The Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost and time. Social tools like blogs and social networking sites are helping crowds form around very discrete topics.

But what is missing from these crowds are leaders. Like any social network that you may join you have those that join and just lurk, those that maybe make a comment or contribute but then you have those who stand up, take some initiative and lead! And that’s what these social networks really need is more leaders!

That’s what Seth Godin’s new book Tribes is all about.

For example, the internet is a great place for Ukrainian Folk Dancers because now for the first time people who love Ukrainian Folk Dancing can ban together and create their own “Tribe”.

This is an important fact since traditional media is no longer working. There is just too much noise out there to shout at people. No consumer brand has been built on the back of traditional media for a while now. TV certainly isn’t working for the creation of new consumer or B2B brands.

Which means your only option is to define your brand in a way that is open to a dialog (no Command and Control branding please) and in a way that is narrow enough to start or tap into a “movement”.

Take for example – Harley Davidson – here is a consumer brand that also is a movement a Tribe. Take from the brand what you want and maybe even lead your own Tribe in your own area.

Seth recently held an event in NY to bring his own Tribe together. You can view his slides here and you can listen to the audio of his presentation here.

Some of the highlights from my notes were

7 elements of leaders
-    Challenge – leaders challenge their tribe
-    Culture – leaders create a culture within the tribe
-    Curiosity – leaders open up a curiosity gap for outsiders
-    Charisma – being a leader gives you charisma
-    Communicate – leaders communicate
-    Connect – leaders connect others in the tribe
-    Commit – to the movement

5 things tribes want
-    Connect – they join to connect with others
-    Create Meaning – joining gives them purpose
-    Make a difference – joining allows them to make a difference
-    Be Noticed – they join to be noticed
-    Matter – they join because it matters to them

Marketing management is now Tribal leadership. Start doing things for people not to them. It’s an obligation and it up to you!

Here are a few companies in alphabetical order I thought had shown some real promise at the Web 2.0 Expo

Ascentium – A model for the agency of the future

I spoke to the CMO, Romi Mahajan who explained Ascentium’s go-to-market strategy to me. They are the nexus of a digital marketing company mixed with a technology firm that does Microsoft CRM, Business Intelligence and Analytics to provide creative solutions for brand perception and instantiation.

No doubt very useful and very powerful when they come together (I read this as an agency mixed with a lead nurturing platform that can track ROI!). Not only do they build cool marketing campaigns but they can connect to your sales process. They in effect unify sales and marketing so that clients see that their campaign pay off – thereby eliminating the normal tension between sales and marketing.

Romi was also a speaker on Agency 2.0 on how should agencies of the future be organized. Clearly I would think Ascentium is a model for agencies of the future.

Brickfish - Measuring Social Engagement

Brickfish offers an innovative way for brands to connect with their target audience online. They offer a launching pad for highly viral marketing campaigns that allow you to reach consumers where they live on the social web. They get them to listen to your message and interact with your brand, and more than that, they produce the results.

What does this mean – as I understood it – they make various viral marketing campaigns or social applications that can then be shared with friends who can customize them to post it to their blog or website via an iFrame. The iFrame technology allows Brickfish to measure where, when, who and how many times your messages were viewed.

Some examples are Coach engaged consumers to design a new tote. Nike asked consumers to share their inspirational athletic achievements. Kodak got consumers to share their Kodak moments to celebrate their new low-ink printer. All of these examples needed consumers to make customize the message and make it their own then spread it virally. Best off Brickfish is an all in one platform to do this.

HiveLive – Platform for building unique communities

I spoke to the CEO John Kimbel and visited with HiveLive crew on the Expo floor and was very impressed. HiveLive has a very different take on Enterprise Communities. In short, what they do is act as a platform that aggregates all your types of media (both new media and social media) to create a very different type of experience than say a standard community. So that means they integrate things like blogs, podcasts, wikis, forums into a “Hive” (one could say mashup here). That can be customized to the experience you want to create for your users.

One of their customers is Serena Software. Their CMO, Rene Bonvanie is a forward-thinking marketer who’s been leading the community charge for quite some time now at places like SalesForce, SAP, BusinessObjects, and Oracle.  Below is a video where he does a great job explaining Serena’s vision of a new model of community-powered marketing and how they’re using tools/technologies (like Facebook, HiveLive, and YouTube) to reinvent their business: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDsJE98NPbM

InsideView – Smart marketing and sales tool

I was lucky enough to have breakfast with the CEO Umberto Milletti. Who started InsideView in 2005 because he saw that “business information was becoming more distributed over the web” though articles, interviews, various databases and then eventually social networks.

He viewed this as an opportunity to aggregate these sources of information to provide a composite view of a person or a company through the use of some proprietary Natural Language Processing.

All comes together in a mashup within your own CRM – InsideView integrates with all of today’s most popular CRM systems namely Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and recently announced Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, and Landslide.

InsideView also tells you who you are connected to in Facebook or LinkedIn. It’s a form of “Smarketing” as Umberto called it.

Over 200 companies use their application with hundreds of sales reps using the application. They sell per seat licenses but they also have a free version in the spirit of Web 2.0 with a limited version of the functionality. No doubt this is a company to watch in the coming years!

Wi5Connect – Welcome to Social Learning 2.0

I spoke to Matthew Bowman, VP of Sales and Marketing, of Wi5Connect who explained what they did as a “different approach to learning that marries two technologies – Social Networking and eLearning” into an easy to deliver SaaS solution.

Their new product LearnSocial is a revolutionary new way for businesses to train employees. Different than online learning, user manuals, or instructor lead training, LearnSocial is an online community that captures the power of social networks and fortifies with a state-of-the-art Learning Management System (LMS) platform. Finally, an effective learning tool that allows you to better engage, track the engagement, correlate progress to training, and measure ROI.

Matt called it “a way to combine the brain trust hidden in all levels of your own organization with the magic of your own corporate social network!”

Sometimes I have to admit it is hard to keep up with all the new advances in Social technologies. And when I hear the buzz about certain technologies getting louder and louder it often times prompts me to seek out the help of a trusted source.

Enter Jesse Stay – Facebook developer and guru, a recent author of FBML essentials, blogger of Stay-n-Alive and social media junkie like myself.

I sought Jesse’s help in further understanding how he was using FriendFeed for tracking and commenting on all the conversations that were happening at the recent F8, Facebook developer conference.

Here his thoughts and excuse my ignorance on any of these topics for those of you more social advanced.

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About Jesse

Jesse is a Social Media technologies expert. He specializes in Facebook and other technologies that enable you as a business to better reach your customers in a viral manner, leading to more targeted ad and marketing positions, leading to faster adaptation of your brand through the social networks.

Through his company, Stay N’ Alive Productions, he has firm experience developing and providing quality applications that have already had strong successes. He has both developed and consulted for successful social networking applications, some of those which currently have over a million users (the top 90 on Facebook!).

 

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Starting up a social network to support any business can be a challenge. These days it seems that there are a variety of new social networks popping up all over. To that end I have heard a new acronym YASN (Yet Another Social Network)!

But to fill this demand many new social network software’s and asp’s are being created to fill the business need. Recently Dotster introduced a new product for not only their clients but of clients beyond their control.

The idea that Social Networking is moving beyond the youth market to business isn’t new but the idea is how and what are people doing to get them to join and what content are they providing to keep them engaged.

Listen to Catherine’s ideas on how to get your own community going as well as keep them coming back for more.

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About Catherine

Catherine Brown, Director of Enterprise Social Networking, Dotster, Inc., has over 14 years experience in marketing and product promotions and has a successful track record at both large and small firms. At Calista, an IP Telephony start-up, she was part of an executive team that took the company to acquisition by Cisco. While at Cisco, she managed major product launches and million dollar promotional campaigns, worked on a company-wide website redesign and started a web analytics program. She has also been an entrepreneur. Catherine has a BA from Stanford, an MBA from UC Berkeley, and has lived in Europe and Latin America (she speaks both French and Spanish).

 

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