Building Efficiency and Scale

You will never be able to scale your social efforts if you have a one-to-one model where you have to pay enough community managers to reply to every tweet themselves.

I just took an online class through Coursera. It’s an incredible service and I highly recommend you check it out. My class had roughly 90,000 students taking it. There was one professor. This is outrageous considering they say a high school class size of 60 people is a lot. Even if only 10% of the students had a question about something, the professor would have thousands of emails to respond to. They don’t accept emails though because that model would never scale to a class size of 90,000 people.

They set up a forum where people can post questions or comments they have and other students can respond with the answers that they know. It turns out that many people have the same question too. So out of 9,000 submitted questions, you may only have 10 different types of questions. In other words, 2,000 people may have had the same question. The professor monitors the forum to answer any questions that other students can’t provide and to ensure accurate information is being given out. When the professor does provide an answer, anyone else that has that question can find the answer there in the forum.

This concept can be applied to many other areas such as customer service. Your most loyal customers, if enabled and properly incentivized can respond to other customers’ questions on Twitter for example. So you as the official brand will continue handling a portion of those tasks, but the burden of constantly scanning every nook and cranny of the web to respond will be shared by your most loyal customers. I’ll have to do a whole separate post on how to encourage, enable, and empower your customers to do this. This is a critical step to be able to scale, but it is also far more than that.

During a company crisis, sending out tweets like official press releases is important but far less effective than having unpaid, non-biased customers go to bat for you. This is one of the key reasons why social media marketing has gained so much traction over traditional advertising. Roughly 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations while only 14% trust advertisements. Don’t underestimate the importance of building those relationships and enabling those customers before there is a crisis.

Closing the Loop in the Purchase Cycle

Most businesses have historically stopped their marketing funnel at the purchase and this is leaving a huge missed opportunity. Now-a-days, supporting your product, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), customer service, and new product ideas are all a part of Marketing. Today, an increasing amount of that happens after the purchase is made.

Marketing and social media should be integral to new product development the way that it now is with Starbucks. Continuing a relationship with your customer to see how satisfied they are with the product is critical, because if they aren’t and they tell the social media world about it, your sales will be affected. That’s a marketing problem. Measuring whether someone shared something isn’t enough. Was that tweet a good or bad thing for your brand?

Customers Meet Customers

Part of the benefit of being the platform and not just the content producer is that you will be able to build a stronger community. Again, you can certainly do this on Facebook, it just won’t be as catered to the specific needs of your community.

Regardless, it is important to facilitate your like-minded customers getting to know each other. There is a growing trend of interest based communities. What I mean is that people are connecting to other people with the same interests even though they may not have ever met in the real world. An example is that people on Pinterest that are interested in traveling will connect with other travelers they’ve never met and will likely never meet because they share a common interest. These people now can become highly engaged in sharing inspiring photography from around the world.

Now imagine if this interaction happened on Samonsite’s website (the suitcase retailer) instead. That puts Samsonite in the center of this community. Now also imagine that Samsonite was prompting and enabling this community to come up with new ideas for better travel equipment to go where their community loves to travel. This is where crowdsourcing is going. However, don’t miss the value of engaging your customers on a much deeper level.

By creating the community, Samsonite would be able to give their customers status within the travel community by being able to proudly share pictures from their last expedition. Samsonite could give them special access to rewards and offerings. They could even further engage key contributers to the forum-like space by giving them moderation powers.

Samsonite could facilitate like-minded travelers meeting online for the first time and going on a new adventure together to a favorite destination. They could facilitate travelers sharing tips, advice, selling old travel gear and even offer partner discounts to travel destinations.

Some could point out here that Samsonite would have to heavily invest in new departments, new talent, new web properties, new branding initiatives and a lot of things outside their core business. That is a valid point. They may not want to expand in this direction.

However, to that I would say that if they boldly took this all on, they would be able to build a much stronger brand, becoming the top place that their customers think of when they think of travel. I also think the long-term revenue from constantly engaging and re-engaging your customers will more than pay for these infrastructure costs.

What Do You Think?

Have you seen or participated in crowdsourcing? What opportunities do you see for it? How could it apply to your business or industry? Have any questions for me?

Follow me on Twitter, Google+, YouTube or my digital marketing video blog: http://AllegorieDesign.com.

Crowdsourcing isn’t new, but it is becoming a much bigger opportunity because it has become more effective due to advances in social networking technology and changes in consumer behavior (tweet this). In other words, consumers now expect to be able to participate more with brands and social networking allows them to do it.

Authentic Dialogue, So What?

Wikipedia, YouTube, and Starbucks have all built social platforms that enable people to communicate, share, build relationships, be entertained or informed, and participate in.

Historically, brands created content and pushed it out through a one-way channel like traditional TV. Then they pushed out that same content with that same one-way mindset through new channels; like through Facebook for example. Many brands have matured and now facilitate an authentic dialogue on social channels like Facebook (Stage 3 in the diagram below).

This however, is not the destination we should be looking for. It is an early step in the social media revolution to come. What will this authentic dialogue enable? How will it benefit the customer in the end? How will the brand use that opportunity to be able to elate and delight their customers?

Companies can certainly capitalize on all of the existing social networking sites (ie. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.) and many are talking about that. I would like to build on what I’ve already laid out about the opportunity of custom built social networking platforms. The last stage in the diagram above is a big maturity step enabling crowdsourcing, efficiency and scale. Wikipedia, YouTube, and Starbucks built their own platforms and are capitalizing on this trend.

Crowdsourcing With Custom Platforms, Beyond Free Labor

YouTube did not become popular because of the videos that YouTube produced. Wikipedia hasn’t become the 5th highest trafficked website on the web because of the content their staff wrote. They provided the platform and the enablement for communities to form and provide valuable content for each other. The content the users produced is what attracted everyone.

As a result, Wikipedia has been able to aggregate far more content than a traditional encyclopedia could have had their employees professionally produce. The same goes with YouTube.

With only these examples, it doesn’t seem crowdsourcing is particularly profitable or applicable to most businesses. After all, Wikipedia has launched donation campaigns because they can’t make enough money to cover their costs without advertising and YouTube hasn’t been profitable until recently when they were able to introduce advertising since they account for over half of all videos viewed online now. However, there are now examples like Starbucks.

Starbucks has built a custom platform to crowdsource new ideas from their customers about anything from improving the ordering process, to corporate responsibility (tweet this). Could they have done this on Facebook? Yes, but in a much more limited way. After all, you would have to fit everything into Facebook’s limited template and play by their rules (like Edgerank). Starbucks was able to improve engagement, participation, and the overall quality of the ideas by customizing the platform to meet the needs of this specific community.

Starbucks is able to glean far better ideas and ideas that are more relevant to their customers because of this. Hearing real feedback from your customers is far better than guessing what they’d say. Getting that feedback in real time, enabling customers to vote on which ideas they like the best, and providing an environment where one idea can lead to several other ideas is much better than traditional surveys or focus groups.

Lastly, it creates a sense of ownership and community. This platform capitalizes on some of the key aspects of Gamification that I explain in my video blog post. Namely, it gives people status when their ideas can be featured and become popular with votes from the community. Additionally, it gives customers power. It allows them to actually affect the experience, product, rewards and every other aspect of Starbucks’ offerings.

This is far more important than even saving some payroll costs. This is building a much better, stronger relationship with their customers (tweet this). This is the future, and life blood of any company. This is what will build a competitive advantage that will fend off competitors.

What Do You Think?

Have you seen or participated in crowdsourcing? What opportunities do you see for it? How could it apply to your business or industry? Have any questions for me? Comment below or tweet me at @MrobertsOnline.

A Teaser: Part 2 Next Week

Check out part 2 where I go into more depth about this crowdsourcing trend. I’ll get into explaining how to become more efficient and scale social efforts (ie. how online classes can scale to facilitate 90,000 students), that the biggest missed marketing opportunity is after your customers make their purchase, and why it is critically important to facilitate your customers getting to know each other. Stay tuned for it all next Thursday!

Follow me on Twitter, Google+, YouTube or my digital marketing video blog: http://AllegorieDesign.com.

The Restaurant and Yelp

This seems obvious when you think about it like this, but this example will help reinforce the point. If a restaurant has bad or even mediocre food, customers may not come back very often if at all. The owner then thinks he needs to tell more people about his restaurant and that if he were to tell twice as many people, twice as many will come. He then asks himself, “how can I reach the most amount of people for the least amount of money?” So he turns to social media.

The problem is that when people leave reviews on Yelp about his bad tasting, over-priced, and under-portioned food, then his potential new customers will actually avoid going to his restaurant for the first time. This owner has the mindset from the old days and thinks social media works like an advertisement.

One of the many differences is that you don’t control the messaging with social media. Good marketing can’t make up for a bad product anymore. Nowadays, this owner must adjust his value offering, which in his case means improving the food quality, to change his social media messaging from his customers.

Once your product is right, you can effectively use social media and social networks to tell more people about your offering in a way that will grow your business.

The Plague of Mediocre Products

I worked at a digital agency that had a regional newspaper as one of our clients and I was in charge of many of their social media efforts. They had the plague of a mediocre product. Their product was to tell people the news.

Their articles were marginally interesting to lots of people, but not interesting or relevant enough for anyone to want to pay for them or share with their friends. In this case mediocrity can be worse than a blatantly bad product. The reason is because if it was blatantly bad, it would be easy to see that it needed to change. Mediocrity will give positive signs, but those signs may not translate into achieving your bottom line objectives. Business owners might say, “look, when we follow people on Twitter, they follow us back and we have a large number of followers now.” Now what? Do those followers pay your bills?

Who Follows You?

Often times I ask my clients, “do you know who your followers are? Do you know what they care about? Do they engage with you in an authentic way online?”

If you have 30,000 followers on Twitter and you send out a tweet, how many of them read it? How many take some meaningful action that benefits your company?

If you have been delivering a relevant, valuable product and built an active community where you have real relationships with your customers, then you have accomplished something that is case study worthy.  However, if half your followers aren’t potential customers or members of your niche and a quarter of them are automated bots, your 30,000 followers aren’t as nearly as valuable.

If you deliver a good product to a group of people, then they will spread awareness of your product to their networks of friends also in that niche. Then those people will begin to follow you and then you’ll begin to access their networks. The key component to all of that is a good, relevant product that actually solves customers’ problems. Businesses that build their social communities in this way will benefit tremendously.

Listen to me speak on 7 Social Media Trends on November 27th in San Diego. 

Follow me on Twitter, Google+, YouTube or my digital marketing video blog: http://AllegorieDesign.com.

1. You Don’t Own Facebook

When you build your marketing efforts on someone else’s platform (ie. Facebook), you have to play by their rules and are only able to do what they allow you to do. Certainly there is room to be creative and build some custom functionality on those platforms, but Facebook has been known to change what it wants when it wants. If it decides to change its Timeline layout, Cover Photo, privacy policy, or custom tabs in the middle of your campaign, you’re hosed.

If your revenue stream is connected to their platform or your community on that platform and they change something, you could miss your profit goals. If you’ve invested tons of money and resources into that community and then they change something so that you’re not able to tap into it like you once did, that investment won’t pay off as well.

This is one reason why some companies are building Facebook’s social functionality on their own website.

2. Strict Regulations

A client came to my team at the agency I was at and needed to develop and roll out an entire social media presence and campaign, but without using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or LinkedIn. Despite common belief, social doesn’t have to take place on one of these mainstream platforms anymore.

This particular client was a large company in the medical industry. This industry is highly regulated and they considered building their own social network a form of risk management. They not only wanted specific functionality that Facebook couldn’t provide, they believed it would be a much better investment in the long run to invest in something that could completely comply with those regulations without having to jump through Facebook’s hoops.

3. Niche Interests

Right now, social interactions take place in specific destinations. For example, if I want to connect with my friends about something, I’ll go to the destination called Facebook to do that.

However, I might go to another destination to interact with people with a specific, niche interest that I also have. For example if I was a committed member of the extreme sports photography/videography community (which I definitely would love to be), I might go to a social platform built on Go Pro’s website. Go Pro makes very small, lightweight, and most importantly, indestructible cameras that can easily attach to your body while you’re doing extreme sports. So if you like jumping out of a plane, kayaking off a water fall, surfing through a massive wave, or snowboarding down an alpine mountain and want to film it, then this camera will let you do that. Check out this incredible video filmed with one of their cameras.

This community is passionate about their sports and having a platform that is made to share this specific type of photos and video with other people doing the exact same things as them would be valuable. They could compare notes about where they got their shots from, how they mounted them, what their next adventure will be and perhaps even connect and go together on it.

You can do this all on Facebook, but the user experience won’t be as good or customized to this community’s specific needs because you have to use their template and play by their rules.

4. Brand Content Vs. User Content

Often times, brands on Facebook have to do the vast majority of the initiation when it comes to building a community. For example, they will post something interesting and valuable and then their community will respond to that. When the post is engaging, people may interact not only with the post, but with other people’s comments on that post as well.

The other option is to provide the platform for users to engage on and let the user content be the main draw for others to visit the site. No one goes to YouTube because YouTube makes great videos themselves. They’re the platform that allows users to share their own videos, which is what makes YouTube worth visiting.

Go Pro could and should put out their own content if they were to ever build their own social platform, but allowing users to share their content would be a critical value-add approach. This way, users can initiate community and connection with other users. The brand is there to facilitate and to contribute occasionally in a meaningful way.

I think that we’ll start to see lots of brands setting up these niche social sites.

Your Thoughts?

What do you think of all of this? Do you think these new custom platforms will actually be valuable to people? Have you seen any yourself?

Listen to me speak on 7 Social Media Trends on November 27th in San Diego. 

Follow me on Twitter, Google+, YouTube or my digital marketing video blog: http://AllegorieDesign.com.

Stage 1: Launch

The first step is to be present on social media channels in the most basic way. As I said, this adoption is quite high with simple Facebook and Twitter pages for example. Companies in this stage have sent out a few posts and tweets, but haven’t seen the bottom line value from investing time and effort there.

Companies then hit a crossroad where they either decide to cut the investment and get out because it isn’t working or ramp up their efforts. On my digital marketing video blog, I discuss how many businesses only invest 20% of the resources into social media that are needed to succeed and then fail. That would be like deciding that you were only going to study in school once you got into Stanford. You have to invest a lot at the beginning to see any kind of return at all.

The real benefit is that as your business matures through these stages, they build what I call “digital equity.” A highly trafficked blog, visible search engine rankings, a high quality email list or an active social community can be built upon day after day. In other words, what you do today and tomorrow will build upon what you did yesterday and it gets easier to push your product the longer you work at it.

If companies choose to invest more into social media, they progress to stage 2.

Stage 2: Formation

Now the department decision makers often get involved, add resources, inject risk reduction tactics, and business process. Businesses at this stage often times see social media and social networks as a risk that needs to be controlled. Decision makers in businesses moving from very closed environments where information was controlled and limited often times inject rules for being on social media. As with all things, this should be balanced.

Developing a crisis-management plan is critical in case something goes wrong. If there is a PR nightmare, establishing who does what, when, how, to what degree, and for what purpose is very important so that the organization can respond quickly, cohesively, and appropriately.

Additionally, simply establishing all of those things when business is running as usual is important during this stage as well. This allows efficiencies to be realized, internal reorganization to prepare for scaling up, and formal training to be set up.

Once the risk is contained, more funding is often available to see if bottom line results can be improved.

Stage 3: Formalize

In this stage, a center of excellence emerges as the internal champions and advocates for new media. This is a group that not only specializes in the social media governance, but also utilizing it as a valuable business tool.

This is the group that first learns the latest technologies, trends and opportunities. They’ll develop the organizations’ strategies in this area and train anyone in the organization that needs it. They also apply general or even industry best practices to the specific business they are in.

At this point in the maturation process, the social advocacy is still limited to only one department, which usually falls under Marketing. For larger organizations, the challenge is that this one group takes on the task of managing many social channels for many different business units spread out over many geographies and aren’t able to be as effective as they could be. They can easily become overwhelmed, or even more likely, not meet customer expectations by not responding and being as present in the online conversation as they should be.

Stage 4: Enablement

This stage is reached when a Hub and Spoke organization structure is set up. The hub is the Center of Excellence at the headquarters and the spokes are each of the regions.

As I said, the challenge with the hub running everything is that it is slow. It is also often times removed from the front lines where the interaction with the customer is. However, if the spokes ran everything, nothing would be coordinated between the regions, the organization couldn’t capitalize on their scale as well, and the overall brand integrity could erode because it would be exceedingly difficult to enforce the same corporate governance across the whole organization.

There is often times a hesitation to allow the intern to manage the Facebook page because they represent the company the way a PR press release does except the Facebook post isn’t approved before hand and not as carefully crafted. I wouldn’t recommend letting the intern manage things, but there is a need to decentralize decision making so that every tweet doesn’t need to get approved beforehand.

Historically, an event would happen, the information would go up the chain of command, a decision would be made and then the corporate PR department would put out an official statement. Today, customers, reporters, and stakeholders expect to get a response to their tweet within minutes or hours, not days or weeks. I explain this shift more in 3 Social Network Trends Inside Your Enterprise.

As a result, a balance is needed. The hub should develop the corporate governance, best practices, and shoulder the regional coordination. The spokes should be in the trenches, managing each of their individual communities and shoulder the brunt of the execution according to the strategies and guidelines dictated by the hub.

To give a very brief example, a company like Whole Foods, a national grocery store, each region could promote events, specials and build the community around one particular store all while integrating seamlessly with the stores across the country.

Stage 5: Enlightenment

After successfully tackling the set-up of an organizational system that is as complex as the Hub and Spoke model could be, it would be easy to stop progressing thinking that you’ve arrived. The core piece that is missing though is that there is still only one department involved. The marketing team at the hub works with the marketing team at the spokes. Manufacturing, supply chain, product development, and possibly even customer service still isn’t involved in the social media landscape leaving a huge missed opportunity.

Companies that are able to connect their internal departments directly with their customers will be able to build products that are closer to what customers actually want, fix manufacturing problems sooner and more effectively, and build trust by establishing a more transparent supply chain. Eventually, this closer interaction will allow business units that used to be far from the customers to actually predict what their customers want.

This interconnectedness will also allow the whole organization to respond to customer needs in real time. For example, if a customer complains about their laptop on Twitter, a company representative will not only respond, but also be able to tell manufacturing what is breaking down to fix it for future production, inform customer service so they can repair or replace the product, and tell product development that customers want a more durable structure in future designs.

In an enlightened organization, that can all happen in real time. To make that happen, the processes, technology, infrastructure, policies, executive sponsorship, authorizations, workflow, and financial analysis all have to be set up before that customer sends out their tweet.

From Vision to Reality

Most large organization will find themselves somewhere on this path and can use this as a roadmap. Setting the vision and direction about where to go is the first step to getting there.

Your Thoughts?

As always, it’s your turn. What stage is your company in? What challenges are you facing in moving up the maturity ladder? Are there any other components to think about that I missed here?

Listen to me speak on 7 Social Media Trends on November 27th in San Diego. 

Follow me on Twitter, Google+, YouTube or my digital marketing video blog: http://AllegorieDesign.com.

If you haven’t read Part 1 to this article, read it first as it will give a good foundation for this piece.

Today’s Tools

It’s needless to say that camera equipment and editing software is getting cheaper and better. This trend will allow many more people to become expert videographers thus raising the bar on quality for the whole industry, which will continue to build consumer habits around consuming video more and more. The opportunity to drive business with video will increase dramatically. At the same time, competition will increase due the drop in barriers of entry. As a result, businesses will have to find new points of differentiation beyond merely producing professional quality video.

I don’t think you can truly understand the future of online video without understanding how the industry tools are changing so stay with me while I break it all down. If you don’t want the details and just want the takeaway insights, skip to the section called: “So What Does all This Mean?”

Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premier, iMovie

Final Cut Pro and Abobe Premier Pro are the two industry standards for video editing and each used to only be accessible by professionals because they were very expensive and had a steep learning curve. Apple has recently reduced their program to a few hundred dollars from a few thousand and made it extremely user friendly by comparison.

Adobe has built an ever-growing learning hub with instructional videos, training, certifications and a robust community enabling consumers to learn how to use their products making it easier for many more people to learn how to use these professional level tools. Both companies have a big interest in making their software programs functional enough for the pros, but easy enough for the novices.

If someone learns one of them, they’ll likely stick with it for life.

iMovie and the ubiquitous free windows versions of basic video editing software allow anyone with a computer to be able to create compelling video. This alone allows the average college student to become a multimedia producer and that gives them potential. The now famous social media entrepreneur, author, and speaker, Gary Vaynerchuck started his media empire with his video blog and edited it with iMovie. Now he consults for Disney.

We can see a parallel to this shift to make software more user-friendly with word processing. Initially, someone needed to almost be a programmer to be able to type out a paper and use the “basic” features. Now, it is something that everyone has on every computer and everyone knows how to use it at least on a basic level. In the near future, video editing will become as common and easy to use as word processing is today.

You can see some early and basic examples with programs such as Animoto that enables people to drag and drop a presentable video together and add music. Another is the iMovie app enabling iPhone users to do basic video editing on their phone.

Cameras Today Produce Directors Tomorrow

The difference between professional videographers and hobbyists used to be massive, but that gap is shrinking fast. All of the major camera manufacturers have started producing SLR (traditionally only for still photos) cameras that have very good video. Without going into the mechanical details (i.e. manual controls, large censor sizes, multiple lenses), the quality of video that can be shot with these SLRs is at a professional level, much better than any comparable handy-cam and much cheaper than the previous generation’s high quality video cameras.

As a result, the cost of cameras that can exceed the quality that the web can distribute it at is quite low.

Instagram for Video

Many professional photographers use sets of pre-made filters when editing so all of their photos can be edited more quickly, ensure high quality photos are consistently produced, and allows the photographer to have a consistent, branded style.  The mobile photo editing app, Instagram took this concept and simplified it even more to allow users to do this in a few seconds on their phone.

Soon I expect that this will be applied to video. Adding occasional blurring, a sepia filter, or other warming tones easily can dramatically enhance the quality of a video without much effort. You’ll be able to shoot it, choose a theme or style like you can on Instagram and then publish it.

Future Innovations

To take it to the next level, you’ll see the ability to have video editing programs start to be able to cut and splice video together automatically too. We see tools today such as Speechpad that can transcribe videos into text. This could allow a program to automatically cut out fluff that doesn’t have someone talking in it and input transitions in between clips. Another element could include the face-recognition technology that Apple has built into iMovie by highlighting one particular person in a whole set of video clips.

Another trend you’ll start to see is the same trend that website development has gone; templates galore. In the old days, you couldn’t put up a website without doing some hard-core programming, but that has changed with development of web templates.

You will still need programmers to build something custom, as you will still need video editors for custom videos. However, for many people, being able to drag and drop rough-cut clips into an order and let the program do the rest is really attractive. I built my digital marketing video blog with a website theme I bought for $30 from a site called Theme Forest. They sell themes for as little as $1 and there are tons of free themes online for all the major website/blog platforms such as WordPress.

All this allows me to put up a high quality HTML 5 website for a tiny fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the amount of time it would take to go to a developer to build me a custom site from the ground up. The vast majority of websites are now built on templates. Even developers able to build a site from scratch will now start with a template that is close to what they’re looking for and then add little customizations here and there to save a ton of time and effort.

Soon, the vast majority of videos will be produced with some sort of template structure, which will drive the cost down, the production turn-a-round time down, and increase the accessibility for small and unsophisticated companies to utilize video to communicate with their customers. Larger, more sophisticated companies will be able to save some money and produce a larger quantity of footage for the same amount of resources.

Video + Search = Opportunity

The speech recognition technology utilized by Speechpad will soon be used to better index videos for search.

Today, I often use Speechpad to translate what I’m saying on my video blog so I can place it below each video, allowing Google (and other search engines) to better know what that page is all about. Tomorrow, Google will be able to scan everything I’m saying for key words whether I add a transcript below or not.

So What Does all This Mean?

These changes in technology will lead to a whole generation of people that will grow up with the ability to produce video that is good enough and engaging enough to spread ideas effectively.

Malcolm Gladwell describes a concept that could be called “10,000 hours” in his book called Outliers. Simply put, he explains that it takes about 10,000 hours of doing something to become a true expert at it. One of his central points was that logging in extra hours is oftentimes more beneficial to success than possessing raw intelligence or innate ability.

He goes on to argue that Bill Gates succeeded because he was very smart, but he also succeeded because he spent many thousands of hours programming in an emerging field. He had become an expert programmer by the time he went to college because he was lucky enough to have had access to a computer and driven enough to live on it. Just as Bill Gates had access to that computer, millions of people now have access to equipment to shoot and edit video that will allow them to start logging their 10,000 hours; as hobbyists at first, but many will also get introduced, grow to love it and then become professionals.

These people will get jobs in every industry out there and factor in how online video could be a solution to their organization’s problems. After all, for groups needing to communicate to their constituents, customers, and stakeholders, video is by far one of the most engaging and effective mediums to use.

All of this innovation and talent will drive the production cost of video down, the quality up, motivate many more companies to utilize it, and begin to set consumer expectations to be communicated to through video more. In addition, product and device companies will give consumers more and better ways to consume this media which will in turn encourage them even more to expect it from brands.

As a result, companies not communicating through online video will begin to lose their share of voice. It will almost be like a company not having a Facebook page today. Consumers now expect companies to be on social channels. If they aren’t, they lose credibility and a valuable opportunity to speak to their customers.

The last important take away, is to put far more effort into strategizing what will differentiate you from your competitors and the rest of the noise in the online video world. The falling barriers of entry into this realm will cause an ever-growing flood of higher and higher quality video the way that the simplification and distribution of Microsoft Word has enabled traditional blogging to spread.

Producing quality content is still critical, but production quality is a shrinking differentiator with all of these developments. As I explain more in my video blog post about niche marketing versus mass marketing, I recommend finding a niche and becoming extraordinarily relevant to that niche.

Listen to me speak on 7 Social Media Trends on November 27th in San Diego. 

Follow me on Twitter, Google+, YouTube or my digital marketing video blog: http://AllegorieDesign.com.

The Original Video: Speeches

Before, the printing press, people exchanged information and ideas through interpersonal, face-to-face communication. The ancient Greeks were known for spreading information by sending actors to give speeches from city to city. When the printing press was invented, it became a much more efficient channel to communicate and distill ideas through and took over as the more predominant medium. It took over because it was more efficient, not because it was more effective. Being able to both see and hear someone speaking is a far more engaging communication format than merely reading something.

We are now in an era where being both seen and heard when communicating is just about as efficient to distribute to the masses as distributing printed (or typed) text. In other words, video is the closest mass distribution tool to facilitate communication as if you were talking to someone in a face-to-face meeting.

Video > Print

If given a choice, there are few people nowadays that would rather read an article than watch a video about something because it is more stimulating and communicates through multiple senses.

To give an example, a good friend of mine with a PhD working in the upper administration of a prestigious university once told me that he much preferred to watch a great lecture live over reading a good book for this very reason. He said the challenge was that he often had to travel to hear a speaker live whereas he could easily purchase any book from any scholar in the world on Amazon.com and have it delivered to his front door.

Now, anyone with a broadband connection can access any lecture put on YouTube or Coursera from any other broadband connection in the world. You don’t even have to wait 2 days for Amazon Prime to deliver the book.

Granted, a written blog can exchange information just as fast, but again, it won’t be as engaging. When many peoples’ attention only lasts for 140 characters, it’s hard to keep them reading for 140 pages. High quality video can capture and hold attention much better in the midst of this world of distractions.

In the more consumer-oriented, advertising sphere that I come from, we often joke and often times expect that consumers can’t (or won’t) read. Make it visual and make it engaging.

YouTube is Growing Up

YouTube has been around long enough to be an adolescent now. Sharing online video internationally has already been possible for years; where are we going next? What will be possible when our computers, tablets, smartphones are twice as fast and the average Internet bandwidth is double what it is now? It won’t take us long to get there.

As I wrote about in the article, 3 Social Network Trends Inside Your Enterprise, these technologies are changing incredibly fast. Historians have seen bursts of faster innovation when certain technologies such as the printing press were invented. Many experts predict that we will see a similar burst of innovation with the development of social technologies and the ease of information sharing.

My great Grandfather was born before the invention of the light bulb and lived to see a man walk on the moon. Think about how much changed in one man’s life time and let it sink in. Don’t forget to consider and remember that his entire life was lived in a slower world than the one we live in today. It was a world before YouTube. If the experts are right about how fast this YouTube enabled generation will innovate, companies must be constantly looking at how they can capitalize on the latest technologies and innovations because the brand new innovation you just came up with is about to become obsolete.

When computers, tablets, and smartphones become twice as fast and the average Internet bandwidth doubles, video will become more prominent—not less.

Developing Countries

When the prices for all of these devices drop in half, they’ll flood into developing countries bringing more eyeballs online. Many people in these developing countries learn English by watching movies, TV shows and listening to music. They don’t learn it in school so many don’t know how to read effectively, leaving video the ideal medium to reach them. You can read more about social media trends in Southeast Asia based on my trip there in the summer of 2012.

Takeaway

Companies looking to capitalize on the latest technologies and innovations would be foolish to not take a serious look at how they can move their business with online video.

Check out part 2 of this article where I will dive into the details of how the tools are changing, how Instagram will transform online video, how video will change search, what future innovations are around the corner and most importantly, what the implications all of this has on businesses regardless of their industry or size.

Listen to me speak on 7 Social Media Trends on November 27th in San Diego. 

Follow me on Twitter, Google+, YouTube or my digital marketing video blog: http://AllegorieDesign.com.

Speed has been critical in many businesses for quite some time. For example, the first manufacturer to market enjoys market dominance for as long as it takes for their competitor to catch up. Speed now directly influences profits.

Google dedicated an edition of their industry insight publication, Think Quarterly to the topic of speed. “The world is moving fast—faster than ever before—and we are all along for the ride. Technologies are getting quicker, affording us instant access and split-second connections. As Moore’s law prophesied, this change is happening at an exponential rate.”

To stay competitive and get products to market first so to speak, enterprises need to capitalize on the additional efficiencies and productivity that new media and social networking provides. I’ll give three specific examples of how companies can do this.

1. New Solutions Through International Collaboration

Dropping communication and technology costs in concert with competitive pressures from the global marketplace have caused companies to collaborate internationally within their organization.

Despite common belief, social networking doesn’t have to involve Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. In fact, I think there can arguably be much more benefit for companies who effectively utilize the same social functionality on internal platforms.

The ability for consumers to be able to exchange ideas, organize quickly, and reach a critical mass to give those ideas momentum can also be capitalized on by lower level employees. These tools can bring employees across borders, geographies and time zones together onto one team. As I explain in my video blog post on the Misconceptions of Building a Creative and Innovative Team, it is critically important to innovation and problem solving to have a diverse group of people coming together to solve the same challenge. There has never been a better opportunity to place people from different economic, cultural, education, and belief backgrounds in a single brainstorming session then there are today.

Different teams around the world can share what they have tried, give a fresh new perspective on a longstanding problem somewhere else, and bring different areas of expertise into one digital room. This gives companies far more flexibility about where people are located. While I worked at Hewlett Packard, I ended up working with people on the other side of the country and in Europe more than I worked with people down the hall in San Diego.

There are now plenty of pre-built software options at virtually all price and functionality levels to take advantage of. On the enterprise level, companies like Microsoft have made industry-recognized solutions like SharePoint. On the startup level, there are free or cheap options like Skype for video conferencing and instant messaging, Google Docs for collaborating on documents, and Ning for building an entire social platform of your own.

2. Reduce Redundant Solutions

Harvesting and organizing this free flow of information is a critical next step beyond merely setting up these social networking tools. Sending out a memo telling everyone to start using them isn’t enough. Internal training explaining the functionality, value, and opportunities is important to create a culture that maximizes their effectiveness.

Even as company cultures begin to adopt social tools and use them as critical assets in their problem solving process, documentation of solutions is a massively missed opportunity. Business schools having been teaching to document the lessons you’ve learned from a project for decades and the better organizations have done this for a long time. However, these lessons have only been made available to the region or team that documented them.

The main stumbling block with that is that when another team in an emerging market is struggling with a problem, they likely won’t ever discover that the company has already spent big dollars coming up with that same solution in the U.S. This is where internal social networks are able to connect the largest global companies and dramatically affect the bottom line.

In Thomas Friedman’s book about globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, he quotes the former Citibank chairman Walter Wriston from an article in Foreign Affairs (September, 1997): “The pursuit of wealth is now largely the pursuit of information and its application to the means of production. The rules, customs, skills, and talents necessary to uncover, capture, produce, preserve and exploit information are now humankind’s most important assets.”

Friedman goes on to explain that the general manager of the Chevron oil company’s Kuwait office, H. F. Iskandar, said that “Chevron is not an oil company, it is a learning company.” Chevron has been pumping oil all over the world for years and has had to learn how to solve the multitude of drilling problems that come up. “All those solutions are then stored in Chevron’s corporate memory. The key to our business now is to tap that memory, and bring out the solution that we used to solve a problem in Nigeria in order to solve the same problem in China or Kuwait. In the old days, it might have taken two years to find the person in the company who actually found that Nigeria solution and to get him to China, where he could apply it,” explained Iskandar.

Effectively collecting and organizing the information in that company wide “lessons learned” network is critical so that employees can easily access the files or the people that will help them. If the system isn’t easy to use, good training won’t help. Employees just wont use it.

Today, the tools exist to enable this organizing and sharing. At the same time, the pressures of the global market place are requiring the Nigeria solution to get to China in two hours instead of two years. In today’s world, how fast that solution gets there will likely be the difference between leading the industry and going out of business.

3. Decentralize Decision-Making

Utilizing the free flow of information enabled by these social tools will allow organizations to flatten and dramatically increase their speed of innovation.

In the old days, line workers at the bottom would encounter a problem and send it up the massive hierarchy to the top, a decision would be made, and then it would be passed all the way back down to be implemented. This took a long time, but this was the way all business was done and there wasn’t really any way around it. The CEO on top would be the only one that would have an accurate view of the whole picture because (s)he was the only one that received all of the information from all of the different departments. He or she offered a lot of strategic value to the process because the line workers couldn’t easily pass information to each other.

Businesses today have either been forced to radically change this system, gone out of business, or been entrenched in a business that has been protected from the forces of the free market and allowed these inefficiencies to stick around. Regardless, it is clear that the new best practice is to decentralize and delegate decision-making down the hierarchy.

With the ability for front line specialists to easily organize themselves, communicate, and collaborate, they will likely have more and better information about their problems than the executive team does. Enabling them to make decisions based on the information they already have saves the information journey up and down the hierarchy. What that means practically is that a decision can be made in a few hours instead of a few weeks.

Friedman makes a strong case that “The way you manage and exchange information and the way you learn as a company—those are your only sustainable advantages.” He goes on to say that “Some companies are writing and rewriting strategies every quarter or even every week—or else…Net speeds force all sorts of cultural changes. Hierarchies flatten out. Budget-cycles get compressed. Decision-making gets pushed out to the front lines. And customer expectations, not the executive board, guide the next big project.”

Social Media Maturity

I explain here that there are five stages of social media maturity for businesses in the external space, but that same concept can be applied to the internal social platforms as well. Companies probably can’t start off at where Chevron is, but understanding where the target is can be critical to taking steps to get there. As you might expect, the speed at which those steps are taken is increasingly important to survival.

Listen to me speak on 7 Social Media Trends on November 27th in San Diego. 

Follow me on Twitter, Google+, YouTube or my digital marketing video blog: http://AllegorieDesign.com.

Interested in hands-on learning about building your own social media strategy? Check out GSMI’s Social Media Strategies Summit happening around the US and in the UK! Contact Michael Roche at michael.roche@gsmiweb.com with any questions.

Supply Chains Go Transparent

It is easy to see how the interconnected web is affecting corporate supply chains by looking at the capital of Cambodia, Phenom Penh. There was a lake in the heart of the city that was purchased and filled with dirt to build factories on it.  The lake was cheaper than any of the surrounding land which made the purchase good business sense for the factory owners. When they filled the lake with dirt the water overflowed into the surrounding area, destroying many homes and displacing thousands of very poor people.

Locals would boycott any products produced there in protest, but they aren’t the target consumer. The target consumers live an ocean away and up until recently hasn’t had a way to find out about any of this back story when they buy a pair of jeans at the store. That is changing though.

Consumers around the world are now demanding to know more about where and how the products they buy are being made. At the same time, computers and Internet connectivity has become much more common, even for villagers. As the number of Cambodians online and connected to social networks grows, the louder their voice will be heard by consumers around the world. Factory owners will no longer be able to hide bad practices like this.

This trend will help improve the standard of living, wages, and workplace conditions for locals in this region. It will also force businesses to look for profits in developing new efficiencies and/or pass along some of the cost to the end consumer which will be tough in a competitive marketplace.

Enhanced Learning

New media is enabling people throughout this region to watch YouTube, access better software, and download free learning materials. Enabling teachers and students to access better resources for free will help train the next generation to fill and even create their own jobs.

The tourism industry, especially in Thailand and Vietnam has brought a new wave of foreign capital and only those who can speak English can earn a piece of it. As a result, learning English is often times the golden ticket to stepping into a good paying job. There is no better way to learn English than watching media on YouTube, using software and filling out learning packets, all produced by native English speakers. Learning from fluent speakers is invaluable and much more effective than learning from teachers who only know it halfway themselves. The vocabulary, slang, and other nuances are often greatly limited when taught by non-native speakers.

The countries in Southeast Asia can’t afford to pay the competitive rates required for people from the United States to come over and teach their populations English like China can so they get the next best thing; social media broadcasted from the United States over the web free of charge.

This along with many other factors will help put this region on a trajectory to become bigger players on the world stage in the years to come.

Competing in the Global Marketplace

New media, social networking, and new technologies have all allowed businesses to improve their efficiency and increase their speed; without which, they would not be able to compete in the global marketplace. Many businesses within and across industries run into the same problems and now are able to collaborate to come up with a solution. That is, if they are connected to this global network via the latest social platforms.

Connecting to these global networks means that businesses in Southeast Asia don’t have to spend the time and money developing their own technologies, best practices, and solutions. This allows even regional companies to buy generic but world-class software and business systems that are sold in mass across the globe at a much cheaper cost than building a customized version.

Social technology enables global communities to communicate quickly, cheaply, and efficiently. The developed world has been reaping these benefits for quite a while now, but the Southeast Asian emerging markets are just starting to capitalize on them.

The long-term effects of this will be that locals will be able to build companies to target this region that will be able to combine their local advantage with advanced tools to become significant competition for foreign-based firms.

Reader Feedback

Do you see examples of how these trends are playing out here? Do you agree that these trends are affecting Southeast Asia the way I’ve described? What other trends do you see out there?

Listen to me speak on 7 Social Media Trends on November 27th in San Diego. 

Follow me on Twitter, Google+, YouTube or my digital marketing video blog: http://AllegorieDesign.com.

The Berlin Wall Already Fell
The mechanisms that caused the communist economic system to fall and the Berlin Wall to go with it will also fight against the regulation in Iran. Some of the most extreme examples of government regulation has been prevelent in communist regimes such as the Soviet Union in Russia during the Cold War. Thomas Friedman explains in his very informative book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, how and why the world moved from the Cold War economic system to the globalized one we have today. Two of the Three mechanisms that lead to its collapse that are relevent here are the changes in power and the changes in information sharing.

Two Mechanisms Erode Iran’s Regulation
In short, much of the power that used to only reside in the top arena of government has been shifted to wealthy individuals, the financial investors around the world and even the common individual. The shift in power goes hand in hand with the drop of cost, and increase in accessibility to tools that can share information internationally.

One: Technology & Information
To begin with, the drop in technology cost has enabled poor people to put a pizza sized TV dish on their porch and pick up signals from around the world in a way the government can’t possibly regulate; they can’t restrict the airwaves. They can patrol for the dishes in people’s homes, but those can be easily hid in the closest when necessary. Additionally, the cost to produce and distribute those TV shows has dropped tremendously as well.

I have a friend who has set up a recording studio in his house in an American suberb and regularly broadcasts professional grade TV shows to the Middle East. Shows that used to be restricted by the government. Iran can aim to replace the internet with a much more regulated version but there are many other channels to get unregulated information freely.

The trends in mobile technology getting smaller and cheaper, GPS technology getting cheaper and more accurate, internet bandwidth doubling in shorter periods, and the cost of transmitting and recieving information over the airwaves dropping will all make Iran’s regulations more and more ineffective. Soon, devices small enough to fit in your pocket will be powerful to watch TV shows the government can’t regulate and cheap enough for even the realtively poor to afford.

Two: Power Shifts
Secondly, power has shifted to allow individuals to be able to decide whether or not they want to abide by the regulations the government sets out because they now have the ability to organize themselves. Historically, the only way to communicate to the masses was through mass media such as TV or radio. The government can control these much easier than they can control social media. To some it may be surprizing that social media worries the Iranian government, but its ability to allow the people to easily communicate and organize in mass means that they could potentially organize against the government. Events like the Arab Spring make this threat a real one.

Iran will try to limit individuals’ entertainment, anti-state news, and social networking channels to name a few categories because anything projecting something that might undermine the rule of the current government is considered a threat. However, as mentioned, the drop in technology cost and increasing ease of communcation today, will make it easier and easier to avoid restrictions such as these.

Businesses and Standard of Living Crippled
Friedman effectively argues that the only way for a business or government to grow economically is to fully embrace free-market capitalism. Putting up walls around Iran will slow and possibly reverse any economic growth. Iranian businesses will not be able to compete in the international market place which would limit the amount of outside capital flowing into the country. They won’t be able to compete because the spread of ideas, solutions, technologies made outside the country, best practices, and education will spread around the world to their competitors but not to them.

That would affect the standard of living for everyone in the country. Historically, governments such as the Soviet Union were able to control the information flowing to their people, downplay how good life is elsewhere, and point to how much their specific country has improved in recent years. The government can’t effectively do this anymore because people can see when something isn’t true. Broadcast media and governments are not the only producers and distributers of information anymore.

This knowledge that the rest of the globalized world is improving their living conditions at a much faster pace than Iran will create a strong dissatisfaction within the country over time. This dissatisfaction could manifest itself in the big, important things, down to even the smallest things. Friedman tells a story when he was in Syria and his guide was dissatisfied with life there because he could see that Israel had it so much better in their country. The guide would watch IsraelTV and the commercials would show yogurt in all kinds of flavours and colors and the Corn Flakes that crunched even after you put the milk in. In Syria, they had 1 yogurt flavour in 1 color, and their Corn Flakes immediately turned to mush when they added milk. The fact that Syria was so far behind even in regards to these very small things created a very strong dissastifaction with the way things were in their country.

Other Countries Around the World
Other countries around the world are struggling with the same issues. Chinna is targeting micro-blogs producing anti-state content. Korea is limiting which websites are available to their citizens. I’m currently in Vietnam and I’m censored from accessing Facebook. Many of these countries have begun to open up their countries economically because they have been forced to by some degree or another because the economic incentive to do so is to great to ignore. However, they are only partially embracing the new system and they will continue to struggle as long as their restrictive ideologies exist.

Iranians can Learn From Indonesians
When Suharto was leading Indonesia, the country was purposefully cut-off from the rest of the world with regulations. The people were in favor of an open, connected country but were not willing to lead a public revoltion to help enact that change. The strategy the people took involved doing everything they could to incorporate Western multinationals into the country because with them would come their standards, polocies, transparency, connectedness, and openess.

Most governments can’t resist the attractiveness of foreign direct investment and investment from the financial stock exchanges around the world. To attract that inflow of capital to the country, it must prove to be stable, open, and transparent.

Iranians don’t want to publicaly protest either, but that doesn’t make them powerless. They too can support Western influence that will make it in the Iranian governments’ best interest to let them in. As it did in Indonesia, Iran would then take two steps forward and one back towards becoming a global economy bettering the lives of their people.

Where do we go From Here
Iran as well as many other developing countries don’t respect Western countries in many ways, but they surely do respect and admire their wealth, comforts, and overall standard of living. The world consumes American movies, TV shows, music and the countries not taking strides to bring more of what they see in the media to their people will slowly create dissatisfaction with their system. The internet certantly speeds up international sharing tremendously, but it is far from the only channel to share information through.

The tension between Iran and the rest of the world will continue to grow for the Iranian people as globalization increases. Some Iranians will circumvent the internet regulation as it becomes easier and easier to do so, some will passively support Westernization and let the markets apply their own pressures, and some will strongly oppose both of these things. Still, it is important to point out that Iranians don’t have to agree with the Western religions, culture, or other ideologies, to support these changes because everyone wants a better standard of living. Self-interest is always the best motivation.

Reader Feedback
What do you think of all this? What do you think will happen in Iran’s future? Are there any holes in my argument?

Listen to me speak on 7 Social Media Trends on November 27th in San Diego. 

Follow me on Twitter, Google+, YouTube or my digital marketing video blog: http://AllegorieDesign.com.