The next two posts are going to outline what it takes IMO to get a successful social media campaign started so that it can keep going on its own.

The list is based on three pieces of literature and I’d like to tell you a little bit about so we can establish some context:

The first is the article from Alternet, The Growth of Talking Points Memo: A Case Study in Independent Media, which has gone from teeny-weeny personal blog to independent media empire (which is what every well run blog really is). The article is an in depth case study of how technology & journalism can work well together. We can dabble about the semantics of “journalism” later.

The second is a list of Dos & Don’ts for building software productively from NASA’s Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL). I first came across the list in Steve McConnell’s Software Project Survival Guide, which has an excellent summary of the whole list. The next two posts were inspired by, and lean heavily on this list.

In short, the SEL list lays out the foundation for building sound software. And it works well: it increased the quality of their software 10 to 20 times at the same time it allowed SEL teams maintain comparable productivity levels.

Not only is software one half of the social media landscape, it is also the platform where online relationships are built on. It’s not too difficult to see how faulty software can affect the quality of the relationships (think Facebook vs. Myspace).

The third is Seth Godin’s best book yet, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us. It’s hard to describe & communicate the potential of the Internet + people & the good ideas they keep coming up with. At it it’s most basic, this is what social media does and Godin puts it all into perspective in this book.

The main ideas in the book that have to do with the following posts are:

• Movements: the only way viable way to turn customers into fans is to start a movement. The fire of revolution dies, people get tired of causes, but movements are a head thing and it’s hard to throw those away. Just ask any Obama fan (better yet, ask a Bush fan and if you are that Bush fan, please let me know).
• Platforms: Movements need a platform, a place to call home. TPM, Google and Apple (to some extent) are places like that. These days, the Internet has the platform part covered so virtually anyone can start their own movement or ind one that fits into the context of their lives.

Admittedly, not much of it is new: the same people that are online are the same people you run into at the coffee shop or at home so the basic rules still apply. The Internet is just another context for these relationships.

Click on the numbers to read the 2nd & 3rd post in the series.

It’s clear the Internet is changing our world as we know it and we’re starting to see a significant shift in the balance of influence. American politics is slowly starting to wake up to this reality and only time will tell where we go from here.

But being submersed in the drama of American politics makes it really easy to forget about what’s going on elsewhere. This month’s issue of Wired changes that with a story on what social media’s doing to slowly crack the tightly controlled structure of authority in Egypt & the Middle East:

Back in March, Maher and a friend launched a Facebook group to promote a protest planned for April 6. It became an Internet phenomenon, quickly attracting more than 70,000 members. The April 6 youth movement — amorphous, lacking a clear mission*, and yet a bull’s-eye to the zeitgeist — blossomed within days into something influential enough to arouse the ire of Egypt’s internal security forces. Maher is part of a new generation in the Middle East that, through blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and now Facebook, is using virtual reality to combat corrupt and oppressive governments. Their nascent, tech-fired rebellion has triggered a government backlash and captured the world’s attention.

The article also ends with an interesting line of thought:

But Maher isn’t tortured. No one can say why his treatment in custody is more lenient this time around. One possibility is that, lacking specific orders to beat or harm him, his captors in Alexandria just went easy.

There is another hypothesis, though, one that many people familiar with Egyptian politics have suggested: Maher’s star has risen. His real-world profile is now high enough that torturing him could backfire, inspiring countless networked young people to take action. The last thing Hosni Mubarak needs is to turn this Facebooking regular guy into a full-fledged hero.

In a seemingly unrelated event, my favorite news website online, Socialmedian, is releasing an election widget with the Washington Post today:

The http://election.socialmedian.com site aggregates news and user-feeds related to the election and enables users to join in the election coverage and discussion.  We created this site with The Washington Post to enable people to track all the election news from thousands of news sources as well as from Twitter feeds, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and more all in one place, and (importantly) to join-in and add their own feeds from their favorite sites to provide user reports leading up to and on election day.

You can see what looks like to the right and although It’s not election day just yet, it’s never a bad thing to get a feel for what’s underfoot going into the election, so play with it (click “Join In” on the widget if you’re not a member) and let the games begin! (follow me at follow bushmanbill when you sign up).

*If the whole thing sounds “amorphous” & “lacking a clear mission” to you too, read Seth Godin’s latest book (aptly named Tribes), which is all about movements, what their made of, the things that happen to make tribes possible to begin with and how to keep them going. In what amounts to one long essay that goes by all too quickly, Godin explains the situation and then presents the opportunity:

A tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea. For millions of years, humans have been seeking out tribes, be they religious, ethnic, economic, political, or even musical (think of the Deadheads). It’s our nature.

Now the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. All those blogs and social networking sites are helping existing tribes get bigger. But more important, they’re enabling countless new tribes to be born—groups of ten or ten thousand or ten million who care about their iPhones, or a political campaign, or a new way to fight global warming.

And so the key question: Who is going to lead us?

Apparently small is the new big.  Seth Godin’s been writing about it for a while now, I hear.  And those guys over at 37Signals have certainly been long-time evangelists.  Here at Epsilon Concepts, it’s been our key mantra.  By focusing on producing the biggest outputs (projects, clients, products, legal insulation, advertising, etc…) for the lowest costs (time/money/resources), you can develop lean habits that will serve you well in business.  All to often, large companies and venture-backed start-ups simply lose sight of a $1.  These $1s add up and before you know it they’ve gone through the garbage disposal of careless spending.

It’s not just about cash.  Sure, in this scary economy we call ours, “cash is king.”  But being small is about more than money.  It’s a paradigm.  It’s a strategy.  It’s having workers telecommute when it saves money, increases productivity and helps the environment.  Or keeping them closeby when it’s quicker, helps the client, or aids communication.  It’s not a black and white point of view; being small is all about gray.  There are countless gray areas in life and business and the smaller you are the more ability you generally have to interpret a gray area and follow-through with a response that fits your paradigm.  In larger organizations a good idea can be shot down quicker than the pace of our government debt.  And the larger you get, the more money, time, and resources you throw at endeavers that maybe make sense on paper, but not in real life.

Being small allows you to wear a kind of glasses that filter your decisions with an eye for improvement.  When you’re small, every opportunity counts, every improvement aids the bottom line, and every weakness is a pounding infection demanding a root canal.  You feel it more when you’re small and this feeling keeps you on your toes and quick, ready for the next problems (opportunities).

In continuation of my points, a few words of wisdom from heroes of mine:

“The media and the tech blogs glamorize businesses that act big. They write about the big checks VCs hand out and they lionize the organizations that make a splash. The untold story is in the organizations that are close to the customer, close to the product and close to each other. Thinking small always pays off.” – Seth Godin

“Another thing I want to take issue with is this notion of “good times.” What was so good about the times a few months ago or even a few years ago for these companies? If you had to keep borrowing to stay afloat, were those good times? If you were running a business with no revenue coming through the door, were those the good times? If you were hiring more people than you really needed, where those the good times? There’s nothing easier than spending other people’s money. So fun and frivolous times, maybe, but good times, no.” – Jason Fried

“Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful” – Warren Buffett
RB’s note: aka now is the time to break out of the race if you can.  Be greedy when others are fearful and insulate yourself or your business while the times are tough and most are avoiding new opportunities!

-Robby Berthume
Join me on Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter!

From Seth Godin:

• How to title stuff
• The truth about word of mouth

Social Media/Blog Marketing

• Networking on several social sites
• Link Bait Articles
• How Companies Blog
• Corporate Blogging Resources
• Flickr for Marketing, PR, and Online Demos
• Tweeterboard (Top 100)
• 10 Social Media Strategies for the Fortune 1000 Corporations
• What Works/Doesn’t Work in Online Marketing
• The Many Forms of Web Marketing for the 2007 Web
• Guerrilla Marketing Ideas for Your Website
• How To Encourage clients to Engage in Social Media
• 8 Simple Rules For Social Media Marketing in Business to Business Markets
• Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts of 2007

99% of your social network’s current and/or future users are what I call “reactive users.” This group is content to read and accept, but isn’t the group that is going to customize their profile to an extreme, contribute blog posts, upload videos, spread the word virally, etc… I’m not saying that this group won’t do these activities, just that they will approach these activities with a limited amount of energy and commitment as well as a different paradigm.

The 1% left are the “proactive users.” Seth Godin in his new book Meatball Sundae (highly recommended) contributes the following:

“Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba’s book Citizen Marketer proves that in just about every community, 1 percent of the people are givers. In Wikipedia, for example, about 1 percent of the users create and edit articles. Same goes for Microsoft’s Channel 9 Web site. They get four and a half million visitors a month, and almost exactly 1 percent of them contribute comments. The same math works for Digg, Reddit, and YouTube. One percent of blog readers are blog writers. One percent of talk-radio listeners are callers. The thing is, you don’t know who they are. You don’t know which 1 percent of your customers and prospects are the ones who need to, love to, and want to post about their experience. It’s like Russian Roulette. You have to assume that every chamber is loaded, that every interaction is an interaction with a critic.”

What does this mean to a fledgling social networking website or to the likes of even Facebook or Bebo? IMO, there are several take-aways:

• You can try to figure out a way to increase the 1% to 2% or maybe 5%, maybe even 10%. Possible? Maybe. How? Make it easier to contribute, quicker to spread the word, more rewarding to post content, etc… It’s like our national voting problem: many people don’t vote simply because they feel, at least internally, that their vote doesn’t count. The same rings true on the web; if users don’t feel like their vote (or post, or video, or profile, etc…) doesn’t count, they won’t bother to show up and they certainly won’t wear the “I Just Voted” sticker (or, in terms of the web, they won’t spread the message virally if they themselves don’t buy into it).
• You must treat every interaction with a user as if they are or can be part of that proactive 1%.
• Appealing to the 1% is more important than anything in terms of marketing, yet appealing to the 99% is crucial for obvious reasons. Without the 1%, you won’t have the 99% and reverse. And just as passionately as the 1% can involve themselves into your social networking website can the 99% devolve themselves if rubbed the wrong way.
• If you thought you needed 1,000 users or 50,000 users for your community to be considered a success, think again. A threshold in terms of users doesn’t mean anything if only 10 out of the 1,000 are the proactive users or if you’ve discovered a way to increase this percentage. A passionate group of 100 users can be much more beneficial than a laid-back group of 10,000.

-RB