Imagine a world without email...

Imagine a world without email, text messages, forums, wikis and tweets, or rather a world with all the good aspects of these communications tools without any of the bad. A pipe dream I hear you say. Until recently I thought the same thing, but then along comes Google Wave.

Google Wave's release will mark the start of an amazing shift in our digital communications culture. Wave will take all those disparate, hard to manage and hard to follow electronic conversation that are punctuated by collaboration tools, and turn them into clear conversation that you can seamlessly follow, replay and keep up with while at the same time collaborating on the actual product of the conversation. You don't believe me, that's okay, checkout the full demo on YouTube. You can also watch an abridged version here.

Now I'm not saying you should throw away your email and instant message tools just yet, but this is the beginning of the end for digital communication as we know it.

Social Bookmarking Evidence of Obama’s Online Strategy

There has been quite a lot of fanfare about president-elect Barack Obama’s pioneering use of Social Media during the presidential campaign.  Social bookmarking activity also appears to indicates dramatically different online behaviors and strategies surrounding Obama and McCann campaigns.

Using bookmarking and commenting activity from Digg and Reddit I've develop some social bookmarking trends.  For now I’ve focused on the conversations (bookmarks + comments going back/forth) for the trends, and ignored agree/disagree voting on bookmarks and comments.  This is certainly something I can expand on in the future.

McCain’s Crescendo
Social bookmarking activity around McCain grew steadily, with monthly spurts of energy, from about 500 conversations a week at the beginning of January, peaking at around 8,300 conversations in the last week of October. In total there appears to have been about 78,000 conversations, remember for now I’m just looking at Digg and Reddit.



Obama’s Drumbeat
The Social bookmarking activity around Obama tells a very different story.  In Obama’s case there is more of a stead quarterly rhythm, with some monthly peaks and troths.  Each quarter starts out at 2,000 – 3,000 conversations, grows to 5,000 – 6,000 conversation and then returns to 2,000 – 3,000 mark by the end of the quarter.  The overall activity in fact slows a little as the year goes on and then peaks just before the election at 12,000 conversations.  In total there are 118,000 conversation centered on Obama, about 34% more than McCain.



Here is a clearer comparison of the volume of Obama versus McCain centered activity.  Is this possibly a Social Media pattern here… steady drumbeats triumph over crescendos.



The Big Obama Question
Will Obama and team continue to use Social Media to transform politics, and influence government as well?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Ford’s Social Media Mindshare

Recently, in my Automaker Social Mind Over Matter post, I talked about how 1.5% of stories/topics received most of the attention and accounted for 70% of the conversation on Social Bookmarking sites. For Ford a dozen or so bookmarked stories on Reddit and Digg made it into the 1.5% group. A few people have asked for some example stories that represent the 1.5%, so here are a couple:

The Secrets of Microsoft's Sync, story from Buisness Week
"Microsoft has really changed the game with this product," says iSuppli's Robinson. "Most people aren't willing to pay $700 or $800 to put Bluetooth in their cars, and frankly in most cases it's not very good. This is a $400 system that connects to iPods and phones, and it works. It's going to have other manufacturers scratching their heads for a while."

The article received plenty of Microsoft bashing. It also received plenty of comments from fans who openly discussed how much they like the sync features. Overall this was a positive article for Ford with positive reaction from community.

Amazing Ford KA Commercial, TV commercial on YouTube
This funny Spanish commercial demonstrating that the Ford KA car is very spacious, since it can hold so many people (okay food, you’ll have to watch it). Some mixed responses from people focused on the food. Looking at all the reactions it looks like they made a memorable ad campaign. An overall positive reaction to this funny/weird commercial.

Ford Fiesta Three Door Pictures And Details - To Be Called Fiesta For US Market, blog entry on Jalopnik (Gawker Media)
Comments like “the quicker North America gets out of its 'big is better' phase the better.” and “If only Ford USA could apply the Euro or even Aussie styling to their hideous US line” are common and show a real passion for the designs. Almost all negative comments have been debated and overruled by the community. A few mentions of past recall issues with past models of the Fiesta. Overall a very positive reaction to the positive article.

Car owners are pirates if they distribute pictures of their own cars, blog entry on BoingBoing
“You're a pirates if you distribute pics of your car… The folks at BMC (Black Mustang Club) automotive forum wanted to put together a calendar featuring members' cars, and print it through CafePress. Photos were submitted, the layout was set, and... CafePress notifies the site admin that pictures of Ford cars cannot be printed....

Trademark law is a tough nut to deal with, and this article stirred up lots of bad feelings towards Ford. This article is negative towards Ford and has a lot of people agreeing with it, so basically bad press for Ford.

Social Marketing: Brand Engagement on Social Bookmarking

During the SXSW’08 back in March there was plenty of discussion about Social Marketing Strategies Metrics with some suggested areas for metrics to focus on:

1. what motivates your audience to interact with your brand, and 
   
2. what is the focus of those interactions
   

An example of this may be to focus on where and when people interact with your brand and how high or low the level of engagement is. Also, look at time spent with your brand and what people are commenting on. Another way to think of this is…

…even though your brand’s website may have seen a low level of impressions, if those that encounter your brand are engaged by it, then this could be considered a higher success than what a high impression based campaign could provide.

So with these ideas in mind I’ve started some research for 2 groups of companies:

1. Fortune Magazine’s 2008 Top 10 Companies to Work
   
2. Wired’s Top 10 Startups Worth Watching in 2008
   

My approach is simple and I’m sure it needs refinement. I'll take the brand names of these 20 companies and look at how often they are mentioned, bookmarked, commented on and comments rated within the social bookmarking world. For this 1st attempt at statistics I used activity from Digg.com and Reddit.com, the sample includes activity from the 7 months January – July 2008.

My hope is that at the end of this exercise, we’ll know more about were and at what level people are interacting with these 20 brands on social bookmarking sites, away from the traditional corporate site. Then I’ll compare the finding with Alexa.com and Google Trends data.

Okay enough background I better get to work on the numbers.

Automaker Social Mind Over Matter - Part 3

Found this interesting blog entry about a Forrester Automaker + Social Network study.  Social Networks Well Suited to Automaker Online Marketing.  I totally agree that car makers, like many big ticket consumer product makers, are well suited to Social Network and Influence Marketing.  But what was really interesting to me was some of the Forrester finding appear to differ from my own research.

Some of Forrester's findings include:

1. Mazda, Honda, Pontiac, Hyundai, and Jeep owners are the most active. These brands have proportionally more young customers than most of the other brands.
2. Chrysler, Toyota, Dodge, Buick, Subaru, and Saturn fall in the middle.
   
3. Ford, Nissan, Chevrolet, GMC, and Mercury owners are touched least by social media, partly because they attract older consumers. Even so, many of their owners are still active in some form of online social behavior.
   

My research, which granted is limited to Social Bookmarking, came up with very different results:

1. GM, Ford, BMW and Mercedes, all received more attention from the social bookmarking community than their market share.
2. Volkswagen is right in the middle, with a market share and level of attention that match.
3. Toyota, Chrysler, Honda, Nissan and Hyundai, did not receive a level of attention from the social bookmarking community that reflects their market share.

Please note I've not read the full report yet, so take my comparison with a grain of salt.

Automaker Social Mind Over Matter – Part 2

I broke the social bookmarking activity, from my prior post, down into 3 major categories: votes/ratings, comments and stories. The following chart shows a comparative breakdown along with an industry average for the automakers. (Click the bar chart to enlarge.)



Ratings – comment agrees/disagrees + story rating/voting. Why did I put these together? They point to a clear user profile, the timid or less involved critic (part collector part critic). This group is in the middle of the influence food chain. On average nearly 72% of the activity around Automakers in the social bookmaking world came in the form of votes/ratings.

Comments – comments on a story or in response to other comments on a story. The more vocal critic. This group is further up the influencer food chain. Just 11% of the activity was in the form of discussions and comments.

Stories – blog entries, videos, podcasts and web pages that have received bookmarking attention. The people behind the blog entries, videos, etc are the content creators. Top of the influence food chain.

Note, the bookmarking itself was done by Collectors. These are the people that took the a moment to bookmark the stories. Collectors tend to be lower on the influence food chain. 17% of the Automaker related activity in the social bookmarking world was the collection of new content.

Automaker Social Mind Over Matter

The top 10 automakers are all working hard to garner market share in a tough times. So it seams appropriate to take a look at how they are doing in the social media space. To start lets see how their market share stacks up against social media mindshare. To compile this comparison I've started by using the broad based social bookmarking activity of the first 6 months of 2008 from digg.com and reddit.com.

Here is the comparison of US Market Share of Auto Manufacturer with the amount of attention or mindshare that creators, critics and collector gave the brands within the Social Bookmarking world. (Click the bar chart to enlarge.)


What's obvious, and we have all been reading about it, is the US automaker are loosing ground to lower cost more fuel efficient overseas automakers like Toyota, Honda and Nissan. While I need to look at more data to see if the same trend is true for social bookmarking behavior, on the surface there doesn't appear to be a correlation.

Interestingly 2 groups have emerged from the comparison. The first group, GM, Ford, BMW and Mercedes, all received much more attention from the social bookmarking community than their market share. Perhaps these companies are actively making noise online that is encouraging the community with, well dig in later.

The second group, Toyota, Chrysler, Honda, Nissan and Hyundai, did not receive a level of attention from the social bookmarking community that reflects their market share.

Volkswagen is right in the middle, with a market share and level of attention that match.

Lets take a closer look at the 1st group that have received more social buzz than their market share. Of the stories about GM, Ford, BMW and Mercedes, 84% received no attention, no comments and almost no votes. 14.5% of the stories received some attention and accounted for 30% of the online conversation. Finally the remaining 1.5% of the stories received most of the attention and accounted for 70% of the conversation.

The number are even more skewed for the 2nd group. 88% of the stories about Toyota, Chrysler, Honda, Nissan and Hyundai received no attention. While 11% of the stories received 30% of the attention, and the remaining 1% of storied received the remaining 70% of attention.

More on the mindshare statistics
The mindshare statistic is focused on people that are engaged enough to participate in the online conversation by blogging, commenting, sharing, voting, rating and reviewing automakers online. I did not look at spectators, those people that are simply reading the posts and comments. While spectators are an important group of automaker customers, I'm more interested in the influencers. And influencers are typically those creators and critics that are doing all the blogging commenting, rating, etc. In my next post I'll break the mindshare statistics down in more detail.

People + activities
Forrester research has come up with the nice groups I've been using here to refer to the different types of people + activity. Here is a summary:

1. Creators create the social content. They blog, publish web pages, create videos & poscasts. Most importantly they make them available online.
   
2. Critics respond to comment. They comment on blogs, rate and review things and participate in forums.
   
3. Collectors organize the web's content. They tag and categorize things, vote on importance of content and use RSS feed.
   
4. Spectators consume the social content. The read the blog posts, ratings, reviews and other content that has been created and organized by the Creators, Critics and Collector.
   

I've left out a few, so check out the Forrester Social Technographics Ladder for more info.