Matthew T Grant

If you don’t have time to blog then don’t. Ghost blogging is inauthentic & the antithesis of everything social. #dontbeafake cc @mitchjoel – Avinash Kaushik

When I was in graduate school, there was a lot of talk about the “death of the author.” Such talk was driven primarily by French, post-structuralist thinkers like Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Lacan who had an intensely nuanced and complex notion of writing and authorship that tended to highlight the supra-personal in any putatively “personal” utterance or authorial gesture. Steeped in such thinking, I became very skeptical of attempts to say with certainty who the “who” is when we ask, “Who wrote this?”

Barthes et al. were responding to various French philosophical currents of the 20th century but especially, I believe, existentialism. Whereas existentialism had put the individual human being at the center of (an ultimately meaningless) existence, thus hoping to establish a new moral center following the death of God, the post-structuralists chose instead to show that the individual was not the center of anything but, rather, the effect of many things (language, culture, discourse, the unconscious, etc.).

The French were not the first or the only critics to suggest that the individual (sometimes called “the subject”) was epiphenomenal. Freud had certainly pointed in this direction when developing his psycho-analytic theories as had Nietzsche a decade or so before him, Marx a decade or so before that, and Hegel at the very outset of the 19th century. But even these gentlemen were not the first to insist on the essentially contingent nature of individual identity which, in one form or another, can be traced back to the teachings of Buddha and even the Vedic authors before him.

Which is all to say that when I read things like Mitch Joel’s recent blog post on “ghost blogging,” my philosophical buttons get pushed.

Conceding that there may be practical value to ghost blogging (”I get that people Ghost Blog and it works”), Mitch shows that his opposition to it is, more than anything else, a matter of faith. Like a Luther for the Twitterati, he writes, “I believe this one thought (and I will stand by it): corporate Blogs being presented as a personal space to share insights have a predisposed and inherent understanding that the person whose name is on it is the actual author.”

You see, Mitch is less concerned with the value of ghost blogging than he is with values or, as he puts it, “ideals” (”I do think that there are some commonly held ideals within Social Media”) which he also refers to as the “pillars of what makes something ’social’.” These pillars being, “transparency, openness, honesty, human and real voices (not corporate mumbo jumbo) and a culture that embraces sharing between these real voices.”

In other words, Mitch is a moralist who even indulges in the classic rhetorical move of the moralist, the value-laden leading question: “Why is everyone who defends ghost blogging so afraid to state that ghost blogging’s first act is one of deceit and misdirection?”

The philosopher in me wishes merely to point out that expressions like “actual author,” “real voices,” “human,” “social” and so on are not unproblematic.

What, after all, is an author and how does an author, generally speaking, differ from an “actual” author? What makes a voice “real,” particularly when we are talking about written texts (blogs) where the notion of “voice” itself is metaphorical? What attributes belong to the category “human” and what happens when “humanness” is invoked as an ethical category? Since when is the “social” defined by “honesty, transparency, and openness” rather than by concepts like “convention” or “conflict”? Etc.

I’m not sure that Mitch Joel is interested in the history of philosophy, let alone the history of the “ideals” that he invokes. Indeed, I’m fairly certain that he would dismiss my argument—that, in essence, concepts like authorship, or authenticity for that matter, are over-determined, social constructs which in no way represent uncontested, universal values—as equivocation. I am, after all, a ghost blogger whose work goes undisclosed by my clients. Thus, in the eyes of Mitch Joel, Avinash Kaushik, and others, I’m an aider and abettor of unreconstructed frauds and deceivers.

In my “defense,” and in answer to Mitch’s inherently unanswerable question (shades of “How frequently do you beat your wife?”), I would say that, if I am afraid to state that my first act every morning is one of deceit and misdirection, it is because I fear saying something that I do not consider to be true. Rightly or wrongly, I actually believe that the people whose bloggings I facilitate are the “actual” authors of the posts that I produce. The ideas are theirs, the “voice” is theirs, the blog is theirs, etc.

That being said, on a “human” level I resent the jargon of authenticity which pervades social media. When someone says, in the imperative voice, “Don’t be a fake,” I bristle. Why? Because I find the division of human actions into “real” and “fake” itself dehumanizing. Where does the notion of “authenticity” come from anyway? It is a term of trade driven by the desire to differentiate the genuine from the counterfeit so that an item can be assigned a monetary value. “Authentically human” is just another way of saying “Genuine leather.”

When we demand that humans be “authentic,” or criticize them for being fake, it’s because we have reduced them to the status of commodities. In fact, I believe that the social media, rather than humanizing marketing, as Mitch Joel and others have long hoped, have in fact completed the total colonization of human thought and affect by market forces.

Given the absolute assimilation of our lives by the new media, down to the most trivial whims (”I just ate a donut covered in bacon!” “I hate Justin Bieber”), isn’t it possible that the only way to hang on to our humanity is through masks, personae, and “ghosts”?

Or, in the immortal words of Robert Plant, “When you fake it, baby, please, fake it right.”

Image Source: Nick Wheeler.

Ron Casalotti of Bloomberg Businessweek kicked things off talking about their Business Exchange social media platform: a people-filtered resource for business people. In order to encourage users to participate, he instituted a rating system for submissions, among other things. With over 40K registered users, BX serves as a folksonomy of topics that are of interest to Bloomberg Businessweek readers and gets used as a source of stories for print publication. It also helps direct content focus for the marketing department since they now know what readers actually care about.

Top Tip: Don’t get caught up in the numbers. 200 active participants are more meaningful than thousands of passive followers on Twitter, for example. What really counts is building engaged relationships.

Deirdre Walsh, self-proclaimed “geek matchmaker” and Community & Social Media Manager for National Instruments was up next. The cornerstone of National Instruments’ community strategy are their support forums which have over 140,000 participants and 50% of all questions posted are answered by community members. The community is used extensively by the organization for product feedback, R&D insight, etc. National Instruments also puts a big emphasis on recognizing and engaging with community “rock stars.” One interesting point of measurement for Deirdre are “actionable conversations.” She also measures community growth and number of posts per community member.

Top Tip: Don’t get overwhelmed by the technical options (Facebook vs. Twitter, etc.) but utilize something like the P.O.S.T. method to develop your plan. In other words, treat social media as any other marketing communication function.

Next up was Mike Travis of Equat!on Research who spoke about the process involved in producing their “2009 Marketing Industry Trends Report,” a research study “by marketers and for marketers” which relied on crowdsourcing to determine survey questions. The strategy was to use the survey methodology itself to engage a community where Equat!on wanted to be better known. These efforts resulted in greater exposure, site traffic, and a five-fold increase in leads generated.

Top Tip: Crowdsourcing is a good way to get in touch with a community and actually become part of it, as long as you have something of value to add to the conversation.

Kirsten Watson, Director of Corporate Marketing at Kinaxis, then spoke about her efforts to create a supply chain expert community. One key element of their strategy was to build a highly engaging, content-rich “home” for supply chain experts to learn, laugh (yes, there is comedy in supply chain management), share, and connect. Another key element was to leverage content to achieve SEO goals and beat out much larger competitors like SAP and Oracle. These SEO efforts pulled people primarily to the community and the Kinaxis blog, and only secondarily to the Kinaxis website. [Quotable quote: "You can always buy traffic."] Note: 20% of community members are customers and 80% are prospects.

Top Tip: Repurpose and reuse content whenever possible (”Create 10 things out of 1 thing”) while always thinking about SEO.

What followed was a Q&A session. Here are some insights and tactics that came out of that:

• Keep communities open, even to competitors.
• Post content to relevant LinkedIn groups (but don’t play where you’re not welcome).
• Link editorial content to keyword strategy.
• Involvement in social media sometimes means “listen and don’t say anything.”
• Use the many conversations happening around your brand as a driver of internal collaboration. (Deirdre called this part of her “Social Media Pangaea” vision.)
• If you have people in your organization interested in blogging, send them to “Blog College” like the folks at National Instruments do. Give people guidelines and frameworks and let them go.
• “Social media” is not a campaign or a program; it’s a tool.

Christina “CK” Kerley moderated this session extremely well keeping things focused and the whole thing highly information-rich.

The way I see it, there are three paths to social media success.

1. Invent a Popular Social Media Platform

Marshall McLuhan once said something like, “Media owners don’t care what’s on TV, as long as everyone is watching.” To put it another way, the people who own what everyone uses, are the big winners. Unfortunately, becoming an owner is easier said than done and it just gets harder over time.

Facebook, for example, may have displaced MySpace – as MySpace displaced Friendster – as the center of the social media universe, but it’s hard to imagine what will displace Facebook. It’s user base just keeps growing and it really has become part of everyday life for millions. Same goes for Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn,  and YouTube, among others.

One possibility, I guess, is creating a meta-tool that allows people to aggregate their disparate online personalities and communities, but that didn’t exactly work for FriendFeed (and plus Facebook is kind of headed in that direction already) though it is kind of working for Apple (if you know what I mean).

2. Become a Social Media Celebrity

Mass media like television and radio have always been platforms for celebrity and the social media are no different, to a degree. Certainly people you have never heard of, such as Fred, have become “famous” by launching programs on YouTube, but that’s because YouTube is basically an open, explorable space.

You can explore Twitter but, generally speaking you are only paying attention to the folks you’ve chosen to follow and only really get noticed by them what follow you. In any event, it’s a lot easier to be a famous person. such as Oprah, Ashton, or Conan, who chooses to use Twitter than it is to become “famous on Twitter” (not sure who counts in the latter category aside from maybe Brogan and Vaynerchuk).

Finally, the rules of engagement on Facebook make it so utterly closed that, at best, it may allow you to become “better known” to your friends and acquaintances. You will never, however, become “well known” via Facebook.

3. Use Social Media to Do Something

Aside from being the easiest way to achieve “social media success,” this is the only way that the words “success” and “social media” ever make sense together in a sentence, as far as I’m concerned. The social media are tools and tools are only meaningful in their application to this or that situation.

This is one reason that I don’t believe it makes sense to have a “social media plan” for your business or one person there who is “responsible for social media.” Social media will only help you achieve your objectives – that’s what “success” means, right? – if it is integrated into the plans and programs you’ve undertaken to achieve them.

So incorporate social media channels in your PR strategy or figure out how to leverage social media in support of a product launch or make social media an important component of customer service. That way leads to success and, specifically, success via social media.

Everything else is just pipe dreams and pyramid schemes.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/33142058@N06/ / CC BY 2.0

At the beginning of this video, captured by the ever ebullient Mr. Sonny Gill at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer back in October, I explain what I do as a “thought ronin” (and talk about what I was digging at the Mixer):

Apropos of MarketingProfs, I’m currently editing the official pre-game blog for their SocialTech 2010 conference to be held in San Jose on March 25.

This conference will focus on how B2B marketers in the hi-tech space (think: IBM, Intel, Cisco, SAP, etc.) are actually using social media to achieve a wide range of business goals. If that’s your bag, you should check it out (it’ll cost you around $500 but there is also a less expensive “virtual attendance option“).

I launched the incredibly successful Twitternet phenomenon, #onewordwednesday, in May 2009, at least by my reckoning.

The fact that on every subsequent Wednesday (and sometimes earlier) the hashtag has seen action, and not just due to my own fervid zealotry, I consider one of the few real achievements of my adult life.

Nevertheless, I fear that I have been lax to the point of wishi-washiness on what constitutes proper observance of #onewordwednesday. Among other things, my wavering spirit has led some to attempt a #onewordwednesday takeover, albeit it in the interest of your eternal salvation.

Today, however, I’m drawing a line in the sand and stating clearly and definitively, that true, devout observance of #onewordwednesday calls for limiting all Tweets that day to ONE WORD.

“But Matthew T. Grant, what about retweets or the sharing of links?”

Gosh darn it! OK. Fine. As Buffy Saint-Marie once sang, “I was an oak, now I’m a willow, now I can bend.”

• You may retweet other contributions to the #onewordwednesday experience until the 140 character limit has been achieved.
• You may also share links if and only if the Tweet consists of nothing more than one word and a shortened URL.

Look, I’m not asking that everyone across the Twitterverse adhere to this standard of observance. I simply want to provide those interested in truth, purity, and righteousness a guiding light and a clear sign that they may better find their way on the path to (#)one(wordwednesday)ness.

Peace.

I write this with very mixed feelings (and a slightly upset stomach).

I’m at the last session of the Mixer and the Mixologists are laying on us a bunch of idears that folks can take back to their real lives and implement. I’m trying to listen, but tears choke my ears. Still, I’m going to be strong and share with you what I’m hearing….

Note: I started writing this one way, but it was too scattered, fragmented, and incoherent. So I started again. If you’d like to read the first attempt, please scroll down.

Here’s by hyper-boiled down version of the boiled down takeaways offered up by the Mixologists:

- HUMANIZE! The social media are personal genres. Make your efforts personal. Let your people speak and participate. As Michael said of Dell’s Twitter stream, “To me, Richard Binhammer is the brand.”

- ORGANIZE! You need to structure your company internally in a way that will allow you to do what you want to do externally. Don’t create barriers in your organization that prevent you from maximizing the potential of emerging technologies and,  more importantly, emerging behaviors on the part of your audience or customers.

- TRY & TEST! Whatever you are doing, don’t assume that you know what is going to work and what won’t work. Try stuff and test, test, test.

- MEASURE! Along the same lines, look for measurable results in what you are doing, which generally means: have a concrete goal and be ready to say whether you achieved that goal or not.

- OPTIMIZE! Yes, content has to be killer and you have to be “offering something of value,” but you need to be as savvy and informed as possible about making sure that people can actually find what you want them to find where you want them to find it.

This is what I wrote at first:

I just heard Stephanie Miller say something about “using down-funnel data,” I’m sure she was quoting Bill Leake of Apogee, but I’m not entirely sure what that means. I must focus. FOCUS!

Jason Baer sez it has to be about passion first, and position second when it comes to recruiting people internally to produce content or represent you on social media. Jason’s main takeaways were summed up by Stephanie as, “We as marketers need to market our marketing.”

Michael Brito sez that his track, “Engaging with Customers,” rocked. People relate to people, not to logos or companies, so the main way to be engaging in your marketing activities is to lead with your humans.

He echoed what Jason said about getting the passionate people involved in social media marketing and community engagement, rather than “celebrities in the organization.”

Similar themes were sounded by Beth Harte when reporting on the Peer-to-peer sessions: Make your business blog/social media presence personal: hand over control of community to the members of the community; don’t hesitate to educate your organization and its leadership – they want you to do this.

SEO has become a recurring theme for me at this conference so I was very curious to check out Li Evans of Serengeti Communications’ presentation on search and social. I’m glad I did. Here’s what I learned. I hope you find it helpful.

First learning: Search is not JUST about text. Current Google search results, for “charleston dance,” for example, include images, video, etc. as well as static, text-based pages. “It’s not just your ten blue links.” This also means that Google is giving you access to content within the search results themselves.

I asked a follow-up question around this because, while Google will not only return text-based results, search is still driven by spiders which do better with text (meta tags, content, etc.) than with pictures. In other words, from a machine perspective, search is still text.

Li said, “Sort of. Spiders are very infantile. They won’t go past things that they don’t understand (Flash, Javascript pop-ups). They can’t see what’s in a picture or a video, yet, but they are getting there.”

Second learning: Search is not just taking place on search engines. People search on YouTube (beating out Yahoo!), craigslist, eBay, and so on.

Third learning: Google is using the Google Toolbar and Chrome in order to gather ever more data about your online habits and behaviors and this data increasingly influences search (while also providing good content fodder if you follow the trends and create content accordingly).

Fourth learning: SEO isn’t just for the few, it’s for everyone and it’s not magic. There are very specific, knowable things that you can do to optimize your content for search. “Content is not king, OPTIMIZED content is king.”

Fifth learning: Google knows you through your accounts and will show you results based on your behaviors, your location, etc. NO ONE can guarantee you a top 10 ranking because Google is personalizing results to fit YOU.

Sixth learning: THEREFORE, you need to understand your audience and optimize towards that. How do they search (which engines, what devices, etc.)? How do they consume media? What lingo (vernacular) do they use (i.e., do they say “commode,” “john,” or “toilet”)? How do they prefer their content served (video, audio, maps, etc.)? Are they national? Local? Global?

Seventh learning: It’s not about the technology, the engine, the platform, or any of that. It’s about being found. To get found, you need to optimize around keywords, the way people really search for you, and the way they are talking about the things that are relevant and valuable to them.

Eighth learning: “Other people make it easier to find you, not just search engines.” Make your content valuable, shareable, and actively engage with the online community that plays where you play.

About three months ago, I wanted to see if I could launch a trending hashtag and the hashtag I hit on was #onewordwednesday. My first tweet containing that hashtag read, “meme #onewordwednesday.”

I quickly discovered that I was not the first person to use this expression. That honor goes @markdudlik, who was about a month ahead of me. By the way, he’s a scientist. Of awesome.

The basic rule for #onewordwednesday is: Post at least one tweet containing a single word of your choosing along with the hashtag, #onewordwednesday. I guess I could have gotten more complicated by insisting that all your tweets for the duration of #onewordwednesday be one word in length, or that you should only tweet one word for the entire day, but I wanted to keep it simple, for good or ill.

So far, about 38 individuals have contributed to the #onewordwednesday effort with @cristinagordet, @motoole1, and @rsheffield deserving special recognition for their unflagging and enthusiastic support of this quixotic endeavor. I would also like to point out that #onewordwednesday would have been strangled in the cradle had @devinusmaximus not reached out and inspired me to keep hope alive in the early days of our movement. Devin, you are the wind beneath my wings.

The future is unwritten, as the Clash used to say, and I do not know whither #onewordwednesday is bound. I like that a kind of game is developing in which people retweet a #onewordwednesday word and add a related word. That sort of thing can only go so far given Twitter’s character limit, but it emerged spontaneously, which I find promising. Who knows what the day after tomorrow might bring?

The other idea I had was to choose a word, like “focus,” and see how many people we can get to tweet, “Focus #onewordwednesday.” In addition, we could retweet any random tweet containing the word “focus,” adding the hallowed hashtag as well. Are you game? Let’s do this.

Actually, the answer to that question is fairly simple: I don’t know.

I realize that answer might not be very helpful, but at least it’s honest.

Fact is, you can only figure out if you need those things, and what you’ll do with them once you got ‘em, after you’ve decided what it is you want to do.

In other words, I would prefer to answer that question with this question: What do you want to do or get other people to do?

Last week on Twitter, Lewis Green asked if anyone was interested in writing a guest post for his blog, bizsolutionsplus. I said I’d been playing around with the idea of content as a process, not a product, and he encouraged me to write something on that topic. What I came up with was, “Content Is Still King (It’s Just Not What You Think It Is),” which was inspired in part by Mack Collier’s provocative assertion that “content is king” is “total bullshit.”

My main point was that stand alone content (whether in the form of a blog post, a white paper, an eBook, or whatever), no matter how well written, had certainly been dethroned, but that it’s place on the throne had been taken by all the content created by members of an organization in the course of their numerous, ongoing, continually evolving online activities. (This point is not dissimilar from Mack’s that your activites off your blog are what make your content interesting, relevant, and attractive.)

Now it is certainly easier to manage a collection of discrete, set pieces than it is to manage an unpredictable range of actions undertaken by a constantly shifting and sometimes loosely defined group of people, and yet that is the challenge facing anyone interested in developing and executing a meaningful content-based marketing strategy today.

What makes the shift from content as product to content as process particularly challenging is that it forces marketers to involve themselves in business operations to an unprecedented degree because, at the end of the day, an organization’s people are rapidly becoming its most active and vital communications channel.

At the same time, these people – their attitudes, their personality, their style, their abilities, and their actions – serve as more than a channel; they constitute in themselves a company’s most meaningful and influential content.

My question on Lewis’ blog and here is: Are marketers ready to engage the rest of their organization as intensively as the rest of the organization is engaging current and prospective customers day to day and minute by minute?

Image Courtesy of miuenski.