Web Social Architecture

St. Paddy’s Happy Hour at ZAAZ: RSVP

Join the ZAAZ Social Media Team for beer and snacks this Wednesday. Invitation / RSVP here: http://zbar.eventbrite.com/

Beannachtam na Feile Padraig!

ZAAZ Hiring Community Managers

We are looking for community managers / moderators with broad experience interacting with customers online on behalf of brands. Above all else, we need brand-savvy, social media literate, agency-experienced doers. Detailed job description below:

COMMUNITY MANAGER

We are looking for a candidate that can thrive in a creative environment where collaboration, innovation and passion for the web are a must. This position will start out on a contract basis and has the potential to move into a full time position.

This position is located in Seattle at ZAAZ World Headquarters (no relocation).

Responsibilities:

Manage online communities, including both hosted communities like forums and blogs; and distributed communities across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc. Enact brand campaigns in social media. Publish branded content and manage conversations across media sharing venues. Promote content across social bookmarking and collaborative filtration engines.

Required Skills:

2-3 years community management, online customer service, or related.

Experience interacting with customers through social media on behalf of brands.

Broad and deep familiarity with social software and online community tools, including forums, discussion, blogs, ratings & reviews, IM, etc.

Immersed in and opinionated about best practices.

Constant personal and professional use of a mix of social media tools, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Flickr, etc. Extra points for Vimeo, Blip.tv, Tumblr, Posterous, etc.

Conversant in SEO/SEM, web analytics, web technology, mobile campaigns, community, creative/brand.

Ability to integrate with virtual teams across agency and client organizations. Collaborative. Communicative.

Superlative and prolific writing. High emotional intelligence and online social skills.

Likes fun.

Additional Desired Skills:

Top candidates will have all the above, and also agency experience.

About ZAAZ

ZAAZ is a premier interactive agency serving some of the world’s most enduring and recognizable brands. Few interactive agencies understand how to utilize web analytics in delivering rich, creative and thoughtfully designed brand experiences optimized for measurable results. Strategically positioned at the intersection of Logic and Creative, ZAAZ is the leader in providing performance-driven digital marketing across all channels and industries. We value a healthy work-life balance and committed individuals who are continually seeking to grow in their professions. Founded in 1998, ZAAZ is headquartered in Seattle and is part of the Wunderman/WPP group of companies. For more information and current open positions, visit www.zaaz.com

 

Have a question? Someone else is probably wondering the same thing. Ask in the comment thread.

Crafting a Great Community / Social Media Policy

I've said before that there are three crucial elements of online community policy: Legality, appropriateness, and relevance. I'm now thinking that there's actually a "hierarchy of needs" among those three, and that taken together and put into practice, they are much more than a set of rules for what's ok to do in the community. They’re more like a social contract, a creator of quality and value.

 

Legality isn’t exactly black and white, as you’d sort of want it to be. But it is quite straightforward in that you basically need to do what your lawyers tell you. In many cases there’s some education and negotiation, but there’s also a reason lawyers get paid a lot. In the end, you do what they say.

Likewise, appropriateness is pretty easy. You generally rule out profanity and abuse. From there you can dial the politeness requirements up or down to suit your needs. In fantasy football, for example, smack talk is part of the fun; in a forum for survivors of childhood sexual abuse, behavioral standards are much higher.

But deciding what's relevant and what isn't is a very different story. I consulted, for example, with REI on their online community strategy and governance, and there are a few great examples from that exercise of how challenging relevance is to define:

 

• It’s tempting for an outdoor retailer with a merchandising focus to align community discussions with its product taxonomy. But REI doesn’t sell photography stuff, and photography is a huge part of many people’s outdoor experience. They want to talk about it. So, this one isn’t too tough, right? How about:

 

• Would it be ok to talk about snowmobiling? To post photos and videos of snowmobiling? What about heli-skiing? REI’s focus on stewardship and sustainable enjoyment of the outdoors makes this tough, because most cross-country skiers despise snowmobiles, and heli-skiing is accessible only to the well-off. And then there’s the whole snowmobiles in Yellowstone thing. Yikes. But wait:

 

• In regions like Texas, among the outdoor activities most enjoyed by REI customers are hunting and fishing. Would it be ok on an REI web site to post a photo of yourself posing with the elk you just shot? The poor barefoot hikers in Portland would pass out! But the folks in Plano, or Missoula, would get it. So maybe the elk feels like an extreme example. What about a photo of your six-year-old proudly displaying the day’s catch of bluegill?

 

The thing is, these are brand questions. And when you involve customers in content creation, you expose yourself to all the variety of your customers’ senses of what your brand is all about, from regional variation to variation in taste and preference.

It’s messy. And yes, you have to exercise control. But a degree of openness is also critical, and not only because people won’t participate in a system they perceive as restricting their self-expression. Online community and social media represent a tremendous opportunity to give customers an emotional stake in the brand, a sense of ownership that will increase value at the far end of the funnel—increasing loyalty and generating word of mouth advocacy.

Craft your policies—both outward-facing in community settings and inward-facing for managing your own company’s social media activity—not with the mindset that you need to restrict activity or restrain creative self-expression, but with the mindset that you need to enable creativity and empower participants. I think of it as analogous to sports: The rules are there to make the game safe, fair, and fun—not to keep people from playing.

Where to Start? 20 Questions for Corporate Social Media

Our social media engagements typically start with some kind of assessment, with varying degrees of formality and scope. We have an internal list of questions we use to plan these assessments, some of which are more relevant and important for a given engagement than others. Here they are:

 

1. Have you formalized the goals, KPIs, and reporting for your social media activities?

This gives us a sense of the degree to which social media efforts are aligned with the business, as well as the current state of listening, analysis, and reporting.

2. Do you know who’s talking about you online, what they’re saying, and the scope of their influence?

Most (though not all) companies I’ve worked with have a general sense of what’s being said about them online. Typically, the past year, this sense is mainly anecdotal. In the next year I expect to see much more systematic, sophisticated, and analytical listening. But if you’re not there yet, you’re not alone.

3. How effectively are you able to respond?

Yes, this begs the question of whether a business is responding at all. For those who are, the question of degree of effectiveness can be a stumper. The real question here is: How do you know how effective you are (see #1)?

4. What technology tools are you using to monitor social media activity around your brand / product / service?

People really are surprisingly resourceful when it comes to using free tools to listen online. Even for businesses without a sophisticated listening platform in place, a conversation about the tools they’re using tells us a lot about what they care about and are (or aren’t yet) able to measure.

5. Which groups and individuals are informally involved in social media activities?

Once you start walking around asking people, the variety here can be surprising. Typically corporate social media efforts emerge out of PR, Marketing, or Customer Service. But ad hoc efforts are very common, and there’s usually something important driving them. Building out a strong program requires accommodating, supporting, and enabling ad hoc efforts.

6. Whose job description includes it, and who has overall responsibility?

As you might guess, the answer here last year was very often “nobody.” Next year we’ll see a shift toward the guerilla social media people formalizing their roles and management recognizing the need for coordination and leadership. And yes, this question can set off turf wars. Tread lightly.

7. Have you defined a corporate policy for engaging with customers through social media?

If not, better get on it. Talking early to legal / brand / compliance, especially in regulated industries, always saves frustration later.

8. In what third-party venues do you have a presence?

This always yields surprises. “None…. Well, oh yeah, I guess we do have the Facebook thingie. And someone in marketing has been posting our ads to YouTube.” Or: “Marketing is in charge of our Twitter accounts. Except for the ones they use in customer service. And Dale down in R&D is a total Twitter fanatic.”

9. How well are those efforts coordinated?

Yes, more question-begging. Most often, efforts across social networks, blogs, and media sharing sites are not coordinated. Maybe, just maybe, they should be.

10. What is your brand’s online personality?

This one is a great conversation starter. It’s really about understanding how to show up in social media (hint: not with offers, and not with campaign messages). This topic is really about starting to think about how the people representing the brand should show up in social settings—authentically, as people, but as people not only representing but also enacting the brand and its character. I like to use the example of our client NAU. They make sustainably-developed clothing, and they blog not about their clothing products but about sustainability, outdoor recreation, and social action—the passions that are at the emotional core of their brand. A while back they posted, for example, a video of people moving an entire Portland, OR household by bicycle. Awesome. You want to subscribe, to follow, to befriend them.

11. How consistently do your social media efforts embody the character of the brand?

This is really a question about governance. How organized are you? Do you have a system in place to manage customer interaction across touch points? Is the system in use?

12. Where do your customers spend time online? What content do they create?

Market research typically tells us a lot about where customers spend time online. What it typically doesn’t tell us is very much about what they’re doing—So 40% of your customers check Facebook daily. That’s good to know, but to really drive action, you need to understand whether they’re there socially, professionally, or both. Whether they’re using it to market their services, keep in touch with Granny (oh yes, Granny is definitely on there), or what. They’re on Twitter, good—but what are they talking about? Whom are they following?

13. What are their preferred information sources, and how do they consume them?

What’s the information ecosystem your customers tap? Who are the influencers? What do they read? Blogs, newspapers, Digg? Are they looking at web pages, RSS feeds? Are they reading on mobile? Are they sharing things they find? Which things? With whom?

14. Where are their relationships?

Whom do your customers interact with online? Through what channels—IM, email, blog post commentary, Flickr photostreams? On social networks? Twitter? Do they use different channels for different kinds of relationships? Which ones, and what kinds?

15. What are you doing to enable customer participation on your own properties?

Do you have an email contact form buried in your footer? Or a p2p support forum? Corporate blogs? Can customers comment? Review? Rate? Can they interact with each other? Create content and add it? Suggest or vet ideas? Do they have a stake in your next version? What value can they create for each other, and how can you enable it?

16. How does your organization interact with customers online?

Can your customers contact you? How? Simply being reachable is a great first step. The next step is to proactively engage customers who need support, to reach out to your customers for feedback and ideas, and to create opportunities for customer collective intelligence to create business intelligence.

17. How do you capture business intelligence from those conversations?

Social media listening has a major difference from behavioral web analytics: It’s a two-way conversation, and it’s not just about what people do. It’s also about what they say, and how they feel.

18. What is the process for making your business intelligence actionable?

Intelligence is useless without action. But the challenges in actionablizing (ha!) business intelligence are often really substantial. How do you get the right bits and pieces to the people who can take action? This question is really about escalation, delegation, roles and responsibilities, and workflow. To make the most of what you know, you need definition around how you’re going to do something about it, who’s responsible, and how success gets measured and reported.

19. Have you monetized the value of your social media efforts?

I’ll be honest. The answer here is always no. Social media ROI is one thing, and monetized estimates of the impact of social media activities are another. ROI is great, and showing ROI in social media is absolutely possible to do. The problem is that a large portion of the payoff in social media happens over the long term and is measured in, for example, lifetime customer value and word of mouth—neither of which show up on your quarterly balance sheets.

20. Estimated the financial impact on lifetime customer value or word of mouth?

We do have a very advanced approach to this, but it’s a subject for another post. Essentially the idea is to be really smart about some monetized estimates of the value of certain measurable activities, then validate and refine those estimates over time.

 

Naturally, we don’t typically get these questions answered by sitting down with the marketing people for an hour and just asking. We basically never ask these questions in these words. A huge part of the assessment is getting time in conversation with the right people in the first place, and talking with them about their jobs, their goals, satisfactions, and frustrations. We use a combination of interviewing approaches including contextual inquiry and appreciative inquiry, and a fair amount of intuition and sneaking around. In other words, it’s not a mechanical process.

But I hope you (you few who’ve read all the way to the bottom of this post) find this list useful, and I’d really love to hear your thoughts about it. Anything missing? Anything off the mark?

Where to Start? 20 Questions for Corporate Social Media

Our social media engagements typically start with some kind of assessment, with varying degrees of formality and scope. We have an internal list of questions we use to plan these assessments, some of which are more relevant and important for a given engagement than others. Here they are:

 

1. Have you formalized the goals, KPIs, and reporting for your social media activities?

This gives us a sense of the degree to which social media efforts are aligned with the business, as well as the current state of listening, analysis, and reporting.

2. Do you know who’s talking about you online, what they’re saying, and the scope of their influence?

Most (though not all) companies I’ve worked with have a general sense of what’s being said about them online. Typically, the past year, this sense is mainly anecdotal. In the next year I expect to see much more systematic, sophisticated, and analytical listening. But if you’re not there yet, you’re not alone.

3. How effectively are you able to respond?

Yes, this begs the question of whether a business is responding at all. For those who are, the question of degree of effectiveness can be a stumper. The real question here is: How do you know how effective you are (see #1)?

4. What technology tools are you using to monitor social media activity around your brand / product / service?

People really are surprisingly resourceful when it comes to using free tools to listen online. Even for businesses without a sophisticated listening platform in place, a conversation about the tools they’re using tells us a lot about what they care about and are (or aren’t yet) able to measure.

5. Which groups and individuals are informally involved in social media activities?

Once you start walking around asking people, the variety here can be surprising. Typically corporate social media efforts emerge out of PR, Marketing, or Customer Service. But ad hoc efforts are very common, and there’s usually something important driving them. Building out a strong program requires accommodating, supporting, and enabling ad hoc efforts.

6. Whose job description includes it, and who has overall responsibility?

As you might guess, the answer here last year was very often “nobody.” Next year we’ll see a shift toward the guerilla social media people formalizing their roles and management recognizing the need for coordination and leadership. And yes, this question can set off turf wars. Tread lightly.

7. Have you defined a corporate policy for engaging with customers through social media?

If not, better get on it. Talking early to legal / brand / compliance, especially in regulated industries, always saves frustration later.

8. In what third-party venues do you have a presence?

This always yields surprises. “None…. Well, oh yeah, I guess we do have the Facebook thingie. And someone in marketing has been posting our ads to YouTube.” Or: “Marketing is in charge of our Twitter accounts. Except for the ones they use in customer service. And Dale down in R&D is a total Twitter fanatic.”

9. How well are those efforts coordinated?

Yes, more question-begging. Most often, efforts across social networks, blogs, and media sharing sites are not coordinated. Maybe, just maybe, they should be.

10. What is your brand’s online personality?

This one is a great conversation starter. It’s really about understanding how to show up in social media (hint: not with offers, and not with campaign messages). This topic is really about starting to think about how the people representing the brand should show up in social settings—authentically, as people, but as people not only representing but also enacting the brand and its character. I like to use the example of our client NAU. They make sustainably-developed clothing, and they blog not about their clothing products but about sustainability, outdoor recreation, and social action—the passions that are at the emotional core of their brand. A while back they posted, for example, a video of people moving an entire Portland, OR household by bicycle. Awesome. You want to subscribe, to follow, to befriend them.

11. How consistently do your social media efforts embody the character of the brand?

This is really a question about governance. How organized are you? Do you have a system in place to manage customer interaction across touch points? Is the system in use?

12. Where do your customers spend time online? What content do they create?

Market research typically tells us a lot about where customers spend time online. What it typically doesn’t tell us is very much about what they’re doing—So 40% of your customers check Facebook daily. That’s good to know, but to really drive action, you need to understand whether they’re there socially, professionally, or both. Whether they’re using it to market their services, keep in touch with Granny (oh yes, Granny is definitely on there), or what. They’re on Twitter, good—but what are they talking about? Whom are they following?

13. What are their preferred information sources, and how do they consume them?

What’s the information ecosystem your customers tap? Who are the influencers? What do they read? Blogs, newspapers, Digg? Are they looking at web pages, RSS feeds? Are they reading on mobile? Are they sharing things they find? Which things? With whom?

14. Where are their relationships?

Whom do your customers interact with online? Through what channels—IM, email, blog post commentary, Flickr photostreams? On social networks? Twitter? Do they use different channels for different kinds of relationships? Which ones, and what kinds?

15. What are you doing to enable customer participation on your own properties?

Do you have an email contact form buried in your footer? Or a p2p support forum? Corporate blogs? Can customers comment? Review? Rate? Can they interact with each other? Create content and add it? Suggest or vet ideas? Do they have a stake in your next version? What value can they create for each other, and how can you enable it?

16. How does your organization interact with customers online?

Can your customers contact you? How? Simply being reachable is a great first step. The next step is to proactively engage customers who need support, to reach out to your customers for feedback and ideas, and to create opportunities for customer collective intelligence to create business intelligence.

17. How do you capture business intelligence from those conversations?

Social media listening has a major difference from behavioral web analytics: It’s a two-way conversation, and it’s not just about what people do. It’s also about what they say, and how they feel.

18. What is the process for making your business intelligence actionable?

Intelligence is useless without action. But the challenges in actionablizing (ha!) business intelligence are often really substantial. How do you get the right bits and pieces to the people who can take action? This question is really about escalation, delegation, roles and responsibilities, and workflow. To make the most of what you know, you need definition around how you’re going to do something about it, who’s responsible, and how success gets measured and reported.

19. Have you monetized the value of your social media efforts?

I’ll be honest. The answer here is always no. Social media ROI is one thing, and monetized estimates of the impact of social media activities are another. ROI is great, and showing ROI in social media is absolutely possible to do. The problem is that a large portion of the payoff in social media happens over the long term and is measured in, for example, lifetime customer value and word of mouth—neither of which show up on your quarterly balance sheets.

20. Estimated the financial impact on lifetime customer value or word of mouth?

We do have a very advanced approach to this, but it’s a subject for another post. Essentially the idea is to be really smart about some monetized estimates of the value of certain measurable activities, then validate and refine those estimates over time.

 

Naturally, we don’t typically get these questions answered by sitting down with the marketing people for an hour and just asking. We basically never ask these questions in these words. A huge part of the assessment is getting time in conversation with the right people in the first place, and talking with them about their jobs, their goals, satisfactions, and frustrations. We use a combination of interviewing approaches including contextual inquiry and appreciative inquiry, and a fair amount of intuition and sneaking around. In other words, it’s not a mechanical process.

But I hope you (you few who’ve read all the way to the bottom of this post) find this list useful, and I’d really love to hear your thoughts about it. Anything missing? Anything off the mark?

ZAAZ Needs a Senior Social Media Strategist

Updated: Now recruiting for FTE as well as freelancers.

SENIOR SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIST

We are looking for a candidate that can thrive in a creative environment where collaboration, innovation and passion for the web are a must. This position will start out on a contract basis and has the potential to move into a full time position.

This position is located in Seattle at ZAAZ World Headquarters (no relocation).

Responsibilities:

Help define and execute overall social media strategy, including onsite communities, brand campaigns in social media, product and service concepts, and more. Develop plans for the social media marketing mix. Consult on new media developments. Collaborate with account teams to identify opportunities for clients in social media and with creative directors to conceive and execute creative ideas. Marketing mentality a must. Collaboration crucial. Passionate + pragmatic = perfect. A challenging role for a thought-leading visionary who wants to help redefine how businesses use the online channel.

Required Skills:

5-7 years online strategic planning, product management, and/or marketing experience.

Experience implementing online community/web 2.0/social media efforts on behalf of brands, ideation through execution.

Familiarity with social media tools, listening platforms, internal operations and community management.

Conversant in SEO/SEM, web analytics, web technology, mobile campaigns, community, creative/brand.

User-centric thinker.

Experience being client facing.

Good communication skills, both verbal and written and comfortable presenting.

Likes fun.

Additional Desired Skills:

Agency experience

About ZAAZ

ZAAZ is a premier interactive agency serving some of the world’s most enduring and recognizable brands. Few interactive agencies understand how to utilize web analytics in delivering rich, creative and thoughtfully designed brand experiences optimized for measurable results. Strategically positioned at the intersection of Logic and Creative, ZAAZ is the leader in providing performance-driven digital marketing across all channels and industries. We value a healthy work-life balance and committed individuals who are continually seeking to grow in their professions. Founded in 1998, ZAAZ is headquartered in Seattle and is part of the Wunderman/WPP group of companies. For more information and current open positions, visit www.zaaz.com

 

Have a question? Someone else is probably wondering the same thing. Ask in the comment thread.

Too Much Marketing

I really like David Armano’s Conversation Starter post from earlier this week with predicted trends in social media for next year. In particular, his first point hits on exactly what I think is going to be the key to success for marketers in social media:

1. Social media begins to look less social
With groups, lists and niche networks becoming more popular, networks could begin to feel more "exclusive." Not everyone can fit on someone's newly created Twitter list and as networks begin to fill with noise, it's likely that user behavior such as "hiding" the hyperactive updaters that appear in your Facebook news feed may become more common. Perhaps it's not actually less social, but it might seem that way as we all come to terms with getting value out of our networks — while filtering out the clutter.

OK, I actually think the header on Armano’s paragraph is, as he hints, actually the opposite of the truth—the way I’d say it is that “social media begins to look less anti-social!”

But the real point Armano is making is spot on. Social channels are too noisy, and as more and more marketers start to proactively reach out to consumers online next year, and as listening technologies are more widely adopted, we’ll see a dramatic increase in, well, spam.

I made a joke on Twitter recently about going to back to grad school. I was, I think, really obviously joking. But in minutes, I had four @replies from universities plugging their Master’s programs. Yikes!

We are fast approaching a time when public online social venues are saturated with listening marketers, responding to every mention of everything related to their brands, products, and services. It’s easy to anticipate Twitter’s @ channel, for example, becoming essentially useless.

Armano is right to predict an increase in user behaviors that enable them to filter the noise. But I also think we’ll see a rise in demand for and sophistication of privacy controls (and even products—like the “social router” I once pitched to Nancy White after her talk here at ZAAZ), as well as an increase in the importance of private networks and communities.

What’s a marketer to do?

Create value, that’s what. Next year will be a year for opt-in marketing—the focus will be on creating content and services people want to use. Heads up, folks, people don’t want you to “engage them” in “conversation.”

Vote for the Presentation You’d Most like to See October 15th at ZAAZ

Below are the submissions for our next social media event. Read the descriptions here, and then vote over on our Facebook page. The eight with most votes will be our presenters for 21 Slides!

For those not in Seattle, by the way, we are working out details on setting up a webcast for the event. We’re considering TwitCam, but we’re happy to here any other suggestions, if you have a favorite tool.

 

1. Lessons Learned from LOLcats.
There's a lot to be learned from the popular LOLcat meme. Why is www.icanhascheezburger.com so successful? What attracts users and keeps them coming back? Are there lessons to be learned from this phenomenon? (yes!) My presentation will include a brief history of the LOL meme, explore the magic ingredients of this social media success story, and present a few key takeaways that can be applied to social media and digital marketing in general.

2. Pulling the Pages out of Facebook: Social Web Optimization
Recent moves towards the vision of the Semantic Web by Google and Yahoo! are accelerating adoption of geeky sounding things like XFN, Microformats, and RDFa. These standards have the potential to move social networking out of walled gardens and into the open Internet itself. I'll look at how semantic markup adds social value to Web sites now, and speculate on what the social future of the Semantic Web might look like.

3.The Social Media Mindset: An InfoCamp case study
The 15th of October is 4 days after the 3rd annual InfoCamp (which I can already tell you is going to kick ass). This year, attendance grew sharply, and interest in InfoCamp hit a critical mass of sorts. InfoCamp is a crowdsourced conference. It is real-time, in-person social media inside a conference format. It is the Wikipedia to more traditional conferences’ Encyclopedia Britannica. This gravitation towards InfoCamp is part of a larger expectation that drives social media – that users can and should generate their own content in a variety of formats, not just digital ones. I’ll show how we used social media to promote InfoCamp. I’ll show examples of how people used our Wiki, twitter, and Facebook presence before the event. I’ll show examples of how social media was used during and after the event.

4. Social Media: All that Glitters is not Gold
A covert mission of exposing a very traditional retail company to social media. One woman. No budget. Few tools. And now with internet restrictions!

5. OMG my (online) life is over. Mom's on Facebook.
How to gracefully deal with the generation gap as your parents, aunts, uncles, and even grandparents join in this "social media" thing. Mom keeps spamming your Facebook posts with mom-comments, Dad got lost in quizzes, but at least neither of them Twitter (whew).

6. The Desperate Housewives of Facebook: Why are they so goddamn bored?!
Facebook recently published an audience statistic that stated the most prolific segment on their site was married women between the ages of 35-40. Basically, housefraus. And honestly, we know it's true. From their seemingly exhausting ability to post up-to-the-minute updates on their over-achieving children, their opinions of Oprah's afternoon guest, how precious someone's twins are, and what god awful family vacation they're planning. Why do they torture us so? And, more importantly, why are they addicted to FaceCrack? This presentation works off this crazy data point to get to the bottom of the Facebook Housewife craze -- and exposes the horror below.

7. Cinching All My Love to You: A Social Media Romance
Here’s a little story about Jack and Diane two American kids growing up in the heartland. No wait, that’s been done before. This presentation is the story of Jo and Nancy, a relationship that starts, develops, and ultimately meets its end on CinchCast.com. Through the words, voice, images and text of our two love birds, attendees will experience the excitement new love can bring...and the drama when things don’t work out as planned. This presentation will be better than any Knot’s Landing or Melrose Place re-run. It is love social media style.

8. Humanizing Social Media: A Few Stories.
Social media is the place where stories are shared and experiences are formed. Only when brands provide return on emotion to their customers, can they fully benefit from social media. People want to know that they’re being heard. By acknowledging their contributions, and teaming up with their most loyal customers, brands can begin to build stronger relationships with their fans. I’d like to share some collected examples of how companies are using social media to build deep and long lasting relationships with their enthusiasts. Some you’ve heard of, others will surely be new.

9. Are you ready for a mobile makeover?
I spearheaded a campaign in which I was able to get the attention of the powers that be over at Waggener Edstrom. A very special twitter page, a Facebook fan page and some fabulous videos on YouTube, helped me break the mold.

10. Government is no longer the bureaucratic monolith you thought it was
At the Washington State Department of Transportation we are using Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, and Flickr and other social media tools to reach audiences. While I don't want to focus on any one element or tool I plan to share amazing stories of how we used them during "snowpocalypse" to help people get home, and won several national awards for it. Also we have incredible direct messaging features that folks in Seattle should be aware of. Did you know you can get Seattle area travel times, mountain pass reports and border wait times via Twitter direct message?

11. Social Telephone Game :: It’s never what they say, it’s what they mean
Do you flinch every time you see your brand being drug through the mud on the social web? Are your inboxes across various social media tools filling up with hate mail? Your unhappiest customer is not likely what they appear to be. Learn how to read between the lines of your social community and harness them for the brand advocates they are.

12. Defamation and Social Media – A Practical Guide to Covering Your Ass
Should you really send that tweet calling your competitor a “douchebag”? What about that status update letting the world know how your mechanic is a “lying, cheating scumbag who would steal medicine from a pediatric ward?” How liable are you for giving all the baddies out there a well-deserved, spleen-filled bitch-slap? In this session, I will walk through a very quick explanation of defamation law and explain how it might apply to the social media landscape. I will also provide a few practical ways that might protect your right as an American to roast the bejeezus out of the asshats of the world, without getting sued into oblivion.

13. An Ecosystem Approach to Social Media: Turning Crap Into Fertilizer
The landscape of social media is a complex system. So are ecosystems: gardens, wetlands, and forests are full of complex webs of dependencies (nutrients, shelter, food) and controls (checks & balances). There are well-established methods for describing and designing ecosystems to produce desired results - and revenue. So the question is: how do we design social media to satisfied customers and cold, hard cash? The answer: Crap. In nature, it's the "nightsoil" that keeps the system going. One creature's crap is another's food. We can identify the byproducts of social media - the waste, the shite, the cruft, the fluff - and find ways to make it feed the system, we've created a self-sustaining Poop Loop. In fact, if we DON'T have a strategy to process the crap, it'll poison the system. So we need to find ways to turn social media manure into fertilizer. How is it done? First identify role types. Then map their inputs and outputs. Finally, design mechanisms to connect one entity's outputs to another's inputs. Congratulations, you've just turned crap into fertilizer. Just one of the many lessons we can learn from ecosystem science.

14. Itsy Bitsy Spiders: Everything I need to know about social media I learned in Kindergarten.
A simple but powerful perspective on social media which shows how it is different from other online tasks like SEO or website design and content. It is NOT about the BIG spider (Google) but all the itsy bitsy spiders that weave their own small webs and catch only the tastiest stuff. What makes social media interesting is not real-time search, but selective, passive content delivery. All we have to do is remember show-and-tell from kindergarten. Find the good stuff, tell your class about it.

15. Two Manifestos: 500 Years of Social Media History repeats itself
A 5 minute journey from Martin Luther and his 95 theses that resulted in Protestantism (1517); to the Cluetrain Manifesto and their 95 theses that defined modern social media (1999).

Martin Luther demanded that the Catholic Church stop selling religion and Cluetrain demanded that companies stop selling their message. The story of two manifestos with the same message: stop trying to profit from being an intermediary and be honest.

The presentation will tell the story of the tithes that the Catholic Church sold as God-proxies. This imposition of a tax for access to God led to the Protestant Reformation. Protestantism was founded on disintermediation. Not by accident, this act of rebellion was followed almost 500 years later by a similar message by some of the original founders and drivers of the Internet and web. They felt that corporations had largely begun to take the role roughly equivalent to the Catholic church - speaking in Latin (corporate-speak) and profiting by the control of information and access. The Cluetrain Manifesto put them on notice.

 

So many fantastic ideas! Cast your vote now!

A Tour of ZAAZ

This is kind of fun. The folks over at Drifting Creatives posted a video of our Seattle headquarters, with my colleague Rachel as tour guide. I like how they captured our vibe, especially with the tunes that take me to my happy place:

Rachel walks you through our usability lab, talks a bit about web optimization, and even takes you behind the infamous Z-Bar.

You should come visit us too! See my previous post about our upcoming social media event.

October 15th is the Next ZAAZ Social Media Event: 21 Slides

Mark your calendar: Our ongoing series resumes October 15th. And this time, you can participate. Here is the announcement:

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What is 21 Slides?
90 minutes. 8 social media presenters. Five minutes each. No more than 21 slides. Add beer.

ZAAZ is inviting local social media digerati, strategists, and media dabblers of all backgrounds to submit presentation ideas to compete for the eight available 5-minute presentations slots. The submissions are reviewed by the event directors to assess quality and social media relevance (no vacation slide shows, please) – then the approved submissions are posted with a brief description on this Facebook event site and presented to the community at large for a vote. The 8 most popular topics as voted by the community will be chosen to present at 21 Slides – with a clear winner being adorned with a social media tiara and sash.

Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=258514510526&ref=mf

Participants in the presentations are encouraged to take creative risks, in terms of content and presentation, and to not just show-off their social media project portfolios. That would be lame.

We’re looking for submissions that present an engaging narrative that tells a powerful story (whether through humor, empathy, concern, enlightenment) about the role or influence that social media can have in our lives today.

Anyone and everyone is encouraged to submit a topic, subject to a few rules of course:

1. All presentations are 5 minutes max (and we do mean five minutes)
2. Social Media reference must be in the title of the presentation (and the primary focus)
3. No one may have more than 21 slides (get it?)
4. Commercials suck (don’t sell anything)
5. Event directors reserve the right to reject submissions based on content appropriateness.

Some possible presentations you might see at our 21 Slides event:

• An interactive PowerPoint that shows how you saved the breakfast sandwich purely on retweets.
• An uncensored look at some of the most powerful video imagery coming out of Iran on YouTube.com
• How to track Hurricane Bill using only your IPhone
• Junk you can do on Twitter besides lame ass status updates
• 10 ways to spice up your love life digitally

SUBMISSION TIMELINE:
September 10 – 22 :: Submissions accepted (PLEASE SEE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES BELOW)

September 22 :: Submission period closed and top concepts are reviewed for relevancy

September 24 – 31 :: Voting opens for top submissions

October 1 :: Final presentations announced

October 5 :: Presentations due from winning presenters (this means your full five minute presentation)

October 15 :: Happy Hour starts @ 6:00 PM, lights dim at 7PM and the show begins.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Send an email to 21slides@zaaz.com by September 22 with the following information included in the body of your email. You will receive email confirmation that your submission was received.

• Your full name
• Your email address
• Title of you presentation
• Describe presentation with as much detail as possible so we get the gist
• Twitter name
• What do you want the audience to walk away with from your presentation?
• How will you deliver your presentation? (PPT, slideware, tweets, interactive, etc.)
• What element of social media will you speak to?
• How do you plan to spice up your presentation? (lighting yourself on fire is grounds for immediate rejection – and so last century)

At the 21 Slides event, the presentations are preceded by a Z-bar sponsored happy hour after which the lights are dimmed, the crowd is hushed, and the social media enlightenment begins. In the spirit of community participation, we will have a split screen showing a live feed of twitter comments on the presentations as they unfold on stage.

See you there!