Some pundits will tell you that you should do away with brand messaging and positioning all together, since you cannot control it anyway. Not so fast! People need to know what bucket to put your offering in, and if they can’t, they won’t know how to assign value to what you have to offer. Tivo ended up in that pickle, with consumers not quite sure what category of products to compare the offering with. Was it more like a DVD player or was it more like a computer?

Knowing that a good positioning will impact your revenue and profits, and realizing that you still have a seat at the customer decision making table (it’s just a much more crowded table and your share of voice has significantly been reduced) you need to develop a point of view about your positioning and try to get it co-opted by your tribe. Like in most social interactions, your chances to get someone to adopt your point of view are going to increase if you involve them early on. The more say you give them in the process of co-creating your products and services, and the earlier you get them involved (preferably at the product concept stage) the more they will embrace a shared view of the brand and product positioning. An added benefit of co-creating products with your customers is that those who are involved in the design of new products will typically

I’m not a recruiter, a life coach or anything like that but I think everyone should be able to come up with a brief truthful answer to what they do for a living. This seemingly obvious skill seems to escape many but for business communications or looking for a job it’s extremely important. It might even be something you want to practice. What does it say to a recruiter if you are asked about a prior job and you either obviously embellish your duties or at the end of the questions they still have no clue what you do for a living. It’s amazing how often I run into this. I’ve had people approach me about various business arrangements and honestly, if they can’t provide me a brief explanation of what they do that any person of average intelligence can comprehend, it’s not worth my time.

The Embellished Answer

I asked a friend of a friend one time what they did for a living. They replied proudly that they sold optimized employee hydration equipment. I had to think about those four words for about five seconds before I rudely blurted out asking if he sold water bottles. My directness and clever deductive reasoning seemed to surprise him. He said yes but again said it was optimized employee hydration equipment. Then he proceeded to spend the next twenty minutes trying to convince me how important a job he had. People have to drink so I guess the

It should NOT be a surprise that O2 is at the table.

What should be a surprise to everyone is that we don't see a lot more of this type of behavior and innovation by telecom providers around the world.

Over the past 10 years, traditional land line voice revenues have been completely commoditized as the combination of the Internet, broadband access, and computers have made it possible to have voice calls and more essentially for free over the Internet. The growth of Skype to more than 500 Million users and $700 Million in revenues is perhaps the best example of how powerful this shift is.

One of the last holdouts around voice revenues is the mobile space. Increasing use of mobile phones has kept mobile carriers in the voice space and has even driven a decent amount of revenue for tools like Skype where users purchase "Skype Out" minutes to be able to call regular phone numbers from Skype.

But that game is going to end soon. Pure voice revenues on mobile phones is going to go the same way that land line voice revenues

Twitter has been rolling out new features for its web interface to small groups to get feedback and then full roll out.  It did this with Twitter Lists.   Over the weekend, I noticed that Twitter's beta retweet feature was available on my account and played around with it.

Brian Solis picks out what's interesting about it.

The new retweet feature is particularly interesting as it organizes your experience directly at Twitter.com much in the same way third-party clients such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic have offered all along. Unlike these desktop applications however, Twitter.com remains as the pervasive interface for engaging on Twitter. For example, your lists, real-time search results, DMs, Twitter stream, and now retweets are key pillars to the personal experience at Twitter.com. For most users, the new retweet functionality, combined with important, cached searches (including your username), the need to stray from Twitter’s online hub begins to dissipate.

Following Rupert Murdoch’s comment that he might in future hide his news sites from Google, there’s obviously been a fair amount of discussion about it.  Ben Kunz’s take on the issue, including a look at how Sony manages to give away free content AND shift inventory is worth a read.

However, the obvious question is, could this become something of an own goal? Answers from Hitwise and Alexa say quite possibly yes.

Hitwise looked at Murdoch’s flagship US title, The Wall Street Journal, and found that both Google and Google News are the top traffic drivers.  More

Big companies have moved cautiously for eons. While many are corporations are making forays into social media, very, very few are taking huge risks. Instead of jumping in, they're still standing on the edge of the pool, diipping a toe in the water. As a result, getting companies to add social media into the marketing mix is still a hard sell. Here are three of the top reasons why.

1- Consultants make social media sound scary.
Consultants, eager to prove the viability of social media in the marketing mix, are overwhelming stodgy companies by making social media sound more complex than it is.

A lot of consultants make what they do sound like a cross between vodoo magic and rocket science. The goal, I guess, is to make potential clients feel there is no way they could do whatever is being sold on their own.

But social media is not rocket science. And even if it was, making it easy to understand will win every time. The best professor I ever had in college taught physics. He could break rocket science down into simple terms. Do that for management and they'll love you.

2- The magic word is "sales"

All most companies care about is whether they can make their numbers for the next quarter. Coolness may be the cherry on top, but it's not the goal for most publicly held companies.

Social media becomes strategically viable when - blasphemous as this may sound to many SM gurus - the goal of its integration into the marketing mix is to go beyond cool and actually help to sell products and

As companies start to dip their toes into the social media waters, we have seen them implement a couple of different approaches. Some companies start with a small group of employees who are identified as brand ambassadors or official representatives of the company in social media networks. Other companies, such as Zappos and Best Buy, have given their entire employee base access to platforms for participating in social media, thereby making all the employees spokespeople of the company.

The Creative Underground has an excellent blog post on using your employees as brand ambassadors… and while it was written more from the perspective of empowering all your employees to be brand ambassadors, I think it rings true for either approach to social media.

That’s right. Instead of just one or two people being social media representatives of the company in the Twitterverse and elsewhere, what if all of them were? I know. Your first thought probably is: “Ha. Good one. We’d never get anything done.” Hear me out. There are rules to this concept working in practice, not just in theory.

1)    Cover your you-know-what.
Namely, adopt a Social Media Policy. I’m talking about a formalized document that establishes some guidelines on ethics and privacy. While you may already have a corporate communications policy of this sort, it’s very smart to be clear that social media is part of that policy too. I could write a blog post on this very subject alone but Sharlyn Lauby, president of Internal Talent Management, already wrote an insightful

One of the more promising areas of focus for social business transformation is customer service. This week at e2.0 I attended a panel discussion of social customer service moderated by Clara Shih. It was an interesting discussion and I think there are some good solid practices growing up, enabled by some new tools. Since I've managed support organizations for a few software vendors in the past and I've done a lot of research on social business I started thinking about some of the possibilities for changing the way we think about customer service.

You will note in the simple diagram above that there's still an underlying customer service system, which is the key to enterprise level scaleability (although there are a few variations on this idea that could create a different type of backend system, I'll explain that later). There are essentially two "new" types of channels for the development of the conversation. The first steps outside the enterprise and into the social cloud to use rapidly growing social networks like Facebook and real time conversation vehicles like Twitter to interact with customers "when, where and how" they choose. As more and more customers become comfortable with these online public communities they grow in importance in reaching customers effectively. There's a secondary use case for real time conversation tools like Twitter that has emerged from Best Buys that uses Twitter, a broad group of employees and a backend system that aggregates the Tweets into a single web page, which

Could British Libel law be forcing British media out of business and creating a boom in blogs hosted by ISPs in countries which are not under UK court jurisdiction?

This article in today’s Sunday Times about libel media law in the UK, and how it could force American publications out of the British market, is just one of a number of recent stories which have stood out.

Then there was the story on BoingBoing.net about British law firm Wragg and Co, which the blog believes is being tasked with targeting internet forum posters and whistle blowers. It is great for the UK to be a leading centre of excellence, but this is one industry which if left unchecked verges on the sinister.

We also have libel tourists flocking to the UK, as explained in this story in The Times. Surely a surefire sign that the law is getting out of hand.

On the positive side, libel is no longer a criminal offence in the UK but this is a rare positive story.

Are strict libel laws pushing already hard up ‘old media’ print outlets out of business? Not solely

via Pew Internet | Twitter and Status Updating

The most influential people on Twitter are either already celebrities, create their own content, or both. Who do you see most often retweeted? Major news outlets like CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Mashable. Guy Kawasaki. Robert Scoble. Of course there are many reasons these people are influential, but a very basic reason is that they are creating original content somewhere other than Twitter. They are most often using Twitter as a super-news-feed, and as a way to drive people back to their blog, web site, etc. (Scoble is an exception. He converses everywhere.)

Here are a handful of the many reasons a blog gives you more control and more power:

• With a blog, you control the agenda, whether you’re communicating on behalf of a company, or for personal reasons.
• Your blog can cater to a sub-group of your Twitter friends or a different audience altogether.
• A blog is less dominated by spam than Twitter.
• You can embed images, audio and video on your blog.
• Blog posts can be of unlimited length. You can express yourself in more than 140 characters.
• With some environments, you have almost unlimited control over the appearance, functionality and arrangement of your blog.
• Many blogs include the ability to offer contact forms, polls, chat and other functionality. You can even embed your Twitter stream into your blog.

There are many popular blogging applications. My blog is on WordPress, which is very popular for its rich feature set, wide variety of

I think it is. And I tweeted so  yesterday.  And the reason is obvious. What is SEO about? Ultimately, it is about one thing: the ‘website’. It’s about making a website and its pages discoverable, ranked favorably in search results, described appropriately so that searchers hook on the description etc.

But ‘websites’ are not ‘in’. Check the diagrams below from Google trends for websites for the past 12 months.

Website traffic for 5 major IT companies

Website traffic for the 2 major

First of all, small businesses may not clearly understand how social media can help them. Nor, do they know how to measure the impact of social networks.  For instance, friending a brand may not always result in immediate sales. So, the small business reporting that social media doesn’t work is probably not giving the program sufficient time to develop.

Additionally, like businesses of all sizes, small businesses have trouble focusing their efforts. They want to jump into Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter all at once. Now, I believe in utilizing all three of these networks, as does Paul Chaney. However, small businesses should pick one platform that makes the most sense for their customers and master that one before adding another one.

And most of them don’t have the necessary resources to make the most of social media.

We’ve written about this often:

David Terrar writes a terrific post on the SOMESSO blog on the  gap between corporate culture and what he calls ‘Web 2.0 society.’

What especially resonates for me about David’s words are the simple truths he articulates on some people’s behaviours in organizations, particularly large ones, that erect hurdles and other obstacles to prevent the organization as a whole from being a connected organization.

But he offers some strong light at the end of a dark tunnel. See how this resonates with you:

[…] Those of us at the leading edge of this ‘web 2.0′ technology, irrespective of which generation we come from (and that includes all the speakers at the conference) are already using these tools in our day to day working lives. We use blogs and online news sites as information feeds and Wikipedia for research. We connect with friends on Facebook, and work colleagues using LinkedIn and Xing. We collaborate with wikis and in online workspaces. We use micro-blogging tools like Twitter to connect with our extended network, and as one of the key places to look for the ideas that are cool, interesting, and innovative. We share presentation material with

Fortunately, I don’t need to … someone has done that work of comparing Google Analytics and Yahoo! Analytics and come up with the point score of each.

Hint :  Look at slide 47 – Google Analytics scores at 53% while Yahoo! Analytics scores at 79%.  Ha!

Source: Shutterstock

Prior to leaving Forrester to join Altimeter Group, Jeremiah Owyang, along with Josh Bernoff, Cynthia N. Pflaum, and Emily Bowen, published a report that attempted to bring the future of the Social Web into focus. If we viewed the content of his research as a social object, the conversations that would transpire could in fact expedite the development and implementation of the most valuable predictions and observations contained within.

The first part of the report observes the state of the Social Web and summarizes its direction:

Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience. Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. Socially connected consumers will strengthen communities and shift power away from brands and CRM systems; eventually this will result in empowered communities defining the next generation of