Jeremiah Owyang on Social Media Strategies

Jeremiah Owyang

Yesterday I attended Jeremiah Owyang's web seminar "Social Media Playtime Is Over: How Brands Must Focus In A Recession." Jeremiah has been covering social media and on-line communities for Forrester for the last year and he offers a unique perspective on the state of the art best practices. In his position as a researcher he gets a first hand view of both corporate practices and vendor product strategies.

Here are some important insights from the seminar.

• The opportunity to use social media despite the recession is NOW. While the media maybe over hyping services like Twitter (Oprah and CNN vs Ashton Kutcher) with 3/4 of the US based on-line adults using social technologies this is a trend not a fad. We can expect adoption to increase during the recession as more people are between jobs and tapping into free social networking services to create and enhance personal brand.
  
• The companies surveyed are increasing their spending on social media programs but as a percentage of their overall marketing spend it remains small as most programs are not strategic.
• Most corporate use of social media is experimental with no clearly defined best practices and with many efforts underfunded and sporadic. Over 60% of the companies surveyed have budgets under $50,000 that are not dedicated but come from previously allocated marketing and advertising budgets.
  
• Jeremiah then offered 7 tactics that can fuel experimentation. These included:
  
  1. Socialize content - Make your existing connect available to be republished
     
  2. Word of mouth with Twitter - Establish Twitter accounts as communication channels
     
  3. Aggregate existing content - Provide a unified view on syndicated content relevant to your audience
     
  4. Crowdsource your support - Empower your users to provide answers and content for your community
     
  5. Sponsor bloggers - Give your customers a forum to talk about your brand and products
     
  6. Sponsor events - Not only provide venue and cover expense but actively participate
     
  7. Let go with APIs - Provide APIs into your service to allow others to build Internet properties using it in unique ways.
     

Bottom line is that we must treat social media as a long term strategy with the appropriate metrics and measurable returns and staff it with resources dedicated to its success that include a constant improvement feedback loop as best practices evolve.

Problems with Twitter Search

Last night as I was watching the Sharks game and conversing with the Sharks faithful on Twitter when I noticed Twitter search didn't provide any updates on the #Sharks hashtag for over two hours between 19:48 and 22:51. When it did start updating all the tweets that I made in the two hour window that included #Sharks didn't show-up in the results.

Anyone had similar problems? Know what's going on?

Here are screen shots that show the sequence.

Ulitzer's Questionable Practices and Curl's Endorsement

Late last year in my role as VP of marketing at Curl we were approached by SYS-CON to provide authors for their new service called Ulitzer. Having worked with Jeremy Gleelan to get Curl's message to the market at AjaxWorld events and in their numerous on-line magazines this appeared to be a good opportunity to continue the dialogue on Enterprise RIA. Jnan Dash, Bert Halstead and I all become contributors. During the period we published numerous articles on Enterprise RIA and saw their distribution in related SYS-CON on-line magazines.

As the beta of Ulitzer ended Jeremy asked if Curl could provide an endorsement. Feeling there was value in the service we did provide our endorsement.

However, given the questionable practices that have come to light over the last week I and Curl no longer feel comfortable with this endorsement and have formally requested Jeremy and SYS-CON to remove it wherever it appears. As of this writing I have been assured by Fuat Kircaali that my endorsement will be removed promptly.

RIA Fit Client and Cloud Computing

Image by David Simonds

As noted in the Economist a battle is brewing over standards for Cloud Computing as the big players begin to take measure of winning and loosing strategies.

While confusion reigns relative to Cloud Computing's definition there is no denying that a new class of application is emerging. The "Web-enabled, rich client, data-driven from Internet based services" application.

RIA technologies like Adobe AIR, Curl and Microsoft Silverlight are enabling this new class of application known as the "Fit Client" - Not Fat or Thin but Fit, web-enabled desktop applications.

The lower cost of the Fit Client application will help make Cloud computing real. Read more about the Fit Client in my post here.