Twitter has announced 3 things in 2010 that are horribly under-discussed, under-valued, and under-experimented on from a brand marketing perspective. As a brand strategist, I’ve been spending a tremendous amount of time thinking about the effect of social technology on traditional web marketing strategies. Specifically, the opportunities opened by Twitter’s @anywhere platform and Facebook’s Open Graph are extremely interesting.

In the past few weeks, I’ve spent some time thinking about website and content strategy for one of our clients, and have been doing some research on this blog and other sites. As a component of this, I’ve added Facebook Like Buttons and @anywhere hovercards to this blog. Now it’s easier for you to see the social context and metadata of what I’m writing about.  :)

I’ll write more about this (both publicly and privately) in the future, but here’s some tips on things to check out from Twitter, these implications of these 3 new products on the Brand Marketing ecosystem are large — folks in Retail and CPG should pay extra attention.

• @anywhere – pull in twitter account context on a traditional website
• Promoted Tweets – advertised next to contextually related search queries on Twitter Search
• @earlybird – scarcity deals for consumers (in the same vein as Groupon)

I wrote about @earlybird’s launch on our Company blog, so go learn more about it here: http://blog.involver.com/2010/07/the-earlybird-gets-the-worm/

I have a serious problem with how I find, attend to, curate, add to, and finally, publish information. Here’s my basic flow today:

• I use Facebook, Twitter, RSS, email and web-browsing to find interesting items.
• Then I use Google Reader Shared Items, Twitter Starred Items, Facebook Likes, Instapaper, Delicious, and Tumblr Likes to store the things that get my attention.
• Finally I publish a subset of those to 2 Tumblr Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and this blog to capture ideas and share what I find interesting
• I’d like to review everything from a certain time period and collect the best ones for sending in an email (and I’d love a tool to help judge which in that mountain of sources got the most reaction from the world).

This is broken I need help in fixing this, and it could be helped by a very simple workflow tool.

I’d also like whatever tools I use to collect items that get my attention to add a data layer that I can use to make interesting connections later (example: tags in delicious).  Taxonomies and codification is good because it helps me understand the information better, however, I need to understand how I’m going to reference that taxonomy later if I’m expected to keep it up manually.

How many people have this problem? Is there a niche market product for this serving bloggers/journalists/intellectuals here?  What would a well-built “publishing workflow management for teams of 1″ look like?

Anyone wanna ruminate on this one with me?  I have several ideas.

I’m fascinated by people and companies who benefit from good content creation to support non-content business objectives:

• Fred Wilson, Chris Dixon, and Mark Suster have materially changed the trajectory of their career by embracing blogging.
• Venturehacks and Tim Ferriss created great evergreen content and collected niche audiences of the impressive people.
• Mint.com leveraged blog content + SEO to drive user adoption (sold to Intuit, 170 million).
• Ramit Sethi and others do an incredible job of writing and sending email (and getting people to signup for emails).

All the blogs above are entities with clear revenue-generating goals, which means they must nail both content and distribution strategies.  My blog doesn’t have such a purpose now, so I don’t have to think as hard about distribution.  I get benefit from blogging (see why I blog), but the primary goal is self-improvement and self-training. Basically I find that sharing my ideas in public makes it easier to:

1. Define my ideas more concretely
2. Reference my ideas in a scalable manner
3. Remember ideas later

The person who accomplishes this best, to my knowledge, is Ben Casnocha. He always shares interesting notes, on diverse topics, in manageable chunks — and he’s a more interesting person for it. I bet if you asked Ben, the discipline of posting frequent, keeps him sharp when he’s consuming content.  It certainly helps me be an active listener if I think I’ll have to recap or explain something.

In the interest of sharing more ideas, faster, I’m going to steal a post format from Ben.  Basically, I’m going to aim for shorter posts that describe more condensed amounts of thinking.  I will then close out that post and if there are any fascinating little idea treats that are worth sharing, I’ll attach them after 3 hash-tags at the bottom of the post. Observe…

###  Treats ###

*  I respect Caterina Fake (co-founder of Flickr and Hunch) a lot. Her blog is an infrequently updated must read. I recently tweeted that I thought Hunch was the most important longterm information base.  I discovered yesterday that Caterina Fake retweeted it.  Around the same time I tweeted a product idea for Quora. Charlie Cheever responded.  This is a one-time interaction with someone who might be fascinating to have a coffee with at some point, and it happens 1-3 times a month. I’m curious how to turn these interactions into something where I can open the door to further interaction and allow both them and I to judge whether there might be mutual value in connecting any further.  I have some theories I’ll be testing (offering to expand on initial idea in a 5-10min phone call, ask for email to follow-up with concise expansion of idea, ask for reaction to another idea I post on twitter or on my blog), but I’m open to suggestions.

* I’m interested in content marketing that allows for reader response, because I think it’s the best (read: fastest, cheapest, most effective) way of establishing credibility/thought-leadership in a field.  It’s unique in that it creates a relationship with the consumer of information and allows them to feel connected with you and the topic. That relationship is the key thing missing from most other markers of credibility (tv/print interviews, book writing, etc).

* I’m surprised blog tools don’t exist that integrate “activity elsewhere” into an appended item to your blog post. Would be fairly simple to aggregate a friend-feed style feed at the bottom of a post, time date it to include only the info since your last post, and create both a contextual record attached to the post and a database record allowing you to own (or at least recreate) all the data you’re publishing/sharing on social services.

Good social media marketing is reliant on frequent, short, and shareable/shareworthy content posting. This is because content is how you get people to move through the brand engagement funnel.

When I was speaking at the AMA a few weeks ago, my co-presentor and I prepared the following social marketing funnel:

Here’s the phase definitions:

1. Unknown — the person is unfamiliar with your brand on social networks
2. Attention — you do something that catches the attention of the person
3. Line of Engagement — if your attention gathering event (or events) got a good reception, your audience will subscribe for more.
4. Relationship — this is where users are encouraged to begin to moving through the “brand engagement funnel” by taking increasingly more brand friendly actions.
5. Line of Trust — Once a user has learned through experience to trust you, then they will be more likely to convert into paying customers and/or serve as a brand ambassador.
6. Advocacy — User will create value for you through buying something ($$$) or telling their friends (NPS).

Getting someone’s attention might require something more stunty then content, but once someone has passed the line of engagement, and is starting to move through the engagement funnel, the best way to convert that person is simple: keep good quality messaging coming. Those messages should be short (<255 characters), contain engaging content, and be something that your users either a) viscerally enjoy (game) or b) will get credit from their friends for finding (utility).

Email me for more info or with your thoughts on the issue.  willis.tyler@gmail.com

###  Unrelated:
* I’m struggling with a “Personal CRM” problem — remembering to stay in touch with people in my network during a fast-growth phase of a company is very difficult. Do you have any recommendations for a system or piece of software to solve this issue?

* The act of codifying information as I discover it helps me think more concretely about it’s value to myself and to others. I’d love a contact system and a bookmarking system that used game mechanics and public comparison to force me to codify links and people for proper future finding. Right now I codify many interesting web pages at http://www.delicious.com/tylerwillis

By the way:
I’ve refreshed the design here. It’s subtle, but I cleaned up the sidebars, removed some legacy javascript code that was slowing down the site, and added some recent speaking engagements to the site. Hope you enjoy it!

I’m a big fan of Obama, and have publicly supported him on this blog several times. I think, by in large, he’s done a great job of managing the presidency and engaging in traditional politics — which is, in my opinion, his biggest (and most annoying) failure.

Obama stopped mobilizing his supporters when he took office. His email database, SMS database, and social lists have been relegated to un-targeted and 2nd-rate messages. Used effectively, those tools could have been extremely powerful tools in Obama’s push for agenda items like healthcare.  It would have galvanized and involved a broad audience of people, which would have made the public view of the debate more of a citizen v. citizen issue.

This would have been messier. It might have even cost us healthcare reform. But if Obama pushed his main agenda points by proxy through millions of supporters who signed up to be involved (email/SMS/social), it would have ushered in an age of consistent engagement by forcing the other side to engage their base similarly.

Obama could have created a legacy of being the man who brought the public back into the fold, who engaged the common man more than once a term. That’s one of the many reasons I voted for him — because he represented that promise.  Instead, you hear that “Social Media in the Age of Obama” is all about how this marketing channel is changing campaigning.  Trust me, that wasn’t the part of the process that needed better engagement tools.

I read an interesting article on USA Today’s website: “Some ditch social networks to reclaim time, privacy”

The reporting is on the trend of more and more people quitting social networks.  What spoke to me most is how much of a minority opinion this was. Here’s a quote:

Lucca, Italy-based Seppukoo helped 20,000 people erase themselves from Facebook after the site launched last fall. Two-month-old Web 2.0 Suicide Machine — where a noose dangles near a ticker tracking the digital mayhem (“181,898 friends have been unfriended, 329,908 tweets removed”) — has been used by 2,600 people. Thousands more are waiting to be accommodated by the site’s small server, says Walter Langelaar, 32, one of three programmers who created the “art project” for Moddr, a media lab in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

20,000 people?

2,600 people?

Facebook has 400 Million active users. Twitter is in the mid 8-digits. Myspace is in the hundreds of millions.

With more users, you’ll have more attrition — I don’t think the “trend” being reported here is much to think about. Facebook has maintained incredible user-activation (50% of it’s users log-in daily). The examples in the article are clearly  from a minority.

My friend Ben Casnocha posted yesterday about privacy, RIP Privacy and Identiy Synthesis on the Web.  It’s a good read, and I would wager he would agree with my statements above, especially given his statement that: “many users do not understand how their personal information is tracked and displayed. But I do not think the majority mainstream users of any age care and I think no young people care. Young people will soon replace old people.”

Ben and I may be buying slinkys on this one, but the privacy argument is becoming moot.  Here’s my outlook:

1. There are still large risks associated with giving up privacy, but far fewer than decades past.
2. Our culture is clearly headed to sharing more, not less, information.

Bottom Line:  Privacy is dying. We are wasting our time trying to save it. Instead, let’s make the world safer for those who are living out in the open — because pretty soon, the majority of us will be.

It sounds radical, and full of the brashness of youth, but… I’m pretty sure it’s correct. I think that message needs to be spread wide and far. And I don’t just mean removing the risk to US Citizens like those profiled in USA Today above, I mean protesters in Iran. As Jonathan Zittrain noticed in a talk I attended last year, Iran could pretty easily/cheeply use Amazon Mechanical Turk to identify and persecute dissidents (starts at 32:45).  The safety of privacy will increasingly be an illusion that can be destroyed almost at-will by those with real power.

You want that in twitter friendly length?  No problem. Put this in your pipe and tweet it:

“Focus on making the world safer for living without privacy — soon, you won’t have any left.” /via @tylerwillis  http://bit.ly/bOdSSN

I’ve been thinking more about systems for success recently.

Adopting a framework is generally the best path to success.  In building a successful startup, you can holy-war over what the framework should be (e.g. Viability, Feasibility, or Desirability), but at the end of the day any framework is better than no framework. Building a successful life is no different.

This thought is something I’ve discovered while I’ve been exploring a framework for personal success the past few months (standards project), and I’ve executed some experiments in quantifying my life:

1. In Iceland I tracked a ton of personal stats about our trip, all food/drink we consumed, how many steps we walked, etc.
2. I tried Facet of Life to track data through email.
3. I added health goals to my standards project, to keep track of promised outcomes.
4. I used dailyburn/iPhone to track sleep, caloric consumption, stress, weight, exercise and energy levels on a daily or more frequent basis.

I like these experiments, I also really like tracking things — it appeals to my inner data-geek[1]. I’m competitive, so I feel a need to improve what I measure; I now unconsciously optimize for: Diet, Energy, Sleep, Exercise. Yep, pretty good list.

Experiment #3 above taught me a bit about how to build a framework that utilizes my own nature to increase the likelihood of good outcomes.

• I’m competitive, so I feel a need to improve what I measure.
• I’m also “lazy” — meaning I like to conserve energy.

I realized that my tracking can be difficult when I don’t have control of food preparation. Standardizing my intake around a core group of meals would greatly help me spend less time concentrated on tracking. So I just choose 6 meals and ordered enough food to make them for 2 weeks from safeway.com — this wasn’t a difficult decision, it was an efficient one. It also improved my health. My framework made it easy to make a limiting choice that was positive on my health.

Lesson learned for my standards project: I will focus more on frameworks that utilize a desire to be awesome + a desire to conserve attention to encourage efficient/scalable improvement.

[1] It also offends my sense of uniqueness, none of us like to feel like we’re robots, and I feel a certain elegance to living life unpredictably. But, at least for me, growing up is about accepting that choosing to put yourself in a routine isn’t the same as having a routine thrust upon you.  Embracing chaos means remaining ever-vigilant, that’s hard. Choose routines that conserve energy, and use that energy for chosen moments of chaos embracing.

This is a great program for social media introduction moderated by Sarah Lacy. Sarah does a fantastic job.

I moderated a panel on this two weeks ago and I WISH it was this good. I give myself a B, this gets an A. If it had less emphasis on search, it would be an A+.  Anyone who was at my panel and now reads my blog, consider this a good followup!

Here’s the description (which I’ve edited):
Social media and online marketing tools are fast becoming the most efficient tools to market and communicate with constituents/customers/members. But it’s not as easy as it seems. Learn the most common mistakes and prime opportunities in the social media world. How can your company use networks like Facebook, Google and Twitter? Come hear the leaders in this contemporary marketplace reveal the secrets of small-business success.

It’s worth the hour, go listen.

disclosure: it features a friend who really rocks that panel. You’ll figure that out in the first 5 minutes, after 30 minutes you’ll really be glad he’s there. That friend is Jeremy Toeman, and I didn’t know he could speak that well. Fantastic!

The past three days I’ve gotten in two political arguments with folks who I perceive as creating rifts in the political process and slowing things down. The first was with Karl Rove and a Karl Rove supporter. The second was with an old classmate from film school who was protesting our treatment of George Bush and Barack Obama.

His exact words are as follows:

“When terrorists killed thousands and we fought back, you said “murderer.” When the idiot took over the banks and auto companies, wants to eliminate term limits, takes Palistine’s side, kissed our enemies’ feet, and wants to “just talk” to our long time nemesis, you still call him hero. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH OUR FREAKING COUNTRY?!?!?!“

I am really fed up with our inability to broach issues. What follows is my first attempt at a piece of writing on this issue. It was written quickly and is a quick edit of something I wrote re-actively as a response in an email, and because of this it seems rough and incomplete. I’d love your feedback and thoughts on this issue to help clarify this important issue.

Before I get too deeply into this, I want to be clear: no party gets what I’m about to say right. I’m engaging you because I hope to sway your opinion one-on-one, not because I’m claiming liberals or conservatives are any better at the course of action I’m suggesting. Our political system is very broken, and people on both sides of the aisle are responsible. I’m hoping that some of us can adopt civility and use our example to influence others, and eventually, to influence the system.

The claims that I’ve seen made from political pundits and journalists grate on me daily. Few if any of their points is intended to be a critique of a policy decision that describes why the decision was wrong, they are all one liners that offer no real analysis of any action, but serve to sound very bad and make people fearful. Here’s how a message could be packaged in a way that creates opportunity for discussion:

“Obama is pushing the agenda of meeting with Iran without preconditions. Opening lines of communication like this legitimizes a brutal regime that hates us, as the only superpower in the world our vote of legitimacy is an important one and we should be more careful about how we use it — offering to meet Iran without trying to use the value of that meeting to force them to make changes is a mistake.”

I would probably rebut that, as I believe openness offers far more power in the decentralized world that has evolved over the past two decades, but at least I can respect the viewpoint put forth — and discuss it rationally. If a pundit were to defend their viewpoint, whatever it is, with that level of detail I can rationally evaluate it and decide if it offers anything.

This is hard to do, because it makes us vulnerable. Complex, well thought out ideas that resound with many people on different levels can be retorted with pithy one-liners that inspire a frothy response from a core group. In those situations it often feels like the complex thought loses — but in reality that thought has contributed to a better conversation, better information for decision making and a move towards slowly bridging gaps and potentially widening it’s proponent’s appeal.

Complex, well-defined plans should not be the types of propositions our system punishes, and if more of us on both sides start to value discussion over rallying behind sound bites, we can marginalize those who cling to the us vs. them mentality. This can’t come from one party, it’s got to be a widespread effort.

What most pundits discuss serves one purpose: To anger people who align opposite them and rally people who align with them. Most of the folks that defend these actions and follow their lead, don’t do this purposefully, but are reacting to feeling marginalized politically. It’s an understandable emotion to be annoyed, fearful, and angry when people in power share very different goals or beliefs than you. Lashing out in that situation is common and comforting. It isn’t effective though, as it only increases the rift between the groups. Emotions have no place in politics, it is a complex world that is built upon compromises, and compromises require rational thinking.

I have faith that many of us are equipped mentally, spiritually, and physically to recognize that our initial reaction isn’t always constructive and because I believe us to be capable of that, I hope that we’ll engage in more meaningful ways.
If dividing citizens and encouraging them to fight with and ignore each other is your goal — we must marginalize you.

What do you think?

I pay attention to what smart people pay attention to.

I moderated a panel on social media yesterday for IPN, and got really deep into using facebook and twitter (especially twitter) to monetize, serve customers, learn market data, generate sales and get referrals.  We missed however one of the core uses of social media — understanding more about people’s habits, in particular about their attention profiles.

I get real-time and relevant data from following the folks that I see as leading thinkers in their field, and this is primarily how I learn about trends in my industry, or in tangential industries, that I can capitalize. By utilizing tools like delicious and twitter, I can see what smart people pay attention to.  By lowering the bar (and the risk) for them to publish information, they are more willing to share — and that’s something you can benefit from.

If you turn on the fire-hose and consume the active sharing of information from 10-20 sources, you’ll see your rate of learning jump up. If you were one of the people who weren’t on twitter at the talk, let me ask you to do the following things to test this theory.

1. Signup for an account at twitter and get an RSS reader (I suggest google reader)
2. Identify a topic you’d benefit from learning more about, like, marketing using social media.
3. Search for 3-5 experts in this field who use twitter, and follow them (for social media marketing, let’s say @jacobm @jeffwidman and @garyvee). Read every tweet. My tip is to get it sent to your phone.
4. Note if any of them have blogs, if so, subscribe to them in google reader (Jacob, Jeff, and Garyvee all do).  Also look for the more traditional leaders in this space who aren’t really using twitter yet (like Seth Godin) and subscribe to them as well.   note: do not use this opportunity to subscribe to topic-specific blogs or twitter accounts, as these can have overwhelming volume and generally just parrot back what the leaders have already known for hours/days/months. If it’s really important, one of the people you’re following will talk about it.
5. Now, identify if any of them are using Delicious to share bookmarks. If so, subscribe to an RSS feed of their posts in google reader.  Jacob does. So does Jeff.
6. Read EVERYTHING.

It shouldn’t be too much. It’s rare that individuals post more than 1-2 blog posts a day, 1-10 tweets a day, or 5-10 bookmarks a day.  If it’s impossible for you to follow along you can cut people out and remove the noisy folks.

For the advanced class, rinse and repeat the above with twitter, youtube, vimeo, tumblr, etc. Look for where people on the forefront are sharing what their attention is on and make it your priority to pay attention to that as well.

Do this for a week, and I think why you’ll see it’s one of the most powerful tools to quickly gauge what an industry is working on at that moment, and what tips can you pickup from the thinking of experts.