The Social Customer Manifesto

Supernova Now Fits In Your Pocket

This year, the Supernova conference is collaborating with Cerado to create a custom Ventana^tm that will serve as a mobile-friendly Official Pocket Guide and connect the event with its attendees in real time.  (Scroll down to see screenshots of the guide.)

There are four versions of the Supernova Pocket Guide available:

• For Mobile (including the Nokia N95 and BlackBerry)
• For iPhone
• Supernova widget for websites
• Supernova widget for your blog

The guide offers quick access to...

The Buzz - The latest blog posts, Twitter comments, and announcements are the first things you see when you open the Guide

The People - The Network page lets other attendees quickly jump to your blog or website. (By the way, you can add yourself to the guide with one click, and link people to your Facebook profile, LinkedIn presence, Twitter stream, or any other online resource.)

The Answers - We've included a helpful FAQ to help you keep track of everything that's going on.

The Plan - The Agenda page will be updated in real time whenever the conference agenda shifts.

The Supernova conference is on its seventh year of catalyzing the visionary conversations about the development of new technology. In collaboration with Wharton, one of the world's foremost business schools, Supernova embraces the changes sweeping our world and the tools that often make the "audience" better connected and informed than the experts.    

Supernova 2008 will take place June 16-18 in San Francisco. To reserve your place in the conversation, register now, and get the Guide.

You can learn more about Cerado Ventana at http://ventana.cerado.com.

   

Jeremiah Owyang at Cluetrain @ 10

Jeremiah is up at Cluetrain @ 10. 

POST methodology

• People - Assess your customers' 'Social Technographics' profile
• Objectives - Decide what you want to accomplish
• Strategy - Plan for how relationships with customer will change
• Technology - Decide which social technologies to use

Full background on POST here.

NOTE:  "It's POST, not 'TSOP' ... it doesn't start with technology"

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How to deal with detractors?

Best practice ... have a crisis strategy in place.  More on how to deal with detractors here.

Five types of detractors:

• Legitimate complainer
• Competitor
• Engaged critic
• Flamer
• Troublemaker

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Adoption models

• "The Tower" - Purely centralized adoption of social media tools
• "The Tire" - Uncoordinated adoption at the edge of the organization
• "Hub & Spoke" - Central resource, but people can be flexible at the edge

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Jeremiah's Recommendations

• Act like a host at a part, rather than a cop
• Power is in the hands of the community
• Put the needs of the members first, followed by marketing objectives

Deb Schultz On How To Connect, Succeed

Deb Schultz is up at Cluetrain at 10.  Just make a number of great points on how to engage in a highly connected world.  Deb's thoughts:

1. Be Real
2. Participate
3. Find your communities
4. Be a catalyst
5. Engage online
6. Engage offline
7. Know when to "let it go"
8. The love you give is equal to the love you get
9. Be multi demensional
10. Be consistent
11. Focus on people not tech
12. Listen.  Rinse.  Repeat.

Cluetrain at 10

Am in Palo Alto this morning at the Cluetrain at 10 event in Palo Alto (details on the event here).   Hope to see you here!  Doc, Debs, and a lot of other great folks here.  Will be updating this post throughout the day.

Highlights from Doc's talk:

"Open source is a lot like the construction industry.  We don't think about the construction industry as a 'gift culture' -- it's just a culture where good ideas get
spread around."  Example: Augustus Taylor and frame construction

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NEA:
Nobody owns it
Everybody can use it.
Anybody can improve it.

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We should be able to express global (and logical) preferences outside of anyone's silo.  Example:   "IF I am calling for tech support THEN I don't want to hear a commercial message AND I am willing to pay X to reach a human in < 60 seconds"

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Joyce Searls: "Why can't I take my shopping cart from one site to another?"

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VRM: A new business model.  Project #1 is for free media (that isn't advertising). 

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RelButton = "I want to pay..what I want, I want to relate on my terms..."

Three states:

1) Intention to relate and pay

2) Intention to sell, but also to relate on your (the buyer's terms) as well as mine

3) Existing relationship

Can capture intentions, transaction records, preferences, memberships, social graphs, shopping lists, existing agreements, etc.

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Summary thoughts:

- The customer is the new platform

- Markets are relationships

- Relating is the new frontier

- The "intention economy" will grow around what we actually want

- Our work has barely started

Jane, Stop This Crazy Thing!

The rumors on the new iPhone state that it'll have a second camera for "video conferencing."  But think about it...if it's on the faster 3G network, and it has that second camera, it's not really "video conferencing," which conjures images of staid meetings and boardrooms and such.

If the camera is there, and the network is fast enough, and the UI is right, this is that individual, person-to-person videophone that has been envisioned for the last 50 years.

Thoughts?

(And yes, for the record, I still want my flying car.)

Yes, It Blends

"In every successful viral campaign there’s at least an ounce or two of luck, but let’s dismiss that and focus on everything else. What we are seeing now in online communities is a shift toward humanness. It’s no longer acceptable to the Internet savvy individuals to interface with a faceless corporation. Social tools like blogs, messaging services and community sites have broken down barriers between individuals and also between brands and consumers." - Jackie Peters

In particular, Jackie was talking about the success of Blendtec, which now has a marketing department that is a profit center, based on the success of their marketing videos on Revver.  (Yes, you read that correctly.)

So...will it blend?

Clay Shirky on Gin, Sitcoms and the Cogitive Surplus

Clay Shirky will be a speaker at Supernova 2008.  Some great insight from a keynote earlier this year:

“I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.”

Go check out the whole discussion here, or the video here.

The People, The People, The People, People

In a timely follow-on to the last post, Shel Holtz has put up an outstanding podcast entitled "Employees Are The Brand," from a session he hosted at the recent New Communications Forum.  An excerpt from Shel:

"I had an interesting conversation with a fella a couple of months ago.  We were talking about this whole issue of your employees going home at night and being part of Facebook groups and commenting on blogs and frequently identifying themselves as associated with their employers.  Some of them are doing this from work because their company allows it, others were finding ways around the restrictions and the blocks.  I talk to more and more IT people who tell me 'we block access to Facebook' and 'we block access to YouTube,' but employees bring their home laptops in with their wireless access cards, or they use their cellphones and they're doing it anyway. 

I was at one company where they actually have the means to block the signal from your personal cellphone or your personal laptop that you bring in so you can't do this stuff on work time.    It's getting kind of ridiculous.  But the fact is, your employees ARE participating in these spaces, because they are the people who go out and participate in these spaces.  These aren't unemployed people in pajamas in their mom's basements."

You can listen to the whole thing here.

Related:  The People ARE the Brand

Getting The Boot

Zappos has a great process for ensuring their corporate culture stays strong, and validating that the people they hire are truly bought into what they are doing:

"After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls 'The Offer.' The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “'f you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.'"

Nice.  Here's a link to the full article from HBS.

(from here)

Defining "You"

In the old world, you were defined by what you consumed*.  In the new world, you are defined by what you create.

*- your credit report, your vehicle, etc.