Chief Marketing Technologist

Experimental marketing: 1 out of 20 ain't bad

If you think a hit rate of 1 out of 20 for marketing ideas is a poor showing, go Elf Yourself.

No, really. Take a lesson from OfficeMax's "Elf Yourself" holiday campaign, that has been a viral brand marketing hit for four Christmas seasons in a row. The www.elfyourself.com web site lets people upload photos of themselves, friends, family, pets, etc., and transpose their faces onto animated dancing elves — and then share those e-cards via email, Facebook, Twitter.

Over 378 million people in 50 countries have elf'd themselves. The site has been featured on CNN, ABC World News, Good Morning America, The Today Show, Fox News, and hundreds of blogs (including TechCrunch).

All told, we're talking about millions of dollars worth of public relations and brand exposure.

Yesterday, I was on a marketing technology panel at the National Retail Federation's Big Show with Bob Thacker, senior vice president of marketing and advertising at OfficeMax, who offered some unique insight into the campaign.

"We were trying to create a holiday tradition, to help people connect the idea of holiday shopping with OfficeMax," said Bob. "Most people don't think of office supplies for gifts — but we've got computers, cameras, GPS's."

Elf Yourself was incredibly successful in achieving that goal.

But what I found most interesting was the way this viral hit came to be. Bob related that they actually launched 19 other web sites at the same time as Elf Yourself. Each had a rationale for why it might be a winner, but it was Elf Yourself that ended up taking off. OfficeMax ran it with and quietly dropped the others.

OfficeMax's plan from the beginning was to experiment and harness crowd feedback.

This is a terrific example of what makes agile marketing — working quickly and iteratively to efficiently test new ideas with low risk — so different and powerful than the old approach of "place a couple big bets and pray."

"The cost of those 20 web sites was less than a single TV spot," said Bob. The ROI of Elf Yourself made the cost of experimenting with the other 19 ideas not much more than a rounding error.

Thanks to Darrell Fry at CrossCap, who organized and moderated the panel, which also included Greg Navalance of American Eagle Outfitters and Jay Kolbe of Weber Shandwick.

Q&A threat to Google that marketers should watch

Search engines created a new ecosystem for consumers and marketers — and in the process made Google worth around $200 billion. If you put aside the hype, the core value proposition is simple: people go to Google looking for things, and marketers whose products or services are related to those things are thrilled to buy "sponsored answers" (i.e., ads) that show up with the results for those queries.

While there's a lot of chatter about Facebook threatening to disrupt that money-pump of an ecosystem, the reality is that social networking isn't a direct threat to "googling." To be sure, it's another amazing venue for marketers to connect with consumers, but in a very different context — one that is arguably better suited for brand advertising and organic social media marketing. (Portals such as Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL are probably the ones being more disrupted.)

Bernard Moon just wrote a terrific article on VentureBeat, Are Q&A startups a threat to Google?, that identifies a much more direct source of disruption to The Big G:

...numerous Question & Answer players that people unwisely dismiss but which are working hard to ... become a danger to Google's current search dominance.

Q&A companies like Quora, Peerpong and others are seeking to become the next Google in what many are eyeing as the next stage of search: capturing specific knowledge and providing the best answers to any question through the Internet.

Bernard sketched the following diagram of the Q&A landscape:

Read the entire article on VentureBeat.

Given that this is a marketing technologist blog, you may already be familiar with Stack Overflow, the Q&A site for programmers. If not — go check it out. This is one of the best implementations I have seen of a reputation system that incentivizes quality contributions in a crowdsourcing community.

This is a much more accurate way of determining authority in specific queries than PageRank, the algorithm behind Google. It can still be challenging to find the most relevant Q&A thread for what you're looking for, but once you hone in on it, it's much easier to determine the "correct" answer. The supporting evidence to its correctness is succinctly and intuitively organized.

If I'm looking for an answer to a programming question — or if I'm looking to hire new developers — Stack Overflow has become my go-to destination. If other Q&A communities, especially in aggregate, are able to achieve a similar dynamic, it's not hard to see how they could very well displace Google's information-seeking ecosystem.

For marketers, this disruption represents intriguing new opportunities.

5 reasons to be excited about Pivot conference

When I heard that Chris Shipley was producing a new conference focused on the modern dynamics of brand marketing, I was instantly intrigued. First of all, it's a terrific topic. While other events have tackled aspects of this — such as a plethora of social media events or shows on state-of-the-art advertising — I believe there has been an unfulfilled need for a more holistic, strategic and integrative view.

This is the promise of Pivot, which will be held October 17-19 at the Crowne Plaza Times Square Manhattan Hotel in New York.

Second, since brand marketing is a big space, rather than narrow by tactic like other shows, Pivot is narrowing its mission by defining the target audience: 18-34 year old consumers sought by brand marketers. I think this is brilliant, because that audience shows us the future of marketing. There's a lot of money in marketing to Boomers, but that's not the demographic where the discipline of marketing itself is rapidly evolving. If you want to understand the future, look to the people who are the future — and Pivot is following their own advice with a set of young consumer advisors as well as a gaggle of seasoned marketing professionals. Smart.

Third, as a long time tech entrepreneur, I've been very familiar with one of Chris Shipley's other events: the DEMO conference, which she ran from 1996 to 2009. (Starting this year, it is now run by VentureBeat.) For essentially the entire lifetime of Internet entrepreneurship, DEMO has been the place to launch innovative products. Every company was hand-selected after great scrutiny, and it was a real badge of honor to be picked. The entire production was always world-class — kind of a TED for the start-up world. Having Chris bring such values and vision to a marketing conference promises to be an inspiring intersection of marketing and technology.

Fourth — much to my surprise and delight — Chris invited me to present The Case for a Chief Marketing Technologist as part of Tuesday morning's session and roundtable on "The New Marketing Organization." Whereas Monday's session will "explore the attitudes, culture, and preferences of the emerging consumer," Tuesday "takes a deep dive into strategies, language and tools to engage effectively." Or, more simply, the first part of the conference is on the what and why of modern brand marketing, the second part is on the how. I'm looking forward to this discussion with much enthusiasm!

The foundation for my talk will be the ideas I presented in Rise of the Marketing Technologist at Search Insider Summit earlier this year. But a lot has happened in six months, which I'll be synthesizing along with points I've discussed more recently here, such as Marketers: you are the software you use.

Fifth, the other speakers that Chris has assembled are just amazing (I'm way out of my league):

• Arianna Huffington, founder of Huffington Post
• Brian Solis, author of Engage and true social media guru
• Esther Dyson, legendary advisor and investor in Web 3.0 innovations
• Douglas Rushkoff, prolific new media author, latest Program or Be Programmed
• David Kirkpatrick, journalist and author of The Facebook Effect
• Stefan Weitz, search guru at Microsoft -- was terrific at Search Insider Summit

...and many more. Intrigued as well? It's not an inexpensive conference, but if you're excited about it (and you have an expense account somewhere), I'm sure it will be well worth it. If it helps, you can save 20% by using the code SPEAKFNF. If you decide to attend, let me know — would be great to meet up.

P.S. A bonus reason to be excited about Pivot? A special performance by Asian pop-sensation supergroup The Wonder Girls:

Risk in PPC vs. social media marketing

There's an argument that's been circulating in social media marketing circles about how "dangerous" it can be for marketers to rely on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, as compared to more organic ways of building traffic.

You know, social media doesn't have to be positioned as the destructor of advertising to justify its existence.

The gist of the argument: a deep-pocketed competitor can come along anytime, say flush with VC cash, and outspend you. One day you were at the top of the sponsored links, bidding some reasonable CPC — and then suddenly you're shoved down the list. Addy Warbucks is bidding CPC's in the stratosphere. There's no way that can be profitable for them, it's just sheer irrationality. Yet you're suffering for their recklessness. You either have to live with your lower ranking or jack up your bids beyond what you think is reasonable.

The implication: social media marketing is safe from this kind of irrationality. If you want a defensible way to win customers, invest in social media instead of advertising.

I'd like to offer up a counterpoint.

First, is this a real risk? I'm a tad skeptical. Since there are generally 11 page-one slots in a typical search keyword auction, and the inherent difference in click-through rates (CTR) between the top slots is not enormous, a single irrational competitor can only do so much.

So they take the 1st slot and you take the 2nd, and in the process you bid strategically so as to make them pay full price for their ridiculous bid. Note: your price for Google ads only depends on the bids of the people below you, not above you, so your price is not affected. Let them burn through that capital while you keep your optimized net CPA (cost-per-acquisition) and comparable CTR.

One bidder doesn't change the whole game in sponsored search. It would take a whole group of cash-rich, irrational bidders to knock you out of the running. And then, if there are really that many other players at higher CPC bids, can you write them all off as "irrational?" After all, despite the amusing stereotype, I'd wager that most VCs and funded entrepreneurs have incentives to behave rationally. Aggressive, yes. Irrational, no. There's a difference between those two adjectives.

However, for sake of debate, let's put that aside.

Let's assume that, yes, PPC has the risk that a marauding herd of super-rich lunatics can bid you off the island of your favorite keywords at any moment.

I contend: social media marketing suffers from the same risk.

If I've got a boatload of money and I want to own the top organic search engine results (SERP) for a particular keyword, there are a wealth of tactics I can employ my capital towards to achieve that goal. I can't buy links directly — well, I can, but that's black-hat, not a stable strategy because if Google catches you, they will punish you harshly.

But I can buy links indirectly:

• hire a research firm to crank out original reports relevant to the keyword, study after study, and then promote them free online ("link if you like!");
• hire a group of super-coders to develop cool web or iPhone/Android applications that are relevant to the keyword and make them available free with ways to encourage people to share them and link to them;
• make a deal with a celebrity in the industry (or in the pop culture scene where appropriate) to participate in a blog or video blog series, again promoted to generate links;
• hire lots of talented people to blog, tweet, comment, and fan-page relevant content, all attributed to the company — note, I'm not suggesting spam but rather a flood of real content, the sort of real content you'd produce if you could afford to hire a platoon of really great social media mavens;
• reward your social media "supporters" with a private invite-only concert by Weezer or whatnot, encouraging lots of blogosphere and Twitter buzz;
• launch a conference or independent organization around the keyword topic to further generate organic interlinked content in the desired keyword space;
• contract with great writers to publish books on the topics of your main keyword space, promote with free copies, leverage Amazon's PageRank positioning to your benefit;

And so on.

The irrational competitor's strategy: overspend on as many of these tactics as necessary to build up a tremendous amount of link juice and subscribers and followers, and then leverage the bejesus out of that base for the promotion of all future content. Again, I'm not talking about anything black-hat — this is just about spending your way to the top, buying socially exciting content and content-making capability.

Specifically spending more than is rational on these tactics.

If you were rationally trying to build your social media marketing presence in the face of such an onslaught, you could very easily be swamped out of the picture.

You might argue that overspending on social media is a harder, more expensive proposition than doing the same with PPC. Perhaps. But the consequences also have greater longevity. PageRank sticks around a heck of a lot longer than the top slot in the sponsored links box. With PPC, as soon as you shut off the money, Google shuts off the ads. But organic listings persist into the future.

Also, a single competitor can generally only win one ad slot on a page — but if they're clever and aggressive in their social media strategy, they can acquire multiple organic links on page one of the SERP. One competitor can conceivably push you off the page entirely, if they set their cost-is-no-objective sights on it.

I rest my case: it's not true that PPC advertising has an "irrational spender risk" and social media marketing doesn't.

They both have that risk. Although that's probably not the top risk that people should be worrying about in either case.

To be clear, I'm certainly not advocating that you should do advertising instead of social media marketing. Rather, I believe that they are both components of a healthy digital marketing strategy, and that you should invest in each relative to their ROI for your business.

If PPC advertising can give you great return, use it. If blogging, tweeting, and Facebook'ing can give you great return, use it. Invest in each to the degree it makes economic sense. They're not mutually exclusive. To the contrary, they can actually be quite synergistic... but that's a post for another day.

What if advertising were dead? Really?

Here's a brain teaser for you:

1. Most people claim to dislike advertising on the web. I know, display advertising is probably despised more than less flamboyant search ads. But in my recent survey, 71.4% of the respondents who don't work in marketing claim that they never or rarely look at the sponsored search ads on Google or Bing. (Interestingly enough, even 31.6% of the people who do work in marketing made the same claim.) Many participants identified the words "annoying," "distracting," and "untrustworthy" to describe how they feel about the ads.

2. Some gurus claim that social media marketing will supersede advertising. Instead of spending money on advertising, they advise marketers to invest in blog posts for SEO rankings, catchy YouTube videos, the nurturing of fan pages on Facebook, and so on. Some go so far as to suggest eliminating advertising entirely (PPC bad, SEO good).

So far, so good, right? Logically everyone should stop advertising and engage purely in social media. But here's the paradoxical conundrum...

3. Almost all of the social media platforms are advertising supported. The only reason there is a Google search in which SEO can thrive is because advertisers foot the bill for essentially all of Google's infrastructure, operations, R&D. Similarly, YouTube and Facebook — largely funded by investors so far — all expect to cover the majority of theirs costs by selling ads. Even Twitter can't avoid revenue forever, and advertising remains a likely mechanism.

Huh.

Given those premises, how can you not conclude that the Internet as we know it is doomed to fail? In other words, if social media marketing really succeeds at banishing advertising, then there will be no media in which to socially market anymore.

Not possible, you say? Economically, it's actually quite rational. Why would anyone pay to advertise when most people ignore ads and that investment is "obviously" better spent on producing social media content and conversations? And why would for-profit companies run these social platforms if they can't generate any revenue?

What are the possible outs?

Users start paying for services directly. You can use Google, but you have to pay $15/month. Same goes for pretty much every web site or service that is advertising supported today. There's some talk that Apple's AppStore for the iPhone has proven that this model can work. Although, I know quite a few app developers, and none of them seem to be making all that much money. Certainly the big media folks tried that road — e.g., online subscriptions to The New York Times — and it didn't end well for them.

The web platforms sell their profiles of everyone. Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc., track everything you do, and then they sell that information to the highest bidder. Marketers won't directly advertise on those system — no one pays attention to the ads, right? — but they will use this information for trying to target you in other channels, or for market research, or for, I don't know, outright blackmail. Seriously though, is the relinquishing of everyone's privacy worth the incremental value it could give marketers? Is there even enough value there for the marketers to cover the expenses of the platforms?

Government or NGO's take over the platforms. Hey, it works for Wikipedia. Theoretically, I suppose Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc., could be funded by tax dollars or donations. Maybe that's the ultimate egalitarian computing society of the future. But realistically, it's hard to imagine. Have you seen the health care debate here in the US lately? Yikes. I have a hard enough time getting someone from Google to respond to my emails already.

None of those options sound pretty. So, how about this:

Advertising isn't really going to die. As Mark Twain famously remarked, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." Even if they won't admit it, maybe enough people find advertising relevant in enough circumstances — consciously or unconsciously — that it is in the economic interest of advertisers to continue. Maybe those social media gurus are incorrect in their predictions that social media will replace advertising — maybe it will end up complementing it instead. Maybe, in a strange way, the dynamics of social media marketing, as it matures, will be closer to advertising than those gurus might like to imagine.

Honestly, I think a lot of advertising today is not very good, and the negativity and backlash it's generated is reasonably justified. However, I also believe that advertising can and will evolve. It needs to become more useful, taking a place in the world where people can generally appreciate it and not despise it.

Yeah, I know, that sounds like a stretch. But not nearly as much of a stretch as the alternatives.

I don't think it's an easy mission. But it's the mission that I think marketers and marketing technologists must tackle. The survival of the web just might depend on it.

Social media marketing stole my woman and ravaged my cattle

Forgive me, I was going to title this post something more subtle like, "Social media's sin of omission," but as a blogger shamelessly vying for your attention, I find myself succumbing to the very social media marketing arms race of "say what?!" that I want to push back on.

I know, as a marketer, it's politically incorrect to be anything less than doe-eyed ga-ga about the Wonder Bread that is social media. And to a certain degree that's justified. Social media has given customers more power, visibility, and voice — all great things! — which has helped many good and deserving companies gain recognition and caused many not-so-good companies to squirm like worms on the YouTube hook.

However, every now and again — and with greater frequency as of late — social media advocates take a ride on the Hyperbole Train to Sillyville and suggest that businesses should only use social media to build their market. The rallying cry is that push marketing such as advertising is dead — or at least badly wounded and limping to the nearest bar — while pull marketing, such as organic search engine optimization (SEO) and social network interactions on Facebook and Twitter, is now the reigning champion of the marketing world.

Frankly, that's like expecting your old college roommate — who once helped you schlep two duffle bags into your 8x12 closet of a dorm room — to come over and now move your family of eight from New York to California. For free. Including grandma's antique grand piano and those big pots on the patio.

Marketers who cede the heavy lifting entirely to the crowd cloud, do so at the risk of not moving at all.

I can prove it mathematically.

But first, just so I don't have my marketing license revoked — or have someone bludgeon me with a hardcover copy of Chris Brogan's Trust Agents — let me reaffirm that there are plenty of things that social media is spectacular at:

• an incredible feedback mechanism to hear from prospects and customers;
• a bonding mechanism to build better relationships with people across distance;
• a delivery mechanism for useful or entertaining content to your fans;
• a force multiplier mechanism to boost successful products and marketing;
• a social enforcement mechanism to encourage your firm to do the right thing;

These are all solid reasons for a marketer to love social media.

However, what I don't think social media is particularly reliable for is getting the word out for new products or services, especially for small to medium sized organizations.

This was going to be the "sin of omission" that I originally envisioned for this post. Social media marketing advocates share two kinds of anecdotes: those of good companies who were rewarded for their fine participation in social media and those of bad companies who were punished for failure to respect the social Blitzkrieg.

What is omitted are the stories of good companies, who genuinely embrace social media, openly sharing good stuff with the community, warmly engaging with anyone who saunters into their social network... yet who get very little return from their endeavors.

And, just to clarify, by "good companies" I mean organizations that include remarkable people and products. They're doing legitimately great things to make the world a better place, and they're happy to blog and tweet about it, commenting and friending in every relevant venue. They're good social media citizens.

Yet still it's hard to move the needle.

See, for every Gary Vaynerchuk who's crushing it, God bless him, there are hundreds or thousands of others who are walking the walk, but on more of a treadmill than a victory lap. Maybe that's because Gary is way better than most. Or maybe he caught a wave at the right time in the right place. Or both. Either way, I have high regard for the guy.

I just don't think "be like Gary Vaynerchuk" is a practical marketing plan.

The problem is the math (isn't it always?). As more and more people invest their energy into contributing to the social sphere, the social sphere gets noisier and noisier. It's like the East Village on a Saturday night, multiplied by a million. While people's abilities to produce content has exploded, our ability to consume content, in any way that's truly meaningful, is still quite limited. The cacophony of choice is a dizzying wall of sound.

Cutting through that pandemonium — even with a remarkable product or service — requires one or more of the following:

• a Looooooong Tail focus on very specific niches;
• ever more ridiculously provocative ideas and hooks;
• an incredible stroke of luck and/or sheer genius;
• judicious use of "other" marketing than social media;

The Long Tail is wonderful, but the farther out you go, the harder it is to achieve scale. Ridiculously provocative ideas are a vicious cycle, as each needs to be more outrageous than the last to stand out, and they can have undesirable side effects — such as now my blog is going to show up for lunatics searching for "ravaged cattle." Great, there's a niche. As for incredible strokes of luck, play the lottery. But as a professional marketer, more predictable work is required.

The "other" kind of marketing — advertising, email, conferences and events, channel promotions, sponsorships, and PR via more exclusive channels — is the only reliable and scalable option.

Don't take my word for it, though. As social media advocates are fond of emphasizing that actions speak louder than words, look at how social media thought leaders themselves — and vendors selling products in that space — promote their own brands:

• speaking at, sponsoring, and organizing conferences about social media (i.e., event marketing);
• traditional publishing of books promoted in bookstores and on Amazon.com;
• advertising said books and conferences on popular sites and search engines;
• collecting email addresses and engaging in permission marketing and marketing automation (more vendors than individuals);
• having one-to-one discussions with people to win business (i.e., sales);

I don't think that's hypocritical — that's exactly what they should be doing. Okay, maybe a tad hypocritical for those who have declared "other" marketing dead, but then again, here I am taking a swipe at social media through a blog post that I'm hoping will be indexed, tweeted, bookmarked, and dugg. (Kind of a weird existential loop. If only Descartes were alive to proclaim, "I blog, therefore I am" — or Blogito, ergo sum in the original Latin.)

My point is that social media marketing is not the destructor of "other" marketing.

To the contrary, social media marketing is immensely synergistic with other marketing vehicles — so long as the marketer is genuine and the company is good. I think some of the most exciting innovation in marketing is the integration of social media tactics and channels into other vehicles such as advertising, billboards, email nurturing, and the ever-imminent blossom of mobile marketing.

Every organization should embrace social media marketing for what it is — which is great — without falling for unrealistic myths of it as a silver bullet. It's a necessary, but not sufficient, component of sustainable success in the new marketing world.

Everything in perspective.

Twitter social cycle

You have to admit, the social dynamics of Twitter are worth a chuckle, especially when you try to explain them to people who aren't into it:

You overhear something someone says.
For some random reason, it intrigues you.

So you start following them.
And listening in on their conversations.
And repeating what they say, verbatim, to your friends.

You even start following their friends too.

Until some minor thing they do annoys you.
("Oh, come on, not another #iphone hashtag!")
Then you dump them immediately.

You repeat this pattern a dozen times a week with complete strangers.

Everybody considers this perfectly normal behavior.

Happy #followfriday from @chiefmartec.

Twitter and semantic microblogging

"Life happens while you're making other plans."

The same may be said about the semantic web. While waiting for mainstream adoption of proper semantic web standards — such as RDF metadata embedded in web pages — the drive for organized structure and meaning in the great sea of web content is being addressed in perhaps the most unexpected of places: Twitter.

Technology adoption, like water, follows the path of least resistance.

The explosion of hashtags on Twitter — e.g., #iphone, #superbowl, #davos — has evolved into an interesting semantic phenomenon. First popularized on Twitter by Nate Ritter during the San Diego forest fires in 2007, hashtags became a way for users to track tweets on a particular subject. Combined with the myriad of Twitter search and tracking services out there — such as hashtags.org and Twemes — people can quickly find streams of conversation on topics of interest to them.

An increasingly common usage pattern is for users to post a URL (usually a short URL alias, such as from TinyURL.com) along with 1 - 3 hashtags and maybe a few words of annotation:

...which amounts to creating an independent metadata layer over the web.

Twitter vs. Bookmarking

Now, I know, there are a ton of issues with this. Like tags in any folksonomy — del.icio.us and flickr, for instance — you end up with conflicting meanings for the same tag, duplicate tags for the same topic, and often a certain amount of ambiguity. And because source URLs are rarely posted in their original form, but rather as a variety of squashed duplicate shortcuts, there's an extra layer of indirection muddying the water.

But there are a few important differences between Twitter and social bookmarking services that preceded it, especially with its incentives for tag convergence:

Followers as an incentive. Followers — the number of people subscribed to your tweet stream — are a primary currency of Twitter. You gain new followers by posting tweets that appeal to others who share the same affinities. Using hashtags, and more importantly the right hashtags, helps people connect. This creates an incentive for communities to converge upon the same tag for something as quickly as possible.

Parsimony as an incentive. The 140 character limit of tweets — including any posted URL and space to permit easy re-tweeting — doesn't leave room for the tag spam that afflicts most bookmarking services. You want to pick one or two of the right tags, and you can't afford duplicates, as that will certainly annoy human readers as well (hurting your number of followers). Again, this encourages tag convergence.

Real-time feedback. On del.icio.us and flickr, you rarely get feedback about your tags. On Twitter, however, you can get immediate reaction from the community — either positive reinforcement or negative signals for course correction. This can be quantitative, such as number of followers, replies, and re-tweets, but also qualitative commentary. This too is an incentive for tag convergence.

It's this social dynamic that takes semantifying the web in an intriguing direction.

The Social Semantic Web

Twitter hashtags seem like a real step towards a social semantic web, what has also been called a socio-semantic web. To be sure, Twitter is still pretty far away from the true semantic web vision. Probably the two biggest complaints are the lack of formal ontologies and the lack of precision for machine-readability. But innovations will emerge to tackle these challenges.

For instance, there has been some experimentation with triple tags on Twitter — akin to the machine tags that were popularized on flickr. For example, #taxonomy:binomial=Alcedo_atthis or #geo:lat=-1.56403 #geo:lon=53.60913 — tantalizing similar to RDF notation.

Unfortunately, the downside of triple tags in Twitter is that they make tweets less human readable, which causes a certain amount of hashtag backlash. Incremental solutions may involve hashtag filtering or other ways of managing the visibility of such metadata on Twitter (albeit with side effects to the incentive structure).

More innovative approaches may be necessary to reach the next level.

Benjamin Nowack has an excellent presentation on semantic microblogging on Slide Share that explores some ideas about "finding the sweet spot between simplicity and added value" in further semantic extensions to this environment:

Semantic Microblogging

View more presentations from Benjamin Nowack. (tags: open zemanta)

For a slightly more technical analysis of future semantic microblogging technologies, you may want to take a look at this recent academic paper, Microblogging: A Semantic and Distributed Approach.

It's hard to predict how hastags on Twitter will evolve. They might be a fad, or a new wave of enhancements to Twitter — or third-party services — might elevate them to a whole new level. Either way, they reveals some of the potential for intersecting social media and the semantic web on the road ahead.

Twitter and the law of propinquity

The law of propinquity states that the greater physical (or psychological) proximity between people, the greater the chance that they will form friendships or romantic relationships.

Other things being equal, the more we see people and interact with them, the more probable we are to like them.

The classic example of propinquity is that two people living on the same floor of a building have a higher propinquity than those living on different floors.

MIT Professor Thomas J. Allen studied this phenomenon in the context of the workplace in 1970's, a project described in Wikipedia:

...to determine how the distance between engineers' offices affects the frequency of technical communication between them. The result of that research, producing what is now know as the Allen Curve, revealed that there is a strong correlation between physical distance and the frequency of communication between work stations. The finding also revealed the critical distance of 50 meters for weekly technical communication.

In other words, people tend to communicate more frequently — and more openly? — with those they work right next to, rather than people on different floors, or in different buildings, or in different cities.

Agile software development teams have been successfully organized around this principle:

Agile methods emphasize face-to-face communication over written documents. Most agile teams are located in a single open office to facilitate such communication. ... Most agile methodologies include a routine and formal daily face-to-face communication among team members.

Ironically, relatively recent studies have shown that email and easy worldwide telephone communications hasn't dramatically altered the dynamics of the law of propinquity or the Allen Curve — perhaps to some degree because email and phone calls don't lend themselves to serendipitous conversations. You have to intentionally pick up the phone or type up a message to someone.

But are things like Twitter bending the law of propinquity, stretching the Allen Curve?

As anyone who has gotten into Twitter can tell you — and if you aren't a Twitter person, suspend your skepticism for a moment — there's something oddly natural and surprisingly useful about floating in and out of conversations in and around your stream of interests. And that this in turn can spark much deeper conversations outside of Twitter.

Twitter is like the water cooler in an infinite virtual office of proximate friends and colleagues. It's virtual proximity — but actual psychological proximity (at least to some degree).

As Twitter, FriendFeed, and so-called Enterprise 2.0 applications grow and advance — and as bandwidth increases to more fluidly incorporate real-time video in these multi-party impromptu gatherings — the dynamics of how we come to know and like people — and work effectively with them — seems poised to evolve as well.

If you're working with a physically distributed team, as more of us are in these flat world times, these changing dynamics could have real — and positive — impact on collaboration.

Social media personal trainers

A colleague of mine recently said her New Year's resolution is to blog, blog, blog.

She's a busy executive, with little time to spare, and always a hundred other things competing for her attention. But she also knows that active participation in the social media sphere — blogging, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. — is increasingly vital to one's influence. It's valuable to one's employer, who needs genuine personalities as emissaries in the social web landscape, and it's also valuable for one's personal brand.

So getting more involved in social media — and maintaining a consistent presence there — sounds like a great New Year's resolution.

But how to best live up to it? To make sure you don't get derailed by the first competing priority?

With more mundane New Year's resolutions, such as exercising more and getting in better shape, a pragmatic solution is to hire a personal trainer. By paying money for a professional's time and making a commitment to work with them on a regularly scheduled basis, you significantly increase the odds that you'll stick with the program and reach your goal.

Is there an analogous role for a social media personal trainer?

Quite possibly. (Actually, there's probably a number of new media PR firms that are charging for this very service now, even if they don't call it that.) Think about how a social media personal trainer might help:

• Help get you set up on the right platforms and venues, show you how to use them.
• Teach you the rules of engagement, etiquette, and lingo of different venues.
• Put together a scheduled regimen of blogging, Tweeting, etc. — and ping you on it.
• Serve as a proactive sounding board for brainstorming new ideas.
• Push you to write better and think more creatively on subjects.
• Alert you to interesting posts and discussions that you may want to join or riff on.
• Introduce you — or help you introduce yourself — to like-minded people.
• Keep you up-to-date with the latest tools, widgets, browser plug-ins, etc.

Could really help tone your social media muscles.

Would it make sense for someone to be a social media personal trainer?

Modeling this out, hypothetically, a trainer might spend 1-3 hours per week with 10-25 clients, at rates ranging from, say $40/hour to $100/hour or more for elite trainers. (There would be higher outliers, of course: how much would you pay Chris Brogan for 3 months of social media personal trianing?) That's anywhere from $1,600/month to $10,000/month or more for doing a job you love, bringing tremendous value to the New Marketing world. Not bad.

As marketing evolves, and old media careers fade away, new and interesting new media career arise. This sure seems like one of them to me.

Best wishes to you for your resolutions in 2009!

P.S. In searching for "social media personal trainer", I found this great post by David Brim on Five Ways Social Media is Like Working Out.