As the many cases of late tell us, corporations aren’t ready for social media. Not the least bit. The reality of today is that regular people aren’t adapting like they usually do. They are joining forces. I mean, corporations had PR crises before social media. But they could play them in a not so public way. Nowadays, they have to talk directly to the customers, and they do HAVE to, as the customers join forces and become a force.

So what is it that makes smart people at corporations make bad decisions? I mean, otherwise smart people that know all the rules of engagement, and are highly skilled to maneuver even the most sneaky of sneaky journalists.

My answer to that question is in the in-betweens.

How does an In-between manifest itself

You have an organizational structure at your company where one floor does one thing and the other does the other. Yeah, I know it says in all your internal documents that you have a flat organization, but c’mon, no human society has displayed that kind of behavior, so don’t feel sick about you failing to live up to it.

An in-between issue occurs when there is a change in society that doesn’t match the internal organization. We have seen them many times before. CSR was a question that has been there always, but has not been communicated by the companies as a separate issue. When it became the trending topic on everyone’s lips a couple of years ago, most companies weren’t ready. Most companies still aren’t done with their work.

The problem with the CSR questions are that they grasp over everything a company does and so they are the concern several floors in your office building. Everyone from sales to HR are in some way related to CSR questions as they have to do with society and people and the way we are mean or un-mean to them.

As it is everyone’s question it becomes no ones responsibility. More specifically there is no one who can take decisions in these types of questions until there is a person who is set to decide over these questions.

In-between’s most frequent conflict Marketing vs. Communication PR

It falls on everyone’s plate to do something about it. The most common problem is that between Marketing and Communication PR. More and more questions that were previously so neatly parted between the two departments are now becoming more and more blurry.

The latest in the bundle of these in-between questions are social media. The problem is as always that Marketing owns the channel, the dialogue area or the horn to the street. They are normally the ones talking to the end consumer. PR and corporate communications holds the mandate to talk, but they don’t know how the channels work, and usually they don’t know how to not talk corporatism.

So. The problem is that of ownership and internal organization. One owns the means, one owns the measures.

Solution to the problem

If you recognize and agree this far. Please read the rest with an “open mind”. Bundle them up. I am not joking. It is way past bedtime for organizations built on departments and not on people. So how to govern you think? Well, govern through values, and truly do it. I am sure I am saying this a bit to easily and that someone will have to show someone graphs somewhere down the road. But bundle people, bundle departments, put it all together to a one and the same company.

That’s the conclusion that we all will come to in the end. So why don’t we just execute?

//Jesper

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As you all know by now, it’s the level of gangster rapper in you that makes you succeed or fail in social media. I am going to make 10 strong arguments to why this is the case. But first put on this track, kick back and read this 5 bullet advice stack.

1. Beef it
Ever heard of a true hip hop beef? It can make you or break you. Just as in social media, if you can handle the open battle with another rapper and come out on top, then you’re the new black. So many of the high rollers in social media today have built their success on beefing with others.

2. Listen to the beat and go with the flow
Just as in hip hop you got to learn to hear the sick beat of the street. If you don’t then you’re out the door faster than a rabbit … You cannot prepare for what’s going to be around the next corner, but you have got to be ready for it. By keeping your ear in the direction of the people you trust and follow your heart, then you shouldn’t be worse than any other bloke out there.

3. Give shout outs to anyone you got love for
This is something real gangster rappers do all the time. They shout out to anyone in their click worth mentioning. This rule goes for social media as well. Do them retweets, do them links from your corporate blog, pack people together and connect the dots. If you do, then you set yourself as the crew front man (woman), and that’s where you want to be. If you can take the heat.

4. If you’re different, thou shall be noted
Just as on the hip hop scene the originals come up faster than the ones running main street. You want your mix tape run by the illest dj’s, played on the sickest radio stations and promoted by the realest people. One thing in common for these people is that they have to stay on top of their game. They have to stay fresh. Provide them with new and original stuff and you’ll have a greater chance of making it. Keep that in mind when constructing your rhymes, social media strategy or next marketing campaign.

5. The Gunz come out
It is for real and you got to be able to handle the heat. This means you have to get your crew in sync and make sure you have everyone’s loyalty. Just as in the hood, you cannot have any snitches in a world wide organization. If you stay true to the street this will never go wrong as you will get all the street cred you deserve.

Listen, it is the rules of the street out there and you can’t just come running with standardized forms for people. They just won’t give a damn. It might even be so that it is what makes them pop you instead of letting you go.

That’s the realest advice I can give, for you to take with you during the weekend!

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I wrote my final university paper on fish, eco labels and international trade. I found that fish are fish and thus belong to no one before they’re in the net, eco labels do create some wickeid kind of price premium and it is actually better to invest in industry than fishery in Tanzania.

So what the heck does this have to do with Social Media? Well it has everything to do with Social Media and the understanding of the medium you need to have in order to get increasing returns to scale on your communication efforts.

The User as a Fish
Just as the net captures the fish, the big corporations owned the web media. The users weren’t satisfied with this and thus they took control of the net seeking every hole they could find in it. And just as with fishery, the industry didn’t particularly care when the fish started to get fewer and fewer and skinnier and skinnier, they just got bigger nets and faster and faster boats with cooler and cooler radars. Fish, just like users move regardless of the traditional dimensions. Fish live in the sea and can easily escape into the sea of another country. Users live on the web and can easily escape as well. Especially since the web has become so big.

And eco labels only work with trust
And just as eco labels allows for companies to charge us more for the same, you see the same pattern with social media. If the company show they care, then users will follow. But as we all know many of the eco labels are BS and in the offline world we have the Sverker Olofsson’s to help us. On the web we don’t need no Sverker as we are all the Sverkers we need. Now, just as eco labels went through a rough time when they were exposed to be fraud, so has corporations like Wallmart become symbols of BS in the online world. It has taken a couple of Dell Ideastorms and Skittles to get back on track. Price premiums can only be extracted where trust is present.

And it is better to Enable, than it is to Harvest
So to the third part of my essay which was about binding this together. Fish move and it is thus the normal way for us people to try and define property rights. But if we are on the web where the users own the net, it is impossible for us to catch anything unless it wants to get caught. Even though we double our efforts and triple our net size, we will see diminishing returns to scale on each dollar we push into it. In order to increase our return to scale we need to invest in our infrastructure and our technology. As in the case with Tanzania, they had already an abundance of fish, just as unexploited areas of the web have an abundance of passioned users. If we invest in the fishing industry there, then we will see an increasing returns to scale on our first few spendings but in the long run experience diminishing returns to scale just as we have in our own industry.

And thus Infrastructure is the answer
So, my point being, it is better to invest in the infrastructure of the Tanzanian industry helping the inhabitants in that country to develop into a modern economy as this will enable us to get a price premium out of our efforts plus give ourselves the chance to sell our own products to people with better finance. Just as it is better to invest in infrastructure of communication as it gives us the opportunity to gain invaluable trust in our target groups that will indeed induce them to talk about us in their own words, but in a positive way. By putting the money in helping the Tanzanians of the web get better at what they do whilst adapting to what you do, is the optimal way for you to make money on the modern web.

Now if you didn’t understand a word of this post. Please don’t feel sad. I just needed to put some of my more philosophical thoughts out there due to the two “x advice on”-something prostitution posts I wrote as my last posts.

//Jesper

The essence of good Marketing
When marketing in a smart way you know that you need to be relevant towards your target group. For example, if a person owns an old car that has just broken down, and you are a good marketeer, then you know that this person shouldn’t be offered ice cream as a solution. Your understanding is that this simply wouldn’t fix their problem. Naturally you would try to solve their problem by offering them the kind of new car or reparation service they need to solve their mess. In the best case scenario you become their designated go to guy when a similar thing happens again.

The essence of good Tribaling
Tribaling is different from this as you need to know your customer intimately. You need to know what their passion is and you need to share this passion with them, and aid them in embracing their passion. For instance if a person is passionate about ice cream and their car breaks down when they are out driving, and you offer them ice cream as the solution, you will probably be as relevant as if you were offering the person a new car. In the best case scenario you become their designated go to guy regardless of what has happened.

And all this means what?
Marketing towards tribes is thus not about marketing towards target groups that are passionate about something. It is getting to know your customer well enough to know how you can help them, regardless of the problem they’re facing.

Hence, Tribal marketing is knowing who still prefer the ice cream instead of the new car when the old car has broken down.

To attain this understanding about your customers you will have to listen, interact and connect with them. If you do, then both you and I know you can keep them margins high on your products and you don’t have to waste money on people that don’t want to have it. You can specialize and outsource some of the production and loads of the business development to the tribal leaders. You can earn loads of money from knowing who is connected to through loving what you do.

Just some nightly thoughts. Now sleep.

Some companies just won’t get on this train of social media and search. Some companies are just too ignorant, too arrogant and too self indulging to understand that the future does not lie in the past, but in the future. Adapting has always been the human beings way of survival. It plays out in all parts of our society. Europe was leading until the kings, church and queen stuff made the “janks” want to turn on us and become a republic. They then ruled the world until now when we see the Chinese take over as they change, they adapt and most of all, they adopt better practices instead of relying on best practices.

It is time for corporations to start listening up, start being radical and start making changes. It is time to start being available where people search for them, where people want to talk to them and where new business opportunities can be mutually arranged. I mean. If you are a corporate CEO and read this… I know there are a few of you out there. Are you REALLY going to tell your stock owners that there was a market buying stuff from your sector, but only not from you, and the only reason for this being that you didn’t understand it?

You conquered the offline world with success. You have opened stores in every diary desk in the world. Your growth has been fantastic and thus your stock price has reached beyond what was ever expected. Now the opportunity is for you to double it. Make it digital, make it easy, make it cheap and most importantly, make it available where ever, and when ever.

If you have supply chain problems, set up a franchise where people in different countries can establish their own online supply chain for that country. If you have problems with optimization, then use affiliates to do the optimization for you. If you have problems with data collection, then tap on into Facebook. If you have problems with knowledge then start reading a good blog, or even a book.

Most importantly!!! Being a part of the online community is NOT what many people say it is. It is not either or. It is not a zero sum game between offline IRL stuff and online stuff. It is a new market. Why not move into it. Why not take the corner spots on each street and why not put people in your stores? It is that simple. It is all the same. You know how to do this. A new format, yes, but you know the art of business and what’s happening truly is business. Keep the offline, add the online!

All I am asking you is to treat this soberly. Compare, prepare and try it out. But please do it now!!

//Jesper

Best practice is a term that has originally described a method or a process “…that is believed to be more effective at delivering a particular outcome than any other technique, method, process, etc.” The idea is that there is some way in which you can do something that will result in better outcome than all other ways of wanting to produce that specific outcome.

Remarkable is never done twice
Best practice is thus a way in which you make your working process the most effective in comparison to other working methods. Of late, this concept has become more synnonym with “good ways of doing a thing” or “a way to do a thing correctly”.

With regards to social media I think we can calmly say that there is no such thing as best practice. The rule of “everything you do, I should do better” must apply to all activities. Ie. if you are to make something spread between users in social media, it needs to have never been done before. Or, at least, it needs to be some time inbetween the last time and this time you’re doing the same thing.

I base this on the notion that people only talk about you when you give them a reason to talk about you in the extremes. “I LOVE them”, “I HATE them”, “They are THE BEST”, “I heard they make WONDERFUL”.

Thus there is no room for best practice as if you copy someone elses campaign, and do that with perfection, it is merely at most an “as god as the other one” campaign.

There is no other company better at being you than you
Secondly, it is important to know that people does not want you to do something that others do. They want your company to do what you want to do. This is important and perhaps one of the main reasons why todays media is much more of a strategic question than it has ever been before.

For example, when you used to communicate a single activity to a journalist, then that journalist could portray that activity to a mass of people through the newspaper, tv-show or through radio. This made it very simple for you to create and base your communication, merely on short and activity based campaigns. You could simply look at who had done something successful and then apply that concept to your industry.

As a means of communication, this does not work for social media. The journalist might apply their expertize in the topic and analyze from his or hers analytical plate. If you know that analytical plate, you will be able to answer all the question that one person might ask.

Now put that into the perspective of social media where you have millions of diffrent analytical plates. There is no way that you can make sense, if you do not make sense. You can fool one person, or shine more if the focus is only on you. However, if you got millions of people talking about you, then your make up really needs to be your skin tone for people to think that it is beautiful.

I mean. Purple lipstick on a pale british girl, will make her look as though she’s freezing. The same goes with a company that starts blogging about whine and weekend parties when no one at the company stays out later than 5 on a friday after work.

I guess you get what I’m getting at.

Two reasons why best practice is dead
Thus there are two reasons why best practice should be dead. First of all since you cannot do what someone else has done before. People will not talk about you if you’re not remarkable. Secondly, you have to be true to yourself, know WHY you’re doing what you’re doing and then stick by what you are saying. If you’re not true to yourself, you will be exposed.

Simply… I don’t want to see or hear ONE more company asking about “what’s in your social media strategy” or “we would like to do what they are doing in social media”… It simply won’t work. Sit back and think about what YOU want to achieve. Then think about the best way to express that. The web is social baby!! No way to get around it anymore

//Jesper

I read a blog post today that said social media is not for making money. I think this is only one side of the coin. I believe that you can utilize social media to make loads of money today and in the future. I am unsure if this posts give you reason enough to trust me, but if we discuss it I am sure we’ll reach a profitable conclusion.

Fortunes on branding
One thing that many companies spend fortunes on today, in order to make money, is branding. Branding is all about putting your brand in the right light so that people think that it is the best option when given several to choose from. I believe, and many with me, that social media is an excellent place where a brand can make it big, and thus also make loads of money, by being the better of two choices.

I mean c’mon… it’s no newsflash that people talk on Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, QZone, Friendster, Jaiku (well not so much talk there anymore..)… For me as a user, these services has become a way of expressing myself to my friends in a much more lasting way than before. People can check up on me without having to talk to me and thus maintain the “nice weather” convo without actually talking to other people.

Social networks are in a way, one way, for us as individuals to stay on top of what’s up in our network. What’s hot, what’s not. What’s lame, what’s game. It is also a way for us to stay on top of that game, and in a sense, a way of us to put our personal brand in the right light.

Branding the long tail
So, what does a company brand have to do in all of this. Well, some say they don’t belong, I say those same people are very wrong. I say that brands have an oportunity to stop being brands in social media. What I’m really saying is that your future brand value, and thus your purchase surplus produced on the web, is in fact at best odds when you have no brand at all. What I am aiming at is utility and function.

“HUH?? You say now…” (Yoda voice)

Well… the social web give you as a company a great oportunity to stop paying for ineffective ads. Let your user be your ad instead. The way this works best is basically through you saying – Nothing.

“HUH??” You say now… (also Yoda voice)

To understand this you need to understand how people work in the long tail. You can watch this clip of Clay Shirky talking about this, or you can simply get the fact that; When you can talk to 300 million people through the web, your 1 in a million shot, actually becomes a group of 300 people.

Regardless if your interest or purpose in life is to starv yourself to death, you will find other people that also want this for their life, on the web, through the social networks. Same theory, but applied to a way in which you park your car…. I am 10000-megazillion percent sure you will find someone who parks their car the same way.

I won’t get “långrandig” (vertically striped… swedish expression for taking to much time for nothing) on you. What the long tail phenomenon of the web offers for you as a company, is for people to connect with others that use your product in exactly the same way as themselves do.

• Focus for you –> make a good product
• Focus for PR department –> tell people who like previous versions of product that new version exists
• Focus for users –> make good use of product
• Focus for marketing department –> help users who have found good use of product, find other users that have found the same way of using the product –> so that they can form a club/a clan/a tribe

Why on earth would this help my company?
Well, first of all, you spread your risk. Today you are putting all your money on one card!! On ONE brand. By letting your users group around several small purposes, utilities and such values, you are relying on their personal brand. When would you put all your money in your stock portfolio on one stock?? Well, you wouldn’t do that… You would spread your risk so that your total portfolio would gain value over time. (I know… you lunatics allready working in social media would put it all on one card, but I am trying to put this in words so that the conservatives understand social medias value)

And just as you talk about the stock in your portfolio that runs steeply upwards with your friends. You should talk about the utility that is gaining the most followers in social media. Why?? Well, because it puts you in the shiny light aswell. You bet on them and they’re paying off. And, if a lot of people have found a common utility for your product, then it is highly likely that people who do not yet know of your product, will find that utility useful. Thus, you highlight what is successful, what the users who actually own your shit, wants to do with it.

It may be wearing your silk trousers on their heads, it might be driving the car backwards or it might simply be eating with your fork in the right hand, as it is more comfortable than the left hand.

You think I’m nuts.. why would ANYONE want to speak about or do like that?? That must be a one in a million shot… Well if it is a one in a million shot… then statistically there should be 300 people on Facebook who wants to do this. Newsflash Social media –> They can now find eachother, group and collaborate!!

So what does this mean
Well, I get it that I don’t get it all said in this post, but I needed to get it out of my system. Basically, this is one way in which I want to say that YOU as a company should focus on making money through social media. You should do this by making a wise investment in spreading your brand risk on many small portfolios –> tribes, colonies etc etc of interpretations of your product utility.

You will not only save a humungus amount of money, but the knowledge about you will also grow NOW and in the long run.

And to learn HOW exactly you should do this call 555-I-WANT-TO-PAY-JESPER-A-FORTUNE-RIGHT-NOW, that was… 555-I-WANT-TO-PAY-JESPER-A-FORTUNE-RIGHT-NOW… if you call within 10 minutes, I said 10 minutes… I’ll throw in the Mitsu knife… an all around knife that makes a filé out of your filé… hmm… tired.. yes… dislike you all…

//Jesper

The Game, the husstle, the folding of the sleves, the pick it up from the ground and brush it off. There is nothing with social media that changes the basics of YOUR daily work. It is what’s around you that has changed. I made an analysis of social media the other day and I sort of stumbled over a way to describe this change that everyone is talking about.

I decided to split it into three areas of interest or historical context. The production of media, the consumption of media and what influences us as human beings.

The evolution of media production
By now you know the story. When speaking of the change social media has brought upon the world, most people speak of media production capabilities. Production was first controlled by who ever had a pike and some power to hack a message into a stone wall. The posibilities of media production was then adopted and controlled by church and state. Then the area of “mass media” came about with the introduction of the printing press, later radio, later tv, later internet 1.0.

Mass media has however never been MASS media as the production has been primarily controlled by institutions such as news paper, religious institiutions, churches, corporations etc. Production has been expensive and has thus been in the hands of those who have had the money to produce. Reach reach reach reach. If someone starts talking bach you reach a little bit more and you simply crowd them out. In some instances, you enforce rules to control the production.

When the internet bubble crashed in the beginning of the second millenium since the death of Jesus loads of technology was released as the money was gone, but the dream remained. This technology was adopted by the users/consumers of mass media in what has later been labled web 2.0. The means of producing the “new media” format online was booming. Production was free, simple and fast. But access was scarce, however evolving from 2001 until today in a pace surpassing economic growth with a kawabungazillion.

The evolution of media consumption
We all lived in a cave (I don’t know if this is what we really did, but it doesn’t matter to this story if we really did), later went to church and were penalised by the king. Stories were passed on by those who could tell and were taught to those and by those who could read, write and speak in a way that others understood.

In the age of mass media, consumption increased in variety as well as in volume as people were taught to understand the new formats available. Technological advances such as teachers, transistors, affordable TVs and computers were produced in order for us to keep on “bowling alone“. We were taught to understand what was taught to us rather than teach to learn to teach.

Even so, the consuption of media exploded even further as the technoloies of web 2.0 were released and we all of a sudden were only “one click away” from actually producing what we were also consuming. The shift became apparent as we, through the social web were allowed to group ourselves around our smallest common denominator rather than what had been taught too us as being the normal and good way of understanding the surrounding world.

Social media gave each and everyone of us the forum to consume exactly what we wanted. All required to open up a door for people of my understanding is that one of us understands the new and can tell the rest of us in a way that we understand. In basic terms, if I understand English I have the power to translate an English article to Swedish so that my grandmother can read it. If I like to starv myself, I can find a crew of people out there who also enjoys my belief. I no longer live in my suburb with my choices, but I can consume ideas, theories and general media produced by anyone with access to the online community (30% of all of us).

New technologies such as automatic translators, text to sound readers, online-tv productions and four dimensional (real time) syndication services allow us to consume everything out there.

Why this don’t matter and matter as hell
Production and consumption behaviors have never really mattered. It is good that everyone with an internet access can produce and consume almost everything thats out there today. It is apparent that the institutions are feeling the sweat as their visibility has decreased from universal to the next door neighbor.

But does this really matter? Well, no. Cause what is influential has not changed the least bit. First and foremost I am influenced by myself, secondly by my friends, later by the “cool people” in my surroundings. I am influenced by general discussions in the blogosphere yet they are almost solely built upon what’s hot in institutional media. I watch TV, and I feel queezy after watching a show about children dying in the south east of Africa whilst I eat another bucket of Sombreros and drink beer.

What I am trying to say here is that the most important parameter for change has not changed. Influence is what we all strive to excert when marketing anywhere. Cause marketing is really all about putting yourself out there on the market and saying – HEY I*M AVAILABLE, COME N GET ME!!. But for anyone to notice you, you need a crew and understand how to speak in a way that will build you as a part of that crew rather than spoil your chances of influencing your surroundings. You want you crew to grow and thus you need to be loyal with your homies first. The rumor of your gangs ability to “keep it real” will then spread in the other gangs and your posse will grow.

Let’s boil it down. People still go to church to hear an interpretation of god, people still go to parties where the cool people hang out, people still dream about being a millionaire, people still read newspapers and watch tv. People are still influenced by exactly the same thing as the cave dude was. If something is hot enough, it will rub of on those standing next to it.

The fact that the source of influence hasn’t changed is what makes Social media powerful
So, what I am trying to say is basically that there has been no change in what effects our decision making process. The production and consumption of media has become more accessible by larger groups of society. This doesn’t mean that everyone can be influential. Hoever, anyone can.

This doesn’t mean that everyone can be influential. Hoever, anyone can.

The game hasn’t changed, but the arena on which to play it has. If you are cool, if you are good, if you are god, then you will influence your surrounding. Seth Godin talks about being remarkable, Clay Shirky talks about how we have to care about the long tail as that’s where the remarkable might take place, LOADS of people talk about viral, word-of-mouth marketing as a means from the remarkable to spread from the long tail to the main stream.

These are all great thoughts, but they do not change that a person who understands the game will be more successful than someone who doesn’t. You can absolutely learn the game, but it doesn’t happen over a day. No matter how much technoloy available for you to talk to your tribe, your kick-ass customers or your homies through, it doesn’t change the fact that you have to talk to them as a leader and not as a follower if you want to influence them.

[Gary... it's not the game that has changed... it's the arena at which the game is played...]

No matter how much you monitor, listen and smile. You will allways be someones bi**h if you can’t play the game when you decide to play. So, when you step up, step correct… For the rest of you… hire a consultant…

//Jesper – who is letting go of some Sunday steam whilst listening to gangster rap

I thought I would write something about automation as I get many inquiries about this topic. What can be automated and what can not be automated online. My simplest answer is that everything can be automated. But most stuff shouldn’t be.

That’s why I LOVE spammers
Spammers usually look at vulnerabilities on the web and try to exploit them in any way possible. They automate as much as possible as they shoot from the hip and try to make a hit. I tend to look at spammers to see what smart solutions they have made that I can use to make my work more efficient. I use them and their creativity to become better at what I do. If something can be automated, it should be. If something can be created easier, then it should be. There is no natural law that says all dialogue has to be between two people. The only law in any social interaction is that everyone should get something out of the dialogue. Think win-win and the rest will follow.

What is a good Social media Automation?
If I for example can generate an automated response that solves a problem for another person, then that is a GOOD solution. If I however do not solve the users problem, then I get a problem. Thus it is in both peoples interest to make sure that any automation you do in social media (in particular) helps to solve problems rather than create them.

This usually takes some initial hard, manual labor in the beginning, but saves LOADS of time once it is done.

If you are looking to automate parts of your social media work you really need to get a hold of some of the following:

• You need some kind of blog or dated publishing system
• You need an account at Yahoo Pipes
• You need a really sound analytics tool such as Google Analytics
• You need an account on Friendfeed, Tumblr or some other service that can repost messages on many different forums at once

Automating your online data gathering
No, you do not need to buy your monitoring from an expensive consultant. You can behave like a spammer and have it created for you right away. Many companies use SERIOUSLY expensive services to collect “press cut outs” that is basically stories about the company cut out from news papers and put in a folder. YACK!!

It is retarded to pay for this service on the modern web. Just set up a spam-blog to do this for you. There are several autoblogging tools out there. My favorite is feedwordpress. It gives you ALL you need to collect everything that is said about you in the newspapers, in blogs etc.

Source, google news, twingly blogs, twitter search, youtube search, technorati search etc etc. Run it through pipes as I wrote in another post about “How to build a communicative Social Media newsroom“.

You will get everything written about you on the web listed with author, date-time stamped, with all the content available right there in your own blog. Then it is all about design, how you want your news to look in order for you to view them the best way.

This enables you to easily see who writes about you the most, what do they write about and then you can focus on how to approach them.

Automating Twitter activities
We all know that there is a load of twitter spam out there. I am currently constructing a post about 5 best way to spam Twitter. I think twitter spam is excellent. Especially since it works. There is no need to hate me for this. Twitter is an opt-in service and if people want to read my shit, then they are able too. How they find me is another question most easily solved by spamming the whole community.

With twitter spam I offcourse do not mean the @xxx spam that has become so popular of late. Ie you search for keywords and then use “@usrname – your ad + link” so that they see it no matter if they have opted in or not. With twitter spam I generally mean that you search for twitter users that tweet about some particular topic and then add all their followers.

Better yet, you make spammers that use this method add you. Basically what you do is that you set up a twitter account, then use friendfeed. In your friendfeed you add a couple of blogs that are related to the content you want to push out on twitter. Then you connect your friendfeed with your twitter account and voila… you are now writing keyword dense tweets like never before. You will eventually see all the keyword spammers out there add you like mad.

What you do now is you construct a script that adds everyone that has added them. Your hitrate will grow exponentially as these people have allready shown interest in this topic. Once your follower base is up to a certain level, they you switch and start posting manually in your feed, removing the friendfeed:er and you will be up and running in no time with an audience that like feeds with relevant links within this topic.

There are several other ways to automate your twitter activities but this is the best one I’ve come across so far as it really generates a relevant crowd in no time.

Continuing Automation
As I think the above written will hail down some comments from the “real person” activists out there, I will continue this topic in another post. (read, my ADD really doesn’t want me to write more).

What are your thoughts on the topic?

Image Borrowed from Merge Left marketing

There has been some talk for a while about brands not knowing how to work in social media. People think companies are too pushy and that they try to push their thoughts upon the users. In many cases this is a correct view. Companies do have their agenda. They want to make as much money as possible for as long as possible. This post will deal with two types of ways to ensure you build good starting blocks for your brand to succeed in social media.

The Institutional Brand
The biggest difference with this post and many others is that I recognize the need for an organization to construct their own brand. As I have said in previous posts, a brand is a composite of many raw materials. Internally, in an organization or in an institution, these raw materials are built, they are kept, and usually also written down on a piece of paper called “brand manual” or “brand guidelines”.

An institutional brand lives and flourishes within the organization. The smallest organizations often don’t think of the brand as something separate from themselves, in medium organizations the brand is perceived as the light of god, and in bigger organizations the brand becomes either the guiding star or the culture in which everyone works. Good or bad, an institutional brand is the sum of it’s raw materials and its employees.

The User generated Brand
Well.. Organizations should feel very lucky if they even have user generated brand. It means that there are people who care about them enough to form an opinion about them. The user generated brand however, does not appear until someone starts talking about it, posting about it or designing it in the way that they look upon it, in public. It might be a blog post, a photo on flickr, a tweet on twitter or just a beep in space. All accounts for the view of a user generated brand.

For search this becomes very apparent as some brands are liked enough to generate results in keyword relation tools that are semantically related to words as “love”, “adore” and “I am”. On the other hand, some brands have got the shitty edge of the stick and are related to words such as “hate”, “prison” and “f**k”.

All in all, the user generated brand becomes the sum of all public opinions of that brand.

How to work with either or
As I’ve said before, a user generated brand is best worked with by being an enabler. Allow for discussion to take place, help your fans and haters discuss your brand together. Give them the raw materials they need such as pictures, songs, logos, visions etc. Make all this public so that all facts are on the table. By providing the best resources you can control the stem of the whole discussion.

Product pictures should be made available without the company logo present, or the copyright text. (I know this might be difficult for some of you as there are copyrights with end dates.) But you can at least make available all that is yours to keep. This way you will at worst have good looking product display with word bashing from an angry blogger. You should put that in comparison with having the word bashing without the good looking product display.

For the institutional brand you have to work internally. As you know all of your employees have voices and at least 20% of them have a blog, and probably 60% of them have an account on Facebook and about 1% of them use Twitter. In any case, you know they are talking about you. If so at night during dinner. What you have to do. Is to make them engaged in what they do. They have to believe it. Cause if they don’t then no one will. They don’t have to like what they do at work, they just need to know the purpose of what they do.

They need to know that they are working for “the best xxx there is in the business of xxx”. (yes, even in the porn industry). Use artifacts such as an apple. Use phrases such “I’m lovin’ it”. Use music such as “Dick in a box…” hmm… You get the point. Put up signs on the inside of the toilet doors. People do take a crap, and when they do they have nothing else to do but to read your “shit”. (lol… I did live in Gothenburg).

Conclusion
I have only briefly touched upon the topic of insitutional and user generated brands. I haven’t been blogging for so long and this has gone stuck in my head for the past few days. Please comment below and we’ll make some stuff happen. I am composing some ppts for you to enjoy, but my inspiration is rock bottom right now. If anyone happen to be in NYC or in Stockholm, please give me your e-mail and we’ll meet up to chat about this.

User generated and institutional brands are very different in their composition. In the end however they are both the result of cultural exchange and understanding.