Can Social Media Tools Catch A Killer?

On Saturday afternoon of September 27th, a 14 year old Canadian girl, popular daughter of a Pastor was horrifically slain walking in the woods near her house in Edson, Alberta. It is believed there may have been two boys as witnesses who ran for help. Sadly, help arrived too late to save her.

The towns residents, understandably, are in an uproar. Many are speaking of tracking the murderer down themselves – vigilante justice. The RCMP are urging the residents to wait and let them work. In an interesting move, the kids have engaged a Social Media tool to try and scare the killer out of hiding. Text Messaging.

Text messages via mobile phones have been traveling around the teens network within the town, according to a story on CBC national radio this morning. The kids are using TXT SMS messages to hopefully scare the murderer with warning messages that the killer would be safer to turn themselves in than be caught by any of the parents on the hunt.

Could a Social Media tool play a key role in catching a killer? Perhaps. It may not be the only way, but it shows that as a society, we are continuing to find innovative ways to use Social Media services to advance our lives and society. Such action is purely ad hoc with no formal organization. A common purpose united a group to use a device and service that didn’t exist 10-20 years ago to participate in a collective action supporting their small community. These teenagers would have had serious limitations on their ability to help in solving the case. Now they are applying peer pressure in the hopes of playing a part in bringing a murderer to justice. Once the killer is caught, perhaps we will learn if this application of Social Media helped?

Social Media Marketing Is A Managed Investment

If you’re looking to engage your company or organization in Social Media and you think Facebook is the place to start, you could be wrong. If you also think a some advertising on Facebook or MySpace and maybe a cool application in Facebook is the way to go, you may end up wondering why it didn’t work.

Engaging in Social Media often requires a holistic, multi-channel approach. This means you might well need to consider engaging through Social Network services like Facebook, microblogs like Twitter or Plurk and leveraging YouTube and a blog or two. Additionally, you’ll also need to look at how you actively participate across those channels.

In our experience, most failures with Social Media marketing come from the assumption that an organization can leverage Social Media in the same way as the Web or traditional marketing. You might have some small degree of success in this regard, but it will also be shortlived. We’ve seen a number of cases where an ad agency will execute a clever video style campaign in Facebook and some push on YouTube with great creative. The message takes off, gets good viral uptake and some click-throughs that result in sales. This is good for the short term. But what happens afterwards? The campaign has ended, but the creative lingers. You might think that’s good in terms of ongoing brand awareness, and it is, but it’s also damaging.

With no later follow-up, your brand is simply seen as marketing. This may very well make the next campaigns significantly weaker in uptake over time, since you aren’t engaging your stakeholders over the longer term and they will simply see you as “pushing” rather than “participating” and Social Media is all about participating.

As you plan to enter Social Media it’s important to think about your ongoing engagement and participation, so that the next time you launch a campaign, you have an engaged base audience to help you spread the message. Over time you build a good solid audience with which you gain permission to engage. Campaigns will be more successful and the results will mean better overall sales. That’s a managed investment in Social Media.

The Fragility of the Social Media Economy

Recently, Facebook changed it’s UI design. So did Twitter and FriendFeed. These are 3 of the top Social Media tools. All have developed an ecosystem around them, and none more so than Facebook. This shows a serious fragility in the Social Media Ecosystem – that one popular platform can have profound economic impact on the many businesses building off the primary in that ecosystem.

Just like auto makers that have begun to shut down and re-tool plants from trucks to smaller cars, there is a profound residual impact on suppliers to those big auto makers. A good article in All Facebook (an unofficial blog about all things Facebook) shows the surface of the impact of a UI design change in a popular Social Network. Apparently there are mixed reviews where some application developers and advertising engines have seen an increase in traffic/impressions while others have seen significant decreases.

Regardless of the nuances of the changes and traffic impacts, what is clear is that the Social Media economics remain fragile and reflective of any emergent industry. A similar set of occurences happened when Google first started changing its search algorithms and Page Rank rules.

While we have little doubt that Social Media and the Social Web will continue to see significant growth, a key challenge ahead will be how the economics will work. Just like the real-world, a major “manufacturer” can have a profound impact on the attendant companies building services and products off the back-end.

Unlike the real-world however, changes in Social Media services can be extensive and destroy business models overnight, while creating whole new ones. This creates some serious concerns over business model sustainability when it comes to adjunct services and products relying on a key player. The overall impact is still less than when an auto maker closes a factory putting thousands out of work, but there is still an economic impact.

Those providing consulting and advice on leveraging Social Media services will have a challenge to constantly understand and adapt to the quickly evolving economics of the Social Media ecosystem. Stability is unlikely to occur in the short term and we anticipate increased volatility as some services collapse in the coming months with monetization pressures. This issue also shows the power of a popular Web service. With Facebook making such arbitrary changes with little warning and forced compliance like Google, how these issues can be better managed will also be interesting. But that’s another blog entry.

A Billion Dead Birds & Social Media

Apparently, 1 Billion birds die each year in America from collisions with windows. Really? A billion? What does that have to do with Social Media? Well, add to that shocker that the leading cause of death in pregnant women is murder. What does that have to do with Social Media? Expectations, both self-created and pundit created.

The bird death number was released to the media based on one scientists report, and rounded-up by the media as well. The comparative report released prior to that stated “roughly one bird died per square mile per year in America” or 3.5 Million; that’s a whole lot less than a billion.

The pregnant women statistic was also exagerated, because, lets face it, a shocker story like that will drive readership. But the journalist failed to show that the researchers included a “pregnancy period” which meant the 365 days after a successful pregnancy, abortion and a pre-pregnancy phase (uh, half-pregnant?) The reality was in fact that there has been a constant decline in homicides of women who are actually, fully, pregnant (mind you, even one death is too many.)

Let’s face it, there’s a lot of hype around Social Media. We’re trapped into big numbers because we’ve been trained to view and accept big numbers from an expert. We intentionally excluded the source of our information above (we’ll email it all if you want, no problem, and you can then post it.) So with the Web, it was much hype that drove the first .com boom. A similar occurrence is happening today with Social Media. Setting expectations too high.

So are we saying there are no big numbers? That Social Media is irrelevant? Not at all. In fact, big numbers may not be of much use. Only 100 readers of your blog or only 80 connections in your Social Networks may actually be better – because they may be the key people you need to develop a relationship with. The smaller number may mean more sales, loyal customers or customers who provide critical product insights that result in a better new product roll-out.

When in engaging in Social Media, manage and understand your expectations at the start. Big is not always better. Social Media is very much about “quality” not “quantity”. This can be a vital reference point when planning your venture into Social Media and determining what success means. If you need a large volume of “participants” to generate a good ROI from Social Media engagement, then that will require more effort.

As for the billion dead birds, the number is apparently, closer to, well, no one really, truly, knows. It would mean 10 birds striking every building in America each year. Apparently though, cats that roam outside are even worse. They kill 4 million birds a day and a billion song-birds a year. So, you can stop feeding your cats so much, since this equates to 14 birds per cat per year…

Monetizing Social Media: A Managed Investment

There is a lot of discussion around monetizing Social Media, and rightly so. Our experience however, is that the approach and thinking around monetization of Social Media has been focused from the wrong frame of reference – that of Web 1.0 and the expectation of fast revenues via advertising. Businesses often anticipate that Social Media is either a) a campaign marketing tool or b) a place to extend their advertising campaigns. While that may be a suitable approach, they are both short-term and singular, thus will not deliver any anticipated returns.

To understand the difference in Social Media vs other forms of revenue generation, it’s good to compare Sales Vs. Marketing. Sales in a business are a Leading Indicator of a company’s cash flow and revenue opportunities measured weekly, monthly and quarterly. They are close and easier to understand – selling is tactical. Marketing on the other hand is more strategic. Marketing, properly implemented, is a strategic investment and marketing ROI is measured over longer periods starting at a minimum of quarterly.

Social Media is also a managed investment. Like a marketing strategy, Social Media takes time to deliver results, even when just marketing. Primarily due to the fact that Social Media means a deeper engagement with your target markets. Additionally, when engaging in Social Media, you are likely reaching a broader circle of stakeholders than a one-off marketing campaign. You will reach shareholders, employees and their families, recruiters and potential employees and more.

Social Media is engaging in a conversation and building a relationship. If we think of comparable “conversations” we have that are transaction oriented, think of these analogies; ordering  a coffee is a brief conversation with the retailer ending in a transaction, that’s a sales transaction. Stand by the water cooler at the office and you have a more meaningful conversation where issues are discussed, that’s a “marketing” action, and it takes longer.

Successful Social Media engagement comes from approaching it like a marketing or communications strategy. Developed over time with metrics along the way to help evaluate and shape the program. With this approach, a Social Media strategy is likely to return better results. Some Social Media projects may generate revenue through advertising, but that too takes time. There is no instant and quick hit with Social Media, just like marketing. It takes careful research, planning, measuring and adaptation to realize success.