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.

I’ve been working with companies on building effective consumer and B2B brands for many years. It’s always interesting to view organizations through the “brand lens”. The church is a particularly interesting subject since it’s so easy to point out inconsistencies in behavior – actions that sit in complete or more often apparent contradiction to the organization’s purpose. Last week Oklahoma Channel 5 News ran a story about Windsor Hills Baptist Church in Oklahoma City who had decided to give away an assault rifle to a lucky youth participating in a week-long revival. I know, Christians have as much right to protect themselves as pagans but I grew up in church. I went to church camp and confirmation. I just can’t imagine Pastor Wally at my church passing out automatic weapons during youth night.

Transportation and communication technology has been “shrinking” the world for hundreds of years. Social media dramatically accelerates this process through the intimacy of the information, the size of the audience reached and judgment that inevitably follows. It’s impossible to say what the long-term effects of the assault rifle give-away will be for the Windsor Hills Baptist Church. But I guarantee the Windsor Hills board will be asking that question from now until the end of the internet — that alone will change their brand.

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. 

Cross posted at Marketonomy.

Another social media trend I’m following:

I mentioned in my last post that certain conversational trends emerge in the first few days of tracking any particular market, but that deeper and often more significant trends only appear when you follow a market over many different channels over a longer period of time. The deeper trend I discussed last time was the globalization of market conversations, and how that’s impacting consumer awareness and preference. There’s another closely related trend that is also having a big impact on consumers, and that’s the broadening of participation in openly accessible discussions, which I believe will make the market increasingly smarter.

Off the Internet, there are a lot of dividing lines between different groups of people that might converse about a given product or market. Market insiders have their associations and professional networks where they talk shop; enthusiasts have their clubs and conferences; general consumers have their friends and family, and sales associates. As these conversations have moved online, the biggest change has been in the consumer category, where people can vastly extend their research beyond friends, family and sales associates to talk with like-minded consumers who have experience with every conceivable product. Market insiders and enthusiasts have mostly just recreated their existing networks online.

When you track market conversations over many channels and over a sufficient amount of time, it becomes apparent that these previously well segmented groups are beginning to blur in places, aided primarily by the power of search. It often isn’t obvious at first–you simply notice that there are many people engaged in the broader dialog with different levels of knowledge and understanding about a given product or market. You find people who are obviously new to the dialog, people who are informed, people who are know-it-alls.

It’s often difficult when you first start tracking the conversation to distinguish between people who are really well-informed and people who just like to spout what they think they know. But if you follow the dialog over time, you realize that right alongside the newbies and know-it-alls, there are often people weighing in with substantial insights, including industry executives, market analysts, economists and engineers. I’m not talking here about the vaunted blogs of industry experts–but about insiders who join the fray, hobnobing right alongside consumers on some of the broader discussions without trumpeting their status.

Most often you find this broad mix of participants in discussions that focus on industry news and trends, while technical product discussions tend to segment into the traditionally stratified groups. But the impact of this mixing in the broader dialog is an obvious increase in the sophistication of conversation. When a consumer Googles a product they want to purchase, along with the focused discussions on features and benefits they’ll also find discussions about the latest product and market news. And when they tap into those discussions they start reading dialog in which experts often drop substantial insights about what’s shaping the market–from technological advances to impending regulation.

For some consumers that might just be noise, but the more complex or expensive the purchase decision, the more likely that added information will be influential. I first saw this play out in the automotive market, where I found automotive engineers engaged in conversation right alongside consumers about the implications of the next generation of hybrid vehicles and when they might be expected to roll out. For a consumer considering a $25-30k purchase, knowing that an improved hybrid technology might be only a few months away can make a huge impact on when and what they buy. But it turns out you’ll find similar conversations happening all the way down the line to a $300 cell phone/PDA.

Why, exactly, apparently high level market insiders are sometimes anonymously engaging in dialog on broad discussion boards is an interesting question–you often can’t even tell they’re insiders until you follow the dialog long enough to pick up on something that gives them away. It may be they find the broad dialog about market trends compelling to engage in but don’t want to be known, it may be they want to demonstrate their expertise, it may be they are motivated to be a knowledge provider, it may be they want to engage with a broader swath of the market beyond their professional echo chambers, it may even be they want to seed the market with information beneficial to their business interests.

Whatever the reason, you can find them if you look, and they’re often quietly adding information far beyond product features and benefits that can shape consumer attitudes and purchasing behavior. The result is a greater likelihood that your customers and prospects are going to have access to more information about the market than ever before. It’s hard to imagine that kind of trend leveling off any time soon, as social media continues to grow and as indexing of content penetrates more types of social content.

The obvious counterpoint to the notion that consumers are becoming more informed is the increasing noise factor of superfluous dialog, misinformation and shilling, which some say will even dampen participation in social media. That’s a long post on it’s own, but I’ll say that from what I’ve seen I think the evolution of online dialog is quite Darwinian. Consumers are learning quickly from direct experience what level of trust to put into what they read online, and they’re developing skills to read more effectively between the lines. Again, I think this points to the long-term development of a more sophisticated and more informed consumer.

What do you think? Will a smarter breed of consumer affect your market?

Cross-posted on Marketonomy
Continuing on the theme of social media trends and implications.

One of the major themes that social media experts talk about incessantly is the shift in control over the message. In the world of mainstream media where content is created by a few and broadcast to the many, whoever controls publication controls the message. In a world of social media where anyone with access to a computer can put a message into play among millions of readers, the most compelling messages win the day.

There are a lot of fascinating implications in this shift–enough to fill an entire year of blog posts. But the trend I want to talk about right now is the changing role of PR and marketing in the influence of market dialog. Many people say PR and marketing are effectively dead, while others try to recast social media as just another new vehicle for revitalizing PR and marketing. Marketing 2.0.

Let me first say where I come down in this discussion about marketing and PR in the age of social media. The rumors of their death are greatly exaggerated. There will always be a need for companies to advocate on their own behalf–to develop and communicate a compelling market position. How that message is developed and communicated has changed forever. Unfortunately, many marketers haven’t figured this out yet, and until they do marketing will continue to decline until a new generation takes over.

The problem for marketers is that they’ve grown up in a bubble–just like the Internet Bubble that gave rise to irrational exuberance and a general belief that business fundamentals were no longer relevant. Let’s call it the Marketing Bubble. Before the Marketing Bubble, we had more than 5000 years of social media–a world in which word-of-mouth was the dominant form of commercial dialog. As the means of mass communication emerged, marketers naturally adopted new tactics for communicating with a larger market. Print. Radio. Television. Computer. Internet. Mobile.

These continuously evolving forms of communication weren’t cheap. In fact, getting a message out over any of these channels was enormously expensive, which kept control over the message sharply limited to those who could afford it. The Marketing and PR we know today grew up in this world, and evolved around the power structure of a highly controlled media. PR was never about developing relationships with customers–it was about developing relationships with publishers and reporters in order to influence customers. Marketing may have a slightly more robust claim to customer intimacy, but not much. How many marketing organizations do you know that actually own customer service? The vast amount of marketing dollars go to advertising–another practice focused on the power brokers rather than the consumers. If you can’t shape the message through PR, then buy a message to piggy-back on the stream of media the market consumes.

This is–or was–the bubble. It emerged with the tools of mass media, but was not a fundamental shift in the thousand-years trajectory of commercial dialog. Just as we had thousands of years of history of consumers discussing products among their peers before mass media, we are returning to that natural state for one very compelling, even Darwinian, reason: consumers will always seek out information from their peers because it provides an economic survival advantage. The Internet has simply provided the means for consumers to elevate their conversation to the same volume as mass media.

Now that the bubble is bursting, Marketing and PR are mostly blind to the historical trendline; they are inclined to see social media as just another new technology like Web sites, or SMS. This is a huge problem. The Marketing and PR organizations we know today are organized not to listen and engage, but to listen just enough to craft messages and find effective channels to influence the market. Success is measured in the tiny percentage of people who took the bait on your latest campaign, rather than the development of an engaged community of customers–customers who become partners in the development and distribution of more successful products and services.

There’s a lot to drill into on this concept, which I’ll continue to do. But there’s one important concept I want to leave off on today. Companies that are trying to figure out social media are going to their PR and Marketing agencies by default–those are the people, after all, who are supposed to understand how to communicate with customers. But a facility for social media is not an inherent strand of DNA for any marketing, advertising or PR agency–despite the cool case studies and hip 2.0 language. Communicating at customers is not the same as communicating with customers, and if you have any hope of success in social media, you need to understand how to tell the difference.

Cross Posted at Marketonomy

I’m still deep in the self-imposed exile of stealth startup mode. But there are some fascinating market and business trends in Social Media that I’m closely tracking and happy to discuss in the abstract, especially as they start to intersect with other discussions in the public sphere.

One of the trends that I’ve been analyzing in some depth over the past few months is the dynamic of social media conversations that span traditional market boundaries–geographic, demographic and psychographic boundaries, as well as other boundaries that are not neatly defined, in part because no one has had to really classify them before. But the Internet is a vast melting pot where conversations involve people that never would have connected in the physical world. The way that influences and transforms the discussion is remarkable. And from a market standpoint, it’s game changing.

If you track the social media conversations in any of the hot consumer markets, a lot of the market driving memes emerge in the first couple of weeks. You learn quickly what kinds of questions consumers are asking, what they complain about, what they hope to see in the future. But when you follow those conversations across many different channels over a few months, some deeper trends emerge that are a clear sign of the future. I’ll give just one example now, but I’ll explore some additional examples over the next few weeks.

One of the clearest market changing trends is the globalization of market conversations. Back in the day when people talked about the Information Superhighway, the reduction of geographic boundaries was one of the most popular tropes that marketers used to signify the new world we were creating. You’d see commercials with a New York executive chatting on a cell phone with a Buddhist monk in Asia, or with a tribal leader in Africa. The exotic contrasts of business suits juxtaposed with colorful costumes made for great marketing imagery. But now that global dialog is a mundane reality, it’s less the mixing of sharply different groups of people online that is changing the market than the reduction of smaller boundaries–the blending of parallel market segments into a larger homogenized whole.

One of the most obvious and striking examples is visible in the automotive market, where hundreds of conversations take place daily on every conceivable channel of social media across the globe. If you follow these conversations for any length of time, you begin to realize just how anachronistic our current marketing landscape is today. Our markets evolved in a world where large markets like Europe, North America and Asia were entirely distinct. As an American abroad, it was somewhat surprising to see entirely different and unrecognizable Fords being sold overseas, or seeing diesel sports cars that you can’t buy in the US. In fact, the cultural and regulatory landscape that evolved in these isolated consumer megaspheres created entirely different but parallel markets. For example,both Europe and North America have evolved environmentally conscious automotive consumers, but in the US we’ve embraced hybrid vehicles while in Europe they’ve embraced clean diesels.

But social media is making these differences seem rather quaint. If you follow the dialog on blogs and forums, you’ll find Europeans talking to Americans, who are talking to Asians, who are talking to Africans, and on it goes. And they’re all asking why we have one thing and you have another, which inevitably leads to why can’t I have what you have. Europeans increasingly want hybrids, and Americans increasingly want clean diesels. Honda recently announced a diesel hybrid for the European market, and within weeks thousands of consumers in North America had signed onto a petition demanding Honda offer the same car in America.

You don’t have to be an ivory-tower marketing guru to see what will happen in the next five years. Automakers will start offering similar vehicles in what used to be sharply defined and isolated market segments, which will have enormous economic benefits for the automakers, and maybe for consumers as the cost of more standardized production and marketing falls. But the longer term future is a little less clear. While the initial impact of global social media seems to lead toward a large-scale homogenization of global consumer tastes, this is in striking contrast to the phenomena of long tail economics. There is plenty of evidence that mainstream tastes often spur a backlash against consumer conformity, and the ability for smaller consumer segments to congeal online does create demand for more highly differentiated products.

It may be that Social Media’s long-term impact is a fundamental shift of scale that defined these large and small market segments. Social media seems to be accelerating the merging of isolated global markets in megamarkets, while what we now now as micromarkets will also grow in a similar scale under the influence of global consumer conversations. In any case, it’s clear that Social Media is creating an enormous transforming influence on consumer markets, and the implications for marketing are just as significant. If you’re not actively following the conversations that are changing your market–beyond just what your customers are saying about your product–you really should be. The future is being written right before our eyes.

Cross-posted at Marketonomy.

This week on What’s Happening in Marketing, I interview Jack Jia, the CEO of Baynote. Baynote is an on-demand provider of software that analyzes customer shopping behavior online to make product recommendations to other customers. As Jia notes in his interview, Baynote doesn’t rely on what consumers say they like, but on what they actually shop for and buy online.

I found Baynote at the Web 2.0 conference last year–not in some flashy booth, but in a vendor mosh pit of small demo tables. Their value proposition was so intriguing, I sought Jack out for an interview. But don’t take my word for it, judge for yourself. As always, these videos are unpaid content, produced by MarketingRev and our friends at Miner Productions.