We still have one major feature to implement though: a logo.

Staying true to our social/on-line nature I decided to let the logo be designed in the cloud (just like the logo of this blog three months earlier). In a period of just nine days no less than 331 logo designs, from many designers all over the world, were submitted on the CrowdSpring site, where we ran the contest. Compare that to the three different design proposals we would have received (from only one designer) when I had given the assignment to a regular design agency. And at the same price! (It’s a wonder such businesses still exist.)

Naturally, there’s a downside to everything. And in this case it was the problem of reviewing and responding to 331 logo designs. There were moments when even I thought that reviewing just three designs wasn’t such a bad idea after all…

Anyways, we’ve been able to narrow down our favorites to the following candidates:

And as you know, Jeroen and I fully believe in the merits of social networks. So feel free to tell us which one you like best, and decide with us what should be the face of our new product (and business unit).

More and more people are using social tools in every day life. Micro blogging, blogging, sharing pictures and videos – at home, at work, and in between. Private and business life is merging. Being a representative of an employer – even if you are your own – bears responsibility. Business relations are online, and connecting too.

The pitfall of tools like Twitter and Facebook is that a misstep is easily made – they can be used as emotional outlets. And with customers watching 24 hours a day, things are bound to go wrong one time. I have been discussing this topic more and more recently. I work with pleasure, and occasional personal frustration. I always keep in mind the following rules before posting anything out on the web.

For employees

Who is paying your bills? Even though your Blogger or FaceBook profile belongs to you -  you are representing the company you work for. Think for a second about the impact that publishing bits of information or pictures might have for the company. And it will also have impact on you – since you decided to accept your job.

Be respectful. Give a colleague or a manager the opportunity to solve the issue or problem before hitting that “Send Tweet” button. People make mistakes and everyone deserves a fair chance to solve them. Some things are better discussed in private, without anyone else watching (or listening).

Don’t like your job? If you do not like your current job, leave. Put effort and energy into finding new job opportunities (positive) instead of dissing your current employer (negative). Your online profile will be scanned by any potential new employer as well, and trash-talking on your colleagues or employer will not increase the chance of you getting that new job. Be careful with job-hunting out in the open though.

For the employer

Just like a real relationship. When work is not going according to their plans, people complain. And usually there is always something to complain about. This is a good thing – it shows authenticity and builds trust. When things are getting out of hand,  you are probably doing something wrong. Listen to what your employees are saying, both online and offline. Have improvement sessions and take appropriate action. Your employees will spread the word.

Let your employees send out your message. Looking for new staff or leads? Your employees are often the right place to start. Make use of their network of people – but pull, and do not push. Do the occasional fun stuff and let your employees talk about how great your company is. Do not expect them to act like a small marketing war machine. Remember that authenticity builds trust.

Create some kind of policy. Creating a policy is a delicate matter – policy equals control. And you do not want your employees to feel like you are controlling them. So some kind of policy requires mutual understanding. Sit down and ask for suggestions – how would they do it? What do they suggest?

Do you have some kind of policy at work? Is your employer giving you the freedom to be authentic? I would love to hear your thoughts about this.

I often tell people that corporate web sites are a thing of the last century. They are só 1999. In those years, when there was nothing else available but a number of crappy and expensive CMS tools, the most natural thing to do for businesses was to launch their own sites on the Internet. And the fight for visitors made some owners of search engines filthily rich.

But nowadays there are big social networks available, for free, with plenty of features and widgets. Social networks are huge applications that ordinary CMS-systems will never be able to compete with. Why create a photo album when uploading pictures to Flickr is much easier? Why build a corporate calendar when we have Google Calendar and Meetup? Why host your own slides and white papers when you can easily make them available with SlideShare and Ning? Why install your own FAQ system when there are plenty of good Wiki sites available?

And even more important: why not use the rich social features (with millions of existing users) that an ordinary CMS can never provide?

More and more content is moving away from corporate web sites to social networks. It won’t be long before the corporate site is nothing more than a shallow façade with a 1-page mash-up of content that is hosted on ten or twenty specialized platforms. And maybe even that single page can disappear in the end…

I firmly believe in this big migration of content to social platforms, and thus it was quite strange, and a bit silly actually, that I was trying to define the content pages for a brand new site for the business unit that I am leading. I had drawn a traditional site map, just like ten years ago! I’m almost embarrassed to say it had headings like “vision”, “products”, “projects”, “services”, “contact”, and stuff like that. Can you believe it? But then I realized that I was falling into the trap of not following my own advice.

Why was I trying to create the 10,000,000th corporate site with no visitors?

Why was I planning to publish content on a location where there are no people?

I’m glad I came to my senses before any harm was done. I revised my plan, and now my plan includes content to be published on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, SlideShare, Flickr, YouTube, and Delicious. After all, that’s where most of our customers are.

And yes, we might have 1-page mash-up of aggregated content, for the more conservative old-style “web surfers” out there. Possibly… When we have time.

For me social media is about people – about building relationships with others that bring value to me, and for whom I can bring value. I build relationships online, participate in different groups (as a spectator or participant), and share resources. Communities are built by people. We are all very passionate about it – we stand up when others treat us unfair, and applaud when we are grateful.

I love to contribute, to help out, to be inspiring to others – just like I love to be inspired by others. The kindness amongst those who join is surprising, almost unrealistic – taken into account our current economical situation.

Obviously it is a rush to get exposure, to be valued for your experience, input, or knowledge. Our 15-minutes of fame is now (Andy Warhol). But getting exposure – even though appreciated – is not what social media is about. It is about the quality of personal relationships and trust, not about the quantity. Participate is exciting.

The subtitle of this blog is “Adventures In Social Media and CRM”, and like any adventure I am learning along the way, becoming more experienced after every stumble, and stumble I will. I do not have answers to all questions, I look forward to discovering (and sharing) them.

Photography by lepiaf.geo

While investigating social media approaches by several social media agencies, I came across strategies that looked a lot like well-known sequences of development and improvement activities. One agency lists presentation, analysis, goals, strategy, realisation, and metrics as their 6-step approach to creating social media solutions. Another one lists presentation, quick scan, strategy, and realisation as separately identifiable activities. And I’m sure there are many other variants of similar sequences.

We can recognize comparable steps in software development methods. For example, there is planning, development, demo, and retrospective in Scrum; inception, elaboration, construction, transition in RUP/OpenUP; and speculate, collaborate, learn in ASD. I won’t bother you with the rest, as there are already too many software development methods to choose from.

But that’s not all! There are similar sequences in various process improvement frameworks. A famous one is plan, do, check, act in the Deming/Shewhart Cycle. But there’s also assess, analyze, metricate, improve in AIM; and define process, map process, define measurement, set targets, analyze process, improve process, manage process in CPI-7. And I found plenty of others as well.

Apparently, there are many ways of sequencing development and improvement activities. But whatever sequence you choose, I believe that any sequence should fulfill the following three crucial criteria:

1. There should be some form of measurement of progress: no metrics => no knowledge;
2. The sequence should be cyclic, starting from the beginning, over and over again;
3. The cycles should be small, because when you’re looking feedback, faster is better.

In an ambitious attempt to improve upon the improvement frameworks, I created my own version by mapping all activity sequences I could find onto one definitive cycle of improvement. This is the 7-Step Cycle for Social Media Management. Feel free to copy it, and adapt it to your liking:

1) Determine Problems

For example: I’m writing a book, and I’d like to increase exposure by attracting more Twitter followers, so that more people know about the book that I’m writing. It’s a (real) example of a problem for which we can attempt to find a solution.

2) Set Goals

I would like my audience on Twitter to be ten times as large as it is now, before my book is released. That’s a SMART goal. It is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

3) Define Metrics

On Twitter Grader my current rank is 9794. I could try and aim for a rank of 979. While on Twinfluence I have 2,867,000 2nd-order followers. I could try and get this number to climb to 28,670,000. And according to Twitterholic I’m ranked 34,580th in the world. I might aim and try to be the 3458th before my book is finished.

4) Identify Improvements

There many articles with useful tips on how to get more followers on Twitter. Identification of improvements means to seek out and find information, and select the improvements that can help you to achieve your goal (though you can only really know after you’ve tried).

5) Implement Improvements

This is the part where you do the real improvements. I updated my Twitter background, added my Twitter name to all my on-line profiles and presentations, added myself to the WeFollow directory, added a TweetMeme button to my blog posts, and revised my Twitter reading-and-writing-schedule. Hope it helps… (fingers crossed!)

6) Execute Processes (implicit)

And then the waiting starts… The length of the cycle depends on the problem you’re trying to solve. But as soon as you have some results, you should check them in Step 7 and then go back to the beginning, with Step 1.

7) Check Measurements

Every week I’m checking the metrics I selected. If something’s not working out as I had hoped (and yes, that’s usually the case), I go back to Step 1 to see what the problem is. And if things are going forward as planned, then there’s always some other problem waiting to be solved. And again, I go back to Step 1.

You can perform these steps for each of the projects you’re working on. It doesn’t matter if it’s about social media presence, software process improvement, or personal growth and development. If you value the stuff you’re working on, then you should value your improvement activities too.

Based on several historical facts, theoretical, economical, and sociological laws, Clay Shirky explains group and community behavior in understandable words and with well chosen practical samples. Difficult issues like (there are plenty of others) transaction costs, power law distribution, social capital, crowd sourcing, group coordination, collaborative production, collective action, and social awareness are discussed and well documented with real cases. Clay covers the rise of well-known platforms like Wikipedia, Linux, MeetUp, Flickr, and Twitter as well as less well-known business cases of group action. You will learn why people on such a large scale contribute to these platforms, freely – and why it is happening now.

If you are putting any effort in social media (listening, participating, or engaging) this book is a must-read. It will help to give a better understanding of group behavior and patterns. The information provided can help you to make better decisions and therefore increase the chance of success of your social media campaigns.

You also might find Clay Shirky’s TED Talk video inspiring or follow him on Twitter.

The interview is about social media books, and you can hear my contribution to this podcast from the 13th minute.

(If the BBC site doesn’t work, then try and download it from here.)

The world of customer relationship management is getting a big Web 2.0 makeover this year. Companies such as Helpstream, Lithium, and others are remaking the staid corporate CRM into one in which much more value is mutually exchanged with the marketplace.

18 Emerging Topics at the Intersection of Business and IT in 2009
Dion Hinchcliffe, ebizQ, August 19th, 2009

Companies can no longer control how customers interact and share information about their products and services. This fundamental shift of power to the customer has profound implications for sales, marketing, and customer service.

Social CRM: Shifting power and rapid burn
Michael Krigsman, ZDNet, August 19th, 2009

Data quality is even more important with online customer communities now making way for social CRM, which brings together the digital community and combines it with crowdsourcing and customer service.

Data quality important with emergence of social CRM
QAS Ltd., August 19th, 2009

45% of HR professionals use social networking sites to research job candidates, with an additional 11% planning to implement social media screening in the very near future.

45% of Employers Now Screen Social Media Profiles
Jennifer Van Grove, Mashable, August 19th, 2009

Social CRM will be a more predictable, reliable model for applying Web 2.0 to customer relationships using many of the strengths of the community model.

Using social software to reinvent the customer relationship
Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDNet, August 18th, 2009

According to the study, 54% of the Fortune 100 companies surveyed are active on Twitter. Another interesting stat is that 21 of the Fortune 100 companies use only Twitter or Facebook Pages or have a company blog. Of that 21%, 76% of those companies that only use one channel, use Twitter.

Fortune 100 companies embracing social media; especially Twitter
Mack Collier, August 18th, 2009

Companies that blog have far better marketing results. Specifically, the average company that blogs has:
* 55% more visitors
* 97% more inbound links
* 434% more indexed pages

Study Shows Small Businesses That Blog Get 55% More Website Visitors
Rick Burnes, HubSpot, August 17th, 2009

This is a list of the top Twitter tools to manage your social media engagement with your customers. While it isn’t a comprehensive list of every available tool, it does cover the market leaders in each category.

Corporate Twitter Toolbox: Twitter Tools for the Enterprise
Sudha Jamthe, Mashable, August 17th, 2009

1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia (Wikipedia) you would earn $156.23 per hour 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.

30+ Impressive Social Media Stats Visualized [Video]
Adam Ostrow, Mashable, August 14th, 2009

No matter what industry term our technology falls under, at the end of the day we want our users to remember us as giving them the ‘right’ up-to-date information at the ‘right’ time.

Getting the lingo down – Social CRM, CRM 2.0, Sales 2.0
InsideView, August 14th, 2009

It looks like the far more difficult part of the social CRM phenomenon would seem to be building the strategy around serving, marketing, selling and most importantly, engaging, customers.

Social-ized CRM – Voices of CRM
Barney Beal, IT Knowledge Exchange, August 13th, 2009

Some days ago my colleague Arno tweeted about the slowness of the Bing engine (through the programmer’s interface) when compared to Google’s API. And within two days he got an answer from Bing’s API dude at Microsoft.

These are two fine examples of companies listening to what people are saying about their brands.

Listening to your brand is one of the first steps you can make when embracing social media. Without knowing what people are saying, you won’t be able to take care of conversations, customer involvement, and engagement. (Of course, after a good deal of filtering.) Fortunately, brand monitoring is not very hard. There are plenty of free tools available to help you out. But unfortunately, the number of tools and options are overwhelming, and some tools are far better than others. Digging around all the options and results can take a bit of time.

So, we did a little research for you.

And we created this presentation:

How To Listen To Your Brand

How to Listen to Your Brand

Here are some of the highlights:

• We found that Yahoo! Pipes is the best engine for brand monitoring on the web, with Google Alerts a close second.
• Google News is the best one to monitor keyword on news sites, with Bing a close second.
• Both Google Blog Search and Bloglines are great in finding keywords in blog posts.
• Twitter Search and BackTweets are crucial in finding out if there are tweets about your brand.
• Social Mention is good at finding keywords in comments, with YackTrack a close second.

Check out our presentation for more details. It contains several long lists of monitoring tools for your reference.

I have created this list using six criteria:

number of Google hits (GH);
number of Amazon ratings (NA);
average Amazon rating (AA);
number of GoodReads ratings (NG);
average GoodReads rating (AG);
release date (RD).

Please refer to the bottom part of this article to find out how the calculations were performed. Believe me, creating this list cost me a huge amount of time. So I sincerely hope you will enjoy it!

Scope of this List
For this Top 100 list I have included only books that (partly) covered social media and social networks. Sometimes the scope of a book wasn’t entirely clear from its official description. In those cases I tried to rely on reader’s reviews and tags on Amazon. Only when these contained references to either social media or social networks, the books were allowed on this list.

(Note that I did not include e-books on this list. That’s because dead-tree versions look so much better in my giant book case.)

Finding the Books
In order to find all these potentially timeless classics, I started with the 24 books listed in the article Best Books on Social Media. I subsequently found many other books through the Customers-Who-Bought-This-Item-Also-Bought-cross-reference-thingy on Amazon. That’s how I finally ended up with a list of 130+ books.

(Note: in case of multiple editions of the same book, only the most recent edition is listed on the chart, though I did my best to combine ratings for all available editions.)

Doing the Calculations
When it was time to do the calculations, I checked the number of reader’s ratings on Amazon, and I ranked the books according to these results (= a measure of quantity). I also checked the average Amazon ratings, and I ranked the books according to these results (= a measure of quality). Consequently I did exactly the same with the ratings on GoodReads, checking both total number of ratings and averages.

I then checked the number of Google hits for each of the books, and I ranked them accordingly (= a measure of popularity). Last of all, I ranked the books according to their age since their first release date. (When Amazon and GoodReads reported different first release dates, I used the oldest one.) I decided to use this metric because I think newer books with X ratings should be awarded higher positions on my list than older books with the same X ratings. After all, having collected those same X ratings in a shorter time span is a better achievement.

Finally, I took the six rankings, waved a bit with my wizard’s wand, drank a lot of coffee, and re-calculated everything into a final ranking. This resulted in the list you now have before you.

(Note: I performed this little brain-damaging project in the second week of August, 2009. Current ratings might have changed since then.)

Disclaimers and Bla-de-bla
I might have missed a few great books. That’s too bad, but I had to stop browsing for more books before frying my cerebral cortex.

And I admit that the system I used has no scientific basis whatsoever. Nevertheless, I think the results are quite interesting, and I’m sure the list can be of great help if you want to broaden your knowledge of the field of social media, in all its exciting dimensions.

I suggest you start with number 1, and then slowly work you way down. It shouldn’t take you more than a couple of years…

Note: If you like this list, be sure to check out the other book lists I created earlier on my personal blog:

Top 100 Best Books for Managers, Leaders & Humans

Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever