word, or html. And fcc.gov should post that link prominently at its top left hand corner, right under the search form.

And speaking of which…

2. Make it easier to search for comments on proceedings

Maybe you’ve heard that Clear Channel or the FBI or some public interest group has filed something interesting with the FCC? Maybe you want to look up the latest comments on a hot proceeding? So you went to the Commission’s search field on the top left of the site and entered the appropriate data, right?

Forget it, you’re lost already. That search engine only ferrets out what the FCC publishes about its activities, not the comments and statements that the agency receives from interested parties. What you really want is here, safely hidden three links away from the main page. And if you try to search that engine for a proceeding—again, you need the docket number.

Good luck finding this on your own. At least it was updated this century

In the long run, the FCC needs to modernize its comment database. It needs to grab some open source program like Lucene and make the millions of PDFs stored in its tables searchable by text (or at least as many as possible). In the short run, it needs to add that same link mentioned in suggestion one—a wiki of dockets so people can make informed use of the right search form. And again, the site should link to the form from the top left of the main page, not three clicks inside.

read more…

What follows is the unedited version of my latest post for TechCrunch, “Is Obama Ready To Be a Two-Way President.”

Source: Barack Obama’s flickr stream

Where there’s victory, there’s also opportunity…

America voted while the entire world watched and listened. Whether you supported Obama or McCain, we equally shared the hope for positive change and a new beginning towards a brighter future. This Presidential election was the first in 50 years, in which there was no incumbent President or Vice President from either party competing for the Presidential nomination. On Tuesday November 4th, 2008, history was made and America is now poised to break new ground as it continues to define and document unwritten history as we work together over the next four years.

Close to 65% of the American population voted in this election, its highest turnout since the election of 1908.

By all means, this election was profound in its results. While I’m not an avid proponent of the Electoral College system for electing our President, the numbers were absolute and decisive. Obama won both the Electoral College vote 364 to 163 and the popular vote 53% to 46% with roughly 127,000,000 votes cast.

Credit: CNN

With Obama’s wins in key “swing states” including Ohio, Florida, Colorado, and Pennsylvania, this election is considered a monumental victory that fundamentally redrew America’s political dynamics. A Democrat had not won Virginia and Indiana in a generation.

Obama’s victory is deeply symbolic. It is a justifying, magnificent, and powerful testament and redemption to those who have struggled for national and personal freedom throughout the history of the United States.

Congratulations is the very least I can send to Mr. Obama and his campaign team.

For the sake of this discussion, let’s examine the election another way, one that may bring to life a different picture of how Obama earned his place in history, and in doing so, his campaign both redrew political lines and also forever changed the political ecosystem.

Over 46% of American voters and 22 states sided with John McCain. Either way you look at it, it’s still a significant portion of America who didn’t believe #change or #hope were attributes of the Obama campaign. These voters believed their future lay with another candidate.

Politics aside, whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, Independent or member of the Green Party, we can not overlook the power of real world community relations combined with the reach and engagement of online social communities and networks.

Again, almost half the country was split with a noteworthy percentage heading into the election undecided.

Online tools such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter contributed to the netting of record-breaking campaign funding and the staggering galvanization of a younger generation of first-time voters who truly made an impact and a difference. The Obama campaign, for example, outspent McCain nearly three-to-one on TV ads toward the tail end of the campaign, which many credit the technology and the corresponding impact of sociology in of itself. The Obama campaign leveraged multiple technology platforms, social immersion strategies and good old fashioned door-to-door relationship building to engage constituents directly, raising an astounding $600 million in campaign contributions.

They went directly to the people online and in the real world.

The Obama team, for example befriended almost 130,000 friends on Twitter with an almost equal amount following him.

On Facebook, the Obama page boasted over three million fans compared to McCain’s 618,000.

YouTube also swayed towards Obama with a network of 358,000 to 191,000 with the Obama camp posting over 1,800 videos compared to McCain’s 330. These videos accounted for millions of views.

If you compare the other social networks and communities from FriendFeed to MySpace to Flickr, the stats are asymmetrical in Obama’s partiality.

Many of these two-way tools however, were simply used as broadcast mechanisms to send updates, solicit contributions, provide updates, and to also rally and unite supporters, albeit successfully.

Reaching the Other 46%

My question is, what if these same social media tools where deployed to not only communicate “to” constituents, but also to listen and interact with supporters as well as those who don’t currently endorse the President-elect?

I argue that if Obama dedicates a team aside from the outbound crew that “pushed” content through social channels in order to strategically reach, listen to, and embrace the 46 % that voted against him, he might be able to run a truly democratic term and head into the next election with a record-breaking approval rating – curtailing the necessity to campaign while in office in order to focus on the issues we elected him to fix – while also cultivating the country for greater future prosperity.

Winning over, conservatively estimating, 5% of voters who were on the fence but ultimately voted for McCain, accounts for almost three million votes.

Since 1954, the approval rating of each President has been actively tracked and published as a reflection of sentiment among the American people:

Among those Presidents with the worst all-time approval rating, our current President holds the dubious honor of ranking at the top:

- George W. Bush – 76% (in a report published 11/10)
- Truman – 67%
- Nixon – 66%
- George Bush – 60%

Perhaps even most concerning is that each President has historically disregarded these numbers so that they could focus on the issues at hand. If the Whitehouse were a business, many of these Presidents would have filed for political bankruptcy.

All signs and words emanating from the Obama camp and Mr. Obama himself, point to a strategy of leveraging today’s powerful, two-way bridges of communication.

In a text message sent to supporters on the eve of the election, he reaffirmed that they will be part of Presidency moving forward, “We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.”

But perhaps the most revealing promise that revealed Mr. Obama will run his office for the “people” of the United States, not just those who voted for him, was shared through his inspirational words on November 4th:

I will listen to you, especially when we disagree…and to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.

His first step to bring the vision of running a cross party campaign is the launch of Change.gov, a portal for transparency and interaction during, and hopefully post the transition.

In a sense, Change.gov is a simple and engaging site, but also highly intricate in its goals to give voters a voice. It is resource center for sharing information, updates, jobs, and also provides a channel for people who share their vision, concern, and ideas with the President and his advisors through text, an uploaded image or video.

Mr. Obama offers a message to visitors:

I ask you to believe – not just in my ability to bring about change, but in yours. I know this change is possible…because in this campaign, I have had the privilege to witness what is best in America.

Change.gov is the first step in a long road of reshaping the dynamics of politics and communication with voters.

They’re on the right track however.

Obama’s history-making campaign that fused community relations with social sciences, after all, carried him to the Democratic nomination and also the Oval Office. Mr. Obama and his team have cultivated and collaborated with a database of millions of people that spans a sophisticated contact relationship management infrastructure that spans across the real world to all popular social networks.

With an elaborate and revolutionary channel that will only grow with his Presidency, Obama takes office with a powerful new medium that may eclipse the reach and drive of traditional broadcast media.

Transforming Voters into Customers, While Potentially Erasing Party Lines

But, what about those who voted against him?

What’s the channel for Obama to ask, “Why didn’t I get your vote?” Is it Change.gov or is it through the combination of inbound and outbound engagement that will unearth the concerns that offer genuine potential for not just listening, also but response and earned support?

Most successful businesses around the world place customers at the center of everything. Before the Web, Nordstrom built its engendering foundation on world-class, and now world famous, customer care. In today’s Social Web, Zappos is growing its business by engaging with customers and creating a public and transparent customer-focused culture that is quickly building the company into a global brand that will make it easy for the company to extend its business beyond shoes.

There’s an extraordinary opportunity here for the Whitehouse to leverage these new and influential channels of conversation to embrace and cultivate voters as if they were customers, winning market share, one person at a time.

This is era where information was and is democratized. It is also a live and unfiltered looking glass into the office of the Presidency and also the thoughts, insights, support, satisfaction, and grievances of the American People.

It’s a Two Way Street

This isn’t just about broadcasting content through new channels or merely soliciting feedback, participating in popular networks or actively listening, it’s the ability to identify and internalize themes to precipitate change and earn support through action – not just words.

For the first time, the U.S. President can simultaneously cultivate communities through traditional door-to-door interaction and also directly where people create, discover, and share information online.

Shortly after completing the first draft of this post, the Washington Post ran an article announcing that Mr. Obama will record the weekly Democratic address on the radio and also on Youtube. The videos will be hosted on Change.gov and the official YouTube video channel, with the first one already recorded.

Other opportunities include:

- Launch a social network at Change.gov and/or whitehouse.gov

- Create a citizen feedback and collaboration page at GetSatisfaction

- Solicit policy proposals that people can vote up or down on Change For Us.

- Open the blog to comments on Change.gov (with community moderation).

- Address the country on YouTube and all other video networks with updates, polls, and also address issues in between official State of the Union broadcasts.

- Capture behind-the-scenes footage of the inner workings of the White House and share across all video networks.

- Create a user-generated channel on Magnify.net that features content from constituents.

-Create an @obamacares or @whitehousecares account on Twitter and other micro-blogging communities to listen and respond directly within each network.

- Complement the Presidential radio show with a regular podcast or livecast on uStream.tv or BlogTalkRadio and also interact with the people online, in real time.

- Publish speeches and important policy documents on document networks such as Scribd and Docstoc to be shared and disseminated throughout blogs and personal social profile pages.

- Create a portable and evolving Obama Widget using a SproutBuilder.

(What other ideas do you have? Add them to comments).

This is how a President, or any politician or business for that matter, can authentically connect with the people formerly known as the audience – in the real world.

It creates the foundation for people to participate in a crowd-sourced Government that doesn’t need Congressmen to share discontent or new ideas. The Web cuts through political tape to spotlight real time threats and issues to expedite support and response.

It’s through this collaboration that any public official, particularly the President, can continually maintain a real-time pulse of the country to learn from the human effects and responses to actions to run a more in-tune and effective campaign.

It’s the art and science of stripping down the politics to reveal truth. This is a political ecology rooted in sociology and conversations. People shouldn’t only have a voice during an election time; listening and responding should be an ongoing practice and process of any office.

The President can’t satisfy everyone, that’s just the reality. It’s human nature to disagree. This President-elect is not purporting to be perfect, but it seems he’s honestly willing to learn. With a national CTO in place combined with an informed engagement team versed in social sciences and psychology, we can use technology and two-way channels to not only increase economic efficiencies and boost education and media literacy, but also “listen” to those influential beacons in order to continue to redraw, or potentially erase, party lines.

My hope is that these incredible networks remain a constant source of conversation to extend beyond campaigning, but also collaborative governance that unite people across party lines.

It’s not about being Republican or a Democrat, it’s about representing the majority of the people, their views, passions, ambitions and struggles, in order to be a representative of the people for the people. This is Obama’s opportunity to use the tools and channels of today’s emerging voter demographics to rewrite the future of politics, while serving the best interests of the American People in the process.

Sometimes the best advisors and cabinet members are the very people who elected that person into office, and maybe, just maybe, also those who voted against him in the first place.

If the Obama camp reads this, I’m more than happy to release @obamacares and @whitehousecares on Twitter. I held them for you.

Special thanks to Drew Olanoff.

Peter Kim is a Senior Partner at Dachis Corporation.  He blogs about social computing and marketing at Being Peter Kim.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been curating a list of social media marketing examples.  The list started with 100 examples (including 35+ from Mashable) and has since tripled in size with the participation of over a hundred contributors with examples from companies around the world.

We could probably come up with 3,000 examples instead of 300 – but the current set already gives us a pretty good sample to think about.  One takeaway: for now, those neurotic about missing “what’s next” can relax a bit.  Consumers still use a broader set of social tools than corporations, but new categories of tools aren’t emerging rapidly today, giving brands a chance to catch up.  It’s time to master the last big thing while you have a chance to catch a breath.

As corporate adoption emerges, there’s nothing wrong with learning lessons from others and making them your own.  Start by making sure you have all of your bases covered with the major tools.  In other words, copy and paste the items below, then fill in the blanks with your own company-driven effort.

Here’s a framework of 22 tools to consider with notable brand examples:

1. Blogs (Johnson & Johnson, Delta Air Lines)
2. Bookmarking/Tagging (Adobe, Kodak)
3. Brand monitoring (Dell, MINI)
4. Content aggregation (Alltop, EMC)
5. Crowdsourcing/Voting (Oracle, Starbucks)
6. Discussion boards and forums (IBM, Mountain Dew)
7. Events and meetups (Molson, Pampers)
8. Mashups (Fidelity Investments, Nike)
9. Microblogging (method, Whole Foods)
10. Online video (Eukanuba, Home Depot)
11. Organization and staffing (Ford, Pepsi)
12. Outreach programs (Nokia, Yum Brands)
13. Photosharing (Rubbermaid, UK Government)
14. Podcasting (Ericsson, McDonalds)
15. Presentation sharing (CapGemini, Daimler AG)
16. Public Relations – social media releases (Avon, Intel)
17. Ratings and reviews (Loblaws, TurboTax)
18. Social networks: applications, fan pages, groups, and personalities (British Airways, Saturn)
19. Sponsorships (Coca-Cola, Whirlpool)
20. Virtual worlds (National Geographic, Toyota)
21. Widgets (Southwest Airlines, Target)
22. Wikis (Second Life, T-Mobile Sidekick)

And use this username check tool to see if your brands/preferred handles are still available.

I haven’t found a single company doing all of these today. Forget divining a big, meaningful business objective before getting started – you’ll end up in analysis paralysis. Just make sure you’re making an existing business function better and get started.  Today.

Businesses, individuals, and organizations will, from time to time, make honest mistakes or in some unfortunate cases, intentionally support unethical decisions to dissuade or conceal something significant from its public.

Whether it’s an oversight or a matter of deception, savvy companies usually employ and deploy a crises response team to prepare for, manage and attempt to positively spin the potential backlash from customers, partners, and employees related to almost anything.

Crisis communications is a branch of PR that is designed to protect and defend an individual, company, or organization, usually from a reactive response, facing a swelling public challenge to its reputation, brand, and community.

Throughout the course of history, we’ve learned that all that’s required to ignite a negative firestorm is a spark from a single voice or an organized congregation.

If a conversation takes place on the Web and you’re not there to hear or see it, did it really happen?

More often than not, we miss the very things that provide insight into a future response simply because we’re not conditioned or trained to proactively discover and diffuse threats or negative experiences.

Our weakness, however, is also our opportunity to manage and also respond to any potentially damaging or menacing public groundswell.

Conversations related to your brand, company, executives, products, and competitors take place each and every day, without our knowledge and perhaps worse, without our participation.

In the era of the Social Web, a story, and the ensuing public recruitment, rallying, and support, can rapidly spread unlike any crisis wildfire witnessed or experienced in previous generations.

Social Media is pervasive. At the very least, it is transforming how we communicate with each other and also how we discover and share information. As the adoption of Social Tools and applications progresses from the left to the right of the bell curve, Social Media will simply coalesce back to “the Web.” But, its migration, exploration, experimentation, and education will only contribute to its significance and resilience and ultimately change behavior and expand the infrastructure for corporate communications in the process. Regardless of genre, the sum of all social channels today equate to a powerful, influential, and revolutionary archetype for exposing and diffusing public opinion.

Perception is formed through the unique, individually-filtered experiences we each bring to the table. In that regard, our brand, and more specifically, our actions are open to public interpretation, support, and dissection. It’s what you say about you, what they hear, how they share that story, and how you weave that insight into future product and service iterations, communications, corporate infrastructure, and public conversations.

The tools and platforms available today are sophisticated, evolved, and designed for social distribution and redistribution. The Social Web forces a new level of understanding and participation in order for all communications professionals, in addition to crises response and reputation management teams, to understand its dynamics and the prevalence of information, positive, neutral, and especially negative.

To date, crisis communications and reputation management were relegated as a reactive response, while the groundwork for a potential predicament and the development of strategic communique is among the best practices for proactive crisis planning.

The traditional crisis communications planning and response workflow:

> Crisis Planning
> Negative Groundswell
> Crisis Response
> Public Relations
> Assessment/Monitoring

In the Social Web, I propose that many, if not a majority of potential crises are now avoidable through proactive listening, engagement, response, conversation, humbleness, and transparency (repeat).

I’d like to introduce you to an old, but new again, dynamic process to integrate into the existing corporate communications and marketing workflow. Today’s social tools and communities that can work against us, can also work with us, when proactively managed and embraced with an open mind, sincere intent, and genuine participation.

> Active
> Listening
> Observation
> Conversation
> Learning
> Planning
> Continued Adaptation and Engagement

The art and science of proactive listening, observation, and participation will not only inspire the creation of in touch, relevant, and poignant PR and marketing strategies, but will also dramatically reduce the potential for reactive response and crisis communications programs. Crisis communications teams can also partner with those responsible for monitoring online brand reputations (ORM – online reputation management) or vice versa, to jointly listen, respond, and incite change from within. This creates a more effective “public relations” organization.

The point is that this is about proactively diffusing visible, but not yet large-scale predicaments before they’re full-blown public crises. And, also through direct listening, engagement, and actively addressing concerns both inside and out of the organization, we’re diverting the momentum from tropical storms before they have an opportunity to form unforeseen and unanticipated hurricanes. It’s the ability to avoid a storm without knowing a storm was brewing by identifying weaknesses and opportunities as they emerge.

This is community-driven communications in its purest form which begets a community-focused and customer-centric organization.

Everything starts with openness and the ability to learn and adapt. It’s the acceptance that it doesn’t matter if the customer is always right. After all, a happy customer will share their good fortune with a group of friends and peers, but an unhappy customer will tell everybody.

Perception is everything.

For communicators, it’s our role to actively listen and translate conversations into actionable next steps. It’s not an automated process. It requires dedication and empowerment. Much of this responsibility is falling upon community managers and the new role of research librarians who are quickly acclimating to online conversations and how and where they apply to the internal decision makers, traffic coordinators, and metrics analysts. By partnering with these new, socially adept resources, Public Relations can can more accurately and genuinely participate with influencers, whether they’re media, analysts, bloggers, or tastemakers. When we step back and assess our markets, we just may find that they’re collectively one in the same.

What if you don’t yet have these roles or resources to help you listen and follow meaningful conversations? It’s not impossible for you to proactively monitor conversations and the cultures and behavior associated within each digital society in order to identify and prioritize opportunities for engagement, reform, and evolution.

Start with using free search blog search tools such as:

- blogsearch.google.com (set up Google Alerts via RSS or email)
- Technorati
- Blogpulse

As we all know, or should know, the social web extends far beyond blogs, relevant online conversations are pervasive and rampant in social networks and microforums as well. In that regard, be sure that your initial waves of search include:

- search.twitter.com
- Ning
- Facebook
- Google and Yahoo Groups
- Uservoice
- Getsatisfaction

For those with a moderate budget to evaluate dedicated SRM (social media relationship management) or ORM tools, consider:

- Trackur
- BuzzGain
- Radian6
- BuzzLogic
- BrandsEye

Search for keywords related to your business, such as the company and product name, key executives, as well as scouting discussions for the “suck” or “die” factor. This includes adding a combination of the following criteria in your search process:

- “product+sucks”
- “company+sucks”
- “die+company”
- “i+hate+company”

As the Web itself grew in pervasiveness, it also paved the way for customers to easily launch sites to vent publicly. Examples already number in the thousands, with some capturing significant public attention including starbucked.com, ihatestarbucks.com, boycottwalmart.org and againstthewal.com.

Fairwinds recently released a study that documents the power of Internet gripe sites. The Wall Street Journal explored the topic with an in-depth article, “How to Handle ‘IHateYourCompany.com,’” which explored what some companies are doing, or not doing, to protect their brands online.

In its study, FairWinds researched the Web to identify gripe sites specifically containing “sucks.com.” The study uncovered over 20,000 domains with only 2,000 ending in the phrase “stinks.com.” Of the major consumer-facing companies surveyed, only 35% own the domain name for their brand followed by the word “sucks.”

But domain names are only one of the many opportunities for customers to share their discontent, and in the new era of the two-way web, communications, customer service, and brand and reputation management teams must all work together together to actively survey the landscape to detect and diagnose negative experiences.

The Social Media and conversation landscape is a diverse universe. In order to identify a potentially dangerous asteroid on a glancing or full-blown collision course with your brand, you’ll also need a powerful telescope, or, a “Conversation Prism.”

The Conversation Prism was designed to provide a snapshot view of dialogue within mainstream and vertical social networks and communities that may be consequential to your brand. Every network provides a search box to unearth threads of discussions tied to connected keywords and inherent developments, negative or positive, that may affect the company brand and reputation.

Conversations and developing crises are probable across a multitude of online channels, including:

- Blogs and Comments
- Microcommunities aka Microforums
- Social Networks
- Lifestreams
- Customer Networks
- Groups

The ensuing conversations tied to your brand can quickly and easily amass, across multiple networks simultaneously. Don’t let those conversations fall upon deaf ears.

For the first time, we have the ability to identify and address potential crises as they surface. And not only do we have the ability to engage with people to address their grievances or discontent, we can also learn from each engagement and feed the corresponding lessons, experiences, and criticisms back into the sales, service, and product development departments to change everything for the better.

It’s the difference between simply placating customers and improving our business and products to satisfy many others who would have been potentially exposed to a potential deficiency.

Customers are among the new influencers and have the tools and platforms readily available to them in order to share their experiences and potentially incite the masses.

It’s not just about the gripes we’ve identified, it’s about the dialogue and actively and publicly addressing each issue to minimize the unforeseen eruptions from those who have yet to publish or rally others against us.

While our control has been crowd-sourced, perception management and crisis communications are ours to lead. Perception is reality and it’s our responsibility to invest in the relationships and the correlated activities that will help us cultivate and manage an industry leading, market relevant, and in-tune brand.

Listen, learn, and adapt. In the Social Web, and in the real world of business, companies will earn the relationships, and the crowd-sourced brand, they deserve.

Maybe you’re the kind of person who doesn’t believe that the kind of person you are can be deduced by an algorithm and expressed through shorthand categorizations like “urban youth” or “hearth keeper.” Maybe I’d agree with you, and maybe we’re right. But the kind of people — “crack mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers” — whom Stephen Baker writes about in “The Numerati” clearly see things differently. In fact, they probably regard such skepticism as more fodder for the math-driven identity formulas they’ve created to satisfy the consumer-product companies and politicians who hire them.

Baker, a writer for BusinessWeek, categorizes the categorizers into seven chapters: some number crunchers seek to decode us as shoppers, others as voters or patients or even potential terrorists. In all cases, the idea is to gather data, use computers to compile and interpret it, and draw conclusions about how we will behave — or how we might be persuaded to behave. “We turn you into math,” one of his subjects declares. Sometimes the data comes from firms that collect it from public records or subscription lists, or that conduct exhaustive attitudinal surveys, concluding on the basis of whether you own cats or subscribe to gourmet magazines which political “tribe” you belong to, and thus how a campaign should approach you (or not). But the most interesting information comes from us, particularly by way of our online activities. Baker’s savants monitor our collective (if anonymous) Web surfing patterns for “behavioral clues” that, for example, help advertisers decide when to hit us with what pitch.

You probably already have a sense that this sort of thing is going on, but Baker uncovers some surprising details. A chapter on efforts to convert the information disclosed by bloggers and users of social networks is among the most interesting. Baker offers an anecdote about a firm called Umbria helping a cellphone company that’s decided to charge more for Bluetooth data connections, a move that “sent bloggers into a fury.” Umbria, which studies bloggers and divides them into tribes, concluded that all the spleen-venting was coming from the “power users,” whereas “the fashionistas, the music lovers, the cheapskates” did not care. “With this intelligence,” Baker writes, the company could placate the power users by offering them “free” service (while raising the prices on headsets) and “continue charging everyone else.” He goes on to describe Umbria’s efforts to teach its computers to interpret blogs and draw conclusions from different phrases, font choices, background colors and even emoticons.

On one level, this is just the low comedy of the profit motive: our finest techno-­wizards and their beautiful machines wrestling with the meaning of “:)” so that some cellphone company can micro-target its fee increases. But Baker also, in effect, offers a counternarrative to the usual story about the digital revolution. While millions of ordinary citizens have been em­powered to express their individuality with a panoply of new tools, a smaller number of people have been working out the most efficient ways to convert those individuals into numbers on a spreadsheet.

We used to go about our business and let marketers try to catch up with us. “Today,” he writes, “we spy on ourselves and send electronic updates minute by minute.”

The most cautionary chapter concerns information-age tools that hunt for terrorists and other bad guys, which risk being “repurposed” in dangerous ways. The most optimistic one deals with data mining and health care, predicting a time when “networked gadgets” will monitor our weight, our physical activity and even our bathroom time to help us live “healthier, happier and longer lives.” Both chapters — all the chapters, really — involve a lot of speculation (many sentences begin “Let’s say . . .” or “Imagine . . .”). By and large, Baker seems to accept much of what the new “counting elite” say they can do now or will be able to do someday, but sometimes their claims and Baker’s credulity are all the reader has to go on. At one point, a data cruncher who is devising ways to improve office-worker efficiency says the underlying stochastic calculus isn’t too hard to understand, starts to explain a formula . . . and then he stops, and Baker lets it drop. Presumably he was simply more interested in keeping up his short book’s crisp pace, but “The Nu­merati” could have used a few more specific and nonhypothetical examples, like that Bluetooth anecdote. Baker makes only passing mention of the application of extensive mathematical modeling that the typical reader is most likely to be familiar with: the Wall Street version, which has proved, shall we say, fallible.

Still, Baker may be right in saying the mathematicians and computer scientists he writes about are or soon will be “in a position to rule the information of our lives.” Maybe you don’t believe in the version of you that some guy is coaxing out of a computer in the nondescript offices of a company you’ve never heard of. But that’s not what matters. What matters is whether that guy, and his clients, believe in it.

Rob Walker writes the Consumed column for The New York Times Magazine. His latest book is “Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are.”

by Josh Bernoff

Data is my secret weapon.

Every time I visit a company, we bring data we’ve collected about the social behaviors of their customers, structured according to the Social Technographics Ladder we introduced last year, a technique we rang the changes on in chapter 3 of Groundswell.

When I go to Vanguard, I show them the profile of their customers – and their competitors’. I went to a company that makes replacement hip joints – I showed them the profile of people with arthritis. I just came back from Brussels, where I showed a bunch of direct marketers how Europeans participate – and how many people who resist direct marketing still embrace social technologies. We’ve published lots of this data right here on the blog, including data on voters. Data settles the pointless “everybody does this/nobody does this” arguments and allows people to invest in the appropriate technologies for their customers.

But data gets old, especially in the rapidly changing social world. Time for an update. Today, we’ve released our 2008 data from around the world. Go ahead and play around with it, free, at our just-updated Social Technographics Profile tool page. We’ve got data from 11 countries around the world, by age and gender. (For the Canadians who’ve been bugging me since Groundswell came out – yes, we now have Canadian data, too.)

Forrester clients can see our complete analysis of the 2008 data in a document we just published, called The Growth Of Social Technology Adoption. (If you’re not a client, the link will just show you an executive summary.) I’ll also be speaking on this topic at our 2008 Consumer Forum.

Looking at the US data, the big news in 2008 is that, not unexpectedly, social technology participation has grown rapidly. Inactives — people untouched by social technologies — have shriveled from 44% down to 25% of the online population. Spectators — those who read, watch, or consumer social content — have ballooned from 48% to 69%. If you think social technology is about to become a universal phenomenon, we just handed you a nice little bundle of evidence.

As you can see, there was also a nice healthy jump in Joiners (social network participants), Critics (those who react to social content they see), and especially Collectors (those who organize social content). None of these are quite as popular as being a Spectator, but I think there’s plenty of growth ahead for these groups. (If it’s bothering you that the numbers add up to more than 100%, remember that these groups overlap – this is not a segmentation.)

I find it just as interesting that the Creators group grew only slightly, from 18% to 21%. I have long suspected that there aren’t more people blogging, creating Web pages, or uploading video or audio, not because the technology gets in the way, but because they’re just not the kind of extroverts who want to talk about themselves or anything else online. I think this group will continue to grow much more slowly than the others. Interestingly, this kind of participation is far greater in some places like Korea and China.

As usual, the real story comes when you look behind the statistics. Where is the growth in consumption of online content coming from? From older people – the group my young colleagues who manage all this data call “middle-aged.” (Ouch!) Social activity is way up among 35-to-44 year-olds, especially when it comes to joining social networks and reading and reacting to content. Even among 45-to-54 year-olds, 68% are now Spectators, 24% are Joiners, and only 28% are Inactives.

Here’s what it means. It will soon be no more remarkable that your grandmother reads a blog than that she reads email. Social content is going mainstream. Social content ranks high on search engines because it changes so frequently and gets linked to more often, so more and more online adults are becoming exposed to it, accepting it, and embracing it. If you’re a marketer, no matter what group of consumers you’re targeting, this means you must pay attention to the social world online.

But the future of social applications online will not include contributions from everyone, because not everyone has the temperament to create content. Don’t count on all your customers to contribute, and don’t believe that what you see online is representative of your whole audience. The shy among your customers are reading this stuff, but most of them aren’t ready to contribute, and won’t be for a while.

This is the power of data – the power to see beyond the hype and see what’s really changing. I’d love to bring some to your company and start the conversation.

Postscript: I’d be remiss if I didn’t give credit to the people who make this data collection possible (and excellent). Cynthia Pflaum is the secret force behind my data insights – she not only finds these tidbits that companies find so useful, she’s also my watchdog for maintaining consistency in our surveys worldwide. Reineke Reitsma is in charge our worldwide data collection and her support of this project (and her budget) make this possible. And Roxana Strohmenger for the second year assembled our worldwide data so we could put it into the profile tool. Thank you, colleagues.