Changing Business Strategy

Socialnomics is transforming the way people do business from interviews, to resumes, to being in the know about insider information in companies. Socialnomics requires that companies, as well as individuals live a more transparent life, "the world has shifted, and whether we like it or not, we are always representing who we are, whether we are on the clock or not" (230).

While the face-to-face interview is not dead, it is in its decline. According to Erik Qualman, "more and more interviews will be conducted on video because the cost to entry is much lower...the ability to use video Skype over smartphones has changed things as well" (215). The benefits to the company are to save time and money. The benefits to the interviewee are similar though the interviewee also gains more prep time (if the interview is done over social network devices), there is a written record, and misquoting does not happen so much.

One of the reasons for this shift is, as Qualman calls them, the emergence of Generation Y, the Internet Generation or Millennials. This is the under 30 crowd that is rather different from their parents. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The work and life balance is more important to this generation. They require positions that fit their lifestyle (e.g. work from home or at odd hours) (233). There is a rise in the demand for companies to contribute to society and be a part of the social community. With this in mind, the typical "hire, train, manage, and retain" playbook needs revision (233). The focus moves from traditional management and micromanagement to fostering an environment for success (234).

There are many recruiting resources now that eliminate the middle man, Craigslist, LinkedIn, and Plaxo are taking over the recruitment role because they provide more direct and insightful connections between employer/employee relationships. These networks can supply photos, videos, links to work and articles a person may be in (226). The world is a bigger place now and more is required of people to succeed. There is less of a divide between an individuals public and private life. Digging up dirt has become much easier.

Fortunately, individuals are now able to do this with companies more easily as well. It is nice to be able to check on your future boss, and what is being said about the company. This profiling helps match the right people to the right places. Glassdoor.com provides an inside look into companies giving ratings and reviews as well as salaries. Like with Zillow, this should not be taken as Bible truth, but it does give some leverage and knowledge when talking with employers.

There is much to be kept up with to stay relevant and competitive in this economy. Social media provides the tools to do this.

Conversational Era

It's natural enough to think of the growth of the blogoshpere as a merely technical phenomenon. But it's also a profoundly human phenomenon, a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in. Every day the blogoshpere captures a little more of the strange immediacy of the life that is passing before us. Think of it as the global thought bubble of a single voluble species. 

                  --New York Times editorial, August 5, 2005

Socialnomics

Erik Qualman, in his book, Socialnomics how social media transforms the way we live and do business claims (as Robert Scoble and Shel Israel) that social media is a revolution; it is not a question of whether a business wants to participate, but how well it does. The currency used in social media is "meaningful engagement, participation, and value creation...if individuals or businesses want a say in how they are categorized, they need to participate with the appropriate currency" (xiv).

Before we begin looking at the business side of social media, let's hear Qualman's positive perspective on individual/personal social media. This post will address 3 complaints people have voiced about personal media and Qualman's responses. First, "investing time on social media actually makes you more productive" (6). Second, social media "can bring families together-it connects parents to their kids like never before" (39). Finally, the navel gazing or "braggadocian" behavior makes people more productive as they compete to do the next interesting thing.

Let's begin with the idea that social media makes a person more productive. One of Qualman's overarching beliefs is the overwhelming excess of information people have available to them. He believes social media helps people make sense of it all. Previously, if you wanted to find out about fashion you would read "Vogue." "Business week" would tell you all you needed to know about business and so on. People rely on information from their social circle to help them make decisions and sort through information. If you want to buy a car seat for your baby, and ten of your friends recommend Britax, 3/4 of your research is done. We rely on word of mouth and put faith in it.  Qualman believes intra-personal relationships are improved through social media. Keeping up with people on twitter and facebook allows conversation to be more productive when you talk face to face. The preliminary questions are already answered so you can cut the small talk.  Besides sorting through information in the word of mouth way, we rely on search engine capacity. Roughly 5 % of people do not go to the second page of a result page on Google. Search engines have become more personalized to get us what we want more efficiently. Ultimately, people trust other people rather than corporations.
Qualman comments that we save time with social media. We are more directed in how we spend our time and what we are looking for. For example, we only watch 5 minutes of a Saturday Night Live on You Tube rather than watching the whole 90 minutes with commercials.

From the word of mouth information I get, I cannot agree that social media saves time. It is very easy to "waste" an hour on the computer and not have gained much. Updates on Twitter and FB can become monotonous. It is nice to have the world at your fingertips, however, it takes a lot of personal self-control to manage it all effectively. I feel we work more as a society, but we are not particularly a much more productive or happy people because of it.

Qualman's second point is social media keeps you in touch with your children. Parents can monitor their kids lives through their FB or MySpace. This seems like a poor excuse for face to face time as families. Teenagers have not changed. They will make sure their parents do not see the juicy secrets of their lives through social media. I think this is a false sense of security. There is also the problem of writing skills eroding from the digital world as well as not understanding boundaries. They do not live in a 9-5 world, but a "24/7 world" (59).

Finally, Qualman admires how social media creates competition among people to live an interesting life. Reality TV is out and reality social media is in. People would rather say they are skiing in CO than sitting on the couch eating Cornflakes. Qualman says, "Social media allows individuals to take real-time inventories of their lives and helps answer the age-old question, 'What an I doing with my life?'" People are more encouraged to live their own lives, rather than watching others.

Qualman uses some of the common arguments against social media and turns them into a positive light. He makes a good point that social media done well establishes relationships and helps us to be more productive in our lives. Individuals must make choices about social media in our lives. Just as businesses don't get to choose whether or not to participate in the conversation, so it is in our personal lives; the choice is how well you participate.

Is blogging best for business?

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel sing the praises of blogging for business in their book Naked Conversations. There are some drawbacks to blogging however that I would like to address.

The authors believe the blog is more effective than many forms of marketing currently in place. Often mailings, phone calls and commercials annoy potential customers more than attract them to a product. However, these marketing methods search out the customer. For a blog to work, the customer has to search  out the blog. The customer must be interested in the topic and make time to find and read a blog. This does not seem like it would reach a very wide or diverse range of people. Many people who are on the computer often understand how quickly hours can be lost in the blogoshpere as one link leads to another; before you know if you have lost half a day. This is especially common with social media like Facebook and blogs.

Alternatively, many businesses who blog do not post often. If I check a blog a few times and it has not been updated, I come to the conclusion that the information is not important enough to be kept up to date and it is not worth my time to return. The blog becomes something a business thinks it should have, but they do not necessarily invest enough time to make it worth anyone's time.

Blogs assume a certain audience which is somewhat exclusive. The elderly and children are out of the equation for information sharing through blogging. As we have seen in a previous post, blogging is perceived differently in other cultures. In our global economy a blog may reach a certain kind of individual, but it can exclude others. The blog cannot be a stand in for really important information.

Blogging for a business can be a dangerous thing. Many people are not good writers and they can damage a companies reputation. Even small things like spelling and grammatical errors can decrease the professionalism a company is trying to maintain. Once words are out it is impossible to retract them. The written word has power and it should be used carefully. It can be difficult to know if comments made on a blog are reliable. Often the people who comment are people who blow issues out of proportion, and lets face it, have too much time on their hands anyway. While it is important to have a good dialogue between business and consumer, the blog may not be the most reliable way to foster that relationship.

Finally, a blog writer is still a person who is creating a persona and showing the side they want people to see. There is still a perspective being advocated and a person creating an image. The authors discuss transparent communication, being honest and up-front, these are all important, but the blog is still going to advance a certain view and only show what a company wants you to see. The authors would argue that the readers will uncover any problem areas and expose a company who is not doing things correctly. Again, this takes people who are very interested in the topic and take time to make it happen.

I do feel like a blog can be a great thing for a business. It gives a personal tilt to a company and often gives good information. However, it is time consuming and must be done well or it should not be done at all. It can be one of many ways to promote a business since it targets only a certain demographic. It must be understood that it is still a way of marketing and showing a potential customer the way the company desires to be perceived. Blogging is definitely something for businesses to consider "blogging is impacting businesses of all sizes in most parts of the developed world. It has made the world a smaller, faster place" (232). 

Global blogging

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel give insight into global blogging. Culture plays a big role in how blogging develops.

The French, like Americans are "accustomed to expressing (our) thoughts as individuals" (115).  French blogging is similar to that of English-speaking countries where there are interesting blogs in large and small companies.

In Germany, people are more cautious in what they disclose and do not tend toward blogs as much.

There are only 50,000 Spanish speaking blogs. The barriers are thought to be that small business often mistakenly perceive "that the cost of all things internet-related is high" as well as large corporations not realizing the "powerful benefits of blogs and continue to dismiss them as irrelevant online teen journals" (125).

China is limited in blogging due to government censorship.

Culturally, the Japanese have dual personalities. They maintain a public and private persona. Their blogging tends to be more informal. It is also more based on sales than is thought to be acceptable to the French or English speaking blogospheres. In Japan, most blogs do not employ comments. If they do, they use trackback "Trackback is more polite...and you know who you are talking with" (130).

Lastly, Ireland is not very interested in blogging. They are terrific story tellers, but prefer to keep it amongst friends. Ireland also lacks in broadband and frankly, the people in pubs like it that way. They do not want a computer in every corner.

The influence of culture will play a large role in how the global economy perceives the emergence and use of blogging. A business must know its audience in order to be successful and not offensive with a blog.

Blogging for Business

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel in their book, Naked Conversations, believe blogging has become a revolution in the way businesses communicate. They claim, "blogging is not just wise for businesses wising to be closer with their customers, but essential"(1). The old forms of PR are not working; sending out mail and cold calling is not only expensive for the company, but annoying for the customer. Not to mention that these methods are only effective in 2% of the population. Blogs are the lowest-cost communications channel, "you can reach thousands, perhaps millions of people for an investment of a few cents and some personal time" (27). Nothing can boost your search engine standing better than links in a regularly updated blog (29). The authors call this way to boost search engine rankings"Google Juice"(29).

The blogging revolution has begun to decentralize corporations enabling simple conversations between people. I like to hear the phenomena referred to as corner grocery marketing. It is what the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker used to do (97). It creates relationships and in turn loyalty. Scoble and Israel identify official spokespeople using a refined scripted language as "corpspeak" (4). Corpspeakers raise a suspicion that there is nothing human about the company; they speak whether you want to listen or not.
The authors use Microsoft as an example of what a blog can do for a company. Microsoft has been thought of as the evil empire. When Lenn Pryor joined the company in 1998 he created a company blog that could personalize what seemed like a monolith without a soul. His idea was "to share our lives with people and then they'll see we're human and they'll trust us" (15). He created Channel 9 which became a way of video blogging, "an interactive video of real people talking about their work with customers" (17). Blogging helped change the face of Microsoft giving it a human touch and credibility.

In today's society in order to stay on top you have to be creative and innovative. In short, you have to make yourself something remarkable. Seth Godin, in his new book, "Purple Cows" talks about the remarkable and the boring. Purple Cows (as opposed to brown cows) are ideas that spread, and a product that the marketplace has deemed remarkable. The audience that blogs appeal to are those who are listening, waiting for the next big thing.

The blog gives access to what people want, conversations. Yossi Vardi, one of Israel's high-tech computer entrepreneurs says, " the world's second favorite entertainment is story telling, but the top is conversations" (43). The blog provides just that, it is like "word of mouth on steroids" (43). Two essentials for blogging success is that they are both transparent and authentic" (51). The two most fundamental rules for blogging according to Bob Luts, a Fortune 10 boardroom executive, are "passion and authority" (51). It is important that the blog is not a marketplace--blogging was "born in an environment of anti-pitch sentiment" (79). They are a place to foster trust "a better place to market your reputation than sell your goods, and in the end that will prove more valuable" (84).

The blog allows marketing to become something conversational and in turn creates a relationship between company and constituency. The blog is what gives a company credibility and honesty. 

Traffic

While creating a blog can be a highly personal experience, not all blogging needs to be navel gazing. Blog writing, as with other writing, allows a person to create a persona. It is up to the individual or company what that persona should be. Keep in mind, the writer needs only reveal what is relevant to the topic.
Regardless of the purpose for the blog, most people want to feel like other people are reading and participating in the blog. A blog is a way to engage with a community so traffic becomes a confidence booster. It is also important if you want the blog to generate income.

Courtney Tuttle writes about increasing blog traffic:

1-Create links in post, "A link cluster is a group of links that you can point at a post or page to improve its search engine ranking." 
Another reason to use links is to increase your credibility as a writer. Links are a way of citing your work as well as generating traffic. Citing is important in ethical blogging. Links keep the blog up-to-date, provide readers with additional information and help attract readers to your site.

2-Joining Networked blogs on Facebook and Technorati helps to increase readership. Also joining other people's blogs that have similar ideas and commenting in thoughtful ways. It is not enough to say, "I like your post."Engage and put some research into the comment. Try to generate a presence in the larger community to which your blog caters. For my blog, "Cooped" I will talk to other people who keep backyard chickens, store owners, chicken supply places, as well as reference websites and blogs about my topic.

3-Edit your post, "You can definitely improve your title, first paragraph, formatting, and grammar within 30 minutes."


4- Give readers something they want, not just information about your personal life.


5- Answer comments and engage in the community created by your blog.


6- Be patient and focus on creating great content!

Introduction

The title of my blog comes from ideas in the book Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Pollan looks at food choices and the variety of alternatives that are available as he deconstructs the way a society eats. In this blog, like Pollan's book I will look at social media as a movement that has changed the face of business while looking at the variety of options available for businesses to approach the public in new and more intimate ways. The blog acts as liaison enabling relationship building which parses the dilemma of interpersonal relationships. I hope to explore this topic more thoroughly through responses to readings and interaction with my own experiences in blogging. 


In this study I will be looking at four main books:

The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success

Author: Lon Safko

Guerrilla Social Media Marketing: 100+ Weapons to Grow Your Online Influence, Attract Customers, and Drive Profits
Author: Levinson and Gibson

        

Naked Conversations: How Blogs are changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers

Author: Robert Scoble and Shel Israel

Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business
Author: Eric Qualman