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Groundswell Paperback: A Look Back Three Years Later
Three years ago, Josh Bernoff and I proudly launched our book, Groundswell. To our astonishment, it has sold more than 100,000 books and now a new, updated paperback version is available (links below), with two new chapters on how to use Twitter and social maturity.
A lot has changed over the past three years – in May 2008, Facebook and Twitter were still nascent and the iPhone had no apps! To address this, Josh added a new chapter about Twitter. But the theme of the book — that you have to focus first on the relationships created by social technologies (and not the technologies themselves) – still resonates today.
At the same time, very little has changed. One of my favorite examples in Groundswell is how Dell responded to one of their notebooks spontaneously bursting into flames in June 2006. The chief blogger, Lionel Menchaca, wrote a blog post titled, “Flaming Notebook” that linked to a photo of that laptop on fire. Talk about guts! That was five years ago, and as a whole, organizations still lack the maturity to be able to truly engage in an honest, authentic dialog – despite their adoption of social technologies.
Groundswell has a new chapter discussing social maturity and Forrester published a report this week on the topic. My organization, Altimeter Group, has done research and consulting on this, as have agencies like Dachis. The fact that so many people are chiming in on how to address social strategies is an indication of the strong interest. But the fact that so many organizations are still treating social as a marketing and messaging channel demonstrates that we still have a long, long way to go.
A key reason why I wrote my second book, Open Leadership, is because leaders could viscerally feel the change that social media was causing in the pit of their stomach – and they lacked the framework to understand how to think, act, and lead in a new environment where relationships were being formed in these new channels. Leadership is built on relationships, and leaders in general have failed to grasp this change.
But by far my favorite part of the new paperback edition is the quotes from readers describing the impact Groundswell has had on them. It is the most gratifying and humbling experience as an author to know that your words have had an impact. I love it when readers show me their books that have been highlighted, dog-eared, and filled with post-it notes. (This photo is from Elizabeth Gebhardt, who showed me her book at an event in 2009.) And I am especially awed when people tell me that Groundswell inspired them to start new jobs or even careers because of the inspiration they got from the book.
So from the bottom of my heart, thank you to all of the readers of Groundswell, and I hope to all of the new readers that you find it just as relevant today. It has been a joy hearing from you over the past three years and I hope to continue growing the relationship we’ve begun!
Where to buy the Groundswell paperback:
Report: How Corporations Should Prioritize Social Business Budgets
One question I frequently get is “How much should I be spending on social media?” The answer, of course, is it depends. This report looks at how 140 Social Strategists spent on social media in 2010 — and their plans for 2011 (read report). From this deep data, my co-author, Jeremiah Owyang, and I, found that maturity levels are a key driver of social technology adoption, and hence, social spending. (Jeremiah also wrote a detailed post about the report). I *love* data, so this was a particular fun and satisfying report to work on with the team (special thanks to Christine Tran and Andrew Jones for being our data gurus).
I’ve included several key charts and points, as well as the report below. But here are a few key takeaways:
- Budgets are the numerical depiction of your strategy. If you don’t have a coherent strategy, you won’t have a coherent budget. And the core of every strategy is a keen sense of what you will do — and what you won’t do. Thus, the budget expresses the prioritization of what you need to focus on. You have limited dollars, people, and time — so you better be focused on how you deploy your precious resources.
- Over-invest in training. It was shocking to see how little people were investing in training. Social is hugely transformative, and I frequently find that most organizations are in desperate need to train not only their social strategists, but anyone touching the customer. Trainers in HR need to be brought into the fold — and they typically have budgets set aside for training employees, meaning more non-social business dollars that you can tap to support your strategy.
- Don’t try to boil the ocean. While it’s fun to dig into the latest SCRM or community platform, unless your maturity level and strategy is aligned to take advantage of that level of social business sophistication, you’re wasting your dollars. Double down on the basics in each area of your social business and build a firm foundation for your long-term strategy, making sure that you are driving concrete business results (so that you can ask for even more budget next year!)
Report Details
The chart below shows the three different types of maturity levels (take a quick quiz to determine your maturity level), and how the average budget, team size, and also the way they are organized differs. The report has a great deal more detail on how adoption and thus spending differs by maturity.
We looked in greater detail at 12 spending categories in three areas: 1) Internal soft costs (staff, R&D, training); 2) Customer-facing initiatives; and 3) Technology investments. The graphic below shows the average spend for each of these categories, for those people who have adopted them. The story is nuanced because not every company is spending in areas like SCRM or community platforms.
Recommendations
This begs the question then, of what you need to do to prioritize in your budget, and thus your social strategy. We developed specific priorities and recommendations for each maturity level, summarized conveniently in the graphic below. Mashable also has a great write-up of the recommendations from the report.
Below is the report, followed by some key charts and findings:
Facebook’s New Profile Page: Good For People (And Yes, Advertisers Too)
Facebook announced the new profile page, updating how member profiles are shown. I was pre-briefed last week by Peter Deng, the product manager in charge of the project, about the changes.
In a nutshell, the profiles are getting a new look with a few new features that will not only make them more functional to read, but also easy to update. I’ll detail those in a minute, but some perspective first. Why the big deal?
First, anytime Facebook makes changes to the interface, there is usually a huge outcry. Expect nothing less this time, especially because this is a person’s expression of themselves on Facebook. Learning from past experiences, Facebook is not pushing this out automatically to people, but instead allowing people to opt-in (you can try it out on the new Facebook Profile “About” page. You can see my new profile too.)
Second, the freshness of profiles is vital not only to the experience, but also to Facebook’s business model. Facebook has innovated a great deal to add new things associated with a person, such as the Pages of which they are a fan or recent “Likes” they have indicated. But the profile page remained an island, infrequently touched, infrequently updated.
And that’s a problem when the advertising that Facebook offers is keyed off the explicit information included in a person’s profile. Advertisers can target off that information but if you’re like me, you seldom look at or update the Info tab on your Facebook profile page.
So Facebook has an incentive to encourage people to not only update their profile pages, but to also make it much more reflective of their interests and relationships, making it a real reflection of the people and things that are important to them. And in so doing, people are providing valuable meta data to Facebook and its advertisers. Deng took care to emphasize that a person’s privacy settings are unchanged with this update – so if they do not want their information to be publicly available, it will not appear thus.
So on to the three key features that I believe are going to make profiles more functional, updated, and thus, valuable to Facebook in the end.
Profile Summary
A synopsis of each person will appear at the top of the new profile page. It includes typical “conversation starters” that get people talking – things like where you work, who you’re married to, where you went to school, etc. In addition, the latest photos posted by the person will also appear – again, complying with existing privacy settings so you only see photos that you have permission to see. In the past, these photos were hidden behind a link on the profile page, so now they are made visible, typically “above the fold”.
Featured Friends
This is one of the most interesting and in my mind, controversial new features. Each person will be able to designate a small number of people to feature as friends. This isn’t necessarily a “top friends” feature, but one where you can specify special relationships, such as family, colleagues, or if you’re a believe that you are defined by who your friends are, celebrity friends.
This introduces a whole new social dynamic into Facebook. Why did you pick Friend A and not Friend B to be featured? What does it mean when you remove someone – did something happen?
But this area also adds greater nuance to friends and relationships within Facebook. Currently, the only designation of a different weight to friends is in the “relationship” field, where you can show that you are in a relationship with one other person. But now I can have a group called “Family” or “College” or “Work” or “Girlfriends” to designate not only the importance of a relationship but also the nature of that relationship.
This becomes valuable meta data to understand who is important in my life – and hence, how influential someone is, or how influential I might be to someone. And a person who is featured on many profiles can be seen as far more influential and thus earn a higher “friend rank” weight than someone who is featured less frequently. Again, this is all valuable information — if not actively used today, then potentially in the future.
Interface Changes
There are several interface changes that will feel disruptive at first, mostly because the information you normally would find in one place are either gone or moved to another place. Case in point: the tabs that appeared at the top of the page are now links on the left hand side.
But I believe those types of navigational changes will be quickly and easily accepted. There will be a backlash at first, but the fact that Facebook is not forcing the changes on to people means that adoption will come because people are seeing the changes on other people’s profiles first.
One of the biggest pull to shift people to the new profiles will be the richness available in the Work profiles and interests. Anything associated with your workplace, such as updates by colleagues, chats, Likes, will appear. Again, you can opt out of having these features show up in your profile, but it will have to be a setting that you control.
In addition, images will usually accompany your stated interests, making it much more visually appealing to browse. For example, my favorite artists, movies, and books will all have images associated with them.
But by far the most valuable and entrancing feature to be added is the Infinite Scroll. Rather than have to click on a link to see “more” photos, friends, and wall posts, I’ll be able to just keep scrolling down and down – and the page will automatically load more information.
Overall, an update to the profile page is long overdue and I personally like a lot of the new features — and this is coming from someone who detests having to update my page. I have basically left it the same since I joined Facebook years ago…until today. What remains to be seen is if by making it more visible, accessible, and feature oriented if I will be motivated to update it as often. I do expect there to be significant push back from Facebook members, both because of the interface changes as well as the new social dynamics that will need to be gotten used to. And of course, privacy will always remain a valid and pressing concern.
But Facebook remains committed to relentless change, something that I greatly admire. But there’s a greater sense of maturity in how it pushes through the changes as well, an acknowledgement and maturing of the organization as it takes into account the fact that rapid changes and advances aren’t always appreciated by the now-mainstream audience that’s on Facebook.
Social Search Propels Bing, Will Hurt Google
by Charlene Li
Microsoft’s Bing.com search unit announced today that it is integrating Facebook’s social graph information into some parts of its search results. This is the long-awaited “social search” that I’ve been talking about and waiting for for years. I was briefed by Adam Sohn from Bing.com this morning. [Update: Danny Sullivan has an excellent deep dive into the new offerings from Bing, as well as implications for SEO and Google.]
Search algorithms have used different types of “signals” like location to figure out what it is that the person is trying find or do. By integrating Facebook’s social graph and the “like” data generated by Facebook members, Bing is adding social signals to its algorithms.
In a nutshell, Bing announced two new features that take advantage of this new social signal: Liked Results and Profile Search.
Liked Results
When you are signed in to Facebook (more on what exactly that is later) and do a search on Bing, you have the option of seeing search results that take into account what your Facebook friends have “liked.” For example, if I’m searching for “restaurant Napa Valley”, I’ll see the 10 blue links that Bing’s search algorithm normally delivers. But I’ll also have the ability to see results that have been “liked” by my friends as well that also match the query.
It’s a way to highlight search results that your friends have liked. The fact that many of my friends are wine-drinking parents who may have dragged their kids along for a wine tasting tour means that the Liked Results are going to be just slightly more relevant to my particular situation.
Where it gets interesting is when the Liked Results don’t show up in the first page of the search engine results page (SERP). Bing then suddenly becomes much more relevant because it is personalized to you because of your social graph. Sohn explained to me that in the future, they plan to include what they call “algo annotation” that will show the signals that are being used to rank the result. For example, you’ll be able to see how many friends liked a particular link. There’s also the possibility in the future of showing not only likes, but also check-ins, photos of food and people, or reviews from friends associated with a particular restaurant in Napa.
Profile Search
About 4% of searches on Bing are name searches, amounting to about 1 billion searches a month. The problem is if you’re looking for a particular person — especially if they have a common name — it’s hard to differentiate. By tapping into your social graph, Bing looks at your friends, your friends’ friends, and your networks to return results that have greater “social proximity” to you. These search results will also appear as a separate module.
Privacy and Permissions
The key to making all of this work is that the person using Bing is logged into Facebook and thus gives permission for Bing to tap into his/her social graph and data. Bing is taking steps to make sure notifications are clear and require explicit opt-in. Over time, the notifications will cease to pop up, because the assumption is that the user will no longer want the notifications to appear after repeated acceptances.
Even if you are not logged into Facebook in another tab but have clicked on the “Keep me logged in” check box, you’re setting your cookie to sign you in for a set period of time, which is approximately two weeks right now. This usually isn’t a problem — as long as I’m the only person using the computer. But on a shared computer — like the one that’s in my kitchen — I am frequently inadvertently logged in as my husband and have done things such as accepted friends and Liked items on his account!
Now with search being impacted, I’ll have to make double sure that I’m logged in (or not) when using Bing.
Surfacing social graph information like photos and check-ins will raise even further the cries around privacy and permissions on Facebook. For someone who has set their privacy settings as completely public — and is careful about not putting up private items — this isn’t a problem. But most people are much more nuanced about this, maybe posting photos from an evening out that will now have the possibility of being taken completely out of context.
I believe that having social data in search results will lead to some inadvertent and potentially embarrassing and explosive situations, which in the end will curb people’s appetite for sharing socially. In the same way that college students realize that Facebook posts and photos will follow them into their professional careers, Facebook members will be more circumspect about posting when they see their friends’ social information showing up in general search results.
Power Shifts With Social Search
The rise of social search means that the people using it — and the companies who know how to leverage it — will have an advantage over those who don’t leverage social technologies. There are three major implications:
- SEO will lose relevance. Search engine optimization (SEO) — where a Web or content person tweaks a web page to get higher SERP positions — will lose effectiveness as search results become more influenced by social signals. While a company could potentially manipulate “likes” for an item or Web page, marketers can’t SEO your friends. The result: better search results for people who leverage their social graph, because the search results will include more relevant data.
- Socially connected people will make more money. If I have a great set of friends, I’ll be able to make better decisions because of more relevant search results. People in my network will start noticing the benefits of likes from their friends and be motivated to be more socially connected as well. It’s the classic network effect, but rather than be driven by purely social incentives, there are clear monetary ones as well — getting better deals, finding things faster, etc.
- Bing’s social search hits Google right between the eyes. Google has recently been making noises that it wants access to Facebook’s social graph, calling for the company to be more open. That’s because Google realizes that unless it can harness social graph data, it will be relegated to traditional algorithmic search based primarily on the information on the Web page itself and scrapping what social data it can. You can see some of Google’s early attempts at social search at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-google-social-search-i.html.
Because Microsoft’s Bing is the privileged search provider on Facebook, it enjoys special access to the social graph and data that no one else does. That’s going to be a huge competitive advantage in a social-driven world, where users and marketers (and their search dollars) will flock to the search engine that performs.
Does it seem unlikely that Bing could unseat Google? It’s happened before. Remember that Yahoo used to be the search leader until Google came on the scene because of its new approach to search. So look for this new phase to come with significant changes.
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