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Many brands now see the need to engage in Social Media. For those brands already engaged, involvement varies from industry-to-industry e.g. technology companies tend to be heavily involved, retail less so. But across industries brands tend to fall into one of four types, characterised by their levels of engagement and commitment, as neatly summarised in the recent ENGAGEMENTdb report:

• Mavens, brands like Starbucks and Dell who are heavily engaged across many social networks, and see social media as ‘core to their go-to-market strategy’.
  
  
• Butterflies, aspiring Mavens, butterflies are involved in a number of networks but, lacking the investment or buy-in to engage fully in ‘multi-way conversations’, tend to spread themselves too thin e.g. American Express and Hyundai.
  
  
• Selectives, though not participating in as many channels as Mavens, Selectives are more focused than Butterflies and focus on depth of engagement with customers where it matters most e.g. H&M and Phillips.
  
  
• Wallflowers, involved in just a few networks and only lightly engaged, Wallflowers are cautious of the risks and uncertain of the benefits e.g. McDonalds.

Though the jury is still out, the report points to a “financial correlation between those who are deeply engaged and those who outperform their peers”, with Mavens and Selectives coming out top. However, what is certain is that, beyond the important and still developing discussion about Social Media ROI, smart brands such as Starbucks and Coca-Cola already get the fact that Social Media is part of deepening the relationship with people who enjoy what it is the brand has to offer. They understand that engagement is core to shifting brand preference and perception, and that social media is not a ‘direct-response play’ (i.e. specific and quantifiable).

Understandably, it is sometimes hard for businesses to come to terms with this, versed as they are in the ways of ‘push/interrupt’ type communication, which is largely based on control and measuring return. Social Media is much more about relinquishing control and facing the fact that you may not currently be able to understand/measure precisely, if indeed at all, the causal relations between engagement and behaviour – you just have to ride the wave.

I recently took the chance to discuss some of these thoughts with Antony Mayfield, SVP Social Media – Global, at iCrossing and author of the eBook ‘Brands in Networks’. Antony borrows a phrase from Kevin Kelly when he talks about Social Media being “the edge of an expanding machine”, the machine in this case being the Internet. I think this is a particularly apt analogy that helps to illustrate both the way our lives have become ‘digitised’, and also the rapidity of  the change. ‘The edge’ also seems to represent the beginning of, as Antony puts it, “people learning to use the media – en masse”.  More and more people are becoming involved in this mass learning process. Movement up the participation ladder is rapid, and brands are being swept along much like the rest of us. This is incredibly disruptive, and poses a significant strategic challenge for businesses who are struggling, either culturally of organisationally, to adapt to the rate of change.

So what can brands aspiring to become Selectives or Mavens do to help make sense of the situation? Following Mayfield’s three fundamentals of brands in networks is not a bad place to start:

• Know your networks – where are they? Who is in them? And how do they work? Take time to identify and understand the relevant networks and the written and unwritten rules of engagement.

• Be useful – what would the networked community find useful, and what could your brand’s participation add to the network? Be careful to listen to cues and criticism from the community, and to think about doing things with and not to its members.

• Be live in your networks – things move fast, so the only way to ensure that you understand what is going on in your networks, to keep up your prominence and maintain your usefulness is to stay keep listening and to continually stay involved.

And what about measurement?  Social Media analytics are an emerging art/science and we need to continue to develop our approach to understanding networks. But we need to be careful that in doing so we don’t feed a ‘fantasy of control’ that has us believe that measuring activity at a micro level somehow enables us to understand and predict what will happen at the network level (I like what strategist and blogger Richard Stacy has to say on this matter.) In the meantime brands just need to keep taking an active role in their networks, listening to the conversations taking place, measuring what they can and trusting in instinct.

I’ve been thinking a lot about maps lately. I like maps. I like the aesthetic of maps, but I realise that as with any worthwhile data visualisation a map that does not convey useful information, a map that does not have purpose, is little more than wallpaper.

It’s arguable that in the past few years the proliferation of digital mapping tools has created an explosion in geo-spatial and geo-tagged information, some of it is produce by experts and some of it is not. Some of this information is useful and has mass-market appeal and some of it is still looking for a reason to exist.

Before the first wave of on-line, geo-spacial information has been totally assimilated and understood, a second wave has already begun. GPS enabled mobile devices have started to provide the next obvious evolutionary step of geo-tagging on the move, and embryonic Augmented Reality applications have begun pushing the boundaries of mobile data retrieval and presentation even further.

But to return to usefulness issue, there is a map that has fascinate me recently that I believe stands as an elegant reminder of the purpose of maps and the potential value of what we currently refer to as user generated content.
In the late summer of 1854, over a period of about ten days, a cholera outbreak killed 10% of people living in the Soho district of London (many more would have died if they hadn’t fled).

Largely due to the investigative work of Dr. John Snow and a local clergyman, Henry Whitehead, the outbreak marked a turning point in our understanding of the transmission of disease.

A key output of Snow’s research was a groundbreaking piece of information design, a spot map illustrating the clustering of deaths around the Broad street water pump. This map set in motion a chain of events that would convince Whitehead, formally a believer in the Miasma theory of disease, of the water borne transmission of cholera and lead to him discovering the original source of infection.

One of the things that makes Snow and Whitehead’s research remarkable is what Steven Johnson, author of The Ghost Map, calls ‘..the triumph of  a certain mode of engaged amateurism’. Both Snow and Whitehead were effectively keen amateurs looking to solve a mystery. Snow, despite his medical training, had no official role when it came to cholera, and all Whitehead had to help him was a keen mind and an intimate, local knowledge of the area affected.

Snow’s map is fascinating in its own, historical right, but Johnson points to a link between the cholera map and the new, digital forms of ‘amateur cartography’ that pervade the web:

“As in 1854 , the amateurs are producing the most interesting work, precisely because they have the most textured, granular experience of their communities…maps of local knowledge created by locals. They’re street-smart. They map the intangibles: blocks that aren’t safe after dark, playgrounds that could use a renovation, local restaurants that have room for strollers”.

At the time Snow and Whitehead were not considered to be experts. Their beliefs also ran contrary to the dominant theory of the day, Miasma, and it took another 30 or so years for their theory and research to become accepted and achieve mass appeal. Yet their theory changed the world.

We are yet to see how today’s explosion of location based information, uploaded by a mass crowd of ‘engaged amateurs’, will shape the world. But I think that is probably true to say that, like Snow, today’s amateurs (and already recognised experts) will have to devise ways to present this information so that it is not the mapmaking technique or visualisation that comes to the fore but rather the underlying patterns, wisdom and value that the information holds.

Every once in a while you read something that effortlessly communicates the essence of a whole load of jumbled-up thoughts that have been looking for a form of expression, that makes you think ‘That’s it! That’s what I wanted to say!’

Such moments for me are mixed with happiness at the thought of discovering someone who is on the same wavelength, and slight frustration that I wasn’t able to blurt out such a succinct communication myself.

Anyway, 10 minutes before writing this post I had one such moment while reading the following:
http://anaandjelic.typepad.com/i_love_marketing/2009/06/the-end-of-the-big-idea.html

For me, the concept of Small Fires neatly summarises the frustration I had at the tale end of my previous career in marketing and my subsequent decision to seek the company of people who deliver brand essence through doing.

At this point I would love to link to a video counterpoint. It involves the MD of a respectable UK marketing agency trying to get across some similar thoughts*. Only problem is he didn’t quite manage to un-jumble them, and confused matters with a badly thought through war metaphor.

But it seems that the ‘conversation’ as ended with the video’s removal from brandrepublic.com

*To be fair, they probably weren’t his in the first place.

Another nail on head moment from Seth Godin in his post 'The new standard for meetings and conferences'

I particularly like the following wake up call, as it's the reason I left my last job and moved to Conchango:

"If you're a knowledge worker, your boss shouldn't make you come to the (expensive) office every day unless there's something there that makes it worth your trip. She needs to provide you with resources or interactions or energy you can't find at home or at Starbucks. And if she does invite you in, don't bother showing up if you're just going to sit quietly."

And yes, the move was all worth it.

"As the Web evolves from its one-way, 'search and retrieve' paradigm into a medium that's more like an unending conversation, browser software will have to evolve with it. Flock is showing the way." Arik Hesseldahl - Businessweek

I think I would have to agree. It's built on Firefox too, so all those nice plugins and extensions still work.

Get it here:

www.flock.com