I don't think anyone goes unscathed in what might be the longest parody on youtube:


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Stumbled across our DEMO pitch video last night and can confirm that Dave hasn't aged a bit since we did this back in Feb'05.

I'd encourage you to take the 6mins to have a look... While it was too bad we didn't have the foresight to call perspectives mashups back then but I was reminded how many mashups we had in the platform 4 years ago.  Some of the names have changed but the requirement has only increased... an easy way for brands to syndicate select specific content from their community to Facebook, twitter, YouTube, flickr, etc. should be an key requirement of any community strategy.

I was also pretty amazed when I watched this realizing that our 6 minute demo included building a blog/community that was integrated with a crm system - we might have emphasized that a little more in hindsight.  (And yes, I can confirm that I did just hurt my shoulder while patting myself on the back...)

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Just sat in on a presentation from our professional services team that included walk throughs of several recent communities deployments - impressive stuff that I thought I'd share.

If you're looking for some design inspiration for your community, take a look at what some of our customers have done:

http://community.asos.com
http://community.airmiles.ca/en/  (/fr if you prefer to parlez vous)
http://www.forallthewaysyoucare.com/
http://vaio.sonyelectronicscommunity.com



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One thing I really like about the fact that we use daily scrums throughout the company and not just in our dev area is that time permitting, I can bounce between a couple of scrums (remembering that I'm a chicken not a pig) and take a real pulse on what's going on whether it's impediments the sales team is running into, status of a marketing initiative or getting an early read on cool stuff making it's way into the platform.

Today's dev scrum gave me a taste of what's coming with Facebook Connect...  We're working on integrations that will allow Awareness powered community members to access their Facebook account in several ways.  Today we completed authentication which allows people to register, login to an Awareness community (or even just to comment, vote, share a story, etc.) using their Facebook credentials rather than creating YAUAP (yet another user account and password).   Watch for more features on this from us in the next several weeks.


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Sticking with my social media's effect on marketing theme, here's a interesting read over at the Financial Times.

"IDC research shows that worldwide average vendor revenue growth will be 5.7 per cent in 2008, while the average sales and marketing cost envelope is growing by 7 per cent. Every dollar of new revenue that a vendor earns, costs more. Or in other words, the return on investment of marketing is declining."

Put aside for a moment the fact that people don't want to hear from companies any more, they want to hear from other people... the reality of the math dictates that marketing executives have to find ways of lowering the costs of connecting with prospects and customers.

Social media offers an opportunity to deploy the new marketing tactics I mentioned in my last post that are all about attracting customers and building relationships by letting them help one another while reducing their spend.


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I've been spending a lot of time lately mapping social media and community to the customer lifecycle and traditional marketing phases... While no surprises in that social medial communities can play a role at virtually every stage, it's been an interesting exercise that I'll elaborate on over the next several days/posts. In the interim, here's a couple of posts from Francois Gossieaux that will be prerequisite reading...
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I did an interview with Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer earlier this week and have since had a bunch of questions about "softer" participation points as a way to engage visitors... 

Turns out David Carter has saved me some typing - he did a webinar this week on frictionless participation that you can listen to here. He does a great job of talking through the various ways to encourage participation in a community and how that maps to engagement and loyalty.


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I've sat through a lot of presentations on the the death of interruptive marketing, marketing as a conversation, marketing 2.0, etc., but it turns out it can be summed up in a 2 minute video.



It's not only entertaining and spot-on in its articulation of the industry cross-roads that social media can help respond to, but a good reminder that all 28-34 year olds are interested in laser hair removal.
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Actually I don't but nobody is believing that I have a flight attendant telling me the cabin doors have been shut as I fire them off a quick email (I know, I know, step 1 is admitting you have a problem). I get car sick if I try and type on my blackberry from the back seat of a cab so I've been a fan of Jott for quite a while - it converts your voice into emails, reminders, lists, etc. Their latest service - a Blackberry app - is something I'm hooked on and may mean that Dave will start driving with me again. It adds a "Reply via Jott" option to your Blackberry email and you just speak your reply which gets converted with surprising accuracy.
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Go Red For Women is the American Heart Association's nationwide movement to wipe out heart disease, the #1 killer of women. One in three women gets heart disease (yes, you read that right... one in three) yet the common perception is that heart disease is a "man's" disease.

goredforwomen.org celebrates the power of banding together and fighting back by encouraging women to submit their stories, words of support, advice, and engage in discussion.    

Awareness powers these aspects of the site - allowing visitors to share and discuss their videos, text stories and photos. Awareness partner Edelman Interactive has done a great job weaving user generated content into the experience and anyone considering video submissions should look at their director's toolkit for ideas on encouraging participation. 

Spend some time on the site - the stories are inspiring! 
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