Gaming the Social Web

Good article by Eliot Van Buskirk, "Gaming the  System: How Marketers Rig the Social Media Machine" here. "If clout is the new currency, in other words, it already has its share of counterfeiters."

Yahoo and Maktoob - Social Web Growing Up in the Gulf

Yahoo will be acquiring Maktoob.com.  Click here for details.

About four years back, while working with Mr. Khurram Hamid who was leading digital mobile marketing for P&G out of Dubai, I met with Mr. Ahmed Nassef, GM of Maktoob (website here) to review their web and social network analytics capabilities.  Ahmed stated his goal of becoming the Yahoo of the MENA region.

Maktoob impressed me with what they were trying to build.  More importantly Maktoob Research (website here) was starting to develop deeper understanding and garner insights on the Arab consumer.  I had worked on the definition and concpet of the Muslim consumer for P&G and felt that Maktoob was leading the way in social networks and social media for the Arab populace of MENA.

Congratulations to Ahmed and Maktoob employees!

Consumer Focus: Social Media Organizations

"Social media isn't a box to be ticked or a department to be manned or even a campaign to be launched. It's about thinking differently about marketing, customer service, the entire company. It's about realizing that consumers are running the biggest recommendation service in the world and that, as has been tiresomely often repeated, they define the brand (no, this is not new; yes, this is becoming more obvious and important by the day). All thinking about product, customers and communications, needs to take this into account -- it cannot sit in a silo."

Above is an excerpt from AdvertisingAge - "Dedicated Social Media Silos? That's the Last Thing We Need" here by Jonah Bloom.

I enjoyed the article.  The tone was perhaps a bit professorial, yet, I have to agree with the statement above.  Unfortunately, silos will develop, organizations have to develop silos, Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" documents the reasons in detail.

Good article overall about what is happening in the social media creation, management and monetization market place.

Thoughts on Consumer Insights

Below is a quick and nice look at what consumer insights mean from a presentation on SlideShare. What provided me value from it? The author, Giulio Bonini, states that there are four properties of a consumer insights: (1) Deep, (2) Original, (3) Base of your communication, and (4) Specific for your target. Enjoy!

What Are People Looking For?

Via Mr. Martin Ertl, CIO - Bombardier Transportation, from Digg Labs, the Swarm on Digg here.

Social Media Trend Alert

Gulliver of the Economist provides insights for the world travelers. In a recent article "Trusting the people" here, he states the following regarding online sites providing reviews of travel services:

"...the small storm stirred up by the news that Royal Caribbean cruises had contacted people who had repeatedly put up positive reviews about them—mainly on the CruiseCritic site (owned by Tripadvisor)—and offered them rewards in return for more positive online coverage."

Gulliver concludes:

"As a result Gulliver finds himself increasingly drifting away from such sites in favour of single-source guides, such as Alastair Sawday or Mr and Mrs Smith. It's not that the accumulated wisdom of online reviewers is to be sniffed at; more that the crowd's objectivity is not always guaranteed."

I believe this is the new social media trend that has been prevelant and now going mainstream.

For further reading, please see my blogs, "Debunking "Wisdom of Crowds" Myth - Two Examples" here, "Crowds, Their Self Management - Empirical Data" here and "Mind-Meshes" here.