Knol's greed appeal will make it a winner

In the two weeks since Google announced plans to unveil a Wikipedia-like encyclopedia called Knol, the blogosphere has been buzzing about its potential impact. Is this the Wikipedia-killer? A nefarious attempt to undermine media companies? A market-share play by a near-monopoly?

In my opinion, it’s none of those things. Knol is just a good idea that fills a gap in the market and that is likely to become a rich and useful alternative to Wikipedia. If Google and its contributors make money in the process, what's wrong with that?

Knol will succeed because (for lack of a better term) it exploits the greed factor in community knowledge-sharing. Think of Wikipedia as public television or radio: it’s a public information source that is endearing, in part, because it’s so free of commercial interest. Sure, some people do use Wikipedia for business benefit, but most do so for the sake of sharing knowledge and contributing to the public good. Wikipedia’s anonymity is a virtue in that respect. There will always be value to that model and an audience for it.

Knol is a commercial play. According to sketchy details provided so far by Google, users will be able to attach bylines and profiles to their contributions and submit to community ratings. Articles will move up the popularity stack based upon a Digg-like process in which visitors identify the most useful content. Contributors could also see some financial reward if their work is heavily trafficked.

The fact that Knol promotes the identity of its contributors will give it significant commercial appeal, particularly for experts who don't have the benefit of a big forum for their knowledge. I've written the past about an experiment called Wikibon that is a precursor to Knol. The creator of Wikibon, David Vellante, spent many years in market research and understands both the power and limitations of that model.

Market research firms charge high fees because they have a reputation for quality. The analysts who work there command big salaries and enjoy considerable influence in their markets. It’s the think-tank model and it’s tried and true.

The problem with think tanks is that they shut out the vast majority of potential experts. In most business-to-business markets, there is a huge body of knowledge locked up in the minds of practitioners, consultants and small businesspeople who don't have the wherewithal to become part of the giant research firms. Their expertise is available only to the small number of people they can reach through whatever means they have available.

Wikibon is a long-tail experiment that tries to tap into that knowledge and create a quality information resource at a cost that’s potentially much lower than that of the think tanks. The idea is to remove all of the organizational overhead and just let people showcase their own expertise. If they do it right, they can grow their professional profile and improve their chance of landing good jobs or consulting assignments.

The same factors will apply to Knol, and that's why it will be so successful. Few Web properties have Google’s capacity to showcase individual experts. There are many blogger networks out there, but Knol should quickly become the biggest blogger network of them all.

For individuals with the time, skill and savvy to promote themselves through a vehicle like this, the payoff could be significant. That's why I say that Knol appeals to the greed factor. People will continue to contribute to Wikipedia because it reaches a vast audience. They will contribute to Knol because it promotes their personal interests. There will be a place for both models on the Web. There’s no reason that either has to be successful at the expense of the other.

Labels: google, knol, social_media influence, wiki, wikipedia

  ¶ 4:59 PM 1 Comments

  Daily reading 12/27/2007

Internet Marketing Best Blog Posts of 2007 - techipedia, Dec. 26, 2007

• Here's a fantastic list of links to blogger advice on nearly every imaginable aspect of business social media marketing. Many of these articles are specific to individual services like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit. The list is a bit overwhelming in its scope, but you can find just about anything you need there, from effective blogging practices to advice on how to use Facebook in marketing campaigns.
   - post by pgillin

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  A manifesto for the new PR The Arthur W. Page Society has just released a manifesto for the new world of corporate communications, and I’d recommend that anyone who works in PR or marketing download it. The Society is an exclusive group of senior execs from big companies, so their opinions carry some weight. While the report is short on quantitative research (though there is a survey of 31 CEOs discussed at the end), it’s hard to argue with its overarching conclusions: businesses no longer control their messages; constituencies are expanding and diversifying; and corporations must be more transparent and open about nearly everything they do.

“The 64-page report is called The Authentic Enterprise: Relationships, Values and The Evolution of Corporate Communications. Below are some excerpts that I snipped from the PDF. They’ll give you a flavor of the recommendations, but it’s worthwhile to read the whole document.

Thanks to George Faulkner at IBM for tipping me off to this new research.

Quoting:

“For those corporations that remain public and that aspire to build trusted brands, sustainable marketplace success and community reputation, the imperative of authenticity will inevitably grow in importance.

“We are no longer in control of our traditional spheres of professional activity. Indeed, all business functions are at the dawn of an era of radical de-professionalization.

“…New priorities and skills for which the Chief Communications Officer must now assume a leadership role: 1. Leadership in defining and instilling company values; 2. Leadership in building and managing multistakeholder relationships; 3. Leadership in enabling the enterprise with “new media” skills and tools…

“For business, globalization has long been transforming markets for capital and labor. Now it is reshaping the footprint – and even the idea – of the corporation. This institution is shifting from a hierarchical, monolithic, multinational model to one that is horizontal, networked and globally integrated.

“The chief communications executive and the communications function of a 21st century corporation will increasingly be responsible not only for the reputation of their single company, but also for understanding, communicating and even helping to shape the reputations of its ecosystem partners – such as clients, partners, government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and other influencers.

“More than 300 million camera phones were shipped in 2005. They are now the most widespread image-capture devices in the world. At current growth rates, there could be one billion camera phones in use worldwide by 2008. That means nearly one person in six is a potential photojournalist – or, with the spread of video capabilities, documentary filmmaker.

“Teens in the U.S. – the consumers of today and the employees, shareholders, voters and leaders of tomorrow – spend 60 percent less time watching TV than their parents, and 600 percent more time online, interacting with, influencing and being influenced not by institutions, marketers or professional communicators, but by their peers.

“Procter & Gamble...“imports” 50 percent of its new ideas from outsiders. And Eli Lilly has created an open R&D marketplace called Innocentive to match problems needing solutions with independent researchers who can solve them.

“All of this makes the 21st century enterprise vulnerable at a wholly new level to unexpected developments that can damage the brand, negatively affect employee commitment, undercut outside relationships and destabilize management, including the CEO and other corporate officers and Board members. This, in turn, means that the stakes are much higher for what corporate communicators do.

“We used to segment communications carefully to targeted audiences. In an open information commons, everyone can see (and, increasingly, modify) any public communication, no matter to whom it is targeted.

“Message 'segmentation' is no longer practical or desirable. Despite the proliferation of diverse stakeholders, all are now on a level playing field.

“Values are the fundamental basis for enterprise communications. “To be an effective communications function in the authentic enterprise:

• “We must not only position our companies, but also help define them. While expertise and authenticity are essential, communicators’ counsel to the corporation must now encompass its fundamental business model, brand, culture, policies and, most importantly, values.
• “We must not only develop channels for messaging but also networks of relationships. In a business ecosystem of proliferating constituencies, communicators must lead the development of social networks and the tools and skills of relationship building and collaborative influence – both to seize new opportunities and to respond to new threats.
  
• “We must shift from changing perceptions to changing realities. In a world of radical transparency, 21st century communications functions must lead in shaping behavior – inside and out – to make the company’s values a reality.

“Conduct public relations as if the whole company depends on it. Corporate relations is a management function. No corporate strategy should be implemented without considering its impact on the public. The public relations professional is a policymaker capable of handling a wide range of corporate communications activities.

“Realize a company’s true character is expressed by its people. The strongest opinions – good or bad – about a company are shaped by the words and deeds of its employees. As a result, every employee – active or retired – is involved with public relations. It is the responsibility of corporate communications to support each employee’s capability and desire to be an honest, knowledgeable ambassador to customers, friends, shareowners and public officials.

“[CEOs] say that the emphasis of communications work must shift significantly toward internal communications, as they seek to transform their organizations’ culture and workforce skills – not just to make them more efficient and productive, but to embed the kind of pervasive transparency, personal responsibility and values-based decision making that enterprise-scale authenticity requires.

“The greatest danger corporate communications faces, ironically, may lie in our very success over the past two decades, if that success blinds us to the new demands that lie ahead."

Labels: marketing, PR, socialmedia, transparency

  ¶ 12:49 PM 0 Comments

  Four social media books worth reading I'm actually not much of a book reader, but I’ve been delving into a number of social media books this year as preparation to write another book of my own. Here are some of my favorite new titles. Although this is by no means an exhaustive list, you can't go wrong with any of them:

Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger -- This is the best book I read about social media this year. While the book isn't technically about marketing, the principles it contains are important to anyone who is trying to understand the changes wrought by community publishing. Ultimately, the book is about social tagging, but it's really about how we organize information and how out tools and tactics are changing in the age of the Internet. Weinberger takes us back thousands of years to illustrate how we arrived the expertise-driven model embodied in the Dewey Decimal System. He then demonstrates how communities can develop far richer and more useful organization schemes than those ever envisioned by experts. Written in an engaging and often entertaining style, this book will open your eyes to the new dynamics of self-organization and stimulate you to envision its potential.

The New Rules Of Marketing And PR by David Meerman Scott -- Scott's book, which has topped the Amazon charts much of this year, is as drop-dead practical as Weinberger's is theoretical. Some of his advice is why-didn’t-I-think-of-that simple, such as to write marketing communications using terms that readers use in search engines. Scott takes a holistic approach to advising his readers on how to make a web presence work for them. This isn't just about social media but about online marketing in general. There are plenty of examples of successful companies that have leveraged new media channels to great effect, and Scott's pedagogical approach is emphatic without ever being condescending. If you want a how-to manual for the new world of PR, get this book.

Marketing to the Social Web by Larry Weber -- A lot of new-media marketing books cross the line from advocacy into arrogance. Their tone seems to imply that readers are stupid if they don't embrace the concepts espoused by the author. There's no question that Larry Weber has an agenda; he was one of the first PR visionaries to forecast the decline of mainstream media and to urge marketers to change their thinking about their work. However, this book takes a storyteller's approach to advocacy, preferring to persuade its readers rather than to talk down to them. It's also rich with case studies and third-party commentary, making it unusual in the universe of books written by marketers for marketers.

Join the Conversation by Joseph Jaffe -- While I found this book to be unnecessarily long and Jaffe's writing style, with its frequent parenthetical digressions, to be difficult to follow, there is no question that the author is an authoritative source on social media. Jaffe's passion is apparent, and his style is personal and persuasive. It’s like listening to a someone talk to you over beers at the pub. The book even includes one chapter that was created from a sequence of posts and comments on a wiki. I'm not sure it worked for me, but I applaud the author’s innovation for trying it.

On my list for early in the new year: We are Smarter than Me by Libert & Spector, and Measuring Public Relationships by Katie Paine.

  ¶ 3:26 PM 2 Comments

  Daily reading 12/24/2007

The Pitfalls, and Potential, of Corporate Social Networks - Baseline, Dec. 21, 2007

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 12/20/2007

Top 5 viral video advertisements of 2007 - FT.com, Dec. 11, 2007

A Beginner’s Guide to Social News Websites - Dosh Dosh

• Sound advice on how to build your reputation and traffic via social news sites. Key takeaways: focus on one or two sites, build relationships with key influencers and contribute regularly. The payoff can be big, but it takes time to build the necessary trust with the community.
   - post by pgillin

FCC gives media conglomerates an early gift - Newspaper Death Watch

• My own commentary on the FCC's rather incredible decision to grant media conglomerates and exemption to the commission's own anti-monopoly rules in some major markets.
   - post by pgillin

10 Year Anniversary of Blogs: Time Flies When One's Overwhelmed! - Consumer Generated Media

• Peter Blackshaw celebrates the 10th anniversary of blogging by (what else?) blogging about it.
   - post by pgillin

Striking writers in talks to launch Web start-ups - Los Angeles Times, Dec. 17, 2007

• Possibly a distant mirror for the formation of United Artists eight decades ago.
   - post by pgillin

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  A look ahead at tech PR in 2008

Labels: google, mahalo, paidcontent, PR, search, secondlife, skype, wallstreetjournal

  ¶ 11:45 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 12/19/2007

On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data - New York Times Annotated

Social Marketing: How Companies Are Generating Value from Customer Input - Knowledge@Wharton Annotated

This article covers several examples of successful word-of-mouth marketing efforts and offers advice on what works:

• Keep branding to a minimum
  
• Engage with customers in a way that's meaningful to their lives
  
• Be self-deprecating and funny
• Have a thick skin; you will encounter some criticism

Several examples and case studies are included.

Labels: facebook, social_media

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Report: Half of online adults, 85% of online kids to use social nets by 2011 eMarketer says that 37% of online adults use social networks at least once a month and that the figure will grow to nearly 50% by 2011. Among teens, usage is already well over half and will near 85% by 2011. Social nets clearly offer value that conventional news and information sites don't.





Allan Cattier, Director of the Academic Technology Group at Emory University gave a mind-blowing statistic in his presentation to the Communintelligence Executing Social Media conference in Atlanta last month. He said Emory had surveyed its freshman class and found that more than 80% of the students log on to Facebook 18 or more times a day. Imagine how our institutions will be shaped by this trend in coming years. He also showed a compelling video called "A Vision of Students Today" created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University. See below.

Labels: facebook, socialmediaresearch, socialnetworks, video

  ¶ 4:57 PM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 12/17/2007

24 Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook - The Facebook Marketing Bible, Dec. 9, 2007

• Here's a great list of resources and tips for marketers trying to unravel the secrets of Facebook. It's a detailed guide to Facebook features with advice on how to leverage each specifically for social campaigns.
   - post by pgillin

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 12/14/2007

16 Things To Do After Starting A New WordPress Blog - JohnTP.com

• Here are some great tips for building traffic to your Wordpress blog. Many relate to registering the site with various services and installing code to make sure you're picked up by search engines.
   - post by pgillin

Newswise Business News and Social and Behavioral Sciences News | Common Word-of-mouth Beats “Highly-connected” Influencers

• New research rebuts the commonly held belief that the key to successful viral marketing is to reach a small number of influencers. "'We find that trying to track down key influencers, people who have
  extremely large social networks, is typically unnecessary and, more
  importantly, can actually limit a campaign or advertisement’s viral
  potential,' says the author of the soon-to-be-published research.
  'Instead, marketers need to realize that the majority of their audience, not just the well-connected few, is eager and willing to pass along well-designed and relevant messages.'"  - post by pgillin

To wiki or not to wiki - iMedia Connection, Dec. 12, 2007

• The CEO of WetPaint counters five common objections to public wikis. These sound a lot like the five most common objections to corporate blogs!
   - post by pgillin

Online customers: how we are failing them - iMedia Connection, Dec. 12, 2007

• CRM mistakes online. Wal-Mart continues to flounder in understanding the online consumer.
   - post by pgillin

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 12/09/2007

Here Comes Another Bubble - The Richter Scales - YouTube

• I don't personally believe this bubble will ever be anything like the last one, but this video is hilarious nonetheless.
   - post by pgillin

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 12/08/2007

We Are Smarter Than Me: How the Wisdom of Crowds Can Help Businesses Succeed - Knowledge@Wharton Annotated

• Online communities can change the way businesses create and sell their products, often dramatically. In this collection of mini-case studies, the author of a new book shows how the wisdom of crowds can help organizations solve problems and innovate. I love the example of P&G's print-on-a-potato-chip problem!
  

  ¶ 8:30 AM 3 Comments

  Corporate Blog Council should swallow hard and learn from critics

The newly formed Corporate Blog Council is getting slammed in the blogosphere this week. The council is a self-described “professional community of top global brands dedicated to promoting best practices in corporate blogging.” It includes some very large companies, although overall membership is small and skewed toward tech and media firms.

The blogosphere has been fairly merciless. Dave Taylor remarks, “My translation: ‘we're all clueless, but don't want anyone to realize just how unplugged our organizations have become from the world of ‘marketing 2.0’, so we created a club so our ignorance can be shielded from public eyes.’"

Scoble is skeptical, too: “I’ve done enough speaking to enough corporations now that if they don’t get why they should be talking with their customers already I don’t get how hanging out at yet another boring industry conference is going to help them to get it,” he says, pointedly.

Brian Solis says the focus on blogs shows that corporations still don’t get the concept of conversation. He asks if we’re also going to have a Viral Media Council, and a Conversation Council.

Marketing Pilgrim counts comments and finds that blogs run by the council members perform pretty dismally. She and several others point out that comments are disabled on the Blog Council’s site and that the council used a conventional press release to announce its existence.

Commenters are piling on, mostly trashing the whole Blog Council idea.

I hope the people that put their companies’ names on this initiative won’t be scared off by the thrashing they’re getting in the blogosphere. To veterans of the polite and deferential world of traditional corporate communications, this trash talk sounds juvenile and hateful, but it is really just the way people express their opinions in this medium. Conversations here are raw, blunt and sometimes offensive, but they are always genuine. You need a thick skin to play, but if you don’t take it personally, you can learn a lot.

Having worked with major corporations for many years, I’m inclined to be more generous to the Blog Council. Yes, everything the bloggers cited above have said is true, but the fact that these companies are taking action of any kind (and scheduling an event for next month, apparently) is significant. It probably took months just to get to the announcement phase.

Critics will say that that’s the problem: corporations have to water down and approve everything and that’s why they don’t get social media. That’s also true, but these companies have worked this way for a very long time. The fact that the world has changed around them in the last four years doesn’t mean they can respond in that timeframe. There are plenty of people within these companies advocating conversation marketing and meaningful change. They are being heard, but it takes a long time for voices to work their way up the hierarchy at big companies. And the people who head those companies are the least likely to understand what’s going on out there.

If the Blog Council is smart, it’ll ignore the tone and listen to the message. The blogosphere is delivering some important early feedback on the whole idea of the Blog Council. The members should listen, adjust and move incrementally forward. Bloggers can be quite blunt, but they can also be very forgiving. If the council demonstrates that it’s really serious about this venture, then the tone will turn supportive with remarkable speed.

Labels: blogging, corporate, marketing

  ¶ 8:21 AM 4 Comments

  How to deal with blogger negativity This week in the the Tech PR War Stories podcast, David Strom and I discuss negativity in the blogosphere. The risk of blogger attacks is one of the biggest reasons companies avoid social media, but we argue that fears are overblown. Sure, you need a thick skin to invite customer feedback. But companies with good products and happy customers aren’t likely to be hurt by one bad seed.

Learn more at TechPRWarStories.com.

Labels: blogswarm, crisis, negativity, PR, socialmedia

  ¶ 2:42 PM 0 Comments

  Twitter's unique appeal Laura Fitton is a Twitter master, and she gave me a whole new perspective on this service, which I had initially dismissed as silly when I saw it last March.

Laura (twitter.com/pistachio) is an independent consultant whose two very young children create some lifestyle choices. Basically, she has to work mostly from home. Twitter has been her business network and support group. Without really trying, she has collected an entourage of nearly 900 followers, and that has led to business, speaking invitations and personal relationships.

Laura Twitters constantly, describing professional and life experiences in 140-character bursts. She supplements her text posts with videos from Seesmic.com, an instant video messaging service that’s still in test phase. It’s a type of journaling called moblogging (mobile blogging) and it has an appeal all its own.

For active mobloggers (Twitter is the preferred medium) blogs are a collection of short bursts that spark mini-conversations. The structured thesis of the type that you’re reading now doesn’t fit this model. Blog entries are a sequence of miniature thoughts and observations, each expressed in the charmingly succinct language of a space-limited medium. People cover hour-long conference keynote speeches as a sequence of Twitter messages. There’s even an emerging style of Twitter language that prompts the greatest possible response. I can’t say I understand it, but it’s a great topic for a follow-up article.

Back to Laura. The other day, she was pondering what to make for breakfast. She Twittered “pancakes or waffles?” to her followers and within two minutes had 10 responses. Today she recorded me talking about my proposal for how Starbucks should be the next great media power (e-mail me for more on this). She posted the video using Seesmic and, within 20 minutes, had a half-dozen comments. Conventional bloggers should be so lucky.

I spent the lunch hour today at a table full of Twitter enthusiasts. It struck me that they are exhilarated by the idea of making connections. To them, Twitter is a lifeline to people they’d never otherwise meet or stay in contact with, and that serendipity is one of the service’s principal attractions.

The chance to find out information provided by those connections is another appeal. One Twitterer proposed that the service is actually a corollary to daily newspapers. In the same sense that newspapers provide guided discovery to information identified by editors, moblogs offer discovery of information identified by trusted sources of any kind. The two approaches fulfill a similar need. They just do it in different ways.

Labels: twitter blogging small_business

  ¶ 11:52 PM 5 Comments

  Daily reading 12/06/2007

The Potential of Enterprise 2.0 - Six Lessons for Success - Trends in the Living Networks

• Six excellent points on how and why to adopt Web 2.0 tools to enterprise applications. Too often businesses install tools without having any idea why they're needed. Those projects usually die on the vine. In this short blog entry, the author advises putting business value before technology.
   - post by pgillin

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 12/05/2007

poll.pdf (application/pdf Object)

• Com.motion, a new social media boutique agency in Canada, has released the results of a survey of 444 business professionals and 1,821 consumers about social media. It's worth reading. Note that top managers and junior employees largely agree on the importance of social media in the communications landscape. However, the survey also pointedly illustrates the generation gap. For example, 68% of 18-34-year-olds say social networks are important for "developing, maintaining and nurturing friendships" compared to 35% of respondents over 55.
   - post by pgillin

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 12/04/2007

Adults E-Mail, Teens IM - eMarketer, Dec. 3, 2007

• Here's an interesting data point: teens use instant messaging more than twice as much as marketers. That means that if your teen-oriented campaign is built around e-mail, you're using the wrong medium. Many businesspeople find IM to be instrusive and disruptive, but teens don't agree. It's increasingly their preferred mode of communication. The rules of IM marketing are very different that those of e-mail marketing, so learn the landscape before using this tool.
   - post by pgillin

  ¶ 8:35 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 12/03/2007

My(Work)Space - Nicholas Carr

• Carr contends that social networks will be a powerful force - and a problem, in some cases - within businesses because they adapt to the informal networks, which are the real information channels. Traditional enterprise software is designed for the formal hierarchy. "In stark contrast to corporate IT systems, social networks shape
  themselves to their users rather than forcing the users to adapt to
  preset specifications," he says. There's an active comment thread, too.
   - post by pgillin

  ¶ 8:35 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 12/01/2007

Keys to social media success - iMedia Connection, Nov. 29, 2007 Annotated

Highlights from this practical column:

• "At the outset, you should be prepared to focus on giving rather than getting. Building goodwill should be a cornerstone of your engagement strategy.
  
• "What you say can be as important as how you say it. It also means that in order to communicate effectively, you have to leave marketing-speak at the door. On the other hand, you don't want to try too hard to fit in and end up losing sight of the reason you're there in the first place.
• "Make sure your legal team is not writing any posts or deciding what's getting written and how. Yes, legal should be involved in crafting and signing off on the policy, but no, legal should not be taking a hands-on role."

How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook - InformationWeek, Nov. 26, 2007

The insightful and articulate Cory Doctorow writes about the social strains created by Facebook, friending and the awkward insights that social networks provide into our personal lives. Facebook is hot right now, but it could easily cross over the line and become another Web 2.0 has-been if it doesn't address the risk of users' lives being seriously disrupted by the openness that it enables.

10 blogging tips from 10 bloggers - iMedia Connection, Nov. 30, 2007

While many of the recommendations in this article are well-known, there are useful comments from top business bloggers as well as good examples of businesses that have applied these sound principles. One tip that surprised me: spend as much time commenting on other blogs as you do writing your own.

  ¶ 8:34 AM 0 Comments