Arnold Waldstein's Blog

With 45M internet-ready TVs shipping this year, there’s a minor land rush in process adapting the building blocks for community and social commerce from the web to the largescreen TV and communal setting in the living room.

There’s a lot of buzz around EBSNs (Event Based Social Networks), bridging web-proven viral loops and social commerce to live connected sporting events and network premieres. This is an obvious direction for flash community gatherings around live broadcasts but doesn’t address the majority of legacy media content available to viewers.

I visited with Scott Varlard (co-founder and CEO) and Philippe Pierre (CFO) of SocialBomb, a NY-based social technology company that is figuring out how to build community and bring social value to the mostly time-shifted reality of TV and webTV content. These guys are betting that brands and fans are both interested in social viewing and sharing around their favorite shows and movies.

SocialBomb, if you don’t know them, is the company that provided the community and technology platform for the HBO release of True Blood Season 2 Blu-ray DVD. This HBO release pioneered scene sharing, social incentives and on-big-screen controls for the Blue-ray release of the blockbuster hit series.

Scott and Pierre walked me through the demo…cool stuff to be able to easily pair your Blu-ray to Facebook and Twitter, share scenes and engage with a bunch of social incentivized activities. I’m a bit geeky and a huge True Blood fan so maybe I’m an easy sell for this but there is real potential here especially as this paradigm moves to streaming catalogs as well as DVD-based content.

This was a gutsy leap of faith for HBO to try this even as a ‘quiet launch’…big win for SocialBomb to pull it off so crisply. Connecting a DVD and TV to the Internet is still the domain of the few and DVDs, in my opinion, are a legacy format looking for some additional life. But…rumor is that fans liked it, scene sharing was very active (the coolest part) and both the fans and HBO have deemed this a success.

My take is that this is a small but important proof point on how to create community events around time-shifted content. DVDs are a second tier choice after streaming for many, but if this provides social proof in the small, hard-wired world of DVDs, it should work well for the mass market as a streamed, built in and easy to set up media in millions of living rooms this holiday season.

Let’s imagine the not so distant future.

Take what SocialBomb has done and apply it to streaming content and connected big screen TVs with, as well, 2nd and 3rd screens on the couch and mobile devices thrown in wherever they may be. And where every title on Netflix or Hulu or Boxee is able to connect to Facebook and Twitter with scene sharing, some social gaming and merchandizing built in. You can watch and rewatch and share media content in a social setting on any screen anytime.

This means that every time I view Godfather II or Hustle and Flow, or Entourage, I will be able to create a flash community event, share scenes and participate in extending my passion for movies, a particular movie or TV show down to the scene level. And most likely, this will inspire others to download and view and share as well.

I think there is something here…maybe not exactly as I’ve described it or precisely as SocialBomb is working with HBO. But something…significant.

People on the social graph, 500M on Facebook and millions on Twitter are hungry for content to share. On Facebook alone, an average user generates 90 pieces of shared content equaling 30B shared pieces monthly (mostly photos). With a tangible connected TV footprint coming and flash community capabilities being developed by SocialBomb and others, there will be a lot of scene sharing and social gaming around what we all do a lot of…that is watch TV. Scene clips could be the next step beyond photos as shareable objects. And everyone has movie and TV scenes that they would want to send as a video invitation to their friends and communities to join in the fun…or watch later.

This is also an innovative solution on how to take the real-time community of the social web and our social networks and connect it with time-shifted movies and TV and sports media that we love and watch and rewatch over and over again.

I can’t see this as any other than a win for everyone…including of course the content owners.

I’m very positive about a real-time social environment on the big screen around legacy content. Certainly more questions than answers exist today, but having all media content available all the time and platforms like Facebook or Twitter seamlessly tied into my ability to share…just makes sense.

Sharing in a Facebook-powered world is a common bond across all networks. Daily and by the billions of posts, we let each other know where we’ve checked in on Foursquare for the best expresso and where we are traveling to and the restaurants we frequent. It’s a natural (and significant) step forward to share movie and TV content we deeply identify with at a scene level, plugged into the social graph and shareable across all of our communities.

______________________________________________________

Thanks to my friend Jeff Blackman for introducing me to the SocialBomb team.

LinkedIn…remember them? The uber Rolodex with breadcrumb connections?

Historically, we all used LinkedIn to see who is doing what on the long tails of our work world. A polite ‘Let’s connect’ once you meet with people at a conference or on a blog. Not much more.

As a marketing platform, or even a channel for messaging, LinkedIn always stopped way short of useful. This was never the first website I looked at when I started the day.

I decided to take a fresh look after writing a number of posts on Facebook fan pages as a platform for promotions and commerce. The world is changing minute by minute and LinkedIn always had a lot of useful material–(us!)– to build something interesting with.

Two new pluses on LinkedIn:

1. Twitter and Foursquare feeds are there

They are everywhere else of course. Context-creating, real-time wallpaper is something we expect and need now.

2. Subgroups have popped up

I really like these and they have some brand and communications potential. They add more specificity to the discussion platform with big growth numbers in my interest areas.

Kind of search meets information portal meets forums.

I like the groups as a subject-filtering device and in some instances, I’ve made new connections. This has been very true for me in the wine business. Not so within the more dispersed marketing and tech groups.

But with LinkedIn the wish-they-would-do-it list still far outranks the glad-they-did-it list.

Big five (still) missing links for LinkedIn:

1. I can find people but I can’t find community

I belong to 20 or so groups covering social media, social TV, some e-commerce and, of course, the wine groups and subgroups.

The more specific your interest, the better the discussion you can find. Wines from a particular region. Interactive TV widgets. Facebook fan page commerce.

And I’ve met some interesting people posting my blogs or responding to others. But invariably we immediately move the discussion to our personal websites or email or Skype.

It’s like speed networking at the recreation center. Find a match and leave to find a cozier place to talk.

People are the heartbeat of any community. LinkedIn has a lot of people but no clubhouse to foster community.

2. No sense of place

There is ‘no there there’ with LinkedIn.

Unlike Facebook or a blog community, there is just nowhere to hang out. If you are going to have a community, you need to have a place, a page, an ongoing conversation and somewhere to go. Otherwise it’s like a newspaper with headlines to scan. If something is interesting, you jump in, otherwise you leave. It’s disposable communications.

Oddly there is an emphasis on news and discussions, not on people and communications. Without a sense of place there is no community.

3. No conversation platform

Blog and community platforms, especially dynamic ones like Disqus, encourage kinship and conversation.

LinkedIn is about forums and groups, not communities. About exchanges, not conversations. About adding facets of dynamic conversation to a newspaper format, rather than encourage communications and make the comments, the content. This seems like a missed opportunity for them and for us.

Join a conversation string on Fred Wilson’s or Mark Suster’s blog and you will get in an instant what I’m talking about.

4. Closed platform to the open web

Take millions of professional people. Connect them together. Create discussion groups with comments and close this off from Google spiders and open web indexing tools.

Why?

LinkedIn hasn’t learned yet that conversations are content and the key to networking.

That is why bloggers use the discussion groups as free channels, grab readers and move them to more dynamic systems that can be indexed and searched.

5. No video broadcast channels

Education, training and business information seem key to LinkedIn. Why they don’t have channels within the network for shows on job related topics, or interactive video for interviews seems a misstep for them. Moving communications broadcast channels inside of LinkedIn just makes sense.

So…do I find LinkedIn valuable?

Yes..as a database with some clever dynamic components. Design wise though it is socially maladjusted.

Do I  find the discussion groups valuable?

Yes…they are useful filters of information but they stop way short. They are swapmeet-like in structure as there is no community to define the value of the content.

Do I recommend LinkedIn as a marketing platform?

Not really. Nor very useful to build new connections. The communications and community platforms are sparse and archaic.

I’ve always believed that given enough eyeballs you can create a runaway business. Rumor has it that LinkedIn is making money from our eyeballs but seems like an uninspired use of a great resource. And that resource is us.

Everyone loves a bargain.

But social buying is more than Crazy Eddie with a modern twist and an added viral loop. The formula for success lies somewhere in the intersection of value, local orientation and an e-commerce system grounded in social behavior.

Successful discount and coupon aggregators have long understood that people love a great deal if it’s easy to find, is limited in availability and is simple to buy. What the social buying services added to that winning formula was the local loop, a service merchandise orientation and social incentives.

What is social buying?

Whether you call this social buying, collective buying or group buying…it’s all the same. This is an opted-in, deal-a-day local marketplace for services fueled by value and scarcity, and powered by community dynamics.

How does it work?

The core value is the daily local deal of course, but social behavior and scarcity creation come in two main flavors

1. Threshold buying as defined by Groupon

Epitomizes group buying (i.e., ‘group’ in Groupon). The deal has a threshold of participants that have to purchase for it to be good. If interested in the deal, you Share and Like and Tweet and reach out to your networks to fill the threshold.

Great deals and clever gameplay, including Groupon Bucks virtual currency makes this hold together.

2. Incentive buying as defined by LivingSocial, DealOn, BuyWithMe

Convince your friends to buy and your cost goes down. Or you get your product for free. Virtual currency incentivizes the referral process in most cases.

Same core value as the threshold approach. Terrific deals, incentives (LivingSocial DealBucks; DealOn Dollars) and gameplay drives community involvement.

These formulas seem almost too simple. But they work for both consumer and merchant alike.

My take on why social buying works:

1. Value of the deal

The deals must have significant savings on either trendy or expensive basic service items. 45% off flights of wine at new wine bar. Personal training for 50% off. Or a $400 dental exam and cleaning for $49.

Add must-have or been-thinking-about-that or never-thought-I-could-afford-it items with can’t-not-do pricing and scarcity… and it is hard to not jump on this.

2. Local matters

Forget geo-targeting as a trend as it has real utility in this model. The reason why social selling works in dense urban areas is convenience and immediacy.

This will go further as they begin to target by neighborhood, but even as a start, making sure the spa or dentist or gym is close drives the immediacy and personalization of the deal.

3. Social incentives and community orientation

This is word-of-mouth viral marketing within the context of a community-oriented and networked world.

Whether it is the threshold or the incentive mechanism, people want to share a great deal especially if it is something they can do with friends. Add Twitter and Facebook to this mix and bang…it’s just sharing fun stuff with friends, but on social media steroids.

4. Customer centric presentation

Never underestimate clear design. The daily deal-a-grams are the height of simplicity, focus and ease-of-use.

They are about you completely. No corporate baggage here. The deal is the why. It is impossible not to know how to share and transact if you have ever used a digital device. Add easy-to-understand videos and smart FAQs and there is simply no need for technical support.

Social buying is the most perfect example of social commerce that I’ve found so far and the cleanest use of social marketing in an e-commerce model either on Facebook fan pages or on the open web.

It’s like a hybrid of dynamic direct (e)mail and geo-targeted advertising. It’s smart marketing, clever adoption of social tools and an acknowledgement that commerce is a natural offshoot of community.

In social commerce, the customer is the winner

The social buying phenomenon has made discounts the new list price and the consumer wins every time.

What I like is that this has taken the idea of a consumer-centric world and made it real. And it has taken the concepts of social design and used them craftily for smart social marketing implications around e-commerce.

The consumer, and to an arguably slightly lesser extent, the merchant, are the winners in this model.

Looking ahead to the coming brand shakeout

It’s still early days for social buying…but maturing very quickly. And already the market seems overcrowded and slightly commoditized.

The mega dental deal I missed on Groupon 3 weeks ago, I just bought from TIPPR this morning (seriously!). This is great for me as the consumer of course, not so for the would be discount brand.

This commodization is a warning sign for the Groupon’s and LivingSocial’s and countless others. They need to both continually innovate, but more so, find brand value and recognition for themselves…and quickly.

My guess is that I’ll soon have a personalized deal dashboard or deal feed. Or more likely, one of my bookmarked shopping or info sites will feed all the deals to me under a brand that I have a long standing and trusted relationship with.

Like social commerce as a larger category, the social buying discount model is just getting started but I’m certain that it is here to stay. It’s just too good for the consumer.

The real question is whether the first movers and pioneers will win. Whether Groupon and LivingSocial will survive the brand shakeout and be where I find my deals a year or two out.

Sometimes the first mover wins…but in tech innovation, being the pioneer isn’t usually the same as being the winner.

Social commerce is a compelling idea that has been floating around for awhile. I first engaged with it on AVC.com (thanks Fred!) and have been thinking and talking about it as a way to explore how the community itself can become a business model.

With Facebook arguably the new desktop for the connected social world, all the reasons that fan pages should work as promotional websites for brands, make them work equally as well for social commerce. Huge population of users. Hours spent online per day per user. And social etiquette as the behavioral norm.

What is social commerce?

It is a dynamic online version of shopping with friends…but on the global, real-time Facebook stage. The intersection of community, commerce, social dynamics…and fun, where the influence and opinion of friends drives the transaction. A pure community referral-based economy.

Did this start with social media? Sort of…but I think it is important to make a distinction between social media and community elements that will make social commerce a success. Commerce will come out of community. Social is simply the design language that defines the interaction within the community.

Community storefronts as the commercial doorway for Facebook fan pages

Is social commerce and community shopping the next big leap for Facebook and the social web?

Commerce on Facebook fan pages is popping up more frequently but most pages are not really social in their orientation. More catalog than community. The Gap Lookbook and Travelocity Travel Deals are two interesting ones to check out though. But examples are scarce, and even moreso outside of the large global brands.

But I do believe that social commerce is coming like a storm to Facebook. And sooner than we think.

Three reasons why social commerce could become the new e-commerce platform for Facebook

There are no certainties but these are the top reasons why I’m a believer.

1. Shopping is a large part of socialization…and it’s mostly absent as a community activity within Facebook today. There are hundreds of millions of users spending hours online per day. Why aren’t they shopping with friends? The social need is certainly there.

Marc Pincus, founder of Zynga, created Farmville and a social gaming empire to give people on social networks something to do. Shopping is as natural as social gaming, universal in its appeal and crosses every segment of the Facebook population.

2. Social commerce as a community driven referral-economy is already working today on the open web. The best example is the exploding social selling, deal-a-day, local, discount markets.

Popularized by the Groupon and LivingSocial, scores of people (including myself) are engaging in socially-driven, deal-a-day discount local commerce. Social commerce in the guise of social selling is most certainly thriving on the open web.

Common sense indicates that this approach, adopted to a community brand strategy, could work equally as well (or maybe better) within already established brand communities like Facebook. It’s fun and social on the open web…why not on a Facebook fan page?

3. There is a natural synergy between e-commerce catalogs on the open web and Facebook. The logistics systems and catalogs are in place, all that is needed is to bring it to the community with social understanding and community dynamics. Not very simple but certainly doable.

The basic rule for businesses and marketers is to bring your product to where your customers are. They are already on Facebook in mass numbers. They are already fans of your products and services. And already referring your brands to their friends. It is time to start to figure out how to build a community-based commerce system for your fan page community.

Social commerce today is a big idea but it will become real…and quickly

In a recent post, I called Facebook fan pages the Wild West for brands and businesses. It’s still early and there are no guidelines for success. Social commerce may be even more embryonic.

Or maybe not.

Today most Facebook fan pages are boring. We Like them more out of courtesy and the need to belong, rather than the community value that we participate in. It’s hard to make them interesting because there is little to do there. For an inexplicable reason how we socialize with our friends on profile pages doesn’t seem as natural or fulfilling on fan pages.

Travelocity putting commerce on their fan page is not brilliance…it’s logical (although their design approach is questionable). But purchasing their next trip may be exactly what fans want to do, while they post pictures of their vacations and chat with their friends about where to go.

Maybe social commerce with its built-in ROI is a missing link for the social graph. Transactions are measurable by nature…and the goods and services that we built our allegiance to brands on, were in many cases, based on our purchases and the buying experience itself. Figuring out commerce and its intersection with community is a potential way of building some measurements into the social paradigm. And nothing is more measurable than revenue.

Social media and communities have immense value in their own right. No denying the importance of community for brands and businesses. But if we can figure out commerce as the natural offshoot of community, then truly everyone wins.

Companies will build more brand loyalty and stronger communities. Fans will socialize and shop. And businesses will do what they do best… build value for themselves from the value they provide through their products and services.

It’s the Wild West for brands and businesses figuring out how to use Facebook as a platform for marketing and promotions.

The potential is significant to move away from websites for movies, stars and retailers to Facebook fan pages where the fans are already congregating in mass numbers.

But somehow, so far, the social connector from most Facebook fan pages is missing. The fans are there and easy to aggregate. But the content and social campaigns that work within the Facebook ecosystems are still being discovered through trial…and a lot of errors.

This problem defines the next great opportunity for businesses on Facebook. Those who discover how to build a viral, social funnel with their fans on Facebook are mining a great new frontier. Truly opportunity abounds here.

Some background on fan pages

They have been around since 2007 and were created to clean up the confusion between people and companies on Facebook. People have profiles and brands have pages. Fan pages are basically a profile page for a business with some built-in marketing and search capability.

The numbers per Facebook on fan pages are starting to grow after a slow start.

• More than 3 million active pages on Facebook
• More than 1.5 million local businesses have active pages on Facebook
• More than 20 million people become fans of pages each day
• Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

Top 5 reasons why fan pages are such fertile ground

1. The fans are on Facebook and easy to round up.

Approximately 500,000 more people are migrating to the platform daily. And it is so much easier (and cost effective) to find your fans on Facebook then on the open web. Think of the pain and cost of PPC and SEM over spurring viral spread through friending.

2. Liking and Fan-ing are part of the Facebook community culture and powerful expansion channels.

People like to like and share those likes. This is a brand dream world. There are also some astounding facts that show that on Facebook becoming a fan actually drives buying behavior.

3. We live in a world of earned social respect.

Facebook is the sandbox for social behaviors, and the infrastructure and the culture for social sharing is already in place.

4. The fan page is free…well sort of.

You can buy widgets, build apps, port media but honest hard effort and connections with the fans is what really works. There is a democratization at work that levels the playing field and rewards honest and interesting communications.

5. Facebook advertising is a powerful tool to drive both fans and prospects.

Not only is the demographic targeting powerful but new abilities to target friends of friends redefines and expands earned support to a great degree.

The two problems to solve to make fan pages work

1. Boring content on the web makes unacceptably boring content on Facebook.

Most brands are simply porting over and reusing content from their open web URLs to their Facebook pages.

Photos, YouTube links to videos, Twitter and RSS feeds. Nothing new here. There is little or no acknowledgement that the social web requires social activities. No understanding that a brand is a personality and that on Facebook, and on the social web, people communicate with people, not companies.

A list of share buttons with some streamed video does not a community make. You may attract some fans but you are missing the bigger and more powerful connection.

2. The Facebook platform is more comment-based than conversational at its core.

The things we do on profile pages to deepen our relationship with our friends work less well on fan pages. Person to person communications is not the same as person to brand. There is a twist that is not fully understood.

And the Facebook platform itself makes it easier to link out to a conversational blog than to build a dynamic structure within Facebook on the fan page. This has created a void that is starting to get filled by new start-ups with a variety of approaches to social brand marketing.

Something is missing and it’s the authentic social connection

Think for a second about the power that the social web brings. It’s about connecting. About authenticity. And about transparency. Standard fare, even basic share channels aren’t enough.

I’ve blogged on the Star Connection. That magic on Twitter where millions of fans can connect and converse with a star like Shaq or John Mayer or your local politician. This one-2-many personal connection is what fan pages haven’t discovered how to accomplish yet. Sure you can chat but Facebook requires a face and real-time connections.

Fan pages need something new and fresh and social. Something different that takes advantage of the power of the social graph. Something that connects personally with the stars or the faces behind the brands.

One of the solution areas will be under the umbrella of what I’ve termed social video. I’m an advisor to Vpype, a start-up company who is innovating in this area on Facebook and providing commercial solutions to most of the examples I outline below for brands.

Other points of conversational video are starting to crop up all over the web, especially in the online dating world.  Most are pretty rough in format but social video without a doubt and a directional marker for what is to come all over the social web.

Some examples of what  ‘might be’ may stimulate some thinking

-Facebook variation of ‘video Twitter’ connecting stars to fans

A Twitter star like Ashton Kutcher broadcasting live to his millions of fans and having a video chat conversation. Impromptu, authentic and fun conversation that just happens on his Facebook page.

-Interactive reality-TV Facebook connections

Think of Survivor and Project Runway and Top Chef. Countless reality shows with weekly interactive conversations with the fans. Not boring chat, but a light as air conversation with the star that was ‘cast off’. There are scores of possibilities for these every week.

-Self chronicling star vblogging from Facebook fan pages

Ongoing video conversations to the fan page wall, interactive with any fans that happen to be around. Storable. Sharable. Reviewable. Think Miley Cyrus or John Stewart or Chris Rock.

There are innumerable options and solutions not yet thought about. Or even imagined.

My point…social media is authentic. Real. Interactive. And fun. Our relationships to our brands needs to be with real people in a new way that suits the platform it sits on.

Facebook is where the populations are. Brands need to find a way to communicate not just broadcast if they want to unlock the keys to a dynamic brand community.

This is a great challenge. A huge upside. And something new to be invented.

———————————-

For more information:

-See The State of Facebook for Business Report from the Hubspot blog.

-Check out Inside Facebook Pages from Sysomos.

My thanks to Tyler Willis, a smart guy and head of brand strategy at Involver.com for pointing me to some of these resources and being open to my questions and opinions. Involver is one of the innovative start-ups that is building solutions for brands on Facebook fan pages.

I spent most of last week in London at the Social Media World Forum talking about social video and Facebook as a platform for businesses and brands in Europe.

It was great fun actually sitting down with MPs, bank and music company executives, advertising and marketing consultants, writers and vbloggers from the Netherlands to Turkey.

For background see my post and my keynote on YouTube.

After endless conversations and two auditorium-sized keynotes, my thoughts sum up below.

Europeans just get video and collaborative communications

They really do.

The very issues that make doing business in Europe challenging and interesting, make them very open to new means of communications. Many corporations, advertising agencies and start-ups have people working from different countries. Communications and collaborative work tools are necessary parts of a distributed workforce.

Most everyone uses Skype and video Skype. Video conferencing is not the exception but the standard here.

In the U.S. when I was demonstrating my client’s social video application Live Broadcaster on Facebook, it was a ‘wow’ of something new and unexpected, like a hybrid car before they were convinced that the car was both environmental green and fun to drive.

In London, using video as a communications medium seemed like the normal thing to do. At the conference, they grabbed the spotlight and jumped in the broadcast window, invited their friends and started a video conversation. It was the natural thing to do. They culturally just get video, distance communications and the need for video as a collaboration tool.

Skype set the groundwork for video as a conversation to move quickly up the adoption curve in Europe and into Asia. Skype made video conversations a natural form of communications. Vpype takes it one step further and integrates it into the social graph. The Europeans understood this at a glance.

The reaction was very similar across the spectrum of businesses, from MPs, bank executives, ad agencies and social TV GMs from all over Eastern Europe.

Europeans, especially in the UK, haven’t embraced Facebook yet as a business platform

Facebook user growth in the UK is falling behind in Facebook adoption from the rest of Europe and into Asia. The data proves this.  An estimated 30 meetings and many emails and DMs on Twitter confirmed this to me at the event and around London.

And the adoption of Facebook fan pages as a business platform appears to be lagging behind this. I can’t find a reliable source of fan page adoption numbers so please share if you know where to get them.

The big but here is that European businesses are looking for solutions and are amazingly practical and ready to leap when the solution works. I found myself being the evangelist for Facebook first; the demonstrator of social video second. Video conversations were an easy step; Facebook as a business community was a bigger leap.

Facebook themselves is the issue here. Not the video conversation format. Certainly not the community but the lack of education and marketing about privacy and specifically around how businesses and brands can use fan pages.

Facebook is the Wild West with no roadmaps. But the the power, the cost effectiveness and fact that the people, the fans are there makes this a natural place for the brands to move to. European businesses are lurking and looking. They are sharp and will leap when comfortable.

Facebook simply needs to help and provide information. And to focus on the small and large businesses alike. The market is here and lack of information and communications is holding the brands and businesses in Europe back.

Niche and private communities have traction in Europe, but this will change over time

Privacy. Trust in the integrity of the network. The interweaving of fans and brands on Facebook. These were large topics of conversation in my meetings in London. There is simply not enough work being done to make the population and the businesses comfortable.

The first questions from corporations about the Vpype solution on Facebook was “How can I get it on my website?” or “How can I get a secure link between Facebook and my database?”

Geographical and language diversity seemed to drive individualized networks more than a move towards shared platforms. The closed umbrella of multinational corporations in Europe, at least from my exposure last week, was very niche oriented. Consequently, a lot of small community platforms were being created for specialty groups and companies. And considerable interest in my client in exporting functionality to private communities.

In the U.S. I see platforms like Involver and scores of agencies and consultants focused on Facebook fan pages. And new platforms for teens and specialty groups seem driven by new requirements not available on Facebook.

In the UK especially, I saw private and closed and specialized as the first thought. Creativity in using technology to communicate in new ways but rigidity in moving businesses and brands onto open platforms with a business component. I believe that this will change as the economic practicality of Facebook and the fact that the populations are moving there make it a given over time.

Europe poses an interesting dichotomy around social media and Facebook. On one side there is a hesitancy to embrace the Facebook platform across companies and brands and sticking to the old niche community paradigm. On the other there is incredible flexibility and creativity in embracing video especially as a new way to have conversations on the Internet.

This is my snapshot after a deep dive into the social media scene in London last week.

__________

A personal thanks to all of my new friends in Europe for their time and input. The honestly and openness of the conversations were inspiring.

I’ve been searching for someway to crystallize the sweeping changes that the social web is making in how we do business, develop new products and discover new markets. The concept of beta as a perpetual state of discovery and growth seems to capture this nicely.

In product release terms, beta is that state of ‘not-quite-done’ between a proposed spec and full functionality with some key customer acceptance thrown in. Usually the specs get reduced to eliminate bugs and meet sales cycles and then you start again.

Beta on the social web is always ongoing and a state of discovery where we are constantly moving forward to test our concepts and products against our developing market. And this concept is not just about products but extends to how we write our materials and discover our channels and markets. Beta is a state of being for how startups survive and grow in the face of unlimited unknowns and obstacles.

There is a synergy between the platform that new ideas are built on and the ideas themselves that speaks to this ongoing state of reinvention. The social web with its real-time data exchange and dynamic communications tools is building new solutions because…and I hate to say this…because it can. Flexible and inexpensive platforms, cloud-based architecture and mash-ups are enabling solutions that were unimaginable prior.

And on the other side, dynamic communications tools built on the same platforms provide community loops that fuel the conversations between developers and adopters that drive new growth and a constant state of new ideas.

A couple of examples jump to mind to illustrate this idea of beta as a state.

‘Slow roll’ is almost always the choice over ‘Big Bang’ for product rollout. On a social platform necessity and choice can become the same. Small companies can’t afford to build in isolation and create a market on launch. But more and more, even if they could, why would they? If you can have a flexible development platform and a community of early adopters, I challenge the wisdom of coming out bold before the users tell you you are ready. And by the time you have it right, the momentum is already there. Beta is the driver to always try and make it better.

Communities as focus groups for developing messaging and content are becoming a welcome norm. Many are writing books online, asking for input on presentations from the groups that are being presented to and questioning customers about product value in development blogs. Co-developing content with your community builds both rapport with your early market and a message that is already market proven. Our community platforms let us draft, share, gather feedback and iterate the message. This is a beta driven process and logical and continuous.

I’m a realist and the genius of companies like Apple who build in secrecy and have unlimited resources to market fall outside of this thought pattern. But for the entrepreneur and startup who are building from the ground up with only ideas and energy and chutzpah to make things happen, finding a model that works on flux is a good starting point to discover the value in the idea and the product.

For the startup, building on top of the social web and discovering a community is not a luxury but a necessity. And in the inevitable state of change that all startups work in, a state of constant beta is one way to think of a framework that allows for change as a solid building block to growth.

Ahh… how much difference a few years make. The old world of e-commerce and transactional metrics are softening and social new world performance values are the developing realities for today’s businesses.

A short while back when the economy was booming, e-commerce was the word to describe the then new model and we learned how to navigate the world of click-to-transaction like scientists. The analytic systems from Google, FeedBurner and Omniture were our tools to get the job done. We measured everything and we optimized human traffic from a click to dynamically created content on a landing page to a transaction. This was harvesting at its most efficient. This was a transactional-based business reality.

But the world and the business model with it are changing slowly but dramatically. Old school e-commerce is changing and being modified by what some are calling Social Commerce.  Moving forward we are building an economics of social performance where community and commerce are tied together. Fred Wilson drove this home to me in his quote on social commerce from Rob Kalin, founder of Etsy.

The rising dominance of the social web appears to correspond with a questioning of the e-commerce model and created a new ecosystem for engagement with the customer. The focus today is the value of interaction and customer engagement first, the transaction later. The principal action is not harvesting clicks but building a place where conversations between the customers and the company, and between customers and other customers can happen openly in a seamless manner. The goal on the social web is to create a community. Sales and transactions build from interactions and from the community base.

Market makers and business owners know how to find the right click and how to measure every bit and action on the open web but when it comes to building and measuring the dynamics of a community with the goal of social commerce, for the most part, we are without clear guidelines.

This is fascinating because out of a period of e-commerce where everything was quantifiable, we seem to have few real datapoints to depend on. You can’t argue away the social web. You can’t deny the value of conversations between companies and customers. The rules of behavior and engagement are just being written now as we move from the crowd to the community and from harvesting clicks to building a social environment for commerce.

This is not an all or nothing reality. We have an arsenal of analytic tools and data. And we are experts at using them. We also have a bunch of new data points—posts, retweets, links, comments and Facebook Shares. All can be measured but no one really knows their value in the stated goal of creating a commercially viable community.

You can use logic and surmise the value of a post over a click, a retweet over a like, a Share over an embedded link but honestly, we don’t know how these gel to create that ineffable community formula. And if you think about it, all of these data points are superficial by themselves. You need to value the currency of the link, rank the reputation of the commenter, and understand the importance of the Sharer’s groups.

The basic issue underlying all of this flux is not counting and measuring but weighing the value of the information. Interestingly as we figure out the value scale of people’s proxies online we will also figure out commerce models that translate reputation into economics.

This is the Wild West and we are building groups and guiding them into communities with the intent of creating social commerce.

I think of this as good news. Uncertainty creates opportunities. Old systems falling means we get a chance to create the value system for the new ones.

And honestly, when commerce is not strictly a data harvesting activity based on price and match but a value system you need to establish a conversation with your market, it’s a lot more interesting and more like the real world rather than a grand catalogue of clicks and optimizations and transactions. People make it interesting and social commerce has put people rather than clicks at the center of the market where they belong.

If your company is small, your product not quite there and your customer base embryonic, and you think your problem is your marketing budget, you are most likely wrong.

Marketing costs money and since cave man days, marketers have been squeezed to perform tactical miracles with whatever was left post product development. Marketers have squirmed and cracked under this pressure for generations.

Thankfully, it’s a new world today and much more interesting. Marketing leadership is not tied inextricably to dollars and programs. And money is not the exclusive currency of success or failure.

This is not to say that brilliant push advertising can’t work in some instances, but certainly no startup can do a raise to get visibility on the traditional tech advertising venues dominated by Apple, Microsoft and now Google. The class gap has become a chasm and it’s just not going to happen. Don’t even bother to think about this. Check, move on and be happy that this is gone.

Marketing chutzpah is no longer about squeezing a dollar out of a dime, perfectly executed traditional venues, or gimmicky schmaltz. It’s about building a product that has articulable value and a distribution strategy that is part of the product itself. And the honesty and smarts to build a community and social presence that has dynamics and viral oomph.

I hear whining and condemnation coming from my smart friends in advertising and traditional big brands, crying foul and calling me the faddish futurist. I’m being practical about pushing the concept of marketing into product development and holding firm to the belief that marketing is about finding a market, not about budgets and campaigns that sit as an line item on a spreadsheet.

My point of view is that today, without a social component, a two-way conversation with your customer or your community, you simply can’t succeed. Large company or small. It just can’t happen.

The larger brands have the leverage of the base. They have their own set of demons to deal with. But the startup has well…only the value of its product and its personality to capture their version of Seth Godin’s ‘sneezers’ who will start the drum circle going from the one to the many and from those many to many more.

The truism is that unless your customers and channel are your voluntary enthusiasts and marketers, you won’t move from company push to market pull without a thunderbolt of luck.

The change that the social web has brought for the marketer is empowering. The age-old discrete building blocks of Product then Marketing Plan then Distribution Strategy then Rollout are rolled into one. For business, especially e-businesses, how you sell, price, market and distribute the product are all part of the same paradigm. One box. The more you create separate buckets, the more you are stacking the odds against success. And yes, this means that the marketing manager had better be the marketing product manager and channel thinker as well. And that marketing tactics as an afterthought to product development is as useless as product development without an eye towards true customer value.

I don’t usually rant, but I’m impatient at the flood of reactions from traditional media types that the basic components of our markets haven’t changed. They really have and the big brands with big dollars don’t have a lock on the consumer’s attention any longer.

With the nostalgic exception of the NY Times, I’ve stopped using print and network radio and TV for news on just about anything.

A finely chosen roll of blogs, plus my own Facebook, Twitter and Linked In networks makes it seemingly impossible for me to not know everything that is going on in tech, finance, movies and pop culture.  And all within a 45-minute timeframe each morning. If the headlines are interesting, I dig in, or else, I feel informed and move on with my day.

So, recently when a client asked me to source a PR agency, I took pause. As a corporate storyteller, I’ve been a strong believer in the value of PR for a long time and many of my friends are expert practitioners. But really, in today’s world, isn’t the concept of press release and pitch and Rolodex,  kind of retro, if not prehistoric?

And with trade rags gone, print mostly gone, an every increasing group of long tail influencers accessible to everyone, and everyone a participant in the social web, shouldn’t the PR agency go the way of the dusty brochure?

I decided to approach this with an open mind. So I took agency referrals from my trusted colleagues, and got face to face with a handful of top notch PR agencies and individuals on the west coast.  Some were just super smart folks. All with rolodexes with no holes. All were web and SEO savvy. And a few were storytellers par excellence.

What I discovered is that surprisingly, for the most part, the biz hasn’t changed.

Sure, everyone optimizes everything for SEO. And certainly there are many more influencers that had to be strategically targeted but at the top of the pyramid, you still had to negotiate for exclusivity and coverage. The core was online, the tools for outreach were many, but at the end of the day the way we received and interacted with the news was much more dramatically changed than the way it was made. You still have to drop the right pebble in the stream at the right place to make the ripples start. They just go on and on throughout new channels.

Hey, I knew that a great story, cleverly and honestly told would find an audience. What I rediscovered was that for companies that sell goods and services that touch the mainstream of the population, how the news got created and lobbied for wasn’t all that different. The social web is a channel to be managed, not a unique source.

Do I have this wrong? I’m certain that David Merman Scott (www.davidmermanscott.com) would disagree  on this. I was on his side of the argument until recently. There are exceptions of course, but they are not the rule…yet.

In my social web of a world, it seemed like things were all brand new. I wanted press relations to be also, but my experience to date tells me no. PR when it works makes you love your agency and be glad to pay. When it doesn’t, well, it’s an expensive line item to cut.  It’s been like that forever.

I can’t help believing that this still needs to change.