The Network Garden - Mark Sigal's Blog

Don't confuse a bunch of chicken parts for a chicken

All too often, we get into the mindset that we can piecemeal our way to real solutions.  Sometimes, the simple reality may be that if something is not inherently more than the sum of the parts, then the basic integrity of the model falls apart.

In such instances, one is falling prey to confusing a bunch of chicken parts for a living, breathing chicken.

Me.com Power’s MyRagan.com, the "MySpace for the PR industry"

To understand the power of social media, it helps to have good use cases to look to for inspiration.  That is why I am so happy to be able to start talking about MyRagan.com, an online community of the Chicago-based publishing house Lawrence Ragan Communications that is targeted at professional communicators (read: public relations, marketing and corporate communications professionals). 

In a little over a month, the community has gone from zero to over 6,000 members.  While on the one hand, such a number pales in comparison to the tens of millions of MySpacers and Facebookers, the reality is that MyRagan.com serves an entirely different need for it users and enables a totally different set of outcomes for its operator, Ragan Communications.

For users, networking between PR and corporate communications professionals was previously limited to organized events often bound by local presence, email lists and discussion groups. By leveraging Me.com's SNAPP PRO solution, Ragan has been able to rapidly launch a highly targeted, brand-centered community that seamlessly integrates the different conversations, contexts, content and communications that are meaningful to their audience.

Think about it.  If you are a media relations specialist sitting in Washington, DC, where do you connect with other media relations specialists, and how do you narrow or widen your “like minds” filter by geography or role? 

Similarly, once you do connect up with these individuals, how do you engage with them?  How do your put your C.V. shingle up in terms of profiling your knowledge, skills, interests and experiences? 

Where do you create and organize content that is an expression of your perspectives?  And how do you maintain the intimacy that creates a context that is meaningful to your constituency of professional communicators?

By connecting the dots between discussion groups, profiles, blogging tools and the like, and enabling community builders to customize and actively manage their communities, Me.com’s SNAPP is enabling a new type of highly specialized community to launch and grow that is focused but has global reach, dynamic but inter-connected in a more than the sum of the parts fashion.

Or, in the words of Mark Ragan, Ragan Communications’ CEO, "The SNAPP platform offers an amazing array of tools for our members. And it blends in perfectly with our current web presence. We credit SNAPP for allowing us to capture the interest of our customers by quickly building a community that reflects our trusted brand."

For the myriads of specialized information publishers, verticals and micro-segments that the long tail is all about, Me.com’s SNAPP is destined to be a game-changer.

Here is the press release announcing the launch of MyRagan.com:
http://www.primenewswire.com/newsroom/?d=121665

vSocial Powers Foster's Laidback Legends Campaign

We just launched a campaign for Foster's Lager called Laidback Legends, which is great on a number of levels.  One, the campaign itself is a lot of fun and well thought out. 

The target for the campaign, so-called Laidback Legends, are the blokes that one meets in pubs that are just an indispensable part of the bar scene.  Maybe you know one of these people. Maybe you are one yourself.  Moreover, the prizes range from some coinage to cover your bar tab to a grand vacation for you and your mates.  Lots of goodness.

Two, the agency that we worked with was a joy.  Really sharp creative folks, technically very strong, and 1+1=3 collaboration style.  Great, great partner.

Three, the campaign takes full advantage of vSocial's Campaign Solution, which makes it super easy for an agency to roll out a turnkey campaign very rapidly, while providing API-level integration.  Rapid deployment but the campaign looks and feels totally customized.

We like this space and have been fortunate to get to work with a number of these companies (social media marketers) on the brand and agency side.

There are definitely some lessons learned, which we have boiled down to a "10 rules" two pager.  If we ever connect, happy to share.

Look at this stuff as a conversation between a brand and its constituency that hopefully never ends.

Take a snapshot and keep that picture in your pocket at all times.  It's the road ahead.

Social Media Explained

(Note: I talk to A LOT of companies who are striving to embrace social media but don’t really grok what exactly it is and how to apply it to their businesses.  This is an attempt to explain social media in simple terms.)

YouTube and MySpace were borne of the recognition that just as radio gave rise to television, the Internet is moving beyond text and links. It is becoming an amalgam of movies, pictures and sound.  It is becoming interactive and mobile.   

Media as we know it is being re-invented.  The once finite lines between audience, network, content and advertiser are becoming blurred.  For the first time, mastered “professional” content and user-generated content co-exist side by side in a still-forming universe known as social media.

Social media extends traditional media models by providing the means for users to express their interests and experiences via a user profile, connect the dots between related pieces of content and engage with “like minds” in a systematic fashion.

It heralds a shift away from very few, homogenous broadcasters with limited points of distribution and towards a surplus of rich media channels and content targeted at every niche imaginable.

Part of what drives this drives this model is the open, inherently boundary-less nature of the Internet, and the rapid commoditization of technologies and devices that ride on top of it.

Whereas once the cost of producing, distributing and marketing new content was prohibitively expensive for all but the largest enterprises, in the social media model, new concepts can be launched very rapidly and very inexpensively.

There are all sorts of interesting tools and platforms emerging that allow anyone to become a legitimate content producer, and to target and reach a very specific audience. This enables consumers and businesses of all sizes to become active participants in the creation and distribution of content.

At its most basic, anyone can rate, tag, comment or share a piece of content that they have an opinion on.  It is no less amazing, however, how many millions of people have embraced social media at a deeper level by writing blogs, creating podcasts and/or uploading video clips.

I have a mantra that this medium is all about breadcrumbs and conversations.  Basically, the idea behind breadcrumbs is that with social media, content is cast far and wide through viral distribution tools like widgets, RSS-based syndication and simple email sharing.  Baked into these distribution tools is a “call home” function that provides a clear path for consumers to get entertained, educated and/or engage in a conversation with the content builder. 

Thus, breadcrumbs enable engagement to occur in a loosely coupled, de-centralized fashion yet still achieve the benefits of an integrated community; namely, clear contexts, well-defined rules of engagement and aggregate scale.

Beyond entertainment and media applications, businesses of all sizes can benefit by embracing this model and applying it to their branding, customer relationship, communications and marketing strategies. 

For example, we (i.e., my companies, Me.com and vSocial) have a number of clients that have launched or are launching word of mouth marketing campaigns that leverage this approach.  In addition, we work with a major media company that is embracing this model to change the way they market DVDs. 

Similarly, we have a client that has baked rich media and community building functionality so deep into their online strategy that in about a month, 6,000 of their customers, prospects and ecosystem partners have signed up to join their social network.  The net effect of this is that pretty much overnight they have gone from an almost exclusively US focused company to one with a virtual global presence, something they never could have achieved prior to the advent of social media.

The audience is now an integral part of the network, and the business of media will never be the same.

Me.com and Userplane Partnership

My company, Me.com, which recently launched a free version of its social networking platform for community builders (over 1500 communities have launched in the first 30 days alone), and Userplane (a unit of AOL), the leader in instant messaging and chat room functionality for online communities, have announced a partnership to integrate Userplane's capabilities into the Me.com's SNAPP platform.

This means that community builders of all sizes can rapidly deploy, customize, monetize and administer social networks that reflect their interests and attract their niche audiences, going live with the must-have IM and chat features that Web 2.0 definitely take to.

Here is an excerpt from the press announcement: "Me.com is at the forefront of the self-creation community - allowing anyone to set up their own social network, with full integration and use of the Userplane toolset," said Michael Jones, CEO of Userplane and vice president of AOL. "We anticipate this partnership will further expand our reach to this key audience of web community builders."

All good stuff, and a good partner to boot.

Social Media, Koans and Virtual Theaters

Okay, so I am not necessarily even sure what the hell a Koan is, but let's just say that this one is pretty close.

A few months back, I was intrigued by a movie trailer that presented a story narrative along the lines of "there are all of these horrific serial killers that we know by name but there is one whom you've probably never heard of named Gustave, and he wrote the book on human atrocities..."

Intrigued, I did some googling to find out what I could about Gustave, which led me to write the following blog post.

Flash forward, we recently had the opportunity to work with Disney and their interactive agency on a new project that seeks to re-invent the way DVDs are marketed.  Long tail friendly. 

It is called the virtual theater, and essentially it allows movie producers to hold online showings of their full-length motion picture releases on an on-demand or scheduled basis with secure, single use seating. 

What do you use a virtual theater for?  Well for one thing, to connect with both print and online media when geography or cost economics dictate that it is impractical to have everyone physically in the same space.

Nonetheless, the theater is a place where the creative team and media gain access to one anther via moderated conversations and conversation building tools.   Other functionality is in the works, which I can't talk about.

Back to Koans. So completely randomly, what was the first movie in the virtual theater? Primeval.

Does it work?  You decide. Here is an excerpt from a blog post by one of the attendees, Josh Tyler of Cinema Blend:

I was recently invited to participate in something new: An online chat and watch with the director of Primeval.  Disney figured out a way to stream the movie for us online, while simultaneously chatting with the film’s director Michael Katleman. The streaming movie ended up serving more as background, a way to set the scene while the journalists in attendance pounded him with questions; but on the whole the experience worked out as a quick and easy way to connect filmmakers with journalists all over the world and by extension, their audience.