I just came across this community marketing presentation by Tara Hunt.  She makes some great points, with a clever presentation.  The moderator who introduces her is hard to understand, but her speaking is clear.  The video is about 30 minutes. 

Video:

Slides, to follow along:

| View | Upload your own

The transcript is also available on her site.

Visible Technologies posted a list of some of the best Social Media industry reports of 2008.  All but one of them are free.  The first, from my former Razorfish colleagues, is quite comprehensive and insightful.

• Razorfish: FEED: Consumer Experience Report: This study focuses on understanding how technology impacts today’s digital consumer experience.
• Technorati: State of the Blogosphere 2008: The long time industry standard, this year’s report analyzed trends and themes of blogging and surveyed bloggers about how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially.
• Universal McCann: Power to the People Wave Report 3: This excellent study measured consumer usage, attitudes and interests in adopting social media platforms and technologies.
• Forrester Research: How to Connect with Bloggers: This paid report helps brands understand bloggers and their motivations before kicking off outreach programs.
• MarketTools Insight: How Americans are Socially Connected on the Web. This report covered the link between socially networked consumers and purchasing decisions.

Also from Razorfish:

Due to popular request, today we are releasing Meet The Connected Consumer, a PDF download that contains our Digital Consumer Behavior Study *and* all of the data. This includes the majority of questions we asked respondents and a detailed quantitative breakdown of their responses.

The FEED Consumer Experience Report includes much of the Meet The Connected Consumer content.  But the Connected Consumer report includes the supporting data.

I just came across this slick JavaScript-based Visual Studio theme (color scheme) generator.  You pick the basic colors and desired contrast level, and it fills in all the gaps and generates a .vssettings file for you to import.  It is a lot easier to test and tweak color options with this utility, than it is in Visual Studio.

http://www.frickinsweet.com/tools/Theme.mvc.aspx

In my last post, I suggested that Microsoft embraced social influence marketing (which includes participatory marketing and word of mouth marketing) in a bold and unique way with the launch of www.windowslive.com.  This post will provide some detail on the solution that was developed. 

As demonstrated by the proliferation of Microsoft product team and employee blogs, the MSDN Community, XBox Live, and other social media outlets (including the Windows Live products, themselves), Microsoft has recognized the value of social media for some time.  But, with the re-launch of www.windowslive.com, Microsoft is demonstrating a much stronger commitment to social media as a strategic interactive marketing channel.  Led by Marty Collins, the Windows group assembled a dedicated team to focus exclusively on social media marketing.  Along with the Windows Live marketing group, Marty engaged my team at Avenue A | Razorfish in late 2007 to help define the social media strategy for Windows Live and develop a web site and services platform to support it.  Let's start with the goal, as stated by Marty: 

We really want to connect people who are doing cool things with Windows Live to other people who may be inspired to try creative things of their own. By giving engaged customers a place to share their experience and knowledge we hope to inspire others while recognizing those that have been great customers. In addition to inspiring people we will look to the community for product feedback to help us continually improve our products. The main goal is to simple: get closer to our customers.

To support this goal, we designed a custom solution enabling Microsoft to engage community members, aggregate, rate, and syndicate their blog content, and recognize and reward their contributions.

Engaging the Community

Through email invitations and posts on product team blogs, Microsoft initially invited over 10,000 of the most active Windows Live users to join the "Community Clubhouse".  The Community Clubhouse is the main hub for community interaction.  Members of the clubhouse are asked to:

• Tell stories about how Windows Live makes their everyday life easier and more fun.
• Share tips & tricks for using Windows Live products and services.
• Help "newbies" (new users) learn how to connect and share with Windows Live.
• Respond to challenges to blog about specific topics, such as new beta products.
• Rate and tag each other's posts.

In return, members are recognized for their contributions and rewarded by having their posts showcased in front of millions of users.  Members activities and contributions are tracked by a reputation system and awarded clubhouse points and achievement badges. 

A key objective of the clubhouse strategy was to make participation as easy as possible.  Rather than requiring community members to maintain separate blogs and post content in multiple systems, members contribute content by adding posts to their existing blogs and including technorati-like tags in the post.   Posts that are tagged appropriately are aggregated into the clubhouse through RSS feeds.  Each clubhouse post must have at least three tags – the word 'clubhouse', at least one Windows Live product/service name, and at least one content type (technical 'how-to' or inspirational 'story').   Members are encouraged to add additional tags to identify other topics covered in the posts - whether they are product related or not.  (Examples include 'wedding planning', 'sports', 'college', 'photo stitching', 'red eye', etc.)

Members visit the clubhouse site to read and rate all the content contributed by the community.   Posts are rated three ways: they can be flagged as inappropriate, given a qualitative star rating, and given a content level.  The content level suggests whether a post is appropriate for new users, everyday users, or power users.

Marketing with the Community

Many companies are, respectably, working to create or foster active communities.  Most do so by appending a "Community" tab/menu to the primary navigation and sending users to a section of the site, or a separate site altogether, that is focused exclusively on community content.  They maintain very clear and distinct barriers between their brand/marketing voice, and the community voice.  This keeps the brand safe from "rogue" community members or content.  However, with this approach, customers have to explicitly seek out the community perspective and navigate away from the more structured editorial content they might also be interested in.  This barrier reinforces the "marketing-speak" mentality. 

Microsoft, on the other hand, pushed to blur the lines between marketing and community perspectives.  A fundamental component of the strategy was to tightly weave community and editorial content throughout the site.  Recognizing that social influence is more powerful than marketing influence, incorporating relevant community content should elevate marketing message authenticity and trust.  Community members control a good portion of the content that is displayed throughout the marketing site.  In fact, there are only two pages on all of www.windowslive.com that do not include user-generated content (UGC). 

The tags in the original posts and the ratings that were applied in the Clubhouse are used to dynamically route posts to various sections of the www.windowslive.com marketing site.  While all community content is visible in the clubhouse, only content that has received a certain number of ratings and exceeds a minimum average rating threshold is promoted to the marketing site.  This assures that the community content displayed on a marketing page is contextually relevant, appropriate and useful.  As you can see from the image below, the tags also drive other parts of the UI, such as the "Featured in this post" module.

While Microsoft is engaged with the community, they are not moderating the content.  The community is responsible for self-policing.  Microsoft will not edit or remove valid content - even if it represents negative opinions.  While that is a scary proposition, Microsoft has confidence in its products and respect for its community.  In turn, Microsoft hopes to cultivate community trust and support.  The value of that trust will outweigh the risk of occasional un-flattering posts.  If there are legitimate concerns, Microsoft wants to know about them. 

In addition to being integrated throughout the marketing site, community content is syndicated out through RSS, advertising placements on MSN and Live.com properties (Hotmail, Spaces, etc), Windows Newsletters, and Hotmail email footers.  This provides reciprocal value for Microsoft and Clubhouse members.  The community provides valuable content assets and generates word-of-mouth for Microsoft and, in turn, they get exposed to millions of users.  One community member received over 10,000,000 views on their blog in one month from a single post that was featured on the www.windowslive.com home page and syndicated through ad placements.  For bloggers looking to grow their readership, this is a great opportunity.  And, obviously, we felt this was a great opportunity for Microsoft to generate positive social influence and word-of-mouth. 

The response from the re-launched www.windowslive.com was much stronger than we expected.  It exceeded the traffic projections and server capacity we had planned.  So we had to struggle to support the load for the first month.  But that is certainly one of the better problems to have.  Marty has already announced that the program is being expanded to support www.windows.com, and the entire Windows family of operating systems and online services. 

For the greater part of my 15-year career I have worked with large interactive marketing agencies, building high profile solutions for online marketing, e-commerce, and Internet-based businesses.  I started with US Web (formerly Ensemble Systems, later marchFIRST) and, until recently, have been with Avenue A | Razorfish.  These, and similar, agencies focus on Fortune 1000 clients that are able to fund large projects at high rates.  With substantial project funding, they can produce outstanding and sometimes groundbreaking solutions.  I have had tremendous opportunities creating industry-leading web sites and Internet solutions for companies like Microsoft, Dell, Southwest Airlines, American Airlines, ServiceMaster, JC Penney, and many others. 

However, in my heart, I am an entrepreneur.  I grew up in a family of small business owners.  I have a true passion for the environment, challenges, and opportunities that are unique to new ventures and small businesses.  Consulting has been rewarding because driving projects through the process of defining a vision, forming a strategy, designing a solution, and creating and executing a plan has many similarities to entrepreneurial business ventures.  But, ultimately, these high-value, high-dollar services are only accessible to large enterprises.  The services are worth the price they charge.  I will continue to recommend Avenue A | Razorfish to large businesses.  But, along with other big agencies, they are priced out of reach of most small businesses and new ventures.  

I'm starting Mediassembly to provide digital, interactive, and social media insight and strategic services to small and medium sized businesses.  I hope to leverage my experience to bring some of the strategic thinking and services provided by big interactive marketing agencies within reach of startups and SMBs, as well as provide insight, resources and solutions that are uniquely suited for smaller businesses. 

Mediassembly is actually a company I formed several years ago while developing a digital media-related consumer software product in my very limited spare time.  The name is derived from media + assembly.  With assembly defined as "a set of pieces that work together in unison as a mechanism or device", I think the Mediassembly name is still appropriate.  Successful interactive marketing strategies require engaging customers through multiple channels and assembling solutions with a wide array of technologies.  So I'll stick with the name and expand the original vision.

I will continue blogging on this site, but will likely blog more frequently about Mediassembly-relevant topics at www.mediassembly.com.  I encourage you to follow me there, and to share the site with any small/medium business leaders you may know.  As a startup small business owner myself, I would very much appreciate the referrals! :-)

[Note: This post was moved over from mediassembly.com, which is being restructured.]

I have spent the last ten months working with great teams at Microsoft and Avenue A | Razorfish defining and executing a strategy for employing social media in marketing and engaging and empowering consumers to share their product insights and experiences.  This effort culminated with with the re-launch of WindowsLive.com.  With this strategy, and this site, Microsoft has made a giant leap of faith in Social Influence Marketing. 

Consumers are blogging about Windows Live products and services, sharing their opinions and experiences, and offering guidance and tips to get the most from the products.  That part is not unique to Microsoft.  Many companies have added discussion forums or other community features to their sites.  What is unique is that Microsoft is not segregating user content from marketing content.  Rather, Microsoft is tightly integrating marketing content and user-generated content.  Users and their blog posts are being featured right along side marketing content throughout the entire site.

Wanting to protect their brands, nearly all Fortune 500 companies (all that we researched, in fact) keep very distinct walls between marketing content and user-generated content.  But social influence is quickly overtaking brand influence online.  Microsoft is making a bet that integrating consumer content along side marketing content will elevate brand authenticity and trust.  As Frederic Lardinois observes on ReadWriteWeb, this strategy is not without risk.

It is interesting to see that Microsoft is willing to experiment in this area. On WindowsLive, it allows Microsoft generated content to stand next to user generated content, which could potentially open Microsoft up for some embarrassments. At the same time though, if Microsoft holds true to its promise of not censoring legitimate content, then this represents an important step forward in how Microsoft interacts with its customers.

As one of the authors of that strategy, I obviously think it is a smart bet.  I've blogged before about the contrast between Microsoft's and Apple's employee blogging policies and suggested that Microsoft's open policy will help build stronger and more intimate relationships with customers.  Microsoft gave its employees a voice through an open and encouraging blogging policy and by supporting blogs.msdn.com and a host of other community sites.  With WindowsLive.com, Microsoft is giving its customers a voice, right along side its own.  

In the coming days, I will write about various components of this strategy and the solution that was developed to execute it. 

Bruce Eckel and coauthor Jaime King have posted a sample of their upcoming book: C# Query Expressions and 3.0 Features

From the authors:

It's become more common for authors to offer a few pages or sometimes a chapter of their text to the public as a means of marketing. Our aim is to not only provide a sample, but also a useful stand-alone text. By itself, this sample provides any C# 2.0 programmer a foundation in C# 3.0.

This is intended to be a useful mini-book on its own, not just a teaser: it's 239 pages long and includes 82 exercises and solutions. The full book is filled with many more exercises and solutions.

The book covers:

• Extension methods
  • Inheritance vs. extension methods
  • Utilities for this book
  • Extended delegates
  • Other rules
• Implicitly-typed local variables
• Automatic properties
• Implicitly-typed arrays......
• Object initializers
• Collection initializers
• Anonymous types
• Lambda expressions
  • Func
• Query Expressions
• Basic LINQ
• Translation
  • Degeneracy
  • Chained where clauses
• Introduction to Deferred Execution
• Multiple froms
• Transparent identifiers
  • Iteration Variable Scope
• More complex data
• let clauses
• Ordering data
• Grouping data
• Joining data
• Nested Queries
  • into
  • let clause translations
  • let vs. into
  • joining into
  • Outer joins
• Other query operators

Download the sample here.

The Expression Design, Blend, and Encoder products each let you change properties with incremental values by clicking on the text box and dragging the mouse up or down.  I think most people know that.  But what I didn't know, is that you can hold [Ctrl] to slow down the rate of change and [Shift] to increase the rate.  That makes this feature much more useful. 

Microsoft recently published a Software + Services Blueprint for using Silverlight with Sharepoint.  The blueprint includes six samples demonstrating basic tasks like using Silverlight in a Sharepont web part, to advanced tasks like displaying a social network diagram using active directory. 

http://www.ssblueprints.net/sharepoint/ 

Each sample includes a video, code walkthrough, setup instructions, and a Visual Studio solution that can be downloaded separately or as a single package.

The full open source blueprint source code is said to be coming soon. 

The common mentality with respect to creative and technology process integration involves a relatively solid line that separates the two disciplines and work streams.  Creatives do their concepting, draw up wireframes, create visual assets, and then toss them over the line.  Technologists pick these up, create the front-end HTML, create the back-end code, and wire them up to create the system.  That is an extremely over-simplified description of both sides of the line - but it represents the general perception of many clients and peers in our industry. 

The agile movement has made great strides toward integrating project teams.  But the focus here has been on bringing business and end-user representatives into the process and advancing the project through small, iterative cycles.  (Again, a dramatic over-simplification.  I'm a huge Agile proponent.)  The iterative cycle keeps all disciplines (plus business stakeholders and users!) engaged throughout the project.  Great progress!  But, within an iteration, the line often remains.  Both the creative and technical teams are tightly engaged with the business and user representatives.  But they're only loosely engaged with each other. 

There are many reasons for this.  On a given project the creative and technical teams are often from separate internal organizations - at best.  At worst, they're from separate companies altogether.  Beyond that, they often think, talk, and act very differently - making it hard to relate.  Right brain, left brain stuff.  There is hope, however. 

One of the most satisfying things about working with Avenue A | Razorfish is experiencing the blurring of the tech/creative line.  As a company with strong marketing, creative, and technology capabilities that are integrated on many projects, we've learned through experience how to work and communicate with each other.  That is one of our strongest value propositions to customers.  We've proven that the line can be blurred and there is significant value in doing so.  However, it is within the last year that I've seen the most substantial fading of the line.

This can be attributed to the popularity and demand for rich Internet applications.  RIAs require a much greater level of cross-discipline understanding and cooperation.  Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML have done the same thing for desktop applications (and the web, with Silverlight).  There is a great whitepaper on the WPF designer/developer workflow entitled The New Iteration.  Definitely worth a read.  It specifically addresses WPF, XAML, and the Expression tools, but many of the points apply more generally to RIAs, as well.  The value proposition is well stated:

"Ultimately, the new collaboration means that iteration of a project can now happen in a much more fluid way. There is no longer the “one-way street” where a change to a specification downstream means a radical reworking of the entire application. The result opens up new possibilities for collaboration between the designer and developer, where a kind of dialogue is possible with the potential to foster greater creativity."

It is that last point - the potential to foster greater creativity - that excites me the most.  Technologists are often in a restricting role.  We have to set boundaries that the creative team must work within so that we're able to deliver on their promises.  Rather than promote cooperation and collaboration, this can create an "us versus them" mentality.  However, with RIAs I have noticed a great change.  Technology and creative teams are pushing each other to expand the solution horizon, rather than constrain it.  Both teams are equally invested and sharing their unique perspectives, which results in far better solutions. 

It may be intuitive that a shared sense of ownership, varying perspectives, and close collaboration will have positive results on a project.  As a consultant "back in the day", when the Internet and HTML were new, I saw the same level of enthusiasm and collaboration between technical and creative teams.  But as technology and creative techniques matured, the tech/creative line solidified.  As a result, the solutions became somewhat cookie-cutter.  That's not to say companies weren't launching sites with great creative and technical work.  But truly remarkable solutions are conceived when both the technical and creative limits are stretched and combined to produce something truly unique.  I'm thrilled to be back in this sweet spot.  The industry as a whole seems to be following suit.  But unless a deliberate effort is made to avoid falling into comfortable patterns, truly remarkable solutions may once again join the endangered species.