hubbub

Another Faux Revolution Exposed?

To paraphrase Pete Seeger, "when will they ever learn?" The Virtual Economics blog has an interesting post today about a bungled Ask (the search engine) campaign to stir up a YouTubey, grassroots, Anti-Google "revolution." Like other big-company attempts to wrap themselves in the counter-culture banky, this one appears to have hidden the identity of the corporate sponsor. (Full disclosure: I represent another search company, FAST, so I am not without bias. But I will be transparent).

To be fair to Ask, let's wait to hear back from the company before we continue tormenting them. In the meantime, the rabble for this "revolution" may be turning upon the insurgents.

The C.I.A. Likes Blogs and Wikis

We've known about this for a while (it has been reported): the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies are now using blogs and wikis to tap large groups of intelligence pros to collect and adjudicate information. But this is now the subject of a cover story in The New York Times Magazine. Recommended reading for anyone seeking to understand the power of social media at organizations who live and die on the quality of their data. Excerpt:

At first glance, the idea might seem slightly crazy. Outfit the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. with blogs and wikis? In the civilian world, after all, these online tools have not always amassed the most stellar reputations. There are many valuable blogs and wikis, of course, but they are vastly outnumbered by ones that exist to compile useless ephemera, celebrity gossip and flatly unverifiable assertions. Nonetheless, Andrus’s ideas struck a chord with many very senior members of the office of the director of national intelligence. This fall, I met with two of them: Thomas Fingar, the patrician head of analysis for the D.N.I., and Mike Wertheimer, his chief technology officer, whose badge clip sports a button that reads “geek.” If it is Meyerrose’s job to coax spy hardware to cooperate, it is Fingar’s job to do the same for analysts.

Fingar and Wertheimer are now testing whether a wiki could indeed help analysts do their job. In the fall of 2005, they joined forces with C.I.A. wiki experts to build a prototype of something called Intellipedia, a wiki that any intelligence employee with classified clearance could read and contribute to. To kick-start the content, C.I.A. analysts seeded it with hundreds of articles from nonclassified documents like the C.I.A. World Fact Book. In April, they sent out e-mail to other analysts inviting them to contribute, and sat back to see what happened.

Pontiac Likes the Web

A nice post from the folks at UrbanWorkBench:

Do you use blogs for marketing? Industries outside of the traditional early adopter computer and IT groupies are beginning to feel to strength of Internet marketing as a tool, here's a recent story...

In late August Advertising Age published an article entitled 'Has The Big Shift Began?'. They were referring to a campaign that Pontiac had decided to launch exclusively on the web. According to Pontiac this will cost them 60-70% less than the way it was traditionally done. Six weeks into the campaign, sales had exceeded August goals by 185%.

Source: iaocblog :: Are You Ready for The Big Shift?

Now that's a big deal for a large company to experience such a shift in market response. How could your company use the web? Do you do email lists? Do you have a blog?

As I noted in "Peer Pressure," the business case for social media is becoming quite apparent, and it of course fits with the general business case for Web marketing. We are talking about efficiencies of scale.

The Case of the Missing Case Study

I believe that this is one of the key issues that we will try to solve in the coming year:  the apparent shortage of corporate case studies in social media.   We know they are out there, but for a variety of reasons -- including  the fact that case studies are hard work -- they remain hidden.  Reminds me of the most frequent request that technology PR folks make of their clients :  "hey, we need actual customer scenarios, illustrating how the product worked, how the customer measured success, etc."  Well, the tables have turned.  Now PR people -- at least the ones who are being asked to counsel clients on social media -- are feeling the pressure.

It's pressure that I myself have felt over the past few months; it's no longer OK to discuss the dozen or so examples of companies that have done and are doing interesting things in social media.  And I've been pulled into two industry studies that have also forced to go broader and deeper.  The first is a survey that several folks at SNCR and Corante Future Tense are doing on the adoption of new media in the enterprise.  The second is a study that the Council of PR Firms has commissioned (Ketchum's Paul Rand and I have volunteered to lead the charge) on what agencies and their clients are doing to address the new opportunities and challenges.   I expect these projects -- and several others that are in the works -- will contribute to the general knowledge base.  But for now, the "list" needs to grow.   E.g., the SNCR "inside the enterprise" survey has only tallied about 30 companies who appear willing to talk.   If you've got a case study, let me know.  I'll share it here and in all the appropriate venues I'm aware of  (would like to get more info on that, as well).