The brothers Partovi gave a clear and concise breakdown of how the shifting landscape in online music has diminished more traditional monetization opportunities, but at the same time created new, and potentially more lucrative ones. While physical record sales are tanking online record sales are growing, and new revenue streams are surfacing.

Downloads
The brothers highlighted emerging trends in the online music space that offer new opportunities. DRM-free music is one trend that they highlighted, sighting that the format allows for expanded innovation and the signal that labels are finally embracing technology.

Artists as Channels
Artists can now establish a deeper level of engagement, and additional monetization models by creating what they referred to as “direct to fan media channels” - artist channels that utilize blogs, video messages, live streaming performances and interviews to create personalized, syndicated streams that fans can tap into and share. Players in this space are channels like MySpace, iLike, Kyte, Nabbr and ReverbNation. Revenue can be generated from advertising as well as subscription models. As an example, the Partovi brothers sighted the band U2. U2 has leveraged the iLike platform to create a space where their fans can feel more connected and engaged with the band, and it works! The band has nearly 3 million fans on iLike, versus just under 200,000 friends on MySpace. iLike offers a suite of tools to leverage the passion of fans and extend that passion out to their social circles on a variety of networks in addition to the main iLike site.

Live Performances
While album sales are taking a nose dive, ticket sales are at an all time high, and there is a clear path to monetization; sales of physical goods being more reliable than advertising or subscription models. Platforms like iLike, LiveNation and StubHub take advantage of social discovery, alerts and recommendation engines to help bands connect with their fans and fans connect with each other to generate awareness, excitement and attendance for live events.

Streaming
According to the brothers “streaming is the new downloading.” Sites like Pandora, LastFM/CBS, AOL,
Video YouTube, Yahoo, Rhapsody, iMeem, MySpace and iLike all offer streaming music. Revenue opportunities in this space come from advertising and subscription models. New opportunities highlighted are mobile and syndication.

Announcing the iLike Music Platform
The brothers also announced the new iLike Music Platform, a developer platform that will allow anyone to add playlists and iLike functionality to their own websites and Facebook applications.

It’s refreshing to see the music industry finally starting to wake up and take notice, thanks to innovators like Hadi and Ali who recognized opportunities early and rose to the challenge. I like to think that the music industry is an early indicator of the direction other industries are heading in. Music makes the most sense as an early entrant as it’s main products can be produced, warehoused, sold and distributed entirely electronically. I think it’s time for other industries, including film and consumer goods to get an early jump on things and take heed to the lessons taught by the music industry.

Below is an approximate transcription on the presentation, actually, it’s my notes, which are probably a better read than the actual transcription…

1.

2.
Has everyone seen Forrester’s technographic ladder?

It’s a way of categorizing how people use the web

the people in this room are not only at the top rung, they’ve climbed up on the roof and are looking down at the rest of the world like they’re a bunch of ants

3.
I’m going to talk a bit tonight about marketing. Many people mistakenly get marketing and advertising or promotion confused. Marketing means looking at markets and making sure that everything from your product to your UX to you messaging, really everything about your company, aligns with a market.

4.
How many people here are at a startup? It’s a sad fact that statistically speaking 90% of the startups represented here won’t make it past the first three years.

5.
There are many reasons why startups fail

6.
But more often than not they’re simply not making stuff that people want or need. Or they’re not letting the right people know about it if they are.

7.
I want to discuss the danger of being a shiny new toy. The proliferation of shiny new toys means that the attention of early adopters is constantly pulled in a million different directions. It’s extremely difficult to gain a significant amount of attention over a long enough period of time for diffusion to mass markets to happen.

8.
Case in point…

9.
How many here are familiar with this graphic? It’s fairly well known, it comes from Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” originally published in 1991 and revised in 1999.

It’s become a staple in developing methodologies to market technology companies. I see a few problems with this approach. For one, it was developed in 1991. In 1991 there was hardly the proliferation of technology products that there is now. New products appeared infrequently, which meant that when one did, it was easy to capture the attention of early adopters and keep it long enough for diffusion to happen. To give you an idea, it actually took 18 months for the first 100 domains to be registered. Not a lot of options for early adopters. In 1994 when Amazon launched there were about 60,000 domain names registered, now there are about 165m.

The other problem I see with using this approach is that it only applies to disruptive technologies. I’m willing to bet that most of the startups in this room are not presenting anything incredibly disruptive compared with what’s already out there. And if you are, you might want to think about how you can take that killer technology you have developed and put a less disruptive front end on it.

10.
I think we’ve all been drinking each other’s Koolaid a bit too much. What I refer to as the echo chamber is the Silicon Valley/Silicon Alley/Web 2.0 crowd. They are feature-hungry, gratuitous Ajax loving, hyper communicators who have dozens of information streams flowing around them in cyberspace.

11.

12.

13.

14.
Even if we do follow Moore’s model, if we go by the book, early adopters should comprise 13% of your total market. Depending on who you talk to, it’s estimated that there are roughly 50 - 75K early adopters of technology in the US. That’s only about 1/2m users total, hardly enough to sustain an online consumer product.

15.
Most startups conduct private Alpha and Beta releases. They try to get TechCrunch, Mashable, VentureBeat and the like to cover the launch. They then initiate an Alpha or a private Beta and invitation codes go to the early adopter elite. The early adopters are integrated into the feedback loop. The product is then modified based on this feedback.

16.
The way I look at it, this is a process that if anything widens the chasm. We’re integrating features, UI, functionality that the early adopter crowd wants, but that mass markets have little if any use for. Look at successful companies like Amazon and Google. When Amazon launched in 1994 pretty much the only people online WERE early adopters, but they designed from the beginning with a mass market in mind, and took a disruptive technology like e-commerce and made it simply “shopping”. Amazon didn’t go integrating things like IRC into their site.

17.
I think it’s important to ask yourself if you’re really a technology company. In most cases I think the answer is no. Amazon is not a technology company, nor is Google, iMeem or IMDB, they are consumer-facing products that are built on technology, Amazon is a shopping site, Google is a place where people can go to find what they are looking for, iMeem is a place where people go to discover and share media, and IMDB is a place where people can go to get information about movies. They are all designed for mass markets, which is why they are so massively successful.

Cars are made of steel, and yet, Toyota is not a steel company, they are a car company. Electricity is amazing technology, yet no one would actually use it if there’s weren’t things like lamps and refrigerators.

18.
So, if you’re not really a technology company, then who are your early adopters really?

Let’s broaden the definition of an early adopter and look outside of the echo chamber.

Let’s say that in each market, there is a group of people who are the first to try new things. Generally there are three reasons why people are willing to be the first to try something new:

Opinion leader
Trendsetter
Naturally curious
Enjoys experimentation
Risk taker

19.
I’d like to encourage every startup in this room to do one thing: make everything about your market; from the napkin, to your product development, to your feedback loop, to your communication strategy, if you know your market, and focus on giving them what they need from the get go, you’re going to be in a much better position for success.

Are We Digging Our Own Chasm?
Many in the industry reference Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” as the key work in addressing the subject of transitioning from early adopters to a mass market. Two things come to mind:

1. When Moore wrote “Crossing the Chasm” in 1991, (it was revised in 1999) the frequency of new technology entering the market was much lower, therefore even among early adopters, there were significantly fewer shiny new toys to distract them. Early adopters were hungry for new technology and adopted it in hordes, their attention remained focused for significantly longer periods of time. At this point in time, supply outnumbers demand and the average early adopter’s attention is being pulled in a million new directions every day. It’s difficult to attract, let alone retain them. If your company is really intent on following Moore’s model, then you need to have a significant enough share of attention, for a long enough period of time, so that your product can transition to a mass market.

2. Crossing the Chasm is only a relevant strategy for companies that are introducing “disruptive technology.” The majority of Web 2.0 startups out there are hardly introducing disruptive technology. In fact, most of them aren’t really technology companies at all. They are simply consumer-facing products that are built on technology. The more these companies design for the early adopter crowd, and the more they integrate this crowd into their feedback loop, the further they get from their actual market. Many times, it’s not the technology that’s disruptive; it’s the way the technology is presented. And this happens as a result of designing for and marketing to those of us who are way at the top of the technographic ladder.

Who Are Your Early Adopters, And How Important Are They?
I’m not taking the stance that early adopters are unimportant, in many cases they are. But two things need to be taken into consideration:

1. Though early adopters may be an important step towards mass adoption, it’s vital to design your product and craft your messaging from the beginning for the market you are trying to serve, which in most cases, at least if you want to be profitable, is not the high-tech early adopter crowd. That doesn’t mean they can’t use your product, nor does it mean they won’t like your product. It just means that though you may be reaching out to them as part of your initial user group, you’ve got to always be thinking about the market that will make you profitable.

2. Let’s broaden the definition of early adopter. Who are your early adopters? They may not be the Silicon Valley echo chamber crowd, as you are most likely not in all actuality a tech company. Remember, there’s a difference between a technology company and a company that’s built on technology. My refrigerator is built using certain kinds of technology, some of it quite advanced I’m sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s a high tech product. Is Toyota a steel company, or a car company? Just because your product is built on technology, even if it’s really innovative technology, that doesn’t necessarily make it a high-tech product.

There are early adopters in every market. They aren’t necessarily early adopters of technology, they are the people who are willing to try new things. Every market has its own set of early adopters, they are the people who start trends. Those are the people that are most likely the most important people to be reaching out to, to be including in your Beta, in your feedback loops, and considering in your product development and marketing plan. Running a fashion site? Who were the first guys to wear skinny jeans last year, the first girls to wear Spartacus sandals? Those are your early adopters. There are all sorts of people, within all sorts of markets, that have a propensity to try new things. According to Everett Rogers Diffusion of Innovation, which Moore modified in Crossing the Chasm, early adopters make up 13% of the total market. If you look at the process in a formulaic manner, this means that if the early adopter crowd you think you need doesn’t comprise 13% of your total market, then you’re most likely going after the wrong early adopters.

Breaking Out of The Echo Chamber
What I’m getting at here, is that there’s a little too much in-breeding going on. We exist inside of a very small echo chamber that to us seems like the entire world. We are a passionate group of people, to be sure. Everyone’s drinking each other’s Koolaid without thinking much about what’s going on outside of our little echo chamber. We’re all caught up in the hype, being lead by our passion for technology down a road that distances the products we create more and more from mass markets. In many cases I think we’re doing the opposite of crossing the chasm; the more we design for and market to those within the echo chamber, the further we get from products that will appeal to a mass market. Just as the innovation cycle has tightened as a result of technology, this cycle may very well become tighter and tighter as products and tools shift further and further to the left of the chasm. It’s my fear that if this cycle continues and compounds we will end up with products that will be unrecognizable to anyone outside of the echo chamber.

Further Reading
I’m not the only one with an opinion on this subject. There are some great posts out there discussing this issue. Here are some that I found recently:

Alex Iskold
Andrew Chen
Paul Grahm
Alexander van Elsas
Stacey Higginbotham
and
Robert Scoble

I am pretty heavily involved in the expanding startup community here in LA, and make my way up to the Bay area on a regular basis. I meet a lot of entrepreneurs and see new startups every day. Many of these companies, and the entrepreneurs who found them are deeply ensnared in the echo chamber, they’re all drinking each other’s Kool-aid. We’re talking about people who are not just at the top of the technographic ladder, they’ve gotten to the roof and are looking down on everyone else like they are a bunch of ants.

We forget that there is a whole world out there. Most people have never even heard of Twitter, Brightkite or many of the other services that we have become accustomed to using. It’s a given that eventually these sorts of tools will be adopted by a larger audience, but only when they add real value and only if we present them in a way in which the barriers to entry are minimal.

I believe that if an idea is ever going to make it out of the echo chamber and appeal to a mass market, a company needs to be mindful of the market it’s hoping to serve from the get-go. It’s not enough to have amazing technology. In the end, very few of these companies are technology companies; they are simply built on technology. These companies typically begin with an initial vision that the founder(s)/ CEO use as their road map for success. Having an amazing vision is a requirement for sure, and it’s a great starting point. But rarely is the original vision the best outcome. The initial vision is basically just one person’s idea of what they think will be cool, successful and profitable. Ultimately, it’s up to the market to determine what meets their criteria. The CEOs that I have admired the most are the ones who use that initial vision as a launch pad, and then listen to their market and iterate on their product, their brand and their marketing strategy to align themselves with their audience.

Photo Credit: 4pizon

It breaks my heart to see so many startups with amazing technology, brilliant minds, and visionary leadership, fail due to the fact that they never bothered thinking about the market their product is designed to serve, or worse, they never saw the bigger picture of how their technology could be applied to better serve a larger, or more profitable market.

Good example: private Beta strategies. It’s typical for most web-based startups to implement a private Beta strategy, they invite people in who, in exchange for having a sneak peak, will find the bugs in the site, offer their feedback on the experience overall, and in some cases blog about the product or otherwise leverage their social graph to spread some buzz on behalf of the new product. It’s a sound strategy in many ways. Here’s the problem: the typical private Beta invitation list is primarily key influencers within the echo chamber. Is this minute portion of the population really the target audience for most of these companies? If they are, then how do these companies ever plan on monetizing?

An entrepreneur came to me recently with a new online product. It took fantasy football, a very middle-America sort of activity and added components which socialized the process and made it more interesting and captivating for the user. He was concerned that his product might not appeal to his audience and asked me for my advice. He had been describing it to some of his non-tech friends as being like “the Digg of fantasy football.” To which his friends responded, “What’s Digg?” You see, we forget the rest of the country isn’t up here on the roof with us. My advice to him was to explain the product from the point-of-view of the market it was designed to serve. Don’t worry about middle-America grasping on to social media. Social media in another year or two will be non-existent, it will just be the Web, same as it’s always been, just the next evolution. We don’t need to confuse the masses by getting over their head with all of the technological mumbo jumbo. We just need to integrate the functionality into our products and services and make sure that there’s a good enough reason for doing so - that it adds value and fulfills the needs and desires of a market, the rest will fall into place. So rather than focusing on the technology, why not focus on how the product makes the user’s experience better.

And what about the marketing strategies these companies employ to let the world know about their product? It’s understandable that a company that’s based on technology would want some presence within the tech world. In the fund raising process it’s essential to be visible and generate buzz within the community so that the investors know you’re there. But beyond that, these companies need to look at themselves and decide: are we really a technology company? In most cases the answer is no. The answer might be: “We are a social shopping company” or “We are a search and discovery company” or “We are a music company” or “We are a dating company” or “We are a travel company” and so on. I see it over and over again, these companies and their agencies are so mired in the tech world, so caught up in the echo chamber, that they never break out, they stay inside and slowly whither away.

Who cares about the echo chamber? Who cares if they like your product or not? What every startup should be thinking about above all else is their market. How are you going to make money? Where is that money going to come from? And do everything in your power to make your product, your marketing communications, your brand, everything about your company, about one thing: appealing to and serving the market that is going to make you profitable.

What is interesting is that Facebook and the F8 platform were probably not on the radar of Mark Blecher, Hasbro’s general manager, or Hasbro’s licensing department. And if it was, no one wanted to lose their jobs by: a) risk licensing the game to someone just to see it fail or b) by suggesting that the licensing structure is outdated in the age the borderless, digital world of the internet. Not only would India be Mattel’s licensing territory, but having a foreign party license a product intended for use worldwide (including the US and Canada) would further complicate Scrabble’s outdated business model. The licensing structure was probably developed around packed goods only. This is the reason the new Scrabble application is only available to Facebook users in the US and Canada. With stamens like “Hasbro has always had the same two priorities…great playing authentic game for fans and the second is to protect our intellectual property” coming from Blecher, it is clear that Hasbro is hypocritical when it comes to user experience, bad at innovation, and only hungry for opportunities to use just like the RIAA.

Now that Scrabble’s popularity has been validated by the Scrabulous developers who went out and took the risk without approval or influence from Hasbro (while adding value to the Scrabble brand), Hasbro has new opportunities to license the game Electronic Arts for a Facebook version, an iPhone version, and now also to Subway for their Play Subway Scrabble contest.

If it takes “passionate pirates” to help a risk averse brand with a broken licensing structure to fully realize new opportunities, and you need to punish them for not following it, there is a problem. Bullying innovators and inconveniencing fans deserves no reward.

Streams are like our digital ghosts, wandering around the rolling landscapes of the internet. They are the imprint we leave behind as we preform our every action. Our thoughts and opinions exist in the form of RSS streams, from our blogs and micro-media sites like Twitter. The content we enjoy is represented by the streams emanating from social bookmarking and user-generated content sites like Digg, Delicious and YouTube. Our “real-world” activities are tracked by event and travel sites like Upcoming, Eventful and Dopplr. The music we listen to is ferried across the digital universe by services such as Last.fm, Pandora and Blip. There are streams floating around in cyberspace for almost every aspect of our personality, daily activities and character that you can imagine.

The analysis of these streams as they pertain to any individual (assuming they are active in the social space) can begin to paint a fairly accurate picture of someone. In some cases they can give a decent indication on one’s world-view. But what about when you separate these streams from the people they are linked to and look at them as a data type? Rather than looking at “Jackie’s digital ghost” we look at the aggregate data from the digital ghosts’ of everyone within a particular community, demographic, psychographic or affinity group. The uses for these streams is only recently being realized.

In addition to their potential as a data type, I also see streams as representations of the multi-dimensional conversations that happen within the social web. If we envision the social web as just that, a web, with each strand being comprised of a stream of information, with each connection point representing a place where these streams intersect: a connection to a friend, multiple people going to the same event, listening to the same song, bookmarking the same site, and so on. Where it begins to get interesting is when you start to see how people, businesses, brands and products can interact with these streams.

Streams can be created.
Streams can be monitored.
Streams can be fed.
Streams can be redirected.
Streams can be aggregated.
Streams can be analyzed and parsed.
Streams can be broadcast.
Streams can be categorized, sorted and promoted.

Brian Solis, Gregarious Narain and I have proposed a panel for SXSW that will address the above, and then some. It’s up on the panel picker right now. If this topic is of interest to you, please visit the site and vote for our panel:

A Discussion on the Pervasiveness of Streams

Presenters: Brian Solis, Jackie Peters, Gregarious Narain

Description
The emergence of streams in our digital lives is, in many ways, aligning our thinking in a way that we are only subtly appreciating. Streams represent the end of top-down broadcast and the beginning of a confluence of information and communication exchange patterns that function multi dimensionally.

When looking at the success and failure of brands in integrating themselves into the social web, one thing becomes clear: it’s more about anthropology, and sociology than anything else. I’ve blogged about this topic before from a slightly different angle. People often refer to their “digital lives” and this term is not to be taken lightly. The social web is where people hang out online. There are tribes, cultures, languages, mores and milieus. These digital cultures are as unique and varied as the cultures that exist in the “real world.” Facebook for example has a different set of mores than MySpace. And within MySpace exist many cultures and tribes, all with their own unique set of accepted behavior. Many failed attempts by brands to “crack the social nut” have failed or backfired because they are engineered by people who are foreign to these cultures and who haven’t taken the time to study them properly.

A few years ago McDonald’s decided to open up shop in India, a country in which the cow is sacred. McDonald’s took the time to get to know the culture they were serving so that they could successfully enter the market. This article from BusinessWeek has more details, here’s an excerpt:

McDonald’s dispensed with its most prominent ingredient in order to respect, and to please, its Indian customers. Many Indians eat no beef or pork, or any meat at all. According to Vikram Bakshi, managing director of McDonald’s India North, it was necessary to adapt the company’s offerings while keeping the core brand values consistent across cultures.

“The menu has evolved over the years as a result of constant innovation and our customers’ needs,” says Bakshi. “Local creations like McAloo Tikki Burger, Curry Pans, Wraps Pizza McPuff, and McVeggie are established departures from what we had in our introductory restaurant offerings.

“Today 70 percent of our menu is ‘Indianized’, and the McAloo Tikki burger is our highest selling product. While the menu may be different in some ways, the McDonald’s experience around the world is consistent, offering quality, great service, cleanliness, and value.”

In addition to adjusting their product offering, McDonald’s also had to consider the manner in which it marketed itself to a new culture. Many things that are acceptable in the US are considered offensive in other areas of the world. The same can be said for different cultures on the social web. For example: on MySpace it’s perfectly acceptable to “friend” someone you don’t know, it’s not considered SPAM by most, it’s just that kind of environment. Facebook, on the other hand is another story, people are much more concerned with truly knowing someone before they add them as a friend. On MySpace it’s also perfectly acceptable to have a profile for an entity, not so on Facebook, entities on Facebook need to be represented by groups, pages or applications. Culture on Twitter is different from culture on Last.fm, which is different from the culture on Digg and so on. Each one of these communities has it’s own culture, it’s own style of communication and it’s own etiquette.

The only way to know it is to live it, or to study it as an anthropologist would study a foreign culture, or preferably both. Just as an anthropologist, no matter how long they study a particular culture, will never be truly a part of that culture, the same can be said for those of us who view the social web from a purely scientific point of view. The science, and the study of the social web can provide useful quantitative data, but the magic lies in the alignment of qualitative and quantitative analysis to provide a complete picture of the culture.

Breaking it Down

• Remember that the social web is not a broadcast medium:
• Listen
• Observe
• Live in the space you wish to enter before you go barging in
• Respect the culture you are attempting to integrate into
• Learn the language
• Learn what’s socially acceptable
• Don’t try to run a campaign
• Participate in a community

In my own business, I find it difficult to describe what we do in a word or two. When my partner and I started the company, we started it based on the idea of creating a two-way communication stream between a brand and it’s audience (the people formerly known as the audience.) That was 7 1/2 years ago. The social web has greatly impacted how we function as a company, and allows us to give new meaning to that original vision.

People in the industry have coined several terms to attempt to suggest the relationship between the social web and the world of marketing. Social Media Marketing is one, Conversational Marketing is another. As Brian Solis points out, these terms are flawed.

The problem with Social Media Marketing and Conversational Marketing as classifiers is that both still involve the word “marketing.” It doesn’t imply authenticity and the two-way process of listening, internalizing, and responding. Each is complementary to traditional marketing, but their intent, practice, and metrics are different. And, the socialization of communications is also unique.

-Brian Solis

This leaves the question: “What is the proper qualifier?” How do we define the act of participating in the social web on behalf of a brand? Up to this point, various factions within marcom have been attempting to include “social” within their particular discipline - PR, marketing, advertising, search, customer service, HR and product development have all attempted to adopt some or all aspects of the social web and fit them in somehow.

I would like to posit the idea that rather than trying to fit a round peg into a square hole, we need to carve out a new hole. The term I am proposing we use for this is Social Communications. Social Communications as a category touches branding, PR, marketing, WOM, customer service, product development, mobile marketing, SEO and many other aspects of a brand’s communications strategy. It is the art of “socializing” these processes.

On it’s own, communications does not necessarily imply a two-way, or a multi-dimensional stream. Communication can be, and historically largely has been, broadcast - it’s a one-way stream of information. Social media represents a disruption to the world of traditional marketing communications. I’ve talked before about the fact that the social web represents the first time in the history of communication that no one is in control, it’s not top-down. The social web requires that communication be two-way at a minimum, but optimally this communication will be multi-dimensional, echoing out in many directions at once, being absorbed, processed, influenced, shared and interacted with.

Social Communications represents the act of socializing communications. Whatever we call it in the end, I believe this category deserves it’s own classification and it’s own field of study. I don’t claim to have all of the answers, my goal in writing this post is to begin a dialogue that can be used as the foundation of future discussions on the topic.

As connected as we all are, it’s sometimes a challenge to get organized amidst all of the clutter. I think it’s vital at this juncture to have a central support network for those of us involved in Social Media to share resources and ideas, build community and contribute to establishing best practices and standards in the area. The Social Media Club is a part of this support network, alongside other organizations and standards efforts including Creative Commons, Microformats, Data Portability, OpenID, the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), the International Association for Business Communicators (IABC) and many others.

The new interim board has been charted to address several key organizational and strategic deliverables, including development of membership goals, acceleration of local chapter development, increase in adoption of industry standards and implementation of a new legal structure to enhance future growth.

The newly named/appointed members of the interim board are leading social media analysts, bloggers and business leaders, and are as follows:

• Lee Aase - Social Media University, Global
• Rohit Bhargava - Influential Marketing Blog and Personality Not Included
• Richard Binhammer - RichardatDell
• Michael Brito - Britopian and Conversations Matter
• Chris Brogan - ChrisBrogan.com
• Mike Chapman - Austin Social Media Club and Every Dot Connects
• Megan Cole - MeganCole.org
• Alex de Carvalho - alexdc.org and Social Object
• Todd Defren - SHIFT Communications and www.pr-squared.com
• Serena Ehrlich - Business Wire
• Jason Falls - Social Media Explorer
• Maggie Fox - Social Media Group
• Jon Gatrell - spatiallyrelevant.org
• Howard Greenstein - HowardGreenstein.com
• Francine Hardaway - Stealthmode
• Josh Hallett - Hyku
• Annie Heckenberger - pikpr.blogspot.com and redspurs.com
• Chuck Hester - iContact
• Chris Heuer - ChrisHeuer.com
• Sherry Heyl - Mind Blogging
• Tara Hunt - HorsePigCow
• Bill Johnston - Forum One Networks Forum and Online Community Report
• Jennifer McClure - Society for New Communications Research
• Mike McGrath - Dogpatch Dispatch
• Jake McKee - CommunityGuy.com and Ant’s Eye View
• Gregory Narain - SocialTwister
• Lee Odden - Online Marketing Blog and TopRank
• Erica OGrady - ReinventingErica.com and Peanut Butter Media
• Jeremiah Owyang - Web Strategist
• David Parmet - Marketing Begins At Home, LLC and PerkettPR
• Jackie Peters - heavyBlog
• Pierre-Yves Platini - Yoono
• Douglas Pollei - Pollei.com
• Connie Reece - Every Dot Connects and Austin Social Media Club
• Chris Saad - ChrisSaad.com
• Andy Sernovitz - Word of Mouth Marketing and GasPedal
• Brian Solis - PR2.0
• J.J. Toothman - jjtoothman.net and Red Pill
• Todd Van Hoosear - Tech PR Gems
• Des Walsh - Des Walsh dot Com
• Kristie Wells - KristieWells.com

About the Social Media Club
The Social Media Club centers on the sharing of best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy with a focus on the emerging discipline of Social Media. The Social Media Club brings together journalists, publishers, communication professionals, artists, amateur media creators, citizen journalists, teachers, students, tool makers, and other interested collaborators who create and consume media and have an interest in seeing the industry improve and evolve. The Social Media Club provides a forum for diverse groups and individuals to discover, connect, share and learn about social media and to play a role in its future evolution.

To find out more about the opportunities in social media and connect with other practitioners, visit: http://www.socialmediaclub.org

Brands on the Social Web
Let’s think of this in terms of brand, of product, of company, and of the people who in one way or another stand behind those things. I’ve blogged before about brand, and how the social web has altered the way that brands are built; it’s no longer singularly a top-down phenomenon, brands are defined and built by people via association, communication, recommendation and declaration. Word of mouth is nothing new, but the social web has provided an infrastructure through which word of mouth travels infinitely faster and farther than ever before. In order to take advantage of this, companies and organizations need to begin to redefine the way they perceive the structure and definition of their brand. The social web has become about people interacting with people. People don’t interact with companies.

So how do you market in this environment?
I think for one, we have to look at how marketing needs to evolve within the social web. It’s got to be one part PR, one part branding, and one part something totally new. In fact, I think we need a new term for it. Is there a place for advertising on the social web? Yes and no. I’m not totally anti-ad, I’m just anti- ineffective ad. I think the best use of advertising in terms of the social web is to drive awareness of the truly social initiatives that emanate from a brand.

There are five strategic pillars that I have identified to marketing successfully on the social web. I think to be successful all five need to be considered:

[edit: 6/23 - gave this some more thought and made a couple of edits, re-ordered items below]

1. Listen
You can gain valuable insights by listening to conversations that occur on the web about your brand. By using social media monitoring tools, or contracting with an outside firm to help with the process you can gather data that far exceeds market research and surveys. You can tap into sentiment, semantics and context. Hear not only what people are saying, but whom they are saying it to and why. This is all information that you can use to help guide everything from product development to a social media marketing strategy that will resonate with your audience.

2. People interact with people, where are your people?
The social web is about interpersonal relationships and interactions. People are out there having conversations about your brand. Where is your voice in all of these conversations? Who within your company is out there actively engaging in conversations with people? What are they saying? You can use a combination of social media monitoring tools and good old human poking around to pick up on the majority of these conversations. These conversations are opportunities, open invitations for you to interact with the people you value most; your customers. As far as I’m concerned every company should have either a dedicated internal resource or work with an outside firm to monitor conversations and identify opportunities to participate.

3. Initiate the conversation and invite people to join in.
You don’t just need to go out and find conversations, you can invite them to come to you. In the age of conversation, blogs can do wonders to allow your company’s personality to shine through, establish a channel for PR and they have the additional benefit of doing wonders for natural search engine results. The people who take the time to read your blog are also the ones most likely to share it!

4. Give your content “social lube.”
The social web is about conversations and it’s also about sharing. Sharing is a natural by-product of conversation. It’s the logical next step. You can encourage people to share your content by giving them access to the tools they use to do so directly from your content. They still, of course have to decide if they like it enough to pass on, but once that decision is made, it makes sense to remove as many hurdles as possible. This means adding social bookmarking links to sites like digg and del.icio.us and making sure videos and other multimedia content are easily shared by including links to embed and share them. Make it effortless!

5. Allow your brand to act as a conduit; place it a the crux for interactions between people online.
Examples of this type of marketing include social networking applications, community sites, UGC submission sites, mashup and remix type tools, discovery and sharing platforms. Allowing people to preform the interactions they naturally tend to engage in via your brand just makes sense. And offering something unique and relevant that they don’t get elsewhere adds value for the user.

Above all else, in all of this, be open and transparent.

I’m planning a follow up post with examples of companies who have demonstrated success using the five approaches outlined in this post. I’d like to get feedback from you on brands that are thriving on the social web and ones that have tanked. I will measure their success against their approach and let you know what the result is. Let me know which brands you’d like to see included.

In July of ‘07,Dave Morgan blogged about a study that he conducted with AOL on ad clicking behavior.

Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.

Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.

Eye tracking and usability research has indicated that not only are banner ads not clicked, they’re not even noticed, a term dubbed “banner ad blindness,” so they apparently don’t even count for much in the branding department.

If a marketer determines that advertising is an integral part of their online marketing plan, and often they do, there are several formats and technologies that are capable of outperforming traditional display ads - by a lot - why aren’t more people using them? Video ads for instance. Video ads are seeing anywhere from 10 - 20X CTRs over traditional display ads. They are also demonstrating recall of up to 4X over television ads. Why? Well, look at the graphic above, when a video ad plays the viewers attention is already focused on the content that was previously occupying that space. There are also rich-media banner ads that in addition to rich media content have the feature sets that make it possible for users to share and embed content directly from the ad.

So here’s my question: why is everyone still dumping money into banner ads? I have some theories:

Old-school agencies do not understand how the web has evolved and cling to what they know
I remember when I was designing websites back pre-bubble 1.0. I started my career in the digital space, beginning with programming, leading into design and multimedia. I remember interfacing with agency designers and creative directors that all moved from print work to the internet. As a result, they were creating incredibly static, print-like websites. They were so used to their way of doing things that that they couldn’t fathom the possibilities that were now possible with the web, they weren’t excited about it.

I think the same can be said of display ads and ad placement. They aren’t taking advantage of the environment they exist in.

Marketing managers are afraid to take risks
Banner ads are accepted and safe (even though they clearly aren’t effective - WTF?) But no one is going to get fired for running a banner ad campaign. I will posit this: At this point, it is a much bigger risk to continue along the same path than it is to try something new

There is a shortage of people in the marketing world who truly understand the social web
I am willing to bet, and I’d love to know if anyone has a study, that there is a direct correlation between the decline in display ad impact and the evolution of the social web. People don’t need ads any more, they have each other. So how can brands remain relevant in this environment? I believe that there needs to be a quantum shift in thinking in terms of online marketing. Marketing and advertising are not the same thing. Advertising is a company-out model, the social web is built on a consumer-in model. They just don’t mix. Marketing needs to include everything from product development to customer service to listening to and participating in conversations. In the evolution of the web, there is a new tool set. First there was browse, then there was search, now it’s all about “do.” For a brand, that means placing your content, your people, your insights and your products at the crux of those interactions. Marketing on the social web also means giving people (customers, fans, advocates and employees) the tools that make it easy for them to become a voice for your brand online.

Clients are used to metrics and continue to cling to them (even if they totally blow)
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in meetings and the subject of metrics comes up. There are currently several companies who offer metrics for the social web, we are working with a couple of them. They provide a decent overall picture, but still fall short in that they aren’t able to actually get into the networks themselves and pick up on conversations, which is usually where the majority of the conversations are happening. But at least I have some nice charts and graphs to show my clients, all with numbers attached and we can measure the impact of certain activities. Admittedly, as an industry we need to do better in this area, and I’m sure technology will improve. But I also think there needs to be a shift in expectations. Marketers are so used to receiving these types of metrics from the web, being able to calculate to the penny CTR, CPA, ROI, etc. But how do you measure CTR on a billboard? Or a magazine ad? Or a press release? You can’t. And yet they are all still executed by marketers on a regular basis because it’s accepted that these are effective means of reaching people.

But still, I really don’t get it.

Here’s the pitch from the event web site:
“Hollywood and content producers are faced with a Hobson’s Choice: Make your content available to all for free online - and potentially see your core business cannibalized. Or hold onto copyrighted content tightly…and watch as an amoral generation of youngsters steals it.”

Is it really that dire? I saw an awful lot of head-scratching going on. No one seems to know quite what to do about this whole “social media thing.” Charlene Li gave a great presentation on social media and groundswell, a primer I think many in the room desperately needed. Thanks Charlene!

Waiting for a Hit
The main theme I kept hearing over and over again from many of the industry panelists was that they are still waiting, or trying to figure out a formula for, a hit to happen online. Sandy Grushow of Filmaka stated that the “Seinfeld of the Internet” is going to change everything. I disagree, I think it’s about a conglomerate of niche content. Both the music and film industries are built around hits. It’s their whole business model. This is where the problem starts. The social web is not a hit-making environment. For the first time ever in the history of media, no one is in control. The democratization of content on the social web has put the user at the helm. This means there are no hits, because everybody has different preferences and tastes and there’s an exponential amount of content in just about any format you can think of for them to choose from. People can also make decisions based on what their trusted network of friends and colleagues like and recommend versus an advertisement.

Some Encouraging Tidbits
Chris Stephenson, GM of Global Marketing for the Zune seemed to have some interesting insights. Stephenson says the Zune strategy is to “turn the pirate into the promoter.” I think that’s a step in the right direction. According to York Baur from Zango last year 42% of total ad spend online was spent on search, while search only represented 1.5% of page views. Why, because search works, it’s about context, and advertising mirroring content. Early results in video advertising are encouraging, garnering significantly higher CTRs than banner ads, I think due to this very reason, context and relevance in relation to the main content. Earlier in the day Jarvis Mak of Media Contacts gave a great presentation of the research Media Contacts conducted through ComScore. The figure that stood out to me is that online video consumption grew 17% from Jan 07 to Dec 07.

On the Social Web Lots of Small = BIG
I think the social web can, and should, be looked a as an opportunity. Content for the web can be produced at a lower cost and brought to market more rapidly. There’s less risk involved because the cost to entry is so much lower. Content can be monetized in many ways: it can be leveraged to drive viewership and purchase in the form of branded entertainment, some are starting to see real ad revenue on video properties, and it can be monetized as subscription or pay per view/download. There are also opportunities for monetization that remain unexplored or underutilized. What will amount to a hit online is a series of smaller successes. And these smaller successes ultimately have the power to be much more impactful because they will appeal to a specific group of dedicated fans and evangelists. If you’re new to the space and want a quick and entertaining primer, check out the “Social Media in Plain English” video on YouTube.

There are already plenty of great posts out there about what Radiohead has been up to. As well as NIN.

And Mashable has an amazing list of 90+ online music and audio sites.

What I want to discuss here is the effect of all of this stuff on us as individuals and the effect it’s had, or could potentially have in the music business.

Music Discovery
Let’s start with the music discovery. Prior to the social web our options for discovering new music were limited. There was the radio, and the friends and family that we saw on a regular basis. People who were serious audiophiles knew the right record stores to go to, the right clubs to check out emerging artists, but your average Joe did not have access, or care enough about it to go out of their way to find it. The social web has allowed everyone to share, rate, recommend, discover and exchange music. The social web is a few to few environment; friends are influenced by friends more than anything else.

Music discovery on the web happens in a variety of ways:

Browsing - users browse through music based on the genre and artists they like
Stumbling - users “stumble” down paths based on behavioral targeting “people who liked X also liked Y”
Peer to Peer - users can send and receive recommendations to each other
Social groupings - your friends liked X

Live Performances
Then there’s the impact social media has had on the discovery process in terms of live performances. With sites like Upcoming.org and Last.fm users can see which shows their friends are going to, and which ones they might like based on their musical tastes. You can figure out what everyone is doing, listen to the music online if you’ve never heard it before, and buy a ticket.

Interactivity and Collaboration
How about the way we interact with music? It used to be that we purchased an album, maybe made mix tapes or CDs and that was about it. Services like Muxtape allow users to make online mix tapes of their favorite songs and share them. Most social music sites are based on play lists that users can create and share with their friends. Radiohead took it one step further with the release of their single “Nude” in which they allowed users to purchase the tracks separately, make their own remix, upload it to radioheadremix.com and share with their friends. This was brilliant on Radiohead’s part, they not only sold each of the tracks for .99 on iTunes, increasing the revenue from the single, they engaged their audience in a relevant way, leveraged them to drive traffic to the site, and got an incredible amount of coverage from news organizations and blogs. People were participating with the Radiohead brand. They were spending their time carefully crafting remixes and rallying their friends to vote for them on the website. I love this concept of including your fans in the creation and improvement of your art and music. User-generated contests are a great way to build momentum and engage with fans.

Purchase
This all then leads to music purchase. Online purchases are influenced by friends and peers more than anything else, by a large margin. That’s what makes social media so pivotal given the surge in digital downloads. Apple just announced that iTunes is now the number one music retailer in the US, with 19% of music sales occurring there. Amazon.com accounts for another 6% (I’m surprised it’s that high) and then you’ve got all of the smaller guys, leading to an overall paid digital download business that accounts for 30% of all music sold.

Take a look at this recent study by Enders Analysis:

Now What?
The music industry doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with this. If the projections are right, though digital purchases will continue to climb, they will not entirely make up for the loss of physical album sales. This is largely due to the fact that users tend to buy one or two songs rather than a whole album, and also availability of free music.

And yet, it’s a phenomenon that is obviously going to continue to grow and can’t be ignored. What I don’t understand is why more labels and artists aren’t jumping in with both feet and harnessing the power of the social web. Use word of mouth and social to build a community around the artist. Make up for the losses by creating new or modified revenue streams that may well surpass the old model. Limited edition high-ticket collectors’ items for example, live performances, even live performances streamed into multiple locations at once where people can interact with each other from location to location and even interact with the artist. What about ad revenue from online video? It’s not a huge profit center yet, but it’s getting there. Why not wrap that into user-generated contests? Have users create videos, upload them, send their friends to the videos to vote for them, run ads on the videos that generate revenue for the artist while all along building social buzz, word of mouth and achieving a viral effect.

There’s also the fact that digital distribution means lower costs in terms of shelf space, physical goods and distribution. Then there’s warehousing, shipping, speed to market, all expenses that will decrease as digital distribution increases. Also, positioning music to take advantage of natural word of mouth is less costly than traditional advertising and marketing, and often much more effective. So perhaps the cost-savings of adopting an online social music model will help offset the decrease in revenue from album sales.

The sooner the music industry stops trying to cling to old models that don’t work and starts getting imaginative about the possibilities the better. I’m sure there are lots of people who know way more about this than I do, I’d love your feedback, please comment.

Source: Nielson

And it’s only getting bigger, gathering critical mass, groundswell is reaching groundswell. (That sort of makes sense if you think about it for a minute.) So what to do about it? How do you keep control over your brand? Short answer: you can’t! But, here’s what you can do:

• Provide a truly superior product or service
• Provide great customer service. I think in the age of the social web, customer service needs to be a part of your marketing plan.
• Listen to your audience, what are they saying about your brand?
• Respond to your audience, participate in the conversations they are having, show them you are listening.
• Give them a good story to tell, and the tools to share it.

Give them a story to tell

I just got back from the Under the Radar Social Media and Entertainment conference on the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, CA. The conference series has been put on by Deal Maker Media since 2005. Thirty six startups were given an opportunity to present their companies to a panel of judges and an audience of peers, potential investors and companies interested in acquisitions.

Deal Maker did an amazing job putting the conference together. There was a quality group of attendees, judges that ranged from Charlene Li to Kara Swisher to Robert Scoble. For a full list of presenting companies and judges see the Under the Radar blog.

There seemed to be basically three kinds of companies at Under the Radar, and in the social space in general; ones that add to the noise, ones that insert themselves into the noise and ones that are attempting to consolidate and quiet the noise.

I have lately been thinking of the social web in terms of our physical universe. Let’s equate the social web, or Web 2.0, with the big bang. Suddenly the web went from being fairly dormant to exploding out into space. The “socialverse” has been expanding rapidly ever since. The proliferation of content and communication is immense. In my vision of the future of the social web, I don’t see all of these sites, all of this chatter going away, just being accessed in different ways, more to come on that later. There will still be a need for things like personal blogs, company blogs, niche social networks and various social tools, especially if they fill a need for a particular audience. Enter sites like Nesting. Nesting solves problems for busy families; it includes social networking and organizational tools for parents and organizations. Parents can do everything from schedule a play date to set up SMS reminders for dentists appointments to order prints of their favorite family photos right from Nesting.com.

Then you have the companies who are doing their best to embed themselves in what exists all ready. Let’s look at them as matter. They exist all over the place and follow the tide of the expansion and contraction of the socialverse. A great example of a company who is doing this well is MyTopia and their Real-time Universal Gaming System (RUGS.) It allows users, developers and advertisers to participate with existing communities of people on major social networks like Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and hi5, with support for additional sites in the works. For instance, MyTopians on Bebo can play games with other MyTopians on Facebook in realtime. RUGS, the platform behind MyTopia, allows developers to automatically and instantly deploy content across the entire RUGS network. Galia Ben-Artzi, co-founder of MyTopia eloquently summed it up when she said “MyTopians play together in harmony across all social networks with gaming as their common language.”

Some physicist believe that the universe at some point will stretch to it’s max and like so many rubber bands everything will once again contract until it once again reaches Planck density, resulting in a “big crunch.” That, in fact, the universe does this in a cyclical manner and always has and always will. With many experiencing “social media fatigue” and new social networks and tools being released everyday it seems like a socialverse big crunch is imminent. But how will this look? The problem I see at the moment is that too many companies are attempting to be aggregators. Everyone wants to be that one place where we all go to check, update and maintain our networks. They are just adding to the clutter. What’s next? Aggregators to aggregate the aggregators? Some companies do seem to be adding real value and are focusing on solving the overload problem in unique and inventive ways. One such company that presented at Under the Radar was ffwd. Patrick Koppula, CEO, formerly of iLike set the stage by supplying us with an overview of his vision of the future of television and online video. Patrick believes that in the future, television and online video will merge. The set top box will no longer be 500 channels but instead will be a sea of 500,000 sources of video. I am inclined to agree. Certainly at the moment we are already there with the internet. Ffwd uses semantics, behavioral targeting and socialization to quiet the chatter and deliver video to users that they are likely to enjoy and appreciate in the form of customized channels, making watching video online more like channel surfing. The technology works across multiple screens, with current support for the web, the Wii and mobile devices.

It’s an interesting space-time! I love watching the socialverse unfold, expand and collapse back in on itself, most likely a pattern that will sustain itself in a cyclical manner, with exciting new technologies and platforms emerging in each incarnation. Congrats also to the winners at Under the Radar, to see a full list click here.

Register to attend on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/730400/

Join the Social Media Club: http://socialmediaclub.org

Email me for more info: jackie \at\ heavybagmedia \dot\ com

Let’s get one thing straight: no one can make a viral video. I love it when a client asks me to create a viral video for them. There’s no such thing. I can create a video that has the right characteristics to go viral, and I can make it easy to share and introduce it to the right audience, but then there’s some magic that has to happen. It’s got to catch on. There are several things you can do to help it catch on and that’s what I will focus on in this post. Let’s take a look at what we can do to encourage the viral spreading of content.

Content is King
The main ingredient for success is content that will engage the people you are trying to reach. For content to engage, it’s got to be entertaining, or educational, and it’s got to trigger an emotional response from the viewer. Tim Street, creator of French Maid TV believes firmly that “In order for a video to go viral it needs to move two or more emotions.”

Engaging also involves knowing your audience and what they are willing to devote their attention to. Gregg Spiridellis filled me in on the story behind “This Land” the cornerstone for JibJab’s continued success. Gregg and his brother Evan had been running JibJab since 1999. They created their first hit in 2000 with a Bush/Gore rap battle that streamed 5 million times, which is successful even by today’s standards, and seriously impressive when you think about the total online population and proliferation of broadband at that time. In 2004 JibJab released “This Land” and things really took off for them. He mentioned the fact that an election is the biggest new story in the US, and you can plan for it in advance, you know it’s going to happen. It’s also a topic that many people are passionate about. Gregg also makes sure to note that from the get go they consistently remained as connected to their audience as possible, building an email list of 130,000 registered members in the process. 130,000 people who were loyal enough to the brand to register. Those 130,000 brand loyalists sparked a chain reaction that ended with 80 million streams, appearances on the Tonight Show and continued success to follow. Gregg also believes firmly that in order to continue to be successful you can’t just be a one-trick-pony. You need to continue to innovate, he says “you can never stand still.” JibJab has gone on to produce new and innovative content, including their “Starting You” series which lets users put themselves into the videos.

Another great example of awesome content is Blendtec’s “Will It Blend” videos. The story behind the videos is the stuff legends are made of. I wrote a guest post for Mashable on the subject. Here’s an excerpt, click here for the full story.

George [Wright, Marketing Direct at Blendtec] was smart enough to recognize this gem and turned it into the widely acclaimed “Will It Blend” series of videos. He simply unveiled the face that the company had all along. The videos were distributed online and Blentec employees reached out to their personal networks to let them know. Word spread and “Will It Blend” became a viral phenomenon, garnering of 100 million views in total. Blendtec’s marketing now serves as a profit center for the company, the videos have made over $50,000 in ad revenue from Revver.

Define Success
Another thing to take into consideration is, it’s not just about number of views, but who’s watching. I often say that I would rather be addressing 100 people who I knew were interested in what I have to say, than 1,000 people who may or may not be. I’ll give you an example: I work with a major technology company, they wanted to “do a viral video” that Web 2.0 startups would respond to. They pointed out several videos on YouTube that were getting 500,000 to 1,000,000 views. I then asked them how big their audience was. They estimated there might be 10,000 Web 2.0 startups in the US. Assuming we needed at least five people in each of those companies to watch the video, that’s 50,000 views. But it’s 50,000 of the right views. And simply tossing a video up on YouTube was not going to guarantee that the right people saw it. Instead, we needed to come up with a distribution strategy for the video that would reach THOSE 50,000 people. So it’s not necessarily all about huge numbers. In many cases it’s more about reaching the right people. Another great example of this is South Park. If you aren’t familiar with the story, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of South Park made their first video, Jesus vs. Santa and sent it as a VHS Christmas card to a few studio execs. Before they knew it, the execs had made copies of the VHS tape and sent it to their friends, their friends sent it to their friends and so on. Next thing they knew, they were in production for South Park. They presented content that was so engaging and entertaining that people were willing to go through all of that trouble just to pass it on. How many people saw it? Maybe 200, 300? But it was the RIGHT 2 or 3 hundred people.

Remove Hurdles and Wax the Lanes
The recipe so far: killer content that appeals to your audience, a clear idea about who your audience is and how to reach them, and a clear definition of success. There’s only one thing left to do: make it easy to share. Everything you do should have sharing links to any service that your audience might be using to propagate information. And these days there are a lot of them. Include embed tags, links to social bookmarking sites, social networks, micro-blogging sites and life streaming sites like: StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed and blogs such as Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad. Oh, and don’t forget good old email! I like to use ShareThis, an example of which is at the bottom of this post, but there are several services out there.

To summarize: start with KILLER content, know your audience, define success and make it easy to share! (Oh, and the examples cited here are videos, but much of this holds true for other forms of content as well.)

If you’ve got more examples of viral success stories, and some insights into what makes them successful I’d love to hear it, please drop me a comment.

…We realize the power of citizen reporters, word of mouth, media sharing, transparency and interaction. We have the tools, we have the stats, we have the case studies, we know how to develop effective strategies.

Our job now is two-fold: make sure the fakers who claim they get it, but really don’t, don’t screw things up, and educate clients, potential clients and our peers so they are able to make intelligent decisions in selecting an agency and implementing a social media strategy…

I’m here at day two of the Executing Social Media conference in Pasadena, CA. Blogger, PR stuntman, and social media maven Peter Shankman gave a very energetic keynote on how the social web is changing the way we do business and make money. Peter is CEO of The Geek Factory, Inc. and has recently launched Help A Reporter Out (HARO,) a service that helps journalists connect with sources.

Peter prefaced his entire presentation by telling us the problem with predictions; he played a short clip from the movie Back to the Future 2, which was released in 1987. According to the film, in 2010 we would have a fax machine in every room - the Internet hadn’t proliferated yet and fax machines were what the writers could envision.

That out of the way, Peter went on to share with us a few predictions he has about the future in regards to social media and technology. Peter sees an information overload starting to occur. There are too many channels, tools and platforms out there. He sees a convergence into one tool that helps you manage your entire network from any device at any time and automates the process for you. He cites FriendFeed and Socialthing as an early entrées into the space.

But the future that Peter predicts includes not just life streaming, but life tracking, life sharing, and network-building. He builds a mental image for us: you are a business traveler leaving for a trip, as you enter the airport, your Bluetooth device signals a computer which prints your ticket and it’s ready for you when you arrive. Your status is automatically u