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While most corporate blogs aren’t trusted, it’s refreshing to see a new type of blog appear to meet the needs of transparency, non-pitching, and openness with the community –yet meet the business needs of the corporations.

I used to work for World Savings (Intranet redesign), which was acquired by Wachovia (I’m a customer), who is now merging with giant Wells Fargo, an outgrowth from all the turmoil in the financial sector the last few years. Wells Fargo has a long history of being best in class as a financial institution that understands social, and Wachovia has dipped their toes with Twitter, but is now jumping on board, espicially during times of scrutiny.

What’s the best way to win back trust? Wells Fargo and Wachovia have launched a blog called The Wells Fargo - Wachovia Blog with a kick off post from the CEO of Wells Fargo, John Stumpf.

This is the first social media property that I’ve seen that is focused on a merger. What should we expect from this blog? While I don’t officially know, obviously this content will have to shift to something new after the merger is completed, perhaps they could focus on a community platform? Having videos that shows behind the scenes how the teams are working together to improve the customer experience would also be helpful. The more material shown that shows how the experience is going to improve for me as a Wachovia customer is key, prove to use that this is good for customers.

Give the economic situation will only get worse, what other creative social media deployments should we see next? I’ll make a few predictions: 1) A corporate blog focused on helping those who were laid off find new jobs 2) A community site hosted by a corporation that helps laid off employees connect with others. 3) A variety of online communities appear for alumnus of companies.

Jason Falls

I’ve long been of the belief that the vast majority of social media thinkers and doers easily lapse into the self-gratifying bubble that is our little online world and forgets the primary audience to which we should speak lies not on Twitter or Facebook or blogs. We are good a sharing social media. We are better at stroking each other and the latter is easier to accomplish.

But what it accomplishes is little. I’ve said before that I feel we should spend less time talking to each other and more talking to the un-enlightened. I’ve made speaking commitments for 2009 at conferences and engagements outside my comfort zone for that very reason. The Social Media Club Louisville will take a decided direction on education, offering paid boot camps for non-profits, educators, public relations professionals and more this year. We will focus on the tools, the basics and getting to know social media so that when we do have events to talk strategy, we aren’t met with deer-in-headlights looks and cricket chirping.

But what can we do for our clients, our businesses and our immediate social media needs to get outside that box as well?

Forrester Research's Social Technographics Ladder from Flickr.

Let’s start with Forrester’s now familiar Social Technographics Ladder. This image proposes Internet users are made up of six groups of participants: those who don’t participate in social sites; spectators who look, but nothing more; joiners who maintain profiles but don’t really get “into” it; collectors who will vote, add tags and maybe use RSS feeds but little else; critics who contribute comments, ratings, edit articles in a wiki and participate on other sites but not their own; and creators who publish their own materials.

According to Forrester’s 2008 statistics to fill in those roles, 21 percent of Internet users are now creators, up from 18 percent in 2007. Surprisingly, 25 percent are inactive, down dramatically from 44 percent in 2007. And an astonishing 69 percent are now spectators (up from 48 percent). All other categories increased as well.

Forrester Research's Social Technographic Profile of U.S. Online Adults via Flickr

Here’s what these numbers mean to me and how they translate to actionable strategies for your 2009 social media activities.

1. More people are adopting the social web as a regular activity.
2. With almost 70 percent of all Internet users now watching what is happening on social sites, companies are now at a critical point in time in doing something meaningful there to capture those attentions.
3. The traditional marketing mindset, however, seeks numbers, eyeballs, etc., so the programs developed are aimed at influencers hoping for the trickle-down and long-tail effects of “going viral.”
4. This means the way we are approaching social media targeting is flawed.

Instead of developing programs to entice the creators or critics into talking about our companies, products or services, why don’t we develop ones that focus on the spectators and serve their needs? By giving them what they’re looking for, we connect our brand to their experience in a meaningful way. And frankly, if we do that, the creators and critics will follow.

It’s worth a shot, right?

Here’s a snippet of what I mean:

Let’s say you’re the brand manager for the Smart Car. You develop a lifestyle website around the Smart Car with content focused on green issues, other eco-friendly companies and programs, helpful tips and pointers to a green lifestyle, environmental event coverage, charity partnerships, etc. Think of it as a tree-hugger’s magazine online. (I don’t say “blog” because that’s the first word that turns most spectators — read: brand managers — off.) By giving the spectator the type of experience online they’re perhaps looking for, but also intertwining your very relevant brand into the content and messaging, you’re giving them something useful. By doing so, you enamor your brand with them and have a chance at sales, conversions, etc.

That’s just one idea and not one given a lot of thought. Imagine, Mr. or Mrs. Smart Car Brand Manager, what we could accomplish if I were fully functional, being paid and off my pain meds. (Heh.)

So my challenge to all of us in 2009 is to not stop thinking about the influencers, but start thinking about the larger audiences of people just toe-tipping the social web, too. Let’s give them something to consume, something to do, some people to interact with on behalf of the brand. Why does it have to be on an influencer’s blog? Why can’t it be on our dime, our time and our server? Let’s see what we can do to not scare them off and show them that we’ve been listening. We know you don’t want to be marketed to. We just want to welcome you to our new world where we talk, listen, share and collaborate.

If we do that, 2009 will be our best yet.

Related articles by Jason Falls and Zemanta

• The Incredible Efficiency of Social Media
• Social Media Strategy: Aligning Goals and Measurements
• Top 10 Social Media Tips For Connecting With Non-Blogging Customers
• Social Media Marketing & The Need For Focus

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By Jeremiah Owyang and Josh Bernoff and cross posted on Forrester’s Interactive Marketing Blog

At Forrester we tend to look forward, not back. In fact, right now we are preparing our predictions for what 2009 will bring in the social application space. But the end of the year is also a time to reflect. So we looked back at our 2008 predictions to see how we did. Overall, we had one big mistake (vendor relationship management went nowhere) and we were too optimistic on several other predictions. Optimism, it seems, comes along with this space. But we were pleased that the entrance of corporations into the social world seems to be coming along fine, despite the recent Motrin kerfuffle, to cite one example.

Hindsight is 20-20; it’s harder to remember what life felt like in December of 2007, before the recession loomed large, Barack Obama used social technologies to win the election, and social technology became mainstream. But cast mind back 12 months, and then see if you would have agreed with our predictions . . . and what can be learned from the mistakes we made. Here they are, along with the grades we give ourselves 12 months later. (Note: these predictions were in a Forrester document available to our clients (Update: Which included the help of Charlene Li and Peter Kim, who have since moved on to become alumni). We’ve reproduced the predictions, with some edits for length that don’t affect the content.

Our 2008 Prediction: Corporate participation will bring social applications to the mainstream. . . .Emboldened by the success of pioneering efforts like Victoria’s Secret’s Facebook page and extensive private communities like Procter & Gamble’s beinggirl.com, companies will move beyond one-off experiments in social media to establish full-fledged initiatives. Sponsored communities, YouTube videos, social networking groups, and widgets will become a standard part of online marketing campaigns, further pushing adoption by mainstream consumers. . . . By the end of 2008, marketers will be searching for concrete ways to measure return . . .

Result: Give us a B on this one. There were indeed many more social applications, as evidenced by the 150 excellent entrants to the Forrester Groundswell awards. And, there is definitely a renewed focus on metrics. But social is far from universal, and the state of measurement sadly lags social deployments.

Our 2008 Prediction: Community manager roles will gain prominence in companies. As companies realize how important social applications are to their marketing and business strategies, formal budgets and roles will become more standard at large marketers. The staff in charge of those applications might not all have the same title, but they will share similar duties and responsibilities, namely, to develop a social technology strategy and start to deploy social tools and programs.

Result: A-. Community managers aren’t universal. But there are an awful lot of them, and the ones we know have definitely risen in prominence within their companies, see this list compiled of community managers at enterprise class corporations.

Our 2008 Prediction: Corporate social responsibility will take on a new meaning. Corporate participation in Social Computing hasn’t had the greatest run, between fake blogs and flat marketer profiles on social networks that shout at, rather than talk with, site members. Moreover, consumers have become more vocal about preserving control over their information and experiences. . . .Just as Sarbanes-Oxley provides guidelines for internal controls, companies will find themselves answering as well to a growing community of external auditors.

Result: B-. Recent events like the Motrin fiasco show the groundswell is keeping people honest. But we still hear the occasional corporate executive asking us if they can fake it. (We always tell them that would be a very bad idea.) We still think this will come true, but may take another year or more.

Our 2008 Prediction: Customer needs will gain a voice and launch demand-platform prototypes. . . . Customers will state their intention to buy products or services via a Web-based marketplace. eBay’s “Want It Now” program will get a turbo boost when the company turns the existing bulletin board/announcement service into a bidding-based marketplace. College students on Facebook will organize buying clubs centered on an entire dormitory, allowing marketers to move bulk merchandise with a single purchase order. Meanwhile, search engines like Google will create prototype vendor relationship management (VRM) tools that will enable both customers and marketers to find, aggregate, and match user requests to providers.

Result: F. Proved to be far too optimistic; never happened.

Our 2008 Prediction: Micromedia adoption will increase, and marketers will learn to join in. Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Utterz, and other micro-blogging and micro-media tools will give users the opportunity to share short sentences or audio clips with trusted friends. Better search and aggregation tools as well as the ability to have differentiated, group-based distribution will make these “micromedia” conversations more useful and relevant, extending their use beyond the early adopters. Marketers will learn how to use the new tools to monitor and target these ephemeral conversations and participate in relevant interactions on the fly.

Result: A-. Twitter dominated the micromedia market. Companies from Comcast to H&R Block to Zappos have learned to accomplish real business goals with it. We expect a whole lot of further growth in marketer use of Twitter in 2009.

Our 2008 Prediction: The social graph will open up. In 2008, we will see social network members clamoring for greater control over their social networking site profiles, specifically, the ability to express their personal social graphs across multiple sites, for example, on both Facebook and LinkedIn. What will break down the walls in these walled gardens? Perhaps a disrupter like Microsoft or Yahoo! will open up their respective relationship maps from Web-based address books and instant messenger buddy lists and allow outside developers to build apps on that truly open the social graph. This will set the standard, and every other social networking service will need to follow suit shortly thereafter, or risk the wrath of members unable to control their profiles.

Result: C. This trend is powerful, and will develop, perhaps even the way we predicted. But standards move slowly and we see fragments of technologies from Facebook’s Connect, Google’s Friend Connect, and OpenID. Look for this opening up to gather momentum in 2009 where a standardized protocol between all of these technologies to merge.

Our 2008 Prediction: Social search will make its debut. Social search will finally inch its way into the mainstream by re-ranking search results based on inputs from your personalized search history as well as the searching patterns of your social graph. For example, people with similar searching patterns and people like you within your social networks might have favored a particular site over other results in a search for “china.” If so, that link will move up higher in the results. Leading the path to social search will be small vendors like Collarity, Eurekster, Mahalo.com, Wink Technologies, and Wikia, which will begin with site-based social search results. But also look for Google and Yahoo! to start testing and inserting limited social and personalized search results, and eventually ads, as an optional advanced search at the top of search results pages.

Result: D. Social search didn’t catch on very well. But Google did add the ability to promote or demote search results to its mainstream searches –but it lacked a true social element. We did start to see tools that help people quickly share information like ex-Googlers at Friendfeed but the tool doesn’t highlight search as a primary effort. Now that large web platforms like Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL are expanding their social features we should expect search to be impacted in the next year. Social search will get here, one way or another.

That covers all our predictions from last yea, it’s important that we review who made a prediction and to own up to how accurate it was, and more importantly; what changed and why? We’ll be publishing our predictions for 2009 in a report for clients, keep an eye out for that.

What are your best ideas for what’s going to happen in 2009? And what predictions already out there do you think are right – or wrong?

Cam posted a message on Twitter “@desaraev Lots of Tweeples are mentioning the DM spam.” 23 hours ago - Comment - Like

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Despite my heavy usage, I’m on Twitter Hiatus
I’m known for being a very active twitter user, recent applications have tracked my daily usage from being 20-30 tweets on average. I’m not like other twitter users, as I have a very specific method in which I use the tool. However, two weeks ago today, I stopped using twitter, and announced that I’m on temporary Twitter hiatus.

Twitter shows its weaknesses
Why? I’m recalibrating my media plan, and trying to shift and shake things up. First of all, there’s a few things that have caused me to evaluate my media strategy: 1) the lack of context in 140 characters, 2) unthreaded discussions makes it difficult to track conversations in one place, and 3) unsymmetrical networks, meaning if you’re not following someone, what they say creates gaps in the conversation. All of these reasons create challenges on making twitter an effective conversation tool. Perhaps most sadly, I’ve observed the cracks getting deeper during crisis and incidents like motrin moms, sponsored blog posts, and mumbai attacks.

Now at the end of the year, I spent more time in the real world with friends and family, and have had an opportunity to step back and think things through. As a result, I’m finding solace in tools that allow for greater context like this blog, and on Friendfeed.

Time to Refocus
Next, I’m trying to focus more on energizing(word of mouth) and supporting (community) this year, rather than just publishing, in an effort to be more efficient, and to help the community during this troublesome economy. Shel Israel has noticed that despite my inactivity in Twitter (which I still monitor, of course) that the community around me continues to grow. I’m not sure why or how that is happening, but it’s an interesting phenomenon.

You should evaluate how you spend your time
I encourage you during this downtime to evaluate and rethink how you use these social technologies. You should think about the following questions: how has the environment around you changed? how was technology changed? what’s your goal? Are you using the tools in the right way to meet these three questions? You have limited inventory (time) and the world is always changing, are you sure you’re investing your resources in the right way? There’s nearly unlimited tools out there, take the time to think it through.

Stay tuned, I have a new project launching
What to expect from me in the future? With my time saved on not interacting as much in the conversation, I’ve been focusing my efforts on a resource that will help people understand the skills needed during a recession, and how to get jobs –stay tuned people.

Cam posted a link Ning, Wordpress or Who Cares? | Greater Than Media Friday at 11:06 am - Comment - Like

Above: I’m thinking about the differences between traditional marketing agencies and social media agencies, this video by Jim the founder of Ignite Social Media agency does a good job explaining the difference. I like how he points out how putting ads on sites, or doing link backs for SEO don’t qualify as engaging in two-way dialog.

Above: Andrew Vascellari gives a comedic rendition of what not to look for in a social media agency, starting with this must read list from Geoff Livingston (update: with Beth Harte).

Cam posted a message on Twitter “Hey... my mom just joined Facebbok AND wants to friend me. Say "hi" to Blobbi, y'all.” Friday at 8:18 am - Comment - Like

Cam posted a message on Twitter “@gillianr I had a similar thought to @joeolson14. I was going to suggest you make sure your hair is dry. Wet floormats could be a cause” Friday at 8:01 am - Comment - Like

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Cam posted a message on Twitter “Getting back into a groove today. Starting right at Sunny Side Up Café- Uptown Mpls.” Friday at 7:44 am - Comment - Like

Cam posted a message “Getting back into a groove today. Starting right at Sunny Side Up Café- Uptown Mpls.” Friday at 7:44 am - Comment - Like

Jason Falls

One of the social media tools I get the most use out of yet see the fewest people adopting is social bookmarking. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to refer to Delicious.com quite a bit. Not only is it my social bookmarking mechanism of choice, but it is the one utility essentially geared for just that — bookmarking. Not voting, or front page-getting or popularity contests. Delicious is about a place to store your favorite sites and share them with your friends along that network if you choose.

Of course, being all social media’d up, Delicious offers several ways to bookmark (copying and pasting the URL straight into Delicious; using a toolbar bookmarklet for one-click access to the entry field; or even zany sync functions with your browser’s bookmarks or favorites, which make no sense to me if you’re going totally web-based, but I digress.) It even allows you (or anyone for that matter) to subscribe to your bookmarks via RSS or — even better — you can subscribe to certain tags applied to your bookmarks via RSS as well. So if I tag a certain number of bookmarks, “rockstar” and you want to subscribe to all the content I bookmark and then tag “rockstar” to indicate that it was written by a rockstar, I’m a rockstar (and vain) or it’s about Rockstar energy drink, then you can subscribe to just that tag and not see all the other crap I save.

At any rate, Delicious kicks ass and I use it in a number of ways. But tagging content, I recently found, is something I’m not very good at.

What you see below are my top Delicious tags as of late Thursday night, granted after parsing quite a few and transferring several client-based tags to a corporate account. (Hence the most popular “for:DoeAnderson”.) A few top level tags standout that make sense for me — PR, blogging, Louisville, bestpractices, advertising. “SME” is the purposed tag I use to populate the “What I’m Reading” side bar on my blog.

Delicous Tags - Jason Falls 1-1-09

But if you look closer, you can see massive redundancy and disorganization. There are tags for brandenthusiasts, branding and brands. Separate ones for forum and forums. And a run of social media related ones that include no fewer than sellingsocialmedia, socialbookmarking, socialmedia, socialmediamarketing, socialmediameasurement, socialmediarelease, socialmediaroi, socialmediastrategy, socialmediatools, socialnetworking and socialnews. Oh, and there are separate entries for business, CEO and corporate.

And that’s just the snapshot of the top 200 tags. If you get down into the minutiae of my tags, you’ll find entries for (and I kid you not): baseballbats, celebrity, coffee, crafts, culturalbias, DIY, forumettiquette, giving, inspirtation, knitting, lawsuits, methanedigester, parenting, sarahpalin, slander, startingablog, TomTom, widgets, wine, WVU, yuwie and my personal favorite, cowfarming.

The reason for all this disorganization is two-fold. First, tagging is free-wheeling, off-the-cuff and can be whatever you want it to be. The concept is simple. Tag the content with a word or a couple of words that you will remember when looking for the content again, making it easier to find in a search. This can, however, often lead to inconsistencies in your tagging habits over time which is the second problem that resulted in my mess. Being inconsistent with what keywords I used to identify, say, social media measurement articles, produced multiple tags for the same essential information. Had I developed either a system, or kept it bare-bones simple from the start of my tagging life, some two years ago, this mess would not have happened.

So, starting over today, and Lord knows if I’ll ever get time to actually fix it all, here are my practical tips to tagging your content:

Keep It Simple

I would recommend using no more than 2-3 tags per piece of content and keep the words very generic. If it’s about social media measurement then maybe tag it “socialmedia” and “measurement”. If you’re ever tempted to get into monitoring, ROI, quantifying success, etc., default to “socialmedia” and “measurement”. And remember that tagging, especially in Delicious, is space sensitive. Thus “social media” will be tagged as “social” and then also as “media.” Be sure to eliminate the space and make it “socialmedia.”

Keep It The Same

If you’re following the Keep it Simple rule, you’ll probably find it easy to follow this one. Remember, inconsistency is what has killed my organization. So you have to keep coming back to the hard fast rules. If you’re bookmarking tax fraud cases in several states for your law firm, then bookmark them, “taxfraud California” and “taxfraud NewJersey” so you have one laundry list (taxfraud) and can then break it down by state with other filters. Don’t go off putting prosecutors names or state abbreviations or other extraneous information you won’t need. Keep it simple and the same.

Periodically Review

To remind yourself of the tags you are using and to help clean out ones you perhaps threw in by accident in your last, late night fit of social bookmarking, you should log in to Delicious periodically and see your mess. If you have hundreds of tags and none of them make sense, you’ve probably done something wrong. If you see a handful of categories that are popping out as the most bookmarked and you can easily filter and find what you’re looking for at a glance, you’re keeping with the program. It’s kind of like your file drawer - the less you look at it, the more it makes you sick when you do. So be a good steward, remembering that the public can see your mess online, and clean up your junk from time to time.

Don’t Bookmark Everything

This one is a hard one for some to grasp, but bear with me. I bookmark fewer and fewer items these days for one simple reason: I subscribe to just about everything I find interesting online via RSS. If I want to find an article I read on Mark Dykeman’s blog a year ago, I can search my RSS feeds and find it. It’s not much more time consuming or difficult than bookmarking it, so I don’t need bookmarking as much anymore. However, there are purposes and reasons for aggregating everything I find on certain subjects, so bookmarking hasn’t lost its relevance. But I only bookmark what I’m going to later need when writing an article on the subject or preparing presentation for clients, etc.

And as a bonus, here are some Delicious tricks.

1. Use the bookmarklet to add things to Delicious. It’s just quicker and easier. Go here to learn how, it adds an icon in your browser, when you’re on the page you click and the dialog box pops up so you can add descriptions, tags, etc. If you still copy-paste, you need to spend some time getting up to speed on stuff like this. Trust me. it will make your life easier.
2. To share a bookmark with a friend on Delicious, just add the tag “for:username” - so to share one with me, it would be “for:JasonFalls”.
3. To subscribe to a certain tag, just select the tag, then scroll down to the bottom of the page. You should see the orange RSS icon in the lower left.
4. To purpose a certain tag, just create a unique name for the tag and add it to content you want used for that purpose. For instance, I use the tag “sme” to produce the RSS feed of articles I want to appear in the sidebar of my blog as “What I’m Reading.” When I find an article I want to place there, I bookmark it, tag it with “sme” then I take the RSS feed of that tag from Delicous, and format the feed to fit in my sidebar using CSS styles. It sounds more complicated than it is. Ask a web dev type for some help. It’s actually not hard. (And once it’s set up, all I do is tag. Everything else is automatic.)
5. If you’re editing your own tags, there’s a new Beta version of a bulk editor in Delicious now, so you can change a bunch of tags all at once. However, it won’t allow you to bulk add a “for:” tag, so you can dump all your corporate stuff at once. Yep … I had to transfer over 250 Maker’s Mark tags one-by-one. Sucked.

As always, this is an effort in collective intelligence. What are your secrets for tagging, bookmarking, Delicious or similar. The comments are, as always, yours.

Related articles by Zemanta and Jason Falls

• Social Bookmarking In Plain English (from CommonCraft)
• Delicious Mobile? Still a Pipe Dream
• Search results show Delicious remains a tech niche
• Delicious: Tagging The Web For Five Years And Counting
• Web Strategy: Using Delicious For Market Research