This post is part of an ongoing series taken from my eBook on Social Media Architecture; a Field Guide to Unifying your Social Media Presence.   You can download the entire book here.

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Most organizations have no clear means of communicating what their social media presence actually looks like.  Excel sheets with lists of dozens (or hundreds) of sites cannot convey a clear sense of the issue. This is where a simple visualization can be enormously powerful. If there is a single step I would urge you to take, it is to create a visualization of your footprint in social media.  In my experience it is the most important tool in building the corporate will to recognize the problem and begin organizing for change.   The minimum data set you will need for this exercise:

• Site URL
• Community audience (who is this site serving?  Give your community the most recognizable name.  If it is focused on a product name it by the product name and so on)
• Platform (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook etc.)
• Size (followers, subscribers, fans etc.)
• Brand engagement (i.e. when was the last time the community manager was actively engaged with the community through posting of new content or facilitating a dialogue, etc.) This last piece of data is critical to understand if the community is still being served by an active moderator.

The goal here is not completeness of data, but collecting enough data to portray an accurate-enough picture of where you stand. Gathering this data can be achieved via a survey (as long as you can get good response rates), persistent phone calls, some investigatory research or an assignment to the agencies that service your social media needs (or some combination of all four of course!).  If you find this task daunting, consider this question: how are you ever going to define an effective structure for social media if you can’t accurately define your current state?

Option One:  visualize your footprint by platform:

The Footprint Visualization above allow you to take your data and place it in a powerful context for communicating the current state of your social media presence.

The figure above represents a sample visualization of an organization’s Facebook presence.  This same visualization will work for each platform (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) that you would like to analyze. Note that you can adjust this visualization in a number of ways to make it the most effective for your purposes.

Here is how to read this particular visualization: each band of concentric circles represents a set range of community members.  In this case the outer band represents 1 to 1,000 members, followed by 1,001 to 10,000 and finally, at the center, 10,001 and up. The dot size represents how large the community is relative to the range of the band it resides within. Thus, the largest dot in the outer band expresses the maximum of its band range, 1,000. Yet this largest dot in the outer band (1,000), is still smaller than the smallest dot in the next interior band since that band range begins at 1,001.   Below each dot is the name of the audience it is serving. The color of the dots relate to the recency of brand engagement:  green means the site has had moderator activity within the past 30 days, orange means no activity in past 60 days, and red means no activity in more than90 days – a dead site.  In simplest terms then, a big green dot in the center is good – a large community with active brand engagement.  A red dot anywhere signifies no recent moderator activity – customers that have been abandoned by the community manager. At first glance any spread of red dots lets you know that you have a problem with brand engagement or with having sites that have long been abandoned.  The names of audiences can be lined up to quickly see where it is that you are fragmenting the same audience into multiple communities.

This exercise can have a powerful impact in bringing people toward a shared point of view on the issues your organization faces.  Any spread of red dots creates a conversation:  are we abandoning our customers with on/off campaigns?   Are we fragmenting the same communities across multiple resource-intensive efforts? Are there big green dots in the center that can represent best-practice or serve as great places for valuable content from other parts of the organization? Are there any patterns to the successful sites?  And so on.

Once you have developed a clear visualization, the problems are usually quite apparent. The next step then, is to clarify what constitutes a unique community.  That will be in the next post.

Related articles

• The Widow – Coming to terms with the Social Media Mystery House (opposableplanets.com)

This post is part of an ongoing series taken from my eBook on Social Media Architecture.   You can download the entire book here.

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The Architect

The earliest surviving written work on the subject of architecture is De Architectura, by the Roman architect Vitruvius in the early 1st century CE.    According to Vitruvius, architecture should satisfy three core principles: utilitas, venustas and firmitas, which translate roughly as:

• Utility – it should be useful and function well for the people using it
• Beauty – it should delight people and raise their spirits
• Durability – it should stand up robustly and remain in good condition

With very slight upgrades to the vernacular, these three core principles seem perfectly suited as operating principles within Social Media Architecture.

Utility – ensuring that your social media presence provides functional value and is designed around customer needs.

Beauty is self-evident; there should be something “remarkable” in how the user experiences the space they find themselves within. Remarkability speaks to the need to transcend functional requirements alone, and consider the emotional and spiritual lives of those that come to inhabit our social media spaces availing them of delight, meaning and connection.

Finally, durability in social media may seem like an oxymoron when designing for such a young medium. Yet durability is about considering how to maintain the principles of utility and beauty over time. This is particularly crucial when attempting to bring some semblance of planning to a decentralized force such as social media, and also moving from on/off communications to an ongoing dialogue.

Taking a cue from Vitruvius then, our working definition for a Social Media Architecture is as follows:

“A structure that brings harmony, utility and durability to the diverse elements of an organization’s social media presence”

A proper Social Media Architecture should, at a minimum, answer these questions:
1. What is my current footprint in social media?
If you are going to plan a Social Media Architecture, understanding the current state of affairs is the starting point.  A proper footprint that renders your social media presence as a powerful visualization (more on this in detail later) will allow your organization to come to terms with the specific issues that you need to address.

2. What constitutes a unique community?
This section explores what defines a community as unique. Doing so allows an organization to stop seeing social media as a reflection of marketing campaign structure (i.e. for every campaign there is a new Facebook page, Twitter feed, etc.) and to bring like communities together in larger, more powerful interest groups.

3. What community needs will I focus on?
While the potential for distinct communities is nearly endless, this section proposes five need states that are common in any community.  In order to be successful your organization should choose the needs on which you will focus  (hint – “all five” is not an appropriate answer).

4. What is our link and like structure?
At the heart of a Social Media Architecture is defining how people navigate (link) these various properties to find the community(ies) where they belong (like).  Thus a proper link and like structure helps define how people find their way and how valuable content flows through these properties.

5. How do I design for durability?
Durability in social media is about establishing the rules governing creation (what conditions warrant creating a new social media presence?), consolidation (when to bring two like communities together) and closure of social media properties.

An organization’s Social Media Architecture is always personal, tied to its brand identity, responsive to its reputation and bound by its organizational structure.   The next posts will go into more detail on each step in that journey.

This post is part of an ongoing series taken from my eBook on Social Media Architecture; a Field Guide to Unifying your Social Media Presence.   You can download the entire book here.

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Tucked in the heart of Silicon Valley, amidst the headquarters of Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter lies the Winchester Mystery House, a sprawling six- acre monument to it’s owner,  Sarah Winchester. As the heir to the Winchester Rifle company’s fortune, Sarah was one of the wealthiest people in 19th  century America, with a fortune totaling some 22 million dollars.

She was also haunted.

With the death of her daughter and subsequently, her young husband, William Wirt Winchester, Sarah came to believe that she was cursed by the ghosts of those killed by the Winchester rifle, the “Gun that Won the West.”

After William’s death, Sarah moved out West to San Jose, then a sleepy valley full of plum and apricot orchards and, in an effort to elude the spirits of the dead, she began building the Winchester house in 1884. For the next thirty years, the remainder of her life, the mansion was continuously built and extended.  It is a sprawling mess. There are roughly 160 rooms, including 40 bedrooms and two ballrooms. he house  has 47 fireplaces, 10,000 window panes, 17 chimneys, two basements and three elevators. It is rumored that she never spent more than a single, consecutive night in any bedroom, always in motion to avoid her ghosts.

Being built without any master plan, the house is a veritable maze; stairways  lead to dead ends, doors open into walls, skylights are placed into floors, a chimney ends inches below the ceiling and so on.  The tour covers a full 1.5 kilometers end to end and, as any visitor can tell you, you can’t go there without a guide. You get lost from the moment you enter.

Located at the center of Internet innovation (no irony intended), Sarah Winchester’s Mystery House is an ideal metaphor for corporate use of social technologies.  Organizations are frantically building without any master plan.  And the bigger the organization, the bigger the problem.   The result is a social media mystery house with campaigns leading nowhere, a maze of branded sites with no connection to one another, and abandoned “rooms” haunted by ghosts of customer’s past.

The social media mystery house is the result of two countervailing forces.  First, the business pressure to get in the game.  Every executive is being asked to define their social media strategy (or just “do something”) and the drumbeat is relentless.  Second, creating a social media presence and getting content online requires zero technical proficiency and has none of the gating factors (such as internal IT involvement) that traditionally accompanied marketing and communications efforts. Each product line gets a Facebook page.  Each marketing campaign deserves a Twitter account -  or a new YouTube channel.  Each local office establishes accounts and so on.  As a result, an organization’s social media presence  becomes a mirror into the structural divisions of the organization itself.

If, like Sarah Winchester, organizations are looking to elude and mystify their customers, they are doing a good job. However, as we move from social media as a novel new means of building relationships, to a mission critical part of the business infrastructure the terms of success will move from isolated pages and campaigns to connectedness and coordination .

If the metaphor for the problem comes from architecture – The Social Media Mystery House – then architecture can also provide a useful metaphor for the solution.     That will be the subject of the next post.

I have recently published an eBook on  ”social media architecture.”  I will be posting much of the content serially on this blog over the coming weeks.  However the best way to read it is to download the free book here:

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Take one look at the social media footprint of any large brand and you find dozens of social sites that lie abandoned with no active engagement.  Many are redundant, fracturing the same potential audience into separate, so-called “communities.”  Further, the majority of these sites are product-centric and isolated, without any formal linkage to a brands’ other sites where customers might find value.  And the bigger the organization, the bigger the problem.  In one recent project we found our client had close to 150 Facebook pages, over 65 YouTube channels and 100 Twitter feeds.  Recent data from the Altimeter Group confirms the issue – with the average organization maintaining 178 social accounts.

This is unsupportable and counterproductive.  The solution is a Social Media Architecture, defined as “a structure that brings harmony, utility and durability to the diverse elements of an organization’s social media presence.”

The benefits of establishing a Social Media Architecture are clear:

• Improve customer experience and gain the benefit of network effects by consolidating your customers into larger, more focused communities

• Increase operational effectiveness by aligning brand initiatives (reduce wasted effort)
• Stabilize brand equity by presenting a unified sense of the brand across social media
• Drive focus towards meeting business objectives

How each organization gets there is a personal journey since, like people, no two organizations are alike.  However the questions an organization must ask are very similar:

• What is our current footprint in social media?
• Which communities will we serve?
• What needs will we focus on satisfying?
• What is the connection between our various social media properties?
• How do we design for durability?

These are the questions that a Social Media Architecture is designed to answer.  The result are fewer social media pages, more clearly defined goals and roles for each platform (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) and a structure for maintaining what you have put in place.

I have chosen to tell this story in three parts: The Widow, The Architect and The Engineer.  The Widow provides a useful metaphor for seeing the problems inherent in corporate use of social media today.  The Architect allows us to take this metaphor and begin seeing a possible solution to these problems.  Finally, The Engineer illuminates a dynamic (a law, if you will) that forces us to consider the implications social media has on corporate culture and organizational design.

Next post:  The Widow – defining the Social Media Mystery House

Related articles

• The Widow – Coming to terms with the Social Media Mystery House (opposableplanets.com)
• 3 Ways to Improve Your Company’s Social Media Architecture (mashable.com)

The great game on the Internet is to own as many of the disparate pieces that make up The Internet Operating System.   The pieces of this puzzle are many (and well covered in Tim O’Reilly’s post on the same which can be found here):

• Identity (Think Facebook)
• Search (think Google or Bing)
• Photos (think Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa)
• Music (think Apple, Amazon)
• Software (Think Google Docs, Salesforce etc.)
• Storage and computation (Think Amazon, VMware, Rackspace)
• Location (Think Foursquare, Facebook)
• Video (Think YouTube, Netflix)
• Content Management (think WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger)
• Telepresence (Think Skype, Cisco or AT&T)
• Etc.

The major players in this battle royal are slugging it out and Google Plus is the latest entrant.   It is a big one.   If any single player is to win they will need to embed the social functionality that brings the disparate pieces together.    Here is why:

Social is identity. Social motivates people to fill in structured information and maintain a complex profile.  It also moves them to self-organize into groups.  This is the magic of Facebook (and to a much lesser extent Twitter) and is the vital (and slightly terrifying) future of advertising/marketing.  Identity also enables frictionless sign in across the various services.

Social is the network effect – the more people connected to any of the above services the more value it has since it is has wider reach and more openness to sharing and co-creation.  To wit, Euan Semple’s comment this morning on switching from Flickr (Yahoo) to Picasa (Google).

Social is the distribution service – Services increasingly rely on peer-sharing as the means of distribution and credibility in public consciousness.   Services passed along via social networks are implicitly (and explicitly) credentialed.

Social is productivity – The next frontier of productivity is real-time collaboration which is driven by shared (read social) services in the cloud – from Google Docs to Salesforce.

Social is Discovery - As the signal (meaning) to noise ratio grows on the Internet, social is the discovery filter that enables us to quickly find what is needed and move on.  Those able to embed social as a filter within search will win.

With that in view – a quick screenshot of the revamped Google Plus interface shows how many of these pieces Google has in play.

What do you think?  Does Google Plus Represent a major shift in the Internet OS front?

Related articles

• Tim O’Reilly – State of the Internet Operating System (itc.conversationsnetwork.org)
• Google Plus as Google’s glue (charman-anderson.com)
• How Google+ Transformed Picasa Web (googlesystem.blogspot.com)

I was fortunate enough to get a chance to sit down with John Hagel at last week’s Web 2.0 Summit and discuss a few big-ticket emerging trends: (1) the rise of the “real time” web, (2) the move from the information web (the web of documents) to the social web (the web of people) and (3) the continued promise of mobile devices.

John is the co-chair of Deloitte’s Center for Edge Innovation, has written,  numerous, influential books and is the co-author of the must-read blog, The Big Shift so I wanted him to analyze these trends from the lens of their potential impact on large organizations.

This first video discusses the rise of the real-time web which I am loosely defining as the convergence of three phenomena:

• Near zero latency communication protocols best embodied by something like Twitter but well described by Anil Dash as “The Pushbutton Web”
• Pervasive connectivity – our PCs are always on – able to send and receive up-to-the-minute with no barriers to “getting” online.
• Mobile access – Ubiquitous access to the web from mobile devices to view or create content wherever you are.

The effects of moving to the real time web are broad and deep.  Like the Internet itself there isn’t a single, totalizing meta-narrative to make sense of it.  John takes a slice of the real-time analysis and lays down an  argument that goes something like this:

A. The Internet as a global communications and computation platform has accelerated the rate of change for the enterprise –  faster product cycle times being one example

B. This accelerated rate of change depreciates the value of explicit knowledge (what I know – which can be summarized in documents, policies, procedures, workflow etc.) and privileges tacit knowledge (know how – the  “knowledge that is difficult to be transferred to another person by means of writing down or verbalizing”)

C. In this environment, the source of value for the enterprise is moving from what John calls, “stocks of knowledge” (what we know at any given point in time) toward flows of knowledge (what we know at this current moment in time).  Real-time “flows” of knowledge help an enterprise move at the pace of change but more importantly – they connect you to people – think about social CRM and being able to immediately recognize when you have customer issues (as opposed to surveys with huge lag times) and respond in the moment.   Real time flows provide real time feedback to assess effectiveness and recalibrate response.

John also talks about the “dark secret of the enterprise” – but you have to watch the video to get that insight.

Open beats Closed states a rather obvious law of doing business on the Internetwork:  There is more talent outside your company than within it.  Companies that harness the power of relationships using networks to tap that outside talent will win over those that don’t.

In another Open Beats Closed story, Netflix just announced the winner of its one million dollar contest to improve its ratings system.

Ratings and recommendations are a critical piece of Netflix’ infrastructure.  If Netflix can do a better job than anyone else deducing from your behavior what movies you will enjoy next, Netflix will enjoy an enormous amount of advantage in terms of customer loyalty and increased movie consumption.

Yet recommendation systems are based on  extremely complex and proprietary algorithms involving heavy math and some deep thinking to set up and test assumptions about behavior.   Employing a team of these people in-house for this work is difficult at best.  How do you assess their talent?  My guess is that 99% of Netflix couldn’t even understand the math involved… How will you build a team?  How long will that take?  How will you know if you have made the right bet once your team is hired?

An Open Beats Closed approach allows you to engage a myriad of already-assembled (or self-organizing) teams in competition to deliver an algorithm that demonstrates success.   How is the Open Beats Closed approach working for Netflix?  They are so happy with the results that they have announced another, more nuanced contest to further improve their recommendation system.    What I find interesting about this revised contest is that they are allocating the rewards over time to the teams that are providing sustained, proven results.  Smart.

From the article:

The new challenge focuses on predicting the movie preferences of people who rarely or never rate the movies they rent. This will be deduced from more than 100 million data points, including information about renters’ ages, genders, ZIP codes, genre ratings and previously chosen movies.

Instead of a single $1 million prize, this new challenge will be split into one $500,000 award to the team judged to be leading after six months and an additional $500,000 to the team in the lead at the 18-month mark, when the contest is wrapped up.

I was reviewing some notes for an upcoming presentation and found this gem of a quote from a BusinessWeek interview with Jeff Bezos.

Q: Every company claims to be customer-focused. Why do you think so few are able to pull it off?
A: Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused. When [companies] think about extending their business into some new area, the first question is “why should we do that—we don’t have any skills in that area.” That approach puts a finite lifetime on a company, because the world changes, and what used to be cutting-edge skills have turned into something your customers may not need anymore. A much more stable strategy is to start with “what do my customers need?” Then do an inventory of the gaps in your skills. Kindle is a great example. If we set our strategy by what our skills happen to be rather than by what our customers need, we never would have done it. We had to go out and hire people who know how to build hardware devices and create a whole new competency for the company.

Particularly in times of rapid change – the question of what you decide to focus on can be critically important.    This also, in my opinion, reinforces the business logic of Amazon’s recent purchase of Zappos which I wrote about here.

Roughly one year ago I was in conversation with the CEO of one of the largest online portals for Human Resources.  My pitch:  Human Resources should be leading the charge in helping businesses understand the possibilities and implications of social technologies such as blogs, wikis, social networks etc.  CEO’s response:  Human Resources is full of backwards people who are always behind the curve.  Don’t waste your (read “my”) time.  This is not an exaggerated paraphrasing.

While Human Resources is still trying to grasp the “what” and “why” of social technologies, they are missing an enormous opportunity to lead on “how” these tools are successfully employed in the enterprise. It is high time that they lead.

Why?

Ask anyone engaged in bringing social technologies into the workplace and you will hear the same thing;  “it’s the people stupid.” (what I call “The Harder Stuff”)   The primary resistance to the new operating principles at work in social technologies lies with the mindset, culture and leadership of today’s workplace.    So if Human Resources’ expertise is people, change and transformation (after all this is where our leadership, training, communications and change management groups are housed) why aren’t they leading the charge?   The market is quickly moving beyond the “what” (what are social technologies?) and the “why” (why are they important to my business strategy?) and engaging the deeper question of “how” (How do I employ them in my business?  How do they threaten business-as-usual?  How do I manage the transition?).

Simple test:

• Would your organization hire someone today in marketing that didn’t understand how social networks change marketing outreach and customer insight?
• Would your organization hire someone today in R&D that didn’t understand the role of online communities and customer led innovation?
• Would your organization hire anyone in Human Resources that had no understanding of how social networks are being used for talent management and employee retention?

The answer is likely no.  Yet the employees that most organizations have working for them today do not possess the skills the organization needs for tomorrow.

Human Resources is uniquely positioned to lead the inevitable move to incorporate social technologies into the enterprise in the form of:

• Skills training: organizing workshops to help employees grasp the operating instructions (what, why, how) for using social technologies.
• Policy support: helping define appropriate terms of use within their companies (one of the largest killers of any project is the lack of understanding between a business unit employing these tools and the legal department’s existing terms of use).
• Leadership development: helping leaders understand how social technologies prompt a new type of leadership
• Talent Management: how social networks can be used in recruiting and retention strategies.

Who better to address this than HR?  As lower skill responsibilities such as payroll get outsourced I am hoping that HR takes a strategic leadership position in the organization.  Anyone reading this that knows someone in HR – please forward this post.  Anyone in HR reading this – please add to the comments or contact me.  Let’s get HR into the game.

Imagine resellers, bloggers and trade press being able to host your videos, screencasts and demos on their own sites while you are  measuring response (engagement and demand).    Your company (especially those of you with reseller channels) should be syndicating your web content to reach a massive, global web audience beyond the reach of your own web site.   The reason is simple; at any given moment online, there are more prospects and customers viewing sites other than yours. Content syndication using widgets (think of YouTube videos that you watch on a site other than YouTube etc.). allows you wider reach and more consistent messaging from  channel partners.  It also allows resellers, bloggers etc. to add valuable content to their own sites at no cost (win/win).  Technically this is a simple operation but it requires leadership to drive this as a company-wide strategy.  Widgets in the consumer space are relatively old news but larger companies are just starting to get the picture in terms of how to create an extended content syndication strategy.   I have yet to see a major non-media company that is executing a strong off-domain strategy.

For more info and syndication resources check these out:

Widget ‘platforms’
These companies all offer basic content syndication to the full range of social networks and blogs.  Very consumer focused.  No commerce or direct-response functionality apparent but that is the obvious direction.

Widgetbox (disclaimer – I have worked with Widgetbox before)
Consumer focused.  ‘Source’ publisher offers content (common blog formats supported).  ‘Distributor’ can design widget by selecting content, style and layout etc.
Example of taking Ben Smith’s blog from Politico.com and creating a widget for your own site here.

Clearspring
Premium platform gives more customization/control to the content owner.

Gigya
Similar to Clearspring.

Commerce widgets
Tumri
“Ad pod” designed to optimize display advertising by dynamically building/testing offers.

Popshops
Commerce syndication.  Let’s you build a store using affiliate programs and feeds from Popshop’s database of merchants.

Cartfly
Similar to Popshops.