My first two posts covered the first seven chapters of 33 Million People in the Room – Part 1 – Juliette Powell and 33 Million People in the Room, Part 2, and Social Capital Value Add - I’ll finish up my review in this final post.
In chapter 8, I was hunting around for practical advice, in this case, how Obama won the Presidental Election in November, and happened upon something that is common knowledge but not often mentioned (on page 89):
” … Obama’s campaign spent 10 to 20 times more on banner ads and sponsored links than his fellow candidates, running ads across a wide array of sites ranging from large newspapers such as the Boston Globe to policical blogs such as Daily Kos and the Drudge Report.”
“…was it’s lack of direct, in -your-face sales approaches. Clicking on on an Obama banner ad led users not to a donation page, but rather to a form where they could sign up for campaign event invitations.”
“… Only after submitting the form were visitors asked to make a donation.”
My sense is that supporters wanted to contribute – but didn’t want to be sold or marketed to.
I also liked advice I read on page 94 where viral marketing is explained in a way that makes sense – your exposed to a message, product, service and go into an “incubation” period where your processing the message, but haven’t yet decided to act on it . Next comes “infection” to the viral marketing message.
The impression is that anyone can be sold on Viral Marketing if it’s done right – but I’m not so sure – think the message has to be in sync with what people instinctively want – I’m not sure every idea can be viral, and I think the book says as much.
Reading about Moving from Audience to Community on page 96 and 97, I was tempted to think about the practical steps in engaging an audience by finding out where it lives online, and what that might mean it terms of Social Media Monitoring and Web Analytics Monitoring.
For example, let’s take a site like www.SocialMediaToday.com, which is profiled by Quantcast - so we have some data to work with; we’d start first by figuring out who the audience is.
The audience is more male than female, and most strongly 35 age of years and above – mostly GenX and Baby Boomers, most have graduated college and there’s a strong likelyhood many have completed graduate school, as well.
Where do they live in the 3D world and online – and that gets tricker – and gets to how to apply the information in 33 Million People in the Room - they live primarly in the United States, and United Kingdom, but really in only a few cities, New York, San Francisco and London.
To find out where the audience lives online, Quantcast didn’t provide the information (though it used to) so I went to Alexa, instead:
People who visit socialmediatoday.com also visit:
Social Media Group | putting the power of social media to wo…
socialmediagroup.ca
Site info for socialmediagroup.ca
Todd Earwood
www.toddearwood.com
Site info for toddearwood.com
It seems a pretty safe bet that AllTop.com, Scobleizer.com and AcidLabs.com would be places the same audience who reads SocialMediaToday.com might go.
At that point, Juliette Powell suggests you study the community and understand what’s important to members – but the practical implication is you’d need to read, study and participate in the community in order to know what is important to that community – and engage in the conversations in that community.
I would not say there’s anything particularly new here – or that makes it easier – it’s work, and while there might be shortcuts here and there – I suspect most people need to put a lot of energy out, initially, and for a while in order to achieve anything one might call, success.
Chapter 9 focuses on CrowdSourcing and CoCreation - Juliette is good about telling the reader, upfront, CrowdSourcing won’t work too well for a small audience as you need a large number of submissions (opinions) – see page 105, 2nd paragraph.
CoCreation is interesting concept – which the author ties to “ownership”
“… In cocreation, a group of people comes together, and each person concentrates on a different element, finally combining their talents to make a better collaborative solution.”
“… The sense of ownership is exactly what drives individuals to participate in crowdsourcing and cocreation platforms with little or no financial benefit”.
If you think about it – maybe Social Media is hard for many corporations because the sense of joint ownership isn’t really present – the transparency isn’t often present and the structure of many companies is not to empower their employees – a ground up Social Media Strategy, the type that works the best, is difficult in envision in many cases. – the best one can hope for, is small steps by individuals, flying under the radar – unless there are executive sponsorship.
Finally, Social Media lets others in your organization, and outside, know you exist, and vice versa, and that might be one of it’s main values (page 115)- by …
“…giving employees the feeling that they are adding value that goes beyond the scope of their jobs”.
By the end of the book, I had absorbed much supporting Social Media, and what worked for the individuals profiled in the book – but the book didn’t do much to address what each person needs to figure out, for themselves – and the book shows how others created, influenced and ran successful businesses with social networking – but it order to put those lessons into practice, you might have to do some of your own homework and figure out what your own message is.
For example, in 33 Million People in the Room, Part 2, and Social Capital Value Add -
I presented videos I personally took of Gary Vaynerchuk at Soccomm a few weeks ago – I loved listening to the videos, but his solutions might need to be retrofitted to my personality and interests – I certainly can’t sell wine, but I can promote what I think is special about Art – the subject and some of the methodology is going to be provided by me, and won’t come from anything that anyone else does that Juliette Powell presents in her book.
To summarize, I think 33 Million People in the Room is an excellent book, aiming to deliver a simple explanation of what Social Media is and how it delivers values and results for many. While she could have provided more personalized advice, I got what I needed out of this book and recommend it.
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