In Populus Nos Fides

You're probably asking what the hell this title means. In case you failed Latin back in high school, it means "in people we trust." The reason I chose this title is that I've read a lot of posts/articles recently talking about the risks of location-based services (a topic that is near and dear to my heart). And while I feel that there are absolutely risks with letting people know your location on a regular basis 1) the rewards outweigh the risks AND 2) that people are inherently good. As my friend, Michelle Greer, would argue, it only takes one bad apple. But still...

This past Friday, I had a chance to reaffirm what I already believed when I participated in my friend, Jim Storer's, annual Island Pond Road Rally. Jim has been doing this all day race for 19 years now and the essence of the race is for 8-10 teams (usually 3-5 people per team) to get from a starting point in Massachusetts or southern New Hampshire up to Jim's family place in northern Vermont. The race takes about 12 hours and along the way, each team must collect items and pictures of places. The way Jim sets up the race, it requires A LOT of interaction with folks who you wouldn't ordinarily come into contact with. Some of these folks are store owners who are used to dealing with people/tourists on a regular basis. Many are not but rather are ordinary people.

Shannon, our faithful navigator

Scooch and his dopplerganger

Team Shuckri in a strangers pool

Liz Phillips posing at a barbershop with curlers in her hair

What's amazing about this race is how helpful and genuinely giving most of the people are that we encounter along the race. And when I tell you that there are certain items like convincing someone to shave off their beard, allowing your team swim in their swimming pool while they take a picture or hanging upside down in a tree with you, this takes a higher level of faith (or craziness) than just giving directions or posing for a picture.

Tying this all back to the world of social and location-based services... I've mostly found that my positive interactions with people in the real world are not mutually exclusive to the online connections that I've made over the last several years. What's different is that at least in the offline world, I can look someone in the eyes (or vice versa) and interpret their body language. In the online world, your taking a leap of faith. On the upside, you can find out a heck of a lot about a person via Google, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. You can also hit the "un-follow" or "un-friend" button if someone decides to abuse your newfound friendship.

I know this concept is nothing earth shattering... but it's how I feel. And while I may be alone in my beliefs, it's gotten me through nearly 42 years of my life. As a result, I've lived a good life and have been fortunate enough to meet some amazing people. How 'bout you?

Photos courtesy Shannon DiGregorio (one of my friends and fellow road rallyers)

Get Out the (Powered) Vote for SXSW 2011

It's hard to believe that it's THAT time already but it is THAT time already. What time is "THAT" time you ask? Time to start voting for your favorite South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) panels.

This year, I'm in the enviable position of having several Powered colleagues have panels that made it to the next round. The only downside of having so many great submissions make it through is trying to promote everyone's panels while NOT pissing everyone off that follows me/us. To that end, I'm trying to consolidate efforts by putting everyone's entrees in the same place.

Below you will find the following information for each of the panels:

• The title of the proposed panel
• The first sentence of the panel abstract
• The suggested speakers
• A link to the session (SO YOU CAN VOTE FOR IT)

Just remember, you need to sign up to vote. It takes less than a minute and doesn't cost you anything (and the folks at SXSW are very respectful of not spamming people to death).

1. Marrying for Money: The ROI of Relationships
   You CAN measure the ROI of relationships - personally, and professionally, and this seminar will show you how. No spreadsheets needed for this lecture, and only minimal algebra...
   Jen van der Meer -  VP Analytics, Powered
   
   
2. Flip the Funnel: Retention is the New Acquisition
   What if we got it all wrong? What if we've been going about marketing strategy completely the wrong way?
   Joe Jaffe - Chief Interrupter, Powered
   
   
3. VideoBlogging: Go from Amateur to Outstanding
   You have a video camera and a YouTube Channel – now what? This panel will be a “Master Class” in online video and teach the next steps in building momentum in the online video space...
   Joe Jaffe - Chief Interrupter, Powered
   
4. Is the Marketing Microsite Dead?
   Thanks to advances in technology and the rapid adoption of social media platforms by consumers globally,  marketers,  brand managers and their agencies are all discussing the pros and cons of driving consumers to marketing "microsites" vs. social media destinations like Facebook,  MySpace and even Twitter where they're already spending time...
   Adam Keats, Weber Shandwick, Joe Jaffe, Powered, Bonin Bough, Pepsi.
   
   
5. Everyone’s Wrong about Influence. Except your Customers
   What is influence? For a decade, Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point has served as a touchstone for those who believe that influence resides in the hands of a select few. Not so, says a new generation of marketers. They believe that thanks to the democratizing power of the Internet, anyone can be an Influential...
   Valeria Maltoni - Director Strategy, Powered
   
   
6. Your Content Stinks! Drive results with Content Marketing
    Are you creating content that drives results? Marketers are jumping on the content marketing bandwagon in droves, creating mountains of boring, useless, copycat content that has no impact on their business...
   David Meerman Scott, author, Jay Baer, Convince and Convert, Joe Pulizzi, Junta42, Valeria Maltoni - Director Strategy, Powered
   
   
7. Get Big Results by Thinking and Acting Small
   Each day the world sees more than 1 million new blog posts, tens-of-millions of tweets, hundreds-of-millions of new pieces of Facebook content, and more than 1 billion YouTube videos...
   Greg Verdino - VP Strategy, Powered
   
   
8. Cage Match: Social vs Video
   Social media and online video battle for mindshare among marketers. Which one totally rules? We’ll lock Craig Wax, CEO of Invodo and Natanya Anderson, VP of Content Strategy and Delivery at Powered, in a cage (metaphorically – or maybe literally) to duke it out. Tim Walker will enforce the rules...
   Natanya Anderson, Powered, Tim Walker, Breaking Point Systems, Craig Wax, Invodo
   
9. Using Online Video to Build Your Company's Audience
   With over 24 hours of video being uploaded every minute on YouTube and over 56 hours of video being uploaded per minute to lifestreaming sites such as UStream and Justin.tv, companies are starting to use videoblogs as a way of directly reaching out to new and existing customers...
   Melissa Pierce - VeriSign (Powered client)
   
   
10. The Steroid Culture of Social Media: You Use?
    Ever think about taking shortcuts to boost your numbers? You know, the numb that show the success of all those interactive social media marketing programs. The numbers that decide your end of year bonus...
    Tim Walker (Breaking Point Systems), Laura Beck (Too Short Productions), Kyle Flaherty (Breaking Point Systems) and Aaron Strout (that's me!)
    
    
11. The ROI of Customer-centricity
    While some of us are single-mindedly focused on social media as a phenomenon,  we often lose sight of the source of its importance...namely,  its ability to enable companies to be more customer-centric...
    Frank Eliason (Citi), Jess Berlin (Cirque du Soleil), Reem Abeidoh (GroupM Search) and Aaron Strout
    
    
12. Generation C: Changing the Future of Business... Forever!
    Forget about Gen X and Gen Y,  it's all about Gen C -- the Content Generation. Business is changing and content is becoming king...
    Edward Boches (Mullen), Sydney Owen (Weber Shandwick), Sherry Lowry (Lowry Group) and Aaron Strout
    
    
13. Road Rules for Mentorship: What's Appropriate (and What's Not)In a world where the saying "it's all about who you know" is more and more relevant across multiple platforms,  mentoring is more important than ever...
    Sydney Owen and Aaron Strout

What's in it for you you ask? Include the name of your panel and a link and I promise that I'll go over and throw you a vote as a little thank you for your participation. And if you don't have a panel, just consider that I owe you one should you choose to vote for any/all of the panels above.

Quick’n'Dirty 55 – ‘What’s the ROI of this Tweet?’

In the spirit of centralizing the recaps from our weekly Quick'n'Dirty podcast, Jennifer, Rich, Ken and I have launched TheQuicknDirty blog. To that end, this week's recap is over on that site. However, for the regular readers of our blogs, we will keep lite recaps coming.

• Social app of the week: SCVNGR - "a game about doing challenges at places"
• Guest of the week: Forrester sr. analyst, Augie Ray - focused on whether or not our addiction to Facebook was good or bad, the death of Google Wave and the ROI of social media.
• Twitterer of the week: Mike Schneider - VP at Allen Gerritsen. Humble, smart, LBS genius.
• Point / counterpoint: Can Google do "social?" Special guest co-host, Kyle Flaherty and I took off the gloves on this one.

Listen to the recording of this week's episode. Or download it on iTunes (go to iTunes and Search for Quick'n'Dirty). And if you want the full recap, head over to our new TheQuicknDirty.com site.

Review: Clay Shirky's New Book, Cognitive Surplus

Chances are that if you are reading this blog, you already know who Clay Shirky is. If not, it's probably a good idea that you do because Shirky is one of the leading voices in the digital space writing, consulting and teaching about the social and economic effects of internet technologies. In addition to being an esteemed professor teaching at NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, he's also the author of the renowned book, Here Comes Everyone, among others.

Two years after publishing Here Comes Everyone, Shirky builds on his groundbreaking thesis in a new book aptly titled Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. While the focus of his last book was the role that online tools played in the explosion of social media adoption (Facebook just announced that it hit 500 million members), Cognitive Surplus spends a majority of its focus the role that culture and psychology play in driving this new phenomena.

The book starts off with a provocative opening chapter titled, Gin, Television and Cognitive Surplus -- inspired by a similarly named speech and Shirky blogpost back in 2008.* In this initial chapter, we rewind back to London's Gin Craze of 1720 where Shirky describes a city in the grips of a massive spike in gin consumption. Essentially, gin was cheap, easy to drink and most importanly, helped country folk who were working hard to assimilate into city living, "take the edge off." What I like about Shirky's gin example (along with many others in the book) is that he not only explains why the government's proposed solution (making gin illegal) had little impact on the level of gin consumption but rather that it was the assimilation of rural folks into the urban population over time that ultimately reduced the reliance on gin.

Throughout the book, Shirky uses other fascinating examples of "social" at work pointing cases like Howard Stern fans helping elect Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf as People.com's 1998 Most Beautiful Person and Georgia Merton and Penny Cross's "couchsurfing" experience across Europe. What's unique about Shirky's style is that he gets at impetus of why people are doing these things, in many cases providing well-documented research by folks like research psychologist Edward Deci's "Soma" experiment or professors, Güth, Schmittberger and Schwarze's Ultimatum Game to explain what motivates people.

At the end of the day, the reason I agreed to read and review this book is because I am an avid believer in the fact that while social media is not about tools or technologies. Instead it's roots are grounded in a fundamental set of human behaviors that have existed for centuries... if not millennia, and these behaviors are now being shaped and changed by the availability of extra time -- a cognitive surplus have you -- and powered by new social technologies like blogs, wikis, Twitter and Facebook. Shirky drives hard on this concept in Cognitive Surplus and spends his time explaining the psychological and cultural drivers behind the phenomena. To me, it's this approach that has a much better chance of resonating with senior management and thus might help them better understand why they should be embracing rather than eschewing social media.

In summary, if I were to rate this book I would give it a solid A. It's a quick read (just over 200 pages) and it's chock full of new and exciting examples that help provide a better understanding of the "why" behind social media. It's also a book that should appeal to both social media veterans along with marketing folks that are new to the space. If you want to buy the book (I don't get anything if you do), it's readily available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

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While this review barely scratches the surface what you'll learn in the book, this 13 minute TED video from earlier this summer should help whet your appetite.




What I neglected to mention up front is that thanks to the efforts and coordination by the fine folks at TLC Book Tours, this post is one in a series of reviews by a dozen prominent marketing bloggers. To read some of the other takes on Shirky's new book, Cognitive Surplus, take your pick from the list of smarties below...

• June 22nd: Being Peter Kim
• June 24th: Graywolf’s SEO Blog
• June 29th: Convince and Convert
• July 8th: Social Media Explorer
• July 14th: Debbie Weil
• July 15th: Beth’s Blog
• July 19th: A Whole Lotta Nothing
• July 22nd: Six Pixels of Separation
• July 26th: Community Guy
• July 28th: Citizen Marketer 2.1 (that's me!)
• July 29th: Nine By Blue
• August 3rd: Socialbrite
• tbd: Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang

*I learned about the origins of the name of the first chapter from my friend, Jake McKee, 

What Do Facebook, The Social Network, Guy Fieri and Scott Monty Have in Common?

The title of this post is hands down the longest title in the history of this blog (I think). But I couldn't think of a better way to respond to my friend over at Ford Motor Company, Scott Monty's, blog post today. If you haven't seen it, he riffs off the new movie, The Social Network which parodies Facebook and their march toward 500 million members.

As part of the fun, Scott decided that he would pick a few of us out of the social media marketing crowd (some more prominent than others, ahem, Seth Godin) that could possibly appear in the movie. And if we did, who would play us in the movie? I got a kick out of my dopplerganger and Food Network star, Guy Fieri, who ironically, I met last summer in New York City. Some folks including my darling wife thought better comparisons for me might be Ben Affleck, Billy Ray Cyrus or even Bruce Springsteen (Stephanie Agresta insists I am his long lost brother).

But that's why I'm writing this post... instead, my goal is to continue with the meme that Scott started. In his post, he asks...

If they were holding open casting calls for extras and you were going to be featured, what famous person, dead or alive, would play you in the movie? Leave a comment below or reply with a post on your own blog with a link back to this post.

So I'm adding a few stars of my own. What do you think?

David Armano, sr. vice president, Edelman Digital / John Leguizamo [updated 7/20]












Maria Ogneva, social media director, Attensity360 / Scarlett Johansen












Brett Petersel, business development and events lead, Mashable / Christian Bale

Shannon DiGregorio, social media marketing, The CR / Angelina Jolie













Adam Cohen, partner at digital agency, Rosetta / Rob Thomas












And last but not least...

Kyle Flaherty, director of marketing, BreakingPoint Systems / Jack Black

[updated 7/20] And apparently, I look much more like Josh Beckett in this pic than any of my other dopplergangers above... (thank you Kyle)