Who should win the $3,690 FEI ticket?

Last week we announced that we have one (1) $3,690 Front End of Innovation ALL ACCESS PASS to give away.

We have now chosen FOUR (4) finalists, and you get to help pick the winner by sending us a "I vote for x" message on either:

1. Twitter by @reply to @innovate


2. Our Continuous Innovation Group on LinkedIn


3. The original Facebook discussion


4. Adding a comment on this blog post below

Do this by midnight GMT on March 28, 2010 and we will announce the one (1) winner on March 29, 2010.


The four finalists answered the following question in their own words - What is the 'Front End of Innovation'?:

1. "Front End of Innovation is a growth opportunity for professionals interested in learning more about innovation in a conference setting in historic Boston. Many professionals will be there to share what they have learned,discuss best practices and invoke good discussions on various related topics. There will be many ways in which to participate - speakers, group discussions, panels, etc. It looks like the best conference on this topic and being new to innovation, I personally would love to win this and attend!" - Suzanne Switzer Hernandez


2. "To me, the 'Front End of Innovation' suggests what is emerging - not what is currently understood. The meeting of design thinking, intrinsic motivation, collaboration and truly cross-enterprise and -boundary thinking. Too many areas of ourlives - government, education, traditional business management - have so much entrenched baggage that they become paralyzed and move nowhere. FEI represents the opportunity to shed the blinders and really look at these challenges in a new way, engage people in this examination and rethinking of these challenges as something that's not a dead end, but a whole new beginning." - Jason Pamental


3. "FEI is hope...potential magic...without limits...democracy of the best ideas...because those of us who actually do this stuff called Innovation know that the best outcomes require many "in-comes"...many inputs...in short, the better the FEI, the better the Innovation probability and possibility. Viva FEI!" - Luis Solis


4. "Biz 1 + Biz 2 spark Biz 3 + Biz 4 + Biz 5. Biz 3 + 4 + 5 spark Biz 6 - N. FEI is like a snowball rushing down a hill, gaining momentum with every iteration." - Tom Chevalier

Which of the four finalists' answers shows the most clarity, passion, or humor?


The winner will be chosen by my tabulation of votes from you the Blogging Innovation readers. Please vote now!


You still can save 20% on event registration when you use our discount code "FEI2010BRADEN".


Editors's note: The ticket for the contest is being provided by the event organizers, not Blogging Innovation, and is conveyed at their discretion not ours. Winner is responsible for paying their own travel costs to the event and any other expenses.


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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

5 Ways to Prepare for a Social Media Disaster

by Mike Brown

I watched the @ThatKevinSmith and @SouthwestAir brouhaha erupt live on Twitter but didn't write about it last week. Bunches of tweeters and bloggers hashing out who was right and wrong based on second, third, or five hundredth-hand information simply wasn't interesting enough to warrant adding to the noise.

Getting ready for a social media presentation this week though, I've been thinking about service defects and service recovery in the world of social networking.

I sought an analogy to help think strategically about how a company prepares for an angry customer who wants to be heard and starts tweeting incessantly: handling a hostage situation is very comparable. Rather than a person though, it's a brand's reputation being taken hostage by a customer threatening irreparable harm unless demands are met. With the one-to-many communication capabilities of social media, this type of threat has never been more credible.

Here are five hostage negotiation principles and related implications for preparing to handle when your brand's good name is being held hostage:

1. Have a negotiating team ready - This means more than a single person monitoring Twitter and handling responses. In hostage negotiations, the primary negotiator, who is ideally the sole contact with the hostage taker, is joined by a coach/commander in charge of the situation and personnel along with a secondary negotiator to help monitor, listen, and offer input.


• Strategic Questions - Does your company have a pre-identified team and protocols for how it will work together in a social media-based service recovery effort? And how would you incorporate front-line employees when you're trying to recover from a service failure playing out both at one of your company's locations and online?


2. Gather as much solid information as possible right away - Beyond having standard questions to run through, there's added complexity in a social media-based service recovery effort. Suppose the customer issue IS taking place in-person. With social media monitoring removed from the scene, it may not even be possible from a customer's messages to determine where the issue is occurring. This creates an interesting implication for enacting rapid service recovery.


• Strategic Questions - If it's clear the issue is taking place in the presence of front line employees, what steps will you take to identify the location and establish communication with them immediately? Since multi-person communication with the angry customer is almost a given, how will you ensure your multiple contacts are speaking with one message?


3. Connect on a personal level - Social media throws a whole new wrinkle into this, especially when you want to move interaction with the customer to a private messaging stream. If it's even available, the company may have outdated phone information on the customer, making direct contact challenging to establish. A corporate tweeter may have to try to get a brand kidnapper to 'follow' the company so direct messaging can take place. And typically, the corporate tweeter is communicating under a corporate account without a personal avatar. It makes establishing a personal tone of, "I'm here to try and fix the situation," difficult when the customer is receiving tweets with the corporate logo.


• Strategic Questions - Are you following your customers on social media? Do you have multiple ways to reach out to customers? Do your company social media people have work-related, personal accounts they can use to reach out specifically in these cases?


4. Communicate openly and actively listen - When you have face-to-face contact, listening, and the silence that goes along with it, is easy to convey. It's a little tougher via phone. But in a medium geared toward short, back-and-forth messages, a pause associated with listening or contemplation comes across as being distracted or ignoring the other person.


• Strategic Question - Beyond having plans for migrating service recovery conversations to private channels, are you actively training your social media response team in dealing with the dynamics of these new service recovery situations?


5. Show empathy - One way hostage negotiators demonstrate empathy is by delivering on aspects of the demands that have been made. Granting small, detailed requests is done in real-life hostage situations to slow and drag them out, which is desirable. In a service recovery situation (especially one playing out in public), the last thing you want to do is extend it.


• Strategic Questions - Who is on your social media service response team? Have you included your best customer service people - the ones with strong understanding of what you can do to solve customer problems and are best at understanding issues from a customer's point of view?

No matter what your company is doing in social media, you have to address this reality. Even if your company doesn't want a proactive social media presence, there's a greater chance every day your customers will be talking about your brand via social media. When they do, and the discussion gets negative and brand threatening, you better have thought about your strategy, with a plan for what you'll do.


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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming TM blog, and serves as the company's chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" and is a frequent keynote presenter.

Social Media Expert or Wannabe?

by Mike Myatt

Determining whether someone is a social media expert or a just another wannabe can be a difficult task for the typical consumer. There is a tremendous amount of noise out there being created by a plethora of "consultants" professing expertise in what I refer to as the new social sciences: personal branding, social networking, social media marketing, etc. I just did a Google search for the term social media expert and had more than 96 million returned search results... give me a break. So my question is this: what constitutes a "social media expert," and how do you tell the posers from the players? Which of these professed miracle workers are true professionals, and which ones are simply attempting to gravy-train a rapidly growing market niche in pursuit of a quick buck?

Let me begin by dispelling a popular myth oft espoused online - It seems to be fashionable of late to state that there is no such thing as a social media expert. The thinking (albeit flawed thinking) of those who hold this opinion is that social media is so new, and so rapidly evolving, that there simply could not be any real experts.

My answer? Ridiculous... Every industry has experts regardless of maturity of life-cycle. In fact, many of the real innovators and experts are those early adopters doing the heavy lifting and the ground breaking. There are experts in every industry and at every stage of maturation. Some early experts mature as the industry grows, and others fall by the way side because they don't keep pace giving way to new generations of innovators building on what the first generation of experts created. The issue is not whether experts exist, as they most certainly do. The issue is finding them among the hordes of pretenders and wannabes.

I'm going to cut right to the chase and give you six things to beware of when attempting to discern the true professional advisers capable of delivering a certainty of execution, from the rogues and scoundrels simply looking to separate you from your money:

1. Beware the Part-Time Expert: My father has an old saying that I've found to be very accurate over the years: "part-time efforts, yield part-time results." If the person seeking your business has a day job that constitutes something other than the services he or she is pitching, run for the hills. If your potential advisor is moonlighting then they really have no business asking for your business.


2. Beware the Shoemaker without Shoes: Your position should be one of "don't tell me... show me." If your would-be social media guru cannot be found online, doesn't blog, tweet, or is invisible on the major social networking platforms you might want to rethink their qualifications. Important Caveat: the mere existence of a blog, YouTube channel, LinkedIn profile, Facebook account, or a Twitter page doesn't guarantee competence... any idiot can amass thousands of followers on Twitter just by following everybody and their brother, so look for someone who has amassed a quality list of followers, who has more people following them than they follow, and who actively engages with their followers.


3. Beware the Expert without Clients: No referenceable clients equals zero credibility. It's one thing to show you their own work, but quite another to show you demonstrated success on behalf of paying and satisfied clients.


4. Beware the Expert without Industry Recognition: If your so called expert isn't published, doesn't speak, lecture or teach, doesn't have a column, hasn't won any awards, etc., then they might not be a true expert.


5. Beware the Expert too Aggressive in their Pursuit: There is a big difference between professional follow-up and desperation. Let me be blunt... most professionals at the top of their game haven't made a cold call in years. In fact, even in this down economy they typically have more business than they know what to do with. If your world-beater of a consultant is chasing you down like a hungry dog after the meat wagon then you may want to take pause.


6. Beware of Bargain Basement Expertise: In most cases the reality is that you get what you pay for... True expertise doesn't come cheaply, but is well worth the investment. Few things in business will get you in as much trouble as not getting advice and counsel when needed, or worse yet, getting poor quality or incorrect advice. I would much rather pay an expert a larger fee for 30 minutes of their time and get what I need rather than pay someone $50 dollars an hour who is faking it until they can make it... Questionable advisors will take much longer to get from point A to point B (if they get there at all), and will likely cost you more money at the end of the day when contrasted with true professionals.

If you need help in integrating social media into your business I would recommend the following individuals (some you may know and some you may not) as they all pass the litmus test mentioned above. Those listed below are in no particular order of preference and you can rest assured they are not "info-product" sales people masquerading as social media professionals, but they are in fact the true subject matter experts who can get the job done:

• Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) - Chris is smart, approachable, innovative, has a high degree of integrity, probably the hardest working man on the planet, and a heck of a nice guy. I've enjoyed every interaction I've had with Chris, and he has earned my trust and respect.


• Mack Collier (@MackCollier) - I don't know Mack personally, but have enjoyed reading his candid and ever straight foward opinions online. Mack is well respected and his the loyalty of his followers more than speak to his capabilities.


• Lee Odden (@LeeOdden) - I've known Lee for several years (before he was rich and famous). In fact, in a prior life as a corporate executive Lee was the consultant I chose to place on retainer. He is smart, seasoned and delivers on his promises.


• Amy Martin (@DigitalRoyalty) - I guess the moniker Digital Royalty says it all... Amy represents some of the biggest names and fastest growning brands online. Nothing bodes as well for an agency as success, and Amy has plenty of pedigree in that department.


• Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) - Ashton combines his celebrity status, a fascination with social media, and a disarming and ever inquistive intellect to head one of the fastest growing social media agencies on the web.


• Liz Strauss (@lizstrauss) - Liz is well known for her approachability, friendliness and candor. She also happens to be one of the savviest bloggers and social media consultants online.


• And if you're slumming @mikemyatt - nuff said...

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Mike Myatt, is a Top CEO Coach, author of "Leadership Matters...The CEO Survival Manual", and Managing Director of N2Growth.

Aligning Social Media, Marketing and PR

by Matt Heinz

I'm moderating a panel on the alignment of marketing & PR in a couple weeks at Dan Greenfield's PR + Mktg Camp in Seattle. Should be a great day of discussion. Earlier this week Dan and I talked how marketing and PR teams have traditionally worked together (or not), and how those relationships are evolving now - especially with the maturation of social media as a cross-functional tool set. Excerpts from our conversation are below:


Question: Are PR and marketing more aligned or less aligned because of social media?

Matt: The idea of separating marketing teams and functions is a remnant of the "old way" of doing marketing. When most marketing was one-way (i.e. customers couldn't react, respond and create messages of their own), it was more acceptable to separate PR from product marketing, and even lead generation activities. Now, especially because the customer has so much control and such a strong voice, it's critical that brands act as one. That means PR, advertising, social media, lead generation - they all need to work from the same playbook in a coordinated fashion. Easier said than done, but that's exactly what today's most successful brands are doing.

Social media has enabled the consumer to talk back in a powerful way, which is accelerating the need for this consolidation and integration of marketing strategy by products, services and brands today.


Question: PR is generally about placement, reputation, messaging, impressions and storytelling. Marketing is generally about transactions, click throughs, key words and web applications. How is social media changing that, if at all?

Matt: Everything is about getting the sale. It always has been, but now it's easier to see and map the progression of a customer from awareness, consideration, intent, trial, purchase - then repeat, renewal, referral, etc.

Social media is blurring the distinction between customer engagement stages. Ten years ago, it was easier to segment the functions - PR talks to the customer at the beginning, then product marketing takes over and offers demos, free trials, etc. Then once they're a customer, your loyalty/retention team takes over. That approach doesn't work anymore.

The way we measure different marketing elements, by function, probably still works. But it has to be put into the context of a more immersive, cohesive customer engagement strategy that blends messages and tactics across stages of a customer relationship.


Question: What disadvantages (inefficiencies, lost opportunities, customer confusion) and advantages (integration, cost savings) are these shared tools like Facebook and Twitter creating for PR and marketing?

Matt: The sales cycle has always been far shorter than the customer's buying cycle. Five years ago, the customer buying cycle was a black box for marketers. We had no visibility to what was happening, what prospective customers were thinking or asking, who they were even considering. Now, thanks to social media, we have insight into how customers are thinking well before they engage directly with brands.

But this isn't an opportunity for selling. It's an opportunity to engage and become part of the community - add value, answer questions, provide valuable content. Earn trust, respect and credibility. Community engagement and social media are at the very top of the buying cycle, before the sales cycle, and it doesn't really matter which part of the organization manages and executes there, as long as the approach is right.


Question: Should social media ultimately be the responsibility of PR who manages reputation and conversations or marketing who is in charge of transactions and sales?

Matt: It doesn't really matter. Everyone in the organization needs to understand the customer, what they want, what they need, and how to address them - with or without a paid relationship current or pending. Every member of your organization should know how to address customers in a respectful, value-added way.

Social media has accelerated the tearing down of walls between customer and provider. There's more transparency, less formality. Brands need to be accessible, approachable and authentic to be accepted.

The social media strategy doesn't end when a customer enters a selling cycle. They aren't going to stop talking to their friends, and using Facebook, or commenting on Twitter, just because they're talking to a sales rep. Their interaction with and reflection of your brand continues across functional sales & marketing groups. That's why ownership of the social media "voice" within one marketing function or another is problematic. Today, that strategy (and especially the execution) is a job everybody has.


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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

Role of Social Media in Creating Word of Mouth and Customer Experience

by Paul Williams


What's the role of social media in creating Word of Mouth (WOM)?

You could say there are two parts to WOM - the analog and the digital.

• Analog is person to person... face to face. I'll also put written and print media into the analog category.


• Digital WOM is converted and stored in a format that can be sent and re-sent electronically.

Social media refers to tools that allow us to easily spread the story electronically, digitally. Like a pyramid marketing scheme I tell my network, and they tell theirs, and they tell theirs... Social media tools (blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc) make the spread easy.

In fact, I may have to contradict my earlier statements indicating that Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin are the father's of Word of Mouth (WOM).


The REAL Originators of Word Of Mouth

I think the folks who wrote the Faberge Organics Shampoo commercials in the 80s invented it.

Do you remember those ads?

If you tell two friends about Faberge Organics shampoo with wheat germ oil and honey, they'll tell two friends, and so on... and so on... and so on...

Sorry about the poor quality - this is all I could find.


(Feed Link For Faberge Commercial)


Has the focus of Social Media had a negative effect on the Customer Experience?

I'll say potentially, YES. Marketers dazzled by the shiny object that social media is, may think they've solved their communication problem - or are engaging in a 'meaningful' way because - for example - they've created a Facebook Fan Page for their business.


False Sense Of Security

Let me pick on one of my favorite brands, Starbucks Coffee, as an example. Specifically, their "My Starbucks Idea" website. Through this site, Starbucks welcomes everyone to submit product, program, design, service, or ANY idea.

The My Starbucks Idea home page declares:


"You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What's your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple - we want to hear it. Share your ideas, tell us what you think of other people's ideas and join the discussion. We're here, and we're ready to make ideas happen."

• Starbucks thinks they are listening.


• Customers think Starbucks is listening, and taking action.


• Starbucks thinks they've "checked the box" (to some extent) in being a social media player by having this site.


• Power to the people!

However, if you look at the "milestone" of the 50 Ideas Launched and Still Counting! - celebrating customer ideas implemented - Starbucks has technically only implemented six (6) ideas submitted by customers. If you dig into it - as John has on his Brand Autopsy site in his Tough Love For Starbucks post - you'll see that most ideas were already in the works, would have been done anyway, or aren't even customer-facing ideas (e.g. Employee discount on work clothes).

A problem with social media is that companies may think - simply by participating in the trend - that they're meeting customer need. Starbucks has invested in this suggestion site and believe they are checking the "we care and listen to customers" box. They think they've fulfilled the portion of their strategy, that supports the objective: to "Develop enthusiastically satisfied customers all of the time."

Starbucks isn't being as democratic with ideas as they claim (and think) they are. It really isn't "power to the people." Social media (or maybe improper use of social media) is giving Starbucks a false sense of security.

Social media isn't for everyone. To "engage in meaningful conversation" may actually mean a conversation. A face-to-face, human-to-human dialogue. For example, the kind a barista can have with a customer at Starbucks.


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Paul Williams is a professional problem solver at Idea Sandbox. He can help you create remarkable ideas to grow your business. You may read more at his website and find him Twittering as @IdeaSandbox.

Internet Future Driven by User Reputation Scores

by Hutch Carpenter

In a recent interview with EMC's Stu Miniman about the future of the web, I predicted that in 20 years, we'll all have online reputation scores. Little badges, numbers that communicate our level of authority, this sort of thing. And these reputations will have tangible impact.

Three different trends come together at some point in the future to make this happen. These trends have been underway for a while, but come together at some tipping point in the years ahead. Here's a visualization of the trends:


It's helpful to discuss each one, in the context of online reputations.


Rate performance of businesses

eBay, which went public back in 1998, played an important role in socializing the concept of people providing online ratings for online sellers. After we receive our purchase, we rate the seller. The collective wisdom identifies top sellers. Got your eye in that Donkey Kong game? Who are you most likely to trust...?


Amazon picked up on this, once it introduced third party sellers into the mix. You can see the percentage of positive ratings for the different sellers. Personally, I have paid premiums (i.e. higher prices) for the assurance that comes from a higher rated seller.

Yelp has taken this concept of rating a seller, and applied to offline consumer experiences. Want to get a burrito in San Francisco? You're likely to go with the highest rated restaurants.

These ratings make up for our lack of information about various providers of services. One could do a lot of online research, and asking friends, before buying. But these ratings do quite well as shorthand ways of assessing quality. They've made it easy to transact, without knowing someone ahead of time.

The rating ethos is expanding. On Facebook, you can 'like' people's entries. We 'love' music on Last.fm. We 'favorite' tweets. We 'digg' and 'buzz up' stories. Implicitly, we provide ratings when we share content via different social networks. Online engagement allows for this.


Migration of transparent work and information online

I found this recent Kaiser Family Foundation study fascinating. The amount of time kids spend online - smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device - is now at an all-time high. There's no denying this: future workers are going to be more accustomed to online engagement and information-seeking than any generation before. It's their lifestyle:


More generally, an important distinction from the web of the 1990s and early 2000s is that we aren't just reading and transacting. Individuals are providing the content. More every day, in fact. We have transferred some of the engagement and contributions from the offline world online. Actually, we're probably creating more content than we ever have,

For workers, the growth of Enterprise 2.0 continues. A key outcome of that? More and more work is making its way online. When it's available there, and not just in a Word document on the hard drive or email in an inbox, it's findable and usable by everyone. Your colleagues know quite well what the quality of your work and contributions are.

Do you think all of this stops, and we go back to message-relaying marathoners, smoke signals and carrier pigeons? No. Enterprise 2.0 and social media will continue their growth apace. And increasingly, this time spent online is through social media.

More and more people will be publishing their work, their ideas, their knowledge, their conversational bits, their creativity... online. It's just going to keep increasing.


Rely on social media for information

An emerging trend is the transition of where we seek information. Remember libraries, magazines and microfiche? Then the 1.0 websites where we got information? Then the portals that aggregated information from major media sites? Then search augmented all this information consumption?

Well, the next wave is to rely on our social connections to deliver interesting, relevant information to us. As was famously said by a college student in 2008:


"If the news is important, it will find me."


A recent Nielsen study confirms this growing tendency to use social media as a first stop to find information:


Admittedly, the leading social sites of today - blogs, Facebook, Twitter - have a ways to go before they become a large percentage of the population's first choice. And it'd help if Twitter could get their search working further back than a week or two.

But this survey and anecdotal evidence points toward an increased reliance on others to provide information to us.


Putting this all together

It's that last trend, still early in its cycle, that really points toward the development of formal, online reputations. When we started transacting online with complete strangers or small businesses we never knew, we needed a basis for understanding their credibility. It turns out, crowdsourced ratings are excellent indicators of quality. It also causes small businesses to be aware of the quality of their products and services.

In the years ahead, expect increased usage of social media for getting information and sourcing people, products and services. As an example, research firm IDC just released these survey results:


"57% of U.S. workers use social media for business purposes at least once per week. The number one reason cited by U.S. workers for using social tools for business purposes was to acquire knowledge and ask questions from a community."


As reliance on people for information increases, expect an increased need for knowing which strangers provide the top quality information. Note I said "strangers" there. One thing we will continue to do is to rely on our "friends" (social media sense of the word) for ongoing daily information. The people we connect with on the various social sites.

But that's the only way we will get information. Or make decisions. Great case in point? Google's real-time search results:


If innovation is the focus of your work, wouldn't you want to be included in those Google results? Here's the thing. Google doesn't just put any old tweet or other form of real-time content in there. As Google's Amit Singhal stated:


"You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone - then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers, his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely," Singhal says. "It is definitely, definitely more than a popularity contest," he adds.


Note his words: "You earn reputation."

PR agency Edelman created a ranking algorithm called Tweetlevel, which analyzes people on the basis of influence, popularity, engagement and trust. Tweetlevel was recently used to create a list of the top analysts on Twitter. As the author of that post noted, one purpose for the list was to answer the question: "Should they spend their limited time interacting with analysts via twitter?" Presumably if you're an analyst in the Top 50, 'yes'.

Again, reputation being used for a defined purpose.

Ross Dawson wrote a good piece about the changes coming due to the increasing visibility of "people's actions and character." He notes the impact of reputation on seeking professionals for work:


"Many professionals will be greatly impacted by these shifts. The search for professional advice is often still highly unstructured, based on anecdotal recommendations or simple searches. As importantly, clients of large professional firms may start to be more selective on who they wish to work with at the firm, creating a more streamlined meritocracy.

The mechanisms for measuring professional reputation are still very crude, yet over the coming decade we can expect to see substantial changes in how professionals are found. This will impact many facets of the industry."


And Bertrand Dupperin sees a similar dynamic playing out internally:


"Use internal social networks to build a kind of marketplace that would put work capacity and competence on a given subject in relation with needs and allow those who can apply for an assignment instead of blind assignments to those who can't."


In a world where individuals emerge as important sources of information, products and services, people will need a way to break through the limited knowledge they'll have on any one person. Look for online reputations to emerge as a way to fill that gap.


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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Presenting Twitter in Search Results

by Hutch Carpenter

In a recent post, I described some ways in which tweets should be ranked in search results. A good follow-on question is...

How should tweets be presented in search results?

It's an interesting question - how exactly would you want to see tweets in your Google and Bing search results? And it's an important question, as searches are critical bases for discovering information and huge drivers of traffic.

Tweets are different from web pages. They are more ephemeral, but also much more current. They're short nature means we can consume them much more quickly than fuller web pages. In many ways, their brevity reduces their "burden of interestingness". Read, move on. Read, move on. Read, move on.

Tweets are small nuggets of insight, and pointers to good content. Web pages are the foundational information components. The value of the two digital forms is different. Thus, it makes sense to consider options for presenting these different types of information to people.

Three different designs for presenting tweets in Google and Bing search results come to mind:

• Separate tweets-only search page
  
• Tweets displayed in a box on the same page with web pages
  
• Tweets integrated into the overall search results

Let's take a look at the options. For added context, I've included appropriate musical selections.

At the bottom of this post, I've set up a poll asking which approach you'd prefer.

Tweets-only search results

Musical theme: Gotta keep 'em separated.

This is the Bing way. A separate URL for tweets. It's an acknowledgment that tweets really are different from web pages. The graphic below conceptualizes this approach, with a search on 'Madrid':


The graphic above puts tweets searches more in line with overall searches. Right now Bing has no link to tweet searches on its home page. You just have to know the URL exists. Of course, the Microsoft Bing team is working on incorporating the firehose into its search experience, so that may change.

Positives

• Dedicated page allows for much more creativity with presenting tweets, as Bing has shown
  
• Visible link/tab keeps tweet searches more in-the-flow of searchers' actions
  
• Users could easily toggle between the tabs for different types of information
  
• Minimizes risk of disruption to current "golden egg" of web searches

Negatives

• Forces an extra step to see potentially relevant information - click the tweets tab
  
• Somewhat diminishes the awareness of tweets' real-time, up-to-date nature by using same tab structure applied to more static web pages

Tweets in same-page box

Musical theme: Man in the box.

The presentation of real-time tweets on the same page is something Google is experimenting with currently. The philosophy here is that you're looking for multiple types of information in a search. Google already displays web page links, images, YouTube videos, maps, PDFs and other types of content. Tweets are just another type of content.

Something I'd like to see is a separate box of the tweets on the search results page, as shown below:


This design effectively distinguishes tweets from other types of content, while preserving the "all information on one page" philosophy. This is important for Google and Bing advertising, making the search results page even more engaging.

Open question: what's better for ad click volumes? Multiple pages of different content (e.g. separate tabs described previously)? Or a single page with more engaging content?

Aside from the information aspect of tweets, there is also a people aspect. Tweets are as much about the person as they are the content. The separate presentation of tweets distinguishes them from web pages, PDFs, videos and the like.

Positives

• Relevant, up-to-date content improves value of searches
  
• In-the-flow of existing search behavior
  
• Real-time nature is engaging
  
• Find people as well as content

Negatives

• Smaller space constrains presentation options
  
• Potential for a too-crowded visual presentation

Because of the volume of searches run through Google and Bing, there will be a premium on ensuring the quality of the tweets presented. This is important regardless, but even more so here with the number of times people will see the tweets. See Search Engine Tweet Ranking Algorithms for thoughts on how to do this.

Tweets integrated with overall search results

Musical theme: Happy Together

There is a third design option. Why not put the tweets right in the mix of overall search results? Treat them less as exotic new forms of content, and more as just another type for searchers to click on. The graphic below conceptualizes this:


A tweet is just another URL that can point searchers to relevant content. The challenge is that Google and Bing need to alter their ranking algorithms to allow tweets to be served up high in search results. Something like a pagerank for the twitter account itself. If it has relevant content and a high "Twitter pagerank", it gets served up higher in the search results.

Positives

• Searchers get tweets in a highly familiar way
  
• Minimizes risk of disruption to current "golden egg" of web searches

Negatives

• Undermines the fresh, up-to-date nature of tweets
  
• Will limit presentation of relevant tweets due to inadequate "Twitter pagerank"
  
• Reduces the people aspect of the tweets
  
• Lack of real-time flow diminishes engagement of the results page

Of course, tweets are served up in search results today. But that generally happens with very specific multi-word searches that match the tweet, or including the word "twitter" in the search. The design above brings tweets more fully into the pantheon of content, displaying them highly in search results for basic keywords.

I imagine smart folks can come up with other designs for displaying tweets. Leave a comment on these three or any other designs you think might be interesting.

Also, take a second and vote in the poll below. I'm curious what people think about the different possibilities for displaying tweets.

Thanks.

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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Are your speeches Twitter-friendly?

by Matt Heinz

When I conduct media training, we teach spokespeople to not just think in terms of sound bites, but to use those sound bites at the beginning of their answers. That way, they're not only more quotable, but you have a better chance that the reporter is taking good notes and gets your comment recorded for use in their piece.

Pretty much the same thing goes for presentations and Twitter today.

If you're giving a presentation, make sure your script is full of tweetable content. Think in terms of 140 characters or less. As you're preparing, literally write out those tweetable points to ensure they'll fit with room for retweets to spare (right around 100 characters is about right).

If your goal is to share your story not just to those in the room, but their followers as well, this will ensure you're getting maximum pass-along for yourself and your message.

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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

Four Quadrants of Innovation

Incremental versus Disruptive

by Hutch Carpenter

I recently wrote up a post, "Innovation Perspectives - No Shooting Stars." In it, I discussed the issue of organizations myopically focusing on only disruptive innovations to the exclusion of more incremental or sustaining innovations.

In doing more research on the subject, I began thinking about the dynamics that apply when a firm pursues different kinds of innovation. A post by Venkatesh Rao, Disruptive versus Radical Innovations, was very useful for distinguishing between disruptive and radical innovations.

Building on that, I wanted a framework for delineating innovations based on their technology and business impacts. Because they're not necessarily the same. The four quadrants below describe the dynamics for innovations according to their technology and market impacts:



In each quadrant, there are different rationales and issues that apply. Let's take a look.

Existing Tech, Manage Existing Market

The lower left quadrant represent innovations that leverage existing technology, and service existing customers. This is every day innovation. The block-n-tackle innovation that keeps companies nimble and operating at rates above industry averages.

Example? See how Wal-Mart improved the fuel efficiency of its vehicle fleet:


"Wal-Mart has taken a number of steps, including the installation of diesel Auxiliary Power Units on all its trucks, and applying aerodynamic skirting. On the tire side, Wal-Mart is working with super single tires. and is testing nitrogen-filled tires and an automatic filling process to maintain constant tire air pressure."


Improving the customer experience is also a critical opportunity. In an era of social-media empowered customers impacting your brand, the consequences of failing to improve the customer experience are higher than ever.

But this quadrant is the one often pooh-poohed by many in innovation. I like the way PriceWaterhouseCoopers puts it in this blog post:


"An unintended consequence of the Innovators Dilemma has been that companies have begun believing that unless they were pursuing a strategy of seeking disruptive innovations, they were somehow losing out."


Wal-Mart's efforts have paid off. The retailer has held relatively strong during the Great Recession, as seen in its stock price. And Toyota famously gathered over million ideas a year from its employees to emerge as a global leader in the automotive industry.

Existing Tech, Create New Market

In this quadrant, existing technology is leveraged to create a new revenue streams. This is the quadrant where the following phrase applies:


"Good artists borrow. Great artists steal."


The simple application of a technology that serves one purpose toward a different purpose can be disruptive from a market perspective. It's not a large technological leap. It's the intelligent application of what's already at hand.

Twitter is a great example. The technology itself is...simple. Web form. Subscription model. Limit to 140 characters. Yet it's revolutionized the way people share and find information, causing Techcrunch's MG Siegler to compare it to a modern day Walter Cronkite. All for a simple little web app. Here's what WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg says about Twitter:


"Whether the Twitter team intended it or not, they've built a killer and highly addictive reader platform with dozens of interesting UIs on top of it."


The thing with these innovations is that they are very much a market-determined disruption. This isn't some sort of EUREKA! the moment the technology is rolled out of the labs. It takes the market to say that it's disruptive.

Clayton Christensen (Innovator's Dilemma) types of innovation will often fall in this quadrant. Existing technologies applied in new ways to address the lower end of the market.

Venkatesh Rao has a great perspective on this quadrant:


"In fact, in most documented cases of disruption, the disruptive innovation was a minor/incremental change and well within the technical capabilities of the incumbent (and was often taken to market by a renegade spin off from the original company)."


This quadrant is the best one for producing organic growth for companies. It has lower risk, but produces meaningful revenue growth.

Radical Tech, Create New Market

If any one quadrant defines the popular view of innovation, it's this one. And that's not without good reason. In the previous quadrant, existing technologies are applied to new markets. Well, existing technologies have to come from somewhere. That's this quadrant.

This is the cool stuff that the press writes about. Check out AT&T's Technology Showcase for a great example of some of these new technologies.

Amazon's Jeff Bezos has done well in this quadrant. His latest innovation, the Kindle, is an example. It includes a new "electronic ink". Ability to read text aloud. It's incredibly thin profile.

And it's paying off. Amazon reports that the Kindle set a new sales record this November. Which points to the Kindle as a strong new revenue stream down the road, and a new source of sales for Amazon's book sales. A home run in this quadrant.

These types of innovations are important for maintaining the long-term growth rates of companies. They provide needed growth, replenishing changes in existing markets.

Which leads us to the final quadrant...

Radical Tech, Manage Existing Market

There are times a company's business is under attack, and it needs to address changing behaviors in its market. Innovations in this quadrant share the high risk profile of the previous quadrant, but they have a defensive nature to them. They don't seek to find new opportunities, they seek to address changes in customer behavior.

Hulu strikes me as an example of this. A joint venture of NBC, Fox and ABC, Hulu lets users view shows on computers. This initiative addresses the emerging market shift away from televisions to viewing on all sorts of devices. It's a better answer for this shift than the music industry initially had for the proliferation of MP3 songs on various P2P sites.

Gary Hamel has noted the increasing volatility of markets across the globe. Customers have better access to information about new options, and are willing to shift their spending more quickly. With this dynamic, expect some increase in activity for innovations in this quadrant.

Companies Need a Portfolio of Innovation Opportunities

In a recent Accenture survey, 58% of executives said their organization is looking for the next silver bullet rather than pursuing a portfolio of opportunities. When I hear that, I think first of the upper right quadrant (radical tech, create new market). These types of innovations are incredibly important, and should be part of a company's innovation efforts.

But there's really a good basis for expanding that view to look at the other types of innovation: technology vs. market, disruptive vs incremental.

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Hutch Carpenter is the Director of Marketing at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Changes Coming in the Twitter Suggested User List

by Hutch Carpenter

At a conference in Malaysia, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the Suggested Users List (SUL), a boon in followers for anyone on it, will be going away sometime in the future:


"That list will be going away," Stone said at a conference in Malaysia. "In its stead will be something that is more programmatically chosen, something that actually delivers more relevant suggestions."


See that term? - "Programmatically chosen" - Hmmm...

The SUL was hand picked by the staff of Twitter. Which meant if you weren't included on the SUL, it felt like a snub if you had established a large presence on the service. It was also celebrity-heavy, which was nice if that's your thing. But people have a range of interests beyond Hollywood and music.

How do you suppose suggested users will be be "programmatically chosen"? My guess is that is that this new reputation score we've been hearing about will be part of it.

More broadly, I could see incorporating the same criteria discussed previously in "Search Engine Tweet Ranking Algorithms" including:

1. Relevancy of tweet stream to a subject


2. Crowdsourced signals of authority


3. Effectiveness in providing relevant content

Maybe a new user enters key words indicating areas of interest and the Twitter system returns a set of users to follow. Wouldn't that be a better way?

This all raw speculation on my part. But it would be cool if they roll out a more effective way to match interests to people.

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Hutch Carpenter is the Director of Marketing at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Are Facebook And Twitter Bad For Your Brain?

Or Does It Actually Make You A Better Person?

by Idris Mootee

Here is an old vision of a high-tech future. It is old magazine illustration in 1969 a Japanese Sunday magazine, which show life in the future, pervaded by computers. This illustration "The Rise of the Computerized School," by Shigeru Komatsuzaki is an illustrated scenario of what schools will be like in the future. Sort of Webex type of online delivery and interactive learning via a tablet.

I always find it fascinating to go back to see the future, comics and movies are the best place to see the future. In those worlds, there are always concern of the computer taking over of the Big Brother is controlling everything. Funny I've never seen an illustration, comic of movie that have anything similar to the Facebook or Twitter of the world. I guess it is never easy imagining the future. There are things we simply cannot imagine. With kids and grown-ups spending so much time in the social networking world, we never really understand the full implications on us. Twitter is everywhere. And yes, Twitter is coming to the X-box.

Does Facebook make us better persons or more sociable? And the idea that our most of our private lives are now semi-public, at least to our friends. Everyone knows what I was doing this weekend, good thing or bad thing? With camera phone being a standard feature, with the tap of a screen your life story is now shared by tens of thousands of people, some you know and some you don't. Your thoughts and feelings are broadcasted to the world; I'm talking about the immediacy and accessibility of Twittermessages that make private conversations public. The space between public and private are dangerously blurred.

What about kids? Neuroscientist warns that social networks harm children's brains. He suggests that sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo are said to shorten attention spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centered. The claims from neuroscientist Susan Greenfield will make disturbing reading for the millions whose social lives depend on the stream of messages coming in everyday. I don't think it is just young people, we all have Blackberry or iPhone addictions. I am always constantly my Blackberry just to see if I've missed anything from the 83 groups that I joined. I called it staying in touch.

Baroness Greenfield, an Oxford University neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, believes repeated exposure could effectively 'rewire' the brain. Computer games and fast-paced TV shows were also a factor, she said. We know how small babies need constant reassurance that they exist. My fear is that these technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment. I don't buy it. I would argue it allows kids to adapt to the fast moving world of data overload and learn to make fast decisions based on multiple sources of data feeding to them. It is like training a fighter pilot when one is 16, it is a lot easier as they can handle all input and perform real-time sense-making.

Having said that, I strongly urge readers not to check your Facebook or Twitter during a bath. And if for whatever reasons you do, don't be like this 17-year-old Romanian girl and risk your well-being to Tweet. Maria Barbu was, in fact, in the tub while using Twitter when she likely reached to plug in her charger with a wet hand, electrocuting herself in the process. It is called Twittercide. Yes, social networking can be dangerous.

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Idris Mootee is the CEO of idea couture, a strategic innovation and experience design firm. He is the author of four books, tens of published articles, and a frequent speaker at business conferences and executive retreats.

Twitter Devices and Business Model Design

Industrial Design, Busness Model Design And Design For Change

by Idris Mootee

I was chatting with some members of our design research team just yesterday next to the cooler the other day. We were talking about how the iPhone is such a bad phone and a great media player, and the Backberry is such a great email gadget but a terrible browser. The conclusion was that phones were not designed to handle the 'social' functions and so they are just add-ons. What does a true 'social' gadget looks like? I will ask our design team to come up with some crazy ideas and I'm sure our clients will love to see them.

As more and more people use Twitter or Facebook as their core communications vehicle, what are the best gadgets designed for that? Is there a gadget that lets them tweet, reply, retweet, send direct messages, and connect with followers easily?

Here comes the Twitter Peek which sells for $99 or $199 (with service plan). But, users can also view TwitPics by clicking the "view content" option from the Twitter Peek menu. If users choose to pay $99 at the time of purchase, they will get the Twitter Peek device and six months of Peek service. After that, they need to pay $7.95 per month for network access. If customers plunk down $199, they'll get the device and service for the life of the product. In either case, Twitter Peek allows for unlimited tweeting. It has one key limitation - it can only support one account at a time.

An important industrial design discipline that they teach in school - Do we design something for a singular or more important function or something that does everything?

The preference is to design something with a purpose in mind. Is the Twitter Peek really necessary in the marketplace? Or do we need a Facebook device?


The deep satisfaction of design is when you find an elegant solution to a problem that has, until now, had a hindering effect on our quality of life (or experience or environment). The function should be super obvious - a straightforward solution to a meaningful problem. But, it is not that simple.

Industrial design is understood to be a part of engineering design, or as running parallel to engineering design (and increasingly interface design). However, when industrial design activity is engaged in the more aesthetic or style concerns of a product, it can be understood as running parallel with marketing and brand activity. And when industrial design is engaged and running parallel with business strategy activity, it becomes a very different game.

There is not a right or wrong or simple answer here, there is a lot of room for ambiguity and misunderstanding and many designers are confused about design themselves.

Many designers love to talk business model design, but I'm not sure how many are qualified to discuss this subject. My experience is that even among MBAs that I have hired, anyone with less than ten years of solid experience doesn't understand the real implications of these business model discussions.

My response to them is:


"How exactly do you change a business model without understanding the industrial and distribution economics and the individual players' competitive dynamics? There is always game theory at play in these moves."


One interesting thought is that traditional industrial designers came into being as mass production raised output and producers wanted to match market demand. This is still true, but not entirely the case. If industrial design comes within a marketing function and marketers buy the creative services of an industrial design consultant on an occasional basis for a special project, this is quite different than if industrial design is a part of the manufacturing function. And if industrial design comes within a strategy firm and executives buy the innovative services of a firm that has strategy + design capabilities (like Idea Couture), then it is part of the corporate strategy undertaking. That's design thinking in action, not design talking. Am I confusing you?

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Idris Mootee is the CEO of idea couture, a strategic innovation and experience design firm. He is the author of four books, tens of published articles, and a frequent speaker at business conferences and executive retreats.

It is NOT who you know

Why Trust Trumps Volume

by Matt Heinz

The assumption that a big network - thousands of followers on Twitter, an enormous rolodex, a really big mailing list - directly translates into influence and performance is ridiculous. Anybody can build a big list of names.

The more important question is whether those people care about you.

• Do they respect you?


• Do they trust you?


• When called upon, will they help you?


• Will they buy from you?

The trick is translating that big list into an army of evangelists, a group of individuals who respect and trust you.

That's how to measure the value of your network. Not by sheer volume, but by trust.

Trust drives influence, and influence enables action.

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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

Search Engine Tweet Ranking Algorithms

by Hutch Carpenter

Anyone remember when Loic LeMeur had the temerity to suggest Twitter rank its search results by the number of followers people have? His post, with 109 comments and reaction from Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble and many others, clearly struck a nerve.

Fast forward to the past couple weeks. Both Microsoft Bing and Google announced deals to provide tweets in search results. Let me say that again: Google and Bing will be providing tweet search results!

Bing's version is the first out the gate. In light of the earlier brouhaha, this may come across as insensitive...but I have to ask:


How should tweets be ranked in Bing and Google search results?


I hope your answer isn't, "I wouldn't." Because that's contrary to what made Google such a global powerhouse used by billions every year. And why Microsoft is working hard to increase Bing's market share. Google and Bing built their business by presenting search results based on the authority of websites. This system of authority (e.g. PageRank) makes the results relevant to users.

So what about running searches for tweets? Should their presentation be utterly devoid of any authority ranking? Does it make sense to just show the latest tweet containing a given term? After all, that would simply be imitating what Summize (aka Twitter Search) does.

First, a good question to ask is, why do people want to search tweets? How does this differ from web search?

Why Are You Searching Tweets?

To my mind, there are three use cases where people will search for tweets rather than search for websites:

1. Find people


2. Find latest on a subject that won't show up in search engines yet (lack of indexing, lack of authority)


3. Jump into conversations on something

Find people: You're interested in a topic, and want to find others who can either improve your knowledge on it or with whom you want to connect. This is using Twitter as people search. The model for all of here is, you are what you tweet. It's what makes you findable to others.

In this case, my sense is that people will have an desire to find those who would have the most authority on a given topic.

Find latest on a subject: The appearance of an article or blog post in the search engines can take a while. That contributes to the challenge of finding the latest. But the more pressing issue is the display of new articles in the search results. A good article or post on a subject, such as Enterprise 2.0, is likely not going to be ranked very high in the Google or Bing search results. No one links to the article yet, and it competes against a bunch of other incumbent articles in the search indexes.

If something shows up on the third page of Google's search results, does it really exist?

This issue is even more pernicious for current events. The San Francisco Bay Bridge has been closed for several days now. It seems every estimate about when it will reopen has been wrong, meaning we all have to scramble to figure out our commute for the next day. To get the latest on the Bay Bridge, I searched Google, including the aggregate news results. Everything was too old when I did that, reflecting previous pronouncements. I needed what people knew right now. I went to Twitter, and found tweets that told me the latest status. Very helpful.

To find the latest on topics, I think there is a role for leveraging some sort of authority. People who have established credibility can be good first filters on what's relevant and useful. For Enterprise 2.0, what is Dion Hinchliffe tweeting? For the Bay Bridge, I most trusted the KTVU tweet I saw.

Jump into conversations: This is Twitter as water cooler. You know something is going on. But how do you connect with people? Searches are good for this. Hash tags for conferences or big stories. Take the recent fraudulent #balloonboy story. It definitely captivated everyone. But even now, you'll see tweets like this:

Watch top quality streaming Movie -> Up here http://cli.gs/dpNT5N Make $ From Home #mileycomeback #balloonboy

What is that? That's someone taking a popular hash tag and polluting the search stream with spam. Again, a case where adding some authority to the tweet search rankings will help.

Tweet Authority Criteria

Keep in mind that "authority" is used in the context of Google and Bing searches. Of course web searches miss many authorities on subjects, but they work pretty well for giving relevant information.

I categorize the bases of authority in three buckets:

1. Relevancy of tweet stream to a subject


2. Crowdsourced signals of authority


3. Effectiveness in providing relevant content

As a point of reference, Bing's initial measure of relevance was reported to be the number of followers a person has. Let's look at the three categories of authority.

Relevancy of Tweet Stream to a Subject

The first basis for authority should be...does someone tend to post about a given topic? Frequency of posts are a good marker that a person has something of interest to share. If someone is going to be deemed an authority on a subject, I'd expect a fair number of tweets related to it.

One twist that would make this better. A semantic basis for linking terms. For example, if some one searches on Foo Fighters, consider people whose tweet streams include posts about "music" frequently as having higher authority.

Crowdsourced Signals of Authority

What does the crowd think of a given person or tweet? Let's start with a single tweet. If someone posts something on a given topic, and it gets retweeted a lot, that should count hugely in terms of its authority for a given topic.

OK, now for the general stats. How many followers does someone have? Yes, it's getting gamed. So the presence of a high number of followers isn't an automatic definition for authority. But it does have relevance in constructing authority.

The benefit of computing this for users is that the authority of those who follow a person can be an input into his or her own authority.

Next... Twitter Lists. Number of followers is not the end of the story. Lists have two characteristics that can be used to compute authority. First is the number of Lists one is on. Tim O'Reilly is on over 2,500 Lists. No surprise - he really made 'web 2.0' ubiquitous in our culture.

But an even better indicator of authority is embedded in Lists. How does the crowd characterize a person? Those Lists are valuable for granting higher authority for a given topic.

Effectiveness in Providing Relevant Content

When someone tweets, how do people react? Robert Scoble has a good take from his blog post:

1. Number of retweets of that tweet


2. Number of favorites of that tweet


3. Number of inbound links to that tweet


4. Number of clicks on an item in Twitter search

I particularly like that #4 item - number of clicks. Once these tweets are in the Google and Bing search results, the clicks can be measured. These are powerful bases for measuring someone's authority.

I'd add a measure for how often a shared link is clicked; say bit.ly's click information. While the actual number of clicks tracked by bit.ly is wrong, let's assume it's wrong in a similar fashion for everyone. So the bit.ly clicks counts can give a measure of relative effectiveness in providing content.

What Do You Think?

That's my somewhat exhaustive description of inputs for ranking tweets in Google and Bing search results. There's more that would be needed. I can think of incorporating some element of time decay in how tweets are presented as well. But this post is long enough.

What do you think? How would you rank tweets in the big search engines?

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Hutch Carpenter is the Director of Marketing at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

The Right Way to do Social Media

Click above to Enlarge
by Braden Kelley

Unfortunately, more often than not I see examples of social media strategy gone wrong. So, it stands out when I see a company like Lufthansa doing social media the right way - at least with their MySkyStatus site. Let's look briefly at why this is a good execution of a social media strategy:

1. Easy to use


2. Gives the customer something of value with minimal effort


3. The value is something that people naturally want to share


4. Works just as well with the competition's product as with their own


5. Gives customer a visual idea of what they are going to get before they invest any time or effort


6. Brand impression is minimal, and no fear of mentioning the competition


7. It gives the user a choice of how much information they want to disclose

Now if we can convince the airlines that charging people for extra bags and other pointless fees are a bad idea (like Delta Airlines charging me $50 for the "privilege" of standing by for an earlier flight with open seats), then the world will be a better place.


What other examples of well-executed social media campaigns would people like to share?

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Twitter Lists Now Live - Some Tips

Surprise, surprise...

Twitter Lists have been talked about for some time, but are now live.

I've created an innovation list here:

http://twitter.com/innovate/innovation

Please feel free to follow along, or make your case for your own favorite innovation tweeter (or yourself) to be included in the list by stating your opinion as a comment on this blog post.

For those of you creating your own lists, the easiest place to add people I've found is in the list of people you are following



And here is an interesting use of Twitter lists on a web page by the Huffington Post.

Finally, you might want to check out Listorious - a new and interesting service built off of the Twitter list functionality. I've created a Listorious list here: http://listorious.com/innovate/innovation

Happy Innovating!

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.