As you probably know, I recently started a new job as Senior Vice President of Communications, Marketing and Advertising at the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce. The job has been a joy so far, both rewarding and challenging, not least because it has caused me to consider my own social media practices.

I’ve written a lot about making time for social media, both here and at Marcana.com, and taking on a new job that moves at supersonic speeds while simultaneously winding down work for CrossCut’s existing clients has given me a great reminder of what life looks like from the “other side.” I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t done the best job of keeping up with my social media world in these first couple of weeks.

Some of that I’m sure will change as things settle and I clear some things off my plate. Some of it, though, is a change of focus. At CrossCut, doing lots of social media work for clients, I had more occasion to “duck into” my own social media life. I consciously cultivated that part of my life and learned as much as I could about it, knowing that the day would almost certainly come that I couldn’t be as active as I had been. The new job includes social media but also much more, and as a result, I can’t expect to maintain my previous volume (at least personally).

As time goes on, I will get back into the swing. I’ll find the corners of the day when I can dip in and communicate. I’ve already started eating my own dog food and following my own advice on pacing, scheduling, leveraging and so forth so that I won’t lose the valuable connections I’ve made through social media. I have been surprised at what a cultural change it is not to be online at the “watercooler” nearly 24-7. I’m amazed at the number of times each day I think about sharing piece of information or asking a question. I miss the back-and-forth.

Perhaps one of the lessons here is that we all have peaks and troughs in whatever we’re doing. We shift focus temporarily and return in time. It’s reassuring to be able to lean on the community and trust that one won’t be forgotten (at least not immediately). Thanks for bearing with me. I’m still watching the discussion and expect to be back to full strength soon.

You might also check out http://willreichard.com. I post a lot of casual thoughts (often pictures) there. Thank you again.

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Dear Clients, Friends and Supporters:

I’m writing today to let you know about a big change to CrossCut Communications. Last week, unexpectedly, I received an offer that was too good to pass up–the chance to be the Senior Vice President for Marketing, Communications and Advertising at the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce (http://abqchamber.com). It’s a job I feel made for in many ways, one that will utilize my skills in social media, community relations, marketing, and business. I am very much looking forward to contributing and to being challenged.

It will be a full-time position and then some, as the Chamber, moving quickly as ever, embarks on even bigger plans. There would be no way for me to do justice to this position while also maintaining CrossCut according to the high standard our clients have come to expect. Therefore, CrossCut will be closed for business.

We have been privileged to work with some of the sharpest minds and best people around. We sincerely hope these relationships won’t end.

Thank you for everything. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to let me know. This blog will remain active for now. You can also reach me at my new address, wreichard@abqchamber.com.

Yours,

Will

William C. Reichard, MBA

(505) 796-8184

Skype: william.reichard

http://willreichard.com

@wreichard

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[D]espite being a page-level metric, homepage PageRank is actually a fairly good predictor of many important domain-level variables relevant to SEO, social media, and website traffic.

via SEOmoz | What is PageRank Good for Anyway? (Statistics Galore).

Google, like Apple, is a company that splits people’s opinions. One night after a presentation, I was talking with some very smart people who felt that Google’s ascent had been masterful. Not necessarily disagreeing, I told them about a convincing article I’d read that said that Google’s real innovation was its real-time bidding system, but they maintained that it was all about search. Perhaps it’s the same conclusion or perhaps it doesn’t matter either way: fact is, Google has known how to deliver eyeballs.

I was not an early adopter of Google search. I far preferred Yahoo!’s human-powered directory, at least till it wasn’t human-powered anymore. I also liked HotBot, mostly because you could do complex searches, but at least a little for its fluorescent colors.

That said, eventually, like everyone else, I went to Google. As I think back , I think the change mainly had to do with speed, simplicity and comprehensiveness. Yahoo! was slow to load that many times in a day. It was hard to find things on its pages. Eventually, it just didn’t have as many pages in its index (or so it seemed) or as quickly.

That said, I went to Google almost despite the search, which has never been great. It’s very good at finding what you would expect to find, which is to say, it’s great when you know what you’re looking for. But most of the time, you don’t know! Add in the fact that its search functions are actually pretty paltry (anybody speak Boolean?) and it’s clear: Google just isn’t a great search engine.

Still, I, like everyone, stuck with them. Why? Because they kept layering on stuff I wanted. Email. Maps. News. It was all in bits and pieces, but each piece was better or more convenient than the other pieces available at the time. Again–not about the search. The search was more or less incidental–it worked well enough that I didn’t bother to load up some other engine.

Now, however, we live in a world where the pieces are quickly getting better than Google’s. Part of it is because Google has commoditized the pieces. By making it clear what works without owning any of it, they essentially do vast quantities of R&D for upstart competitors. Thus, Facebook may be about to eat Google’s lunch on email. Note that switching costs are essentially zero for online services. I myself float among many of them and use some redundantly so that I can quickly jump ship if the time should come.

So let’s assume that Google doesn’t come through with a Facebook-killing social network. And really, how likely is that? Google’s been foundering lately with a string of scattered and lackluster products and offerings. After Buzz and Wave, should we really have much confidence in Google’s abilities to design complex customer-facing enterprises? GMail, for all its strengths, is only marginally great. It remains absurdly complicated for what should be easy tasks. (Good grief–I’m an above-average computer user, and I can’t remember the two dozen keyboard shortcuts and idiosyncratic search operators I’d need for it to be easy.)

Even in the mobile space, Android is gaining ground, but not necessarily to Google’s advantage. We’re starting to see Android phones with Bing as their default search engine. What’s Google’s strategy here? (I say that even as an open-source champion.)

What Google really has is a golden goose: Search. People come to Google to search, so advertisers will pay for the eyeballs. Google is very efficient at capitalizing on the advertisers, but without the eyeballs, Google has a very efficient machine without any fuel.

Facebook is beginning to eat Google’s lunch on eyeballs. It has become the No. 1 traffic referral site in the U.S., the most visited site in the U.S., and its advertising setup is lucrative and growing. Google is and should be petrified.

Google search is a victim of its own success. The problem with Google search is that it can be gamed. If I do a search for “New Mexico Consultants,” I will see a fair number of irrelevant entries and, worse, consultants who may not have anything to do with New Mexico beyond having created a web page with those words on it and, through keyword research and linking strategies, have bumped it to Google’s front page.

Look at what Google has made here: A large-scale distributed system that provides feedback in real time on an almost uncountable number of events and then optimizes the system and provides what in economics would be approaching  “perfect information.” Everyone knows what everyone else pays. We know what’s being bid upon. Moreover, it’s a system with enormous monetary incentives. Winning means getting paid. You are providing motivation to others to improve the system–for themselves.

There is one Google. There are millions of gamers. Google exerts huge amounts of energy for increasingly less improvement in its search results. The gamers have won: Google search sucks.

This is why we’re increasingly searching at Facebook. Just tell me what my friends are looking at. Let my friends bubble the information to the top for me. It’s not a more effective filter–it’s just that it is effective at all, whereas Google search rarely is.

By creating an incentivized, self-optimizing system, Google is engineering its own doom. Gamers will continue to reverse engineer, model, and guess at Google’s algorithm until there’s no more point. How could Google make its results better? What Google is really doing is providing information that helps gamers create content that Google likes. Google has created the most massively parallel supercomputer ever built–composed of millions of brains and devoted entirely and singlemindedly to erasing its advantage.

A searcheris looking for information that can’t be gamed. Otherwise, it’s worthless or, worse yet, actually costs us in time or opportunity. Where people want to look–that’s where the money is. Given that, is Google reaching a tipping point? Is spam the real challenge facing Google? Is Google doomed? I hope not, as Google is actually a very cool company. It has lived, it seems, by its own creed of not doing evil. And yet, I don’t see how Google will win this short of creating an effective Facebook competitor.

Facebook and Skype between them have a billion users. Google owns capacity in both of those areas. The stakes are large.

I look forward to your thoughts.

Thank you to Benson Hendrix for spurring many of these thoughts in a recent conversation. Benson is a savvy thinker on technology!

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We only had an hour to speak, but I had some additional thoughts on the questions we discussed at the last Coronado Ventures Forum panel on social media. Here are some of the questions we had planned to discuss along with the notes I made myself in thinking about them:

How do you explain the use of Social Media as a Marketing tool to someone who has relied on traditional print media for most of their marketing careers?

I usually talk numbers and trends. Print circulations have been in decline for 30 years. Half a billion people use Facebook—half a billion use Skype—and the numbers are skyrocketing everywhere. And there’s nothing to stop it—social networking is a mobile phenomenon, and mobile lines surpassed landlines in number globally in 2004. These aren’t going to be just phones—this is going to be truly ubiquitous. It will be embedded in things all around us—the Internet of things. We’re rewiring culture. We’re on the cusp of the first global society.

We’re changing from a culture of “push” to one of “pull.” People are designing the streams of information they receive—sometimes on the fly (e.g., with Collecta). They’re using their friends to filter out everything but what they care about.

Here’s the winning point, though—it’s getting to be possible to create information that only gets to the right people. It’s as near to perfect targeting as it may be possible to get.

What are the limitations of Social Media as a Marketing tool?

• Extremely low barriers to entry make it an incredibly noisy channel.
• Switching costs = zero. This is why Google keeps creating new services right down to the DNS level.
• Misinformation spreads as quickly as accurate information.
• Low stickiness.
• Conversion rates can be very low–sometimes have to do massive volumes to get to long-tail riches.

What are some of the advantages? Disadvantages? Pitfalls?

• Extremely low barriers to entry!
• Advantages: Trust factor of communities / potential virality / ability to harvest the long tail
• Cost can be low—reach can be instantly global—intensely targeted—in many cases, sought out
• Disadvantage: Still new.
• Cost: Bidding system prices ads more or less perfectly, but that also means there are few bargains and information is more or less perfect.
• Pitfalls—treating social media as a strategy rather than a tactic. This is a big one. Everything has to flow from strategy.

Will social communities ever replace the need for Coronado Ventures Forum events?

We did pretty well in answering this, I thought, during the presentation. But I had also been thinking about recent trends toward “cocooning” and how social media is actually not a passive engagement. It requires active participation. So I think it’s good for “socialness” in general. Meeting in person will become increasingly “special” and meaningful as telepresence accelerates–its value is rising all the time.

Is there money to be made in Social Media?

Mark Zuckerberg would probably say yes after this week—Facebook is eating into Google’s ad profits. Dell has also made money directly attributable to social media. And I’d argue there’s a huge amount of money to be lost in social media.

That said, the channels themselves will probably become a commodity just as email has. They’re telephone lines.

In a traditional VC model the value of a company may be based on sales or the IP portfolio, what is a reasonable benchmark for a VC to value a social media start-up?

One point I didn’t get to add: In my view, more than the particular technical skills is the philosophy—do you know how to listen to customers and take part in conversations? Michael Odza and I were talking afterwards about The Cluetrain Manifesto and how even all these years later, it’s still an incredibly alien concept to business. It’s 180 degrees inside-out from how business has always been done. Social media involves ceding some control–even a lot of control. It’s a real challenge.

For venture capitalists looking at business plans, the question is really whether it’s in place in terms of the communications strategy. If the model requires social media, do they know it? And if they do, do they have the background from which to execute it? In that way, it’s no different from any other tactic.

Any reactions? Thanks as always for reading.

Starbucks didnt become Starbucks by getting discovered by Oprah Winfrey or being blessed by Warren Buffet when they only had a few stores. No, they plugged along. They raised bits of money here and there, flirted with disaster, added one store and then another, tweaked and measured and improved and repeated. Day by day, they dripped their way to success. No magic lottery.

via Seths Blog: Hope and the magic lottery.

It takes both, and Seth’s point is very well made in this piece. Successful entrepreneurs get both points, and the magic is in the balance.

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Had a blast last night taking part in a panel at the Coronado Ventures Forum on social media. A big thank you to Dominic Pruitt for taping the event!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbAnL7N3Wqw

One question that came up was about small-business owners or solopreneurs and whether and how they can effectively outsource any of their social media efforts. I should have mentioned a friend in the audience, Barbara Lemaire, who offers a specialized service for such businesses. Please do visit her website: http://www.inspiredcollaboration.com/.

I had also asked online what people the NMCVF crowd should know about social media and got some great responses:

Lisa Abeyta
I’m sure you’ll cover this already, but the only thing I’d say is that social media isn’t just a nice idea of startups, it’s a must if the startup requires public support or interaction. The trick is talking with people, generating conversations and letting audiences get to know the people behind the tweets. Talking AT people will never build support or make a sale.

@Marlitah
…to remember their PR skills. I’ve seen some people get chewed up and spit out, forgetting they are in public.

@DomPruitt
that #twitter enables larger social and sometimes anonymous social currents beyond local word-of-mouth interactions
@CDunkeson
That its not a goal to be accomplished and checked off, but part of making sure they have an ongoing and responsive voice.

Finally, per another question:

Google Health is the company’s attempt to offer an online medical portal where you can research medical conditions and issues, find doctors and health care professionals, and track down other health-related Web sites. You can also compile and store a health profile by adding test results, names of medications, insurance information, and electronic medical records from your computer or from third-party partners.

via Google Health gains partners | Health Tech -- CNET News.

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In a first-of-its kind lawsuit, an IT staffing firm has accused one of its former employees of violating the terms of her noncompete agreement through her conduct on LinkedIn.

via LinkedIn communications at center of unprecedented lawsuit – Computerworld.

This is a fascinating case that is sure to set a precedent one way or the other.

Personally, it seems punitive to me, and somewhat ridiculous to assume that relationships someone has built up in a company shouldn’t “carry forward.” It’s one of the benefits of working somewhere.

In many ways, this is a question of the “traditional” way of looking at employment–as a lasting covenant–vs. the reality of the modern way of looking at it–which is every person for him or herself. Actions like these don’t do much to make people believe in that traditional view.

On the other hand, it does sound as if the employee in question tried to poach former co-workers using LinkedIn, which of course wouldn’t be in the spirit of a non-compete.

Will be interesting to see what happens. What do you think–are you ready to have to sever all ties to coworkers when you change jobs?

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Even if, like me, you follow 500-plus RSS feeds, you will simply never find time to read everything you might want to. Whether you’re a professional who works in the online realm or just a serious surfer, it’s worth thinking about.

via Are You Following the Right Blogs?

We have been tremendously impressed by Mark Brimm. He’s smart, conscientious, ethically driven, and creative. We’ve been reading his work for quite a while now, and so it was an honor when he began discussing a new blogging approach at Marcana.com and asked us to be part of the discussion.

It’s a joy when you connect with people with perfectly complementary skills sets and viewpoints. “Complementary” is one of my favorite words. It doesn’t mean “identical”–it’s more about extending each other’s offerings, about fitting together. Mark does that brilliantly. He has a technical mind for search issues and marketing logistics that fits well with my own tendency to concentrate on ideas, messages and culture. He’s found a group of other people with similar complementary skills. It’s a perfect demonstration of “cooperation gain”–we can do more together than individually. Marcana will offer real value to anyone with an interest in marketing in the new world.

Technoagita, this blog, will continue, of course. At the same time, we’ll be sending many of our more developed social media marketing ideas and posts to Marcana, so Technoagita will keep its experimental feel and perhaps concentrate more on local issues and some of our other interests. We hope you will find cause to follow both, and ideas are of course always welcomed on how to make either or both better.

So please, check it out and let us know what you think. Thanks as always for reading.

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“This is one of the first hints of a wave of imminent consolidation in this space,” William C. Reichard, president of CrossCut Communications in Albuquerque said.

“Expect to see the major players snapping up smaller niche companies and falling in line behind various standards. Facebook has a lot of momentum here and is going to be tough to beat,” he said.

Reichard said the development is sad news for the once-ascendant Yahoo, which is increasingly flailing in the world of Web 2.0.

via Yahoo gets friendlier with Facebook – New Mexico Business Weekly.

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