Some economics
In a perfect market economy, the price we pay equals the marginal cost of producing that last piece of product put out on the market. Profits are created where there is an inbalance between supply and demand in the market. In theory, supply will increase as long as there are profits to be made.

In reality however, this has not been a likely scenario as the perfect market needs complete information. In a world where there has been a lack of information, profits have been possible as demand or supply has not been transparent.

Now watch this video:

The long tail theory that Clay Shirky is talking about in his video above would incur that we should expect that the future will bring a next to perfect supply of information about both supply and demand. Thus, profits that are constructed from non-transparent institutions, or producing business models, will diminish over time.

The cost of transparency
Cause what has kept the market economy from fully functioning has been a monopoly in the access to information. With full transparency, we can begin to fully evaluate different options in contrast to others.

Regardless of whether or not a company is transparent or not, they will be anyhow. There is no room to hide in a world where information sharing and unboundary collaboration is possible. The surplus value of non-transparent business structures will be marginalized as you cannot say something and yet do another. You cannot charge a customer twice than what your competitor charges, if your product is known to be similar to the one of your competitor. You cannot even charge people a cent more. If you do, then demand will shift to your competitors product.

Long tail distribution of consumption and production
In a long tail world, where I connect to other people who like the same thing as me, a companys competitor becomes the customer herself. If a company doesn’t satisfy the needs of one person, and that person is one in a million, then that person have a statistical probability of finding 300 people with a similar demand on Facebook alone.

300 people is a large enough group to produce large enough of a demand for at least one of the people involved in the group to live of the surplus value it creates to satisfy the extra utility that is produced from producing the good that the people in the group wants to buy.

Misplacement of utility
The world before social media only allowed for dominant marketers to enlighten the utility of their products. A group of sowing Chinese production workers could not reach the 300 people in Sweden eager to buy their purple colored shirts. The Swedes had to go to the big retailer who sold the garment to its production price + distribution price + profit margin. They also had to obide to the supply given by the big retailer.

If the retailer said red was the color for spring, then red was what was in their stores. There was thus a misplacement of utility as the people really wanting purple could not get that shirt, but they had to buy a red shirt instead for the same price, but at a lesser perceived utility.

In a world of tribes this status quo changes as I can find someone who wants to produce the shit I want, and I can definitively find a group of people with the same demand as myself to bulk up enough buying power to make someone want to produce it. Perhaps production will not be any cheaper than it was before, and excessive profits will dissappear as a result, but I will get the shirt that I really want, that brings me the best utility, and someone will get to produce the shirt that they really want, and be able to have an ok life from that production.

So what does this mean
Well, we have allready seen this shift in digital products. Demand and supply has made business models next to non profitable for an institution, but still profitable enough for collaborative groups supported by the demand from passionate tribes. The most evident case being the music industry.

I believe we will see more industries walking down the same path as the music industry. Not only because social media allows for communication, but also because I think the speed of which social media is evolving is faster than the speed of change in large institutions that now have the production possibilities and supply power of the offline retail trade.

I’m simply asking… who wants to pay for the profits, when we know we don’t have to?

Have you had a distant colleague who tried to add you on LinkedIn? Perhaps a person you do not know, and most of all didn’t know worked at the same company? Congratulations, YOU are a victim of the latest LinkedIn spam.

Virtually their tactic is like this:

1. They sign up for an account on LinkedIn
2. They compose a very short profile, usually without a picture
3. They write that they represent the same company as you do
4. They add a couple of people from that company – usually they add a couple of other spam accounts for that company, then they start adding “real people”

As people are often polite, they generally add these “as you are person I trust” invites. BUT have caution as this is one of the most dangerous types of online spam there is. As LinkedIn has grown to become one of the most trusted B2B social platforms online, it can have devastating effects if a person is able to hijack your brand by association.

The spammers often use a “ready” account (ie. an account that seems to be associated with a brand as it is connected to a lot of people from that brand) to start sales dialogues with other people. They extract important information that they then put in a CRM and sell to sales databases around the world. It is an excellent business as the Cost Per Lead in some industries can be ranging between 20 USD to 500 USD.

I hope you take care of yourself out there

//Jesper

Possibly related posts:

• Related posts on LinkedIn
• Google's two-front war; who are the winners and the losers?
• A Job You Love» Blog Archive » I disagree with Lions: Networking …

• Related posts on SPAM
• PLUG!: The Fine Line Between Spam and Promotion « UME ORIGAMI
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There has been a lot of talk about brandjacking on Twitter lately. Some of it is really interesting to follow as many companies seem not to care. If you are a company that cares however, and your brand feels important to you, and you are desparate, because your brand is jacked and you really want to tweet. What should you do?

Stay calm. Dr Jesper is here to help. I have done this and this works. This is the “How to Un-brandjack your brand on Twitter”.

How to un-brandjack your brand on Twitter

Step 1 – Your brand is really jacked
First of all you should look at yourself and figure out whether or not your Twitter brand is really brandjacked. If you are going to just republish your newsfeed onto Twitter, then maybe your company name and news is a better brand for you on Twitter. A good example of this was the CNNbrk twitter user that published the breaking news stories from CNN.

Remember, you will not get enthusiast followers if your name does not give them a promise of what kind of tweets they will receive from your user. If you tell them, and they still follow you, then they really want what you can offer.

So, first of all think about what you’re going to use your brand account for. If your brand news account is not taken, then take it and all is good. Secondly, it might be your news and articles allready feeding on the account. Maybe someone loves your brand and want to do the job for you. If this is the case, you should not try to get the account back, you should reward the person for their persistance and free work.

Step 2 – Make contact with the jacker
You should make contact with the brandjacker. Do not!!! and I repeat DO NOT send your lawyers to go Copyright them. This will give them a huge reason for a Digg campaign and a BIG retweet campaign. Nothing is better for linkbaits than corporate lawyers. We have plenty of examples about this and you don’t want the search engine result pages to be messy aswell.

So, this is what you do. If they have a website on the presentation and that website is not yours. Try to find out who it is on the website and call them or e-mail them pleading to please get your account back.

If they reply – YES – here you go -> then problem solved.

If they reply – NO – we own you BITCH -> then you have a problem.

If the reply – NO – PAY US -> then they have broken the Twitter account policies and you can rightfully get your account back.

Step 3 – Make contact with Twitter
The correct e-mail address to use is: suspended@twitter.com Why? Well basically it is because you’ll reach the right people. They handle the spam and suspended accounts. They can suspend accounts and take them out of use right away.

Explain your situation. If the user has called you a BITCH, you actually do not have a case and you’ll have to plea and beg to get your account back. Actually works if you’re good enough and have good enough reason to get the account. If the account is suspended due to “suspicious activity”, then you just have to tell Twitter about this. If someone is trying to charge you or blackmail you, then this also constitutes a situation where Twitter will suspend the account when you can show them proof and give you the account back.

What you write in your e-mail to Twitter should be REALLY to the point. They recieve tousands of e-mails and if you want to get your point across and your account back. PLEASE keep to the point. Hire a copy if you’re not a good e-mail writer.

ENCLOSE the full url to the jacked account.

Step 4 – Account transfer
Now all you have to do is to wait untill Twitter tells you that you can create an account with an official e-mail address -> containing the domain of the account-name you want. Ie. if you want to un-brandjack the account http://twitter.com/somedomain you need to register an account with the e-mailaddress that ends with @somedomain.com.

You can register any kind of account. http://twitter.com/Iwantmyaccountback would be funny. But any account name works.

Twitter will then close down the brandjacked account and point it towards your newly created account.

Step 5 – DO NOT REPLY
Do not reply or try to contact Twitter again to say thank you. That will only take up time from them. Instead, write a blog post about your new and wonderful Twitter-account and link to your own Twitter account instead. This will increase the visibility of Twitter as well as give your account a boost in the search engines.

It is not more difficult than that.

Any questions?

For further reading – Help from Twitter

Picture taken from another speach I made at Göteborg University to a bunch of professors.

I held a talk on social media perspectives on the 15th of April. The audience consisted of a group of web analysts engaged in the network Web analytics wednesday. Below is the presentation that I shared with them. (Now translated into English)

Three main voices of Social Media Debate
Basically my theory is that there are three major voices in the social media debate right now. There are the evangelists, the marketers and then a group I would like to call Dr Data. This presentation tries to tell the story of how these three groups communicate what social media is, what is its value and also how it should be measured.

Not really perfect
It is in no way a perfect presentation, and it is kind of plain in its format. But my main point is that there is too much pullet proof lines between the three groups right now. We need to co-operate with eachother in order to build a sustainable web for the future. Only then will we be able to really increase the values of our business online.

Let’s make loads of money
For you sensitive viewers out there… be adviced. I strongly argue that all activities a company does in social media should be aimed towards making money out of it. View this presentation as bullets. One perspective on three perspectives.

I know there are some parts of this presentation that needs explanation. Please make comments below and I’ll try my best to explain.

I was talking over Skype with my friend Peter Einarsson the other day. He asked me whether or not to use the ShareThis plugin for WordPress installations and social media buttons. Quite frankly, I get this question quite a lot as it is very simple to add the ShareThis plugin to a blog or a website. It is almost automagic. All hail to the ShareThis ppl for producing such an easy to install plugin.

However, I am quite reluctant to recommend the use of the plugin. Regardless of how easy it is to install it is counter productive when it comes to actually getting anyone to use it the way you want them to. Here are some reasons why:

1. There are too many choices, and they are all clustered underneith a sharethis icon thus hiding the goodies from the user
2. The user does not get any natural/artificial incentive to click any of the icons
3. If you add the ShareThis function hoping people will share, you will not have the time to check all those places
4. Users that are spread across too many platforms might get the sense that there are too few people at that place –> hence, your site is in the viewpoint of the user not as popular as he/she thought it was
5. Localization issues is allways a problem when it comes to sharethis buttons. Choose as many social media websites as possible in the local language. If there isn’t a site in the language of the shareable content –> then try to share it on another site… but you will not have as great a success as you do on local alternatives
6. It is lazy… and however marginal you might think that lazy is, it really tells a story to your user… If you do not care, why should they??
7. Un-editable embed codes –> you SHALL put a link in the embed code to give yourself some link love for all types of embed codes…
8. I could probably go on for a while.. but I really hate negative people… so here to how you should do it…

The Mashable example – Subscription and Links
I really like the implementation that Mashable has done on their website. First of all they have put these icons in a central position of the website. Secondly they have designed their buttons themsleves and thirdly, they seem to have a strategy behind using them as they have selected a few, but not all.

Do you see the icons? Well, you should also think about what kind of icons they have put there. These are the “Follow” or best case, “Interact” buttons. If you feel as though you cannot give them as much space as Mashable have, you should at least bundle them together with the subscription icons/texts as it gives more users a posibility to actually subscribe with ease.

On their posts however, they are using a different set of icons at the bottom of each page. Why do they do it like this you might ask? Well, basically it is because it is natural that they do it this way. They want links pointing to the correct place for all shared material. Think about it.

Imagine if you were to recommend a friend to read an article on the web and only gave the person the top domain as a source. Your friend is highly unlikely to find the material, if they do not spend a lot of time searching for it on the website. Especially at fast paced news websites, blogs or corporate websites that need their every news associated with their brand to appear high in the search engine results.

As I will tell you later, “deep links” ie. such links that point towards specific pages on your website and not to the home page are highly valued as they give you authority –> people are referencing many different parts of your website –> hence it must be given more value than a website with only one recommended page.

As you can see, mashable has actually put the sharethis icon in there amongst the others. That is a good thing to do if you get some anarchist users that want to share your website in other areas than what you have a strategy for. Offcourse –> you should not stop them. Just remember to put a tracker on the outlinks and you’ll be able to see if there are any new social spheres where you should start engaging with the users.

The Urban Lifestyle example – Pushing for dialogue
Now I am giving Urban Lifestyle some credd here for a solution they are using for a more personal touch on social media bookmarks/connection. Why? Well, first of all I like their website. They have two choices in the top menu. “About” and “Connect with us”. Plain and simple. What if more organizations would cut out the bullshit and focus on the important stuff. I am sure that increase their conversion of contacts on their website with a humungus percentage.

Secondly, this is a perfect example on how to use social media buttons for people. Think of it as if your website is your online business card, and social media is your 24/7 meeting place. If someone gets your business card, you sure as hell want them to give you a ring… (except if it is the IRS –> and yes, I know from my Google Analytics that I actually have visitors from the Swedish IRS to this website –> how cool is that )

Anyhow –> My recommendation is hence to give all your web publishers, or important people or your information bosses or your all around best people social media pages on your website to work side by side with your other contact details. As it is easier to poke someone on Facebook, than it is poking someone you don’t know in a public place –> let your customers or business contacts follow you for a while, make them ease themselves into knowing who you are, then they will almost be your friend at the first “real” contact which makes it so much easier.

Conclusion
Well, what I really wanted to say with this post is that you should really think twice before adding the sharethis button by itself. It is better than nothing, as you can track the traffic. But you should really think about where you want to interact with the users coming to and through your website. You should make a long term plan for how you should gain their trust and make them loyal customers/business partners.

If you have the resources to do everything. GO FOR IT. But most of you don’t and so you should really choose some of the social media places/platforms where you want to interact and then make these easy choices for your users. That way you will gain the most out of your social media strategy.

And now you’re still thinking –> So which ones should I use??? I say… Think about it… it will come to you..

//Jesper

My thoughts have been spinning around KPIs and Social media the past few weeks. Today however, I saw this TED-talk which put the dot over the i when talking about the true importance and difference in the shift between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Social media, as a child to Web 2.0 is really all about LINKED DATA.

Applying Linked Data
When talking about applying linked data, Tim Berners-Lee says that you should make your data available. Corporations have done this for years, but they have done it in formats that are not very good. Usually it is the quarterly reports that are posted to the website in excel-format so that any analyst in the world can download them and do their funky stuff with the numbers to come up with their analysis. So this is nothing new for corporations. (or is it..?)

What you have to do is 1. make that same data available in a database, 2. open the database so that people can extract data from it, 3. tag your data, or even better, let your users tag your data so that it naturally relates to other data in other databases.

This way, you will not only get the good juicy visibility that you so much strive for. People will actually make use of your data and other people will like both you and those people making use of your data a little bit longer.

What kind of data?
For those of you without imagination think that I am still talking about the quarterly reports when I’m talking about the data. Your thoughts are now circling around why the fuck anyone who is not an analyst would like to look at your data. You might even be repelled or scared of these unknown interested people. Well, there are 9 billion people in the world, and a lot of them have way sicker interests than digging through data, so I believe that you will even have a normal crowd playing with your quarterly reports.

But no… there are other types of data that you should make available. Data that you keep in store such as phone numbers to employees, names of people in charge and people in customer service, your brand components (I am currently writing another post on exactly what I mean by that), your product names and numbers, your christmas party photos (well.. maybe not those). Anything that can be stored as data, that is either allready on Facebook or YouTube, or on its way to Facebook or YouTube.

I know you’re shitting your pants right now thinking… “isn’t that dangerous?”.. and my very best answer to that question is NO. If someone wants to hurt you, this data is allready available on your website. The only problem is that it is not data, it is pages. The problem with pages is that anyone pissed off enough to want to hurt you, will. But anyone eager to promote you, probably won’t take the time. So you better hurry and make this data available.

So what’s the business bottom line?
The business bottom line is that you DO NOT OWN YOUR BRAND anymore. I am sorry to all the copywrite lawyers out there, but since anyone can use the internet, everyone is a part in building the position of a brand on the web. (and I don’t give a crap about what’s said on TV or in newspapers (well I do, but I thought it would be cool to say that I didn’t))

My bottom line, which is also your business bottom line is that you need to make this data available to your audiences that like you. If a computer nerd likes you – even better. They will construct the fan pages, the open UIs and the widgets for your data. No need to do that yourself. Find them, promote them, and they will promote you. Since they love you, unlike most of your employees in customer service, they will defend you, they will ReTweet you and they will hack anyone who hates you into pieces. But more importantly, they will make your brand, and without them you do not have one.

How to do this – the ugly hack way – if you’re not rich?
If anyone of you reading this post are still reading, then here is the most simple ugly hack how to in order to do this. If you want to know how to really do it you shoul read this article.

Making your data available:

• RSS – If you don’t make your website fully available on RSS, then you’re lost
• Split your RSS-feed into different categories such as Business, Business Germany, Business Berlin, Business Left side of where the wall used to stand – ie. categorize your data so that it can be played with
• Geo-tag your information – if applicable – can be done after som reading on Wikipedia

Once these three first steps are done – share it:

• Create an account on Twitter, Facebook or YouTube, or start a blog
• If Twitter –> open search.twitter.com and search for your brand
• If Facebook –> search for your brand name and see the flora of groups
• If YouTube –> do what I told you to do with the Facebook thingy
• If Blog –> use Twingly.com (spam free blog indexing spider – works wonders)
• Amazingly enough people are talking about you (unless you are company providing electricity services)
• Find the people who are talking about you the most and say “Hi, we are here now, let’s talk”
• Then say – “Look, I have all this data, want to use it”

Well.. I know it is doesent ever seem as simple as I try to write it here in the blog, but seriously it really is once you try. Now I know you’re asking yourself the question – WHY THE HECK SHOULD I DO THIS?

Well, that I will start to explain in my next post about collaborative brand building through social media.

Best regards,

Jesper