The best thing about staring at web data all day is that I get to see trends as they emerge. Usually it’s just little shifts in the drift and flow of online dialog. But sometimes I get a front-row seat to a tectonic change that points toward some unexpected and emerging truth. A clear view of a reality that’s just beginning to unfold.

I had one of those experiences recently working on a project for Creative Labs. Creative is doing a lot of exploration in social marketing, and one of the areas of interest was digging into the phenomenon of Mommy Bloggers. If you’re not familiar with the trend, blogs written by moms reached a tipping point a couple of years ago and have grown to be a significant market influence.

As part of our research into online dialog and influence, we spent a lot of time looking at mommy blogs and daddy blogs, and variations on the content they create, the audiences they attract and the communities they develop. All very interesting stuff that would fill a good marketing brief. But the most interesting insight was a simple observation about the nature of mommy and daddy blogs. Moms are writing a lot about consumer gadgets, Web 2.0 and tech, while dads are writing a lot about changing diapers and teething. It’s a striking role reversal that’s fascinating to observe.

It’s not hard to speculate about what’s going on. Men have had hundreds of sources to learn about gadgets and tech for decades, but few to share about how to be a good dad, while the opposite is true for women. Women have unlimited opportunities to compare notes with their peers about parenting, but where can they connect with other moms about new technology? In the world of mainstream media, we accepted these cultural boundaries for which there was apparently little interest in crossing. But the mommy and daddy blogs demonstrate there is a huge pent-up audience for gadget moms and diaper dads that mainstream media never found a reason to serve. Traffic on these blogs is now a full blown phenomena.

Beyond any commercial fascination, there’s a profound social implication. The phenomenon puts a stark lie to the notion that mainstream media simply reflects social values and expectations, and suggests instead that mainstream media has played a central role in sustaining traditional values and expectations–if through no other means than projecting the world view of the tiny minority that has controlled media for the past 100 years, or whatever world view they could exploit for advertising dollars. Clearly they never conceived of the kind of content that would emerge when you unleash media and let ordinary moms and dads, or any other constituency, loose on the world to talk about whatever really interests them.

It’s equally clear that mainstream media is not only coming apart at the seams as a financial model, but its peculiar power over the stories we accept about our lives is quickly being rendered impotent. As media is democratized, ordinary people are gravitating to the stories that resonate with their lives–and those stories emerge in a more authentic and compelling way when they emerge from a shared interest among a group of like-minded people rather than being projected from a board room focused on a demographic chart.

In a very real sense, we’re returning to stories told around a fire after a lifetime of only listening to stories told from a stage. And if the content driving traffic on mommy and daddy blogs is any indication, it’s going to be a radical shift in the way we see ourselves.

Over the past few months I’ve been analyzing social media marketing data produced by our alter-ego/partner SocialRep. One of the industries SocialRep tracks is consumer electronics, which includes endless sub-sectors where pitched battles for the hearts and minds of consumers play out every day. Many companies in this industry have become savvy about social media–few industries attract more online dialog than electronic gadgets–but the tactics companies use to integrate social media with traditional marketing programs varies widely.

One of the more interesting battles has been playing out in the pocket video market, where the Flip made a splash three years ago introducing a tiny video cam with no tape, just memory, and they dominated the competitive share of voice in online dialog for that sector ever since. What made this remarkable was that Flip’s maker, PureDigital, was an upstart, and they caught the industry heavy-weights flat-footed. Sony, JVC, RCA and other household brands were slow to respond until the brush fire started by PureDigital became a serious sector of the video market.

If it looked like the Flip came out of nowhere, in a way it did. PureDigital had been making cheap disposable video cameras for sale in CVS Pharmacy, and they anticipated market demand for a reusable version–a cheap video camera that would slip in your pocket. At the time, interest in YouTube was exploding, but the big handycam players were still focused on big and expensive cameras–at least, big and expensive compared to the Flip pocket cam. The tradeoff with pocket cams, of course, is quality; a tiny camera forces lots of compromises. But if you’re creating short video for sharing online, you can afford a drop in quality that no one will notice on the Web. And the opportunity to capture candid moments they’d never haul out a standard video camera to film caught the imagination of web-savvy consumers.

In time, competitors joined the fray. Creative Labs, the prolific engineers that produced the Sound Blaster and essentially invented MP3 players, outdid the Flip with a smaller camera called the Vado that went head-to-head on features and quality. Kodak appeared with their own version, the zi6, and took an interesting niche approach by creating a ruggedized version targeting the travel market. Sony came out with the Webbie, and Samsung and RCA weighed in as well.

So now you have the typical consumer electronics market dynamic: a number of players, each kicking and scratching for a foothold based on features and price. With each successive release of an updated model–which seems to be at a pace averaging two releases per company, per year–the competitors up the ante in one way or another. One company comes out with an 8GB camera, another comes out with a higher quality lens. In this way, the market slowly ratchets forward, with each competitor leveraging an incremental advance on features, quality or price. It’s a Kabuki dance that plays out the same away all across the industry. That is, until now.

If you carefully track the social media conversations about pocket video cameras, you eventually wind up with a comprehensive list of all the features people care about. Not everyone cares about the same features–some want better audio features, some want better editing software, some want higher video resolution–and the wish extends down to special features that vary among the different categories of users and their intended applications for the camera. As each new release of a product comes to market, you can track which features get checked off with a cheer, or with a groan when one contingent’s favored feature doesn’t get upgraded. This is one of the great promises of social media–listening to consumers to plan and build better products.

It turns out, Kodak was listening as well. Kodak’s CMO, Jeff Hayzlett, has been both celebrated and bashed for his approach to marketing, which includes a heavy dose of social media. Kodak is all over Facebook and Twitter–they’re just winding up a contest on Twitter to rename their newest camera–and they’re doing all the things social media gurus say a savvy company should. But when they announced the release of their newest camera, they demonstrated that they really had been listening. Instead of making an incremental advance on one or two features to move an inch ahead of the competition, Kodak cleaned up the entire list of every feature consumers had mentioned online on their wish lists. In one go. And it was uncanny. As I went back through the SocialRep data looking at the features consumers had discussed over the past 6 months, it was obvious Kodak had created the same list, and used it as a product roadmap for the Kodak zi8.

So this will be an interesting case study.

The zi8 was announced a few weeks ago, and the response to the announcement among the gadget analysts was almost apoplectic. Everyone cheered. When the advance models went out to reviewers, you could see the dialog shift ever so slightly. “Sure, it’s 1080p resolution, but how much difference does that really make? Tough crowd, but of course, reviewers need something to complain about. The real question will be how consumers respond when the camera rolls out next month–no word on Amazon pre sales yet–and what that says about social media as a marketing tool.

Will Kodak displace the Flip in competitive share of voice? (A “forensic” analysis of Flip’s marketing tactics and how Kodak’s tactics compare is an entirely different topic, but one I’ve been tracking as well for a social media case study.) There are so many angles to look at now that there’s a clear case of a company leveraging social media to tune product development. Clearly, the market has been recalibrated for pocket video cameras–every player will now have to approach parity with Kodak in features sooner rather than later. But will that kind of development acceleration across the market help Kodak? It will certainly shift the focus of development to a new set of features next year, which could give Kodak an edge as they look ahead while all their competitors focus on playing catch-up. But do they have a vision for where to take the market now that consumer’s baseline ideals have been answered?

Needless to say, I’ll be continuing to watch this play out, and watching more of the data as the story unfolds. I’m hoping maybe I can draw my friends Jonathan Knowles and Victor Cook into the discussion to parse some of the competitive market share data.

Disclosure: SocialRep is a MotiveLab partner, and provides social media intelligence software to Creative Labs.

As social media continues to mature, and as the economy continues to falter, interest is growing rapidly among businesses in how to leverage social media for lead generation. Lets look at some of the most basic aspects of understanding lead generation in the context of social media.

The Three C’s: Content, Conversation and Community
I’m sure you already know this by know, but it still bears repeating: social media signifies a shift in marketing that is no longer driven by your carefully crafted and broadcast message. It’s about content, conversation and community. It’s not about blasting messages relentlessly through a series of channels to gather your 1.5% response. It’s about listening to the conversation taking place in your market community and engaging. Your market is now a networked community of customers, and technology has amplified the conversation to the point where people see more value in learning about your product from others like themselves than from your marketing campaigns. That means instead of blasting the market with pick-up lines, you need to listen to, engage and catalyze your customer community. If you do it well, your market will spread your message for you.

Find Your Hot Spots
The best place to begin is by finding out where your customer community is already gathering to talk about your market, and who is influencing the conversation. You can begin the process online by using some of the many new tools focused on searching through social content. You can search for real time conversations on Twitter. You can search for keyword concepts related to your market on some of the many social bookmarking sites and indexes, likeDel.icio.us, StumbleUpon or AllTop. You can search for news items related to your market that were highly rated by Web users at Reddit, Digg or Sphere. And when you’re ready to start seriously tracking the flow of conversation and the impact of key influencers, you can leverage Google Alerts, or one of the growing number of social media monitoring tools like Radian6 and Techrigy, or the system we use, SocialRep.

Listen Before You Launch
The point of all these tools is to find and track the influential hotspots where market conversations are percolating. Once you know who’s driving the conversation and where, you can start to participate more effectively by listening first. What are people talking about? What issues are driving the discussion? If you have something meaningful to say, then jump in. But get engaged as an interested participant, not as a product shill. Imagine yourself being at a dinner party with friends. How would you feel about a salesman butting into your conversation to promote a product, or defend his brand against something you said, and then walking away to butt into the next group?

Design Your Campaign to Fit Your Community
Once your team is engaged with one or more of your market communities, lead-generation programs can be a lot more focused. You’ll have a much better sense of which community hot spots are attracting traffic and driving conversations. A lead-gen campaign for a bike company at Facebook, for example, might focus on leveraging a big personality like Lance Armstrong to attract friends and drive links. A campaign at Mountain Bike Review Forum, with 60,000 dedicated cyclists, would be more product-focused, maybe organizing a demo ride. The program you put together should be designed to fit the community, and you’ll only know how to do that well if you’re engaged.

With any lead-generation campaign that engages an existing community, it’s also important to connect with the facilitators of that community before you do any serious program. You should understand and respect any policies they might have about commercial campaigns on their networks. Some communities will have additional opportunities for sponsorship, or co-branded content, which might help you create a more effective campaign. If you’re just interested in testing the waters to see how a community—particularly a large community—might pull in a broader campaign, you can often buy banner ads or adword campaigns that focus on particular sites so you can test the interest in program concepts.

Offer Opportunities for More Conversation
Finally, there’s always the potential to use community development as a lead-generation program, rather than tapping into an existing community. Starbucks, for example, has launched a number of word-of-mouth campaigns, including their “Let’s Meet At Starbucks: Invite a Friend” campaign, while Dell has pushed a lot of product through dedicated product profiles on Twitter, used to announce hot deals. Initiatives like this make the campaign offer a socializing opportunity, and the possibilities are endless, for both retail and B2B companies.

Once you are oriented to your market community, campaign execution will look surprisingly familiar. It’s still important as ever to have a compelling offer, a clear message and to test everything you can to continually improve effectiveness. The difference today is that you need to be much more transparent, honest and accountable in the ways you engage your market. Prospects aren’t just individual “targets” to pick off like sitting ducks. They’re members of a community where word travels fast.

You would have to be a mummy not to have noticed the ongoing and pervasive conversation about what role public relations firms should play in helping their clients understand and use social media. I won’t go into the details here, except to point you to two recent posts on the subject; check out a response to this week’s event at the Horn Group called “Is Social Media Killing PR?” By Jeremiah Owyang and a post by Christopher Kenton called “The Bursting Media Bubble: Is this the death of Public Relations?” Jeremiah and Christopher are quick to acknowledge the continuing value of public relations but hold PR firm’s toes to the fire when it comes to understanding the fundamentals of social media and engaging the public instead of the media power brokers on behalf of their clients.

Public Relations firm’s inability to understand this paradigm shift was highlighted at the 3rd Annual Society for New Communications Research Symposium where Don Middleberg, CEO of the public relations agency, Middleberg Communications, and Jen McClure, executive director, Society for New Communications Research made the following statement to attendees,

“Managing social media belongs with public relations practitioners since PR professionals are story tellers who understand how to build relationships, collaborate, engage in conversations, understand changing influence patterns, and how to communicate with journalists in the channel of their choice.”

Framing social media as “communicating with journalists in the channel of their choice” is exactly why public relations practitioners are failing to provide leadership in the social media space.

Public relations is organized to maintain relationships with reporters and analysts not with customers directly. Influencing the influencers is so deeply rooted in the DNA of PR firms that it is difficult for them to hear what their own research is telling them. Perhaps that’s why only 5% of the 1850 companies surveyed by MotiveLab last summer trusted their PR firms to help them implement social media programs.

Photo Credit: tranchis

There’s no doubt that Crowdsourcing (aka getting your customers to work for you) is big business. According to IHL Consulting Group self-checkout alone is projected to be worth $1.2 trillion by 2009. Customers helping themselves or each other works because most people are served quicker, more accurately and leave with a stronger relationship to the company or product then they arrived with. For some of us this is hard to believe. I much prefer being served. But I am being retrained. I pump my own gas, research and buy my own travel tickets, check myself out of Home Depot and seek purchasing advice from bloggers. The grease that makes these wheels turn is best described by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “The Tipping Point”. Mavens, “one who accumulates knowledge” are wonderfully obsessed with details and love to help others. To a large degree building successful online communities relies on recruiting Mavens. But of course you can’t recruit Mavens – you can only entice them to participate. Fortunately they’re easy to spot. They participate and they don’t pull punches. We tell our clients that if a Maven has wondered into your community respond directly, openly and honestly. Without their participation in your social media plan, Crowdsourcing will become Crowdsouring.

A year ago MotiveLab syndicated a marketing whitepaper with Netline, entitled “12 Essential Tips for Success in Social Media”. Over 3,000 people downloaded the report and 1,800 filled out a short survey asking about their attitudes and approach to social media marketing. The results of that survey are available here for free.

We separated the data gathered in the first six months from the data gathered in the second six months. Interesting trends are discernable even in this short of a time period suggesting that the pace of adoption and the level of social media integration among corporations are increasing. We also discovered a lack of confidence in PR and Advertising agency’s ability to deliver social media strategies despite a considerable effort by these traditional media players to add social media to their service offering.

Most of the work we do here at MotiveLab focuses on understanding the attitudes, interest and motivations of the people using a product or service. Understanding an audience enables us to design programs for engagement that create trusting relationships.

Occasionally we are asked to design social media programs that alter behavior so that a new service or product becomes desirable. Creating new product categories is not new but it is very difficult because you have to get analysts and the media to agree that we need a new category.

In social media the analysts and traditional media are less important. Changing behavior is about getting a large community of people to agree that a change is necessary or desirable. If you want to see this process unfolding, check out the PickensPlan. It’s a five minute idea for moving away from our dependence on foreign oil and toward natural gas and wind. Energy solution aside, this is one of the most well-integrated and thought through social media sites I’ve seen lately. There are no Hollywood-style movies, t-shirts to make or games to play just solid community building. Click around the web site and you’ll notice two things straight away. The content is just under five minutes – that’s it. I hope more substance will follow but at this point participation is much more important than pushing content. The second thing you’ll see is a host of opportunities to participate. From Twitter to forums they make it easy to link T. Boon into your community.

Granted, T. Boon is not creating a new product category but at the end of the day there is not much difference between convincing people they need to drive natural gas cars and convincing them they need a walkman.

Interesting article today from the Sydney Morning Herald about sharing ultrasound images on sites like MySpace. Social networking with a foetal attraction.

“Many mums-to-be say posting ultrasound photos is an easy way to announce an exciting piece of information to lots of people all at once. But some warn that sharing foetal pictures could be oversharing”

I think this discussion is done. Sharing fetal images on the web is widespread and ironically considered less personal than images of children at play. Even my own 20-something daughters agree they’d share ultrasound images of their children but not photos of their first birthday. A good company to look at for this service is MyPhotoBaby.

What interests me though is where this is going. For an insight I spoke with Steve Corey, an IT executive working with a group of physicians and ultrasound technicians to deliver 3D and 4D images from the Doctor’s office right to your personal web site — without necessitating a non-medical ultrasound procedure.

Steve sees this as just the beginning; “Right now we are giving families the ability to create keepsakes and get to know their child in utero. But in the near future we see people sharing all sorts of medical imaging”

Where does this lead? You guessed it – MyInnerSpace. It won’t be long before people with serious medical conditions are sharing their MRI’s , X-ray’s and other scans with a non-medical network who have experienced similar ailments.

If doctor’s aren’t already jumping off of rooftops out of frustration with patients who know as much (or more) than they do about their diagnosis – they will now. I predict that patients will be showing up to their appointment with problem areas notated on images they provide. Many doctors have been trained in ultrasound diagnoses by the equipment sales reps – who have no medical degree. It won’t be hard for the determined novice (motivated by a life threatening illness) to become an expert.

Some bad behavior is bound to follow but for the most part, the more we know about our own health the healthier we’ll be.

Cross-posted on Marketonomy

ReadWriteWeb has a great story on the impressive mashup of social media tools the RedCross is using to engage with flood victims in the midwest.

The newsroom site runs off of Wordpress, and it’s being used to push out press releases, media, and information about shelters. The Red Cross is using Utterz to post from the field, Flickr for photos and for videos, as well as a Slide-powered slideshow widget that allows anyone to upload photos of disaster areas. The site also features a Google Maps mashup that depicts the surprisingly large number of relief operations currently being run by the American Red Cross (hint: click the "view larger map" link, because viewing the informative popups inside the widget on site is next to impossible).

I find this a particularly poignant trend marker. When lives are in the balance, social media shines as a more effective way to connect people than traditional tools like print, radio and television. Social Media enables many-to-many communication that allows citizens to notify each other and authorities of danger zones, people in need of help, and available resources. It’s simply a far more efficient and effective means of communication. It’s only when budgets, rather than lives, are in the balance that the usefulness of social media comes into question. 

Several years ago I saw a cartoon where an enterprising child was selling 5 cent lemonade to adults passing by. Just around the corner his friend was greeting the customers leaving the lemonade stand — now doubled over in pain — with another stand selling the lemonade antidote for $5. Fast forward to the present day and you’ll find Michael Fertik, selling the social networking antidote at http://www.reputationdefender.com/index for as little as $29.95 (actually he has to diagnose the problem first for $9.95) I don’t know whether he’s a hero to the small but growing number of people in the back of the tech-boat who are paddling in the opposite direction or a sharliton, selling snorkels to the passengers of the Titanic. Either way his service won’t save you now but it does turn “antisocial” into a viable, and even lofty, business model.
Read more at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24715735/