Much of the hyperbole comes from agencies and consultants who have seized upon social media as the next wave; their motivation is self-serving, of course. Promoting their credentials as social media experts enables them to attract clients, launch new projects and grow revenues. Still more hyperbole comes from pundits seeking to grow their audience for blogs, speaking engagements, books they’ve authored, podcasts, etc. (You know who I mean.) These are all classic examples of early hype cycles.

So much of the rationale on why this matters still comes back to audience size (expressed in terms of new social media metrics that replace the old-fashioned “eyeballs” and page views of the early Internet days). Here’s a great example of this argument:

But all this attention on numbers makes it all too seductive for marketers to do the same old things in a new way. Where’s the conversation?

I Love the Concept – Now Engage in Conversation

Don’t get me wrong: I love the idea of conversational marketing between brands and customers – I just haven’t seen much evidence of it.

Outside of email or phone, I’ve not yet had a single “digital conversation” with any service provider to my business or any brand whose products I buy. Most of what I receive from vendors is predominantly email marketing (this is true in both my personal and business life).

Most of the activity I observe in the social media world today is the result of people who earn their living via social media and who actively promote it as the next new platform for marketing or company-customer-brand interaction.

Today’s Practice Is Rarely Conversational, With a Few Exceptions

In the B2B world webinars are often effective conversation starters. The Q&A that follows webinars is a good example of conversation, one that’s triggered by a digitally hosted event that’s happening in real time. But these conversations are heavily dependent on human voices engaging in dialog.

I see lots of examples on Twitter of employees talking up their company’s products or services – especially when something new is being launched. For example: You should have seen the noise in the Seattle area as the Windows 7 launch neared! It was obvious Microsoft’s PR team had initiated a concerted effort to galvanize the employees to talk up the launch. Local tweet-ups abounded…

But on a day-to-day basis Twitter is loaded with examples of self-promotional messages or personal brand building. (I have engaged in this myself.) Who really cares what I’m cooking for dinner, or that my high-tech cats know how to turn on my Mac?

When I’ve found tweets to be most useful is when someone points out a helpful resource they’ve found on Slideshare or someone’s website. This is what I call the “signpost” form of tweet… It’s rarely conversation.

The Medium Limits the Message

As for conversation, the 140-character constraint on tweets means that at best each message is a quip or a retort. Maybe it serves as a conversation starter, but I’m still looking for evidence of real conversation happening in the Twitter world.

There are a few highly talented people who’ve mastered this medium, but in general what you see on your Tweetdeck sounds more like cacophony.

Blogs Still Rule

The best examples of online conversation take place in good-old-fashioned blogs: when someone writes a provocative post, and lots of people respond with interesting commentary or alternative points of view.

Conversation occurs when someone speaks, people listen, the speaker responds, and multiple parties engage. Yes, conversation of a sort takes place when lots of people speak all at once, but it’s ineffective if no one is listening. Or if so many people are talking that they drown out each other’s voice.

Blogs are the best online vehicle I’ve seen for asynchronous online conversations. They also offer the benefit of allowing late arrivers to benefit from the conversation after it has taken place.

Late arrivers’ role is generally limited to listening because the active conversationalists have moved on… Archived webinars can perform a similar function, but are often closed to the general public or to nonpaying subscribers.

Social Networks?

I also see occasional signs of conversation within LinkedIn’s network, sometimes sparked via Q&A; more often by the conversations that take place privately when LinkedIn enables former colleagues to find each other and reconnect over email and then phone.

Plaxo seems less effective at this – perhaps because of its hybrid mission as address book updater and personal news flash publisher. (I’m finding Plaxo more and more annoying, and have had to turn it off because it causes  Outlook to crash on a daily basis.)

Facebook fans rave about the conversations they have there. Due to social media fatigue and too many other demands on my time, I haven’t yet found the time to invest in building a Facebook presence. So I don’t have enough personal experience with Facebook to comment.

Conversations with the People Who Matter

Perhaps due to our New England upbringing, my family has found more value in a “gated community” we’ve established for private conversations and memory sharing using 37Signals’ Basecamp. It has proven to be a wonderful  platform for re-uniting a distributed family and enabling very thoughtful or even tearful conversations. This has been a true cross-generational conversation – but it’s not conversational marketing, as no brands are involved. There’s no opportunity for anyone to monetize what’s taking place.

And as for my real friends: we talk in person or by phone; occasionally by email, but always as a prelude to a real-world conversation or get-together.

So, yes, call me a Baby Boomer. Even though I’ve been using computers and email for literally decades, my conversations still tend to take place “off the grid” and face to face.

But I’ll be happy to engage in a dialog with my favorite brands, once they have mastered the art of conversation.

My question was, “Who are the Anusara yoga teachers on Cape Cod?” The person who responded to my query, John Friend, is the founder of the Anusara tradition, and currently the worldwide leader of this style of yoga practice.

Normally I take yoga classes with some wonderful teachers in Seattle; however, this summer I’ll be on Cape Cod several times for 10 days or more each stay. I’d like to find some local instructors there to keep my asanas going, and retain the alignment principles.

Cape Cod is 3000 miles from here, so I don’t know who is certified as a qualified Anusara yoga instructor within reach of my base there. (And yoga practitioners tend to pay attention to the tradition or philosophy that is embraced by yoga teachers, so this matters.) I did a directory search, but there was no information about the teachers other than their most basic contact information and location.

So getting such a quick and highly informed response from John Friend was WAY more than I’d hoped when I posed my question on Twitter this morning.

Blessings to John Friend, and thanks to Twitter.

I had a chuckle this morning, courtesy of a friend who works at Microsoft. She passed on a link to the “Twitter spoof video” that Jeremiah Owyang showed in a blog post this week. Although tongue in cheek, the animation raises some good points about what happens when a new way to communicate turns into a celebrity fad fest.

Their book is an in-depth discussion of their manifesto for “a New PR” — to reinvent the practice of PR given the onslaught of social media, new forms of peer-to-peer engagement, and the emergence of conversational marketing. There’s a lot to like in what they’re advocating, even though it threatens to turn the traditional practice of marketing inside out.

But — I’ve struggled for a week now to get my thoughts in order before writing the review, as requested by their publisher. (For my creative procrastination, see this post.)

Much as I agree with the ideas and approaches advocated by the co-authors, I have mixed feelings about the book itself. The book is chock full of great ideas, but it suffers from insufficient editing. It reads as if the publisher has conflated the blog postings of two prominent thinkers without investing sufficient time, energy (or political capital?) to edit out the redundancies.

The book would have been more powerful at half the length. I read it from start to finish but found it slow going due to the repetitious material. To be honest, if I hadn’t been asked to review it, I might have stopped reading midway through the book. But I’d made a promise, so I had to follow through.

Some infographics would have helped to illustrate the authors’ key ideas, and break up the monotony of the long running text. The page design was prosaic, which didn’t help.

In retrospect I’m not quite clear on the intended audience. Practicing PR professionals who have not yet tipped their toes into the waters of social media? Are there any left? It definitely felt like a primer for at least the first half of the book.

I think the authors’ blogs are actually more compelling: Brian Solis’ blog and Deirdre Breakenridge’s blog – both focused on PR 2.0.

In reading this book I learned a dirty secret: PR pros have problems with self-esteem. The authors believe that those who embrace “the New PR” will deliver true value to their clients – and society – and will thereby regain respect for themselves and their profession.

In no particular order here are some thought nuggets that I enjoyed, and wrote down in my notebook (quotes from the book):

• a new set of accidental influencers
• the magic middle
• participant observation
• the art and science of marketing without marketing
• social network fatigue
• the ability to listen and engage in conversations without speaking in messages
• the shift of PR from a broadcast machine to community participation

Disclosure: I don’t know the authors and have never been a PR professional; however, as a high tech marketer I’ve worked with PR pros for years. Like all Apple marketers I was taught the Regis McKenna model for high tech marketing. This approach was also the conceptual grounding for high tech marketing guru Geoff Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm and other groundbreaking business books. He worked for Regis McKenna before branching out on his own.

And I fully recognize that the adoption of “the New PR” means that marketers have to change their ways too.

Source: Nielsen Online

Based on historical patterns for other social networking sites, this implies, says Nielsen, that Twitter’s reach will ultimately be limited to only 10% of consumers online:

To be clear, a high retention rate doesn’t guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite. There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point.

Needless to say, the debate rages on at Nielsen’s blog, at AdAge and other places frequented by marketers and media professionals. Some of the comments are quite emotional, particularly those submitted by Twitter enthusiasts.

Some people question Nielsen’s stats, saying they under-represent people who use Twitter via Tweetdeck, Tweetie or other third-party tweeting tools. Nielsen counter-argues that as long as those people visit Twitter.com at least once a month, they’re included in Twitter’s user base stats. (Speaking for myself, I happily use Tweetie — but do in fact visit Twitter.com at least once a week.)

Pretty much everyone agrees: the issue is not the platform, but how compelling the content is to people who exchange tweets or follow “broadcast tweets” by celebrities or those with huge numbers of followers.

The other key success factor is whether or not the conversation is stimulating or relevant for you personally, the people you follow and those who follow you. (This is why I argue you need a critical mass of like-minded people to make Twitter’s service compelling.)

For me the jury is still out…

This weekend I encountered two instances of the “mainstreaming” of social media for B2B business purposes.

Thou Shalt Blog or Twitter

One of my friends told me over dinner that she has to start blogging and/or tweeting. Her company has begun to mandate that people in marketing functions (like hers) demonstrate their proficiency in digital media and social media. We didn’t get into the details of the specific requirements but it became clear that hands-on experience will be expected of her.

She is not required to blog about or on behalf of her company — that is, she doesn’t have to become a corporate shill. But she does have to set up a blog and keep it reasonably current so she can talk about blogging based on personal experience. She’s got a busy life, so she is having a hard time figuring out how to carve out space and time to take on yet another commitment. Especially one that she feels is being imposed upon her without any apparent compensation or reward mechanism…

When we brainstormed about themes or activities she cares passionately about, her interest in blogging grew dramatically. It’s unlikely that her employer will permit her to take time out of her workday for blogging, so she’s going to have to love the subject matter in order to muster the enthusiasm to start and keep a blog going…

She works for a very large software company on the West Coast.

I can’t help but wonder how fair it is for companies to require employees to blog if they don’t allow their employees to do so on company time…

Are You Listening?

My second example of social media mainstreaming involves my brother, who works for a bio-tech company in the pharmaceuticals sector. Although he doesn’t use the term “social media,” it’s clear that he wants to see social networking adopted by his employer.

My brother is enrolled in an online MBA program, the kind busy professionals take to accelerate their degree program and minimize on-campus residential requirements. His program is highly specialized, focused on the specific educational needs of people who want to pursue careers in pharmaceutical marketing.

Last summer he and fellow students read and discussed Groundswell for one of their marketing courses. He is still talking about the book.

He loved the healthcare case studies cited in Groundswell, and can easily imagine how the practice of listening to patients, doctors and healthcare providers could transform the pharma industry. He’s frustrated because there’s no obvious person or function within his company to whom he can evangelize the benefits of online communities or an active listening strategy.

He thinks his company’s IT department should take on this challenge, because he believes the role of marketing professionals within pharma organizations is very unlike their counterparts’ roles in other industries. (I didn’t have an informed POV on that subject, but questioned the likelihood of IT people stepping up to a marketing function.)

He’s a salesman in a field office, thousands of miles away from headquarters, so he lacks the personal relationship with HQ execs to lobby for his ideas. It will be interesting to see if he can figure out how to bring about change within his company. Or influence new practices within his industry.

With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I can see that it was an early precursor to Twitter, but also offered personal blogging, community building tools, and other aspects of social media.

It was way ahead of Web 2.0 — in fact it was one of the first-ever Java-based web apps — so the dev team had to invent all of the services, a massive engineering feat. Meeting the designers’ and product managers’ requirements for user experience was incredibly demanding: no Flash, no Ajax, no Flex or Silverlight… (Our lead interaction design architect went on to a leading role in user interaction design for Yahoo! and Yahoo! Mobile.)

We’re All Connected

At a time when the “AOL walled garden” was the norm for consumers’ online experience, FriendFactory offered personalized services based on user preferences (implicit and explicit). There were tools for self-published home pages, as well as community building so like-minded people could meet and share interests or activities online.

Its core benefit was the people-to-people messaging capability, which we called “eNotes.” (The PC client interface appears here.)

eNotes enabled “friends” to exchange brief messages, either via instant messaging, PC-to-PC, or SMS, PC-to-cellphone. It also provided real-time status information about other friends who were online. The PC-to-SMS messaging was a real hit among early members.

The home page featured a dynamic activity indicator to help people see what was going on in the community — both in general and specific to each member’s interests.

We planned to offer capabilities to notify members when their friends were online or had recently updated their personal home page or community page. (I don’t remember whether development on that functionality was completed before Sony ended the pilots.) We also planned to enable members to find new friends based on shared interests or other things they had in common (profile-based matchmaking).

Pioneers Are Sometimes Too Early

Based on early opt-in notions, it enabled marketers to send targeted messages to people based on the consumers’ expressed interests and profiles. 

Some pioneering brands and agencies were quite interested in this concept. But the timing wasn’t right. Because there were so few interactive marketers working for agencies (or within European firms) at that time, there was a real shortage of talent who could imagine how to make use of this opportunity. This made it challenging for Sony to recruit a critical mass of B2C direct or brand marketers. Sony’s prospective partners may have “gotten” the vision but they couldn’t find the talent to act on it.

Even Sony’s own brands were still trapped in the broadcast, mass-market model and had trouble envisioning how to leverage this opportunity to expand their business. (We tended to view them as still caught in their old “analog habits of thought.”)

Europeans had just enacted their first data privacy laws, so the business team had to expend a lot of resources educating legal counsel and trying to figure out how to comply with the regulatory environment without comprising the core value proposition. (Few lawyers could even figure out how to advise us!) Because the concept and its ramifications were so new, there were few comparable models for them to look at.

Most European consumers were going online via dial-up or very slow ISDN lines, so not all were able to benefit from this graphically rich, interactive experience. A few lucky devils lived in places that were getting early cable provisioning. Those who had fast connections loved the service.

One of the fatal flaws in the business model was the assumption that European telecoms would deregulate faster than in fact happened; that bandwidth would increase quickly to surpass dial-up; and that the prices consumers would pay to go online would fall much faster than they did. The slow and expensive online access challenge proved to be its Achilles’ heel. For the European Internet infrastructure of that time, it was too early to market.

As a service concept it was way ahead of its time. No one — partners, media, participants — really knew how to categorize this offering. They knew it wasn’t a “site,” a “portal” or an ISP, which were the usual ways to classify Internet services in the late 1990s when FriendFactory made its debut.

In 1998 it was a breakthrough concept, a true service innovation. And that’s not always a good thing.

Today we’d call it a social media platform, combining aspects of Twitter, blogging and online communities for like-minded consumers. Ten years later, we’ve figured out the benefits of services like these.