Into the MyST | MyST Technology Partners, Inc.

Managing a Reflection of Your Brand Reputation

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 13:57:56 -0400

Many social media sites (such as Wikipedia) are a reflection of the markets’ perceived understanding and reputation of your brand.

I’m not surprised when businesses contact me to describe online social networking and brand reputation scenarios they find annoying and troublesome; I’ve been cautioning business leaders to use social networks and social publishing as a key source of online reputation management visibility since 2003. I’ve often commented that Google ceased being a search engine 10 years ago – it’s now a reputation engine.

However, a week rarely goes by when I don’t hear from at least one that hasn’t taken my advice to fortify their online reputation with some earnest degree of non-trivial participation in the read-write web.

A close business acquaintance (not a client) recently tossed out this thought in an email with a predictable tone of desperation.

Internet related postings and structures have a significant influence (beyond the recession) on the degree to which people find us, inquire, and/or buy our services and the degree to which our competitors are able to literally water-down and usurp our visibility to their advantage.

Customers, the media, competitors and journalists are busy shaping your online brand reputation using every manner of social content publishing and networking environment they can find. If you don’t participate effectively, how can you possibly expect your online reputation to reflect your own marketing message and product positioning?

The acquaintance goes on (I’m paraphrasing to conceal identity of course) to say…

Two competitors have literally moved into a Wikipedia page that should be about my company and undermined it in a couple of different ways: (i) they positioned themselves front and center in the page; (ii) they made the description of our core philosophy innocuous by focusing the discussion away from my company’s mission and core values.

Setting aside the misconception that Wikipedia is ripe grounds for marketing influence, links to opposing (or complementary) viewpoints, whether it’s from competitors or not, is Wikipedia’s purpose. To effectively balance competitive threats that manifest in Wikipedia, you must have something worthwhile to link to related to the topic of interest – preferably lots (and lots) of domain expertise that establishes you and your firm as thought leaders. The body of influence must be so significant that no Wikipedia editor could find reason to leave it off the page.

There are many ways to achieve this, but these three things come to mind as the most important.

A dominant and high-quality content based deeply indexed and organically findable across all major search channels.
A collection of tightly connected and purposefully integrated social networking presences.
A consistent and scalable social participation strategy that includes significant elements of both publishing and listening.

While these strategic attributes translate into a large number of business and technical requirements that seem to grow in scope every day, it is possible to simplify and streamline your online brand reputation by outsourcing some of the requirements to services and technology that wisely leverage automation and integration. Trying to chip away at your brand reputation objectives without a comprehensive strategy and tools to bring success into focus, is unlikely to produce competitive results.

Google Buzz: It Will Change The Future

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:16:56 -0500

The pundits have missed a key point - most have failed to recognize that Buzz [1.0] was built for GMail's 200+ million active users.

Many have said that the core value in Google Buzz is that it aggregates disparate (and relevant) social information into one place. The reaction to this has been lukewarm and few experts believe it will be successful in winning over the hearts and minds of seemingly happy Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook users.

I agree with this assertion only to the extent that we assume Buzz is feature-complete and unlikely to change dramatically in the next five quarters. I have a sense that those of us evaluating it have failed to recognize that Buzz [1.0] was built for GMail's 200+ million active users. Once these users get accustomed to it and they provide feedback, you'll see Buzz 2.0 (Q1, 2011 I suspect).

By then a significant number of the 200 million GMail users will have well-established social networks that have been slowly chipping away at Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook users, causing user-base erosion at the edges of these services. The GMail/Buzz community who are magically being enticed by this new ability to share quickly and without friction, will slowly tug at friends who don't use GMail, and over time many of those folks will become Buzz-converts.

When Buzz 2.0 emerges in 2011 with seamless integration to Outlook and other email services, Google will have a head of steam, 275 million GMail users, and most will be comfortable sharing micro-posts and other information artifacts through Buzz. It will only be a matter of time before the features of Wave and other Google business apps creep into the feature set, possibly as soon as Q3 2010. By 2012 Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook will have a real tiger by the tail trying to maintain market share for Facebook activity that involves communication and sharing - their core benefits.

Indeed, Facebook is not the new MySpace as [some] pundits have claimed. Instead, it will emerge as one of the first meso-scale SENs (social entertainment network). FriendFeed will go away not because there are better alternatives, but because it will be off-message and out of context for the Facebook that will emerge in 2012. Twitter and other 140 character systems will become quasi-protocols because they're useful infrastructure elements for the greater segment known as micro-posts and they'll continue to meet real-time information awareness requirements.

I've always thought that there was healthy demand for mini-posts -- i.e., longer than 140 characters and shorter (and more casual) information objects than a 600 word blog post.

A conversation thread in Buzz is a good example of mini-posts; brief buzzes become deeper conversations; some comments transition into new posts; some emerge as macro-posts in other blogs (this blog post began its existence as a comment). Ergo, my intent was to write a quick comment, but I ended up with an article. But more important, Buzz can capture both small and large artifacts.

While Twitter meets real-time awareness requirements, Buzz provides a medium for real-time conversations that may (or may not) stem from three forms of communication; (i) micro-posts, (ii) macro-posts, or (iii) email threads.

Google has brilliantly positioned a fraction of Wave's functionality (AKA Buzz) in the center of the publishing triangle. Other features of Wave will be slowly blended into the infrastructure in a manner that will transform the triangle into a square (i.e., adding another cornerstone).

Imagine a rinse-repeat strategy that (over time) continues to add more cornerstones of communication, sharing, new information object types, search, identity, security, private spaces, etc. The strategy seems clear - Google is building a circle that encompasses a comprehensive topology of all information artifacts people create, share, and consume.

Brilliant.

Gistonomies: Market Intelligence in the Context of a Specific Business Role

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 12:20:19 -0500

As builders of social identity and social media tools, we have to think about solutions for business people in the context of the person *and* the business roles they perform.

I like Gist (a bunch). I use it all the time and I've begun to use it for more than just a tracking system for my social media tasks although, this alone I would pay large sums of money for.

The notion of a “gistonomy” falls out of my brief experience with ontologies while at Starbase almost 10 years ago. Ontologies are defined here better than I ever could, but the idea of blending a “taxonomy”, a less precise but well known method of information categorization, with Gist (ergo, “gistonomy”) is to suggest that in the context of a given business role, there ought to be an “…onomy” that can be easily mapped into Gist such that it provide discrete awareness of information in the context of that business role.

Imagine you're the business development officer of an equity funding company. Setting aside your own contacts and historical conversations, what information would that user expect in terms of information flows into Gist? If we assume the information diet should be based solely on the connective tissue of email conversations, contact data, and companies already in the users historical perspective, we rule out the ability of the user to gain advanced awareness of change in their respective market segment.

To be fair. Gist does a phenomenal job of finding information at the periphery of the conversation. In just a few minutes experiencing Gist, you'll know you're dealing with a whole new kind of smarts. But there are limits to how far Gist can take its predictive powers without making its users feel like they're watering potted plants with a fire-hose. Some information sources should be intentionally targeted and sculpted from independent sources.

Our own MyST Net Intelligence service is ideal for creating market intelligence feeds that enhance the Gist experience beyond the obvious benefits of tracking and developing deeper social identity awareness based on your legacy conversations and contacts.

This is the thought process that led me to the idea of gistonomies; discrete information feeds that provide Gist users with significant competitive advantages over a user who relies solely on their own legacy company and contact list.

While we've developed media and competitive intelligence solutions for companies such as Vail Resorts and Citrix, we haven't really focused on the benefits of using our media aggregation services for individuals, but Gist changes the dynamics of this thinking.

Today we have services in place to provide a team of Gist users with a core [secure] market intelligence platform complete with an annotation and collaborative environment. Integrating this information into Gist for a team of marketing professionals takes it up a notch - ergo, a gistonomy.

I've built three Gistonomies for test purposes and they're quite pleasurable to use as they call out news and information in social contexts that typically require lots of time to find and digest. My test gistonomies include:

Startups/Funding
Social Media Technology
Environment and Climate Change

If you have ideas concerning new gistonomies and how to build them, drop me a note.

Into the MyST | MyST Technology Partners, Inc.

Managing a Reflection of Your Brand Reputation

Google Buzz: It Will Change The Future

See Also

Gistonomies: Market Intelligence in the Context of a Specific Business Role

See Also