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Overcoming Social Media Objections
“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” – Howard Aiken

As Dr. Aiken discovered, knowing which direction to go doesn’t mean much if you can’t get your team to follow. Thankfully, unlike Dr. Aiken we don’t have to convince people to buy in on an idea as crazy as building a computer at a time when phones were considered state of the art. But knowing that doesn’t make our job any easier.

All marketing campaigns come down to getting time, money, or resources and to be done properly, your Social Media Marketing campaign will likely need a little of all three. For many of us, this means approval from one or more decision makers on a marketing campaign that may be fundamentally different from anything they’ve done before.

The people considering your idea are going to have a running list going of positives and negatives. If they’re like most humans, this list won’t be entirely rational and will likely end up coming down to one major factor either way. Whether choosing new cars, new houses, or even new presidential candidates – people can usually narrow down their decision making criteria to one or two factors, positive or negative.

There’s no way to know which factors will be most critical to the people in your audience but if they’re anything like the folks I’ve been working with, here’s a few that come up almost every time.

“The devil we know IS NOT SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING”. This is where many good ideas have gone to die. While it’s true that building a social media project likely won’t be as predictable as a more traditional campaign, there is a healthy amount of data out there already. Besides this blog, success stories and ROI can be found on sites such as Groundswell, The Social Organization, and Marshall Kirkpatrick.
“We’re already doing social media marketing. We have a website, and it has a “talk to a sales rep” button – what else is there?” There is a common misconception amongst the uninitiated that if a company is online, it’s “connected”. As much hype as Web 2.0 receives, there are still many people who don’t get what it is, what it’s for, and more importantly where it might help. The only way to correct this is with education. In addition to collaborating on Web 2.0 projects enterprise-wide, I drive adoption through educational blog pots, workshops and webinars. I’ve found that most people, especially in marketing, have a remarkable capacity to learn about the bleeding edge but if they’re making a go/no go decision on your new project, it might be too late. The way to beat this one is early and often.
“OK, even if we do it with social media, how would we know if it worked?” Unlike “direct response” or “click through” marketing, social media campaigns aren’t as easily measured. Oftentimes we’re counting things like “engagement” and “connections” that don’t have a correlation to existing marketing metrics programs. At first blush, this seems like a minor point that will get fixed in time. But if your team is compensated on traditional marketing MBO’s, they might not be as motivated to kick off a social media endeavor. Marketing runs on metrics, but somehow TV and print ads get approved every year – stick to your guns, metrics are important but there are other factors to consider.

These certainly are not the only objections that you’ll run up against in trying to get your social media campaign off the ground, but they seem to be pretty common. Feel free to share objections you’ve come up against and any ideas on how to work through them. ( Mon, 12 May 2008 06:09:00 +0000 )

Social Media Strategies Event Wrap-Up
The WebGuild's Social Media Strategies Event on May 7 was very successful and a social affair. Many thanks to the stellar speakers: Sam Lawrence, CMO, Jive Software; Sylvia Marino, Executive Director - Community Operations, Edmunds.com; and Felix Serna, Sr. Director Global eMarketing, Sun Microsystems. They were highly knowledgeable and entertaining, and shared great anecdotes. Thank you as well to all who attended and we look forward to seeing you again. Photos of the event.

( Mon, 12 May 2008 03:40:00 +0000 )

Powerset Launches
Powerset, one of the most talked about startups in Silicon Valley, launched tonight. I'm guessing they chose late Saturday to make sure the server load would initially be fairly small as there will likely be a surge of activity on Monday.

The initial Powerset search is restricted to Wikipedia pages but it gives insight into the approaches to semantic search that are driving this company.

Barney Pell, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, is considered by many to be Powerset's key strategic advantage. He stepped down from top leadership several months ago in what the company said was restructuring as they got closer to launch, though critics suggested it was because Powerset was failing to deliver.

See for yourself -is Powerset the next Google? ( Mon, 12 May 2008 03:19:00 +0000 )

Facebook Borrowing to Scale Up Servers: $100,000,000. Facebook Stock: Priceless?
Facebook has announced that it will borrow $100 million to purchase new servers. This report suggests they are scaling up from 10,000 servers to about 60,000. Assuming Facebook Connect is widely adopted (and it probably will be) it does make sense that the server loads may go up dramatically.

So why did they borrow that money rather than just sell more stock? Silicon Alley Insider suggests, I think correctly, that it is because nobody is foolish enough to value Facebook at the whopping $15 billion that earlier deals were *rumored* to have been based upon. In fact Henry Blodget suggests that the Hong Kong deal did *not* value the company at 15 billion. I've noted before that Microsoft was probably not all that concerned about the monster theoretical valuation they gave to Facebook with the $240,000,000 investment - rather they were after foothold and ongoing advertising and partnership agreements.

So, with Facebook poised to lose a lot of money in the coming months to years, what will be their ultimate future? Without some huge breakthrough in their pitiful social networking advertising yields, the answer may not be all that Facebook friendly. ( Sun, 11 May 2008 07:11:00 +0000 )

Powerset Part Two
Web 2.0 Startup playmaker Mike Arrington was very skeptical of Powerset during the early phases, but he appears to have had a change of heart after attending a demo of the semantic search engine, scheduled to launch soon. Today in TechCrunch Arrington quotes his reaction to a demo last month and writes (with a few qualifications I'm not noting):

.. when I tested the service I had something very similar to the “Aha!” feeling that ran through me the first time I ever used Google. In short, it is an evolutionary, and possibly revolutionary, step forward in search...

This is the kind of praise that Powerset has had from several key valley players so it is not surprise that even before launch they are already on the sales block hoping for a huge play from Microsoft who is especially flush with cash after the withdrawl of Microsoft's offer to buy Yahoo. Although a pricetag of $100,000,000 has been bandied about Arrington is likely correct that this will be considerably too low for a company that - if Powerset lives up to all the hype and all the promise - could become worth more than Google or Microsoft as the next search giant. ( Sun, 11 May 2008 04:02:00 +0000 )

Powerset and Microsoft
It appears that that semantic search startup Powerset, which some were reporting was having major problems getting their search act off the ground, is in talks with Microsoft regarding a Microsoft aquisition.

Powerset, led by software pioneer Bernie Pell, claims to be solving one of the critical problems with web search - the inability of many search routines to pull context out of the query. Many believe that if users could find things using "natural language" rather than keyword searching they would consider switching to the best natural language search. Although Google is now working aggressively in this area it is not clear how much progress they have made. In fact it remains unclear how much progress Powerset has made so far, though Microsoft's interest in them may imply things are moving along and may lead to a rather impressive Powerset payday.

Dan Farber reports ( Sat, 10 May 2008 18:36:00 +0000 )

Google Friend Connect For Social Network Data Sharing
Myspace and Facebook announced enhanced social network data sharing last week and Google has now jumped in with Friend Connect. My guess is that both Facebook and Google pushed their launch dates to "catch up" with Myspaces announcement, so hopefully all these applications will be well tested and secure as legions of users adopt new open standards.

Mike at Techcrunch has more ( Sat, 10 May 2008 05:50:00 +0000 )

Java Has The Flu

I attended the JavaOne show this week, after a 4 year gap. What a difference - who knew Java could be so boring? On the other hand, this is what it feels like to go to a show for a technology that has lost half of its market share in the last 4 years (at least when measured by O'Reilly book sales - not a particularly reliable source but better than no source at all). If you don't like that source, check out Andi Gutman's recent post that Java is losing the battle for the modern web.

Let me be clear here - at WaveMaker, we have hitched our wagon to Java and hope very much that JavaOne is showing us the ghost of Java present, not the ghost of Java to come.

Trade shows in general have been eviscerated by the flood of technical information on the web. But even in the new "I'm only here for the Tchotchkes" world of conference attendees, this was a surprisingly desultory affair.

Aisle after aisle was populated almost solely by people in ugly sports shirts wearing a vacant gaze that we all reserve for particularly humiliating situations. In fact, the only booth which seemed to have any mojo was the - you guessed it - schwag booth from Sun.

This morning, I found out what was wrong. I got one of those delightful ALL CAPS emails from JavaOne informing me that we had all been the subject of a viral attack by the dreaded Norovirus. So that was it!

There is something seriously wrong, not just with JavaOne, but with Java. After 10 years, Java remains an extremely complex development environment with nothing even approaching an easy learning curve. Microsoft has gleefully filled this vacuum, driving a vast J2EE to .Net migration at the low end of the market that nobody in the Java world seems willing to acknowledge.

The Sun promise to put Java runtimes everywhere is meaningless if nobody wants to develop for those runtimes. Adobe and Microsoft are doing a far better job making their tools simple enough for mere mortals and focusing on the presentation layer.

The news at the show was that Sun's front end technology, JavaFX, was *still* not ready. The world needs Sun to stand behind one of the 200+ Ajax frameworks already out there, not create yet another one. While we're at it, why can't they just put more effort into an Ajax toolkit they have already "partnered" with, like Dojo?

Here is my prescription for curing the Java Flu:

Fight for the low end: in modern warfare, death may come from above. In technology, death comes from below. Ten years from now, who will have more power over IT - web designers or core developers? If Microsoft and Adobe win the designers today, Java developers will be the Cobol developers of tomorrow.
Make Java easier: something is wrong when very useful but also very complex code frameworks like Spring are considered the "easy" way to do Java development. Java needs to be easy enough for your mother to build her web-based phone list with it. I'm talking Hypercard/Filemaker/Access easy.
Make Java prettier: just put a bullet in JavaFX and adopt something with momentum like Dojo or Ext. If you just can't stomach Javascript, then adopt GWT.
Make Java fun: can't do this without doing the first three items. For an example of one attempt to make Java easy, check out the WaveMaker download.

Remember when people built cool web apps with Java? When was the last time you heard about a cool web app that wasn't written in Rails or PHP? OK, people still build lots of cool stuff in Java, but the love is gone and its just a day job now. ( Fri, 09 May 2008 22:32:00 +0000 )

Facebook's Facebook Connect
Facebook is announcing a stronger information sharing feature called "Facebook Connect":

Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows
users to "connect" their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site.
This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more
features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features
available to third party applications today on Facebook.

Facebook lists Trusted authentication, Real identity, Friends Access, and Dynamic Privacy as key features of the new platform. Here are more details at the developer blog.

Although open is very much the key paradigm it is also clear that major social players Myspace and Facebook are working hard to figure out how to make "their" open application "the" open application.

( Fri, 09 May 2008 22:02:00 +0000 )